Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “And whatever became of the girl, Mrs. Bowers?”

  “Oh, as to that this deponent saith not. Consoled herself, I suppose, in the usual way.”

  The two women laughed together, and began to pull up their sacks, which had dropped from their shoulders into their chairs behind them.

  Helen tried to speak, but she could not. She tried to rise and seize the woman before she left the room, to make her render some account of her words. But the shame of a terrible doubt crushed her with a burden under which she could not move. When the waiter, respectfully hovering near, approached at last, and, viewing her untouched plate, suggestively asked if he could bring her anything more, she said “No,” and paid her check and came out.

  It was a beautiful day, but she walked spiritlessly, along in the sunshine that seemed to smile life into everything but her; and she feebly sought to adjust the pang of this last blow to some misdeed of her own. But she could not. She could only think how she should once have contrasted Lord Rainford’s nobleness with Robert’s folly, and indignantly preferred him. But now she was aware of not having the strength to do this — of not being able to pluck her heart from the idea to which love and loss had rooted it; and she could not even wish to wish anything but to die. In another world, perhaps — if there were any other world — Robert could explain and justify the weakness for which she could not do other than pity him here.

  Her brain was so dull and jaded withal, that when she dragged herself wearily up the steps at the Butlers’ door, she felt no surprise that it should be the old Captain who opened it to her, or that he should seek to detain her in the drawing-room alone with him. At last she found something strange in his manner, something mysterious in the absence of all the others, and she asked, “What is it, Captain Butler?”

  He seemed troubled, as though he felt himself unequal to the task before him. “Helen,” he began, “do you still sometimes think that those men’s story about Robert wasn’t true?”

  “I know it wasn’t true. I always knew they killed him. Why do you ask me that?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” returned the Captain, with increasing trouble, “but that perhaps he—”

  She turned upon him in awful quiet. “Captain Butler, don’t try to soften or break any bad news to me! What is it I haven’t borne that you think I must be spared now? You will make it worse, whatever you are keeping back. Did they leave him there to starve on that rock? Did—”

  “No — no. It isn’t that. Mrs. Butler thought that I could prepare — we’ve had news—”

  “News? — prepare? Oh, how can you mock me so? For pity’s sake, what is it?”

  The Captain’s poor attempt to mediate between her and whatever fact he was concealing broke down in the appeal with which he escaped from Helen through the open door, and called his wife. She came quickly, as if she had been waiting near; and as on that day when she had told the girl of her father’s death, she took her fast in her arms. Perhaps the thoughts of both went back to that hour.

  “Helen — Helen — Helen! It’s life this time! You have borne the worst so bravely, I know you can bear the best. Robert is here!”

  The papers of that time gave full particulars of Fenton’s rescue from the island on which he was cast away, and the reader can hardly have forgotten them. It is unnecessary even to record the details of his transfer, after several months, from the whaler which took him off, to another vessel homeward bound, and of his final arrival in San Francisco. When the miracle of his resurrection had become familiar enough for Helen to begin to touch it at here and there a point, she asked him why he did not telegraph her from San Francisco as soon as he landed, and instantly answered herself that it would have killed her if he had done so; and that if he had not been there at once to help her bear the fact of his being alive, she could not have borne it.

  They were married, and went to live in a little house in a retired street of Old Cambridge, and Margaret came to live with them. She sacrificed to this end an ideal place in an expressman’s family in East Somerville, where she had the sole charge of the housework for twelve persons; but it was something that Miss Helen kept no other girl; and it was everything that she could be with her when Lieutenant Fenton should be ordered away to sea again. He had six months’ leave, and he tried to find some occupation which would justify him in quitting the navy. He found nothing, and in the leisure of this time Helen and he concerned themselves rather with their past than their future. They rehabilitated every moment of it for each other; and, as their lives came completely together again, he developed certain limitations which at first puzzled her. She did not approach that passage which related to Lord Rainford without trying to establish defences from which, if necessary, she could make reprisals; and she began by abruptly asking one day, “Robert, who is Mrs. Bowers?”

  “Did she turn up?” he asked in reply, with a joyous guiltlessness that at once defeated and utterly consoled his wife. “That was very kind of her! But how did she find you out? I never told her your name!”

  “She never turned up — directly,” said Helen; and then she told him how she happened to know of Mrs. Bowers, and of the bad half-hour that lady had given her.

  “Well, she might call it a flirtation,” said Fenton, “but I didn’t know it was one. I thought it was just walking up and down the deck and talking about you.”

  “I’d rather you wouldn’t have talked to that kind of people about me,” returned Helen, with a retrospective objection which she tried in vain to make avail her.

  “How should I know what kind of person she was? I never took the least notice of anything she did or said.”

  This was heavenly hopeless, and Helen resolved that for the present at least she would not inculpate herself. But she found herself saying, “Well, then, I’m going to tell you about something that all came from my being desperate about you, and flirting a little one day just after you sailed.” She went on to make a full and free confession, to which her husband listened with surprisingly little emotion.

