Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “What a horror, poor soul!” the voice of Emerance said close to her ear, and she realized that she had shrunk to his side.

  “Yes,” she said, detaching herself with a quavering effort for lightness. “I much prefer the little Frenchman; but I suppose one mustn’t be too choice in tramps.” She tried to joke away the evidence of her fright.

  “They probably don’t choose themselves,” Emerance said.

  “Probably not,” she answered, with hauteur. “Something might be done about them.”

  “Well, they’re arresting them a good deal, and banishing or imprisoning them, I suppose,” he concluded, sadly. “Something of the kind has to be done. A fellow like that makes one think.”

  “My cousin has a pistol,” she said, severely.

  Emerance only said, “Ah?” But that evening, after supper, he asked Kelwyn if he had ever used his pistol at all, and, without owning to the ignominy of Mrs.

  Kelwyn’s control, Kelwyn said he had thought of shooting at a mark with it. They went out into the orchard, followed by the Kite boy, the young Kelwyns being forbidden by their mother, who had consented to her husband’s share in the danger because she was ashamed to deny him before another man. They tried shooting at a tin cup eight paces away, and missed it six times out of six; they reduced the distance by a half and still missed it.

  “I hope, Mr. Emerance,” Kelwyn said, “that we are too civilized for this sort of thing. We have been aiming all our lives at something higher than tin cups with something more accurate than revolvers. If the custom of duelling should be restored, as some people think it ought, I shouldn’t mind fighting with you.”

  “I might hit you by accident,” the young man suggested.

  “That is true. Are you too young, I wonder, to have read the Reverend Doctor Knott’s funeral oration on the Burr-Hamilton duel? There were some fine things in it, especially about Burr, like: ‘If there be tears in heaven, a pious mother looks down and weeps.’ And the doctor got over his difficulty of saying that he aimed his pistol at Hamilton by a very handsome paraphrase: ‘He pointed at that incorruptible bosom the instrument of death.’”

  “Yes,” Emerance said; “I know that oration. I have rather revived the old fashion with my boys of having them learn passages of eloquence. I think it lifts their thoughts somewhat, and for the moment it keeps their tongues from slang. I don’t know whether they realize the fact of the duel very clearly. It’s surprising how incredible the duel has become already, how impossible.”

  “Still, there are a great many pistols made. I once saw a big mound of them in Colt’s factory. When I bought mine I realized that every one was made to kill a man. It was a heap of potential homicide.”

  They walked homeward talking, and as they passed the old well near the barn, disused since the Shakers had brought the spring down from the upland above, Kelwyn said, “I wonder what effect this pistol would have on the water here if I dropped it in.”

  “I should think the iron would make it tonic and good for the horses, if they ever drank of it again.”

  Kelwyn let the pistol fall, and they listened an appreciable moment for the splash. “I shouldn’t have thought it was so deep.” When he told his wife, she was not as glad as he expected. She said, “I don’t know — if there are going to be black tramps about!”

  The help which Emerance now rendered Mrs. Kite in the kitchen, and the help which Parthenope rendered him, eventuated in so large a release of Mrs. Kite from that part of her cares that she could sit much of the time and watch the two at work without having to join in it, except in shelling pease or stringing beans, or some other task that did not break the flow of conversation or require steps. She showed a gay surprise at their finding so much of the garden stuff ready to use when they came in from picking it, but this surprise, like the admiration she had expressed for their cooking, presently passed, and she accepted the situation with a serenity unruffled by a sense of responsibility for the other details of housework, which she left to Mrs. Kelwyn, and came back to after they were done in an amiable amusement that she should have forgotten them. She was, without too keenly realizing it, having a rest such as she had not known since she could remember. Emerance had cleared out the milkroom for her, and set the pans there after having instructed Raney and Albert how to guard against cowiness in milking; and there remained nothing very definite for her to do but to provide for her own family the food to which they were used and to which they continued loyal. Under these circumstances it was not strange that her thoughts should stray beyond their wonted limits, and she announced one day toward the end of June that she believed she should go and see her sister over in the edge of Hancock. She made a show of having been constantly employed in the service of her guests. “I can cook up enough things to last my folks over a few days, and you can make Raney and Albert help you while I’m gone.”

  She had been having for her own immediate assistance the daughter of a neighbor, and the day after she went on her visit the neighbor came to fetch his daughter away. While the girl was putting her things together he stood on the green before the house leaning on a long staff like a classic shepherd, and with Parthenope surreptitiously sketching him he began to tell what he would do with that place if he had it and had five thousand dollars to spend on it. For one thing, he would put a piazza all round it. Then, before he could say what else, his daughter came out with her bundle, and they moved away together with visible reluctance. The old Family house was, in fact, the pride and envy of the whole region. All the neighbors wanted it, and each said how he would fit it up for a summer hotel if he had it. The Kites alone seemed satisfied with it as it was, and this, where there was so little in their favor, commended them to the Kelwyns, who were disturbed in their sense of possession by a sense of the covetous environment. It was a comfort, under the circumstances, to Have Emerance in the house with them, though his ideas of private property were of a latitude which Kelwyn’s science could not approve. Still, so long as he did not suggest filling the vacant rooms with a colony of houseless poor, which seemed to be his notion of the use that the empty summer hotels ought to be put to in the winter, his heresies could be tolerated.

