The difficulty in life is to bring experience to the level of expectation, to match our real emotions in view of any great occasion with the ideal emotions which we have taught ourselves that we ought to feel. This is all the truer when the occasion is tragical: we surprise ourselves in a helplessness to which the great event, death, ruin, lost love, reveals itself slowly, and at first wears the aspect of an unbroken continuance of what has been, or at most of another incident in the habitual sequence.
Dan Mavering came out into the bright winter morning knowing that his engagement was broken, but feeling it so little that he could not believe it. He failed to realise it, to seize it for a fact, and he could not let it remain that dumb and formless wretchedness, without proportion or dimensions, which it now seemed to be, weighing his life down. To verify it, to begin to outlive it, he must instantly impart it, he must tell it, he must see it with others' eyes. This was the necessity of his youth and of his sympathy, which included himself as well as the rest of the race in its activity. He had the usual environment of a young man who has money. He belonged to clubs, and he had a large acquaintance among men of his own age, who lived a life of greater leisure; or were more absorbed in business, but whom he met constantly in society. For one reason or another, or for no other reason than that he was Dan Mavering and liked every one, he liked them all. He thought himself great friends with them; he dined and lunched with them; and they knew the Pasmers, and all about his engagement. But he did not go to any of them now, with the need he felt to impart his calamity, to get the support of come other's credence and opinion of it. He went to a friend whom, in the way of his world, he met very seldom, but whom he always found, as he said, just where he had left him.
Boardman never made any sign of suspecting that he was put on and off, according to Dan's necessity or desire for comfort or congratulation; but it was part of their joke that Dan's coming to him always meant something decisive in his experiences. The reporter was at his late breakfast, which his landlady furnished him in his room, though, as Mrs. Mash said, she never gave meals, but a cup of coffee and an egg or two, yes.
“Well?” he said, without looking up.
“Well, I'm done for!” cried Dan.
“Again?” asked Boardman.
“Again! The other time was nothing, Boardman—I knew it wasn't anything; but this—this is final.”
“Go on,” said Boardman, looking about for his individual salt-cellar, which he found under the edge of his plate; and Mavering laid the whole case before him. As he made no comment on it for a while, Dan was obliged to ask him what he thought of it. “Well,” he said, with the smile that showed the evenness of his pretty teeth, “there's a kind of wild justice in it.” He admitted this, with the object of meeting Dan's views in an opinion.
“So you think I'm a faithless man too, do you?” demanded Mavering stormily.
“Not from your point of view,” said Boardman, who kept on quietly eating and drinking.
Mavering was too amiable not to feel Boardman's innocence of offence in his unperturbed behaviour. “There was no faithlessness about it, and you know it,” he went on, half laughing, half crying, in his excitement, and making Boardman the avenue of an appeal really addressed to Alice. “I was ready to do what either side decided.”
“Or both,” suggested Boardman.
“Yes, or both,” said Dan, boldly accepting the suggestion. “It wouldn't have cost me a pang to give up if I'd been in the place of either.”
“I guess that's what she could never understand,” Boardman mused aloud.
“And I could never understand how any one could fail to see that that was what I intended—expected: that it would all come out right of itself—naturally.” Dan was still addressing Alice in this belated reasoning. “But to be accused of bad faith—of trying to deceive any one—”
“Pretty rough,” said Boardman.
“Rough? It's more than I can stand!”
“Well, you don't seem to be asked to stand it,” said Boardman, and Mavering laughed forlornly with him at his joke, and then walked away and looked out of Boardman's dormer-window on the roofs below, with their dirty, smoke-stained February snow. He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped his face with it. When he turned round, Boardman looked keenly at him, and asked, with an air of caution, “And so it's all up?”
“Yes, it's all up,” said Dan hoarsely.
“No danger of a relapse?”
“What do you mean?”
“No danger of having my sympathy handed over later to Miss Pasmer for examination?”
“I guess you can speak up freely, Boardman,” said Dan, “if that's what you mean. Miss Pasmer and I are quits.”
“Well, then, I'm glad of it. She wasn't the one for you. She isn't fit for you.”
“What's the reason she isn't?” cried Dan. “She's the most beautiful and noble girl in the world, and the most conscientious, and the best—if she is unjust to me.”
“No doubt of that. I'm not attacking her, and I'm not defending you.”
“What are you doing then?”
“Simply saying that I don't believe you two would ever understand each other. You haven't got the same point of view, and you couldn't make it go. Both out of a scrape.”
“I don't know what you mean by a scrape,” said Dan, resenting the word more than the idea. Boardman tacitly refused to modify or withdraw it, and Dan said, after a sulky silence, in which he began to dramatise a meeting with his family: “I'm going home; I can't stand it here. What's the reason you can't come with me, Boardman?”
“Do you mean to your rooms?”
“No; to the Falls.”
“Thanks. Guess not.”
“Why not?”
“Don't care about being a fifth wheel.”
