“O Helen, Helen!” said the elder lady, when she had spelled through these documents in the dim light, “how glad I am for you! Come, look at me, my dear, and let me see your happy face! This makes up your quarrel, and you are — Why, Helen!” she cried, when the girl obeying, bent those eyes of tragedy upon her, “what is the matter? Don’t you — didn’t you—”
“O yes, I care for him — all the world!” Helen broke out. “But the more I care for him the worse it is, and unless you can help me out of this trouble, Mrs. Butler, I shall surely go crazy. Oh, how indelicate it is of me to come to you! But I don’t know what to do — I don’t know what to do; I’m so horribly alone! And it’s such a very strange, ridiculous thing!” She did not suffer herself to pause, while Mrs. Butler stared compassionately at her, till she had put her in full possession of her perplexity, and explained how it had poisoned all her joy.
Mrs. Butler did not laugh at her; she was one of those high spirits who perceive the sacred rather than the absurd, and amidst the girl’s wild talk, she saw the reasonableness of pain that to a coarser sense would only have been ludicrous. “You must not think of this second letter at all, Helen,” she said seriously. “Shall I tear it up?”
“Oh, oh!” said Helen, half-reaching for it, and yet holding her hand. “It’s about papa, and — it’s from him!” She caught her breath, and trembled for Mrs. Butler’s decision.
“I didn’t think of destroying it,” said the other, “but I’m not going to let you have it back. This is the only letter you’ve got, Helen, for the present,” she added, handing the girl the first, and putting the second under her pillow. “The letter that you sent him the other day — wouldn’t that be a kind of answer to this?”
“Why, yes!” cried Helen with electrical perception.
“Well, then, answer the first. I want you to let me keep this till — till I can give it back to Mrs. Fenton.”
“Oh!” said Helen.
“And kiss me, my dear,” said Mrs. Butler fondly; “and bathe your eyes yonder. And if you touch the left hand-bell, Marian will come up.”
“Oh!” said Helen in the same shaken tone as before. “Shall you — shall you tell her?”
“No; you shall,” replied Mrs. Butler. But when Marian came, it was Mrs. Butler who had to explain the embrace in which Helen seized her, and which, first returning with mechanical affection, she now returned with rapturous intelligence.
“Engaged?” she exulted. “Oh, Helen, Helen, Helen!”
“Why,” cried Helen, laughing from her happy heart, and pulling away from her friend, “I don’t know what you call it. I’ve written him a making-up letter, and he’s written me one, and they’ve crossed on the way.”
“Oh, that’s an engagement,” said Marian, with the authority of a connoisseur.
“But he hasn’t got my letter yet, and I’m not engaged till he has.”
“That’s nothing. He’s engaged, because you’ve got his, and in an engagement the man counts for everything; the girl goes without saying.” Marian Butler was at that period full of those airs of selfabnegation with which women adorn themselves in the last days of betrothal, and the first of marriage, and never afterwards.
They talked Helen’s whole affair over, in the light of the full candour which she was able to bring to bear upon it now for the first time, As to feelings she must still have her reserves; but as to facts, she made them little by little all theirs; it helped her to realise Robert to be talking of him by his name, and to hear others doing so. At the sound of approaching footsteps without, Marian said —
“Now mother, those children are not to know about this. They ‘re too forthputting now, especially Jessie.”
Ignorant of this supreme interest, the younger sisters were richly content with Helen’s further account of her boarding-house life, which she continued to them like an instalment of some intoxicating romance. When she came to the end of her chapter, she stopped with a manner that roused their worst suspicions.
“Oh, she’s keeping something back!” complained Jessie, and “Oh, oh!” went up from the others.
“Yes!” cried Helen, “I’m keeping back the best of all, because it doesn’t seem as if I could tell it.”
While they all stared, she abruptly began the confession of her experiment in decorative keramics. She was by this time in high spirits, and she poured it all out, illustrating, mimicking, not sparing herself in the minutest particular of conceited expectation or forlorn reality. It was all past now, far past, and was part of a former existence which she had suddenly outlived by an untraversable period of time. It made them laugh, Marian with amusement, and Mrs. Butler with a sort of grieving compassion; as for the young girls, it seemed to them the wildest and most enviable adventure that ever was known out of a book.
“And you didn’t meet a soul — not a soul you knew?” asked Mrs. Butler. —
“O no; no one shops in Boston now, you know; and I was perfectly safe. But I shouldn’t have cared.”
“I should have been glad of it!” cried Jessie Butler. “I should have liked to lug my basket up and poke it into their carriage-doors, and offer to sell them the things, and see how they would look!”
“Jessie!” said her mother.
“Well, never mind. Go on, go on, Helen!”
“That’s all,” said Helen, who had brought them back to the period of her return to her room and her long desperate slumber. “No, the worst is to come! Miss Root came in while I was asleep, and discovered them; and what do you think I told her? I told her I had been doing them for a wedding present!” There was fresh sensation at this, but Jessie exclaimed, “Marian Butler shall never have those vases in the world. They shall be sold! The idea! I will go up and sell them!”
