Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Your affectionate brother,

  OTIS.

  XXV.

  From ABNER J. BAYSLEY to REV. WILLIAM BAYSLEY, Timber Creek.

  NEW YORK, January 25, 1902.

  Dr. Bro. Wm.:

  I’m thankful to say for wife and I that we are about well again. She still keeps her room, but is out of bed, and daughter Jenny is much the same, though not quite so far along as mother. Essie has not been sick at all, and we some hope that she will escape, though we don’t want to whistle till we are out of the woods. Will say right here that there never was a better child; and her and young Ardith have about fixed it up together, by the signs. He has been a true friend from first to last, helping Ess do the work like a good fellow when the rest of us was down sick, and using his influence with old Ralson to keep me from being thrown out when I could not get down town to look after things. I got a letter from the company this morning saying my salary was put up to the $3000 notch; so I guess I have been giving satisfaction right along. I did expect to send you a postal order for that loan, but there have been some extra expenses, and I do not believe I can get round to it till next pay day.

  Neither Ess or him has said anything yet to me, but from what she told her mother I guess it’s a sure thing; and he’s as nice a young fellow as ever stepped, and talented. Although he has kept mum about it, I guess he has been pretty thick with the Ralsons. Went into regular Four Hundred circles with them, and them glad to have him. He is not one to brag, and so far as mother can make out, he does not say anything to Ess about it either. But if he was anyways taken up in that direction before, he sticks close enough here now. So it is satisfactory all round.

  Hope you are getting the good out of the old place, and glad you can use the horse, riding round. They all join me in regards.

  Your affec bro.,

  ABNER.

  XXVI.

  From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

  NEW YORK, January 27, 1902.

  Well, my dear Linc, the expected has happened. But where shall I begin to tell you how?

  It is more than a week since I called on America, and during that time I have refused three or four invitations from her to breakfast and lunch and dinner, and I don’t know what else, each growing a little more formal, and a little less like the good terms we used to be on. All this while I had left her to her own conjectures about my real motives in staying away, for how could I tell her what they were? If I could not understand them, knowing the party as I do, how could she possibly believe in them? But it is dangerous to leave a girl to her conjectures, especially a girl who likes to do her thinking after she has done her acting, as most girls do.

  What America conjectured, as nearly as I can make it out, was that not only all the Baysleys were at the point of death, but that I was not very well myself. The leap from this to the conclusion that it was the part of a friend to come and see what the facts were, was not beyond her powers, and this morning she came. Essie answered the ring from above by pulling the latch of the outside door, and then she had a call from the invalids, some of them, and she ran in where I was writing the “Impressions of a Provincial,” and asked if I would stand guard at the door of the apartment, and let in whoever was coming up.

  I knew — long before America arrived with her secretary. She began to fill the hallway and staircase with the rich resonance of her laugh, and the proud frou-frou of her skirts against the blood-red tapestry carpet, from the moment she came in, while I stood transfixed at the door. She panted, and then laughed at herself for panting, and whispered to the girl with her, and then spoke aloud, and stopped, and came on. Suddenly she stood there on the platform before the Baysley portal, with her skirt in her hand, and the flare from the skylight full in her face, staring at me with a kind of challenge. “Oh!” she said, and the other girl slipped behind her. It was as if she had confronted my ghost, and I wish she had. I could see that somehow she was not prepared for my being there, though why, I could not understand then, even if I understand now. She turned red and then she turned white, but she did not say anything more; she only leaned against the wall, and waited for me. I asked her if she would not come in, and she said “Thank you,” in a kind of bewilderment, and she swept in, and the other girl eddied silently in after her. I showed them the way into the horrible little parlor, with the bed-alcove off it, and got them seated, somehow, and then she found presence of mind enough to say, “I hope Mr. and Mrs. Baysley are better.” I said they were all better, and Mr. Baysley was so well as to have gone down to the office. I volunteered that Miss Essie Baysley would be with us in a moment, and the conversation languished, till America remarked with the aimlessness of people who don’t know what they are saying or saying they don’t know what, “I didn’t understand that you were living with them, before.” I answered that I thought I had mentioned it, and I could see that America suspected I was lying, and that the secretary was making a tacit note of my mendacity. In fact, throughout this glad interview, the secretary had the effect of accumulating evidence against me, I don’t know why, and when Essie came in, and I tried to talk to her while America engaged Essie, I felt as if she were warning me that anything I said would be used against me. She has disliked me from the first, apparently, and it hasn’t been any better for me because I know she has a conscience against disliking me without reason.

