MRS. LAPHAM went away to put on her bonnet and cloak, and she was waiting at the window when her husband drove up. She opened the door and ran down the steps. "Don't get out; I can help myself in," and she clambered to his side, while he kept the fidgeting mare still with voice and touch.
"Where do you want I should go?" he asked, turning the buggy.
"Oh, I don't care. Out Brookline way, I guess. I wish you hadn't brought this fool of a horse," she gave way petulantly. "I wanted to have a talk."
"When I can't drive this mare and talk too, I'll sell out altogether," said Lapham. "She'll be quiet enough when she's had her spin."
"Well," said his wife; and while they were making their way across the city to the Milldam she answered certain questions he asked about some points in the new house.
"I should have liked to have you stop there," he began; but she answered so quickly, "Not to-day," that he gave it up and turned his horse's head westward when they struck Beacon Street.
He let the mare out, and he did not pull her in till he left the Brighton road and struck off under the low boughs that met above one of the quiet streets of Brookline, where the stone cottages, with here and there a patch of determined ivy on their northern walls, did what they could to look English amid the glare of the autumnal foliage. The smooth earthen track under the mare's hoofs was scattered with flakes of the red and yellow gold that made the air luminous around them, and the perspective was gay with innumerable tints and tones.
"Pretty sightly," said Lapham, with a long sigh, letting the reins lie loose in his vigilant hand, to which he seemed to relegate the whole charge of the mare. "I want to talk with you about Rogers, Persis. He's been getting in deeper and deeper with me; and last night he pestered me half to death to go in with him in one of his schemes. I ain't going to blame anybody, but I hain't got very much confidence in Rogers. And I told him so last night."
"Oh, don't talk to me about Rogers!" his wife broke in. "There's something a good deal more important than Rogers in the world, and more important than your business. It seems as if you couldn't think of anything else--that and the new house. Did you suppose I wanted to ride so as to talk Rogers with you?" she demanded, yielding to the necessity a wife feels of making her husband pay for her suffering, even if he has not inflicted it. "I declare----"
"Well, hold on, now!" said Lapham. "What DO you want to talk about? I'm listening."
His wife began, "Why, it's just this, Silas Lapham!" and then she broke off to say, "Well, you may wait, now--starting me wrong, when it's hard enough anyway."
Lapham silently turned his whip over and over in his hand and waited.
"Did you suppose," she asked at last, "that that young Corey had been coming to see Irene?"
"I don't know what I supposed," replied Lapham sullenly. "You always said so." He looked sharply at her under his lowering brows.
"Well, he hasn't," said Mrs. Lapham; and she replied to the frown that blackened on her husband's face. "And I can tell you what, if you take it in that way I shan't speak another word."
"Who's takin' it what way?" retorted Lapham savagely. "What are you drivin' at?"
"I want you should promise that you'll hear me out quietly."
"I'll hear you out if you'll give me a chance. I haven't said a word yet."
"Well, I'm not going to have you flying into forty furies, and looking like a perfect thunder-cloud at the very start. I've had to bear it, and you've got to bear it too."
"Well, let me have a chance at it, then."
"It's nothing to blame anybody about, as I can see, and the only question is, what's the best thing to do about it. There's only one thing we can do; for if he don't care for the child, nobody wants to make him. If he hasn't been coming to see her, he hasn't, and that's all there is to it."
"No, it ain't!" exclaimed Lapham.
"There!" protested his wife.
"If he hasn't been coming to see her, what HAS he been coming for?"
"He's been coming to see Pen!" cried the wife. "NOW are you satisfied?" Her tone implied that he had brought it all upon them; but at the sight of the swift passions working in his face to a perfect comprehension of the whole trouble, she fell to trembling, and her broken voice lost all the spurious indignation she had put into it. "O Silas! what are we going to do about it? I'm afraid it'll kill Irene."
Lapham pulled off the loose driving-glove from his right hand with the fingers of his left, in which the reins lay. He passed it over his forehead, and then flicked from it the moisture it had gathered there. He caught his breath once or twice, like a man who meditates a struggle with superior force and then remains passive in its grasp.
His wife felt the need of comforting him, as she had felt the need of afflicting him. "I don't say but what it can be made to come out all right in the end. All I say is, I don't see my way clear yet."
"What makes you think he likes Pen?" he asked quietly.
"He told her so last night, and she told me this morning. Was he at the office to-day?"
"Yes, he was there. I haven't been there much myself. He didn't say anything to me. Does Irene know?"
"No; I left her getting ready to go out shopping. She wants to get a pin like the one Nanny Corey had on." "O my Lord!" groaned Lapham.
