"Oh, no; go on. I don"t think anything can do that, after an afternoon of Kenby"s confidences."
"It"s worse than Kenby," she said with a sigh. "You know I told you at Carlsbad I thought that ridiculous old thing was making up to Mrs.
Adding."
"Kenby? Why of co--"
"Don"t be stupid, my dear! No, not Kenby: General Triscoe. I wish you could have been here to see him paying her all sort; of silly attentions, and hear him making her compliments."
"Thank you. I think I"m just as well without it. Did she pay him silly attentions and compliments, too?"
"That"s the only thing that can make me forgive her for his wanting her.
She was keeping him at arm"s-length the whole time, and she was doing it so as not to make him contemptible before his daughter."
"It must have been hard. And Rose?"
"Rose didn"t seem very well. He looks thin and pale; but he"s sweeter than ever. She"s certainly commoner clay than Rose. No, I won"t say that!
It"s really nothing but General Triscoe"s being an old goose about her that makes her seem so, and it isn"t fair."
March went down to his coffee in the morning with the delicate duty of telling Kenby that Mrs. Adding was in town. Kenby seemed to think it quite natural she should wish to see the manoeuvres, and not at all strange that she should come to them with General Triscoe and his daughter. He asked if March would not go with him to call upon her after breakfast, and as this was in the line of his own instructions from Mrs.
March, he went.
They found Mrs. Adding with the Triscoes, and March saw nothing that was not merely friendly, or at the most fatherly, in the general"s behavior toward her. If Mrs. Adding or Miss Triscoe saw more, they hid it in a guise of sisterly affection for each other. At the most the general showed a gayety which one would not have expected of him under any conditions, and which the fact that he and Rose had kept each other awake a good deal the night before seemed so little adapted to call out. He joked with Rose about their room and their beds, and put on a comradery with him that was not a perfect fit, and that suffered by contrast with the pleasure of the boy and Kenby in meeting. There was a certain question in the att.i.tude of Mrs. Adding till March helped Kenby to account for his presence; then she relaxed in an effect of security so tacit that words overstate it, and began to make fun of Rose.
March could not find that Miss Triscoe looked unhappy, as his wife had said; he thought simply that she had grown plainer; but when he reported this, she lost her patience with him. In a girl, she said, plainness was unhappiness; and she wished to know when he would ever learn to look an inch below the surface: She was sure that Agatha Triscoe had not heard from Burnamy since the Emperor"s birthday; that she was at swords"-points with her father, and so desperate that she did not care what became of her.
He had left Kenby with the others, and now, after his wife had talked herself tired of them all, he proposed going out again to look about the city, where there was nothing for the moment to remind them of the presence of their friends or even of their existence. She answered that she was worrying about all those people, and trying to work out their problem for them. He asked why she did not let them work it out themselves as they would have to do, after all her worry, and she said that where her sympathy had been excited she could not stop worrying, whether it did any good or not, and she could not respect any one who could drop things so completely out of his mind as he could; she had never been able to respect that in him.
"I know, my dear," he a.s.sented. "But I don"t think it"s a question of moral responsibility; it"s a question of mental structure, isn"t it? Your consciousness isn"t built in thought-tight compartments, and one emotion goes all through it, and sinks you; but I simply close the doors and shut the emotion in, and keep on."
The fancy pleased him so much that he worked it out in all its implications, and could not, after their long experience of each other, realize that she was not enjoying the joke too, till she said she saw that he merely wished to tease. Then, too late, he tried to share her worry; but she protested that she was not worrying at all; that she cared nothing about those people: that she was nervous, she was tired; and she wished he would leave her, and go out alone.
He found himself in the street again, and he perceived that he must be walking fast when a voice called him by name, and asked him what his hurry was. The voice was Stoller"s, who got into step with him and followed the first with a second question.
"Made up your mind to go to the manoeuvres with me?"
His bluntness made it easy for March to answer: "I"m afraid my wife couldn"t stand the drive back and forth."
"Come without her."
"Thank you. It"s very kind of you. I"m not certain that I shall go at all. If I do, I shall run out by train, and take my chances with the crowd."
Stoller insisted no further. He felt no offence at the refusal of his offer, or chose to show none. He said, with the same uncouth abruptness as before: "Heard anything of that fellow since he left Carlsbad?"
"Burnamy?"
"Mm."
"No."
"Know where he is?"
"I don"t in the least."
Stoller let another silence elapse while they hurried on, before he said, "I got to thinking what he done afterwards. He wasn"t bound to look out for me; he might suppose I knew what I was about."
March turned his face and stared in Stoller"s, which he was letting hang forward as he stamped heavily on. Had the disaster proved less than he had feared, and did he still want Burnamy"s help in patching up the broken pieces; or did he really wish to do Burnamy justice to his friend?
In any case March"s duty was clear. "I think Burnamy was bound to look out for you; Mr. Stoller, and I am glad to know that he saw it in the same light."
