Читать книгу A Woman's Reason - William Dean Howells - Страница 5

Helen sat beside her father, while the solitude of the house deepened from silence to silence. Then Margaret came to the door, and looked in as if to ask whether it was not time for her to fetch away the tea-things. Helen gave her a nod of acquiescence, and presently rose, and followed her out to the kitchen, to tell her that she was going to her own room, and to say that she must be called when her father woke. But in the kitchen Margaret's company was a temptation to her loneliness, and she made one little pretext after another for remaining, till Margaret set her a chair in the doorway. Margaret had been in the house ever since Helen was born, and Helen still used the same freedom with her that she had in childhood, and gave herself the range of places to which young ladyhood ordinarily denies its radiant presence. She had indeed as much intimacy with the cook as could consist with their different ages, and she got on smoothly with the cook's temper, which had not been so good as her looks in youth, and had improved quite as little with age. Margaret was of a remote sort of Irish birth; but her native land had scarcely marked her accent, and but for her church and her sense of place, which was sometimes very respectful and sometimes very high and mighty with those above her, she might have been mistaken for an American; she had a low voice which only grew lower as she grew angry. A family in which she could do all the work had been her ideal when she first came to Boston, but she had failed of this now for some thirty years, and there seemed little hope that the chances would still turn in her favor. In Helen's childhood, when she used to ask Margaret in moments of tenderness, following the gift of dough in unexpected quantity, whether she would come and live with her after she got married, Margaret had always answered, "Yes, if you won't have anyone else bothering round," which was commonly too much for the just pride of the actual second-girl. She had been cook in the family so long ago as when Mr. Harkness had kept a man; she had pressed upon the retreat of the last man with a broom in her hand and a joyful sarcasm on her lips; and she would willingly have kept vacant the place that she had made too hot for a long succession of second-girls. In the intervals of their going and coming, she realized her ideal of domestic service for the time being; and in the summer when Helen was away a good deal, she prolonged these intervals to the utmost. She was necessarily much more the housekeeper than Helen, though they both respected a fiction of contrary effect, and Helen commonly left her the choice of her helpers. She had not been surprised to find Margaret alone in the house, but she thought it well to ask her how she was getting on without anybody.

"Oh, very well, Miss Helen! You know your father don't make any trouble."

"Well, I've come now, and we must get somebody", said Helen.

"Why, I thought you was going back on Monday, Miss Helen," answered Margaret.

"No, I shall not leave papa. I think he's not at all well."

"He does seem rather poorly, Miss Helen. But I don't see why you need anyone, in the summer, this way."

"Who's to go to the door?" asked Helen. "Besides, you couldn't take care of both of us, Margaret."

"Just as you say, Miss Helen; I'd just as lives," answered Margaret, stubbornly. "It isn't for me to say; but I don't see what you want with anybody: you won't see a soul."

"O, you never can tell, Margaret. You've had a good rest now, and you must have somebody to help you." Helen's sadness smiled at this confusion of ideas, and its suitableness to Margaret's peculiar attitude. "Get somebody that you know, Margaret, and that you'll like. But we must have somebody." She regarded Margaret's silent and stiff displeasure with a moment's amusement, and then her bright face clouded; and she asked softly: "Did you know, Margaret, that Robert,—that Lieutenant Fenton— had sailed again?"

"Why, no, Miss Helen! You don't mean that? Why, I thought he was going to stay the summer at Portsmouth?"

"He was," said Helen, in the same low voice, "but he changed his mind, it seems."

"Sailors is a roving set, anyway," Margaret generalized. Then she added: "Did he come down to say good-bye to your father?"

"Why, no," sadly answered Helen, who now thought of this for the first time. Her heart throbbed indignantly; then she reflected that she had kept him from coming. She looked up at the evening blue, with the swallows weaving a woof of flight across the top of the space framed in by the high walls on every hand, and "He hadn't time, I suppose," she said sadly. "He couldn't get off."

"Well, I don't call it very nice, his not coming," persisted Margaret. "I'd 'a' deserted first." Her associations with naval service had been through gallant fellows who were not in a position to resign.

Helen smiled so ruefully at this that she would better for cheerfulness have wept. But she recognized Margaret's limitations as a confidant, and said no more. She rose presently, and again asked Margaret to look in pretty soon, and see if her father were awake, and call her, if he were: she was going to her room. She looked in a moment herself as she went, and listened till she heard him breathing, and so passed on through the drawing-room, and trailed heavily up-stairs.

The house was rather old-fashioned, and it was not furnished in the latest taste, but it made the appeal with which things out of date, or passing out of date, touch the heart. It was in fact beginning to be respectable because it was no longer in the contest for effect, which the decorations of the newer houses carried on about it, and there was a sort of ugly keeping throughout.

