Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “That sounds very impartial.”

  “It is impartial. I’m a purely disinterested spectator.”

  “Oh, quite.”

  “And don’t you suppose I understand Mr. and Mrs. Pasmer quite as well as you do? All I say is that Alice is simply the noblest girl that ever breathed, and—”

  “Now you’re talking sense, Dan!”

  “Well, what are you going to say when you get home, Eunice? Come!”

  “That we had better make the best of it.”

  “And what else?”

  “That you’re hopelessly infatuated; and that she will twist you round her finger.”

  “Well?”

  “But that you’ve had your own way so much, it will do you good to have somebody else’s a while.”

  “I guess you’re pretty solid,” said Dan, after thinking it over for a moment. “I don’t believe you’re going to make it hard for me, and I know you can make it just what you please. But I want you to be frank with mother. Of course I wish you felt about the whole affair just as I do, but if you’re right on the main question, I don’t care for the rest. I’d rather mother would know just how you feel about it,” said Dan, with a sigh for the honesty which he felt to be not immediately attainable in his own case.

  “Well, I’ll see what can be done,” Eunice finally assented.

  Whatever her feelings were in regard to the matter, she must have satisfied herself that the situation was not to be changed by her disliking it, and she began to talk so sympathetically with Dan that she soon had the whole story of his love out of him. They laughed a good deal together at it, but it convinced her that he had not been hoodwinked into the engagement. It is always the belief of a young man’s family, especially his mother and sisters, that unfair means have been used to win him, if the family of his betrothed are unknown to them; and it was a relief, if not exactly a comfort, for Eunice Mavering to find that Alice was as great a simpleton as Dan, and perhaps a sincerer simpleton.

  XXXII.

  A week later, in fulfilment of the arrangement made by Mrs. Pasmer and Eunice Mavering, Alice and her mother returned the formal visit of Dan’s people.

  While Alice stood before the mirror in one of the sumptuously furnished rooms assigned them, arranging a ribbon for the effect upon Dan’s mother after dinner, and regarding its relation to her serious beauty, Mrs. Pasmer came out of her chamber adjoining, and began to inspect the formal splendour of the place.

  “What a perfect man’s house!” she said, peering about. “You can see that everything has been done to order. They have their own taste; they’re artistic enough for that — or the father is — and they’ve given orders to have things done so and so, and the New York upholsterer has come up and taken the measure of the rooms and done it. But it isn’t like New York, and it isn’t individual. The whole house is just like those girls’ tailor-made costumes in character. They were made in New York, but they don’t wear them with the New York style; there’s no more atmosphere about them than if they were young men dressed up. There isn’t a thing lacking in the house here; there’s an awful completeness; but even the ornaments seem laid on, like the hot and cold water. I never saw a handsomer, more uninviting room than that drawing room. I suppose the etching will come some time after supper. What do you think of it all, Alice?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. They must be very rich,” said the girl indifferently.

  “You can’t tell. Country people of a certain kind are apt to put everything on their backs and their walls and floors. Of course such a house here doesn’t mean what it would in town.” She examined the texture of the carpet more critically, and the curtains; she had no shame about a curiosity that made her daughter shrink.

  “Don’t, mamma!” pleaded the girl. “What if they should come?”

  “They won’t come,” said Mrs. Pasmer; and her notice being called to Alice, she made her take off the ribbon. “You’re better without it.”

  “I’m so nervous I don’t know what I’m doing,” said Alice, removing it, with a whimper.

  “Well, I can’t have you breaking down!” cried her mother warningly: she really wished to shake her, as a culmination of her own conflicting emotions. “Alice, stop this instant! Stop it, I say!”

  “But if I don’t like her?” whimpered Alice.

  “You’re not going to marry her. Now stop! Here, bathe your eyes; they’re all red. Though I don’t know that it matters. Yes, they’ll expect you to have been crying,” said Mrs. Pasmer, seeing the situation more and more clearly. “It’s perfectly natural.” But she took some cologne on a handkerchief, and recomposed Alice’s countenance for her. “There, the colour becomes you, and I never saw your eyes look so bright.”

