Читать книгу William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated) - William Dean Howells - Страница 143

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Tedham was sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in, and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked, with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom exposed to the open air, gave him the effect of a workingman just out of the hospital. His eyes were deep in their sockets, and showed fine shadows in the overhead light, and I must say he looked very interesting.

At the threshold my wife paused again; then she went forward, turning the gas up full as she passed under the chandelier, and gave him her hand, where he had risen from his chair.

"I am glad to see you, Mr. Tedham," she said; and I should have found my astonishment overpowering, I dare say, if I had not felt that I was so completely in the hands of Providence, when she added, "Won't you come out to dinner with us? We were just going to sit down, when Mr. March came in. I never know when he will be back, when he starts off on these Saturday afternoon tramps of his."

The children seemed considerably mystified at the appearance of our guest, but they had that superior interest in the dinner appropriate to their years, and we got through the ordeal, in which, I believe, I suffered more than any one else, much better than I could have hoped. I could not help noting in Tedham a certain strangeness to the use of a four-pronged fork, at first, but he rapidly overcame this; and if it had not been for a terrible moment when, after one of the courses, he began, mechanically, to scrape his plate with his knife, there would not have been anything very odd in his behavior, or anything to show that it was the first dinner in polite society that he had taken for so many years.

The man's mind had apparently stiffened more than his body. It used to be very agile, if light, but it was not agile now. It worked slowly toward the topics which we found with difficulty, in our necessity of avoiding the only topics of real interest between us, and I could perceive that his original egotism, intensified by the long years in which he had only himself for company, now stood in the way of his entering into the matters brought forward, though he tried to do so. They were mostly in the form of reminiscences of this person and that whom we had known in common, and even in this shape they had to be very carefully handled so as not to develop anything leading. The thing that did most to relieve the embarrassment of the time was the sturdy hunger Tedham showed, and his delight in the cooking; I suppose that I cannot make others feel the pathos I found in this.

After dinner we shut the children into the library, and kept Tedham with us in the parlor.

My wife began at once to say, "Mr. March has told me why you wanted to see me, Mr. Tedham."

"Yes," he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure his cause.

"I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs. Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me."

Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily, "Won't you try?"

"Yes," she answered, most unexpectedly to me, "I will try to see her. But if I do see her, and she refuses to tell me anything about your daughter, what will you do? Of course, I shall have to tell her I come from you, and for you."

"I thought," Tedham ventured, with a sort of timorous slyness, "that perhaps you might approach it casually, without any reference to me."

"No, I couldn't do that," my wife said.

He went on as if he had not heard her: "If she did not know that the inquiries were made in my behalf, she might be willing to say whether my daughter was with her."

There was in this suggestion a quality of Tedham's old insinuation, but coarser, inferior, as if his insinuation had degenerated into something like mere animal cunning. I felt rather ashamed for him, but to my surprise, my wife seemed only to feel sorry, and did not repel his suggestion in the way I had thought she would.

"No," she said, "that wouldn't do. She has kept account of the time, you may be sure, and she would ask me at once if I was inquiring in your behalf, and I should have to tell her the truth."

"I didn't know," he returned, "but you might evade the point, somehow. So much being at stake," he added, as if explaining.

Still my wife was not severe with him. "I don't understand, quite," she said.

"Being the turning-point in my life, I can't begin to do anything, to be anything, till I have seen my daughter. I don't know where to find myself. If I could see her, and she did not cast me off, then I should know where I was. Or, if she did, I should. You understand that."

"But, of course, there is another point of view."

"My daughter's?"

"Mrs. Hasketh's."

"I don't care for Mrs. Hasketh. She did what she has done for the child's sake. It was the best thing for the child at the time—the only thing; I know that. But I agreed to it because I had to."

He continued: "I consider that I have expiated the wrong I did. There is no sense in the whole thing, if I haven't. They might as well have let me go in the beginning. Don't you think that ten years out of my life is enough for a thing that I never intended to go as far as it did, and a thing that I was led into, partly, for the sake of others? I have tried to reason it out, and not from my own point of view at all, and that is the way I feel about it. Is it to go on forever, and am I never to be rid of the consequences of a single act? If you and Mr. March could condone—"

"Oh, you mustn't reason from us," my wife broke in. "We are very silly people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have got to reckon with the world at large."

"I have reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the reckoning. But why shouldn't my daughter look at this thing as you do?"

Instead of answering, my wife asked, "When did you hear from her last?"

Tedham took a few thin, worn letters from his breast-pocket "There is Mr. March's letter," he said, laying one on his knee. He handed my wife another.

She read it, and asked, "May Mr. March see it?"

