Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Yes,” said Kendricks ruefully.

  “But his daughter,” I continued, “is probably altogether different. There is something fine about her — really fine. Our world wouldn’t shrivel in her eye; it would probably swell up and fill the universe,” I added by an impulse that came from nowhere irresistibly upon me: “that is, if she could see you in it.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked with a start.

  “Oh, now I must tell you what I mean,” I said desperately. “It’s you that have complicated this case so dreadfully for us. Can’t you think why?”

  “No, I can’t,” he said; but he had to say that.

  His fine, sensitive face flamed at once so fire-red that it could only turn pale for a change when I plunged on: “I’m afraid we’ve trifled with her happiness”; and this formulation of the case disgusted me so much that I laughed wildly, and added, “unless we’ve trifled with yours, too.”

  “I don’t know why you call it trifling with happiness,” he returned with dignity, but without offence. “If you will leave her out of the question, I will say that you have given me the greatest happiness of my life in introducing me to Miss Gage.”

  “Now,” I demanded, “may I ask what you mean? You know I wouldn’t if I didn’t feel bound for her sake, and if you hadn’t said just what you have said. You needn’t answer me unless you like! It’s pleasant to know that you’ve not been bored, and Mrs. March and I are infinitely obliged to you for helping us out.”

  Kendricks made as if he were going to say something, and then he did not. He hung his head lower and lower in the silence which I had to break for him— “I hope I haven’t been intrusive, my dear fellow. This is something I felt bound to speak of. You know we couldn’t let it go on. Mrs. March and I have blamed ourselves a good deal, and we couldn’t let it go on. But I’m afraid I haven’t been as delicate with you—”

  “Oh! delicate!” He lifted his head and flashed a face of generous self-reproach upon me. “It’s I that haven’t been delicate with you. I’ve been monstrously indelicate. But I never meant to be, and — and — I was coming to see you just now when we met — to see you — Miss Gage — and ask her — tell her that we — I — must tell you and Mrs. March — Mr. March! At the hop last night I asked her to be my wife, and as soon as she can hear from her father — But the first thing when I woke this morning, I saw that I must tell Mrs. March and you. And you — you must forgive us — or me, rather; for it was my fault — for not telling you last night — at once — oh, thank you! thank you!”

  I had seized his hand, and was wringing it vehemently in expression of my pleasure in what he had told me. In that first moment I felt nothing but pure joy and an immeasurable relief. I drew my breath, a very deep and full one, in a sudden, absolute freedom from anxieties which had been none the less real and constant because so often burlesqued. Afterward considerations presented themselves to alloy my rapture, but for that moment, as I say, it was nothing but rapture. There was no question in it of the lovers’ fitness for each other, of their acceptability to their respective families, of their general conduct, or of their especial behaviour toward us. All that I could realise was that it was a great escape for both of us, and a great triumph for me. I had been afraid that I should not have the courage to speak to Kendricks of the matter at all, much less ask him to go away; and here I had actually spoken to him, with the splendid result that I need only congratulate him on his engagement to the lady whose unrequited affections I had been wishing him to spare. I don’t remember just the terms I used in doing this, but they seemed satisfactory to Kendricks; probably a repetition of the letters of the alphabet would have been equally acceptable. At last I said, “Well, now I must go and tell the great news to Mrs. March,” and I shook hands with him again; we had been shaking hands at half-minutely intervals ever since the first time.

  XVIII

  I saw Mrs. March waiting for me on the hotel verandah. She wore her bonnet, and she warned me not to approach, and then ran down to meet me.

  “Well, my dear,” she said, as she pushed her hand through my arm and began to propel me away from the sight and hearing of people on the piazza, “I hope you didn’t make a fool of yourself with Kendricks. They’re engaged!”

  She apparently expected me to be prostrated by this stroke. “Yes,” I said very coolly; “I was just coming to tell you.”

