Mavering kept up until he took leave of the party of young people who had come over on the ferry-boat to Eastport for the frolic of seeing him off. It was a tremendous tour de force to accept their company as if he were glad of it, and to respond to all their gay nothings gaily; to maintain a sunny surface on his turbid misery. They had tried to make Alice come with them, but her mother pleaded a bad headache for her; and he had to parry a hundred sallies about her, and from his sick heart humour the popular insinuation that there was an understanding between them, and that they had agreed together she should not come. He had to stand about on the steamboat wharf and listen to amiable innuendoes for nearly an hour before the steamer came in from St. John. The fond adieux of his friends, their offers to take any message back, lasted during the interminable fifteen minutes that she lay at her moorings, and then he showed himself at the stern of the boat, and waved his handkerchief in acknowledgment of the last parting salutations on shore.
When it was all over, he went down into his state-room, and shut himself in, and let his misery rollover him. He felt as if there were a flood of it, and it washed him to and fro, one gall of shame, of self-accusal, of bitterness, from head to foot. But in it all he felt no resentment toward Alice, no wish to wreak any smallest part of his suffering upon her. Even while he had hoped for her love, it seemed to him that he had not seen her in all that perfection which she now had in irreparable loss. His soul bowed itself fondly over the thought of her; and, stung as he was by that last cruel word of hers, he could not upbraid her. That humility which is love casting out selfishness, the most egotistic of the passions triumphing over itself—Mavering experienced it to the full. He took all the blame. He could not see that she had ever encouraged him to hope for her love, which now appeared a treasure heaven—far beyond his scope; he could only call himself fool, and fool, and fool, and wonder that he could have met her in the remoteness of that morning with the belief that but for the follies of last night she might have answered him differently. He believed now that, whatever had gone before, she must still have rejected him. She had treated his presumption very leniently; she had really spared him.
It went on, over and over. Sometimes it varied a little, as when he thought of how, when she should tell her mother, Mrs. Pasmer must laugh. He pictured them both laughing at him; and then Mr. Pasmer—he had scarcely passed a dozen words with him-coming in and asking what they were laughing at, and their saying, and his laughing too.
At other times he figured them as incensed at his temerity, which must seem to them greater and greater, as now it seemed to him. He had never thought meanly of himself, and the world so far had seemed to think well of him; but because Alice Pasmer was impossible to him, he felt that it was an unpardonable boldness in him to have dreamed of her. What must they be saying of his having passed from the ground of society compliments and light flirtation to actually telling Alice that he loved her?
He wondered what Mrs. Pasmer had thought of his telling her that he had come to Campobello to consider the question whether he should study law or go into business, and what motive she had supposed he had in telling her that. He asked himself what motive he had, and tried to pretend that he had none. He dramatised conversations with Mrs. Pasmer in which he laughed it off.
He tried to remember all that had passed the day before at the picnic, and whether Alice had done or said anything to encourage him, and he could not find that she had. All her trust and freedom was because she felt perfectly safe with him from any such disgusting absurdity as he had been guilty of. The ride home through the mist, with its sweet intimacy, that parting which had seemed so full of tender intelligence, were parts of the same illusion. There had been nothing of it on her side from the beginning but a kindliness which he had now flung away for ever.
He went back to the beginning, and tried to remember the point where he had started in this fatal labyrinth of error. She had never misled him, but he had misled himself from the first glimpse of her.
Whatever was best in his light nature, whatever was generous and self-denying, came out in this humiliation. From the vision of her derision he passed to a picture of her suffering from pity for him, and wrung with a sense of the pain she had given him. He promised himself to write to her, and beg her not to care for him, because he was not worthy of that. He framed a letter in his mind, in which he posed in some noble attitudes, and brought tears into his eyes by his magnanimous appeal to her not to suffer for the sake of one so unworthy of her serious thought. He pictured her greatly moved by some of the phrases, and he composed for her a reply, which led to another letter from him, and so to a correspondence and a long and tender friendship. In the end he died suddenly, and then she discovered that she had always loved him. He discovered that he was playing the fool again, and he rose from the berth where he had tumbled himself. The state-room had that smell of parboiled paint which state-rooms have, and reminded him of the steamer in which he had gone to Europe when a boy, with the family, just after his mother's health began to fail.
