He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressing himself

more and more to the intelligence of March, who let him go on without

question, and laid a restraining hand upon his wife when he saw her

about to prompt him. At the end, “That's all,” he said, huskily, and

then he seemed to be waiting for March's comment. He made none, and the

young fellow was forced to ask, “Well, what do you think, Mr. March?”

“What do you think yourself?”

“I think, I behaved badly,” said Burnamy, and a movement of protest

from Mrs. March nerved him to add: “I could make out that it was not my

business to tell him what he was doing; but I guess it was; I guess

I ought to have stopped him, or given him a chance to stop himself.

I suppose I might have done it, if he had treated me decently when I

turned up a day late, here; or hadn't acted toward me as if I were

a hand in his buggy-works that had come in an hour after the whistle

sounded.”

He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone in Mrs. March's eyes;

but her husband only looked the more serious.

He asked gently, “Do you offer that fact as an explanation, or as a

justification.”

Burnamy laughed forlornly. “It certainly wouldn't justify me. You might

say that it made the case all the worse for me.” March forbore to say,

and Burnamy went on. “But I didn't suppose they would be onto him so

quick, or perhaps at all. I thought--if I thought anything--that it

would amuse some of the fellows in the office, who know about those

things.” He paused, and in March's continued silence he went on. “The

chance was one in a hundred that anybody else would know where he had

brought up.”

“But you let him take that chance,” March suggested.

“Yes, I let him take it. Oh, you know how mixed all these things are!”

“Yes.”

“Of course I didn't think it out at the time. But I don't deny that I

had a satisfaction in the notion of the hornets' nest he was poking his

thick head into. It makes me sick, now, to think I had. I oughtn't to

have let him; he was perfectly innocent in it. After the letter went, I

wanted to tell him, but I couldn't; and then I took the chances too.

I don't believe he could have ever got forward in politics; he's too

honest--or he isn't dishonest in the right way. But that doesn't let

me out. I don't defend myself! I did wrong; I behaved badly. But I've

suffered for it.

“I've had a foreboding all the time that it would come to the worst, and

felt like a murderer with his victim when I've been alone with Stoller.

When I could get away from him I could shake it off, and even believe

that it hadn't happened. You can't think what a nightmare it's been!

Well, I've ruined Stoller politically, but I've ruined myself, too.

I've spoiled my own life; I've done what I can never explain to--to the

people I want to have believe in me; I've got to steal away like the

thief I am. Good-by!” He jumped to his feet, and put out his hand to

March, and then to Mrs. March.

“Why, you're not going away now!” she cried, in a daze.

“Yes, I am. I shall leave Carlsbad on the eleven-o'clock train. I don't

think I shall see you again.” He clung to her hand. “If you see General

Triscoe--I wish you'd tell them I couldn't--that I had to--that I was

called away suddenly--Good-by!” He pressed her hand and dropped it, and

mixed with the crowd. Then he came suddenly back, with a final appeal to

March: “Should you--do you think I ought to see Stoller, and--and tell

him I don't think I used him fairly?”

“You ought to know--” March began.

But before he could say more, Burnamy said, “You're right,” and was off

again.

“Oh, how hard you were with him, my dear!” Mrs. March lamented.

“I wish,” he said, “if our boy ever went wrong that some one would be as

true to him as I was to that poor fellow. He condemned himself; and he

was right; he has behaved very badly.”

“You always overdo things so, when you act righteously!”

“Now, Isabel!”

“Oh, yes, I know what you will say. But I should have tempered justice

with mercy.”

Her nerves tingled with pity for Burnamy, but in her heart she was glad

that her husband had had strength to side with him against himself, and

she was proud of the forbearance with which he had done it. In their

earlier married life she would have confidently taken the initiative on

all moral questions. She still believed that she was better fitted for

their decision by her Puritan tradition and her New England birth, but

once in a great crisis when it seemed a question of their living, she

had weakened before it, and he, with no such advantages, had somehow met

the issue with courage and conscience. She could not believe he did so

by inspiration, but she had since let him take the brunt of all such

issues and the responsibility. He made no reply, and she said: “I

suppose you'll admit now there was always something peculiar in the poor

boy's manner to Stoller.”

He would confess no more than that there ought to have been. “I don't

see how he could stagger through with that load on his conscience. I'm

not sure I like his being able to do so.”

She was silent in the misgiving which she shared with him, but she said:

“I wonder how far it has gone with him and Miss Triscoe?”

“Well, from his wanting you to give his message to the general in the

plural--”

“Don't laugh! It's wicked to laugh! It's heartless!” she cried,

hysterically. “What will he do, poor fellow?”

“I've an idea that he will light on his feet, somehow. But, at any rate,

he's doing the right thing in going to own up to Stoller.”

“Oh, Stoller! I care nothing for Stoller! Don't speak to me of Stoller!”

Burnamy fond the Bird of Prey, as he no longer had the heart to call

him, walking up and down in his room like an eagle caught in a trap. He

erected his crest fiercely enough, though, when the young fellow came in

at his loudly shouted, “Herein!”

“What do you want?” he demanded, brutally.

This simplified Burnamy's task, while it made it more loathsome. He

answered not much less brutally, “I want to tell you that I think I used

you badly, that I let you betray yourself, that I feel myself to blame.”

He could have added, “Curse you!” without change of tone.

Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lower teeth like a dog's

when he snarls. “You want to get back!”

“No,” said Burnamy, mildly, and with increasing sadness as he spoke. “I

don't want to get back. Nothing would induce me. I'm going away on the

first train.”

“Well, you're not!” shouted Stoller. “You've lied me into this--”

“Look out!” Burnamy turned white.

“Didn't you lie me into it, if you let me fool myself, as you say?”

Stoller pursued, and Burnamy felt himself weaken through his wrath.

“Well, then, you got to lie me out of it. I been going over the damn

thing, all night--and you can do it for me. I know you can do it,” he

gave way in a plea that was almost a whimper. “Look here! You see if you

can't. I'll make it all right with you. I'll pay you whatever you think

is right--whatever you say.”

“Oh!” said Burnamy, in otherwise unutterable disgust.

“You kin,” Stoller went on, breaking down more and more into his adopted

Hoosier, in the stress of his anxiety. “I know you kin, Mr. Burnamy.” He

pushed the paper containing his letter into Burnamy's hands, and pointed

out a succession of marked passages. “There! And here! And this place!

Don't you see how you could make out that it meant something else, or

was just ironical?” He went on to prove how the text might be given the

complexion he wished, and Burnamy saw that he had really thought it not

impossibly out. “I can't put it in writing as well as you; but I've done

all the work, and all you've got to do is to give it some of them

turns of yours. I'll cable the fellows in our office to say I've been

misrepresented, and that my correction is coming. We'll get it into

shape here together, and then I'll cable that. I don't care for the

money. And I'll get our counting-room to see this scoundrel”--he picked

up the paper that had had fun with him--“and fix him all right, so that

he'll ask for a suspension of public opinion, and--You see, don't you?”

The thing did appeal to Burnamy. If it could be done, it would enable

him to make Stoller the reparation he longed to make him more than

anything else in the world. But he heard himself saying, very gently,

almost tenderly, “It might be done, Mr. Stoller. But I couldn't do it.

It wouldn't be honest--for me.”

“Yah!” yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper into a wad and flung it

into Burnamy's face. “Honest, you damn humbug! You let me in for this,

when you knew I didn't mean it, and now you won't help me out because it

a'n't honest! Get out of my room, and get out quick before I--”

He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightened himself, with “If you

dare!” He knew that he was right in refusing; but he knew that Stoller

was right, too, and that he had not meant the logic of what he had

said in his letter, and of what Burnamy had let him imply. He braved

Stoller's onset, and he left his presence untouched, but feeling as

little a moral hero as he well could.

XXXVIII.

General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day's

pleasure, and in the self-reproach of a pessimist who has lost his point

of view for a time, and has to work back to it. He began at the belated

breakfast with his daughter when she said, after kissing him gayly, in

the small two-seated bower where they breakfasted at their hotel when

they did not go to the Posthof, “Didn't you have a nice time, yesterday,

papa?”

She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at him across the little

iron table, as she lifted the pot to pour out his coffee.

“What do you call a nice time?” he temporized, not quite able to resist

her gayety.

“Well, the kind of time I had.”

“Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass? I took cold in that

old church, and the tea at that restaurant must have been brewed in

a brass kettle. I suffered all night from it. And that ass from

Illinois--”

“Oh, poor papa! I couldn't go with Mr. Stoller alone, but I might have

gone in the two-spanner with him and let you have Mr. or Mrs. March in

the one-spanner.”

“I don't know. Their interest in each other isn't so interesting to

other people as they seem to think.”

“Do you feel that way really, papa? Don't you like their being so much

in love still?”

“At their time of life? Thank you it's bad enough in young people.”

The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupied in pouring out

her father's coffee.

He tasted it, and then he drank pretty well all of it; but he said, as

he put his cup down, “I don't know what they make this stuff of. I wish

I had a cup of good, honest American coffee.”

“Oh, there's nothing like American food!” said his daughter, with so

much conciliation that he looked up sharply.

But whatever he might have been going to say was at least postponed by

the approach of a serving-maid, who brought a note to his daughter. She

blushed a little at sight of it, and then tore it open and read:

“I am going away from Carlsbad, for a fault of my own which forbids me

to look you in the face. If you wish to know the worst of me, ask Mrs.

March. I have no heart to tell you.”

Agatha read these mystifying words of Burnamy's several times over in a

silent absorption with them which left her father to look after himself,

and he had poured out a second cup of coffee with his own hand, and was

reaching for the bread beside her before she came slowly back to a sense

of his presence.

“Oh, excuse me, papa,” she said, and she gave him the butter. “Here's a

very strange letter from Mr. Burnamy, which I think you'd better see.”

She held the note across the table to him, and watched his face as he

read it.

After he had read it twice, he turned the sheet over, as people do with

letters that puzzle them, in the vain hope of something explanatory on

the back. Then he looked up and asked: “What do you suppose he's been

doing?”

“I don't believe he's been doing anything. It's something that Mr.

Stoller's been doing to him.”

“I shouldn't infer that from his own words. What makes you think the

trouble is with Stoller?”

“He said--he said yesterday--something about being glad to be through

with him, because he disliked him so much he was always afraid of

wronging him. And that proves that now Mr. Stoller has made him believe

that he's done wrong, and has worked upon him till he does believe it.”

“It proves nothing of the kind,” said the general, recurring to

the note. After reading it again, he looked keenly at her: “Am I to

understand that you have given him the right to suppose you would want

to know the worst--or the best of him?”

The girl's eyes fell, and she pushed her knife against her plate. She

began: “No--”

“Then confound his impudence!” the general broke out. “What business has

he to write to you at all about this?”

“Because he couldn't go away without it!” she returned; and she met her

father's eye courageously. “He had a right to think we were his friends;

and if he has done wrong, or is in disgrace any way, isn't it manly of

him to wish to tell us first himself?”

