He postponed any, duty which he himself had in the matter through the love he now owned; he made it contingent upon hers; but all the same, he determined to forego no right it gave him. Again he had a mind to go back to Mrs. Meredith, and ask her to do nothing until Bloomingdale came, and then, before she spoke, to authorize him to approach the man as her family physician and deal tentatively, hypothetically, with the matter, and interpret his probable decision from his actual behavior.
This course, which appeared the only course open to him, commended itself more and more to Olney as he thought of it; here was something practicable, here was something that was perhaps even obligatory upon him; he tried to believe it was obligatory. But it occurred to him only after long turmoil of thinking and feeling in other directions, and it was half-past seven o’clock before he returned from a walk he took as a final means of clearing his mind, and went to Mrs. Meredith’s room to propose it to her. He knocked several times without response, and then went to the once to see if she had gone out and left her key with the clerk ; he was now in a hurry to speak to her.
The clerk felt in the pigeon-hole of Mrs. Meredith’s number. “Her key isn’t here, but that’s no sign she hasn’t gone out. Ladies seldom leave their keys when they go out . we’re only too glad if they leave ’em when they go away for good. I thought she was sick.”
“She would be able to drive out.”
Olney mastered his impatience as well as he could, and went in to his dinner. After dinner he knocked again at Mrs., Meredith’s door, and confirmed himself in the belief that she had gone out. After that it was not so easy to wait for her to come back. He wished to remain of the mind he had been about speaking to her of Rhoda, and to avow himself her lover at all risks, but more and more he began to feel that he was too late, that he was quixotic, that he was ridiculous. He felt himself wavering from his purpose, and he held to it all the more tenaciously for that reason. If he was willing to hazard all upon the chance of being in time, that gave him the right to ask that the girl might be spared; but when he thought she and Mrs. Meredith were probably spending the evening together with the Bloomingdales, his courage failed. It was but too imaginable that Miss Aldgate had made up her mind to accept that man, and that her aunt would tell her all that he longed to save her from knowing before he could prevent it.
When at last he went a third time to her door, he ventured to turn the knob, and the door opened to his inward pressure. It let in with him a glare of gas from the lamp in the entry, and by this light he saw Rhoda standing beside her aunt’s sofa with the empty bottle in her hand. She had her hat on, and at the face she turned him across her shoulder, a shiver of prescience passed over him. It was the tragic mask, the inherited woe, unlit by a gleam of the brightness which had sometimes seemed Heaven’s direct gift to the girl on whom that burden of ancestral sin and sorrow had descended.
“What is the matter?” he murmured.
Rhoda gave him the empty bottle. “She’s drunk it all. She’s dead.”
“Oh, no,” he almost laughed. “It would be too soon.” He dropped on his knees beside the insensi-ble body, and satisfied himself by pulse and breath that the life had not yet left it. But to keep it there was now the business, and Olney began his losing light with a sort of pluriscience in which it seemed to him that he was multiplied into three selves: one applying all the antidotes and using all the professional skill with instant coolness; another guarding the probable suicide from the conjecture of the hotel servants and keeping the whole affair as silent as possible; another devotedly vigilant of the poor girl who was so deeply concerned in the small chances of success perceptible to Olney, and who, whether he succeeded or not, was destined to so sad an orphanage. When he thought of the chance that fate was invisibly offering her, he almost wished he might fail, but he fought his battle through with relentless scientific conscience. At the end it was his part to say, “It’s over; she’s dead.”
“I know she was,” Rhoda answered apathetically. “I expected it.”
“Where were you? “ he asked, with the sort of sad futility with which, when all is done, the spirit continues its endeavor. “Was she alone?”
“Yes. I had gone out,” Rhoda said.
“What time was that?” Olney wondered that he had not asked this before; perhaps he had made some mistake through not having verified the moment.
“It was about half-past seven,” answered the girl.
“You went out at half-past seven! And when did you return?”
“We had a quarrel. I didn’t come back till nearly ten — when you came in.”
The poignancy of Olney’s interest remained, but it took another direction. “You were out all the evening alone? Excuse my asking,” he made haste to add, “But I don’t understand—”
“I wasn’t alone,” said Rhoda. “I met an old colored woman on the street, and she went with me to the colored church. She came home with me.” The girl said this quietly, as if there were nothing at all strange in it.
Her calm left Olney in the question which he was always pressing home to himself ; whether her aunt had told her that thing. It was on his tongue to ask her why she went to the colored church, and what her quarrel with her aunt was about. He asked her instead, “Did you think, when you left her, that Mrs. Meredith seemed different at all — that — ?”
“I didn’tnotice,”said Rhoda. “No. She seemed as she often did. But I know she thought she hadn’t taken enough of the medicine. She wanted to sleep more.”
