Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Lemuel made what answer he could. There was happiness enough in merely being with her to have counterbalanced all the pain he was suffering; and when she made him partner of her interests and associations, and appealed to their common memories in confidence of his sympathy, his heavy heart stirred with strange joy. He had supposed that Berry must have warned her against him; but she was treating him as if he had not. Perhaps he had not, and perhaps he had done so, and this was her way of showing that she did not believe it. He tried to think so; he knew it was a subterfuge, but he lingered in it with a fleeting, fearful pleasure. They had crossed from the Common and were walking up under the lindens of Chestnut Street, and from time to time they stopped, in the earnestness of their parley, and stood talking, and then loitered on again in the summer security from oversight which they were too rapt to recognise. They reached the top of the hill, and came to a door where she stopped. He fell back a pace. “Good-bye—” It was eternal loss, but it was escape.

  She smiled in timorous hesitation. “Won’t you come in? And I will get Mr. Berry’s letter.”

  She opened the door with a latch-key, and he followed her within; a servant-girl came half-way up the basement stairs to see who it was, and then went down. She left him in the dim parlour a moment, while she went to get the letter. When she returned, “I have a little room for my work at the top of the house,” she said, “but it will never be like the St. Albans. There’s no one else here yet, and it’s pretty lonesome — without Madeline.”

  She sank into a chair, but he remained standing, and seemed not to heed her when she asked him to sit down. He put Berry’s letter into his pocket without looking at it, and she rose again.

  She must have thought he was going, and she said with a smile of gentle trust, “It’s been like having last winter back again to see you. We thought you must have gone home right after the fire; we didn’t see anything of you again. We went ourselves in about a week.”

  Then she did not know, and he must tell her himself.

  “Did Mr. Berry say anything about me — at the fire — that last day?” he began bluntly.

  “No!” she said, looking at him with surprise; there was a new sound in his voice. “He had no need to say anything! I wanted to tell you — to write and tell you — how much I honoured you for it — how ashamed I was for misunderstanding you just before, when—”

  He knew that she meant when they all pitied him for a coward.

  Her voice trembled; he could tell that the tears were in her eyes. He tried to put the sweetness of her praise from him. “Oh, it wasn’t that that I meant,” he groaned; and he wrenched the words out. “That fellow, who said he was a friend of mine, and got into the house that way, was a thief; and Mr. Berry caught him robbing his room the day of the fire, and treated me as if I knew it and was helping him on—”

  “Oh!” cried the girl. “How cruel! How could he do that?”

  Lemuel could not suffer himself to take refuge in her generous faith now.

  “When I first came to Boston, I had my money stolen, and there were two days when I had nothing to eat; and then I was arrested by mistake for stealing a girl’s satchel; and when I was acquitted, I slept the next night in the tramp’s lodging-house, and that fellow was there, and when he came to the St. Albans I was ashamed to tell where I had known him, and so I let him pass himself off for my friend.”

  He kept his eyes fixed on hers, but he could not see them change from their pity of him, or light up with a sense of any squalor in his history.

  “And I used to think that my life had been hard!” she cried. “Oh, how much you have been through!”

  “And after that,” he pursued, “Mr. Sewell got me a place, a sort of servant’s place, and when I lost that I came to be the man-of-all work at the St. Albans.”

  In her eyes the pity was changing to admiration; his confession which he had meant to be so abject had kindled her fancy like a boastful tale.

  “How little we know about people and what they have suffered! But I thank you for telling me this — oh yes! — and I shall always think of myself with contempt. How easy and pleasant my life has been! And you—”

  She stopped, and he stood helpless against her misconception. He told her about the poverty he had left at home, and the wretched circumstance of his life, but she could not see it as anything but honourable to his present endeavour. She listened with breathless interest to it all, and, “Well,” she sighed at last, “it will always be something for you to look back to, and be proud of. And that girl — did she never say or do anything to show that she was sorry for that cruel mistake? Did you ever see her afterwards?”

