Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Robert took all this awry. He did not deign to ask her when this mysterious moment was, far less whether it might ever recur; he did not answer one of her arguments; he did not even come over to Rye Beach to combat and trample on her reasons. He wrote her a furious, foolish reply, in which he agreed with her that she had never loved him, and never would, and he bade her farewell. He managed to exchange with a friend who was bemoaning his hard lot in being ordered away from his young wife to the China station, and he sailed with their blessing three days after getting Helen’s letter. She only learned of his departure by chance.

  The old man held the letter in his hand, after reading it, for so long a time, that at last Helen looked up. “It seems to me you take it pretty coolly, papa,” she said, her lips quivering.

  “Yes, yes. Poor Robert! poor boy!” sighed her father. Then while she bridled indignantly at his misplaced compassion, he added, “I’m sorry, Helen. I think you would have come to like him. Well, well! If you are contented, my dear—”

  “How can you say such a thing, papa?” cried Helen, astonished that he should have taken what he understood of her letter just as Robert had done, “when you know, — when you know I—” but Helen could not finish what she was going to say. She could not own that she thought her letter susceptible of quite a different answer. She set her lips and tried to stop their trembling, while her eyes filled.

  Her father did not notice. “My dear,” he said presently, “will you ask Margaret to make me a cup of tea? I feel unpleasantly weak.”

  “Why, papa!” cried Helen, flying to the bell, “why didn’t you tell me before, instead of letting me worry you with all this foolishness? why didn’t you say you were not so well?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of it,” said her father, meekly accepting her reproof. “It’s nothing. The wind has changed, hasn’t it? I feel the east a little.”

  “You’re chilly?” Helen was now tempted to be really harsh with him for his remissness, but she did not stay from running after the wrap, soft and light, which she had brought back from the sea-side with her, and had thrown down with her bag in the hall, and though she bemoaned his thoughtlessness, as she flung it over him, still she did not pour out upon him all the self-reproach in her heart. She went and hurried Margaret with the tea, and then set an old-fashioned tea-poy beside the sofa, and when the tea came, she drew up her chair, and poured it for him She offered to pull down the window, but he made her a sign to let it be; and in fact, it was not cooler without than within, and no chill came from the little yard, on whose lofty walls the sunset was beginning to burn in tender red light. She poured herself a cup of tea when she came back, and when she had made her father repeat again and again that he felt much better, she began to see the absurdity of being tragic about Robert at this late day, when she had so often refused him before without the least tragedy. This, to be sure, was not quite like the other refusals; not so one-sided; but really, except for Robert’s own sake, what had she to be sorry for, and why should she pity his towering dudgeon? An ache, faint and dull, made itself felt deep in her heart, and she answered sadly, “Well,” to her father’s tentative “Helen.”

  He did not go on, and she asked presently, “What is it, papa?”

  “Oh, nothing. There was Something I was going to speak to you about. But it will do another time.” Helen recollected that once or twice before this her father had begun in the same way, and postponed whatever he had been going to say in the same fashion. It was not a thing to be curious about, and she had never pressed him to speak. She knew that he would speak when he really thought best. But she wondered now a little if his mind were still running upon Robert.

  “Was it something in regard to — to — me, papa?”

  “Why, yes. Yes; indirectly.”

  “Well, then, don’t think of it any more. I shall not. I’m sorry I worried you about it.”

  “About what, my dear?” asked her father, who could not have followed her.

  “Robert!” said Helen, abruptly.

  “Oh! I wasn’t thinking about Robert.”

  “Because, if you were, papa, I want to tell you that I am quite reconciled to have everything end as it has done. Robert and I will always be good friends. You needn’t be troubled about that.”

  “Oh yes, certainly,” assented her father, closing his eyes.

  Helen sat looking at him, as if she would like to go on. But she was a little ashamed, and a little piqued that her father should shut his eyes in that way while she was talking of Robert. He had taken the whole affair rather oddly. She had been prepared to defend Robert if her father were angry with him, as she expected; but instead of being angry, he had really seemed to side with Robert, and had somehow, by his reticence, implied that he would have been glad to have her humble herself to Robert.

  “If you wish to sleep, papa,” she said with a dignity wasted upon him, for he still lay with his eyes closed, “I will go away.”

