Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  While the people were stirring vaguely from the attitude in which the benediction had left them, Langbrith came forward and shouted, “Friends, ladies and gentlemen, there’s a lunch at my mother’s, and everybody is invited — everybody!”

  The crowd cheered and the band played and the square emptied itself in the direction of the Langbrith homestead.

  XXV

  THE last of the guests had got themselves away from the Langbrith grounds late in the afternoon, with the difficulty that people unaccustomed to social rites find in taking their leave. It was halfpast four o’clock when Langbrith stood, with his mother, in the porch at their front door, looking down, over the trampled lawn and dishevelled decorations, at that fellow-citizen who managed all the public functions of Saxmills, rushing about in his shirt-sleeves and directing his shirt-sleeved helpers in the work of dismantling and removing the long tables of rough board at which the hungry throng had lately joked and shouted and rioted.

  The son noted the knot between his mother’s eyes, and laughed. “You’d like to go out there and take a hand, mother,” he interpreted; “but you’d better leave it to Danning. It’ll suit him better.” He sighed deeply. “It’s been perfect, mother, beyond my dreams. It’s been beautiful, ideal. I couldn’t tell you now, without disturbing my sense of it, how happy it’s made me. It’s made me feel as if the people here loved me, and I do like to be liked, though I don’t know how to show it, and that they cherish my father’s memory. How good everybody has been — how kind! It was awfully sweet of the old doctor to come and sit on the platform after his reluctance. I won’t forget it.” Langbrith gave a short laugh. “He knew father better than I do, and he probably felt for him against the affair; but if father had cared to look down on it to-day, I can fancy his being pleased with it in some shy, reticent way. I wish the doctor could have come to the lunch.”

  “He said he had a patient — over at Wakeford,” Mrs. Langbrith said. “I asked him to come.”

  “Yes, I know. I hoped he might have got back. Well, now, you must go in and lie down, mother. Take a good rest.” He put his arm round her waist and pressed her in-doors, and got his hat in the hall. “I’m going to pick up poor old Falk somewhere. I shall probably find him at the Johns’, unless Jessamy got away with him.”

  He kissed his mother and left her, not to lie down, but to go and take counsel with Norah about the things that Danning’s men would be bringing in to be washed up and put away. He saved his conscience with respect to Falk by walking past the Johns’, and looking in over the fence, but he did not stay to ask for his friend on his way up to the Hawberks’. He did not know whether he had seen Falk sitting with Susie Johns at her door or not. Every sense of his was full of Hope Hawberk. Except as she was related to them, she pressed even the facts of this happy day out of his consciousness.

  Hope’s grandmother came to the door, and said with grim directness, before he had asked, “She’s round in the garden.”

  “Oh!” Langbrith answered, and he took the little path in the grass that the feet of the household had, traced round the corner of the house.

  Hope was sitting in a low rocking-chair, by the dial, which the sun had relieved from duty for the day by getting down among the tops of the pines on the hill. She was reading a newspaper, but she was not so absorbed in it that she did not hear his step sweeping over the grass. As she looked up she laughed quietly, and in her laugh he felt a peculiar note of welcome. “Well, how did it go off?” she asked, and she let fall her paper and rocked back in her chair.

  “Don’t let’s talk of it,” he said, and he crouched at her feet, with his back against the base of the dial. “Let’s talk of ourselves.”

  “Well, what about you?”

  “Nothing about me. When I say ourselves, I mean you, for you are ourselves. At least I am nobody without you.”

  She laughed again, but her derision was full of the love which she did not try to keep out of her eyes. His own eyes glowed upon her. Neither felt the need of speaking till she turned her head away with a little difficult motion, almost as if it hurt.

  “Then you will?” he murmured from somewhere deep in his throat, and she answered, low:

  “Yes.”

  He bent forward and put his head on her knee.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, with a catching of the breath, while she smoothed his hair with her hand.

