Mrs. Baysley didn’t say anything, and for awhile I did not see that she could not say anything. America poured out a cup of coffee, and went with it to her, and this time she did not refuse it. She put up her veil to drink it, and then I saw that she had been crying. She drank the whole cup off, and America went and got it from her, and sat down again, and waited patiently. It seemed a long time, but I do not suppose it was long, before Mrs. Baysley spoke again. She cleared her voice, and said, “I don’t know but what you’ll do just as well.”
“I’ll go and wake my father, if you are in a hurry,” said America. “No,” said Mrs. Baysley, “I guess I’d rather talk with you.” She stopped, and sat fumbling the paper in her hands; then she rose and came stiffly forward and laid it on the table before America, and I could not help seeing that it was a check, with Mr. Ralson’s flourishing signature.
America looked up at her puzzled, and Mrs. Baysley said, “I got it from Mr. Baysley, and I want you to give it to your father, and tell him that we can’t keep it. We don’t want to go back to Timber Creek — at least the girls and I don’t — and if we can just go on here, as if nothing had happened, it’s all we ask.”
“But didn’t — wasn’t the money coming to Mr. Baysley?” America asked, and Mrs. Baysley shook her head. “There ain’t any money coming to us.”
“But I don’t understand,” said America. “What should my father want to give it to Mr. Baysley for then?”
“I don’t know as I can explain,” said Mrs. Baysley, and she began edging toward the door.
“Maybe your father will tell you. Any rate I’ve got nothing to say. All we want is to stay on just as we were before. We shall get through.” She was looking down at the floor, as if she were ashamed of something, but now she looked up into America’s face “I want to say that there are not going to be any hard feelings in us.”
America’s nostrils puffed out with indignation in an instant. “Any hard feelings! Why in the world should you have hard feelings, I should like to know! You have him, and I have lost him!” Mrs. Baysley looked at her as if she did not understand. Then she seemed to realize something, and she asked, “Hasn’t he been here since?”
“Since?” said America. “Since when?”
“Since he was at our house last night,” Mrs. Baysley said, and America flashed out, “Now you just sit right down, and tell me what you mean.”
“There ain’t any call to sit down,” Mrs. Baysley said. “He came over from the hotel where he says he is going to put up, from this out, and wanted to see Essie, Well, I saw him, and I told him what she had agreed to tell him: that we did not feel he was beholden to her in any way or shape, and he was just as free as if he had never laid eyes on her. I don’t know what fath — Mr. Baysley — would have said if he had been there, but he had come here to see your father, and I spoke for myself; and I told him we felt as bad as he did, and we didn’t put the blame on him, altogether, if there was any blame, for we didn’t believe he wanted to fool the child. She ain’t anything but a child, anyway, and she’s got chances enough to get over it.” Mrs. Baysley was winking hard as she said this, and she had got her hand on the doorknob, when she let drop, the only bitterness that came from her: “Next time, I hope she wont be so ready to make a fool of herself because some simpleton is kind to her, and pets her up when he better keep his hands off. I wish you good morning.”
She opened the door and whisked out, and left America and me staring at each other. I don’t know which would have spoken first, or whether we should ever have spoken again, if we had not heard Mr. Ralson behind us saying, “What’s the row about! Who’s been here, asking for me at eight o’clock in the morning?” America turned and pounced on him. “Father, what did you give Mr. Baysley this check for?” and she poked it at him. He looked at it with a kind of shame-faced smile, and she rushed on, “Was it to buy Mr. Ardith from him?”
“Well, I shouldn’t call it that, exactly,” her father said. I supposed you wanted to make things smooth for them — it was nothing but a matter of business.”
“Oh, business!” she flung out. “You think everything is business! Well, there are some things that are not. Mrs. Baysley has been here to bring back your check, and give me Mr. Ardith for nothing. But I don’t want him, and you may have him, if you do. Perhaps he’ll sell himself to you a little cheaper.” She dashed the check at her father’s feet, and ran but of the room, and I could hear her crying on the way to her own room. Mr. Ralson just said, “Well, I’ll be damned,” and went in to breakfast, and left me to pick up the check, and put it into his desk.
Now, this is all at present, and I think it is enough for one while. I am finishing this, while the maid is giving Mrs. Ralson her breakfast, and I have nothing else to do. I do not know whether to send it by fast freight or not; the postage on such a letter would be something awful. I suppose that I will let you know the rest if anything else happens. I shall want to tell it as bad as you will want to have me.
Your affectionate daughter,
FRANCES.
XLVII.
From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.
NEW YORK, March 10th., 1902.
Dear Mother:
I almost wish there was no “rest” to the story I have been telling you, but things have to end somehow, when they begin, no matter whether you like the ending or not.
The worst of women is that they take things out in talk, and when they have said a thing they are just as well satisfied as if they had done it, and seem to think they have. I never respected any one so much in my life as I did America Ralson when she had that scene with her father about the check, and I would have done anything to help her in the stand she had taken. For once, I was proud of my sex, for although we can despise men easily enough, it is not quite so easy to honor women; and I did honor her with my whole heart. She could not have taken Mr. Ardith back, under the circumstances, and kept a solitary rag of self-respect, and I gloried in her.
