A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

A Modern Instance

W >> William Dean Howells >> A Modern Instance




"I'm glad you value my opinion, Clara. And if you come to me for frankness,
you can always have all you want; it's a drug in the market with me." She
meagrely returned Clara's embrace, and left her in a reverie of tactless
scheming for the restoration of peace with Mr. Atherton.

Marcia came in upon the lawyer before he had thought, after parting with
Miss Kingsbury, to tell the clerk in the outer office to deny him; but she
was too full of her own trouble to see the reluctance which it tasked all
his strength to quell, and she sank into the nearest chair unbidden. At
sight of her, Atherton became the prey of one of those fantastic repulsions
in which men visit upon women the blame of others' thoughts about them: he
censured her for Halleck's wrong; but in another instant he recognized
his cruelty, and atoned by relenting a little in his intolerance of her
presence. She sat gazing at him with a face of blank misery, to which he
could not refuse the charity of a prompting question: "Is there something I
can do for you, Mrs. Hubbard?"

"Oh, I don't know,--I don't know!" She had a folded paper in her hands,
which lay helpless in her lap. After a moment she resumed, in a hoarse, low
voice: "They have all begun to come for their money, and this one--this one
says he will have the law of me--I don't know what he means--if I don't pay
him."

Marcia could not know how hard Atherton found it to govern the professional
suspicion which sprung up at the question of money. But he overruled his
suspicion by an effort that was another relief to the struggle in which he
was wrenching his mind from Miss Kingsbury's outrageous behavior. "What
have you got there?" he asked gravely, and not unkindly, and being used to
prompt the reluctance of lady clients, he put out his hand for the paper
she held. It was the bill of the threatening creditor, for indefinitely
repeated dozens of tivoli beer.

"Why do they come to _you_ with this?"

"Mr. Hubbard is away."

"Oh, yes. I heard. When do you expect him home?"

"I don't know."

"Where is he?"

She looked at him piteously without speaking.

Atherton stepped to his door, and gave the order forgotten before. Then
he closed the door, and came back to Marcia. "Don't you know where your
husband is, Mrs. Hubbard?"

"Oh, he will come back! He _couldn't_ leave me! He's dead,--I know he's
dead; but he will come back! He only went away for the night, and something
must have happened to him."

The whole tragedy of her life for the past fortnight was expressed in these
wild and inconsistent words; she had not been able to reason beyond the
pathetic absurdities which they involved; they had the effect of assertions
confirmed in the belief by incessant repetition, and doubtless she had
said them to herself a thousand times. Atherton read in them, not only the
confession of her despair, but a prayer for mercy, which it would have
been inhuman to deny, and for the present he left her to such refuge from
herself as she had found in them. He said, quietly, "You had better give me
that paper, Mrs. Hubbard," and took the bill from her. "If the others come
with their accounts again, you must send them to me. When did you say Mr.
Hubbard left home?"

"The night after the election," said Marcia.

"And he didn't say how long he should be gone?" pursued the lawyer, in the
feint that she had known he was going.

"No," she answered.

"He took some things with him?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps you could judge how long he meant to be absent from the
preparation he made?"

"I've never looked to see. I couldn't!"

Atherton changed the line of his inquiry. "Does any one else know of this?"

"No," said Marcia, quickly, "I told Mrs. Halleck and all of them that
he was in New York, and I said that I had heard from him. I came to you
because you were a lawyer, and you would not tell what I told you."

"Yes," said Atherton.

"I want it kept a secret. Oh, do you think he's dead?" she implored.

"No," returned Atherton, gravely, "I don't think he's dead."

"Sometimes it seems to me I could bear it better if I knew he was dead. If
he isn't dead, he's out of his mind! He's out of his mind, don't you think,
and he's wandered off somewhere?"

She besought him so pitifully to agree with her, bending forward and trying
to read the thoughts in his face, that he could not help saying, "Perhaps."

A gush of grateful tears blinded her, but she choked down her sobs.

"I said things to him that night that were enough to drive him crazy. I was
always the one in fault, but he was always the one to make up first, and he
never would have gone away from me if he had known what he was doing! But
he will come back, I know he will," she said, rising. "And oh, you won't
say anything to anybody, will you? And he'll get back before they find out.
I will send those men to you, and Bartley will see about it as soon as he
comes home--"

"Don't go, Mrs. Hubbard," said the lawyer. "I want to speak with you
a little longer." She dropped again in her chair, and looked at him
inquiringly. "Have you written to your father about this?"

