CHAPTER XIII

When I reached the hotel I found Miss Gage at the door, and Kendricks coming out of the office toward her.

"Oh, here he is!" she called to him at sight of me.

"Where in the world have you been?" he demanded. "I had just found out from the clerk that you hadn't come in yet, and I was going back for you with a searchlight."

"Oh, I wasn't so badly lost as all that," I returned. "I missed you in the crowd at the door, but I knew you'd get home somehow, and so I came on without you. But my aged steps are not so quick as yours."

The words, mechanically uttered, suggested something, and I thought that if they were in for weirdness I would give them as much weirdness as they could ask for. "When you get along toward fifty you'll find that the foot you've still got out of the grave doesn't work so lively as it used. Besides, I was interested in the night effect. It's so gloriously dark; and I had a fine sense of isolation as I came along, as if I were altogether out of my epoch and my environment. I felt as if the earth was a sort of Flying Dutchman, and I was the only pa.s.senger. It was about the weirdest sensation I ever had. It reminded me, I don't know how, exactly of the feeling I had when I was young, and I saw the sunset one evening through the woods after a sleet-storm."

They stared at each other as I went on, and I could see Kendricks's fine eyes kindle with an imaginative appreciation of the literary quality of the coincidence. But when I added, "Did you ever read a poem about the end of the world by that City of Dreadful Night man?"

Miss Gage impulsively caught me by the coat lapel and shook me.

"Ah, it was you all the time! I knew there was somebody following us, and I might have KNOWN who it was!"

We all gave way in a gale of laughter, and sat down on the verandah and had our joke out in full recognition of the fact. When Kendricks rose to go at last, I said, "We won't say anything about this little incident to Mrs. March, hey?" And then they laughed again as if it were the finest wit in the world, and Miss Gage bade me a joyful good-night at the head of the stairs as she went off to her room and I to mine.

I found Mrs. March waiting up with a book; and as soon as I shut myself in with her she said, awfully, "What WERE you laughing so about?"

"Laughing? Did you hear me laughing?"

"The whole house heard you, I'm afraid. You certainly ought to have known better, Basil. It was very inconsiderate of you." And as I saw she was going on with more of that sort of thing, to divert her thoughts from my crime I told her the whole story. It had quite the effect I intended up to a certain point. She even smiled a little, as much as a woman could be expected to smile who was not originally in the joke.

"And they had got to comparing weird experiences?" she asked.

"Yes; the staleness of the thing almost made me sick. Do you remember when we first compared our weird experiences? But I suppose they will go on doing it to the end of time, and it will have as great a charm for the last man and woman as it had for Adam and Eve when they compared THEIR weird experiences."

"And was that what you were laughing at?"

"We were laughing at the wonderful case of telepathy I put up on them."

Mrs. March faced her open book down on the table before her, and looked at me with profound solemnity. "Well, then, I can tell you, my dear, it is no laughing matter. If they have got to the weird it is very serious; and her talking to him about her family, and his wanting to know about her father, that's serious too--far more serious than either of them can understand. I don't like it, Basil; we have got a terrible affair on our hands."

"Terrible?"

"Yes, terrible. As long as he was interested in her simply from a literary point of view, though I didn't like that either, I could put up with it; but now that he's got to telling her about himself, and exchanging weird experiences with her, it's another thing altogether. Oh, I never wanted Kendricks brought into the affair at all."

"Come now, Isabel! Stick to the facts, please."

"No matter! It was you that discovered the girl, and then something had to be done. I was perfectly shocked when you told me that Mr.

Kendricks was in town, because I saw at once that he would have to be got in for it; and now we have to think what we shall do."

"Couldn't we think better in the morning?"

"No; we must think at once. I shall not sleep to-night anyhow. My peace is gone. I shall have to watch them every instant."

"Beginning at this instant. Why not wait till you can see them?"

"Oh, you can't joke it away, my dear. If I find they are really interested in each other I shall have to speak. I am responsible."

"The young lady," I said, more to gain time than anything else, "seems quite capable of taking care of herself."

"That makes it all the worse. Do you think I care for her only?

It's Kendricks too that I care for. I don't know that I care for her at all."

"Oh, then I think we may fairly leave Kendricks to his own devices; and I'm not alarmed for Miss Gage either, though I do care for her a great deal."

"I don't understand how you can be so heartless about it, Basil,"

said Mrs. March, plaintively. "She is a young girl, and she has never seen anything of the world, and of course if he keeps on paying her attention in this way she can't help thinking that he is interested in her. Men never can see such things as women do. They think that, until a man has actually asked a girl to marry him, he hasn't done anything to warrant her in supposing that he is in love with her, or that she has any right to be in love with him."

