Part 14 (1/2)

”I leave that entirely to your own conscience.”

”And if my conscience has no suggestion to make?”

”That's your affair.”

I reflected again, and then I said, more than anything to make her uncomfortable, I'm afraid: ”I feel perfectly easy in my conscience, personally, but I have a social duty in the matter, and I hope I shall perform it with more fidelity and courage than you have shown.

I shall speak to Kendricks.”

She said: ”That is just what you ought to do. I'm quite surprised.” After this touch of irony she added earnestly, ”And I do hope, my dear, you will use judgment in speaking to him, and tact. You mustn't go at it bluntly. Remember that Mr. Kendricks is not at all to blame. He began to show her attention to oblige us, and if she has fallen in love with him it is our fault.”

”I shall handle him without gloves,” I said. ”I shall tell him he had better go away.”

I was joking, but she said seriously, ”Yes; he must go away. And I don't envy you having to tell him. I suppose you will bungle it, of course.”

”Well, then, you must advise me,” I said; and we really began to consider the question. We could hardly exaggerate the difficulty and delicacy of the duty before me. We recognised that before I made any explicit demand of him I must first ascertain the nature of the whole ground and then be governed by the facts. It would be simple enough if I had merely to say that we thought the girl's affections were becoming engaged, and then appeal to his eager generosity, his delicate magnanimity; but there were possible complications on his side which must be regarded. I was to ascertain, we concluded, the exact nature of the situation before I ventured to say anything openly. I was to make my approaches by a series of ambushes before I unmasked my purpose, and perhaps I must not unmask it at all. As I set off on my mission, which must begin with finding Kendricks at his hotel, Mrs. March said she pitied me.

She called me back to ask whether I thought I had really better do anything. Then, as I showed signs of weakening, she drove me from her with, ”Yes, yes! You must! You must!”

CHAPTER XVII

It was still so early that I had my doubts whether I should find Kendricks up after the last night's revelry, but he met me half-way between our hotel and his. He said he was coming to see how Mrs.

March was bearing Miss Gage's immense success at the ball; but perhaps this was not his sole motive. He asked frankly how the young lady was, and whether I thought Mrs. March would consider a lunch at a restaurant by the lake a good notion. When I said I had very little doubt she would, and proposed taking a turn in the park before I went back with him, he looked at his watch and laughed, and said he supposed it WAS rather early yet, and came very willingly with me.

We had the pretty place almost to ourselves at that hour. There were a half-dozen or so nursemaids, pus.h.i.+ng their perambulators about, or standing the vehicles across the walk in front of the benches where they sat, in the simple belief of all people who have to do with babies that the rest of the world may be fitly discommoded in their behalf. But they did not actively molest us, and they scarcely circ.u.mscribed our choice of seats. We were by no means driven to the little kiosk in the lake for them, and I should rather say that we were fatefully led there, so apt were the a.s.sociations of the place to my purpose. Nothing could have been more natural than that I should say, as we sat down there, ”This was where I first saw Miss Gage with her friends”; and it was by a perfectly natural transition that I should go on to speak, in a semi-humorous strain, of the responsibility which Mrs. March and myself had incurred by letting our sympathy for her run away with us. I said I supposed that if we had not been willing from the first to try to realise for her some of the expectations we imagined she had in coming to Saratoga, she never would have fallen to our charge; that people really brought a great many more things upon themselves than they were willing to own; and that fate was perhaps more the fulfilment of our tacit ambitions than our overt acts.

This bit of philosophy, which I confess I thought fine, did not seem to impress Kendricks. He merely said that it must be great fun to have the chance of baffling the malice of circ.u.mstance in a case like that, and I perceived that he felt nothing complex in the situation. In fact, I doubt whether youth perceives anything complex in life. To the young, life is a very plain case. To be sure, they are much more alarmed than their elders at getting tangled up in its web at times, but that is because they have not had our experience in getting untangled, and think they are never going to get out alive. When they do, they think that it is the only tangle they are ever going to be in, and do not know that they are simply going on from one to another as long as there is enough of them left to be caught in a mesh. To Kendricks we Marches were simply two amiable people, who had fancied doing a pleasant thing for a beautiful girl that accident had thrown it in our power to befriend, and were by no means the trembling arbiters of her destiny we felt ourselves to be. The difference between his objective sense and my subjective sense was the difference between his twenty-seven years and my fifty-two, and while this remained I saw that it would be useless to try to get on common ground with him, or to give him our point of view. If I were to speak to him at all, it must be with authority, with the right of one who stood in the place of the girl's parents, and had her happiness at heart. That is, it was something like that; but my words say it too bluntly. I found myself beginning, ”I have rather had a notion that her father might come on, and take the enterprise off our hands,” though, to tell the truth, I had never imagined such a thing, which came into my head at that moment through an a.s.sociation with the thought of parents.

”Have you any idea what sort of man he is?” asked Kendricks.

”Oh, some little local magnate, president of the village and president of the village bank; I fancy the chief figure in the place, but probably as ignorant of our world as a Cherokee.”

”Well, I don't know,” said the young fellow. ”Do you think that follows because he doesn't live in it?” I could see that he did not quite like what I had said. ”I suppose ours is rather a small world.”

”The smallest of all worlds,” I answered. ”And in the eyes of Papa Gage, if they could once be focused upon it, our world would shrivel to an atom.”

”Do you think,” he asked, with a manifest anxiety, ”that it would in hers?”

”No; she is not the American people, and her father is, as I fancy him. I make out from the vague hints that Brother Deering (as Fulkerson would call him) dropped when he talked about him that Papa Gage is a shrewd, practical, home-keeping business man, with an eye single to the main chance, lavish, but not generous, Philistine to the backbone, blindly devoted to his daughter, and contemptuous of all the myriad mysteries of civilisation that he doesn't understand.

I don't know why I should be authorised to imagine him personally long and lank, with possibly a tobacco habit of some sort. His natural history, upon no better authority, is that of a hard-headed farmer, who found out that farming could never be more than a livelihood, and came into the village, and began to lend money, and get gain, till he was in a position to help found the De Witt Point National Bank, and then, by weight of his moneyed solidity, imposed himself upon the free and independent voters of the village--a majority of them under mortgage to him--and became its president.

It isn't a pleasant type, but it's ideally American.”

”Yes,” said Kendricks ruefully.

”But his daughter,” I continued, ”is probably altogether different.

There is something fine about her--really fine. Our world wouldn't shrivel in her eye; it would probably swell up and fill the universe,” I added by an impulse that came from nowhere irresistibly upon me: ”that is, if she could see YOU in it.”

”What do you mean?” he asked with a start.