Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  It was the fact that Helen’s life now seemed wrenched and twisted so far from its rightful destiny, which bowed Captain Butler over it in such despair, and which well might strike pity into the hardiest beholder. Her old friend saw no hope for her but in the chance of there being something, as his wife suggested, between her and Robert Fenton. Yet it was against this hope that Helen herself had most strenuously steeled her heart. She had not the least doubt of Robert. He was a gentleman, and he would take what she had written in the right way. She rested in such absolute faith in his generosity, that she shrank from the possibility of abusing it as from something like sacrilege. If Robert were that moment to come and ask her to marry him, she would not take him till she had fairly won him again; and if, when he had got her letter, and thought it all over, he decided that she was too light and flippant a girl to trust with his happiness, she should know just how to take it. She should not blame him; she should not think him less kind and true; he should be none the less her hero. In fact, it seemed as if his willingness to forget her folly would somehow mar the perfection of her self-sacrifice. So, while she clung the most fondly to the thought of him, it was with the austerest readiness to give him up, and even a sort of impatience. Women seldom reason, it is said; when they do so, it must be owned that it is with passionate largeness. The sum of Helen’s emotional logic was that she must plan her future with as much severity and seriousness, as much will to venture and to endure, as if there were no Robert Fenton, or ever had been, in the world. Her sole difficulty was to imagine her future, and to begin to imagine it, she must first escape from the affectionate restraint of these kind friends of hers. She had no purpose more definite than that.

  When she went from Mrs. Butler to her own room, the chamber did not seem spacious enough for the tumult in her mind, and now that she had resolved to go up to Boston that afternoon, and was, as it were, already in motion, the inertness of the place was intolerable. She put on a wrap and a hat, and stole out to her accustomed place on the rocks. It was a very still morning late in September, after the first autumn gales had blown themselves away, and a glistening calm, with a deep heart of mellow warmth, had followed. The sea sparkled and shone with a thousand radiances in its nearer levels, and in its distance was a blue that melted into a hardly more ethereal heaven, a few white sails that might have been wings showing palely at its confluence with the sky. It washed languidly up the little beach of the cove, and with a slow, shouldering action, softly heaved against the foot of the rocks where the sea-weed flung up by the storm hung drying its masses in the sun, and trailing its ribbons in the tide. The air seemed to sparkle and burn like the sea, and was full of the same pungent, saline odours.

  Helen came round a knot of twisted cedars that hid her haunt from the house, and, climbing to the perch where she was used to sit, found herself confronted by a gentleman apparently in as great trouble as herself at their encounter. She could not mistake those sloping shoulders, that long neck, and that ineffective chin: it was Lord Rainford, not now in the blue yachting-stuff in which she had last seen him, but in a morning costume which seemed to make even less of him in point of personal attractiveness. Helen held the only pass by which he could have escaped, and, much as she would have liked to let him go, it was impossible for her to yield without speaking.

  “Ah — good-morning. I’m intruding here, I’m afraid, Miss — Harkness,” he began.

  “O no,” she said, and paused, not knowing just what else to say.

  “The fact is,” the Englishman continued, “that I had been calling with Mr. Ray, and he went back a moment, and I stepped down here on the rocks, and—” Helen perceived that he had taken in the fact of her crapes, visiting them with a glance of wistful pity, as if he would like to say something fit and due about her bereavement. But he only asked, after his abrupt pause, “Have you been always well since I saw you?”

  She remembered Ray’s praises of Lord Rainford, and would have liked to put herself right with him. She hated to have him thinking her flippant and unfeeling, though she might have proved that it was his fault she had been so. But she could think of nothing more than “Thank you” to say; and then she asked, “Have you been well?”

  “Oh, very!” answered Lord Rainford; “my American summer has quite set me up.”

  This seemed to imply that he had not been very well when he came, but Helen did not ask. She was thinking that when he should have a heavier moustache and a beard to that feeble chin, his face and neck might be helped off a little, but nothing could ever do anything for those shoulders. She settled this in her mind before she said, rather absently, “I am glad of that. You will be going home soon, I suppose,” she added, from mere dearth, though it occurred to her that this might be set down as an instance of the Yankee inquisitiveness that Englishmen are always in quest of.

  “Yes; I’m going to sail to-morrow,” said Lord Rainford. “Your friends have promised to come and see me in England.”

  “They told me,” assented Helen.

  “I’m sure they owe me a revenge in that way,” continued the young man. “Mr. Ray has done me no end of kindness. In fact everybody’s been most uncommonly kind. I couldn’t say enough of it!”

  “I’m glad you have enjoyed your stay here,” said Helen. “We Americans are rather weak about our country. We like people to like it, and take it as a personal favour when they do. I suppose none of us,” she added, “does anything to set even the least important person in it before a stranger in a false light, without feeling sorry.” She examined Lord Rainford’s face for an instant before she dropped her eyes, and saw it kindle with a delicate intelligence.

  “I wish,” he answered, “that I could be sure I leave everybody in America as well pleased with me as I am with all America.”

  “Good-bye,” said Helen; “we shall be making international allusions to the language of Shakespeare and Milton in another minute.

