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Georg Ebers - "The Elixir"

L. Muhlbach - "FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS FAMILY"

Richard F. Burton - "Supplemental Nights, Volume 4"

Gilbert Parker - "Embers, Volume 2."

Their Silver Wedding Journey

W >> William Dean Howells >> Their Silver Wedding Journey




Nearly ten days had passed before he left his room, and it was not till
then that he clearly saw how far affairs had gone with his daughter and
Burnamy, though even then his observance seemed to have anticipated
theirs. He found them in a quiet acceptance of the fortune which had
brought them together, so contented that they appeared to ask nothing
more of it. The divine patience and confidence of their youth might
sometimes have had almost the effect of indifference to a witness who had
seen its evolution from the moods of the first few days of their reunion
in Weimar. To General Triscoe, however, it looked like an understanding
which had been made without reference to his wishes, and had not been
directly brought to his knowledge.

"Agatha," he said, after due note of a gay contest between her and
Burnamy over the pleasure and privilege of ordering his supper sent to
his room when he had gone back to it from his first afternoon in the open
air, "how long is that young man going to stay in Weimar?"

"Why, I don't know!" she answered, startled from her work of beating the
sofa pillows into shape, and pausing with one of them in her hand. "I
never asked him." She looked down candidly into his face where he sat in
an easy-chair waiting for her arrangement of the sofa. "What makes you
ask?"

He answered with another question. "Does he know that we had thought of
staying here?"

"Why, we've always talked of that, haven't we? Yes, he knows it. Didn't
you want him to know it, papa? You ought to have begun on the ship, then.
Of course I've asked him what sort of place it was. I'm sorry if you
didn't want me to."

"Have I said that? It's perfectly easy to push on to Paris. Unless--"

"Unless what?" Agatha dropped the pillow, and listened respectfully. But
in spite of her filial attitude she could not keep her youth and strength
and courage from quelling the forces of the elderly man.

He said querulously, "I don't see why you take that tone with me. You
certainly know what I mean. But if you don't care to deal openly with me,
I won't ask you." He dropped his eyes from her face, and at the same time
a deep blush began to tinge it, growing up from her neck to her forehead.
"You must know--you're not a child," he continued, still with averted
eyes, "that this sort of thing can't go on... It must be something else,
or it mustn't be anything at all. I don't ask you for your confidence,
and you know that I've never sought to control you."

This was not the least true, but Agatha answered, either absently or
provisionally, "No."

"And I don't seek to do so now. If you have nothing that you wish to tell
me--"

He waited, and after what seemed a long time, she asked as if she had not
heard him, "Will you lie down a little before your supper, papa?"

"I will lie down when I feel like it," he answered. "Send August with the
supper; he can look after me."

His resentful tone, even more than his words, dismissed her, but she left
him without apparent grievance, saying quietly, "I will send August."




LXVII.

Agatha did not come down to supper with Burnamy. She asked August, when
she gave him her father's order, to have a cup of tea sent to her room,
where, when it came, she remained thinking so long that it was rather
tepid by the time she drank it.

Then she went to her window, and looked out, first above and next below.
Above, the moon was hanging over the gardened hollow before the Museum
with the airy lightness of an American moon. Below was Burnamy behind the
tubbed evergreens, sitting tilted in his chair against the house wall,
with the spark of his cigar fainting and flashing like an American
firefly. Agatha went down to the door, after a little delay, and seemed
surprised to find him there; at least she said, "Oh!" in a tone of
surprise.

Burnamy stood up, and answered, "Nice night."

"Beautiful!" she breathed. "I didn't suppose the sky in Germany could
ever be so clear."

"It seems to be doing its best."

"The flowers over there look like ghosts in the light," she said
dreamily.

"They're not. Don't you want to get your hat and wrap, and go over and
expose the fraud?"

"Oh," she answered, as if it were merely a question of the hat and wrap,
"I have them."

They sauntered through the garden walks for a while, long enough to have
ascertained that there was not a veridical phantom among the flowers, if
they had been looking, and then when they came to their accustomed seat,
they sat down, and she said, "I don't know that I've seen the moon so
clear since we left Carlsbad." At the last word his heart gave a jump
that seemed to lodge it in his throat and kept him from speaking, so that
she could resume without interruption, "I've got something of yours, that
you left at the Posthof. The girl that broke the dishes found it, and
Lili gave it to Mrs. March for you." This did not account for Agatha's
having the thing, whatever it was; but when she took a handkerchief from
her belt, and put out her hand with it toward him, he seemed to find that
her having it had necessarily followed. He tried to take it from her, but
his own hand trembled so that it clung to hers, and he gasped, "Can't you
say now, what you wouldn't say then?"

