She suggested this theory to Ewbert, and he denied it with blithe derision, but she said that he need not tell her, and in confirming herself in it she began to relax her belief that old Ransom Hilbrook had preyed upon him. She even went so far as to say that the only intellectual companionship he had ever had in the place was that which he found in the old man’s society. When she discovered, after the fact, that Ewbert had written to him since they came away, she was not so severe with him as she might have expected herself to be in view of an act which, if not quite clandestine, was certainly without her privity. She would have considered him fitly punished by Hilbrook’s failure to reply, if she had not shared his uneasiness at the old man’s silence. But she did not allow this to affect her good spirits, which were essential to her husband’s comfort as well as her own. She redoubled her care of him in every sort, and among all the ladies who admired her devotion to him there was none who enjoyed it as much as herself. There was none who believed more implicitly that it was owing to her foresight and oversight that his health mended so rapidly, and that at the end of the bathing season she was, as she said, taking him home quite another man. In her perfect satisfaction she suffered him his small joke about not feeling it quite right to go with her if that were so; and though a woman of little humor, she even professed to find pleasure in his joke after she fully understood it.
“All that I ask,” she said, as if it followed, “is that you won’t spoil everything by letting old Hilbrook come every night and drain the life out of you again.”
“I won’t,” he retorted, “if you’ll promise to make the university people come regularly to my sermons.”
He treated the notion of Hilbrook’s visits lightly; but with his return to the familiar environment he felt a shrinking from them in an experience which was like something physical. Yet when he sat down the first night in his study, with his lamp in its wonted place, it was with an expectation of old Hilbrook in his usual seat so vivid that its defeat was more a shock than its fulfilment upon supernatural terms would have been. In fact, the absence of the old man was spectral; and though Ewbert employed himself fully the first night in answering an accumulation of letters that required immediate reply, it was with nervous starts from time to time, which he could trace to no other cause. His wife came in and out, with what he knew to be an accusing eye, as she brought up those arrears of housekeeping which always await the housewife on the return from any vacation; and he knew that he did not conceal his guilt from her.
They both ignored the stress which had fallen back upon him, and which accumulated, as the days of the week went by, until the first Sunday came.
Ewbert dreaded to look in the direction of Hilbrook’s pew, lest he should find it empty; but the old man was there, and he sat blinking at the minister, as his custom was, through the sermon, and thoughtfully passing the tip of his tongue over the inner edge of his lower lip.
Many came up to shake hands with the minister after church, and to tell him how well he was looking, but Hilbrook was not among them. Some of the university people who had made a point of being there that morning, out of a personal regard for Ewbert, were grouped about his wife, in the church vestibule, where she stood answering their questions about his health. He glimpsed between the heads and shoulders of this gratifying group the figure of Hilbrook dropping from grade to grade on the steps outside, till it ceased to be visible, and he fancied, with a pang, that the old man had lingered to speak with him, and had then given up and started home.
The cordial interest of the university people was hardly a compensation for the disappointment he shared with Hilbrook; but his wife was so happy in it that he could not say anything to damp her joy. “Now,” she declared, on their way home, “I am perfectly satisfied that they will keep coming. You never preached so well, Clarence, and if they have any appreciation at all, they simply won’t be able to keep away. I wish you could have heard all the nice things they said about you. I guess they’ve waked up to you, at last, and I do believe that the idea of losing you has had a great deal to do with it. And that is something we owe to old Ransom Hilbrook more than to anything else. I saw the poor old fellow hanging about, and I couldn’t help feeling for him. I knew he wanted to speak with you, and I’m not afraid that he will be a burden again. It will be such an inspiration, the prospect of having the university people come every Sunday, now, that you can afford to give a little of it to him, and I want you to go and see him soon; he evidently isn’t coming till you do.”
XV.
Ewbert had learned not to inquire too critically for a logical process in his wife’s changes of attitude toward any fact. In her present mood he recognized an effect of the exuberant good-will awakened by the handsome behavior of the university people, and he agreed with her that he must go to see old Hilbrook at once. In this good intention his painful feeling concerning him was soothed, and Ewbert did not get up to the Hilbrook place till well into the week. It was Thursday afternoon when he climbed through the orchard, under the yellowing leaves which dappled the green masses of the trees like intenser spots of the September sunshine. He came round by the well to the side door of the house, which stood open, and he did not hesitate to enter when he saw how freely the hens were coming and going through it. They scuttled out around him and between his legs, with guilty screeches, and left him standing alone in the middle of the wide, low kitchen. A certain discomfort of the nerves which their flight gave him was heightened by some details quite insignificant in themselves. There was no fire in the stove, and the wooden clock on the mantel behind it was stopped; the wind had carried in some red leaves from the maple near the door, and these were swept against the farther wall, where they lay palpitating in the draft.
