第79章 XXXVIII.(2)

"You've no right to give yourself away to that romantic old goose." He put up his hand to interrupt her protest. "This thing has got to be gone to the bottom of. But you're not to do it. I will see March myself. We must consider your dignity in this matter--and mine. And you may as well understand that I'm not going to have any nonsense. It's got to be managed so that it can't be supposed we're anxious about it, one way or the other, or that he was authorized to write to you in this way--"

"No, no! He oughtn't to have done so. He was to blame. He couldn't have written to you, though, papa--"

"Well, I don't know why. But that's no reason why we should let it be understood that he has written to you. I will see March; and I will manage to see his wife, too. I shall probably find them in the reading-room at Pupp's, and--"

"The Marches were in fact just coming in from their breakfast at the Posthof, and he met them at the door of Pupp's, where they all sat down on one of the iron settees of the piazza, and began to ask one another questions of their minds about the pleasure of the day before, and to beat about the bush where Burnamy lurked in their common consciousness.

Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting him. "You knew," she said, "that Mr. Burnamy had left us?"

"Left! Why?" asked the general.

She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this she found it best to trust her husband's poverty of invention. She looked at him, and he answered for her with a promptness that made her quake at first, but finally seemed the only thing, if not the best thing: "He's had some trouble with Stoller." He went on to tell the general just what the trouble was.

At the end the general grunted as from an uncertain mind. "You think he's behaved badly."

"I think he's behaved foolishly--youthfully. But I can understand how strongly he was tempted. He could say that he was not authorized to stop Stoller in his mad career."

At this Mrs. March put her hand through her husband's arm.

"I'm not so sure about that," said the general.

March added: "Since I saw him this morning, I've heard something that disposes me to look at his performance in a friendlier light. It's something that Stoller told me himself; to heighten my sense of Burnamy's wickedness. He seems to have felt that I ought to know what a serpent I was cherishing in my bosom," and he gave Triscoe the facts of Burnamy's injurious refusal to help Stoller put a false complexion on the opinions he had allowed him ignorantly to express.

The general grunted again. "Of course he had to refuse, and he has behaved like a gentleman so far. But that doesn't justify him in having let Stoller get himself into the scrape."

"No," said March. "It's a tough nut for the casuist to try his tooth on.

And I must say I feel sorry for Stoller."

Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm. "I don't, one bit. He was thoroughly selfish from first to last. He has got just what he deserved."

"Ah, very likely," said her husband. "The question is about Burnamy's part in giving him his deserts; he had to leave him to them, of course."

The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter of his eye-glasses, and left the subject as of no concern to him. "I believe," he said, rising, "I'll have a look at some of your papers," and he went into the reading-room.

"Now," said Mrs. March, "he will go home and poison that poor girl's mind. And, you will have yourself to thank for prejudicing him against Burnamy."

"Then why didn't you do it yourself, my dear?" he teased; but he was really too sorry for the whole affair, which he nevertheless enjoyed as an ethical problem.

The general looked so little at the papers that before March went off for his morning walk he saw him come out of the reading-room and take his way down the Alte Wiese. He went directly back to his daughter, and reported Burnamy's behavior with entire exactness. He dwelt upon his making the best of a bad business in refusing to help Stoller out of it, dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it was a bad business.

"Now, you know all about it," he said at the end, "and I leave the whole thing to you. If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March. I don't know but I'd rather you'd satisfy yourself--"

"I will not see Mrs. March. Do you think I would go back of you in that way? I am satisfied now."