Chapter 8

“No; I shall let the poor thing have her sleep to-night. But the first thing in the morning I shall speak, and I want you to send her up to me as soon as she’s had her breakfast. Tell her I’m not well, and shall not be down; I shall not close my eyes the whole night. And now,” she added, “I want you to tell me everything that happened this evening. Don’t omit a word, or a look, or a motion. I wish to proceed intelligently.”

I hope I was accurate in the history of the hop which I gave Mrs. March; I am sure I was full. I think my account may be justly described as having a creative truthfulness, if no other merit. I had really no wish to conceal anything except the fact that I had not, in my utter helplessness, even tried to get Miss Gage any other partners. But in the larger interest of the present situation, Mrs. March seemed to have lost the sense of my dereliction in this respect. She merely asked, “And it was after you went back to the parlour, just before you came home, that you wrote those names on her card?”

“Kendricks wrote half of them,” I said.

“I dare say. Well, it was very amusing, and if the circumstances were different, I could have entered into the spirit of it too. But you see yourself, Basil, that we can’t let this affair go any further without dealing frankly with her. _You_ can’t speak to her, and _I must_. Don’t you see?”

I said that I saw, but I had suddenly a wild wish that it were practicable for me to speak to Miss Gage. I should have liked to have a peep into a girl’s heart at just such a moment, when it must be quivering with the unconfessed sense of love, and the confident hope of being loved, but while as yet nothing was assured, nothing was ascertained. If it would not have been shocking, if it would not have been sacrilegious, it would have been infinitely interesting, and from an æsthetic point of view infinitely important. I thought that I should have been willing to undergo all the embarrassment of such an inquiry for the sake of its precious results, if it had been at all possible; but I acquiesced that it would not be possible. I felt that I was getting off pretty lightly not to have it brought home to me again that I was the cause of all this trouble, and that if it had not been for me there would have been, as far as Mrs. March was concerned, no Miss Gage, and no love-affair of hers to deal with. I debated in my mind a moment whether I had better urge her to let me speak to Kendricks after all; but I forbore, and in the morning I waited about in much perturbation, after I had sent Miss Gage to her, until I could know the result of their interview. When I saw the girl come away from her room, which she did rather trippingly, I went to her, and found her by no means the wreck I had expected the ordeal to leave her.

“Did you meet Miss Gage?” she asked.

“Yes,” I returned, with tremulous expectation.

“Well, don’t you think she looks perfectly divine in that gown? It’s one of Mme. Cody’s, and we got it for thirty dollars. It would have been fifty in New York, and it was, here, earlier in the season. I shall always come here for some of my things; as soon as the season’s a little past they simply _fling_ them away. Well, my dear!”

“Well, what?”

“I didn’t speak to her after all.”

“You didn’t! Don’t you think she’s in love with him, then?”

“Dead.”

“Well?”

“Well, I couldn’t somehow seem to approach the subject as I had expected to. She was so happy, and so good, and so perfectly obedient, that I couldn’t get anything to take hold of. You see, I didn’t know but she might be a little rebellious, or resentful of my interference; but in the little gingerly attempts I did make she was so submissive, don’t you understand? And she was very modest about Mr. Kendricks’ attentions, and so self-depreciatory that, well—”

“Look here, Isabel,” I broke in, “this is pretty shameless of you. You pretend to be in the greatest kind of fidge about this girl; and you make me lie awake all night thinking what you’re going to say to her; and now you as much as tell me you were so fascinated with the modest way she was in love that you couldn’t say anything to her against being in love on our hands in any sort of way. Do you call this business?”

“Well, I don’t care if I _did_ encourage her—”

“Oh, you even encouraged her!”

“I _didn’t_ encourage her. I merely praised Mr. Kendricks, and said how much you thought of him as a writer.”

“Oh! then you gave the subject a literary cast. I see! Do you think Miss Gage was able to follow you?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“And what do you propose to do now?”

“I propose to do nothing. I think that I have done all my duty requires, and that now I can leave the whole affair to you. It was your affair in the beginning. I don’t see why I should worry myself about it.”

“It seems to me that this is a very strange position for a lady to take who was not going to close an eye last night in view of a situation which has not changed in the least, except for the worse. Don’t you think you are rather culpably light-hearted all of a sudden?”

“I am light-hearted, but if there is any culpability it is yours, Basil.”

I reflected, but I failed to find any novelty in the fact. “Very well, then; what do you propose that I should do?”

“I leave that entirely to your own conscience.”

“And if my conscience has no suggestion to make?”

“That’s your affair.”

I reflected again, and then I said, more than anything to make her uncomfortable, I’m afraid: “I feel perfectly easy in my conscience, personally, but I have a social duty in the matter, and I hope I shall perform it with more fidelity and courage than you have shown. I shall speak to Kendricks.”

