Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Burn off?” cried Mrs. Alger. “I should think it had!” The other ladies laughed.

  “And you’ll see,” added Barlow, “that the wind ‘ll change at noon, and we’ll have it cooler.”

  “If it’s as hot on the water as it is here,” said Mrs. Scott, “I should think those people would get a sunstroke.”

  “Well, so should I, Mrs. Scott,” cordially exclaimed a little fat lady, as if here at last were an opinion in which all might rejoice to sympathize.

  “It’s never so hot on the water, Mrs. Merritt,” said Mrs. Alger, with the instructiveness of an old habitude.

  “Well, not at Jocelyn’s,” suggested Barlow. Mrs. Alger stopped fanning herself with her newspaper, and looked at him. Upon her motion, the other ladies looked at Barlow. Doubtless he felt that his social acceptability had ceased with his immediate usefulness. But he appeared resolved to carry it off easily. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I must go and pick my peas.”

  No one said anything to this. When the factotum had disappeared round the corner of the house, Mrs. Alger turned her head’ aside, and glanced downward with an air of fatigue. In this manner Barlow was dismissed from the ladies’ minds.

  “I presume,” said young Mrs. Scott, with a deferential glance at Grace, “that the sun is good for a person with lung-difficulty.”

  Grace silently refused to consider herself appealed to, and Mrs. Merritt said, “Better than the moon, I should think.”

  Some of the others tittered, but Grace looked up at Mrs. Merritt and said, “I don’t think Mrs. Maynard’s case is so bad that she need be afraid of either.”

  “Oh, I am so glad to hear it!” replied the other. She looked round, but was unable to form a party. By twos or threes they might have liked to take Mrs. Maynard to pieces; but no one cares to make unkind remarks before a whole company of people. Some of the ladies even began to say pleasant things about Mr. Libby, as if he were Grace’s friend.

  “I always like to see these fair men when they get tanned,” said Mrs. Alger. “Their blue eyes look so very blue. And the backs of their necks — just like my boys!”

  “Do you admire such a VERY fighting-clip as Mr. Libby has on?” asked Mrs. Scott.

  “It must be nice for summer,” returned the elder lady.

  “Yes, it certainly must,” admitted the younger.

  “Really,” said another, “I wish I could go in the fighting-clip. One does n’t know what to do with one’s hair at the sea-side; it’s always in the way.”

  “Your hair would be a public loss, Mrs. Frost,” said Mrs. Alger. The others looked at her hair, as if they had seen it now for the first time.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Frost, in a sort of flattered coo.

  “Oh, don’t have it cut off!” pleaded a young girl, coming up and taking the beautiful mane, hanging loose after the bath, into her hand. Mrs. Frost put her arm round the girl’s waist, and pulled her down against her shoulder. Upon reflection she also kissed her.

  Through a superstition, handed down from mother to daughter, that it is uncivil and even unkind not to keep saying something, they went on talking vapidities, where the same number of men, equally vacuous, would have remained silent; and some of them complained that the nervous strain of conversation took away all the good their bath had done them. Miss Gleason, who did not bathe, was also not a talker. She kept a bright-eyed reticence, but was apt to break out in rather enigmatical flashes, which resolved the matter in hand into an abstraction, and left the others with the feeling that she was a person of advanced ideas, but that, while rejecting historical Christianity, she believed in a God of Love. This Deity was said, upon closer analysis, to have proved to be a God of Sentiment, and Miss Gleason was herself a hero-worshiper, or, more strictly speaking, a heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, “Too bad!” or, “I don’t see how you keep-up?” and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was doing. She seemed to rejoice in keeping herself at a respectful distance, to which she breathlessly retired, as she did now, after waylaying her at the top of the stairs, and confidentially darting at her the words, “I’m so glad you don’t like scandal!”

  III.

  After dinner the ladies tried to get a nap, but such of them as re-appeared on the piazza later agreed that it was perfectly useless. They tested every corner for a breeze, but the wind had fallen dead, and the vast sweep of sea seemed to smoulder under the sun. “This is what Mr. Barlow calls having it cooler,” said Mrs. Alger.

