"Don"t you think," timidly suggested Miss Cotton, "that truth is the first essential in marriage?"
"Of course it is. And if this girl was worthy of Dan Mavering, if she were capable of loving him or anybody else unselfishly, she would have felt his truth even if she couldn"t have seen it. I believe this minute that that manoeuvring, humbugging mother of hers is a better woman, a kinder woman, than she is."
"Alice says her mother took his part," said Miss Cotton, with a sigh.
"She took your view of it."
"She"s a sensible woman. But I hope she won"t be able to get him into her toils again," continued Mrs. Brinkley, recurring to the conventional estimate of Mrs. Pasmer.
"I can"t help feeling--believing--that they"ll come together somehow still," murmured Miss Cotton. It seemed to her that she had all along wished this; and she tried to remember if what she had said to comfort Alice might be construed as adverse to a reconciliation.
"I hope they won"t, then," said Mrs. Brinkley, "for they couldn"t help being unhappy together, with their temperaments. There"s one thing, Miss Cotton, that"s more essential in marriage than Miss Pasmer"s instantaneous honesty, and that"s patience."
"Patience with wrong?" demanded Miss Cotton.
"Yes, even with wrong; but I meant patience with each other. Marriage is a perpetual pardon, concession, surrender; it"s an everlasting giving up; that"s the divine thing about it; and that"s just what Miss Pa.s.ser could never conceive of, because she is self-righteous and conceited and unyielding. She would make him miserable."
Miss Cotton rose in a bewilderment which did not permit her to go at once. There was something in her mind which she wished to urge, but she could not make it out, though she fingered in vague generalities. When she got a block away from the house it suddenly came to her. Love! If they loved each other, would not all be well with them? She would have liked to run back and put that question to Mrs. Brinkley; but just then she met Brinkley lumbering heavily homeward; she heard his hard breathing from the exertion of bowing to her as he pa.s.sed.
His wife met him in the hall, and went up to kiss him. He smelt abominably of tobacco smoke.
"Hullo!" said her husband. "What are you after?"
"Nothing," said his wife, enjoying his joke. "Come in here; I want to tell you how I have just sat upon Miss Cotton."
XLVIII.
The relations between Dan and his father had always been kindly and trustful; they now became, in a degree that touched and flattered the young fellow, confidential. With the rest of the family there soon ceased to be any reference to his engagement; his sisters were glad, each in her way, to have him back again; and, whatever they may have said between themselves, they said nothing to him about Alice. His mother appeared to have finished with the matter the first night; she had her theory, and she did it justice; and when Mrs. Mavering had once done a thing justice, she did not bring it up again unless somebody disputed it. But n.o.body had defended Mrs. Pasmer after Dan"s feeble protest in her behalf; Mrs. Mavering"s theory was accepted with obedience if not conviction; the whole affair dropped, except between Dan and his father.
Dan was certainly not so gay as he used to be; he was glad to find that he was not so gay. There had been a sort of mercy in the suddenness of the shock; it benumbed him, and the real stress and pain came during the long weeks that followed, when nothing occurred to vary the situation in any manner; he did not hear a word about Alice from Boston, nor any rumour of her people.
At first he had intended to go back with Boardman and face it out; but there seemed no use in this, and when it came to the point he found it impossible. Boardman went back alone, and he put Dan"s things together in his rooms at Boston and sent them to him, so that Dan remained at home.
He set about helping his father at the business with unaffected docility. He tried not to pose, and he did his best to bear his loss and humiliation with manly fort.i.tude. But his whole life had not set so strongly in one direction that it could be sharply turned aside now, and not in moments of forgetfulness press against the barriers almost to bursting. Now and then, when he came to himself from the wonted tendency, and remembered that Alice and he, who had been all in all to each other, were now nothing, the pain was so sharp, so astonishing, that he could not keep down a groan, which he then tried to turn off with a cough, or a s.n.a.t.c.h of song, or a whistle, looking wildly round to see if any one had noticed.
Once this happened when his father and he were walking silently home from the works, and his father said, without touching him or showing his sympathy except in his tone of humorously frank recognition, "Does it still hurt a little occasionally, Dan?"