“Oh, pshaw, now, Boardman! Look here, you must go. I want you to go. I—I want your support. That's it. I'm all broken up, and I couldn't stand that three hours' pull alone. They'll be glad to see you—all of them. Don't you suppose they'll be glad to see you? They're always glad; and they'll understand.”
“I don't believe you want me to go yourself. You just think you do.”
“No. I really do want you, Boardman. I want to talk it over with you. I do want you. I'm not fooling.”
“Don't think I could get away.” Yet he seemed to be pleased with the notion of the Falls; it made him smile.
“Well, see,” said Mavering disconsolately. “I'm going round to my rooms now, and I'll be there till two o'clock; train's at 2.30.” He went towards the door, where he faced about. “And you don't think it would be of any use?”
“Any use—what?”
“Trying to—to—to make it up.”
“How should I know?”
“No, no; of course you couldn't,” said Dan, miserably downcast. All the resentment which Alice's injustice had roused in him had died out; he was suffering as helplessly and hopelessly as a child. “Well,” he sighed, as he swung out of the door.
Boardman found him seated at his writing-desk in his smoking-jacket when he came to him, rather early, and on the desk were laid out the properties of the little play which had come to a tragic close. There were some small bits of jewellery, among the rest a ring of hers which Alice had been letting him wear; a lock of her hair which he had kept, for the greater convenience of kissing, in the original parcel, tied with crimson ribbon; a succession of flowers which she had worn, more and more dry and brown with age; one of her gloves, which he had found and kept from the day they first met in Cambridge; a bunch of withered bluebells tied with sweet-grass, whose odour filled the room, from the picnic at Campobello; scraps of paper with her writing on them, and cards; several photographs of her, and piles of notes and letters.
“Look here,” said Dan, knowing it was Boardman without turning round, “what am I to do about these things?”
Boardman respectfully examined them over his shoulder. “Don't know what the usual ceremony is,” he said, he ventured to add, referring to the heaps of letters, “Seems to have been rather epistolary, doesn't she?”
“Oh, don't talk of her as if she were dead!” cried Dan. “I've been feeling as if she were.” All at once he dropped his head among these witnesses of his loss, and sobbed.
Boardman appeared shocked, and yet somewhat amused; he made a soft low sibilation between his teeth.
Dan lifted his head. “Boardman, if you ever give me away!”
“Oh, I don't suppose it's very hilarious,” said Boardman, with vague kindness. “Packed yet?” he asked, getting away from the subject as something he did not feel himself fitted to deal with consecutively.
“I'm only going to take a bag,” said Mavering, going to get some clothes down from a closet where his words had a sepulchral reverberation.
“Can't I help?” asked Boardman, keeping away from the sad memorials of Dan's love strewn about on the desk, and yet not able to keep his eyes off them across the room.
“Well, I don't know,” said Dan. He came out with his armful of coats and trousers, and threw them on the bed. “Are you going?”
“If I could believe you wanted me to.”
“Good!” cried Mavering, and the fact seemed to brighten him immediately. “If you want to, stuff these things in, while I'm doing up these other things.” He nodded his head side-wise toward the desk.
“All right,” said Boardman.
His burst of grief must have relieved Dan greatly. He set about gathering up the relics on the desk, and getting a suitable piece of paper to wrap them in. He rejected several pieces as inappropriate.
“I don't know what kind of paper to do these things up in,” he said at last.
“Any special kind of paper required?” Boardman asked, pausing in the act of folding a pair of pantaloons so as not to break the fall over the boot.
“I didn't know there was, but there seems to be,” said Dan.
“Silver paper seems to be rather more for cake and that sort of thing,” suggested Boardman. “Kind of mourning too, isn't it—silver?”
“I don't know,” said Dan. “But I haven't got any silver paper.”
“Newspaper wouldn't do?”
“Well, hardly, Boardman,” said Dan, with sarcasm.
“Well,” said Boardman, “I should have supposed that nothing could be simpler than to send back a lot of love-letters; but the question of paper seems insuperable. Manila paper wouldn't do either. And then comes string. What kind of string are you going to tie it up with?”
“Well, we won't start that question till we get to it,” answered Dan, looking about. “If I could find some kind of a box—”
“Haven't you got a collar box? Be the very thing!” Boardman had gone back to the coats and trousers, abandoning Dan to the subtler difficulties in which he was involved.
“They've all got labels,” said Mavering, getting down one marked “The Tennyson” and another lettered “The Clarion,” and looking at them with cold rejection.
“Don't see how you're going to send these things back at all, then. Have to keep them, I guess.” Boardman finished his task, and came back to Dan.
“I guess I've got it now,” said Mavering, lifting the lid of his desk, and taking out a large stiff envelope, in which a set of photographic views had come.
“Seems to have been made for it,” Boardman exulted, watching the envelope, as it filled up, expand into a kind of shapely packet. Dan put the things silently in, and sealed the parcel with his ring. Then he turned it over to address it, but the writing of Alice's name for this purpose seemed too much for him, in spite of Boardman's humorous support throughout.