"That is true; we can't imagine that she would be so indelicate."

"I see that you're determined to tease, my dear," said Mrs. March, and she took up her book with an air of offence and dismissal. "If you won't talk seriously, I hope you will think seriously, and try to realise what we've got in for. Such a girl couldn't imagine that we had simply got Mr Kendricks to go about with her from a romantic wish to make her have a good time, and that he was doing it to oblige us, and wasn't at all interested in her."

"It does look a little preposterous, even to the outsider," I admitted.

"I am glad you are beginning to see it in that light, my dear, and if you can think of anything to do by morning I shall be humbly thankful. _I_ don't expect to."

"Perhaps I shall dream of something," I said more lightly than I felt. "How would it do for you to have a little talk with her--a little motherly talk--and hint round, and warn her not to let her feelings run away with her in Kendricks's direction?" Mrs. March faced her book down in her lap, and listened as if there might be some reason in the nonsense I was talking. "You might say that he was a society man, and was in great request, and then intimate that there was a prior attachment, or that he was the kind of man who would never marry, but was really cold-hearted with all his sweetness, and merely had a pa.s.sion for studying character."

"Do you think that would do, Basil?" she asked.

"Well, I thought perhaps you might think so."

"I'm afraid it wouldn't," she sighed.

"All that we can do now is to watch them, and act promptly, if we see that they are really in love, either of them."

"I don't believe," I said, "that I should know that they were in love even if I saw it. I have forgotten the outward signs, if I ever knew them. Should he give her flowers? He's done it from the start; he's brought her boxes of Huyler candy, and lent her books; but I dare say he's been merely complying with our wishes in doing it. I doubt if lovers sigh nowadays. I didn't sigh myself, even in my time; and I don't believe any pa.s.sion could make Kendricks neglect his dress. He keeps his eyes on her all the time, but that may be merely an effort to divine her character. I don't believe I should know, indeed I don't."

"I shall," said Mrs. March.

CHAPTER XIV

We were to go the next day to the races, and I woke with more anxiety about the weather than about the lovers, or potential lovers. But after realising that the day was beautiful, on that large scale of loveliness which seems characteristic of the summer days at Saratoga, where they have them almost the size of the summer days I knew when I was a boy, I was sensible of a secondary worry in my mind, which presently related itself to Kendricks and Miss Gage.

It was a haze of trouble merely, however, such as burns off, like a morning fog, when the sun gets higher, and it was chiefly on my wife's account.

I suppose that the great difference between her conscience and one originating outside of New England (if any conscience can originate outside of New England) is that it cannot leave the moral government of the universe in the hands of divine Providence. I was willing to leave so many things which I could not control to the Deity, who probably could that she accused me of fatalism, and I was held to be little better than one of the wicked because I would not forecast the effects of what I did in the lives of others. I insisted that others were also probably in the hands of the somma sapienza e il primo amore, and that I was so little aware of the influence of other lives upon my own, even where there had been a direct and strenuous effort to affect me, that I could not readily believe others had swerved from the line of their destiny because of me.

Especially I protested that I could not hold myself guilty of misfortunes I had not intended, even though my faulty conduct had caused them. As to this business of Kendricks and Miss Gage, I denied in the dispute I now began tacitly to hold with Mrs. March's conscience that my conduct had been faulty. I said that there was no earthly harm in my having been interested by the girl's forlornness when I first saw her; that I did not do wrong to interest Mrs. March in her; that she did not sin in going shopping with Miss Gage and Mrs. Deering; that we had not sinned, either of us, in rejoicing that Kendricks had come to Saratoga, or in letting Mrs. Deering go home to her sick husband and leave Miss Gage on our hands; that we were not wicked in permitting the young fellow to help us make her have a good time. In this colloquy I did all the reasoning, and Mrs. March's conscience was completely silenced; but it rose triumphant in my miserable soul when I met Miss Gage at breakfast, looking radiantly happy, and disposed to fellowship me in an unusual confidence because, as I clearly perceived, of our last night's adventure. I said to myself bitterly that happiness did not become her style, and I hoped that she would get away with her confounded rapture before Mrs. March came down. I resolved not to tell Mrs. March if it fell out so, but at the same time, as a sort of atonement, I decided to begin keeping the sharpest kind of watch upon Miss Gage for the outward signs and tokens of love.

She said, "When you began to talk that way last night, Mr. March, it almost took my breath, and if you hadn't gone so far, and mentioned about the sunset through the sleety trees, I never should have suspected you."