They were going to have some theatricals at one of the cottages, and the
lady at whose house they were to be given made haste to invite all the
picnic party before it dispersed. Mrs. Pasmer accepted with a mental
reservation, meaning to send an excuse later if she chose; and before
she decided the point she kept her husband from going after dinner into
the reading-room, where he spent nearly all his time over a paper and a
cigar, or in sitting absolutely silent and unoccupied, and made him go
to their own room with her.
“There is something that I must speak to you about,” she said, closing
the door, “and you must decide for yourself whether you wish to let it
go any further.”
“What go any further?” asked Mr. Pasmer, sitting down and putting his
hand to the pocket that held his cigar-case with the same series of
motions.
“No, don't smoke,” she said, staying his hand impatiently. “I want you
to think.”
“How can I think if I don't smoke?”
“Very well; smoke, then. Do you want this affair with young Mavering to
go any farther?”
“Oh!” said Pasmer, “I thought you had been looking after that.” He had
in fact relegated that to the company of the great questions exterior to
his personal comfort which she always decided.
“I have been looking after it, but now the time has come when you must,
as a father, take some interest in it.”
Pasmer's noble mask of a face, from the point of his full white beard to
his fine forehead, crossed by his impressive black eyebrows, expressed
all the dignified concern which a father ought to feel in such an
affair; but what he was really feeling was a grave reluctance to have to
intervene in any way. “What do you want me to say to him?” he asked.
“Why, I don't know that he's going to ask you anything. I don't know
whether he's said anything to Alice yet,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with some
exasperation.
Her husband was silent, but his silence insinuated a degree of wonder
that she should approach him prematurely on such a point.
“They have been thrown together all day, and there is no use to conceal
from ourselves that they are very much taken with each other?”
“I thought,” Pasmer said, “that you said that from the beginning. Didn't
you want them to be taken with each other?”
“That is what you are to decide.”
Pasmer silently refused to assume the responsibility.
“Well?” demanded his wife, after waiting for him to speak.
“Well what?”
“What do you decide?”
“What is the use of deciding a thing when it is all over?”
“It isn't over at all. It can be broken off at any moment.”
“Well, break it off, then, if you like.”
Mrs. Pasmer resumed the responsibility with a sigh. She felt the burden,
the penalty, of power, after having so long enjoyed its sweets, and she
would willingly have abdicated the sovereignty which she had spent her
whole married life in establishing. But there was no one to take it up.
“No, I shall not break it off,” she said resentfully; “I shall let it go
on.” Then seeing that her husband was not shaken by her threat from his
long-confirmed subjection, she added: “It isn't an ideal affair, but I
think it will be a very good thing for Alice. He is not what I expected,
but he is thoroughly nice, and I should think his family was nice. I've
been talking with Mr. Munt about them to-day, and he confirms all
that Etta Saintsbury said. I don't think there can be any doubt of his
intentions in coming here. He isn't a particularly artless young man,
but he's been sufficiently frank about Alice since he's been here.” Her
husband smoked on. “His father seems to have taken up the business from
the artistic side, and Mr. Mavering won't be expected to enter into
the commercial part at once. If it wasn't for Alice, I don't believe he
would think of the business for a moment; he would study law. Of course
it's a little embarrassing to have her engaged at once before she's seen
anything of society here, but perhaps it's all for the best, after all:
the main thing is that she should be satisfied, and I can see that
she's only too much so. Yes, she's very much taken with him; and I don't
wonder. He is charming.”
It was not the first time that Mrs. Pasmer had reasoned in this round;
but the utterance of her thoughts seemed to throw a new light on them,
and she took a courage from them that they did not always impart. She
arrived at the final opinion expressed, with a throb of tenderness for
the young fellow whom she believed eager to take her daughter from her,
and now for the first time she experienced a desolation in the prospect,
as if it were an accomplished fact. She was morally a bundle of
finesses, but at the bottom of her heart her daughter was all the world
to her. She had made the girl her idol, and if, like some other heathen,
she had not always used her idol with the greatest deference, if she
had often expected the impossible from it, and made it pay for her
disappointment, still she had never swerved from her worship of it. She
suddenly asked herself, What if this young fellow, so charming and so
good, should so wholly monopolise her child that she should no longer
have any share in her? What if Alice, who had so long formed her first
care and chief object in life, should contentedly lose herself in the
love and care of another, and both should ignore her right to her? She
answered herself with a pang that this might happen with any one Alice
married, and that it would be no worse, at the worst, with Dan Mavering
than with another, while her husband remained impartially silent. Always
keeping within the lines to which his wife's supremacy had driven him,
he felt safe there, and was not to be easily coaxed out of them.
Mrs. Pasmer rose and left him, with his perfect acquiescence, and went
into her daughter's room. She found Alice there, with a pretty evening
dress laid out on her bed. Mrs. Pasmer was very fond of that dress, and
at the thought of Alice in it her spirits rose again.
“Oh, are you going, Alice?”
