Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  He looked at her in questioning amaze.

  “I think I was very pert with you all day, — and I don’t think I’m pert naturally, — taking you up about the landscape, and twitting you about the Saguenay scenery and legends, you know. But I thought you were trying to put me down, — you are rather down-putting at times, — and I admired you, and I couldn’t bear it.”

  “Oh!” said Mr. Arbuton. He dimly recollected, as if it had been in some former state of existence, that there were things he had not approved in Kitty that day, but now he met her penitence with a smile and another pressure of the hand. “Well, then,” he said, “if you don’t like to recall that time, let’s go back of it to the day I met you on Goat Island Bridge at Niagara.”

  “O, did you see me there? I thought you didn’t; but I saw you. You had on a blue cravat,” she answered; and he returned with as much the air of coherency as if really continuing the same train of thought, “You won’t think it necessary to visit Boston, now, I suppose,” and he smiled triumphantly upon her. “I fancy that I have now a better right to introduce you there than your South End friends.”

  Kitty smiled, too. “I’m willing to wait. But don’t you think you ought to see Eriecreek before you promise too solemnly? I can’t allow that there’s anything serious, till you’ve seen me at home.”

  They had been going, for no reason that they knew, back to the country inn near which you purchase admittance to a certain view of the falls, and now they sat down on the piazza, somewhat apart from other people who were there, as Mr. Arbuton said, “O, I shall visit Eriecreek soon enough. But I shall not come to put myself or you to the proof. I don’t ask to see you at home before claiming you forever.”

  Kitty murmured, “Ah! you are more generous than I was.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “O yes, you are. But I wonder if you’ll be able to find Eriecreek.”

  “Is it on the map?”

  “It’s on the county map; and so is Uncle Jack’s lot on it, and a picture of his house, for that matter. They’ll all be standing on the piazza — something like this one — when you come up. You’ll know Uncle Jack by his big gray beard, and his bushy eyebrows, and his boots, which he won’t have blacked, and his Leghorn hat, which we can’t get him to change. The girls will be there with him, — Virginia all red and heated with having got supper for you, and Rachel with the family mending in her hand, — and they’ll both come running down the walk to welcome you. How will you like it?”

  Mr. Arbuton suspected the gross caricature of this picture, and smiled securely at it. “I shall like it well enough,” he said, “if you run down with them. Where shall you be?”

  “I forgot. I shall be up stairs in my room, peeping through the window-blinds, to see how you take it. Then I shall come down, and receive you with dignity in the parlor, but after supper you’ll have to excuse me while I help with the dishes. Uncle Jack will talk to you. He’ll talk to you about Boston. He’s much fonder of Boston than you are, even.” And here Kitty broke off with a laugh, thinking what a very different Boston her Uncle Jack’s was from Mr. Arbuton’s, and maliciously diverted with what she conceived of their mutual bewilderment in trying to get some common stand-point. He had risen from his chair, and was now standing a few paces from her, looking toward the fall, as if by looking he might delay the coming of the colonel and Fanny.

  She checked her merriment a moment to take note of two ladies who were coming up the path towards the porch where she was sitting. Mr. Arbuton did not see them. The ladies mounted the steps, and turned slowly and languidly to survey the company. But at sight of Mr. Arbuton, one of them advanced directly toward him, with exclamations of surprise and pleasure, and he with a stupefied face and a mechanical movement turned to meet her.

  She was a lady of more than middle age, dressed with certain personal audacities of color and shape, rather than overdressed, and she thrust forward, in expression of her amazement, a very small hand, wonderfully well gloved; her manner was full of the anxiety of a woman who had fought hard for a high place in society, and yet suggested a latent hatred of people who, in yielding to her, had made success bitter and humiliating.

