He felt a sinking of the heart as he pushed the state-room door open, and looked at his wife lying with her face turned to the wall; and he was going to withdraw, thinking her asleep, when she said quietly, "Are we going down?"
"Not that I know of," he answered with a gayety he did not feel. "But I"ll ask the head steward."
She put out her hand behind her for him to take, and clutched his fingers convulsively. "If I"m never any better, you will always remember this happy, summer, won"t you? Oh, it"s been such a happy summer! It has been one long joy, one continued triumph! But it was too late; we were too old; and it"s broken me."
The time had been when he would have attempted comfort; when he would have tried mocking; but that time was long past; he could only pray inwardly for some sort of diversion, but what it was to be in their barren circ.u.mstance he was obliged to leave altogether to Providence. He ventured, pending an answer to his prayers upon the question, "Don"t you think I"d better see the doctor, and get you some sort of tonic?"
She suddenly turned and faced him. "The doctor! Why, I"m not sick, Basil! If you can see the purser and get our rooms changed, or do something to stop those waves from slapping against that horrible blinking one-eyed window, you can save my life; but no tonic is going to help me."
She turned her face from him again, and buried it in the bedclothes, while he looked desperately at the racing waves, and the port that seemed to open and shut like a weary eye.
"Oh, go away!" she implored. "I shall be better presently, but if you stand there like that--Go and see if you can"t get some other room, where I needn"t feel as if I were drowning, all the way over."
He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and having once started, he did not stop short of the purser"s office. He made an excuse of getting greenbacks for some English bank-notes, and then he said casually that he supposed there would be no chance of having his room on the lower deck changed for something a little less intimate with the sea. The purser was not there to take the humorous view, but he conceived that March wanted something higher up, and he was able to offer him a room of those on the promenade where he had seen swells going in and out, for six hundred dollars. March did not blench, but said he would get his wife to look at it with him, and then he went out somewhat dizzily to take counsel with himself how he should put the matter to her. She would be sure to ask what the price of the new room would be, and he debated whether to take it and tell her some kindly lie about it, or trust to the bracing effect of the sum named in helping restore the lost balance of her nerves. He was not so rich that he could throw six hundred dollars away, but there might be worse things; and he walked up and down thinking. All at once it flashed upon him that he had better see the doctor, anyway, and find out whether there were not some last hope in medicine before he took the desperate step before him. He turned in half his course, and ran into a lady who had just emerged from the door of the promenade laden with wraps, and who dropped them all and clutched him to save herself from falling.
"Why, Mr. March!" she shrieked.
"Miss Triscoe!" he returned, in the astonishment which he shared with her to the extent of letting the shawls he had knocked from her hold lie between them till she began to pick them up herself. Then he joined her and in the relief of their common occupation they contrived to possess each other of the reason of their presence on, the same boat. She had sorrowed over Mrs. March"s sad state, and he had grieved to hear that her father was going home because he was not at all well, before they found the general stretched out in his steamer-chair, and waiting with a grim impatience for his daughter.
"But how is it you"re not in the pa.s.senger-list?" he inquired of them both, and Miss Triscoe explained that they had taken their pa.s.sage at the last moment, too late, she supposed, to get into the list. They were in London, and had run down to Liverpool on the chance of getting berths. Beyond this she was not definite, and there was an absence of Burnamy not only from her company but from her conversation which mystified March through all his selfish preoccupations with his wife.
She was a girl who had her reserves, but for a girl who had so lately and rapturously written them of her engagement, there was a silence concerning her betrothed that had almost positive quality. With his longing to try Miss Triscoe upon Mrs. March"s malady as a remedial agent, he had now the desire to try Mrs. March upon Miss Triscoe"s mystery as a solvent. She stood talking to him, and refusing to sit down and be wrapped up in the chair next her father. She said that if he were going to ask Mrs. March to let her come to her, it would not be worth while to sit down; and he hurried below.
"Did you get it?" asked his wife, without looking round, but not so apathetically as before.
"Oh, yes. That"s all right. But now, Isabel, there"s something I"ve got to tell you. You"d find it out, and you"d better know it at once."
She turned her face, and asked sternly, "What is it?"
Then he said, with, an almost equal severity, "Miss Triscoe is on board.
Miss Triscoe-and-her-father. She wishes to come down and see you."
Mrs. March sat up and began to twist her hair into shape. "And Burnamy?"
"There is no Burnamy physically, or so far as I can make out, spiritually. She didn"t mention him, and I talked at least five minutes with her."
"Hand me my dressing-sack," said Mrs. March, "and poke those things on the sofa under the berth. Shut up that wash-stand, and pull the curtain across that hideous window. Stop! Throw those towels into your berth.
Put my shoes, and your slippers into the shoe-bag on the door. Slip the brushes into that other bag. Beat the dent out of the sofa cushion that your head has made. Now!"
"Then--then you will see her?"
"See her!"
Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it, and he returned with Miss Triscoe in a dreamlike simultaneity. He remembered, as he led the way into his corridor, to apologize for bringing her down into a bas.e.m.e.nt room.
"Oh, we"re in the bas.e.m.e.nt, too; it was all we could get," she said in words that ended within the state-room he opened to her. Then he went back and took her chair and wraps beside her father.
