A Counterfeit Presentment; and, The Parlour Car

by William Dean Howells

IV.

Bartlett and Constance.

Bartlett.—"I didn't know you were here."

Constance.—"Neither did I—know you were, till I heard you singing."

Bartlett, smiling ironically.—"Oh, you didn't suppose I sang!"

Constance, confusedly.—"I—I don't know"—

Bartlett.—"Ah, you thought I did! I don't. I was indulging in a sort of modulated howling which I flatter myself is at least one peculiarity that's entirely my own. I was baying the landscape merely for my private amusement, and I'd not have done it, if I'd known you were in hearing. However, if it's helped to settle the fact one way or other, concerning any little idiosyncrasy of mine, I shan't regret it. I hope not to disappoint you in anything, by-and-by." He drops his hands from the door-posts and steps into the room, while Constance, in shrinking abeyance, stands trembling at his harshness.

Constance, in faltering reproach.—"Mr. Bartlett!"

Bartlett.—"Constance!"

Constance, struggling to assert herself, but breaking feebly in her attempt at hauteur.—"Constance? What does this mean, Mr. Bartlett?"

Bartlett, with a sudden burst.—"What does it mean? It means that I'm sick of this nightmare masquerade. It means that I want to be something to you—all the world to you—in and for myself. It means that I can't play another man's part any longer and live. It means that I love you, love you, love you, Constance!" He starts involuntarily toward her with outstretched arms, from which she recoils with a convulsive cry.

Constance.—"You love me? Me? Oh, no, no! How can you be so merciless as to talk to me of love?" She drops her glowing face into her hands.

Bartlett.—"Because I'm a man. Because love is more than mercy—better, higher, wiser. Listen to me, Constance!—yes, I will call you so now if never again: you are so dear to me that I must say it at last if it killed you. If loving you is cruel, I'm pitiless! Give me some hope, tell me to breathe, my girl!"

Constance.—"Oh go, while I can still forgive you."

Bartlett.—"I won't go; I won't have your forgiveness; I will have all or nothing; I want your love!"

Constance, uncovering her face and turning its desolation upon him: "My love? I have no love to give. My heart is dead."

Bartlett.—"No, no! That's part of the ugly trance that we've both been living in so long. Look! You're better now than when you came here; you're stronger, braver, more beautiful. My angel, you're turned a woman again! Oh, you can love me if you will; and you will! Look at me, darling!" He takes her listless right hand in his left, and gently draws her toward him.

Constance, starting away.—"You're wrong; you're all wrong! You don't understand; you don't know— Oh, listen to me!"

Bartlett, still holding her cold hand fast.—"Yes, a thousand years. But you must tell me first that I may love you. That first!"

Constance.—"No! That never! And since you speak to me of love, listen to what it's my right you should hear."

Bartlett, releasing her.—"I don't care to hear. Nothing can ever change me. But if you bid me, I will go!"

Constance.—"You shall not go now till you know what despised and hated and forsaken thing you've offered your love to."

Bartlett, beseechingly.—"Constance, let me go while I can forgive myself. Nothing you can say will make me love you less; remember that; but I implore you to spare yourself. Don't speak, my love."

Constance.—"Spare myself? Not speak? Not speak what has been on my tongue and heart and brain, a burning fire, so long?— Oh, I was a happy girl once! The days were not long enough for my happiness; I woke at night to think of it. I was proud in my happiness and believed myself, poor fool, one to favour those I smiled on; and I had my vain and crazy dreams of being the happiness of some one who should come to ask for—what you ask now. Some one came. At first I didn't care for him, but he knew how to make me. He knew how to make my thoughts of him part of my happiness and pride and vanity till he was all in all, and I had no wish, no hope, no life but him; and then he—left me!" She buries her face in her hands again, and breaks into a low, piteous sobbing.

Bartlett, with a groan of helpless fury and compassion.—"The fool, the sot, the slave! Constance, I knew all this,—I knew it from the first."

Constance, recoiling in wild reproach.—"You knew it?"

