“No, certainly. She showed it to him in our presence, and I think she was willing we should know, but he decided very wisely that he would rather speak with her alone about it.”
My feeling did not seem to make much impression upon Mrs. Faulkner.
“I suppose you do know, Mr. March, that my son was not quite in his right mind when he died?”
I admitted that I had some misgivings to that effect.
“I don’t understand,” she went on, “why we should be so ashamed to acknowledge that any one connected with us is not perfectly sane. As if the world were not full of crazy people! As if we were not all a little crazy on some point or other! The pain he suffered had affected his mind; it’s very common, I believe; and he had a delusion that showed itself in the form of a dream, but that would have been sure, if he lived, to have broken out in a mania.
She stopped, as if she expected me to prompt her or agree with her, and I said, “Yes, Dr. Wingate told me something of the kind.”
“But he gave you no hint of what the dream — the delusion — was?”
“None.”
“We used often to try to think what it could be. It seemed to give him a dislike or distrust for Hermia; and we thought — we hardly ever spoke of it openly; now we must handle it without shrinking, no matter what pain it gives! We thought — that it involved some fear of violence from her. People whose minds are beginning to be affected, often have such dreadful fancies about those who are dearest to them.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” I said, and I hope I did not let my tone express the slight impatience I felt at being obliged to traverse ground I had been over with Hermia already in this quest.
“But it was nothing of that kind whatever. It was” — Mrs. Faulkner hesitated, as if to prepare me for a great surprise-”jealousy.”
“Jealousy?” I repeated, and I could not help throwing into the word a touch of the surprise which she evidently expected of me. I had not followed her so far without perceiving that an old lady so devoted to literature valued the literary quality of the situation; that with all her good sense and true and just feeling she had the foible of being rather proud of a passage in her family life which was so like a passage of romance.
“Yes,” she went on. “And of all things, jealousy of her with — with James.” I could say nothing to a fact which I had conjectured long before, and she continued: “Dr. Wingate seemed to think that now she had better know exactly what the dream was, since the paper we had found distressed her so much, and take it in the right way. It was a scribble in one of his note-books, on a leaf that he had torn Out and probably meant to tear up. It had the date, and it spoke of his having that dream again; that he had begun to have it every night, and if he fell asleep by day. The leaf was torn out at the side in places, and you could only read scraps of sentences, but it all accused her of wishing his death. It would have driven any other woman wild, but Hermia had been through too much already. She told me something of it, to explain the paper as well as she could; and she said that she knew you and Mrs. March had noticed something strange in Douglas’s manner toward her the day you were there; and I urged her to go right on and consult you both, and see Dr. Wingate, and find out exactly what the trouble was.”
I was silent, for want of anything fitting to say, though she seemed to expect me to speak.
“The doctor told her that Douglas had been having the dream almost a year before he died: at first every month or two, and then every week. So far as he could remember it was always exactly the same thing from the very beginning. He dreamed that she and James were — attached, and were waiting for him to die, so that they could get married. Then he would see them getting married in church, and at the same time it would be his own funeral, and he would try to scream out that he was not dead; but Hermia would smile, and say to the people that she had known James before she knew Douglas; and then both ceremonies would go on, and he would wake. That was all.”
“It seems to me quite enough. Horrible! Horrible! I’m surprised that Wingate should have told her.”
“He had to do so. There was nothing else. She got it from him by questioning; though I suppose he thought it best she should know just what the trouble was, so that she could see how perfectly fantastic it was, and be able to deal with it accordingly.”
“Poor man! How he must have suffered from that unrelenting nightmare! And it seems too ghastly to drag from his grave the secret he kept while he lived.” These thoughts were so vivid in my mind that I should not have been surprised if Mrs. Faulkner had replied to them like spoken words.