  “There are some clouds that look like thunderheads in the west,” said Mrs. Frost, returning from an excursion to the part of the piazza commanding that quarter.

  “Oh, it won’t rain to-day,” Mrs. Alger decided.

  “I thought there was always a breeze at Jocelyn’s,” Mrs. Scott observed, in the critical spirit of a recent arrival.

  “There always is,” the other explained, “except the first week you’re here.”

  A little breath, scarcely more than a sentiment of breeze, made itself felt. “I do believe the wind has changed,” said Mrs. Frost. “It’s east.” The others owned one by one that it was so, and she enjoyed the merit of a discoverer; but her discovery was rapidly superseded. The clouds mounted in the west, and there came a time when the ladies disputed whether they had heard thunder or not: a faction contended for the bowling alley, and another faction held for a wagon passing over the bridge just before you reached Jocelyn’s. But those who were faithful to the theory of thunder carried the day by a sudden crash that broke over the forest, and, dying slowly away among the low hills, left them deeply silent.

  “Some one,” said Mrs. Alger, “ought to go for those children.” On this it appeared that there were two minds as to where the children were, — whether on the beach or in the woods.

  “Was n’t that thunder, Grace?” asked Mrs. Breen, with the accent by which she implicated her daughter in whatever happened.

  “Yes,” said Grace, from where she sat at her window, looking seaward, and waiting tremulously for her mother’s next question.

  “Where is Mrs. Maynard?”

  “She is n’t back, yet.”

  “Then,” said Mrs. Breen, “he really did expect rough weather.”

  “He must,” returned Grace, in a guilty whisper.

  “It’s a pity,” remarked her mother, “that you made them go.”

  “Yes.” She rose, and, stretching herself far out of the window, searched the inexorable expanse of sea. It had already darkened at the verge, and the sails of some fishing-craft flecked a livid wall with their white, but there was no small boat in sight.

  “If anything happened to them,” her mother continued, “I should feel terribly for you.”

  “I should feel terribly for myself,” Grace responded, with her eyes still seaward.

  “Where do you think they went?”

  “I did n’t ask,” said the girl. “I wouldn’t,” she added, in devotion to the whole truth.

  “Well, it is all of the same piece,” said Mrs. Breen. Grace did not ask what the piece was. She remained staring at the dark wall across the sea, and spiritually confronting her own responsibility, no atom of which she rejected. She held herself in every way responsible, — for doubting that poor young fellow’s word, and then for forcing that reluctant creature to go with him, and forbidding by her fierce insistence any attempt of his at explanation; she condemned herself to perpetual remorse with even greater zeal than her mother would have sentenced her, and she would not permit herself any respite when a little sail, which she knew for theirs, blew round the point. It seemed to fly along just on the hither side of that mural darkness, skilfully tacking to reach the end of the-reef before
the wall pushed it on the rocks. Suddenly, the long low stretch of the reef broke into white foam, and then passed from sight under the black wall, against which the little sail still flickered. The girl fetched a long, silent breath. They were inside the reef, in comparatively smooth water, and to her ignorance they were safe. But the rain would be coming in another moment, and Mrs. Maynard would be drenched; and Grace would be to blame for her death. She ran to the closet, and pulled down her mother’s India-rubber cloak and her own, and fled out-of-doors, to be ready on the beach with the wrap, against their landing. She met the other ladies on the stairs and in the hall, and they clamored at her; but she glided through them like something in a dream, and then she heard a shouting in her ear, and felt herself caught and held up against the wind.

  “Where in land be you goin’, Miss Breen?”

  Barlow, in a long, yellow oil-skin coat and sou’wester hat, kept pushing her forward to the edge of the cliff, as he asked.

  “I’m going down to meet them!” she screamed.

