William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
heard from the parlor at last, and we knew the ladies had risen. In a loud voice Hasketh began to say that they had a carriage down at the gate, and I said they had better let me show them the way down; and as my wife followed the others into the hall, I pulled open the outer door for them. On the threshold stood a man about to ring, who let his hand drop from the bell-pull. "Why, Tedham!" I shouted, joyfully.
The light from the hall-lamp struck full on his face; we all involuntarily shrank back, except the girl, who looked, not at the man before her, but first at her aunt and then at her uncle, timorously, and murmured some inaudible question. They did not answer, and now Tedham and his daughter looked at each other, with what feeling no one can ever fully say.
VIII
It always seemed to me as if we had witnessed something like the return of one from the dead, in this meeting. We were talking it over one evening some weeks later, and "It would be all very well," I philosophized, "if the dead came back at once, but if one came back after ten years, it would be difficult."
"It was worse than coming back from the dead," said my wife. "But I hope that is the end of it so far as we are concerned. I am sure I am glad to be out of it, and I don't wish to see any of them ever again."
"Why, I don't know about that," I returned, and I began to laugh. "You know Hubbell, our inspector of agencies?"
"What has he got to do with it?"
"Hubbell has had a romantic moment. He thinks that in view of the restitution Tedham made as far as he could, and his excellent record—elsewhere—it would be a fine thing for the Reciprocity to employ him again in our office, and he wanted to suggest it to the actuary."
"Basil! You didn't allow him to do such a cruel thing as that?"
"No, my dear, I am happy to say that I sat upon that dramatic climax."
This measurably consoled my wife, but she did not cease to denounce the idea for some moments. When she ended, I asked her if she would allow the company to employ Tedham in a subordinate place in another city, and when she signified that this might be suffered, I said that this was what would probably be done. Then I added, seriously, that I thoroughly liked the notion of it, and that I took it for a testimony that poor old Tedham was right, and that he had at last fully expiated his offence against society.
His daughter continued to live with her aunt and uncle, but Tedham used to spend his holidays with them, and, however incongruously, they got on together very well, I believe. The girl kept the name of Hasketh, and I do not suppose that many people knew her relation to Tedham. It appeared that our little romantic supposition of a love affair, which the reunion of father and child must shatter, was for the present quite gratuitous. But if it should ever come to that, my wife and I had made up our minds to let God manage. We said that we had already had one narrow escape in proposing to better the divine way of doing, and we should not interfere again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was married to a young Englishman whom she had met in Canada, and whom she told all about her unhappy family history before she permitted herself to accept him.
During the one brief interview I had with him, for the purpose of further blackening her father's character (for so I understood her insistence that I should see the young man), he seemed not only wholly unmoved by the facts, but was apparently sorry that poor Tedham had not done much worse things, and many more of them, that he might forgive him for her sake.
They went to live abroad after they were married; and by and by Tedham joined them. So far now as human vision can perceive, the trouble he made, the evil he did, is really at an end. Love, which can alone arrest the consequences of wrong, had ended it, and in certain luminous moments it seemed to us that we had glimpsed, in our witness of this experience, an infinite compassion encompassing our whole being like a sea, where every trouble of our sins and sorrows must cease at last like a circle in the water.
A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA: A Romance
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