  “No,” said Lord Rainford; “it seems to me you don’t care to do that any more. Very curious,” he added; “I can’t get the people I meet to say a good word for their country. They all seem ashamed of it, and abuse it, no end.”

  “That’s because they want you to praise it,” suggested Helen.

  “Ah, but they won’t let you praise it! They’ll let you join them in crying it down.”

  “But you had better not.”

  “Ah, yes; very likely. I can’t think that a country where I’ve met so many nice people, and seen scarcely anything but order and comfort even in these very bad times, can be going to the dogs; but I can’t get anybody here to agree with me — that is, in society. I don’t understand it.”

  “I can’t explain,” said Helen, with a little smile, “except by ‘the settled opposition to our institutions which pervades the British mind.’”

  “Ah, Chuzzlewit; I know. But you’ll excuse my saying that I think your institutions have changed for the worse in this respect since Mr. Pogram’s time. I think Pogramism is better than this other thing.”

  “What other thing?” asked Helen, not a great deal interested.

  “Why, this not talking of America at all. I find your people — your best people, I suppose they are — very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant — only talk about Europe. They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don’t seem interested in their own country. I can’t make it out. It isn’t as if they were cosmopolitan; that isn’t quite the impression, though — excuse my saying so — they try to give it. They always seem to have been reading the Fortnightly and the Saturday Review, and the Spectator, and the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the last French and English books. It’s very odd! Upon my word, at one dinner the Americans got to talking to one another about some question of local finance in pounds, shillings, and pence. I don’t understand it.” Lord Rainford seemed to find nothing ridiculous, but only something mysterious in this, and reddened a little when Helen laughed.

  “Per
haps you’re embittered because experience has destroyed your ideal. You expected us all to call you a Britisher, and to flaunt Bunker Hill Monument in your face.”

  “Ah, now, do you think that’s quite fair, Miss Harkness?”

  Helen stooped a little sidewise and felt about her skirts with her left hand for the loop of her train, in that peculiar clawing and grappling manner which once had its fascination for the idle spectator. “We American women are accused of not caring anything about our institutions,” she said. She secured the loop now, and, erecting herself, gave Lord Rainford her right hand for good-bye.

  A deeper red dyed the young man’s face, as he took her hand and detained it a moment. “Are you going,” he asked, and hesitated before he added, with an abrupt change of tone: “I can’t let you go, Miss Harkness, without saying — without saying — without trying to say how very sorry I have felt at — at — your bereavement. It came so soon after I first saw you that — that I — thought you — thought myself not altogether wrong to tell you. But, I suppose, I shouldn’t have spoken. I beg your pardon!”

  “You are very, very kind, Lord Rainford,” answered Helen steadily, “and I thank you for speaking of it. I know people usually avoid speaking to others in — mourning — about it to spare them; but it’s better to recognise it; I like it better than trying to ignore it.”

  “I’ve always felt,-”’ pursued Lord Rainford, “that I was painfully associated in your mind — I mean — I don’t know — I hope you won’t always think of me as a particularly disagreeable part of that day’s experience.” Lord Rainford still spoke with an awkward halt and hesitation, but the genuine feeling with which he seemed eager to leave Helen a better impression dignified his manner. “If you won’t think it egotistical,” he hastened to add, “I’ll say that I believe I’m rather a serious man; at least I’m a heavy one; and when I attempt anything else, I — I know I’m disgusting — more disgusting than ordinarily. I was shocked — I can’t tell you how much I was shocked — to think I had followed you up almost to the moment of that — intelligence, with imbecilities that must have been a — in distressing contrast. I don’t know whether I make myself clear — whether I ought to speak—”

  “O yes!” cried Helen, touched at his assumption of all the blame. “I’m so glad you have spoken of that, if only for the selfish reason that it gives me a chance to say how ashamed I am of my own part in it. I never thought of yours” — this was not quite true, but we cannot be very generous and quite true at the same time— “but it was the thought of my own frivolity that sometimes helped to make what followed so hard to bear. I was very rude.”

  “O no, no!” answered the young man. “You said nothing but what I richly deserved. If you’d only said more, I should have liked it much better — afterwards. But what I want you to think is, that I shouldn’t have done so badly, perhaps, if I’d been acting quite naturally, or in my own character. That is—”

  “I’m afraid,” said Helen, “that I can’t ask you to think that I was acting out of my character — or all of my characters: I seem to have so many—”

  “Yes,” interrupted Lord Rainford,- “that’s what I meant.”

  “It seems to me that it was only too much like one of mine — the one I’m most ashamed of. You will have a pleasant time to cross, Lord Rainford,” she added, and took away her hand.

  “Well, I don’t know,’; said the other, accepting the close of this passage of their interview, and answering from the conscientiousness in talk which serves the English so well instead of conventional politeness, and is not so pleasant, “there are apt to, be gales at this season, you know.”

  “O yes, yes!” returned Helen, a little vexed at herself. “Gales, yes. But I was thinking of the equinoctial storm being past. They say it’s past now.”

