The Son Of Royal Langbrith. William Dean Howells
know,” she tremulously consented; and in her admission there was no feint of sparing the dead, of defending the name she bore, or the man whose son she had borne. She must have gone all over that ground long ago, and abandoned it. “ It ought to have come out,” she even added.
“Yes, but it never can come out now, while any of his victims live,” Anther helplessly raged. “ I’m willing to help keep it covered up in his grave myself, because you’re one of them. If poor Hawberk had only taken to drink instead of opium!”
“Yes,” she again consented, with no more apparent feeling for the memory imperiled by the conjecture than if she had been nowise concerned in it.
“But you must, Amelia—I hate to blame you; I know how true you are—you must have let the boy think—”
“As a child, he used to ask me, but not much; and what would you have had I should answer him?”
“ Of course, of course! You couldn’t.”
“ I used to wonder if I could. Once, when he was little, he put his finger on this”—she put her own finger on a scar over her left eye—“and asked me what made it. I almost told him.”
Anther groaned and twisted in his chair. “The child always spoke of him,” she went on passionlessly, “ as being in heaven. I found out, one night, when I was saying his prayers with him, that—you know how children get things mixed up in their thoughts—he supposed Mr. Langbrith was the father in heaven he was praying to.”
“Gracious powers!” Anther broke out.
“I suppose,” she concluded, with a faint sigh, “though it’s no comfort, that there are dark corners in other houses.”
“Plenty,” Anther grimly answered, from the physician’s knowledge. “ But not many as dark as in yours, Amelia.”
“No,” she passively consented once more. “As he grew up,” she resumed the thread of their talk, without prompting, “he seemed less and less curious about it; and I let it go. I suppose I wanted to escape from it, to forget it.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“But, doctor,” she pleaded with him for the extenuation which she could not, perhaps, find in herself, “ I never did teach him by any word or act— unless not saying anything was doing it—that his father was the sort of man he thinks he was. I should have been afraid that Mr. Langbrith himself would not have liked that. It would have been a fraud upon the child.”
‘‘I don’t think Langbrith would have objected to it on that ground,” Anther bitterly suggested.
‘‘No, perhaps not. But between Mr. Langbrith and me there were no concealments, and I felt that he would not have wished me to impose upon the child expressly.”
“ Oh, he preferred the tacit deceit, if it would serve his purpose. I’ll allow that. And in this case, it seems to have done it.”
“Do you mean,” she meekly asked, “that I have deceived James?”
“No,” said Anther, with a blurt of joyless laughter. “But if such a thing were possible, if it were not too sickeningly near some wretched superstition that doesn’t believe in itself, I should say that his father deceived him through you, that he diabolically acted through your love, and did the evil which we have got to face now. Amelia!” he startled her with the resolution expressed in his utterance of her name, “you say the boy will object to my marrying you. Do you object to my telling him?”
“Telling him?”
“Just what his father was!”
“Oh, you mustn’t! It would make him hate you.”
“What difference?”
“I couldn’t let him hate you. I couldn’t bear that. ” The involuntary tears, kept back in the abstracter passages of their talk, filled her eyes again, and trembled above her cheeks.
" If necessary, he has got to know," Anther went on, obdurately.
" I won't give you up on a mere apprehension of his opposition."
" Oh, do give me up !" she implored. " It would be the best way."
" It would be the worst. I have a right to you, and if you care for me, as you say — "
"I do!"
" Then, heaven help us, you have right to me. You have a right to freedom, to peace, to rest, to security ; and you are going to have it. Now, will you let it come to the question without his having the grounds of a fair judgment, or shall we tell him what he ought to know, and then do what we ought to do : marry, and let me look after you as long as I live?"
She hesitated, and then said, with a sort of furtive evasion of the point: "There is something that I ought to tell you. You said that you would despise yourself if you had cared for me in Mr. Langbrith's lifetime." She always spoke of her husband, dead, as she had always addressed him, living, in the tradition of her great juniority, and in a convention of what was once polite form from wives to husbands, not to be dropped in the most solemn, the most intimate, moments.
Anther found nothing grotesque in it, and therefore nothing peculiarly pathetic. "Well?" he asked, impatiently trying for patience.
"Well, I know that I cared for you then. I couldn't help it. Now you despise me, and that ends it."
Anther rubbed his hand over his face; then he said, "I don't believe you, Amelia."
" I did," she persisted.
"Well, then, it was all right. You couldn't have had a wrong thought or feeling, and the theory may go. After all I was applying the principle in my own case, and trying to equal myself with you. If you choose to equal yourself with me by saying this, I must let you; but it makes no difference. You cared for me because I stood your helper when there was no other possible, and that was right. Now, shall we tell Jim, or not?"
She looked desperately round, as if she might escape the question by escaping from the room. As all the doors were shut, she seemed to abandon the notion of flight, and said, with a deep sigh, " I must see him first."
Anther caught up his hat and put it on, and went out without any form of leave-taking. When the outer door had closed upon him, she stole to the window, and, standing back far enough not to be seen, watched him heavily tramping down the brick walk, with its borders of box, to the white gate-posts, each under its elm, budded against a sky threatening rain, and trailing its pendulous spray in the wind. He jounced into his buggy, and drew the reins over his horse, which had been standing unhitched, and drove away. She turned from the window.
III.
Easter came late that year, and the jonquils were there before it, even in the Mid-New England latitude of Saxmills, when James Langbrith brought his friend Falk home with him for the brief vacation. The two fellows had a great time, as they said to each other, among the village girls; and perhaps Langbrith evinced his local superiority more appreciably by his patronage of them than by the colonial nobleness of the family mansion, squarely fronting the main village street, with gardened grounds behind dropping to the river. He did not dispense his patronage in all cases without having his hand somewhat clawed by the recipients, but still he dispensed it; and, though Falk laughed when Langbrith was scratched, still Langbrith felt that he was more than holding his own, and he made up for any defeat he met outside by the unquestioned supremacy he bore within his mother’s house. Her shyness, out of keeping with her age and stature, invited the sovereign command which Langbrith found it impossible to refuse, though he tempered his tyranny with words and shows of affection well calculated to convince his friend of the perfect intelligence which existed between his mother and himself. When he thought of it, he gave her his arm in going out to dinner; and, when he forgot, he tried to make up by pushing