XLII.
Eunice Mavering acknowledged Alice's first letter. She said that hermother read it aloud to them all, and had been delighted with the goodaccount she gave of Dan, and fascinated with all the story of theirdaily doings and sayings. She wished Eunice to tell Alice how fully sheappreciated her thoughtfulness of a sick old woman, and that she wasgoing to write herself and thank her. But Eunice added that Alice mustnot be surprised if her mother was not very prompt in this, and she sentmessages from all the family, affectionate for Alice, and polite for herfather and mother.
Alice showed Dan the letter, and he seemed to find nothing noticeable init. "She says your mother will write later," Alice suggested.
"Yes. You ought to feel very much complimented by that. Mother'sautographs are pretty uncommon," he said, smiling.
"Why, doesn't she write? Can't she? Does it tire her?" asked Alice.
"Oh yes, she can write, but she hates to. She gets Eunice or Minnie towrite usually."
"Dan," cried Alice intensely, "why didn't you tell me?"
"Why, I thought you knew it," he explained easily. "She likes to read,and likes to talk, but it bores her to write. I don't suppose I get morethan two or three pencil scratches from her in the course of a year. Shemakes the girls write. But you needn't mind her not writing. You may besure she's glad of your letters."
"It makes me seem very presumptuous to be writing to her when there's nochance of her answering," Alice grieved. "It's as if I had passed overyour sisters' heads. I ought to have written to them."
"Oh, well, you can do that now," said Dan soothingly.
"No. No, I can't do it now. It would be ridiculous." She was silent, andpresently she asked, "Is there anything else about your mother that Iought to know?" She looked at him with a sort of impending discipline inher eyes which he had learned to dread; it meant such a long course ofthings, such a very great variety of atonement and expiation for him,that he could not bring himself to confront it steadily.
His heart gave a feeble leap; he would have gladly told her all that wasin it, and he meant to do so at the right time, but this did not seemthe moment. "I can't say that there is," he answered coldly.
In that need of consecrating her happiness which Alice felt, she went agreat deal to church in those days. Sometimes she felt the need almostof defence against her happiness, and a vague apprehension mixed withit. Could it be right to let it claim her whole being, as it seemedto do? Than was the question which she once asked Dan, and it made himlaugh, and catch her to him in a rapture that served for the time, andthen left her to more morbid doubts. Evidently he could not follow herin them; he could not even imagine them; and while he was with herthey seemed to have no verity or value. But she talked them over veryhypothetically and impersonally with Miss Cotton, in whose sympathy theyresumed all their import, and gained something more. In the idealisationwhich the girl underwent in this atmosphere all her thoughts andpurposes had a significance which she would not of herself, perhaps,have attached to them. They discussed them and analysed them with asatisfaction in the result which could not be represented withoutan effect of caricature. They measured Alice's romance together, andevolved from it a sublimation of responsibility, of duty, of devotion,which Alice found it impossible to submit to Dan when he came with hissimple-hearted, single-minded purpose of getting Mrs. Pasmer out of theroom, and sitting down with his arm around Alice's waist. When he hadaccomplished this it seemed sufficient in itself, and she had to think,to struggle to recall things beyond it, above it. He could not be madeto see at such times how their lives could be more in unison thanthey were. When she proposed doing something for him which he knewwas disagreeable to her, he would not let her; and when she hintedat anything she wished him to do for her because she knew it wasdisagreeable to him, he consented so promptly, so joyously, that sheperceived he could not have given the least thought to it.
She felt every day that they were alien in their tastes and aims; theirpleasures were not the same, and though it was sweet, though it wascharming, to have him give up so willingly all his preferences, shefelt, without knowing that the time must come when this could not be so,that it was all wrong.
"But these very differences, these antagonisms, if you wish to call themso," suggested Miss Cotton, in talking Alice's misgivings over with her,"aren't they just what will draw you together more and more? Isn'tit what attracted you to each other? The very fact that you are suchperfect counterparts--"
"Yes," the girl assented, "that's what we're taught to believe." Shemeant by the novels, to which we all trust our instruction in suchmatters, and her doubt doubly rankled after she had put it to silence.
She kept on writing to Dan's mother, though more and more perfunctorily;and now Eunice and now Minnie Mavering acknowledged her letters. Sheknew that they must think she was silly, but having entered by Dan'sconnivance upon her folly, she was too proud to abandon it.
At last, after she had ceased to expect it, came a letter from hismother, not a brief note, but a letter which the invalid had evidentlytasked herself to make long and full, in recognition of Alice's kindnessin writing to her so much. The girl opened it, and, after a verifyingglance at the signature, began to read it with a thrill of tendertriumph, and the fond prevision of the greater pleasure of reading itagain with Dan.
But after reading it once through, she did not wait for him beforereading it again and again. She did this with bewilderment, intershotwith flashes of conviction, and then doubts of this conviction. When shecould misunderstand no longer, she rose quietly and folded the letter,and put it carefully back into its envelope and into her writing desk,where she sat down and wrote, in her clearest and firmest hand, thisnote to Mavering--
"I wish to see you immediately.
"ALICE PASMER."