Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  What did avail him in the course he must pursue was his sense of professional duty; amid all the moral confusion, that was clear. He ought to have no question but of the recovery of his patient, and he tried to fix his mind upon this, and not let it stray to any question of consequences. He did his best to keep his study of the case physiological, and not to concern himself with those psychological aspects which Hawberk himself found more interesting, and which he was fond of turning to the light in his visits to his physician. With his escape from the terrors of his opium nightmares, he found a philosophic pleasure in noting facts from which even the physician was aware of shrinking.

  Once, towards the end of summer, when they had been “taking stock,” as Hawberk called it, of his symptoms, and he was exulting in the reduction of his laudanum to the equivalent of three grains of morphine a day, he said: “The most curious thing about it is that I seem to be doing a sort of Rip Van Winkle act, and waking out of a dream of twenty years or so. It’s a dream that’s been going on steadily all the while that those little one-horse nightmares have been cavorting round, with green dwarfs on their backs, and playing the devil generally; and this steady dream has had a good genius in it that I’m beginning to have my doubts about, now that I’m waking up. It seems to me that Royal Langbrith wasn’t such a friend of mine as I’ve been trying to make out. What do you think? Or did I put this up on you once before?”

  “Not just in so many words.”

  “Well, I wasn’t certain. Royal Langbrith seems to have a better grip as a good genius when I’ve been dipping into the laudanum pretty freely than he does when I’ve kept to the medicine and the tonics. I have my ups and downs about him. But what do you think of him in the capacity of a good genius?”

  “As I told you before, Hawberk, that’s something you’ve got to work out for yourself.”

  “And if I’ve worked it out that he was an infernal scoundrel, and was ready to say so, what are the chances that folks would believe it?”

  “The chances would be against you, with your past as an opium-eater.”

  “They could say it was another of my pipe-dreams?”

  “You would have to bring the strongest sort of proof.”

  “With every one?”

  “What makes you think now that you were mistaken about him before?”

  “Look here, Doct’ Anther, what do you think about Royal Langbrith?”

  Anther suddenly perceived that he had a duty towards Hawberk not contained in the duty of a physician to his patient: the duty one has to a man whom one knows to have been wronged. “I?” he hesitated. Then he plunged. “I think he was an infernal scoundrel!”

  Hawberk laughed queerly. “Don’t you know he was?”

  “Yes, I know he was.” The truth was open between them, and each was astonished at the effect the open truth had on himself.

  “What,” Hawberk parleyed, with a smile as queer as his laugh, “should you say we’d ought to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Anther candidly avowed. “Once I should have known.”

  “So should I.” And now Hawberk roared with pleasure. “But I guess that devil has got us now. I’ve seen the time when I wanted to go into the cemetery and dig him up and burn him, but I don’t know as I do now. What do you say, Doct’ Anther? Let by-gones be by-gones, as the fellow said about his old debts when he started in to make some new ones? Still, it does gravel me when I think of that tablet in the front of the library. I was looking at it as I came along down. Kind of pathetic, too, when you think of Jim. How did they ever keep him in the dark about his father?”

  “It happened naturally enough. It rested with his mother; and, when the time came for him to know the facts, the time for her to tell them was past.”

  “I see. A good deal as it is with me now. You might almost say that devil had planned it out to have his boy make it up with my girl, so as to stop my mouth for good and all. First off, after I lost my wife, I used to think I should like to make him suffer for the lies he threatened me with. I wanted to kill him. Well, what’s the use? Somehow, I don’t feel that way now. I don’t want to revenge myself, and I don’t believe she’d want me to revenge her. Curious!” Hawberk reflected, with a pause, in view of the interesting predicament. After a while he said, “How that devil must have chuckled when he saw me up there, with the other leading citizens that day, dedicating that tablet to his memory! But, Doct’ Anther, there’s something I can’t get through me. I can understand why I should be there. I was game for anything, when I was filled up with laudanum; but I don’t see how you came to be celebrating the life, death, and Christian sufferings of Royal Langbrith. Never did you any harm, did he?”

  “Not while he lived,” Anther said.

  “Kind of fetched you a back-hander from the grave? Well, I don’t want to ask you what it was, but I should like to ask how you came, knowing all you did about him, to let Judge Garley and Dr. Enderby in for their share in the proceedings. They any notion of the peculiar virtues of the deceased?”

  A painful flush overspread Anther’s face. “I felt it my duty to tell Judge Garley as soon as I found that the scheme had taken shape in James’s mind, and he held the legal view of it. He was duly warned, and I have nothing to blame myself with there. I don’t feel so easy about Dr. Enderby. I am afraid I let a personal motive influence me in withholding the truth from him until it was practically too late for him to withdraw. I can’t decide how much he wished to spare me in arriving at the conclusion he did. He agreed substantially with Garley that no good could come of exposing Langbrith at this late day, and much harm might come. Besides, James was to be considered.”

  “Ah!” Hawberk said. “That’s where I come in. What about James? Hadn’t he ought to know about it? Hadn’t I ought to have it out with him before he marries a daughter of mine?”

