A Woman's Reason. William Dean Howells
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Then he said, "I suppose it's no worse with the old trade than with everything else, at present."
"No, we're all in the same boat, I believe," said Harkness.
"How is Marian?" asked Helen, a little restive under the cross firing.
"Oh, Marian's all right. But if she were not, she wouldn't know it."
"I suppose she's very much engaged," said Helen, with a faint pang of something like envy.
"Yes," said Captain Butler. "I thought you were at Rye Beach, young lady."
"I thought you were at Beverley, old gentleman," retorted Helen; she had been saucy to Captain Butler from infancy.
"So I was. But I came up unexpectedly today."
"So did I."
"Did you? Good! Now I'll tell you why J came, and you shall tell me why you did. I came because I got to thinking of your father, and had a fancy I should like to see him. Did you?"
Helen hung her head. "No," she said at length.
The Captain laughed. "Whom had you a fancy to see here, then, at this time of year?"
"Oh, I didn't say I should tell. You made that bargain all yourself," mocked Helen. "But it was very kind of you to come on papa's account," she added softly.
"What are you making there?" asked the Captain, bending forward to look at the work Helen had taken into her lap.
"Who—I ?" she asked, as if she had perhaps been asked what Robert was making. Her mind had been running upon him since Captain Butler asked her why she had come up to Boston. "Oh !" she recovered herself. "Why, this," she said, taking the skeleton framework of gauze and wire on her fingertips, and holding it at arm's-length, with her head aslant surveying it, "this is a bonnet for Margaret."
"A bonnet, hey?" said the Captain. "It looks like a Shaker cap."
"Yes?" Helen clapped it on her head, and looked jauntily at the captain, dropping her shoulders, and putting her chin out. "Now, does it?"
"No, not now. The Shaker sisters don't wear crimps, and they don't smile in that wicked way." Helen laughed, and took the bonnet-frame off. "So you make Margaret's bonnets, do you? Do you make your own?"
"Sometimes. Not often. But I like millinery. It's what I should turn to if I were left to take care of myself."
"I'm afraid you wouldn't find it such fun," said the Captain.
"Oh, milliners make lots of money," returned Helen. "They must. Why, when this bonnet is done, you couldn't get it for ten dollars. Well, the materials don't cost three."
"I wish my girls had your head for business," said the Captain honestly. Helen made him a burlesque obeisance. "Yes, I mean it," he insisted. "You know that I always admired your good sense. I'm always talking it into Marian."
"Better not," said Helen, with a pin between her teeth.
"Why?"
"Because I haven't got it, and it'd make her hate me if I had."
"Do you mean to tell me that you're not a sensible girl ?" inquired the Captain.
Helen nodded, and made "Yes" with her lips, as well as she could with the pin between her teeth. She took it out to say, " You should have seen my performances in my room a little while ago." She was thinking of that rehearsal before the mirror.
"What were they?" asked the Captain.
"Oh, as if I should tell!" Helen bowed herself over the bonnet, and blushed, and laughed. Her father liked to hear the banter between her and his old friend. They both treated her as if she were a child, and she knew it and liked it; she behaved like a child.
"Harkness," said the Captain, turning his fat head half round toward his friend, who sat a little back of him, and breaking off his cigar-ash into the bronze plate at his elbow, "do you know that your remaining in the trade after all the rest of us have gone out of it is something quite monumental?" Captain Butler had a tender and almost reverential love for Joshua Harkness, but he could not help using a little patronage toward him, since his health had grown delicate, and his fortunes had not distinctly prospered.
"I am glad you like it, Jack," said Harkness quietly.
"The Captain is a mass of compliments tonight," remarked Helen.
The Captain grinned his consciousness. "You are a minx," he said admiringly to Helen. Then he threw back his head and pulled at his cigar, uttering between puffs, " No, but I mean it, Harkness. There's something uncommonly fine about it. A man gets to be noblesse by sticking to any old order of things. It makes one think of the ancien régime somehow to look at you. Why, you're still of the oldest tradition of commerce, the stately and gorgeous traffic of the orient; you're what Samarkand, and Venice, and Genoa, and Lisbon, and London, and Salem have come to."
"They've come to very little in the end then," said Harkness as before.
"Oh, I don't know about that;" the Captain took the end of his cigar out and lit a fresh one from it before he laid it down upon the ash-holder; "I don't know about that. We don't consider material things merely. There has always been something romantic, something heroic about the old trade. To be sure, now that it's got down to telegraphing, it's only fit for New-Yorkers. They're quite welcome to it." This was not very logical taken as a whole, but we cannot always be talking reason. At the words romantic and heroic Helen had pricked her ears, if that phrase may be used concerning ears of such loveliness as hers, and she paused from her millinery. "Ah ha, young lady!" cried the Captain; "you're listening, are you? You didn't know there was any romance or heroism in business, did you?"
"What business?" asked Helen.
"Your father's business, young woman; my old business, the India trade."
"The India trade? Why, were you ever in the India trade, Captain Butler?"
"Was I ever in the India trade ?" demanded the Captain, taking his cigar out of his mouth in order to frown with more effect upon Helen. "Well, upon my word! Where did you think I got my title? I'm too old to have been in the war."
"I didn't know," said Helen.
"I got it in the India trade. I was captain and supercargo many an eleven months' voyage, just as your father was."
Helen was vastly amused at this. "Why, papa! were you ever captain of a ship?"
"For a time," said Mr. Harkness, smiling at the absurdity.
"Of course he was !" shouted the Captain.
"Then why isn't he captain, now?"
"Because there's a sort of captain that loses his handle when he comes ashore, and there's a sort that keeps it. I'm one sort and your father's the other. It's natural to call a person of my model and complexion by some kind of title, and it isn't natural to call such a man as your father so. Besides, I was captain longer than he was. I was in the India trade, young lady, and out of it before you were born."
"I was born a great while ago," observed Helen, warningly.
"I daresay you think so," said the Captain. "I thought I was, at your age. But you'll find, as you grow older, that you weren't born such a very great while ago after all. The time shortens up. Isn't that so, Harkness?"
"Yes," said Mr. Harkness. "Everything happened day before yesterday."
"Exactly," said the Captain. Helen thought how young she must be to have already got that letter of Robert's so many centuries ago. "Yes," the Captain pursued. "I had been in the India trade twenty-five years when I went out of it in 1857—or it went out of me." He nodded his great, close-clipped head in answer to her asking glance. "It went out of a good many people at that time. We had a grand smash. We had overdone it . We had warnings enough, but we couldn't realize that our world was coming to an end. It hadn't got so low as telegraphing, yet; but it was mere shop then even, compared with the picturesque