A Woman's Reason. William Dean Howells

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      "Not quite," said her father quietly. "It's not a new thing."

      Helen gave a sort of lamentable laugh. "I know I was humbugging, and I 'm as selfish as I can be, to think more of myself even now than I do of you. But, oh papa! I'm so unhappy!" She looked at him through a mist that gathered and fell in silent drops from her eyes without clearing them, so that she did not see him carry the hand she had abandoned to his heart, and check a gasp. " I suppose we all have our accounts, one way or other, and they get confused like yours. Mine with— with—a certain person, had got so mixed up that there was nothing for it but just to throw them away."

      "Do you mean that you have broken with him finally, Helen?" asked her father gravely.

      "I don't know whether you call it finally," said Helen, "but I told him it was no use—not just in those words—and that he ought to forget me; and I was afraid I wasn't equal to it; and that I couldn't see my way to it clearly; and unless I could see my way clearly, I oughtn't to go on any longer. I wrote to him last week, and I thought—I thought that perhaps he wouldn't answer it; perhaps he would come over to Rye Beach—he could easily have run over from Portsmouth—to see me—about it. But he didn't—he didn't—he—wrote a very short letter—. Oh, I didn't see how he could write such a letter; I tried to spare him in every way; and yesterday he—he—s—s—sailed!" Here the storm broke, and Helen bowed herself to the sobs with which her slimness shook, like a tall flower beaten in the wind. Then she suddenly stopped, and ran her hand into her pocket, and pulled out her handkerchief. She wiped away, her tears, and waited for her father to speak; but he lay silent, and merely regarded her pitifully. "I couldn't bear it any longer there with those geese of Merrills—I'm sure they were as kind as could be—and so I came home to burden and afflict you, papa. Don't you think that was like me?" She gave her lamentable laugh again, sobbed, laughed once more, dried the fresh tears with her handkerchief, which she had mechanically shaped into a rabbit, and sat plucking at her dress as before. "What do people do, papa," she asked presently, with a certain hoarseness in her voice, "when they've thrown away their accounts?"

      "I never heard of their doing it, my dear," said her father.

      "Well, but when they've come to the very end of everything, and there's nothing to go on with, and they might as well stop?"

      "They go into bankruptcy," answered the old man, absently, as if the thought had often been in his mind before.

      "Well, that's what I've gone into—bankruptcy," said Helen. "And what do they do after they've gone into bankruptcy?"

      "They begin the world again with nothing, if they have the heart," replied her father.

      "That's what I have to do then—begin the world again with nothing! There! my course is clear, and I hope I like it, and I hope I'm satisfied!"

      With these words of self-reproach, Helen again broke down, and bowed herself over the ruin she had made of her life.

      "I don't think you need despair," said her father, soothingly, yet with a sort of physical effort which escaped her self-centered grief. "Robert is such a good fellow that if you wrote to him—"

      "Why, papa! Are you crazy?" shouted the young girl. "Write to him? He's off for three years, and? don't think he'd come posting back from China, if I did write to him. And how could I write to him, even if he were in the next room?"

      "It wouldn't be necessary, in that case," said her father. "I'm sorry he's gone for so long," he added, rather absently.

      "If he were gone for a day, it couldn't make any difference," cried Helen, inexorably. "I argued it all out,—and it's a perfect chain of logic—before I wrote to him. I looked at it in this way. I said to myself that it was no use having the affair off and on, any longer. It would be perfect misery to a person of my temperament to be an officer's wife, and have my husband with me today and at the ends of the earth to-morrow. Besides, his pay wouldn't support us. You told me that yourself, papa."

      "Yes," said Mr. Harkness. "But I thought Robert might leave the navy, and—"

      "I never would have let him!" Helen burst in. "He would have been as unhappy as a fish out of water, and I wouldn't have his wretchedness on my conscience, and his idleness—you know how long that splendid Captain Seymour was trying to get into business in Boston, after he left the service: and then he had to go to California before he could find anything to do; and do you suppose I was going to have Robert mooning round in that way, for ages?"

      "He might have gone into business with me for the time being," said Mr. Harkness, not very hopefully.

      "Oh yes! you could have made a place for him, I know! And we should both have been a burden to you, then. But I shouldn't have cared for all that. I would have met any fate with Robert, if I had believed that I felt toward him just as I should. But, don't you see, papa? If I had felt towards him in that way, I never should have thought of any—any —prudential considerations. That was what convinced me, that was what I couldn't escape from, turn which way I would. That was the point I put to Robert himself, and—and—oh, I don't see how he could answer as he did! I don't see how he could!" Helen convulsively clutched something in the hand which she had thrust into her pocket. "It isn't that I care for myself; but oh, I am so sorry for him, away off there all alone, feeling so hard and bitter towards me, and thinking me heartless, and I don't know what all,—and hating me so."

      "What did he say, Helen?" asked her father, tenderly. She snatched her hand from her pocket and laid a paper, crumpled, bewept, distained, in the hand he stretched towards her, and then bowed her face upon her knees.

      Helen and her father were old confidants, and she had not more reluctance in showing him this letter than most girls would have had in trusting such a paper to their mother's eyes. Her own mother had died long ago, and in the comradeship of her young life her father had entered upon a second youth, happier, or at least tranquiller, than the first. She adored him and petted him, as a wife could not, and this worship did not spoil him as it might if it had been a conjugal devotion. They had always a perfect understanding; she had not withdrawn her childish intimacy of thought and feeling from him to give it to her mother, as she would have done if her mother had lived; he knew all her small heart affairs without asking, more or less in a tacit way; and she had an abidingly grateful sense of his wisdom in keeping her from follies which she could see she had escaped through it. He had never before so directly sought to know her trouble; but he had never before seen her in so much trouble; besides, he had always been Robert Fenton's friend at court with Helen; and he had quietly kept his hopes of their future through rather a stormy and uncertain present.

      He liked Robert for the sake of Robert's father, who had been captain and supercargo of one of Harkness and Co.'s ships, and had gone down in her on her home voyage when he was returning to be junior partner in the house, after a prosperous venture of his own in Wenham ice. He left this boy, and a young wife who died soon afterwards. Then Mr. Harkness, who was the boy's guardian, gave him and the small property that remained to him more than a guardian's care. He sent him to school, but he made him at home in his own house on all holidays and in vacation. These sojourns and absences, beginning when Robert was ten years old, and continuing through his school-boy age, had renewed alternately his intimacy and strangeness with Helen, and kept her a mystery and enchantment which grew with his growth, while to her consciousness he was simply Robert, a nice boy, who was now at school, or now at home, and who was often so shy that it was perfectly silly. When he was old enough to be placed in some career, he was allowed to choose Harvard and a profession afterwards, or any more technical training that he liked better. He chose neither: the sea called him, as the old superstition is, and every nerve in his body responded. He would have liked to go into the trade in which his father had died, but here his guardian overruled СКАЧАТЬ