  “I’m drowsy,” said her father. “But don’t go, Helen. Sit down here.”

  He made a motion for her to sit beside him, and after an instant’s further resentment she drew up her chair, and laid her beautiful head down upon the cushion by his. She gave him a kiss, and dropped a large tear against his withered cheek, and wiped it away with her handkerchief, and then she hid her face again, and wept peacefully till all her tears were gone. At last she lifted her face, and dried her eyes, and sat dreamily watching the red sunset light creeping up the wall on which the wisteria clambered. It rose slowly, leaf by leaf, till it lit an airy frond at top, that swayed in it like a pennon. Suddenly it leaped from this and left it dark, and a shiver coursed through the next rank of foliage. It somehow made her think of a ship going down below the horizon, and the waves running along the sky where the streamers had just hung. But Robert must have been out of sight of land for two days and more before that.

  II.

  HELEN sat beside her father, while the solitude of the house deepened from silence to silence. Then Margaret came to the door, and looked in as if to ask whether it was not time for her to fetch away the tea-things. Helen gave her a nod of acquiescence, and presently rose, and followed her out to the kitchen, to tell her that she was going to her own room, and to say that she must be called when her father woke. But in the kitchen Margaret’s company was a temptation to her loneliness, and she made one little pretext after another for remaining, till Margaret set her a chair in the doorway. Margaret had been in the house ever since Helen was born, and Helen still used the same freedom with her that she had in childhood, and gave herself the range of places to which young ladyhood ordinarily denies its radiant presence. She had indeed as much intimacy with the cook as could consist with their different ages, and she got on smoothly with the cook’s temper, which had not been so good as her looks in youth, and had improved quite as little with age. Margaret was of a remote sort of Irish birth; but her native land had scarcely marked her accent, and but for her church and her sense of place, which was sometimes very respectful and sometimes very high and mighty with those above her, she might have been mistaken for an American; she had a low voice which only grew lower as she grew angry. A family in which she could do all the work had been her ideal when she first came to Boston, but she had failed of this now for some thirty years, and there seemed little hope that the chances would still turn in her favour. In Helen’s childhood, when she used to ask Margaret in moments of tenderness, following the gift of dough in unexpected quantity, whether she would come and live with her after she got married, Margaret had always answered, “Yes, if you won’t have anyone else bothering round,” which was commonly too much for the just pride of the actual second-girl. She had been cook in the family so long ago as when Mr. Harkness had kept a man; she had pressed upon the retreat of the last man with a broom in her hand and a joyful sarcasm on her lips; and she would willingly have kept vacant the place that she had made too hot for a long succession of second-girls. In the intervals of their going an
d coming, she realised her ideal of domestic service for the time being; and in the summer when Helen was away a good deal, she prolonged these intervals to the utmost. She was necessarily much more the housekeeper than Helen, though they both respected a fiction of contrary effect, and Helen commonly left her the choice of her helpers. She had not been surprised to find Margaret alone in the house, but she thought it well to ask her how she was getting on without anybody.

  “Oh, very well, Miss Helen! You know your father don’t make any trouble.”

  “Well, I’ve come now, and we must get somebody,” said Helen.

  “Why, I thought you was going back on Monday, Miss Helen,” answered Margaret.

  “No, I shall not leave papa. I think he’s not at all well.”

  “He does seem rather poorly, Miss Helen. But I don’t see why you need any one, in the summer, this way.”

  “Who’s to go to the door?” asked Helen. “Besides, you couldn’t take care of both of us, Margaret.”

  “Just as you say, Miss Helen; I’d just as lives,” answered Margaret, stubbornly. “It isn’t for me to say; but I don’t see what you want with anybody: you won’t see a soul.”

  “O, you never can tell, Margaret. You’ve had a good rest now, and you must have somebody to help you.” Helen’s sadness smiled at this confusion of ideas, and its suitableness to Margaret’s peculiar attitude. “Get somebody that you know, Margaret, and that you’ll like. But we must have somebody.” She regarded Margaret’s silent and stiff displeasure with a moment’s amusement, and then her bright face clouded; and she asked softly: “Did you know, Margaret, that Robert, — that Lieutenant Fenton — had sailed again?”

  “Why, no, Miss Helen! You don’t mean that? Why, I thought he was going to stay the summer at Portsmouth.”