I did not see her the whole morning, and I had to lunch alone. About four o’clock this afternoon, she sent for me, and we had a long, splendid powwow. I never supposed she had such a clear mind, but she must have been thinking the whole affair over, and she was so logical that I could hardly believe it was the same harum-scarum person. She went over the case with me, from the time Mr. Ardith first appeared here, broken hearted from the way Miss Deschenes had used him in Wottoma, till he was taken down with the grippe there at the Baysley’s. She tried to do him justice at every step, but her conclusion was that he had been wickedly weak, if he had not been simply wicked, and that no girl could be happy with a man she could not look up to. She said that he might have done much worse things, and still kept her respect, but she could not respect a man who was so afraid of hurting people that he could not say his soul was his own, and really did more harm by his shilly-shallying than if he had taken a thoroughly selfish course throughout, and been guided by nothing but his own interests.
When I defended him a little, and said that I thought he ought not to be punished for the harm he had not meant to do, she said she was surprised at me, and she argued me out of it. She declared that if there was any such thing as justice, it had to be blind to everything but the facts, and could not have anything to do with the motives. She said, “Don’t you see that if I took Mr. Ardith back now we could never look each other in the face? We should always be remembering what had happened, and I should be thinking how he had been feebly led away by his pity, to let that girl get in love with him; and he would be thinking how I had let my silliness for him overcome my better judgment. No, there is just one thing for it. We are parted now, and we must stay parted.”
She said a great deal more, but it always came to this, and every now and then she would throw her arms round me, and cry, and make me promise never to leave her, but take her out to Lake Ridge, and we would start a grape farm together; we could make it pay by raising the early kinds, and getting them into the market before any
body else. She made me want to laugh, at times, but through it all, I honored her, and she talked herself quiet at last, and said she had not felt so strong in her life before. She kept up splendidly, that whole evening, and through the whole of Saturday. We went to a matinée, where there was rather a lovesick play, and she criticised it unmercifully; I never heard any one so funny about the plot, and the idiotic lovers. She would not let me go home in the evening; I slept in her room with her, and we talked till nearly morning, about all sorts of things, but mostly about girls and the kind of men they had married. She wanted to know if I had ever been engaged, and I tried to give her an idea of the kind of men I would have had to be engaged to in Lake Ridge; and she said that was just the place where she should like to spend the rest of her life, and not see another man to speak to as long as she breathed.
In the morning we went to church, and in the afternoon we talked again, and she made me say that I would write to you, and ask you if we might come out for a few days’ visit this week; but I don’t think you need get the spare room ready just yet. Suddenly, when she had arranged everything she said, “Don’t you think its rather queer he doesn’t write, and ask if he may come to see me!” I knew who he was, but I thought I would make her say Mr.
Ardith for the discipline, if her mind was veering round that way, so I asked whom she meant, and then I suggested that perhaps he was waiting for some sort of sign from her. She was very haughty at the idea, and said he would have to wait a good while, and then we branched off on other things, but in the midst of a discussion of Mr. Binning, and whether it would be much out of our way to go round by Boston when we went to Lake Ridge, she broke off with, “I’ll tell you what: if Mr. Ardith calls, you shall see him, and give him his letters; I’ve got them tied up. And I want you to put on your frozenest Lake Ridge behavior, and let him feel that you are handing him a small cake of ice from me. Will you?” She began to laugh, and I did not know what to make of her, when she said, “If he is anything of a man at all, he can’t let the thing drop just at this point; he must try to see me. I hate a boyish man. I believe if I ever marry, it will be somebody like Mr. Binning. A girl ought to marry somebody who can understand her, or at least analyze her, and I am sure he could do that. I wonder how I would go down in Boston. I believe I could get him if I tried, and I have got half a notion to try. It would be fun Yes, I am going in for Mr. Binning.”
She ran out of the room, and when she came back, I could see by her very bright-eyed look that she had been crying, and then washing away the tears. She said, “I have decided to send Mr. Ardith’s notes to him by a messenger, as soon as I know his address. I never want him to darken these doors again.” She had hardly got the words out of her mouth before we heard the scraping of Mr. Ralson’s latchkey, and then the opening of the door, and his saying, “Oh, come in, come right in!” and before I knew what I was about, he came in to where we were sitting, with Mr. Ardith by the arm. I expected to see America get up, and leave the room, and she did rise and stand looking at him magnificently, so that I should have thought he would have quailed at her glance. I don’t know exactly how people do quail, but if it is anything like getting down on the carpet, and crawling round on their hands and knees, Mr. Ardith did not do it. He just stood with his head flung back, and gazing at her with such an appealing look that I was glad I was not in America’s place. As it was I was perfectly dazed, but I managed to hear Mr. Ralson saying, “You come in here, and take a letter, Miss Dennam. Wallace, you’ll have to excuse me a minute,” and we left the two standing there together.
