A Pair of Patient Lovers

by William Dean Howells

"You never can know just how much of a thing children have taken in, or how much they have understood," she continued, repeating herself, as she did throughout, "and I had to keep this in mind when I had my talks with Fay about her father. She wanted to write to him at first, and of course I let her—"

My wife and I could not forbear exchanging a glance of intelligence, which Mrs. Hasketh intercepted.

"I presume he told you?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "he showed us the letter."

"Well, it was something that had to be done. As long as she questioned me about him, I put her off the best way I could, and after a while she seemed to give up questioning me of her own accord. Perhaps she really began to understand it, or some of the cruel little things she played with said something. I was always afraid of the other children throwing it up to her, and that was one reason we went away for three or four years and let our place here."

"I didn't know you were gone," I said toward Hasketh, who cleared his throat to explain:

"I had some interests at that time in Canada. We were at Quebec."

"It shows what a rush our life is," I philosophized, with the implication that Hasketh and I had been old friends, and I ought to have noticed that I had not met him during the time of his absence. The fact was we had never come so near intimacy as when we exchanged confidences concerning the severity of Tedham's sentence in coming out of the court-room together.

"I hadn't any interest in Canada, except to get the child away," said Mrs. Hasketh. "Sometimes it seemed strange we should be in Canada, and not Mr. Tedham! She got acquainted with some little girls who were going to a convent school there as externes—outside pupils, you know," Mrs. Hasketh explained to my wife. "She got very fond of one of them—she is a child of very warm affections. I never denied that Mr. Tedham had warm affections—and when her little girl friend went into the convent to go on with her education there, Fay wanted to go too, and—we let her. That was when she was twelve, and Mr. Hasketh felt that he ought to come back and look after his business here; and we left her in the convent. Just as soon as she was out of the way, and out of the question, it seemed as if I got to feeling differently toward Mr. Tedham. I don't mean to say I ever got to like him, or that I do to this day; but I saw that he had some rights, too, and for years and years I wanted to take the child and tell her when he was coming out. I used to ask myself what right I even had to keep the child from the suffering. The suffering was hers by rights, and she ought to go through it. I got almost crazy thinking it over. I got to thinking that her share of her father's shame might be the very thing, of all things, that was to discipline her and make her a good and useful woman; and that's much more than being a happy one, Mrs. March; we can't any of us be truly happy, no matter what's done for us. I tried to make believe that I was sparing her alone, but I knew I was sparing myself, too, and that made it harder to decide." She suddenly addressed herself to us both: "What would you have done?"

My wife and I looked at each other in a dismay in which a glance from old Hasketh assured us that we had his sympathy. It would have been far simpler if Mrs. Hasketh had been up and down with us as Tedham's emissaries, and refused to tell us anything of his daughter, and left us to report to him that he must find her for himself if he found her at all. This was what we had both expected, and we had come prepared to take back that answer to Tedham, and discharge our whole duty towards him in its delivery. This change in the woman who had hated him so fiercely, but whose passion had worn itself down to the underlying conscience with the lapse of time, certainly complicated the case. I was silent; my wife said: "I don't know what I should have done, Mrs. Hasketh;" and Mrs. Hasketh resumed: