“No,” said Barbara, “we hadn’t got round to it, quite.”
“Oh, do!” Langbourne entreated, and he wondered that he had not asked her before; it would have saved them from each ether.
“Wait a moment,” cried Juliet Bingham, and she gulped the last draught of her lemonade upon a final morsel of sponge-cake, and was down at the piano while still dusting the crumbs from her fingers. She struck the refractory sheet of music flat upon the rack with her palm, and then tilted her head over her shoulder towards Langbourne, who had risen with some vague notion of turning the sheets of the song. “Do you sing?”
“Oh, no. But I like—”
“Are you ready, Bab?” she asked, ignoring him; and she dashed into the accompaniment.
He sat down in his chair behind the two girls, where they could not see his face.
Barbara began rather weakly, but her voice gathered strength, and then poured full volume to the end, where it weakened again. He knew that she was taking refuge from him in the song, and in the magic of her voice he escaped from the disappointment he had been suffering. He let his head drop and his eyelids fall, and in the rapture of her singing he got back what he had lost; or rather, he lost himself again to the illusion which had grown so precious to him.
Juliet Bingham sounded the last note almost as she rose from the piano; Barbara passed her handkerchief over her forehead, as if to wipe the heat from it, but he believed that this was a ruse to dry her eyes in it: they shone with a moist brightness in the glimpse he caught of them. He had risen, and they all stood talking; or they all stood, and Juliet talked. She did not offer to sit down again, and after stiffly thanking them both, he said he must be going, and took leave of them. Juliet gave his hand a nervous grip; Barbara’s touch was lax and cold; the parting with her was painful; he believed that she felt it so as much as he.
The girls’ voices followed him down the walk, — Juliet’s treble, and Barbara’s contralto, — and he believed that they were making talk purposely against a pressure of silence, and did not know what they were saying. It occurred to him that they had not asked how long he was staying, or invited him to come again: he had not thought to ask if he might; and in the intolerable inconclusiveness of this ending he faltered at the gate till the lights in the windows of the parlor disappeared, as if carried into the hall, and then they twinkled into darkness. From an upper entry window, which reddened with a momentary flush and was then darkened, a burst of mingled laughter came. The girls must have thought him beyond hearing, and he fancied the laugh a burst of hysterical feeling in them both.
IX.
Langbourne went to bed as soon as he reached his hotel because he found himself spent with the experience of the evening; but as he rested from his fatigue he grew wakeful, and he tried to get its whole measure and meaning before him. He had a methodical nature, with a necessity for order in his motions, and he now balanced one fact against another none the less passionately because the process was a series of careful recognitions. He perceived that the dream in which he had lived for the year past was not wholly an illusion. One of the girls whom he had heard but not seen was what he had divined her to be: a dominant influence, a control to which the other was passively obedient. He had not erred greatly as to the face or figure of the superior, but he had given all the advantages to the wrong person. The voice, indeed, the spell which had bound him, belonged with the one to whom he had attributed it, and the qualities with which it was inextricably blended in his fancy were hers; she was more like his ideal than the other, though he owned that the other was a charming girl too, and that in the thin treble of her voice lurked a potential fascination which might have made itself ascendently felt if he had happened to feel it first.
There was a dangerous instant in which he had a perverse question of changing his allegiance. This passed into another moment, almost as perilous, of confusion through a primal instinct of the man’s by which he yields a double or a divided allegiance and simultaneously worships at two shrines; in still another breath he was aware that this was madness.
If he had been younger, he would have had no doubt as to his right in the circumstances. He had simply corresponded all winter with Miss Simpson; but though he had opened his heart freely and had invited her to the same confidence with him, he had not committed himself, and he had a right to drop the whole affair. She would have no right to complain; she had not committed herself either: they could both come off unscathed. But he was now thirty-five, and life had taught him something concerning the rights of others which he could not ignore. By seeking her confidence and by offering her his, he had given her a claim which was none the less binding because it was wholly tacit. There had been a time when he might have justified himself in dropping the affair; that was when she had failed to answer his letter; but he had come to see her in defiance of her silence, and now he could not withdraw, simply because he was disappointed, without cruelty, without atrocity.
