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




"Yes," said Atherton, after a thoughtful silence, "it _is_ shocking. The
only consolation is that it is _not_ unnecessarily shocking. I'm afraid
that it's necessarily so. When any disease of soul or body has gone
far enough, it makes its own conditions, and other things must adjust
themselves to it. Besides, no one knows the ugliness of the situation but
Halleck himself. I don't see how I could have interfered; and upon the
whole I don't know that I ought to have interfered, if I could. She would
be helpless without him; and he can get no harm from it. In fact, it's part
of his expiation, which must have begun as soon as he met her again after
he came home."

Clara was convinced, but not reconciled. She only said, "I don't like it."

Her husband did not reply; he continued musingly: "When the old man
made that final appeal to her jealousy,--all that there is really left,
probably, of her love for her husband,--and she responded with a face as
wicked as his, I couldn't help looking at Halleck--"

"Oh, poor Ben! _How_ did he take it? It must have scared, it must have
disgusted him!"

"That's what I had expected. But there was nothing in his face but pity. He
understood, and he pitied her. That was all."

Clara rose, and turned to the window, where she remained looking through
her tears at the gulls on the shallow. It seemed much more than twenty-four
hours since she had taken leave of Marcia and the rest at the station, and
saw them set out on their long journey with its uncertain and unimaginable
end. She had deeply sympathized with them all, but at the same time she
had felt very keenly the potential scandalousness of the situation; she
shuddered inwardly when she thought what if people knew; she had always
revolted from contact with such social facts as their errand involved. She
got Olive aside for a moment, and asked her, "Don't you _hate_ it, Olive?
Did you ever dream of being mixed up in such a thing? I should die,--simply
_die_!"

"I shall not think of dying, unless we fail," answered Olive. "And, as for
hating it, I haven't consulted my feelings a great deal; but I rather think
I like it."

"Like going out to be a witness in an Indiana divorce case!"

"I don't look at it in that way, Clara. It's a crusade to me; it's a holy
war; it's the cause of an innocent woman against a wicked oppression. I
know how _you_ would feel about it, Clara; but I never _was_ as respectable
as you are, and I'm quite satisfied to do what Ben, and father, and Mr.
Atherton approve. They think it's my duty, and I am glad to go, and to be
of all the use I can. But you shall have my heartfelt sympathy through all,
Clara, for your involuntary acquaintance with our proceedings."

"Olive! You _know_ that I'm proud of your courage and Ben's goodness, and
that I fully appreciate the sacrifice you're making. And I'm not ashamed
of your business: I think it's grand and sublime, and I would just as soon
scream it out at the top of my voice, right here in the Albany depot."

"Don't," said Olive. "It would frighten the child." She had Flavia by
the hand, and she made the little girl her special charge throughout the
journey. The old Squire seemed anxious to be alone, and he restlessly
escaped from Marcia's care. He sat all the first day apart, chewing upon
some fragment of wood that he had picked up, and now and then putting up
a lank hand to rasp his bristling jaw; glancing furtively at people who
passed him, and lapsing into his ruminant abstraction. He had been vexed
that they did not start the night before; and every halt the train made
visibly afflicted him. He would not leave his place to get anything to eat
when they stopped for refreshment, though he hungrily devoured the lunch
that Marcia brought into the car for him. At New York he was in a tumult of
fear lest they should lose the connecting train on the Pennsylvania Road;
and the sigh of relief with which he sank into his seat in the sleeping-car
expressed the suffering he had undergone. He said he was not tired, but he
went to bed early, as if to sleep away as much of the time as he could.

When Halleck came into their car, the next morning, he found Marcia and her
father sitting together, and looking out of the window at the wooded slopes
of the Alleghanies through which the train was running. The old man's
impatience had relaxed; he let Marcia lay her hand on his, and he answered
her with quiet submission, when she spoke now and then of the difference
between these valleys, where the wild rhododendrons were growing, and the
frozen hollows of the hills at home, which must be still choked with snow.

"But, oh! how much I would rather see them!" she said at last with a
homesick throb.

"Well," he assented, "we can go right back--afterwards."

"Yes," she whispered.

"Well, sir, good morning," said the old man to Halleck, "we are getting
along, sir. At this rate, unless our calculations were mistaken, we shall
be there by midnight. We are on time, the porter tells me."

