MACMILLAN AND CO., Limirep
LONDON + BOMBAY * CALCUTTA + MADRAS MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YVORK * BOSTON ° CHICAGO DALLAS ° SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltp. TORONTO
THE DIARY
OF A MAN OF FIFTY
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
THE PATH OF DUTY AND OTHER TALES
BY
HENRY JAMES
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1923
COPYRIGHT
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
NOTE -
Or the stories contained in this volume, none of which appeared in the “New York” edition, the first is taken from The Madonna of the Future, and Other Tales, 1879, the second from Tales of Three Cities, 1884. The rest are from Stories Revived, 1885. Four of these last (A Day of Days, A Light Man, A Landscape-Painter, Poor Richard) were written at a much earlier time; they were first published in American magazines between 1866
and 1869. P.L.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY I
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER .... 43 THE PATH OF DUTY . . ... 123 A DAY OF DAYS . . . ..., 177 ALIGHT MAN... ..... 209 GEORGINA’S REASONS . ....___.., 251 A LANDSCAPE-PAINTER. . . . 341 ROSE-AGATHE . : ; : ; : 389 POOR RICHARD . ; : ; : ; 415
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
FLORENCE, April 5, 1874.—They told me I should find Italy greatly changed; and in seven-and-twenty years there is room for changes. But to me every- thing is so perfectly the same that I seem to be living my youth over again; all the forgotten im- pressions of that enchanting time come back to me. At the moment they were powerful enough; but they afterwards faded away. What in the world became of them ? What ever becomes of such things, in the long intervals of consciousness? Where do they hide themselves away ? in what unvisited cup- boards and crannies of our being do they preserve themselves? They are like the lines of a letter written in sympathetic ink; hold the letter to the fire for a while and the grateful warmth brings out the invisible words. It is the warmth of this yellow sun of Florence that has been restoring the text of my own young romance; the thing has been lying before me to-day as a clear, fresh page. There have been moments during the last ten years when I have felt so portentously old, so fagged and finished, that I should have taken as a very bad joke any intima- tion that this present sense of juvenility was still in store for me. It won’t last at any rate; so I had better make the best of it. But I confess it surprises me. I have led too serious a life; but that perhaps, after all, preserves one’s youth. At all events, I have travelled too far, I have worked too hard, I have lived in brutal climates and associated with tiresome
3
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
people. When a man has reached ‘his fifty-second year without being, materially, the worse for wear— when he has fair health, a fair fortune, a tidy con- science and a complete exemption from embarrassing relatives—I suppose he is bound, in delicacy, to write himself happy. But I confess I shirk this obligation. I have not been miserable; I won’t go so far as to say that—or at least as to write it. But happiness —positive happiness—would have been something different. I don’t know that it would have been better, by all measurements—that it would have left me better off at the present time. But it certainly would have made this difference—that I should not have been reduced, in pursuit of pleasant images, to disinter a buried episode of more than a quarter of a century ago. I should have found entertainment more—what shall I call it >—more contemporaneous. I should have had a wife and children, and I should not be in the way of making, as the French say, infidelities to the present. Of course it’s a great gain to have had an escape, not to have committed an act of thumping folly ; and I suppose that, what- ever serious step one might have taken at twenty- five, after a struggle, and with a violent effort, and however one’s conduct might appear to be justified by events, there would always remain a certain element of regret; a certain sense of loss lurking in the sense of gain; a tendency to wonder, rather wishfully, what might have been. What might have been, in this case, would, without doubt, have been very sad, and what has been has been very cheerful and comfortable; but there are nevertheless two or three questions I might ask myself. Why, for instance, have I never married — why have I never been able to care for any woman as I cared for that one? Ah, why are the mountains blue and why is the sunshine warm? Happiness miti-
4
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
gated by impertinent conjectures—that’s about my ticket.
6th. —I knew it wouldn’t last ; it’s already passing away. But I have spent a delightful day; I have been strolling all over the place. Everything reminds me of something else, and yet of itself at the same time; my imagination makes a great circuit and comes back to the starting-point. There is that well- remembered odour of spring in the air, and the flowers, as they used to be, are gathered into great sheaves and stacks, all along the rugged base of the Strozzi Palace. I wandered for an hour in the Boboli Gardens ; we went there several times together. I remember all those days individually ; they seem to me as yesterday. I found the corner where she always chose to sit—the bench of sun-warmed marble, in front of the screen of ilex, with that exuberant statue of Pomona just beside it. The place is exactly the same, except that poor Pomona has lost one of her tapering fingers. I sat there for half an hour, and it was strange how near to me she seemed. The place was perfectly empty—that is, it was filled with her. I closed my eyes and listened; I could almost hear the rustle of her dress on the gravel. Why do we make such an ado about death? What is it after all but a sort of refinement of life? She died ten years ago, and yet, as I sat there in the sunny stillness, she was a palpable, audible presence. I went afterwards into the gallery of the palace and wandered for an hour from room to room. The same great pictures hung in the same places and the same dark frescoes arched above them. Twice, of old, I went there with her; she had a great under- standing of art. She understood all sorts of things. Before the Madonna of the Chair I stood a long time. The face is not a particle like hers, and yet it reminded me of her. But everything does that. We stood
5
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
and looked at it together once for half an hour; I remember perfectly what she said.
8th.— Yesterday I felt blue—blue and bored; and when I got up this morning I had half a mind to leave Florence. But I went out into the street, beside the Arno, and looked up and down—looked at the yellow river and the violet hills, and then decided to remain—or rather, I decided nothing. I simply stood gazing at the beauty of Florence, and before I had gazed my fill I was in good-humour again, and it was too late to start for Rome. I strolled along the quay, where something presently happened that rewarded me for staying. I stopped in front of a little jeweller’s shop, where a great many objects in mosaic were exposed in the window ; I stood there for some minutes—I don’t know why, for I have no taste for mosaic. In a moment a little girl came and stood beside me—a little girl with a frowsy Italian head, carrying a basket. I turned away, but, as I turned, my eyes happened to fall on her basket. It was covered with a napkin, and on the napkin was pinned a piece of paper, inscribed with an address. This address caught my glance—there was a name on it I knew. It was very legibly written—evidently by a scribe who had made up in zeal what was lacking in skill. Contessa Salvi-Scavabellt, Via Ghibellima—so ran the super- scription; I looked at it for some moments; it caused me a sudden emotion. Presently the little girl, becoming aware of my attention, glanced up at me, wondering, with a pair of timid brown eyes.
“Are you carrying your basket to the Countess Salvi? ” I asked.
The child stared at me. ‘To the Countess Scarabelli.””
“‘ Do you know the Countess ? ”
6
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“ Know her? ”’ murmured the child, with an air of small dismay.
‘“‘T mean, have you seen her?”
‘““ Yes, I have seen her.’”’ And then, in a moment, with a sudden soft smile—“ E bella !’’ said the little girl. She was beautiful herself as she said it.
“Precisely ; and is she fair or dark ? ”’
The child kept gazing at me. ‘‘ Bionda—btonda,” she answered, looking about into the golden sunshine for a comparison.
“‘ And is she young ? ”
‘“‘She is not young—like me. But she is not old like—like——”’
‘“‘ Like me, eh ? And is she married ? ”
The little girl began to look wise. ‘‘ I have never seen the Signor Conte.”
‘* And she lives in Via Ghibellina ? ”
“ Sscuro. In a beautiful palace.”
I had one more question to ask, and I pointed it with certain copper coins. ‘‘ Tell me a little—is she good : ? a9
The child inspected a moment the contents of her little brown fist. ‘“‘It’s you who are good,” she answered.
“ Ah, but the Countess ? ’’ I repeated.