  “Well, I hope you WILL meet ‘em. But I guess you better go back to the house. Hey? WUNT? Well; come along, then, if they ain’t past doctorin’ by the time they git ashore! Pretty well wrapped up, any way!” he roared; and she perceived that she had put on her waterproof and drawn the hood over her head.

  Those steps to the beach had made her giddy when she descended with leisure for such dismay; but now, with the tempest flattening her against the stair-case, and her gossamer clutching and clinging to every surface, and again twisting itself about her limbs, she clambered down as swiftly and recklessly as Barlow himself, and followed over the beach beside the men who were pulling a boat down the sand at a run.

  “Let me get in!” she screamed. “I wish to go with you!”

  “Take hold of the girl, Barlow!” shouted one of the men. “She’s crazy.”

  He tumbled himself with four others into the boat, and they all struck out together through the froth and swirl of the waves. She tried to free herself from Barlow, so as to fling the waterproof into the boat. “Take this, then. She’ll be soaked through!”

  Barlow broke into a grim laugh. “She won’t need it, except for a windin’-sheet!” he roared. “Don’t you see the boat’s drivin’ right on t’ the sand? She’ll be kindlin’ wood in a minute.”

  “But they’re inside the reef! They can come to anchor!” she shrieked in reply. He answered her with a despairing grin and a shake of the head. “They can’t. What has your boat gone out for, then?”

  “To pick ’em up out the sea. But they’ll never git ’em alive. Look how she slaps her boom int’ the water! Well! He DOES know how to handle a boat!”

  It was Libby at the helm, as she could dimly see, but what it was in his management that moved Barlow’s praise she could not divine. The boat seemed to be aimed for the shore, and to be rushing, head on, upon the beach; her broad sail was blown straight out over her bow, and flapped there like a banner, while the heavy boom hammered the water as she rose and fell. A jagged line of red seamed the breast of the dark wall behind; a rending crash came, and as if fired upon, the boat flung up her sail, as a wild fowl flings up its wing when shot, and lay tossing keel up, on the top of the waves. It all looked scarcely a stone’s cast away, though it was vastly farther. A figure was seen to drag itself up out of the sea, and fall over into the boat, hovering and pitching in the surrounding welter, and struggling to get at two other figures clinging to the wreck. Suddenly the men in the boat pulled away, and Grace uttered a cry of despair and reproach: “Why, they’re leaving it, they’re leaving it!”

  “Don’t expect ’em to tow the wreck ashore in this weather, do ye?” shouted Barlow. “They’ve got the folks all safe enough. I tell ye I see ‘em!” he cried, at a wild look of doubt in her eyes. “Run to the house, there, and get everything in apple-pie order. There’s goin’ to be a chance for some of your doctor’n’ now, if ye know how to fetch folks to.”

  It was the little house on the beach, which the children were always prying and peering into, trying the lock, and wondering what the boat was like, which Grace had seen launched. Now the door yielded to her, and within she found a fire kindled in the stove, blankets laid in order, and flasks of brandy in readiness in the cupboard. She put the blankets to heat for instant use, and prepared for the work of resuscitation. When she could turn from them to the door, she met there a procession that approached with difficulty, heads down and hustled by the furious blast through which the rain now hissed and shot. Barlow and one of the boat’s crew were carrying Mrs. Maynard, and bringing up the rear of the huddling oil-skins and sou’westers came Libby, soaked, and dripping as he walked. His eyes and Grace’s encountered with a mutual avoidance; but whatever was their sense of blame, their victim had no reproaches to make herself. She was not in need of restoration. She was perfectly alive, and apparently stimulated by her escape from deadly peril to a vivid conception of the wrong that had been done her. If the adventure had passed off prosperously, she was the sort of woman to have owned to her friend that she ought not to have thought of going. But the event had obliterated these scruples, and she realized herself as a hapless creature who had been thrust on to dangers from which she would have shrunk. “Well, Grace!” she began, with a voice and look before which the other quailed, “I hope you are satisfied! All the time I was clinging to that wretched boat. I was wondering how you would feel. Yes, my last thoughts were of you. I pitied you. I did n’t see how you could ever have peace again.”