"Yes, we shall soon be at Pittsburg," said Halleck, and he looked at
Marcia, who turned away her face. She had not spoken of the object of the
journey to him since they had left Boston, and it had not been so nearly
touched by either of them before.

He could see that she recoiled from it, but the old man, once having
approached it, could not leave it. "If everything goes well, we shall have
our grip on that fellow's throat in less than forty-eight hours." He looked
down mechanically at his withered hands, lean and yellow like the talons of
a bird, and lifted his accipitral profile with a predatory alertness. "I
didn't sleep very well the last part of the night, but I thought it all
out. I sha'n't care whether I get there before or after judgment is
rendered; all I want is to get there before he has a chance to clear out.
I think I shall be able to convince Bartley Hubbard that there is a God
in Israel yet! Don't you be anxious, Marcia; I've got this thing at my
fingers' ends, as clear as a bell. I intend to give Bartley a little
surprise!"

Marcia kept her face averted, and Halleck relinquished his purpose of
sitting down with them, and went forward to the state-room that Marcia and
Olive had occupied with the little girl. He tapped on the door, and found
his sister dressed, but the child still asleep.

"What is the matter, Ben?" she asked. "You don't look well. You oughtn't to
have undertaken this journey."

"Oh, I'm all right. But I've been up a good while, with nothing to eat.
That old man is terrible. Olive!"

"Her father? Yes, he's a terrible old man!"

"It sickened me to hear him talk, just now,--throwing out his threats of
vengeance against Hubbard. It made me feel a sort of sympathy for that poor
dog. Do you suppose she has the same motive? I couldn't forgive her!" he
said, with a kind of passionate weakness. "I couldn't forgive myself!"

"We've got nothing to do with their motive, Ben. We are to be her witnesses
for justice against a wicked wrong. I don't believe in special providences,
of course; but it does seem as if we had been called to this work, as
mother would say. Your happening to go home with her, that night, and then
that paper happening to come to you,--doesn't it look like it?"

"It looks like it, yes."

"We couldn't have refused to come. That's what consoles me for being here
this minute. I put on a bold face with Clara Atherton, yesterday morning at
the depot; but I was in a cold chill, all the time. Our coming off, in this
way, on such an errand, is something so different from the rest of our
whole life! And I _do_ like quiet, and orderly ways, and all that we call
respectability! I've been thinking that the trial will be reported by some
such interviewing wretch as Bartley himself, and that we shall figure in
the newspapers. But I've concluded that we mustn't care. It's right, and we
must do it. I don't shut my eyes to the kind of people we're mixed up with.
I pity Marcia, and I love her--poor, helpless, unguided thing!--but that
old man _is_ terrible! He's as cruel as the grave where he thinks he's been
wronged, and crueller where he thinks _she's_ been wronged. You've forgiven
so much, Ben, that you can't understand a man who forgives nothing; but
_I_ can, for I'm a pretty good hater, myself. And Marcia's just like her
father, at times. I've seen her look at Clara Atherton as if she could kill
her!"

The little girl stirred in her berth, and then lifted herself on her hands,
and stared round at them through her tangled golden hair. "Is it morning,
yet?" she asked sleepily. "Is it to-morrow?"

"Yes; it's to-morrow, Flavia," said Olive. "Do you want to get up?"

"And is next day the day after to-morrow?"

"Yes."

"Then it's only one day till I shall see papa. That's what mamma said.
Where is mamma?" asked the child, rising to her knees, and sweeping back
her hair from her face with either hand.

"I will go and send her to you," said Halleck.

At Pittsburg the Squire was eager for his breakfast, and made amends for
his fast of the day before. He ate grossly of the heterogeneous abundance
of the railroad restaurant, and drank two cups of coffee that in his thin,
native air would have disordered his pulse for a week. But he resumed his
journey with a tranquil strength that seemed the physical expression of a
mind clear and content. He was willing and even anxious to tell Halleck
what his theories and plans were; but the young man shrank from knowing
them. He wished only to know whether Marcia were privy to them, and this,
too, he shrank from knowing.




XXXIX.