  “How did you know it? Who told you? Did Kendricks? I don’t believe it!” she cried in an excitement not unmixed with resentment.

  “No one told me,” I said. “I simply divined it.”

  She didn’t mind that for a moment. “Well, I’m glad he had the grace to do so, and I hope he did it before you asked him any leading questions.” Without waiting to hear whether this was so or not, she went on, with an emphasis on the next word that almost blotted it out of the language, “She came back to me almost the instant you were gone, and told me everything. She said she wanted to tell me last night, but she hadn’t the courage, and this morning, when she saw that I was beginning to hint up to Mr. Kendricks a little, she hadn’t the courage at all. I sent her straight off to telegraph for her father. She is behaving splendidly. And now, what are we going to do?”

  “What the rest of the world is — nothing. It seems to me that we are out of the story, my dear. At any rate, I shan’t attempt to compete with Miss Gage in splendid behaviour, and I hope you won’t. It would be so easy for us. I wonder what Papa Gage is going to be like.”

  I felt my thrill of apprehension impart itself to her. “Yes!” she gasped; “what if he shouldn’t like it?”

  “Well, then, that’s his affair.” But I did not feel so lightly about it as I spoke, and from time to time during the day I was overtaken with a cold dismay at the thought of the unknown quantity in the problem.

  When we returned to the hotel after a tour of the block, we saw Kendricks in our corner of the verandah with Miss Gage. They were both laughing convulsively, and they ran down to meet us in yet wilder throes of merriment.

  “We’ve just been comparing notes,” he said, “and at the very moment when I was telling you, Mr. March, Julia was telling Mrs. March.”

  “Wonderful case of telepathy,” I mocked.

  “Give it to the Psychical Research.”

  They both seemed a little daunted, and Miss Gage said, “I know Mr. March doesn’t like the way we’ve done.”

  “Like it!” cried Mrs. March, contriving to shake me a little with the hand she still had in my arm. “Of course he likes it. He was just saying you had behaved splendidly. He said he wouldn’t attempt to compete with you. But you mustn’t regard him in the least.”

  I admired the skill with which Isabel saved her conscience in this statement too much to dispute it; and I suppose that whatever she had said, Miss Gage would have been reassured. I cannot particularly praise the wisdom of her behaviour during that day, or, for the matter of that, the behaviour of Kendricks either. The ideal thing would have been for him to keep away now till her father came, but it seemed to me that he was about under our feet all the while, and that she, so far from making him remain at his own hotel, encouraged him to pass the time at ours. Without consulting me, Mrs. March asked him to stay to dinner after he had stayed all the forenoon, and he made this a pretext for spending the afternoon in our corner of the verandah. She made me give it up to him and Miss Gage, so that they could be alone together, though I must say they did not seem to mind us a great deal when we were present; he was always leaning on the back of her chair, or sitting next her with his hand dangling over it in a manner that made me sick. I wondered if I was ever such an ass as that, and I quite lost the respect for Kendricks’s good sense and good taste which had been the ground of my liking for him.

  I felt myself withdrawn from the affair farther and farther in sympathy, since it had now passed beyond my control; and I resented the strain of the responsibility which I had thrown off, I found, only for a moment, and must continue to suffer until the
girl’s father appeared and finally relieved me. The worst was that I had to bear it alone. It was impossible to detach Mrs. March’s interest from Miss Gage, as a girl who had been made love to, long enough to enable her to realise her as a daughter with filial ties and duties. She did try in a perfunctory way to do it, but I could see that she never gave her mind to it. I could not even make her share my sense of my own culpability, a thing she was only too willing to do in most matters. She admitted that it was absurd for me to have let my fancy play about the girl when I first saw her until we felt that I must do something for her; but I could not get her to own that we had both acted preposterously in letting Mrs. Deering leave Miss Gage in our charge. In the first place, she denied that she had been left in our charge. She had simply been left in the hotel where we were staying, and we should have been perfectly free to do nothing for her. But when Kendricks turned up so unexpectedly, it was quite natural we should ask him to be polite to her. Mrs. March saw nothing strange in all that. What was I worrying about? What she had been afraid of was that he had not been in love with the girl when she was so clearly in love with him. But now!

