An engagement must always be a little incredible at first to the families of the betrothed, and especially to the family of the young man; in the girl's, the mother, at least, will have a more realising sense of the situation. If there are elder sisters who have been accustomed to regard their brother as very young, he will seem all the younger because in such a matter he has treated himself as if he were a man; and Eunice Mavering said, after seeing the Pasmers, “Well, Dan, it's all well enough, I suppose, but it seems too ridiculous.”
“What's ridiculous about it, I should like to know?” he demanded.
“Oh, I don't know. Who'll look after you when you're married? Oh, I forgot Ma'am Pasmer!”
“I guess we shall be able to look after ourselves,” said Dan; a little sulkily.
“Yes, if you'll be allowed to,” insinuated his sister.
They spoke at the end of a talk in which he had fretted at the reticence of both his sister and his father concerning the Pasmers, whom they had just been to see. He was vexed with his father, because he felt that he had been influenced by Eunice, and had somehow gone back on him. He was vexed and he was grieved because his father had left them at the door of the hotel without saying anything in praise of Alice, beyond the generalities that would not carry favour with Eunice; and he was depressed with a certain sense of Alice's father and mother, which seemed to have imparted itself to him from the others, and to be the Mavering opinion of them. He could no longer see Mrs. Pasmer harmless if trivial, and good-hearted if inveterately scheming; he could not see the dignity and refinement which he had believed in Mr. Pasmer; they had both suffered a sort of shrinkage or collapse, from which he could not rehabilitate them. But this would have been nothing if his sister's and his father's eyes, through which he seemed to have been looking, had not shown him Alice in a light in which she appeared strange and queer almost to eccentricity. He was hurt at this effect from their want of sympathy, his pride was touched, and he said to himself that he should not fish for Eunice's praise; but he found himself saying, without surprise, “I suppose you will do what you can to prejudice mother and Min.”
“Isn't that a little previous?” asked Eunice. “Have I said anything against Miss Pasmer?”
“You haven't because you couldn't,” said Dan, with foolish bitterness.
“Oh, I don't know about that. She's a human being, I suppose—at least that was the impression I got from her parentage.”
“What have you got to say against her parents?” demanded Dan savagely.
“Oh, nothing. I didn't come down to Boston to denounce the Pasmer family.”
“I suppose you didn't like their being in a flat; you'd have liked to find them in a house on Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street.”
“I'll own I'm a snob,” said Eunice, with maddening meekness. “So's father.”
“They are connected with the best families in the city, and they are in the best society. They do what they please, and they live where they like. They have been so long in Europe that they don't care for those silly distinctions. But what you say doesn't harm them. It's simply disgraceful to you; that's all,” said Dan furiously.
“I'm glad it's no worse, Dan,” said his sister, with a tranquil smile. “And if you'll stop prancing up and down the room, and take a seat, and behave yourself in a Christian manner, I'll talk with you; and if you don't, I won't. Do you suppose I'm going to be bullied into liking them?”
“You can like them or not, as you please,” said Dan sullenly; but he sat down, and waited decently for his sister to speak. “But you can't abuse them—at least in my presence.”
“I didn't know men lost their heads as well as their hearts,” said Eunice. “Perhaps it's only an exchange, though, and it's Miss Pasmer's head.” Dan started, but did not say anything, and Eunice smoothly continued: “No, I don't believe it is. She looked like a sensible girl, and she talked sensibly. I should think she had a very good head. She has good manners, and she's extremely pretty, and very graceful. I'm surprised she should be in love with such a simpleton.”
“Oh, go on! Abuse me as much as you like,” said Dan. He was at once soothed by her praise of Alice.
“No, it isn't necessary to go on; the case is a little too obvious. But I think she will do very well. I hope you're not marrying the whole family, though. I suppose that it's always a question of which shall be scooped up. They will want to scoop you up, and we shall want to scoop her up. I dare say Ma'am Pasmer has her little plan; what is it?”
Dan started at this touch on the quick, but he controlled himself, and said, with dignity, “I have my own plans.”
“Well, you know what mother's are,” returned Eunice easily. “You seem so cheerful that I suppose yours are quite the same, and you're just keeping them for a surprise.” She laughed provokingly, and Dan burst forth again—
“You seem to live to give people pain. You take a fiendish delight in torturing others. But if you think you can influence me in the slightest degree, you're very much mistaken.”
“Well, well, there! It sha'n't be teased any more, so it sha'n't! It shall have its own way, it shall, and nobody shall say a word against its little girly's mother.” Eunice rose from her chair, and patted Dan on the head as she passed to the adjoining room. He caught her hand, and flung it violently away; she shrieked with delight in his childish resentment, and left him sulking. She was gone two or three minutes, and when she came back it was in quite a different mood, as often happens with women in a little lapse of time.
“Dan, I think Miss Pasmer is a beautiful girl, and I know we shall all like her, if you don't set us against her by your arrogance. Of course we don't know anything about her yet, and you don't, really; but she seems a very lovable little thing, and if she's rather silent and undemonstrative, why, she'll be all the better for you: you've got demonstration enough for twenty. And I think the family are well enough. Mrs. Pasmer is thoroughly harmless; and Mr. Pasmer is a most dignified personage; his eyebrows alone are worth the price of admission.” Dan could not help smiling. “All that there is about it is, you mustn't expect to drive people into raptures about them, and expect them to go grovelling round on their knees because you do.”