They left Pittsburg under the dun pall of smoke that hangs perpetually over
the city, and ran out of a world where the earth seemed turned to slag and
cinders, and the coal grime blackened even the sheathing from which the
young leaves were unfolding their vivid green. Their train twisted along
the banks of the Ohio, and gave them now and then a reach of the stream,
forgetful of all the noisy traffic that once fretted its waters, and losing
itself in almost primitive wildness among its softly rounded hills. It is a
beautiful land, and it had, even to their loath eyes, a charm that touched
their hearts. They were on the borders of the illimitable West, whose lands
stretch like a sea beyond the hilly Ohio shore; but as yet this vastness,
which appalls and wearies all but the born Westerner, had not burst upon
them; they were still among heights and hollows, and in a milder and softer
New England.

"I have a strange feeling about this journey," said Marcia, turning from
the window at last, and facing Halleck on the opposite seat. "I want it to
be over, and yet I am glad of every little stop. I feel like some one that
has been called to a death-bed, and is hurrying on and holding back with
all her might, at the same time. I shall have no peace till I am there,
and then shall I have peace?" She fixed her eyes imploringly on his. "Say
something to me, if you can! What do you think?"

"Whether you will--succeed?" He was confounding what he knew of her
father's feeling with what he had feared of hers.

"Do you mean about the lawsuit? I don't care for that! Do you think he will
hate me when he sees me? Do you think he will believe me when I tell him
that I never meant to leave him, and that I'm sorry for what I did to drive
him away?"

She seemed to expect him to answer, and he answered as well as he could:
"He ought to believe that,--yes, he must believe it."

"Then all the rest may go," she said. "I don't care who gains the case.
But if he shouldn't believe me,--if he should drive me away from him, as
I drove him from me--" She held her breath in the terror of such a
possibility, and an awe of her ignorance crept over Halleck. Apparently she
had not understood the step that Bartley had taken, except as a stage in
their quarrel from which they could both retreat, if they would, as easily
as from any other dispute; she had not realized it as a final, an almost
irrevocable act on his part, which could only be met by reprisal on hers.
All those points of law which had been so sharply enforced upon her must
have fallen blunted from her longing to be at one with him; she had,
perhaps, not imagined her defence in open court, except as a sort of public
reconciliation.

But at another time she recurred to her wrongs in all the bitterness of her
father's vindictive purpose. A young couple entered the car at one of the
country stations, and the bride made haste to take off her white bonnet,
and lay her cheek on her husband's shoulder, while he passed his arm round
her silken waist, and drew her close to him on the seat, in the loving
rapture which is no wise inconvenienced by publicity on our railroad
trains. Indeed, after the first general recognition of their condition, no
one noticed them except Marcia, who seemed fascinated by the spectacle of
their unsophisticated happiness; it must have recalled the blissful abandon
of her own wedding journey to her. "Oh, poor fool!" she said to Olive. "Let
her wait, and it will not be long before she will know that she had better
lean on the empty air than on him. Some day, he will let her fall to the
ground, and when she gathers herself up all bruised and bleeding--But he
hasn't got the all-believing simpleton to deal with that he used to have;
and he shall pay me back for all--drop by drop, and ache for ache!"

She was in that strange mental condition into which women fall who brood
long upon opposing purposes and desires. She wished to be reconciled, and
she wished to be revenged, and she recurred to either wish for the time as
vehemently as if the other did not exist. She took Flavia on her knee, and
began to prattle to her of seeing papa to-morrow, and presently she turned
to Olive, and said: "I know he will find us both a great deal changed.
Flavia looks so much older,--and so do I. But I shall soon show him that I
can look young again. I presume he's changed too."

Marcia held the little girl up at the window. They had now left the river
hills and the rolling country beyond, and had entered the great plain which
stretches from the Ohio to the Mississippi; and mile by mile, as they ran
southward and westward, the spring unfolded in the mellow air under the
dull, warm sun. The willows were in perfect leaf, and wore their delicate
green like veils caught upon their boughs; the may-apples had already
pitched their tents in the woods, beginning to thicken and darken with the
young foliage of the oaks and hickories; suddenly, as the train dashed
from a stretch of forest, the peach orchards flushed pink beside the brick
farmsteads. The child gave a cry of delight, and pointed; and her mother
seemed to forget all that had gone before, and abandoned herself to
Flavia's joy in the blossoms, as if there were no trouble for her in the
world.

