"I can"t say about the son, but I"m his father"s friend, and I suppose that I"m his friend too. Everybody seems to be so," suggested Munt.
"Oh Yes," Mrs. Pasmer a.s.sented; "he appears to be a universal favourite."
"We used to expect great things of Elbridge Mavering in college. We were rather more romantic than the Harvard men are nowadays, and we believed in one another more than they do. Perhaps we idealised one another. But, anyway, our cla.s.s thought Mavering could do anything. You know about his taste for etchings?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of deep appreciation. "What gifted people!"
"I understand that the son inherits all his father"s talent."
"He sketches delightfully."
"And Mavering wrote. Why, he was our cla.s.s poet!" cried Munt, remembering the fact with surprise and gratification to himself. "He was a tremendous satirist."
"Really? And he seems so amiable now."
"Oh, it was only on paper."
"Perhaps he still keeps it up--on wall-paper?" suggested Mrs. Pasmer.
Munt laughed at the little joke with a good-will that flattered the veteran flatterer. "I should like to ask him that some time. Will you lend it to me?"
"Yes, if such a sayer of good things will deign to borrow--"
"Oh, Mrs. Pasmer!" cried Munt, otherwise speechless.
"And the mother? Do you know Mrs. Mavering?"
"Mrs. Mavering I"ve never seen."
"Oh!" said Mrs. Pasmer, with a disappointment for which Munt tried to console her.
"I"ve never even been at their place. He asked me once a great while ago; but you know how those things are. I"ve heard that she used to be very pretty and very gay. They went about a great deal, to Saratoga and Cape May and such places--rather out of our beat."
"And now?"
"And now she"s been an invalid for a great many years. Bedridden, I believe. Paralysis, I think."
"Yes; Mrs. Saintsbury said something of the kind."
"Well," said Munt, anxious to add to the store of knowledge which this remark let him understand he had not materially increased, "I think Mrs.
Mavering was the origin of the wall-paper--or her money. Mavering was poor; her father had started it, and Mavering turned in his talent."
"How very interesting! And is that the reason--its being ancestral--that Mr. Mavering wishes his son to go into it?"
"Is he going into it?" asked Munt.
"He"s come up here to think about it."
"I should suppose it would be a very good thing," said Munt.
"What a very remarkable forest!" said Mrs. Pasmer, examining it on either side, and turning quite round. This gave her, from her place in the van of the straggling procession, a glimpse of Alice and Dan Mavering far in the rear.
"Don"t you know," he was saying to the girl at the same moment, "it"s like some of those Dore ill.u.s.trations to the Inferno, or the Wandering Jew."
"Oh yes. I was trying to think what it was made me think I had seen it before," she answered. "It must be that. But how strange it is!" she exclaimed, "that sensation of having been there before--in some place before where you can"t possibly have been."
"And do you feel it here?" he asked, as vividly interested as if they two had been the first to notice the phenomenon which has been a psychical consolation to so many young observers.
"Yes," she cried.
"I hope I was with you," he said, with a sudden turn of levity, which did not displease her, for there seemed to be a tender earnestness lurking in it. "I couldn"t bear to think of your being alone in such a howling wilderness."
"Oh, I was with a large picnic," she retorted gaily. "You might have been among the rest. I didn"t notice."
"Well, the next time, I wish you"d look closer. I don"t like being left out." They were so far behind the rest that he devoted himself entirely to her, and they had grown more and more confidential.
They came to a narrow foot-bridge over a deep gorge. The hand-rail had fallen away. He sprang forward and gave her his hand for the pa.s.sage.
"Who helped you over here?" he demanded. "Don"t say I didn"t."
"Perhaps it was you," she murmured, letting him keep the fingers to which he clung a moment after they had crossed the bridge. Then she took them away, and said: "But I can"t be sure. There were so many others."
"Other fellows?" he demanded, placing himself before her on the narrow path, so that she could not get by. "Try to remember, Miss Pasmer. This is very important. It would break my heart if it was really some one else." She stole a glance at his face, but it was smiling, though his voice was so earnest. "I want to help you over all the bad places, and I don"t want any one else to have a hand in it."
The voice and the face still belied each other, and between them the girl chose to feel herself trifled with by the artistic temperament. "If you"ll please step out of the way, Mr. Mavering," she said severely, "I shall not need anybody"s help just here."
He instantly moved aside, and they were both silent, till she said, as she quickened her pace to overtake the others in front, "I don"t see how you can help liking nature in such a place as this."
"I can"t--human nature," he said. It was mere folly; and an abstract folly at that; but the face that she held down and away from him flushed with sweet consciousness as she laughed.
On the cliff beetling above the bay, where she sat to look out over the sad northern sea, lit with the fishing sail they had seen before, and the surge washed into the rocky coves far beneath them, he threw himself at her feet, and made her alone in the company that came and went and tried this view and that from the different points where the picnic hostess insisted they should enjoy it. She left the young couple to themselves, and Mrs. Pasmer seemed to have forgotten that she had bidden Alice to be a little more with her.
Alice had forgotten it too. She sat listening to Mavering"s talk with a certain fascination, but not so much apparently because the meaning of the words pleased her as the sound of his voice, the motion of his lips in speaking, charmed her. At first he was serious, and even melancholy, as if he were afraid he had offended her; but apparently he soon believed that he had been forgiven, and began to burlesque his own mood, but still with a deference and a watchful observance of her changes of feeling which was delicately flattering in its way. Now and then when she answered something it was not always to the purpose; he accused her of not hearing what he said, but she would have it that she did, and then he tried to test her by proofs and questions. It did not matter for anything that was spoken or done; speech and action of whatever sort were mere masks of their young joy in each other, so that when he said, after he had quoted some lines befitting the scene they looked out on; "Now was that from Tennyson or from Tupper?" and she answered, "Neither; it was from Shakespeare," they joined, in the same happy laugh, and they laughed now and then without saying anything. Neither this nor that made them more glad or less; they were in a trance, vulnerable to nothing but the summons which must come to leave their dream behind, and issue into the waking world.
In hope or in experience such a moment has come to all, and it is so pretty to those who recognise it from the outside that no one has the heart to hurry it away while it can be helped. The affair between Alice and Mavering had evidently her mother"s sanction, and all the rest were eager to help it on. When the party had started to return, they called to them, and let them come behind together. At the carriages they had what Miss Anderson called a new deal, and Alice and Mavering found themselves together in the rear seat of the last.
The fog began to come in from the sea, and followed them through the woods. When they emerged upon the highway it wrapped them densely round, and formed a little world, cosy, intimate, where they two dwelt alone with these friends of theirs, each of whom they praised for delightful qualities. The horses beat along through the mist, in which there seemed no progress, and they lived in a blissful arrest of time. Miss Anderson called back from the front seat, "My ear buyns; you"re talkin" about me."
"Which ear?" cried Mavering.
"Oh, the left, of couyse."
"Then it"s merely habit, Julie. You ought to have heard the nice things we were saying about you," Alice called.
"I"d like to hear all the nice things you"ve been saying."
This seemed the last effect of subtle wit. Mavering broke out in his laugh, and Alice"s laugh rang above it.
Mrs. Pasmer looked involuntarily round from the carriage ahead.