I SAW Mrs. March waiting for me on the hotel verandah. She wore her
bonnet, and she warned me not to approach, and then ran down to meet me.
“Well, my dear,” she said, as she pushed her hand through my arm and
began to propel me away from the sight and hearing of people on the
piazza, “I hope you didn’t make a fool of yourself with Kendricks.
They’re engaged!”
She apparently expected me to be prostrated by this stroke. “Yes,” I
said very coolly; “I was just coming to tell you.”
“How did you know it? Who told you? Did Kendricks? I don’t believe
it!” she cried in an excitement not unmixed with resentment.
“No one told me,” I said. “I simply divined it.”
She didn’t mind that for a moment. “Well, I’m glad he had the grace to
do so, and I hope he did it before you asked him any leading questions.”
Without waiting to hear whether this was so or not, she went on, with an
emphasis on the next word that almost blotted it out of the language,
“_She_ came back to me almost the instant you were gone, and told me
everything. She said she wanted to tell me last night, but she hadn’t
the courage, and this morning, when she saw that I was beginning to hint
up to Mr. Kendricks a little, she hadn’t the courage at all. I sent her
straight off to telegraph for her father. She is behaving splendidly.
And now, what are we going to do?”
“What the rest of the world is—nothing. It seems to me that we are out
of the story, my dear. At any rate, I shan’t attempt to compete with
Miss Gage in splendid behaviour, and I hope you won’t. It would be so
easy for us. I wonder what Papa Gage is going to be like.”
I felt my thrill of apprehension impart itself to her. “Yes!” she
gasped; “what if he shouldn’t like it?”
“Well, then, that’s his affair.” But I did not feel so lightly about it
as I spoke, and from time to time during the day I was overtaken with a
cold dismay at the thought of the unknown quantity in the problem.
When we returned to the hotel after a tour of the block, we saw Kendricks
in our corner of the verandah with Miss Gage. They were both laughing
convulsively, and they ran down to meet us in yet wilder throes of
merriment.
“We’ve just been comparing notes,” he said, “and at the very moment when
I was telling you, Mr. March, Julia was telling Mrs. March.”
“Wonderful case of telepathy,” I mocked.
“Give it to the Psychical Research.”
They both seemed a little daunted, and Miss Gage said, “I know Mr. March
doesn’t like the way we’ve done.”
“Like it!” cried Mrs. March, contriving to shake me a little with the
hand she still had in my arm. “Of course he likes it. He was just
saying you had behaved splendidly. He said _he_ wouldn’t attempt to
compete with you. But you mustn’t regard him in the least.”
I admired the skill with which Isabel saved her conscience in this
statement too much to dispute it; and I suppose that whatever she had
said, Miss Gage would have been reassured. I cannot particularly praise
the wisdom of her behaviour during that day, or, for the matter of that,
the behaviour of Kendricks either. The ideal thing would have been for
him to keep away now till her father came, but it seemed to me that he
was about under our feet all the while, and that she, so far from making
him remain at his own hotel, encouraged him to pass the time at ours.
Without consulting me, Mrs. March asked him to stay to dinner after he
had stayed all the forenoon, and he made this a pretext for spending the
afternoon in our corner of the verandah. She made me give it up to him
and Miss Gage, so that they could be alone together, though I must say
they did not seem to mind us a great deal when we were present; he was
always leaning on the back of her chair, or sitting next her with his
hand dangling over it in a manner that made me sick. I wondered if I was
ever such an ass as that, and I quite lost the respect for Kendricks’s
good sense and good taste which had been the ground of my liking for him.
I felt myself withdrawn from the affair farther and farther in sympathy,
since it had now passed beyond my control; and I resented the strain of
the responsibility which I had thrown off, I found, only for a moment,
and must continue to suffer until the girl’s father appeared and finally
relieved me. The worst was that I had to bear it alone. It was
impossible to detach Mrs. March’s interest from Miss Gage, as a girl who
had been made love to, long enough to enable her to realise her as a
daughter with filial ties and duties. She did try in a perfunctory way
to do it, but I could see that she never gave her mind to it. I could
not even make her share my sense of my own culpability, a thing she was
only too willing to do in most matters. She admitted that it was absurd
for me to have let my fancy play about the girl when I first saw her
until we felt that I must do something for her; but I could not get her
to own that we had both acted preposterously in letting Mrs. Deering
leave Miss Gage in our charge. In the first place, she denied that she
had been left in our charge. She had simply been left in the hotel where
we were staying, and we should have been perfectly free to do nothing for
her. But when Kendricks turned up so unexpectedly, it was quite natural
we should ask him to be polite to her. Mrs. March saw nothing strange in
all that. What was I worrying about? What she had been afraid of was
that he had not been in love with the girl when she was so clearly in
love with him. But now!
“And suppose her father doesn’t like it!”
“Not like Mr. Kendricks!” She stared at me, and I could see how
infatuated she was.
I was myself always charmed with the young fellow. He was not only good
and generous and handsome, and clever—I never thought him a first-class
talent—but he was beautifully well bred, and he was very well born, as
those things go with us. That is, he came of people who had not done
much of anything for a generation, and had acquired merit with themselves
for it. They were not very rich, but they had a right to think that he
might have done nothing, or done something better than literature; and I
wish I could set forth exactly the terms, tacit and explicit, in which
his mother and sisters condoned his dereliction to me at a reception
where he presented me to them. In virtue of his wish to do something, he
had become a human being, and they could not quite follow him; but they
were very polite in tolerating me, and trying to make me feel that I was
not at all odd, though he was so queer in being proud of writing for my
paper, as they called it. He was so unlike them all that I liked him
more than ever after meeting them. Still, I could imagine a fond father,
as I imagined Miss Gage’s father to be, objecting to him, on some grounds
at least, till he knew him, and Mrs. March apparently could not imagine
even this.
I do not know why I should have prefigured Miss Gage’s father as tall and
lank. She was not herself so very tall, though she was rather tall than
short, and though she was rather of the Diana or girlish type of goddess,
she was by no means lank. Yet it was in this shape that I had always
thought of him, perhaps through an obscure association with his
fellow-villager, Deering. I had fancied him saturnine of spirit,
slovenly of dress, and lounging of habit, upon no authority that I could
allege, and I was wholly unprepared for the neat, small figure of a man,
very precise of manner and scrupulous of aspect, who said, “How do you
do, sir? I hope I see you well, sir,” when his daughter presented us to
each other, the morning after the eventful day described, and he shook my
hand with his very small, dry hand.
I could not make out from their manner with each other whether they had
been speaking of the great matter in hand or not. I am rather at a loss
about people of that Philistine make as to what their procedure will be
in circumstances where I know just what people of my own sort of
sophistication would do. These would come straight at the trouble, but I
fancy that with the other sort the convention is a preliminary reserve.
I found Mr. Gage disposed to prolong, with me at least, a discussion of
the weather, and the aspects of Saratoga, the events of his journey from
De Witt Point, and the hardship of having to ride all the way to Mooer’s
Junction in a stage-coach. I felt more and more, while we bandied these
futilities, as if Mr. Gage had an overdue note of mine, and was waiting
for me, since I could not pay it, to make some proposition toward its
renewal; and he did really tire me out at last, so that I said, “Well,
Mr. Gage, I suppose Miss Gage has told you something of the tremendous
situation that has developed itself here?”
I thought I had better give the affair such smiling character as a jocose
treatment might impart, and the dry little man twinkled up responsively
so far as manner was concerned. “Well, yes, yes. There has been some
talk of it between us,” and again he left the word to me.
“Mrs. March urged your daughter to send for you at once because that was
the right and fit thing to do, and because we felt that the affair had
now quite transcended our powers, such as they were, and nobody could
really cope with it but yourself. I hope you were not unduly alarmed by
the summons?”
“Not at all. She said in the despatch that she was not sick. I had been
anticipating a short visit to Saratoga for some days, and my business was
in a shape so that I could leave.”