Her father could not say that it was not. But he could and did say, very

sceptically: “Stuff! Now, see here, Agatha: what are you going to do?”

“I'm going to see Mrs. March, and then--”

“You mustn't do anything of the kind, my dear,” said her father, gently.

“You've no right to give yourself away to that romantic old goose.” He

put up his hand to interrupt her protest. “This thing has got to be gone

to the bottom of. But you're not to do it. I will see March myself. We

must consider your dignity in this matter--and mine. And you may as

well understand that I'm not going to have any nonsense. It's got to be

managed so that it can't be supposed we're anxious about it, one way or

the other, or that he was authorized to write to you in this way--”

“No, no! He oughtn't to have done so. He was to blame. He couldn't have

written to you, though, papa--”

“Well, I don't know why. But that's no reason why we should let it be

understood that he has written to you. I will see March; and I

will manage to see his wife, too. I shall probably find them in the

reading-room at Pupp's, and--”

The Marches were in fact just coming in from their breakfast at the

Posthof, and he met them at the door of Pupp's, where they all sat down

on one of the iron settees of the piazza, and began to ask one another

questions of their minds about the pleasure of the day before, and to

beat about the bush where Burnamy lurked in their common consciousness.

Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting him. “You knew,” she

said, “that Mr. Burnamy had left us?”

“Left! Why?” asked the general.

She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this she found it best

to trust her husband's poverty of invention. She looked at him, and he

answered for her with a promptness that made her quake at first, but

finally seemed the only thing, if not the best thing: “He's had some

trouble with Stoller.” He went on to tell the general just what the

trouble was.

At the end the general grunted as from an uncertain mind. “You think

he's behaved badly.”

“I think he's behaved foolishly--youthfully. But I can understand how

strongly he was tempted. He could say that he was not authorized to stop

Stoller in his mad career.”

At this Mrs. March put her hand through her husband's arm.

“I'm not so sure about that,” said the general.

March added: “Since I saw him this morning, I've heard something that

disposes me to look at his performance in a friendlier light. It's

something that Stoller told me himself; to heighten my sense of

Burnamy's wickedness. He seems to have felt that I ought to know what a

serpent I was cherishing in my bosom,” and he gave Triscoe the facts of

Burnamy's injurious refusal to help Stoller put a false complexion on

the opinions he had allowed him ignorantly to express.

The general grunted again. “Of course he had to refuse, and he has

behaved like a gentleman so far. But that doesn't justify him in having

let Stoller get himself into the scrape.”

“No,” said March. “It's a tough nut for the casuist to try his tooth on.

And I must say I feel sorry for Stoller.”

Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm. “I don't, one bit. He

was thoroughly selfish from first to last. He has got just what he

deserved.”

“Ah, very likely,” said her husband. “The question is about Burnamy's

part in giving him his deserts; he had to leave him to them, of course.”

The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter of his eye-glasses,

and left the subject as of no concern to him. “I believe,” he said,

rising, “I'll have a look at some of your papers,” and he went into the

reading-room.

“Now,” said Mrs. March, “he will go home and poison that poor girl's

mind. And, you will have yourself to thank for prejudicing him against

Burnamy.”

“Then why didn't you do it yourself, my dear?” he teased; but he was

really too sorry for the whole affair, which he nevertheless enjoyed as

an ethical problem.

The general looked so little at the papers that before March went off

for his morning walk he saw him come out of the reading-room and take

his way down the Alte Wiese. He went directly back to his daughter, and

reported Burnamy's behavior with entire exactness. He dwelt upon his

making the best of a bad business in refusing to help Stoller out of it,

dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it was a bad

business.

“Now, you know all about it,” he said at the end, “and I leave the whole

thing to you. If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March. I don't know but

I'd rather you'd satisfy yourself--”

“I will not see Mrs. March. Do you think I would go back of you in that

way? I am satisfied now.”

XXXIX.

Instead of Burnamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now breakfasted with the

Marches at the Posthof, and the boy was with March throughout the day a

good deal. He rectified his impressions of life in Carlsbad by March's

greater wisdom and experience, and did his best to anticipate his

opinions and conform to his conclusions. This was not easy, for

sometimes he could not conceal from himself, that March's opinions

were whimsical, and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not always

conceal from March that he was matching them with Kenby's on some

points, and suffering from their divergence. He came to join the sage in

his early visit to the springs, and they walked up and down talking; and

they went off together on long strolls in which Rose was proud to bear

him company. He was patient of the absences from which he was often

answered, and he learned to distinguish between the earnest and the

irony of which March's replies seemed to be mixed. He examined him upon

many features of German civilization, but chiefly upon the treatment of

women in it; and upon this his philosopher was less satisfactory than

he could have wished him to be. He tried to excuse his trifling as an

escape from the painful stress of questions which he found so afflicting

himself; but in the matter of the woman-and-dog teams, this was not

easy. March owned that the notion of their being yokemates was shocking;

but he urged that it was a stage of evolution, and a distinct advance

upon the time when women dragged the carts without the help of the dogs;

and that the time might not be far distant when the dogs would drag the

carts without the help of the women.

Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he was

troubled by his friend's apparent acceptance of unjust things on their

picturesque side. Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of

the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe

in his mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows

grazing by the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of

women were reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over

to clutch the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades. “Ah,

delightful!” March took off his hat as if to salute the pleasant sight.

“But don't you think, Mr. March,” the boy ventured, “that the man had

better be cutting the wheat, and letting the women watch the cows?”

“Well, I don't know. There are more of them; and he wouldn't be half so

graceful as they are, with that flow of their garments, and the sway of

their aching backs.” The boy smiled sadly, and March put his hand on

his shoulder as they walked on. “You find a lot of things in Europe that

need putting right, don't you, Rose?”

“Yes; I know it's silly.”

“Well, I'm not sure. But I'm afraid it's useless. You see, these old

customs go such a way back, and are so grounded in conditions. We think

they might be changed, if those who rule could be got to see how cruel

and ugly they are; but probably they couldn't. I'm afraid that the

Emperor of Austria himself couldn't change them, in his sovereign

plenitude of power. The Emperor is only an old custom too, and he's as

much grounded in the conditions as any.” This was the serious way Rose

felt that March ought always to talk; and he was too much grieved to

laugh when he went on. “The women have so much of the hard work to do,

over here, because the emperors need the men for their armies. They

couldn't let their men cut wheat unless it was for their officers'

horses, in the field of some peasant whom it would ruin.”

If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to work these paradoxes

for the boy's confusion. She said the child adored him, and it was a

sacrilege to play with his veneration. She always interfered to save

him, but with so little logic though so much justice that Rose suffered

a humiliation from her championship, and was obliged from a sense

of self-respect to side with the mocker. She understood this, and

magnanimously urged it as another reason why her husband should not

trifle with Rose's ideal of him; to make his mother laugh at him was

wicked.

“Oh, I'm not his only ideal,” March protested. “He adores Kenby too,

and every now and then he brings me to book with a text from Kenby's

gospel.”

Mrs. March caught her breath. “Kenby! Do you really think, then, that

she--”

“Oh, hold on, now! It isn't a question of Mrs. Adding; and I don't say

Rose had an eye on poor old Kenby as a step-father. I merely want you to

understand that I'm the object of a divided worship, and that when I'm

off duty as an ideal I don't see why I shouldn't have the fun of making

Mrs. Adding laugh. You can't pretend she isn't wrapped up in the boy.

You've said that yourself.”

“Yes, she's wrapped up in him; she'd give her life for him; but she is

so light. I didn't suppose she was so light; but it's borne in upon me

more and more.”

They were constantly seeing Rose and his mother, in the sort of abeyance

the Triscoes had fallen into. One afternoon the Addings came to Mrs.

March's room to look from her windows at a parade of bicyclers' clubs

from the neighboring towns. The spectacle prospered through its first

half-hour, with the charm which German sentiment and ingenuity, are able

to lend even a bicycle parade. The wheelmen and wheelwomen filed by on

machines wreathed with flowers and ribbons, and decked with streaming

banners. Here and there one sat under a moving arch of blossoms, or in

a bower of leaves and petals, and they were all gay with their club

costumes and insignia. In the height of the display a sudden mountain

shower gathered and broke upon them. They braved it till it became a

drenching down-pour; then they leaped from their machines and fled to

any shelter they could find, under trees and in doorways. The men used

their greater agility to get the best places, and kept them; the women

made no appeal for them by word or look, but took the rain in the open

as if they expected nothing else.

Rose watched the scene with a silent intensity which March interpreted.

“There's your chance, Rose. Why don't you go down and rebuke those

fellows?”

Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and Mrs. March promptly

attacked her husband in his behalf. “Why don't you go and rebuke them

yourself?”

“Well, for one thing, there isn't any conversation in my phrase-book

Between an indignant American Herr and a Party of German Wheelmen who

have taken Shelter from the Rain and are keeping the Wheelwomen out in

the Wet.” Mrs. Adding shrieked her delight, and he was flattered into

going on. “For another thing, I think it's very well for you ladies to

realize from an object-lesson of this sort what spoiled children of

our civilization you are. It ought to make you grateful for your

privileges.”

“There is something in that,” Mrs. Adding joyfully consented.

“Oh, there is no civilization but ours,” said Mrs. March, in a burst of

vindictive patriotism. “I am more and more convinced of it the longer I

stay in Europe.”

“Perhaps that's why we like to stay so long in Europe; it strengthens

us in the conviction that America is the only civilized country in the

world,” said March.

The shower passed as quickly as it had gathered, and the band which it

had silenced for a moment burst forth again in the music which fills

the Carlsbad day from dawn till dusk. Just now, it began to play a pot

pourri of American airs; at the end some unseen Americans under the

trees below clapped and cheered.

“That was opportune of the band,” said March. “It must have been a

telepathic impulse from our patriotism in the director. But a pot pourri

of American airs is like that tablet dedicating the American Park up

here on the Schlossberg, which is signed by six Jews and one Irishman.

The only thing in this medley that's the least characteristic or

original is Dixie; and I'm glad the South has brought us back into the

Union.”

“You don't know one note from another, my dear,” said his wife.

“I know the 'Washington Post.'”

“And don't you call that American?”

“Yes, if Sousa is an American name; I should have thought it was

Portuguese.”

“Now that sounds a little too much like General Triscoe's pessimism,”

said Mrs. March; and she added: “But whether we have any national

melodies or not, we don't poke women out in the rain and keep them

soaking!”

“No, we certainly don't,” he assented, with such a well-studied effect

of yielding to superior logic that Mrs. Adding screamed for joy.

The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, “I hope Rose isn't

acting on my suggestion?”

“I hate to have you tease him, dearest,” his wife interposed.

“Oh, no,” the mother said, laughing still, but with a note of tenderness

in her laugh, which dropped at last to a sigh. “He's too much afraid of

lese-majesty, for that. But I dare say he couldn't stand the sight. He's

queer.”

