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A Modern Instance

W >> William Dean Howells >> A Modern Instance




"I'm not afraid. Those two winters make a great difference. You saw girls
from other places,--from Augusta, and Bangor, and Bath."

"Well, I couldn't see how they were so very different from Equity girls."

"I dare say they couldn't, either, if they judged from you."

She leaned forward again, and begged for more flattery from him with her
happy eyes. "Why, what _does_ make me so different from all the rest? I
should really like to know."

"Oh, you don't expect me to tell you to your face!"

"Yes, to my face! I don't believe it's anything complimentary."

"No, it's nothing that you deserve any credit for."

"Pshaw!" cried the girl. "I know you're only talking to make fun of me. How
do I know but you make fun of me to other girls, just as you do of them to
me? Everybody says you're sarcastic."

"Have I ever been sarcastic with you?"

"You know I wouldn't stand it."

He made no reply, but she admired the ease with which he now turned from
her, and took one book after another from the table at his elbow, saying
some words of ridicule about each. It gave her a still deeper sense of his
intellectual command when he finally discriminated, and began to read out a
poem with studied elocutionary effects. He read in a low tone, but at last
some responsive noises came from the room overhead; he closed the book, and
threw himself into an attitude of deprecation, with his eyes cast up to the
ceiling.

"Chicago," he said, laying the book on the table and taking his knee
between his hands, while he dazzled her by speaking from the abstraction
of one who has carried on a train of thought quite different from that on
which he seemed to be intent,--"Chicago is the place for me. I don't think
I can stand Equity much longer. You know that chum of mine I told you
about; he's written to me to come out there and go into the law with him at
once."

"Why don't you go?" the girl forced herself to ask.

"Oh, I'm not ready yet. Should you write to me if I went to Chicago?"

"I don't think you'd find my letters very interesting. You wouldn't want
any news from Equity."

"Your letters wouldn't be interesting if you gave me the Equity news; but
they would if you left it out. Then you'd have to write about yourself."

"Oh, I don't think that would interest anybody."

"Well, I feel almost like going out to Chicago to see."

"But I haven't promised to write yet," said the girl, laughing for joy in
his humor.

"I shall have to stay in Equity till you do, then. Better promise at once."

"Wouldn't that be too much like marrying a man to get rid of him?"

"I don't think that's always such a bad plan--for the man." He waited for
her to speak; but she had gone the length of her tether in this direction.
"Byron says,--

'Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,--
'Tis woman's whole existence.'

Do you believe that?" He dwelt upon her with his tree look, in the happy
embarrassment with which she let her head droop.

"I don't know," she murmured. "I don't know anything about a man's life."

"It was the woman's I was asking about."

"I don't think I'm competent to answer."

"Well, I'll tell you, then. I think Byron was mistaken. My experience is,
that, when a man is in love, there's nothing else of him. That's the reason
I've kept out of it altogether of late years. My advice is, don't fall
in love: it takes too much time." They both laughed at this. "But about
corresponding, now; you haven't said whether you would write to me, or not.
Will you?"

"Can't you wait and see?" she asked, slanting a look at him, which she
could not keep from being fond.

"No, no. Unless you wrote to me I couldn't go to Chicago."

"Perhaps I ought to promise, then, at once."

"You mean that you wish me to go."

"You said that you were going. You oughtn't to let anything stand in the
way of your doing the best you can for yourself."

"But you would miss me a little, wouldn't you? You would try to miss me,
now and then?"

"Oh, you are here pretty often. I don't think I should have much difficulty
in missing you."

"Thanks, thanks! I can go with a light heart, now. Good by." He made a
pretence of rising.

"What! Are you going at once?"

"Yes, this very night,--or to-morrow. Or no, I can't go to-morrow. There's
something I was going to do to-morrow."

"Perhaps go to church."

"Oh, that of course. But it was in the afternoon. Stop! I have it! I want
you to go sleigh-riding with me in the afternoon."

"I don't know about that," Marcia began.

"But I do," said the young man. "Hold on: I'll put my request in writing."
He opened her portfolio, which lay on the table. "What elegant stationery!
May I use some of this elegant stationery? The letter is to a lady,--to
open a correspondence. May I?" She laughed her assent. "How ought I to
begin? Dearest Miss Marcia, or just Dear Marcia: which is better?"