The logical sequence was no more obvious than be fore; but she apparently
felt it in her turn as he had felt it in his. She whispered back, "Yes,"
and then she could not get out anything more till she entreated in a
half-stifled voice, "Oh, don't!"

"No, no!" he panted. "I won't--I oughtn't to have done it--I beg your
pardon--I oughtn't to have spoken,--even--I--"

She returned in a far less breathless and tremulous fashion, but still
between laughing and crying, "I meant to make you. And now, if you're
ever sorry, or I'm ever too topping about anything, you can be perfectly
free to say that you'd never have spoken if you hadn't seen that I wanted
you to."

"But I didn't see any such thing," he protested. "I spoke because I
couldn't help it any longer."

She laughed triumphantly. "Of course you think so! And that shows that
you are only a man after all; in spite of your finessing. But I am going
to have the credit of it. I knew that you were holding back because you
were too proud, or thought you hadn't the right, or something. Weren't
you?" She startled him with the sudden vehemence of her challenge: "If
you pretend, that you weren't I shall never forgive you!"

"But I was! Of course I was. I was afraid--"

"Isn't that what I said?" She triumphed over him with another laugh, and
cowered a little closer to him, if that could be.

They were standing, without knowing how they had got to their feet; and
now without any purpose of the kind, they began to stroll again among the
garden paths, and to ask and to answer questions, which touched every
point of their common history, and yet left it a mine of inexhaustible
knowledge for all future time. Out of the sweet and dear delight of this
encyclopedian reserve two or three facts appeared with a present
distinctness. One of these was that Burnamy had regarded her refusal to
be definite at Carlsbad as definite refusal, and had meant never to see
her again, and certainly never to speak again of love to her. Another
point was that she had not resented his coming back that last night, but
had been proud and happy in it as proof of his love, and had always meant
somehow to let him know that she was torched by his trusting her enough
to come back while he was still under that cloud with Mr. Stoller. With
further logic, purely of the heart, she acquitted him altogether of wrong
in that affair, and alleged in proof, what Mr. Stoller had said of it to
Mr. March. Burnamy owned that he knew what Stoller had said, but even in
his present condition he could not accept fully her reading of that
obscure passage of his life. He preferred to put the question by, and
perhaps neither of them cared anything about it except as it related to
the fact that they were now each other's forever.

They agreed that they must write to Mr. and Mrs. March at once; or at
least, Agatha said, as soon as she had spoken to her father. At her
mention of her father she was aware of a doubt, a fear, in Burnamy which
expressed itself by scarcely more than a spiritual consciousness from his
arm to the hands which she had clasped within it. "He has always
appreciated you," she said courageously, "and I know he will see it in
the right light."

She probably meant no more than to affirm her faith in her own ability
finally to bring her father to a just mind concerning it; but Burnamy
accepted her assurance with buoyant hopefulness, and said he would see
General Triscoe the first thing in the morning.

"No, I will see him," she said, "I wish to see him first; he will expect
it of me. We had better go in, now," she added, but neither made any
motion for the present to do so. On the contrary, they walked in the
other direction, and it was an hour after Agatha declared their duty in
the matter before they tried to fulfil it.

Then, indeed, after they returned to the hotel, she lost no time in going
to her father beyond that which must be given to a long hand-pressure
under the fresco of the five poets on the stairs landing, where her ways
and Burnamy's parted. She went into her own room, and softly opened the
door into her father's and listened.

"Well?" he said in a sort of challenging voice.

"Have you been asleep?" she asked.

"I've just blown out my light. What has kept you?"

She did not reply categorically. Standing there in the sheltering dark,
she said, "Papa, I wasn't very candid with you, this afternoon. I am
engaged to Mr. Burnamy."

"Light the candle," said her father. "Or no," he added before she could
do so. "Is it quite settled?"

"Quite," she answered in a voice that admitted of no doubt. "That is, as
far as it can be, without you."

"Don't be a hypocrite, Agatha," said the general. "And let me try to get
to sleep. You know I don't like it, and you know I can't help it."

"Yes," the girl assented.