  If I had been trying to conceal anything, and certainly I felt as if I were, Essie gave everything away when she came in looking flurried, and then frightened, at the sight of my visitors, if they were mine. In the brief time of our intensified domesticity she has come to depend upon me for pretty much everything but breathing, and now she rubbed kitten-like up against me, with her eyes first on the magnificent America, and then on me, but mostly on me. I was as miserable as a guilty wretch can be, and be conscious of his innocence, but my confounded mind kept taking note of the situation, and in a hideous way rejoicing in it as material. I made out to introduce Essie to the company, and to detach her towards America, while I took the secretary off to the window, and showed her the view of the other side of the street, with the rock in the Park that you can get a glimpse of if you don’t mind a crick in your neck. The secretary treated me with merited severity, and gave evidence for the prosecution, and charged the jury, and brought in a verdict of puellicide in the first degree, and sentenced me, and had me in the electric chair, while I saw through the back of my head, all the time, America killing Essie with kindness, and heard her asking her with adamantine benevolence all about the family sickness, and trying to listen, if she died on the spot for it, to Essie’s terrified answers. I was actually aware of her holding the girl’s hands, and finding them as cold as ice. “Well, you must take care not to get the grippe yourself,” she said, and just then the secretary turned on the current, and I knew no more.

  I seemed to come to life in another world, where America and the secretary were talking to Essie, and not minding me any more than if I were an invisible presence. America was saying that she had ventured to bring a few little things to tempt a sick appetite, and that if Essie would let her she would send them up by the man; I noted how she forebore to give Essie the coup de grâce by not saying footman. Essie went out to the top of the landing with them, and watched them down the stairs, and then she came back and looked at me. It could not have lasted a long time, but it took a small eternity to live through it, and when it ended in a cloud-burst of tears that seemed to sweep her out of the room, Methusaleh was no match for me in age. I don’t know why I waited for the Ralson’s James to come up with the hamper America had sent; perhaps I had nothing else to do. I had always been rather friendly with James, but this time I met him with a face as chill as his own imported cheerlessness, and I treated him not like a man, as I had made a point of doing before, but like a footman. He did not seem to notice. Now I am writing to you, and that is all I know.

  Your distracted

  W. A.

  XXVII.

  From Miss
Ralson to Miss DESCHENES, Wottoma.

  Jan. 27, Evening.

  Dear Caroline:

  I can’t remember just what I wrote, but if you understood that I did not want you to come, you must have been reading between the lines. I do want you. Come whenever you like, and as often and as long; you couldn’t come too soon, or too much, for me. I really and truly want you, and that’s no lie.

  I wish I could be decided about Mr. Ardith. But you had better come on and see for yourself. He is living with some people from Timber Creek, up on the West side; I heard that they were all down with the grippe, and I went up to see about them this morning; the father is in the office of the Trust here, and I felt rather obliged to. I don’t think they were in much need of me, especially one of the daughters. But I may have been deceived by appearances; you might ask Mr. Ardith after you got here; I will have him to dinner.

  I have a bad headache, and I hardly know what I am writing. Miss Dennam, mother’s companion and my secretary, would know if she was here, but she has gone home for the night; so you must try to make it out for yourself. But if you make out that I don’t want you, you will have to settle with me after you get here.

  Devotedly yours,

  AMERICA.

  XXVIII.

  From FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

  NEW YORK, Jan. 27, 1902.

  Dear Mother:

  Every now and then I have felt awfully for the way I have written you about Mr. Ardith: firstly because he is none of my business, and secondly because I really care nothing about him, and thirdly because I don’t want to wrong him. You know I wouldn’t hurt a fly, or even a spider that was eating a fly. Well, I don’t know now whether I have been wronging him, but if I lay the facts fully before you maybe I shall find out. I can’t very well face them till I get them down on paper, can I?

  It seems sort of eavesdropping, but I know that the drops will go no farther with you and Lizzie, and so I will keep on, because it is so very interesting, if for no other reason. The first time I saw him and Miss Ralson together, I could see that she was perfectly gone on him, as you say at Lake Ridge, and the only thing that I really liked in him was his not being able to see it. That was certainly in the wretch’s favor; but whether his blindness was a remnant of the heartbreak (don’t mind the mixture of metaphors, mother! ) that he came on here from Wottoma with, I was not sure. They say that the human male when heartbroken is easily the prey of the first human female that makes up to him; but in Mr. Ardith’s case the male didn’t see it. I don’t believe, though, the female in Miss Ralson’s case was fully aware of it, as I told you in my last letter.

  I suppose I have heard more about Mr. Ardith and his love affair with a Miss Deschenes, out in Wottoma, than would fill a volume; and from what I could learn, she behaved as badly to him as I could have wished in my most venomous moods. She led him on by every art known to her sex, and then tossed him, as Miss Ralson said, or gave him the grand bounce, as she explained. She said Miss Deschenes was very beautiful in a dark, thin, slight way, and knew how to dress, far beyond the dreams of Wottoma; she was very intellectual, too; and nobody could understand why she turned Mr. Ardith down when it came to the point. The worst of it was that she did not turn him down at once. They were engaged for a while, and then an able lawyer, well along in his thirties, and ripe for Congress, appeared on the scene. This was when the tossing, and bouncing, and turning down took place. In Wattoma it was considered very heartless, and nobody could account for it, but when I met Mr. Ardith, I thought I saw what she meant.

