“Why, there's Dan Mavering now!” said Mrs. Brinkley, rather to herself than to her companion. “And alone!”
Dan's face showed above most of the heads and shoulders about him; it was flushed, and looked troubled and excited. He caught sight of Mrs. Brinkley, and his eyes brightened joyfully. He slipped quickly through the crowd, and bowed over her hand, while he stammered out, without giving her a chance for reply till the end: “O Mrs. Brinkley, I'm so glad to see you! I'm going—I want to ask a great favour of you, Mrs. Brinkley. I want to bring—I want to introduce some friends of mine to you—some ladies, Mrs. Brinkley; very nice people I met last summer at Portland. Their father—General Wrayne—has been building some railroads down East, and they're very nice people; but they don't know any one—any ladies—and they've been looking at the pictures ever since they came. They're very good pictures; but it isn't an exhibition!” He broke down with a laugh.
“Why, of course, Mr. Mavering; I shall be delighted,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a hospitality rendered reckless by her sympathy with the young fellow. “By all means!”
“Oh; thanks!—thank you aver so much!” said Dan. “I'll bring them to you—they'll understand!” He slipped into the crowd again.
Corey made an offer of going. Mrs. Brinkley stopped him with her fan. “No—stay, Mr. Corey. Unless you wish to go. I fancy it's the people you were talking about, and you must help me through with them.”
“I ask nothing better,” said the old man, unresentful of Dan's having not even seemed to see him, in his generous preoccupation. “I should like to see how you'll get on, and perhaps I can be of use.”
“Of course you can—the greatest.”
“But why hasn't he introduced them to his Pasmers? What? Eh? Oh!” Corey made these utterances in response to a sharper pressure of Mrs. Brinkley's fan on his arm.
Dan was opening a way through the crowd before them for two ladies, whom he now introduced. “Mrs. Frobisher, Mrs. Brinkley; and Miss Wrayne.”
Mrs. Brinkley cordially gave her hand to the ladies, and said, “May I introduce Mr. Corey? Mr. Mavering, let me introduce you to Mr. Corey.” The old man rose and stood with the little group.
Dan's face shone with flattered pride and joyous triumph. He bubbled out some happy incoherencies about the honour and pleasure, while at the same time he beamed with tender gratitude upon Mrs. Brinkley, who was behaving with a gracious, humorous kindliness to the aliens cast upon her mercies. Mrs. Frobisher, after a half-hour of Boston society, was not that presence of easy gaiety which crossed Dan's path on the Portland pavement the morning of his arrival from Campobello; but she was still a handsome, effective woman, of whom you would have hesitated to say whether she was showy or distinguished. Perhaps she was a little of both, with an air of command bred of supremacy in frontier garrisons; her sister was like her in the way that a young girl may be like a young matron. They blossomed alike in the genial atmosphere of Mrs. Brinkley and of Mr. Corey. He began at once to make bantering speeches with them both. The friendliness of an old man and a stout elderly woman might not have been their ideal of success at an evening party, used as they were to the unstinted homage of young captains and lieutenants, but a brief experience of Mrs. Bellingham's hospitality must have taught them humility; and when a stout, elderly gentleman, whose baldness was still trying to be blond, joined the group, the spectacle was not without its points of resemblance to a social ovation. Perhaps it was a Boston social ovation.
“Hallo, Corey!” said this stout gentleman, whom Mrs. Brinkley at once introduced as Mr. Bellingham, and whose salutation Corey returned with “Hallo, Charles!” of equal intimacy.
Mr. Bellingham caught at the name of Frobisher. “Mrs. Major Dick Frobisher?”
“Mrs. Colonel now, but Dick always,” said the lady, with immediate comradery. “Do you know my husband?”
“I should think so!” said Bellingham; and a talk of common interest and mutual reminiscence sprang up between them. Bellingham graphically depicted his meeting with Colonel Frobisher the last time he was out on the Plains, and Mrs. Frobisher and Miss Wrayne discovered to their great satisfaction that he was the brother of Mrs. Stephen Blake, of Omaba, who had come out to the fort once with her husband, and captured the garrison, as they said. Mrs. Frobisher accounted for her present separation from her husband, and said she had come on for a while to be with her father and sister, who both needed more looking after than the Indians. Her father had left the army, and was building railroads.
Miss Wrayne, when she was not appealed to for confirmation or recollection by her sister, was having a lively talk with Corey and Mrs. Brinkley; she seemed to enter into their humour; and no one paid much attention to Dan Mavering. He hung upon the outskirts of the little group; proffering unrequited sympathy and applause; and at last he murmured something about having to go back to some friends, and took himself off. Mrs. Frobisher and Miss Wrayne let him go with a certain shade—the lightest, and yet evident—of not wholly satisfied pique: women know how to accept a reparation on account, and without giving a receipt in full.
Mrs. Brinkley gave him her hand with an effect of compassionate intelligence and appreciation of the sacrifice he must have made in leaving Alice. “May I congratulate you?” she murmured.