In the very earliest days of Mr. Harkness's housekeeping, the ornamentation of his home had reflected the character of his business somewhat. There had been even a time when the young supercargo brought back—it was his first voyage—quaint and beautiful shells from the East, for his wife to set about the tables and mantels; but these objects, so exquisite in themselves, so unyielding in composition, had long since disappeared. Some grotesque bronzes, picked up in Chinese ports, to which his early ventures had taken him, survived the expulsion of ivory carvings and Indian idols and genre statuettes in terra cotta, (like those you see in the East Indian Museum at Salem) and now found themselves, with the new feeling for oriental art, in the very latest taste. Tire others were bestowed in neglected drawers and shelves, along with boxes containing a wealth of ghastly rich and elaborate white crape shawls from China, and fantastically subtle cotton webs from India which Helen had always thought she should use in tableaux, and never had worn. Among the many pictures on the walls (there were too many), there were three Stuarts, the rest were of very indifferent merit; large figure paintings, or allegorical landscapes, after the taste of Cole and Poussin, in great carved and scrolly frames. Helen had once thought of making a raid upon these enemies of art, and in fact she had contemplated remodeling the whole equipment of the parlors, in conformity to the recent feeling in such matters; but she had not got further than the incomplete representation of some goldenrod and mullein-stalks upon the panels of her own chamber-door; and now that the fervor of her first enthusiasm had burnt itself out, she was not sorry she had left the old house in peace.

"Oh, I should think you'd be so rejoiced," said the chief of her friends; "it's such a comfort to go into one house where you don't have to admire the artistic sentiment, and where every wretched little aesthetic prig of a table or a chair isn't asserting a principle or teaching a lesson. Don't touch a cobweb, Helen!" It had never even come to a talk between her and her father, and the house remained unmolested the home of her childhood. She had not really cared much for it since she was a child. The sense of our impermanent relation to the parental roof comes to us very early in life; and perhaps more keenly to a young girl than to her brothers. They are of the world by all the conditions of their active, positive being, almost from the first—a great world that is made for them; but she has her world to create. She cannot sit and adorn her father's house, as she shall one day beautify and worship her husband's; she can indeed do her duty by it, but the restless longing remains, and her housewifeliness does not voluntarily blossom out beyond the precincts of her own chamber, which she makes her realm of fancy and of dreams. She could not be the heart of the house if she would, as her mother is, or has been; and though in her mother's place, she can be housekeeper, thrifty, wise, and notable, still some mysterious essential is wanting which it is not in her nature to supply to her father's house.

