Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “The lady at the conna? That’s her motha.”

  When the event was over, and all the things had been said and said again, and there was nothing more to keep the spring and summer months from going up to their rooms to lie down, and the fall and winter months from trying to get something to eat, Mrs. Milray found herself alone with Clementina.

  The child seemed anxious about something, and Mrs. Milray, who wanted to go and lie down, too, asked a little impatiently, “What is it, Clementina?”

  “Oh, nothing. Only I was afraid maybe you didn’t like my waving to the children, when you saw how queea they looked.” Clementina’s lips quivered.

  “Did any of the rest say anything?”

  “I know what they thought. But I don’t care! I should do it right over again!”

  Mrs. Milray’s happiness in the day’s triumph was so great that she could indulge a generous emotion. She caught the girl in her arms. “I want to kiss you; I want to hug you, Clementina!”

  X.

  The notion of a dance for the following night to celebrate the success of the house in the coaching parade came to Mrs. Milray over a welsh-rarebit which she gave at the close of the evening. The party was in the charge of Gregory, who silently served them at their orgy with an austerity that might have conspired with the viand itself against their dreams, if they had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations. He would not allow the waitresses to be disturbed in their evening leisure, or kept from their sleep by such belated pleasures; and when he had provided the materials for the rarebit, he stood aloof, and left their combination to Mrs. Milray and her chafing-dish.

  She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to one of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed Clementina’s absence with a “Hello! Anything the matter with the Spirit of Summer?” Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these months before the parade was over, and now they clamored together, and said they must have her at the dance anyway. They were more tepidly seconded by the spring and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, “Well, then, you’ll have to all subscribe and get her a pair of dancing slippers.” They pressed her for her meaning, and she had to explain the fact of Clementina’s destitution, which that additional fold of cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the coaching tableau that it had never been suspected. The young men entreated her to let them each buy a pair of slippers for the Spirit of Summer, which she should wear in turn for the dance that she must give each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray declare that, no, the child should not come to the dance at all, and that she was not going to have her spoiled. But, before the party broke up, she promised that she would see what could be done, and she put it very prettily to the child the next day, and waited for her to say, as she knew she must, that she could not go, and why. They agreed that the cheese-cloth draperies of the Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for the dance; but they had to agree that this still left the question of slippers untouched. It remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried on all of Mrs. Milray’s festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints and high heels would avail. She went away disappointed, but not yet disheartened; youth does not so easily renounce a pleasure pressed to the lips; and Clementina had it in her head to ask some of the table girls to help her out. She meant to try first with that big girl who had helped her put on the shoeman’s bronze slippers; and she hurried through the office, pushing purblindly past Fane without looking his way, when he called to her in the deference which he now always used with her, “Here’s a package here for you, Clementina — Miss Claxon,” and he gave her an oblong parcel, addressed in a hand strange to her. “Who is it from?” she asked, innocently, and Fane replied with the same ingenuousness: “I’m sure I don’t know.” Afterwards he thought of having retorted, “I haven’t opened it,” but still without being certain that he would have had the courage to say it.

  Clementina did not think of opening it herself, even when she was alone in her little room above Mrs. Atwell’s, until she had carefully felt it over, and ascertained that it was a box of pasteboard, three or four inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long. She looked at the address again, “Miss Clementina Claxon,” and at the narrow notched ribbon which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrapped in was very white and clean. Then she sighed, and loosed the knot, and the paper slipped off the box, and at the same time the lid fell off, and the shoe man’s bronze slippers fell out upon the floor.

  Either it must be a dream or it must be a joke; it could not be both real and earnest; somebody was trying to tease her; such flattery of fortune could not be honestly meant. But it went to her head, and she was so giddy with it as she caught the slippers from the floor, and ran down to Mrs. Atwell, that she knocked against the sides of the narrow staircase.

  “What is it? What does it mean? Who did it?” she panted, with the slippers in her hand. “Whe’e did they come from?” She poured out the history of her trying on these shoes, and of her present need of them and of their mysterious coming, to meet her longing after it had almost ceased to be a hope. Mrs. Atwell closed with her in an exultation hardly short of a clapping the hands. Her hair was gray, and the girl’s hair still hung in braids down her back, but they were of the same age in their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with her in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes. Mrs. Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given them to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the parade. Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had secretly dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at Middlemount Centre for them. Clementina believed that they came from the shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then in that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them. Each conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free to any opposite theory.

  Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long before his day’s work was done it reached the chef, and amused him as a piece of the Boss’s luck. He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen door after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands that took her between Mrs. Milray’s room and her own, and he called to her: “Boss, what’s this I hear about a pair o’ glass slippas droppin’ out the sky int’ youa lap?”

  Clementina was so happy that she thought she might trust him for once, and she said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin! Who do you suppose sent them?” she entreated him so sweetly that it would have softened any heart but the heart of a tease.

  “I believe I could give a pootty good guess if I had the facts.”

  Clementina innocently gave them to him, and he listened with a well-affected sympathy.

  “Say Fane fust told you about ‘em?”

