The figure of a woman, imaginably some patient who had waited for him in vain, slipped from his gate and went down the obscurity of the street, in the opposite direction, as he drove up to Mrs. Burwell’s darkened house. He put his horse and buggy into the bam, and then came round and let himself in at the front door. On the threshold within lay something white, which he felt to be a sealed letter; and, when he had turned up his office lamp, he found it addressed to him, in a hand which he knew. “Dr. Anther,” he read, “I want you should not fail to accept James’s invitation for to-morrow. He is feeling very anxious you should be there, though he will not say so. If you don’t choose to do it for his sake, do it for mine. I would give anything to have you. — AMELIA.”
He turned it over, as people turn letters over, rather when they have got everything out of them than when they have not, and he knew that the woman he had seen coming away from his gate was Mrs. Langbrith. Her anxiety must have been great, to bring her from home so far at that hour, and she must have wished to keep her writing him a secret from her household, if she could not send the letter. She might have hoped to see him, and carried the letter to leave in case she should not find him.
“Why,” he asked himself, bitterly, “should we be doing things by stealth? We hide our affection, as if it were something to be ashamed of. We behave like guilty persons, but you are the most innocent of victims, and I am to blame only for not forcing you to right yourself. I can’t stand it, Amelia!”
XXIV
LANGBRITH had at first meant to dedicate his father’s memorial on grand terms. It had seemed to him not out of scale with the merit of such a man to have the governor and his staff in full uniform present at the ceremony. But a few drops of ridicule sprinkled on the notion by Falk extinguished it, after an angry sputtering; and he reasoned that to confine the civic interest to Saxmills would be to intensify it, and to appeal still more strongly to the local pride. In his illumination, he declined the offer of even a band from the next town, when it was submitted to him through the committee of arrangements, and decided to have no music but such as the fifes and drums of the Saxmills cadets could make in their march through the streets. This, with the singing of the public-school and Sunday-school children, ranked below the platform where the invited guests were to be seated, before and after the unveiling of the tablet, would be tastefully sufficient in Langbrith’s more tempered ideal of the affair.
The cadets looked very well as they paraded, and the children, marshalled by their teachers, looked charming — the larger boys bearing school banners, supported by smaller boys holding the tassels on each side, as they marched to the library and formed themselves in the appointed order. They counted in their number all the children in town, except some inveterate truants in whom the Fourth-of-July excitement was beginning to work, and who opened their celebration at daybreak with the explosion of cannon-crackers. Throughout the morning, the sound of their torpedoes broke upon the more ceremonious sounds of public rejoicing; and, when the procession formed, they made themselves its straggling escort, and followed it in the mixed admiration and derision of boyish outlawry. It had been proposed, at one time, that the mill hands, men and women, should join the procession, in such gala as they chose; but John Langbrith had passively disfavored the plan, which had not found acceptance with the hands themselves. When it was brought to James Langbrith’s knowledge, he decided against it, as something perfunctory and out of keeping with the voluntary spirit of the affair.
Falk, who stayed over the week as Langbrith’s guest, praised his decision as a stroke of surprising wisdom. He mingled with the operatives, in the rear, where they formed the great mass of the spectators, and was able to report to Langbrith a satisfaction with their unalloyed holiday which he was sure they would not have felt in the procession. He himself refused any share in the ceremonies by refusing a seat among the invited guests; and when he was not going about and feeling the public pulse in Langbrith’s interest, he amused himself by making the three young girls under his charge laugh, or try to keep from laughing, at his remarks on the general and personal aspects of the occasion, especially on the activities of Langbrith, as host, and Matthewson, as chief-marshal. Susie Johns was not concerned in either of them, and could laugh at both, without the fond misgiving of Jessamy Colebridge or the perverse delight of Hope Hawberk, as Falk made them note the majesty of Matthewson in ushering the invited guests up the stairs of the platform, and the urbane hospitality of Langbrith in receiving them at the top and appointing them their seats. The girls laughed so much, and Falk kept so grave, that glances of reproval for them and sympathy for him were shot from neighboring eyes, while the band brayed on, and the crowd packed into the square before the library cheered each guest as he mounted and took his place.