  “Hold on, Mrs. Maynard!” cried Libby. “There’s no, time for that, now. What had best be done, Miss Green? Had n’t she better be got up to the house?”

  “Yes, by all means,” answered Grace.

  “You might as well let me die here,” Mrs. Maynard protested, as Grace wrapped the blankets round her dripping dress. “I ‘m as wet as I can be, now.”

  Libby began to laugh at these inconsequences, to which he was probably well used. “You would n’t have time to die here. And we want to give this hydropathic treatment a fair trial. You’ve tried the douche, and now you’re to have the pack.” He summoned two of the boatmen, who had been considerately dripping outside, in order to leave the interior to the shipwrecked company, and they lifted Mrs. Maynard, finally wrapped in, Grace’s India-rubber cloak, and looking like some sort of strange, huge chrysalis, and carried her out into the storm and up the steps.

  Grace followed last with Mr. Libby, very heavyhearted and reckless. She had not only that sore self-accusal; but the degradation of the affair, its grotesqueness, its spiritual squalor, its utter gracelessness, its entire want of dignity, were bitter as death in her proud soul. It was not in this shameful guise that she had foreseen the good she was to do. And it had all come through her own wilfulness and self-righteousness. The tears could mix unseen with the rain that drenched her face, but they blinded her, and half-way up the steps she stumbled on her skirt, and would have fallen, if the young man had not caught her. After that, from time to time he put his arm about her, and stayed her against the gusts.

  Before they reached the top he said, “Miss Breen, I’m awfully sorry for all this. Mrs. Maynard will be ashamed of what she said. Confound it! If Maynard were only here!”

  “Why should she be ashamed?” demanded Grace. “If she had been drowned, I should have murdered her, and I’m responsible if anything happens to her, — I am to blame.” She escaped from him, and ran into the house. He slunk round the piazza to the kitchen door, under the eyes of the ladies watching at the parlor windows.

  “I wonder he let the others carry her up,” said Miss Gleason. “Of course, he will marry her now, — when she gets her divorce.” She spoke of Mrs. Maynard, whom her universal toleration not only included in the mercy which the opinions of the other ladies denied her, but round whom her romance cast a halo of pretty possibilities as innocently sentimental as the hopes of a young girl.

  IV.

  The next morning Grace was sitting beside her patient
, with whom she had spent the night. It was possibly Mrs. Maynard’s spiritual toughness which availed her, for she did not seem much the worse for her adventure: she had a little fever, and she was slightly hoarser; but she had died none of the deaths that she projected during the watches of the night, and for which she had chastened the spirit of her physician by the repeated assurance that she forgave her everything, and George Maynard everything, and hoped that they would be good to her poor little Bella. She had the child brought from its crib to her own bed, and moaned over it; but with the return of day and the duties of life she appeared to feel that she had carried her forgiveness far enough, and was again remembering her injuries against Grace, as she lay in her morning gown on the lounge which had been brought in for her from the parlor.

  “Yes, Grace, I shall always say if I had died and I may die yet — that I did not wish to go out with Mr. Libby, and that I went purely to please you. You forced me to go. I can’t understand why you did it; for I don’t suppose you wanted to kill us, whatever you did.”

  Grace could not lift her head. She bowed it over the little girl whom she had on her knee, and who was playing with the pin at her throat, in apparent unconsciousness of all that was said. But she had really followed it, with glimpses of intelligence, as children do, and now at this negative accusal she lifted her hand, and suddenly struck Grace a stinging blow on the cheek.

  Mrs. Maynard sprang from her lounge. “Why, Bella! you worthless little wretch!” She caught her from Grace’s knee, and shook her violently. Then, casting the culprit from her at random, she flung herself down again in a fit of coughing, while the child fled to Grace for consolation, and, wildly sobbing, buried her face in the lap of her injured friend.