Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  I didn’t know what he was driving at, but I said, “I wouldn’t, either,” in a sympathetic manner.

  “I’ve got to see her!” he fired at me again.

  “Yep,” I said. “She’s up at the house now. Come on.” But that didn’t suit him. He explained that she wouldn’t look at him when the others were around, and that she slid off and wormed out of his way, so he couldn’t get at her, anyhow. Just like a girl, wasn’t it — not to face the music? Well, anyway, he’d cooked up a plan that he wanted me to do, and I promised I would. He wanted me to get Peggy to go up the river to their former spooning-resort (only he put it differently), and he would be there waiting and make Peggy talk to him, which he seemed to desire more than honey in the honeycomb.

  Lovers are a strange animal. I may be foolish, but I prefer toads. With them you can tie a string around the hind leg, and you have got them. But with lovers it’s all this way one day and upside down the next, and wondering what’s hurt the feelings of her, and if he’s got tired of you, and polyandering around to get interviews up rivers when you could easier sit on the piazza and talk — and all such. It seems to me that things would go a lot simpler if everybody would cut out most of the feelings department, and just eat their meals and look after their animals and play all they get time for, and then go to sleep quietly. Fussing is such a depravity. But they wouldn’t do what I said, not if I told them, so I lie low and think.

  Next morning I harnessed the pony in the cart and said, “Peg — take a drive with me — come on,” and Peg looked grattyfied, and mother said I was a dear, thoughtful child, and grandma said it would do the girl good, and I was a noble lad. So I got encombiums all round for once. Only Aunt Elizabeth — she looked thoughtful.

  I rattled Hotspur — that’s the pony — out to the happy hunting-ground by the river, till I saw Dr. Denbigh’s gray cap behind a bush, and I rightly argued that his manly form was hitched onto it, for he arose up in his might as I stopped the cart. Peggy gasped and said, “Oh — oh! We must go home. Oh, Billy, drive on!” Which Billy didn’t do, not so you’d notice it. Then the doctor said, in his I-am-the-Ten-Commandments manner, “Get out, Peggy,” and held his hand.

  And Peggy said, “I won’t — I can’t,” and immediately did, the goose.

  Then he looked at me in a funny, fierce way he has, with his eyebrows away down, only you know he’s pleasant because his eyes jiggle.

  “Billy, my son,” he said, “will you kindly deprive us of the light of your presence for one hour by the clock? Here’s my timepiece — one hour. Go!” And he gave Hotspur a slap so he leaped.

  Dr. Denbigh is the most different person from Harry Goward I know.

  Well, I drove round by the Red Bridge, and was gone an hour and twelve minutes, and I thought they’d be missing me and in a fit to get home, so I just raced Hotspur the last mile.

  “I’m awfully sorry I’m so late,” said I. “I got looking at some pigs, so I forgot. I’m sorry,” said I.

  Peg looked up at me as if she couldn’t remember who I was, and inquired, wonderingly: “Is it an hour yet?”

  And Dr. Denbigh said, “Great Scott! boy, you needn’t have hurried!”

  That’s lovers all over.

  And they hadn’t finished yet, if you’ll believe me. Dr. Denbigh went on talking as they stood up, just as if I wasn’t living. “You won’t promise me?” he asked her.

  And she said: “Oh, Jack, how can I? I don’t know what to do — but I’m engaged to him — that’s a solemn thing.”

  “Solemn nonsense,” said the doctor. “You don’t love him — you never did — you never could. Be a woman, dearest, and end this wretched mess.”

  “I never would have thought I loved him if I hadn’t believed I’d lost you,” Peggy ruminated to herself. “But I must think—” As if she hadn’t thunk for an hour!

  “How long must you think?” the doctor fired at her.

  “Don’t be cross at me,” said she, like a baby, and that big capable man picked up her hand and kissed it — shame on him!

  “No, no, dear,” he said, as meek as pie. “I’ll wait — only you MUST decide the right way, and remember that I’m waiting, and that it’s hard.”

  Then he put her into the cart clingingly — I’d have chucked her — and I leaned over toward him the last thing and threw my head lovingly on one side and rolled my eyes up and murmured at him, “Good-bye, Jack,” and started Hotspur before he could hit me.