"You had better not put either--"

"But I must. You're one or the other, you know. You're dear--to your
family,--and you're Marcia: you can't deny it. The only question is whether
you're the dearest of all the Miss Marcias. I may be mistaken, you know.
We'll err on the safe side: Dear Marcia:" He wrote it down. "That looks
well, and it reads well. It looks very natural, and it reads like
poetry,--blank verse; there's no rhyme for it that I can remember. Dear
Marcia: Will you go sleigh-riding with me to-morrow afternoon, at two
o'clock sharp? Yours--yours? sincerely, or cordially, or affectionately, or
what? The 'dear Marcia' seems to call for something out of the common.
I think it had better be affectionately." He suggested it with ironical
gravity.

"And _I_ think it had better be 'truly,'" protested the girl.

"'Truly' it shall be, then. Your word is law,--statute in such case made
and provided." He wrote, "With unutterable devotion, yours truly, Bartley
J. Hubbard," and read it aloud.

She leaned forward, and lightly caught it away from him, and made a feint
of tearing it. He seized her hands. "Mr. Hubbard!" she cried, in undertone.
"Let me go, please."

"On two conditions,--promise not to tear up my letter, and promise to
answer it in writing."

She hesitated long, letting him hold her wrists. At last she said, "Well,"
and he released her wrists, on whose whiteness his clasp left red circles.
She wrote a single word on the paper, and pushed it across the table to
him. He rose with it, and went around to her side.

"This is very nice. But you haven't spelled it correctly. Anybody would say
this was No, to look at it; and you meant to write Yes. Take the pencil in
your hand, Miss Gaylord, and I will steady your trembling nerves, so that
you can form the characters. Stop! At the slightest resistance on your
part, I will call out and alarm the house; or I will--." He put the pencil
into her fingers, and took her soft fist into his, and changed the word,
while she submitted, helpless with her smothered laughter. "Now the
address. Dear--"

"No, no!" she protested.

"Yes, yes! Dear Mr. Hubbard. There, that will do. Now the signature.
Yours--"

"I _won't_ write that. I won't, indeed!"

"Oh, yes, you will. You only think you won't. Yours gratefully, Marcia
Gaylord. That's right. The Gaylord is not very legible, on account of a
slight tremor in the writer's arm, resulting from a constrained posture,
perhaps. Thanks, Miss Gaylord. I will be here promptly at the hour
indicated--"

The noises renewed themselves overhead,--some one seemed to be moving
about. Hubbard laid his hand on that of the girl, still resting on the
table, and grasped it in burlesque alarm; she could scarcely stifle her
mirth. He released her hand, and, reaching his chair with a theatrical
stride, sat there cowering till the noises ceased. Then he began to speak
soberly, in a low voice. He spoke of himself; but in application of a
lecture which they had lately heard, so that he seemed to be speaking of
the lecture. It was on the formation of character, and he told of the
processes by which he had formed his own character. They appeared very
wonderful to her, and she marvelled at the ease with which he dismissed the
frivolity of his recent mood, and was now all seriousness. When he came to
speak of the influence of others upon him, she almost trembled with the
intensity of her interest. "But of all the women I have known, Marcia," he
said, "I believe you have had the strongest influence upon me. I believe
you could make me do anything; but you have always influenced me for good;
your influence upon me has been ennobling and elevating."

She wished to refuse his praise; but her heart throbbed for bliss and pride
in it; her voice dissolved on her lips. They sat in silence; and he took in
his the hand that she let hang over the side of her chair. The lamp began
to burn low, and she found words to say, "I had better get another," but
she did not move.

"No, don't," he said; "I must be going, too. Look at the wick, there,
Marcia; it scarcely reaches the oil. In a little while it will not reach
it, and the flame will die out. That is the way the ambition to be good and
great will die out of me, when my life no longer draws its inspiration from
your influence."

This figure took her imagination; it seemed to her very beautiful; and his
praise humbled her more and more.

"Good night," he said, in a low, sad voice. He gave her hand a last
pressure, and rose to put on his coat. Her admiration of his words, her
happiness in his flattery, filled her brain like wine. She moved dizzily as
she took up the lamp to light him to the door. "I have tired you," he said,
tenderly, and he passed his hand around her to sustain the elbow of the arm
with which she held the lamp; she wished to resist, but she could not try.

At the door he bent down his head and kissed her. "Good night,
dear--friend."

"Good night," she panted; and after the door had closed upon him, she
stooped and kissed the knob on which his hand had rested.