But she only said: “There were some strange details of the dream, which it seems Dr. Wingate recalled; he may have written it down after hearing Douglas tell it; and from the description of the church which he gave, Hermia recognized it as one here in the city: James’s own church. Of course,” said the old lady, ignoring the shudder with which I received this final touch, “Dr. Wingate might not have been so explicit if he had known of Hermia’s engagement to James. I suppose you hadn’t told him?”
“No,” I said, and I set that omission down as the chief enormity in a life which has not been free from some blunders worse than crimes.
“Well, that is the whole affair, and we must act at once,” said Mrs. Faulkner.
“Break off the engagement, of course,” was at my tongue’s end; but I found out I had said nothing when she added:
“James must know it all without delay. He has been out of town, but he will be home to-night, and he must know it before he meets Hermia again.”
“Of course,” I said.
“We talked it over late into the night, and we both came to that conclusion. In fact, Hermia had thought it out on the way home; and she said that just as the train came in sight of home yesterday, it all flashed upon her what she must do. She must leave the future wholly to James, to do whatever he thought right after he knew everything. She says it came to her like a sudden relief from pain. You must have thought it strange we could keep up, as we did in the evening, but it was the revulsion of feeling with her, and I knew nothing till you left us. She merely said, when we met, ‘It is all right, mother,’ and I should have thought so, if she had told me every word. The decision she reached is the only one. We must leave it to James. She rests in that, and I can’t say whether the thought of my poor son’s illusion troubles her or not, in its elf. I know that it ought not to trouble her; but at the same time I know that it is something which we ought not to keep from James. Men often look at things very differently from women, the best of women.”
V
IT WENT THROUGH my mind that the affections being the main interest of women’s lives, perhaps they dealt with them more practically if not more wholesomely than men. Certainly their treatment of them seems much more business-like.
Heaven knows what was really in that old woman’s heart, as she talked so bravely of a future from which even her son’s memory was to be obliterated. Whether it was a sacrifice of herself she was completing, or whether she was accomplishing an end which she freely intended, I shall never be certain; but I thought afterward that she had perhaps schooled herself to look only at Hermia’s side of the affair, and had come to feel that she could do no wrong to the dead, whom she could no longer help, by seeking the happiness of the living, whom she could help so much. I myself have always reasoned to this effect, and in what I had to do with it I did my best to bring others to the same mind; and yet at that moment, in that place, it seemed a hellish thing. I saw Faulkner with the inner vision, by which alone, doubtless, we see the dead, standing there where I first met him, by that table where we were sitting, with his long nervous fingers, yellowed at their tips by his cigar, trembling on an open page; and then I saw him fall back on the seat of the arbor in the old sea-side garden and die. What a long tragedy it was that had passed between those two meetings! Had not his suffering won him the right to remembrance? None of us would have denied this; but what was proposed was to forget hi
m; to blot his memory and his sorrow, as he had himself been blotted, out of the world forever. The living must do this for their lives’ sake; the dead must not master us through an immortal grief. All the same I pitied Faulkner, pitied him for his baleful dream, whose shadow had clouded his own life, and seemed destined to follow that of others as relentlessly; and I pitied him all the more because there seemed no one to do it but me who had cared for him so little while he lived. He had suffered greatly, and by no fault of his own, unless you could blame his folly in having his friend so familiarly a part of his home that his crazy jealousy must make him its object almost necessarily. But even this weakness, culpable as it was, was a weakness and not a wrong; and no casuistry could prove it malevolent. Something impersonally sinister was in it all, and the group involved was severally as blameless as the victims of fate in a Greek trilogy. Neither I nor any other witness of the fact considered for a moment that Faulkner had cause for the dark suspicion which was the beginning and the end of his dream.
I do not know whether Mrs. Faulkner had been saying anything else before I woke from these thoughts and heard her say, “I have spoken very fully and freely to you, Mr. March, both because you knew much of this matter already, and because I need — Hermia needs — your help. We depend upon your kindness; we are quite helpless without you; and you were one of my son’s early friends, and can enter into our feelings.”
