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A Fearful Responsibility, a fiction by William Dean Howells |
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Chapter 8 |
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_ CHAPTER VIII Mrs. Elmore and Lily again rose buoyantly from the conclusive event, but he succumbed to it. For the delicate and fastidious invalid, keeping his health evenly from day to day upon the condition of a free and peaceful mind, the strain had been too much. He had a bad night, and the next day a gastric trouble declared itself which kept him in bed half the week, and left him very weak and tremulous. His friends did not forget him during this time. Hoskins came regularly to see him, and supplied his place at the table d'hote of the Danieli, going to and fro with the ladies, and efficiently protecting them from the depredations of the Austrian soldiery. From Mr. Rose-Black he could not protect them; and both the ladies amused Elmore with a dramatization of how the Englishman had boldly outwitted them, and trampled all their finessing under foot, by simply walking up to them in the reading-room, and saying, "This is Miss Mayhew, I suppose," and putting himself at once on the footing of an old family friend. They read to Elmore, and they put his papers in order, so that he did not know where to find anything when he got well; but they always came home from the hotel with some lively gossip, and this he liked. They professed to recognize an anxiety on the part of Mr. Andersen's aunt that his mind should not be diverted from the civil service in India by thoughts of young American ladies; but she sent some delicacies to Elmore, and one day she even came to call with her nephew, in extreme reluctance and anxiety as they pretended to him. The next afternoon the young man called alone, and Elmore, who was now on foot, received him in the parlor, before the ladies came in. Mr. Andersen had a bunch of flowers in one hand, and a small wooden box containing a little turtle on a salad-leaf in the other; the poor animals are sold in the Piazza at Venice for souvenirs of the city, and people often carry them away. Elmore took the offerings simply, as he took everything in life, and interpreted them as an expression, however odd, of Mr. Andersen's sympathy with his recent sufferings, of which he gave him some account; but he practised a decent self-denial, here, and they were already talking of the weather when the ladies appeared. He hastened to exhibit the tokens of Mr. Andersen's kind remembrance, and was mystified by the young man's confusion, and the impatient, almost contemptuous, air with which his wife listened to him. Hoskins came in at that moment to ask about Elmore's health, and showed the hostile civility to Andersen which young men use toward each other in the presence of ladies; and then, seeing that the latter had secured the place at Miss Mayhew's side on the sofa, he limped to the easy chair near Mrs. Elmore, and fell into talk with her about Rose-Black's pictures, which he had just seen. They were based upon an endeavor to trace the moral principles believed by Mr. Ruskin to underlie Venetian art, and they were very queer, so Hoskins said; he roughly sketched an idea of some of them on a block he took from his pocket. Mr. Andersen and Lily went out upon one of the high-railed balconies that overhung the canal, and stood there, with their backs to the others. She seemed to be listening, with averted face, while he, with his cheek leaning upon one hand and his elbow resting on the balcony rail, kept a pensive attitude after they had apparently ceased to speak. Something in their pose struck the sculptor's fancy, and he made a hasty sketch of them, and was showing it to the Elmores when Lily suddenly descended into the room again, and, saying something about its being quite dark, went out, and left Mr. Andersen to make his adieux to the others. He startled them by saying that he was to set off for India in the morning, and he went away very melancholy. "Well, I don't know," said Hoskins, thoughtfully retouching his sketch, "that I should feel very lively about going out to India myself." "He seems to be a very affectionate young fellow," observed Elmore, "and I've no doubt he will feel the separation from his friends. But I really don't know why he should have brought me a bouquet, and a small turtle in a box, on the eve of his departure." "What?" cried Hoskins, with a rude guffaw; and when Elmore had showed his gifts, Hoskins threw back his head and laughed indecently. His behavior nettled Elmore, and it sent Mrs. Elmore prematurely out of the room; for, not content with his explosions of laughter, he continued for some time to amuse himself by touching up with the point of his pencil the tail of the turtle which he had turned out of its box upon the table. At Mrs. Elmore's withdrawal he stopped, and