Fennel and Rue

W >> William Dean Howells >> Fennel and Rue


"Ah, Philip, don't let your fancy go after that girl!"

"Miss Andrews? I thought--"

"Don't you be complex, my dear. You know I mean Miss Shirley. What has
become of her, I wonder. I heard Miss Andrews asking you."

"I wasn't able to tell her. Do you want me to try telling you?"

"I would rather you never could."

Philip laughed sardonically. "Now, I shall forget Thursdays and all the
other days, too. You are a very unwise parent, mother."

They laughed with each other at each other, and treated her enthusiasm
for Miss Andrews as the joke it partly was. Mrs. Verrian did not follow
him up about her idol, and a week or so later she was able to affect a
decent surprise when he came in at the end of an afternoon and declined
the cup of tea she proposed on the ground that he had been taking a cup
of tea with the Andrewses. "You have really been there?"

"Didn't you expect me to keep my promise?"

"But I was afraid I had put a stumbling-block in the way."

"Oh, I found I could turn the consciousness you created in me into
literary material, and so I was rather eager to go. I have got a point
for my new story out of it. I shall have my fellow suffer all I didn't
suffer in meeting the girl he knows his mother wants him to marry. I got
on very well with those ladies. Mrs. Andrews is the mother of innocence,
but she isn't innocence. She managed to talk of my story without asking
about the person who wanted to anticipate the conclusion. That was what
you call complex. She was insincere; it was the only thing she wanted to
talk about."

"I don't believe it, Philip. But what did Miss Andrews talk about?"

"Well, she is rather an optimistic conscience. She talked about books
and plays that some people do not think are quite proper. I have a
notion that, where the point involved isn't a fact of her own experience,
she is not very severe about it. You think that would be quite safe for
me?"

"Philip, I don't like your making fun of her!"

"Oh, she wasn't insipid; she was only limpid. I really like her, and,
as for reverencing her, of course I feel that in a way she is sacred."
He added, after a breath, "Too sacred. We none of us can expect to
marry Eve before the Fall now; perhaps we have got over wanting to."

"You are very perverse, my dear. But you will get over that."

"Don't take away my last defence, mother."

Verrian began to go rather regularly to the Andrews house, or, at least,
he was accused of doing it by Miss Macroyd when, very irregularly, he
went one day to see her. "How did you know it?" he asked.

"I didn't say I knew it. I only wished to know it. Now I am satisfied.
I met another friend of yours on Sunday." She paused for him to ask who;
but he did not ask. "I see you are dying to know what friend: Mr.
Bushwick."

"Oh, he's a good-fellow. I wonder I don't run across him."

"Perhaps that's because you never call on Miss Shirley." Miss Macroyd
waited for this to take effect, but he kept a glacial surface towards
her, and she went on:

"They were walking together in the park at noon. I suppose they had been
to church together."

Verrian manifested no more than a polite interest in the fact. He
managed so well that he confirmed Miss Macroyd in a tacit conjecture.
She went on: "Miss Shirley was looking quite blooming for her. But so
was he, for that matter. Why don't you ask if they inquired for you?"

"I thought you would tell me without."

"I will tell you if he did. He was very cordial in his inquiries; and I
had to pretend, to gratify him, that you were very well. I implied that
you came here every Tuesday, but your Thursdays were dedicated to Miss
Andrews."

"You are a clever woman, Miss Macroyd. I should never have thought of so
much to say on such an uninteresting subject. And Miss Shirley showed no
curiosity?"

"Ah, she is a clever woman, too. She showed the prettiest kind of
curiosity--so perfectly managed. She has a studio--I don't know just how
she puts it to use--with a painter girl in one of those studio apartment
houses on the West Side: The Veronese, I believe. You must go and see
her; I'll let you have next Tuesday off; Tuesday's her day, too."

"You are generosity itself, Miss Macroyd."

"Yes, there's nothing mean about me," she returned, in slang rather older
than she ordinarily used. "If you're not here next Tuesday I shall know
where you are."

"Then I must take a good many Tuesdays off, unless I want to give myself
away."