  “He was,” said Helen, in the same low voice, “but he changed his mind, it seems.”

  “Sailors is a roving set, anyway,” Margaret generalised. Then she added: “Did he come down to say good-bye to your father?”

  “Why, no,” sadly answered Helen, who now thought of this for the first time. Her heart throbbed indignantly; then she reflected that she had kept him from coming. She looked up at the evening blue, with the swallows weaving a woof of flight across the top of the space framed in by the high walls on every hand, and “He hadn’t time, I suppose,” she said sadly. “He couldn’t get off.”

  “Well, I don’t call it very nice, his not coming,” persisted Margaret. “I’d ‘a’ deserted first.” Her associations with naval service had been through gallant fellows who were not in a position to resign.

  Helen smiled so ruefully at this that she would better for cheerfulness have wept. But she recognised Margaret’s limitations as a confidant, and said no more. She rose presently, and again asked Margaret to look in pretty soon, and see if her father were awake, and call her, if he were: she was going to her’ room. She looked in a moment herself as she went, and listened till she heard him breathing, and so passed on through the drawing-room, and trailed heavily up-stairs.

  The house was rather old-fashioned, and it was not furnished in the latest taste, but it made the appeal with which things out of date, or passing out of date, touch the heart. It was in fact beginning to be respectable because it was no longer in the contest for effect, which the decorations of the newer houses carried on about it, and there was a sort of ugly keeping throughout.

  In the very earliest days of Mr. Harkness’s housekeeping, the ornamentation of his home had reflected the character of his business somewhat. There had been even a time when the young supercargo brought back — it was his first voyage — quaint and beautiful shells from the East, for his wife to set about the tables and mantels; but these objects, so exquisite in themselves, so unyielding in composition, had long since disappeared. Some grotesque bronzes, picked up in Chinese ports, to which his early ventures had taken him, survived the expulsion of ivory carvings and Indian idols and genre statuettes in terra cotta, (like those you see in the East Indian Museum at Salem) and now found themselves, with the new feeling for oriental art, in the very latest taste. The others were bestowed in neglected drawers and shelves, along with boxes containing a wealth of ghastly rich and elaborate white crape shawls from China, and fantastically subtle cotton webs from India which Helen had always thought she should use in tableaux, and never had worn. Among the many pictures on the walls (there were too many), there were three Stuarts, the rest were of very indifferent merit; large figure paintings, or allegorical landscapes, after the taste of Cole and Poussin, in great carved and scrolly frames. Helen had once thought of making a raid upon these enemies of art, and in fact she had contemplated remodelling the whole equipment of the parlours, in conformity to the recent feeling in such matters; but she had not got further than the incomplete representation of some golden-rod and mullein-stalks upon the panels of her own chamber-door; and now that the fervour of her first enthusiasm had burnt itself out, she was not sorry she had left the old house in peace.

  “Oh, I should think you’d be so rejoiced,” said the chief of her friends; “it’s such a comfort to go into one house where you don’t have to admire the artistic sentiment, and where every wretched little aesthetic prig of a table or a chair isn’t asserting a principle or teaching a lesson. Don’t touch a cobweb, Helen!” It had never even come to a talk between her and her father, and the house remained unmolested the home of her childhood. She had not really cared much for it since she was a child. The sense of our impermanent relation to the parental roof comes to us very early in life; and perhaps more keenly to a young girl than to her brothers. They are of the world by all the conditions of their active, positive being, almost from the first — a great world that is made for them; but she has her world to create. She cannot sit and adorn her father’s house, as she shall one day beautify and worship her husband’s; she can indeed do her duty by it, but the restless longing remains, and her housewifeliness does not voluntarily blossom out beyond the precincts of her own chamber, which she makes her realm of fancy and of dreams. She could not be the heart of the house if she would, as her mother is, or has been; and though in her mother’s place, she can be housekeeper, thrifty, wise, and notable, still some mysterious essential is wanting which it is not in her nature to supply to her father’s house.