As she turned, she started to see her father coming down the stairs with a
candle in his hand. He had his black cravat tied around his throat, but no
collar; otherwise, he had on the rusty black clothes in which he ordinarily
went about his affairs,--the cassimere pantaloons, the satin vest, and the
dress-coat which old-fashioned country lawyers still wore ten years ago, in
preference to a frock or sack. He stopped on one of the lower steps, and
looked sharply down into her uplifted face, and, as they stood confronted,
their consanguinity came out in vivid resemblances and contrasts; his high,
hawk-like profile was translated into the fine aquiline outline of hers;
the harsh rings of black hair, now grizzled with age, which clustered
tightly over his head, except where they had retreated from his deeply
seamed and wrinkled forehead, were the crinkled flow above her smooth white
brow; and the line of the bristly tufts that overhung his eyes was the same
as that of the low arches above hers. Her complexion was from her mother;
his skin was dusky yellow; but they had the same mouth, and hers showed how
sweet his mouth must have been in his youth. His eyes, deep sunk in their
cavernous sockets, had rekindled their dark fires in hers; his whole
visage, softened to her sex and girlish years, looked up at him in his
daughter's face.

"Why, father! Did we wake you?"

"No. I hadn't been asleep at all. I was coming down to read. But it's time
you were in bed, Marcia."

"Yes, I'm going, now. There's a good fire in the parlor stove."

The old man descended the remaining steps, but turned at the parlor door,
and looked again at his daughter with a glance that arrested her, with her
foot on the lowest stair.

"Marcia," he asked, grimly, "are you engaged to Bartley Hubbard?"

The blood flashed up from her heart into her face like fire, and then, as
suddenly, fell back again, and left her white. She let her head droop and
turn, till her eyes were wholly averted from him, and she did not speak. He
closed the door behind him, and she went upstairs to her own room; in her
shame, she seemed to herself to crawl thither, with her father's glance
burning upon her.




II.


Bartley Hubbard drove his sorrel colt back to the hotel stable through the
moonlight, and woke up the hostler, asleep behind the counter, on a bunk
covered with buffalo-robes. The half-grown boy did not wake easily; he
conceived of the affair as a joke, and bade Bartley quit his fooling, till
the young man took him by his collar, and stood him on his feet. Then he
fumbled about the button of the lamp, turned low and smelling rankly, and
lit his lantern, which contributed a rival stench to the choking air. He
kicked together the embers that smouldered on the hearth of the Franklin
stove, sitting down before it for his greater convenience, and, having put
a fresh pine-root on the fire, fell into a doze, with his lantern in his
hand. "Look here, young man!" said Bartley, shaking him by the shoulder,
"you had better go out and put that colt up, and leave this sleeping before
the fire to me."

"Guess the colt can wait awhile," grumbled the boy; but he went out,
all the same, and Bartley, looking through the window, saw his lantern
wavering, a yellow blot in the white moonshine, toward the stable. He sat
down in the hostler's chair, and, in his turn, kicked the pine-root with
the heel of his shoe, and looked about the room. He had had, as he would
have said, a grand good time; but it had left him hungry, and the table in
the middle of the room, with the chairs huddled around it, was suggestive,
though he knew that it had been barrenly put there for the convenience of
the landlord's friends, who came every night to play whist with him, and
that nothing to eat or drink had ever been set out on it to interrupt the
austere interest of the game. It was long since there had been anything
on the shelves behind the counter more cheerful than corn-balls and fancy
crackers for the children of the summer boarders; these dainties being out
of season, the jars now stood there empty. The young man waited in a hungry
reverie, in which it appeared to him that he was undergoing unmerited
suffering, till the stable-boy came back, now wide awake, and disposed to
let the house share his vigils, as he stamped over the floor in his heavy
boots.

"Andy," said Bartley, in a pathetic tone of injury, "can't you scare me up
something to eat?"

"There aint anything in the buttery but meat-pie," said the boy.

He meant mince-pie, as Hubbard knew, and not a pasty of meat; and the
hungry man hesitated. "Well, fetch it," he said, finally. "I guess we can
warm it up a little by the coals here."