“Oh yes, indeed; thank you, Mrs. Brinkley,” he gushed tremulously; and he pressed her hand hard, and clung to it, as if he would like to take her with him.
Neither of the older men noticed his going. They were both taken in their elderly way with these two handsome young women, and they professed regret—Bellingham that his mother was not there, and Corey that neither his wife nor daughters had come, whom they might otherwise have introduced. They did not offer to share their acquaintance with any one else, but they made the most of it themselves, as if knowing a good thing when they had it. Their devotion to Mrs. Frobisher and her sister heightened the curiosity of such people as noticed it, but it would be wrong to say that it moved any in that self-limited company with a strong wish to know the ladies. The time comes to every man, no matter how great a power he may be in society, when the general social opinion retires him for senility, and this time had come for Bromfield Corey. He could no longer make or mar any success; and Charles Bellingham was so notoriously amiable, so deeply compromised by his inveterate habit of liking nearly every one, that his notice could not distinguish or advantage a newcomer.
He and Corey took the ladies down to supper. Mrs. Brinkley saw them there together, and a little later she saw old Corey wander off; forgetful of Miss Wrayne. She saw Dan Mavering, but not the Pasmers, and then, when Corey forgot Miss Wrayne, she saw Dan, forlorn and bewildered looking, approach the girl, and offer her his arm for the return to the drawing-room; she took it with a bright, cold smile, making white rings of ironical deprecation around the pupils of her eyes.
“What is that poor boy doing, I wonder?” said Mrs. Brinkley to herself.
The next morning Dan Mavering knocked at Boardman's door before the reporter was up. This might have been any time before one o'clock, but it was really at half-past nine. Boardman wanted to know who was there, and when Mavering had said it was he, Boardman seemed to ponder the fact awhile before Mavering heard him getting out of bed and coming barefooted to the door. He unlocked it, and got back into bed; then he called out, “Come in,” and Mavering pushed the door open impatiently. But he stood blank and silent, looking helplessly at his friend. A strong glare of winter light came in through the naked sash—for Boardman apparently not only did not close his window-blinds, but did not pull down his curtains, when he went to bed—and shone upon his gay, shrewd face where he lay, showing his pop-corn teeth in a smile at Mavering.
“Prefer to stand?” he asked by and by, after Mavering had remained standing in silence, with no signs of proposing to sit down or speak. Mavering glanced at the only chair in the room: Boardman's clothes dripped and dangled over it. “Throw 'em on the bed,” he said, following Mavering's glance.
“I'll take the bed myself,” said Mavering; and he sat down on the side of it, and was again suggestively silent.
Boardman moved his head on the pillow, as he watched Mavering's face, with the agreeable sense of personal security which we all feel in viewing trouble from the outside: “You seem balled up about something.”
Mavering sighed heavily. “Balled up? It's no word for it. Boardman, I'm done for. Yesterday I was the happiest fellow in the world, and now—Yes, it's all over with me, and it's my own fault, as usual. Look; at that!” He jerked Boardman a note which he had been holding fast in his band, and got up and went to look himself at the wide range of chimney-pots and slated roofs which Boardman's dormer-window commanded.
“Want me to read it?” Boardman asked; and Mavering nodded without glancing round. It dispersed through the air of Boardman's room, as he unfolded it, a thin, elect perfume, like a feminine presence, refined and strict; and Boardman involuntarily passed his hand over his rumpled hair, as if to make himself a little more personable before reading the letter.
“DEAR MR. MAVERING,—I enclose the ring you gave me the other day, and I release you from the promise you gave with it. I am convinced that you wronged yourself in offering either without your whole heart, and I care too much for your happiness to let you persist in your sacrifice.
“In begging that you will not uselessly attempt to see me, but that you will consider this note final, I know you will do me the justice not to attribute an ungenerous motive to me. I shall rejoice to hear of any good that may befall you; and I shall try not to envy any one through whom it comes.—Yours sincerely,”
“ALICE PASMER.
“P.S.—I say nothing of circumstances or of persons; I feel that any comment of mine upon them would be idle.”
Mavering looked up at the sound Boardman made in refolding the letter. Boardman grinned, with sparkling eyes. “Pretty neat,” he said.
“Pretty infernally neat,” roared Mavering.
“Do you suppose she means business?”
“Of course she means business. Why shouldn't she?”
“I don't know. Why should she?”
“Well, I'll tell you, Boardman. I suppose I shall have to tell you if I'm going to get any good out of you; but it's a dose.” He came away from the window, and swept Boardman's clothes off the chair preparatory to taking it.
Boardman lifted his head nervously from the pillow.
“Oh; I'll put them on the bed, if you're so punctilious!” cried Mavering.
“I don't mind the clothes,” said Boardman. “I thought I heard my watch knock on the floor in my vest pocket. Just take it out, will you, and see if you've stopped it?”
