Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I see,” Mrs. Crombie said, “and it coincides with your uncle’s view of her.” She turned from Lillias to the young man. “Was it very—”

  Craybourne merely looked unhappy, but Lillias easily answered for him: “They didn’t throw things, as far as he could make out, but anything short of that!”

  Mrs. Crombie remembered the dignity she had lost sight of in her curiosity. “I think there is some mistake. The Mr. and Mrs. Mevison I am speaking of are middle-aged people, and I have asked him to let me bring them over to stay with us. They are not very comfortable at the hotel.”

  “It seems to be rather full,” Craybourne vaguely assented.

  In the presence of a calamity on which Mrs. Crombie put so bold a face, the girl was sobered. “I’ve no idea they are the same people, aunty.” Then she gave way again to the spirit of mischief which her happiness seemed to have awakened in her. “But if they do happen to be, it’s the very contrast you want, to us. If you don’t get somebody of that kind into the house, I don’t see how you are going to live through us. We’re bad enough now, but we’re going to be worse. At least, Mr. Craybourne is.”

  She looked teasingly from her aunt to her lover, and it seemed as if he were not able to gainsay her; as if he had no wish to do so; as if what she said was final wisdom as well as primal love. He was a sight to make another man sick, but his aspect filled Mrs. Crombie with reverence. She was not a ready or epigrammatical woman, but she had the inspiration of answering, “I should be willing to take my chances with you two alone.”

  “Oh, poor aunty!” the girl cried, with a laugh, in which they all senselessly joined.

  Mrs. Crombie moved on towards the ferry, and the young people towards the house. She had met them midway of the avenue, and at its foot Mrs. Crombie turned and looked back towards them at its head; they were turning, too, as well as they could, and she perceived that she had lost the intermediate step towards the closer union which had been represented before by Lillias’s having her hand through Craybourne’s arm.

  VII

  MRS. MEVISON received Mrs. Crombie in her husband’s presence, with the prompt and peculiar smile with which ladies know how to condone men’s clumsy blunders. He was getting lamely up from his newspaper to introduce the two women, when his wife came gracefully forward with outstretched hand, saying, in a sort of tender warble, “Mrs. Crombie?” She had certainly a very winning voice, and her manner was perfection; if it had been less perfect, perhaps it might have been better.

  “Arthur,” she cried to her husband, “do get Mrs. Crombie a chair, and let us all sit down on the veranda here. The best part of these summer hotels is the outside, don’t you think? I was sure you would come, when Arthur told me he had been to look you up, though he always keeps such things as a little surprise for me.”

  Mrs. Mevison was bending and smiling, and sweeping herself into a chair after Mrs. Crombie was seated, and wanting to give her a fan or take something from her, or make her have an easier seat, and ignoring her excuses for Crombie’s failure to come, too, with an angelic amiability which deceived neither of them. They both knew that Mevison had said nothing to his wife about the Crombies’ coming, and they understood that Mrs. Mevison was now taking it out of him for his failure to do so. He cast a certain look upon Mrs. Crombie, as if he would say: “Now, here is your chance to back out of your hospitality. I haven’t said anything about it, and you needn’t.”

  Mrs. Crombie was above any such meanness. “Men are so forgetful!” she joined Mrs. Mevison in politely assuming. Then, for this would not quite do, she said, “They seem to have a passion for surprises, and are always keeping things back to spring them on you.”

  “Mr. Mevison,” his wife said, with an arch glance at him which did not disperse the kind of darkness involving him, “likes to keep them back without springing them on you.” She continued to look tenderly across her shoulder at him while Mrs. Crombie went on, but her jaw was set.

  “Well, I hope you Won’t find this surprise too formidable. It’s merely that I want you to come over and stay with us as long as you meant to stay at the hotel, and as much longer as we can make you. And I won’t take no for answer!”

  “What do you say, dearest?” Mrs. Mevison asked, with melting meekness, in referring the question to her husband. Then she referred his attitude ironically to Mrs. Crombie. “You see what a tyrant I have! I can’t say my soul’s my own in these matters!” she concluded gayly.