Halleck rose and went into the other car; he felt giddy, as if her
fluctuations of mood and motive had somehow turned his own brain. He did
not come back till the train stopped at Columbus for dinner. The old Squire
showed the same appetite as at breakfast: he had the effect of falling upon
his food like a bird of prey; and as soon as the meal was despatched he
went back to his seat in the car, where he lapsed into his former silence
and immobility, his lank jaws working with fresh activity upon the wooden
toothpick he had brought away from the table. While they waited for a train
from the north which was to connect with theirs, Halleck walked up and down
the vast, noisy station with Olive and Marcia, and humored the little girl
in her explorations of the place. She made friends with a red-bird that
sang in its cage in the dining-hall, and with an old woman, yellow, and
wrinkled, and sunken-eyed, sitting on a bundle tied up in a quilt beside
the door, and smoking her clay pipe, as placidly as if on her own cabin
threshold. "'Pears like you ain't much afeard of strangers, honey," said
the old woman, taking her pipe out of her mouth, to fill it. "Where do you
live at when you're home?"

"Boston," said the child, promptly. "Where do _you_ live?"

"I _used_ to live in Old Virginny. But my son, he's takin' me out to
Illinoy, now. He's settled out there." She treated the child with the
serious equality which simple old people use with children; and spat neatly
aside in resuming her pipe. "Which o' them ladies yender is your maw,
honey?"

"My mamma?"

The old woman nodded.

Flavia ran away and laid her hand on Marcia's dress, and then ran back to
the old woman.

"That your paw, with her?" Flavia looked blank, and the old woman
interpreted, "Your father."

"No! We're going out to see papa,--out West. We're going to see him
to-morrow, and then he's coming back with us. My grandpa is in that car."

The old woman now laid her folded arms on her knees, and smoked
obliviously. The little girl lingered a moment, and then ran off laughing
to her mother, and pulled her skirt. "Wasn't it funny, mamma? She thought
Mr. Halleck was my papa!" She hung forward by the hold she had taken, as
children do, and tilted her head back to look into her mother's face. "What
_is_ Mr. Halleck, mamma?"

"What is he?" The group halted involuntarily.

"Yes, what is he? Is he my uncle, or my cousin, or what? Is _he_ going
out to see papa, too? What is _he_ going for? Oh, look, look!" The child
plucked away her hand, and ran off to join the circle of idle men and
half-grown boys who were forming about two shining negroes with banjos.
The negroes flung their hands upon the strings with an ecstatic joy in the
music, and lifted their black voices in a wild plantation strain. The child
began to leap and dance, and her mother ran after her.

"Naughty little girl!" she cried. "Come into the car with me, this minute."

Halleck did not see Marcia again till the train had run far out of the
city, and was again sweeping through the thick woods, and flashing out upon
the levels of the fields where the farmers were riding their sulky-plows
up and down the long furrows in the pleasant afternoon sun. There was
something in this transformation of man's old-time laborious dependence
into a lordly domination over the earth which strikes the westward
journeyer as finally expressive of human destiny in the whole mighty
region, and which penetrated even to Halleck's sore and jaded thoughts.
A different type of men began to show itself in the car, as the Western
people gradually took the places of his fellow-travellers from the East.
The men were often slovenly and sometimes uncouth in their dress; but they
made themselves at home in the exaggerated splendor and opulence of the
car, as if born to the best in every way; their faces suggested the
security of people who trusted the future from the past, and had no fears
of the life that had always used them well; they had not that eager and
intense look which the Eastern faces wore; there was energy enough and to
spare in them, but it was not an anxious energy. The sharp accent of the
seaboard yielded to the rounded, soft, and slurring tones, and the prompt
address was replaced by a careless and confident neighborliness of manner.

Flavia fretted at her return to captivity in the car, and demanded to be
released with a teasing persistence from which nothing she was shown out of
the window could divert her. A large man leaned forward at last from a seat
near by, and held out an orange. "Come here to me, little Trouble," he
said; and Flavia made an eager start toward this unlooked-for friend.

Marcia wished to check her; but Halleck pleaded to have her go. "It will be
a relief to you," he said.

"Well, let her go," Marcia consented. "But she was no trouble, and she is
no relief." She sat looking dully at the little girl after the Westerner
had gathered her up into his lap. "Should I have liked to tell her," she
said, as if thinking aloud, "how we were really going to meet her father,
and that you were coming with me to be my witness against him in a
court,--to put him down and disgrace him,--to fight him, as father says?"