  He could not see anything romantic in it at all. He could not see anything remarkable in Lord Rainford.

  “You can’t,” he said finally, “expect me to admire a man who came so near making an Enoch Arden of me.”

  “Oh, you know he never came near doing anything of the kind, Robert.”

  “He came as near as he could. Do you wish me to admire him because you refused him? You refused me three times.”

  “I wish you to — to — appreciate him.”

  Fenton laughed. “Oh, well, I do that, of course.

  I’ve no doubt he was a very good fellow; and I daresay he’s behaving more sensibly than I did. From what you tell me, I think he’ll get over his disappointment. Perhaps he’ll end by marrying some one who will help him to complete his reaction, and cure him of all his illusions about us over here. But his buying that pottery was nothing. He would have been a very poor creature if he had resented your refusal; I know that from my own experience.” He would not be serious about Lord Rainford; he made her share in the good-natured slight with which husband and wife always talk over the sorrows of unlucky pretendants. He professed to find something much more admirable in Kimball’s quiet acceptance of the loss he had incurred through Helen: that, he said, was fine, for Kimball was supported by no sentimental considerations, and had no money to back his delicacy. He looked Kimball up, and made friends with him and a man who could do nothing to advance his own fortunes had the cheerful audacity to suppose that he might promote another’s. He wrote to Washington, and tried to get Kimball appointed assistant-keeper of one of the lighthouses on Cape Ann; but, pending the appointment of a gentleman who had “worked” for the newly-elected Congressman, Kimball found a place as night-watchman in a large clothing house, where he distinguished himself, when off duty one day, by quelling a panic among the sewing girls at an alarm of fire, and getting them safely out of the building. The newspaper éclat following this affair seemed to have silently wrought
upon the imagination of a public-spirited gentleman, who about that time was maturing his plans for the establishment of our well-known Everton Institute of Industrial Arts for Young Ladies. The Institute was opened on a small scale in the residence of Mr. Everton at Beacon Steps, which he devoted to it during his life, and at his death it was removed to the new building at West Newton; but from the first Kimball was put in charge as janitor, and still holds his place from the trustees.

  He came rather apologetically to announce his appointment to the Fentons. “I don’t seem to feel.” he said, “as if it was quite the thing to go in there without saying ‘By your leave to you, Mrs. Fenton. I hain’t forgot the first time I was in the house; and I don’t suppose I ever passed it without lookin’ up at them steps and thinkin’ of you, just how you appeared that day when you came runnin’ up with your bag in your hand, and I let you in.”

  “Yes, I remember it too, Mr. Kimball. But you mustn’t think of it as my old home, and you mustn’t feel as if you were intruding. If the place could be anything to me after Mr. Everton had lived there, I should be glad to think of you and Mrs. Kimball in it, looking after those poor girls, as I know you will.”

  “I guess we shall do the best we know how by ‘em. And whatever Mr. Everton is — and I guess least said’s soonest mended, even amongst friends, about him in some respects — you can’t say but what it’s a good object. If he can have girls without any dependence but themselves taught how to do something for their own livin’, I guess it’s about equal to turnin’ the house into a church. And I guess the old gentleman’s about right in confinin’ it to girls brought up as ladies. I ain’t much on caste myself; as I know of, but I guess that’s the class of girls that need help the most.”

  “O yes, indeed!” cried Helen fervently. “Of all helpless creatures in the world, they are the most to be pitied. I know you’ll be kind to them, Mr. Kimball, and save their poor, foolish feelings as much as you can, and not mind their weak, silly little pride, if it ever shows itself.”

  “I guess you can depend upon me for that,” said Kimball. “I understand girls pretty well — or I ought to, by this time. And once a lady, always a lady, I say.” Helen even promised to come with her husband to see the Kimballs in her old home. She courageously kept her promise, and she was rewarded by meeting Mr. Everton there. He received her very cordially, showing no sort of pique or resentment, — no more, Fenton suggested, than Lord Rainford himself, — and took her over the house, and explained all his plans to her with a flattering confidence in her interest. There were already some young ladies there, and he introduced Helen to them, and, in the excess of his good feeling, hinted at the desirability of her formally addressing them as visitors to schools are expected to do. She refused imperatively; but to one of the girls with whom she found herself in sympathy she opened her heart and told her own story. “And oh!” she said at the end, “do learn to do something that people have need of, and learn to do it well and humbly, and just as if you had been working for your living all your life. Try to notice how men do things, and when you ‘re at work, forget that you ‘re a woman, and, above all, a young lady.”

  After she came away, she said there was one more thing she wished to say to that girl.

  “What was that?” asked Fenton.

  “Not to omit the first decent opportunity of marrying any one she happened to be in love with.”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to say that,” suggested her husband.

  “No,” sighed Helen; “and that’s what undoes all the rest.”

