Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I don’t know that I think that, or anything. What’s the use of worrying about it? She’ll be here so soon.”

  “Well, I really believe she has. And I shall watch her, I can tell you. If Aggie Bellard” — Mrs. Crombie branched away in the direction of the girl’s mother— “thinks she can go off to Europe for the summer, and leave Lillias scattered broadcast over the continent, with no one to look after her, she is very much mistaken.” This was the expression of such very complex feeling that Crombie could reply with nothing so well as a spluttering laugh. His wife knew perfectly what his laugh meant, and she went on: “I never approved of her second marriage, any-way, and I am not going to have Lillias shouldered off on me to make room for a second family in her mother’s house. Archibald!” she cried, and she had to use him very sternly in the tone she was really taking with her sister and niece, “do you suppose it’s a plot between them to get Lillias here with us, so that she can ingratiate herself with me, and just keep staying on indefinitely? Because if you do,” she continued to threaten him, while she cast about in her mind for a penalty severe enough to fit the offence, “I won’t have it!”

  This was so ineffective that he had to laugh again, but he reconciled her to his derision by the real compassion with which he said, “You know you don’t suppose anything of the kind yourself. It’s a perfectly simple case, and the only reasonable conjecture is that Lillias has told you the exact truth in her letter. She is coming here because she has nowhere else to put in the time till the Mellays are ready for her, and in a week she will be gone. I don’t think that will make any serious break in the quiet of our summer. At any rate, you can’t help yourself.”

  “No, I can’t,” Mrs. Crombie recognized. “But if she imagines that she is going to hoodwink me!”

  She did not attempt to say what she would do in such an event, and her husband felt no anxiety as to the sort of time Lillias would have under his roof.

  II

  THE maid met them on their return with word that a gentleman had called while they were away. On rigid question from Mrs. Crombie she confessed that he seemed rather short and fair, but this proved to be partially an effect from Mrs. Crombie’s displeasure with his being first long and dark. The girl was quite sure that he had a mustache, though she afterwards corrected herself so far as to say that his hair was cut close. He had asked for no one but Mr. Crombie, who evinced so little interest in his visitor that after a casual glance at his card he left it to the scrutiny by which his wife sought to divine him from it. From evidences not apparent to Crombie, she had decided that it was an English card, and that Mr. Edmund Craybourne was English himself, because he had no middle name, not even a middle initial.

  “Did he leave any message?” She now turned upon the maid again.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Did he say he would come back?”

  “He didn’t say, m’m.”

  “Did he tell you whether he was stopping at the Saco Shore House?”

  “He didn’t tell anything, m’m.”

  With these facts in hand, Mrs. Crombie followed her husband to his room, where he was washing the odor of his driving-gloves from his hands, and asked him what he had to say now about Lillias Bellard.

  “Well, when I said there was a young man in question, you told me not to be indecent.”

  “‘Coarse,’ I said; and it was coarse. Do you suppose this is the young man?”

  “Not if there is none.”

  “Well, I know it is. Now what are you going to do? He didn’t say where he was staying, and you will have to wait till he comes back. But what will you do, then?”

  “I will settle that when I see him,” Crombie said, applying himself vigorously to the towel. “If he is short and fair and fat, I may fall upon him and rend him; but if he is long and lank and dark, I may consider about it; though I don’t know why I should do anything at all, come to think of it.”

  “No,” Mrs. Crombie allowed, “I don’t know why you should. In fact, I should prefer to see him myself. I could get it out of him better.”

  She did not say what it was, and the whole situation was simplified, as to action, by the young man’s not coming back, though it was intensified as a mystery by his failure to reappear. In this aspect it supplied Mrs. Crombie with conversation quite to the end of supper, when the barge of the Saco Shore House drove up, and left Lillias Bellard and her baggage at the cottage door. Her aunt welcomed her with a warmth which she could not have imagined of herself, and affectionately ignored the girl’s excuses for coming so much sooner than she had said, and so much later; for the train that brought her twenty-four hours ahead of time was a whole hour behind. For that reason she sat down to her retarded supper nearly a day before she should have had any supper at all. Her justification was that she had found people she knew coming on, and she had thought it best to come with them, hoping it would not make too much difference to her aunt Hester.

