Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  At another time Parthenope might have resented this way of putting it, but now she only said, lifelessly, “I understand.”

  The want of opposition seemed to weaken Mrs. Kelwyn in her position. “Not that young people, in these picnicking and camping times, don’t throw off a good many social trammels, and it’s quite proper and harmless. With Mr. Emerance, too, I felt that his very want of any experience like your own added to the propriety. But I don’t think I have considered you enough in the matter, and I blame myself very much. I suppose we may both acknowledge that there is something very attractive about him. He is cultivated, in a certain way, and he has the good manners that come from a good heart. Though he seems such a dreamer, he is the most practical and efficient person I ever saw. And he is certainly very good-looking. You must acknowledge that yourself, Parthenope.”

  “Oh yes,” the girl owned, “very handsome, indeed.”

  “I shouldn’t really have wondered if you had become interested in him; I shouldn’t have been at all surprised if there had been something between you.”

  “But there isn’t.”

  “Yes; I know that, and I am glad you are not interested in him at all in that way.” Parthenope did not respond, and Mrs. Kelwyn went on as if less confident of her ground. “You are very much his superior in every respect.”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said, coldly. “He has read quite as much as I have, and he has thought in directions where I haven’t thought at all.”

  “I like your being impartial, but you must be just even to yourself, no matter how generous you feel like being. I don’t suppose he has the least notion of art?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “And that is what I mean by your superiority. I take that merely as a type. He is utterly wanting on the aesthetic side. I don’t suppose he has the least idea how perfectly you are dressed; how simply and yet how beautifully. And, though he has the good manners that come from a good heart, as I say, he hasn’t the least notion of society as we know it.”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, somewhat baffled by Parthenope’s acquiescences, “you see that it would never have done in the world. I don’t imagine, if there had been anything between you, that your aunt Julia would have objected; she never objects to anything you do. But that has made my responsibility all the greater, don’t you see? And I have felt my responsibility toward him as well as toward you. We have both got to confess that he has acted in everything with the most perfect delicacy. I think his behavior in every respect has been worthy of the highest ideal of a gentleman. But things like that have made me anxious not to let the affair go too far with him. I have been afraid that he was interested in you, and that he would feel it more than you realized when you had to tell him that there was no hope for him.” Parthenope was silent, and Mrs. Kelwyn added, almost interrogatively: “As you certainly would. You couldn’t have forgiven yourself for that. And that was what made me so anxious, all round.”

  “There was no occasion for anxiety, Cousin Carry,” Parthenope replied, coldly. “Mr. Emerance has been consoling himself against the chances.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean — I mean — that he has gone to the Centennial with that — that school-teacher,” Parthenope answered.

  “And you mean — you mean — that there is something between them?”

  “I don’t mean anything but what I say.”

  “But how do you know? Who told you?”

  “Sister Saranna.”

  “This morning?”

  Parthenope nodded.

  “But, Parthenope, how did Sister Saranna know it?”

  “She saw him getting into the wagon at the Office with her and that committee-girl.”

  “But, Parthenope, that may not mean anything. People of that sort could go to the Centennial on the same train, and still — and still—” Mrs. Kelwyn felt that she was failing to make out her case, and more remotely that she had no reason for trying to console her cousin under the circumstances, if she was glad that there was nothing between her and Emerance.

  Parthenope turned upon her. “You seemed to think his being about with me meant something — meant something on his part.”

  “Yes, but that was very different.”

  “It was not the least different. It was exactly the same thing. But it doesn’t matter. It is all for the best, and it releases you from the responsibility which you dread so much.”

  “I don’t understand. Had you any reason to suppose that he was interested in the school-teacher? She is certainly very pretty. But has he been” — the words framed themselves on Mrs. Kelwyn’s involuntary lips—” going with her?”

  “Don’t be country, Cousin Carry. If he was ‘ going with’ me he may have been ‘ going with’ her, too.”

  “That is true. But if you have never been interested in him, she may not have been, either.” Mrs. Kelwyn felt this a triumph of logic, almost a syllogism. “Don’t you see that it proves nothing?” she pursued.

  “Cousin Carry, do you think I have no sense or no feeling?” Parthenope turned away and was, as she felt, sweeping from the room, when she was arrested by something she saw through the window.

  “What is it?” Mrs. Kelwyn demanded, from where she still sat at the table.

  “Nothing. Cousin Elmer is coming.” She spoke now in a wholly different note.

  “Is Brother Jasper with him? I hope—”

  “It isn’t Jasper. You can look for yourself,” and now Parthenope really swept from the room, and Mrs. Kelwyn heard her shutting her door before she made her own way to the window.

  She saw her husband coming forward at a conversational pace, and with him was Emerance, sharing a discussion which seemed so far removed, to the eyes at least, from the pressing actualities of life that she provisionally lost all patience with them both. She hurried down to the door, and met them in time to hear Kelwyn saying, “Yes, that is an admirable subject, but everything, as you have realized, depends upon the treatment.”