"Oh, no," she answered quickly, with an effect of shrinking back into
herself.

"I think you had better do so. You can't tell when your husband will
return, and you can't go on in this way."

"I will never tell _father_," she replied, closing her lips inexorably.

The lawyer forbore to penetrate the family trouble he divined. "Are you all
alone in the house?" he asked.

"The girl is there. And the baby."

"That won't do, Mrs. Hubbard," said Atherton, with a compassionate shake of
the head. "You can't go on living there alone."

"Oh, yes, I can. I'm not afraid to be alone," she returned with the air of
having thought of this.

"But he may be absent some time yet," urged the lawyer; "he may be absent
indefinitely. You must go home to your father and wait for him there."

"I can't do that. He must find me here when he comes," she answered firmly.

"But how will you stay?" pleaded Atherton; he had to deal with an
unreasonable creature who could not be driven, and he must plead. "You have
no money, and how can you live?"

"Oh," replied Marcia, with the air of having thought of this too, "I will
take boarders."

Atherton smiled at the hopeless practicality, and shook his head; but he
did not oppose her directly. "Mrs. Hubbard," he said earnestly, "you have
done well in coming to me, but let me convince you that this is a matter
which can't be kept. It must be known. Before you can begin to help
yourself, you must let others help you. Either you must go home to your
father and let your husband find you there--"

"He must find me here, in our own house."

"Then you must tell your friends here that you don't know where he is, nor
when he will return, and let them advise together as to what can be done.
You must tell the Hallecks--"

"I will _never_ tell them!" cried Marcia. "Let me go! I can starve there
and freeze, and if he finds me dead in the house, none of them shall have
the right to blame him,--to say that he left me,--that he deserted his
little child! Oh! oh! oh! oh! What shall I do?"

The hapless creature shook with the thick-coming sobs that overpowered her
now, and Atherton refrained once more. She did not seem ashamed before
him of the sorrows which he felt it a sacrilege to know, and in a blind
instinctive way he perceived that in proportion as he was a stranger it was
possible for her to bear her disgrace in his presence. He spoke at last
from the hint he found in this fact: "Will you let me mention the matter to
Miss Kingsbury?"

She looked at him with sad intensity in the eyes, as if trying to fathom
any nether thought that he might have. It must have seemed to her at first
that he was mocking her, but his words brought her the only relief from her
self-upbraiding she had known. To suffer kindness from Miss Kingsbury would
be in some sort an atonement to Bartley for the wrong her jealousy had done
him; it would be self-sacrifice for his sake; it would be expiation. "Yes,
tell her," she answered with a promptness whose obscure motive was not
illumined by the flash of passionate pride with which she added, "I shall
not care for _her_."

She rose again, and Atherton did not detain her; but when she had left him
he lost no time in writing to her father the facts of the case as her visit
had revealed them. He spoke of her reluctance to have her situation known
to her family, but assured the Squire that he need have no anxiety about
her for the present. He promised to keep him fully informed in regard to
her, and to telegraph the first news of Mr. Hubbard. He left the Squire to
form his own conjectures, and to take whatever action he thought best. For
his own part, he had no question that Hubbard had abandoned his wife, and
had stolen Halleck's money; and the detectives to whom he went were clear
that it was a case of European travel.




XXXV.


Atherton went from the detectives to Miss Kingsbury, and boldly resisted
the interdict at her door, sending up his name with the message that he
wished to see her immediately on business. She kept him waiting while she
made a frightened toilet, and leaving the letter to him which she had
begun half finished on her desk, she came down to meet him in a flutter of
despondent conjecture. He took her mechanically yielded hand, and seated
himself on the sofa beside her. "I sent word that I had come on business,"
he said, "but it is no affair of yours,"--she hardly knew whether to feel
relieved or disappointed,--"except as you make all unhappy people's affairs
your own."

"Oh!" she murmured in meek protest, and at the same time she remotely
wondered if these affairs were his.

"I came to you for help," he began again, and again she interrupted him in
deprecation.

"You are very good, after--after--what I--what happened,--I'm sure." She
put up her fan to her lips, and turned her head a little aside. "Of course
I shall be glad to help you in anything, Mr. Atherton; you know I always
am."

"Yes, and that gave me courage to come to you, even after the way in which
we parted this morning. I knew you would not misunderstand me"--

"No," said Clara softly, doing her best to understand him.

"Or think me wanting in delicacy--"

"Oh, no, no!"

