William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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his. "Say something to me, if you can! What do you think?"
"Whether you will—succeed?" He was confounding what he knew of her father's feeling with what he had feared of hers.
"Do you mean about the lawsuit? I don't care for that! Do you think he will hate me when he sees me? Do you think he will believe me when I tell him that I never meant to leave him, and that I'm sorry for what I did to drive him away?"
She seemed to expect him to answer, and he answered as well as he could: "He ought to believe that,—yes, he must believe it."
"Then all the rest may go," she said. "I don't care who gains the case. But if he shouldn't believe me,—if he should drive me away from him, as I drove him from me—" She held her breath in the terror of such a possibility, and an awe of her ignorance crept over Halleck. Apparently she had not understood the step that Bartley had taken, except as a stage in their quarrel from which they could both retreat, if they would, as easily as from any other dispute; she had not realized it as a final, an almost irrevocable act on his part, which could only be met by reprisal on hers. All those points of law which had been so sharply enforced upon her must have fallen blunted from her longing to be at one with him; she had, perhaps, not imagined her defence in open court, except as a sort of public reconciliation.
But at another time she recurred to her wrongs in all the bitterness of her father's vindictive purpose. A young couple entered the car at one of the country stations, and the bride made haste to take off her white bonnet, and lay her cheek on her husband's shoulder, while he passed his arm round her silken waist, and drew her close to him on the seat, in the loving rapture which is no wise inconvenienced by publicity on our railroad trains. Indeed, after the first general recognition of their condition, no one noticed them except Marcia, who seemed fascinated by the spectacle of their unsophisticated happiness; it must have recalled the blissful abandon of her own wedding journey to her. "Oh, poor fool!" she said to Olive. "Let her wait, and it will not be long before she will know that she had better lean on the empty air than on him. Some day, he will let her fall to the ground, and when she gathers herself up all bruised and bleeding—But he hasn't got the all-believing simpleton to deal with that he used to have; and he shall pay me back for all—drop by drop, and ache for ache!"
She was in that strange mental condition into which women fall who brood long upon opposing purposes and desires. She wished to be reconciled, and she wished to be revenged, and she recurred to either wish for the time as vehemently as if the other did not exist. She took Flavia on her knee, and began to prattle to her of seeing papa to-morrow, and presently she turned to Olive, and said: "I know he will find us both a great deal changed. Flavia looks so much older,—and so do I. But I shall soon show him that I can look young again. I presume he's changed too."
Marcia held the little girl up at the window. They had now left the river hills and the rolling country beyond, and had entered the great plain which stretches from the Ohio to the Mississippi; and mile by mile, as they ran southward and westward, the spring unfolded in the mellow air under the dull, warm sun. The willows were in perfect leaf, and wore their delicate green like veils caught upon their boughs; the may-apples had already pitched their tents in the woods, beginning to thicken and darken with the young foliage of the oaks and hickories; suddenly, as the train dashed from a stretch of forest, the peach orchards flushed pink beside the brick farmsteads. The child gave a cry of delight, and pointed; and her mother seemed to forget all that had gone before, and abandoned herself to Flavia's joy in the blossoms, as if there were no trouble for her in the world.
Halleck rose and went into the other car; he felt giddy, as if her fluctuations of mood and motive had somehow turned his own brain. He did not come back till the train stopped at Columbus for dinner. The old Squire showed the same appetite as at breakfast: he had the effect of falling upon his food like a bird of prey; and as soon as the meal was despatched he went back to his seat in the car, where he lapsed into his former silence and immobility, his lank jaws working with fresh activity upon the wooden toothpick he had brought away from the table. While they waited for a train from the north which was to connect with theirs, Halleck walked up and down the vast, noisy station with Olive and Marcia, and humored the little girl in her explorations of the place. She made friends with a red-bird that sang in its cage in the dining-hall, and with an old woman, yellow, and wrinkled, and sunken-eyed, sitting on a bundle tied up in a quilt beside the door, and smoking her clay pipe, as placidly as if on her own cabin threshold. "'Pears like you ain't much afeard of strangers, honey," said the old woman, taking her pipe out of her mouth, to fill it. "Where do you live at when you're home?"
"Boston," said the child, promptly. "Where do you live?"
"I used to live in Old Virginny. But my son, he's takin' me out to Illinoy, now. He's settled out there." She treated the child with the serious equality which simple old people use with children; and spat neatly aside in resuming her pipe. "Which o' them ladies yender is your maw, honey?"
"My mamma?"
The old woman nodded.
Flavia ran away and laid her hand on Marcia's dress, and then ran back to the old woman.
"That your paw, with her?" Flavia looked blank, and the old woman interpreted, "Your father."
"No! We're going out to see papa,—out West. We're going to see him to-morrow, and then he's coming back with us. My grandpa is in that car."
The old woman now laid her folded arms on her knees, and smoked obliviously. The little girl lingered a moment, and then ran off laughing to her mother, and pulled her skirt. "Wasn't it funny, mamma? She thought Mr. Halleck was my papa!" She hung forward by the hold she had taken, as children do, and tilted her head back to look into her mother's face. "What is Mr. Halleck, mamma?"
"What is he?" The group halted involuntarily.
"Yes, what is he? Is he my uncle, or my cousin, or what? Is he going out to see papa, too? What is he going for? Oh, look, look!" The child plucked away her hand, and ran off to join the circle of idle men and half-grown boys who were forming about two shining negroes with banjos. The negroes flung their hands upon the strings with an ecstatic joy in the music, and lifted their black voices in a wild plantation strain. The child began to leap and dance, and her mother ran after her.
"Naughty little girl!" she cried. "Come into the car with me, this minute."
Halleck did not see Marcia again till the train had run far out of the city, and was again sweeping through the thick woods, and flashing out upon the levels of the fields where the farmers were riding their sulky-plows up and down the long furrows in the pleasant afternoon sun. There was something in this transformation of man's old-time laborious dependence into a lordly domination over the earth which strikes the westward journeyer as finally expressive of human destiny in the whole mighty region, and which penetrated even to Halleck's sore and jaded thoughts. A different type of men began to show itself in the car, as the Western people gradually took the places of his fellow-travellers from the East. The men were often slovenly and sometimes uncouth in their dress; but they made themselves at home in the exaggerated splendor and opulence of the car, as if born to the best in every way; their faces suggested the security of people who trusted the future from the past, and had no fears of the life that had always used them well; they had not that eager and intense look which the Eastern faces wore; there was energy enough and to spare in them, but it was not an anxious energy. The sharp accent of the seaboard yielded to the rounded, soft, and slurring tones, and the prompt address was replaced by a careless and confident neighborliness of manner.
Flavia fretted at her return to captivity in the car, and demanded to be released with a teasing persistence from which nothing she was shown out of the window could divert her. A large man leaned forward at last from a seat near by, and held out an orange. "Come here to me, little Trouble," he said; and Flavia made an eager start toward this unlooked-for friend.
Marcia wished to check her; but Halleck pleaded to have her go. "It will be a relief to you," he said.
"Well, let her go," Marcia consented. "But she was no trouble, and she is no relief." She sat looking dully at the little girl after the Westerner had gathered