Probably he saw no reason for putting Langbrith to the ordeal he shrank from, and he said: “You needn’t go on. I think I know what you want to say. I did not know it when you asked me to speak those words, but I knew it before I spoke them — from Dr. Anther.”
Langbrith fetched a sigh of relief that was almost a groan. “I won’t say,” the rector continued, “what I might have done if I had known it all when you asked me, for I am no longer master of such a situation, and I can’t go back to it and recreate it. But I was informed in time to refuse a part in that ceremony, and I did not, for reasons that still seem to me good.”
Langbrith passed his right hand over his forehead, and was aware of having Hope’s hand in his left as he did so. “Would you mind,” he huskily asked, “telling me your reasons?”
“They were not very profound. They related less to myself than to the effect of my refusal with the public — of the ultimate effect, if the cause of my refusal became, we will say, notorious. I had not much time to give to the matter, but I find that I don’t think differently now, upon further reflection. It seemed to me that no good and much harm could come of revealing the past; that so far as your father was concerned we had no right to enter into judgment, and that so far as God’s purposes were concerned we had no right to act upon our conception of what they might be in such a case. Do I make myself understood?”
“Yes,” Langbrith whispered.
“I believe that I said to Dr. Anther — in fact, I am sure I did — that to take upon ourselves any agency for supposed justice — for the discovery and the retribution implied by the concealment and the wrong in the case, would be in a manner forcing God’s purposes; I don’t like the phrase, now, but it expressed my meaning. May I ask how the matter has become known to you?”
“My uncle John told me yesterday, as we were coming up from New York. We have had a difference about — the business, and I am afraid I — I affronted him; and — and he told me.”
“In anger?”
“Yes, in anger.”
The rector thought how it was written, “Surely the wrath of man shall praise Thee.” It seemed to him that the Divine Providence had not acted inopportunely; and he was contented with the mode in which the young man had learned the worst; it was better that he should have come by the knowledge of it so than by any deliberate revelation, with the effect of such authority as an officious interference could have arrogated to itself. His mother could not have told him, and she could not suffer Dr. Anther to tell him; but his father’s brother might tell him, in anger and in hate, even, and out of his evil passions, and the evil passions they would arouse in the young man evoke the best result possible from the otherwise hopeless case.
Langbrith waited for him to speak; then he said: “And what do you think I ought to do now?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. What had you thought of doing?”
“Of making it all known; of undoing my father’s wrong as far as I could, and of revoking my own acts in perpetuating his good name — the good name he has falsely borne in this community.”
“That is natural — for you, and you will let me say that it does you honor. But — What do you think, Hope?”
“I think he oughtn’t to do any such thing.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t see what good it would do, and it would make a great deal of misery for nothing. I know that the Bible says things have got to come out, but it doesn’t say that they need come out here, when there’s nobody left to suffer for them but those that didn’t do them.”
“What do you say, my dear?” The rector turned his head towards Mrs. Enderby.
“I say what Hope does.” Mrs. Enderby’s eyes shone with admiration of the girl, as she smiled on her.
“And I suppose there can be no doubt of your mother’s wish?” he asked Langbrith.
“I am afraid,” said the young man sadly, “I hadn’t considered her. I’m afraid that I have never considered her.”
The rector sat in a muse, which he was some time in breaking. “If it is something that you feel is for the good of your own soul,” he spoke solemnly, “I could adjure you to speak out and make confession of your father’s sins.”
“I was trying,” said Langbrith, “not to think of my own good.” He looked at Hope, as if there might be some help in her, but she would not meet his glance.
“Then,” said the rector, “though I know that it would be a relief to you to have all this known, and to take upon yourself the dishonor which the stupid and malignant love to visit upon the children of wrong-doers, I think you must not seek that relief. I would impose a more difficult, a heavier penance. I would bid you keep all this to yourself, as your mother has kept it to herself, and as your wife — Excuse me, I didn’t realize—”
“Oh, that is all right, Dr. Enderby!” Hope quaintly condoned his break.
“ — and as your wife,” the rector resumed with fresh courage, “wishes you to keep it. I know that from my talks with Dr. Anther; this was finally his mind in regard to the matter, and he told me this was finally, or indeed, long ago, the mind of Hope’s father. Yes, you must keep this secret locked in your own heart, until such time as the Infinite Mercy, which is the Infinite Justice, shall choose to free you of it. You will know the will of God when, if ever in this world, there is some event which may well seem a chance, leading to the discovery of what you have kept hid. Then you must own the truth promptly and fully. I believe in your good-will, and in your love of the truth, and I know that God will give you strength to do His purpose when He bids you.”
