“DEAR MR. MAVERING,--We shall now be here so short a time that I do not
think it advisable for you to come.
“Your letter was rather enigmatical, and I do not know whether I
understood it exactly. I suppose you told me what you did for good
reasons of your own, and I did not think much about it. I believe the
question of taste did not come up in my mind.
“My aunt joins me in kindest regards.
“Yours very sincerely,
“JULIA V. H. ANDERSON.
“P.S.--I think that I ought to return your letter. I know that you would
not object to my keeping it, but it does not seem right. I wish to
ask your congratulations. I have been engaged for several years to
Lieutenant Willing, of the Army. He has been transferred from his post
in Montana to Fort Hamilton at New York, and we are to be married in
June.”
The next morning Mrs. Brinkley came up from breakfast in a sort of
duplex excitement, which she tried to impart to her husband; he stood
with his back toward the door, bending forward to the glass for a more
accurate view of his face, from which he had scraped half the lather in
shaving.
She had two cards in her hand: “Miss Van Hook and Miss Anderson have
gone. They went this morning. I found their P. P. C.'s by my plate.”
Mr. Brinkley made an inarticulate noise for comment, and assumed the
contemptuous sneer which some men find convenient for shaving the lower
lip.
“And guess who's come, of all people in the world?”
“I don't know,” said Brinkley, seizing his chance to speak.
“The Pasmers!--Alice and her mother! Isn't it awful?”
Mr. Brinkley had entered upon a very difficult spot at the corner of
his left jaw. He finished it before he said, “I don't see anything awful
about it, so long as Pasmer hasn't come too.”
“But Dan Mavering! He's in Washington, and he may come down here any
day. Just think how shocking that would be!”
“Isn't that rather a theory?” asked Mr. Brinkley, finding such
opportunities for conversation as he could. “I dare say Mrs. Pasmer
would be very glad to see him.”
“I've no doubt she would,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “But it's the worst
thing that could happen--for him. And I feel like writing him not to
come--telegraphing him.”
“You know how the man made a fortune in Chicago,” said her husband,
drying his razor tenderly on a towel before beginning to strop it. “I
advise you to let the whole thing alone. It doesn't concern us in any
way whatever.”
“Then,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “there ought to be a committee to take it in
hand and warn him.”
“I dare say you could make one up among the ladies. But don't be the
first to move in the matter.”
“I really believe,” said his wife, with her mind taken off the point by
the attractiveness of a surmise which had just occurred to her, “that
Mrs. Pasmer would be capable of following him down if she knew he was in
Washington.”
“Yes, if she know. But she probably doesn't.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley disappointedly. “I think the sudden departure
of the Van Hooks must have had something to do with Dan Mavering.”
“Seems a very influential young man,” said her husband. “He attracts and
repels people right and left. Did you speak to the Pasmers?”
“No; you'd better, when you go down. They've just come into the
dining-room. The girl looks like death.”
“Well, I'll talk to her about Mavering. That'll cheer her up.”
Mrs. Brinkley looked at him for an instant as if she really thought him
capable of it. Then she joined him in his laugh.
Mrs. Brinkley had theorised Alice Pasmer as simply and primitively
selfish, like the rest of the Pasmers in whom the family traits
prevailed.
When Mavering stopped coming to her house after his engagement she
justly suspected that it was because Alice had forbidden him, and she
had rejoiced at the broken engagement as an escape for Dan; she had
frankly said so, and she had received him back into full favour at the
first moment in Washington. She liked Miss Anderson, and she had hoped,
with the interest which women feel in every such affair, that her
flirtation with him might become serious. But now this had apparently
not happened. Julia Anderson was gone with mystifying precipitation,
and Alice Pasmer had come with an unexpectedness which had the aspect of
fatality.
Mrs. Brinkley felt bound, of course, since there was no open enmity
between them, to meet the Pasmers on the neutral ground of the Hygeia
with conventional amiability. She was really touched by the absent
wanness of the girls look, and by the later-coming recognition which
shaped her mouth into a pathetic snide. Alice did not look like death
quite, as Mrs. Brinkley had told her husband, with the necessity her sex
has for putting its superlatives before its positives; but she was pale
and thin, and she moved with a languid step when they all met at night
after Mrs. Brinkley had kept out of the Pasmers' way during the day.
