In Boston the rumour of Dan's broken engagement was followed promptly
by a denial of it; both the rumour and the denial were apparently
authoritative; but it gives the effect of a little greater sagacity to
distrust rumours of all kinds, and most people went to bed, after the
teas and dinners and receptions and clubs at which the fact was first
debated, in the self-persuasion that it was not so. The next day they
found the rumour still persistent; the denial was still in the air
too, but it seemed weaker; at the end of the third day it had become a
question as to which broke the engagement, and why; by the end of a week
it was known that Alice had broken the engagement, but the reason could
not be ascertained.
This was not for want of asking, more or less direct. Pasmer, of course,
went and came at his club with perfect immunity. Men are quite as
curious as women, but they set business bounds to their curiosity, and
do not dream of passing these. With women who have no business of their
own, and can not quell themselves with the reflection that this thing
or that is not their affair, there is no question so intimate that they
will not put it to some other woman; perhaps it is not so intimate, or
perhaps it will not seem so; at any rate, they chance it. Mrs. Pasmer
was given every opportunity to explain the facts to the ladies whom
she met, and if she was much afflicted by Alice's behaviour, she had a
measure of consolation in using her skill to baffle the research of her
acquaintance. After each encounter of the kind she had the pleasure of
reflecting that absolutely nothing more than she meant had become known.
The case never became fully known through her; it was the girl herself
who told it to Miss Cotton in one of those moments of confidence which
are necessary to burdened minds; and it is doubtful if more than two or
three people ever clearly understood it; most preferred one or other of
several mistaken versions which society finally settled down to.
The paroxysm of self-doubt, almost self-accusal, in which Alice came to
Miss Cotton, moved the latter to the deepest sympathy, and left her with
misgivings which became an intolerable anguish to her conscience. The
child was so afflicted at what she had done, not because she wished to
be reconciled with her lover, but because she was afraid she had been
unjust, been cruelly impatient and peremptory with him; she seemed to
Miss Cotton so absolutely alone and friendless with her great trouble,
she was so helpless, so hopeless, she was so anxious to do right, and
so fearful she had done wrong, that Miss Cotton would not have been
Miss Cotton if she had not taken her in her arms and assured her that in
everything she had done she had been sublimely and nobly right, a lesson
to all her sex in such matters for ever. She told her that she had
always admired her, but that now she idolised her; that she felt like
going down on her knees and simply worshipping her.
“Oh, don't say that, Miss Cotton!” pleaded Alice, pulling away from
her embrace, but still clinging to her with her tremulous, cold little
hands. “I can't bear it! I'm wicked and hard you don't know how bad I
am; and I'm afraid of being weak, of doing more harm yet. Oh, I wronged
him cruelly in ever letting him get engaged to me! But now what you've
said will support me. If you think I've done right--It must seem strange
to you that I should come to you with my trouble instead of my mother;
but I've been to her, and--and we think alike on so few subjects, don't
you know--”
“Yes, yes; I know, dear!” said Miss Cotton, in the tender folly of
her heart, with the satisfaction which every woman feels in being more
sufficient to another in trouble than her natural comforters.
“And I wanted to know how you saw it; and now, if you feel as you say, I
can never doubt myself again.”
She tempested out of Miss Cotton's house, all tearful under the veil she
had pulled down, and as she shut the door of her coupe, Miss Cotton's
heart jumped into her throat with an impulse to run after her, to recall
her, to recant, to modify everything.
From that moment Miss Cotton's trouble began, and it became a torment
that mounted and gave her no peace till she imparted it. She said to
herself that she should suffer to the utmost in this matter, and if she
spoke to any one, it must not be to same one who had agreed with her
about Alice, but to some hard, skeptical nature, some one who would look
at it from a totally different point of view, and would punish her for
her error, if she had committed an error, in supporting and consoling
Alice. All the time she was thinking of Mrs. Brinkley; Mrs. Brinkley
had come into her mind at once; but it was only after repeated struggles
that she could get the strength to go to her.
Mrs. Brinkley, sacredly pledged to secrecy, listened with a sufficiently
dismaying air to the story which Miss Cotton told her in the extremity
of her fear and doubt.
“Well,” she said at the end, “have you written to Mr. Mavering?”
“Written to Mr. Mavering?” gasped Miss Cotton.
“Yes--to tell him she wants him back.”
“Wants him back?” Miss Cotton echoed again.
“That's what she came to you for.”
“Oh, Mrs. Brinkley!” moaned Miss Cotton, and she stared at her in mute
reproach.
Mrs. Brinkley laughed. “I don't say she knew that she came for that; but
there's no doubt that she did; and she went away bitterly disappointed
with your consolation and support. She didn't want anything of the
kind--you may comfort yourself with that reflection, Miss Cotton.”
“Mrs. Brinkley,” said Miss Cotton, with a severity which ought to have
been extremely effective from so mild a person, “do you mean to accuse
that poor child of dissimulation--of deceit--in such--a--a--”
“No!” shouted Mrs. Brinkley; “she didn't know what she was doing any
more than you did; and she went home perfectly heart-broken; and I hope
she'll stay so, for the good of all parties concerned.”
Miss Cotton was so bewildered by Mrs. Brinkley's interpretation of
Alice's latent motives that she let the truculent hostility of her
aspiration pass unheeded. She looked helplessly about, and seemed faint,
so that Mrs. Brinkley, without appearing to notice her state, interposed
the question of a little sherry. When it had been brought, and Miss
Cotton had sipped the glass that trembled in one hand while her emotion
shattered a biscuit with the other, Mrs. Brinkley went on: “I'm glad the
engagement is broken, and I hope it will never be mended. If what you
tell me of her reason for breaking it is true--”
“Oh, I feel so guilty for telling you! I'd no right to! Please never
speak of it!” pleaded Miss Cotton.