  Mrs. Kelwyn, in a revulsion from her earlier diffidence, trusted him in everything even more implicitly than her husband. She let him go off on long rambles in the wild region with her two boys, and with Parthenope to look after them; and she sent them all on the errands to the village grocer and butcher, which, in the frequent failure of the Kites’ provisioning, she used to do with Kelwyn. Her demoralization included the temperamental defects of the lazy old horse which Kite had provided them, and which she had early denounced as the worst horse in existence. She now began to say that the carryall was too heavy for him, but Emerance differed from her on that point, and then she contented herself with making him promise to drive very slowly and have everybody get out going up-hill. Sometimes he forgot her instruction in his talks with Parthenope, which were apt to take the form of dispute and a final difference of opinion. The girl felt that he was wrong in these differences, but she blamed herself more than she blamed him for her want of severity with him.

  Emerance’s traditions were probably not those which would have made him feel it strange that he should be wandering about the lonely country with a young girl; and the conventions of Parthenope’s Boston were not yet so strict, thirty five or six years ago, that after the first days of strangeness she should be conscious in his companionship. Perhaps that something of a wilding quality in her nature came from her artist father and mother, and had never been quelled by her environment. Her aunt, though of a world much more regulated, lived rather out of her world; she had left the girl mostly to her own inspirations in conduct, and Parthenope had found these sufficient in the simple ways of society just beginning to imagine chaperonage. If it was not the first society of her ancestral city, it was society that read and thought and idealized, and was of a freedom gladder than that which has come in something like ex
cess to the society which now neither reads nor thinks nor idealizes. If she had known it — but no girl could have known it — she was standing on the verge of that America which is now so remote in everything but time, and was even then rounding away with such girlhood as hers into the past which can hardly be recalled in any future of the world. It was sweet and dear; with its mixture of the simple and the gentle, it was nearer the Golden Age than any the race has yet known; and it followed fitly upon the great war which had established liberty on a wider basis than ever before in history. These two could not feel their relation to the conventional, the social, fact; they were a young man and a young girl walking or driving together in the pastures or along the wood-roads in the fragrant summer mornings; and in their intense personalization they could not know how elemental they were, how akin to earth and air, and of one blood with the grass and the trees, with the same ichor in their veins.

  They often stopped at the Shakers for pleasure, but one morning they went on the business of selecting the stuff for a writing-desk, which was to be a surprise for Kelwyn. He had decided that he could not afford it at the figure named by Raney for making it, and Emerance, in conspiracy with Mrs. Kelwyn, had proposed building it from designs by Parthenope: he said he sometimes did odd jobs of carpentering. The designer came with him into the loft of the old Shaker shop to choose the plank, and afterward she sat by, most of the time, while he planed it and put it together, and corrected his errors as to her intentions in the plan. In that day of Eastlake furniture the desk was to be a remorseless sort of akimbo Gothic, which permitted no luxurious deviations from the most virtuous rigidity. When Parthenope was tired of sitting on a trestle and looking on, she went and chatted with the Office Sisters; they took a less fearful interest in her going about with a young man than the unworldlier inmates of the Family houses, who caught glimpses of them round the valves of half-open doors or through edges of lifted window-curtains, and forbiddenly conjectured, when they were gone, how such a girl must feel.

  Once, as she was driving through the village with Emerance, they saw Elder Nathaniel lying beside a great fire of refuse broom-corn on the grass, which ho was keeping from running wild in the garden. He looked so sweet and beautiful as he lay there that Parthenope wanted to sketch him, but suddenly he caught sight of them and came forward to the fence, and began to chat courteously, while the flames behind him tossed richly against the green curtain of the raspberry vines. “Now and then,” he said, at parting, “I meet with some one who has ideas, and that brightens everything up. If you keep your hold of ideas, and do not lose yourselves in trivial cares, your lives will be as bright as you have made my half-hour.”

  The old man seemed quite naturally to have joined their lives in his thought, and Emerance was silent as they drove away; but Parthenope was quite unconscious, and laughed and said How sweet the Elder was, and did not Emerance think him lovely, with his thin, aquiline face and his white hair? She was not so much at her ease as to Emerance’s looks, when her ownership of them was imagined by a great, silly, buxom girl, overripe for her years, when they stopped to ask her if she would sell them some cherries, at a wayside farm-house. She was talking to some guinea-fowls on terms of cosey confidence as if they were human hens, but she came forward in her bare head and large, white, bare feet. “My,” she gurgled, “if I thought I was goin? to have company I guess I should had my shoes on.” She apparently expected them to enjoy her predicament, and she told Emerance the family she lived with had gone to the village and she could not sell him any cherries, but she guessed he could pick all he wanted to eat. She got him a dish to pick them in, and while he mounted the tree she praised him over the palings to Parthenope in undertone. “He’s just about the handsomest fellow yet! I should be jealous if another girl as much as winked at him.” She was not discouraged by Parthenope’s failure to humor her joke, and when Emerance came out of the tree she laughed, “Got enough?” and she said to Parthenope: “Well, call again. Wish I could let you take the dish along too!” She warned them they would not find any thimble - berries on that road; there used to be plenty; but the farmers thought they hurt the looks of the walls, and they had cut the vines down that spring.