He let the general himself lead the way up to his health, which he was not slow in reaching, and was not quick in leaving. He reminded March of the state he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said it had gone from bad to worse with him. At Weimar he had taken to his bed and merely escaped from it with his life. Then they had tried Schevleningen for a week, where, he said in a tone of some injury, they had rather thought they might find them, the Marches. The air had been poison to him, and they had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth; but the doctor in London had thought not, and urged their going home. "All Europe is damp, you know, and dark as a pocket in winter," he ended.
There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decided that he must wait to see his wife if he wished to know anything, when the general, who had been silent, twisted his head towards him, and said without regard to the context, "It was complicated, at Weimar, by that young man in the most devilish way. Did my daughter write to Mrs. March about--Well it came to nothing, after all; and I don"t understand how, to this day. I doubt if they do. It was some sort of quarrel, I suppose.
I wasn"t consulted in the matter either way. It appears that parents are not consulted in these trifling affairs, nowadays." He had married his daughter"s mother in open defiance of her father; but in the glare of his daughter"s wilfulness this fact had whitened into pious obedience.
"I dare say I shall be told, by-and-by, and shall be expected to approve of the result."
A fancy possessed March that by operation of temperamental laws General Triscoe was no more satisfied with Burnamy"s final rejection than with his acceptance. If the engagement was ever to be renewed, it might be another thing; but as it stood, March divined a certain favor for the young man in the general"s att.i.tude. But the affair was altogether too delicate for comment; the general"s aristocratic frankness in dealing with it might have gone farther if his knowledge had been greater; but in any case March did not see how he could touch it. He could only say, He had always liked Burnamy, himself.
He had his good qualities, the general owned. He did not profess to understand the young men of our time; but certainly the fellow had the instincts of a gentleman. He had nothing to say against him, unless in that business with that man--what was his name?
"Stoller?" March prompted. "I don"t excuse him in that, but I don"t blame him so much, either. If punishment means atonement, he had the opportunity of making that right very suddenly, and if pardon means expunction, then I don"t see why that offence hasn"t been pretty well wiped out.
"Those things are not so simple as they used to seem," said the general, with a seriousness beyond his wont in things that did not immediately concern his own comfort or advantage.
LXXVI.
In the mean time Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe were discussing another offence of Burnamy"s.
"It wasn"t," said the girl, excitedly, after a plunge through all the minor facts to the heart of the matter, "that he hadn"t a perfect right to do it, if he thought I didn"t care for him. I had refused him at Carlsbad, and I had forbidden him to speak to me about--on the subject.
But that was merely temporary, and he ought to have known it. He ought to have known that I couldn"t accept him, on the spur of the moment, that way; and when he had come back, after going away in disgrace, before he had done anything to justify himself. I couldn"t have kept my self-respect; and as it was I had the greatest difficulty; and he ought to have seen it. Of course he said afterwards that he didn"t see it. But when--when I found out that SHE had been in Weimar, and all that time, while I had been suffering in Carlsbad and Wurzburg, and longing to see him--let him know how I was really feeling--he was flirting with that--that girl, then I saw that he was a false nature, and I determined to put an end to everything. And that is what I did; and I shall always think I--did right--and--"
The rest was lost in Agatha"s handkerchief, which she put up to her eyes. Mrs. March watched her from her pillow keeping the girl"s unoccupied hand in her own, and softly pressing it till the storm was past sufficiently to allow her to be heard.
Then she said, "Men are very strange--the best of them. And from the very fact that he was disappointed, he would be all the more apt to rush into a flirtation with somebody else."
Miss Triscoe took down her handkerchief from a face that had certainly not been beautified by grief. "I didn"t blame him for the flirting; or not so much. It was his keeping it from me afterwards. He ought to have told me the very first instant we were engaged. But he didn"t. He let it go on, and if I hadn"t happened on that bouquet I might never have known anything about it. That is what I mean by--a false nature. I wouldn"t have minded his deceiving me; but to let me deceive myself--Oh, it was too much!"
Agatha hid her face in her handkerchief again. She was perching on the edge of the berth, and Mrs. March said, with a glance, which she did not see, toward the sofa, "I"m afraid that"s rather a hard seat for you.
"Oh, no, thank you! I"m perfectly comfortable--I like it--if you don"t mind?"
Mrs. March pressed her hand for answer, and after another little delay, sighed and said, "They are not like us, and we cannot help it. They are more temporizing."
"How do you mean?" Agatha unmasked again.
"They can bear to keep things better than we can, and they trust to time to bring them right, or to come right of themselves."
"I don"t think Mr. March would trust things to come right of themselves!" said Agatha in indignant accusal of Mrs. March"s sincerity.
"Ah, that"s just what he would do, my dear, and has done, all along; and I don"t believe we could have lived through without it: we should have quarrelled ourselves into the grave!"
"Mrs. March!"
"Yes, indeed. I don"t mean that he would ever deceive me. But he would let things go on, and hope that somehow they would come right without any fuss."
"Do you mean that he would let anybody deceive themselves?"
"I"m afraid he would--if he thought it would come right. It used to be a terrible trial to me; and it is yet, at times when I don"t remember that he means nothing but good and kindness by it. Only the other day in Ansbach--how long ago it seems!--he let a poor old woman give him her son"s address in Jersey City, and allowed her to believe he would look him up when we got back and tell him we had seen her. I don"t believe, unless I keep right round after him, as we say in New England, that he"ll ever go near the man."