“I am with the Butlers at Beverley. They have been everything to me, and are everything.
“HELEN.”
In Helen’s tall hand it took three sheets of note-paper to hold this letter; the paper was very thin, but she put on a double postage to make perfectly sure, and she kept the letter till she went up to Boston, and then posted it herself in the general post-office.
VII.
Helen had been three weeks at the Butlers’, and, in spite of their goodness, which guarded her freedom, as well as all her wishes, she began to feel a constraint which she could not throw off. Life had come to a pause with her, and when it should move forward it must be seriously, and even sadly; and she was morbidly conscious that she somehow clogged the joyous march of Marian Butler’s days. There had been an effort to keep out of her sight the preparations for the wedding, till she had protested against it, and demanded to see every dress. But this very demand emphasised the dark difference between her fate and her friend’s, and Marian was apologetically happy in Helen’s presence, however they both tried to have it otherwise. Once Marian had explained with tears that she would like to put it off for Helen’s sake, if she could, but the time of the marriage had been fixed with regard to so many other matters that it could not be postponed. Helen had answered that Marian made her very wretched talking of such a thing, and that she must go at once if Marian spoke of it again. They had embraced with perfect tenderness and sympathy, and Helen had remained with the helpless feeling of her incongruity in a house of rejoicing. It seemed to her intolerable that she must bring her sorrow thither; she suffered till she could get away with it; all they did to make her feel at ease could only heighten her trouble. She had waited with a painful patience till the Captain should report to her on the settlement of her father’s affairs, and she could begin to shape her future; now that he had spoken she need wait no longer.
She found Mrs. Butler in the parlour the morning after she had written to Robert.
“Mrs. Butler,” she said, “I want you to let me go away next week.”
“I can’t bear to have you talk of leaving us, Helen!” cried Mrs. Butler, with a wistful trouble in her eyes and voice, yet as if she had expected this.
“Yes, I know,” returned Helen, “but I must go. It’s foolish and useless to keep staying on; and now that I’ve made up my feeble mind about it, don’t try to stop me.”
“Helen,” said Mrs. Butler, “don’t go! We all want you to stay. We want you to go to Europe with us — to be our guest, our child. Put away your scruples, my dear — I understand them, and honour them — and go with us.”
“You know I can’t, Mrs. Butler.”
“But if your father had been living, you would have felt free to accept our invitation.”
“Perhaps. But it would have been different then. Don’t press me.”
“I’m sorry, Helen,” sighed Mrs. Butler. “I won’t press you. But stay with us, my dear. It does us good to have you. Mr. Butler and I often talk of it; we all feel it. Say that you’ll stay till we go away, and then we’ll feel as if we had parted because we must.” Helen was standing before Mrs. Butler, who had the girl’s hands in hers, as she sat in her easy-chair, and looked up into her evasive face.
“No,” said Helen, gently taking away her hands, and sitting down near the other, “I couldn’t. Don’t let us deceive ourselves. I’m a shadow in the house; we all know it, and feel it. Nobody’s to blame, nobody can help it,” she added quickly, to stay a protest from Mrs. Butler, “but it’s true. You see how I have to take my blackness out of the loom when your friends come; I give them a painful shock when they catch sight of me; it checks the pleasant things they would like to say; and I hate myself for glooming about the house in secret; I feel that I must cast a shadow on them even through the walls and floors.”
“Helen, dear, there’s no friend we have who is so precious to us as you are!”
“O yes — yes! I know how kind you are. But you see it can’t be. I should have to go away at the time of the wedding, and you had better let me go before.”
“Go away at the time of Marian’s wedding? Not be — Why, Helen!”
“Yes. Think, Mrs. Butler! It couldn’t be.”
Mrs. Butler was silent. “I shouldn’t care for myself, and I know you wouldn’t care for yourselves; but the others have some rights which we mustn’t overlook. I should throw a chill over everything. I couldn’t endure that, and you can’t persuade me, Mrs. Butler; you mustn’t try.”