  She was a pretty girl of what Crombie in his quality of incomplete artist decided was a silvery type, singularly paintable in the relation of her gray-green eyes to the argent tones of her travelling-costume, her hat and ribbons and her gloves. You must take her, of course, with the same intention and intelligence that she had taken herself with, or as much of it as you could get; for it was clear that she was dressed in the frankest sympathy with her own coloring, and in conscious rejection of all mistaken notions of contrast. If some girls made you think of May and others of July or August, the month that she made you think of was September: not the moods in which it mirrored the coming October, but those in which it suggested the youngest months of summer, or even spring. She was fairly mature, as he knew from his acquaintance with her history; she would not see twenty-seven again; but she gave you the same sort of contradictory impressions of youth and age that she gave you of knowingness and innocence, of self-reliance and helplessness, of ignorance and experience, and of energy that ended in indecision.

  Crombie revolved these things in his mind, while he looked at her where she sat at table, talking with her aunt in a serenity like that of a September afternoon: her silvery veil misting her gray hat above her hair, sprinkled even at her age with gray, and her gray gloves lying beside her plate, physically but not spiritually detached from her gray costume. Her intelligent eyes, glancing from her aunt to him and back again to her, had lovely skyey lights in them, of the sort that haunt the horizons of the passing summer, when the deep turquoise of the upper heavens changes into the delicate emerald that seems a reflection of the green earth below. It struck him that if it were really a question of his wife’s knowing what her niece had up her sleeve, she would know no more than her niece chose to show; and if there were possibilities of her being quite willing to bare both her pretty arms to the elbows it might be in the confident skill with which the prestidigitator chooses to convince the witness that there is really nothing of preparation for the feat he is about to perform, in order to heighten the effect of it.

  A sense of her contradictions persisted when she rose from the table and stood not so high as he had expected, and again when she followed her aunt up-stairs with a deceptive show of height from the skirt that trailed behind her. He was shut from the revelation of the slight and rather small figure which Lillias made to Mrs. Crombie, in her room, when she had reduced herself to the fact by putting off her jacket and hat, and stood waiting in her shirt-waist for her aunt to finish explaining why she gave her that room and not another. Mrs. Crombie ended by saying that she supposed Lillias must be very tired, and would want to be going to bed; but Lillias answered, not at all, and would not her aunt sit down? She said that one got so used to distances in the West that trains rather rested one than not. Besides, she had enjoyed a season of such entire vegetation, since Commencement, out on the Pacific coast, that a little fatigue would be an agreeable variety which she would be glad to be aware of. At the same time she hid a yawn with such skill that it made her aunt respect her, and resolve to spare her
as soon as she got what she wished out of her.

  She sat down provisionally and asked Lillias whether she was going back there in the fall, and when the girl said she did not know but she was, Mrs. Crombie said it must be very queer, co-education. “Aren’t they apt to get married?” she asked, with a frown of polite disgust.

  “Well, yes, they are,” Lillias admitted. “But that isn’t considered such a very bad thing, out there. You might say that there was a good deal of courting, but there is very little flirting; and there is nothing that is so instantly sat upon by the girls themselves as the least fastness. But I don’t come in on the question anywhere. I’m ‘one of the faculty,’ but my professorship, if it’s that, is teaching the advanced pupils of the upper-grade schools that form part of the university. My undergraduate classes average about fourteen for girls, and fifteen or sixteen for boys, and there hasn’t been a marriage among them for the whole year past. My postgraduate lecture audiences are mostly made up of townspeople who are married already.”