“Oh, confound your old Waterbury! All the world's stopped; why shouldn't your watch stop too?” Mavering tugged it out of the pocket, and then shoved it back disdainfully. “You couldn't stop that thing with anything short of a sledgehammer; it's rattling away like a mowing-machine. You know those Portland women—those ladies I spent the day with when you were down there at the regatta—the day I came from Campobello—Mrs. Frobisher and her sister?” He agglutinated one query to another till he saw a light of intelligence dawn in Boardman's eye. “Well, they're at the bottom of it, I suppose. I was introduced to them on Class Day, and I ought to have shown them some attention there; but the moment I saw Alice—Miss Pasmer—I forgot all about 'em. But they didn't seem to have noticed it much, and I made it all right with 'em that day at Portland; and they came up in the fall, and I made an appointment with them to drive out to Cambridge and show them the place. They were to take me up at the Art Museum; but that was the day I met Miss Pasmer, and I—I forgot about those women again.”
Boardman was one of those who seldom laugh; but his grin expressed all the malicious enjoyment he felt. He said nothing in the impressive silence which Mavering let follow at this point.
“Oh, you think it was funny?” cried Mavering. “I thought it was funny too; but Alice herself opened my eyes to what I'd done, and I always intended to make it all right with them when I got the chance. I supposed she wished me too.”
Boardman grinned afresh.
“She told me I must; though she seemed to dislike my having been with them the day after she'd thrown me over. But if”—Mavering interrupted himself to say, as the grin widened on Boardman's face—“if you think it was any case of vulgar jealousy, you're very much mistaken, Boardman. She isn't capable of it, and she was so magnanimous about it that I made up my mind to do all I could to retrieve myself. I felt that it was my duty to her. Well, last night at Mrs. Jim Bellingham's reception—”
A look of professional interest replaced the derision in Boardman's eyes. “Any particular occasion for the reception? Given in honour of anybody?”
“I'll contribute to your society notes some other time, Boardman,” said Mavering haughtily. “I'm speaking to a friend, not an interviewer. Well, whom should I see after the first waltz—I'd been dancing with Alice, and we were taking a turn through the drawing-room, and she hanging on my arm, and I knew everybody saw how it was, and I was feeling well—whom should I see but these women. They were in a corner by themselves, looking at a picture, and trying to look as if they were doing it voluntarily. But I could see at a glance that they didn't know anybody; and I knew they had better be in the heart of the Sahara without acquaintances than where they were; and when they bowed forlornly across the room to me, my heart was in my mouth, I felt so sorry for them; and I told Alice who they were; and I supposed she'd want to rush right over to them with me—”
“And did she rush?” asked Boardman, filling up a pause which Mavering made in wiping his face.
“How infernally hot you have it in here!” He went to the window and threw it up; and then did not sit down again, but continued to walk back and forth as he talked. “She didn't seem to know who they were at first, and when I made her understand she hung back, and said, 'Those showy things?' and I must say I think she was wrong; they were dressed as quietly as nine-tenths of the people there; only they are rather large, handsome women. I said I thought we ought to go and speak to them, they seemed stranded there; but she didn't seem to see it; and, when I persisted, she said, 'Well, you go if you think best; but take me to mamma.' And I supposed it was all right; and I told Mrs. Pasmer I'd be back in a minute, and then I went off to those women. And after I'd talked with them a while I saw Mrs. Brinkley sitting with old Bromfield Corey in another corner, and I got them across and introduced them; after I'd explained to Mrs. Brinkley who they were; and they began to have a good time, and I—didn't.”
“Just so,” said Boardman.
“I thought I hadn't been gone any while at all from Alice; but the weather had changed by the time I had got back. Alice was pretty serious, and she was engaged two or three dances deep; and I could see her looking over the fellows' shoulders, as she went round and round, pretty pale. I hung about till she was free; but then she couldn't dance with me; she said her head ached, and she made her mother take her home before supper; and I mooned round like my own ghost a while, and then I went home. And as if that wasn't enough, I could see by the looks of those other women—old Corey forgot Miss Wrayne in the supper-room, and I had to take her back—that I hadn't made it right with them, even; they were as hard and smooth as glass. I'd ruined myself, and ruined myself for nothing.”
Mavering flung Boardman's chair over, and seated himself on its rungs.
“I went to bed, and waited for the next thing to happen. I found my thunderbolt waiting for me when I woke up. I didn't know what it was going to be, but when I felt a ring through the envelope of that note I knew what it was. I mind-read that note before I opened it.”
“Give it to the Society for Psychical Research,” suggested Boardman. “Been to breakfast?”
“Breakfast!” echoed Mavering. “Well, now, Boardman, what use do you suppose I've got for breakfast under the circumstances?”
“Well, not very much; but your story's made me pretty hungry. Would you mind turning your back, or going out and sitting on the top step of the stairs' landing, or something, while I get up and dress?”
