Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “How do you know,” he entreated, “that my daughter wouldn’t be as glad to see me as I to see her?”

  “I don’t know it. I don’t know anything about it. That’s the reason I can’t have anything to do with it. I can’t justify myself in meddling with what doesn’t concern me, and in what I’m not sure but I should do more harm than good. I must say good-night. It’s getting late, and they will be anxious about me at home.” My heart smote me as I spoke the last word, which seemed a cruel recognition of Tedham’s homelessness. But I held out my hand to him for parting, and braced myself against my inward weakness.

  He might well have failed to see my hand. At any rate he did not take it. He turned and started to walk out of the woods by my side. We came presently to some open fields. Beyond them was the road, and after we had climbed the first wall, and found ourselves in a somewhat lighter place, he began to speak again.

  “I thought,” he said, “that if you had forgiven me, I could take it as a sign that I had suffered enough to satisfy everybody.”

  “We needn’t dwell upon my share in the matter, Tedham,” I answered, as kindly as I could. “That was entirely my own affair.”

  “You can’t think,” he pursued, “how much your letter was to me. It came when I was in perfect despair — in those awful first days when it seemed as if I could not bear it, and yet death itself would be no relief. Oh, they don’t know how much we suffer! If they did, they would forgive us anything, everything! Your letter was the first gleam of hope I had. I don’t know how you came to write it!”

  “Why, of course, Tedham, I felt sorry for you—”

  “Oh, did you, did you?” He began to cry, and as we hurried along over the fields, he sobbed with the wrenching, rending sobs of a man. “I knew you did, and I believe it was God himself that put it into your heart to write me that letter and take off that much of the blame from me. I said to myself that if I ever lived through it, I would try to tell you how much you had done for me. I don’t blame you for refusing to do what I’ve asked you now. I can see how you may think it isn’t best, and I thank you all the same for that letter. I’ve got it here.” He took a letter out of his breast-pocket, and showed it to me. “It isn’t the first time I’ve cried over it.”

  I did not say anything, for my heart was in my throat, and we stumbled along in silence till we climbed the last wall, and stood on the sidewalk that skirted the suburban highway. There, under the street-lamp, we stopped a moment, and it was he who now offered me his hand for parting. I took it, and we said, together, “Well, good-by,” and moved in different directions. I knew very well that I should turn back, and I had not gone a hundred feet away when I faced about. He was shambling off into the dusk, a most hapless figure. “Tedham!” I called after him.

  “Well?” he answered, and he halted instantly; he had evidently known what I would do as well as I had.

  We reapproached each other, and when we were again under the lamp I asked, a little awkwardly, “Are you in need of money, Tedham?”

  “I’ve got my ten years’ wages with me,” he said, with a lightness that must have come from his reviving hope in me. He drew his hand out of his pocket, and showed me the few dollars with which the State inhumanly turns society’s outcasts back into the world again.

  “Oh, that won’t do.” I said. “You must let me lend you something.”

  “Thank you,” he said, with perfect simplicity. “But you know I can’t tell when I shall be able to pay you.”

  “Oh, that’s all right.” I gave him a ten-dollar note which I had loose in my pocket; it was one that my wife had told me to get changed at the grocery near the station, and I had walked off to the old temple, or the old cockpit, and forgotten about it.

  Tedham took the note, but he said, holding it in his hand, “I would a million times rather you would let me go home with you and see Mrs. March a moment.”

  “I can’t do that, Tedham,” I answered, not unkindly, I hope. “I know what you mean, and I assure you that it wouldn’t be the least use. It’s because I feel so sure that my wife wouldn’t like my going to see Mrs. Hasketh, that I—”

  “Yes, I know that,” said Tedham. “That is the reason why I should like to see Mrs. March. I believe that if I could see her, I could convince her.”

  “She wouldn’t see you, my dear fellow,” said I, strangely finding myself on these caressing terms with him. “She entirely approved of what I did, the letter I wrote you, but I don’t believe she will ever feel just as I do about it. Women are different, you know.”

  “Yes,” he said, drawing a long, quivering breath.

  We stood there, helpless to part. He did not offer to leave me, and I could not find it in my heart to abandon him. After a most painful time, he drew another long breath, and asked, “Would you be willing to let me take the chances?”

  “Why, Tedham,” I began, weakly; and upon that he began walking with me again.

  III.

  I went to my wife’s room, after I reached the house, and faced her with considerable trepidation. I had to begin rather far off, but I certainly began in a way to lead up to the fact. “Isabel,” I said, “Tedham is out at last.” I had it on my tongue to say poor Tedham, but I suppressed the qualification in actual speech as likely to prove unavailing, or worse.

  “Is that what kept you!” she demanded, instantly. “Have you seen him?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. I added, “Though I am afraid I was rather late, anyway.”