  She smiled very amusingly upon her aunt at the end of a speech which she made with pretty turns of her head and a final droop of her shoulders and a forward thrust of her chin above her hands fallen into each other in her lap. It was very young-ladyish, and as little academical as could be, so that her aunt, who had feared among other things that the child was going to be priggish, was entirely consoled. Lillias was in the department of oratory, and she might have been expected to have a public manner, or an elocutionary manner, but anything more private or colloquial than her manner Mrs. Crombie had not seen. It was with the determination not to be overcome by the peculiar charm which she felt in her, and yet not to use unnecessary violence in avoiding the dust which Lillias might attempt to throw into her eyes, that Mrs. Crombie now no longer delayed coming down to business.

  “Lillias,” she said, with a skirmishing laugh, and trying not to say it with any change of note, “we have had a very strange call this afternoon. Some gentleman whom we don’t at all know asked for Mr. Crombie, while we were driving, and left his card. We thought perhaps he was an acquaintance of yours, or it may be some mistake of his; though the maid was very sure that he asked for Mr. Crombie by name.”

  Mrs. Crombie gave Lillias Mr. Craybourne’s card, and that girl looked at it with a carelessness which only partially faded from her manner as she read. She said, “Really!” and she might apparently have contented herself with that brief comment if her aunt had not prompted her.

  “You know him?”

  “Yes,” Lillias said, promptly enough.

  Mrs. Crombie, as lightly and brightly as she could, suggested, “And you expected him?”

  Lillias laughed after a little absence and silence, “Well, not quite so soon, Aunt Hester. I didn’t expect him for a day or two yet. I won’t let him bother you.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Crombie said, with a flight of generous insincerity, “any friend of yours!” and she prepared, with an effect of going away, which did not even lift her out of her chair, to make her next approach still more delicately. “We thought, somehow, that he was an Englishman.”

  The candor of Lillias in replying could not have been greater if she was actually trying to conceal something. “Well, he is, Aunt Hester. He’s one of those younger sons who rather abound out there.”

  “Oh, indeed! And the eldest son—” It was a little too leading, even with the abrupt stop that Mrs. Crombie made.

  “Isn’t a title, in this case. But there’s property, and Mr. Craybourne’s brother got it all, I guess, except the money that Mr. Craybourne has spent in amateur ranching. He’s very nice, I may as well tell you at once, Aunt Hester. He’s cultivated and well - read and well - mannered. Our men have no manners, though some of them will have when my boys grow up through the department of applied conduct, which is really my job, though I pretend to teach the niceties of speech and pronunciation only. Yes, I like Mr. Craybourne very, very much,” Lillias concluded, and she remained looking at the card in her left palm, as if it were the sort of photograph that used to be called a carte-de-visite.

  Mrs. Crombie made several attempts to speak, which ended, as they began, in gasps, and left Lillias to go on, as she did, thoughtfully.

  “He is very nice, and very bidable, though what he might be afterwards!—”

  Now, indeed, Mrs. Crombie broke from her inarticulate struggles. “Why, Lillias Bellard, are you engaged to Mr. Craybourne?”

  “Well, no. But we’re seeing.”

  III

  CROMBIE, when his wife had rejoined him, sat dripping, as it were, from the deluge of conjectures, facts, and reflections which she had hastened to pour out on him after coming away from Lillias.

  “Anything more outspoken, more boldfaced, more unblushing! If those are the manners that she is teaching the youth out there under the guise of elocution!”

  “There does seem to be a sort of brazen ingenuousness in it,” Crombie allowed. “But you can’t say there’s anything deceitful. And that’s what you dreaded.”

  “I don’t know whether I dreaded it. But I did hope that if Lillias had anything to conceal she would manage it with a little finesse, a little delicacy. I hoped that if she was going to bring the burden of a love-affair into the house with her, she would have the grace to carry it off so that it shouldn’t seem to be a burden. But the brutal frankness with which she dumps it all on me!”

