Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “No, Mrs. Mevison,” Lillias said, rather dreadfully.

  The woman tossed her head. “If you had listened, you might have heard the good of yourself that listeners always hear. It is you, you that have added the last straw! Do you suppose I don’t know that from the first moment my husband entered that house you were making a set at him? Do you suppose I can’t see that your engagement to that wretched cockney is a mere blind, and that you’re waiting till my husband and I are separated to transfer your easy affections to him? Do you imagine I couldn’t feel the flirt-nature in you as soon as I came near you? Arthur and I might still have made it up; he was getting to see the trouble from my point of view, but when you came in between us—” She choked with her rage, and suddenly she changed from accusation to imploring. “Leave him to me, Miss Bellard, and it will all come right! I didn’t intend to push him over just now, but when I saw how it shocked you, with your goody-goody pretences, I laughed, and I was glad I did it. But now, now I would give anything — I take it all back about you! Yes, I do. And I beg your pardon! I don’t accuse you of anything. It is his fault, all his fault; and if you will only say that you will not encourage him—”

  At this point Lillias did a wrong thing, but it may be contended that she was rather sorely tried. “Get away!” she said, with a contempt past description, and she advanced upon Mrs. Mevison as if she would tread her down. The other had no alternative but to slip aside.

  “Don’t take it so!” she besought the pitiless girl. “I know that you love Mr. Craybourne. I take back calling him a cockney. He isn’t. He’s fine and good. Any one can see it. And you are going to have in him what I have lost in my husband! That ought to make you a little lenient. It ought, oughtn’t it? See how I humble myself to you! I hope you may never, never have to humble yourself to another woman as I am doing to you. We began as sweetly as you are beginning now. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for him, or he for me. There never were people so devoted. And it has come to this with us! We are going to part, unless — unless you can show him that you don’t care for him. I know you don’t, but he thinks you do! If he knew you didn’t, he would be reconciled to me, and we could be happy again. My life is wrapped up in him. Oh, if you won’t have pity on me, have pity on yourself! You can’t expect to be happy in your marriage if you break up mine. Give me back my husband — no, give him back to himself, his better self! If you don’t, my misery will be upon you; it will bring you to judgment.”

  Lillias strode relentlessly on in silent scorn of the frantic woman, who pursued her at last with a long-drawn, heart-broken, heartbreaking “Oh!”

  XI

  AT luncheon Mrs. Mevison was of a calm that betrayed no signs of the morning’s tempests. Lillias and she observed a truce that had the effect of a peace, unbroken by any hostile experience, and in the absence of Craybourne, who had apparently not found himself equal to further eventualities, Mrs. Mevison seemed less exasperated by the sense of the happiness so near and yet so far from her. She was very sweet and gentle with every one, from the waitress to Mevison, so that Crombie could scarcely credit his old friend when Mevison said, in the stroll which he took at Crombie’s side a few hours before dinner, “Well, it has been amicably arranged with Mrs. Mevison.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We are going to part — friends.”

  “Has it really come to that? I was in hopes, seeing you so pleasant together at luncheon—”

  Mevison shook his head sadly. “All women like to put a good face on things, and Mrs. Mevison above all other women. After we had agreed to separate peaceably, it was an easy matter to agree upon behaving ourselves decently during the brief remnant of our union. She feels, as I do, that we owe that much to you and Mrs. Crombie, if not to each other.” To Crombie’s vast astonishment he added, “She isn’t unreasonable; you mustn’t think that; and you mustn’t think that in this business the fault has been altogether on her side, as I believe I told you before. I don’t pretend that I’m not a trying man to live with at times. Certainly I’m trying to such a woman as Clarice. And in our rows I do my full share of the nagging. I’ve got a nasty temper of my own, and I give her as good as she sends, though I know all the time how much worse I’m hurting her than she is hurting me. It isn’t out of any wickedness she does it; I can’t make any one else understand. My God! how vulgar it all is! But it’s coming to an end, quickly and quietly.”

