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April Hopes, a novel by William Dean Howells |
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Chapter 25 |
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_ CHAPTER XXV She burst into the room where her mother sat looking over some housekeeping accounts. His kiss and his name were upon her lips; her soul was full of him. "Mamma!" she panted. Her mother did not look round. She could have had no premonition of the vital news that her daughter was bringing, and she went on comparing the first autumn month's provision bill with that of the last spring month, and trying to account for the difference. The silence, broken by the rattling of the two bills in her mother's hands as she glanced from one to the other through her glasses, seemed suddenly impenetrable, and the prismatic world of the girl's rapture burst like a bubble against it. There is no explanation of the effect outside of temperament and overwrought sensibilities. She stared across the room at her mother, who had not heard her, and then she broke into a storm of tears. "Alice!" cried her mother, with that sanative anger which comes to rescue women from the terror of any sudden shock. "What is the matter with you?--what do you mean?" She dropped both of the provision bills to the floor, and started toward her daughter. "Nothing--nothing! Let me go. I want to go to my room." She tried to reach the door beyond her mother. "Indeed you shall not!" cried Mrs. Pasmer. "I will not have you behaving so! What has happened to you? Tell me. You have frightened me half out of my senses." The girl gave up her efforts to escape, and flung herself on the sofa, with her face in the pillow, where she continued to sob. Her mother began to relent at the sight of her passion. As a woman and as a mother she knew her daughter, and she knew that this passion, whatever it was, must have vent before there could be anything intelligible between them. She did not press her with further question, but set about making her a little more comfortable on the sofa; she pulled the pillow straight, and dropped a light shawl over the girl's shoulders, so that she should not take cold. Then Mrs. Pasmer had made up her mind that Alice had met Mavering somewhere, and that this outburst was the retarded effect of seeing him. During the last six weeks she had assisted at many phases of feeling in regard to him, and knew more clearly than Alice herself the meaning of them all. She had been patient and kind, with the resources that every woman finds in herself when it is the question of a daughter's ordeal in an affair of the heart which she has favoured. The storm passed as quickly as it came, and Alice sat upright casting off the wraps. But once checked with the fact on her tongue, she found it hard to utter it. "What is it, Alice?--what is it?" urged her mother. "Nothing. I--Mr. Mavering--we met--I met him at the Museum, and--we're engaged! It's really so. It seems like raving, but it's true. He came with me to the door; I wouldn't let him come in. Don't you believe it? Oh, we are! indeed we are! Are you glad, mamma? You know I couldn't have lived without him." She trembled on the verge of another outbreak. Mrs. Pasmer sacrificed her astonishment in the interest of sanity, and returned quietly: "Glad, Alice! You know that I think he's the sweetest and best fellow in the world." "O mamma!" "But are you sure--" "Yes, Yes. I'm not crazy; it isn't a dream he was there--and I met him--I couldn't run away--I put out my hand; I couldn't help it--I thought I should give way; and he took it; and then--then we were engaged. I don't know what we said: I went in to look at the 'Joan of Arc' again, and there was no one else there. He seemed to feel just as I did. I don't know whether either of us spoke. But we, knew we were engaged, and we began to talk." Mrs. Pasmer began to laugh. To her irreverent soul only the droll side of the statement appeared. "Don't, mamma!" pleaded Alice piteously. "No, no; I won't. But I hope Dan Mavering will be a little more definite about it when I'm allowed to see him. Why couldn't he have come in with you?" "It would have killed me. I couldn't let him see me cry, and I knew I should break down." "He'll have to see you cry a great many times, Alice," said her mother, with almost unexampled seriousness. "Yes, but not yet--not so soon. He must think I'm very gloomy, and I want to be always bright and cheerful with him. He knows why I wouldn't let him come in; he knew I was going to have a cry." Mrs. Pasmer continued to laugh. "Don't, mamma!" pleaded Alice. "No, I won't," replied her mother, as before. "I suppose he was mystified. But now, if it's really settled between you, he'll be coming here soon to see your papa and me." "Yes--to-night." "Well, it's very sudden," said Mrs. Pasmer. "Though I suppose these things always seem so." "Is it too sudden?" asked Alice, with misgiving. "It seemed so to me when it was going on, but I couldn't stop it." Her mother laughed at her simplicity. "No, when it begins once, nothing can stop it. But you've really known each other a good while, and for the last six weeks at least you've known you own mind about him pretty clearly. It's a pity you couldn't have known it before." "Yes, that's what he says. He says it was such a waste of time. Oh, everything he says is perfectly fascinating!" Her mother laughed and laughed again. "What is it, mamma? Are you laughing at me?" "Oh no. What an idea!" "He couldn't seem to understand why I didn't say Yes the first time, if I meant it." She looked down dreamily at her hands in her lap, and then she said, with a blush and a start, "They're very queer, don't you think?" "Who?" "Young men." "Oh, very." "Yes," Alice went on musingly. "Their minds are so different. Everything they say and do is so unexpected, and yet it seems to be just right." Mrs. Pasmer asked herself if this single-mindedness was to go on for ever, but she had not the heart to treat it with her natural levity. Probably it was what charmed Mavering with the child. Mrs. Pasmer had the firm belief that Mavering was not single-minded, and she respected him for it. She would not spoil her daughter's perfect trust and hope by any of the cynical suggestions of her own dark wisdom, but entered into her mood, as such women are able to do, and flattered out of her every detail of the morning's history. This was a feat which Mrs. Pasmer enjoyed for its own sake, and it fully satisfied the curiosity which she naturally felt to know all. She did not comment upon many of the particulars; she opened her eyes a little at the notion of her daughter sitting for two or three hours and talking with a young man in the galleries of the Museum, and she asked if anybody they knew had come in. When she heard that there were only strangers, and very few of them, she said nothing; and she had the same consolation in regard to the walking back and forth in the Garden. She was so full of potential escapades herself, so apt to let herself go at times, that the fact of Alice's innocent self-forgetfulness rather satisfied a need of her mother's nature; she exulted in it when she learned that there were only nurses and children in the Garden. "And so you think you won't take up art this winter?" she said, when, in the process of her cross-examination, Alice had left the sofa and got as far as the door, with her hat in her hand and her sacque on her arm. "No." "And the Sisters of St. James--you won't join them either?" The girl escaped from the room. "Alice! Alice!" her mother called after her; she came back. "You haven't told me how he happened to be there." "Oh, that was the most amusing part of it. He had gone there to keep an appointment with two ladies from Portland. They were to take him up in their carriage and drive out to Cambridge, and when he saw me he forgot all about them." "And what became of them?" "We don't know. Isn't it ridiculous?" If it appeared other or more than this to Mrs. Pasmer, she did not say. She merely said, after a moment, "Well, it was certainly devoted, Alice," and let her go. _ |
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