In the dull first half-hour after dinner, while she sat absently feeling on the porcelain-toned piano in the hotel parlor for the music of the past, two ladies who wished to see her were announced. One of these visitors proved to be a Shaker sister, whom Mrs. Perham recognized, and who introduced her companion, a short, squarely built young woman, as Miss Thorn.
They took seats, though Mrs. Perham had risen and remained standing, and Miss Thorn said without preamble, “I teach in the school-house in Vardley, where Dr. Boynton stopped this spring. I heard from my mother this noon that a lady and gentleman had been asking the way to the Shaker Village, who seemed to know Dr. Boynton.”
“No, I don’t know him,” said Mrs. Perham. Phillips came forward, from a corner of the parlor. “I know Dr. Boynton; at least I saw him and Miss Boynton in Boston once.”
“I thought,” said Miss Thorn, “that I ought to come and tell you that my mother didn’t understand about that — that water-proof.”
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Perham; “we thought it so curious.”
“I was sure,” said Phillips, with an attempted severity, “that there was some mistake.” The severity had no apparent effect upon Mrs. Perham, but Miss Thorn, who had been talking in some sort to both, now addressed herself wholly to him:— “I was away from home when you stopped today. I thought you would like to know there was a misunderstanding. The water-proof was as much a gift as anything; though that wouldn’t have excused them if they had thought I wanted it again. But anybody could see that Miss Boynton was stupid then with the fever, and didn’t half know where she was or what she was doing. She had been walking late the night before through the snow, and they had slept on the benches before the stove.” Phillips bowed, and looked at Miss Thorn, who resumed with increasing stiffness: “I never wondered at his not remembering it; he seemed too flighty for anything. I knew they were here all summer at the Shakers’. I don’t,” said Miss Thorn, “pass any judgment on my mother for the way she looked at it; but I’d have given anything if she hadn’t spoken.” The tears started to her eyes, and she bit her lip as she rose.
“It didn’t make any difference to us,” said Diantha, who had hitherto sat a silent and inscrutable glimmer of spectacles in the depths of her Shaker bonnet. “It got hung up among our things while she was sick, and when she got well she couldn’t seem to remember about it. She thought she must have brought it from the cars with her for her own.”
Miss Thorn waited, and then resumed stiffly, “I never suspected or blamed them the least bit. As soon as I could, I went over to the Shakers’ to see about it, and told them the way I felt, and that I wanted to come to you. Diantha felt as if she would like to come with me, and I brought her. That’s all.” Miss Thorn rose with à personal primness that by contrast almost softened the Shaker primness of Diantha into ceremony.
Phillips experienced the rush of an emotion which, upon subsequent analysis, he knew to be of unquestionable genuineness. “My dear young lady,” he said, “I ask you to do me the justice to believe that I never had an injurious suspicion of Miss Boynton. Her father had attempted a line of life that naturally subjected himself and her to question, but I never doubted them. I have a positive pleasure in disbelieving anything to their disadvantage in connection with — with — your generous behavior to them. Did — did Mr. Ford speak of the matter to you? Did he wish any expression from me in their behalf? Because” —
“He no need to ask anything as far as we’re concerned,” interposed Diantha.
“No,” said Phillips. “I can only repeat that J was sure there was a misunderstanding, and that you’ve done us a favor in coming. Is there any way in which I could be of use to Dr. Boynton? I should be most happy if I thought there was.” Miss Thorn left the reply to Diantha, who said as they went out, “There ain’t anything as I know of.”
“Really,” commented Mrs. Perham, “this is edifying. I haven’t felt so put down for a long while. I don’t see what more we could do, unless we joined with Miss Thorn and Sister Diantha in presenting Miss Boynton with a piece of plate, as a slight token of gratitude for her noble example in borrowing a water-proof and keeping it. She has classed the water-proof with the umbrella, as a thing not to be returned. Is that the principle? Well, if Mr. Ford is going to marry her” —
“Going to marry her!” cried Phillips.
