Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “And there certainly are some things against us. Even when the chance was given us to sell all we had and give it to the poor, we couldn’t bring our minds to it, and went away exceeding sorrowful.”

  “I wonder,” said Miss Cotton, “whether those things were ever intended to be taken literally?”

  “Let’s hope not,” said John Munt, seeing his chance to make a laugh.

  Mrs. Stamwell said, “Well, I shall take another cup of coffee, at any rate,” and her hardihood raised another laugh.

  “That always seems to me the most pitiful thing in the whole Bible,” said Alice, from her place. “To see the right so clearly, and not to be strong enough to do it.”

  “My dear, it happens every day,” said Mrs. Brinkley.

  “I always felt sorry for that poor fellow, too,” said Mavering. “He seemed to be a good fellow, and it was pretty hard lines for him.”

  Alice looked round at him with deepening gravity.

  “Confound those fellows!” said the photographer, glancing at his hastily developed plate. “They moved.”

  XVII.

  The picnic party gathered itself up after the lunch, and while some of the men, emulous of Mavering’s public spirit, helped some of the ladies to pack the dishes and baskets away under the wagon seats, others threw a corked bottle into the water, and threw stones at it. A few of the ladies joined them, but nobody hit the bottle, which was finally left bobbing about on the tide.

  Mrs. Brinkley addressed the defeated group, of whom her husband was one, as they came up the beach toward the wagons. “Do you think that display was calculated to inspire the lower middle classes with respectful envy?”

  Her husband made himself spokesman for the rest: “No; but you can’t tell how they’d have felt if we’d hit it.”

  They all now climbed to a higher level, grassy and smooth, on the bluff, from which there was a particular view; and Mavering came, carrying the wraps of Mrs. Pasmer and Alice, with which he associated his overcoat. A book fell out of one of the pockets when he threw it down.

  Miss Anderson picked the volume up. “Browning! He reads Browning! Superior young man!”

  “Oh, don’t say that!” pleaded Mavering.

  “Oh, read something aloud!” cried another of the young ladies.

  “Isn’t Browning rather serious for a picnic?” he asked, with a glance at Alice; he still had a doubt of the effect of the rheumatic uncle’s dance upon her, and would have been glad to give her some other aesthetic impression of him.

  “Oh no!” said Mrs. Brinkley, “nothing is more appropriate to a picnic than conundrums; they always have them. Choose a good tough one.”

  “I don’t know anything tougher than the ‘Legend of Pernik’ — or lovelier,” he said, and he began to read, simply, and with a passionate pleasure in the subtle study, feeling its control over his hearers.

  The gentlemen lay smoking about at their ease; at the end a deep sigh went up from the ladies, cut short by the question which they immediately fell into.

  They could not agree, but they said, one after another: “But you read beautifully, Mr. Mavering!” “Beautifully!” “Yes, indeed!”

  “Well, I’m glad there is one point clear,” he said, putting the book away, and “I’m afraid you’ll think I’m rather sentimental,” he added, in a low voice to Alice, “carrying poetry around with me.”

  “Oh no!” she replied intensely; “I thank you.”

  “I thank you,” he retorted, and their eyes met in a deep look.

  One of the outer circle of smokers came up with his watch in his hand, and addressed the company, “Do you know what time it’s got to be? It’s four o’clock.”

  They all sprang up with a clamour of surprise.

  Mrs. Pasmer, under cover of the noise, said, in a low tone, to her daughter, “Alice, I think you’d better keep a little more with me now.”

  “Yes,” said the girl, in a sympathy with her mother in which she did not always find herself.

  But when Mavering, whom their tacit treaty concerned, turned toward them, and put himself in charge of Alice, Mrs. Pasmer found herself dispossessed by the charm of his confidence, and relinquished her to him. They were going to walk to the Castle Rocks by the path that now loses and now finds itself among the fastnesses of the forest, stretching to the loftiest outlook on the bay. The savage woodland is penetrated only by this forgetful path, that passes now and then aver the bridge of a ravine, and offers to the eye on either hand the mystery deepening into wilder and weirder tracts of solitude. The party resolved itself into twos and threes, and these straggled far apart, out of conversational reach of one another. Mrs. Pasmer found herself walking and talking with John Munt.