“Oh, I can't do it,” he said, falling back in his chair.
“Let me,” said his friend, cheerfully ignoring his despair. He philosophised the whole transaction, as he addressed the package, rang for a messenger, and sent it away, telling him to call a cab for ten minutes past two.
“Mighty good thing in life that we move by steps. Now on the stage, or in a novel, you'd have got those things together and addressed 'em, and despatched 'em, in just the right kind of paper, with just the right kind of string round it, at a dash; and then you'd have had time to go up and lean your head against something and soliloquise, or else think unutterable things. But here you see how a merciful Providence blocks your way all along. You've had to fight through all sort of sordid little details to the grand tragic result of getting off Miss Pasmer's letters, and when you reach it you don't mind it a bit.”
“Don't I?” demanded Dan, in as hollow a voice as he could. “You'd joke at a funeral, Boardman.”
“I've seen some pretty cheerful funerals,” said Boardman. “And it's this principle of steps, of degrees, of having to do this little thing, and that little thing, that keeps funerals from killing the survivors. I suppose this is worse than a funeral—look at it in the right light. You mourn as one without hope, don't you? Live through it too, I suppose.”
He made Dan help get the rest of his things into his bag, and with one little artifice and another prevented him from stagnating in despair. He dissented from the idea of waiting over another day to see if Alice would not relent when she got her letters back, and send for Dan to come and see her.
“Relent a good deal more when she finds you've gone out of town, if she sends for you,” he argued; and he got Dan into the cab and off to the station, carefully making him an active partner in the whole undertaking, even to checking his own bag.
Before he bought his own ticket he appealed once more to Dan.
“Look here! I feel like a fool going off with you on this expedition. Be honest for once, now, Mavering, and tell me you've thought better of it, and don't want me to go!”
“Yes—yes, I do. Oh yes, you've got to go. I I do want you. I—you make me see things in just the right light, don't you know. That idea of yours about little steps—it's braced me all up. Yes—”
“You're such an infernal humbug,” said Boardman, “I can't tell whether you want me or not. But I'm in for it now, and I'll go.” Then he bought his ticket.
Boardman put himself in charge of Mavering, and took him into the smoking car. It was impossible to indulge a poetic gloom there without becoming unpleasantly conspicuous in the smoking and euchre and profanity. Some of the men were silent and dull, but no one was apparently very unhappy, and perhaps if Dan had dealt in absolute sincerity with himself, even he would not have found himself wholly so. He did not feel as he had felt when Alice rejected him. Then he was wounded to the quick through his vanity, and now; in spite of all, in spite of the involuntary tender swaying of his heart toward her through the mere force of habit, in spite of some remote compunctions for his want of candour with her, he was supported by a sense of her injustice, her hardness. Related with this was an obscure sense of escape, of liberation, which, however he might silence and disown it, was still there. He could not help being aware that he had long relinquished tastes customs, purposes, ideals, to gain a peace that seemed more and more fleeting and uncertain, and that he had submitted to others which, now that the moment of giving pleasure by his submission was past, he recognised as disagreeable. He felt a sort of guilt in his enlargement; he knew, by all that he had, ever heard or read of people in his position, that he ought to be altogether miserable; and yet this consciousness of relief persisted. He told himself that a very tragical thing had befallen him; that this broken engagement was the ruin of his life and the end of his youth, and that he must live on an old and joyless man, wise with the knowledge that comes to decrepitude and despair; he imagined a certain look for himself, a gait, a name, that would express this; but all the same he was aware of having got out of something. Was it a bondage, a scrape, as Boardman called it? He thought he must be a very light, shallow, and frivolous nature not to be utterly broken up by his disaster.
“I don't know what I'm going home for,” he said hoarsely to Boardman.
“Kind of a rest, I suppose,” suggested his friend.
“Yes, I guess that's it,” said Dan. “I'm tired.”
It seemed to him that this was rather fine; it was a fatigue of the soul that he was to rest from. He remembered the apostrophic close of a novel in which the heroine dies after much emotional suffering. “Quiet, quiet heart!” he repeated to himself. Yes, he too had died to hope, to love, to happiness.
As they drew near their journey's end he said, “I don't know how I'm going to break it to them.”
“Oh, probably break itself,” said Boardman. “These things usually do.”
“Yes, of course,” Dan assented.
“Know from your looks that something's up. Or you might let me go ahead a little and prepare them.”
Dan laughed. “It was awfully good of you to come, Boardman. I don't know what I should have done without you.”
“Nothing I like more than these little trips. Brightens you up to sere the misery of others; makes you feel that you're on peculiarly good terms with Providence. Haven't enjoyed myself so much since that day in Portland.” Boardman's eyes twinkled.
“Yes,” said Dan, with a deep sigh, “it's a pity it hadn't ended there.”
“Oh, I don't know. You won't have to go through with it again. Something that had to come, wasn't it? Never been satisfied if you hadn't tried it. Kind of aching void before, and now you've got enough.”
