Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  XII.

  He arrived at Upper Ashton Falls long enough before the early autumnal dusk to note that the crimson buds of the maples were now their crimson leaves, but he kept as close to the past as he could by not going to find Barbara before the hour of the evening when he had turned from her gate without daring to see her. It was a soft October evening now, as it was a soft May evening then; and there was a mystical hint of unity in the like feel of the dull, mild air. Again voices were coming out of the open doors and windows of the house, and they were the same voices that he had last heard there.

  He knocked, and after a moment of startled hush within Juliet Bingham came to the door. “Why, Mr. Langbourne!” she screamed.

  “I — I should like to come in, if you will let me,” he gasped out.

  “Why, certainly, Mr. Langbourne,” she returned.

  He had not dwelt so long and so intently on the meeting at hand without considering how he should account for his coming, and he had formulated a confession of his motives. But he had never meant to make it to Juliet Bingham, and he now found himself unable to allege a word in explanation of his presence. He followed her into the parlor. Barbara silently gave him her hand and then remained passive in the background, where Dickery held aloof, smiling in what seemed his perpetual enjoyment of the Juliet Bingham joke. She at once put herself in authority over the situation; she made Langbourne let her have his hat; she seated him when and where she chose; she removed and put back the lampshades; she pulled up and pulled down the window-blinds; she shut the outer door because of the night air, and opened it because of the unseasonable warmth within. She excused Mrs. Simpson’s absence on account of a headache, and asked him if he would not have a fan; when he refused it she made him take it, and while he sat helplessly dangling it from his hand, she asked him about the summer he had had, and whether he had passed it in New York. She was very intelligent about the heat in New York, and tactful in keeping the one-sided talk from falling. Barbara said nothing after a few faint attempts to take part in it, and Langbourne made briefer and briefer answers. His reticence seemed only to heighten Juliet Bingham’s satisfaction, and she said, with a final supremacy, that she had been intending to go out with Mr. Dickery to a business meeting of the book-club, but they would be back before Langbourne could get away; she made him promise to wait for them. He did not know if Barbara looked any protest, — at least she spoke none, — and Juliet went out with Dickery. She turned at the door to bid Barbara say, if any one called, that she was at the book-club meeting. Then she disappeared, but reappeared and called, “See here, a minute, Bab!” and at the outer threshold she detained Barbara in vivid whisper, ending aloud, “Now you be sure to do both, Bab! Aunt Elmira will tell you where the things are.” Again she vanished, and was gone long enough to have reached the gate and come back from it. She was renewing all her whispered and out-spoken charges when Dickery showed himself at her side, put his hand under her elbow, and wheeled her about, and while she called gayly over her shoulder to the others, “Did you ever?” walked her definitively out of the house.

  Langbourne did not suffer the silence which followed her going to possess him. What he had to do he must do quickly, and he said, “Miss Simpson, may I ask you one question?”

  “Why, if you won’t expect me to answer it,” she suggested quaintly.

  “You must do as you please about that. It has to come before I try to excuse myself for being here; it’s the only excuse I can offer. It’s this: Did you send Miss Bingham to get back your letters from me last spring?”

  “Why, of course!”

  “I mean, was it your idea?”

  “We thought it would be better.”

  The evasion satisfied Langbourne, but he asked, “Had I given you some cause to distrust me at that time?”

  “Oh, no,” she protested. “We got to talking it over, and — and we thought we had better.”

  “Because I had come here without being asked?”

  “No, no; it wasn’t that,” the girl protested.

  “I know I oughtn’t to have come. I know I oughtn’t to have written to you in the beginning, but you had let me write, and I thought you would let me come. I tried always to be sincere with you; to make you feel that you could trust me. I believe that I am an honest man; I thought I was a better man for having known you through your letters. I couldn’t tell you how much they had been to me. You seemed to think, because I lived in a large place, that I had a great many friends; but I have very few; I might say I hadn’t any — such as I thought I had when I was writing to you. Most of the men I know belong to some sort of clubs; but I don’t. I went to New York when I was feeling alone in the world, — it was from something that had happened to me partly through my own fault, — and I’ve never got over being alone there. I’ve never gone into society; I don’t know what society is, and I suppose that’s why I am acting differently from a society man now. The only change I ever had from business was reading at night: I’ve got a pretty good library. After I began to get your letters, I went out more — to the theatre, and lectures, and concerts, and all sorts of things — so that I could have something interesting to write about; I thought you’d get tired of always hearing about me. And your letters filled up my life, so that I didn’t seem alone any more. I read them all hundreds of times; I should have said that I knew them by heart, if they had not been as fresh at last as they were at first. I seemed to hear you talking in them.” He stopped as if withholding himself from what he had nearly said without intending, and resumed: “It’s some comfort to know that you didn’t want them back because you doubted me, or my good faith.”

  “Oh, no, indeed, Mr. Langbourne,” said Barbara compassionately.

  “Then why did you?”

  “I don’t know. We—”

  “No; not ‘we.’ You!”

