Miss Bellard's Inspiration E-Book

William Dean Howells

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 161

Beschreibung

'Miss Bellard's Inspiration' has a charm altogether out of proportion to its pretensions. It is no more than a novelette in dimensions, and its story is of the simplest. but displays in the telling a very delicate art. There are six people concerned — Miss Ballard and her fiancé, the aunt and uncle with whom they spend a few days in the country, and a married couple who are their guests by chance. This couple proves to be singularly mismated, and the spectacle afforded by their bickerings so alarms the heroine that she discards her lover, lest some such future may be in store for them also. She speaks by way of explanation, about 'that strange sort of feeling I had that we would be like them, if we married, and that there was not room in the world for two such quarrelsome couples' Later on, when the jangling pair have reached the point of imminent divorce, the rejected lover makes the following plea for a resumption of the old relations: 'If they are separated for good and all, don't you see that it gives us our chance?' The argument is convincing, and these are the words in which the heroine describes her capitulation: 'The point was a very fine one, and I kept losing it; but he never did; and he held me to it, so that when he did go away, I promised him that I would think about it. I did think about it, and before morning I had a perfect inspiration. My inspiration was that when I was so helpless to reason it out for myself, I ought to leave it altogether to him, and that is why we are going to be married in the spring.' This is the orthodox conclusion, if brought about by whimsical means, but we cannot escape a certain concern for the young man's future.

Leseprobe

Miss Bellard's Inspiration

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

Miss Bellard's Inspiration, W. D. Howells

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849657789

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

I1

II4

III8

IV.. 16

V.. 21

VI27

VII33

VIII36

IX.. 39

X.. 42

XI47

XII51

XIII62

XIV.. 67

I

"MY dear, will you please read that letter again?" Mrs. Crombie said, in tones that might . either be those of entreaty for her husband's compliance, or command of his obedience, or appeal to his clearer impression from the confusion which her niece's letter had cast her into. She began in a high, imperative note, and ended in something like an imploring whimper. She had first read the letter herself, and then thrown it across the breakfast table to Crombie; and as he began to read it to himself she now added, "Aloud!"

"I don't see any use in that," he said. "There's no mystery about it."

"No mystery, when a girl like Lillias Bellard starts up out of space and asks a thing like that? We might as well sell the place at once. It will be as bad as The Surges before the summer is over; and I did think that if we came and built inland, we could have a little peace of our lives." Crombie trivially thought of saying, " Little pieces of our lives," but he did not, and she went on: "If it's going on like this, the mountains will be as bad as the seashore, and there will be nothing left but Europe. Give me that letter, Archibald!"

She recovered it from his wonderingly extended left hand, his right being employed in filling up his cup with the exactly proportioned due of hot milk which he poured so as to make a bead on the surface of the coffee.

"I can't make Lillias out," Mrs. Crombie flamed forth again. "She is a sly girl; or at least I have always considered her so."

"It isn't a sly letter," Crombie suggested, impartially.

" No; and that is just it. Anything franker, or bolder, even, I've never seen in my family." Crombie might have felt the emphasis a blow at his own family, but as he had none except the wife before him, he did not suffer it to alienate his sympathy from her. " If it was anybody but my own sister's child, I should call it brazen. It's a liberty, yes, a liberty, even if I am her aunt. She had no right to presume upon our relationship. If the Mellays are not able to receive her now, she might go somewhere else."

"Where?"

"Anywhere!"

" I don't see where. Her people are abroad, and the Mellays' telegram postponing her a week, seems to have caught her at the end of her stipulated stay with the Franklings; and she can't go to a hotel alone."

" I don't see why she can't, with these advanced ideas of hers."

" Because the hotel men are not as advanced in their ideas, and won't receive a pretty young girl if she presents herself with no escort but her youth and beauty. She might as well be a Hebrew or an Ethiopian."

"Well, it's a shame! There ought to be a law to make them."

" Oh, I dare say there is one now," Crombie easily assented. " But come, Hester! This isn't going to kill you. A niece for a week is no such mortal matter. One voluntary, or involuntary, guest doesn't imply a succession of house-parties."

