“But how can we exist without them?” Hilbrook urged. “Shall we be made up of two passions, — of love and hope alone?”
“Why not?” Ewbert returned, with what he felt a specious brightness.
“Because we should not be complete beings with these two elements alone.”
“Ah, as we know ourselves here, I grant you,” said the minister. “But why should we not be far more simply constituted somewhere else? Have you ever read Isaac Taylor’s Physical Theory of another Life? He argues that the immortal body would be a far less complex mechanism than the mortal body. Why should not the immortal soul be simple, too? In fact, it would necessarily be so, being one with the body. I think I can put my hand on that book, and if I can I must make you take it with you.”
He rose briskly from his chair, and went to the shelves, running his fingers along the books with that subtlety of touch by which the student knows a given book in the dark. He had heard Mrs. Ewbert stirring about in the rooms beyond with an activity in which he divined a menacing impatience; and he would have been glad to get rid of old Hilbrook before her impatience burst in an irruption upon them. Perhaps because of this distraction he could not find the book, but he remained on foot, talking with an implication in his tone that they were both preparing to part, and were now merely finishing off some odds and ends of discourse before they said good-night.
Old Hilbrook did not stir. He was far too sincere a nature, Ewbert saw, to conceive of such inhospitality as a hint for his departure, or he was too deeply interested to be aware of it. The minister was obliged to sit down again, and it was eleven o’clock before Hilbrook rose to go.
X.
Ewbert went out to the gate with the old man, and when he came back to his study, he found his wife there looking strangely tall and monumental in her reproach. “I supposed you were in bed long ago, my dear,” he attempted lightly.
“You don’t mean that you’ve been out in the night air without your hat on!” she returned. “Well, this is too much!” Her long-pent-up impatience broke in tears, and he strove in vain to comfort her with caresses. “Oh, what a fatal day it was when you stirred that wretched old creature up! Why couldn’t you leave him alone!”
“To his apathy? To his despair? Emily!” Ewbert dropped his arms from the embrace in which he had folded her woodenly unresponsive frame, and regarded her sadly.
“Oh yes, of course,” she answered, rubbing her handkerchief into her eyes. “But you don’t know that it was despair; and he was quite happy in his apathy; and as it is, you’ve got him on your hands; and if he’s going to come here every night and stay till morning, it will kill you. You know you’re not strong; and you get so excited when you sit up talking. Look how flushed your cheeks are, now, and your eyes — as big! You won’t sleep a wink to-night, — I know you won’t.”
“Oh yes, I shall,” he answered bravely. “I believe I’ve done some good work with poor old Hilbrook; and you mustn’t think he’s tired me. I feel fresher than I did when he came.”
“It’s because you’re excited,” she persisted. “I know you won’t sleep.”
“Yes, I shall. I shall just stay here, and read my nerves down a little. Then I’ll come.”
“Oh yes!” Mrs. Ewbert exulted disconsolately, and she left him to his book. She returned to say: “If you must take anything to make you sleepy, I’ve left some warm milk on the back of the stove. Promise me you won’t take any sulphonal! You know how you feel the next day!”
“No, no, I won’t,” said Ewbert; and he kept his word, with the effect of remaining awake all night. Toward morning he did not know but he had drowsed; he was not aware of losing consciousness, and he started from his drowse with the word “consciousness” in his mind, as he had heard Hilbrook speaking it.
XI.
Throughout the day, under his wife’s watchful eye, he failed of the naps he tried for, and he had to own himself as haggard, when night came again, as the fondest anxiety of a wife could pronounce a husband. He could not think of his talk with old Hilbrook without an anguish of brain exhaustion; and yet he could not help thinking of it. He realized what the misery of mere weakness must be, and the horror of not having the power to rest. He wished to go to bed before the hour when Hilbrook commonly appeared, but this was so early that Ewbert knew he should merely toss about and grow more and more wakeful from his premature effort to sleep. He trembled at every step outside, and at the sound of feet approaching the door on the short brick walk from the gate, he and his wife arrested themselves with their teacups poised in the air. Ewbert was aware of feebly hoping the feet might go away again; but the bell rang, and then he could not meet his wife’s eye.
