Chapter 20

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.

“O Alice! Alice! Alice! Nobody could ever be what you are to me!” He soothed and comforted her with endearing words and touches; but before he could have believed her half consoled she pulled away from him, and asked, with shining eyes, “Do you think Mr. Boardman is a good influence in your life?”

“Boardman!” cried Mavering, in astonishment. “Why, I thought you liked Boardman?”

“I do; and I respect him very much. But that isn't the question. Don't you think we ought to ask ourselves how others influence us?”

“Well, I don't see much of Boardy nowadays; but I like to drop down and touch earth in Boardy once in a while--I'm in the air so much. Board has more common-sense, more solid chunk-wisdom, than anybody I know. He's kept me from making a fool of myself more times--”

“Wasn't he with you that day with--with those women in Portland?”

Dan winced a little, and then laughed. “No, he wasn't. That was the trouble. Boardman was off on the press boat. I thought I told you. But if you object to Boardman--”

“I don't. You mustn't think I object to people when I ask you about them. All that I wished was that you should think yourself what sort of influence he was. I think he's a very good influence.”

“He's a splendid fellow, Boardman is, Alice!” cried Dan. “You ought to have seen how he fought his way through college on such a little money, and never skulked or felt mean. He wasn't appreciated for it; the men don't notice these things much; but he didn't want to have it noticed; always acted as if it was neither here nor there; and now I guess he sends out home whatever he has left after keeping soul and body together every week.”

He spoke, perhaps, with too great an effect of relief. Alice listened, as it seemed, to his tone rather than his words, and said absently--

“Yes, that's grand. But I don't want you to act as if you were afraid of me in such things.”

“Afraid?” Dan echoed.

“I don't mean actually afraid, but as if you thought I couldn't be reasonable; as if you supposed I didn't expect you to make mistakes or to be imperfect.”

“Yes, I know you're very reasonable, and you're more patient with me than I deserve; I know all that, and it's only my wish to come up to your standard, I suppose, that gives me that apprehensive appearance.”

“That was what vexed me with you there at Campobello, when you--asked me--”

“Yes, I know.”

“You ought to have understood me better. You ought to know now that I don't wish you to do anything on my account, but because it's something we owe to others.”

“Oh, excuse me! I'd much rather do it for you,” cried Dan; but Alice looked so grave, so hurt, that he hastened on: “How in the world does it concern others whether we are devoted or not, whether we're harmonious and two-souls-with-but-a-single-thought, and all that?” He could not help being light about it.

“How?” Alice repeated. “Won't it give them an idea of what--what--of how much--how truly--if we care for each other--how people ought to care? We don't do it for ourselves. That would be selfish and disgusting. We do it because it's something that we owe to the idea of being engaged--of having devoted our lives to each other, and would show--would teach--”

“Oh yes! I know what you mean,” said Dan, and he gave way in a sputtering laugh. “But they wouldn't understand. They'd only think we were spoons on each other; and if they noticed that I cooled off toward people I'd liked, and warmed up toward those you liked, they'd say you made me.”

“Should you care?” asked Alice sublimely, withdrawing a little from his arm.

“Oh no! only on your account,” he answered, checking his laugh.

“You needn't on my account,” she returned. “If we sacrifice some little preferences to each other, isn't that right? I shall be glad to sacrifice all of mine to you. Isn't our--marriage to be full of such sacrifices? I expect to give up everything to you.” She looked at him with a sad severity.

He began to laugh again. “Oh no, Alice! Don't do that! I couldn't stand it. I want some little chance at the renunciations myself.”

She withdrew still further from his side, and said, with a cold anger, “It's that detestable Mrs. Brinkley.”

“Mrs. Brinkley!” shouted Dan.

“Yes; with her pessimism. I have heard her talk. She influences you. Nothing is sacred to her. It was she who took up with those army women that night.”

“Well, Alice, I must say you can give things as ugly names as the next one. I haven't seen Mrs. Brinkley the whole winter, except in your company. But she has more sense than all the other women I know.”

“Oh, thank you!”

“You know I don't mean you,” he pushed on. “And she isn't a pessimist. She's very kindhearted, and that night she was very polite and good to those army women, as you call them, when you had refused to say a word or do anything for them.”

“I knew it had been rankling in your mind all along,” said the girl “I expected it to coma out sooner or later. And you talk about renunciation! You never forget nor forgive the slightest thing. But I don't ask your forgiveness.”

“Alice!”

“No. You are as hard as iron. You have that pleasant outside manner that makes people think you're very gentle and yielding, but all the time you're like adamant. I would rather die than ask your forgiveness for anything, and you'd rather let me than give it.”

“Well, then, I ask your forgiveness, Alice, and I'm sure you won't let me die without it.”

They regarded each other a moment. Then the tenderness gushed up in their hearts, a passionate tide, and swept them into each other's arms.

