Ragged Lady, Complete

W >> William Dean Howells >> Ragged Lady, Complete

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They had come to a bad piece of road where a Slough of thick mud forced
the wagon-way over the stumps of a turnout in the woods. "You had better
let me have the reins, Clementina," he said. He drove home over the
yellow leaves of the hickories and the crimson leaves of the maples, that
heavy with the morning dew, fell slanting through the still air; and on
the way he began to sing; his singing made her heart ache. His father
came out to put up the colt for him; and Hinkle would not have his help.

He unhitched the colt himself, while his father trembled by with bent
knees; he clapped the colt on the haunch and started him through the
pasture-bars with a gay shout, and then put his arm round Clementina's
waist, and walked her into the kitchen amidst the grins of his mother and
sisters, who said he ought to be ashamed.

The winter passed, and in the spring he was not so well as he had been in
the fall. It was the out-door life which was best for him, and he picked
up again in the summer. When another autumn came, it was thought best for
him not to risk the confinement of another winter in the North. The
prolongation of the summer in the South would complete his cure, and
Clementina took her baby and went with him to Florida. He was very well,
there, and courageous letters came to Middlemount and Ohio, boasting of
the gains he had made. One day toward spring he came in languid from the
damp, unnatural heat, and the next day he had a fever, which the doctor
would not, in a resort absolutely free from malaria, pronounce malarial.
After it had once declared itself, in compliance with this reluctance, a
simple fever, Hinkle was delirious, and he never knew Clementina again
for the mother of his child. They were once more at Venice in his
ravings, and he was reasoning with her that Belsky was not drowned.

The mystery of his malady deepened into the mystery of his death. With
that his look of health and youth came back, and as she gazed upon his
gentle face, it wore to her the smile of quaint sweetness that she had
seen it wear the first night it won her fancy at Miss Milray's horse in
Florence.

XXXIX.

Six years after Miss Milray parted with Clementina in Venice she found
herself, towards the close of the summer, at Middlemount. She had
definitely ceased to live in Florence, where she had meant to die, and
had come home to close her eyes. She was in no haste to do this, and in
the meantime she was now at Middlemount with her brother, who had
expressed a wish to revisit the place in memory of Mrs. Milray. It was
the second anniversary of her divorce, which had remained, after a
married life of many vicissitudes, almost the only experience untried in
that relation, and which had been happily accomplished in the courts of
Dacotah, upon grounds that satisfied the facile justice of that State.
Milray had dealt handsomely with his widow, as he unresentfully called
her, and the money he assigned her was of a destiny perhaps as honored as
its origin. She employed it in the negotiation of a second marriage, in
which she redressed the balance of her first by taking a husband somewhat
younger than herself.

Both Milray and his sister had a wish which was much more than a
curiosity to know what had become of Clementina; they had heard that her
husband was dead, and that she had come back to Middlemount; and Miss
Milray was going to the office, the afternoon following their arrival, to
ask the landlord about her, when she was arrested at the door of the
ball-room by a sight that she thought very pretty. At the bottom of the
room, clearly defined against the long windows behind her, stood the
figure of a lady in the middle of the floor. In rows on either side sat
little girls and little boys who left their places one after another, and
turned at the door to make their manners to her. In response to each
obeisance the lady dropped a curtsey, now to this side, now to that,
taking her skirt between her finger tips on either hand and spreading it
delicately, with a certain elegance of movement, and a grace that was
full of poetry, and to Miss Milray, somehow, full of pathos. There
remained to the end a small mite of a girl, who was the last to leave her
place and bow to the lady. She did not quit the room then, like the
others, but advanced toward the lady who came to meet her, and lifted her
and clasped her to her breast with a kind of passion. She walked down
toward the door where Miss Milray stood, gently drifting over the
polished floor, as if still moved by the music that had ceased, and as
she drew near, Miss Milray gave a cry of joy, and ran upon her. "Why,
Clementina!" she screamed, and caught her and the child both in her arms.

She began to weep, but Clementina smiled instead of weeping, as she
always used to do. She returned Miss Milray's affectionate greeting with
a tenderness as great as her own, but with a sort of authority, such as
sometimes comes to those who have suffered. She quieted the older woman
with her own serenity, and met the torrent of her questions with as many
answers as their rush permitted, when they were both presently in Miss
Milray's room talking in their old way. From time to time Miss Milray
broke from the talk to kiss the little girl, whom she declared to be
Clementina all over again, and then returned to her better behavior with
an effect of shame for her want of self-control, as if Clementina's mood
had abashed her. Sometimes this was almost severe in its quiet; that was
her mother coming to her share in her; but again she was like her father,
full of the sunny gayety of self-forgetfulness, and then Miss Milray
said, "Now you are the old Clementina!"

