A Woman's Reason. William Dean Howells
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again," pleaded Helen.
"Well, I won't," consented her father, coming back to himself with a smile, which presently faded. "But it all makes me restless and impatient. I should like to begin a new life somewhere else, in a new house." He was silent a while, trifling with the toast on his plate; his appetite had passed at the sight of the food, and he had eaten scarcely anything. He looked at Helen, and then at a portrait on the wall, and than at Helen again.
"I'm not much like mamma, am I, papa?" she asked.
"Not much in face," said Mr. Harkness.
"Do you wish I was more?" she pursued timidly.
"No, I don't think I do," said her father.
"It would only make me more painful, if I looked more like her, such a helpless, selfish thing as I am," morbidly assented Helen. "I should only make you miss her the more."
"Why, Helen, you're a very good girl—the best child in the world," said her father.
"O no, I'm not, papa. I'm one of the worst. I never think of anybody but myself," said Helen, who was thinking of Robert. "You don't know how many times I've gone down on my mental knees to you and asked you to have patience with me."
"Asked me to have patience with you?" said her father, taking her by the chin, and pressing against his cheek the beautiful face which she leaned toward him. "Poor child! There's hardly a day since you were born that I haven't done you a greater wrong than the sum of all your sins would come to. Papas are dreadful fellows, Helen; but they sometimes live in the hope of repairing their misdeeds."
"Write them on a slip of paper, and hide it in a secret drawer that opens with a clasp and spring, when you don't know they're there," said Helen, glad of his touch of playfulness. "We've both been humbugging, and we know it."
He stared at her and said, "Your voice is like your mother's; and just now, when you came in, your movement was very like hers. I hadn't noticed it before. But she has been a great deal in my mind of late."
If he had wished to talk of her mother, whom Helen could not remember, and who had been all her life merely the shadow of a sorrow to her, a death, a grave, a name upon a stone, a picture on the wall, she would not spare herself the duty of encouraging him to do so. "Was she tall, like me?" she asked.
"Not so tall," answered her father. "And she was dark."
"Yes," said Helen, lifting her eyes to the picture on the wall.
"She had a great passion for the country," continued Mr. Harkness, "and I liked the town. It was more convenient for me, and I was born in Boston. It has often grieved me to think that I didn't yield to her. I must have been dreaming of her, for when I woke a little while ago, this regret was like a physical pang at my heart . As long as we live, we can't help treating each other as if we were to live always. But it's a mistake. I never refused to go into the country with her," he said as if to appease this old regret. "I merely postponed it. Now I should like to go."
He rose from the table, and taking the study-lamp in his hand, he feebly pushed apart the sliding-doors that opened into the drawing-room. He moved slowly down its length, on one side, throwing the light upon this object and that, before which he faltered, and so returned on the other side, as if to familiarize himself with every detail. Sometimes he held the lamp above, and sometimes below bis face, but always throwing its age and weariness into relief. Helen had remained watching him. As he came back, she heard him say, less to her as it seemed than to himself, "Yes, I should like to sell it. I'm tired of it."
He set the lamp down upon the table again, and sank into his chair, and lapsed into a reverie which left Helen solitary beside him. "Ah," she realized, as she looked on his musing, absent face, "he is old and I am young, and he has more to love in the other world, with my mother and both my brothers there, than he has in this. Oh, Robert, Robert, Robert!"
But perhaps his absent mind was not so much bent upon the lost as she thought. He had that way fathers have of treating his daughter as an equal, of talking to her gravely and earnestly, and then of suddenly dropping her into complete nothingness, as if she were a child to be amused for a while, and then set down from his knee and sent out of doors. Helen dutifully accepted this condition of their companionship; she cared for it so little as never to have formulated it to herself; when she was set down, she went out, and ordinarily she did not think of it.
A peremptory ring at the door startled them both, and when Margaret had opened it there entered all at the same instant, a loud, kindly voice, the chirp of boots, heavily trodden upon by a generous bulk, that rocked from side to side in its advance, and a fragrance of admirable cigars, that active and passive perfume, which comes from smoking and being smoked in the best company. "At home, Margaret?" asked the voice, whose loudness was a husky loudness, in a pause of the boots. "Yes? Well, don't put me in there, Margaret," which was apparently in rejection of the drawing-room. "I'll join them in the library."
The boots came chirping down the hall in that direction, with a sound of heavy breathing. Helen sprang from her chair, and fled to meet the cheerful sound; there was the noise of an encountering kiss, and a jolly laugh, and "Well, Helen!" and "Oh, Captain Butler!" and later, "Harkness !" and "Butler!" as Helen led the visitor in.
"Well!" said this guest, for the third time. He straightened his tall mass to its full height, and looked out over his chest with eyes of tender regard upon Harkness's thin and refined face, now lit up after the handshaking with cordial welcome. "Do you know," he said, as if somehow it were a curious fact of natural history, "that you have it uncommonly close in here?" He went over to the window that opened upon the little grassy yard, and put it up for himself, while Harkness was explaining that it had been put down while he was napping. Then he planted himself in a large leathern chair beside it, and went on smoking the cigar on the end of which he had been chewing. He started from the chair with violence, coughing and gesturing to forbid Helen, who was hospitably whispering to Margaret. "No, no; don't do it. I won't have anything. I couldn't. I've just dined at the club. Yes, you may do that much," he added to Helen, as she set a little table with an ash-holder at his elbow. "You've no idea what a night it is. It's cooler, and the air's delicious. I say, I want to take Helen back with me. I wish she'd go alone, and leave us two old fellows together here. There's no place like Boston in the summer, after all. But you haven't told me whether you're surprised to see me." Captain Butler looked round at them with something of the difficulty of a sea-turtle in a lateral inspection.
"Never surprised, but always charmed," said Helen, with just the shade of mockery in her tone which she knew suited this visitor.
"Charmed, eh?" asked Captain Butler. Apparently, he meant to say something satirical about the word, but could not think of anything. He turned again to her father: "How are you, Harkness?"
"Oh, I'm very well," said Harkness evasively. "I'm as well as usual."
"Then you have yourself fetched home in a hack by a policeman every day, do you?" remarked Captain Butler, blowing a succession of white rings into the air. "You were seen from the club window. I'll tell you what; you're sticking to it too close."
"O yes, Captain Butler, do get him away," sighed Helen, while her father, who had not sat down, began to walk back and forth in an irritated, restless way.
"For the present I can't leave it," said Harkness, fretfully. He added more graciously: "Perhaps in a week or two, or next month, I can get off for a few days. You know I was one of the securities for Bates and Mather," he said, looking at Captain Butler over Helen's head.
"I had forgotten that," answered Captain Butler gravely.
"They left things in a complete tangle. I can't tell just where I am yet, and, of course, I've no peace till I know."
"Of course," assented Captain Butler. "I won't vex you with retroactive advice, Joshua," he added affectionately, "but I hope you won't do anything of that kind again."
"No, Jack, I won't. But you know under the circumstances it would have been black ingratitude to refuse."
"Yes," said Captain Butler. He smoked a while in