They were going to have some theatricals at one of the cottages, and the lady at whose house they were to be given made haste to invite all the picnic party before it dispersed. Mrs. Pasmer accepted with a mental reservation, meaning to send an excuse later if she chose; and before she decided the point she kept her husband from going after dinner into the reading-room, where he spent nearly all his time over a paper and a cigar, or in sitting absolutely silent and unoccupied, and made him go to their own room with her.
“There is something that I must speak to you about,” she said, closing the door, “and you must decide for yourself whether you wish to let it go any further.”
“What go any further?” asked Mr. Pasmer, sitting down and putting his hand to the pocket that held his cigar-case with the same series of motions.
“No, don't smoke,” she said, staying his hand impatiently. “I want you to think.”
“How can I think if I don't smoke?”
“Very well; smoke, then. Do you want this affair with young Mavering to go any farther?”
“Oh!” said Pasmer, “I thought you had been looking after that.” He had in fact relegated that to the company of the great questions exterior to his personal comfort which she always decided.
“I have been looking after it, but now the time has come when you must, as a father, take some interest in it.”
Pasmer's noble mask of a face, from the point of his full white beard to his fine forehead, crossed by his impressive black eyebrows, expressed all the dignified concern which a father ought to feel in such an affair; but what he was really feeling was a grave reluctance to have to intervene in any way. “What do you want me to say to him?” he asked.
“Why, I don't know that he's going to ask you anything. I don't know whether he's said anything to Alice yet,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with some exasperation.
Her husband was silent, but his silence insinuated a degree of wonder that she should approach him prematurely on such a point.
“They have been thrown together all day, and there is no use to conceal from ourselves that they are very much taken with each other?”
“I thought,” Pasmer said, “that you said that from the beginning. Didn't you want them to be taken with each other?”
“That is what you are to decide.”
Pasmer silently refused to assume the responsibility.
“Well?” demanded his wife, after waiting for him to speak.
“Well what?”
“What do you decide?”
“What is the use of deciding a thing when it is all over?”
“It isn't over at all. It can be broken off at any moment.”
“Well, break it off, then, if you like.”
Mrs. Pasmer resumed the responsibility with a sigh. She felt the burden, the penalty, of power, after having so long enjoyed its sweets, and she would willingly have abdicated the sovereignty which she had spent her whole married life in establishing. But there was no one to take it up. “No, I shall not break it off,” she said resentfully; “I shall let it go on.” Then seeing that her husband was not shaken by her threat from his long-confirmed subjection, she added: “It isn't an ideal affair, but I think it will be a very good thing for Alice. He is not what I expected, but he is thoroughly nice, and I should think his family was nice. I've been talking with Mr. Munt about them to-day, and he confirms all that Etta Saintsbury said. I don't think there can be any doubt of his intentions in coming here. He isn't a particularly artless young man, but he's been sufficiently frank about Alice since he's been here.” Her husband smoked on. “His father seems to have taken up the business from the artistic side, and Mr. Mavering won't be expected to enter into the commercial part at once. If it wasn't for Alice, I don't believe he would think of the business for a moment; he would study law. Of course it's a little embarrassing to have her engaged at once before she's seen anything of society here, but perhaps it's all for the best, after all: the main thing is that she should be satisfied, and I can see that she's only too much so. Yes, she's very much taken with him; and I don't wonder. He is charming.”
It was not the first time that Mrs. Pasmer had reasoned in this round; but the utterance of her thoughts seemed to throw a new light on them, and she took a courage from them that they did not always impart. She arrived at the final opinion expressed, with a throb of tenderness for the young fellow whom she believed eager to take her daughter from her, and now for the first time she experienced a desolation in the prospect, as if it were an accomplished fact. She was morally a bundle of finesses, but at the bottom of her heart her daughter was all the world to her. She had made the girl her idol, and if, like some other heathen, she had not always used her idol with the greatest deference, if she had often expected the impossible from it, and made it pay for her disappointment, still she had never swerved from her worship of it. She suddenly asked herself, What if this young fellow, so charming and so good, should so wholly monopolise her child that she should no longer have any share in her? What if Alice, who had so long formed her first care and chief object in life, should contentedly lose herself in the love and care of another, and both should ignore her right to her? She answered herself with a pang that this might happen with any one Alice married, and that it would be no worse, at the worst, with Dan Mavering than with another, while her husband remained impartially silent. Always keeping within the lines to which his wife's supremacy had driven him, he felt safe there, and was not to be easily coaxed out of them.
Mrs. Pasmer rose and left him, with his perfect acquiescence, and went into her daughter's room. She found Alice there, with a pretty evening dress laid out on her bed. Mrs. Pasmer was very fond of that dress, and at the thought of Alice in it her spirits rose again.
“Oh, are you going, Alice?”
