“Mr. Verrian!”
“Miss Shirley!”
The stress of their voices fell upon different parts of the sentences they uttered, but did not commit either of them to a special role.
“How very strange we should meet here!” she said, with pleasure in her voice. “Do you know, I have been wanting to come all winter to see this man, on account of his name? And to think that I should meet the other Mr. Verrian as soon as I yielded to the temptation.”
“I have just yielded myself,” Verrian said. “I hope you don’t feel punished for yielding.”
“Oh, dear, no! It seems a reward.”
She did not say why it seemed so, and he suggested, “The privilege of comparing the histrionic and the literary Verrian?”
“Could there be any comparison?” she came back, gayly.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the histrionic Verrian yet.”
They were laughing when the curtain rose, and the histrionic Verrian had his innings for a long, long first act. When the curtain fell she turned to the literary Verrian and said, “Well?”
“He lasted a good while,” Verrian returned.
“Yes. Didn’t he?” She looked at the little watch in her wristlet. “A whole hour! Do you know, Mr. Verrian, I am going to seem very rude. I am going to leave you to settle this question of superiority; I know you’ll be impartial. I have an appointment — with the dressmaker, to be specific — at half-past four, and it’s half-past three now, and I couldn’t well leave in the middle of the next act. So I will say good-bye now—”
“Don’t!” he entreated. “I couldn’t bear to be left alone with this dreadful double of mine. Let me go out with you.”
“Can I accept such self-sacrifice? Well!”
She had put on her hat and risen, and he now stepped out of his place to let her pass and then followed her. At the street entrance he suggested, “A hansom, or a simple trolley?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured, meditatively, looking up the street as if that would settle it. “If it’s only half-past three now, I should have time to get home more naturally.”
“Oh! And will you let me walk with you?”
“Why, if you’re going that way.”
“I will say when I know which way it is.”
They started on their walk so blithely that they did not sadden in the retrospect of their joint experiences at Mrs. Westangle’s. By the time they reached the park gate at Columbus Circle they had come so distinctly to the end of their retrospect that she made an offer of letting him leave her, a very tacit offer, but unmistakable, if he chose to take it. He interpreted her hesitation as he chose. “No,” he said, “it won’t be any longer if we go up through the park.”
She drew in her breath softly, smoothing down her muff with her right hand while she kept her left in it. “And it will certainly be pleasanter.” When they were well up the path, in that part of it where it deflects from the drive without approaching the street too closely, and achieves something of seclusion, she said:
“Your speaking of him just now makes me want to tell you something, Mr. Verrian. You would hear of it very soon, anyway, and I feel that it is always best to be very frank with you; but you’ll regard it as a secret till it comes out.”
The currents that had been playing so warmly in and out of Verrian’s heart turned suddenly cold. He said, with joyless mocking, “You know, I’m used to keeping your secrets. I — shall feel honored, I’m sure, if you trust me with another.”
“Yes,” she returned, pathetically, “you have always been faithful — even in your wounds.” It was their joint tribute to the painful past, and they had paid no other. She was looking away from him, but he knew she was aware of his hanging his head. “That’s all over now,” she uttered, passionately. “What I wanted to say — to tell you — is that I am engaged to Mr. Bushwick.”
He could have answered that she had no need to tell him. The cold currents in and out of his heart stiffened frozenly and ceased to flow; his heart itself stood still for an eternal instant. It was in this instant that he said, “He is a fine fellow.” Afterwards, amid the wild bounding of his recovered pulse, he could add, “I congratulate him; I congratulate you both.”
“Thank you,” she said. “No one knows as I do how good he is — has been, all through.” Probably she had not meant to convey any reproach to Verrian by Bushwick’s praise, but he felt reproach in it. “It only happened last week. You do wish me happy, don’t you? No one knows what a winter I have had till now. Everything seeming to fail—”
She choked, and did not say more. He said, aimlessly, “I am sorry—”
“Let me sit down a moment,” she begged. And she dropped upon the bench at which she faltered, and rested there, as if from the exhaustion of running. When she could get her breath she began again: “There is something else I want to tell you.”
She stopped. And he asked, to prompt her, “Yes?”
“Thank you,” she answered, piteously. And she added, with superficial inconsequence, “I shall always think you were very cruel.”
He did not pretend not to know what she meant, and he said, “I shall always think so, too. I tried to revenge myself for the hurt your harmless hoax did my vanity. Of course, I made believe at the time that I was doing an act of justice, but I never was able to brave it out afterwards.”
“But you were — you were doing an act of justice. I deserved what you said, but I didn’t deserve what has followed. I meant no harm — it was a silly prank, and I have suffered for it as if it were a crime, and the consequences are not ended yet. I should think that, if there is a moral government of the universe, the Judge of all the earth would know when to hold his hand. And now the worst of it is to come yet.” She caught Verrian’s arm, as if for help.