Helen went to her own room, and, flinging up the windows, let in the noises of the streets. A few feet went by in the secluded place, and a sound of more frequent trampling came from the street into which it opened. Further off rose the blurred tumult of business, softened by the stretch of the Common, and growing less and less with the lapse of the long summer day. It was already a little cooler, and the smell of the sprinkled street stole refreshingly in at the window. It was still very light, and when Helen opened her blinds, the room brightened cheerfully all about her, and the sympathetic intimacy of her own closest belongings tenderly appealed to her. After something has happened, and we first see familiar things about us as they were, there comes, just before the sense of difference in ourselves returns to torment us, a moment of blind and foolish oblivion, and this was Helen's as she sat down beside the window, and looked round upon the friendly prettiness of her room. It had been her room when she was a child, and there were childish keepsakes scattered about in odd places, out of the way of young-ladyish luxuries, high-shouldered bottles of perfume, and long-handled ivory brushes, and dainty boxes and cases, and starred and beveled hand-glasses, and other sacred mysteries of toilet. Of the period when she had thought herself wedded to art there were certain charcoal sketches pinned against the wall, and in one corner, not very definite at first glance under the draperies tossed upon it from time to time, was her easel. On projections of her mirror-frame hung souvenirs of Robert's first cruise, which had been in the Mediterranean : ropes of Roman pearls; nets and bracelets and necklaces of shells and beads from Venice; filigree silver jewelry from Genoa; strands and rosaries of black, barbarically scented wooden beads from the Levant: not things you could wear at all, but very pleasant to have; they gave a sentiment to your room when you brought any one into it; they were nice to have lying about, and people liked to take them into their hands: they were not so very uncommon, either, that you had to keep telling what they were. She had never thought that possibly Robert had expected her to wear the absurd things. With an aching recurrence to their quarrel (it could be called no less) and a penitent self-pity, she thought of it now. It did not seem to her that she could touch them, but she went languidly to the mirror and took some of them down, and then all at once fantastically began to array herself in them: like a mad girl, she reflected. She threw the loops of Roman pearls and the black strands of Levantine beads about her neck; she set a net of the Venetian shell-work on her hair, and decked her wrists and her lovely ears with the Genoese filigree; a perfectly frantic combination, she mused, as she shook her head a little to make the ear-bobs dance. "Yes, perfectly frantic," she said aloud, but not much thinking of the image confronting her from the mirror, thinking rather of Robert, and poignantly regretting that she had never put them on for him; and thinking that if the loss of him had made her certain about him too late for ever, how fatally strange that would be. Again she went over all the facts of the affair, and was able to make much surer of Robert's motives than of her own. She knew that if he had understood her saying that she might have loved him once to be any encouragement for the future, he would not have written as he did. She could imagine Robert's being very angry at the patronizing tone of the rest of her letter; she had entire faith in his stupidity; she never doubted his generosity, his magnanimous incapability of turning her refusal of him into a refusal of her; his was not the little soul that could rejoice in such a chance. She wondered if now, far out at sea, sailing, sailing away, three years away, from her, he saw anything in her letter but refusal; or was he still in that blind rage? Did he never once think that it had seemed such a great thing for her to make confession, which meant him to come to her? But had she really meant that? It seemed so now, but perhaps then she had only thought of mingling a drop of kindness in his bitter cup, of trying to spare him the mortification of having loved a person who had never thought for a moment of loving him? From time to time, her image appeared to advance upon her from the depths of the mirror, decked in all that incongruous frippery, and to say with trembling lips, "Perfectly frantic, perfectly frantic," while the tears ran down its face; and she found a wild comfort in regarding herself as quite an insane, irresponsible creature, who did not know what she was about. She felt that fate ought not to hold her to account. The doorbell rang, and she snatched the net from her hair with a fearful shudder, and flung down all the ornaments in a heap upon her dressing-table. Bumping sounds in the hall below reminded her that in her trance before the glass, she had remotely known of a wagon stopping at the door, and presently she heard Margaret coming up the stairs behind the panting express-man who was fetching up her trunk. She fled into another room, and guiltily lurked there till they went Out again, before she returned to unlock and unpack the box. It was one of Helen's economies not to drive home from the station, but to send her baggage by express and come up in a horsecar. The sums thus saved she devoted to a particular charity, and was very rigid with herself about spending every half-dollar coach-fare for that object. She only gave twenty-five cents to the express, and she made a merit of the fact that neither the coach-hire nor the charity ever cost her father anything. Robert had once tried to prove that it always cost him seventy-five cents, but she had easily seen through the joke, and had made him confess it.

She was still busy unpacking when Margaret came up to say that her father was awake now, and then she left off at once to go to him. The gas had been lighted in the hall and library, and that made life another thing. Her father was in his armchair, and was feeling decidedly better, he said; he had told Margaret to have tea there in the library. Helen laughed at him for having two teas within two hours; he owned to being hungry, and that reminded her that she had eaten nothing since an early dinner. When the tea and toast came in, and the cloth was laid half across the round table, in the mellow light of the study lamp, they were very cozy. Helen, who was always thinking of Robert, whatever else she thought of, began to play in fancy at a long life of devotion to her father, in which she should never marry. She had always imagined him living with her, but now she was living with him, and they were to grow old together; in twenty years, when he was eighty, she would be forty-three, and then there would not be much difference between them. She now finally relinquished the very last idea of Robert, except as a brother. She did not suppose she should ever quite like his wife, but she should pet their children.

"Helen," said her father, breaking in upon these ideas, " how should you like to live in the country?"

"Why, papa, I was just thinking of it! That is, not in the country exactly, but somewhere off by ourselves, just you and I. Of course, I should like it."

"I don't mean on a farm," pursued her father, "but in some of the suburban towns, where we could have a bit of ground and breathing space. I think it grows closer and closer in town; at times it seems "as if I could hardly catch my breath. I believe it would agree with me in the country. I can't get away from business entirely for a few years yet—if the times continue so bad, I must bend all my energies to it, in fact—and I have a fancy that the coming in and out of town would do me good. And I have a notion that I should like to build. I should like a new house—a perfectly new house. We could live on a simpler scale in the country."

"O yes, indeed!" said Helen. "I should come into town to shop, with my initials worked in worsted on the side of my bag, and I should know where the bargains were, and lunch at Copeland's. I should like it."

"Well, we must think about it . I daresay we could let the house here without much trouble. I feel it somehow a great burden upon me, but I shouldn't like to sell it."

"O no, papa! We couldn't think of selling it. I should just like to let it, and then never go near it, or look in the same direction, till we were ready to come back to it."

"I have lived here so long," continued her father, making her the listener to his musings rather than speaking to her, "that I should like a change. I used to think that I should never leave the house, but a place may become overcrowded with associations. You are too young, Helen, to understand how terrible it is to find one's own past grow into the dumb material things about one, and become, as it were, imprisoned in them."

