The Son Of Royal Langbrith. William Dean Howells

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      XII

      The neighbor over the way who saw Anther drop the hitching-weight of his buggy in front of the „ Langbrith house, late in the afternoon of the lengthening April day, decided that Mrs. Langbrith had been overdoing. She watched for him to come out until she could stay no longer at the window without making her own tea late, but she did not see him come out at all.

      In fact, it was the doctor who appeared to have been overdoing. He looked so tired to Mrs. Langbrith that she asked him if he would not have a cup of tea. Upon second thought, she asked him if he would not have it with her. Supper would be ready very soon; and, without waiting for a refusal, she went into the kitchen to hurry it, and to have the cook add something to the milk-toast for the man-appetite, to which her hospitality was ministering with more impulsiveness and spontaneity than the wont of village hospitality is.

      When they sat down together at the table, he did not eat much, and he talked little; but he seemed to feel gratefully the comfort of the place and presence. She came into authority with him, as a woman does when the man dear to her is depressed. Her affection for him came out in little suggestions and insistencies about the food. Like most physicians, he kept his precepts for himself and his practices for his patients. He now ate rather recklessly, and he preferred the unwholesome things. At first, she had to press him, and then she had to check him. At last she had to say to Norah, who came in with successive plates of the hot cakes which he devoured, “That will do, Norah,’’ and, when he had swept the final batch upon his plate and soaked them in butter and syrup, and then cut their layers into deep vertical sections, and gorged these with a kind of absent gluttony, while she looked on in patient amaze, she rose and led the way from the table into the parlor.

      It lay beyond the library and had windows to the north and east. The library was lighted from the east alone, like the dining-room in the wing. The main house was square, and divided by an ample hall from front to back. Beyond the hall, the two drawing-rooms opening from it balanced the parlor and library. There was a fire of logs burning on the parlor hearth, and its glow alone lighted the place when the two came into it. He went first to the window and looked at his horse. When he came away, she pulled down the curtains and shut out what was left of the pale day and the disappointment of the neighbor who had been waiting for the reappearance of the persons of a drama not played for her.

      Mrs. Langbrith took the chair at the corner, and invited Anther to the deeper one in front of thy fire by her action, I oughtn’t to stay,” he said, looking at his watch. But he sat down. Neither of them made haste to take up any talk for the entertainment of the other. What they were to say was to come because they were both thinking the same things, from interests that were no longer separable. Yet he began with as great apparent remoteness as possible from their common interests. “Hawberk is at home again,” he said, as if that followed from his saying he ought not to stay.

      ‘‘James told me,” she responded. “He saw him last night.”

      “And he has begun again.”

      “Yes, I knew that from the way that James said he talked. It doesn’t seem much use his ever going.”

      “It prolongs his life, if that’s any use. If he hadn’t pulled up completely, from time to time, he would have been dead ten years ago. It is a curious case. Mostly they keep on and on, till they kill themselves, but Hawberk seems disposed to see how much relief can be got out of it with the least danger. At the rate he is going, he can live as long as anybody. Of course, the moral effect always follows the indulgence of a morbid appetite. What did he say to James?”

      “ He just told him some of his wild stories. He boasted of being Mr. Langbrith’s greatest friend.”

      “So he was, in a kind of way. An involuntary friend,” Anther said, with a smile. She smiled, too, strangely enough, but as people can smile, in dealing with an old wrong when it offers an ironical aspect to them. But she said, “Sometimes I wish it could be known what a deadly enemy Mr. Langbrith had been to him. Why shouldn’t I tell it?

      I ought to feel guilty for not telling it. He robbed him, as much as if he had taken his money out of his pocket.”

      “No doubt about that; and once it might have been best to own the fact publicly. But sometimes it seems to me that time is past. A wrong like that seems to gather a force that enslaves those who have done nothing worse than leave it unacknowledged through a good motive. You haven’t been silent for your own sake.”

      “I am not sure it hasn’t been for my own sake.”

      “I am.”

      “I wonder,” she said, “that Mr. Hawberk hasn’t told it himself.”

      “Well, possibly, he thinks that it wouldn’t be credited, that it would be regarded as one of his wild inventions; that is, he thinks that when he is in his soberer moments. When he is under the influence of the drug, he likes to make pleasing romances, and has no desire to mix a tragical ingredient in them.”

      “Then Mr. Langbrith has ruined a soul!”

      “Yes,” Anther admitted, “he has done something like that. And the most terrible thing is, that he holds the man in bondage now much more securely than he could have held him living. If they were both still alive, there would be some means of righting the wrong that has been done. Some pressure could be brought upon him to make him do Hawberk justice.”

      “ No, no, he would know how to get out of that.” She rose and closed the door opening into the library. She had meant to do it quietly, and without self-betrayal; but, in the nervous stress that was on her, she brought it to with a clash, and then she felt obliged to explain: ‘‘It always seems as if it were listening,” and Anther knew that she meant the portrait over the library mantel.

      “At any rate,” the doctor resumed, “he makes it hard for you to do him justice now. You do the best you can, and perhaps it is the best that anyone could do. I suppose that a moralist, like Enderby, for instance, would say that the secrecy which Hawberk’s misfortune promotes is the worst part of it. You pay Hawberk an income from a stolen invention, and he goes about bragging of the inventions which he has in the hands of Boston capitalists. Perhaps it is not even possible for him to tell the truth, in the perversion of his nature through his habit.”

      “What was he like before he took to it, Dr. Anther?” she asked, from the security she felt in shutting out the portrait. “ I know that he took it up in the misery he felt at being trapped and robbed, and it was his only escape.”

      “Do you mean, whether he was inclined some such way?”

      “I have sometimes wished that he were.”

      “He may have been,” the doctor mused. “I knew him very little before I came here. But there is a sort of crime, isn’t there, in pushing a man in the direction of a natural propensity? You don’t want to palliate what was done?”

      “Mr. Langbrith was capable of any crime,” she answered. ‘‘Sometimes I have to shield his memory. But I don’t wish to do it when I needn’t. That is the comfort, the rest, of talking with you. I can’t tell you what a kind of awful happiness it is to say out to you the things I cannot say to anyone else. You will think I am crazy, but the next greatest happiness I have is in hoping that his fancy is taken with her, and that СКАЧАТЬ