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The Europeans

by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #179 · 353,382 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Europeans

Author: Henry James


        
Release date: March 15, 2006 [eBook #179]
                Most recently updated: September 17, 2022

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EUROPEANS ***




The Europeans

by Henry James


CONTENTS

 CHAPTER I
 CHAPTER II
 CHAPTER III
 CHAPTER IV
 CHAPTER V
 CHAPTER VI
 CHAPTER VII
 CHAPTER VIII
 CHAPTER IX
 CHAPTER X
 CHAPTER XI
 CHAPTER XII




CHAPTER I


A narrow grave-yard in the heart of a bustling, indifferent city, seen
from the windows of a gloomy-looking inn, is at no time an object of
enlivening suggestion; and the spectacle is not at its best when the
mouldy tombstones and funereal umbrage have received the ineffectual
refreshment of a dull, moist snow-fall. If, while the air is thickened
by this frosty drizzle, the calendar should happen to indicate that the
blessed vernal season is already six weeks old, it will be admitted
that no depressing influence is absent from the scene. This fact was
keenly felt on a certain 12th of May, upwards of thirty years since, by
a lady who stood looking out of one of the windows of the best hotel in
the ancient city of Boston. She had stood there for half an hour—stood
there, that is, at intervals; for from time to time she turned back
into the room and measured its length with a restless step. In the
chimney-place was a red-hot fire which emitted a small blue flame; and
in front of the fire, at a table, sat a young man who was busily plying
a pencil. He had a number of sheets of paper cut into small equal
squares, and he was apparently covering them with pictorial
designs—strange-looking figures. He worked rapidly and attentively,
sometimes threw back his head and held out his drawing at arm’s-length,
and kept up a soft, gay-sounding humming and whistling. The lady
brushed past him in her walk; her much-trimmed skirts were voluminous.
She never dropped her eyes upon his work; she only turned them,
occasionally, as she passed, to a mirror suspended above the
toilet-table on the other side of the room. Here she paused a moment,
gave a pinch to her waist with her two hands, or raised these
members—they were very plump and pretty—to the multifold braids of her
hair, with a movement half caressing, half corrective. An attentive
observer might have fancied that during these periods of desultory
self-inspection her face forgot its melancholy; but as soon as she
neared the window again it began to proclaim that she was a very
ill-pleased woman. And indeed, in what met her eyes there was little to
be pleased with. The window-panes were battered by the sleet; the
head-stones in the grave-yard beneath seemed to be holding themselves
askance to keep it out of their faces. A tall iron railing protected
them from the street, and on the other side of the railing an
assemblage of Bostonians were trampling about in the liquid snow. Many
of them were looking up and down; they appeared to be waiting for
something. From time to time a strange vehicle drew near to the place
where they stood,—such a vehicle as the lady at the window, in spite of
a considerable acquaintance with human inventions, had never seen
before: a huge, low omnibus, painted in brilliant colors, and decorated
apparently with jangling bells, attached to a species of groove in the
pavement, through which it was dragged, with a great deal of rumbling,
bouncing and scratching, by a couple of remarkably small horses. When
it reached a certain point the people in front of the grave-yard, of
whom much the greater number were women, carrying satchels and parcels,
projected themselves upon it in a compact body—a movement suggesting
the scramble for places in a life-boat at sea—and were engulfed in its
large interior. Then the life-boat—or the life-car, as the lady at the
window of the hotel vaguely designated it—went bumping and jingling
away upon its invisible wheels, with the helmsman (the man at the
wheel) guiding its course incongruously from the prow. This phenomenon
was repeated every three minutes, and the supply of eagerly-moving
women in cloaks, bearing reticules and bundles, renewed itself in the
most liberal manner. On the other side of the grave-yard was a row of
small red brick houses, showing a series of homely, domestic-looking
backs; at the end opposite the hotel a tall wooden church-spire,
painted white, rose high into the vagueness of the snow-flakes. The
lady at the window looked at it for some time; for reasons of her own
she thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen. She hated it, she
despised it; it threw her into a state of irritation that was quite out
of proportion to any sensible motive. She had never known herself to
care so much about church-spires.

She was not pretty; but even when it expressed perplexed irritation her
face was most interesting and agreeable. Neither was she in her first
youth; yet, though slender, with a great deal of extremely
well-fashioned roundness of contour—a suggestion both of maturity and
flexibility—she carried her three and thirty years as a light-wristed
Hebe might have carried a brimming wine-cup. Her complexion was
fatigued, as the French say; her mouth was large, her lips too full,
her teeth uneven, her chin rather commonly modeled; she had a thick
nose, and when she smiled—she was constantly smiling—the lines beside
it rose too high, toward her eyes. But these eyes were charming: gray
in color, brilliant, quickly glancing, gently resting, full of
intelligence. Her forehead was very low—it was her only handsome
feature; and she had a great abundance of crisp dark hair, finely
frizzled, which was always braided in a manner that suggested some
Southern or Eastern, some remotely foreign, woman. She had a large
collection of ear-rings, and wore them in alternation; and they seemed
to give a point to her Oriental or exotic aspect. A compliment had once
been paid her, which, being repeated to her, gave her greater pleasure
than anything she had ever heard. “A pretty woman?” someone had said.
“Why, her features are very bad.” “I don’t know about her features,” a
very discerning observer had answered; “but she carries her head like a
pretty woman.” You may imagine whether, after this, she carried her
head less becomingly.

She turned away from the window at last, pressing her hands to her
eyes. “It’s too horrible!” she exclaimed. “I shall go back—I shall go
back!” And she flung herself into a chair before the fire.

“Wait a little, dear child,” said the young man softly, sketching away
at his little scraps of paper.

The lady put out her foot; it was very small, and there was an immense
rosette on her slipper. She fixed her eyes for a while on this
ornament, and then she looked at the glowing bed of anthracite coal in
the grate. “Did you ever see anything so hideous as that fire?” she
demanded. “Did you ever see anything so—so _affreux_ as—as everything?”
She spoke English with perfect purity; but she brought out this French
epithet in a manner that indicated that she was accustomed to using
French epithets.

“I think the fire is very pretty,” said the young man, glancing at it a
moment. “Those little blue tongues, dancing on top of the crimson
embers, are extremely picturesque. They are like a fire in an
alchemist’s laboratory.”

“You are too good-natured, my dear,” his companion declared.

The young man held out one of his drawings, with his head on one side.
His tongue was gently moving along his under-lip. “Good-natured—yes.
Too good-natured—no.”

“You are irritating,” said the lady, looking at her slipper.

He began to retouch his sketch. “I think you mean simply that you are
irritated.”

“Ah, for that, yes!” said his companion, with a little bitter laugh.
“It’s the darkest day of my life—and you know what that means.”

“Wait till tomorrow,” rejoined the young man.

“Yes, we have made a great mistake. If there is any doubt about it
today, there certainly will be none tomorrow. _Ce sera clair, au
moins!_”

The young man was silent a few moments, driving his pencil. Then at
last, “There are no such things as mistakes,” he affirmed.

“Very true—for those who are not clever enough to perceive them. Not to
recognize one’s mistakes—that would be happiness in life,” the lady
went on, still looking at her pretty foot.

“My dearest sister,” said the young man, always intent upon his
drawing, “it’s the first time you have told me I am not clever.”

“Well, by your own theory I can’t call it a mistake,” answered his
sister, pertinently enough.

The young man gave a clear, fresh laugh. “You, at least, are clever
enough, dearest sister,” he said.

“I was not so when I proposed this.”

“Was it you who proposed it?” asked her brother.

She turned her head and gave him a little stare. “Do you desire the
credit of it?”

“If you like, I will take the blame,” he said, looking up with a smile.

“Yes,” she rejoined in a moment, “you make no difference in these
things. You have no sense of property.”

The young man gave his joyous laugh again. “If that means I have no
property, you are right!”

“Don’t joke about your poverty,” said his sister. “That is quite as
vulgar as to boast about it.”

“My poverty! I have just finished a drawing that will bring me fifty
francs!”

_“Voyons,”_ said the lady, putting out her hand.

He added a touch or two, and then gave her his sketch. She looked at
it, but she went on with her idea of a moment before. “If a woman were
to ask you to marry her you would say, ‘Certainly, my dear, with
pleasure!’ And you would marry her and be ridiculously happy. Then at
the end of three months you would say to her, ‘You know that blissful
day when I begged you to be mine!’”

The young man had risen from the table, stretching his arms a little;
he walked to the window. “That is a description of a charming nature,”
he said.

“Oh, yes, you have a charming nature; I regard that as our capital. If
I had not been convinced of that I should never have taken the risk of
bringing you to this dreadful country.”

“This comical country, this delightful country!” exclaimed the young
man, and he broke into the most animated laughter.

“Is it those women scrambling into the omnibus?” asked his companion.
“What do you suppose is the attraction?”

“I suppose there is a very good-looking man inside,” said the young
man.

“In each of them? They come along in hundreds, and the men in this
country don’t seem at all handsome. As for the women—I have never seen
so many at once since I left the convent.”

“The women are very pretty,” her brother declared, “and the whole
affair is very amusing. I must make a sketch of it.” And he came back
to the table quickly, and picked up his utensils—a small
sketching-board, a sheet of paper, and three or four crayons. He took
his place at the window with these things, and stood there glancing
out, plying his pencil with an air of easy skill. While he worked he
wore a brilliant smile. Brilliant is indeed the word at this moment for
his strongly-lighted face. He was eight and twenty years old; he had a
short, slight, well-made figure. Though he bore a noticeable
resemblance to his sister, he was a better favored person: fair-haired,
clear-faced, witty-looking, with a delicate finish of feature and an
expression at once urbane and not at all serious, a warm blue eye, an
eyebrow finely drawn and excessively arched—an eyebrow which, if ladies
wrote sonnets to those of their lovers, might have been made the
subject of such a piece of verse—and a light moustache that flourished
upwards as if blown that way by the breath of a constant smile. There
was something in his physiognomy at once benevolent and picturesque.
But, as I have hinted, it was not at all serious. The young man’s face
was, in this respect, singular; it was not at all serious, and yet it
inspired the liveliest confidence.

“Be sure you put in plenty of snow,” said his sister. “_Bonté divine_,
what a climate!”

“I shall leave the sketch all white, and I shall put in the little
figures in black,” the young man answered, laughing. “And I shall call
it—what is that line in Keats?—Mid-May’s Eldest Child!”

“I don’t remember,” said the lady, “that mamma ever told me it was like
this.”

“Mamma never told you anything disagreeable. And it’s not like
this—every day. You will see that tomorrow we shall have a splendid
day.”

“_Qu’en savez-vous?_ Tomorrow I shall go away.”

“Where shall you go?”

“Anywhere away from here. Back to Silberstadt. I shall write to the
Reigning Prince.”

The young man turned a little and looked at her, with his crayon
poised. “My dear Eugenia,” he murmured, “were you so happy at sea?”

Eugenia got up; she still held in her hand the drawing her brother had
given her. It was a bold, expressive sketch of a group of miserable
people on the deck of a steamer, clinging together and clutching at
each other, while the vessel lurched downward, at a terrific angle,
into the hollow of a wave. It was extremely clever, and full of a sort
of tragi-comical power. Eugenia dropped her eyes upon it and made a sad
grimace. “How can you draw such odious scenes?” she asked. “I should
like to throw it into the fire!” And she tossed the paper away. Her
brother watched, quietly, to see where it went. It fluttered down to
the floor, where he let it lie. She came toward the window, pinching in
her waist. “Why don’t you reproach me—abuse me?” she asked. “I think I
should feel better then. Why don’t you tell me that you hate me for
bringing you here?”

“Because you would not believe it. I adore you, dear sister! I am
delighted to be here, and I am charmed with the prospect.”

“I don’t know what had taken possession of me. I had lost my head,”
Eugenia went on.

The young man, on his side, went on plying his pencil. “It is evidently
a most curious and interesting country. Here we are, and I mean to
enjoy it.”

His companion turned away with an impatient step, but presently came
back. “High spirits are doubtless an excellent thing,” she said; “but
you give one too much of them, and I can’t see that they have done you
any good.”

The young man stared, with lifted eyebrows, smiling; he tapped his
handsome nose with his pencil. “They have made me happy!”

“That was the least they could do; they have made you nothing else. You
have gone through life thanking fortune for such very small favors that
she has never put herself to any trouble for you.”

“She must have put herself to a little, I think, to present me with so
admirable a sister.”

“Be serious, Felix. You forget that I am your elder.”

“With a sister, then, so elderly!” rejoined Felix, laughing. “I hoped
we had left seriousness in Europe.”

“I fancy you will find it here. Remember that you are nearly thirty
years old, and that you are nothing but an obscure Bohemian—a penniless
correspondent of an illustrated newspaper.”

“Obscure as much as you please, but not so much of a Bohemian as you
think. And not at all penniless! I have a hundred pounds in my pocket.
I have an engagement to make fifty sketches, and I mean to paint the
portraits of all our cousins, and of all _their_ cousins, at a hundred
dollars a head.”

“You are not ambitious,” said Eugenia.

“You are, dear Baroness,” the young man replied.

The Baroness was silent a moment, looking out at the sleet-darkened
grave-yard and the bumping horse-cars. “Yes, I am ambitious,” she said
at last. “And my ambition has brought me to this dreadful place!” She
glanced about her—the room had a certain vulgar nudity; the bed and the
window were curtainless—and she gave a little passionate sigh. “Poor
old ambition!” she exclaimed. Then she flung herself down upon a sofa
which stood near against the wall, and covered her face with her hands.

Her brother went on with his drawing, rapidly and skillfully; after
some moments he sat down beside her and showed her his sketch. “Now,
don’t you think that’s pretty good for an obscure Bohemian?” he asked.
“I have knocked off another fifty francs.”

Eugenia glanced at the little picture as he laid it on her lap. “Yes,
it is very clever,” she said. And in a moment she added, “Do you
suppose our cousins do that?”

“Do what?”

“Get into those things, and look like that.”

Felix meditated awhile. “I really can’t say. It will be interesting to
discover.”

“Oh, the rich people can’t!” said the Baroness.

“Are you very sure they are rich?” asked Felix, lightly.

His sister slowly turned in her place, looking at him. “Heavenly
powers!” she murmured. “You have a way of bringing out things!”

“It will certainly be much pleasanter if they are rich,” Felix
declared.

“Do you suppose if I had not known they were rich I would ever have
come?”

The young man met his sister’s somewhat peremptory eye with his bright,
contented glance. “Yes, it certainly will be pleasanter,” he repeated.

“That is all I expect of them,” said the Baroness. “I don’t count upon
their being clever or friendly—at first—or elegant or interesting. But
I assure you I insist upon their being rich.”

Felix leaned his head upon the back of the sofa and looked awhile at
the oblong patch of sky to which the window served as frame. The snow
was ceasing; it seemed to him that the sky had begun to brighten. “I
count upon their being rich,” he said at last, “and powerful, and
clever, and friendly, and elegant, and interesting, and generally
delightful! _Tu vas voir_.” And he bent forward and kissed his sister.
“Look there!” he went on. “As a portent, even while I speak, the sky is
turning the color of gold; the day is going to be splendid.”

And indeed, within five minutes the weather had changed. The sun broke
out through the snow-clouds and jumped into the Baroness’s room.
“_Bonté divine_,” exclaimed this lady, “what a climate!”

“We will go out and see the world,” said Felix.

And after a while they went out. The air had grown warm as well as
brilliant; the sunshine had dried the pavements. They walked about the
streets at hazard, looking at the people and the houses, the shops and
the vehicles, the blazing blue sky and the muddy crossings, the
hurrying men and the slow-strolling maidens, the fresh red bricks and
the bright green trees, the extraordinary mixture of smartness and
shabbiness. From one hour to another the day had grown vernal; even in
the bustling streets there was an odor of earth and blossom. Felix was
immensely entertained. He had called it a comical country, and he went
about laughing at everything he saw. You would have said that American
civilization expressed itself to his sense in a tissue of capital
jokes. The jokes were certainly excellent, and the young man’s
merriment was joyous and genial. He possessed what is called the
pictorial sense; and this first glimpse of democratic manners stirred
the same sort of attention that he would have given to the movements of
a lively young person with a bright complexion. Such attention would
have been demonstrative and complimentary; and in the present case
Felix might have passed for an undispirited young exile revisiting the
haunts of his childhood. He kept looking at the violent blue of the
sky, at the scintillating air, at the scattered and multiplied patches
of color.

“_Comme c’est bariolé_, eh?” he said to his sister in that foreign
tongue which they both appeared to feel a mysterious prompting
occasionally to use.

“Yes, it is _bariolé_ indeed,” the Baroness answered. “I don’t like the
coloring; it hurts my eyes.”

“It shows how extremes meet,” the young man rejoined. “Instead of
coming to the West we seem to have gone to the East. The way the sky
touches the house-tops is just like Cairo; and the red and blue
sign-boards patched over the face of everything remind one of Mahometan
decorations.”

“The young women are not Mahometan,” said his companion. “They can’t be
said to hide their faces. I never saw anything so bold.”

“Thank Heaven they don’t hide their faces!” cried Felix. “Their faces
are uncommonly pretty.”

“Yes, their faces are often very pretty,” said the Baroness, who was a
very clever woman. She was too clever a woman not to be capable of a
great deal of just and fine observation. She clung more closely than
usual to her brother’s arm; she was not exhilarated, as he was; she
said very little, but she noted a great many things and made her
reflections. She was a little excited; she felt that she had indeed
come to a strange country, to make her fortune. Superficially, she was
conscious of a good deal of irritation and displeasure; the Baroness
was a very delicate and fastidious person. Of old, more than once, she
had gone, for entertainment’s sake and in brilliant company, to a fair
in a provincial town. It seemed to her now that she was at an enormous
fair—that the entertainment and the _désagréments_ were very much the
same. She found herself alternately smiling and shrinking; the show was
very curious, but it was probable, from moment to moment, that one
would be jostled. The Baroness had never seen so many people walking
about before; she had never been so mixed up with people she did not
know. But little by little she felt that this fair was a more serious
undertaking. She went with her brother into a large public garden,
which seemed very pretty, but where she was surprised at seeing no
carriages. The afternoon was drawing to a close; the coarse, vivid
grass and the slender tree-boles were gilded by the level
sunbeams—gilded as with gold that was fresh from the mine. It was the
hour at which ladies should come out for an airing and roll past a
hedge of pedestrians, holding their parasols askance. Here, however,
Eugenia observed no indications of this custom, the absence of which
was more anomalous as there was a charming avenue of remarkably
graceful, arching elms in the most convenient contiguity to a large,
cheerful street, in which, evidently, among the more prosperous members
of the _bourgeoisie_, a great deal of pedestrianism went forward. Our
friends passed out into this well lighted promenade, and Felix noticed
a great many more pretty girls and called his sister’s attention to
them. This latter measure, however, was superfluous; for the Baroness
had inspected, narrowly, these charming young ladies.

“I feel an intimate conviction that our cousins are like that,” said
Felix.

The Baroness hoped so, but this is not what she said. “They are very
pretty,” she said, “but they are mere little girls. Where are the
women—the women of thirty?”

“Of thirty-three, do you mean?” her brother was going to ask; for he
understood often both what she said and what she did not say. But he
only exclaimed upon the beauty of the sunset, while the Baroness, who
had come to seek her fortune, reflected that it would certainly be well
for her if the persons against whom she might need to measure herself
should all be mere little girls. The sunset was superb; they stopped to
look at it; Felix declared that he had never seen such a gorgeous
mixture of colors. The Baroness also thought it splendid; and she was
perhaps the more easily pleased from the fact that while she stood
there she was conscious of much admiring observation on the part of
various nice-looking people who passed that way, and to whom a
distinguished, strikingly-dressed woman with a foreign air, exclaiming
upon the beauties of nature on a Boston street corner in the French
tongue, could not be an object of indifference. Eugenia’s spirits rose.
She surrendered herself to a certain tranquil gaiety. If she had come
to seek her fortune, it seemed to her that her fortune would be easy to
find. There was a promise of it in the gorgeous purity of the western
sky; there was an intimation in the mild, unimpertinent gaze of the
passers of a certain natural facility in things.

“You will not go back to Silberstadt, eh?” asked Felix.

“Not tomorrow,” said the Baroness.

“Nor write to the Reigning Prince?”

“I shall write to him that they evidently know nothing about him over
here.”

“He will not believe you,” said the young man. “I advise you to let him
alone.”

Felix himself continued to be in high good humor. Brought up among
ancient customs and in picturesque cities, he yet found plenty of local
color in the little Puritan metropolis. That evening, after dinner, he
told his sister that he should go forth early on the morrow to look up
their cousins.

“You are very impatient,” said Eugenia.

“What can be more natural,” he asked, “after seeing all those pretty
girls today? If one’s cousins are of that pattern, the sooner one knows
them the better.”

“Perhaps they are not,” said Eugenia. “We ought to have brought some
letters—to some other people.”

“The other people would not be our kinsfolk.”

“Possibly they would be none the worse for that,” the Baroness replied.

Her brother looked at her with his eyebrows lifted. “That was not what
you said when you first proposed to me that we should come out here and
fraternize with our relatives. You said that it was the prompting of
natural affection; and when I suggested some reasons against it you
declared that the _voix du sang_ should go before everything.”

