Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “You know it!” she exclaimed, with a fierce recoil. “How do you know it?”

  “Your aunt told me,” he answered, hardily. He must now make the best of the worst.

  “Then she was false to me with her last breath! Oh, I will never forgive her!”

  “Oh, yes you will, my dear,” said Olney, with the quiet which he felt to be his only hope with her. “She had to tell met to advise with me, before she told you. I wish she had never told you, but if she had not told me, she would have defrauded me of the sweetest thing in life.”

  “The privilege of stooping to such a creature as I?” she demanded, bitterly.

  He took her hand and kissed it, and kept it in his. “No: the right of saying that you are all the dearer to me for being just what you are, and that I’m prouder of you for it. And now, don’t say that you will not forgive that poor soul, who suffered years for every hour that you have suffered from that cause. She felt herself sacredly bound to tell you.”

  “It was too late then,” said the girl, with starting tears. “ She killed me. I can’t forgive her.”

  “Well, what can that matter to her? She can forgive you; and that’s the great thing.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, weakly trying to get her hand away.

  “How came she to tell you that she hadn’t told me?”

  “I — I made her,” faltered the girl. “ I asked her if she had. I was frantic.”

  “Yes. You had no right to do that. Of course she had to deny it, and you made her take a new lie on her conscience when she had just escaped from one that she had carried for you all your life.” Olney gave her back her hand. “Whatever you do with me, for your own sake put away all thoughts of hardness towards that poor woman.”

  There was a long silence. Then the girl broke into sudden tears. “I do; I will! I see it now! It was cruel, cruel! But I couldn’t see it then; I couldn’t see anything but myself ; the world was filled with me — blotted out with me! Ah, can she ever forgive me? If I could only have one word with her, to say that there never was any real hardness in me toward her, and I didn’t know what I was doing! Do you think I made her kill herself? Tell me if you do! I can bear it — I deserve to bear it!”

  “She never meant to kill herself,” said Olney, sincerely. “I feel sure of that. But she’s gone, and you are here; the question’s of you, not of her; and I only asked you to be just to yourself. I did’ nt mean to tell you now that I knew your secret from her, but I’m not sorry I told you, if it’s helped you to substitute a regret for a resentment.”

  “It’s done that for all my life long.”

  “Ah, I didn’t mean it to go so far as that!” said Olney, smiling.

  “No matter! It’s what I must bear. It’s a just punishment.” She rose suddenly, and put out her hand to him. “Good-by.”

  “What for?” he asked. “I’m not going.”

  “But I am. I’m going away to find my mother’s people, if I can — to help them and acknowledge them. I tried to talk with Mrs. Atherton about it, the other day, but I couldn’t rightly, for I couldn’t let her understand fully. But it’s true — and be serious about it, and don’t laugh at me! Oughtn’t I to go down there and help them; try to educate them, and elevate them; give my life to them? Isn’t it base and cowardly to desert them, and live happily apart from them, when—”

  “When you might live so miserably with them?” Olney asked. “ Ah, that’s the kind of question that I suspect your poor aunt used to torment herself with! But if you wish me to be really serious with you about it, I will say, Yes, you would have some such duty toward them, perhaps, if you had voluntarily chosen your part with them — if you had ever consented to be of their kind. Then it would be base and cowardly to desert them; it would be a treason of the vilest sort. But you never did that, or anything like it, and there is no more specific obligation upon you to give your life to their elevation than there is upon me. Besides, I doubt if that sort of specific devotion would do much good. The way to elevate them is to elevate us, to begin with. It will be an easy matter to deal with those simple-hearted folks after we’ve got into the right way ourselves. No, if you must give your life to the improvement of any particular race, give it to mine. Begin with me. You won’t find me unreasonable. All that I shall ask of you are the fifteen-sixteenths or so of you that belong to my race by heredity; and I will cheerfully consent to your giving our colored connections their one-sixteenth.”

  Olney broke off, and laughed at his joke, and she joined him helplessly. “ Oh! don’t laugh at me!”

  “Laugh at you? I feel a great deal more like crying. If you go down there to elevate the blacks, what is to become of me? I don’t really object to your going, but I want to go with you.”

  “What do you mean?” she entreated, piteously.

  “What I said just now. I love you, and I ask you to be my wife.”

  “I said I couldn’t. You know why.”

  “But you didn’t mean it, or you’d have given me some reason.”

  “Some reason?”

  “Yes. What you said was only an excuse. I can’t accept it. Rhoda,” he added, seriously, “ I’m afraid you don’t understand! Can’t you understand that what you told me — what I knew already — didn’t make the slightest difference to me, and couldn’t to any man who was any sort of a man! Or yes, it does make a difference! But such a kind of difference that if I could have you other than you are by wishing I wouldn’t — for my own selfish sake at least, I wouldn’t wish it for the world. Can’t you understand that?”