“I assure you, Mrs. Faulkner—” I began; and I was going to say that the matter of my early friendship with her son had somehow always been strangely exaggerated; but I found that I could not decently do this, under the circumstances, and I said— “There is nothing in my power that I wouldn’t gladly do for you.”
“I was certain of that,” she answered. “James must know of this — of the whole fact — as soon as he gets back. But Hermia can’t write to him about it, and I can’t speak to him.” I began to feel a cold apprehension steal over me; at the same time a light of intelligence concerning Hermia’s hospitable eagerness to make me her guest dawned upon me. Could that exquisite creature, in that electrical moment of relief from her trouble, have foreseen my usefulness by the same flash that showed her the simple duty she had in the matter? I do not think I should have blamed her, if that were the case; and I was prepared for Mrs. Faulkner’s conclusion: “We must ask you to speak to James.”
I was prepared, but I was certainly dismayed, too; and I promptly protested: “My dear Mrs. Faulkner, I don’t see how I could possibly do that. I am very sorry, very sorry indeed; but I cannot. I should not feel warranted in assuming such a confidential mission to Mr. Nevil, by my really slight acquaintance, or by anything in my past relations with your son. I have been most reluctant to know anything about this painful business,” and if this was not quite true, it was certainly true that I had not sought to know anything. “At every point my wife and I have respected the secrecy in which we felt it ought to remain, even against the impulse of sympathetic curiosity.”
“Then Mrs. March did not tell you what it was when you started home with Hermia?”
“Surely not! She would have thought it a betrayal of Mrs. Faulkner that would have been embarrassing to me; and how could you suppose I would let you go on and tell me the whole story if I knew it already.
“I didn’t think of that,” said Mrs. Faulkner. “Hermia and I both took it for granted that Mrs. March had told you.” I did not say anything, and she added ruefully, “Then I don’t know what we shall do. Is it asking too much to ask if you can suggest anything?”
I knew from her tone that she was hurt as well as disappointed by this refusal of mine to act for them; strange as it appears, she must have counted unquestioningly upon my consent. I said, to gain time as much as possible, for I had no doubt on that point, “Excuse me, Mrs. Faulkner: do I understand this request to come from you both?”
“No; my daughter knows nothing about it. The idea of asking you was entirely my own; and I made a point of seeing you as soon as possible, this morning. If you must refuse, I beg you will not let her know.”
“You may depend upon my silence, Mrs. Faulkner. But,” and I rose and began to walk about the room, “why should you tell Mr. Nevil what the dream was; or at least that it concerned him? We must consider that, in the light of reason, the thing is non-existent. It has no manner of substance, or claim upon any one’s conscience or even interest. Dr. Wingate did not wish Mrs. Faulkner to know it; and I really think that when she insisted, he would have done wisely and righteously to lie to her about it. I’m sure he would have done so if he had known that she was engaged to Mr. Nevil. But it’s too late now; the mischief’s done, as far as she’s concerned. The question is now how to stop the evil from going farther; and I say there is no necessity for Mr. Nevil’s knowing anything about it. Treat it from this moment as the unreality which it is; ignore it.”
I went on to the same effect; but as I talked, I knew more and more that I was wasting my breath, and in a bad cause, and I saw that Mrs. Faulkner even ceased to follow me. One of the maids came to my rescue with the announcement that breakfast was served. We followed her, and I ate with the appetite to which I have noticed that the exercise of the sympathies always gives an edge of peculiar keenness.
VI
HERMIA did not join us at breakfast, but I had no need to account for her absence upon that theory of extreme fatigue from her journey, which Mrs. Faulkner urged with so much superfluous apology. I began to have my reluctances about that old lady, to wish to escape from her, because I had refused to oblige her in that little matter of interviewing Nevil, and I was afraid she would recur to it. I made an excuse of wanting to look about the town, and I went out as soon as I could get away after breakfast.