"It's been Pen from the start, I guess, or almost from the start. I don't say but what he was attracted some by Irene at the very first; but I guess it's been Pen ever since he saw her; and we've taken up with a notion, and blinded ourselves with it. Time and again I've had my doubts whether he cared for Irene any; but I declare to goodness, when he kept coming, I never hardly thought of Pen, and I couldn't help believing at last he DID care for Irene. Did it ever strike you he might be after Pen?"
"No. I took what you said. I supposed you knew."
"Do you blame me, Silas?" she asked timidly.
"No. What's the use of blaming? We don't either of us want anything but the children's good. What's it all of it for, if it ain't for that? That's what we've both slaved for all our lives."
"Yes, I know. Plenty of people LOSE their children," she suggested.
"Yes, but that don't comfort me any. I never was one to feel good because another man felt bad. How would you have liked it if some one had taken comfort because his boy lived when ours died? No, I can't do it. And this is worse than death, someways. That comes and it goes; but this looks as if it was one of those things that had come to stay. The way I look at it, there ain't any hope for anybody. Suppose we don't want Pen to have him; will that help Irene any, if he don't want her? Suppose we don't want to let him have either; does that help either!"
"You talk," exclaimed Mrs. Lapham, "as if our say was going to settle it. Do you suppose that Penelope Lapham is a girl to take up with a fellow that her sister is in love with, and that she always thought was in love with her sister, and go off and be happy with him? Don't you believe but what it would come back to her, as long as she breathed the breath of life, how she'd teased her about him, as I've heard Pen tease Irene, and helped to make her think he was in love with her, by showing that she thought so herself? It's ridiculous!"
Lapham seemed quite beaten down by this argument. His huge head hung forward over his breast; the reins lay loose in his moveless hand; the mare took her own way. At last he lifted his face and shut his heavy jaws.
"Well?" quavered his wife.
"Well," he answered, "if he wants her, and she wants him, I don't see what that's got to do with it." He looked straight forward, and not at his wife.
She laid her hands on the reins. "Now, you stop right here, Silas Lapham! If I thought that--if I really believed you could be willing to break that poor child's heart, and let Pen disgrace herself by marrying a man that had as good as killed her sister, just because you wanted Bromfield Corey's son for a son-in-law----"
Lapham turned his face now, and gave her a look. "You had better NOT believe that, Persis! Get up!" he called to the mare, without glancing at her, and she sprang forward. "I see you've got past being any use to yourself on this subject."
"Hello!" shouted a voice in front of him. "Where the devil you goin' to?"
"Do you want to KILL somebody!" shrieked his wife.
There was a light crash, and the mare recoiled her length, and separated their wheels from those of the open buggy in front which Lapham had driven into. He made his excuses to the occupant; and the accident relieved the tension of their feelings, and left them far from the point of mutual injury which they had reached in their common trouble and their unselfish will for their children's good.
It was Lapham who resumed the talk. "I'm afraid we can't either of us see this thing in the right light. We're too near to it. I wish to the Lord there was somebody to talk to about it."
"Yes," said his wife; "but there ain't anybody."
"Well, I dunno," suggested Lapham, after a moment; "why not talk to the minister of your church? May be he could see some way out of it."
Mrs. Lapham shook her head hopelessly. "It wouldn't do. I've never taken up my connection with the church, and I don't feel as if I'd got any claim on him."
"If he's anything of a man, or anything of a preacher, you HAVE got a claim on him," urged Lapham; and he spoiled his argument by adding, "I've contributed enough MONEY to his church."
"Oh, that's nothing," said Mrs. Lapham. "I ain't well enough acquainted with Dr. Langworthy, or else I'm TOO well. No; if I was to ask any one, I should want to ask a total stranger. But what's the use, Si? Nobody could make us see it any different from what it is, and I don't know as I should want they should."
It blotted out the tender beauty of the day, and weighed down their hearts ever more heavily within them. They ceased to talk of it a hundred times, and still came back to it. They drove on and on. It began to be late. "I guess we better go back, Si," said his wife; and as he turned without speaking, she pulled her veil down and began to cry softly behind it, with low little broken sobs.
Lapham started the mare up and drove swiftly homeward. At last his wife stopped crying and began trying to find her pocket. "Here, take mine, Persis," he said kindly, offering her his handkerchief, and she took it and dried her eyes with it. "There was one of those fellows there the other night," he spoke again, when his wife leaned back against the cushions in peaceful despair, "that I liked the looks of about as well as any man I ever saw. I guess he was a pretty good man. It was that Mr. Sewell."
He looked at his wife, but she did not say anything. "Persis," he resumed, "I can't bear to go back with nothing settled in our minds. I can't bear to let you."
"We must, Si," returned his wife, with gentle gratitude. Lapham groaned. "Where does he live?" she asked.
"On Bolingbroke Street. He gave me his number."
"Well, it wouldn't do any good. What could he say to us?"
