Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “How d’ do, Margaret?” She greeted the cook in a voice whose bright kindness seemed the translation of her girlish beauty into sound. “Surprised to see me?” She did not wait for the cook’s answer, but put down her bag, and began pulling off her gloves, after shaking out her skirt, and giving that penetrating sidelong downward look at it, which women always give their drapery at moments of arrival or departure. She turned into the drawing-room from the hall, and went up to the long, old-fashioned mirror, and glanced at the face which it dimly showed her in the close-shuttered room. The face had apparently not changed since she last saw it in that mirror, and one might have fancied that the young lady was somehow surprised at this.

  “May I ask why policemen are coming and going in and out of our house, Margaret?” she demanded of the cook’s image, which, further down in the mirror, hesitated at the doorway.

  “He come home with your father, Miss Helen,” answered the cook, and as Helen turned round and stared at her in the flesh, she continued: “He had one of his faint turns in the Common. He’s laying down in the library now, Miss Helen.”

  “O, poor papa!” wailed the young lady, who knew that in spite of the cook’s pronoun, it could not be the policeman who was then reposing from faintness in the library. She whirled away from the mirror, and swooped through the doorway into the hall, and back into the room where her father lay. “The heat has been too much for him,” she moaned, in mixed self-reproach and compassion, as she flew; and she dropped upon her knees beside him, and fondly caressed his grey head, and cooed and lamented over him, with the irreverent tenderness he liked her to use with him. “Poor old fellow,” she murmured. “It’s too bad! You ‘re working yourself to death, and I’m going to stay with you now, and put a stop to your being brought home by policemen. Why, you ought to be ashamed, breaking down in this way, as soon as my back is turned! Has Margaret done everything for you? Wouldn’t you like a little light?” She started briskly to her feet, flung up the long window, and raising and lowering the shade to get the right level for her father’s eyes, stood silhouetted against the green space without: a grass plot between high brick walls, on one of which clambered a grape-vine, and on the other a wisteria, while a bed of bright-leafed plants gave its colour in the centre of the yard. “There!” she said, with a glance at this succinct landscape. “That’s the prettiest bit of nature I’ve seen since I left Boston.” She came back and sat down on a low chair beside her father, who smiled fondly upon her, and took one of her hands to hold, while she pushed back his hair with the other.

  “Are you awfully glad to see me?”

  “Awfully,” said Mr. Harkness, falling in with her mood, and brightening with the light and her presence. “What brought you so suddenly?”

  “Oh, that’s a long story. Are you feeling better, now?”

  “Yes. I was merely fault. I shall be all right by morning. I’ve been a little worn out.”

  “Was it like the last time?” asked Helen.

  “Yes,” said her father.

  “A little more like?”

  “I don’t think it was more severe,” said Mr. Harkness, thoughtfully.

  “What had you been doing? Honour bright, now: was it accounts?”

  “Yes, it was accounts, my dear.”

  “The same old wretches?”

  “The same old ones; some new ones, too. They ‘re in hopeless confusion,” sighed Mr. Harkness, who seemed to age and sadden with the thought.

  “Well, now, I’ll tell you what, papa,” said Helen, sternly: “I want you to leave all accounts, old and new, quite alone till the cold weather comes. Will you promise?”

  Harkness smiled, as wearily as he had sighed. He knew that she was burlesquing somewhat her ignorance of affairs; and yet it was not much burlesqued, after all; for her life, like that of other American girls of prosperous parentage, had been almost as much set apart from the hard realities of bread-winning as the life of a princess, as entirely dedicated to society, to the studies that refine, and the accomplishments that grace society. The question of money had hardly entered into it. Since she was a little child, and used to climb upon her father’s knee, and ask him, in order to fix his status in her fairy tales, whether he was rich or poor, she might be said never to have fairly thought of that matter. Of course, she understood that she was not so rich as some girls, but she had never found that the difference was against her in society; she could not help perceiving that in regard to certain of them it was in her favour, and that she might have patronised them if she had liked, and that they were glad of her friendship on any terms. Her father’s great losses had come when she was too young to see the difference that they made in his way of living; ever since she could remember they had kept to the same scale of simple ease in the house where she was born, and she had known no wish that there had not been money enough to gratify. Pleasures of every kind had always come to her as freely and with as little wonder on her part as if they had been, like her youth, her bounding health, her beauty, the direct gift of heaven. She knew that the money came from her father’s business, but she had never really asked herself how it was earned. It is doubtful if she could have told what his business was; it was the India trade, whatever that was, and of late years he had seemed to be more worried by it than he used to be, and she had vaguely taken this ill, as an ungrateful return on the part of business. Once he had gone so far as to tell her that he had been hurt by the Great Fire somewhat. But the money for all her needs and luxuries (she was not extravagant, and really did not spend much upon herself) had come as before, and walking through the burnt district, and seeing how handsomely it had been rebuilt, she had a comforting sense that its losses had all been repaired.