"If I believed that we need not have any embarrassment in meeting in behalf
of the poor creature who came to see me just after you left me. The fact
is," he went on, "I felt a little freer to promise your interest since I
had no longer any business relation to you, and could rely on your kindness
like--like--any other."

"Yes," assented Clara, faintly; and she forbore to point out to him, as she
might fitly have done, that he had never had the right to advise or direct
her at which he hinted, except as she expressly conferred it from time to
time. "I shall be only too glad--"

"And I will have a statement of your affairs drawn up to-morrow, and sent
to you." Her heart sank; she ceased to move the fan which she had been
slowly waving back and forth before her face. "I was going to set about it
this morning, but Mrs. Hubbard's visit--"

"Mrs. Hubbard!" cried Clara, and a little air of pique qualified her
despair.

"Yes; she is in trouble,--the greatest: her husband has deserted her."

"_Oh_, Mr. Atherton!" Clara's mind was now far away from any concern for
herself. The woman whose husband has deserted her supremely appeals to all
other women. "I can't believe it! What makes you think so?"

"What she concealed, rather than what she told me, I believe," answered
Atherton. He ran over the main points of their interview, and summed up his
own conjectures. "I know from things Halleck has let drop that they haven't
always lived happily together; Hubbard has been speculating with borrowed
money, and he's in debt to everybody. She's been alone in her house for a
fortnight, and she only came to me because people had begun to press her
for money. She's been pretending to the Hallecks that she hears from her
husband, and knows where he is."

"Oh, poor, poor thing!" said Clara, too shocked to say more. "Then they
don't know?"

"No one knows but ourselves. She came to me because I was a comparative
stranger, and it would cost her less to confess her trouble to me than to
them, and she allowed me to speak to you for very much the same reason."

"But I know she dislikes me!"

"So much the better! She can't doubt your goodness--"

"Oh!"

"And if she dislikes you, she can keep her pride better with you."

Clara let her eyes fall, and fingered the edges of her fan. There was
reason in this, and she did not care that the opportunity of usefulness was
personally unflattering, since he thought her capable of rising above the
fact. "What do you want me to do?" she asked, lifting her eyes docilely to
his.

"You must find some one to stay with her, in her house, till she can be
persuaded to leave it, and you must lend her some money till her father can
come to her or write to her. I've just written to him, and I've told her to
send all her bills to me; but I'm afraid she may be in immediate need."

"Terrible!" sighed Clara to whom the destitution of an acquaintance was
appalling after all her charitable knowledge of want and suffering. "Of
course, we mustn't lose a moment," she added; but she lingered in her
corner of the sofa to discuss ways and means with him, and to fathom that
sad enjoyment which comfortable people find in the contemplation of alien
sorrows. It was not her fault if she felt too kindly toward the disaster
that had brought Atherton back to her on the old terms; or if she arranged
her plans for befriending Marcia in her desolation with too buoyant a
cheerfulness. But she took herself to task for the radiant smile she found
on her face, when she ran up stairs and looked into her glass to see how
she looked in parting with Atherton: she said to herself that he would
think her perfectly heartless.

She decided that it would be indecent to drive to Marcia's under the
circumstances, and she walked; though with all the time this gave her for
reflection she had not wholly banished this smile when she looked
into Marcia's woe-begone eyes. But she found herself incapable of
the awkwardnesses she had deliberated, and fell back upon the native
motherliness of her heart, into which she took Marcia with sympathy that
ignored everything but her need of help and pity. Marcia's bruised pride
was broken before the goodness of the girl she had hated, and she
performed her sacrifice to Bartley's injured memory, not with the haughty
self-devotion which she intended should humiliate Miss Kingsbury, but with
the prostration of a woman spent with watching and fasting and despair. She
held Clara away for a moment of scrutiny, and then submitted to the embrace
in which they recognized and confessed all.

It was scarcely necessary for Clara to say that Mr. Atherton had told her;
Marcia already knew that; and Clara became a partisan of her theory of
Bartley's absence almost without an effort, in spite of the facts that
Atherton had suggested to the contrary. "Of _course_! He has wandered off
somewhere, and at soon as he comes to his senses he will hurry home. Why I
was reading of such a case only the other day,--the case of a minister who
wandered off in just the same way, and found himself out in Western New
York somewhere, after he had been gone three mouths."

"Bartley won't be gone three months," protested Marcia.

