“No, indeed! You couldn’t have done differently under the circumstances. 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 assured 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 reassure 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 illustration 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 compassion 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 passenger, 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 buttoned 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 masses 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 orb.
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 ashore 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 passengers 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 attitude 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.
LXXV.
Except for the first day and night out from Queenstown, when the ship rolled and pitched with straining and squeaking noises, and a thumping of the lifted screws, there was no rough weather, and at last the ocean was livid and oily, with a long swell, on which she swayed with no perceptible motion save from her machinery.
Most of the seamanship seemed to be done after dark, or in those early hours when March found the stewards cleaning the stairs, and the sailors scouring the promenades. He made little acquaintance with his fellow- passengers. One morning he almost spoke with an old Quaker lady whom he joined in looking at the Niagara flood which poured from the churning screws; but he did not quite get the words out. On the contrary he talked freely with an American who, bred horses on a farm near Boulogne, and was going home to the Horse Show; he had been thirty-five years out of the country, but he had preserved his Yankee accent in all its purity, and was the most typical-looking American on board. Now and then March walked up and down with a blond Mexican whom he found of the usual well- ordered Latin intelligence, but rather flavorless; at times he sat beside a nice Jew, who talked agreeably, but only about business; and he philosophized the race as so tiresome often because it seemed so often without philosophy. He made desperate attempts at times to interest himself in the pool-selling in the smoking-room where the betting on the ship’s wonderful run was continual.
He thought that people talked less and less as they drew nearer home; but on the last day out there was a sudden expansion, and some whom he had not spoken with voluntarily addressed him. The sweet, soft air was like midsummer the water rippled gently, without a swell, blue under the clear sky, and the ship left a wide track that was silver in the sun. There were more sail; the first and second class baggage was got up and piled along the steerage deck.
Some people dressed a little more than usual for the last dinner which was earlier than usual, so as to be out of the way against the arrival which had been variously predicted at from five to seven-thirty. An indescribable nervousness culminated with the appearance of the customs officers on board, who spread their papers on cleared spaces of the dining-tables, and summoned the passengers to declare that they had nothing to declare, as a preliminary to being searched like thieves at the dock.
This ceremony proceeded while the Cupania made her way up the Narrows, and into the North River, where the flare of lights from the crazy steeps and cliffs of architecture on the New York shore seemed a persistence of the last Fourth of July pyrotechnics. March blushed for the grotesque splendor of the spectacle, and was confounded to find some Englishmen admiring it, till he remembered that aesthetics were not the strong point of our race. His wife sat hand in hand with Miss Triscoe, and from time to time made him count the pieces of small baggage in the keeping of their steward; while General Triscoe held aloof in a sarcastic calm.
The steamer groped into her dock; the gangways were lifted to her side; the passengers fumbled and stumbled down their incline, and at the bottom the Marches found themselves respectively in the arms of their son and daughter. They all began talking at once, and ignoring and trying to remember the Triscoes to whom the young Marches were presented. Bella did her best to be polite to Agatha, and Tom offered to get an inspector for the general at the same time as for his father. Then March, remorsefully remembered the Eltwins, and looked about for them, so that his son might get them an inspector too. He found the major already in the hands of an inspector, who was passing all his pieces after carelessly looking into one: the official who received the declarations on board had noted a Grand Army button like his own in the major’s lapel, and had marked his fellow-veteran’s paper with the mystic sign which procures for the bearer the honor of being promptly treated as a smuggler, while the less favored have to wait longer for this indignity at the hands of their government. When March’s own inspector came he was as civil and lenient as our hateful law allows; when he had finished March tried to put a bank-note in his hand, and was brought to a just shame by his refusal of it. The bed-room steward keeping guard over the baggage helped put-it together after the search, and protested that March had feed him so handsomely that he would stay there with it as long as they wished. This partly restored March’s self-respect, and he could share in General Triscoe’s indignation with the Treasury ruling which obliged him to pay duty on his own purchases in excess of the hundred- dollar limit, though his daughter had brought nothing, and they jointly came far within the limit for two.
He found that the Triscoes were going to a quiet old hotel on the way to Stuyvesant Square, quite in his own neighborhood, and he quickly arranged for all the ladies and the general to drive together while he was to follow with his son on foot and by car. They got away from the scene of the customs’ havoc while the steamer shed, with its vast darkness dimly lit by its many lamps, still showed like a battle-field where the inspectors groped among the scattered baggage like details from the victorious army searching for the wounded. His son clapped him on the shoulder when he suggested this notion, and said he was the same old father; and they got home as gayly together as the dispiriting influences of the New York ugliness would permit. It was still in those good and decent times, now so remote, when the city got something for the money paid out to keep its streets clean, and those they passed through were not foul but merely mean.
The ignoble effect culminated when they came into Broadway, and found its sidewalks, at an hour when those of any European metropolis would have been brilliant with life, as unpeopled as those of a minor country town, while long processions of cable-cars carted heaps of men and women up and down the thoroughfare amidst the deformities of the architecture.
The next morning the March family breakfasted late after an evening prolonged beyond midnight in spite of half-hourly agreements that now they must really all go to bed. The children had both to recognize again and again how well their parents were looking; Tom had to tell his father about the condition of ‘Every Other Week’; Bella had to explain to her mother how sorry her husband was that he could not come on to meet them with her, but was coming a week later to take her home, and then she would know the reason why they could not all, go back to Chicago with him: it was just the place for her father to live, for everybody to live. At breakfast she renewed the reasoning with which she had maintained her position the night before; the travellers entered into a full expression of their joy at being home again; March asked what had become of that stray parrot which they had left in the tree-top the morning they started; and Mrs. March declared that this was the last Silver Wedding Journey she ever wished to take, and tried to convince them all that she had been on the verge of nervous collapse when she reached the ship. They sat at table till she discovered that it was very nearly eleven o’clock, and said it was disgraceful.
Before they rose, there was a ring at the door, and a card was brought in to Tom. He glanced at it, and said to his father, “Oh, yes! This man has been haunting the office for the last three days. He’s got to leave to-day, and as it seemed to be rather a case of life and death with him, I said he’d probably find you here this morning. But if you don’t want to see him, I can put him off till afternoon, I suppose.”
He tossed the card to his father, who looked at it quietly, and then gave it to his wife. “Perhaps I’d as well see him?”
“See him!” she returned in accents in which all the intensity of her soul was centred. By an effort of self-control which no words can convey a just sense of she remained with her children, while her husband with a laugh more teasing than can be imagined went into the drawing-room to meet Burnamy.
The poor fellow was in an effect of belated summer as to clothes, and he looked not merely haggard but shabby. He made an effort for dignity as well as gayety, however, in stating himself to March, with many apologies for his persistency. But, he said, he was on his way West, and he was anxious to know whether there was any chance of his ‘Kasper Hauler’ paper being taken if he finished it up. March would have been a far harder- hearted editor than he was, if he could have discouraged the suppliant before him. He said he would take the Kasper Hauler paper and add a band of music to the usual rate of ten dollars a thousand words. Then Burnamy’s dignity gave way, if not his gayety; he began to laugh, and suddenly he broke down and confessed that he had come home in the steerage; and was at his last cent, beyond his fare to Chicago. His straw hat looked like a withered leaf in the light of his sad facts; his thin overcoat affected March’s imagination as something like the diaphanous cast shell of a locust, hopelessly resumed for comfort at the approach of autumn. He made Burnamy sit down, after he had once risen, and he told him of Major Eltwin’s wish to see him; and he promised to go round with him to the major’s hotel before the Eltwins left town that afternoon.
While he prolonged the interview in this way, Mrs. March was kept from breaking in upon them only by the psychical experiment which she was making with the help and sympathy of her daughter at the window of the dining-room which looked up Sixteenth Street. At the first hint she gave of the emotional situation which Burnamy was a main part of, her son; with the brutal contempt of young men for other young men’s love affairs, said he must go to the office; he bade his mother tell his father there was no need of his coming down that day, and he left the two women together. This gave the mother a chance to develop the whole fact to the daughter with telegrammic rapidity and brevity, and then to enrich the first-outline with innumerable details, while they both remained at the window, and Mrs. March said at two-minutely intervals, with no sense of iteration for either of them, “I told her to come in the morning, if she felt like it, and I know she will. But if she doesn’t, I shall say there is nothing in fate, or Providence either. At any rate I’m going to stay here and keep longing for her, and we’ll see whether there’s anything in that silly theory of your father’s. I don’t believe there is,” she said, to be on the safe side.
