William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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Mr. Atherton!" Clara's mind was now far away from any concern for herself. The woman whose husband has deserted her supremely appeals to all other women. "I can't believe it! What makes you think so?"
"What she concealed, rather than what she told me, I believe," answered Atherton. He ran over the main points of their interview, and summed up his own conjectures. "I know from things Halleck has let drop that they haven't always lived happily together; Hubbard has been speculating with borrowed money, and he's in debt to everybody. She's been alone in her house for a fortnight, and she only came to me because people had begun to press her for money. She's been pretending to the Hallecks that she hears from her husband, and knows where he is."
"Oh, poor, poor thing!" said Clara, too shocked to say more. "Then they don't know?"
"No one knows but ourselves. She came to me because I was a comparative stranger, and it would cost her less to confess her trouble to me than to them, and she allowed me to speak to you for very much the same reason."
"But I know she dislikes me!"
"So much the better! She can't doubt your goodness—"
"Oh!"
"And if she dislikes you, she can keep her pride better with you."
Clara let her eyes fall, and fingered the edges of her fan. There was reason in this, and she did not care that the opportunity of usefulness was personally unflattering, since he thought her capable of rising above the fact. "What do you want me to do?" she asked, lifting her eyes docilely to his.
"You must find some one to stay with her, in her house, till she can be persuaded to leave it, and you must lend her some money till her father can come to her or write to her. I've just written to him, and I've told her to send all her bills to me; but I'm afraid she may be in immediate need."
"Terrible!" sighed Clara to whom the destitution of an acquaintance was appalling after all her charitable knowledge of want and suffering. "Of course, we mustn't lose a moment," she added; but she lingered in her corner of the sofa to discuss ways and means with him, and to fathom that sad enjoyment which comfortable people find in the contemplation of alien sorrows. It was not her fault if she felt too kindly toward the disaster that had brought Atherton back to her on the old terms; or if she arranged her plans for befriending Marcia in her desolation with too buoyant a cheerfulness. But she took herself to task for the radiant smile she found on her face, when she ran up stairs and looked into her glass to see how she looked in parting with Atherton: she said to herself that he would think her perfectly heartless.
She decided that it would be indecent to drive to Marcia's under the circumstances, and she walked; though with all the time this gave her for reflection she had not wholly banished this smile when she looked into Marcia's woe-begone eyes. But she found herself incapable of the awkwardnesses she had deliberated, and fell back upon the native motherliness of her heart, into which she took Marcia with sympathy that ignored everything but her need of help and pity. Marcia's bruised pride was broken before the goodness of the girl she had hated, and she performed her sacrifice to Bartley's injured memory, not with the haughty self-devotion which she intended should humiliate Miss Kingsbury, but with the prostration of a woman spent with watching and fasting and despair. She held Clara away for a moment of scrutiny, and then submitted to the embrace in which they recognized and confessed all.
It was scarcely necessary for Clara to say that Mr. Atherton had told her; Marcia already knew that; and Clara became a partisan of her theory of Bartley's absence almost without an effort, in spite of the facts that Atherton had suggested to the contrary. "Of course! He has wandered off somewhere, and at soon as he comes to his senses he will hurry home. Why I was reading of such a case only the other day,—the case of a minister who wandered off in just the same way, and found himself out in Western New York somewhere, after he had been gone three mouths."
"Bartley won't be gone three months," protested Marcia.
"Certainly not!" cried Clara, in severe self-rebuke. Then she talked of his return for a while as if it might be expected any moment. "In the mean time," she added, "you must stay here; you're quite right about that, too, but you mustn't stay here alone: he'd be quite as much shocked at that as if he found you gone when he came back. I'm going to ask you to let my friend Miss Strong stay with you; and she must pay her board; and you must let me lend you all the money you need. And, dear,"—Clara dropped her voice to a lower and gentler note,—"you mustn't try to keep this from your friends. You must let Mr. Atherton write to your father; you must let me tell the Hallecks: they'll be hurt if you don't. You needn't be troubled; of course he wandered off in a temporary hallucination, and nobody will think differently."
She adopted the fiction of Bartley's aberration with so much fervor that she even silenced Atherton's injurious theories with it when he came in the evening to learn the result of her intervention. She had forgotten, or she ignored, the facts as he had stated them in the morning; she was now Bartley's valiant champion, as well as the tender protector of Marcia: she was the equal friend of the whole exemplary Hubbard family.
Atherton laughed, and she asked what he was laughing at.
"Oh," he answered, "at something Ben Halleck once said: a real woman can make righteousness delicious and virtue piquant."
Clara reflected. "I don't know whether I like that," she said finally.
"No?" said Atherton. "Why not?"
She was serving him with an after-dinner cup of tea, which she had brought into the drawing-room, and in putting the second lump of sugar into his saucer she paused again, thoughtfully, holding the little cube in the tongs. She was rather elaborately dressed for so simple an occasion, and her silken train coiled itself far out over the mossy depth of the moquette carpet; the pale blue satin of the furniture, and the delicate white and gold of the decorations, became her wonderfully.
"I can't say, exactly. It seems depreciatory, somehow, as a generalization. But a man might say it of the woman he was in love with," she concluded.
"And you wouldn't approve of a man's saying it of the woman his friend was in love with?" pursued Atherton, taking his cup from her.
"If they were very close friends." She did not know why, but she blushed, and then grew a little pale.
"I understand what you mean," he said, "and I shouldn't have liked the speech from another kind of man. But Halleck's innocence characterized it." He stirred his tea, and then let it stand untasted in his abstraction.
"Yes, he is good," sighed Clara. "If he were not so good, it would be hard to forgive him for disappointing all their hopes in the way he's done."
"It's the best thing he could have done," said Atherton gravely, even severely.
"I know you advised it," asserted Clara. "But it's a great blow to them. How strange that Mr. Hubbard should have disappeared the last night Ben was at home! I'm glad that he got away without knowing anything about it."
Atherton drank off his tea, and refused a second cup with a gesture of his hand. "Yes, so am I," he said. "I'm glad of every league of sea he puts behind him." He rose, as if eager to leave the subject.
Clara rose too, with the patient acquiescence of a woman, and took his hand proffered in parting. They had certainly talked out, but there seemed no reason why he should go. He held her hand, while he asked, "How shall I make my peace with you?"
"My peace? What for?" She flushed joyfully. "I was the one in fault."
He looked at her mystified. "Why, surely, you didn't repeat Halleck's remark?"
"Oh!" she cried indignantly, withdrawing her hand. "I meant this morning. It doesn't matter," she added. "If you still wish to resign the charge of my affairs, of course I must submit. But I thought—I thought—" She did not go on, she was too deeply hurt. Up to this moment she had imagined that she had befriended Marcia, and taken all that trouble upon herself for goodness' sake; but now she was ready to upbraid him for ingratitude in not seeing that she had done it for his sake. "You can send me the statement,