A Woman's Reason. William Dean Howells
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Helen sat beside her father, while the solitude of the house deepened from silence to silence. Then Margaret came to the door, and looked in as if to ask whether it was not time for her to fetch away the tea-things. Helen gave her a nod of acquiescence, and presently rose, and followed her out to the kitchen, to tell her that she was going to her own room, and to say that she must be called when her father woke. But in the kitchen Margaret's company was a temptation to her loneliness, and she made one little pretext after another for remaining, till Margaret set her a chair in the doorway. Margaret had been in the house ever since Helen was born, and Helen still used the same freedom with her that she had in childhood, and gave herself the range of places to which young ladyhood ordinarily denies its radiant presence. She had indeed as much intimacy with the cook as could consist with their different ages, and she got on smoothly with the cook's temper, which had not been so good as her looks in youth, and had improved quite as little with age. Margaret was of a remote sort of Irish birth; but her native land had scarcely marked her accent, and but for her church and her sense of place, which was sometimes very respectful and sometimes very high and mighty with those above her, she might have been mistaken for an American; she had a low voice which only grew lower as she grew angry. A family in which she could do all the work had been her ideal when she first came to Boston, but she had failed of this now for some thirty years, and there seemed little hope that the chances would still turn in her favor. In Helen's childhood, when she used to ask Margaret in moments of tenderness, following the gift of dough in unexpected quantity, whether she would come and live with her after she got married, Margaret had always answered, "Yes, if you won't have anyone else bothering round," which was commonly too much for the just pride of the actual second-girl. She had been cook in the family so long ago as when Mr. Harkness had kept a man; she had pressed upon the retreat of the last man with a broom in her hand and a joyful sarcasm on her lips; and she would willingly have kept vacant the place that she had made too hot for a long succession of second-girls. In the intervals of their going and coming, she realized her ideal of domestic service for the time being; and in the summer when Helen was away a good deal, she prolonged these intervals to the utmost. She was necessarily much more the housekeeper than Helen, though they both respected a fiction of contrary effect, and Helen commonly left her the choice of her helpers. She had not been surprised to find Margaret alone in the house, but she thought it well to ask her how she was getting on without anybody.
"Oh, very well, Miss Helen! You know your father don't make any trouble."
"Well, I've come now, and we must get somebody", said Helen.
"Why, I thought you was going back on Monday, Miss Helen," answered Margaret.
"No, I shall not leave papa. I think he's not at all well."
"He does seem rather poorly, Miss Helen. But I don't see why you need anyone, in the summer, this way."
"Who's to go to the door?" asked Helen. "Besides, you couldn't take care of both of us, Margaret."
"Just as you say, Miss Helen; I'd just as lives," answered Margaret, stubbornly. "It isn't for me to say; but I don't see what you want with anybody: you won't see a soul."
"O, you never can tell, Margaret. You've had a good rest now, and you must have somebody to help you." Helen's sadness smiled at this confusion of ideas, and its suitableness to Margaret's peculiar attitude. "Get somebody that you know, Margaret, and that you'll like. But we must have somebody." She regarded Margaret's silent and stiff displeasure with a moment's amusement, and then her bright face clouded; and she asked softly: "Did you know, Margaret, that Robert,—that Lieutenant Fenton— had sailed again?"
"Why, no, Miss Helen! You don't mean that? Why, I thought he was going to stay the summer at Portsmouth?"
"He was," said Helen, in the same low voice, "but he changed his mind, it seems."
"Sailors is a roving set, anyway," Margaret generalized. Then she added: "Did he come down to say good-bye to your father?"
"Why, no," sadly answered Helen, who now thought of this for the first time. Her heart throbbed indignantly; then she reflected that she had kept him from coming. She looked up at the evening blue, with the swallows weaving a woof of flight across the top of the space framed in by the high walls on every hand, and "He hadn't time, I suppose," she said sadly. "He couldn't get off."
"Well, I don't call it very nice, his not coming," persisted Margaret. "I'd 'a' deserted first." Her associations with naval service had been through gallant fellows who were not in a position to resign.
Helen smiled so ruefully at this that she would better for cheerfulness have wept. But she recognized Margaret's limitations as a confidant, and said no more. She rose presently, and again asked Margaret to look in pretty soon, and see if her father were awake, and call her, if he were: she was going to her room. She looked in a moment herself as she went, and listened till she heard him breathing, and so passed on through the drawing-room, and trailed heavily up-stairs.
The house was rather old-fashioned, and it was not furnished in the latest taste, but it made the appeal with which things out of date, or passing out of date, touch the heart. It was in fact beginning to be respectable because it was no longer in the contest for effect, which the decorations of the newer houses carried on about it, and there was a sort of ugly keeping throughout.
In the very earliest days of Mr. Harkness's housekeeping, the ornamentation of his home had reflected the character of his business somewhat. There had been even a time when the young supercargo brought back—it was his first voyage—quaint and beautiful shells from the East, for his wife to set about the tables and mantels; but these objects, so exquisite in themselves, so unyielding in composition, had long since disappeared. Some grotesque bronzes, picked up in Chinese ports, to which his early ventures had taken him, survived the expulsion of ivory carvings and Indian idols and genre statuettes in terra cotta, (like those you see in the East Indian Museum at Salem) and now found themselves, with the new feeling for oriental art, in the very latest taste. Tire others were bestowed in neglected drawers and shelves, along with boxes containing a wealth of ghastly rich and elaborate white crape shawls from China, and fantastically subtle cotton webs from India which Helen had always thought she should use in tableaux, and never had worn. Among the many pictures on the walls (there were too many), there were three Stuarts, the rest were of very indifferent merit; large figure paintings, or allegorical landscapes, after the taste of Cole and Poussin, in great carved and scrolly frames. Helen had once thought of making a raid upon these enemies of art, and in fact she had contemplated remodeling the whole equipment of the parlors, in conformity to the recent feeling in such matters; but she had not got further than the incomplete representation of some goldenrod and mullein-stalks upon the panels of her own chamber-door; and now that the fervor of her first enthusiasm had burnt itself out, she was not sorry she had left the old house in peace.
"Oh, I should think you'd be so rejoiced," said the chief of her friends; "it's such a comfort to go into one house where you don't have to admire the artistic sentiment, and where every wretched little aesthetic prig of a table or a chair isn't asserting a principle or teaching a lesson. Don't touch a cobweb, Helen!" It had never even come to a talk between her and her father, and the house remained unmolested the home of her childhood. She had not really cared much for it since she was a child. The sense of our impermanent relation to the parental roof comes to us very early in life; and perhaps more keenly to a young girl than to her brothers. They are of the world by all the conditions of their active, positive being, almost from the first—a great world that is made for them; but she has her world to create. She cannot sit and adorn her father's house, as she shall one day beautify and worship her husband's; she can indeed do her duty by it, but the restless longing remains, and her housewifeliness does not voluntarily blossom out beyond the precincts of her own chamber, which she makes her realm of fancy and of dreams. She could not be the heart of the house if she would, as her mother is, or has been; and though in her mother's place, she can be housekeeper, thrifty, wise, and notable, still some mysterious essential is wanting which it is not in her nature to supply to her father's house.
Helen went to her own room, and, flinging up the windows, let in the noises of the streets. A few feet went by in