Mrs. Butler looked really disconsolate. Helen was right; there was no possibility of gainsaying her, much less of outreasoning her; and Mrs. Butler was one of those feminine temperaments, rather commoner in New England than elsewhere, whom a good reason absolutely silences: they may not often have it themselves, but their reverence for truth and a clear conclusion is such that they must bow to it in others. The most that she could say was, “But you will come back to us afterwards, Helen? You will come after Marian is gone, to comfort us, won’t you? It will be a month before we shall sail, and we should so like to have you with us. We shall not be gay ourselves, then, and you will feel more at home. I won’t oppose you now, dear, but you’ll promise me that!”
“Yes,” answered Helen, “I’ll come back, then, if you want me.”
“And where are you going, now? Where do you mean to stay?”
“I don’t know. I thought I should go to the Miss Amys — you remember them, don’t you? — and ask them to let me stay with them for the present. I know they sometimes take people to board.”
“O yes, I remember them — on West Pomegranate Street; one of those pleasant old houses, with the threshold level with the side-walk. It will be a good place,” said Mrs. Butler, cheered with the thought. “You must let Mr. Butler arrange for you. He—”
“No,” said Helen promptly; “I am not going to trouble Captain Butler any more. I must begin taking care of myself now, and I can’t begin too soon. I have my own money, and I ought to know how to use it.” Human nature is such a very simple as well as complex thing, that Helen could feel a childish pride in being absolute mistress of a certain sum, and for the moment could forget the loss that had endowed her with it. “I am going to be very saving of it, Mrs. Butler.” She smiled, but the smile took away all hope from Mrs. Butler. She looked at Helen in despair, and did not know how to begin what she felt it on her conscience to say at once.
“Oh, Helen!” she broke out, and then checked herself.
“What, Mrs. Butler?” asked the girl, startled by her accent.
“Oh, nothing! I mean — has Mr. Butler told you how much it is?” Mrs. Butler was ashamed of her flighty reluctance and indecision, and now took herself firmly in hand.
“Yes, it’s five thousand dollars — so much more than I ever—”
“Did you understand,” interrupted Mrs. Butler, “that it’s only five thousand in all? Not — not five thousand a year?” Mrs. Butler was prepared for the worst dismay that Helen could show, but Helen showed none. On the contrary, she gave a little laugh.
“Five thousand a year? No indeed! Why, Mrs. Butler, what have you been thinking of? That would be insanity.”
Mrs. Butler looked like one to whom the worst dismay might have been welcomer than this cheerfulness: this might be a far more hopeless condition than the realisation of the fact that the sum of five thousand dollars was not a fortune; Helen might be thinking it was. Mrs. Butler felt obliged to ask: “Do you know how much that will give you to live on?”
“Not exactly,” said Helen, “but not much, I suppose.”
Perhaps she thought a thousand a year. Mrs. Butler must still go on. “Some of Mr. Butler’s Chicago mortgages bring him nine per cent. That would be five times ninety — four hundred and fifty?”
“Oh, I should never send my money away to Chicago. I want it where I can put my hand on it at once. I shall deposit it in savings-banks — like Margaret — at six per cent., and then I shall get three hundred a year from it.”
“But, poor child! you can’t live upon that,” Mrs. Butler besought her.
“No, I must do something. I’m determined never to encroach upon the principal, whatever happens.
Don’t you think that’s the right way? I’ve always heard that it’s perfectly ruinous to live upon your principal.”
Mrs. Butler could not combat these just conceptions. “Have you thought what you shall do, Helen?” she asked.
“Yes, I’ve been thinking about it nearly all night. I couldn’t sleep, and I thought I might as well think. I couldn’t decide. But one thing I have made up my mind’ I shall not do: I shall not paint holly-wood boxes.” They both laughed, the elder lady pityingly and reluctantly. “In the first place, I paint horridly; but that wouldn’t make any difference. What I couldn’t do would be to ask the outrageous prices which holly-wood boxes bring from sympathising friends when painted by young ladies in need. Besides, I think the market must be overstocked. Only consider, Mrs. Butler, how many holly-wood boxes must have been painted by this time, and what stores of them people must have laid by, that they couldn’t give away if Christmas came twice a year from now till the millennium. And all so much alike, too: a farm-house very deep in the snow; the moon monopolising the sky, and Santa Claus, very fuzzy all over, and much too large for his sleigh, with his reindeers and his pipe just of a size; and fat robins at each end of the box. No, you needn’t be afraid of holly-wood boxes from me, Mrs. Butler.”
