The Son Of Royal Langbrith. William Dean Howells
Читать онлайн книгу.
able to extend itself to its displays. “Poor thing!” he pitied her. “Must you always have a tyrant?”
“He isn’t a tyrant,” she said.
“Oh yes, he is! I know the type. I dare say he doesn’t hit you, but he terrorizes you.”
Mrs. Langbrith did not speak. In her reticence, even her tears stopped.
“You tempt him to bully you. Lord bless me, you tempt me! But I won’t; no, I won’t. Amelia, why, in Heaven’s name, should he object? He has his own interests, quite apart from yours; his own world, which you couldn’t enter if he would let you. A fellow in his junior year at college is as remote from his mother in everything as if he were in another planet!”
“We write to each other every Sunday,” she urged, diffidently.
“ I have no doubt you try to keep along with him; that’s your nature; but I know that he cowed you before he left home, and I know that he cows you still. I could read your correspondence—the spirit -—without seeing it. He isn’t to blame. You’ve let him walk over you till he thinks there is no other path to manhood. Remember, I don’t say Jim is a bad fellow. He is a very good fellow—considering.”
The doctor went to the window and stooped to look out at his horse, which remained as he had left it, only more patiently sunken in a permanence expressed by the collapsing of its hind quarters into a comfortable droop, and a dreamy dejection of its large head. In the meantime, Mrs. Langbrith had sat down in a chair which she seemed to think had offered itself to her, and when the doctor came back, he asked, “May I sit down?”
“Why, of course! I’m ashamed—”
“No, no! Don’t say that! Don’t say anything like that!”
In the act of sitting down, he realized that he had his hat on. He took it off and put it on the floor near his feet, where it toppled into a soft heap. His hair had partly lifted with it, and its disorder on his crown somewhat concealed its thinness. “ I want to talk this matter over sensibly. We are not two young things that we need be scared at our own feelings, or each other’s. I suppose I may say we both knew it was coming to something like this?”
She might not have let him say so for her, but in her silence, he went on to say so for himself.
“I knew it was coming, anyway, and I’ve known it for a good while. I have liked you ever since I came to Saxmills she trembled and colored a little—“but I wouldn’t be saying what I am saying to you, if I had cared for you before Langbrith died as I care for you now. That would be, to my thinking, rather loathsome. I should despise myself for it; I should despise you; I couldn’t help it. But we are both fairly outside of that. I didn’t begin to realize how it was with me till about a year ago, and I don’t suppose that you—’’
Mrs. Langbrith shifted her position slightly, but he did not notice, and he began again.
“ So I feel that I can offer you a clean hand. I’m six years older than you are, which makes it just about right; and I’m not so poor that I need seem to be after your—thirds. I’ve got a good practice, and I don’t intend to take life so hard hereafter. I could give you as pleasant a home—”
“Oh, I couldn’t think of leaving this!” she broke out, helplessly.
Anther allowed himself to smile. “Well, well, there’s no hurry. But if Jim marries—”
“ I should live with him.”
“ I’m imagining that you would live with me.”
“You mustn’t.”
“I’m merely imagining; I’m not trying to commit you to anything, or to overrule you at all. My idea is, that there’s been enough of that in your life. I want you to overrule me, and if you don’t fancy settling down immediately, and would like a year or two in Europe first, I could freshen my science up in Vienna or Paris, and come back all the better prepared to keep on in my practice here, or I could give up my practice altogether.”
“You oughtn’t to do that.”
“ No, I oughtn’t. But all this is neither here nor there, till the great point is settled. Do you think anyone could care for me as I care for you?
“Why, of course, Dr. Anther?”
“Do you care for me—that way—now?” He seemed to expect evasion or hesitation, even such elusion as might have expressed itself in material escape from him, and, unconsciously, he hitched his chair forward as if to hem her in.
It was a needless precaution. She answered instantly, “You know I do.”
“Amelia,” Anther asked solemnly, without changing his posture or the slant of his face in its lift towards hers, “have I put any pressure on you to say this? Do you say it as freely as if I hadn’t asked you?”
The absurdity of the question did not appear to either of them. She answered, “I say it as freely as if it had never been asked. I would have said it years ago. I have always liked you—that way. Or ever since—”
He leaned back in his chair and pushed his hands forward on the arms. “ Then—then—’” he began, bewilderedly, and she said:
“But—”
“Ah!” he broke out, “I know what that ‘but’ means. Why need there be any such ‘but’? Do you think he dislikes me?”
“ No, he likes you; he respects you. He says you are a physician who would be famous in a large place. He—”
Anther put the rest aside with his hand. “Then he would object to anyone? Is that it?’’
“Yes,’’ said Mrs. Langbrith, with a drop to specific despair from her general hopelessness.
“ I don’t recognize his right,” Anther said sharply, “unless he is ready to promise that he will never leave you to be pushed aside; turned from a mother into a mother-in-law. I don’t recognize his right. Why does he assume such a right?”
“ Out of reverence for his father’s memory.”
II
One cannot look on a widow who has long survived her husband without a curiosity not easily put into terms. The curiosity is intensified, and the difficulty enhanced if there are children to testify of a relation which, in the absence of the dead, has no other witness. The man has passed out of the woman’s life as absolutely as if he had never been there; it is conceivable that she herself does not always think of her children as also his. Yet they are his children, and there must be times when he holds her in mortmain through them, when he is still her husband, still her lord and master. But how much, otherwise, does she keep of that intimate history of emotions, experiences, so manifold, so recondite? Is he as utterly gone, to her sense, as to all others? Or is he in some sort there still, in her ear, in her eye, in her touch? Was it for the nothing which it now seems that they were associated in the most tremendous of the human dramas, the drama that allies human nature with the creative, the divine and the immortal, on one side, the bestial and the perishable on the other? Does oblivion pass equally over the tremendous and the trivial and blur them alike?
Anther looked at Mrs. Langbrith in a whirl of question: question of himself as well as of her. By virtue of his privity to her past, he was in a sort of authority over her; but it may have been because of his knowledge that he almost humbly forbore to use his authority.
“Amelia,” he entreated her, “have you brought him up in a superstition of his father?”
“Oh no!” She had the effect of hurrying to answer him. “Oh, never!”
“ I am glad of that, anyway. But if you have let him grow up in ignorance—
“How