“Oh!” I said vaguely, “I am very glad. Mrs. March felt, as I did, that
circumstances had given us a certain obligation in regard to Miss Gage,
and we were anxious to discharge it faithfully and to the utmost. We
should have written to you, summoned you, before, if we could have
supposed—or been sure; but you know these things go on so obscurely, and
we acted at the very first possible moment. I wish you to understand
that. We talked it over a great deal, and I hope you will believe that
we studied throughout—that we were most solicitous from beginning to end
for Miss Gage’s happiness, and that if we could have foreseen or
imagined—if we could have taken any steps—I trust you will believe—” I
was furious at myself for being so confoundedly apologetic, for I was
thinking all the time of the bother and affliction we had had with the
girl; and there sat that little wooden image accepting my
self-inculpations, and apparently demanding more of me; but I could not
help going on in the same strain: “We felt especially bound in the
matter, from the fact that Mr. Kendricks was a personal friend of ours,
whom we are very fond of, and we both are very anxious that you should
not suppose that we promoted, or that we were not most vigilant—that we
were for a moment forgetful of your rights in such an affair—”
I stopped, and Mr. Gage passed his hand across his little meagre, smiling
mouth.
“Then he is not a connection of yours, Mr. March?”
“Bless me, no!” I said in great relief; “we are not so swell as that.”
And I tried to give him some notion of Kendricks’s local quality,
repeating a list of agglutinated New York surnames to which his was more
or less affiliated. They always amuse me, those names, which more than
any in the world give the notion of social straining; but I doubt if they
affected the imagination of Mr. Gage, either in this way or in the way I
meanly meant them to affect him.
“And what did you say his business was?” he asked, with that implication
of a previous statement on your part which some people think it so clever
to make when they question you.
I always hate it, and I avenged myself by answering simply, “Bless my
soul, he has no business!” and letting him take up the word now or not,
as he liked.
“Then he is a man of independent means?”
I could not resist answering, “Independent means? Kendricks has no means
whatever.” But having dealt this blow, I could add, “I believe his
mother has some money. They are people who live comfortably.”
“Then he has no profession?” asked Mr. Gage, with a little more
stringency in his smile.
“I don’t know whether you will call it a profession. He is a writer.”
“Ah!” Mr. Gage softly breathed. “Does he write for your—paper?”
I noted that as to the literary technicalities he seemed not to be much
more ignorant than Kendricks’s own family, and I said, tolerantly, “Yes;
he writes for our magazine.”
“Magazine—yes; I beg your pardon,” he interrupted.
“And for any others where he can place his material.”
This apparently did not convey any very luminous idea to Mr. Gage’s mind,
and he asked after a moment, “What kind of things does he write?”
“Oh, stories, sketches, poems, reviews, essays—almost anything, in fact.”
The light left his face, and I perceived that I had carried my revenge
too far, at least for Kendricks’s advantage, and I determined to take a
new departure at the first chance. The chance did not come immediately.
“And can a man support a wife by that kind of writing?” asked Mr. Gage.
I laughed uneasily. “Some people do. It depends upon how much of it he
can sell. It depends upon how handsomely a wife wishes to be supported.
The result isn’t usually beyond the dreams of avarice,” I said, with a
desperate levity.
“Excuse me,” returned the little man. “Do you live in that way? By your
writings?”
“No,” I said with some state, which I tried to subdue; “I am the editor
of _Every Other Week_, and part owner. Mr. Kendricks is merely a
contributor.”
“Ah,” he breathed again. “And if he were successful in selling his
writings, how much would he probably make in a year?”
“In a year?” I repeated, to gain time. “Mr. Kendricks is comparatively a
beginner. Say fifteen hundred—two thousand—twenty-five hundred.”
“And that would not go very far in New York.”
