Delphi complete works of.., p.813
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 813
“I can’t let this go on. Dr. Anther,” she said, traversing any pretense of greeting between them when he appeared. “Mr. Hawberk is making a mistake. Hope ought to know. She ought to be told. James is his father’s son. He may be like him. He may make his wife suffer what his father made me suffer. How do we know what he is doing there in Paris, now?”
She was a woman of few words, and in these few she had compacted her suspicions, her reasons, her conclusions; and, though she pressed them upon Anther with hysterical nervousness, he had to respect the sense there was in them, as well as the anguish there was behind them.
He could only parley, for a beginning. “He is your son, too, Amelia.”
“And what if he is?” she retorted. “What is me in him will be crushed out by what is him in him,” and Anther saw that she had thought it better than she could speak it, though but for her erring grammar it was spoken well enough.
He said, “I should not fear for her in her marriage with James. She is a stronger character than he.”
“That was what I said when I began to think of it. But the weakest man can make the strongest woman suffer things worse than death; and I don’t care whether there would be any suffering or not. There would be wrong. She has a right to know. Her father has no right to keep her from knowing. Why, it’s wicked! What will she think, what will he say if she doesn’t find it out till afterwards?”
“He can say that he didn’t know himself. She will not blame him, at any rate.”
“That isn’t enough. She has got to have the right to say now she will not marry the son of such a man. Will you tell her?”
Anther reflected. “No, Amelia,” he said, “I don’t think that I will tell her.”
“Why?”
“Because I have only the relation of her father’s physician to her. If I could have had another relation to her,” and Mrs. Langbrith winced at the implication, so that he felt sorry for it, “I might have been justified in telling her. As it is, I don’t.”
“Well, then,” Mrs. Langbrith said, desperately, “I will tell her.”
“Before you tell him?”
The question daunted her; it was necessary, but he realized its cruelty as well as its necessity. She gasped inarticulately; the unfailing tears started into her eyes. She had, as he saw, reached the limit of her small strength. It must be days or weeks, possibly months, before she could gather force for a new effort.
Anther tried to say something consoling to her; he succeeded only in saying something compassionate, which did not avail. “You have taken away my chance,” she said, and he would not take from her the slight stay she found in her resentment.
XXXII
ANTHER noted in himself, with curious interest, the accomplished adjustment of the spirit to circumstances that once seemed impossible, and the acceptance of conditions which before had been intolerable. He had gone on to the end of a certain event, strongly willing and meaning something which then he no longer willed or meant. With a sense of acquiescent surprise he found himself at peace with desires and purposes that had long afflicted him with unrest, and it was not they, apparently, that differed, but himself. To the young this will be a mystery, but to those no longer young it will be of the quality of many experiences which, if still mysterious, are not more so than the whole texture of existence.
He had foregone a hope that had seemed essential to his life, but that, once foregone, was like other things outlived — like something of years ago, of his early manhood, almost of his boyhood. He was still baffled and disappointed, but he perceived that he did not care, did not suffer, as he supposed he should care and suffer. It was his compensation that what was ignoble in his regret was gone from it. Neither resentment nor the selfish sense of loss tinged it. Primarily, his regret was hardly for himself; and he perceived that, so far as it concerned another, it was mixed with a sense of escape from anxiety, from fears which the fulfilment of his hopes would have perpetuated. He realized more and more that he had been having to do with weakness, and he realized this not in contempt of weakness, but in the compassion which was the constant lesson of his calling. He blamed Mrs. Langbrith, in her shrinking from collision with her son’s will, no more than he would have blamed any timorous creature for seeking to shim a physical ordeal to which it was unequal. He had, at least, learned patience and mercy from his acquaintance with disease; and he had learned to distinguish between what was disease and what was an innate fault which no drugs, either for the soul or body, could medicine.
What surprised him and, when it first suggested itself, shocked him, was a sort of reason, which was not an excuse, for Royal Langbrith in the defect which he realized. Given such a predatory nature, as his, was it not in the order of things that there should be another nature formed for his prey? Must not the very helplessness of his victim have been the irresistible lure of his cruelty? We are not masters of those vagaries, good or evil, that fill the mind after its disoccupation by direct purposes; and Anther did not seriously blame himself for their wild play. He broke this up and banished the vagaries sometimes by calling to his help things that he ought to think of, or by confronting them with the woman they wronged and so rendered the more tenderly dear to him.
