Mrs. Enderby kept herself as fully instructed as possible from Hope as to the future of the young people, and if she partook of her husband’s uneasiness, she did not show it. Perhaps, in that optimistic view of marriage which some of the best women take voluntarily, if not instinctively, she looked forward to that as the panacea of whatever ills life had in store for them. Of course, she allowed, Hope ought somehow to know the truth before she committed herself to the keeping of such a man’s son, but this she felt would be somehow divinely rather than humanely accomplished; in reverting to the comfort of a more positive faith from her ancestral Unitarianism, she grew constantly in the grace of a belief in, at least, subjective miracles. That everything would come out right in the end was so clearly a part of the universal justice that she could not have final question of it. When she permitted herself to join in any of the rare and guarded approaches of Anther and her husband to the matter, it was to interpose herself between what the doctor might say and its effect upon the rector. She made herself the interpreter of Anther’s acquiescence in the rector’s reasoning, so that it should be more of the nature of a robust and positive support. If it would not have taken from Enderby the honor of being first to reach a right conclusion, she might have argued that Anther had himself intimated it to him — when she was less confident of it she sometimes conjectured this. But, for the most part, she was sure that Dr. Enderby had been inspired to it, and that the notion of patiente, of waiting on the Supreme Will, of looking for what the older theology called a “leading,” was the true ground to take. She was the more to be praised in this because patience was not one of her innate virtues, and it was ordinarily her practice in life to anticipate the signs and tokens for which she was now willing to trust.
Something, in fact a great deal, she held, was to be hoped from Hawberk’s return to health and work. There, she argued, was proof that the case had never really lapsed into forgetfulness with the Power that makes for righteousness. It was affecting, it was enough to bring the tears — and she showed them in her eyes — to know, as she knew by her husband’s report of Anther’s confidences, how poor Hawberk was taking the cruel wrong that had been done him by that wretched creature. No one else, surely, ought to insist upon justice, if he preferred mercy; and, certainly, if Hawberk took such a large, humane view, her husband ought to feel himself fully confirmed in it. Such a man could be trusted with the decision of what ought to be done about Hope. If he was willing to let the matter go for the present, no one else need bother.
To this conclusion, in these terms, Mrs. Enderby came; and, without transgressing the bounds of confidence in her cordiality with Hawberk, she tried to throw into her manner an appreciation, an approbation, which should be a reward to him, even in its want of relevance. As nearly as she might with self-respect, she lay in wait for him in his goings and comings to and from the mills, and she sent the very latest of her autumn flowers home by him, now to his daughter, and now to his mother-in-law, so that the old lady might not feel neglected. After one of the gay confabulations which Hawberk was as willing to hold as herself, she told him that now she knew where Hope got her happiness, and he owned that, well, yes, that sort of thing seemed to run in the family. As to his infirmity and his recovery from it, she would have liked to question him about it; but no opening offered itself, though she felt that Mr. Hawberk would have been perfectly willing to talk if they had once begun.
He was the most enthusiastic and optimistic of convalescents, and Anther, who had always to count with some sort of weakness, physical or moral, in his patients, had not the worse weakness to deal with in Hawberk. It was weakness of body, not of spirit, that confronted the physician, who could caution, but must not alarm, his patient as to his limitations. Hawberk was more strenuous than Anther in pushing their advantages against the common enemy, when he had begun sensibly to realize them. Without instruction, he suspended the laudanum altogether for a week; and one morning, at the end of it, he fell in the street, and was carried home senseless. It was just when John Langbrith had summoned his forces to the point of putting the mills into the charge of Hawberk and his business assistant, preparatory to going round the world so quickly that he would not be missed before he got back. When they told him of what had happened to Hawberk he said, “Hell!” and took up his burden again.
Hawberk went back to the alternating bane and antidote, and was much sooner at his work than John Langbrith in his scepticism could have imagined; but Langbrith’s faith in him was gone, in spite of all that Anther could say or do to restore it. Even when, as the winter wore along towards the spring, and he was made to believe that Hawberk’s laudanum had been gradually reduced again to nothing, and he had the witness of Hawberk’s enthusiastic efficiency against his own doubts, he practised a sardonic self-denial with regard to the fact.
“You let it run along till winter,” he said to Anther, “and, if he keeps up till then, it’ll be time enough to talk to me about taking a vacation. But I guess I’ve got enough of putting an opium-eater in charge of the mills, for one while.”
In early April, when the first of the blackbirds had come prospecting as far north as Saxmills, Hawberk was one day making a personal examination of the logs in the boom at the head-gates, for certain sticks which he wished to experiment with, in a new idea of pulp which he had got. He slipped and fell into the water, still icy cold; but he easily climbed out, and hurried home, to laugh at the prophecies of his mother-in-law, who told him that he had taken his death, as soon as he came dripping into the house. For once, in a long series of gloomy forecasts, she was right. Pneumonia set in, and, twenty-four hours after it set in, death put his seal to the cure of opium-eating which Doctor Anther had effected in a typical case.