He went down on the deck near the ladies' saloon, where the second-class passengers were gathered listening to the same band of plantation negroes who had amused him so much on the eastward trip. The passengers were mostly pock marked Provincials, and many of them were women; they lounged on the barrels of apples neatly piled up, and listened to the music without smiling. One of the negroes was singing to the banjo, and another began to do the rheumatic uncle's breakdown. Mavering said to himself: “I can't stand that. Oh, what a fool I am! Alice, I love you. O merciful heavens! O infernal jackass! Ow! Gaw!”
At the bow of the boat he found a gang of Italian labourers returning to the States after some job in the Provinces. They smoked their pipes and whined their Neapolitan dialect together. It made Mavering think of Dante, of the Inferno, to which he passed naturally from his self-denunciation for having been an infernal jackass. The inscription on the gate of hell ran through his mind. He thought he would make his life—his desolate, broken life—a perpetual exile, like Dante's. At the same time he ground his teeth, and muttered: “Oh, what a fool I am! Oh, idiot! beast! Oh! oh!” The pipes reminded him to smoke, and he took out his cigarette case. The Italians looked at him; he gave all the cigarettes among them, without keeping any for himself. He determined to spend the miserable remnant of his life in going about doing good and bestowing alms.
He groaned aloud, so that the Italians noticed it, and doubtless spoke of it among themselves. He could not understand their dialect, but he feigned them saying respectfully compassionate things. Then he gnashed his teeth again, and cursed his folly. When the bell rang for supper he found himself very hungry, and ate heavily. After that he went out in front of the cabin, and walked up and down, thinking, and trying not to think. The turmoil in his mind tired him like a prodigious physical exertion.
Toward ten o'clock the night grew rougher. The sea was so phosphorescent that it broke in sheets and flakes of pale bluish flame from the bows and wheel-houses, and out in the dark the waves revealed themselves in flashes and long gleams of fire. One of the officers of the boat came and hung with Mavering over the guard. The weird light from the water was reflected on their faces, and showed them to each other.
“Well, I never saw anything like this before. Looks like hell; don't it?” said the officer.
“Yes,” said Mavering. “Is it uncommon?”
“Well, I should say so. I guess we're going to have a picnic.”
Mavering thought of blueberries, but he did not say anything.
“I guess it's going to be a regular circus.”
Mavering did not care. He asked incuriously, “How do you find your course in such weather?”
“Well, we guess where we are, and then give her so many turns of the wheel.” The officer laughed, and Mavering laughed too. He was struck by the hollow note in his laugh; it seemed to him pathetic; he wondered if he should now always laugh so, and if people would remark it. He tried another laugh; it sounded mechanical.
He went to bed, and was so worn out that he fell asleep and began to dream. A face came up out of the sea, and brooded over the waters, as in that picture of Vedder's which he calls “Memory,” but the hair was not blond; it was the colour of those phosphorescent flames, and the eyes were like it. “Horrible! horrible!” he tried to shriek, but he cried, “Alice, I love you.” There was a burglar in the room, and he was running after Miss Pasmer. Mavering caught him, and tried to beat him; his fists fell like bolls of cotton; the burglar drew his breath in with a long, washing sound like water.
Mavering woke deathly sick, and heard the sweep of the waves. The boat was pitching frightfully. He struggled out into the saloon, and saw that it was five o'clock. In five hours more it would be a day since he told Alice that he loved her; it now seemed very improbable. There were a good many half-dressed people in the saloon, and a woman came running out of her state-room straight to Mavering. She was in her stocking feet, and her hair hung down her back.
“Oh! are we going down?” she implored him. “Have we struck? Oughtn't we to pray—somebody? Shall I wake the children?”
“Mavering reassured her, and told her there was no danger.
“Well, then,” she said, “I'll go back for my shoes.”
“Yes, better get your shoes.”
