Alice went on. "It would have been quite like Campobello again."
"Oh, quite," said Mrs. Brinkley, with a short breath, and not knowing whither this tended. Alice did not leave her in doubt.
"I should like to have seen her, and begged her for the way I treated her the last part of the time there. I feel as if I could make my whole life a reparation," she added pa.s.sionately.
Mrs. Brinkley believed that this was the mere frenzy of sentimentality, the exaltation of a selfish asceticism; but at the break in the girl"s voice and the aversion of her face she could not help a thrill of motherly tenderness for her. She wanted to tell her she was an unconscious humbug, bent now as always on her own advantage, and really indifferent to others she also wanted to comfort her, and tell her that she exaggerated, and was not to blame. She did neither, but when Alice turned her face back she seemed encouraged by Mrs. Brinkley"s look to go on: "I didn"t appreciate her then; she was very generous and high-minded--too high-minded for me to understand, even. But we don"t seem to know how good others are till we wrong them."
"Yes, that is very true," said Mrs. Brinkley. She knew that Alice was obviously referring to the breach between herself and Miss Anderson following the night of the Trevor theatricals, and the dislike for her that she had shown with a frankness some of the ladies had thought brutal. Mrs. Brinkley also believed that her words had a tacit meaning, and she would have liked to have the hardness to say she had seen an unnamed victim of Alice doing his best to console the other she had specified. But she merely said drily, "Yes, perhaps that"s the reason why we"re allowed to injure people."
"It must be," said Alice simply. "Did Miss Anderson ever speak of me?"
"No; I can"t remember that she ever did." Mrs. Brinkley did not feel bound to say that she and Miss Van Hook had discussed her at large, and agreed perfectly about her.
"I should like to see her; I should like to write to her."
Mrs. Brinkley felt that she ought not to suffer this intimate tendency in the talk:
"You must find a great many other acquaintances in the hotel, Miss Pasmer."
"Some of the Frankland girds are here, and the two Bellinghams. I have hardly spoken to them yet. Do you think that where you have even been in the right, if you have been harsh, if you have been hasty, if you haven"t made allowances, you ought to offer some atonement?"
"Really, I can"t say," said Mrs. Brinkley, with a smile of distaste.
"I"m afraid your question isn"t quite in my line of thinking; it"s more in Miss Cotton"s way. You"d better ask her some time."
"No," said Alice sadly; "she would flatter me."
"Ah! I always supposed she was very conscientious."
"She"s conscientious, but she likes me too well."
"Oh!" commented Mrs. Brinkley to herself, "then you know I don"t like you, and you"ll use me in one way, if you can"t in another. Very well!" But she found the girl"s trust touching somehow, though the sentimentality of her appeal seemed as tawdry as ever.
"I knew you would be just," added Alice wistfully.
"Oh, I don"t know about atonements!" said Mrs. Brinkley, with an effect of carelessness. "It seems to me that we usually make them for our own sake."
"I have thought of that," said Alice, with a look of expectation.
"And we usually astonish other people when we offer them."
"Either they don"t like it, or else they don"t feel so much injured as we had supposed."
"Oh, but there"s no question--"
"If Miss Anderson--"
"Miss Anderson? Oh--oh yes!"
"If Miss Anderson for example," pursued Mrs. Brinkley, "felt aggrieved with you. But really I"ve no right to enter into your affairs, Miss Pasmer."
"Oh Yes, yes!--do! I asked you to," the girl implored.
"I doubt if it will help matters for her to know that you regret anything; and if she shouldn"t happen to have thought that you were unjust to her, it would make her uncomfortable for nothing."
"Do you think so?" asked the girl, with a disappointment that betrayed itself in her voice and eyes.
"I never feel I myself competent to advise," said Mrs. Brinkley. "I can criticise--anybody can--and I do, pretty freely; but advice is a more serious matter. Each of us must act from herself--from what she thinks is right."
"Yes, I see. Thank you so much, Mrs. Brinkley."
"After all, we have a right to do ourselves good, even when we pretend that it"s good to others, if we don"t do them any harm."
"Yes, I see." Alice looked away, and then seemed about to speak again; but one of Mrs. Brinkley"s acquaintance came up, and the girl rose with a frightened air and went away.
"Alice"s talk with you this morning did her so much good!" said Mrs.
Pasmer, later. "She has always felt so badly about Miss Anderson!"
