“It is,” said the girl, with a spoiled air of insistence.
“Well,” said Lapham, and, nodding to Corey to enter, he closed the door upon her. Then he turned to the young, man and demanded: “Was I drunk last night?”
XV.
LAPHAM’S strenuous face was broken up with the emotions that had forced him to this question: shame, fear of the things that must have been thought of him, mixed with a faint hope that he might be mistaken, which died out at the shocked and pitying look in Corey’s eyes.
“Was I drunk?” he repeated. “I ask you, because I was never touched by drink in my life before, and I don’t know.” He stood with his huge hands trembling on the back of his chair, and his dry lips apart, as he stared at Corey.
“That is what every one understood, Colonel Lapham,” said the young man. “Every one saw how it was. Don’t—-“
“Did they talk it over after I left?” asked Lapham vulgarly.
“Excuse me,” said Corey, blushing, “my father doesn’t talk his guests over with one another.” He added, with youthful superfluity, “You were among gentlemen.”
“I was the only one that wasn’t a gentleman there!” lamented Lapham. “I disgraced you! I disgraced my family! I mortified your father before his friends!” His head dropped. “I showed that I wasn’t fit to go with you. I’m not fit for any decent place. What did I say? What did I do?” he asked, suddenly lifting his head and confronting Corey. “Out with it! If you could bear to see it and hear it, I had ought to bear to know it!”
“There was nothing–really nothing,” said Corey. “Beyond the fact that you were not quite yourself, there was nothing whatever. My father DID speak of it to me,” he confessed, “when we were alone. He said that he was afraid we had not been thoughtful of you, if you were in the habit of taking only water; I told him I had not seen wine at your table. The others said nothing about you.”
“Ah, but what did they think?”
“Probably what we did: that it was purely a misfortune– an accident.”
“I wasn’t fit to be there,” persisted Lapham. “Do you want to leave?” he asked, with savage abruptness.
“Leave?” faltered the young man.
“Yes; quit the business? Cut the whole connection?”
“I haven’t the remotest idea of it!” cried Corey in amazement. “Why in the world should I?” “Because you’re a gentleman, and I’m not, and it ain’t right I should be over you. If you want to go, I know some parties that would be glad to get you. I will give you up if you want to go before anything worse happens, and I shan’t blame you. I can help you to something better than I can offer you here, and I will.”
“There’s no question of my going, unless you wish it,” said Corey. “If you do—-“
“Will you tell your father,” interrupted Lapham, “that I had a notion all the time that I was acting the drunken blackguard, and that I’ve suffered for it all day? Will you tell him I don’t want him to notice me if we ever meet, and that I know I’m not fit to associate with gentlemen in anything but a business way, if I am that?”
“Certainly I shall do nothing of the kind,” retorted Corey. “I can’t listen to you any longer. What you say is shocking to me–shocking in a way you can’t think.”
“Why, man!” exclaimed Lapham, with astonishment; “if I can stand it, YOU can!”
“No,” said Corey, with a sick look, “that doesn’t follow. You may denounce yourself, if you will; but I have my reasons for refusing to hear you–my reasons why I CAN’T hear you. If you say another word I must go away.”
“I don’t understand you,” faltered Lapham, in bewilderment, which absorbed even his shame.
“You exaggerate the effect of what has happened,” said the young man. “It’s enough, more than enough, for you to have mentioned the matter to me, and I think it’s unbecoming in me to hear you.”
He made a movement toward the door, but Lapham stopped him with the tragic humility of his appeal. “Don’t go yet! I can’t let you. I’ve disgusted you,–I see that; but I didn’t mean to. I–I take it back.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to take back,” said Corey, with a repressed shudder for the abasement which he had seen. “But let us say no more about it–think no more. There wasn’t one of the gentlemen present last night who didn’t understand the matter precisely as my father and I did, and that fact must end it between us two.”
He went out into the larger office beyond, leaving Lapham helpless to prevent his going. It had become a vital necessity with him to think the best of Lapham, but his mind was in a whirl of whatever thoughts were most injurious. He thought of him the night before in the company of those ladies and gentlemen, and he quivered in resentment of his vulgar, braggart, uncouth nature. He recognised his own allegiance to the exclusiveness to which he was born and bred, as a man perceives his duty to his country when her rights are invaded. His eye fell on the porter going about in his shirt-sleeves to make the place fast for the night, and he said to himself that Dennis was not more plebeian than his master; that the gross appetites, the blunt sense, the purblind ambition, the stupid arrogance were the same in both, and the difference was in a brute will that probably left the porter the gentler man of the two. The very innocence of Lapham’s life in the direction in which he had erred wrought against him in the young man’s mood: it contained the insult of clownish inexperience. Amidst the stings and flashes of his wounded pride, all the social traditions, all the habits of feeling, which he had silenced more and more by force of will during the past months, asserted their natural sway, and he rioted in his contempt of the offensive boor, who was even more offensive in his shame than in his trespass. He said to himself that he was a Corey, as if that were somewhat; yet he knew that at the bottom of his heart all the time was that which must control him at last, and which seemed sweetly to be suffering his rebellion, secure of his submission in the end. It was almost with the girl’s voice that it seemed to plead with him, to undo in him, effect by effect, the work of his indignant resentment, to set all things in another and fairer light, to give him hopes, to suggest palliations, to protest against injustices. It WAS in Lapham’s favour that he was so guiltless in the past, and now Corey asked himself if it were the first time he could have wished a guest at his father’s table to have taken less wine; whether Lapham was not rather to be honoured for not knowing how to contain his folly where a veteran transgressor might have held his tongue. He asked himself, with a thrill of sudden remorse, whether, when Lapham humbled himself in the dust so shockingly, he had shown him the sympathy to which such ABANDON had the right; and he had to own that he had met him on the gentlemanly ground, sparing himself and asserting the superiority of his sort, and not recognising that Lapham’s humiliation came from the sense of wrong, which he had helped to accumulate upon him by superfinely standing aloof and refusing to touch him.
He shut his desk and hurried out into the early night, not to go anywhere, but to walk up and down, to try to find his way out of the chaos, which now seemed ruin, and now the materials out of which fine actions and a happy life might be shaped. Three hours later he stood at Lapham’s door.
At times what he now wished to do had seemed for ever impossible, and again it had seemed as if he could not wait a moment longer. He had not been careless, but very mindful of what he knew must be the feelings of his own family in regard to the Laphams, and he had not concealed from himself that his family had great reason and justice on their side in not wishing him to alienate himself from their common life and associations. The most that he could urge to himself was that they had not all the reason and justice; but he had hesitated and delayed because they had so much. Often he could not make it appear right that he should merely please himself in what chiefly concerned himself. He perceived how far apart in all their experiences and ideals the Lapham girls and his sisters were; how different Mrs. Lapham was from his mother; how grotesquely unlike were his father and Lapham; and the disparity had not always amused him.
He had often taken it very seriously, and sometimes he said that he must forego the hope on which his heart was set. There had been many times in the past months when he had said that he must go no further, and as often as he had taken this stand he had yielded it, upon this or that excuse, which he was aware of trumping up. It was part of the complication that he should he unconscious of the injury he might be doing to some one besides his family and himself; this was the defect of his diffidence; and it had come to him in a pang for the first time when his mother said that she would not have the Laphams think she wished to make more of the acquaintance than he did; and then it had come too late. Since that he had suffered quite as much from the fear that it might not be as that it might be so; and now, in the mood, romantic and exalted, in which he found himself concerning Lapham, he was as far as might be from vain confidence. He ended the question in his own mind by affirming to himself that he was there, first of all, to see Lapham and give him an ultimate proof of his own perfect faith and unabated respect, and to offer him what reparation this involved for that want of sympathy–of humanity–which he had shown.
XVI.
THE Nova Scotia second-girl who answered Corey’s ring said that Lapham had not come home yet.
“Oh,” said the young man, hesitating on the outer step.
“I guess you better come in,” said the girl, “I’ll go and see when they’re expecting him.”
Corey was in the mood to be swayed by any chance. He obeyed the suggestion of the second-girl’s patronising friendliness, and let her shut him into the drawing-room, while she went upstairs to announce him to Penelope. “Did you tell him father wasn’t at home?”
“Yes. He seemed so kind of disappointed, I told him to come in, and I’d see when he WOULD be in,” said the girl, with the human interest which sometimes replaces in the American domestic the servile deference of other countries.