“If it is that old Mr. Hilbrook,” she said to the maid in transit through the room, “tell him that Mr. Ewbert is not well, but I shall be glad to see him,” and now Ewbert did not dare to protest. His forebodings were verified when he heard Hilbrook asking for him, but though he knew the voice, he detected a difference in the tone that puzzled him.
His wife did not give Hilbrook time to get away, if he had wished, without seeing her; she rose at once and went out to him. Ewbert heard her asking him into the library, and then he heard them in parley there; and presently they came out into the hall again, and went to the front door together. Ewbert’s heart misgave him of something summary on her part, and he did not know what to make of the cheerful parting between them. “Well, I bid you good-evening, ma’am,” he heard old Hilbrook say briskly, and his wife return sweetly, “Good-night, Mr. Hilbrook. You must come soon again.”
“You may put your mind at rest, Clarence,” she said, as she reëntered the dining room and met his face of surprise. “He didn’t come to make a call; he just wanted to borrow a book, — Physical Theory of another Life.”
“How did you find it?” asked Ewbert, with relief.
“It was where it always was,” she returned indifferently. “Mr. Hilbrook seemed to be very much interested in something you said to him about it. I do believe you have done him good, Clarence; and now, if you can only get a full night’s rest, I shall forgive him. But I hope he won’t come very soon again, and will never stay so late when he does come. Promise me you won’t go near him till he’s brought the book back!”
XII.
Hilbrook came the night after he had borrowed the book, full of talk about it, to ask if he might keep it a little longer. Ewbert had slept well the intervening night, and had been suffered to see Hilbrook upon promising his wife that he would not encourage the old man to stay; but Hilbrook stayed without encouragement. An interest had come into his apathetic life which renewed it, and gave vitality to a whole dead world of things. He wished to talk, and he wished even more to listen, that he might confirm himself from Ewbert’s faith and reason in the conjectures with which his mind was filled. His eagerness as to the conditions of a future life, now that he had begun to imagine them, was insatiable, and Ewbert, who met it with glad sympathy, felt drained of his own spiritual forces by the strength which he supplied to the old man. But the case was so strange, so absorbing, so important, that he could not refuse himself to it. He could not deny Hilbrook’s claim to all that he could give him in this sort; he was as helpless to withhold the succor he supplied as he was to hide from Mrs. Ewbert’s censoriously anxious eye the nervous exhaustion to which it left him after each visit that Hilbrook paid him. But there was a drain from another source of which he would not speak to her till he could make sure that the effect was not some trick of his own imagination.
He had been aware, in twice urging some reason upon Hilbrook, of a certain perfunctory quality in his performance. It was as if the truth, so vital at first, had perished in its formulation, and in the repetition he was sensible, or he was fearful, of an insincerity, a hollowness in the arguments he had originally employed so earnestly against the old man’s doubt. He recognized with dismay a quality of question in his own mind, and he fancied that as Hilbrook waxed in belief he himself waned. The convi
ction of a life hereafter was not something which he was sharing with Hilbrook; he was giving it absolutely, and with such entire unreserve that he was impoverishing his own soul of its most precious possession.
So it seemed to him in those flaccid moods to which Hilbrook’s visits left him, when mind and body were both spent in the effort he had been making. In the intervals in which his strength renewed itself, he put this fear from him as a hypochondriacal fancy, and he summoned a cheerfulness which he felt less and less to meet the hopeful face of the old man. Hilbrook had renewed himself, apparently, in the measure that the minister had aged and waned. He looked, to Ewbert, younger and stronger. To the conventional question how he did, he one night answered that he never felt better in his life. “But you,” he said, casting an eye over the face and figure of the minister, who lay back in his easy-chair, with his hands stretched nerveless on the arms, “you, look rather peaked. I don’t know as I noticed it before, but come to think, I seemed to feel the same way about it when I saw you in the pulpit yesterday.”
“It was a very close day,” said Ewbert. “I don’t know why I shouldn’t be about as well as usual.”
“Well, that’s right,” said Hilbrook, in willing dismissal of the trifle which had delayed him from the great matter in his mind.