“You remember all that?” asked the Baroness.

“Vividly! I was greatly moved by it.”

She was walking up and down the room, as she had done in the morning;
she stopped in her walk and looked at her brother. She apparently was
going to say something, but she checked herself and resumed her walk.
Then, in a few moments, she said something different, which had the
effect of an explanation of the suppression of her earlier thought.
“You will never be anything but a child, dear brother.”

“One would suppose that you, madam,” answered Felix, laughing, “were a
thousand years old.”

“I am—sometimes,” said the Baroness.

“I will go, then, and announce to our cousins the arrival of a
personage so extraordinary. They will immediately come and pay you
their respects.”

Eugenia paced the length of the room again, and then she stopped before
her brother, laying her hand upon his arm. “They are not to come and
see me,” she said. “You are not to allow that. That is not the way I
shall meet them first.” And in answer to his interrogative glance she
went on. “You will go and examine, and report. You will come back and
tell me who they are and what they are; their number, gender, their
respective ages—all about them. Be sure you observe everything; be
ready to describe to me the locality, the accessories—how shall I say
it?—the _mise en scène_. Then, at my own time, at my own hour, under
circumstances of my own choosing, I will go to them. I will present
myself—I will appear before them!” said the Baroness, this time
phrasing her idea with a certain frankness.

“And what message am I to take to them?” asked Felix, who had a lively
faith in the justness of his sister’s arrangements.

She looked at him a moment—at his expression of agreeable veracity;
and, with that justness that he admired, she replied, “Say what you
please. Tell my story in the way that seems to you most—natural.” And
she bent her forehead for him to kiss.




CHAPTER II


The next day was splendid, as Felix had prophesied; if the winter had
suddenly leaped into spring, the spring had for the moment as quickly
leaped into summer. This was an observation made by a young girl who
came out of a large square house in the country, and strolled about in
the spacious garden which separated it from a muddy road. The flowering
shrubs and the neatly-disposed plants were basking in the abundant
light and warmth; the transparent shade of the great elms—they were
magnificent trees—seemed to thicken by the hour; and the intensely
habitual stillness offered a submissive medium to the sound of a
distant church-bell. The young girl listened to the church-bell; but
she was not dressed for church. She was bare-headed; she wore a white
muslin waist, with an embroidered border, and the skirt of her dress
was of colored muslin. She was a young lady of some two or three and
twenty years of age, and though a young person of her sex walking
bare-headed in a garden, of a Sunday morning in spring-time, can, in
the nature of things, never be a displeasing object, you would not have
pronounced this innocent Sabbath-breaker especially pretty. She was
tall and pale, thin and a little awkward; her hair was fair and
perfectly straight; her eyes were dark, and they had the singularity of
seeming at once dull and restless—differing herein, as you see, fatally
from the ideal “fine eyes,” which we always imagine to be both
brilliant and tranquil. The doors and windows of the large square house
were all wide open, to admit the purifying sunshine, which lay in
generous patches upon the floor of a wide, high, covered piazza
adjusted to two sides of the mansion—a piazza on which several
straw-bottomed rocking-chairs and half a dozen of those small
cylindrical stools in green and blue porcelain, which suggest an
affiliation between the residents and the Eastern trade, were
symmetrically disposed. It was an ancient house—ancient in the sense of
being eighty years old; it was built of wood, painted a clean, clear,
faded gray, and adorned along the front, at intervals, with flat wooden
pilasters, painted white. These pilasters appeared to support a kind of
classic pediment, which was decorated in the middle by a large triple
window in a boldly carved frame, and in each of its smaller angles by a
glazed circular aperture. A large white door, furnished with a
highly-polished brass knocker, presented itself to the rural-looking
road, with which it was connected by a spacious pathway, paved with
worn and cracked, but very clean, bricks. Behind it there were meadows
and orchards, a barn and a pond; and facing it, a short distance along
the road, on the opposite side, stood a smaller house, painted white,
with external shutters painted green, a little garden on one hand and
an orchard on the other. All this was shining in the morning air,
through which the simple details of the picture addressed themselves to
the eye as distinctly as the items of a “sum” in addition.

A second young lady presently came out of the house, across the piazza,
descended into the garden and approached the young girl of whom I have
spoken. This second young lady was also thin and pale; but she was
older than the other; she was shorter; she had dark, smooth hair. Her
eyes, unlike the other’s, were quick and bright; but they were not at
all restless. She wore a straw bonnet with white ribbons, and a long,
red, India scarf, which, on the front of her dress, reached to her
feet. In her hand she carried a little key.

“Gertrude,” she said, “are you very sure you had better not go to
church?”

Gertrude looked at her a moment, plucked a small sprig from a
lilac-bush, smelled it and threw it away. “I am not very sure of
anything!” she answered.

The other young lady looked straight past her, at the distant pond,
which lay shining between the long banks of fir trees. Then she said in
a very soft voice, “This is the key of the dining-room closet. I think
you had better have it, if anyone should want anything.”

“Who is there to want anything?” Gertrude demanded. “I shall be all
alone in the house.”

“Someone may come,” said her companion.

“Do you mean Mr. Brand?”

“Yes, Gertrude. He may like a piece of cake.”

“I don’t like men that are always eating cake!” Gertrude declared,
giving a pull at the lilac-bush.

Her companion glanced at her, and then looked down on the ground. “I
think father expected you would come to church,” she said. “What shall
I say to him?”

“Say I have a bad headache.”

“Would that be true?” asked the elder lady, looking straight at the
pond again.

“No, Charlotte,” said the younger one simply.

Charlotte transferred her quiet eyes to her companion’s face. “I am
afraid you are feeling restless.”

“I am feeling as I always feel,” Gertrude replied, in the same tone.

Charlotte turned away; but she stood there a moment. Presently she
looked down at the front of her dress. “Doesn’t it seem to you,
somehow, as if my scarf were too long?” she asked.

Gertrude walked half round her, looking at the scarf. “I don’t think
you wear it right,” she said.

“How should I wear it, dear?”

“I don’t know; differently from that. You should draw it differently
over your shoulders, round your elbows; you should look differently
behind.”

“How should I look?” Charlotte inquired.

“I don’t think I can tell you,” said Gertrude, plucking out the scarf a
little behind. “I could do it myself, but I don’t think I can explain
it.”

Charlotte, by a movement of her elbows, corrected the laxity that had
come from her companion’s touch. “Well, some day you must do it for me.
It doesn’t matter now. Indeed, I don’t think it matters,” she added,
“how one looks behind.”

“I should say it mattered more,” said Gertrude. “Then you don’t know
who may be observing you. You are not on your guard. You can’t try to
look pretty.”

Charlotte received this declaration with extreme gravity. “I don’t
think one should ever try to look pretty,” she rejoined, earnestly.

Her companion was silent. Then she said, “Well, perhaps it’s not of
much use.”

Charlotte looked at her a little, and then kissed her. “I hope you will
be better when we come back.”

“My dear sister, I am very well!” said Gertrude.

Charlotte went down the large brick walk to the garden gate; her
companion strolled slowly toward the house. At the gate Charlotte met a
young man, who was coming in—a tall, fair young man, wearing a high hat
and a pair of thread gloves. He was handsome, but rather too stout. He
had a pleasant smile. “Oh, Mr. Brand!” exclaimed the young lady.

“I came to see whether your sister was not going to church,” said the
young man.

“She says she is not going; but I am very glad you have come. I think
if you were to talk to her a little”.... And Charlotte lowered her
voice. “It seems as if she were restless.”

Mr. Brand smiled down on the young lady from his great height. “I shall
be very glad to talk to her. For that I should be willing to absent
myself from almost any occasion of worship, however attractive.”

“Well, I suppose you know,” said Charlotte, softly, as if positive
acceptance of this proposition might be dangerous. “But I am afraid I
shall be late.”

“I hope you will have a pleasant sermon,” said the young man.

“Oh, Mr. Gilman is always pleasant,” Charlotte answered. And she went
on her way.

Mr. Brand went into the garden, where Gertrude, hearing the gate close
behind him, turned and looked at him. For a moment she watched him
coming; then she turned away. But almost immediately she corrected this
movement, and stood still, facing him. He took off his hat and wiped
his forehead as he approached. Then he put on his hat again and held
out his hand. His hat being removed, you would have perceived that his
forehead was very large and smooth, and his hair abundant but rather
colorless. His nose was too large, and his mouth and eyes were too
small; but for all this he was, as I have said, a young man of striking
appearance. The expression of his little clean-colored blue eyes was
irresistibly gentle and serious; he looked, as the phrase is, as good
as gold. The young girl, standing in the garden path, glanced, as he
came up, at his thread gloves.

“I hoped you were going to church,” he said. “I wanted to walk with
you.”

“I am very much obliged to you,” Gertrude answered. “I am not going to
church.”

She had shaken hands with him; he held her hand a moment. “Have you any
special reason for not going?”

“Yes, Mr. Brand,” said the young girl.

“May I ask what it is?”

She looked at him smiling; and in her smile, as I have intimated, there
was a certain dullness. But mingled with this dullness was something
sweet and suggestive. “Because the sky is so blue!” she said.

He looked at the sky, which was magnificent, and then said, smiling
too, “I have heard of young ladies staying at home for bad weather, but
never for good. Your sister, whom I met at the gate, tells me you are
depressed,” he added.

“Depressed? I am never depressed.”

“Oh, surely, sometimes,” replied Mr. Brand, as if he thought this a
regrettable account of one’s self.

“I am never depressed,” Gertrude repeated. “But I am sometimes wicked.
When I am wicked I am in high spirits. I was wicked just now to my
sister.”

“What did you do to her?”

“I said things that puzzled her—on purpose.”

“Why did you do that, Miss Gertrude?” asked the young man.

She began to smile again. “Because the sky is so blue!”

“You say things that puzzle _me_,” Mr. Brand declared.

“I always know when I do it,” proceeded Gertrude. “But people puzzle me
more, I think. And they don’t seem to know!”

“This is very interesting,” Mr. Brand observed, smiling.

“You told me to tell you about my—my struggles,” the young girl went
on.

“Let us talk about them. I have so many things to say.”

Gertrude turned away a moment; and then, turning back, “You had better
go to church,” she said.

“You know,” the young man urged, “that I have always one thing to say.”

Gertrude looked at him a moment. “Please don’t say it now!”

“We are all alone,” he continued, taking off his hat; “all alone in
this beautiful Sunday stillness.”

Gertrude looked around her, at the breaking buds, the shining distance,
the blue sky to which she had referred as a pretext for her
irregularities. “That’s the reason,” she said, “why I don’t want you to
speak. Do me a favor; go to church.”

“May I speak when I come back?” asked Mr. Brand.

“If you are still disposed,” she answered.

“I don’t know whether you are wicked,” he said, “but you are certainly
puzzling.”

She had turned away; she raised her hands to her ears. He looked at her
a moment, and then he slowly walked to church.

She wandered for a while about the garden, vaguely and without purpose.
The church-bell had stopped ringing; the stillness was complete. This
young lady relished highly, on occasions, the sense of being alone—the
absence of the whole family and the emptiness of the house. Today,
apparently, the servants had also gone to church; there was never a
figure at the open windows; behind the house there was no stout negress
in a red turban, lowering the bucket into the great shingle-hooded
well. And the front door of the big, unguarded home stood open, with
the trustfulness of the golden age; or what is more to the purpose,
with that of New England’s silvery prime. Gertrude slowly passed
through it, and went from one of the empty rooms to the other—large,
clear-colored rooms, with white wainscots, ornamented with thin-legged
mahogany furniture, and, on the walls, with old-fashioned engravings,
chiefly of scriptural subjects, hung very high. This agreeable sense of
solitude, of having the house to herself, of which I have spoken,
always excited Gertrude’s imagination; she could not have told you why,
and neither can her humble historian. It always seemed to her that she
must do something particular—that she must honor the occasion; and
while she roamed about, wondering what she could do, the occasion
usually came to an end. Today she wondered more than ever. At last she
took down a book; there was no library in the house, but there were
books in all the rooms. None of them were forbidden books, and Gertrude
had not stopped at home for the sake of a chance to climb to the
inaccessible shelves. She possessed herself of a very obvious
volume—one of the series of the _Arabian Nights_—and she brought it out
into the portico and sat down with it in her lap. There, for a quarter
of an hour, she read the history of the loves of the Prince
Camaralzaman and the Princess Badoura. At last, looking up, she beheld,
as it seemed to her, the Prince Camaralzaman standing before her. A
beautiful young man was making her a very low bow—a magnificent bow,
such as she had never seen before. He appeared to have dropped from the
clouds; he was wonderfully handsome; he smiled—smiled as if he were
smiling on purpose. Extreme surprise, for a moment, kept Gertrude
sitting still; then she rose, without even keeping her finger in her
book. The young man, with his hat in his hand, still looked at her,
smiling and smiling. It was very strange.

“Will you kindly tell me,” said the mysterious visitor, at last,
“whether I have the honor of speaking to Miss Wentworth?”

“My name is Gertrude Wentworth,” murmured the young woman.

“Then—then—I have the honor—the pleasure—of being your cousin.”

The young man had so much the character of an apparition that this
announcement seemed to complete his unreality. “What cousin? Who are
you?” said Gertrude.

He stepped back a few paces and looked up at the house; then glanced
round him at the garden and the distant view. After this he burst out
laughing. “I see it must seem to you very strange,” he said. There was,
after all, something substantial in his laughter. Gertrude looked at
him from head to foot. Yes, he was remarkably handsome; but his smile
was almost a grimace. “It is very still,” he went on, coming nearer
again. And as she only looked at him, for reply, he added, “Are you all
alone?”

“Everyone has gone to church,” said Gertrude.

“I was afraid of that!” the young man exclaimed. “But I hope you are
not afraid of me.”

“You ought to tell me who you are,” Gertrude answered.

“I am afraid of you!” said the young man. “I had a different plan. I
expected the servant would take in my card, and that you would put your
heads together, before admitting me, and make out my identity.”

Gertrude had been wondering with a quick intensity which brought its
result; and the result seemed an answer—a wondrous, delightful
answer—to her vague wish that something would befall her. “I know—I
know,” she said. “You come from Europe.”

“We came two days ago. You have heard of us, then—you believe in us?”

“We have known, vaguely,” said Gertrude, “that we had relations in
France.”

“And have you ever wanted to see us?” asked the young man.

Gertrude was silent a moment. “I have wanted to see you.”

“I am glad, then, it is you I have found. We wanted to see you, so we
came.”

“On purpose?” asked Gertrude.

The young man looked round him, smiling still. “Well, yes; on purpose.
Does that sound as if we should bore you?” he added. “I don’t think we
shall—I really don’t think we shall. We are rather fond of wandering,
too; and we were glad of a pretext.”

“And you have just arrived?”

“In Boston, two days ago. At the inn I asked for Mr. Wentworth. He must
be your father. They found out for me where he lived; they seemed often
to have heard of him. I determined to come, without ceremony. So, this
lovely morning, they set my face in the right direction, and told me to
walk straight before me, out of town. I came on foot because I wanted
to see the country. I walked and walked, and here I am! It’s a good
many miles.”

“It is seven miles and a half,” said Gertrude, softly. Now that this
handsome young man was proving himself a reality she found herself
vaguely trembling; she was deeply excited. She had never in her life
spoken to a foreigner, and she had often thought it would be delightful
to do so. Here was one who had suddenly been engendered by the Sabbath
stillness for her private use; and such a brilliant, polite, smiling
one! She found time and means to compose herself, however: to remind
herself that she must exercise a sort of official hospitality. “We are
very—very glad to see you,” she said. “Won’t you come into the house?”
And she moved toward the open door.

“You are not afraid of me, then?” asked the young man again, with his
light laugh.

She wondered a moment, and then, “We are not afraid—here,” she said.

_“Ah, comme vous devez avoir raison!”_ cried the young man, looking all
round him, appreciatively. It was the first time that Gertrude had
heard so many words of French spoken. They gave her something of a
sensation. Her companion followed her, watching, with a certain
excitement of his own, this tall, interesting-looking girl, dressed in
her clear, crisp muslin. He paused in the hall, where there was a broad
white staircase with a white balustrade. “What a pleasant house!” he
said. “It’s lighter inside than it is out.”

“It’s pleasanter here,” said Gertrude, and she led the way into the
parlor,—a high, clean, rather empty-looking room. Here they stood
looking at each other,—the young man smiling more than ever; Gertrude,
very serious, trying to smile.

“I don’t believe you know my name,” he said. “I am called Felix Young.
Your father is my uncle. My mother was his half sister, and older than
he.”

“Yes,” said Gertrude, “and she turned Roman Catholic and married in
Europe.”

“I see you know,” said the young man. “She married and she died. Your
father’s family didn’t like her husband. They called him a foreigner;
but he was not. My poor father was born in Sicily, but his parents were
American.”

“In Sicily?” Gertrude murmured.

“It is true,” said Felix Young, “that they had spent their lives in
Europe. But they were very patriotic. And so are we.”

“And you are Sicilian,” said Gertrude.

“Sicilian, no! Let’s see. I was born at a little place—a dear little
place—in France. My sister was born at Vienna.”

“So you are French,” said Gertrude.

“Heaven forbid!” cried the young man. Gertrude’s eyes were fixed upon
him almost insistently. He began to laugh again. “I can easily be
French, if that will please you.”

“You are a foreigner of some sort,” said Gertrude.

“Of some sort—yes; I suppose so. But who can say of what sort? I don’t
think we have ever had occasion to settle the question. You know there
are people like that. About their country, their religion, their
profession, they can’t tell.”

Gertrude stood there gazing; she had not asked him to sit down. She had
never heard of people like that; she wanted to hear. “Where do you
live?” she asked.

“They can’t tell that, either!” said Felix. “I am afraid you will think
they are little better than vagabonds. I have lived
anywhere—everywhere. I really think I have lived in every city in
Europe.” Gertrude gave a little long soft exhalation. It made the young
man smile at her again; and his smile made her blush a little. To take
refuge from blushing she asked him if, after his long walk, he was not
hungry or thirsty. Her hand was in her pocket; she was fumbling with
the little key that her sister had given her. “Ah, my dear young lady,”
he said, clasping his hands a little, “if you could give me, in
charity, a glass of wine!”

Gertrude gave a smile and a little nod, and went quickly out of the
room. Presently she came back with a very large decanter in one hand
and a plate in the other, on which was placed a big, round cake with a
frosted top. Gertrude, in taking the cake from the closet, had had a
moment of acute consciousness that it composed the refection of which
her sister had thought that Mr. Brand would like to partake. Her
kinsman from across the seas was looking at the pale, high-hung
engravings. When she came in he turned and smiled at her, as if they
had been old friends meeting after a separation. “You wait upon me
yourself?” he asked. “I am served like the gods!” She had waited upon a
great many people, but none of them had ever told her that. The
observation added a certain lightness to the step with which she went
to a little table where there were some curious red glasses—glasses
covered with little gold sprigs, which Charlotte used to dust every
morning with her own hands. Gertrude thought the glasses very handsome,
and it was a pleasure to her to know that the wine was good; it was her
father’s famous madeira. Felix Young thought it excellent; he wondered
why he had been told that there was no wine in America. She cut him an
immense triangle out of the cake, and again she thought of Mr. Brand.
Felix sat there, with his glass in one hand and his huge morsel of cake
in the other—eating, drinking, smiling, talking. “I am very hungry,” he
said. “I am not at all tired; I am never tired. But I am very hungry.”

“You must stay to dinner,” said Gertrude. “At two o’clock. They will
all have come back from church; you will see the others.”

“Who are the others?” asked the young man. “Describe them all.”

“You will see for yourself. It is you that must tell me; now, about
your sister.”

“My sister is the Baroness Münster,” said Felix.

On hearing that his sister was a Baroness, Gertrude got up and walked
about slowly, in front of him. She was silent a moment. She was
thinking of it. “Why didn’t she come, too?” she asked.

“She did come; she is in Boston, at the hotel.”

“We will go and see her,” said Gertrude, looking at him.

“She begs you will not!” the young man replied. “She sends you her
love; she sent me to announce her. She will come and pay her respects
to your father.”

Gertrude felt herself trembling again. A Baroness Münster, who sent a
brilliant young man to “announce” her; who was coming, as the Queen of
Sheba came to Solomon, to pay her “respects” to quiet Mr.
Wentworth—such a personage presented herself to Gertrude’s vision with
a most effective unexpectedness. For a moment she hardly knew what to
say. “When will she come?” she asked at last.

“As soon as you will allow her—tomorrow. She is very impatient,”
answered Felix, who wished to be agreeable.

“Tomorrow, yes,” said Gertrude. She wished to ask more about her; but
she hardly knew what could be predicated of a Baroness Münster. “Is
she—is she—married?”

Felix had finished his cake and wine; he got up, fixing upon the young
girl his bright, expressive eyes. “She is married to a German
prince—Prince Adolf, of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. He is not the
reigning prince; he is a younger brother.”

Gertrude gazed at her informant; her lips were slightly parted. “Is she
a—a _Princess_?” she asked at last.