“Oh, I know I'm an infernal idiot,” said Dan, yielding to the mingled sarcasm and flattery. “It's because I'm so anxious; and you all seem so confoundedly provisional about it. Eunice, what do you suppose father really thinks?”
Eunice seemed tempted to a relapse into her teasing, but she did not yield. “Oh, father's all right—from your point of view. He's been ridiculous from the first; perhaps that's the reason he doesn't feel obliged to expatiate and expand a great deal at present.”
“Do you think so?” cried Dan, instantly adopting her as an ally.
“Well, if I sad so, oughtn't it to be enough?”
“It depends upon what else you say. Look here, now, Eunice!” Dan said, with a laughing mixture of fun and earnest, “what are you going to say to mother? It's no use, being disagreeable, is it? Of course, I don't contend for ideal perfection anywhere, and I don't expect it. But there isn't anything experimental about this thing, and don't you think we had better all make the best of it?”
“That sounds very impartial.”
“It is impartial. I'm a purely disinterested spectator.”
“Oh, quite.”
“And don't you suppose I understand Mr. and Mrs. Pasmer quite as well as you do? All I say is that Alice is simply the noblest girl that ever breathed, and—”
“Now you're talking sense, Dan!”
“Well, what are you going to say when you get home, Eunice? Come!”
“That we had better make the best of it.”
“And what else?”
“That you're hopelessly infatuated; and that she will twist you round her finger.”
“Well?”
“But that you've had your own way so much, it will do you good to have somebody else's a while.”
“I guess you're pretty solid,” said Dan, after thinking it over for a moment. “I don't believe you're going to make it hard for me, and I know you can make it just what you please. But I want you to be frank with mother. Of course I wish you felt about the whole affair just as I do, but if you're right on the main question, I don't care for the rest. I'd rather mother would know just how you feel about it,” said Dan, with a sigh for the honesty which he felt to be not immediately attainable in his own case.
“Well, I'll see what can be done,” Eunice finally assented.
Whatever her feelings were in regard to the matter, she must have satisfied herself that the situation was not to be changed by her disliking it, and she began to talk so sympathetically with Dan that she soon had the whole story of his love out of him. They laughed a good deal together at it, but it convinced her that he had not been hoodwinked into the engagement. It is always the belief of a young man's family, especially his mother and sisters, that unfair means have been used to win him, if the family of his betrothed are unknown to them; and it was a relief, if not exactly a comfort, for Eunice Mavering to find that Alice was as great a simpleton as Dan, and perhaps a sincerer simpleton.
A week later, in fulfilment of the arrangement made by Mrs. Pasmer and Eunice Mavering, Alice and her mother returned the formal visit of Dan's people.
While Alice stood before the mirror in one of the sumptuously furnished rooms assigned them, arranging a ribbon for the effect upon Dan's mother after dinner, and regarding its relation to her serious beauty, Mrs. Pasmer came out of her chamber adjoining, and began to inspect the formal splendour of the place.
“What a perfect man's house!” she said, peering about. “You can see that everything has been done to order. They have their own taste; they're artistic enough for that—or the father is—and they've given orders to have things done so and so, and the New York upholsterer has come up and taken the measure of the rooms and done it. But it isn't like New York, and it isn't individual. The whole house is just like those girls' tailor-made costumes in character. They were made in New York, but they don't wear them with the New York style; there's no more atmosphere about them than if they were young men dressed up. There isn't a thing lacking in the house here; there's an awful completeness; but even the ornaments seem laid on, like the hot and cold water. I never saw a handsomer, more uninviting room than that drawing room. I suppose the etching will come some time after supper. What do you think of it all, Alice?”
“Oh, I don't know. They must be very rich,” said the girl indifferently.
“You can't tell. Country people of a certain kind are apt to put everything on their backs and their walls and floors. Of course such a house here doesn't mean what it would in town.” She examined the texture of the carpet more critically, and the curtains; she had no shame about a curiosity that made her daughter shrink.
“Don't, mamma!” pleaded the girl. “What if they should come?”
“They won't come,” said Mrs. Pasmer; and her notice being called to Alice, she made her take off the ribbon. “You're better without it.”
“I'm so nervous I don't know what I'm doing,” said Alice, removing it, with a whimper.
“Well, I can't have you breaking down!” cried her mother warningly: she really wished to shake her, as a culmination of her own conflicting emotions. “Alice, stop this instant! Stop it, I say!”
“But if I don't like her?” whimpered Alice.
“You're not going to marry her. Now stop! Here, bathe your eyes; they're all red. Though I don't know that it matters. Yes, they'll expect you to have been crying,” said Mrs. Pasmer, seeing the situation more and more clearly. “It's perfectly natural.” But she took some cologne on a handkerchief, and recomposed Alice's countenance for her. “There, the colour becomes you, and I never saw your eyes look so bright.”