As long as she lived, the seeress could boast, not only that she knew Hawberk would die as soon as she laid eyes on him, but also that, if Doctor Anther could have attended him, Hawberk would not have died.
XXXIII
IN March, John Langbrith’s misery had pushed him to the desperate step of writing to his nephew that, somehow, at any risk or cost, he must get away from work for a while. It was not a case of life or death, and neither he nor Anther had pretended that it was so; but it was a case of what a man could stand and care to live. He said this to his nephew; but he said also that he had merely reached the point where he did not care what became of the business. If James Langbrith cared, he had better come home and look after it; for, in a month from the time he wrote, John Langbrith was going to leave it. Like some men who have found a grim pleasure in suppressing their feelings, and who, upon a sudden occasion, find a yet grimmer pleasure in freeing them, he poured out on his nephew the disgust he had bottled up in his heart for James Langbrith’s views and aims, and said that he had better learn to make paper than plays, for more people wanted it; there was more demand even for poor paper than for poor plays. He said something about James Langbrith’s being old enough to leave off being a loafer, and to turn to and do something for a living.
The letter, rightly read, was a cry of physical pain; but there is no doubt that it was a vulgar and abusive cry, and it filled Langbrith with a fury which was not greater than his astonishment. In his whole life, his uncle had never spoken so many words to him on business, and had never offered him any criticism on what he was doing or proposing to do. He had felt a sardonic reserve in John Langbrith at their spare encounters, but so long as it continued reserve he did not care for it. He had a general contempt for his uncle, as a sort of mechanical-minded insect who could fulfil its office without volition or imagination, and now this insect had venomously risen and stung him in the tenderest part of his vanity. But he resolved to be a gentleman in repelling the attack. He determined not to answer John Langbrith’s letter till he had let his wrath cool; not to judge him till he had submitted the case to another. The other was, of course, Falk, who did not give the matter too great thought when Langbrith pushed the letter peremptorily between him and a sketch Falk was making, an
d required to know what he thought of it. Falk read it with the sort of amusement which the pain of such a man as Langbrith is apt to give those who know him, and even those who like him; but, though he smiled, he could not refuse his friend the justice of owning, “Pretty nasty letter.”
Langbrith briefly wrote back to his uncle that he was not prepared to leave Paris at the moment; but that, if John Langbrith wished to relinquish his charge of the mills, it would be entirely acceptable to have them left in the hands of his business lieutenant and of Mr. Hawberk, who, as the old and devoted friend of his father, would doubtless feel, as his father’s brother seemed not to have felt, the importance and sacred character of the charge. He made no reply to John Langbrith’s sarcasms, but suffered himself the expression of a high, impersonal regret that he should have always mistakenly inferred his uncle’s character from his father’s. He could not, however, be altogether sorry that he had credited John Langbrith with the noble nature and magnanimous ideals of Royal Langbrith. Brief as it was, the letter was as insolently foolish as it could well be, and John Langbrith, reading it on the way up to Hawberk’s house, where he had been summoned by news of Hawberk’s dangerous condition, pushed it into his pocket with a pleasure in not having been mistaken as to the writer which few men would have been able to feel.
He had been told that he had better go up, by the young doctor who was hopelessly looking after Hawberk in place of Dr. Anther, then in the second week of a typhoid fever. Anther had fought against the fever to the last, and when he succumbed to it he was already delirious, so that it was not known whether his asking for Mrs. Langbrith was or was not from a mind fully master of itself. But it did not matter. She was already on her way to him, at the first rumor of his sickness; and she carried her home into his homeless house, and gave him the tireless devotion in which alone she was not weak. She took her two women with her and installed them in the place, which she stripped the Langbrith homestead to make a little less comfortless. She published, so far as her action went, the fact of their affection to the whole village world. To some of those who came to offer the help she almost passionately refused, she said that Dr. Anther and she were engaged, and that they were to be married as soon as he was well again. In the sort of vehemence with which she declared this, she might well have wished to put her purpose beyond recall. Mrs. Enderby and Mrs. Garley would have helped her; there were few in the village who would not have been glad to offer help, if that of her nearest friends and his had been allowed. She was not stupidly and jealously set upon the sole charge of the sick man: it was she who had first thought of having a trained nurse from Boston, and had suggested it to the young doctor, who did not like to venture on it. She put herself second to the nurse, and subordinately shared her duties and vigils, claiming no rights and asserting no hopes they had not in common. She had not even the poor consolation of being the subject of the sick man’s ravings. His crazy thoughts ran mostly upon Hawberk, whom he fancied advising and cautioning as to his case. Two or three times he dimly knew Mrs. Langbrith, but supposed himself in her own house with her. He sometimes mistook the nurse for her. All the tragedy that had allied them in the past, the baffle, the defeat, the despair was wiped out; and a trivial cheerfulness replaced it in the sick man’s delirium.
