They had one impulse to escape from the place, and from the sympathy and
congratulation. In the dressing-room she declared again that she was all
right. "How beautifully you waltz, Mrs. March!" she said, and she laughed
again, and would not agree with her that she had been ridiculous. "But
I'm glad those American girls didn't see me. And I can't be too thankful
papa didn't come!"
Mrs. March's heart sank at the thought of what General Triscoe would
think of her. "You must tell him I did it. I can never lift up my head!"
"No, I shall not. No one did it," said the girl, magnanimously. She
looked down sidelong at her draperies. "I was so afraid I had torn my
dress! I certainly heard something rip."
It was one of the skirts of Burnamy's coat, which he had caught into his
hand and held in place till he could escape to the men's dressing-room,
where he had it pinned up so skillfully that the damage was not suspected
by the ladies. He had banged his knee abominably too; but they did not
suspect that either, as he limped home on the air beside them, first to
Miss Triscoe's pension, and then to Mrs. March's hotel.
It was quite eleven o'clock, which at Carlsbad is as late as three in the
morning anywhere else, when she let herself into her room. She decided
not to tell her husband, then; and even at breakfast, which they had at
the Posthof, she had not got to her confession, though she had told him
everything else about the ball, when the young officer with whom she had
danced passed between the tables near her. He caught her eye and bowed
with a smile of so much meaning that March asked, "Who's your pretty
young friend?"
"Oh, that!" she answered carelessly. "That was one of the officers at the
ball," and she laughed.
"You seem to be in the joke, too," he said. "What is it?"
"Oh, something. I'll tell you some time. Or perhaps you'll find out."
"I'm afraid you won't let me wait."
"No, I won't," and now she told him. She had expected teasing, ridicule,
sarcasm, anything but the psychological interest mixed with a sort of
retrospective tenderness which he showed. "I wish I could have seen you;
I always thought you danced well." He added: "It seems that you need a
chaperon too."
The next morning, after March and General Triscoe had started off upon
one of the hill climbs, the young people made her go with them for a walk
up the Tepl, as far as the cafe of the Freundschaftsaal. In the grounds
an artist in silhouettes was cutting out the likenesses of people who
supposed themselves to have profiles, and they begged Mrs. March to sit
for hers. It was so good that she insisted on Miss Triscoe's sitting in
turn, and then Burnamy. Then he had the inspiration to propose that they
should all three sit together, and it appeared that such a group was
within the scope of the silhouettist's art; he posed them in his little
bower, and while he was mounting the picture they took turns, at five
kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes played by his Edison
phonograph.
Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moral fibre; but she
tried to draw the line at letting Burnamy keep the group. "Why not?" he
pleaded.
"You oughtn't to ask," she returned. "You've no business to have Miss
Triscoe's picture, if you must know."
"But you're there to chaperon us!" he persisted.
He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she said, "You need a
chaperon who doesn't lose her head, in a silhouette." But it seemed
useless to hold out after that, and she heard herself asking, "Shall we
let him keep it, Miss Triscoe?"
Burnamy went off to his work with Stoller, carrying the silhouette with
him, and she kept on with Miss Triscoe to her hotel. In turning from the
gate after she parted with the girl she found herself confronted with
Mrs. Adding and Rose. The ladies exclaimed at each other in an
astonishment from which they had to recover before they could begin to
talk, but from the first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Adding had
something to say. The more freely to say it she asked Mrs. March into her
hotel, which was in the same street with the pension of the Triscoes, and
she let her boy go off about the exploration of Carlsbad; he promised to
be back in an hour.
"Well, now what scrape are you in?" March asked when his wife came home,
and began to put off her things, with signs of excitement which he could
not fail to note. He was lying down after a long tramp, and he seemed
very comfortable.
His question suggested something of anterior import, and she told him
about the silhouettes, and the advantage the young people had taken of
their power over her through their knowledge of her foolish behavior at
the ball.
He said, lazily: "They seem to be working you for all you're worth. Is
that it?"
"No; there is something worse. Something's happened which throws all that
quite in the shade. Mrs. Adding is here."
"Mrs. Adding?" he repeated, with a dimness for names which she would not
allow was growing on him.
"Don't be stupid, dear! Mrs. Adding, who sat opposite Mr. Kenby on the
Norumbia. The mother of the nice boy."
"Oh, yes! Well, that's good!"
"No, it isn't! Don't say such a thing--till you know!" she cried, with a
certain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomed seriousness in the
fact. He sat up as if better to confront the mystery. "I have been at her
hotel, and she has been telling me that she's just come from Berlin, and
that Mr. Kenby's been there, and--Now I won't have you making a joke of
it, or breaking out about it, as if it were not a thing to be looked for;
though of course with the others on our hands you're not to blame for not
thinking of it. But you can see yourself that she's young and
good-looking. She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were not
for him, I don't believe she would hesitate--"
"For heaven's sake, what are you driving at?" March broke in, and she
answered him as vehemently:
"He's asked her to marry him!"
"Kenby? Mrs. Adding?"
"Yes!"
"Well, now, Isabel, this won't do! They ought to be ashamed of
themselves. With that morbid, sensitive boy! It's shocking--"
"Will you listen? Or do you want me to stop?" He arrested himself at her
threat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence time
to sink in, "She refused him, of course!"
"Oh, all right, then!"
"You take it in such a way that I've a great mind not to tell you
anything more about it."
"I know you have," he said, stretching himself out again; "but you'll do
it, all the same. You'd have been awfully disappointed if I had been calm
and collected."
"She refused him," she began again, "although she respects him, because
she feels that she ought to devote herself to her son. Of course she's
very young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a man
twice her age, and she's not thirty-five yet. I don't think she ever
cared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something about
him."
"I never heard of him. I--"
Mrs. March made a "tchck!" that would have recalled the most consequent
of men from the most logical and coherent interpretation to the true
intent of her words. He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely:
"Well, I won't do it. If she's refused him, that's the end of it; she
needn't know anything about him, and she has no right to."
"Now I think differently," said Mrs. March, with an inductive air. "Of
course she has to know about him, now." She stopped, and March turned his
head and looked expectantly at her. "He said he would not consider her
answer final, but would hope to see her again and--She's afraid he may
follow her--What are you looking at me so for?"
"Is he coming here?"
"Am I to blame if he is? He said he was going to write to her."
March burst into a laugh. "Well, they haven't been beating about the
bush! When I think how Miss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from the
first moment she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she was
running from him, and he imagines that he has been boldly following her,
without the least hope from her, I can't help admiring the simple
directness of these elders."
"And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what will you say?" she cut in
eagerly.
"I'll say I don't like the subject. What am I in Carlsbad for? I came for
the cure, and I'm spending time and money on it. I might as well go and
take my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to listen to
Kenby."
"I know it's bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people,"
said Mrs. March. "I don't believe he'll want to talk with you; but if--"
"Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel? I'm not going to have them round in my
bread-trough!"
"She isn't. She's at one of the hotels on the hill."
"Very well, let her stay there, then. They can manage their love-affairs
in their own way. The only one I care the least for is the boy."
"Yes, it is forlorn for him. But he likes Mr. Kenby, and--No, it's
horrid, and you can't make it anything else!"
"Well, I'm not trying to." He turned his face away. "I must get my nap,
now." After she thought he must have fallen asleep, he said, "The first
thing you know, those old Eltwins will be coming round and telling us
that they're going to get divorced." Then he really slept.