There was a pathos in their brilliancy which of course betrayed her to the Mavering girls. It softened Eunice, and encouraged Minnie, who had been a little afraid of the Pasmers. They both kissed Alice with sisterly affection. Their father merely saw how handsome she looked, and Dan's heart seemed to melt in his breast with tenderness.
In recognition of the different habits of their guests, they had dinner instead of tea. The Portuguese cook had outdone himself, and course followed course in triumphal succession. Mrs. Pasmer praised it all with a sincerity that took away a little of the zest she felt in making flattering speeches.
Everything about the table was perfect, but in a man's fashion, like the rest of the house. It lacked the atmospheric charm, the otherwise indefinable grace, which a woman's taste gives. It was in fact Elbridge Mavering's taste which had characterised the whole; the daughters simply accepted and approved.
“Yes,” said Eunice, “we haven't much else to do; so we eat. And Joe does his best to spoil us.”
“Joe?”
“Joe's the cook. All Portuguese cooks are Joe.”
“How very amusing!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “You must let me speak of your grapes. I never saw anything so—well!—except your roses.”
“There you touched father in two tender spots. He cultivates both.”
“Really? Alice, did you ever see anything like these roses?”
Alice looked away from Dan a moment, and blushed to find that she had been looking so long at him.
“Ah, I have,” said Mavering gallantly.
“Does he often do it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, in an obvious aside to Eunice.
Dan answered for him. “He never had such a chance before.”
Between coffee, which they drank at table, and tea, which they were to take in Mrs. Mavering's room, they acted upon a suggestion from Eunice that her father should show Mrs. Pasmer his rose-house. At one end of the dining-room was a little apse of glass full of flowering plants growing out of the ground, and with a delicate fountain tinkling in their midst. Dan ran before the rest, and opened two glass doors in the further side of this half-bubble, and at the same time with a touch flashed up a succession of brilliant lights in some space beyond, from which there gushed in a wave of hothouse fragrance, warm, heavy, humid. It was a pretty little effect for guests new to the house, and was part of Elbridge Mavering's pleasure in this feature of his place. Mrs. Pasmer responded with generous sympathy, for if she really liked anything with her whole heart, it was an effect, and she traversed the half-bubble by its pebbled path, showering praises right and left with a fulness and accuracy that missed no detail, while Alice followed silently, her hand in Minnie Mavering's, and cold with suppressed excitement. The rose-house was divided by a wall, pierced with frequent doorways, over which the trees were trained and the roses hung; and on either side were ranks of rare and costly kinds, weighed down with bud and bloom. The air was thick with their breath and the pungent odours of the rich soil from which they grew, and the glass roof was misted with the mingled exhalations.
Mr. Mavering walked beside Alice, modestly explaining the difficulties of rose culture, and his method of dealing with the red spider. He had a stout knife in his hand, and he cropped long, heavy-laden stems of roses from the walls and the beds, casually giving her their different names, and laying them along his arm in a massive sheaf.
Mrs. Pasmer and Eunice had gone forward with Dan, and were waiting for them at the thither end of the rose-house.
“Alice! just imagine: the grapery is beyond this,” cried the girl's mother.
“It's a cold grapery,” said Mr. Mavering. “I hope you'll see it to-morrow.”
“Oh, why not to-night?” shouted Dan.
“Because it's a cold grapery,” said Eunice; “and after this rose-house, it's an Arctic grapery. You're crazy, Dan.”
“Well, I want Alice to see it anyway,” he persisted wilfully. “There's nothing like a cold grapery by starlight. I'll get some wraps.” They all knew that he wished to be alone with her a moment, and the three women, consenting with their hearts, protested with their tongues, following him in his flight with their chorus, and greeting his return. He muffled her to the chin in a fur-lined overcoat, which he had laid hands on the first thing; and her mother, still protesting, helped to tie a scarf over her hair so as not to disarrange it. “Here,” he pointed, “we can run through it, and it's worth seeing. Better come,” he said to the others as he opened the door, and hurried Alice down the path under the keen sparkle of the crystal roof, blotched with the leaves and bunches of the vines. Coming out of the dense, sensuous, vaporous air of the rose-house into this clear, thin atmosphere, delicately penetrated with the fragrance, pure and cold, of the fruit, it was as if they had entered another world. His arm crept round her in the odorous obscurity.
“Look up! See the stars through the vines! But when she lifted her face he bent his upon it for a wild kiss.
“Don't! don't!” she murmured. “I want to think; I don't know what I'm doing.”
“Neither do I. I feel as if I were a blessed ghost.”
Perhaps it is only in these ecstasies of the senses that the soul ever reaches self-consciousness on earth; and it seems to be only the man-soul which finds itself even in this abandon. The woman-soul has always something else to think of.
“What shall we do,” said the girl, “if we—Oh, I dread to meet your mother! Is she like either of your sisters?”
“No,” he cried joyously; “she's like me. If you're not afraid of me, and you don't seem to be—”
“You're all I have—you're all I have in the world. Do you think she'll like me? Oh, do you love me, Dan?”
“You darling! you divine—” The rest was a mad embrace. “If you're not afraid of me, you won't mind mother. I wanted you here alone for just a last word, to tell you you needn't be afraid; to tell you to—But I needn't tell you how to act. You mustn't treat her as an invalid—you must treat her like any one else; that's what she likes. But you'll know what's best, Alice. Be yourself, and she'll like you well enough. I'm not afraid.”
