Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh yes, I know that. It was because,” she entreated, “I thought it would be so dreadful if I thought it that I thought it.”

  He looked at her with a sad intelligence where she stood wavering. “I understand,” he said, and he took her hand, hesitating. Then he dropped it, saying “Good-bye,” and left the house.

  He drove away hardly aware of anything outside himself, till he was aware of coming to the rectory. Then he realized that he was going to see Hawberk. He was beset by a sudden longing to speak with Enderby, and was staying himself against it in a sense of its meanness and unfairness, when Mrs. Enderby’s voice called to him from the yard, where she was gathering some flowers from the blossomed shrubbery. He perceived he had stopped at the gate.

  “Won’t you come in and see Dr. Enderby?” she called.

  “No, no, I thank you,” he returned. “I hope he’s well.”

  “Oh, quite well,” she answered, looking at the sprays in her hand. “I was just getting some flowers to send to Hope,” she said, as she came to the gate. “Aren’t these roses magnificent?” She touched their cheeks with the hand from which she dangled her garden-shears. “They’re fit for any fiancée, even such a little dear as Hope. You’ve heard, of course?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s too delightful! There’s something very romantic, don’t you think? in his remaining constant to her after all the nice girls he must have seen in Boston and Cambridge and Brookline, as a student. But she’s wonderful! Yes, she is. And so happy! Have you seen her since?”

  “No, but I suppose I shall see her now. May I take her your flowers?”

  “Oh, will you? Thank you, so much.” She came out and put the flowers on the seat, where he made room for them beside him. “It’s rather hard,” she ran on, “her being left behind here and he gone out to Paris. But her father’s being so much better is a great compensation. You must feel doubly anxious to cure him now. Of course, they never could think of marrying and going away from him while he’s in this state. And you really have hopes of him?”

  Anther could not smile, even in his amusement with the comely, kindly woman beaming up at him with her hand above her eyes. “I’m doing my best,” he said, gravely.

  “And you will succeed.”

  “These cases are difficult; but I have my hopes.”

  “And you shall have my prayers — our prayers!” she said, fervently. “You won’t come in and see Dr. Enderby?”

  “.Not this morning. I have too much to say to him.”

  “Yes,” she assented, dropping her eyes; and he knew that she knew what was in his thoughts.

  XXIX

  ANTHER did not find Hawberk. Hope said, from the steps of the house which the doctor could drive so near, that he had gone down into the village; she believed that he meant to call at the doctor’s office before he came back. She was always a cheerful presence, but now joy seemed to radiate from her like a rapturous effulgence. Anther felt it, and he felt that if she knew of his own reason for sadness, she had the same right to ignore it in her own nerves as she had to ignore her father’s misery. She looked as if lifted tiptoe by her happiness, and her voice danced with her dancing eyes.

  “Why haven’t you been to congratulate me, Dr. Anther?” she challenged him, archly. “I do believe you don’t care!”

  “Oh, I guess not,” he retorted, feeling his load raised in part by the mere ecstasy of her spirits. “I hadn’t been officially notified.”

  “Well, you are now. I was waiting to come and tell you, when I was sure I could tell you how much better father was. He hasn’t disobeyed for nearly a week — ever since James left. It all seems to come together. It’s made me so wretched.”

  “Well, you don’t look it,” he answered. But he did not smile at her mocking, and she recollected herself. She looked at him in wistful sympathy, but the years between them were so many, and Dr. Anther was such a really dignified person, that she could not venture to speak her sympathy, uninvited. He did not invite her. He felt himself blush at the pity of the joyous young creature who was imagining his case from her own, in an equality of passion. It embarrassed him in his consciousness of the difference. She grew a little embarrassed, herself, and he knew that he was wounding her. “Did you say your father had gone to see me?” he asked, gathering up his reins, while Hope stepped back from the wheels.

  “Dr. Anther!” The hoarse croak of her grandmother intercepted her answer, and the doctor saw the stooping figure and fierce face of the old woman in the open doorway; “I want you should tell this crazy girl there can’t come any good from that Langbrith tribe. I know ’em root and branch, and I don’t know any good of ‘em. If ever Lorenzo Hawberk gets to be a man again, instead of a laudanum toper, I can tell him a thing or two about the Langbriths that’ll lock their wheels for ‘em.”

