Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Dr. Anther said he told Judge Garley and Mr. Enderby. I shouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Enderby knows too, but I don’t believe Mrs. Garley does. Mr. Hawberk did. And your Uncle John. I guess that’s all.”

  “And now everybody must know! I will begin with Hope.”

  His mother said nothing to this; it was as if she considered it his affair, in which she had no longer any part. She sat awhile, but not apparently for further speech with him. Then she rose and took her lamp. “I guess I will go to bed, now.” She moved absently towards the door. She turned, and came back to light another lamp, which stood ready on a table. “I was leaving you in the dark—”

  “I would rather,” he broke out. “Don’t light it! I can find my way. Good-night, mother!”

  She looked at him, faltering, and then she stooped and kissed him on the forehead, and left him sitting in the dark. He realized that he was sitting before his father’s portrait, and that it had been witness of the scene which had passed. He mutely said to it, “ I must begin to undo.”

  He sat through the night, and in the morning, Norah returning to the house, and letting herself in with a latch-key at the front door, woke him from the drowse he had fallen into, and after his bath forced him to drink the coffee she had brought him in the dining-room. She was very gentle with him, and he with her, like people sharing the sorrow of the same house of mourning, but beyond the exchange of a few questions and answers about his voyage home they did not speak till he said, “ What did my mother mean, Norah, about having just got back here? Has she been out of the house?”

  “And didn’t she tell you? We all been up at the doctor’s keepin’ house there, and doin’ for him; me and Mary and your mother, ever since it was sure he was goin’ to be bad. I thought some one would be writin’ to you!”

  “No,” Langbrith answered, briefly.

  “Miss Hope was with us, too, some of the time, and Mrs. Enderby. But it was all no use, as far as the doctor went. He didn’t know one from another, after the first day or two. Mary has got ye some rice-cakes, Mr. James. Won’t ye have anny?” — .

  Langbrith was pushing back his chair. “No, I don’t want anything more, Norah. I’ll be back before long; tell my mother, when she comes down.”

  “And I hope, then, she won’t come down soon, if she’s sleeping. It’s more than she’s done for the last week.”

  He went away with the trivial sense of Norah’s Yankee correction in her Irish parlance, which he did not remember to have noted before, and he had no question of going directly to find Hope at eight o’clock in the morning.

  She was waiting for him, even then, though it could not be said that she was expecting him. He had figured holding himself from her out of duty to her, but they were in each other’s arms before he could help it. In that mutual transport, and while he still pressed her close to him, she divined his constraint, and asked, vividly, “What is the matter?”

  “I want to tell you, but I don’t know how,” he began.

  “Well, don’t mind now,” she said, with the first gleam of her inextinguishable gayety. “Do it anyhow,” she added. “There isn’t anything I can’t bear now — now you’re here.”

  “Oh, Hope, dearest!”

  “Is it something dreadful? something about us?”

  “It’s about your father” — she pulled herself away, he felt indignantly—” and mine. I should think I was dreaming, but I know I’m awake for the first time in my life. Every one must know the truth, but I must begin with you.”

  “What do you mean, James Langbrith?” she demanded, severely. And he found the strength of despair.

  “My father was not what I believed. He was a man that — that — wronged every one he had to do with. He wronged your father so cruelly that he drove him to the opium.”

  “Your father? Mine? Why, you must be crazy!”

  “If you say that you will make me so. But I am perfectly sane at last. Uncle John told me about it yesterday coming up from New York, and I’ve come the first thing this morning to tell you. I told mother last night that I was coming to release you, and to give back all that my father had stolen — stolen! — from yours. It makes me feel as if I had stolen you.”

  “Now, James Langbrith,” she broke out upon him from her bewilderment, “you just stop being silly, and tell me exactly what you’re talking about.” She took his hand, and pulled it vehemently while she fixed him with her eyes.

