“I wished,” she explained, “to show you that I loved you for something above yourself and myself — far above either—”
She stopped and dropped the hand which she had raised to fend him off; and he profited by the little pause she made to take her in his arms without seeming to do so. “Well,” he said, “I don’t believe I was formed to be loved on a very high plane. But I’m not too proud to be loved for my own sake; and I don’t think there’s anything above you, Alice.”
“Oh yes, there is! I don’t deserve to be happy, and that’s the reason why I’m not allowed to be happy in any noble way. I can’t bear to give you up; you know I can’t; but you ought to give me up — indeed you ought. I have ideals, but I can’t live up to them. You ought to go. You ought to leave me.” She accented each little sentence by vividly pressing herself to his heart, and he had the wisdom or the instinct to treat their reconciliation as nothing settled, but merely provisional in its nature.
“Well, we’ll see about that. I don’t want to go till after breakfast, anyway; your mother says I may stay, and I’m awfully hungry. If I see anything particularly base in you, perhaps I sha’n’t come back to lunch.”
Dan would have liked to turn it alt off into a joke, now that the worst was apparently over; but Alice freed herself from him, and held him off with her hand set against his breast. “Does mamma know about it?” she demanded sternly.
“Well, she knows there’s been some misunderstanding,” said Dan, with a laugh that was anxious, in view of the clouds possibly gathering again.
“How much?”
“Well, I can’t say exactly.” He would not say that he did not know, but he felt that he could truly say that he could not say.
She dropped her hand, and consented to be deceived. Dan caught her again to his breast; but he had an odd, vague sense of doing it carefully, of using a little of the caution with which one seizes the stem of a rose between the thorns.
“I can bear to be ridiculous with you,” she whispered, with an implication which he understood.
“You haven’t been ridiculous, dearest,” he said; and his tension gave way in a convulsive laugh, which partially expressed his feeling of restored security, and partly his amusement in realising how the situation would have pleased Mrs. Pasmer if she could have known it.
Mrs. Pasmer was seated behind her coffee biggin at the breakfast-table when he came into the room with Alice, and she lifted an eye from its glass bulb long enough to catch his flying glance of exultation and admonition. Then, while she regarded the chemical struggle in the bulb, with the rapt eye of a magician reading fate in his crystal ball, she questioned herself how much she should know, and how much she should ignore. It was a great moment for Mrs. Pasmer, full of delicious choice. “Do you understand this process, Mr. Mavering?” she said, glancing up at him warily for farther instruction.
“I’ve seen it done,” said Dan, “but I never knew how it was managed. I always thought it was going to blow up; but it seemed to me that if you were good and true and very meek, and had a conscience void of offence, it wouldn’t.”
“Yes, that’s what it seems to depend upon,” said Mrs. Pasmer, keeping her eye on the bulb. She dodged suddenly forward, and put out the spirit-lamp. “Now have your coffee!” she cried, with a great air of relief. “You must need it by this time,” she said with a low cynical laugh— “both of you!”
“Did you always make coffee with a biggin in France, Mrs. Pasmer?” asked Dan; and he laughed out the last burden that lurked in his heart.
Mrs. Pasmer joined him. “No, Mr. Mavering. In France you don’t need a biggin. I set mine up when we went to England.”
Alice looked darkly from one of these light spirits to the other, and then they all shrieked together.
They went on talking volubly from that, and they talked as far away from what they were thinking about as possible. They talked of Europe, and Mrs. Pasmer said where they would live and what they would do when they all got back there together. Dan abetted her, and said that they must cross in June. Mrs. Pasmer said that she thought June was a good month. He asked if it were not the month of the marriages too, and she answered that he must ask Alice about that. Alice blushed and laughed her sweet reluctant laugh, and said she did not know; she had never been married.
It was silly, but it was delicious; it made them really one family. Deep in his consciousness a compunction pierced and teased Dan. But he said to himself that it was all a joke about their European plans, or else his people would consent to it if he really wished it.
XXXIX.
