Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She turned her face from him again, and buried it in the bedclothes, while he looked desperately at the racing waves, and the port that seemed to open and shut like a weary eye.

  “Oh, go away!” she implored. “I shall be better presently, but if you stand there like that — Go and see if you can’t get some other room, where I needn’t feel as if I were drowning, all the way over.”

  He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and having once started, he did not stop short of the purser’s office. He made an excuse of getting greenbacks for some English bank-notes, and then he said casually that he supposed there would be no chance of having his room on the lower deck changed for something a little less intimate with the sea. The purser was not there to take the humorous view, but he conceived that March wanted something higher up, and he was able to offer him a room of those on the promenade where he had seen swells going in and out, for six hundred dollars. March did not blench, but said he would get his wife to look at it with him, and then he went out somewhat dizzily to take counsel with himself how he should put the matter to her. She would be sure to ask what the price of the new room would be, and he debated whether to take it and tell her some kindly lie about it, or trust to the bracing effect of the sum named in helping restore the lost balance of her nerves. He was not so rich that he could throw six hundred dollars away, but there might be worse things; and he walked up and down thinking. All at once it flashed upon him that he had better see the doctor, anyway, and find out whether there were not some last hope in medicine before he took the desperate step before him. He turned in half his course, and ran into a lady who had just emerged from the door of the promenade laden with wraps, and who dropped them all and clutched him to save herself from falling.

  “Why, Mr. March!” she shrieked.

  “Miss Triscoe!” he returned, in the astonishment which he shared with her to the extent of letting the shawls he had knocked from her hold lie between them till she began to pick them up herself. Then he joined her and in the relief of their common occupation they contrived to possess each other of the reason of their presence on, the same boat. She had sorrowed over Mrs. March’s sad state, and he had grieved to hear that her father was going home because he was not at all well, before they found the general stretched out in his steamer-chair, and waiting with a grim impatience for his daughter.

  “But how is it you’re not in the passenger-list?” he inquired of them both, and Miss Triscoe explained that they had taken their passage at the last moment, too late, she supposed, to get into the list. They were in London, and had run down to Liverpool on the chance of getting berths. Beyond this she was not definite, and there was an absence of Burnamy not only from her company but from her conversation which mystified March through all his selfish preoccupations with his wife. She was a girl who had her reserves, but for a girl who had so lately and rapturously written them of her engagement, there was a silence concerning her betrothed that had almost positive quality. With his longing to try Miss Triscoe upon Mrs. March’s malady as a remedial agent, he had now the desire to try Mrs. March upon Miss Triscoe’s mystery as a solvent. She stood talking to him, and refusing to sit down and be wrapped up in the chair next her father. She said that if he were going to ask Mrs. March to let her come to her, it would not be worth while to sit down; and he hurried below.

  “Did you get it?” asked his wife, without looking round, but not so apathetically as before.

  “Oh, yes. That’s all right. But now, Isabel, there’s something I’ve got to tell you. You’d find it out, and you’d better know it at once.”

  She turned her face, and asked sternly, “What is it?”

  Then he said, with, an almost equal severity, “Miss Triscoe is on board.

  Miss Triscoe-and-her-father. She wishes to come down and see you.”

  Mrs. March sat up and began to twist her hair into shape. “And Burnamy?”

  “There is no Burnamy physically, or so far as I can make out, spiritually. She didn’t mention him, and I talked at least five minutes with her.”

  “Hand me my dressing-sack,” said Mrs. March, “and poke those things on the sofa under the berth. Shut up that wash-stand, and pull the curtain across that hideous window. Stop! Throw those towels into your berth. Put my shoes, and your slippers into the shoe-bag on the door. Slip the brushes into that other bag. Beat the dent out of the sofa cushion that your head has made. Now!”

  “Then — then you will see her?”

  “See her!”

  Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it, and he returned with Miss Triscoe in a dreamlike simultaneity. He remembered, as he led the way into his corridor, to apologize for bringing her down into a basement room.

  “Oh, we’re in the basement, too; it was all we could get,” she said in words that ended within the state-room he opened to her. Then he went back and took her chair and wraps beside her father.

  He let the general himself lead the way up to his health, which he was not slow in reaching, and was not quick in leaving. He reminded March of the state he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said it had gone from bad to worse with him. At Weimar he had taken to his bed and merely escaped from it with his life. Then they had tried Schevleningen for a week, where, he said in a tone of some injury, they had rather thought they might find them, the Marches. The air had been poison to him, and they had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth; but the doctor in London had thought not, and urged their going home. “All Europe is damp, you know, and dark as a pocket in winter,” he ended.

  There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decided that he must wait to see his wife if he wished to know anything, when the general, who had been silent, twisted his head towards him, and said without regard to the context, “It was complicated, at Weimar, by that young man in the most devilish way. Did my daughter write to Mrs. March about — Well it came to nothing, after all; and I don’t understand how, to this day. I doubt if they do. It was some sort of quarrel, I suppose. I wasn’t consulted in the matter either way. It appears that parents are not consulted in these trifling affairs, nowadays.” He had married his daughter’s mother in open defiance of her father; but in the glare of his daughter’s wilfulness this fact had whitened into pious obedience. “I dare say I shall be told, by-and-by, and shall be expected to approve of the result.”

  A fancy possessed March that by operation of temperamental laws General Triscoe was no more satisfied with Burnamy’s final rejection than with his acceptance. If the engagement was ever to be renewed, it might be another thing; but as it stood, March divined a certain favor for the young man in the general’s attitude. But the affair was altogether too delicate for comment; the general’s aristocratic frankness in dealing with it might have gone farther if his knowledge had been greater; but in any case March did not see how he could touch it. He could only say, He had always liked Burnamy, himself.

  He had his good qualities, the general owned. He did not profess to understand the young men of our time; but certainly the fellow had the instincts of a gentleman. He had nothing to say against him, unless in that business with that man — what was his name?

  “Stoller?” March prompted. “I don’t excuse him in that, but I don’t blame him so much, either. If punishment means atonement, he had the opportunity of making that right very suddenly, and if pardon means expunction, then I don’t see why that offence hasn’t been pretty well wiped out.

  “Those things are not so simple as they used to seem,” said the general, with a seriousness beyond his wont in things that did not immediately concern his own comfort or advantage.

  LXXVI.

  In the mean time Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe were discussing another offence of Burnamy’s.

  “It wasn’t,” said the girl, excitedly, after a plunge through all the minor facts to the heart of the matter, “that he hadn’t a perfect right to do it, if he thought I didn’t care for him. I had refused him at Carlsbad, and I had forbidden
him to speak to me about — on the subject. But that was merely temporary, and he ought to have known it. He ought to have known that I couldn’t accept him, on the spur of the moment, that way; and when he had come back, after going away in disgrace, before he had done anything to justify himself. I couldn’t have kept my self-respect; and as it was I had the greatest difficulty; and he ought to have seen it. Of course he said afterwards that he didn’t see it. But when — when I found out that SHE had been in Weimar, and all that time, while I had been suffering in Carlsbad and Wurzburg, and longing to see him — let him know how I was really feeling — he was flirting with that — that girl, then I saw that he was a false nature, and I determined to put an end to everything. And that is what I did; and I shall always think I — did right — and—”

  The rest was lost in Agatha’s handkerchief, which she put up to her eyes. Mrs. March watched her from her pillow keeping the girl’s unoccupied hand in her own, and softly pressing it till the storm was past sufficiently to allow her to be heard.

  Then she said, “Men are very strange — the best of them. And from the very fact that he was disappointed, he would be all the more apt to rush into a flirtation with somebody else.”