  “You look a little flushed and excited, my dear,” said her father, in evasion of the commands laid upon him, and he touched her fair cheek. He was very fond of her beauty and of her style; in the earlier days of her young ladyhood, he used to go about with her a great deal, and was angry when he thought she did not get all the notice she ought, and a little jealous when she did.

  “Yes, I am flushed and excited, papa,” she owned, throwing herself back in the low chair she had pulled up to his sofa, and beginning to pluck nervously at those little tufts of silk that roughened the cobwebby fabric of the grey summer stuff she wore. “Don’t you think,” she asked, lifting her downcast eyes, “that coming home and finding you in this state is enough to make me look flushed and excited?”

  “Not quite,” said her father quietly. “It’s not a new thing.”

  Helen gave a sort of lamentable laugh. “I know I was humbugging, and I’m as selfish as I can be, to think more of myself even now than I do of you. But, oh papa! I’m so unhappy!” She looked at him through a mist that gathered and fell in silent drops from her eyes without clearing them, so that she did not see him carry the hand she had abandoned to his heart, and check a gasp. “I suppose we all have our accounts, one way or other, and they get confused like yours. Mine with — with — a certain person, had got so mixed up that there was nothing for it but just to throw them away.”

  “Do you mean that you have broken with him finally, Helen?” asked her father gravely.

  “I don’t know whether you call it finally,” said Helen, “but I told him it was no use — not just in those words — and that he ought to forget me; and I was afraid I wasn’t equal to it; and that I couldn’t see my way to it clearly; and unless I could see my way clearly, I oughtn’t to go on any longer. I wrote to him last week, and I thought — I thought that perhaps he wouldn’t answer it; perhaps he would come over to Eye Beach — he could easily have run over from Portsmouth — to see me — about it. But he didn’t — he didn’t — he — wrote a very short letter — . Oh, I didn’t see how he could write such a letter; I tried to spare him in every way; and yesterday he — he — s — s — sailed!” Here the storm broke, and Helen bowed herself to the sobs with which her slimness shook, like a tall flower beaten in the wind. Then she sudden
ly stopped, and ran her hand into her pocket, and pulled out her handkerchief. She wiped away her tears, and waited for her father to speak; but he lay silent, and merely regarded her pitifully. “I couldn’t bear it any longer there with those geese of Merrills — I’m sure they were as kind as could be — and so I came home to burden and afflict you, papa. Dont you think that was like me?” She gave her lamentable laugh again, sobbed, laughed once more, dried the fresh tears with her handkerchief, which she had mechanically shaped into a rabbit, and sat plucking at her dress as before. “What do people do, papa,” she asked presently, with a certain hoarseness in her voice, “when they’ve thrown away their accounts?”

  “I never heard of their doing it, my dear,” said her father.

  “Well, but when they’ve come to the very end of everything, and there’s nothing to go on with, and they might as well stop?”

  “They go into bankruptcy,” answered the old man, absently, as if the thought had often been in his mind before.

  “Well, that’s what I’ve gone into — bankruptcy,” said Helen. “And what do they do after they’ve gone into bankruptcy?”

  “They begin the world again with nothing, if they have the heart,” replied her father.

  “That’s what I have to do then — begin the world again with nothing! There! my course is clear, and I hope I like it, and I hope I’m satisfied!”