"Oh, I don't know as he could say anything," said Lapham hopelessly; and neither of them said anything more till they crossed the Milldam and found themselves between the rows of city houses.
"Don't drive past the new house, Si," pleaded his wife. "I couldn't bear to see it. Drive--drive up Bolingbroke Street. We might as well see where he DOES live."
"Well," said Lapham. He drove along slowly. "That's the place," he said finally, stopping the mare and pointing with his whip.
"It wouldn't do any good," said his wife, in a tone which he understood as well as he understood her words. He turned the mare up to the curbstone.
"You take the reins a minute," he said, handing them to his wife.
He got down and rang the bell, and waited till the door opened; then he came back and lifted his wife out. "He's in," he said.
He got the hitching-weight from under the buggy-seat and made it fast to the mare's bit.
"Do you think she'll stand with that?" asked Mrs. Lapham.
"I guess so. If she don't, no matter."
"Ain't you afraid she'll take cold," she persisted, trying to make delay.
"Let her!" said Lapham. He took his wife's trembling hand under his arm, and drew her to the door.
"He'll think we're crazy," she murmured in her broken pride.
"Well, we ARE," said Lapham. "Tell him we'd like to see him alone a while," he said to the girl who was holding the door ajar for him, and she showed him into the reception-room, which had been the Protestant confessional for many burdened souls before their time, coming, as they did, with the belief that they were bowed down with the only misery like theirs in the universe; for each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.
They were as loath to touch their trouble when the minister came in as if it were their disgrace; but Lapham did so at last, and, with a simple dignity which he had wanted in his bungling and apologetic approaches, he laid the affair clearly before the minister's compassionate and reverent eye. He spared Corey's name, but he did not pretend that it was not himself and his wife and their daughters who were concerned.
"I don't know as I've got any right to trouble you with this thing," he said, in the moment while Sewell sat pondering the case, "and I don't know as I've got any warrant for doing it. But, as I told my wife here, there was something about you--I don't know whether it was anything you SAID exactly--that made me feel as if you could help us. I guess I didn't say so much as that to her; but that's the way I felt. And here we are. And if it ain't all right."
"Surely," said Sewell, "it's all right. I thank you for coming--for trusting your trouble to me. A time comes to every one of us when we can't help ourselves, and then we must get others to help us. If people turn to me at such a time, I feel sure that I was put into the world for something--if nothing more than to give my pity, my sympathy."
The brotherly words, so plain, so sincere, had a welcome in them that these poor outcasts of sorrow could not doubt.
"Yes," said Lapham huskily, and his wife began to wipe the tears again under her veil.
Sewell remained silent, and they waited till he should speak. "We can be of use to one another here, because we can always be wiser for some one else than we can for ourselves. We can see another's sins and errors in a more merciful light--and that is always a fairer light--than we can our own; and we can look more sanely at others' afflictions." He had addressed these words to Lapham; now he turned to his wife. "If some one had come to you, Mrs. Lapham, in just this perplexity, what would you have thought?"
"I don't know as I understand you," faltered Mrs. Lapham.
Sewell repeated his words, and added, "I mean, what do you think some one else ought to do in your place?"
"Was there ever any poor creatures in such a strait before?" she asked, with pathetic incredulity.
"There's no new trouble under the sun," said the minister.
"Oh, if it was any one else, I should say--I should say--Why, of course! I should say that their duty was to let----" She paused.
"One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame?" suggested Sewell. "That's sense, and that's justice. It's the economy of pain which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality. Tell me, Mrs. Lapham, didn't this come into your mind when you first learned how matters stood?"
"Why, yes, it flashed across me. But I didn't think it could be right."
"And how was it with you, Mr. Lapham?"
"Why, that's what I thought, of course. But I didn't see my way----"
"No," cried the minister, "we are all blinded, we are all weakened by a false ideal of self-sacrifice. It wraps us round with its meshes, and we can't fight our way out of it. Mrs. Lapham, what made you feel that it might be better for three to suffer than one?"
"Why, she did herself. I know she would die sooner than take him away from her."
"I supposed so!" cried the minister bitterly. "And yet she is a sensible girl, your daughter?"
"She has more common-sense----"
"Of course! But in such a case we somehow think it must be wrong to use our common-sense. I don't know where this false ideal comes from, unless it comes from the novels that befool and debauch almost every intelligence in some degree. It certainly doesn't come from Christianity, which instantly repudiates it when confronted with it. Your daughter believes, in spite of her common-sense, that she ought to make herself and the man who loves her unhappy, in order to assure the life-long wretchedness of her sister, whom he doesn't love, simply because her sister saw him and fancied him first! And I'm sorry to say that ninety-nine young people out of a hundred--oh, nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand!--would consider that noble and beautiful and heroic; whereas you know at the bottom of your hearts that it would be foolish and cruel and revolting. You know what marriage is! And what it must be without love on both sides."