When she entered Mrs. Mavering's room Alice first saw the pictures, the bric-a-brac, the flowers, the dazzle of lights, and then the invalid propped among her pillows, and vividly expectant of her. She seemed all eager eyes to the girl, aware next of the strong resemblance to Dan in her features, and of the careful toilet the sick woman had made for her. To youth all forms of suffering are abhorrent, and Alice had to hide a repugnance at sight of this spectre of what had once been a pretty woman. Through the egotism with which so many years of flattering subjection in her little world had armed her, Mrs. Mavering probably did not feel the girl's shrinking, or, if she did, took it for the natural embarrassment which she would feel. She had satisfied herself that she was looking her best, and that her cap and the lace jacket she wore were very becoming, and softened her worst points; the hangings of her bed and the richly embroidered crimson silk coverlet were part of the coquetry of her costume, from which habit had taken all sense of ghastliness; she was proud of them, and she was not aware of the scent of drugs that insisted through the odour of the flowers.
She lifted herself on her elbow as Dan approached with Alice, and the girl felt as if an intense light had been thrown upon her from head to foot in the moment of searching scrutiny that followed. The invalid's set look broke into a smile, and she put out her hand, neither hot nor cold, but of a dry neutral, spiritual temperature, and pulled Alice down and kissed her.
“Why, child, your hand's like ice!” she exclaimed without preamble. “We used to say that came from a warm heart.”
“I guess it comes from a cold grapery in this case, mother,” said Dan, with his laugh. “I've just been running Alice through it. And perhaps a little excitement—”
“Excitement?” echoed his mother. “Cold grapery, I dare say, and very silly of you, Dan; but there's no occasion for excitement, as if we were strangers. Sit down in that chair, my dear. And, Dan, you go round to the other side of the bed; I want Alice all to myself. I saw your photograph a week ago, and I've thought about you for ages since, and wondered whether you would approve of your old friend.”
“Oh yes,” whispered the girl, suppressing a tremor; and Dan's eyes were suffused with grateful tears at his mother's graciousness.
Alice's reticence seemed to please the invalid. “I hope you'll like all your old friends here; you've begun with the worst among us, but perhaps you like him the best because he is the worst; I do.”
“You may believe just half of that, Alice,” cried Dan.
“Then believe the best half, or the half you like best,” said Mrs. Mavering. “There must be something good in him if you like him. Have they welcomed you home, my dear?”
“We've all made a stagger at it,” said Dan, while Alice was faltering over the words which were so slow to come.
“Don't try to answer my formal stupidities. You are welcome, and that's enough, and more than enough of speeches. Did you have a comfortable journey up?”
“Oh, very.”
“Was it cold?”
“Not at all. The cars were very hot.”
“Have you had any snow yet at Boston?”
“No, none at all yet.”
“Now I feel that we're talking sense. I hope you found everything in your room? I can't look after things as I would like, and so I inquire.”
“There's everything,” said Alice. “We're very comfortable.”
“I'm very glad. I had Dan look, he's my housekeeper; he understands me better than my girls; he's like me, more. That's what makes us so fond of each other; it's a kind of personal vanity. But he has his good points, Dan has. He's very amiable, and I was too, at his age—and till I came here. But I'm not going to tell you of his good points; I dare say you've found them out. I'll tell you about his bad ones. He says you're very serious. Are you?” She pressed the girl's hand, which she had kept in hers, and regarded her keenly.
Alice dropped her eyes at the odd question. “I don't know,” she faltered. “Sometimes.”
“Well, that's good. Dan's frivolous.”
“Oh, sometimes—only sometimes!” he interposed.
“He's frivolous, and he's very light-minded; but he's none the worse for that.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Dan; and Alice, still puzzled, laughed provisionally.
“No; I want you to understand that. He's light-hearted too, and that's a great thing in this world. If you're serious you'll be apt to be heavyhearted, and then you'll find Dan of use. And I hope he'll know how, to turn your seriousness to account too, he needs something to keep him down—to keep him from blowing away. Yes, it's very well for people to be opposites. Only they must understand each other, If they do that, then they get along. Light-heartedness or heavy-heartedness comes to the same thing if they know how to use it for each other. You see, I've got to be a great philosopher lying here; nobody dares contradict me or interrupt me when I'm constructing my theories, and so I get them perfect.”
“I wish I could hear them all,” said Alice, with sincerity that made Mrs. Mavering laugh as light-heartedly as Dan himself, and that seemed to suggest the nest thing to her.
“You can for the asking, almost any time. Are you a very truthful person, my dear? Don't take the trouble to deny it if you are,” she added, at Alice's stare. “You see, I'm not at all conventional and you needn't be. Come! tell the truth for once, at any rate. Are you habitually truthful?”
“Yes, I think I am,” said Alice, still staring.
“Dan's not,” said his mother quietly.
“Oh, see here, now, mother! Don't give me away!”
“He'll tell the truth in extremity, of course, and he'll tell it if it's pleasant, always; but if you don't expect much more of him you won't be disappointed; and you can make him of great use.”
“You see where I got it, anyway, Alice,” said Dan, laughing across the bed at her.
