“Oh, I can’t let you take the trouble of driving me to a hotel,” I said. “I will get a hack here.”
“Why, surely,” she answered in a tone of wounded expectation, “you are coming to us?”
“No; I shall be here such a little while, and—”
“But that’s all the more reason why you should be our guest. My mother would be hurt if you went anywhere else; we will leave you free to come and go as you like; only you must stay with us.”
It was useless to protest, and I got into the carriage with her.
II
BOTH THEN and afterward, when we reached the Faulkner mansion, I was aware of not having done the Faulkners justice as personages, in our meeting at Swampscott. I had understood, in a careless way, that their occupation of that villa and the style of their living in it meant money; but Faulkner himself was such an informal sloven, and Hermia was so little attributable in character to anything about her, and the doom hanging over them was so exclusive of all other interest in them, that I had not conjectured the degree of state from which they were detached. The quiet richness of the equip age that had met us now was the forerunner of a sumptuous comfort, far beyond any expectation of mine, in all Mrs. Faulkner’s belongings and surroundings. She was not a person you could imagine caring for the evidences or uses of wealth; she affected you at once as exterior to all such sordid accidents; as capable of being a goddess in any gown. As a matter of fact, however, the costliness in which her whole life was clad was certainly very great.
I had forgotten the spacious grounds in which Faulkner’s house stood, or perhaps I now noticed them more because all the neighborhood had been closely built up in the process of the city’s growth. In the heart of the town the mansion rose from the midst of ample lawns and gardens, enclosed by a high brick wall, such as I had always said was my ideal of stately bounds; and it all looked much older than anything at the East, from the soft-coal smoke with which wall and mansion and garden trees were blackened. I suppose it was the smell of this in the air, and the mat of ivy on the house front, that confused my memories of the farther past with more recent recollections of England, and imparted to my present sensations the vagueness of both, as we rolled up under the porte cochere. I saw that the house must have been vastly enlarged since I had been there last, and the bulk of the elms that overtopped it, and the height of the slim white birches on the lawn before it, warned me how long ago that had been. Within, I was met by the fresh, brisk warmth of a fire of hickory limbs, that burnt on the wide hall hearth, and I at once delivered myself up to the caresses of the velvety ease in which all life moved there. These influences are so subtly corrupting that a vulgar question formed itself in my mind, as I followed the servant up the broad staircase to my room, and I wondered how much the invitation of such luxury might tempt a man fagged in heart and mind. I said to myself that if I were Nevil, for example, and I were in love with the heart of this material bliss, I should certainly let no fantastic scruple bar me from possession. I cannot exactly say how the formulation of this low thought affected me with a perception of Hermia’s charm in a way it was not apt to make its appeal. But when I went down to dinner, and met her again, mellowed to harmony with all that softness and richness by a dress that lent itself in color and texture to her peculiar beauty, I was abashed by her youth and loveliness. I had till then thought of her so much as a mysteriously stricken soul, that I had never done justice to her as a woman that some favored man might be in love with, as men are with women, and might marry. When I now realized this I was ashamed of realizing it, and was afraid of betraying it somehow, by some levity, some want of conformity in mood or manner to what I knew of her. I suffered myself to wonder if Nevil ever had this unruly sense of her, against which something sadly reproachful in her beauty itself seemed to protest, and which I feel that I have given undue import and fixity in putting it into words. I suppose it was all from seeing her for the first time in colors, and from perceiving with a distinctness unfelt before that she was in the perfect splendor of a most regal womanhood. Something perversely comic mixed with my remorse, when I met her eye with these thoughts in my mind, and fancied a swift query there as to the impression I had of her. I wished to tease, to mystify her, to keep her between laughing and crying, as a naughty boy will with some little girl whom he pretends to have found something wrong about. I have since thought she may have been questioning whether I read in her costume any conclusion as to the matter pending in her mind; and that she meant to express by this assertion of her right to be beautiful the decision which she had reached. If this was so, she had chosen a means too finely, too purely feminine; my wife might have understood her, but I certainly did not.