  She did not answer for so long that he believed she resented his speaking so peremptorily and was not going to answer him at all. At last she said, “I thought you would rather give them back.” She turned and looked at him, with the eyes which he knew saw his face dimly, but saw his thought clearly.

  “What made you think that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Didn’t you want to?”

  He knew that the fact which their words veiled was now the first thing in their mutual consciousness. He spoke the truth in saying, “No, I never wanted to,” but this was only a mechanical truth, and he knew it. He had an impulse to put the burden of the situation on her, and press her to say why she thought he wished to do so; but his next emotion was shame for this impulse. A thousand times, in these reveries in which he had imagined meeting her, he had told her first of all how he had overheard her talking in the room next his own in the hotel, and of the power her voice had instantly and lastingly had upon him. But now, with a sense spiritualized by her presence, he perceived that this, if it was not unworthy, was secondary, and that the right to say it was not yet established. There was something that must come before this, — something that could alone justify him in any further step. If she could answer him first as he wished, then he might open his whole heart to her, at whatever cost; he was not greatly to blame, if he did not realize that the cost could not be wholly his, as he asked, remotely enough from her question, “After I wrote that I was coming up here, and you did not answer me, did you think I was coming?”

  She did not answer, and he felt that he had been seeking a mean advantage. He went on: “If you didn’t expect it, if you never thought that I was coming, there’s no need for me to tell you anything else.”

  Her face turned towards him a very little, but not so much as even to get a sidelong glimpse of him; it was as if it were drawn by a magnetic attraction; and she said, “I didn’t know but you would come.”

  “Then I will tell you why I came — the only thing that gave me the right to come against your will, if it was against it. I came to ask you to marry me. Will you?”

  She now turned and looked fully at him, th
ough he was aware of being a mere blur in her near-sighted vision.

  “Do you mean to ask it now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And have you wished to ask it ever since you first saw me?”

  He tried to say that he had, but he could not; he could only say, “I wish to ask it now more than ever.”

  She shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure how you want me to answer you.”

  “Not sure?”

  “No. I’m afraid I might disappoint you again.”

  He could not make out whether she was laughing at him. He sat, not knowing what to say, and he blurted out, “Do you mean that you won’t?”

  “I shouldn’t want you to make another mistake.”

  “I don’t know what you” — he was going to say “mean,” but he substituted— “wish. If you wish for more time, I can wait as long as you choose.”

  “No, I might wish for time, if there was anything more. But if there’s nothing else you have to tell me — then, no, I cannot marry you.”

  Langbourne rose, feeling justly punished, somehow, but bewildered as much as humbled, and stood stupidly unable to go. “I don’t know what you could expect me to say after you’ve refused me—”

  “Oh, I don’t expect anything.”

  “But there is something I should like to tell you. I know that I behaved that night as if — as if I hadn’t come to ask you — what I have; I don’t blame you for not trusting me now. But it is no use to tell you what I intended if it is all over.”

  He looked down into his hat, and she said in a low voice, “I think I ought to know. Won’t you — sit down?”

  He sat down again. “Then I will tell you at the risk of — But there’s nothing left to lose! You know how it is, when we think about a person or a place before we’ve seen them: we make some sort of picture of them, and expect them to be like it. I don’t know how to say it; you do look more like what I thought than you did at first. I suppose I must seem a fool to say it; but I thought you were tall, and that you were — well! — rather masterful—”

  “Like Juliet Bingham?” she suggested, with a gleam in the eye next him.

  “Yes, like Juliet Bingham. It was your voice made me think — it was your voice that first made me want to see you, that made me write to you, in the beginning. I heard you talking that night in the hotel, where you left that circular; you were in the room next to mine; and I wanted to come right up here then; but I had to go back to New York, and so I wrote to you. When your letters came, I always seemed to hear you speaking in them.”

  “And when you saw me you were disappointed. I knew it.”

  “No; not disappointed—”

  “Why not? My voice didn’t go with my looks; it belonged to a tall, strong-willed girl.”

  “No,” he protested. “As soon as I got away it was just as it always had been. I mean that your voice and your looks went together again.”

  “As soon as you got away?” the girl questioned.

  “I mean — What do you care for it, anyway!” he cried, in self-scornful exasperation.

  “I know,” she said thoughtfully, “that my voice isn’t like me; I’m not good enough for it. It ought to be Juliet Bingham’s—”

  “No, no!” he interrupted, with a sort of disgust that seemed not to displease her, “I can’t imagine it!”

  “But we can’t any of us have everything, and she’s got enough as it is. She’s a head higher than I am, and she wants to have her way ten times as bad.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Langbourne began. “I — but you must think me enough of a simpleton already.”

  “Oh, no, not near,” she declared. “I’m a good deal of a simpleton myself at times.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said desperately; “I love you.”

  “Ah, that belongs to the time when you thought I looked differently.”

  “I don’t want you to look differently. I—”

  “You can’t expect me to believe that now. It will take time for me to do that.”