A period of entire harmony and tenderness followed the episode which seemed to threaten the lovers with the loss of each other. Mavering forbore to make Alice feel that in attempting a sacrifice which consulted only his good and ignored his happiness, and then failing in it so promptly, she had played rather a silly part. After one or two tentative jokes in that direction he found the ground unsafe, and with the instinct which served him in place of more premeditated piety he withdrew, and was able to treat the affair with something like religious awe. He was obliged, in fact, to steady Alice’s own faith in it, and to keep her from falling under dangerous self-condemnation in that and other excesses of uninstructed self-devotion. This brought no fatigue to his robust affection, whatever it might have done to a heart more tried in such exercises. Love acquaints youth with many things in character and temperament which are none the less interesting because it never explains them; and Dan was of such a make that its revelations of Alice were charming to him because they were novel. He had thought her a person of such serene and flawless wisdom that it was rather a relief to find her subject to gusts of imprudence, to unexpected passions and resentments, to foibles and errors, like other people. Her power of cold reticence; which she could employ at will, was something that fascinated him almost as much as that habit of impulsive concession which seemed to came neither from her will nor her reason. He was a person himself who was so eager to give other people pleasure that he quivered with impatience to see them happy through his words or acts; he could not bear to think that any one to whom he was speaking was not perfectly comfortable in regard to him; and it was for this reason perhaps that he admired a girl who could prescribe herself a line of social conduct, and follow it out regardless of individual pangs — who could act from ideals and principles, and not from emotions and sympathies. He knew that she had the emotions and sympathies, for there were times when she lavished them on him; and that she could seem without them was another proof of that depth of nature which he liked to imagine had first attracted him to her. Dan Mavering had never been able to snub any one in his life; it gave him a great respect for Alice that it seemed not to cost her an effort or a regret, and it charmed him to think that her severity was part of the unconscious sham which imposed her upon the world for a person of inflexible design and invariable constancy to it. He was not long in seeing that she shared this illusion, if it was an illusion, and that perhaps the only person besides himself who was in the joke was her mother. Mrs. Pasmer and he grew more and more into each other’s confidence in talking Alice over, and he admired the intrepidity of this lady, who was not afraid of her daughter even in the girl’s most topping moments of self-abasement. For his own part, these moods of hers never failed to cause him confusion and anxiety. They commonly intimated themselves parenthetically in the midst of some blissful talk they were having, and overcast his clear sky with retrospective ideals of conduct or presentimental plans for contingencies that might never occur. He found himself suddenly under condemnation for not having reproved her at a given time when she forced him to admit she had seemed unkind or cold to others; she made him promise that even at the risk of alienating her affections he would make up for her deficiencies of behaviour in such matters whenever he noticed them. She now praised him for what he had done for Mrs. Frobisher and her sister at Mrs. Bellingham’s reception; she said it was generous, heroic. But Mavering rested satisfied with his a
chievement in that instance, and did not attempt anything else of the kind. He did not reason from cause to effect in regard to it: a man’s love is such that while it lasts he cannot project its object far enough from him to judge it reasonable or unreasonable; but Dan’s instincts had been disciplined and his perceptions sharpened by that experience. Besides, in bidding him take this impartial and even admonitory course toward her, she stipulated that they should maintain to the world a perfect harmony of conduct which should be an outward image of the union of their lives. She said that anything less than a continued self-sacrifice of one to the other was not worthy of the name of love, and that she should not be happy unless he required this of her. She said that they ought each to find out what was the most distasteful thing which they could mutually require, and then do it; she asked him to try to think what she most hated, and let her do that for him; as for her, she only asked to ask nothing of him.
Mavering could not worship enough this nobility of soul in her, and he celebrated it to Boardman with the passionate need of imparting his rapture which a lover feel. Boardman acquiesced in silence, with a glance of reserved sarcasm, or contented himself with laconic satire of his friend’s general condition, and avoided any comment that might specifically apply to the points Dan made. Alice allowed him to have this confidant, and did not demand of him a report of all he said to Boardman. A main fact of their love, she said, must be their utter faith in each other. She had her own confidante, and the disparity of years between her and Miss Cotton counted for nothing in the friendship which their exchange of trust and sympathy cemented. Miss Cotton, in the freshness of her sympathy and the ideality of her inexperience, was in fact younger than Alice, at whose feet, in the things of soul and character, she loved to sit. She never said to her what she believed: that a girl of her exemplary principles, a nature conscious of such noble ideals, so superior to other girls, who in her place would be given up to the happiness of the moment, and indifferent to the sense of duty to herself and to others, was sacrificed to a person of Mavering’s gay, bright nature and trivial conception of life. She did not deny his sweetness; that was perhaps the one saving thing about him; and she confessed that he simply adored Alice; that counted for everything, and it was everything in his favour that he could appreciate such a girl. She hoped, she prayed, that Alice might never realise how little depth he had; that she might go through life and never suspect it. If she did so, then they might be happy together to the end, or at least Alice might never know she was unhappy.
Miss Cotton never said these things in so many words; it is doubtful if she ever said them in any form of words; with her sensitive anxiety not to do injustice to any one, she took Dan’s part against those who viewed the engagement as she allowed it to appear only to her secret heart. She defended him the more eagerly because she felt that it was for Alice’s sake, and that everything must be done to keep her from knowing how people looked at the affair, even to changing people’s minds. She said to all who spoke to her of it that of course Alice was superior to him, but he was devoted to her, and he would grow into an equality with her. He was naturally very refined, she said, and, if he was not a very serious person, he was amiable beyond anything. She alleged many little incidents of their acquaintance at Campobello in proof of her theory that he had an instinctive appreciation of Alice, and she was sure that no one could value her nobleness of character more than he. She had seen them a good deal together since their engagement, and it was beautiful to see his manner with her. They were opposites, but she counted a good deal upon that very difference in their temperaments to draw them to each other.
