Mavering first woke in the morning with the mechanical recurrence of that shame and grief which each day had brought him since Alice refused him. Then with a leap of the heart came the recollection of all that had happened yesterday. Yet lurking within his rapture was a mystery of regret: a reasonless sense of loss, as if the old feeling had been something he would have kept. Then this faded, and he had only the longing to see her, to realise in her presence and with her help the fact that she was his. An unspeakable pride filled him, and a joy in her love. He tried to see some outward vision of his bliss in the glass; but, like the mirror which had refused to interpret his tragedy in the Portland restaurant, it gave back no image of his transport: his face looked as it always did, and he and the refection laughed at each other:
He asked himself how soon he could go and see her. It was now seven o'clock: eight would be too early, of course—it would be ridiculous; and nine—he wondered if he might go to see her at nine. Would they have done breakfast? Had he any right to call before ten? He was miserable at the thought of waiting till ten: it would be three hours. He thought of pretexts—of inviting her to go somewhere, but that was absurd, for he could see her at home all day if he liked; of carrying her a book, but there could be no such haste about a book; of going to ask if he had left his cane, but why should he be in such a hurry for his cane? All at once he thought he could take her some flowers—a bouquet to lay beside her plate at breakfast. He dramatised himself charging the servant who should take it from him at the door not to say who left it; but Alice would know, of course, and they would all know; it would be very pretty. He made Mrs. Pasmer say some flattering things of him; and he made Alice blush deliciously to hear them. He could not manage Mr. Pasmer very well, and he left him out of the scene: he imagined him shaving in another room; then he remembered his wearing a full beard.
He dressed himself as quickly as he could, and went down into the hotel vestibule, where he had noticed people selling flowers the evening before, but there was no one there with them now, and none of the florists' shops on the street were open yet. He could not find anything till he went to the Providence Depot, and the man there had to take some of his yesterday's flowers out of the refrigerator where he kept them; he was not sure they would be very fresh; but the heavy rosebuds had fallen open, and they were superb. Dan took all there were, and when they had been sprinkled with water, and wrapped in cotton batting, and tied round with paper, it was still only quarter of eight, and he left them with the man till he could get his breakfast at the Depot restaurant. There it had a consoling effect of not being so early; many people were already breakfasting, and when Dan said, with his order, “Hurry it up, please,” he knew that he was taken for a passenger just arrived or departing. By a fantastic impulse he ordered eggs and bacon again; he felt, it a fine derision of the past and a seal of triumph upon the present to have the same breakfast after his acceptance as he had ordered after his rejection; he would tell Alice about it, and it would amuse her. He imagined how he would say it, and she would laugh; but she would be full of a ravishing compassion for his past suffering. They were long bringing the breakfast; when it came he despatched it so quickly that it was only half after eight when he paid his check at the counter. He tried to be five minutes more getting his flowers, but the man had them all ready for him, and it did not take him ten seconds. He had said he would carry them at half-past nine; but thinking it over on a bench in the Garden, he decided that he had better go sooner; they might breakfast earlier, and there would be no fun if Alice did not find the roses beside her plate: that was the whole idea. It was not till he stood at the door of the Pasmer apartment that he reflected that he was not accomplishing his wish to see Alice by leaving her those flowers; he was a fool, for now he would have to postpone coming a little, because he had already come.
The girl who answered the bell did not understand the charge he gave her about the roses, and he repeated his words. Some one passing through the room beyond seemed to hesitate and pause at the sound of his voice. Could it be Alice? Then he should see her, after all! The girl looked over her shoulder, and said, “Mrs. Pasmer.”
Mrs. Pasmer came forward, and he fell into a complicated explanation and apology. At the end she said, “You had better give them yourself. She will be here directly.” They were in the room now, and Mrs. Pasmer made the time pass in rapid talk; but Dan felt that he ought to apologise from time to time. “No!” she said, letting herself go. “Stay and breakfast with us, Mr. Mavering. We shall be so glad to have you.”
At last Alice came in, and they decorously shook hands. Mrs. Pasmer turned away a smile at their decorum. “I will see that there's a place for you,” she said, leaving them.
They were instantly in each other's arms. It seemed to him that all this had happened because he had so strongly wished it.
“What is it, Dan? What did you come for?” she asked.
“To see if it was really true, Alice. I couldn't believe it.”
“Well—let me go—you mustn't—it's too silly. Of course it's true.” She pulled herself free. “Is my hair tumbled? You oughtn't to have come; it's ridiculous; but I'm glad you came. I've been thinking it all over, and I've got a great many things to say to you. But come to breakfast now.”
She had a business-like way of treating the situation that was more intoxicating than sentiment would have been, and gave it more actuality.
Mrs. Pasmer was alone at the table, and explained that Alice's father never breakfasted with them, or very seldom. “Where are your flowers?” she asked Alice.
“Flowers? What flowers?”
“That Mr. Mavering brought.”
They all looked at one another. Dan ran out and brought in his roses.
“They were trying to get away in the excitement, I guess, Mrs. Pasmer; I found them behind the door.” He had flung them there, without knowing it, when Mrs. Pasmer left him with Alice.
He expected her to join him and her mother in being amused at this, but he was as well pleased to have her touched at his having brought them, and to turn their gaiety off in praise of the roses. She got a vase for them, and set it on the table. He noticed for the first time the pretty house-dress she had on, with its barred corsage and under-skirt, and the heavy silken rope knotted round it at the waist, and dropping in heavy tufts or balls in front.