presently said good-night rather soberly. Then she returned. "Owen," she asked sadly, "did you really think these flowers and that turtle were for you?" "Why, yes," he answered. "Well, I don't know whether I wouldn't almost rather it had been a joke. I believe that I would rather despise your heart than your head. Why should Mr. Andersen bring _you_ flowers and a turtle?" "Upon my word, I don't know." "They were for Lily! And your mistake has added another pang to the poor young fellow's suffering. She has just refused him," she said; and as Elmore continued to glare blankly at her, she added: "She was refusing him there on the balcony while that disgusting Mr. Hoskins was sketching them; and he had his hand up, that way, because he was crying." "This is horrible, Celia!" cried Elmore. The scent of the flowers lying on the table seemed to choke him; the turtle clawing about on the smooth surface looked demoniacal. "Why----" "Now, don't ask me why she refused him, Owen. Of course she couldn't care for a boy like that. But he can't realize it, and it's just as miserable for him as if he were a thousand years old." Elmore hung his head. "It was all a mistake. But how should I know any better? I am a straightforward man, Celia; and I am unfit for the care that has been thrown upon me. It's more than I can bear. No, I'm _not_ fit for it!" he cried at last; and his wife, seeing him so crushed, now said something to console him. "I know you're not. I see it more and more. But I know that you will do the best you can, and that you will always act from a good motive. Only _do_ try to be more on your guard." "I will--I will," he answered humbly. He had a temptation, the next time he visited Hoskins, to tell him the awful secret, and to see how the situation of that night, with this lurid light upon it, affected him: it could do poor Andersen, now on his way to India, no harm. He yielded to his temptation, at the same time that he confessed his own blunder about the flowers. Hoskins whistled. "I tell you what," he said, after a long pause, "there are some things in history that I never could realize,--like Mary, Queen of Scots, for instance, putting on her best things, and stepping down into the front parlor of that castle to have her head off. But a thing like this, happening on your own balcony, _helps_ you to realize it." "It helps you to realize it," assented Elmore, deeply oppressed by the tragic parallel. "He's just beginning to feel it about now," said Hoskins, with strange _sang froid_. "I reckon it's a good deal like being shot. I didn't fully appreciate my little hit under a couple of days. Then I began to find out that something had happened. Look here," he added, "I want to show you something;" and he pulled the wet cloth off a breadth of clay which he had set up on a board stayed against the wall. It was a bas-relief representing a female figure advancing from the left corner over a stretch of prairie towards a bulk of forest on the right; bison, bear, and antelope fled before her; a lifted hand shielded her eyes; a star lit the fillet that bound her hair. "That's the best thing you've done, Hoskins," said Elmore. "What do you call it?" "Well, I haven't settled yet. I _have_ thought of 'Westward the Star of Empire,' but that's rather long; and I've thought of 'American Enterprise.' I ain't in any hurry to name it. You like it, do you?" "I like it immensely!" cried Elmore. "You must let me bring the ladies to see it." "Well, not just yet," said the sculptor, in some confusion. "I want to get it a little further along first." They stood looking together at the figure; and when Elmore went away he puzzled himself about something in it,--he could not tell exactly what. He thought he had seen that face and figure before, but this is what often occurs to the connoisseur of modern sculpture. His mind heavily reverted to Lily and her suitors. Take her in one way, especially in her subordination to himself, the girl was as simply a child as any in the world,--good-hearted, tender, and sweet, and, as he could see, without tendency to flirtation. Take her in another way, confront her with a young and marriageable man, and Elmore greatly feared that she unconsciously set all her beauty and grace at work to charm him; another life seemed to inform her, and irradiate from her, apart from which she existed simple and childlike still. In the security of his own deposited affections, it appeared to him cruelly absurd that a passion which any other pretty girl might, and some other pretty girl in time must, have kindled, should cling, when once awakened, so inalienably to the pretty girl who had, in a million chances, chanced to awaken it. He wondered how much of this constancy was natural, and how much merely attributive and traditional, and whether human happiness or misery were increased by it on the whole. _ |
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