Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “What is it, Dan? What did you come for?” she asked.

  “To see if it was really true, Alice. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Well — let me go — you mustn’t — it’s too silly. Of course it’s true.” She pulled herself free. “Is my hair tumbled? You oughtn’t to have come; it’s ridiculous; but I’m glad you came. I’ve been thinking it all over, and I’ve got a great many things to say to you. But come to breakfast now.”

  She had a business-like way of treating the situation that was more intoxicating than sentiment would have been, and gave it more actuality.

  Mrs. Pasmer was alone at the table, and explained that Alice’s father never breakfasted with them, or very seldom. “Where are your flowers?” she asked Alice.

  “Flowers? What flowers?”

  “That Mr. Mavering brought.”

  They all looked at one another. Dan ran out and brought in his roses.

  “They were trying to get away in the excitement, I guess, Mrs. Pasmer; I found them behind the door.” He had flung them there, without knowing it, when Mrs. Pasmer left him with Alice.

  He expected her to join him and her mother in being amused at this, but he was as well pleased to have her touched at his having brought them, and to turn their gaiety off in praise of the roses. She got a vase for them, and set it on the table. He noticed for the first time the pretty house-dress she had on, with its barred corsage and under-skirt, and the heavy silken rope knotted round it at the waist, and dropping in heavy tufts or balls in front.

  The breakfast was Continental in its simplicity, and Mrs. Pasmer said that they had always kept up their Paris habit of a light breakfast, even in London, where it was not so easy to follow foreign customs as it was in America. She was afraid he might find it too light. Then he told all about his morning’s adventure, ending with his breakfast at the Providence Depot. Mrs. Pasmer entered into the fun of it, but she said it was for only once in a way, and he must not expect to be let in if he came at that hour another morning. He said no; he understood what an extraordinary piece of luck it was for him to be there; and he was there to be bidden to do whatever they wished. He said so much in recognition of their goodness, that he became abashed by it. Mrs. Pasmer sat at the head of the table, and Alice across it from him, so far off that she seemed parted from him by an insuperable moral distance. A warm flush seemed to rise from his heart into his throat and stifle him. He wished to shed tears. His eyes were wet with grateful happiness in answering Mrs. Pasmer that he would not have any more coffee. “Then,” she said, “we will go into the drawing-room;” but she allowed him and Alice to go alone.

  He was still in that illusion of awe and of distance, and he submitted to the interposition of another table between their chairs.

  “I wish to talk with you,” she said, so seriously that he was frightened, and said to himself: “Now she is going to break it off. She has thought it over, and she finds she can’t endure me.”

  “Well?” he said huskily.

  “You oughtn’t to have come here, you know, this morning.”

  “I know it,” he vaguely conceded. “But I didn’t expect to get in.”

  “Well, now you’re here, we may as well talk. You must tell your family at once.”

  “Yes; I’m going to write to them as soon as I get back to my room. I couldn’t last night.”

  “But you mustn’t write; you must go — and prepare their minds.”

  “Go?” he echoed. “Oh, that isn’t necessary! My father knew about it from the beginning, and I guess they’ve all talked it over. Their minds are prepared.” The sense of his immeasurable superiority to any one’s opposition began to dissipate Dan’s unnatural awe; at the pleading face which Alice put on, resting one cheek against the back of one of her clasped hands, and leaning on the table with her elbows, he began to be teased by that silken rope round her waist.

  “But you don’t understand, dear,” she said; and she said “dear” as if they were old married people. “You must go to see them, and tell them; and then some of them must come to see me — your father and sisters.”

  “Why, of course.” His eye now became fastened to one of the fluffy silken balls.

  “And then mamma and I must go to see your mother, mustn’t we?”

  “It’ll be very nice of you — yes. You know she can’t come to you.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought, and — What are you looking at?” she drew herself back from the table and followed the direction of his eye with a woman’s instinctive apprehension of disarray.

  He was ashamed to tell. “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I don’t know. That it seems so strange any one else should have any to do with it — my family and yours. But I suppose they must. Yes, it’s all right.”

  “Why, of course. If your family didn’t like it—”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference to me,” said Dan resolutely.

  “It would to me,” she retorted, with tender reproach. “Do you suppose it would be pleasant to go into a family that didn’t like you? Suppose papa and mamma didn’t like you?”

  “But I thought they did,” said Mavering, with his mind still partly on the rope and the fluffy ball, but keeping his eyes away.

  “Yes, they do,” said Alice. “But your family don’t know me at all; and your father’s only seen me once. Can’t you understand? I’m afraid we don’t look at it seriously enough — earnestly — and oh, I do wish to have everything done as it should be! Sometimes, when I think of it, it makes me tremble. I’ve been thinking about it all the morning, and — and — praying.”

  Dan wanted to fall on his knees to her. The idea of Alice in prayer was fascinating.

  “I wish our life to begin with others, and not with ourselves. If we’re intrusted with so much happiness, doesn’t it mean that we’re to do good with it — to give it to others as if it were money?”

