It was not the first time that Mrs. Pasmer had reasoned in this round; but the utterance of her thoughts seemed to throw a new light on them, and she took a courage from them that they did not always impart. She arrived at the final opinion expressed, with a throb of tenderness for the young fellow whom she believed eager to take her daughter from her, and now for the first time she experienced a desolation in the prospect, as if it were an accomplished fact. She was morally a bundle of finesses, but at the bottom of her heart her daughter was all the world to her. She had made the girl her idol, and if, like some other heathen, she had not always used her idol with the greatest deference, if she had often expected the impossible from it, and made it pay for her disappointment, still she had never swerved from her worship of it. She suddenly asked herself, What if this young fellow, so charming and so good, should so wholly monopolise her child that she should no longer have any share in her? What if Alice, who had so long formed her first care and chief object in life, should contentedly lose herself in the love and care of another, and both should ignore her right to her? She answered herself with a pang that this might happen with any one Alice married, and that it would be no worse, at the worst, with Dan Mavering than with another, while her husband remained impartially silent. Always keeping within the lines to which his wife’s supremacy had driven him, he felt safe there, and was not to be easily coaxed out of them.
Mrs. Pasmer rose and left him, with his perfect acquiescence, and went into her daughter’s room. She found Alice there, with a pretty evening dress laid out on her bed. Mrs. Pasmer was very fond of that dress, and at the thought of Alice in it her spirits rose again.
“Oh, are you going, Alice?”
“Why, yes,” answered the girl. “Didn’t you accept?”
“Why, yes,” Mrs. Pasmer admitted. “But aren’t you tired?”
“Oh, not in the least. I feel as fresh as I did this morning. Don’t you want me to go?”
“Oh yes, certainly, I want you to go — if you think you’ll enjoy it.”
“Enjoy it? Why, why shouldn’t I enjoy it, mamma!”
“What are you thinking about? It’s going to be the greatest kind of fun.”
“But do you think you ought to look at everything simply as fun?” asked the mother, with unwonted didacticism.
“How everything? What are you thinking about, mamma?”
“Oh, nothing! I’m so glad you’re going to wear that dress.”
“Why, of course! It’s my best. But what are you driving at, mamma?”
Mrs. Pasmer was really seeking in her daughter that comfort of a distinct volition which she had failed to find in her husband, and she wished to assure herself of it more and more, that she might share with some one the responsibility which he had refused any part in.
“Nothing. But I’m glad you wish so much to go.” The girl dropped her hands and stared. “You must have enjoyed yourself to-day,” she added, as if that were an explanation.
“Of course I enjoyed myself! But what has that to do with my wanting to go to-night?”
“Oh, nothing. But I hope, Alice, that there is one thing you have looked fully in the face.”
“What thing?” faltered the girl, and now showed herself unable to confront it by dropping her eyes.
“Well, whatever you may have heard or seen, nobody else is in doubt about it. What do you suppose has brought Mr. Mavering here!”
“I don’t know.” The denial not only confessed that she did know, but it informed her mother that all was as yet tacit between the young people.
“Very well, then, I know,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “and there is one thing that you must know before long, Alice.”
“What?” she asked faintly.
“Your own mind,” said her mother. “I don’t ask you what it is, and I shall wait till you tell me. Of course I shouldn’t have let him stay here if I had objected—”
“O mamma!” murmured the girl, dyed with shame to have the facts so boldly touched, but not, probably, too deeply displeased.
“Yes. And I know that he would never have thought of going into that business if he had not expected — hoped—”
“Mamma!”
“And you ought to consider—”
“Oh, don’t! don’t! don’t!” implored the girl.
“That’s all,” said her mother, turning from Alice, who had hidden her face in her hands, to inspect the costume on the bed. She lifted one piece of it after another, turned it over, looked at it, and laid it down. “You can never get such a dress in this country.”
She went out of the room, as the girl dropped her face in the pillow. An hour later they met equipped for the evening’s pleasure. To the keen glance that her mother gave her, the daughter’s eyes had the brightness of eyes that have been weeping, but they were also bright with that knowledge of her own mind which Mrs. Pasmer had desired for her. She met her mother’s glance fearlessly, even proudly, and she carried her stylish costume with a splendour to which only occasions could stimulate her. They dramatised a perfect unconsciousness to each other, but Mrs. Pasmer was by no means satisfied with the decision which she had read in her daughter’s looks. Somehow it did not relieve her of the responsibility, and it did not change the nature of the case. It was gratifying, of course, to see Alice the object of a passion so sincere and so ardent; so far the triumph was complete, and there was really nothing objectionable in the young man and his circumstances, though there was nothing very distinguished. But the affair was altogether different from anything that Mrs. Pasmer had imagined. She had supposed and intended that Alice should meet some one in Boston, and go through a course of society before reaching any decisive step. There was to be a whole season in which to look the ground carefully over, and the ground was to be all within certain well-ascertained and guarded precincts. But this that had happened was outside of these precincts, of at least on their mere outskirts. Class Day, of course, was all right; and she could not say that the summer colony at Campobello was not thoroughly and essentially Boston; and yet she felt that certain influences, certain sanctions, were absent. To tell the truth, she would not have cared for the feelings of Mavering’s family in regard to the matter, except as they might afterward concern Alice, and the time had not come when she could recognise their existence in regard to the affair; and yet she could have wished that even as it was his family could have seen and approved it from the start. It would have been more regular.
