A Woman's Reason. William Dean Howells
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grief swept over her, they left her 'to herself; when the calm that follows such paroxysms came, they talked to her of her father, and led her to talk of him. Then she was tranquil enough. At some droll things that forced themselves into remembrance in their talk, she even laughed without feeling it treason to her grief; and it was not what she thought or recalled of him that touched the springs of her sorrow. It was meeting Margaret, downcast and elusive on the stairs, and saying sadly to her, "Well, Margaret;" or catching sight of Captain Butler sitting opposite her father's vacant chair in the library, his grizzled head sunk on his breast, and looking suddenly aged, and, at the same time, awkward in his bereavement, like a great boy, that moved her with intolerable pathos.
Mrs. Butler went home and had out the headache which she had kept back while she must, by force of will, but every day some of them came up to see Helen, and reminded her without urgency that she was to come to them soon. She said yes, she would come very soon, and so remained without going abroad, or looking into the light of the sun. At night, when she lay down she wept, and in the morning when she woke, but through the day her tears were dried. She brooded upon what her father had said and done in the last hours they had spent together, his longing for change and for a new life that now seemed to have been prophetic of death. His weariness of the house that had been his home took a new meaning; he must long have been more in the other world than in this, and but for his pitying love for her, he must have been glad when his swift summons came. She realized at last that he had been an old man. She had known without realizing it that his ways were the ways of one who has outlived himself, and who patiently remains in the presence of things that no longer interest him. She wondered if the tie by which she, who was so wholly of the earth, had bound her father to it, had not sometimes been a painful one. She remembered all the little unthinking selfishnesses of the past, and worse than these, the consolations which she had tried to offer him. She thought of the gentleness with which he always listened to her and consented, and ended by comforting her; and she bitterly accused herself for not having seen all this long ago. But she had not even seen that he had a mortal disorder about him; she had merely thought him wearied with work, or spent, with the heat, in those sinkings which had at first so much alarmed her. The hand carried so often to his heart that she now recognized it as an habitual gesture, had given her no warning, and she blamed herself that it had not. But in truth she was not to blame. The sources of his malady were obscure, and even its nature had been so dimly hinted to him that doubtless her father had justified himself in keeping his fear of it from her. Perhaps he had hoped that yet somehow he could struggle to a better footing in other things, before he need cloud her young life with the shadow that hung upon his own; perhaps the end of many resolutions was that he could not do it. She wondered if he had himself known his danger, and if it was of that which he so often began to speak to her. But all now was dark, and this question and every other searched the darkness in vain.
She seemed to stand somewhere upon a point of time between life and death, from which either world was equally remote. She was quite alien here, without the will or the fitness to be anywhere else; •and she shrank, with a vague resentment, from the world that had taken him from her.
This terrible touchstone of death, while it revealed the unimagined tenderness of many hearts, revealed also to her the fact that no friendliness could supply the love in which there was perfect unity of interest and desire, and perfect rest. Every day, when the Butlers came to her, they brought her word from someone, from people who had known her father in business, from others who had casually met him, and who all now spoke their regret for his death. A rare quality of character had given him standing in the world that vastly greater prosperity could not have won him; and men who were of quite another stuff had a regard for him, which perhaps now and then expressed itself in affectionate patronage, but which was yet full of reverence. They found something heroic in the quiet constancy with which he fought his long, losing battle, and now that he was down at last, they had their honest regrets and spoke their honest praises. It made Helen very proud of her father to hear them; she read with a swelling heart the paragraphs about him in the newspapers, and even the formal preambles and resolutions which expressed the loss the commerce of the city had suffered in the death of a merchant of his standing and integrity. These things set Helen's father in a new light to her; but while they made her prouder and fonder of his memory, they brought her a pang that she should have known so little of what formed his life, and should never have cared to know anything of it apart from herself.
This was not the only phase in which she seemed to have been ignorant of him. She had always believed him good and kind, without thinking of him in that way. But now there came poor people to the door, who sometimes asked to see her, or who sometimes only sent by Margaret, to tell how sorry they felt for her, and to say that her father had at this time or that been a good friend to each of them. They all seemed to be better acquainted with him than she, and their simple stories set him in a light in which she had never seen him before. It touched Helen that they should frankly lament her father's death as another of their deprivations, more than if they had pretended merely to condole with her, and she did not take it ill of them, that they generally concluded their blessings on his memory with some hint that further benefactions would be gratefully received. The men accepted her half-dollars in sign that their audience was ended, and went away directly; the women shed tears over the old clothes she gave them, and stayed to drink tea in the kitchen.
One day after she had already seen three or four of these visitors, the bell rang, and Captain Butler's boots came chirping along the hall, not with their old cheerful hint of a burly roll in the wearer's gait, but subdued and slow as if he approached with unnaturally measured tread. Helen sprang into his arms, and broke out crying on his breast. "Oh, Captain Butler! I felt just now that papa must be here. Ever since he died, he has been with me somehow. It seems wild to say it; but no words can ever tell how I have felt it; and just before you came in, I know that he was going to speak to me."
The Captain held her away at arm's-length, and looked into her face. "Poor child I They've sent me to bring you home with me, and I see that I haven't come a moment too soon. You have been alone in this house quite long enough. My God, if he only could speak to us!" The Captain controlled himself as he walked up and down the library, with his face twitching, and his hand knotting itself into a fist at his side, and presently he came and sat down in his accustomed chair near Helen. He waited till she lifted her head and wiped her eyes before he began to speak.
"Helen," said Captain Butler, "I told you that they had sent me for you, and I hope that you will come."
"Yes," answered Helen, "I shall be very glad to go with you; but I think it's hard for Marian, bringing my trouble there, to be a blot on her happiness."
"We won't speak of that, my dear," said the Captain. "H Marian can't find her happiness in something besides gaiety, she'd better not think of getting married."
"I wouldn't come if I thought I could endure it here any longer; I wouldn't come, if I had anywhere else to go," cried Helen.
"We wouldn't let you go anywhere else," returned the Captain. "But we can talk of all that another time. What I have to say to you now is something for you to decide. Do you think you are equal to talking a little business with me?"
"O yes. I should like to."
"Yes, it will take up your mind." The Captain paused restively, and seemed at a loss how to frame what he had next to say. "Helen," he broke out abruptly, "did you know anything about your father's affairs?"
"Papa's affairs ?" asked Helen, with a start.
"Oh, don't be troubled—don't be troubled," the Captain hastened to say. "It's all right; perfectly right; but I want to speak to you about yourself, and—it's all right. Don't you think we'd better have one of these windows open?"
"Are they shut?" asked Helen. "Yes, you can open them, please."
"We shall be cheerfuller with a little light," said the Captain, flinging back the shutters; but they hardly looked so. Helen had dark rings round her eyes, which were swollen with her long weeping; she was very pale, and looked old in that black which, in a house of mourning, seems to grow upon women in a single night. She thought the Captain tremulous and broken; these muscles at the sides of his chin hung down, as if ten years had been added