  “I knew it was he, the moment you spoke,” she said, rising on the lounge where she had been lying, and sitting up on it; with the book she had been reading shut on her thumb, she faced me across the table where her lamp stood. “I had a presentiment when the children said there was some strange-looking man here, asking for you, and that they had told him where to find you. I couldn’t help feeling a little uneasy about it. What did he want with you, Basil?”

  “Well, he wanted to know where his daughter was.”

  “You didn’t tell him!”

  “I didn’t know. Then he wanted me to go to Mrs. Hasketh and find out.”

  “You didn’t say you would?”

  “I said most decidedly I wouldn’t,” I returned, and I recalled my severity to Tedham in refusing his prayer with more satisfaction than it had given me at the time. “I told him that I had no business to interfere, and that I was not sure it would be right even for me to meddle with the course things had taken.” I was aware of weakening my case as I went on; I had better left her with a dramatic conception of a downright and relentless refusal.

  “I don’t see why you felt called upon to make excuses to him, Basil. His impudence in coming to you, of all men, is perfectly intolerable. I suppose it was that sentimental letter you wrote him.”

  “You didn’t think it sentimental at the time, my dear. You approved of it.”

  “I didn’t approve of it, Basil; but if you felt so strongly that you ought to do it, I felt that I ought to let you. I have never interfered with your sense of duty, and I never will. But I am glad that you didn’t feel it your duty to that wretch to go and make more trouble on his account. He has made quite enough already; and it wasn’t his fault that you were not tried and convicted in his place.”

  “There wasn’t the slightest danger of that—”

  “He tried to put the suspicion on you, and to bring the disgrace on your wife and children.”

  “Well, my dear, we agreed to forget all that long ago. And I don’t think — I never thought — that Tedham would have let the suspicion rest on me. He merely wanted to give it that turn, when the investigation began, so as to gain time to get out to Canada.”

  My wife looked at me with a glance in which I saw tender affection dangerously near contempt. “You are a very forgiving man, Basil,” she said, and I looked down sheepishly. “Well, at any rate, you have had the sense not to mix yourself up in his business. Did he pretend that he came straight to you, as soon as he got out? I suppose he want
ed you to believe that he appealed to you before he tried anybody else.”

  “Yes, he stopped at the Reciprocity office to ask for my address, and after he had visited the cemetery he came on out here. And, if you must know, I think Tedham is still the old Tedham. Put him behind a good horse, with a pocketful of some one else’s money, in a handsome suit of clothes, and a game-and-fish dinner at Tafft’s in immediate prospect, and you couldn’t see any difference between the Tedham of to-day and the Tedham of ten years ago, except that the actual Tedham is clean-shaved and wears his hair cut rather close.”

  “Basil!”

  “Why do you object to the fact? Did you imagine he had changed inwardly?”

  “He must have suffered.”

  “But does suffering change people? I doubt it. Certain material accessories of Tedham’s have changed. But why should that change Tedham? Of course, he has suffered, and he suffers still. He threw out some hints of what he had been through that would have broken my heart if I hadn’t hardened it against him. And he loves his daughter still, and he wants to see her, poor wretch.”

  “I suppose he does!” sighed my wife.

  “He would hardly take no for an answer from me, when I said I wouldn’t go to the Haskeths for him; and when I fairly shook him off, he wanted me to ask you to go.”

  “And what did you say?” she asked, not at all with the resentment I had counted upon equally with the possible pathos; you never can tell in the least how any woman will take anything, which is perhaps the reason why men do not trust women more.

  “I told him that it would not be the smallest use to ask you; that you had forgiven that old affair as well as I had, but that women were different, and that I knew you wouldn’t even see him.”

  “Well, Basil, I don’t know what right you had to put me in that odious light,” said my wife.

  “Why, good heavens! Would you have seen him?”

  “I don’t know whether I would or not. That’s neither here nor there. I don’t think it was very nice of you to shift the whole responsibility on me.”

  “How did I do that? It seems to me that I kept the whole responsibility myself.”

  “Yes, altogether too much. What became of him, then?”

  “We walked along a little farther, and then—”

  “Then, what? Where is the man?”

  “He’s down in the parlor,” I answered hardily, in the voice of some one else.

  My wife stood up from the lounge, and I rose, too, for whatever penalty she chose to inflict.

  “Well, Basil, that is what I call a very cowardly thing.”

  “Yes, my dear, it is; I ought to have protected you against his appeal. But you needn’t see him. It’s practically the same as if he had not come here. I can send him away.”

  “And you call that practically the same! No, I am the one that will have to do the refusing now, and it is all off your shoulders. And you knew I was not feeling very well, either! Basil, how could you?”

  “I don’t know. The abject creature drove me out of my senses. I suppose that if I had respected him more, or believed in him more, I should have had more strength to refuse him. But his limpness seemed to impart itself to me, and I — I gave way. But really you needn’t see him, Isabel. I can tell him we have talked it over, and I concluded, entirely of myself, that it was best for you not to meet him, and—”

  “He would see through that in an instant. And if he is still the false creature you think he is, we owe him the truth, more than any other kind of man. You must understand that, Basil!”