The breakfast was Continental in its simplicity, and Mrs. Pasmer said that they had always kept up their Paris habit of a light breakfast, even in London, where it was not so easy to follow foreign customs as it was in America. She was afraid he might find it too light. Then he told all about his morning's adventure, ending with his breakfast at the Providence Depot. Mrs. Pasmer entered into the fun of it, but she said it was for only once in a way, and he must not expect to be let in if he came at that hour another morning. He said no; he understood what an extraordinary piece of luck it was for him to be there; and he was there to be bidden to do whatever they wished. He said so much in recognition of their goodness, that he became abashed by it. Mrs. Pasmer sat at the head of the table, and Alice across it from him, so far off that she seemed parted from him by an insuperable moral distance. A warm flush seemed to rise from his heart into his throat and stifle him. He wished to shed tears. His eyes were wet with grateful happiness in answering Mrs. Pasmer that he would not have any more coffee. “Then,” she said, “we will go into the drawing-room;” but she allowed him and Alice to go alone.
He was still in that illusion of awe and of distance, and he submitted to the interposition of another table between their chairs.
“I wish to talk with you,” she said, so seriously that he was frightened, and said to himself: “Now she is going to break it off. She has thought it over, and she finds she can't endure me.”
“Well?” he said huskily.
“You oughtn't to have come here, you know, this morning.”
“I know it,” he vaguely conceded. “But I didn't expect to get in.”
“Well, now you're here, we may as well talk. You must tell your family at once.”
“Yes; I'm going to write to them as soon as I get back to my room. I couldn't last night.”
“But you mustn't write; you must go—and prepare their minds.”
“Go?” he echoed. “Oh, that isn't necessary! My father knew about it from the beginning, and I guess they've all talked it over. Their minds are prepared.” The sense of his immeasurable superiority to any one's opposition began to dissipate Dan's unnatural awe; at the pleading face which Alice put on, resting one cheek against the back of one of her clasped hands, and leaning on the table with her elbows, he began to be teased by that silken rope round her waist.
“But you don't understand, dear,” she said; and she said “dear” as if they were old married people. “You must go to see them, and tell them; and then some of them must come to see me—your father and sisters.”
“Why, of course.” His eye now became fastened to one of the fluffy silken balls.
“And then mamma and I must go to see your mother, mustn't we?”
“It'll be very nice of you—yes. You know she can't come to you.”
“Yes, that's what I thought, and—What are you looking at?” she drew herself back from the table and followed the direction of his eye with a woman's instinctive apprehension of disarray.
He was ashamed to tell. “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking.”
“What?”
“Well, I don't know. That it seems so strange any one else should have any to do with it—my family and yours. But I suppose they must. Yes, it's all right.”
“Why, of course. If your family didn't like it—”
“It wouldn't make any difference to me,” said Dan resolutely.
“It would to me,” she retorted, with tender reproach. “Do you suppose it would be pleasant to go into a family that didn't like you? Suppose papa and mamma didn't like you?”
“But I thought they did,” said Mavering, with his mind still partly on the rope and the fluffy ball, but keeping his eyes away.
“Yes, they do,” said Alice. “But your family don't know me at all; and your father's only seen me once. Can't you understand? I'm afraid we don't look at it seriously enough—earnestly—and oh, I do wish to have everything done as it should be! Sometimes, when I think of it, it makes me tremble. I've been thinking about it all the morning, and—and—praying.”
Dan wanted to fall on his knees to her. The idea of Alice in prayer was fascinating.
“I wish our life to begin with others, and not with ourselves. If we're intrusted with so much happiness, doesn't it mean that we're to do good with it—to give it to others as if it were money?”
The nobleness of this thought stirred Dan greatly; his eyes wandered back to the silken rope; but now it seemed to him an emblem of voluntary suffering and self-sacrifice, like a devotee's hempen girdle. He perceived that the love of this angelic girl would elevate him and hallow his whole life if he would let it. He answered her, fervently, that he would be guided by her in this as in everything; that he knew he was selfish, and he was afraid he was not very good; but it was not because he had not wished to be so; it was because he had not had any incentive. He thought how much nobler and better this was than the talk he had usually had with girls. He said that of course he would go home and tell his people; he saw now that it would make them happier if they could hear it directly from him. He had only thought of writing because he could not bear to think of letting a day pass without seeing her; but if he took the early morning train he could get back the same night, and still have three hours at Ponkwasset Falls, and he would go the next day, if she said so.
“Go to-day, Dan,” she said, and she stretched out her hand impressively across the table toward him. He seized it with a gush of tenderness, and they drew together in their resolution to live for others. He said he would go at once. But the next train did not leave till two o'clock, and there was plenty of time. In the meanwhile it was in the accomplishment of their high aims that they sat down on the sofa together and talked of their future; Alice conditioned it wholly upon his people's approval of her, which seemed wildly unnecessary to Mavering, and amused him immensely.
“Yes,” she said, “I know you will think me strange in a great many things; but I shall never keep anything from you, and I'm going to tell you that I went to matins this morning.”
“To matins?” echoed Dan. He would not quite have liked her a Catholic; he remembered with relief that she had said she was not a Roman Catholic; though when he came to think, he would not have cared a great deal. Nothing could have changed her from being Alice.
