Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “What are you doing that for?” he whispered, hoarsely, harshly.

  She turned and looked at him where he stood at his door, and measured him in mass and detail with an imperious eye. “I am trying to waken my husband,” she answered, with a dignified calm which he could hope to emulate.

  Crombie’s belief was that she was doing it for pure mischief, and with a diabolical intent of tormenting her husband, who had probably locked the door between them to prevent her talking to him, but this was a belief which he could not well express even to a woman for whom he had tacitly allowed himself a wide range of disrespect. All he could do was to say, “Oh!” and stand there till he heard a responsive stirring within Mevison’s room.

  After an interval long enough for Mevison to light a candle and get to the door it was unlocked and thrown open, and he appeared on the threshold.

  “Oh, Arthur,” she began, in the way people do who have been unexpectedly reminded, “I was just coming to tell you something I had thought of that will make us see everything in a new and different light; and—”

  Her husband put his arm round her and looked over her shoulder at Crombie with a countenance of severe amaze. Then he murmured, “Come in, Clarice,” and drew her inside the room and closed the door in Crombie’s face.

  The whole household slept late, and there was barely time for the Mevisons to get from the breakfast - table to the train that was to carry them to the Junction together. After what had happened at their last meeting, Crombie was not surprised that Mevison should bear himself somewhat awkwardly towards him. On the other hand, Mrs. Mevison was not only very sweet with Mrs. Crombie and Lillias, and tender with the waitress, to whom he afterwards saw her giving a tip out of all proportion to the length of her stay under his roof, but she behaved with extreme gentleness towards Crombie himself. He understood, as well as if she had put it in words, that this was in triumph over him and his suspicions; he surmised that she had been able to make Mevison make up their quarrel, and that between them they had offered him a sacrifice on the altar of their domestic happiness. As long as they were all together, Mevison did not relax from the stiffness with which he comported himself towards Crombie, but there came a moment when his wife did not keep the two men from meeting alone.

  Mevison improved the chance, rather sheepishly. “My wife will tell Mrs. Crombie, but I think I ought to tell you, that Clarice and I are going to try it together again. She has seen our whole relation in a more possible light, and I must say that she has shown me where I have been in fault, and how I can avoid future causes of trouble. It’s only right I should tell you that when you saw her last night she was impatient to tell me what she had thought of, and was trying to waken me without disturbing any one else.”

  “Oh, I understand that now, and I wish you would offer Mrs. Mevison my very sincere apologies for my seeming intrusion.”

  “I will, Crombie, with the greatest pleasure, for I know how glad she will be to feel that you are doing her justice. There is not a more generous creature under the sun.”

  “Oh, I can see that. I can see that it has been only her impulsiveness — I beg your pardon!”

  “Not at all, old fellow. As I told you yesterday afternoon, though, I have been to blame myself. I see that more clearly than ever.” They were both silent, for now they seemed to have come to the end of their say, but Mevison added, with an appeal as if from some profound insecurity, which Crombie found very affecting, “We feel as if we were beginning all over again, and I know that we are going forward on ground where there will be no room for the old — anxieties.”

  “I’m sure of that, Mevison.”

  “Thank you, Crombie — thank you!” Mevison’s voice trembled a little, and he wrung his friend’s hand hard.

  Mrs. Mevison parted emotionally with all. She pressed Crombie’s hand as if in recognition of a sacred confidence between them, and she exacted from Mrs. Crombie almost a promise that they would both come to see her when she and Arthur were settled in New York for the winter, though she knew how hard it would be for her to tear herself from her beloved Boston. She thanked Mrs. Crombie for having rescued them from that dreadful hotel, and she hoped they had not been too much trouble to her. She must let them pay her back for it somehow.