  With these words of self-reproach, Helen again broke down, and bowed herself over the ruin she had made of her life.

  “I don’t think you need despair,” said her father, soothingly, yet with a sort of physical effort which escaped her self-centred grief. “Robert is such a good fellow that if you wrote to him—”

  “Why, papa! Are you crazy?” shouted the young girl. “Write to him? He’s off for three years, and I don’t think he’d come posting back from China, if I did write to him. And how could I write to him, even if he were in the next room?”

  “It wouldn’t be necessary, in that case,” said her father. “I’m sorry he’s gone for so long,” he added, rather absently.

  “If he were gone for a day, it couldn’t make any difference,” cried Helen, inexorably. “I argued it all out, — and it’s a perfect chain of logic — before I wrote to him. I looked at it in this way. I said to myself that it was no use having the affair off and on, any longer. It would be perfect misery to a person of my temperament to be an officer’s wife, and have my husband with me to-day and at the ends of the earth to-morrow. Besides, his pay wouldn’t support us. You told me that yourself, papa.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Harkness. “But I thought Robert might leave the navy, and—”

  “I never would have let him!” Helen burst in. “He would have been as unhappy as a fish out of water, and I wouldn’t have his wretchedness on my conscience, and his idleness — you know how long that splendid Captain Seymour was trying to get into business in Boston, after he left the service: and then he had to go to California before he could find anything to do; and do you suppose I was going to have Robert mooning round in that way, for ages?”

  “He might have gone into business with me for the time being,” said Mr. Harkness, not very hopefully.

  “Oh yes! you could have made a place for him, I know! And we should both have been a burden to you, then. But I shouldn’t have cared for all that. I would have met any fate with Robert, if I had believed that I felt toward him just as I should. But, don’t you see, papa? If I had felt towards him in that way, I never should have thought of any — any — prudential considerations. That was what convinced me, that was what I couldn’t escape from, turn which way I would. That was the point I put to Robert himself, and — and — oh, I don’t see how he could answer as he did! I don’t see how he could!” Helen convulsively clutched something in the hand which she had thrust into her pocket. “It isn’t that I care for myself; but oh, I am so sorry for him, away off there all alone, feeling so hard and bitter towards me, and thinking me heartless, and I don’t, know what all, — and hating me so.”

  “What did he say, Helen?” asked her father, tenderly. She snatched her hand from her pocket and laid a paper, crumpled, bewept, distained, in the hand he stretched towards her, and then bowed her face upon her knees.

  Helen and her father were old confidants, and she had not more reluctance in showing him this letter than most girls would have had in trusting such a paper to their mother’s eyes. Her own mother had died long ago, and in the comradeship of her young life her father had entered upon a second youth, happier, or at least tranquiller, than the first. She adored him and petted him, as a wife could not, and this worship did not spoil him as it might if it had been a conjugal devotion. They had always a perfect understanding; she had not withdrawn her childish intimacy of thought and feeling from him to give it to her mother, as she would have done if her mother had lived; he knew all her small heart affairs without asking, more or less in a tacit way; and she had an abidingly grateful sense of his wisdom in keeping her from follies which she could see she had escaped through it. He had never before so directly sought to know her trouble; but he had never before seen her in so much trouble; besides, he had always been Robert Fenton’s friend at court with Helen; and he had quietly kept his hopes of their future through rather a stormy and uncertain present.

  He liked Robert for the sake of Robert’s father, who had been captain and supercargo of one of Harkness and Co.’s ships, and had gone down in her on her home voyage when he was returning to be junior partner in the house, after a prosperous venture of his own in Wenham ice. He left this boy, and a young wife who died soon afterwards. Then Mr. Harkness, who was the boy’s guardian, gave him and the small property that remained to him more than a guardian’s care. He sent him to school, but he made him at home in his own house on all holidays and in vacation. These sojourns and absences, beginning when Robert was ten years old, and continuing through his school-boy age, had renewed alternately his intimacy and strangeness with Helen, and kept her a mystery and enchantment which grew with his growth, while to her consciousness he was simply Robert, a nice boy, who was now at school, or now at home, and who was often so shy that it was perfectly silly. When he was old enough to be placed in some career he was allowed to choose Harvard and a profession afterwards, or any more technical training that he liked better. He chose neither: the sea called him, as the old superstition is, and every nerve in his body responded. He would have liked to go into the trade in which his father had died, but here his guardian overruled him. He knew that the India trade was dying out. If Robert’s soul was set upon the sea, of which there seemed no doubt, it was better that he should go into the navy; at Annapolis he would have a thorough schooling, which would stand him in good stead, if future chance or choice ever cast him ashore to live.