“Yes, I wished to consecrate the first morning of our engagement; and I'm always going. I determined that I would go before breakfast—that was what made breakfast so late. Don't you like it?” she asked timidly.
“Like it!” he said. “I'm going with you:”
“Oh no!” she turned upon him. “That wouldn't do.” She became grave again. “I'm glad you approve of it, for I should feel that there was something wanting to our happiness. If marriage is a sacrament, why shouldn't an engagement be?”
“It is,” said Dan, and he felt that it was holy; till then he had never realised that marriage was a sacrament, though he had often heard the phrase.
At the end of an hour they took a tender leave of each other, hastened by the sound of Mrs. Pasmer's voice without. Alice escaped from one door before her mother entered by the other. Dan remained, trying to look unconcerned, but he was sensible of succeeding so poorly that he thought he had better offer his hand to Mrs. Pasmer at once. He told her that he was going up to Ponkwasset Falls at two o'clock, and asked her to please remember him to Mr. Pasmer.
She said she would, and asked him if he were to be gone long.
“Oh no; just overnight—till I can tell them what's happened.” He felt it a comfort to be trivial with Mrs. Pasmer, after bracing up to Alice's ideals. “I suppose they'll have to know.”
“What an exemplary son!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Yes, I suppose they will.”
“I supposed it would be enough if I wrote, but Alice thinks I'd better report in person.”
“I think you had, indeed! And it will be a good thing for you both to have the time for clarifying your ideas. Did she tell you she had been at matins this morning?” A light of laughter trembled in Mrs. Pasmer's eyes, and Mavering could not keep a responsive gleam out of his own. In an instant the dedication of his engagement by morning prayer ceased to be a high and solemn thought, and became deliciously amusing; and this laughing Alice over with her mother did more to realise the fact that she was his than anything else had yet done.
In that dark passage outside he felt two arms go tenderly round his neck; and a soft shape strain itself to his heart. “I know you have been laughing about me. But you may. I'm yours now, even to laugh at, if you want.”
“You are mine to fall down and worship,” he vowed, with an instant revulsion of feeling.
Alice didn't say anything; he felt her hand fumbling about his coat lapel. “Where is your breast pocket?” she asked; and he took hold of her hand, which left a carte-de-visite-shaped something in his.
“It isn't very good,” she murmured, as well as she could, with her lips against his cheek, “but I thought you'd like to show them some proof of my existence. I shall have none of yours while you're gone.”
“O Alice! you think of everything!”
His heart was pierced by the soft reproach implied in her words; he had not thought to ask her for her photograph, but she had thought to give it; she must have felt it strange that he had not asked for it, and she had meant to slip it in his pocket and let him find it there. But even his pang of self-upbraiding was a part of his transport. He seemed to float down the stairs; his mind was in a delirious whirl. “I shall go mad,” he said to himself in the excess of his joy—“I shall die!”
The parting scene with Alice persisted in Mavering's thought far on the way to Ponkwasset Falls. He now succeeded in saying everything to her: how deeply he felt her giving him her photograph to cheer him in his separation from her; how much he appreciated her forethought in providing him with some answer when his mother and sisters should ask him about her looks. He took out the picture, and pretended to the other passengers to be looking very closely at it, and so managed to kiss it. He told her that now he understood what love really was; how powerful; how it did conquer everything; that it had changed him and made him already a better man. He made her refuse all merit in the work.
When he began to formulate the facts for communication to his family, love did not seem so potent; he found himself ashamed of his passion, or at least unwilling to let it be its own excuse even; he had a wish to give it almost any other appearance. Until he came in sight of the station and the Works, it had not seemed possible for any one to object to Alice. He had been going home as a matter of form to receive the adhesion of his family. But now he was forced to see that she might be considered critically, even reluctantly. This would only be because his family did not understand how perfect Alice was; but they might not understand.
With his father there would be no difficulty. His father had seen Alice and admired her; he would be all right. Dan found himself hoping this rather anxiously, as if from the instinctive need of his father's support with his mother and sisters. He stopped at the Works when he left the train, and found his father in his private office beyond the book-keeper's picket-fence, which he penetrated, with a nod to the accountant.
“Hello, Dan!” said his father, looking up; and “Hello, father!” said Dan. Being alone, the father and son not only shook hands, but kissed each other, as they used to do in meeting after an absence when Dan was younger.
He had closed his father's door with his left hand in giving his right, and now he said at once, “Father, I've come home to tell you that I'm engaged to be married.”
Dan had prearranged his father's behaviour at this announcement, but he now perceived that he would have to modify the scene if it were to represent the facts. His father did not brighten all over and demand, “Miss Pasmer, of course?” he contrived to hide whatever start the news had given him, and was some time in asking, with his soft lisp, “Isn't that rather sudden, Dan?”
“Well, not for me,” said Dan, laughing uneasily. “It's—you know her, father—Miss Pasmer.”
“Oh yes,” said his father, certainly not with displeasure, and yet not with enthusiasm.
“I've had ever since Class Day to think it over, and it—came to a climax yesterday.”
“And then you stopped thinking,” said his father—to gain time, it appeared to Dan.
“Yes, sir,” said Dan. “I haven't thought since.”
“Well,” said his father, with an amusement which was not unfriendly. He added, after a moment, “But I thought that had been broken off,” and Dan's instinct penetrated to the lurking fact that his father must have talked the rupture over with his mother, and not wholly regretted it.
“There was a kind of—hitch at one time,” he admitted; “but it's all right now.”