Even when she saw Agatha Triscoe enter the park gate on Rutherford Place, she saved herself from disappointment by declaring that she was not coming across to their house. As the girl persisted in coming and coming, and at last came so near that she caught sight of Mrs. March at the window and nodded, the mother turned ungratefully upon her daughter, and drove her away to her own room, so that no society detail should hinder the divine chance. She went to the door herself when Agatha rang, and then she was going to open the way into the parlor where March was still closeted with Burnamy, and pretend that she had not known they were there. But a soberer second thought than this prevailed, and she told the girl who it was that was within and explained the accident of his presence. “I think,” she said nobly, “that you ought to have the chance of going away if you don’t wish to meet him.”
The girl, with that heroic precipitation which Mrs. March had noted in her from the first with regard to what she wanted to do, when Burnamy was in question, answered, “But I do wish to meet him, Mrs. March.”
While they stood looking at each other, March came out to ask his wife if she would see Burnamy, and she permitted herself so much stratagem as to substitute Agatha, after catching her husband aside and subduing his proposed greeting of the girl to a hasty handshake.
Half an hour later she thought it time to join the young people, urged largely by the frantic interest of her daughter. But she returned from the half-open door without entering. “I couldn’t bring myself to break in on the poor things. They are standing at the window together looking over at St. George’s.”
Bella silently clasped her hands. March gave cynical laugh, and said, “Well we are in for it, my dear.” Then he added, “I hope they’ll take us with them on their Silver Wedding Journey.”
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
Declare that they had nothing to declare Despair which any perfection inspires
Disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love Fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously Held aloof in a sarcastic calm
Illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them Married life: we expect too much of each other Not do to be perfectly frank with one’s own country Offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him Passionate desire for excess in a bad thing Puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste Race seemed so often without philosophy
Self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain She always came to his defence when he accused himself
ETEXT EDITORS BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE TRILOGY:
Affected absence of mind
Affectional habit
All the loveliness that exists outside of you, dearest is little All luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else Amusing world, if you do not refuse to be amused Anticipative homesickness
Anticipative reprisal
Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much Artists never do anything like other people As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting At heart every man is a smuggler
Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars Ballast of her instinctive despondency
Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever Beautiful with the radiance of loving and being loved Bewildering labyrinth of error
Biggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelest Brag of his wife, as a good husband always does Brown-stone fronts
But when we make that money here, no one loses it Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience Calm of those who have logic on their side Civilly protested and consented
Clinging persistence of such natures Coldly and inaccessibly vigilant
Collective silence which passes for sociality Comfort of the critical attitude
Conscience weakens to the need that isn’t Considerable comfort in holding him accountable Courage hadn’t been put to the test
Courtship
Deadly summer day
Death is peace and pardon
Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance Declare that they had nothing to declare Despair which any perfection inspires
Did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him Dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty Disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love Dividend: It’s a chicken before it’s hatched Does any one deserve happiness
Does anything from without change us? Dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad Effort to get on common ground with an inferior Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation Evil which will not let a man forgive his victim Explained perhaps too fully
Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable Family buryin’ grounds
Favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting Feeblest-minded are sure to lead the talk Feeling rather ashamed,–for he had laughed too Feeling of contempt for his unambitious destination Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another Fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously Futility of travel
Gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it Glad; which considering, they ceased to be Got their laugh out of too many things in life Guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction Had learned not to censure the irretrievable Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance Handsome pittance
Happiness is so unreasonable
Happiness built upon and hedged about with misery He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices He buys my poverty and not my will
Headache darkens the universe while it lasts Heart that forgives but does not forget
Held aloof in a sarcastic calm
Helplessness begets a sense of irresponsibility Helplessness accounts for many heroic facts in the world Hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death Homage which those who have not pay to those who have Honest selfishness
Hopeful recklessness
How much can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing Humanity may at last prevail over nationality Hurry up and git well–or something
Hypothetical difficulty
I cannot endure this–this hopefulness of yours I want to be sorry upon the easiest possible terms I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife’s acquaintance I’m not afraid–I’m awfully demoralized
If you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen Ignorant of her ignorance
Illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much Indispensable
Indulge safely in the pleasures of autobiography Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate It had come as all such calamities come, from nothing It must be your despair that helps you to bear up It don’t do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time It ‘s the same as a promise, your not saying you wouldn’t Jesting mood in the face of all embarrassments Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs Less intrusive than if he had not been there Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous Life of the ship, like the life of the sea: a sodden monotony Life has taught him to truckle and trick Long life of holidays which is happy marriage Love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence Made money and do not yet know that money has made them Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel Man’s willingness to abide in the present Married life: we expect too much of each other Married the whole mystifying world of womankind Married for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid Marry for love two or three times
Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign Muddy draught which impudently affected to be coffee Nervous woes of comfortable people
Never-blooming shrub
Never could have an emotion without desiring to analyze it Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all No man deserves to sufer at the hands of another No longer the gross appetite for novelty No right to burden our friends with our decisions Not do to be perfectly frank with one’s own country Nothing so apt to end in mutual dislike,–except gratitude Nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it’s a young mother Novelists, who really have the charge of people’s thinking Oblivion of sleep
Offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him Only so much clothing as the law compelled Only one of them was to be desperate at a time Our age caricatures our youth
Parkman
Passionate desire for excess in a bad thing Patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius Patronizing spirit of travellers in a foreign country People that have convictions are difficult Person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it Poverty as hopeless as any in the world
Prices fixed by his remorse
Puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste Race seemed so often without philosophy
Recipes for dishes and diseases
Reckless and culpable optimism
Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last Rejoice in everything that I haven’t done Rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage Repeated the nothings they had said already Respect for your mind, but she don’t think you’ve got any sense Say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him Seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him Self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity
Self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain Servant of those he loved
She always came to his defence when he accused himself She cares for him: that she was so cold shows that She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression Shouldn’t ca’ fo’ the disgrace of bein’ poo’–its inconvenience Sigh with which ladies recognize one another’s martyrdom So hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do So old a world and groping still
Society: All its favors are really bargains Sorry he hadn’t asked more; that’s human nature Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism Superstition that having and shining is the chief good Superstition of the romances that love is once for all That isn’t very old–or not so old as it used to be The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart They can only do harm by an expression of sympathy Timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes Took the world as she found it, and made the best of it Tragical character of heat
Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues Tried to be homesick for them, but failed Turn to their children’s opinion with deference Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine Used to having his decisions reached without his knowledge Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness
Voice of the common imbecility and incoherence Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold
Wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit We get too much into the hands of other people We don’t seem so much our own property
Weariness of buying
What we can be if we must
When you look it–live it
Wilful sufferers
Willingness to find poetry in things around them Wish we didn’t always recognize the facts as we do Without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child Woman harnessed with a dog to a cart
Wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests Work he was so fond of and so weary of
Would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase
DR. BREEN’S PRACTICE.
By William Dean Howells
Near the verge of a bold promontory stands the hotel, and looks southeastward over a sweep of sea unbroken to the horizon. Behind it stretches the vast forest, which after two hundred years has resumed the sterile coast wrested from it by the first Pilgrims, and has begun to efface the evidences of the inroad made in recent years by the bold speculator for whom Jocelyn’s is named. The young birches and spruces are breast high in the drives and avenues at Jocelyn’s; the low blackberry vines and the sweet fern cover the carefully-graded sidewalks, and obscure the divisions of the lots; the children of the boarders have found squawberries in the public square on the spot where the band-stand was to have been. The notion of a sea-side resort at this point was courageously conceived, and to a certain extent it was generously realized. Except for its remoteness from the railroad, a drawback which future enterprise might be expected to remedy in some way, the place has many natural advantages. The broad plateau is cooled by a breeze from the vast forests behind it, which comes laden with health and freshness from the young pines; the sea at its feet is warmed by the Gulf Stream to a temperature delicious for bathing. There are certainly mosquitoes from the woods; but there are mosquitoes everywhere, and the report that people have been driven away by them is manifestly untrue, for whoever comes to Jocelyn’s remains. The beach at the foot of the bluff is almost a mile at its curve, and it is so smooth and hard that it glistens like polished marble when newly washed by the tide. It is true that you reach it from the top by a flight of eighty steps, but it was intended to have an elevator, like those near the Whirlpool at Niagara. In the mean time it is easy enough to go down, and the ladies go down every day, taking their novels or their needle-work with them. They have various notions of a bath: some conceive that it is bathing to sit in the edge of the water, and emit shrieks as the surge sweeps against them; others run boldly in, and after a moment of poignant hesitation jump up and down half-a-dozen times, and run out; yet others imagine it better to remain immersed to the chin for a given space, looking toward the shore with lips tightly shut and the breath held. But after the bath they are all of one mind; they lay their shawls on the warm sand, and, spreading out their hair to dry, they doze in the sun, in such coils and masses as the unconscious figure lends itself to. When they rise from their beds, they sit in the shelter of the cliff and knit or sew, while one of them reads aloud, and another stands watch to announce the coming of the seals, which frequent a reef near the shore in great numbers. It has been said at rival points on the coast that the ladies linger there in despair of ever being able to remount to the hotel. A young man who clambered along the shore from one of those points reported finding day after day the same young lady stretched out on the same shawl, drying the same yellow hair, who had apparently never gone upstairs since the season began. But the recurrence of this phenomenon in this spot at the very moment when the young man came by might have been accounted for upon other theories. Jocelyn’s was so secluded that she could not have expected any one to find her there twice, and if she had expected this she would not have permitted it. Probably he saw a different young lady each time.