The saloon rose round him and sank. He controlled his sickness by planting a chair in the centre and sitting in it with his eyes shut. As he grew more comfortable he reflected how he had calmed that woman, and he resolved again to spend his life in doing good. “Yes, that's the only ticket,” he said to himself, with involuntary frivolity. He thought of what the officer had said, and he helplessly added, “Circus ticket—reserved seat.” Then he began again, and loaded himself with execration.
The boat got into Portland at nine o'clock, and Mavering left her, taking his hand-bag with him, and letting his trunk go on to Boston.
The officer who received his ticket at the gangplank noticed the destination on it, and said, “Got enough?”
“Yes, for one while.” Mavering recognised his acquaintance of the night before.
“Don't like picnics very much.”
“No,” said Mavering, with abysmal gloom. “They don't agree with me. Never did.” He was aware of trying to make his laugh bitter. The officer did not notice.
Mavering was surprised, after the chill of the storm at sea, to find it rather a warm, close morning in Portland. The restaurant to which the hackman took him as the best in town was full of flies; they bit him awake out of the dreary reveries he fell into while waiting for his breakfast. In a mirror opposite he saw his face. It did not look haggard; it looked very much as it always did. He fancied playing a part through life—hiding a broken heart under a smile. “O you incorrigible ass!” he said to himself, and was afraid he had said it to the young lady who brought him his breakfast, and looked haughtily at him from under her bang. She was very thin, and wore a black jersey.
He tried to find out whether he had spoken aloud by addressing her pleasantly. “It's pretty cold this morning.”
“What say?”
“Pretty cool.”
“Oh yes. But it's pretty clo-ose,” she replied, in her Yankee cantillation. She went away and left him to the bacon and eggs he had ordered at random. There was a fly under one of the slices of bacon, and Mavering confined himself to the coffee.
A man came up in a white cap and jacket from a basement in the front of the restaurant, where confectionery was sold, and threw down a mass of malleable candy on a marble slab, and began to work it. Mavering watched him, thinking fuzzily all the time of Alice, and holding long, fatiguing dialogues with the people at the Ty'n-y-Coed, whose several voices he heard.
He said to himself that it was worse than yesterday. He wondered if it would go on getting worse every day.
He saw a man pass the door of the restaurant who looked exactly like Boardman as he glanced in. The resemblance was explained by the man's coming back, and proving to be really Boardman.
“I thought it was you as I passed,” said Boardman, “but I couldn't make sure—so dark back here.”
“And I thought it was you, but I couldn't believe it,” said Mavering, with equal force, cutting short an interior conversation with Mr. Pasmer, which had begun to hold itself since his first glimpse of Boardman.
“I came down here to do a sort of one-horse yacht race to-day,” Boardman explained.
“Going to be a yacht race? Better have some breakfast. Or better not—here. Flies under your bacon.”
“Rough on the flies,” said Boardman, snapping the bell which summoned the spectre in the black jersey, and he sat down. “What are you doing in Portland?”
Mavering told him, and then Boardman asked him how he had left the Pasmers. Mavering needed no other hint to speak, and he spoke fully, while Boardman listened with an agreeable silence, letting the hero of the tale break into self-scornful groans and doleful laughs, and ease his heart with grotesque, inarticulate noises, and made little or no comments.
By the time his breakfast came, Boardman was ready to say, “I didn't suppose it was so much of a mash.”
“I didn't either,” said Mavering, “when I left Boston. Of course I knew I was going down there to see her, but when I got there it kept going on, just like anything else, up to the last moment. I didn't realise till it came to the worst that I had become a mere pulp.”
“Well, you won't stay so,” said Boardman, making the first vain attempt at consolation. He lifted the steak he had ordered, and peered beneath it. “All right this time, any way.”
“I don't know what you mean by staying so,” replied Mavering, with gloomy rejection of the comfort offered.