"Then go to bed," said the general concisely.

Agatha did not obey her father. She thought she ought to kiss him, but
she decided that she had better postpone this; so she merely gave him a
tender goodnight, to which he made no response, and shut herself into her
own room, where she remained sitting and staring out into the moonlight,
with a smile that never left her lips.

When the moon sank below the horizon, the sky was pale with the coming
day, but before it was fairly dawn, she saw something white, not much
greater than some moths, moving before her window. She pulled the valves
open and found it a bit of paper attached to a thread dangling from
above. She broke it loose and in the morning twilight she read the great
central truth of the universe:

"I love you. L. J. B."

She wrote under the tremendous inspiration:

"So do I. Don't be silly. A. T."

She fastened the paper to the thread again, and gave it a little twitch.
She waited for the low note of laughter which did not fail to flutter
down from above; then she threw herself upon the bed, and fell asleep.

It was not so late as she thought when she woke, and it seemed, at
breakfast, that Burnamy had been up still earlier. Of the three involved
in the anxiety of the night before General Triscoe was still respited
from it by sleep, but he woke much more haggard than either of the young
people. They, in fact, were not at all haggard; the worst was over, if
bringing their engagement to his knowledge was the worst; the formality
of asking his consent which Burnamy still had to go through was
unpleasant, but after all it was a formality. Agatha told him everything
that had passed between herself and her father, and if it had not that
cordiality on his part which they could have wished it was certainly not
hopelessly discouraging.

They agreed at breakfast that Burnamy had better have it over as quickly
as possible, and he waited only till August came down with the general's
tray before going up to his room. The young fellow did not feel more at
his ease than the elder meant he should in taking the chair to which the
general waved him from where he lay in bed; and there was no talk wasted
upon the weather between them.

"I suppose I know what you have come for, Mr. Burnamy," said General
Triscoe in a tone which was rather judicial than otherwise, "and I
suppose you know why you have come." The words certainly opened the way
for Burnamy, but he hesitated so long to take it that the general had
abundant time to add, "I don't pretend that this event is unexpected, but
I should like to know what reason you have for thinking I should wish you
to marry my daughter. I take it for granted that you are attached to each
other, and we won't waste time on that point. Not to beat about the bush,
on the next point, let me ask at once what your means of supporting her
are. How much did you earn on that newspaper in Chicago?"

"Fifteen hundred dollars," Burnamy answered, promptly enough.

"Did you earn anything more, say within the last year?"

"I got three hundred dollars advance copyright for a book I sold to a
publisher." The glory had not yet faded from the fact in Burnamy's mind.

"Eighteen hundred. What did you get for your poem in March's book?"

"That's a very trifling matter: fifteen dollars."

"And your salary as private secretary to that man Stoller?"

"Thirty dollars a week, and my expenses. But I wouldn't take that,
General Triscoe," said Burnamy.

General Triscoe, from his 'lit de justice', passed this point in silence.
"Have you any one dependent on you?"

"My mother; I take care of my mother," answered Burnamy, proudly.

"Since you have broken with Stoller, what are your prospects?"

"I have none."

"Then you don't expect to support my daughter; you expect to live upon
her means."

"I expect to do nothing of the kind!" cried Burnamy. "I should be
ashamed--I should feel disgraced--I should--I don't ask you--I don't ask
her till I have the means to support her--"

"If you were very fortunate," continued the general, unmoved by the young
fellow's pain, and unperturbed by the fact that he had himself lived upon
his wife's means as long as she lived, and then upon his daughter's, "if
you went back to Stoller--"

"I wouldn't go back to him. I don't say he's knowingly a rascal, but he's
ignorantly a rascal, and he proposed a rascally thing to me. I behaved
badly to him, and I'd give anything to undo the wrong I let him do
himself; but I'll never go back to him."

"If you went back, on your old salary," the general persisted pitilessly,
"you would be very fortunate if you brought your earnings up to
twenty-five hundred a year."

"Yes--"

"And how far do you think that would go in supporting my daughter on the
scale she is used to? I don't speak of your mother, who has the first
claim upon you."

Burnamy sat dumb; and his head which he had lifted indignantly when the
question was of Stoller, began to sink.