"You mustn't think of it in that way," said Halleck, gently, but, as he
felt, feebly and inadequately.

"Oh, I shall not think of it in that way long," she answered. "My head is
in a whirl, and I can't hold what we're doing before my mind in any one
shape for a minute at a time. I don't know what will become of me,--I don't
know what will become of me!"

But in another breath she rose from this desolation, and was talking with
impersonal cheerfulness of the sights that the car-window showed. As long
as the light held, they passed through the same opulent and monotonous
landscape; through little towns full of signs of material prosperity,
and then farms, and farms again; the brick houses set in the midst of
evergreens, and compassed by vast acreages of corn land, where herds of
black pigs wandered, and the farmers were riding their ploughs, or heaping
into vast windrows for burning the winter-worn stalks of the last year's
crop. Where they came to a stream the landscape was roughened into low
hills, from which it sank again luxuriously to a plain. If there was any
difference between Ohio and Indiana, it was that in Indiana the spring
night, whose breath softly buffeted their cheeks through the open window,
had gathered over those eternal cornfields, where the long crooked
windrows, burning on either hand, seemed a trail of fiery serpents writhing
away from the train as it roared and clamored over the track.

They were to leave their car at Indianapolis, and take another road which
would bring them to Tecumseh by daylight the next morning. Olive went away
with the little girl, and put her to bed on the sofa in their state-room,
and Marcia suffered them to go alone; it was only by fits that she had
cared for the child, or even noticed it. "Now tell me again," she said to
Halleck, "why we are going."

"Surely you know."

"Yes, yes, I know; but I can't think,--I don't seem to remember. Didn't I
give it up once? Didn't I say that I would rather go home, and let Bartley
get the divorce, if he wanted?"

"Yes, you said that, Marcia."

"I used to make him very unhappy; I was very strict with him, when I knew
he couldn't bear any kind of strictness. And he was always so patient with
me; though he never really cared for me. Oh, yes, I knew that from the
first! He used to try; but he must have been glad to get away. Poor
Bartley! It was cruel, cruel, to put that in about my abandoning him when
he knew I would come back; but perhaps the lawyers told him he must; he had
to put in something! Why shouldn't I let him go? Father said he only wanted
to get rid of me, so that he could marry some one else--Yes, yes; it was
that that made me start! Father knew it would! Oh," she grieved, with a
wild self-pity that tore Halleck's heart, "he knew it would!" She fell
wearily back against the seat, and did not speak for some minutes. Then she
said, in a slow, broken utterance: "But now I don't seem to mind even that,
any more. Why shouldn't he marry some one else that he really likes, if he
doesn't care for me?"

Halleck laughed in bitterness of soul as his thought recurred to Atherton's
reasons. "Because," he said, "you have a _public_ duty in the matter.
You must keep him bound to you, for fear some other woman, whose husband
doesn't care for her, should let _him_ go, too, and society be broken up,
and civilization destroyed. In a matter like this, which seems to concern
yourself alone, you are only to regard others."

His reckless irony did not reach her through her manifold sorrow. "Well,"
she said, simply, "it must be that. But, oh! how can I bear it! how can I
bear it!"

The time passed; Olive did not return for an hour; then she merely said
that the little girl had just fallen asleep, and that she should go back
and lie down with her; that she was sleepy too.

Marcia did not answer, but Halleck said he would call her in good time
before they reached Indianapolis.

The porter made up the berths of such as were going through to St. Louis,
and Marcia was left sitting alone with Halleck. "I will go and get your
father to come here," he said.

"I don't want him to come! I want to talk to you--to say something--What
was it? I can't think!" She stopped, like one trying to recover a faded
thought; he waited, but she did not speak again. She had laid a nervous
clutch upon his arm, to detain him from going for her father, and she
kept her hand there mechanically; but after a while he felt it relax; she
drooped against him, and fell away into a sleep in which she started now
and then like a frightened child. He could not release himself without
waking her; but it did not matter; her sorrow had unsexed her; only the
tenderness of his love for this hapless soul remained in his heart, which
ached and evermore heavily sank within him.

He woke her at last when he must go to tell Olive that they were running
into Indianapolis. Marcia struggled to her feet: "Oh, oh! Are we there? Are
we there?"

"We are at Indianapolis," said Halleck.

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