My informant lowered her big brown eyes, with an air of conscientious meditation that was inexpressibly quaint. ‘To me she appears so,’ she said at last, looking up.
“ Ah, then she must be so,” I said, “ because, for your age, you are very intelligent.” And having delivered myself of this compliment I walked away and left the little girl counting her solds. .
I walked back to the hotel, wondering how I could learn something about the Contessa Salvi-Scarabelli. In the doorway I found the innkeeper, and near him stood a young man whom I immediately perceived
7
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
to be a compatriot and with whom, apparently, he had been in conversation.
“I wonder whether you can give me a piece of information,’ I said to the landlord. ‘‘ Do you know anything about the Count Salvi-Scarabelli ? ”
The landlord looked down at his boots, then slowly raised his shoulders, with a melancholy smile. ‘I have many regrets, dear sir ‘i
“You don’t know the name ? ”
“TIT know the name, assuredly. But I don’t know the gentleman.”
I saw that my question had attracted the attention of the young Englishman, who looked at me with a good deal of earnestness. He was apparently satisfied with what he saw, for he presently decided to speak.
“The Count Scarabelli is dead,’’ he said, very gravely.
I looked at him a moment; he was a pleasing young fellow. ‘‘ And his widow lives,’ I observed, “in Via Ghibellina ? ”’
‘“‘T daresay that is the name of the street.” He was a handsome young Englishman, but he was also an awkward one; he wondered who I was and what I wanted, and he did me the honour to per- ceive that, as regards these points, my appearance was reassuring. But he hesitated, very properly, to talk with a perfect stranger about a lady whom he knew, and he had not the art to conceal his hesitation. I instantly felt it to be singular that though he regarded me as a perfect stranger, I had not the same feeling about him. Whether it was that I had seen him before, or simply that I was struck with his agreeable young face—at any rate I felt myself, as they say here, in sympathy with him. If I have seen him before I don’t remember the occasion, and neither, apparently, does he; I:
8
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
suppose it’s only a-part of the feeling I have had the last three days about everything. It was this feeling that made me suddenly act as if I had known him a long time.
“Do you know the Countess Salvi? ” I asked.
He looked at me a little, and then, without resent- ing the freedom of my question—‘‘ The Countess Scarabelli you mean,’’ he said.
“Yes,” I answered ; ‘‘ she’s the daughter.”
“ The daughter is a little girl.”
“She must be grown up now. She must be—let me see—close upon thirty.”
My young Englishman began to smile. ‘‘ Of whom are you speaking ? ”’
“I was speaking of the daughter,’’ I said, under- standing his smile. “ But I was thinking of the mother.”
“Of the mother ? ”
“Of a person I knew twenty-seven years ago— the most charming woman I have ever known. She was the Countess Salvi—she lived in a wonderful old house in Via Ghibellina.”’
“ A wonderful old house |’ my young Englishman repeated.
“* She had a little girl,’’ I went on; “ and the little girl was very fair, like her mother; and the mother and daughter had the same name—Bianca.” I stopped and looked at my companion, and he blushed a little. ‘“‘ And Bianca Salvi,”’ I continued, “was the most charming woman in the world.” He blushed a little more, and I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Do you know why I tell you this? Because you remind me of what I was when I knew her—when I loved her.’”’ -My poor young English- man gazed at me with a sort of embarrassed and fascinated stare, and still I went on. “I say that’s the reason I told you this—but you'll think it a
9
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
strange reason. You remind me.of my younger self. You needn’t resent that—I was a charming young fellow. The Countess Salvi thought so. Her daughter thinks the same of you.”
Instantly, instinctively he raised his hand to my arm. “Truly?”