  Hope turned and ran back to her grandmother, whom she gently pushed in-doors. “Now, grandmother, I guess Dr. Anther knows as much about the Langbriths as you do,” she said, and she turned her laughing face over her shoulder to show him that she was not taking her grandmother seriously. “Good-bye, Dr. Anther,” she shouted, and, suddenly remembering the flowers, he called out to her:

  “Oh, hold on a moment, Hope; here’s something Mrs. Enderby sent you by me.”

  “Well, I never did!” she rippled down to him with a laugh that denied any sadness in the world. “What would you have said if you’d forgotten altogether? Oh, how gorgeous!”

  She fluttered up the steps again with her face buried in the flowers, and then she called back, “Oh, I forgot, this time. Thank you, Dr. Anther,” she sweetly chanted, and the doctor drove away.

  He felt it an escape not to find Hawberk waiting for him. He found both the bottles, one for laudanum and one for medicine, which Hawberk had left, and a scribbled note from him: “Will call for these later. Guess we’re getting the upper hand of that green fellow a little. I couldn’t get him to come with me, anyway.”

  Dr. Anther was taking his meals at the hotel when he could think of them or time them aright, and his hired man was in a sort of loose, general charge of his place, pending the installation of some specific house-keeper, of whom the doctor had as yet no distinct prevision. When the hired man was not about, the door was free to any one who would open it, and patients came in and waited for the doctor, or wrote their calls on his slate and went away.

  He now examined his slate, and found no call so pressing but that he felt justified in sitting down and giving Hawberk a chance to return before he started on his rounds. He was perplexed by a situation which would once have been joy and triumph to him, mixed with the hope whose fierceness he now recognized with abhorrence. What had worn the high look of righteous retribution and been the promise of happiness was now more like a menace of the peace which alone remained his desire, as far as he had any desire. He had been beaten in the struggle. The dead hand had been too strong for him. If he could stall prevail, through Hawberk’s restoration to truth in his restoration to health, he would prevail in vain, for he would prevail too late. Nothing but his duty remained, a duty that was barren of personal reward, and that if done successfully, as regarded Hawberk, must be done at the risk of fruitless suffering for others. It was with a sense of reluctance close upon disgust that he pulled himself together, at the sound of shuffling steps, which he did not doubt were Hawberk’s, loosely dragging themselves up his walk.

  John Langbrith came in, and lounged weakly into the easy-chair with a cursory nod to the doctor. “I want to see,” he said, without further greeting, “if you can do something for this dyspepsia of mine.” They had not parted friends, or even courteous acquaintances, at their last meeting; but, as John Langbrith ignored that, Anther ignored it, too, in the superior interest of their relation as patient and physician.

  “Is it worse?” he asked.

  “If it wasn’t worse, I shouldn’t have come. I can stand a good deal without squealing, but I can’t stand everything!” Langbrith began nervously
swinging the leg he had crossed upon the other, and looked about for something to chew. In default of anything else, he tore a piece from the splint bottom of his chair and chewed upon that, as he laconically, almost sardonically, rehearsed his symptoms. Anther listened without prompting questions, and at the end John Langbrith said, “I presume you’ll come out with the old thing: overwork.”

  Anther rubbed his hand all over his face, after his fashion. “That’s usually the trouble with nervous dyspeptics, when it isn’t overeating or overdrinking. Couldn’t you get a little time off and go somewhere for a change, as well as rest?”

  “I guess I’ve got to. What can you give me to take, while I’m putting things in shape to leave?”

  “I’ll do something to tide you along; but you understand that it’s merely temporary.” Anther turned in his chair to write a prescription, pausing and thinking over it, while John Langbrith continued talking to his back.

  “If you could get off on a good long sea-voyage, it would be the best thing — two or three weeks.”

  “I could get off on that as well as anything else. The devil of it is to get off on anything at all. There ain’t a soul to leave the business with, the way I want to. If that fool of a boy was worth the powder to blow him, I should be all right. What’s he going to do over there, anyway? You make it out?”

  “He’s going to learn to write plays, as I understand.”

