Читать книгу Miss Bellard's Inspiration - William Dean Howells - Страница 6

CROMBIE, when his wife had rejoined him, sat dripping, as it were, from the deluge of conjectures, facts, and reflections which she had hastened to pour out on him after coming away from Lillias.

"Anything more outspoken, more boldfaced, more unblushing! If those are the manners that she is teaching the youth out there under the guise of elocution!"

"There does seem to be a sort of brazen ingenuousness in it," Crombie allowed. " But you can't say there's anything deceitful. And that's what you dreaded."

" I don't know whether I dreaded it. But I did hope that if Lillias had anything to conceal she would manage it with a little finesse, a little delicacy. I hoped that if she was going to bring the burden of a love-affair into the house with her, she would have the grace to carry it off so that it shouldn't seem to be a burden. But the brutal frankness with which she dumps it all on me!"

" I don't call it brutal," Crombie said, with an air of reasoning, "though it is certainly frank. I think it has its charm. It's deliciously honest, and it ought to be a relief to you, after the duplicity you've been dreading — the finesse, as you call it."

" I call it duplicity, pretending to come here for a week, so as to bridge over between visits, and meaning all the time to make us a base of operations, with him at the Saco Shore House, so that they can see each other constantly under my very wing. If that isn't finesse, I don't know what it is!"

" Then, I don't see what you have to complain of, with frankness and finesse both on hand in one and the same Mephistophelian innocent."

"Oh, Archie!" Mrs. Crombie whimpered. "It's the care! It's the terrible disappointment of a broken-up summer! It's having the disturbance of it going on under our roof day after day, when I was looking forward to such a complete rest with you, dear! It's enough to make me wish we were back at The Surges. You had better sell this place at once."

"There'll be time enough to think about that and to change our minds twice or thrice. Mountain property hasn't the instant convertibility of shore property. I should find some difficulty in giving this place away if I was in a hurry to get rid of it. Fortunately I'm not. Did she tell you how they happened to meet?"

"Oh, romantically enough, I believe. After his last failure in ranching he was quite at leisure, and he came into town to pass the time at the hotel, and think. There he heard of Lillias's lectures, or talks, which were open to the public — really, I can't imagine it, but her lectures seem to be quite a fad, out there — and he went to one of them, and then he went to all that were left of them. At last he got himself introduced; though why he didn't at first she couldn't understand, unless it was his English shyness. After he did it seems to have been plain sailing, as far as they've gone."

"And how far have they gone?"

"Well, she doesn't seem to know, exactly. The case appears to be that she has some doubts of marriage itself."

"Oh, come, now! A pretty girl like that?"

" I don't see what her prettiness has to do with it. A great many girls are that way, now. They look at it very cool-headedly. They don't like to give up their liberty unless they're certain of their happiness, and they see, if they look round them at all, that there's a great deal of unhappiness in marriage."

"They could always get divorced."

"Yes, but they don't like that — nice girls don't. They'd rather not go in for it, to begin with. It seems that Lillias has a great idea of being honest with herself. Really, to hear her talk — I wish you could have been at the key-hole!"

" I wish I could — if I may be as honest as Lillias."

"It seems that it wasn't the hard work, or the beginning at the bottom, or the personal exhibition, as Mrs. Kemble calls it, which kept her from going on the stage. There was a manager quite ready to take her from the dramatic school and feature her, as she said, in a new play — "

"Don't go too far back!"

"I'm not, but you can't understand if I don't. — It was the perpetual pretense; what she felt was the essential and final falsity of a life that consisted in the representation of emotions that were not really felt. In short, the insincerity."

"Well?"

"Well— where was I? Oh yes! She felt that if she had no doubt about marrying Mr. Craybourne, she would have no misgivings about marriage; or if she had perfect faith in marriage, she could confidently trust herself in marrying him. But as she has neither, she can't."

Crombie rubbed his forehead, as if to clear away a cloud within. " I don't believe I've followed you," he said.

