The young man took time, as if to let the fact sink in before he said, “When I came here first, a week ago — it seems much longer, and it seems no time at all; it’s very strange! — I came to put myself frankly in your hands; and if you bade me go away and not see Miss Bel — Lillias” — this new form of her name amused Crombie so that his mouth worked round the stem of his pipe in a smile which Craybourne was far too absorbed in himself to notice—” I was prepared to do so. Now I come prepared, if you say, to go after her.”
“It’s a free country,” Crombie said, with a corner of his eye on the young man.
“I mean, if you think it’s at all worth while. I don’t pretend to be an American in these things, though I’ve taken out my first naturalization papers.”
“One has to be more or less born to the case of a girl like Lillias,” her uncle reflected for her lover’s benefit.
“That is what I mean. You knew that we had broken, or rather that she had?” Crombie thought it fit to say, “Mrs. Crombie mentioned something of the kind,” not merely because it comported best with his own dignity to give it that casual turn, but because he felt that it politely reduced the fact to the insignificance it ought to have in Craybourne’s eyes.
“Then the question is,” the young man said, “whether, from the native American point of view, you not merely approve of my going after her, but whether you think it would be at all hopeful?”
Crombie got up for a match to relight his pipe, which he had been letting go out. “Do you mean to the Mellays’?”
“Has she gone to them? To be sure! I was thinking she had gone out there—”
“She’s going, I believe, as soon as she’s had her visit over with the Mellays. Excuse me, but how did you leave your affairs out there?”
“Oh, pretty much at sixes and sevens, I’m afraid.”
“So that you would feel yourself justified in going out to look after them a little?”
“Entirely.”
Crombie smoked a breath or two, nursing the knee he had taken between his hands in sitting down again. “It mightn’t be a bad idea for you to be on the ground.”
“On the ground?”
“When she gets there. I’m supposing you want it on again?”
“Decidedly, I want it on again!”
“Then it mightn’t be a bad idea, and it might be a very bad idea. You’d have to take the chances.”
The young man unfolded himself to his full height, as if about to take them on the instant. “Thank you, thank you—”
“Not at all. Though I don’t mind saying that I shouldn’t say this to everybody. But I think you’re the man for Lillias, if there is one. I think you know how to take her, or will know. She has her ups and downs, and she’s been looking after herself just long enough to suppose that she knows it all.
But she isn’t a thundering fool, like that woman, Mrs. Mevison.”
Craybourne smiled all over hope and joy. “She seemed to feel that we were somehow entangled in their fate because we were very much in love.” He looked silly in taking the word on his lips, as a man always must before another man, as long as he is in love. “But I don’t see how it follows. They quarrel because they are of the temperament for it, not because they are in love.”
“There’s a good deal of sense in that.”
“It’s what I urged Lillias to consider, but she seemed morbid, and couldn’t bring her mind to it.”
“You’ll have to give her time. Perhaps she’ll have brought her mind to it by the time you meet out there. Women think very quickly — when they do think. And they veer round like lightning.”
“They’re very strange,” the young man said, blissfully.
“They’re the devil and all for strangeness.”
“But they’re charming!”
“Some of them.”
Craybourne put out his hand for good-bye and Crombie took it in getting up. “Going? I thought you might like to see Mrs. Crombie—”
“If it will do any good? Otherwise I don’t think I’ll disturb her, if you will make her my best compliments, and tell her how very kind I think she’s been. But if you think I’d better see her—”
“No, on second thoughts, better not. She might queer it, and I confess that it won’t stand queering, in my judgment. It’s a very delicate situation. Let it be between us. I hope it’ll come out all right, but if it doesn’t you mustn’t blame me.”
“No, certainly not. I—”
The stir of garments made itself heard, and Mrs. Crombie, who had been standing it as long as she could, up-stairs, after she knew Craybourne was in the house, came in upon the two men. Her husband said to her casually, while she was greeting Craybourne, “Mr. Craybourne is going out there to wind up his business, and I’ve been advising him to wait till Lillias comes.”
Mrs. Crombie seemed to have utterance, at first, for no more than a joyful “Oh!” though she made up for it afterwards, before Craybourne got away.
“Yes,” Crombie said, proud of her approval, “I couldn’t assure him that it would be all peaches and cream, but I think if they meet again on neutral ground there’s a chance she may feel differently.”
“Oh, I’m sure there is!” Mrs. Crombie breathed perfervidly. “Lillias is very reasonable. She was under the shadow of that terrible woman here, and she couldn’t get away from the idea that she might somehow be like her; but I know she won’t, and that she’ll think so, too.”
“It’s very curious, isn’t it?” Craybourne said. “It’s a sort of obsession.”
“Yes, indeed. All she has got to do is to forget her, and then she will see everything in its true light again. Lillias is very generous. She talked it over with me, and I know that she has no feeling against you; and that’s the main thing.”
“The other main thing,” Crombie ventured a joke, “is that she still has a feeling for him. But that’s what he’s got to find out.”
