Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Mrs. Enderby ceased obviously reporting Langbrith’s diction, and continued: “Of course, he is rather vague about what he really does want, but Dr. Enderby found his wish, so far as he imagined it, rather suggestive, and he said at once that he would like to talk with you about it. When could he see you, at your entire leisure?” she could not help pushing officiously on, though she had no authority from her husband to ask the question. Anther did not know what to say, between his ire and his embarrassment. In his hesitation she added, “I know how difficult it will be for you to fix a time, but I knew how interested you would be.”

  “Thank you. I’m afraid I should be very little use,” Anther began, but she broke in upon him, to make reparation for James Langbrith’s strange thoughtlessness, and to soothe the doctor’s wounded pride:

  “I’m sure Mr. Langbrith will write you about it. I’m surprised — He probably knows how pressed you are, and wanted to save you all the trouble with details that he could. I rather like his going forward, and doing it all himself, don’t you? It shows such spirit, and such a pride in keeping it in his own hands!”

  “Yes, yes,” Anther said.

  “But, of course, you don’t have to wait for a direct application from him.”

  “No.”

  “Why!” she started in self - surprise.— “Why shouldn’t you stop in any evening, and have tea with us, and talk the matter over with Dr. Enderby, then? I should so like to hear you two discussing the civic and social significance of such a man as Royal Langbrith, and getting at the psychology of him. You will come, won’t you? Won’t that be the easiest for you? Will you come, say, to-morrow night?”

  “Not to-morrow night. I can’t fix the time just now. But I will see. Will you excuse my hurrying off to a patient—”

  “Why, of course! How thoughtless of me! But any night will do, doctor, so that it’s soon. Goodbye! good-bye!”

  She turned from the gate where she had stopped the doctor, and went indoors to her husband.

  “I think it’s strangely thoughtless of James Langbrith not to have written to Dr. Anther about the measures he’s been taking. The doctor feels it, I know, but he’s so large-minded that he’ll not let it interfere. He’s coming here some evening to talk Royal Langbrith’s personality over with you.”

  “Where have you seen him?”

  “At the gate, just now. But I didn’t call you, because I didn’t want to interrupt you. I’ve told him all about it, and he’s coming the first evening he can. I told him any evening would do. I knew you’d want me to. And all I shall ask is to sit by and hear you two analyze Royal Langbrith. With the scientific stand-point which Doctor Anther can supply, and toe philosophic and religious view which you can give, I think it will be one of the most intensely interesting things that ever was. Don’t you?”

  “I hope you’ll find it so, my dear. But, really, young Langbrith’s oversight seems an extraordinary—”

  “Yes, doesn’t it! I hardly know how to account for it, but if the doctor can overlook it, we can, and he’s evidently disposed to overlook it. At any rate, I shall ‘keep right round after him,’ as the country people say, till he redeems his promise.” She so far redeemed her own promise as to halt Anther, whenever she could reach him, by hailing him with her voice, and, when she could not, by waving him to a stand with her fluttered handkerchief. But it was not till she had almost lost faith in his large-mindedness, and had many times sided with him and against him in his imaginable resentment of young Langbrith’s neglect; it was not till the eve of the day fixed for the dedication ceremonies that Anther appeared at the rectory. He came too late for tea; and, when he did come, he did not invite Mrs. Enderby’s presence at the psychological analysis of Royal Langbrith’s personality, which he did not enter upon till she no longer had the least excuse for not leaving him to her husband.

  XXIII

  AFTER Mrs. Enderby went out Dr. Anther remained in a silence which the rector could not quite bring himself to break. He thought that his visitor looked fagged, and that he looked even more sad than fagged. He would have liked to ask Anther about Hawberk, in the way of a beginning, but somehow he did not, though he had heard that Hawberk was holding up a little, and he was interested in the experiment of his physician, as it was known to any one who cared to listen to Hawberk’s sanguine prophecies of the outcome.

  Mrs. Enderby, lingering honorably out of intelligible eavesdropping, but not out of ear-shot, was disinterestedly impatient of the interval before Anther spoke.

  “What do you think,” he began, and at the sound of his voice she fled from temptation, “of evil done in the past, and so effectually covered up, except from two or three people, that for the public generally it never existed: should you think it the duty of the two or three, or any one of them, to make it known?”

  “I’m not quite sure that I follow you,” said the rector, but confessing his interest by his look of prompt animation. He was seeking, as he professed, a stronger light upon it, but he could not feel that Anther cast this light upon it by what he said next.

  “Take the case of — the doctor resumed, and he named a famous case which once agonized the public with a curiosity still unsatisfied. “He must have known, and a few others must have known quite as well, whether he was guilty or innocent in that business. Do you believe it would have been to the advantage of religion or morals to have had the fact generally known; or was it just as well to have had it hushed up forever, as it apparently was?”

  “I don’t see what advantage the common knowledge of it would have been,” the rector said, still feeling his way rather blindly. “I can’t see what use it would have been as concerns this world, to have had the fact known. If the fact would benefit some one, save some one from unjust suspicion, relieve some burdened spirit, yes; but otherwise not, I should say.”