" Why, he's offered himself, but she hasn't thought it out yet."

"And she's got him here to help her think?"

"That is where the sinuosity comes in; that is where Lillias shows herself a true girl."

Crombie laughed. "And what does she expect us to do?"

" Do you know what she said to me? Not just in so many words, but that was the sum and substance of it. She made a long, sly preamble about having always thought us the happiest married couple she had ever seen, the most united and harmonious; and she wanted Mr. Craybourne to know us, too."

" As a sort of object-lesson? I'm not sure that I should like to be studied. It would make me conscious."

"Of course," Mrs. Crombie said, with a seriousness which amazed him, "it's very flattering."

" It's taffy of the most barefaced description. Now, my dear, you look out for that girl. Don't trust her beyond your sight. Does she expect us to take any active part in regard to this Englishman of hers?"

"Oh no. And I quite agree with you about her slyness. There can't be so much smoke without some fire, and I shall certainly watch her. She wants to commit us to some scheme in her mother's absence, and I am not going to be used. She will find that out."

The talk of the Crombies ended for the night in a very exhaustive analysis of the relations of Lillias to her more immediate family, then as remote in space as close in blood, and in a just recognition of how very little the girl, left to shift for herself, owed her mother in obedience or deference. Mrs. Crombie led the conclusion in censure of her sister, with those reserves in behalf of her peculiarities which a woman sometimes likes to make in judging her next of kin, as if their eccentricities somehow reflected picturesqueness if not praise upon herself. Lillias, she said, had come honestly by anything that was original in her; and she did not know but that if the girl was now hesitating in a way that was ridiculous about accepting Mr. Craybourne, she was certainly improving upon her mother, who used to be always hesitating about people after she had accepted them, and sometimes after she had married them. In the case of Lillias's father, she reminded Crombie, Aggie's misgiving had gone so far as to have the character of a provisional separation for a whole year before his death. She asked Crombie if he did not think that this showed a real honesty in the child; and he said that he did. By this time he was so sleepy that he would have said anything.

He was quite as compliant when he woke, but he found his wife of another mind, after a night passed beyond the influence of her niece. She came into his room before he was up, or fairly awake, fully dressed and with a defensive armor invisibly on, which she betrayed in saying, " Well, she is a case."

"Why, what has she been doing now?"

Crombie asked, instantly roused to consciousness.

" Oh, nothing. I have just been thinking her over, and I have gone back to my first impressions. I think what she has done is enough without anything more. The question is, what ought we to do? Shall we quietly ignore Mr. Craybourne until she chooses to make a move, or shall we ignore her, and you go over to the Saco Shore and call upon him, and take the bull by the horns? Do you know, my dear, I believe that's just what she wants you to do. How can we tell but it's a plot between them to force our hands? There's every probability, to my mind, that she planned for him to get here before her, so that he would come and be looked over before she arrived, and we be driven at the point of the bayonet to say what we think of him. I'll bet anything you dare that she was enraged beyond description when she found that she had missed fire, and that we hadn't seen him, after all!"

" I don't think it's fair," Crombie said, " to use such various and vigorous imagery with a man that's still on his back."

"Well, you must get up, then." She had been going about, pulling up window-shades and throwing open shutters, as she talked, and she now confronted him in the full light of day. "It's nearly breakfast-time, anyway; and I want to talk it thoroughly over with you after you're shaved."

" I shall be clearer, then; but I shall be a great deal hungrier, and I don't believe I can talk it over till I've had my coffee."

"You've got to," she said, going out of the room.

But before he had half-finished shaving, and while he was still grieving inwardly at having to help his wife make up her mind about her niece all over again, he heard her voice gayly lifted and the clash of enthusiastic kisses in a pause of the rustling skirts that he knew to be meeting in the upper hallway on which all the bedroom doors opened. He noticed that his wife's and her niece's voices were very much alike in the one asking, "Why, child, you poor thing, are you up already? Why didn't you let me send your breakfast to your room?" and the other answering, " Oh, I'm always up to breakfast, aunt, and I'm so be-you-tifull rested, I couldn't think of it."