Now that I was there, and had come so far, I was willing to see all I could of the place, and of several people in it whom I remembered as very charming; and I felt exasperated by the terms of my presence. I reviled myself for going to the Faulkners’, though I knew I could not help it; but being their guest I could not leave them except to leave town. I strolled about harassed with the notion that I would go on the night express, and denying myself in the interest of this early departure all those little lapses into sentiment concerning the past which I had always expected to indulge when I returned to its scenes. I found myself unwilling to meet my old friends, with the burden on me of having to say that I was there only for the day, and to explain that I had come on with Mrs. Faulkner, and was her guest. I hated the air of mystery the affair would have; but there was one person whom I could not really think of going away without seeing. As a young man I used to come and go in her house as freely as in my own home, at any time between nine in the morning and twelve at night; she had been kind to me, and helpful and inspiring, as only a brilliant woman of the world, who is also good, can be to an ambitious, shy, awkward young fellow of twenty-two; and I decided to make hers stand for all the friendships of the past.
She made me so sweetly welcome that in a moment we had broken through the little web of alienation that the spider years had been spinning between us; and found ourselves exactly in the old relations again. I had been a little curious, after seeing so much of the world, to see whether she would appear as clever and accomplished as she used to seem; and I was glad to find she bore the test of my mature experience perfectly. After all, it is such women who make the polite world, wherever we find it; not the world them. Her tact divined, without any motion of mine, all the external points of the case, and made it seem even to me the most natural thing possible that I should have seized the occasion of Mrs. Faulkner’s being in Boston to run out with her to my old home, if only for a day, and give my old friends a glimpse of me. She supposed that I must be devoted to the Faulkners for the short time I staid, and she would merely insist upon my lunching with her; she would make my peace with Mrs. Faulkner. Was not she exquisite? Had I ever met any one just like her? And what a life of self-devotion, and then of sorrow! No, no one could understand what she had been through
, unless they had seen something of it day by day. But I had seen something; the most tragical thing of all, perhaps; and my wife had been so good! Mrs. Faulkner had told her about Mrs. March.
The talk naturally confined itself to Mrs. Faulkner for a time, and it naturally returned to her from whatever excursions it made in other directions. After a while, it began, somehow, to include Nevil, whom I found to be another of my friend’s enthusiasms; she celebrated him with the fervor that is rather characteristic of hero and heroine worship in small places, where people almost have their noses against the altar. I trembled inwardly for the secret I was guarding, for I felt that my friend would have it out of me in an instant if she suspected me of its custody, but apparently she knew nothing of the engagement. She asked me if I had heard of that horrid affair out West which had given poor Mr. Nevil back to them again; and she said she supposed he would never think of marrying, now. She wished that he would marry Hermia Faulkner; it would be more than appropriate, it would be ideal; they were exactly suited to each other; and she could help him in his work as no other woman could. She deserved some happiness; but it would be like her to go on dedicating her whole existence to the memory of a man who was really her inferior, and who had nothing to commend him to her constancy except his love for her. Of his love for her you could not say enough; but my friend reminded me that she had never considered him the wonderful person that some people thought him; and she scouted the notion of his having married beneath him in marrying Hermia Winter. Her people were very nice people, though they were so poor; they were idealists; and her father had come West and settled on Pawpaw Creek after the failure of one of those communities in New England, which he had been connected with. As for Hermia herself, whom my friend remembered in her Bell’s Institute days, she was a girl of the rarest intelligence and character; a being quite supernally above a ward politician and a pretentious dilettante like Douglas Faulkner, whose “three times skimmed sky-blue” Virginia blood was full of the barbaric pride of a race of slave-holders. As my friend went on she characterized poor Faulkner with a violent excess which would have satisfied even Mrs. March the day when she first met him at Swampscott, and he betrayed his defective tastes in literature and art. Of course, I said that this was exactly the way in which he had impressed my wife; and I defended him. But she told me I might spare my breath; that she knew I really thought just as my wife and she did about him; and that if James Nevil had not been a saint upon earth he never could have endured the man.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 441