"Yes, sir, it hurts," said the son; and he turned his face aside, and whistled through his teeth.
"Well, it"s a trial, I suppose," said his father, with his gentle, soft half-lisp. "But there are greater trials."
"How, greater?" asked Dan, with sad incredulity. "I"ve lost all that made life worth living; and it"s all my own fault, too."
"Yes," said his father; "I think she was a good girl."
"Good!" cried Dan; the word seemed to choke him.
"Still, I doubt if it"s all your fault." Dan looked round at him. He added, "And I think it"s perhaps for the best as it is."
Dan halted, and then said, "Oh, I suppose so," with dreary resignation, as they walked on.
"Let us go round by the paddock," said his father, "and see if Pat"s put the horses up yet. You can hardly remember your mother, before she became an invalid, I suppose," he added, as Dan mechanically turned aside with him from the path that led to the house into that leading to the barn.
"No; I was such a little fellow," said Dan.
"Women give up a great deal when they marry," said the elder. "It"s not strange that they exaggerate the sacrifice, and expect more in return than it"s in the nature of men to give them. I should have been sorry to have you marry a woman of an exacting disposition."
"I"m afraid she was exacting," said Dan. "But she never asked more than was right."
"And it"s difficult to do all that"s right," suggested the elder.
"I"m sure you always have, father," said the son.
The father did not respond. "I wish you could remember your mother when she was well," he said. Presently he added, "I think it isn"t best for a woman to be too much in love with her husband."
Dan took this to himself, and he laughed harshly. "She"s been able to dissemble her love at last."
His father went on, "Women keep the romantic feeling longer than men; it dies out of us very soon--perhaps too soon."
"You think I couldn"t have come to time?" asked Dan. "Well, as it"s turned out, I won"t have to."
"No man can be all a woman wishes him to be," said his father. "It"s better for the disappointment to come before it"s too late."
"I was to blame," said Dan stoutly. "She was all right."
"You were to blame in the particular instance," his father answered.
"But in general the fault was in her--or her temperament. As long as the romance lasted she might have deluded herself, and believed you were all she imagined you; but romance can"t last, even with women. I don like your faults, and I don"t want you to excuse them to yourself. I don"t like your chancing things, and leaving them to come out all right of themselves; but I"ve always tried to make you children see all your qualities in their true proportion and relation."
"Yes; I know that, sir," said Dan.
"Perhaps," continued his father, as they swung easily along, shoulder to shoulder, "I may have gone too far in that direction because I was afraid that you might take your mother too seriously in the other--that you might not understand that she judged you from her nerves and not her convictions. It"s part of her malady, of her suffering, that her inherited Puritanism clouds her judgment, and makes her see all faults as of one size and equally d.a.m.ning. I wish you to know that she was not always so, but was once able to distinguish differences in error, and to realise that evil is of ill-will."
"Yes; I know that," said Dan. "She is now--when she feels well."
"Harm comes from many things, but evil is of the heart. I wouldn"t have you condemn yourself too severely for harm that you didn"t intend--that"s remorse--that"s insanity; and I wouldn"t have you fall under the condemnation of another"s invalid judgment."
"Thank you, father," said Dan.
They had come up to the paddock behind the barn, and they laid their arms on the fence while they looked over at the horses, which were still there. The beasts, in their rough winter coats, some bedaubed with frozen clots of the mud in which they had been rolling earlier in the afternoon, stood motionless in the thin, keen breeze that crept over the hillside from the March sunset, and blew their manes and tails out toward Dan and his father. Dan"s pony sent him a gleam of recognition from under his frowsy bangs, but did not stir.
"Bunch looks like a caterpillar," he said, recalling the time when his father had given him the pony; he was a boy then, and the pony was as much to him, it went through his mind, as Alice had ever been. Was it all a jest, an irony? he asked himself.
"He"s getting pretty old," said his father. "Let"s see: you were only twelve."
"Ten," said Dan. "We"ve had him thirteen years."
Some of the horses p.r.i.c.ked up their ears at the sound of their voices.