The neglect in all was evidently too recent to suggest any supposition but that of the master’s temporary absence, and Ewbert went to the threshold to look for his coming from the sheds or the barn. But these were all fast shut, and there was no sign of Hilbrook anywhere. Ewbert turned back into the room again, and saw the door of the old man’s little bedroom standing slightly ajar. With a chill of apprehension he pushed it open, and he could not have experienced a more disagreeable effect if the dark fear in his mind had been realized than he did to see Hilbrook lying in his bed alive and awake. His face showed like a fine mask above the sheet, and his long, narrow hands rested on the covering across his breast. His eyes met those of Ewbert not only without surprise, but without any apparent emotion.
“Why, Mr. Hilbrook,” said the minister, “are you sick?”
“No, I am first-rate,” the old man answered.
It was on the point of the minister’s tongue to ask him, “Then what in the world are you doing in bed?” but he substituted the less authoritative suggestion, “I am afraid I disturbed you — that I woke you out of a nap. But I found the door open and the hens inside, and I ventured to come in” —
Hilbrook replied calmly, “I heard you; I wa’n’t asleep.”
“Oh,” said Ewbert, apologetically, and he did not know quite what to do; he had an aimless wish for his wife, as if she would have known what to do. In her absence he decided to shut the door against the hens, who were returning adventurously to the threshold, and then he asked, “Is there something I can do for you? Make a fire for you to get up by” —
“I ha’n’t got any call to get up,” said Hilbrook; and, after giving Ewbert time to make the best of this declaration, he asked abruptly, “What was that you said about my wantin’ to be alive enough to know I was dead?”
“The consciousness of unconsciousness?”
“Ah!” the old man assented, as with satisfaction in having got the notion right; and then he added, with a certain defiance: “There ain’t anything in that. I got to thinking it over, when you was gone, and the whole thing went to pieces. That idea don’t prove anything at all, and all that we worked out of it had to go with it.”
“Well,” the minister returned, with an assumption of cosiness in his
tone which he did not feel, and feigning to make himself easy in the hard kitchen chair which he pulled up to the door of Hilbrook’s room, “let’s see if we can’t put that notion together again.”
“You can, if you want to,” said the old man, dryly “I got no interest in it any more; ‘twa’n’t nothing but a metaphysical toy, anyway.” He turned his head apathetically on the pillow, and no longer faced his visitor, who found it impossible in the conditions of tacit dismissal to philosophize further.
“I was sorry,” Ewbert began, “not to be able to speak with you after church, the other day. There were so many people” —
“That’s all right,” said Hilbrook unresentfully. “I hadn’t anything to say, in particular.”
“But I had,” the minister persisted. “I thought a great deal about you when I was away, and I went over our talks in my own mind a great many times. The more I thought about them, the more I believed that we had felt our way to some important truth in the matter. I don’t say final truth, for I don’t suppose that we shall ever reach that in this life.”
“Very likely,” Hilbrook returned, with his face to the wall. “I don’t see as it makes any difference; or if it does, I don’t care for it.”
Something occurred to Ewbert which seemed to him of more immediate usefulness than the psychological question. “Couldn’t I get you something to eat, Mr. Hilbrook? If you haven’t had any breakfast to-day, you must be hungry.”
“Yes, I’m hungry,” the old man assented, “but I don’t want to eat anything.”
Ewbert had risen hopefully in making his suggestion, but now his heart sank. Here, it seemed to him, a physician rather than a philosopher was needed, and at the sound of wheels on the wagon track to the door his imagination leaped to the miracle of the doctor’s providential advent. He hurried to the threshold and met the fish-man, who was about to announce himself with the handle of his whip on the clapboarding. He grasped the situation from the minister’s brief statement, and confessed that he had expected to find the old gentleman dead in his bed some day, and he volunteered to send some of the women folks from the farm up the road. When these came, concentrated in the person of the farmer’s bustling wife, who had a fire kindled in the stove and the kettle on before Ewbert could get away, he went for the doctor, and returned with him to find her in possession of everything in the house except the owner’s interest. Her usefulness had been arrested by an invisible but impassable barrier, though she had passed and re-passed the threshold of Hilbrook’s chamber with tea and milk toast. He said simply that he saw no object in eating; and he had not been sufficiently interested to turn his head and look at her in speaking to her.
With the doctor’s science he was as indifferent as with the farm-wife’s service. He submitted to have his pulse felt, and he could not help being prescribed for, but he would have no agency in taking his medicine. He said, as he had said to Mrs. Stephson about eating, that he saw no object in it.
The doctor retorted, with the temper of a man not used to having his will crossed, that he had better take it, if he had any object in living, and Hilbrook answered that he had none. In his absolute apathy he did not even ask to be let alone.