“Don’t — don’t!” he besought her. “What will people think?”
“Yes, Yes!” she owned, releasing him and withdrawing to the other end of the seat.
“But it almost drives me wild. What shall I do? You ought to know. It is your fault. You have frightened me out of daring to tell the truth.”
Had he, indeed, done that? Verrian asked himself, and it seemed to him that he had done something like it. If it was so, he must help her over her fear now. He answered, bluntly, harshly: “You must tell him all about it—”
“But if he won’t believe me? Do you think he will believe me? Would you believe me?”
“You have nothing to do with that. There is nothing for you but to tell him the whole story. You mustn’t share such a secret with any one but your husband. When you tell him it will cease to be my secret.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Well, then, you must tell him, unless—”
“Yes,” she prompted.
Then they were both silent, looking intensely into each other’s eyes. In that moment all else of life seemed to melt and swim away from Verrian and leave him stranded upon an awful eminence confronting her.
“Hello, hello!” a gay voice called, as if calling to them both. “What are you two conspiring?” Bushwick, as suddenly as if he had fallen from the sky or started up from the earth, stood before them, and gave a hand to each — his right to Verrian, his left to Miss Shirley. “How are you, Verrian? How are you, Miss Shirley?” He mocked her in the formality of his address. “I’ve been shadowing you ever since you came into the park, but I thought I wouldn’t interrupt till you seemed to have got through your conversation. May I ask what it was all about? It seemed very absorbing, from a respectful distance.”
“Very absorbing, indeed,” Miss Shirley said, making room for him between them. “Sit down and let me tell you. You’re to be a partner in the secret.”
“Silent partner,” Bushwick suggested.
“I hope you’ll always be silent,” the girl shared in his drolling. She began and told the whole story to the last detail, sparing neither herself nor Verrian, who listened as if he were some one else not concerned, and kept saying to
himself, “what courage!” Bushwick listened as mutely, with a face that, to Verrian’s eye, seemed to harden from its light jocosity into a severity he had not seen in it before. “It was something,” she ended towards Bushwick, with a catch in her breath, “that you had to know.”
“Yes,” he answered, tonelessly.
“And now” — she attempted a little forlorn playfulness— “don’t you think he gave me what I deserved?”
Bushwick rose up and took her hand under his arm, keeping his left hand upon hers.
“He! Who?”
“Mr. Verrian.”
“I don’t know any Mr. Verrian. Come, you’ll take cold here.”
He turned his back on Verrian, who fancied a tremor in her hat, as if she would look round at him; but then, as if she divined Bushwick’s intention, she did not look round, and together they left him.
It was days before Verrian could confess himself of the fact to his mother, who listened with the justice instinctive in her. She still had not spoken when he ended, and he said, “I have thought it all over, and I feel that he did right. He did the only thing that a man in love with her could do. And I don’t wonder he’s in love with her. Yes” — he stayed his mother, imperatively— “and such a man as he, though he ground me in the dirt and stamped on me, I will say, it, is worthy of any woman. He can believe in a woman, and that’s the first thing that’s needed to make a woman like her, true. I don’t envy his job.” He was speaking self-contradictorily, irrelevantly, illogically, as a man thinks. He went on in that way, getting himself all out. “She isn’t single-hearted, but she’s faithful. She’ll never betray him now. She’s never given him any reason to distrust her. She’s the kind that can keep on straight with any one she’s begun straight with. She told him all that before me be cause she wanted me to know — to realize — that she had told him. It took courage.”
Mrs. Verrian had thought of generalizing, but she seized a single point. “Perhaps not so much courage as you think. You mustn’t let such bravado impose upon you, Philip. I’ve no doubt she knew her ground.”
“She took the chance of his casting her off.”
“She knew he wouldn’t. She knew him, and she knew you. She knew that if he cast her off—”
“Mother! Don’t say it! I can’t bear it!”
His mother did not say it, or anything more, then. Late at night she came to him. “Are you asleep, Philip?”
“Asleep? I!”
“I didn’t suppose you were. But I have had a note to-day which I must answer. Mrs. Andrews has asked us to dinner on Saturday. Philip, if you could see that sweet girl as I do, in all her goodness and sincerity—”
“I think I do, mother. And I wouldn’t be guilty of her unhappiness for the world. You must decline.”
“Well, perhaps you are right.” Mrs. Verrian went away, softly, sighing. As she sealed her reply to Mrs. Andrews, she sighed again, and made the reflection which a mother seldom makes with regard to her son, before his marriage, that men do not love women for their goodness.