  The nobleness of this thought stirred Dan greatly; his eyes wandered back to the silken rope; but now it seemed to him an emblem of voluntary suffering and self-sacrifice, like a devotee’s hempen girdle. He perceived that the love of this angelic girl would elevate him and hallow his whole life if he would let it. He answered her, fervently, that he would be guided by her in this as in everything; that he knew he was selfish, and he was afraid he was not very good; but it was not because he had not wished to be so; it was because he had not had any incentive. He thought how much nobler and better this was than the talk he had usually had with girls. He said that of course he would go home and tell his people; he saw now that it would make them happier if they could hear it directly from him. He had only thought of writing because he could not bear to think of letting a day pass without seeing her; but if he took the early morning train he could get back the same night, and still have three hours at Ponkwasset Falls, and he would go the next day, if she said so.

  “Go to-day, Dan,” she said, and she stretched out her hand impressively across the table toward him. He seized it with a gush of tenderness, and they drew together in their resolution to live for others. He said he would go at once. But the next train did not leave till two o’clock, and there was plenty of time. In the meanwhile it was in the accomplishment of their high aims that they sat down on the sofa together and talked of their future; Alice conditioned it wholly upon his people’s approval of her, which seemed wildly unnecessary to Mavering, and amused him immensely.

  “Yes,” she said, “I know you will think me strange in a great many things; but I shall never keep anything from you, and I’m going to tell you that I went to matins this morning.”

  “To matins?” echoed Dan. He would not quite have liked her a Catholic; he remembered with relief that she had said she was not a Roman Catholic; though when he came to think, he would not have cared a great deal. Nothing could have changed her from being Alice.

  “Yes, I wished to consecrate the first morning of our engagement; and I’m always g
oing. I determined that I would go before breakfast — that was what made breakfast so late. Don’t you like it?” she asked timidly.

  “Like it!” he said. “I’m going with you:”

  “Oh no!” she turned upon him. “That wouldn’t do.” She became grave again. “I’m glad you approve of it, for I should feel that there was something wanting to our happiness. If marriage is a sacrament, why shouldn’t an engagement be?”

  “It is,” said Dan, and he felt that it was holy; till then he had never realised that marriage was a sacrament, though he had often heard the phrase.

  At the end of an hour they took a tender leave of each other, hastened by the sound of Mrs. Pasmer’s voice without. Alice escaped from one door before her mother entered by the other. Dan remained, trying to look unconcerned, but he was sensible of succeeding so poorly that he thought he had better offer his hand to Mrs. Pasmer at once. He told her that he was going up to Ponkwasset Falls at two o’clock, and asked her to please remember him to Mr. Pasmer.

  She said she would, and asked him if he were to be gone long.

  “Oh no; just overnight — till I can tell them what’s happened.” He felt it a comfort to be trivial with Mrs. Pasmer, after bracing up to Alice’s ideals. “I suppose they’ll have to know.”

  “What an exemplary son!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Yes, I suppose they will.”

  “I supposed it would be enough if I wrote, but Alice thinks I’d better report in person.”

  “I think you had, indeed! And it will be a good thing for you both to have the time for clarifying your ideas. Did she tell you she had been at matins this morning?” A light of laughter trembled in Mrs. Pasmer’s eyes, and Mavering could not keep a responsive gleam out of his own. In an instant the dedication of his engagement by morning prayer ceased to be a high and solemn thought, and became deliciously amusing; and this laughing Alice over with her mother did more to realise the fact that she was his than anything else had yet done.

  In that dark passage outside he felt two arms go tenderly round his neck; and a soft shape strain itself to his heart. “I know you have been laughing about me. But you may. I’m yours now, even to laugh at, if you want.”

  “You are mine to fall down and worship,” he vowed, with an instant revulsion of feeling.

  Alice didn’t say anything; he felt her hand fumbling about his coat lapel. “Where is your breast pocket?” she asked; and he took hold of her hand, which left a carte-de-visite-shaped something in his.

  “It isn’t very good,” she murmured, as well as she could, with her lips against his cheek, “but I thought you’d like to show them some proof of my existence. I shall have none of yours while you’re gone.”

  “O Alice! you think of everything!”

  His heart was pierced by the soft reproach implied in her words; he had not thought to ask her for her photograph, but she had thought to give it; she must have felt it strange that he had not asked for it, and she had meant to slip it in his pocket and let him find it there. But even his pang of self-upbraiding was a part of his transport. He seemed to float down the stairs; his mind was in a delirious whirl. “I shall go mad,” he said to himself in the excess of his joy— “I shall die!”

  XXVIII.

  The parting scene with Alice persisted in Mavering’s thought far on the way to Ponkwasset Falls. He now succeeded in saying everything to her: how deeply he felt her giving him her photograph to cheer him in his separation from her; how much he appreciated her forethought in providing him with some answer when his mother and sisters should ask him about her looks. He took out the picture, and pretended to the other passengers to be looking very closely at it, and so managed to kiss it. He told her that now he understood what love really was; how powerful; how it did conquer everything; that it had changed him and made him already a better man. He made her refuse all merit in the work.