“You'll see that it's all for the best; that you're well out of it. If she could throw you over, after leading you on—”
“But she didn't lead me on!” exclaimed Mavering. “Don't you understand that it was all my mistake from the first? If I hadn't been perfectly besotted I should have seen that she was only tolerating me. Don't you see? Why, hang it, Boardman, I must have had a kind of consciousness of it under my thick-skinned conceit, after all, for when I came to the point—when I did come to the point—I hadn't the sand to stick to it like a man, and I tried to get her to help me. Yes, I can see that I did now. I kept fooling about, and fooling about, and it was because I had that sort of prescience—of whatever you call it—that I was mistaken about it from the very beginning.”
He wished to tell Boardman about the events of the night before; but he could not. He said to himself that he did not care about their being hardly to his credit; but he did not choose to let Alice seem to have resented anything in them; it belittled her, and claimed too much for him. So Boardman had to proceed upon a partial knowledge of the facts.
“I don't suppose that boomerang way of yours, if that's what you mean, was of much use,” he said.
“Use? It ruined me! But what are you going to do? How are you going to presuppose that a girl like Miss Pasmer is interested in an idiot like you? I mean me, of course.” Mavering broke off with a dolorous laugh. “And if you can't presuppose it, what are you going to do when it comes to the point? You've got to shillyshally, and then you've got to go it blind. I tell you it's a leap in the dark.”
“Well, then, if you've got yourself to blame—”
“How am I to blame, I should like to know?” retorted Mavering, rejecting the first offer from another of the censure which he had been heaping upon himself: the irritation of his nerves spoke. “I did speak out at last—when it was too late. Well, let it all go,” he groaned aimlessly. “I don't care. But she isn't to blame. I don't think I could admire anybody very much who admired me. No, sir. She did just right. I was a fool, and she couldn't have treated me differently.”
“Oh, I guess it'll come out all right,” said Boardman, abandoning himself to mere optimism.
“How come all right?” demanded Mavering, flattered by the hope he refused. “It's come right now. I've got my deserts; that's all.”
“Oh no, you haven't. What harm have you done? It's all right for you to think small beer of yourself, and I don't see how you could think anything else just at present. But you wait awhile. When did it happen?”
Mavering took out his watch. “One day, one hour, twenty minutes, and fifteen seconds ago.”
“Sure about the seconds? I suppose you didn't hang round a great while afterward?”
“Well, people don't, generally,” said Mavering, with scorn.
“Never tried it,” said Boardman, looking critically at his fried potatoes before venturing upon them. “If you had stayed, perhaps she might have changed her mind,” he added, as if encouraged to this hopeful view by the result of his scrutiny.
“Where did you get your fraudulent reputation for common-sense, Boardman?” retorted Mavering, who had followed his examination of the potatoes with involuntary interest. “She won't change her mind; she isn't one of that kind. But she's the one woman in this world who could have made a man of me, Boardman.”
“Is that so?” asked Boardman lightly. “Well, she is a good-looking girl.”
“She's divine!”
“What a dress that was she had on Class Day!”
“I never think what she has on. She makes everything perfect, and then makes you forget it.”
“She's got style; there's no mistake about that.”
“Style!” sighed Mavering; but he attempted no exemplification.
“She's awfully graceful. What a walk she's got!”
“Oh, don't, don't, Boardman! All that's true, and all that's nothing—nothing to her goodness. She's so good, Boardman! Well, I give it up! She's religious. You wouldn't think that, may be; you can't imagine a pretty girl religious. And she's all the more intoxicating when she's serious; and when she's forgotten your whole worthless existence she's ten thousand times more fascinating than and other girl when she's going right for you. There's a kind of look comes into her eyes—kind of absence, rapture, don't you know—when she's serious, that brings your heart right into your mouth. She makes you think of some of those pictures—I want to tell you what she said the other day at a picnic when we were off getting blueberries, and you'll understand that she isn't like other girls—that she has a soul fall of—of—you know what, Boardman. She has high thoughts about everything. I don't believe she's ever had a mean or ignoble impulse—she couldn't have.” In the business of imparting his ideas confidentially, Mavering had drawn himself across the table toward Boardman, without heed to what was on it.
“Look out! You'll be into my steak first thing you know.”
“Oh, confound your steak?” cried Mavering, pushing the dish away. “What difference does it make? I've lost her, anyway.”