Rhoda sat by the window of the little parlor where she had sat when the dead woman had told her that dreadful thing, and she remembered how she had glanced out of it and seen Olney in the street. The gas was now at full blaze in the room, but she glanced through the window again, and saw that the day was beginning to come outside. She turned from the chill of its pale light, and looked at Olney. Through the irresistible association of ideas, she looked for his baldness with the lack-lustre eyes she lifted to his face.
“Is there anything you wish me — anything I can do?” he asked, after a silence, in which he got back to the level of practical affairs, though still stupefied from what Rhoda had said.
“No.”
“I mean, notify your friends — your family — telegraph—”
“I have no friends — no relatives. We were alone; all our family are dead.”
“But Mr. Meredith’s family — there is surely some one that you can call upon at this time.”
A strong compassion swelled in Olney’s heart; he yearned to take her in his arms and be all the world to one who had no one in all the world.
She remained as if dazed, and then she said, with a perplexed look: “I was trying to think who there was. Mr. Meredith’s people lived in St. Louis; I remember some of them when I was little. . Perhaps my aunt would have their address.”
She went into the adjoining chamber where the dead woman lay, in the atmosphere of useless drugs and effectless antidotes, and Olney thought, “It’s the mechanical operation of custom; she’s going to ask her,” but Rhoda came back with an address-book in her hand, as if she had gone directly to Mrs. Meredith’s writing case for it with no such error of cerebration.
“Here it is,” she said.
“Very well. I’ll telegraph them at once. But in the mean time, what will you do, Miss Aldgate? You can’t stay here in the hotel — she can’t. How can I be of use to you?” Olney felt all the disinterestedness in the world in asking, but in what he asked next he had a distinct consciousness of self-interest, or at least of selfish curiosity. “Shall I let your friends at the Vendome—”
“Oh, no, no, no!” she broke out. “Not on any account! I couldn’t bear to see them. I)don’t think of such a thing! No, indeed, I can’t let you!”
The self-seeker is never fully rewarded, and Olney was left with a doubt whether this reluctance meant abhorrence of the Bloomingdales, or unwillingness to receive kindness from them which might involve some loss of her perfect inde
pendence to the spirited girl; she would not choose or be chosen for any reason but one. He could not make out from her manner as yet whether her aunt had spoken what was on her mind to speak or not; it seemed such a cruel invasion of her rights even to conjecture, that he tried to put the question out of his thoughts.
He began again while he was sensible of an unequal struggle with the question, which intruded itself in the swift whirl of his anxieties, as to what could immediately be done for her.
“Is there anything else you would suggest?”
“No,” said the girl, in the dreamy quiet she seemed helpless to emerge from. “I suppose it wouldn’t do, even if we could find her. I was thinking of the old woman I saw to-night,” she explained. “I would like to go and stay with her if I could.”
“Is it some one you know?”
“No, I don’t know her. I just met her on the street, and we went to the colored people’s church together. I went out after dinner and left my aunt alone. That was when she drank it.”
She added the vague sentences together with a child’s heedlessness as to their reaching her listener’s intelligence, and she did not persist in her whimsical suggestion.
Olney left it too. “You must let me got you another room,” he said; “You can’t stay here any longer,” and he made her take her hat and come with him to the hotel parlor. He went to arrange the business with the clerk, and to tell him of Mrs. Meredith’s death; then he had to go about other duties connected with the case, which he rather welcomed as a distraction; to notify the fact and cause of Mrs. Meredith’s death to the authorities, and to give the funeral preparations in charge. But when this was all done, and he could no longer play off the aggregate of these minor cares against his great one, he began to be harassed again about Miss Aldgate.
X
It was so much easier to dispose of the friendless dead than the friendless living, Olney thought, with a sardonic perception of one of the bitterest truths in the world; and he was not consoled by the reflection that it is often the man readiest to do all for a woman who can do nothing for her. At the same time he hurried along imagining a scene in which Rhoda owned her love for him, and for his sake and her own, consented to throw convention to the winds, and to unite her fate with his in a marriage truly solemnized by the presence of death. He was aroused from this preposterous melodrama by a voice that said, with liking and astonishment, “Why, Dr. Olney!” and he found himself confronted with Mrs. Atherton, whom he had known as Miss Clara Kingsbury. In another moment she had flooded him with inquiry and explanation, from which he emerged with the dim consciousness that he had told her how he happened not to be in Florence, and had heard how she happened to be in Boston. Her presence in the city at such an untimely season was to be accounted for by the eccentric spirit in which she carried on her visiting for the Associated Charities; she visited her families in the summer, while most people looked after their families only in the winter. She excused herself by saying that Beverly was so near, and sometimes it gave her a chance for a little bohemian lunch with Mr. Atherton.
Olney laid his trouble before her. He knew from of old that if he could not count upon her tact, he could count upon her imagination, and he was quite prepared for the sympathy with which she rushed to his succor, a sympathy that in spite of the circumstances could not be called less than jubilant.
“Why, the poor, forlorn, little helpless creature!” she exulted. “I’ll go to the hotel at once with you, doctor; and she must come down to Beverly with me, and stay till her friends come on for her.”