  “Mr. Pasmer hasn’t much interest in these excursions,” he suggested.

  “No; he never goes,” she answered, and, by one of the agile intellectual processes natural to women, she arrived at the question, “You and the Maverings are old friends, Mr. Munt?”

  “I can’t say about the son, but I’m his father’s friend, and I suppose that I’m his friend too. Everybody seems to be so,” suggested Munt.

  “Oh Yes,” Mrs. Pasmer assented; “he appears to be a universal favourite.”

  “We used to expect great things of Elbridge Mavering in college. We were rather more romantic than the Harvard men are nowadays, and we believed in one another more than they do. Perhaps we idealised one another. But, anyway, our class thought Mavering could do anything. You know about his taste for etchings?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of deep appreciation. “What gifted people!”

  “I understand that the son inherits all his father’s talent.”

  “He sketches delightfully.”

  “And Mavering wrote. Why, he was our class poet!” cried Munt, remembering the fact with surprise and gratification to himself. “He was a tremendous satirist.”

  “Really? And he seems so amiable now.”

  “Oh, it was only on paper.”

  “Perhaps he still keeps it up — on wall-paper?” suggested Mrs. Pasmer.

  Munt laughed at the little joke with a good-will that flattered the veteran flatterer. “I should like to ask him that some time. Will you lend it to me?”

  “Yes, if such a sayer of good things will deign to borrow—”

  “Oh, Mrs. Pasmer!” cried Munt, otherwise speechless.

  “And the mother? Do you know Mrs. Mavering?”

  “Mrs. Mavering I’ve never seen.”

  “Oh!” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a disappointment for which Munt tried to console her.

  “I’ve never even been at their place. He asked me once a great while ago; but you know how those things are. I’ve heard that she used to be very pretty and very gay. They went about a great deal, to Saratoga and Cape May and such places — rather out of our beat.”

  “And now?”

  “And now she’s been an invalid for a great many years. Bedridden, I believe. Paralysis, I think.”

  “Yes; Mrs. Saintsbury said something of the kind.”

  “Well,” said Munt, anxious to add to the store of knowledge which this remark let him understand he had not materially increased, “I think Mrs. Mavering was the origin of the wall-paper — or her money. Mavering was poor; her father had started it, and Mavering turned in his talent.”

  “How very interesting! And is that the reason — its being ancestral — that Mr. Mavering wishes his son to go into it?”

  “Is he going into it?” asked Munt.

  “He’s come up here to think about it.”

  “I should suppose it would be a very good thing,” said Munt.

  “What a very remarkable forest!” said Mrs. Pasmer, examining it on either side, and turning quite round. This gave her, from her place in the van of the straggling procession, a glimpse of Alice and Dan Mavering far in the rear.

  “Don’t you know,” he was saying to the girl at the same moment, “it’s like some of those Dore illustrati
ons to the Inferno, or the Wandering Jew.”

  “Oh yes. I was trying to think what it was made me think I had seen it before,” she answered. “It must be that. But how strange it is!” she exclaimed, “that sensation of having been there before — in some place before where you can’t possibly have been.”

  “And do you feel it here?” he asked, as vividly interested as if they two had been the first to notice the phenomenon which has been a psychical consolation to so many young observers.

  “Yes,” she cried.

  “I hope I was with you,” he said, with a sudden turn of levity, which did not displease her, for there seemed to be a tender earnestness lurking in it. “I couldn’t bear to think of your being alone in such a howling wilderness.”

  “Oh, I was with a large picnic,” she retorted gaily. “You might have been among the rest. I didn’t notice.”

  “Well, the next time, I wish you’d look closer. I don’t like being left out.” They were so far behind the rest that he devoted himself entirely to her, and they had grown more and more confidential.