  “Then you are going to—”

  “Don’t speak to me, Basil, please,” she said, and with an air of high offence she swept out of the room, and out to the landing of the stairs. There she hesitated a moment, and put her hand to her hair, mechanically, to feel if it were in order, and then she went on downstairs without further faltering. It was I who descended slowly, and with many misgivings.

  IV.

  Tedham was sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in, and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked, with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom exposed to the open air, gave him the effect of a workingman just out of the hospital. His eyes were deep in their sockets, and showed fine shadows in the overhead light, and I must say he looked very interesting.

  At the threshold my wife paused again; then she went forward, turning the gas up full as she passed under the chandelier, and gave him her hand, where he had risen from his chair.

  “I am glad to see you, Mr. Tedham,” she said; and I should have found my astonishment overpowering, I dare say, if I had not felt that I was so completely in the hands of Providence, when she added, “Won’t you come out to dinner with us? We were just going to sit down, when Mr. March came in. I never know when he will be back, when he starts off on these Saturday afternoon tramps of his.”

  The children seemed considerably mystified at the appearance of our guest, but they had that superior interest in the dinner appropriate to their years, and we got through the ordeal, in which, I believe, I suffered more than any one else, much better than I could have hoped. I could not help noting in Tedham a certain strangeness to the use of a four-pronged fork, at first, but he rapidly overcame this; and if it had not been for a terrible moment when, after one of the courses, he began, mechanically, to scrape his plate with his knife, there would not have been anything very odd in his behavior, or anything to show that it was the first dinner in polite society that he had taken for so many years.

  The man’s mind had apparently stiffened more than his body. It used to be very agile, if light, but it was not agile now. It worked slowly toward the topics which we found with difficulty, in our necessity of avoiding the only topics of real interest between us, and I could perceive that his original egotism, intensified by the long years in which he had only himself for company, now stood in the way of his entering into the matters brought forward, though he tried to do so. They were mostly in the form of reminiscences of this person and that whom we had known in common, and even in this shape they had to be very carefully handled so as not to develop anything leading. The thing that did most to relieve the embarrassment of the time was the sturdy hunger Tedham showed, and his delight in the cooking; I suppose that I cannot make others feel the pathos I found in this.

  After dinner we shut the children into the library, and kept Tedham with us in the parlor.

  My wife began at once to say, “Mr. March has told me why you wanted to see me, Mr. Tedham.”

  “Yes,” he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure his cause.

  “I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs. Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me.”

  Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily, “Won’t you try?”

  “Yes,” she answered, most unexpectedly to me, “I will try to see her. But if I do see her, and she refuses to tell me anything about your daughter, what will you do? Of course, I shall have to tell her I come from you, and for you.”

  “I thought,” Tedham ventured, with a sort of timorous slyness, “that perhaps you might approach it casually, without any reference to me.”

  “No, I couldn’t do that,” my wife said.

  He went on as if he had not heard her: “If she did not know that the inquiries were made in my behalf, she might be willing to say whether my daughter was with her.”

  There was in this suggestion a quality of Tedham’s old insinuation, but coarser, inferior, as if his insinuation had degenerated into something like mere animal cunning. I felt rather ashamed for him, but to my surprise, my wife seemed only to feel sorry, and did not repel his suggestion in the way I had thought she would.

&nb
sp; “No,” she said, “that wouldn’t do. She has kept account of the time, you may be sure, and she would ask me at once if I was inquiring in your behalf, and I should have to tell her the truth.”

  “I didn’t know,” he returned, “but you might evade the point, somehow. So much being at stake,” he added, as if explaining.

  Still my wife was not severe with him. “I don’t understand, quite,” she said.

  “Being the turning-point in my life, I can’t begin to do anything, to be anything, till I have seen my daughter. I don’t know where to find myself. If I could see her, and she did not cast me off, then I should know where I was. Or, if she did, I should. You understand that.”

  “But, of course, there is another point of view.”

  “My daughter’s?”

  “Mrs. Hasketh’s.”

  “I don’t care for Mrs. Hasketh. She did what she has done for the child’s sake. It was the best thing for the child at the time — the only thing; I know that. But I agreed to it because I had to.”

  He continued: “I consider that I have expiated the wrong I did. There is no sense in the whole thing, if I haven’t. They might as well have let me go in the beginning. Don’t you think that ten years out of my life is enough for a thing that I never intended to go as far as it did, and a thing that I was led into, partly, for the sake of others? I have tried to reason it out, and not from my own point of view at all, and that is the way I feel about it. Is it to go on forever, and am I never to be rid of the consequences of a single act? If you and Mr. March could condone—”

  “Oh, you mustn’t reason from us,” my wife broke in. “We are very silly people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have got to reckon with the world at large.”

  “I have reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the reckoning. But why shouldn’t my daughter look at this thing as you do?”

  Instead of answering, my wife asked, “When did you hear from her last?”