William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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only one to be considered at all."
"Right! How are you right? Have you been suggesting that, my dear?" demanded my wife, with a gentle despair of me in her voice.
It almost seemed to me that I had, but Tedham came to my rescue most unexpectedly.
"No, Mrs. March, he hasn't said anything of the kind to me; or, if he has, I haven't heard it. But you intimated, yourself, last night, that she might be so situated—"
"I was a wicked simpleton," cried my wife, and I forebore to triumph, even by a glance at her; "to put my doubts between you and your daughter in any way. It was romantic, and—and—disgusting. It's not only your right to see her, it's your duty. At least it's your duty to let her decide whether she will let you see her. What nonsense! Of course she will! She must bear her part in it. She ought not to escape it, even if she could. Now you must just drop all idea of going away, and you must stay, and you must go to see your daughter. There is no other way to do."
Tedham shook his head stubbornly. "She has borne her share, already, and I won't inflict my penalty on her innocence—"
"Innocence? It's because she is innocent that it must be inflicted upon her! That is what innocence is in the world for!"
Tedham looked back at her in a dull bewilderment. "I can't get back to that. It seemed so once; but now it looks selfish, and I'm afraid of it. I am not the one to take that ground. It might do for you—"
"Well, then, let it do for me!" I confess that I was astonished at this turn, or should have been, if I could be astonished at any turn a woman takes. "I will see her for you, if you wish, and I will tell her just how it is with you, and then she can decide for herself. You have certainly no right to decide for her, whether she will see you or not, have you?"
"No," Tedham admitted.
"Well, then, sit down and listen."
He sat down, and my wife reasoned it all out with him. She convinced me, perfectly, so that what Tedham proposed to do seemed not only sentimental and foolish, but unnatural and impious. I confess that I admired her casuistry, and gave it my full support. She was a woman who, in the small affairs of the tastes and the nerves and the prejudices could be as illogical as the best of her sex, but with a question large enough to engage the hereditary powers of her New England nature she showed herself a dialectician worthy of her Puritan ancestry.
Tedham rose when she had made an end; and when we both expected him to agree with her and obey her, he said, "Very likely you are right. I once saw it all that way myself, but I don't see it so now, and I can't do it. Perhaps we shouldn't care for each other; at any rate, it's too much to risk, and I can't do it. Good-by." He began sidling toward the door.
I would have detained him, but my wife made me a sign not to interfere. "But surely, Mr. Tedham," she pleaded, "you are going to leave some word for her—or for Mrs. Hasketh to give her?"
"No," he answered, "I don't think I will. If I don't appear, then she won't see me, and that will be all there is of it."
"Yes, but Mrs. Hasketh will probably tell her that you have asked about her, and will prepare her for your coming, and then if you don't come—"
"What time is it, March?" Tedham asked.
I took out my watch. "It's nine o'clock." I was surprised to find it no later.
"I can get over to Somerville before ten, can't I? I'll go and tell Mrs. Hasketh I am not coming."
We could not prevent his getting away, by force, and we had used all the arguments we could have hoped to detain him with. As he opened the door to go out into the night, "But, Tedham!" I called to him, "if anything happens, where are we to find you, hear of you?"
He hesitated. "I will let you know. Well, good-night."
"I suppose this isn't the end, Isabel," I said, after we had turned from looking blankly at the closed door, and listening to Tedham's steps, fainter and fainter on the board-walk to the gate.
"There never is an end to a thing like this!" she returned, with a passionate sigh of pity. "Oh, what a terrible thing an evil deed is! It can't end. It has to go on and on forever. Poor wretch! He thought he had got to the end of his misdeed, when he had suffered the punishment for it, but it was only just beginning then! Now, you see, it has a perfectly new lease of life. It's as if it had just happened, as far as the worst consequences are concerned."
"Yes," I assented. "By the way, that was a great idea of yours about the office of innocence in the world, Isabel!"
"Why, Basil!" she cried, "you don't suppose I believed in such a monstrous thing as that, do you?"
"You made me believe in it."
"Well, then, I can tell you that I merely said it so as to convince him that he ought to let his daughter decide whether she would see him or not, and it had nothing whatever to do with the matter. Do you think you could find me anything to eat, dear? I'm perfectly famishing, and it doesn't seem as if I could stir a step till I've had a bite of something."
She sank down on the sofa in the hall in proof of her statement, and I went out into the culinary regions (deserted of their dwellers after our early tea) and made her up a sandwich along with the one I had the Sunday-night habit of myself. I found some half-bottles of ale on the ice, and I brought one of them, too. Before we had emptied it we resigned ourselves to what we could not help in Tedham's case; perhaps we even saw it in a more hopeful light.
VII
The next day was one of those lax Mondays which come before the Tuesdays and Wednesdays when business has girded itself up for the week, and I got home from the office rather earlier than usual. My wife met me with, "Why, what has happened?"
"Nothing," I said; "I had a sort of presentiment that something had happened here."
"Well, nothing at all has happened, and you have had your presentiment for your pains, if that's what you hurried home for."
I justified myself as well as I could, and I added, "That wretched Tedham has been in my mind all day. I think he has made a ridiculous mistake. As if he could stop the harm by taking himself off! The harm goes on independently of him; it is hardly his harm any more."
"That is the way it has seemed to me, too, all day," said my wife. "You don't suppose he has been out of my mind either? I wish we had never had anything to do with him."
A husband likes to abuse his victory, when he has his wife quite at his mercy, but the case was so entirely in my favor that for once I forbore. I could see that she was suffering for having put into Tedham's head the notion which had resulted in this error, and I considered that she was probably suffering enough. Besides, I was afraid that if I said anything it would bring out the fact that I had myself intimated the question again which his course had answered so mistakenly. I could well imagine that she was grateful for my forbearance, and I left her to this admirable state of mind while I went off to put myself a little in shape after my day's work and my journey out of town. I kept thinking how perfectly right in the affair Tedham's simple, selfish instinct had been, and how our several consciences had darkened counsel; that quaint Tuscan proverb came into ray mind: Lascia fare Iddio, ch' è un buon vecchio. We had not been willing to let God alone, or to trust his leading; we had thought to improve on his management of the case, and to invent a principle for poor Tedham that should be better for him to act upon than the love of his child, which God had put into the man's heart, and which was probably the best thing that had ever been there. Well, we had got our come-uppings, as the country people say, and however we might reason it away we had made ourselves responsible for the event.
There came a ring at the door that made my own heart jump into my mouth. I knew it was Tedham come back again, and I was still in the throes of buttoning on my collar when my wife burst into my room. I smiled round at her as