“No,” said Helen soberly; “she must take them, Jessie, to save me from fibbing, if nothing else. Besides, you suggested painting pottery, Marian, and they’re Beverley ware — all very appropriate, you see. And some of them are not so bad. And I can’t give you anything better till — my ship comes home!
At this idea of a ship, and of its coming home, Helen and Marian simultaneously pressed each other’s hands, where they sat side by side on the lounge, with delicious intelligence. Marian said that she should prize Helen’s present more than anything else that could be given her, and that its history, which could not be known out the family, would make it all the more precious; the legend would be something to tell the future age. It would be great to say, “Only think of your great-grandmother going about the whole day with these beautiful things, and not being able to sell them for a crust of bread to keep her from starving.”
“Marian” said her mother, “I can’t let you make a joke of it. I can’t help thinking how wretched it would have been if poor Helen had really been in need.”
“Indeed I was in need, Mrs. Butler,” said Helen, “while I was doing those things. I felt just as destitute! And I worked at them, early and late, as if my life depended upon it.”
“Oh, that’s a very different thing, my dear,” said Mrs. Butler. “It was only play poverty, after all. Think if you had really been some poor girl, with nothing, and had met with such a disappointment!”? “I don’t believe I could have suffered more,” said Helen, confidently.
“I’m glad you’ve no means of knowing, certainly. But now that you’ve tried your experiment, Helen, hadn’t you better end this little escapade, and come back to us? Things have come about very fortunately,” she added quickly, at a look of refusal in Helen’s eye, “and your failure to earn a living makes it easier for me to tell you something that’s been rather weighing upon my mind.”
She spoke with a double sense to Helen, who understood that it was not her failure, but the letter from Robert which made it easy for Mrs. Butler to say what followed.
“We have concluded not to wait a month after Marian is married, before we sail, but to go the next week. We shall not try to run them down — Girls,” she broke off, and speaking with the tone of
authority which they knew when they heard it, “go and see where your father is,” and when they were gone, she resumed,— “but we shall follow them up pretty closely, and we shall meet them in Venice just before they start from Trieste for Egypt. Now, Marian!”
“And there,” said Marian, “Miss Harkness, who has come to that point with the bride’s family, will join the happy couple, and make one of their party up the Nile. It s to be a trusteeship, Helen,” she cried, “it can’t be resigned; you must come. We are going to take a dahabeiah at Cairo, with some Philadelphia friends of Ned’s, very quiet people whom he took a great fancy to; and I want you along to do the correct, and elegant, and superior thing for Boston, and leave me to uninterrupted enjoyment of the sillies. Yes, Helen, you must come. Ned wishes it as much as I, and I can’t tell you how much that is. We want to take you away from yourself, and we promise to bring you back in a year—” She hesitated: “I was pausing for want of an idea, but say — improved in every way.”
“Oh, I can’t!” lamented Helen. She leaned back upon the lounge, and brooded upon the matter in a silence to which the others left her unmolested. “It isn’t because it doesn’t seem the loveliest and kindest thing in the world, Marian, and I’ve no peasant pride that would prevent me from accepting it; and it isn’t because I think I should do better to go on trying to take care of myself, Mrs. Butler. I know that I’m a distinct failure in that way, and I haven’t any heart or conceit for further experiments. But — ? I must stay! He will come back — I know he will come back, as soon as he gets that letter of mine — and he must find me here waiting for him. It would be a shocking kind of treachery if I were away.”
“You could write to him now that you were going with us,” said Marian, a good deal shaken by the heroism of Helen’s position, “and he could meet you somewhere abroad.”
Mrs. Butler said nothing.
“The second letter might miss,” replied Helen, as if the first letter could not.
“You could keep writing,” urged Marian, “before you sailed, and then from Europe.”
“No; it wouldn’t do. He must find me here waiting for him; and I mustn’t stir from the spot till he gets back. I don’t know how to explain it exactly. But it would look very queer and light minded, wouldn’t it, if I went off junketing up the Nile, while he was thinking all the time that I was forlornly waiting for him in Boston, and was as unhappy as he till we met? Besides, I feel this way about it, after what has passed between us: I Ought not to be on a high horse of any sort when Robert comes back. I feel that it is his right and his due to be able to stoop to me a little; and it would only be a just reparation for me to be in very humble circumstances when I met him. Doesn’t that seem like a kind of reason to you, Mrs. Butler?” —
“Yes,” assented Mrs. Butler doubtfully; “a little romantic!”
“Do you think so?” asked Helen, rather hurt; “I hoped you would think it sensible.”
“I do, my dear, I do,” Mrs. Butler hastened to reply, “from your point of view.”
“There’s this, too,” Helen added, not quite appeased, after a hesitation. “Robert hasn’t any money, but his pay; and I only have such a very little, that we couldn’t begin living like rich people; and the question is whether I had better keep on living as I used to do, or whether I hadn’t better get accustomed to something very plain and simple at once.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Butler, while Marian fidgeted in protest, but said nothing.