Many of the same boarders come year after year, and these tremble at the suggestion of a change for the better in Jocelyn’s. The landlord has always believed that Jocelyn’s would come up, some day, when times got better. He believes that the narrow-gauge railroad from New Leyden– arrested on paper at the disastrous moment when the fortunes of Jocelyn’s felt the general crash–will be pushed through yet; and every summer he promises that next summer they are going to have a steam-launch running twice a day from Leyden Harbor. But at present his house is visited once a day by a barge, as the New England coast-folks call the vehicle in which they convey city boarders to and from the station, and the old frequenters of the place hope that the station will never be nearer Jocelyn’s than at present. Some of them are rich enough to afford a sojourn at more fashionable resorts; but most of them are not, though they are often people of polite tastes and of aesthetic employments. They talk with slight of the large watering-places, and probably they would not like them, though it is really economy that inspires their passion for Jocelyn’s with most of them, and they know of the splendid. weariness of Newport mostly by hearsay. New arrivals are not favored, but there are not often new arrivals at Jocelyn’s. The chief business of the barge is to bring fresh meat for the table and the gaunt bag which contains the mail; for in the first flush of the enterprise the place was made a post-office, and the landlord is postmaster; he has the help of the lady-boarders in his official duties.
Scattered about among the young birches there are several of those pine frames known as shells, within easy walk of the hotel, where their inmates board. They are picturesque interiors, and are on informal terms with the public as to many domestic details. The lady of the house, doing her back hair at her dressing-room glass, is divided from her husband, smoking at the parlor fire-place, only by a partition of unlathed studding. The arrest of development in these shells is characteristic of everything about the place. None of the improvements invented since the hard times began have been added to Jocelyn’s; lawntennis is still unknown there; but there is a croquet-ground before the hotel, where the short, tough grass is kept in tolerable order. The wickets are pretty rusty, and it is usually the children who play; but toward the close of a certain, afternoon a young lady was pushing the balls about there. She seemed to be going over a game just played, and trying to trace the cause of her failure. She made bad shots, and laughed at her blunders. Another young lady drooped languidly on a bench at the side of the croquet-ground, and followed her movements with indifference.
“I don’t see how you did it, Louise,” panted the player; “it’s astonishing how you beat me.”
The lady on the bench made as if to answer, but ended by coughing hoarsely.
“Oh, dear child!” cried the first, dropping her mallet, and running to her. “You ought to have put on your shawl!” She lifted the knit shawl lying beside her on the bench, and laid it across the other’s shoulders, and drew it close about her neck.
“Oh, don’t!” said the other. “It chokes me to be bundled up so tight.” She shrugged the shawl down to her shoulders with a pretty petulance. “If my chest’s protected, that’s all that’s necessary.” But she made no motion to drape the outline which her neatly-fitted dress displayed, and she did not move from her place, or look up at her anxious friend.
“Oh, but don’t sit here, Louise,” the latter pleaded, lingering near her. “I was wrong to let you sit down at all after you had got heated.”
“Well, Grace, I had to,” said she who was called Louise. “I was so tired out. I’m not going to take more cold. I can always tell when I am. I’ll put on the shawl in half a minute; or else I’ll go in.”
“I’m sure there’s nothing to keep me out. That’s the worst of these lonely places: my mind preys upon itself. That’s what Dr. Nixon always said: he said it was no use in air so long as my mind preyed upon itself. He said that I ought to divert my mind all I could, and keep it from preying upon itself; that it was worth all the medicine in the world.”
“That’s perfectly true.”
“Then you ought n’t to keep reminding me all the time that I’m sick. That’s what starts my mind to preying upon itself; and when it gets going once I can’t stop it. I ought to treat myself just like a well person; that’s what the doctor said.”
The other stood looking at the speaker in frowning perplexity. She was a serious-faced girl, and now when she frowned her black brows met sternly above her gray eyes. But she controlled any impulse she had to severity, and asked gently, “Shall I send Bella to you?”
“Oh, no! I can’t make society out of a child the whole time. I’ll just sit here till the barge comes in. I suppose it will be as empty as a gourd, as usual.” She added, with a sick and weary negligence, “I don’t even know where Bella is. She’s run off, somewhere.”
“It’s quite time she should be looked up, for tea. I’ll wander out that way and look for her.” She indicated the wilderness generally.
“Thanks,” said Louise. She now gratefully drew her shawl up over her shoulders, and faced about on the bench so as to command an easy view of the arriving barge. The other met it on her way to the place in the woods where the children usually played, and found it as empty as her friend had foreboded. But the driver stopped his horses, and leaned out of the side of the wagon with a little package in his hand. He read the superscription, and then glanced consciously at the girl. “You’re Miss Breen, ain’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, with lady-like sweetness and a sort of business-like alertness.
“Well,” suggested the driver, “this is for Miss Grace Breen, M. D.”
“For me, thank you,” said the young lady. “I’m Dr. Breen.” She put out her hand for the little package from the homoeopathic pharmacy in Boston; and the driver yielded it with a blush that reddened him to his hair. “Well,” he said slowly, staring at the handsome girl, who did not visibly share his embarrassment, “they told me you was the one; but I could n’t seem to get it through me. I thought it must be the old lady.”
“My mother is Mrs. Breen,” the young lady briefly explained, and walked rapidly away, leaving the driver stuck in the heavy sand of Sea-Glimpse Avenue.
“Why, get up!” he shouted to his horses. “Goin’ to stay here all day?” He craned his neck round the side of the wagon for a sight of her. “Well, dumm ‘f I don’t wish I was sick! Steps along,” he mused, watching the swirl and ripple of her skirt, “like–I dunno what.”
With her face turned from him Dr. Breen blushed, too; she was not yet so used to her quality of physician that she could coldly bear the confusion to which her being a doctor put men. She laughed a little to herself at the helplessness of the driver, confronted probably for the first time with a graduate of the New York homoeopathic school; but she believed that she had reasons for taking herself seriously in every way, and she had not entered upon this career without definite purposes. When she was not yet out of her teens, she had an unhappy love affair, which was always darkly referred to as a disappointment by people who knew of it at the time. Though the particulars of the case do not directly concern this story, it may be stated that the recreant lover afterwards married her dearest girl-friend, whom he had first met in her company. It was cruel enough, and the hurt went deep; but it neither crushed nor hardened her. It benumbed her for a time; she sank out of sight; but when she returned to the knowledge of the world she showed no mark of the blow except what was thought a strange eccentricity in a girl such as she had been. The world which had known her–it was that of an inland New England city–heard of her definitely after several years as a student of medicine in New York. Those who had more of her intimacy understood that she had chosen this work with the intention of giving her life to it, in the spirit in which other women enter convents, or go out to heathen lands; but probably this conception had its exaggerations. What was certain was that she was rich enough to have no need of her profession as a means of support, and that its study had cost her more than the usual suffering that it brings to persons of sensitive nerves. Some details were almost insuperably repugnant; but in schooling herself to them she believed that she was preparing to encounter anything in the application of her science.