“Yes, I've got enough,” said Dan, “if that's all.”
When they got out of the train at Ponkwasset Falls, and the conductor and the brakeman, who knew Dan as his father's son, and treated him with the distinction due a representative of an interest valued by the road, had bidden him a respectfully intimate good-night, and he began to climb the hill to his father's house, he recurred to the difficulty before him in breaking the news to his family. “I wish I could have it over in a flash. I wish I'd thought to telegraph it to them.”
“Wouldn't have done,” said Boardman. “It would have given 'em time to formulate questions and conjectures, and now the astonishment will take their breath away till you can get your second wind, and then—you'll be all right.”
“You think so?” asked Dan submissively.
“Know so. You see, if you could have had it over in a flash, it would have knocked you flat. But now you've taken all the little steps, and you've got a lot more to take, and you're all braced up. See? You're like rock, now—adamant.” Dan laughed in forlorn perception of Boardman's affectionate irony. “Little steps are the thing. You'll have to go in now and meet your family, and pass the time of day with each one, and talk about the weather, and account for my being along, and ask how they all are; and by the time you've had dinner, and got settled with your legs out in front of the fire, you'll be just in the mood for it. Enjoy telling them all about it.”
“Don't, Boardman,” pleaded Dan. “Boardy, I believe if I could get in and up to my room without anybody's seeing me, I'd let you tell them. There don't seem to be anybody about, and I think we could manage it.”
“It wouldn't work,” said Boardman. “Got to do it yourself.”
“Well, then, wait a minute,” said Dan desperately; and Boardman knew that he was to stay outside while Dan reconnoitred the interior. Dan opened one door after another till he stood within the hot brilliantly lighted hall. Eunice Mavering was coming down the stairs, hooded and wrapped for a walk on the long verandahs before supper.
“Dan!” she cried.
“It's all up, Eunice,” he said at once, as if she had asked him about it. “My engagement's off.”
“Oh, I'm so glad!” She descended upon him with outstretched arms, but stopped herself before she reached him. “It's a hoax. What do you mean? Do you really mean it, Dan?”
“I guess I mean it. But don't—Hold on! Where's Minnie?”
Eunice turned, and ran back upstairs. “Minnie! Min!” she called on her way. “Dan's engagement's off.”
“I don't believe it!” answered Minnie's voice joyously, from within some room. It was followed by her presence, with successive inquiries. “How do you know? Did you get a letter? When did it happen? Oh, isn't it too good?”
Minnie was also dressed for the verandah promenade, which they always took when the snow was too deep. She caught sight of her brother as she came down. “Why, Dan's here! Dan, I've been thinking about you all day.” She kissed him, which Eunice was now reminded to do too.
“Yes, it's true, Minnie,” said Dan gravely. “I came up to tell you. It don't seem to distress you much.”
“Dan!” said his sister reproachfully. “You know I didn't mean to say anything I only felt so glad to have you back again.”
“I understand, Minnie—I don't blame you. It's all right. How's mother? Father up from the works yet? I'm going to my room.”
“Indeed you're not!” cried Eunice, with elder sisterly authority. “You shall tell us about it first.”
“Oh no! Let him go, Eunice!” pleaded Minnie, “Poor Dan! And I don't think we ought to go to walk when—”
Dan's eyes dimmed, and his voice weakened a little at her sympathy. “Yes, go. I'm tired—that's all. There isn't anything to tell you, hardly. Miss Pasmer—”
“Why, he's pale!” cried Minnie. “Eunice!”
“Oh, it's just the heat in here.” Dan really felt a little sick and faint with it, but he was not sorry to seem affected by the day's strain upon his nerves.
The girls began to take off their wraps. “Don't. I'll go with you. Boardman's out there.”
“Boardman! What nonsense!” exclaimed Eunice.
“He'll like to hear your opinion of it,” Dan began; but his sister pulled the doors open, and ran out to see if he really meant that too.
Whether Boardman had heard her, or had discreetly withdrawn out of earshot at the first sound of voices, she could not tell, but she found him some distance away from the snow-box on the piazza. “Dan's just managed to tell us you were here,” she said, giving him her hand. “I'm glad to see you. Do come in.”
“Come along as a sort of Job's comforter,” Boardman explained, as he followed her in; and he had the silly look that the man who feels himself superfluous must wear.
“Then you know about it?” said Eunice, while Minnie Mavering and he were shaking hands.
“Yes, Boardman knows; he can tell you about it,” said Dan, from the hall chair he had dropped into. He rose and made his way to the stairs, with the effect of leaving the whole thing to them.
His sisters ran after him, and got him upstairs and into his room, with Boardman's semi-satirical connivance, and Eunice put up the window, while Minnie went to get some cologne to wet his forehead. Their efforts were so successful that he revived sufficiently to drive them out of his room, and make them go and show Boardman to his.
