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?"