Her first intention had been to go back to her own town after her graduation, and begin the practice of her profession among those who had always known her, and whose scrutiny and criticism would be hardest to bear, and therefore, as she fancied, the most useful to her in the formation of character. But afterwards she relinquished her purpose in favor of a design which she thought would be more useful to others: she planned going to one of the great factory towns, and beginning practice there, in company with an older physician, among the children of the operatives. Pending the completion of this arrangement, which was waiting upon the decision of the other lady, she had come to Jocelyn’s with her mother, and with Mrs. Maynard, who had arrived from the West, aimlessly sick and unfriended, just as they were about leaving home. There was no resource but to invite her with them, and Dr. Breen was finding her first patient in this unexpected guest. She did not wholly regret the accident; this, too, was useful work, though not that she would have chosen; but her mother, after a fortnight, openly repined, and could not mention Mrs. Maynard without some rebellious murmur. She was an old lady, who had once kept a very vigilant conscience for herself; but after making her life unhappy with it for some threescore years, she now applied it entirely to the exasperation and condemnation of others. She especially devoted it to fretting a New England girl’s naturally morbid sense of duty in her daughter, and keeping it in the irritation of perpetual self-question. She had never actively opposed her studying medicine; that ambition had harmonized very well with certain radical tendencies of her own, and it was at least not marriage, which she had found tolerable only in its modified form of widowhood; but at every step after the decisive step was taken she was beset with misgivings lest Grace was not fully alive to the grave responsibilities of her office, which she accumulated upon the girl in proportion as she flung off all responsibilities of her own. She was doubtless deceived by that show of calm which sometimes deceived Grace herself, who, in tutoring her soul to bear what it had to bear, mistook her tense effort for spiritual repose, and scarcely realized through her tingling nerves the strain she was undergoing. In spite of the bitter experience of her life, she was still very ardent in her hopes of usefulness, very scornful of distress or discomfort to herself, and a little inclined to exact the heroism she was ready to show. She had a child’s severe morality, and she had hardly learned to understand that there is much evil in the world that does not characterize the perpetrators: she held herself as strictly to account for every word and deed as she held others, and she had an almost passionate desire to meet the consequence of her errors; till that was felt, an intolerable doom hung over her. She tried not to be impulsive; that was criminal in one of her calling; and she struggled for patience with an endeavor that was largely successful.
As to the effect of her career outside of herself, and of those whom her skill was to benefit, she tried to think neither arrogantly nor meanly. She would not entertain the vanity that she was serving what is called the cause of woman, and she would not assume any duties or responsibilities toward it. She thought men were as good as women; at least one man had been no worse than one woman; and it was in no representative or exemplary character that she had chosen her course. At the same time that she held these sane opinions, she believed that she had put away the hopes with the pleasures that might once have taken her as a young girl. In regard to what had changed the current of her life, she mentally asserted her mere nullity, her absolute non-existence. The thought of it no longer rankled, and that interest could never be hers again. If it had not been so much like affectation, and so counter to her strong aesthetic instinct, she might have made her dress somehow significant of her complete abeyance in such matters; but as it was she only studied simplicity, and as we have seen from the impression of the barge-driver she did not finally escape distinction in dress and manner. In fact, she could not have escaped that effect if she would; and it was one of the indomitable contradictions of her nature that she would not.
When she came back to the croquet-ground, leading the little girl by the hand, she found Mrs. Maynard no longer alone and no longer sad. She was chatting and laughing with a slim young fellow, whose gay blue eyes looked out of a sunburnt face, and whose straw hat, carried in his hand, exposed a closely shaven head. He wore a suit of gray flannel, and Mrs. Maynard explained that he was camping on the beach at Birkman’s Cove, and had come over in the steamer with her when she returned from Europe. She introduced him as Mr. Libby, and said, “Oh, Bella, you dirty little thing!”
Mr. Libby bowed anxiously to Grace, and turned for refuge to the little girl. “Hello, Bella!” “Hello!” said the child. “Remember me?” The child put her left hand on that of Grace holding her right, and prettily pressed her head against the girl’s arm in bashful silence. Grace said some coldly civil words to the young man: without looking at Mrs. Maynard, and passed on into the house.
“You don’t mean that’s your doctor?” he scarcely more than whispered.
“Yes, I do,” answered Mrs. Maynard. “Is n’t she too lovely? And she’s just as good! She used to stand up at school for me, when all the girls were down on me because I was Western. And when I came East, this time, I just went right straight to her house. I knew she could tell me exactly what to do. And that’s the reason I’m here. I shall always recommend this air to anybody with lung difficulties. It’s the greatest thing ! I’m almost another person. Oh, you need n’t look after her, Mr. Libby! There’s nothing flirtatious about Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard.
The young man recovered himself from his absentminded stare in the direction Grace had taken, with a frank laugh. “So much the better for a fellow, I should say!”
Grace handed the little girl over to her nurse, and went to her own room, where she found her mother waiting to go down to tea.
“Where is Mrs. Maynard?” asked Mrs. Breen.
“Out on the croquet-ground,” answered the daughter.
“I should think it would be damp,” suggested Mrs. Green.
“She will come in when the tea-bell rings. She wouldn’t come in now, if I told her.”
“Well,” said the elder lady, “for a person who lets her doctor pay her board, I think ‘she’s very independent.”
“I wish you would n’t speak of that, mother,” said the girl.
“I can’t help it, Grace. It’s ridiculous,–that’s what it is; it’s ridiculous.”
“I don’t see anything ridiculous in it. A physician need not charge anything unless he chooses, or she; and if I choose to make Louise my guest here it’s quite the same as if she were my guest at home.”
“I don’t like you to have such a guest,” said Mrs. Green. “I don’t see what claim she has upon your hospitality.”
“She has a double claim upon it,” Grace answered, with a flush. “She is in sickness and in trouble. I don’t see how she could have a better claim. Even if she were quite well I should consider the way she had been treated by her husband sufficient, and I should want to do everything I could for her.”
“I should want her to behave herself,” said Mrs. Breen dryly.
“How behave herself? What do you mean?” demanded Grace, with guilty heat.
“You know what I mean, Grace. A woman in her position ought to be more circumspect than any other woman, if she wants people to believe that her husband treated her badly.”
“We ought n’t to blame her for trying to forget her troubles. It’s essential to her recovery for her to be as cheerful as she can be. I know that she’s impulsive, and she’s free in her manners with strangers; but I suppose that’s her Westernism. She’s almost distracted. She was crying half the night, with her troubles, and kept Bella and me both awake.”
“Is Bella with her now?”
“No,” Grace admitted. “Jane’s getting her ready to go down with us. Louise is talking with a gentleman who came over on the steamer with her; he’s camping on the beach near here. I didn’t wait to hear particulars.”
When the nurse brought the little girl to their door, Mrs. Green took one hand and Grace the other, and they led her down to tea. Mrs. Maynard was already at table, and told them all about meeting Mr. Libby abroad.
Until the present time she and Grace had not seen each other since they were at school together in Southington, where the girl used to hear so much to the disadvantage of her native section that she would hardly have owned to it if her accent had not found her out. It would have been pleasanter to befriend another person, but the little Westerner suffered a veritable persecution, and that was enough to make Grace her friend. Shortly after she returned home from school she married, in that casual and tentative fashion in which so many marriages seem made. Grace had heard of her as travelling in Europe with her husband, from whom she was now separated. She reported that he had known Mr. Libby in his bachelor days, and that Mr. Libby had travelled with them. Mr. Maynard appeared to have left to Mr. Libby the arrangement of his wife’s pleasures, the supervision of her shopping, and the direction of their common journeys and sojourns; and it seemed to have been indifferent to him whether his friend was smoking and telling stories with him, or going with his wife to the opera, or upon such excursions as he had no taste for. She gave the details of the triangular intimacy with a frank unconsciousness; and after nine o’clock she returned from a moonlight walk on the beach with Mr. Libby.
Grace sat waiting for her at the little one’s bedside, for Bella had been afraid to go to sleep alone.
“How good you are!” cried Louise, in a grateful under-tone, as she came in. She kissed Grace, and choked down a cough with her hand over her mouth.
“Louise,” said Grace sternly, “this is shameful! You forget that you are married, and ill, too.”
“Oh, I’m ever so much better, to-night. The air’s just as dry! And you needn’t mind Mr. Libby. He’s such an old friend! Besides, I’m sure to gain the case.”
“No matter. Even as a divorced woman, you oughtn’t to go on in this way.”
“Well, I would n’t, with every one. But it’s quite different with Mr. Libby. And, besides, I have to keep my mind from preying on itself somehow.”
II.
Mrs. Maynard sat in the sun on the seaward-looking piazza of the hotel, and coughed in the warm air. She told the ladies, as they came out from breakfast, that she was ever so much better generally, but that she seemed to have more of that tickling in her throat. Each of them advised her for good, and suggested this specific and that; and they all asked her what Miss Breen was doing for her cough. Mrs. Maynard replied, between the paroxysms, that she did not know: it was some kind of powders. Then they said they would think she would want to try something active; even those among them who were homoeopathists insinuated a fine distrust of a physician of their own sex. “Oh, it’s nothing serious,” Mrs. Maynard explained. “It’s just bronchial. The air will do me more good than anything. I’m keeping out in it all I can.”