  Helen went to her own room, and, flinging up the windows, let in the noises of the streets. A few feet went by in the secluded place, and a sound of more frequent trampling came from the street into which it opened. Further off rose the blurred tumult of business, softened by the stretch of the Common, and growing less and less with the lapse of the long summer day. It was already a little cooler, and the smell of the sprinkled street stole refreshingly in at the window. It was still very light, and when Helen opened her blinds, the room brightened cheerfully all about her, and the sympathetic intimacy of her own closest belongings tenderly appealed to her. After something has happened, and we first see familiar things about us as they were, there comes, just before the sense of difference in ourselves returns to torment us, a moment of blind and foolish oblivion, and this was Helen’s as she sat down beside the window, and looked round upon the friendly prettiness of her room. It had been her room when she was a child, and there were childish keepsakes scattered about in odd places, out of the way of young-ladyish luxuries, highshouldered bottles of perfume, and long-handled ivory brushes, and dainty boxes and cases, and starred and bevelled hand-glasses, and other sacred mysteries of toilet. Of the period when she had thought herself wedded to art there were certain charcoal sketches pinned against the wall, and in one corner, not very definite at first glance under the draperies tossed upon it from time to time, was her easel. On projections of her mirror-frame hung souvenirs of Robert’s first cruise, which had been in the Mediterranean: ropes of Roman pearls; nets and bracelets and necklaces of shells and beads from Venice; filigree silver jewellery from Genoa; strands and rosaries of black, barbarically scented wooden beads from the Levant
: not things you could wear at all, but very pleasant to have; they gave a sentiment to your room when you brought any one into it; they were nice to have lying about, and people liked to take them into their hands: they were not so very uncommon, either, that you had to keep telling what they were. She had never thought that possibly Robert had expected her to wear the absurd things. With an aching recurrence to their quarrel (it could be called no less) and a penitent self-pity, she thought of it now. It did not seem to her that she could touch them, but she went languidly to the mirror and took some of them down, and then all at once fantastically began to array herself in them: like a mad girl, she reflected. She threw the loops of Roman pearls and the black strands of Levantine beads about her neck; she set a net of the Venetian shell-work on her hair, and decked her wrists and her lovely ears with the Genoese filigree; a perfectly frantic combination, she mused, as she shook her head a little to make the ear-bobs dance. “Yes, perfectly frantic,” she said aloud, but not much thinking of the image confronting her from the mirror, thinking rather of Robert, and poignantly regretting that she had never put them on for him; and thinking that if the loss of him had made her certain about him too late for ever, how fatally strange that would be. Again she went over all the facts of the affair, and was able to make much surer of Robert’s motives than of her own. She knew that if he had understood her saying that she might have loved him once to be any encouragement for the future, he would not have written as he did. She could imagine Robert’s being very angry at the patronising tone of the rest of her letter; she had entire faith in his stupidity; she never doubted his generosity, his magnanimous incapability of turning her refusal of him into a refusal of her; his was not the little soul that could rejoice in such a chance. She wondered if now, far out at sea, sailing, sailing away, three years away, from her, he saw anything in her letter but refusal; or was he still in that blind rage? Did he never once think that it had seemed such a great thing for her to make confession, which meant him to come to her? But had she really meant that? It seemed so now, but perhaps then she had only thought of mingling a drop of kindness in his bitter cup, of trying to spare him the mortification of having loved a person who had never thought for a moment of loving him? From time to time, her image appeared to advance upon her from the depths of the mirror, decked in all that incongruous frippery, and to say with trembling lips, “Perfectly frantic, perfectly frantic,” while the tears ran down its face; and she found a wild comfort in regarding herself as quite an insane, irresponsible creature, who did not know what she was about. She felt that fate ought not to hold her to account. The door-bell rang, and she snatched the net from her hair with a fearful shudder, and flung down all the ornaments in a heap upon her dressing-table. Bumping sounds in the hall below reminded her that in her trance before the glass, she had remotely known of a wagon stopping at the door, and presently she heard Margaret coming up the stairs behind the panting express-man who was fetching up her trunk. She fled into another room, and guiltily lurked there till they went out again, before she returned to unlock and unpack the box. It was one of Helen’s economies not to drive home from the station, but to send her baggage by express and come up in a horse-car. The sums thus saved she devoted to a particular charity, and was very rigid with herself about spending every half-dollar coach-fare for that object. She only gave twenty-five cents to the express, and she made a merit of the fact that neither the coach-hire nor the charity ever cost her father anything. Robert had once tried to prove that it always cost him seventy-five cents, but she had easily seen through the joke, and had made him confess it.