  There was a pathos in their brilliancy which of course betrayed her to the Mavering girls. It softened Eunice, and encouraged Minnie, who had been a little afraid of the Pasmers. They both kissed Alice with sisterly affection. Their father merely saw how handsome she looked, and Dan’s heart seemed to melt in his breast with tenderness.

  In recognition of the different habits of their guests, they had dinner instead of tea. The Portuguese cook had outdone himself, and course followed course in triumphal succession. Mrs. Pasmer praised it all with a sincerity that took away a little of the zest she felt in making flattering speeches.

  Everything about the table was perfect, but in a man’s fashion, like the rest of the house. It lacked the atmospheric charm, the otherwise indefinable grace, which a woman’s taste gives. It was in fact Elbridge Mavering’s taste which had characterised the whole; the daughters simply accepted and approved.

  “Yes,” said Eunice, “we haven’t much else to do; so we eat. And Joe does his best to spoil us.”

  “Joe?”

  “Joe’s the cook. All Portuguese cooks are Joe.”

  “How very amusing!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “You must let me speak of your grapes. I never saw anything so — well! — except your roses.”

  “There you touched father in two tender spots. He cultivates both.”

  “Really? Alice, did you ever see anything like these roses?”

  Alice looked away from Dan a moment, and blushed to find that she had been looking so long at him.

  “Ah, I have,” said Mavering gallantly.

  “Does he often do it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, in an obvious aside to Eunice.

  Dan answered for him. “He never had such a chance before.”

  Between coffee, which they drank at table, and tea, which they were to take in Mrs. Mavering’s room, they acted upon a suggestion from Eunice that her father should show Mrs. Pasmer his rose-house. At one end of the dining-room was a little apse of glass full of flowering plants growing out of the ground, and with a delicate fountain tinkling in their midst. Dan ran before the rest, and opened two glass doors in the further side of this half-bubble, and at the same time with a touch flashed up a succession of brilliant lights in some space beyond, from which there gushed in a wave of hothouse fragrance, warm, heavy, humid. It was a pretty little effect for guests new to the house, and was part of Elbridge Mavering’s pleasure in this feature of his place. Mrs. Pasmer responded with generous sympathy, for if she really liked anything with her whole heart, it was an effect, and she traversed the half-bubble by its pebbled path, showering praises right and left with a fulness and accuracy that missed no detail, while Alice followed silently, her hand in Minnie Mavering’s, and cold with suppressed excitement. The rose-house was divided by a wall, pierced with frequent doorways, over which the trees were trained and the roses hung; and on either side were ranks of rare and costly kinds, weighed down with bud and bloom. The air was thick with their breath and the pungent odours of the rich soil from which they grew, and the glass roof was misted with the mingled exhalations.

  Mr. Mavering walked beside Alice, modestly explaining the difficulties of rose culture, and his method of dealing with the red spider. He had a stout knife in his hand, and he cropped long, heavy-laden stems o
f roses from the walls and the beds, casually giving her their different names, and laying them along his arm in a massive sheaf.

  Mrs. Pasmer and Eunice had gone forward with Dan, and were waiting for them at the thither end of the rose-house.

  “Alice! just imagine: the grapery is beyond this,” cried the girl’s mother.

  “It’s a cold grapery,” said Mr. Mavering. “I hope you’ll see it to-morrow.”

  “Oh, why not to-night?” shouted Dan.

  “Because it’s a cold grapery,” said Eunice; “and after this rose-house, it’s an Arctic grapery. You’re crazy, Dan.”

  “Well, I want Alice to see it anyway,” he persisted wilfully. “There’s nothing like a cold grapery by starlight. I’ll get some wraps.” They all knew that he wished to be alone with her a moment, and the three women, consenting with their hearts, protested with their tongues, following him in his flight with their chorus, and greeting his return. He muffled her to the chin in a fur-lined overcoat, which he had laid hands on the first thing; and her mother, still protesting, helped to tie a scarf over her hair so as not to disarrange it. “Here,” he pointed, “we can run through it, and it’s worth seeing. Better come,” he said to the others as he opened the door, and hurried Alice down the path under the keen sparkle of the crystal roof, blotched with the leaves and bunches of the vines. Coming out of the dense, sensuous, vaporous air of the rose-house into this clear, thin atmosphere, delicately penetrated with the fragrance, pure and cold, of the fruit, it was as if they had entered another world. His arm crept round her in the odorous obscurity.

