Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “If I do that,” said Atherton, gravely, “I must make my conditions,” and now they sat down together on the sofa from which he had risen. “I can’t be subjected again to your — disappointments,” — he arrested with a motion of his hand the profuse expression of her penitence and good intentions,— “and I’ve felt for a long time that this was no attitude for your attorney. You ought to have the right to question and censure; but I confess I can’t grant you this. I’ve allowed myself to make your interests too much my own in everything to be able to bear it. I’ve thought several times that I ought to give up the trust; but it seemed like giving up so much more, that I never had the courage to do it in cold blood. This morning you gave me my chance to do it in hot blood, and if I resume it, I must make my terms.”

  It seemed a long speech to Clara, who sometimes thought she knew whither it tended, and sometimes not. She said in a low voice, “Yes.”

  “I must be relieved,” continued Atherton, “of the sense I’ve had that it was indelicate in me to keep it, while I felt as I’ve grown to feel — towards you.” He stopped: “If I take it back, you must come with it!” he suddenly concluded.

  The inconsistency of accepting these conditions ought to have struck a woman who had so long imagined herself the chase of fortune-hunters. But Clara apparently found nothing alarming in the demand of a man who openly acted upon his knowledge of what could only have been matter of conjecture to many suitors she had snubbed. She found nothing incongruous in the transaction, and she said, with as tremulous breath and as swift a pulse as if the question had been solely of herself, “I accept — the conditions.”

  In the long, happy talk that lasted till midnight, they did not fail to recognize that, but for their common pity of Marcia, they might have remained estranged, and they were decently ashamed of their bliss when they thought of misery like hers. When Atherton rose to bid Clara good night, Marcia was still watching for Bartley, indulging for the last time the folly of waiting for him as if she definitely expected him that night.

  Every night since he disappeared, she had kept the lights burning in the parlor and hall, and drowsed before the fire till the dawn drove her to a few hours of sleep in bed. But with the coming of the stranger who was to be her companion, she must deny herself even this consolation, and openly accept the fact that she no longer expected Bartley at any given time. She bitterly rebelled at the loss of her solitude, in which she could be miserable in whatever way her sorrow prompted, and the pangs with which she had submitted to Miss Kingsbury’s kindness grew sharper hour by hour till she maddened in a frenzy of resentment against the cruelty of her expiation. She longed for the day to come that she might go to her, and take back her promises and her submission, and fling her insulting good-will in her face. She said to herself that no one should enter her door again till Bartley opened it; she would die there in the house, she and her baby, and as she stood wringing her hands and moaning over the sleeping little one, a hideous impulse made her brain reel; she wished to look if Bartley had left his pistol in its place; a cry for help against herself broke from her; she dropped upon her knees.

  The day came, and the hope and strength which the mere light so strangely brings to the sick in spirit as well as the sick in body visited Marcia. She abhorred the temptation of the night like the remembrance of a wicked dream, and she went about with a humble and grateful prayer — to something, to some one — in her heart. Her housewifely pride stirred again: that girl should not think she was a slattern; and Miss Strong, when she preceded her small trunk in the course of the forenoon, found the parlor and the guest-chamber, which she was to have, swept, and dusted, and set in perfect order by Marcia’s hands. She had worked with fury, and kept her heart-ache still, but it began again at sight of the girl. Fortunately, the conservatory pupil had embraced with even more than Miss Kingsbury’s ardor the theory of Bartley’s aberration, and she met Marcia with a sympathy in her voice and eyes that could only have come from sincere conviction. She was a simple country thing, who would never be a prima donna; but the overflowing sentimentality which enabled her to accept herself at the estimate of her enthusiastic fellow-villagers made her of far greater comfort to Marcia than the sublimest musical genius would have done. She worshipped the heroine of so tragic a fact, and her heart began to go out to her in honest helpfulness from the first. She broke in upon the monotony of Marcia’s days with the offices and interests of wholesome commonplace, and exorcised the ghostly silence with her first stroke on the piano, — which Bartley had bought on the instalment plan and had not yet paid for.

