"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?"
"Oh; it must be," said Dan, laughing. "It"s so pleasant."
"Oh," said the girl gloomily; "that"s what makes me doubt it."
XLII.
Eunice Mavering acknowledged Alice"s first letter. She said that her mother read it aloud to them all, and had been delighted with the good account she gave of Dan, and fascinated with all the story of their daily doings and sayings. She wished Eunice to tell Alice how fully she appreciated her thoughtfulness of a sick old woman, and that she was going to write herself and thank her. But Eunice added that Alice must not be surprised if her mother was not very prompt in this, and she sent messages from all the family, affectionate for Alice, and polite for her father and mother.
Alice showed Dan the letter, and he seemed to find nothing noticeable in it. "She says your mother will write later," Alice suggested.
"Yes. You ought to feel very much complimented by that. Mother"s autographs are pretty uncommon," he said, smiling.
"Why, doesn"t she write? Can"t she? Does it tire her?" asked Alice.
"Oh yes, she can write, but she hates to. She gets Eunice or Minnie to write usually."
"Dan," cried Alice intensely, "why didn"t you tell me?"
"Why, I thought you knew it," he explained easily. "She likes to read, and likes to talk, but it bores her to write. I don"t suppose I get more than two or three pencil scratches from her in the course of a year. She makes the girls write. But you needn"t mind her not writing. You may be sure she"s glad of your letters."
"It makes me seem very presumptuous to be writing to her when there"s no chance of her answering," Alice grieved. "It"s as if I had pa.s.sed over your sisters" heads. I ought to have written to them."
"Oh, well, you can do that now," said Dan soothingly.
"No. No, I can"t do it now. It would be ridiculous." She was silent, and presently she asked, "Is there anything else about your mother that I ought to know?" She looked at him with a sort of impending discipline in her eyes which he had learned to dread; it meant such a long course of things, such a very great variety of atonement and expiation for him, that he could not bring himself to confront it steadily.
His heart gave a feeble leap; he would have gladly told her all that was in it, and he meant to do so at the right time, but this did not seem the moment. "I can"t say that there is," he answered coldly.
In that need of consecrating her happiness which Alice felt, she went a great deal to church in those days. Sometimes she felt the need almost of defence against her happiness, and a vague apprehension mixed with it. Could it be right to let it claim her whole being, as it seemed to do? Than was the question which she once asked Dan, and it made him laugh, and catch her to him in a rapture that served for the time, and then left her to more morbid doubts. Evidently he could not follow her in them; he could not even imagine them; and while he was with her they seemed to have no verity or value. But she talked them over very hypothetically and impersonally with Miss Cotton, in whose sympathy they resumed all their import, and gained something more. In the idealisation which the girl underwent in this atmosphere all her thoughts and purposes had a significance which she would not of herself, perhaps, have attached to them. They discussed them and a.n.a.lysed them with a satisfaction in the result which could not be represented without an effect of caricature. They measured Alice"s romance together, and evolved from it a sublimation of responsibility, of duty, of devotion, which Alice found it impossible to submit to Dan when he came with his simple-hearted, single-minded purpose of getting Mrs. Pasmer out of the room, and sitting down with his arm around Alice"s waist. When he had accomplished this it seemed sufficient in itself, and she had to think, to struggle to recall things beyond it, above it. He could not be made to see at such times how their lives could be more in unison than they were. When she proposed doing something for him which he knew was disagreeable to her, he would not let her; and when she hinted at anything she wished him to do for her because she knew it was disagreeable to him, he consented so promptly, so joyously, that she perceived he could not have given the least thought to it.
She felt every day that they were alien in their tastes and aims; their pleasures were not the same, and though it was sweet, though it was charming, to have him give up so willingly all his preferences, she felt, without knowing that the time must come when this could not be so, that it was all wrong.
"But these very differences, these antagonisms, if you wish to call them so," suggested Miss Cotton, in talking Alice"s misgivings over with her, "aren"t they just what will draw you together more and more? Isn"t it what attracted you to each other? The very fact that you are such perfect counterparts--"
"Yes," the girl a.s.sented, "that"s what we"re taught to believe." She meant by the novels, to which we all trust our instruction in such matters, and her doubt doubly rankled after she had put it to silence.