She was, in fact, never more tenderly dear to him than now, when he had abandoned the hope, almost the wish, of making her his wife. She had been a wife long ago, and yet he began to feel a sort of profanation in the idea of making her a wife. The time came when Anther wondered whether he had ever really felt a passion for her, such as even in middle life a man may feel for a woman, and whether, in that embrace into which they had once been surprised, there was any love other than the affection of a brother and sister, drawn heart to heart in a moment of supreme emotion. At such a time he made entire excuse for James Langbrith, and accounted for him as forgivingly as for her. If her son had instinctively the feeling which had tardily worked itself out in Anther’s consciousness, then, surely, it was not the son whom he could blame. One hints at cognitions which refuse anything more positive than intimation, and which can have no proof in the admissions of those who deal conventionally with their own consciences. It was because Anther was not one of these that he was a nature of exceptional type, and because he could accept the logic of his self-knowledge that he was a character of rare strength. He was strong enough not only to forgive the frantic boy who had insulted and outraged him in his pain, but to feel a share in the error which had kept him in ignorance of the truth. It was not the less his right to know this because there had never been the moment to make it known to him. Anther realized that the boy had been deeply injured, and he accepted his own share of the retribution as the just penalty of his share in the error. He saw, too late, that it was his weakness not to have overruled the weakness which he spared the supreme ordeal. He promised himself, somehow, sometime, to make good to James Langbrith the wrong he had suffered.
In this self-promise, after the experience which had stirred his life to its depths, he found a limpid peace from which his dream of passion hung retreatingly aloof, like a cloud broken and drifting away. He had a gayety of heart for which he did not logically account, but in which he felt the power of consoling and supporting the weakness he had once imagined protecting through a husband’s rights. When he first saw Mrs. Langbrith after his tacit renunciation, much more real than that explicit renunciation which preceded it, he was aware of an apprehension in her which it was not for words to quiet. By what he forbore, he must make her know that he had ceased to think of her as he had thought, and that she was as safe from the pursuit of what had been his love as from the reproach which he would never join her in making herself.
They talked of Hope and Langbrith, and of the reason there was in believing that it might be safe for the girl to trust her father to himself, if James wished it, before very long. Mrs. Langbrith did not know directly of her son’s plans and purposes. Apparently, the communication between them was formal and restricted, and she spoke of what was in her mind rather because of the girl than of him. In an involuntary measurement of her interest with his own, it appeared to Anther that it was he who was the more concerned for James Langbrith; and it was with surprise that he saw she really did not understand him at first when he said, “I wish he could be assured that, when he comes home, there will be no question of its being the same home to him that it has always been.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she returned.
“I really believe you don’t,” he said, musingly, with his unselfish gaze on her. “Well,” he explained, “that he need not be afraid of my making a difference in it.”
“Oh!” she evaded whatever challenge she might have fancied in the words, “he will have a home of his own. Dr. Anther,” she continued, “I don’t know what you’ll think of me, but I don’t feel the same towards James that I used to. I can’t make it out, exactly, but should you think it was wicked if I had changed so that I did not care for him so much? When I was a child I was that way, if ever they made me do what I didn’t want to do, and didn’t make me see the reason. I remember it about my mother once, when I was quite little. I had to do what she made me, but after that she wasn’t the same to me. It is so with James, now. He is not the same to me. I don’t want to punish him for it, but he is not the same. I don’t know whether I explain it.”
“Yes, I think you do.”
“And do you blame me?”
“No, but I think you may change again towards him.” She shook her head doubtfully. “You’re one of those who need to get back their strength when they have been tried.”
His pitying intelligence was very sweet to her. “If I tried to say what I thought of you—” she began.
“Don’t try,” he said, simply, and she did not.
She said: “I don’t like to think how you have to live there in that way, taking your meals out, and your house so uncomfortable.”
“Is it uncomfortable? I don’t notice those things very much. I like going to the hotel; it gives variety, and it seems to me I don’t get things so cold as I did with Mrs. Burwell.”
She gave a house-keeper’s sigh of compassion, but she said, from a higher feeling, “I know why you bought it.”
“Yes, I told you. But that’s all past now.”
“Why is it past?” she demanded, almost resentfully. “Do you think I’ve changed towards you, too, Dr. Anther?”
“No, I don’t, Amelia. I believe you’re just what you always were towards me.”
“Then, if it’s all past, as you say, it must be you that have changed.”
“No. I am the same, too.”
She looked at him with a wistfulness which he knew to be entreaty of him for that strength to give herself to him which she did not feel in her own will.
“If you say so,” she tried her courage, “I will do it now — to-morrow — to-day, if you say so. I told you that James took back what he said; that he was willing. At any rate, what is the use? He can never feel right to me after this, no matter what I do. I know him — he can’t forgive the hurt to his pride.”
“It was a hurt to something better than his pride,” Anther said, justly.
“No matter. It’s something he can’t forgive me and I don’t care. You’re more than James is, and now he doesn’t want me — he won’t need me. If you ask me now to marry you, I will.”
He believed that he saw in her the little maximum of her force, which perhaps spent itself in the words and would have nothing left for the deed. The deed must be altogether his. In the sweetness that welled up in his soul from the consciousness of perfectly comprehending, not her intention merely, but her nature, he was happier than the fulfilment of his hopes could once have made him.
“Do you say that, Amelia, because you wish it or because you think I do?”
“I want to do everything that you want me to.”
“Then I don’t want you to do this, my dear. I know you will understand me. I don’t believe we ought to get married.”
“Because James — ?”
“He has nothing to do with it now. Because we can be more to each other if we remain as we are.”
She looked bewilderedly at him, but he believed that he saw in her the relief that weakness intimates to one who forbears demand upon it. She had fulfilled her impulse, and spent all her force on it. She was not hurt, either in her vanity or affection. He could see, indeed, that she trusted him too entirely for such an effect.
