Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I said saw,” the young man returned. “I don’t think she saw me. I didn’t speak with her; she preferred that we should meet first at your house. That is why I — I have come so unwarrantably early.”

  Crombie had two reasons for falling upon the young man: one, resentment for having been so misled, and the other relief for being rescued from the error, which, now it was gone, he knew must have left him without a shred of respect for the poor child whose difficult little romance had enlisted his interest. But he spared his guest, and merely said, “Oh, I see!” and smiled fatuously, in adding, “I thought it was rather odd she hadn’t mentioned it. Ah, ha, ha!” he ended, in rehearsal of the merriment of a man laughing to his wife at a good joke on himself. He experienced such a kindly revulsion toward Lillias, whom he had wronged by his error, that he could not bear any longer to keep her from her happiness in her lover’s presence. “If you will excuse me,” he said, with a politeness that was almost tender, “I will tell the ladies you are here.”

  He was moving toward the door when he was arrested by a “Well — ah — well,” from Mr. Craybourne, which sounded like the preliminary of an entreaty for a stay of action. He turned, and the young man, still crouching over his hat, made a more successful effort for coherence, “I really oughtn’t to see Miss Bellard — or, I should say, Mrs. Crombie — till I have given you some notion of how matters stand with us — Miss Bellard, I mean. I don’t know what Miss Bellard has said, or whether she has told you how entirely I am without claim on her?”

  Crombie rather liked this, which he thought manly, but he could only say, “Oh, we quite understand that it’s only in the pour parler stage, and nobody’s committed.” That was the year of the Spanish War, and every one spoke more or less in the diplomatic French of the opening negotiations for peace; the papers all had a touch of it.

  The Englishman returned with a certain stiffness of self-assertion against the prompt American pliability of his host, “You’re very good, I’m sure. But I can’t allow you to suppose that I am not committed. If I had not felt myself so absolutely committed from the moment I first heard Miss Bellard speak, and first saw her, I should not have felt at liberty to address her, in the absence of her natural — her family. Of course, I had the countenance of the president of the university; I had the honor of an introduction from him; but it was the other — feeling that seemed to warrant me in — ah — going on.” The young man spoke with courage, but not steadily; Crombie noticed with a mixture of pathos and amusement that his chin was trembling.

  “Oh yes. Quite right. I meant that she was not committed—”

  “No,” the Englishman said, “and I am prepared now, if Mrs. Crombie thinks there has been anything irregular in my — my — procedure, to go away without seeing Miss Bellard, and wait till her mother returns; though I believe that is rather indefinite. Not that I couldn’t wait indefinitely.” Crombie had a notion of not being outdone in punctiliousness, if it came to that, and he put on the air of giving the matter thought. “She would want her mother’s approval, naturally. But — I don’t think it’s necessary for you to go away. In fact” — he caught at the inspiration—” Mrs. Crombie was rather hoping you would stay to lunch.”

  “Why, you’re very good,” Craybourne said. “I’m sure I shall be very glad if — But I should like, if it won’t bore you, or if you won’t think it unnecessary — to tell you — I don’t know whether she has told you — that I have formally offered myself to Miss Bellard. It came to that very soon. Am I tiring you? Are you interested?”

  “Oh, quite. Not at all, I assure you. Go on!” Crombie, in token of his patience and concern, relapsed into the chair from which he had risen, and took from the table a paper-knife offering itself there to his hand.

  “The whole affair has been so — different, that I should be glad to make sure that from the — the — from your point of view, I have been — warranted.”

  Crombie bowed seriously and the Englishman went on.

  “I can’t say, looking back, that I was actuated by anything better than an idle curiosity in going, the first time, to hear Miss Bellard lecture. I should like you to know that; she knows it. I was at the hotel, with nothing to do, and I heard her lectures talked of. Not,” the young man made haste to add, “in any slighting way. But nearly everything is a joke, out there, and I can’t say that Miss Bellard’s lectures were taken very seriously by the hotel acquaintance who mentioned them: he spoke of them as a good show; he has apologized and explained that he meant nothing derogatory. They were very popular. Ah — have you — you have heard her — lecture?”