“He's beautiful!” said Mrs. March.

“He's good,” the mother admitted. “As good as the day's long. He's never

given me a moment's trouble--but he troubles me. If you can understand!”

“Oh, I do understand!” Mrs. March returned. “By his innocence, you mean.

That is the worst of children. Their innocence breaks our hearts and

makes us feel ourselves such dreadful old things.”

“His innocence, yes,” pursued Mrs. Adding, “and his ideals.” She began

to laugh again. “He may have gone off for a season of meditation and

prayer over the misbehavior of these bicyclers. His mind is turning that

way a good deal lately. It's only fair to tell you, Mr. March, that

he seems to be giving up his notion of being an editor. You mustn't be

disappointed.”

“I shall be sorry,” said the editor. “But now that you mention it,

I think I have noticed that Rose seems rather more indifferent to

periodical literature. I supposed he might simply have exhausted his

questions--or my answers.”

“No; it goes deeper than that. I think it's Europe that's turned his

mind in the direction of reform. At any rate he thinks now he will be a

reformer.”

“Really! What kind of one? Not religious, I hope?”

“No. His reform has a religious basis, but its objects are social. I

don't make it out, exactly; but I shall, as soon as Rose does. He tells

me everything, and sometimes I don't feel equal to it, spiritually or

even intellectually.”

“Don't laugh at him, Mrs. Adding!” Mrs. March entreated.

“Oh, he doesn't mind my laughing,” said the mother, gayly. Rose came

shyly back into the room, and she said, “Well, did you rebuke those bad

bicyclers?” and she laughed again.

“They're only a custom, too, Rose,”, said March, tenderly. “Like the

man resting while the women worked, and the Emperor, and all the rest of

it.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” the boy returned.

“They ride modern machines, but they live in the tenth century. That's

what we're always forgetting when we come to Europe and see these

barbarians enjoying all our up-to-date improvements.”

“There, doesn't that console you?” asked his mother, and she took him

away with her, laughing back from the door. “I don't believe it does, a

bit!”

“I don't believe she understands the child,” said Mrs. March. “She

is very light, don't you think? I don't know, after all, whether it

wouldn't be a good thing for her to marry Kenby. She is very easygoing,

and she will be sure to marry somebody.”

She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, and he said, “You might

put these ideas to her.”

XL.

With the passage of the days and weeks, the strange faces which had

familiarized themselves at the springs disappeared; even some of

those which had become the faces of acquaintance began to go. In the

diminishing crowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen; the

sad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemed never to have quite got

his bearings after his error with General Triscoe, seldom showed itself.

The Triscoes themselves kept out of the Marches' way, or they fancied

so; Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their daily encounter.

It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-August, but at Carlsbad

the sun was so late getting up over the hills that as people went to

their breakfasts at the cafes up the valley of the Tepl they found him

looking very obliquely into it at eight o'clock in the morning. The

yellow leaves were thicker about the feet of the trees, and the grass

was silvery gray with the belated dews. The breakfasters were fewer than

they had been, and there were more little barefooted boys and girls with

cups of red raspberries which they offered to the passers with cries of

“Himbeeren! Himbeeren!” plaintive as the notes of birds left songless by

the receding summer.

March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and Mrs. Adding bought

recklessly of it, and ate it under his eyes with their coffee and bread,

pouring over it pots of clotted cream that the 'schone' Lili brought

them. Rose pretended an indifference to it, which his mother betrayed

was a sacrifice in behalf of March's inability.

Lili's delays in coming to be paid had been such that the Marches now

tried to pay her when she brought their breakfast, but they sometimes

forgot, and then they caught her whenever she came near them. In this

event she liked to coquet with their impatience; she would lean against

their table, and say: “Oh, no. You stay a little. It is so nice.” One

day after such an entreaty, she said, “The queen is here, this morning.”

Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes. “The queen!”

“Yes; the young lady. Mr. Burnamy was saying she was a queen. She is

there with her father.” She nodded in the direction of a distant corner,

and the Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and the general. “She

is not seeming so gayly as she was being.”

March smiled. “We are none of us so gayly as we were being, Lili. The

summer is going.”

“But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?” the girl asked, resting

her tray on the corner of the table.

“No, I'm afraid he won't,” March returned sadly.

“He was very good. He was paying the proprietor for the dishes that

Augusta did break when she was falling down. He was paying before he

went away, when he was knowing that the proprietor would make Augusta to

pay.”

“Ah!” said March, and his wife said, “That was like him!” and she

eagerly explained to Mrs. Adding how good and great Burnamy had been

in this characteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to add

some pathetic facts about Augusta's poverty and gratitude. “I think Miss

Triscoe ought to know it. There goes the wretch, now!” she broke off.

“Don't look at him!” She set her husband the example of averting his

face from the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middle aisle of

the grove, and looking to the right and left for a vacant table. “Ugh! I

hope he won't be able to find a single place.”

Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, while Rose watched March's

face with grave sympathy. “He certainly doesn't deserve one. Don't let

us keep you from offering Miss Triscoe any consolation you can.” They

got up, and the boy gathered up the gloves, umbrella, and handkerchief

which the ladies let drop from their laps.

“Have you been telling?” March asked his wife.

“Have I told you anything?” she demanded of Mrs. Adding in turn.

“Anything that you didn't as good as know, already?”

“Not a syllable!” Mrs. Adding replied in high delight. “Come, Rose!”

“Well, I suppose there's no use saying anything,” said March, after she

left them.

“She had guessed everything, without my telling her,” said his wife.

“About Stoller?”

“Well-no. I did tell her that part, but that was nothing. It was about

Burnamy and Agatha that she knew. She saw it from the first.”

“I should have thought she would have enough to do to look after poor

old Kenby.”

“I'm not sure, after all, that she cares for him. If she doesn't, she

oughtn't to let him write to her. Aren't you going over to speak to the

Triscoes?”

“No, certainly not. I'm going back to the hotel. There ought to be

some steamer letters this morning. Here we are, worrying about these

strangers all the time, and we never give a thought to our own children

on the other side of the ocean.”

“I worry about them, too,” said the mother, fondly. “Though there is

nothing to worry about,” she added.

“It's our duty to worry,” he insisted.

At the hotel the portier gave them four letters. There was one from each

of their children: one very buoyant, not to say boisterous, from the

daughter, celebrating her happiness in her husband, and the loveliness

of Chicago as a summer city (“You would think she was born out there!”

sighed her mother); and one from the son, boasting his well-being in

spite of the heat they were having (“And just think how cool it is

here!” his mother upbraided herself), and the prosperity of 'Every Other

Week'. There was a line from Fulkerson, praising the boy's editorial

instinct, and ironically proposing March's resignation in his favor.

“I do believe we could stay all winter, just as well as not,” said Mrs.

March, proudly. “What does 'Burnamy say?”

“How do you know it's from him?”

“Because you've been keeping your hand on it! Give it here.”

“When I've read it.”

The letter was dated at Ansbach, in Germany, and dealt, except for some

messages of affection to Mrs. March, with a scheme for a paper which

Burnamy wished to write on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought he could use

it in 'Every Other Week'. He had come upon a book about that hapless

foundling in Nuremberg, and after looking up all his traces there he had

gone on to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his death so pathetically.

Burnamy said he could not give any notion of the enchantment of

Nuremberg; but he besought March, if he was going to the Tyrol for his

after-cure, not to fail staying a day or so in the wonderful place. He

thought March would enjoy Ansbach too, in its way.

“And, not a word--not a syllable--about Miss Triscoe!” cried Mrs. March.

“Shall you take his paper?”

“It would be serving him right, if I refused it, wouldn't it?”

They never knew what it cost Burnamy to keep her name out of his letter,

or by what an effort of the will he forbade himself even to tell of his

parting interview with Stoller. He had recovered from his remorse for

letting Stoller give himself away; he was still sorry for that, but he

no longer suffered; yet he had not reached the psychological moment when

he could celebrate his final virtue in the matter. He was glad he had

been able to hold out against the temptation to retrieve himself by

another wrong; but he was humbly glad, and he felt that until happier

chance brought him and his friends together he must leave them to their

merciful conjectures. He was young, and he took the chance, with an

aching heart. If he had been older, he might not have taken it.

XLI.

The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently, in late August, in the

good weather which is pretty sure to fall then, if ever in the Austrian

summer. For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had been building a

scaffolding for the illumination in the woods on a height overlooking

the town, and making unobtrusive preparations at points within it.

The day was important as the last of March's cure, and its pleasures

began for him by a renewal of his acquaintance in its first kindliness

with the Eltwins. He had met them so seldom that at one time he thought

they must have gone away, but now after his first cup he saw the quiet,

sad old pair, sitting together on a bench in the Stadt Park, and he

asked leave to sit down with them till it was time for the next. Eltwin

said that this was their last day, too; and explained that his wife

always came with him to the springs, while he took the waters.

“Well,” he apologized, “we're all that's left, and I suppose we like to

keep together.” He paused, and at the look in March's face he suddenly

went on. “I haven't been well for three or four years; but I always

fought against coming out here, when the doctors wanted me to. I said

I couldn't leave home; and, I don't suppose I ever should. But my home

left me.”

As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, and March saw her steal

her withered hand into his.

“We'd had a large family, but they'd all died off, with one thing

or another, and here in the spring we lost our last daughter. Seemed

perfectly well, and all at once she died; heart-failure, they called it.

It broke me up, and mother, here, got at me to go. And so we're here.”

His voice trembled; and his eyes softened; then they flashed up, and

March heard him add, in a tone that astonished him less when he looked

round and saw General Triscoe advancing toward them, “I don't know what

it is always makes me want to kick that man.”

The general lifted his hat to their group, and hoped that Mrs. Eltwin

was well, and Major Eltwin better. He did not notice their replies, but

said to March, “The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp's readingroom, to

go with them to the Posthof for breakfast.”

“Aren't you going, too?” asked March.

“No, thank you,” said the general, as if it were much finer not; “I

shall breakfast at our pension.” He strolled off with the air of a man

who has done more than his duty.

“I don't suppose I ought to feel that way,” said Eltwin, with a remorse

which March suspected a reproachful pressure of his wife's hand had

prompted in him. “I reckon he means well.”

“Well, I don't know,” March said, with a candor he could not wholly

excuse.

On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wife for her interest in

the romantic woes of her lovers, in a world where there was such real

pathos as these poor old people's; but in the company of Miss Triscoe he

could not give himself this pleasure. He tried to amuse her on the

way from Pupp's, with the doubt he always felt in passing the Cafe

Sans-Souci, whether he should live to reach the Posthof where he meant

to breakfast. She said, “Poor Mr. March!” and laughed inattentively;

when he went on to philosophize the commonness of the sparse company

always observable at the Sans-Souci as a just effect of its Laodicean

situation between Pupp's and the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and

his wife frowned at him.

The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms

for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the

rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance;

a poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the

various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like

sere foliage as it moved.

