A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories Part 16

"Celia," cried Elmore, "this I _cannot_ bear. Did I take a single step in that business without her request and your full approval? Didn't you both ask me to write?"

"Yes, I suppose we did."

"Suppose?"

"Well, we _did_,--if you want me to say it. And I'm not accusing you of anything. I know you acted for the best. But you can see yourself, can't you, that it was rather sudden to have it end so quickly--"

She did not finish her sentence, or he did not hear the close in the miserable absence into which he lapsed. "Celia," he asked at last, "do you think she--she had any feeling about him?"

"Oh," cried his wife restively, "how should _I_ know?"

"I didn't suppose you _knew_," he pleaded. "I asked if you thought so."

"What would be the use of thinking anything about it? The matter can't be helped now. If you inferred from anything she said to you--"

"She told me repeatedly, in answer to questions as explicit as I could make them, that she wished him dismissed."

"Well, then, very likely she did."

"Very likely, Celia?"

"Yes. At any rate, it's too late now."

"Yes, it's too late now." He was silent again, and he began to walk the floor, after his old habit, without speaking. He was always mute when he was in pain, and he startled her with the anguish in which he now broke forth. "I give it up! I give it up! Celia, Celia, I'm afraid I did wrong! Yes, I'm afraid that I spoiled two lives. I ventured to lay my sacrilegious hands upon two hearts that a divine force was drawing together, and put them asunder. It was a lamentable blunder,--it was a crime!"

"Why, Owen, how strangely you talk! How could you have done any differently under the circ.u.mstances?"

"Oh, I could have done very differently. I might have seen him, and talked with him brotherly, face to face. He was a fearless and generous soul! And I was meanly scared for my wretched little decorums, for my responsibility to her friends, and I gave him no chance."

"We wouldn't let you give him any," interrupted his wife.

"Don't try to deceive yourself, don't try to deceive _me_, Celia! I know well enough that you would have been glad to have me show mercy; and I would not even show him the poor grace of pa.s.sing his offer in silence, if I must refuse it. I couldn't spare him even so much as that!"

"We decided--we both decided--that it would be better to cut off all hope at once," urged his wife.

"Ah, it was I who decided that--decided everything. Leave me to deal honestly with myself at last, Celia! I have tried long enough to believe that it was not I who did it!" The pent-up doubt of years, the long-silenced self-accusal, burst forth in his words. "Oh, I have suffered for it! I thought he must come back, somehow, as long as we stayed in Venice. When we left Peschiera without a glimpse of him--I wonder I outlived it. But even if I had seen him there, what use would it have been? Would I have tried to repair the wrong done? What did I do but impute unmanly and impudent motives to him when he seized his chance to see her once more at that masquerade--"

"No, no, Owen! He was not the one. Lily was satisfied of that long ago.

It was nothing but a chance, a coincidence. Perhaps it was some one he had told about the affair--"

"No matter! no matter! If I thought it was he, my blame is the same. And she, poor girl,--in my lying compa.s.sion for him, I used to accuse her of cold-heartedness, of indifference! I wonder she did not abhor the sight of me. How has she ever tolerated the presence, the friendship, of a man who did her this irreparable wrong? Yes, it has spoiled her life, and it was my work. No, no, Celia! you and she had nothing to do with it, except as I forced your consent--it was my work; and, however I have tried openly and secretly to shirk it, I must bear this fearful responsibility."

He dropped into a chair, and hid his face in his hands, while his wife soothed him with loving excuses for what he had done, with tender protests against the exaggerations of his remorse. She said that he had done the only thing he could do; that Lily wished it, and that she never had blamed him. "Why, I don't believe she would ever have married Captain Ehrhardt, anyhow. She was full of that silly fancy of hers about d.i.c.k Burton, all the time,--you know how she used always to be talking about him; and when she came home and found she had outgrown him, she had to refuse him, and I suppose it's that that's made her rather melancholy." She explained that Major Burton had become extremely fat, that his moustache was too big and black, and his laugh too loud; there was nothing left of him, in fact, but his empty sleeve, and Lily was too conscientious to marry him merely for that.