This was what the girl’s wistful eyes said to him; this was the reproach of her trembling lips; this was the accusation of her dejected figure, as she drooped in vision before him on the piano-stool and passed her hand soundlessly over the key-board. He tried to own to her that he was disappointed, but he could not get the words out of his throat; and now in her presence, as it were, he was not sure that he was disappointed.
X.
He woke late, with a longing to put his two senses of her to the proof of day; and as early in the forenoon as he could hope to see her, he walked out towards her aunt’s house. It was a mild, dull morning, with a misted sunshine; in the little crimson tassels of the budded maples overhead the bees were droning.
The street was straight, and while he was yet a good way off he saw the gate open before the house, and a girl whom he recognized as Miss Bingham close it behind her. She then came down under the maples towards him, at first swiftly, and then more and more slowly, until finally she faltered to a stop. He quickened his own pace and came up to her with a “Good-morning” called to her and a lift of his hat. She returned neither salutation, and said, “I was coming to see you, Mr. Langbourne.” Her voice was still a silver bell, but it was not gay, and her face was severely unsmiling.
“To see me?” he returned. “Has anything—”
“No, there’s nothing the matter. But — I should like to talk with you.” She held a little packet, tied with blue ribbon, in her intertwined hands, and she looked urgently at him.
“I shall be very glad,” Langbourne began, but she interrupted, —
“Should you mind walking down to the Falls?”
He understood that for some reason she did not wish him to pass the house, and he bowed. “Wherever you like. I hope Mrs. Simpson is well? And Miss Simpson?”
“Oh, perfectly,” said Miss Bingham, and they fenced with some questions and answers of no interest till they had walked back through the village to the Falls at the other end of it, where the saw in a mill was whirring through a long pine log, and the water, streaked with sawdust, was spreading over the rocks below and flowing away with a smooth swiftness. The ground near the mill was piled with fresh-sawed, fragrant lumber and strewn with logs.
Miss Bingham found a comfortable place on one of the logs, and began abruptly:
“You may think it’s pretty strange, Mr. Langbourne, but I want to talk with you about Miss Simpson.” She seemed to satisfy a duty to convention by saying Miss Simpson at the outset, and after that she called her friend Barbara. “I’ve brought you your letters to her,” and she handed him the packet she had been holding. “Have you got hers with you?”
“They are at the hotel,” answered Langbourne.
“Well, that’s right, then. I thought perhaps you had brought them. You see,” Miss Bingham continued, much more cold-bloodedly than Langbourne thought she need, “we talked it over last night, and it’s too silly. That’s the way Barbara feels herself. The fact is,” she went on confidingly, and with the air of saying something that he
would appreciate, “I always thought it was some young man, and so did Barbara; or I don’t believe she would ever have answered your first letter.”
Langbourne knew that he was not a young man in a young girl’s sense; but no man likes to have it said that he is old. Besides, Miss Bingham herself was not apparently in her first quarter of a century, and probably Miss Simpson would not see the earliest twenties again. He thought none the worse of her for that; but he felt that he was not so unequally matched in time with her that she need take the attitude with regard to him which Miss Bingham indicated. He was not the least gray nor the least bald, and his tall figure had kept its youthful lines.
Perhaps his face manifested something of his suppressed resentment. At any rate, Miss Bingham said apologetically, “I mean that if we had known it was a serious person we should have acted differently. I oughtn’t to have let her thank you for those seedsman’s catalogues; but I thought it couldn’t do any harm. And then, after your letters began to come, we didn’t know just when to stop them. To tell you the truth, Mr. Langbourne, we got so interested we couldn’t bear to stop them. You wrote so much about your life in New York, that it was like a visit there every week; and it’s pretty quiet at Upper Ashton in the winter time.”