At the Posthof the 'schone' Lili alone was as gay, as in the prime of

July. She played archly about the guests she welcomed to a table in

a sunny spot in the gallery. “You are tired of Carlsbad?” she said

caressingly to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before her.

“Not of the Posthof,” said the girl, listlessly.

“Posthof, and very little Lili?” She showed, with one forefinger on

another, how very little she was.

Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to Mrs. March, with

abrupt seriousness, “Augusta was finding a handkerchief under the table,

and she was washing it and ironing it before she did bring it. I have

scolded her, and I have made her give it to me.”

She took from under her apron a man's handkerchief, which she offered to

Mrs. March. It bore, as she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B.

But, “Whose can it be?” they asked each other.

“Why, Burnamy's,” said March; and Lili's eyes danced. “Give it here!”

His wife caught it farther away. “No, I'm going to see whose it is,

first; if it's his, I'll send it to him myself.”

She tried to put it into the pocket which was not in her dress by

sliding it down her lap; then she handed it to the girl, who took it

with a careless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.

Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once in

Carlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off

and was holding them in her lap. They fell to the ground when she now

rose from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up. Miss Triscoe was

too quick for her.

“Oh, let me carry them for you!” she entreated, and after a tender

struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearing

them through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist. She was not the

kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not the

kind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and

let March go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in

the Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath.

Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited

the girl's advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting

it in every case, with Miss Triscoe's eager approval. In the Stadt

Park they sat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite

feints of recovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased

effusion.

When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been

sitting, they seemed to be followed. They looked round and saw no one

more alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim

in spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian

hat brims are. He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, “Something

left lying,” passed on.

They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at their

skirts to see if there was anything amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe

perceived her hands empty of Mrs. March's sandals and of Burnamy's

handkerchief.

“Oh, I put it in one of the toes!” she lamented, and she fled back to

their bench, alarming in her course the fears of a gendarme for the

public security, and putting a baby in its nurse's arms into such doubts

of its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry. She laughed

breathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March. “That comes of having no

pocket; I didn't suppose I could forget your sandals, Mrs. March! Wasn't

it absurd?”

“It's one of those things,” Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards,

“that they can always laugh over together.”

“They? And what about Burnamy's behavior to Stoller?”

“Oh, I don't call that anything but what will come right. Of course he

can make it up to him somehow. And I regard his refusal to do wrong when

Stoller wanted him to as quite wiping out the first offence.”

“Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behind you. My only hope is

that when we leave here tomorrow, her pessimistic papa's poison will

neutralize yours somehow.”

XLII.

One of the pleasantest incidents of March's sojourn in Carlsbad was his

introduction to the manager of the municipal theatre by a common friend

who explained the editor in such terms to the manager that he conceived

of him as a brother artist. This led to much bowing and smiling from

the manager when the Marches met him in the street, or in their frequent

visits to the theatre, with which March felt that it might well have

ended, and still been far beyond his desert. He had not thought of going

to the opera on the Emperor's birthnight, but after dinner a box came

from the manager, and Mrs. March agreed with him that they could not in

decency accept so great a favor. At the same time she argued that they

could not in decency refuse it, and that to show their sense of the

pleasure done them, they must adorn their box with all the beauty

and distinction possible; in other words, she said they must ask Miss

Triscoe and her father.

“And why not Major Eltwin and his wife? Or Mrs. Adding and Rose?”

She begged him, simply in his own interest, not to be foolish; and they

went early, so as to be in their box when their guests came. The

foyer of the theatre was banked with flowers, and against a curtain of

evergreens stood a high-pedestalled bust of the paternal Caesar, with

whose side-whiskers a laurel crown comported itself as well as it could.

At the foot of the grand staircase leading to the boxes the manager

stood in evening dress, receiving his friends and their felicitations

upon the honor which the theatre was sure to do itself on an occasion so

august. The Marches were so cordial in their prophecies that the manager

yielded to an artist's impulse and begged his fellow-artist to do him

the pleasure of coming behind the scenes between the acts of the opera;

he bowed a heart-felt regret to Mrs. March that he could not make the

invitation include her, and hoped that she would not be too lonely while

her husband was gone.

She explained that they had asked friends, and she should not be alone,

and then he entreated March to bring any gentleman who was his guest

with him. On the way up to their box, she pressed his arm as she used in

their young married days, and asked him if it was not perfect. “I wish

we were going to have it all to ourselves; no one else can appreciate

the whole situation. Do you think we have made a mistake in having the

Triscoes?”

“We!” he retorted. “Oh, that's good! I'm going to shirk him, when it

comes to going behind the scenes.”

“No, no, dearest,” she entreated. “Snubbing will only make it worse. We

must stand it to the bitter end, now.”

The curtain rose upon another laurelled bust of the Emperor, with a

chorus of men formed on either side, who broke into the grave and noble

strains of the Austrian Hymn, while every one stood. Then the curtain

fell again, and in the interval before the opera could begin, General

Triscoe and his daughter came in.

Mrs. March took the splendor in which the girl appeared as a tribute to

her hospitality. She had hitherto been a little disappointed of the open

homage to American girlhood which her readings of international romance

had taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patriotic vanity feasted

full. Fat highhotes of her own sex levelled their lorgnettes at Miss

Triscoe all around the horseshoe, with critical glances which fell

blunted from her complexion and costume; the house was brilliant

with the military uniforms, which we have not yet to mingle with our

unrivalled millinery, and the ardent gaze of the young officers dwelt on

the perfect mould of her girlish arms and neck, and the winning lines of

her face. The girl's eyes shone with a joyful excitement, and her little

head, defined by its dark hair, trembled as she slowly turned it from

side to side, after she removed the airy scarf which had covered it.

Her father, in evening dress, looked the Third Emperor complaisant to

a civil occasion, and took a chair in the front of the box without

resistance; and the ladies disputed which should yield the best place

to the other, till Miss Triscoe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for the

first act at least.

The piece had to be cut a good deal to give people time for the

illuminations afterwards; but as it was it gave scope to the actress

who, 'als Gast' from a Viennese theatre, was the chief figure in it. She

merited the distinction by the art which still lingered, deeply embedded

in her massive balk, but never wholly obscured.

“That is grand, isn't it?” said March, following one of the tremendous

strokes by which she overcame her physical disadvantages. “It's fine

to see how her art can undo, for one splendid instant, the work of

all those steins of beer, those illimitable licks of sausage, those

boundless fields of cabbage. But it's rather pathetic.”

“It's disgusting,” said his wife; and at this General Triscoe, who

had been watching the actress through his lorgnette, said, as if his

contrary-mindedness were irresistibly invoked:

“Well, I don't know. It's amusing. Do you suppose we shall see her when

we go behind, March?”

He still professed a desire to do so when the curtain fell, and they

hurried to the rear door of the theatre. It was slightly ajar, and they

pulled it wide open, with the eagerness of their age and nation, and

began to mount the stairs leading up from it between rows of painted

dancing-girls, who had come out for a breath of air, and who pressed

themselves against the walls to make room for the intruders. With their

rouged faces, and the stare of their glassy eyes intensified by the

coloring of their brows and lashes, they were like painted statues, as

they stood there with their crimsoned lips parted in astonished smiles.

“This is rather weird,” said March, faltering at the sight. “I wonder

if we might ask these young ladies where to go?” General Triscoe made no

answer, and was apparently no more prepared than himself to accost the

files of danseuses, when they were themselves accosted by an angry voice

from the head of the stairs with a demand for their business. The voice

belonged to a gendarme, who descended toward them and seemed as deeply

scandalized at their appearance as they could have been at that of the

young ladies.

March explained, in his ineffective German, with every effect of

improbability, that they were there by appointment of the manager, and

wished to find his room.

The gendarme would not or could not make anything out of it. He pressed

down upon them, and laying a rude hand on a shoulder of either, began

to force them back to the door. The mild nature of the editor might have

yielded to his violence, but the martial spirit of General Triscoe was

roused. He shrugged the gendarme's hand from his shoulder, and with a

voice as furious as his own required him, in English, to say what the

devil he meant. The gendarme rejoined with equal heat in German; the

general's tone rose in anger; the dancing-girls emitted some little

shrieks of alarm, and fled noisily up the stairs. From time to time

March interposed with a word of the German which had mostly deserted

him in his hour of need; but if it had been a flow of intelligible

expostulation, it would have had no effect upon the disputants. They

grew more outrageous, till the manager himself, appeared at the head of

the stairs, and extended an arresting hand over the hubbub. As soon as

the situation clarified itself he hurried down to his visitors with a

polite roar of apology and rescued them from the gendarme, and led

them up to his room and forced them into arm-chairs with a rapidity of

reparation which did not exhaust itself till he had entreated them with

every circumstance of civility to excuse an incident so mortifying to

him. But with all his haste he lost so much time in this that he had

little left to show them through the theatre, and their presentation to

the prima donna was reduced to the obeisances with which they met and

parted as she went upon the stage at the lifting of the curtain. In

the lack of a common language this was perhaps as well as a longer

interview; and nothing could have been more honorable than their

dismissal at the hands of the gendarme who had received them so

stormily. He opened the door for them, and stood with his fingers to his

cap saluting, in the effect of being a whole file of grenadiers.

XLIII.

At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of the box where he had

been sitting with the ladies during the absence of the gentlemen. He had

knocked at the door almost as soon as they disappeared, and if he did

not fully share the consternation which his presence caused, he looked

so frightened that Mrs. March reserved the censure which the sight of

him inspired, and in default of other inspiration treated his coming

simply as a surprise. She shook hands with him, and then she asked him

to sit down, and listened to his explanation that he had come back to

Carlsbad to write up the birthnight festivities, on an order from the

Paris-New York Chronicle; that he had seen them in the box and had

ventured to took in. He was pale, and so discomposed that the heart of

justice was softened more and more in Mrs. March's breast, and she left

him to the talk that sprang up, by an admirable effect of tact in the

young lady, between him and Miss Triscoe.

After all, she decided, there was nothing criminal in his being in

Carlsbad, and possibly in the last analysis there was nothing so very

wicked in his being in her box. One might say that it was not very nice

of him after he had gone away under such a cloud; but on the other hand

it was nice, though in a different way, if he longed so much to see Miss

Triscoe that he could not help coming. It was altogether in his favor

that he was so agitated, though he was momently becoming less agitated;

the young people were beginning to laugh at the notion of Mr. March and

General Triscoe going behind the scenes. Burnamy said he envied them the

chance; and added, not very relevantly, that he had come from Baireuth,

where he had seen the last of the Wagner performances. He said he was

going back to Baireuth, but not to Ansbach again, where he had finished

looking up that Kaspar Hauser business. He seemed to think Mrs. March

would know about it, and she could not help saying; Oh, yes, Mr. March

was so much interested. She wondered if she ought to tell him about his

handkerchief; but she remembered in time that she had left it in Miss

Triscoe's keeping. She wondered if the girl realized how handsome he

was. He was extremely handsome, in his black evening dress, with his

Tuxedo, and the pallor of his face repeated in his expanse of shirt

front.

