Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “No, I don’t,” John Langbrith sourly responded. And he came into the smoking-room, and sat down in a chair opposite the corner of the sofa where James had been looking out of the window.

  They had the place to themselves. It was the train which used to be called the “ladies’ train,” because of its convenient hours and slower gait, suitable to the leisurely transit of the unbusiness sex; and James Langbrith, in entering the car, had noted that, but for one man, there were only women in it, and had taken possession of the smoking-room to think the more unmolestedly of things that had filled, it seemed almost to bursting, his mind for the last ten days. John Langbrith had made no such observation, but he saw that they were alone with an opportunity for quarrel, with which he luxuriously toyed before he fully grasped it.

  “When did you come?” he asked, after looking vainly for a splinter to chew upon. He caught sight of the porter’s whisk-broom over the wash-bowl, and supplied himself with a straw.

  In the mean time, James had said, “We got in this morning; our boat was thirty-six hours late; it was two days before I could get away after the cable reached me. She was the first boat out.”

  The words were spare enough, but there was an exculpatory flavor in them that suited John Langbrith’s ferocious mood, and when James added, “How is my mother, and Hope?” he loosed himself upon the young man.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen them for a week, and I don’t want to bandy any small-talk with you.

  I got your answer to my letter all right, and I want to have a square understanding with you. I don’t know as we ever had a regular understanding, did we?”

  “I don’t know that we did, if you mean about the mills.”

  “I mean about the mills. What the devil else could I mean?”

  “That,” said James, “was all arranged before I was old enough to have any understanding with you, and since then I have let my absolute trust in you take the place of an understanding.”

  “I know that damn well. But the time has come now when I don’t want your absolute trust.”

  It occurred again to James Langbrith, as it had occurred before, since getting his uncle’s astounding letter, that his uncle might be mad.

  “I want to know whether you’ve come home for good, to take a grown man’s share in your own business?”

  “That depends,” James parried the issue. He was really no more afraid of the impending quarrel than his uncle, but he was a dreamer, and he liked to nurse his conclusions before trying them: liked to shy off from them and feign that they were not immediate, and perhaps not at all. John Langbrith was concrete where the young man was abstract, and his pleasure was to force the issue.

  “It don’t depend on me. I’m done with the thing. I’m going back to Saxmills, but it’s to pull out for good and all.”

  “I suppose,” James Langbrith assented, “that there will be an accounting and a settlement?”

  “Oh, don’t you be afraid of that, young man. There’ll be a settlement all right, and after I’ve been paid a little more than days’ wages, you can have the rest.” John Langbrith felt the coffee and beans and pie beginning to ignite, and he flamed out upon his nephew from that inner conflagration, “What do you mean by ‘an accounting,’ you — you whipper-snapper?”

  James Langbrith made no answer, and his uncle pulled his chair closer, and put his face so near that the young man turned his own slightly aside, to get it out of the current of his uncle’s dyspeptic breath.

  “What do you mean? What do you mean?” John Langbrith insisted. “Do you suppose Royal Langbrith was a man to put anybody slippery into his business?”

  “You know,” James Langbrith disgustedly, but quietly, responded, “that I could not mean to impugn your honor.” With the effect of being pushed to the wall and menaced there, he looked like his mother, who had so often been in that place, first through his father’s duress and then through his own.

  “Honor!” John Langbrith spat the word out of his mouth. “I’m talking business! What sort of man do you suppose your father was, anyway?”

  A light, less of hate for his uncle than of love for his ideal of the father he had never known, kindled in James Langbrith’s eyes, the long eyes of his mother. “He was, at least, a gentleman.”