“Oh, I can go, if you want to get rid of me,” said Mavering, with unresentful sadness. “But I hoped you might have something to suggest, Boardy.'
“Well, I've suggested two things, and you don't like either. Why not go round and ask to see the old lady?”
“Mrs. Pasmer?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I thought of that. But I didn't like to mention it, for fear you'd sit on it. When would you go?”
“Well, about as quick as I could get there. It's early for a call, but it's a peculiar occasion, and it'll show your interest in the thing. You can't very well let it cool on your hands, unless you mean to accept the situation.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Mavering, getting up and standing over Boardman. “Do you think I could accept the situation, as you call it, and live?”
“You did once,” said Boardman. “You couldn't, unless you could fix it up with Mrs. Frobisher's sister.”
Mavering blushed. “It was a different thing altogether then. I could have broken off then, but I tell you it would kill me now. I've got in too deep. My whole life's set on that girl. You can't understand, Boardman, because you've never been there; but I couldn't give her up.”
“All right. Better go and see the old lady without loss of time; or the old man, if you prefer.”
Mavering sat down on the edge of the bed again. “Look here, Boardman, what do you mean?”
“By what?”
“By being so confoundedly heartless. Did you suppose that I wanted to pay those women any attention last night from an interested motive?”
“Seems to have been Miss Pasmer's impression.”
“Well, you're mistaken. She had no such impression. She would have too much self-respect, too much pride—magnanimity. She would know that after such a girl as she is I couldn't think of any other woman; the thing is simply impossible.”
“That's the theory.”
“Theory? It's the practice!”
“Certain exceptions.”
“There's no exception in my case. No, sir! I tell you this thing is for all time—for eternity. It makes me or it mars me, once for all. She may listen to me or she may not listen, but as long as she lives there's no other woman alive for me.”
“Better go and tell her so. You're wasting your arguments on me.”
“Why?”
“Because I'm convinced already. Because people always marry their first and only loves. Because people never marry twice for love. Because I've never seen you hit before, and I know you never could be again. Now go and convince Miss Pasmer. She'll believe you, because she'll know that she can never care for any one but you, and you naturally can't care for anybody but her. It's a perfectly clear case. All you've got to do is to set it before her.”
“If I were you, I wouldn't try to work that cynical racket, Boardman,” said Mavering. He rose, but he sighed drearily, and regarded Boardman's grin with lack-lustre absence. But he went away without saying anything more; and walked mechanically toward the Cavendish. As he rang at the door of Mrs. Pasmer's apartments he recalled another early visit he had paid there; he thought how joyful and exuberant he was then, and how crushed and desperate now. He was not without youthful satisfaction in the disparity of his different moods; it seemed to stamp him as a man of large and varied experience.
Mrs. Pasmer was genuinely surprised to see Mavering, and he pursued his advantage—if it was an advantage—by coming directly to the point. He took it for granted that she knew all about the matter, and he threw himself upon her mercy without delay.
“Mrs. Pasmer, you must help me about this business with Alice,” he broke out at once. “I don't know what to make of it; but I know I can explain it. Of course,” he added, smiling ruefully, “the two statements don't hang together; but what I mean is that if I can find out what the trouble is, I can make it all right, because there's nothing wrong about it; don't you see?”
Mrs. Pasmer tried to keep the mystification out of her eye; but she could not even succeed in seeming to do so, which she would have liked almost as well.
“Don't you know what I mean?” asked Dan.
Mrs. Pasmer chanced it. “That Alice was a little out of sorts last night?” she queried leadingly.
“Yes,” said Mavering fervently. “And about her—her writing to me.”
“Writing to you?” Mrs. Pasmer was going to ask, when Dan gave her the letter.
“I don't know whether I ought to show it, but I must. I must have your help, and I can't, unless you understand the case.”
Mrs. Pasmer had begun to read the note. It explained what the girl herself had refused to give any satisfactory reason for—her early retirement from the reception, her mysterious disappearance into her own room on reaching home, and her resolute silence on the way. Mrs. Pasmer had known that there must be some trouble with Dan, and she had suspected that Alice was vexed with him on account of those women; but it was beyond her cheerful imagination that she should go to such lengths in her resentment. She could conceive of her wishing to punish him, to retaliate her suffering on him; but to renounce him for it was another thing; and she did not attribute to her daughter any other motive than she would have felt herself. It was always this way with Mrs. Pasmer: she followed her daughter accurately up to a certain point; beyond that she did not believe the girl knew herself what she meant; and perhaps she was not altogether wrong. Girlhood is often a turmoil of wild impulses, ignorant exaltations, mistaken ideals, which really represent no intelligent purpose, and come from disordered nerves, ill-advised reading, and the erroneous perspective of inexperience. Mrs. Pasmer felt this, and she was tempted to break into a laugh over Alice's heroics; but she preferred to keep a serious countenance, partly because she did not feel the least seriously. She was instantly resolved not to let this letter accomplish anything more than Dan's temporary abasement, and she would have preferred to shorten this to the briefest moment possible. She liked him, and she was convinced that Alice could never do better, if half so well. She would now have preferred to treat him with familiar confidence, to tell him that she had no idea of Alice's writing him that nonsensical letter, and he was not to pay the least attention to it; for of course it meant nothing; but another principle of her complex nature came into play, and she silently folded the note and returned it to Dan, trembling before her.
