A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories

by William Dean Howells

It accomplished at least one purpose intended. It kept Hoskins away till the final moment, and it brought him to the station for their adieux just before their train started. A consciousness of the absurdity of his part gave his face a humorously rueful cast. But he came pluckily to the mark. He marched straight up to the girl. "It's all right, Miss Lily," he said, and offered her his hand, which she had a strong impulse to cry over. Then he turned to Mrs. Elmore, and while he held her hand in his right, he placed his left affectionately on Elmore's shoulder, and, looking at Lily, he said, "You ought to get Miss Lily to help you out with your history, Professor; she has a very good style,—quite a literary style, I should have said, if I hadn't known it was hers. I don't like her subjects, though." They broke into a forlorn laugh together; he wrung their hands once more, without a word, and, without looking back, limped out of the waiting-room and out of their lives.

They did not know that this was really the last of Hoskins,—one never knows that any parting is the last,—and in their inability to conceive of a serious passion in him, they quickly consoled themselves for what he might suffer. They knew how kindly, how tenderly even, they felt towards him, and by that juggle with the emotions which we all practise at times, they found comfort for him in the fact. Another interest, another figure, began to occupy the morbid fancy of Elmore, and as they approached Peschiera his expectation became intense. There was no reason why it should exist; it would be by the thousandth chance, even if Ehrhardt were still there, that they should meet him at the railroad station, and there were a thousand chances that he was no longer in Peschiera. He could see that his wife and Lily were restive too: as the train drew into the station they nodded to each other, and pointed out of the window, as if to identify the spot where Lily had first noticed him; they laughed nervously, and it seemed to Elmore that he could not endure their laughter.

During that long wait which the train used to make in the old Austrian times at Peschiera, while the police authorities viséd the passports of those about to cross the frontier, Elmore continued perpetually alert. He was aware that he should not know Ehrhardt if he met him; but he should know that he was present from the looks of Lily and Mrs. Elmore, and he watched them. They dined well in waiting, while he impatiently trifled with the food, and ate next to nothing; and they calmly returned to their places in the train, to which he remounted after a last despairing glance around the platform in a passion of disappointment. The old longing not to be left so wholly to the effect of what he had done possessed him to the exclusion of all other sensations, and as the train moved away from the station he fell back against the cushions of the carriage, sick that he should never even have looked on the face of the man in whose destiny he had played so fatal a part.

XIII.

In America, life soon settled into form about the daily duties of Elmore's place, and the daily pleasures and cares which his wife assumed as a leader in Patmos society. Their sojourn abroad conferred its distinction; the day came when they regarded it as a brilliant episode, and it was only by fitful glimpses that they recognized its essential dulness. After they had been home a year or two, Elmore published his Story of Venice in the Lives of her Heroes, which fell into a ready oblivion; he paid all the expenses of the book, and was puzzled that, in spite of this, the final settlement should still bring him in debt to his publishers. He did not understand, but he submitted; and he accepted the failure of his book very meekly. If he could have chosen, he would have preferred that the Saturday Review, which alone noticed it in London with three lines of exquisite slight, should have passed it in silence. But after all, he felt that the book deserved no better fate. He always spoke of it as unphilosophized and incomplete, without any just claim to being.

Lily had returned to her sister's household, but though she came home in the heyday of her young beauty, she failed somehow to take up the story of her life just where she had left it in Patmos. On the way home she had refused an offer in London, and shortly after her arrival in America she received a letter from a young gentleman whom she had casually seen in Geneva, and who had found exile insupportable since parting with her, and was ready to return to his native land at her bidding; but she said nothing of these proposals till long afterwards to Professor Elmore, who, she said, had suffered enough from her offers. She went to all the parties and picnics, and had abundant opportunities of flirtation and marriage; but she neither flirted nor married. She seemed to have greatly sobered; and the sound sense which she had always shown became more and more qualified with a thoughtful sweetness. At first, the relation between her and the Elmores lost something of its intimacy; but when, after several years, her health gave way, a familiarity, even kinder than before, grew up. She used to like to come to them, and talk and laugh fondly over their old Venetian days. But often she sat pensive and absent, in the midst of these memories, and looked at Elmore with a regard which he found hard to bear: a gentle, unconscious wonder it seemed, in which he imagined a shade of tender reproach.

When she recovered her health, after a journey to the West one winter, they saw that, by some subtile and indefinable difference, she was no longer a young girl. Perhaps it was because they had not met her for half a year. But perhaps it was age,—she was now thirty. However it was, Elmore recognized with a pang that the first youth at least had gone out of her voice and eyes. She only returned to arrange for a long sojourn in the West. She liked the climate and the people, she said; and she seemed well and happy. She had planned starting a Kindergarten school in Omaha with another young lady; she said that she wanted something to do. "She will end by marrying one of those Western widowers," said Mrs. Elmore.

"I wonder she didn't take poor old Hoskins," mused Elmore aloud.

"No, you don't, dear," said his wife, who had not grown less direct in dealing with him. "You know it would have been ridiculous; besides, she never cared anything for him,—she couldn't. You might as well wonder why she didn't take Captain Ehrhardt after you dismissed him."