“Well, well,” said his father, “this is great news—great news,” and he seemed to be shaping himself to the new posture of affairs, while giving it a conditional recognition. “She's a beautiful creature.”
“Isn't she?” cried Dan, with a little break in his voice, for he had found his father's manner rather trying. “And she's good too. I assure you that she is—she is simply perfect every way.”
“Well,” said the elder Mavering, rising and pulling down the rolling top of his desk, “I'm glad to hear it, for your sake, Dan. Have you been up at the house yet?”
“No; I'm just off the train.”
“How is her mother—how is Mrs. Pasmer? All well?”
“Yes, sir,” said Dan; “they're all very well. You don't know Mr. Pasmer, I believe, sir, do you?”
“Not since college. What sort of person is he?”
“He's very refined and quiet. Very handsome. Very courteous. Very nice indeed.”
“Ah! that's good,” said Elbridge Mavering, with the effect of not having been very attentive to his son's answer.
They walked up the long slope of the hillside on which the house stood, overlooking the valley where the Works were, and fronting the plateau across the river where the village of operatives' houses was scattered. The paling light of what had been a very red sunset flushed them, and brought out the picturesqueness which the architect, who designed them for a particular effect in the view from the owner's mansion, had intended.
A good carriage road followed the easiest line of ascent towards this edifice, and reached a gateway. Within it began to describe a curve bordered with asphalted footways to the broad verandah of the house, and then descended again to the gate. The grounds enclosed were planted with deciduous shrubs, which had now mostly dropped their leaves, and clumps of firs darkening in the evening light with the gleam of some garden statues shivering about the lawn next the house. The breeze grew colder and stiffer as the father and son mounted toward the mansion which Dan used to believe was like a chateau, with its Mansard-roof and dormer windows and chimneys. It now blocked its space sharply out of the thin pink of the western sky, and its lights sparkled with a wintry keenness which had often thrilled Dan when he climbed the hill from the station in former homecomings. Their brilliancy gave him a strange sinking of the heart for no reason. He and his father had kept up a sort of desultory talk about Alice, and he could not have said that his father had seemed indifferent; he had touched the affair only too acquiescently; it was painfully like everything else. When they came in full sight of the house, Dan left the subject, as he realised presently, from a reasonless fear of being overheard.
“It seems much later here, sir, than it does in Boston,” he said, glancing round at the maples, which stood ragged, with half their leaves blown from them.
“Yes; we're in the hills, and we're further north,” answered his father. “There's Minnie.”
Dan had seen his sister on the verandah, pausing at sight of him, and puzzled to make out who was with her father. He had an impulse to hail her with a shout, but he could not. In his last walk with her he had told her that he should never marry, and they had planned to live together. It was a joke; but now he felt as if he had come to rob her of something, and he walked soberly on with his father.
“Why, Dan, you good-for-nothing fellow!” she called out when he came near enough to be unmistakable, and ran down the steps to kiss him. “What in the world are you doing here? When did you come? Why didn't you hollo, instead of letting me stand here guessing? You're not sick, are you?”
The father got himself indoors unnoticed in the excitement of the brother's arrival. This would have been the best moment for Dan to tell his sister of his engagement; he knew it, but he parried her curiosity about his coming; and then his sister Eunice came out, and he could not speak. They all went together into the house flaming with naphtha gas, and with the steam heat already on, and Dan said he would take his bag to his room, and then come down again. He knew that he had left them to think that there was something very mysterious in his coming, and while he washed away the grime of his journey he was planning how to appear perfectly natural when he should get back to his sisters. He recollected that he had not asked either them or his father how his mother was, but it was certainly not because his mind was not full of her. Alice now seemed very remote from him, further even than his gun, or his boyish collection of moths and butterflies, on which his eye fell in roving about his room. For a bitter instant it seemed to him as if they were all alike toys, and in a sudden despair he asked himself what had become of his happiness. It was scarcely half a day since he had parted in transport from Alice.
He made pretexts to keep from returning at once to his sisters, and it was nearly half an hour before he went down to them. By that time his father was with them in the library, and they were waiting tea for him.
A family of rich people in the country, apart from intellectual interests, is apt to gormandise; and the Maverings always sat down to a luxurious table, which was most abundant and tempting at the meal they called tea, when the invention of the Portuguese man-cook was taxed to supply the demands of appetites at once eager and fastidious. They prolonged the meal as much as possible in winter, and Dan used to like to get home just in time for tea when he came up from Harvard; it was always very jolly, and he brought a boy's hunger to its abundance. The dining-room, full of shining light, and treated from the low-down grate, was a pleasant place. But now his spirits failed to rise with the physical cheer; he was almost bashfully silent; he sat cowed in the presence of his sisters, and careworn in the place where he used to be so gay and bold. They were waiting to have him begin about himself, as he always did when he had been away, and were ready to sympathise with his egotism, whatever new turn it took. He mystified them by asking about them and their affairs, and by dealing in futile generalities, instead of launching out with any business that he happened at the time to be full of. But he did not attend to their answers to his questions; he was absent-minded, and only knew that his face was flushed, and that he was obviously ill at ease.
His younger sister turned from him impatiently at last. “Father, what is the matter with Dan?”
Her bold recognition of their common constraint broke it down. Dan looked at his father with helpless consent, and his father said quietly, “He tells me he's engaged.”
“What nonsense!” said his sister Eunice.
