"Hold on!" said Stoller, assuming the host. "I got the change."

He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March had meant her husband to

reward his naivete with half a florin at least; but he seemed to feel

that he had now ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himself

in charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel; he made Miss

Triscoe let him carry her jacket when she found it warm.

The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who

designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy in

the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details.

Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then

the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the three

side-altars. The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German

version of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic at the time; the

carving is coarse, and the color harsh and unsoftened by years, though it

is broken and obliterated in places.

The sacristan said that the chapel was never used for anything but

funeral services, and he led the way out into the cemetery, where he

wished to display the sepultural devices. The graves here were planted

with flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies; but a space

fenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown with

weeds and brambles: This space, he said, was for suicides; but to March

it was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in consecrated

ground where the stones had photographs of the dead on porcelain let into

them. One was the picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been the

wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed to her in the

inscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of irony, the

magnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house of the

village. He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest the

attention of the strangers, and he led them with less apparent

hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the

figure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject much

celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to his

party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and March

tried to make him understand that they appreciated it. He knew that his

wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great favor in

showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of grief in the

poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile of those who

had taken their own lives and were parted in death from the more patient

sufferers who had waited for God to take them. With a curious, unpainful

self-analysis he noted that the older members of the party, who in the

course of nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from its

shows; but the young girl and the young man had not borne to look on

them, and had quickly escaped from the place, somewhere outside the gate.

Was it the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with death which

nature brings to life at last, or was it merely the effect, or defect, of

ossified sensibilities, of toughened nerves?

"That is all?" he asked of the spectral sacristan.

"That is all," the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin

commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something

handsome.

"No, no," said Stoller, detecting his gesture. "Your money a'n't good."

He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded

them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so patient.

In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have frankly

said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and whispered

a sad "Danke."

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they

were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.

"Oh, have I lost my glove in there?" said Mrs. March, looking at her

hands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to.

"Let me go and find it for you," Burnamy entreated.

"Well," she consented, and she added, "If the sacristan has found it,

give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow."

As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, and

her heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence: some

men would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand. He

came back directly, saying, "No, he didn't find it."

She laughed, and held both gloves up. "No wonder! I had it all the time.

Thank you ever so much."

"How are we going to ride back?" asked Stoller.

Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably. No one else

spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, "Oh, I think the way

we came, is best."

"Did that absurd creature," she apostrophized her husband as soon as she

got him alone after their arrival at Pupp's, "think I was going to let

him drive back with Agatha?"

"I wonder," said March, "if that's what Burnamy calls her now?"

"I shall despise him if it isn't."

XXXVII.

Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supper which they had eaten

in a silence natural with two men who have been off on a picnic together.

He did not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in, and the young

man did not sit down after putting his letters before him. He said, with

an effort of forcing himself to speak at once, "I have looked through the

papers, and there is something that I think you ought to see."

"What do you mean?" said Stoller.

Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certain

articles were strongly circumscribed in ink. The papers varied, but their

editorials did not, in purport at least. Some were grave and some were

gay; one indignantly denounced; another affected an ironical

bewilderment; the third simply had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller. They

all, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad as

the praise of municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with him

gleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on the accession of the

Honorable Jacob to their ranks.

Stoller read the articles, one after another, with parted lips and

gathering drops of perspiration on his upper lip, while Burnamy waited on

foot. He flung the papers all down at last. "Why, they're a pack of

fools! They don't know what they're talking about! I want city government

carried on on business principles, by the people, for the people. I don't

care what they say! I know I'm right, and I'm going ahead on this line if

it takes all--" The note of defiance died out of his voice at the sight

of Burnamy's pale face. "What's the matter with you?"

"There's nothing the matter with me."

"Do you mean to tell me it is"--he could not bring himself to use the

word--"what they say?"

"I suppose," said Burnamy, with a dry mouth, "it's what you may call

municipal socialism."

Stoller jumped from his seat. "And you knew it when you let me do it?"

"I supposed you knew what you were about."

"It's a lie!" Stoller advanced upon him, wildly, and Burnamy took a step

backward.

"Look out!" shouted Burnamy. "You never asked me anything about it. You

told me what you wanted done, and I did it. How could I believe you were

such an ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you were talking

about?" He added, in cynical contempt, "But you needn't worry. You can

make it right with the managers by spending a little more money than you

expected to spend."

Stoller started as if the word money reminded him of something. "I can

take care of myself, young man. How much do I owe you?"

"Nothing!" said Burnamy, with an effort for grandeur which failed him.

The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffee at the Posthof, he

came dragging himself toward them with such a haggard air that Mrs. March

called, before he reached their table, "Why, Mr. Burnamy, what's the

matter?"

He smiled miserably. "Oh, I haven't slept very well. May I have my coffee

with you? I want to tell you something; I want you to make me. But I

can't speak till the coffee comes. Fraulein!" he besought a waitress

going off with a tray near them. "Tell Lili, please, to bring me some

coffee--only coffee."

He tried to make some talk about the weather, which was rainy, and the

Marches helped him, but the poor endeavor lagged wretchedly in the

interval between the ordering and the coming of the coffee. "Ah, thank

you, Lili," he said, with a humility which confirmed Mrs. March in her

instant belief that he had been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and been

rejected. After gulping his coffee, he turned to her: "I want to say

good-by. I'm going away."

"From Carlsbad?" asked Mrs. March with a keen distress.

The water came into his eyes. "Don't, don't be good to me, Mrs. March! I

can't stand it. But you won't, when you know."

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

THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY