All that had happened a few minutes ago in the blueberry patch seemed a far-off dream; the reality had died out of the looks and words.
He ran about from one to another, serving every one; in a little while the whole affair was in his hospitable hands, and his laugh interspersed and brightened the talk.
She got a little back of the others, and sat looking wistfully out over the bay, with her hands in her lap.
"Hold on just half a minute, Miss Pasmer! don"t move!" exclaimed the amateur photographer, who is now of all excursions; he jumped to his feet, and ran for his apparatus. She sat still, to please him; but when he had developed his picture, in a dark corner of the rocks, roofed with a waterproof, he accused her of having changed her position. "But it"s going to be splendid," he said, with another look at it.
He took several pictures of the whole party, for which they fell into various att.i.tudes of consciousness. Then he shouted to a boat-load of sailors who had beached their craft while they gathered some drift for their galley fire. They had flung their arm-loads into the boat, and had bent themselves to shove it into the water.
"Keep still! don"t move!" he yelled at them, with the imperiousness of the amateur photographer, and they obeyed with the helplessness of his victims. But they looked round.
"Oh, idiots!" groaned the artist.
"I always wonder what that kind of people think of us kind of people,"
said Mrs. Brinkley, with her eye on the photographer"s subjects.
"Yes, I wonder what they do?" said Miss Cotton, pleased with the speculative turn which the talk might take from this. "I suppose they envy us?" she suggested.
"Well, not all of them; and those that do, not respectfully. They view, us as the possessors of ill-gotten gains, who would be in a very different place if we had our deserts."
"Do you really think so?"
"Yes, I think so; but I don"t know that I really think so. That"s another matter," said Mrs. Brinkley, with the whimsical resentment which Miss Cotton"s conscientious pursuit seemed always to rouse in her.
"I supposed," continued Miss Cotton, "that it was only among the poor in the cities, who have begin misled by agitators, that the-well-to-do cla.s.ses were regarded with suspicion."
"It seems to have begun a great while ago," said Mrs. Brinkley, "and not exactly with agitators. It was considered very difficult for us to get into the kingdom of heaven, you know."
"Yes, I know," a.s.sented Miss Cotton.
"And there certainly are some things against us. Even when the chance was given us to sell all we had and give it to the poor, we couldn"t bring our minds to it, and went away exceeding sorrowful."
"I wonder," said Miss Cotton, "whether those things were ever intended to be taken literally?"
"Let"s hope not," said John Munt, seeing his chance to make a laugh.
Mrs. Stamwell said, "Well, I shall take another cup of coffee, at any rate," and her hardihood raised another laugh.
"That always seems to me the most pitiful thing in the whole Bible,"
said Alice, from her place. "To see the right so clearly, and not to be strong enough to do it."
"My dear, it happens every day," said Mrs. Brinkley.
"I always felt sorry for that poor fellow, too," said Mavering. "He seemed to be a good fellow, and it was pretty hard lines for him."
Alice looked round at him with deepening gravity.
"Confound those fellows!" said the photographer, glancing at his hastily developed plate. "They moved."
XVII.
The picnic party gathered itself up after the lunch, and while some of the men, emulous of Mavering"s public spirit, helped some of the ladies to pack the dishes and baskets away under the wagon seats, others threw a corked bottle into the water, and threw stones at it. A few of the ladies joined them, but n.o.body hit the bottle, which was finally left bobbing about on the tide.
Mrs. Brinkley addressed the defeated group, of whom her husband was one, as they came up the beach toward the wagons. "Do you think that display was calculated to inspire the lower middle cla.s.ses with respectful envy?"
Her husband made himself spokesman for the rest: "No; but you can"t tell how they"d have felt if we"d hit it."
They all now climbed to a higher level, gra.s.sy and smooth, on the bluff, from which there was a particular view; and Mavering came, carrying the wraps of Mrs. Pasmer and Alice, with which he a.s.sociated his overcoat. A book fell out of one of the pockets when he threw it down.
Miss Anderson picked the volume up. "Browning! He reads Browning!
Superior young man!"
"Oh, don"t say that!" pleaded Mavering.
"Oh, read something aloud!" cried another of the young ladies.
"Isn"t Browning rather serious for a picnic?" he asked, with a glance at Alice; he still had a doubt of the effect of the rheumatic uncle"s dance upon her, and would have been glad to give her some other aesthetic impression of him.
"Oh no!" said Mrs. Brinkley, "nothing is more appropriate to a picnic than conundrums; they always have them. Choose a good tough one."
"I don"t know anything tougher than the "Legend of Pernik"--or lovelier," he said, and he began to read, simply, and with a pa.s.sionate pleasure in the subtle study, feeling its control over his hearers.
The gentlemen lay smoking about at their ease; at the end a deep sigh went up from the ladies, cut short by the question which they immediately fell into.
They could not agree, but they said, one after another: "But you read beautifully, Mr. Mavering!" "Beautifully!" "Yes, indeed!"
"Well, I"m glad there is one point clear," he said, putting the book away, and "I"m afraid you"ll think I"m rather sentimental," he added, in a low voice to Alice, "carrying poetry around with me."
"Oh no!" she replied intensely; "I thank you."
"I thank you," he retorted, and their eyes met in a deep look.
One of the outer circle of smokers came up with his watch in his hand, and addressed the company, "Do you know what time it"s got to be? It"s four o"clock."
They all sprang up with a clamour of surprise.
Mrs. Pasmer, under cover of the noise, said, in a low tone, to her daughter, "Alice, I think you"d better keep a little more with me now."
"Yes," said the girl, in a sympathy with her mother in which she did not always find herself.
But when Mavering, whom their tacit treaty concerned, turned toward them, and put himself in charge of Alice, Mrs. Pasmer found herself dispossessed by the charm of his confidence, and relinquished her to him. They were going to walk to the Castle Rocks by the path that now loses and now finds itself among the fastnesses of the forest, stretching to the loftiest outlook on the bay. The savage woodland is penetrated only by this forgetful path, that pa.s.ses now and then aver the bridge of a ravine, and offers to the eye on either hand the mystery deepening into wilder and weirder tracts of solitude. The party resolved itself into twos and threes, and these straggled far apart, out of conversational reach of one another. Mrs. Pasmer found herself walking and talking with John Munt.
"Mr. Pasmer hasn"t much interest in these excursions," he suggested.
"No; he never goes," she answered, and, by one of the agile intellectual processes natural to women, she arrived at the question, "You and the Maverings are old friends, Mr. Munt?"