A gleam of amusement passed over Penelope’s face, as she glanced at herself in the glass. “Well,” she cried finally, dropping from her shoulders the light shawl in which she had been huddled over a book when Corey rang, “I will go down.”
“All right,” said the girl, and Penelope began hastily to amend the disarray of her hair, which she tumbled into a mass on the top of her little head, setting off the pale dark of her complexion with a flash of crimson ribbon at her throat. She moved across the carpet once or twice with the quaint grace that belonged to her small figure, made a dissatisfied grimace at it in the glass, caught a handkerchief out of a drawer and slid it into her pocket, and then descended to Corey.
The Lapham drawing-room in Nankeen Square was in the parti-coloured paint which the Colonel had hoped to repeat in his new house: the trim of the doors and windows was in light green and the panels in salmon; the walls were a plain tint of French grey paper, divided by gilt mouldings into broad panels with a wide stripe of red velvet paper running up the corners; the chandelier was of massive imitation bronze; the mirror over the mantel rested on a fringed mantel-cover of green reps, and heavy curtains of that stuff hung from gilt lambrequin frames at the window; the carpet was of a small pattern in crude green, which, at the time Mrs. Lapham bought it, covered half the new floors in Boston. In the panelled spaces on the walls were some stone-coloured landscapes, representing the mountains and canyons of the West, which the Colonel and his wife had visited on one of the early official railroad excursions. In front of the long windows looking into the Square were statues, kneeling figures which turned their backs upon the company within-doors, and represented allegories of Faith and Prayer to people without. A white marble group of several figures, expressing an Italian conception of Lincoln Freeing the Slaves,–a Latin negro and his wife,–with our Eagle flapping his wings in approval, at Lincoln’s feet, occupied one corner, and balanced the what-not of an earlier period in another. These phantasms added their chill to that imparted by the tone of the walls, the landscapes, and the carpets, and contributed to the violence of the contrast when the chandelier was lighted up full glare, and the heat of the whole furnace welled up from the registers into the quivering atmosphere on one of the rare occasions when the Laphams invited company.
Corey had not been in this room before; the family had always received him in what they called the sitting-room. Penelope looked into this first, and then she looked into the parlour, with a smile that broke into a laugh as she discovered him standing under the single burner which the second-girl had lighted for him in the chandelier.
“I don’t understand how you came to be put in there,” she said, as she led the way to the cozier place, “unless it was because Alice thought you were only here on probation, anyway. Father hasn’t got home yet, but I’m expecting him every moment; I don’t know what’s keeping him. Did the girl tell you that mother and Irene were out?”
“No, she didn’t say. It’s very good of you to see me.” She had not seen the exaltation which he had been feeling, he perceived with half a sigh; it must all be upon this lower level; perhaps it was best so. “There was something I wished to say to your father—-I hope,” he broke off, “you’re better to-night.”
“Oh yes, thank you,” said Penelope, remembering that she had not been well enough to go to dinner the night before.
“We all missed you very much.”
“Oh, thank you! I’m afraid you wouldn’t have missed me if I had been there.”
“Oh yes, we should,” said Corey, “I assure you.”
They looked at each other.
“I really think I believed I was saying something,” said the girl.
“And so did I,” replied the young man. They laughed rather wildly, and then they both became rather grave.
He took the chair she gave him, and looked across at her, where she sat on the other side of the hearth, in a chair lower than his, with her hands dropped in her lap, and the back of her head on her shoulders as she looked up at him. The soft-coal fire in the grate purred and flickered; the drop-light cast a mellow radiance on her face. She let her eyes fall, and then lifted them for an irrelevant glance at the clock on the mantel.
“Mother and Irene have gone to the Spanish Students’ concert.”
“Oh, have they?” asked Corey; and he put his hat, which he had been holding in his hand, on the floor beside his chair.
She looked down at it for no reason, and then looked up at his face for no other, and turned a little red. Corey turned a little red himself. She who had always been so easy with him now became a little constrained.
“Do you know how warm it is out-of-doors?” he asked.
“No, is it warm? I haven’t been out all day.”
“It’s like a summer night.”
She turned her face towards the fire, and then started abruptly. “Perhaps it’s too warm for you here?”
“Oh no, it’s very comfortable.”
“I suppose it’s the cold of the last few days that’s still in the house. I was reading with a shawl on when you came.”
“I interrupted you.”
“Oh no. I had finished the book. I was just looking over it again.”
“Do you like to read books over?”
“Yes; books that I like at all.”
“That was it?” asked Corey.
The girl hesitated. “It has rather a sentimental name. Did you ever read it?–Tears, Idle Tears.”
“Oh yes; they were talking of that last night; it’s a famous book with ladies. They break their hearts over it. Did it make you cry?”
“Oh, it’s pretty easy to cry over a book,” said Penelope, laughing; “and that one is very natural till you come to the main point. Then the naturalness of all the rest makes that seem natural too; but I guess it’s rather forced.”
“Her giving him up to the other one?”
“Yes; simply because she happened to know that the other one had cared for him first. Why should she have done it? What right had she?”
“I don’t know. I suppose that the self-sacrifice—-“
“But it WASN’T self-sacrifice–or not self-sacrifice alone. She was sacrificing him too; and for some one who couldn’t appreciate him half as much as she could. I’m provoked with myself when I think how I cried over that book–for I did cry. It’s silly–it’s wicked for any one to do what that girl did. Why can’t they let people have a chance to behave reasonably in stories?”
“Perhaps they couldn’t make it so attractive,” suggested Corey, with a smile.
“It would be novel, at any rate,” said the girl. “But so it would in real life, I suppose,” she added.
“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t people in love behave sensibly?”
“That’s a very serious question,” said Penelope gravely. “I couldn’t answer it,” and she left him the embarrassment of supporting an inquiry which she had certainly instigated herself. She seemed to have finally recovered her own ease in doing this. “Do you admire our autumnal display, Mr. Corey?”
“Your display?”
“The trees in the Square. WE think it’s quite equal to an opening at Jordan & Marsh’s.”
“Ah, I’m afraid you wouldn’t let me be serious even about your maples.”
“Oh yes, I should–if you like to be serious.”
“Don’t you?”
“Well not about serious matters. That’s the reason that book made me cry.”
“You make fun of everything. Miss Irene was telling me last night about you.”
“Then it’s no use for me to deny it so soon. I must give Irene a talking to.”
“I hope you won’t forbid her to talk about you!”
She had taken up a fan from the table, and held it, now between her face and the fire, and now between her face and him. Her little visage, with that arch, lazy look in it, topped by its mass of dusky hair, and dwindling from the full cheeks to the small chin, had a Japanese effect in the subdued light, and it had the charm which comes to any woman with happiness. It would be hard to say how much of this she perceived that he felt. They talked about other things a while, and then she came back to what he had said. She glanced at him obliquely round her fan, and stopped moving it. “Does Irene talk about me?” she asked. “I think so–yes. Perhaps it’s only I who talk about you. You must blame me if it’s wrong,” he returned.
“Oh, I didn’t say it was wrong,” she replied. “But I hope if you said anything very bad of me you’ll let me know what it was, so that I can reform—-“
“No, don’t change, please!” cried the young man.
Penelope caught her breath, but went on resolutely,– “or rebuke you for speaking evil of dignities.” She looked down at the fan, now flat in her lap, and tried to govern her head, but it trembled, and she remained looking down. Again they let the talk stray, and then it was he who brought it back to themselves, as if it had not left them.
“I have to talk OF you,” said Corey, “because I get to talk TO you so seldom.”
“You mean that I do all the talking when we’re–together?” She glanced sidewise at him; but she reddened after speaking the last word.
“We’re so seldom together,” he pursued.
“I don’t know what you mean—-“
“Sometimes I’ve thought–I’ve been afraid that you avoided me.”
“Avoided you?”
“Yes! Tried not to be alone with me.”
She might have told him that there was no reason why she should be alone with him, and that it was very strange he should make this complaint of her. But she did not. She kept looking down at the fan, and then she lifted her burning face and looked at the clock again. “Mother and Irene will be sorry to miss you,” she gasped.
He instantly rose and came towards her. She rose too, and mechanically put out her hand. He took it as if to say good-night. “I didn’t mean to send you away,” she besought him.