  He began again, and now he told her the greater part of the story that John Langbrith had vindictively poured out upon him. He could not bring himself to speak of his father’s hidden life; the innocent shame that was between them forbade that; but, somehow, he possessed her of all else that he knew, while she kept clutching his hand convulsively, and pulling herself to him. “This has been my home-coming. I — didn’t sleep last night, and I’m rather broken up, or else I could have prepared you—”

  “Oh, you poor thing!” She put forward her left hand and passed it over his reeking forehead, as if he were her child, in the divine mother-pity which is in a woman’s heart even for her husband or her lover. “You are the injured one, kept in the dark so, all your life.”

  He tried to resist her compassion, but his head fell upon her breast. “It had to be so. And now,” he said, “the most I can do is to make restitution of what you have been robbed of, and give you back yourself.”

  “Oh, how ridiculous!” she said, with a bewitching inadequacy, while she smoothed his hair with her hand. “Do you suppose father would want you to do that? And I won’t have myself back, as you call it! What would I do with myself, if I had it?” she added. “Now you be still, and let me talk awhile. I don’t believe it’s as bad as your Uncle John says, and, if it is, it don’t make any difference now. It’s all past and gone, isn’t it? I guess father got the fun out of his inventions, even if somebody else got the money. He was so happy this last year that it would have made up for anything. I do believe that he couldn’t have enjoyed it so much if it hadn’t been for what went before. He never said a word to me to show that he felt injured, and he liked you, James; he was proud of you, and he believed in what you were trying to do, over there, even when I couldn’t, always. Father was a genius, I think. Don’t you?”

  “Yes—”

  “Well, then, he had his good time as it went along. He took it with him, as you may say. And as far as I’m concerned, and that restitution of me that you talk about, I guess we’ll just have me in the family.”

  If his despair had been what he thought it, he could not have resisted her sweetness, her greatness; he could not have denied himself the pardon and the blessing it assured him. But he could not speak, and a little hurt at his silence stole into her drolling voice.

  “Still, if you don’t want me—”

  “Oh, my dearest!” he cried out. “What are you saying?” and once more they took each other into a long embrace that said everything which they had both vainly tried to put into words. When they were so far parted that he could look into her eyes, he said, “How strange you are, Hope!”

  “Am I? Well, that’s what Dr. Anther used to insinuate, so it’s a compliment that I’m used to. He seemed to think it was all right, even if you don’t.”

  “I? Oh, Hope!”

  “Well, some people, then. If they were in your place, they would say that it was very queer I shouldn’t act more as if I felt father’s going. And we haven’t spoken of it; poor father! What would you say if I said sometimes I was glad of it? He was well when he went, and he hadn’t touched a drop of laudanum for months and months. But I never felt sure about it, and I don’t believe Dr.

  Anther did, and when I think how he used to suffer — well!” She was one of the women who rain and shine together, and now the tears fell over her pathetic smile.

  “I know,” he gulped.

  “Sometime I’ll tell you all about him, but not now. And I’ll tell you about Dr. Anther. He was the best man that ever lived. Are you glad that you went
home that night and took it back, with your mother?”

  “It’s what gives me the only courage I have left.”

  “Well, I’d rather hear you say that than that I gave you courage,” she said; but he could see that she was a little jealous of the help of even a good conscience, and he answered, “You’re my Hope.” She laughed into a sob, and then laughed out of it. “Then you must be equal to seeing grandmother. Come in and speak with her.”

  They had been sitting in the dim little parlor, and now Hope led him into the dining-room, where Mrs. Southfield was grimly chastizing the breakfast-table for the disorder in which Hope had left it when she flew to let Langbrith in at the front door. She paused with a plate in her hand, and transferred her fierceness to Langbrith’s face. “Here’s James, grandmother,” said Hope, recklessly; “can’t you stop and shake hands with him?”

  “I don’t know,” the old woman said, “as I want to shake hands with any of his tribe.”