“Yes, you got it from me: I own it. A great part of my life was made up of making life pleasant to others by fibbing. I stopped it when I came here.”
“Oh, not altogether, mother!” urged her son. “You mustn't be too hard on yourself.”
She ignored his interruption: “You'll find Dan a great convenience with that agreeable habit of his. You can get him to make all your verbal excuses for you (he'll, do it beautifully), and dictate all the thousand and one little lying notes you'll have to write; he won't mind it in the least, and it will save you a great wear-and-tear of conscience.”
“Go on, mother, go on,” said Dan, with delighted eyes, that asked of Alice if it were not all perfectly charming.
“And you can come in with your habitual truthfulness where Dan wouldn't know what to do, poor fellow. You'll have the moral courage to come right to the point when he would like to shillyshally, and you can be frank while he's trying to think how to make y-e-s spell no.”
“Any other little compliments, mother?” suggested Dan.
“No,” said Mrs. Mavering; “that's all. I thought I'd better have it off my mind; I knew you'd never get it off yours, and Alice had better know the worst. It is the worst, my dear, and if I talked of him till doomsday I couldn't say any more harm of him. I needn't tell you how sweet he is; you know that, I'm sure; but you can't know yet how gentle and forbearing he is, how patient, how full of kindness to every living soul, how unselfish, how—”
She lost her voice. “Oh, come now, mother,” Dan protested huskily.
Alice did not say anything; she bent over, without repugnance, and gathered the shadowy shape into her strong young arms, and kissed the wasted face whose unearthly coolness was like the leaf of a flower against her lips. “He never gave me a moment's trouble,” said the mother, “and I'm sure he'll make you happy. How kind of you not to be afraid of me—”
“Afraid!” cried the girl, with passionate solemnity. “I shall never feel safe away from you!”
The door opened upon the sound of voices, and the others came in.
Mrs. Pasmer did not wait for an introduction, but with an affectation of impulse which she felt Mrs. Mavering would penetrate and respect, she went up to the bed and presented herself. Dan's mother smiled hospitably upon her, and they had some playful words about their children. Mrs. Pasmer neatly conveyed the regrets of her husband, who had hoped up to the last moment that the heavy cold he had taken would let him come with her; and the invalid made her guest sit down on the right hand of her bed, which seemed to be the place of honour, while her husband took Dan's place on the left, and admired his wife's skill in fence. At the end of her encounter with Mrs. Pasmer she called out with her strong voice, “Why don't you get your banjo, Molly, and play something?”
“A banjo? Oh, do!” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “It's so picturesque and interesting! I heard that young ladies had taken it up, and I should so like to hear it!” She had turned to Mrs. Mavering again, and she now beamed winningly upon her.
Alice regarded the girl with a puzzled frown as she brought her banjo in from another room and sat down with it. She relaxed the severity of her stare a little as Molly played one wild air after another, singing some of them with an evidence of training in her naive effectiveness. There were some Mexican songs which she had learned in a late visit to their country, and some Creole melodies caught up in a winter's sojourn to Louisiana. The elder sister accompanied her on the piano, not with the hard, resolute proficiency which one might have expected of Eunice Mavering, but with a sympathy which was perhaps the expression of her share of the family kindliness.
“Your children seem to have been everywhere,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of flattering envy. “Oh, you're not going to stop!” she pleaded, turning from Mrs. Mavering to Molly.
“I think Dan had better do the rheumatic uncle now,” said Eunice, from the piano.
“Oh yes! the rheumatic uncle—do,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “We know the rheumatic uncle,” she added, with a glance at Alice. Dan looked at her too, as if doubtful of her approval; and then he told in character a Yankee story which he had worked up from the talk of his friend the foreman. It made them all laugh.
Mrs. Pasmer was the gayest; she let herself go, and throughout the evening she flattered right and left, and said, in her good-night to Mrs. Mavering, that she had never imagined so delightful a time. “O Mrs. Mavering, I don't wonder your children love their home. It's a revelation.”
“She's a cat, Dan,” said his mother quietly, and not without liking, when he looked in for his goodnight kiss after the rest were gone; “a perfect tabby. But your Alice is sublime.”
“O mother—”
“She's a little too sublime for me. But you're young, and you can stand it.”
Dan laughed with delight. “Yes, I think I can, mother. All I ask is the chance.”
“Oh, you're very much in love, both of you; there's no doubt about that. What I mean is that she's very high strung, very intense. She has ideals—any one can see that.”
Dan took it all for praise. “Yes,” he said eagerly, “that's what I told you. And that will be the best thing about it for me. I have no ideals.”
“Well, you must find out what hers are, and live up to them.”
“Oh, there won't be any trouble about that,” said Dan buoyantly.
“You must help her to find them out too.” He looked puzzled. “You mustn't expect the child to be too definite at first, nor to be always right, even when she's full of ideals. You must be very patient with her, Dan.”
“Oh, I will, mother! You know that. How could I ever be impatient with Alice?”
“Very forbearing, and very kind, and indefatigably forgiving. Ask your father how to behave.”
