Chapter 6

"It all comes round to the same thing at last," said General Triscoe. "Your precious humanity--"

"Oh, I don't claim it exclusively," March protested.

"Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road. He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on his course, and coming back to where he started."

Stoller said, "I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here, that they will come to America and set up, if they can't stand the duties."

"Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway," March consented.

If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer. He followed with his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of the ruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin, upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot. The land fell away from the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fields and in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into the distance. "I don't suppose," Burnamy said, "that life ever does much better than this, do you? I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and saying 'Unberufen.' I might knock on your bouquet; that's wood."

"It would spoil the flowers," she said, looking down at them in her belt. She looked up and their eyes met.

"I wonder," he said, presently, "what makes us always have a feeling of dread when we are happy?"

"Do you have that, too?" she asked.

"Yes. Perhaps it's because we know that change must come, and it must be for the worse."

"That must be it. I never thought of it before, though."

"If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological weather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tears beforehand--it may come to that."

"I hope it won't. I'd rather not know when I was to be happy; it would spoil the pleasure; and wouldn't be any compensation when it was the other way."

A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller looking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquiline profile into relief. "Oh! Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?" he called gayly up to him.

"I guess we've seen about all there is," he answered. "Hadn't we better be going?" He probably did not mean to be mandatory.

"All right," said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe again without further notice of him.

They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the weird sacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and to account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt, and this one built only a few years before. Then he locked the doors after them, and ran forward to open against their coming the chapel of the village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortified themselves for it at the village cafe.

They were served by a little hunch-back maid; and she told them who lived in the chief house of the village. It was uncommonly pretty; where all the houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as the dwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the great man of the place. March admired the cat which rubbed against her skirt while she stood and talked, and she took his praises modestly for the cat; but they wrought upon the envy, of her brother so that he ran off to the garden, and came back with two fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held up, with an arm across each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the spectators.

"Oh, give him something!" Mrs. March entreated. "He's such a dear."

"No, no! I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat outdone," he refused; and then he was about to yield.

"Hold on!" said Stoller, assuming the host. "I got the change."

He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March had meant her husband to reward his naivete with half a florin at least; but he seemed to feel that he had now ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himself in charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel; he made Miss Triscoe let him carry her jacket when she found it warm.

The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy in the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details. Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the three side-altars. The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German version of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic at the time; the carving is coarse, and the color harsh and unsoftened by years, though it is broken and obliterated in places.

The sacristan said that the chapel was never used for anything but funeral services, and he led the way out into the cemetery, where he wished to display the sepultural devices. The graves here were planted with flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies; but a space fenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown with weeds and brambles: This space, he said, was for suicides; but to March it was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in consecrated ground where the stones had photographs of the dead on porcelain let into them. One was the picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been the wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed to her in the inscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of irony, the magnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house of the village. He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest the attention of the strangers, and he led them with less apparent hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the figure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject much celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to his party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and March tried to make him understand that they appreciated it. He knew that his wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great favor in showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of grief in the poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile of those who had taken their own lives and were parted in death from the more patient sufferers who had waited for God to take them. With a curious, unpainful self-analysis he noted that the older members of the party, who in the course of nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from its shows; but the young girl and the young man had not borne to look on them, and had quickly escaped from the place, somewhere outside the gate. Was it the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last, or was it merely the effect, or defect, of ossified sensibilities, of toughened nerves?

"That is all?" he asked of the spectral sacristan.

"That is all," the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something handsome.

"No, no," said Stoller, detecting his gesture. "Your money a'n't good."

He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so patient. In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have frankly said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and whispered a sad "Danke."

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.

"Oh, have I lost my glove in there?" said Mrs. March, looking at her hands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to.

"Let me go and find it for you," Burnamy entreated.

"Well," she consented, and she added, "If the sacristan has found it, give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow."

As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, and her heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence: some men would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand. He came back directly, saying, "No, he didn't find it."

She laughed, and held both gloves up. "No wonder! I had it all the time. Thank you ever so much."

"How are we going to ride back?" asked Stoller.

Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably. No one else spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, "Oh, I think the way we came, is best."