  Now, thank the stars, there’s just one or two little items more that I’ve got to write. One is what I heard mother tell father when they were on the front piazza alone, and I was teaching the puppy to beg, right in sight of them on the grass. They think I’m an earless freak, maybe. She told him that dear Peggy was growing into such a strong, splendid woman; that she’d been talking to her, and she thought the child would be able to give up her weak, vacillating lover with hardly a pang, because she realized that he was unworthy of her; that Peg had said she couldn’t marry a man she didn’t admire — and wasn’t that noble of her? Noble, your grandmother — to give up a perfect lady like Harry Goward, when she’s got a real man up her sleeve! I’d have made them sit up and take notice if I hadn’t promised not to tell. Which reminds me that I ought to explain how I got Dr. Denbigh to let me write this for Lorraine. I put it to him strongly, you see, about the cookies, and at first he said.

  “Not on your life! Not in a thousand years!” And then —

  But what’s the use of writing that? Lorraine is on to all that. But, my pickles! won’t there be a circus when Alice finds out that I’ve known things she didn’t! Won’t Alice be hopping — gee

  CHAPTER XI PEGGY by Alice Brown

  “Remember,” said Charles Edward — he had run in for a minute on his way home from the office where he has been clearing out his desk, “for good and all,” he tells us— “remember, next week will see us out of this land of the free and home of the talkative.” He meant our sailing. I shall be glad to be with him and Lorraine. “And whatever you do. Peg, don’t talk, except to mother. Talk to her all you want to. Mother has the making of a woman in her. If mother’d been a celibate, she’d have been, also, a peach.”

  “But I don’t want to talk,” said I. “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “Good for you,” said Charles Edward. “Now I’ll run along.”

  I sat there on the piazza watching him, thinking he’d been awfully good to me, and feeling less bruised, somehow, than I do when the rest of the family advise me — except mother! And I saw him stop, turn round as if he were coming back, and then settle himself and plant his feet wide apart, as he does when the family question him about business. Then I saw somebody in light blue through the trees, and I knew it was Aunt Elizabeth. Alice was down in the hammock reading and eating cookies, and she saw her, too. Alice threw the book away and got her long legs out of the hammock and ran. I thought she was coming into the house to hide from Aunt Elizabeth. That’s what we all do the first minute, and then we recover ourselves and go down and meet her. But Alice dropped on her knees by my chair and threw her arms round me.

  “Forgive, Peggy,” she moaned. “Oh, forgive!”

  I saw she had on my fraternity pin, and I thought she meant that. So I said, “You can wear it today”; but she only hugged me the tighter and ran on in a rigmarole I didn’t understand.

  “She’s coming, and she’ll get it out of Lorraine, and they’ll all be down on us.”

  Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth stood talking together, and just then I saw her put her hand on his shoulder.

  “She’s trying to come round him,” said Alice.

  I began to see she was really in earnest now. “He’s squirming. Oh, Peggy, maybe she’s found it out some way, and she’s telling him, and they’ll tell you, and you’ll think I am false as hell!”

  I knew she didn’t mean anything by that word, because whenever she says such things they’re always quotations. She began to cry real tears.

/>   “It was Billy put it into my head,” said she, “and Lorraine put it into his. Lorraine wanted him to write out exactly what he knew, and he didn’t know anything except about the telegram and how the letter got wuzzled, and I told him I’d help him write it as it ought to be ‘if life were a banquet and beauty were wine’; but I told him we must make him say in it how he’d got to conceal it from me, or they’d think we got it up together. So I wrote it,” said Alice, “and Billy copied it.”

  Perhaps I wasn’t nice to the child, for I couldn’t listen to her. I was watching Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth, and saying to myself that mother’d want me to sit still and meet Aunt Elizabeth when she came— “like a good girl,” as she used to say to me when I was little and begged to get out of hard things. Alice went on talking and gasping.

  “Peg,” she said, “he’s perfectly splendid — Dr. Denbigh is.”

  “Yes, dear,” said I, “he’s very nice.”

  “I’ve adored him for years,” said Alice. “I could trust him with my whole future. I could trust him with yours.”