The minister had grown quite heated and red in the face.
"I lose all patience!" he went on vehemently. "This poor child of yours has somehow been brought to believe that it will kill her sister if her sister does not have what does not belong to her, and what it is not in the power of all the world, or any soul in the world, to give her. Her sister will suffer--yes, keenly!--in heart and in pride; but she will not die. You will suffer too, in your tenderness for her; but you must do your duty. You must help her to give up. You would be guilty if you did less. Keep clearly in mind that you are doing right, and the only possible good. And God be with you!"
"HE talked sense, Persis," said Lapham gently, as he mounted to his wife's side in the buggy and drove slowly homeward through the dusk.
"Yes, he talked sense," she admitted. But she added bitterly, "I guess, if he had it to DO! Oh, he's right, and it's got to be done. There ain't any other way for it. It's sense; and, yes, it's justice." They walked to their door after they left the horse at the livery stable around the corner, where Lapham kept it. "I want you should send Irene up to our room as soon as we get in, Silas."
"Why, ain't you going to have any supper first?" faltered Lapham with his latch-key in the lock.
"No. I can't lose a minute. If I do, I shan't do it at all."
"Look here, Persis," said her husband tenderly, "let me do this thing."
"Oh, YOU!" said his wife, with a woman's compassionate scorn for a man's helplessness in such a case. "Send her right up. And I shall feel----" She stopped to spare him.
Then she opened the door, and ran up to her room without waiting to speak to Irene, who had come into the hall at the sound of her father's key in the door.
"I guess your mother wants to see you upstairs," said Lapham, looking away.
Her mother turned round and faced the girl's wondering look as Irene entered the chamber, so close upon her that she had not yet had time to lay off her bonnet; she stood with her wraps still on her arm.
"Irene!" she said harshly, "there is something you have got to bear. It's a mistake we've all made. He don't care anything for you. He never did. He told Pen so last night. He cares for her."
The sentences had fallen like blows. But the girl had taken them without flinching. She stood up immovable, but the delicate rose-light of her complexion went out and left her colourless. She did not offer to speak.
"Why don't you say something?" cried her mother. "Do you want to kill me, Irene?"
"Why should I want to hurt you, mamma?" the girl replied steadily, but in an alien voice. "There's nothing to say. I want to see Pen a minute."
She turned and left the room. As she mounted the stairs that led to her own and her sister's rooms on the floor above, her mother helplessly followed. Irene went first to her own room at the front of the house, and then came out leaving the door open and the gas flaring behind her. The mother could see that she had tumbled many things out of the drawers of her bureau upon the marble top.
She passed her mother, where she stood in the entry. "You can come too, if you want to, mamma," she said.
She opened Penelope's door without knocking, and went in. Penelope sat at the window, as in the morning. Irene did not go to her; but she went and laid a gold hair-pin on her bureau, and said, without looking at her, "There's a pin that I got to-day, because it was like his sister's. It won't become a dark person so well, but you can have it."
She stuck a scrap of paper in the side of Penelope's mirror. "There's that account of Mr. Stanton's ranch. You'll want to read it, I presume."
She laid a withered boutonniere on the bureau beside the pin. "There's his button-hole bouquet. He left it by his plate, and I stole it."
She had a pine-shaving fantastically tied up with a knot of ribbon, in her hand. She held it a moment; then, looking deliberately at Penelope, she went up to her, and dropped it in her lap without a word. She turned, and, advancing a few steps, tottered and seemed about to fall.
Her mother sprang forward with an imploring cry, "O 'Rene, 'Rene, 'Rene!"
Irene recovered herself before her mother could reach her. "Don't touch me," she said icily. "Mamma, I'm going to put on my things. I want papa to walk with me. I'm choking here."
"I--I can't let you go out, Irene, child," began her mother.
"You've got to," replied the girl. "Tell papa ta hurry his supper."
"O poor soul! He doesn't want any supper. HE knows it too."
"I don't want to talk about that. Tell him to get ready."
She left them once more.
Mrs. Lapham turned a hapless glance upon Penelope.
"Go and tell him, mother," said the girl. "I would, if I could. If she can walk, let her. It's the only thing for her." She sat still; she did not even brush to the floor the fantastic thing that lay in her lap, and that sent up faintly the odour of the sachet powder with which Irene liked to perfume her boxes.
Lapham went out with the unhappy child, and began to talk with her, crazily, incoherently, enough.
She mercifully stopped him. "Don't talk, papa. I don't want any one should talk with me."
