"To-morrow," said Kenby, and he added, "And now the question is, why
shouldn't I go with her?"
Mrs. March gave a little start, and looked at her husband, but he said
nothing, and Kenby seemed not to have supposed that he would say
anything.
"I know it would be very American, and all that, but I happen to be an
American, and it wouldn't be out of character for me. I suppose," he
appealed to Mrs. March, "that it's something I might offer to do if it
were from New York to Florida--and I happened to be going there? And I
did happen to be going to Holland."
"Why, of course, Mr. Kenby," she responded, with such solemnity that
March gave way in an outrageous laugh.
Kenby laughed, and Mrs. March laughed too, but with an inner note of
protest.
"Well," Kenby continued, still addressing her, "what I want you to do is
to stand by me when I propose it."
Mrs. March gathered strength to say, "No, Mr. Kenby, it's your own
affair, and you must take the responsibility."
"Do you disapprove?"
"It isn't the same as it would be at home. You see that yourself."
"Well," said Kenby, rising, "I have to arrange about their getting away
to-morrow. It won't be easy in this hurly-burly that's coming off."
"Give Rose our love; and tell Mrs. Adding that I'll come round and see
her to-morrow before she starts."
"Oh! I'm afraid you can't, Mrs. March. They're to start at six in the
morning."
"They are! Then we must go and see them tonight. We'll be there almost as
soon as you are."
March went up to their rooms with, his wife, and she began on the stairs:
"Well, my dear, I hope you realize that your laughing so gave us
completely away. And what was there to keep grinning about, all through?"
"Nothing but the disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love. It's always
the most amusing thing in the world; but to see it trying to pass itself
off in poor old Kenby as duty and humanity, and disinterested affection
for Rose, was more than I could stand. I don't apologize for laughing; I
wanted to yell."
His effrontery and his philosophy both helped to save him; and she said
from the point where he had side-tracked her mind: "I don't call it
disingenuous. He was brutally frank. He's made it impossible to treat the
affair with dignity. I want you to leave the whole thing to me, from this
out. Now, will you?"
On their way to the Spanischer Hof she arranged in her own mind for Mrs.
Adding to get a maid, and for the doctor to send an assistant with her on
the journey, but she was in such despair with her scheme that she had not
the courage to right herself when Mrs. Adding met her with the appeal:
"Oh, Mrs. March, I'm so glad you approve of Mr. Kenby's plan. It does
seem the only thing to do. I can't trust myself alone with Rose, and Mr.
Kenby's intending to go to Schevleningen a few days later anyway. Though
it's too bad to let him give up the manoeuvres."
"I'm sure he won't mind that," Mrs. March's voice said mechanically,
while her thought was busy with the question whether this scandalous
duplicity was altogether Kenby's, and whether Mrs. Adding was as
guiltless of any share in it as she looked. She looked pitifully
distracted; she might not have understood his report; or Kenby might
really have mistaken Mrs. March's sympathy for favor.
"No, he only lives to do good," Mrs. Adding returned. "He's with Rose;
won't you come in and see them?"
Rose was lying back on the pillows of a sofa, from which they would not
let him get up. He was full of the trip to Holland, and had already
pushed Kenby, as Kenby owned, beyond the bounds of his very general
knowledge of the Dutch language, which Rose had plans for taking up after
they were settled in Schevleningen. The boy scoffed at the notion that he
was not perfectly well, and he wished to talk with March on the points
where he had found Kenby wanting.
"Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me, Rose," the editor protested,
and he amplified his ignorance for the boy's good to an extent which Rose
saw was a joke. He left Holland to talk about other things which his
mother thought quite as bad for him. He wished to know if March did not
think that the statue of the bishop with the sparrow on its finger was a
subject for a poem; and March said gayly that if Rose would write it he
would print it in 'Every Other Week'.
The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter. "No, I couldn't do it. But I
wish Mr. Burnamy had seen it. He could. Will you tell him about it?" He
wanted to know if March had heard from Burnamy lately, and in the midst
of his vivid interest he gave a weary sigh.