“Oh, I’m not going,” he answered simply. “I wanted to say–to say that it’s I who make her talk about you. To say I—-There is something I want to say to you; I’ve said it so often to myself that I feel as if you must know it.” She stood quite still, letting him keep her hand, and questioning his face with a bewildered gaze. “You MUST know–she must have told you–she must have guessed—-” Penelope turned white, but outwardly quelled the panic that sent the blood to her heart. “I–I didn’t expect–I hoped to have seen your father–but I must speak now, whatever—-I love you!”
She freed her hand from both of those he had closed upon it, and went back from him across the room with a sinuous spring. “ME!” Whatever potential complicity had lurked in her heart, his words brought her only immeasurable dismay.
He came towards her again. “Yes, you. Who else?”
She fended him off with an imploring gesture. “I thought–I–it was—-“
She shut her lips tight, and stood looking at him where he remained in silent amaze. Then her words came again, shudderingly. “Oh, what have you done?”
“Upon my soul,” he said, with a vague smile, “I don’t know. I hope no harm?”
“Oh, don’t laugh!” she cried, laughing hysterically herself. “Unless you want me to think you the greatest wretch in the world!”
“I?” he responded. “For heaven’s sake tell me what you mean!”
“You know I can’t tell you. Can you say–can you put your hand on your heart and say that–you–say you never meant–that you meant me–all along?”
“Yes!–yes! Who else? I came here to see your father, and to tell him that I wished to tell you this–to ask him—-But what does it matter? You must have known it–you must have seen–and it’s for you to answer me. I’ve been abrupt, I know, and I’ve startled you; but if you love me, you can forgive that to my loving you so long before I spoke.”
She gazed at him with parted lips.
“Oh, mercy! What shall I do? If it’s true–what you say–you must go!” she said. “And you must never come any more. Do you promise that?”
“Certainly not,” said the young man. “Why should I promise such a thing–so abominably wrong? I could obey if you didn’t love me—-“
“Oh, I don’t! Indeed I don’t! Now will you obey.”
“No. I don’t believe you.” “Oh!”
He possessed himself of her hand again.
“My love–my dearest! What is this trouble, that you can’t tell it? It can’t be anything about yourself. If it is anything about any one else, it wouldn’t make the least difference in the world, no matter what it was. I would be only too glad to show by any act or deed I could that nothing could change me towards you.”
“Oh, you don’t understand!”
“No, I don’t. You must tell me.”
“I will never do that.”
“Then I will stay here till your mother comes, and ask her what it is.”
“Ask HER?”
“Yes! Do you think I will give you up till I know why I must?”
“You force me to it! Will you go if I tell you, and never let any human creature know what you have said to me?”
“Not unless you give me leave.”
“That will be never. Well, then—-” She stopped, and made two or three ineffectual efforts to begin again. “No, no! I can’t. You must go!”
“I will not go!”
“You said you–loved me. If you do, you will go.”
He dropped the hands he had stretched towards her, and she hid her face in her own.
“There!” she said, turning it suddenly upon him. “Sit down there. And will you promise me–on your honour– not to speak–not to try to persuade me–not to–touch me? You won’t touch me?”
“I will obey you, Penelope.”
“As if you were never to see me again? As if I were dying?”
“I will do what you say. But I shall see you again; and don’t talk of dying. This is the beginning of life—-“
“No. It’s the end,” said the girl, resuming at last something of the hoarse drawl which the tumult of her feeling had broken into those half-articulate appeals. She sat down too, and lifted her face towards him. “It’s the end of life for me, because I know now that I must have been playing false from the beginning. You don’t know what I mean, and I can never tell you. It isn’t my secret–it’s some one else’s. You–you must never come here again. I can’t tell you why, and you must never try to know. Do you promise?”
“You can forbid me. I must do what you say.”
“I do forbid you, then. And you shall not think I am cruel—-
“How could I think that?”
“Oh, how hard you make it!”
Corey laughed for very despair. “Can I make it easier by disobeying you?”
“I know I am talking crazily. But I ‘m not crazy.”
“No, no,” he said, with some wild notion of comforting her; “but try to tell me this trouble! There is nothing under heaven–no calamity, no sorrow–that I wouldn’t gladly share with you, or take all upon myself if I could!”
“I know! But this you can’t. Oh, my—-“
“Dearest! Wait! Think! Let me ask your mother–your father—-“
She gave a cry.
“No! If you do that, you will make me hate you! Will you—-“
The rattling of a latch-key was heard in the outer door.
“Promise!” cried Penelope.
“Oh, I promise!”
“Good-bye!” She suddenly flung her arms round his neck, and, pressing her cheek tight against his, flashed out of the room by one door as her father entered it by another.
Corey turned to him in a daze. “I–I called to speak with you–about a matter—-But it’s so late now. I’ll–I’ll see you to-morrow.”
“No time like the present,” said Lapham, with a fierceness that did not seem referable to Corey. He had his hat still on, and he glared at the young man out of his blue eyes with a fire that something else must have kindled there.
“I really can’t now,” said Corey weakly. “It will do quite as well to-morrow. Good night, sir.”
“Good night,” answered Lapham abruptly, following him to the door, and shutting it after him. “I think the devil must have got into pretty much everybody to-night,” he muttered, coming back to the room, where he put down his hat. Then he went to the kitchen-stairs and called down, “Hello, Alice! I want something to eat!
XVII.
“WHAT’s the reason the girls never get down to breakfast any more?” asked Lapham, when he met his wife at the table in the morning. He had been up an hour and a half, and he spoke with the severity of a hungry man. “It seems to me they don’t amount to ANYthing. Here I am, at my time of life, up the first one in the house. I ring the bell for the cook at quarter-past six every morning, and the breakfast is on the table at half-past seven right along, like clockwork, but I never see anybody but you till I go to the office.”
“Oh yes, you do, Si,” said his wife soothingly. “The girls are nearly always down. But they’re young, and it tires them more than it does us to get up early.”
“They can rest afterwards. They don’t do anything after they ARE up,” grumbled Lapham.
“Well, that’s your fault, ain’t it?” You oughtn’t to have made so much money, and then they’d have had to work.” She laughed at Lapham’s Spartan mood, and went on to excuse the young people. “Irene’s been up two nights hand running, and Penelope says she ain’t well. What makes you so cross about the girls? Been doing something you’re ashamed of?”
“I’ll tell you when I’ve been doing anything to be ashamed of,” growled Lapham.
“Oh no, you won’t!” said his wife jollily. “You’ll only be hard on the rest of us. Come now, Si; what is it?”
Lapham frowned into his coffee with sulky dignity, and said, without looking up, “I wonder what that fellow wanted here last night?” “What fellow?”
“Corey. I found him here when I came home, and he said he wanted to see me; but he wouldn’t stop.”
“Where was he?”
“In the sitting-room.”
“Was Pen there?”
“I didn’t see her.”
Mrs. Lapham paused, with her hand on the cream-jug. “Why, what in the land did he want? Did he say he wanted you?”
“That’s what he said.”
“And then he wouldn’t stay?”
“Well, then, I’ll tell you just what it is, Silas Lapham. He came here”–she looked about the room and lowered her voice–“to see you about Irene, and then he hadn’t the courage.”
“I guess he’s got courage enough to do pretty much what he wants to,” said Lapham glumly. “All I know is, he was here. You better ask Pen about it, if she ever gets down.”
“I guess I shan’t wait for her,” said Mrs. Lapham; and, as her husband closed the front door after him, she opened that of her daughter’s room and entered abruptly.
The girl sat at the window, fully dressed, and as if she had been sitting there a long time. Without rising, she turned her face towards her mother. It merely showed black against the light, and revealed nothing till her mother came close to her with successive questions. “Why, how long have you been up, Pen? Why don’t you come to your breakfast? Did you see Mr. Corey when he called last night? Why, what’s the matter with you? What have you been crying about?
“Have I been crying?”
“Yes! Your cheeks are all wet!”
“I thought they were on fire. Well, I’ll tell you what’s happened.” She rose, and then fell back in her chair. “Lock the door!” she ordered, and her mother mechanically obeyed. “I don’t want Irene in here. There’s nothing the matter. Only, Mr. Corey offered himself to me last night.”
Her mother remained looking at her, helpless, not so much with amaze, perhaps, as dismay. “Oh, I’m not a ghost! I wish I was! You had better sit down, mother. You have got to know all about it.”
