Delphi complete works of.., p.809
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 809
XXVI
ANTHER had driven home from Wakeford with a heart softened more and more towards what had been the odious self-compulsion of the day, by his thoughts of the pleasure that had shone upon him from James Langbrith’s face when they met upon the platform before the veiled effigy of Royal Langbrith. There had been a fantastic moment when it seemed to him as if the father’s misdeeds might be uncovered when the son tore those curtains from his face, but nothing had been revealed; and all the fortuities — one could not quite call them providences — had joined to keep his evil life still in the dark. Anther submitted; he had said to himself he could do no more than he had done; he was not sure that he had done unselfishly in the business, so far as he had acted, and yet he could not have done other than he did. That was his consolation; and now he was going to let events drift as they would; he would never again attempt to stay or steer their course. He had even meant to come to the luncheon at the Langbrith house, and though he had gladly spared himself at the call from Wakeford that reached him when he left the platform, yet he was coming now to make his excuses to the young man for having been unable to take a further part in the affairs of the day.
He found Langbrith’s mother alone when he went in at the door, on which he tapped with his whiphandle, and then entered without staying to ring. “James not here?” he promptly suggested in sitting down before her, with his hat on his knee; he waved her away when she offered, mechanically, to take it.
“No,” she answered, “he said he was going out to look for Mr. Falk. Perhaps he went to Hope’s, too.” She let her eyes fall and sighed “Yes” when Anther said, “It would be the best thing,” knowing that he meant as the only atonement the son could make for the father’s wrong. “He has always liked her,” she added, “but sometimes I have wondered whether she liked him. She’s a strange girl.” Anther said, suddenly turning from his wish to let things drift to something in his immediate thought, “And there is the question of how she would feel towards him if she found out, some time, the sort of injury she had suffered from his father through hers.”
“Surely she wouldn’t hold James responsible for that!” Mrs. Langbrith started as with a physical pang. “How will it ever come out now?”
“I don’t know. If Hawberk—”
“What?”
He did not answer, but, “Amelia,” he asked, with a compassionate intelligence for her helplessness, “why do you ding to this hope of concealment? We have let that poor boy go on and stultify himself, and involve, innocently enough on his part, two good men like Garley and Enderby in the fraud that he has practised on the community—”
“Do they know?”
“I had to tell them.” She caught her breath, but did not interrupt him. “That’s all nothing, though, in my regard, compared with the harm you are doing yourself and the trouble you are storing up for the future, when he finds it out, as he must some day, and asks you if you had known it all along. What will you say to him? I wish you would tell him now, my dear, as soon as you see him, without an instant’s delay—”
“I can’t, Dr. Anther; it’s too late. I can never tell him now.”
“Then let me!” It was always coming to that with him.
“No, that would be worse. What would he think of your concealment — your being there today. But I made you!”
“Yes,” Anther sadly owned, “ I was there because you asked it. I would certainly never have dreamt of being there otherwise.” He rose.
She rose, too, and wavered towards him. “Don’t you think I knew you did it for me? Don’t you think I felt it? And James,” she added, incoherently, “he felt it, too. He cared more for your being there than for anything else, he said.” Anther laughed forlornly. “Oh, don’t despise me! I know I’m a coward, but don’t you despise me, or I shall die!”
“Despise you! There’s nothing but love for you in my heart, Amelia. Why can’t we be all in all to each other?”
“Well,” she answered, abruptly, desperately, “I will do what you ask. Now I don’t care what happens. I care more for you than for all the world. Don’t you know that?” She stole her arm tenderly through his arm, and pulled herself towards him, but almost at the moment he saw the fondness die out of her face and her arm slipped from his.
He turned and confronted James Langbrith standing in the door-way and staring at them. It was his impulse, somehow, to put himself between the mother and the son, but a guiltless shame withheld him and silenced him when he tried to speak. He heard Mrs. Langbrith gasping, “James, I want to tell you that Dr. Anther — that I — that we — we are going to get married,” and he realized that, in anticipating him, she was heroically acting on her instinct as woman and mother.
“Married!” Langbrith echoed, and now he looked at Anther alone, as if for explanation of something unintelligible and incredible. He smiled faintly, and Anther replied with a sudden resentment.
“Yes, I have been attached to your mother for a long time. She has known it, and has consented to marry me.”
The resentment was for his own shame, rather than for the young man’s words; but not the less it kindled the cold amaze in Langbrith to a flame of hostility that lighted up the whole past of conjecture and misgiving. As one thing after another grew clear in this illumination, the young man’s anger burned within him, not so much for the fact immediately before him, as for the series of facts by which he had been duped. But curiously concurrent with his swift retrospect was the flow of his tenderness for Hope, his sense of her love for him and of his love for her, so that it was partly lost in this, and half incredulous, that he began:
“Have you kept it from me so that you can crown my father’s commemoration services with it? Was it a surprise you were holding back for me, or were you afraid of telling me?” His anger gained somewhat upon his love, through the mere utterance of the offensive words, but he did not yet speak with a single mind. What was this case, and how did his father enter? He had that still to work out in an unalloyed consciousness.