  They ate the cherries, with the help of the boys, and pushed farther on, having the whole afternoon before them in the study of the pleasant country-side, and the villages which were sometimes clusters of farmhouses, and with once a little milling hamlet, and a millpond starred with white water-lilies, and yellow ones that looked like flights of canary birds stooping on the water. The low factory buildings that hummed so softly had taken, in the embrowning heat of many summers, the tone of the earthen banks; the hills around were lighted up with the stems of birches. The houses were homes of simple comfort, in their well-netted security from mosquitoes. Before a door four neighbor women sat in a row together sewing.

  “This seems about the best that life can do,” Emerance suggested. “When I see something like this peacefulness I wonder why cities should be. Then I think I should like to spend the rest of my days here!”

  “Sewing on a bench by a door, or working in a mill?” the girl asked, with an unreasoned necessity which was on her to combat anything that was too eccentric in him.

  “Oh!” he laughed, “sewing on a bench by a door, of course. But working in an old, brown, wood-colored mill wouldn’t be so bad, with a Saturday half-holiday. No; you are right. The world is here, as it is everywhere, and it is always the same old world. I suppose those women were gossiping about some one. I wonder whom.”

  “Us, probably.”

  “Really? What were they saying?”

  “That you must be very rich to afford driving about with a horse and carriage like this.”

  “But I cant afford it. I drive about in this style because I’m out of work.”

  “I didn’t say they were right.”

  The social superiority to Emerance which Parthenope felt so distinctly at first had evanesced into something like a sense of moral seniority, though this is putting in terms still vaguer a feeling that was itself very vague. From her greater knowledge of the world, as she believed it, she was called to instruct him on points which were not always of worldly knowledge, but were matters on which he needed instruction or on which she saw the need of giving it.

  In another drive they came on a turn of the road to a stone cottage standing among maple-trees on the brow of a hill overlooking a wide meadow. A mass of honeysuckle in blossom embowered the doorway and matted the hip-roof gables; the wooden extension of the cottage did not discord with the gray masonry; possibly because it looked old from its weather-worn red paint. Emerance stopped the horse and asked the way of a handsome, stout, blond man, who answered through his mouth and not through his nose.

  “One doesn’t often see a stone house in the country,” Emerance suggested, when he had got his directions.

  “That’s a fact,” the owner allowed. “But we built it ourselves because we liked stone.” By this time a comely, ladylike woman had joined him at the door. “Guess we’d better built it all stone. The ell part begins to want paint. And the worst of it is,” he added, with a laugh, in his rush of confidence, “we can’t agree what color to paint it. What should you say?”

  Emerance glanced at the shutters of the stone structure. “I should say green — dark green.”

  The man laughed again. “Well, that’s what I say.” Then, after some playful asides with the comely matron, he called toward Parthenope, “She wants to know what the lady thinks.”

  “Who? I?” Parthenope called back. “Oh, red, by all means! The same red it was!”

  The man clapped himself joyfully on the thigh; his wife gave his shoulder a little triumphant push. Emerance chirruped to his horse, but before he could start him the man of the cottage shouted, “Well, I guess the reds have it!” and his wife vanished indoors.

  After the horse had really begun to move away, Emerance said, from a dreamy silence, “May I ask why you preferred red?�
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  “Why,” she answered, with the need she felt of marking an æsthetical inferiority in him, “I don’t suppose I can tell. It is impossible to explain a feeling.”

  “A feeling for color?” he asked, idly flicking at the harness with his whip. “I don’t believe I have it. Is it something that can be acquired? Like right principles, for instance?”

  “No, I don’t think it can. It has to be born in you. Perhaps it’s like right principles in that, though. Ruskin seems to think they’re the same: that the great colorists were morally great.”

  “I wonder if that’s so,” the young man questioned, and he was pensively silent as if he were thinking the point over self-reproachfully. But he said, after a moment, “I don’t believe there is anything in that idea,” and then she was so abashed by his boldness that she became rather meek, and began trying quite humbly to say why dull red would be better than dark green for that wooden extension.

  XXI

  THE Fourth of July had been heralded by a summer evening of that exquisite New England quality which has its like nowhere else in the world. There was a clear sunset, and the young moon lingered in the western sky above the great stretch of forest. The two families, parted by the stretch of greensward before their separate doors, sat under the trees; Parthenope had been drawing pictures of the three boys pulling the spring wagon up and down the road. It was so peaceful that Kelwyn lost the feeling of nether unrest which at other times tormented him, and began to hope that somehow the Kites would yet do. He did not, in fact, much mind being wakened from his first sleep that night by the firing of cannon and ringing of bells in the surrounding villages, or being broken of his morning nap by the torpedoes and fire-crackers which the three boys exploded under his window.