"Did that absurd creature," she apostrophized her husband as soon as she got him alone after their arrival at Pupp's, "think I was going to let him drive back with Agatha?"

"I wonder," said March, "if that's what Burnamy calls her now?"

"I shall despise him if it isn't."

XXXVII.

Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supper which they had eaten in a silence natural with two men who have been off on a picnic together. He did not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in, and the young man did not sit down after putting his letters before him. He said, with an effort of forcing himself to speak at once, "I have looked through the papers, and there is something that I think you ought to see."

"What do you mean?" said Stoller.

Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certain articles were strongly circumscribed in ink. The papers varied, but their editorials did not, in purport at least. Some were grave and some were gay; one indignantly denounced; another affected an ironical bewilderment; the third simply had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller. They all, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad as the praise of municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with him gleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on the accession of the Honorable Jacob to their ranks.

Stoller read the articles, one after another, with parted lips and gathering drops of perspiration on his upper lip, while Burnamy waited on foot. He flung the papers all down at last. "Why, they're a pack of fools! They don't know what they're talking about! I want city government carried on on business principles, by the people, for the people. I don't care what they say! I know I'm right, and I'm going ahead on this line if it takes all--" The note of defiance died out of his voice at the sight of Burnamy's pale face. "What's the matter with you?"

"There's nothing the matter with me."

"Do you mean to tell me it is"--he could not bring himself to use the word--"what they say?"

"I suppose," said Burnamy, with a dry mouth, "it's what you may call municipal socialism."

Stoller jumped from his seat. "And you knew it when you let me do it?"

"I supposed you knew what you were about."

"It's a lie!" Stoller advanced upon him, wildly, and Burnamy took a step backward.

"Look out!" shouted Burnamy. "You never asked me anything about it. You told me what you wanted done, and I did it. How could I believe you were such an ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you were talking about?" He added, in cynical contempt, "But you needn't worry. You can make it right with the managers by spending a little more money than you expected to spend."

Stoller started as if the word money reminded him of something. "I can take care of myself, young man. How much do I owe you?"

"Nothing!" said Burnamy, with an effort for grandeur which failed him.

The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffee at the Posthof, he came dragging himself toward them with such a haggard air that Mrs. March called, before he reached their table, "Why, Mr. Burnamy, what's the matter?"

He smiled miserably. "Oh, I haven't slept very well. May I have my coffee with you? I want to tell you something; I want you to make me. But I can't speak till the coffee comes. Fraulein!" he besought a waitress going off with a tray near them. "Tell Lili, please, to bring me some coffee--only coffee."

He tried to make some talk about the weather, which was rainy, and the Marches helped him, but the poor endeavor lagged wretchedly in the interval between the ordering and the coming of the coffee. "Ah, thank you, Lili," he said, with a humility which confirmed Mrs. March in her instant belief that he had been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and been rejected. After gulping his coffee, he turned to her: "I want to say good-by. I'm going away."

"From Carlsbad?" asked Mrs. March with a keen distress.

The water came into his eyes. "Don't, don't be good to me, Mrs. March! I can't stand it. But you won't, when you know."

He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressing himself more and more to the intelligence of March, who let him go on without question, and laid a restraining hand upon his wife when he saw her about to prompt him. At the end, "That's all," he said, huskily, and then he seemed to be waiting for March's comment. He made none, and the young fellow was forced to ask, "Well, what do you think, Mr. March?"

"What do you think yourself?"

"I think, I behaved badly," said Burnamy, and a movement of protest from Mrs. March nerved him to add: "I could make out that it was not my business to tell him what he was doing; but I guess it was; I guess I ought to have stopped him, or given him a chance to stop himself. I suppose I might have done it, if he had treated me decently when I turned up a day late, here; or hadn't acted toward me as if I were a hand in his buggy-works that had come in an hour after the whistle sounded."

He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone in Mrs. March's eyes; but her husband only looked the more serious.

He asked gently, "Do you offer that fact as an explanation, or as a justification."