The general went on. "You ask me to give you my daughter when you haven't
money enough to keep her in gowns; you ask me to give her to a
stranger--"

"Not quite a stranger, General Triscoe," Burnamy protested. "You have
known me for three months at least, and any one who knows me in Chicago
will tell you--"

"A stranger, and worse than a stranger," the general continued, so
pleased with the logical perfection of his position that he almost
smiled, and certainly softened toward Burnamy. "It isn't a question of
liking you, Mr. Burnamy, but of knowing you; my daughter likes you; so do
the Marches; so does everybody who has met you. I like you myself. You've
done me personally a thousand kindnesses. But I know very little of you,
in spite of our three months' acquaintance; and that little is--But you
shall judge for yourself! You were in the confidential employ of a man
who trusted you, and you let him betray himself."

"I did. I don't excuse it. The thought of it burns like fire. But it
wasn't done maliciously; it wasn't done falsely; it was done
inconsiderately; and when it was done, it seemed irrevocable. But it
wasn't; I could have prevented, I could have stooped the mischief; and I
didn't! I can never outlive that."

"I know," said the general relentlessly, "that you have never attempted
any defence. That has been to your credit with me. It inclined me to
overlook your unwarranted course in writing to my daughter, when you told
her you would never see her again. What did you expect me to think, after
that, of your coming back to see her? Or didn't you expect me to know
it?"

"I expected you to know it; I knew she would tell you. But I don't excuse
that, either. It was acting a lie to come back. All I can say is that I
had to see her again for one last time."

"And to make sure that it was to be the last time, you offered yourself
to her."

"I couldn't help doing that."

"I don't say you could. I don't judge the facts at all. I leave them
altogether to you; and you shall say what a man in my position ought to
say to such a man as you have shown yourself."

"No, I will say." The door into the adjoining room was flung open, and
Agatha flashed in from it.

Her father looked coldly at her impassioned face. "Have you been
listening?" he asked.

"I have been hearing--"

"Oh!" As nearly as a man could, in bed, General Triscoe shrugged.

"I suppose I had, a right to be in my own room. I couldn't help hearing;
and I was perfectly astonished at you, papa, the cruel way you went on,
after all you've said about Mr. Stoller, and his getting no more than he
deserved."

"That doesn't justify me," Burnamy began, but she cut him short almost as
severely as she--had dealt with her father.

"Yes, it does! It justifies you perfectly! And his wanting you to falsify
the whole thing afterwards, more than justifies you."

Neither of the men attempted anything in reply to her casuistry; they
both looked equally posed by it, for different reasons; and Agatha went
on as vehemently as before, addressing herself now to one and now to the
other.

"And besides, if it didn't justify you, what you have done yourself
would; and your never denying it, or trying to excuse it, makes it the
same as if you hadn't done it, as far as you are concerned; and that is
all I care for." Burnamy started, as if with the sense of having heard
something like this before, and with surprise at hearing it now; and she
flushed a little as she added tremulously, "And I should never, never
blame you for it, after that; it's only trying to wriggle out of things
which I despise, and you've never done that. And he simply had to come
back," she turned to her father, "and tell me himself just how it was.
And you said yourself, papa--or the same as said--that he had no right to
suppose I was interested in his affairs unless he--unless--And I should
never have forgiven him, if he hadn't told me then that he that he had
come back because he--felt the way he did. I consider that that
exonerated him for breaking his word, completely. If he hadn't broken his
word I should have thought he had acted very cruelly and--and strangely.
And ever since then, he has behaved so nobly, so honorably, so
delicately, that I don't believe he would ever have said anything
again--if I hadn't fairly forced him. Yes! Yes, I did!" she cried at a
movement of remonstrance from Burnamy. "And I shall always be proud of
you for it." Her father stared steadfastly at her, and he only lifted his
eyebrows, for change of expression, when she went over to where Burnamy
stood, and put her hand in his with a certain childlike impetuosity. "And
as for the rest," she declared, "everything I have is his; just as
everything of his would be mine if I had nothing. Or if he wishes to take
me without anything, then he can have me so, and I sha'n't be afraid but
we can get along somehow." She added, "I have managed without a maid,
ever since I left home, and poverty has no terrors for me!"




LXVIII.

General Triscoe submitted to defeat with the patience which soldiers
learn. He did not submit amiably; that would have been out of character,
and perhaps out of reason; but Burnamy and Agatha were both so amiable
that they supplied good-humor for all. They flaunted their rapture in her
father's face as little as they could, but he may have found their serene
satisfaction, their settled confidence in their fate, as hard to bear as
a more boisterous happiness would have been.

