His wife’s praise of his courage and firmness failed of effect, and he was still ashamed, rather than proud, of his part when he met Elder Nathaniel on his way to the post-office in the afternoon, and the Elder expressed his personal regret for the hopeless pass the affair had come to. It appeared that something like a Family meeting had been held, and that the Office Sisters had pursuantly gone to see Mrs. Kite and urged her to advise her husband to go quietly. They had made her understand that the Family was determined to give the house to some one who could satisfy the Kelwyns, and that it was useless for her to hold out against them, and she had admitted the wisdom of this. “But,” Elder Nathaniel said, “she thought she had done everything she could to please you, and, if she could only find out where she hadn’t suited, she was sure she could make it right. I have no doubt now that they will give up peaceably, and we shall have no further trouble.”
If this was not soothing to Kelwyn’s feeling, in the circumstances, Mrs. Kite’s return to her futile efforts to please him and his family added to his self-reproach. He found greater comfort in Kite’s sullen attitude, where he held aloof from all part in her endeavors, and the whole Sunday morning that followed, when none of the Kelwyns had heart for going to the Shaker meeting, they saw him sulking at the barn-door. In the afternoon he drove about in a close, warm rain with two shabby friends, as if there were some sort of conspiracy afoot; but there was, apparently, no appeal to the law, and Kelwyn heard next day from the Shakers that Kite had agreed to go out; that referees were coming that week to appraise his crops and decide what would be due him from the Family. In the mean time Mrs. Kite resumed her confidence in their friendly relations, and talked to Parthenope as if they were going on together indefinitely. The storm had so far cleared the sky that in the ensuing calm a sort of toleration, if not kindness, grew up between the rival camps, and in this truce the Kelwyns could not refuse to acknowledge to themselves that the Kites were not wilfully bad. At the worst, they questioned, were they not ignorant and helpless? It was true that the renewal of the momentary amenities of the past were wholly through the woman’s efforts, but the man was not actively offensive.
A night or two after Kelwyn’s meeting with Kite in the meadow, Parthenope, leaning from her window and looking out into the dark, heard her cousin and Emerance talking in their chairs under the elm. Kelwyn was saying: “It is strange how difficult it is to withdraw from any human relation, no matter how provisional. There is always an unexpected wrench, a rending of fibres, a pang of remorse.”
The girl knew very well that Kelwyn was thinking of his quarrel with Kite, but she did not know how he was always trying to pull himself up from the degradation of an encounter which Mrs. Kelwyn had represented to her as something almost heroic, and from which he had barely escaped with his life.
She was more interested in what Emerance answered. “Yes, there seems to be a quality of death in every human parting. When we go a journey and leave friends behind it is like a voluntary dying.”
“But I didn’t mean that exactly,” Kelwyn returned, in a note of vexation. “I meant merely the termination of the common concords, agreements, partnerships.”
“Oh yes; I was following a suggestion from your thought rather than the thought itself. But if we carry your thought further to the most enduring of provisional relations—”
He paused, and Kelwyn asked, “To marriage?”
“Yes; I have often wondered how the parties to a divorce, people who had once cared for each other, really felt when it came to the point of severing.” Parthenope found herself listening acutely, eavesdropping, as it were, with all her might, though there was nothing that she would have abhorred more than eavesdropping. “I have wondered whether there wasn’t always a touch of regret, a lingering kindness as they had when their outlook was the brightest.”
This struck Parthenope as beautiful, and she was vexed more than she could have expressed with Kelwyn’s answering commonplace: “Every one has good qualities as well as bad. No doubt they see each other’s good qualities at such a time. But if there was any appreciable kindness, perhaps there would be no divorces.”
“No,” the young man assented; and then there was a little silence in which Parthenope tried to follow his course of thinking back to its real source, as she had so easily followed Kelwyn’s. They knew so little of Emerance; he might easily, in his obscure past, have been married and divorced; or much more probably he might have been engaged, and in the image of a divorce he might have been brooding on a broken engagement.