“Oh, Helen, you queer child!” laughed Mrs. Butler helplessly.
“But I will confess that when I thought of doing something for myself, holly-wood boxes popped into my head the first thing. I suppose there’s really no getting away from them. And, O yes! I thought of something else; I thought of parlour-readings. What should you think of parlour-readings, Mrs. Butler?” Mrs. Butler visibly cowered under the proposition, and Helen gave a wild laugh. “‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,’ don’t you know? and Poe’s ‘Bells; ‘ and ‘Curfew shall not ring to-night.’ How would that do? Don’t you believe that if it could be generally given out, I might be handsomely bought off by public subscription? But I really needn’t do anything at once, Mrs. Butler,” Helen went on seriously. “I’ve got clothes enough to last me indefinitely, for I shall expect to make over and make over, now; and I shall take a very cheap little room at the Miss Amys’, and think it all over very carefully, and look about before I attempt anything. I’m not afraid: I can do all sorts of things. Don’t — don’t — sympathise with me!” she added, suddenly breaking. “That hills me! It disheartens me more than anything.”
“She understands perfectly well how much she’s got,” Mrs. Butler reported to her husband. “She had worked out just how much income it would be, and she says she expects to do something to help herself. But she is so cheerful about it that I don’t believe she does. There’s something between her and Robert Fenton.”
“It would be the best thing that could happen,” said the Captain, with a sigh of relief. “I hope to the Lord it’s so! But he’s off for three years!” he added, with dismay.
“She doesn’t think of that. Or perhaps she hopes he can get leave to come home — or something. Besides, such a girl as Helen could wait thirty years,” said Mrs. Butler, viewing the affair in the heroical abstract. “Her hope and her trust will support her.”
“Morally, perhaps. But she would have to be supported otherwise,” said the Captain. He refused to be wholly comforted by his wife’s manner. Still, its probability, in the absence of anything more substantial, afforded him a measure of consolation. At any rate it was, to his thinking, the sole hopeful outlook for Helen. Since the hard times began he had seen so much futile endeavour by able and experienced men, to get something to do for even a scanty living, that he had grown sceptical of all endeavour at self-help. Every year he was called upon to assist at the disillusion of a score or more of bright young spirits fresh from the University, with their academic honours still green upon their brows, and eager for victory in the battle of life. He knew the boys’ fathers and mothers, and of what excellent stock they came, what honest fellows they were, and what good reason there was to believe them capable of bearing their part with distinction in any place demanding quality and talent, and training. But there seemed to be no such place for them; the world in which their sires had prospered did not want them, did not know what to do with them. Through the strange blight which had fallen upon a land where there should be work for every one, and success for every one willing to work, there seemed to be nothing but idleness and defeat for these young men in the city of their ancestry and birth. They were fit to lead in any commonwealth, but the common-illness apparently would not have them; they were somehow anachronisms in their own day and generation; they were too far before or too far behind their time. The Captain saw them dispersed in a various exile. Some tried cattle-raising in Colorado; some tried sheep-farming in Virginia, and some sheep-ranching in California. There were others who tried cotton-planting in the South and the orange-culture in Florida; there were others yet, bolder and more imaginative, who tried the milk-farming in Massachusetts. The Captain heard of their undertakings, and then he saw them with their hats scrupulously on, at the club, which a few of their comrades had in a superior wisdom never abandoned.
They had got back, and they were not to blame. Perhaps there was some error in the training of these young gentlemen, which had not quite fitted them to solve the simple yet exacting problem of making a living. But then, people who had worked hard all their lives were not now solving this problem. Captain Butler thought of these nice fellows, and how willing and helpless they were, and then he thought, with compassion too keen for any expression but grim laughter, of such a girl as Helen, and what her training was for the task of taking care of herself. It was probably the same as Marian’s, and he knew what that was. They had in fact gone to the same schools, and grown through the same circumstances into the same society, in which everything they had been and had done fitted them to remain, and which was very charming and refined, and good in a good sense, and so very, very far from doing anything for anything but culture’s, or pleasure’s, or kindness’ sake.