In fact, Elmore's regret did reflect a monstrous and distorted image of his conduct. He had really acted the part of a prudent and conscientious man; he was perfectly justifiable at every step: but in the retrospect those steps which we can perfectly justify sometimes seem to have cost so terribly that we look back even upon our sinful stumblings with better heart. Heaven knows how such things will be at the last day; but at that moment there was no wrong, no folly of his youth, of which Elmore did not think with more comfort than of this pa.s.sage in which he had been so wise and right.

Of course the time came when he saw it all differently again; when his wife persuaded him that he had done the best that any one could do with the responsibilities that ought never to have been laid on a man of his temperament and habits; when he even came to see that Lily's feeling was a matter of pure conjecture with him, and that so far as he knew she had never cared anything for Ehrhardt. Yet he was glad to have her away; he did not like to talk of her with his wife; he did not think of her if he could help it.

They heard from time to time through her sister that her little enterprise in Omaha was prospering, and that she was very contented out West; at last they heard directly from her that she was going to be married. Till then, Elmore had been dumbly tormented in his sombre moods with the solution of a problem at which his imagination vainly toiled,--the problem of how some day she and Ehrhardt should meet again and retrieve the error of the past for him. He contrived this encounter in a thousand different ways by a thousand different chances; what he so pa.s.sionately and sorrowfully longed for accomplished itself continually in his dreams, but only in his dreams.

In due course Lily married, and from all they could understand, very happily. Her husband was a clergyman, and she took particular interest in his parochial work, which her good heart and clear head especially qualified her to share with him. To connect her fate any longer with that of Ehrhardt was now not only absurd, it was improper; yet Elmore sometimes found his fancy forgetfully at work as before. He could not at once realize that the tragedy of this romance, such as it was, remained to him alone, except perhaps as Ehrhardt shared it. With him, indeed, Elmore still sought to fret his remorse and keep it poignant, and his final failure to do so made him ashamed. But what lasting sorrow can one have from the disappointment of a man whom one has never seen? If Lily could console herself, it seemed probable that Ehrhardt too had "got along."

AT THE SIGN OF THE SAVAGE.

As they bowled along in the deliberate German express train through the Black Forest, Colonel Kenton said he had only two things against the region: it was not black, and it was not a forest. He had all his life heard of the Black Forest, and he hoped he knew what it was. The inhabitants burned charcoal, high up the mountains, and carved toys in the winter when shut in by the heavy snows; they had Easter eggs all the year round, with overshot mill-wheels in the valleys, and cherry-trees all about, always full of blossoms or ripe fruit, just as you liked to think. They were very poor people, but very devout, and lived in little villages on a friendly intimacy with their cattle. The young women of these hamlets had each a long braid of yellow hair down her back, blue eyes, and a white bodice with a cat's-cradle lacing behind; the men had bell-crowned hats and spindle-legs: they b.u.t.toned the breath out of their bodies with round pewter b.u.t.tons on tight, short crimson waistcoats.

"Now, here," said the colonel, breathing on the window of the car and rubbing a little s.p.a.ce clear of the frost, "I see nothing of the sort.

Either I have been imposed upon by what I have heard of the Black Forest, or this is not the Black Forest. I'm inclined to believe that there is no Black Forest, and never was. There isn't," he added, looking again, so as not to speak hastily, "a charcoal-burner, or an Easter egg, or a cherry blossom, or a yellow braid, or a red waistcoat, to enliven the whole desolate landscape. What are we to think of it, Bessie?"

Mrs. Kenton, who sat opposite, huddled in speechless comfort under her wraps and rugs, and was just trying to decide in her own mind whether it was more delicious to let her feet, now that they were thoroughly warm, rest upon the carpet-covered cylinder of hot water, or hover just a hair's breadth above it without touching it, answered a little impatiently that she did not know. In ordinary circ.u.mstances she would not have been so short with the colonel's nonsense. She thought that was the way all men talked when they got well acquainted with you; and, as coming from a s.e.x incapable of seriousness, she could have excused it if it had not interrupted her in her solution of so nice a problem.

Colonel Kenton, however, did not mind. He at once possessed himself of much more than his share of the cylinder, extorting a cry of indignation from his wife, who now saw herself reduced from a fastidious choice of luxuries to a mere vulgar strife for the necessaries of life,--a thing any woman abhors.