  Miss Triscoe took down her handkerchief from a face that had certainly not been beautified by grief. “I didn’t blame him for the flirting; or not so much. It was his keeping it from me afterwards. He ought to have told me the very first instant we were engaged. But he didn’t. He let it go on, and if I hadn’t happened on that bouquet I might never have known anything about it. That is what I mean by — a false nature. I wouldn’t have minded his deceiving me; but to let me deceive myself — Oh, it was too much!”

  Agatha hid her face in her handkerchief again. She was perching on the edge of the berth, and Mrs. March said, with a glance, which she did not see, toward the sofa, “I’m afraid that’s rather a hard seat for you.

  “Oh, no, thank you! I’m perfectly comfortable — I like it — if you don’t mind?”

  Mrs. March pressed her hand for answer, and after another little delay, sighed and said, “They are not like us, and we cannot help it. They are more temporizing.”

  “How do you mean?” Agatha unmasked again.

  “They can bear to keep things better than we can, and they trust to time to bring them right, or to come right of themselves.”

  “I don’t think Mr. March would trust things to come right of themselves!” said Agatha in indignant accusal of Mrs. March’s sincerity.

  “Ah, that’s just what he would do, my dear, and has done, all along; and I don’t believe we could have lived through without it: we should have quarrelled ourselves into the grave!”

  “Mrs. March!”

  “Yes, indeed. I don’t mean that he would ever deceive me. But he would let things go on, and hope that somehow they would come right without any fuss.”

  “Do you mean that he would let anybody deceive themselves?”

  “I’m afraid he would — if he thought it would come right. It used to be a terrible trial to me; and it is yet, at times when I don’t remember that he means nothing but good and kindness by it. Only the other day in Ansbach — how long ago it seems! — he let a poor old woman give him her son’s address in Jersey City, and allowed her to believe he would look him up when we got back and tell him we had seen her. I don’t believe, unless I keep right round after him, as we say in New England, that he’ll ever go near the man.”

  Agatha looked daunted, but she said, “That is a very different thing.”

  “It isn’t a different kind of thing. And it shows what men are, — the sweetest and best of them, that is. They are terribly apt to be — easy-going.”

  “Then you think I was all wrong?” the girl asked in a tremor.

  “No, indeed! You were right, because you really expected perfection of him. You expected the ideal. And that’s what makes all the trouble, in married life: we expect too much of each other — we each expect more of the other than we are willing to give or can give. If I had to begin over again, I should not expect anything at all, and then I should be sure of being radiantly happy. But all this talking and all this writing about love seems to turn our brains; we know that men are not perfect, even at our craziest, because women are not, but we expect perfection of them; and they seem to expect it of us, poor things! If we could keep on after we are in love just as we were before we were in love, and take nice things as favors and surprises, as we did in the beginning! But we get more and more greedy and exacting—”

  “Do you think I was too exacting in wanting him to tell me everything after we were engaged?”

  “No, I don’t say that. But suppose he had put it off till you were married?” Agatha blushed a little, but not painfully, “Would it have been so bad? Then you might have thought that his flirting up to the last moment in his desperation was a very good joke. You would have understood better just how it was, and it might even have made you fonder of him. You might have seen that he had flirted with some one else because he was so heart-broken about you.”

  “Then you believe that if I could have waited till — till — but when I had found out, don’t you see I couldn’t wait? It would have been all very well if I hadn’t known it till then. But as I did know it. Don’t you see?”

  “Yes, that certainly complicated it,” Mrs. March admitted. “But I don’t think, if he’d been a false nature, he’d have owned up as he did. You see, he didn’t try to deny it; and that’s a great point gained.”

  “Yes, that is true,” said Agatha, with conviction. “I saw that afterwards. But you don’t think, Mrs. March, that I was unjust or — or hasty?”

  “No, indeed! You couldn’t have done differently under the circumstances.