  “And suppose her father doesn’t like it!”

  “Not like Mr. Kendricks!” She stared at me, and I could see how infatuated she was.

  I was myself always charmed with the young fellow. He was not only good and generous and handsome, and clever — I never thought him a first-class talent — but he was beautifully well bred, and he was very well born, as those things go with us. That is, he came of people who had not done much of anything for a generation, and had acquired merit with themselves for it. They were not very rich, but they had a right to think that he might have done nothing, or done something better than literature; and I wish I could set forth exactly the terms, tacit and explicit, in which his mother and sisters condoned his dereliction to me at a reception where he presented me to them. In virtue of his wish to do something, he had become a human being, and they could not quite follow him; but they were very polite in tolerating me, and trying to make me feel that I was not at all odd, though he was so queer in being proud of writing for my paper, as they called it. He was so unlike them all that I liked him more than ever after meeting them. Still, I could imagine a fond father, as I imagined Miss Gage’s father to be, objecting to him, on some grounds at least, till he knew him, and Mrs. March apparently could not imagine even this.

  I do not know why I should have prefigured Miss Gage’s father as tall and lank. She was not herself so very tall, though she was rather tall than short, and though she was rather of the Diana or girlish type of goddess, she was by no means lank. Yet it was in this shape that I had always thought of him, perhaps through an obscure association with his fellow-villager, Deering. I had fancied him saturnine of spirit, slovenly of dress, and lounging of habit, upon no authority that I could allege, and I was wholly unprepared for the neat, small figure of a man, very precise of manner and scrupulous of aspect, who said, “How do you do, sir? I hope I see you well, sir,” when his daughter presented us to each other, the morning after the eventful day described, and he shook my hand with his very small, dry hand.

  I could not make out from their manner with each other whether they had been speaking of the great matter in hand or not. I am rather at a loss about people of that Philistine make as to what their procedure will be in circumstances where I know just what people of my own sort of sophistication would do. These would come straight at the trouble, but I fancy that with the other sort the convention is a preliminary reserve. I found Mr. Gage disposed to prolong, with me at least, a discussion of the weather, and the aspects of Saratoga, the events of his journey from De Witt Point, and the hardship of having to ride all the way to Mooer’s Junction in a stage-coach. I felt more and more, while we bandied these futilities, as if Mr. Gage had an overdue note of mine, and was waiting for me, since I could not pay it, to make some proposition toward its renewal; and he did really tire me out at last, so that I said, “Well, Mr. Gage, I suppose Miss Gage has told you something of the tremendous situation that has developed itself here?”

  I thought I had better give the affair such smiling character as a jocose treatment might impart, and the dry little man twinkled up responsively so far as manner was concerned. “Well, yes, yes. There has been some talk of it between us,” and again he left the word to me.

  “Mrs. March urged your daughter to send for you at once because that was the right and fit thing to do, and because we felt that the affair had now quite transcended our powers, such as they were, and nobody could really cope with it but yourself. I hope you were not unduly alarmed by the summons?”

  “Not at all. She said in the despatch that she was not sick. I had been anticipating a short visit to Saratoga for some days, and my business was in a shape so that I could leave.”