  Crombie shook his head. “She took it up, I’ve understood, after leaving the dramatic school, as a means of — independence. We did not know of it till we heard of her appointment to a lectureship, out there. I must confess we had our misgivings.”

  The young man ardently cried, “You needn’t have had! Anything more graceful, more beautiful, more natural, more artistic, more divine—” He stopped for want of words, and then resumed at another point. “I will say, that I was chiefly interested, as far as I was worthily interested, by the fact, which I heard, that Miss Bellard was doing it for, as you say, independence. You may think it odd, and you may not agree with me at all, but I go in for women doing that kind of thing. I suppose that I might be considered an extremist by some people. But I believe that marriage would be happier, generally speaking, if the wife and husband were always pecuniarily independent of each other.”

  Crombie thought that he had heard of some marriages, especially international marriages, in which the wife alone had the means of pecuniary independence, but he could not note these instances, even in the way of jest, to the eager and ingenuous countenance of his visitor. He murmured, “Quite so,” and Mr. Craybourne went on.

  “I am happy to say that Miss Bellard and I are of the same opinion on this point. In fact, it was the very first point that came up for discussion between us, and it was she who urged it first.”

  It seemed, hazily enough, to Crombie’s intelligence, that the young pair who could have reached this point in their love-making, without anything more definite than the girl’s consent to be made love to, were modern beyond any fin-de-siècle newness of the century then ending; but it was easier not to grasp the fact, and he did not grasp it, at least very firmly. Hazily, also, he conceived of the young man’s liberal-mindedness as a willingness to let a wife make her own living, which he had known carried to the excess of letting her make her husband’s living too; but again he was unable to impart his reflections. He said, “I believe Lillias has developed in that direction since we — have seen much of her. One finds girls feeling like that a good deal, nowadays.”

  “Yes,” the young man assented, “but not quite in her way, I believe.” He seemed proud of her singularity, and jealous of its attribution to any one else. “I don’t know,” he continued, “whether I can explain — and in fact it’s only in the most provisional way that I can allow myself to talk of it at all — how this breadth of view — it’s a kind of cant, but I don’t find just the words I want —

  added to the charm she had for me from the first moment. I understood, when I first saw her, that I saw her earning her living; and later I was told that she had prepared herself to earn her living on the stage. It was impossible for me, from the beginning, not to think of how I should feel toward such a fact if she were my wife; I don’t justify my presumption, because it was in no degree voluntary: the case, as it were, supposed itself, and I did ask myself the question on these very indefensible grounds. There could only be one answer. I ought to say that I had read myself and thought myself out of the prejudices of what I should once have called my class, and I could feel nothing but admiration and reverence for her — her attitude.” The young man’s words flowed rapidly enough, but there had not ceased to be in their stream that tremor, that vibrant eagerness which had moved Crombie. He pricked up his thin red ears at the spare allusion to Mr. Craybourne’s so
cial rank, a thing which the true American prefers even in the Englishman who renounces it, especially if the Englishman is seeking an alliance with his family; yet the liking with which this Mr. Craybourne had inspired him was not mean. It was merely qualified with a satisfaction in his being socially a gentleman, which he would not have exacted from an American pretendant; such a pretendant would have been wholly left to the instinct and knowledge of the girl in that case.

  He now merely said, “That’s all right, Mr. Craybourne. It’s a matter for you to settle with Lillias. In fact, with a girl who has been taking care of herself for the last year or two, I should be a little shy of interfering in any way. But she has a feeling, which we consider a very right one, that — that if she’s got some thinking over to do, she had better do it under her family roof, or as nearly as she can come to one.”