"Certainly not!" cried Clara, in severe self-rebuke. Then she talked of
his return for a while as if it might be expected any moment. "In the mean
time," she added, "you must stay here; you're quite right about that, too,
but you mustn't stay here alone: he'd be quite as much shocked at that as
if he found you gone when he came back. I'm going to ask you to let my
friend Miss Strong stay with you; and she must pay her board; and you must
let me lend you all the money you need. And, dear,"--Clara dropped her
voice to a lower and gentler note,--"you mustn't try to keep this from your
friends. You must let Mr. Atherton write to your father; you must let me
tell the Hallecks: they'll be hurt if you don't. You needn't be troubled;
of _course_ he wandered off in a temporary hallucination, and nobody will
think differently."

She adopted the fiction of Bartley's aberration with so much fervor that
she even silenced Atherton's injurious theories with it when he came in the
evening to learn the result of her intervention. She had forgotten, or
she ignored, the facts as he had stated them in the morning; she was now
Bartley's valiant champion, as well as the tender protector of Marcia: she
was the equal friend of the whole exemplary Hubbard family.

Atherton laughed, and she asked what he was laughing at.

"Oh," he answered, "at something Ben Halleck once said: a real woman can
make righteousness delicious and virtue piquant."

Clara reflected. "I don't know whether I like that," she said finally.

"No?" said Atherton. "Why not?"

She was serving him with an after-dinner cup of tea, which she had brought
into the drawing-room, and in putting the second lump of sugar into his
saucer she paused again, thoughtfully, holding the little cube in the
tongs. She was rather elaborately dressed for so simple an occasion, and
her silken train coiled itself far out over the mossy depth of the moquette
carpet; the pale blue satin of the furniture, and the delicate white and
gold of the decorations, became her wonderfully.

"I can't say, exactly. It seems depreciatory, somehow, as a generalization.
But a man might say it of the woman he was in love with," she concluded.

"And you wouldn't approve of a man's saying it of the woman his friend was
in love with?" pursued Atherton, taking his cup from her.

"If they were very close friends." She did not know why, but she blushed,
and then grew a little pale.

"I understand what you mean," he said, "and I shouldn't have liked the
speech from another kind of man. But Halleck's innocence characterized it."
He stirred his tea, and then let it stand untasted in his abstraction.

"Yes, he is good," sighed Clara. "If he were not so good, it would be hard
to forgive him for disappointing all their hopes in the way he's done."

"It's the best thing he could have done," said Atherton gravely, even
severely.

"I know you advised it," asserted Clara. "But it's a great blow to them.
How strange that Mr. Hubbard should have disappeared the last night Ben was
at home! I'm glad that he got away without knowing anything about it."

Atherton drank off his tea, and refused a second cup with a gesture of his
hand. "Yes, so am I," he said. "I'm glad of every league of sea he puts
behind him." He rose, as if eager to leave the subject.

Clara rose too, with the patient acquiescence of a woman, and took his hand
proffered in parting. They had certainly talked out, but there seemed no
reason why he should go. He held her hand, while he asked, "How shall I
make my peace with you?"

"My peace? What for?" She flushed joyfully. "I was the one in fault."

He looked at her mystified. "Why, surely, _you_ didn't repeat Halleck's
remark?"

"Oh!" she cried indignantly, withdrawing her hand. "I meant _this morning_.
It doesn't matter," she added. "If you still wish to resign the charge of
my affairs, of course I must submit. But I thought--I thought--" She did
not go on, she was too deeply hurt. Up to this moment she had imagined that
she had befriended Marcia, and taken all that trouble upon herself for
goodness' sake; but now she was ready to upbraid him for ingratitude in not
seeing that she had done it for his sake. "You can send me the statement,
and then--and then--I don't know what I _shall_ do! _Why_ do you mind what
I said? I've often said quite as much before, and you know that I didn't
mean it. I want you to take my property back again, and never to mind
anything I say: I'm not worth minding." Her intended upbraiding had come
to this pitiful effect of self-contempt, and her hand somehow was in his
again. "Do take it back!"

"If I do that," said Atherton, gravely, "I must make my conditions," and
now they sat down together on the sofa from which he had risen. "I can't be
subjected again to your--disappointments,"--he arrested with a motion of
his hand the profuse expression of her penitence and good intentions,--"and
I've felt for a long time that this was no attitude for your attorney. You
ought to have the right to question and censure; but I confess I can't
grant you this. I've allowed myself to make your interests too much my own
in everything to be able to bear it. I've thought several times that I
ought to give up the trust; but it seemed like giving up so much more, that
I never had the courage to do it in cold blood. This morning you gave me my
chance to do it in hot blood, and if I resume it, I must make my terms."