“Well?” he quavered.
“Well,” returned Mrs. Pasmer judicially, while she enjoyed his tremor, whose needlessness inwardly amused her—“well, of course, Alice was—”
“Annoyed, I know. And it was all my fault—or my misfortune. But I assure you, Mrs. Pasmer, that I thought I was doing something that would please her—in the highest and noblest way. Now don't you know I did?”
Mrs. Pasmer again wished to laugh, but in the face of Dan's tragedy she had to forbear. She contented herself with saying: “Of course. But perhaps it wasn't the best time for pleasing her just in that way.”
“It was then or never. I can see now—why, I could see all the time—just how it might look; but I supposed Alice wouldn't care for that, and if I hadn't tried to make some reparation then to Mrs. Frobisher and her sister, I never could. Don't you see?”
“Yes, certainly. But—”
“And Alice herself told me to go and look after them,” interposed Mavering. He suppressed, a little uncandidly, the fact of her first reluctance.
“But you know it was the first time you had been out together?”
“Yes.”
“And naturally she would wish to have you a good deal to herself, or at least not seeming to run after other people.”
“Yes, yes; I know that.”
“And no one ever likes to be taken at their word in a thing like that.”
“I ought to have thought of that, but I didn't. I wish I had gone to you first, Mrs. Pasmer. Somehow it seems to me as if I were very young and inexperienced; I didn't use to feel so. I wish you were always on hand to advise me, Mrs. Pasmer.” Dan hung his head, and his face, usually so gay, was blotted with gloom.
“Will you take my advice now?” asked Mrs. Pasmer.
“Indeed I will!” cried the young fellow, lifting his head. “What is it?”
“See Alice about this.”
Dan jumped to his feet, and the sunshine broke out over his face again. “Mrs. Pasmer, I promised to take your advice, and I'll do it. I will see her. But how? Where? Let me have your advice on that point too.”
They began to laugh together, and Dan was at once inexpressibly happy. Those two light natures thoroughly comprehended each other.
Mrs. Pasmer had proposed his seeing Alice with due seriousness, but now she had a longing to let herself go; she felt all the pleasure that other people felt in doing Dan Mavering a pleasure, and something more, because he was so perfectly intelligible to her. She let herself go.
“You might stay to breakfast.”
“Mrs. Pasmer, I will—I will do that too. I'm awfully hungry, and I put myself in your hands.”
“Let me see,” said Mrs. Pasmer thoughtfully, “how it can be contrived.”
“Yes;” said Mavering, ready for a panic. “How? She wouldn't stand a surprise?”
“No; I had thought of that.”
“No behind-a-screen or next-room business?”
“No,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a light sigh. “Alice is peculiar. I'm afraid she wouldn't like it.”
“Isn't there any little ruse she would like?”
“I can't think of any. Perhaps I'd better go and tell her you're here and wish to see her.”
“Do you think you'd better?” asked Dan doubtfully. “Perhaps she won't come.”
“She will come,” said Mrs. Pasmer confidently.
She did not say that she thought Alice would be curious to know why he had come, and that she was too just to condemn him unheard.
But she was right about the main point. Alice came, and Dan could see with his own weary eyes that she had not slept either.
She stopped just inside the portiere, and waited for him to speak. But he could not, though a smile from his sense of the absurdity of their seriousness hovered about his lips. His first impulse was to rush upon her and catch her in his arms, and perhaps this might have been well, but the moment for it passed, and then it became impossible.
“Well?” she said at last, lifting her head, and looking at him with impassioned solemnity. “You wished to see me? I hoped you wouldn't. It would have spared me something. But perhaps I had no right to your forbearance.”
“Alice, how can you say such things to me?” asked the young fellow, deeply hurt.
She responded to his tone. “I'm sorry if it wounds you. But I only mean what I say.”
“You've a right to my forbearance, and not only that, but to my—my life; to everything that I am,” cried Dan, in a quiver of tenderness at the sight of her and the sound of her voice. “Alice, why did you write me that letter?—why did you send me back my ring?”
“Because,” she said, looking him seriously in the face—“because I wished you to be free, to be happy.”
“Well, you've gone the wrong way about it. I can never be free from you; I never can be happy without you.”
“I did it for your good, then, which ought to be above your happiness. Don't think I acted hastily. I thought it over all night long. I didn't sleep—”
“Neither did I,” interposed Dan.