“You know the way, Mr. Boardman,” said Eunice, going before him, while Minnie followed timorously, but curious for what he should say. She lingered on the threshold, while her sister went in and pulled the electric apparatus which lighted the gas-burners. “I suppose Dan didn't break it?” she said, turning sharply upon him.
“No; and I don't think he was to blame,” said Boardman, inferring her reserved anxiety.
“Oh, I'm quite sure of that,” said Eunice, rejecting what she had asked for. “You'll find everything, Mr. Boardman. It was kind of you to come with Dan. Supper's at seven.”
“How severe you were with him!” murmured Minnie, following her away.
“Severe with Dan?”
“No—with Mr. Boardman.”
“What nonsense! I had to be. I couldn't let him defend Dan to me. Couple of silly boys!”
After a moment Minnie said, “I don't think he's silly.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Boardman.”
“Well, Dan is, then, to bring him at such a time. But I suppose he felt that he couldn't get here without him. What a boy! Think of such a child being engaged! I hope we shan't hear any more of such nonsense for one while again—at least till Dan's got his growth.”
They went down into the library, where, in their excitement, they sat down with most of their outdoor things on.
Minnie had the soft contrary-mindedness of gentle natures. “I should like to know how you would have had Dan bear it,” she said rebelliously.
“How? Like a man. Or like a woman. How do you suppose Miss Pasmer's bearing it? Do you suppose she's got some friend to help her?”
“If she's broken it, she doesn't need any one,” urged Minnie.
“Well,” said Eunice, with her high scorn of Dan unabated, “I never could have liked that girl, but I certainly begin to respect her. I think I could have got on with her—now that it's no use. I declare,” she broke off, “we're sitting here sweltering to death! What are we keeping our things on for?” She began to tear hers violently off and to fling them on chairs, scolding, and laughing at the same time with Minnie, at their absent-mindedness.
A heavy step sounded on the verandah without.
“There's father!” she cried vividly, jumping to her feet and running to the door, while Minnie, in a nervous bewilderment, ran off upstairs to her room. Eunice flung the door open. “Well, father, we've got Dan back again.” And at a look of quiet question in his eye she hurried on: “His engagement's broken, and he's come up here to tell us, and brought Mr. Boardman along to help.”
“Where is he?” asked the father, with his ruminant quiet, pulling off first one sleeve of his overcoat, and pausing for Eunice's answer before he pulled off the other.
“He's up in his room, resting from the effort.” She laughed nervously, and her father made no comment. He took off his articles, and then went creaking upstairs to Dan's room. But at the door he paused, with his hand on the knob, and turned away to his own room without entering.
Dan must have heard him; in a few minutes he came to him.
“Well, Dan,” said his father, shaking hands.
“I suppose Eunice has told you? Well, I want to tell you why it happened.”
There was something in his father that always steadied Dan and kept him to the point. He now put the whole case fairly and squarely, and his candour and openness seemed to him to react and characterise his conduct throughout. He did not realise that this was not so till his father said at the close, with mild justice, “You were to blame for letting the thing run on so at loose ends.”
“Yes, of course,” said Dan, seeing that he was. “But there was no intention of deceiving any one of bad faith—”
“Of course not.”
“I thought it could be easily arranged whenever it came to the point.”
“If you'd been older, you wouldn't have thought that. You had women to deal with on both sides. But if it's all over, I'm not sorry. I always admired Miss Pasmer, but I've been more and more afraid you were not suited to each other. Your mother doesn't know you're here?”
“No, sir, I suppose not. Do you think it will distress her?”
“How did your sisters take it?”
Dan gave a rueful laugh. “It seemed to be rather a popular move with them.”
“I will see your mother first,” said the father.
He left them when they went into the library after supper, and a little later Dan and Eunice left Boardman in charge of Minnie there.
He looked after their unannounced withdrawal in comic consciousness. “It's no use pretending that I'm not a pretty large plurality here,” he said to Minnie.
“Oh, I'm so glad you came!” she cried, with a kindness which was as real as if it had been more sincere.
“Do you think mother will feel it much?” asked Dan anxiously, as he went upstairs with Eunice.
“Well, she'll hate to lose a correspondent—such a regular one,” said Eunice, and the affair being so far beyond any other comment, she laughed the rest of the way to their mother's room.
The whole family had in some degree that foible which affects people who lead isolated lives; they come to think that they are the only people who have their virtues; they exaggerate these, and they conceive a kindness even for the qualities which are not their virtues. Mrs. Mavering's life was secluded again from the family seclusion, and their peculiarities were intensified in her. Besides, she had some very marked peculiarities of her own, and these were also intensified by the solitude to which she was necessarily left so much. She meditated a great deal upon the character of her children, and she liked to analyse and censure it both in her own mind and openly in their presence. She was very trenchant and definite in these estimates of them; she liked to ticket them, and then ticket them anew. She explored their ancestral history on both sides for the origin of their traits, and there were times when she reduced them in formula to mere congeries of inherited characteristics. If Eunice was self-willed and despotic, she was just like her grandmother Mavering; if Minnie was all sentiment and gentle stubbornness, it was because two aunts of hers, one on either side, were exactly so; if Dan loved pleasure and beauty, and was sinuous and uncertain in so many ways, and yet was so kind and faithful and good, as well as shilly-shallying and undecided, it was because her mother, and her mother's father, had these qualities in the same combination.