  “Dr. Enderby thought that no one should tell him now; that no one could, without interfering with the order of Providence, without forcing God’s purposes, as he put it. The truth could come out fully only when it could come out naturally, necessarily, inevitably.”

  Hawberk fetched a long, deep sigh of relief. “Well, that lets me out. I was feeling my way in that direction, I guess. I guess Doct’ Enderby is right. Any rate, I’m going to let the thing rest for the present. I’m satisfied with what I’ve got. It wouldn’t help me any, and it wouldn’t help Hope, if the whole thing was out. Let the damned thing be, I say, and that’s what I understand Doct’ Enderby says: maybe not just in the same words. I don’t know as I should exactly want Hope to marry Jim Langbrith, without he had been told something about it — say enough to understand that there wa’n’t any flies on me when I was put out. That’s only fair to Hope; I don’t care for myself. But if there’s an order of Providence, I’m willing to wait for the procession. Yes, I’m willing to wait and see if there is any procession. If there ain’t, it’ll be time enough to start one. Well, Doct’ Anther,” Hawberk said, putting out his hand to the doctor as he rose, “I don’t want to holler before I’m out of the woods, but as far as I’m a judge, you’ve saved me, body and soul. I don’t know how you feel, but I should be glad to swap my feelings for yours, whatever they are. Yes,” and Hawberk broke down with his laugh from the height of sentiment he had reached; “I don’t know but I’d be willing to swap Royal Langbrith’s feelings for yours, this minute.”

  Anther could not refuse to join in his laugh, but he felt it right to put in a word of caution. “We mustn’t brag about your case. But I’ll say that I’ve hopes of you that I never had before. It now rests with you, mainly. If we pull through together, I’ll be glad to swap feelings with you. We won’t say anything about Langbrith; he mightn’t be willing to trade.”

  “Not without some boot, you may bet,” Hawberk shouted, with supreme joy in the joke, as he went out of the doctor’s door, where the doctor stood looking after him, not unhappy for himself, as he ought logically to have been in contrasting his hopeless life with the life that wa
s beginning anew so hopefully for Hawberk, and with something of the peace that passes understanding in his heart.

  XXXI

  JOHN LANGBRITH continued to talk of going away. Upon the inspiration of meeting an old acquaintance whom he asked where he had been keeping himself of late, and who answered that he had been in Japan, John Langbrith began to think of going round the world, as a little experimental journey, since a man could go to Japan and back without being noticed. He asked Anther what he thought of circumnavigating the globe as a remedy for nervous dyspepsia, and the doctor told him he did not think it would be bad. Then John Langbrith said he had half a notion to go out to Paris, and see James; there had never been much affection between them, but John Langbrith considered that James could get him a comfortable boarding-place, where he could stay while he was picking out some German spring to go to more permanently. He asked Anther if he did not think some of those German springs would be good for him. Again-Anther said that he did not think it would be bad; and this suggested giving Saratoga a trial. John Langbrith could go to Saratoga for a week before the season ended, and he shaped his business so that he could put it in the hands of a young subordinate, with instructions to reach him by telegraph if needed, for he could return at a second’s notice; and he actually went. At Saratoga he drank impartially of all the waters, at all hours of the day, without regard to diet, and came home worse, if anything, than he went, but somehow with a sense of renewed energy.

  He took hold with so much force that, before the snow flew, he had, as he phrased it to Anther, got round to a little back of where he started. Then the doctor indulged a sentiment of something like poetic justice, in suggesting a means of relief for John Langbrith from one side of his work, and of benefit for another patient.

  “Why don’t you split up your responsibility?” he asked. “Shoulder the business half yourself, and let Hawberk look after the manufacturing. He needs something to help keep him out of mischief, and he is able now to take hold of the paper-making and run it as well as ever he did. He hasn’t forgotten how to use his own inventions, I guess.” John Langbrith’s jaundiced eyes emitted a yellow light of appreciative relish. “Lord! Make Royal turn in his grave — what there’s left of him to turn! Do you mean to say you could put any dependence on Hawberk?”

  “Why not? It would be merely a mechanical exercise of his faculties, and it would occupy him and keep his mind off the opium.”

  “Lord!” John Langbrith said again; and after a moment’s muse he said, “Send him round,” and so took himself away with a galvanic activity that supported him in his automatic progress towards the mills.

  Hawberk had much the same sardonic pleasure as Langbrith had shown at the notion of his being reinstated in his old charge; but it was sweetened to something better by the virtues of temperament in him. “Now, Hope,” he bade his daughter, after the first day’s experiment had justified the confidence with which he entered on his work, “you write to James about this. He’ll like to hear about it, and he’ll like to hear about it from you. And you tell him it was Doct’ Anther’s idea. He’d ought to like that, too, and the doctor’d ought to have the credit of it, anyway. If I should make a slump, later on, I’ll take the credit of that. But I guess there ain’t going to be any slump.”