It was agreed among them all that they were to return soon to America,
and Burnamy was to find some sort of literary or journalistic employment
in New York. She was much surer than he that this could be done with
perfect ease; but they were of an equal mind that General Triscoe was not
to be disturbed in any of his habits, or vexed in the tenor of his
living; and until Burnamy was at least self-supporting there must be no
talk of their being married.

The talk of their being engaged was quite enough for the time. It
included complete and minute auto-biographies on both sides, reciprocal
analyses of character, a scientifically exhaustive comparison of tastes,
ideas and opinions; a profound study of their respective chins, noses,
eyes, hands, heights, complexions, moles and freckles, with some account
of their several friends.

In this occupation, which was profitably varied by the confession of what
they had each thought and felt and dreamt concerning the other at every
instant since they met, they passed rapidly the days which the persistent
anxiety of General Triscoe interposed before the date of their leaving
Weimar for Paris, where it was arranged that they should spend a month
before sailing for New York. Burnamy had a notion, which Agatha approved,
of trying for something there on the New York-Paris Chronicle; and if he
got it they might not go home at once. His gains from that paper had eked
out his copyright from his book, and had almost paid his expenses in
getting the material which he had contributed to it. They were not so
great, however, but that his gold reserve was reduced to less than a
hundred dollars, counting the silver coinages which had remained to him
in crossing and recrossing frontiers. He was at times dimly conscious of
his finances, but he buoyantly disregarded the facts, as incompatible
with his status as Agatha's betrothed, if not unworthy of his character
as a lover in the abstract.

The afternoon before they were to leave Weimar, they spent mostly in the
garden before the Grand-Ducal Museum, in a conference so important that
when it came on to rain, at one moment, they put up Burnamy's umbrella,
and continued to sit under it rather than interrupt the proceedings even
to let Agatha go back to the hotel and look after her father's packing.
Her own had been finished before dinner, so as to leave her the whole
afternoon for their conference, and to allow her father to remain in
undisturbed possession of his room as long as possible.

What chiefly remained to be put into the general's trunk were his coats
and trousers, hanging in the closet, and August took these down, and
carefully folded and packed them. Then, to make sure that nothing had
been forgotten, Agatha put a chair into the closet when she came in, and
stood on it to examine the shelf which stretched above the hooks.

There seemed at first to be nothing on it, and then there seemed to be
something in the further corner, which when it was tiptoed for, proved to
be a bouquet of flowers, not so faded as to seem very old; the blue satin
ribbon which they were tied up with, and which hung down half a yard, was
of entire freshness except far the dust of the shelf where it had lain.

Agatha backed out into the room with her find in her hand, and examined
it near to, and then at arm's length. August stood by with a pair of the
general's trousers lying across his outstretched hands, and as Agatha
absently looked round at him, she caught a light of intelligence in his
eyes which changed her whole psychological relation to the withered
bouquet. Till then it had been a lifeless, meaningless bunch of flowers,
which some one, for no motive, had tossed up on that dusty shelf in the
closet. At August's smile it became something else. Still she asked
lightly enough, "Was ist loss, August?"

His smile deepened and broadened. "Fur die Andere," he explained.

Agatha demanded in English, "What do you mean by feardy ondery?"

"Oddaw lehdy."

"Other lady?" August nodded, rejoicing in big success, and Agatha closed
the door into her own room, where the general had been put for the time
so as to be spared the annoyance of the packing; then she sat down with
her hands in her lap, and the bouquet in her hands. "Now, August," she
said very calmly, "I want you to tell me-ich wunsche Sie zu mir
sagen--what other lady--wass andere Dame--these flowers belonged
to--diese Blumen gehorte zu. Verstehen Sie?"

August nodded brightly, and with German carefully adjusted to Agatha's
capacity, and with now and then a word or phrase of English, he conveyed
that before she and her Herr Father had appeared, there had been in
Weimar another American Fraulein with her Frau Mother; they had not
indeed staid in that hotel, but had several times supped there with the
young Herr Bornahmee, who was occupying that room before her Herr Father.
The young Herr had been much about with these American Damen, driving and
walking with them, and sometimes dining or supping with them at their
hotel, The Elephant. August had sometimes carried notes to them from the
young Herr, and he had gone for the bouquet which the gracious Fraulein
was holding, on the morning of the day that the American Damen left by
the train for Hanover.

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