"O yes," sighed the girl, "there are some dresses of mine that I can't bear the sight of, just because I felt, or said, or did certain things when I wore them."

"An old house like this," Mr. Harkness went on, "gets to be your body, and usurps all your reality, which doesn't seem to live in it either, while you move round like a ghost. The past is so much more than_ the present. Think how much more these walls and these old chairs and tables have known of us than we now are!"

"No, no! Don't think of it, papa, or we shall be getting into the depths again," pleaded Helen.

"Well, I won't," consented her father, coming back to himself with a smile, which presently faded. "But it all makes me restless and impatient. I should like to begin a new life somewhere else, in a new house." He was silent a while, trifling with the toast on his plate; his appetite had passed at the sight of the food, and he had eaten scarcely anything. He looked at Helen, and then at a portrait on the wall, and than at Helen again.

"I'm not much like mamma, am I, papa?" she asked.

"Not much in face," said Mr. Harkness.

"Do you wish I was more?" she pursued timidly.

"No, I don't think I do," said her father.

"It would only make me more painful, if I looked more like her, such a helpless, selfish thing as I am," morbidly assented Helen. "I should only make you miss her the more."

"Why, Helen, you're a very good girl—the best child in the world," said her father.

"O no, I'm not, papa. I'm one of the worst. I never think of anybody but myself," said Helen, who was thinking of Robert. "You don't know how many times I've gone down on my mental knees to you and asked you to have patience with me."

"Asked me to have patience with you?" said her father, taking her by the chin, and pressing against his cheek the beautiful face which she leaned toward him. "Poor child! There's hardly a day since you were born that I haven't done you a greater wrong than the sum of all your sins would come to. Papas are dreadful fellows, Helen; but they sometimes live in the hope of repairing their misdeeds."

"Write them on a slip of paper, and hide it in a secret drawer that opens with a clasp and spring, when you don't know they're there," said Helen, glad of his touch of playfulness. "We've both been humbugging, and we know it."

He stared at her and said, "Your voice is like your mother's; and just now, when you came in, your movement was very like hers. I hadn't noticed it before. But she has been a great deal in my mind of late."

If he had wished to talk of her mother, whom Helen could not remember, and who had been all her life merely the shadow of a sorrow to her, a death, a grave, a name upon a stone, a picture on the wall, she would not spare herself the duty of encouraging him to do so. "Was she tall, like me?" she asked.

"Not so tall," answered her father. "And she was dark."

"Yes," said Helen, lifting her eyes to the picture on the wall.

"She had a great passion for the country," continued Mr. Harkness, "and I liked the town. It was more convenient for me, and I was born in Boston. It has often grieved me to think that I didn't yield to her. I must have been dreaming of her, for when I woke a little while ago, this regret was like a physical pang at my heart . As long as we live, we can't help treating each other as if we were to live always. But it's a mistake. I never refused to go into the country with her," he said as if to appease this old regret. "I merely postponed it. Now I should like to go."

He rose from the table, and taking the study-lamp in his hand, he feebly pushed apart the sliding-doors that opened into the drawing-room. He moved slowly down its length, on one side, throwing the light upon this object and that, before which he faltered, and so returned on the other side, as if to familiarize himself with every detail. Sometimes he held the lamp above, and sometimes below bis face, but always throwing its age and weariness into relief. Helen had remained watching him. As he came back, she heard him say, less to her as it seemed than to himself, "Yes, I should like to sell it. I'm tired of it."

He set the lamp down upon the table again, and sank into his chair, and lapsed into a reverie which left Helen solitary beside him. "Ah," she realized, as she looked on his musing, absent face, "he is old and I am young, and he has more to love in the other world, with my mother and both my brothers there, than he has in this. Oh, Robert, Robert, Robert!"

But perhaps his absent mind was not so much bent upon the lost as she thought. He had that way fathers have of treating his daughter as an equal, of talking to her gravely and earnestly, and then of suddenly dropping her into complete nothingness, as if she were a child to be amused for a while, and then set down from his knee and sent out of doors. Helen dutifully accepted this condition of their companionship; she cared for it so little as never to have formulated it to herself; when she was set down, she went out, and ordinarily she did not think of it.

A peremptory ring at the door startled them both, and when Margaret had opened it there entered all at the same instant, a loud, kindly voice, the chirp of boots, heavily trodden upon by a generous bulk, that rocked from side to side in its advance, and a fragrance of admirable cigars, that active and passive perfume, which comes from smoking and being smoked in the best company. "At home, Margaret?" asked the voice, whose loudness was a husky loudness, in a pause of the boots. "Yes? Well, don't put me in there, Margaret," which was apparently in rejection of the drawing-room. "I'll join them in the library."