“I don't believe you've lost her,” said Boardman.
“What's the reason you don't?” retorted Mavering, with contempt.
“Because, if she's the serious kind of a girl you say she is, she wouldn't let you come up there and dangle round a whole fortnight without letting you know she didn't like it, unless she did like it. Now you just go a little into detail.”
Mavering was quite willing. He went so much into detail that he left nothing to Boardman's imagination. He lost the sense of its calamitous close in recounting the facts of his story at Campobello; he smiled and blushed and laughed in telling certain things; he described Miss Anderson and imitated her voice; he drew heads of some of the ladies on the margin of a newspaper, and the tears came into his eyes when he repeated the cruel words which Alice had used at their last meeting.
“Oh, well, you must brace up,” said Boardman. “I've got to go now. She didn't mean it, of course.”
“Mean what?”
“That you were ungentlemanly. Women don't know half the time how hard they're hitting.”
“I guess she meant that she didn't want me, anyway,” said Mavering gloomily.
“Ah, I don't know about that. You'd better ask her the next time you see her. Good-bye.” He had risen, and he offered his hand to Mavering, who was still seated.
“Why, I've half a mind to go with you.”
“All right, come along. But I thought you might be going right on to Boston.”
“No; I'll wait and go on with you. How, do you go to the race?”
“In the press boat.”
“Any women?”
“No; we don't send them on this sort of duty.”
“That settles it. I have got all I want of that particular sex for the time being.” Mavering wore a very bitter air as he said this; it seemed to him that he would always be cynical; he rose, and arranged to leave his bag with the restaurateur, who put it under the counter, and then he went out with his friend.
The sun had come out, and the fog was burning away; there was life and lift in the air, which the rejected lover could not refuse to feel, and he said, looking round, and up and down the animated street. “I guess you're going to have a good day for it.”
The pavement was pretty well filled with women who had begun shopping. Carriages were standing beside the pavement; a lady crossed the pavement from a shop door toward a coupe just in front of them, with her hand full of light packages; she dropped one of them, and Mavering sprang forward instinctively and picked it up for her.
“Oh, thank you!” she said, with the deep gratitude which society cultivates for the smallest services. Then she lifted her drooped eyelashes, and, with a flash of surprise, exclaimed, “Mr. Mavering!” and dropped all her packages that she might shake hands with him.
Boardman sauntered slowly on, but saw with a backward glance Mavering carrying the lady's packages to the coupe for her; saw him lift his hat there, and shake hands with somebody in the coupe, and then stand talking beside it. He waited at the corner of the block for Mavering to come up, affecting an interest in the neck-wear of a furnisher's window.
In about five minutes Mavering joined him.
“Look here, Boardman! Those ladies have snagged onto me.”
“Are there two of them?”
“Yes, one inside. And they want me to go with then to see the race. Their father's got a little steam-yacht. They want you to go too.”
Boardman shook his head.
“Well, that's what I told them—told them that you had to go on the press boat. They said they wished they were going on the press boat too. But I don't see how I can refuse. They're ladies that I met Class Day, and I ought to have shown them a little more attention then; but I got so taken up with—”
“I see,” said Boardman, showing his teeth, fine and even as grains of pop-corn, in a slight sarcastic smile. “Sort of poetical justice,” he suggested.
“Well, it is—sort of,” said Mavering, with a shamefaced consciousness. “What train are you going back on?”
“Seven o'clock.”
“I'll be there.”
He hurried back to rejoin the ladies, and Boardman saw him, after some parley and laughter, get into the coupe, from which he inferred that they had turned down the little seat in front, and made him take it; and he inferred that they must be very jolly, sociable girls.
He did not see Mavering again till the train was on its way, when he came in, looking distraughtly about for his friend. He was again very melancholy, and said dejectedly that they had made him stay to dinner, and had then driven him down to the station, bag and all. “The old gentleman came too. I was in hopes I'd find you hanging round somewhere, so that I could introduce you. They're awfully nice. None of that infernal Boston stiffness. The one you saw me talking with is married, though.”