  Then I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And Alice was hurt, for some reason, and got up and held her head high and went into the house. And Aunt Elizabeth came up the drive, and that is how she found me laughing. She had on a lovely light-blue linen. Nobody wears such delicate shades as Aunt Elizabeth. I remember, one day, when she came in an embroidered pongee over Nile-green, father groaned, and grandmother said: “What is it, Cyrus? Have you got a pain?” “Yes,” said father, “the pain I always have when I see sheep dressed lamb fashion.” Grandmother laughed, but mother said: “Sh!” Mother’s dear.

  This time Aunt Elizabeth had on a great picture-hat with light-blue ostrich plumes; it was almost the shape of her lavender one that Charles Edward said made her look like a coster’s bride. When she bent over me and put both arms around me the plumes tickled my ear. I think that was why I was so cross. I wriggled away from her and said: “Don’t!”

  Aunt Elizabeth spoke quite solemnly. “Dear child!” she said, “you are broken, indeed.”

  And I began to feel again just as I had been feeling, as if I were in a show for everybody to look at, and I found I was shaking all over, and was angry with myself because of it. She had drawn up a chair, and she held both my hands.

  “Peggy,” said she, “haven’t you been to the hospital to see that poor dear boy?”

  I didn’t have to answer, for there was a whirl on the gravel, and Billy, on his bicycle, came riding up with the mail. He threw himself off his wheel and plunged up the steps as he always does, pretended to tickle his nose with Aunt Elizabeth’s feathers as he passed behind her, and whispered to me: “Shoot the hat!” But he had heard Aunt Elizabeth asking if I were not going to see that poor dear boy, and he said, as if he couldn’t help it:

  “Huh! I guess if she did she wouldn’t get in. His mother’s walking up and down front of the hospital when she ain’t with him, and she’s got a hook nose and white hair done up over a roll and an eye-glass on a stick, and I guess there won’t be no nimps and shepherdesses get by HER.”

  Aunt Elizabeth stood and thought for a minute, and her eyes looked as they do when she stares through you and doesn’t see you at all. Alice asked Charles Edward once if he thought she was sorrowing o’er the past when she had that look, and he said: “Bless you, chile, no more than a gentle industrious spider. She’s spinning a web.” But in a minute mother had stepped out on the piazza, and I felt as if she had come to my rescue. It was the way she used to come when I broke my doll or tore my skirt. But we didn’t look at each other, mother and I. We didn’t mean Aunt Elizabeth should see there was anything to rescue me from. Aunt Elizabeth turned to mother, and seemed to pounce upon her.

  “Ada,” said she, “has my engagement been announced?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” said mother. She spoke with a great deal of dignity. “I understood that the name of the gentleman had been withheld.”

  “Withheld!” repeated Aunt Elizabeth. “What do you mean by ‘withheld’? Billy, whom are those letters for?”

  In spite of ourselves mother and I started. Letters have begun to seem rather tragic to us.

  “One’s the gas-bill,” said Billy, “and one’s for you.” Aunt Elizabeth took the large, square envelope and tore it open. Then she looked at mother and smiled a little and tossed her head.

  “This is from Lyman Wilde,” said she.

  I thought I had never seen Aunt Elizabeth look so young. It must have meant something more to mother than it did to me, for she stared at her a minute very seriously.

  “I am truly glad for you, Elizabeth,” she said. Then she turned to me. “Daughter,” said she, “I shall need you about the salad.”

  She smiled at me and went in. I knew what that meant. She was giving me a chance to follow her, if I needed to escape. But there was hardly time. I was at the door when Aunt Elizabeth rustled after so quickly that it sounded like a flight. There on the piazza she put her arms about me.

  “Child!” she whispered. “Child! Verlassen! Verlassen!”

  I drew away a little and looked at her. Then I thought: “Why, she is old!” But I hadn’t understood. I knew the word was German, and I hadn’t taken that in the elective course.

  “What is it. Aunt Elizabeth?” I asked. I had a feeling I mustn’t leave her. She smiled a little — a queer, sad smile.

  “Peggy,” said she, “I want you to read this letter.” She gave it to me. It was written on very thick gray paper with rough edges, and there was a margin of two inches at the left. The handwriting was beautiful, only not very clear, and when I had puzzled over it for a minute she snatched it back again.

  “I’ll read it to you,” said she.