When she took her children to pieces before their faces, she was sharp and admonitory enough with them. She warned them to what their characters would bring them to if they did not look out; but perhaps because she beheld them so hopelessly the present effect of the accumulated tendencies of the family past, she was tender and forgiving to their actions. The mother came in there, and superseded the student of heredity: she found excuse for them in the perversity of circumstance, in the peculiar hardship of the case, in the malignant misbehaviour of others.
As Dan entered, with the precedence his father and sister yielded him as the principal actor in the scene which must follow, she lifted herself vigorously in bed, and propped herself on the elbow of one arm while she stretched the other towards him.
“I'm glad of it, Dan!” she called, at the moment he opened the door, and as he came toward her she continued, with the amazing velocity of utterance peculiar to nervous sufferers of her sex: “I know all about it, and I don't blame you a bit! And I don't blame her! Poor helpless young things! But it's a perfect mercy it's all over; it's the greatest deliverance I ever heard of! You'd have been eaten up alive. I saw it, and I knew it from the very first moment, and I've lived in fear and trembling for you. You could have got on well enough if you'd been left to yourselves, but that you couldn't have been nor hope to be as long as you breathed, from the meddling and the machinations and the malice of that unscrupulous and unconscionable old Cat!”
By the time Mrs. Mavering had hissed out the last word she had her arm round her boy's neck and was clutching him, safe and sound after his peril, to her breast; and between her kissing and crying she repeated her accusals and denunciations with violent volubility.
Dan could not have replied to them in that effusion of gratitude and tenderness he felt for his mother's partisanship; and when she went on in almost the very terms of his self-defence, and told him that he had done as he had because it was easy for him to yield, and he could not imagine a Cat who would put her daughter up to entrapping him into a promise that she knew must break his mother's heart, he found her so right on the main point that he could not help some question of Mrs. Pasmer in his soul. Could she really have been at the bottom of it all? She was very sly, and she might be very false, and it was certainly she who had first proposed their going abroad together. It looked as if it might be as his mother said, and at any rate it was no time to dispute her, and he did not say a word in behalf of Mrs. Pasmer, whom she continued to rend in a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds till she had to stop breathless.
“Yes! it's quite as I expected! She did everything she could to trap you into it. She fairly flung that poor girl at you. She laid her plans so that you couldn't say no—she understood your character from the start!—and then, when it came out by accident, and she saw that she had older heads to deal with, and you were not going to be quite at her mercy, she dropped the mask in an instant, and made Alice break with you. Oh, I could see through her from the beginning! And the next time, Dan, I advise you, as you never suspect anybody yourself, to consult with somebody who doesn't take people for what they seem, and not to let yourself be flattered out of your sensor, even if you see your father is.”
Mrs. Mavering dropped back on her pillow, and her husband smiled patiently at their daughter.
Dan saw his patient smile and understood it; and the injustice which his father bore made him finally unwilling to let another remain under it. Hard as it was to oppose his mother in anything when she was praising him so sweetly and comforting him in the moment of his need, he pulled himself together to protest: “No, no, mother! I don't think Mrs. Pasmer was to blame; I don't believe she had anything to do with it. She's always stood my friend—”
“Oh, I've no doubt she's made you think so, Dan,” said his mother, with unabated fondness for him; “and you think so because you're so simple and good, and never suspect evil of any one. It's this hideous optimism that's killing everything—”
A certain note in the invalid's falling voice seemed to warn her hearers of an impending change that could do no one good. Eunice rose hastily and interrupted: “Mother, Mr. Boardman's here. He came up with Dan. May Minnie come in with him?”
Mrs. Mavering shot a glance of inquiry at Dan, and then let a swift inspection range over all the details of the room, and finally concentrate itself on the silk and lace of her bed, over which she passed a smoothing hand. “Mr. Boardman?” she cried, with instantly recovered amiability. “Of course she may!”
In Boston the rumour of Dan's broken engagement was followed promptly by a denial of it; both the rumour and the denial were apparently authoritative; but it gives the effect of a little greater sagacity to distrust rumours of all kinds, and most people went to bed, after the teas and dinners and receptions and clubs at which the fact was first debated, in the self-persuasion that it was not so. The next day they found the rumour still persistent; the denial was still in the air too, but it seemed weaker; at the end of the third day it had become a question as to which broke the engagement, and why; by the end of a week it was known that Alice had broken the engagement, but the reason could not be ascertained.