“O Dan,” she cried, “how sweet you are! how good! how lovely! Oh, how wonderful it is! I wanted to hate you, but I couldn't. I couldn't do anything but love you. Yes, now I understand what love is, and how it can do everything, and last for ever.”

XLI.

Mavering came to lunch the next day, and had a word with Mrs. Pasmer before Alice came in. Mr. Pasmer usually lunched at the club.

“We don't see much of Mrs. Saintsbury nowadays,” he suggested.

“No; it's a great way to Cambridge,” said Mrs. Pasmer, stifling, in a little sigh of apparent regret for the separation, the curiosity she felt as to Dan's motive in mentioning Mrs. Saintsbury. She was very patient with him when he went on.

“Yes, it is a great way. And a strange thing about it is that when you're living here it's a good deal further from Boston to Cambridge than it is from Cambridge to Boston.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “every one notices that.”

Dan sat absently silent for a time before he said, “Yes, I guess I must go out and see Mrs. Saintsbury.”

“Yes, you ought. She's very fond of you. You and Alice ought both to go.”

“Does Mrs. Saintsbury like me?” asked Dan. “Well, she's awfully nice. Don't you think she's awfully fond of formulating people?”

“Oh, everybody in Cambridge does that. They don't gossip; they merely accumulate materials for the formulation of character.”

“And they get there just the same!” cried Dan. “Mrs. Saintsbury used to think she had got me down pretty fine,” he suggested.

“Yes!” said Mrs. Pasmer, with an indifference which they both knew she did not feel.

“Yes. She used to accuse me of preferring to tack, even in a fair wind.”

He looked inquiringly at Mrs. Pasmer; and she said, “How ridiculous!”

“Yes, it was. Well, I suppose I am rather circuitous about some things.”

“Oh, not at all!”

“And I suppose I'm rather a trial to Alice in that way.”

He looked at Mrs. Pasmer again, and she said: “I don't believe you are, in the least. You can't tell what is trying to a girl.”

“No,” said Dan pensively, “I can't.” Mrs. Pasmer tried to render the interest in her face less vivid. “I can't tell where she's going to bring up. Talk about tacking!”

“Do you mean the abstract girl; or Alice?”

“Oh, the abstract girl,” said Dan, and they laughed together. “You think Alice is very straightforward, don't you?”

“Very,” said Mrs. Pasmer, looking down with a smile--“for a girl.”

“Yes, that's what I mean. And don't you think the most circuitous kind of fellow would be pretty direct compared with the straight-forwardest kind of girl?”

There was a rueful defeat and bewilderment in Dan's face that made Mrs. Pasmer laugh. “What has she been doing now?” she asked.

“Mrs. Pasmer,” said Dan, “you and I are the only frank and open people I know. Well, she began to talk last night about influence--the influence of other people on us; and she killed off nearly all the people I like before I knew what she was up to, and she finished with Mrs. Brinkley. I'm glad she didn't happen to think of you, Mrs. Pasmer, or I shouldn't be associating with you at the present moment.” This idea seemed to give Mrs. Pasmer inexpressible pleasure. Dan went on: “Do you quite see the connection between our being entirely devoted to each other and my dropping Mrs. Brinkley?”

“I don't know,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Alice doesn't like satirical people.”

“Well, of course not. But Mrs. Brinkley is such an admirer of hers.”

“I dare say she tells you so.”

“Oh, but she is!”

“I don't deny it,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “But if Alice feels something inimical--antipatico--in her atmosphere, it's no use talking.”

“Oh no, it's no use talking, and I don't know that I want to talk.” After a pause, Mavering asked, “Mrs. Pasmer, don't you think that where two people are going to be entirely devoted to each other, and self-sacrificing to each other, they ought to divide, and one do all the devotion, and the other all the self-sacrifice?”

Mrs. Pasmer was amused by the droll look in Dan's eyes. “I think they ought to be willing to share evenly,” she said.

“Yes; that's what I say--share and share alike. I'm not selfish about those little things.” He blew off a long sighing breath. “Mrs. Pasmer, don't you think we ought to have an ideal of conduct?”

Mrs. Pasmer abandoned herself to laughter. “O Dan! Dan! You will be the death of me.”

“We will die together, then, Mrs. Pasmer. Alice will kill me.” He regarded her with a sad sympathy in his eye as she laughed and laughed with delicious intelligence of the case. The intelligence was perfect, from their point of view; but whether it fathomed the girl's whole intention or aspiration is another matter. Perhaps this was not very clear to herself. At any rate, Mavering did not go any more to see Mrs. Brinkley, whose house he had liked to drop into. Alice went several times, to show, she said, that she had no feeling in the matter; and Mrs. Brinkley, when she met Dan, forbore to embarrass him with questions or reproaches; she only praised Alice to him.