Upon the whole she listened with few interruptions to the story which she
exacted. It was mainly what we know. After her husband's death Clementina
had gone back to his family for a time, and each year since she had spent
part of the winter with them; but it was very lonesome for her, and she
began to be home-sick for Middlemount. They saw it and considered it.
"They ah' the best people, Miss Milray!" she said, and her voice, which
was firm when she spoke of her husband, broke in the words of minor
feeling. Besides being a little homesick, she ended, she was not willing
to live on there, doing nothing for herself, and so she had come back.

"And you are here, doing just what you planned when you talked your life
over with me in Venice!"

"Yes, but life isn't eva just what we plan it to be, Miss Milray."

"Ah, don't I know it!"

Clementina surprised Miss Milray by adding, "In a great many things--I
don't know but in most--it's better. I don't complain of mine--"

"You poor child! You never complained of anything--not even of Mrs.
Lander!"

"But it's different from what I expected; and it's--strange."

"Yes; life is very strange."

"I don't mean-losing him. That had to be. I can see, now, that it had to
be almost from the beginning. It seems to me that I knew it had to be
from the fust minute I saw him in New Yo'k; but he didn't, and I am glad
of that. Except when he was getting wohse, he always believed he should
get well; and he was getting well, when he--"

Miss Milray did not violate the pause she made with any question, though
it was apparent that Clementina had something on her mind that she wished
to say, and could hardly say of herself.

She began again, "I was glad through everything that I could live with
him so long. If there is nothing moa, here or anywhe'a, that was
something. But it is strange. Sometimes it doesn't seem as if it had
happened."

"I think I can understand, Clementina."

"I feel sometimes as if I hadn't happened myself." She stopped, with a
patient little sigh, and passed her hand across the child's forehead, in
a mother's fashion, and smoothed her hair from it, bending over to look
down into her face. "We think she has her fatha's eyes," she said.

"Yes, she has," Miss Milray assented, noting the upward slant of the
child's eyes, which gave his quaintness to her beauty. "He had
fascinating eyes."

After a moment Clementina asked, "Do you believe that the looks are all
that ah' left?"

Miss Milray reflected. "I know what you mean. I should say character was
left, and personality--somewhere."

"I used to feel as if it we'e left here, at fust--as if he must come
back. But that had to go."

"Yes."

"Everything seems to go. After a while even the loss of him seemed to
go."

"Yes, losses go with the rest."

"That's what I mean by its seeming as if it never any of it happened.
Some things before it are a great deal more real."

"Little things?"

"Not exactly. But things when I was very young." Miss Milray did not know
quite what she intended, but she knew that Clementina was feeling her way
to something she wanted to say, and she let her alone. "When it was all
over, and I knew that as long as I lived he would be somewhere else, I
tried to be paht of the wo'ld I was left in. Do you think that was
right?"

"It was wise; and, yes, it was best," said Miss Milray, and for relief
from the tension which was beginning to tell upon her own nerves, she
asked, "I suppose you know about my poor brother? I'd better tell you to
keep you from asking for Mrs. Milray, though I don't know that it's so
very painful with him. There isn't any Mrs. Milray now," she added, and
she explained why.

Neither of them cared for Mrs. Milray, and they did not pretend to be
concerned about her, but Clementina said, vaguely, as if in recognition
of Mrs. Milray's latest experiment, "Do you believe in second marriages?"

Miss Milray laughed, "Well, not that kind exactly."

"No," Clementina assented, and she colored a little.

Miss Milray was moved to add, "But if you mean another kind, I don't see
why not. My own mother was married twice."

"Was she?" Clementina looked relieved and encouraged, but she did not say
any more at once. Then she asked, "Do you know what ever became of Mr.
Belsky?"

"Yes. He's taken his title again, and gone back to live in Russia; he's
made peace with the Czar; I believe."

"That's nice," said Clementina; and Miss Milray made bold to ask:

"And what has become of Mr. Gregory?"

Clementina answered, as Miss Milray thought, tentatively and obliquely:
"You know his wife died."

"No, I never knew that she lived."

"Yes. They went out to China, and she died the'a."

