Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Why, of course. What in the world are you thinking about?”

  “About that foolish girl who came to me with her miserable love-trouble. I declare, I can’t get rid of it. I feel morally certain that she went away from me and dismissed the poor fellow who was looking to her love to save him.”

  “At the cost of some other poor creature who’d trusted and believed in him till his silly fancy changed? I hope for the credit of women that she did. But you may be morally certain she did nothing of the kind. Girls don’t give up all their hopes in life so easily as that. She might think she would do it, because she had read of such things, and thought it was fine, but when it came to the pinch, she wouldn’t.”

  “I hope not. If she did she would commit a great error, a criminal error.”

  “Well, you needn’t be afraid. Look at Mrs. Tom Corey. And that was her own sister!”

  “That was different. Corey had never thought of her sister, much less made love to her, or promised to marry her. Besides, Mrs. Corey had her father and mother to advise her, and support her in behaving sensibly. And this poor creature had nothing but her own novel fed fancies, and her crazy conscience. She thought that because she inflicted suffering upon herself she was acting unselfishly. Really the fakirs of India and the Penitentes of New Mexico are more harmless; for they don’t hurt any one else. If she has forced some poor fellow into a marriage like this of Barker’s she’s committed a deadly sin. She’d better driven him to suicide, than condemned him to live a lie to the end of his days. No doubt she regarded it as a momentary act of expiation. That’s the way her romances taught her to look at loveless marriage — as something spectacular, transitory, instead of the enduring, degrading squalor that it is!”

  “What in the world are you talking about, David? I should think you were a novelist yourself, by the wild way you go on! You have no proof whatever that Barker isn’t happily engaged. I’m sure he’s got a much better girl than he deserves, and one that’s fully his equal. She’s only too fond of that dry stick. Such a girl as the one you described, — like that mysterious visitor of yours, — what possible relation could she have with him? She was a lady!”

  “Yes, yes! Of course, it’s absurd. But everybody seems to be tangled up with everybody else. My dear, will you give me a cup of tea? I think I’ll go to writing at once.”

  Before she left her husband to order his tea Mrs. Sewell asked, “And do you think you have got through with him now?”

  “I have just begun with him,” replied Sewell.

  His mind, naturally enough in connection with Lemuel, was running upon his friend Evans, and the subject they had once talked of in that room. It was primarily in thinking of him that he begun to write his sermon on Complicity, which made a great impression at the time, and had a more lasting effect as enlarged from the newspaper reports, and reprinted in pamphlet form. His evolution from the text, “Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them,” of a complete philosophy of life, was humorously treated by some of his critics as a phase of Darwinism, but upon the whole the sermon met with great favour. It not only strengthened Sewell’s hold upon the affections of his own congregation, but carried his name beyond Boston, and made him the topic of editorials in the Sunday editions of leading newspapers as far off as Chicago. It struck one of those popular moods of intelligent sympathy when the failure of a large class of underpaid and worthy workers to assert their right to a living wage against a powerful monopoly had sent a thrill of respectful pity through every generous heart in the country; and it was largely supposed that Sewell’s sermon referred indirectly to the telegraphers’ strike. Those who were aware of his habit of seeking to produce a personal rather than a general effect, of his belief that you can have a righteous public only by the slow process of having righteous men and women, knew that he meant something much nearer home to each of his hearers when he preached the old Christ-humanity to them, and enforced again the lessons that no one for good or for evil, for sorrow or joy, for sickness or health, stood apart from his fellows, but each was bound to the highest and the lowest by ties that centred in the hand of God. No man, he said, sinned or suffered to himself alone; his error and his pain darkened and afflicted men who never heard of his name. If a community was corrupt, if an age was immoral, it was not because of the vicious, but the virtuous who fancied themselves indifferent spectators. It was not the tyrant who oppressed, it was the wickedness that had made him possible. The gospel — Christ — God, so far as men had imagined him, — was but a lesson, a type, a witness from everlasting to everlasting of the spiritual unity of man. As we grew in grace, in humanity, in civilisation, our recognition of this truth would be transfigured from a duty to a privilege, a joy, a heavenly rapture. Many men might go through life harmlessly without realising this, perhaps, but sterilely; only those who had had the care of others laid upon them, lived usefully, fruitfully. Let no one shrink from such a burden, or seek to rid himself of it. Rather let him bind it fast upon his neck, and rejoice in it. The wretched, the foolish, the ignorant whom we found at every turn, were something more; they were the messengers of God, sent to tell his secret to any that would hear it. Happy he in whose ears their cry for help was a perpetual voice, for that man, whatever his creed, knew God and could never forget him. In his responsibility for his weaker brethren he was Godlike, for God was but the impersonation of loving responsibility, of infinite and never-ceasing care for us all.