She seemed to refer this fact to Langbourne for sympathetic appreciation; he said mechanically, “Yes.”
She resumed: “But when your picture came, I said it had got to stop; and so we just sent back my picture, — or I don’t know but what Barbara did it without asking me, — and we did suppose that would be the last of it; when you wrote back you were coming here, we didn’t believe you really would unless we said so. That’s all there is about it; and if there is anybody to blame, I am the one. Barbara would never have done it in the world if I hadn’t put her up to it.”
In those words the implication that Miss Bingham had operated the whole affair finally unfolded itself. But distasteful as the fact was to Langbourne, and wounding as was the realization that he had been led on by this witness of his infatuation for the sake of the entertainment which his letters gave two girls in the dull winter of a mountain village, there was still greater pain, with an additional embarrassment, in the regret which the words conveyed. It appeared that it was not he who had done the wrong; he had suffered it, and so far from having to offer reparation to a young girl for having unwarrantably wrought her up expect of him a step from which he afterwards recoiled, he had the duty of forgiving her a trespass on his own invaded sensibilities. It was humiliating to his vanity; it inflicted a hurt to something better than his vanity. He began very uncomfortably: “It’s all right, as far as I’m concerned. I had no business to address Miss Simpson in the first place—”
“Well,” Miss Bingham interrupted, “that’s what I told Barbara; but she got to feeling badly about it; she thought if you had taken the trouble to send back the circular that she dropped in the hotel, she couldn’t do less than acknowledge it, and she kept on so about it that I had to let her. That was the first false step.”
These words, while they showed Miss Simpson in a more amiable light, did not enable Langbourne to see Miss Bingham’s merit so clearly. In the methodical and consecutive working of his emotions, he was aware that it was no longer a question of divided allegiance, and that there could never be any such question again. He perceived that Miss Bingham had not such a good figure as he had fancied the night before, and that her eyes were set rather too near together. While he dropped his own eyes, and stood trying to think what he should say in answer to her last speech, her high, sweet voice tinkled out in gay challenge, “How do, John?”
He looked up and saw a square-set, brown-faced young man advancing towards them in his shirt-sleeves; he came deliberately, finding his way in and out among the logs, till he stood smiling down, through a heavy mustache and thick black lashes, into the face of the girl, as if she were some sort of joke. The sun struck into her face as she looked up at him, and made her frown with a knot between her brows that pulled her eyes still closer together, and she asked, with no direct reference to his shirt-sleeves,— “A’n’t you forcing the season?”
“Don’t want to let the summer get the start of you,” the young man generalized, and Miss Bingham said, —
“Mr. Langbourne, Mr. Dickery.” The young man silently shook hands with Langbourne, whom he took into the joke of Miss Bingham with another smile; and she went on: “Say, John, I wish you’d tell Jenny I don’t see why we shouldn’t go this afternoon, after all.”
“All right,” said the young man.
“I suppose you’re coming too?” she suggested.
“Hadn’t heard of it,” he returned.
“Well, you have now. You’ve got to be ready at two o’clock.”
“That so?” the young fellow inquired. Then he walked away among the logs, as casually as he had arrived, and Miss Bingham rose and shook some bits of bark from her skirt.
“Mr. Dickery is owner of the mills,” she explained, and she explored Langbourne’s face for an intelligence which she did not seem to find there. He thought, indifferently enough, that this young man had heard the two girls speak of him, and had satisfied a natural curiosity in coming to look him over; it did not occur to him that he had any especial relation to Miss Bingham.
She walked up into the village with Langbourne, and he did not know whether he was to accompany her home or not. But she gave him no sign of dismissal till she put her hand upon her gate to pull it open without asking him to come in. Then he said, “I will send Miss Simpson’s letters to her at once.”
“Oh, any time will do, Mr. Langbourne,” she returned sweetly. Then, as if it had just occurred to her, she added, “We’re going after May-flowers this afternoon. Wouldn’t you like to come too?”