“She has been ill all the latter part of the winter,” said Mrs. Pasmer
to Mrs. Brinkley that night in the corner of the spreading hotel
parlours, where they found themselves. Mrs. Pasmer did not look well
herself; she spoke with her eyes fixed anxiously on the door Alice had
just passed out of. “She is going to bed, but I know I shall find her
awake whenever I go.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Mrs. Brinkley, “this soft, heavy sea air will put
her to sleep.” She tried to speak drily and indifferently, but she could
not; she was, in fact, very much interested by the situation, and she
was touched, in spite of her distaste for them both, by the evident
unhappiness of mother and daughter. She knew what it came from, and
she said to herself that they deserved it; but this did not altogether
fortify her against their pathos. “I can hardly keep awake myself,” she
added gruffly.
“I hope it may help her,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “the doctor strongly urged
our coming.”
“Mr. Pasmer isn't with you,” said Mrs. Brinkley, feeling that it was
decent to say something about him.
“No; he was detained.” Mrs. Pasmer did not explain the cause of his
detention, and the two ladies slowly waved their fans a moment in
silence. “Are there many Boston People in the house?” Mrs. Pasmer asked.
“It's full of them,” cried Mrs. Brinkley.
“I had scarcely noticed,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer; and Mrs. Brinkley knew
that this was not true. “Alice takes up all my thoughts,” she added; and
this might be true enough. She leaned a little forward and asked, in a
low, entreating voice over her fan, “Mrs. Brinkley, have you seen Mr.
Mavering lately?”
Mrs. Brinkley considered this a little too bold, a little too brazen.
Had they actually come South in pursuit of him? It was shameless, and
she let Mrs. Pasmer know something of her feeling in the shortness
with which she answered, “I saw him in Washington the other day--for a
moment.” She shortened the time she had spent in Dan's company so as to
cut Mrs. Pasmer off from as much comfort as possible, and she stared at
her in open astonishment.
Mrs. Pasmer dropped her eyes and fingered the edge of her fan with a
submissiveness that seemed to Mrs. Brinkley the perfection of duplicity;
she wanted to shake her. “I knew,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, “that you had
always been such a friend of his.”
It is the last straw which breaks the camel's back; Mrs. Brinkley felt
her moral vertebrae give way; she almost heard them crack; but if there
was really a detonation, the drowned the noise with a harsh laugh.
“Oh, he had other friends in Washington. I met him everywhere with
Miss Anderson.” This statement conflicted with the theory of her single
instant with Dan, but she felt that in such a cause, in the cause of
giving pain to a woman like Mrs. Pasmer, the deflection from exact truth
was justifiable. She hurried on: “I rather expected he might run
down here, but now that they're gone, I don't suppose he'll come. You
remember Miss Anderson's aunt, Miss Van Hook?”
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer.
“She was here with her.”
“Miss Van Hook was such a New York type--of a certain kind,” said Mrs.
Pasmer. She rose, with a smile at once so conventional, so heroic, and
so pitiful that Mrs. Brinkley felt the remorse of a generous victor.
She went to her room, hardening her heart, and she burst in with a flood
of voluble exasperation that threatened all the neighbouring rooms with
overflow.
“Well,” she cried, “they have shown their hands completely. They have
come here to hound Dan Mavering down, and get him into their toils
again. Why, the woman actually said as much! But I fancy I have given
her a fit of insomnia that will enable her to share her daughter's
vigils. Really such impudence I never heard of!”
“Do you want everybody in the corridor to hear of it?” asked Brinkley,
from behind a newspaper.
“I know one thing,” continued Mrs. Brinkley, dropping her voice a couple
of octaves. “They will never get him here if I can help it. He won't
come, anyway, now Miss Anderson is gone; but I'll make assurance doubly
sure by writing him not to come; I'll tell him they've gone; and than we
are going too.”
