Agatha looked daunted, but she said, "That is a very different thing."
"It isn"t a different kind of thing. And it shows what men are,--the sweetest and best of them, that is. They are terribly apt to be--easy-going."
"Then you think I was all wrong?" the girl asked in a tremor.
"No, indeed! You were right, because you really expected perfection of him. You expected the ideal. And that"s what makes all the trouble, in married life: we expect too much of each other--we each expect more of the other than we are willing to give or can give. If I had to begin over again, I should not expect anything at all, and then I should be sure of being radiantly happy. But all this talking and all this writing about love seems to turn our brains; we know that men are not perfect, even at our craziest, because women are not, but we expect perfection of them; and they seem to expect it of us, poor things! If we could keep on after we are in love just as we were before we were in love, and take nice things as favors and surprises, as we did in the beginning! But we get more and more greedy and exacting--"
"Do you think I was too exacting in wanting him to tell me everything after we were engaged?"
"No, I don"t say that. But suppose he had put it off till you were married?" Agatha blushed a little, but not painfully, "Would it have been so bad? Then you might have thought that his flirting up to the last moment in his desperation was a very good joke. You would have understood better just how it was, and it might even have made you fonder of him. You might have seen that he had flirted with some one else because he was so heart-broken about you."
"Then you believe that if I could have waited till--till--but when I had found out, don"t you see I couldn"t wait? It would have been all very well if I hadn"t known it till then. But as I did know it. Don"t you see?"
"Yes, that certainly complicated it," Mrs. March admitted. "But I don"t think, if he"d been a false nature, he"d have owned up as he did. You see, he didn"t try to deny it; and that"s a great point gained."
"Yes, that is true," said Agatha, with conviction. "I saw that afterwards. But you don"t think, Mrs. March, that I was unjust or--or hasty?"
"No, indeed! You couldn"t have done differently under the circ.u.mstances.
You may be sure he felt that--he is so unselfish and generous--" Agatha began to weep into her handkerchief again; Mrs. March caressed her hand.
"And it will certainly come right if you feel as you do."
"No," the girl protested. "He can never forgive me; it"s all over, everything is over. It would make very little difference to me, what happened now--if the steamer broke her shaft, or anything. But if I can only believe I wasn"t unjust--"
Mrs. March a.s.sured her once more that she had behaved with absolute impartiality; and she proved to her by a process of reasoning quite irrefragable that it was only a question of time, with which place had nothing to do, when she and Burnamy should come together again, and all should be made right between them. The fact that she did not know where he was, any more than Mrs. March herself, had nothing to do with the result; that was a mere detail, which would settle itself. She clinched her argument by confessing that her own engagement had been broken off, and that it had simply renewed itself. All you had to do was to keep willing it, and waiting. There was something very mysterious in it.
"And how long was it till--" Agatha faltered.
"Well, in our ease it was two years."
"Oh!" said the girl, but Mrs. March hastened to rea.s.sure her.
"But our case was very peculiar. I could see afterwards that it needn"t have been two months, if I had been willing to acknowledge at once that I was in the wrong. I waited till we met."
"If I felt that I was in the wrong, I should write," said Agatha. "I shouldn"t care what he thought of my doing it."
"Yes, the great thing is to make sure that you were wrong."
They remained talking so long, that March and the general had exhausted all the topics of common interest, and had even gone through those they did not care for. At last the general said, "I"m afraid my daughter will tire Mrs. March."
"Oh, I don"t think she"ll tire my wife. But do you want her?"
"Well, when you"re going down."
"I think I"ll take a turn about the deck, and start my circulation,"
said March, and he did so before he went below.
He found his wife up and dressed, and waiting provisionally on the sofa.
"I thought I might as well go to lunch," she said, and then she told him about Agatha and Burnamy, and the means she had employed to comfort and encourage the girl. "And now, dearest, I want you to find out where Burnamy is, and give him a hint. You will, won"t you! If you could have seen how unhappy she was!"
"I don"t think I should have cared, and I"m certainly not going to meddle. I think Burnamy has got no more than he deserved, and that he"s well rid of her. I can"t imagine a broken engagement that would more completely meet my approval. As the case stands, they have my blessing."
"Don"t say that, dearest! You know you don"t mean it."
"I do; and I advise you to keep your hands off. You"ve done all and more than you ought to propitiate Miss Triscoe. You"ve offered yourself up, and you"ve offered me up--"
"No, no, Basil! I merely used you as an ill.u.s.tration of what men were--the best of them."