“Why, yes,” answered the girl. “Didn't you accept?”
“Why, yes,” Mrs. Pasmer admitted. “But aren't you tired?”
“Oh, not in the least. I feel as fresh as I did this morning. Don't you want me to go?”
“Oh yes, certainly, I want you to go—if you think you'll enjoy it.”
“Enjoy it? Why, why shouldn't I enjoy it, mamma!”
“What are you thinking about? It's going to be the greatest kind of fun.”
“But do you think you ought to look at everything simply as fun?” asked the mother, with unwonted didacticism.
“How everything? What are you thinking about, mamma?”
“Oh, nothing! I'm so glad you're going to wear that dress.”
“Why, of course! It's my best. But what are you driving at, mamma?”
Mrs. Pasmer was really seeking in her daughter that comfort of a distinct volition which she had failed to find in her husband, and she wished to assure herself of it more and more, that she might share with some one the responsibility which he had refused any part in.
“Nothing. But I'm glad you wish so much to go.” The girl dropped her hands and stared. “You must have enjoyed yourself to-day,” she added, as if that were an explanation.
“Of course I enjoyed myself! But what has that to do with my wanting to go to-night?”
“Oh, nothing. But I hope, Alice, that there is one thing you have looked fully in the face.”
“What thing?” faltered the girl, and now showed herself unable to confront it by dropping her eyes.
“Well, whatever you may have heard or seen, nobody else is in doubt about it. What do you suppose has brought Mr. Mavering here!”
“I don't know.” The denial not only confessed that she did know, but it informed her mother that all was as yet tacit between the young people.
“Very well, then, I know,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “and there is one thing that you must know before long, Alice.”
“What?” she asked faintly.
“Your own mind,” said her mother. “I don't ask you what it is, and I shall wait till you tell me. Of course I shouldn't have let him stay here if I had objected—”
“O mamma!” murmured the girl, dyed with shame to have the facts so boldly touched, but not, probably, too deeply displeased.
“Yes. And I know that he would never have thought of going into that business if he had not expected—hoped—”
“Mamma!”
“And you ought to consider—”
“Oh, don't! don't! don't!” implored the girl.
“That's all,” said her mother, turning from Alice, who had hidden her face in her hands, to inspect the costume on the bed. She lifted one piece of it after another, turned it over, looked at it, and laid it down. “You can never get such a dress in this country.”
She went out of the room, as the girl dropped her face in the pillow. An hour later they met equipped for the evening's pleasure. To the keen glance that her mother gave her, the daughter's eyes had the brightness of eyes that have been weeping, but they were also bright with that knowledge of her own mind which Mrs. Pasmer had desired for her. She met her mother's glance fearlessly, even proudly, and she carried her stylish costume with a splendour to which only occasions could stimulate her. They dramatised a perfect unconsciousness to each other, but Mrs. Pasmer was by no means satisfied with the decision which she had read in her daughter's looks. Somehow it did not relieve her of the responsibility, and it did not change the nature of the case. It was gratifying, of course, to see Alice the object of a passion so sincere and so ardent; so far the triumph was complete, and there was really nothing objectionable in the young man and his circumstances, though there was nothing very distinguished. But the affair was altogether different from anything that Mrs. Pasmer had imagined. She had supposed and intended that Alice should meet some one in Boston, and go through a course of society before reaching any decisive step. There was to be a whole season in which to look the ground carefully over, and the ground was to be all within certain well-ascertained and guarded precincts. But this that had happened was outside of these precincts, of at least on their mere outskirts. Class Day, of course, was all right; and she could not say that the summer colony at Campobello was not thoroughly and essentially Boston; and yet she felt that certain influences, certain sanctions, were absent. To tell the truth, she would not have cared for the feelings of Mavering's family in regard to the matter, except as they might afterward concern Alice, and the time had not come when she could recognise their existence in regard to the affair; and yet she could have wished that even as it was his family could have seen and approved it from the start. It would have been more regular.
With Alice it was a simpler matter, and of course deeper. For her it was only a question of himself and herself; no one else existed to the sublime egotism of her love. She did not call it by that name; she did not permit it to assert itself by any name; it was a mere formless joy in her soul, a trustful and blissful expectance, which she now no more believed he could disappoint than that she could die within that hour. All the rebellion that she had sometimes felt at the anomalous attitude exacted of her sex in regard to such matters was gone. She no longer thought it strange that a girl should be expected to ignore the admiration of a young man till he explicitly declared it, and should then be fully possessed of all the materials of a decision on the most momentous question in life; for she knew that this state of ignorance could never really exist; she had known from the first moment that he had thought her beautiful. To-night she was radiant for him. Her eyes shone with the look in which they should meet and give themselves to each other before they spoke—the look in which they had met already, in which they had lived that whole day.