The dowager Mrs. Faulkner was there with her in the drawing-room, a plain old lady, whom I could see her son had looked like, in a rich old lady’s silk. She welcomed me with a motherly cordiality, and put me on that footing of intimacy with Faulkner in the past which I was always wishing in vain to refuse. I perceived that I had for her only the personality that he had given me; she could not detach me from the period of my first acquaintance with him. She began at once to talk literature with me, as if that were the practical interest of my life; and I found her far better read, and of a far more modern taste, than her son had been. She was one of those old ladies who perhaps reach their perfection a little away from the centres of thought, or rather of talk, and in some such subordinate city as that where her life had been passed. She had kept the keen relish for books which seems to dull where books are written and printed, and she had vivid opinions about them which were not faded by constant wear. I found also that she knew personally a great many of the authors we discussed: it was still in the palmy days of lecturing, and the Faulkners had made their house the hospitable sojourn of every writer who had come to the place to read his essay or poem. She told me that I had the authors’ seat at her table, and that the very chair I then sat in had been occupied by Emerson, Curtis, Wendell Phillips, Saxe, Dr. Holland, Bayard Taylor, Mark Twain, and I do not know who else.
I confess that she fatigued me a little with all that enthusiasm, but except for her passion for authorship in books and out of them, I found that I must revise my impression that she was a romantic person. Her relations with her daughter-in-law had nothing, certainly, of romantic insubstantiality; they were of the solidest and simplest affection, founded apparently upon a confidence as perfect as could have existed between them if Hermia had been her own child. She gave her the head of the table, and she let herself be ruled by her in many little things in which old ladies are apt to be rebellious to younger women. She seemed to wish only to lead the talk, but she deferred to Hermia in several questions of fact as well as taste, and though she always spoke to her as “child,” it was evidently with no wish to depose or minify her. On her part Hermia, without seeming to do so, showed herself watchful of Mrs. Faulkner’s comfort and pleasure at every moment, and evidently returned her liking in all its cordiality. There was no manner of jealousy between them, perhaps because Mrs. Faulkner could never have been a beauty, and could not even be retrospectively envious of Hermia’s magnificence, and partly also because they were temperaments that in being wholly opposite did not in the least wear upon each other.
This at least was my rapid formulation of the case. The dinner was exquisite, and Mrs. Faulkner praised it with impartial jollity, assuring me that I should have had no such dinner if she had been in authority, but that Hermia’s genius for house-keeping was such that its inspirations ruled even in her absence. As for herself, she did not know what she was eating.
“Nor, I hope, how much I am,” I said.
In fact I felt quite torpid, after dinner. As we sat before the fire I began to have long dreams between the syllables of the words I heard spoken, and I had a passage of conversation with my wife and Faulkner, in which it was all pleasantly arranged in regard to Nevil, while I was dimly aware of Mrs. Faulkner’s asking me whether I thought George Eliot would live a
s a poet.
I do not know whether I perceptibly disgraced myself or not. But we made a short evening, and a little after nine o’clock I acquiesced with an alacrity for which I am sure my wife would never have forgiven me, in Hermia’s suggestion that I must be very tired, and would like to go to bed.
III
IT WAS CERTAINLY a most anomalous situation, and I woke with the brilliant idea that for my own part in it the whole thing was to take it as naturally as possible; which was probably reflected into my waking thought from some otherwise wholly vanished dream.