He obeyed, and they walked silently on and on. In their aimless course they reached the new house on the water side of Beacon, and she made him stop, and stood looking up at it. The scaffolding which had so long defaced the front was gone, and in the light of the gas-lamp before it all the architectural beauty of the facade was suggested, and much of the finely felt detail was revealed. Seymour had pretty nearly satisfied himself in that rich facade; certainly Lapham had not stinted him of the means.
"Well," said the girl, "I shall never live in it," and she began to walk on.
Lapham's sore heart went down, as he lumbered heavily after her. "Oh yes, you will, Irene. You'll have lots of good times there yet."
"No," she answered, and said nothing more about it. They had not talked of their trouble at all, and they did not speak of it now. Lapham understood that she was trying to walk herself weary, and he was glad to hold his peace and let her have her way. She halted him once more before the red and yellow lights of an apothecary's window.
"Isn't there something they give you to make you sleep?" she asked vaguely. "I've got to sleep to-night!"
Lapham trembled. "I guess you don't want anything, Irene."
"Yes, I do! Get me something!" she retorted wilfully. "If you don't, I shall die. I MUST sleep."
They went in, and Lapham asked for something to make a nervous person sleep. Irene stood poring over the show-case full of brushes and trinkets, while the apothecary put up the bromide, which he guessed would be about the best thing. She did not show any emotion; her face was like a stone, while her father's expressed the anguish of his sympathy. He looked as if he had not slept for a week; his fat eyelids drooped over his glassy eyes, and his cheeks and throat hung flaccid. He started as the apothecary's cat stole smoothly up and rubbed itself against his leg; and it was to him that the man said, "You want to take a table-spoonful of that, as long as you're awake. I guess it won't take a great many to fetch you." "All right," said Lapham, and paid and went out. "I don't know but I SHALL want some of it," he said, with a joyless laugh.
Irene came closer up to him and took his arm. He laid his heavy paw on her gloved fingers. After a while she said, "I want you should let me go up to Lapham to-morrow."
"To Lapham? Why, to-morrow's Sunday, Irene! You can't go to-morrow."
"Well, Monday, then. I can live through one day here."
"Well," said the father passively. He made no pretence of asking her why she wished to go, nor any attempt to dissuade her.
"Give me that bottle," she said, when he opened the door at home for her, and she ran up to her own room.
The next morning Irene came to breakfast with her mother; the Colonel and Penelope did not appear, and Mrs. Lapham looked sleep-broken and careworn.
The girl glanced at her. "Don't you fret about me, mamma," she said. "I shall get along." She seemed herself as steady and strong as rock.
"I don't like to see you keeping up so, Irene," replied her mother. "It'll be all the worse for you when you do break. Better give way a little at the start."
"I shan't break, and I've given way all I'm going to. I'm going to Lapham to-morrow,--I want you should go with me, mamma,--and I guess I can keep up one day here. All about it is, I don't want you should say anything, or LOOK anything. And, whatever I do, I don't want you should try to stop me. And, the first thing, I'm going to take her breakfast up to her. Don't!" she cried, intercepting the protest on her mother's lips. "I shall not let it hurt Pen, if I can help it. She's never done a thing nor thought a thing to wrong me. I had to fly out at her last night; but that's all over now, and I know just what I've got to bear."
She had her way unmolested. She carried Penelope's breakfast to her, and omitted no care or attention that could make the sacrifice complete, with an heroic pretence that she was performing no unusual service. They did not speak, beyond her saying, in a clear dry note, "Here's your breakfast, Pen," and her sister's answering, hoarsely and tremulously, "Oh, thank you, Irene." And, though two or three times they turned their faces toward each other while Irene remained in the room, mechanically putting its confusion to rights, their eyes did not meet. Then Irene descended upon the other rooms, which she set in order, and some of which she fiercely swept and dusted. She made the beds; and she sent the two servants away to church as soon as they had eaten their breakfast, telling them that she would wash their dishes. Throughout the morning her father and mother heard her about the work of getting dinner, with certain silences which represented the moments when she stopped and stood stock-still, and then, readjusting her burden, forced herself forward under it again.
They sat alone in the family room, out of which their two girls seemed to have died. Lapham could not read his Sunday papers, and she had no heart to go to church, as she would have done earlier in life when in trouble. Just then she was obscurely feeling that the church was somehow to blame for that counsel of Mr. Sewell's on which they had acted.
"I should like to know," she said, having brought the matter up, "whether he would have thought it was such a light matter if it had been his own children. Do you suppose he'd have been so ready to act on his own advice if it HAD been?"
"He told us the right thing to do, Persis,--the only thing. We couldn't let it go on," urged her husband gently.
"Well, it makes me despise Pen! Irene's showing twice the character that she is, this very minute."
The mother said this so that the father might defend her daughter to her. He did not fail. "Irene's got the easiest part, the way I look at it. And you'll see that Pen'll know how to behave when the time comes."
"What do you want she should do?"
