Dan had learned, with a lover's keenness, to read Alice's moods in the
most colourless wording of her notes. She was rather apt to write him
notes, taking back or reaffirming the effect of something that had just
passed between them. Her note were tempered to varying degrees of heat
and cold, so fine that no one else would have felt the difference, but
sensible to him in their subtlest intention.
Perhaps a mere witness of the fact would have been alarmed by a note
which began without an address, except that on the envelope, and ended
its peremptory brevity with the writer's name signed in full. Dan read
calamity in it, and he had all the more trouble to pull himself together
to meet it because he had parted with unusual tenderness from Alice
the night before, after an evening in which it seemed to him that their
ideals had been completely reconciled.
The note came, as her notes were apt to come, while Dan was at
breakfast, which he was rather luxurious about for so young a man, and
he felt formlessly glad afterward that he had drunk his first cup of
coffee before he opened it, for it chilled the second cup, and seemed to
take all character out of the omelet.
He obeyed it, wondering what the doom menaced in it might be, but
knowing that it was doom, and leaving his breakfast half-finished, with
a dull sense of the tragedy of doing so.
He would have liked to ask for Mrs. Pasmer first, and interpose a moment
of her cheerful unreality between himself and his interview with Alice,
but he decided that he had better not do this, and they met at once,
with the width of the room between them. Her look was one that made it
impassable to the simple impulse he usually had to take her in his arms
and kiss her. But as she stood holding out a letter to him, with the
apparent intention that he should come and take it, he traversed the
intervening space and took it.
“Why, it's from mother!” he said joyously, with a glance at the
handwriting.
“Will you please explain it?” said Alice, and Dan began to read it.
It began with a good many excuses for not having written before, and
went on with a pretty expression of interest in Alice's letters and
gratitude for them; Mrs. Mavering assured the girl that she could not
imagine what a pleasure they had been to her. She promised herself
that they should be great friends, and she said that she looked forward
eagerly to the time, now drawing near, when Dan should bring her home to
them. She said she knew Alice would find it dull at the Falls except for
him, but they would all do their best, and she would find the place
very different from what she had seen it in the winter. Alice could make
believe that she was there just for the summer, and Mrs. Mavering hoped
that before the summer was gone she would be so sorry for a sick old
woman that she would not even wish to go with it. This part of the
letter, which gave Dan away so hopelessly, as he felt, was phrased so
touchingly, that he looked up from it with moist eyes to the hard cold
judgment in the eyes of Alice.
“Will you please explain it?” she repeated.
He tried to temporise. “Explain what?”
Alice was prompt to say, “Had you promised your mother to take me home
to live?”
Dan did not answer.
“You promised my mother to go abroad. What else have you promised?” He
continued silent, and she added, “You are a faithless man.” They were
the words of Romola, in the romance, to Tito; she had often admired
them; and they seemed to her equally the measure of Dan's offence.
“Alice--”
“Here are your letters and remembrances, Mr. Mavering.” Dan mechanically
received the packet she had been holding behind her; with a perverse
freak of intelligence he observed that, though much larger now, it was
tied up with the same ribbon which had fastened it when Alice returned
his letters and gifts before. “Good-bye. I wish you every happiness
consistent with your nature.”
She bowed coldly, and was about to leave him, as she had planned; but
she had not arranged that he should be standing in front of the door,
and he was there, with no apparent intention of moving.
“Will you allow me to pass?” she was forced to ask, however, haughtily.
“No!” he retorted, with a violence that surprised him. “I will not let
you pass till you have listened to me--till you tell me why you treat me
so. I won't stand it--I've had enough of this kind of thing.”
It surprised Alice too a little, and after a moment's hesitation she
said, “I will listen to you,” so much more gently than she had spoken
before that Dan relaxed his imperative tone, and began to laugh. “But,”
she added, and her face clouded again, “it will be of no use. My mind is
made up this time. Why should we talk?”
“Why, because mine isn't,” said Dan. “What is the matter, Alice? Do you
think I would force you, or even ask you, to go home with me to
live unless you were entirely willing? It could only be a temporary
arrangement anyway.”
“That isn't the question,” she retorted. “The question is whether you've
promised your mother one thing and me another.”
