A Woman's Reason. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ when he was eighty, she would be forty-three, and then there would not be much difference between them. She now finally relinquished the very last idea of Robert, except as a brother. She did not suppose she should ever quite like his wife, but she should pet their children.

      "Helen," said her father, breaking in upon these ideas, " how should you like to live in the country?"

      "Why, papa, I was just thinking of it! That is, not in the country exactly, but somewhere off by ourselves, just you and I. Of course, I should like it."

      "I don't mean on a farm," pursued her father, "but in some of the suburban towns, where we could have a bit of ground and breathing space. I think it grows closer and closer in town; at times it seems "as if I could hardly catch my breath. I believe it would agree with me in the country. I can't get away from business entirely for a few years yet—if the times continue so bad, I must bend all my energies to it, in fact—and I have a fancy that the coming in and out of town would do me good. And I have a notion that I should like to build. I should like a new house—a perfectly new house. We could live on a simpler scale in the country."

      "O yes, indeed!" said Helen. "I should come into town to shop, with my initials worked in worsted on the side of my bag, and I should know where the bargains were, and lunch at Copeland's. I should like it."

      "Well, we must think about it . I daresay we could let the house here without much trouble. I feel it somehow a great burden upon me, but I shouldn't like to sell it."

      "O no, papa! We couldn't think of selling it. I should just like to let it, and then never go near it, or look in the same direction, till we were ready to come back to it."

      "I have lived here so long," continued her father, making her the listener to his musings rather than speaking to her, "that I should like a change. I used to think that I should never leave the house, but a place may become overcrowded with associations. You are too young, Helen, to understand how terrible it is to find one's own past grow into the dumb material things about one, and become, as it were, imprisoned in them."

      "O yes," sighed the girl, "there are some dresses of mine that I can't bear the sight of, just because I felt, or said, or did certain things when I wore them."

      "An old house like this," Mr. Harkness went on, "gets to be your body, and usurps all your reality, which doesn't seem to live in it either, while you move round like a ghost. The past is so much more than_ the present. Think how much more these walls and these old chairs and tables have known of us than we now are!"

      "No, no! Don't think of it, papa, or we shall be getting into the depths again," pleaded Helen.

      "Well, I won't," consented her father, coming back to himself with a smile, which presently faded. "But it all makes me restless and impatient. I should like to begin a new life somewhere else, in a new house." He was silent a while, trifling with the toast on his plate; his appetite had passed at the sight of the food, and he had eaten scarcely anything. He looked at Helen, and then at a portrait on the wall, and than at Helen again.

      "I'm not much like mamma, am I, papa?" she asked.

      "Not much in face," said Mr. Harkness.

      "Do you wish I was more?" she pursued timidly.

      "No, I don't think I do," said her father.

      "It would only make me more painful, if I looked more like her, such a helpless, selfish thing as I am," morbidly assented Helen. "I should only make you miss her the more."

      "Why, Helen, you're a very good girl—the best child in the world," said her father.

      "O no, I'm not, papa. I'm one of the worst. I never think of anybody but myself," said Helen, who was thinking of Robert. "You don't know how many times I've gone down on my mental knees to you and asked you to have patience with me."

      "Asked me to have patience with you?" said her father, taking her by the chin, and pressing against his cheek the beautiful face which she leaned toward him. "Poor child! There's hardly a day since you were born that I haven't done you a greater wrong than the sum of all your sins would come to. Papas are dreadful fellows, Helen; but they sometimes live in the hope of repairing their misdeeds."

      "Write them on a slip of paper, and hide it in a secret drawer that opens with a clasp and spring, when you don't know they're there," said Helen, glad of his touch of playfulness. "We've both been humbugging, and we know it."

      He stared at her and said, "Your voice is like your mother's; and just now, when you came in, your movement was very like hers. I hadn't noticed it before. But she has been a great deal in my mind of late."

      If he had wished to talk of her mother, whom Helen could not remember, and who had been all her life merely the shadow of a sorrow to her, a death, a grave, a name upon a stone, a picture on the wall, she would not spare herself the duty of encouraging him to do so. "Was she tall, like me?" she asked.

      "Not so tall," answered her father. "And she was dark."

      "Yes," said Helen, lifting her eyes to the picture on the wall.

      "She had a great passion for the country," continued Mr. Harkness, "and I liked the town. It was more convenient for me, and I was born in Boston. It has often grieved me to think that I didn't yield to her. I must have been dreaming of her, for when I woke a little while ago, this regret was like a physical pang at my heart . As long as we live, we can't help treating each other as if we were to live always. But it's a mistake. I never refused to go into the country with her," he said as if to appease this old regret. "I merely postponed it. Now I should like to go."

      He rose from the table, and taking the study-lamp in his hand, he feebly pushed apart the sliding-doors that opened into the drawing-room. He moved slowly down its length, on one side, throwing the light upon this object and that, before which he faltered, and so returned on the other side, as if to familiarize himself with every detail. Sometimes he held the lamp above, and sometimes below bis face, but always throwing its age and weariness into relief. Helen had remained watching him. As he came back, she heard him say, less to her as it seemed than to himself, "Yes, I should like to sell it. I'm tired of it."

      He set the lamp down upon the table again, and sank into his chair, and lapsed into a reverie which left Helen solitary beside him. "Ah," she realized, as she looked on his musing, absent face, "he is old and I am young, and he has more to love in the other world, with my mother and both my brothers there, than he has in this. Oh, Robert, Robert, Robert!"

      But perhaps his absent mind was not so much bent upon the lost as she thought. He had that way fathers have of treating his daughter as an equal, of talking to her gravely and earnestly, and then of suddenly dropping her into complete nothingness, as if she were a child to be amused for a while, and then set down from his knee and sent out of doors. Helen dutifully accepted this condition of their companionship; she cared for it so little as never to have formulated it to herself; when she was set down, she went out, and ordinarily she did not think of it.

      A peremptory ring at the door startled them both, and when Margaret had opened it there entered all at the same instant, a loud, kindly voice, the chirp of boots, heavily trodden upon by a generous bulk, that rocked from side to side in its advance, and a fragrance of admirable cigars, that active and passive perfume, which comes from smoking and being smoked in the best company. "At home, Margaret?" asked the voice, whose loudness was a husky loudness, in a pause of the boots. "Yes? Well, don't put me in there, Margaret," which was apparently in rejection of the drawing-room. "I'll join them in the library."

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