It seemed a long speech to Clara, who sometimes thought she knew whither it
tended, and sometimes not. She said in a low voice, "Yes."

"I must be relieved," continued Atherton, "of the sense I've had that
it was indelicate in me to keep it, while I felt as I've grown to
feel--towards you." He stopped: "If I take it back, you must come with it!"
he suddenly concluded.

The inconsistency of accepting these conditions ought to have struck a
woman who had so long imagined herself the chase of fortune-hunters. But
Clara apparently found nothing alarming in the demand of a man who openly
acted upon his knowledge of what could only have been matter of conjecture
to many suitors she had snubbed. She found nothing incongruous in the
transaction, and she said, with as tremulous breath and as swift a pulse as
if the question had been solely of herself, "I accept--the conditions."

In the long, happy talk that lasted till midnight, they did not fail to
recognize that, but for their common pity of Marcia, they might have
remained estranged, and they were decently ashamed of their bliss when they
thought of misery like hers. When Atherton rose to bid Clara good night,
Marcia was still watching for Bartley, indulging for the last time the
folly of waiting for him as if she definitely expected him that night.

Every night since he disappeared, she had kept the lights burning in the
parlor and hall, and drowsed before the fire till the dawn drove her to a
few hours of sleep in bed. But with the coming of the stranger who was to
be her companion, she must deny herself even this consolation, and openly
accept the fact that she no longer expected Bartley at any given time.
She bitterly rebelled at the loss of her solitude, in which she could be
miserable in whatever way her sorrow prompted, and the pangs with which she
had submitted to Miss Kingsbury's kindness grew sharper hour by hour
till she maddened in a frenzy of resentment against the cruelty of her
expiation. She longed for the day to come that she might go to her,
and take back her promises and her submission, and fling her insulting
good-will in her face. She said to herself that no one should enter her
door again till Bartley opened it; she would die there in the house, she
and her baby, and as she stood wringing her hands and moaning over the
sleeping little one, a hideous impulse made her brain reel; she wished to
look if Bartley had left his pistol in its place; a cry for help against
herself broke from her; she dropped upon her knees.

The day came, and the hope and strength which the mere light so strangely
brings to the sick in spirit as well as the sick in body visited Marcia.
She abhorred the temptation of the night like the remembrance of a wicked
dream, and she went about with a humble and grateful prayer--to something,
to some one--in her heart. Her housewifely pride stirred again: that girl
should not think she was a slattern; and Miss Strong, when she preceded
her small trunk in the course of the forenoon, found the parlor and the
guest-chamber, which she was to have, swept, and dusted, and set in perfect
order by Marcia's hands. She had worked with fury, and kept her heart-ache
still, but it began again at sight of the girl. Fortunately, the
conservatory pupil had embraced with even more than Miss Kingsbury's ardor
the theory of Bartley's aberration, and she met Marcia with a sympathy in
her voice and eyes that could only have come from sincere conviction. She
was a simple country thing, who would never be a prima donna; but the
overflowing sentimentality which enabled her to accept herself at the
estimate of her enthusiastic fellow-villagers made her of far greater
comfort to Marcia than the sublimest musical genius would have done. She
worshipped the heroine of so tragic a fact, and her heart began to go out
to her in honest helpfulness from the first. She broke in upon the monotony
of Marcia's days with the offices and interests of wholesome commonplace,
and exorcised the ghostly silence with her first stroke on the
piano,--which Bartley had bought on the instalment plan and had not yet
paid for.

In fine, life adjusted itself with Marcia to the new conditions, as it does
with women less wofully widowed by death, who promise themselves reunion
with their lost in another world, and suffer through the first weeks and
days in the hope that their parting will be for but days or weeks, and then
gradually submit to indefinite delay. She prophesied Bartley's return, and
fixed it in her own mind for this hour and that. "Now, in the morning, I
shall wake and find him standing by the bed. No, at night he will come in
and surprise us at dinner." She cheated herself with increasing faith at
each renewal of her hopes. When she ceased to formulate them at last, it
was because they had served their end, and left her established, if not
comforted, in the superstition by which she lived. His return at any
hour or any moment was the fetish which she let no misgiving blaspheme;
everything in her of woman and of wife consecrated it. She kept the child
in continual remembrance of him by talking of him, and by making her
recognize the photographs in which Bartley had abundantly perpetuated
himself; at night, when she folded the little one's hands for prayer, she
made her pray God to take care of poor papa and send him home soon to
mamma. She was beginning to canonize him.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.