"Miss Burton," said Van Berg, as soon as they were alone, "I wish
I could have saved you from this disagreeable experience. I tried
to do so, but was not quick enough. I much blame my slow wits that
I was not more prompt."
"I wish it might have been prevented," she replied, "for their
sakes as well as my own."
"I have no compunctions on their account whatever," said Van Berg,
"and feel that you let them off much too kindly. I think, however,
that they and all others here will understand you much better
hereafter. I cannot express too strongly to you how thoroughly our
brief acquaintance has taught me to respect you, and if you will
permit me to give an earnest meaning to Mr. Burleigh's jesting offer
to share with me the responsibility of your care, I will esteem it
an honor."
"I sincerely thank you, Mr. Van Berg, and should I ever need the
services of a gentleman,"--she laid a slight emphasis upon the
term--"I shall, without any hesitancy, turn to you. But I have
long since learned to be my own protectress, as, after all, one
must be, situated as I am."
"You seem to have the ability, not only to take care of yourself,
but of others, Miss Burton. Nevertheless I shall, with your
permission, establish a sort of protectorate over you which shall
be exceedingly unobtrusive and undemonstrative, and not in the
least like that which some powers make the excuse for exactions,
until the protected party is ready to cry out in desperation to
be delivered from its friends. I hesitated too long this evening
from the fear of being forward; and yet I did not know what was
coming, and had learned only accidentally but a few moments before
that anything was coming."
"Well," replied Miss Burton with a slight laugh, "it's a comfortable
thought that there's a fort near, to which one can run should an
enemy appear; and a pleasanter thought still, that the fort is strong
and staunch. but, to change the figure, I have a great fancy for
paddling my own light canoe, and such small craft will often float,
you know, where a ship of the line would strike."
"I will admit, Miss Burton, that ships of the line are often unwieldy
and clumsily deep in the water; but if you ever do need a gunboat
with a howitzer or two on deck, may I hope to be summoned?"
"I could ask for no better champion. I fairly tremble at the
broadside that would follow."
"Are you thinking of the discharge or the recoil?"
"Both might involve danger," said Miss Burton, laughing; "but I
have concluded to keep on your side through such wars as may rage
at the Lake House during my sojourn. I cannot help thinking of
poor Mr. and Mrs. Chints. I feel almost as sorry for such people
as I do for the blind and deaf. They seem to lack a certain sense
which, if possessed, would teach them to avoid such scenes."
"I detest such people and like to snub them unmercifully," said
Van Berg, heartily.
"That may be in accordance with a gunboat character; but is it
knightly?"
"Why not? What does snobbishness and rich vulgarity deserve at
any man's hands?"
"Nothing but sturdy blows. But what do weak, imperfect, half-educated
men and women, who have never had a tithe of your advantages, NEED
at your hands? Can we not condemn faults, and at the same time
pity and help the faulty? The gunboat sends its shot crashing too
much at random. It seems to me that true knighthood would spare
weakness of any kind."
"I'm glad you have not spared mine. You have demolished me as a
gunboat, but I would fain be your knight."
"It is Mrs. Chints who needs a knight at present, and not I. It
troubles me to think of her worriment over this foolish little
episode, and with your permission I will go and try to banish the
cloud."
As she turned she was intercepted by Stanton, who said:
"Miss Burton, let my present to you my cousin, Miss Mayhew."
A ray from a parlor lamp fell upon Ida's face, and Van Berg saw at
once that it was clouded and unamiable in its expression. Stanton
had evidently been reproaching her severely.
Miss Burton held out her hand cordially and said; "I wish to thank
you for maintaining the credit of our sex this morning. These
superior men are so fond of portraying us as hysterical, clinging
creatures whose only instinct in peril is to throw themselves on
man's protection, that I always feel a little exultation when one
of the 'weaker and gentler sex,' as we are termed, show the courage
and presence of mind which they coolly appropriate as masculine
qualities."
"Are you an advocate of woman's rights, Miss Burton?" asked Miss
Mayhew, stung by the unconscious sarcasm of the lady's words, to reply
in almost as resentful a manner as if a wound had been intended.
"Not of woman's, particularly," was the quiet answer; "I would be
glad if every one had their rights."
"You philanthropy is very wide, certainly."