“Oh, no,” said the young man; “her position is rather a singular one.
It’s a morganatic marriage.”

“Morganatic?” These were new names and new words to poor Gertrude.

“That’s what they call a marriage, you know, contracted between a scion
of a ruling house and—and a common mortal. They made Eugenia a
Baroness, poor woman; but that was all they could do. Now they want to
dissolve the marriage. Prince Adolf, between ourselves, is a ninny; but
his brother, who is a clever man, has plans for him. Eugenia, naturally
enough, makes difficulties; not, however, that I think she cares
much—she’s a very clever woman; I’m sure you’ll like her—but she wants
to bother them. Just now everything is _en l’air_.”

The cheerful, off-hand tone in which her visitor related this darkly
romantic tale seemed to Gertrude very strange; but it seemed also to
convey a certain flattery to herself, a recognition of her wisdom and
dignity. She felt a dozen impressions stirring within her, and
presently the one that was uppermost found words. “They want to
dissolve her marriage?” she asked.

“So it appears.”

“And against her will?”

“Against her right.”

“She must be very unhappy!” said Gertrude.

Her visitor looked at her, smiling; he raised his hand to the back of
his head and held it there a moment. “So she says,” he answered.
“That’s her story. She told me to tell it you.”

“Tell me more,” said Gertrude.

“No, I will leave that to her; she does it better.”

Gertrude gave her little excited sigh again. “Well, if she is unhappy,”
she said, “I am glad she has come to us.”

She had been so interested that she failed to notice the sound of a
footstep in the portico; and yet it was a footstep that she always
recognized. She heard it in the hall, and then she looked out of the
window. They were all coming back from church—her father, her sister
and brother, and their cousins, who always came to dinner on Sunday.
Mr. Brand had come in first; he was in advance of the others, because,
apparently, he was still disposed to say what she had not wished him to
say an hour before. He came into the parlor, looking for Gertrude. He
had two little books in his hand. On seeing Gertrude’s companion he
slowly stopped, looking at him.

“Is this a cousin?” asked Felix.

Then Gertrude saw that she must introduce him; but her ears, and, by
sympathy, her lips, were full of all that he had been telling her.
“This is the Prince,” she said, “the Prince of
Silberstadt-Schreckenstein!”

Felix burst out laughing, and Mr. Brand stood staring, while the
others, who had passed into the house, appeared behind him in the open
doorway.




CHAPTER III


That evening at dinner Felix Young gave his sister, the Baroness
Münster, an account of his impressions. She saw that he had come back
in the highest possible spirits; but this fact, to her own mind, was
not a reason for rejoicing. She had but a limited confidence in her
brother’s judgment; his capacity for taking rose-colored views was such
as to vulgarize one of the prettiest of tints. Still, she supposed he
could be trusted to give her the mere facts; and she invited him with
some eagerness to communicate them. “I suppose, at least, they didn’t
turn you out from the door;” she said. “You have been away some ten
hours.”

“Turn me from the door!” Felix exclaimed. “They took me to their
hearts; they killed the fatted calf.”

“I know what you want to say: they are a collection of angels.”

“Exactly,” said Felix. “They are a collection of angels—simply.”

“_C’est bien vague_,” remarked the Baroness. “What are they like?”

“Like nothing you ever saw.”

“I am sure I am much obliged; but that is hardly more definite.
Seriously, they were glad to see you?”

“Enchanted. It has been the proudest day of my life. Never, never have
I been so lionized! I assure you, I was cock of the walk. My dear
sister,” said the young man, “_nous n’avons qu’à nous tenir_; we shall
be great swells!”

Madame Münster looked at him, and her eye exhibited a slight responsive
spark. She touched her lips to a glass of wine, and then she said,
“Describe them. Give me a picture.”

Felix drained his own glass. “Well, it’s in the country, among the
meadows and woods; a wild sort of place, and yet not far from here.
Only, such a road, my dear! Imagine one of the Alpine glaciers
reproduced in mud. But you will not spend much time on it, for they
want you to come and stay, once for all.”

“Ah,” said the Baroness, “they want me to come and stay, once for all?
_Bon_.”

“It’s intensely rural, tremendously natural; and all overhung with this
strange white light, this far-away blue sky. There’s a big wooden
house—a kind of three-story bungalow; it looks like a magnified
Nuremberg toy. There was a gentleman there that made a speech to me
about it and called it a ‘venerable mansion;’ but it looks as if it had
been built last night.”

“Is it handsome—is it elegant?” asked the Baroness.

Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. “It’s very clean! No splendors,
no gilding, no troops of servants; rather straight-backed chairs. But
you might eat off the floors, and you can sit down on the stairs.”

“That must be a privilege. And the inhabitants are straight-backed too,
of course.”

“My dear sister,” said Felix, “the inhabitants are charming.”

“In what style?”

“In a style of their own. How shall I describe it? It’s primitive; it’s
patriarchal; it’s the _ton_ of the golden age.”

“And have they nothing golden but their _ton_? Are there no symptoms of
wealth?”

“I should say there was wealth without symptoms. A plain, homely way of
life: nothing for show, and very little for—what shall I call it?—for
the senses; but a great _aisance_, and a lot of money, out of sight,
that comes forward very quietly for subscriptions to institutions, for
repairing tenements, for paying doctor’s bills; perhaps even for
portioning daughters.”

“And the daughters?” Madame Münster demanded. “How many are there?”

“There are two, Charlotte and Gertrude.”

“Are they pretty?”

“One of them,” said Felix.

“Which is that?”

The young man was silent, looking at his sister. “Charlotte,” he said
at last.

She looked at him in return. “I see. You are in love with Gertrude.
They must be Puritans to their finger-tips; anything but gay!”

“No, they are not gay,” Felix admitted. “They are sober; they are even
severe. They are of a pensive cast; they take things hard. I think
there is something the matter with them; they have some melancholy
memory or some depressing expectation. It’s not the epicurean
temperament. My uncle, Mr. Wentworth, is a tremendously high-toned old
fellow; he looks as if he were undergoing martyrdom, not by fire, but
by freezing. But we shall cheer them up; we shall do them good. They
will take a good deal of stirring up; but they are wonderfully kind and
gentle. And they are appreciative. They think one clever; they think
one remarkable!”

“That is very fine, so far as it goes,” said the Baroness. “But are we
to be shut up to these three people, Mr. Wentworth and the two young
women—what did you say their names were—Deborah and Hephzibah?”

“Oh, no; there is another little girl, a cousin of theirs, a very
pretty creature; a thorough little American. And then there is the son
of the house.”

“Good!” said the Baroness. “We are coming to the gentlemen. What of the
son of the house?”

“I am afraid he gets tipsy.”

“He, then, has the epicurean temperament! How old is he?”

“He is a boy of twenty; a pretty young fellow, but I am afraid he has
vulgar tastes. And then there is Mr. Brand—a very tall young man, a
sort of lay-priest. They seem to think a good deal of him, but I don’t
exactly make him out.”

“And is there nothing,” asked the Baroness, “between these
extremes—this mysterious ecclesiastic and that intemperate youth?”

“Oh, yes, there is Mr. Acton. I think,” said the young man, with a nod
at his sister, “that you will like Mr. Acton.”

“Remember that I am very fastidious,” said the Baroness. “Has he very
good manners?”

“He will have them with you. He is a man of the world; he has been to
China.”

Madame Münster gave a little laugh. “A man of the Chinese world! He
must be very interesting.”

“I have an idea that he brought home a fortune,” said Felix.

“That is always interesting. Is he young, good-looking, clever?”

“He is less than forty; he has a baldish head; he says witty things. I
rather think,” added the young man, “that he will admire the Baroness
Münster.”

“It is very possible,” said this lady. Her brother never knew how she
would take things; but shortly afterwards she declared that he had made
a very pretty description and that on the morrow she would go and see
for herself.

They mounted, accordingly, into a great barouche—a vehicle as to which
the Baroness found nothing to criticise but the price that was asked
for it and the fact that the coachman wore a straw hat. (At Silberstadt
Madame Münster had had liveries of yellow and crimson.) They drove into
the country, and the Baroness, leaning far back and swaying her
lace-fringed parasol, looked to right and to left and surveyed the
way-side objects. After a while she pronounced them _affreux_. Her
brother remarked that it was apparently a country in which the
foreground was inferior to the _plans reculés_; and the Baroness
rejoined that the landscape seemed to be all foreground. Felix had
fixed with his new friends the hour at which he should bring his
sister; it was four o’clock in the afternoon. The large, clean-faced
house wore, to his eyes, as the barouche drove up to it, a very
friendly aspect; the high, slender elms made lengthening shadows in
front of it. The Baroness descended; her American kinsfolk were
stationed in the portico. Felix waved his hat to them, and a tall, lean
gentleman, with a high forehead and a clean shaven face, came forward
toward the garden gate. Charlotte Wentworth walked at his side.
Gertrude came behind, more slowly. Both of these young ladies wore
rustling silk dresses. Felix ushered his sister into the gate. “Be very
gracious,” he said to her. But he saw the admonition was superfluous.
Eugenia was prepared to be gracious as only Eugenia could be. Felix
knew no keener pleasure than to be able to admire his sister
unrestrictedly; for if the opportunity was frequent, it was not
inveterate. When she desired to please she was to him, as to everyone
else, the most charming woman in the world. Then he forgot that she was
ever anything else; that she was sometimes hard and perverse; that he
was occasionally afraid of her. Now, as she took his arm to pass into
the garden, he felt that she desired, that she proposed, to please, and
this situation made him very happy. Eugenia would please.

The tall gentleman came to meet her, looking very rigid and grave. But
it was a rigidity that had no illiberal meaning. Mr. Wentworth’s manner
was pregnant, on the contrary, with a sense of grand responsibility, of
the solemnity of the occasion, of its being difficult to show
sufficient deference to a lady at once so distinguished and so unhappy.
Felix had observed on the day before his characteristic pallor; and now
he perceived that there was something almost cadaverous in his uncle’s
high-featured white face. But so clever were this young man’s quick
sympathies and perceptions that he already learned that in these
semi-mortuary manifestations there was no cause for alarm. His light
imagination had gained a glimpse of Mr. Wentworth’s spiritual
mechanism, and taught him that, the old man being infinitely
conscientious, the special operation of conscience within him announced
itself by several of the indications of physical faintness.

The Baroness took her uncle’s hand, and stood looking at him with her
ugly face and her beautiful smile. “Have I done right to come?” she
asked.

“Very right, very right,” said Mr. Wentworth, solemnly. He had arranged
in his mind a little speech; but now it quite faded away. He felt
almost frightened. He had never been looked at in just that way—with
just that fixed, intense smile—by any woman; and it perplexed and
weighed upon him, now, that the woman who was smiling so and who had
instantly given him a vivid sense of her possessing other unprecedented
attributes, was his own niece, the child of his own father’s daughter.
The idea that his niece should be a German Baroness, married
“morganatically” to a Prince, had already given him much to think
about. Was it right, was it just, was it acceptable? He always slept
badly, and the night before he had lain awake much more even than
usual, asking himself these questions. The strange word “morganatic”
was constantly in his ears; it reminded him of a certain Mrs. Morgan
whom he had once known and who had been a bold, unpleasant woman. He
had a feeling that it was his duty, so long as the Baroness looked at
him, smiling in that way, to meet her glance with his own scrupulously
adjusted, consciously frigid organs of vision; but on this occasion he
failed to perform his duty to the last. He looked away toward his
daughters. “We are very glad to see you,” he had said. “Allow me to
introduce my daughters—Miss Charlotte Wentworth, Miss Gertrude
Wentworth.”

The Baroness thought she had never seen people less demonstrative. But
Charlotte kissed her and took her hand, looking at her sweetly and
solemnly. Gertrude seemed to her almost funereal, though Gertrude might
have found a source of gaiety in the fact that Felix, with his
magnificent smile, had been talking to her; he had greeted her as a
very old friend. When she kissed the Baroness she had tears in her
eyes. Madame Münster took each of these young women by the hand, and
looked at them all over. Charlotte thought her very strange-looking and
singularly dressed; she could not have said whether it was well or ill.
She was glad, at any rate, that they had put on their silk
gowns—especially Gertrude. “My cousins are very pretty,” said the
Baroness, turning her eyes from one to the other. “Your daughters are
very handsome, sir.”

Charlotte blushed quickly; she had never yet heard her personal
appearance alluded to in a loud, expressive voice. Gertrude looked
away—not at Felix; she was extremely pleased. It was not the compliment
that pleased her; she did not believe it; she thought herself very
plain. She could hardly have told you the source of her satisfaction;
it came from something in the way the Baroness spoke, and it was not
diminished—it was rather deepened, oddly enough—by the young girl’s
disbelief. Mr. Wentworth was silent; and then he asked, formally,
“Won’t you come into the house?”

“These are not all; you have some other children,” said the Baroness.

“I have a son,” Mr. Wentworth answered.

“And why doesn’t he come to meet me?” Eugenia cried. “I am afraid he is
not so charming as his sisters.”

“I don’t know; I will see about it,” the old man declared.

“He is rather afraid of ladies,” Charlotte said, softly.

“He is very handsome,” said Gertrude, as loud as she could.

“We will go in and find him. We will draw him out of his _cachette_.”
And the Baroness took Mr. Wentworth’s arm, who was not aware that he
had offered it to her, and who, as they walked toward the house,
wondered whether he ought to have offered it and whether it was proper
for her to take it if it had not been offered. “I want to know you
well,” said the Baroness, interrupting these meditations, “and I want
you to know me.”

“It seems natural that we should know each other,” Mr. Wentworth
rejoined. “We are near relatives.”

“Ah, there comes a moment in life when one reverts, irresistibly, to
one’s natural ties—to one’s natural affections. You must have found
that!” said Eugenia.

Mr. Wentworth had been told the day before by Felix that Eugenia was
very clever, very brilliant, and the information had held him in some
suspense. This was the cleverness, he supposed; the brilliancy was
beginning. “Yes, the natural affections are very strong,” he murmured.

“In some people,” the Baroness declared. “Not in all.” Charlotte was
walking beside her; she took hold of her hand again, smiling always.
“And you, _cousine_, where did you get that enchanting complexion?” she
went on; “such lilies and roses?” The roses in poor Charlotte’s
countenance began speedily to predominate over the lilies, and she
quickened her step and reached the portico. “This is the country of
complexions,” the Baroness continued, addressing herself to Mr.
Wentworth. “I am convinced they are more delicate. There are very good
ones in England—in Holland; but they are very apt to be coarse. There
is too much red.”

“I think you will find,” said Mr. Wentworth, “that this country is
superior in many respects to those you mention. I have been to England
and Holland.”

“Ah, you have been to Europe?” cried the Baroness. “Why didn’t you come
and see me? But it’s better, after all, this way,” she said. They were
entering the house; she paused and looked round her. “I see you have
arranged your house—your beautiful house—in the—in the Dutch taste!”

“The house is very old,” remarked Mr. Wentworth. “General Washington
once spent a week here.”

“Oh, I have heard of Washington,” cried the Baroness. “My father used
to tell me of him.”

Mr. Wentworth was silent a moment, and then, “I found he was very well
known in Europe,” he said.

Felix had lingered in the garden with Gertrude; he was standing before
her and smiling, as he had done the day before. What had happened the
day before seemed to her a kind of dream. He had been there and he had
changed everything; the others had seen him, they had talked with him;
but that he should come again, that he should be part of the future,
part of her small, familiar, much-meditating life—this needed, afresh,
the evidence of her senses. The evidence had come to her senses now;
and her senses seemed to rejoice in it. “What do you think of Eugenia?”
Felix asked. “Isn’t she charming?”

“She is very brilliant,” said Gertrude. “But I can’t tell yet. She
seems to me like a singer singing an air. You can’t tell till the song
is done.”

“Ah, the song will never be done!” exclaimed the young man, laughing.
“Don’t you think her handsome?”

Gertrude had been disappointed in the beauty of the Baroness Münster;
she had expected her, for mysterious reasons, to resemble a very pretty
portrait of the Empress Josephine, of which there hung an engraving in
one of the parlors, and which the younger Miss Wentworth had always
greatly admired. But the Baroness was not at all like that—not at all.
Though different, however, she was very wonderful, and Gertrude felt
herself most suggestively corrected. It was strange, nevertheless, that
Felix should speak in that positive way about his sister’s beauty. “I
think I _shall_ think her handsome,” Gertrude said. “It must be very
interesting to know her. I don’t feel as if I ever could.”

“Ah, you will know her well; you will become great friends,” Felix
declared, as if this were the easiest thing in the world.

“She is very graceful,” said Gertrude, looking after the Baroness,
suspended to her father’s arm. It was a pleasure to her to say that
anyone was graceful.

Felix had been looking about him. “And your little cousin, of
yesterday,” he said, “who was so wonderfully pretty—what has become of
her?”

“She is in the parlor,” Gertrude answered. “Yes, she is very pretty.”
She felt as if it were her duty to take him straight into the house, to
where he might be near her cousin. But after hesitating a moment she
lingered still. “I didn’t believe you would come back,” she said.

“Not come back!” cried Felix, laughing. “You didn’t know, then, the
impression made upon this susceptible heart of mine.”

She wondered whether he meant the impression her cousin Lizzie had
made. “Well,” she said, “I didn’t think we should ever see you again.”

“And pray what did you think would become of me?”

“I don’t know. I thought you would melt away.”

“That’s a compliment to my solidity! I melt very often,” said Felix,
“but there is always something left of me.”

“I came and waited for you by the door, because the others did,”
Gertrude went on. “But if you had never appeared I should not have been
surprised.”

“I hope,” declared Felix, looking at her, “that you would have been
disappointed.”

She looked at him a little, and shook her head. “No—no!”

_“Ah, par exemple!”_ cried the young man. “You deserve that I should
never leave you.”

Going into the parlor they found Mr. Wentworth performing
introductions. A young man was standing before the Baroness, blushing a
good deal, laughing a little, and shifting his weight from one foot to
the other—a slim, mild-faced young man, with neatly-arranged features,
like those of Mr. Wentworth. Two other gentlemen, behind him, had risen
from their seats, and a little apart, near one of the windows, stood a
remarkably pretty young girl. The young girl was knitting a stocking;
but, while her fingers quickly moved, she looked with wide, brilliant
eyes at the Baroness.

“And what is your son’s name?” said Eugenia, smiling at the young man.

“My name is Clifford Wentworth, ma’am,” he said in a tremulous voice.

“Why didn’t you come out to meet me, Mr. Clifford Wentworth?” the
Baroness demanded, with her beautiful smile.

“I didn’t think you would want me,” said the young man, slowly sidling
about.

“One always wants a _beau cousin_,—if one has one! But if you are very
nice to me in future I won’t remember it against you.” And Madame
Münster transferred her smile to the other persons present. It rested
first upon the candid countenance and long-skirted figure of Mr. Brand,
whose eyes were intently fixed upon Mr. Wentworth, as if to beg him not
to prolong an anomalous situation. Mr. Wentworth pronounced his name.
Eugenia gave him a very charming glance, and then looked at the other
gentleman.

This latter personage was a man of rather less than the usual stature
and the usual weight, with a quick, observant, agreeable dark eye, a
small quantity of thin dark hair, and a small moustache. He had been
standing with his hands in his pockets; and when Eugenia looked at him
he took them out. But he did not, like Mr. Brand, look evasively and
urgently at their host. He met Eugenia’s eyes; he appeared to
appreciate the privilege of meeting them. Madame Münster instantly felt
that he was, intrinsically, the most important person present. She was
not unconscious that this impression was in some degree manifested in
the little sympathetic nod with which she acknowledged Mr. Wentworth’s
announcement, “My cousin, Mr. Acton!”

“Your cousin—not mine?” said the Baroness.

“It only depends upon you,” Mr. Acton declared, laughing.

The Baroness looked at him a moment, and noticed that he had very white
teeth. “Let it depend upon your behavior,” she said. “I think I had
better wait. I have cousins enough. Unless I can also claim
relationship,” she added, “with that charming young lady,” and she
pointed to the young girl at the window.

“That’s my sister,” said Mr. Acton. And Gertrude Wentworth put her arm
round the young girl and led her forward. It was not, apparently, that
she needed much leading. She came toward the Baroness with a light,
quick step, and with perfect self-possession, rolling her stocking
round its needles. She had dark blue eyes and dark brown hair; she was
wonderfully pretty.

Eugenia kissed her, as she had kissed the other young women, and then
held her off a little, looking at her. “Now this is quite another
_type_,” she said; she pronounced the word in the French manner. “This
is a different outline, my uncle, a different character, from that of
your own daughters. This, Felix,” she went on, “is very much more what
we have always thought of as the American type.”

The young girl, during this exposition, was smiling askance at everyone
in turn, and at Felix out of turn. “I find only one type here!” cried
Felix, laughing. “The type adorable!”

This sally was received in perfect silence, but Felix, who learned all
things quickly, had already learned that the silences frequently
observed among his new acquaintances were not necessarily restrictive
or resentful. It was, as one might say, the silence of expectation, of
modesty. They were all standing round his sister, as if they were
expecting her to acquit herself of the exhibition of some peculiar
faculty, some brilliant talent. Their attitude seemed to imply that she
was a kind of conversational mountebank, attired, intellectually, in
gauze and spangles. This attitude gave a certain ironical force to
Madame Münster’s next words. “Now this is your circle,” she said to her
uncle. “This is your _salon_. These are your regular _habitués_, eh? I
am so glad to see you all together.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Wentworth, “they are always dropping in and out. You
must do the same.”