“But to return to the original point,” Kelwyn said, in breaking the silence, “I think that at the end of every relation in life there is a sort of blind desire, unreasonable and illogical, to have it on again. If it ends abruptly or inimically this is especially the case. We go back of the cause of disagreement and find potentialities of continued reciprocity. We see defects in ourselves and excellences in our antagonist — if it has come to antagonism — and we wish we could try it all over again. I am speaking in the abstract, of course.” Kelwyn recovered himself from a position that gave too much away to his own consciousness. “As a matter of fact, it might be quite the other way, and we be very glad to have the thing over for good and all.”
“Oh yes,” Emerance said, and then there was a sound of rising and of feet stirring in the dark.
“I think we’ll take these chairs in. It’s so very close that I shouldn’t be surprised if there were a storm before morning. Good-night,” she heard Kelwyn say, and then Emerance answer:
“Good-night.” But he added: “I don’t think I’ll go in just yet. It is pleasanter outdoors than in, such a night. Don’t trouble about the chairs; I’ll bring them.”
“All right,” Kelwyn said, and now Parthenope was aware of Emerance sitting there in the dark alone and thinking. What was he thinking? She would have liked to know. If it had been possible to eavesdrop his thoughts she would have done it; people often tried to penetrate one another’s thoughts, and she never heard that it was wrong or even disgraceful. She fancied keeping him company in the dark where he sat outside, and she held a long tacit colloquy with him on the most serious things. They were both very serious. They were confidential. They told each other the history of their lives. At last she lay down on her bed in the close, hot air, but she did not know she had slept when about midnight she was awakened by a wild screaming, which seemed to come from the dwelling of their nearest neighbor, an old woman, who lived a little way down the road, alone in her two rooms. Parthenope had been in during the forenoon to see her, and had found her lying on her high old-fashioned bed, with the sabre of her son, a soldier of the Civil War, crossed over a withered wreath, at the bed-head. She said she was not feeling just well, and now the girl imagined those shrieks coming from her. She roused her cousins and straggled forth with them into the cloud-broken moonlight that now hid and now rendered picturesque their common dishabille. The Kites were up and out with a lantern; Emerance was there, too, and they joined forces for the succor of their neighbor. Kite went to the window with his lantern and rapped on the pane, while his wife asked, in her sweet treble, “Are you sick, Mrs. Ager?”
After an interval, as if for waking and understanding, the old woman answered, No, she was very much better.
Then Mrs. Kite said, “We thought we heard you screaming. Well, good-night.”
“I guess,” her husband said, tolerantly, to Parthenope, “that it was a screech-owl we heard. But sometime there’s goin’ to be trouble if that old fool keeps on livin’ by herself there and these tramps get much thicker. She’d ought to be put somewheres, but as long as she’s got enough to live on the selectmen can’t touch her. She’ll die in that shanty of her’n some night if she don’t get killed first.”
The Kites went back to their place beyond the kitchen, and when they had disappeared with their lantern the Kelwyns lingered a moment at their door, looking up into the moon-broken clouds. Parthenope sat down on the threshold-stone. “I am n
ot going in just yet,” she said; “it’s choking in my room, and it’s not going to rain.”
“I don’t wonder you don’t want to go in,” Mrs. Kelwyn conceded. “But I don’t like your staying out here alone, Thennie,” she added.
A cloud had passed over the moon, and it could not be seen that Emerance had sat down at the other end of the threshold, but his voice placed him when he said, “I will stay and protect her if you’ll let me, Mrs. Kelwyn.”
“I shall not need any protection,” Parthenope answered.
“Oh, well, then,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, vaguely, as she led her husband indoors.
Parthenope was the first to break the silence to which she was left with Emerance in a murmured, “How perfectly still it is.”
“Yes; we only need some sound to make the stillness evident, just as we need some one with us when we wish to feel ourselves alone.”
“I don’t know that I need any one,” she demurred, “to help me realize that I’m alone.”
