Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “What did he say?”

  “Well, he said he would like to have you back, but—”

  “Well?”

  “If you really meant business, you could write plays in Saxmills as well as in Paris. You could get it out of you, anywhere, if you had it in you.” James Langbrith did not ask if Falk had said anything of Susie Johns; he knew from Hope that their affair had been one of those without seriousness on either side, which pass with our young people in frequent succession, failing to eventuate in the matrimony which would be otherwise universal among us — without attaching blame to either side. There was something else that interested the young man infinitely more in the things that his uncle volunteered to tell him. John Langbrith, with greater reluctance than could have been predicated of him, either by himself or others, approached a fact which he said James ought to know, and when, without further preamble, he came out with it, his nephew agreed with him. One day, at his hotel in Paris, he had received the visit of a lady who seemed at first disposed to make a mystery of herself. She was the widow, she said, of a gentleman who had so far deceived her in marriage as not to have left her, at his death, so well provided for as she had expected, and she bore more heavily upon his’ want of candor in this respect than her own in another, though she was presently obliged to be entirely frank with. John Langbrith. She was, it then appeared, the mother of that other family of his brother, who had provided for her so well that she was able to figure as a widow in easy circumstances when contracting her subsequent marriage. But her money had gone in the speculations which her husband was always engaging in for the increase of his fortune, and, if her children had not been nearly all provided for in successful marriages, she would not have known what to do. She did not know what to do now, in the case of the daughter whom she had with her in Paris for the cultivation of her voice. She had, as she said, kept track of Mr. Langbrith’s family, and she had heard that he left a son — by another marriage, as she said; for in the retrospect she preferred to treat Royal Langbrith’s relation to her as bigamous — very comfortably off. Without actually putting it, she left with John Langbrith the question whether this son might not like to do something for his sister, and, without actually putting it, John Langbrith now left the question with his nephew.

  After a moment, James Langbrith asked, with a sickened face, “Did you see the girl?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What sort of a girl was she?”

  “About the sort her mother was, I guess, at her age. Why not?”

  “Did you hear her sing?”

  “She can sing all right, I guess. Maybe that’ll keep her straight. Any rate, it don’t seem to matter so much in that line of life.”

  “Yes,” James Langbrith assented, from the dark, unwilling knowledge of the theatre which in the way of his ambition had revolted more than it had ever interested him. He added, “I will speak to Hope,” and John Langbrith being apparently as sick of the subject as himself, they dropped it. James Langbrith took it up again that night with his wife, recurring to the general fact in his father’s history with the shrinking which he did not understand her not understanding. When he had got the fact before her, “What ought I to do?” he asked, with a frown of disgust, as at some loathsome sight.

  “You ought to tell your mother, in the first place,” Hope said, and he answered, with still stronger repulsion:

  “I don’t see how I can.”

  “No,” she assented. “I guess I shall have to do it for you,” and Langbrith perhaps never felt so deeply her goodness and greatness as in this. With her wifely instinct, and the motherly instinct which was prophesying in her heart, she made known the fact to that virginal nature which never otherwise approached it. Mrs. Langbrith perhaps never fully realized the relation that established itself between her son and his father’s past in his assumption of his father’s cast responsibility, but Langbrith did so to the last fibre of his being. He needlessly stipulated with those people, as he always characterized them in his thought, that the recognition of the tie acknowledged was to be absolutely tacit; they had really no more wish to have it known than he; but at the bottom of Hope’s heart there was what must be called a curiosity concerning her half-sister-in-law which she did not venture to own till she had Langbrith at disadvantage where he was helpless. It was when they hung together one night over the cradle of their first-born, and felt the holiness of her innocence purify their hearts, that she said, dreamily, “If she were the child of people who had done wrong, I suppose she would be just as pure and sweet.”

  “What do you mean, Hope?” he cried, and she told him how she often thought of that girl, and how she longed to know what she was like, or what she looked like.

  “Hope,” he asked, “have you ever told Mrs. Enderby?”

  “Indeed, I haven’t!” she said, and then, woundedly, she asked, “Do you think I would speak of it without your knowing?”

  “No, and I beg your pardon. I will ask the woman to send her picture.”

  But when the picture came, with the girl in the pose of the first part that had been given her in comic opera at Milan, which it had been her pride or her mother’s to perpetuate in photography, Hope first gave the laugh that had so often defended her against the trials of life, and then prepared to break the blow to her husband.

