Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She swept forward so swiftly that though he easily kept up with her, in his long, lank stride, his stride was quicker than usual. “Will you listen to me, Lillias?”

  “No, I will not listen to you. I have heard too much already.” She stopped as suddenly as she had started, and fixed him with scornful defiance. “I dare say that if we were married, and quarrelling, this is the point where you would call me a stubborn little fool.”

  “Oh, that abominable woman!” he groaned. “She has poisoned our love.”

  “Our love for olives? Our peculiar passion for intellectual women?”

  “You are cruel, Lillias, to take what I said in that way.”

  “You were cruel to say what I couldn’t take in any other way.”

  “Then have patience with me for expressing myself badly! For Heaven’s sake don’t let us quarrel!”

  “Who is quarrelling?” she demanded.

  “I mean, let us be reasonable. You have always wished me to regard our affair dispassionately, and now you are giving way to a very mistaken feeling—”

  “I am not giving way to any sort of feeling! You are worse and worse.”

  “Oh,” he said, sadly, “I do seem to roil the water somehow, whether I stand up-stream from you or down.”

  “Poor lamb!” she retorted, contemptuously. Then, after a few steps, she stopped again and challenged him: “And I am the wolf, I suppose!”

  “Do you think it fair to accuse me of calling you a wolf?”

  “You insinuate that I am unjust to you, when you know that I am the soul of justice!”

  “I insinuate nothing, my dear. But I see that you are determined to break with me.”

  “Break with you? What is there left to break, I should like to know, after what has passed between us?”

  “Very little, I’m afraid,” he answered, with dignity. “And you are quite right. I accuse you of nothing; I take all the blame to myself for the beastly row that I should never have believed we would come to.” She stared at him, and the heat went out of her face, and a light of intelligence came into it, which was also consternation. “Yes, it is a beastly row, as you say, Edmund,” she owned, with the frankness on which she prided herself. “It seems that we can’t even part without quarrelling. Who would have dreamt it! And I meant that it should all be with such dignity, such self-respect, such consideration for each other! Oh, it isn’t at all as I meant it to be! It’s as bad as if we were married already. But you see, dearest, don’t you, that we must part now? Doesn’t it show you that we are not suited to each other? That I was perfectly right? Oh, dearest, how can you ever forgive me?”

  She looked at him so tenderly, so ruefully, that he could not forbear giving her an object-lesson in forgiveness. The spot was secluded and convenient for the purpose, and he took her in his arms and laid her head on his breast, and she lingered for a moment in his embrace, as if gathering strength from it for the ordeal before her. Then she gently repulsed him and wiped from her eyes the tears which had accompanied her self-analysis from the point where it began to break in self-condemnation.

  “Now,” she said, “this is the end.”

  He seemed surprised at her announcement, as if he had supposed it were rather the beginning, but he had apparently not the courage to protest.

  “We are parting,” she continued, “not because we have quarrelled and are mad at each other, like two fractious children — though it nearly came to that — with me, at least; you are always divine — but because our reason is convinced that it is best; that we are not fit for each other, or at least I am not; and that if we married, we should go on squabbling to the bitter end. Oh, I am glad that it has turned out as it has, and that I have shown you what an unreasonable and impossible person I am, in time. So, good-bye, dear—”

  “Don’t you think,” he inquired, very deferentially, “that it would be more, well, becoming, if I were to go back to the house with you, and—”

  “Not for worlds! Why should you want to?”

  “Merely for the effect with your family. I think it’s due to them that I should say — that I should formalize our position, that I shouldn’t seem to run away, or have been driven away—”

  “I see what you mean, but I don’t believe it’s necessary, indeed I don’t, dearest. If I did—”

  “I went to your uncle when we first came here, and had it all out with him, and received his approval of my remaining, and now I think I ought to notify him of the conclusion we’ve come to.”

  “Yes, there’s something in that. But Uncle Archibald wouldn’t expect it. He wouldn’t feel that it was due to him.”

