April Hopes
Page 46
XLVI.
"He's up in his room, resting from the effort." She laughed nervously,and her father made no comment. He took off his articles, and then wentcreaking upstairs to Dan's room. But at the door he paused, with hishand on the knob, and turned away to his own room without entering.
Dan must have heard him; in a few minutes he came to him.
"Well, Dan," said his father, shaking hands.
"I suppose Eunice has told you? Well, I want to tell you why ithappened."
There was something in his father that always steadied Dan and kept himto the point. He now put the whole case fairly and squarely, and hiscandour and openness seemed to him to react and characterise his conductthroughout. He did not realise that this was not so till his fathersaid at the close, with mild justice, "You were to blame for letting thething run on so at loose ends."
"Yes, of course," said Dan, seeing that he was. "But there was nointention of deceiving any one of bad faith--"
"Of course not."
"I thought it could be easily arranged whenever it came to the point."
"If you'd been older, you wouldn't have thought that. You had women todeal with on both sides. But if it's all over, I'm not sorry. I alwaysadmired Miss Pasmer, but I've been more and more afraid you were notsuited to each other. Your mother doesn't know you're here?"
"No, sir, I suppose not. Do you think it will distress her?"
"How did your sisters take it?"
Dan gave a rueful laugh. "It seemed to be rather a popular move withthem."
"I will see your mother first," said the father.
He left them when they went into the library after supper, and a littlelater Dan and Eunice left Boardman in charge of Minnie there.
He looked after their unannounced withdrawal in comic consciousness."It's no use pretending that I'm not a pretty large plurality here," hesaid to Minnie.
"Oh, I'm so glad you came!" she cried, with a kindness which was as realas if it had been more sincere.
"Do you think mother will feel it much?" asked Dan anxiously, as he wentupstairs with Eunice.
"Well, she'll hate to lose a correspondent--such a regular one," saidEunice, and the affair being so far beyond any other comment, shelaughed the rest of the way to their mother's room.
The whole family had in some degree that foible which affects people wholead isolated lives; they come to think that they are the only peoplewho have their virtues; they exaggerate these, and they conceive akindness even for the qualities which are not their virtues. Mrs.Mavering's life was secluded again from the family seclusion, and theirpeculiarities were intensified in her. Besides, she had some verymarked peculiarities of her own, and these were also intensified bythe solitude to which she was necessarily left so much. She meditated agreat deal upon the character of her children, and she liked to analyseand censure it both in her own mind and openly in their presence. Shewas very trenchant and definite in these estimates of them; she likedto ticket them, and then ticket them anew. She explored their ancestralhistory on both sides for the origin of their traits, and there weretimes when she reduced them in formula to mere congeries of inheritedcharacteristics. If Eunice was self-willed and despotic, she was justlike her grandmother Mavering; if Minnie was all sentiment and gentlestubbornness, it was because two aunts of hers, one on either side,were exactly so; if Dan loved pleasure and beauty, and was sinuous anduncertain in so many ways, and yet was so kind and faithful and good, aswell as shilly-shallying and undecided, it was because her mother, andher mother's father, had these qualities in the same combination.
When she took her children to pieces before their faces, she wassharp and admonitory enough with them. She warned them to what theircharacters would bring them to if they did not look out; but perhapsbecause she beheld them so hopelessly the present effect of theaccumulated tendencies of the family past, she was tender and forgivingto their actions. The mother came in there, and superseded thestudent of heredity: she found excuse for them in the perversity ofcircumstance, in the peculiar hardship of the case, in the malignantmisbehaviour of others.
As Dan entered, with the precedence his father and sister yielded him asthe principal actor in the scene which must follow, she lifted herselfvigorously in bed, and propped herself on the elbow of one arm while shestretched the other towards him.
"I'm glad of it, Dan!" she called, at the moment he opened the door,and as he came toward her she continued, with the amazing velocity ofutterance peculiar to nervous sufferers of her sex: "I know all aboutit, and I don't blame you a bit! And I don't blame her! Poor helplessyoung things! But it's a perfect mercy it's all over; it's the greatestdeliverance I ever heard of! You'd have been eaten up alive. I saw it,and I knew it from the very first moment, and I've lived in fear andtrembling for you. You could have got on well enough if you'd been leftto yourselves, but that you couldn't have been nor hope to be as long asyou breathed, from the meddling and the machinations and the malice ofthat unscrupulous and unconscionable old Cat!"
By the time Mrs. Mavering had hissed out the last word she had her armround her boy's neck and was clutching him, safe and sound after hisperil, to her breast; and between her kissing and crying she repeatedher accusals and denunciations with violent volubility.
Dan could not have replied to them in that effusion of gratitude andtenderness he felt for his mother's partisanship; and when she went onin almost the very terms of his self-defence, and told him that he haddone as he had because it was easy for him to yield, and he could notimagine a Cat who would put her daughter up to entrapping him into apromise that she knew must break his mother's heart, he found her soright on the main point that he could not help some question of Mrs.Pasmer in his soul. Could she really have been at the bottom of it all?She was very sly, and she might be very false, and it was certainly shewho had first proposed their going abroad together. It looked as if itmight be as his mother said, and at any rate it was no time to disputeher, and he did not say a word in behalf of Mrs. Pasmer, whom shecontinued to rend in a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds till shehad to stop breathless.
"Yes! it's quite as I expected! She did everything she could to trap youinto it. She fairly flung that poor girl at you. She laid her plansso that you couldn't say no--she understood your character from thestart!--and then, when it came out by accident, and she saw that shehad older heads to deal with, and you were not going to be quite at hermercy, she dropped the mask in an instant, and made Alice break withyou. Oh, I could see through her from the beginning! And the next time,Dan, I advise you, as you never suspect anybody yourself, to consultwith somebody who doesn't take people for what they seem, and not to letyourself be flattered out of your sensor, even if you see your fatheris."
Mrs. Mavering dropped back on her pillow, and her husband smiledpatiently at their daughter.
Dan saw his patient smile and understood it; and the injustice which hisfather bore made him finally unwilling to let another remain under it.Hard as it was to oppose his mother in anything when she was praisinghim so sweetly and comforting him in the moment of his need, he pulledhimself together to protest: "No, no, mother! I don't think Mrs. Pasmerwas to blame; I don't believe she had anything to do with it. She'salways stood my friend--"
"Oh, I've no doubt she's made you think so, Dan," said his mother, withunabated fondness for him; "and you think so because you're so simpleand good, and never suspect evil of any one. It's this hideous optimismthat's killing everything--"
A certain note in the invalid's falling voice seemed to warn her hearersof an impending change that could do no one good. Eunice rose hastilyand interrupted: "Mother, Mr. Boardman's here. He came up with Dan. MayMinnie come in with him?"
Mrs. Mavering shot a glance of inquiry at Dan, and then let a swiftinspection range over all the details of the room, and finallyconcentrate itself on the silk and lace of her bed, over which shepassed a smoothing hand. "Mr. Boardman?" she cried, with instantlyrecovered amiability. "Of course she may!"
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