Boardman was writing out his report from a little book with shorthand notes in it. There were half a dozen other reporters in the car busy with their work. A man who seemed to be in authority said to one of them, “Try to throw in a little humour.”
Mavering pulled his hat over his eyes, and leaned his head on the back of his seat, and tried to sleep.
At his father's agency in Boston he found, the next morning, a letter from him saying that he expected to be down that day, and asking Dan to meet him at the Parker House for dinner. The letter intimated the elder Mavering's expectation that his son had reached some conclusion in the matter they had talked of before he left for Campobello.
It gave Dan a shiver of self-disgust and a sick feeling of hopelessness. He was quite willing now to do whatever his father wished, but he did not see haw he could face him and own his defeat.
When they met, his father did not seem to notice his despondency, and he asked him nothing about the Pasmers, of course. That would not have been the American way. Nothing had been said between the father and son as to the special advantages of Campobello for the decision of the question pending when they saw each other last; but the son knew that the father guessed why he chose that island for the purpose; and now the elder knew that if the younger had anything to tell him he would tell it, and if he had not he would keep it. It was tacitly understood that there was no objection on the father's part to Miss Pasmer; in fact, there had been a glimmer of humorous intelligence in his eye when the son said he thought he should run down to Bar Harbour, and perhaps to Campobello, but he had said nothing to betray his consciousness.
They met in the reading-room at Parker's, and Dan said, “Hello, father,” and his father answered, “Well, Dan;” and they shyly touched the hands dropped at their sides as they pressed together in the crowd. The father gave his boy a keen glance, and then took the lead into the dining-room, where he chose a corner table, and they disposed of their hats on the window-seat.
“All well at home?” asked the young fellow, as he took up the bill of fare to order the dinner. His father hated that, and always made him do it.
“Yes, yes; as usual, I believe. Minnie is off for a week at the mountains; Eunice is at home.”
“Oh! How would you like some green goose, with apple-sauce, sweet-potatoes, and succotash?”
“It seems to me that was pretty good, the last time. All right, if you like it.”
“I don't know that I care for anything much. I'm a little off my feed. No soup,” he said, looking up at the waiter bending over him; and then he gave the order. “I think you may bring me half a dozen Blue Points, if they're good,” he called after him.
“Didn't Bar Harbour agree with you—or Campobello?” asked Mr. Mavering, taking the opening offered him.
“No, not very well,” said Dan; and he said no more about it, leaving his father to make his own inferences as to the kind or degree of the disagreement.
“Well, have you made up your mind?” asked the father, resting his elbows on either side of his plate, and putting his hands together softly, while he looked across them with a cheery kindness at his boy.
“Yes, I have,” said Dan slowly.
“Well?”
“I don't believe I care to go into the law.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that's all right, then. I wished you to choose freely, and I suppose you've done so.”
“Oh Yes.”
“I think you've chosen wisely, and I'm very glad. It's a weight off my mind. I think you'll be happier in the business than you would in the law; I think you'll enjoy it. You needn't look forward to a great deal of Ponkwasset Falls, unless you like.”
“I shouldn't mind going there,” said Dan listlessly.
“It won't be necessary—at first. In fact, it won't be desirable. I want you to look up the business at this end a little.”
Dan gave a start. “In Boston?”
“Yes. It isn't in the shape I want to have it. I propose to open a place of our own, and to put you in charge.” Something in the young man's face expressed reluctance, and his father asked kindly, “Would that be distasteful to you?”
“Oh no. It isn't the thing I object to, but I don't know that I care to be in Boston.” He lifted his face and looked his father full in the eyes, but with a gaze that refused to convey anything definite. Then the father knew that the boy's love affair had gone seriously wrong.
The waiter came with the dinner, and made an interruption in which they could be naturally silent. When he had put the dinner before them, and cumbered them with superfluous service, after the fashion of his kind, he withdrew a little way, and left them to resume their talk.