The question whether he was not bound in honor to tell Mrs. Atherton just what Miss Aldgate was, crazily visited him, and became a kind of longing before he could rid himself of it; he dismissed it only upon the terms of a self-promise to entertain it some other time; and he availed himself of her good offices almost as joyfully as she proposed them. He had to submit to the romantic supposition which he was aware Mrs. Atherton was keeping out of her words and looks, and he joined her in the conspicuous pretence she made throughout the affair that he was acting from the most disinterested, the most scientific motives.
It was not so hard as he had fancied it might be to get Miss Aldgate’s consent to Mrs. Atherton’s hospitality. It was the only possible thing for her, and she acquiesced simply, like one accustomed to favors; she expressed a sense of the kindness done her, with a delicate self-respect which Olney hardly know how to account for upon the theory that Mrs. Meredith had spoken to her. Apparently she appreciated all the necessities of the case, and she did not troublesomely interpose any of the reluctanaces of grief which he had expected. If he could have wished any difference in her it would have been for rather less composure; but then this might have been the apathy following the great shock she had received. He willingly accepted Mrs. Atherton’s theory, hurriedly whispered at parting, that she did not realize what had happened yet; Mrs. Atherton seemed to prize her the more for it.
He came back from seeing them off on the train to the hotel, where he found a telegram from Mrs. Meredith’s connections in St. Louis. They were very sorry; they were unable to come on; they would write. Olney felt a grateful lift of the heart in thinking of Miss Aldgate in Mrs. Atherton’s affectionate keeping, as he crumpled the despatch in his hand and tossed it on his dismal white-marble hearth. He believed that he read between its words a revelation of the fact that the dead woman’s husband had not kept Rhoda’s secret from his family, and that these unable friends, whatever they wrote, were not likely to urge any claim to comfort the girl.
It was Mrs. Bloomingdale who came to do this with several of her large and passive daughters, about as long after the evening papers came out as would take her to drive over from the Vendome. Olney had been able to persuade the reporters who got hold of the case that there was nothing to work up in it, and the paragraph that Mrs. Bloomingdale saw was discreet enough; it attributed Mrs. Meredith’s death to an overdose of the soporific prescribed for her, and it connected Olney’s name with the matter as the physician who happened to be stopping in the hotel with the unfortunate lady.
“I came the instant I read it,” Mrs. Bloomingdale explained, “for I couldn’t believe the evidence of my senses,” and she added such a circumstantial statement of her mental struggle with the fact projected into her consciousness as could leave no doubt that the fact itself was far less important than the effect produced upon her.
As Olney listened he lost entirely a lurking discomfort he had felt at Miss Aldgate’s refusal to let those people have anything to do with her or for her in her calamity. Whatever the son might be, the mother was a vulgarly selfish woman, posing before him as a generous benefactress, who was also a martyr. “I asked for you, doctor,” she went on, at the end of her personal history in connection with the affair, “because I preferred not to intrude upon that poor young creature without learning just how I ought to approach her. As I said to my daughter Roberta, in coming along” — she put the tallest and serenest of the big, still blondes in evidence with a wave of her hand— “I would be ruled entirely by what you said of the newspaper report.”
Olney said of it dryly that it was quite correct.
“Oh, I am so relieved, doctor!” said Mrs. Bloomingdale. “I didn’t know, don’t you know — I thought perhaps that there were facts — details which you preferred to keep from the public; that there were peculiar circumstances — aberration, don’t you know; and that kind of thing. But I’m so glad there wasn’t!”
Olney felt a malicious desire to disturb this crowing complacency which he believed was the cover of mean anxieties and suspicions. He asked, “Do you mean suicide?”
“Well, no; not that exactly. But—” She stopped, and he merely said:
“There was no evidence of suicidal intent.”
“Oh! “ said Mrs. Bloomingdale, but, as he intended, .not so crowingly this time. “And then -you think I can ask for Miss Aldgate?”
“Miss Aldgate is not here—” Olney began.
<
br /> “Not here!”
“She is with Mrs. Atherton, at Beverly. She couldn’t remain here, you know.”
“And may I ask — do I understand — Why didn’t Miss Aldgate let us know?”
Olney rejoiced to be able to say, “I suggested that, but she preferred not to disturb you.”
“And why did she prefer that? “ said Mrs. Bloomingdale, with rising crest.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know. It was by accident that I met Mrs. Atherton on the street; she is a well- known lady here, and she at once took Miss Aldgate home with her.”
At the bottom of his heart Olney did not feel altogether easy at what he knew of Miss Aldgate’s relations to the Bloomingdale family. He would have liked to blind himself to facts that proved her weak or at least light-mindedly fond of any present pleasure at the cost of any future complication, but he was not quite able to do so, much as he wished to inculpate the Bloomingdales. He was silent, and attempted no farther explanation or defence of Rhoda’s refusal to see them.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 506