  Here, Crombie had got to the end of his tether, and had so literally nothing more to say that he was glad of Craybourne’s eager suggestion, “Then I have your permission? I may—”

  “Why, certainly,” Crombie said, and again he started toward the door. “I will tell Mrs. Crombie you are here.”

  “A moment!” the young man interposed. “I ought to apologize perhaps for — for turning up here yesterday, before Miss Bellard’s arrival — when—”

  “I don’t think that’s a thing a girl could really object to, no matter how matters stood,” Crombie said.

  “I was hoping,” the young man pursued, “for some such interview as this, and for the opportunity of speaking of a point on which I’m told that Americans are rather more sensitive than Englishmen. I wish to say that there is no question whatever of — of money in my mind; a dot, or that kind of thing. If the time ever came when Miss Bellard chose to abandon her independent career, there would be sufficient provision for the future. My elder brother was naturally my father’s heir; but an uncle of mine left me something which I haven’t quite made ducks and drakes of.”

  He smiled a little anxiously, and Crombie said, largely, “Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Craybourne. The great thing is whether you can make up your minds to each other.”

  “Yes!” the young man deeply sighed. “Whether she can.”

  V

  “WELL, I thoroughly like him,” Mrs. Crombie said, looking at the backs of Lillias and Craybourne narrowing in the perspective as they took their way down the lane that led from the cottage grounds to the banks of the Saco. The meeting of the lovers had taken place under her eye in Crombie’s library, and she had been pleased with his discreet ardor, and the girl’s plain good sense. They had all sat down for some time, and then Mrs. Crombie had eliminated herself in some housekeeping interest, discovering in the act that Crombie had already disappeared. Lillias and Craybourne remained together for some time longer, when she joined her aunt up-stairs, and said she had come for her hat: she was going out with Mr. Craybourne to explore. Mrs. Crombie bade her be sure and be back to lunch promptly, and she now added to Crombie, “And I like her. She is a good girl.”

  “Almost too good to be true,” Crombie suggested cynically.

  “No; I’ve quite changed my mind about that. I believe Lillias is just what we see her. What became of you so suddenly?”

  “Was it sudden? I didn’t seem to be needed. I had had a good deal of him before you came in.”

  “There is a good deal of him, in one way,” she reflected. “He is very tall; and Lillias is not a tall girl; she is certainly not ‘new’ in that way. But she can manage. She is managing now. Look at them! She is keeping just the right distance and at the proper angle from him, so that the difference won’t be noticed. I know that she got that summer hat of hers so as to reduce his height.”

  “One would think,” Crombie said, gloomily, “that you liked her illusiveness.”

  “She isn’t illusive in the essentials; but in some things a girl has to be illusive; and Lillias has been left to do for herself in a great many things where most girls’ mothers are illusive for them. I don’t see how Aggie can excuse herself. But you certainly have the gift of choosing the most offensive expressions! One would think you really disliked the child. Aren’t you glad to see her so happy?”

  “Well, I haven’t quite adjusted myself yet to having such a well-spring of pleasure turned on in the house. I haven’t got over sympathizing with you at her breaking into your tranquillity.”

  “Yes, there is that, and it is very nice of you to remember it, but you mustn’t lay it up against her. I didn’t know she was going to be so interesting. She is very interesting. I wish you could have heard her telling all about her life out there. What made you keep us waiting so long?”

  “Was she impatient? I had to let him free his mind. He wanted to tell me a lot of things. Principally that he approved of her independence, but if she ever wanted to go back on it, he had money enough for them both.”

  “He has? I don’t believe Lillias knows that. And well?”

  “That he doesn’t expect anything with her.”

  “Well, that is certainly ideal! He certainly isn’t a common Englishman.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be a noble one, either. It’s the noble ones that go in for the money.”

  “You know what I mean, and I hope Lillias will make up her mind to have him before he leaves. How long is he going to stay?”

  “I didn’t ask him.”

  “Of course not. But I thought he might have mentioned it. I’m glad, anyway, that you asked him to lunch.”