“You had better remember the man in Chicago,” said her husband.
“Well, this is my business--or I'll make it my business!” cried Mrs.
Brinkley. She went on talking rapidly, rising with great excitement in
her voice at times, and then remembering to speak lower; and her husband
apparently read on through most of her talk, though now and then he made
some comment that seemed of almost inspired aptness.
“The way they both made up to me was disgusting. But I know the girl is
just a tool in her mother's hands. Her mother seemed actually passive
in comparison. For skilful wheedling I could fall down and worship that
woman; I really admire her. As long as the girl was with us she kept
herself in the background and put the girl at me. It was simply a
masterpiece.”
“How do you know she put her at you?” asked Brinkley.
“How? By the way she seemed not to do it! And because from what I know
of that stupid Pasmer pride it would be perfectly impossible for any one
who was a Pasmer to take her deprecatory manner toward me of herself.
You ought to have seen it! It was simply perfect.”
“Perhaps,” said Brinkley, with a remote dreaminess, “she was truly
sorry.”
“Truly stuff! No, indeed; she hates me as much as ever--more!”
“Well, then, may be she's doing it because she hates you--doing it for
her soul's good--sort of penance, sort of atonement to Mavering.”
Mrs. Brinkley turned round from her dressing-table to see what her
husband meant, but the newspaper hid him. We all know that our own
natures are mixed and contradictory, but we each attribute to others a
logical consistency which we never find in any one out of the novels.
Alice Pasmer was cold and reticent, and Mrs. Brinkley, who had lived
half a century in a world full of paradoxes, could not imagine her
subject to gusts of passionate frankness; she knew the girl to be
proud and distant, and she could not conceive of an abject humility
and longing for sympathy in her heart. If Alice felt, when she saw Mrs.
Brinkley, that she had a providential opportunity to punish herself
for her injustice to Dan, the fact could not be established upon Mrs.
Brinkley's theory of her. If the ascetic impulse is the most purely
selfish impulse in human nature, Mrs. Brinkley might not have been
mistaken in suspecting her of an ignoble motive, though it might have
had for the girl the last sublimity of self-sacrifice. The woman who
disliked her and pitied her knew that she had no arts, and rather than
adopt so simple a theory of her behaviour as her husband had advanced
she held all the more strenuously to her own theory that Alice was
practising her mother's arts. This was inevitable, partly from the sense
of Mrs. Pasmer's artfulness which everybody had, and partly from the
allegiance which we pay--and women especially like to pay--to the
tradition of the playwrights and the novelists, that social results of
all kinds are the work of deep, and more or less darkling, design on the
part of other women--such other women as Mrs. Pasmer.
Mrs. Brinkley continued to talk, but the god spoke no more from behind
the newspaper; and afterward Mrs. Brinkley lay a long time awake;
hardening her heart. But she was haunted to the verge of her dreams by
that girl's sick look, by her languid walk, and by the effect which she
had seen her own words take upon Mrs. Pasmer--an effect so admirably
disowned, so perfectly obvious. Before she could get to sleep she was
obliged to make a compromise with her heart, in pursuance of which, when
she found Mrs. Pasmer at breakfast alone in the morning, she went up to
her, and said, holding her hand a moment, “I hope your daughter slept
well last night.”
“No,” said Mrs. Pasmer, slipping her hand away, “I can't say that she
did.” There was probably no resentment expressed in the way she withdrew
her hand, but the other thought there was.
“I wish I could do something for her,” she cried.
“Oh, thank you,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “It's very good of you.” And Mrs.
Brinkley fancied she smiled rather bitterly.
Mrs. Brinkley went out upon the seaward verandah of the hotel with this
bitterness of Mrs. Pasmer's smile in her thoughts; and it disposed her
to feel more keenly the quality of Miss Pasmer's smile. She found the
girl standing there at a remote point of that long stretch of planking,
and looking out over the water; she held with both hands across her
breast the soft chuddah shawl which the wind caught and fluttered away
from her waist. She was alone, said as Mrs. Brinkley's compunctions
goaded her nearer, she fancied that the saw Alice master a primary
dislike in her face, and put on a look of pathetic propitiation. She did
not come forward to meet Mrs. Brinkley, who liked better her waiting to
be approached; but she smiled gratefully when Mrs. Brinkley put out her
hand, and she took it with a very cold one.