  Well, I thought it was a most beautiful letter. The gentleman said she had always been the ideal of his life. He owed everything — and by everything he meant chiefly his worship of beauty — to her. He asked her to accept his undying devotion, and to believe that, however far distance and time should part them, he was hers and hers only. He said he looked back with ineffable contempt upon the days when he had hoped to build a nest and see her beside him there. Now he had reached the true empyrean, and he could only ask to know that she, too, was winging her bright way into regions where he, in another life, might follow and sing beside her in liquid, throbbing notes to pierce the stars. He ended by saying that he was not very fit — the opera season had been a monumental experience this year — and he was taking refuge with an English brotherhood to lead, for a time, a cloistered life instinct with beauty and its worship, but that there as everywhere he was hers eternally. How glad I was of the verbal memory I have been so often praised for! I knew almost every word of that lovely letter by heart after the one reading. I shall never forget it.

  “Well?” said Aunt Elizabeth. She was looking at me, and again I saw how long it must have been since she was young. “Well, what do you think of it?”

  I told the truth. “Oh,” said I, “I think it’s a beautiful letter!”

  “You do!” said Aunt Elizabeth. “Does it strike you as being a love-letter!”

  I couldn’t answer fast enough. “Why, Aunt Elizabeth,” I said, “he tells you so. He says he loves you eternally. It’s beautiful!”

  “You fool!” said Aunt Elizabeth. “You pink-cheeked little fool! You haven’t opened the door yet — not any door, not one of them — oh, you happy, happy fool!” She called through the window (mother was arranging flowers there for tea): “Ada, you must telephone the Banner. My engagement is not to be announced.” Then she turned to me. “Peggy’” said she, in a low voice, as if mother was not to hear, “to-morrow you must drive with me to Whitman.”

  Something choked me in my throat: either fear of her or dread of what she meant to make me do. But I looked into her face and answered with all the strength I had: “Aunt Elizabeth, I sha’n’t go near the hospital.”

  “Don’t you think it’s decent for you to call on Mrs. Goward?” she
asked.

  She gave me a little shake. It made me angry. “It may be decent,” I said, “but I sha’n’t do it.”

  “Very well,” said Aunt Elizabeth. Her voice was sweet again. “Then I must do it for you. Nobody asks you to see Harry himself. I’ll run in and have a word with him — but, Peggy, you simply must pay your respects to Mrs. Goward.”

  “No! no! no!” I heard myself answering, as if I were in some strange dream. Then I said: “Why, it would be dreadful! Mother wouldn’t let me!”

  Aunt Elizabeth came closer and put her hands on my shoulders. She has a little fragrance about her, not like flowers, but old laces, perhaps, that have been a long time in a drawer with orris and face-powder and things. “Peggy,” said she, “never tell your mother I asked you.”

  I felt myself stiffen. She was whispering, and I saw she meant it.

  “Oh, Peggy! don’t tell your mother. She is not — not simpatica. I might lose my home here, my only home. Peggy, promise me.”

  “Daughter!” mother was calling from the dining-room.

  I slipped away from Aunt Elizabeth’s hands. “I promise,” said I. “You sha’n’t lose your home.”

  “Daughter!” mother called again, and I went in.

  That night at supper nobody talked except father and mother, and they did every minute, as if they wanted to keep the rest of us from speaking a word. It was all about the Works. Father was describing some new designs he had accepted, and telling how Charles Edward said they would do very well for the trimmings of a hearse, and mother coughed and said Charles Edward’s ideas were always good, and father said not where the market was concerned. Aunt Elizabeth had put on a white dress, and I thought she looked sweet, because she was sad and had made her face quite pale; but I was chiefly busy in thinking how to escape before anybody could talk to me. It doesn’t seem safe nowadays to speak a word, because we don’t know where it will lead us. Alice, too, looked pale, poor child! and kept glancing at me in a way that made me so sorry. I wanted to tell her I didn’t care about her pranks and Billy’s, whatever they were. And whatever she had written, it was sure to be clever. The teacher says Alice has a positive genius for writing, and before many years she’ll be in all the magazines. When supper was over I ran up-stairs to my room. I sat down by the window in the dark and wondered when the moon would rise. I felt excited — as if something were going to happen. And in spite of all the dreadful things that had happened to us, and might keep on happening, I felt as if I could die with joy. There were steps on the porch below my window. I heard father’s voice.