This was not for want of asking, more or less direct. Pasmer, of course, went and came at his club with perfect immunity. Men are quite as curious as women, but they set business bounds to their curiosity, and do not dream of passing these. With women who have no business of their own, and can not quell themselves with the reflection that this thing or that is not their affair, there is no question so intimate that they will not put it to some other woman; perhaps it is not so intimate, or perhaps it will not seem so; at any rate, they chance it. Mrs. Pasmer was given every opportunity to explain the facts to the ladies whom she met, and if she was much afflicted by Alice's behaviour, she had a measure of consolation in using her skill to baffle the research of her acquaintance. After each encounter of the kind she had the pleasure of reflecting that absolutely nothing more than she meant had become known. The case never became fully known through her; it was the girl herself who told it to Miss Cotton in one of those moments of confidence which are necessary to burdened minds; and it is doubtful if more than two or three people ever clearly understood it; most preferred one or other of several mistaken versions which society finally settled down to.
The paroxysm of self-doubt, almost self-accusal, in which Alice came to Miss Cotton, moved the latter to the deepest sympathy, and left her with misgivings which became an intolerable anguish to her conscience. The child was so afflicted at what she had done, not because she wished to be reconciled with her lover, but because she was afraid she had been unjust, been cruelly impatient and peremptory with him; she seemed to Miss Cotton so absolutely alone and friendless with her great trouble, she was so helpless, so hopeless, she was so anxious to do right, and so fearful she had done wrong, that Miss Cotton would not have been Miss Cotton if she had not taken her in her arms and assured her that in everything she had done she had been sublimely and nobly right, a lesson to all her sex in such matters for ever. She told her that she had always admired her, but that now she idolised her; that she felt like going down on her knees and simply worshipping her.
“Oh, don't say that, Miss Cotton!” pleaded Alice, pulling away from her embrace, but still clinging to her with her tremulous, cold little hands. “I can't bear it! I'm wicked and hard you don't know how bad I am; and I'm afraid of being weak, of doing more harm yet. Oh, I wronged him cruelly in ever letting him get engaged to me! But now what you've said will support me. If you think I've done right—It must seem strange to you that I should come to you with my trouble instead of my mother; but I've been to her, and—and we think alike on so few subjects, don't you know—”
“Yes, yes; I know, dear!” said Miss Cotton, in the tender folly of her heart, with the satisfaction which every woman feels in being more sufficient to another in trouble than her natural comforters.
“And I wanted to know how you saw it; and now, if you feel as you say, I can never doubt myself again.”
She tempested out of Miss Cotton's house, all tearful under the veil she had pulled down, and as she shut the door of her coupe, Miss Cotton's heart jumped into her throat with an impulse to run after her, to recall her, to recant, to modify everything.
From that moment Miss Cotton's trouble began, and it became a torment that mounted and gave her no peace till she imparted it. She said to herself that she should suffer to the utmost in this matter, and if she spoke to any one, it must not be to same one who had agreed with her about Alice, but to some hard, skeptical nature, some one who would look at it from a totally different point of view, and would punish her for her error, if she had committed an error, in supporting and consoling Alice. All the time she was thinking of Mrs. Brinkley; Mrs. Brinkley had come into her mind at once; but it was only after repeated struggles that she could get the strength to go to her.
Mrs. Brinkley, sacredly pledged to secrecy, listened with a sufficiently dismaying air to the story which Miss Cotton told her in the extremity of her fear and doubt.
“Well,” she said at the end, “have you written to Mr. Mavering?”
“Written to Mr. Mavering?” gasped Miss Cotton.
“Yes—to tell him she wants him back.”
“Wants him back?” Miss Cotton echoed again.
“That's what she came to you for.”
“Oh, Mrs. Brinkley!” moaned Miss Cotton, and she stared at her in mute reproach.
Mrs. Brinkley laughed. “I don't say she knew that she came for that; but there's no doubt that she did; and she went away bitterly disappointed with your consolation and support. She didn't want anything of the kind—you may comfort yourself with that reflection, Miss Cotton.”
“Mrs. Brinkley,” said Miss Cotton, with a severity which ought to have been extremely effective from so mild a person, “do you mean to accuse that poor child of dissimulation—of deceit—in such—a—a—”
“No!” shouted Mrs. Brinkley; “she didn't know what she was doing any more than you did; and she went home perfectly heart-broken; and I hope she'll stay so, for the good of all parties concerned.”
Miss Cotton was so bewildered by Mrs. Brinkley's interpretation of Alice's latent motives that she let the truculent hostility of her aspiration pass unheeded. She looked helplessly about, and seemed faint, so that Mrs. Brinkley, without appearing to notice her state, interposed the question of a little sherry. When it had been brought, and Miss Cotton had sipped the glass that trembled in one hand while her emotion shattered a biscuit with the other, Mrs. Brinkley went on: “I'm glad the engagement is broken, and I hope it will never be mended. If what you tell me of her reason for breaking it is true—”
“Oh, I feel so guilty for telling you! I'd no right to! Please never speak of it!” pleaded Miss Cotton.
“Then I feel more than ever that it was all a mistake, and that to help it on again would be a—crime.”
