They did not question him, but they tried in every way to find out how much he was hurt, and they watched him in every word and look for signs of change to better or worse, with a growing belief that he was not very much hurt.
It could not be said that in three weeks he forgot Alice, or had begun to forget her; but he had begun to reconcile himself to his fate, as people do in their bereavements by death. His consciousness habituated itself to the facts as something irretrievable. He no longer framed in his mind situations in which the past was restored. He knew that he should never love again, but he had moments, and more and more of them, in which he experienced that life had objects besides love. There were times when he tingled with all the anguish of the first moment of his rejection, when he stopped in whatever he was doing, or stood stock-still, as a man does when arrested by a physical pang, breathless, waiting. There were other times when he went about steeped in gloom so black that all the world darkened with it, and some mornings when he woke he wished that the night had lasted for ever, and felt as if the daylight had uncovered his misery and his shame to every one. He never knew when he should have these moods, and he thought he should have them as long as he lived. He thought this would be something rather fine. He had still other moods, in which he saw an old man with a grey moustache, like Colonel Newcome, meeting a beautiful white-haired lady; the man had never married, and he had not seen this lady for fifty years. He bent over, and kissed her hand.
"You idiot!" said Mavering to himself. Throughout he kept a good appet.i.te. In fact, after that first morning in Portland, he had been hungry three times a day with perfect regularity. He lost the idea of being sick; he had not even a furred tongue. He fell asleep pretty early, and he slept through the night without a break. He had to laugh a great deal with his mother and sisters, since he could not very well mope without expecting them to ask why, and he did not wish to say why. But there were some laughs which he really enjoyed with the Yankee foreman of the works, who was a droll, after a common American pattern, and said things that were killingly funny, especially about women, of whom his opinions were sarcastic.
Dan Mavering suffered, but not solidly. His suffering was short, and crossed with many gleams of respite and even joy. His disappointment made him really unhappy, but not wholly so; it was a genuine sorrow, but a sorrow to which he began to resign himself even in the monotony of Ponkwa.s.set Falls, and which admitted the thought of Mrs. Frobisher"s sister by the time business called him to Boston.
XXIV.
Before the end of the first week after Dan came back to town, that which was likely to happen whenever chance brought him and Alice together had taken place.
It was one of the soft days that fall in late October, when the impending winter seems stayed, and the warm breath of the land draws seaward and over a thousand miles of Indian summer. The bloom came and went in quick pulses over the girl"s temples as she sat with her head thrown back in the corner of the car, and from moment to moment she stirred slightly as if some stress of rapture made it hard for her to get her breath; a little gleam of light fell from under her fallen eyelids into the eyes of the young man beside her, who leaned forward slightly and slanted his face upward to meet her glances. They said some words, now and then, indistinguishable to the others; in speaking they smiled slightly. Sometimes her hand wavered across her lap; in both their faces there was something beyond happiness--a transport, a pa.s.sion, the brief splendour of a supreme moment.
They left the car at the Arlington Street corner of the Public Garden, and followed the winding paths diagonally to the further corner on Charles Street.
"How stupid we were to get into that ridiculous horse-car!" she said.
"What in the world possessed us to do it?"
"I can"t imagine," he answered. "What a waste of time it was! If we had walked, we might have been twice as long coming. And now you"re going to send me off so soon!"
"I don"t send you," she murmured.
"But you want me to go."
"Oh no! But you"d better."
"I can"t do anything against your wish."
"I wish it--for your own good."
"Ah, do let me go home with you, Alice?"
"Don"t ask it, or I must say yes."
"Part of the way, then?"
"No; not a step! You must take the first car for Cambridge. What time is it now?"
"You can see by the clock on the Providence Depot."
"But I wish you to go by your watch, now. Look!"
"Alice!" he cried, in pure rapture.
"Look!"
"It"s a quarter of one."
"And we"ve been three hours together already! Now you must simply fly.
If you came home with me I should be sure to let you come in, and if I don"t see mamma alone first, I shall die. Can"t you understand?"
"No; but I can do the next best thing: I can misunderstand. You want to be rid of me."
"Shall you be rid of me when we"ve parted?" she asked, with an inner thrill of earnestness in her gay tone.
"Alice!"
"You know I didn"t mean it, Dan."
"Say it again."
"What?"
"Dan."
"Dan, love! Dan, dearest!"
"Will that car of yours never come? I"ve promised myself not to leave you till it does, and if I stay here any longer I shall go wild. I can"t believe it"s happened. Say it again!"
"Say what?"
"That--"
"That I love you? That we"re engaged?"
"I don"t believe it. I can"t." She looked impatiently up the street.
"Oh, there comes your car! Run! Stop it!"
"I don"t run to stop cars." He made a sign, which the conductor obeyed, and the car halted at the further crossing.
She seemed to have forgotten it, and made no movement to dismiss him.
"Oh, doesn"t it seem too good to be standing here talking in this way, and people think it"s about the weather, or society?" She set her head a little on one side, and twirled the open parasol on her shoulder.
"Yes, it does. Tell me it"s true, love!"
"It"s true. How splendid you are!" She said it with an effect for the world outside of saying it was a lovely day.
He retorted, with the same apparent nonchalance, "How beautiful you are!
How good! How divine!"
The conductor, seeing himself apparently forgotten, gave his bell a vicious snap, and his car jolted away.
She started nervously. "There! you"ve lost your car, Dan."
"Have I?" asked Mavering, without troubling himself to look after it.