Mrs. Lapham dropped nervelessly into the chair at the other window, and while the girl went slowly but briefly on, touching only the vital points of the story, and breaking at times into a bitter drollery, she sat as if without the power to speak or stir.
“Well, that’s all, mother. I should say I had dreamt, it, if I had slept any last night; but I guess it really happened.”
The mother glanced round at the bed, and said, glad to occupy herself delayingly with the minor care: “Why, you have been sitting up all night! You will kill yourself.”
“I don’t know about killing myself, but I’ve been sitting up all night,” answered the girl. Then, seeing that her mother remained blankly silent again, she demanded, “Why don’t you blame me, mother?” Why don’t you say that I led him on, and tried to get him away from her? Don’t you believe I did?”
Her mother made her no answer, as if these ravings of self-accusal needed none. “Do you think,” she asked simply, “that he got the idea you cared for him?”
“He knew it! How could I keep it from him? I said I didn’t–at first!”
“It was no use,” sighed the mother. “You might as well said you did. It couldn’t help Irene any, if you didn’t.”
“I always tried to help her with him, even when I—-“
“Yes, I know. But she never was equal to him. I saw that from the start; but I tried to blind myself to it. And when he kept coming—-“
“You never thought of me!” cried the girl, with a bitterness that reached her mother’s heart. “I was nobody! I couldn’t feel! No one could care for me!” The turmoil of despair, of triumph, of remorse and resentment, which filled her soul, tried to express itself in the words.
“No,” said the mother humbly. “I didn’t think of you. Or I didn’t think of you enough. It did come across me sometimes that may be—-But it didn’t seem as if—-And your going on so for Irene—-“
“You let me go on. You made me always go and talk with him for her, and you didn’t think I would talk to him for myself. Well, I didn’t!”
“I’m punished for it. When did you–begin to care for him!”
“How do I know? What difference does it make? It’s all over now, no matter when it began. He won’t come here any more, unless I let him.” She could not help betraying her pride in this authority of hers, but she went on anxiously enough, “What will you say to Irene? She’s safe as far as I’m concerned; but if he don’t care for her, what will you do?”
“I don’t know what to do,” said Mrs. Lapham. She sat in an apathy from which she apparently could not rouse herself. “I don’t see as anything can be done.”
Penelope laughed in a pitying derision.
“Well, let things go on then. But they won’t go on.”
“No, they won’t go on,” echoed her mother. “She’s pretty enough, and she’s capable; and your father’s got the money–I don’t know what I’m saying! She ain’t equal to him, and she never was. I kept feeling it all the time, and yet I kept blinding myself.”
“If he had ever cared for her,” said Penelope, “it wouldn’t have mattered whether she was equal to him or not. I’M not equal to him either.”
Her mother went on: “I might have thought it was you; but I had got set—-Well! I can see it all clear enough, now it’s too late. I don’t know what to do.”
“And what do you expect me to do?” demanded the girl. “Do you want ME to go to Irene and tell her that I’ve got him away from her?”
“O good Lord!” cried Mrs. Lapham. “What shall I do? What do you want I should do, Pen?”
“Nothing for me,” said Penelope. “I’ve had it out with myself. Now do the best you can for Irene.”
“I couldn’t say you had done wrong, if you was to marry him to-day.”
“Mother!”
“No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t say but what you had been good and faithfull all through, and you had a perfect right to do it. There ain’t any one to blame. He’s behaved like a gentleman, and I can see now that he never thought of her, and that it was you all the while. Well, marry him, then! He’s got the right, and so have you.”
“What about Irene? I don’t want you to talk about me. I can take care of myself”
“She’s nothing but a child. It’s only a fancy with her. She’ll get over it. She hain’t really got her heart set on him.”
“She’s got her heart set on him, mother. She’s got her whole life set on him. You know that.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said the mother, as promptly as if she had been arguing to that rather than the contrary effect.
“If I could give him to her, I would. But he isn’t mine to give.” She added in a burst of despair, “He isn’t mine to keep!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Lapham, “she has got to bear it. I don’t know what’s to come of it all. But she’s got to bear her share of it.” She rose and went toward the door.
Penelope ran after her in a sort of terror. “You’re not going to tell Irene?” she gasped, seizing her mother by either shoulder.
“Yes, I am,” said Mrs. Lapham. “If she’s a woman grown, she can bear a woman’s burden.”
“I can’t let you tell Irene,” said the girl, letting fall her face on her mother’s neck. “Not Irene,” she moaned. “I’m afraid to let you. How can I ever look at her again?”
“Why, you haven’t done anything, Pen,” said her mother soothingly.
“I wanted to! Yes, I must have done something. How could I help it? I did care for him from the first, and I must have tried to make him like me. Do you think I did? No, no! You mustn’t tell Irene! Not– not–yet! Mother! Yes! I did try to get him from her!” she cried, lifting her head, and suddenly looking her mother in the face with those large dim eyes of hers. “What do you think? Even last night! It was the first time I ever had him all to myself, for myself, and I know now that I tried to make him think that I was pretty and–funny. And I didn’t try to make him think of her. I knew that I pleased him, and I tried to please him more. Perhaps I could have kept him from saying that he cared for me; but when I saw he did–I must have seen it–I couldn’t. I had never had him to myself, and for myself before. I needn’t have seen him at all, but I wanted to see him; and when I was sitting there alone with him, how do I know what I did to let him feel that I cared for him? Now, will you tell Irene? I never thought he did care for me, and never expected him to. But I liked him. Yes–I did like him! Tell her that! Or else I will.”
“If it was to tell her he was dead,” began Mrs. Lapham absently.
“How easy it would be!” cried the girl in self-mockery. “But he’s worse than dead to her; and so am I. I’ve turned it over a million ways, mother; I’ve looked at it in every light you can put it in, and I can’t make anything but misery out of it. You can see the misery at the first glance, and you can’t see more or less if you spend your life looking at it.” She laughed again, as if the hopelessness of the thing amused her. Then she flew to the extreme of self-assertion. “Well, I HAVE a right to him, and he has a right to me. If he’s never done anything to make her think he cared for her,–and I know he hasn’t; it’s all been our doing, then he’s free and I’m free. We can’t make her happy whatever we do; and why shouldn’t I—-No, that won’t do! I reached that point before!” She broke again into her desperate laugh. “You may try now, mother!”
“I’d best speak to your father first—-“
Penelope smiled a little more forlornly than she had laughed.
“Well, yes; the Colonel will have to know. It isn’t a trouble that I can keep to myself exactly. It seems to belong to too many other people.”
Her mother took a crazy encouragement from her return to her old way of saying things. “Perhaps he can think of something.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt but the Colonel will know just what to do!”
“You mustn’t be too down-hearted about it. It–it’ll all come right—-“
“You tell Irene that, mother.”
Mrs. Lapham had put her hand on the door-key; she dropped it, and looked at the girl with a sort of beseeching appeal for the comfort she could not imagine herself. “Don’t look at me, mother,” said Penelope, shaking her head. “You know that if Irene were to die without knowing it, it wouldn’t come right for me.”
“Pen!”
“I’ve read of cases where a girl gives up the man that loves her so as to make some other girl happy that the man doesn’t love. That might be done.”
“Your father would think you were a fool,” said Mrs. Lapham, finding a sort of refuge in her strong disgust for the pseudo heroism. “No! If there’s to be any giving up, let it be by the one that shan’t make anybody but herself suffer. There’s trouble and sorrow enough in the world, without MAKING it on purpose!”
She unlocked the door, but Penelope slipped round and set herself against it. “Irene shall not give up!”
“I will see your father about it,” said the mother. “Let me out now—-“
“Don’t let Irene come here!”
“No. I will tell her that you haven’t slept. Go to bed now, and try to get some rest. She isn’t up herself yet. You must have some breakfast.”
“No; let me sleep if I can. I can get something when I wake up. I’ll come down if I can’t sleep. Life has got to go on. It does when there’s a death in the house, and this is only a little worse.”
“Don’t you talk nonsense!” cried Mrs. Lapham, with angry authority.
“Well, a little better, then,” said Penelope, with meek concession.