  “Not when he’s going to be one of our tribe, grandmother? That’s what he says he is?”

  “I wouldn’t trust anything a Langbrith says,’ Mrs. Southfield returned, with impartiality.

  “Well, then, it’s what I say, too. Just shake hands, anyway,” Hope bade her cheerfully, and, after her grandmother had wiped her hand on her apron and given it to Langbrith, the girl pursued, “Well, now, that’s settled”; and when she had drawn him out of the room again by the hand that was still finding itself in his, she suddenly asked him, “Did you like it?” and at his stare she added, “The way grandmother welcomed you?”

  “It was what I deserved,” he answered, stonily.

  “No, it wasn’t, but it’s what you’ll get if you tell everybody about your father. Will you do it? Can you?”

  “I will, whether I can or not.”

  “I don’t like that hard look in your face,” she said, with a criticism that seemed general rather than special; then, with special application, she said, “It makes me afraid of you. I wonder if you’ll be stubborn.”

  “Don’t you want me to be firm in the right?”

  “Yes,” she sighed, “if you know what the right is.”

  He looked at her, perplexed. “Have you told any one else? — or no, you said you wanted to tell me first. Are you going to tell other people right away?”

  “Can it be known too soon?” he demanded, gloomily. “ I should like to stand by Dr. Anther’s open grave and proclaim it, and take my father’s shame on me before them all.”

  She only said, “Oh!” with so little liking for the imaginary spectacle that he had to brace himself for the effort of going on.

  “That tablet must come down out of the library as publicly as I put it there. I must tell the whole community the facts of my father’s life, so far as they can be decently known. I must own the wrongs he did, and ask any man who has a grievance against him to come forward and let me right him so far as I can.”

  “It sounds like a play, doesn’t it?” she said, with a smile that was somehow loving as well as mocking. “Anybody can see that you will know how to write plays.” At sight of the dismay in his face, she turned wholly serious. “James, you are crazy! Don’t you see that it wouldn’t do?”

  “Why not?” he faltered.

  “Because it is too late! You would just disgrace yourself and not help anybody. It would make the greatest scandal! And what good would it do?”

  “That is not the question.”

  “Yes it is, James; and if we are going to bear this together—”

  “What have you to do with it?”

  “Well, if I don’t take myself back, I should say I had full as much to do with it as you!”

  He stood daunted by what had not occurred to him before, and he could not answer her anything.

  “Now do you understand?” she triumphed, tenderly. “I guess if it was my father that suffered the most I have the right to say the most; and I don’t believe I should like to have everybody know the kind of family I was marrying into. Why, if grandmother treats you the way she does because she felt it in her bones about your father, what would she do when all the neighbors knew it, and it got into the papers? Think what Jessamy Colebridge would say; and Susie Johns!”

  He knew that she was entreating him lovingly as well as mockingly, and though it was sweet, yet he could not make sure of the reality of what was so opposite to the picture he had carried night-long in his mind of her instantly agreeing with him, and supporting him in the ordeal he proposed to himself, in the event of her refusing his renunciation. “I don’t understand you, Hope,” he hesitated.

  “Yes, you do, James Langbrith!” she retorted. “You see that I’ve got just as much to do with this as you have. Don’t you suppose,” she softly reproached him, “that I know how you feel, and how proud I am of you for it? But I’m not sure about it — I’m not sine it’s right; and I’m not going to let you do it on your own responsibility, if I have any say in it. And I have, haven’t I?”

  “Why, surely! If I hadn’t been so blindly selfish I should have seen that without your telling »» me.

  “I will settle it about your selfishness some other time. It’s my selfishness now. This is something we can’t decide between us. Do you know what I was just thinking?”

  “Yes,” he huskily responded. “That we could leave it to Dr. Anther.”

  “Yes!” she said, solemnly.

  “I am glad you knew. Who else is there?”