“Why, Dan!” cried Minnie; and he felt a reproach in her words which the words did not express. A silence followed, in which the father along went on with his supper. The girls sat staring at Dan with incredulous eyes. He became suddenly angry.
“I don't know what's so very extraordinary about it, or why there should be such a pother,” he began; and he knew that he was insolently ignoring abundant reasons for pother, if there had been any pother. “Yes, I'm engaged.”
He expected now that they would believe him, and ask whom he was engaged to; but apparently they were still unable to realise it. He was obliged to go on. “I'm engaged to Miss Pasmer.”
“To Miss Pasmer!” repeated Eunice.
“But I thought—” Minnie began, and then stopped.
Dan commanded his temper by a strong effort, and condescended to explain. “There was a misunderstanding, but it's all right now; I only met her yesterday, and—it's all right.” He had to keep on ignoring what had passed between him and his sisters during the month he spent at home after his return from Campobello. He did not wish to do so; he would have been glad to laugh over that epoch of ill-concealed heart-break with them; but the way they had taken the fact of his engagement made it impossible. He was forced to keep them at a distance; they forced him. “I'm glad,” he added bitterly, “that the news seems to be so agreeable to my family. Thank you for your cordial congratulations.” He swallowed a large cup of tea, and kept looking down.
“How silly!” said Eunice, who was much the oldest of the three. “Did you expect us to fall upon your neck before we could believe it wasn't a hoax of father's?”
“A hoax!” Dan burst out.
“I suppose,” said Minnie, with mock meekness, “that if we're to be devoured, it's no use saying we didn't roil the brook. I'm sure I congratulate you, Dan, with all my heart,” she added, with a trembling voice.
“I congratulate Miss Pasmer,” said Eunice, “on securing such a very reasonable husband.”
When Eunice first became a young lady she was so much older than Dan that in his mother's absence she sometimes authorised herself to box his ears, till she was finally overthrown in battle by the growing boy. She still felt herself so much his tutelary genius that she could not let the idea of his engagement awe her, or keep her from giving him a needed lesson. Dan jumped to his feet, and passionately threw his napkin on his chair.
“There, that will do, Eunice!” interposed the father. “Sit down, Dan, and don't be an ass, if you are engaged. Do you expect to come up here with a bombshell in your pocket, and explode it among us without causing any commotion? We all desire your happiness, and we are glad if you think you've found it, but we want to have time to realise it. We had only adjusted our minds to the apparent fact that you hadn't found it when you were here before.” His father began very severely, but when he ended with this recognition of what they had all blinked till then, they laughed together.
“My pillow isn't dry yet, with the tears I shed for you, Dan,” said Minnie demurely.
“I shall have to countermand my mourning,” said Eunice, “and wear louder colours than ever. Unless,” she added, “Miss Pasmer changes her mind again.”
This divination of the past gave them all a chance for another laugh, and Dan's sisters began to reconcile themselves to the fact of his engagement, if not to Miss Pasmer. In what was abstractly so disagreeable there was the comfort that they could joke about his happiness; they had not felt free to make light of his misery when he was at home before. They began to ask all the questions they could think of as to how and when, and they assimilated the fact more and more in acquiring these particulars and making a mock of them and him.
“Of course you haven't got her photograph,” suggested Eunice. “You know we've never had the pleasure of meeting the young lady yet.”
“Yes,” Dan owned, blushing, “I have. She thought I might like to show it to mother: But it isn't—”
“A very good one—they never are,” said Minnie.
“And it was taken several years ago—they always are,” said Eunice.
“And she doesn't photograph well, anyway.”
“And this one was just after a long fit of sickness.”
Dan drew it out of his pocket, after some fumbling for it, while he tolerated their gibes.
Eunice put her nose to it. “I hope it's your cigarettes it smells of,” she said.
“Yes; she doesn't use the weed,” answered Dan.
“Oh, I didn't mean that, exactly,” returned his sister, holding the picture off at arm's length, and viewing it critically with contracted eyes.
Dan could not help laughing. “I don't think it's been near any other cigar-case,” he answered tranquilly.
Minnie looked at it very near to, covering all but the face with her hand. “Dan, she's lovely!” she cried, and Dan's heart leaped into his throat As he gratefully met his sister's eyes.
“You'll like her, Min.”
Eunice took the photograph from her for a second scrutiny. “She's certainly very stylish. Rather a beak of a nose, and a little too bird—like on the whole. But she isn't so bad. Is it like her?” she asked with a glance at her father.
“I might say—after looking,” he replied.
“True! I didn't know but Dan had shown it to you as soon as you met. He seemed to be in such a hurry to let us all know.”
The father said, “I don't think it flatters her,” and he looked at it more carefully. “Not much of her mother there?” he suggested to Dan.
“No, sir; she's more like her father.”
“Well, after all this excitement, I believe I'll have another cup of tea, and take something to eat, if Miss Pasmer's photograph doesn't object,” said Eunice, and she replenished her cup and plate.
“What coloured hair and eyes has she, Dan?” asked Minnie.
He had to think so as to be exact. “Well, you might say they were black, her eyebrows are so dark. But I believe they're a sort of greyish-blue.”
“Not an uncommon colour for eyes,” said Eunice, “but rather peculiar for hair.”
They got to making fun of the picture, and Dan told them about Alice and her family; the father left them at the table, and then came back with word from Dan's mother that she was ready to see him.