  “That’s to say I’m not. Well, go on! We’ll take it for granted in my case. How do you know he was a gentleman, heigh?” He pressed him with the last word, and repeated it with a smile of scorn and pain. “Heigh? How do you know?” James Langbrith moved his head from side to side, as much now to escape what message of disaster might be coming as the effluvium that should bear it. But he made no answer, and John Langbrith hitched himself so near that his bony shins sawed against his nephew’s legs, and he tapped him on the knee with his spiky forefinger, in the habit he had when talking business with people. He was talking business now as he said: “You don’t know? Well, I do, because he was my brother, and I knew him up to within twenty minutes of his death. If he didn’t reform within them twenty minutes” — John Langbrith in his passion lost the grip, always uncertain, of his grammar—” he’d ought to have went smack, smooth to hell, like shot out of a shovel!” James Langbrith’s eyes dilated with the assured conviction of his uncle’s insanity, but at the same time his nostrils swelled with resentment of the maniac’s offence. John Langbrith gave him no chance for the expression of either the belief or the emotion. “Ever since I could remember him he was the coolest and slickest devil! I don’t know where he got it! He had the trick of making other folks do his dirty work — and he was full of that, I can tell you — and keeping such a hold of ’em that they never had the chance to squirm out of the blame. He had me fixed good and fast, while we were boys, by a scrape he hauled me into along with him, and when he wanted me, any time, and said ‘Come!’ you bet I went. That’s the way I came to be left in charge of his business when he died, and that poor fool of a Hawberk crowded out of it with lies that Royal threatened to tell his wife if he peeped. That’s the way the woman Royal lived with down to Boston came to take what he give her and no questions asked, without makin’ trouble for him, alive or dead. She was fixed so that she didn’t peep! And so right along the whole line! If he hadn’t cowed your mother for good and all she might have said something about the way he used to bully her, and when he came home from his Boston sprees used to pound her.

  Oh, he was a gentleman, Royal was! And that poor sheep of an Anther might have spoke out in meetin’ if your mother hadn’t been so mollycoddlin’ about you that she couldn’t bear to have you told the truth when he wanted to marry her and couldn’t make her tell. But I’ll tell you now, and don’t you forget it. Royal was such a gentleman that he cooked it up with the devil how to fool the whole town, and make ’em believe he was a saint upon earth. That library buildin’! He gave it out of the profits of the first year after he choused Hawberk, and the mis’ble crittur was makin’ it all right for Royal by tryin’ to kill himself with laudanum! Why, he made Royal Langbrith rich with his inventions, and then Royal got the credit of ‘em; and he got the credit of doin’ the handsome thing by a man that was an opium-fiend, according to his tell, from the beginning. And when you took it into your fool head to put up that tablet to him in the front of the library, he had things so solid that all hell couldn’t bust ’em up. Anther did go round to Garley and tell him the rights of it, but that old chump honeyfugled him into believin’ that he better let by-gones be by-gones, for fear of the corruptin’ effects on the community. Then Anther come to me, the last thing, but I was stickin’ to my job, just about then, and I thought if your mother wouldn’t keep you from runnin’ your neck into the noose, I wouldn’t. I believe there wasn’t a last one of them jackasses up on the platform that wasn’t as big a fool as you, except me and Anther, and that old honeyfugler. And I ain’t sure,” John Langbrith said, withdrawing his furious face a little from its proximity to his nephew’s, “but what I’d have held my tongue, now, if you hadn’t put it to me th
at Royal Langbrith was a gentleman and I wasn’t; but now you’ve got it, I guess, about as strong as they make it, right in the collar-button!” He leaned forward again, and demanded in a fresh burst of fury: “I suppose you don’t believe me! I presume you think I’m tryin’ to work you, or off my nut, or just pure ugly! Well, you can ask Anther, when you get home. And you can ask your mother! And you can ask the mother of his children — I’ll give you her address. And you can ask that old honeyfugling fraud of a Garley. And you can ask Haw — Oh no, you can’t ask him! He’s out of it, but I guess his mother-in-law could tell you something she’s suspected, all right! Oh, you’ve got a nice job cut out for you, young man! Why, I wouldn’t be in your shoes—”

  The parlor-car conductor put his head in at the door, and looked at them. John Langbrith fell suddenly as silent as James Langbrith had been throughout. With the shadow of a changing mind passing over his face, the conductor said, “See: d’ I get your tickets?” and James Langbrith, if not John Langbrith, knew that he had been drawn to them by the sound of a noisy, angry voice, and had meant to ask them to be quieter.