“You must find it chilly here,” said the elder woman.
“I had better be out in the air all I could, the doctor said,” answered
Alice.
“Well, then, come with me round the corner; there's a sort of recess
there, and you won't be blown to pierces,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with
authority. They sat down together in the recess, and she added: “I used
to sit here with Miss Van Hook; she could hear better in the noise the
waves made. I hope it isn't too much for you.”
“Oh no,” said Alice. “Mamma said you told her they were here.” Mrs.
Brinkley reassured herself from this; Miss Van Hook's name had rather
slipped out; but of course Mrs. Pasmer had not repeated what she had
said about Dan in this connection. “I wish I could have seen Julia,”
Alice went on. “It would have been quite like Campobello again.”
“Oh, quite,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a short breath, and not knowing
whither this tended. Alice did not leave her in doubt.
“I should like to have seen her, and begged her for the way I treated
her the last part of the time there. I feel as if I could make my whole
life a reparation,” she added passionately.
Mrs. Brinkley believed that this was the mere frenzy of sentimentality,
the exaltation of a selfish asceticism; but at the break in the girl's
voice and the aversion of her face she could not help a thrill
of motherly tenderness for her. She wanted to tell her she was an
unconscious humbug, bent now as always on her own advantage, and really
indifferent to others she also wanted to comfort her, and tell her that
she exaggerated, and was not to blame. She did neither, but when Alice
turned her face back she seemed encouraged by Mrs. Brinkley's look to
go on: “I didn't appreciate her then; she was very generous and
high-minded--too high-minded for me to understand, even. But we don't
seem to know how good others are till we wrong them.”
“Yes, that is very true,” said Mrs. Brinkley. She knew that Alice was
obviously referring to the breach between herself and Miss Anderson
following the night of the Trevor theatricals, and the dislike for
her that she had shown with a frankness some of the ladies had thought
brutal. Mrs. Brinkley also believed that her words had a tacit meaning,
and she would have liked to have the hardness to say she had seen an
unnamed victim of Alice doing his best to console the other she had
specified. But she merely said drily, “Yes, perhaps that's the reason
why we're allowed to injure people.”
“It must be,” said Alice simply. “Did Miss Anderson ever speak of me?”
“No; I can't remember that she ever did.” Mrs. Brinkley did not feel
bound to say that she and Miss Van Hook had discussed her at large, and
agreed perfectly about her.
“I should like to see her; I should like to write to her.”
Mrs. Brinkley felt that she ought not to suffer this intimate tendency
in the talk:
“You must find a great many other acquaintances in the hotel, Miss
Pasmer.”
“Some of the Frankland girds are here, and the two Bellinghams. I have
hardly spoken to them yet. Do you think that where you have even been
in the right, if you have been harsh, if you have been hasty, if you
haven't made allowances, you ought to offer some atonement?”
“Really, I can't say,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a smile of distaste.
“I'm afraid your question isn't quite in my line of thinking; it's more
in Miss Cotton's way. You'd better ask her some time.”
“No,” said Alice sadly; “she would flatter me.”
“Ah! I always supposed she was very conscientious.”
“She's conscientious, but she likes me too well.”
“Oh!” commented Mrs. Brinkley to herself, “then you know I don't like
you, and you'll use me in one way, if you can't in another. Very
well!” But she found the girl's trust touching somehow, though the
sentimentality of her appeal seemed as tawdry as ever.
“I knew you would be just,” added Alice wistfully.
“Oh, I don't know about atonements!” said Mrs. Brinkley, with an effect
of carelessness. “It seems to me that we usually make them for our own
sake.”
“I have thought of that,” said Alice, with a look of expectation.
“And we usually astonish other people when we offer them.”