He had not been so long out of college but the idea of this irregular
supper, when he had once formed it, began to have its fascination. He took
up the broad fire-shovel, and, by the time the boy had shuffled to and from
the pantry beyond the dining-room, Bartley had cleaned the shovel with a
piece of newspaper and was already heating it by the embers which he had
raked out from under the pine-root. The boy silently transferred the
half-pie he had brought from its plate to the shovel. He pulled up a chair
and sat down to watch it. The pie began to steam and send out a savory
odor; he himself, in thawing, emitted a stronger and stronger smell of
stable. He was not without his disdain for the palate which must have its
mince-pie warm at midnight,--nor without his respect for it, either. This
fastidious taste must be part of the splendor which showed itself in Mr.
Hubbard's city-cut clothes, and in his neck-scarfs and the perfection of
his finger-nails and mustache. The boy had felt the original impression of
these facts deepened rather than effaced by custom; they were for every
day, and not, as he had at first conjectured, for some great occasion only.

"You don't suppose, Andy, there is such a thing as cold tea or coffee
anywhere, that we could warm up?" asked Bartley, gazing thoughtfully at the
pie.

The boy shook his head. "Get you some milk," he said; and, after he had let
the dispiriting suggestion sink into the other's mind, he added, "or some
water."

"Oh, bring on the milk," groaned Bartley, but with the relief that a choice
of evils affords. The boy stumped away for it, and when he came back the
young man had got his pie on the plate again, and had drawn his chair up to
the table. "Thanks," he said, with his mouth full, as the boy set down the
goblet of milk. Andy pulled his chair round so as to get an unrestricted
view of a man who ate his pie with his fork as easily as another would
with a knife. "That sister of yours is a smart girl," the young man added,
making deliberate progress with the pie.

The boy made an inarticulate sound of satisfaction, and resolved in his
heart to tell her what Mr. Hubbard had said.

"She's as smart as time," continued Bartley.

This was something concrete. The boy knew he should remember that
comparison. "Bring you anything else?" he asked, admiring the young man's
skill in getting the last flakes of the crust on his fork. The pie had now
vanished.

"Why, there isn't anything else, is there?" Bartley demanded, with the
plaintive dismay of a man who fears he has flung away his hunger upon one
dish when he might have had something better.

"Cheese," replied the boy.

"Oh!" said Bartley. He reflected awhile. "I suppose I could toast a piece
on this fork. But there isn't any more milk."

The boy took away the plate and goblet, and brought them again replenished.

Bartley contrived to get the cheese on his fork and rest it against one of
the andirons so that it would not fall into the ashes. When it was done, he
ate it as he had eaten the pie, without offering to share his feast with
the boy. "There'" he said. "Yes, Andy, if she keeps on as she's been doing,
she won't have any trouble. She's a bright girl." He stretched his legs
before the fire again, and presently yawned.

"Want your lamp, Mr. Hubbard?" asked the boy.

"Well, yes, Andy," the young man consented. "I suppose I may as well go to
bed."

But when the boy brought his lamp, he still remained with outstretched legs
in front of the fire. Speaking of Hannah Morrison made him think of Marcia
again, and of the way in which she had spoken of the girl. He lolled his
head on one side in such comfort as a young man finds in the conviction
that a pretty girl is not only fond of him, but is instantly jealous of any
other girl whose name is mentioned. He smiled at the flame in his reverie,
and the boy examined, with clandestine minuteness, the set and pattern of
his trousers, with glances of reference and comparison to his own.

There were many things about his relations with Marcia Gaylord which were
calculated to give Bartley satisfaction. She was, without question, the
prettiest girl in the place, and she had more style than any other girl
began to have. He liked to go into a room with Marcia Gaylord; it was some
pleasure. Marcia was a lady; she had a good education; she had been away
two years at school; and, when she came back at the end of the second
winter, he knew that she had fallen in love with him at sight. He believed
that he could time it to a second. He remembered how he had looked up at
her as he passed, and she had reddened, and tried to turn away from the
window as if she had not seen him. Bartley was still free as air; but if he
could once make up his mind to settle down in a hole like Equity, he
could have her by turning his hand. Of course she had her drawbacks, like
everybody. She was proud, and she would be jealous; but, with all her pride
and her distance, she had let him see that she liked him; and with not a
word on his part that any one could hold him to.

"Hollo!" he cried, with a suddenness that startled the boy, who had
finished his meditation upon Bartley's trousers, and was now deeply
dwelling on his boots. "Do you like 'em? See what sort of a shine you can
give 'em for Sunday-go-to-meeting to-morrow morning." He put out his hand
and laid hold of the boy's head, passing his fingers through the thick red
hair. "Sorrel-top!" he said, with a grin of agreeable reminiscence. "They
emptied all the freckles they had left into your face,--didn't they, Andy?"