“I try to look at it quite dispassionately, and in the light of common sense, without any foolishness, and it seems to me that I shouldn’t be doing right unless I were making some sacrifice for Robert, and suffering, don’t you know, in some way; I should not be happy unless I were. You know,” she said softly, “that I don’t think I always used Robert very well. I don’t mean that I meant to; but I didn’t understand myself; and now that I do, and understand him, I should be detestable, if I went off to be pleased and diverted, while he was hurrying home with his mind burning upon the thought that I was waiting here in perfect wretchedness till he came Don’t you see? I must be here, and I must be wretched, to be perfectly true to him!”
“You are right, Helen!” cried Mrs. Butler, deeply moved by this divine logic of the heart. “Hush, Marian don’t speak! You know she is right. Come here, Helen!” The matron embraced the girl in the fervour of that youth which women of all ages have in common. “We won’t say anything more of this matter, Marian, and we will just tell your father that Helen can’t go. You won’t mind my letting out a little of your secret to him?”
“O no!” blushed Helen. “I had expected you to tell him.”
Captain Butler would once have teased the girl about her happiness. But since her father’s death he seemed not to have been able to treat her lightly; her loss and her uncertain future made her a serious affair to him; and now that her father was gone, Helen was startled at times to find how much his old friend was like him. There were tones and movements of strange resemblance; perhaps the impression came partly from Captain Butler’s impaired health; he was certainly not well, and that made her think of her father. He took what Mrs. Butler told him very much as her father would have done, she thought, and he expressed his satisfaction almost as quietly. His only revenge was to ask: —
“Shall you answer in care of the Navy Department, or would you like to telegraph a reply?”
“Oh, Captain Butler,” cried Helen, “could I telegraph?”
“Yes,” said the Captain. “How would you word your despatch?”
“Mr. Butler!” said his wife in reproach.
“I — I don’t know!” gasped Helen.
“It wouldn’t reach him, now, any sooner than your letter of three weeks ago. He’ll find that at Hong Kong when he gets there, and you wouldn’t know where to hit him with a telegram on the way. If your letter was posted at Rio, the Muskingum—”
“Messasauga,” Helen softly corrected him.
“Was it Messasauga? — is going round the Cape of Good Hope, and she must have passed that point a week ago, and she won’t stop at any other telegraphic port, probably. Here,” said the Captain, with rising interest, “I’ll show you his course.”
He got a chart out of the library, and Helen began to study navigation with the impassioned devotion which love lends to intellectual pursuits. One observes this ardour in two young persons of opposite sexes who take up some branch of literature or science together, which they might not perhaps have thought of, if they had not thought of each other. It has been known to cast a purple light upon metaphysics. Helen borrowed the chart and brought it away with her.
It was a happy day, and its memory remained to sweeten the days in the increasing bustle of preparation for Marian’s wedding, when Helen saw her friends less and less, and then the days when she saw them no more.
XI.
HELEN’S letter, crossing the letter Fenton wrote at Rio de Janeiro, reached him at Hong-Kong. It added, after the first hours of rapture, the anguish of a hopeless longing to the remorse he had been suffering. It was no longer a question of her forgiveness; but he did not find it easier, now that he had the assurance of her love, to forgive himself for his rashness; he thought of her alone in her sorrow, without the instant sympathy and support which she had a right to expect from him, even if there had been no tie but their common affection for her father between them; and his whole life centred in an impulse to return to her somehow from the banishment he had inflicted upon himself. But he had himself made return impossible — for the present at least — by the terms on which he had sought exile; he must wait and he must suffer — that would have been simple enough — and he must also make her wait and suffer. When he came to this conclusion, as he always must, it was with a mental shock that was like a veritable concussion of the brain, that left him weaker day by day, and that broke him at last. He fell sick of a disorder that baffled the science of the surgeon when he visited him in his room.
“What the devil is
the matter with you? I believe in my soul you ‘re trying to make a die of it,” said the doctor, a cheerful, elderly man, tight in his uniform.
“No man ever wanted to live as I do,” answered Fenton.
“Well, then, you must brace up. I’ll give you a tonic. Make you up a bottle and send it to you.” The doctor felt his pulse again and said, “You’re either down with the climate, and that affects your spirits, or else it’s your spirits that affect your health. But in any case you must brace up.” As Fenton lay perfectly still with his face turned away, Dr. Simmons passed his hand over the top of his head where a perspiration of perplexity had gathered in the scattering down. “I can’t minister to a mind diseased, you know,” he suggested.
“No,” said Fenton.
“You must go to some other shop.”
He got himself with difficulty out of Fenton’s door into the ward-room, and presently sent him the bottle. It seemed to make him worse, and the doctor visited him again in renewed mystification. After the usual inspection, he sat looking at Fenton as before, and then said casually, “What a lucky chap N Nixon is, going home on leave so soon!”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 202