Mrs. Lapham attempted to say something, and could not. She went out and opened Irene’s door. The girl lifted her head drowsily from her pillow “Don’t disturb your sister when you get up, Irene. She hasn’t slept well— -“
“PLEASE don’t talk! I’m almost DEAD with sleep!” returned Irene. “Do go, mamma! I shan’t disturb her.” She turned her face down in the pillow, and pulled the covering up over her ears.
The mother slowly closed the door and went downstairs, feeling bewildered and baffled almost beyond the power to move. The time had been when she would have tried to find out why this judgment had been sent upon her. But now she could not feel that the innocent suffering of others was inflicted for her fault; she shrank instinctively from that cruel and egotistic misinterpretation of the mystery of pain and loss. She saw her two children, equally if differently dear to her, destined to trouble that nothing could avert, and she could not blame either of them; she could not blame the means of this misery to them; he was as innocent as they, and though her heart was sore against him in this first moment, she could still be just to him in it. She was a woman who had been used to seek the light by striving; she had hitherto literally worked to it. But it is the curse of prosperity that it takes work away from us, and shuts that door to hope and health of spirit. In this house, where everything had come to be done for her, she had no tasks to interpose between her and her despair. She sat down in her own room and let her hands fall in her lap,–the hands that had once been so helpful and busy,–and tried to think it all out. She had never heard of the fate that was once supposed to appoint the sorrows of men irrespective of their blamelessness or blame, before the time when it came to be believed that sorrows were penalties; but in her simple way she recognised something like that mythic power when she rose from her struggle with the problem, and said aloud to herself, “Well, the witch is in it.” Turn which way she would, she saw no escape from the misery to come–the misery which had come already to Penelope and herself, and that must come to Irene and her father. She started when she definitely thought of her husband, and thought with what violence it would work in every fibre of his rude strength. She feared that, and she feared something worse–the effect which his pride and ambition might seek to give it; and it was with terror of this, as well as the natural trust with which a woman must turn to her husband in any anxiety at last, that she felt she could not wait for evening to take counsel with him. When she considered how wrongly he might take it all, it seemed as if it were already known to him, and she was impatient to prevent his error.
She sent out for a messenger, whom she despatched with a note to his place of business: “Silas, I should like to ride with you this afternoon. Can’t you come home early? Persis.” And she was at dinner with Irene, evading her questions about Penelope, when answer came that he would be at the house with the buggy at half-past two. It is easy to put off a girl who has but one thing in her head; but though Mrs. Lapham could escape without telling anything of Penelope, she could not escape seeing how wholly Irene was engrossed with hopes now turned so vain and impossible. She was still talking of that dinner, of nothing but that dinner, and begging for flattery of herself and praise of him, which her mother had till now been so ready to give.
“Seems to me you don’t take very much interest, mamma!” she said, laughing and blushing at one point.
“Yes,–yes, I do,” protested Mrs. Lapham, and then the girl prattled on.
“I guess I shall get one of those pins that Nanny Corey had in her hair. I think it would become me, don’t you?” “Yes; but Irene–I don’t like to have you go on so, till–unless he’s said something to show–You oughtn’t to give yourself up to thinking—-” But at this the girl turned so white, and looked such reproach at her, that she added frantically: “Yes, get the pin. It is just the thing for you! But don’t disturb Penelope. Let her alone till I get back. I’m going out to ride with your father. He’ll be here in half an hour. Are you through? Ring, then. Get yourself that fan you saw the other day. Your father won’t say anything; he likes to have you look well. I could see his eyes on you half the time the other night.”
“I should have liked to have Pen go with me,” said Irene, restored to her normal state of innocent selfishness by these flatteries. “Don’t you suppose she’ll be up in time? What’s the matter with her that she didn’t sleep?”
“I don’t know. Better let her alone.”
“Well,” submitted Irene.
XVIII.
MRS. LAPHAM went away to put on her bonnet and cloak, and she was waiting at the window when her husband drove up. She opened the door and ran down the steps. “Don’t get out; I can help myself in,” and she clambered to his side, while he kept the fidgeting mare still with voice and touch.
“Where do you want I should go?” he asked, turning the buggy.
“Oh, I don’t care. Out Brookline way, I guess. I wish you hadn’t brought this fool of a horse,” she gave way petulantly. “I wanted to have a talk.”
“When I can’t drive this mare and talk too, I’ll sell out altogether,” said Lapham. “She’ll be quiet enough when she’s had her spin.”
“Well,” said his wife; and while they were making their way across the city to the Milldam she answered certain questions he asked about some points in the new house.
“I should have liked to have you stop there,” he began; but she answered so quickly, “Not to-day,” that he gave it up and turned his horse’s head westward when they struck Beacon Street.
He let the mare out, and he did not pull her in till he left the Brighton road and struck off under the low boughs that met above one of the quiet streets of Brookline, where the stone cottages, with here and there a patch of determined ivy on their northern walls, did what they could to look English amid the glare of the autumnal foliage. The smooth earthen track under the mare’s hoofs was scattered with flakes of the red and yellow gold that made the air luminous around them, and the perspective was gay with innumerable tints and tones.
“Pretty sightly,” said Lapham, with a long sign, letting the reins lie loose in his vigilant hand, to which he seemed to relegate the whole charge of the mare. “I want to talk with you about Rogers, Persis. He’s been getting in deeper and deeper with me; and last night he pestered me half to death to go in with him in one of his schemes. I ain’t going to blame anybody, but I hain’t got very much confidence in Rogers. And I told him so last night.”
“Oh, don’t talk to me about Rogers!” his wife broke in. “There’s something a good deal more important than Rogers in the world, and more important than your business. It seems as if you couldn’t think of anything else–that and the new house. Did you suppose I wanted to ride so as to talk Rogers with you?” she demanded, yielding to the necessity a wife feels of making her husband pay for her suffering, even if he has not inflicted it. “I declare—-“
“Well, hold on, now!” said Lapham. “What DO you want to talk about? I’m listening.”
His wife began, “Why, it’s just this, Silas Lapham!” and then she broke off to say, “Well, you may wait, now–starting me wrong, when it’s hard enough anyway.”
Lapham silently turned his whip over and over in his hand and waited.
“Did you suppose,” she asked at last, “that that young Corey had been coming to see Irene?”
“I don’t know what I supposed,” replied Lapham sullenly. “You always said so.” He looked sharply at her under his lowering brows.
“Well, he hasn’t,” said Mrs. Lapham; and she replied to the frown that blackened on her husband’s face. “And I can tell you what, if you take it in that way I shan’t speak another word.”
“Who’s takin’ it what way?” retorted Lapham savagely. “What are you drivin’ at?”
“I want you should promise that you’ll hear me out quietly.”
“I’ll hear you out if you’ll give me a chance. I haven’t said a word yet.”
“Well, I’m not going to have you flying into forty furies, and looking like a perfect thunder-cloud at the very start. I’ve had to bear it, and you’ve got to bear it too.”
“Well, let me have a chance at it, then.”
“It’s nothing to blame anybody about, as I can see, and the only question is, what’s the best thing to do about it. There’s only one thing we can do; for if he don’t care for the child, nobody wants to make him. If he hasn’t been coming to see her, he hasn’t, and that’s all there is to it.”
“No, it ain’t!” exclaimed Lapham.
“There!” protested his wife.
“If he hasn’t been coming to see her, what HAS he been coming for?”
“He’s been coming to see Pen!” cried the wife. ” NOW are you satisfied?” Her tone implied that he had brought it all upon them; but at the sight of the swift passions working in his face to a perfect comprehension of the whole trouble, she fell to trembling, and her broken voice lost all the spurious indignation she had put into it. “O Silas! what are we going to do about it? I’m afraid it’ll kill Irene.”
Lapham pulled off the loose driving-glove from his right hand with the fingers of his left, in which the reins lay. He passed it over his forehead, and then flicked from it the moisture it had gathered there. He caught his breath once or twice, like a man who meditates a struggle with superior force and then remains passive in its grasp.
His wife felt the need of comforting him, as she had felt the need of afflicting him. “I don’t say but what it can be made to come out all right in the end. All I say is, I don’t see my way clear yet.”
“What makes you think he likes Pen?” he asked quietly.
“He told her so last night, and she told me this morning. Was he at the office to-day?”
“Yes, he was there. I haven’t been there much myself. He didn’t say anything to me. Does Irene know?”
“No; I left her getting ready to go out shopping. She wants to get a pin like the one Nanny Corey had on.” “O my Lord!” groaned Lapham.