"And is he there yet? But of course! He could never have given up being a
missionary."

"Well," said Clementina, "he isn't in China. His health gave out, and he
had to come home. He's in Middlemount Centa."

Miss Milray suppressed the "Oh!" that all but broke from her lips.
"Preaching to the heathen, there?" she temporized.

"To the summa folks," Clementina explained, innocent of satire. "They
have got a Union Chapel the'a, now, and Mr. Gregory has been preaching
all summa." There seemed nothing more that Miss Milray could prompt her
to say, but it was not quite with surprise that she heard Clementina
continue, as if it were part of the explanation, and followed from the
fact she had stated, "He wants me to marry him."

Miss Milray tried to emulate her calm in asking, "And shall you?"

"I don't know. I told him I would see; he only asked me last night. It
would be kind of natural. He was the fust. You may think it is strange--"

Miss Milray, in the superstition of her old-maidenhood concerning love,
really thought it cold-blooded and shocking; but she said, "Oh, no."

Clementina resumed: "And he says that if it was right for me to stop
caring for him when I did, it is right now for me to ca'e for him again,
where the'e's no one to be hu't by it. Do you think it is?"

"Yes; why not?" Miss Milray was forced to the admission against what she
believed the finer feelings 'of her nature.

Clementina sighed, "I suppose he's right. I always thought he was good.
Women don't seem to belong very much to themselves in this wo'ld, do
they?"

"No, they seem to belong to the men, either because they want the men, or
the men want them; it comes to the same thing. I suppose you don't wish
me to advise you, my dear?"

"No. I presume it's something I've got to think out for myself."

"But I think he's good, too. I ought to say that much, for I didn't
always stand his friend with you. If Mr. Gregory has any fault it's being
too scrupulous."

"You mean, about that old trouble--our not believing just the same?" Miss
Milray meant something much more temperamental than that, but she allowed
Clementina to limit her meaning, and Clementina went on. "He's changed
all round now. He thinks it's all in the life. He says that in China they
couldn't understand what he believed, but they could what he lived. And
he knows I neva could be very religious."

It was in Miss Milray's heart to protest, "Clementina, I think you are
one of the most religious persons I ever knew," but she forebore, because
the praise seemed to her an invasion of Clementina's dignity. She merely
said, "Well, I am glad he is one of those who grow more liberal as they
grow older. That is a good sign for your happiness. But I dare say it's
more of his happiness you think."

"Oh, I should like to be happy, too. There would be no sense in it if I
wasn't."

"No, certainly not."

"Miss Milray," said Clementina, with a kind of abruptness, "do you eva
hear anything from Dr. Welwright?"

"No! Why?" Miss Milray fastened her gaze vividly upon her.

"Oh, nothing. He wanted me to promise him, there in Venice, too."

"I didn't know it."

"Yes. But--I couldn't, then. And now--he's written to me. He wants me to
let him come ova, and see me."

"And--and will you?" asked Miss Milray, rather breathlessly.

"I don't know. I don't know as I'd ought. I should like to see him, so as
to be puffectly su'a. But if I let him come, and then didn't--It wouldn't
be right! I always felt as if I'd ought to have seen then that he ca'ed
for me, and stopped him; but I didn't. No, I didn't," she repeated,
nervously. "I respected him, and I liked him; but I neva"--She stopped,
and then she asked, "What do you think I'd ought to do, Miss Milray?"

Miss Milray hesitated. She was thinking superficially that she had never
heard Clementina say had ought, so much, if ever before. Interiorly she
was recurring to a sense of something like all this before, and to the
feeling which she had then that Clementina was really cold-blooded and
self-seeking. But she remembered that in her former decision, Clementina
had finally acted from her heart and her conscience, and she rose from
her suspicion with a rebound. She dismissed as unworthy of Clementina any
theory which did not account for an ideal of scrupulous and unselfish
justice in her.

"That is something that nobody can say but yourself, Clementina," she
answered, gravely.

"Yes," sighed Clementina, "I presume that is so."

She rose, and took her little girl from Miss Milray's knee. "Say
good-bye," she bade, looking tenderly down at her.

Miss Milray expected the child to put up her lips to be kissed. But she
let go her mother's hand, took her tiny skirts between her finger-tips,
and dropped a curtsey.

"You little witch!" cried Miss Milray. "I want a hug," and she crushed
her to her breast, while the child twisted her face round and anxiously
questioned her mother's for her approval. "Tell her it's all right,
Clementina!" cried Miss Milray. "When she's as old as you were in
Florence, I'm going to make you give her to me."

