Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  As she mounted beside him the two Kelwyn boys came running from the kitchen to say, in their usual order: “We don’t want to go with you, papa. Arthur has give us the white horse.”

  “Yes, yes,” their father said, absently; “given, not give.”

  “Arthur says give; Mrs. Kite says give,” they defended themselves.

  “I’ve no doubt,” Kelwyn said. “But you mustn’t. And don’t try to ride him.”

  “No, we won’t,” they promised; and as Kelwyn drove off with Parthenope, who had tried, within the bounds of truth, to magnify the gift which the boys had asked her to appreciate, after their evident failure with their father, Kelwyn added: “I’m not sure that I know which they promised not to do. If we stayed here much longer they would not have a grammatical principle uncorrupted. But fortunately we are not going to stay. We are going to go.”

  “Why, have the Shakers found that that last family won’t do?” the girl asked, glad of the fresh morning air in a world where there were many things one could not approve of.

  “They will do only too well,” Kelwyn said, “and that makes the difficulty the greater. The whole matter is one that I should like to put before you, as Carry and I have been seeing it in the darkness of the night.”

  “Oh, do, Cousin Elmer! You know I always feel so honored when you talk to me as if I were grown up. And I will try my very best to be grown up.”

  “I want you to help me to be grown up, too, and I hope you won’t mind my being a little prolix and perhaps repeating what you know already.”

  “Not at all; that’s the only way I can help you.” This was not very consequent, and Kelwyn frowned a little for the inconsequence as he went on. “You know the plain and logical view of the matter, the legal position, would be to stand upon our rights. Perhaps, in the interest of society, we should not enable the Kites to remain where they could impose upon other long suffering and unoffending people.”

  “Yes,” Parthenope assented, with bright intelligence.

  “But it is just there where we have found ourselves weak, and where we have decided to incur the measure of guilt that lies in what I may call a self-indulgent self-sacrifice. We have been talking it over the whole night, or what was left of the night, and we cannot bring ourselves to stand upon our rights. To put those people out would be to disgrace them before their neighbors, and cloud their future wherever the rumor of their disgrace followed them. I have realized more and more, from my last talk with Brother Jasper, that he would justify us in putting them out, not because they were unfit to keep the house for any one, but because they could not keep it to suit us, could not meet our tastes. This is the business view of it. I know that Elder Nathaniel and the Sisters feel differently, and that they truly regret what we have undergone; they have all said so, and they would approve our action understandingly, but Brother Jasper never would. To the last he would think we had been too particular, and he might even say so to justify himself for putting the Kites into the house at all. I don’t believe he has been very wise in his selection of their unsuccessive successors, though he seems at last to have found the right family for us. Until the other day, when I forced him to it explicitly, he has never talked the matter over with Kite in my presence either because he is afraid of him or because he does not wholly approve of us. I don’t like that in Brother Jasper, and I am going round to tell him so when I tell him that we have decided now, without further delay, to go out ourselves.”

  “I am sure you owe it to yourself, Cousin Elmer, to do so,” Parthenope assented. But in listening to Kelwyn’s statement her mind had wandered to the toleration with which Emerance had always spoken of the Kites, and it seemed as if she had inspired her cousin to say:

  “I don’t blame the Kites altogether, you understand. Carry and I have both come to the same conclusion.

  “It’s even a little pathetic about them in their ignorance, their want of domestic civilization. He believes she is a perfect housekeeper so thoroughly that she believes it herself. That is the hopeless phase of the case, as it is the pathetic phase. Besides, they are not without human, without humane feeling. Kite thinks he is the superior of that drunken Alison, and is qualified to advise him and his wife for their good; and you saw last night how ready they were to go to the help of Mrs. Ager when they thought she was in trouble.”

  “Yes; that is what complicates the matter,” Parthenope said, and it seemed to her as if she were saying it in assent to Emerance as well as to Kelwyn.

  “And now I am going to the Shakers’ to have it out with Brother Jasper, and to make him go with me to the field again where Kite is working and have it out with him. Brother Jasper has got to listen while I tell Kite that we are not going to make him go, but are going ourselves, not because he cannot suit us, but because he can’t suit anybody. I shall have at least that satisfaction.”

  “And I think you have a perfect right to it, Cousin Elmer,” Parthenope commented, with a judicial air which was not impaired for Kelwyn by her laying her hand on his and pressing it with impulsive approval. He liked it the more because it did not seem alloyed by the doubt of his course which he had felt himself, and which his wife had expressed in arriving with him at their present decision. “The worst of it,” he answered, with a sigh of disclaimer, “is that we don’t know where to go. It’s still a month or six weeks before we want to go back to town, and we haven’t the least idea where to put in the time.”

  Parthenope hesitated, and a blush made its way through the tan which covered her face to her cinnamon hair.

  “The only place that I have seen yet,” Kelwyn pursued, “is the one I saw with Carry the other day while you were off with Emerance. The place was charming, and the rooms were as many as we could ask; but they were stuffy and shabby, and the woman, though good-looking enough, was long, lank, and slatternly, and had drawn her hair up over her head and dyed the skull through it in spots!” But he broke away from the picture. “Part of my errand to the Shakers is to ask whether they don’t know of some decent people who will take us in when we turn ourselves out into the street; for that is what it practically comes to. They certainly owe us as much as that. I don’t know but I have a right to demand that they shall board us till we can find some place.”