  When Sewell came down from his pulpit, many people came up to speak to him of his sermon. Some of the women’s faces showed the traces of tears, and each person had made its application to himself. There were two or three who had heard between the words. Old Bromfield Corey, who was coming a good deal more to church since his eyes began to fail him, because it was a change and a sort of relief from being read to, said —

  “I didn’t know that they had translated it Barker in the revised version. Well, you must let me know how he’s getting on, Sewell, and give me a chance at the revelation, too, if he ever gets troublesome to you again.”

  Miss Vane was standing at the door with his wife when Sewell came out. She took his hand and pressed it.

  “Do you think I threw away my chance?” she demanded. She had her veil down, and at first Sewell thought it was laughter that shook her voice, but it was not that.

  He did not know quite what to say, but he did say, “He was sent to me.’”

  As they walked off alone, his wife said —

  “Well, David, I hope you haven’t preached away all your truth and righteousness.”

  “I know what you mean, my dear,” answered Sewell humbly. He added, “You shall remind me if I seem likely to forget.” But he concluded seriously, “If I thought I could never do anything more for Barker, I should be very unhappy; I should take it as a sign that I had been recreant to my charge.”

  XXXVI

  The minister heard directly from Barker two or three times during the winter, and as often through Statira, who came to see Mrs. Sewell. Barker had not got the place he had hoped for at once, but he had got a school in the country a little way off, and he was doing something; and he expected to do better.

  The winter proved a very severe one. “I guess it’s just as well I stayed in town,” said Statira, the last time she came, with a resignation which Mrs. Sewell, fond of the ideal in others as most ladies are, did not like. “‘Manda Grier says ’twould killed me up there; and I d’ know but what it would. I done so well here, since the cold weather set in that ‘Manda Grier she thinks I hadn’t better get married right away; well, not till it comes summer, anyway. I tell her I guess she don’t want I should get married at all, after all she done to help it along first off. Her and Mr. Barker don’t seem to get along very well.”

  Now that Statira felt a little better acquainted with Mrs. Sewell, she dropped the genteel elongation of her final syllables, and used such vernacular forms of speech as came first to her. The name of ‘Manda Grier seemed to come in at every
fourth word with her, and she tired Mrs. Sewell with visits which she appeared unable to bring to a close of herself.

  A long relief from them ended in an alarm for her health with Mrs. Sewell, who went to find her. She found her still better than before, and Statira frankly accounted for her absence by saying that ‘Manda thought she had better not come any more till Mrs. Sewell returned some of her calls. She laughed, and then she said —

  “I don’t know as you’d found me here if you’d come much later. ‘Manda Grier don’t want I should be here in the east winds, now it’s coming spring so soon; and she’s heard of a chance at a box factory in Philadelphia. She wants I should go there with her, and I don’t know but what it would be about the best thing.”

  Mrs. Sewell could not deny the good sense of the plan, though she was sensible of liking Statira less and less for it.

  The girl continued: “Lem — Mr. Barker, I should say — wants I should come up there, out the east winds. But ‘Manda Grier she’s opposed to it: she thinks I’d ought to have more of a mild climate, and he better come down there and get a school if he wants me too,” Statira broke into an impartial little titter. “I’m sure I don’t know which of ’em ‘ll win the day!”

  Mrs. Sewell’s report of this speech brought a radiant smile of relief to Sewell’s face. “Ah, well, then! That settles it! I feel perfectly sure that ‘Manda Grier will win the day. That poor, sick, flimsy little Statira is completely under ‘Manda Grier’s thumb, and will do just what she says, now that there’s no direct appeal from her will to Barker’s; they will never be married. Don’t you see that it was ‘Manda Grier’s romance in the beginning, and that when she came to distrust, to dislike Barker, she came to dislike her romance too — to hate it?”