"I haven't got so far as that yet. What are we going to do about Irene?"
"What do you want Pen should do," repeated Mrs. Lapham, "when it comes to it?"
"Well, I don't want she should take him, for ONE thing," said Lapham.
This seemed to satisfy Mrs. Lapham as to her husband, and she said in defence of Corey, "Why, I don't see what HE'S done. It's all been our doing."
"Never mind that now. What about Irene?"
"She says she's going to Lapham to-morrow. She feels that she's got to get away somewhere. It's natural she should."
"Yes, and I presume it will be about the best thing FOR her. Shall you go with her?"
"Yes."
"Well." He comfortlessly took up a newspaper again, and she rose with a sigh, and went to her room to pack some things for the morrow's journey.
After dinner, when Irene had cleared away the last trace of it in kitchen and dining-room with unsparing punctilio, she came downstairs, dressed to go out, and bade her father come to walk with her again. It was a repetition of the aimlessness of the last night's wanderings. They came back, and she got tea for them, and after that they heard her stirring about in her own room, as if she were busy about many things; but they did not dare to look in upon her, even after all the noises had ceased, and they knew she had gone to bed.
"Yes; it's a thing she's got to fight out by herself," said Mrs Lapham.
"I guess she'll get along," said Lapham. "But I don't want you should misjudge Pen either. She's all right too. She ain't to blame."
"Yes, I know. But I can't work round to it all at once. I shan't misjudge her, but you can't expect me to get over it right away."
"Mamma," said Irene, when she was hurrying their departure the next morning, "what did she tell him when he asked her?"
"Tell him?" echoed the mother; and after a while she added, "She didn't tell him anything."
"Did she say anything, about me?"
"She said he mustn't come here any more."
Irene turned and went into her sister's room. "Good-bye, Pen," she said, kissing her with an effect of not seeing or touching her. "I want you should tell him all about it. If he's half a man, he won't give up till he knows why you won't have him; and he has a right to know."
"It wouldn't make any difference. I couldn't have him after----"
"That's for you to say. But if you don't tell him about me, I will."
"'Rene!" "Yes! You needn't say I cared for him. But you can say that you all thought he--cared for--me."
"O Irene----"
"Don't!" Irene escaped from the arms that tried to cast themselves about her. "You are all right, Pen. You haven't done anything. You've helped me all you could. But I can't--yet."
She went out of the room and summoned Mrs. Lapham with a sharp "Now, mamma!" and went on putting the last things into her trunks.
The Colonel went to the station with them, and put them on the train. He got them a little compartment to themselves in the Pullman car; and as he stood leaning with his lifted hands against the sides of the doorway, he tried to say something consoling and hopeful: "I guess you'll have an easy ride, Irene. I don't believe it'll be dusty, any, after the rain last night."
"Don't you stay till the train starts, papa," returned the girl, in rigid rejection of his futilities. "Get off, now."
"Well, if you want I should," he said, glad to be able to please her in anything. He remained on the platform till the cars started. He saw Irene bustling about in the compartment, making her mother comfortable for the journey; but Mrs. Lapham did not lift her head. The train moved off, and he went heavily back to his business.
From time to time during the day, when he caught a glimpse of him, Corey tried to make out from his face whether he knew what had taken place between him and Penelope. When Rogers came in about time of closing, and shut himself up with Lapham in his room, the young man remained till the two came out together and parted in their salutationless fashion.
Lapham showed no surprise at seeing Corey still there, and merely answered, "Well!" when the young man said that he wished to speak with him, and led the way back to his room.
Corey shut the door behind them. "I only wish to speak to you in case you know of the matter already; for otherwise I'm bound by a promise."
"I guess I know what you mean. It's about Penelope."
"Yes, it's about Miss Lapham. I am greatly attached to her--you'll excuse my saying it; I couldn't excuse myself if I were not."
"Perfectly excusable," said Lapham. "It's all right."
"Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that!" cried the young fellow joyfully. "I want you to believe that this isn't a new thing or an unconsidered thing with me--though it seemed so unexpected to her."
Lapham fetched a deep sigh. "It's all right as far as I'm concerned--or her mother. We've both liked you first-rate."
"Yes?"
"But there seems to be something in Penelope's mind--I don't know--" The Colonel consciously dropped his eyes.
"She referred to something--I couldn't make out what--but I hoped--I hoped--that with your leave I might overcome it--the barrier--whatever it was. Miss Lapham--Penelope--gave me the hope--that I was--wasn't--indifferent to her----"
"Yes, I guess that's so," said Lapham. He suddenly lifted his head, and confronted the young fellow's honest face with his own face, so different in its honesty. "Sure you never made up to any one else at the same time?"
"NEVER! Who could imagine such a thing? If that's all, I can easily."