I found it early, as to the daylight, but in that smoke-dimmed November air it might very well be still rather dark at seven o’clock. I went out for a breath of the pensive confusion which I found still persisted in it, and inhaled my glad youth and my first joy of travel in the odor of those bituminous fumes. The grass was still brightly green on the lawn;
“And parting summer lingering blooms delayed”
in the garden, which stretched with box-bordered walks and grape-vined trellises to the wall at one side of the house. The leaves had dropped from the trees, and I picked up from the fallen foliage, soft and dank under my feet, a black walnut, pungently aromatic, and redolent of my boyhood. At the same time a faint scent rose from the box, and transported me to that old neglected garden by the sea, where I saw Faulkner die. A thrill of immense pity for him pierced my heart. I thought with what a passion of tenderness for that woman he must have planned this house, from which he was now in eternal exile, and her willingness to forget him in her love for another seemed monstrous. It was hard to be a philosophical spectator; I found myself taking the unfriended side of the dead.
In the house, when I returned to it, I was met by Faulkner’s mother, before that cheerful hall fire. She put aside the damp morning paper which she had just opened to dry in the heat, and gave me her old, soft hand.
“Do you find many familiar points about the place?” she asked.
“No; I’m afraid I hadn’t kept any distinct remembrance of it. At least, it’s all very strange.”
“You would recognize my son’s room, I suppose,” she said, turning and leading the way down a corridor that branched away from the hall. “The old house is all here; the new one was built round it; and we’ve kept poor Douglas’s den, as he used to call it, just as it was.”
I thought it an odd fancy she should wish me to visit the place with her, but I concluded that perhaps she wished to tell her daughter I had already seen it, if she should ask. At any rate, I had no comment to make even in my own mind: we all deal as we best can with our bereavements. and it is but lamely, helplessly at the best.
We had to pass through the library, and I recognized some of the rare editions and large-paper copies with which poor Faulkner had so quickly surfeited me; and there were two or three of his ridiculous Madonnas hung about, cold engravings with wide mats in frigid frames of black, after a belated taste for the quiet in art. They made me shiver; and in the room which we entered from the library that night, and found Nevil smoking there, we were now met by a ghostly scent of tobacco, as if from the cigars that Faulkner kept on nervously consuming, one after another, as we had talked. It brought back my youth, which seemed haunting the city everywhere: not my youth bright and warm as we find it imagined in the lying books, but cold and dead: the spectre that really revisits after years, and makes us glad it is dead.
The stout-hearted old lady pushed back a blind that had swung to across an open casement, and let in the morning sun. “We keep it aired every day; I can’t bear to let it seem to be getting out of use. Hermia feels as I do about it, and she would have asked you to come here and smoke and write your letters; but I thought perhaps I had better bring you first. She was very tired, and we sat up late, talking. Will you sit down? Breakfast will not be ready till half past eight.”
I obeyed, and she sat down too. I wondered what could be her motive in wishing to keep me there, and what her theory was in bringing up the last matter that I should have supposed she would like to talk of in that place. Perhaps she spoke from that absence of sensation in regard to certain interests of life which we imagine callousness in the old: those interests are simply extinct in them, and they are no harder than the young who still feel them so keenly. Perhaps she still felt them, and meant to make a supreme renunciation of the past on the spot hallowed to her by the strongest associations. I do not know; I only know that she began to speak, and to speak with a plainness that I have no right to call obtuseness.
IV
“MR. MARCH, Hermia has been telling me of what she learnt in Boston from Dr. Wingate.”
“Yes?” I said feebly.
“It was my wish that she should go there, and see him, and find out to the last word all that he remembered of Douglas. She would not have gone without my wish; but it was her wish, too; or rather it was the necessity of both of us. After we found that paper of Douglas’s, which she took with her, we could neither of us rest till we knew everything.”
I nodded, for want of wit to say anything relevant, and she went on.