  “Well, don’t you romance him, David,” said Mrs. Sewell, only conditionally accepting his theory.

  Yet it may be offered to the reader as founded in probability and human nature. In fact, he may be assured here that the marriage which eventually took place was not that of Lemuel with Statira; though how the union, which was not only happiness for those it joined, but whatever is worthier and better in life than happiness, came about, it is aside from the purpose of this story to tell, and must be left for some future inquiry.

  THE END

  ANNIE KILBURN

  CONTENTS

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  XVI.

  XVII.

  XVIII.

  XIX.

  XX.

  XXI.

  XXII.

  XXIII.

  XXIV.

  XXV.

  XXVI.

  XXVII.

  XXVIII.

  XXIX.

  XXX.

  I.

  After the death of Judge Kilburn his daughter came back to America. They had been eleven winters in Rome, always meaning to return, but staying on from year to year, as people do who have nothing definite to call them home. Toward the last Miss Kilburn tacitly gave up the expectation of getting her father away, though they both continued to say that they were going to take passage as soon as the weather was settled in the spring. At the date they had talked of for sailing he was lying in the Protestant cemetery, and she was trying to gather herself together, and adjust her life to his loss. This would have been easier with a younger person, for she had been her father’s pet so long, and then had taken care of his helplessness with a devotion which was finally so motherly, that it was like losing at once a parent and a child when he died, and she remained with the habit of giving herself when there was no longer any one to receive the sacrifice. He had married late, and in her thirty-first year he was seventy-eight; but the disparity of their ages, increasing toward the end through his infirmities, had not loosened for her the ties of custom and affection that bound them; she had seen him grow more and more fitfully cognisant of what they had been to each other since her mother’s death, while she grew the more tender and fond with him. People who came to condole with her seemed not to understand this, or else they thought it would help her to bear up if they treated her bereavement as a relief from hopeless anxiety. They were all surprised when she told them she still meant to go home.

  “Why, my dear,” said one old lady, who had been away from America twenty years, “this is home! You’ve lived in this apartment longer now than the oldest inhabitant has lived in most American towns. What are you talking about? Do you mean that you are going back to Washington?”

  “Oh no. We were merely staying on in Washington from force of habit, after father gave up practice. I think we shall go back to the old homestead, where we used to spend our summers, ever since I can remember.”

  “And where is that?” the old lady asked, with the sharpness which people believe must somehow be good for a broken spirit.

  “It’s in the interior of Massachusetts — you wouldn’t know it: a place called Hatboro’.”

  “No, I certainly shouldn’t,” said the old lady, with superiority. “Why Hatboro’, of all the ridiculous reasons?”

  “It was one of the first places where they began to make straw hats; it was a nickname at first, and then they adopted it. The old name was Dorchester Farms. Father fought the change, but it was of no use; the people wouldn’t have it Farms after the place began to grow; and by that time they had got used to Hatboro’. Besides, I don’t see how it’s any worse than Hatfield, in England.”

  “It’s very American.”

  “Oh, it’s American. We have Boxboro’ too, you know, in Massachusetts.”

  “And you are going from Rome to Hatboro’, Mass.,” said the old lady, trying to present the idea in the strongest light by abbreviating the name of the State.

  “Yes,” said Miss Kilburn. “It will be a change, but not so much of a change as you would think. It was father’s wish to go back.”

  “Ah, my dear!” cried the old lady. “You’re letting that weigh with you, I see. Don’t do it! If it wasn’t wise, don’t you suppose that the last thing he could wish you to do would be to sacrifice yourself to a sick whim of his?”

  The kindness expressed in the words touched Annie Kilburn. She had a certain beauty of feature; she was near-sighted; but her eyes were brown and soft, her lips red and full; her dark hair grew low, and played in little wisps and rings on her temples, where her complexion was clearest; the bold contour of her face, with its decided chin and the rather large salient nose, was like her father’s; it was this, probably, that gave an impression of strength, with a wistful qualification. She was at that time rather thin, and it could have been seen that she would be handsomer when her frame had rounded out in fulfilment of its generous design. She opened her lips to speak, but shut them again in an effort at self-control before she said —

  “But I really wish to do it. At this moment I would rather be in Hatboro’ than in Rome.”