Dan promised to do so, with a laugh at the joke. It had never occurred to him that his father was particularly exemplary in these things, or that his mother idolised him for what seemed to Dan simply a matter-of-course endurance of her sick whims and freaks and moods. He broke forth into a vehement protest of his good intentions, to which his mother did not seem very attentive. After a while she asked—
“Is she always so silent, Dan?”
“Well, not with me, mother. Of course she was a little embarrassed; she didn't know exactly what to say, I suppose—”
“Oh, I rather liked that. At least she isn't a rattle-pate. And we shall get acquainted; we shall like each other. She will understand me when you bring her home here to live with us, and—”
“Yes,” said Dan, rising rather hastily, and stooping over to his mother. “I'm not going to let you talk any more now, or we shall have to suffer for it to-morrow night.”
He got gaily away before his mother could amplify a suggestion which spoiled a little of his pleasure in the praises—he thought they were unqualified and enthusiastic praises—she had been heaping upon Alice. He wished to go to bed with them all sweet and unalloyed in his thought, to sleep, to dream upon his perfect triumph.
Mrs. Pasmer was a long time in undressing, and in calming down after the demands which the different events of the evening had made upon her resources.
“It has certainly been a very mixed evening, Alice,” she said, as she took the pins out of her back hair and let it fall; and she continued to talk as she went back and forth between their rooms. “What do you think of banjo-playing for young ladies? Isn't it rather rowdy? Decidedly rowdy, I think. And Dan's Yankee story! I expected to see the old gentleman get up and perform some trick.”
“I suppose they do it to amuse Mrs. Mavering,” said Alice, with cold displeasure.
“Oh, it's quite right,” tittered Mrs. Pasmer. “It would be as much as their lives are worth if they didn't. You can see that she rules them with a rod of iron. What a will! I'm glad you're not going to come under her sway; I really think you couldn't be safe from her in the same hemisphere; it's well you're going abroad at once. They're a very self-concentrated family, don't you think—very self-satisfied? Of course that's the danger of living off by themselves as they do: they get to thinking there's nobody else in the world. You would simply be absorbed by them: it's a hair-breadth escape.
“How splendidly Dan contrasts with the others! Oh, he's delightful; he's a man of the world. Give me the world, after all! And he's so considerate of their rustic conceit! What a house! It's perfectly baronial—and ridiculous. In any other country it would mean something—society, entertainments, troops of guests; but here it doesn't mean anything but money. Not that money isn't a very good thing; I wish we had more of it. But now you see how very little it can do by itself. You looked very well, Alice, and behaved with great dignity; perhaps too much. You ought to enter a little more into the spirit of things, even if you don't respect them. That oldest girl isn't particularly pleased, I fancy, though it doesn't matter really.”
Alice replied to her mother from time to time with absent Yeses and Noes; she sat by the window looking out on the hillside lawn before the house; the moon had risen, and poured a flood of snowy light over it, in which the cold statues dimly shone, and the firs, in clumps and singly, blackened with an inky solidity. Beyond wandered the hills, their bare pasturage broken here and there by blotches of woodland.
After her mother had gone to bed she turned her light down and resumed her seat by the window, pressing her hot forehead against the pane, and losing all sense of the scene without in the whirl of her thoughts.
After this, evening of gay welcome in Dan's family, and those moments of tenderness with him, her heart was troubled. She now realised her engagement as something exterior to herself and her own family, and confronted for the first time its responsibilities, its ties, and its claims. It was not enough to be everything to Dan; she could not be that unless she were something to his family. She did not realise this vividly, but with the remoteness which all verities except those of sensation have for youth.
Her uneasiness was full of exultation, of triumph; she knew she had been admired by Dan's family, and she experienced the sweetness of having pleased them for his sake; his happy eyes shone before her; but she was touched in her self-love by what her mother had coarsely characterised in them. They had regarded her liking them as a matter of course; his mother had ignored her even in pretending to decry Dan to her. But again this was very remote, very momentary. It was no nearer, no more lasting on the surface of her happiness, than the flying whiff's of thin cloud that chased across the moon and lost themselves in the vast blue around it.
People came to the first of Mrs. James Bellingham's receptions with the expectation of pleasure which the earlier receptions of the season awaken even in the oldest and wisest. But they tried to dissemble their eagerness in a fashionable tardiness. “We get later and later,” said Mrs. Brinkley to John Munt, as she sat watching the slow gathering of the crowd. By half-past eleven it had not yet hidden Mrs. Bellingham, where she stood near the middle of the room, from the pleasant corner they had found after accidentally arriving together. Mr. Brinkley had not come; he said he might not be too old for receptions, but he was too good; in either case he preferred to stay at home. “We used to come at nine o'clock, and now we come at I'm getting into a quotation from Mother Goose, I think.”
“I thought it was Browning,” said Munt, with his witticism manner. Neither he nor Mrs. Brinkley was particularly glad to be together, but at Mrs. James Bellingham's it was well not to fling any companionship away till you were sure of something else. Besides, Mrs. Brinkley was indolent and good-natured, and Munt was active and good-natured, and they were well fitted to get on for ten or fifteen minutes. While they talked she kept an eye out for other acquaintance, and he stood alert to escape at the first chance. “How is it we are here so early—or rather you are?” she pursued irrelevantly.