The evening's entertainment was something that must fail before an audience which was not very kind. They were to present a burlesque of classic fable, and the parts, with their general intention, had been distributed to the different actors; but nothing had been written down, and, beyond the situations and a few points of dialogue, all had to be improvised. The costumes and properties had been invented from such things as came to hand. Sheets sculpturesquely draped the deities who took part; a fox-pelt from the hearth did duty as the leopard skin of Bacchus; a feather duster served Neptune for a trident; the lyre of Apollo was a dust-pan; a gull's breast furnished Jove with his grey beard.
The fable was adapted to modern life, and the scene had been laid in Campobello, the peculiarities of which were to be satirised throughout. The principal situation was to be a passage between Jupiter, represented by Mavering, and Juno, whom Miss Anderson personated; it was to be a scene of conjugal reproaches and reprisals, and to end in reconciliation, in which the father of the gods sacrificed himself on the altar of domestic peace by promising to bring his family to Campobello every year.
This was to be followed by a sketch of the Judgment of Paris, in which Juno and Pallas were to be personated by two young men, and Miss Anderson took the part of Venus.
The pretty drawing-room of the Trevors—young people from Albany, and cousins of Miss Anderson—was curtained off at one end for a stage, and beyond the sliding doors which divided it in half were set chairs for the spectators. People had come in whatever dress they liked; the men were mostly in morning coats; the ladies had generally made some attempt at evening toilet, but they joined in admiring Alice Pasmer's costume, and one of them said that they would let it represent them all, and express what each might have done if she would. There was not much time for their tributes; all the lamps were presently taken away and set along the floor in front of the curtain as foot-lights, leaving the company in a darkness which Mrs. Brinkley pronounced sepulchral. She made her reproaches to the master of the house, who had effected this transposition of the lamps. “I was just thinking some very pretty and valuable things about your charming cottage, Mr. Trevor: a rug on a bare floor, a trim of varnished pine, a wall with half a dozen simple etchings on it, an open fire, and a mantelpiece without bric-a-brac, how entirely satisfying it all is! And how it upbraids us for heaping up upholstery as we do in town!”
“Go on,” said the host. “Those are beautiful thoughts.”
“But I can't go on in the dark,” retorted Mrs. Brinkley. “You can't think in the dark, much less talk! Can you, Mrs. Pasmer?” Mrs. Pasmer, with Alice next to her, sat just in front of Mrs. Brinkley.
“No,” she assented; “but if I could—YOU can thick anywhere, Mrs. Brinkley—Mrs. Trevor's lovely house would inspire me to it.”
“Two birds with one stone—thank you, Mrs. Pasmer, for my part of the compliment. Pick yourself up, Mr. Trevor.”
“Oh, thank you, I'm all right,” said Trevor, panting after the ladies' meanings, as a man must. “I suppose thinking and talking in the dark is a good deal like smoking in the dark.”
“No; thinking and talking are not at all like smoking under any conditions. Why in the world should they be?”
“Oh, I can't get any fun out of a cigar unless I can see the smoke,” the host explained.
“Do you follow him, Mrs. Pasmer?”
“Yes, perfectly.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Pasmer,” said Trevor.
“I'll get you to tell me how you did it some time,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “But your house is a gem, Mr. Trevor.”
“Isn't it?” cried Trevor. “I want my wife to live here the year round.” It was the Trevors' first summer in their cottage, and the experienced reader will easily recognise his mood. “But she's such a worldly spirit, she won't.”
“Oh, I don't know about the year round. Do you, Mrs. Pasmer?”
“I should,” said Alice, with the suddenness of youth, breaking into the talk which she had not been supposed to take any interest in.
“Is it proper to kiss a young lady's hand?” said Trevor gratefully, appealing to Mrs. Brinkley.
“It isn't very customary in the nineteenth century,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “But you might kiss her fan. He might kiss her fan, mightn't he, Mrs. Pasmer?”
“Certainly. Alice, hold out your fan instantly.”
The girl humoured the joke, laughing.
Trevor pressed his lips to the perfumed sticks. “I will tell Mrs. Trevor,” he said, “and that will decide her.”
“It will decide her not to come here at all next year if you tell her all.”
“He never tells me all,” said Mrs. Trevor, catching so much of the talk as she came in from some hospitable cares in the dining-room. “They're incapable of it. What has he been doing now?”
“Nothing. Or I will tell you when we are alone, Mrs. Trevor,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with burlesque sympathy. “We oughtn't to have a scene on both sides of the foot-lights.”
A boyish face, all excitement, was thrust out between the curtains forming the proscenium of the little theatre. “All ready, Mrs. Trevor?”
“Yes, all ready, Jim.”
He dashed the curtains apart, and marred the effect of his own disappearance from the scene by tripping over the long legs of Jove, stretched out to the front, where he sat on Mrs. Trevor's richest rug, propped with sofa cushions on either hand.