This was all I could write last night, for Mr. Ralson really had a business letter to dictate, and a pretty long one, which he wanted me to write out after I had taken it down in short hand, because he did not want the hotel type-writer to see it, even if she had been on duty, Sunday night. He went in to Mrs. Ralson’s room after I had taken the letter, and I was scribbling away at the long-hand copy of it, when I looked up, and there was America standing at my side and smiling down on me, but looking rather silly. She flung her arms round me, and hid her face in my neck, and kind of smothered out, “He is an angel! But don’t ask me, now!”
Of course I have heard since why he was an angel, but I guess you will have to wait till you see me before you find out. There are some things so sacred that they make you sick. But if those two simpletons were fated to come it over each other, they have done it, and they have done it whether they were fated to or not. “What I am now trying to do is to untangle my own ideas, and get the rights of it, somehow. It is straight, about America. She had to go through that humbugging with me for the last three days, because it was our woman’s nature to; but it is not straight about Mr. Ardith, and I am tempted to go back to my original opinion of him as a poor thing. Other people’s forgiving him and releasing him from the consequences of what he has done, has nothing to do with it; that does not change it, or lessen his responsibility in the least. The cold fact is that out of his weak pity he let that silly child get in love with him, when he was not only not in love with her but was actually in love with somebody else. That is what I cannot excuse him for, though to be sure he has not asked me to; and on the other hand I have to ask myself how I should have felt toward him if he had died from the grippe, there, when everybody expected it, instead of ignominiously getting well and remaining on everybody’s hands. Should I have thought he had expiated his offence, or doesn’t death really wipe out a wrong? It does in novels, but does it in real life?
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
That is what Shakespeare says, and Shakespeare knew a thing or two, though he does not always let on. Am I mad with Mr. Ardith because he has made a farce out of his tragedy by living through it; and, if I am, how much better would the tragedy have been? And is he responsible for the harm he did not want to do, and did not mean to do, or was that just fate? If it was, what becomes of the suffering of that girl’s heart that he let trifle with itself? Of course she was very young, and she will get over it; her own mother says she will. But does her mother really believe it, or does she say so because she is poor and the Ralsons are rich, and she does not dare to quarrel with her family’s bread and butter? Any way, she seems to me the only one, except America, who is coming out of the difficulty with any chance of self-respect.
You see I am gathering up my principles from the woodpile, but they seem rather weather-beaten, and I don’t know whether I shall be able to use them as effectually as formerly. Some of them are considerably frayed round the roots.
FRANCES.
XLVIII.
From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.
NEW YORK, March 10, 1902.
My Dear Lincoln:
I wanted to write you last night, but I was not equal to it. Since my letter of a week ago I have been through enough to try a well man, and I am not well, yet, by any means. But now I have something to get well for, and then I hadn’t.
I went that night to the Baysleys’, when I told you I should, expecting to see both of the old people, and tell them that it was off between America and me, and try to make it right with Essie. That is the brute fact; but of course I had got it into some heroic shape so that it was tolerable to the imagination. Jenny let me in, with her mouth pursed in hostility, and said her mother was at home, but her father was out, and she stood holding the door, so that I could go away if I chose. I said her mother would do, and in fact I suddenly felt that I could manage better with her, for I always respected her more than her husband. I found her alone in the parlor, though I knew that Essie had just crept out of it. She asked me if I would sit down, and, country fashion, if I would let her take my hat; and then she left the beginning to me. I do not think she meant to make it hard for me, but that did not make it easy; and I fought away from it as long as I could. Then I found a sort of relief in facing the business. But it was an ugly business, and I cannot pretend that I put a pleasant face on
it. She listened patiently enough, and then she asked me if I cared for Essie the way I did for America; and the fine pretences that I had been preparing turned useless on my hands. In the presence of her honesty I was obliged to be honest myself. I said, No, I did not; and then she asked why I had come back; was it because I had made the child think I cared for her, or because I thought she cared for me? That was a bad moment, Linc, and the best I could do was to hang my head. Then she asked me if I thought that was a good reason, and whether I expected her daughter to accept such an offer, or would I have wanted a sister of mine to do it? I had to own that I would not, and she said maybe I would consider that an answer; she would send for Essie, and let her speak for herself, if I wished, after I had told her the same things. Silence might not have been the best thing for me, but it was the only thing, and I felt myself dwindling from a hero and martyr into something so infinitesimal that there is no name for it. That was when she began to have a little mercy on me, and to let me up from the dust. She told me that she had heard from Essie about our goings-on together, and that she did not blame me more than Essie, except that I was ten years older and knew more. She made a better defence for me than I could have made for myself, and she did not spare me her gratitude for what I had done for them in their sickness; she gave me credit for good motives, which I will not pretend was not my due, though I could never have claimed it: but I know I was not selfish in going to live with them, and I did my best to help them in their trouble; I see that as clearly as any one. After she had done that for me she signified, by holding her tongue, that I could go, and I went. I wonder I did not go through the keyhole; there would have been room.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 770