  “Write plays!” John Langbrith grunted. “Who wants his plays?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “Well, I’m not goin’ to stan’ it. They’ll find that out, both of ‘em. If his mother hadn’t babied him up so, and kept him in cotton all his life, I could have worked him into the business before this, and now I could leave it in his hands.”

  “You say you don’t sleep very well?”

  “Sleep! How can a man sleep with a stomach like mine? But I shouldn’t care for the not sleeping. Never did want much sleep. The devil of it is, I don’t wake well. Sometimes I’m in such misery I don’t hardly know where I am. Why can’t you give me some of Hawberk’s dose?”

  “I can if you want to come to Hawberk’s condition.”

  “I suppose you could cure me if you have him?”

  “I don’t boast of having cured him, yet.”

  “I thought you did, the last time.” Langbrith chuckled with a dry pleasure, while he seemed indifferent as to the doctor’s sharing in the recollection. “If you could get him on to his legs again, I might leave him in charge of the mills. Maybe he wouldn’t want to blow on Royal, then!”

  Anther still sat stooped over his desk, and gave no heed to Langbrith’s continued pleasantry. He wheeled abruptly in his chair, and held a prescription towards his patient. “There, that’s the best I can do for you now; but get away as soon as you can.”

  Langbrith folded up the prescription, and put it into his pocket-book, but he did not rise at once. “I guess I shall have to, unless this does the business for me. I don’t know why I’m so anxious about the damned mills, anyway. Royal always treated me like a nigger — he did everybody he could get under his thumb, and this boy seems to think I’m part of the property. It wasn’t for either of them I couldn’t meet you on your proposition the other day.”

  “Oh, that’s all right!” the doctor said.

  “I shouldn’t care if Hawberk came out with the true story some day. But I don’t want to go outside of my job, if I don’t have to. That’s all there is to it. I’ve got enough to do, running the business, without looking for trouble with Royal’s ghost!”

  Anther had nothing to offer on this point, and in the country fashion, in such cases, he said nothing at all. And he did not respond in any wise to the long-drawn, groaned-out “We-e-ell!” with which John Langbrith got himself away, as a form of leave-taking. He had been gone some time when Hawberk came in, with a step so much firmer and quicker than Anther had known it for a long time that he could not have known it as his.

  “Well, Doct’ Anther,” he said, briskly, “have you got my bottles ready for me?”

  “I’ve not got your prescriptions ready; I happen to be out of the drugs,” Anther said, with a returning sense of meaning in the duty which had lately seemed so purposeless, and a rise of liking for Hawberk in the place of his reluctance and disgust. He felt the charm of the man, which he had never quite ceased to feel, though it had been dulled by long disappointment with him. “Well, I don’t know,” Hawberk said, “but I guess we’re doing the business for that green fellow at last. I always did know what he was when he seemed to be coming at me by the thousand, like your reflection, you know, when you stand between a couple of glasses. That got to be a great trick of his one while; but he’s stopped it now. Why, Doct’ Anther,” he exclaimed, with a sort of impersonal pleasure in a fact which Anther must enjoy, “I’ve got so, inside of the last forty-eight hours, that I haven’t been afraid to go to sleep. He still keeps hanging round, but he seems to know I’m on to him, and he don’t try any of his old jinks with me; just comes and goes to let me know he’s around, but don’t make any particular trouble. Why, doctor, just to try myself, one day this week — day before yesterday, I guess it was — I got down to sixty drops of laudanum, and it was my laudanum day, too. Don’t I show it — in my looks, I mean?”

  “Your complexion is clearing up. But go slow, Hawberk, even when you are going in the direction of my instructions. I don’t want you to tamper with my patient’s case.”

  Hawberk tasted the humor. “Well, I won’t, doctor; I won’t,” he said, and he laughed in the free way that was natural to him, and that went to Anther’s heart.

  The doctor turned a little grave, though. “How are the psychological symptoms? Do you see things, generally, as you have been seeing them?”

  “I don’t know as I do — everything. There’s one thing I wanted to speak to you about.”

  “That house you’re going to put up on the hill back of you?”

  Hawberk smiled. “I guess that can wait awhile.” Then he said, seriously, “You know Hope and Jim Langbrith have fixed it up between them?”

  “Yes, Hope told me this morning. I had heard of it before.”

