The parting scene with Alice persisted in Mavering's thought far on the
way to Ponkwasset Falls. He now succeeded in saying everything to her:
how deeply he felt her giving him her photograph to cheer him in
his separation from her; how much he appreciated her forethought in
providing him with some answer when his mother and sisters should ask
him about her looks. He took out the picture, and pretended to the other
passengers to be looking very closely at it, and so managed to kiss it.
He told her that now he understood what love really was; how powerful;
how it did conquer everything; that it had changed him and made him
already a better man. He made her refuse all merit in the work.
When he began to formulate the facts for communication to his family,
love did not seem so potent; he found himself ashamed of his passion,
or at least unwilling to let it be its own excuse even; he had a wish
to give it almost any other appearance. Until he came in sight of the
station and the Works, it had not seemed possible for any one to object
to Alice. He had been going home as a matter of form to receive the
adhesion of his family. But now he was forced to see that she might be
considered critically, even reluctantly. This would only be because
his family did not understand how perfect Alice was; but they might not
understand.
With his father there would be no difficulty. His father had seen Alice
and admired her; he would be all right. Dan found himself hoping this
rather anxiously, as if from the instinctive need of his father's
support with his mother and sisters. He stopped at the Works when he
left the train, and found his father in his private office beyond the
book-keeper's picket-fence, which he penetrated, with a nod to the
accountant.
“Hello, Dan!” said his father, looking up; and “Hello, father!” said
Dan. Being alone, the father and son not only shook hands, but kissed
each other, as they used to do in meeting after an absence when Dan was
younger.
He had closed his father's door with his left hand in giving his right,
and now he said at once, “Father, I've come home to tell you that I'm
engaged to be married.”
Dan had prearranged his father's behaviour at this announcement, but
he now perceived that he would have to modify the scene if it were to
represent the facts. His father did not brighten all over and demand,
“Miss Pasmer, of course?” he contrived to hide whatever start the news
had given him, and was some time in asking, with his soft lisp, “Isn't
that rather sudden, Dan?”
“Well, not for me,” said Dan, laughing uneasily. “It's--you know her,
father--Miss Pasmer.”
“Oh yes,” said his father, certainly not with displeasure, and yet not
with enthusiasm.
“I've had ever since Class Day to think it over, and it--came to a
climax yesterday.”
“And then you stopped thinking,” said his father--to gain time, it
appeared to Dan.
“Yes, sir,” said Dan. “I haven't thought since.”
“Well,” said his father, with an amusement which was not unfriendly.
He added, after a moment, “But I thought that had been broken off,” and
Dan's instinct penetrated to the lurking fact that his father must have
talked the rupture over with his mother, and not wholly regretted it.
“There was a kind of--hitch at one time,” he admitted; “but it's all
right now.”
“Well, well,” said his father, “this is great news--great news,” and he
seemed to be shaping himself to the new posture of affairs, while giving
it a conditional recognition. “She's a beautiful creature.”
“Isn't she?” cried Dan, with a little break in his voice, for he had
found his father's manner rather trying. “And she's good too. I assure
you that she is--she is simply perfect every way.”
“Well,” said the elder Mavering, rising and pulling down the rolling top
of his desk, “I'm glad to hear it, for your sake, Dan. Have you been up
at the house yet?”
“No; I'm just off the train.”
“How is her mother--how is Mrs. Pasmer? All well?”
“Yes, sir,” said Dan; “they're all very well. You don't know Mr. Pasmer,
I believe, sir, do you?”
“Not since college. What sort of person is he?”
“He's very refined and quiet. Very handsome. Very courteous. Very nice
indeed.”
“Ah! that's good,” said Elbridge Mavering, with the effect of not having
been very attentive to his son's answer.
They walked up the long slope of the hillside on which the house stood,
overlooking the valley where the Works were, and fronting the plateau
across the river where the village of operatives' houses was scattered.
The paling light of what had been a very red sunset flushed them, and
brought out the picturesqueness which the architect, who designed
them for a particular effect in the view from the owner's mansion, had
intended.
A good carriage road followed the easiest line of ascent towards this
edifice, and reached a gateway. Within it began to describe a curve
bordered with asphalted footways to the broad verandah of the house, and
then descended again to the gate. The grounds enclosed were planted with
deciduous shrubs, which had now mostly dropped their leaves, and clumps
of firs darkening in the evening light with the gleam of some garden
statues shivering about the lawn next the house. The breeze grew colder
and stiffer as the father and son mounted toward the mansion which Dan
used to believe was like a chateau, with its Mansard-roof and dormer
windows and chimneys. It now blocked its space sharply out of the thin
pink of the western sky, and its lights sparkled with a wintry keenness
which had often thrilled Dan when he climbed the hill from the station
in former homecomings. Their brilliancy gave him a strange sinking
of the heart for no reason. He and his father had kept up a sort of
desultory talk about Alice, and he could not have said that his
father had seemed indifferent; he had touched the affair only too
acquiescently; it was painfully like everything else. When they came in
full sight of the house, Dan left the subject, as he realised presently,
from a reasonless fear of being overheard.
“It seems much later here, sir, than it does in Boston,” he said,
glancing round at the maples, which stood ragged, with half their leaves
blown from them.
“Yes; we're in the hills, and we're further north,” answered his father.
“There's Minnie.”
Dan had seen his sister on the verandah, pausing at sight of him, and
puzzled to make out who was with her father. He had an impulse to hail
her with a shout, but he could not. In his last walk with her he had
told her that he should never marry, and they had planned to live
together. It was a joke; but now he felt as if he had come to rob her of
something, and he walked soberly on with his father.
“Why, Dan, you good-for-nothing fellow!” she called out when he came
near enough to be unmistakable, and ran down the steps to kiss him.
“What in the world are you doing here? When did you come? Why didn't you
hollo, instead of letting me stand here guessing? You're not sick, are
you?”
The father got himself indoors unnoticed in the excitement of the
brother's arrival. This would have been the best moment for Dan to tell
his sister of his engagement; he knew it, but he parried her curiosity
about his coming; and then his sister Eunice came out, and he could not
speak. They all went together into the house flaming with naphtha gas,
and with the steam heat already on, and Dan said he would take his bag
to his room, and then come down again. He knew that he had left them to
think that there was something very mysterious in his coming, and while
he washed away the grime of his journey he was planning how to appear
perfectly natural when he should get back to his sisters. He recollected
that he had not asked either them or his father how his mother was, but
it was certainly not because his mind was not full of her. Alice now
seemed very remote from him, further even than his gun, or his boyish
collection of moths and butterflies, on which his eye fell in roving
about his room. For a bitter instant it seemed to him as if they were
all alike toys, and in a sudden despair he asked himself what had become
of his happiness. It was scarcely half a day since he had parted in
transport from Alice.
He made pretexts to keep from returning at once to his sisters, and it
was nearly half an hour before he went down to them. By that time his
father was with them in the library, and they were waiting tea for him.