  There was no other demonstration between them, because he knew that she liked best that there should be none, and it was a moment before he lifted his head, with a laugh of the joy otherwise unutterable: “I knew you would say yes, now. But why now? Why never before?”

  She looked at him with the glowing eyes which she could not keep from his face, but it seemed to him that she no longer saw him so distinctly, for a mist that veiled their glow. Her lips twitched so that she could scarcely form the words: “Can’t you think?”

  “No. What have I done?”

  “You want to make me tell you! How you acted to father — when — when they laughed — I said that I would do anything for you, then; I said that I would do anything you asked—”

  “Hope!”

  “Don’t make me cry! I shall hate you if you do. When I need all the strength I have, so!”

  “No, Hope; but listen to me. I must be honest. I didn’t do that for you. I did it for him. I like your father; he was my father’s friend; and I had nothing in my mind but the thought of their old friendship. That needn’t make you cry, or, if it does, it needn’t weaken you. Hope” — he kept getting her name in as often as he could, for the pleasure of speaking it—” I am not going to ask any promises of you, now. We will let the future take care of itself. But I want to tell you; I haven’t told my mother yet; I am going to Paris to study — to study the stage, and learn to write for it; I believe I can write plays, and Paris is the place to study the stage.

  I thought I should ask you to go with me; but I see I can’t” — she shook her head in affirmation of his words—” but if I can take your love and leave you mine, will you — will you — wait?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Hope!” he sighed.

  “Oh, James!” she sweetly mocked him.

  “Where was I?”

  “You had left me waiting.”

  “Well, that is all, then.”

  They both laughed.

  “Of course,” he took up the broken thread, “I shall tell mother.”

  “You couldn’t go without.”

  “Oh, I mean about you. She will be glad. She likes you so much, Hope.”

  “Well, I like her, too.”

  “And you will go to see her often, Hope, won’t you?”

  “Not often enough to cause remark,” she drolled, and he laughed and said:

  “How funny you are, Hope! Falk thinks you are the wittiest girl he ever saw.”

  “Well, you’ve always told me Mr. Falk hadn’t been in society a great deal. There must be lots of funny girls in Boston.”

  Langbrith thought that droll, too. “I believe I love you more for your fun than your beauty, Hope.”

  “Perhaps there’s more of the fun.”

  “No, I don’t say that. You are the most beautiful creature in the world to me. And Falk thinks that your dark style—”

  “Well, I always thought Mr. Falk was pretty, too. So it’s an equal thing. Now, we won’t talk of that any more; it’s too personal. We will talk about Paris. I shall never dare to tell grandmother that you are going to write plays. She thinks I’m bad enough as it is, and if she knew that I was engaged to a person who wrote plays, she would certainly give me up. Does Mr. Falk know about your plan?”

  “Why, he’s going with me! Hope! May I tell you a secret?”

  “Well, if it isn’t a very large one.”

  “It’s nothing. You know he is going to be an artist, and Paris is the place for art as well as the stage, and I am going to lend him the money. I’d give it to him, if he’d let me. What better use could I m
ake of it? But of course Falk won’t stand that.”

  “No, I wouldn’t, in his place.”

  “Does he care for — I mean does Susie Johns care for him?”

  “She never said so. Perhaps she hadn’t been asked. She’s rather queer, that way. She never answers till she’s been asked. She’s very secretive.”

  He laughed, and began in another place. “I wish I could have you with me to keep me from playing the fool.”

  “Why, I’m the greatest fool myself,” she explained.

  “No, you’re not. You’re the very soul of common-sense. But I shall keep writing to you, and consulting you about everything, and that will make me sensible. And perhaps — in about a year—”

  She mocked, “I was just waiting to know how long!”

  “Hope,” he asked at another tangent, “Dr. Anther does think your father’s getting better, doesn’t he?”

  “He thinks his will is getting stronger.”