  Through all this Crombie had a fuzzy notion that he was ill-used, or if not he, then Mrs. Crombie. She had asked these people into the house to do him a pleasure through her hospitality to his old friend, and now, confound them, they were abusing her hospitality with their infernal jangling, and they were going to set the seal to the outrage by breaking up under his roof. It was like having a double suicide on one’s premises. It was violating the sanctities of a Christian home. It was a species of sacrilege; it was a scandal. People would say — there was no saying what people would not say, if Mevison and his wife had this sort of burst-up on the place, with the subsequent proceedings for divorce. Mrs. Crombie and he might be dragged into the trial as witnesses. Lillias might; Craybourne might. He kept his injury out of his voice as well as he could in asking, “Do you mean that you are going to separate now, right off the handle?”

  “We shall not even leave your house together, if you will allow me to leave her behind me for an hour or two. I expect to take the train for Quebec, and she will take the Boston express when it comes along. It’s all arranged. We were packed in view of this possibility, this moral certainty, before we came to you.”

  “Well, see here, Mevison,” Crombie said, with a knotted brow of extreme perplexity, “I hope it won’t seem unreasonable to you if I ask you whether you can’t hold up a little.”

  “How hold up?”

  The two men paused in their ramble and stood facing each other.

  “Hold up till you get away. Go off together, and separate at the Junction.” The word dimly suggested something different to Crombie, but he ignored its suggestion; or, rather, he postponed it to its possible effect upon Mevison when he got to the Junction. “This thing is going to make a lot of talk. It’s going to get into the papers; such things always do, nowadays. There’ll be a raft of reporters round. My house will be snapshotted, and my wife’s photograph and mine and Lillias’s and Craybourne’s will be grouped round yours and Mrs. Mevison’s, with bits of the Saco Valley scenery, in the Sunday editions. You see?”

  Mevison’s jaw fell. “I see,” he admitted, in a kind of dismay.

  Crombie had made his point, and he started on, with Mevison limping at his side. “I hope, old fellow, you feel that I’ve been with you in this deplorable business, first, last, and all the time. It’s very well for you to blame yourself; it’s handsome, and manly, and generous, and chivalrous, and all that rot, but unless you’ve changed most infernally from the fellow I used to know at Réné’s—”

  “I have, Crombie,” Mevison sadly responded. “Marriage changes a man; or, rather, it finds him out. I’ve been to blame; but all that’s too late now.”

  “I’m not advocating your remaining together. It’s probably best for both of you that you should separate. It seems to me that it’s come to that — for a while at least. But, Mevison, don’t do it here! It will break Mrs. Crombie up awfully.”

  Mevison laughed miserably. “It will break Mrs. Mevison up, too.”

  “Yes, I suppose it will. But, you see, Mrs. Crombie isn’t in it as Mrs. Mevison is.”

  “No.”

  “She’s tried to act nicely in the whole business, Mrs. Crombie has; but it’s killing her by inches.” When Crombie made use of this image, he could not help making the reflection that Mevison might think there were a good many inches of Mrs. Crombie to kill, and that her vitality would hold out a long while in the process. He made haste to add, “Of course, I beg your pardon. But what I’m getting at is the idea of making this business as easy for Mrs. Crombie as possible. Now, why can’t y
ou two go off together and separate at the Junction? Why can’t you put that idea before Mrs. Mevison? She might take to it.”

  Mevison frowned, in a recurrence of the disgust for his wife which Crombie’s championship of himself had momentarily dissipated. “Yes, she might consent, if it were not for her cursed histrionics. She consented to my leaving her in your house, I believe, as much for the dramatic effect as anything—”

  “But, don’t you see? It will be a great deal more dramatic for you to part at the Junction. The up-train and the down-train meet there; you get aboard one and she gets aboard the other, and that ends it.”

  Crombie’s voice rose in a cheerfulness, as he urged his point, which it had not expressed before. But Mevison apparently did not share his gay expectation. “There’s no telling how she will take the idea. I’m afraid it will lead to a review of the whole case. But I will try it with her. It is certainly your due in the matter, and Mrs. Crombie’s due. I hope, Crombie, you understand how very grateful I feel towards you both?”