  “Yes,” said Lemuel, sick at heart, and feeling how much more triumphantly he could have borne ignominy and rejection than this sweet sympathy.

  She seemed to think he would say something more, but he turned away from her, and after a little silence of expectance she let him go, with promises to come again, which she seemed to win from him for his own sake.

  In the street he took out Berry’s letter and read it.

  “DEAR OLD MAN, — I’ve been trying to get off a letter to you almost any time the last three months; but I’ve been round so much, and upside down so much since I saw you — out to W. T. and on my head in Western Mass. — that I’ve not been able to fetch it. I don’t know as I could fetch it now, if it wasn’t for the prospective Mrs. A. W. B., Jr., standing over me with a revolver, and waiting to see me do it. I’ve just been telling her about that little interview of ours with Williams, that day, and she thinks I ought to be man enough to write and say that I guess I was all wrong about you; I had a sneaking idea of the kind from the start almost, but if a fellow’s proud at all, he’s proud of his mistakes, and he hates to give them up. I’m pretty badly balled up now, and I can’t seem to get the right words about remorse, and so forth; but you know how it is yourself. I am sorry, there’s no two ways about that; but I’ve kept my suspicions as well as my regrets to myself, and now I do the best thing I can by way of reparation. I send this letter by Miss Carver. She hasn’t read it, and she don’t know what it’s all about; but I guess you’d better tell her. Don’t spare, yours truly, A. W. BERRY, JR.”

  The letter did not soften Lemuel at all towards Berry, and he was bitterly proud that he had spoken without this bidding, though he had seemed to speak to no end that he had expected. After a while he lost himself in his day-dreams again, and in the fantastic future which he built up this became a great source of comfort to him and to his ideal. Now he parted with her in sublime renunciation, and now he triumphed over all the obstacles between them; but whatever turn he willed his fortunes to take, she still praised him, and he prided himself that he had shown himself at his worst to her of his own free impulse. Sewell praised him for it in his reverie; Mr. Corey and Mr. Bellingham both made him delicate compliments upon his noble behaviour, which he feigned had somehow become known to them.

  XXIX.

  At the usual hour he was at Mr. Corey’s house, where he arrived footsore, and empty from supperless wanderings, but not hungry and not weary. The serving-man at the door met him with the message that Mr. Corey had gone to dine at his club, and would not be at home till late. He gave Lemuel a letter, which had all the greater effect from being presented to him on the little silver tray employed to bring up the cards and notes of the visitors and correspondents of the family. The envelope was stamped in that ephemeral taste which configured the stationery of a few years ago, with the lines of alligator leather, and it exhaled a perfume so characteristic that it seemed to breathe Statira visibly before him. He knew this far better than the poor, scrawly, uncultivated handwriting which he had seen so little. He took the letter, and turning from the door read it by the light of the next street lamp.

  “DEAR LEMUEL — Manda Grier has told me what she said to you and Ime about crazy about it dear Lem I want you should come and see mee O Lem you dont Suppose i could of let Manda Grier talk to you that way if I had of none
it but of course you dident only do Say so I give her a real good goen over and she says shes sory she done it i dont want any body should care for mee without itse there free will but I shall alwayes care for you if you dont care for me dont come but if you do Care I want you should come as soon as ever you can I can explane everything Manda Grier dident mean anything but for the best but sometimes she dont know what she is sayin O Lem you mussent be mad But if you are and you dont want to come ennymore dont come But O i hope you wouldent let such a thing set you againste mee recollect that I never done or Said anything to set you against me,

  “STATIRA.”

  A cruel disgust mingled with the remorse that this letter brought him. Its illiteracy made him ashamed, and the helpless fondness it expressed was like a millstone hanged about his neck. He felt the deadly burden of it drag him down.

  A passer-by on the other side of the street coughed slightly in the night air, and a thought flashed through Lemuel, from which he cowered, as if he had found himself lifting his hand against another’s life.