They were, first of all, the oldest employés of the Langbrith paper-mills, women as well as men, who were given the seats next the speakers; veterans of the Civil War had the seats behind them; and then the village dignitaries, the selectmen, the high-school principal and the Sunday-school superintendent, with citizens of no official quality, but eminent in business, or entitled to recognition by their age or social standing. Before all sat Judge Garley, Mr. Enderby, Father Cody, the orthodox minister, and John Langbrith. At the last moment, Matthewson was seen receiving Dr. Anther at the foot of the steps, and then Langbrith, with a forward start and a flush of surprise, greeted him at the top. The young man’s face was lighted with a joyful smile as he clung to Anther’s hand and bubbled an incoherent welcome, looking round to see where he should place his father’s old friend. He restrained a movement of Anther towards the rear seats, and led him forward and put him between the judge and the rector, who made room for him with dumb shows of courtesy. The band brayed out afresh, and the general applause of the crowd rose in such personal cheers as: “Hurrah for Dr. Anther!”
“Hurrah for Dr. Anther!” Hope took out her handkerchief and waved it, and then Jessamy and Susie took out their handkerchiefs and waved them. The doctor sat down abashed, and his lowered gaze fell upon the veiled face of a woman sitting in the foremost row of chairs, placed in the little square before the library. At sight of Amelia Langbrith, a sad smile overspread Anther’s reddened visage, which he turned at the slight tumult caused by some unexpected event at the foot of the steps. The tumult passed with the slow mounting of a figure to the platform, and its momentary hesitation at the top; then the gaunt shape and blotched, brown visage, with the deeply sunken eyes, of Hiram Hawberk showed themselves spectrally to the crowd. Inarticulate cries and gasps broke from it, and shaped themselves in derisions like “Three cheers for Hawberk!”
“Hurrah for Hawberk!”
Langbrith turned from whispering to Judge Garley; at sight of Hawberk, he flashed a silencing glance at the crowd, with a scornful lift of his young head, and hurried towards him with outstretched hands. He seized Hawberk’s trembling hand as he had seized Anther’s, and then, placing it under his arm, led him forward. There was no place among the front seats, but every occupant of them rose and offered his place to Hawberk. Langbrith waved the others down, while he spoke to his uncle. Then John Langbrith, chewing the splinter of wood on which he had been sardonically working his jaws from the first, shook hands with Hawberk, and pulled him into his place, where be took Anther’s hand, proffered across their knees, and remained dimly looking out over the people.
“Why, I thought your father wasn’t coming, Hope?” Jessamy Colebridge said.
“I suppose he changed his mind,” Hope answered, quietly. But she dropped her veil as she rose with the rest at the uplifting of Father Cody’s voice in the words of the invocation.
The priest had been chosen for the opening ceremony to satisfy him in certain scruples with reference to his association with the Protestant clergy, which the committee treated with the large indulgence of an underlying indifference in sectarian matters. But afterwards their choice was felt to be almost providential. The dignified form of his words, and th
e sort of sacerdotal authority with which he pronounced them, struck a note fortunate for the after proceedings, which these obeyed. It did not, indeed, form a law for the excursive generalities of the oration which Judge Garley delivered, but it tempered him to perhaps greater simplicity and directness than he would otherwise have had. He paid a tribute both to the secular and sacred character of the priest, which gathered all Father Cody’s parishioners to him, and carried them attentively with him wherever he strayed. But no one followed him so closely, so curiously, as Dr. Anther, who was, as anxiously as he was unwillingly, alert to see what course the legal mind would take among the difficulties so evident to him. It could not be said that Judge Garley made light of the difficulties; lightness was not a thing imaginable of him; but he won his way among them by leaps and bounds, which, if ponderous, certainly got him over the ground, and by turns which, if not agile, were undeniably effective. He made a background of the history of Saxmills, from the earliest colonial period down through the old French War, the Revolution, the last war with Great Britain, and the invasion of Mexico, to the great civil strife for the maintenance of the Union; and then, in the middle distance, he sketched the rise of the manufacturing interests of New England, with their share in the immense expansion of industries throughout the country, after the pacification of the South and the establishment of the great principle of manhood suffrage on the rock of the Constitution. Such, he said, was the time, such the place, such the situation that confronted the man whose far-seeing enterprise had given Saxmills its unsurpassed prosperity, and whose munificence, in one of its many instances, they were tardily recognizing to-day. They all knew who the man was; but what was he?