“So perish all the impious race of titans, enemies of the gods!” said Mavering solemnly, as the boy fell sprawling. “Pick the earth-born giant up, Vulcan, my son.”
The boy was very small for his age; every one saw that the accident had not been premeditated, and when Vulcan appeared, with an exaggerated limp, and carried the boy off, a burst of laughter went up from the company.
It did not matter what the play was to have been after that; it all turned upon the accident. Juno came on, and began to reproach Jupiter for his carelessness. “I've sent Mercury upstairs for the aynica; but he says it's no use: that boy won't be able to pass ball for a week. How often have I told you not to sit with your feet out that way! I knew you'd hurt somebody.”
“I didn't have my feet out,” retorted Jupiter. “Besides,” he added, with dignity, and a burlesque of marital special pleading which every wife and husband recognised, “I always sit with my feet out so, and I always will, so long as I've the spirit of a god.”
“Isn't he delicious?” buzzed Mrs. Pasmer, leaning backward to whisper to Mrs. Brinkley; it was not that she thought what Dan had just said was so very fanny, but people are immoderately applausive of amateur dramatics, and she was feeling very fond of the young fellow.
The improvisation went wildly and adventurously on, and the curtains dropped together amidst the facile acclaim of the audience:
“It's very well for Jupiter that he happened to think of the curtain,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “They couldn't have kept it up at that level much longer.”
“Oh, do you think so?” softly murmured Mrs. Pasmer. “It seemed as if they could have kept it up all night if they liked.”
“I doubt it. Mr. Trevor,” said Mrs. Brinkley to the host, who had come up for her congratulations, “do you always have such brilliant performances?”
“Well, we have so far,” he answered modestly; and Mrs. Brinkley laughed with him. This was the first entertainment at Trevor cottage.
“'Sh!” went up all round them, and Mrs. Trevor called across the room, in a reproachful whisper loud enough for every one to hear, “My dear!—enjoying yourself!” while Mavering stood between the parted curtains waiting for the attention of the company.
“On account of an accident to the call-boy and the mental exhaustion of some of the deities, the next piece will be omitted, and the performance will begin with the one after. While the audience is waiting, Mercury will go round and take up a collection for the victim of the recent accident, who will probably be indisposed for life. The collector will be accompanied by a policeman, and may be safely trusted.”
He disappeared behind the curtain with a pas and r swirl of his draperies like the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe, and the audience again abandoned itself to applause.
“How very witty he is!” said Miss Cotton, who sat near John Munt. “Don't you think he's really witty?”
“Yes,” Munt assented critically. “But you should have known his father.”
“Oh, do you know his father?”
“I was in college with him.”
“Oh, do tell me about him, and all Mr. Mavering's family. We're so interested, you know, on account of—Isn't it pretty to have that little love idyl going on here? I wonder—I've been wondering all the time—what she thinks of all this. Do you suppose she quite likes it? His costume is so very remarkable!” Miss Cotton, in the absence of any lady of her intimate circle, was appealing confidentially to John Munt.
“Why, do you think there's anything serious between them?” he asked, dropping his head forward as people do in church when they wish to whisper to some one in the same pew.
“Why, yes, it seems so,” murmured Miss Cotton. “His admiration is quite undisguised, isn't it?”
“A man never can tell,” said Munt. “We have to leave those things to you ladies.”
“Oh, every one's talking of it, I assure you. And you know his family?”
“I knew his father once rather better than anybody else.”
“Indeed!”
“Yes.” Munt sketched rather a flattered portrait of the elder Mavering, his ability, his goodness, his shyness, which he had always had to make such a hard fight with. Munt was sensible of an access of popularity in knowing Dan Mavering's people, and he did not spare his colours.
“Then it isn't from his father that he gets everything. He isn't in the least shy,” said Miss Cotton.
“That must be the mother.”
“And the mother?”
“The mother I don't know.”
Miss Cotton sighed. “Sometimes I wish that he did show a little more trepidation. It would seem as if he were more alive to the great difference that there is between Alice Pasmer and other girls.”
Munt laughed a man's laugh. “I guess he's pretty well alive to that, if he's in love with her.”
“Oh, in a certain way, of course, but not in the highest way. Now, for instance, if he felt all her fineness as—as we do, I don't believe he'd be willing to appear before her just like that.” The father of the gods wore a damask tablecloth of a pale golden hue and a classic pattern; his arms were bare, and rather absurdly white; on his feet a pair of lawn-tennis shoes had a very striking effect of sandals.
“It seems to me,” Miss Cotton pursued; “that if he really appreciated her in the highest way, he would wish never to do an undignified or trivial thing in her presence.”
“Oh, perhaps it's that that pleases her in him. They say we're always taken with opposites.”
“Yes—do you think so?” asked Miss Cotton.