  When he began to formulate the facts for communication to his family, love did not seem so potent; he found himself ashamed of his passion, or at least unwilling to let it be its own excuse even; he had a wish to give it almost any other appearance. Until he came in sight of the station and the Works, it had not seemed possible for any one to object to Alice. He had been going home as a matter of form to receive the adhesion of his family. But now he was forced to see that she might be considered critically, even reluctantly. This would only be because his family did not understand how perfect Alice was; but they might not understand.

  With his father there would be no difficulty. His father had seen Alice and admired her; he would be all right. Dan found himself hoping this rather anxiously, as if from the instinctive need of his father’s support with his mother and sisters. He stopped at the Works when he left the train, and found his father in his private office beyond the book-keeper’s picket-fence, which he penetrated, with a nod to the accountant.

  “Hello, Dan!” said his father, looking up; and “Hello, father!” said Dan. Being alone, the father and son not only shook hands, but kissed each other, as they used to do in meeting after an absence when Dan was younger.

  He had closed his father’s door with his left hand in giving his right, and now he said at once, “Father, I’ve come home to tell you that I’m engaged to be married.”

  Dan had prearranged his father’s behaviour at this announcement, but he now perceived that he would have to modify the scene if it were to represent the facts. His father did not brighten all over and demand, “Miss Pasmer, of course?” he contrived to hide whatever start the news had given him, and was some time in asking, with his soft lisp, “Isn’t that rather sudden, Dan?”

  “Well, not for me,” said Dan, laughing uneasily. “It’s — you know her, father — Miss Pasmer.”

  “Oh yes,” said his father, certainly not with displeasure, and yet not with enthusiasm.

  “I’ve had ever since Class Day to think it over, and it — came to a climax yesterday.”

  “And then you stopped thinking,” said his father — to gain time, it appeared to Dan.

  “Yes, sir,” said Dan. “I haven’t thought since.”

  “Well,” said his father, with an amusement which was not unfriendly. He added, after a moment, “But I thought that had been broken off,” and Dan’s instinct penetrated to the lurking fact that his father must have talked the rupture over with his mother, and not wholly regretted it.

  “There was a kind of — hitch at one time,” he admitted; “but it’s all right now.”

  “Well, well,” said his father, “this is great news — great news,” and he seemed to be shaping himself to the new posture of affairs, while giving it a conditional recognition. “She’s a beautiful creature.”

  “Isn’t she?” cried Dan, with a little break in his voice, for he had found his father’s manner rather trying. “And she’s good too. I assure you that she is — she is simply perfect every way.”

  “Well,” said the elder Mavering, rising and pulling down the rolling top of his desk, “I’m glad to hear it, for your sake, Dan. Have you been up at the house yet?”

  “No; I’m just off the train.”

  “How is her mother — how is Mrs. Pasmer? All well?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Dan; “they’re all very well. You don’t know Mr. Pasmer, I believe, sir, do you?”

  “Not since college. What sort of person is he?”

  “He’s very refined and quiet. Very handsome. Very courteous. Very nice indeed.”

  “Ah! that’s good,” said Elbridge Mavering, with the effect of not having been very attentive to his son’s answer.

  They walked up the long slope of the hillside on which the house stood, overlooking the valley where the Works were, and fronting the plateau across the river where the village of operatives’ houses was scattered. The paling light of what had been a very red sunset flushed them, and brought out the picturesqueness which the architect, who designed them for a particular effect in the view from the owner’s mansion, had intended.

  A
good carriage road followed the easiest line of ascent towards this edifice, and reached a gateway. Within it began to describe a curve bordered with asphalted footways to the broad verandah of the house, and then descended again to the gate. The grounds enclosed were planted with deciduous shrubs, which had now mostly dropped their leaves, and clumps of firs darkening in the evening light with the gleam of some garden statues shivering about the lawn next the house. The breeze grew colder and stiffer as the father and son mounted toward the mansion which Dan used to believe was like a chateau, with its Mansard-roof and dormer windows and chimneys. It now blocked its space sharply out of the thin pink of the western sky, and its lights sparkled with a wintry keenness which had often thrilled Dan when he climbed the hill from the station in former homecomings. Their brilliancy gave him a strange sinking of the heart for no reason. He and his father had kept up a sort of desultory talk about Alice, and he could not have said that his father had seemed indifferent; he had touched the affair only too acquiescently; it was painfully like everything else. When they came in full sight of the house, Dan left the subject, as he realised presently, from a reasonless fear of being overheard.

  “It seems much later here, sir, than it does in Boston,” he said, glancing round at the maples, which stood ragged, with half their leaves blown from them.

  “Yes; we’re in the hills, and we’re further north,” answered his father. “There’s Minnie.”

  Dan had seen his sister on the verandah, pausing at sight of him, and puzzled to make out who was with her father. He had an impulse to hail her with a shout, but he could not. In his last walk with her he had told her that he should never marry, and they had planned to live together. It was a joke; but now he felt as if he had come to rob her of something, and he walked soberly on with his father.

  “Why, Dan, you good-for-nothing fellow!” she called out when he came near enough to be unmistakable, and ran down the steps to kiss him. “What in the world are you doing here? When did you come? Why didn’t you hollo, instead of letting me stand here guessing? You’re not sick, are you?”