  Helen was in the sophomore year of the class with which she was dancing through Harvard when Robert came home from his first cruise. She was then a very great lady, and she patronised the midshipman with killing kindness as a younger brother, though he was in fact half a year her senior. He now fell in love with her outright: very proud love, very jealous, very impatient. She could not understand it. She said to her father it was so queer. She never thought of such a thing. Why, Robert! It was absurd. Besides, he had such a funny name; Fenton! But a passion like his was not to be quenched with reasons even so good as these. He went to sea again, bitterly, rapturously brooding over her idea, and came home in the autumn after Helen’s class-day. All the fellows had scattered now; and she was left much younger and humbler in her feelings, and not so great a lady for all her triumphs. Two of her class had proposed to her, and lots had come near it; but her heart had been left untouched, and she perceived, or thought she perceived, that these young gentlemen, who were wise and mature enough for their age, though neither Solomons nor Methuselahs, were all silly boys. In herself, on the contrary, the tumult of feeling with which she had first entered the world had been succeeded by a calm, which she might well have mistaken for
wisdom. She felt that she now knew the world thoroughly, and while she was resolved to judge it kindly, she was not going to be dazzled by it any longer. She had become an observer of human nature; she analysed her feelings; sometimes she made cutting remarks to people, and was dreadfully sorry for it. She withdrew a great deal from society, and liked being thought odd. She had begun to take lessons in painting with a number of ladies under an artist’s criticism; she took up courses of reading; she felt that life was a serious affair. On his return, Robert at first seemed to her more boyish, more brotherly than before. But in talking with him certain facts of his history came out that showed him a very brave and manly fellow, and good, too. This gave her pause; so keen an observer of human nature at once discerned in this young man, who did not brag of his experiences, nor yet affect to despise them as trifles, but honestly owned that at one time he was scared, and that at another he would have given everything to be ashore, an object worthy of her closest and most reverent study. She proceeded to idealise him, and to stand in awe of him. Oh yes! with a deep sighing breath, and a long dreamy look at him — he! What he had been through must have changed the whole world to him. After that night in the typhoon — well, nothing could ever have been the same to her after that. He must find all the interests at home sickeningly mean. This was the tone she took with him, driving him to despair. When he again urged his suit, she said that she could not see why he should care for her. At the same time she wanted to ask him why he did not wear his uniform ashore, instead of that unnatural civil dress that he seemed so anxious to make himself ridiculous in. Being pressed for some sort of answer, she said that she had resolved never to marry. After this Robert went off very melancholy upon his third cruise. But she wrote him such kind and sympathetic letters that he came home from this cruise, which was a short one, more fondly in love than ever, but more patiently, more pleasingly in love; and he now behaved so sensibly, with so much apparent consideration for her uncertainty of mind, that she began to think seriously of him. But though she liked him ever so much, and respected him beyond anything, the very fact that she was wondering whether she could ask him to leave the navy or not, and where and how they should live, seemed sufficient proof to her that she did not care for him in the right way. Love, she knew, did not consider ways and means; it did not stop to argue; it found in itself its own reason and the assurance of a future. It did not come after years of shilly-shallying, and beating about the bush, and weighing this and that, and scrutiny of one’s emotions. If she loved Robert so little as to care what happened after they were married, she did not love him at all. Something like this, but expressed with infinite kindness was what she had written from Rye Beach to Robert stationed at Portsmouth. She ended by leaving the case in his hands. She forbade, him to hope, but she told him that there had been a time, a moment, when she thought that she might have loved him.