“Father,” interposed Charlotte Wentworth, “they must do something
more.” And she turned her sweet, serious face, that seemed at once
timid and placid, upon their interesting visitor. “What is your name?”
she asked.

“Eugenia-Camilla-Dolores,” said the Baroness, smiling. “But you needn’t
say all that.”

“I will say Eugenia, if you will let me. You must come and stay with
us.”

The Baroness laid her hand upon Charlotte’s arm very tenderly; but she
reserved herself. She was wondering whether it would be possible to
“stay” with these people. “It would be very charming—very charming,”
she said; and her eyes wandered over the company, over the room. She
wished to gain time before committing herself. Her glance fell upon
young Mr. Brand, who stood there, with his arms folded and his hand on
his chin, looking at her. “The gentleman, I suppose, is a sort of
ecclesiastic,” she said to Mr. Wentworth, lowering her voice a little.

“He is a minister,” answered Mr. Wentworth.

“A Protestant?” asked Eugenia.

“I am a Unitarian, madam,” replied Mr. Brand, impressively.

“Ah, I see,” said Eugenia. “Something new.” She had never heard of this
form of worship.

Mr. Acton began to laugh, and Gertrude looked anxiously at Mr. Brand.

“You have come very far,” said Mr. Wentworth.

“Very far—very far,” the Baroness replied, with a graceful shake of her
head—a shake that might have meant many different things.

“That’s a reason why you ought to settle down with us,” said Mr.
Wentworth, with that dryness of utterance which, as Eugenia was too
intelligent not to feel, took nothing from the delicacy of his meaning.

She looked at him, and for an instant, in his cold, still face, she
seemed to see a far-away likeness to the vaguely remembered image of
her mother. Eugenia was a woman of sudden emotions, and now,
unexpectedly, she felt one rising in her heart. She kept looking round
the circle; she knew that there was admiration in all the eyes that
were fixed upon her. She smiled at them all.

“I came to look—to try—to ask,” she said. “It seems to me I have done
well. I am very tired; I want to rest.” There were tears in her eyes.
The luminous interior, the gentle, tranquil people, the simple, serious
life—the sense of these things pressed upon her with an overmastering
force, and she felt herself yielding to one of the most genuine
emotions she had ever known. “I should like to stay here,” she said.
“Pray take me in.”

Though she was smiling, there were tears in her voice as well as in her
eyes. “My dear niece,” said Mr. Wentworth, softly. And Charlotte put
out her arms and drew the Baroness toward her; while Robert Acton
turned away, with his hands stealing into his pockets.




CHAPTER IV


A few days after the Baroness Münster had presented herself to her
American kinsfolk she came, with her brother, and took up her abode in
that small white house adjacent to Mr. Wentworth’s own dwelling of
which mention has already been made. It was on going with his daughters
to return her visit that Mr. Wentworth placed this comfortable cottage
at her service; the offer being the result of a domestic colloquy,
diffused through the ensuing twenty-four hours, in the course of which
the two foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal
of earnestness and subtlety. The discussion went forward, as I say, in
the family circle; but that circle on the evening following Madame
Münster’s return to town, as on many other occasions, included Robert
Acton and his pretty sister. If you had been present, it would probably
not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was
treated as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this
tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment. This was not
Mr. Wentworth’s way of treating any human occurrence. The sudden
irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the Wentworths of an
element not allowed for in its scheme of usual obligations required a
readjustment of that sense of responsibility which constituted its
principal furniture. To consider an event, crudely and baldly, in the
light of the pleasure it might bring them was an intellectual exercise
with which Felix Young’s American cousins were almost wholly
unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely pursued in
any section of human society. The arrival of Felix and his sister was a
satisfaction, but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic
satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more
recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr.
Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of
reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted to it as an extension of
enjoyment. This function was ultimately assumed by Gertrude Wentworth,
who was a peculiar girl, but the full compass of whose peculiarities
had not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext
in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners. Gertrude,
however, had to struggle with a great accumulation of obstructions,
both of the subjective, as the metaphysicians say, and of the
objective, order; and indeed it is no small part of the purpose of this
little history to set forth her struggle. What seemed paramount in this
abrupt enlargement of Mr. Wentworth’s sympathies and those of his
daughters was an extension of the field of possible mistakes; and the
doctrine, as it may almost be called, of the oppressive gravity of
mistakes was one of the most cherished traditions of the Wentworth
family.

“I don’t believe she wants to come and stay in this house,” said
Gertrude; Madame Münster, from this time forward, receiving no other
designation than the personal pronoun. Charlotte and Gertrude acquired
considerable facility in addressing her, directly, as “Eugenia;” but in
speaking of her to each other they rarely called her anything but
“she.”

“Doesn’t she think it good enough for her?” cried little Lizzie Acton,
who was always asking unpractical questions that required, in
strictness, no answer, and to which indeed she expected no other answer
than such as she herself invariably furnished in a small,
innocently-satirical laugh.

“She certainly expressed a willingness to come,” said Mr. Wentworth.

“That was only politeness,” Gertrude rejoined.

“Yes, she is very polite—very polite,” said Mr. Wentworth.

“She is too polite,” his son declared, in a softly growling tone which
was habitual to him, but which was an indication of nothing worse than
a vaguely humorous intention. “It is very embarrassing.”

“That is more than can be said of you, sir,” said Lizzie Acton, with
her little laugh.

“Well, I don’t mean to encourage her,” Clifford went on.

“I’m sure I don’t care if you do!” cried Lizzie.

“She will not think of you, Clifford,” said Gertrude, gravely.

“I hope not!” Clifford exclaimed.

“She will think of Robert,” Gertrude continued, in the same tone.

Robert Acton began to blush; but there was no occasion for it, for
everyone was looking at Gertrude—everyone, at least, save Lizzie, who,
with her pretty head on one side, contemplated her brother.

“Why do you attribute motives, Gertrude?” asked Mr. Wentworth.

“I don’t attribute motives, father,” said Gertrude. “I only say she
will think of Robert; and she will!”

“Gertrude judges by herself!” Acton exclaimed, laughing. “Don’t you,
Gertrude? Of course the Baroness will think of me. She will think of me
from morning till night.”

“She will be very comfortable here,” said Charlotte, with something of
a housewife’s pride. “She can have the large northeast room. And the
French bedstead,” Charlotte added, with a constant sense of the lady’s
foreignness.

“She will not like it,” said Gertrude; “not even if you pin little
tidies all over the chairs.”

“Why not, dear?” asked Charlotte, perceiving a touch of irony here, but
not resenting it.

Gertrude had left her chair; she was walking about the room; her stiff
silk dress, which she had put on in honor of the Baroness, made a sound
upon the carpet. “I don’t know,” she replied. “She will want something
more—more private.”

“If she wants to be private she can stay in her room,” Lizzie Acton
remarked.

Gertrude paused in her walk, looking at her. “That would not be
pleasant,” she answered. “She wants privacy and pleasure together.”

Robert Acton began to laugh again. “My dear cousin, what a picture!”

Charlotte had fixed her serious eyes upon her sister; she wondered
whence she had suddenly derived these strange notions. Mr. Wentworth
also observed his younger daughter.

“I don’t know what her manner of life may have been,” he said; “but she
certainly never can have enjoyed a more refined and salubrious home.”

Gertrude stood there looking at them all. “She is the wife of a
Prince,” she said.

“We are all princes here,” said Mr. Wentworth; “and I don’t know of any
palace in this neighborhood that is to let.”

“Cousin William,” Robert Acton interposed, “do you want to do something
handsome? Make them a present, for three months, of the little house
over the way.”

“You are very generous with other people’s things!” cried his sister.

“Robert is very generous with his own things,” Mr. Wentworth observed
dispassionately, and looking, in cold meditation, at his kinsman.

“Gertrude,” Lizzie went on, “I had an idea you were so fond of your new
cousin.”

“Which new cousin?” asked Gertrude.

“I don’t mean the Baroness!” the young girl rejoined, with her laugh.
“I thought you expected to see so much of him.”

“Of Felix? I hope to see a great deal of him,” said Gertrude, simply.

“Then why do you want to keep him out of the house?”

Gertrude looked at Lizzie Acton, and then looked away.

“Should you want me to live in the house with you, Lizzie?” asked
Clifford.

“I hope you never will. I hate you!” Such was this young lady’s reply.

“Father,” said Gertrude, stopping before Mr. Wentworth and smiling,
with a smile the sweeter, as her smile always was, for its rarity; “do
let them live in the little house over the way. It will be lovely!”

Robert Acton had been watching her. “Gertrude is right,” he said.
“Gertrude is the cleverest girl in the world. If I might take the
liberty, I should strongly recommend their living there.”

“There is nothing there so pretty as the northeast room,” Charlotte
urged.

“She will make it pretty. Leave her alone!” Acton exclaimed.

Gertrude, at his compliment, had blushed and looked at him: it was as
if someone less familiar had complimented her. “I am sure she will make
it pretty. It will be very interesting. It will be a place to go to. It
will be a foreign house.”

“Are we very sure that we need a foreign house?” Mr. Wentworth
inquired. “Do you think it desirable to establish a foreign house—in
this quiet place?”

“You speak,” said Acton, laughing, “as if it were a question of the
poor Baroness opening a wine-shop or a gaming-table.”

“It would be too lovely!” Gertrude declared again, laying her hand on
the back of her father’s chair.

“That she should open a gaming-table?” Charlotte asked, with great
gravity.

Gertrude looked at her a moment, and then, “Yes, Charlotte,” she said,
simply.

“Gertrude is growing pert,” Clifford Wentworth observed, with his
humorous young growl. “That comes of associating with foreigners.”

Mr. Wentworth looked up at his daughter, who was standing beside him;
he drew her gently forward. “You must be careful,” he said. “You must
keep watch. Indeed, we must all be careful. This is a great change; we
are to be exposed to peculiar influences. I don’t say they are bad. I
don’t judge them in advance. But they may perhaps make it necessary
that we should exercise a great deal of wisdom and self-control. It
will be a different tone.”

Gertrude was silent a moment, in deference to her father’s speech; then
she spoke in a manner that was not in the least an answer to it. “I
want to see how they will live. I am sure they will have different
hours. She will do all kinds of little things differently. When we go
over there it will be like going to Europe. She will have a boudoir.
She will invite us to dinner—very late. She will breakfast in her
room.”

Charlotte gazed at her sister again. Gertrude’s imagination seemed to
her to be fairly running riot. She had always known that Gertrude had a
great deal of imagination—she had been very proud of it. But at the
same time she had always felt that it was a dangerous and irresponsible
faculty; and now, to her sense, for the moment, it seemed to threaten
to make her sister a strange person who should come in suddenly, as
from a journey, talking of the peculiar and possibly unpleasant things
she had observed. Charlotte’s imagination took no journeys whatever;
she kept it, as it were, in her pocket, with the other furniture of
this receptacle—a thimble, a little box of peppermint, and a morsel of
court-plaster. “I don’t believe she would have any dinner—or any
breakfast,” said Miss Wentworth. “I don’t believe she knows how to do
anything herself. I should have to get her ever so many servants, and
she wouldn’t like them.”

“She has a maid,” said Gertrude; “a French maid. She mentioned her.”

“I wonder if the maid has a little fluted cap and red slippers,” said
Lizzie Acton. “There was a French maid in that play that Robert took me
to see. She had pink stockings; she was very wicked.”

“She was a _soubrette_,” Gertrude announced, who had never seen a play
in her life. “They call that a soubrette. It will be a great chance to
learn French.” Charlotte gave a little soft, helpless groan. She had a
vision of a wicked, theatrical person, clad in pink stockings and red
shoes, and speaking, with confounding volubility, an incomprehensible
tongue, flitting through the sacred penetralia of that large, clean
house. “That is one reason in favor of their coming here,” Gertrude
went on. “But we can make Eugenia speak French to us, and Felix. I mean
to begin—the next time.”

Mr. Wentworth had kept her standing near him, and he gave her his
earnest, thin, unresponsive glance again. “I want you to make me a
promise, Gertrude,” he said.

“What is it?” she asked, smiling.

“Not to get excited. Not to allow these—these occurrences to be an
occasion for excitement.”

She looked down at him a moment, and then she shook her head. “I don’t
think I can promise that, father. I am excited already.”

Mr. Wentworth was silent a while; they all were silent, as if in
recognition of something audacious and portentous.

“I think they had better go to the other house,” said Charlotte,
quietly.

“I shall keep them in the other house,” Mr. Wentworth subjoined, more
pregnantly.

Gertrude turned away; then she looked across at Robert Acton. Her
cousin Robert was a great friend of hers; she often looked at him this
way instead of saying things. Her glance on this occasion, however,
struck him as a substitute for a larger volume of diffident utterance
than usual, inviting him to observe, among other things, the
inefficiency of her father’s design—if design it was—for diminishing,
in the interest of quiet nerves, their occasions of contact with their
foreign relatives. But Acton immediately complimented Mr. Wentworth
upon his liberality. “That’s a very nice thing to do,” he said, “giving
them the little house. You will have treated them handsomely, and,
whatever happens, you will be glad of it.” Mr. Wentworth was liberal,
and he knew he was liberal. It gave him pleasure to know it, to feel
it, to see it recorded; and this pleasure is the only palpable form of
self-indulgence with which the narrator of these incidents will be able
to charge him.

“A three days’ visit at most, over there, is all I should have found
possible,” Madame Münster remarked to her brother, after they had taken
possession of the little white house. “It would have been too
_intime_—decidedly too _intime_. Breakfast, dinner, and tea _en
famille_—it would have been the end of the world if I could have
reached the third day.” And she made the same observation to her maid
Augustine, an intelligent person, who enjoyed a liberal share of her
confidence. Felix declared that he would willingly spend his life in
the bosom of the Wentworth family; that they were the kindest,
simplest, most amiable people in the world, and that he had taken a
prodigious fancy to them all. The Baroness quite agreed with him that
they were simple and kind; they were thoroughly nice people, and she
liked them extremely. The girls were perfect ladies; it was impossible
to be more of a lady than Charlotte Wentworth, in spite of her little
village air. “But as for thinking them the best company in the world,”
said the Baroness, “that is another thing; and as for wishing to live
_porte à porte_ with them, I should as soon think of wishing myself
back in the convent again, to wear a bombazine apron and sleep in a
dormitory.” And yet the Baroness was in high good humor; she had been
very much pleased. With her lively perception and her refined
imagination, she was capable of enjoying anything that was
characteristic, anything that was good of its kind. The Wentworth
household seemed to her very perfect in its kind—wonderfully peaceful
and unspotted; pervaded by a sort of dove-colored freshness that had
all the quietude and benevolence of what she deemed to be Quakerism,
and yet seemed to be founded upon a degree of material abundance for
which, in certain matters of detail, one might have looked in vain at
the frugal little court of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. She perceived
immediately that her American relatives thought and talked very little
about money; and this of itself made an impression upon Eugenia’s
imagination. She perceived at the same time that if Charlotte or
Gertrude should ask their father for a very considerable sum he would
at once place it in their hands; and this made a still greater
impression. The greatest impression of all, perhaps, was made by
another rapid induction. The Baroness had an immediate conviction that
Robert Acton would put his hand into his pocket every day in the week
if that rattle-pated little sister of his should bid him. The men in
this country, said the Baroness, are evidently very obliging. Her
declaration that she was looking for rest and retirement had been by no
means wholly untrue; nothing that the Baroness said was wholly untrue.
It is but fair to add, perhaps, that nothing that she said was wholly
true. She wrote to a friend in Germany that it was a return to nature;
it was like drinking new milk, and she was very fond of new milk. She
said to herself, of course, that it would be a little dull; but there
can be no better proof of her good spirits than the fact that she
thought she should not mind its being a little dull. It seemed to her,
when from the piazza of her eleemosynary cottage she looked out over
the soundless fields, the stony pastures, the clear-faced ponds, the
rugged little orchards, that she had never been in the midst of so
peculiarly intense a stillness; it was almost a delicate sensual
pleasure. It was all very good, very innocent and safe, and out of it
something good must come. Augustine, indeed, who had an unbounded faith
in her mistress’s wisdom and far-sightedness, was a great deal
perplexed and depressed. She was always ready to take her cue when she
understood it; but she liked to understand it, and on this occasion
comprehension failed. What, indeed, was the Baroness doing _dans cette
galère_? what fish did she expect to land out of these very stagnant
waters? The game was evidently a deep one. Augustine could trust her;
but the sense of walking in the dark betrayed itself in the physiognomy
of this spare, sober, sallow, middle-aged person, who had nothing in
common with Gertrude Wentworth’s conception of a soubrette, by the most
ironical scowl that had ever rested upon the unpretending tokens of the
peace and plenty of the Wentworths. Fortunately, Augustine could quench
skepticism in action. She quite agreed with her mistress—or rather she
quite out-stripped her mistress—in thinking that the little white house
was pitifully bare. _“Il faudra,”_ said Augustine, _“lui faire un peu
de toilette.”_ And she began to hang up _portières_ in the doorways; to
place wax candles, procured after some research, in unexpected
situations; to dispose anomalous draperies over the arms of sofas and
the backs of chairs. The Baroness had brought with her to the New World
a copious provision of the element of costume; and the two Miss
Wentworths, when they came over to see her, were somewhat bewildered by
the obtrusive distribution of her wardrobe. There were India shawls
suspended, curtain-wise, in the parlor door, and curious fabrics,
corresponding to Gertrude’s metaphysical vision of an opera-cloak,
tumbled about in the sitting-places. There were pink silk blinds in the
windows, by which the room was strangely bedimmed; and along the
chimney-piece was disposed a remarkable band of velvet, covered with
coarse, dirty-looking lace. “I have been making myself a little
comfortable,” said the Baroness, much to the confusion of Charlotte,
who had been on the point of proposing to come and help her put her
superfluous draperies away. But what Charlotte mistook for an almost
culpably delayed subsidence Gertrude very presently perceived to be the
most ingenious, the most interesting, the most romantic intention.
“What is life, indeed, without curtains?” she secretly asked herself;
and she appeared to herself to have been leading hitherto an existence
singularly garish and totally devoid of festoons.

Felix was not a young man who troubled himself greatly about
anything—least of all about the conditions of enjoyment. His faculty of
enjoyment was so large, so unconsciously eager, that it may be said of
it that it had a permanent advance upon embarrassment and sorrow. His
sentient faculty was intrinsically joyous, and novelty and change were
in themselves a delight to him. As they had come to him with a great
deal of frequency, his life had been more agreeable than appeared.
Never was a nature more perfectly fortunate. It was not a restless,
apprehensive, ambitious spirit, running a race with the tyranny of
fate, but a temper so unsuspicious as to put Adversity off her guard,
dodging and evading her with the easy, natural motion of a wind-shifted
flower. Felix extracted entertainment from all things, and all his
faculties—his imagination, his intelligence, his affections, his
senses—had a hand in the game. It seemed to him that Eugenia and he had
been very well treated; there was something absolutely touching in that
combination of paternal liberality and social considerateness which
marked Mr. Wentworth’s deportment. It was most uncommonly kind of him,
for instance, to have given them a house. Felix was positively amused
at having a house of his own; for the little white cottage among the
apple trees—the chalet, as Madame Münster always called it—was much
more sensibly his own than any domiciliary _quatrième_, looking upon a
court, with the rent overdue. Felix had spent a good deal of his life
in looking into courts, with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows
resting upon the ledge of a high-perched window, and the thin smoke of
a cigarette rising into an atmosphere in which street-cries died away
and the vibration of chimes from ancient belfries became sensible. He
had never known anything so infinitely rural as these New England
fields; and he took a great fancy to all their pastoral roughnesses. He
had never had a greater sense of luxurious security; and at the risk of
making him seem a rather sordid adventurer I must declare that he found
an irresistible charm in the fact that he might dine every day at his
uncle’s. The charm was irresistible, however, because his fancy flung a
rosy light over this homely privilege. He appreciated highly the fare
that was set before him. There was a kind of fresh-looking abundance
about it which made him think that people must have lived so in the
mythological era, when they spread their tables upon the grass,
replenished them from cornucopias, and had no particular need of
kitchen stoves. But the great thing that Felix enjoyed was having found
a family—sitting in the midst of gentle, generous people whom he might
call by their first names. He had never known anything more charming
than the attention they paid to what he said. It was like a large sheet
of clean, fine-grained drawing-paper, all ready to be washed over with
effective splashes of water-color. He had never had any cousins, and he
had never before found himself in contact so unrestricted with young
unmarried ladies. He was extremely fond of the society of ladies, and
it was new to him that it might be enjoyed in just this manner. At
first he hardly knew what to make of his state of mind. It seemed to
him that he was in love, indiscriminately, with three girls at once. He
saw that Lizzie Acton was more brilliantly pretty than Charlotte and
Gertrude; but this was scarcely a superiority. His pleasure came from
something they had in common—a part of which was, indeed, that physical
delicacy which seemed to make it proper that they should always dress
in thin materials and clear colors. But they were delicate in other
ways, and it was most agreeable to him to feel that these latter
delicacies were appreciable by contact, as it were. He had known,
fortunately, many virtuous gentlewomen, but it now appeared to him that
in his relations with them (especially when they were unmarried) he had
been looking at pictures under glass. He perceived at present what a
nuisance the glass had been—how it perverted and interfered, how it
caught the reflection of other objects and kept you walking from side
to side. He had no need to ask himself whether Charlotte and Gertrude,
and Lizzie Acton, were in the right light; they were always in the
right light. He liked everything about them: he was, for instance, not
at all above liking the fact that they had very slender feet and high
insteps. He liked their pretty noses; he liked their surprised eyes and
their hesitating, not at all positive way of speaking; he liked so much
knowing that he was perfectly at liberty to be alone for hours,
anywhere, with either of them; that preference for one to the other, as
a companion of solitude, remained a minor affair. Charlotte Wentworth’s
sweetly severe features were as agreeable as Lizzie Acton’s wonderfully
expressive blue eyes; and Gertrude’s air of being always ready to walk
about and listen was as charming as anything else, especially as she
walked very gracefully. After a while Felix began to distinguish; but
even then he would often wish, suddenly, that they were not all so sad.
Even Lizzie Acton, in spite of her fine little chatter and laughter,
appeared sad. Even Clifford Wentworth, who had extreme youth in his
favor, and kept a buggy with enormous wheels and a little sorrel mare
with the prettiest legs in the world—even this fortunate lad was apt to
have an averted, uncomfortable glance, and to edge away from you at
times, in the manner of a person with a bad conscience. The only person
in the circle with no sense of oppression of any kind was, to Felix’s
perception, Robert Acton.