  “You think the truth itself, merely as truth, has no claim upon our recognition?”

  “What is truth?”

  “Ah, that’s what jesting Pilate asked!”

  “Isn’t the truth,” the rector pursued, “that absolute entirety of fact which includes not only every circumstance, but also every extenuation in motive and temperament?”

  “Well?”

  “That sort of truth can never be made known in this world, and the brute fact doesn’t express it.”

  “You remand it to the Last Day?”

  “I leave it to God. The Searcher of hearts can alone find it out, and judge it. If we press for judgment here, we are in danger of becoming executioners. But I am never able to deal with abstractions, such as this case has become. You can’t lay down any rule that will fit an abstraction. I don’t like to lay down any rule at all, except such as I find given us. If there were any particular case — any concrete instance—”

  “There is a particular case,” the doctor said, “a concrete instance, but I’m afraid that the lapse of time has rendered it as much an abstraction as that other case — in fact, has outlawed it.”

  The rector could only answer at first, “I should like to hear anything you have to tell me.” But he added, “Why are we fencing?”

  “Are we fencing? I didn’t mean it,” the doctor said, with his fagged look and his sad look possessing he rector again with compassion. “I’ll lower my point, anyway. I’ll go back to the beginning. If a man had so successfully lived what they call a double life that he had kept each life largely a secret from the other, and kept everybody but those he had most wronged altogether out of the secret, and there were but one impartial witness of the facts, would it become the duty of that witness to make the facts known when the man was dead and the evil he did had not apparently lived after him?”

  “I think you’ll have to be a little more specific.”

  “Have we no such a thing as a duty to justice? Is there no such thing as justice?”

  The rector looked grave. “I have never seen any instance of justice in the world. I have seen many instances of mercy. I should say we have a dut
y to mercy. We are warned more than once to make sure first of our own sinlessness before we offer to judge the sins of others.”

  “But imagine that the guilt of the man I am imagining had imposed itself upon the public for virtue, and was apparently left to the Last Judgment, as so many things — most things, in fact, as I agree with you — seem left, and time had gone on till it became, by this chance and by that, the question of recognizing a cruel miscreant as a public benefactor, and holding him up as an example to the young, and celebrating some twopenny munificence of his as an act of characteristic virtue, of habitual greatness and goodness—”

  The rector rose, and his face whitened, as the doctor’s had reddened with the rush of feeling into his voice. “Are you talking to me of Royal Langbrith?” he asked.

  “I am talking to you of Royal Langbrith,” Anther replied. “And ever since I heard that you had been asked to take part in this preposterous business I have been talking to you about Royal Langbrith. Not to your knowledge, of course, but in those one-sided colloquies which, I dare say, you hold as well as I when you are working up to face some one whom they concern. When Mrs. Enderby first told me you had been invited by Langbrith’s son to join in honoring his father’s abominable memory, my impulse was to come at once and tell you what the man had really been. But when that impulse passed, I said to myself that I would think it over; and I have thought it over and thought it over, but never with so much justification in paltering with my duty as you have given me by the things you have just said. It seemed to me, on one side, that it was an outrage upon your own purity and uprightness to let you go on and unwittingly praise that infamous scoundrel. It seemed an atrocious invasion of your rights, an abuse of your ignorance as well as an insult to your office. Then, on the other hand, I asked myself what harm would be done if I let you go on, compared with the harm I should do if I stopped you — the pain I should needlessly inflict; for the truth would now probably never come out, and in the interest of public morals had much better remain hidden. I recognized this long ago. I saw that the time for a public exposure of the man’s evil had apparently passed; that it had paralyzed those who had left it hidden; but when I heard that you had been asked to eulogize such a miscreant in public, I felt a new responsibility. I realized that if I let you do so, I should be guilty towards you; yet, if I spoke, I should be putting my burden upon you, and compelling you to the sophistications with which I stifled my own conscience. You could not then stand up and declare the truth before the people; you could only reveal it to that miserable boy; or, if you had not the heart for that, you must stultify yourself and wound him with lying excuses. I paltered with my duty, and I have come at the eleventh hour to do what I ought to have done at once or never done at all.

  Anther told his story with a fulness which he had wanted even in telling it to Judge Garley. In the sympathy which he felt Enderby was giving him, with that instant self-forgetfulness natural to the born priest, there was invitation which the legal mind could not give him, with its concurrent criticism of his facts and motives. He was dealing now with a man who could appropriate his facts and realize his motives to their remotest intimations and finest significances. Science and religion met in the study of the life laid bare between them. At any detail from which Anther faltered, Enderby prompted him, and, in the end, nothing was left untold.

  “Besides Hawberk and Mrs. Langbrith and yourself, is there any one knowing to the facts?”

  “John Langbrith; but how intimately he knows them I can’t say. We have never exchanged confidences. He was on the train with his brother when Royal Langbrith died. Didn’t I say? Yes — he died in the smoking-car coming up from Boston, but so suddenly, so secretly, that John Langbrith did not notice anything till he put his hand on the dead man’s shoulder to arouse him from his nap when they reached Saxmills. He had died as secretly as he had lived.”

  “What has become of the woman?”