“Either they don't like it, or else they don't feel so much injured as
we had supposed.”
“Oh, but there's no question--”
“If Miss Anderson--”
“Miss Anderson? Oh--oh yes!”
“If Miss Anderson for example,” pursued Mrs. Brinkley, “felt aggrieved
with you. But really I've no right to enter into your affairs, Miss
Pasmer.”
“Oh Yes, yes!--do! I asked you to,” the girl implored.
“I doubt if it will help matters for her to know that you regret
anything; and if she shouldn't happen to have thought that you were
unjust to her, it would make her uncomfortable for nothing.”
“Do you think so?” asked the girl, with a disappointment that betrayed
itself in her voice and eyes.
“I never feel I myself competent to advise,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I can
criticise--anybody can--and I do, pretty freely; but advice is a more
serious matter. Each of us must act from herself--from what she thinks
is right.”
“Yes, I see. Thank you so much, Mrs. Brinkley.”
“After all, we have a right to do ourselves good, even when we pretend
that it's good to others, if we don't do them any harm.”
“Yes, I see.” Alice looked away, and then seemed about to speak again;
but one of Mrs. Brinkley's acquaintance came up, and the girl rose with
a frightened air and went away.
“Alice's talk with you this morning did her so much good!” said Mrs.
Pasmer, later. “She has always felt so badly about Miss Anderson!”
Mrs. Brinkley saw that Mrs. Pasmer wished to confine the meaning of
their talk to Miss Anderson, and she assented, with a penetration of
which she saw that Mrs. Pasmer was gratefully aware.
She grew more tolerant of both the Pasmers as the danger of greater
intimacy from them, which seemed to threaten at first seemed to pass
away. She had not responded to their advances, but there was no reason
why she should not be civil to them; there had never been any open
quarrel with them. She often found herself in talk with them, and was
amused to note that she was the only Bostonian whom they did not keep
aloof from.
It could not be said that she came to like either of them better. She
still suspected Mrs. Pasmer of design, though she developed none beyond
manoeuvring Alice out of the way of people whom she wished to avoid; and
she still found the girl, as she always thought her, as egotist, whose
best impulses toward others had a final aim in herself. She thought her
very crude in her ideas--cruder than she had seemed at Campobello, where
she had perhaps been softened by her affinition with the gentler and
kindlier nature of Dan Mavering. Mrs. Brinkley was never tired of saying
that he had made the most fortunate escape in the world, and though
Brinkley owned he was tired of hearing it, she continued to say it with
a great variety of speculation. She recognised that in most girls of
Alice's age many traits are in solution, waiting their precipitation
into character by the chemical contact which time and chances must
bring, and that it was not fair to judge her by the present ferment of
hereditary tendencies; but she rejoiced all the same that it was not Dan
Mavering's character which was to give fixity to hers. The more she saw
of the girl the more she was convinced that two such people could only
make each other unhappy; from day to day, almost from hour to hour, she
resolved to write to Mavering and tell him not to come.
She was sure that the Pasmers wished to have the affair on again, and
part of her fascination with a girl whom she neither liked nor approved
was her belief that Alice's health had broken under the strain of her
regrets and her despair. She did not get better from the change of
air; she grew more listless and languid, and more dependent upon Mrs.
Brinkley's chary sympathy. The older woman asked herself again and again
what made the girl cling to her? Was she going to ask her finally to
intercede with Dan? or was it really a despairing atonement to him,
the most disagreeable sacrifice she could offer, as Mr. Brinkley had
stupidly suggested? She believed that Alice's selfishness and morbid
sentiment were equal to either.
Brinkley generally took the girl's part against his wife, and in a heavy
jocose way tried to cheer her up. He did little things for her; fetched
and carried chairs and cushions and rugs, and gave his attentions the
air of pleasantries. One of his offices was to get the ladies' letters
for them in the evening, and one night he came in beaming with a letter
for each of them where they sat together in the parlour. He distributed
them into their laps.
“Hello! I've made a mistake,” he said, putting down his head to take
back the letter he had dropped in Miss Pasmer's lap. “I've given you my
wife's letter.”