  He only glanced at the picture and said, without offering to take it from her, “We must keep on with the allowance,” as if it had been in his mind instantly to withdraw it. He never asked her what she did with the picture, but when she had put it definitely away she remained with a longing to laugh herself over with somebody, in view of this oversatiation of her curiosity. She resisted her impulse to such a confidence with Mrs. Enderby not only because she was bound in honor against it, but because she did not believe Mrs. Enderby could enter perfectly into the spirit of the affair. The wife of the rector, and through her the rector himself, continued in that patience with Providence which those more intimately concerned were obliged to practise in a situation of apparently indefinite duration. Enderby’s patience was more tacit than that of Mrs. Enderby, with whom it often took the form of inquiry whether he thought there would ever be any revelation of the secrets of Royal Langbrith’s life. She alleged that passage of scripture to which she had recurred from the beginning of her own privity. “There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, and hid that shall not be known,” and required him to reconcile it with the case in hand. Though she had agreed with Hope about that when the girl first offered her interpretation of the text, she had since had her recurrent misgivings, and she wished for a fuller exegesis from her husband.

  Enderby was loath to put his wife off with the only answer he could make, and to say that, in the spiritual continuity of existence, eternity was not too far a term for the judgment of offences. He did not suffer with her at the hold which a bad man’s life had kept after his death on those who survived him, and he reasoned in vain that good, evidently, and not evil, had come to others from leaving his life where the man himself had left it. In her soul she would have been willing the justice she longed for should have included the innocent as well as the guilty, but he gave her pause by making her reflect that in this instance earthly justice would include the innocent alone.

  “Then you mean,” she persisted, “that it must all go over to the day of judgment?”

  “You know,” he returned, “that I never like to say those positive things. But if we suppose that there is a day of judgment in the old sense, what else could it be for except for those sins on which justice has apparently been adjourned from the earthly tribunals?”

  “There is something in that,” she was forced to own.

  “Besides, how do we know that upon this particular sinner justice has not already been done?”

  “Why, what ever happened to him?”

  “The fortitude of a man is no more the measure of his suffering than his weakness is. The strong suffer as much as the weak — only, they do not
show it.”

  “Then you mean that Royal Langbrith suffered all that made his wife, and that other wretched woman, and Hope’s father, and Dr. Anther, and poor James Langbrith suffer?”

  “I don’t say that. But could there be fearfuller suffering than his consciousness in his sudden death that he could not undo here the evil he had done? Why should we suppose him to have been without that anguish, if men in the presence of mortal peril are tormented with the instantaneous vision of their whole lives?”

  Mrs. Enderby was silent, and measurably appeased. But then the rector went a step further, and in this it must be owned she could never follow him, great as her faith in him was. “How do we know but that in that mystical legislation, as to whose application to our conduct we have to make our guesses and inferences, there may not be a law of limitations by which the debts overdue through time are the same as forgiven? No one was the poorer through their non-payment in Royal Langbrith’s case; in every high sort each was the richer. It may be the complicity of all mortal being is such that the pain he inflicted was endured to his behoof, and that it has helped him atone for his sins as an acceptable offering in the sort of vicarious atonement which has always been in the world.”

  “But the blight — the misery he has left behind him?” she protested.

  “Why,” the rector said, “he seems to have left that around him rather than behind him. He made some of his own generation miserable — Hawberk and his wife, and his own wife, and that other woman, and Anther for them and with them. But Hope and James Langbrith are not unhappy. They are radiantly happy, and more wisely happy for tasting the sorrow which has not passed down to their generation.”

  “Then you don’t believe that the children’s teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes their fathers have eaten? What does the scripture say?”

  “There are many scriptures, my dear. The scripture also says that the son who has not done the iniquities of the father shall not pay their penalty.”

  THE END

  MISS BELLARD’S INSPIRATION

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  I

  “My dear, will you please read that letter again?” Mrs. Crombie said, in tones that might either be those of entreaty for her husband’s compliance, or command of his obedience, or appeal to his clearer impression from the confusion which her niece’s letter had cast her into. She began in a high, imperative note, and ended in something like an imploring whimper. She had first read the letter herself, and then thrown it across the breakfast-table to Crombie; and as he began to read it to himself she now added, “Aloud!”

  “I don’t see any use in that,” he said. “There’s no mystery about it.”

  “No mystery, when a girl like Lillias Bellard starts up out of space and asks a thing like that? We might as well sell the place at once. It will be as bad as The Surges before the summer is over; and I did think that if we came and built inland we could have a little peace of our lives.” Crombie trivially thought of saying, “Little pieces of our lives,” but he did not, and she went on: “If it’s going on like this, the mountains will be as bad as the seashore, and there will be nothing left but Europe. Give me that letter, Archibald!”

  She recovered it from his wanderingly extended left hand, his right being employed in filling up his cup with the exactly proportioned due of hot milk which he poured so as to make a bead on the surface of the coffee.

  “I can’t make Lillias out,” Mrs. Crombie flamed forth again. “She is a sly girl; or at least I have always considered her so.”

  “It isn’t a sly letter,” Crombie suggested, impartially.

  “No; and that is just it. Anything franker, or bolder, even, I’ve never seen in my family.” Crombie might have felt the emphasis a blow at his own family, but as he had none except the wife before him, he did not suffer it to alienate his sympathy from her. “If it was anybody but my own sister’s child, I should call it brazen. It’s a liberty, yes, a liberty, even if I am her aunt. She had no right to presume upon our relationship. If the Mellays are not able to receive her now, she might go somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere!”