  “I’m a good sailor,” said Lord Rainford. “I think I shall take a run over again, next year.”

  “You’ve not got enough of America in three months!”

  “No. I hope it hasn’t got too much of me.” He looked at Helen as if he expected her to say something civil on the part of her hemisphere. But she refused to be the national voice, except very evasively.

  “Oh, we ought to be flattered that people care to come back.”

  “You know,” said Lord Rainford, “that I’ve seen almost nothing of the country yet. I’ve not even been in Washington, and I want to see Chicago and San Francisco.” Helen did not say that she could not understand why, and Lord Rainford went on. “I’d only a few weeks in Canada, you know, before I came down to Orchard Beach — I think they call it — with some Montreal people, and then I came to Boston, and I’ve been about Boston and Newport ever since. People have been extraordinarily kind. I couldn’t really get away, and as I’m going away rather prematurely now, I must come back.”

  From this outline of his experience, Helen knew quite accurately all its details. She could have told just what had happened to him at Newport, going thither with Boston introductions, what lawn-parties, lunches, and dinners had been made for him, and in whose carriage he had first driven to the polo grounds. He had been perhaps once at the Town and Country Club; and he had been a good deal at the bathing-beaches, although early assured that nobody bathed there any more, and the Manhattan Yacht Club had sailed him over all the neighbouring waters. He had seen the decay of the custom of Fort Day, and had been told what numbers of people used to go to the music in Fort Adams before polo began. When he returned to Boston, it was too soon for society to have come back in full force, but enough of it had got back to show him with what intensity of hospitality the sojourning Englishman, distinguished by rank, or otherwise, or simply well accredited, is used among us. Helen knew, without asking, the houses and their succession, in which Lord Rainford had been entertained, and she could have guessed pretty-well at what semi-civic feasts he had assisted. The Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday Evening Clubs had all shared in him, and he had listened to part of a lecture at the Woman’s Club. He had been taught much more about the charitable, penal, and educational establishments of Boston, than any one Bostonian could endure to know, and he had kept his original impression that Boston reminded you of an English town. If he was at all astonished, as a young man, at the attentions heaped upon him, he must, as a Lord, have been too much used to consideration in his own country, to be surprised at it in ours. Men vastly his superiors in everything but birth liked to speak casually of him as that very nice young Englishman, who had dined with them, and to let the fact of his rank rather patronisingly escape them in talk. People whose secret pride and dearest prejudices he had unwittingly trodden into pulp in his plump expressions of crude opinion, professed rather to like his frankness. They said that there was something in his bearing — a simplicity, a directness, an unconsciousness — which showed the advantage of a standard of manners. The fact that you might often think him, at first glance, the most plebeian-looking person in company, showed his extraordinary qualities of race; the persistence, through so many hundred years, of the ancestral traits, which, in the attrition of a democratic society like our own must have been obliterated long ago, was held to be a peculiar triumph of aristocratic civilisation. One accomplished gentleman had proved himself much better versed in the Rainford pedigree than Lord Rainford himself. “Talked to me about my great-grandmother,” said the nobleman afterwards to Ray, “and my maiden step-aunts.”

  “Good-bye,” said Helen once more, and nodding, she turned away, and went down the rocks.

  Lord Rainford bowed, and said good-bye, too, following her with his eyes, but not otherwise pursuing her.

  “You ‘re back soon,” he said to Mr. Ray, when the latter presently joined him.

  At Salem that afternoon he came into the car where Helen sat. The place beside her was the only vacant one, and he stood leaning against the seat while he explained that he had been left by his train at that station in the morning. He looked as if he would like to be asked to take the
vacant seat, Helen thought; but she was perturbed and preoccupied, she could not endure the -thought of talking all the way to Boston, and she made no sign of invitation. She was sorry, but she could not help it. He hesitated an instant, and bidding her good-bye once more, said he was going forward into the smoking-car, and she did not see him again.

  She went first to the post-office, where she had never been before, and which was so vast, and looked so hurried and careless with those throngs of people sweeping through its corridors, that she began to question whether it could be safely intrusted with a letter for Robert. Through one of the windows opening in the long façade of glass above the stretch of brass drawers, which people were unlocking and locking up, all about, she saw a weary-looking clerk toss a little package into the air for relaxation, and then throw it into a distant corner, and she thought with a shudder, what if that had been her letter, and it had slipped under something and been lost? Besides, now that she had come to the post-office, she did not know in which of the many letter-holes to trust, and she studied the neighbouring inscriptions without being able to make up her mind. At last she asked an old gentleman, who was unlocking his box, and he showed her; she feigned to drop her letter according to his instructions, but waited till he went away, and then asked the clerk at the nearest window. He confirmed the statement of the old gentleman, and Helen had almost allowed her letter to go when she bethought herself to say to the clerk that it was to the care of the Navy Department. He smiled — sarcastically, Helen fancied — and said it was quite the same thing. Then she dedicated a final blush to the act, and posted her letter, and found herself quite at a distance from the post-office, walking giddily along, with a fluttering heart full of delicious shame. She was horrified to think she had done it, and so glad it was done.