  Mevison ignored her in replying to Mrs. Crombie: “I really couldn’t think of our crowding in upon you. We’re very comfortable here, though that has nothing to do with it; and it wouldn’t be fair to sacrifice you to my old friendship with Crombie—” Mrs. Crombie would have lifted her voice in protest; she had indeed got it incoherently up, when Mrs. Mevison cut in under it with a warble of the sweetest caressingness: “Now, dearest! I must, just for once, put in my little plea! I don’t think it at all nice for you to say it’s quite comfortable here as a reason for refusing Mrs. Crombie’s kindness—”

  “I admitted something like that,” he growled, without looking at her.

  She patted the air towards him with a small, glittering, jewelled hand. “Now, now, now! You know I’m not criticising you, love. I simply can’t have Mrs. Crombie misunderstand you. I must have her know that it’s merely your delicacy, and that you’re dying to be with your old friend, for those long, late talks that men can have only when they’ve risen from the same table and are going to bed under the same roof. You must own, now, that I couldn’t keep you from rushing over to Mr. Crombie’s as soon as you had breakfast this morning, and that you’re just dying to accept Mrs. Crombie’s invitation.” She turned vividly to Mrs. Crombie. “That’s the true version, Mrs. Crombie, and I’m going to accept for him.” She warbled down the disclaimer that he tried to make. “We will be in good time for luncheon — half-past one? No, one! — and I will see to having our things sent over later in the day; you needn’t trouble about them! And Mr. Mevison won’t, either! He’s all a man when it comes to packing, though he doesn’t always have the courage of his preferences.”

  She laughed to Mrs. Crombie at the discomfiture and confusion in his face, and Mrs. Crombie, presently getting up to go, with some polite fatuities about being so glad they could come, and all that, Mrs. Mevison rose too, of course, and went over to her husband where he had risen, and grouped herself affectionately with him, laying her pretty hand on his arm, which, while Mrs. Crombie still admired, twitched itself from her as with a nervous impatience.

  They followed Mrs. Crombie down to the foot of the veranda stairs in her going, and there repeated their leave of her. Then Mrs. Mevison tripped girlishly up the stairs, and with a gay cry of laughter ran back into the hotel before her husband.

  Mrs. Crombie walked very soberly home, and, as the sum of her reflections, said to her husband, whom she met in the avenue, going over at last to do the decencies in calling upon his friend: “Well, Archibald, I can’t make her out, and I don’t believe you can. But you needn’t go, now. They’ve accepted, or she has, and they’ll be to lunch. I’m afraid we’re in for something awful.”

  He turned with her. “Why, what makes you think so?”

  “Well, she may be thundering, but she’s no fool.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I couldn’t begin to tell you. We’d better wait and see if you can see. I don’t want to prejudice you against her.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “But this I will say: she’s either the most consummate actress, or the fondest wife, or the most perfect little fiend that I ever did see.”

  “Come! That’s something like impartial treatment. She couldn’t be all three?”

  “She might. But didn’t you always tell me that Mevison was a man of the greatest courage?”

  “He was the cock of the atelier. Was going to fight a duel with one of the Frenchmen, and cowed the fellow out by his choice of revolvers for weapons. He confes
sed that he couldn’t have hit the side of a bam, afterwards.”

  “That is what I always understood. Well!”

  “Do you mean that Mrs. Mevison has taken the pluck out of him?”

  “Not that. But she has bewildered him. She does what she pleases with him, because he can’t follow her. Archibald, I never saw a man that I liked so much! — except you, of course!’’

  “Thank you. I dare say he has his faults. He used to have them; perhaps Mrs. Mevison has reformed him. But I notice that a woman always attributes the fault in these cases to the wife, unless the case happens to be her own. What did you see or hear that made you suspect Mrs. Mevison of not being a saint upon earth?”

  “Well, everything that I heard was in her favor. He seemed very sulky, though he was perfectly polite to me; and perhaps I only fancied what I saw.”

  “What was it?”

  “She laid her hand on his arm, when we all got up, and smoothed it, and suddenly he twitched away, as if something had stung him.”

  “You mean, she pinched him?”

  “I can’t be sure that she did.”

  “And it’s that sort of calamity you’ve asked into our house! Perhaps it would have been as well to wait and make Mrs. Mevison’s acquaintance.”