"No, but it is the disappointment! My family, at least, know that we sold The Surges because I was completely worn out with people, and that we came up here into this by-gone hollow of the hills, on the wrong side of the Saco, and built a tumble-down old farm-house over so as to be alone in it."

"Then you oughtn't to have built the old farm-house over so nicely. Lillias will go away, and tell everybody that you've got electric lights, and hot and cold water, and a furnace, and all the modem conveniences, and the most delightful rambling camp, with ten or twenty bedrooms, and open fires for cold days in everyone. She will say that it isn't dull here a bit; that there's a hotel full of delightful people just across the Saco, which you get to by private ferry, and hops every night, with a young man to every ten girls, and picnics all the time, and lots of easy mountain-climbing."

"Yes, that is the worst of it. Very well, I shall telegraph her not to come, I don't care what happens. I shall say, ' Very sorry. Uncle sick; not dangerously; but all taken up with him.' That's just ten words."

"Twelve; and not one true. Besides, where will you telegraph her? She's started. She left Kansas City yesterday."

"Nonsense!"

"All the same, that's what's happened."

"Very well, then, I know what I shall do. I shall engage a room for her at The Saco Shore, if it's full of such delightful people — "

"Hold on, my dear! That was merely my forecast of her language."

"No matter! And you can meet her at the station and tell her what I've done, and take her there. I am not going to be scooped up, even if she -is my niece. And so Lillias Bellard will find out."

Mrs. Crombie gathered the offending letter and its envelope violently together, and started from the table as if to go at once and carry out her declared purpose. But she really went up-stairs to decide which of the bedrooms she should give the girl. She began with the worst and ended with the best, which looked eastward in that particular crook of the river towards the Presidential range, and, if you poked your head out, commanded a glimpse of the almost eternal snows of Mount Washington where a drift of the belated winter was glimmering, now at the end of July, in a fold of the pachydermal slope. She had always to play some such comedy with herself before she could reconcile herself to the inevitable; and her husband was content to have her do so, as long as her drama did not involve his complexity with the inevitable. But the wildest stroke of her imagination could not inculpate him in the present affair; and though she felt it somewhat guilty of him to attempt any palliation of Lillias Bellard's behavior, she also felt it kind, and was very good to him the whole day on account of it; so that he was able honestly to pity her for the base of real tragedy he knew in her comedy. They had not only sold The Surges, where they had spent twenty summers, because of the heavy drain of hospitality upon her energies there, but because they had been offered a very good price for it, and they believed that the air of the mountains would be better for their rheumatisms. It formed at any rate a more decided change from the air of Boston; and the sale of The Surges was not altogether that sacrifice to solitude which her passionate resentment of the first menace of it had made it seem to her. Still there were associations with the things brought from the seaside cottage which supported her in the change, and which now burdened her with unavailing suggestions of how easy it would have been to make Lillias have a nice time in the more familiar environment. She sighed to herself in owning that she did not know what she should do with the girl where they were; for already, as she went through the house, she forgot her own hardship in realizing how difficult, with only the Saco Shore House to draw upon, it would be to amuse the child.

It was an essential part of her comedy to keep this transmutation of moods from Crombie; her self-respect required it, and experience had taught her that the most generous of men would take a mean advantage if he could, and would turn from pitying to mocking her for the change. There was no outward change from the effect of plaintive submission into which she had sunk by their one-o'clock dinnertime, when, in the later afternoon she asked him to take her adrive: the last, she predicted, they should have alone together that summer. Some part of the way she dedicated to a decent pathos in the presence of scenery endeared by their unmolested meanderings, and the thought of the sweet intimacy in which they had all but got back their young married selves. But the time and the place came when she could stand it no longer, and he was hardly surprised to have her break out with the unrelated conjecture, " I wonder what she has got up her sleeve."

"A young man, probably," he suggested.

" Don't be coarse! What makes you think that?"

" I don't know that I think that, or anything. What's the use of worrying about it? She'll be here so soon."