“Why, of course. Did you think anything else? Is marriage such an unnatural thing?”
“No. But Ford’s marrying is.”
“That remains to be seen. If he’s going to marry her, he can’t believe in her too thoroughly. I’ve an idea that the Pythoness is insipid; but if Mr. Ford likes insipidity, I want him to have it. I think we ought to drive over to the Shakers’, and assure him in person that we didn’t believe anything, and we didn’t mean anything. You shall do all the talking, this time; you talk so well.”
“Thanks,” said Phillips, “I suspect I’ve done my last talking to Ford.”
“And you won’t go?” demanded Mrs. Perham, with a laugh. “Then I must go alone, some day. Meantime, I know how to keep a secret. I hope Miss Thorn may be able to teach her mother.”
XXVI.
FORD stood still, looking at the ground, while Phillips and Mrs. Perham drove away. His impulse to pluck Phillips from his place, and make him pay in person for that woman’s malice, was still so vividly present in his nerves that he seemed to have done it; but when the misery of Phillips’s face, intensifying as Mrs. Perham went on from bad to worse, recurred to him, he broke into a laugh.
Sister Frances came out of the office. “Friend Edward,” she said, “was that wicked woman speakin’ to you about Egery?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you believe her! Don’t you believe a word she said!” cried the Shakeress, with hot looks of indignation. “I know just how it all happened” —
“I don’t wish to know. I should feel disgraced if I let you tell me. Whatever happened, this woman lied. Where is Egeria?”
“Oh!” cried Frances. “She has gone to Harshire with Rebecca. She won’t be back till mornin’.” She bent on the young man a look of wistful sympathy. —
“Well!” he cried, throwing up his hands desperately, as if the morrow were a time so remote that it never would come, “I must wait.”
“She’d been plannin’ to go a long while,” Frances apologized, “and her father seemed so well this mornin’ she thought she might” —
“Oh, yes, yes!” answered Ford dejectedly. He knew that he somehow had driven her away by his behavior of the day before, and that he had himself to blame for this delay in which he stifled. He turned about, with some wild purpose of following her to Harshire, and speaking to her there, when he heard Frances calling him again: —
“Friend Edward, I don’t know as you know that Egery’s expectin’ friends to-morrow.”
“Friends? No, what friends?” asked Ford. “Has she gone to meet them at Harshire?” he added stupidly.
“Well, no; she only got the letter yesterday. I suppose her father didn’t think to tell you of it. I don’t know as you ever heard her speak of the young man that come with ’em as far as the Junction that day they missed their train. He was with ’em a while in Boston, and he come from the same place they did, Down East. He’s been twice to find ’em there in Maine, this summer; but he couldn’t hear any word of ’em till just now. They was children together, Egery and Friend — Well, I never could remember names.”
“Oh, never mind!” exclaimed Ford, with a deathly pallor. “I know the name, — I know the man!” And now he turned again, and hurried beyond a second recall from the trouble in which Frances saw him groping down the road, like one in the dark. When he had got out of her sight, he walked a little into the wayside woods, and stumbling to the ground gave himself to the despair which had blackened round him. His first feeling was a generous regret that now he could not let his love speak the contempt in which he held the wrong he had heard done her; this feeling came even be
fore the sense of hopeless loss to which he abandoned himself with a lover’s rashness. He meekly owned that the man whom he marveled now that he could ever have forgotten as a rival was one of those in whom women confided, and were not disappointed, —— who made constant friends and good husbands; and questioning himself he could not be sure that her happiness would be as safe in his own keeping. He remembered with abject humiliation the last time he had met this man, and the savagery with which he had wreaked upon him the jealousy which he would not then admit to himself, and in which he had refused to consider even her at his prayer. The turmoil went on for hours, but always to this effect. The most that he could hope, when he crept homeward at dusk, sore as if bruised in body by the conflict in his mind, was that he might steal away before he saw them together. With this intent, to which he had worked with difficulty in the chaos of his dreams, he set about putting his books and other belongings together, but he gave up tremulous and exhausted before the work was half done. He fell to thinking again, and this time with a sort of sullen resentment, in which he said to himself that his love had its own rights, and that he would not betray them. It had a right to be heard, at any cost; and he began to despise his purpose of hurrying away as mock-heroic. It was like a character in a lady’s novel to leave the field to a rival whom he did not yet know to be preferred; the high humility, in which he had thought to yield Egeria without her explicit authority to a man whom he judged his better, sickened him. He saw that it was for her to choose between them, and it was the part of a coward and a fool to go before she had chosen. As matters stood, he had no right to go; she had a preeminent right to know from him that he loved her.