"Ah' you going back to Florence?" asked Clementina, provisionally.

"Oh, no! You can't go back to anything. That's what makes New York so
impossible. I think we shall go to Los Angeles."

XL.

On her way home Clementina met a man walking swiftly forward. A sort of
impassioned abstraction expressed itself in his gait and bearing. They
had both entered the shadow of the deep pine woods that flanked the way
on either side, and the fallen needles helped with the velvety summer
dust of the roadway to hush their steps from each other. She saw him far
off, but he was not aware of her till she was quite near him.

"Oh!" he said, with a start. "You filled my mind so full that I couldn't
have believed you were anywhere outside of it. I was coming to get you--I
was coming to get my answer."

Gregory had grown distinctly older. Sickness and hardship had left traces
in his wasted face, but the full beard he wore helped to give him an
undue look of age.

"I don't know," said Clementina, slowly, "as I've got an answa fo' you,
Mr. Gregory--yet."

"No answer is better that the one I am afraid of!"

"Oh, I'm not so sure of that," she said, with gentle perplexity, as she
stood, holding the hand of her little girl, who stared shyly at the
intense face of the man before her.

"I am," he retorted. "I have been thinking it all ever, Clementina. I've
tried not to think selfishly about it, but I can't pretend that my wish
isn't selfish. It is! I want you for myself, and because I've always
wanted you, and not for any other reason. I never cared for any one but
you in the way I cared for you, and--"

"Oh!" she grieved. "I never ca'ed at all for you after I saw him."

"I know it must be shocking to you; I haven't told you with any wretched
hope that it would commend me to you!"

"I don't say it was so very bad," said Clementina, reflectively, "if it
was something you couldn't help."

"It was something I couldn't help. Perhaps I didn't try ."

"Did-she know it?"

"She knew it from the first; I told her before we were married."

Clementina drew back a little, insensibly pulling her child with her. "I
don't believe I exactly like it."

"I knew you wouldn't! If I could have thought you would, I hope I
shouldn't have wished--and feared--so much to tell you."

"Oh, I know you always wanted to do what you believed was right, Mr.
Gregory," she answered. "But I haven't quite thought it out yet. You
mustn't hurry me."

"No, no! Heaven forbid." He stood aside to let her pass.

"I was just going home," she added.

"May I go with you?"

"Yes, if you want to. I don't know but you betta; we might as well; I
want to talk with you. Don't you think it's something we ought to talk
about-sensibly?"

"Why, of course! And I shall try to be guided by you; I should always
submit to be ruled by you, if--"

"That's not what I mean, exactly. I don't want to do the ruling. You
don't undastand me."

"I'm afraid I don't," he assented, humbly.

"If you did, you wouldn't say that--so." He did not venture to make any
answer, and they walked on without speaking, till she asked, "Did you
know that Miss Milray was at the Middlemount?"

"Miss Milray! Of Florence?"

"With her brother. I didn't see him; Mrs. Milray is not he'a; they ah'
divo'ced. Miss Milray used to be very nice to me in Florence. She isn't
going back there any moa. She says you can't go back to anything. Do you
think we can?"

She had left moments between her incoherent sentences where he might
interrupt her if he would, but he waited for her question. "I hoped we
might; but perhaps--"

"No, no. We couldn't. We couldn't go back to that night when you threw
the slippas into the riva, no' to that time in Florence when we gave up,
no' to that day in Venice when I had to tell you that I ca'ed moa fo'
some one else. Don't you see?"

"Yes, I see," he said, in quick revulsion from the hope he had expressed.
"The past is full of the pain and shame of my errors!"

"I don't want to go back to what's past, eitha," she reasoned, without
gainsaying him.

She stopped again, as if that were all, and he asked, "Then is that my
answer?"

"I don't believe that even in the otha wo'ld we shall want to go back to
the past, much, do you?" she pursued, thoughtfully.

Once Gregory would have answered confidently; he even now checked an
impulse to do so. "I don't know," he owned, meekly.

"I do like you, Mr. Gregory!" she relented, as if touched by his
meekness, to the confession. "You know I do--moa than I ever expected to
like anybody again. But it's not because I used to like you, or because I
think you always acted nicely. I think it was cruel of you, if you ca'ed
for me, to let me believe you didn't, afta that fust time. I can't eva
think it wasn't, no matta why you did it."

