IT was still so early that I had my doubts whether I should find
Kendricks up after the last night’s revelry, but he met me half-way
between our hotel and his. He said he was coming to see how Mrs. March
was bearing Miss Gage’s immense success at the ball; but perhaps this was
not his sole motive. He asked frankly how the young lady was, and
whether I thought Mrs. March would consider a lunch at a restaurant by
the lake a good notion. When I said I had very little doubt she would,
and proposed taking a turn in the park before I went back with him, he
looked at his watch and laughed, and said he supposed it _was_ rather
early yet, and came very willingly with me.
We had the pretty place almost to ourselves at that hour. There were a
half-dozen or so nursemaids, pushing their perambulators about, or
standing the vehicles across the walk in front of the benches where they
sat, in the simple belief of all people who have to do with babies that
the rest of the world may be fitly discommoded in their behalf. But they
did not actively molest us, and they scarcely circumscribed our choice of
seats. We were by no means driven to the little kiosk in the lake for
them, and I should rather say that we were fatefully led there, so apt
were the associations of the place to my purpose. Nothing could have
been more natural than that I should say, as we sat down there, “This was
where I first saw Miss Gage with her friends”; and it was by a perfectly
natural transition that I should go on to speak, in a semi-humorous
strain, of the responsibility which Mrs. March and myself had incurred by
letting our sympathy for her run away with us. I said I supposed that if
we had not been willing from the first to try to realise for her some of
the expectations we imagined she had in coming to Saratoga, she never
would have fallen to our charge; that people really brought a great many
more things upon themselves than they were willing to own; and that fate
was perhaps more the fulfilment of our tacit ambitions than our overt
acts. This bit of philosophy, which I confess I thought fine, did not
seem to impress Kendricks. He merely said that it must be great fun to
have the chance of baffling the malice of circumstance in a case like
that, and I perceived that he felt nothing complex in the situation. In
fact, I doubt whether youth perceives anything complex in life. To the
young, life is a very plain case. To be sure, they are much more alarmed
than their elders at getting tangled up in its web at times, but that is
because they have not had our experience in getting untangled, and think
they are never going to get out alive. When they do, they think that it
is the only tangle they are ever going to be in, and do not know that
they are simply going on from one to another as long as there is enough
of them left to be caught in a mesh. To Kendricks we Marches were simply
two amiable people, who had fancied doing a pleasant thing for a
beautiful girl that accident had thrown it in our power to befriend, and
were by no means the trembling arbiters of her destiny we felt ourselves
to be. The difference between his objective sense and my subjective
sense was the difference between his twenty-seven years and my fifty-two,
and while this remained I saw that it would be useless to try to get on
common ground with him, or to give him our point of view. If I were to
speak to him at all, it must be with authority, with the right of one who
stood in the place of the girl’s parents, and had her happiness at heart.
That is, it was something like that; but my words say it too bluntly. I
found myself beginning, “I have rather had a notion that her father might
come on, and take the enterprise off our hands,” though, to tell the
truth, I had never imagined such a thing, which came into my head at that
moment through an association with the thought of parents.
“Have you any idea what sort of man he is?” asked Kendricks.
“Oh, some little local magnate, president of the village and president of
the village bank; I fancy the chief figure in the place, but probably as
ignorant of our world as a Cherokee.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the young fellow. “Do you think that follows
because he doesn’t live in it?” I could see that he did not quite like
what I had said. “I suppose ours is rather a small world.”
“The smallest of all worlds,” I answered. “And in the eyes of Papa Gage,
if they could once be focused upon it, our world would shrivel to an
atom.”
“Do you think,” he asked, with a manifest anxiety, “that it would in
hers?”
“No; she is not the American people, and her father is, as I fancy him.
