Their Silver Wedding Journey Part 27

"Yes, if Sousa is an American name; I should have thought it was Portuguese."

"Now that sounds a little too much like General Triscoe's pessimism,"

said Mrs. March; and she added: "But whether we have any national melodies or not, we don't poke women out in the rain and keep them soaking!"

"No, we certainly don't," he a.s.sented, with such a well-studied effect of yielding to superior logic that Mrs. Adding screamed for joy.

The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, "I hope Rose isn't acting on my suggestion?"

"I hate to have you tease him, dearest," his wife interposed.

"Oh, no," the mother said, laughing still, but with a note of tenderness in her laugh, which dropped at last to a sigh. "He's too much afraid of lese-majesty, for that. But I dare say he couldn't stand the sight. He's queer."

"He's beautiful!" said Mrs. March.

"He's good," the mother admitted. "As good as the day's long. He's never given me a moment's trouble--but he troubles me. If you can understand!"

"Oh, I do understand!" Mrs. March returned. "By his innocence, you mean.

That is the worst of children. Their innocence breaks our hearts and makes us feel ourselves such dreadful old things."

"His innocence, yes," pursued Mrs. Adding, "and his ideals." She began to laugh again. "He may have gone off for a season of meditation and prayer over the misbehavior of these bicyclers. His mind is turning that way a good deal lately. It's only fair to tell you, Mr. March, that he seems to be giving up his notion of being an editor. You mustn't be disappointed."

"I shall be sorry," said the editor. "But now that you mention it, I think I have noticed that Rose seems rather more indifferent to periodical literature. I supposed he might simply have exhausted his questions--or my answers."

"No; it goes deeper than that. I think it's Europe that's turned his mind in the direction of reform. At any rate he thinks now he will be a reformer."

"Really! What kind of one? Not religious, I hope?"

"No. His reform has a religious basis, but its objects are social. I don't make it out, exactly; but I shall, as soon as Rose does. He tells me everything, and sometimes I don't feel equal to it, spiritually or even intellectually."

"Don't laugh at him, Mrs. Adding!" Mrs. March entreated.

"Oh, he doesn't mind my laughing," said the mother, gayly. Rose came shyly back into the room, and she said, "Well, did you rebuke those bad bicyclers?" and she laughed again.

"They're only a custom, too, Rose,", said March, tenderly. "Like the man resting while the women worked, and the Emperor, and all the rest of it."

"Oh, yes, I know," the boy returned.

"They ride modern machines, but they live in the tenth century. That's what we're always forgetting when we come to Europe and see these barbarians enjoying all our up-to-date improvements."

"There, doesn't that console you?" asked his mother, and she took him away with her, laughing back from the door. "I don't believe it does, a bit!"

"I don't believe she understands the child," said Mrs. March. "She is very light, don't you think? I don't know, after all, whether it wouldn't be a good thing for her to marry Kenby. She is very easygoing, and she will be sure to marry somebody."

She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, and he said, "You might put these ideas to her."

XL.

With the pa.s.sage of the days and weeks, the strange faces which had familiarized themselves at the springs disappeared; even some of those which had become the faces of acquaintance began to go. In the diminis.h.i.+ng crowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen; the sad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemed never to have quite got his bearings after his error with General Triscoe, seldom showed itself.

The Triscoes themselves kept out of the Marches' way, or they fancied so; Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their daily encounter.

It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-August, but at Carlsbad the sun was so late getting up over the hills that as people went to their breakfasts at the cafes up the valley of the Tepl they found him looking very obliquely into it at eight o'clock in the morning. The yellow leaves were thicker about the feet of the trees, and the gra.s.s was silvery gray with the belated dews. The breakfasters were fewer than they had been, and there were more little barefooted boys and girls with cups of red raspberries which they offered to the pa.s.sers with cries of "Himbeeren! Himbeeren!" plaintive as the notes of birds left songless by the receding summer.

March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and Mrs. Adding bought recklessly of it, and ate it under his eyes with their coffee and bread, pouring over it pots of clotted cream that the 'schone' Lili brought them. Rose pretended an indifference to it, which his mother betrayed was a sacrifice in behalf of March's inability.

Lili's delays in coming to be paid had been such that the Marches now tried to pay her when she brought their breakfast, but they sometimes forgot, and then they caught her whenever she came near them. In this event she liked to coquet with their impatience; she would lean against their table, and say: "Oh, no. You stay a little. It is so nice." One day after such an entreaty, she said, "The queen is here, this morning."

Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes. "The queen!"

"Yes; the young lady. Mr. Burnamy was saying she was a queen. She is there with her father." She nodded in the direction of a distant corner, and the Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and the general. "She is not seeming so gayly as she was being."

March smiled. "We are none of us so gayly as we were being, Lili. The summer is going."

"But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?" the girl asked, resting her tray on the corner of the table.

"No, I'm afraid he won't," March returned sadly.

"He was very good. He was paying the proprietor for the dishes that Augusta did break when she was falling down. He was paying before he went away, when he was knowing that the proprietor would make Augusta to pay."

"Ah!" said March, and his wife said, "That was like him!" and she eagerly explained to Mrs. Adding how good and great Burnamy had been in this characteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to add some pathetic facts about Augusta's poverty and grat.i.tude. "I think Miss Triscoe ought to know it. There goes the wretch, now!" she broke off.

"Don't look at him!" She set her husband the example of averting his face from the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middle aisle of the grove, and looking to the right and left for a vacant table. "Ugh! I hope he won't be able to find a single place."

Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, while Rose watched March's face with grave sympathy. "He certainly doesn't deserve one. Don't let us keep you from offering Miss Triscoe any consolation you can." They got up, and the boy gathered up the gloves, umbrella, and handkerchief which the ladies let drop from their laps.

"Have you been telling?" March asked his wife.

"Have I told you anything?" she demanded of Mrs. Adding in turn.

"Anything that you didn't as good as know, already?"

"Not a syllable!" Mrs. Adding replied in high delight. "Come, Rose!"

"Well, I suppose there's no use saying anything," said March, after she left them.

"She had guessed everything, without my telling her," said his wife.

"About Stoller?"

"Well-no. I did tell her that part, but that was nothing. It was about Burnamy and Agatha that she knew. She saw it from the first."

"I should have thought she would have enough to do to look after poor old Kenby."

"I'm not sure, after all, that she cares for him. If she doesn't, she oughtn't to let him write to her. Aren't you going over to speak to the Triscoes?"

"No, certainly not. I'm going back to the hotel. There ought to be some steamer letters this morning. Here we are, worrying about these strangers all the time, and we never give a thought to our own children on the other side of the ocean."

"I worry about them, too," said the mother, fondly. "Though there is nothing to worry about," she added.