Mrs. Brinkley saw that Mrs. Pasmer wished to confine the meaning of their talk to Miss Anderson, and she a.s.sented, with a penetration of which she saw that Mrs. Pasmer was gratefully aware.
She grew more tolerant of both the Pasmers as the danger of greater intimacy from them, which seemed to threaten at first seemed to pa.s.s away. She had not responded to their advances, but there was no reason why she should not be civil to them; there had never been any open quarrel with them. She often found herself in talk with them, and was amused to note that she was the only Bostonian whom they did not keep aloof from.
It could not be said that she came to like either of them better. She still suspected Mrs. Pasmer of design, though she developed none beyond manoeuvring Alice out of the way of people whom she wished to avoid; and she still found the girl, as she always thought her, as egotist, whose best impulses toward others had a final aim in herself. She thought her very crude in her ideas--cruder than she had seemed at Campobello, where she had perhaps been softened by her affinition with the gentler and kindlier nature of Dan Mavering. Mrs. Brinkley was never tired of saying that he had made the most fortunate escape in the world, and though Brinkley owned he was tired of hearing it, she continued to say it with a great variety of speculation. She recognised that in most girls of Alice"s age many traits are in solution, waiting their precipitation into character by the chemical contact which time and chances must bring, and that it was not fair to judge her by the present ferment of hereditary tendencies; but she rejoiced all the same that it was not Dan Mavering"s character which was to give fixity to hers. The more she saw of the girl the more she was convinced that two such people could only make each other unhappy; from day to day, almost from hour to hour, she resolved to write to Mavering and tell him not to come.
She was sure that the Pasmers wished to have the affair on again, and part of her fascination with a girl whom she neither liked nor approved was her belief that Alice"s health had broken under the strain of her regrets and her despair. She did not get better from the change of air; she grew more listless and languid, and more dependent upon Mrs.
Brinkley"s chary sympathy. The older woman asked herself again and again what made the girl cling to her? Was she going to ask her finally to intercede with Dan? or was it really a despairing atonement to him, the most disagreeable sacrifice she could offer, as Mr. Brinkley had stupidly suggested? She believed that Alice"s selfishness and morbid sentiment were equal to either.
Brinkley generally took the girl"s part against his wife, and in a heavy jocose way tried to cheer her up. He did little things for her; fetched and carried chairs and cushions and rugs, and gave his attentions the air of pleasantries. One of his offices was to get the ladies" letters for them in the evening, and one night he came in beaming with a letter for each of them where they sat together in the parlour. He distributed them into their laps.
"h.e.l.lo! I"ve made a mistake," he said, putting down his head to take back the letter he had dropped in Miss Pasmer"s lap. "I"ve given you my wife"s letter."
The girl glanced at it, gave a moaning kind of cry, and fell beak in her chair, hiding her face in her hands.
Mrs. Brinkley, possessed herself of the other letter, and, though past the age when ladies wish to kill their husbands for their stupidity, she gave Brinkley a look of ma.s.sacre which mystified even more than it murdered his innocence. He had to learn later from his wife"s more elicit fury what the women had all known instantly.
He showed his usefulness in gathering Alice up and getting her to her mother"s room.
"Oh, Mrs. Brinkley," implored Mrs. Pasmer, following her to the door, "is Mr. Mavering coming here?"
"I don"t know--I can"t say--I haven"t read the letter yet."
"Oh, do let me know when you"ve read it, won"t you? I don"t know what we shall do."
Mrs. Brinkley read the letter in her own room. "You go down," she said to her husband, with unabated ferocity; "and telegraph Dan Mavering at Wormley"s not to came. Say we"re going away at once."
Then she sent Mrs. Pasmer a slip of paper on which she had written, "Not coming."
It has been the experience of every one to have some alien concern come into his life and torment him with more anxiety than any affair of his own. This is, perhaps, a hint from the infinite sympathy which feels for us all that none of us can hope to free himself from the troubles of others, that we are each bound to each by ties which, for the most part, we cannot perceive, but which, at the moment their stress comes, we cannot break.
Mrs. Brinkley lay awake and raged impotently against her complicity with the unhappiness of that distasteful girl and her more than distasteful mother. In her revolt against it she renounced the interest she had felt in that silly boy, and his ridiculous love business, so really unimportant to her whatever turn it took. She asked herself what it mattered to her whether those children marred their lives one way or another way. There was a lurid moment before she slept when she wished Brinkley to go down and recall her telegram; but he refused to be a fool at so much inconvenience to himself.