  Lillias was the last to receive her adieux, and she told the girl she had purposely kept her for the last. “What shall I say to you, my dear?” she asked, from the sunny summit of her matronly felicity. “I wish you very, very happy, as the nice old phrase is. I wish you as happy as Arthur and I are going to be, for our honeymoon is just beginning over again. It seems a little selfish for us to be taking it before you have yours, but I suppose it can’t be helped.” She was clinging to the girl’s hand, and fondly bending her eyes upon her from this slant of the head and from that, and now she humbly entreated, “May I kiss you?”

  Lillias did not say, but perhaps she inclined her cheek a little. At any rate, she did not forbid the endearment, and Mrs. Mevison bestowed it.

  “There!” she cried. “That’s for good luck. Come, Arthur, dear! Good-bye, all! Oh! Why, Mr. Craybourne!” she called to the young man as he came round the corner of the house. “Just in time for hail and farewell!” She ran and seized his hand. “Goodbye! good-bye!” she cried, and she added in a stage whisper, for every one to hear, “Be good to that sweet girl!”

  The carriage whirled her and Mevison away, but before it had traced the gravelled curve in front of the cottage Mrs. Crombie burst out with, “Treacherous, false, hypocritical, disagreeable woman!” in a diminuendo which seemed to do so little justice to the case that Crombie threw his arms desperately into the air and went in-doors without a word.

  “I don’t know,” Lillias said, continuing to rub with her handkerchief at the cheek which Mrs. Mevison had kissed, and staring after the carriage in a blank forgetfulness of Craybourne, who stood submissively by in expectation of her return to herself.

  “Lillias!” her aunt cried.

  “She’s disagreeable, but you can’t say she’s insincere. She’s shown out the worst that’s in her, but can we be sure that he has?”

  “Well, Lillias! After the rude way she behaved to you from the beginning!”

  “I like to be just, Aunt Hester.”

  “Well, I can’t make you out. Can you, Mr. Craybourne?”

  Craybourne smiled. “Whenever I can’t, I trust to a period of unconscious cerebration.”

  The girl looked at him with sudden wonder in her fine eyes and some apparent doubt.

  “Well,” Mrs. Crombie said, “I’m glad she’s out of the house, anyway,” and she added, “What would you poor things like for luncheon?”

  “Oh, anything, Aunt Hester. Or nothing.” Lillias turned distractedly to Craybourne. “I want you, Edmund. Aunt Hester, excuse us a moment. I want to speak to Mr. Craybourne. No, no!” she said. “Don’t go in! I’ll take him down to the river. Come, Mr. Craybourne.”

  She left Mrs. Crombie looking after them as she led the way with Craybourne, swiftly swooping over the slope of the meadow, with her light skirt lifted before her and swirling in a fine eddy behind her.

  She did not pause for the important talk which he felt impending till they reached that point of the river where they had sat the day before and thrown sticks into the stream and played the fool so gladly. Then she panted, “You see it won’t do, Edmund.” He was not the sort of man to repeat her words in idle question; he sat silently down, and, with his kind, intelligent looks bent on her, let her go on.

  “I am too much like her. I have been feeling it more and more; and unless you can prove to me that there is some vital difference, so that, under the same conditions, I should behave otherwise, it had better be off, and the sooner the better. I would rather be dead than treat you as she treated him, and much rather you would be dead than have you treat me as he treated her. I couldn’t stand it for a moment, and I shouldn’t respect you if you could.”

  Craybourne gave himself an interval
of thoughtful silence before he asked, “Aren’t you taking it rather too much for granted that you are like her? I don’t see the least resemblance.”

  He had, certainly not with her connivance, but certainly not without her consent, possessed himself of that hand of hers which hung next him; and, now finding it in his clasp, she pressed his hand gratefully. “I don’t mean in temperament—”

  “And I am sure not in temper!”

  She pressed his hand again, and smiled sidelong up at him. Then as he folded himself down on the bank, she could not well keep standing, and, besides, she thought she could think better sitting. “I don’t mean in temper, either; at least, I should hope not. But, Edmund, that has nothing to do with the kind of resemblance I had in mind. I am too much like her in being too much in love.”