After they were gone, a queer, gaunt man came and glanced from the doorway at her. He had one eye in unnatural fixity, and the other set at that abnormal slant which is said to qualify the owner for looking round a corner before he gets to it. A droll twist of his mouth seemed partly physical, but: there is no doubt that he had often a humorous intention. It was Barlow, the man-of-all-work, who killed and plucked the poultry, peeled the potatoes and picked the peas, pulled the sweet-corn and the tomatoes, kindled the kitchen fire, harnessed the old splayfooted mare, –safe for ladies and children, and intolerable for all others, which formed the entire stud of the Jocelyn House stables,–dug the clams, rowed and sailed the boat, looked after the bath-houses, and came in contact with the guests at so many points that he was on easy terms with them all. This ease tended to an intimacy which he was himself powerless to repress, and which, from time to time, required their intervention. He now wore a simple costume of shirt and trousers, the latter terminated by a pair of broken shoes, and sustained by what he called a single gallows; his broad-brimmed straw hat scooped down upon his shoulders behind, and in front added to his congenital difficulty of getting people in focus. “How do you do, this morning, Mrs. Maynard?” he said.
“Oh, I’m first-rate, Mr. Barlow. What sort of day do you think it’s going to be for a sail?”
Barlow came out to the edge of the piazza, and looked at the sea and sky. “First-rate. Fog’s most burnt away now. You don’t often see a fog at Jocelyn’s after ten o’clock in the mornin’.”
He looked for approval to Mrs. Maynard, who said, “That’s so. The air’s just splendid. It ‘s doing everything for me.”
“It’s these pine woods, back o’ here. Every breath on ’em does ye good. It’s the balsam in it. D’ you ever try,” he asked, stretching his hand as far up the piazza-post as be could, and swinging into a conversational posture,–“d’ you ever try whiskey–good odd Bourbon whiskey–with white- pine chips in it?”
Mrs. Maynard looked up with interest, but, shaking her head, coughed for no.
“Well, I should like to have you try that.”
“What does it do?” she gasped, when she could get her breath.
“Well, it’s soothin’ t’ the cough, and it builds ye up, every ways. Why, my brother,” continued the factotum, “he died of consumption when I was a boy,–reg’lar old New England consumption. Don’t hardly ever hear of it any more, round here. Well, I don’t suppose there’s been a case of reg’lar old New England consumption–well, not the old New England kind –since these woods growed up. He used to take whiskey with white-pine chips in it; and I can remember hearin ’em say that it done him more good than all the doctor’s stuff. He’d been out to Demarary, and everywheres, and he come home in the last stages, and took up with this whiskey with whitepine chips in it. Well, it’s just like this, I presume it’s the balsam in the chips. It don’t make any difference how you git the balsam into your system, so ‘s ‘t you git it there. I should like to have you try whiskey with white-pine chips in it.”
He looked convincingly at Mrs. Maynard, who said she should like to try it. “It’s just bronchial with me, you know. But I should like to try it. I know it would be soothing; and I’ve always heard that whiskey was the very thing to build you up. But,” she added, lapsing from this vision of recovery, “I couldn’t take it unless Grace said so. She’d be sure to find it out.”
“Why, look here,” said Barlow. “As far forth as that goes, you could keep the bottle in my room. Not but what I believe in going by your doctor’s directions, it don’t matter who your doctor is. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against Miss Breen, you understand?”
“Oh, no!” cried Mrs. Maynard.
“I never see much nicer ladies than her and her mother in the house. But you just tell her about the whiskey with the white-pine chips in it. Maybe she never heard of it. Well, she hain’t had a great deal of experience yet.”
“No,” said Mrs. Maynard. “And I think she’ll be glad to hear of it. You may be sure I’ll tell her, Mr. Barlow. Grace is everything for the balsamic properties of the air, down here. That’s what she said; and as you say, it doesn’t matter how you get the balsam into your system, so you get it there.”
“No,” said the factotum, in a tone of misgiving, as if the repetition of the words presented the theory in a new light to him.
“What I think is, and what I’m always telling Grace,” pursued Mrs. Maynard, in that confidential spirit in which she helplessly spoke of her friends by their first names to every one, “that if I could once get my digestion all right, then the cough would stop of itself. The doctor said–Dr. Nixon, that is–that it was more than half the digestion any way. But just as soon as I eat anything–or if I over-eat a little–then that tickling in my throat begins, and then I commence coughing; and I’m back just where I was. It’s the digestion. I oughtn’t to have eaten that mince pie, yesterday.”
“No,” admitted Barlow. Then he said, in indirect defence of the kitchen, “I think you had n’t ought to be out in the night air,–well, not a great deal.”
“Well, I don’t suppose it does do me much good,” Mrs. Maynard said, turning her eyes seaward.
Barlow let his hand drop from the piazza post, and slouched in-doors; but he came out again as if pricked by conscience to return.
“After all, you know, it did n’t cure him.”
“What cure him?” asked Mrs. Maynard.
“The whiskey with the white-pine chips in it.”
“Cure who?”
“My brother.”
“Oh! Oh, yes! But mine’s only bronchial. I think it might do me good. I shall tell Grace about it.”
Barlow looked troubled, as if his success in the suggestion of this remedy were not finally a pleasure; but as Mrs. Maynard kept her eyes persistently turned from him, and was evidently tired, he had nothing for it but to go in-doors again. He met Grace, and made way for her on the threshold to pass out.
As she joined Mrs. Maynard, “Well, Grace,” said the latter, “I do believe you are right. I have taken some more cold. But that shows that it does n’t get worse of itself, and I think we ought to be encouraged by that. I’m going to be more careful of the night air after this.”
“I don’t think the night air was the worst thing about it, Louise,” said Grace bluntly.
“You mean the damp from the sand? I put on my rubbers.”
“I don’t mean the damp sand,” said Grace, beginning to pull over some sewing which she had in her lap, and looking down at it.
Mrs. Maynard watched her a while in expectation that she would say more, but she did not speak. “Oh–well!” she was forced to continue herself, “if you’re going to go on with that!”
“The question is,” said Grace, getting the thread she wanted, “whether you are going on with it.”
“Why, I can’t see any possible harm in it,” protested Mrs. Maynard. “I suppose you don’t exactly like my going with Mr. Libby, and I know that under some circumstances it would n’t be quite the thing. But did n’t I tell you last night how he lived with us in Europe? And when we were all coming over on the steamer together Mr. Libby and Mr. Maynard were together the whole time, smoking and telling stories. They were the greatest friends! Why, it isn’t as if he was a stranger, or an enemy of Mr. Maynard’s.”
Grace dropped her sewing into her lap. “Really, Louise, you’re incredible!” She looked sternly at the invalid; but broke into a laugh, on which Mrs. Maynard waited with a puzzled face. As Grace said nothing more, she helplessly resumed:–
“We did n’t expect to go down the cliff when he first called in the evening. But he said he would help me up again, and–he did, nicely. I was n’t exhausted a bit; and how I took more cold I can’t understand; I was wrapped up warmly. I think I took the cold when I was sitting there after our game of croquet, with my shawl off. Don’t you think so?” she wheedled.
“Perhaps,” said Grace.
“He did nothing but talk about you, Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard, with a sly look at the other. “He’s awfully afraid of you, and he kept asking about you.”
“Louise,” said the other, gravely ignoring these facts, “I never undertook the care of you socially, and I object very much to lecturing you. You are nearly as old as I am, and you have had a great deal more experience of life than I have.” Mrs. Maynard sighed deeply in assent. “But it does n’t seem to have taught you that if you will provoke people to talk of you, you must expect criticism. One after another you’ve told nearly every woman in the house your affairs, and they have all sympathized with you and pitied you. I shall have to be plain, and tell you that I can’t have them sneering and laughing at any one who is my guest. I can’t let you defy public opinion here.”
“Why, Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard, buoyed above offence at her friend’s words by her consciousness of the point she was about to make, “you defy public opinion yourself a good deal more than I do, every minute.”
“I? How do I defy it?” demanded Grace indignantly.
“By being a doctor.”
Grace opened her lips to speak, but she was not a ready person, and she felt the thrust. Before she could say anything Mrs. Maynard went on: “There isn’t one of them that does n’t think you’re much more scandalous than if you were the greatest flirt alive. But, I don’t mind them, and why should you?”
The serious girl whom she addressed was in that helpless subjection to the truth in which so many New England women pass their lives. She could not deny the truth which lurked in the exaggeration of these words, and it unnerved her, as the fact that she was doing what the vast majority of women considered unwomanly always unnerved her when she suffered herself to think of it. “You are right, Louise,” she said meekly and sadly. “They think as well of you as they do of me.”