  When the Butlers heard of this visit of hers to her old home, it seemed to them but another instance of that extraordinary fortitude of spirit which they had often reason to admire in her. Marian Ray could not suffer it to pass, however, without some expression of surprise that Fenton should have allowed her to go: she was a little his rival on behalf of Lord Rainford still, and she seized what occasions she could for an unfavourable comparison of their characters. In fact, now that he had really come back, she had not wholly forgiven him for doing so; but the younger sisters rejoiced in him as a thoroughly satisfactory equivalent for the romance they had lost in the nobleman. If Helen was not to be Lady Rainford, it was consoling to have her the wife of a man who had been cast away on a desert island, and had been mourned for dead a whole year and more. They were disappointed, however, that he should not be always telling the story of his adventures, but should only now and then drop bits of it in a scrappy way, and once — but once only — when he and Helen were at Beverley, they pinned him down to a full and minute narration.

  “Ah, but,” said Jessie Butler, when all was told, to the very last moment of his meeting Helen after his return, “you haven’t said how you felt, any of the time.”

  “Well, you know,” answered Fenton, rising, and going over to where Helen sat dwelling on him with shining eyes, “I can look back and see how I ought to have felt at given points.”

  “But — but how did you feel,” pursued one of his rapt auditors, “when—”

  “No, no,” said Fenton, “that will do! I’ve given you the facts; you must make your own fiction out of them. And I think, while you’re at it, you’d better get another hero.”

  “Never!” exclaimed Jessie Butler. “We want you. And we want you to behave something like a hero, now. You can, if you will. Can’t he, Helen?”

  “I never can make him,” said his wife fondly.

  “Then that’s because he doesn’t appreciate his own adventures properly. Now—”

  “Why,” explained Fenton, “the adventures were merely a lot of things that happened to me.”

  “Happened to you!” cried his champion against himself in generous indignation. “Did it merely happen to you to put that rope round you and swim ashore with it when the ship struck? Did it merely happen to you to stay there, and let the others go off in the boat?”

  Fenton affected to give the arguments serious thought. “Well, you know, I couldn’t very well have done otherwise under the circumstances.”

  “You needn’t try to get out of it in that way!

  You have every attribute of a real hero,” persisted his worshipper.

  The hero laughed, and did his best to bear the part like a man. Another of the young girls took up the strain.

  “Yes, you would be entirely satisfactory if you had only had some better companion in misfortune.” “Who, — Giffen?”

  “Yes. He seems so hopelessly commonplace,” sighed the gentle connoisseur of castaways.

  “He was certainly not more than, an average fellow-being,” said Fenton, preparing to escape. “But he was equal to his bad luck.”

  When he and Helen were alone, he was a long time silent.

  “What is the matter, Robert?” she asked tenderly at last.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said. “But whenever it comes to that point, I’m afraid that Giffen knew I wanted to leave him to die alone there!”

  “You didn’t want to!” she protested for him.

  “Ah, don’t put it that way!” he cried. “The best you can say for me is that I didn’t do it.”

  She could only tell him that she loved him more’ dearly for the temptation he confessed, than if there had been no breach in his armour. He had a simplicity in dealing with all the incidents of his experience which seemed to her half divine. When she hotly invoked justice upon the wretches who had stolen the boat and abandoned him and Giffen on the island, he said, “Oh, what could atone for a thing like that? The only way was for them to escape altogether.” He would not even let her denounce them as cowards; he contended that they had shown as much mere courage in remaining to rifle the ship as he had in anything. Giffen, he said, was the only one to be admired, for Giffen was afraid all the time, and yet remained to share his fate. But Helen con tended that this was nothing wonderful; and again she wished to praise him for what he had suffered.

  “Ah, don’t!” he said, with tragic seriousness.

  “There’s nothin
g in all that. It might all have happened to a worse man, and it has happened to many a better one. It hurts me to have you value me for it. Let it go, and give me a little chance for the future.” He was indeed eager to escape from all that related to that passage of his life, and Helen learned to believe this. At certain moments he seemed to be suffering from some strange sort of mental stress, which he could not explain, but which they both thought must be the habit of anguish formed in his imprisonment on the atoll. It sometimes woke him from his sleep — the burden, but not the drama, of nightmare — a mere formless horror, which they had to shape and recognise for themselves.

  It grew less and less as the time passed, and when his orders came to report for duty at Washington, they had strength for the parting. He supposed that he was to be sent to sea again, but he found that he was to be put in charge for the present of the revenue cutter for provisioning the lighthouses on the Rhode Island coast; and when removed from this service, he was appointed commandant at the Narragansett Navy Yard. It is there that ‘Helen still finds her home in a little house overlooking the Bay, on the height behind the vast sheds in which two frigates of obsolete model, began in Polk’s time, are slowly rotting on the stocks, in a sort of emblematic expression of the present formidable character of the American navy.

  Fenton is subject to be ordered away at any moment upon other duty; but till his orders come he rests with Helen in as much happiness as can fall to the share of people in a world of chance and change. The days of their separation have already faded into the incredible past: and if her experience ever had any peculiar significance to her, it is rapidly losing that meaning.