  “I did it for your sake. I thought you would like to have your old friend here.”

  “I know you did, and I don’t blame you. Well, it will be rather interesting. It will be a show. Poor old Mevison!”

  “Yes, my heart aches for him. Archibald, do you suppose there is much of that kind of misery in the world?”

  “Lots.”

  “Then marriage is a failure!”

  “In those instances. It all comes from their expecting too much of it. I still incline to the theory that Mrs. Mevison is a thundering fool. Well, it will be a good object-lesson for Lillias and her love. It will teach them to go slow in their demands upon each other. I always heard that the Mevisons were furiously in love; and she seems to be in love yet.”

  “Do you call pinching love?”

  “It’s one form of it. It’s the hating and hurting form.”

  “Now, Archibald, you are beginning to be disgusting again.”

  VIII

  MRS. MEVISON made the luncheon go off so nicely that Crombie, at least, began to think his wife’s eyes must have deceived her, and there could have been no pinching or baffling or bewildering on the part of such a woman as she showed herself. She deferred to Mevison in everything; when there was nothing to defer to him in, she invented things. She made Crombie tell her all about Mevison’s life and his in Réné’s atelier; she confessed that she was jealous of everybody who had known her husband before she had, and she said that if Réné had taken girl pupils, she did not know what she should do, so intimately as art students were thrown together.

  “Oh, but he did,” Crombie said.

  “He did? Why, dearest,” she turned to her husband, “didn’t you always tell me that Réné didn’t take girl pupils?”

  “No,” Mevison answered, briefly.

  “How very strange! I must have dreamed it. I knew that I couldn’t bear it if it was so, and so I simply dreamed it wasn’t.”

  She took the able-minded Lillias and her lover into her especial favor, though she extended her favor to the whole household, and there was not a servant whom she came in contact with whose heart she did not make it her business to win. Mrs. Crombie had acquainted her at once with the absorbing psychological situation which Lillias and Craybourne embodied, and extracted from her a warble that was also a crow of sympathetic exultation. “Oh, how perfectly dear! It’s just as if it had been planned for us. Lovers! Arthur and I have never ceased to be lovers. And to think that it should be that delightful young Englishman who has been sitting at our table at the inn! I must tell Arthur? May I?”

  She frankly possessed herself of Craybourne at once, and by her brave unconsciousness defied him beyond his powers to think evil of anything he had seen of her; as to what he had heard he began to doubt that too. While she captured Craybourne with one hand, she playfully threatened Lillias with the other. “Don’t you turn those pretty eyes of yours on my husband, Miss Bellard! I won’t have it! The poor fellow couldn’t stand their fire a half-minute if I were not here; or if Mr. Craybourne wasn’t; he’ll help me save him.”

  She treated Lillias alternately as a chit and as a veteran worldling who knew it all, and whom nothing need be kept from. During the whole of the first day she pretended that the girl was Crombie’s niece, and insinuated a subtle and delicate compassion for Mrs. Crombie in having the burden of her affair in the house, together with the responsibility. When she consented to understand that Lillias was the daughter of Mrs. Crombie’s sister, nothing could exceed the pleasure she had in Crombie’s good nature and her sympathy with Mrs. Crombie’s sense of it. One did so hate to ask things of one’s husband! She had made it a principle to die before letting Arthur do anything for her that she could possibly help. She was struck with fresh wonder at Lillias: her remarkable beauty, which was so different from the ordinary beauty; her grace, which was as wholly her own as if she had invented the idea of grace; her brilliancy, which was so unlike the brilliancy of girls who were thought brilliant in the usual acceptation of the term. She said that Mrs. Crombie must tell her all about Lillias, and she made her tell her at least all she wished to know of the girl’s strange career, her odd notions of independence, how and where she met Mr. Craybourne, and what his credentials were, and how utterly devoted they were to each other. She said that very few Americans would have fallen in love with a girl under such very peculiar circumstances; it was only an Englishman who could do it, and everybody that knew said that Englishmen made the best of lovers and the worst of husbands.