  You may be sure he felt that — he is so unselfish and generous—” Agatha

  began to weep into her handkerchief again; Mrs. March caressed her hand.

  “And it will certainly come right if you feel as you do.”

  “No,” the girl protested. “He can never forgive me; it’s all over, everything is over. It would make very little difference to me, what happened now — if the steamer broke her shaft, or anything. But if I can only believe I wasn’t unjust—”

  Mrs. March assured her once more that she had behaved with absolute impartiality; and she proved to her by a process of reasoning quite irrefragable that it was only a question of time, with which place had nothing to do, when she and Burnamy should come together again, and all should be made right between them. The fact that she did not know where he was, any more than Mrs. March herself, had nothing to do with the result; that was a mere detail, which would settle itself. She clinched her argument by confessing that her own engagement had been broken off, and that it had simply renewed itself. All you had to do was to keep willing it, and waiting. There was something very mysterious in it.

  “And how long was it till—” Agatha faltered.

  “Well, in our ease it was two years.”

  “Oh!” said the girl, but Mrs. March hastened to reassure her.

  “But our case was very peculiar. I could see afterwards that it needn’t have been two months, if I had been willing to acknowledge at once that I was in the wrong. I waited till we met.”

  “If I felt that I was in the wrong, I should write,” said Agatha. “I shouldn’t care what he thought of my doing it.”

  “Yes, the great thing is to make sure that you were wrong.”

  They remained talking so long, that March and the general had exhausted all the topics of common interest, and had even gone through those they did not care for. At last the general said, “I’m afraid my daughter will tire Mrs. March.”

  “Oh, I don’t think she’ll tire my wife. But do you want her?”

  “Well, when you’re going down.”

  “I think I’ll take a turn about the deck, and start my circulation,” said

  March, and he did so before he went below.

  He found his wife up and dr
essed, and waiting provisionally on the sofa. “I thought I might as well go to lunch,” she said, and then she told him about Agatha and Burnamy, and the means she had employed to comfort and encourage the girl. “And now, dearest, I want you to find out where Burnamy is, and give him a hint. You will, won’t you! If you could have seen how unhappy she was!”

  “I don’t think I should have cared, and I’m certainly not going to meddle. I think Burnamy has got no more than he deserved, and that he’s well rid of her. I can’t imagine a broken engagement that would more completely meet my approval. As the case stands, they have my blessing.”

  “Don’t say that, dearest! You know you don’t mean it.”

  “I do; and I advise you to keep your hands off. You’ve done all and more than you ought to propitiate Miss Triscoe. You’ve offered yourself up, and you’ve offered me up—”

  “No, no, Basil! I merely used you as an illustration of what men were — the best of them.”

  “And I can’t observe,” he continued, “that any one else has been considered in the matter. Is Miss Triscoe the sole sufferer by Burnamy’s flirtation? What is the matter with a little compassion for the pivotal girl?”

  “Now, you know you’re not serious,” said his wife; and though he would not admit this, he could not be seriously sorry for the new interest which she took in the affair. There was no longer any question of changing their state-room. Under the tonic influence of the excitement she did not go back to her berth after lunch, and she was up later after dinner than he could have advised. She was absorbed in Agatha, but in her liberation from her hypochondria, she began also to make a comparative study of the American swells, in the light of her late experience with the German highhotes. It is true that none of the swells gave her the opportunity of examining them at close range, as the highhotes had done. They kept to their state-rooms mostly, where, after he thought she could bear it, March told her how near he had come to making her their equal by an outlay of six hundred dollars. She now shuddered at the thought; but she contended that in their magnificent exclusiveness they could give points to European princes; and that this showed again how when Americans did try to do a thing, they beat the world. Agatha Triscoe knew who they were, but she did not know them; they belonged to another kind of set; she spoke of them as “rich people,” and she seemed content to keep away from them with Mrs. March and with the shy, silent old wife of Major Eltwin, to whom March sometimes found her talking.