  “Yes,” Parthenope assented, provisionally. “You wouldn’t like to keep house for yourselves?”

  “Isn’t that what we are and have been doing?” he asked, sarcastically.

  “Then,” she said, “I believe I know of something. It is a house that Mr. Emerance and I saw. I didn’t suppose it could be had; but Mr. Emerance said last night that he had met the owner in the post-office, and he told him they were going to the seaside for August, and he wondered if you wouldn’t like his house, for he heard you were not satisfied with the Kites. But I didn’t know that Cousin Carry wanted the care of housekeeping, or even that you were going to leave the Kites—”

  “Don’t keep me waiting, Parthenope! What is it? Where is it? Housekeeping! We are prepared for hotel keeping, rather than stay where we are.”

  “Why, you remember that stone cottage round by the pond, or dam, where those wood-colored mills are?”

  “You don’t mean that cottage where they can’t agree whether to paint the ell red or green? Do you mean that we could get that cottage for the rest of the summer?”

  “That is what Mr. Emerance said; but—”

  “Get up!” Kelwyn called to his horse; he almost shouted, in fact; and he pulled so hard on one of the reins that the girl cried out in alarm:

  “Are you trying to turn the wagon over, Cousin Elmer?”

  “I’m trying to turn the road round.”

  “But that isn’t the way to the Shakers’!”

  “No; but it’s the way to the stone cottage, and I’m going there as fast as this horse can crawl. Parthenope, you are an instrument of Providence, though you may never have suspected it. That stone cottage has dropped from heaven, and at your touch. I only hope no one else has ta
ken it, or the people changed their minds.”

  “But wait, Cousin Elmer,” she entreated, laying her hand on the reins. “You’re not going to take it without Cousin Carry’s seeing it?”

  “Your seeing it will be enough. You know our wants quite as well as we do, and Caroline will trust your judgment.”

  In his wilfulness Kelwyn became almost gay, and the girl caught his spirit, so that when they came in sight of the cottage at a turn of the road she was laughing.

  The owners of the cottage were out in its grounds, looking up at the ell as before, but at sight of the carryall at their front door they both came to it questioningly.

  “Your place gone yet?” Kelwyn asked, with the jocoseness which in him was always racial rather than personal.

  “No,” the owner of the cottage said, in the same vein, “it seems to be here still. Professor Kelwyn? Thought it was you. Guess we know the young lady already. Won’t you come in and look round? Hitch your horse for you?”

  “No,” Kelwyn said, alighting and helping Parthenope down. “He’ll stand — whenever he gets the chance.”

  “Looks that way,” the other assented. “Well, it’s a great thing in a horse.”

  The wife took friendly possession of Parthenope, and followed her indoors while the men talked of terms in walking about the grounds.

  “And there isn’t an unpleasant room in the house,” the wife said, proudly, when their tour of it had ended, and Parthenope had to own:

  “No; there isn’t, indeed. I think it’s perfect, but my cousin will have to see it. I couldn’t be responsible.”

  “No, of course not,” the wife said, coming to the door with her. “She can have our girl, too.”

  “Well, he’s taken it,” her husband said, referring to Kelwyn. “Has she?”

  “The same as, I guess,” his wife humored him.

  “He’s going to paint the ell dark green.”

  “And she’s going to paint it red.”

  They had their joke, and Parthenope praised the house, but cautioned Kelwyn that Mrs. Kelwyn, in justice to her, ought to see it.

  “Have I the refusal till to-morrow?” he asked of the lady.

  “Oh yes.”

  “Just drop a postal,” the husband said, and Kelwyn got back into the carryall with Parthenope.

  As he drove away, in high content with himself and the whole world, he said, “Now, I shall have courage to face the Shakers, and tell Brother Jasper what I have decided to do.”

  Parthenope looked her surprise at his seeming to have just come to a conclusion which she had thought his prime errand, and he went on:

  “Of course I should have done it in any case, but having a roof to put over one’s head beforehand makes a great difference. It gives one heart.”

  “Of course,” she agreed; but it seemed to her that here was a point on which she ought to help Kelwyn clear his mind if she meant to be of the highest use to him. “I am glad you have that to fall back on.” She added, tactfully: “A woman wouldn’t have had the courage to take such a leap in the dark without it; I suppose that is where a man is different.”

  After a moment Kelwyn said, rather dryly, “I suppose so.”

  “I almost wish,” she continued, with a light of the ideal in the face she turned on him, but a modest ideal expressing a willingness for instruction, “that you could have told them you were going out before you really knew of anything else.”

  “I think it quite enough as it is,” Kelwyn said, not liking to have what was left of his magnanimous position minimized.

  “Yes,” Parthenope reflected. “And perhaps Cousin Carry may not like the house. There’s that.”

  “I believe we can make sure of her liking it,” Kelwyn said, in refusing the high consolation.