  She looked anxiously at him, and as he had the instinct, rare among men, of knowing when not to laugh at a woman’s seriousness, he did not even smile, and she went on:

  “I should ask too much of you—”

  “Ah, that,” he broke in, “you could not do. You couldn’t ask anything that I wouldn’t gladly do.”

  “That is just what I should answer you, if you had said what I said; and that convinces me that it is quite as bad as I supposed, if not worse. We are both too much in love.”

  He was as serious as she in replying, “Do you mean that people who are very much in love had better not marry?”

  “That is what I mean. It is dangerous; it’s madness to do so.”

  “I’ve sometimes vaguely felt it. But — Go on, Lillias.”

  She took her hand from him, observing, “If we kept that up, we never could talk sensibly, and I wish to talk sensibly.”

  “I’m afraid there’s something in what you say,” he sighed.

  “Besides, this may be the beginning of the end, and we had better commence at once.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t come to that, yet. But there is something — and it’s the great thing, that I’m sure of — and that is that if we’re marrying for love, we’re making a mistake, and the more love the more mistake. We ought to marry dispassionately.”

  “I don’t know that I should go so far as that,” he said, with the fine reasonableness which she had early told him was his greatest charm. “But I certainly agree with you that love alone isn’t a sufficient motive. I always supposed,” he continued, with an introspective air, “that there was something besides love in our case. I thought there was a sense of character, an intellectual reciprocity, a mutual respect—”

  “Yes,” she said, “there’s no denying that, and that’s just what makes the love so dangerous. It’s the mixture.”

  “Why,” he argued, “you don’t mean to say that there oughtn’t to be any love?”

  “No, I don’t mean that, quite. It would be repulsive if there were no love. To marry for reason would be almost as bad as to marry for money.”

  “Then what do you think people ought to marry for?”

  After a moment of sad reflection she said, “I’m not sure that they ought to marry at all.”

  “Lillias!”

  “Of course, I don’t mean that, either, quite. But after hearing what we’ve heard, and seeing what we’ve seen, all in a supposed union of hearts and hands that didn’t admit anything of the kind to the world—”

  “But why need we think that our marriage would be like that?”

  “How do we know but all marriages are like that?”

  “I’m sure they’re not. There are your aunt and uncle: why shouldn’t we be like them in our marriage?”

  Lillias gave a fine, small shrug. “My aunt and uncle are ridiculous. Would you like to be like them? Darby and Joan are not my ideal.”

  “I don’t think Darby and Joan are so bad when you get to their time of life. People come to Darby and Joan because they are good, I suppose, and kind to each other, and patient, and all that.”

  “Yes, but it may be the peace of exhaustion. They’ve simply fought to a finish.”

  “Well, my dear — Or perhaps you don’t wish me to call you my dear?”

  “You can call me so, provisionally.”

  “Thank you. Then, Lillias, I should like to know what you think was the attraction that brought us together, to begin with?”

  “I don’t know. Love, I suppose. At least, it was in my case.”

  “It wasn’t in mine.”

  “It wasn’t in yours!” She looked at him with the notion that he must be joking. But besides his being an Englishman, of whom joking could not always be predicated, especially on serious subjects, she saw that in this instance he was particularly in earnest. “I should like to know what it was, then!” she said, rather indignantly.

  “It was interest in an experiment that had my respect. It was what you were doing, not what you were, that attracted me.”

  “Oh, indeed!”

  “Yes.”

  “And may I ask what retained your interest?”

  “It was you, your charming and adorable self. But the sense of that certainly came second and not first. Ah! I see I have wounded you.”

  “Not at all. I like what you have told me. It restores my self-respect. But it shows me that men never can understand women. When all is said and done, we are of different natures.”

  Craybourne laughed joyfully. “Now that is such an American way of putting it. So delightful, so mystical!”