John Langbrith came to tell her of Hawberk’s death, and he said to the bewilderment in which she listened, “What are you going to do about James? He ought to come home, if he ever means to; but I can’t make him.”
“I will,” she said from her daze, without asking him why he could not do it, as he, perhaps, intended. But she sat still without offering to put her will into any sort of effect.
“I’ve got the cablegram-blank with me,” John Langbrith said. “You want to cable him, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she answered. “What shall I say?” she asked.
“Oh,-anything — just ‘Hawberk dead: come immediately.’”
She wrote mechanically from his dictation; then she put in a word.
“Well,” John Langbrith said, with his grim smile, “it wa’n’t necessary to have the ‘Mister,’ but it only costs twenty-five cents more, and he didn’t get the ‘Mister’ so often while he was alive. Want to sign it, don’t you?”
“Oh yes,” and she took the despatch from him. Then, after a hesitation, she signed it “Mother,” and gave it back, and let him go without asking anything about Hope.
John Langbrith stayed two days for Hawberk’s funeral; then, with some formality, referring to the favorable symptoms in Anther’s case, which he would not have observed, perhaps, if they had been unfavorable, he broke away from his work, and took his misery with him on a vacation. He had a blind notion that a sea-voyage would be the thing for him, and he thought of a trip to Bermuda. But he found that he could not get back under a week, and, desperate as he was, he could not bring himself to put that time between him and possible recall to his business cares. He devolved upon a trip to Old Point Comfort, and went and returned by the coastwise steamers, which encountered heavy weather enough to prolong both voyages, and to give him several days of haggard unrest at the beach hotel. He got in, he considered, a full week of sea-air by this means, and he arrived in New York one morning in time to take a Boston train which would connect for Saxmills, so that he could sleep at home that night.
He imagined it in this phrase before he realized, with a sardonic humor, that it would be going to bed, rather than sleeping, at home. He did not know how he was ever to sleep again anywhere; and the flame in his stomach fretted him to a white heat of exasperation with everything in life and the world. He was going back not better but worse, and he was going to take up alone the burden that Hawberk had divided with him during the last six months. Why need Hawberk have died now, damn him? He raged, and he cursed the fool for losing his life on that idiotic venture, when he could have sent any boy in the mills to pick out the right logs. In his thought he visited the insufficiency of this business lieutenant with equal fury and profanity, and wondered what hell of a muddle he would have contrived to make of things in the week that he had been left alone. He included Anther in the rage of his condemnation, for being down with typhoid just when his skill was needed to save Hawberk, and he included that young jackass of an Emering, who knew as much about practising medicine as John Langbrith knew about sailing a ship. The figure was an effect from his recent voyages, in which all forms of navigation had fallen under his contempt, as incompetent to supply a man with the seasickness on which he had counted as one of the means of relief from his dyspepsia. While the boat rolled and pitched, and cries for help hailed the stewards from every state-room, he had kept a steadfast stomach, such as it was; and he had maniacally calculated in his anguish that there was not enough water in the Atlantic Ocean to put out the fire that was burning in his hold.
It was still smoldering when the train stopped ten minutes for refreshments at New Haven, and Langbrith, who had started breakfastless from New York, recklessly decided to supply it with fresh fuel. As everything indifferently disagreed with him, he did not see why he should not have a cup of turbid coffee, a plate of cold beans, and a piece of apple-pie, as well as anything wholesome, and he was wiping the traces of this repast from his shaggy mustache when he ran for his train, and scrambled into his parlor-car, just before the porter picked up his carpeted step and swung himself aboard. As he crowded through the narrow aisle on his way to take his seat again, he glanced into the smoking-room and met the eye of his nephew, who turned at the same moment from watching the shipping in the harbor through the windows and over the platforms of the cars receding on the sidings.
They knew each other with less surprise on John Langbrith’s part than James Langbrith’s; but it was the uncle who expressed an ironical astonishment, when he decided to be first to break the silence in which they were glaring at each other. “Oh!” he said, “thought you’d come over!”
XXXIV
EVERYTHING in the sight of the young man made the older man hate
him; but, most of all, it was the indefinable touch of Europe, of Prance, of the Latin Quarter in James Langbrith’s dress which, while it could not interpret itself explicitly to John Langbrith’s ignorance, expressed something superiorly and offensively alien.
“Uncle John” — the young man’s misfortune was to intensify this effect by the tone of his suggestion—” don’t you think we had better leave anything of this sort till after — till later?”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 814
