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
his friends!" His head dropped. "I showed that 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 more and more by force of
will during the past 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 he was aware of trumping up. It was part of the
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.