It was an easy matter to see Dan and Alice together. Their engagement came out in the usual way: it had been announced to a few of their nearest friends, and intelligence of it soon spread from their own set through society generally; it had been published in the Sunday papers while it was still in the tender condition of a rumour, and had been denied by some of their acquaintance and believed by all.
The Pasmer cousinship had been just in the performance of the duties of blood toward Alice since the return of her family from Europe, and now did what was proper in the circumstances. All who were connected with her called upon her and congratulated her; they knew Dan, the younger of them, much better than they knew her; and though he had shrunk from the nebulous bulk of social potentiality which every young man is to that much smaller nucleus to which definite betrothal reduces him, they could be perfectly sincere in calling him the sweetest fellow that ever was, and too lovely to live.
In such a matter Mr. Pasmer was naturally nothing; he could not be less than he was at other times, but he was not more; and it was Mrs. Pasmer who shared fully with her daughter the momentary interest which the engagement gave Alice with all her kindred. They believed, of course, that they recognised in it an effect of her skill in managing; they agreed to suppose that she had got Mavering for Alice, and to ignore the beauty and passion of youth as factors in the case. The closest of the kindred, with the romantic delicacy of Americans in such things, approached the question of Dan’s position and prospects, and heard with satisfaction the good accounts which Mrs. Pasmer was able to give of his father’s prosperity. There had always been more or less apprehension among them of a time when a family subscription would be necessary for Bob Pasmer, and in the relief which the new situation gave them some of them tried to remember having known Dan’s father in College, but it finally came to their guessing that they must have heard John Munt speak of him.
Mrs. Pasmer had a supreme control in the affair. She believed with the rest — so deeply is this delusion seated — that she had made the match; but knowing herself to have used no dishonest magic in the process, she was able to enjoy it with a clean conscience. She grew fonder of Dan; they understood each other; she was his refuge from Alice’s ideals, and helped him laugh off his perplexity with them. They were none the less sincere because they were not in the least frank with each other. She let Dan beat about the bush to his heart’s content, and waited for him at the point which she knew he was coming to, with an unconsciousness which he knew was factitious; neither of them got tired of this, or failed freshly to admire the other’s strategy.
XL.
It cannot be pretended that Alice was quite pleased with the way her friends took her engagement, or rather the way in which they spoke of Dan. It seemed to her that she alone, or she chiefly, ought to feel that sweetness and loveliness of which every one told her, as if she could not have known it. If he was sweet and lovely to every one, how was he different to her except in degree? Ought he not to be different in kind? She put the case to Miss Cotton, whom it puzzled, while she assured Alice that he was different in kind to her, though he might not seem so; the very fact that he was different in degree proved that he was different in kind. This logic sufficed for the moment of its expression, but it did not prevent Alice from putting the case to Dan himself. At one of those little times when she sat beside him alone and rearranged his necktie, or played with his watch chain, or passed a critical hand over his cowlick, she asked him if he did not think they ought to have an ideal in their engagement. “What ideal?” he asked. He thought it was all solid ideal through and through. “Oh,” she said, “be more and more to each other.” He said he did not see how that could be; if there was anything more of him, she was welcome to it, but he rather thought she had it all. She explained that she meant being less to others; and he asked her to explain that.
“Well, when we’re anywhere together, don’t you think we ought to show how different we are to each other from what we are to any one else.”
Dan laughed. “I’m afraid we do, Alice; I always supposed one ought to hide that little preference as much as possible. You don’t want me to be dangling after you every moment?”
“No-o-o. But not — dangle after others.”
Dan sighed a little — a little impatiently. “Do I dangle after others?”
“Of course not. But show that we’
re thoroughly united in all our tastes and feelings, and — like and dislike the same persons.”
“I don’t think that will be difficult,” said Dan.
She was silent a moment, and then she said; “You don’t like to have me bring up such things?”
“Oh yes, I do. I wish to be and do just what you wish.”
“But I can see, I can understand, that you would sooner pass the time without talking of them. You like to be perfectly happy, and not to have any cares when — when you’re with me this way?”
“Well, yes, I suppose I do,” said Dan, laughing again. “I suppose I rather do like to keep pleasure and duty apart. But there’s nothing you can wish, Alice, that isn’t a pleasure to me.”
“I’m very different,” said the girl. “I can’t be at peace unless I know that I have a right to be so. But now, after this, I’m going to do your way. If it’s your way, it’ll be the right way — for me.” She looked sublimely resolved, with a grand lift of the eyes, and Dan caught her to him in a rapture, breaking into laughter.
“Oh, don’t! Mine’s a bad way — the worst kind of a way,” he cried.
“It makes everybody like you, and mine makes nobody like me.”
“It makes me like you, and that’s quite enough. I don’t want other people to like you!”
“Yes, that’s what I mean!” cried Alice; and now she flung herself on his neck, and the tears came. “Do you suppose it can be very pleasant to have everybody talking of you as if everybody loved you as much — as much as I do?” She clutched him tighter and sobbed.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 372
