Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The Irish girl answered him, at the house which he had left so gayly such a little time before, that Falk had gone out to walk with Miss Susie. He asked “Where?’’ but the girl could not tell him, and he realized that he must not try to follow them. He could not go home, and he would not see Hope.

  But he could pass her house; there was that left him to do in the wild need he had of doing something.

  She was at her gate, waiting for him, as he knew, after he had bridged the hour of his absence with a recollection of the promise to come back which he had given her. The full moon was looking over the eastern shoulder of the hill, behind the house, into his face; but it was with an inner sense, the vision which love so soon supplies to women, that she read something strange in it.

  “Why, James!” she said.

  “Come with me, Hope,” he bade her, and, as she joined him, wonderingly, letting him seize her hand and pull it under his arm, as he pushed away from the house, up the road climbing into the shelter of the pine woods beyond, “I’ve got something to tell you, Hope; something to — tell — you,” he forced himself. “My mother is going to marry Dr. Anther.”

  “How glorious!” she shouted, pulling her hand out of his to leave herself the freer to front him “Glorious?” he faltered back.

  “Yes! I have always thought what a splendid thing it would be. They are such old friends, and they are just suited to each other: your mother is the best woman, and I think Dr. Anther is the best man, in the world. Yes, it’s what I call glorious.”

  “I call it infamous!” he said, in a voice that struck her with greater amaze than his words by its dreadfulness.

  “Why, James Langbrith!” she gasped.

  “Infamous. Does no one,” he demanded, turning his severity upon her, “remember my father?”

  “Why, yes — yes, of course—”

  “Is it glorious for my mother to forget him? Could you forget met.”

  “No, never! And I don’t believe she’s forgotten him. But it’s a different thing from you and me. She knows that you will be leaving her some day — why, I intend to take you from her myself, and, if I could do such a thing, what mightn’t others do! — and then she will be alone; and why in the world shouldn’t she marry such an old friend as Dr. Anther? It would be different if it were a stranger, and I shouldn’t blame you, then, if you were morbid about it. But Dr. Anther! Why, he’s always seemed to me like one of the family. Why, it’s ridiculous! What has it got to do with remembering your father? Now, James, if you let yourself get to thinking this way about things, I shall be afraid to marry you. I say it’s the best thing that could happen, and I can’t understand you.”

  “No, it seems you can’t.”

  “Oh, very well!”

  “I don’t mean that,” he made haste to save himself. “No one can understand how I have always felt towards my father. You may call it superstition, if you like, but I have always felt him something sacred. I have felt as if he were a mysterious influence in my own life, shaping it for the highest things. And at the same time it’s as if he appealed to me, always, from his grave, for protection. Since I was old enough to realize that I had lost him, I have never been recreant to his trust in me.”

  “Yes, I should feel just so about my own father,” Hope granted.

  Langbrith put aside the comparison of his father with hers by something in his tone rather than in his words. “Yes,” he assented, though he refused her sympathy on those terms. “But it isn’t the same thing. My father is dead; and, while he lived, he was not a man who could make himself understood; I can’t explain; in all the letters he left, and his memorandum-books, it was implied. I thought my mother felt the same, and that was why she was so silent about him; and I thought that Dr. Anther — But if all the time they were conspiring to betray him — if they were thinking of themselves and each other, when they, of all people in the world, should have been the truest to him—”

  “Oh, oh, what talk!” Hope broke in. “Why, James Langbrith, I should think you were insane.”

  “I am! I am!” he choked out. “This thing is turning my brain. I try to realize it, and then when I. realize it I feel that I must go mad. Oh, you don’t understand; you can’t! you can’t! I feel so covered with shame for my mother.”

  As they talked, they walked swiftly. Now and then the moon struck between the trees, upon them, but in the prevailing shadow they had the seclusion in which they willingly hid themselves, till they reached the top of the ridge that overlooked the house and below that the town. Its varied murmurs came up to them there, with the sound of the mills vibrating through all.

