William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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please," she said, and with an air of high offence she swept out of the room, and out to the landing of the stairs. There she hesitated a moment, and put her hand to her hair, mechanically, to feel if it were in order, and then she went on downstairs without further faltering. It was I who descended slowly, and with many misgivings.
IV
Tedham was sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in, and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked, with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom exposed to the open air, gave him the effect of a workingman just out of the hospital. His eyes were deep in their sockets, and showed fine shadows in the overhead light, and I must say he looked very interesting.
At the threshold my wife paused again; then she went forward, turning the gas up full as she passed under the chandelier, and gave him her hand, where he had risen from his chair.
"I am glad to see you, Mr. Tedham," she said; and I should have found my astonishment overpowering, I dare say, if I had not felt that I was so completely in the hands of Providence, when she added, "Won't you come out to dinner with us? We were just going to sit down, when Mr. March came in. I never know when he will be back, when he starts off on these Saturday afternoon tramps of his."
The children seemed considerably mystified at the appearance of our guest, but they had that superior interest in the dinner appropriate to their years, and we got through the ordeal, in which, I believe, I suffered more than any one else, much better than I could have hoped. I could not help noting in Tedham a certain strangeness to the use of a four-pronged fork, at first, but he rapidly overcame this; and if it had not been for a terrible moment when, after one of the courses, he began, mechanically, to scrape his plate with his knife, there would not have been anything very odd in his behavior, or anything to show that it was the first dinner in polite society that he had taken for so many years.
The man's mind had apparently stiffened more than his body. It used to be very agile, if light, but it was not agile now. It worked slowly toward the topics which we found with difficulty, in our necessity of avoiding the only topics of real interest between us, and I could perceive that his original egotism, intensified by the long years in which he had only himself for company, now stood in the way of his entering into the matters brought forward, though he tried to do so. They were mostly in the form of reminiscences of this person and that whom we had known in common, and even in this shape they had to be very carefully handled so as not to develop anything leading. The thing that did most to relieve the embarrassment of the time was the sturdy hunger Tedham showed, and his delight in the cooking; I suppose that I cannot make others feel the pathos I found in this.
After dinner we shut the children into the library, and kept Tedham with us in the parlor.
My wife began at once to say, "Mr. March has told me why you wanted to see me, Mr. Tedham."
"Yes," he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure his cause.
"I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs. Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me."
Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily, "Won't you try?"
"Yes," she answered, most unexpectedly to me, "I will try to see her. But if I do see her, and she refuses to tell me anything about your daughter, what will you do? Of course, I shall have to tell her I come from you, and for you."
"I thought," Tedham ventured, with a sort of timorous slyness, "that perhaps you might approach it casually, without any reference to me."
"No, I couldn't do that," my wife said.
He went on as if he had not heard her: "If she did not know that the inquiries were made in my behalf, she might be willing to say whether my daughter was with her."
There was in this suggestion a quality of Tedham's old insinuation, but coarser, inferior, as if his insinuation had degenerated into something like mere animal cunning. I felt rather ashamed for him, but to my surprise, my wife seemed only to feel sorry, and did not repel his suggestion in the way I had thought she would.
"No," she said, "that wouldn't do. She has kept account of the time, you may be sure, and she would ask me at once if I was inquiring in your behalf, and I should have to tell her the truth."
"I didn't know," he returned, "but you might evade the point, somehow. So much being at stake," he added, as if explaining.
Still my wife was not severe with him. "I don't understand, quite," she said.
"Being the turning-point in my life, I can't begin to do anything, to be anything, till I have seen my daughter. I don't know where to find myself. If I could see her, and she did not cast me off, then I should know where I was. Or, if she did, I should. You understand that."
"But, of course, there is another point of view."
"My daughter's?"
"Mrs. Hasketh's."
"I don't care for Mrs. Hasketh. She did what she has done for the child's sake. It was the best thing for the child at the time—the only thing; I know that. But I agreed to it because I had to."
He continued: "I consider that I have expiated the wrong I did. There is no sense in the whole thing, if I haven't. They might as well have let me go in the beginning. Don't you think that ten years out of my life is enough for a thing that I never intended to go as far as it did, and a thing that I was led into, partly, for the sake of others? I have tried to reason it out, and not from my own point of view at all, and that is the way I feel about it. Is it to go on forever, and am I never to be rid of the consequences of a single act? If you and Mr. March could condone—"
"Oh, you mustn't reason from us," my wife broke in. "We are very silly people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have got to reckon with the world at large."
"I have reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the reckoning. But why shouldn't my daughter look at this thing as you do?"
Instead of answering, my wife asked, "When did you hear from her last?"
Tedham took a few thin, worn letters from his breast-pocket "There is Mr. March's letter," he said, laying one on his knee. He handed my wife another.
She read it, and asked, "May Mr. March see it?"
Tedham nodded, and I took the little paper in turn. The letter was written in a child's stiff, awkward hand. It was hardly more than a piteous cry of despairing love. The address was Mrs. Hasketh's, in Somerville, and the date was about three months after Tedham's punishment began. "Is that the last you have heard from her?" I asked.
Tedham nodded as he took the letter from me.
"But surely you have heard something more about her in all this time?" my wife pursued.
"Once from Mrs. Hasketh, to make me promise that I would leave the child to her altogether, and not write to her, or ask to see her. When I went to the cemetery to-day, I did not know but I should find her grave, too."
"Well, it is cruel!" cried my wife. "I will go and see Mrs. Hasketh, but—you ought to feel yourself that it's hopeless."
"Yes," he admitted. "There isn't much chance unless she should happen to think the same way you do: that I had suffered enough, and that it was time to stop punishing me."
My wife looked compassionately at him, and she began with a sympathy that I have not always known her to show more deserving people, "If it were a question of that alone it would be very easy. But suppose your daughter were so situated that it would be—disadvantageous to her to have it known that you were her father?"