With Alice it was a simpler matter, and of course deeper. For her it was only a question of himself and herself; no one else existed to the sublime egotism of her love. She did not call it by that name; she did not permit it to assert itself by any name; it was a mere formless joy in her soul, a trustful and blissful expectance, which she now no more believed he could disappoint than that she could die within that hour. All the rebellion that she had sometimes felt at the anomalous attitude exacted of her sex in regard to such matters was gone. She no longer thought it strange that a girl should be expected to ignore the admiration of a young man till he explicitly declared it, and should then be fully possessed of all the materials of a decision on the most momentous question in life; for she knew that this state of ignorance could never really exist; she had known from the first moment that he had thought her beautiful. To-night she was radiant for him. Her eyes shone with the look in which they should meet and give themselves to each other before they spoke — the look in which they had met already, in which they had lived that whole day.
XIX.
The evening’s entertainment was something that must fail before an audience which was not very kind. They were to present a burlesque of classic fable, and the parts, with their general intention, had been distributed to the different actors; but nothing had been written down, and, beyond the situations and a few points of dialogue, all had to be improvised. The costumes and properties had been invented from such things as came to hand. Sheets sculpturesquely draped the deities who took part; a fox-pelt from
the hearth did duty as the leopard skin of Bacchus; a feather duster served Neptune for a trident; the lyre of Apollo was a dust-pan; a gull’s breast furnished Jove with his grey beard.
The fable was adapted to modern life, and the scene had been laid in Campobello, the peculiarities of which were to be satirised throughout. The principal situation was to be a passage between Jupiter, represented by Mavering, and Juno, whom Miss Anderson personated; it was to be a scene of conjugal reproaches and reprisals, and to end in reconciliation, in which the father of the gods sacrificed himself on the altar of domestic peace by promising to bring his family to Campobello every year.
This was to be followed by a sketch of the Judgment of Paris, in which Juno and Pallas were to be personated by two young men, and Miss Anderson took the part of Venus.
The pretty drawing-room of the Trevors — young people from Albany, and cousins of Miss Anderson — was curtained off at one end for a stage, and beyond the sliding doors which divided it in half were set chairs for the spectators. People had come in whatever dress they liked; the men were mostly in morning coats; the ladies had generally made some attempt at evening toilet, but they joined in admiring Alice Pasmer’s costume, and one of them said that they would let it represent them all, and express what each might have done if she would. There was not much time for their tributes; all the lamps were presently taken away and set along the floor in front of the curtain as foot-lights, leaving the company in a darkness which Mrs. Brinkley pronounced sepulchral. She made her reproaches to the master of the house, who had effected this transposition of the lamps. “I was just thinking some very pretty and valuable things about your charming cottage, Mr. Trevor: a rug on a bare floor, a trim of varnished pine, a wall with half a dozen simple etchings on it, an open fire, and a mantelpiece without bric-a-brac, how entirely satisfying it all is! And how it upbraids us for heaping up upholstery as we do in town!”
“Go on,” said the host. “Those are beautiful thoughts.”
“But I can’t go on in the dark,” retorted Mrs. Brinkley. “You can’t think in the dark, much less talk! Can you, Mrs. Pasmer?” Mrs. Pasmer, with Alice next to her, sat just in front of Mrs. Brinkley.
“No,” she assented; “but if I could — YOU can thick anywhere, Mrs. Brinkley — Mrs. Trevor’s lovely house would inspire me to it.”
“Two birds with one stone — thank you, Mrs. Pasmer, for my part of the compliment. Pick yourself up, Mr. Trevor.”
“Oh, thank you, I’m all right,” said Trevor, panting after the ladies’ meanings, as a man must. “I suppose thinking and talking in the dark is a good deal like smoking in the dark.”
“No; thinking and talking are not at all like smoking under any conditions. Why in the world should they be?”
“Oh, I can’t get any fun out of a cigar unless I can see the smoke,” the host explained.
“Do you follow him, Mrs. Pasmer?”
“Yes, perfectly.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Pasmer,” said Trevor.
“I’ll get you to tell me how you did it some time,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “But your house is a gem, Mr. Trevor.”
“Isn’t it?” cried Trevor. “I want my wife to live here the year round.” It was the Trevors’ first summer in their cottage, and the experienced reader will easily recognise his mood. “But she’s such a worldly spirit, she won’t.”
“Oh, I don’t know about the year round. Do you, Mrs. Pasmer?”
“I should,” said Alice, with the suddenness of youth, breaking into the talk which she had not been supposed to take any interest in.
“Is it proper to kiss a young lady’s hand?” said Trevor gratefully, appealing to Mrs. Brinkley.
“It isn’t very customary in the nineteenth century,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “But you might kiss her fan. He might kiss her fan, mightn’t he, Mrs. Pasmer?”