The curtains were flung apart, and the Judgment of Paris followed rather tamely upon what had gone before, though the two young fellows who did Juno and Minerva were very amusing, and the dialogue was full of hits. Some of the audience, an appreciative minority, were of opinion that Mavering and Miss Anderson surpassed themselves in it; she promised him the most beautiful and cultured wife in Greece. “That settles it,” he answered. They came out arm in arm, and Paris, having put on a striped tennis coat over his short-sleeved Greek tunic, moved round among the company for their congratulations, Venus ostentatiously showing the apple she had won.
“I can haydly keep from eating it,” she explained to Alice; before whom she dropped Mavering's arm. “I'm awfully hungry. It's hayd woyk.”
Alice stood with her head drawn back, looking at the excited girl with a smile, in which seemed to hover somewhere a latent bitterness.
Mavering, with a flushed face and a flying tongue, was exchanging sallies with her mother, who smothered him in flatteries.
Mrs. Trevor came toward the group, and announced supper. “Mr. Paris, will you take Miss Aphrodite out?”
Miss Anderson swept a low bow of renunciation, and tacitly relinquished Mavering to Alice.
“Oh, no, no!” said Alice, shrinking back from him, with an intensification of her uncertain smile. “A mere mortal?”
“Oh, how very good!” said Mrs. Trevor.
There began to be, without any one's intending it, that sort of tacit misunderstanding which is all the worse because it can only follow upon a tacit understanding like that which had established itself between Alice and Mavering. They laughed and joked together gaily about all that went on; they were perfectly good friends; he saw that she and her mother were promptly served; he brought them salad and ice-cream and coffee himself, only waiting officially upon Miss Anderson first, and Alice thanked him, with the politest deprecation of his devotion; but if their eyes met, it was defensively, and the security between them was gone. Mavering vaguely felt the loss, without knowing how to retrieve it, and it made him go on more desperately with Miss Anderson. He laughed and joked recklessly, and Alice began to mark a more explicit displeasure with her. She made her mother go rather early.
On her part, Miss Anderson seemed to find reason for resentment in Alice's bearing toward her. As if she had said to herself that her frank loyalty had been thrown away upon a cold and unresponsive nature, and that her harmless follies in the play had been met with unjust suspicions, she began to make reprisals, she began in dead earnest to flirt with Mavering. Before the evening passed she had made him seem taken with her; but how justly she had done this, and with how much fault of his, no one could have said. There were some who did not notice it at all, but these were not people who knew Mavering, or knew Alice very well.
The next morning Alice was walking slowly along the road toward the fishing village, when she heard rapid, plunging strides down the wooded hillside on her right. She knew them for Mavering's, and she did not affect surprise when he made a final leap into the road, and shortened his pace beside her.
“May I join you, Miss Pasmer?”
“I am only going down to the herring-houses,” she began.
“And you'll let me go with you?” said the young fellow. “The fact is—you're always so frank that you make everything else seem silly—I've been waiting up there in the woods for you to come by. Mrs. Pasmer told me you had started this way, and I cut across lots to overtake you, and then, when you came in sight, I had to let you pass before I could screw my courage up to the point of running after you. How is that for open-mindedness?”
“It's a very good beginning, I should think.”
“Well, don't you think you ought to say now that you're sorry you were so formidable?”
“Am I so formidable?” she asked, and then recognised that she had been trapped into a leading question.
“You are to me. Because I would like always to be sure that I had pleased you, and for the last twelve hours I've only been able to make sure that I hadn't. That's the consolation I'm going away with. I thought I'd get you to confirm my impression explicitly. That's why I wished to join you.”
“Are you—were you going away?”
“I'm going by the next boat. What's the use of staying? I should only make bad worse. Yesterday I hoped But last night spoiled everything. 'Miss Pasmer,'” he broke out, with a rush of feeling, “you must know why I came up here to Campobello.”
His steps took him a little ahead of her, and he could look back into her face as he spoke. But apparently he saw nothing in it to give him courage to go on, for he stopped, and then continued, lightly: “And I'm going away because I feel that I've made a failure of the expedition. I knew that you were supremely disgusted with me last night; but it will be a sort of comfort if you'll tell me so.”
“Oh,” said Alice, “everybody thought it was very brilliant, I'm sure.”
“And you thought it was a piece of buffoonery. Well, it was. I wish you'd say so, Miss Pasmer; though I didn't mean the playing entirely. It would be something to start from, and I want to make a beginning—turn over a new leaf. Can't you help me to inscribe a good resolution of the most iron-clad description on the stainless page? I've lain awake all night composing one. Wouldn't you like to hear it?”
“I can't see what good that would do,” she said, with some relenting toward a smile, in which he instantly prepared himself to bask.
“But you will when I've done it. Now listen!”
“Please don't go on.” She cut him short with a return to her severity, which he would not recognise.
