"There is no Burnamy physically, or so far as I can make out,
spiritually. She didn't mention him, and I talked at least five minutes
with her."
"Hand me my dressing-sack," said Mrs. March, "and poke those things on
the sofa under the berth. Shut up that wash-stand, and pull the curtain
across that hideous window. Stop! Throw those towels into your berth. Put
my shoes, and your slippers into the shoe-bag on the door. Slip the
brushes into that other bag. Beat the dent out of the sofa cushion that
your head has made. Now!"
"Then--then you will see her?"
"See her!"
Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it, and he returned with
Miss Triscoe in a dreamlike simultaneity. He remembered, as he led the
way into his corridor, to apologize for bringing her down into a basement
room.
"Oh, we're in the basement, too; it was all we could get," she said in
words that ended within the state-room he opened to her. Then he went
back and took her chair and wraps beside her father.
He let the general himself lead the way up to his health, which he was
not slow in reaching, and was not quick in leaving. He reminded March of
the state he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said it had gone from
bad to worse with him. At Weimar he had taken to his bed and merely
escaped from it with his life. Then they had tried Schevleningen for a
week, where, he said in a tone of some injury, they had rather thought
they might find them, the Marches. The air had been poison to him, and
they had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth; but the
doctor in London had thought not, and urged their going home. "All Europe
is damp, you know, and dark as a pocket in winter," he ended.
There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decided that he must wait
to see his wife if he wished to know anything, when the general, who had
been silent, twisted his head towards him, and said without regard to the
context, "It was complicated, at Weimar, by that young man in the most
devilish way. Did my daughter write to Mrs. March about--Well it came to
nothing, after all; and I don't understand how, to this day. I doubt if
they do. It was some sort of quarrel, I suppose. I wasn't consulted in
the matter either way. It appears that parents are not consulted in these
trifling affairs, nowadays." He had married his daughter's mother in open
defiance of her father; but in the glare of his daughter's wilfulness
this fact had whitened into pious obedience. "I dare say I shall be told,
by-and-by, and shall be expected to approve of the result."
A fancy possessed March that by operation of temperamental laws General
Triscoe was no more satisfied with Burnamy's final rejection than with
his acceptance. If the engagement was ever to be renewed, it might be
another thing; but as it stood, March divined a certain favor for the
young man in the general's attitude. But the affair was altogether too
delicate for comment; the general's aristocratic frankness in dealing
with it might have gone farther if his knowledge had been greater; but in
any case March did not see how he could touch it. He could only say, He
had always liked Burnamy, himself.
He had his good qualities, the general owned. He did not profess to
understand the young men of our time; but certainly the fellow had the
instincts of a gentleman. He had nothing to say against him, unless in
that business with that man--what was his name?
"Stoller?" March prompted. "I don't excuse him in that, but I don't blame
him so much, either. If punishment means atonement, he had the
opportunity of making that right very suddenly, and if pardon means
expunction, then I don't see why that offence hasn't been pretty well
wiped out.
"Those things are not so simple as they used to seem," said the general,
with a seriousness beyond his wont in things that did not immediately
concern his own comfort or advantage.