“Certainly. Alice, hold out your fan instantly.”
The girl humoured the joke, laughing.
Trevor pressed his lips to the perfumed sticks. “I will tell Mrs. Trevor,” he said, “and that will decide her.”
“It will decide her not to come here at all next year if you tell her all.”
“He never tells me all,” said Mrs. Trevor, catching so much of the talk as she came in from some hospitable cares in the dining-room. “They’re incapable of it. What has he been doing now?”
“Nothing. Or I will tell you when we are alone, Mrs. Trevor,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with burlesque sympathy. “We oughtn’t to have a scene on both sides of the foot-lights.”
A boyish face, all excitement, was thrust out between the curtains forming the proscenium of the little theatre. “All ready, Mrs. Trevor?”
“Yes, all ready, Jim.”
He dashed the curtains apart, and marred the effect of his own disappearance from the scene by tripping over the long legs of Jove, stretched out to the front, where he sat on Mrs. Trevor’s richest rug, propped with sofa cushions on either hand.
“So perish all the impious race of titans, enemies of the gods!” said Mavering solemnly, as the boy fell sprawling. “Pick the earth-born giant up, Vulcan, my son.”
The boy was very small for his age; every one saw that the accident had not been premeditated, and when Vulcan appeared, with an exaggerated limp, and carried the boy off, a burst of laughter went up from the company.
It did not matter what the play was to have been after that; it all turned upon the accident. Juno came on, and began to reproach Jupiter for his carelessness. “I’ve sent Mercury upstairs for the aynica; but he says it’s no use: that boy won’t be able to pass ball for a week. How often have I told you not to sit with your feet out that way! I knew you’d hurt somebody.”
“I didn’t have my feet out,” retorted Jupiter. “Besides,” he added, with dignity, and a burlesque of marital special pleading which every wife and husband recognised, “I always sit with my feet out so, and I always will, so long as I’ve the spirit of a god.”
“Isn’t he delicious?” buzzed Mrs. Pasmer, leaning backward to whisper to Mrs. Brinkley; it was not that she thought what Dan had just said was so very fanny, but people are immoderately applausive of amateur dramatics, and she was feeling very fond of the young fellow.
The improvisation went wildly and adventurously on, and the curtains dropped together amidst the facile acclaim of the audience:
“It’s very well for Jupiter that he happened to think of the curtain,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “They couldn’t have kept it up at that level much longer.”
“Oh, do you think so?” softly murmured Mrs. Pasmer. “It seemed as if they could have kept it up all night if they liked.”
“I doubt it. Mr. Trevor,” said Mrs. Brinkley to the host, who had come up for her congratulations, “do you always have such brilliant performances?”
“Well, we have so far,” he answered modestly; and Mrs. Brinkley laughed with him. This was the first entertainment at Trevor cottage.
“‘Sh!” went up all round them, and Mrs. Trevor called across the room, in a reproachful whisper loud enough for every one to hear, “My dear! — enjoying yourself!” while Mavering stood between the parted curtains waiting for the attention of the company.
“On account of an accident to the call-boy and the mental exhaustion of some of the deities, the next piece will be omitted, and the performance will begin with the one after. While the audience is waiting, Mercury will go round and take up a collection for the victim of the recent accident, who will probably be indisposed for life. The collector will be accompanied by a policeman, and may be safely trusted.”
He disappeared behind the curtain with a pas and r swirl of his draperies like the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe, and the audience again abandoned itself to applause.
“How very witty he is!” said Miss Cotton, who sat near John Munt. “Don’t you think he’s really witty?”
“Yes,” Munt assented critically. “But you should have known his father.”
“Oh, do you kn
ow his father?”
“I was in college with him.”
“Oh, do tell me about him, and all Mr. Mavering’s family. We’re so interested, you know, on account of — Isn’t it pretty to have that little love idyl going on here? I wonder — I’ve been wondering all the time — what she thinks of all this. Do you suppose she quite likes it? His costume is so very remarkable!” Miss Cotton, in the absence of any lady of her intimate circle, was appealing confidentially to John Munt.
“Why, do you think there’s anything serious between them?” he asked, dropping his head forward as people do in church when they wish to whisper to some one in the same pew.
“Why, yes, it seems so,” murmured Miss Cotton. “His admiration is quite undisguised, isn’t it?”
“A man never can tell,” said Munt. “We have to leave those things to you ladies.”
“Oh, every one’s talking of it, I assure you. And you know his family?”
“I knew his father once rather better than anybody else.”
“Indeed!”
“Yes.” Munt sketched rather a flattered portrait of the elder Mavering, his ability, his goodness, his shyness, which he had always had to make such a hard fight with. Munt was sensible of an access of popularity in knowing Dan Mavering’s people, and he did not spare his colours.
“Then it isn’t from his father that he gets everything. He isn’t in the least shy,” said Miss Cotton.
“That must be the mother.”
“And the mother?”
“The mother I don’t know.”
Miss Cotton sighed. “Sometimes I wish that he did show a little more trepidation. It would seem as if he were more alive to the great difference that there is between Alice Pasmer and other girls.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 358