The boots came chirping down the hall in that direction, with a sound of heavy breathing. Helen sprang from her chair, and fled to meet the cheerful sound; there was the noise of an encountering kiss, and a jolly laugh, and "Well, Helen!" and "Oh, Captain Butler!" and later, "Harkness !" and "Butler!" as Helen led the visitor in.

"Well!" said this guest, for the third time. He straightened his tall mass to its full height, and looked out over his chest with eyes of tender regard upon Harkness's thin and refined face, now lit up after the handshaking with cordial welcome. "Do you know," he said, as if somehow it were a curious fact of natural history, "that you have it uncommonly close in here?" He went over to the window that opened upon the little grassy yard, and put it up for himself, while Harkness was explaining that it had been put down while he was napping. Then he planted himself in a large leathern chair beside it, and went on smoking the cigar on the end of which he had been chewing. He started from the chair with violence, coughing and gesturing to forbid Helen, who was hospitably whispering to Margaret. "No, no; don't do it. I won't have anything. I couldn't. I've just dined at the club. Yes, you may do that much," he added to Helen, as she set a little table with an ash-holder at his elbow. "You've no idea what a night it is. It's cooler, and the air's delicious. I say, I want to take Helen back with me. I wish she'd go alone, and leave us two old fellows together here. There's no place like Boston in the summer, after all. But you haven't told me whether you're surprised to see me." Captain Butler looked round at them with something of the difficulty of a sea-turtle in a lateral inspection.

"Never surprised, but always charmed," said Helen, with just the shade of mockery in her tone which she knew suited this visitor.

"Charmed, eh?" asked Captain Butler. Apparently, he meant to say something satirical about the word, but could not think of anything. He turned again to her father: "How are you, Harkness?"

"Oh, I'm very well," said Harkness evasively. "I'm as well as usual."

"Then you have yourself fetched home in a hack by a policeman every day, do you?" remarked Captain Butler, blowing a succession of white rings into the air. "You were seen from the club window. I'll tell you what; you're sticking to it too close."

"O yes, Captain Butler, do get him away," sighed Helen, while her father, who had not sat down, began to walk back and forth in an irritated, restless way.

"For the present I can't leave it," said Harkness, fretfully. He added more graciously: "Perhaps in a week or two, or next month, I can get off for a few days. You know I was one of the securities for Bates and Mather," he said, looking at Captain Butler over Helen's head.

"I had forgotten that," answered Captain Butler gravely.

"They left things in a complete tangle. I can't tell just where I am yet, and, of course, I've no peace till I know."

"Of course," assented Captain Butler. "I won't vex you with retroactive advice, Joshua," he added affectionately, "but I hope you won't do anything of that kind again."

"No, Jack, I won't. But you know under the circumstances it would have been black ingratitude to refuse."

"Yes," said Captain Butler. He smoked a while in silence. Then he said, "I suppose it's no worse with the old trade than with everything else, at present."

"No, we're all in the same boat, I believe," said Harkness.

"How is Marian?" asked Helen, a little restive under the cross firing.

"Oh, Marian's all right. But if she were not, she wouldn't know it."

"I suppose she's very much engaged," said Helen, with a faint pang of something like envy.

"Yes," said Captain Butler. "I thought you were at Rye Beach, young lady."

"I thought you were at Beverley, old gentleman," retorted Helen; she had been saucy to Captain Butler from infancy.

"So I was. But I came up unexpectedly today."

"So did I."

"Did you? Good! Now I'll tell you why J came, and you shall tell me why you did. I came because I got to thinking of your father, and had a fancy I should like to see him. Did you?"

Helen hung her head. "No," she said at length.

The Captain laughed. "Whom had you a fancy to see here, then, at this time of year?"

"Oh, I didn't say I should tell. You made that bargain all yourself," mocked Helen. "But it was very kind of you to come on papa's account," she added softly.

"What are you making there?" asked the Captain, bending forward to look at the work Helen had taken into her lap.

"Who—I ?" she asked, as if she had perhaps been asked what Robert was making. Her mind had been running upon him since Captain Butler asked her why she had come up to Boston. "Oh !" she recovered herself. "Why, this," she said, taking the skeleton framework of gauze and wire on her fingertips, and holding it at arm's-length, with her head aslant surveying it, "this is a bonnet for Margaret."

"A bonnet, hey?" said the Captain. "It looks like a Shaker cap."

"Yes?" Helen clapped it on her head, and looked jauntily at the captain, dropping her shoulders, and putting her chin out. "Now, does it?"

"No, not now. The Shaker sisters don't wear crimps, and they don't smile in that wicked way." Helen laughed, and took the bonnet-frame off. "So you make Margaret's bonnets, do you? Do you make your own?"