  “I don’t call it brutal,” Crombie said, with an air of reasoning, “though it is certainly frank. I think it has its charm. It’s deliciously honest, and it ought to be a relief to you, after the duplicity you’ve been dreading — the finesse, as you call it.”

  “I call it duplicity, pretending to come here for a week, so as to bridge over between visits, and meaning all the time to make us a base of operations, with him at the Saco Shore House, so that they can see each other constantly under my very wing. If that isn’t finesse, I don’t know what it is!”

  “Then, I don’t see what you have to complain of, with frankness and finesse both on hand in one and the same Mephistophelean innocent.”

  “Oh, Archie!” Mrs. Crombie whimpered. “It’s the care! It’s the terrible disappointment of a broken-up summer! It’s having the disturbance of it going on under our roof day after day, when I was looking forward to such a complete rest with you, dear! It’s enough to make me wish we were back at The Surges. You had better sell this place at once.”

  “There’ll be time enough to think about that and to change our minds twice or thrice. Mountain property hasn’t the instant convertibility of shore property. I should find some difficulty in giving this place away if I was in a hurry to get rid of it. Fortunately I’m not. Did she tell you how they happened to meet?”

  “Oh, romantically enough, I believe. After his last failure in ranching he was quite at leisure, and he came into town to pass the time at the hotel, and think. There he heard of Lillias’s lectures, or talks, which were open to the public — really, I can’t imagine it, but her lectures seem to be quite a fad, out there — and he went to one of them, and then he went to all that were left of them. At last he got himself introduced; though why he didn’t at first she couldn’t understand, unless it was his English shyness. After he did it seems to have been plain sailing, as far as they’ve gone.”

  “And how far have they gone?”

  “Well, she doesn’t seem to know, exactly. The case appears to be that she has some doubts of marriage itself.”

  “Oh, come, now! A pretty girl like that?”

  “I don’t see what her prettiness has to do with it. A great many girls are that way, now. They look at it very cool-headedly. They don’t like to give up their liberty unless they’re certain of their happiness, and they see, if they look round them at all, that there’s a great deal of unhappiness in marriage.”

  “They could always get divorced.”

  “Yes, but they don’t like that — nice girls don’t. They’d rather not go in for it, to begin with. It seems that
Lillias has a great idea of being honest with herself. Really, to hear her talk — I wish you could have been at the key-hole!”

  “I wish I could — if I may be as honest as Lillias.”

  “It seems that it wasn’t the hard work, or the beginning at the bottom, or the personal exhibition, as Mrs. Kemble calls it, which kept her from going on the stage. There was a manager quite ready to take her from the dramatic school and feature her, as she said, in a new play—”

  “Don’t go too far back!”

  “I’m not, but you can’t understand if I don’t. — It was the perpetual pretence; what she felt was the essential and final falsity of a life that consisted in the representation of emotions that were not really felt. In short, the insincerity.”

  “Well?”

  “Well — where was I? Oh yes! She felt that if she had no doubt about marrying Mr. Craybourne she would have no misgivings about marriage; or if she had perfect faith in marriage she could confidently trust herself in marrying him. But as she has neither, she can’t.”

  Crombie rubbed his forehead, as if to clear away a cloud within. “I don’t believe I’ve followed you,” he said.

  “Why, he’s offered himself, but she hasn’t thought it out yet.”

  “And she’s got him here to help her think?”

  “That is where the sinuosity comes in; that is where Lillias shows herself a true girl.”

  Crombie laughed. “And what does she expect us to do?”

  “Do you know what she said to me? Not just in so many words, but that was the sum and substance of it. She made a long, sly preamble about having always thought us the happiest married couple she had ever seen, the most united and harmonious; and she wanted Mr. Craybourne to know us, too.”

  “As a sort of object-lesson? I’m not sure that I should like to be studied. It would make me conscious.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Crombie said, with a seriousness which amazed him, “it’s very flattering.”