The girl glanced at it, gave a moaning kind of cry, and fell beak in her
chair, hiding her face in her hands.
Mrs. Brinkley, possessed herself of the other letter, and, though past
the age when ladies wish to kill their husbands for their stupidity,
she gave Brinkley a look of massacre which mystified even more than
it murdered his innocence. He had to learn later from his wife's more
elicit fury what the women had all known instantly.
He showed his usefulness in gathering Alice up and getting her to her
mother's room.
“Oh, Mrs. Brinkley,” implored Mrs. Pasmer, following her to the door,
“is Mr. Mavering coming here?”
“I don't know--I can't say--I haven't read the letter yet.”
“Oh, do let me know when you've read it, won't you? I don't know what we
shall do.”
Mrs. Brinkley read the letter in her own room. “You go down,” she said
to her husband, with unabated ferocity; “and telegraph Dan Mavering at
Wormley's not to came. Say we're going away at once.”
Then she sent Mrs. Pasmer a slip of paper on which she had written, “Not
coming.”
It has been the experience of every one to have some alien concern come
into his life and torment him with more anxiety than any affair of his
own. This is, perhaps, a hint from the infinite sympathy which feels
for us all that none of us can hope to free himself from the troubles of
others, that we are each bound to each by ties which, for the most part,
we cannot perceive, but which, at the moment their stress comes, we
cannot break.
Mrs. Brinkley lay awake and raged impotently against her complicity with
the unhappiness of that distasteful girl and her more than distasteful
mother. In her revolt against it she renounced the interest she had
felt in that silly boy, and his ridiculous love business, so really
unimportant to her whatever turn it took. She asked herself what it
mattered to her whether those children marred their lives one way or
another way. There was a lurid moment before she slept when she wished
Brinkley to go down and recall her telegram; but he refused to be a fool
at so much inconvenience to himself.
Mrs. Brinkley came to breakfast feeling so much more haggard than she
found either of the Pasmers looking, that she was able to throw off
her lingering remorse for having told Mavering not to come. She had the
advantage also of doubt as to her precise motive in having done so; she
had either done so because she had judged it best for him not to see
Miss Pasmer again, or else she had done so to relieve the girl from the
pain of an encounter which her mother evidently dreaded for her. If one
motive seemed at moments outrageously meddling and presumptuous, the
other was so nobly good and kind that it more than counterbalanced it in
Mrs. Brinkley's mind, who knew very well in spite of her doubt that she
had, acted from a mixture of both. With this conviction, it was both
a comfort and a pang to find by the register of the hotel, which she
furtively consulted, that Dan had not arrived by the morning boat, as
she groundlessly feared and hoped he might have done.
In any case, however, and at the end of all the ends, she had that girl
on her hands more than ever; and believing as she did that Dan and Alice
had only to meet in order to be reconciled, she felt that the girl whom
she had balked of her prey was her innocent victim. What right had she
to interfere? Was he not her natural prey? If he liked being a prey,
who was lawfully to forbid him? He was not perfect; he would know how to
take care of himself probably; in marriage things equalised themselves.
She looked at the girl's thin cheeks and lack-lustre eyes, and pitied
and hated her with that strange mixture of feeling which our victims
aspire in us.
She walked out on the verandah with the Pasmers after breakfast, and
chatted a while about indifferent things; and Alice made an effort to
ignore the event of the night before with a pathos which wrung Mrs.
Brinkley's heart, and with a gay resolution which ought to have been a
great pleasure to such a veteran dissembler as her mother. She said she
had never found the air so delicious; she really believed it would begin
to do her good now; but it was a little fresh just there, and with her
eyes she invited her mother to come with her round the corner into that
sheltered recess, and invited Mrs. Brinkley not to come.
It was that effect of resentment which is lighter even than a touch, the
waft of the arrow's feather; but it could wound a guilty heart, and Mrs.