“Afraid!” Anther dropped Mrs. Langbrith’s hand, which he had caught up, and started forward, but he stopped at her cry of “Justin!”
“James,” she implored her son in turn, “you don’t know what you are saying! Yes — we were afraid. I wanted to spare you — I wanted to wait—”
Now he answered more definitely: “And this is your notion of sparing me! Did you choose this time, of all others, to tell me that you had forgotten my father?”
“Oh, you don’t know him. You don’t know what you’re saying. Indeed—”
“The trouble is that I don’t know what you’re saying. I can’t make it out. Is it some wretched joke? Dr. Anther, you know how I have always felt about my father. If you were in my place what should you say to a man in yours? It must be distasteful to any son for his mother to marry again, but perhaps you have special reasons that would reconcile me.”
His words were temperate, but Anther felt the bitterness that they covered, and he answered as caustically. “I think I could give you special reasons,” he said; but at Mrs. Langbrith’s imploring look he stopped.
Langbrith had missed the look and its significance. With the sense of Hope fading more and more, he was able to say: “I can imagine them. It isn’t the first time that I’ve suspected you of secretly hating my father, with some such just cause as a nature like his could give a treacherous nature like yours!” He knew, somehow, that he was hurting Anther less than he was hurting his mother, and less than he was hurting himself, even. His rhetoric rang false to him. He was aware that it did not apply. He forced the added words: “But I don’t care to know your reasons. I have done with you, sir. I don’t want to hear anything more from you.” He turned from Anther arrogantly. “Mother, what was it you were saying about my father?”
She found Anther’s hand again and clung to it. She only said, “I’m going to marry Dr. Anther.”
“Is that what you have to say about my father? Well, perhaps it is enough.”
“Dr. Anther is the best friend I’ve ever had in the world, and—” she hesitated. Langbrith stood silent, his mind whirling from point to point without seizing definitely upon any. His mother ended, “He will be a good father to you, James.”
At this feeble conclusion, Langbrith’s daze broke in cruel sneering. “I am of age, and I need no father but the one that I have lost, and that you have forgotten.”
“I haven’t forgotten him,” his mother answered, with a struggle for courage; “I’m remembering him now as I never did before.”
“I don’t understand this,” said Langbrith, haughtily. “But it doesn’t matter. I begin to understand some other things, though. I see now why this man has taken the part he has towards my father’s memory, but why he should have had the base hypocrisy to-day—”
“He was there because I asked him,” she interposed.
“No matter why he was there; his presence was an insult to the living and the dead, and as this happens to be my house, my father’s house, I object to his remaining in it another instant.”
“James!”
Anther’s hand shook in Mrs. Langbrith’s clutch, and he burst out: “How dare you talk so to me! If it wasn’t that you don’t know what you’re saying — if your ignorance wasn’t so monstrous — But I can tell you—”
“Oh, Dr. Anther!” Mrs. Langbrith implored him, and he stopped, panting. “Will you listen to me, James?” She turned to her son.
“Yes, mother, as much as you like. You can’t say anything that will change me towards this horrible business, but I will listen.”
“Oh, you don’t know what I could say to you!” she broke out. But then she turned again helplessly to Anther. “Will you—”
“No, you must excuse me there, mother; I could not hear anything from a stranger about family affairs.”
“Dr. Anther is my family now,” she began, bravely.
“That is what saves him from the only answer a gentleman could make to his impudence.”
She felt Anther’s arm grow rigid under the hold she had laid on it. “Well,” she said, with a helpless pathos, “as my son will not let my husband speak for me, I will go with my husband and not speak.”
“No, Amelia,” Anther said, with the dignity he had lost in his angry burst; “I will go, and you can say what you wish to your son.”
“I will say it before you or not at all, and if you leave this house I will leave it with you. I’m not going to justify myself to you, James.” She turned to her son. “I need no justification—”
“I am not requiring you to say anything, mother.”
“And you won’t hear me then, my son?”
“If you have no need of being heard, as you say, why should I put you to the trouble of explaining anything? I ask no explanation now. It seems that I’ve been living all my life in a mistake. That’s all. I supposed we had the same ideal, and that the memory of my father was as sacred to you as to me; but it wasn’t, and that’s your sufficient justification.”
“Amelia,” Anther entreated, “let me leave you with James.”
“Not for a moment!” she returned. “I can’t stay without you, now.”
“Perhaps we can simplify the situation by my leaving you with him,” Langbrith said. “As it is not convenient for you to let me have my house on my own terms, I will go to the hotel. I can find Falk and go to Boston. When I come back, I hope I can have my house to myself.” He recalled himself to add, “You will always be welcome in it, mother.”
He turned and went out and left them standing there looking at each other.
“Why didn’t I speak? Why didn’t I tell him?” Mrs. Langbrith was the first to break their silence.