  In fine, life adjusted itself with Marcia to the new conditions, as it does with women less wofully widowed by death, who promise themselves reunion with their lost in another world, and suffer through the first weeks and days in the hope that their parting will be for but days or weeks, and then gradually submit to indefinite delay. She prophesied Bartley’s return, and fixed it in her own mind for this hour and that. “Now, in the morning, I shall wake and find him standing by the bed. No, at night he will come in and surprise us at dinner.” She cheated herself with increasing faith at each renewal of her hopes. When she ceased to formulate them at last, it was because they had served their end, and left her established, if not comforted, in the superstition by which she lived. His return at any hour or any moment was the fetish which she let no misgiving blaspheme; everything in her of woman and of wife consecrated it. She kept the child in continual remembrance of him by talking of him, and by making her recognize the photographs in which Bartley had abundantly perpetuated himself; at night, when she folded the little one’s hands for prayer, she made her pray God to take care of poor papa and send him home soon to mamma. She was beginning to canonize him.

  Her father came to see her as soon as he thought it best after Atherton’s letter; and the old man had to endure talk of Bartley to which all her former praises were as refreshing shadows of defamation. She required him to agree with everything she said, and he could not refuse; she reproached him for being with herself the cause of all Bartley’s errors, and he had to bear it without protest. At the end he could say nothing but “Better come home with me, Marcia,” and he suffered in meekness the indignation with which she rebuked him: “I will stay in Bartley’s house till he comes back to me. If he is dead, I will die here.”

  The old man had satisfied himself that Bartley had absconded in his own rascally right mind, and he accepted with tacit grimness the theory of the detectives that he had not gone to Europe alone. He paid back the money which Bartley had borrowed from Halleck, and he set himself as patiently as he could to bear with Marcia’s obstinacy. It was a mania which must be indulged for the time, and he could only trust to Atherton to keep him advised concerning her. When he offered her money at parting, she hesitated. But she finally took it, saying, “Bartley will pay it back, every cent, as soon as he gets home. And if,” she added, “he doesn’t get back soon, I will take some other boarders and pay it myself.”

  He could see that she was offended with him for asking her to go home. But she was his girl; he only pitied her. He shook hands with her as usual, and kissed her with the old stoicism; but his lips, set to fierceness by the life-long habit of sarcasm, trembled as he turned away. She was eager to have him go; for she had given him Miss Strong’s room, and had taken the girl into her own, and Bartley would not like it if he came back and found her there.

  Bartley’s disappearance was scarcely a day’s wonder with people outside his own circle in that time of anxiety for a fair count in Louisiana and Florida, and long before the Returning Boards had partially relieved the tension of the public mind by their decision he had quite dropped out of it. The reporters who called at his house to get the bottom facts in the case, adopted Marcia’s theory, given them by Miss Strong, and whatever were their own suspicions or convictions, paragraphed him with merciful brevity as having probably wandered away during a temporary hallucination. They spoke of the depression of spirits which ma
ny of his friends had observed in him, and of pecuniary losses, as the cause. They mentioned his possible suicide only to give the report the authoritative denial of his family; and they added, that the case was in the hands of the detectives, who believed themselves in possession of important clews. The detectives in fact remained constant to their original theory, that Bartley had gone to Europe, and they were able to name with reasonable confidence the person with whom he had eloped. But these were matters hushed up among the force and the press. In the mean time, Bartley had been simultaneously seen at Montreal and Cincinnati, at about the same time that an old friend had caught a glimpse of him on a train bound westward from Chicago.