  But the chance of her not liking the house haunted his consciousness, and reinforced his pride of selfindulgent self-sacrifice when it came to his announcement of it. He had to suffer the disappointment of not finding Brother Jasper at the office; there was no one there hut Elder Nathaniel, with the two Office Sisters. They told him that Brother Jasper had gone to the field where Kite was working to meet the referees who were to value his crops before he could be put out of the place.

  “The Family will have to take them at the referees’ valuation,” Elder Nathaniel said, with a dejection which the Sisters mutely shared. “And we wish to tell you again how greatly we regret the inconvenience you have suffered; and desire you to understand that our share of it is comparatively little. We would be pleased to do more if we could.”

  “Yee, we would,” the Office Sisters united with the Elder. “We all would.”

  “Thank you,” Kelwyn said, with a severity which was meant less to reproach them than to strengthen himself in his high purpose. “I have come to relieve you even of that part. My wife and I have decided not to put you to any further trouble, but to end the whole matter by going out ourselves and leaving the Kites in possession.”

  “I have been afraid it might come to that,” Elder Nathaniel sadly admitted, without that explicit applause of Kelwyn’s decision which he certainly thought it merited.

  The Sisters merely looked their distress, and while the men talked the matter over in detail they seemed glad to turn from it and enter into such gossip with Parthenope as they thought harmless.

  “It seems as if a great many were going to the Centennial,” Saranna said. “Some of our Canbury Family are going, and the storekeeper in the village at the depot is taking his wife. We did hear that the folks in the stone cottage were going, too, if they could let their house right away.”

  As her cousin Kelwyn had not thought fit to say that he expected to take the house, Parthenope did not feel warranted in doing so, though her higher ideal of truth demanded it of her. She said nothing, and Sister Saranna went on, placidly: “The teacher over at the school where Friend Caroline said you saw the exercises went this morning by the first train — her and the young woman on the school committee. They passed here early, and Friend Emerance got into their carryall with them and went to the depot. Did you hear that they were going to the Centennial together?”

  “No,” Parthenope answered, briefly; and through a tumult of emotions and conjectures that whirled round her she heard Kelwyn saying as from a distance: “Then I will let you take the horse and drive on home, Parthenope, and I will walk over after I have seen Kite. Elder Nathaniel is going to show me where to find him. You can tell Carry what we have done.”

  “Very well, Cousin Elmer,” she answered, in her remoteness.

  The light which Sister Saranna’s news had thrown upon Emerance’s relation to herself was a sort of baleful dazzle which showed the facts but not the meaning of the facts. Its searching glare multiplied the whole question in the shape of doubts, of suspicions, which tormented and disgraced her before herself. Had he been, then, amusing himself with her? Had he dared to remain in some such uncertainty regarding her as she had remained in regarding him? Had he played off in his mind his preference for the school-teacher against his preference for her, and had the school-teacher won? If he had been opener, her course would have been clear. Even if he had cared most for her, it would have been in accordance with the canons of the high romance to give him up to that girl; and although she loved him herself, to deny her love until she died of it. But Parthenope was not convinced that she loved him, or would have, if he asked her, and she felt that as the affair stood he had, to formulate the vulgar fact vulgarly, been flirting with them both, in an insensibility to her superiority which was a part of his inferiority. She had to put it to herself as grossly as this before she could seize the reality and begin to take thought for action. But when she asked herself what she should do she felt stricken, wounded, lamed to helplessness. Like every other woman, since love began, to whom the like had happened, she could do nothing but stand still and take the blows of destiny, without returning them, till she sank under them. But she could not believe that anything so out of keeping with h
er character and experience could really happen to her

  XXV

  PARTHENOPE found Mrs. Kelwyn, in a pause of her packing, refreshing herself with an untimely cup of tea, which she seemed to he drinking merely because Mrs. Kite had offered to make it for her, and which she praised for its unexpected goodness. “It’s this sort of thing that makes it so distressing to leave them. Whether we turn ourselves out or them out, we disgrace them in their neighbors’ eyes. I have realized that more and more, and when the incapable creature makes one of her hopeless efforts to please I lose all resentment and wish we could stay. It isn’t such a simple matter! Nothing seems very simple, even the simplest thing. And that brings me to the point, Parthenope. There’s something I want to speak to you about, but I’ve been so distracted that I’m afraid I’ve put it off rather selfishly.”

  “Yes,” the girl spiritlessly suggested, from the other side of the table.

  “Is there anything between you and Mr. Emerance?”

  “No,” Parthenope answered, as spiritlessly as before.

  “Well, so far, so good,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, with an air of strict sequence. “Then I need say nothing about it. I was afraid you were allowing yourself to become interested in him, and such a thing would have been very unfortunate. I ought to have warned you before, but in the confusion here, the perfect topsyturviness of all our ideas, I Haven’t been able to bring my mind to bear upon it. You know yourself, Parthenope, that anything serious would be quite out of the question. The very fact that he was so different from ourselves in what Mr. Kelwyn calls his civilization had made me feel easier, but it doesn’t excuse me. If he had been a young man of your own class I certainly should have objected to your being about with him so much at all hours” — she helplessly flowed into the saying—” of the day and night.”