"Well, I really believe she has. And I shall watch her, I can tell you. If Aggie Bellard" — Mrs. Crombie branched away in the direction of the girl's mother — "thinks she can go off to Europe for the summer, and leave Lillias scattered broadcast over the continent, with no one to look after her, she is very much mistaken." This was the expression of such very complex feeling that Crombie could reply with nothing so well as a spluttering laugh. His wife knew perfectly what his laugh meant, and she went on: "I never approved of her second marriage, anyway, and I am not going to have Lillias shouldered off on me to make room for a second family in her mother's house. Archibald!" she cried, and she had to use him very sternly in the tone she was really taking with her sister and niece, "do you suppose it's a plot between them to get Lillias here with us, so that she can ingratiate herself with me, and just keep staying on indefinitely? Because if you do," she continued to threaten him, while she cast about in her mind for a penalty severe enough to fit the offence, " I won't have it!"

This was so ineffective that he had to laugh again, but he reconciled her to his derision by the real compassion with which he said, "You know you don't suppose anything of the kind yourself. It's a perfectly simple case, and the only reasonable conjecture is that Lillias has told you the exact truth in her letter. She is coming here because she has nowhere else to put in the time till the Mellays are ready for her, and in a week she will be gone. I don't think that will make any serious break in the quiet of our summer. At any rate, you can't help yourself."

"No, I can't," Mrs. Crombie recognized. "But if she imagines that she is going to hoodwink me!"

She did not attempt to say what she would do in such an event, and her husband felt no anxiety as to the sort of time Lillias would have under his roof.

II

THE maid met them on their return with word that a gentleman had called while they were

I away. On rigid question from Mrs. Crombie she confessed that he seemed rather short and fair, but this proved to be partially an effect from Mrs. Crombie's displeasure with his being first long and dark. The girl was quite sure that he had a mustache, though she afterwards corrected herself so far as to say that his hair was cut close. He had asked for no one but Mr. Crombie, who evinced so little interest in his visitor that after a casual glance at his card he left it to the scrutiny by which his wife sought to divine him from it. From evidences not apparent to Crombie, she had decided that it was an English card, and that Mr. Edmund Craybourne was English himself, because he had no middle name, not even a middle initial.

"Did he leave any message?" She now turned upon the maid again.

"No, ma'am."

" Did he say he would come back?"

"He didn't say, m'm."

" Did he tell you whether he was stopping at the Saco Shore House?"

" He didn't tell anything, m'm."

With these facts in hand, Mrs. Crombie followed her husband to his room, where he was washing the odor of his driving-gloves from his hands, and asked him what he had to say now about Lillias Bellard.

"Well, when I said there was a young man in question, you told me not to be indecent."

"'Coarse," I said; and it was coarse. Do you suppose this is the young man?"

"Not if there is none."

" Well, I know it is. Now what are you going to do? He didn't say where he was staying, and you will have to wait till he comes back. But what will you do, then?"

" I will settle that when I see him," Crombie said, applying himself vigorously to the towel. "If he is short and fair and fat, I may fall upon him and rend him; but if he is long and lank and dark, I may consider about it; though I don't know why I should do anything at all, come to think of it."

"No," Mrs. Crombie allowed, "I don't know why you should. In fact, I should prefer to see him myself. I could get it out of him better."

She did not say what it was, and the whole situation was simplified, as to action, by the young man's not coming back, though it was intensified as a mystery by his failure to reappear. In this aspect it supplied Mrs. Crombie with conversation quite to the end of supper, when the barge of the Saco Shore House drove up, and left Lillias Bellard and her baggage at the cottage door. Her aunt welcomed her with a warmth which she could not have imagined of herself, and affectionately ignored the girl's excuses for coming so much sooner than she had said, and so much later; for the train that brought her twenty-four hours ahead of time was a whole hour behind. For that reason she sat down to her retarded supper nearly a day before she should have had any supper at all. Her justification was that she had found people she knew coming on, and she had thought it best to come with them, hoping it would not make too much difference to her aunt Hester. She was a pretty girl of what Crombie in his quality of incomplete artist decided was a silvery type, singularly paintable in the relation of her gray-green eyes to the argent tones of her travelling-costume, her hat and ribbons and her gloves. You must take her, of course, with the same intention and intelligence that she had taken herself with, or as much of it as you could get; for it was clear that she was dressed in the frankest sympathy with her own coloring, and in conscious rejection of all mistaken notions of contrast. If some girls made you think of May and others of July or August, the month that she made you think of was September: not the moods in which it mirrored the coming October, but those in which it suggested the youngest months of summer, or even spring. She was fairly mature, as he knew from his acquaintance with her history; she would not see twenty-seven again; but she gave you the same sort of contradictory impressions of youth and age that she gave you of knowingness and innocence, of self-reliance and helplessness, of ignorance and experience, and of energy that ended in indecision.