“I wish to say at once that I thoroughly approve of Hermia’s engagement to Mr. Nevil, and that nothing she heard from Dr. Wingate has changed me in the least about it. At first, the engagement was rather a shock to me; but not more so than his offer was to Hermia; perhaps not so much.” There was no faltering in Mrs. Faulkner’s voice, but a tear ran down her cheek. “We are very strangely made, Mr. March. It is twenty years since my husband died, and I have never once thought of marrying again; but I cannot honestly say that I would not have married if I had met any one I loved. I know that such a thing was possible, though I did not know it then. At first, after we have lost some one who is very dear to us, it seems as if henceforward we must live only for the dead: to atone to them for the default of our lives with them, and to make reparation for unkindness. That is the way I felt when my husband died. I wanted to keep myself in communion with him. But that was not possible. Nature soon teaches us better than that; she shows us that as long as we live upon the earth, we Cannot live at all for the dead: we can live only for the living.”
“Yes,” I said. “I never thought of it before, though.”
“Have you ever known any deep bereavement?”
“No; I have been very fortunate.”
“If you ever have such a sorrow, you will understand what I say as you never can without it. I had learned the truth when my son died, and I tried to make my daughter accept it from me. But she could not; she could only accept it from experience. He had been her whole life so long that she did not wish to live any other. No woman ever devoted herself more utterly than she did to him. She could not realize that as long as she remained in the world she could not devote herself to him any more; that all that had come absolutely to an end. The truth was the harder for her to learn ‘by reason of great strength.’ She thought that for his sake she could bear not to know what was the trouble of mind in which he died. That was a mistake.”
“My wife and I thought so, when we heard of it. Dr. Wingate told me about it. But it was very heroic.”
“It was heroic, yes; but it was impossible. I knew it at the time. If she had made Dr. Wingate tell her then, she could have thought it out and lived it down; or, if she couldn’t have done that, then at least what makes it so cruel now would never have happened.”
“Yes, I see,” I said, in the pause which Mrs. Faulkner made.
“I have always been willing,” she resumed, “and sometimes I have been anxious that Hermia should marry again. Marriage is for this world. We are told that by Christ himself, and we know it instinctively. Death does dissolve it inexorably; and although I believe, as Swedenborg says in one of his strange books, that one man and one woman shall live together to all eternity in a union that will make them one personality, still I believe that, as he says, that union may or may not begin on earth, and that it will be formed hereafter without regard to earthly ties. I was not a fool, and I saw that
Hermia was young and attractive, and I expected her to have the feelings of other young and attractive women.”
There was a mixture of mysticism and matter-of-fact in this dear old lady’s formulation of the case which was bringing me near the verge of a smile, but I said, gravely, “Of course.”
“But she never showed the least sign of it; and when, after Mr. Nevil came back from Europe, their engagement took place, I was entirely unprepared for such a thing. He had been with us a great deal. We nursed him through a long sickness after that broken engagement of his in Nebraska, and he was quite like one of ourselves. In fact, his friendship with Douglas dates back so far — to the very beginning of their college days — that I can hardly remember when James did not seem like a son to me. You mustn’t suppose, though, that I ever objected to the engagement, or do now. I highly approve of it. But I had always fancied that the very intimacy that Hermia was thrown into with him, was unfavorable to her forming any fancy for him. In fact, she has always been rather critical of him; and I know that she rather dislikes clergymen — as men, I mean. She is a religious person in her own way: I’ve nothing to say against her way. So, as I say, I was sufficiently astonished; but that is neither here nor there. I gave my cordial consent at once. James has not had a very joyous life; he has made it rather hard for himself, and I suppose that the idea of putting some brightness into it may have first made Hermia — But at any rate they were very happy together; and though Hermia had her morbid feelings occasionally about Douglas, and seemed to think it was wicked to turn from him to anybody else, and a kind of treason, still, she always listened to me about it, and would be reasonable when I showed her how foolish she was. I wanted her to put his things away, and there I suppose I made a little mistake, especially the things connected with his last days — writings and letters, and odd scraps, that she was always intending to look over, and never quite had the strength for. She consented to burn them; but she could not bring herself to do that without reading them; and so we found that paper which she carried to Dr. Wingate. Do you know what was in it?”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 440