 | XV. The rise of Silas Lapham |  |
XV.
Lapham's strenuous face was broken up with the
emotions that had forced him to this question:
shame, fear of the things that must have been
thought of him, mixed with a faint hope that he
might be mistaken, which died out at the shocked
and pitying look in Corey's eyes.
"Was I drunk?" he repeated. "I ask you, because
I was never touched by drink in my life before,
and I don't know." He stood with his huge hands
trembling on the back of his chair, and his dry lips
apart, as he stared at Corey.
"That is what every one understood, Colonel
Lapham," said the young man. "Every one saw
how it was. Don't—"
"Did they talk it over after I left?" asked Lapham
vulgarly.
"Excuse me," said Corey, blushing, "my father
doesn't talk his guests over with one another." He
added, with youthful superfluity, "You were among
gentlemen."
"I was the only one that wasn't a gentleman
there!" lamented Lapham. "I disgraced you! I
disgraced my family! I mortified your father before
I wasn't fit to go with you. I'm not fit for any
decent place. What did I say? What did I do?"
he asked, suddenly lifting his head and confronting
Corey. "Out with it! If you could bear to see it
and hear it, I had ought to bear to know it!"
"There was nothing—really nothing," said Corey.
"Beyond the fact that you were not quite yourself,
there was nothing whatever. My father did speak
of it to me," he confessed, "when we were alone.
He said that he was afraid we had not been thoughtful
of you, if you were in the habit of taking only
water; I told him I had not seen wine at your
table. The others said nothing about you."
"Ah, but what did they think?"
"Probably what we did: that it was purely a
misfortune—an accident."
"I wasn't fit to be there," persisted Lapham. "Do
you want to leave?" he asked, with savage abruptness.
"Leave?" faltered the young man.
"Yes; quit the business? Cut the whole connection?"
"I haven't the remotest idea of it!" cried Corey
in amazement. "Why in the world should I?"
"Because you're a gentleman, and I'm not, and
it ain't right I should be over you. If you want to
go, I know some parties that would be glad to get
you. I will give you up if you want to go before
anything worse happens, and I shan't blame you.
I can help you to something better than I can offer
you here, and I will."
"There's no question of my going, unless you wish
it," said Corey. "If you do—"
"Will you tell your father," interrupted Lapham,
"that I had a notion all the time that I was acting
the drunken blackguard, and that I've suffered for
it all day? Will you tell him I don't want him
to notice me if we ever meet, and that I know I'm
not fit to associate with gentlemen in anything but a
business way, if I am that?"
"Certainly I shall do nothing of the kind," retorted
Corey. "I can't listen to you any longer.
What you say is shocking to me—shocking in a way
you can't think."
"Why, man!" exclaimed Lapham, with astonishment;
"if I can stand it, you can!"
"No," said Corey, with a sick look, "that doesn't
follow. You may denounce yourself, if you will;
but I have my reasons for refusing to hear you—my
reasons why I can't hear you. If you say another
word I must go away."
"I don't understand you," faltered Lapham, in
bewilderment, which absorbed even his shame.
"You exaggerate the effect of what has happened,"
said the young man. "It's enough, more than
enough, for you to have mentioned the matter to me,
and I think it's unbecoming in me to hear you."
He made a movement toward the door, but Lapham
stopped him with the tragic humility of his
appeal. "Don't go yet! I can't let you. I've disgusted
you,—I see that; but I didn't mean to. I—
I take it back."
"Oh, there's nothing to take back," said Corey,
with a repressed shudder for the abasement which
he had seen. "But let us say no more about it—
think no more. There wasn't one of the gentlemen
present last night who didn't understand the matter
precisely as my father and I did, and that fact must
end it between us two."
