The evening after the funeral, while the Marches sat together talking it
over, and making approaches, through its shadow, to the question of their
own future, which it involved, they were startled by the twitter of the
electric bell at their apartment door. It was really not so late as the
children's having gone to bed made it seem; but at nine o'clock it was
too late for any probable visitor except Fulkerson. It might be he, and
March was glad to postpone the impending question to his curiosity
concerning the immediate business Fulkerson might have with him. He went
himself to the door, and confronted there a lady deeply veiled in black
and attended by a very decorous serving-woman.
"Are you alone, Mr. March--you and Mrs. March?" asked the lady, behind
her veil; and, as he hesitated, she said: "You don't know me! Miss
Vance"; and she threw back her veil, showing her face wan and agitated in
the dark folds. "I am very anxious to see you--to speak with you both.
May I come in?"
"Why, certainly, Miss Vance," he answered, still too much stupefied by
her presence to realize it.
She promptly entered, and saying, with a glance at the hall chair by the
door, "My maid can sit here?" followed him to the room where he had left
his wife.
Mrs. March showed herself more capable of coping with the fact. She
welcomed Miss Vance with the liking they both felt for the girl, and with
the sympathy which her troubled face inspired.
"I won't tire you with excuses for coming, Mrs. March," she said, "for it
was the only thing left for me to do; and I come at my aunt's
suggestion." She added this as if it would help to account for her more
on the conventional plane, and she had the instinctive good taste to
address herself throughout to Mrs. March as much as possible, though what
she had to say was mainly for March. "I don't know how to begin--I don't
know how to speak of this terrible affair. But you know what I mean. I
feel as if I had lived a whole lifetime since it happened. I don't want
you to pity me for it," she said, forestalling a politeness from Mrs.
March. "I'm the last one to be thought of, and you mustn't mind me if I
try to make you. I came to find out all of the truth that I can, and when
I know just what that is I shall know what to do. I have read the
inquest; it's all burned into my brain. But I don't care for that--for
myself: you must let me say such things without minding me. I know that
your husband--that Mr. March was there; I read his testimony; and I
wished to ask him--to ask him--" She stopped and looked distractedly
about. "But what folly! He must have said everything he knew--he had to."
Her eyes wandered to him from his wife, on whom she had kept them with
instinctive tact.
"I said everything--yes," he replied. "But if you would like to know--"
"Perhaps I had better tell you something first. I had just parted with
him--it couldn't have been more than half an hour--in front of
Brentano's; he must have gone straight to his death. We were talking, and
I--I said, Why didn't some one go among the strikers and plead with them
to be peaceable, and keep them from attacking the new men. I knew that he
felt as I did about the strikers: that he was their friend. Did you
see--do you know anything that makes you think he had been trying to do
that?"
"I am sorry," March began, "I didn't see him at all till--till I saw him
lying dead."
"My husband was there purely by accident," Mrs. March put in. "I had
begged and entreated him not to go near the striking anywhere. And he had
just got out of the car, and saw the policeman strike that wretched
Lindau--he's been such an anxiety to me ever since we have had anything
to do with him here; my husband knew him when he was a boy in the West.
Mr. March came home from it all perfectly prostrated; it made us all
sick! Nothing so horrible ever came into our lives before. I assure you
it was the most shocking experience."
Miss Vance listened to her with that look of patience which those who
have seen much of the real suffering of the world--the daily portion of
the poor--have for the nervous woes of comfortable people. March hung his
head; he knew it would be useless to protest that his share of the
calamity was, by comparison, infinitesimally small.
After she had heard Mrs. March to the end even of her repetitions, Miss
Vance said, as if it were a mere matter of course that she should have
looked the affair up, "Yes, I have seen Mr. Lindau at the hospital--"
"My husband goes every day to see him," Mrs. March interrupted, to give
a final touch to the conception of March's magnanimity throughout.
"The poor man seems to have been in the wrong at the time," said Miss
Vance.
"I could almost say he had earned the right to be wrong. He's a man of
the most generous instincts, and a high ideal of justice, of equity--too
high to be considered by a policeman with a club in his hand," said
March, with a bold defiance of his wife's different opinion of Lindau.