Some new thoughts had occurred to him in corroboration of the notions they had agreed upon in their last meeting. But in response Ewbert found himself beset by a strange temptation, — by the wish to take up these notions and expose their fallacy. They were indeed mere toys of their common fancy which they had constructed together in mutual supposition, but Ewbert felt a sacredness in them, while he longed so strangely to break them one by one and cast them in the old man’s face. Like all imaginative people, he was at times the prey of morbid self-suggestions, whose nature can scarcely be stated without excess. The more monstrous the thing appeared to his mind and conscience, the more fascinating it became. Once the mere horror of such a conception as catching a comely parishioner about the waist and kissing her, when she had come to him with a case of conscience, had so confused him in her presence as to make him answer her wildly, not because he was really tempted to the wickedness, but because he realized so vividly the hideousness of the impossible temptation. In some such sort he now trembled before old Hilbrook, thinking how dreadful it would be if he were suddenly to begin undoing the work of faith in him, and putting back in its place the doubts which he had uprooted before. In a swift series of dramatic representations he figured the old man’s helpless amaze at the demoniacal gayety with which he should mock his own seriousness in the past, the cynical ease with which he should show the vanity of the hopes he had been so fervent in awakening. He had throughout recognized the claim that all the counter-doubts had upon the reason, and he saw how effective he could make these if he were now to become their advocate. He pictured the despair in which he could send his proselyte tottering home to his lonely house through the dark.
He rent himself from the spell, but the last picture remained so real with him that he went to the window and looked out, saying, “Is there a moon?”
“It ain’t up yet, I guess,” said old Hilbrook, and from something in his manner, rather than from anything he recollected of their talk, Ewbert fancied him to have asked a question, and to be now waiting for some answer. He had not the least notion what the question could have been, and he began to walk up and down, trying to think of something to say, but feeling his legs weak under him and the sweat cold on his forehead. All the time he was aware of Hilbrook following him with an air of cheerful interest, and patiently waiting till he should take up the thread of their discourse again.
He controlled himself at last, and sank into his chair. “Where were we?” he asked. “I had gone off on a train of associations, and I don’t just recall our last point.”
Hilbrook stated it, and Ewbert said, “Oh, yes,” as if he recognized it, and went on from it upon the line of thought which it suggested. He was aware of talking rationally and forcibly; but in the subjective undercurrent paralleling his objective thought he was holding discourse with himself to an effect wholly different from that produced in Hilbrook.
“Well, sir,” said the old man when he rose to go at last, “I guess you’ve settled it for me. You’ve made me see that there can be an immortal life that’s worth living; and I was afraid there wa’n’t! I shouldn’t care, now, if I woke up any morning in the other world. I guess it would be all right; and that there would be new conditions every way, so that a man could go on and be himself, without feelin’ that he was in any danger of bein’ wasted. You’ve made me want to meet my boy again; and I used to dread it; I didn’t think I was fit for it. I don’t know whether you expect me to thank you; I presume you don’t; but I” — he faltered, and his voice shook in sympathy with the old hand that he put trembling into Ewbert’s— “I bless you!”
XIII.
The time had come when the minister must seek refuge and counsel with his wife. He went to her as a troubled child goes to its mother, and she heard the confession of his strange experience with the motherly sympathy which performs the comforting office of perfect intelligence. If she did not grasp its whole significance, she seized what was perhaps the main point, and she put herself in antagonism to the cause of his morbid condition, while administering an inevitable chastisement for the neglect of her own prevision.
“That terrible old man,” she said, “has simply been draining the life out of you, Clarence. I saw it from the beginning, and I warned you against it; but you wouldn’t listen to me. Now I suppose you will listen, after the doctor tells you that you’re in danger of nervous prostration, and that you’ve got to give up everything and rest. I think you’ve been in danger of losing your reason, you’ve overworked it so; and I sha’n’t be easy till I’ve got you safely away at the seaside, and out of the reach of that — that vampire.”
“Emily!” the minister protested. “I can’t allow you to use such language. At the worst, and supposing that he has really been that drain upon me which you say (though I don’t admit it), what is my life for but to give to others?”