  “I’m not sure that I don’t feel it due to myself,” Craybourne said, steadily. “I rather feel that it’s my right not to have the appearance of skulking off.”

  “Oh, no one would dream of that! I can explain it to Uncle Archibald and to Aunt Hester both. You needn’t be troubled. You may be sure that I won’t let you suffer in their opinion. I shall take all the blame upon myself. But there is no blame! It’s simply the wisest and best and kindest thing we could do for ourselves.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is—”

  “Oh, it is! And now don’t come a step farther! No!” The last word was accompanied by a swift evasion of the arms lifted towards her, and she fled away from him up the meadow and over the line where it began to be lawn. There she passed from his sight through a clump of shrubbery, behind which she hid, and watched him standing motionless, and then turning, and so walking slowly, head down, a pathetic figure, towards the ferry at the foot of the field.

  XIII

  LILLIAS went to her aunt as soon as she got to the house, and found her, with her spectacles on, doing some mending that would not admit the casual help of eye-glasses. “Aunt Hester,” she said, sitting down without waiting to be asked, “Mr. Craybourne is not coming to lunch.”

  “Not coming to lunch! Why, I have got broilers, and strawberry short—”

  “It doesn’t matter. He probably couldn’t eat a broiler as big as a grasshopper; at least, I couldn’t. Or a single bite of strawberry short-cake. We have separated.”

  She had to endure having her aunt repeat, “Separated?”

  “Yes, it’s all off, and I propose being off to-morrow morning. My week is up, and the Mellays will be quite ready to receive me. But if they weren’t, I should go, anyway, somewhere, so that I could get away from this terrible place where I have been so happy.” At this point Lillias put up her hands to her face to hide the peculiar expression she had noticed it always had when she was crying.

  Mrs. Crombie had dropped her mending, and she now went on with an exclamatory, interrogative, objurgatory comment, until Lillias had got through crying and again took up her story.

  “It’s very nice of you to say that you can’t believe it, and all that; and don’t think I don’t appreciate it. And it’s very sweet of you to insist upon my staying, but my plans are made, and I shall go. And I’m not crying because I’m sorry that we’ve broken, but because we’ve broken in such a humiliating way.”

  “I don’t see,” her aunt ventured, “what you mean by humiliating, or what difference it makes how you break, so long as you break.”

  “It makes all the difference in the world when you have your ideal of breaking; and if you intend to do it with dignity, and carry conviction by reasoning it out, and the first thing you know you are trying to quarrel, it is humiliating. For the time being I felt just like Mrs. Mevison.”

  “I should have supposed,” Mrs. Crombie said, very stupidly, as Lillias thought, “that if she occurred to you in any sort of way, it would have stopped you in your mad career.”

  “It was she that started me in my mad career. It was seeing what marriage could come to with no end of love, and — and — esteem, that gave me pause, and made me resolve to break with Edmund before it came to the sin and shame of such squabbling as went on with the Mevisons here. I reasoned it out perfectly, to myself, and I had just the expression
s in my mind that would have left him without a word to say against it, when something he said before I could come to them started me off in another direction, and I was scolding and upbraiding him before I knew it, just like Mrs. Mevison. But, thank Heaven! that was convincing, anyway; and no matter what he thinks of my arguments, and considers me a wilful, capricious child, he must be glad he’s well out of it. I certainly am. But what,” Lillias demanded, with spirit, “makes you call it my mad career, Aunt Hester? Of course I know that you’re my mother’s sister, and all that, but I’m used to taking care of myself, and I don’t think that as your guest I ought exactly to be called insane.”

  “I didn’t mean that, Lillias. It was not the word I meant to use. I’m sure nobody could consider you more sane than I do. But—”

  “But what? If you didn’t mean insanity by mad career, what do you mean?”

  “Why, I mean that you’ve thrown away a great chance.”

  “The chance to get married? I can get along perfectly well without being married. What great chance have I thrown away?”