“Yes, that’s just what I said!” cried Mrs. Maynard, glad of her successful argument.
But however disabled, her friend resumed: “The only safe way for you is to take the ground that so long as you wear your husband’s name you must honor it, no matter how cruel and indifferent to you he has been.”
“Yes,” assented Mrs. Maynard ruefully, “of course.”
“I mean that you must n’t even have the appearance of liking admiration, or what you call attentions. It’s wicked.”
“I suppose so,” murmured the culprit.
“You have been brought up to have such different ideas of divorce from what I have,” continued Grace, “that I don’t feel as if I had any right to advise you about what you are to do after you gain your suit.”
“I shall not want to get married again for one while; I know that much,” Mrs. Maynard interpolated self-righteously.
“But till you do gain it, you ought not to regard it as emancipating you in the slightest degree.”
“No,” came in sad assent from the victim of the law’s delays.
“And I want you to promise me that you won’t go walking with Mr. Libby any more; and that you won’t even see him alone, after this.”
“Why, but Grace!” cried Mrs. Maynard, as much in amazement as in annoyance. “You don’t seem to understand! Have n’t I told you he was a friend of the family? He’s quite as much Mr. Maynard’s friend as he is mine. I’m sure,” she added, “if I asked Mr. Libby, I should never think of getting divorced. He’s all for George; and it’s as much as I can do to put up with him.”
“No matter. That does n’t alter the appearance to people here. I don’t wish you to go with him alone any more.”
“Well, Grace, I won’t,” said Mrs. Maynard earnestly. “I won’t, indeed. And that makes me think: he wanted you to go along this morning.”
“To go along? Wanted me–What are you talking about?”
“Why, I suppose that’s his boat, out there, now.” Mrs. Maynard pointed to a little craft just coming to anchor inside the reef. “He said he wanted me to take a sail with him, this morning; and he said he would come up and ask you, too. I do hope you’ll go, Grace. It’s just as calm; and he always has a man with him to help sail the boat, so there is n’t the least danger.” Grace looked at her in silent sorrow, and Mrs. Maynard went on with sympathetic seriousness: “Oh! there’s one thing I want to ask you about, Grace: I don’t like to have any concealments from you.” Grace did not speak, but she permitted Mrs. Maynard to proceed: “Barlow recommended it, and he’s lived here a great while. His brother took it, and he had the regular old New England consumption. I thought I shouldn’t like to try it without your knowing it.”
“Try it? What are you talking about, Louise?”
“Why, whiskey with white-pine chips in it.”
Grace rose, and moved towards the door, with the things dropping from her lap. One of these was a spool, that rolled down the steps and out upon the sandy road. She turned to pursue it, and recovered it at the cost of dropping her scissors and thimble out of opposite sides of her skirt, which she had gathered up apronwise to hold her work. When she rose from the complicated difficulty, in which Mrs. Maynard had amiably lent her aid, she confronted Mr. Libby, who was coming towards them from the cliff. She gave him a stiff nod, and attempted to move away; but in turning round and about she had spun herself into the folds of a stout linen thread escaping from its spool. These gyves not only bound her skirts but involved her feet in an extraordinary mesh, which tightened at the first step and brought her to a standstill.
Mrs. Maynard began to laugh and cough, as Mr. Libby came to her friend’s help. He got the spool in his hand, and walked around her in the endeavor to free her; but in vain. She extended him the scissors with the stern passivity of a fate. “Cut it,” she commanded, and Mr. Libby knelt before her and obeyed. “Thanks,” she said, taking back the scissors; and now she sat down again, and began deliberately to put up her work in her handkerchief.
“I ‘ll go out and get my things. I won’t be gone half a minute, Mr. Libby,” said Mrs. Maynard, with her first breath, as she vanished indoors.
Mr. Libby leaned against the post lately occupied by the factotum in his talk with Mrs. Maynard, and looked down at Grace as she bent over her work. If he wished to speak to her, and was wavering as to the appropriate style of address for a handsome girl, who was at once a young lady and a physician, she spared him the agony of a decision by looking up at him suddenly.
“I hope,” he faltered, “that you feel like a sail, this morning? Did Mrs. Maynard–“
“I shall have to excuse myself,” answered Grace, with a conscience against saying she was sorry. “I am a very bad sailor.”
“Well, so am I, for that matter,” said Mr. Libby. “But it’s smooth as a pond, to-day.”
Grace made no direct response, and he grew visibly uncomfortable under the cold abstraction of the gaze with which she seemed to look through him. “Mrs. Maynard tells me you came over with her from Europe.”
‘Oh yes!” cried the young man, the light of pleasant recollection kindling in his gay eyes. “We had a good time. Maynard was along: he’s a first-rate fellow. I wish he were here.”
“Yes,” said Grace, “I wish so, too.” She did not know what to make of this frankness of the young man’s, and she did not know whether to consider him very depraved or very innocent. In her question she continued to stare at him, without being aware of the embarrassment to which she was putting him.
“I heard of Mrs. Maynard’s being here, and I thought I should find him, too. I came over yesterday to get him to go into the woods with us.”
Grace decided that this was mere effrontery. “It is a pity that he is not here,” she said; and though it ought to have been possible for her to go on and rebuke the young fellow for bestowing upon Mrs. Maynard the comradeship intended for her husband, it was not so. She could only look severely at him, and trust that he might conceive the intention which she could not express. She rebelled against the convention and against her own weakness, which would not let her boldly interfere in what she believed a wrong; she had defied society, in the mass, but here, with this man, whom as an atom of the mass she would have despised, she was powerless.
“Have you ever seen him?” Libby asked, perhaps clinging to Maynard because he was a topic of conversation in default of which there might be nothing to say.
“No,” answered Grace.
“He ‘s funny. He’s got lots of that Western humor, and he tells a story better than any man I ever saw. There was one story of his”–
“I have no sense of humor,” interrupted Grace impatiently. “Mr. Libby,” she broke out, “I ‘m sorry that you’ve asked Mrs. Maynard to take a sail with you. The sea air”–she reddened with the shame of not being able to proceed without this wretched subterfuge–“won’t do her any good.”
“Then,” said the young man, “you must n’t let her go.”
“I don’t choose to forbid her,” Grace began.
“I beg your pardon,” he broke in. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
He turned, and ran to the edge of the cliff, over which he vanished, and he did not reappear till Mrs. Maynard had rejoined Grace on the piazza.
“I hope you won’t mind its being a little rough, Mrs. Maynard,” he said, breathing quickly. “Adams thinks we’re going to have it pretty fresh before we get back.”
“Indeed, I don’t want to go, then!” cried Mrs. Maynard, in petulant disappointment, letting her wraps fall upon a chair.
Mr. Libby looked at Grace, who haughtily rejected a part in the conspiracy. “I wish you to go, Louise,” she declared indignantly. “I will take the risk of all the harm that comes to you from the bad weather.” She picked up the shawls, and handed them to Mr. Libby, on whom her eyes blazed their contempt and wonder. It cost a great deal of persuasion and insistence now to make Mrs. Maynard go, and he left all this to Grace, not uttering a word till he gave Mrs. Maynard his hand to help her down the steps. Then he said, “Well, I wonder what Miss Breen does want.”
“I ‘m sure I don’t know,” said the other. “At first she did n’t want me to go, this morning, and now she makes me. I do hope it is n’t going to be a storm.”
“I don’t believe it is. A little fresh, perhaps. I thought you might be seasick.”
“Don’t you remember? I’m never seasick! That’s one of the worst signs.”
“Oh, yes.”
“If I could be thoroughly seasick once, it would be the best thing I could do.”
“Is she capricious?” asked Mr. Libby.
“Grace?” cried Mrs. Maynard, releasing her hand half-way down the steps, in order to enjoy her astonishment without limitation of any sort. “Grace capricious!”
“Yes,” said Mr. Libby, “that’s what I thought. Better take my hand again,” and he secured that of Mrs. Maynard, who continued her descent. “I suppose I don’t understand her exactly. Perhaps she did n’t like my not calling her Doctor. I did n’t call her anything. I suppose she thought I was dodging it. I was. I should have had to call her Miss Breen, if I called her anything.”
“She wouldn’t have cared. She is n’t a doctor for the name of it.”
“I suppose you think it’s a pity?” he asked.
“What?”
“Her being a doctor.”
“I’ll tell her you say so.”
“No, don’t. But don’t you?”
“Well, I would n’t want to be one,” said Mrs. Mayward candidly.
“I suppose it’s all right, if she does it from a sense of duty, as you say,” he suggested.
