“He's up in his room, resting from the effort.” She laughed nervously,
and her father made no comment. He took off his articles, and then went
creaking upstairs to Dan's room. But at the door he paused, with his
hand on the knob, and turned away to his own room without entering.
Dan must have heard him; in a few minutes he came to him.
“Well, Dan,” said his father, shaking hands.
“I suppose Eunice has told you? Well, I want to tell you why it
happened.”
There was something in his father that always steadied Dan and kept him
to the point. He now put the whole case fairly and squarely, and his
candour and openness seemed to him to react and characterise his conduct
throughout. He did not realise that this was not so till his father
said at the close, with mild justice, “You were to blame for letting the
thing run on so at loose ends.”
“Yes, of course,” said Dan, seeing that he was. “But there was no
intention of deceiving any one of bad faith--”
“Of course not.”
“I thought it could be easily arranged whenever it came to the point.”
“If you'd been older, you wouldn't have thought that. You had women to
deal with on both sides. But if it's all over, I'm not sorry. I always
admired Miss Pasmer, but I've been more and more afraid you were not
suited to each other. Your mother doesn't know you're here?”
“No, sir, I suppose not. Do you think it will distress her?”
“How did your sisters take it?”
Dan gave a rueful laugh. “It seemed to be rather a popular move with
them.”
“I will see your mother first,” said the father.
He left them when they went into the library after supper, and a little
later Dan and Eunice left Boardman in charge of Minnie there.
He looked after their unannounced withdrawal in comic consciousness.
“It's no use pretending that I'm not a pretty large plurality here,” he
said to Minnie.
“Oh, I'm so glad you came!” she cried, with a kindness which was as real
as if it had been more sincere.
“Do you think mother will feel it much?” asked Dan anxiously, as he went
upstairs with Eunice.
“Well, she'll hate to lose a correspondent--such a regular one,” said
Eunice, and the affair being so far beyond any other comment, she
laughed the rest of the way to their mother's room.
The whole family had in some degree that foible which affects people who
lead isolated lives; they come to think that they are the only people
who have their virtues; they exaggerate these, and they conceive a
kindness even for the qualities which are not their virtues. Mrs.
Mavering's life was secluded again from the family seclusion, and their
peculiarities were intensified in her. Besides, she had some very
marked peculiarities of her own, and these were also intensified by
the solitude to which she was necessarily left so much. She meditated a
great deal upon the character of her children, and she liked to analyse
and censure it both in her own mind and openly in their presence. She
was very trenchant and definite in these estimates of them; she liked
to ticket them, and then ticket them anew. She explored their ancestral
history on both sides for the origin of their traits, and there were
times when she reduced them in formula to mere congeries of inherited
characteristics. If Eunice was self-willed and despotic, she was just
like her grandmother Mavering; if Minnie was all sentiment and gentle
stubbornness, it was because two aunts of hers, one on either side,
were exactly so; if Dan loved pleasure and beauty, and was sinuous and
uncertain in so many ways, and yet was so kind and faithful and good, as
well as shilly-shallying and undecided, it was because her mother, and
her mother's father, had these qualities in the same combination.
When she took her children to pieces before their faces, she was
sharp and admonitory enough with them. She warned them to what their
characters would bring them to if they did not look out; but perhaps
because she beheld them so hopelessly the present effect of the
accumulated tendencies of the family past, she was tender and forgiving
to their actions. The mother came in there, and superseded the
student of heredity: she found excuse for them in the perversity of
circumstance, in the peculiar hardship of the case, in the malignant
misbehaviour of others.
As Dan entered, with the precedence his father and sister yielded him as
the principal actor in the scene which must follow, she lifted herself
vigorously in bed, and propped herself on the elbow of one arm while she
stretched the other towards him.
“I'm glad of it, Dan!” she called, at the moment he opened the door,
and as he came toward her she continued, with the amazing velocity of
utterance peculiar to nervous sufferers of her sex: “I know all about
it, and I don't blame you a bit! And I don't blame her! Poor helpless
young things! But it's a perfect mercy it's all over; it's the greatest
deliverance I ever heard of! You'd have been eaten up alive. I saw it,
and I knew it from the very first moment, and I've lived in fear and
trembling for you. You could have got on well enough if you'd been left
to yourselves, but that you couldn't have been nor hope to be as long as
you breathed, from the meddling and the machinations and the malice of
that unscrupulous and unconscionable old Cat!”
By the time Mrs. Mavering had hissed out the last word she had her arm
round her boy's neck and was clutching him, safe and sound after his
peril, to her breast; and between her kissing and crying she repeated
her accusals and denunciations with violent volubility.
Dan could not have replied to them in that effusion of gratitude and
tenderness he felt for his mother's partisanship; and when she went on
in almost the very terms of his self-defence, and told him that he had
done as he had because it was easy for him to yield, and he could not
imagine a Cat who would put her daughter up to entrapping him into a
promise that she knew must break his mother's heart, he found her so
right on the main point that he could not help some question of Mrs.
Pasmer in his soul. Could she really have been at the bottom of it all?
She was very sly, and she might be very false, and it was certainly she
who had first proposed their going abroad together. It looked as if it
might be as his mother said, and at any rate it was no time to dispute
her, and he did not say a word in behalf of Mrs. Pasmer, whom she
continued to rend in a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds till she
had to stop breathless.
“Yes! it's quite as I expected! She did everything she could to trap you
into it. She fairly flung that poor girl at you. She laid her plans
so that you couldn't say no--she understood your character from the
start!--and then, when it came out by accident, and she saw that she
had older heads to deal with, and you were not going to be quite at her
mercy, she dropped the mask in an instant, and made Alice break with
you. Oh, I could see through her from the beginning! And the next time,
Dan, I advise you, as you never suspect anybody yourself, to consult
with somebody who doesn't take people for what they seem, and not to let
yourself be flattered out of your sensor, even if you see your father
is.”
Mrs. Mavering dropped back on her pillow, and her husband smiled
patiently at their daughter.
Dan saw his patient smile and understood it; and the injustice which his
father bore made him finally unwilling to let another remain under it.
Hard as it was to oppose his mother in anything when she was praising
him so sweetly and comforting him in the moment of his need, he pulled
himself together to protest: “No, no, mother! I don't think Mrs. Pasmer
was to blame; I don't believe she had anything to do with it. She's
always stood my friend--”
“Oh, I've no doubt she's made you think so, Dan,” said his mother, with
unabated fondness for him; “and you think so because you're so simple
and good, and never suspect evil of any one. It's this hideous optimism
that's killing everything--”
A certain note in the invalid's falling voice seemed to warn her hearers
of an impending change that could do no one good. Eunice rose hastily
and interrupted: “Mother, Mr. Boardman's here. He came up with Dan. May
Minnie come in with him?”
Mrs. Mavering shot a glance of inquiry at Dan, and then let a swift
inspection range over all the details of the room, and finally
concentrate itself on the silk and lace of her bed, over which she
passed a smoothing hand. “Mr. Boardman?” she cried, with instantly
recovered amiability. “Of course she may!”