"I don't say that's all, nor that that's it. I don't want you should go upon that idea. I just thought, may be--you hadn't thought of it."
"No, I certainly hadn't thought of it! Such a thing would have been so impossible to me that I couldn't have thought of it; and it's so shocking to me now that I don't know what to say to it."
"Well, don't take it too much to heart," said Lapham, alarmed at the feeling he had excited; "I don't say she thought so. I was trying to guess--trying to----"
"If there is anything I can say or do to convince you----"
"Oh, it ain't necessary to say anything. I'm all right."
"But Miss Lapham! I may see her again? I may try to convince her that----"
He stopped in distress, and Lapham afterwards told his wife that he kept seeing the face of Irene as it looked when he parted with her in the car; and whenever he was going to say yes, he could not open his lips. At the same time he could not help feeling that Penelope had a right to what was her own, and Sewell's words came back to him. Besides, they had already put Irene to the worst suffering. Lapham compromised, as he imagined. "You can come round to-night and see ME, if you want to," he said; and he bore grimly the gratitude that the young man poured out upon him.
Penelope came down to supper and took her mother's place at the head of the table.
Lapham sat silent in her presence as long as he could bear it. Then he asked, "How do you feel to-night, Pen?"
"Oh, like a thief," said the girl. "A thief that hasn't been arrested yet."
Lapham waited a while before he said, "Well, now, your mother and I want you should hold up on that a while."
"It isn't for you to say. It's something I can't hold up on."
"Yes, I guess you can. If I know what's happened, then what's happened is a thing that nobody is to blame for. And we want you should make the best of it and not the worst. Heigh? It ain't going to help Irene any for you to hurt yourself--or anybody else; and I don't want you should take up with any such crazy notion. As far as heard from, you haven't stolen anything, and whatever you've got belongs to you."
"Has he been speaking to you, father?"
"Your mother's been speaking to me."
"Has HE been speaking to you?"
"That's neither here nor there."
"Then he's broken his word, and I will never speak to him again!"
"If he was any such fool as to promise that he wouldn't talk to me on a subject"--Lapham drew a deep breath, and then made the plunge--"that I brought up----"
"Did you bring it up?"
"The same as brought up--the quicker he broke his word the better; and I want you should act upon that idea. Recollect that it's my business, and your mother's business, as well as yours, and we're going to have our say. He hain't done anything wrong, Pen, nor anything that he's going to be punished for. Understand that. He's got to have a reason, if you're not going to have him. I don't say you've got to have him; I want you should feel perfectly free about that; but I DO say you've got to give him a reason."
"Is he coming here?"
"I don't know as you'd call it COMING----"
"Yes, you do, father!" said the girl, in forlorn amusement at his shuffling.
"He's coming here to see ME----"
"When's he coming?"
"I don't know but he's coming to-night."
"And you want I should see him?"
"I don't know but you'd better."
"All right. I'll see him."
Lapham drew a long deep breath of suspicion inspired by this acquiescence. "What you going to do?" he asked presently.
"I don't know yet," answered the girl sadly. "It depends a good deal upon what he does."
"Well," said Lapham, with the hungriness of unsatisfied anxiety in his tone. When Corey's card was brought into the family-room where he and Penelope were sitting, he went into the parlour to find him. "I guess Penelope wants to see you," he said; and, indicating the family-room, he added, "She's in there," and did not go back himself.
Corey made his way to the girl's presence with open trepidation, which was not allayed by her silence and languor. She sat in the chair where she had sat the other night, but she was not playing with a fan now.
He came toward her, and then stood faltering. A faint smile quivered over her face at the spectacle of his subjection. "Sit down, Mr. Corey," she said. "There's no reason why we shouldn't talk it over quietly; for I know you will think I'm right."
"I'm sure of that," he answered hopefully. "When I saw that your father knew of it to-day, I asked him to let me see you again. I'm afraid that I broke my promise to you--technically----"
"It had to be broken." He took more courage at her words. "But I've only come to do whatever you say, and not to be an--annoyance to you----"
"Yes, you have to know; but I couldn't tell you before. Now they all think I should."
A tremor of anxiety passed over the young man's face, on which she kept her eyes steadily fixed.
"We supposed it--it was--Irene----"
He remained blank a moment, and then he said with a smile of relief, of deprecation, of protest, of amazement, of compassion--
"OH! Never! Never for an instant! How could you think such a thing? It was impossible! I never thought of her. But I see--I see! I can explain--no, there's nothing to explain! I have never knowingly done or said a thing from first to last to make you think that. I see how terrible it is!" he said; but he still smiled, as if he could not take it seriously. "I admired her beauty--who could help doing that?--and I thought her very good and sensible. Why, last winter in Texas, I told Stanton about our meeting in Canada, and we agreed--I only tell you to show you how far I always was from what you thought--that he must come North and try to see her, and--and--of course, it all sounds very silly!--and he sent her a newspaper with an account of his ranch in it----"
"She thought it came from you."