“Then I feel more than ever that it was all a mistake, and that to help
it on again would be a--crime.”
Miss Cotton gave a small jump at the word, as if she had already
committed the crime: she had longed to do it.
“Yes; I mean to say that they are better parted than plighted. If
matches are made in heaven, I believe some of them are unmade there too.
They're not adapted to each other; there's too great a disparity.”
“You mean,” began Miss Cotton, from her prepossession of Alice's
superiority, “that she's altogether his inferior, intellectually and
morally.”
“Oh, I can't admit that!” cried Miss Cotton, glad to have Mrs. Brinkley
go too far, and plucking up courage from her excess.
“Intellectually and morally,” repeated Mrs. Brinkley, with the mounting
conviction which ladies seem to get from mere persistence. “I saw that
girl at Campobello; I watched her.”
“I never felt that you did her justice!” cried Miss Cotton, with the
valour of a hen-sparrow. “There was an antipathy.”
“There certainly wasn't a sympathy, I'm happy to say,” retorted Mrs.
Brinkley. “I know her, and I know her family, root and branch. The
Pasmers are the dullest and most selfish people in the world.”
“Oh, I don't think that's her character,” said Miss Cotton, ruffling her
feathers defensively.
“Neither do I. She has no fixed character. No girl has. Nobody has. We
all have twenty different characters--more characters than gowns--and we
put them on and take them off just as often for different occasions.
I know you think each person is permanently this or that; but my
experience is that half the time they're the other thing.”
“Then why,” said Miss Cotton, winking hard, as some weak people do when
they thick they are making a point, “do you say that Alice is dull and
selfish?”
“I don't--not always, or not simply so. That's the character of the
Pasmer blood, but it's crossed with twenty different currents in her;
and from some body that the Pasmer dulness and selfishness must have
driven mad she got a crazy streak of piety; and that's got mixed up in
her again with a nonsensical ideal of duty; and everything she does she
not only thinks is right, but she thinks it's religious, and she thinks
it's unselfish.”
“If you'd seen her, if you'd heard her, this morning,” said Miss Cotton,
“you wouldn't say that, Mrs. Brinkley.”
Mrs. Brinkley refused this with an impatient gesture. “It isn't what
she is now, or seems to be, or thinks she is. It's what she's going to
finally harden into--what's going to be her prevailing character. Now
Dan Mavering has just the faults that will make such a girl think her
own defects are virtues, because they're so different. I tell you Alice
Pasmer has neither the head nor the heart to appreciate the goodness,
the loveliness, of a fellow like Dan Mavering.”
“I think she feels his sweetness fully,” urged Miss Cotton. “But she
couldn't endure his uncertainty. With her the truth is first of all
things.”
“Then she's a little goose. If she had the sense to know it, she would
know that he might delay and temporise and beat about the bush, but he
would be true when it was necessary. I haven't the least doubt in the
world but that poor fellow was going on in perfect security, because he
felt that it would be so easy for him to give up, and supposed it would
be just as easy for her. I don't suppose he had a misgiving, and it must
have come upon him like a thunder-clap.”
“Don't you think,” timidly suggested Miss Cotton, “that truth is the
first essential in marriage?”
“Of course it is. And if this girl was worthy of Dan Mavering, if she
were capable of loving him or anybody else unselfishly, she would have
felt his truth even if she couldn't have seen it. I believe this minute
that that manoeuvring, humbugging mother of hers is a better woman, a
kinder woman, than she is.”
“Alice says her mother took his part,” said Miss Cotton, with a sigh.
“She took your view of it.”
“She's a sensible woman. But I hope she won't be able to get him into
her toils again,” continued Mrs. Brinkley, recurring to the conventional
estimate of Mrs. Pasmer.
“I can't help feeling--believing--that they'll come together somehow
still,” murmured Miss Cotton. It seemed to her that she had all along
wished this; and she tried to remember if what she had said to comfort
Alice might be construed as adverse to a reconciliation.
“I hope they won't, then,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “for they couldn't help
being unhappy together, with their temperaments. There's one thing,
Miss Cotton, that's more essential in marriage than Miss Pasmer's
instantaneous honesty, and that's patience.”
“Patience with wrong?” demanded Miss Cotton.
“Yes, even with wrong; but I meant patience with each other. Marriage
is a perpetual pardon, concession, surrender; it's an everlasting giving
up; that's the divine thing about it; and that's just what Miss Passer
could never conceive of, because she is self-righteous and conceited and
unyielding. She would make him miserable.”
Miss Cotton rose in a bewilderment which did not permit her to go at
once. There was something in her mind which she wished to urge, but she
could not make it out, though she fingered in vague generalities. When
she got a block away from the house it suddenly came to her. Love! If
they loved each other, would not all be well with them? She would have
liked to run back and put that question to Mrs. Brinkley; but just
then she met Brinkley lumbering heavily homeward; she heard his hard
breathing from the exertion of bowing to her as he passed.
His wife met him in the hall, and went up to kiss him. He smelt
abominably of tobacco smoke.
“Hullo!” said her husband. “What are you after?”
“Nothing,” said his wife, enjoying his joke. “Come in here; I want to
tell you how I have just sat upon Miss Cotton.”