He went out into the larger office beyond, leaving
Lapham helpless to prevent his going. It had become
a vital necessity with him to think the best of
Lapham, but his mind was in a whirl of whatever
thoughts were most injurious. He thought of him
the night before in the company of those ladies and
gentlemen, and he quivered in resentment of his
vulgar, braggart, uncouth nature. He recognised
his own allegiance to the exclusiveness to which he
was born and bred, as a man perceives his duty to
his country when her rights are invaded. His eye
fell on the porter going about in his shirt-sleeves to
make the place fast for the night, and he said to
himself that Dennis was not more plebeian than his
master; that the gross appetites, the blunt sense,
the purblind ambition, the stupid arrogance were
the same in both, and the difference was in a brute
will that probably left the porter the gentler man of
the two. The very innocence of Lapham's life in
the direction in which he had erred wrought against
him in the young man's mood: it contained the
insult of clownish inexperience. Amidst the stings
and flashes of his wounded pride, all the social traditions,
all the habits of feeling, which he had silenced
months, asserted their natural sway, and he rioted
in his contempt of the offensive boor, who was even
more offensive in his shame than in his trespass.
He said to himself that he was a Corey, as if that
were somewhat; yet he knew that at the bottom of
his heart all the time was that which must control
him at last, and which seemed sweetly to be suffering
his rebellion, secure of his submission in the end.
It was almost with the girl's voice that it seemed to
plead with him, to undo in him, effect by effect, the
work of his indignant resentment, to set all things
in another and fairer light, to give him hopes, to
suggest palliations, to protest against injustices. It
was in Lapham's favour that he was so guiltless in
the past, and now Corey asked himself if it were the
first time he could have wished a guest at his father's
table to have taken less wine; whether Lapham was
not rather to be honoured for not knowing how to
contain his folly where a veteran transgressor might
have held his tongue. He asked himself, with a
thrill of sudden remorse, whether, when Lapham
humbled himself in the dust so shockingly, he had
shown him the sympathy to which such abandon had
the right; and he had to own that he had met him
on the gentlemanly ground, sparing himself and
asserting the superiority of his sort, and not recognising
that Lapham's humiliation came from the
sense of wrong, which he had helped to accumulate
upon him by superfinely standing aloof and refusing
to touch him.
He shut his desk and hurried out into the early
night, not to go anywhere, but to walk up and down,
to try to find his way out of the chaos, which now
seemed ruin, and now the materials out of which
fine actions and a happy life might be shaped.
Three hours later he stood at Lapham's door.
At times what he now wished to do had seemed
for ever impossible, and again it had seemed as if he
could not wait a moment longer. He had not been
careless, but very mindful of what he knew must be
the feelings of his own family in regard to the Laphams,
and he had not concealed from himself that
his family had great reason and justice on their side
in not wishing him to alienate himself from their
common life and associations. The most that he
could urge to himself was that they had not all the
reason and justice; but he had hesitated and delayed
because they had so much. Often he could not make
it appear right that he should merely please himself in
what chiefly concerned himself. He perceived how
far apart in all their experiences and ideals the Lapham
girls and his sisters were; how different Mrs.
Lapham was from his mother; how grotesquely
unlike were his father and Lapham; and the disparity
had not always amused him.
He had often taken it very seriously, and sometimes
he said that he must forego the hope on which
his heart was set. There had been many times in
the past months when he had said that he must go
no further, and as often as he had taken this stand
he had yielded it, upon this or that excuse, which
complication that he should be unconscious of the
injury he might be doing to some one besides his
family and himself; this was the defect of his diffidence;
and it had come to him in a pang for the
first time when his mother said that she would not
have the Laphams think she wished to make more
of the acquaintance than he did; and then it had
come too late. Since that he had suffered quite as
much from the fear that it might not be as that it
might be so; and now, in the mood, romantic and
exalted, in which he found himself concerning Lapham,
he was as far as might be from vain confidence.
He ended the question in his own mind by affirming
to himself that he was there, first of all, to see
Lapham and give him an ultimate proof of his own
perfect faith and unabated respect, and to offer him
what reparation this involved for that want of
sympathy—of humanity—which he had shown.
| XV. The rise of Silas Lapham | |