  “Yes. ‘He’e’s a package for you,’ he said. Just that way; and he couldn’t tell me who left it, or anything.”

  “Anybody asked him about it since?”

  “Oh, yes! Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr. Atwell, and everybody.”

  “Everybody.” The chef smiled with a peculiar droop of one eye. “And he didn’t know when the slippas got into the landlo’d’s box?”

  “No. The fust thing he knew, the’ they we’e!” Clementina stood expectant, but the chef smoked on as if that were all there was to say, and seemed to have forgotten her. “Who do you think put them thea, Mr. Mahtin?”

  The chef looked up as if surprised to find her still there. “Oh! Oh, yes! Who d’ I think? Why, I know, Boss. But I don’t believe I’d betta tell you.”

  “Oh, do, Mr. Mahtin! If you knew how I felt about it—”

  “No, no! I guess I betta not. ’Twouldn’t do you any good. I guess I won’t say anything moa. But if I was in youa place, and I really wanted to know whe’e them slippas come from—”

  “I do — I do inde
ed—”

  The chef paused before he added, “I should go at Fane. I guess what he don’t know ain’t wo’th knowin’, and I guess nobody else knows anything. Thea! I don’t know but I said mo’n I ought, now.”

  What the chef said was of a piece with what had been more than once in Clementina’s mind; but she had driven it out, not because it might not be true, but because she would not have it true. Her head drooped; she turned limp and springless away. Even the heart of the tease was touched; he had not known that it would worry her so much, though he knew that she disliked the clerk.

  “Mind,” he called after her, too late, “I ain’t got no proof ‘t he done it.”

  She did not answer him, or look round. She went to her room, and sat down in the growing dusk to think, with a hot lump in her throat.

  Mrs. Atwell found her there an hour later, when she climbed to the chamber where she thought she ought to have heard Clementina moving about over her own room.

  “Didn’t know but I could help you do youa dressin’,” she began, and then at sight of the dim figure she broke off: “Why, Clem! What’s the matte? Ah’ you asleep? Ah’ you sick? It’s half an hour of the time and—”

  “I’m not going,” Clementina answered, and she did not move.

  “Not goin’! Why the land o’—”

  “Oh, I can’t go, Mrs. Atwell. Don’t ask me! Tell Mrs. Milray, please!”

  “I will, when I got something to tell,” said Mrs. Atwell. “Now, you just say what’s happened, Clementina Claxon!” Clementina suffered the woful truth to be drawn from her. “But you don’t know whether it’s so or not,” the landlady protested.

  “Yes, yes, I do! It was the last thing I thought of, and the chef wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t believe it.”

  “That’s just what he would done,” cried Mrs. Atwell. “And I’ll give him such a goin’ ova, for his teasin’, as he ain’t had in one while. He just said it to tease. What you goin’ to say to Mrs. Milray?”

  “Oh, tell her I’m not a bit well, Mrs. Atwell! My head does ache, truly.”

  “Why, listen,” said Mrs. Atwell, recklessly. “If you believe he done it — and he no business to — why don’t you just go to the dance, in ‘em, and then give ’em back to him after it’s ova? It would suv him right.”

  Clementina listened for a moment of temptation, and then shook her head. “It wouldn’t do, Mrs. Atwell; you know it wouldn’t,” she said, and Mrs. Atwell had too little faith in her suggestion to make it prevail. She went away to carry Clementina’s message to Mrs. Milray, and her task was greatly eased by the increasing difficulty Mrs. Milray had begun to find, since the way was perfectly smoothed for her, in imagining the management of Clementina at the dance: neither child nor woman, neither servant nor lady, how was she to be carried successfully through it, without sorrow to herself or offence to others? In proportion to the relief she felt, Mrs. Milray protested her irreconcilable grief; but when the simpler Mrs. Atwell proposed her going and reasoning with Clementina, she said, No, no; better let her alone, if she felt as she did; and perhaps after all she was right.

  XI.

  Clementina listened to the music of the dance, till the last note was played; and she heard the gay shouts and laughter of the dancers as they issued from the ball room and began to disperse about the halls and verandas, and presently to call good night to one another. Then she lighted her lamp, and put the slippers back into the box and wrapped it up in the nice paper it had come in, and tied it with the notched ribbon. She thought how she had meant to put the slippers away so, after the dance, when she had danced her fill in them, and how differently she was doing it all now. She wrote the clerk’s name on the parcel, and then she took the box, and descended to the office with it. There seemed to be nobody there, but at the noise of her step Fane came round the case of letter-boxes, and advanced to meet her at the long desk.

  “What’s wanted, Miss Claxon?” he asked, with his hopeless respectfulness. “Anything I can do for you?”

  She did not answer, but looked him solemnly in the eyes and laid the parcel down on the open register, and then went out.

  He looked at the address on the parcel, and when he untied it, the box fell open and the shoes fell out of it, as they had with Clementina. He ran with them behind the letter-box frame, and held them up before Gregory, who was seated there on the stool he usually occupied, gloomily nursing his knee.