"Sometimes. Not often. But I like millinery. It's what I should turn to if I were left to take care of myself."

"I'm afraid you wouldn't find it such fun," said the Captain.

"Oh, milliners make lots of money," returned Helen. "They must. Why, when this bonnet is done, you couldn't get it for ten dollars. Well, the materials don't cost three."

"I wish my girls had your head for business," said the Captain honestly. Helen made him a burlesque obeisance. "Yes, I mean it," he insisted. "You know that I always admired your good sense. I'm always talking it into Marian."

"Better not," said Helen, with a pin between her teeth.

"Why?"

"Because I haven't got it, and it'd make her hate me if I had."

"Do you mean to tell me that you're not a sensible girl ?" inquired the Captain.

Helen nodded, and made "Yes" with her lips, as well as she could with the pin between her teeth. She took it out to say, " You should have seen my performances in my room a little while ago." She was thinking of that rehearsal before the mirror.

"What were they?" asked the Captain.

"Oh, as if I should tell!" Helen bowed herself over the bonnet, and blushed, and laughed. Her father liked to hear the banter between her and his old friend. They both treated her as if she were a child, and she knew it and liked it; she behaved like a child.

"Harkness," said the Captain, turning his fat head half round toward his friend, who sat a little back of him, and breaking off his cigar-ash into the bronze plate at his elbow, "do you know that your remaining in the trade after all the rest of us have gone out of it is something quite monumental?" Captain Butler had a tender and almost reverential love for Joshua Harkness, but he could not help using a little patronage toward him, since his health had grown delicate, and his fortunes had not distinctly prospered.

"I am glad you like it, Jack," said Harkness quietly.

"The Captain is a mass of compliments tonight," remarked Helen.

The Captain grinned his consciousness. "You are a minx," he said admiringly to Helen. Then he threw back his head and pulled at his cigar, uttering between puffs, " No, but I mean it, Harkness. There's something uncommonly fine about it. A man gets to be noblesse by sticking to any old order of things. It makes one think of the ancien régime somehow to look at you. Why, you're still of the oldest tradition of commerce, the stately and gorgeous traffic of the orient; you're what Samarkand, and Venice, and Genoa, and Lisbon, and London, and Salem have come to."

"They've come to very little in the end then," said Harkness as before.

"Oh, I don't know about that;" the Captain took the end of his cigar out and lit a fresh one from it before he laid it down upon the ash-holder; "I don't know about that. We don't consider material things merely. There has always been something romantic, something heroic about the old trade. To be sure, now that it's got down to telegraphing, it's only fit for New-Yorkers. They're quite welcome to it." This was not very logical taken as a whole, but we cannot always be talking reason. At the words romantic and heroic Helen had pricked her ears, if that phrase may be used concerning ears of such loveliness as hers, and she paused from her millinery. "Ah ha, young lady!" cried the Captain; "you're listening, are you? You didn't know there was any romance or heroism in business, did you?"

"What business?" asked Helen.

"Your father's business, young woman; my old business, the India trade."

"The India trade? Why, were you ever in the India trade, Captain Butler?"

"Was I ever in the India trade ?" demanded the Captain, taking his cigar out of his mouth in order to frown with more effect upon Helen. "Well, upon my word! Where did you think I got my title? I'm too old to have been in the war."

"I didn't know," said Helen.

"I got it in the India trade. I was captain and supercargo many an eleven months' voyage, just as your father was."

Helen was vastly amused at this. "Why, papa! were you ever captain of a ship?"

"For a time," said Mr. Harkness, smiling at the absurdity.

"Of course he was !" shouted the Captain.

"Then why isn't he captain, now?"

"Because there's a sort of captain that loses his handle when he comes ashore, and there's a sort that keeps it. I'm one sort and your father's the other. It's natural to call a person of my model and complexion by some kind of title, and it isn't natural to call such a man as your father so. Besides, I was captain longer than he was. I was in the India trade, young lady, and out of it before you were born."

"I was born a great while ago," observed Helen, warningly.

"I daresay you think so," said the Captain. "I thought I was, at your age. But you'll find, as you grow older, that you weren't born such a very great while ago after all. The time shortens up. Isn't that so, Harkness?"

"Yes," said Mr. Harkness. "Everything happened day before yesterday."

"Exactly," said the Captain. Helen thought how young she must be to have already got that letter of Robert's so many centuries ago. "Yes," the Captain pursued. "I had been in the India trade twenty-five years when I went out of it in 1857—or it went out of me." He nodded his great, close-clipped head in answer to her asking glance. "It went out of a good many people at that time. We had a grand smash. We had overdone it . We had warnings enough, but we couldn't realize that our world was coming to an end. It hadn't got so low as telegraphing, yet; but it was mere shop then even, compared with the picturesque traffic of our young days. Eh, Harkness?"