He hungrily dispatched the supper he had left standing on his table, and then kindled a brushwood fire on his hearth; he sat down before it in his easy-chair, and stayed by the clearer mind at which he had arrived he experienced a sensual comfort in the blaze. Presently he was aware of drowsing; and then suddenly he awoke. The dawn came in at the windows; he perceived that he had passed the night in his chair. A loud knocking continued at his door, while he gathered his scattered wits together. At length he cried, “Come in!” and the farmer from over the way entered.
“I don’t suppose ye know what’s happened?” he said.
“No,” said Ford, “I don’t, if it’s anything in particular.”
“No. Well. I thought may be ye’d like to know. The old man’s dead. Died sudden this mornin’.”
“What? Who? What old man?”
The farmer nodded his head in the direction of the village. “Dr. Boynton. I thought ye’d like to know it.”
“Thank you,” said Ford. He rose and stood at one corner of the hearth; the farmer, from the other, stiffly stretched his hard, knotted hand towards the ashes of the dead fire.
Ford went out and walked up through the village, whose familiar aspect was all estranged, as if he himself had died, and were looking upon it from another world. At the office he found a group of Shakers listening to Boynton’s physician, who, on his appearance, addressed more directly to him what he was saying of the painless death Boynton must have died in his sleep. “The first part of the night he was very restless, and several times he said that he would like to see you and talk with you; but he would not let them send; said he hadn’t formulated his ideas yet.” The doctor involuntarily smiled in recalling a turn of the phraseology so newly silent forever. “I wonder if he has formulated them now to his satisfaction.” Ford made no response, and the doctor asked, “Did he speak to you yesterday of the case of an electrical girl?”
“Yes.”
“I inferred as much from something he said, when I saw him in the afternoon. I had lent him the magazine containing the account. He found an analogy between that case and Miss Boynton’s that I had not anticipated. It seems to have put a quietus to his belief in her supernatural gifts.”
“Yes,” Ford assented, as before.
“He told me that it had depressed him to the lowest point. But when I saw him he had quite recovered his spirits.” He added thoughtfully, “You can’t say that a man dies because he wishes to die; though it sometimes seems as if people could live if they would. When I parted with Dr. Boynton he had what I might call an enthusiasm for death. It might be described in other words as a desire, amounting almost to frenzy, to know whether we live again, and a willingness to gratify that desire at the cost of not living at all.”
“He dwelt habitually on that question,” said Ford, with difficulty. “But when I talked with him yesterday, he seemed at rest on the main point.”
“Yes, I don’t know but he was. Perhaps I had better say that he was impatient to verify it. He talked of nothing else during the evening, Sister Frances tells me; though he fell off quietly to sleep at last.”
“Well,” said Ford drearily, “he has verified it now.”
“Yes, and in the old way, — the way appointed for all living. He knows now. Did it ever occur to you, sir,” added the doctor, philosophically, “what ignorance all our wisdom is compared with the knowledge of a child that has just died?”
“If it knows anything at all.”
“Oh, certainly, — if it does know.”
“We are sure it knows,” said Elihu.