At the bell for the rising of the curtain he rose too, and took their

offered hands. In offering hers Mrs. March asked if he would not stay

and speak with Mr. March and the general; and now for the first time he

recognized anything clandestine in his visit. He laughed nervously, and

said, “No, thank you!” and shut himself out.

“We must tell them,” said Mrs. March, rather interrogatively, and she

was glad that the girl answered with a note of indignation.

“Why, certainly, Mrs. March.”

They could not tell them at once, for the second act had begun when

March and the general came back; and after the opera was over and they

got out into the crowded street there was no chance, for the general was

obliged to offer his arm to Mrs. March, while her husband followed with

his daughter.

The facades of the theatre and of the hotels were outlined with thickly

set little lamps, which beaded the arches of the bridges spanning the

Tepl, and lighted the casements and portals of the shops. High above

all, against the curtain of black woodland on the mountain where its

skeleton had been growing for days, glittered the colossal effigy of the

doubleheaded eagle of Austria, crowned with the tiara of the Holy Roman

Empire; in the reflected splendor of its myriad lamps the pale Christ

looked down from the mountain opposite upon the surging multitudes in

the streets and on the bridges.

They were most amiable multitudes, March thought, and they responded

docilely to the entreaties of the policemen who stood on the steps

of the bridges, and divided their encountering currents with patient

appeals of “Bitte schon! Bitte schon!” He laughed to think of a New York

cop saying “Please prettily! Please prettily!” to a New York crowd which

he wished to have go this way or that, and then he burned with shame to

think how far our manners were from civilization, wherever our heads and

hearts might be, when he heard a voice at his elbow:

“A punch with a club would start some of these fellows along quicker.”

It was Stoller, and March turned from him to lose his disgust in the

sudden terror of perceiving that Miss Triscoe was no longer at his side.

Neither could he see his wife and General Triscoe, and he began to

push frantically about in the crowd looking for the girl. He had an

interminable five or ten minutes in his vain search, and he was going

to call out to her by name, when Burnamy saved him from the hopeless

absurdity by elbowing his way to him with Miss. Triscoe on his arm.

“Here she is, Mr. March,” he said, as if there were nothing strange in

his having been there to find her; in fact he had followed them all

from the theatre, and at the moment he saw the party separated, and Miss

Triscoe carried off helpless in the human stream, had plunged in

and rescued her. Before March could formulate any question in his

bewilderment, Burnamy was gone again; the girl offered no explanation

for him, and March had not yet decided to ask any when he caught sight

of his wife and General Triscoe standing tiptoe in a doorway and craning

their necks upward and forward to scan the crowd in search of him and

his charge. Then he looked round at her and opened his lips to express

the astonishment that filled him, when he was aware of an ominous

shining of her eyes and trembling of her hand on his arm.

She pressed his arm nervously, and he understood her to beg him to

forbear at once all question of her and all comment on Burnamy's

presence to her father.

It would not have been just the time for either. Not only Mrs. March was

with the general, but Mrs. Adding also; she had called to them from that

place, where she was safe with Rose when she saw them eddying about in

the crowd. The general was still, expressing a gratitude which became

more pressing the more it was disclaimed; he said casually at sight of

his daughter, “Ah; you've found us, have you?” and went on talking to

Mrs. Adding, who nodded to them laughingly, and asked, “Did you see me

beckoning?”

“Look here, my dear!” March said to his wife as soon as they parted from

the rest, the general gallantly promising that his daughter and he would

see Mrs. Adding safe to her hotel, and were making their way slowly home

alone. “Did you know that Burnamy was in Carlsbad?”

“He's going away on the twelve-o'clock train tonight,” she answered,

firmly.

“What has that got to do with it? Where did you see him?”

“In the box, while you were behind the scenes.”

She told him all about it, and he listened in silent endeavor for the

ground of censure from which a sense of his own guilt forced him. She

asked suddenly, “Where did you see him?” and he told her in turn.

He added severely, “Her father ought to know. Why didn't you tell him?”

“Why didn't you?” she retorted with great reason.

“Because I didn't think he was just in the humor for it.” He began to

laugh as he sketched their encounter with the gendarme, but she did not

seem to think it amusing; and he became serious again. “Besides, I was

afraid she was going to blubber, any way.”

“She wouldn't have blubbered, as you call it. I don't know why you need

be so disgusting! It would have given her just the moral support she

needed. Now she will have to tell him herself, and he will blame us. You

ought to have spoken; you could have done it easily and naturally

when you came up with her. You will have yourself to thank for all the

trouble that comes of it, now, my dear.”

He shouted in admiration of her skill in shifting the blame on him. “All

right! I should have had to stand it, even if you hadn't behaved with

angelic wisdom.”

“Why,” she said, after reflection, “I don't see what either of us has

done. We didn't get Burnamy to come here, or connive at his presence in

any way.”

“Oh! Make Triscoe believe that! He knows you've done all you could to

help the affair on.”

“Well, what if I have? He began making up to Mrs. Adding himself as soon

as he saw her, to-night. She looked very pretty.”

“Well, thank Heaven! we're off to-morrow morning, and I hope we've seen

the last of them. They've done what they could to spoil my cure, but I'm

not going to have them spoil my aftercure.”

XLIV.

Mrs. March had decided not to go to the Posthof for breakfast, where

they had already taken a lavish leave of the 'schone' Lili, with a sense

of being promptly superseded in her affections. They found a place in

the red-table-cloth end of the pavilion at Pupp's, and were served by

the pretty girl with the rose-bud mouth whom they had known only as

Ein-und-Zwanzig, and whose promise of “Komm' gleich, bitte schon!” was

like a bird's note. Never had the coffee been so good, the bread so

aerially light, the Westphalian ham so tenderly pink. A young married

couple whom they knew came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and

sat down with them, like their own youth, for a moment.

“If you had told them we were going, dear,” said Mrs. March, when the

couple were themselves gone, “we should have been as old as ever. Don't

let us tell anybody, this morning, that we're going. I couldn't bear

it.”

They had been obliged to take the secretary of the hotel into their

confidence, in the process of paying their bill. He put on his high hat

and came out to see them off. The portier was already there, standing at

the step of the lordly two-spanner which they had ordered for the long

drive to the station. The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offer

them a fellow-republican's good wishes for their journey; Herr Pupp

himself appeared at the last moment to hope for their return another

summer. Mrs. March bent a last look of interest upon the proprietor as

their two-spanner whirled away.

“They say that he is going to be made a count.”

“Well, I don't object,” said March. “A man who can feed fourteen

thousand people, mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an

archduke.”

At the station something happened which touched them even more than

these last attentions of the hotel. They were in their compartment, and

were in the act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting

their bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March's name

called.

They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with

excitement and his eyes glowing. “I was afraid I shouldn't get here in

time,” he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.

“Why Rose! From your mother?”

“From me,” he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor,

when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace. “I want to

kiss you,” she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to them

from the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for

her handkerchief. “I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the

sweetest child!”

“He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I'm sorry to

leave behind,” March assented. “He's the only unmarried one that wasn't

in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some

rather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I'm

not sure that I should have been safe even from Rose. Carlsbad has been

an interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now

that it will begin again.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “now we can have each other all to ourselves.”

“Yes. It's been very different from our first wedding journey in that.

It isn't that we're not so young now as we were, but that we don't seem

so much our own property. We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we

seem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come

in and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk. The disadvantage of

living along is that we get too much into the hands of other people.”

“Yes, it is. I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too.”

“I don't know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we had

died young--or younger,” he suggested.

“No, I don't know that it is,” she assented. She added, from an absence

where he was sufficiently able to locate her meaning, “I hope she'll

write and tell me what her father says and does when she tells him that

he was there.”

There were many things, in the weather, the landscape, their

sole occupancy of an unsmoking compartment, while all the smoking

compartments round overflowed with smokers, which conspired to offer

them a pleasing illusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect

that they almost held each other's hands. In later life there are such

moments when the youthful emotions come back, as certain birds do in

winter, and the elderly heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it

were young. But it is best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs. March

joined her husband in mocking it, when he made her observe how fit it

was that their silver wedding journey should be resumed as part of his

after-cure. If he had found the fountain of youth in the warm, flat,

faintly nauseous water of the Felsenquelle, he was not going to call

himself twenty-eight again till his second month of the Carlsbad regimen

was out, and he had got back to salad and fruit.

At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it that

they could form a life-long friendship for the old English-speaking

waiter who served them, and would not suffer them to hurry themselves.

The hills had already fallen away, and they ran along through a cheerful

country, with tracts of forest under white clouds blowing about in a

blue sky, and gayly flinging their shadows down upon the brown ploughed

land, and upon the yellow oat-fields, where women were cutting the

leisurely harvest with sickles, and where once a great girl with swarthy

bare arms unbent herself from her toil, and rose, a statue of rude vigor

and beauty, to watch them go by. Hedges of evergreen enclosed the yellow

oat-fields, where slow wagons paused to gather the sheaves of the week

before, and then loitered away with them. Flocks of geese waddled in

sculpturesque relief against the close-cropt pastures, herded by little

girls with flaxen pigtails, whose eyes, blue as corn-flowers, followed

the flying train. There were stretches of wild thyme purpling long

barren acreages, and growing up the railroad banks almost to the rails

themselves. From the meadows the rowen, tossed in long loose windrows,

sent into their car a sad autumnal fragrance which mingled with the

tobacco smoke, when two fat smokers emerged into the narrow corridor

outside their compartments and tried to pass each other. Their vast

stomachs beat together in a vain encounter.

“Zu enge!” said one, and “Ja, zu enge!” said the other, and they laughed

innocently in each other's' faces, with a joy in their recognition of

the corridor's narrowness as great as if it had been a stroke of the

finest wit.

All the way the land was lovely, and as they drew near Nuremberg it grew

enchanting, with a fairy quaintness. The scenery was Alpine, but the

scale was toy-like, as befitted the region, and the mimic peaks and

valleys with green brooks gushing between them, and strange rock forms

recurring in endless caprice, seemed the home of children's story. All

the gnomes and elves might have dwelt there in peaceful fellowship with

the peasants who ploughed the little fields, and gathered the garlanded

hops, and lived in the farmsteads and village houses with those high

timber-laced gables.

“We ought to have come here long ago with the children, when they were

children,” said March.

“No,” his wife returned; “it would have been too much for them. Nobody

but grown people could bear it.”

The spell which began here was not really broken by anything that

afterwards happened in Nuremberg, though the old toy-capital was

trolley-wired through all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a

hotel lighted by electricity and heated by steam, and equipped with an

elevator which was so modern that it came down with them as well as went

up. All the things that assumed to be of recent structure or invention

were as nothing against the dense past, which overwhelmed them with the

sense of a world elsewhere outlived. In Nuremberg it is not the quaint

or the picturesque that is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact and

the commonplace. Here, more than anywhere else, you are steeped in the

gothic spirit which expresses itself in a Teutonic dialect of homely

sweetness, of endearing caprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive

grace and beauty almost never. It is the architectural speech of a

strenuous, gross, kindly, honest people's fancy; such as it is it was

inexhaustible, and such as it is it was bewitching for the travellers.