Miss Cotton gave a small jump at the word, as if she had already committed the crime: she had longed to do it.
“Yes; I mean to say that they are better parted than plighted. If matches are made in heaven, I believe some of them are unmade there too. They're not adapted to each other; there's too great a disparity.”
“You mean,” began Miss Cotton, from her prepossession of Alice's superiority, “that she's altogether his inferior, intellectually and morally.”
“Oh, I can't admit that!” cried Miss Cotton, glad to have Mrs. Brinkley go too far, and plucking up courage from her excess.
“Intellectually and morally,” repeated Mrs. Brinkley, with the mounting conviction which ladies seem to get from mere persistence. “I saw that girl at Campobello; I watched her.”
“I never felt that you did her justice!” cried Miss Cotton, with the valour of a hen-sparrow. “There was an antipathy.”
“There certainly wasn't a sympathy, I'm happy to say,” retorted Mrs. Brinkley. “I know her, and I know her family, root and branch. The Pasmers are the dullest and most selfish people in the world.”
“Oh, I don't think that's her character,” said Miss Cotton, ruffling her feathers defensively.
“Neither do I. She has no fixed character. No girl has. Nobody has. We all have twenty different characters—more characters than gowns—and we put them on and take them off just as often for different occasions. I know you think each person is permanently this or that; but my experience is that half the time they're the other thing.”
“Then why,” said Miss Cotton, winking hard, as some weak people do when they thick they are making a point, “do you say that Alice is dull and selfish?”
“I don't—not always, or not simply so. That's the character of the Pasmer blood, but it's crossed with twenty different currents in her; and from some body that the Pasmer dulness and selfishness must have driven mad she got a crazy streak of piety; and that's got mixed up in her again with a nonsensical ideal of duty; and everything she does she not only thinks is right, but she thinks it's religious, and she thinks it's unselfish.”
“If you'd seen her, if you'd heard her, this morning,” said Miss Cotton, “you wouldn't say that, Mrs. Brinkley.”
Mrs. Brinkley refused this with an impatient gesture. “It isn't what she is now, or seems to be, or thinks she is. It's what she's going to finally harden into—what's going to be her prevailing character. Now Dan Mavering has just the faults that will make such a girl think her own defects are virtues, because they're so different. I tell you Alice Pasmer has neither the head nor the heart to appreciate the goodness, the loveliness, of a fellow like Dan Mavering.”
“I think she feels his sweetness fully,” urged Miss Cotton. “But she couldn't endure his uncertainty. With her the truth is first of all things.”
“Then she's a little goose. If she had the sense to know it, she would know that he might delay and temporise and beat about the bush, but he would be true when it was necessary. I haven't the least doubt in the world but that poor fellow was going on in perfect security, because he felt that it would be so easy for him to give up, and supposed it would be just as easy for her. I don't suppose he had a misgiving, and it must have come upon him like a thunder-clap.”
“Don't you think,” timidly suggested Miss Cotton, “that truth is the first essential in marriage?”
“Of course it is. And if this girl was worthy of Dan Mavering, if she were capable of loving him or anybody else unselfishly, she would have felt his truth even if she couldn't have seen it. I believe this minute that that manoeuvring, humbugging mother of hers is a better woman, a kinder woman, than she is.”
“Alice says her mother took his part,” said Miss Cotton, with a sigh. “She took your view of it.”
“She's a sensible woman. But I hope she won't be able to get him into her toils again,” continued Mrs. Brinkley, recurring to the conventional estimate of Mrs. Pasmer.
“I can't help feeling—believing—that they'll come together somehow still,” murmured Miss Cotton. It seemed to her that she had all along wished this; and she tried to remember if what she had said to comfort Alice might be construed as adverse to a reconciliation.
“I hope they won't, then,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “for they couldn't help being unhappy together, with their temperaments. There's one thing, Miss Cotton, that's more essential in marriage than Miss Pasmer's instantaneous honesty, and that's patience.”
“Patience with wrong?” demanded Miss Cotton.
“Yes, even with wrong; but I meant patience with each other. Marriage is a perpetual pardon, concession, surrender; it's an everlasting giving up; that's the divine thing about it; and that's just what Miss Passer could never conceive of, because she is self-righteous and conceited and unyielding. She would make him miserable.”
Miss Cotton rose in a bewilderment which did not permit her to go at once. There was something in her mind which she wished to urge, but she could not make it out, though she fingered in vague generalities. When she got a block away from the house it suddenly came to her. Love! If they loved each other, would not all be well with them? She would have liked to run back and put that question to Mrs. Brinkley; but just then she met Brinkley lumbering heavily homeward; she heard his hard breathing from the exertion of bowing to her as he passed.
His wife met him in the hall, and went up to kiss him. He smelt abominably of tobacco smoke.
“Hullo!” said her husband. “What are you after?”
“Nothing,” said his wife, enjoying his joke. “Come in here; I want to tell you how I have just sat upon Miss Cotton.”