“Well,” said the elder lightly, as if Dan's not caring to be in Boston had no particular significance for him, “I don't know that I care to have you settle down to it immediately. I rather think I'd like to have you look about first a little. Go to New York, go to Philadelphia, and see their processes there. We can't afford to get old-fashioned in our ways. I've always been more interested by the aesthetic side of the business, but you ought to have a taste for the mechanism, from your grandfather; your mother has it.”
“Oh yes, sir. I think all that's very interesting,” said Dan.
“Well, go to France, and see how those fellows do it. Go to London, and look up William Morris.”
“Yes, that would be very nice,” admitted the young fellow, beginning to catch on. “But I didn't suppose—I didn't expect to begin life with a picnic.” He entered upon his sentence with a jocular buoyancy, but at the last word, which he fatally drifted upon, his voice fell. He said to himself that he was greatly changed; that, he should never be gay and bright again; there would always be this undercurrent of sadness; he had noticed the undercurrent yesterday when he was laughing and joking with those girls at Portland.
“Oh, I don't want you to buckle down at once,” said his father, smiling. “If you'd decided upon the law, I should have felt that you'd better not lose time. But as you're going into the business, I don't mind your taking a year off. It won't be lost time if you keep your eyes open. I think you'd better go down into Italy and Spain. Look up the old tapestries and stamped leathers. You may get some ideas. How would you like it?”
“First-rate. I should like it,” said Dan, rising on the waft of his father's suggestion, but gloomily lapsing again. Still, it was pleasing to picture himself going about through Europe with a broken heart, and he did not deny himself the consolation of the vision.
“Well, there's nobody to dislike it,” said his father cheerily. He was sure now that Dan had been jilted; otherwise he would have put forth some objection to a scheme which must interrupt his lovemaking. “There's no reason why, with our resources, we shouldn't take the lead in this business.”
He went on to speak more fully of his plans, and Dan listened with a nether reference of it all to Alice, but still with a surface intelligence on which nothing was lost.
“Are you going home with me to-morrow?” asked his father as they rose from the table.
“Well, perhaps not to-morrow. I've got some of my things to put together in Cambridge yet, and perhaps I'd better look after them. But I've a notion I'd better spend the winter at home, and get an idea of the manufacture before I go abroad. I might sail in January; they say it's a good month.”
“Yes, there's sense in that,” said his father.
“And perhaps I won't break up in Cambridge till I've been to New York and Philadelphia. What do you think? It's easier striking them from here.”
“I don't know but you're right,” said his father easily.
They had come out of the dining-room, and Dan stopped to get some cigarettes in the office. He looked mechanically at the theatre bills over the cigar case. “I see Irving's at the 'Boston.'”
“Oh, you don't say!” said his father. “Let's go and see him.”
“If you wish it, sir,” said Dan, with pensive acquiescence. All the Maverings were fond of the theatre, and made any mood the occasion or the pretext of going to the play. If they were sad, they went; if they were gay, they went. As long as Dan's mother could get out-of-doors she used to have herself carried to a box in the theatre whenever she was in town; now that she no longer left her room, she had a dominant passion for hearing about actors and acting; it was almost a work of piety in her husband and children to see them and report to her.
His father left him the next afternoon, and Dan, who had spent the day with him looking into business for the first time, with a running accompaniment of Alice in all the details, remained to uninterrupted misery. He spent the evening in his room, too wretched even for the theatre. It is true that he tried to find Boardman, but Boardman was again off on some newspaper duty; and after trying at several houses in the hope, which he knew was vain, of finding any one in town yet, he shut himself up with his thoughts. They did not differ from the thoughts of the night before, and the night before that, but they were calmer, and they portended more distinctly a life of self-abnegation and solitude from that time forth. He tested his feelings, and found that it was not hurt vanity that he was suffering from: it was really wounded affection. He did not resent Alice's cruelty; he wished that she might be happy; he could endure to see her happy.
He wrote a letter to the married one of the two ladies he had spent the day with in Portland, and thanked them for making pass pleasantly a day which he would not otherwise have known how to get through. He let a soft, mysterious melancholy pervade his letter; he hinted darkly at trouble and sorrow of which he could not definitely speak. He had the good sense to tear his letter up when he had finished it, and to send a short, sprightly note instead, saying that if Mrs. Frobisher and her sister came to Boston at the end of the month, as they had spoken of doing, they must be sure to let him know. Upon the impulse given him by this letter he went more cheerfully to bed, and fell instantly asleep.