She said: “That is just what you ought to do. I’m quite surprised.” After this touch of irony she added earnestly, “And I do hope, my dear, you will use judgment in speaking to him, and tact. You mustn’t go at it bluntly. Remember that Mr. Kendricks is not at all to blame. He began to show her attention to oblige us, and if she has fallen in love with him it is our fault.”

“I shall handle him without gloves,” I said. “I shall tell him he had better go away.”

I was joking, but she said seriously, “Yes; he must go away. And I don’t envy you having to tell him. I suppose you will bungle it, of course.”

“Well, then, you must advise me,” I said; and we really began to consider the question. We could hardly exaggerate the difficulty and delicacy of the duty before me. We recognised that before I made any explicit demand of him I must first ascertain the nature of the whole ground and then be governed by the facts. It would be simple enough if I had merely to say that we thought the girl’s affections were becoming engaged, and then appeal to his eager generosity, his delicate magnanimity; but there were possible complications on his side which must be regarded. I was to ascertain, we concluded, the exact nature of the situation before I ventured to say anything openly. I was to make my approaches by a series of ambushes before I unmasked my purpose, and perhaps I must not unmask it at all. As I set off on my mission, which must begin with finding Kendricks at his hotel, Mrs. March said she pitied me. She called me back to ask whether I thought I had really better do anything. Then, as I showed signs of weakening, she drove me from her with, “Yes, yes! You must! You must!”

XVII

IT was still so early that I had my doubts whether I should find Kendricks up after the last night’s revelry, but he met me half-way between our hotel and his. He said he was coming to see how Mrs. March was bearing Miss Gage’s immense success at the ball; but perhaps this was not his sole motive. He asked frankly how the young lady was, and whether I thought Mrs. March would consider a lunch at a restaurant by the lake a good notion. When I said I had very little doubt she would, and proposed taking a turn in the park before I went back with him, he looked at his watch and laughed, and said he supposed it _was_ rather early yet, and came very willingly with me.

We had the pretty place almost to ourselves at that hour. There were a half-dozen or so nursemaids, pushing their perambulators about, or standing the vehicles across the walk in front of the benches where they sat, in the simple belief of all people who have to do with babies that the rest of the world may be fitly discommoded in their behalf. But they did not actively molest us, and they scarcely circumscribed our choice of seats. We were by no means driven to the little kiosk in the lake for them, and I should rather say that we were fatefully led there, so apt were the associations of the place to my purpose. Nothing could have been more natural than that I should say, as we sat down there, “This was where I first saw Miss Gage with her friends”; and it was by a perfectly natural transition that I should go on to speak, in a semi-humorous strain, of the responsibility which Mrs. March and myself had incurred by letting our sympathy for her run away with us. I said I supposed that if we had not been willing from the first to try to realise for her some of the expectations we imagined she had in coming to Saratoga, she never would have fallen to our charge; that people really brought a great many more things upon themselves than they were willing to own; and that fate was perhaps more the fulfilment of our tacit ambitions than our overt acts. This bit of philosophy, which I confess I thought fine, did not seem to impress Kendricks. He merely said that it must be great fun to have the chance of baffling the malice of circumstance in a case like that, and I perceived that he felt nothing complex in the situation. In fact, I doubt whether youth perceives anything complex in life. To the young, life is a very plain case. To be sure, they are much more alarmed than their elders at getting tangled up in its web at times, but that is because they have not had our experience in getting untangled, and think they are never going to get out alive. When they do, they think that it is the only tangle they are ever going to be in, and do not know that they are simply going on from one to another as long as there is enough of them left to be caught in a mesh. To Kendricks we Marches were simply two amiable people, who had fancied doing a pleasant thing for a beautiful girl that accident had thrown it in our power to befriend, and were by no means the trembling arbiters of her destiny we felt ourselves to be. The difference between his objective sense and my subjective sense was the difference between his twenty-seven years and my fifty-two, and while this remained I saw that it would be useless to try to get on common ground with him, or to give him our point of view. If I were to speak to him at all, it must be with authority, with the right of one who stood in the place of the girl’s parents, and had her happiness at heart. That is, it was something like that; but my words say it too bluntly. I found myself beginning, “I have rather had a notion that her father might come on, and take the enterprise off our hands,” though, to tell the truth, I had never imagined such a thing, which came into my head at that moment through an association with the thought of parents.

“Have you any idea what sort of man he is?” asked Kendricks.

“Oh, some little local magnate, president of the village and president of the village bank; I fancy the chief figure in the place, but probably as ignorant of our world as a Cherokee.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the young fellow. “Do you think that follows because he doesn’t live in it?” I could see that he did not quite like what I had said. “I suppose ours is rather a small world.”