At five or six years of age, Helen had begun to go with the other little girls of her station in life to a school, in which the established language was French, and in which she acquired a graceful and ladylike use of that tongue. It stood her in good stead when she went abroad one summer with her father, and she found that she spoke it as correctly as most English girls she met, and a great deal more readily. But she had too much sense to be sure of her accent or her syntax; at Paris she found that her French was good, but with a difference, and she would not have dreamt of such a thing as teaching it. In fact she had not thought of that at any time, and she had no such natural gift for languages as would have enabled her to master it without such a design.
From this school she went to others, where she was taught what people must learn, with thoroughness and with an intelligence very different alike from the old-fashioned methods of young ladies’ establishments, and from the hard, mechanical processes of the public schools. She was made to feel an enlightened interest in her studies; she liked some of them very much, and she respected those she did not like. Still she had not shown a passionate preference for any particular branch of learning; she had a ladylike ease and kindness withal; if she really hated anything it was mathematics, but because she hated this she had been the more conscientiously attentive to it. She had a good taste in music, and fair skill. After she left school, she had a musical enthusiasm, in the height of which she devoted herself under her German instructor to many hours of practice every day, and had her own ideas of becoming a great performer. But these gave way to clearer conceptions of her powers, and she remained an impassioned amateur of musical genius in others. She went devotedly to all the private musicales; she was unfailing at the rehearsals of the Symphony Concerts, and of the Handel and Haydn Society. She made her father join the A
pollo Club for her, and she made him go to some of the concerts with her. In those days her talk was of Bach and Beethoven; she thought poorly of Italian music, though she was very fond of the Italian operas.
It was to this period that her passion for the German language also belonged. She had studied German at school, of course, but it was not till after leaving school that French was relegated to its true place as something charming enough, but not serious; and German engrossed her. She read Goethe’s and Schiller’s plays with her teacher, and Heine’s songs with one of her girl-friends. She laid out a course of reading in German, which was to include Schopenhauer’s philosophy, already familiar to her through the talk of a premature Harvard man, who rarely talked of anything else. But it never really came to this; German literature presently took the form of drama, and after Helen’s participation in a certain number of German plays, it yielded to the pleasing dance of the same name; though not till it had superseded Italian as well as French in her affections. Dante, of course, one must always respect, but after Dante, there was so little in Italian as compared with German! The soft throat from which the southern vowels came so mellow roughed itself with gutturals. But this, like music, was only for a time. In the end, Helen was always a girl of sense. She knew that she was not a German scholar, any more than a great performer, and she would have shrunk with astonished modesty from the notion of putting such acquirements as she had in either to practical use. She hid them away, when her frenzy for them was past, as really so little that one ought to be ashamed of them.
It was the same with painting — or Art, as she then called it — in which it has already been represented that she at one time took a great interest. She really liked it very much; she had that feeling for form and colour without which no dressmaker can enable a young lady to dress exquisitely, and she enjoyed form and colour in painting. But by and by, as the class fanned itself down to the grains of wheat in its large measure of amiable and well-meaning chaff, Helen found that her place was with the chaff. It did not need the eye of the great painter, glancing with a humorous gleam from her work at her, to teach her this; she had felt it before, and she gave it up before she had conspicuously disgraced herself. She was always very glad to have taken to it; the attempt to paint for herself had cleared and defined her taste in painting, and indefinitely enlarged the bounds of her knowledge and enjoyment. But it had not done anything more, and all that Helen had learnt and done had merely had the effect that was meant: to leave her a cultivated and agreeable girl, with bright ideas on all sorts of pleasant subjects. She was, as the sum of it, merely and entirely a lady, the most charming thing in the world, and as regards anything but a lady’s destiny the most helpless.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 196