During the next three weeks he bent himself faithfully to the schemes of work his father had outlined for him. He visited New York and Philadelphia, and looked into the business and the processes there; and he returned to Ponkwasset Falls to report and compare his facts intelligently with those which he now examined in his father's manufactory for the first time. He began to understand how his father, who was a man of intellectual and artistic interests, should be fond of the work.
He spent a good deal of time with his mother, and read to her, and got upon better terms with her than they usually were. They were very much alike, and she objected to him that he was too light and frivolous. He sat with his sisters, and took an interest in their pursuits. He drove them about with his father's sorrels, and resumed something of the old relations with them which the selfish years of his college life had broken off. As yet he could not speak of Campobello or of what had happened there; and his mother and sisters, whatever they thought, made no more allusion to it than his father had done.
They mercifully took it for granted that matters must have gone wrong there, or else he would speak about them, for there had been some gay banter among them concerning the objects of his expedition before he left home. They had heard of the heroine of his Class Day, and they had their doubts of her, such as girls have of their brothers' heroines. They were not inconsolably sorry to have her prove unkind; and their mother found in the probable event another proof of their father's total want of discernment where women were concerned, for the elder Mavering had come home from Class Day about as much smitten with this mysterious Miss Pasmer as Dan was. She talked it over indignantly with her daughters; they were glad of Dan's escape, but they were incensed with the girl who could let him escape, and they inculpated her in a high degree of heartless flirtation. They knew how sweet Dan was, and they believed him most sincere and good. He had been brilliantly popular in college, and he was as bright as he could be. What was it she chose not to like in him? They vexed themselves with asking how or in what way she thought herself better. They would not have had her love Dan, but they were hot against her for not loving him.
They did not question him, but they tried in every way to find out how much he was hurt, and they watched him in every word and look for signs of change to better or worse, with a growing belief that he was not very much hurt.
It could not be said that in three weeks he forgot Alice, or had begun to forget her; but he had begun to reconcile himself to his fate, as people do in their bereavements by death. His consciousness habituated itself to the facts as something irretrievable. He no longer framed in his mind situations in which the past was restored. He knew that he should never love again, but he had moments, and more and more of them, in which he experienced that life had objects besides love. There were times when he tingled with all the anguish of the first moment of his rejection, when he stopped in whatever he was doing, or stood stock-still, as a man does when arrested by a physical pang, breathless, waiting. There were other times when he went about steeped in gloom so black that all the world darkened with it, and some mornings when he woke he wished that the night had lasted for ever, and felt as if the daylight had uncovered his misery and his shame to every one. He never knew when he should have these moods, and he thought he should have them as long as he lived. He thought this would be something rather fine. He had still other moods, in which he saw an old man with a grey moustache, like Colonel Newcome, meeting a beautiful white-haired lady; the man had never married, and he had not seen this lady for fifty years. He bent over, and kissed her hand.
“You idiot!” said Mavering to himself. Throughout he kept a good appetite. In fact, after that first morning in Portland, he had been hungry three times a day with perfect regularity. He lost the idea of being sick; he had not even a furred tongue. He fell asleep pretty early, and he slept through the night without a break. He had to laugh a great deal with his mother and sisters, since he could not very well mope without expecting them to ask why, and he did not wish to say why. But there were some laughs which he really enjoyed with the Yankee foreman of the works, who was a droll, after a common American pattern, and said things that were killingly funny, especially about women, of whom his opinions were sarcastic.
Dan Mavering suffered, but not solidly. His suffering was short, and crossed with many gleams of respite and even joy. His disappointment made him really unhappy, but not wholly so; it was a genuine sorrow, but a sorrow to which he began to resign himself even in the monotony of Ponkwasset Falls, and which admitted the thought of Mrs. Frobisher's sister by the time business called him to Boston.