By eight o'clock in the evening the pain with which every day began for Mrs. Mavering was lulled, and her jarred nerves were stayed by the opiates till she fell asleep about midnight. In this interval the family gathered into her room, and brought her their news and the cheer of their health. The girls chattered on one side of her bed, and their father sat with his newspaper on the other, and read aloud the passages which he thought would interest her, while she lay propped among her pillows, brilliantly eager for the world opening this glimpse of itself to her shining eyes. That was on her good nights, when the drugs did their work, but there were times when they failed, and the day's agony prolonged itself through the evening, and the sleep won at last was a heavy stupor. Then the sufferer's temper gave way under the stress; she became the torment she suffered, and tore the hearts she loved. Most of all, she afflicted the man who had been so faithful to her misery, and maddened him to reprisals, of which he afterward abjectly repented. Her tongue was sharpened by pain, and pitilessly skilled to inculpate and to punish; it pierced and burned like fire but when a good day came again she made it up to the victims by the angelic sweetness and sanity which they felt was her real self; the cruelty was only the mask of her suffering.
When she was better they brought to her room anybody who was staying with them, and she liked them to be jolly in the spacious chamber. The pleasantest things of the house were assembled, and all its comforts concentrated, in the place which she and they knew she should quit but once. It was made gay with flowers and pictures; it was the salon for those fortunate hours when she became the lightest and blithest of the company in it, and made the youngest guest forget that there was sickness or pain in the world by the spirit with which she ignored her own. Her laugh became young again; she joked; she entered into what they were doing and reading and thinking, and sent them away full of the sympathy which in this mood of hers she had for every mood in others. Girls sighed out their wonder and envy to her daughters when they left her; the young men whom she captivated with her divination of their passions or ambitions went away celebrating her supernatural knowledge of human nature. The next evening after some night of rare and happy excitement, the family saw her nurse carrying the pictures and flowers and vases out of her room, in sign of her renunciation of them all, and assembled silently, shrinkingly, in her chamber, to take each their portion of her anguish, of the blame and the penalty. The household adjusted itself to her humours, for she was supreme in it.
When Dan used to come home from Harvard she put on a pretty cap for him, and distinguished him as company by certain laces hiding her wasted frame, and giving their pathetic coquetry to her transparent wrists. He was her favourite, and the girls acknowledged him so, and made their fun of her for spoiling him. He found out as he grew up that her broken health dated from his birth, and at first this deeply affected him; but his young life soon lost the keenness of the impression, and he loved his mother because she loved him, and not because she had been dying for him so many years.
As he now came into her room, and the waiting-woman went out of it with her usual, “Well, Mr. Dan!” the tenderness which filled him at sight of his mother was mixed with that sense of guilt which had tormented him at times ever since he met his sisters. He was going to take himself from her; he realised that.
“Well, Dan!” she called, so gaily that he said to himself, “No, father hasn't told her anything about it,” and was instantly able to answer her as cheerfully, “Well, mother!”
He bent over her to kiss her, and the odour of the clean linen mingling with that of the opium, and the cologne with which she had tried to banish its scent, opened to him one of those vast reaches of associations which perfumes can unlock, and he saw her lying there through those years of pain, as many as half his life, and suddenly the tears gushed into his eyes, and he fell on his knees, and hid his face in the bed-clothes and sobbed.
She kept smoothing his head, which shook under her thin hand, and saying, “Poor Dan! poor Dan!” but did not question him. He knew that she knew what he had come to tell her, and that his tears, which had not been meant for that, had made interest with her for him and his cause, and that she was already on his side.
He tried boyishly to dignify the situation when he lifted his face, and he said, “I didn't mean to come boohooing to you in this way, and I'm ashamed of myself.”
“I know, Dan; but you've been wrought up, and I don't wonder. You mustn't mind your father and your sisters. Of course, they're rather surprised, and they don't like your taking yourself from them—we, none of us do.”
At these honest words Dan tried to become honest too. At least he dropped his pretence of dignity, and became as a little child in his simple greed for sympathy. “But it isn't necessarily that; is it, mother?”
“Yes, it's all that, Dan; and it's all right, because it's that. We don't like it, but our not liking it has nothing to do with its being right or wrong.”
“I supposed that father would have been pleased, anyway; for he has seen her, and—and. Of course the girls haven't, but I think they might have trusted my judgment a little. I'm not quite a fool.”
His mother smiled. “Oh, it isn't a question of the wisdom of your choice; it's the unexpectedness. We all saw that you were very unhappy when you were here before, and we supposed it had gone wrong.”
“It had, mother,” said Dan. “She refused me at Campobello. But it was a misunderstanding, and as soon as we met—”
“I knew you had met again, and what you had come home for, and I told your father so, when he came to say you were here.”
“Did you, mother?” he asked, charmed at her having guessed that.
“Yes. She must be a good girl to send you straight home to tell us.”
“You knew I wouldn't have thought of that myself,” said Dan joyously. “I wanted to write; I thought that would do just as well. I hated to leave her, but she made me come. She is the best, and the wisest, and the most unselfish—O mother, I can't tell you about her! You must see her. You can't realise her till you see her, mother. You'll like each other, I'm sure of that. You're just alike.” It seemed to Dan that they were exactly alike.
“Then perhaps we sha'n't,” suggested his mother. “Let me see her picture.”
“How did you know I had it? If it hadn't been for her, I shouldn't have brought any. She put it into my pocket just as I was leaving. She said you would all want to see what she looked like.”