  “I will give you time,” he said, so simply that she smiled.

  “If it was my voice you cared for I should have to live up to it, somehow, before you cared for me. I’m not certain that I ever could. And if I couldn’t? You see, don’t you?”

  “I see that I was a fool to tell you what I have,” he so far asserted himself. “But I thought I ought to be honest.”

  “Oh, you’ve been honest!” she said.

  “You have a right to think that I am a flighty, romantic person,” he resumed, “and I don’t blame you. But if I could explain, it has been a very real experience to me. It was your nature that I cared for in your voice. I can’t tell you just how it was; it seemed to me that unless I could hear it again, and always, my life would not be worth much. This was something deeper and better than I could make you understand. It wasn’t merely a fancy; I do not want you to believe that.”

  “I don’t know whether fancies are such very bad things. I’ve had some of my own,” Barbara suggested.

  He sat still with his hat between his hands, as if he could not find a chance of dismissing himself, and she remained looking down at her skirt where it tented itself over the toe of her shoe. The tall clock in the hall ticked second after second. It counted thirty of them at least before he spoke, after a preliminary noise in his throat.

  “There is one thing I should like to ask: If you had cared for me, would you have been offended at my having thought you looked differently?”

  She took time to consider this. “I might have been vexed, or hurt, I suppose, but I don’t see how I could really have been offended.”

  “Then I understand,” he began, in one of his inductive emotions; but she rose nervously, as if she could not sit still, and went to the piano. The Spanish song he had given her was lying open upon it, and she struck some of the chords absently, and then let her fingers rest on the keys.

  “Miss Simpson,” he said, coming stiffly forward, “I should like to hear you sing that song once more before I — Won’t you sing it?”

  “Why, yes,” she said, and she slipped laterally into the piano-seat.

  At the end of the first stanza he gave a long sigh, and then he was silent to the close.

  As she sounded the last notes of the accompaniment Juliet Bingham burst into the room with somehow the effect to Langbourne of having lain in wait outside for that moment.

  “Oh, I just knew it!” she shouted, running upon them. “I bet John anything! Oh, I’m so happy it’s come out all right; and now I’m going to have the first—”

  She lifted her arms as if to put them round his neck; he stood dazed, and Barbara rose from the piano-stool and confronted her with nothing less than horror in her face.

  Juliet Bingham was beginning again, “Why, haven’t you—”

  “No!” cried Barbara. “I forgot all about what you said! I just happened to sing it because he asked me,” and she ran from the room.

  “Well, if I ever!” said Juliet Bingham, following her with astonished eyes. Then she turned to Langbourne. “It’s perfectly ridiculous, and I don’t see how I can ever explain it. I don’t think Barbara has shown a great deal of tact,” and Juliet Bingham was evidently prepared to make up the defect by a diplomacy which she enjoyed. “I don’t know where to begin exactly; but you must certainly excuse my — manner, when I came in.”

  “Oh, certainly,” said Langbourne in polite mystification.

  “It was all through a misunderstanding that I don’t think I was to blame for, to say the least; but I can’t explain it without making Barbara appear perfectly — Mr. Langbourne, will you tell whether you are engaged?”

  “No! Miss Simpson has declined my offer,” he answered.

  “Oh, then it’s all right,” said Juliet Bingham, but Langbourne looked as if he did not see why she should say that. “Then I can understand; I see the whole thing now; and I didn’t want to make another mistake. Ah — won’t you — sit down?”
/>   “Thank you. I believe I will go.”

  “But you have a right to know—”

  “Would my knowing alter the main facts?” he asked dryly.

  “Well, no, I can’t say it would,” Juliet Bingham replied with an air of candor. “And, as you say, perhaps it’s just as well,” she added with an air of relief.

  Langbourne had not said it, but he acquiesced with a faint sigh, and absently took the hand of farewell which Juliet Bingham gave him. “I know Barbara will be very sorry not to see you; but I guess it’s better.”

  In spite of the supremacy which the turn of affairs had given her, Juliet Bingham looked far from satisfied, and she let Langbourne go with a sense of inconclusiveness which showed in the parting inclination towards him; she kept the effect of this after he turned from her.

  He crept light-headedly down the brick walk with a feeling that the darkness was not half thick enough, though it was so thick that it hid from him a figure that leaned upon the gate and held it shut, as if forcibly to interrupt his going.

  “Mr. Langbourne,” said the voice of this figure, which, though so unnaturally strained, he knew for Barbara’s voice, “you have got to know! I’m ashamed to tell you, but I should be more ashamed not to, after what’s happened. Juliet made me promise when she went out to the book-club meeting that if I — if you — if it turned out as you wanted, I would sing that song as a sign — It was just a joke — like my sending her picture. It was my mistake and I am sorry, and I beg your pardon — I—”

  She stopped with a quick catch in her breath, and the darkness round them seemed to become luminous with the light of hope that broke upon him within.

  “But if there really was no mistake,” he began. He could not get further.