"It was atrocious. I can see that now."

"I say it, because I shouldn't eva wish to say it again. I know that all
the time you we'e betta than what you did, and I blame myself a good deal
moa fo' not knowing when you came to Florence that I had begun to ca'e
fo'some one else. But I did wait till I could see you again, so as to be
su'a which I ca'ed for the most. I tried to be fai'a, before I told you
that I wanted to be free. That is all," she said, gently, and Gregory
perceived that the word was left definitely to him.

He could not take it till he had disciplined himself to accept
unmurmuringly his sentence as he understood it. "At any rate," he began,
"I can thank you for rating my motive above my conduct."

"Oh," she said. "I don't think either of us acted very well. I didn't
know till aftawa'ds that I was glad to have you give up, the way you did
in Florence. I was--bewild'ed. But I ought to have known, and I want you
to undastand everything, now. I don't ca'e for you because I used to when
I was almost a child, and I shouldn't want you to ca'e for me eitha,
because you did then. That's why I wish you had neva felt that you had
always ca'ed fo' me."

"Yes," said Gregory. He let fall his head in despair.

"That is what I mean," said Clementina. "If we ah' going to begin
togetha, now, it's got to be as if we had neva begun before. And you
mustn't think, or say, or look as if the'e had been anything in oua lives
but ouaselves. Will you? Do you promise?" She stopped, and put her hand
on his breast, and pushed against it with a nervous vehemence.

"No!" he said. "I don't promise, for I couldn't keep my promise. What you
ask is impossible. The past is part of us; it can't be ignored any more
than it can be destroyed. If we take each other, it must be for all that
we have been as well as all that we are. If we haven't the courage for
that we must part."

He dropped the little one's hand which he had been holding, and moved a
few steps aside. "Don't!" she said. "They'll think I've made you," and he
took the child's hand again.

They had emerged from the shadow of the woods, and come in sight of her
father's house. Claxon was standing coatless before the door in full
enjoyment of the late afternoon air; his wife beside him, at sight of
Gregory, quelled a natural impulse to run round the corner of the house
from the presence of strangers.

"I wonda what they'a sayin'," she fretted.

"It looks some as if she was sayin' yes," said Claxon, with an impersonal
enjoyment of his conjecture. "I guess she saw he was bound not to take no
for an answa."

"I don't know as I should like it very much," his wife relucted. "Clem's
doin' very well, as it is. She no need to marry again."

"Oh, I guess it a'n't that altogetha. He's a good man." Claxon mused a
moment upon the figures which had begun to advance again, with the little
one between them, and then gave way in a burst of paternal pride, "And I
don't know as I should blame him so very much for wantin' Clem. She
always did want to be of moa use--But I guess she likes him too."

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

All in all to each other
Chained to the restless pursuit of an ideal not his own
Composed her features and her ideas to receive her visitor
Didn't reason about their beliefs, but only argued
Dull, cold self-absorption
Everything seems to go
Gift of waiting for things to happen
Going on of things had long ceased to bring pleasure
He a'n't a do-nothin'; he's a do-everything
He's so resting
Hopeful apathy in his face
I'm moa used to havin' the things brought to me
Inexhaustible flow of statement, conjecture and misgiving
It's the best that he doesn't seem prepared for
Kept her talking vacuities when her heart was full
Led a life of public seclusion
Life alone is credible to the young
Luxury of helplessness
Morbid egotism
Motives lie nearer the surface than most people commonly pretend
New England necessity of blaming some one
No object in life except to deprive it of all object
One time where one may choose safest what one likes best
Only man I ever saw who would know how to break the fall
Perverse reluctance to find out where they were
Provisional reprehension of possible shiftlessness
Real artistocracy is above social prejudice
Scant sleep of an elderly man
Seldom talked, but there came times when he would'nt even listen
Singleness of a nature that was all pose
Submitted, as people always do with the trials of others
Sunny gayety of self-forgetfulness
Thrown mainly upon the compassion of the chambermaids
Tone was a snuffle expressive of deep-seated affliction
Unaware that she was a selfish or foolish person
Under a fire of conjecture and asseveration
Understood when I've said something that doesn't mean anything
We change whether we ought, or not
Weak in his double letters
When she's really sick, she's better
Willing that she should do herself a wrong
Wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted
Women don't seem to belong very much to themselves
You can't go back to anything
You were not afraid, and you were not bold; you were just right
You've got a light-haired voice
You've got a light-haired voice

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