  “Well, that’s all right. He’s a good fellow, and I haven’t a word against him. I don’t know what he’s going to do out there in Paris, but I presume he does. Anyway, Hope believes in it, and if it never comes to anything, he’s got money enough without it.” Hawberk’s face clouded. “I suppose if everything had gone right, I should have had some money, too. That’s the way it looks, off and on. I’ve had times, of late, very curious times, Doct’ Anther, when it don’t seem as if the square thing had been done by me. Do your remember the circumstances of my leaving the mills? I ain’t clear, myself.”

  The dawn in Hawberk’s mind had broken sooner than Anther expected, though it had come too late for any purpose of his. Now, if he had a wish, it must have been to darken it. When he thought how he would have once exulted in it, he had a kind of sickness of it; but his duty was still before him. He must do his best to cure his patient. As a physician, he could have no other concern; but he could keep himself out of the moral consequences. With these he had nothing, and must have nothing, to do.

  “You’ll be clear enough if you get well,” he said. “All the facts of that matter are something you must work out for yourself. I wish to caution you only on one point. You must be very careful to verify any surmise you may have. I should urge you not to speak of it to any one but me. You can see how, under the present circumstances, it could make great unhappiness for James Langbrith, and through him, for Hope.”

  “Yes, I see that, doctor. I’m not speaking of it. As I say, it’s something that comes and goes.” He added, with a laugh, “And it goes full as much as it comes. Well,” he rose and took his bottles from Anther’s table, “Emmering put these up for me? You ain’t afraid we’ll get our heads together and make ’em both laudanum?”

  “I guess I can trust you,” the doctor answered,
almost absently.

  “Well, I guess you’re right. Anyway, that green fellow has got the job of watching after me, and he’s on the lookout. You’ve weakened on the laudanum a little this time, as I understand.”

  “A little.”

  Anther’s absence gained upon him so much that he scarcely noticed Hawberk’s going; and he sat long in a hapless muse, in which now and then he smiled in self-derision. If the situation had been contrived by the sardonic spirit of Royal Langbrith himself, it could not have had a more diabolical perfection.

  XXX

  LIFE is never the logical and consequent thing we argue from the moral and intellectual premises. There ought always to be evident reason in it; but such reason as it has is often crossed and obscured by perverse events, which, in our brief perspective, give it the aspect of a helpless craze. Obvious effect does not follow obvious cause; there is sometimes no perceptible cause for the effects we see. The law that we find at work in the material world is, apparently, absent from the moral world; not, imaginably, because it is without law, but because the law is of such cosmical vastness in its operation that it is only once or twice sensible to any man’s experience. The seasons come and go in orderly course, but the incidents of human life have not the orderly procession of the seasons; so far as the sages or the saints are able convincingly to affirm, they have only the capricious vicissitudes of weather.

  Anther had been in charge of Hawberk’s case for twenty years; and, though he had always forbidden himself to despair of it, he had long ceased to hope for any final cure. He was used to changes for the better and changes for the worse in Hawberk’s habit, and to the psychological consequences when he limited his indulgence and when he lapsed again into his debauch. Under it all, though the man’s character was deteriorated or ameliorated, his temperament remained fundamentally the same, and Anther had never ceased to feel his gayety and his goodness, which, as they reappeared in Hope, charmed and deeply touched him. Hawberk’s recovery had become personally indifferent to him, so far as it concerned the hopes he had once built upon it; but the girl’s joy in it gave poignancy to the fears that had replaced his hopes. In a reasonable forecast of the effect, Hawberk must return in his self-restoration to a full sense of the reality concerning the wrong done him by Langbrith; and in place of the delusion he had promoted in the helpless mendacity of his habit, he must know and speak the truth. There had already been hints of such an eventuality; the hints that sickened Anther in his thought of the time when he would have welcomed them, and that made him tremble for the misery which the truth must bring upon Hope, through her love for the man whose father had so pitilessly wronged her own. Anther had believed that he wanted justice done. This had been his argument with Judge Garley; it had been his suggestion to Dr. Enderby. It ought to avail him in any emergency, but now it did not avail him, and he accused himself of having cared for the truth only in his own interest, as the truth would have promoted it with Mrs. Langbrith against her son.