"Yes, it had lost all attraction but profit."

"Were you ever down at India Wharf, Helen? "demanded the Captain. "I don't blame you; neither were my girls. But were you?"

"Of course," said Helen, scorning to lift her eyes from her work. "The Nahant boat starts from it."

"The Nahant boat!" repeated the Captain in a great rage. "In my day there was no Nahant boat about India Wharf, I can tell you, nor any other steamboat; nor any dirty shanties ashore. The place was sacred to the shipping of the grandest commerce in the world. There they lay, those beautiful ships, clean as silver, every one of them, and manned by honest Yankee crews." The Captain got upon his feet for the greater convenience of his eloquence. "Not by ruffians from every quarter of the globe. There were gentlemen's sons before the mast, with their share in the venture, going out for the excitement of the thing; boys from Harvard, fellows of education and spirit; and the forecastle was filled with good Toms and Jims and Joes from the Cape; chaps whose aunts you knew; good stock through and through, sound to the core. The supercargo was often his own captain, and he was often a Harvard man—you know what they are!"

"Nicest fellows in the world," consented Helen.

The Captain blew a shaft of white smoke into the air, and then cut it through with a stroke of his cigar. "We had on a mixed cargo, and we might be going to trade at eastern ports on the way out. Nobody knew what market we should find in Calcutta. It was pure adventure, and a calculation of chances, and. it was a great school of character. It was a trade that made men as well as fortunes; it took thought and forethought. The owners planned their ventures like generals planning a campaign. They were not going to see us again for a year; they were not going to hear of us till we were signaled outside on our return. When we sailed it was an event, a ceremony, a solemnity; and we celebrated it with song from all the tarry throats on board. Yes, the men used to sing as we dropped down the bay."

"Oh, Captain Butler, it was fine!" cried Helen, dropping her hands on her work, and looking up at the Captain in his smoke-cloud, with rapture. "Papa, why didn't you ever let me come down to see your ships sail?"

"It was all changed before you were born, Helen," began her father.

"O yes, all changed," cried the Captain, taking the word away from him. "The ships had begun, long before that, to stop at East Boston, and we sold their cargoes by sample, instead of handling them in our warehouses, and getting to feel some sort of human interest in them. When it came to that, a mere shopman's speculation, I didn't much care for the New-Yorkers getting it." The Captain sat down and smoked in silence.

"How did the New-Yorkers get it?" asked Helen, with some indignant stir in her local pride.

"In the natural course of things," said her father. "Just as we got it from Salem. By being bigger and richer."

"Oh, it was all changed anyway," broke in the Captain. "We used to import nearly all the cotton goods used in this country,—fabrics that the natives wove on their little looms at home, and that had the sentiment you girls pretend to find in hand-made things,—but before we stopped we got to sending our own cottons to India. And then came the telegraph, and put the finishing-stroke to romance in the trade. Your father loads now according to the latest dispatches from Calcutta. He knows just what his cargo will be worth when it gets there, and he telegraphs his people what to send back." The Captain ended in a very minor key: "I'm glad I went out of it when I did. You'd have done well to go out too, Harkness."

"I don't know, Jack. I had nothing else in view. You know I had become involved before the crash came; and I couldn't get out."

"I think you could," returned the Captain stubbornly, and he went on to show his old friend how; and the talk wandered back to the great days of the old trade, and to the merchants, the supercargoes, the captains, the mates of their youth. They talked of the historic names before their date, of Cleaveland and his voyages, of Handasyde Perkins, of Bromfield, of the great chiefs of a commerce which founded the city's prosperity, and which embraced all climes and regions. The Dutch colonies and coffee, the China trade and tea, the North-west coast and furs; the Cape, and its wines and oil; the pirates that used to harass the early adventurers; famous shipwrecks; great gains and magnificent losses; the splendor of the English nabobs and American residents at Calcutta; mutinies aboard ship; the idiosyncrasies of certain sailors; the professional merits of certain black cooks: these varied topics and interests conspired to lend a glamour to the India trade as it had been, that at last moved Captain Butler to argument in proof of the feasibility of its revival. It was the explanation of this scheme that wearied Helen. At the same time she saw that Captain Butler did not mean to go very soon, for he had already sunk the old comrade in the theorist so far as to be saying, "Well, sir," and "Why, sir," and "I tell you, sir." She got up—not without dropping her scissors from her lap, as is the custom of her sex—and gave him her hand, which he took in his left, without rising.

"Going to bed? That's right. I shall stay a bit, yet. I want to talk with your father."

"Talk him into taking a little rest," said Helen, looking at the Captain as she bent over her father to kiss him goodnight.