"And therefore very thin, perhaps you think, since it covers so much
ground. I agree with you, Miss Mayhew, that general good-will is
as cold and thin as moonshine. One ray of sunlight that warms some
particular thing into life is worth it all."
"Indeed! I think I prefer moonlight."
"There are certain absorbing avocations in life to which moonshine
is better adapted then sunlight, is probably the thought in my
cousin's mind," said Stanton, satirically.
"And what are they?" asked Miss Burton.
"Flirtation, for instance."
"My cousin is speaking for himself," said Ida, acidly; "and knows
better what is in his own mind than in mine."
"If some ladies themselves never know their own minds, how can
another know?" Stanton retorted.
"Well," said Miss Burton, with a laugh, "if we accept a practical
philosophy much in vogue--that of taking the world as we find
it--flirting is one of the commonest pursuits of mankind."
"I'm quite sure, Miss Burton," said Van Berg, "that your philosophy
of life is the reverse of taking the world as we find it."
"Indeed, you are mistaken, sir; I am exceedingly prosaic in my views,
and cherish no Utopian dreams and theories. I do indeed take the
old matter-of-fact world as I find it, and try to make the best of
it."
"Ah, your last is a very saving clause. Too many are seemingly
trying to make the worst of it, and unfortunately they succeed."
Ida here shot a quick and vengeful glance at the speaker.
"Please do not present me as a general reformer, Mr. Van Berg,"
protested Miss Burton, with a light laugh; "I have my hands full
in mending my own ways."
"And so might we all, no doubt," said Stanton; "only most of us
leave our ways unmended. but I am curious to know, Miss Burton, how
you would make the best of a flirtation; since this is emphatically
a part of the world as we find it, especially at a summer hotel."
"The best that we can do with many things that exist," she replied,
"is to leave them alone. Italy is pre-eminently the land of garlic
and art; but fortunately we shall not find it necessary to indulge
in both and in equal proportions when we are so happy as to go
abroad."
"A great many people prefer the garlic," said Stanton.
"Oh, certainly," she answered; "it's a matter of taste."
"So then garlic and flirtation are corresponding terms in your
vocabulary?"
"I cannot say which term outranks the other, but it seems to me that
if a woman regards her love as a sacred thing, she cannot permit
an indefinite number of commonplace people even to attempt to stain
it with their soiling touch."
"I think gentlemen show just as much of a disposition to flirt as
ladies," said Ida, with resentment in her tone.
"I will not dispute that statement," replied Miss Burton, with a
laugh; "indeed, I'm inclined to think they are very human."
"Humane, you mean," interposed Stanton. "Yes, I often wonder at
our patient endurance."
"Which shall be taxed no longer to-night by me. Good-evening, Miss
Mayhew. Good-evening, patient martyrs."
"Humane, indeed!" said Stanton. "Are you that way inclined, Van?"
"I have no occasion to be otherwise."
"Well, I feel savage enough to scalp some one."
"So I should judge," remarked Ida.
"Perhaps then, as my mood contrasts somewhat favorably with your
cousin's, you will venture to walk with me for awhile?" said Van
Berg.
"Indeed, sir," she replied, taking his arm, "there are times when
any change is a relief."
"I cannot be very greatly elated over that view of the case,
certainly," remarked Van Berg, with a laugh.
She did not reply at once, but after a moment said: "I suppose
you regard me as a hopeless case at best."
"what suggests that thought to you, Miss Mayhew?"
"You are not so dull as to need to ask that question, and you only
ask it to draw me out. For one thing, you probably think that
I instigated Mr. and Mrs. Chints to act as they did. This is not
true."
"I'm very glad to hear it."
"I'm no more to blame than Mr. Burleigh was. He knew about it as
well as I did, but Mrs. Chints was bound to carry out her project."
"Will you permit a suggestion?"
"I suppose you wish to insinuate that I acted like a heathen,
instead of saying that I am one plainly, as does Cousin Ik?"
"I think you acted a little thoughtlessly. If Miss Burton had been
in your place, she would have tried to prevent the disagreeable
scene."
"Oh, certainly! she is perfect."
"No; she is kind."
"Would it be possible to speak upon some agreeable subject, Mr.
Van Berg? I have had enough mortifications for one day."