Bartlett, desperately.—"Yes, I knew it—in spite of myself, through my own stubborn fury I knew it, that first day, when I had obliged my friend to tell me what your father had told him, before I would hear reason. I would have given anything not to have known it then, when it was too late, for I had at least the grace to feel the wrong, the outrage of my knowing it. You can never pardon it, I see; but you must feel what a hateful burden I had to bear, when I found that I had somehow purloined the presence, the looks, the voice of another man—a man whom I would have joyfully changed myself to any monstrous shape not to resemble, though I knew that my likeness to him, bewildering you in a continual dream of him, was all that ever made you look at me or think of me. I lived in the hope—Heaven only knows why I should have had the hope!—that I might yet be myself to you; that you might wake from your dream of him and look on me in the daylight, and see that I was at least an honest man, and pity me and may be love me at last, as I loved you at first, from the moment I saw your dear pale face, and heard your dear, sad voice." He follows up her slow retreat and again possesses himself of her hand: "Don't cast me off! It was monstrous, out of all decency, to know your sorrow; but I never tried to know it; I tried not to know it." He keeps fast hold of her hand, while she remains with averted head. "I love you, Constance; I loved you; and when once you had bidden me stay, I was helpless to go away, or I would never be here now to offend you with the confession of that shameful knowledge. Do you think it was no trial to me? It gave me the conscience of an eavesdropper and a spy; yet all I knew was sacred to me."

Constance, turning and looking steadfastly into his face.—"And you could care for so poor a creature as I—so abject, so obtuse as never to know what had made her intolerable to the man that cast her off?"

Bartlett.—"Man? He was no man! He"—

Constance, suddenly.—"Oh, wait! I—I love him yet."

Bartlett, dropping her hand.—"You"—

Constance.—"Yes, yes! As much as I live, I love him! But when he left me, I seemed to die; and now it's as if I were some wretched ghost clinging for all existence to the thought of my lost happiness. If that slips from me, then I cease to be."

Bartlett.—"Why, this is still your dream. But I won't despair. You'll wake yet, and care for me: I know you will."

Constance, tenderly.—"Oh, I'm not dreaming now. I know that you are not he. You are everything that is kind and good; and some day you will be very happy."

Bartlett, desolately.—"I shall never be happy without your love." After a pause: "It will be a barren, bitter comfort, but let me have it if you can: if I had met you first, could you have loved me?"

Constance.—"I might have loved you if—I had—lived." She turns from him again, and moves softly toward the door; his hollow voice arrests her.

Bartlett.—"If you are dead, then I have lived too long. Your loss takes the smile out of life for me." A moment later: "You are cruel, Constance."

Constance, abruptly facing him.—"I cruel? To you?"

Bartlett.—"Yes, you have put me to shame before myself. You might have spared me! A treacherous villain is false in time to save you from a life of betrayal, and you say your heart is dead. But that isn't enough. You tell me that you cannot care for me because you love that treacherous villain still. That's my disgrace, that's my humiliation, that's my killing shame. I could have borne all else. You might have cast me off however you would, driven me away with any scorn, whipped me from you with the sharpest rebuke that such presumption as mine could merit; but to drag a decent man's self-respect through such mire as that poor rascal's memory for six long weeks, and then tell him that you prefer the mire"—

Constance.—"Oh, hush! I can't let you reproach him! He was pitilessly false to me, but I will be true to him for ever. How do I know—I must find some reason for that, or there is no reason in anything!—how do I know that he did not break his word to me at my father's bidding? My father never liked him."

Bartlett, shaking his head with a melancholy smile.—"Ah, Constance, do you think I would break my word to you at your father's bidding?"

Constance, in abject despair.—"Well, then I go back to what I always knew; I was too slight, too foolish, too tiresome for his life-long love. He saw it in time, I don't blame him. You would see it, too."

Bartlett.—"What devil's vantage enabled that infernal scoundrel to blight your spirit with his treason? Constance, is this my last answer?"

Constance.—"Yes, go! I am so sorry for you,—sorrier than I ever thought I could be for anything again."

Bartlett.—"Then if you pity me, give me a little hope that sometime, somehow"—

Constance.—"Oh, I have no hope, for you, for me, for any one. Good-bye, good, kind friend! Try,—you won't have to try hard—to forget me. Unless some miracle should happen to show me that it was all his fault and none of mine, we are parting now for ever. It has been a strange dream, and nothing is so strange as that it should be ending so. Are you the ghost or I, I wonder! It confuses me as it did at first; but if you are he, or only you— Ah, don't look at me so, or I must believe he has never left me, and implore you to stay!"

Bartlett, quietly.—"Thanks. I would not stay a moment longer in his disguise, if you begged me on your knees. I shall always love you, Constance, but if the world is wide enough, please Heaven, I will never see you again. There are some things dearer to me than your presence. No, I won't take your hand; it can't heal the hurt your words have made, and nothing can help me, now I know from your own lips that but for my likeness to him I should never have been anything to you. Good-bye!"

Constance.—"Oh!" She sinks with a long cry into the arm-chair beside the table, and drops her head into her arms upon it. At the door toward which he turns Bartlett meets General Wyatt, and a moment later Mrs. Wyatt enters by the other. Bartlett recoils under the concentrated reproach and inquiry of their gaze.

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