  “And that is such an English way of recognizing the fact. Yes, Mr. Craybourne,” the girl said, getting unexpectedly to her feet, “we are not only of different natures, but different races.”

  “I always supposed the Americans and English were of the same race — the Anglo-Saxon race. Or if you won’t allow that we’re certainly of the same human race.”

  “I’m not joking, Mr. Craybourne, as you seem to think. I see that we have never understood each other, and never can.”

  “I think we can. But why ‘Mr. Craybourne,’ Lillias?”

  “Because I think it had better come to it at once.”

  “The—”

  “Parting, yes.”

  He turned very white, very suddenly, so that she entreated, “Don’t do that!”

  “It isn’t a thing I can help, quite. Lillias, why should we part?”

  “You have the same as told me you don’t love me—”

  “No, dearest — or Miss Bellard, I mean — I said I didn’t love you at first. And you had been saying that we oughtn’t to love each other.”

  “Then you were deceiving me?”

  He looked a magnanimous reproach at her unreasonableness, her unfairness, and she was ashamed. She took up a stitch she had dropped.

  “I could see that all along you didn’t care for me primarily as a woman. I piqued you and puzzled you as an American. I could see that you were always trying to make me out. And that was very offensive.”

  “I am sorry that I was offensive, but certainly you did pique and puzzle me, not only as a woman but as an American. Perhaps I piqued and puzzled you as an Englishman?”

  “Not a bit. You were so much of a man that I could see through you instantly.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s quite enough that we know our own minds at last. Our marriage would be unhappy because we are so hopelessly different, in nature, in nationality, in everything. I love you and I always shall—”

  “And I you, Lillias, as long as I live.”

  “That is very sweet of you, Edmund. But we have had our lesson in those wretched people, and we had better heed it. You see yourself, dearest, that we could never remain united!”

  “I don’t see why we shouldn’t try.”

  “Yes, dearest, you do. We can break now, and the cleavage would be absolute; but if we were married and broke there would be all sorts of pieces. We have never had the least sign of a quarrel.”

  Craybourne was silent, perhaps absently, and she went on:

&n
bsp; “And I determined from the first moment—”

  “When was the first moment?”

  “Why, I suppose it was the glimpse of you I caught that first day I saw you coming in to hear my lecture. I thought you were very distinguished, and I — well, I was taken with you. It began then.”

  “Did it, really? How intoxicating! I never knew that, Lillias.”

  “We’ve never talked out fully, yet.”

  “Then suppose we do it now.”

  “No, there isn’t time, now. It’s too late,” she sighed.

  “Oh, don’t say that, dearest!”

  “Yes, it’s too late. According to what you say, you were not at all impressed so soon.”

  “Impressed?”

  “Taken with me — it’s the same thing.”

  “No,” he owned, “I can’t honestly say I was.” Then he explained, “But I was taken with the idea of you, or what you were doing. I’ve always fancied women leading men in thought, you know; they’re naturally our teachers. That sort of women were my heroines: Hypatia, and those two women who were university professors at Bologna, and the one at Padua; I don’t remember their names; and when I heard, out there, that there was a woman lecturing to the students, of course I was taken — with the idea. I have always fancied intellectual women. I think they’re peculiarly lovable. I dare say it’s rather odd; a sort of taste for olives—”

  Lillias remained gravely looking at him. Now, at the break in his continuity, she said, aloud, but as if to herself, “How ecstatically offensive!”

  He stared blankly at her.

  “Then I am — olives!” she explained.

  “In the highest sense — well, yes.”

  “And I thought perhaps that I was roses, or violets, or lilies, poor fool!”

  “Don’t take it in that way, dearest! I supposed it would please you to know—”

  “Please me!”

  He gazed at her in a perplexity of such childlike simplicity that she could not help a very miserable laugh. “Really, Edmund, “ she said, as she turned and began to move homeward, “you beat the band. Now, don’t,” she added, angrily, “ask me just what I mean by beating the band. Any American idiot would know that.”