" Well, then, come right down. It 'll be on the table instantly," he heard his wife continue. "Your uncle will come any old time, as he says, and we needn't wait for him."

"Well, I am rather nippish," he heard Lillias owning in the same note.

The girl was very amusing, he thought, when he found them at breakfast, and Mrs. Crombie said she had been telling about her university life, out there, and bade her go on.

" Oh, I don't believe Uncle Archibald will care for it," Lillias said, but she corrected herself so far as to add, " It is rather funny, I suppose, to you, off here." He liked her standing up so for her adoptive West, and he showed an immediate interest which inspired her. She was looking still prettier than the night before, and the flower-like freshness of her morning-dress was quite as becoming as the twilight tones which had clothed her as with a pensive music the night before. He tried to put out of his mind a saying to the effect that in the dark all cats are gray, while he found a singular pleasure in the pseudo-deference with which she addressed herself to him. "You see," she continued, "that my lectures are rather outside of the regular courses, and that was the reason why the general public was always more or less at them. I believe they were popular, but I knew all the time that they would have been more popular if they had been more — well, humbuggy. And you know I couldn't stand that, uncle," she appealed to him with a sidelong glance.

" No," he assented, in a way that made her laugh.

She went on: "People like that, both old and young, and I should have had all the unoccupied human material that goes into women's clubs raving about me, if I had done some sort of Delsarte business; they would have much preferred a song and dance to the modesty of nature which I was trying to brag up by precept and practice. I was tolerably adored by my classes, as it was, but I should have had them in ecstasies if I had descended to the cheap kind of things we were taught to avoid in the dramatic school."

"Yes," Crombie said, and now Lillias did not immediately continue.

When she did, it was to say, with a silently accumulated frankness, "The only one, really, that thoroughly understood, from the first instant, what I was driving at, was Mr. Craybourne. I suppose," she said, with another cast of her eyes, though this time it was rather defiant than appealing, towards Crombie, "Aunt Hester has told you about him?"

" Not at all! What about him?"

His effrontery made her laugh again.

" Oh, that's another story, as Kipling says — or used to say; I believe he doesn't say it now, anymore. This story only relates to his telling me, as soon as he could manage to get introduced — which he did by very properly waiting and asking the president to perform the ceremony, when he could have got any soul in the place to do it at once — that I was the first person to give him the least notion of what nature was at."

"Indeed!" Crombie said. "Did you believe him?"

" Not immediately. There's nothing," she deferred, " that we suspect so much as downright openness, is there?"

" It's often very misleading."

"Well, I found out afterwards that he really meant it. That," she added, after a distinct interval, " was what gave me pause," and Crombie felt that she had come to the other story. " There is no use beating about the bush, and I'm not going to. Aunt Hester," she now turned to Mrs. Crombie, "I may as well say first as last that if the Mellays hadn't providentially written to put me off a week I should have invented some providential excuse for coming to you and letting me meet Mr. Craybourne as nearly on the parental premises as I could get them."

Crombie stole a look at his wife, but he could detect nothing of resentment in her face; nothing but a generous and protecting welcome. She laid her left hand along the table towards the girl, and Lillias put hers gratefully into it. "You have done exactly right, my dear," she said, and Lillias went on, piecing a little break in her voice:

" Even if mother were on the ground, and not off in the wilds of Europe somewhere, I should wish Uncle Archie's approval, as I've no father of my own; for in the kind of scrambling life I've led I like to have a thing of this kind perfectly regular. I'm not the least bit bohemian, Aunt Hester, though I know you always thought me so — "

"No, my dear!" Mrs. Crombie protested, but Lillias tenderly insisted:

"Oh yes, you did, aunt, and I don't blame you; I should have, myself. But at heart I'm deadly respectable, and Mr. Craybourne's being an Englishman makes me all the more anxious to be more so; though he thinks the other kind of thing is charming, and was quite ready to be fetched by it — at least in my case. You see, I'm not having any concealments from you!"