“Well, perhaps I'd better not,” he consented. “It's rather a long resolution, and I don't know that I've committed it perfectly yet. But I do assure you that if you were disgusted last night, you were not the only one. I was immensely disgusted myself; and why I wanted you to tell me so, was because when I have a strong pressure brought to bear I can brace up, and do almost anything,” he said, dropping into earnest. Then he rose lightly again, and added, “You have no idea how unpleasant it is to lie awake all night throwing dust in the eyes of an accusing conscience.”
“It must have been, if you didn't succeed,” said Alice drily.
“Yes, that's it—that's just the point. If I'd succeeded, I should be all right, don't you see. But it was a difficult case.” She turned her face away, but he saw the smile on her cheek, and he laughed as if this were what he had been trying to make her do. “I got beaten. I had to give up, and own it. I had to say that I had thrown my chance away, and I had better take myself off.” He looked at her with a real anxiety in his gay eyes.
“The boat goes just after lunch, I believe,” she said indifferently.
“Oh yes, I shall have time to get lunch before I go,” he said, with bitterness. “But lunch isn't the only thing; it isn't even the main thing, Miss Pasmer.”
“No?” She hardened her heart.
He waited for her to say something more, and then he went on. “The question is whether there's time to undo last night, abolish it, erase it from the calendar of recorded time—sponge it out, in short—and get back to yesterday afternoon.” She made no reply to this. “Don't you think it was a very pleasant picnic, Miss Pasmer?” he asked, with pensive respectfulness.
“Very,” she answered drily.
He cast a glance at the woods that bordered the road on either side. “That weird forest—I shall never forget it.”
“No; it was something to remember,” she said.
“And the blueberry patch? We mustn't forget the blueberry patch.”
“There were a great many blueberries.”
She walked on, and he said, “And that bridge—you don't have that feeling of having been here before?”
“No.”
“Am I walking too fast for you, Miss Pasmer?”
“No; I like to walk fast.”
“But wouldn't you like to sit down? On this wayside log, for example?” He pointed it out with his stick. “It seems to invite repose, and I know you must be tired.”
“I'm not tired.”
“Ah, that shows that you didn't lie awake grieving over your follies all night. I hope you rested well, Miss Pasmer.” She said nothing. “If I thought—if I could hope that you hadn't, it would be a bond of sympathy, and I would give almost anything for a bond of sympathy just now, Miss Pasmer. Alice!” he said, with sudden seriousness. “I know that I'm not worthy even to think of you, and that you're whole worlds above me in every way. It's that that takes all heart out of me, and leaves me without a word to say when I'd like to say so much. I would like to speak—tell you—”
She interrupted him. “I wish to speak to you, Mr. Mavering, and tell you that—I'm very tired, and I'm going back to the hotel. I must ask you to let me go back alone.”
“Alice, I love you.”
“I'm sorry you said it—sorry, sorry.”
“Why?” he asked, with hopeless futility.
“Because there can be no love between us—not friendship even—not acquaintance.”
“I shouldn't have asked for your acquaintance, your friendship, if—” His words conveyed a delicate reproach, and they stung her, because they put her in the wrong.
“No matter,” she began wildly. “I didn't mean to wound you. But we must part, and we must never see each other again:”
He stood confused, as if he could not make it out or believe it. “But yesterday—”
“It's to-day now.”
“Ah, no! It's last night. And I can explain.”
“No!” she cried. “You shall not make me out so mean and vindictive. I don't care for last night, nor for anything that happened.” This was not true, but it seemed so to her at the moment; she thought that she really no longer resented his association with Miss Anderson and his separation from herself in all that had taken place.
“Then what is it?”
“I can't tell you. But everything is over between us—that's all.”
“But yesterday—and all these days past—you seemed—”
“It's unfair of you to insist—it's ungenerous, ungentlemanly.”
That word, which from a woman's tongue always strikes a man like a blow in the face, silenced Mavering. He set his lips and bowed, and they parted. She turned upon her way, and he kept the path which she had been going.
It was not the hour when the piazzas were very full, and she slipped into the dim hotel corridor undetected, or at least undetained. She flung into her room, and confronted her mother.
Mrs. Pasmer was there looking into a trunk that had overflowed from her own chamber. “What is the matter?” she said to her daughter's excited face.
“Mr. Mavering—”
“Well?”
“And I refused him.”
Mrs. Pasmer was one of those ladies who in any finality have a keen retrovision of all the advantages of a different conclusion. She had been thinking, since she told Dan Mavering which way Alice had gone to walk, that if he were to speak to her now, and she were to accept him, it would involve a great many embarrassing consequences; but she had consoled herself with the probability that he would not speak so soon after the effects of last night, but would only try at the furthest to make his peace with Alice. Since he had spoken, though, and she had refused him, Mrs. Pasmer instantly saw all the pleasant things that would have followed in another event. “Refused him?” she repeated provisionally, while she gathered herself for a full exploration of all the facts.
