“Not perfect justice, no.”
“He had a very strong character, but that painting conveys the notion of hardness rather than strength. Perhaps the hardness was something in the painter’s method, and he couldn’t eliminate it from the likeness.” The judge and the rector smiled. Anther said nothing.
“But if I could get hold of the right man to do the work, and could have you to help out from memory, doctor—”
“I couldn’t,” Anther said, abruptly.
The door-bell rang. Langbrith lost the frown in which his forehead had gathered, and smiled as he rose, and threw on the table the napkin he had been dragging across his lap while he talked. “There they come! This is something I should like to talk over with you gentlemen again.” The judge and the rector made murmurs of friendly assent in their throats; the doctor did nothing to signify his acquiescence. “But, in the meantime, I would rather you wouldn’t speak of it out of your own circle. Shall I follow you?” He made a motion for his guests to precede him, and called over his shoulder to his friend, “Come along, Falk.”
IX
THE dance was coming to an end, and the girls, some of them, followed by as many young men, strayed out between the waltzes into the conservatory, to escape the heat; after trying the air, they said it was no cooler, only damper, and rushed back at the first strain of the music for the last figure of the dance. Hope Hawberk stayed, and Langbrith stayed with her. “Why don’t you go back and look after your guests?” she challenged him.
“The guest that needs looking after most is here.” He broke a rose from the vine at his hand, and threw it across the little fountain at her, where she stood with her head framed in the pale greenery of a jasmine bush. She lifted herself, haughtily. “May I ask what you mean, Mr. Langbrith?” Suddenly, while he stood, mystified and sobered, by the severity of her tone, she brought one hand from behind her, where she had been keeping both, and dashed a rose in his face. She tried to escape by the path that led up to the dining-room door past the callas in the oval bed about the fountain. He was instantly there to meet her, to catch her by a slim wrist and hold her fast.
“You witch!” he panted. “Oh, Hope, may I go home with you? The way we used to?”
“Before you were such a great person?”
“Why do you say that to me?” he entreated.
“Because — because you are hurting my wrist,” she answered, with a child’s wilful inconsequence.
He released it with all but his thumb and forefinger, and bent over it as if to see what harm he had done, while she stood passive. He kissed the red marks his fingers had left.
“What next, Mr. Langbrith?” she said, with a feint of cold impersonality.
“You know! Will you let me go home with you?”
“You’re making me break your mother’s lilies!”
“I don’t care for the lilies. I care for you, you, you! May I go home with you?”
Another dash of the fitful April rain, which seemed to have gathered again, smote the glass roof; then it began to fall steadily. “You may lend me an umbrella,” she said.
“Well, if I may go along to carry it.”
“Oh, if you’re afraid of not getting it back!”
“Yes, I can’t trust you.”
“You’re hurting me again. Don’t make me cry. Everybody will know it,” she pleaded, releasing her wrist and passing her handkerchief over her eyes, with her face turned from the doors.
“Ah, Hope!” he tried to catch her hands, but she whipped them behind her, the handkerchief still in one of them, and ran, while he followed slowly.
The rain stopped again, before the dance was ended. The old people had gone home before, and the dancers now sallied out together into the air that had softened, since nightfall, under a sky where the moon sailed in seas of blue, among islands of white cloud. The girls started chattering, laughing, with meaningless cries, massing themselves at first, and then losing themselves from the group, one by one, and finding their way homeward with the young men who seemed to fall to their share, each as by divine accident.
Langbrith and Hope Hawberk were the foremost to put a space between themselves and the others, and he pressed closer and closer to his side the hand she let lie on his arm. “Will you say it now?” he was insisting.
“No more now than ever. What good would it do, I should like to know.”
“How delicious! All the good in the world!”
“Well, I shall not. Why should you want me to be engaged to you.”
“Oh, if you’ll only say you love me, we’ll let the engagement go!”
“Thank you! Well, we’ll let it go without my saying anything so silly.”
“But I may say that I love you.”
“Yes, so long as you don’t mean it.”
“But I do mean it — I do, heart and soul. Hope, can’t you be serious? May I write to you from Cambridge when I get back.”
“How can I help that? I suppose the mail will have to bring your letters!”
“But will you answer them?”
“Perhaps they won’t need answering.”
“Oh yes, they will. I shall ask questions.”
“Well, I never could answer questions. That’s the one thing I can’t do.”
“Then you don’t want me to write to you?”
“What an idea! I thought it was you that were doing the wanting.”
“And I may?”
“Well, you may write one letter.”
“Oh, how intoxicating you are, Hope!” He tried in his rapture to put his hand on hers, but it had slipped from his arm, and she was flying up the path before him. He followed after a moment of surprise; but, because she was fleet of foot, or because she had that little start of him, or because he felt the chase undignified, he did not overtake her till she had reached her gate. The little story-and-a-half house, overshadowed by two tall spruces, under the shoulder of the hill, was withdrawn only a few yards from the street, to which the gabled porch at the front-door brought it a few feet nearer.