Brinkley sat down where she was, realising with a pang that the time
when she might have been everything to this unhappy girl had just passed
for ever, and henceforth she could be nothing. She remained musing
sadly upon the contradictions she had felt in the girl's character, the
confusion of good and evil, the potentialities of misery and harm, the
potentialities of bliss and good; and she felt less and less satisfied
with herself. She had really presumed to interfere with Fate; perhaps
she had interfered with Providence. She would have given anything to
recall her act; and then with a flash she realised that it was quite
possible to recall it. She could telegraph Mavering to come; and she
rose, humbly and gratefully, as if from an answered prayer, to go and do
so.
She was not at all a young woman, and many things had come and gone
in her life that ought to have fortified her against surprise; but she
wanted to scream like a little frightened girl as Dan Mavering stepped
out of the parlour door toward her. The habit of not screaming, however,
prevailed, and she made a tolerably successful effort to treat him with
decent composure. She gave him a rigid hand. “Where in the world did you
come from? Did you get my telegram?”
“No. Did you get my letter?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I took a notion to come right on after I wrote, and I started on
the same train with it. But they said it was no use trying to get into
the Hygeia, and I stopped last night at the little hotel in Hampton.
I've just walked over, and Mr. Brinkley told me you were out here
somewhere. That's the whole story, I believe.” He gave his nervous
laugh, but it seemed to Mrs. Brinkley that it had not much joy in it.
“Hush!” she said involuntarily, receding to her chair and sinking back
into it again. He looked surprised. “You know the Van Hooks are gone?”
He laughed harshly. “I should think they were dead from your manner,
Mrs. Brinkley. But I didn't come to see the Van Hooks. What made you
think I did?”
He gave her a look which she found so dishonest, so really insincere,
that she resolved to abandon him to Providence as soon as she could.
“Oh, I didn't know but there had been some little understanding at
Washington.”
“Perhaps on their part. They were people who seemed to take a good
many things for granted, but they could hardly expect to control other
people's movements.”
He looked sharply at Mrs. Brinkley, as if to question how much she knew;
but she had now measured him, and she said, “Oh! then the visit's to
me?”
“Entirely,” cried Dan. The old sweetness came into his laughing eyes
again, and went to Mrs. Brinkley's heart. She wished him to be happy,
somehow; she would have done anything for him; she wished she knew what
to do. Ought she to tell him the Pasmers were there? Ought she to make
up some excuse and get him away before he met them? She felt herself
getting more and more bewildered and helpless. Those women might come
round that corner any moment and then she know the first sight of
Alice's face would do or undo everything with Dan. Did she wish them
reconciled? Did she wish them for ever parted? She no longer knew what
she wished; she only knew that she had no right to wish anything. She
continued to talk on with Dan, who grew more and more at ease, and did
most of the talking, while Mrs. Brinkley's whole being narrowed itself
to the question. Would the Pasmers come back that way, or would they go
round the further corner, and get into the hotel by another door?
The suspense seemed interminable; they must have already gone that other
way. Suddenly she heard the pushing back of chairs in that recess. She
could not bear it. She jumped to her feet.
“Just wait a moment, Mr. Mavering! I'll join you again. Mr. Brinkley is
expecting--I must--”
*****
One morning of the following June Mrs. Brinkley sat well forward in the
beautiful church where Dan and Alice were to be married. The lovely day
became a still lovelier day within, enriched by the dyes of the stained
windows through which it streamed; the still place was dim yet bright
with it; the figures painted on the walls had a soft distinctness;
a body of light seemed to irradiate from the depths of the dome like
lamp-light.
There was a subdued murmur of voices among the people in the pews: they
were in a sacred edifice without being exactly at church, and they might
talk; now and then a muffled, nervous laugh escaped. A delicate scent
of flowers from the masses in the chancel mixed with the light and the
prevailing silence. There was a soft, continuous rustle of drapery as
the ladies advanced up the thickly carpeted aisles on the arms of the
young ushers and compressed themselves into place in the pews.
Two or three people whom she did not know were put into the pew with
Mrs. Brinkley, but she kept her seat next the aisle; presently an usher
brought up a lady who sat down beside her, and then for a moment or two
seemed to sink and rise, as if on the springs of an intense excitement.
