A Woman's Reason. William Dean Howells
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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 him. He knew that the India trade was dying out. If Robert's soul was set upon the sea, of which there seemed no doubt, it was better that he should go into the navy; at Annapolis he would have a thorough schooling, which would stand him in good stead, if future chance or choice ever cast him ashore to live.
Helen was in the sophomore year of the class with which she was dancing through Harvard when Robert came home from his first cruise. She was then a very great lady, and she patronized the midshipman with killing kindness as a younger brother, though he was in fact half a year her senior. He now fell in love with her outright: very proud love, very jealous, very impatient. She could not understand it. She said to her father it was so queer. She never thought of such a thing. Why, Robert! It was absurd. Besides, he had such a funny name; Fenton! But a passion like his was not to be quenched with reasons even so good as these. He went to sea again, bitterly, rapturously brooding over her idea, and came home in the autumn after Helen's class day. All the fellows had scattered now; and she was left much younger and humbler in her feelings, and not so great a lady for all her triumphs. Two of her class had proposed to her, and lots had come near it; but her heart had been left untouched, and she perceived, or thought she perceived, that these young gentlemen, who were wise and mature enough for their age, though neither Solomons nor Methuselahs, were all silly boys. In herself, on the contrary, the tumult of feeling with which she had first entered the world had been succeeded by a calm, which she might well have mistaken for wisdom. She felt that she now knew the world thoroughly, and while she was resolved to judge it kindly, she was not going to be dazzled by it any longer. She had become an observer of human nature ; she analyzed her feelings; sometimes she made cutting remarks to people, and was dreadfully sorry for it. She withdrew a great deal from society, and liked being thought odd. She had begun to take lessons in painting with a number of ladies under an artist's