Crombie revolved these things in his mind, while he looked at her where she sat at table, talking with her aunt in a serenity like that of a September afternoon: her silvery veil misting her gray hat above her hair, sprinkled even at her age with gray, and her gray gloves lying beside her plate, physically but not spiritually detached from her gray costume. Her intelligent eyes, glancing from her aunt to him and back again to her, had lovely skyey lights in them, of the sort that haunt the horizons of the passing summer, when the deep turquoise of the upper heavens changes into the delicate emerald that seems a reflection of the green earth below. It struck him that if it were really a question of his wife's knowing what her niece had up her sleeve, she would know no more than her niece chose to show; and if there were possibilities of her being quite willing to bare both her pretty arms to the elbows it might be in the confident skill with which the prestidigitator chooses to convince the witness that there is really nothing of preparation for the feat he is about to perform, in order to heighten the effect of it.

A sense of her contradictions persisted when she rose from the table and stood not so high as he had expected, and again when she followed her aunt upstairs with a deceptive show of height from the skirt that trailed behind her. He was shut from the revelation of the slight and rather small figure which Lillias made to Mrs. Crombie, in her room, when she had reduced herself to the fact by putting off her jacket and hat, and stood waiting in her shirt-waist for her aunt to finish explaining why she gave her that room and not another. Mrs. Crombie ended by saying that she supposed Lillias must be very tired, and would want to be going to bed; but Lillias answered, not at all, and would not her aunt sit down? She said that one got so used to distances in the West that trains rather rested one than not. Besides, she had enjoyed a season of such entire vegetation, since Commencement, out on the Pacific coast, that a little fatigue would be an agreeable variety which she would be glad to be aware of. At the same time she hid a yawn with such skill that it made her aunt respect her, and resolve to spare her as soon as she got what she wished out of her.

She sat down provisionally and asked Lillias whether she was going back there in the fall, and when the girl said she did not know but she was, Mrs. Crombie said it must be very queer, co-education. "Aren't they apt to get married?" she asked, with a frown of polite disgust.

"Well, yes, they are," Lillias admitted. " But that isn't considered such a very bad thing, out there. You might say that there was a good deal of courting, but there is very little flirting; and there is nothing that is so instantly sat upon by the girls themselves as the least fastness. But I don't come in on the question anywhere. I'm 'one of the faculty,' but my professorship, if it's that, is teaching the advanced pupils of the upper-grade schools that form part of the university. My undergraduate classes average about fourteen for girls, and fifteen or sixteen for boys, and there hasn't been a marriage among them for the whole year past. My postgraduate lecture audiences are mostly made up of townspeople who are married already."

She smiled very amusingly upon her aunt at the end of a speech which she made with pretty turns of her head and a final droop of her shoulders and a forward thrust of her chin above her hands fallen into each other in her lap. It was very young-ladyish, and as little academical as could be, so that her aunt, who had feared among other things that the child was going to be priggish, was entirely consoled. Lillias was in the department of oratory, and she might have been expected to have a public manner, or an elocutionary manner, but anything more private or colloquial than her manner Mrs. Crombie had not seen. It was with the determination not to be overcome by the peculiar charm which she felt in her, and yet not to use unnecessary violence in avoiding the dust which Lillias might attempt to throw into her eyes, that Mrs. Crombie now no longer delayed coming down to business.

"Lillias," she said, with a skirmishing laugh, and trying not to say it with any change of note, " we have had a very strange call this afternoon. Some gentleman whom we don't at all know asked for Mr. Crombie, while we were driving, and left his card. We thought perhaps he was an acquaintance of yours, or it may be some mistake of his; though the maid was very sure that he asked for Mr. Crombie by name."

Mrs. Crombie gave Lillias Mr. Craybourne's card, and that girl looked at it with a carelessness which only partially faded from her manner as she read. She said, "Really!" and she might apparently have contented herself with that brief comment if her aunt had not prompted her.