It might perhaps have been feared that after the completion of those
graceful domiciliary embellishments which have been mentioned Madame
Münster would have found herself confronted with alarming possibilities
of _ennui_. But as yet she had not taken the alarm. The Baroness was a
restless soul, and she projected her restlessness, as it may be said,
into any situation that lay before her. Up to a certain point her
restlessness might be counted upon to entertain her. She was always
expecting something to happen, and, until it was disappointed,
expectancy itself was a delicate pleasure. What the Baroness expected
just now it would take some ingenuity to set forth; it is enough that
while she looked about her she found something to occupy her
imagination. She assured herself that she was enchanted with her new
relatives; she professed to herself that, like her brother, she felt it
a sacred satisfaction to have found a family. It is certain that she
enjoyed to the utmost the gentleness of her kinsfolk’s deference. She
had, first and last, received a great deal of admiration, and her
experience of well-turned compliments was very considerable; but she
knew that she had never been so real a power, never counted for so
much, as now when, for the first time, the standard of comparison of
her little circle was a prey to vagueness. The sense, indeed, that the
good people about her had, as regards her remarkable self, no standard
of comparison at all gave her a feeling of almost illimitable power. It
was true, as she said to herself, that if for this reason they would be
able to discover nothing against her, so they would perhaps neglect to
perceive some of her superior points; but she always wound up her
reflections by declaring that she would take care of that.

Charlotte and Gertrude were in some perplexity between their desire to
show all proper attention to Madame Münster and their fear of being
importunate. The little house in the orchard had hitherto been occupied
during the summer months by intimate friends of the family, or by poor
relations who found in Mr. Wentworth a landlord attentive to repairs
and oblivious of quarter-day. Under these circumstances the open door
of the small house and that of the large one, facing each other across
their homely gardens, levied no tax upon hourly visits. But the Misses
Wentworth received an impression that Eugenia was no friend to the
primitive custom of “dropping in;” she evidently had no idea of living
without a door-keeper. “One goes into your house as into an inn—except
that there are no servants rushing forward,” she said to Charlotte. And
she added that that was very charming. Gertrude explained to her sister
that she meant just the reverse; she didn’t like it at all. Charlotte
inquired why she should tell an untruth, and Gertrude answered that
there was probably some very good reason for it which they should
discover when they knew her better. “There can surely be no good reason
for telling an untruth,” said Charlotte. “I hope she does not think
so.”

They had of course desired, from the first, to do everything in the way
of helping her to arrange herself. It had seemed to Charlotte that
there would be a great many things to talk about; but the Baroness was
apparently inclined to talk about nothing.

“Write her a note, asking her leave to come and see her. I think that
is what she will like,” said Gertrude.

“Why should I give her the trouble of answering me?” Charlotte asked.
“She will have to write a note and send it over.”

“I don’t think she will take any trouble,” said Gertrude, profoundly.

“What then will she do?”

“That is what I am curious to see,” said Gertrude, leaving her sister
with an impression that her curiosity was morbid.

They went to see the Baroness without preliminary correspondence; and
in the little salon which she had already created, with its becoming
light and its festoons, they found Robert Acton.

Eugenia was intensely gracious, but she accused them of neglecting her
cruelly. “You see Mr. Acton has had to take pity upon me,” she said.
“My brother goes off sketching, for hours; I can never depend upon him.
So I was to send Mr. Acton to beg you to come and give me the benefit
of your wisdom.”

Gertrude looked at her sister. She wanted to say, “_That_ is what she
would have done.” Charlotte said that they hoped the Baroness would
always come and dine with them; it would give them so much pleasure;
and, in that case, she would spare herself the trouble of having a
cook.

“Ah, but I must have a cook!” cried the Baroness. “An old negress in a
yellow turban. I have set my heart upon that. I want to look out of my
window and see her sitting there on the grass, against the background
of those crooked, dusky little apple trees, pulling the husks off a
lapful of Indian corn. That will be local color, you know. There isn’t
much of it here—you don’t mind my saying that, do you?—so one must make
the most of what one can get. I shall be most happy to dine with you
whenever you will let me; but I want to be able to ask you sometimes.
And I want to be able to ask Mr. Acton,” added the Baroness.

“You must come and ask me at home,” said Acton. “You must come and see
me; you must dine with me first. I want to show you my place; I want to
introduce you to my mother.” He called again upon Madame Münster, two
days later. He was constantly at the other house; he used to walk
across the fields from his own place, and he appeared to have fewer
scruples than his cousins with regard to dropping in. On this occasion
he found that Mr. Brand had come to pay his respects to the charming
stranger; but after Acton’s arrival the young theologian said nothing.
He sat in his chair with his two hands clasped, fixing upon his hostess
a grave, fascinated stare. The Baroness talked to Robert Acton, but, as
she talked, she turned and smiled at Mr. Brand, who never took his eyes
off her. The two men walked away together; they were going to Mr.
Wentworth’s. Mr. Brand still said nothing; but after they had passed
into Mr. Wentworth’s garden he stopped and looked back for some time at
the little white house. Then, looking at his companion, with his head
bent a little to one side and his eyes somewhat contracted, “Now I
suppose that’s what is called conversation,” he said; “real
conversation.”

“It’s what I call a very clever woman,” said Acton, laughing.

“It is most interesting,” Mr. Brand continued. “I only wish she would
speak French; it would seem more in keeping. It must be quite the style
that we have heard about, that we have read about—the style of
conversation of Madame de Staël, of Madame Récamier.”

Acton also looked at Madame Münster’s residence among its hollyhocks
and apple trees. “What I should like to know,” he said, smiling, “is
just what has brought Madame Récamier to live in that place!”




CHAPTER V


Mr. Wentworth, with his cane and his gloves in his hand, went every
afternoon to call upon his niece. A couple of hours later she came over
to the great house to tea. She had let the proposal that she should
regularly dine there fall to the ground; she was in the enjoyment of
whatever satisfaction was to be derived from the spectacle of an old
negress in a crimson turban shelling peas under the apple trees.
Charlotte, who had provided the ancient negress, thought it must be a
strange household, Eugenia having told her that Augustine managed
everything, the ancient negress included—Augustine who was naturally
devoid of all acquaintance with the expurgatory English tongue. By far
the most immoral sentiment which I shall have occasion to attribute to
Charlotte Wentworth was a certain emotion of disappointment at finding
that, in spite of these irregular conditions, the domestic arrangements
at the small house were apparently not—from Eugenia’s peculiar point of
view—strikingly offensive. The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea;
she dressed as if for dinner. The tea-table offered an anomalous and
picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the
large piazza, or wandered about the garden in the starlight, with their
ears full of those sounds of strange insects which, though they are
supposed to be, all over the world, a part of the magic of summer
nights, seemed to the Baroness to have beneath these western skies an
incomparable resonance.

Mr. Wentworth, though, as I say, he went punctiliously to call upon
her, was not able to feel that he was getting used to his niece. It
taxed his imagination to believe that she was really his half-sister’s
child. His sister was a figure of his early years; she had been only
twenty when she went abroad, never to return, making in foreign parts a
willful and undesirable marriage. His aunt, Mrs. Whiteside, who had
taken her to Europe for the benefit of the tour, gave, on her return,
so lamentable an account of Mr. Adolphus Young, to whom the headstrong
girl had united her destiny, that it operated as a chill upon family
feeling—especially in the case of the half-brothers. Catherine had done
nothing subsequently to propitiate her family; she had not even written
to them in a way that indicated a lucid appreciation of their suspended
sympathy; so that it had become a tradition in Boston circles that the
highest charity, as regards this young lady, was to think it well to
forget her, and to abstain from conjecture as to the extent to which
her aberrations were reproduced in her descendants. Over these young
people—a vague report of their existence had come to his ears—Mr.
Wentworth had not, in the course of years, allowed his imagination to
hover. It had plenty of occupation nearer home, and though he had many
cares upon his conscience the idea that he had been an unnatural uncle
was, very properly, never among the number. Now that his nephew and
niece had come before him, he perceived that they were the fruit of
influences and circumstances very different from those under which his
own familiar progeny had reached a vaguely-qualified maturity. He felt
no provocation to say that these influences had been exerted for evil;
but he was sometimes afraid that he should not be able to like his
distinguished, delicate, lady-like niece. He was paralyzed and
bewildered by her foreignness. She spoke, somehow, a different
language. There was something strange in her words. He had a feeling
that another man, in his place, would accommodate himself to her tone;
would ask her questions and joke with her, reply to those pleasantries
of her own which sometimes seemed startling as addressed to an uncle.
But Mr. Wentworth could not do these things. He could not even bring
himself to attempt to measure her position in the world. She was the
wife of a foreign nobleman who desired to repudiate her. This had a
singular sound, but the old man felt himself destitute of the materials
for a judgment. It seemed to him that he ought to find them in his own
experience, as a man of the world and an almost public character; but
they were not there, and he was ashamed to confess to himself—much more
to reveal to Eugenia by interrogations possibly too innocent—the
unfurnished condition of this repository.

It appeared to him that he could get much nearer, as he would have
said, to his nephew; though he was not sure that Felix was altogether
safe. He was so bright and handsome and talkative that it was
impossible not to think well of him; and yet it seemed as if there were
something almost impudent, almost vicious—or as if there ought to be—in
a young man being at once so joyous and so positive. It was to be
observed that while Felix was not at all a serious young man there was
somehow more of him—he had more weight and volume and resonance—than a
number of young men who were distinctly serious. While Mr. Wentworth
meditated upon this anomaly his nephew was admiring him unrestrictedly.
He thought him a most delicate, generous, high-toned old gentleman,
with a very handsome head, of the ascetic type, which he promised
himself the profit of sketching. Felix was far from having made a
secret of the fact that he wielded the paint-brush, and it was not his
own fault if it failed to be generally understood that he was prepared
to execute the most striking likenesses on the most reasonable terms.
“He is an artist—my cousin is an artist,” said Gertrude; and she
offered this information to everyone who would receive it. She offered
it to herself, as it were, by way of admonition and reminder; she
repeated to herself at odd moments, in lonely places, that Felix was
invested with this sacred character. Gertrude had never seen an artist
before; she had only read about such people. They seemed to her a
romantic and mysterious class, whose life was made up of those
agreeable accidents that never happened to other persons. And it merely
quickened her meditations on this point that Felix should declare, as
he repeatedly did, that he was really not an artist. “I have never gone
into the thing seriously,” he said. “I have never studied; I have had
no training. I do a little of everything, and nothing well. I am only
an amateur.”

It pleased Gertrude even more to think that he was an amateur than to
think that he was an artist; the former word, to her fancy, had an even
subtler connotation. She knew, however, that it was a word to use more
soberly. Mr. Wentworth used it freely; for though he had not been
exactly familiar with it, he found it convenient as a help toward
classifying Felix, who, as a young man extremely clever and active and
apparently respectable and yet not engaged in any recognized business,
was an importunate anomaly. Of course the Baroness and her brother—she
was always spoken of first—were a welcome topic of conversation between
Mr. Wentworth and his daughters and their occasional visitors.

“And the young man, your nephew, what is his profession?” asked an old
gentleman—Mr. Broderip, of Salem—who had been Mr. Wentworth’s classmate
at Harvard College in the year 1809, and who came into his office in
Devonshire Street. (Mr. Wentworth, in his later years, used to go but
three times a week to his office, where he had a large amount of highly
confidential trust-business to transact.)

“Well, he’s an amateur,” said Felix’s uncle, with folded hands, and
with a certain satisfaction in being able to say it. And Mr. Broderip
had gone back to Salem with a feeling that this was probably a
“European” expression for a broker or a grain exporter.

“I should like to do your head, sir,” said Felix to his uncle one
evening, before them all—Mr. Brand and Robert Acton being also present.
“I think I should make a very fine thing of it. It’s an interesting
head; it’s very mediaeval.”

Mr. Wentworth looked grave; he felt awkwardly, as if all the company
had come in and found him standing before the looking-glass. “The Lord
made it,” he said. “I don’t think it is for man to make it over again.”

“Certainly the Lord made it,” replied Felix, laughing, “and he made it
very well. But life has been touching up the work. It is a very
interesting type of head. It’s delightfully wasted and emaciated. The
complexion is wonderfully bleached.” And Felix looked round at the
circle, as if to call their attention to these interesting points. Mr.
Wentworth grew visibly paler. “I should like to do you as an old
prelate, an old cardinal, or the prior of an order.”

“A prelate, a cardinal?” murmured Mr. Wentworth. “Do you refer to the
Roman Catholic priesthood?”

“I mean an old ecclesiastic who should have led a very pure, abstinent
life. Now I take it that has been the case with you, sir; one sees it
in your face,” Felix proceeded. “You have been very—a very moderate.
Don’t you think one always sees that in a man’s face?”

“You see more in a man’s face than I should think of looking for,” said
Mr. Wentworth coldly.

The Baroness rattled her fan, and gave her brilliant laugh. “It is a
risk to look so close!” she exclaimed. “My uncle has some peccadilloes
on his conscience.” Mr. Wentworth looked at her, painfully at a loss;
and in so far as the signs of a pure and abstinent life were visible in
his face they were then probably peculiarly manifest. “You are a _beau
vieillard_, dear uncle,” said Madame Münster, smiling with her foreign
eyes.

“I think you are paying me a compliment,” said the old man.

“Surely, I am not the first woman that ever did so!” cried the
Baroness.

“I think you are,” said Mr. Wentworth gravely. And turning to Felix he
added, in the same tone, “Please don’t take my likeness. My children
have my daguerreotype. That is quite satisfactory.”

“I won’t promise,” said Felix, “not to work your head into something!”

Mr. Wentworth looked at him and then at all the others; then he got up
and slowly walked away.

“Felix,” said Gertrude, in the silence that followed, “I wish you would
paint my portrait.”

Charlotte wondered whether Gertrude was right in wishing this; and she
looked at Mr. Brand as the most legitimate way of ascertaining.
Whatever Gertrude did or said, Charlotte always looked at Mr. Brand. It
was a standing pretext for looking at Mr. Brand—always, as Charlotte
thought, in the interest of Gertrude’s welfare. It is true that she
felt a tremulous interest in Gertrude being right; for Charlotte, in
her small, still way, was an heroic sister.

“We should be glad to have your portrait, Miss Gertrude,” said Mr.
Brand.

“I should be delighted to paint so charming a model,” Felix declared.

“Do you think you are so lovely, my dear?” asked Lizzie Acton, with her
little inoffensive pertness, biting off a knot in her knitting.

“It is not because I think I am beautiful,” said Gertrude, looking all
round. “I don’t think I am beautiful, at all.” She spoke with a sort of
conscious deliberateness; and it seemed very strange to Charlotte to
hear her discussing this question so publicly. “It is because I think
it would be amusing to sit and be painted. I have always thought that.”

“I am sorry you have not had better things to think about, my
daughter,” said Mr. Wentworth.

“You are very beautiful, cousin Gertrude,” Felix declared.

“That’s a compliment,” said Gertrude. “I put all the compliments I
receive into a little money-jug that has a slit in the side. I shake
them up and down, and they rattle. There are not many yet—only two or
three.”

“No, it’s not a compliment,” Felix rejoined. “See; I am careful not to
give it the form of a compliment. I didn’t think you were beautiful at
first. But you have come to seem so little by little.”

“Take care, now, your jug doesn’t burst!” exclaimed Lizzie.

“I think sitting for one’s portrait is only one of the various forms of
idleness,” said Mr. Wentworth. “Their name is legion.”

“My dear sir,” cried Felix, “you can’t be said to be idle when you are
making a man work so!”

“One might be painted while one is asleep,” suggested Mr. Brand, as a
contribution to the discussion.

“Ah, do paint me while I am asleep,” said Gertrude to Felix, smiling.
And she closed her eyes a little. It had by this time become a matter
of almost exciting anxiety to Charlotte what Gertrude would say or
would do next.

She began to sit for her portrait on the following day—in the open air,
on the north side of the piazza. “I wish you would tell me what you
think of us—how we seem to you,” she said to Felix, as he sat before
his easel.

“You seem to me the best people in the world,” said Felix.

“You say that,” Gertrude resumed, “because it saves you the trouble of
saying anything else.”

The young man glanced at her over the top of his canvas. “What else
should I say? It would certainly be a great deal of trouble to say
anything different.”

“Well,” said Gertrude, “you have seen people before that you have
liked, have you not?”

“Indeed I have, thank Heaven!”

“And they have been very different from us,” Gertrude went on.

“That only proves,” said Felix, “that there are a thousand different
ways of being good company.”

“Do you think us good company?” asked Gertrude.

“Company for a king!”

Gertrude was silent a moment; and then, “There must be a thousand
different ways of being dreary,” she said; “and sometimes I think we
make use of them all.”

Felix stood up quickly, holding up his hand. “If you could only keep
that look on your face for half an hour—while I catch it!” he said. “It
is uncommonly handsome.”

“To look handsome for half an hour—that is a great deal to ask of me,”
she answered.

“It would be the portrait of a young woman who has taken some vow, some
pledge, that she repents of,” said Felix, “and who is thinking it over
at leisure.”

“I have taken no vow, no pledge,” said Gertrude, very gravely; “I have
nothing to repent of.”

“My dear cousin, that was only a figure of speech. I am very sure that
no one in your excellent family has anything to repent of.”

“And yet we are always repenting!” Gertrude exclaimed. “That is what I
mean by our being dreary. You know it perfectly well; you only pretend
that you don’t.”

Felix gave a quick laugh. “The half hour is going on, and yet you are
handsomer than ever. One must be careful what one says, you see.”

“To me,” said Gertrude, “you can say anything.”

Felix looked at her, as an artist might, and painted for some time in
silence.

“Yes, you seem to me different from your father and sister—from most of
the people you have lived with,” he observed.

“To say that one’s self,” Gertrude went on, “is like saying—by
implication, at least—that one is better. I am not better; I am much
worse. But they say themselves that I am different. It makes them
unhappy.”

“Since you accuse me of concealing my real impressions, I may admit
that I think the tendency—among you generally—is to be made unhappy too
easily.”

“I wish you would tell that to my father,” said Gertrude.

“It might make him more unhappy!” Felix exclaimed, laughing.

“It certainly would. I don’t believe you have seen people like that.”

“Ah, my dear cousin, how do you know what I have seen?” Felix demanded.
“How can I tell you?”

“You might tell me a great many things, if you only would. You have
seen people like yourself—people who are bright and gay and fond of
amusement. We are not fond of amusement.”

“Yes,” said Felix, “I confess that rather strikes me. You don’t seem to
me to get all the pleasure out of life that you might. You don’t seem
to me to enjoy..... Do you mind my saying this?” he asked, pausing.

“Please go on,” said the girl, earnestly.

“You seem to me very well placed for enjoying. You have money and
liberty and what is called in Europe a ‘position.’ But you take a
painful view of life, as one may say.”

“One ought to think it bright and charming and delightful, eh?” asked
Gertrude.

“I should say so—if one can. It is true it all depends upon that,”
Felix added.

“You know there is a great deal of misery in the world,” said his
model.

“I have seen a little of it,” the young man rejoined. “But it was all
over there—beyond the sea. I don’t see any here. This is a paradise.”

Gertrude said nothing; she sat looking at the dahlias and the
currant-bushes in the garden, while Felix went on with his work. “To
‘enjoy,’” she began at last, “to take life—not painfully, must one do
something wrong?”