"Oh, don't do that, Mr. Verrian! Please! Or else I can't let you have
any Tuesday off."




XXI.

Upon the whole, Verrian thought he would go to see Miss Shirley the next
Tuesday, but he did not say so to Miss Macroyd. Now that he knew where
the girl was, all the peculiar interest she had inspired in him renewed
itself. It was so vivid that he could not pay his usual Thursday call at
Miss Andrews's, and it filled his mind to the exclusion of the new story
he had begun to write. He loafed his mornings away at his club, and he
lunched there, leaving his mother to lunch alone, and was dreamily
preoccupied in the evenings which he spent at home, sitting at his desk,
with the paper before him, unable to coax the thoughts from his brain to
its alluring blank, but restive under any attempts of hers to talk with
him.

In his desperation he would have gone to the theatre, but the fact that
the ass who rightfully called himself Verrian was playing at one of them
blocked his way, through his indignation, to all of them. By Saturday
afternoon the tedious time had to be done something with, and he decided
to go and see what the ass was like.

He went early, and found himself in the end seat of a long row of many
rows of women, who were prolonging the time of keeping their hats on till
custom obliged them to take them off. He gave so much notice to the
woman next him as to see that she was deeply veiled as well as widely
hatted, and then he lapsed into a dreary muse, which was broken by the
first strains of the overture. Then he diverted himself by looking round
at all those ranks of women lifting their arms to take out them hat-pins
and dropping them to pin their hats to the seat-backs in front of them,
or to secure them somehow in their laps. Upon the whole, he thought the
manoeuvre graceful and pleasing; he imagined a consolation in it for the
women, who, if they were forced by public opinion to put off their
charming hats, would know how charmingly they did it. Each turned a
little, either her body or her head, and looked in any case out of the
corner of her eyes; and he was phrasing it all for a scene in his story,
when he looked round at his neighbor to see how she had managed, or was
managing, with her veil. At the same moment she looked at him, and their
eyes met.

"Mr. Verrian!"

"Miss Shirley!"

The stress of their voices fell upon different parts of the sentences
they uttered, but did not commit either of them to a special role.

"How very strange we should meet here!" she said, with pleasure in her
voice. "Do you know, I have been wanting to come all winter to see this
man, on account of his name? And to think that I should meet the other
Mr. Verrian as soon as I yielded to the temptation."

"I have just yielded myself," Verrian said. "I hope you don't feel
punished for yielding."

"Oh, dear, no! It seems a reward."

She did not say why it seemed so, and he suggested, "The privilege of
comparing the histrionic and the literary Verrian?"

"Could there be any comparison?" she came back, gayly.

"I don't know. I haven't seen the histrionic Verrian yet."

They were laughing when the curtain rose, and the histrionic Verrian had
his innings for a long, long first act. When the curtain fell she turned
to the literary Verrian and said, "Well?"

"He lasted a good while," Verrian returned.

"Yes. Didn't he?" She looked at the little watch in her wristlet.
"A whole hour! Do you know, Mr. Verrian, I am going to seem very rude.
I am going to leave you to settle this question of superiority; I know
you'll be impartial. I have an appointment--with the dressmaker, to be
specific--at half-past four, and it's half-past three now, and I couldn't
well leave in the middle of the next act. So I will say good-bye now--"

"Don't!" he entreated. "I couldn't bear to be left alone with this
dreadful double of mine. Let me go out with you."

"Can I accept such self-sacrifice? Well!"

She had put on her hat and risen, and he now stepped out of his place to
let her pass and then followed her. At the street entrance he suggested,
"A hansom, or a simple trolley?"

"I don't know," she murmured, meditatively, looking up the street as if
that would settle it. "If it's only half-past three now, I should have
time to get home more naturally."

"Oh! And will you let me walk with you?"

"Why, if you're going that way."

"I will say when I know which way it is."