“Oh, I don't know,” said Munt, accepting the implication of his superior fashion with pleasure. “I never mind being among the first. It's rather interesting to see people come in—don't you think?”
“That depends a good deal on the people. I don't find a great variety in their smirks and smiles to Mrs. Bellingham; I seem to be doing them all myself. And there's a monotony about their apprehension and helplessness when they're turned adrift that's altogether too much like my own. No, Mr. Munt, I can't agree with you that it's interesting to see people come in. It's altogether too autobiographical. What else have you to suggest?”
“I'm afraid I'm at the end of my string,” said Munt. “I suppose we shall see the Pasmers and young Mavering here to-night.”
Mrs. Brinkley turned and looked sharply at him.
“You've heard of the engagement?” he asked.
“No, decidedly, I haven't. And after his flight from Campobello it's the last thing I expected to hear of. When did it come out?”
“Only within a few days. They've been keeping it rather quiet. Mrs. Pasmer told me herself.”
Mrs. Brinkley gave herself a moment for reflection. “Well, if he can stand it, I suppose I can.”
“That isn't exactly what people are saying to Mrs. Pasmer, Mrs. Brinkley,” suggested Munt, with his humorous manner.
“I dare say they're trying to make her believe that her daughter is sacrificed. That's the way. But she knows better.”
“There's no doubt but she's informed herself. She put me through my catechism about the Maverings the day of the picnic down there.”
“Do you know them?”
“Bridge Mavering and I were at Harvard together.”
“Tell me about them.” Mrs. Brinkley listened to Munt's praises of his old friend with an attention superficially divided with the people to whom she bowed and smiled. The room was filling up. “Well,” she said at the end, “he's a sweet young fellow. I hope he likes his Pasmers.”
“I guess there's no doubt about his liking one of them—the principal one.”
“Yes, if she is the principal one.” There was an implication in everything she said that Dan Mavering had been hoodwinked by Mrs. Pasmer. Mature ladies always like to imply something of the sort in these cases. They like to ignore the prime agency of youth and love, and pretend that marriage is a game that parents play at with us, as if we were in an old comedy; it is a tradition. “Will he take her home to live?”
“No. I heard that they're all going abroad—for a year, or two at least.”
“Ah! I thought so,” cried Mrs. Brinkley. She looked up with whimsical pleasure in the uncertainty of an old gentleman who is staring hard at her through his glasses. “Well,” she said with a pleasant sharpness, “do you make me out?”
“As nearly as my belief in your wisdom will allow,” said the old gentleman, as distinctly as his long white moustache and an apparent absence of teeth behind it would let him. John Munt had eagerly abandoned the seat he was keeping at Mrs. Brinkley's side, and had launched himself into the thickening crowd. The old gentleman, who was lank and tall, folded himself down into it, He continued as tranquilly as if seated quite alone with Mrs. Brinkley, and not minding that his voice, with the senile crow in it, made itself heard by others. “I'm always surprised to find sensible people at these things of Jane's. They're most extraordinary things. Jane's idea of society is to turn a herd of human beings loose in her house, and see what will come of it. She has no more sense of hospitality or responsibility than the Elements or Divine Providence. You may come here and have a good time—if you can get it; she won't object; or you may die of solitude and inanition; she'd never know it. I don't know but it's rather sublime in her. It's like the indifference of fate; but it's rather rough on those who don't understand it. She likes to see her rooms filled with pretty dresses, but she has no social instincts and no social inspiration whatever. She lights and heats and feeds her guests, and then she leaves them to themselves. She's a kind woman—Jane is a very good-natured woman, and I really think she'd be grieved if she thought any one went away unhappy, but she does nothing to make them at home in her house—absolutely nothing.”
“Perhaps she does all they deserve for them. I don't know that any one acquires merit by coming to an evening party; and it's impossible to be personally hospitable to everybody in such a crowd.”
“Yes, I've sometimes taken that view of it. And yet if you ask a stranger to your house, you establish a tacit understanding with him that you won't forget him after you have him there. I like to go about and note the mystification of strangers who've come here with some notion of a little attention. It's delightfully poignant; I suffer with them; it's a cheap luxury of woe; I follow them through all the turns and windings of their experience. Of course the theory is that, being turned loose here with the rest, they may speak to anybody; but the fact is, they can't. Sometimes I should like to hail some of these unfriended spirits, but I haven't the courage. I'm not individually bashful, but I have a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon civilisation behind me. There ought to be policemen, to show strangers about and be kind to them. I've just seen two pretty women cast away in a corner, and clinging to a small water-colour on the wall with a show of interest that would melt a heart of stone. Why do you come, Mrs. Brinkley? I should like to know. You're not obliged to.”
“No,” said Mrs. Brinkley, lowering her voice instinctively, as if to bring his down. “I suppose I come from force of habit I've been coming a long time, you know. Why do you come?”
“Because I can't sleep. If I could sleep, I should be at home in bed.” A weariness came into his thin face and dim eyes that was pathetic, and passed into a whimsical sarcasm. “I'm not one of the great leisure class, you know, that voluntarily turns night into day. Do you know what I go about saying now?”
“Something amusing, I suppose.”