He was puzzled. What topic could he introduce that would interest
this spoiled and petulant beauty.
He touched on art, but she was only artful in her small way, and
could not follow him. He tried literature, and here they had even
less in common. He would not and indeed could not read the thin
society novels which reflected modes of life as trivial as her
own, and his books might have been written in another language,
so slight was her acquaintance with them. The various political,
social, or scientific questions of the day had never puzzled her
brain. Van Berg cautiously felt his way towards his companion's
knowledge of two or three of the most popular of them. Her answers,
however, were so superficial and irrelevant, and also so evidently
embarrassed, that he saw his only resources to be society chit-chat,
gossip about mutual acquaintances, the latest modes, the attractions
of pleasure resorts in the city, and of summer resorts in the country.
But he gave his mind to these unwonted themes, and labored hard to
be entertaining; for now that he had gained the vantage-ground he
sought, he was determined to discover whether there was a sleeping
mind or a vacuum behind Miss Mayhew's shapely forehead. Granting
that there was a womanly intelligence there, as yet unquickened,
he was not so irrational as to imagine he could jostle it into
illumining activity in one short hour, or day, or week. But it
seemed to him that if any mind existed worth the name, it would
give such encouraging signs of life before many days passed as
would promise success of his experiment. He felt that his first
aim must be to establish an intimacy that would permit as full
and frank an exchange of thought as was possible between people so
dissimilar.
While he tried to bring himself down to the littleness of her daily
life, he determined to show his disapproval of every phrase of its
meanness as far as he could without offending her. He had made her
feel that he condemned her course towards Miss Burton that evening,
and he had meant to do so.
She resented this disapproval, and at the same time respected him
for it. Indeed he puzzled her. He evidently sought and wished
for her society; and yet as they walked back and forth, even though
she did not look at him when the light gave her the opportunity
to do so, she felt intuitively that he did not enjoy her company.
She saw that he was laboring hard to make himself agreeable; but
his small talk had not the familiar flippancy and fluency of one
speaking in his native tongue; nor was his manner that of one who,
infatuated with her beauty, had thrown aside all other considerations.
She felt that the man at her side measured her, and understood her
littleness thoroughly.
And she herself had a growing consciousness of insignificance that
was as painful as it was novel. Adding to all the humiliations
of this day here was a man, not so very much older than herself,
trying to come down to her level, as he would accommodate his
language to a child. No labored argument could have revealed her
ignorance to her so clearly, as her conscious inability to follow
him into his ordinary range of thought. Unwittingly he had demonstrated
his superiority in a way that she could not deny, however much she
might be inclined to resent it. And yet he treated her with a sort
of respect, and occasionally she saw that he bent his eyes upon
her face as if in search of something.
After a transient effort to ignore everything and talk in her usual
superficial manner, she became more and more silent and oppressed,
and, at last said, somewhat abruptly:
"Mr. Van Berg, I am weary, and I imagine you are too. I think I
will say good-night."
"I scarcely wonder that you are fatigued. You have had a trying
day."
"It has been a horrid day," she said, emphatically.
"It might have ended much worse, nevertheless."
"Possibly," she admitted with a shrug.
"You have more reason to congratulate yourself than you imagine,
Miss Mayhew. Even that disagreeable souvenir of our morning peril,
your lameness, has disappeared, and you might have been maimed for
life."
"My lameness, like my courage, was chiefly a fraud to begin with,
and soon disappeared; but I have other souvenirs of that occasion
that I cannot get rid of so easily."
"If I am one of them, you are right, Miss Mayhew; I shall hold you
to our agreement this morning. You put me on my good behavior--have
I not behaved well?"
"Yes, better than I have. I was not referring to you personally,
but to certain memories."
"We agreed to let by-gones be by-gones."
"But others are not parties to this agreement, and every reference
to the affair is odious to me."
"I shall make no further reference to it, and you must be fair
enough not to punish me for the acts of others."
"You also despise me in your heart of my course towards Miss Burton
this evening."
"If I despised you would I have sought your society this evening?"
"I do not know. I don't understand you, if you will permit my
bluntness."
"Possibly you don't understand yourself, Miss Mayhew."
"I understand that I have had a miserable day, and I hope I may
never see another like it. Good-night, sir."