Felix gave his long, light laugh again. “Seriously, I think not. And
for this reason, among others: you strike me as very capable of
enjoying, if the chance were given you, and yet at the same time as
incapable of wrong-doing.”

“I am sure,” said Gertrude, “that you are very wrong in telling a
person that she is incapable of that. We are never nearer to evil than
when we believe that.”

“You are handsomer than ever,” observed Felix, irrelevantly.

Gertrude had got used to hearing him say this. There was not so much
excitement in it as at first. “What ought one to do?” she continued.
“To give parties, to go to the theatre, to read novels, to keep late
hours?”

“I don’t think it’s what one does or one doesn’t do that promotes
enjoyment,” her companion answered. “It is the general way of looking
at life.”

“They look at it as a discipline—that’s what they do here. I have often
been told that.”

“Well, that’s very good. But there is another way,” added Felix,
smiling: “to look at it as an opportunity.”

“An opportunity—yes,” said Gertrude. “One would get more pleasure that
way.”

“I don’t attempt to say anything better for it than that it has been my
own way—and that is not saying much!” Felix had laid down his palette
and brushes; he was leaning back, with his arms folded, to judge the
effect of his work. “And you know,” he said, “I am a very petty
personage.”

“You have a great deal of talent,” said Gertrude.

“No—no,” the young man rejoined, in a tone of cheerful impartiality, “I
have not a great deal of talent. It is nothing at all remarkable. I
assure you I should know if it were. I shall always be obscure. The
world will never hear of me.” Gertrude looked at him with a strange
feeling. She was thinking of the great world which he knew and which
she did not, and how full of brilliant talents it must be, since it
could afford to make light of his abilities. “You needn’t in general
attach much importance to anything I tell you,” he pursued; “but you
may believe me when I say this,—that I am little better than a
good-natured feather-head.”

“A feather-head?” she repeated.

“I am a species of Bohemian.”

“A Bohemian?” Gertrude had never heard this term before, save as a
geographical denomination; and she quite failed to understand the
figurative meaning which her companion appeared to attach to it. But it
gave her pleasure.

Felix had pushed back his chair and risen to his feet; he slowly came
toward her, smiling. “I am a sort of adventurer,” he said, looking down
at her.

She got up, meeting his smile. “An adventurer?” she repeated. “I should
like to hear your adventures.”

For an instant she believed that he was going to take her hand; but he
dropped his own hands suddenly into the pockets of his painting-jacket.
“There is no reason why you shouldn’t,” he said. “I have been an
adventurer, but my adventures have been very innocent. They have all
been happy ones; I don’t think there are any I shouldn’t tell. They
were very pleasant and very pretty; I should like to go over them in
memory. Sit down again, and I will begin,” he added in a moment, with
his naturally persuasive smile.

Gertrude sat down again on that day, and she sat down on several other
days. Felix, while he plied his brush, told her a great many stories,
and she listened with charmed avidity. Her eyes rested upon his lips;
she was very serious; sometimes, from her air of wondering gravity, he
thought she was displeased. But Felix never believed for more than a
single moment in any displeasure of his own producing. This would have
been fatuity if the optimism it expressed had not been much more a hope
than a prejudice. It is beside the matter to say that he had a good
conscience; for the best conscience is a sort of self-reproach, and
this young man’s brilliantly healthy nature spent itself in objective
good intentions which were ignorant of any test save exactness in
hitting their mark. He told Gertrude how he had walked over France and
Italy with a painter’s knapsack on his back, paying his way often by
knocking off a flattering portrait of his host or hostess. He told her
how he had played the violin in a little band of musicians—not of high
celebrity—who traveled through foreign lands giving provincial
concerts. He told her also how he had been a momentary ornament of a
troupe of strolling actors, engaged in the arduous task of interpreting
Shakespeare to French and German, Polish and Hungarian audiences.

While this periodical recital was going on, Gertrude lived in a
fantastic world; she seemed to herself to be reading a romance that
came out in daily numbers. She had known nothing so delightful since
the perusal of _Nicholas Nickleby_. One afternoon she went to see her
cousin, Mrs. Acton, Robert’s mother, who was a great invalid, never
leaving the house. She came back alone, on foot, across the fields—this
being a short way which they often used. Felix had gone to Boston with
her father, who desired to take the young man to call upon some of his
friends, old gentlemen who remembered his mother—remembered her, but
said nothing about her—and several of whom, with the gentle ladies
their wives, had driven out from town to pay their respects at the
little house among the apple trees, in vehicles which reminded the
Baroness, who received her visitors with discriminating civility, of
the large, light, rattling barouche in which she herself had made her
journey to this neighborhood. The afternoon was waning; in the western
sky the great picture of a New England sunset, painted in crimson and
silver, was suspended from the zenith; and the stony pastures, as
Gertrude traversed them, thinking intently to herself, were covered
with a light, clear glow. At the open gate of one of the fields she saw
from the distance a man’s figure; he stood there as if he were waiting
for her, and as she came nearer she recognized Mr. Brand. She had a
feeling as of not having seen him for some time; she could not have
said for how long, for it yet seemed to her that he had been very
lately at the house.

“May I walk back with you?” he asked. And when she had said that he
might if he wanted, he observed that he had seen her and recognized her
half a mile away.

“You must have very good eyes,” said Gertrude.

“Yes, I have very good eyes, Miss Gertrude,” said Mr. Brand. She
perceived that he meant something; but for a long time past Mr. Brand
had constantly meant something, and she had almost got used to it. She
felt, however, that what he meant had now a renewed power to disturb
her, to perplex and agitate her. He walked beside her in silence for a
moment, and then he added, “I have had no trouble in seeing that you
are beginning to avoid me. But perhaps,” he went on, “one needn’t have
had very good eyes to see that.”

“I have not avoided you,” said Gertrude, without looking at him.

“I think you have been unconscious that you were avoiding me,” Mr.
Brand replied. “You have not even known that I was there.”

“Well, you are here now, Mr. Brand!” said Gertrude, with a little
laugh. “I know that very well.”

He made no rejoinder. He simply walked beside her slowly, as they were
obliged to walk over the soft grass. Presently they came to another
gate, which was closed. Mr. Brand laid his hand upon it, but he made no
movement to open it; he stood and looked at his companion. “You are
very much interested—very much absorbed,” he said.

Gertrude glanced at him; she saw that he was pale and that he looked
excited. She had never seen Mr. Brand excited before, and she felt that
the spectacle, if fully carried out, would be impressive, almost
painful. “Absorbed in what?” she asked. Then she looked away at the
illuminated sky. She felt guilty and uncomfortable, and yet she was
vexed with herself for feeling so. But Mr. Brand, as he stood there
looking at her with his small, kind, persistent eyes, represented an
immense body of half-obliterated obligations, that were rising again
into a certain distinctness.

“You have new interests, new occupations,” he went on. “I don’t know
that I can say that you have new duties. We have always old ones,
Gertrude,” he added.

“Please open the gate, Mr. Brand,” she said; and she felt as if, in
saying so, she were cowardly and petulant. But he opened the gate, and
allowed her to pass; then he closed it behind himself. Before she had
time to turn away he put out his hand and held her an instant by the
wrist.

“I want to say something to you,” he said.

“I know what you want to say,” she answered. And she was on the point
of adding, “And I know just how you will say it;” but these words she
kept back.

“I love you, Gertrude,” he said. “I love you very much; I love you more
than ever.”

He said the words just as she had known he would; she had heard them
before. They had no charm for her; she had said to herself before that
it was very strange. It was supposed to be delightful for a woman to
listen to such words; but these seemed to her flat and mechanical. “I
wish you would forget that,” she declared.

“How can I—why should I?” he asked.

“I have made you no promise—given you no pledge,” she said, looking at
him, with her voice trembling a little.

“You have let me feel that I have an influence over you. You have
opened your mind to me.”

“I never opened my mind to you, Mr. Brand!” Gertrude cried, with some
vehemence.

“Then you were not so frank as I thought—as we all thought.”

“I don’t see what anyone else had to do with it!” cried the girl.

“I mean your father and your sister. You know it makes them happy to
think you will listen to me.”

She gave a little laugh. “It doesn’t make them happy,” she said.
“Nothing makes them happy. No one is happy here.”

“I think your cousin is very happy—Mr. Young,” rejoined Mr. Brand, in a
soft, almost timid tone.

“So much the better for him!” And Gertrude gave her little laugh again.

The young man looked at her a moment. “You are very much changed,” he
said.

“I am glad to hear it,” Gertrude declared.

“I am not. I have known you a long time, and I have loved you as you
were.”

“I am much obliged to you,” said Gertrude. “I must be going home.”

He on his side, gave a little laugh.

“You certainly do avoid me—you see!”

“Avoid me, then,” said the girl.

He looked at her again; and then, very gently, “No I will not avoid
you,” he replied; “but I will leave you, for the present, to yourself.
I think you will remember—after a while—some of the things you have
forgotten. I think you will come back to me; I have great faith in
that.”

This time his voice was very touching; there was a strong, reproachful
force in what he said, and Gertrude could answer nothing. He turned
away and stood there, leaning his elbows on the gate and looking at the
beautiful sunset. Gertrude left him and took her way home again; but
when she reached the middle of the next field she suddenly burst into
tears. Her tears seemed to her to have been a long time gathering, and
for some moments it was a kind of glee to shed them. But they presently
passed away. There was something a little hard about Gertrude; and she
never wept again.




CHAPTER VI


Going of an afternoon to call upon his niece, Mr. Wentworth more than
once found Robert Acton sitting in her little drawing-room. This was in
no degree, to Mr. Wentworth, a perturbing fact, for he had no sense of
competing with his young kinsman for Eugenia’s good graces. Madame
Münster’s uncle had the highest opinion of Robert Acton, who, indeed,
in the family at large, was the object of a great deal of
undemonstrative appreciation. They were all proud of him, in so far as
the charge of being proud may be brought against people who were,
habitually, distinctly guiltless of the misdemeanor known as “taking
credit.” They never boasted of Robert Acton, nor indulged in
vainglorious reference to him; they never quoted the clever things he
had said, nor mentioned the generous things he had done. But a sort of
frigidly-tender faith in his unlimited goodness was a part of their
personal sense of right; and there can, perhaps, be no better proof of
the high esteem in which he was held than the fact that no explicit
judgment was ever passed upon his actions. He was no more praised than
he was blamed; but he was tacitly felt to be an ornament to his circle.
He was the man of the world of the family. He had been to China and
brought home a collection of curiosities; he had made a fortune—or
rather he had quintupled a fortune already considerable; he was
distinguished by that combination of celibacy, “property,” and good
humor which appeals to even the most subdued imaginations; and it was
taken for granted that he would presently place these advantages at the
disposal of some well-regulated young woman of his own “set.” Mr.
Wentworth was not a man to admit to himself that—his paternal duties
apart—he liked any individual much better than all other individuals;
but he thought Robert Acton extremely judicious; and this was perhaps
as near an approach as he was capable of to the eagerness of
preference, which his temperament repudiated as it would have
disengaged itself from something slightly unchaste. Acton was, in fact,
very judicious—and something more beside; and indeed it must be claimed
for Mr. Wentworth that in the more illicit parts of his preference
there hovered the vague adumbration of a belief that his cousin’s final
merit was a certain enviable capacity for whistling, rather gallantly,
at the sanctions of mere judgment—for showing a larger courage, a finer
quality of pluck, than common occasion demanded. Mr. Wentworth would
never have risked the intimation that Acton was made, in the smallest
degree, of the stuff of a hero; but this is small blame to him, for
Robert would certainly never have risked it himself. Acton certainly
exercised great discretion in all things—beginning with his estimate of
himself. He knew that he was by no means so much of a man of the world
as he was supposed to be in local circles; but it must be added that he
knew also that his natural shrewdness had a reach of which he had never
quite given local circles the measure. He was addicted to taking the
humorous view of things, and he had discovered that even in the
narrowest circles such a disposition may find frequent opportunities.
Such opportunities had formed for some time—that is, since his return
from China, a year and a half before—the most active element in this
gentleman’s life, which had just now a rather indolent air. He was
perfectly willing to get married. He was very fond of books, and he had
a handsome library; that is, his books were much more numerous than Mr.
Wentworth’s. He was also very fond of pictures; but it must be
confessed, in the fierce light of contemporary criticism, that his
walls were adorned with several rather abortive masterpieces. He had
got his learning—and there was more of it than commonly appeared—at
Harvard College; and he took a pleasure in old associations, which made
it a part of his daily contentment to live so near this institution
that he often passed it in driving to Boston. He was extremely
interested in the Baroness Münster.

She was very frank with him; or at least she intended to be. “I am sure
you find it very strange that I should have settled down in this
out-of-the-way part of the world!” she said to him three or four weeks
after she had installed herself. “I am certain you are wondering about
my motives. They are very pure.” The Baroness by this time was an old
inhabitant; the best society in Boston had called upon her, and
Clifford Wentworth had taken her several times to drive in his buggy.

Robert Acton was seated near her, playing with a fan; there were always
several fans lying about her drawing-room, with long ribbons of
different colors attached to them, and Acton was always playing with
one. “No, I don’t find it at all strange,” he said slowly, smiling.
“That a clever woman should turn up in Boston, or its suburbs—that does
not require so much explanation. Boston is a very nice place.”

“If you wish to make me contradict you,” said the Baroness, “_vous vous
y prenez mal_. In certain moods there is nothing I am not capable of
agreeing to. Boston is a paradise, and we are in the suburbs of
Paradise.”

“Just now I am not at all in the suburbs; I am in the place itself,”
rejoined Acton, who was lounging a little in his chair. He was,
however, not always lounging; and when he was he was not quite so
relaxed as he pretended. To a certain extent, he sought refuge from
shyness in this appearance of relaxation; and like many persons in the
same circumstances he somewhat exaggerated the appearance. Beyond this,
the air of being much at his ease was a cover for vigilant observation.
He was more than interested in this clever woman, who, whatever he
might say, was clever not at all after the Boston fashion; she plunged
him into a kind of excitement, held him in vague suspense. He was
obliged to admit to himself that he had never yet seen a woman just
like this—not even in China. He was ashamed, for inscrutable reasons,
of the vivacity of his emotion, and he carried it off, superficially,
by taking, still superficially, the humorous view of Madame Münster. It
was not at all true that he thought it very natural of her to have made
this pious pilgrimage. It might have been said of him in advance that
he was too good a Bostonian to regard in the light of an eccentricity
the desire of even the remotest alien to visit the New England
metropolis. This was an impulse for which, surely, no apology was
needed; and Madame Münster was the fortunate possessor of several New
England cousins. In fact, however, Madame Münster struck him as out of
keeping with her little circle; she was at the best a very agreeable, a
gracefully mystifying anomaly. He knew very well that it would not do
to address these reflections too crudely to Mr. Wentworth; he would
never have remarked to the old gentleman that he wondered what the
Baroness was up to. And indeed he had no great desire to share his
vague mistrust with anyone. There was a personal pleasure in it; the
greatest pleasure he had known at least since he had come from China.
He would keep the Baroness, for better or worse, to himself; he had a
feeling that he deserved to enjoy a monopoly of her, for he was
certainly the person who had most adequately gauged her capacity for
social intercourse. Before long it became apparent to him that the
Baroness was disposed to lay no tax upon such a monopoly.

One day (he was sitting there again and playing with a fan) she asked
him to apologize, should the occasion present itself, to certain people
in Boston for her not having returned their calls. “There are half a
dozen places,” she said; “a formidable list. Charlotte Wentworth has
written it out for me, in a terrifically distinct hand. There is no
ambiguity on the subject; I know perfectly where I must go. Mr.
Wentworth informs me that the carriage is always at my disposal, and
Charlotte offers to go with me, in a pair of tight gloves and a very
stiff petticoat. And yet for three days I have been putting it off.
They must think me horribly vicious.”

“You ask me to apologize,” said Acton, “but you don’t tell me what
excuse I can offer.”

“That is more,” the Baroness declared, “than I am held to. It would be
like my asking you to buy me a bouquet and giving you the money. I have
no reason except that—somehow—it’s too violent an effort. It is not
inspiring. Wouldn’t that serve as an excuse, in Boston? I am told they
are very sincere; they don’t tell fibs. And then Felix ought to go with
me, and he is never in readiness. I don’t see him. He is always roaming
about the fields and sketching old barns, or taking ten-mile walks, or
painting someone’s portrait, or rowing on the pond, or flirting with
Gertrude Wentworth.”

“I should think it would amuse you to go and see a few people,” said
Acton. “You are having a very quiet time of it here. It’s a dull life
for you.”

“Ah, the quiet,—the quiet!” the Baroness exclaimed. “That’s what I
like. It’s rest. That’s what I came here for. Amusement? I have had
amusement. And as for seeing people—I have already seen a great many in
my life. If it didn’t sound ungracious I should say that I wish very
humbly your people here would leave me alone!”

Acton looked at her a moment, and she looked at him. She was a woman
who took being looked at remarkably well. “So you have come here for
rest?” he asked.

“So I may say. I came for many of those reasons that are no
reasons—don’t you know?—and yet that are really the best: to come away,
to change, to break with everything. When once one comes away one must
arrive somewhere, and I asked myself why I shouldn’t arrive here.”

“You certainly had time on the way!” said Acton, laughing.

Madame Münster looked at him again; and then, smiling: “And I have
certainly had time, since I got here, to ask myself why I came.
However, I never ask myself idle questions. Here I am, and it seems to
me you ought only to thank me.”

“When you go away you will see the difficulties I shall put in your
path.”

“You mean to put difficulties in my path?” she asked, rearranging the
rosebud in her corsage.

“The greatest of all—that of having been so agreeable——”

“That I shall be unable to depart? Don’t be too sure. I have left some
very agreeable people over there.”

“Ah,” said Acton, “but it was to come here, where I am!”

“I didn’t know of your existence. Excuse me for saying anything so
rude; but, honestly speaking, I did not. No,” the Baroness pursued, “it
was precisely not to see you—such people as you—that I came.”

“Such people as me?” cried Acton.

“I had a sort of longing to come into those natural relations which I
knew I should find here. Over there I had only, as I may say,
artificial relations. Don’t you see the difference?”

“The difference tells against me,” said Acton. “I suppose I am an
artificial relation.”

“Conventional,” declared the Baroness; “very conventional.”

“Well, there is one way in which the relation of a lady and a gentleman
may always become natural,” said Acton.

“You mean by their becoming lovers? That may be natural or not. And at
any rate,” rejoined Eugenia, _“nous n’en sommes pas là!”_

They were not, as yet; but a little later, when she began to go with
him to drive, it might almost have seemed that they were. He came for
her several times, alone, in his high “wagon,” drawn by a pair of
charming light-limbed horses. It was different, her having gone with
Clifford Wentworth, who was her cousin, and so much younger. It was not
to be imagined that she should have a flirtation with Clifford, who was
a mere shame-faced boy, and whom a large section of Boston society
supposed to be “engaged” to Lizzie Acton. Not, indeed, that it was to
be conceived that the Baroness was a possible party to any flirtation
whatever; for she was undoubtedly a married lady. It was generally
known that her matrimonial condition was of the “morganatic” order; but
in its natural aversion to suppose that this meant anything less than
absolute wedlock, the conscience of the community took refuge in the
belief that it implied something even more.

Acton wished her to think highly of American scenery, and he drove her
to great distances, picking out the prettiest roads and the largest
points of view. If we are good when we are contented, Eugenia’s virtues
should now certainly have been uppermost; for she found a charm in the
rapid movement through a wild country, and in a companion who from time
to time made the vehicle dip, with a motion like a swallow’s flight,
over roads of primitive construction, and who, as she felt, would do a
great many things that she might ask him. Sometimes, for a couple of
hours together, there were almost no houses; there were nothing but
woods and rivers and lakes and horizons adorned with bright-looking
mountains. It seemed to the Baroness very wild, as I have said, and
lovely; but the impression added something to that sense of the
enlargement of opportunity which had been born of her arrival in the
New World.

One day—it was late in the afternoon—Acton pulled up his horses on the
crest of a hill which commanded a beautiful prospect. He let them stand
a long time to rest, while he sat there and talked with Madame Münster.
The prospect was beautiful in spite of there being nothing human within
sight. There was a wilderness of woods, and the gleam of a distant
river, and a glimpse of half the hill-tops in Massachusetts. The road
had a wide, grassy margin, on the further side of which there flowed a
deep, clear brook; there were wild flowers in the grass, and beside the
brook lay the trunk of a fallen tree. Acton waited a while; at last a
rustic wayfarer came trudging along the road. Acton asked him to hold
the horses—a service he consented to render, as a friendly turn to a
fellow-citizen. Then he invited the Baroness to descend, and the two
wandered away, across the grass, and sat down on the log beside the
brook.

“I imagine it doesn’t remind you of Silberstadt,” said Acton. It was
the first time that he had mentioned Silberstadt to her, for particular
reasons. He knew she had a husband there, and this was disagreeable to
him; and, furthermore, it had been repeated to him that this husband
wished to put her away—a state of affairs to which even indirect
reference was to be deprecated. It was true, nevertheless, that the
Baroness herself had often alluded to Silberstadt; and Acton had often
wondered why her husband wished to get rid of her. It was a curious
position for a lady—this being known as a repudiated wife; and it is
worthy of observation that the Baroness carried it off with exceeding
grace and dignity. She had made it felt, from the first, that there
were two sides to the question, and that her own side, when she should
choose to present it, would be replete with touching interest.