  “Who ever knows what becomes of the woman? Perhaps, in this case, John Langbrith does. I ought to tell you,” Anther added, “that I have put the case to Judge Garley.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Several weeks — a month.”

  “And knowing the truth, he let me accept a part in this commemoration!”

  “You might say the same of me.”

  “No, I couldn’t say the same of you. I can understand the stress there has been upon you, and your reluctance — your fear of being misunderstood — misconstrued. But if Judge Garley had given me a hint — No, I don’t blame him either! I mustn’t be cowardly.”

  The rector sat with his elbow on the arm of his chair, and his head propped on his hand, thinking. What he found first to say, with a sigh and a forlorn smile, was, “It’s part of my cowardice that I could wish you hadn’t told me.”

  “I was obliged to do it. In this, at least, I have had no selfish motive.”

  “Of course not. But I must go on all the same, you see.” Anther said nothing, and Enderby asked, “The boy is without the least suspicion, the slightest surmise?”

  “Absolutely. He was not purposely kept so. But the time for telling him never seemed to come. Who could tell him?”

  “It may never come,” the rector mused aloud, and he said to Anther, “It hasn’t come now.”

  They were silent together, but the doctor spoke first: “It did cross my mind that you might feel authorized to—”

  “No,” the rector stopped him; “ we must leave it all to God now, as it has been left hitherto. He will know when the son can best bear his father’s shame. He will know how to do justice, and when, on the memory of the dead; but until now, in mercy to the living, He has forborne. The circumstances will arrange themselves; the atoms will fall into the order of the divine scheme. We must keep our hands off. De mortuis — you know the saying; there is as much wisdom sis kindness in it. There is a feeling — it is mostly a vengeful feeling, I don’t know why — that men’s evil deeds must not be suffered to lurk in the dark; but perhaps they should, for this life. What would it avail to have them dragged into the light? Everything shall be made known, but perhaps not on earth. Whoever wished to hasten the knowledge of hidden evil, here and now, might well beware of forcing God’s purposes, as we understand or misunderstand them. It could not help this community to know the truth about that wretched man. It would only render it cynical and deprave it. But I am not concerned about the son, primarily, I am afraid; or about our fellow-citizens. I have the selfish concern of keeping myself clear from falsehood in what I have to do. At present, I don’t see how I can, but I shall try; and, meantime, between the two evils before me, I will choose that which seems likest virtue.”

  Anther was struck with the similarity in the conclusions of the priest and those of the judge, but he did not comment on it. Enderby himself offered none of the reflections in which he seemed lost, and Anther, after a little longer stay, in which nothing suggested itself as a solution, took his leave, without protest from the rector. He carried with him, capriciously, the vision of the rector’s neatness, as to the black waistcoat, buttoned to his throat, which was without suspicion of those droppings from the rector’s full beard such as the doctor remembered noting on the vestments of some clergymen less conscientiously benzined by their wives.

  Enderby’s wife was otherwise so conscientious that she would not join him in his study, after he returned from seeing Anther to the gate, till he called to her, “Come here, Alice.” Thai she rustled down-stairs and entered to him with a face eager for the account of his talk with the doctor. At sight of his face, looking up at her from the chair into which he had nervelessly dropped, hers fell.

  “Dearest!” she said.

  “I am in trouble,” he answered. “I want you to help me.”

  Though a woman whose chief delight was, ordinarily, in the expression and examination of her emotions, she now postponed them, as she was able to do in great emergencies, and closed so promptly and directly with the trouble he owned to her tha
t he was able after an hour to say, “Well, then, I will do it.”

  “It’s the only thing you could do, and it’s the thing you must do. It’s what suggested itself to you at first; and I call it an inspiration.”

  The notion of an inspiration was something left over from her Unitarian nurture, which she would not deny herself in the present exigency. It had a literary rather than a theological significance, and was less an article of faith than of critical appreciation. Then the rector went to bed, and, instead of harassing his worn-out brain by vain dramatizations of the predicament, surprised himself by falling almost immediately asleep.

  It was for Dr. Anther to lie awake after he had driven home through the dim Saxmills streets, usually so quiet at half-past ten, but to-night only quiescing, after a tumultuous evening of last details in preparation for the morrow. His course lay by the open square on which the library faced, and he noted that the platform built up around the doorway, below the bas-relief, for the invited guests had been draped, since he passed earlier in the evening, with American flags. The tablet was veiled in white cotton cloth, which, in its association with the dead, gave Anther the sense of a shroud, so that he started at the light, gay laugh which burst from the lips of a girl pausing with a young man and looking up at the platform from the square below. He recognized the voice of Hope Hawberk in the laugh, and in the young man beside her he recognized James Langbrith, and he imagined her teasing him.

  He smiled to himself in the prevision of his absence from the group of the invited guests who were to occupy that platform the next day. The committee of arrangements had promptly sent him an invitation; and a second card had come later, under a cover addressed in Langbrith’s hand-writing, as if he were not willing that Anther should by any chance be passed over. So far, indeed, Langbrith had subdued his rancor with his old friend. But Anther had determined, from the first, not to be present at the dedication, and he had not faltered since.