  Her companion was a young and very handsome girl, exquisitely dressed, and just so far within the fashion as to show her already a mistress of style. But it was not the vivid New York stylishness. A peculiar restraint of line, an effect of lady-like concession to the ruling mode, a temperance of ornament, marked the whole array, and stamped it with the unmistakable character of Boston. Her clear tints of lip and cheek and eye were incomparable; her blond hair gave weight to the poise of her delicate head by its rich and decent masses. She had a look of independent innocence, an angelic expression of extremely nice young fellow blending with a subtle maidenly charm. She indicated her surprise at seeing Mr. Arbuton by pressing the point of her sun-umbrella somewhat nervously upon the floor, and blushing a very little. Then she gave him her hand with friendly frankness, and smiled dazzlingly upon him, while the elder hailed him with effusive assertion of familiar acquaintance, heaping him with greetings and flatteries and cries of pleasure.

  “O dear!” sighed Kitty, “these are old friends of his; and will I have to know them? Perhaps it’s best to begin at once, though,” she thought.

  But he made no movement toward her where she sat. The ladies began to walk up and down, and he with them. As they passed her, he did not seem to see her.

  The ladies said they were waiting for their carriage, which they had left at a certain point when they went to look at the fall, and had ordered to take them up at the inn. They talked about people and things that Kitty had never heard of.

  “Have you seen the Trailings since you left Newport?” asked the elder woman.

  “No,” said Mr. Arbuton.

  “Perhaps you’ll be surprised then — or perhaps you won’t — to hear that we parted with them on the top of Mount Washington, Thursday. And the Mayflowers are at the Glen House. The mountains are horribly full. But what are you to do! Now the Continent” — she spoke as if the English Channel divided it from us— “is so common, you can’t run over there any more.”

  Whenever they walked towards Kitty, this woman, whose quick eye had detected Mr. Arbuton at her side as she came up to the inn, bent upon the young girl’s face a stare of insolent curiosity, yet with a front of such impassive coldness that to another she might not have seemed aware of her presence. Kitty shuddered at the thought of being made acquainted with her; then she remembered, “Why, how stupid I am! Of course a gentleman can’t introduce ladies; and the only thing for him to do is to excuse himself to them as soon as he can without rudeness, and come back to me.” But none the less she felt helpless and deserted. Though ordinarily so brave, she was so beaten down by that look, that for a glance of not unkindly interest that the young lady gave her she was abjectly grateful. She admired her, and fancied that she could easily be friends with such a girl as that, if they met fairly. She wondered that she should be there with that other, not knowing that society cannot really make distinctions between fine and coarse, and could not have given her a reason for their association.

  Still the three walked up and down before Kitty, and still she made his peace with herself, thinking, “He is embarrassed; he can’t come to me at once; but he will, of course.”

  The elder of his companions talked on in her loud voice of this thing and that, of her summer, and of the people she had met, and of their places and yachts and horses, and all the splendors of their keeping, — talk which Kitty’s aching sense sometimes caught by fragments, and sometimes in full. The lady used a slang of deprecation and apology for having come to such a queer resort as Quebec, and raised her brows when Mr. Arbuton reluctantly owned how long he had been there.

  “Ah, ah!” she said briskly, bringing the group to a stand-still while she spoke, “one doesn’t stay in a slow Canadian city a whole month for love of the place. Come, Mr. Arbuton, is she English or French?”


  Kitty’s heart beat thickly, and she whispered to herself, “O, now! — now surely he must do something.”

  “Or perhaps,” continued his tormentor, “she’s some fair fellow-wanderer in these Canadian wilds, — some pretty companion of voyage.”

  Mr. Arbuton gave a kind of start at this, like one thrilled for an instant with a sublime impulse. He cast a quick, stealthy look at Kitty, and then as suddenly withdrew his glance. What had happened to her who was usually dressed so prettily? Alas! true to her resolution, Kitty had again refused Fanny’s dresses that morning, and had faithfully put on her own travelling-suit, — the suit which Rachel had made her, and which had seemed so very well at Eriecreek that they had called Uncle Jack in to admire it when it was tried on. Now she knew that it looked countrified, and its unstylishness struck in upon her, and made her feel countrified in soul. “Yes,” she owned, as she met Mr. Arbuton’s glance, “I’m nothing but an awkward milkmaid beside that young lady.” This was unjust to herself; but truly it was never in her present figure that he had intended to show her to his world, which he had been sincere enough in contemning for her sake while away from it. Confronted with good society in these ladies, its delegates, he doubtless felt, as never before, the vastness of his self-sacrifice, the difficulty of his enterprise, and it would not have been so strange if just then she should have appeared to him through the hard cold vision of the best people instead of that which love had illumined. She saw whatever purpose toward herself was in his eyes, flicker and die out as they fell from hers. Then she sat alone while they three walked up and down, up and down, and the skirts of the ladies brushed her garments in passing.