“Then,” she said, in simple abeyance to his judgment, “will you let me do anything for you that I think you need?”
“What is there that I need?” he parried her question. “I am very well as I am. I assure you that I am quite as I wish to be. I don’t feel what seems to you discomfort, and after this tinderstanding, that has no misunderstanding in it, I shall feel happier about you than I have ever felt. If I didn’t believe you would rather live your life alone, or if I could believe you wanted me to join mine with it for any help I could give, you know I would make you do what you have offered to let me. But I believe the one thing, and I don’t believe the other. I know you’re wanting to put yourself under my will — to sacrifice yourself to me.”
“No!”
“Yes, it is so. If you ever want my help or counsel or friendship, you know it is always here for you, as fully and freely as if I were your husband — perhaps more so. At any rate, I should not exact anything in return, for I need nothing!”
“But if you ever do need anything — me or anything I can do — will you promise — promise—”
“Oh, yes, I will ask you. I promise you that.” Nothing seems final in human experience, and neither of these two who now parted really accepted the conclusion to which they had come as the last word in their affair. It was to be held in that sort of solution in which all human affairs are held, until that happens which can alone precipitate them. She went on with the life to which alone she was, perhaps, equal. She was, at any rate, inveterately used to its abnegations, if they were abnegations; and he did the daily duties which were always full of interest and had the variety which keeps men from stagnating. He had not falsely pretended that he liked meeting the new people he met at the hotel, and he was richer in old companionships than most men of his age. The new people, it must be confessed, were oftenest the commercial travellers whose enterprises brought them to Saxmills. But, to a man who took other men as unconventionally as he offered himself, they were less typical and more personal than they are in common acceptance. The younger ones might be noisy in manner, and over-jocular with one another at table and in the hotel office, where Anther sometimes paused for a moment of digestion after his meals, before driving off on his calls. But with the old fellow, whose bounds they did not try to traverse, they were quiet and gentle. When they had identified him, through the landlord, they liked to ask him if there was much sickness around. Now and then, one submitted a malady of his own to Anther, and took his medicine with a deferential inquiry whether the doctor thought smoking hurt a man. Now and then, there was a young family-man among them, who was homesick for his wife and babies. The older family-men liked the quiet of Anther’s willing talk, and put before him their own philosophic conjectures and conclusions about life in general. Of their own sort of life they were confessedly tired, but what, at their time of day, could a man do? If they could get hold of a piece of land near a good market, they would be all right. What about abandoned farms in that neighborhood?
Among the transients there happened people who had chanced stopping at Saxmills because they had a fancy for seeing what such a place was like. They were people of independent tastes, from some of the larger cities, and of aesthetic occupations or none, who brought the waft of a larger life and the eagerness of a sympathetic intelligence. There was once an elderly couple from the West, who, after sparely owning that they were originally from this part of the country, developed into pilgrims to the old homestead of one or other of them, which they thought of buying back and fixing up for a summer place, if they could get the children to see it the same way. More than once there was a young couple, still in the flush of immediate marriage, who were breaking their wedding journey to Portland or Montreal or Boston, and were first diffident and then confident of Anther’s good-will in his approaches to their acquaintance.
Besides all these, there were regular boarders, as the bank cashier and his wife, somewhat arid financial and social types; and that young and foolish matron who seldom fails, in any village community, to supply food for general reflection, and who, in the idleness of the hotel, where her young husband, a travelling man, has left her, amuses herself by wearing a white yachting-cap and a toothpick about the verandas, and varies her monotonous leisure by buggy-rides with a merchant of the place old enough to behave better.
Anther liked to drop in on Judge Garley of a late afternoon, when he commonly found the jurist reading a novel; he preferred the translations of French novels, which he devoured insatiably, but was as fond, in another way, of scientific tracts, such as he found in the mustard-colored Humboldt series; he liked psychology in any sort and size. With Anther he had always a certain effect of consideration, as one to whom, if not apology, tenderness was due, because of his peculiarities of temperament. The Langbrith incident remained closed between them, and there was no reason for Anther to believe that Garley had any misgivings as to his own attitude in it. Such spare reference to that business as Anther permitted himself was in his talk with Dr. Enderby, whom he fancied of an uneasy mind concerning it, and with whom he had a humane interest in administering the anodyne of his own final peace. It was, in fact, from the rector’s reasoning to the conclusion he had reached before that Anther was most helpful to his friend; Enderby himself was never so much satisfied with being in the right as sure that he was right in what he had done. It was one of those experiences, he once owned, that intimate a less perfect adjustment of the moral elements in this life than we may hope for in the life hereafter; as if the earthly materials of conduct were cruder and coarser than the spirit which dealt with them, and which was attuned to finer issues of behavior. Occasionally he asked if Anther knew anything of James Langbrith’s immediate purposes, and if he might be expected to return at all soon. He betrayed that he was not at rest with regard to Langbrith’s unwittingly making another a sharer in the responsibilities which he must some day assume towards the past.