His mother said that now he had talked enough, and bade him say good-by
to the Marches, who were coming so soon to Holland, anyway. Mrs. March
put her arms round him to kiss him, and when she let him sink back her
eyes were dim.
"You see how frail he is?" said Mrs. Adding. "I shall not let him out of
my sight, after this, till he's well again."
She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby away with them which was not
lost upon the witnesses. He asked them to come into the reading-room a
moment with him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were going to make some
excuse to her for himself; but he said: "I don't know how we're to manage
about the Triscoes. The general will have a room to himself, but if Mrs.
Adding takes Rose in with her, it leaves Miss Triscoe out, and there
isn't a room to be had in this house for love or money. Do you think," he
appealed directly to Mrs. March, "that it would do to offer her my room
at the Swan?"
"Why, yes," she assented, with a reluctance rather for the complicity in
which he had already involved her, and for which he was still unpunished,
than for what he was now proposing. "Or she could come in with me, and
Mr. March could take it."
"Whichever you think," said Kenby so submissively that she relented, to
ask:
"And what will you do?"
He laughed. "Well, people have been known to sleep in a chair. I shall
manage somehow."
"You might offer to go in with the general," March suggested, and the men
apparently thought this was a joke. Mrs. March did not laugh in her
feminine worry about ways and means.
"Where is Miss Triscoe?" she asked. "We haven't seen them."
"Didn't Mrs. Adding tell you? They went to supper at a restaurant; the
general doesn't like the cooking here. They ought to have been back
before this."
He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she said, "I suppose you would
like us to wait."
"It would be very kind of you."
"Oh, it's quite essential," she returned with an airy freshness which
Kenby did not seem to feel as painfully as he ought.
They all sat down, and the Triscoes came in after a few minutes, and a
cloud on the general's face lifted at the proposition Kenby left Mrs.
March to make.
"I thought that child ought to be in his mother's charge," he said. With
his own comfort provided for, he made no objections to Mrs. March's plan;
and Agatha went to take leave of Rose and his mother. "By-the-way," the
general turned to March, "I found Stoller at the restaurant where we
supped. He offered me a place in his carriage for the manoeuvres. How are
you going?"
"I think I shall go by train. I don't fancy the long drive."
"Well, I don't know that it's worse than the long walk after you leave
the train," said the general from the offence which any difference of
taste was apt to give him. "Are you going by train, too?" he asked Kenby
with indifference.
"I'm not going at all," said Kenby. "I'm leaving Wurzburg in the
morning."
"Oh, indeed," said the general.
Mrs. March could not make out whether he knew that Kenby was going with
Rose and Mrs. Adding, but she felt that there must be a full and open
recognition of the fact among them. "Yes," she said, "isn't it fortunate
that Mr. Kenby should be going to Holland, too! I should have been so
unhappy about them if Mrs. Adding had been obliged to make that long
journey with poor little Rose alone."
"Yes, yes; very fortunate, certainly," said the general colorlessly.
Her husband gave her a glance of intelligent appreciation; but Kenby was
too simply, too densely content with the situation to know the value of
what she had done. She thought he must certainly explain, as he walked
back with her to the Swan, whether he had misrepresented her to Mrs.
Adding, or Mrs. Adding had misunderstood him. Somewhere there had been an
error, or a duplicity which it was now useless to punish; and Kenby was
so apparently unconscious of it that she had not the heart to be cross
with him. She heard Miss Triscoe behind her with March laughing in the
gayety which the escape from her father seemed to inspire in her. She was
promising March to go with him in the morning to see the Emperor and
Empress of Germany arrive at the station, and he was warning her that if
she laughed there, like that, she would subject him to fine and
imprisonment. She pretended that she would like to see him led off
between two gendarmes, but consented to be a little careful when he asked
her how she expected to get back to her hotel without him, if such a
thing happened.