"I really believe," said his wife, with her mind taken off the point by the attractiveness of a surmise which had just occurred to her, "that Mrs. Pasmer would be capable of following him down if she knew he was in Washington."
"Yes, if she know. But she probably doesn"t."
"Yes," said Mrs. Brinkley disappointedly. "I think the sudden departure of the Van Hooks must have had something to do with Dan Mavering."
"Seems a very influential young man," said her husband. "He attracts and repels people right and left. Did you speak to the Pasmers?"
"No; you"d better, when you go down. They"ve just come into the dining-room. The girl looks like death."
"Well, I"ll talk to her about Mavering. That"ll cheer her up."
Mrs. Brinkley looked at him for an instant as if she really thought him capable of it. Then she joined him in his laugh.
Mrs. Brinkley had theorised Alice Pasmer as simply and primitively selfish, like the rest of the Pasmers in whom the family traits prevailed.
When Mavering stopped coming to her house after his engagement she justly suspected that it was because Alice had forbidden him, and she had rejoiced at the broken engagement as an escape for Dan; she had frankly said so, and she had received him back into full favour at the first moment in Washington. She liked Miss Anderson, and she had hoped, with the interest which women feel in every such affair, that her flirtation with him might become serious. But now this had apparently not happened. Julia Anderson was gone with mystifying precipitation, and Alice Pasmer had come with an unexpectedness which had the aspect of fatality.
Mrs. Brinkley felt bound, of course, since there was no open enmity between them, to meet the Pasmers on the neutral ground of the Hygeia with conventional amiability. She was really touched by the absent wanness of the girls look, and by the later-coming recognition which shaped her mouth into a pathetic snide. Alice did not look like death quite, as Mrs. Brinkley had told her husband, with the necessity her s.e.x has for putting its superlatives before its positives; but she was pale and thin, and she moved with a languid step when they all met at night after Mrs. Brinkley had kept out of the Pasmers" way during the day.
"She has been ill all the latter part of the winter," said Mrs. Pasmer to Mrs. Brinkley that night in the corner of the spreading hotel parlours, where they found themselves. Mrs. Pasmer did not look well herself; she spoke with her eyes fixed anxiously on the door Alice had just pa.s.sed out of. "She is going to bed, but I know I shall find her awake whenever I go."
"Perhaps," suggested Mrs. Brinkley, "this soft, heavy sea air will put her to sleep." She tried to speak drily and indifferently, but she could not; she was, in fact, very much interested by the situation, and she was touched, in spite of her distaste for them both, by the evident unhappiness of mother and daughter. She knew what it came from, and she said to herself that they deserved it; but this did not altogether fortify her against their pathos. "I can hardly keep awake myself," she added gruffly.
"I hope it may help her," said Mrs. Pasmer; "the doctor strongly urged our coming."
"Mr. Pasmer isn"t with you," said Mrs. Brinkley, feeling that it was decent to say something about him.
"No; he was detained." Mrs. Pasmer did not explain the cause of his detention, and the two ladies slowly waved their fans a moment in silence. "Are there many Boston People in the house?" Mrs. Pasmer asked.
"It"s full of them," cried Mrs. Brinkley.
"I had scarcely noticed," sighed Mrs. Pasmer; and Mrs. Brinkley knew that this was not true. "Alice takes up all my thoughts," she added; and this might be true enough. She leaned a little forward and asked, in a low, entreating voice over her fan, "Mrs. Brinkley, have you seen Mr.
Mavering lately?"
Mrs. Brinkley considered this a little too bold, a little too brazen.
Had they actually come South in pursuit of him? It was shameless, and she let Mrs. Pasmer know something of her feeling in the shortness with which she answered, "I saw him in Washington the other day--for a moment." She shortened the time she had spent in Dan"s company so as to cut Mrs. Pasmer off from as much comfort as possible, and she stared at her in open astonishment.
Mrs. Pasmer dropped her eyes and fingered the edge of her fan with a submissiveness that seemed to Mrs. Brinkley the perfection of duplicity; she wanted to shake her. "I knew," sighed Mrs. Pasmer, "that you had always been such a friend of his."
It is the last straw which breaks the camel"s back; Mrs. Brinkley felt her moral vertebrae give way; she almost heard them crack; but if there was really a detonation, the drowned the noise with a harsh laugh.
"Oh, he had other friends in Washington. I met him everywhere with Miss Anderson." This statement conflicted with the theory of her single instant with Dan, but she felt that in such a cause, in the cause of giving pain to a woman like Mrs. Pasmer, the deflection from exact truth was justifiable. She hurried on: "I rather expected he might run down here, but now that they"re gone, I don"t suppose he"ll come. You remember Miss Anderson"s aunt, Miss Van Hook?"
"Oh yes," said Mrs. Pasmer.
"She was here with her."
"Miss Van Hook was such a New York type--of a certain kind," said Mrs.
Pasmer. She rose, with a smile at once so conventional, so heroic, and so pitiful that Mrs. Brinkley felt the remorse of a generous victor.
She went to her room, hardening her heart, and she burst in with a flood of voluble exasperation that threatened all the neighbouring rooms with overflow.
"Well," she cried, "they have shown their hands completely. They have come here to hound Dan Mavering down, and get him into their toils again. Why, the woman actually said as much! But I fancy I have given her a fit of insomnia that will enable her to share her daughter"s vigils. Really such impudence I never heard of!"