“It does not remind me of the town, of course,” she said, “of the
sculptured gables and the Gothic churches, of the wonderful Schloss,
with its moat and its clustering towers. But it has a little look of
some other parts of the principality. One might fancy one’s self among
those grand old German forests, those legendary mountains; the sort of
country one sees from the windows at Schreckenstein.”

“What is Schreckenstein?” asked Acton.

“It is a great castle,—the summer residence of the Reigning Prince.”

“Have you ever lived there?”

“I have stayed there,” said the Baroness. Acton was silent; he looked a
while at the uncastled landscape before him. “It is the first time you
have ever asked me about Silberstadt,” she said. “I should think you
would want to know about my marriage; it must seem to you very
strange.”

Acton looked at her a moment. “Now you wouldn’t like me to say that!”

“You Americans have such odd ways!” the Baroness declared. “You never
ask anything outright; there seem to be so many things you can’t talk
about.”

“We Americans are very polite,” said Acton, whose national
consciousness had been complicated by a residence in foreign lands, and
who yet disliked to hear Americans abused. “We don’t like to tread upon
people’s toes,” he said. “But I should like very much to hear about
your marriage. Now tell me how it came about.”

“The Prince fell in love with me,” replied the Baroness simply. “He
pressed his suit very hard. At first he didn’t wish me to marry him; on
the contrary. But on that basis I refused to listen to him. So he
offered me marriage—in so far as he might. I was young, and I confess I
was rather flattered. But if it were to be done again now, I certainly
should not accept him.”

“How long ago was this?” asked Acton.

“Oh—several years,” said Eugenia. “You should never ask a woman for
dates.”

“Why, I should think that when a woman was relating history “ Acton
answered. “And now he wants to break it off?”

“They want him to make a political marriage. It is his brother’s idea.
His brother is very clever.”

“They must be a precious pair!” cried Robert Acton.

The Baroness gave a little philosophic shrug. “_Que voulez-vous?_ They
are princes. They think they are treating me very well. Silberstadt is
a perfectly despotic little state, and the Reigning Prince may annul
the marriage by a stroke of his pen. But he has promised me,
nevertheless, not to do so without my formal consent.”

“And this you have refused?”

“Hitherto. It is an indignity, and I have wished at least to make it
difficult for them. But I have a little document in my writing-desk
which I have only to sign and send back to the Prince.”

“Then it will be all over?”

The Baroness lifted her hand, and dropped it again. “Of course I shall
keep my title; at least, I shall be at liberty to keep it if I choose.
And I suppose I shall keep it. One must have a name. And I shall keep
my pension. It is very small—it is wretchedly small; but it is what I
live on.”

“And you have only to sign that paper?” Acton asked.

The Baroness looked at him a moment. “Do you urge it?”

He got up slowly, and stood with his hands in his pockets. “What do you
gain by not doing it?”

“I am supposed to gain this advantage—that if I delay, or temporize,
the Prince may come back to me, may make a stand against his brother.
He is very fond of me, and his brother has pushed him only little by
little.”

“If he were to come back to you,” said Acton, “would you—would you take
him back?”

The Baroness met his eyes; she colored just a little. Then she rose. “I
should have the satisfaction of saying, ‘Now it is my turn. I break
with your Serene Highness!’”

They began to walk toward the carriage. “Well,” said Robert Acton,
“it’s a curious story! How did you make his acquaintance?”

“I was staying with an old lady—an old Countess—in Dresden. She had
been a friend of my father’s. My father was dead; I was very much
alone. My brother was wandering about the world in a theatrical
troupe.”

“Your brother ought to have stayed with you,” Acton observed, “and kept
you from putting your trust in princes.”

The Baroness was silent a moment, and then, “He did what he could,” she
said. “He sent me money. The old Countess encouraged the Prince; she
was even pressing. It seems to me,” Madame Münster added, gently,
“that—under the circumstances—I behaved very well.”

Acton glanced at her, and made the observation—he had made it
before—that a woman looks the prettier for having unfolded her wrongs
or her sufferings. “Well,” he reflected, audibly, “I should like to see
you send his Serene Highness—somewhere!”

Madame Münster stooped and plucked a daisy from the grass. “And not
sign my renunciation?”

“Well, I don’t know—I don’t know,” said Acton.

“In one case I should have my revenge; in another case I should have my
liberty.”

Acton gave a little laugh as he helped her into the carriage. “At any
rate,” he said, “take good care of that paper.”

A couple of days afterward he asked her to come and see his house. The
visit had already been proposed, but it had been put off in consequence
of his mother’s illness. She was a constant invalid, and she had passed
these recent years, very patiently, in a great flowered arm-chair at
her bedroom window. Lately, for some days, she had been unable to see
anyone; but now she was better, and she sent the Baroness a very civil
message. Acton had wished their visitor to come to dinner; but Madame
Münster preferred to begin with a simple call. She had reflected that
if she should go to dinner Mr. Wentworth and his daughters would also
be asked, and it had seemed to her that the peculiar character of the
occasion would be best preserved in a _tête-à-tête_ with her host. Why
the occasion should have a peculiar character she explained to no one.
As far as anyone could see, it was simply very pleasant. Acton came for
her and drove her to his door, an operation which was rapidly
performed. His house the Baroness mentally pronounced a very good one;
more articulately, she declared that it was enchanting. It was large
and square and painted brown; it stood in a well-kept shrubbery, and
was approached, from the gate, by a short drive. It was, moreover, a
much more modern dwelling than Mr. Wentworth’s, and was more
redundantly upholstered and expensively ornamented. The Baroness
perceived that her entertainer had analyzed material comfort to a
sufficiently fine point. And then he possessed the most delightful
_chinoiseries_—trophies of his sojourn in the Celestial Empire: pagodas
of ebony and cabinets of ivory; sculptured monsters, grinning and
leering on chimney-pieces, in front of beautifully figured
hand-screens; porcelain dinner-sets, gleaming behind the glass doors of
mahogany buffets; large screens, in corners, covered with tense silk
and embroidered with mandarins and dragons. These things were scattered
all over the house, and they gave Eugenia a pretext for a complete
domiciliary visit. She liked it, she enjoyed it; she thought it a very
nice place. It had a mixture of the homely and the liberal, and though
it was almost a museum, the large, little-used rooms were as fresh and
clean as a well-kept dairy. Lizzie Acton told her that she dusted all
the pagodas and other curiosities every day with her own hands; and the
Baroness answered that she was evidently a household fairy. Lizzie had
not at all the look of a young lady who dusted things; she wore such
pretty dresses and had such delicate fingers that it was difficult to
imagine her immersed in sordid cares. She came to meet Madame Münster
on her arrival, but she said nothing, or almost nothing, and the
Baroness again reflected—she had had occasion to do so before—that
American girls had no manners. She disliked this little American girl,
and she was quite prepared to learn that she had failed to commend
herself to Miss Acton. Lizzie struck her as positive and explicit
almost to pertness; and the idea of her combining the apparent
incongruities of a taste for housework and the wearing of fresh,
Parisian-looking dresses suggested the possession of a dangerous
energy. It was a source of irritation to the Baroness that in this
country it should seem to matter whether a little girl were a trifle
less or a trifle more of a nonentity; for Eugenia had hitherto been
conscious of no moral pressure as regards the appreciation of
diminutive virgins. It was perhaps an indication of Lizzie’s pertness
that she very soon retired and left the Baroness on her brother’s
hands. Acton talked a great deal about his _chinoiseries_; he knew a
good deal about porcelain and bric-à-brac. The Baroness, in her
progress through the house, made, as it were, a great many stations.
She sat down everywhere, confessed to being a little tired, and asked
about the various objects with a curious mixture of alertness and
inattention. If there had been anyone to say it to she would have
declared that she was positively in love with her host; but she could
hardly make this declaration—even in the strictest confidence—to Acton
himself. It gave her, nevertheless, a pleasure that had some of the
charm of unwontedness to feel, with that admirable keenness with which
she was capable of feeling things, that he had a disposition without
any edges; that even his humorous irony always expanded toward the
point. One’s impression of his honesty was almost like carrying a bunch
of flowers; the perfume was most agreeable, but they were occasionally
an inconvenience. One could trust him, at any rate, round all the
corners of the world; and, withal, he was not absolutely simple, which
would have been excess; he was only relatively simple, which was quite
enough for the Baroness.

Lizzie reappeared to say that her mother would now be happy to receive
Madame Münster; and the Baroness followed her to Mrs. Acton’s
apartment. Eugenia reflected, as she went, that it was not the
affectation of impertinence that made her dislike this young lady, for
on that ground she could easily have beaten her. It was not an
aspiration on the girl’s part to rivalry, but a kind of laughing,
childishly-mocking indifference to the results of comparison. Mrs.
Acton was an emaciated, sweet-faced woman of five and fifty, sitting
with pillows behind her, and looking out on a clump of hemlocks. She
was very modest, very timid, and very ill; she made Eugenia feel
grateful that she herself was not like that—neither so ill, nor,
possibly, so modest. On a chair, beside her, lay a volume of Emerson’s
Essays. It was a great occasion for poor Mrs. Acton, in her helpless
condition, to be confronted with a clever foreign lady, who had more
manner than any lady—any dozen ladies—that she had ever seen.

“I have heard a great deal about you,” she said, softly, to the
Baroness.

“From your son, eh?” Eugenia asked. “He has talked to me immensely of
you. Oh, he talks of you as you would like,” the Baroness declared; “as
such a son _must_ talk of such a mother!”

Mrs. Acton sat gazing; this was part of Madame Münster’s “manner.” But
Robert Acton was gazing too, in vivid consciousness that he had barely
mentioned his mother to their brilliant guest. He never talked of this
still maternal presence,—a presence refined to such delicacy that it
had almost resolved itself, with him, simply into the subjective
emotion of gratitude. And Acton rarely talked of his emotions. The
Baroness turned her smile toward him, and she instantly felt that she
had been observed to be fibbing. She had struck a false note. But who
were these people to whom such fibbing was not pleasing? If they were
annoyed, the Baroness was equally so; and after the exchange of a few
civil inquiries and low-voiced responses she took leave of Mrs. Acton.
She begged Robert not to come home with her; she would get into the
carriage alone; she preferred that. This was imperious, and she thought
he looked disappointed. While she stood before the door with him—the
carriage was turning in the gravel-walk—this thought restored her
serenity.

When she had given him her hand in farewell she looked at him a moment.
“I have almost decided to dispatch that paper,” she said.

He knew that she alluded to the document that she had called her
renunciation; and he assisted her into the carriage without saying
anything. But just before the vehicle began to move he said, “Well,
when you have in fact dispatched it, I hope you will let me know!”




CHAPTER VII


Felix Young finished Gertrude’s portrait, and he afterwards transferred
to canvas the features of many members of that circle of which it may
be said that he had become for the time the pivot and the centre. I am
afraid it must be confessed that he was a decidedly flattering painter,
and that he imparted to his models a romantic grace which seemed easily
and cheaply acquired by the payment of a hundred dollars to a young man
who made “sitting” so entertaining. For Felix was paid for his
pictures, making, as he did, no secret of the fact that in guiding his
steps to the Western world affectionate curiosity had gone hand in hand
with a desire to better his condition. He took his uncle’s portrait
quite as if Mr. Wentworth had never averted himself from the
experiment; and as he compassed his end only by the exercise of gentle
violence, it is but fair to add that he allowed the old man to give him
nothing but his time. He passed his arm into Mr. Wentworth’s one summer
morning—very few arms indeed had ever passed into Mr. Wentworth’s—and
led him across the garden and along the road into the studio which he
had extemporized in the little house among the apple trees. The grave
gentleman felt himself more and more fascinated by his clever nephew,
whose fresh, demonstrative youth seemed a compendium of experiences so
strangely numerous. It appeared to him that Felix must know a great
deal; he would like to learn what he thought about some of those things
as regards which his own conversation had always been formal, but his
knowledge vague. Felix had a confident, gayly trenchant way of judging
human actions which Mr. Wentworth grew little by little to envy; it
seemed like criticism made easy. Forming an opinion—say on a person’s
conduct—was, with Mr. Wentworth, a good deal like fumbling in a lock
with a key chosen at hazard. He seemed to himself to go about the world
with a big bunch of these ineffectual instruments at his girdle. His
nephew, on the other hand, with a single turn of the wrist, opened any
door as adroitly as a horse-thief. He felt obliged to keep up the
convention that an uncle is always wiser than a nephew, even if he
could keep it up no otherwise than by listening in serious silence to
Felix’s quick, light, constant discourse. But there came a day when he
lapsed from consistency and almost asked his nephew’s advice.

“Have you ever entertained the idea of settling in the United States?”
he asked one morning, while Felix brilliantly plied his brush.

“My dear uncle,” said Felix, “excuse me if your question makes me smile
a little. To begin with, I have never entertained an idea. Ideas often
entertain _me_; but I am afraid I have never seriously made a plan. I
know what you are going to say; or rather, I know what you think, for I
don’t think you will say it—that this is very frivolous and
loose-minded on my part. So it is; but I am made like that; I take
things as they come, and somehow there is always some new thing to
follow the last. In the second place, I should never propose to
_settle_. I can’t settle, my dear uncle; I’m not a settler. I know that
is what strangers are supposed to do here; they always settle. But I
haven’t—to answer your question—entertained that idea.”

“You intend to return to Europe and resume your irregular manner of
life?” Mr. Wentworth inquired.

“I can’t say I intend. But it’s very likely I shall go back to Europe.
After all, I am a European. I feel that, you know. It will depend a
good deal upon my sister. She’s even more of a European than I; here,
you know, she’s a picture out of her setting. And as for ‘resuming,’
dear uncle, I really have never given up my irregular manner of life.
What, for me, could be more irregular than this?”

“Than what?” asked Mr. Wentworth, with his pale gravity.

“Well, than everything! Living in the midst of you, this way; this
charming, quiet, serious family life; fraternizing with Charlotte and
Gertrude; calling upon twenty young ladies and going out to walk with
them; sitting with you in the evening on the piazza and listening to
the crickets, and going to bed at ten o’clock.”

“Your description is very animated,” said Mr. Wentworth; “but I see
nothing improper in what you describe.”

“Neither do I, dear uncle. It is extremely delightful; I shouldn’t like
it if it were improper. I assure you I don’t like improper things;
though I dare say you think I do,” Felix went on, painting away.

“I have never accused you of that.”

“Pray don’t,” said Felix, “because, you see, at bottom I am a terrible
Philistine.”

“A Philistine?” repeated Mr. Wentworth.

“I mean, as one may say, a plain, God-fearing man.” Mr. Wentworth
looked at him reservedly, like a mystified sage, and Felix continued,
“I trust I shall enjoy a venerable and venerated old age. I mean to
live long. I can hardly call that a plan, perhaps; but it’s a keen
desire—a rosy vision. I shall be a lively, perhaps even a frivolous old
man!”

“It is natural,” said his uncle, sententiously, “that one should desire
to prolong an agreeable life. We have perhaps a selfish indisposition
to bring our pleasure to a close. But I presume,” he added, “that you
expect to marry.”

“That too, dear uncle, is a hope, a desire, a vision,” said Felix. It
occurred to him for an instant that this was possibly a preface to the
offer of the hand of one of Mr. Wentworth’s admirable daughters. But in
the name of decent modesty and a proper sense of the hard realities of
this world, Felix banished the thought. His uncle was the incarnation
of benevolence, certainly; but from that to accepting—much more
postulating—the idea of a union between a young lady with a dowry
presumptively brilliant and a penniless artist with no prospect of
fame, there was a very long way. Felix had lately become conscious of a
luxurious preference for the society—if possible unshared with
others—of Gertrude Wentworth; but he had relegated this young lady, for
the moment, to the coldly brilliant category of unattainable
possessions. She was not the first woman for whom he had entertained an
unpractical admiration. He had been in love with duchesses and
countesses, and he had made, once or twice, a perilously near approach
to cynicism in declaring that the disinterestedness of women had been
overrated. On the whole, he had tempered audacity with modesty; and it
is but fair to him now to say explicitly that he would have been
incapable of taking advantage of his present large allowance of
familiarity to make love to the younger of his handsome cousins. Felix
had grown up among traditions in the light of which such a proceeding
looked like a grievous breach of hospitality. I have said that he was
always happy, and it may be counted among the present sources of his
happiness that he had as regards this matter of his relations with
Gertrude a deliciously good conscience. His own deportment seemed to
him suffused with the beauty of virtue—a form of beauty that he admired
with the same vivacity with which he admired all other forms.

“I think that if you marry,” said Mr. Wentworth presently, “it will
conduce to your happiness.”

_“Sicurissimo!”_ Felix exclaimed; and then, arresting his brush, he
looked at his uncle with a smile. “There is something I feel tempted to
say to you. May I risk it?”

Mr. Wentworth drew himself up a little. “I am very safe; I don’t repeat
things.” But he hoped Felix would not risk too much.

Felix was laughing at his answer.

“It’s odd to hear you telling me how to be happy. I don’t think you
know yourself, dear uncle. Now, does that sound brutal?”

The old man was silent a moment, and then, with a dry dignity that
suddenly touched his nephew: “We may sometimes point out a road we are
unable to follow.”

“Ah, don’t tell me you have had any sorrows,” Felix rejoined. “I didn’t
suppose it, and I didn’t mean to allude to them. I simply meant that
you all don’t amuse yourselves.”

“Amuse ourselves? We are not children.”

“Precisely not! You have reached the proper age. I was saying that the
other day to Gertrude,” Felix added. “I hope it was not indiscreet.”

“If it was,” said Mr. Wentworth, with a keener irony than Felix would
have thought him capable of, “it was but your way of amusing yourself.
I am afraid you have never had a trouble.”

“Oh, yes, I have!” Felix declared, with some spirit; “before I knew
better. But you don’t catch me at it again.”

Mr. Wentworth maintained for a while a silence more expressive than a
deep-drawn sigh. “You have no children,” he said at last.

“Don’t tell me,” Felix exclaimed, “that your charming young people are
a source of grief to you!”

“I don’t speak of Charlotte.” And then, after a pause, Mr. Wentworth
continued, “I don’t speak of Gertrude. But I feel considerable anxiety
about Clifford. I will tell you another time.”

The next time he gave Felix a sitting his nephew reminded him that he
had taken him into his confidence. “How is Clifford today?” Felix
asked. “He has always seemed to me a young man of remarkable
discretion. Indeed, he is only too discreet; he seems on his guard
against me—as if he thought me rather light company. The other day he
told his sister—Gertrude repeated it to me—that I was always laughing
at him. If I laugh it is simply from the impulse to try and inspire him
with confidence. That is the only way I have.”

“Clifford’s situation is no laughing matter,” said Mr. Wentworth. “It
is very peculiar, as I suppose you have guessed.”

“Ah, you mean his love affair with his cousin?”

Mr. Wentworth stared, blushing a little. “I mean his absence from
college. He has been suspended. We have decided not to speak of it
unless we are asked.”

“Suspended?” Felix repeated.

“He has been requested by the Harvard authorities to absent himself for
six months. Meanwhile he is studying with Mr. Brand. We think Mr. Brand
will help him; at least we hope so.”

“What befell him at college?” Felix asked. “He was too fond of
pleasure? Mr. Brand certainly will not teach him any of those secrets!”

“He was too fond of something of which he should not have been fond. I
suppose it is considered a pleasure.”

Felix gave his light laugh. “My dear uncle, is there any doubt about
its being a pleasure? _C’est de son âge_, as they say in France.”

“I should have said rather it was a vice of later life—of disappointed
old age.”

Felix glanced at his uncle, with his lifted eyebrows, and then, “Of
what are you speaking?” he demanded, smiling.

“Of the situation in which Clifford was found.”

“Ah, he was found—he was caught?”

“Necessarily, he was caught. He couldn’t walk; he staggered.”

“Oh,” said Felix, “he drinks! I rather suspected that, from something I
observed the first day I came here. I quite agree with you that it is a
low taste. It’s not a vice for a gentleman. He ought to give it up.”

“We hope for a good deal from Mr. Brand’s influence,” Mr. Wentworth
went on. “He has talked to him from the first. And he never touches
anything himself.”

“I will talk to him—I will talk to him!” Felix declared, gayly.

“What will you say to him?” asked his uncle, with some apprehension.

Felix for some moments answered nothing. “Do you mean to marry him to
his cousin?” he asked at last.

“Marry him?” echoed Mr. Wentworth. “I shouldn’t think his cousin would
want to marry him.”

“You have no understanding, then, with Mrs. Acton?”

Mr. Wentworth stared, almost blankly. “I have never discussed such
subjects with her.”

“I should think it might be time,” said Felix. “Lizzie Acton is
admirably pretty, and if Clifford is dangerous....”

“They are not engaged,” said Mr. Wentworth. “I have no reason to
suppose they are engaged.”

_“Par exemple!”_ cried Felix. “A clandestine engagement? Trust me,
Clifford, as I say, is a charming boy. He is incapable of that. Lizzie
Acton, then, would not be jealous of another woman.”

