The rough weather which made Berlin almost uninhabitable to Mrs. March
had such an effect with General Triscoe at Weimar that under the orders
of an English-speaking doctor he retreated from it altogether and went to
bed. Here he escaped the bronchitis which had attacked him, and his
convalesence left him so little to complain of that he could not always
keep his temper. In the absence of actual offence, either from his
daughter or from Burnamy, his sense of injury took a retroactive form; it
centred first in Stoller and the twins; then it diverged toward Rose
Adding, his mother and Kenby, and finally involved the Marches in the
same measure of inculpation; for they had each and all had part, directly
or indirectly, in the chances that brought on his cold.
He owed to Burnamy the comfort of the best room in the hotel, and he was
constantly dependent upon his kindness; but he made it evident that he
did not over-value Burnamy's sacrifice and devotion, and that it was not
an unmixed pleasure, however great a convenience, to have him about. In
giving up his room, Burnamy had proposed going out of the hotel
altogether; but General Triscoe heard of this with almost as great
vexation as he had accepted the room. He besought him not to go, but so
ungraciously that his daughter was ashamed, and tried to atone for his
manner by the kindness of her own.
Perhaps General Triscoe would not have been without excuse if he were not
eager to have her share with destitute merit the fortune which she had
hitherto shared only with him. He was old, and certain luxuries had
become habits if not necessaries with him. Of course he did not say this
to himself; and still less did he say it to her. But he let her see that
he did not enjoy the chance which had thrown them again in such close
relations with Burnamy, and he did pot hide his belief that the Marches
were somehow to blame for it. This made it impossible for her to write at
once to Mrs. March as she had promised; but she was determined that it
should not make her unjust to Burnamy. She would not avoid him; she would
not let anything that had happened keep her from showing that she felt
his kindness and was glad of his help.
Of course they knew no one else in Weimar, and his presence merely as a
fellow-countryman would have been precious. He got them a doctor, against
General Triscoe's will; he went for his medicines; he lent him books and
papers; he sat with him and tried to amuse him. But with the girl he
attempted no return to the situation at Carlsbad; there is nothing like
the delicate pride of a young man who resolves to forego unfair advantage
in love.
The day after their arrival, when her father was making up for the sleep
he had lost by night, she found herself alone in the little reading-room
of the hotel with Burnamy for the first time, and she said: "I suppose
you must have been all over Weimar by this time."
"Well, I've been here, off and on, almost a month. It's an interesting
place. There's a good deal of the old literary quality left."
"And you enjoy that! I saw"--she added this with a little unnecessary
flush--"your poem in the paper you lent papa."
"I suppose I ought to have kept that back. But I couldn't." He laughed,
and she said:
"You must find a great deal of inspiration in such a literary place."
"It isn't lying about loose, exactly." Even in the serious and perplexing
situation in which he found himself he could not help being amused with
her unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and commonplace
conceptions of it. They had their value with him as those of a more
fashionable world than his own, which he believed was somehow a greater
world. At the same time he believed that she was now interposing them
between the present and the past, and forbidding with them any return to
the mood of their last meeting in Carlsbad. He looked at her ladylike
composure and unconsciousness, and wondered if she could be the same
person and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd that
night and heard and said words palpitant with fate. Perhaps there had
been no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination. He must leave her
to recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt bitterly that
there was nothing for him but submission and patience; if she never did
so, there was nothing for him but acquiescence.
In this talk and in the talks they had afterwards she seemed willing
enough to speak of what had happened since: of coming on to Wurzburg with
the Addings and of finding the Marches there; of Rose's collapse, and of
his mother's flight seaward with him in the care of Kenby, who was so
fortunately going to Holland, too. He on his side told her of going to
Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, and they agreed that it was very strange
they had not met.
She did not try to keep their relations from taking the domestic
character which was inevitable, and it seemed to him that this in itself
was significant of a determination on her part that was fatal to his
hopes. With a lover's indefinite power of blinding himself to what is
before his eyes, he believed that if she had been more diffident of him,
more uneasy in his presence, he should have had more courage; but for her
to breakfast unafraid with him, to meet him at lunch and dinner in the
little dining-room where they were often the only guests, and always the
only English-speaking guests, was nothing less than prohibitive.