  “Oh, I thought I might as well have a hand in bu’sting our blissful calm.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Archibald?” she turned on him with the demand, and he at once denied that there was anything the matter.

  Whether she believed him or not, or thought that she could get it out of him better some other time, she let him be for the present, and went about seeing that luncheon should be of the signal character which befitted the occasion, and they did not meet again till they sat down at table with the young people. Crombie went out, charged to go quite in the opposite direction from that they had taken, and did one of his ridiculous sketches, which he knew himself were bad, and could hardly forgive people for pretending to admire, but which amused for him a leisure otherwise intolerable. He did not come in till quite luncheon-time, and so escaped the duty of entertaining Mr. Craybourne in the library, when Lillias had brought the young man back with her half an hour earlier, so that she could change her dress, and talk with her aunt, whom she found to be lying in wait for her.

  “Come in, Aunt Hester!” she invited the hungering apparition that showed itself at her doorway, and she added with her splendid frankness, “Well, it has been a perfect landslide.”

  “What do you mean? Have you accepted him?”

  “No, but I am quite prepared to do so — emotionally prepared. We went over to look at the slide, across the river, by your ferry, and when I saw how it had done the work of ages, in about three minutes from the time it started, as the owner of the farm said, and covered about twenty acres with granite and gravel, and leaves ground to pulp, and logs of big trees chewed off, and packed full of sand so that you couldn’t strike an axe into them, I felt just so myself. The undermining separation of the last four weeks had had its effect, and the first four minutes with him did the rest, and I should be asking your congratulations now, Aunt Hester, if it had not been for Mr. Craybourne’s delicacy in giving me more time than I wanted. He is a dear, but he is making it difficult.”

  “Why, Lillias, I don’t suppose he thinks he is allowed to speak unless he has some hint from you,” Mrs. Crombie said, in high approval of him.

  “Do you think so, Aunt Hester? Well, that is rather embarrassing. Is it usual for girls to hint?”

  “Not unless it is absolutely necessary, my dear.”

  “Did you — hint?”

  “Certainly not! What a question!”

  “Because if you did, I think I will. I think it had better be over.”

  While they ta
lked, Lillias was effecting what is called by performers in the drama where one actor takes several parts, a lightning change, and was reappearing from the pastoral simplicity of her walking-dress in the elaboration of an afternoon toilette. The change was not exactly imperative, under the circumstances, and yet both of the women felt that it was highly desirable, and were perhaps tacitly agreed that if a hint were not possible, there were means of otherwise doing its work quite as effectually. When Lillias came down to join Mr. Craybourne in the library before luncheon, and wait with him there for her aunt and uncle, she was what is known to her sex as a dream. The word is commonly used in description of a very visionary gown, but Lillias so thoroughly characterized her gown, and subdued it to her personality that she was herself the dream.

  The young man glowed all over love at sight of her, and a landslide must have taken place in him too. He seized the first minutes or moments that they could have together, and huskily entreated, “Lillias, why not say it now?”

  She smiled mystically, beatifically, and “Well!” she said.

  Then everything was said between them, and Crombie and his wife coming in directly, Lillias told them.

  There began with the whole household now a series of experiences as idyllic as any which have been put into poetry, but which would have very much the effect of prose if they were successively presented. They had for the lovers, in fact, no succession, but a sort of rapturous simultaneity, imaginable of a state of being in which the problem of time and space was eliminated. They were together, as it seemed, by mere volition, and the hotel was so near, and his presence in the Crombie cottage so constant, that there was no question to his consciousness of coming or going. Lillias knew of course that he took so many of his meals at her uncle’s table that the exception was when he remained at the hotel for any of them. He got to coming over to breakfast, and with her aunt’s habit of breakfasting in bed, and her uncle’s way of breakfasting whenever he happened to get up, they mostly had the meal alone together. Lillias would say to Mrs. Crombie’s neat waitress, “You needn’t stay, Norah. I think we can take care of ourselves,” and then Norah would not stay.