“No; that would not go far in New York.” I was beginning to find a
certain pleasure in dealing so frankly with this hard little man. I
liked to see him suffer, and I could see that he did suffer; he suffered
as a father must who learns that from a pecuniary point of view his
daughter is imprudently in love. Why should we always regard such a
sufferer as a comic figure? He is, if we think of it rightly, a most
serious, even tragical figure, and at all events a most respectable
figure. He loves her, and his heart is torn between the wish to indulge
her and the wish to do what will be finally best for her. Why should our
sympathies, in such a case, be all for the foolish young lovers? They
ought in great measure to be for the father, too. Something like a sense
of this smote me, and I was ashamed in my pleasure.
“Then I should say, Mr. March, that this seems a most undesirable
engagement for my daughter. What should you say? I ask you to make the
case your own.”
“Excuse me,” I answered; “I would much rather not make the case my own,
Mr. Gage, and I must decline to have you consult me. I think that in
this matter I have done all that I was called upon to do. I have told
you what I know of Mr. Kendricks’s circumstances and connections. As to
his character, I can truly say that he is one of the best men I ever
knew. I believe in his absolute purity of heart, and he is the most
unselfish, the most generous—”
Mr. Gage waved the facts aside with his hand. “I don’t undervalue those
things. If I could be master, no one should have my girl without them.
But they do not constitute a livelihood. From what you tell me of Mr.
Kendricks’s prospects, I am not prepared to say that I think the outlook
is brilliant. If he has counted upon my supplying a deficiency—”
“Oh, excuse me, Mr. Gage! Your insinuation—”
“Excuse _me_!” he retorted. “I am making no insinuation. I merely wish
to say that, while my means are such as to enable me to live in comfort
at De Witt Point, I am well aware that much more would be needed in New
York to enable my daughter to live in the same comfort. I’m not willing
she should live in less. I think it is my duty to say that I am not at
all a rich man, and if there has been any supposition that I am so, it is
a mistake that cannot be corrected too soon.”
This time I could not resent his insinuation, for since he had begun to
speak I had become guiltily aware of having felt a sort of ease in regard
to Kendricks’s modesty of competence from a belief, given me, I suspect,
by the talk of Deering, that Mr. Gage had plenty of money, and could come
to the rescue in any amount needed. I could only say, “Mr. Gage, all
this is so far beyond my control that I ought not to allow you to say it
to me. It is something that you must say to Mr. Kendricks.”
As I spoke I saw the young fellow come round the corner of the street,
and mount the hotel steps. He did not see me, for he did not look toward
the little corner of lawn where Mr. Gage and I had put our chairs for the
sake of the morning shade, and for the seclusion that the spot afforded
us. It was at the angle of the house farthest from our peculiar corner
of the piazza, whither I had the belief that the girl had withdrawn when
she left me to her father. I was sure that Kendricks would seek her
there, far enough beyond eyeshot or earshot of us, and I had no doubt
that she was expecting him.
“You are Mr. Kendricks’s friend—”
“I have tried much more to be Miss Gage’s friend; and Mrs. March—” It
came into my mind that she was most selfishly and shamelessly keeping out
of the way, and I could not go on and celebrate her magnanimous
impartiality, her eager and sleepless vigilance.
“I have no doubt of that,” said the little man, “and I am very much
obliged to you for all the trouble you have taken on my daughter’s
account. But you are his friend, and I can speak to you much more fully
and frankly than I could to him.”
I did not know just what to say to this, and he went on: “In point of
fact, I don’t think that I shall speak to him at all.”
“That is quite your affair, my dear sir,” I said dryly. “It isn’t to be
supposed that you would seek an interview with him.”
“And if he seeks an interview with me, I shall decline it.” He looked at
me defiantly and yet interrogatively. I could see that he was very
angry, and yet uncertain.
“I must say, then, Mr. Gage, that I don’t think you would be right.”
“How, not right?”
“I should say that in equity he had a full and perfect right to meet you,
and to talk this matter over with you. He has done you no wrong whatever
in admiring your daughter, and wishing to marry her. It’s for you and
her to decide whether you will let him. But as far as his wish goes, and
his expression of it to her, he is quite within his rights. You must see
that yourself.”