“You'd better not be so sure of that. I've discovered a fact, or rather I've formulated an old one. I've always been troubled how to classify people here, there are so many exceptions; and I've ended by broadly generalising them as women and men.”
Mrs. Brinkley was certainly amused at this. “It seems to me that there you've been anticipated by nature—not to mention art.”
“Oh, not in my particular view. The women in America represent the aristocracy which exists everywhere else in both sexes. You are born to the patrician leisure; you have the accomplishments and the clothes and manners and ideals; and we men are a natural commonalty, born to business, to newspapers, to cigars, and horses. This natural female aristocracy of ours establishes the forms, usages, places, and times of society. The epicene aristocracies of other countries turn night into day in their social pleasures, and our noblesse sympathetically follows their example. You ladies, who can lie till noon next day, come to Jane's reception at eleven o'clock, and you drag along with you a herd of us brokers, bankers, merchants, lawyers, and doctors, who must be at our offices and counting-rooms before nine in the morning. The hours of us work-people are regulated by the wholesome industries of the great democracy which we're a part of; and the hours of our wives and daughters by the deleterious pleasures of the Old World aristocracy. That's the reason we're not all at home in bed.”
“I thought you were not at home in bed because you couldn't sleep.”
“I know it. And you've no idea how horrible a bed is that you can't sleep in.” The old man's voice broke in a tremor. “Ah, it's a bed of torture! I spend many a wicked hour in mine, envying St. Lawrence his gridiron. But what do you think of my theory?”
“It's a very pretty theory. My only objection to it is that it's too flattering. You know I rather prefer to abuse my sex; and to be set up as a natural aristocracy—I don't know that I can quite agree to that, even to account satisfactorily for being at your sister-in-law's reception.”
“You're too modest, Mrs. Brinkley.”
“No, really. There ought to be some men among us—men without morrows. Now, why don't you and my husband set an example to your sex? Why don't you relax your severe sense of duty? Why need you insist upon being at your offices every morning at nine? Why don't you fling off these habits of lifelong industry, and be gracefully indolent in the interest of the higher civilisation?”
Bromfield Corey looked round at her with a smile of relish for her satire. Her husband was a notoriously lazy man, who had chosen to live restrictedly upon an inherited property rather than increase it by the smallest exertion.
“Do you think we could get Andy Pasmer to join us?”
“No, I can't encourage you with that idea. You must get on without Mr. Pasmer; he's going back to Europe with his son-in-law.”
“Do you mean that their girl's married?”
“No-engaged. It's just out.”
“Well, I must say Mrs. Pasmer has made use of her time.” He too liked to imply that it was all an effect of her manoeuvring, and that the young people had nothing to do with it; this survival from European fiction dies hard. “Who is the young man?”
Mrs. Brinkley gave him an account of Dan Mavering as she had seen him at Campobello, and of his family as she just heard of them. “Mr. Munt was telling me about them as you came up.”
“Why, was that John Munt?”
“Yes; didn't you know him?”
“No,” said Corey sadly. “I don't know anybody nowadays. I seem to be going to pieces every way. I don't call sixty-nine such a very great age.”
“Not at all!” cried Mrs. Brinkley. “I'm fifty-four myself, and Brinkley's sixty.”
“But I feel a thousand years old. I don't see people, and when I do I don't know 'em. My head's in a cloud.” He let it hang heavily; then he lifted it, and said: “He's a nice, comfortable fellow, Munt is. Why didn't he stop and talk a bit?”
“Well, Munt's modest, you know; and I suppose he thought he might be the third that makes company a crowd. Besides, nobody stops and talks a bit at these things. They're afraid of boring or being bored.”
“Yes, they're all in as unnatural a mood as if they were posing for a photograph. I wonder who invented this sort of thing? Do you know,” said the old man, “that I think it's rather worse with us than with any other people? We're a simple, sincere folk, domestic in our instincts, not gregarious or frivolous in any way; and when we're wrenched away from our firesides, and packed in our best clothes into Jane's gilded saloons, we feel vindictive; we feel wicked. When the Boston being abandons himself—or herself—to fashion, she suffers a depravation into something quite lurid. She has a bad conscience, and she hardens her heart with talk that's tremendously cynical. It's amusing,” said Corey, staring round him purblindly at the groups and files of people surging and eddying past the corner where he sat with Mrs. Brinkley.
“No; it's shocking,” said his companion. “At any rate, you mustn't say such things, even if you think them. I can't let you go too far, you know. These young people think it heavenly, here.”
She took with him the tone that elderly people use with those older than themselves who have begun to break; there were authority and patronage in it. At the bottom of her heart she thought that Bromfield Corey should not have been allowed to come; but she determined to keep him safe and harmless as far as she could.
From time to time the crowd was a stationary mass in front of them; then it dissolved and flowed away, to gather anew; there were moments when the floor near them was quite vacant; then it was inundated again with silken trains. From another part of the house came the sound of music, and most of the young people who passed went two and two, as if they were partners in the dance, and had come out of the ball-room between dances. There was a good deal of nervous talk, politely subdued among them; but it was not the note of unearthly rapture which Mrs. Brinkley's conventional claim had implied; it was self-interested, eager, anxious; and was probably not different from the voice of good society anywhere.