He had taken it out of his pocket, and he held it, smiling fondly upon it. Alice seemed to smile back at him. He had lost her in the reluctance of his father and sisters; and now his mother—it was his mother who had given her to him again. He thought how tenderly he loved his mother.
When he could yield her the photograph, she looked long and silently at it. “She has a great deal of character, Dan.”
“There you've hit it, mother! I'd rather you would have said that than anything else. But don't you think she's beautiful? She's the gentlest creature, when you come to know her! I was awfully afraid of her at first. I thought she was very haughty. But she isn't at all. She's really very self-depreciatory; she thinks she isn't good enough for me. You ought to hear her talk, mother, as I have. She's full of the noblest ideals—of being of some use in the world, of being self-devoted, and—all that kind of thing. And you can see that she's capable of it. Her aunt's in a Protestant sisterhood,” he said, with a solemnity which did not seem to communicate itself to his mother, for Mrs. Mavering smiled. Dan smiled too, and said: “But I can't tell you about Alice, mother. She's perfect.” His heart overflowed with proud delight in her, and he was fool enough to add, “She's so affectionate!”
His mother kept herself from laughing. “I dare say she is, Dan—with you.” Then she hid all but her eyes with the photograph, and gave way.
“What a donkey!” said Dan, meaning himself. “If I go on, I shall disgust you with her. What I mean is that she isn't at all proud, as I used to think she was.”
“No girl is, under the circumstances. She has all she can do to be proud of you.”
“Do you think so, mother?” he said, enraptured with the notion. “I've done my best—or my worst—not to give her any reason to be so.”
“She doesn't 'want any—the less the better. You silly boy! Don't you suppose she wants to make you out of whole cloth just as you do with her? She doesn't want any facts to start with; they'd be in the way. Well, now, I can make out, with your help, what the young lady is; but what are the father and mother? They're rather important in these cases.”
“Oh, they're the nicest kind of people,” said Dan, in optimistic generalisation. “You'd like Mrs. Pasmer. She's awfully nice.”
“Do you say that because you think I wouldn't?” asked his mother. “Isn't she rather sly and hum-bugging?”
“Well, yes, she is, to a certain extent,” Dan admitted, with a laugh. “But she doesn't mean any harm by it. She's extremely kind-hearted.”
“To you? I dare say. And Mr. Pasmer is rather under her thumb?”
“Well, yes, you might say thumb,” Dan consented, feeling it useless to defend the Pasmers against this analysis.
“We won't say heel,” returned his mother; “we're too polite. And your father says he had the reputation in college of being one of the most selfish fellows in the world. He's never done anything since but lose most of his money. He's been absolutely idle and useless all his days.” She turned her vivid blue eyes suddenly upon her son's.
Dan winced. “You know how hard father is upon people who haven't done anything. It's a mania of his. Of course Mr. Pasmer doesn't show to advantage where there's no—no leisure class.”
“Poor man!”
Dan was going to say, “He's very amiable, though,” but he was afraid of his mother's retorting, “To you?” and he held his peace, looking chapfallen.
Whether his mother took pity on him or not, her next sally was consoling. “But your Alice may not take after either of them. Her father is the worst of his breed, it seems; the rest are useful people, from what your father knows, and there's a great deal to be hoped for collaterally. She had an uncle in college at the same time who was everything that her father was not.”
“One of her aunts is in one of those Protestant religious houses in England,” repeated Dan.
“Oh!” said his mother shortly, “I don't know that I like that particularly. But probably she isn't useless there. Is Alice very religious?”
“Well, I suppose,” said Dan, with a smile for the devotions that came into his thought, “she's what would be called 'Piscopal pious.”
Mrs. Mavering referred to the photograph, which she still held in her hand. “Well, she's pure and good, at any rate. I suppose you look forward to a long engagement?”
Dan was somewhat taken aback at a supposition so very contrary to what was in his mind. “Well, I don't know. Why?”
“It might be said that you are very young. How old is Agnes—Alice, I mean?”
“Twenty-one. But now, look here, mother! It's no use considering such a thing in the abstract, is it?”
“No,” said his mother, with a smile for what might be coming.
“This is the way I've been viewing it; I may say it's the way Alice has been viewing it—or Mrs. Pasmer, rather.”
“Decidedly Mrs. Pasmer, rather. Better be honest, Dan.”
“I'll do my best. I was thinking, hoping, that is, that as I'm going right into the business—have gone into it already, in fact—and could begin life at once, that perhaps there wouldn't be much sense in waiting a great while.”
“Yes?”
“That's all. That is, if you and father are agreed.” He reflected upon this provision, and added, with a laugh of confusion and pleasure: “It seems to be so very much more of a family affair than I used to think it was.”
“You thought it concerned just you and her?” said his mother, with arch sympathy.
“Well, yes.”
“Poor fellow! She knew better than that, you may be sure. At any rate, her mother did.”
“What Mrs. Pasmer doesn't know isn't probably worth knowing,” said Dan, with an amused sense of her omniscience.
“I thought so,” sighed his mother, smiling too. “And now you begin to find out that it concerns the families in all their branches on both sides.”
“Oh, if it stopped at the families and their ramifications! But it seems to take in society and the general public.”
“So it does—more than you can realise. You can't get married to yourself alone, as young people think; and if you don't marry happily, you sin against the peace and comfort of the whole community.”