“Why, yes,” answered the girl. “Didn't you accept?”
“Why, yes,” Mrs. Pasmer admitted. “But aren't you tired?”
“Oh, not in the least. I feel as fresh as I did this morning. Don't you
want me to go?”
“Oh yes, certainly, I want you to go--if you think you'll enjoy it.”
“Enjoy it? Why, why shouldn't I enjoy it, mamma!”
“What are you thinking about? It's going to be the greatest kind of
fun.”
“But do you think you ought to look at everything simply as fun?” asked
the mother, with unwonted didacticism.
“How everything? What are you thinking about, mamma?”
“Oh, nothing! I'm so glad you're going to wear that dress.”
“Why, of course! It's my best. But what are you driving at, mamma?”
Mrs. Pasmer was really seeking in her daughter that comfort of a
distinct volition which she had failed to find in her husband, and she
wished to assure herself of it more and more, that she might share with
some one the responsibility which he had refused any part in.
“Nothing. But I'm glad you wish so much to go.” The girl dropped her
hands and stared. “You must have enjoyed yourself to-day,” she added, as
if that were an explanation.
“Of course I enjoyed myself! But what has that to do with my wanting to
go to-night?”
“Oh, nothing. But I hope, Alice, that there is one thing you have looked
fully in the face.”
“What thing?” faltered the girl, and now showed herself unable to
confront it by dropping her eyes.
“Well, whatever you may have heard or seen, nobody else is in doubt
about it. What do you suppose has brought Mr. Mavering here!”
“I don't know.” The denial not only confessed that she did know, but it
informed her mother that all was as yet tacit between the young people.
“Very well, then, I know,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “and there is one thing
that you must know before long, Alice.”
“What?” she asked faintly.
“Your own mind,” said her mother. “I don't ask you what it is, and I
shall wait till you tell me. Of course I shouldn't have let him stay
here if I had objected--”
“O mamma!” murmured the girl, dyed with shame to have the facts so
boldly touched, but not, probably, too deeply displeased.
“Yes. And I know that he would never have thought of going into that
business if he had not expected--hoped--”
“Mamma!”
“And you ought to consider--”
“Oh, don't! don't! don't!” implored the girl.
“That's all,” said her mother, turning from Alice, who had hidden her
face in her hands, to inspect the costume on the bed. She lifted one
piece of it after another, turned it over, looked at it, and laid it
down. “You can never get such a dress in this country.”
She went out of the room, as the girl dropped her face in the pillow.
An hour later they met equipped for the evening's pleasure. To the keen
glance that her mother gave her, the daughter's eyes had the brightness
of eyes that have been weeping, but they were also bright with that
knowledge of her own mind which Mrs. Pasmer had desired for her. She
met her mother's glance fearlessly, even proudly, and she carried her
stylish costume with a splendour to which only occasions could stimulate
her. They dramatised a perfect unconsciousness to each other, but Mrs.
Pasmer was by no means satisfied with the decision which she had read
in her daughter's looks. Somehow it did not relieve her of the
responsibility, and it did not change the nature of the case. It was
gratifying, of course, to see Alice the object of a passion so sincere
and so ardent; so far the triumph was complete, and there was really
nothing objectionable in the young man and his circumstances, though
there was nothing very distinguished. But the affair was altogether
different from anything that Mrs. Pasmer had imagined. She had supposed
and intended that Alice should meet some one in Boston, and go through
a course of society before reaching any decisive step. There was to be a
whole season in which to look the ground carefully over, and the ground
was to be all within certain well-ascertained and guarded precincts. But
this that had happened was outside of these precincts, of at least on
their mere outskirts. Class Day, of course, was all right; and she could
not say that the summer colony at Campobello was not thoroughly and
essentially Boston; and yet she felt that certain influences, certain
sanctions, were absent. To tell the truth, she would not have cared for
the feelings of Mavering's family in regard to the matter, except as
they might afterward concern Alice, and the time had not come when she
could recognise their existence in regard to the affair; and yet she
could have wished that even as it was his family could have seen and
approved it from the start. It would have been more regular.
With Alice it was a simpler matter, and of course deeper. For her it
was only a question of himself and herself; no one else existed to the
sublime egotism of her love. She did not call it by that name; she did
not permit it to assert itself by any name; it was a mere formless joy
in her soul, a trustful and blissful expectance, which she now no more
believed he could disappoint than that she could die within that hour.
All the rebellion that she had sometimes felt at the anomalous attitude
exacted of her sex in regard to such matters was gone. She no longer
thought it strange that a girl should be expected to ignore the
admiration of a young man till he explicitly declared it, and should
then be fully possessed of all the materials of a decision on the most
momentous question in life; for she knew that this state of ignorance
could never really exist; she had known from the first moment that he
had thought her beautiful. To-night she was radiant for him. Her eyes
shone with the look in which they should meet and give themselves to
each other before they spoke--the look in which they had met already, in
which they had lived that whole day.