“I certainly hope not,” said the old man, with a vague sense of
jealousy being an even lower vice than a love of liquor.

“The best thing for Clifford, then,” Felix propounded, “is to become
interested in some clever, charming woman.” And he paused in his
painting, and, with his elbows on his knees, looked with bright
communicativeness at his uncle. “You see, I believe greatly in the
influence of women. Living with women helps to make a man a gentleman.
It is very true Clifford has his sisters, who are so charming. But
there should be a different sentiment in play from the fraternal, you
know. He has Lizzie Acton; but she, perhaps, is rather immature.”

“I suspect Lizzie has talked to him, reasoned with him,” said Mr.
Wentworth.

“On the impropriety of getting tipsy—on the beauty of temperance? That
is dreary work for a pretty young girl. No,” Felix continued; “Clifford
ought to frequent some agreeable woman, who, without ever mentioning
such unsavory subjects, would give him a sense of its being very
ridiculous to be fuddled. If he could fall in love with her a little,
so much the better. The thing would operate as a cure.”

“Well, now, what lady should you suggest?” asked Mr. Wentworth.

“There is a clever woman under your hand. My sister.”

“Your sister—under my hand?” Mr. Wentworth repeated.

“Say a word to Clifford. Tell him to be bold. He is well disposed
already; he has invited her two or three times to drive. But I don’t
think he comes to see her. Give him a hint to come—to come often. He
will sit there of an afternoon, and they will talk. It will do him
good.”

Mr. Wentworth meditated. “You think she will exercise a helpful
influence?”

“She will exercise a civilizing—I may call it a sobering—influence. A
charming, clever, witty woman always does—especially if she is a little
of a coquette. My dear uncle, the society of such women has been half
my education. If Clifford is suspended, as you say, from college, let
Eugenia be his preceptress.”

Mr. Wentworth continued thoughtful. “You think Eugenia is a coquette?”
he asked.

“What pretty woman is not?” Felix demanded in turn. But this, for Mr.
Wentworth, could at the best have been no answer, for he did not think
his niece pretty. “With Clifford,” the young man pursued, “Eugenia will
simply be enough of a coquette to be a little ironical. That’s what he
needs. So you recommend him to be nice with her, you know. The
suggestion will come best from you.”

“Do I understand,” asked the old man, “that I am to suggest to my son
to make a—a profession of—of affection to Madame Münster?”

“Yes, yes—a profession!” cried Felix sympathetically.

“But, as I understand it, Madame Münster is a married woman.”

“Ah,” said Felix, smiling, “of course she can’t marry him. But she will
do what she can.”

Mr. Wentworth sat for some time with his eyes on the floor; at last he
got up. “I don’t think,” he said, “that I can undertake to recommend my
son any such course.” And without meeting Felix’s surprised glance he
broke off his sitting, which was not resumed for a fortnight.

Felix was very fond of the little lake which occupied so many of Mr.
Wentworth’s numerous acres, and of a remarkable pine grove which lay
upon the further side of it, planted upon a steep embankment and
haunted by the summer breeze. The murmur of the air in the far off
tree-tops had a strange distinctness; it was almost articulate. One
afternoon the young man came out of his painting-room and passed the
open door of Eugenia’s little salon. Within, in the cool dimness, he
saw his sister, dressed in white, buried in her arm-chair, and holding
to her face an immense bouquet. Opposite to her sat Clifford Wentworth,
twirling his hat. He had evidently just presented the bouquet to the
Baroness, whose fine eyes, as she glanced at him over the big roses and
geraniums, wore a conversational smile. Felix, standing on the
threshold of the cottage, hesitated for a moment as to whether he
should retrace his steps and enter the parlor. Then he went his way and
passed into Mr. Wentworth’s garden. That civilizing process to which he
had suggested that Clifford should be subjected appeared to have come
on of itself. Felix was very sure, at least, that Mr. Wentworth had not
adopted his ingenious device for stimulating the young man’s aesthetic
consciousness. “Doubtless he supposes,” he said to himself, after the
conversation that has been narrated, “that I desire, out of fraternal
benevolence, to procure for Eugenia the amusement of a flirtation—or,
as he probably calls it, an intrigue—with the too susceptible Clifford.
It must be admitted—and I have noticed it before—that nothing exceeds
the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid
people.” Felix, on his own side, had of course said nothing to
Clifford; but he had observed to Eugenia that Mr. Wentworth was much
mortified at his son’s low tastes. “We ought to do something to help
them, after all their kindness to us,” he had added. “Encourage
Clifford to come and see you, and inspire him with a taste for
conversation. That will supplant the other, which only comes from his
puerility, from his not taking his position in the world—that of a rich
young man of ancient stock—seriously enough. Make him a little more
serious. Even if he makes love to you it is no great matter.”

“I am to offer myself as a superior form of intoxication—a substitute
for a brandy bottle, eh?” asked the Baroness. “Truly, in this country
one comes to strange uses.”

But she had not positively declined to undertake Clifford’s higher
education, and Felix, who had not thought of the matter again, being
haunted with visions of more personal profit, now reflected that the
work of redemption had fairly begun. The idea in prospect had seemed of
the happiest, but in operation it made him a trifle uneasy. “What if
Eugenia—what if Eugenia”—he asked himself softly; the question dying
away in his sense of Eugenia’s undetermined capacity. But before Felix
had time either to accept or to reject its admonition, even in this
vague form, he saw Robert Acton turn out of Mr. Wentworth’s enclosure,
by a distant gate, and come toward the cottage in the orchard. Acton
had evidently walked from his own house along a shady by-way and was
intending to pay a visit to Madame Münster. Felix watched him a moment;
then he turned away. Acton could be left to play the part of Providence
and interrupt—if interruption were needed—Clifford’s entanglement with
Eugenia.

Felix passed through the garden toward the house and toward a postern
gate which opened upon a path leading across the fields, beside a
little wood, to the lake. He stopped and looked up at the house; his
eyes rested more particularly upon a certain open window, on the shady
side. Presently Gertrude appeared there, looking out into the summer
light. He took off his hat to her and bade her good-day; he remarked
that he was going to row across the pond, and begged that she would do
him the honor to accompany him. She looked at him a moment; then,
without saying anything, she turned away. But she soon reappeared below
in one of those quaint and charming Leghorn hats, tied with white satin
bows, that were worn at that period; she also carried a green parasol.
She went with him to the edge of the lake, where a couple of boats were
always moored; they got into one of them, and Felix, with gentle
strokes, propelled it to the opposite shore. The day was the perfection
of summer weather; the little lake was the color of sunshine; the plash
of the oars was the only sound, and they found themselves listening to
it. They disembarked, and, by a winding path, ascended the pine-crested
mound which overlooked the water, whose white expanse glittered between
the trees. The place was delightfully cool, and had the added charm
that—in the softly sounding pine boughs—you seemed to hear the coolness
as well as feel it. Felix and Gertrude sat down on the rust-colored
carpet of pine-needles and talked of many things. Felix spoke at last,
in the course of talk, of his going away; it was the first time he had
alluded to it.

“You are going away?” said Gertrude, looking at him.

“Some day—when the leaves begin to fall. You know I can’t stay
forever.”

Gertrude transferred her eyes to the outer prospect, and then, after a
pause, she said, “I shall never see you again.”

“Why not?” asked Felix. “We shall probably both survive my departure.”

But Gertrude only repeated, “I shall never see you again. I shall never
hear of you,” she went on. “I shall know nothing about you. I knew
nothing about you before, and it will be the same again.”

“I knew nothing about you then, unfortunately,” said Felix. “But now I
shall write to you.”

“Don’t write to me. I shall not answer you,” Gertrude declared.

“I should of course burn your letters,” said Felix.

Gertrude looked at him again. “Burn my letters? You sometimes say
strange things.”

“They are not strange in themselves,” the young man answered. “They are
only strange as said to you. You will come to Europe.”

“With whom shall I come?” She asked this question simply; she was very
much in earnest. Felix was interested in her earnestness; for some
moments he hesitated. “You can’t tell me that,” she pursued. “You can’t
say that I shall go with my father and my sister; you don’t believe
that.”

“I shall keep your letters,” said Felix, presently, for all answer.

“I never write. I don’t know how to write.” Gertrude, for some time,
said nothing more; and her companion, as he looked at her, wished it
had not been “disloyal” to make love to the daughter of an old
gentleman who had offered one hospitality. The afternoon waned; the
shadows stretched themselves; and the light grew deeper in the western
sky. Two persons appeared on the opposite side of the lake, coming from
the house and crossing the meadow. “It is Charlotte and Mr. Brand,”
said Gertrude. “They are coming over here.” But Charlotte and Mr. Brand
only came down to the edge of the water, and stood there, looking
across; they made no motion to enter the boat that Felix had left at
the mooring-place. Felix waved his hat to them; it was too far to call.
They made no visible response, and they presently turned away and
walked along the shore.

“Mr. Brand is not demonstrative,” said Felix. “He is never
demonstrative to me. He sits silent, with his chin in his hand, looking
at me. Sometimes he looks away. Your father tells me he is so eloquent;
and I should like to hear him talk. He looks like such a noble young
man. But with me he will never talk. And yet I am so fond of listening
to brilliant imagery!”

“He is very eloquent,” said Gertrude; “but he has no brilliant imagery.
I have heard him talk a great deal. I knew that when they saw us they
would not come over here.”

“Ah, he is making _la cour_, as they say, to your sister? They desire
to be alone?”

“No,” said Gertrude, gravely, “they have no such reason as that for
being alone.”

“But why doesn’t he make _la cour_ to Charlotte?” Felix inquired. “She
is so pretty, so gentle, so good.”

Gertrude glanced at him, and then she looked at the distantly-seen
couple they were discussing. Mr. Brand and Charlotte were walking side
by side. They might have been a pair of lovers, and yet they might not.
“They think I should not be here,” said Gertrude.

“With me? I thought you didn’t have those ideas.”

“You don’t understand. There are a great many things you don’t
understand.”

“I understand my stupidity. But why, then, do not Charlotte and Mr.
Brand, who, as an elder sister and a clergyman, are free to walk about
together, come over and make me wiser by breaking up the unlawful
interview into which I have lured you?”

“That is the last thing they would do,” said Gertrude.

Felix stared at her a moment, with his lifted eyebrows. _“Je n’y
comprends rien!”_ he exclaimed; then his eyes followed for a while the
retreating figures of this critical pair. “You may say what you
please,” he declared; “it is evident to me that your sister is not
indifferent to her clever companion. It is agreeable to her to be
walking there with him. I can see that from here.” And in the
excitement of observation Felix rose to his feet.

Gertrude rose also, but she made no attempt to emulate her companion’s
discovery; she looked rather in another direction. Felix’s words had
struck her; but a certain delicacy checked her. “She is certainly not
indifferent to Mr. Brand; she has the highest opinion of him.”

“One can see it—one can see it,” said Felix, in a tone of amused
contemplation, with his head on one side. Gertrude turned her back to
the opposite shore; it was disagreeable to her to look, but she hoped
Felix would say something more. “Ah, they have wandered away into the
wood,” he added.

Gertrude turned round again. “She is _not_ in love with him,” she said;
it seemed her duty to say that.

“Then he is in love with her; or if he is not, he ought to be. She is
such a perfect little woman of her kind. She reminds me of a pair of
old-fashioned silver sugar-tongs; you know I am very fond of sugar. And
she is very nice with Mr. Brand; I have noticed that; very gentle and
gracious.”

Gertrude reflected a moment. Then she took a great resolution. “She
wants him to marry me,” she said. “So of course she is nice.”

Felix’s eyebrows rose higher than ever. “To marry you! Ah, ah, this is
interesting. And you think one must be very nice with a man to induce
him to do that?”

Gertrude had turned a little pale, but she went on, “Mr. Brand wants it
himself.”

Felix folded his arms and stood looking at her. “I see—I see,” he said
quickly. “Why did you never tell me this before?”

“It is disagreeable to me to speak of it even now. I wished simply to
explain to you about Charlotte.”

“You don’t wish to marry Mr. Brand, then?”

“No,” said Gertrude, gravely.

“And does your father wish it?”

“Very much.”

“And you don’t like him—you have refused him?”

“I don’t wish to marry him.”

“Your father and sister think you ought to, eh?”

“It is a long story,” said Gertrude. “They think there are good
reasons. I can’t explain it. They think I have obligations, and that I
have encouraged him.”

Felix smiled at her, as if she had been telling him an amusing story
about someone else. “I can’t tell you how this interests me,” he said.
“Now you don’t recognize these reasons—these obligations?”

“I am not sure; it is not easy.” And she picked up her parasol and
turned away, as if to descend the slope.

“Tell me this,” Felix went on, going with her: “are you likely to give
in—to let them persuade you?”

Gertrude looked at him with the serious face that she had constantly
worn, in opposition to his almost eager smile. “I shall never marry Mr.
Brand,” she said.

“I see!” Felix rejoined. And they slowly descended the hill together,
saying nothing till they reached the margin of the pond. “It is your
own affair,” he then resumed; “but do you know, I am not altogether
glad? If it were settled that you were to marry Mr. Brand I should take
a certain comfort in the arrangement. I should feel more free. I have
no right to make love to you myself, eh?” And he paused, lightly
pressing his argument upon her.

“None whatever,” replied Gertrude quickly—too quickly.

“Your father would never hear of it; I haven’t a penny. Mr. Brand, of
course, has property of his own, eh?”

“I believe he has some property; but that has nothing to do with it.”

“With you, of course not; but with your father and sister it must have.
So, as I say, if this were settled, I should feel more at liberty.”

“More at liberty?” Gertrude repeated. “Please unfasten the boat.”

Felix untwisted the rope and stood holding it. “I should be able to say
things to you that I can’t give myself the pleasure of saying now,” he
went on. “I could tell you how much I admire you, without seeming to
pretend to that which I have no right to pretend to. I should make
violent love to you,” he added, laughing, “if I thought you were so
placed as not to be offended by it.”

“You mean if I were engaged to another man? That is strange reasoning!”
Gertrude exclaimed.

“In that case you would not take me seriously.”

“I take everyone seriously,” said Gertrude. And without his help she
stepped lightly into the boat.

Felix took up the oars and sent it forward. “Ah, this is what you have
been thinking about? It seemed to me you had something on your mind. I
wish very much,” he added, “that you would tell me some of these
so-called reasons—these obligations.”

“They are not real reasons—good reasons,” said Gertrude, looking at the
pink and yellow gleams in the water.

“I can understand that! Because a handsome girl has had a spark of
coquetry, that is no reason.”

“If you mean me, it’s not that. I have not done that.”

“It is something that troubles you, at any rate,” said Felix.

“Not so much as it used to,” Gertrude rejoined.

He looked at her, smiling always. “That is not saying much, eh?” But
she only rested her eyes, very gravely, on the lighted water. She
seemed to him to be trying to hide the signs of the trouble of which
she had just told him. Felix felt, at all times, much the same impulse
to dissipate visible melancholy that a good housewife feels to brush
away dust. There was something he wished to brush away now; suddenly he
stopped rowing and poised his oars. “Why should Mr. Brand have
addressed himself to you, and not to your sister?” he asked. “I am sure
she would listen to him.”

Gertrude, in her family, was thought capable of a good deal of levity;
but her levity had never gone so far as this. It moved her greatly,
however, to hear Felix say that he was sure of something; so that,
raising her eyes toward him, she tried intently, for some moments, to
conjure up this wonderful image of a love-affair between her own sister
and her own suitor. We know that Gertrude had an imaginative mind; so
that it is not impossible that this effort should have been partially
successful. But she only murmured, “Ah, Felix! ah, Felix!”

“Why shouldn’t they marry? Try and make them marry!” cried Felix.

“Try and make them?”

“Turn the tables on them. Then they will leave you alone. I will help
you as far as I can.”

Gertrude’s heart began to beat; she was greatly excited; she had never
had anything so interesting proposed to her before. Felix had begun to
row again, and he now sent the boat home with long strokes. “I believe
she _does_ care for him!” said Gertrude, after they had disembarked.

“Of course she does, and we will marry them off. It will make them
happy; it will make everyone happy. We shall have a wedding and I will
write an epithalamium.”

“It seems as if it would make _me_ happy,” said Gertrude.

“To get rid of Mr. Brand, eh? To recover your liberty?”

Gertrude walked on. “To see my sister married to so good a man.”

Felix gave his light laugh. “You always put things on those grounds;
you will never say anything for yourself. You are all so afraid, here,
of being selfish. I don’t think you know how,” he went on. “Let me show
you! It will make me happy for myself, and for just the reverse of what
I told you a while ago. After that, when I make love to you, you will
have to think I mean it.”

“I shall never think you mean anything,” said Gertrude. “You are too
fantastic.”

“Ah,” cried Felix, “that’s a license to say everything! Gertrude, I
adore you!”




CHAPTER VIII


Charlotte and Mr. Brand had not returned when they reached the house;
but the Baroness had come to tea, and Robert Acton also, who now
regularly asked for a place at this generous repast or made his
appearance later in the evening. Clifford Wentworth, with his juvenile
growl, remarked upon it.

“You are always coming to tea nowadays, Robert,” he said. “I should
think you had drunk enough tea in China.”

“Since when is Mr. Acton more frequent?” asked the Baroness.

“Since you came,” said Clifford. “It seems as if you were a kind of
attraction.”

“I suppose I am a curiosity,” said the Baroness. “Give me time and I
will make you a salon.”

“It would fall to pieces after you go!” exclaimed Acton.

“Don’t talk about her going, in that familiar way,” Clifford said. “It
makes me feel gloomy.”

Mr. Wentworth glanced at his son, and taking note of these words,
wondered if Felix had been teaching him, according to the programme he
had sketched out, to make love to the wife of a German prince.

Charlotte came in late with Mr. Brand; but Gertrude, to whom, at least,
Felix had taught something, looked in vain, in her face, for the traces
of a guilty passion. Mr. Brand sat down by Gertrude, and she presently
asked him why they had not crossed the pond to join Felix and herself.

“It is cruel of you to ask me that,” he answered, very softly. He had a
large morsel of cake before him; but he fingered it without eating it.
“I sometimes think you are growing cruel,” he added.

Gertrude said nothing; she was afraid to speak. There was a kind of
rage in her heart; she felt as if she could easily persuade herself
that she was persecuted. She said to herself that it was quite right
that she should not allow him to make her believe she was wrong. She
thought of what Felix had said to her; she wished indeed Mr. Brand
would marry Charlotte. She looked away from him and spoke no more. Mr.
Brand ended by eating his cake, while Felix sat opposite, describing to
Mr. Wentworth the students’ duels at Heidelberg. After tea they all
dispersed themselves, as usual, upon the piazza and in the garden; and
Mr. Brand drew near to Gertrude again.

“I didn’t come to you this afternoon because you were not alone,” he
began; “because you were with a newer friend.”

“Felix? He is an old friend by this time.”

Mr. Brand looked at the ground for some moments. “I thought I was
prepared to hear you speak in that way,” he resumed. “But I find it
very painful.”

“I don’t see what else I can say,” said Gertrude.

Mr. Brand walked beside her for a while in silence; Gertrude wished he
would go away. “He is certainly very accomplished. But I think I ought
to advise you.”

“To advise me?”

“I think I know your nature.”

“I think you don’t,” said Gertrude, with a soft laugh.

“You make yourself out worse than you are—to please him,” Mr. Brand
said, gently.

“Worse—to please him? What do you mean?” asked Gertrude, stopping.

Mr. Brand stopped also, and with the same soft straight-forwardness,
“He doesn’t care for the things you care for—the great questions of
life.”

Gertrude, with her eyes on his, shook her head. “I don’t care for the
great questions of life. They are much beyond me.”

“There was a time when you didn’t say that,” said Mr. Brand.

“Oh,” rejoined Gertrude, “I think you made me talk a great deal of
nonsense. And it depends,” she added, “upon what you call the great
questions of life. There are some things I care for.”

“Are they the things you talk about with your cousin?”

“You should not say things to me against my cousin, Mr. Brand,” said
Gertrude. “That is dishonorable.”

He listened to this respectfully; then he answered, with a little
vibration of the voice, “I should be very sorry to do anything
dishonorable. But I don’t see why it is dishonorable to say that your
cousin is frivolous.”

“Go and say it to himself!”

“I think he would admit it,” said Mr. Brand. “That is the tone he would
take. He would not be ashamed of it.”

“Then I am not ashamed of it!” Gertrude declared. “That is probably
what I like him for. I am frivolous myself.”

“You are trying, as I said just now, to lower yourself.”

“I am trying for once to be natural!” cried Gertrude passionately. “I
have been pretending, all my life; I have been dishonest; it is you
that have made me so!” Mr. Brand stood gazing at her, and she went on,
“Why shouldn’t I be frivolous, if I want? One has a right to be
frivolous, if it’s one’s nature. No, I don’t care for the great
questions. I care for pleasure—for amusement. Perhaps I am fond of
wicked things; it is very possible!”

Mr. Brand remained staring; he was even a little pale, as if he had
been frightened. “I don’t think you know what you are saying!” he
exclaimed.

“Perhaps

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