“I don’t know,” he began, “whether I shall have the time—”
“Why, you’re not going away to-day!”
“I expected — I — But if you don’t think I shall be intruding—”
“Why, I should be delighted to have you. Mr. Dickery’s going, and Jenny Dickery, and Barbara. I don’t believe it will rain.”
“Then, if I may,” said Langbourne.
“Why, certainly, Mr. Langbourne!” she cried, and he started away. But he had gone only a few rods when he wheeled about and hurried back. The girl was going up the walk to the house, looking over her shoulder after him; at his hurried return she stopped and came down to the gate again.
“Miss Bingham, I think — I think I had better not go.”
“Why, just as you feel about it, Mr. Langbourne,” she assented.
“I will bring the letters this evening, if you will let me — if Miss Simpson — if you will be at home.”
“We shall be very happy to see you, Mr. Langbourne,” said the girl formally, and then he went back to his hotel.
XI.
Langbourne could not have told just why he had withdrawn his acceptance of Miss Bingham’s invitation. If at the moment it was the effect of a quite reasonless panic, he decided later that it was because he wished to think. It could not be said, however, that he did think, unless thinking consists of a series of dramatic representations which the mind makes to itself from a given impulse, and which it is quite powerless to end. All the afternoon, which Langbourne spent in his room, his mind was the theatre of scenes with Miss Simpson, in which he perpetually evolved the motives governing him from the beginning, and triumphed out of his difficulties and embarrassments. Her voice, as it acquiesced in all, no longer related itself to that imaginary personality which had inhabited his fancy. That was gone irrevocably; and the voice belonged to the likeness of Barbara, and no other; from her similitude, little, quaint, with her hair of cloudy red and her large, dim-sighted eyes, it played upon the spiritual sense within him with the coaxing, drolling, mocking charm which he had felt from the first. It blessed him with intelligent and joyous forgiveness. But as he stood at her gate that evening this unmerited felicity fell from him. He now really hea
rd her voice, through the open doorway, but perhaps because it was mixed with other voices — the treble of Miss Bingham, and the bass of a man who must be the Mr. Dickery he had seen at the saw mills — he turned and hurried back to his hotel, where he wrote a short letter saying that he had decided to take the express for New York that night. With an instinctive recognition of her authority in the affair, or with a cowardly shrinking from direct dealing with Barbara, he wrote to Juliet Bingham, and he addressed to her the packet of letters which he sent for Barbara. Superficially, he had done what he had no choice but to do. He had been asked to return her letters, and he had returned them, and brought the affair to an end.
In his long ride to the city he assured himself in vain that he was doing right if he was not sure of his feelings towards the girl. It was quite because he was not sure of his feeling that he could not be sure he was not acting falsely and cruelly.
The fear grew upon him through the summer, which he spent in the heat and stress of the town. In his work he could forget a little the despair in which he lived; but in a double consciousness like that of the hypochondriac, the girl whom it seemed to him he had deserted was visibly and audibly present with him. Her voice was always in his inner ear, and it visualized her looks and movements to his inner eye.
Now he saw and understood at last that what his heart had more than once misgiven him might be the truth, and that though she had sent back his letters, and asked her own in return, it was not necessarily her wish that he should obey her request. It might very well have been an experiment of his feeling towards her, a mute quest of the impression she had made upon him, a test of his will and purpose, an overture to a clearer and truer understanding between them. This misgiving became a conviction from which he could not escape.
He believed too late that he had made a mistake, that he had thrown away the supreme chance of his life. But was it too late? When he could bear it no longer, he began to deny that it was too late. He denied it even to the pathetic presence which haunted him, and in which the magic of her voice itself was merged at last, so that he saw her more than he heard her. He overbore her weak will with his stronger will, and set himself strenuously to protest to her real presence what he now always said to her phantom. When his partner came back from his vacation, Langbourne told him that he was going to take a day or two off.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1055