“And I saw that I had no claim to you; that you never could be truly happy with me—”
“I'll take the chances,” he interrupted. “Alice, you don't suppose I cared for those women any more than the ground under your feet, do you? I don't suppose I should ever have given them a second thought if you hadn't seemed to feel so badly about my neglecting them; and I thought you'd be pleased to have me try to make it up to them if I could.”
“I know your motive was good—the noblest. Don't think that I did you injustice, or that I was vexed because you went away with them.”
“You sent me.”
“Yes; and now I give you up to them altogether. It was a mistake, a crime, for me to think we could be anything to each other when our love began with a wrong to some one else.”
“With a wrong to some one else?”
“You neglected them on Class Day after you saw me.”
“Why, of course I did. How could I help it?”
A flush of pleasure came into the girl's pale face; but she banished it, and continued gravely, “Then at Portland you were with them all day.”
“You'd given me up—you'd thrown me over, Alice,” he pleaded.
“I know that; I don't blame you. But you made them believe that you were very much interested in them.”
“I don't know what I did. I was perfectly desperate.”
“Yes; it was my fault. And then, when they came to meet you at the Museum, I had made you forget them; I'd made you wound them and insult them again. No. I've thought it all out, and we never could be happy. Don't think that I do it from any resentful motive.”
“Alice? how could I think that?—Of you!”
“I have tried—prayed—to be purified from that, and I believe that I have been.”
“You never had a selfish thought.”
“And I have come to see that you were perfectly right in what you did last night. At first I was wounded.”
“Oh, did I wound you, Alice?” he grieved.
“But afterward I could see that you belonged to them, and not me, and—and I give you up to them. Yes, freely, fully.”
Alice stood there, beautiful, pathetic, austere; and Dan had halted in the spot to which he had advanced, when her eye forbade him to approach nearer. He did not mean to joke, and it was in despair that he cried out: “But which, Alice? There are two of them.”
“Two?” she repeated vaguely.
“Yes; Mrs. Frobisher and Miss Wrayne. You can't give me up to both of them.”
“Both?” she repeated again. She could not condescend to specify; it would be ridiculous, and as it was, she felt her dignity hopelessly shaken. The tears came into her eyes.
“Yes. And neither of them wants me—they haven't got any use for me. Mrs. Frobisher is married already, and Miss Wrayne took the trouble last night to let me feel that, so far as she was concerned, I hadn't made it all right, and couldn't. I thought I had rather a cold parting with you, Alice, but it was quite tropical to what you left me to.” A faint smile, mingled with a blush of relenting, stole into her face, and he hurried on. “I don't suppose I tried very hard to thaw her out. I wasn't much interested. If you must give me up, you must give me up to some one else, for they don't want me, and I don't want them.” Alice's head dropped lover, and he could come nearer now without her seeming to know it. “But why need you give me up? There's really no occasion for it, I assure you.”
“I wished,” she explained, “to show you that I loved you for something above yourself and myself—far above either—”
She stopped and dropped the hand which she had raised to fend him off; and he profited by the little pause she made to take her in his arms without seeming to do so. “Well,” he said, “I don't believe I was formed to be loved on a very high plane. But I'm not too proud to be loved for my own sake; and I don't think there's anything above you, Alice.”
“Oh yes, there is! I don't deserve to be happy, and that's the reason why I'm not allowed to be happy in any noble way. I can't bear to give you up; you know I can't; but you ought to give me up—indeed you ought. I have ideals, but I can't live up to them. You ought to go. You ought to leave me.” She accented each little sentence by vividly pressing herself to his heart, and he had the wisdom or the instinct to treat their reconciliation as nothing settled, but merely provisional in its nature.
“Well, we'll see about that. I don't want to go till after breakfast, anyway; your mother says I may stay, and I'm awfully hungry. If I see anything particularly base in you, perhaps I sha'n't come back to lunch.”
Dan would have liked to turn it alt off into a joke, now that the worst was apparently over; but Alice freed herself from him, and held him off with her hand set against his breast. “Does mamma know about it?” she demanded sternly.
“Well, she knows there's been some misunderstanding,” said Dan, with a laugh that was anxious, in view of the clouds possibly gathering again.
“How much?”
“Well, I can't say exactly.” He would not say that he did not know, but he felt that he could truly say that he could not say.
She dropped her hand, and consented to be deceived. Dan caught her again to his breast; but he had an odd, vague sense of doing it carefully, of using a little of the caution with which one seizes the stem of a rose between the thorns.
“I can bear to be ridiculous with you,” she whispered, with an implication which he understood.
“You haven't been ridiculous, dearest,” he said; and his tension gave way in a convulsive laugh, which partially expressed his feeling of restored security, and partly his amusement in realising how the situation would have pleased Mrs. Pasmer if she could have known it.
