Part 7 (1/2)
”And do you consider the statement valuable?” I asked, laughing out. ”You had better ask your young friend herself.”
Mrs. Nettlepoint stared. ”I couldn't do that.”
On which I was the more amused that I had to explain I was only amused.
”What does it signify now?”
”I thought you thought everything signified. You were so full,” she cried, ”of signification!”
”Yes, but we're further out now, and somehow in mid-ocean everything becomes absolute.”
”What else _can_ he do with decency?” Mrs. Nettlepoint went on. ”If, as my son, he were never to speak to her it would be very rude and you'd think that stranger still. Then _you_ would do what he does, and where would be the difference?”
”How do you know what he does? I haven't mentioned him for twenty-four hours.”
”Why, she told me herself. She came in this afternoon.”
”What an odd thing to tell you!” I commented.
”Not as she says it. She says he's full of attention, perfectly devoted--looks after her all the time. She seems to want me to know it, so that I may approve him for it.”
”That's charming; it shows her good conscience.”
”Yes, or her great cleverness.”
Something in the tone in which Mrs. Nettlepoint said this caused me to return in real surprise: ”Why what do you suppose she has in her mind?”
”To get hold of him, to make him go so far he can't retreat. To marry him perhaps.”
”To marry him? And what will she do with Mr. Porterfield?”
”She'll ask me just to make it all right to him--or perhaps you.”
”Yes, as an old friend”--and for a moment I felt it awkwardly possible.
But I put to her seriously: ”_Do_ you see Jasper caught like that?”
”Well, he's only a boy--he's younger at least than she.”
”Precisely; she regards him as a child. She remarked to me herself today, that is, that he's so much younger.”
Mrs. Nettlepoint took this in. ”Does she talk of it with you? That shows she has a plan, that she has thought it over!”
I've sufficiently expressed--for the interest of my anecdote--that I found an oddity in one of our young companions, but I was far from judging her capable of laying a trap for the other. Moreover my reading of Jasper wasn't in the least that he was catchable--could be made to do a thing if he didn't want to do it. Of course it wasn't impossible that he might be inclined, that he might take it--or already have taken it--into his head to go further with his mother's charge; but to believe this I should require still more proof than his always being with her. He wanted at most to ”take up with her” for the voyage. ”If you've questioned him perhaps you've tried to make him feel responsible,” I said to my fellow critic.
”A little, but it's very difficult. Interference makes him perverse. One has to go gently. Besides, it's too absurd--think of her age. If she can't take care of herself!” cried Mrs. Nettlepoint.
”Yes, let us keep thinking of her age, though it's not so prodigious. And if things get very bad you've one resource left,” I added.
She wondered. ”To lock her up in her cabin?”
”No--to come out of yours.”