“You see,” the baffled doctor fumed in the conference that he had with Ewbert apart, “he doesn’t really need any medicine. There’s nothing the matter with him, and I only wanted to give him something to put an edge to his appetite. He’s got cranky living here alone; but there is such a thing as starving to death, and that’s the only thing Hilbrook’s in danger of. If you’re going to stay with him — he oughtn’t to be left alone” —
“I can come up, yes, certainly, after supper,” said Ewbert, and he fortified himself inwardly for the question this would raise with his wife.
“Then you must try to interest him in something. Get him to talking, and then let Mrs. Stephson come in with a good bowl of broth, and I guess we may trust Nature to do the rest.”
XVI.
When we speak of Nature, we figure her as one thing, with a fixed purpose and office in the universal economy; but she is an immense number of things, and her functions are inexpressibly varied. She includes decay as well as growth; she compasses death as well as birth. We call certain phenomena unnatural; but in a natural world how can anything be unnatural, except the supernatural? These facts gave Ewbert pause in view of the obstinate behavior of Ransom Hilbrook in dying for no obvious reason, and kept him from pronouncing it unnatural. The old man, he reflected, had really less reason to live than to die, if it came to reasons; for everything that had made the world home to him had gone out of it, and left him in exile here. The motives had ceased; the interests had perished; the strong personality that had persisted was solitary amid the familiar environment grown alien.
The wonder was that he should ever have been roused from his apathetic unfaith to inquiry concerning the world beyond this, and to a certain degree of belief in possibilities long abandoned by his imagination. Ewbert had assisted at the miracle of this resuscitation upon terms which, until he was himself much older, he could not question as to their beneficence, and in fact it never came to his being quite frank with himself concerning them. He kept his thoughts on this point in that state of solution which holds so many conjectures from precipitation in actual conviction.
But his wife had no misgivings. Her dread was that in his devotion to that miserable old man (as she called him, not always in compassion) he should again contribute to Hilbrook’s vitality at the expense, if not the danger, of his own. She of course expressed her joy that Ewbert had at last prevailed upon him to eat something, when the entreaty of his nurse and the authority of his doctor availed nothing; and of course she felt the pathos of his doing it out of affection for Ewbert, and merely to please him, as Hilbrook declared. It did not surprise her that any one should do anything for the love of Ewbert, but it is doubtful if she fully recognized the beauty of this last efflorescence of the aged life; and she perceived it her duty not to sympathize entirely with Ewbert’s morbid regret that it came too late. She was much more resigned than he to the will of Providence, and she urged a like submissiveness upon him.
“Don’t talk so!” he burst out. “It’s horrible!” It was in the first hours after Ewbert’s return from Hilbrook’s death-bed, and his spent nerves gave way in a gush of tears.
“I see what you mean,” she said, after a pause in which he controlled his sobs. “And I suppose,” she added, with a touch of bitterness, “that you blame me for taking you away from him here when he was coming every night and sapping your very life. You were very glad to have me do it at the time! And what use would there have been in your killing yourself, anyway? It wasn’t as if he were a young man with a career of usefulness before him, that might have been marred by his not believing this or that. He had been a complete failure every way, and the end of the world had come for him. What did it matter whether such a man believed that there was another world or not?”
“Emily! Emily!” the minister cried out. “What are you saying?”
Mrs. Ewbert broke down in her turn. “I don’t know what I’m saying!” she retorted from behind her handkerchief. “I’m trying to show you that it’s your duty to yourself — and to me — and to people who can know how to profit by your teaching and your example, not to give way as you’re doing, simply because a wornout old agnostic couldn’t keep his hold on the truth. I don’t know what your Rixonitism is for if it won’t let you wait upon the divine will in such a thing, too. You’re more conscientious than the worst kind of Congregationalist. And now for you to blame me” —
“Emily, I don’t blame you,” said her husband. “I blame myself.”
“And you see that that’s the same thing! You ought to thank me for saving your life; for it was just as if you were pouring your heart’s blood into him, and I could see you getting more anæmic every day. Even now you’re not half as well as when you got home! And yet I do believe that if you could bring old Hilbrook back into a w
orld that he was sick and tired of, you’d give your own life to do it.”
XVII.
There was reason and there was justice in what she said, though they were so chaotic in form, and Ewbert could not refuse to acquiesce.
After all, he had done what he could, and he would not abandon himself to a useless remorse. He rather set himself to study the lesson of old Hilbrook’s life, and in the funeral sermon that he preached he urged upon his hearers the necessity of keeping themselves alive through some relation to the undying frame of things, which they could do only by cherishing earthly ties; and when these were snapped in the removal of their objects, by attaching the broken threads through an effort of the will to yet other objects: the world could furnish these inexhaustibly. He touched delicately upon the peculiarities, the eccentricities, of the deceased, and he did cordial justice to his gentleness, his blameless, harmless life, his heroism on the battlefields of his country. He declared that he would not be the one to deny an inner piety, and certainly not a steadfast courage, in Hilbrook’s acceptance of whatever his sincere doubts implied.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1052