“Oh, yes, she’s all right. And she’s just as much of a girl as anybody; though she don’t know it,” Mrs. Maynard added astutely. “Why would n’t she come with us? Were you afraid to ask her?”
“She said she was n’t a good sailor. Perhaps she thought we were too young. She must be older than you.”
“Yes, and you, too!” cried Mrs. Maynard, with good-natured derision.
“She doesn’t look old,” returned Mr. Libby.
“She’s twenty-eight. How old are you?”
“I promised the census-taker not to tell till his report came out.”
“What is the color of her hair?”
“Brown.”
“And her eyes?”
“I don’t know!”
“You had better look out, Mr. Libby!” said Mrs. Maynard, putting her foot on the ground at last.
They walked across the beach to where his dory lay, and Grace saw him pulling out to the sail boat before she went in from the piazza. Then she went to her mother’s room. The elderly lady was keeping indoors, upon a theory that the dew was on, and that it was not wholesome to go out till it was off. She asked, according to her habit when she met her daughter alone, “Where is Mrs. Maynard?”
“Why do you always ask that, mother?” retorted Grace, with her growing irritation in regard to her patient intensified by the recent interview. “I can’t be with her the whole time.”
“I wish you could,” said Mrs. Breen, with noncommittal suggestion.
Grace could not keep herself from demanding, “Why?” as her mother expected, though she knew why too well.
“Because she wouldn’t be in mischief then,” returned Mrs. Breen.
“She’s in mischief now!” cried the girl vehemently; “and it’s my fault! I did it. I sent her off to sail with that ridiculous Mr. Libby!”
“Why?” asked Mrs. Breen, in her turn, with unbroken tranquillity.
“Because I am a, fool, and I couldn’t help him lie out of his engagement with her.”
“Did n’t he want to go?”
“I don’t know. Yes. They both wanted me to go with them. Simpletons! And while she had gone up-stairs for her wraps I managed to make him understand that I did n’t wish her to go, either; and he ran down to his boat, and came back with a story about its going to be rough, and looked at me perfectly delighted, as if I should be pleased. Of course, then, I made him take her.”
“And is n’t it going to be rough?” asked Mrs. Green.
“Why, mother, the sea’s like glass.”
Mrs. Breen turned the subject. “You would have done better, Grace, to begin as you had planned. Your going to Fall River, and beginning practice there among those factory children, was the only thing that I ever entirely liked in your taking up medicine. There was sense in that. You had studied specially for it. You could have done good there.”
“Oh, yes,” sighed the girl, “I know. But what was I to do, when she came to us, sick and poor? I couldn’t turn my back on her, especially after always befriending her, as I used to, at school, and getting her to depend on me.”
“I don’t see how you ever liked her,” said Mrs. Breen.
“I never did like her. I pitied her. I always thought her a poor, flimsy little thing. But that ought n’t to make any difference, if she was in trouble.”
“No,” Mrs. Breen conceded, and in compensation Grace admitted something more on her side: “She’s worse than she used to be,–sillier. I don’t suppose she has a wrong thought; but she’s as light as foam.”
“Oh, it is n’t the wicked people who, do the harm,” said Mrs. Green.
“I was sure that this air would be everything for her; and so it would, with any ordinary case. But a child would take better care of itself. I have to watch her every minute, like a child; and I never know what she will do next.”
“Yes; it’s a burden,” said Mrs. Breen, with a sympathy which she had not expressed before. “And you’re a good girl, Grace,” she added in very unwonted recognition.
The grateful tears stole into the daughter’s eyes, but she kept a firm face, even after they began to follow one another down her cheeks. “And if Louise had n’t come, you know, mother, that I was anxious to have some older person with me when I went to Fall River. I was glad to have this respite; it gives me a chance to think. I felt a little timid about beginning alone.”
“A man would n’t,” Mrs. Breen remarked.
“No. I am not a man. I have accepted that; with all the rest. I don’t rebel against being a woman. If I had been a man, I should n’t have studied medicine. You know that. I wished to be a physician because I was a woman, and because–because–I had failed where–other women’s hopes are.” She said it out firmly, and her mother softened to her in proportion to the girl’s own strength. “I might have been just a nurse. You know I should have been willing to be that, but I thought I could be something more. But it’s no use talking.” She added, after an interval, in which her mother rocked to and fro with a gentle motion that searched the joints of her chair, and brought out its most plaintive squeak in pathetic iteration, and watched Grace, as she sat looking seaward through the open window, “I think it’s rather hard, mother, that you should be always talking as if I wished to take my calling mannishly. All that I intend is not to take it womanishly; but as for not being a woman about it, or about anything, that’s simply impossible. A woman is reminded of her insufficiency to herself every hour of the day. And it’s always a man that comes to her help. I dropped some things out of my lap down there, and by the time I had gathered them up I was wound round and round with linen thread so that I could n’t move a step, and Mr. Libby cut me loose. I could have done it myself, but it seemed right and natural that he should do it. I dare say he plumed himself upon his service to me, –that would be natural, too. I have things enough to keep me meek, mother!”
She did not look round at Mrs. Breen, who said, “I think you are morbid about it.”
“Yes. And I have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever people think of Louise’s giddiness, I’m, a great deal more scandalous to them than she is simply because I wish to do some good in the world, in a way that women have n’t done it, usually.”
“Now you are morbid.”
“Oh, yes! Talk about men being obstacles! It’s other women! There isn’t a woman in the house that would n’t sooner trust herself in the hands of the stupidest boy that got his diploma with me than she would in mine. Louise knows it, and she feels that she has a claim upon me in being my patient. And I ‘ve no influence with her about her conduct because she understands perfectly well that they all consider me much worse. She prides herself on doing me justice. She patronizes me. She tells me that I’m just as nice as, if I hadn’t ‘been through all that.'” Grace rose, and a laugh, which was half a sob, broke from her.
Mrs. Breen could not feel the humor of the predicament. “She puts you in a false position.”
“I must go and see where that poor little wretch of a child is,” said Grace, going out of the room. She returned in an hour, and asked her mother for the arnica. “Bella has had a bump,” she explained.
“Why, have you been all this time looking for her?
“No, I couldn’t find her, and I’ve been reading. Barlow has just brought her in. HE could find her. She fell out of a tree, and she’s frightfully bruised.”
She was making search on a closet shelf as she talked. When she reappeared with the bottle in her hand, her mother asked, “Is n’t it very hot and close?”
“Very,” said Grace.
“I should certainly think they would perish,” said Mrs. Breen, hazarding the pronoun, with a woman’s confidence that her interlocutor would apply it correctly.
When Grace had seen Bella properly bathed and brown-papered, and in the way to forgetfulness of her wounds in sleep, she came down to the piazza, and stood looking out to sea. The ladies appeared one by one over the edge of the cliff, and came up, languidly stringing their shawls after them, or clasping their novels to their bosoms.
“There isn’t a breath down there,” they said, one after another. The last one added, “Barlow says it’s the hottest day he’s ever seen here.”
In a minute Barlow himself appeared at the head of the steps with the ladies’ remaining wraps, and confirmed their report in person. “I tell you,” he said, wiping his forehead, “it’s a ripper.”
“It must be an awful day in town,” said one of the ladies, fanning herself with a newspaper.
“Is that to-day’s Advertiser, Mrs. Alger?” asked another.
“Oh, dear, no! yesterday’s. We sha’n’t have today’s till this afternoon. It shows what a new arrival you are, Mrs. Scott–your asking.”
“To be sure. But it’s such a comfort being where you can see the Advertiser the same morning. I always look at the Weather Report the first thing. I like to know what the weather is going to be.”
“You can’t at Jocelyn’s. You can only know what it’s been.”
“Well,” Barlow interposed, jealous for Jocelyn’s, “you can most al’ays tell by the look o’ things.”
“Yes,” said one of the ladies; “but I’d rather trust the Weather Report. It’s wonderful how it comes true. I don’t think there ‘s anything that you miss more in Europe than our American Weather Report.”
“I’m sure you miss the oysters,” said another.
“Yes,” the first admitted, “you do miss the oysters. It was the last of the R months when we landed in New York; and do you know what we did the first thing–? We drove to Fulton Market, and had one of those Fulton Market broils! My husband said we should have had it if it had been July. He used to dream of the American oysters when we were in Europe. Gentlemen are so fond of them.”
Barlow, from scanning the heavens, turned round and faced the company, which had drooped in several attitudes of exhaustion on the benching of the piazza. “Well, I can most al’ays tell about Jocelyn’s as good as the Weather Report. I told Mrs. Maynard here this mornin’ that the fog was goin’ to burn off.”