  “My mother—”

  “We mustn’t put anything on her. But she had a right that you should think of her. Well?”

  “Uncle John would be no use.”

  “No.”

  “Judge Garley?”

  “Of course you don’t mean it. He is a good man, but he would just laugh at us. Why are we beating about the bush so? We must go to Dr. Enderby!”

  “Yes, I really thought of him next, when I remembered that Dr. Anther—”

  “I knew you did. Well, we ought to go to Him at once. Don’t let us hesitate. Wait till I get my hat.”

  She went up the cramped stairs, apparently into that chamber out of which he had once heard the nightmare groans of her father coming, and before she returned he heard her open some door downstairs, and call cheerfully through it, “Don’t you wash the dishes, grandma. I’ll be back soon,” and she joined him with her face freshened and brightened by the bathing away of her tears.

  Her quick tilting was swifter than his long striding as they descended (he hill-side path towards the rectory, and she chanted to Mrs. Enderby among the flowers beyond the fence with a gayety that she could not quite keep out of her voice, “ How d’ ye do, Mrs. Enderby! Is Dr. Enderby at home?”

  XXXVI

  THE two young people were upon Mrs. Enderby before she could drop her garden-shears and dismiss from her consciousness a prescience of their coming for a purpose she had long associated with them and replace it with a decorous sense of all there was in the circumstances of their lives to banish that from them for the time. She was smiling too radiantly upon Langbrith, she felt, even when she had effected the substitution, but she could not help it. She could only make an apposite reflection on the strangeness of life as she asked him about himself and about his mother, and dedicated some just observations on the sad home-coming this must be for him in the losses which he shared with them all. Then she said, “The doctor is in his study. Won’t you go in?” and offered to remain outside; but Hope said:

  “We want you, too, Mrs. Enderby. It’s something that we want you both to talk with us about; don’t we, James?” she ended, with a deference to him which seemed to Mrs. Enderby very pretty.

  “He is trying to write his sermon — for to-morrow, you know,” she explained more directly towards Hope; but it was now Langbrith who answered:

  “If it is the funeral sermon, what we may have to say will be fit, perhaps.”

  “Oh, he will not mind being interrupted by you, in any case,” she said, with her mind playing mechani
cally away from the occasion to the general duty she had of always sequestering the rector when he was writing.

  After the greeting to Hope and the formalities with himself, Langbrith took the word with a dignity and composure that Mrs. Enderby saw kindle the girl’s eyes with pride in him.

  “I was saying to Mrs. Enderby that I hoped our errand wouldn’t be out of keeping with the subject of your sermon, if you are writing about Dr. Anther. He knew something — something of my — family history which never came to me till yesterday. My ignorance of it was the means of a cruel misconception on my part and of most generous forbearance on his; and it is a question now of what can be done in reparation from me — the sort and measure of it.”

  Langbrith paused, and the rector sat kindly interpreting the young man’s thoughts by the light of his previous knowledge. But it was not for him to forestall the confidence which he felt was about to be offered to him. He merely said, “I could hardly imagine anything you could tell me that would heighten my sense of Dr. Anther’s worth.”

  “Yes, I know that,” the young man assented, with a humility which made the other accuse himself of having not been quite clear. “But before I speak of him, I ought to say that I owe you some reparation. When I asked you to say some words at the dedication of the tablet to my father, I didn’t know that my father — that my father—” He choked. He had easily told Hope, not only because, as she had made him realize, it was as essentially her affair as his, but because, also, there was something in the confession of his father’s iniquity to one so supremely concerned which supported him; but his heart sank with a sense of the common shame awaiting him from the common knowledge, as it intimated itself to him from even such pity as Dr. Enderby’s. He perceived that it was not the victims of his father’s misdeeds that he feared, but the witnesses of these whom his confession would create. Instinctively, he looked towards Hope for help, but she dropped her face, and at the pathos of this Mrs. Enderby addressed a murmur of appeal to her husband.