“He’s so good—there’s no fault to be found with him. Otherwise she’d
have thrown it all up. It has dragged on since she was eighteen: she
became engaged to him before he went abroad to study. It was one of
those very young and perfectly needless blunders that parents in America
might make so much less possible than they do. The thing is to insist on
one’s daughter waiting, on the engagement’s being long; and then, after
you’ve got that started, to take it on every occasion as little seriously
as possible—to make it die out. You can easily tire it to death,” Mrs.
Nettlepoint competently stated. “However,” she concluded, “Mr.
Porterfield has taken this one seriously for some years. He has done his
part to keep it alive. She says he adores her.”
“His part? Surely his part would have been to marry her by this time.”
“He has really no money.” My friend was even more confidently able to
report it than I had been.
“He ought to have got some, in seven years,” I audibly reflected.
“So I think she thinks. There are some sorts of helplessness that are
contemptible. However, a small difference has taken place. That’s why
he won’t wait any longer. His mother has come out, she has something—a
little—and she’s able to assist him. She’ll live with them and bear some
of the expenses, and after her death the son will have what there is.”
“How old is she?” I cynically asked.
“I haven’t the least idea. But it doesn’t, on his part, sound very
heroic—or very inspiring for our friend here. He hasn’t been to America
since he first went out.”
“That’s an odd way of adoring her,” I observed.
“I made that objection mentally, but I didn’t express it to her. She met
it indeed a little by telling me that he had had other chances to marry.”
“That surprises me,” I remarked. “But did she say,” I asked, “that _she_
had had?”
“No, and that’s one of the things I thought nice in her; for she must
have had. She didn’t try to make out that he had spoiled her life. She
has three other sisters and there’s very little money at home. She has
tried to make money; she has written little things and painted little
things—and dreadful little things they must have been; too bad to think
of. Her father has had a long illness and has lost his place—he was in
receipt of a salary in connexion with some waterworks—and one of her
sisters has lately become a widow, with children and without means. And
so as in fact she never has married any one else, whatever opportunities
she may have encountered, she appears to have just made up her mind to go
out to Mr. Porterfield as the least of her evils. But it isn’t very
amusing.”
“Well,” I judged after all, “that only makes her doing it the more
honourable. She’ll go through with it, whatever it costs, rather than
disappoint him after he has waited so long. It’s true,” I continued,
“that when a woman acts from a sense of honour—!”
“Well, when she does?” said Mrs. Nettlepoint, for I hung back
perceptibly.
“It’s often so extravagant and unnatural a proceeding as to entail heavy
costs on some one.”
“You’re very impertinent. We all have to pay for each other all the
while and for each other’s virtues as well as vices.”
“That’s precisely why I shall be sorry for Mr. Porterfield when she steps
off the ship with her little bill. I mean with her teeth clenched.”
“Her teeth are not in the least clenched. She’s quite at her ease
now”—Mrs. Nettlepoint could answer for that.
“Well, we must try and keep her so,” I said.
“You must take care that Jasper neglects nothing.” I scarce know what
reflexions this innocent pleasantry of mine provoked on the good lady’s
part; the upshot of them at all events was to make her say: “Well, I
never asked her to come; I’m very glad of that. It’s all their own
doing.”
“‘Their’ own—you mean Jasper’s and hers?”
“No indeed. I mean her mother’s and Mrs. Allen’s; the girl’s too of
course. They put themselves on us by main force.”
“Oh yes, I can testify to that. Therefore I’m glad too. We should have
missed it, I think.”
“How seriously you take it!” Mrs. Nettlepoint amusedly cried.
“Ah wait a few days!”—and I got up to leave her.