Mrs. Pasmer was seated behind her coffee biggin at the breakfast-table when he came into the room with Alice, and she lifted an eye from its glass bulb long enough to catch his flying glance of exultation and admonition. Then, while she regarded the chemical struggle in the bulb, with the rapt eye of a magician reading fate in his crystal ball, she questioned herself how much she should know, and how much she should ignore. It was a great moment for Mrs. Pasmer, full of delicious choice. “Do you understand this process, Mr. Mavering?” she said, glancing up at him warily for farther instruction.
“I've seen it done,” said Dan, “but I never knew how it was managed. I always thought it was going to blow up; but it seemed to me that if you were good and true and very meek, and had a conscience void of offence, it wouldn't.”
“Yes, that's what it seems to depend upon,” said Mrs. Pasmer, keeping her eye on the bulb. She dodged suddenly forward, and put out the spirit-lamp. “Now have your coffee!” she cried, with a great air of relief. “You must need it by this time,” she said with a low cynical laugh—“both of you!”
“Did you always make coffee with a biggin in France, Mrs. Pasmer?” asked Dan; and he laughed out the last burden that lurked in his heart.
Mrs. Pasmer joined him. “No, Mr. Mavering. In France you don't need a biggin. I set mine up when we went to England.”
Alice looked darkly from one of these light spirits to the other, and then they all shrieked together.
They went on talking volubly from that, and they talked as far away from what they were thinking about as possible. They talked of Europe, and Mrs. Pasmer said where they would live and what they would do when they all got back there together. Dan abetted her, and said that they must cross in June. Mrs. Pasmer said that she thought June was a good month. He asked if it were not the month of the marriages too, and she answered that he must ask Alice about that. Alice blushed and laughed her sweet reluctant laugh, and said she did not know; she had never been married.
It was silly, but it was delicious; it made them really one family. Deep in his consciousness a compunction pierced and teased Dan. But he said to himself that it was all a joke about their European plans, or else his people would consent to it if he really wished it.
A period of entire harmony and tenderness followed the episode which seemed to threaten the lovers with the loss of each other. Mavering forbore to make Alice feel that in attempting a sacrifice which consulted only his good and ignored his happiness, and then failing in it so promptly, she had played rather a silly part. After one or two tentative jokes in that direction he found the ground unsafe, and with the instinct which served him in place of more premeditated piety he withdrew, and was able to treat the affair with something like religious awe. He was obliged, in fact, to steady Alice's own faith in it, and to keep her from falling under dangerous self-condemnation in that and other excesses of uninstructed self-devotion. This brought no fatigue to his robust affection, whatever it might have done to a heart more tried in such exercises. Love acquaints youth with many things in character and temperament which are none the less interesting because it never explains them; and Dan was of such a make that its revelations of Alice were charming to him because they were novel. He had thought her a person of such serene and flawless wisdom that it was rather a relief to find her subject to gusts of imprudence, to unexpected passions and resentments, to foibles and errors, like other people. Her power of cold reticence; which she could employ at will, was something that fascinated him almost as much as that habit of impulsive concession which seemed to came neither from her will nor her reason. He was a person himself who was so eager to give other people pleasure that he quivered with impatience to see them happy through his words or acts; he could not bear to think that any one to whom he was speaking was not perfectly comfortable in regard to him; and it was for this reason perhaps that he admired a girl who could prescribe herself a line of social conduct, and follow it out regardless of individual pangs—who could act from ideals and principles, and not from emotions and sympathies. He knew that she had the emotions and sympathies, for there were times when she lavished them on him; and that she could seem without them was another proof of that depth of nature which he liked to imagine had first attracted him to her. Dan Mavering had never been able to snub any one in his life; it gave him a great respect for Alice that it seemed not to cost her an effort or a regret, and it charmed him to think that her severity was part of the unconscious sham which imposed her upon the world for a person of inflexible design and invariable constancy to it. He was not long in seeing that she shared this illusion, if it was an illusion, and that perhaps the only person besides himself who was in the joke was her mother. Mrs. Pasmer and he grew more and more into each other's confidence in talking Alice over, and he admired the intrepidity of this lady, who was not afraid of her daughter even in the girl's most topping moments of self-abasement. For his own part, these moods of hers never failed to cause him confusion and anxiety. They commonly intimated themselves parenthetically in the midst of some blissful talk they were having, and overcast his clear sky with retrospective ideals of conduct or presentimental plans for contingencies that might never occur. He found himself suddenly under condemnation for not having reproved her at a given time when she forced him to admit she had seemed unkind or cold to others; she made him promise that even at the risk of alienating her affections he would make up for her deficiencies of behaviour in such matters whenever he noticed them. She now praised him for what he had done for Mrs. Frobisher and her sister at Mrs. Bellingham's reception; she said it was generous, heroic. But Mavering rested satisfied with his achievement in that instance, and did not attempt anything else of the kind. He did not reason from cause to effect in regard to it: a man's love is such that while it lasts he cannot project its object far enough from him to judge it reasonable or unreasonable; but Dan's instincts had been disciplined and his perceptions sharpened by that experience. Besides, in bidding him take this impartial and even admonitory course toward her, she stipulated that they should maintain to the world a perfect harmony of conduct which should be an outward image of the union of their lives. She said that anything less than a continued self-sacrifice of one to the other was not worthy of the name of love, and that she should not be happy unless he required this of her. She said that they ought each to find out what was the most distasteful thing which they could mutually require, and then do it; she asked him to try to think what she most hated, and let her do that for him; as for her, she only asked to ask nothing of him.