“The smallest of all worlds,” I answered. “And in the eyes of Papa Gage, if they could once be focused upon it, our world would shrivel to an atom.”

“Do you think,” he asked, with a manifest anxiety, “that it would in hers?”

“No; she is not the American people, and her father is, as I fancy him. I make out from the vague hints that Brother Deering (as Fulkerson would call him) dropped when he talked about him that Papa Gage is a shrewd, practical, home-keeping business man, with an eye single to the main chance, lavish, but not generous, Philistine to the backbone, blindly devoted to his daughter, and contemptuous of all the myriad mysteries of civilisation that he doesn’t understand. I don’t know why I should be authorised to imagine him personally long and lank, with possibly a tobacco habit of some sort. His natural history, upon no better authority, is that of a hard-headed farmer, who found out that farming could never be more than a livelihood, and came into the village, and began to lend money, and get gain, till he was in a position to help found the De Witt Point National Bank, and then, by weight of his moneyed solidity, imposed himself upon the free and independent voters of the village—a majority of them under mortgage to him—and became its president. It isn’t a pleasant type, but it’s ideally American.”

“Yes,” said Kendricks ruefully.

“But his daughter,” I continued, “is probably altogether different. There is something fine about her—really fine. Our world wouldn’t shrivel in her eye; it would probably swell up and fill the universe,” I added by an impulse that came from nowhere irresistibly upon me: “that is, if she could see _you_ in it.”

“What do you mean?” he asked with a start.

“Oh, now I must tell you what I mean,” I said desperately. “It’s you that have complicated this case so dreadfully for us. Can’t you think why?”

“No, I can’t,” he said; but he had to say that.

His fine, sensitive face flamed at once so fire-red that it could only turn pale for a change when I plunged on: “I’m afraid we’ve trifled with her happiness”; and this formulation of the case disgusted me so much that I laughed wildly, and added, “unless we’ve trifled with yours, too.”

“I don’t know why you call it trifling with happiness,” he returned with dignity, but without offence. “If you will leave her out of the question, I will say that you have given me the greatest happiness of my life in introducing me to Miss Gage.”

“Now,” I demanded, “may I ask what _you_ mean? You know I wouldn’t if I didn’t feel bound for her sake, and if you hadn’t said just what you have said. You needn’t answer me unless you like! It’s pleasant to know that you’ve not been bored, and Mrs. March and I are infinitely obliged to you for helping us out.”

Kendricks made as if he were going to say something, and then he did not. He hung his head lower and lower in the silence which I had to break for him—“I hope I haven’t been intrusive, my dear fellow. This is something I felt bound to speak of. You know we couldn’t let it go on. Mrs. March and I have blamed ourselves a good deal, and we couldn’t let it go on. But I’m afraid I haven’t been as delicate with you—”

“Oh! delicate!” He lifted his head and flashed a face of generous self-reproach upon me. “It’s _I_ that haven’t been delicate with _you_. I’ve been monstrously indelicate. But I never meant to be, and—and—I was coming to see you just now when we met—to see you—Miss Gage—and ask her—tell her that we—I—must tell you and Mrs. March—Mr. March! At the hop last night I asked her to be my wife, and as soon as she can hear from her father—But the first thing when I woke this morning, I saw that I must tell Mrs. March and you. And you—you must forgive us—or me, rather; for it was my fault—for not telling you last night—at once—oh, thank you! thank you!”

I had seized his hand, and was wringing it vehemently in expression of my pleasure in what he had told me. In that first moment I felt nothing but pure joy and an immeasurable relief. I drew my breath, a very deep and full one, in a sudden, absolute freedom from anxieties which had been none the less real and constant because so often burlesqued. Afterward considerations presented themselves to alloy my rapture, but for that moment, as I say, it was nothing but rapture. There was no question in it of the lovers’ fitness for each other, of their acceptability to their respective families, of their general conduct, or of their especial behaviour toward us. All that I could realise was that it was a great escape for both of us, and a great triumph for me. I had been afraid that I should not have the courage to speak to Kendricks of the matter at all, much less ask him to go away; and here I had actually spoken to him, with the splendid result that I need only congratulate him on his engagement to the lady whose unrequited affections I had been wishing him to spare. I don’t remember just the terms I used in doing this, but they seemed satisfactory to Kendricks; probably a repetition of the letters of the alphabet would have been equally acceptable. At last I said, “Well, now I must go and tell the great news to Mrs. March,” and I shook hands with him again; we had been shaking hands at half-minutely intervals ever since the first time.