“Burn off?” cried Mrs. Alger. “I should think it had!” The other ladies laughed.
“And you’ll see,” added Barlow, “that the wind ‘ll change at noon, and we’ll have it cooler.”
“If it’s as hot on the water as it is here,” said Mrs. Scott, “I should think those people would get a sunstroke.”
“Well, so should I, Mrs. Scott,” cordially exclaimed a little fat lady, as if here at last were an opinion in which all might rejoice to sympathize.
“It’s never so hot on the water, Mrs. Merritt,” said Mrs. Alger, with the instructiveness of an old habitude.
“Well, not at Jocelyn’s,” suggested Barlow. Mrs. Alger stopped fanning herself with her newspaper, and looked at him. Upon her motion, the other ladies looked at Barlow. Doubtless he felt that his social acceptability had ceased with his immediate usefulness. But he appeared resolved to carry it off easily. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I must go and pick my peas.”
No one said anything to this. When the factotum had disappeared round the corner of the house, Mrs. Alger turned her head’ aside, and glanced downward with an air of fatigue. In this manner Barlow was dismissed from the ladies’ minds.
“I presume,” said young Mrs. Scott, with a deferential glance at Grace, “that the sun is good for a person with lung-difficulty.”
Grace silently refused to consider herself appealed to, and Mrs. Merritt said, “Better than the moon, I should think.”
Some of the others tittered, but Grace looked up at Mrs. Merritt and said, “I don’t think Mrs. Maynard’s case is so bad that she need be afraid of either.”
“Oh, I am so glad to hear it!” replied the other. She looked round, but was unable to form a party. By twos or threes they might have liked to take Mrs. Maynard to pieces; but no one cares to make unkind remarks before a whole company of people. Some of the ladies even began to say pleasant things about Mr. Libby, as if he were Grace’s friend.
“I always like to see these fair men when they get tanned,” said Mrs. Alger. “Their blue eyes look so very blue. And the backs of their necks–just like my boys!”
“Do you admire such a VERY fighting-clip as Mr. Libby has on?” asked Mrs. Scott.
“It must be nice for summer,” returned the elder lady.
“Yes, it certainly must,” admitted the younger.
“Really,” said another, “I wish I could go in the fighting-clip. One does n’t know what to do with one’s hair at the sea-side; it’s always in the way.”
“Your hair would be a public loss, Mrs. Frost,” said Mrs. Alger. The others looked at her hair, as if they had seen it now for the first time.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Frost, in a sort of flattered coo.
“Oh, don’t have it cut off!” pleaded a young girl, coming up and taking the beautiful mane, hanging loose after the bath, into her hand. Mrs. Frost put her arm round the girl’s waist, and pulled her down against her shoulder. Upon reflection she also kissed her.
Through a superstition, handed down from mother to daughter, that it is uncivil and even unkind not to keep saying something, they went on talking vapidities, where the same number of men, equally vacuous, would have remained silent; and some of them complained that the nervous strain of conversation took away all the good their bath had done them. Miss Gleason, who did not bathe, was also not a talker. She kept a bright- eyed reticence, but was apt to break out in rather enigmatical flashes, which resolved the matter in hand into an abstraction, and left the others with the feeling that she was a person of advanced ideas, but that, while rejecting historical Christianity, she believed in a God of Love. This Deity was said, upon closer analysis, to have proved to be a God of Sentiment, and Miss Gleason was herself a hero-worshiper, or, more strictly speaking, a heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, “Too bad!” or, “I don’t see how you keep- up?” and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was doing. She seemed to rejoice in keeping herself at a respectful distance, to which she breathlessly retired, as she did now, after waylaying her at the top of the stairs, and confidentially darting at her the words, “I’m so glad you don’t like scandal!”
III.
After dinner the ladies tried to get a nap, but such of them as re- appeared on the piazza later agreed that it was perfectly useless. They tested every corner for a breeze, but the wind had fallen dead, and the vast sweep of sea seemed to smoulder under the sun. “This is what Mr. Barlow calls having it cooler,” said Mrs. Alger.
“There are some clouds that look like thunderheads in the west,” said Mrs. Frost, returning from an excursion to the part of the piazza commanding that quarter.
“Oh, it won’t rain to-day,” Mrs. Alger decided.
“I thought there was always a breeze at Jocelyn’s,” Mrs. Scott observed, in the critical spirit of a recent arrival.
“There always is,” the other explained, “except the first week you’re here.”
A little breath, scarcely more than a sentiment of breeze, made itself felt. “I do believe the wind has changed,” said Mrs. Frost. “It’s east.” The others owned one by one that it was so, and she enjoyed the merit of a discoverer; but her discovery was rapidly superseded. The clouds mounted in the west, and there came a time when the ladies disputed whether they had heard thunder or not: a faction contended for the bowling alley, and another faction held for a wagon passing over the bridge just before you reached Jocelyn’s. But those who were faithful to the theory of thunder carried the day by a sudden crash that broke over the forest, and, dying slowly away among the low hills, left them deeply silent.
“Some one,” said Mrs. Alger, “ought to go for those children.” On this it appeared that there were two minds as to where the children were,– whether on the beach or in the woods.
“Was n’t that thunder, Grace?” asked Mrs. Breen, with the accent by which she implicated her daughter in whatever happened.
“Yes,” said Grace, from where she sat at her window, looking seaward, and waiting tremulously for her mother’s next question.
“Where is Mrs. Maynard?”
“She is n’t back, yet.”
“Then,” said Mrs. Breen, “he really did expect rough weather.”
“He must,” returned Grace, in a guilty whisper.
“It’s a pity,” remarked her mother, “that you made them go.”
“Yes.” She rose, and, stretching herself far out of the window, searched the inexorable expanse of sea. It had already darkened at the verge, and the sails of some fishing-craft flecked a livid wall with their white, but there was no small boat in sight.
“If anything happened to them,” her mother continued, “I should feel terribly for you.”
“I should feel terribly for myself,” Grace responded, with her eyes still seaward.
“Where do you think they went?”
“I did n’t ask,” said the girl. “I wouldn’t,” she added, in devotion to the whole truth.
“Well, it is all of the same piece,” said Mrs. Breen. Grace did not ask what the piece was. She remained staring at the dark wall across the sea, and spiritually confronting her own responsibility, no atom of which she rejected. She held herself in every way responsible,–for doubting that poor young fellow’s word, and then for forcing that reluctant creature to go with him, and forbidding by her fierce insistence any attempt of his at explanation; she condemned herself to perpetual remorse with even greater zeal than her mother would have sentenced her, and she would not permit herself any respite when a little sail, which she knew for theirs, blew round the point. It seemed to fly along just on the hither side of that mural darkness, skilfully tacking to reach the end of the-reef before the wall pushed it on the rocks. Suddenly, the long low stretch of the reef broke into white foam, and then passed from sight under the black wall, against which the little sail still flickered. The girl fetched a long, silent breath. They were inside the reef, in comparatively smooth water, and to her ignorance they were safe. But the rain would be coming in another moment, and Mrs. Maynard would be drenched; and Grace would be to blame for her death. She ran to the closet, and pulled down her mother’s India-rubber cloak and her own, and fled out-of-doors, to be ready on the beach with the wrap, against their landing. She met the other ladies on the stairs and in the hall, and they clamored at her; but she glided through them like something in a dream, and then she heard a shouting in her ear, and felt herself caught and held up against the wind.
“Where in land be you goin’, Miss Breen?”
Barlow, in a long, yellow oil-skin coat and sou’wester hat, kept pushing her forward to the edge of the cliff, as he asked.
“I’m going down to meet them!” she screamed.
“Well, I hope you WILL meet ’em. But I guess you better go back to the house. Hey? WUNT? Well; come along, then, if they ain’t past doctorin’ by the time they git ashore! Pretty well wrapped up, any way!” he roared; and she perceived that she had put on her waterproof and drawn the hood over her head.
Those steps to the beach had made her giddy when she descended with leisure for such dismay; but now, with the tempest flattening her against the stair-case, and her gossamer clutching and clinging to everysurface, and again twisting itself about her limbs, she clambered down as swiftly and recklessly as Barlow himself, and followed over the beach beside the men who were pulling a boat down the sand at a run.
“Let me get in!” she screamed. “I wish to go with you!”
“Take hold of the girl, Barlow!” shouted one of the men. “She’s crazy.”
He tumbled himself with four others into the boat, and they all struck out together through the froth and swirl of the waves. She tried to free herself from Barlow, so as to fling the waterproof into the boat. “Take this, then. She’ll be soaked through!”