Mavering could not worship enough this nobility of soul in her, and he celebrated it to Boardman with the passionate need of imparting his rapture which a lover feel. Boardman acquiesced in silence, with a glance of reserved sarcasm, or contented himself with laconic satire of his friend's general condition, and avoided any comment that might specifically apply to the points Dan made. Alice allowed him to have this confidant, and did not demand of him a report of all he said to Boardman. A main fact of their love, she said, must be their utter faith in each other. She had her own confidante, and the disparity of years between her and Miss Cotton counted for nothing in the friendship which their exchange of trust and sympathy cemented. Miss Cotton, in the freshness of her sympathy and the ideality of her inexperience, was in fact younger than Alice, at whose feet, in the things of soul and character, she loved to sit. She never said to her what she believed: that a girl of her exemplary principles, a nature conscious of such noble ideals, so superior to other girls, who in her place would be given up to the happiness of the moment, and indifferent to the sense of duty to herself and to others, was sacrificed to a person of Mavering's gay, bright nature and trivial conception of life. She did not deny his sweetness; that was perhaps the one saving thing about him; and she confessed that he simply adored Alice; that counted for everything, and it was everything in his favour that he could appreciate such a girl. She hoped, she prayed, that Alice might never realise how little depth he had; that she might go through life and never suspect it. If she did so, then they might be happy together to the end, or at least Alice might never know she was unhappy.
Miss Cotton never said these things in so many words; it is doubtful if she ever said them in any form of words; with her sensitive anxiety not to do injustice to any one, she took Dan's part against those who viewed the engagement as she allowed it to appear only to her secret heart. She defended him the more eagerly because she felt that it was for Alice's sake, and that everything must be done to keep her from knowing how people looked at the affair, even to changing people's minds. She said to all who spoke to her of it that of course Alice was superior to him, but he was devoted to her, and he would grow into an equality with her. He was naturally very refined, she said, and, if he was not a very serious person, he was amiable beyond anything. She alleged many little incidents of their acquaintance at Campobello in proof of her theory that he had an instinctive appreciation of Alice, and she was sure that no one could value her nobleness of character more than he. She had seen them a good deal together since their engagement, and it was beautiful to see his manner with her. They were opposites, but she counted a good deal upon that very difference in their temperaments to draw them to each other.
It was an easy matter to see Dan and Alice together. Their engagement came out in the usual way: it had been announced to a few of their nearest friends, and intelligence of it soon spread from their own set through society generally; it had been published in the Sunday papers while it was still in the tender condition of a rumour, and had been denied by some of their acquaintance and believed by all.
The Pasmer cousinship had been just in the performance of the duties of blood toward Alice since the return of her family from Europe, and now did what was proper in the circumstances. All who were connected with her called upon her and congratulated her; they knew Dan, the younger of them, much better than they knew her; and though he had shrunk from the nebulous bulk of social potentiality which every young man is to that much smaller nucleus to which definite betrothal reduces him, they could be perfectly sincere in calling him the sweetest fellow that ever was, and too lovely to live.
In such a matter Mr. Pasmer was naturally nothing; he could not be less than he was at other times, but he was not more; and it was Mrs. Pasmer who shared fully with her daughter the momentary interest which the engagement gave Alice with all her kindred. They believed, of course, that they recognised in it an effect of her skill in managing; they agreed to suppose that she had got Mavering for Alice, and to ignore the beauty and passion of youth as factors in the case. The closest of the kindred, with the romantic delicacy of Americans in such things, approached the question of Dan's position and prospects, and heard with satisfaction the good accounts which Mrs. Pasmer was able to give of his father's prosperity. There had always been more or less apprehension among them of a time when a family subscription would be necessary for Bob Pasmer, and in the relief which the new situation gave them some of them tried to remember having known Dan's father in College, but it finally came to their guessing that they must have heard John Munt speak of him.
Mrs. Pasmer had a supreme control in the affair. She believed with the rest—so deeply is this delusion seated—that she had made the match; but knowing herself to have used no dishonest magic in the process, she was able to enjoy it with a clean conscience. She grew fonder of Dan; they understood each other; she was his refuge from Alice's ideals, and helped him laugh off his perplexity with them. They were none the less sincere because they were not in the least frank with each other. She let Dan beat about the bush to his heart's content, and waited for him at the point which she knew he was coming to, with an unconsciousness which he knew was factitious; neither of them got tired of this, or failed freshly to admire the other's strategy.