  “I suppose,” he said, bitterly, “that they all think I am a fool to care for him, though he made their prosperity, and did more for them than they did for themselves all together.”

  “Now, you sha’n’t be morbid, if I can help it,” she broke out upon him., “I don’t believe any such thing, and I don’t believe you will, when you come to think. Do you want me to talk up to you the way I used to at school, or to pretend I’m afraid of you, and flatter you and make you think you’ve been abused?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Of course, we haven’t been together so much since you went to Harvard; but since — since this afternoon, I’ve been feeling the old way, as if we were children again, and we should always speak right out anything we thought. There wouldn’t be any use or sense in it if we couldn’t.”

  “Why, of course.”

  “And you believe that I care for you more than for any one else in the world?”

  “That’s how I care for you.”

  “And that I wouldn’t say anything I didn’t believe was for your good?”

  “I can’t think of you apart from myself.”

  “Well, then, listen: you know very well that everybody honors you for wanting to commemorate your father. They don’t know anything about him, but they think you do; so that’s settled, and we won’t have any misanthropy for the people down there. Now you’re sure I may say what else I think to you?”

  “Anybody may say what they think to me.”

  “Oh, if you want to be boyish!”

  “Go on, Hope!” he said, humbly. “I beg your pardon.”

  “There’s no pardon to be begged or granted. I just want you to see this in the right light, and I’ve got, first of all, to know what you said to your mother.”

  “I don’t remember the words. But I let her know how I felt,” he gloomily answered.

  “And to Dr. Anther?”

  “Nothing! I wouldn’t speak to him. But I let him know that he was ordered out of the house.”

  “You did! Well, I’ve half a mind never to speak to you again. And did he go?”

  “No. I went,” Langbrith said, with sullenness, somewhat crestfallen. “I told my mother I was going to Boston with Falk, to-night. Did you expect me to stay and see them married?”

  “Where is Mr. Falk?” Hope asked, as if to gain time before answering his question.

  “I couldn’t find him. He was walking somewhere with Susie Johns.”

  “And why didn’t you go to Boston without him?” He looked into her face in a daze that did not at once yield to her intention.

  “Without coming to see you?”

  “Oh, you stayed for that, and now it’s too late to go.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “And so you’re going back to your mother?”

  “I’m going back to the hotel for the night; then—”

  “No, James,” she said, gently, dropping her mockery in the seriousness which was in the veiled depth of her nature; “you mustn’t do that. I want you to do what I say. Will you?”

  “I will listen to what you say.”

  “No, that isn’t enough. I want you to go back to your mother, and say, ‘I was all wrong; I know I am wrong because I know you couldn’t be.’ Will you say that?”

  “No, never! I wouldn’t say it if you made it a condition of my ever seeing you a
gain.”

  “Do you think I would do that, or do anything that would make me a tyrant over you? I am not so foolish, no matter how wicked I am. I wouldn’t give you up if you chose to stay in the wrong; but I know some day you will want to put yourself in the right, and I don’t want it to be too late. Now will you do this? Go and say, ‘Mother, I can’t withdraw what I said, but I know you believe that you are doing right, and I will stay here and be at your marriage.’ Will you?”

  “Why do you wish me to do that?” he struggled against the sense that he was giving way to her.

  “Because I hate you, and want to do you all the harm I can.”

  He understood. “Well, I can’t tell her what you say; but if she wishes to marry that man, she mustn’t seem to do it against my will.”

  “And you’ll promise her to be at the ceremony?”

  “No, I won’t do that, Hope; I won’t do it even for you. How could I, without seeming to condone it, to approve of it, when my whole nature revolts against it? Would you want me to act such a lie as that?”

  “You know that it would seem a quarrel with your mother if you didn’t.”

  “Well, there is a quarrel. She’s no mother of mine if she marries that man.”

  “But you said yourself that she mustn’t seem to do it against your will.”