They started on their walk so blithely that they did not sadden in the
retrospect of their joint experiences at Mrs. Westangle's. By the time
they reached the park gate at Columbus Circle they had come so distinctly
to the end of their retrospect that she made an offer of letting him
leave her, a very tacit offer, but unmistakable, if he chose to take it.
He interpreted her hesitation as he chose. "No," he said, "it won't be
any longer if we go up through the park."

She drew in her breath softly, smoothing down her muff with her right
hand while she kept her left in it. "And it will certainly be
pleasanter." When they were well up the path, in that part of it where
it deflects from the drive without approaching the street too closely,
and achieves something of seclusion, she said:

"Your speaking of him just now makes me want to tell you something, Mr.
Verrian. You would hear of it very soon, anyway, and I feel that it is
always best to be very frank with you; but you'll regard it as a secret
till it comes out."

The currents that had been playing so warmly in and out of Verrian's
heart turned suddenly cold. He said, with joyless mocking, "You know,
I'm used to keeping your secrets. I--shall feel honored, I'm sure, if
you trust me with another."

"Yes," she returned, pathetically, "you have always been faithful--even
in your wounds." It was their joint tribute to the painful past, and
they had paid no other. She was looking away from him, but he knew she
was aware of his hanging his head. "That's all over now," she uttered,
passionately. "What I wanted to say--to tell you--is that I am engaged
to Mr. Bushwick."

He could have answered that she had no need to tell him. The cold
currents in and out of his heart stiffened frozenly and ceased to flow;
his heart itself stood still for an eternal instant. It was in this
instant that he said, "He is a fine fellow." Afterwards, amid the wild
bounding of his recovered pulse, he could add, "I congratulate him; I
congratulate you both."

"Thank you," she said. "No one knows as I do how good he is--has been,
all through." Probably she had not meant to convey any reproach to
Verrian by Bushwick's praise, but he felt reproach in it. "It only
happened last week. You do wish me happy, don't you? No one knows what
a winter I have had till now. Everything seeming to fail--"

She choked, and did not say more. He said, aimlessly, "I am sorry--"

"Let me sit down a moment," she begged. And she dropped upon the bench
at which she faltered, and rested there, as if from the exhaustion of
running. When she could get her breath she began again: "There is
something else I want to tell you."

She stopped. And he asked, to prompt her, "Yes?"

"Thank you," she answered, piteously. And she added, with superficial
inconsequence, "I shall always think you were very cruel."

He did not pretend not to know what she meant, and he said, "I shall
always think so, too. I tried to revenge myself for the hurt your
harmless hoax did my vanity. Of course, I made believe at the time that
I was doing an act of justice, but I never was able to brave it out
afterwards."

"But you were--you were doing an act of justice. I deserved what you
said, but I didn't deserve what has followed. I meant no harm--it was a
silly prank, and I have suffered for it as if it were a crime, and the
consequences are not ended yet. I should think that, if there is a moral
government of the universe, the Judge of all the earth would know when to
hold his hand. And now the worst of it is to come yet." She caught
Verrian's arm, as if for help.

"Don't--don't!" he besought her. "What will people think?"


"Yes, Yes!" she owned, releasing him and withdrawing to the other end of
the seat.

"But it almost drives me wild. What shall I do? You ought to know. It
is your fault. You have frightened me out of daring to tell the truth."

Had he, indeed, done that? Verrian asked himself, and it seemed to him
that he had done something like it. If it was so, he must help her over
her fear now. He answered, bluntly, harshly: "You must tell him all
about it--"

"But if he won't believe me? Do you think he will believe me? Would you
believe me?"

"You have nothing to do with that. There is nothing for you but to tell
him the whole story. You mustn't share such a secret with any one but
your husband. When you tell him it will cease to be my secret."

"Yes, yes."

"Well, then, you must tell him, unless--"

"Yes," she prompted.

Then they were both silent, looking intensely into each other's eyes. In
that moment all else of life seemed to melt and swim away from Verrian
and leave him stranded upon an awful eminence confronting her.

