The Son Of Royal Langbrith. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 good many years, I’m afraid.”

      “As long back as to my father’s time?”

       “Yes—quite. Why, what makes you ask?”

      Oh, I saw him last night when I went home with Hope.”

      “I thought he was away at the Retreat.”

      “It seems not. At any rate, he was at home, and she didn’t seem surprised at his being there. It isn’t like alcoholism, is it? It doesn’t make him violent? So that he ever hurts them?”

      “Oh no, not at all. Did Hope seem troubled?”

      “No. She slipped into the house behind him, when he came out to the gate to talk to me. He was disposed to be rather expansive. Just in what way do you understand that he has been an affliction to them?”

      “He has kept them poor.”

      “Well, that might be remedied. And it isn’t the worst thing that could happen. A great many people are poor and happy. You don’t mean that they’re ever in anything like want?”

      “Oh no,” Mrs. Langbrith sighed. “He has some of his inventions in the hands of other people, who pay him a percentage on them, and it is secured so that it goes to his family, instead of to him. The worst of him is that they can’t put the least dependence on him. They can’t trust anything he says. He is very kind to them when he is with them, and he is proud of Hope. But they can’t believe a word from him.”

      “ He got off twenty inventions to me, in as many sentences, while we stood talking over the gate. I had a notion of something of the kind you say. Doesn’t he ever blunder into the truth? He said my father and he used to be great chums. Was there nothing in that?”

      “They were friends at one time, certainly.”

      “ Until he began to give way to all kinds of invention. Then, of course, it had to come to an end. Well, it’s interesting to know that he can sometimes make a straight statement. Don’t think I don’t feel the awfulness of it, mother. I do, and I pity Hope, and I can understand how she can’t help thinking that she is put wrong by it with—people. I suppose it’s that that makes her a little defiant, a little doubtful of—Have you ever, or has she ever, mentioned the subject?”

      “ Not to me, James, or to anyone that I know of. Everybody knows it. It’s an old thing, and nobody talks of it, except newcomers. And there are not many new-comers here.”

      “No,” Langbrith assented, with a smile. “Saxmills is static.”

      His mother may not have known just what he meant, or it may have been from the country habit of making no comment in response to what was not a question. She asked, “Will you have some more coffee, James?”

      “No; but have them keep it hot for old Falk.”

      “ I will have some fresh for him.”

      “ There never was such thoughtful hospitality as yours, mother,” Langbrith said, rising and going round the table to where she had risen too, and putting his arm fondly across her shoulders. She was almost as tall as he, and their likeness showed as he laid his face against hers and rubbed his cheek on her own. “I believe that when I wake up in the other world you will be there to offer me something nice to eat. Old Falk is having a tremendously good time, don’t you think?”

      Mrs. Langbrith said, “Everything has been done for him that could be, by everybody.”

      “And I’m glad it’s happened to Falk, too. A great many of the fellows don’t know what a good fellow he is. They don’t get hold of him. Falk is proud, and that makes him shy. Last year I wouldn’t have thought of bringing him here, or getting him to come here. His people out in Kentucky are Germans, and they’ve always gone with the Germans. If Falk hadn’t come to Harvard, he never would have got into American society. Fellows from out that way, where the Germans are rather thick, say that the third generation gets in, and sometimes the second if the first has got rich. But Falk’s father is only a very musical doctor with a German practice, and no social instincts or aspirations. Of course, it’s Falk’s work in Caricature that’s brought him forward with the best fellows. He’s going to be a great artist, I believe, and I want to have a hand in helping him. It’s difficult. He would rather say a nasty thing than a nice thing to you, and that doesn’t cement friendship with everybody. But the way is not to mind it. He’s all right at heart, if he wasn’t so proud.”

      “ I don’t think it’s very polite,” Mrs. Langbrith ventured.

      “Well, no,” her son owned, “but it’s better than being slimy.”

      XI

      Langbrith and his friend took the Northern Express in the afternoon, which would bring them to Boston just in time for dinner. Mrs. Langbrith gave them such a heavy lunch that, what with the sleep they had still to make up from the night before, they drowsed half the way to town in the smoking-car, which they had to themselves until the train began to stop at the suburban stations. Before this happened they woke, and Falk took a sheet of crumpled paper from his pocket, and spread it on the little stationary table between them which the commuters used for playing cards.

      “ How would that do for the next cartoon?” he asked.

      He pushed it towards Langbrith, who smoothed it out again, and examined it carefully. “ I don’t know what it means,” he said, at last.

      “ Neither do I,” Falk said. “ I want you to joke it, so that I shall.”

      Langbrith continued to look at the drawing, but apparently with less and less consciousness of it. He returned to it in pushing it away. “I don’t know that I feel much like joking, today.”

      Falk crumpled the drawing up in his hand and threw it on the floor. “There oughtn’t to be any tomorrows. There ought to be nothing but yesterdays. Then we could manage.”

      “What do you mean?” Langbrith demanded.

      “You’re СКАЧАТЬ