XXXVII
AT Anther’s grave, Enderby kept himself to the ritual of his church, and disappointed many who thought he would make some remarks, as they phrased it, on the dead man’s life, more final than anything he had said in his sermon the day before. There was some disappointment with the sermon itself, which the rector shared, for in his reluctance to make it the mere personal praise of his friend, he was aware of having kept it too general. He would have agreed, if he could from his own knowledge, with those who said it was the least moving of the discourses of the day which had all dealt with Anther’s character and career. At the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, the Methodist Church, and the Universalist Church, the qualities of the man who had now become a memory were dealt with directly, and his example interpreted as a lesson to those who heard. But Enderby shrank from eulogy, and while he knew that he was failing the expectations of his hearers, he had the consolation, such as it was, of knowing that he was dealing with Anther’s memory as Anther would have had him if it had been his to choose. Even this consolation was alloyed by the consciousness that it was no more for Anther to choose being made little of than to choose being made much of, and that in deferring to an imaginable preference of the man he was possibly as greatly in error as if he had pronounced the warmest and fullest panegyric of his virtues.
He could only say to himself that he had done what he could, when he feared, from the effect, that he had not done enough. He was curiously disabled by the personal considerations of the case, not only as concerned Anther himself, but as concerned Langbrith and his mother. In the friendship beginning tardily, but growing rapidly into something vitally strong between them, Anther had told the preacher of all that had passed with either of these and himself. He spoke of the affair as if it were a great while ago, and with a certain aloofness in which he judged himself as impartially as the others. From being the man in later middle life who had wished to form the happiness of a woman long dear to him, he had suddenly lapsed into an elderly man to whom it was appreciable that he could not have made her happy, but only more miserable, if he had pressed her to obey the prompting of her own affection for him. He had come to see that in a case where nothing was wrong, where everything was right, there were yet obstacles which could not be removed without a violence leaving a bruise destined to be lastingly sensitive. In his confidences to the man who understood him, he not only excused James La
ngbrith’s part in the matter, as something natural and inevitable, but his tolerance retracted towards the boy’s father, and he accounted for Royal Langbrith with a scientific largeness in which Enderby could not join him. He seemed to have exhausted the hoarded abhorrence with which he had hitherto visited the sinner’s memory, and to regard his evil life as a morbid condition with which the psychological side of pathology had to do rather than morals. He regarded him, apparently, with no more resentment than some treacherous and cruel beast whose propensities imply its prey, and which has satisfied them with a moral responsibility difficult or impossible for our ethics to adjust. In these speculations, Royal Langbrith seemed for him a part of the vast sum of evil, not personally detachable and punishable. As for that publicity which his revolted instincts had long demanded for Langbrith’s sins, he divined that it would have been the wildest and wantonest of errors. He alleged the attitude of Hawberk towards the memory of his pitiless enemy. Hawberk once said that he guessed Royal Langbrith was built that way, and that it was too late to give him a realizing sense that there was anything out of order in his machinery. Hawberk said he had no wish to make anybody else suffer for what Royal, as he called him, had done. He doubted whether, if Royal himself were on hand, he should want to collect anything from Royal out of his pocket or out of his hide. He guessed his claims were outlawed.
Anther himself more than once approved the position which Enderby had taken in regard to the public celebration of Langbrith’s public munificence, but in this he did not allay the disquiet of the rector’s own mind concerning it. In this Enderby insisted that he had done no better than choose the least of the evils presented, and that, somehow, some day, it behooved him to own the compromise made with his conscience. He did not see the way nor the hour, but he hoped that he was holding himself in readiness.
Early in the winter, the one vindictive foe of Royal Langbrith’s memory perished in Mrs. Southfield, who had, indeed, only a conjectured, or, as she believed, an inspired grievance. Such as it was, she wished to visit it on the sinner’s son rather than the sinner himself. Royal Langbrith had necessarily lapsed beyond her active hostility, and she turned this upon James Langbrith, whose engagement to Hope she never ceased to oppose. Hope herself took the humorous view of her grandmother’s opposition, as she had taken the humorous view of her father’s long tragedy, not because it was not real and terrible, but because temperamentally she had no other way of bearing it, because in that way she could transmute it into something fantastic, and smile at what otherwise must have broken her heart. She did not try to reconcile her grandmother to what her grandmother held her weak recreancy, but she reconciled herself to her grandmother, and assented and coaxed and had her way, and kept Langbrith from offering his antagonist a vain and exasperating propitiation. Mrs. Southfield’s antagonism endured to the end. On her death-bed she left Hope a hoarsely whispered warning against the Langbrith tribe, as her last charge.
She might be said to have died of her vivid sense of a vague and unavenged injury, but her injury died with her, and with her died the sole reason against Hope’s marriage.
There were people who contended for the fact of an unbecoming haste in her marriage, but these in their censure made no provision for the life of the girl, otherwise left absolutely alone in the world. Mrs. Enderby led the party against them, and with the support of Mrs. Garley, and their respective husbands, declared that Hope should not observe a vain decorum in waiting for a certain period of mourning to pass. She was married from the rectory, which Mrs. Enderby had made her make her home, three months after her father’s death, and something less than three weeks after her grandmother’s, and she went at Christmas to live with her husband in his father’s house. Mrs. Enderby would have liked to infer a mystical significance from the coincidence of the event with the sacred time, when peace on earth and good-will was prophesied in every sort. If Dr. Enderby had been still a Unitarian, she would have openly done so, but under the circumstances she was not sure how far she might loose her imagination without compromising some doctrinal position of his, or committing him to what he might have felt a sentimental fancy. She confined herself to suggesting the notion to him, and contented herself with his assent that they might tacitly draw what comfort they could from the notion.