  She took no notice of her husband in challenging his companion, “Why, Mr. Emerance, I thought you had gone to the Centennial!”

  “Oh no! I did intend to go to Boston this morning, but I found a letter at the post-office in the village which decided me to put off my whole trip for a week or two; and Mr. Kelwyn has let me come back with him.”

  Mrs. Kelwyn stared at her husband with a severity which he met with a tone of comradery for Emerance, full of greater liking than he usually allowed himself to express. “Mr. Emerance has put it so succinctly that I needn’t explain that his object in returning is to help us pack and get off. He thinks we can’t manage without him.”

  Mrs. Kelwyn’s mind reverted to the main point, on which it had been turning before flying off at a tangent to Parthenope and Emerance. “And you are really going?”

  “Not unless you are, my dear,” Kelwyn answered, with sarcasm. “Didn’t you understand that I had gone to see Kite and arrange the matter with him once and for all?”

  “Oh yes, but—”

  “Well, that’s what I’ve done, and quite amicably, though he had his misgivings when I gave up every point to him; I might say he had his suspicions. But he seemed to overcome them, and I think we are going to part friends. I don’t believe we can part too soon, though, with all this ‘changin’ faces,’ as Brother Jasper calls it.”

  “No, probably not,” Mrs. Kelwyn consented, with a sigh of lingering reluctance. “Well, now we mustn’t lose any time. Fortunately we are pretty well packed already.”

  “That will disappoint Mr. Emerance. But you could let him cord a few trunks, couldn’t you? If you can’t, he has a notion of looking up transportation for us. You know we can’t get away without a good-sized vehicle to carry us and our things. If those gypsies would turn up again we might hire their van.”

  At the sound of talking, which might or might not concern her, Mrs. Kite had come to her door, and she now hospitably j
oined in the question. “I don’t believe but what you could get a team to the village. There’s an express that could take you in two trips. I’m real sorry you feel you got to go. Mr. Kite and me been talkin’ it all over, and I don’t believe but what we could make out together somehow.”

  “Well,” Kelwyn said, in acceptance of her friendly feeling, “Mr. Kite and I have been talking it over since, and he agrees with me that we had perhaps better part if I’ve engaged other quarters. Oh, by the way,” he turned to his wife, “I found out that the stone cottage we all liked so much was to be had, and I saw it with Parthenope this morning. I said I would take it if you approved.”

  “Really, Elmer, you might have known I would simply jump at it!”

  “Well, I’ll drop a postal to them at once—”

  “No, that won’t do,” his wife said, with the eagerness of women not to let slip the chance which they might have been willing to renounce. “Some one else might—”

  “Mrs. Kelwyn,” Emerance interposed, “let me go over and tell them that you are coming?”

  “Well, the hoss ain’t unhitched yet,” Mrs. Kite intervened, with impartiality. “I guess he’s right there in the bam, where Miss Brook left him not more’n half an hour ago. She was sayin’ something about goin’ to the village after some canned goods for dinner, though I don’t believe but what we could get along without.”

  “Perhaps Miss Brook will come with me,” Emerance suggested, “and we can combine the stone cottage and the canned goods and the transportation in one errand.”

  “Capital!” Kelwyn agreed. “Our lease of the cottage will come more authoritatively from one of the family than even from a friend of the family. Where is Parthenope? Is she in the house?” He made a start toward the door, but faltered, aware for the first time of his wife frowning significantly at him.

  “I will go, Elmer,” she said, sternly, and over her shoulder she showed him the same mystifying front that she had bent on him.

  Whatever the arts or reasons she used to compel the appearance of the girl, they succeeded, and Parthenope appeared at the door without more delay than sufficed her to have had the situation placed attractively before her.

  “How do you do?” Emerance called to her face, which lighted up only provisionally; and as if he assumed that she was there to accompany him on his errand, he added, “Well, I’ll go and get the horse.”

  XXVI

  THE morning had not yet got so far toward noon as to have lost the freshness in which the world renews itself every day in summer with something like the joy of spring. The year was as if in its second youth, and had some of those charms of maturity which add to the beauty of that renascence. There were not so many birds singing as there would have been at the same hour in June; but the air was as clear and bright, and from the stubble of a piece of the Shakers’ wheat the quails were calling, not with the amorous entreaty of their mating-time, but with the tender anxiety of parental love. At one point a mother - quail, which seemed to have been waiting for the opportunity to risk the lives of all her chickens at once, scuttled with them across the road through the thick dust almost under the horse’s feet.

  “Ah,” Emerance said, “that was a narrow escape.”

  “You’re sure it was an escape?” Parthenope looked over her shoulder at the road, which had become invisible in the dust.

  “I didn’t count them, but I think so.” He leaned back in the carryall seat and drew a deep breath. “This is better than going to the Centennial.”

  “Is it? I thought you wished to go.”

  “I did and I didn’t. I can go later. But it’s so good to be driving along such a road, such a day as this, that I feel as if I had made an escape. That’s why I’m so sure those quails got safely away.”