"And I can"t observe," he continued, "that any one else has been considered in the matter. Is Miss Triscoe the sole sufferer by Burnamy"s flirtation? What is the matter with a little compa.s.sion for the pivotal girl?"
"Now, you know you"re not serious," said his wife; and though he would not admit this, he could not be seriously sorry for the new interest which she took in the affair. There was no longer any question of changing their state-room. Under the tonic influence of the excitement she did not go back to her berth after lunch, and she was up later after dinner than he could have advised. She was absorbed in Agatha, but in her liberation from her hypochondria, she began also to make a comparative study of the American swells, in the light of her late experience with the German highhotes. It is true that none of the swells gave her the opportunity of examining them at close range, as the highhotes had done. They kept to their state-rooms mostly, where, after he thought she could bear it, March told her how near he had come to making her their equal by an outlay of six hundred dollars. She now shuddered at the thought; but she contended that in their magnificent exclusiveness they could give points to European princes; and that this showed again how when Americans did try to do a thing, they beat the world. Agatha Triscoe knew who they were, but she did not know them; they belonged to another kind of set; she spoke of them as "rich people," and she seemed content to keep away from them with Mrs.
March and with the shy, silent old wife of Major Eltwin, to whom March sometimes found her talking.
He never found her father talking with Major Eltwin. General Triscoe had his own friends in the smoking-room, where he held forth in a certain corner on the chances of the approaching election in New York, and mocked their incredulity when he prophesied the success of Tammany and the return of the King. March himself much preferred Major Eltwin to the general and his friends; he lived back in the talk of the Ohioan into his own younger years in Indiana, and he was amused and touched to find how much the mid-Western life seemed still the same as he had known. The conditions had changed, but not so much as they had changed in the East and the farther West. The picture that the major drew of them in his own region was alluring; it made March homesick; though he knew that he should never go back to his native section. There was the comfort of kind in the major; and he had a vein of philosophy, spare but sweet, which March liked; he liked also the meekness which had come through sorrow upon a spirit which had once been proud.
They had both the elderly man"s habit of early rising, and they usually found themselves together waiting impatiently for the cup of coffee, ingenuously bad, which they served on the Cupania not earlier than half past six, in strict observance of a rule of the line discouraging to people of their habits. March admired the vileness of the decoction, which he said could not be got anywhere out of the British Empire, and he asked Eltwin the first morning if he had noticed how instantly on the Channel boat they had dropped to it and to the sour, heavy, sodden British bread, from the spirited and airy Continental tradition of coffee and rolls.
The major confessed that he was no great hand to notice such things, and he said he supposed that if the line had never lost a pa.s.senger, and got you to New York in six days it had a right to feed you as it pleased; he surmised that if they could get their airing outside before they took their coffee, it would give the coffee a chance to taste better; and this was what they afterwards did. They met, well b.u.t.toned and well mined up, on the promenade when it was yet so early that they were not at once sure of each other in the twilight, and watched the morning planets pale east and west before the sun rose. Sometimes there were no paling planets and no rising sun, and a black sea, ridged with white, tossed under a low dark sky with dim rifts.
One morning, they saw the sun rise with a serenity and majesty which it rarely has outside of the theatre. The dawn began over that sea which was like the rumpled canvas imitations of the sea on the stage, under long mauve clouds bathed in solemn light. Above these, in the pale tender sky, two silver stars hung, and the steamer"s smoke drifted across them like a thin dusky veil. To the right a bank of dun cloud began to burn crimson, and to burn brighter till it was like a low hill-side full of gorgeous rugosities fleeced with a dense dwarfish growth of autumnal shrubs. The whole eastern heaven softened and flushed through diaphanous mists; the west remained a livid mystery. The eastern ma.s.ses and flakes of cloud began to kindle keenly; but the stars shone clearly, and then one star, till the tawny pink hid it. All the zenith reddened, but still the sun did not show except in the color of the brilliant clouds. At last the lurid horizon began to burn like a flame-shot smoke, and a fiercely bright disc edge pierced its level, and swiftly defined itself as the sun"s...o...b..
Many thoughts went through March"s mind; some of them were sad, but in some there was a touch of hopefulness. It might have been that beauty which consoled him for his years; somehow he felt himself, if no longer young, a part of the young immortal frame of things. His state was indefinable, but he longed to hint at it to his companion.
