The Son Of Royal Langbrith. William Dean Howells
you know.”
“Yes,” Langbrith assented, while he retired a few steps from the gate, on which Hawberk was now lounging. In the moonlight, Hawberk’s face had a greenish hue, and his eyes shone vitreously.
“ There is something fine about these gloomy autumn nights,” he suggested. “ I sold him the mills, you recollect, and it would be sort of evening things up if you sold them back to me. Yes, your father and I were great friends. He liked to go off with me in my yacht. We made the trip to the Azores, together. I think I was the first to own a steam yacht in Boston. I lived most of the time in Boston, then: looked after the city end of the business. Often had your father down. I was always giving dinners, and he used to enjoy them. You and Hope been at the play? Fine company, I’m told. Pity we don’t get them oftener in Saxmills.”
“Ah—I think I must say good night, Mr. Hawberk.” Langbrith moved a little farther away, backing. “It’s rather late—
“Is it?” Hawberk took out his watch and held it up to the moonlight. “Why, so it is! Nearly morning. Well, good-night.” He did not offer to leave the gate, but remained lounging across it, while Langbrith turned and moved down the footpath towards the village.
X
In the morning, the dissatisfactions which are apt to qualify the satisfactions of the night before made themselves felt in Langbrith. He had wanted to talk the satisfactions over with Falk, whom he found in bed, on his return from seeing Hope Hawberk home, with the disaster of meeting her father; but Falk was either sleepy from the fatigues of the evening, or cynical from the excess of its pleasures, and would not talk. He met Langbrith’s overtures to a confidence with a prayer for rest, with a counsel of forgetting, with an aspiration for help in his extremity against him from the powers which he did not often invoke. Langbrith was obliged to go to bed himself, without the light of Falk’s mind on the things which kept him turning from side to side till well towards morning. Then he slept so briefly that he woke to hear Falk still asleep in the next room, and went down alone to his breakfast.
He found his mother in the library ready to join him, and he said, rather crossly, that they would not wait for Falk, who would anyway not want anything but coffee. At first, it seemed as if he would himself not want anything else, but after he had drunk a cup he helped himself to the steak which his mother refused, and then to the rice-cakes, which Norah brought in relays, till he said, “I shan’t want any more, Norah,” and then she ceased to bring them, and shut the door into the kitchen definitely after her in going out.
If Mrs. Langbrith expected her son to begin by saying something of the pleasure she had tried to give him the night before, she was destined to disappointment, less, perhaps, from his ingratitude than from his preoccupation. “Mother,” he asked, in pouring the syrup over the last relay of cakes that Norah had brought, “do you know whether there was ever anything unpleasant between Dr. Anther and my father?”
She caught her breath in a way that was habitual with her at any sort of abruptness, and had a moment of hesitation in which she might have been deciding what form of evasion she should employ. Then she asked, “Why, James, what made you think so?”
“Something—nothing—that happened, or didn’t happen, last night, after you left us smoking in the dining-room.” Langbrith frowned, in what was resentment or what was perplexity. “ It might have been my fancy, altogether. But he seemed to receive a suggestion I made very dryly, very coldly. I had always supposed they were great friends.”
Mrs. Langbrith quelled her respiration into long, smooth under-breaths, and said nothing.
Langbrith went on. “I had been thinking of something I meant to mention to you first—putting up a medallion of my father, with some sort of inscription, in the façade of the library, and last night I happened to come out with the notion in the course of some general talk, and Dr. Anther received it so blankly that I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt.
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Langbrith said, with a drop of her eyes, “he didn’t take it in.”
“That was what I have been trying to think. People began to come for the dance just after that, and the subject couldn’t go any further. But, before Judge Garley and Mr. Enderby, Dr. Anther s blankness had time to be painful. Well!” he broke off from the affair. “ He may not have taken it in, as you say.”
Mrs. Langbrith rubbed her hand nervously up and down on the smooth, warm handle of the coffeepot, in the struggle with herself, rather than with her son, which was renewed whenever it came to any sort of question of his father between them. She was long past the superstition of her husband’s right, through the mere fact of his death, to her silence, her forbearance. Except for their son, she would have been willing that he should be known to the world as he was known to her and to Anther. But with reference to the dead man’s son, it still seemed to her that the truth would be defamation, as much as if his memory were really pure and holy. It always came to some sort of evasion. But this morning, somehow, it did not seem to her as if she could consent to that any longer. It was on her tongue to say, No, his father and Dr. Anther were not friends at last, and give, swiftly and unsparingly, the reasons why they could not be. But when she spoke, she got no further than saying, and it was with tremendous effect that she got so far from her wonted reserve, “If you think there was ever anything unpleasant between them, why don’t you ask Dr. Anther himself?”
There was a desperate challenge in her eyes, which she would have been miserably glad to have him see there, if only some counter of his would then push her past the silence which she could never traverse of herself alone. But he was looking down into his cup, and he did not see what was in her eyes. He stirred his coffee, and said: “It was not serious enough for that. Very likely it wasn’t anything at all. He may not have been giving the matter close attention, or he may have had something else on his mind. Doctors often have, I suppose; or he may have been vexed at something in my manner—what Falk calls my patronizing. Possibly he was thinking from his knowledge of my father that such a thing would be distasteful to him. But he might have left it all to me. Well, it doesn’t really amount to anything.”
She drew a long, deep breath, in the desperate relief of postponement, and he looked up affectionately. “ It’s all a very old story for you, mother, and you can’t take much pleasure in knowing how the evening went off. You did manage it wonderfully.”
She flushed at his praise. “ I tried to carry out your instructions.”
“You bettered them. It was a great little triumph. Don’t you think people enjoyed it?”
“Yes, I think so. But if you enjoyed it, that is quite enough for me.”
“ Oh, for you, mother! But I’m unselfish enough for you to wish the rest had a good time. I thought the girls all looked very pretty, and they behaved prettily, too, which doesn’t always follow. Country girls—village girls—don’t always know the difference between being lively and being rowdy. I’m bound to say that sometimes city girls don’t either. The latest blossoming of buds in Boston—well! Don’t you think Hope is very beautiful?”
He seemed quite in good humor, now, and was smiling retrospectively. His mother said, from that remote caution, doubtless, which is in every woman where her son’s relations with other women are concerned, “ She is a very good girl.”
Langbrith laughed out. “Well, I wasn’t thinking about the goodness, exactly! But I dare say she is good. What I’m sure of, though, is that she’s stunning. Mother!”
“Well, James?”
Langbrith’s face, so like her own face, in its contour and features, flushed as hers always did with any strong feeling; but whatever his feeling was, he did not put it into the words which followed as from a second impulse. He gave himself time to lose his flush, and to knit his brows, which approached very nearly together, before he asked, “ How long has her father been an opium fiend? I mean, how long have people known that he eats opium?”
“A