They walked out together, and before the doctor mounted his buggy to drive away they stood a moment looking at the closed windows of the infirmary. “It’s useless, now, to talk of causes,” said the doctor. “The heart had been affected a long time” —
“He is dead, all the same,” said Ford.
“Oh, yes, he is dead,” assented the doctor. “What I meant to say was that while no human foresight could have prevented the result I confess its suddenness surprised me. One moment he was with us, and the next” —
“He wasn’t,” interrupted Ford, restively. “That’s all we can know: and neither he nor all the myriads that have gone that way can tell us anything more.”
“If we suppose him to be somewhere in a state of conscious being,” observed the doctor, “we can suppose that reflection to be a trial to him, after a life so much devoted to the effort of working out proof of something different.”
“He had been a spiritualist; and not a selfish or ignoble one,” answered Ford, oppressed by the doctor’s speculative mood, and letting his impatience appear. A voice was in his ears, repeating the things that Boynton had said. In the pauses of it, he brooded upon the chances that had thrown upon him for sympathy and comfort in his last days the man for whom he had once felt and shown such contempt. The dark irony, the broken meaning, afflicted him, and he lurked about, stunned and helpless, waiting till Egeria should come, and dreading to see the grief in which he had no rights. He thought of her trouble, not of his own; it blotted even his jealousy from his mind, and left him acquiescent in whatever fate befell. The time for what he had intended to do was swept away; he could now only wait passively for events to shape themselves.
Hatch did not come that day, and Ford took such part as Elihu assigned him in the sad business of fulfilling Boynton’s wishes. These had been casually expressed from time to time to Frances, and referred to his removal to his old home, where he desired to be laid by the side of his wife. When Hatch arrived, the second morning, he assumed charge of the affair, as a family friend; and Ford, lapsing from all active concern in it, shut himself in his own room, and waited for he knew not what. In the evening, Hatch came to see him. They had already met in the presence of the Shakers, but doubtless neither felt that they had met till now, since their parting in Boston. Hatch received awkwardly the civility which Ford awkwardly showed. He would not sit down, and he said abruptly that he had come to say that Miss Boynton was going back in the morning to her home in Maine, where the funeral was to be. He added that Frances and Elihu were going with her, on the part of the family; and after a hesitation he said, “Wouldn’t you like to attend the funeral, too?”
“Has she authorized you to invite me?” asked Ford.
“Well, no,” said Hatch.
“I don’t suppose she wanted to put that much of a burden on you. It’s a long ways.”
Ford reflected a long time. “You are going, I suppose?”
“Why, of course,” said Hatch.
Ford pondered again. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I believe that I oughtn’t to let my own preference have any weight. Miss Boynton is going with friends to her own home, and I couldn’t be of any use. I propose to do what I think would be least afflicting to her by not going.” He hesitated, and presently added, tentatively, “I believe she would prefer it.”
“You ought to know best,” said Hatch.
“Well, I believe that I am right. Tell her that I will not try to see her before she goes; but — but — some other time.” He said this tentatively, also, and with an odd sort of faltering, as if somehow Hatch might advise him better. “I thank you for coming.”
“Well, sir,” said the young fellow, standing with his feet squarely apart in the way that Ford had hated him for in Mrs. Le Roy’s parlor, “you must do what you think is best. I want to thank you, too. Dr. Boynton was a good friend to me, and from all I hear you were a good friend to him, —— at last. You’ve behaved like a man. They all say here that the doctor couldn’t have got along without you.”
“They overpraise me,” said Ford, helped to a melancholy irony by Hatch’s simple patronage.
“No, sir,” replied Hatch, “I don’t think so. And you must have found it pretty tough, feeling the way you did about him.”
“No,” said Ford, “it was not so tough as it might seem. I liked him. It isn’t a logical position; he never squared with my ideas; but I know now that he was a singularly upright and truthful man.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 110