They could hardly wait till they had supper before plunging into the

ancient town, and they took the first tram-car at a venture. It was a

sort of transfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a little

inside of the city gate to a trolley-car. The conductor with their fare

demanded their destination; March frankly owned that they did not know

where they wanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductor chose;

and the conductor, after reflection, decided to put them down at the

public garden, which, as one of the newest things in the city, would

make the most favorable impression upon strangers. It was in fact so

like all other city gardens, with the foliage of its trimly planted

alleys, that it sheltered them effectually from the picturesqueness of

Nuremberg, and they had a long, peaceful hour on one of its benches,

where they rested from their journey, and repented their hasty attempt

to appropriate the charm of the city.

The next morning it rained, according to a custom which the elevator-boy

(flown with the insolent recollection of a sunny summer in Milan) said

was invariable in Nuremberg; but after the one-o'clock table d'hote

they took a noble two-spanner carriage, and drove all round the city.

Everywhere the ancient moat, thickly turfed and planted with trees and

shrubs, stretched a girdle of garden between their course and the wall

beautifully old, with knots of dead ivy clinging to its crevices, or

broad meshes of the shining foliage mantling its blackened masonry. A

tile-roofed open gallery ran along the top, where so many centuries of

sentries had paced, and arched the massive gates with heavily moulded

piers, where so countlessly the fierce burgher troops had sallied forth

against their besiegers, and so often the leaguer hosts had dashed

themselves in assault. The blood shed in forgotten battles would have

flooded the moat where now the grass and flowers grew, or here and there

a peaceful stretch of water stagnated.

The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, where the Hapsburg Kaisers

dwelt when they visited their faithful imperial city. From its ramparts

the incredible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best shows itself, and if

one has any love for the distinctive quality of Teutonic architecture it

is here that more than anywhere else one may feast it. The prospect of

tower and spire and gable is of such a mediaeval richness, of such an

abounding fulness, that all incidents are lost in it. The multitudinous

roofs of red-brown tiles, blinking browsily from their low dormers,

press upon one another in endless succession; they cluster together on

a rise of ground and sink away where the street falls, but they nowhere

disperse or scatter, and they end abruptly at the other rim of the city,

beyond which looms the green country, merging in the remoter blue of

misty uplands.

A pretty young girl waited at the door of the tower for the visitors

to gather in sufficient number, and then led them through the terrible

museum, discanting in the same gay voice and with the same smiling air

on all the murderous engines and implements of torture. First in German

and then in English she explained the fearful uses of the Iron Maiden,

she winningly illustrated the action of the racks and wheels on which

men had been stretched and broken, and she sweetly vaunted a sword which

had beheaded eight hundred persons. When she took the established fee

from March she suggested, with a demure glance, “And what more you

please for saying it in English.”

“Can you say it in Russian?” demanded a young man, whose eyes he

had seen dwelling on her from the beginning. She laughed archly, and

responded with some Slavic words, and then delivered her train of

sight-seers over to the custodian who was to show them through the halls

and chambers of the Burg. These were undergoing the repairs which the

monuments of the past are perpetually suffering in the present, and

there was some special painting and varnishing for the reception of the

Kaiser, who was coming to Nuremberg for the military manoeuvres then

at hand. But if they had been in the unmolested discomfort of their

unlivable magnificence, their splendor was such as might well reconcile

the witness to the superior comfort of a private station in our snugger

day. The Marches came out owning that the youth which might once have

found the romantic glories of the place enough was gone from them. But

so much of it was left to her that she wished to make him stop and look

at the flirtation which had blossomed out between that pretty young girl

and the Russian, whom they had scarcely missed from their party in the

Burg. He had apparently never parted from the girl, and now as they

sat together on the threshold of the gloomy tower, he most have been

teaching her more Slavic words, for they were both laughing as if they

understood each other perfectly.

In his security from having the affair in any wise on his hands, March

would have willingly lingered, to see how her education got on; but it

began to rain, The rain did not disturb the lovers, but it obliged the

elderly spectators to take refuge in their carriage; and they drove

off to find the famous Little Goose Man. This is what every one does at

Nuremberg; it would be difficult to say why. When they found the Little

Goose Man, he was only a mediaeval fancy in bronze, who stood on his

pedestal in the market-place and contributed from the bill of the goose

under his arm a small stream to the rainfall drenching the wet wares of

the wet market-women round the fountain, and soaking their cauliflowers

and lettuce, their grapes and pears, their carrots and turnips, to the

watery flavor of all fruits and vegetables in Germany.

The air was very raw and chill; but after supper the clouds cleared

away, and a pleasant evening tempted the travellers out. The portier

dissembled any slight which their eagerness for the only amusement he

could think of inspired, and directed them to a popular theatre which

was giving a summer season at low prices to the lower classes, and which

they surprised, after some search, trying to hide itself in a sort of

back square. They got the best places at a price which ought to have

been mortifyingly cheap, and found themselves, with a thousand other

harmless bourgeois folk, in a sort of spacious, agreeable barn, of a

decoration by no means ugly, and of a certain artless comfort. Each seat

fronted a shelf at the back of the seat before it, where the spectator

could put his hat; there was a smaller shelf for his stein of the beer

passed constantly throughout the evening; and there was a buffet

where he could stay himself with cold ham and other robust German

refreshments.

It was “The Wedding Journey to Nuremberg” upon which they had oddly

chanced, and they accepted as a national tribute the character of an

American girl in it. She was an American girl of the advanced pattern,

and she came and went at a picnic on the arm of a head waiter. She

seemed to have no office in the drama except to illustrate a German

conception of American girlhood, but even in this simple function she

seemed rather to puzzle the German audience; perhaps because of the

occasional English words which she used.

To the astonishment of her compatriots, when they came out of the

theatre it was not raining; the night was as brilliantly starlit as

a night could be in Germany, and they sauntered home richly content

through the narrow streets and through the beautiful old Damenthor,

beyond which their hotel lay. How pretty, they said, to call that

charming port the Ladies' Gate! They promised each other to find out

why, and they never did so, but satisfied themselves by assigning it

to the exclusive use of the slim maidens and massive matrons of the old

Nuremberg patriciate, whom they imagined trailing their silken splendors

under its arch in perpetual procession.

XLV.

The life of the Nuremberg patriciate, now extinct in the control of the

city which it builded so strenuously and maintained so heroically, is

still insistent in all its art. This expresses their pride at once and

their simplicity with a childish literality. At its best it is never so

good as the good Italian art, whose influence is always present in its

best. The coloring of the great canvases is Venetian, but there is no

such democracy of greatness as in the painting at Venice; in decoration

the art of Nuremberg is at best quaint, and at the worst puerile.

Wherever it had obeyed an academic intention it seemed to March poor and

coarse, as in the bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence. The

water spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in streams

that cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in

the base of the church there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely

affecting in its simple-hearted truth. The long ages have made it even

more affecting than the sculptor imagined it; they have blurred

the faces and figures in passing till their features are scarcely

distinguishable; and the sleeping apostles seem to have dreamed

themselves back into the mother-marble. It is of the same tradition and

impulse with that supreme glory of the native sculpture, the ineffable

tabernacle of Adam Krafft, which climbs a column of the church within,

a miracle of richly carven story; and no doubt if there were a Nuremberg

sculptor doing great things today, his work would be of kindred

inspiration.

The descendants of the old patrician who ordered the tabernacle at

rather a hard bargain from the artist still worship on the floor below,

and the descendants of his neighbor patricians have their seats in

the pews about, and their names cut in the proprietary plates on the

pew-tops. The vergeress who showed the Marches through the church was

devout in the praise of these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers. “So

simple, and yet so noble!” she said. She was a very romantic vergeress,

and she told them at unsparing length the legend of the tabernacle, how

the artist fell asleep in despair of winning his patron's daughter, and

saw in a vision the master-work with the lily-like droop at top, which

gained him her hand. They did not realize till too late that it was all

out of a novel of Georg Ebers's, but added to the regular fee for the

church a gift worthy of an inedited legend.

Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm rarely imparted by the

Nuremberg manner. They missed there the constant, sweet civility of

Carlsbad, and found themselves falling flat in their endeavors for a

little cordiality. They indeed inspired with some kindness the old woman

who showed them through that cemetery where Albert Durer and Hans Sachs

and many other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumental brasses

of such beauty:

“That kings to have the like, might wish to die.”

But this must have been because they abandoned themselves so

willingly to the fascination of the bronze skull on the tomb of a

fourteenth-century patrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a

lower jaw hinged to the upper. She proudly clapped it up and down for

their astonishment, and waited, with a toothless smile, to let them

discover the bead of a nail artfully figured in the skull; then she gave

a shrill cackle of joy, and gleefully explained that the wife of this

patrician had killed him by driving a nail into his temple, and had been

fitly beheaded for the murder.

She cared so much for nothing else in the cemetery, but she consented

to let them wonder at the richness of the sculpture in the level tombs,

with their escutcheons and memorial tablets, overrun by the long grass

and the matted ivy; she even consented to share their indignation at the

destruction of some of the brasses and the theft of others. She suffered

more reluctantly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figured

in sculpture at one corner of the cemetery, where the anguish of the

Christ had long since faded into the stone from which it had been

evoked, and the thieves were no longer distinguishable in their

penitence or impenitence; but she parted friends with them when she saw

how much they seemed taken with the votive chapel of the noble Holzschuh

family, where a line of wooden shoes puns upon the name in the frieze,

like the line of dogs which chase one another, with bones in their

mouths, around the Canossa palace at Verona. A sense of the beautiful

house by the Adige was part of the pleasing confusion which possessed

them in Nuremberg whenever they came upon the expression of the gothic

spirit common both to the German and northern Italian art. They knew

that it was an effect which had passed from Germany into Italy, but in

the liberal air of the older land it had come to so much more beauty

that now, when they found it in its home, it seemed something fetched

from over the Alps and coarsened in the attempt to naturalize it to an

alien air.

In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian painters from the German

pictures they had inspired; in the great hall of the Rathhaus the noble

Processional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph of

Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar. There was to

be a banquet in the hall, under the mighty fresco, to welcome the German

Emperor, coming the next week, and the Rathhaus was full of work-people

furbishing it up against his arrival, and making it difficult for the

custodian who had it in charge to show it properly to strangers. She was

of the same enthusiastic sisterhood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence and

the guardian of the old cemetery, and by a mighty effort she prevailed

over the workmen so far as to lead her charges out through the corridor

where the literal conscience of the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the

roof to an exact image of a tournament as it was in Nuremberg four

hundred years ago. In this relief, thronged with men and horses, the

gala-life of the past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed

himself after enjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality

which seems the final effect of the German gothicism in sculpture.