"Do you want everybody in the corridor to hear of it?" asked Brinkley, from behind a newspaper.
"I know one thing," continued Mrs. Brinkley, dropping her voice a couple of octaves. "They will never get him here if I can help it. He won"t come, anyway, now Miss Anderson is gone; but I"ll make a.s.surance doubly sure by writing him not to come; I"ll tell him they"ve gone; and than we are going too."
"You had better remember the man in Chicago," said her husband.
"Well, this is my business--or I"ll make it my business!" cried Mrs.
Brinkley. She went on talking rapidly, rising with great excitement in her voice at times, and then remembering to speak lower; and her husband apparently read on through most of her talk, though now and then he made some comment that seemed of almost inspired aptness.
"The way they both made up to me was disgusting. But I know the girl is just a tool in her mother"s hands. Her mother seemed actually pa.s.sive in comparison. For skilful wheedling I could fall down and worship that woman; I really admire her. As long as the girl was with us she kept herself in the background and put the girl at me. It was simply a masterpiece."
"How do you know she put her at you?" asked Brinkley.
"How? By the way she seemed not to do it! And because from what I know of that stupid Pasmer pride it would be perfectly impossible for any one who was a Pasmer to take her deprecatory manner toward me of herself.
You ought to have seen it! It was simply perfect."
"Perhaps," said Brinkley, with a remote dreaminess, "she was truly sorry."
"Truly stuff! No, indeed; she hates me as much as ever--more!"
"Well, then, may be she"s doing it because she hates you--doing it for her soul"s good--sort of penance, sort of atonement to Mavering."
Mrs. Brinkley turned round from her dressing-table to see what her husband meant, but the newspaper hid him. We all know that our own natures are mixed and contradictory, but we each attribute to others a logical consistency which we never find in any one out of the novels.
Alice Pasmer was cold and reticent, and Mrs. Brinkley, who had lived half a century in a world full of paradoxes, could not imagine her subject to gusts of pa.s.sionate frankness; she knew the girl to be proud and distant, and she could not conceive of an abject humility and longing for sympathy in her heart. If Alice felt, when she saw Mrs.
Brinkley, that she had a providential opportunity to punish herself for her injustice to Dan, the fact could not be established upon Mrs.
Brinkley"s theory of her. If the ascetic impulse is the most purely selfish impulse in human nature, Mrs. Brinkley might not have been mistaken in suspecting her of an ign.o.ble motive, though it might have had for the girl the last sublimity of self-sacrifice. The woman who disliked her and pitied her knew that she had no arts, and rather than adopt so simple a theory of her behaviour as her husband had advanced she held all the more strenuously to her own theory that Alice was practising her mother"s arts. This was inevitable, partly from the sense of Mrs. Pasmer"s artfulness which everybody had, and partly from the allegiance which we pay--and women especially like to pay--to the tradition of the playwrights and the novelists, that social results of all kinds are the work of deep, and more or less darkling, design on the part of other women--such other women as Mrs. Pasmer.
Mrs. Brinkley continued to talk, but the G.o.d spoke no more from behind the newspaper; and afterward Mrs. Brinkley lay a long time awake; hardening her heart. But she was haunted to the verge of her dreams by that girl"s sick look, by her languid walk, and by the effect which she had seen her own words take upon Mrs. Pasmer--an effect so admirably disowned, so perfectly obvious. Before she could get to sleep she was obliged to make a compromise with her heart, in pursuance of which, when she found Mrs. Pasmer at breakfast alone in the morning, she went up to her, and said, holding her hand a moment, "I hope your daughter slept well last night."
"No," said Mrs. Pasmer, slipping her hand away, "I can"t say that she did." There was probably no resentment expressed in the way she withdrew her hand, but the other thought there was.
"I wish I could do something for her," she cried.
"Oh, thank you," said Mrs. Pasmer. "It"s very good of you." And Mrs.
Brinkley fancied she smiled rather bitterly.
Mrs. Brinkley went out upon the seaward verandah of the hotel with this bitterness of Mrs. Pasmer"s smile in her thoughts; and it disposed her to feel more keenly the quality of Miss Pasmer"s smile. She found the girl standing there at a remote point of that long stretch of planking, and looking out over the water; she held with both hands across her breast the soft chuddah shawl which the wind caught and fluttered away from her waist. She was alone, said as Mrs. Brinkley"s compunctions goaded her nearer, she fancied that the saw Alice master a primary dislike in her face, and put on a look of pathetic propitiation. She did not come forward to meet Mrs. Brinkley, who liked better her waiting to be approached; but she smiled gratefully when Mrs. Brinkley put out her hand, and she took it with a very cold one.
"You must find it chilly here," said the elder woman.
"I had better be out in the air all I could, the doctor said," answered Alice.
"Well, then, come with me round the corner; there"s a sort of recess there, and you won"t be blown to pierces," said Mrs. Brinkley, with authority. They sat down together in the recess, and she added: "I used to sit here with Miss Van Hook; she could hear better in the noise the waves made. I hope it isn"t too much for you."
"Oh no," said Alice. "Mamma said you told her they were here." Mrs.
Brinkley rea.s.sured herself from this; Miss Van Hook"s name had rather slipped out; but of course Mrs. Pasmer had not repeated what she had said about Dan in this connection. "I wish I could have seen Julia,"