  “No, I can’t understand that. It seems to me that it must make you loathe me. Oh!” she shuddered. “You don’t know how hideous they are — a whole churchful, as I saw them that night. And I’m like them!”

  Olney’s heart ached for her, but he could not help his laugh. “Well, you don’t look it. Oh, you poor child! Why do you torment yourself ?”

  “I can’t help it. It’s burnt into me. It’s branded me one of them. I am one. No, I can’t escape. And the best way is to go and live among them and own it. Then perhaps I can learn to bear it, and not hate them so. But I do hate them. I do, I do! I can’t help it and I don’t blame you for hating me!”

  “I don’t happen to hate even you,” said Olney, going back to his lightness. “My trouble’s another kind. Perhaps I should hate you, and hate them, if I’d come of a race of slave-holders, as you have. But my people never injured those poor creatures, and so I don’t hate them, or their infinitesimal part in you.”

  He found himself, whenever it came to the worst with her in this crisis, taking a tone of levity which was so little of his own volition that it seemed rather to take him. He was physician enough to flatter his patient for her good, and instinctively he treated Rhoda as if she were his patient. It did flatter her to have that side of her ancestry dwelt upon, and to be treated as the daughter of slave-holders; she who would not reconcile herself to her servile origin, listened with a kind of fascination to his tender mockery, in which she felt herself swayed by the deep under-current of his faithful love.

  “Come, come!” he went on, and at his touch she dropped weakly back into her seat again, and let him take her hand and hold it. “I know how this fact has seized upon you and blotted everything else out of the world. But life’s made up of a great deal else; and you are but one little part injured to many parts injurer. You belong incomparably more to the oppressors than to the oppressed, and what I’m afraid of is that you’ll keep me in hopeless slavery as long as I live. Who would ever imagine that you were as black as you say ? Who would think—”

  “Ah, you’ve confessed it! You would be ashamed of me, if people knew! That is it!”

  “If you’ll answer me as I wish, I’ll go up with you to the house and tell Mrs. Atherton. I’ve rather a fancy for seeing how she would take it. But I can’t unless you’ll let me share in the disgrace with you. Will you?”

  “Never! It shall never be known! For your sake! I can
bear it; but you shall not. Promise me that you’ll never tell a living soul!” She caught him nervously, by the arm, and clung to him. It was her sign of surrender.

  He accepted it, and said: “ Very well, I promise it. But only on one condition: that you believe I’m not afraid to tell it. Otherwise my self-respect will oblige me to go round shouting it to everybody. Do you promise?”

  “Yes, I promise: “ and now she yielded to the gayety of his mood, and a succession of flashing smiles lit up her face, in which her doom was transmuted to the happiest fortune. She kept smiling, with her bands linked through his arm and her form drawn close to him; while their talk flowed fantastically away from all her awful questions.. Their love performed the effect of common-sense for them, and in its purple light they saw the every-day duties of life plain before them. They spoke frankly of the incidents of the past few days, and he told her now of his interview with the Bloomingdale family, and how he felt that be had hardened Mrs. Bloomingdale’s heart against her by his unsympathetic behavior in denying them an interview with Rhoda herself.

  This made her laugh, but she said, with a shudder: “I couldn’t have borne to look at them. From the first moment after my aunt told me, I felt that I must prevent their ever seeing me again. I wrote to him, and I carried the letter out with me to post it, and make sure it went; and then somehow I forgot to post it.”

  “Ah,” said Olney, “ I suppose that’s the reason why he came to see me, and to ask where he could find you.”

  “Yes,” answered Rhoda, placidly.

  “There is only one thing in the whole affair that really troubles me,” said Olney, “ and that’s the very short shrift you gave that poor fellow.”

  “Why, when I had written to him I would not see him again, I supposed he was persisting, and it was only the other day that I found the letter, which I’d forgotten to post. It was in the pocket of the dress I wore that night to the church.”

  “And you don’t think his persisting — his caring so much for you — gave him the right to see you?”

  “Not the least.”

  “Ah, a man never understands a woman’s position on that question.”

  “Why, of course, if I had cared for him—”

  “I don’t know but I’ve a little case of conscience here myself. I had awful qualms when that poor fellow was talking with me. I perceived that he was as magnanimous as I was on the subject of heredity, and that, I thought, ought to count in his favor. Will you let it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?’

  “ Because I don’t care for him.”

  “How simple it is! Well, he’s off my conscience, at any rate.”

  She began to grieve a little.”But if you are sorry—”

  “Sorry?”

  “If you think you will ever regret — if you’re not sure that you’ll never be troubled by — by — that, then we had better—”

  “My dear child,” said Olney, “ I’m going to leave all the trouble of that to you. I assure you that from this on I shall never think of it. I am going to provide for your future, and let you look after your past.”