“It’s been Pen from the start, I guess, or almost from the start. I don’t say but what he was attracted some by Irene at the very first; but I guess it’s been Pen ever since he saw her; and we’ve taken up with a notion, and blinded ourselves with it. Time and again I’ve had my doubts whether he cared for Irene any; but I declare to goodness, when he kept coming, I never hardly thought of Pen, and I couldn’t help believing at last he DID care for Irene. Did it ever strike you he might be after Pen?”
“No. I took what you said. I supposed you knew.”
“Do you blame me, Silas?” she asked timidly.
“No. What’s the use of blaming? We don’t either of us want anything but the children’s good. What’s it all of it for, if it ain’t for that? That’s what we’ve both slaved for all our lives.”
“Yes, I know. Plenty of people LOSE their children,” she suggested.
“Yes, but that don’t comfort me any. I never was one to feel good because another man felt bad. How would you have liked it if some one had taken comfort because his boy lived when ours died? No, I can’t do it. And this is worse than death, someways. That comes and it goes; but this looks as if it was one of those things that had come to stay. The way I look at it, there ain’t any hope for anybody. Suppose we don’t want Pen to have him; will that help Irene any, if he don’t want her? Suppose we don’t want to let him have either; does that help either!”
“You talk,” exclaimed Mrs. Lapham, “as if our say was going to settle it. Do you suppose that Penelope Lapham is a girl to take up with a fellow that her sister is in love with, and that she always thought was in love with her sister, and go off and be happy with him? Don’t you believe but what it would come back to her, as long as she breathed the breath of life, how she’d teased her about him, as I’ve heard Pen tease Irene, and helped to make her think he was in love with her, by showing that she thought so herself? It’s ridiculous!”
Lapham seemed quite beaten down by this argument. His huge head hung forward over his breast; the reins lay loose in his moveless hand; the mare took her own way. At last he lifted his face and shut his heavy jaws.
“Well?” quavered his wife.
“Well,” he answered, “if he wants her, and she wants him, I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.” He looked straight forward, and not at his wife.
She laid her hands on the reins. “Now, you stop right here, Silas Lapham! If I thought that–if I really believed you could be willing to break that poor child’s heart, and let Pen disgrace herself by marrying a man that had as good as killed her sister, just because you wanted Bromfield Corey’s son for a son-in-law—-“
Lapham turned his face now, and gave her a look. “You had better NOT believe that, Persis! Get up!” he called to the mare, without glancing at her, and she sprang forward. “I see you’ve got past being any use to yourself on this subject.”
“Hello!” shouted a voice in front of him. “Where the devil you goin’ to?”
“Do you want to KILL somebody!” shrieked his wife.
There was a light crash, and the mare recoiled her length, and separated their wheels from those of the open buggy in front which Lapham had driven into. He made his excuses to the occupant; and the accident relieved the tension of their feelings, and left them far from the point of mutual injury which they had reached in their common trouble and their unselfish will for their children’s good.
It was Lapham who resumed the talk. “I’m afraid we can’t either of us see this thing in the right light. We’re too near to it. I wish to the Lord there was somebody to talk to about it.”
“Yes,” said his wife; “but there ain’t anybody.”
“Well, I dunno,” suggested Lapham, after a moment; “why not talk to the minister of your church? May be he could see some way out of it.”
Mrs. Lapham shook her head hopelessly. “It wouldn’t do. I’ve never taken up my connection with the church, and I don’t feel as if I’d got any claim on him.”
“If he’s anything of a man, or anything of a preacher, you HAVE got a claim on him,” urged Lapham; and he spoiled his argument by adding, “I’ve contributed enough MONEY to his church.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Mrs. Lapham. “I ain’t well enough acquainted with Dr. Langworthy, or else I’m TOO well. No; if I was to ask any one, I should want to ask a total stranger. But what’s the use, Si? Nobody could make us see it any different from what it is, and I don’t know as I should want they should.”
It blotted out the tender beauty of the day, and weighed down their hearts ever more heavily within them. They ceased to talk of it a hundred times, and still came back to it. They drove on and on. It began to be late. “I guess we better go back, Si,” said his wife; and as he turned without speaking, she pulled her veil down and began to cry softly behind it, with low little broken sobs.
Lapham started the mare up and drove swiftly homeward. At last his wife stopped crying and began trying to find her pocket. “Here, take mine, Persis,” he said kindly, offering her his handkerchief, and she took it and dried her eyes with it. “There was one of those fellows there the other night,” he spoke again, when his wife leaned back against the cushions in peaceful despair, “that I liked the looks of about as well as any man I ever saw. I guess he was a pretty good man. It was that Mr. Sewell.”
He looked at his wife, but she did not say anything. “Persis,” he resumed, “I can’t bear to go back with nothing settled in our minds. I can’t bear to let you.”
“We must, Si,” returned his wife, with gentle gratitude. Lapham groaned. “Where does he live?” she asked.
“On Bolingbroke Street. He gave me his number.”
“Well, it wouldn’t do any good. What could he say to us?”
“Oh, I don’t know as he could say anything,” said Lapham hopelessly; and neither of them said anything more till they crossed the Milldam and found themselves between the rows of city houses.”
“Don’t drive past the new house, Si,” pleaded his wife. “I couldn’t bear to see it. Drive–drive up Bolingbroke Street. We might as well see where he DOES live.”
“Well,” said Lapham. He drove along slowly. “That’s the place,” he said finally, stopping the mare and pointing with his whip.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” said his wife, in a tone which he understood as well as he understood her words. He turned the mare up to the curbstone .
“You take the reins a minute,” he said, handing them to his wife.
He got down and rang the bell, and waited till the door opened; then he came back and lifted his wife out. “He’s in,” he said.
He got the hitching-weight from under the buggy-seat and made it fast to the mare’s bit.
“Do you think she’ll stand with that?” asked Mrs. Lapham.
“I guess so. If she don’t, no matter.”
“Ain’t you afraid she’ll take cold,” she persisted, trying to make delay.
“Let her!” said Lapham. He took his wife’s trembling hand under his arm, and drew her to the door.
“He’ll think we’re crazy,” she murmured in her broken pride.
“Well, we ARE,” said Lapham. “Tell him we’d like to see him alone a while,” he said to the girl who was holding the door ajar for him, and she showed him into the reception-room, which had been the Protestant confessional for many burdened souls before their time, coming, as they did, with the belief that they were bowed down with the only misery like theirs in the universe; for each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.
They were as loath to touch their trouble when the minister came in as if it were their disgrace; but Lapham did so at last, and, with a simple dignity which he had wanted in his bungling and apologetic approaches, he laid the affair clearly before the minister’s compassionate and reverent eye. He spared Corey’s name, but he did not pretend that it was not himself and his wife and their daughters who were concerned.
“I don’t know as I’ve got any right to trouble you with this thing,” he said, in the moment while Sewell sat pondering the case, “and I don’t know as I’ve got any warrant for doing it. But, as I told my wife here, there was something about you–I don’t know whether it was anything you SAID exactly–that made me feel as if you could help us. I guess I didn’t say so much as that to her; but that’s the way I felt. And here we are. And if it ain’t all right”
“Surely,” said Sewell, “it’s all right. I thank you for coming–for trusting your trouble to me. A time comes to every one of us when we can’t help ourselves, and then we must get others to help us. If people turn to me at such a time, I feel sure that I was put into the world for something–if nothing more than to give my pity, my sympathy.”
The brotherly words, so plain, so sincere, had a welcome in them that these poor outcasts of sorrow could not doubt.
“Yes,” said Lapham huskily, and his wife began to wipe the tears again under her veil.
Sewell remained silent, and they waited till he should speak. “We can be of use to one another here, because we can always be wiser for some one else than we can for ourselves. We can see another’s sins and errors in a more merciful light–and that is always a fairer light–than we can our own; and we can look more sanely at others’ afflictions.” He had addressed these words to Lapham; now he turned to his wife. “If some one had come to you, Mrs. Lapham, in just this perplexity, what would you have thought?”
“I don’t know as I understand you,” faltered Mrs. Lapham.
Sewell repeated his words, and added, “I mean, what do you think some one else ought to do in your place?”
“Was there ever any poor creatures in such a strait before?” she asked, with pathetic incredulity.
“There’s no new trouble under the sun,” said the minister.