“Yes, that's what I'm chiefly looking out for now. I don't want any of those people in Central Africa to suffer. That's the reason I want to marry Alice at the earliest opportunity. But I suppose there'll have to be a Mavering embassy to the high contracting powers of the other part now?”
“Your father and one of the girls had better go down.”
“Yes?”
“And invite Mr. and Mrs. Pasmer and their daughter to come up here.”
“All on probation?”
“Oh no. If you're pleased, Dan—”
“I am, mother—measurably.” They both laughed at this mild way of putting it.
“Why, then it's to be supposed that we're all pleased. You needn't bring the whole Pasmer family home to live with you, if you do marry them all.”
“No,” said Dan, and suddenly he became very distraught. It flashed through him that his mother was expecting him to come home with Alice to live, and that she would not be at all pleased with his scheme of a European sojourn, which Mrs. Pasmer had so cordially adopted. He was amazed that he had not thought of that, but he refused to see any difficulty which his happiness could not cope with.
“No, there's that view of it,” he said jollily; and he buried his momentary anxiety out of sight, and, as it were, danced upon its grave. Nevertheless, he had a desire to get quickly away from the spot. “I hope the Mavering embassy won't be a great while getting ready to go,” he said. “Of course it's all right; but I shouldn't want an appearance of reluctance exactly, you know, mother; and if there should be much of an interval between my getting back and their coming on, don't you know, why, the cat might let herself out of the bag.”
“What cat?” asked his mother demurely.
“Well, you know, you haven't received my engagement with unmingled enthusiasm, and—and I suppose they would find it out from me—from my manner; and—and I wish they'd come along pretty soon, mother.”
“Poor boy! I'm afraid the cat got out of the bag when Mrs. Pasmer came to the years of discretion. But you sha'n't be left a prey to her. They shall go back with you. Ring the bell, and let's talk it over with them now.”
Dan joyfully obeyed. He could see that his mother was all on fire with interest in his affair, and that the idea of somehow circumventing Mrs. Pasmer by prompt action was fascinating her.
His sisters came up at once, and his father followed a moment later. They all took their cue from the mother's gaiety, and began talking and laughing, except the father, who sat looking on with a smile at their lively spirits and the jokes of which Dan became the victim. Each family has its own fantastic medium, in which it gets affairs to relieve them of their concrete seriousness, and the Maverings now did this with Dan's engagement, and played with it as an airy abstraction. They debated the character of the embassy which was to be sent down to Boston on their behalf, and it was decided that Eunice had better go with her father, as representing more fully the age and respectability of the family: at first glance the Pasmers would take her for Dan's mother, and this would be a tremendous advantage.
“And if I like the ridiculous little chit,” said Eunice, “I think I shall let Dan marry her at once. I see no reason why he shouldn't and I couldn't stand a long engagement; I should break it off.”
“I guess there are others who will have something to say about that,” retorted the younger sister. “I've always wanted a long engagement in this family, and as there seems to be no chance for it with the ladies, I wish to make the most of Dan's. I always like it where the hero gets sick and the heroine nurses him. I want Dan to get sick, and have Alice come here and take care of him.”
“No; this marriage must take place at once. What do you say, father?” asked Eunice.
Her father sat, enjoying the talk, at the foot of the bed, with a tendency to doze. “You might ask Dan,” he said, with a lazy cast of his eye toward his son.
“Dan has nothing to do with it.”
“Dan shall not be consulted.”
The two girls stormed upon their father with their different reasons.
“Now I will tell you Girls, be still!” their mother broke in. “Listen to me: I have an idea.”
“Listen to her: she has an idea!” echoed Eunice, in recitative.
“Will you be quiet?” demanded the mother.
“We will be du-u-mb!”
When they became so, at the verge of their mother's patience, of which they knew the limits, she went on: “I think Dan had better get married at once.”
“There, Minnie!”
“But what does Dan say?”
“I will—make the sacrifice,” said Dan meekly.
“Noble boy! That's exactly what Washington said to his mother when she asked him not to go to sea,” said Minnie.
“And then he went into the militia, and made it all right with himself that way,” said Eunice. “Dan can't play his filial piety on this family. Go on, mother.”
“I want him to bring his wife home, and live with us,” continued his mother.
“In the L part!” cried Minnie, clasping her hands in rapture. “I've always said what a perfect little apartment it was by itself.”
“Well, don't say it again, then,” returned her sister. “Always is often enough. Well, in the L part Go on, mother! Don't ask where you were, when it's so exciting.”
“I don't care whether it's in the L part or not. There's plenty of room in the great barn of a place everywhere.”
“But what about his taking care of the business in Boston?” suggested Eunice, looking at her father.
“There's no hurry about that.”
“And about the excursion to aesthetic centres abroad?” Minnie added.
“That could be managed,” said her father, with the same ironical smile.
The mother and the girls went on wildly planning Dan's future for him. It was all in a strain of extravagant burlesque. But he could not take his part in it with his usual zest. He laughed and joked too, but at the bottom of his heart was an uneasy remembrance of the different future he had talked over with Mrs. Pasmer so confidently. But he said to himself buoyantly at last that it would come out all right. His mother would give in, or else Alice could reconcile her mother to whatever seemed really best.
He parted from his mother with fond gaiety. His sisters came out of the room with him.
“I'm perfectly sore with laughing,” said Minnie. “It seems like old times—doesn't it, Dan?—such a gale with mother.”