  “Oh!” I said vaguely, “I am very glad. Mrs. March felt, as I did, that circumstances had given us a certain obligation in regard to Miss Gage, and we were anxious to discharge it faithfully and to the utmost. We should have written to you, summoned you, before, if we could have supposed — or been sure; but you know these things go on so obscurely, and we acted at the very first possible moment. I wish you to understand that. We talked it over a great deal, and I hope you will believe that we studied throughout — that we were most solicitous from beginning to end for Miss Gage’s happiness, and that if we could have foreseen or imagined — if we could have taken any steps — I trust you will believe—” I was furious at myself for being so confoundedly apologetic, for I was thinking all the time of the bother and affliction we had had with the girl; and there sat that little wooden image accepting my self-inculpations, and apparently demanding more of me; but I could not help going on in the same strain: “We felt especially bound in the matter, from the fact that Mr. Kendricks was a personal friend of ours, whom we are very fond of, and we both are very anxious that you should not suppose that we promoted, or that we were not most vigilant — that we were for a moment forgetful of your rights in such an affair—”

  I stopped, and Mr. Gage passed his hand across his little meagre, smiling mouth.

  “Then he is not a connection of yours, Mr. March?”

  “Bless me, no!” I said in great relief; “we are not so swell as that.” And I tried to give him some notion of Kendricks’s local quality, repeating a list of agglutinated New York surnames to which his was more or less affiliated. They always amuse me, those names, which more than any in the world give the notion of social straining; but I doubt if they affected the imagination of Mr. Gage, either in this way or in the way I meanly meant them to affect him.

  “And what did you say his business was?” he asked, with that implication of a previous statement on your part which some people think it so clever to make when they question you.

  I always hate it, and I avenged myself by answering simply, “Bless my soul, he has no business!” and letting him take up the word now or not, as he liked.

  “Then he is a man of independent means?”

  I could not resist answering, “Independent means? Kendricks has no means whatever.” But having dealt this blow, I could add, “I believe his mother has some money. They are people who live comfortably.”

  “Then he has no profession?” asked Mr. Gage, with a little more stringency in his smile.

  “I don’t know whether you will call it a profession. He is a writer.”

  “Ah!” Mr. Gage softly breathed. “Does he write for your — paper?”

  I noted that as to the literary technicalities he seemed not to be much more ignorant than Kendricks’s own family, and I said, tolerantly, “Yes; he writes for our magazine.”

  “Magazine — yes; I beg your pardon,” he interrupted.

  “And for any others where he can place his material.”

  This apparently did not convey any very luminous idea to Mr. Gage’s mind, and he asked after a moment, “What kind of things does he write?”

  “Oh, stories, s
ketches, poems, reviews, essays — almost anything, in fact.”

  The light left his face, and I perceived that I had carried my revenge too far, at least for Kendricks’s advantage, and I determined to take a new departure at the first chance. The chance did not come immediately.

  “And can a man support a wife by that kind of writing?” asked Mr. Gage.

  I laughed uneasily. “Some people do. It depends upon how much of it he can sell. It depends upon how handsomely a wife wishes to be supported. The result isn’t usually beyond the dreams of avarice,” I said, with a desperate levity.

  “Excuse me,” returned the little man. “Do you live in that way? By your writings?”

  “No,” I said with some state, which I tried to subdue; “I am the editor of Every Other Week, and part owner. Mr. Kendricks is merely a contributor.”

  “Ah,” he breathed again. “And if he were successful in selling his writings, how much would he probably make in a year?”

  “In a year?” I repeated, to gain time. “Mr. Kendricks is comparatively a beginner. Say fifteen hundred — two thousand — twenty-five hundred.”

  “And that would not go very far in New York.”

  “No; that would not go far in New York.” I was beginning to find a certain pleasure in dealing so frankly with this hard little man. I liked to see him suffer, and I could see that he did suffer; he suffered as a father must who learns that from a pecuniary point of view his daughter is imprudently in love. Why should we always regard such a sufferer as a comic figure? He is, if we think of it rightly, a most serious, even tragical figure, and at all events a most respectable figure. He loves her, and his heart is torn between the wish to indulge her and the wish to do what will be finally best for her. Why should our sympathies, in such a case, be all for the foolish young lovers? They ought in great measure to be for the father, too. Something like a sense of this smote me, and I was ashamed in my pleasure.