Anther held his breath as he watched his old friend standing before the impressive canvas he had prepared, and wondered what manner of heroic effigy he would paint upon it. From where he sat, beside Hawberk, feeling the tremor of his limbs when they chanced to touch his own, and breathing the narcotic odors that exhaled from his person, he could not catch the eye of the orator, which presented itself only in profile, as he shook his head in challenge and pounded the air with his fist in accentuation of his appeal. Except that he knew the judge to have justified himself invulnerably through his professional conscience, he might have thought that he kept his face purposely averted, and he held his breath when Garley resumed. “I never spoke with the man. I never saw him. I never heard his name till I came to live among you here. He was no friend of mine, not even my acquaintance, yet from his work I know him.” But when Garley reached the end of his characterization of Royal Langbrith, Anther laughed in his heart, with no wish to utter its bitterness to his old friend, as he resoundingly closed with the words: “Such was the man, such was the character, such was the personality whose counterfeit presentment shall be revealed to us this day, and each day shall show him to others after we are dust, as long as stone and bronze shall endure.”
On that magnificent background the scenic artist had really painted nothing; nothing but what might pass for one enterprising and successful American as well as another: the mere conventional outline of a face or a figure which a thousand names would fit as well as Royal Langbrith’s. He had carefully avoided not only distinctive traits, but he had, with purpose evident enough to Anther, kept a surface as impenetrable as it was shallow. He had given this surface a glare which dazzled the eye and distracted the thought from the performance to the performer; and Anther judged him less and less harshly as he considered that Garley had discharged a duty which he could not shun as harmlessly as it could be discharged. No one but the brother and the widow of Royal Langbrith knew how false an impression he had made; for it could not be said that his narcotized victim realized it, and none save the rector, who was to follow him, knew how false he had been in making it. Anther did not condemn him. Garley, too, was in the grip of that dead hand which seemed to clutch every one by the throat, and his severest feeling towards him was for the deceit which he had practised upon the son of Royal Langbrith. He could see James Langbrith, where he had retired from the platform to the place beside his mother, watching the speaker with what Anther felt a piteous intensity, and hanging upon every empty word. With tender compassion Anther wondered if he felt the hollowness of the tribute paid to his father’s memory. He was touched for that poor, generous boy, and ashamed more than he was amused for his old friend in the success of his fraud. When the applause swept the orator to his seat, and then refluently bore him, bowing and smiling, back to the front of the platform, the young fellow started forward, and, all glowing with tears and smiles, stretched his hand up to the judge, and the judge stooped down to take it. Anther dropped his eyes and hung his head, and he had not the courage to look up again till he heard Enderby beginning, very gravely and measuredly, the address which the dead man was requiring of him, in his turn. Then Anther’s pity was no longer for the trusting boy, but for the good man, compelled to this office, and he wondered how he would reconcile it with his conscience.