  The few spectators of Hawberk’s experiment who could witness it with a fully comprehensive intelligence of the case regarded it according to their respective natures. To the community at large, it had the interest of something miraculous — something between rising from the dead and returning cured from an inebriate asylum. If anything could have rendered Hawberk a more dramatically notable member of society than he had been as an opium eater of twenty-five years’ standing, it was his novel quality of reformed opium-eater. This gave him a claim upon the wonder of every stranger who came to Saxmills, and it conferred the right on every citizen to point him out to the sojourner in his going and coming. The fascination of the fact extended itself to Hope, when she happened to be seen, and to the house where the Hawberks lived.

  The general belief was that the thing would not last; and this was the particular belief of Judge Garley, who owned his scepticism to Dr. Anther, with some tendency to an amiable criticism of Anther’s share in the affair. He had seen so little of reform, in his acquaintance with the law, he said, that he was shy of it wherever he saw it. But he was willing to give it time; it never took much time. Perhaps, though, he suggested, this was a case not so much under the law as under the gospel. If that was so, he would like to know if the doctor really believed in the supernatural.

  “No,” Anther said, “only in the natural.” And this was, substantially, the answer which he opposed to Mrs. Enderby’s secret wistfulness regarding a fact which she beheld as with clasped hands, uncertain how, as a church-woman, she ought to feel towards miracles post-dating those of Scripture. She would have liked to feel the hand of God in the tardy and partial retribution of a man cruelly wronged; and it is doubtful if she thought the rector quite level with his spiritual opportunities in his preference of Dr. Anther’s theory, that the unexpected was one of the things always to be looked for in the practice of medicine. What measurably consoled her was the tender seriousness of her husband in the whole matter — the brotherly affection which he showed Hawberk in the relation which he was able to form with him, as a man doing a man’s part in the world’s work after long uselessness, and the delicacy with which he forbore to recognize that there was anything novel in this performance of duty by Hawberk. She was peculiarly touched when he proposed that they should have Hope and her father to supper, and she promised that she should be forever ashamed that she had let her husband think of it first.

  Mrs. Enderby atoned, as far as she could, by asking Mrs. Langbrith and Dr. Anther, but neither of them could come, and she wasn’t sorry that they had the Hawberks alone; with retrospective prevision she perceived that anything else would have been overdoing it. She found Hawberk very entertaining. He talked frankly of getting back to his old work in the mill, and he tried to make her understand an invention he had hopes of perfecting for the “Dandy Roll,” as he called it, so that the water-marking of paper could be done at an immense saving of time and money. He explained to her that the words, or designs, to be water-marked had now to be put in by hand with bits of fine wire, and sewed on a cylinder with fine metallic thread; but he was trying to make a Dandy Roll on which the design could be changed as easily as if it were a section of type in a printer’s form. It was very luminous while he talked, but it all faded away afterwards, and left in Mrs. Enderby’s intelligence only the words “Dandy Roll,” which had a queer fascination, together with a sense of Hawberk’s dignity and enthusiasm about it.

  Hope was gay, as always; but it seemed to Mrs. Enderby that she was not so gay as she had sometimes seen her, when she had far less reason to be so. There was a shadow of anxiety in her beauty which Mrs. Enderby wondered never to have found there before, and a sound of anxiety in her lovely tones unheard before. She thought she could see the girl closely following all her father did and said; but perhaps it was only the effect in her of hopes not cherished till now, naturally betraying themselves in anxieties. As a matter of fact, Hope had no reason to feel anything but joy in her father’s restoration to his old usefulness. There was no poison of a gratified vengeance in her heart, for it was agreed almost tacitly between Hawberk and Anther that no good could come of her knowing, for the present at least, the outrage of the past. “Time enough,” her father had gone so far as to say, “for Hope to be brought into all that when we see that it’s got to come out generally. I don’t know as I should feel just right about letting her keep on with Jim, if she was one to blame a man for what she has to suffer instead of for what he has done. Any rate, till we see our way to telling Jim, I guess we’d better keep dark with Hope, heigh?”

  Whatever might have been the full mind of Dr. Anther, he assented to Hawberk’s decision, though he had to hold to it against counter reasoning tha
t searched his deeper nature or his complexer conscience. It was not finally strange to him that this reasoning should have come from one whose peace was more intimately involved than that of any one but Hope herself. Anther must long ago, if it had not been for his tenderness of her, have owned that Mrs. Langbrith had shown a moral cowardice concerning her son, which was hardly less than a culpable weakness; bat he defended her to himself, because he perceived that weakness could never be culpable. He might as well blame any of the feeble creatures which she made him think of for not being strong, and he was not ready with praise for the unexpected force which she showed, where he took her weakness for granted. He merely reflected that he had not taken into account the pity of women for women, when one of them has been able to put herself perfectly in another’s place, and to ignore in behalf of their sex’s helplessness the other claims of nature. A sense of this awed him at Mrs. Langbrith’s refusal to acquiesce in Hawberk’s notion of what was best to be done in regard to Hope. At first, she had seemed to acquiesce in it, as something that superiorly concerned the father and the daughter. Then one day, suddenly, she went to Anther, and, not finding him, she left a message of peremptory entreaty for him; and they found themselves together, in the early falling twilight of an autumn day, in the dim parlor where their middle-aged drama had already seemed to play itself out.