  So far as the world was concerned, the surmise with which Marcia saved herself from final despair was the only impression that even vaguely remained of the affair. Her friends, who had compassionately acquiesced in it at first, waited for the moment when they could urge her to relinquish it and go home to her father; but while they waited, she gathered strength to establish herself immovably in it, and to shape her life more and more closely about it. She had no idea, no instinct, but to stay where he had left her till he came back. She opposed this singly and solely against all remonstrance, and treated every suggestion to the contrary as an instigation to crime. Her father came from time to time during the winter to see her, but she would never go home with him even for a day. She put her plan in force; she took other boarders: other girl students like Miss Strong, whom her friends brought her when they found that it was useless to oppose her and so began to abet her; she worked hard, and she actually supported herself at last in a frugal independence. Her father consulted with Atherton and the Hallecks; he saw that she was with good and faithful friends, and he submitted to what he could not help. When the summer came, he made a last attempt to induce her to go home with him. He told her that her mother wished to see her. She would not understand. “I’ll come,” she said, “if mother gets seriously sick. But I can’t go home for the summer. If I hadn’t been at home last summer, he would never have got into that way, and it would never have happened.”

  She went home at last, in obedience to a peremptory summons; but her mother was too far gone to know her when she came. Her quiet, narrow life had grown colder and more inward to the end, and it passed without any apparent revival of tenderness for those once dear to her; the funeral publicity that followed seemed a final touch of the fate by which all her preferences had been thwarted in the world.

  Marcia stayed only till she could put the house in order after they had laid her mother to rest among the early reddening sumacs under the hot glare of the August sun; and when she came away, she brought her father with her to Boston, where he spent his days as he might, taking long and aimless walks, devouring heaps of newspapers, rusting in idleness, and aging fast, as men do in the irksomeness of disuse.

  Halleck’s father was beginning to show his age, too; and Halleck’s mother lived only in her thoughts of him, and her hopes of his return; but he did not even speak of this in his letters to them. He said very little of himself, and they could merely infer that the experiment to which he had devoted himself was becoming less and less satisfactory. Their sense of this added its pang to their unhappiness in his absence.

  One day Marcia said to Olive Halleck, “Has any one noticed that you are beginning to look like your sisters?”

  “I’ve noticed it,” answered the girl. “I always was an old maid, and now I’m beginning to show it.”

  Marcia wondered if she had not hurt Olive’s feelings; but she would never have known how to excuse herself; and latterly she had been growing more and more like her father in certain traits. Perhaps her passion for Bartley had been the one spring of tenderness in her nature, and, if ever it were spent, she would stiffen into the old man’s stern aridity.

  XXXVI.

  It was nearly two years after Atherton’s marriage that Halleck one day opened the door of the lawyer’s private office, and, turning the key in the lock, limped forward to where the latter was sitting at his desk. Halleck was greatly changed: the full beard that he had grown scarcely hid the savage gauntness of his face; but the change was not so much in lines and contours as in that expression of qualities which we call looks.

  “Well, Atherton!”

  “Halleck! You!”

  The friends looked at each other; and Atherton finally broke from his amaze and offered his hand, with an effect, even then, of making conditions. But it was Halleck who was the first to speak again.

  “How is she? Is she well? Is she still here? Have they heard anything from him yet?”

  “No,” said Atherton, answering the last question with the same provisional effect as before.

  “Then he is dead. That’s what I knew; that’s what I said! And here I am. The fight is over, and that’s the end of it. I’m beaten.”

  “You look it,” said Atherton, sadly.

  “Oh, yes; I look it. That’s the reason I can afford to be frank, in coming back to my friends. I knew that with this look in my face I should make my own welcome; and it’s cordial even beyond my expectations.”

  “I’m not glad to see you, Halleck,” said Atherton. “For your own sake I wish you were at the other end of the world.”

  “Oh, I know that. How are my people? Have you seen my father lately? Or my mother? Or — Olive?” A pathetic tremor shook his voice.

  “Why, haven’t you seen them yet?” demanded Atherton.

  Halleck laughed cynically. “My dear friend, my steamer arrived this morning, and I’m just off the New York train. I’ve hurried to your office in all the impatience of friendship. I’m very lucky to find you here so late in the day! You can take me home to dinner, and let your domestic happiness preach to me. Come, I rather like the notion of that!”

  “Halleck,” said Atherton, without heeding his banter, “I wish you would go away again! No one knows you are here, you say, and no one need ever know it.”