“I saw you try. It was too late; we’re always saying that. Amelia, if this trial is too great for you, I shall never blame you. It has been all sudden and unexpected; no one thing more than another. I didn’t dream of your consenting when I came here. Give me up, if you will—”
“And be left with James? Oh no! I care more for you now; perhaps I always did. He was always hard. It seems a strange thing for a mother to say of her son, but it’s true; and now he has been cruel. It’s worse even than I thought it would be. I’m afraid of him!”
Anther felt within him a curious shifting of the grounds of judgment, and he spoke from the change. “You mustn’t condemn him. You must remember how much he had to bear; thinking of his father, as he did, it must seem like sacrilege to him.”
“Unless he could know the truth. And if it’s too late for the truth now, take me away from the lie. I can’t bear it any longer. Can’t we live somewhere else?”
He took her literally, and her shapeless longings for escape crystallized as he answered, simply, “I’ve bought the house where I’ve lived.”
“Oh, have you?” she cried, with hysterical joy. “Then take me there. Let us go now — this instant.”
“To-morrow. We can’t go now, you know, Amelia.”
“I forgot. Now you see how long I have seemed to be married to you. Do you like that? I wish I were! I can’t endure to pass another night under this roof! It’s hateful! hateful! hateful!”
“Well, you must have patience. You must part kindly with your son.”
“With my son? With Royal Langbrith’s son?” Her bitterness expressed to him all the revolt of her soul from its long slavery.
He rose in his self-control over her headlong impulse. “You must try to be friends with your son. Nothing else will do, Amelia. If he comes back here, tell him we are to be married to-morrow. Ask him to be with us. You have hidden so much from the world so long that you can hide this, too. We mustn’t make our marriage a seven days’ wonder.’ You will feel differently towards James. I pity him from my heart.”
“I don’t.”
“You will, and you must do your best to be reconciled with him. I want your life to be free and happy, from this on. I can’t let you incur any shadow of self-reproach. You mustn’t have one regret to chain you to the past. Good-night, my dear. I must leave you here because there’s nowhere else. But when James comes back you will see him, and try — for my sake — to make peace with him. Remember that his error is not his fault!”
“It is my fault.”
“It is no one’s. I can understand — and tell him that I beg his pardon for not considering at once — what a bolt out of the blue this has been for him. We have known for a long time that we should marry, but he has never imagined it, and it seems a wrong to his father, as he has idealized him. He can’t help acting as he has done towards us, but he will learn to act differently. Yes, his common-sense — and he has plenty of it in the end — will teach him that we could have meant no wrong to his father if he were the best of men. Don’t let yourself be tempted, now, to tell him the truth. It could do no good: only harm. Be patient with him. Bear everything from him. He is deeply hurt in the part that is the best part of him; think of that. Amelia, ask him to be present at our marriage. You asked me to be present at—”
“Yes, yes, I will. I don’t care what he says to me!”
“That’s right. I’ll have Mr. Alway. It needn’t be in the church, then, it can be—”
“Here?” she shrieked. “In this house?”
“No, in the minister’s; and good-night again.”
XXVII
IN the quarrel which he had forced with his mother and Dr. Anther, Langbrith was sensible throughout of failing to say the worst. He had not put into words the outrage which was burning in his heart.
He had not expressed the amaze, and far less the abhorrence, which he felt. He had meant to hurt Anther to death, so far as insult could kill; and he had meant to wither his mother with shame. But the crudest blows he dealt them had seemed to fall like blows dealt in nightmare, as if they were dealt with balls of cotton or of down; and he had left them in possession of the place he ought to have driven them out of with ignominy.
He was aware of having been disabled for his part by the confusion which still kept him from a clear sense of what had befallen, and perhaps saved him from its full effect. He had entered upon that scene with his soul full of the good-will, the tender purpose towards Anther, which his happy love for Hope had inspired; and he had not, even yet, after all that had passed, wholly freed himself from it. He kept recurring to it with puzzle and interrogation, as something which in its strange metamorphosis he could not make out. It was still mixed with his thought of Hope. It seemed as if he were going to tell her of it still, as he had meant to do, and to taste the pleasure of her praise for it.
He could not make definitely out what he was now really going to do; but he acted upon the notion that he wished to find Falk and get him to take the train with him for Boston. He was sure that he wished to get as far away as he could. That was the first thing. The next thing was to get away from the humiliation of failing to do justice to himself and his cause. Now he saw a thousand proofs that the offence done him had been long impending; that if he had not been a fool, and blind, he must have known it; but the longer it had been impending, the greater the shame, the greater the defamation, the viler the insult to his father, to have it follow so instantly upon the consecration of his memory. His heart closed about the thought of his father with an indignant tenderness, which, somehow, could not leave his mother out. She had always been part of that thought, and he had an impulse to entreat her against herself, as if being a child she had struck him, and there was no one but her for him to go to for comfort.
His feet set themselves uncertainly, as if his vertigo were physical, while he pushed on, looking crazily for Falk. He could not go to Hope yet.