"Well, well," said the colonel, "keep your old hot-water bottle. If there was any other way of warming my feet, I wouldn't touch it. It makes me sick to use it; I feel as if the doctor was going to order me some boneset tea. Give _me_ a good red-hot patent car-heater, that smells enough of burning iron to make your head ache in a minute, and sets your car on fire as soon as it rolls over the embankment. That's what _I_ call comfort. A hot-water bottle shoved under your feet--I should suppose I _was_ a woman, and a feeble one at that. I'll tell you what _I_ think about this Black Forest business, Bessie: I think it's part of a system of deception that runs through the whole German character. I have heard the Germans praised for their sincerity and honesty, but I tell you they have got to work hard to convince me of it, from this out. I am on my guard. I am not going to be taken in any more."

It became the colonel's pleasure to develop and exemplify this idea at all points of their progress through Germany. They were going to Italy, and as Mrs. Kenton had had enough of the sea in coming to Europe, they were going to Italy by the only all-rail route then existing,--from Paris to Vienna, and so down through the Simmering to Trieste and Venice. Wherever they stopped, whatever they did before reaching Vienna, Colonel Kenton chose to preserve his guarded att.i.tude. "Ah, they pretend this is Stuttgart, do they?" he said on arriving at the Suabian capital.

"A likely story! They pretended that was the Black Forest, you know, Bessie." At Munich, "And this is Munich!" he sneered, whenever the conversation flagged during their sojourn. "It's outrageous, the way they let these swindling little towns palm themselves off upon the traveller for cities he's heard of. This place will be calling itself Berlin, next." When his wife, guide-book in hand, was struggling to heat her admiration at some cold history of Kaulbach, and in her failure clinging fondly to the fact that Kaulbach had painted it, "Kaulbach!"

the colonel would exclaim, and half close his eyes and slowly nod his head and smile. "What guide-book is that you've got, Bessie?" looking curiously at the volume he knew so well. "Oh!--Baedeker! And are you going to let a Black Forest Dutchman like Baedeker persuade you that this daub is by Kaulbach? Come! That's a little too much!" He rejected the birthplaces of famous persons one and all; they could not drive through a street or into a park, whose claims to be this or that street or park he did not boldly dispute; and he visited a pitiless incredulity upon the dishes of the _table d'hote_, concerning which he always answered his wife's questions: "Oh, he _says_ it's beef," or veal, or fowl, as the case might be; and though he never failed to relish his own dinner, strange fears began to affect the appet.i.te of Mrs. Kenton. It happened that he never did come out with these sneers before other travellers, but his wife was always expecting him to do so, and afterwards portrayed herself as ready to scream, the whole time. She was not a nervous person, and regarding the colonel's jokes as part of the matrimonial contract, she usually bore them, as I have hinted, with severe composure; accepting them all, good, bad, and indifferent, as something in the nature of man which she should understand better after they had been married longer. The present journey was made just after the close of the war; they had seen very little of each other while he was in the army, and it had something of the fresh interest of a bridal tour. But they sojourned only a day or two in the places between Strasburg and Vienna; it was very cold and very unpleasant getting about, and they instinctively felt what every wise traveller knows, that it is folly to be lingering in Germany when you can get into Italy; and so they hurried on.

It was nine o'clock one night when they reached Salzburg; and when their baggage had been visited and their pa.s.sports examined, they had still half an hour to wait before the train went on. They profited by the delay to consider what hotel they should stop at in Vienna, and they advised with their Bradshaw on the point. This railway guide gave in its laconic fashion several hotels, and specified the Kaiserin Elisabeth as one at which there was a table d'hote, briefly explaining that at most hotels in Vienna there was none.

"That settles it," said Mrs. Kenton. "We will go to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, of course. I'm sure I never want the bother of ordering dinner in English, let alone German, which never was meant for human beings to speak."