“Oh, if it was any one else, I should say–I should say–Why, of course! I should say that their duty was to let—-” She paused.
“One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame?” suggested Sewell. “That’s sense, and that’s justice. It’s the economy of pain which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality. Tell me, Mrs. Lapham, didn’t this come into your mind when you first learned how matters stood?”
“Why, yes, it flashed across me. But I didn’t think it could be right.”
“And how was it with you, Mr. Lapham?”
“Why, that’s what I thought, of course. But I didn’t see my way—-“
“No,” cried the minister, “we are all blinded, we are all weakened by a false ideal of self-sacrifice. It wraps us round with its meshes, and we can’t fight our way out of it. Mrs. Lapham, what made you feel that it might be better for three to suffer than one?”
“Why, she did herself. I know she would die sooner than take him away from her.”
“I supposed so!” cried the minister bitterly. “And yet she is a sensible girl, your daughter?”
“She has more common-sense—-“
“Of course! But in such a case we somehow think it must be wrong to use our common-sense. I don’t know where this false ideal comes from, unless it comes from the novels that befool and debauch almost every intelligence in some degree. It certainly doesn’t come from Christianity, which instantly repudiates it when confronted with it. Your daughter believes, in spite of her common-sense, that she ought to make herself and the man who loves her unhappy, in order to assure the life-long wretchedness of her sister, whom he doesn’t love, simply because her sister saw him and fancied him first! And I’m sorry to say that ninety-nine young people out of a hundred–oh, nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand!–would consider that noble and beautiful and heroic; whereas you know at the bottom of your hearts that it would be foolish and cruel and revolting. You know what marriage is! And what it must be without love on both sides.”
The minister had grown quite heated and red in the face.
“I lose all patience!” he went on vehemently. “This poor child of yours has somehow been brought to believe that it will kill her sister if her sister does not have what does not belong to her, and what it is not in the power of all the world, or any soul in the world, to give her. Her sister will suffer–yes, keenly!–in heart and in pride; but she will not die. You will suffer too, in your tenderness for her; but you must do your duty. You must help her to give up. You would be guilty if you did less. Keep clearly in mind that you are doing right, and the only possible good. And God be with you!”
XIX.
HE talked sense, Persis,” said Lapham gently, as he mounted to his wife’s side in the buggy and drove slowly homeward through the dusk.
“Yes, he talked sense,” she admitted. But she added bitterly, “I guess, if he had it to DO! Oh, he’s right, and it’s got to be done. There ain’t any other way for it. It’s sense; and, yes, it’s justice.” They walked to their door after they left the horse at the livery stable around the corner, where Lapham kept it. “I want you should send Irene up to our room as soon as we get in, Silas.”
“Why, ain’t you going to have any supper first?” faltered Lapham with his latch-key in the lock.
“No. I can’t lose a minute. If I do, I shan’t do it at all.”
“Look here, Persis,” said her husband tenderly, “let me do this thing.”
“Oh, YOU!” said his wife, with a woman’s compassionate scorn for a man’s helplessness in such a case. “Send her right up. And I shall feel—-” She stopped to spare him.
Then she opened the door, and ran up to her room without waiting to speak to Irene, who had come into the hall at the sound of her father’s key in the door.
“I guess your mother wants to see you upstairs,” said Lapham, looking away.
Her mother turned round and faced the girl’s wondering look as Irene entered the chamber, so close upon her that she had not yet had time to lay off her bonnet; she stood with her wraps still on her arm.
“Irene!” she said harshly, “there is something you have got to bear. It’s a mistake we’ve all made. He don’t care anything for you. He never did. He told Pen so last night. He cares for her.”
The sentences had fallen like blows. But the girl had taken them without flinching. She stood up immovable, but the delicate rose-light of her complexion went out and left her colourless. She did not offer to speak.
“Why don’t you say something?” cried her mother. “Do you want to kill me, Irene?”
“Why should I want to hurt you, mamma?” the girl replied steadily, but in an alien voice. “There’s nothing to say. I want to see Pen a minute.”
She turned and left the room. As she mounted the stairs that led to her own and her sister’s rooms on the floor above, her mother helplessly followed. Irene went first to her own room at the front of the house, and then came out leaving the door open and the gas flaring behind her. The mother could see that she had tumbled many things out of the drawers of her bureau upon the marble top.
She passed her mother, where she stood in the entry. “You can come too, if you want to, mamma,” she said.
She opened Penelope’s door without knocking, and went in. Penelope sat at the window, as in the morning. Irene did not go to her; but she went and laid a gold hair-pin on her bureau, and said, without looking at her, “There’s a pin that I got to-day, because it was like his sister’s. It won’t become a dark person so well, but you can have it.”
She stuck a scrap of paper in the side of Penelope’s mirror. “There’s that account of Mr. Stanton’s ranch. You’ll want to read it, I presume.”
She laid a withered boutonniere on the bureau beside the pin. “There’s his button-hole bouquet. He left it by his plate, and I stole it.”
She had a pine-shaving fantastically tied up with a knot of ribbon, in her hand. She held it a moment; then, looking deliberately at Penelope, she went up to her, and dropped it in her lap without a word. She turned, and, advancing a few steps, tottered and seemed about to fall.
Her mother sprang forward with an imploring cry, “O ‘Rene, ‘Rene, ‘Rene!”
Irene recovered herself before her mother could reach her. “Don’t touch me,” she said icily. “Mamma, I’m going to put on my things. I want papa to walk with me. I’m choking here.”
“I–I can’t let you go out, Irene, child,” began her mother.
“You’ve got to,” replied the girl. “Tell papa ta hurry his supper.”
“O poor soul! He doesn’t want any supper. HE knows it too.”
“I don’t want to talk about that. Tell him to get ready.”
She left them once more.
Mrs. Lapham turned a hapless glance upon Penelope.
“Go and tell him, mother,” said the girl. “I would, if I could. If she can walk, let her. It’s the only thing for her.” She sat still; she did not even brush to the floor the fantastic thing that lay in her lap, and that sent up faintly the odour of the sachet powder with which Irene liked to perfume her boxes.
Lapham went out with the unhappy child, and began to talk with her, crazily, incoherently, enough.
She mercifully stopped him. “Don’t talk, papa. I don’t want any one should talk with me.”
He obeyed, and they walked silently on and on. In their aimless course they reached the new house on the water side of Beacon, and she made him stop, and stood looking up at it. The scaffolding which had so long defaced the front was gone, and in the light of the gas-lamp before it all the architectural beauty of the facade was suggested, and much of the finely felt detail was revealed. Seymour had pretty nearly satisfied himself in that rich facade; certainly Lapham had not stinted him of the means.
“Well,” said the girl, “I shall never live in it,” and she began to walk on.
Lapham’s sore heart went down, as he lumbered heavily after her. “Oh yes, you will, Irene. You’ll have lots of good times there yet.”
“No,” she answered, and said nothing more about it. They had not talked of their trouble at all, and they did not speak of it now. Lapham understood that she was trying to walk herself weary, and he was glad to hold his peace and let her have her way. She halted him once more before the red and yellow lights of an apothecary’s window.
“Isn’t there something they give you to make you sleep?” she asked vaguely. “I’ve got to sleep to-night!”
Lapham trembled. “I guess you don’t want anything, Irene.”
“Yes, I do! Get me something!” she retorted wilfully. “If you don’t, I shall die. I MUST sleep.”
They went in, and Lapham asked for something to make a nervous person sleep. Irene stood poring over the show-case full of brushes and trinkets, while the apothecary put up the bromide, which he guessed would be about the best thing. She did not show any emotion; her face was like a stone, while her father’s expressed the anguish of his sympathy. He looked as if he had not slept for a week; his fat eyelids drooped over his glassy eyes, and his cheeks and throat hung flaccid. He started as the apothecary’s cat stole smoothly up and rubbed itself against his leg; and it was to him that the man said, “You want to take a table-spoonful of that, as long as you’re awake. I guess it won’t take a great many to fetch you.” “All right,” said Lapham, and paid and went out. “I don’t know but I SHALL want some of it,” he said, with a joyless laugh.
Irene came closer up to him and took his arm. He laid his heavy paw on her gloved fingers. After a while she said, “I want you should let me go up to Lapham to-morrow.”
“To Lapham? Why, to-morrow’s Sunday, Irene! You can’t go to-morrow.”
“Well, Monday, then. I can live through one day here.”