In the hotel service there was one of those men who are porters in this
world, but will be angels in the next, unless the perfect goodness of
their looks, the constant kindness of their acts, belies them. The
Marches had known and loved the man in their brief stay, and he had been
the fast friend of Burnamy from the moment they first saw each other at
the station. He had tenderly taken possession of General Triscoe on his
arrival, and had constituted himself the nurse and keeper of the
irascible invalid, in the intervals of going to the trains, with a zeal
that often relieved his daughter and Burnamy. The general in fact
preferred him to either, and a tacit custom grew up by which when August
knocked at his door, and offered himself in his few words of serviceable
English, that one of them who happened to be sitting with the general
gave way, and left him in charge. The retiring watcher was then apt to
encounter the other watcher on the stairs, or in the reading-room, or in
the tiny, white-pebbled door-yard at a little table in the shade of the
wooden-tubbed evergreens. From the habit of doing this they one day
suddenly formed the habit of going across the street to that gardened
hollow before and below the Grand-Ducal Museum. There was here a bench in
the shelter of some late-flowering bush which the few other frequenters
of the place soon recognized as belonging to the young strangers, so that
they would silently rise and leave it to them when they saw them coming.
Apparently they yielded not only to their right, but to a certain
authority which resides in lovers, and which all other men, and
especially all other women, like to acknowledge and respect.
In the absence of any civic documents bearing upon the affair it is
difficult to establish the fact that this was the character in which
Agatha and Burnamy were commonly regarded by the inhabitants of Weimar.
But whatever their own notion of their relation was, if it was not that
of a Brant and a Brautigam, the people of Weimar would have been puzzled
to say what it was. It was known that the gracious young lady's father,
who would naturally have accompanied them, was sick, and in the fact that
they were Americans much extenuation was found for whatever was
phenomenal in their unencumbered enjoyment of each other's society.
If their free American association was indistinguishably like the peasant
informality which General Triscoe despised in the relations of Kenby and
Mrs. Adding, it is to be said in his excuse that he could not be fully
cognizant of it, in the circumstances, and so could do nothing to prevent
it. His pessimism extended to his health; from the first he believed
himself worse than the doctor thought him, and he would have had some
other physician if he had not found consolation in their difference of
opinion and the consequent contempt which he was enabled to cherish for
the doctor in view of the man's complete ignorance of the case. In proof
of his own better understanding of it, he remained in bed some time after
the doctor said he might get up.
Nearly ten days had passed before he left his room, and it was not till
then that he clearly saw how far affairs had gone with his daughter and
Burnamy, though even then his observance seemed to have anticipated
theirs. He found them in a quiet acceptance of the fortune which had
brought them together, so contented that they appeared to ask nothing
more of it. The divine patience and confidence of their youth might
sometimes have had almost the effect of indifference to a witness who had
seen its evolution from the moods of the first few days of their reunion
in Weimar. To General Triscoe, however, it looked like an understanding
which had been made without reference to his wishes, and had not been
directly brought to his knowledge.
"Agatha," he said, after due note of a gay contest between her and
Burnamy over the pleasure and privilege of ordering his supper sent to
his room when he had gone back to it from his first afternoon in the open
air, "how long is that young man going to stay in Weimar?"
"Why, I don't know!" she answered, startled from her work of beating the
sofa pillows into shape, and pausing with one of them in her hand. "I
never asked him." She looked down candidly into his face where he sat in
an easy-chair waiting for her arrangement of the sofa. "What makes you
ask?"
He answered with another question. "Does he know that we had thought of
staying here?"
"Why, we've always talked of that, haven't we? Yes, he knows it. Didn't
you want him to know it, papa? You ought to have begun on the ship, then.
Of course I've asked him what sort of place it was. I'm sorry if you
didn't want me to."
"Have I said that? It's perfectly easy to push on to Paris. Unless--"
"Unless what?" Agatha dropped the pillow, and listened respectfully. But
in spite of her filial attitude she could not keep her youth and strength
and courage from quelling the forces of the elderly man.
He said querulously, "I don't see why you take that tone with me. You
certainly know what I mean. But if you don't care to deal openly with me,
I won't ask you." He dropped his eyes from her face, and at the same time
a deep blush began to tinge it, growing up from her neck to her forehead.
"You must know--you're not a child," he continued, still with averted
eyes, "that this sort of thing can't go on... It must be something else,
or it mustn't be anything at all. I don't ask you for your confidence,
and you know that I've never sought to control you."
This was not the least true, but Agatha answered, either absently or
provisionally, "No."
"And I don't seek to do so now. If you have nothing that you wish to tell
me--"
He waited, and after what seemed a long time, she asked as if she had not
heard him, "Will you lie down a little before your supper, papa?"
"I will lie down when I feel like it," he answered. "Send August with the
supper; he can look after me."
His resentful tone, even more than his words, dismissed her, but she left
him without apparent grievance, saying quietly, "I will send August."