"Oh, good heavens! He didn't tell me till after he'd done it. But he did it for a part of our foolish joke. And when I met your sister again, I only admired her as before. I can see, now, how I must have seemed to be seeking her out; but it was to talk of you with her--I never talked of anything else if I could help it, except when I changed the subject because I was ashamed to be always talking of you. I see how distressing it is for all of you. But tell me that you believe me!"
"Yes, I must. It's all been our mistake----"
"It has indeed! But there's no mistake about my loving you, Penelope," he said; and the old-fashioned name, at which she had often mocked, was sweet to her from his lips.
"That only makes it worse!" she answered.
"Oh no!" he gently protested. "It makes it better. It makes it right. How is it worse? How is it wrong?"
"Can't you see? You must understand all now! Don't you see that if she believed so too, and if she----" She could not go on.
"Did she--did your sister--think that too?" gasped Corey.
"She used to talk with me about you; and when you say you care for me now, it makes me feel like the vilest hypocrite in the world. That day you gave her the list of books, and she came down to Nantasket, and went on about you, I helped her to flatter herself--oh! I don't see how she can forgive me. But she knows I can never forgive myself! That's the reason she can do it. I can see now," she went on, "how I must have been trying to get you from her. I can't endure it! The only way is for me never to see you or speak to you again!" She laughed forlornly. "That would be pretty hard on you, if you cared."
"I do care--all the world!"
"Well, then, it would if you were going to keep on caring. You won't long, if you stop coming now."
"Is this all, then? Is it the end?"
"It's--whatever it is. I can't get over the thought of her. Once I thought I could, but now I see that I can't. It seems to grow worse. Sometimes I feel as if it would drive me crazy."
He sat looking at her with lacklustre eyes. The light suddenly came back into them. "Do you think I could love you if you had been false to her? I know you have been true to her, and truer still to yourself. I never tried to see her, except with the hope of seeing you too. I supposed she must know that I was in love with you. From the first time I saw you there that afternoon, you filled my fancy. Do you think I was flirting with the child, or--no, you don't think that! We have not done wrong. We have not harmed any one knowingly. We have a right to each other----"
"No! no! you must never speak to me of this again. If you do, I shall know that you despise me."
"But how will that help her? I don't love HER."
"Don't say that to me! I have said that to myself too much."
"If you forbid me to love you, it won't make me love her," he persisted.
She was about to speak, but she caught her breath without doing so, and merely stared at him. "I must do what you say," he continued. "But what good will it do her? You can't make her happy by making yourself unhappy."
"Do you ask me to profit by a wrong?"
"Not for the world. But there is no wrong!"
"There is something--I don't know what. There's a wall between us. I shall dash myself against it as long as I live; but that won't break it."
"Oh!" he groaned. "We have done no wrong. Why should we suffer from another's mistake as if it were our sin?"
"I don't know. But we must suffer."
"Well, then, I WILL not, for my part, and I will not let you. If you care for me----"
"You had no right to know it."
"You make it my privilege to keep you from doing wrong for the right's sake. I'm sorry, with all my heart and soul, for this error; but I can't blame myself, and I won't deny myself the happiness I haven't done anything to forfeit. I will never give you up. I will wait as long as you please for the time when you shall feel free from this mistake; but you shall be mine at last. Remember that. I might go away for months--a year, even; but that seems a cowardly and guilty thing, and I'm not afraid, and I'm not guilty, and I'm going to stay here and try to see you."
She shook her head. "It won't change anything? Don't you see that there's no hope for us?"
"When is she coming back?" he asked.
"I don't know. Mother wants father to come and take her out West for a while."
"She's up there in the country with your mother yet?"
"Yes."
He was silent; then he said desperately--
"Penelope, she is very young; and perhaps--perhaps she might meet----"
"It would make no difference. It wouldn't change it for me."
"You are cruel--cruel to yourself, if you love me, and cruel to me. Don't you remember that night--before I spoke--you were talking of that book; and you said it was foolish and wicked to do as that girl did. Why is it different with you, except that you give me nothing, and can never give me anything when you take yourself away? If it were anybody else, I am sure you would say----"
"But it isn't anybody else, and that makes it impossible. Sometimes I think it might be if I would only say so to myself, and then all that I said to her about you comes up----"
"I will wait. It can't always come up. I won't urge you any longer now. But you will see it differently--more clearly. Good-bye--no! Good night! I shall come again to-morrow. It will surely come right, and, whatever happens, you have done no wrong. Try to keep that in mind. I am so happy, in spite of all!"
He tried to take her hand, but she put it behind her. "No, no! I can't let you--yet!"