Burnamy laughed forlornly. "It certainly wouldn't justify me. You might say that it made the case all the worse for me." March forbore to say, and Burnamy went on. "But I didn't suppose they would be onto him so quick, or perhaps at all. I thought--if I thought anything--that it would amuse some of the fellows in the office, who know about those things." He paused, and in March's continued silence he went on. "The chance was one in a hundred that anybody else would know where he had brought up."

"But you let him take that chance," March suggested.

"Yes, I let him take it. Oh, you know how mixed all these things are!"

"Yes."

"Of course I didn't think it out at the time. But I don't deny that I had a satisfaction in the notion of the hornets' nest he was poking his thick head into. It makes me sick, now, to think I had. I oughtn't to have let him; he was perfectly innocent in it. After the letter went, I wanted to tell him, but I couldn't; and then I took the chances too. I don't believe he could have ever got forward in politics; he's too honest--or he isn't dishonest in the right way. But that doesn't let me out. I don't defend myself! I did wrong; I behaved badly. But I've suffered for it.

"I've had a foreboding all the time that it would come to the worst, and felt like a murderer with his victim when I've been alone with Stoller. When I could get away from him I could shake it off, and even believe that it hadn't happened. You can't think what a nightmare it's been! Well, I've ruined Stoller politically, but I've ruined myself, too. I've spoiled my own life; I've done what I can never explain to--to the people I want to have believe in me; I've got to steal away like the thief I am. Good-by!" He jumped to his feet, and put out his hand to March, and then to Mrs. March.

"Why, you're not going away now!" she cried, in a daze.

"Yes, I am. I shall leave Carlsbad on the eleven-o'clock train. I don't think I shall see you again." He clung to her hand. "If you see General Triscoe--I wish you'd tell them I couldn't--that I had to--that I was called away suddenly--Good-by!" He pressed her hand and dropped it, and mixed with the crowd. Then he came suddenly back, with a final appeal to March: "Should you--do you think I ought to see Stoller, and--and tell him I don't think I used him fairly?"

"You ought to know--" March began.

But before he could say more, Burnamy said, "You're right," and was off again.

"Oh, how hard you were with him, my dear!" Mrs. March lamented.

"I wish," he said, "if our boy ever went wrong that some one would be as true to him as I was to that poor fellow. He condemned himself; and he was right; he has behaved very badly."

"You always overdo things so, when you act righteously!"

"Now, Isabel!"

"Oh, yes, I know what you will say. But I should have tempered justice with mercy."

Her nerves tingled with pity for Burnamy, but in her heart she was glad that her husband had had strength to side with him against himself, and she was proud of the forbearance with which he had done it. In their earlier married life she would have confidently taken the initiative on all moral questions. She still believed that she was better fitted for their decision by her Puritan tradition and her New England birth, but once in a great crisis when it seemed a question of their living, she had weakened before it, and he, with no such advantages, had somehow met the issue with courage and conscience. She could not believe he did so by inspiration, but she had since let him take the brunt of all such issues and the responsibility. He made no reply, and she said: "I suppose you'll admit now there was always something peculiar in the poor boy's manner to Stoller."

He would confess no more than that there ought to have been. "I don't see how he could stagger through with that load on his conscience. I'm not sure I like his being able to do so."

She was silent in the misgiving which she shared with him, but she said: "I wonder how far it has gone with him and Miss Triscoe?"

"Well, from his wanting you to give his message to the general in the plural--"

"Don't laugh! It's wicked to laugh! It's heartless!" she cried, hysterically. "What will he do, poor fellow?"

"I've an idea that he will light on his feet, somehow. But, at any rate, he's doing the right thing in going to own up to Stoller."

"Oh, Stoller! I care nothing for Stoller! Don't speak to me of Stoller!"

Burnamy fond the Bird of Prey, as he no longer had the heart to call him, walking up and down in his room like an eagle caught in a trap. He erected his crest fiercely enough, though, when the young fellow came in at his loudly shouted, "Herein!"

"What do you want?" he demanded, brutally.

This simplified Burnamy's task, while it made it more loathsome. He answered not much less brutally, "I want to tell you that I think I used you badly, that I let you betray yourself, that I feel myself to blame." He could have added, "Curse you!" without change of tone.

Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lower teeth like a dog's when he snarls. "You want to get back!"

"No," said Burnamy, mildly, and with increasing sadness as he spoke. "I don't want to get back. Nothing would induce me. I'm going away on the first train."

"Well, you're not!" shouted Stoller. "You've lied me into this--"

"Look out!" Burnamy turned white.

"Didn't you lie me into it, if you let me fool myself, as you say?" Stoller pursued, and Burnamy felt himself weaken through his wrath. "Well, then, you got to lie me out of it. I been going over the damn thing, all night--and you can do it for me. I know you can do it," he gave way in a plea that was almost a whimper. "Look here! You see if you can't. I'll make it all right with you. I'll pay you whatever you think is right--whatever you say."

"Oh!" said Burnamy, in otherwise unutterable disgust.

"You kin," Stoller went on, breaking down more and more into his adopted Hoosier, in the stress of his anxiety. "I know you kin, Mr. Burnamy." He pushed the paper containing his letter into Burnamy's hands, and pointed out a succession of marked passages. "There! And here! And this place! Don't you see how you could make out that it meant something else, or was just ironical?" He went on to prove how the text might be given the complexion he wished, and Burnamy saw that he had really thought it not impossibly out. "I can't put it in writing as well as you; but I've done all the work, and all you've got to do is to give it some of them turns of yours. I'll cable the fellows in our office to say I've been misrepresented, and that my correction is coming. We'll get it into shape here together, and then I'll cable that. I don't care for the money. And I'll get our counting-room to see this scoundrel"--he picked up the paper that had had fun with him--"and fix him all right, so that he'll ask for a suspension of public opinion, and--You see, don't you?"

The thing did appeal to Burnamy. If it could be done, it would enable him to make Stoller the reparation he longed to make him more than anything else in the world. But he heard himself saying, very gently, almost tenderly, "It might be done, Mr. Stoller. But I couldn't do it. It wouldn't be honest--for me."

"Yah!" yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper into a wad and flung it into Burnamy's face. "Honest, you damn humbug! You let me in for this, when you knew I didn't mean it, and now you won't help me out because it a'n't honest! Get out of my room, and get out quick before I--"

He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightened himself, with "If you dare!" He knew that he was right in refusing; but he knew that Stoller was right, too, and that he had not meant the logic of what he had said in his letter, and of what Burnamy had let him imply. He braved Stoller's onset, and he left his presence untouched, but feeling as little a moral hero as he well could.

XXXVIII.

General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day's pleasure, and in the self-reproach of a pessimist who has lost his point of view for a time, and has to work back to it. He began at the belated breakfast with his daughter when she said, after kissing him gayly, in the small two-seated bower where they breakfasted at their hotel when they did not go to the Posthof, "Didn't you have a nice time, yesterday, papa?"

She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at him across the little iron table, as she lifted the pot to pour out his coffee.

"What do you call a nice time?" he temporized, not quite able to resist her gayety.

"Well, the kind of time I had."

"Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass? I took cold in that old church, and the tea at that restaurant must have been brewed in a brass kettle. I suffered all night from it. And that ass from Illinois--"

"Oh, poor papa! I couldn't go with Mr. Stoller alone, but I might have gone in the two-spanner with him and let you have Mr. or Mrs. March in the one-spanner."

"I don't know. Their interest in each other isn't so interesting to other people as they seem to think."

"Do you feel that way really, papa? Don't you like their being so much in love still?"

"At their time of life? Thank you it's bad enough in young people."

The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupied in pouring out her father's coffee.

He tasted it, and then he drank pretty well all of it; but he said, as he put his cup down, "I don't know what they make this stuff of. I wish I had a cup of good, honest American coffee."

"Oh, there's nothing like American food!" said his daughter, with so much conciliation that he looked up sharply.

But whatever he might have been going to say was at least postponed by the approach of a serving-maid, who brought a note to his daughter. She blushed a little at sight of it, and then tore it open and read:

"I am going away from Carlsbad, for a fault of my own which forbids me to look you in the face. If you wish to know the worst of me, ask Mrs. March. I have no heart to tell you."