“But my life isn’t for you to give to others, and your life is mine, and I think I have some right to say what shall be done with it, and I don’t choose to have it used up on old Hilbrook.” It passed through Ewbert’s languid thought, which it stirred to a vague amusement, that the son of an older church than the Rixonite might have found in this thoroughly terrestrial attitude of his wife a potent argument for sacerdotal celibacy; but he did not attempt to formulate it, and he listened submissively while she went on: “One thing: I am certainly not going to let you see him again till you’ve seen the doctor, and I hope he won’t come about. If he does, I shall see him.”
The menace in this declaration moved Ewbert to another protest, which he worded conciliatingly: “I shall have to let you. But I know you won’t say anything to convey a sense of responsibility to him. I couldn’t forgive myself if he were allowed to feel that he had been preying upon me. The fact is, I’ve been overdoing in every way, and nobody is to blame for my morbid fancies but myself. I should blame myself very severely if you based any sort of superstition on them, and acted from that superstition.”
“Oh, you needn’t be afraid!” said Mrs. Ewbert. “I shall take care of his feelings, but I shall have my own opinions, all the same, Clarence.”
Whether a woman with opinions so strong as Mrs. Ewbert’s, and so indistinguishable from her prejudices, could be trusted to keep them to herself, in dealing with the matter in hand, was a question which her husband felt must largely be left to her goodness of heart for its right solution.
When Hilbrook came that night, as usual, she had already had it out with him in several strenuous reveries before they met, and she was able to welcome him gently to the interview which she made very brief. His face fell in visible disappointment when she said that Mr. Ewbert would not be able to see him, and perhaps there was nothing to
uplift him in the reasons she gave, though she obscurely resented his continued dejection as a kind of ingratitude. She explained that poor Mr. Ewbert was quite broken down, and that the doctor had advised his going to the seaside for the whole of August, where he promised everything from the air and the bathing. Mr. Ewbert merely needed toning up, she said; but to correct the impression she might be giving that his breakdown was a trifling matter, she added that she felt very anxious about it, and wanted to get him away as soon as possible. She said with a confidential effect, as of something in which Hilbrook could sympathize with her: “You know it isn’t merely his church work proper; it’s his giving himself spiritually to all sorts of people so indiscriminately. He can’t deny himself to any one; and sometimes he’s perfectly exhausted by it. You must come and see him as soon as he gets back, Mr. Hilbrook. He will count upon it, I know; he’s so much interested in the discussions he has been having with you.”
She gave the old man her hand for good-by, after she had artfully stood him up, in a double hope, — a hope that he would understand that there was some limit to her husband’s nervous strength, and a hope that her closing invitation would keep him from feeling anything personal in her hints.
Hilbrook took his leave in the dreamy fashion age has with so many things, as if there were a veil between him and experience which kept him from the full realization of what had happened; and as she watched his bent shoulders down the garden walk, carrying his forward-drooping head at a slant that scarcely left the crown of his hat visible, a fear came upon her which made it impossible for her to recount all the facts of her interview to her husband. It became her duty, rather, to conceal what was painful to herself in it, and she merely told him that Mr. Hilbrook had taken it all in the right way, and she had made him promise to come and see them as soon as they got back.
XIV.
Events approved the wisdom of Mrs. Ewbert’s course in so many respects that she confidently trusted them for the rest. Ewbert picked up wonderfully at the seaside, and she said to him again and again that it was not merely those interviews with old Hilbrook which had drained his vitality, but it was the whole social and religious keeping of the place. Everybody, she said, had thrown themselves upon his sympathies, and he was carrying a load that nobody could bear up under. She addressed these declarations to her lingering consciousness of Ransom Hilbrook, and confirmed herself, by their repetition, in the belief that he had not taken her generalizations personally. She now extended these so as to inculpate the faculty of the university, who ought to have felt it their duty not to let a man of Ewbert’s intellectual quality stagger on alone among them, with no sign of appreciation or recognition in the work he was doing, not so much for the Rixonite church as for the whole community. She took several ladies at the hotel into her confidence on this point, and upon study of the situation they said it was a shame. After that she felt more bitter about it, and attributed her husband’s collapse to a concealed sense of the indifference of the university people, so galling to a sensitive nature.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1051