“Well, I don't know about promising,” said Dan, laughing a little more
uneasily, but still laughing. “As nearly as I can remember, I wasn't
consulted about the matter. Your mother proposed one thing, and my
mother proposed another.”
“And you agreed to both. That is quite enough--quite characteristic!”
Dan flushed, and stopped laughing. “I don't know what you mean by
characteristic. The thing didn't have to be decided at once, and I
didn't suppose it would be difficult for either side to give way, if it
was judged best. I was sure my mother wouldn't insist.”
“It seems very easy for your family to make sacrifices that are not
likely to be required of them.”
“You mustn't criticise my mother!” cried Dan.
“I have not criticised her. You insinuate that we would be too selfish
to give up, if it were for the best.”
“I do nothing of the kind, and unless you are determined to quarrel with
me you wouldn't say so.”
“I don't wish a quarrel; none is necessary,” said Alice coldly.
“You accuse me of being treacherous--”
“I didn't say treacherous!”
“Faithless, then. It's a mere quibble about words. I want you to take
that back.”
“I can't take it back; it's the truth. Aren't you faithless, if you let
us go on thinking that you're going to Europe, and let your mother think
that we're coming home to live after we're married?”
“No! I'm simply leaving the question open!”
“Yes,” said the girl--sadly, “you like to leave questions open. That's
your way.”
“Well, I suppose I do till it's necessary to decide them. It saves the
needless effusion of talk,” said Dan, with a laugh; and then, as people
do in a quarrel, he went back to his angry mood, and said “Besides, I
supposed you would be glad of the chance to make some sacrifice for me.
You're always asking for it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mavering,” said Alice, “for reminding me of it; nothing
is sacred to you, it seems. I can't say that you have ever sought any
opportunities of self-sacrifice.”
“I wasn't allowed time to do so; they were always presented.”
“Thank you again, Mr. Mavering. All this is quite a revelation. I'm glad
to know how you really felt about things that you seemed so eager for.”
“Alice, you know that I would do anything for you!” cried Dan, rueing
his precipitate words.
“Yes; that's what you've repeatedly told me. I used to believe it.”
“And I always believed what you said. You said at the picnic that day
that you thought I would like to live at Ponkwasset Falls if my business
was there--”
“That is not the point!”
“And now you quarrel with me because my mother wishes me to do so.”
Alice merely said: “I don't know why I stand here allowing you to
intimidate me in my father's house. I demand that you shall stand aside
and let me pass.”
“I'll not oblige you to leave the room,” said Dan. “I will go. But if I
go, you will understand that I don't come back.”
“I hope that,” said the girl.
“Very well. Good morning, Miss Pasmer.”
She inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment of his bow, and he
whirled out of the room and down the dim narrow passageway into the arms
of Mrs. Pasmer, who had resisted as long as she could her curiosity to
know what the angry voices of himself and Alice meant.
“O Mr. Mavering, is it you?” she buzzed; and she flung aside one
pretence for another in adding, “Couldn't Alice make you stay to
breakfast?”
Dan felt a rush of tenderness in his heart at the sound of the kind,
humbugging little voice. “No, thank you, Mrs. Pasmer, I couldn't stay,
thank you. I--I thank you very much. I--good-bye, Mrs. Pasmer.” He wrung
her hand, and found his way out of the apartment door, leaving her to
clear up the mystery of his flight and his broken words as she could.
“Alice,” she said, as she entered the room, where the girl had remained,
“what have you been doing now?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, with a remnant of her scorn for Dan qualifying
her tone and manner to her mother. “I've dismissed Mr. Mavering.”
“Then you want him to come to lunch?” asked her mother. “I should advise
him to refuse.”
“I don't think he'd accept,” said Alice. Then, as Mrs. Pasmer stood
in the door, preventing her egress, as Dan had done before, she asked
meekly “Will you let me pass, mamma? My head aches.”
Mrs. Pasmer, whose easy triumphs in so many difficult circumstances kept
her nearly always in good temper, let herself go, at these words, in
vexation very uncommon with her. “Indeed I shall not!” she retorted.
“And you will please sit down here and tell me what you mean by
dismissing Mr. Mavering. I'm tired of your whims and caprices.”
“I can't talk,” began the girl stubbornly.
“Yes, I think you can,” said her mother. “At any rate, I can. Now what
is it all?”