  By this time Crombie wanted to put her out of the house, to throw her into the Saco; and his fury gratified Mrs. Crombie as a generous tribute to her niece. “I don’t like her any more than you do, Archibald,” she said, “but she interests me, and you needn’t feel anxious about Lillias. She can be trusted to take care of herself, when she gets round to it, as the country people say. It’s very sweet of you to think of her, but you mustn’t, dearest, though I appreciate it. Everything is going swimmingly. I’ve given you and Mr. Mevison a chance to bring up your arrears of talk, and I don’t believe they’ll stay long. I noticed this morning when I was in her room that she had hardly hung up a thing; there’s one of her trunks that she hasn’t even unlocked. So you needn’t worry, you poor thing!”

  She put her hand on the gloved hand of Crombie, in which he held the reins of the horse he was driving on an excursion stolen from their guests. She had done her duty in proposing a buckboard that they could all six have driven in; when Lillias declined that, and urged Mr. Craybourne to go, Mrs. Crombie devolved upon a carryall for four, but so forbiddingly that Mrs. Mevison laughed at the notion of Mevison and herself foisting themselves upon their hosts for the only relief they could have from their hospitalities. She said she would make Arthur take her a walk; it was a pity his lameness would not let him do any mountain-climbing; the mountain-climbing there must be so easy.

  She must get Mr. Craybourne and Lillias to take her with them some time; she doted on mountain-climbing.

  Lillias said, gravely, perhaps Mr. Craybourne would take her now; she would stay and see that Mr. Mevison came to no harm while they were gone; but after an infinitesimal moment in which Craybourne manifested a perdurable resolution not to take Mrs. Mevison mountain-climbing, she warbled back, Oh no! She could never leave Mr. Mevison alone while she was enjoying herself; and she warned Lillias against the insidious effect of giving way to the emotions, which was always in danger of becoming such a fixed habit that you had no peace of your life.

  For these reasons the Crombies found themselves driving alone, and quit of the sight of all their guests until, on the homestretch, they arrived at a mowing-piece not far from their cottage, but secluded from the sight of it. There they saw the Me
visons walking together at the farther side of the meadow, and well beyond hearing of their wheels. He had his hands folded on his stick behind him, and was limping along between the hay-cocks which dotted the smoothly cropped stubble, while she playfully came and went, dropping after him, and then passing ahead of him, apparently saying something to him, and either laughing or crying, they could not make out which. Suddenly, she gave a scream of unmistakable rage, with a sort of rush at him; then he was gripping her wrists and vividly expostulating with her.

  “Oh, Archibald!” Mrs. Crombie wailed: “Do you, can you, believe she meant to—”

  “Not a doubt of it!” In his transport, Crombie gave a cut of the whip to the horse, which, after a moment of astonishment at treatment so unprecedented, bolted into a short trot that carried them temporarily past the belligerents. As soon as the horse slowed up, Crombie looked back round the side of his buggy.

  “Can you see them?” his wife palpitated.

  “Yes, and she’s walking beside him as peaceably as a lamb. Well, upon my soul, if she isn’t waving her handkerchief to me!”

  “Then,” his wife commanded, “take off your hat and bow, so that she’ll think we haven’t seen them. Smile!”

  “Not much!” Crombie said, grimly, without doing either, and this forced his wife, at great personal inconvenience, to get up and wave her handkerchief over the top of the buggy.

  At dinner, Mrs. Mevison came radiantly down, warbling out as she took her place rather belatedly, “Such a game of romps as Arthur and I had in your hay-field, Mr. Crombie! You wouldn’t think, with his lameness, how quick he is. I hope we didn’t spoil the hay.”

  “Oh,” Crombie said, “if you were having fun, I don’t mind the hay.”

  IX

  THΕ Crombies decided that in the interest of young love they would; keep what they had seen in the I mowing-piece from Lillias and Craybourne. It was not that the girl was so ignorant of life as not to know that husbands and wives have their little tiffs, but a convention of the kind that forbids elders recognizing the knowledge of children concerning all sorts of things constrained them to the pretence that marriage is an indefinite continuation of love’s young dream. Craybourne, indeed, might be supposed acquainted with darkling things about life outside of matrimony, but he could not decently be imagined privy to the fact that people joined in wedlock ever chafed in their bonds.