XLVI.

On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England ideal

of the day by ceasing from sight-seeing. She could not have understood

the sermon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the lingering

conscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon. Then

she found nothing of the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic

lands. The people were resting from their week-day labors, but they

were not playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran

uses, were locked against tourist curiosity.

It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in

this ancient city, where the past was so much alive in the perpetual

picturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were

fain to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness of the

streets to the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily visited

the evening of their arrival.

On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whom March asked some

question of their way. He answered in English, and in the parley that

followed they discovered that they were all Americans. The stranger

proved to be an American of the sort commonest in Germany, and he said

he had returned to his native country to get rid of the ague which he

had taken on Staten Island. He had been seventeen years in New York, and

now a talk of Tammany and its chances in the next election, of pulls and

deals, of bosses and heelers, grew up between the civic step-brothers,

and joined them is a common interest. The German-American said he was

bookkeeper in some glass-works which had been closed by our tariff, and

he confessed that he did not mean to return to us, though he spoke of

German affairs with the impartiality of an outsider. He said that the

Socialist party was increasing faster than any other, and that this

tacitly meant the suppression of rank and the abolition of monarchy. He

warned March against the appearance of industrial prosperity in Germany;

beggary was severely repressed, and if poverty was better clad than with

us, it was as hungry and as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York. The

working classes were kindly and peaceable; they only knifed each other

quietly on Sunday evenings after having too much beer.

Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marches for good-by; and

as he walked down the aisle of trees in which they had been fitting

together, he seemed to be retreating farther and farther from such

Americanism as they had in common. He had reverted to an entirely German

effect of dress and figure; his walk was slow and Teutonic; he must be a

type of thousands who have returned to the fatherland without wishing

to own themselves its children again, and yet out of heart with the only

country left them.

“He was rather pathetic, my dear,” said March, in the discomfort he knew

his wife must be feeling as well as himself. “How odd to have the lid

lifted here, and see the same old problems seething and bubbling in the

witch's caldron we call civilization as we left simmering away at home!

And how hard to have our tariff reach out and snatch the bread from the

mouths of those poor glass-workers!”

“I thought that was hard,” she sighed. “It must have been his bread,

too.”

“Let's hope it was not his cake, anyway. I suppose,” he added, dreamily,

“that what we used to like in Italy was the absence of all the modern

activities. The Italians didn't repel us by assuming to be of our epoch

in the presence of their monuments; they knew how to behave as pensive

memories. I wonder if they're still as charming.”

“Oh, no,” she returned, “nothing is as charming as it used to be. And

now we need the charm more than ever.”

He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understanding they had lived

into that only one of them was to be desperate at a time, and that they

were to take turns in cheering each other up. “Well, perhaps we don't

deserve it. And I'm not sure that we need it so much as we did when we

were young. We've got tougher; we can stand the cold facts better now.

They made me shiver once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable

thrill. Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, if it insisted

upon being as charming as it used to be, how could we ever bear to

die? We've got that to consider.” He yielded to the temptation of his

paradox, but he did not fail altogether of the purpose with which he

began, and they took the trolley back to their hotel cheerful in the

intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate when they had only had the

hardihood to face a phrase.

They agreed that now he ought really to find out something about the

contemporary life of Nuremberg, and the next morning he went out before

breakfast, and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the hope

of intimate impressions. The peasant women, serving portions of milk

from house to house out of the cans in the little wagons which they drew

themselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect

of tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the sucking-pigs

jolted over the pavements in handcarts; a certain majesty from the long

procession of yellow mail-wagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarian

blue, trooping by in the cold small rain, impassibly dripping from their

glazed hat-brims upon their uniforms. But he could not feel that these

things were any of them very poignantly significant; and he covered

his retreat from the actualities of Nuremberg by visiting the chief

book-store and buying more photographs of the architecture than he

wanted, and more local histories than he should ever read. He made a

last effort for the contemporaneous life by asking the English-speaking

clerk if there were any literary men of distinction living in Nuremberg,

and the clerk said there was not one.

He went home to breakfast wondering if he should be able to make his

meagre facts serve with his wife; but he found her far from any wish to

listen to them. She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a table

near her own, who were so absorbed in each other that they were proof

against an interest that must otherwise have pierced them through.

The bridegroom, as he would have called himself, was a pretty little

Bavarian lieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride was as pretty

and as little, but delicately blond. Nature had admirably mated them,

and if art had helped to bring them together through the genius of the

bride's mother, who was breakfasting with them, it had wrought almost as

fitly. Mrs. March queried impartially who they were, where they met, and

how, and just when they were going to be married; and March consented,

in his personal immunity from their romance, to let it go on under his

eyes without protest. But later, when they met the lovers in the street,

walking arm in arm, with the bride's mother behind them gloating upon

their bliss, he said the woman ought, at her time of life, to be ashamed

of such folly. She must know that this affair, by nine chances out of

ten, could not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tiresome

as most other marriages, and yet she was abandoning herself with

those ignorant young people to the illusion that it was the finest and

sweetest thing in life.

“Well, isn't it?” his wife asked.

“Yes, that's the worst of it. It shows how poverty-stricken life really

is. We want somehow to believe that each pair of lovers will find the

good we have missed, and be as happy as we expected to be.”

“I think we have been happy enough, and that we've had as much good as

was wholesome for us,” she returned, hurt.

“You're always so concrete! I meant us in the abstract. But if you will

be personal, I'll say that you've been as happy as you deserve, and got

more good than you had any right to.”

She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they

were walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensibly

following.

He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to

the old cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner,

wagging in eternal accusation of his murderess. “It's rather hard on

her, that he should be having the last word, that way,” he said. “She

was a woman, no matter what mistakes she had committed.”

“That's what I call 'banale',” said Mrs. March.

“It is, rather,” he confessed. “It makes me feel as if I must go to see

the house of Durer, after all.”

“Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later.”

It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, because

everybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven

to Durer's house, which they found in a remote part of the town near

a stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by the

interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time they

reached it. The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and without

being squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardly

have been different in Durer's time. His dwelling, in no way impressive

outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a

narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped

bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the

cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house. It was cavernous and

cold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid

in the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German

fashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly,

simple, neighborly existence there. It in no wise suggested the calling

of an artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer's time to

take themselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life

of a prosperous citizen, and it expressed the period.

The Marches wrote their names in the visitors' book, and paid the

visitor's fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for a

reproduction of one of Durer's pictures; and then they came away, by no

means dissatisfied with his house. By its association with his sojourns

in Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that

it was really no worse than Ariosto's house at Ferrara, or Petrarch's at

Arqua, or Michelangelo's at Florence. “But what I admire,” he said, “is

our futility in going to see it. We expected to surprise some quality of

the man left lying about in the house because he lived and died in it;

and because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked him so hard

to save his widow from coming to want.”

“Who said she did that?”

“A friend of his who hated her. But he had to allow that she was a

God-fearing woman, and had a New England conscience.”

“Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going.”

“Yes; but I don't like her laying her plans to survive him; though women

always do that.”

They were going away the next day, and they sat down that evening to a

final supper in such good-humor with themselves that they were willing

to include a young couple who came to take places at their table, though

they would rather have been alone. They lifted their eyes for their

expected salutation, and recognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the

Norumbia.

The ladies fell upon each other as if they had been mother and daughter;

March and the young man shook hands, in the feeling of passengers

mutually endeared by the memories of a pleasant voyage. They arrived

at the fact that Mr. Leffers had received letters in England from his

partners which allowed him to prolong his wedding journey in a tour

of the continent, while their wives were still exclaiming at their

encounter in the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all sat down to

have, as the bride said, a real Norumbia time.

She was one of those young wives who talk always with their eyes

submissively on their husbands, no matter whom they are speaking to; but

she was already unconsciously ruling him in her abeyance. No doubt she

was ruling him for his good; she had a livelier, mind than he, and she

knew more, as the American wives of young American business men always

do, and she was planning wisely for their travels. She recognized her

merit in this devotion with an artless candor, which was typical rather

than personal. March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little

stroll, and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who did not

let them go without making her husband promise to wrap up well, and not

get his feet wet. She made March promise not to take him far, and to

bring him back early, which he found himself very willing to do, after

an exchange of ideas with Mr. Leffers. The young man began to talk about

his wife, in her providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the

sort of man he was, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of

man he was, there was no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the

reading-room.

XLVII.

The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinner

the next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside

Mrs. March, who said, as soon as they were gone, “I believe I would

rather meet people of our own age after this. I used to think that you

could keep young by being with young people; but I don't, now. There

world is very different from ours. Our world doesn't really exist any

more, but as long as we keep away from theirs we needn't realize it.

Young people,” she went on, “are more practical-minded than we used to

be; they're quite as sentimental; but I don't think they care so much

for the higher things. They're not so much brought up on poetry as we

were,” she pursued. “That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow

in our time; but now she didn't know of his poem on Nuremberg; she

was intelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its

quaintness was not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred.” Her tone

entreated him to find more meaning in her words than she had put into

them. “They couldn't have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and

that grassy, flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that

pile-up of the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with

their Gothic facades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow,

aguish-looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of

those overhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before

the churches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round

them!”

“I see what you mean. But do you think it's as sacred to us as it would

have been twenty-five years ago? I had an irreverent feeling now and

then that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg.”

“Oh, yes; so had I. We're that modern, if we're not so young as we

were.”

“We were very simple, in those days.”

“Well, if we were simple, we knew it!”

“Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking

at it.”

“We had a good time.”

“Too good. Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it

had not been so good. We might have our cake now if we hadn't eaten it.”

“It would be mouldy, though.”

“I wonder,” he said, recurring to the Lefferses; “how we really struck

them.”

“Well, I don't believe they thought we ought to be travelling about

alone, quite, at our age.”

“Oh, not so bad as that!” After a moment he said, “I dare say they don't

go round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did.”

“Indeed they do! They had an awful quarrel just before they got to

Nuremberg: about his wanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool

by express that she wanted to keep with them. But she said it had been

a lesson, and they were never going to quarrel again.” The elders looked

at each other in the light of experience, and laughed. “Well,” she

ended, “that's one thing we're through with. I suppose we've come to

feel more alike than we used to.”

“Or not to feel at all. How did they settle it about the baggage?”

“Oh! He insisted on her keeping it with her.” March laughed again, but

this time he laughed alone, and after a while she said: “Well, they

gave just the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean American

philistinism. I don't mind their thinking us queer; they must have

thought Nuremberg was queer.”

“Yes. We oldsters are always queer to the young. We're either

ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we're ridiculously stiff and grim;

they never expect to be like us, and wouldn't, for the world. The worst

of it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don't, at the

bottom of our hearts, believe we're like that, when we meet. I suppose

that arrogant old ass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard.”

“I wonder,” said Mrs. March, “if she's told him yet,” and March

perceived that she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic

introspection; but he had no difficulty in following her.

“She's had time enough. But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her.”

“Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back in

that way. I know she is dead in love with him; but she could only have

accepted him conditionally.”

“Conditionally to his making it all right with Stoller?”

“Stoller? No! To her father's liking it.”

“Ah, that's quite as hard. What makes you think she accepted him at

all?”

“What do you think she was crying about?”

“Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionally shed tears of pity. If

she accepted him conditionally she would have to tell her father about

it.” Mrs. March gave him a glance of silent contempt, and he hastened to

atone for his stupidity. “Perhaps she's told him on the instalment plan.

She may have begun by confessing that Burnamy had been in Carlsbad. Poor

old fellow, I wish we were going to find him in Ansbach! He could make

things very smooth for us.”

“Well, you needn't flatter yourself that you'll find him in Ansbach. I'm

sure I don't know where he is.”

“You might write to Miss Triscoe and ask.”

“I think I shall wait for Miss Triscoe to write to me,” she said, with

dignity.

“Yes, she certainly owes you that much, after all your suffering for

her. I've asked the banker in Nuremberg to forward our letters to the

poste restante in Ansbach. Isn't it good to see the crows again, after

those ravens around Carlsbad?”

She joined him in looking at the mild autumnal landscape through the

open window. The afternoon was fair and warm, and in the level fields

bodies of soldiers were at work with picks and spades, getting the

ground ready for the military manoeuvres; they disturbed among the

stubble foraging parties of crows, which rose from time to time with

cries of indignant protest. She said, with a smile for the crows,

“Yes. And I'm thankful that I've got nothing on my conscience, whatever

happens,” she added in dismissal of the subject of Burnamy.

“I'm thankful too, my dear. I'd much rather have things on my own. I'm

more used to that, and I believe I feel less remorse than when you're to

blame.”

They might have been carried near this point by those telepathic

influences which have as yet been so imperfectly studied. It was

only that morning, after the lapse of a week since Burnamy's furtive

reappearance in Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her father about

it, and she had at that moment a longing for support and counsel that

might well have made its mystical appeal to Mrs. March.

She spoke at last because she could put it off no longer, rather than

because the right time had come. She began as they sat at breakfast.

“Papa, there is something that I have got to tell you. It is something

that you ought to know; but I have put off telling you because--”

She hesitated for the reason, and “Well!” said her father, looking up at

her from his second cup of coffee. “What is it?”

Then she answered, “Mr. Burnamy has been here.”

“In Carlsbad? When was he here?”

“The night of the Emperor's birthday. He came into the box when you were

behind the scenes with Mr. March; afterwards I met him in the crowd.”

“Well?”

“I thought you ought to know. Mrs. March said I ought to tell you.”

“Did she say you ought to wait a week?” He gave way to an irascibility

which he tried to check, and to ask with indifference, “Why did he come

back?”

“He was going to write about it for that paper in Paris.” The girl had

the effect of gathering her courage up for a bold plunge. She looked

steadily at her father, and added: “He said he came back because he

couldn't help it. He--wished to speak with me, He said he knew he had no

right to suppose I cared anything about what had happened with him and

Mr. Stoller. He wanted to come back and tell me--that.”

Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently she was going to

leave the word to him, now. He hesitated to take it, but he asked

at last with a mildness that seemed to surprise her, “Have you heard

anything from him since?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“I don't know. I told him I could not say what he wished; that I must

tell you about it.”

The case was less simple than it would once have been for General

Triscoe. There was still his affection for his daughter, his wish for

her happiness, but this had always been subordinate to his sense of his

own interest and comfort, and a question had recently arisen which put

his paternal love and duty in a new light. He was no more explicit with

himself than other men are, and the most which could ever be said of him

without injustice was that in his dependence upon her he would rather

have kept his daughter to himself if she could not have been very

prosperously married. On the other hand, if he disliked the man for

whom she now hardly hid her liking, he was not just then ready to go to

extremes concerning him.

“He was very anxious,” she went on, “that you should know just how

it was. He thinks everything of your judgment and--and--opinion.” The

general made a consenting noise in his throat. “He said that he did not

wish me to 'whitewash' him to you. He didn't think he had done right;

he didn't excuse himself, or ask you to excuse him unless you could from

the stand-point of a gentleman.”

The general made a less consenting noise in his throat, and asked, “How

do you look at it, yourself, Agatha?”

“I don't believe I quite understand it; but Mrs. March--”

“Oh, Mrs. March!” the general snorted.

“--says that Mr. March does not think so badly of it as Mr. Burnamy

does.”

“I doubt it. At any rate, I understood March quite differently.”

“She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly afterwards when Mr.

Stoller wanted him to help him put a false complexion on it; that it was

all the more difficult for him to do right then, because of his remorse

for what he had done before.” As she spoke on she had become more eager.

“There's something in that,” the general admitted, with a candor that he

made the most of both to himself and to her. “But I should like to know

what Stoller had to say of it all. Is there anything,” he inquired, “any

reason why I need be more explicit about it, just now?”

“N--no. Only, I thought--He thinks so much of your opinion that--if--”

“Oh, he can very well afford to wait. If he values my opinion so highly

he can give me time to make up my mind.”

“Of course--”

“And I'm not responsible,” the general continued, significantly, “for

the delay altogether. If you had told me this before--Now, I don't know

whether Stoller is still in town.”

He was not behaving openly with her; but she had not behaved openly with

him. She owned that to herself, and she got what comfort she could from

his making the affair a question of what Burnamy had done to Stoller

rather than of what Burnamy had said to her, and what she had answered

him. If she was not perfectly clear as to what she wanted to do, or

wished to have happen, there was now time and place in which she could

delay and make sure. The accepted theory of such matters is that people

know their minds from the beginning, and that they do not change them.

But experience seems to contradict this theory, or else people often

act contrary to their convictions and impulses. If the statistics were

accessible, it might be found that many potential engagements hovered in

a doubtful air, and before they touched the earth in actual promise were

dissipated by the play of meteorological chances.

When General Triscoe put down his napkin in rising he said that he would

step round to Pupp's and see if Stoller were still there. But on the

way he stepped up to Mrs. Adding's hotel on the hill, and he came back,

after an interval which he seemed not to have found long, to report

rather casually that Stoller had left Carlsbad the day before. By this

time the fact seemed not to concern Agatha herself very vitally.

He asked if the Marches had left any address with her, and she answered

that they had not. They were going to spend a few days in Nuremberg,

and then push on to Holland for Mr. March's after-cure. There was no

relevance in his question unless it intimated his belief that she was in

confidential correspondence with Mrs. March, and she met this by saying

that she was going to write her in care of their bankers; she asked

whether he wished to send any word.

“No. I understand,” he intimated, “that there is nothing at all in the

nature of a--a--an understanding, then, with--”

“No, nothing.”

“Hm!” The general waited a moment. Then he ventured, “Do you care to

say--do you wish me to know--how he took it?”

The tears came into the girl's eyes, but she governed herself to say,

“He--he was disappointed.”

“He had no right to be disappointed.”

It was a question, and she answered: “He thought he had. He said--that

he wouldn't--trouble me any more.”

The general did not ask at once, “And you don't know where he is

now--you haven't heard anything from him since?”

Agatha flashed through her tears, “Papa!”

“Oh! I beg your pardon. I think you told me.”

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else

Effort to get on common ground with an inferior

He buys my poverty and not my will

Honest selfishness

Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate

Less intrusive than if he had not been there

Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign

Only one of them was to be desperate at a time

Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last

Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold

We don't seem so much our own property

We get too much into the hands of other people

PART III.

XLVIII.

At the first station where the train stopped, a young German bowed

himself into the compartment with the Marches, and so visibly resisted

an impulse to smoke that March begged him to light his cigarette. In the

talk which this friendly overture led to between them he explained that

he was a railway architect, employed by the government on that line of

road, and was travelling officially. March spoke of Nuremberg; he owned

the sort of surfeit he had suffered from its excessive mediaevalism, and

the young man said it was part of the new imperial patriotism to

cherish the Gothic throughout Germany; no other sort of architecture

was permitted in Nuremberg. But they would find enough classicism at

Ansbach, he promised them, and he entered with sympathetic intelligence

into their wish to see this former capital when March told him they were

going to stop there, in hopes of something typical of the old disjointed

Germany of the petty principalities, the little paternal despotisms now

extinct.

As they talked on, partly in German and partly in English, their purpose

in visiting Ansbach appeared to the Marches more meditated than it was.

In fact it was somewhat accidental; Ansbach was near Nuremberg; it was

not much out of the way to Holland. They took more and more credit to

themselves for a reasoned and definite motive, in the light of their

companion's enthusiasm for the place, and its charm began for them with

the drive from the station through streets whose sentiment was both

Italian and French, and where there was a yellowish cast in the gray

of the architecture which was almost Mantuan. They rested their

sensibilities, so bruised and fretted by Gothic angles and points,

against the smooth surfaces of the prevailing classicistic facades of

the houses as they passed, and when they arrived at their hotel, an old

mansion of Versailles type, fronting on a long irregular square planted

with pollard sycamores, they said that it might as well have been Lucca.

The archway and stairway of the hotel were draped with the Bavarian

colors, and they were obscurely flattered to learn that Prince Leopold,

the brother of the Prince-Regent of the kingdom, had taken rooms there,

on his way to the manoeuvres at Nuremberg, and was momently expected

with his suite. They realized that they were not of the princely

party, however, when they were told that he had sole possession of the

dining-room, and they went out to another hotel, and had their supper in

keeping delightfully native. People seemed to come there to write their

letters and make up their accounts, as well as to eat their suppers;

they called for stationery like characters in old comedy, and the

clatter of crockery and the scratching of pens went on together; and

fortune offered the Marches a delicate reparation for their exclusion

from their own hotel in the cold popular reception of the prince which

they got back just in time to witness. A very small group of people,

mostly women and boys, had gathered to see him arrive, but there was no

cheering or any sign of public interest. Perhaps he personally merited

none; he looked a dull, sad man, with his plain, stubbed features; and

after he had mounted to his apartment, the officers of his staff stood

quite across the landing, and barred the passage of the Americans,

ignoring even Mrs. March's presence, as they talked together.

“Well, my dear,” said her husband, “here you have it at last. This is

what you've been living for, ever since we came to Germany. It's a great

moment.”

“Yes. What are you going to do?”

“Who? I? Oh, nothing! This is your affair; it's for you to act.”

If she had been young, she might have withered them with a glance; she

doubted now if her dim eyes would have any such power; but she advanced

steadily upon them, and then the officers seemed aware of her, and stood

aside.

March always insisted that they stood aside apologetically, but she

held as firmly that they stood aside impertinently, or at least

indifferently, and that the insult to her American womanhood was

perfectly ideal. It is true that nothing of the kind happened again

during their stay at the hotel; the prince's officers were afterwards

about in the corridors and on the stairs, but they offered no shadow of

obstruction to her going and coming, and the landlord himself was not so

preoccupied with his highhotes but he had time to express his grief that

she had been obliged to go out for supper.