She put her hand, panting, on the gate, and he had his on her shoulder, laughing, when, with an instinct of another presence, rather than a knowledge, she turned vividly towards him, and put her hand to her lip. He checked his laughter, and at her formal “Good-night” he said, reluctantly, “Well, goodnight,” and faltered outside the gate which she shut between them.
“Won’t you come in, Jim?” a voice called huskily from the darkness of the little portico, and before he could formulate his “Oh no, thank you, Mr. Hawberk, it’s rather late,” the figure of a man advanced from its shadow. Around this figure Hope faded into the shadow it had left.
“It’s only nine,” Hawberk said. “Come in, and we’ll have a bottle of champagne together. I’m just up from Boston, where I’ve been passing a week with some of your father’s old friends: gay people. I was out at Cambridge, where I met some of the college grandees. They gave me great accounts of you. I was coming round in the morning to see your mother. She’ll like to know direct from the university authorities that you are regarded as the most promising man there. I’ve been looking after an invention of mine, that I’ve succeeded in getting into good hands in Boston, and that will probably give me more money than I shall know what to do with. Have you ever thought of parting with the mills?”
“I don’t believe I have, Mr. Hawberk,” Langbrith responded.
“If you ever do,” Hawberk said, “let me know. I’ve had an idea of taking them over, lately, and the income from this invention of mine will enable me to run them as they should be run. Your father and I were pretty close together in their management, at the outset, you know.”
“Yes,” Langbrith assented, while he retired a few steps from the gate, on which Hawberk was now lounging. In the moonlight, Hawberk’s face had a greenish hue, and his eyes shone vitreously.
“There is something fine about these gloomy autumn nights,” he suggested. “I sold him the mills, you recollect, and it would be s
ort of evening things up if you sold them back to me. Yes, your father and I were great friends. He liked to go off with me in my yacht. We made the trip to the Azores, together. I think I was the first to own a steam-yacht in Boston. I lived most of the time in Boston, then: looked after the city end of the business. Often had your father down. I was always giving dinners, and he used to enjoy them. You and Hope been at the play? Fine company, I’m told. Pity we don’t get them oftener in Saxmills.”
“Ah — I think I must say good night, Mr. Hawberk.” Langbrith moved a little farther away, backing. “It’s rather late—”
“Is it?” Hawberk took out his watch and held it up to the moonlight. “Why, so it is! Nearly morning. Well, good-night.” He did not offer to leave the gate, but remained lounging across it, while Langbrith turned and moved down the footpath towards the village.
X
IN the morning, the dissatisfactions which are apt to qualify the satisfactions of the night before made themselves felt in Langbrith. He had wanted to talk the satisfactions over with Falk, whom he found in bed, on his return from seeing Hope Hawberk home, with the disaster of meeting her father; but Falk was either sleepy from the fatigues of the evening, or cynical from the excess of its pleasures, and would not talk. He met Langbrith’s overtures to a confidence with a prayer for rest, with a counsel of forgetting, with an aspiration for help in his extremity against him from the powers which he did not often invoke. Langbrith was obliged to go to bed himself, without the light of Falk’s mind on the things which kept him turning from side to side till well towards morning. Then he slept so briefly that he woke to hear Falk still asleep in the next room, and went down alone to his breakfast.
He found his mother in the library ready to join him, and he said, rather crossly, that they would not wait for Falk, who would anyway not want anything but coffee. At first, it seemed as if he would himself not want anything else, but after he had drunk a cup he helped himself to the steak which his mother refused, and then to the rice-cakes, which Norah brought in relays, till he said, “I sha’n’t want any more, Norah,” and then she ceased to bring them, and shut the door into the kitchen definitely after her in going out.
If Mrs. Langbrith expected her son to begin by saying something of the pleasure she had tried to give him the night before, she was destined to disappointment, less, perhaps, from his ingratitude than from his preoccupation. “Mother,” he asked, in pouring the syrup over the last relay of cakes that Norah had brought, “do you know whether there was ever anything unpleasant between Dr. Anther and my father?”
She caught her breath in a way that was habitual with her at any sort of abruptness, and had a moment of hesitation in which she might have been deciding what form of evasion she should employ. Then she asked, “Why, James, what made you think so?”
“Something — nothing — that happened, or didn’t happen, last night, after you left us smoking in the dining-room.” Langbrith frowned, in what was resentment or what was perplexity. “It might have been my fancy, altogether. But he seemed to receive a suggestion I made very dryly, very coldly. I had always supposed they were great friends.”
Mrs. Langbrith quelled her respiration into long, smooth under-breaths, and said nothing.
Langbrith went on. “I had been thinking of something I meant to mention to you first — putting up a medallion of my father, with some sort of inscription, in the façade of the library, and last night I happened to come out with the notion in the course of some general talk, and Dr. Anther received it so blankly that I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt.”
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Langbrith said, with a drop of her eyes, “he didn’t take it in.”