“I consider,” he answered, “that he has done me a wrong in that very
thing. A man without means, or any stated occupation, he had no business
to speak to my daughter without speaking to me. He took advantage of the
circumstances. What does he think? Does he suppose I am _made_ of
money? Does he suppose I want to support a son-in-law? I can tell you
that if I were possessed of unlimited means, I should not do it.” I
began to suspect that Deering was nearer right, after all, in his
representations of the man’s financial ability; I fancied something of
the anxiety, the tremor of avarice, in his resentment of poor Kendricks’s
possible, or rather impossible, designs upon his pocket. “If he had any
profession, or any kind of business, I should feel differently, and I
should be willing to assist him to a reasonable degree; or if he had a
business training, I might take him in with me; but as it is, I should
have a helpless burden on my hands, and I can tell you I am not going in
for that sort of thing. I shall make short work of it. I shall decline
to meet Mr. Hendricks, or Kendricks, and I shall ask you to say as much
to him from me.”
“And I shall decline to be the bearer of any such message from you, Mr.
Gage,” I answered, and I saw, not without pleasure, the bewilderment that
began to mix with his arrogance.
“Very well, then, sir,” he answered, after a moment; “I shall simply take
my daughter away with me, and that will end it.”
The prim little, grim little man looked at me with his hard eyes, and set
his lips so close that the beard on the lower one stuck out at me with a
sort of additional menace I felt that he was too capable of doing what he
said, and I lost myself in a sense of his sordidness, a sense which was
almost without a trace of compassion.
It seemed as if I were a long time under the spell of this, and the sight
of his repugnant face; but it could really have been merely a moment,
when I heard a stir of drapery on the grass near us, and the soft, rich
voice of Miss Gage saying, “Papa!”
We both started to our feet. I do not know whether she had heard what he
said or not. We had spoken low, and in the utmost vehemence of his
speech he did not lift his voice. In any case, she did not heed what he
said.
“Papa,” she repeated, “I want you to come up and see Mrs. March on the
piazza. And—Mr. Kendricks is there.”
I had a wild desire to laugh at what followed, and yet it was not without
its pathos. “I—I—hm! hm! I—cannot see Mr. Kendricks just at present.
I—the fact is, I do not want to see him. It is better—not. I think you
had better get ready to go home with me at once, daughter. I—hm!—cannot
approve of any engagement to Mr. Kendricks, and I—prefer not to meet
him.” He stopped.
Miss Gage said nothing, and I cannot say that she looked anything. She
simply _clouded up_, if I may so express the effect that came and
remained upon her countenance, which was now the countenance she had
shown me the first evening I saw her, when I saw the Deerings cowering in
its shadow. I had no need to look at the adamantine little man before
her to know that he was softening into wax, and, in fact, I felt a sort
of indecency in beholding his inteneration, for I knew that it came from
his heart, and had its consecration through his love for her.
That is why I turned away, and do not know to this moment just how the
change she desired in him was brought about. I will not say that I did
not look back from a discreet distance, and continue looking until I saw
them start away together and move in the direction of that corner of the
piazza where Kendricks was waiting with Mrs. March.
It appeared, from her account, that Mr. Gage, with no uncommon show of
ill-will, but with merely a natural dryness, suffered Kendricks to be
presented to him, and entered upon some preliminary banalities with him,
such as he had used in opening a conversation with me. Before these came
to a close Mrs. March had thought it well to leave the three together.
Afterward, when we knew the only result that the affair could have, she
said, “The girl has a powerful will. I wonder what the mother was like.”
“Yes; evidently she didn’t get that will from her father. I have still a
sense of exhaustion from it in our own case. What do you think it
portends for poor Kendricks!”
“Poor Kendricks!” she repeated thoughtfully. “Yes; in that sense I
suppose you might call him poor. It isn’t an equal thing as far as
nature, as character, goes. But isn’t it always dreadful to see two
people who have made up their minds to get married?”
“It’s very common,” I suggested.
“That doesn’t change the fact, or lessen the risk. She is very
beautiful, and now he is in love with her beautiful girlhood. But after
a while the girlhood will go.”
“And the girl will remain,” I said.
* * * * *