  “What do you suppose this means, Frank?”

  Gregory looked at the shoes frowningly. “They’re the slippers she got to-day. She thinks you sent them to her.”

  “And she wouldn’t have them because she thought I sent them! As sure as I’m standing here, I never did it,” said the clerk, solemnly.

  “I know it,” said Gregory. “I sent them.”

  “You!”

  “What’s so wonderful?” Gregory retorted. “I saw that she wanted them that day when the shoe peddler was here. I could see it, and you could.”

  “Yes.”

  “I went across into the woods, and the man overtook me with his wagon. I was tempted, and I bought the slippers of him. I wanted to give them to her then, but I resisted, and I thought I should never give them. To-day, when I heard that she was going to that dance, I sent them to her anonymously. That’s all there is about it.”

  The clerk had a moment of bitterness. “If she’d known it was you, she wouldn’t have given them back.”

  “That’s to be seen. I shall tell her, now. I never meant her to know, but she must, because she’s doing you wrong in her ignorance.”

  Gregory was silent, and Fane was trying to measure the extent of his own suffering, and to get the whole bearing of the incident in his mind. In the end his attempt was a failure. He asked Gregory, “And do you think you’ve done just right by me?”

  “I’ve done right by nobody,” said Gregory, “not even by myself; and I can see that it was my own pleasure I had in mind. I must tell her the truth, and then I must leave this place.”

  “I suppose you want I should keep it quiet,” said Fane.

  “I don’t ask anything of you.”

  “And she wouldn’t,” said Fane, after reflection. “But I know she’d be glad of it, and I sha’n’t say anything. Of course, she never can care for me; and — there’s my hand with my word, if you want it.” Gregory silently took the hand stretched toward him and Fane added: “All I’ll ask is that you’ll tell her I wouldn’t have presumed to send her the shoes. She wouldn’t be mad at you for it.”

  Gregory took the box, and after some efforts to speak, he went away. It was an old trouble, an old error, an old folly; he had yielded to impulse at every step, and at every step he had sinned against another or against himself. What pain he had now given the simple soul of Fane; what pain he had given that poor child who had so mistaken and punished the simple soul! With Fane it was over now, but with Clementina the worst was perhaps to come yet. He could not hope to see the girl before morning, and then, what should he say to her? At sight of a lamp burning in Mrs. Atwell’s room, which was on a level with the veranda where he was walking, it came to him that first of all he ought to go to her, and confess the whole affair; if her husband were with her, he ought to confess before him; they were there in the place of the child’s father and mother, and it was due to them. As he pressed rapidly toward the light he framed in his thought the things he should say, and he did not notice, as he turned to enter the private hallway leading to Mrs. Atwell’s apartment, a figure at the door. It shrank back from his contact, and he recognized Clementina. His purpose instantly changed, and he said, “Is that you, Miss Claxon? I want to speak with you. Will you come a moment where I can?”

  “I — I don’t know as I’d betta,” she faltered. But she saw the box under his arm, and she thought that he wished to speak to her about that, and she wanted to hear what he would say. She had been waiting at the door there, because she could not bear to go to her room without having something more happen.
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  “You needn’t be afraid. I shall not keep you. Come with me a moment. There is something I must tell you at once. You have made a mistake. And it is my fault. Come!”

  Clementina stepped out into the moonlight with him, and they walked across the grass that sloped between the hotel and the river. There were still people about, late smokers singly, and in groups along the piazzas, and young couples, like themselves, strolling in the dry air, under the pure sky.

  Gregory made several failures in trying to begin, before he said: “I have to tell you that you are mistaken about Mr. Fane. I was there behind the letter boxes when you came in, and I know that you left these shoes because you thought he sent them to you. He didn’t send them.” Clementina did not say anything, and Gregory was forced to ask: “Do you wish to know who sent them? I won’t tell you unless you do wish it.”

  “I think I ought to know,” she said, and she asked, “Don’t you?”

  “Yes; for you must blame some one else now, for what you thought Fane did. I sent them to you.”

  Clementina’s heart gave a leap in her breast, and she could not say anything. He went on.

  “I saw that you wanted them that day, and when the peddler happened to overtake me in the woods where I was walking, after I left you, I acted on a sudden impulse, and I bought them for you. I meant to send them to you anonymously, then. I had committed one error in acting upon impulse-my rashness is my besetting sin — and I wished to add a species of deceit to that. But I was kept from it until-to-day. I hoped you would like to wear them to the dance to-night, and I put them in the post-office for you myself. Mr. Fane didn’t know anything about it. That is all. I am to blame, and no one else.”

  He waited for her to speak, but Clementina could only say, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You can’t say anything that would be punishment enough for me. I have acted foolishly, cruelly.”

  Clementina did not think so. She was not indignant, as she was when she thought Fane had taken this liberty with her, but if Mr. Gregory thought it was so very bad, it must be something much more serious than she had imagined. She said, “I don’t see why you wanted to do it,” hoping that he would be able to tell her something that would make his behavior seem less dreadful than he appeared to think it was.