  “No matter for that. They can wait till I go away; till I put the ocean between me and the loathsome thought of it. I’ve promised enough. I can’t do more than I’ve said I would; no, not even for your asking, Hope!”

  “Do you think I ask it for myself?”

  “No.”

  “For Dr. Anther, or your mother, even?”

  “No.”

  “For whom, then?”

  “For me, I suppose. But you ask too much for me.”

  She could not mistake his sullen finality. She sighed deeply, but not desperately. “Well then, tell her that you won’t oppose the marriage. And if you are going to do that, you can’t do it too soon”; and she began to find her way trippingly down the slope that led from the hill-top into the garden behind her house. Langbrith followed more heavily and more slowly, and less securely of the way, and she had to wait for him beside the gate, on which the moon was trying feebly to paint the hour. He felt that he had no right to her embrace; but, when she turned there and put her arms round his neck and kissed him, his sore heart melted within him.

  He wanted to say that he would do what she asked, but somehow he could not, and they parted without further words, except a whispered “Goodnight!” from him, and a “Good-night, dearest! Be good!” from her.

  A light showed in the roof-chamber which he knew, and as he turned the corner of the house, towards the street, a low moaning, the precursor of nightmare within, stole out of the lifted sash on the moonlit air. He thought of the burden and affliction her father was; but he did not think, he was too young for that, what a burden and affliction her husband might be; and, doubtless, Hope herself, strengthened for one trial by the other, did not feel either beyond her woman’s force, or both more than her woman’s share.

  Langbrith pulled himself more and more slowly homeward. The outer door was open, as he had left it, and he passed in and stood a moment at the door of the parlor. The moonlight without showed him his mother sitting in the room, as if she had not stirred from the chair into which he had seen her sink when he madly broke from her entreaty.

  “Mother,” he said, stonily, for all the pathos of the sight, “I know you think you’re right, and, if you’re going to be married soon, I will stay and be present.”

  At first she did not answer; but, after he had begun to imagine she had not heard him, she said, “I am not going to be married.” Langbrith waited, in his turn, before he said, “I don’t understand; but I suppose you know what you mean, at any rate.” And he now felt himself speaking as much to Hope as to his mother; ‘‘I’ve done what I could.”

  “Oh, yes,” she answered, with bitter rejection of the immediate purport of his words, “you’ve done what you could.”

  XXVIII

  MRS. LANGBRITH did not wait for Anther to come to her for the withdrawal of her promise: she could not take the chance of another meeting between him and her son. She sent him word the next morning, as soon as Norah was up. She had not slept, consciously waiting to send it, and he had not slept, unconsciously waiting to receive it.

  He read her note without surprise; he read it almost, he felt, with a sort of expectation. “I must take back my word. I cannot keep it. You know why. We ought to have known I could not.” Within, the note was neither addressed nor signed. He read it passively, and folded it up and put it into his pocket-book. That day, as he made his visits, he thought recurrently of those weak forms of animal life which gather their strength for a sudden spurt, and then, when it is spent, rest helpless till their forces are renewed. He had taken her in a moment when her will had accumulated strength enough for action; but the impulse had exhausted itself, and now she could not act. At first, he said to himself that he must wait for another rise of her slight powers, and then help her to prevail with herself. But, at last, he said that this would be taking advantage of her weakness — making himself her tyrant, her oppressor. She was not less but more dear to him because of her feeble will. He had always pitied her for her subjection to the brute force of others — of her husband and of her son; and the love that had begun in pity continued increasingly in pity. She was never so dear to him as now when she had failed him. He could not decide that she had failed him more finally than before, but she had failed him more signally. He promised himself that he would not try to see her again, as long as her son was with her; and, in fact, it was not till the morning after Langbrith had been gone a week that he stopped his horse at her gate, and found his way up the box-bordered path to her door.

  She had seen him coming, and met him at the threshold with a dismay and entreaty that went to his heart.

  “How do you do, Amelia?” he asked. And she answered:

  “Have you come to say that you despise me?”