  His impulse was to turn and run, but there was no escape on any side. It seemed to him that he was like that prisoner he had read of, who saw the walls of his cell slowly closing together upon him, and drawing nearer and nearer till they should crush him between them. The inexperience of youth denies it perspective; in that season of fleeting and unsubstantial joys, of feverish hopes, despair wholly darkens a world which after years find full of chances and expedients.

  If Mr. Sewell had been in town there might have been some hope through him; or if Mr. Evans were there; or even if Berry were at hand, it would be some one to advise with, to open his heart to in his extremity. He walked down into Bolingbroke Street, knowing well that Mr. Sewell was not at home, but pretending to himself, after the fashion of the young, that if he should see a light in his house it would be a sign that all should come out right with him, and if not, it would come out wrong. He would not let himself lift his eyes to the house front till he arrived before it. When he looked his heart stood still; a light streamed bright and strong from the drawing-room window.

  He hurried across the street, and rang; and after some delay, in which the person coming to the door took time to light the gas in the hall, Mr. Sewell himself opened to him. They stood confronted in mutual amazement, and then Sewell said, with a cordiality which he did not keep free from reluctance, “Oh — Mr. Barker! Come in! Come in!” But after they had shaken hands, and Lemuel had come in, he stood there in the hall with him, and did not offer to take him up to his study. “I’m so glad to have this glimpse of you! How in the world did you happen to come?”

  “I was passing and saw the light,” said Lemuel.

  Sewell laughed. “To be sure! We never have any idea how far our little candle throws its beams! I’m just here for the night, on my way from the mountains to the sea; I’m to be the ‘supply’ in a friend’s pulpit at New Bedford; and I’m here quite alone in the house, scrambling a sermon together. But I’m so glad to see you! You’re well, I hope? You’re looking a little thin, but that’s no harm. Do you enjoy your life with Mr. Corey? I was sure you would! When you come to know him, you will find him one of the best of men — kindly, thoughtful, and sympathetic. I’ve felt very comfortable about your being with him whenever I’ve thought of you, and you may be sure that I’ve thought of you often. What about our friends of the St. Albans? Do you see Mrs. Harmon? You knew the Evanses had gone to Europe.”

  “Yes; I got a letter from him yesterday.”

  “He didn’t pick up so fast as they hoped, and he concluded to try the voyage. I hear very good accounts of him. He said he was going to write you. Well! And Mr. Corey is well?” He smiled more beamingly upon Lemuel, who felt that he wished him to go, and stood haplessly trying to get away.

  In the midst of his own uneasiness Sewell noted Lemuel’s. “Is there anything — something — you wished to speak with me about?”

  “No. No, not anything in particular. I just saw the light, and—”

  Sewell took his hand and wrung it with affection.

  “It was so good of you to run in and see me. Don’t fancy it’s been any disturbance. I’d got into rather a dim place in my work, but since I’ve been standing here with you — ha, ha, ha! those things do happen so curiously! — the whole thing has become perfectly luminous. I’m delighted you’re getting on so nicely. Give my love to Mr. Corey. I shall see you soon again. We shall all be back in a little over a fortnight. Glad of this moment with you, if it’s only a moment! Good-bye!”

  He wrung Lemuel’s hand again, this time in perfect sincerity, and eagerly shut him out into the night.

  The dim place had not become so luminous to him as it had to the minister. A darkness, which the obscurity of the night faintly typified, closed round him, pierced by one ray only, and from this he tried to turn his face. It was the gleam that lights up every labyrinth where our feet wander and stumble, but it is not always easy to know it from those false lights of feeble-hearted pity, of mock-sacrifice, of sick conscience, which dance before us to betray to worse misery yet.

  Some sense of this, broken and faltering, reached Lemuel where he stood, and tried to deal faithfully with his problem. In that one steadfast ray he saw that whatever he did he must not do it for himself; but what his duty was he could not make out. He knew now, if he had not known before, that whatever his feeling for Statira was, he had not released himself from her, and it seemed to him that he could not release himself by any concern for his own advantage. That notion with which he had so long played, her insufficiency for his life now and for the needs of his mind hereafter, revealed itself in its real cruelty. The things that Mr. Sewell had said, that his mother had said, that Berry had said, in what seemed a fatal succession, and all to the same effect, against throwing himself away upon some one inadequate to him at his best, fell to the ground like withered leaves, and the fire of that steadfast ray consumed them.