"It's the policeman's business, I suppose, to club the ideal when he
finds it inciting a riot."
"Oh, I don't blame Mr. Lindau; I don't blame the policeman; he was as
much a mere instrument as his club was. I am only trying to find out how
much I am to blame myself. I had no thought of Mr. Dryfoos's going
there--of his attempting to talk with the strikers and keep them quiet; I
was only thinking, as women do, of what I should try to do if I were a
man.
"But perhaps he understood me to ask him to go--perhaps my words sent him
to his death."
She had a sort of calm in her courage to know the worst truth as to her
responsibility that forbade any wish to flatter her out of it. "I'm
afraid," said March, "that is what can never be known now." After a
moment he added: "But why should you wish to know? If he went there as a
peacemaker, he died in a good cause, in such a way as he would wish to
die, I believe."
"Yes," said the girl; "I have thought of that. But death is awful; we
must not think patiently, forgivingly of sending any one to their death
in the best cause."--"I fancy life was an awful thing to Conrad Dryfoos,"
March replied. "He was thwarted and disappointed, without even pleasing
the ambition that thwarted and disappointed him. That poor old man, his
father, warped him from his simple, lifelong wish to be a minister, and
was trying to make a business man of him. If it will be any consolation
to you to know it, Miss Vance, I can assure you that he was very unhappy,
and I don't see how he could ever have been happy here."
"It won't," said the girl, steadily. "If people are born into this world,
it's because they were meant to live in it. It isn't a question of being
happy here; no one is happy, in that old, selfish way, or can be; but he
could have been of great use."
"Perhaps he was of use in dying. Who knows? He may have been trying to
silence Lindau."
"Oh, Lindau wasn't worth it!" cried Mrs. March.
Miss Vance looked at her as if she did not quite understand. Then she
turned to March. "He might have been unhappy, as we all are; but I know
that his life here would have had a higher happiness than we wish for or
aim for." The tears began to run silently down her cheeks.
"He looked strangely happy that day when he left me. He had hurt himself
somehow, and his face was bleeding from a scratch; he kept his
handkerchief up; he was pale, but such a light came into his face when he
shook hands--ah, I know he went to try and do what I said!" They were all
silent, while she dried her eyes and then put her handkerchief back into
the pocket from which she had suddenly pulled it, with a series of vivid,
young-ladyish gestures, which struck March by their incongruity with the
occasion of their talk, and yet by their harmony with the rest of her
elegance. "I am sorry, Miss Vance," he began, "that I can't really tell
you anything more--"
"You are very kind," she said, controlling herself and rising quickly. "I
thank you--thank you both very much." She turned to Mrs. March and shook
hands with her and then with him. "I might have known--I did know that
there wasn't anything more for you to tell. But at least I've found out
from you that there was nothing, and now I can begin to bear what I must.
How are those poor creatures--his mother and father, his sisters? Some
day, I hope, I shall be ashamed to have postponed them to the thought of
myself; but I can't pretend to be yet. I could not come to the funeral; I
wanted to."
She addressed her question to Mrs. March, who answered: "I can
understand. But they were pleased with the flowers you sent; people are,
at such times, and they haven't many friends."
"Would you go to see them?" asked the girl. "Would you tell them what
I've told you?"
Mrs. March looked at her husband.
"I don't see what good it would do. They wouldn't understand. But if it
would relieve you--"
"I'll wait till it isn't a question of self-relief," said the girl.
"Good-bye!"
She left them to long debate of the event. At the end Mrs. March said,
"She is a strange being; such a mixture of the society girl and the
saint."
Her husband answered: "She's the potentiality of several kinds of
fanatic. She's very unhappy, and I don't see how she's to be happier
about that poor fellow. I shouldn't be surprised if she did inspire him
to attempt something of that kind."
"Well, you got out of it very well, Basil. I admired the way you managed.
I was afraid you'd say something awkward."
"Oh, with a plain line of truth before me, as the only possible thing, I
can get on pretty well. When it comes to anything decorative, I'd rather
leave it to you, Isabel."
She seemed insensible of his jest. "Of course, he was in love with her.
That was the light that came into his face when he was going to do what
he thought she wanted him to do."
"And she--do you think that she was--"
"What an idea! It would have been perfectly grotesque!"