"Yes," said Eltwin, with a long deep sigh. "I feel as if I could walk out through that brightness and find her. I reckon that such hopes wouldn"t be allowed to lie to us; that so many ages of men couldn"t have fooled themselves so. I"m glad I"ve seen this." He was silent and they both remained watching the rising sun till they could not bear its splendor. "Now," said the major, "it must be time for that mud, as you call it." Over their coffee and crackers at the end of the table which they had to themselves, he resumed. "I was thinking all the time--we seem to think half a dozen things at once, and this was one of them--about a piece of business I"ve got to settle when I reach home; and perhaps you can advise me about it; you"re an editor. I"ve got a newspaper on my hands; I reckon it would be a pretty good thing, if it had a chance; but I don"t know what to do with it: I got it in trade with a fellow who has to go West for his lungs, but he"s staying till I get back. What"s become of that young chap--what"s his name?--that went out with us?"
"Burnamy?" prompted March, rather breathlessly.
"Yes. Couldn"t he take hold of it? I rather liked him. He"s smart, isn"t he?"
"Very," said March. "But I don"t know where he is. I don"t know that he would go into the country--. But he might, if--"
They entered provisionally into the case, and for argument"s sake supposed that Burnamy would take hold of the major"s paper if he could be got at. It really looked to March like a good chance for him, on Eltwin"s showing; but he was not confident of Burnamy"s turning up very soon, and he gave the major a pretty clear notion why, by entering into the young fellow"s history for the last three months.
"Isn"t it the very irony of fate?" he said to his wife when he found her in their room with a cup of the same mud he had been drinking, and reported the facts to her.
"Irony?" she said, with all the excitement he could have imagined or desired. "Nothing of the kind. It"s a leading, if ever there was one.
It will be the easiest thing in the world to find Burnamy. And out there she can sit on her steps!"
He slowly groped his way to her meaning, through the hypothesis of Burnamy"s reconciliation and marriage with Agatha Triscoe, and their settlement in Major Eltwin"s town under social conditions that implied a habit of spending the summer evenings on their front porch. While he was doing this she showered him with questions and conjectures and requisitions in which nothing but the impossibility of going ash.o.r.e saved him from the instant devotion of all his energies to a world-wide, inquiry into Burnamy"s whereabouts.
The next morning he was up before Major Eltwin got out, and found the second-cabin pa.s.sengers free of the first-cabin promenade at an hour when their superiors were not using it. As he watched these inferiors, decent-looking, well-clad men and women, enjoying their privilege with a furtive air, and with stolen glances at him, he asked himself in what sort he was their superior, till the inquiry grew painful. Then he rose from his chair, and made his way to the place where the material barrier between them was lifted, and interested himself in a few of them who seemed too proud to avail themselves of his society on the terms made. A figure seized his attention with a sudden fascination of conjecture and rejection: the figure of a tall young man who came out on the promenade and without looking round, walked swiftly away to the bow of the ship, and stood there, looking down at the water in an att.i.tude which was bewilderingly familiar. His movement, his posture, his dress, even, was that of Burnamy, and March, after a first flush of pleasure, felt a sickening repulsion in the notion of his presence. It would have been such a cheap performance on the part of life, which has all sorts of chances at command, and need not descend to the poor tricks of second-rate fiction; and he accused Burnamy of a complicity in the bad taste of the affair, though he realized, when he reflected, that if it were really Burnamy he must have sailed in as much unconsciousness of the Triscoes as he himself had done. He had probably got out of money and had hurried home while he had still enough to pay the second-cabin fare on the first boat back. Clearly he was not to blame, but life was to blame for such a shabby device; and March felt this so keenly that he wished to turn from the situation, and have nothing to do with it.
He kept moving toward him, drawn by the fatal attraction, and at a few paces" distance the young man whirled about and showed him the face of a stranger.
March made some witless remark on the rapid course of the ship as it cut its way through the water of the bow; the stranger answered with a strong Lancashire accent; and in the talk which followed, he said he was going out to see the cotton-mills at Fall River and New Bedford, and he seemed hopeful of some advice or information from March; then he said he must go and try to get his Missus out; March understood him to mean his wife, and he hurried down to his own, to whom he related his hair-breadth escape from Burnamy.
"I don"t call it an escape at all!" she declared. "I call it the greatest possible misfortune. If it had been Burnamy we could have brought them together at once, just when she has seen so clearly that she was in the wrong, and is feeling all broken up. There wouldn"t have been any difficulty about his being in the second-cabin. We could have contrived to have them meet somehow. If the worst came to the worst you could have lent him money to pay the difference, and got him into the first-cabin."
"I could have taken that six-hundred-dollar room for him," said March, "and then he could have eaten with the swells."
She answered that now he was teasing; that he was fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously; and in the end he retired before the stewardess bringing her first coffee, with a well-merited feeling that if it had not been for his triviality the young Lancashireman would really have been Burnamy.