  “O, where can Dick and Fanny be?” she silently bemoaned herself, “and why don’t they come and save me from these dreadful people?”

  She sat in a stony quiet while they talked on, she thought, forever. Their voices sounded in her ears like voices heard in a dream, their laughter had a nightmare cruelty. Yet she was resolved to be just to Mr. Arbuton, she was determined not meanly to condemn him; she confessed to herself, with a glimmer of her wonted humor, that her dress must be an ordeal of peculiar anguish to him, and she half blamed herself for her conscientiousness in wearing it. If she had conceived of any such chance as this, she would perhaps, she thought, have worn Fanny’s grenadine.

  She glanced again at the group which was now receding from her. “Ah!” the elder of the ladies said, again halting the others midway of the piazza’s length, “there’s the carriage at last! But what is that stupid animal stopping for? O, I suppose he didn’t understand, and expects to take us up at the bridge! Provoking! But it’s no use; we may as well go to him at once; it’s plain he isn’t coming to us. Mr. Arbuton, will you see us on board?”

  “Who — I? Yes, certainly,” he answered absently, and for the second time he cast a furtive look at Kitty, who had half started to her feet in expectation of his coming to her before he went, — a look of appeal, or deprecation, or reassurance, as she chose to interpret it, but after all a look only.

  She sank back in blank rejection of his look, and so remained motionless as he led the way from the porch with a quick and anxious step. Since those people came he had not openly recognized her presence, and now he had left her without a word. She could not believe what she could not but divine, and she was powerless to stir as the three moved down the road towards the carriage. Then she felt the tears spring to her eyes: she flung down her veil, and, swept on by a storm of grief and pride and pain, she hurried, ran towards the grounds about the falls. She thrust aside the boy who took money at the gate. “I have no money,” she said fiercely; “I’m going to look for my friends: they’re in here.”

  But Dick and Fanny were not to be seen. Instead, as she fluttered wildly about in search of them, she beheld Mr. Arbuton, who had missed her on his return to the inn, coming with a frightened face to look for her. She had hoped, somehow never to see him again in the world; but since it was to be, she stood still and waited his approach in a strange composure; while he drew nearer, thinking how yesterday he had silenced her prophetic doubt of him: “I have one answer to all this; I love you.” Her faltering words, verified so fatally soon, recalled themselves to him with intolerable accusation. And what should he say now? If possibly, — if by some miracle, — she might not have seen what he feared she must! One glance that he dared give her taught him better; and while she waited for him to speak, he could not lure any of the phrases, of which the air seemed full, to serve him.

  “I wonder you came back to me,” she said after an eternal moment.

  “Came back?” he echoed, vacantly.

  “You seemed to have forgotten my existence!”

  Of course the whole wrong, if any wrong had been done to her, was tacit, and much might be said to prove that she felt needlessly aggrieved, and that he could not have acted otherwise than as he did; she herself had owned that it must be an embarrassing position to him.