  “I understand you can’t leave him, Hope, and that’s why I don’t ask you to go with me to Paris as well as Falk; but when your father is all right — and he will be, I know he will — then we will go out together — my mother and your father, as well as you.”

  “What a beautiful vision! And what about grandmother?”

  “Oh, we would take her, too.”

  “I should like to see you getting grandmother on a steamer! Why, she thinks going on the cars is as much as her life’s worth.”

  “We can manage, somehow.” They laughed together at his optimism, and he asked, “Do you know what I liked best in the whole thing to-day? I mean besides your father’s coming. Dr. Anther’s being there. He didn’t like the notion of the tablet at the first, and he let me feel it; but it was just his way — working round, and giving in handsomely in the end, without saying anything. My heart was in my mouth till he came onto the platform. It wouldn’t have been anything without him.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t. But, of course, he was sure to come. He’s grand.”

  “Yes, after my own father, as I imagine him, there’s nobody equal to Dr. Anther, as I know him.”

  They talked rapturously away from themselves, and they talked back in ecstatic return, and an hour passed before he reverted to her with impatience of anything but her in her relation to himself. “What made you cry out that way?”

  “Me? How did you know who it was?”

  “Don’t you suppose I should know your voice, in the dark, anywhere in or out of the world? What made you do it?”

  “As if you didn’t know! I was so worked up by those curtains not coming apart, and thinking how you felt, that I couldn’t help it, though I wasn’t sure but it was somebody else. If it had gone on much longer, I should have got onto the platform and married you on the spot.”

  Langbrith jumped alertly to his feet, and Hope rose, too, laughing. He put out his arms towards her. “Now I think it’s full time for you—”

  She did not try to escape, but a sound of lamentable groaning came between them, and she called out, “Oh, poor father!” and whirled from her lover into the house.

  He stood dazed by the ghastly interruption, and remained bewildered when, a little after, she returned to him, somewhat paler, but not looking as distressed as he looked, and dropped again into her chair.

  “Isn’t there anything I can do? Go for Dr. Anther?—”

  “No, no! It’s all right, now. He was just dreaming — he has awful dreams, but they are only dreams.”

  “Oh, Hope!” He stood before her, not offering to take his place at her feet again, but aching, as she saw, with pity for her.

  “You mustn’t mind me. I’m used to it. And it isn’t anything real, you know.”

  “It seems terrible. I don’t know how to bear it for you.”

  Hope smiled. “Well, you don’t have to, and I can bear it for myself as long as — as long as father must bear it. Are you going away?”

  “Yes, I must go back to mother—”

  She rose, and, without his advance, put her arms round his neck and kissed him, and then began to cry against his cheek. It was not the passionate embrace with which he had often, in his burning reveries, sealed their betrothal, but it was something sacreder, sweeter, and he seemed purified and uplifted, as if her arms were raising him into heavenlier air. He knew now what misery and sorrow, what squalor, even, he was making his part; but he thought only of her with whom they came, and he was richly content.

  “Your trouble shall be my trouble, after this,” he began, but she would not let him say more.

  “Yes, yes! Don’t talk!” and while she brushed the tears from her eyes with her handkerchief, she pushed him from her with the other hand.

  He accepted his dismissal. “I shall come back after supper,” he said, and she neither invited nor forbade him. He did not go home; he could not, without first using the new authority which her love had given him, and he went round by Dr. Anther’s office to ask him if nothing, nothing, could be done for her father. He tried to think about it all, and how he should press the doctor to some conclusion, to some definite promise, to some clear prophecy of a fortunate end; but it was confused in his mind with his love, and he was so lost in the sense of that as it concerned her and him alone that from step to step he forgot what he was about and had to recall himself to his errand. Once he went down a wrong turning, and, when he came to Mrs. Burwell’s at last, he recognized the house with a kind of astonishment.