  “Look up! See the stars through the vines! But when she lifted her face he bent his upon it for a wild kiss.

  “Don’t! don’t!” she murmured. “I want to think; I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Neither do I. I feel as if I were a blessed ghost.”

  Perhaps it is only in these ecstasies of the senses that the soul ever reaches self-consciousness on earth; and it seems to be only the man-soul which finds itself even in this abandon. The woman-soul has always something else to think of.

  “What shall we do,” said the girl, “if we — Oh, I dread to meet your mother! Is she like either of your sisters?”

  “No,” he cried joyously; “she’s like me. If you’re not afraid of me, and you don’t seem to be—”

  “You’re all I have — you’re all I have in the world. Do you think she’ll like me? Oh, do you love me, Dan?”

  “You darling! you divine—” The rest was a mad embrace. “If you’re not afraid of me, you won’t mind mother. I wanted you here alone for just a last word, to tell you you needn’t be afraid; to tell you to — But I needn’t tell you how to act. You mustn’t treat her as an invalid — you must treat her like any one else; that’s what she likes. But you’ll know what’s best, Alice. Be yourself, and she’ll like you well enough. I’m not afraid.”

  XXXIII:

  When she entered Mrs. Mavering’s room Alice first saw the pictures, the bric-a-brac, the flowers, the dazzle of lights, and then the invalid propped among her pillows, and vividly expectant of her. She seemed all eager eyes to the girl, aware next of the strong resemblance to Dan in her features, and of the careful toilet the sick woman had made for her. To youth all forms of suffering are abhorrent, and Alice had to hide a repugnance at sight of this spectre of what had once been a pretty woman. Through the egotism with which so many years of flattering subjection in her little world had armed her, Mrs. Mavering probably did not feel the girl’s shrinking, or, if she did, took it for the natural embarrassment which she would feel. She had satisfied herself that she was looking her best, and that her cap and the lace jacket she wore were very becoming, and softened her worst points; the hangings of her bed and the richly embroidered crimson silk coverlet were part of the coquetry of her costume, from which habit had taken all sense of ghastliness; she was proud of them, and she was not aware of the scent of drugs that insisted through the odour of the flowers.

  She lifted herself on her elbow as Dan approached with Alice, and the girl felt as if an intense light had been thrown upon her from head to foot in the moment of searching scrutiny that followed. The invalid’s set look broke into a smile, and she put out her hand, neither hot nor cold, but of a dry neutral, spiritual temperature, and pulled Alice down and kissed her.

  “Why, child, your hand’s like ice!” she exclaimed without preamble. “We used to say that came from a warm heart.”

  “I guess it comes from a cold grapery in this case, mother,” said Dan, with his laugh. “I’ve just been running Alice through it. And perhaps a little excitement—”

  “Excitement?” echoed his mother. “Cold grapery, I dare say, and very silly of you, Dan; but there’s no occasion for excitement, as if we were strangers. Sit down in that chair, my dear. And, Dan, you go round to the other side of the bed; I want Alice all to myself. I saw your photograph a week ago, and I’ve thought about you for ages since, and wondered whether you would approve of your old friend.”

  “Oh yes,” whispered the girl, suppressing a tremor; and Dan’s eyes were suffused with grateful tears at his mother’s graciousness.

  Alice’s reticence seemed to please the invalid. “I hope you’ll like all your old friends here; you’ve begun with the worst among us, but perhaps you like him the best because he is the worst; I do.”

  “You may believe just half of that, Alice,” cried Dan.

  “Then believe the best half, or the half you like best,” said Mrs. Mavering. “There must be something good in him if you like him. Have they welcomed you home, my dear?”

  “We’ve all made a stagger at it,” said Dan, while Alice was faltering over the words which were so slow to come.