"Hello, hello!" a gay voice called, as if calling to them both. "What
are you two conspiring?" Bushwick, as suddenly as if he had fallen from
the sky or started up from the earth, stood before them, and gave a hand
to each--his right to Verrian, his left to Miss Shirley. "How are you,
Verrian? How are you, Miss Shirley?" He mocked her in the formality of
his address. "I've been shadowing you ever since you came into the park,
but I thought I wouldn't interrupt till you seemed to have got through
your conversation. May I ask what it was all about? It seemed very
absorbing, from a respectful distance."

"Very absorbing, indeed," Miss Shirley said, making room for him between
them. "Sit down and let me tell you. You're to be a partner in the
secret."

"Silent partner," Bushwick suggested.

"I hope you'll always be silent," the girl shared in his drolling.
She began and told the whole story to the last detail, sparing neither
herself nor Verrian, who listened as if he were some one else not
concerned, and kept saying to himself, "what courage!" Bushwick listened
as mutely, with a face that, to Verrian's eye, seemed to harden from its
light jocosity into a severity he had not seen in it before. "It was
something," she ended towards Bushwick, with a catch in her breath,
"that you had to know."

"Yes," he answered, tonelessly.

"And now"--she attempted a little forlorn playfulness--"don't you think he
gave me what I deserved?"

Bushwick rose up and took her hand under his arm, keeping his left hand
upon hers.

"He! Who?"

"Mr. Verrian."

"I don't know any Mr. Verrian. Come, you'll take cold here."

He turned his back on Verrian, who fancied a tremor in her hat, as if she
would look round at him; but then, as if she divined Bushwick's
intention, she did not look round, and together they left him.

It was days before Verrian could confess himself of the fact to his
mother, who listened with the justice instinctive in her. She still had
not spoken when he ended, and he said, "I have thought it all over, and I
feel that he did right. He did the only thing that a man in love with
her could do. And I don't wonder he's in love with her. Yes"--he stayed
his mother, imperatively--"and such a man as he, though he ground me in
the dirt and stamped on me, I will say, it, is worthy of any woman. He
can believe in a woman, and that's the first thing that's needed to make
a woman like her, true. I don't envy his job." He was speaking
self-contradictorily, irrelevantly, illogically, as a man thinks. He
went on in that way, getting himself all out. "She isn't single-hearted,
but she's faithful. She'll never betray him now. She's never given him
any reason to distrust her. She's the kind that can keep on straight
with any one she's begun straight with. She told him all that before me
be cause she wanted me to know--to realize--that she had told him. It
took courage."

Mrs. Verrian had thought of generalizing, but she seized a single point.
"Perhaps not so much courage as you think. You mustn't let such bravado
impose upon you, Philip. I've no doubt she knew her ground."

"She took the chance of his casting her off."

"She knew he wouldn't. She knew him, and she knew you. She knew that if
he cast her off--"

"Mother! Don't say it! I can't bear it!"

His mother did not say it, or anything more, then. Late at night she
came to him. "Are you asleep, Philip?"

"Asleep? I!"

"I didn't suppose you were. But I have had a note to-day which I must
answer. Mrs. Andrews has asked us to dinner on Saturday. Philip, if you
could see that sweet girl as I do, in all her goodness and sincerity--"

"I think I do, mother. And I wouldn't be guilty of her unhappiness for
the world. You must decline."

"Well, perhaps you are right." Mrs. Verrian went away, softly, sighing.
As she sealed her reply to Mrs. Andrews, she sighed again, and made the
reflection which a mother seldom makes with regard to her son, before his
marriage, that men do not love women for their goodness.




PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Almost incomparably ignorant woman
Almost to die of hunger for something to happen
Belief of immortality--without one jot of evidence
Brave in the right time and place
Continuity becomes the instinctive expectation
Found her too frankly disputatious
Girls who were putting on the world as hard as they could
If there's wrong done the penalty doesn't right it
Never wanted a holiday so much as the day after you had one
Personal view of all things and all persons which women take
Proof against the stupidest praise
Read too many stories to care for the plot
She laughed too much and too loud
Sick people are terribly, egotistical
The fad that fails is extinguished forever
Timidity is at the bottom of all fondness for secrecy