There were not many other influences that Alice cut him off from; she even exposed him to some influences that might have been thought deleterious. She made him go and call alone upon certain young ladies whom she specified, and she praised several others to him, though she did not praise them for the same things that he did. One of them was a girl to whom Alice had taken a great fancy, such as often buds into a romantic passion between women; she was very gentle and mild, and she had none of that strength of will which she admired in Alice. One night there was a sleighing party to a hotel in the suburbs, where they had dancing and then supper. After the supper they danced “Little Sally Waters” for a finale, instead of the Virginia Reel, and Alice would not go on the floor with Dan; she said she disliked that dance; but she told him to dance with Miss Langham. It became a gale of fun, and in the height of it Dan slipped and fell with his partner. They laughed it off, with the rest, but after a while the girl began to cry; she had received a painful bruise. All the way home, while the others laughed and sang and chattered, Dan was troubled about this poor girl; his anxiety became a joke with the whole sleighful of people.

When he parted with Alice at her door, he said, “I'm afraid I hurt Miss Langham; I feel awfully about it.”

“Yes; there's no doubt of that. Good night!”

She left him to go off to his lodging, hot and tingling with indignation at her injustice. But kindlier thoughts came to him before he slept, and he fell asleep with a smile of tenderness for her on his lips. He could see how he was wrong to go out with any one else when Alice said she disliked the dance; he ought not to have taken advantage of her generosity in appointing him a partner; it was trying for her to see him make that ludicrous tumble, of course; and perhaps he had overdone the attentive sympathy on the way home. It flattered him that she could not help showing her jealousy--that is flattering, at first; and Dan was able to go and confess all but this to Alice. She received his submission magnanimously, and said that she was glad it had happened, because his saying this showed that now they understood each other perfectly. Then she fixed her eyes on his, and said, “I've just been round to see Lilly, and she's as well as ever; it was only a nervous shock.”

Whether Mavering was really indifferent to Miss Langham's condition, or whether the education of his perceptions had gone so far that he consciously ignored her, he answered, “That was splendid of you, Alice.”

“No,” she said; “it's you that are splendid; and you always are. Oh, I wonder if I can ever be worthy of you!”

Their mutual forgiveness was very sweet to them, and they went on praising each other. Alice suddenly broke away from this weakening exchange of worship, and said, with that air of coming to business which he lad learned to recognise and dread a little, “Dan, don't you think I ought to write to your mother?”

“Write to my mother?”

“Why, you have written to her. You wrote as soon as you got back, and she answered you.”

“Yes; but write regularly?--Show that I think of her all the time? When I really think I'm going to take you from her, I seem so cruel and heartless!”

“Oh, I don't look at it in that light, Alice.”

“Don't joke! And when I think that we're going away to leave her, for several years, perhaps, as soon as we're married, I can't make it seem right. I know how she depends upon your being near her, and seeing her every now and then; and to go off to Europe for years, perhaps--Of course you can be of use to your father there; but do you think it's right toward your mother? I want you to think.”

Dan thought, but his thinking was mainly to the effect that he did not know what she was driving at. Had she got any inkling of that plan of his mother's for them to come and stay a year or two at the Falls after their marriage? He always expected to be able to reconcile that plan with the Pasmer plan of going at once; to his optimism the two were not really incompatible; but he did not wish them prematurely confronted in Alice's mind. Was this her way of letting him know that she knew what his mother wished, and that she was willing to make the sacrifice? Or was it just some vague longing to please him by a show of affection toward his family, an unmeditated impulse of reparation? He had an impulse himself to be frank with Alice, to take her at her word, and to allow that he did not like the notion of going abroad. This was Dan's notion of being frank; he could still reserve the fact that he had given his mother a tacit promise to bring Alice home to live, but he postponed even this. He said: “Oh, I guess that'll be all right, Alice. At any rate, there's no need to think about it yet awhile. That can be arranged.”

“Yes,” said Alice; “but don't you think I'd better get into the habit of writing regularly to your mother now, so that there needn't be any break when we go abroad?” He could see now that she had no idea of giving that plan up, and he was glad that he had not said anything. “I think,” she continued, “that I shall write to her once a week, and give her a full account of our life from day to day; it'll be more like a diary; and then, when we get over there, I can keep it up without any effort, and she won't feel so much that you've gone.”

She seemed to refer the plan to him, and he said it was capital. In fact, he did like the notion of a diary; that sort of historical view would involve less danger of precipitating a discussion of the two schemes of life for the future. “It's awfully kind of you, Alice, to propose such a thing, and you mustn't make it a burden. Any sort of little sketchy record will do; mother can read between the lines, you know.”

“It won't be a burden,” said the girl tenderly. “I shall seem to be doing it for your mother, but I know I shall be doing it for you. I do everything for you. Do you think it's right?”