  “Why, what have I done,” he began, “what makes you think... For heaven’s sake listen to me!” he cried; and then, while she turned a mute attentive face to him, he stood silent as before, like one who has lost his thought, and strives to recall what he was going to say. “What sense, — what use,” he resumed at last, as if continuing the course of some previous argument, “would there have been in making a display of our acquaintance before them? I did not suppose at first that they saw us together.”... But here he broke off, and, indeed, his explanation had but a mean effect when put into words. “I did not expect them to stay. I thought they would go away every moment; and then at last it was too late to manage the affair without seeming to force it.” This was better; and he paused again, for some sign of acquiescence from Kitty, and caught her eye fixed on his face in what seemed contemptuous wonder. His own eyes fell, and ran uneasily over her dress before he lifted them and began once more, as if freshly inspired: “I could have wished you to be known to my friends with every advantage on your side,” and this had such a magnanimous sound that he took courage; “and you ought to have had faith enough in me to believe that I never could have meant you a slight. If you had known more of the world, — if your social experience had been greater you would have seen.... Oh!” he cried, desperately, “is there nothing you have to say to me?”

  “No,” said Kitty, simply, but with a languid quiet, and shrinking from speech as from an added pang. “You have been telling me that you were ashamed of me in this dress before those people. But I knew that already. What do you want me to do?”

  “If you give me time, I can make everything clear to you.”

  “But now you don’t deny it.”

  “Deny what? I—”

  But here the whole fabric of Mr. Arbuton’s defence toppled to the ground. He was a man of scrupulous truth, not accustomed to deceive himself or others. He had been ashamed of her, he could not deny it, not to keep the love that was now dearer to him than life. He saw it with paralyzing clearness; and, as an inexorable fact that confounded quite as much as it dismayed him, he perceived that throughout that ignoble scene she had been the gentle person and he the vulgar one. How could it have happened with a man like him! As he looked back upon it, he seemed to have been only the helpless sport of a sinister chance.

  But now he must act; it could not go so, it was too horrible a thing to let stand confessed. A hundred protests thronged to his lips, but he refused utterance to them all as worse even than silence; and so, still meaning to speak, he could not speak. He could only stand and wait while it wrung his heart to see her trembling, grieving lips.

  His own aspect was so lamentable, that she half pitied him, half respected him for his truth’s sake. “You were right; I think it won’t be necessary for me to go to Boston,” she said with a dim smile. “Good by. It’s all been a dreadful, dreadful mistake.”

  It was like him, even in that humiliation, not to have thought of losing her, not to have dreamed but that he could somehow repair his error, and she would yet wi
llingly be his. “O no, no, no,” he cried, starting forward, “don’t say that! It can’t be, it mustn’t be! You are angry now, but I know you’ll see it differently. Don’t be so quick with me, with yourself. I will do anything, say anything, you like.”

  The tears stood in her eyes; but they were cruel drops. “You can’t say anything that wouldn’t make it worse. You can’t undo what’s been done, and that’s only a little part of what couldn’t be undone. The best way is for us to part; it’s the only way.”

  “No, there are all the ways in the world besides! Wait — think! — I implore you not to be so — precipitate.”

  The unfortunate word incensed her the more; it intimated that she was ignorantly throwing too much away. “I am not rash now, but I was very rash half an hour ago. I shall not change my mind again. O,” she cried, giving way, “it isn’t what you’ve done, but what you are and what I am, that’s the great trouble! I could easily forgive what’s happened, — if you asked it; but I couldn’t alter both our whole lives, or make myself over again, and you couldn’t change yourself. Perhaps you would try, and I know that I would, but it would be a wretched failure and disappointment as long as we lived. I’ve learnt a great deal since I first saw those people.” And in truth he felt as if the young girl whom he had been meaning to lift to a higher level than her own at his side had somehow suddenly grown beyond him; and his heart sank. “It’s foolish to try to argue such a thing, but it’s true; and you must let me go.”

  “I can’t let you go,” he said in such a way, that she longed at least to part kindly with him.

  “You can make it hard for me,” she answered, “but the end will be the same.”

  “I won’t make it hard for you, then,” he returned, after a pause, in which he grew paler and she stood with a wan face plucking the red leaves from a low bough that stretched itself towards her.

  He turned and walked away some steps; then he came suddenly back. “I wish to express my regret,” he began formally, and with his old air of doing what was required of him as a gentleman, “that I should have unintentionally done anything to wound—”