  “The doctor ain’t here,” Mrs. Burwell called down to him from the window over the door as he stood with his hand on the bell-pull. She had her head tied up in a handkerchief, as if she had been sweeping; the impression of this was strengthened by her having a broom in the hand that supported her on the window-sill. “He hain’t got back from that patient — drefful sick crittur, I guess — to Wakeford, and I’m givin’ the place one last dustin’; I don’t know when it’ll get another. I was ril sorry I couldn’t come to the ceremony to-day, but I got my mind set on finishin’ my movin’, and nothing couldn’t seem to stop me. I feel bad about leavin’ the doctor here, alone like a cat in a strange garret, as you may say, but I guess I got to. I don’t know who he’ll get in to care for him. As far forth as I can make out, he ha’n’t even thought of anybody.”

  “He’ll be in after supper, I suppose?” Langbrith said, with an imperfect sense of the words spilled on him, as in a stream, from above.

  “Yes, if he gets any supper,” Mrs. Burwell responded with mystery lost upon Langbrith’s abstraction. “He’s always in nights, you know, without he’s got a call.”

  “Then I’ll come round again, later.”

  “So do!” Mrs. Burwell called after his averted figure as he stepped down the two yards of path to the gate, and moved away with feet that wandered with his wandering thoughts.

  Something had penetrated the whirl of his mind which centred around the idea of Hope all kindly and pleasant things, and he was afterwards aware of some meaning in Mrs. Burwell as to Dr. Anther which he had not taken at once from her words. Had she meant that the doctor had bought her house or hired it? He had lived there a long time, and it might very well be. But a magnificent scheme now suggested itself to Langbrith, which he would consult his mother about, and then propose to the doctor, if she approved. He would offer Dr. Anther his father’s office, standing apart from the mansion, if he found he had not taken Mrs. Burwell’s house; it would be more convenient for him, and it would be near the hotel, where the poor old fellow could get a meal at any time without being subject to such severities as Mrs. Burwell had practised with him, and as he must fall under again if any village person took him to board. Langbrith himself would feel so safe, having him there near his mother, for all advising and helping in any sort of exigency. With that lifelong friend near her, he would not feel as if he were leaving her alone for the year he should spend in Paris, before he brought Hope home to the old place.

  He glowed with the thought of what motherliness and daughterlines
s there would be between those dearest women, and how he would protect and cherish them both in their common reliance upon him. He wished Falk was there. He would like first to consult Falk about it. Falk had so much sense, and would put his finger on any weak spot in the plan and laugh him out of it if it would not do. He felt the need of Falk so much and the desire of immediate action so greatly, that he turned from going home and walked rapidly up the hill towards Susie Johns’. He wished he could go and ask Hope’s counsel, too, but it would be silly — he feared her thinking it silly — if he went back to her so soon; and if Falk approved, he knew that she would, and his perfected plan would be such a pleasant surprise for her:

  He could make an excuse with Susie Johns, that he had come to fetch Falk home for tea; but, when he knocked at her door, the Irish girl who answered him said that Mr. Falk was at tea within.

  “Oh, then, don’t bother him,” he said, and got quickly away, lest Susie should run out and hospitably seize upon him for another guest. “Don’t say who it was,” he called over his shoulder to the Irish girl, as he fled.

  It would only be postponing the matter a little while. He could see Falk before he saw the doctor, which would be before he saw Hope again, and, with the affair settled in his mind, he pushed down the side-hill street up which his own house looked. He had not reached the bottom when he foreboded a temptation beyond his strength at sight of the doctor’s shabby old buggy and his sleepy horse slumped before the gate. But now he suddenly recurred to the thought of bringing him to book about Hope’s father, and getting his mother help to get something like a promise of Hawberk’s recovery from him. He fancied first telling his mother and their old friend together of his authority for anxiety in the matter. Both these things must come before the offer which he wished to make, and which he now knew he should make without asking Falk about it. But which of the two pleasant things in his mind should come out first was the happy question with him as he entered the wide-open front door and pushed into the twilighted parlor.