“Yes, mamma; and I can't talk about it. I wish never to hear his name again, or to see him, or to speak to him.”
“Why, of course not,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a fine smile, from the vantage-ground of her superior years, “if you've refused him.” She left the trunk which she had been standing over, and sat down, while Alice swept to and fro before her excitedly. “But why did you refuse him, my dear?”
“Why? Because he's detestable—perfectly ignoble.”
Her mother probably knew how to translate these exalted expressions into the more accurate language of maturer life. “Do you mean last night?”
“Last night?” cried Alice tragically. “No. Why should I care for last night?”
“Then I don't understand what you mean,” retorted Mrs. Pasmer. “What did he say?” she demanded, with authority.
“Mamma, I can't talk about it—I won't.”
“But you must, Alice. It's your duty. Of course I must know about it. What did he say?”
Alice walked up and down the room with her lips firmly closed—like Mavering's lips, it occurred to her; and then she opened them, but without speaking.
“What did he say?” persisted her mother, and her persistence had its effect.
“Say?” exclaimed the girl indignantly. “He tried to make me say.”
“I see,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Well?”
“But I forced him to speak, and then—I rejected him. That's all.”
“Poor fellow!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “He was afraid of you.”
“And that's what made it the more odious. Do you think I wished him to be afraid of me? Would that be any pleasure? I should hate myself if I had to quell anybody into being unlike themselves.” She sat down for a moment, and then jumped up again, and went to the window, for no reason, and came back.
“Yes,” said her mother impartially, “he's light, and he's roundabout. He couldn't come straight at anything.”
“And would you have me accept such a—being?”
Mrs. Pasmer smiled a little at the literary word, and continued: “But he's very sweet, and he's as good as the day's long, and he's very fond of you, and—I thought you liked him.”
The girl threw up her arms across her eyes. “Oh, how can you say such a thing, mamma?”
She dropped into a chair at the bedside, and let her face fall into her hands, and cried.
Her mother waited for the gust of tears to pass before she said, “But if you feel so about it—”
“Mamma!” Alice sprang to her feet.
“It needn't come from you. I could make some excuse to see him—write him a little note—”
“Never!” exclaimed Alice grandly. “What I've done I've done from my reason, and my feelings have nothing to do with it.”
“Oh, very well,” said her mother, going out of the room, not wholly disappointed with what she viewed as a respite, and amused by her daughter's tragics. “But if you think that the feelings have nothing to do with such a matter, you're very much mistaken.” If she believed that her daughter did not know her real motives in rejecting Dan Mavering, or had not been able to give them, she did not say so.
The little group of Aliceolaters on the piazza, who began to canvass the causes of Mavering's going before the top of his hat disappeared below the bank on the path leading to the ferry-boat, were of two minds. One faction held that he was going because Alice had refused him, and that his gaiety up to the last moment was only a mask to hide his despair. The other side contended that, if he and Alice were not actually engaged, they understood each other, and he was going away because he wanted to tell his family, or something of that kind. Between the two opinions Miss Cotton wavered with a sentimental attraction to either. “What do you really think?” she asked Mrs. Brinkley, arriving from lunch at the corner of the piazza where the group was seated.
“Oh, what does it matter, at their age?” she demanded.
“But they're just of the age when it does happen to matter,” suggested Mrs. Stamwell.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “and that's what makes the whole thing so perfectly ridiculous. Just think of two children, one of twenty and the other of twenty-three, proposing to decide their lifelong destiny in such a vital matter! Should we trust their judgment in regard to the smallest business affair? Of course not. They're babes in arms, morally and mentally speaking. People haven't the data for being wisely in love till they've reached the age when they haven't the least wish to be so. Oh, I suppose I thought that I was a grown woman too when I was twenty; I can look back and see that I did; and, what's more preposterous still, I thought Mr. Brinkley was a man at twenty-four. But we were no more fit to accept or reject each other at that infantile period—”
“Do you really think so?” asked Miss Cotton, only partially credulous of Mrs. Brinkley's irony.
“Yes, it does seem out of all reason,” admitted Mrs. Stamwell.
“Of course it is,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “If she has rejected him, she's done a very safe thing. Nobody should be allowed to marry before fifty. Then, if people married, it would be because they knew that they loved each other.”
Miss Cotton reflected a moment. “It is strange that such an important question should have to be decided at an age when the judgment is so far from mature. I never happened to look at it in that light before.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley—and she made herself comfortable in an arm chair commanding a stretch of the bay over which the ferry-boat must pass—“but it's only part and parcel of the whole affair. I'm sure that no grown person can see the ridiculous young things—inexperienced, ignorant, featherbrained—that nature intrusts with children, their immortal little souls and their extremely perishable little bodies, without rebelling at the whole system. When you see what most young mothers are, how perfectly unfit and incapable, you wonder that the whole race doesn't teeth and die. Yes, there's one thing I feel pretty sure of—that, as matters are arranged now, there oughtn't to be mothers at all, there ought to be only grandmothers.”