“Well,” said the father passively. He made no pretence of asking her why she wished to go, nor any attempt to dissuade her.
“Give me that bottle,” she said, when he opened the door at home for her, and she ran up to her own room.
The next morning Irene came to breakfast with her mother; the Colonel and Penelope did not appear, and Mrs. Lapham looked sleep-broken and careworn.
The girl glanced at her. “Don’t you fret about me, mamma,” she said. “I shall get along.” She seemed herself as steady and strong as rock.
“I don’t like to see you keeping up so, Irene,” replied her mother. “It’ll be all the worse for you when you do break. Better give way a little at the start”
“I shan’t break, and I’ve given way all I’m going to. I’m going to Lapham to-morrow,–I want you should go with me, mamma,–and I guess I can keep up one day here. All about it is, I don’t want you should say anything, or LOOK anything. And, whatever I do, I don’t want you should try to stop me. And, the first thing, I’m going to take her breakfast up to her. Don’t!” she cried, intercepting the protest on her mother’s lips. “I shall not let it hurt Pen, if I can help it. She’s never done a thing nor thought a thing to wrong me. I had to fly out at her last night; but that’s all over now, and I know just what I’ve got to bear.”
She had her way unmolested. She carried Penelope’s breakfast to her, and omitted no care or attention that could make the sacrifice complete, with an heroic pretence that she was performing no unusual service. They did not speak, beyond her saying, in a clear dry note, “Here’s your breakfast, Pen,” and her sister’s answering, hoarsely and tremulously, “Oh, thank you, Irene.” And, though two or three times they turned their faces toward each other while Irene remained in the room, mechanically putting its confusion to rights, their eyes did not meet. Then Irene descended upon the other rooms, which she set in order, and some of which she fiercely swept and dusted. She made the beds; and she sent the two servants away to church as soon as they had eaten their breakfast, telling them that she would wash their dishes. Throughout the morning her father and mother heard her about the work of getting dinner, with certain silences which represented the moments when she stopped and stood stock-still, and then, readjusting her burden, forced herself forward under it again.
They sat alone in the family room, out of which their two girls seemed to have died. Lapham could not read his Sunday papers, and she had no heart to go to church, as she would have done earlier in life when in trouble. Just then she was obscurely feeling that the church was somehow to blame for that counsel of Mr. Sewell’s on which they had acted.
“I should like to know,” she said, having brought the matter up, “whether he would have thought it was such a light matter if it had been his own children. Do you suppose he’d have been so ready to act on his own advice if it HAD been?”
“He told us the right thing to do, Persis,–the only thing. We couldn’t let it go on,” urged her husband gently.
“Well, it makes me despise Pen! Irene’s showing twice the character that she is, this very minute.”
The mother said this so that the father might defend her daughter to her. He did not fail. “Irene’s got the easiest part, the way I look at it. And you’ll see that Pen’ll know how to behave when the time comes.”
“What do you want she should do?”
“I haven’t got so far as that yet. What are we going to do about Irene?”
“What do you want Pen should do,” repeated Mrs. Lapham, “when it comes to it?”
“Well, I don’t want she should take him, for ONE thing,” said Lapham.
This seemed to satisfy Mrs. Lapham as to her husband, and she said in defence of Corey, “Why, I don’t see what HE’S done. It’s all been our doing.”
“Never mind that now. What about Irene?”
“She says she’s going to Lapham to-morrow. She feels that she’s got to get away somewhere. It’s natural she should.”
“Yes, and I presume it will be about the best thing FOR her. Shall you go with her?”
“Yes.”
“Well.” He comfortlessly took up a newspaper again, and she rose with a sigh, and went to her room to pack some things for the morrow’s journey.
After dinner, when Irene had cleared away the last trace of it in kitchen and dining-room with unsparing punctilio, she came downstairs, dressed to go out, and bade her father come to walk with her again. It was a repetition of the aimlessness of the last night’s wanderings. They came back, and she got tea for them, and after that they heard her stirring about in her own room, as if she were busy about many things; but they did not dare to look in upon her, even after all the noises had ceased, and they knew she had gone to bed.
“Yes; it’s a thing she’s got to fight out by herself,” said Mrs Lapham.
“I guess she’ll get along,” said Lapham. “But I don’t want you should misjudge Pen either. She’s all right too. She ain’t to blame.”
“Yes, I know. But I can’t work round to it all at once. I shan’t misjudge her, but you can’t expect me to get over it right away.”
“Mamma,” said Irene, when she was hurrying their departure the next morning, “what did she tell him when he asked her?”
“Tell him?” echoed the mother; and after a while she added, “She didn’t tell him anything.”
“Did she say anything, about me?”
“She said he mustn’t come here any more.”
Irene turned and went into her sister’s room. “Good-bye, Pen,” she said, kissing her with an effect of not seeing or touching her. “I want you should tell him all about it. If he’s half a man, he won’t give up till he knows why you won’t have him; and he has a right to know.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference. I couldn’t have him after—-“
“That’s for you to say. But if you don’t tell him about me, I will.”
“‘Rene!” “Yes! You needn’t say I cared for him. But you can say that you all thought he–cared for–me.”
“O Irene—-“
“Don’t!” Irene escaped from the arms that tried to cast themselves about her. “You are all right, Pen. You haven’t done anything. You’ve helped me all you could. But I can’t–yet.”
She went out of the room and summoned Mrs. Lapham with a sharp ” Now, mamma!” and went on putting the last things into her trunks.
The Colonel went to the station with them, and put them on the train. He got them a little compartment to themselves in the Pullman car; and as he stood leaning with his lifted hands against the sides of the doorway, he tried to say something consoling and hopeful: “I guess you’ll have an easy ride, Irene. I don’t believe it’ll be dusty, any, after the rain last night.”
“Don’t you stay till the train starts, papa,” returned the girl, in rigid rejection of his futilities. “Get off, now.”
“Well, if you want I should,” he said, glad to be able to please her in anything. He remained on the platform till the cars started. He saw Irene bustling about in the compartment, making her mother comfortable for the journey; but Mrs. Lapham did not lift her head. The train moved off, and he went heavily back to his business.
From time to time during the day, when he caught a glimpse of him, Corey tried to make out from his face whether he knew what had taken place between him and Penelope. When Rogers came in about time of closing, and shut himself up with Lapham in his room, the young man remained till the two came out together and parted in their salutationless fashion.
Lapham showed no surprise at seeing Corey still there, and merely answered, “Well!” when the young man said that he wished to speak with him, and led the way back to his room.
Corey shut the door behind them. “I only wish to speak to you in case you know of the matter already; for otherwise I’m bound by a promise.”
“I guess I know what you mean. It’s about Penelope.”
“Yes, it’s about Miss Lapham. I am greatly attached to her–you’ll excuse my saying it; I couldn’t excuse myself if I were not.”
“Perfectly excusable,” said Lapham. “It’s all right.”
“Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that!” cried the young fellow joyfully. “I want you to believe that this isn’t a new thing or an unconsidered thing with me–though it seemed so unexpected to her.”
Lapham fetched a deep sigh. “It’s all right as far as I’m concerned–or her mother. We’ve both liked you first-rate.”
“Yes?”
“But there seems to be something in Penelope’s mind–I don’t know ” The Colonel consciously dropped his eyes.
“She referred to something–I couldn’t make out what–but I hoped–I hoped–that with your leave I might overcome it–the barrier–whatever it was. Miss Lapham–Penelope–gave me the hope–that I was–wasn’t–indifferent to her—-“
“Yes, I guess that’s so,” said Lapham. He suddenly lifted his head, and confronted the young fellow’s honest face with his own face, so different in its honesty. “Sure you never made up to any one else at the same time?”
“NEVER! Who could imagine such a thing? If that’s all, I can easily”
“I don’t say that’s all, nor that that’s it. I don’t want you should go upon that idea. I just thought, may be–you hadn’t thought of it.”
“No, I certainly hadn’t thought of it! Such a thing would have been so impossible to me that I couldn’t have thought of it; and it’s so shocking to me now that I don’t know what to say to it.”
“Well, don’t take it too much to heart,” said Lapham, alarmed at the feeling he had excited; “I don’t say she thought so. I was trying to guess–trying to—-“
“If there is anything I can say or do to convince you— –
“Oh, it ain’t necessary to say anything. I’m all right.”