“She is an ideal. And Mrs. Deering is as afraid as death of her. Of
course she has to live up to her. It’s probably been the struggle of her
life, and I can quite imagine her letting her husband die before she
would take Miss Gage back, unless she went back satisfied.”
“I don’t believe I can imagine so much as that exactly, but I can imagine
her being afraid of Miss Gage’s taking it out of her somehow. Now she
will take it out of us. I hope you realise that you’ve done it now, my
dear. To be sure, you will have all your life to repent of your
rashness.”
“I shall never repent,” Mrs. March retorted hardily. “It was the right
thing, the only thing. We couldn’t have let that poor creature stay on,
when she was so anxious to get back to her husband.”
“No.”
“And I confess, Basil, that I feel a little pity for that poor girl, too.
It would have been cruel, it would have been fairly wicked, to let her go
home so soon, and especially now.”
“Oh! And I suppose that by _especially now_, you mean Kendricks,” I
said, and I laughed mockingly, as the novelists say. “How sick I am of
this stale old love-business between young people! We ought to know
better—we’re old enough; at least _you_ are.”
She seemed not to feel the gibe. “Why, Basil,” she asked dreamily,
“haven’t you any romance left in you?”
“Romance? Bah! It’s the most ridiculous unreality in the world. If you
had so much sympathy for that stupid girl, in that poor woman in her
anxiety about her disappointment, why hadn’t you a little for her sick
husband? But a husband is nothing—when you have got him.”
“I did sympathise with her.”
“You didn’t say so.”
“Well, she is only his second wife, and I don’t suppose it’s anything
serious. Didn’t I really say anything to her?”
“Not a word. It is curious,” I went on, “how we let this idiotic
love-passion absorb us to the very last. It is wholly unimportant who
marries who, or whether anybody marries at all. And yet we no sooner
have the making of a love-affair within reach than we revert to the folly
of our own youth, and abandon ourselves to it as if it were one of the
great interests of life.”
“Who is talking about love? It isn’t a question of that. It’s a
question of making a girl have a pleasant time for a few days; and what
is the harm of it? Girls have a dull enough time at the very best. My
heart aches for them, and I shall never let a chance slip to help them, I
don’t care what you say.”
“Now, Isabel,” I returned, “don’t you be a humbug. This is a perfectly
plain case, and you are going in for a very risky affair with your eyes
open. You shall not pretend you’re not.”
“Very well, then, if I am going into it with my eyes open, I shall look
out that nothing happens.”
“And you think prevision will avail! I wish,” I said, “that instead of
coming home that night and telling you about this girl, I had confined my
sentimentalising to that young French-Canadian mother, and her dirty
little boy who ate the pea-nut shells. I’ve no doubt it was really a
more tragical case. They looked dreadfully poor and squalid. Why
couldn’t I have amused my idle fancy with their fortunes—the sort of
husband and father they had, their shabby home, the struggle of their
life? That is the appeal that a genuine person listens to. Nothing does
more to stamp me a _poseur_ than the fact that I preferred to bemoan
myself for a sulky girl who seemed not to be having a good time.”
There was truth in my joking, but the truth did not save me; it lost me
rather. “Yes,” said my wife; “it was your fault. I should never have
seen anything in her if it had not been for you. It was your coming back
and working me up about her that began the whole thing, and now if
anything goes wrong you will have yourself to thank for it.”
She seized the opportunity of my having jestingly taken up this load to
buckle it on me tight and fast, clasping it here, tying it there, and
giving a final pull to the knots that left me scarcely the power to draw
my breath, much less the breath to protest. I was forced to hear her say
again that all her concern from the beginning was for Mrs. Deering, and
that now, if she had offered to do something for Miss Gage, it was not
because she cared anything for her, but because she cared everything for
Mrs. Deering, who could never lift up her head again at De Witt Point if
she went back so completely defeated in all the purposes she had in
asking Miss Gage to come with her to Saratoga.
I did not observe that this wave of compassion carried Mrs. March so far
as to leave her stranded with Mrs. Deering that evening when we called
with Kendricks, and asked her and Miss Gage to go with us to the Congress
Park concert. Mrs. Deering said that she had to pack, that she did not
feel just exactly like going; and my tender heart ached with a knowledge
of her distress. Miss Gage made a faint, false pretence of refusing to
come with us, too; but Mrs. Deering urged her to go, and put on the new
dress, which had just come home, so that Mrs. March could see it. The
girl came back looking radiant, divine, and—“Will it do?” she palpitated
under my wife’s critical glance.
“Do? It will _out_do! I never saw anything like it!” The connoisseur
patted it a little this way and a little that. “It is a dream! Did the
hat come too?”
It appeared that the hat had come too. Miss Gage rematerialised with it
on, after a moment’s evanescence, and looked at my wife with the
expression of being something impersonal with a hat on.