The group all laughed, even Miss Cotton, but she was the first to become grave. At the bottom of her heart there was a doubt whether so light a way of treating serious things was not a little wicked.
“Perhaps,” she said, “we shall have to go back to the idea that engagements and marriages are not intended to be regulated by the judgment, but by the affections.”
“I don't know what's intended,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “but I know what is. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the affections have it their own way, and I must say I don't think the judgment could make a greater mess of it. In fact,” she continued, perhaps provoked to the excess by the deprecation she saw in Miss Cotton's eye, “I consider every broken engagement nowadays a blessing in disguise.”
Miss Cotton said nothing. The other ladies said, “Why, Mrs. Brinkley!”
“Yes. The thing has gone altogether too far. The pendulum has swung in that direction out of all measure. We are married too much. And as a natural consequence we are divorced too much. The whole case is in a nutshell: if there were no marriages, there would be no divorces, and that great abuse would be corrected, at any rate.”
All the ladies laughed, Miss Cotton more and more sorrowfully. She liked to have people talk as they do in genteel novels. Mrs. Brinkley's bold expressions were a series of violent shocks to her nature, and imparted a terrible vibration to the fabric of her whole little rose-coloured ideal world; if they had not been the expressions of a person whom a great many unquestionable persons accepted, who had such an undoubted standing, she would have thought them very coarse. As it was, they had a great fascination for her. “But in a case like that of”—she looked round and lowered her voice—“our young friends, I'm sure you couldn't rejoice if the engagement were broken off.”
“Well, I'm not going to be 'a mush of concession,' as Emerson says, Miss Cotton. And, in the first place, how do you know they're engaged?”
“Ah, I don't; I didn't mean that they were. But wouldn't it be a little pathetic if, after all that we've seen going on, his coming here expressly on her account, and his perfect devotion to her for the past two weeks, it should end in nothing?”
“Two weeks isn't a very long time to settle the business of a lifetime.”
“No.”
“Perhaps she's proposed delay; a little further acquaintance.”
“Oh, of course that would be perfectly right. Do you think she did?”
“Not if she's as wise as the rest of us would have been at her age. But I think she ought.”
“Yes?” said Miss Cotton semi-interrogatively.
“Do you think his behaviour last night would naturally impress her with his wisdom and constancy?”
“No, I can't say that it would, but—”
“And this Alice of yours is rather a severe young person. She has her ideas, and I'm afraid they're rather heroic. She'd be just with him, of course. But there's nothing a man dreads so much as justice—some men.”
“Yes,” pursued Miss Cotton, “but that very disparity—I know they're very unlike—don't you think—”
“Oh yes, I know the theory about that. But if they were exactly alike in temperament, they'd be sufficiently unlike for the purposes of counterparts. That was arranged once for all when 'male and female created He them.' I've no doubt their fancy was caught by all the kinds of difference they find in each other; that's just as natural as it's silly. But the misunderstanding, the trouble, the quarrelling, the wear and tear of spirit, that they'd have to go through before they assimilated—it makes me tired, as the boys say. No: I hope, for the young man's own sake, he's got his conge.”
“But he's so kind, so good—”
“My dear, the world is surfeited with kind, good men. There are half a dozen of them at the other end of the piazza smoking; and there comes another to join them,” she added, as a large figure, semicircular in profile, advanced itself from a doorway toward a vacant chair among the smokers. “The very soul of kindness and goodness.” She beckoned toward her husband, who caught sight of her gesture. “Now I can tell you all his mental processes. First, surprise at seeing some one beckoning; then astonishment that it's I, though who else should beckon him?—then wonder what I can want; then conjecture that I may want him to come here; then pride in his conjecture; rebellion; compliance.”
The ladies were in a scream of laughter as Mr. Brinkley lumbered heavily to their group.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Do you believe in broken engagements? Now quick—off-hand!”
“Who's engaged?”
“No matter.”
“Well, you know Punch's advice to those about to marry?”
“I know—chestnuts,” said his wife scornfully. They dismissed each other with tender bluntness, and he went in to get a match.
“Ah, Mrs. Brinkley,” said one of the ladies, “it would be of no use for you to preach broken engagements to any one who saw you and Mr. Brinkley together.” They fell upon her, one after another, and mocked her with the difference between her doctrine and practice; and they were all the more against her because they had been perhaps a little put down by her whimsical sayings.
“Yes,” she admitted. “But we've been thirty years coming to the understanding that you all admire so much; and do you think it was worth the time?”