It was Miss Cotton, who, while this process of quiescing lasted,
appeared not to know Mrs. Brinkley. When she became aware of her, all
was lost again. “Mrs. Brinkley!” she cried, as well as one can cry in
whisper. “Is it possible?”
“I have my doubts,” Mrs. Brinkley whispered back. “But we'll suppose the
case.”
“Oh, it's all too good to be true! How I envy you being the means of
bringing them together, Mrs. Brinkley!”
“Means?”
“Yes--they owe it all to you; you needn't try to deny it; he's told
every one!”
“I was sure she hadn't,” said Mrs. Brinkley, remembering how Alice had
marked an increasing ignorance of any part she might have had in the
affair from the first moment of her reconciliation with Dan; she had the
effect of feeling that she had sacrificed enough to Mrs. Brinkley; and
Mrs. Brinkley had been restored to all the original strength of her
conviction that she was a solemn little unconscious egotist, and Dan was
as unselfish and good as he was unequal to her exactions.
“Oh no?” said Miss Cotton. “She couldn't!” implying that Alice would be
too delicate to speak of it.
“Do you see any of his family here?” asked Mrs. Brinkley.
“Yes; over there--up front.” Miss Cotton motioned, with her eyes toward
a pew in which Mrs. Brinkley distinguished an elderly gentleman's
down-misted bald head and the back of a young lady's bonnet. “His father
and sister; the other's a bridemaid; mother bed-ridden and couldn't
come.”
“They might have brought her in an-arm-chair,” suggested Mrs. Brinkley
ironically, “on such an occasion. But perhaps they don't take much
interest in such a patched-up affair.”
“Oh yes, they do!” exclaimed Miss Cotton. “They idolise Alice.”
“And Mrs. Pasmer and Mister, too?”
“I don't suppose that so much matters.”
“They know how to acquiesce, I've no doubt.”
“Oh yes! You've heard? The young people are going abroad first with her
family for a year, and then they come back to live with his--where the
Works are.”
“Poor fellow!” said Mrs. Brinkley.
“Why, Mrs. Brinkley, do you still feel that way?” asked Miss Cotton,
with a certain distress. “It seems to me that if ever two young people
had the promise of happiness, they have. Just see what their love has
done for them already!”
“And you still think that in these cases love can do everything?”
Miss Cotton was about to reply, when she observed that the people about
her had stopped talking. The bridegroom, with his best man, in whom his
few acquaintances there recognised Boardman with some surprise, came
over the chancel from one side.
Miss Cotton bent close to Mrs. Brinkley and whispered rapidly: “Alice
found out Mr. Mavering wished it, and insisted on his having him. It was
a great concession, but she's perfectly magnanimous. Poor fellow! how he
does look!”
Alice, on her father's arm, with her bridemaids, of whom the first was
Minnie Mavering, mounted the chancel steps, where Mr. Pasmer remained
standing till he advanced to give away the bride. He behaved with great
dignity, but seemed deeply affected; the ladies in the front pews said
they could see his face twitch; but he never looked handsomer.
The five clergymen came from the back of the chancel in their white
surplices. The ceremony proceeded to the end.
The young couple drove at once to the station, where they were to take
the train for New York, and wait there a day or two for Mrs. and Mr.
Pasmer before they all sailed.
As they drove along, Alice held Dan's wrist in the cold clutch of her
trembling little ungloved hand, on which her wedding ring shone. “O
dearest! let us be good!” she said. “I will try my best. I will try not
to be exacting and unreasonable, and I know I can. I won't even make any
conditions, if you will always be frank and open with me, and tell me
everything.”
He leaned over and kissed her behind the drawn curtains. “I will, Alice!
I will indeed! I won't keep anything from you after this.”
He resolved to tell her all about Julia Anderson at the right moment,
when Alice was in the mood, and as soon as he thoroughly understood what
he had really meant himself.
If he had been different she would not have asked him to be frank and
open; if she had been different, he might have been frank and open. This
was the beginning of their married life.