LXI.

Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl and her mother off on the train which they were taking that evening for Frankfort and Hombourg, and strolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease with himself. While he was with the girl and near her he had felt the attraction by which youth impersonally draws youth, the charm which mere maid has for mere man; but once beyond the range of this he felt sick at heart and ashamed. He was aware of having used her folly as an anodyne for the pain which was always gnawing at him, and he had managed to forget it in her folly, but now it came back, and the sense that he had been reckless of her rights came with it. He had done his best to make her think him in love with her, by everything but words; he wondered how he could be such an a.s.s, such a wicked a.s.s, as to try making her promise to write to him from Frankfort; he wished never to see her again, and he wished still less to hear from her. It was some comfort to reflect that she had not promised, but it was not comfort enough to restore him to such fragmentary self-respect as he had been enjoying since he parted with Agatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not even get back to the resentment with which he had been staying himself somewhat before the pivotal girl unexpectedly appeared with her mother in Weimar.

It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no official observance of the holiday, perhaps because the Grand-Duke was away at the manoeuvres, with all the other German princes. Burnamy had hoped for some voluntary excitement among the people, at least enough to warrant him in making a paper about Sedan Day in Weimar, which he could sell somewhere; but the night was falling, and there was still no sign of popular rejoicing over the French humiliation twenty-eight years before, except in the mult.i.tude of j.a.panese lanterns which the children were everywhere carrying at the ends of sticks. Babies had them in their carriages, and the effect of the floating lights in the winding, up-and-down-hill streets was charming even to Burnamy"s lack-l.u.s.tre eyes. He went by his hotel and on to a cafe with a garden, where there was a patriotic, concert promised; he supped there, and then sat dreamily behind his beer, while the music banged and brayed round him unheeded.

Presently he heard a voice of friendly banter saying in English, "May I sit at your table?" and he saw an ironical face looking down on him.

"There doesn"t seem any other place."

"Why, Mr. March!" Burnamy sprang up and wrung the hand held out to him, but he choked with his words of recognition; it was so good to see this faithful friend again, though he saw him now as he had seen him last, just when he had so little reason to be proud of himself.

March settled his person in the chair facing Burnamy, and then glanced round at the joyful jam of people eating and drinking, under a firmament of lanterns. "This is pretty," he said, "mighty pretty. I shall make Mrs. March sorry for not coming, when I go back."

"Is Mrs. March--she is--with you--in Weimar?" Burnamy asked stupidly.

March forbore to take advantage of him. "Oh, yes. We saw you out at Belvedere this afternoon. Mrs. March thought for a moment that you meant not to see us. A woman likes to exercise her imagination in those little flights."

"I never dreamed of your being there--I never saw--" Burnamy began.

"Of course not. Neither did Mrs. Etkins, nor Miss Etkins; she was looking very pretty. Have you been here some time?"

"Not long. A week or so. I"ve been at the parade at Wurzburg."

"At Wurzburg! Ah, how little the world is, or how large Wurzburg is!

We were there nearly a week, and we pervaded the place. But there was a great crowd for you to hide in from us. What had I better take?" A waiter had come up, and was standing at March"s elbow. "I suppose I mustn"t sit here without ordering something?"

"White wine and selters," said Burnamy vaguely.

"The very thing! Why didn"t I think of it? It"s a divine drink: it satisfies without filling. I had it a night or two before we left home, in the Madison Square Roof Garden. Have you seen "Every Other Week"

lately?"

"No," said Burnamy, with more spirit than he had yet shown.

"We"ve just got our mail from Nuremberg. The last number has a poem in it that I rather like." March laughed to see the young fellow"s face light up with joyful consciousness. "Come round to my hotel, after you"re tired here, and I"ll let you see it. There"s no hurry. Did you notice the little children with their lanterns, as you came along?

It"s the gentlest effect that a warlike memory ever came to. The French themselves couldn"t have minded those innocents carrying those soft lights on the day of their disaster. You ought to get something out of that, and I"ve got a subject in trust for you from Rose Adding. He and his mother were at Wurzburg; I"m sorry to say the poor little chap didn"t seem very well. They"ve gone to Holland for the sea air." March had been talking for quant.i.ty in compa.s.sion of the embarra.s.sment in which Burnamy seemed bound; but he questioned how far he ought to bring comfort to the young fellow merely because he liked him. So far as he could make out, Burnamy had been doing rather less than nothing to retrieve himself since they had met; and it was by an impulse that he could not have logically defended to Mrs. March that he resumed. "We found another friend of yours in Wurzburg: Mr. Stoller."

"Mr. Stoller?" Burnamy faintly echoed.

"Yes; he was there to give his daughters a holiday during the manoeuvres; and they made the most of it. He wanted us to go to the parade with his family but we declined. The twins were pretty nearly the death of General Triscoe."

Again Burnamy echoed him. "General Triscoe?"

"Ah, yes: I didn"t tell you. General Triscoe and his daughter had come on with Mrs. Adding and Rose. Kenby--you remember Kenby, On the Norumbia?--Kenby happened to be there, too; we were quite a family party; and Stoller got the general to drive out to the manoeuvres with him and his girls."

Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed letting himself go. He did not know what he should say to Mrs. March when he came to confess having told Burnamy everything before she got a chance at him; he pushed on recklessly, upon the principle, which probably will not hold in morals, that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. "I have a message for you from Mr. Stoller."

"For me?" Burnamy gasped.

"I"ve been wondering how I should put it, for I hadn"t expected to see you. But it"s simply this: he wants you to know--and he seemed to want me to know--that he doesn"t hold you accountable in the way he did. He"s thought it all over, and he"s decided that he had no right to expect you to save him from his own ignorance where he was making a show of knowledge. As he said, he doesn"t choose to plead the baby act. He says that you"re all right, and your place on the paper is open to you."

Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now he seemed braced for instant response. "I think he"s wrong," he said, so harshly that the people at the next table looked round. "His feeling as he does has nothing to do with the fact, and it doesn"t let me out."

March would have liked to take him in his arms; he merely said, "I think you"re quite right, as to that. But there"s such a thing as forgiveness, you know. It doesn"t change the nature of what you"ve done; but as far as the sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it."

"Yes, I understand that. But I can"t accept his forgiveness if I hate him."

"But perhaps you won"t always hate him. Some day you may have a chance to do him a good turn. It"s rather ba.n.a.le; but there doesn"t seem any other way. Well, I have given you his message. Are you going with me to get that poem?"

When March had given Burnamy the paper at his hotel, and Burnamy had put it in his pocket, the young man said he thought he would take some coffee, and he asked March to join him in the dining-room where they had stood talking.

"No, thank you," said the elder, "I don"t propose sitting up all night, and you"ll excuse me if I go to bed now. It"s a little informal to leave a guest--"

"You"re not leaving a guest! I"m at home here. I"m staying in this hotel too."

March said, "Oh!" and then he added abruptly, "Good-night," and went up stairs under the fresco of the five poets.

"Whom were you talking with below?" asked Mrs. March through the door opening into his room from hers.

"Burnamy," he answered from within. "He"s staying in this house. He let me know just as I was going to turn him out for the night. It"s one of those little uncandors of his that throw suspicion on his honesty in great things."

"Oh! Then you"ve been telling him," she said, with a mental bound high above and far beyond the point.

"Everything."

"About Stoller, too?"

"About Stoller and his daughters, and Mrs. Adding and Rose and Kenby and General Triscoe--and Agatha."

"Very well. That"s what I call shabby. Don"t ever talk to me again about the inconsistencies of women. But now there"s something perfectly fearful."

"What is it?"

"A letter from Miss Triscoe came after you were gone, asking us to find rooms in some hotel for her and her father to-morrow. He isn"t well, and they"re coming. And I"ve telegraphed them to come here. Now what do you say?"

LXII.

They could see no way out of the trouble, and Mrs. March could not resign herself to it till her husband suggested that she should consider it providential. This touched the lingering superst.i.tion in which she had been ancestrally taught to regard herself as a means, when in a very tight place, and to leave the responsibility with the moral government of the universe. As she now perceived, it had been the same as ordered that they should see Burnamy under such conditions in the afternoon that they could not speak to him, and hear where he was staying; and in an inferior degree it had been the same as ordered that March should see him in the evening and tell him everything, so that she should know just how to act when she saw him in the morning. If he could plausibly account for the renewal of his flirtation with Miss Elkins, or if he seemed generally worthy apart from that, she could forgive him.

It was so pleasant when he came in at breakfast with his well-remembered smile, that she did not require from him any explicit defence. While they talked she was righting herself in an undercurrent of drama with Miss Triscoe, and explaining to her that they could not possibly wait over for her and her father in Weimar, but must be off that day for Berlin, as they had made all their plans. It was not easy, even in drama where one has everything one"s own way, to prove that she could not without impiety so far interfere with the course of Providence as to prevent Miss Triscoe"s coming with her father to the same hotel where Burnamy was staying. She contrived, indeed, to persuade her that she had not known he was staying there when she telegraphed them where to come, and that in the absence of any open confidence from Miss Triscoe she was not obliged to suppose that his presence would be embarra.s.sing.

March proposed leaving her with Burnamy while he went up into the town and interviewed the house of Schiller, which he had not done yet; and as soon as he got himself away she came to business, breaking altogether from the inner drama with Miss Triscoe and devoting herself to Burnamy.

They had already got so far as to have mentioned the meeting with the Triscoes in Wurzburg, and she said: "Did Mr. March tell you they were coming here? Or, no! We hadn"t heard then. Yes, they are coming to-morrow. They may be going to stay some time. She talked of Weimar when we first spoke of Germany on the ship." Burnamy said nothing, and she suddenly added, with a sharp glance, "They wanted us to get them rooms, and we advised their coming to this house." He started very satisfactorily, and "Do you think they would be comfortable, here?" she pursued.

"Oh, yes, very. They can have my room; it"s southeast; I shall be going into other quarters." She did not say anything; and "Mrs. March," he began again, "what is the use of my beating about the bush? You must know what I went back to Carlsbad for, that night--"