XVIII

I SAW Mrs. March waiting for me on the hotel verandah. She wore her bonnet, and she warned me not to approach, and then ran down to meet me.

“Well, my dear,” she said, as she pushed her hand through my arm and began to propel me away from the sight and hearing of people on the piazza, “I hope you didn’t make a fool of yourself with Kendricks. They’re engaged!”

She apparently expected me to be prostrated by this stroke. “Yes,” I said very coolly; “I was just coming to tell you.”

“How did you know it? Who told you? Did Kendricks? I don’t believe it!” she cried in an excitement not unmixed with resentment.

“No one told me,” I said. “I simply divined it.”

She didn’t mind that for a moment. “Well, I’m glad he had the grace to do so, and I hope he did it before you asked him any leading questions.” Without waiting to hear whether this was so or not, she went on, with an emphasis on the next word that almost blotted it out of the language, “_She_ came back to me almost the instant you were gone, and told me everything. She said she wanted to tell me last night, but she hadn’t the courage, and this morning, when she saw that I was beginning to hint up to Mr. Kendricks a little, she hadn’t the courage at all. I sent her straight off to telegraph for her father. She is behaving splendidly. And now, what are we going to do?”

“What the rest of the world is—nothing. It seems to me that we are out of the story, my dear. At any rate, I shan’t attempt to compete with Miss Gage in splendid behaviour, and I hope you won’t. It would be so easy for us. I wonder what Papa Gage is going to be like.”

I felt my thrill of apprehension impart itself to her. “Yes!” she gasped; “what if he shouldn’t like it?”

“Well, then, that’s his affair.” But I did not feel so lightly about it as I spoke, and from time to time during the day I was overtaken with a cold dismay at the thought of the unknown quantity in the problem.

When we returned to the hotel after a tour of the block, we saw Kendricks in our corner of the verandah with Miss Gage. They were both laughing convulsively, and they ran down to meet us in yet wilder throes of merriment.

“We’ve just been comparing notes,” he said, “and at the very moment when I was telling you, Mr. March, Julia was telling Mrs. March.”

“Wonderful case of telepathy,” I mocked.

“Give it to the Psychical Research.”

They both seemed a little daunted, and Miss Gage said, “I know Mr. March doesn’t like the way we’ve done.”

“Like it!” cried Mrs. March, contriving to shake me a little with the hand she still had in my arm. “Of course he likes it. He was just saying you had behaved splendidly. He said _he_ wouldn’t attempt to compete with you. But you mustn’t regard him in the least.”

I admired the skill with which Isabel saved her conscience in this statement too much to dispute it; and I suppose that whatever she had said, Miss Gage would have been reassured. I cannot particularly praise the wisdom of her behaviour during that day, or, for the matter of that, the behaviour of Kendricks either. The ideal thing would have been for him to keep away now till her father came, but it seemed to me that he was about under our feet all the while, and that she, so far from making him remain at his own hotel, encouraged him to pass the time at ours. Without consulting me, Mrs. March asked him to stay to dinner after he had stayed all the forenoon, and he made this a pretext for spending the afternoon in our corner of the verandah. She made me give it up to him and Miss Gage, so that they could be alone together, though I must say they did not seem to mind us a great deal when we were present; he was always leaning on the back of her chair, or sitting next her with his hand dangling over it in a manner that made me sick. I wondered if I was ever such an ass as that, and I quite lost the respect for Kendricks’s good sense and good taste which had been the ground of my liking for him.

I felt myself withdrawn from the affair farther and farther in sympathy, since it had now passed beyond my control; and I resented the strain of the responsibility which I had thrown off, I found, only for a moment, and must continue to suffer until the girl’s father appeared and finally relieved me. The worst was that I had to bear it alone. It was impossible to detach Mrs. March’s interest from Miss Gage, as a girl who had been made love to, long enough to enable her to realise her as a daughter with filial ties and duties. She did try in a perfunctory way to do it, but I could see that she never gave her mind to it. I could not even make her share my sense of my own culpability, a thing she was only too willing to do in most matters. She admitted that it was absurd for me to have let my fancy play about the girl when I first saw her until we felt that I must do something for her; but I could not get her to own that we had both acted preposterously in letting Mrs. Deering leave Miss Gage in our charge. In the first place, she denied that she had been left in our charge. She had simply been left in the hotel where we were staying, and we should have been perfectly free to do nothing for her. But when Kendricks turned up so unexpectedly, it was quite natural we should ask him to be polite to her. Mrs. March saw nothing strange in all that. What was I worrying about? What she had been afraid of was that he had not been in love with the girl when she was so clearly in love with him. But now!

“And suppose her father doesn’t like it!”

“Not like Mr. Kendricks!” She stared at me, and I could see how infatuated she was.