  They came to a narrow foot-bridge over a deep gorge. The hand-rail had fallen away. He sprang forward and gave her his hand for the passage. “Who helped you over here?” he demanded. “Don’t say I didn’t.”

  “Perhaps it was you,” she murmured, letting him keep the fingers to which he clung a moment after they had crossed the bridge. Then she took them away, and said: “But I can’t be sure. There were so many others.”

  “Other fellows?” he demanded, placing himself before her on the narrow path, so that she could not get by. “Try to remember, Miss Pasmer. This is very important. It would break my heart if it was really some one else.” She stole a glance at his face, but it was smiling, though his voice was so earnest. “I want to help you over all the bad places, and I don’t want any one else to have a hand in it.”

  The voice and the face still belied each other, and between them the girl chose to feel herself trifled with by the artistic temperament. “If you’ll please step out of the way, Mr. Mavering,” she said severely, “I shall not need anybody’s help just here.”

  He instantly moved aside, and they were both silent, till she said, as she quickened her pace to overtake the others in front, “I don’t see how you can help liking nature in such a place as this.”

  “I can’t — human nature,” he said. It was mere folly; and an abstract folly at that; but the face that she held down and away from him flushed with sweet consciousness as she laughed.

  On the cliff beetling above the bay, where she sat to look out over the sad northern sea, lit with the fishing sail they had seen before, and the surge washed into the rocky coves far beneath them, he threw himself at her feet, and made her alone in the company that came and went and tried this view and that from the different points where the picnic hostess insisted they should enjoy it. She left the young couple to themselves, and Mrs. Pasmer seemed to have forgotten that she had bidden Alice to be a little more with her.

  Alice had forgotten it too. She sat listening to Mavering’s talk with a certain fascination, but not so much apparently because the meaning of the words pleased her as the sound of his voice, the motion of his lips in speaking, charmed her. At first he was serious, and even melancholy, as if he were afraid he had offended her; but apparently he soon believed that he had been forgiven, and began to burlesque his own mood, but still with a deference and a watchful observance of her changes of feeling which was delicately flattering in its way. Now and then when she answered something it was not always to the purpose; he accused her of not hearing what he said, but she would have it that she did, and then he tried to test her by proofs and questions. It did not matter for anything that was spoken or done; speech and action of whatever sort were mere masks of their young joy in each other, so that when he said, after he had quoted some lines befitting the scene they looked out on; “Now was that from Tennyson or from Tupper?” and she answered, “Neither; it was from Shakespeare,” they joined, in the same happy laugh, and they laughed now and then without saying anything. Neither this nor that made them more glad or less; they were in a trance, vulnerable to nothing but the summons which must come to leave their dream behind, and issue into the waking world.

  In hope or in experience such a moment has come to all, and it is so pretty to those who recognise it from the outside that no one has the heart to hurry it away while it can be helped. The affair between Alice and Mavering had evidently her mother’s sanction, and all the rest were eager to help it on. When the party had started to return, they called to them, and let them come behind together. At the carriages they had what Miss Anderson called a new deal, and Alice and Mavering found themselves together in the rear seat of the last.

  The fog began to come in from the sea, and followed them through the woods. When they emerged upon the highway it wrapped them densely round, and formed a little world, cosy, intimate, where they two dwelt alone with these friends of theirs, each of whom they praised for delightful qualities. The horses beat along through the mist, in which there seemed no progress, and they lived in a blissful arrest of time. Miss Anderson called back from the front seat, “My ear buyns; you’re talkin’ about me.”

  “Which ear?” cried Mavering.

  “Oh, the left, of couyse.”

  “Then it’s merely habit, Julie. You ought to have heard the nice things we were saying about you,” Alice called.

  “I’d like to hear all the nice things you’ve been saying.”

  This seemed the last effect of subtle wit. Mavering broke out in his laugh, and Alice’s laugh rang above it.

  Mrs. Pasmer looked involuntarily round from the carriage ahead.

  “They seem to be having a good time,” said Mrs. Brinkley at her side.