  “Oh, that’s all right, Mevison.”

  They dismissed the matter, from their talk, at least, and finished their stroll in such remoteness from it that Crombie was able to gather some wild sweetbrier roses and bring them home. Mrs. Mevison admired them so much when he arrived with them on the veranda where she was sitting with his wife that he gave them to her, bidding her be careful not to scratch herself.

  “Oh, I know how to manage,” she said. “Give me your handkerchief, Arthur,” and when he held it out to her she put it round the thorny stems, and said, with a triumphant smile up into Crombie’s face, “There!” It was all very lurid to Crombie. With his privity to the impending tragedy he felt like a fiend, and in this comedy he was playing with the victim-villain of the tragedy he felt like a fool.

  He was still of no very determinate conviction with respect to himself at large, when, after the women had left them that night, and Mevison and he sat over their cigars on the veranda and absently marked the Big Dipper filling its bowl with the clear night above the Presidential Range, Mevison said, in a low voice, “Well, it’s all right.”

  “You suggested my idea to Mrs. Mevison?”

  “Yes, and she took to the notion of the Junction instantly. It satisfied the curious kind of poetry that Clarice has in her.” Crombie thought it a very curious kind of poetry, but he thought it best not to say so, and Mevison went on.

  “I gave her some inkling of how you felt, and she instantly entered into your feeling. Clarice is a very reasonable woman in those things. She is very intelligent.”

  Mevison heaved a long, low sigh, with which he exhaled a volume of smoke, whitening in the clear, chill night air.

  “Well, then,” Crombie said, “if it’s all settled, I hope you’ll get a good night’s rest, and start fresh in the morning.” This was not quite what he would have wished to say, but he let it go.

  “No doubt about that,” Mevison returned. “As I haven’t slept for several nights past, I should be pretty sure of sleeping to-night even if I didn’t feel so strangely at peace. I suppose it’s the peace of exhaustion.

  I suppose Clarice feels the same, poor woman!”

  “Better take the whiskey up with you,” Crombie said, as they rose from their tobacco at last.

  “No, I’m all right without, don’t be afraid. Besides, Clarice has given me some sleep-medicine of hers that she finds never fails.”

  XII

  CROMBIE also felt something of that peace from exhaustion of which Mevison had all but boasted, as he entered his room very carefully, so as not to waken Mrs. Crombie, whom he imagined asleep beyond the door opening into her own room. He was surprised to have her look in at him, as if she had been waiting up for him. But he said, as if he had expected it:

  “Well, you know they’re going, in the morning?”

  “Yes, she told me.”

  “And they’re going to separate, too.”

  “Separate!”

  “You must have seen it was coming to that. I had it out with Mevison this afternoon when we were walking; but I didn’t mean to tell you till they were out of the house. They meant to separate before they left us, he taking the up-train and she the down-train, an hour later. But I told him that it wouldn’t do; that it would make talk about us, and bring us into their row in all sorts of ways.”

  “That was very thoughtful of you, Archibald.”

  “He saw the point, too. I made him promise that they would decently leave the house together, and leave the Saco Shore station together, and do their confounded separating at the Junction.”

  Crombie ended in an exasperation, in which he lifted his voice, out of the whisper they had been using, into a thick barytone.

  “‘Sh!” she hissed. “Don’t speak so loud! You’ve done the wisest thing that could be done; but I don’t think it was delicate of them to come here at all. What do you suppose could have possessed them to do it, when they knew—”

  “I don’t believe they did know. It’s something they couldn’t realize; at least, Mevison couldn’t. They’ve been fighting along for years, and as far as their nerves are concerned they’re no nearer the end now than they ever were; their consciousness doesn’t accept the fact. Mevison talked like a fool; I wanted to laugh. He would pitch into her, and pitch into himself, and then he would dwell on her good qualities, and he concluded, when we came off to bed, by refusing whiskey for his insomnia, because he was going to try some sleep-medicine that his wife had given him.” Crombie ended in a note of hollow laughter which attested the derision in which he held Mevison’s absurdity.