"I know he did," said Stoker with a blaze as from a long-smouldering fury, "and d.a.m.n him, I"m not going to have it. I"m not going to, plead the baby act with him, or with any man. You tell him so, when you get the chance. You tell him I don"t hold him accountable for anything I made him do. That ain"t business; I don"t want him around me, any more; but if he wants to go back to the paper he can have his place. You tell him I stand by what I done; and it"s all right between him and me. I hain"t done anything about it, the way I wanted him to help me to; I"ve let it lay, and I"m a-going to. I guess it ain"t going to do me any harm, after all; our people hain"t got very long memories; but if it is, let it. You tell him it"s all right."
"I don"t know where he is, Mr. Stoller, and I don"t know that I care to be the bearer of your message," said March.
"Why not?"
"Why, for one thing, I don"t agree with you that it"s all right. Your choosing to stand by the consequences of Burnamy"s wrong doesn"t undo it.
As I understand, you don"t pardon it--"
Stoller gulped and did not answer at once. Then he said, "I stand by what I done. I"m not going to let him say I turned him down for doing what I told him to, because I hadn"t the sense to know what I was about."
"Ah, I don"t think it"s a thing he"ll like to speak of in any case," said March.
Stoller left him, at the corner they had reached, as abruptly as he had joined him, and March hurried back to his wife, and told her what had just pa.s.sed between him and Stoller.
She broke out, "Well, I am surprised at you, my dear! You have always accused me of suspecting people, and attributing bad motives; and here you"ve refused even to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt. He merely wanted to save his savage pride with you, and that"s all he wants to do with Burnamy. How could it hurt the poor boy to know that Stoller doesn"t blame him? Why should you refuse to give his message to Burnamy?
I don"t want you to ridicule me for my conscience any more, Basil; you"re twice as bad as I ever was. Don"t you think that a person can ever expiate an offence? I"ve often heard you say that if any one owned his fault, he put it from him, and it was the same as if it hadn"t been; and hasn"t Burnamy owned up over and over again? I"m astonished at you, dearest."
March was in fact somewhat astonished at himself in the light of her reasoning; but she went on with some sophistries that restored him to his self-righteousness.
"I suppose you think he has interfered with Stoller"s political ambition, and injured him in that way. Well, what if he has? Would it be a good thing to have a man like that succeed in politics? You"re always saying that the low character of our politicians is the ruin of the country; and I"m sure," she added, with a prodigious leap over all the sequences, "that Mr. Stoller is acting n.o.bly; and it"s your duty to help him relieve Burnamy"s mind." At the laugh he broke into she hastened to say, "Or if you won"t, I hope you"ll not object to my doing so, for I shall, anyway!"
She rose as if she were going to begin at once, in spite of his laughing; and in fact she had already a plan for coming to Stoller"s a.s.sistance by getting at Burnamy through Miss Triscoe, whom she suspected of knowing where he was. There had been no chance for them to speak of him either that morning or the evening before, and after a great deal of controversy with herself in her husband"s presence she decided to wait till they came naturally together the next morning for the walk to the Capuchin Church on the hill beyond the river, which they had agreed to take. She could not keep from writing a note to Miss Triscoe begging her to be sure to come, and hinting that she had something very important to speak of.
She was not sure but she had been rather silly to do this, but when they met the girl confessed that she had thought of giving up the walk, and might not have come except for Mrs. March"s note. She had come with Rose, and had left him below with March; Mrs. Adding was coming later with Kenby and General Triscoe.
Mrs. March lost no time in telling her the great news; and if she had been in doubt before of the girl"s feeling for Burnamy she was now in none. She had the pleasure of seeing her flush with hope, and then the pain which was also a pleasure, of seeing her blanch with dismay.
"I don"t know where he is, Mrs. March. I haven"t heard a word from him since that night in Carlsbad. I expected--I didn"t know but you--"
Mrs. March shook her head. She treated the fact skillfully as something to be regretted simply because it would be such a relief to Burnamy to know how Mr. Stoller now felt. Of course they could reach him somehow; you could always get letters to people in Europe, in the end; and, in fact, it was altogether probable that he was that very instant in Wurzburg; for if the New York-Paris Chronicle had wanted him to write up the Wagner operas, it would certainly want him to write up the manoeuvres. She established his presence in Wurzburg by such an irrefragable chain of reasoning that, at a knock outside, she was just able to kelp back a scream, while she ran to open the door. It was not Burnamy, as in compliance with every nerve it ought to have been, but her husband, who tried to justify his presence by saying that they were all waiting for her and Miss Triscoe, and asked when they were coming.
She frowned him silent, and then shut herself outside with him long enough to whisper, "Say she"s got a headache, or anything you please; but don"t stop talking here with me, or I shall go wild." She then shut herself in again, with the effect of holding him accountable for the whole affair.
LVI.