  “The chance of being married to such a man as Mr. Craybourne,” Mrs. Crombie said, and she took back her mending into her lap again.

  Lillias hesitated; perhaps she felt that there was reason in what her aunt suggested; but with a little spitefulness she asked, “What is so very remarkable about Mr. Craybourne, I should like to know?”

  “Well, he is very unlike you, Lillias.”

  “Oh, thank you! Is that such a merit?” Mrs. Crombie was on the track of a reason, and she was not to be put off the scent.

  “He is an Englishman, and you would interest him as long as you lived. An American wouldn’t be interested in you half so long. You would be just like a lot of other girls to him; like most of the other girls he had seen. But an Englishman is different. He has never seen any other girls like you — girls let loose, as it were — and he’d be always puzzling over you, and trying to make you out.”

  “Now, Aunt Hester, you have touched upon the very point that has been troubling me, and that I couldn’t get at — like a pin somewhere. I don’t think it’s at all nice to have a man interested in you because you puzzle him; and in this case I don’t think it would be fair to Edmund. I should be an imposition. But that isn’t what I am getting at. Please go on.”

  The Old Woman in Mrs. Crombie felt somewhat baffled at the New Woman in Lillias, whom she vaguely suspected to be her spiritual as well as her intellectual superior; but in her belated way, she tried to go on. “He is not only an Englishman — whether you think it’s an advantage or not to have your husband always interested in you; some girls would, I know — but he is a very good man. Any one can see that he’s good by looking at him. I know he’s rather romantic, but as long as he’s romantic about you, I don’t think that’s any great fault.”

  “It is in a lover,” Lillias interpolated. “Then it isn’t in a husband. They make the happiest kind of wives. I’ve seen it.” Lillias wondered if this meant her uncle, but she merely said, “Well, go on.”

  “And he is very intelligent. He is cultivated. He knows a great deal more than most American men. He’s read more, and thought more. He isn’t merely a business man.”

  “No, he certainly isn’t a business man, poor fellow,” Lillias noted, “or he wouldn’t have made such a mess of his ranching.”

  “And no matter how high you went intellectually, he could follow you.”

  “Yes, he could even lead me; and our men, unless they make a profession of it, though they’re bright enough, are not intellectual,” Lillias reflected. “Well?”

  “Well, that’s all, I think. I suppose that once we should have considered whether he was religious or not; but the world has got to the pass where we don’t consider that any more, when a man is good, and kind, and truthful, and fond of you. And so I say you have thrown a pearl away.”

  The girl was silent, passing her hand across her lap, and looking down at it in its passage. Then, “I know it, Aunt Hester,” she said, “and it’s just because he’s a pearl that I’ve thrown him away — or it’s as much that as anything. If he were less of a pearl I might have kept him.”

  “I can’t make you out, Lillias.”

  “Why, it seems to me that I’m very clear. We should have fought like cats and dogs, or Mevisons, not because he wanted to, but because I did. I should have made him do it, too. I couldn’t have helped it. I’m so wrapped up in him, he’s so all this world and the next to me that I couldn’t have borne to have anybody else have the least look of him. I should have worried his life out of him. I saw it in time, and I stopped it. That’s all. And the only regret I have is that I couldn’t convince him of the fact without giving him an illustration. Well!” she rose with a quick sigh. “I suppose you will have to tell uncle?”

  “Shouldn’t you wish him to know? Don’t you think it’s his due?”

  “Well, not perhaps till I get out of the house. I shall go the first train in the morning. Do you think you could keep it till then?”

  “If you very much wish it,” Mrs. Crombie said, with gravity bordering on offence. “I do. And don’t be vexed, Aunt Hester!”

  “Oh no!”

  “I think I should like to write to uncle about it. I believe he would understand. I’ll write as quick as I get to the Mellays’. Could you wait till then?”

  Mrs. Crombie promised. “Yes, I will wait till you can write to him.”

  “Thank you, Aunt Hester.”

