A Modern Instance eBook

“She’s grown commoner and narrower, but it’s hardly her fault, poor thing, and it seems terribly unjust that she should be made so by what she has suffered.  But that’s just the way it has happened.  She’s so undisciplined, that she couldn’t get any good out of her misfortunes; she’s only got harm:  they’ve made her selfish, and there seems to be nothing left of what she was two years ago but her devotion to that miserable wretch.  You mustn’t let it turn you against her, Ben; you mustn’t forget what she might have been.  She had a rich nature; but how it’s been wasted, and turned back upon itself!  Poor, untrained, impulsive, innocent creature,—­my heart aches for her!  It’s been hard to bear with her at times, terribly hard, and you’ll find it so, Ben.  But you must bear with her.  The awfulest thing about people in trouble is that they are such bores; they tire you to death.  But you’ll only have to stand her praises of what Bartley was, and we had to stand them, and her hopes of what you would be if you were only at home, besides.  I don’t know what all she expects of you; but you must try not to disappoint her; she worships the ground you tread on, and I really think she believes you can do anything you will, just because you’re good.”

Halleck listened in silence.  He was indeed helpless to be otherwise than constant.  With shame and grief in his heart, he could only vow her there the greater fealty because of the change he found in her.

He was doomed at every meeting to hear her glorify a man whom he believed a heartless traitor, to plot with her for the rescue from imaginary captivity of the wretch who had cruelly forsaken her.  He actually took some of the steps she urged; he addressed inquiries to the insane asylums, far and near; and in these futile endeavors, made only with the desire of failure, his own reason seemed sometimes to waver.  She insisted that Atherton should know all the steps they were taking; and his sense of his old friend’s exact and perfect knowledge of his motives was a keener torture than even her father’s silent scorn of his efforts, or the worship in which his own family held him for them.

XXXVII.

Halleck had come home in broken health, and had promised his family, with the self-contempt that depraves, not to go away again, since the change had done him no good.  There was no talk for the present of his trying to do anything but to get well; and for a while, under the strong excitement, he seemed to be better.  But suddenly he failed; he kept his room, and then he kept his bed; and the weeks stretched into months before he left it.

When the spring weather came, he was able to go out again, and he spent most of his time in the open air, feeling every day a fresh accession of strength.  At the end of one long April afternoon, he walked home with a light heart, whose right to rejoice he would not let his conscience question.  He had met Marcia in the Public Garden, where they sat down on a bench and talked, while her father and the little girl wandered away in the restlessness of age and the restlessness of childhood.