  But the young man could not care. It would not have mattered to him now whether the whole world had overheard; the universal knowledge of the fact could be nothing,- compared with the fact itself.

  His uncle got up and went out to his seat in the parlor, but James Langbrith did not move. He sat exposed to the tempest that had opened upon him without the shelter of a doubt. It seemed still to rage upon him like some war of the elements, and he was aware not only of the truth of what had been told him, but of its not being novel. He had that mystical sense of its having all happened before, long ago, and of a privity to it, in his inmost, dating back to his first consciousness. The awful conviction of the reality which held him like a demoniacal obsession was blended with a physical loathing of his uncle’s person, a disgust verging on sickness for his boiling hate, his vulgar profanities, mixed with the oldest and the newest slang, and the brute solecisms of the vernacular into which John Langbrith had lapsed in his passion. If he had wanted proof of what had been said of his father, the fact that John Langbrith was his father’s brother would have been proof enough to the young man’s shame.

  From time to time, in the turmoil of his cognitions, he had a nerveless impulse to follow his uncle, where he had gone to his seat in the drawing-room, and ask him this and that, but he did not. He was not aware of stirring till the porter came for his bag at the South Terminals in Boston. Then the horrible dream went on like waking, as he drove across the city to the Northern Stations, and found his train for Saxmills. Till then he had lost sight of his uncle, but he saw him boarding the same train; he looked into the smoker, and, finding it fairly full, he got into it, making sure that John Langbrith would not come to molest him there. He had no wish now but to keep away from him, to keep for the present out of the sight of the man who had heaped his dishonor upon him, and who alone of all that he could encounter would be knowing to it.

  Apparently John Langbrith had no wish to look him up. He had doubtless poured the last drop from the vials of his wrath out upon him, and was without any purpose of breaking them upon his devoted head. At any rate, when they got out of the train at Saxmills, the uncle made no motion to approach his nephew. He stared at him, ignoring him as perfectly as if he were any other shadow of the vaguely lighted depot, and getting into one of the two ramshackle public carriages which had chanced a late passenger, drove off into the darkness. James Langbrith took the other, and bade the man, who was a stranger to him, drive to Mrs. Langbrith’s.

  All the way he had a sinking of the heart which was not related to the failure of his mother to have him met, after he had telegraphed her from New York that he was coming on that train. There was no lifting at sight of a belated lamp in the parlor, or at its moving thence, when he knocked, and showing through the transom of the hall-door, which his mother opened to him herself.

  XXXV

  JAMES LANGBRITH took his mother in his arms with an emotion that he had never known before, with pity, with honor, with reverence due to mute suffering, with everything that endears and exalts an object long beloved and wronged. She seemed surprised at his warmth, and sparely kissed him, without even a lax return of his embrace.

  “Mother,” he said, breaking from the sense of her coldness and from the subjective pressure of something unwonted in the absolutely unchanged environment, “I came from New York with Uncle John, and he told me about father.” As he said this, he noted that the place was lighted only by a hand-lamp, which she was nervously fingering. Her face was swollen as with weeping, and the red crescents under her eyes were tumid with tears unshed.

  She said, beginning with the estrayal of his glance towards the lamp: “Norah is not here, and I have let the cook go to bed. I said I would sit up for you. She wanted to.”

  “Thank you,” he said, mechanically, to her drooping head. “Uncle John,” he repeated, “told me about father.” Either she did not understand or she did not heed; it seemed impossible that she should not have done both; but he felt that it would be cruel to press her further with the fact of his knowledge now; he took his first lesson in forbearance with her. “I want to see Dr. Anther, at once. Do you suppose he is well enough to see me, tonight?”

  “Dr. Anther?” she asked, with an accent that impressed him as having something in it as strange to herself as to him. “Why, you can’t see him!”