“That was what I have been trying to think. People began to come for the dance just after that, and the subject couldn’t go any further. But, before Judge Garley and Mr. Enderby, Dr. Anther’s blankness had time to be painful. Well!” he broke off from the affair. “He may not have taken it in, as you say.”
Mrs. Langbrith rubbed her hand nervously up and down on the smooth, warm handle of the coffeepot, in the struggle with herself, rather than with her son, which was renewed whenever it came to any sort of question of his father between them. She was long past the superstition of her husband’s right, through the mere fact of his death, to her silence, her forbearance. Except for their son, she would have been willing that he should be known to the world as he was known to her and to Anther. But with reference to the dead man’s son, it still seemed to her that the truth would be defamation, as much as if his memory were really pure and holy. It always came to some sort of evasion. But this morning, somehow, it did not seem to her as if she could consent to that any longer. It was on her tongue to say, No, his father and Dr. Anther were not friends at last, and give, swiftly and unsparingly, the reasons why they could not be. But when she spoke, she got no further than saying, and it was with tremendous effect that she got so far from her wonted reserve, “If you think there was ever anything unpleasant between them, why don’t you ask Dr. Anther himself?”
There was a desperate challenge in her eyes, which she would have been miserably glad to have him see there, if only some counter of his would then push her past the silence which she could never traverse of herself alone. But he was looking down into his cup, and he did not see what was in her eyes. He stirred his coffee, and said: “It was not serious enough for that. Very likely it wasn’t anything at all. He may not have been giving the matter close attention, or he may have had something else on his mind. Doctors often have, I suppose; or he may have been vexed at something in my manner — what Falk calls my patronizing. Possibly he was thinking from his knowledge of my father that such a thing would be distasteful to him. But he might have left it all to me. Well, it doesn’t really amount to anything.”
She drew a long, deep breath, in the desperate relief of postponement, and he looked up affectionately. “It’s all a very old story for you, mother, and you can’t take much pleasure in knowing how the evening went off. You did manage it wonderfully.”
She flushed at his praise. “I tried to carry out your instructions.”
“You bettered them. It was a great little triumph. Don’t you think people enjoyed it?”
“Yes, I think so. But if you enjoyed it, that is quite enough for me.”
“Oh, for you, mother! But I’m unselfish enough for you to wish the rest had a good time. I thought the girls all looked very pretty, and they behaved prettily, too, which doesn’t always follow. Country girls — village girls — don’t always know the difference between being lively and being rowdy. I’m bound to say that sometimes city girls don’t either. The latest blossoming of buds in Boston — well! Don’t you think Hope is very beautiful?”
He seemed quite in good humor, now, and was smiling retrospectively. His mother said, from that remote caution, doubtless, which is in every woman where her son’s relations with other women are concerned, “She is a very good girl.”
Langbrith laughed out. “Well, I wasn’t thinking about the goodness, exactly! But I dare say she is good. What I’m sure of, though, is that she’s stunning. Mother!”
“Well, James?”
Langbrith’s face, so like her own face, in its contour and features, flushed as hers always did with any strong feeling; but whatever his feeling was, he did not put it into the words which followed as from a second impulse. He gave himself time to lose his flush, and to knit his brows, which approached very nearly together, before he asked, “How long has her father been an opium fiend? I mean, how long have people known that he eats opium?”
“A good many years, I’m afraid.”
“As long back as to my father’s time?”
“Yes — quite. Why, what makes you ask?”
“Oh, I saw him last night when I went home with Hope.”
“I thought he was away at the Retreat.”
“It seems not. At any rate, he was at home, and she didn’t seem surprised at his being there. It isn’t
like alcoholism, is it? It doesn’t make him violent? So that he ever hurts them?”
“Oh no, not at all. Did Hope seem troubled?”
“No. She slipped into the house behind him, when he came out to the gate to talk to me. He was disposed to be rather expansive. Just in what way do you understand that he has been an affliction to them?”
“He has kept them poor.”
“Well, that might be remedied. And it isn’t the worst thing that could happen. A great many people are poor and happy. You don’t mean that they’re ever in anything like want?”
“Oh no,” Mrs. Langbrith sighed. “He has some of his inventions in the hands of other people, who pay him a percentage on them, and it is secured so that it goes to his family, instead of to him. The worst of him is that they can’t put the least dependence on him. They can’t trust anything he says. He is very kind to them when he is with them, and he is proud of Hope. But they can’t believe a word from him.”
“He got off twenty inventions to me, in as many sentences, while we stood talking over the gate. I had a notion of something of the kind you say. Doesn’t he ever blunder into the truth? He said my father and he used to be great chums. Was there nothing in that?”
“They were friends at one time, certainly.”
“Until he began to give way to all kinds of invention. Then, of course, it had to come to an end. Well, it’s interesting to know that he can sometimes make a straight statement. Don’t think I don’t feel the awfulness of it, mother. I do, and I pity Hope, and I can understand how she can’t help thinking that she is put wrong by it with — people. I suppose it’s that that makes her a little defiant, a little doubtful of — Have you ever, or has she ever, mentioned the subject?”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 795