NEW LEAF MILLS: A CHRONICLE
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
I
THE opinions of Owen Powell marked a sharp difference between him and most of his fellow-townsmen in the town of the Middle West, where he lived sixty years ago. A man who condemned the recent war upon Mexico as a wicked crusade for the extension of slavery, and denounced the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Law as infernal, would have done well to have a confession of spiritual faith like that of his neighbors; but here Owen Powell was still more widely at variance with them. He rejected the notion of a personal devil, and many others did that; but his hell was wholly at odds with the hell popularly accepted; it was not a place of torment where the lost sinner was sent, but a state which the transgressor himself chose and where he abode everlastingly bereft of the sense of better things. Even so poor a hell saved Powell from the reproach of Universalism; but in a person so one-ideaed, as people then said, through his abhorrence of slavery, it was not enough. He was valued, but he was valued in spite of his opinions; they were distinctly a fact to his disadvantage in that day and place.
His younger brother Felix, after the wont of prosperous merchants, kept out of politics, and he carried his prayer-book every Sunday to the Episcopal service.
But he quietly voted with Owen, and those who counted on a want of sympathy between the brothers were apt to meet with a prompt rebuff from Felix. He once stopped his subscription and took away his advertising from the Whig editor who spoke of a certain political expression of Owen’s (it was in a letter to the editor’s paper) as having the unimportance of small potatoes, and he extorted a printed retractation of the insult before he renewed his patronage. He felt, more than any of his words or acts evinced, the beauty of the large benevolent intention which was the basis of Owen’s character, and he was charmed, if he was not convinced, by his inextinguishable faith in mankind as a race merely needing good treatment to become everything that its friends could wish; by his simple courage, so entire that he never believed in danger; and by his sweet serenity of temperament. Felix was in delicate health, and he was given to some vague superstitions. He had lost several children, and he believed that he had in every case had some preternatural warning of their death; his young wife, who was less openly an invalid, shared his beliefs, as well as his half-melancholy fondness for his brother. She liked to have Owen Powell’s children in her childless house; and she had some pretty affectations of manner and accent which took them with the sense of elegance in a world beyond them.
They came to her with their mother every Sunday night, and heard their father and uncle talk of their boyhood in the backwoods; of their life in a log cabin, and of the privations they had gladly suffered there.
The passing years had endeared these hardships to the brothers, but their wives resented the early poverty which they held precious; and they hated the memory of that farm where the brothers had lived in a log cabin, and had run wild, as it appeared from the fond exaggeration of their reminiscences, in bare feet, tattered trousers, and hickory shirts. Sometimes the brothers reasoned of the questions of theology upon which the mind of the elder habitually dwelt; but Felix disliked argument, and Owen affectionately forebore to assail him as a representative of the Old Church. After the pioneer stories, the children fell asleep on the sofa and the carpet, and did not wake till they heard the piano, where their young aunt used to sing and their uncle accompany her with his flute; he remained associated in their memories with the pensive trebles of his instrument and the cadences of her gentle voice.
There came a time when the summer days were clouded in their home by an increasing care, which they felt at second hand from their father and mother; then there came a Sunday night when there were no rosy visions of the past; and, by the matter-of-fact light of the Monday following, Felix saw that the affairs of his brother were hopeless. Owen’s book and drug store had never been a flourishing business, and now it had gone from bad to worse beyond retrieval. On the afternoon of the morning when the store was not opened he walked with his boys a long way into the country. It was very sultry, and he repeated a description of summer from Thompson’s Seasons. As they returned along the river-shore he pointed out the lovely iridescence of the mussel-shells which he picked up, and geologized in passing on the stratification of the rocks in the bank.
An interval of suspense followed this stressful time, which their young memories took little note of. On the Sunday evenings at their uncle’s the talk seemed to the children to be al
l of a plan for going to live in the country. Apparently there was to be a property which the brothers were to hold in common, and it was to be bought as soon as the younger could get his business into shape. Two brothers in other towns were to be invited to close up their affairs and join in the enterprise. Then, with something of the unsurprising inconsequence of dreams, the notion of a farm had changed in the children’s apprehension to the notion of a mill, and more dimly a settlement of communal proportions about it. They heard their elders discussing the project one night when they woke from their nap, and crowded about their mother’s chair for warmth, with the fire now burning low upon the hearth.
“The best plan,” their uncle said, “will be to find a mill privilege with the buildings already on it. We could take out the burrs,” which the boys understood later were millstones, “and put in paper machinery. When we were once settled there we could ask people that we found adapted to join us, but at first it would have to be a purely family concern.”
“Yes,” their father said. “One condition of our being able to do any good from the start would be our unquestionable hold of the management. That would be the only orderly method. I would give all hands a share in the profits, so as to interest and attach them, but till they were educated up to our ideas they oughtn’t to be allowed any control.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 895