"You needn't have, poor child!" Mrs. Crombie said, so tenderly that Crombie kept himself with difficulty from a derisory snort.

"And now you have the whole thing before you. I have come to you simply for a social basis, a domestic hearth, a family fireside, and when Mr. Craybourne comes, I want him to find me in a chimney-comer belonging to my own kith and kin."

The terms of this declaration, and the mixed tones in which it was delivered, were such as to make Crombie feel that it need not be taken too seriously, though it could not be taken too earnestly; so, when his wife, with an adjuratory frown, indicated that it was for him, as head of the house, to make their joint response, he said, with a certain hardy gayety:

"And when is he coming?"

"Oh, any moment!" Lillias said, with a rueful little smile full of gladness at his light daring. " That is, if one can judge from his already being here before me. I suppose I may say that it wasn't his fault that we are not here on our wedding journey."

She turned from her uncle to her aunt in making this observation, and Mrs. Crombie met it in the same spirit. "Well, Lillias, I must say that you have done very wisely in the whole matter. I should never have forgiven myself if any fancied inconvenience to us had kept you from coming to us in such an emergency; and no matter how it turns out, I shall write to Aggie that you have done everything that a girl could do."

"Thank you. Aunt Hester," and the two women had a moment of mothering and daughtering in which Crombie could not join them.

" Well, I am prepared to do anything you want," he said, with an ironical ease, and a genuine interest in the affair which he thought it more manly to conceal. "Do I understand that Mr. Craybourne will ask for me again?"

"Yes, indeed!" the girl said. "We are not out there now, and he knows it."

"And what am I to say, when he asks to see you — if he does?"

Lillias looked at her aunt, who visibly failed to formulate a line of conduct for Crombie, and then she looked back at him, and said, caressingly, "Oh, just trust to the inspiration of the moment, uncle."

"Then you leave it all to me?"

"Quite."

"Well, I've never had the chance of forbidding a young man my house before, and perhaps I sha'n't do it in just the way that this Mr. Craybourne is used to, but I think I can do it effectually."

Crombie wore the mustache of his period branching into the side whiskers of the early eighteen-sixties, and it was with a fine flare of both that he now tilted his head on one side and waited for his wife and niece to precede him out of the breakfast-room. His beard and the gossamer traces of his hair were faded from their earlier red to an agreeable yellowish white, and his bulging blue eyes matched very well with them and with a complexion of ancestral Scotch floridity, so that as he stood leaning forward with his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets he was such a fine elderly Du Maurier military type that Lillias could hardly forbear throwing him a kiss. She did forbear, but she forbore with a backward roll of her own eyes which had all the effect of a thrown kiss. "You'll be splendid. Uncle Archie, whatever you do," she encouraged him, though it made him tremble, almost, to see her put her arm round her aunt's waist. He felt that she might carry it too far in constituting herself Mrs. Crombie's protegee, and in fact he fancied Mrs. Crombie's waist tacitly stiffening under the caress.

To make sure, he asked her, when Lillias had gone up to her room for a moment, "Then you've changed your mind about her?"

"Not at all!" his wife returned, in the scorn often used by women to give dignity to a misstatement. " I feel exactly as I did, though in an entirely different way. She is not underhanded, but overhanded, and she thinks that if she is perfectly transparent, I shall not see through her. All is, I shall have to fight her in the open."

"Where did you get that expression?" Crombie parleyed.

"I don't know: in some of those English South African accounts. You know what I mean. She is determined to be married from this house."

Crombie caught his breath, and then whistled.

"I can see it," she went on, "as plain as the nose on my face. But I can tell her she won't do it, without my knowing it."

" I wish I knew what you meant by that," Crombie sighed.

"Well, you will see."

Just then Lillias's trailing skirts were heard on the stairs like the drift of fallen leaves down a forest path.