  “Do you know me so little as not to know that I care for you more than ever I did?” he protested. But at the kind of fluttering in her, he said: “I hadn’t come to speak of that; I never will be the first to speak of that again. I know that James has left you. I wouldn’t come till I knew that, though I wanted to assure myself with my own eyes that you were well.”

  She looked at him in gratitude that included the larger with the lesser favor, and answered, evasively, “He went last Saturday; he sailed this morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hope Hawberk and he are engaged. She’s been to see me. But he told me before he left. She’s a good girl.”

  Anther said, as if in reply, “James is a good man.” Those unfailing tears came into Mrs. Langbrith’s eyes.

  “I know who is a good man,” she said.

  “When are they to be married?” Anther asked, ignoring her worship.

  “They don’t know, exactly; not for a year, at least. He says he wants to be sure that he is doing something over there, first. Do you understand what it is that he wants to do?”

  “Not very well; but I have heard of other young men studying to write for the theatre, there. The French are supposed to do those things best.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Langbrith vaguely assented. “He’s got that Mr. Falk to go with him.”

  “That’s good. He seems to be a good fellow.”

  “I think he will be a good influence,” Mrs. Langbrith suggested.

  “Oh yes, but James could be trusted to himself.”

  “Yes. Dr. Anther,” she broke off, “do you think Mr. Hawberk is going to get well?”

  He looked quickly at her.

  “Why?”

  “Hope thinks he is. She says he is trying harder than he ever did before; he’s paying more attention to what you want him to do. She says that the days when you want him to take the medicine instead of the laudanum he does not take the laudanum a
t all.”

  “I haven’t seen him for more than a week. His gain depends upon how long he has been keeping faith with me.”

  “I guess it’s more than five or six days, now. Dr. Anther, if Mr. Hawberk should get over it, would he begin to tell the truth, or would he go on talking the same as he does now?”

  “Talking about what?”

  “Oh, everything. You said that his opium-eating prevented his telling the truth.”

  “The truth?”

  “Well,” she said, desperately, “about Mr. Langbrith. If he got well, would he say what Mr. Langbrith really was?”

  Anther rose, and walked across the room and back; and he did not sit down again. “He would be apt to say what he really was.”

  She drew a long breath. “I don’t know as I should like that,” she said, piteously, and her voice trembled. “It would get to James, and — and — I don’t know as I want he should ever know, now.”

  They looked at each other, he searchingly, she beseechingly. He wondered, “What is she asking me?” and a pit, on the edge of which she seemed to tremble, opened to his conjecture. His gaze hardened, and hers sank under it. “I’ve nothing to do with that,” he said to her falling face. “My business is to cure Hawberk, if I can, at any risk, and with any consequence.”

  She returned wildly, as if in terror of something she had barely escaped. “Yes, yes! You must! And, oh, I hope you can do it! I can’t help what he says about Mr. Langbrith; I don’t care who knows the truth. Only cure him! Why do you look at me so, Dr. Anther, as if you blamed me? Well, I am to blame. I did—”

  “Hush, Amelia! I don’t blame you. I understand you. Don’t think I blame you, or hold you responsible for anything.” Whatever it was that had passed from one consciousness to the other was confessed and pardoned, and he took her hand in saying, while her tears rose without falling, “I have been thinking the whole matter over very anxiously since I saw you last, and I have asked myself, now that we can never be anything more to each other than we are, what would be the use of James’s ever knowing the sort of man his father was. I have had my impulses to revenge myself on him, to punish him for what I have considered his insolence to you as well as me; but I have fully realized that his wrong came from the illusion in which he lived, and that we could not destroy this illusion now to any good purpose, and I have no longer any wish to hurt him. Let it go. But as a physician,” he added, “there can be no doubt of my duty. Hawberk might live on indefinitely, as an opium-eater, and, again, he might die suddenly. It’s my business to keep him alive and get him well.”