“I didn’t mean you did. When I said we I meant “That is rather trivial, Mr. Emerance, if you’ll allow me to say so.”
“I like to have you frank with me. Do you think that I am trivial?”
“Not always. But often enough to provoke people with you.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” he said, with a sigh which she was not sure was sincere. “I suppose I’m nothing but a dreamer, after all.”
She defended him from himself. “I don’t think you’re a dreamer. Or not altogether. Doesn’t Emerson say, ‘Be true to the dream of thy youth’?”
“Ah, but which one?” he asked.
“Now that is what I call truly trivial — making light of serious things.”
“But I’m not; I’m quite in earnest. With all my various dreaming — my experimenting, as you call it—”
“Oh, if you mean that, yes,” she assented, and then, not knowing just where they were, or not being sure what next she should say in criticism of him, she remarked, abstractly, “Isn’t it strange what life seems to come to?”
“It certainly is,” he agreed, in turn. “But do you mean generally or particularly?”
“Oh, I was just thinking of poor Mrs. Ager yonder. I suppose she was a bright young girl once, and had a whole tribe of brothers and sisters, as they used to in the country, and believed she was having the gayest kind of times when she grew up; and then she got married and had a large family of her own, and her husband died, and her children got married, most of them, and one son went to the war and was killed, and they brought his sword home and put it over the head of her bed. And now she lives there alone, just one little shrivelled up old scrap of all the lives she once belonged to.”
“Yes,” he said, “that is very pathetic. If something like such a common history could be put whole into a play—”
“But it couldn’t. A play must be made up of a few great moments.”
“Ah, I’m not so sure of that!”
“Of course if you could hint at it all in a sort of prologue, and then get in the feeling of this wild neighborhood, and have it end tragically, with her getting killed in her house alone there by tramps — I do believe Mr. Kite is right about it! Some day the neighbors will find her dead there.”
“Yes. Or we could have it end well. Mrs. Ager could make an outcry, as we thought she did to-night; and Kite could come to the rescue. He seems to be the neighborhood moralist and philanthropist.”
“Now you are trivial again! I should think you would be awed by the sort of mixture such a man is; he and his wife both. Sometimes they really seem to want to do right.”
‘“I suppose we all do; but some of us find it more difficult than others.”
“Do you excuse them on that account?” she demanded, severely. “Perhaps you think they are more to be considered than my cousins, whose lives they have made so miserable here. I dare say you think that rather than put the Kites out we ought to go away ourselves and leave the house to them. I really believe you do!” If she expected him to be daunted by her charge she had to own to herself that he was right in answering nothing to it. She ended, ineffectively enough, “But where could we go?”
“Well,” he surprised her in answering, “I do happen to have heard of a place—”
“Oh! Have you been making inquiries?” she asked. But she felt that her question was vulgar, and she added, “I beg your pardon.”
He did not seem to have taken offence. “You remember that stone cottage?”
“Not the one where they couldn’t agree whether to paint the ell red or green?” she demanded, tumultuously.
“Yes; the people in it want to go to the seaside for July and August, and they had heard of your troubles here—”
“Our troubles seem to have filled the neighborhood for miles around!”
“And the man was at the post-office to-day when I went for my letters, and he asked if your cousins wouldn’t like to take his house. I hesitated about telling Mr. Kelwyn because I didn’t just know how to do it without seeming to meddle—”
“Don’t dream of apologizing. I’m not sure but we ought to be on our bended knees in gratitude, or that they won’t be as soon as I tell them. I’ll wake them out of their sleep to tell them!” she declared, with more irony than she meant as she showed herself in the dimness suddenly looming to her feet. But she did not go in at once. She said, as if it followed, “The moon feels fairly warm.”
A curtain of cloud had swept aside, and in a space of sheer blue the moon hung, round, with a soft glow of almost ivory-white.
“Perhaps there’s reflected heat as well as light from it,” he suggested, looking at her looking at the moon.
“You’ll be wanting to experiment with it on the crops,” she said.