  But whom to turn to for counsel now? The one friend in whom he had trusted, to whom he had just gone, ready to fling down his whole heart before him, had failed him, failed him unwittingly, unwillingly, as he had failed him once before, but this time in infinitely greater stress. He did not blame him now, fiercely, proudly, as he had once blamed him, but again he wandered up and down the city streets, famished and outcast through his defection.

  It was late when he went home, but Mr. Corey had not yet returned, and he had time to sit down and write the letter which he had decided to send to Statira, instead of going to see her. It was not easy to write, but after many attempts he wrote it.

  Dear Statira, — You must not be troubled, at what Amanda said to me. I assure you that, although I was angry at first, I am entirely willing to overlook it at your request. She probably spoke hastily, and I am now convinced that she spoke without your authority. You must not think that I am provoked at you.

  “I received your letter this evening; and I will come to see you very soon. Lemuel Barker.”

  The letter was colder than he meant to make it, but he felt that he must above all be honest, and he did not see how he could honestly make it less cold. When it came to Statira’s hands she read it silently to herself, over and over again, while her tears dripped upon it.

  ‘Manda Grier was by, and she watched her till she could bear the sight no longer. She snatched the letter from the girl’s hands and ran it through, and then she flung it on the ground. “Nasty, cold-hearted, stuck-up, shameless thing!”

  “Oh, don’t, ‘Manda; don’t, ‘Manda!” sobbed Statira, and she plunged her face into the pillows of the bed, where she sat.

  “Shameless, cold-hearted, stuck-up, nasty thing!” said ‘Manda Grier, varying her denunciation in the repetition, and apparently getting fresh satisfaction out of it in that way. “Don’t? St’ira Dudley, if you was a woman — if you was half a woman — you’d never speak to that little corpse-on-ice again.”

  “O ‘Manda, don’t call him names-! I can’t bear to have
you!”

  “Names? If you was anybody at all, you wouldn’t look at him! You wouldn’t think of him!”

  “O ‘Manda, ‘Manda! You know I can’t let you talk so,” moaned Statira.

  “Talk? I could talk my head off! ‘You must not think I was provoked with you,’” she mimicked Lemuel’s dignity of diction in mincing falsetto. “‘I will come to see you very soon.’ Miserable, worthless, conceited whipper-snapper!”

  “O ‘Manda, you’ll break my heart if you go on so!”

  “Well, then, give him up! He’s goin’ to give you up.”

  “Oh, he ain’t; you know he ain’t! He’s just busy, and I know he’ll come. I’ll bet you he’ll be here to-morrow. It’ll kill me to give him up.”

  She had lifted herself from the pillow, and she began to cough.

  “He’ll kill you anyway,” cried ‘Manda Grier, in a passion of pity and remorse. She ran across the room to get the medicine which Statira had to take in these paroxysms. “There, there! Take it! I sha’n’t say anything more about him.”

  “And do you take it all back?” gasped Statira, holding the proffered spoon away.

  “Yes, yes! But do take your med’cine, St’ira, ‘f you don’t want to die where you set.”

  “And do you think he’ll come?”

  “Yes, he’ll come.”

  “Do you say it just to get me to take the medicine?”

  “No, I really do believe he’ll come.”

  “O ‘Manda, ‘Manda!” Statira took her medicine, and then wildly flung her arms round ‘Manda Grier’s neck, and began to sob and to cry there. “Oh, how hard I am with you, Manda! I should think if I was as hard with everybody else, they’d perfectly hate me.”

  “You hard!”

  “Yes, and that’s why he hate me. He does hate me. You said he did.”

  “No, St’ira, I didn’t. You never was hard to anybody, and the meanest old iceberg in creation couldn’t hate you.”