Craybourne would not let him have his laugh alone, but Mrs. Crombie remained grave, with her recurrent sense that Crombie was coarse, but her faith that he was always good even when he was coarse. “But Mr. Craybourne is coming to supper, isn’t he?” she said, as if that were relevant.
“By supper,” the young man answered, “I hope to be well started on my way. I shall take the five-o’clock train for Boston, and try to catch a Western train there. Or I can go by way of New York. I feel that everything depends upon my being out there somewhat before Lillias, so as not to have the appearance of following her.”
“Yes, she wouldn’t like that. But if you are there that will make all the difference.”
“That is what I think,” Craybourne said, and he and Mrs. Crombie went on talking it all over again, and leaving Crombie out more and more.
He was brought in again, after the young man had taken the leave he many times attempted, and Mrs. Crombie said to him, reproachfully, “Were you going to let him go, Archibald, without referring the matter to me?”
“Well, I didn’t see the use of disturbing you. I thought you were lying down.”
“And if it hadn’t turned out well? I don’t at all feel that it will. Where would you have been then?”
“Where I shall be now, if it doesn’t turn out well, I suppose. I shall be responsible in any event.”
“I don’t see why you say that, my dear. Lillias is my niece, and I ought to have been consulted.”
“Well, she’s my niece, too, by marriage, just as much as you are my wife.”
Mrs. Crombie looked baffled by his nonsense, as she finally looked grieved, but she left him, saying, there had been quarrelling enough in that house for one while, and that if he could laugh at such a serious matter she could not.
She forgave his offence, but it cannot be said that she entirely forgot it until she heard from Lillias, out there, a few days after her arrival. The girl wrote her aunt a very long letter and a sufficiently important letter, though Crombie professed to attach no special importance to it up to
a certain point. Her letter came at breakfast, and Mrs. Crombie read it aloud, mumbling over the mechanical facts with which Lillias felt bound, as people do, to delay the appearance of the vital matters. Then Mrs. Crombie’s voice grew more distinct, and her utterance more coherent. “‘Of course,’” she read on, “‘I could not honestly say that I was surprised to see him. I might as well confess, “right here,” as the public speakers say in this section, that I should have been a little disappointed if I had not found him waiting for me, not exactly at the station, but somewhere on the municipal premises. His being here opened up the whole subject again, and when we had gone over it very thoroughly I could not see where the situation had changed in the least, and he was forced to acknowledge himself that it had not. The evening was ending — he came to call on me at the president’s house, where they had asked me to stay till I could get settled — with our having decided neither of us ever to marry, but both to remain friends, and see each other when we liked, without any silly consciousness, when he remembered something. He said he had forgotten to mention that Mrs. Mevison was staying at his hotel, and when I whooped at him, he said, Yes, he believed she had taken up her residence there in order to get a divorce. He had not spoken with her, but the young lawyer here who first told him about my lectures and brought him to hear me, has charge of her case, and he told Edmund.
“‘Somehow, that seemed to throw a new light on the whole affair. I can’t say just how it did, but it did. I sank down into one chair, and Edmund, who is only too glad to sink into chairs, so as to get rid of some of his ridiculous length, I suppose, sank into another. I instantly commanded him to tell me all about it, but it seems that he had told me at least all he knew, except the grounds for her divorce which her lawyer gave him. “She alleges extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty,” Edmund said, and then we looked at each other, and though he has not the American sense of humor that we brag so about, even he could see the fun of this, and we burst out laughing in each other’s faces. When I could get my breath, I said, “So they are going to separate, after all.”
“Yes,” he said, and then before I knew it he was offering an argument that cleared me up to myself in the most wonderful way. I must try to give it to you in his own words, as nearly as I can, for I think it is very subtle, and does him great credit. He said, “Now you see, don’t you, that this removes the only obstacle, the only real obstacle, in your mind?” I asked him if he meant that strange sort of feeling I had that we should be like them, if we married, and that there was not room in the world for two such quarrelsome couples, and he said that was just what he meant. “If they are separated for good and all,” he said, “don’t you see that it gives us our chance? There is really no occasion for our breaking now, is there?”
“‘Of course, there was a great deal more, and it was midnight before we had talked it all out; but midnight is nothing here, when a young man is calling. The point was a very fine one, and I kept losing it; but he never did; he has so much intellectual tenacity; and he held me to it, so that when he did go away, I promised him that I would think about it. I did think about it, and before morning I had a perfect inspiration. My inspiration was that where I was so helpless to reason it out for myself, I ought to leave it altogether to him, and that is why we are going to be married in the spring. We have agreed to wait till the spring term of the court is over, and see whether Mrs. Mevison gets her divorce or not. I know she will, but I am still a little morbid about it, and Edmund waits to gratify me. I shall enjoy giving my lectures during the winter, and he is going to look after his ranch, and see if he can get it into shape again, so that we can go out and live there.’” There was more like this in the letter, but it was here that Mrs. Crombie broke off her reading to ask, “Did you ever hear of anything so absurd?”