  His laughter made his wife say “‘Sh!” again, but she smiled herself before she added, severely, “Well, I hope they will separate. It will be the best thing for them. They can’t respect each other after what they have done — or she has done. But what a dreadful thing to come into our lives!”

  “I suppose we can stand it if they can,” Crombie gloomily suggested. “I can’t help being sorry for poor old Mevison.”

  “I am sorry for her, too. You can see that she’s perfectly wrapped up in him.”

  “Well, she has a queer way of showing it.”

  “Not at all! But what I keep thinking of, all the time, is the effect it is going to have on Lillias.”

  “What has it got to do with Lillias?”

  “It is such an awful warning.”

  “I hope it will be a warning to her to behave herself. She mustn’t suppose that an Englishman will stand any such jinks as Mrs. Mevison’s. It’s a very good thing for Lillias.”

  “Perhaps. But oh, dear me! What a heart-breaking thing it is, Archibald, when you come to think of it! We’ve never come so near to a separation — other people’s, I mean — before. Isn’t it strange that with all the separating and divorcing that seems to be going on, one has so very little of it in one’s own circle?”

  “I’m not sure but there had better be more of it.”

  “You know you don’t think that, my dear!”

  “Well, anyway, I think I’ll go to bed. I’m awfully sleepy.”

  “Yes, you must be worn out by it. Goodnight, darling.”

  The epithet would not have seemed a very close fit for Crombie with a dispassionate witness, but these things are never intended for the dispassionate witness, and perhaps the kindly pair looked much the same in each other’s eyes as a younger couple might have looked to one another.

  Crombie might have been in bed half an hour, and he had got distinctly past the border between drowsing and sleeping, when he heard a sort of scraping sound. He was aware of it scraping and scraping as if it were scraping through his sleep, and getting down to a dream beneath, and finally reaching the quick of his waking. He roused himself with a sense of having a head of balloon-like vastness and lightness, which, when he sat up in bed, seemed to sway and swing on his shoulders as if impatient for an ascent to the ceiling.

  The instant he sat up, the gnawing or the scraping ceased. But he got out
of bed, and went and bathed his eyes, so as to be ready for any emergency, in which quickness of vision was requisite, like that of a rat. The precaution aided in rousing him fully, and at once reduced the dimensions of his head, so that he had no difficulty in putting it out of the door into the hall and peering with his candle into its emptiness and silence.

  It was so absolutely empty and so absolutely silent that the void seemed to mock his vision, and the stillness hummed in his ear with an audible derision. “Well,” he said to himself, “I don’t care what it was before, it isn’t anything now. I probably dreamed it.”

  He went back into his room, however, and mechanically got into his clothes, and waited for that gnawing, or that scraping, to begin again. He was determined not to let it surprise him; he was determined to surprise it. With a resolution that affected him as adamantine, he drowsed again, and then started from his drowse, not to the accustomed noise, but to the sound, as he fancied, of a door in the hall quickly opened and quickly shut.

  He flung his own door open, but again the innocent emptiness and silence of the dark hall offered themselves in a sort of gentle reproach of his turbulence. He waited, now, a considerable time, but the emptiness and silence maintained themselves in conscious innocence, and after a vain prolongation of his final scrutiny of the shadows he returned to his chair.

  This time he did not drowse; he could not, he was so furious at being played upon — that is, he did not believe he was drowsing, but it was certainly not from a vigil that he again started to his feet. Now he did not fling his door open into the hall, but softly set it ajar and waited on the threshold for the scraping or the gnawing to begin. Then he was aware of a soft movement in the hall, and a figure, the figure of a woman fully dressed and bearing a candle in one hand while the other held her skirt behind from the floor, as the fashion of women is, or lately was, crept as with down-shod feet to the door of Mevison’s room and began to scrape on it with her finger-nails. It was unmistakably Mrs. Mevison, and, unless she was sleep-walking, it was Mrs. Mevison inspired by a fell intent of which the conception almost bereft Crombie of his habitual politeness and the hospitable sense of the sacred character of a guest.