"Did you get it?" asked his wife, without looking round, but not so apathetically as before.
"Oh, yes. That's all right. But now, Isabel, there's something I've got to tell you. You'd find it out, and you'd better know it at once."
She turned her face, and asked sternly, "What is it?"
Then he said, with, an almost equal severity, "Miss Triscoe is on board.
Miss Triscoe-and-her-father. She wishes to come down and see you."
Mrs. March sat up and began to twist her hair into shape. "And Burnamy?"
"There is no Burnamy physically, or so far as I can make out, spiritually. She didn't mention him, and I talked at least five minutes with her."
"Hand me my dressing-sack," said Mrs. March, "and poke those things on the sofa under the berth. Shut up that wash-stand, and pull the curtain across that hideous window. Stop! Throw those towels into your berth.
Put my shoes, and your slippers into the shoe-bag on the door. Slip the brushes into that other bag. Beat the dent out of the sofa cushion that your head has made. Now!"
"Then--then yon will see her?"
"See her!"
Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it, and he returned with Miss Triscoe in a dreamlike simultaneity. He remembered, as he led the way into his corridor, to apologize for bringing her down into a basement room.
"Oh, we're in the basement, too; it was all we could get," she said in words that ended within the state-room he opened to her. Then he went back and took her chair and wraps beside her father.
He let the general himself lead the way up to his health, which he was not slow in reaching, and was not quick in leaving. He reminded March of the state he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said it had gone from bad to worse with him. At Weimar he had taken to his bed and merely escaped from it with his life. Then they had tried Schevleningen for a week, where, he said in a tone of some injury, they had rather thought they might find them, the Marches. The air had been poison to him, and they had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth; but the doctor in London had thought not, and urged their going home. "All Europe is damp, you know, and dark as a pocket in winter," he ended.
There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decided that he must wait to see his wife if he wished to know anything, when the general, who had been silent, twisted his head towards him, and said without regard to the context, "It was complicated, at Weimar, by that young man in the most devilish way. Did my daughter write to Mrs. March about-- Well it came to nothing, after all; and I don't understand how, to this day. I doubt if they do. It was some sort of quarrel, I suppose. I wasn't consulted in the matter either way. It appears that parents are not consulted in these trifling affairs, nowadays." He had married his daughter's mother in open defiance of her father; but in the glare of his daughter's wilfulness this fact had whitened into pious obedience. "I dare say I shall be told, by-and-by, and shall be expected to approve of the result."
A fancy possessed March that by operation of temperamental laws General Triscoe was no more satisfied with Burnamy's final rejection than with his acceptance. If the engagement was ever to be renewed, it might be another thing; but as it stood, March divined a certain favor for the young man in the general's attitude. But the affair was altogether too delicate for comment; the general's aristocratic frankness in dealing with it might have gone farther if his knowledge had been greater; but in any case March did not see how he could touch it. He could only say, He had always liked Burnamy, himself.
He had his good qualities, the general owned. He did not profess to understand the young men of our time; but certainly the fellow had the instincts of a gentleman. He had nothing to say against him, unless in that business with that man--what was his name?
"Stoller?" March prompted. "I don't excuse him in that, but I don't blame him so much, either. If punishment means atonement, he had the opportunity of making that right very suddenly, and if pardon means expunction, then I don't see why that offence hasn't been pretty well wiped out.
"Those things are not so simple as they used to seem," said the general, with a seriousness beyond his wont in things that did not immediately concern his own comfort or advantage.