Enderby stood clutching the scant lapels of his clerical coat, and looking pale above its black. He said that he had been asked to speak some words concerning the ethical significance of the business they were about, and he would now only suggest a few general notions in regard to the respective attitudes of giver and receiver, in the matter of public benefactions. Such benefactions were likely to be more frequent in the future than in the past, when the town had become debtor to one of its citizens for this library, the most useful of its possessions, and the most sacred, after the houses of God; and they must be more and more impersonally regarded. The town was here in its collective capacity to make acknowledgment of the gift, tardily, it was true, but not the less gratefully; for, in the years that had elapsed, the people of Saxmills had fully experienced the great advantage bestowed upon them. It might, perhaps, have been wished — it might, perhaps, have been more graceful in some aspects if the town itself had offered the memorial it was accepting; but in that case it would have anticipated the act by which the son renewed, as it were, and confirmed the father’s deed. For himself, the rector said, he was more interested in this renewal and confirmation of it, than in the fact of the original gift. It spoke well for the young man whom in different ways they all knew, that he wished to testify his reverence for his father’s memory by doing again one of the best things that his father could have done. In this he had not only testified his reverence to his father’s memory, but had borne important witness to the imperishable vitality of a good deed in this world. It was not only the evil that men do which lived after them, but the good also lived, laying upon the future a more powerful obligation to virtue than any bond to vice that evil could impose. God had apparently willed that the good should continually and eternally show itself, and the evil should hide itself, for evil, brought into the light of day, corrupted, and good, whenever manifest, purified and restored and strengthened all men for good. Such, in fact, was the potency of a good deed that, if done from the most selfish motive, it took no color from the motive. It returned through its beneficent effect upon the world to the God of goodness. But they who were assembled to receive from the son the evidence that he renewed and confirmed his father’s gift to them had really nothing to do with the character of either. They had only to do with the good-will expressed in what was now their joint gift, and they were to honor neither of those men, but only their good deed, which was not of them, but of God. Few present had known the elder of the two; all present had known the younger, and it was he who stood for both before them. Every heart must respond to the impulse which had governed their fellow-townsman in his filial devotion to his father’s memory, and must rejoice with him in the beauty and fitness of the tribute he had paid it. If either were to be known by the other, though it was not necessary, for the present purpose, that either should be known apart from his gift, let the father be inferred from the son, and let them not be separated in the public acceptance of their benefaction.
The rector would have sat down; but
James Langbrith, who had remained on the platform after Judge Garley’s oration, prevented him. He seized Enderby’s hand, and Anther heard him say, while he clung to it, “You have spoken just as I feel my father would have wished you to speak. He was the most reserved, the most impersonal of men, and I thank you, thank you, thank you for him as well as myself.”
“Oh,” the rector groaned, in a sort of protest; but before he could say anything the leading selectman rose in his place and commanded, “Three cheers for both the Langbriths!” James Langbrith stepped forward to acknowledge the applause, and Anther felt Enderby’s eye seek his own.
There was no defiance in the rector’s asking look, but a sort of entreaty, as if for the effect his words might have had with the man who knew how, primarily, they had been spoken to him. Enderby’s back had been turned to Anther while he addressed them to the people, but it had not needed the comment of the speaker’s face to convey all their latent meaning to Anther, whose eyes were as troubled as his own. He put out his hand and sadly pressed the hand of the rector, who miserably smiled a little.
“You did the best that any man could, in the circumstances,” Anther said, under cover of the uproar.
“Now, friends,” said the selectman to the Crowd, when the cheering had died away, “the tablet will be unveiled.”
At the moment James Langbrith stepped back to perform the office, Anther saw Hawberk put something into his mouth and heard him huskily explain, “Thought I might need some, and brought along a little of the gum.”
Langbrith pulled at the cord which had been contrived to separate the white curtains veiling the tablet, and slip them to the sides on the wire from which they hung. The contrivance would not work, though he tugged and twitched, and there began to be some nervous laughing in the crowd, which had its effect with him. He gave an impatient pull and the whole contrivance came away, dropping to the ground behind the platform. A girl’s hysterical cry went up, and the people began to clap and cheer. Langbrith had turned an angry face towards them, but their good-will was so manifest, their laughing had been clearly so helpless from the sense of humor which any unserious mischance appeals to in a crowd, that the anger went out of his face, and he, too, was smiling when the voice of the selectman announcing that the Rev. Mr. Alway would ask a blessing recalled him to the necessity of a more appropriate expression.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 807