  “Don’t try to answer my formal stupidities. You are welcome, and that’s enough, and more than enough of speeches. Did you have a comfortable journey up?”

  “Oh, very.”

  “Was it cold?”

  “Not at all. The cars were very hot.”

  “Have you had any snow yet at Boston?”

  “No, none at all yet.”

  “Now I feel that we’re talking sense. I hope you found everything in your room? I can’t look after things as I would like, and so I inquire.”

  “There’s everything,” said Alice. “We’re very comfortable.”

  “I’m very glad. I had Dan look, he’s my housekeeper; he understands me better than my girls; he’s like me, more. That’s what makes us so fond of each other; it’s a kind of personal vanity. But he has his good points, Dan has. He’s very amiable, and I was too, at his age — and till I came here. But I’m not going to tell you of his good points; I dare say you’ve found them out. I’ll tell you about his bad ones. He says you’re very serious. Are you?” She pressed the girl’s hand, which she had kept in hers, and regarded her keenly.

  Alice dropped her eyes at the odd question. “I don’t know,” she faltered. “Sometimes.”

  “Well, that’s good. Dan’s frivolous.”

  “Oh, sometimes — only sometimes!” he interposed.

  “He’s frivolous, and he’s very light-minded; but he’s none the worse for that.”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Dan; and Alice, still puzzled, laughed provisionally.

  “No; I want you to understand that. He’s light-hearted too, and that’s a great thing in this world. If you’re serious you’ll be apt to be heavyhearted, and then you’ll find Dan of use. And I hope he’ll know how, to turn your seriousness to account too, he needs something to keep him down — to keep him from blowing away. Yes, it’s very well for people to be opposites. Only they must understand each other, If they do that, then they get along. Light-heartedness or heavy-heartedness comes to the same thing if they know how to use it for each other. You see, I’ve got to be a great philosopher lying here; nobody dares contradict me or interrupt me when I’m constructing my theories, and so I get them perfect.”

  “I wish I could hear them all,” said A
lice, with sincerity that made Mrs. Mavering laugh as light-heartedly as Dan himself, and that seemed to suggest the nest thing to her.

  “You can for the asking, almost any time. Are you a very truthful person, my dear? Don’t take the trouble to deny it if you are,” she added, at Alice’s stare. “You see, I’m not at all conventional and you needn’t be. Come! tell the truth for once, at any rate. Are you habitually truthful?”

  “Yes, I think I am,” said Alice, still staring.

  “Dan’s not,” said his mother quietly.

  “Oh, see here, now, mother! Don’t give me away!”

  “He’ll tell the truth in extremity, of course, and he’ll tell it if it’s pleasant, always; but if you don’t expect much more of him you won’t be disappointed; and you can make him of great use.”

  “You see where I got it, anyway, Alice,” said Dan, laughing across the bed at her.

  “Yes, you got it from me: I own it. A great part of my life was made up of making life pleasant to others by fibbing. I stopped it when I came here.”

  “Oh, not altogether, mother!” urged her son. “You mustn’t be too hard on yourself.”

  She ignored his interruption: “You’ll find Dan a great convenience with that agreeable habit of his. You can get him to make all your verbal excuses for you (he’ll, do it beautifully), and dictate all the thousand and one little lying notes you’ll have to write; he won’t mind it in the least, and it will save you a great wear-and-tear of conscience.”

  “Go on, mother, go on,” said Dan, with delighted eyes, that asked of Alice if it were not all perfectly charming.

  “And you can come in with your habitual truthfulness where Dan wouldn’t know what to do, poor fellow. You’ll have the moral courage to come right to the point when he would like to shillyshally, and you can be frank while he’s trying to think how to make y-e-s spell no.”

  “Any other little compliments, mother?” suggested Dan.

  “No,” said Mrs. Mavering; “that’s all. I thought I’d better have it off my mind; I knew you’d never get it off yours, and Alice had better know the worst. It is the worst, my dear, and if I talked of him till doomsday I couldn’t say any more harm of him. I needn’t tell you how sweet he is; you know that, I’m sure; but you can’t know yet how gentle and forbearing he is, how patient, how full of kindness to every living soul, how unselfish, how—”