The picnic party gathered itself up after the lunch, and while some of
the men, emulous of Mavering's public spirit, helped some of the ladies
to pack the dishes and baskets away under the wagon seats, others threw
a corked bottle into the water, and threw stones at it. A few of the
ladies joined them, but nobody hit the bottle, which was finally left
bobbing about on the tide.
Mrs. Brinkley addressed the defeated group, of whom her husband was one,
as they came up the beach toward the wagons. “Do you think that display
was calculated to inspire the lower middle classes with respectful
envy?”
Her husband made himself spokesman for the rest: “No; but you can't tell
how they'd have felt if we'd hit it.”
They all now climbed to a higher level, grassy and smooth, on the bluff,
from which there was a particular view; and Mavering came, carrying the
wraps of Mrs. Pasmer and Alice, with which he associated his overcoat. A
book fell out of one of the pockets when he threw it down.
Miss Anderson picked the volume up. “Browning! He reads Browning!
Superior young man!”
“Oh, don't say that!” pleaded Mavering.
“Oh, read something aloud!” cried another of the young ladies.
“Isn't Browning rather serious for a picnic?” he asked, with a glance at
Alice; he still had a doubt of the effect of the rheumatic uncle's dance
upon her, and would have been glad to give her some other aesthetic
impression of him.
“Oh no!” said Mrs. Brinkley, “nothing is more appropriate to a picnic
than conundrums; they always have them. Choose a good tough one.”
“I don't know anything tougher than the 'Legend of Pernik'--or
lovelier,” he said, and he began to read, simply, and with a passionate
pleasure in the subtle study, feeling its control over his hearers.
The gentlemen lay smoking about at their ease; at the end a deep
sigh went up from the ladies, cut short by the question which they
immediately fell into.
They could not agree, but they said, one after another: “But you read
beautifully, Mr. Mavering!” “Beautifully!” “Yes, indeed!”
“Well, I'm glad there is one point clear,” he said, putting the book
away, and “I'm afraid you'll think I'm rather sentimental,” he added, in
a low voice to Alice, “carrying poetry around with me.”
“Oh no!” she replied intensely; “I thank you.”
“I thank you,” he retorted, and their eyes met in a deep look.
One of the outer circle of smokers came up with his watch in his hand,
and addressed the company, “Do you know what time it's got to be? It's
four o'clock.”
They all sprang up with a clamour of surprise.
Mrs. Pasmer, under cover of the noise, said, in a low tone, to her
daughter, “Alice, I think you'd better keep a little more with me now.”
“Yes,” said the girl, in a sympathy with her mother in which she did not
always find herself.
But when Mavering, whom their tacit treaty concerned, turned toward
them, and put himself in charge of Alice, Mrs. Pasmer found herself
dispossessed by the charm of his confidence, and relinquished her to
him. They were going to walk to the Castle Rocks by the path that
now loses and now finds itself among the fastnesses of the forest,
stretching to the loftiest outlook on the bay. The savage woodland is
penetrated only by this forgetful path, that passes now and then aver
the bridge of a ravine, and offers to the eye on either hand the mystery
deepening into wilder and weirder tracts of solitude. The party resolved
itself into twos and threes, and these straggled far apart, out of
conversational reach of one another. Mrs. Pasmer found herself walking
and talking with John Munt.
“Mr. Pasmer hasn't much interest in these excursions,” he suggested.
“No; he never goes,” she answered, and, by one of the agile intellectual
processes natural to women, she arrived at the question, “You and the
Maverings are old friends, Mr. Munt?”
“I can't say about the son, but I'm his father's friend, and I suppose
that I'm his friend too. Everybody seems to be so,” suggested Munt.
“Oh Yes,” Mrs. Pasmer assented; “he appears to be a universal
favourite.”
“We used to expect great things of Elbridge Mavering in college. We were
rather more romantic than the Harvard men are nowadays, and we believed
in one another more than they do. Perhaps we idealised one another. But,
anyway, our class thought Mavering could do anything. You know about his
taste for etchings?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of deep appreciation. “What gifted
people!”
“I understand that the son inherits all his father's talent.”
“He sketches delightfully.”
“And Mavering wrote. Why, he was our class poet!” cried Munt,
remembering the fact with surprise and gratification to himself. “He was
a tremendous satirist.”
“Really? And he seems so amiable now.”
“Oh, it was only on paper.”
“Perhaps he still keeps it up--on wall-paper?” suggested Mrs. Pasmer.
Munt laughed at the little joke with a good-will that flattered the
veteran flatterer. “I should like to ask him that some time. Will you
lend it to me?”
“Yes, if such a sayer of good things will deign to borrow--”
“Oh, Mrs. Pasmer!” cried Munt, otherwise speechless.
“And the mother? Do you know Mrs. Mavering?”
“Mrs. Mavering I've never seen.”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a disappointment for which Munt tried to
console her.
“I've never even been at their place. He asked me once a great while
ago; but you know how those things are. I've heard that she used to be
very pretty and very gay. They went about a great deal, to Saratoga and
Cape May and such places--rather out of our beat.”
“And now?”
“And now she's been an invalid for a great many years. Bedridden, I
believe. Paralysis, I think.”
“Yes; Mrs. Saintsbury said something of the kind.”
“Well,” said Munt, anxious to add to the store of knowledge which this
remark let him understand he had not materially increased, “I think Mrs.
Mavering was the origin of the wall-paper--or her money. Mavering was
poor; her father had started it, and Mavering turned in his talent.”
“How very interesting! And is that the reason--its being ancestral--that
Mr. Mavering wishes his son to go into it?”
“Is he going into it?” asked Munt.
“He's come up here to think about it.”
“I should suppose it would be a very good thing,” said Munt.