  The redeeming feature in his case all along has been his not knowing that Miss Ralson was throwing herself at him. He thought, if he thought anything, that she was binding up his wounds, and perhaps she was, though it looked more like that trapeze act to the outsider. I don’t know whether the rest of the family noticed it or not; I rather think not. Mrs. Ralson has seldom seen them together that I know of, and Mr. Ralson’s great object seems to have been to see them together as much as possible, or at least to shirk going to places with America and sending Mr. Ardith instead. Where a third person was absolutely demanded by New York propriety, I have done duty, and Mr. Ralson has escaped everything but opera and theatre for the last month. Seven or eight nights ago they were at the theatre together, and when it was over, they took Mr. Ardith up to his lodgings, as usual; and they found out that he was living with some people from the little town in Iowa where he was born, and that they were mostly down with the grippe. She thinks he acted very strangely that night, because he wouldn’t let her think of coming to see them, or sending anything; and as the days have gone by he has acted still more strangely. He has not come near the Walhondia, and as for dropping in for lunch, as he had been in the habit of doing, he would not come when he was asked. I must say Miss Ralson gave him more chances of refusing than I should have done, and his excuses were shamefully shallow. Of course I could not say that to her; and I have done more passive fibbing than I should have liked to do in the best cause, let alone one like this. Things went on, Miss Ralson getting more and more anxious, and vibrating between renouncing him forever, and going to fetch him by main force. She decided at last that he was down with the grippe himself, and this morning his condition was so bad, (or hers,) that she could not stand it any longer. She sent out for a lot of things at a place where they keep delicacies for the sick, and took me in her automobile with her to succor the Baysley family, and to see what the matter with Mr. Ardith really was. She did not say that, of course, but went entirely in the character of an angel of mercy.

  I do not know whether she felt like one when she got there, and found Mr. Ardith perfectly well; but I know how I should have felt in her place, when the youngest of the Baysley sisters, and the only one on foot, came in and went up to him, and sort of took refuge from her awe of America with him. The situation was quite unmistakable, but I must say that Miss Ralson ignored it magnificently; and I must say, though I hate to, that he did not quail either, though he looked like death. He left them together and talked with me till Miss Ralson was ready to go, and then he did what was polite, and we got away somehow. But there was no urging him to come down for lunch, or dinner, or breakfast, and there was no mention of him all the way home, except once. She looked out of the window most of the time, and I wonder what people could have thought of her, for when she turned to me, her eyes were simply raining tears. I do not believe she knew it, or was aware of the unnatural voice in which she asked me, “Do you think they are engaged?”

  Mother, if we were not so poor, I would have been willing to give any money not to have had to answer, and as it is I would have given all Mr. Ralson’s money. But I had to do it. I had to say, “It seemed to look like it,” and then she turned her face away, and did not speak again. I don’t believe she was mortified at all thinking of how she had given herself away about Mr. Ardith the other day, and bragged that she could have him when she wanted. The hurt was something that went deeper than her pride, though it came out through that later; now it was pure heartbreak. I have scarcely seen her, this afternoon. She had her luncheon taken to her room, and I had mine with her mother. About four o’clock she came in to say that if I would like to go home, then, she would stay with Mrs. Ralson, and I was glad to get away; but before I could manage I had to hear her mother afflicting her with conjectures and questions. She usually does not notice, but she began at once to ask Miss Ralson whether Mr. Ardith was sick, and if that was the reason why he had not been there for so long. Her daughter fought her off as well as she could, and told her that Mr. Ardith had been kept by the sickness of the family he was staying with; that he had been helping take care of them. Her mother said, “Well, I always did say he was the best-hearted gentleman I ever saw.”

  Now, what do you think, mother? For I confess I don’t know what to think. Of course if he is in love with that girl, he has a right to be engaged to her, but if he has been in love with her all along, I don’t think it was nice in him to come h
ere so much. It is to his credit that he prefers a poor girl, if he really likes her the best, to a rich girl, but I do not understand how any one could like that girl better than America Ralson. For she is grand, if she is rich; and Miss Baysley struck me as about the commonest piece of prettiness that I ever saw; her grammar was frightful. Propinquity will do much, and he is not to be blamed for being thrown with her in the care of her family. I don’t know! The whole thing puzzles me more than it would if it were any of my business, and I don’t like to be puzzled, you know. The only thing I am sure of is that Miss Ralson is miserable from it, and that if a man doesn’t know enough not to make a girl like her miserable, he ought to; besides it is not very flattering to me, to have a man whom I had set down as a toad turn out something else. The logic of Mr. Ardith ought to have been trifling with that silly child’s affections while he was making love to Miss Ralson’s millions, but he does not seem to have been doing anything of the kind, unless appearances are deceiving. Sometimes they are!