“Absurd? No!” Crombie answered with robust decision. “I have had my moments of suspecting that Lillias was a fool, but this settles it. She has shown horse-sense.”
“How can you be so coarse?” his wife murmured, fondly, with tears of entire satisfaction in her eyes. “She can make him go to England and live now, if she wants to. He will do anything for her. But you can see it wasn’t a reason he gave her.”
“Well, I suppose she didn’t want a reason, if she had an inspiration.”
THE END
BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE DAYLIGHT
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
I
A Sleep and a Forgetting
I
Matthew Lanfear had stopped off, between Genoa and Nice, at San Remo in the interest of a friend who had come over on the steamer with him, and who wished him to test the air before settling there for the winter with an invalid wife. She was one of those neurasthenics who really carry their climate — always a bad one — with them, but she had set her mind on San Remo; and Lanfear was willing to pass a few days in the place making the observations which he felt pretty sure would be adverse.
His train was rather late, and the sunset was fading from the French sky beyond the Italian shore when he got out of his car and looked round for a porter to take his valise. His roving eye lighted on the anxious figure, which as fully as the anxious face, of a short, stout, elderly man expressed a sort of distraction, as he stood loaded down with umbrellas, bags, bundles, and wraps, and seemed unable to arrest the movements of a tall young girl, with a travelling-shawl trailing from her arm, who had the effect of escaping from him towards a bench beside the door of the waiting-room. When she reached it, in spite of his appeals, she sat down with an absent air, and looked as far withdrawn from the bustle of the platform and from the snuffling train as if on some quiet garden seat along with her own thoughts.
In his fat frenzy, which Lanfear felt to be pathetic, the old gentleman glanced at him, and then abruptly demanded: “Are you an American?”
We knew each other abroad in some mystical way, and Lanfear did not try to deny the fact.
“Oh, well, then,” the stranger said, as if the fact made everything right, “will you kindly tell my daughter, on that bench by the door yonder” — he pointed with a bag, and dropped a roll of rugs from under his arm— “that I’ll be with her as soon as I’ve looked after the trunks? Tell her not to move till I come. Heigh! Here! Take hold of these, will you?” He caught the sleeve of a facchino who came wandering by, and heaped him with his burdens, and then pushed ahead of the man in the direction of the baggage-room with a sort of mastery of the situation which struck Lanfear as springing from desperation rather than experience.
Lanfear stood a moment hesitating. Then a glance at the girl on the bench, drooping a little forward in freeing her face from the veil that hung from her pretty hat, together with a sense of something quaintly charming in the confidence shown him on such purely compatriotic grounds, decided him to do just what he had been asked. The girl had got her veil up by this time, and as he came near, she turned from looking at the sunset over the stretch of wall beyond the halting train, and met his dubious face with a smile.
“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “I know I shall get well, here, if they have such sunsets every day.”
There was something so convincingly normal in her expression that Lanfear dismissed a painful conjecture. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I am afraid there’s some mistake. I haven’t the pleasure — You must excuse me, but your father wished me to ask you to wait here for him till he had got his baggage—”
“My father?” the girl stopped him with a sort of a frowning perplexity in the stare she gave him. “My father isn’t here!”
“I beg your pardon,” Lanfear said. “I must have misunderstood. A gentleman who got out of the train with you — a short, stout gentleman with gray hair — I understood him to say you were his daughter — requested me to bring this message—”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t know him. It must be
a mistake.”
“The mistake is mine, no doubt. It may have been some one else whom he pointed out, and I have blundered. I’m very sorry if I seem to have intruded—”
“What place is this?” the girl asked, without noticing his excuses.
“San Remo,” Lanfear answered. “If you didn’t intend to stop here, your train will be leaving in a moment.”
“I meant to get off, I suppose,” she said. “I don’t believe I’m going any farther.” She leaned back against the bars of the bench, and put up one of her slim arms along the top.
There was something wrong. Lanfear now felt that, in spite of her perfect tranquillity and self-possession; perhaps because of it. He had no business to stay there talking with her, but he had not quite the right to leave her, though practically he had got his dismissal, and apparently she was quite capable of taking care of herself, or could have been so in a country where any woman’s defencelessness was not any man’s advantage. He could not go away without some effort to be of use.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Can I help you in calling a carriage; or looking after your hand-baggage — it will be getting dark — perhaps your maid—”
“My maid!” The girl frowned again, with a measure of the amazement which she showed when he mentioned her father. “I have no maid!”
Lanfear blurted desperately out: “You are alone? You came — you are going to stay here — alone?”
“Quite alone,” she said, with a passivity in which there was no resentment, and no feeling unless it were a certain color of dignity. Almost at the same time, with a glance beside and beyond him, she called out joyfully: “Ah, there you are!” and Lanfear turned, and saw scuffling and heard puffing towards them the short, stout elderly gentleman who had sent him to her. “I knew you would come before long!”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 828