She kept on writing to Dan"s mother, though more and more perfunctorily; and now Eunice and now Minnie Mavering acknowledged her letters. She knew that they must think she was silly, but having entered by Dan"s connivance upon her folly, she was too proud to abandon it.
At last, after she had ceased to expect it, came a letter from his mother, not a brief note, but a letter which the invalid had evidently tasked herself to make long and full, in recognition of Alice"s kindness in writing to her so much. The girl opened it, and, after a verifying glance at the signature, began to read it with a thrill of tender triumph, and the fond prevision of the greater pleasure of reading it again with Dan.
But after reading it once through, she did not wait for him before reading it again and again. She did this with bewilderment, intershot with flashes of conviction, and then doubts of this conviction. When she could misunderstand no longer, she rose quietly and folded the letter, and put it carefully back into its envelope and into her writing desk, where she sat down and wrote, in her clearest and firmest hand, this note to Mavering--
"I wish to see you immediately.
"ALICE PASMER."
XLIII
Dan had learned, with a lover"s keenness, to read Alice"s moods in the most colourless wording of her notes. She was rather apt to write him notes, taking back or reaffirming the effect of something that had just pa.s.sed between them. Her note were tempered to varying degrees of heat and cold, so fine that no one else would have felt the difference, but sensible to him in their subtlest intention.
Perhaps a mere witness of the fact would have been alarmed by a note which began without an address, except that on the envelope, and ended its peremptory brevity with the writer"s name signed in full. Dan read calamity in it, and he had all the more trouble to pull himself together to meet it because he had parted with unusual tenderness from Alice the night before, after an evening in which it seemed to him that their ideals had been completely reconciled.
The note came, as her notes were apt to come, while Dan was at breakfast, which he was rather luxurious about for so young a man, and he felt formlessly glad afterward that he had drunk his first cup of coffee before he opened it, for it chilled the second cup, and seemed to take all character out of the omelet.
He obeyed it, wondering what the doom menaced in it might be, but knowing that it was doom, and leaving his breakfast half-finished, with a dull sense of the tragedy of doing so.
He would have liked to ask for Mrs. Pasmer first, and interpose a moment of her cheerful unreality between himself and his interview with Alice, but he decided that he had better not do this, and they met at once, with the width of the room between them. Her look was one that made it impa.s.sable to the simple impulse he usually had to take her in his arms and kiss her. But as she stood holding out a letter to him, with the apparent intention that he should come and take it, he traversed the intervening s.p.a.ce and took it.
"Why, it"s from mother!" he said joyously, with a glance at the handwriting.
"Will you please explain it?" said Alice, and Dan began to read it.
It began with a good many excuses for not having written before, and went on with a pretty expression of interest in Alice"s letters and grat.i.tude for them; Mrs. Mavering a.s.sured the girl that she could not imagine what a pleasure they had been to her. She promised herself that they should be great friends, and she said that she looked forward eagerly to the time, now drawing near, when Dan should bring her home to them. She said she knew Alice would find it dull at the Falls except for him, but they would all do their best, and she would find the place very different from what she had seen it in the winter. Alice could make believe that she was there just for the summer, and Mrs. Mavering hoped that before the summer was gone she would be so sorry for a sick old woman that she would not even wish to go with it. This part of the letter, which gave Dan away so hopelessly, as he felt, was phrased so touchingly, that he looked up from it with moist eyes to the hard cold judgment in the eyes of Alice.
"Will you please explain it?" she repeated.
He tried to temporise. "Explain what?"
Alice was prompt to say, "Had you promised your mother to take me home to live?"
Dan did not answer.
"You promised my mother to go abroad. What else have you promised?" He continued silent, and she added, "You are a faithless man." They were the words of Romola, in the romance, to t.i.to; she had often admired them; and they seemed to her equally the measure of Dan"s offence.
"Alice--"
"Here are your letters and remembrances, Mr. Mavering." Dan mechanically received the packet she had been holding behind her; with a perverse freak of intelligence he observed that, though much larger now, it was tied up with the same ribbon which had fastened it when Alice returned his letters and gifts before. "Good-bye. I wish you every happiness consistent with your nature."
She bowed coldly, and was about to leave him, as she had planned; but she had not arranged that he should be standing in front of the door, and he was there, with no apparent intention of moving.
"Will you allow me to pa.s.s?" she was forced to ask, however, haughtily.