  “I don’t see where. Her people are abroad, and the Mellays’ telegram postponing her a week, seems to have caught her at the end of her stipulated stay with the Franklings; and she can’t go to a hotel alone.”

  “I don’t see why she can’t, with these advanced ideas of hers.”

  “Because the hotel men are not as advanced in their ideas, and won’t receive a pretty young girl if she presents herself with no escort but her youth and beauty. She might as well be a Hebrew or an Ethiopian.”

  “Well, it’s a shame! There ought to be a law to make them.”

  “Oh, I dare say there is one now,” Crombie easily assented. “But come, Hester! This isn’t going to kill you. A niece for a week is no such mortal matter. One voluntary, or involuntary, guest doesn’t imply a succession of house-parties.”

  “No, but it is the disappointment! My family, at least, know that we sold The Surges because I was completely worn out with people, and that we came up here into this by-gone hollow of the hills, on the wrong side of the Saco, and built a tumble-down old farm-house over so as to be alone in it.”

  “Then you oughtn’t to have built the old farm-house over so nicely. Lillias will go away, and tell everybody that you’ve got electric lights, and hot and cold water, and a furnace, and all the modem conveniences, and the most delightful rambling camp, with ten or twenty bedrooms, and open fires for cold days in every one. She will say that it isn’t dull here a bit; that there’s a hotel full of delightful people just across the Saco, which you get to by private ferry, and hops every night, with a young man to every ten girls, and picnics all the time, and lots of easy mountain-climbing.”

  “Yes, that is the worst of it. Very well, I shall telegraph her not to come, I don’t care what happens. I shall say, ‘Very sorry. Uncle sick; not dangerously; but all taken up with him.’ That’s just ten words.”

  “Twelve; and not one true. Besides, where will you telegraph her? She’s started. She left Kansas City yesterday.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “All the same, that’s what’s happened.”

  “Very well, then, I know what I shall do. I shall engage a room for her at The Saco Shore, if it’s full of such delightful people—”

  “Hold on, my dear! That was merely my forecast of her language.”

  “No matter! And you can meet her at the station and tell her what I’ve done, and take her there. I am not going to be scooped up, even if she is my niece. And so Lillias Bellard will find out.”

  Mrs. Crombie gathered the offending letter and its envelope violently together, and started from the table as if to go at once and carry out her declared purpose. But she really went up-stairs to decide which of the bedrooms she should give the girl. She began with the worst and ended with the best, which looked eastward in that particular crook of the river towards the Presidential range, and, if you poked your head out, commanded a glimpse of the almost eternal snows of Mount Washington where a drift of the belated winter was glimmering, now at the end of July, in a fold of the pachy-dermal slope. She had always to play some such comedy with herself before she could reconcile herself to the inevitable; and her husband was content to have her do so, as long as her drama did not involve his complexity with the inevitable. But the wildest stroke of her imagination could not inculpate him in the present affair; and though she felt it somewhat guilty of him to attempt any palliation of Lillias Bellard’s behavior, she also felt it kind, and was very good to him the whole day on account of it; so that he was able honestly to pity her for the base of real tragedy he knew in her
comedy. They had not only sold The Surges, where they had spent twenty summers, because of the heavy drain of hospitality upon her energies there, but because they had been offered a very good price for it, and they believed that the air of the mountains would be better for their rheumatisms. It formed at any rate a more decided change from the air of Boston; and the sale of The Surges was not altogether that sacrifice to solitude which her passionate resentment of the first menace of it had made it seem to her. Still there were associations with the things brought from the seaside cottage which supported her in the change, and which now burdened her with unavailing suggestions of how easy it would have been to make Lillias have a nice time in the more familiar environment. She sighed to herself in owning that she did not know what she should do with the girl where they were; for already, as she went through the house, she forgot her own hardship in realizing how difficult, with only the Saco Shore House to draw upon, it would be to amuse the child.

  It was an essential part of her comedy to keep this transmutation of moods from Crombie; her self-respect required it, and experience had taught her that the most generous of men would take a mean advantage if he could, and would turn from pitying to mocking her for the change. There was no outward change from the effect of plaintive submission into which she had sunk by their one-o’clock dinner-time, when, in the later afternoon she asked him to take her adrive: the last, she predicted, they should have alone together that summer. Some part of the way she dedicated to a decent pathos in the presence of scenery endeared by their unmolested meanderings, and the thought of the sweet intimacy in which they had all but got back their young married selves. But the time and the place came when she could stand it no longer, and he was hardly surprised to have her break out with the unrelated conjecture, “I wonder what she has got up her sleeve.”

  “A young man, probably,” he suggested. “Don’t be coarse! What makes you think that?”