  She dropped her head with a sob upon his shoulder, and as he gathered her in his arms he felt as if he had literally rescued her from her own thoughts of herself.

  He was young and strong, and he believed that he would always be able to make her trust him against them, because now in the fulness of their happiness he prevailed.

  There are few men who, when the struggle of life is mainly over, do not wonder at the risks they took in the days of their youth and strength; and it could not be pretended that Olney found more than the common share of happiness in the lot he chose; but then it could be said honestly enough that he did not consider either life or love valuable for the happiness they could yield. They were enough in themselves. He was not a seeker after happiness, and when he saw that even his love failed at times to make life happy for his wife, he pitied her, and he did not blame her. He knew that in her hours of despondency there was that war between her temperament and her character which is the fruitful cause of misery in the world, where all strains are now so crossed and intertangled that there is no definite and unbroken direction any more in any of us. In her, the infusion was only a little greater than in most others, and if Olney ever had any regret it was that the sunny-natured antetypes of her mother’s race had not endowed her with more of the heaven-born cheerfulness with which it meets contumely and injustice. His struggle was with that hypochondria of the soul into which the Puritanism of her father’s race had sickened in her, and which so often seems to satisfy its crazy claim upon conscience by enforcing some aimless act of self-sacrifice. The silence in which they lived concerning her origin weighed upon her sometimes with the sense of a guilty deceit, and it was her remorse for this that he had to reason her out of. The question whether it ought not to be told to each of their acquaintance who became a friend had always to be solved anew, especially if the acquaintance was an American; but as yet their secret remains their own. They are settled at Rome, after a brief experiment of a narrower field of practice at Florence; and the most fanciful of Olney’s compatriot patients does not dream that his wife ought to suffer shame from her. She is thought to look so very Italian that you would really take her for an Italian, and he represents to her that it would not be the ancestral color, which is much the same in other races, but the ancestral condition which their American friends would despise if they knew of it; that this is a quality of the despite in which hard work is held all the world over, and has always followed the children of the man who earns his bread with his hands, especially if he earns other people’s bread too.

  THE WORLD OF CHANCE

  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.

  XXXI.

  XXXII.

  XXXIII.

  XXXIV.

  XXXV.

  XXXVI.

  XXXVII.

  XXXVIII.

  XXXIX.

  XL.

  XLI.

  XLII.

  XLIII.

  XLIV.

  XLV.

  I.

  FROM the club where the farewell dinner was given him, Ray went to the depot of the East & West Railroad with a friend of his own age, and they walked up and down the platform talking of their lives and their loves, as young men do, till they both at once found themselves suddenly very drowsy. They each pretended not to be so; his friend made a show of not meaning to leave him till the through express should come along at two o’clock and pick up the sleeping-car waiting for it on the side track; and Ray feigned that he had no desire to turn in, but would much rather keep walking and talking.

  They got rid of each other at last, and Ray hurried aboard his sleeper, and plunged into his berth as soon as he could get his coat and boots off. Then he found himself very wakeful. The soporific first effect of the champagne had passed, but it still sent the blood thumping in his neck and pounding in his ears as he lay smiling and thinking of the honor that had been done him, and the affection that had been shown him by his fellow-townsmen. In the reflected light of these the future stretched brightly before him. He scarcely felt it a hardship any more that he should be forced to leave Midland by the business change which had thrown him out of his place on the Midland Echo, and he certainly did not envy the friend who had just parted from him, and who was going to remai
n with the new owners. His mind kept, in spite of him, a sort of grudge toward the Hanks Brothers who had bought the paper, and who had thought they must reduce the editorial force as a first step towards making the property pay. He could not say that they had treated him unfairly or unkindly; they had been very frank and very considerate with him; but he could not conceal from himself the probability that if they had really appreciated him they would have seen that it would be a measure of the highest wisdom to keep him. He had given the paper standing and authority in certain matters; he knew that; and he smiled to think of Joe Hanks conducting his department. He hoped the estimation in which the dinner showed that his fellow-citizens held him, had done something to open the eyes of the brothers to the mistake they had made; they were all three at the dinner, and Martin Hanks had made a speech expressive of regard and regret which did not reconcile Ray to them. He now tried to see them as benefactors in disguise, and when he recalled the words of people who said that they always thought he was thrown away on a daily paper, he was willing to acknowledge that the Hankses had probably, at least, not done him an injury. He had often been sensible himself of a sort of incongruity in using up in ephemeral paragraphs, and even leading articles, the mind-stuff of a man who had published poems in the Century Bric-a-brac and Harper’s Drawer, and had for several years had a story accepted by the Atlantic, though not yet printed. With the manuscript of the novel which he was carrying to New York, and the four or five hundred dollars he had saved from his salary, he felt that he need not undertake newspaper work at once again. He meant to make a thorough failure of literature first. There would be time enough then to fall back upon journalism, as he could always do.