“What a very remarkable forest!” said Mrs. Pasmer, examining it on
either side, and turning quite round. This gave her, from her place
in the van of the straggling procession, a glimpse of Alice and Dan
Mavering far in the rear.
“Don't you know,” he was saying to the girl at the same moment, “it's
like some of those Dore illustrations to the Inferno, or the Wandering
Jew.”
“Oh yes. I was trying to think what it was made me think I had seen it
before,” she answered. “It must be that. But how strange it is!” she
exclaimed, “that sensation of having been there before--in some place
before where you can't possibly have been.”
“And do you feel it here?” he asked, as vividly interested as if
they two had been the first to notice the phenomenon which has been a
psychical consolation to so many young observers.
“Yes,” she cried.
“I hope I was with you,” he said, with a sudden turn of levity, which
did not displease her, for there seemed to be a tender earnestness
lurking in it. “I couldn't bear to think of your being alone in such a
howling wilderness.”
“Oh, I was with a large picnic,” she retorted gaily. “You might have
been among the rest. I didn't notice.”
“Well, the next time, I wish you'd look closer. I don't like being left
out.” They were so far behind the rest that he devoted himself entirely
to her, and they had grown more and more confidential.
They came to a narrow foot-bridge over a deep gorge. The hand-rail had
fallen away. He sprang forward and gave her his hand for the passage.
“Who helped you over here?” he demanded. “Don't say I didn't.”
“Perhaps it was you,” she murmured, letting him keep the fingers to
which he clung a moment after they had crossed the bridge. Then she took
them away, and said: “But I can't be sure. There were so many others.”
“Other fellows?” he demanded, placing himself before her on the narrow
path, so that she could not get by. “Try to remember, Miss Pasmer. This
is very important. It would break my heart if it was really some one
else.” She stole a glance at his face, but it was smiling, though his
voice was so earnest. “I want to help you over all the bad places, and I
don't want any one else to have a hand in it.”
The voice and the face still belied each other, and between them the
girl chose to feel herself trifled with by the artistic temperament. “If
you'll please step out of the way, Mr. Mavering,” she said severely, “I
shall not need anybody's help just here.”
He instantly moved aside, and they were both silent, till she said, as
she quickened her pace to overtake the others in front, “I don't see how
you can help liking nature in such a place as this.”
“I can't--human nature,” he said. It was mere folly; and an abstract
folly at that; but the face that she held down and away from him flushed
with sweet consciousness as she laughed.
On the cliff beetling above the bay, where she sat to look out over the
sad northern sea, lit with the fishing sail they had seen before, and
the surge washed into the rocky coves far beneath them, he threw himself
at her feet, and made her alone in the company that came and went and
tried this view and that from the different points where the picnic
hostess insisted they should enjoy it. She left the young couple to
themselves, and Mrs. Pasmer seemed to have forgotten that she had bidden
Alice to be a little more with her.
Alice had forgotten it too. She sat listening to Mavering's talk with a
certain fascination, but not so much apparently because the meaning of
the words pleased her as the sound of his voice, the motion of his lips
in speaking, charmed her. At first he was serious, and even melancholy,
as if he were afraid he had offended her; but apparently he soon
believed that he had been forgiven, and began to burlesque his own mood,
but still with a deference and a watchful observance of her changes of
feeling which was delicately flattering in its way. Now and then when
she answered something it was not always to the purpose; he accused her
of not hearing what he said, but she would have it that she did, and
then he tried to test her by proofs and questions. It did not matter
for anything that was spoken or done; speech and action of whatever sort
were mere masks of their young joy in each other, so that when he said,
after he had quoted some lines befitting the scene they looked out on;
“Now was that from Tennyson or from Tupper?” and she answered, “Neither;
it was from Shakespeare,” they joined, in the same happy laugh, and they
laughed now and then without saying anything. Neither this nor that made
them more glad or less; they were in a trance, vulnerable to nothing but
the summons which must come to leave their dream behind, and issue into
the waking world.
In hope or in experience such a moment has come to all, and it is so
pretty to those who recognise it from the outside that no one has the
heart to hurry it away while it can be helped. The affair between Alice
and Mavering had evidently her mother's sanction, and all the rest were
eager to help it on. When the party had started to return, they called
to them, and let them come behind together. At the carriages they had
what Miss Anderson called a new deal, and Alice and Mavering found
themselves together in the rear seat of the last.
The fog began to come in from the sea, and followed them through the
woods. When they emerged upon the highway it wrapped them densely round,
and formed a little world, cosy, intimate, where they two dwelt alone
with these friends of theirs, each of whom they praised for delightful
qualities. The horses beat along through the mist, in which there seemed
no progress, and they lived in a blissful arrest of time. Miss Anderson
called back from the front seat, “My ear buyns; you're talkin' about
me.”
“Which ear?” cried Mavering.
“Oh, the left, of couyse.”
“Then it's merely habit, Julie. You ought to have heard the nice things
we were saying about you,” Alice called.
“I'd like to hear all the nice things you've been saying.”
This seemed the last effect of subtle wit. Mavering broke out in his
laugh, and Alice's laugh rang above it.
Mrs. Pasmer looked involuntarily round from the carriage ahead.
“They seem to be having a good time,” said Mrs. Brinkley at her side.
“Yes; I hope Alice isn't overdoing.”
“I'm afraid you're dreadfully tired,” said Mavering to the girl, in a
low voice, as he lifted her from her place when they reached the hotel
through the provisional darkness, and found that after all it was only
dinner-time.
“Oh no. I feel as if the picnic were just beginning.”
“Then you will come to-night?”
“I will see what mamma says.”
“Shall I ask her?”
“Oh, perhaps not,” said the girl, repressing his ardour, but not
severely.