"It's a language you can't tell the truth in," said the colonel thoughtfully. "You can't call an open country an open country; you have to call it a Black Forest." Mrs. Kenton sighed patiently. "But I don't know about this Kaiserin Elisabeth business. How do we know that's the _real_ name of the hotel? How can _we_ be sure that it isn't an _alias_, an a.s.sumed name, trumped up for the occasion? I tell you, Bessie, we can't be too cautious as long as we're in this fatherland of lies. What guide-book is this? Baedeker? Oh! Bradshaw. Well, that's some comfort.

Bradshaw's an Englishman, at least. If it had been Baedeker"--

"Oh, Edward, Edward!" Mrs. Kenton burst out. "Will you _never_ give that up? Here you've been harping on it for the last four days, and worrying my life out with it. I think it's unkind. It's perfectly bewildering me.

I don't know where or what I am, any more." Some tears of vexation started to her eyes, at which Colonel Kenton put the s.h.a.ggy arm of his overcoat round her, and gave her an honest hug.

"Well," he said, "I give it up, from this out. Though I shall always say that it was a joke that wore well. And I can tell you, Bessie, that it's no small sacrifice to give up a joke that you've just got into prime working order, so that you can use it on almost anything that comes up.

But that's a thing that you can never understand. Let it all pa.s.s. We'll go to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and submit to any sort of imposition they've a mind to practise upon us. I shall not breathe freely, I suppose, till we get into Italy, where people mean what they say. Haw, haw, haw!" laughed the colonel, "honest Iago's the man _I'm_ after."

The doors of the waiting-room were thrown open, and cries of "Erste Kla.s.se! Zweite Kla.s.se! Dritte Kla.s.se!" summoned the variously a.s.sorted pa.s.sengers to carriages of their several degrees. The colonel lifted his little wife into a non-smoking first-cla.s.s carriage, and established her against the cushioned barrier dividing the two seats, so that her feet could just reach the hot-water bottle, as he called it, and tucked her in and built her up so with wraps that she was a prodigy of comfort; and then folding about him the long fur-lined coat which she had bought him at Munich (in spite of his many protests that the fur was artificial), he sat down on the seat opposite, and proudly enjoyed the perfect content that beamed from Mrs. Kenton's face, looking so small from her heap of luxurious coverings.

"Well, Bessie, this would be very pleasant--if you could believe in it,"

he said, as the train smoothly rolled out of the station. "But of course it can't be genuine. There must be some dodge about it. I've no doubt you'll begin to feel perfectly horrid, the first thing you know."

Mrs. Kenton let him go on, as he did at some length, and began to drowse, while he amused himself with a gross parody of things she had said during the past four days. In those years while their wedded bliss was yet practically new, Colonel Kenton found his wife an inexhaustible source of mental refreshment. He prized beyond measure the feminine inadequacy and excess of her sayings; he had stored away such a variety of these that he was able to talk her personal parlance for an hour together; indeed, he had learned the trick of inventing phrases so much in her manner that Mrs. Kenton never felt quite safe in disowning any monstrous thing attributed to her. Her drowse now became a little nap, and presently a delicious doze, in which she drifted far away from actual circ.u.mstance into a realm where she seemed to exist as a mere airy thought of her physical self; suddenly she lost this thought, and slept through all stops at stations and all changes of the hot-water cylinder, to renew which the guard, faithful to Colonel Kenton's bribe, alone opened the door.

"Wake up, Bessie!" she heard her husband saying. "We're at Vienna."

It seemed very improbable, but she did not dispute it. "What time is it?" she asked, as she suffered herself to be lifted from the carriage into the keen air of the winter night.

"Three o'clock," said the colonel, hurrying her into the waiting-room, where she sat, still somewhat remote from herself but getting nearer and nearer, while he went off about the baggage. "Now, then!" he cried cheerfully when he returned; and he led his wife out and put her into a _fiacre_. The driver bent from his perch and arrested the colonel, as he was getting in after Mrs. Kenton, with words in themselves unintelligible, but so probably in demand for neglected instructions that the colonel said, "Oh! Kaiserin Elisabeth!" and again bowed his head towards the fiacre door, when the driver addressed further speech to him, so diffuse and so presumably unnecessary that Colonel Kenton merely repeated, with rising impatience, "Kaiserin Elisabeth,--Kaiserin Elisabeth, I tell you!" and getting in shut the fiacre door after him.