"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."

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."