  “Yes; I hope Alice isn’t overdoing.”

  “I’m afraid you’re dreadfully tired,” said Mavering to the girl, in a low voice, as he lifted her from her place when they reached the hotel through the provisional darkness, and found that after all it was only dinner-time.

  “Oh no. I feel as if the picnic were just beginning.”

  “Then you will come to-night?”

  “I will see what mamma says.”

  “Shall I ask her?”

  “Oh, perhaps not,” said the girl, repressing his ardour, but not severely.

  XVIII.

  They were going to have some theatricals at one of the cottages, and the lady at whose house they were to be given made haste to invite all the picnic party before it dispersed. Mrs. Pasmer accepted with a mental reservation, meaning to send an excuse later if she chose; and before she decided the point she kept her husband from going after dinner into the reading-room, where he spent nearly all his time over a paper and a cigar, or in sitting absolutely silent and unoccupied, and made him go to their own room with her.

  “There is something that I must speak to you about,” she said, closing the door, “and you must decide for yourself whether you wish to let it go any further.”

  “What go any further?” asked Mr. Pasmer, sitting down and putting his hand to the pocket that held his cigar-case with the same series of motions.

  “No, don’t smoke,” she said, staying his hand impatiently. “I want you to think.”

  “How can I think if I don’t smoke?”

  “Very well; smoke, then. Do you want this affair with young Mavering to go any farther?”

  “Oh!” said Pasmer, “I thought you had been looking after that.” He had in fact relegated that to the company of the great questions exterior to his personal comfort which she always decided.

  “I have been looking after it, but now the time has come when you must, as a father, take some interest in it.”

  Pasmer’s noble mask of a face, from the point of his full white beard to his fine forehead, crossed by his impressive black eyebrows, expressed all the dignified concern which a father ought to feel in such an affair; but what he was really feeling was a grave reluc
tance to have to intervene in any way. “What do you want me to say to him?” he asked.

  “Why, I don’t know that he’s going to ask you anything. I don’t know whether he’s said anything to Alice yet,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with some exasperation.

  Her husband was silent, but his silence insinuated a degree of wonder that she should approach him prematurely on such a point.

  “They have been thrown together all day, and there is no use to conceal from ourselves that they are very much taken with each other?”

  “I thought,” Pasmer said, “that you said that from the beginning. Didn’t you want them to be taken with each other?”

  “That is what you are to decide.”

  Pasmer silently refused to assume the responsibility.

  “Well?” demanded his wife, after waiting for him to speak.

  “Well what?”

  “What do you decide?”

  “What is the use of deciding a thing when it is all over?”

  “It isn’t over at all. It can be broken off at any moment.”

  “Well, break it off, then, if you like.”

  Mrs. Pasmer resumed the responsibility with a sigh. She felt the burden, the penalty, of power, after having so long enjoyed its sweets, and she would willingly have abdicated the sovereignty which she had spent her whole married life in establishing. But there was no one to take it up. “No, I shall not break it off,” she said resentfully; “I shall let it go on.” Then seeing that her husband was not shaken by her threat from his long-confirmed subjection, she added: “It isn’t an ideal affair, but I think it will be a very good thing for Alice. He is not what I expected, but he is thoroughly nice, and I should think his family was nice. I’ve been talking with Mr. Munt about them to-day, and he confirms all that Etta Saintsbury said. I don’t think there can be any doubt of his intentions in coming here. He isn’t a particularly artless young man, but he’s been sufficiently frank about Alice since he’s been here.” Her husband smoked on. “His father seems to have taken up the business from the artistic side, and Mr. Mavering won’t be expected to enter into the commercial part at once. If it wasn’t for Alice, I don’t believe he would think of the business for a moment; he would study law. Of course it’s a little embarrassing to have her engaged at once before she’s seen anything of society here, but perhaps it’s all for the best, after all: the main thing is that she should be satisfied, and I can see that she’s only too much so. Yes, she’s very much taken with him; and I don’t wonder. He is charming.”