  Parthenope would not smile, though she knew that he expected it. She said, “I hope this is an escape, too.”

  “You mean getting away from the Kites? I was afraid,” he said, seriously, “that Mrs. Kelwyn might be tempted to try staying on. It’s not my business, but I’ve seen more and more that it wouldn’t do.”

  “You haven’t always shown it. You have seemed to think we were wronging them.”

  “Not after you had given them a full trial. I didn’t want you to have a bad conscience.”

  “Thank you. I don’t know that you’ve prevented that. My cousin thinks that they will feel disgraced before their friends as much by our going as by our turning them out.”

  “Oh, no they won’t. They remain in possession of the field, and so the victory is theirs. They will console themselves.” —

  “Mr. Emerance,” she said, severely, “sometimes I think you are really a cynic; you seem to have so little consideration for others.”

  “Do I? I should be sorry to think that. I don’t pity the Kites a great deal, for I don’t believe they deserve it, and I don’t want them to; but when have I seemed wanting in consideration for any others?”

  “Do you wish me to say?”

  “I do, indeed.”

  Parthenope gave herself time for reflection. She thought of doing an ideal thing, of performing an act of self - sacrifice which would cost her more than she had even allowed to herself that it would. Whether she was interested in Mr. Emerance herself or not, perhaps for the very reason that she was interested, if she was, it was her duty to remind him that he owed a duty to another whom he had given reason to think he was interested in her. This act must be performed heroically, and yet it must be performed delicately, and after reflection that would take the quality of rashness from it and leave her with no regret on her own account; the sublimity must not be marred by any absurdity; with whatever secret pain, it must be performed with the superiority of a witness of conduct on a level below her own. Yet she found herself, after due reflection, saying, rashly, personally, and, as it sounded to her, spitefully: “Don’t you think Miss Nichols has a right to think you’ve been inconsiderate?” She tried to look steadily at him, but failed a little before his steady stare.

  “Miss Nichols? How? Why?”

  “Your leaving her so abruptly, after you had promised to go with her and her friend to the Centennial?” Since she must be plain, Parthenope spared herself nothing, and she was strengthened for the effort by her rising anger with Emerance. She had turned pale with it, and she reddened with resentment when for first answer he laughed aloud, and then she waited indignantly for him to account for himself.

  “I don’t think she will be disappointed. Or not, after she reaches Boston. I was only going as far as Boston, at any rate, and she was to meet some one there who would console her for any desertion of mine. He and his sister are going with her and her friend to Philadelphia at once, and I had expected to follow next week.”

  Parthenope was silent, while he went on to explain the whole case with an increasing recognition of the motive from which she had spoken.

  He carried this so far that at last she said, in bitter confusion: “Don’t let us speak of it any more. I had no business — And I beg your pardon.”

  “Oh, but if I could only tell you how much I value your having spoken—”

  “But you can’t, you mustn’t, and unless you want me to detest you—”

  He stopped, and they drove on for what seemed the promise of indefinite silence.

  At last he said, with an effort to command their lost cheerfulness, and a smile that was rueful enough, “And you won’t let me tell you what the letter was that turned me back?”

  She consented, with an “Oh yes” so listless that it might well have discouraged a man less full of his object. But Emerance seemed to find sufficient incentive in it.

  He brightened as he began. “It was from an actor — not the one who has let me learn the theatre from him, so far as I know it, but a friend of his, a younger man, who is looking for a play. My friend showed mine to him in the rough draft I had sent him, and he likes it. He likes it with enthusiasm; ‘ that is their way when they like a thing at all, though it doesn�
��t mean that they will take it. But this one wants to see me and talk it over, and he has proposed coming up here for Sunday — he’s in New York now — and, of course, I couldn’t miss such a chance.”

  He seemed to refer the point to Parthenope, and she said, abstractedly, “No.”

  “It will be more than the Centennial to me,” Emerance continued, “though I needn’t miss that, either, and do more to decide my future. In fact, if he takes my play my future is already decided.”

  He clearly expected some response of interest and sympathy, and Parthenope could not withhold it. “You ought to be very happy.” But she spoke coldly. “Oh, I am. This chance has cleared up a lot of things. You can’t imagine what a light it has thrown on them.” As if he had not noticed her coldness, he talked on so joyously and so full of his theme that he forgot their errand, and he would have driven past the stone cottage, when they came to it, if she had not laid her hand on the reins. “What is it?” he asked, and then returned to his mission, with a laugh at himself and an “Oh! Somebody else might have got the place if you hadn’t stopped me.”

  The husband and wife were sitting on the cottage steps, and the man came forward to the gate. “Thought you might be along, some of you. Well, I suppose you don’t want my place,” he added, ironically. “Paint the ell part any color you please,” he suggested.

  Emerance left the answer to Parthenope. “Yes, we want it, and the question is how soon can we have it.”

  “To-morrow do?”

  “We didn’t quite expect it to-day,” she answered, in his humor.

  “‘All right. To-morrow it is, then. That so?” he referred to the lady who now came to the gate, too.