“But you know that it’s the warm nights that make the corn grow. In the great corn-raising States they say you can hear it growing at night.”
She laughed. “You could probably. I doubt if I could. But there is one thing I don’t understand about you, Mr. Emerance. Why do you always take the part of these wretched beings around here, no matter how they behave or how degraded they are?”
“Do I do that?” he asked, but apparently with more curiosity than denial.
“I must leave you to think it out. Good-night,” she said, abruptly.
“Oh no! Don’t go!” he entreated, in what she thought a strange manner, though he really added nothing more than, “I’m going to Boston, and then to the Centennial to-morrow, you know.”
“To-morrow? Oh yes; I didn’t know it was tomorrow. Then I must change good-night to good-bye.”
“I shouldn’t like that any better — I—” But he stopped.
“How mysterious!” she said; but her heart beat quickly, for now if it was coming, that greatest it of all, she ought not to have let it come unless she wished for it as she believed a woman ought to wish with her whole soul. She had her ideal of this matter, as she had of the other great matters of life; her ideal was an instant and entire passion for surrender and possession, and as far as she could see in this rather dismaying moment there was and there had never been anything of the kind with her toward him. She did not fail to blame herself for having idly swayed and drifted on the surface of a current that had nothing torrential in it; but she believed that she could have made excuses for herself. She had always felt in many ways so much beyond him; not above him, but beyond him. It was not so much that his level was lower than hers, but his point of arrival was so much short of hers. She was older in spirit, more settled in principle, more convinced in opinion. She was of quite another civilization and an experience of the world altogether different. Yet she ought not to have let it come to what it was coming to. She had been wrong, and now she could only be right by being cruel. If Parthenope was rather cold she did not like being cruel.
One imperceptible instant she waited for him to go on before she said, “Well, I’ll keep to my original good-night.” He echoed, “Good-night,” with an accent of sub
mission that haunted her to her room, but left her to a various mind. Among her ideals none was more distinct than that of the manliness which must take all the risks in love-making. Her temperamental adequacy to the demands of life upon herself left her without much compassion for those who paltered with destiny and feared to put their fate to the touch. She had a difficulty in the matter that did not leave her wholly at ease, for if she had encouraged Emerance to the point of asking her for herself, when she meant to deny him, she was clearly wrong according to her lowest ideal of herself; but if he believed she had encouraged him, and yet was so nerveless that he could not act upon his belief, she could only regard him with a pity close upon contempt. Her pitying contempt did not wholly exclude the remorse with which she began thinking the whole case over. Either she had or she had not encouraged him, and if she had she ought now to have discouraged him sharply, decisively. But had he been definite enough for this? If she had really left him to a sort of vague hope, was it because she was uncertain of his meaning? Had he led her on through her curiosity, tempted her to the uncandor of which she accused herself? Was it all a part, another phase of his temperamental experimenting? Had he been experimenting with her? The thought made Parthenope rebound where she lay in bed, as one does in a drowse-dream of having dropped from some height. It roused her to full waking, but it was of such comfort that now she could dismiss all regret. She dismissed it so absolutely that she passed from it into a slumber in which she knew nothing more till she heard a knocking on her door. Her cousin Kelwyn excused it as his, saying that he would like her to drive over to the Shakers with him, and it was past eight o’clock.
XXIV
FROM the sleepless remnant of the night, which Parthenope had found so refreshing after the clearing of her conscience toward Emerance, Kelwyn had risen with as generous a resolution as ever filled the breast of a lecturer on historical sociology. At the very first step toward its fulfilment he met with an experience which was the first of his difficulties. Kite was not there to hitch up the horse for him, and when he asked for Raney or Albert, Mrs. Kite said they had both gone to the field with her husband. But she added, lightly, that the horse was in the barn, and she guessed Kelwyn could hitch it up all right. She guessed truly, and by the time Parthenope had finished the belated breakfast she had got for herself Kelwyn had been so expeditious that he was sitting in the carryall waiting for her at the door.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 940