  “Oh, very well,” said the old lady, gathering herself up as one does from throwing away one’s sympathy upon an unworthy object; “if you really wish it—”

  “I know that it must seem preposterous and — and almost ungrateful that I should think of going back, when I might just as well stay. Why, I’ve a great many more friends here than I have there; I suppose I shall be almost a stranger when I get there, and there’s no comparison in congeniality; and yet I feel that I must go back. I can’t tell you why. But I have a longing; I feel that I must try to be of some use in the world — try to do some good — and in Hatboro’ I think I shall know how.” She put on her glasses, and looked at the old lady as if she might attempt an explanation, but, as if a clearer vision of the veteran worldling discouraged her, she did not make the effort.

  “Oh!” said the old lady. “If you want to be of use, and do g
ood—” She stopped, as if then there were no more to be said by a sensible person. “And shall you be going soon?” she asked. The idea seemed to suggest her own departure, and she rose after speaking.

  “Just as soon as possible,” answered Miss Kilburn. Words take on a colour of something more than their explicit meaning from the mood in which they are spoken: Miss Kilburn had a sense of hurrying her visitor away, and the old lady had a sense of being turned out-of-doors, that the preparations for the homeward voyage might begin instantly.

  II.

  Many times after the preparations began, and many times after they were ended, Miss Kilburn faltered in doubt of her decision; and if there had been any will stronger than her own to oppose it, she might have reversed it, and stayed in Rome. All the way home there was a strain of misgiving in her satisfaction at doing what she believed to be for the best, and the first sight of her native land gave her a shock of emotion which was not unmixed joy. She felt forlorn among people who were coming home with all sorts of high expectations, while she only had high intentions.

  These dated back a good many years; in fact, they dated back to the time when the first flush of her unthinking girlhood was over, and she began to question herself as to the life she was living. It was a very pleasant life, ostensibly. Her father had been elected from the bench to Congress, and had kept his title and his repute as a lawyer through several terms in the House before he settled down to the practice of his profession in the courts at Washington, where he made a good deal of money. They passed from boarding to house-keeping, in the easy Washington way, after their impermanent Congressional years, and divided their time between a comfortable little place in Nevada Circle and the old homestead in Hatboro’. He was fond of Washington, and robustly content with the world as he found it there and elsewhere. If his daughter’s compunctions came to her through him, it must have been from some remoter ancestry; he was not apparently characterised by their transmission, and probably she derived them from her mother, who died when she was a little girl, and of whom she had no recollection. Till he began to break, after they went abroad, he had his own way in everything; but as men grow old or infirm they fall into subjection to their womenkind; their rude wills yield in the suppler insistence of the feminine purpose; they take the colour of the feminine moods and emotions; the cycle of life completes itself where it began, in helpless dependence upon the sex; and Rufus Kilburn did not escape the common lot. He was often complaining and unlovely, as aged and ailing men must be; perhaps he was usually so; but he had moments when he recognised the beauty of his daughter’s aspiration with a spiritual sympathy, which showed that he must always have had an intellectual perception of it. He expressed with rhetorical largeness and looseness the longing which was not very definite in her own heart, and mingled with it a strain of homesickness poignantly simple and direct for the places, the scenes, the persons, the things, of his early days. As he failed more and more, his homesickness was for natural aspects which had wholly ceased to exist through modern changes and improvements, and for people long since dead, whom he could find only in an illusion of that environment in some other world. In the pathos of this situation it was easy for his daughter to keep him ignorant of the passionate rebellion against her own ideals in which she sometimes surprised herself. When he died, all counter-currents were lost in the tidal revulsion of feeling which swept her to the fulfilment of what she hoped was deepest and strongest in her nature, with shame for what she hoped was shallowest, till that moment of repulsion in which she saw the thickly roofed and many towered hills of Boston grow up out of the western waves.