"I shall give him all sorts of good advice," returned the Captain cheerily.

Her father held her hand fondly till she drew an arm's-length away, and then relinquished it with a very tender "Goodnight, my dear."

Helen did not mean to go to bed, and when she reached her own room, she sat a long time there, working at Margaret's bonnet, and overhearing now and then some such words of the Captain's as "dyes," "muslins," "ice," "teak," "gunny-bags," "shellac," "Company's choppers,"—a name of fearful note descriptive of a kind of Calcutta handkerchief once much imported. She imagined that the Captain was still talking of the India trade. Her father spoke so low that she could not make out any words of his; the sound of his voice somehow deeply touched her, his affection appealed to hers in that unintelligible murmur, as the disembodied religion of a far-heard hymn appeals to the solemnity of the listener's soul. She began to make a fantastic comparison of the qualities of her father's voice and the Captain's, to the disadvantage of the Captain's other qualities; she found that her father was of finer spirit and of gentler nature, and by a natural transition she perceived that it was a grander thing to be sitting alone in one's room with one's heart-ache than to be perhaps foolishly walking the piazza with one's accepted commonplace destiny as Marian Butler was at that moment. At this point she laughed at herself, said "Poor Marian" aloud, and recognized that her vagaries were making Captain Butler an ill return for his kindness in dropping in to chat with her father; she hoped he would not chat too long, and tire him out; and so her thoughts ran upon Robert again, and she heard no more of the talk below, till after what seemed to her, starting from it, a prolonged reverie. Then she was aware of Captain Butler's boots chirping out of the library into the hall, toward the door, with several pauses, and she caught fragments of talk again: "I had no idea it was as bad as that, Harkness— bad business, must see what can be done, weather it a few weeks longer—confoundedly straitened myself—pull you through," and faintly, "Well, goodnight, Joshua; I'll see you in the morning." There was another pause, in which she fancied Captain Butler lighting his cigar at the chimney of the study-lamp with which her father would be following him to the door; the door closed and her father went slowly back to the library, where she felt rather than heard him walking up and down. She wanted to go to him, but she would not; she wanted to call to him, but she remained silent; when at last she heard his step upon the stairs, heavily ascending, and saw the play of his lamp-light on the walls without, she stealthily turned down the gas that he might not think her awake. Half an hour later, she crept to his door, which stood a little ajar, and whispered, "Papa!"

"What is it, Helen?" He was in bed, but his voice sounded very wakeful. "What is it, my dear!"

"Oh, I don't know!"—she flung herself on her knees beside his bed in the dark, and put her arms about his neck—" but I feel so unhappy!"

"About—" began her father, but she quickly interrupted.

"No, no! About you, papa! You seem so sad and careworn, and I'm nothing but a burden and a trouble to you."

"You are nothing but a comfort and a help to me. Poor child! You mustn't be worried by my looks. I shall be all right in the morning. Come, come!"

"But weren't you perplexed somehow about business? Weren't you thinking about those accounts?"

"No, my dear."

"What were you thinking of?"

"Well, Helen, I was thinking of your mother and your little brothers."

"Oh !" said Helen, with the kind of recoil which the young must feel even from the dearest dead. "Do you often think of them?"

"No, I believe, not often. Never so much as tonight, since I first lost them; the house seemed full of them then. I suppose these impressions must recur."

"Oh, doesn't it make you feel strange?" asked Helen, cowering a little closer to him.

"Why should it? It doesn't make me feel strange to have your face against mine."

"No, but— O don't, don't talk of such things, or I can't endure it! Papa, papa! I love you so, it breaks my heart to have you talk in that way. How wicked I must be not to like you to think of them! But don't, tonight! I want you to think of me, and what we are going to do together, and about all our plans for next winter, and for that new house, and everything. Will you? Promise!"

Her father pressed her cheek closer against his, and she felt the fond smile which she could not see in the dark. He gave her his promise, and then began to talk about her going down to the Butlers', which it seemed the Captain had urged further after she had bidden him goodnight. The Captain was going to stay in Boston a day or two, and Mr. Harkness thought he might run down with him at the end of' the week. Helen did not care to go, but with this in view she did not care to say so. She let her father comfort her with caressing words and touches, as when she was a child, and she frankly stayed her weakheartedness upon his love. She was ashamed, but she could not help it, nor wish to help it. As she rested her head upon his pillow she heard his watch ticking under it; in this sound all the years since she was a little girl were lost. Then his voice began to sink drowsily, as it used to do in remote times, when she had wearied him out with her troubles. He answered at random, and his talk wandered so that it made her laugh. That roused him to full consciousness of her parting kiss. "Goodnight," he said, and held her hand, and drew her down by it again, and kissed her once more.