She did not feel it right to share it with Hope, but she permitted herself to share fully with the girl the promise of her new happiness. There was no question of primacy, in the house where Hope went to live, between the elder and the younger Mrs. Langbrith. People are modified rather than essentially changed, and it would be fatuous to pretend that James Langbrith was not irked in his love of fitnesses by his wife’s continuing in certain things her relation of guest to the house where she was really mistress. She left her mother-in-law the head of the table, and the poor woman whose life had always been in such an abeyance seemed to satisfy an instinct of dominance, never gratified before, in this shadowy superiority. The two worked equally together in other things of the house, and there was no change except a turning, so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, of the old Norah and of Mary, the cook, to the younger Mrs. Langbrith for instructions.
The change did not awaken any apparent jealousy in the passive nature of the elder woman, whose bearing towards her son betrayed no trace of the past conflict of her weak will with his strong will. At times, when he feared himself to have been almost obviously impatient with her illusory headship, or when Hope interpreted his restiveness to him in that sense and blamed it, he sought little occasions of reparation. But those seemed to afflict her, and Hope had to warn him against being apparently other than he had always been to her. He had to bear with that as he had to bear with another trial, which was less real. He had imagined removing his father’s portrait from its place over the library mantel, but when he intimated his wish to Hope she vehemently forbade it. That, she said, was no more to be thought of, without the leading that Dr. Enderby had insisted upon as Langbrith’s rule of action, than the removal of the commemorative tablet from the front of the town library. They must both stay till the providential time came.
As a matter of fact that time has never come. The evil life of Royal Langbrith remains as he hid it, except for the few contemporary and subsequent witnesses of it. To the rest of the community nothing is known; but as happens with men sometimes of whom nothing is known, there has grown up in the public mind a certain conjecture of discredit. This may have sprung from chance expressions of Mrs. Southfield, in her theoretical distrust of the whole Langbrith tribe; she could not always be silent before people; but what is certain is that, from the moment of the dedication of the votive tablet by the son, the myth of the father suffered a kind of discoloration, not to say obscuration. Nobody could then say whether he was really the saint and sage that he was reputed, and of what nobody can say the contrary can be affirmed without contention, with, even some honor to the shrewd conjecture of those who affirm it.
The silence of Royal Langbrith’s widow continued as unbroken as that of Anther in his grave. It was so inveterately the habit of her life that she never betrayed herself to Hope, and what passed between her and her son is as if it had never passed. The whole incident of her proposed marriage with the man who was so truly her friend is without trace in her actual relation to her son. It may be that the forces of her nature exhausted themselves in the struggle to accomplish her happiness, or it may be that her happiness was never essentially involved, and that she submitted to her fate without the suffering which Mrs. Enderby preferred to imagine of her. She never spoke of Anther, and whether she ever thought of him in the tender reverence which was his due Mrs. Enderby could not decide. Sometimes she was intolerably vexed with Mrs. Langbrith, sometimes she was resigned to the submission in which she saw the life of Mrs. Langbrith passing. That, when she came to think of it, was not without its dignity; and it was not what Anther himself, she realized, would have had changed into a futile rebellion. She realized, in her most vehement emotion, that th
ere were women who had been long happily married, and who when widowed lived on in the same silence concerning the happiness they had lost as Mrs. Langbrith kept concerning the happiness she never knew.
Whether she duly enjoyed the happiness of her son in his wife was another question which vexed the kindly witness; but she saw that at least Mrs. Langbrith lived in harmony with them, and that a quiet pervaded the whole household which might very well pass for peace. After a certain period, which John Langbrith himself fixed for the instruction of his nephew in the business of the mills, James Langbrith took charge of them, and released his uncle to that voyage round the world in whose course he was to lose his dyspepsia, perhaps, with that equatorial day which lapses from the circumnavigator’s calendar. He lost the day, if not the dyspepsia, and he returned with strength sufficiently renewed to bear it, which is probably the only real form of cure known to suffering. He then offered to let his nephew go back to Paris, if he wished, and resume his dramaturgical studies. There had been no explicit reconciliation between them, but a better reciprocal knowledge had done the effect of this, and it was with a respect for his nephew’s ambition which he had not felt before that John Langbrith proposed to take up his job again in its entirety. The younger man did not respond directly. He asked his uncle, who had stopped in Paris on his way home, how Falk seemed to be getting on, and John Langbrith said Falk seemed to be doing well, and was at any rate working like a beaver; he had made a study of this fact, for he knew that James was paying his friend’s way, and he did not want him to waste his money. He was not a judge of painting, but he was a judge of working, and Falk was working.
James Langbrith asked, “Did you have any talk with him about me?”
“Yes, I did,” the uncle said, more promptly than willingly.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 817
