She posted her letter, and he sent his reply in the evening, by hand:—
Dearest—What I did was nothing, till you praised it. Everything I have and am is yours. Won’t you send a line by the bearer, to say that I may come to see you? I know how you feel; but I am sure that I can make you think differently. You must consider that I loved you without a thought of your father’s circumstances, and always shall.
The generous words were blurred to her eyes by the tears that sprang into them. But she could only write in answer:—
“Please do not come; I have made up my mind. As long as this trouble is hanging over us, I cannot see you. And if father is unfortunate, all is over between us.”
She brought his letter to her mother, and told her what she had written in reply. Her mother was thoughtful a while before she said, with a sigh, “Well, I hope you’ve begun as you can carry out, Pen.”
“Oh, I shall not have to carry out at all. I shall not have to do anything. That’s one comfort—the only comfort.” She went away to her own room, and when Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the affair, he was silent at first, as she had been. Then he said, “I don’t know as I should have wanted her to done differently; I don’t know as she could. If I ever come right again, she won’t have anything to feel meeching about; and if I don’t, I don’t want she should be beholden to anybody. And I guess that’s the way she feels.”
The Coreys in their turn sat in judgment on the fact which their son felt bound to bring to their knowledge.
“She has behaved very well,” said Mrs. Corey, to whom her son had spoken.
“My dear,” said her husband, with his laugh, “she has behaved too well. If she had studied the whole situation with the most artful eye to its mastery, she could not possibly have behaved better.”
The process of Lapham’s financial disintegration was like the course of some chronic disorder, which has fastened itself upon the constitution, but advances with continual reliefs, with apparent amelioration, and at times seems not to advance at all, when it gives hope of final recovery not only to the sufferer, but to the eye of science itself. There were moments when James Bellingham, seeing Lapham pass this crisis and that, began to fancy that he might pull through altogether; and at these moments, when his adviser could not oppose anything but experience and probability to the evidence of the fact, Lapham was buoyant with courage, and imparted his hopefulness to his household. Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelists, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false. The house of mourning is decorously darkened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing. Bursts of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the stricken survivors have their jests together, in which the thought of the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and making it all up again with the conventional fitness of things. Lapham’s adversity had this quality in common with bereavement. It was not always like the adversity we figure in allegory; it had its moments of being like prosperity, and if upon the whole it was continual, it was not incessant. Sometimes there was a week of repeated reverses, when he had to keep his teeth set and to hold on hard to all his hopefulness; and then days came of negative result or slight success, when he was full of his jokes at the tea-table, and wanted to go to the theatre, or to do something to cheer Penelope up. In some miraculous way, by some enormous stroke of success which should eclipse the brightest of his past prosperity, he expected to do what would reconcile all difficulties, not only in his own affairs, but in hers too. “You’ll see,” he said to his wife; “it’s going to come out all right. Irene’ll fix it up with Bill’s boy, and then she’ll be off Pen’s mind; and if things go on as they’ve been going for the last two days, I’m going to be in a position to do the favours myself, and Pen can feel that she’s makin’ a sacrifice, and then I guess may be she’ll do it. If things turn out as I expect now, and times ever do get any better generally, I can show Corey that I appreciate his offer. I can offer him the partnership myself then.”
Even in the other moods, which came when everything had been going wrong, and there seemed no way out of the net, there were points of consolation to Lapham and his wife. They rejoiced that Irene was safe beyond the range of their anxieties, and they had a proud satisfaction that there had been no engagement between Corey and Penelope, and that it was she who had forbidden it. In the closeness of interest and sympathy in which their troubles had reunited them, they confessed to each other that nothing would have been more galling to their pride than the idea that Lapham should not have been able to do everything for his daughter that the Coreys might have expected. Whatever happened now, the Coreys could not have it to say that the Laphams had tried to bring any such thing about.
Bellingham had lately suggested an assignment