Tedham nodded, and I took the little paper in turn. The letter was written in a child's stiff, awkward hand. It was hardly more than a piteous cry of despairing love. The address was Mrs. Hasketh's, in Somerville, and the date was about three months after Tedham's punishment began. "Is that the last you have heard from her?" I asked.

Tedham nodded as he took the letter from me.

"But surely you have heard something more about her in all this time?" my wife pursued.

"Once from Mrs. Hasketh, to make me promise that I would leave the child to her altogether, and not write to her, or ask to see her. When I went to the cemetery to-day, I did not know but I should find her grave, too."

"Well, it is cruel!" cried my wife. "I will go and see Mrs. Hasketh, but—you ought to feel yourself that it's hopeless."

"Yes," he admitted. "There isn't much chance unless she should happen to think the same way you do: that I had suffered enough, and that it was time to stop punishing me."

My wife looked compassionately at him, and she began with a sympathy that I have not always known her to show more deserving people, "If it were a question of that alone it would be very easy. But suppose your daughter were so situated that it would be—disadvantageous to her to have it known that you were her father?"

"You mean that I have no right to mend my broken-up life—what there is left of it—by spoiling hers? I have said that to myself. But then, on the other hand, I have had to ask myself whether I had any right to keep her from choosing for herself about it. I sha'n't force myself on her. I expect to leave her free. But if the child cares for me, as she used to, hasn't that love—not mine for her, but hers for me—got some rights too?"

His voice sank almost to a hush, and the last word was scarcely more than a breathing. "All I want is to know where she is, and to let her know that I am in the world, and where she can find me. I think she ought to have a chance to decide."

"I am afraid Mrs. Hasketh may think it would be better, for her sake, not to have the chance," my wife sighed, and she turned her look from Tedham upon me, as if she wished me rather than him to answer.

"The only way to find out is to ask her," I answered, non-committally, and rather more lightly than I felt about it. In fact, the turn the affair had taken interested me greatly. It involved that awful mystery of the ties by which, unless we are born of our fathers and mothers for nothing more than the animals are, we are bound to them in all the things of life, in duty and in love transcending every question of interest and happiness. The parents' duty to the children is obvious and plain, but the child's duty to its parents is something subtler and more spiritual. It is to be more delicately, more religiously, regarded. No one, without impiety, can meddle with it from the outside, or interfere in its fulfilment. This and much more I said to my wife when we came to talk the matter over after Tedham left us. Above all, I urged something that came to me so forcibly at the moment that I said I had always thought it, and perhaps I really believed that I had. "Why should we try to shield people from fate? Isn't that always wrong? One is fated to be born the child of a certain father, and one can no more escape the consequences of his father's misdeeds than the doer himself can. Perhaps the pain and the shame come from the wish and the attempt to do so, more than from the fact itself. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children. But the children are innocent of evil, and this visitation must be for their good, and will be, if they bear it willingly."

"Well, don't try to be that sort of blessing to your children, Basil," said my wife, personalizing the case, as a woman must.

After that we tried to account to each other for having consented to do what Tedham asked us. Perhaps we accused each other somewhat for doing it.

"I didn't know, my dear, but you were going to ask him to come and stay with us," I said.

"I did want to," she replied. "It seemed so forlorn, letting him go out into the night, and find a place for himself, when we could just as well have let him stay as not. Why shouldn't we have offered him a bed for the night, as we would any other acquaintance?"

"Well, you must allow that the circumstances were peculiar!"

"But if he was sentenced to pay a certain penalty, and has paid it, why, as he said, shouldn't we stop punishing him?"

"I suppose we can't. There seems to be an instinctive demand for eternal perdition, for hell, in the human heart," I suggested.

"Well, then, I believe that your instinct, Basil—"

"Oh, I don't claim it, exclusively!"

"Is a survival of savagery, and the sooner we get rid of it the better. How queer he seems. It is the old Tedham, but all faded in—or out."

"Yes, he affected me like an etching of himself from a wornout plate. Still, I'm afraid there's likeness enough left to make trouble, yet. I hope you realize what you have gone in for, Isabel?"

She answered from the effort that I could see she was making, to brace herself already for the work before us:

"Well, we must do this because we can't help doing it, and because, whatever happens, we had no right to refuse. You must come with me, Basil!"

"I? To Mrs. Hasketh's?"

"Certainly. I will do the talking, but I shall depend upon your moral support. We will go over to Somerville to-morrow afternoon. We had better not lose any time."

"To-morrow is Sunday."

"So much the better. They will be sure to be at home, if they're there at all, yet."

She said they, but I knew that she did not expect poor old Hasketh really to count in the matter, any more than she expected me to do so.