Part 13

“It can’t be helped now,” returned the girl.

“But we shall see you again before you go?” Mrs. March asked of both.

“Well, I don’t know,” said the girl, with a look at Mrs. Deering, who now said—

“I guess so. We’ll let you know when we’re going.” And they got away rather stiffly.

“Why in the world, my dear,” I asked, “if you weren’t going to promote their stay, need you prolong the agony of their acquaintance?”

“Did you feel that about it too? Well, I wanted to ask you first if you thought it would do.”

“What do?”

“You know; get her a room here. Because if we do we shall have her literally on our hands as long as we are here. We shall have to have the whole care and responsibility of her, and I wanted you to feel just what you were going in for. You know very well I can’t do things by halves, and that if I undertake to chaperon this girl I shall chaperon her—”

“To the bitter end. Yes; I understand the conditions of your uncompromising conscience. But I don’t believe it will be any such killing matter. There are other semi-detached girls in the house; she could go round with them.”

We talked on, and, as sometimes happens, we convinced each other so thoroughly that she came to my ground and I went to hers. Then it was easier for us to come together, and after making me go to the clerk and find out that he had a vacant room, Mrs. March agreed with me that it would not do at all to have Miss Gage stay with us; the fact that there was a vacant room seemed to settle the question.

We were still congratulating ourselves on our escape when Mrs. Deering suddenly reappeared round our corner of the verandah. She was alone, and she looked excited.

“Oh, it isn’t anything,” she said in answer to the alarm that showed itself in Mrs. March’s face at sight of her. “I hope you won’t think it’s too presuming, Mrs. March, and I want you to believe that it’s something I have thought of by myself, and that Julia wouldn’t have let me come if she had dreamed of such a thing. I do hate so to take her back with me, now that she’s begun to have a good time, and I was wondering—wondering whether it would be asking too much if I tried to get her a room here. I shouldn’t exactly like to leave her in the hotel alone, though I suppose it would be perfectly proper; but Mr. Deering found out when he was trying to get rooms before that there were some young ladies staying by themselves here, and I didn’t want to ask the clerk for a room unless you felt just right about it.”

“Why, of course, Mrs. Deering. It’s a public house, like any other, and you have as much right—”

“But I didn’t want you to think that I would do it without asking you, and if it is going to be the least bit of trouble to you.” The poor thing while she talked stood leaning anxiously over toward Mrs. March, who had risen, and pressing the points of her fingers nervously together.

“It won’t, Mrs. Deering. It will be nothing but pleasure. Why, certainly. I shall be delighted to have Miss Gage here, and anything that Mr. March and I can do—Why, we had just been talking of it, and Mr. March has this minute got back from seeing the clerk, and she can have a very nice room. We had been intending to speak to you about it as soon as we saw you.”

I do not know whether this was quite true or not, but I was glad Mrs. March said it, from the effect it had upon Mrs. Deering. Tears of relief came into her eyes, and she said: “Then I can go home in the morning. I was going to stay on a day or two longer, on Julia’s account, but I didn’t feel just right about Mr. Deering, and now I won’t have to.”

There followed a flutter of polite offers and refusals, acknowledgments and disavowals, and an understanding that I would arrange it all, and that we would come to Mrs. Deering’s hotel after supper and see Miss Gage about the when and the how of her coming to us.

“Well, Isabel,” I said, after it was all over, and Mrs. Deering had vanished in a mist of happy tears, “I suppose this is what you call perfectly providential. Do you really believe that Miss Gage didn’t send her back?”

“I know she didn’t. But I know that she had to do it just the same as if Miss Gage had driven her at the point of the bayonet.”

I laughed at this tragical image. “Can she be such a terror?”

“She is an ideal. And Mrs. Deering is as afraid as death of her. Of course she has to live up to her. It’s probably been the struggle of her life, and I can quite imagine her letting her husband die before she would take Miss Gage back, unless she went back satisfied.”

“I don’t believe I can imagine so much as that exactly, but I can imagine her being afraid of Miss Gage’s taking it out of her somehow. Now she will take it out of us. I hope you realise that you’ve done it now, my dear. To be sure, you will have all your life to repent of your rashness.”

“I shall never repent,” Mrs. March retorted hardily. “It was the right thing, the only thing. We couldn’t have let that poor creature stay on, when she was so anxious to get back to her husband.”

“No.”

“And I confess, Basil, that I feel a little pity for that poor girl, too. It would have been cruel, it would have been fairly wicked, to let her go home so soon, and especially now.”

“Oh! And I suppose that by especially now, you mean Kendricks,” I said, and I laughed mockingly, as the novelists say. “How sick I am of this stale old love-business between young people! We ought to know better—we’re old enough; at least you are.”

She seemed not to feel the gibe. “Why, Basil,” she asked dreamily, “haven’t you any romance left in you?”

“Romance? Bah! It’s the most ridiculous unreality in the world. If you had so much sympathy for that stupid girl, in that poor woman in her anxiety about her disappointment, why hadn’t you a little for her sick husband? But a husband is nothing—when you have got him.”