  Halleck set his lips and shook his head, with a mocking smile. “I’m surprised at you, Atherton, with your knowledge of human nature. I’ve come to stay; you must know that. You must know that I had gone through everything before I gave up, and that I haven’t the strength to begin the struggle over again. I tell you I’m beaten, and I’m glad of it; for there is rest in it. You would waste your breath, if you talked to me in the old way; there’s nothing in me to appeal to, any more. If I was wrong — But I don’t admit, any more, that I was wrong: by heaven, I was right!”

  “You are beaten, Halleck,” said Atherton sorrowfully. He pushed himself back in his chair, and clasped his hands together behind his head, as his habit was in reasoning with obstinate clients. “What do you propose to do?”

  “I propose to stay.”

  “What for?”

  “What for? Till I can prove that he is dead.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I shall be free to ask her.” He added angrily, “You know what I’ve come back for: why do you torment me with these questions? I did what I could; I ran away. And the last night I saw her, I thrust her back into that hell she called her home, and I told her that no man could be her refuge from that devil, her husband, — when she had begged me in her mortal terror to go in with her, and save her from him. That was the recollection I had to comfort me when I tried to put her out of my mind, — out of my soul! When I heard that he was gone, I respected her days of mourning. God knows how I endured it, now it’s over; but I did endure it. I waited, and here I am. And you ask me to go away again! Ah!” He fetched his breath through his set teeth, and struck his fist on his knee. “He is dead! And now, if she will, she can marry me. Don’t look at me as if I had killed him! There hasn’t been a time in these two infernal years when I wouldn’t have given my life to save his — for her sake. I know that, and that gives me courage, it gives me hope.”

  “But if he isn’t dead?”

  “Then he has abandoned her, and she has the right to be free: she can get a divorce
!”

  “Oh,” said Atherton, compassionately, “has that poison got into you, Halleck? You might ask her, if she were a widow, to marry you; but how will you ask her, if she’s still a wife, to get a divorce and then marry you? How will you suggest that to a woman whose constancy to her mistake has made her sacred to you?” Halleck seemed about to answer; but he only panted, dry-lipped and open-mouthed, and Atherton continued: “You would have to corrupt her soul first. I don’t know what change you’ve made in yourself during these two years; you look like a desperate and defeated man, but you don’t look like that. You don’t look like one of those scoundrels who lure women from their duty, ruin homes, and destroy society, not in the old libertine fashion in which the seducer had at least the grace to risk his life, but safely, smoothly, under the shelter of our infamous laws. Have you really come back here to give your father’s honest name, and the example of a man of your own blameless life, in support of conditions that tempt people to marry with a mental reservation, and that weaken every marriage bond with the guilty hope of escape whenever a fickle mind, or secret lust, or wicked will may dictate? Have you come to join yourself to those miserable spectres who go shrinking through the world, afraid of their own past, and anxious to hide it from those they hold dear; or do you propose to defy the world, to help form within it the community of outcasts with whom shame is not shame, nor dishonor, dishonor? How will you like the society of those uncertain men, those certain women?”

  “You are very eloquent,” said Halleck, “but I ask you to observe that these little abstractions don’t interest me. I’ve a concrete purpose, and I can’t contemplate the effect of other people’s actions upon American civilization. When you ask me to believe that I oughtn’t to try to rescue a woman from the misery to which a villain has left her, simply because some justice of the peace consecrated his power over her, I decline to be such a fool. I use my reason, and I see who it was that defiled and destroyed that marriage, and I know that she is as free in the sight of God as if he had never lived. If the world doesn’t like my open shame, let it look to its own secret shame, — the marriages made and maintained from interest, and ambition, and vanity, and folly. I will take my chance with the men and women who have been honest enough to own their mistake, and to try to repair it, and I will preach by my life that marriage has no sanctity but what love gives it, and that when love ceases marriage ceases, before heaven. If the laws have come to recognize that, by whatever fiction, so much the better for the laws!” Halleck rose.