  Mrs. Crombie looked after her as she left the room, not less baffled by her behavior about her uncle than by her behavior to her lover. Lillias immediately returned. “I don’t think I shall stay with the Mellays long. I believe I shall go back almost immediately.”

  “Out there?”

  “Yes. They wanted me to go on with my work, and now I should like to do so. It will be something to do. And I like it. I will write to the president, and when I hear from him I will go out there and begin preparing my lectures for the fall term.”

  “Well, you know what is best for you, Lillias.”

  “I used to think so,” the girl said, sadly, and again she closed the door upon herself.

  That afternoon, in default of anything else to say, Lillias having assigned a headache as her reason for not wishing to be provided for in any way, Crombie and his wife went on one of their drives. When they came back the girl could see by their looks of aggressive guiltlessness that her aunt had been telling her uncle everything. This was not unexpected to her, and Crombie was so openly embarrassed by the burden of the deceit imposed upon him, that she was fairly well amused by the spectacle, and she did not blame her aunt.

  That night when Mrs. Crombie came in to help her with the last touches of her packing, or to offer help, she said, with a joyless laugh, “We had better not have any concealments, Aunt Hester, and I won’t pretend I don’t know you’ve been telling uncle. I had no right to ask you not.”

  “Oh yes, you had,” her aunt nobly protested. “And I really didn’t expect to tell him. But I was so droopy that he noticed it, and then I had to tell him. We never keep anything from each other.”

  “No, and that is right. It is something I can never say of Edmund and myself, now.”

  “Oh yes, you can. That will all come right again. You are both so wise and sensible that I don’t believe you’ll let a little scare like those Mevisons spoil your lives.”

  “It’s because we are so wise and sensible that we shall.”

  Lillias was leaning over her trunk with her hand stayed upon the lifted lid, and looking absently down at the freshly done-up shirtwaists in the top of it. Some sudden tears ran down her face and dropped on the shirt-waists. Her aunt rose from where she was sitting, and looked at the splotches on the shirt-waists.

  “Never mind,” she said. “If it leaves a blister, you can wait till you’ve had them washed.”

  XIV

  THE next afternoon when Crombie was napping in his library (one of the uses of his libra
ry was to be napped in), he was roused by the titter of the electric door-bell, and the maid brought in Craybourne’s card. Crombie was yet so dim with sleep that he looked at it for some time before he could say, with recognition, “Oh, send him in.” He also called through the open door, “Come in, Craybourne.” It had been such a relief to get the Mevisons out of the house, and then Lillias out of the house, that he had napped more deeply than usual, and it was not with a reasoned welcome that he hailed his visitor. As far as he could get himself aware of him, he realized that he thought he had gone, too, and it was something like this he said when he stumped heavily forward and shook hands with the young man in appointing him a chair.

  “No,” Craybourne said, quietly, “I wished to see you before I went, and I didn’t wish to come before Lillias had gone.”

  “You know she went this morning?”

  “Yes, I saw her at the station.”

  It recurred to Crombie that Craybourne had seen Lillias at the station when she came, and his sense of the coincidence was embarrassed by the doubt he had always had whether Craybourne had not spoken to her on that occasion, and they both had decided not to recognize the fact in their very natural surprise at meeting afterwards under his roof. Partly this kept him from asking whether Craybourne had spoken to her on the present occasion, and partly the feeling that it would be indelicate. Craybourne helped him out by saying:

  “I didn’t speak with her, however.”

  “Oh,” Crombie said.

  “But I wished to speak with you, Mr. Crombie. I had a fancy it was your due, somehow, and at any rate the fact that I came here to talk with you about Lillias at first has controlled me so far that, well, here I am now. It may be the working of one of those odd subliminal—”

  “Oh, don’t get me on that kind of thing, my dear fellow,” Crombie interrupted. “Smoke?” The young man shook his head, and Crombie said, “Ah, I remember,” and lighted a pipe for himself Then he remarked, as if it were a novelty, “Yes, she’s gone,” and sighed in a great whiff of nicotized expansion.