“Simply, there is nothing to say!” cried Mrs. March. The girl put up her
hands to it. “Good gracious! You mustn’t take it off! Your costume is
perfect for the concert.”
“Is it, really?” asked the girl joyfully; and she seemed to find this the
first fitting moment to say, for sole recognition of our self-sacrifice,
“I’m much obliged to you, Mr. March, for getting me that room.”
I begged her not to speak of it, and turned an ironical eye upon my wife;
but she was lost in admiration of the hat.
“Yes,” she sighed; “it’s much better than the one I wanted you to get at
first.” And she afterward explained that the girl seemed to have a
perfect instinct for what went with her style.
Kendricks kept himself discreetly in the background, and, with his
unfailing right feeling, was talking to Mrs. Deering, in spite of her not
paying much attention to him. I must own that I too was absorbed in the
spectacle of Miss Gage.
She went off with us, and did not say another word to Mrs. Deering about
helping her to pack. Perhaps this was best, though it seemed heartless;
it may not have been so heartless as it seemed. I dare say it would have
been more suffering to the woman if the girl had missed this chance.
X
WE had undertaken rather a queer affair but it was not so queer after
all, when Miss Gage was fairly settled with us. There were other young
girls in that pleasant house who had only one another’s protection and
the general safety of the social atmosphere. We could not conceal from
ourselves, of course, that we had done a rather romantic thing, and, in
the light of Europe, which we had more or less upon our actions, rather
an absurd thing; but it was a comfort to find that Miss Gage thought it
neither romantic nor absurd. She took the affair with an apparent
ignorance of anything unusual in it—with so much ignorance, indeed, that
Mrs. March had her occasional question whether she was duly impressed
with what was being done for her. Whether this was so or not, it is
certain that she was as docile and as biddable as need be. She did not
always ask what she should do; that would not have been in the tradition
of village independence; but she always did what she was told, and did
not vary from her instructions a hair’s-breadth. I do not suppose she
always knew why she might do this and might not do that; and I do not
suppose that young girls often understand the reasons of the proprieties.
They are told that they must, and that they must not, and this in an
astonishing degree suffices them if they are nice girls.
Of course there was pretty constant question of Kendricks in the
management of Miss Gage’s amusement, for that was really what our
enterprise resolved itself into. He showed from the first the sweetest
disposition to forward all our plans in regard to her, and, in fact, he
even anticipated our wishes. I do not mean to give the notion that he
behaved from an interested motive in going to the station the morning
Mrs. Deering left, and getting her ticket for her, and checking her
baggage, and posting her in the changes she would have to make. This was
something I ought to have thought of myself, but I did not think of it,
and I am willing that he should have all the credit.
I know that he did it out of the lovely generosity of nature which always
took me in him. Miss Gage was there with her, and she remained to be
consoled after Mrs. Deering departed. They came straight to us from the
train, and then, when he had consigned Miss Gage to Mrs. March’s care, he
offered to go and see that her things were transferred from her hotel to
ours; they were all ready, she said, and the bill was paid.
He did not come back that day, and, in fact, he delicately waited for
some sign from us that his help was wanted. But when he did come he had
formulated Saratoga very completely, and had a better conception of doing
it than I had, after my repeated sojourns.
We went very early in our explorations to the House of Pansa, which you
find in very much better repair at Saratoga than you do at Pompeii, and
we contrived to pass a whole afternoon there. My wife and I had been
there before more than once; but it always pleasantly recalled our
wander-years, when we first met in Europe, and we suffered round after
those young things with a patience which I hope will not be forgotten at
the day of judgment. When we came to a seat we sat down, and let them go
off by themselves; but my recollection is that there is not much
furniture in the House of Pansa that you can sit down on, and for the
most part we all kept together.
Kendricks and I thought alike about the Pompeian house as a model of
something that might be done in the way of a seaside cottage in our own
country, and we talked up a little paper that might be done for _Every
Other Week_, with pretty architectural drawings, giving an account of our
imaginary realisation of the notion.
“Have somebody,” he said, “visit people who had been boring him to come
down, or up, or out, and see them, and find them in a Pompeian house,
with the sea in front and a blue-green grove of low pines behind. Might
have a thread of story, but mostly talk about how they came to do it, and
how delightfully livable they found it. You could work it up with some
architect, who would help you to ‘keep off the grass’ in the way of
technical blunders. With all this tendency to the classic in public
architecture, I don’t see why the Pompeian villa shouldn’t be the next
word for summer cottages.”
“Well, we’ll see what Fulkerson says. He may see an ad. in it. Would
you like to do it?”
“Why not do it yourself? Nobody else could do it so well.”
“Thanks for the taffy; but the idea was yours.”
“I’ll do it,” said Kendricks after a moment, “if you won’t.”
“We’ll see.”