  “Yes, I know he is sick; Hope wrote to me. I didn’t think — you must excuse — How is he?”

  “He is dead,” she answered, simply. “He died early this morning. I wanted to stay and sit up, to-night, but they wouldn’t let me. They say it isn’t the custom, any more. I’ve just got back here. I brought the trained nurse. She ought to have a little rest before she goes back to Boston.” She added one fact to the other in the same quality of tone, with the same effect of not realizing any of them.

  “Dead?” was all that James Langbrith could say. “They thought he was getting well, one while; or I did. But Dr. Emering said he was afraid, all along. He had splendid care. That trained nurse is as good as another doctor.” With the same lifelessness she said: “I’ve put you out a little supper; and then I suppose you’ll want to go to bed. I don’t know as you’ll find things very comfortable. I took both the girls with me, and, with Norah there still, things haven’t been put to rights, all. But I’ve got your room ready.”

  She ceased to speak, and they both sat in a silence like that of the night when he found her in the moonlight there after his return to do Hope’s bidding, and consent to her marriage with Dr. Anther. Now as then it was as if there was to be no end to their sitting in silence together, but now it ought to be a silence that united, not parted, them.

  Up to a certain moment in every evil predicament men are the victims of it, and after that, if they continue in it they are its agents, though as little its masters as before. They are exceptionally happy men if they realize this early enough in life to make choice of their better selves against their worse, and in that choice finally prevail over their evil predicament. The events of James Langbrith’s situation presented themselves with the simultaneity with which events are said to show themselves in instants of mortal peril. No detail was missing in the retrospect of wilful arrogance, of blind conceit, of vain folly, of baseless illusion; and yet, with it all, he justly felt that he was not so bad as any of the things he had done. At his age he could not be without hope: there could be as yet no error in life wholly irreparable. His soul seized upon renunciation, sacrifice, as its only refuge, and he said, as he thought, to himself — but from her response he knew that he must have also said it to his mother—” I must release Hope.”

  She answered simply, “It’s too late, to-night.”

  “Yes, but I will see her the first thing in the morning, and tell her. That will be the end between us.” His mother did not gainsay him, and he asked: “Does she know about it — what my father did to hers?”

>   His mother said impassively, “I don’t believe she does.”

  “Then I must tell her, and let her take herself back. She would hate me.”

  His mother looked at him in a daze; she seemed about to speak, but did not. “Mother,” his voice quivered in the question, “do you suppose Dr. Anther hated me?”

  She took time, as if to consider. “I don’t believe he did — after the first — after you went away that day. As far as anything went that he said then or ever afterwards, he pitied you.”

  “Oh!” Langbrith groaned.

  “I don’t know,” she resumed, “how much for me it was that he pitied you. He was always wanting you to be told about — about Mr. Langbrith; but he wouldn’t force me, when he saw I couldn’t. I don’t know as I did right not to tell you, but the time never seemed to come.”

  The words had a sound of excuse, and against this he protested, “Oh, mother!”

  “He wanted me,” she continued emotionlessly, “to let him tell you, but he always said he wouldn’t be my tyrant; he thought I had had enough of tyrants.”

  Her son winced with a cruel pang. “Did he think I had been your tyrant?”

  “I guess he did, in some ways. But not that you meant to. He never liked to blame, a great deal.” She added, with finality, “He was a good man.”

  “Yes, yes!” Langbrith wailed, in his intolerable regret. “He was a good man. And I insulted and outraged him when, because he meant the best a man could and had been your true and constant friend, I should have been on my knees to him. And mother, do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Pity me, too? Forgive me?”

  She drew a long, weary sigh. “Oh, what does it all matter?”

  “Everything — the whole world, life, death!”

  She appeared to consider again. Then she answered, “I don’t know as I ever felt but the one way to you. You were my son.”

  He felt that to rise and kiss her for the assurance of her love would have been to profane it. He sat where he was, but he burst into a wild sobbing, the tears of a man who does not weep till the fountains of being are broken up. When he controlled himself he asked, “Who else knows about father?”