This free, joking way of Bartley's was one of the things that made him
popular; he passed the time of day, and was give and take right along,
as his admirers expressed it, from the first, in a community where his
smartness had that honor which gives us more smart men to the square mile
than any other country in the world. The fact of his smartness had been
affirmed and established in the strongest manner by the authorities of the
college at which he was graduated, in answer to the reference he made to
them when negotiating with the committee in charge for the place he now
held as editor of the Equity Free Press. The faculty spoke of the solidity
and variety of his acquirements, and the distinction with which he had
acquitted himself in every branch of study' he had undertaken. They added
that he deserved the greater credit because his early disadvantages as an
orphan, dependent on his own exertions for a livelihood, had been so great
that he had entered college with difficulty, and with heavy conditions.
This turned the scale with a committee who had all been poor boys
themselves, and justly feared the encroachments of hereditary aristocracy.
They perhaps had their misgivings when the young man, in his well-blacked
boots, his gray trousers neatly fitting over them, and his diagonal coat
buttoned high with one button, stood before them with his thumbs in his
waistcoat pockets, and looked down over his mustache at the floor with
sentiments concerning their wisdom which they could not explore; they must
have resented the fashionable keeping of everything about him, for Bartley
wore his one suit as if it were but one of many; but when they understood
that he had come by everything through his own unaided smartness, they
could no longer hesitate: One, indeed, still felt it a duty to call
attention to the fact that the college authorities said nothing of the
young man's moral characteristics in a letter dwelling so largely upon his
intellectual qualifications. The others referred this point by a silent
look to Squire Gaylord.

"I don't know;" said the Squire, "as I ever heard that a great deal of
morality was required by a newspaper editor." The rest laughed at the joke,
and the Squire continued: "But I guess if he worked his own way through
college, as they say, that he haint had time to be up to a great deal of
mischief. You know it's for idle hands that the Devil provides, doctor."

"That's true, as far as it goes," said the doctor.

"But it isn't the whole truth. The Devil provides for some busy hands,
too."

"There's a good deal of sense in that," the Squire admitted. "The worst
scamps I ever knew were active fellows. Still, industry is in a man's
favor. If the faculty knew anything against this young man they would
have given us a hint of it. I guess we had better take him; we sha'n't do
better. Is it a vote?"

The good opinion of Bartley's smartness which Squire Gaylord had formed was
confirmed some months later by the development of the fact that the young
man did not regard his management of the Equity Free Press as a final
vocation. The story went that he lounged into the lawyer's office one
Saturday afternoon in October, and asked him to let him take his Blackstone
into the woods with him. He came back with it a few hours later.

"Well, sir," said the attorney, sardonically, "how much Blackstone have you
read?"

"About forty pages," answered the young man, dropping into one of the empty
chairs, and hanging his leg over the arm.

The lawyer smiled, and, opening the book, asked half a dozen questions at
random. Bartley answered without changing his indifferent countenance, or
the careless posture he had fallen into. A sharper and longer examination
followed; the very language seemed to have been unbrokenly transferred to
his mind, and he often gave the author's words as well as his ideas.

"Ever looked at this before?" asked the lawyer, with a keen glance at him
over his spectacles.

"No," said Bartley, gaping as if bored, and further relieving his weariness
by stretching. He was without deference for any presence; and the old
lawyer did not dislike him for this: he had no deference himself.

"You think of studying law?" he asked, after a pause.

"That's what I came to ask you about," said Bartley, swinging his leg.

The elder recurred to his book, and put some more questions. Then he said,
"Do you want to study with me?"

"That's about the size of it."

He shut the book, and pushed it on the table toward the young man. "Go
ahead. You'll get along--if you don't get along too easily."

It was in the spring after this that Marcia returned home from her last
term at boarding-school, and first saw him.




III.


Bartley woke on Sunday morning with the regrets that a supper of mince-pie
and toasted cheese is apt to bring. He woke from a bad dream, and found
that he had a dull headache. A cup of coffee relieved his pain, but it left
him listless, and with a longing for sympathy which he experienced in any
mental or physical discomfort. The frankness with which he then appealed
for compassion was one of the things that made people like him; he flung
himself upon the pity of the first he met. It might be some one to whom he
had said a cutting or mortifying thing at their last encounter, but Bartley
did not mind that; what he desired was commiseration, and he confidingly
ignored the past in a trust that had rarely been abused. If his sarcasm
proved that he was quick and smart, his recourse to those who had suffered
from it proved that he did not mean anything by what he said; it showed
that he was a man of warm feelings, and that his heart was in the right
place.

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