I make out from the vague hints that Brother Deering (as Fulkerson would
call him) dropped when he talked about him that Papa Gage is a shrewd,
practical, home-keeping business man, with an eye single to the main
chance, lavish, but not generous, Philistine to the backbone, blindly
devoted to his daughter, and contemptuous of all the myriad mysteries of
civilisation that he doesn’t understand. I don’t know why I should be
authorised to imagine him personally long and lank, with possibly a
tobacco habit of some sort. His natural history, upon no better
authority, is that of a hard-headed farmer, who found out that farming
could never be more than a livelihood, and came into the village, and
began to lend money, and get gain, till he was in a position to help
found the De Witt Point National Bank, and then, by weight of his moneyed
solidity, imposed himself upon the free and independent voters of the
village—a majority of them under mortgage to him—and became its
president. It isn’t a pleasant type, but it’s ideally American.”
“Yes,” said Kendricks ruefully.
“But his daughter,” I continued, “is probably altogether different.
There is something fine about her—really fine. Our world wouldn’t
shrivel in her eye; it would probably swell up and fill the universe,” I
added by an impulse that came from nowhere irresistibly upon me: “that
is, if she could see _you_ in it.”
“What do you mean?” he asked with a start.
“Oh, now I must tell you what I mean,” I said desperately. “It’s you
that have complicated this case so dreadfully for us. Can’t you think
why?”
“No, I can’t,” he said; but he had to say that.
His fine, sensitive face flamed at once so fire-red that it could only
turn pale for a change when I plunged on: “I’m afraid we’ve trifled with
her happiness”; and this formulation of the case disgusted me so much
that I laughed wildly, and added, “unless we’ve trifled with yours, too.”
“I don’t know why you call it trifling with happiness,” he returned with
dignity, but without offence. “If you will leave her out of the
question, I will say that you have given me the greatest happiness of my
life in introducing me to Miss Gage.”
“Now,” I demanded, “may I ask what _you_ mean? You know I wouldn’t if I
didn’t feel bound for her sake, and if you hadn’t said just what you have
said. You needn’t answer me unless you like! It’s pleasant to know that
you’ve not been bored, and Mrs. March and I are infinitely obliged to you
for helping us out.”
Kendricks made as if he were going to say something, and then he did not.
He hung his head lower and lower in the silence which I had to break for
him—“I hope I haven’t been intrusive, my dear fellow. This is something
I felt bound to speak of. You know we couldn’t let it go on. Mrs. March
and I have blamed ourselves a good deal, and we couldn’t let it go on.
But I’m afraid I haven’t been as delicate with you—”
“Oh! delicate!” He lifted his head and flashed a face of generous
self-reproach upon me. “It’s _I_ that haven’t been delicate with _you_.
I’ve been monstrously indelicate. But I never meant to be, and—and—I was
coming to see you just now when we met—to see you—Miss Gage—and ask
her—tell her that we—I—must tell you and Mrs. March—Mr. March! At the
hop last night I asked her to be my wife, and as soon as she can hear
from her father—But the first thing when I woke this morning, I saw that
I must tell Mrs. March and you. And you—you must forgive us—or me,
rather; for it was my fault—for not telling you last night—at once—oh,
thank you! thank you!”
I had seized his hand, and was wringing it vehemently in expression of my
pleasure in what he had told me. In that first moment I felt nothing but
pure joy and an immeasurable relief. I drew my breath, a very deep and
full one, in a sudden, absolute freedom from anxieties which had been
none the less real and constant because so often burlesqued. Afterward
considerations presented themselves to alloy my rapture, but for that
moment, as I say, it was nothing but rapture. There was no question in
it of the lovers’ fitness for each other, of their acceptability to their
respective families, of their general conduct, or of their especial
behaviour toward us. All that I could realise was that it was a great
escape for both of us, and a great triumph for me. I had been afraid
that I should not have the courage to speak to Kendricks of the matter at
all, much less ask him to go away; and here I had actually spoken to him,
with the splendid result that I need only congratulate him on his
engagement to the lady whose unrequited affections I had been wishing him
to spare. I don’t remember just the terms I used in doing this, but they
seemed satisfactory to Kendricks; probably a repetition of the letters of
the alphabet would have been equally acceptable. At last I said, “Well,
now I must go and tell the great news to Mrs. March,” and I shook hands
with him again; we had been shaking hands at half-minutely intervals ever
since the first time.