“Perhaps this letter, will explain,” said Alice, continuing to dignify
her enforced submission with a tone of unabated hauteur; and she gave
her mother Mrs. Mavering's letter, which Dan had mechanically restored
to her.
Mrs. Pasmer read it, not only without indignation, but apparently
without displeasure. But, she understood perfectly what the trouble was,
when she looked up and asked, cheerfully, “Well?”
“Well!” repeated Alice, with a frown of astonishment. “Don't you see
that he's promised us one thing and her another, and that he's false to
both?”
“I don't know,” said Mrs. Pasmer, recovering her good-humour in view of
a situation that she felt herself able to cope with. “Of course he has
to temporise, to manage a little. She's an invalid, and of course she's
very exacting. He has to humour her. How do you know he has promised
her? He hasn't promised us.”
“Hasn't promised us?” Alice gasped.
“No. He's simply fallen in with what we've said. It's because he's
so sweet and yielding, and can't bear to refuse. I can understand it
perfectly.”
“Then if he hasn't promised us, he's deceived us all the more
shamefully, for he's made us think he had.”
“He hasn't me,” said Mrs. Pasmer, smiling at the stormy virtue in her
daughter's face. “And what if you should go home awhile with him--for
the summer, say? It couldn't last longer, much; and it wouldn't hurt us
to wait. I suppose he hoped for something of that kind.”
“Oh, it isn't that,” groaned the girl, in a kind of bewilderment. “I
could have gone there with him joyfully, and lived all my days, if he'd
only been frank with me.”
“Oh no, you couldn't,” said her mother, with cosy security. “When it
comes to it, you don't like giving up any more than other people. It's
very hard for you to give up; he sees that--he knows it, and he doesn't
really like to ask any sort of sacrifice from you. He's afraid of you.”
“Don't I know that?” demanded Alice desolately: “I've known it from the
first, and I've felt it all the time. It's all a mistake, and has been.
We never could understand each other. We're too different.”
“That needn't prevent you understanding him. It needn't prevent you from
seeing how really kind and good he is--how faithful and constant he is.”
“Oh, you say that--you praise him--because you like him.”
“Of course I do. And can't you?”
“No. The least grain of deceit--of temporising, you call it--spoils
everything. It's over,” said the girl, rising, with a sigh, from the
chair she had dropped into. “We're best apart; we could only have been
wretched and wicked together.”
“What did you say to him, Alice?” asked her mother, unshaken by her
rhetoric.
“I told him he was a faithless person.”
“Then you were a cruel girl,” cried Mrs. Pasmer, with sudden
indignation; “and if you were not my daughter I could be glad he had
escaped you. I don't know where you got all those silly, romantic
notions of yours about these things. You certainly didn't get them from
me,” she continued, with undeniable truth, “and I don't believe you
get them from your Church, It's just as Miss Anderson said: your Church
makes allowance for human nature, but you make none.”
“I shouldn't go to Julia Anderson for instruction in such matters,” said
the girl, with cold resentment.
“I wish you would go to her for a little commonsense--or somebody,” said
Mrs. Pasmer. “Do you know what talk this will make?”
“I don't care for the talk. It would be worse than talk to marry a man
whom I couldn't trust--who wanted to please me so much that he had to
deceive me, and was too much afraid of me to tell me the truth.”
“You headstrong girl!” said her mother impartially, admiring at the same
time the girl's haughty beauty.
There was an argument in reserve in Mrs. Pasmer's mind which perhaps
none but an American mother would have hesitated to urge; but it is so
wholly our tradition to treat the important business of marriage as a
romantic episode that even she could not bring herself to insist that
her daughter should not throw away a chance so advantageous from
every worldly point of view. She could only ask, “If you break this
engagement, what do you expect to do?”
“The engagement is broken. I shall go into a sisterhood.”
“You will do nothing of the kind, with my consent,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “I
will have no such nonsense. Don't flatter yourself that I will. Even if
I approved of such a thing, I should think it wicked to let you do it.
You're always fancying yourself doing something very devoted, but I've
never seen you ready to give up your own will, or your own comfort
even, in the slightest degree. And Dan Mavering, if he were twice as
temporising and circuitous”--the word came to her from her talk with
him--“would be twice too good for you. I'm going to breakfast.”