“* Ah, you are wonderfully like me!” I said, laugh- ing. ‘That was just my state of mind. I wanted tremendously to please her.’” He dropped his hand and looked away, smiling, but with an air of in- genuous confusion which quickened my interest in him. ‘ You don’t know what to make of me,” I pursued. ‘“ You don’t know why a stranger should suddenly address you in this way and pretend to read your thoughts. Doubtless you think me a little cracked. Perhaps I am eccentric; but it’s not so bad as that. I have lived about the world a great deal, following my profession, which is that of a soldier. I have been in India, in Africa, in Canada, and I have lived a good deal alone. That inclines people, I think, to sudden bursts of confidence. A week ago I came into Italy, where I spent six months when I was your age. I came straight to Florence —I was eager to see it again, on account of associa- tions. They have been crowding upon me ever so thickly. I have taken the liberty of giving you a hint of them.”” The young man inclined himself a little, in silence, as if he had been struck with a sudden respect. He stood and looked away for a moment at the river and the mountains. “It’s very beautiful,” I said.
“‘ Oh, it’s enchanting,” he murmured.
“That’s the way I used to talk. But that’s nothing to you.”
He glanced at me again. “On the contrary, I like to hear.”
“Well, then, let us take a walk. If you too are
TO
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
staying at this inn, we are fellow-travellers. We will walk down the Arno to the Cascine. There are several things I should like to ask of you.”
My young Englishman assented with an air of almost filial confidence, and we strolled for an hour beside the river and through the shady alleys of that lovely wilderness. We had a great deal of talk: it’s not only myself, it’s my whole situation over again.
“‘ Are you very fond of Italy ? ” I asked.
He hesitated a moment. ‘One can’t express that.”
““ Just so; I couldn’t express it. I used to try— I used to write verses. On the subject of Italy I was very ridiculous.”’
“So am I ridiculous,” said my companion.
“No, my dear boy,” I answered, ‘‘ we are not ridiculous; we are two very reasonable, superior people.”
“The first time one comes—as I have done—it’s a revelation.”
“Qh, I remember well ; one never forgets it. It’s an introduction to beauty.”
“‘ And it must be a great pleasure,”’ said my young friend, ‘‘ to come back.”
“Yes, fortunately the beauty is always here. What form of it,” I asked, ‘‘ do you prefer ? ”’
My companion looked a little mystified ; and at last he said, ‘‘ I am very fond of the pictures.”
“So was I. And among the pictures, which do you like best ? ”’
“Qh, a great many.”
“So did I; but I had certain favourites.”’
Again the young man hesitated a little, and then he confessed that the group of painters he preferred on the whole to all others was that of the early Florentines.
I was so struck with this that I stopped short.
II
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“That was exactly my taste!” And then I
passed my hand into his arm and we went our way again. We sat down on an old stone bench in the Cascine, and a solemn blank-eyed Hermes, with wrinkles accentuated by the dust of ages, stood above us and listened to our talk.
“The Countess Salvi died ten years ago,” I said.
My companion admitted that he had heard her daughter say so.
“‘ After I knew her she married again,” I added. “The Count Salvi died before I knew her—a couple of years after their marriage.”
“Yes, I have heard that.”
“‘ And what else have you heard ? ”’
My companion stared at me; he had evidently heard nothing.
‘She was a very interesting woman—there are a great many things to be said about her. Later, perhaps, I will tell you. Has the daughter the same charm ? ”
“You forget,” said my young man, smiling, “ that I have never seen the mother.”’
“Very true. I keep confounding. But the daughter—how long have you known her ? ”’
““Qnly since I have been here. A very short time.”
“ A week ? ”’
For a moment he said nothing. ‘“ A month.”
“ That’s just the answer I should have made. A week, a month—it was all the same to me.”
“‘T think it is more than a month,” said the young man.
“It’s probably six. How did you make her acquaintance ? ”’
‘By a letter—an introduction given me by a friend in England.”
12
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“The analogy is complete,’’ I said. “‘ But the friend who gave me my letter to Madame de Salvi died many years ago. He, too, admired her greatly. I don’t know why it never came into my mind that her daughter might be living in Florence. Somehow I took for granted it was all over. I never thought of the little girl; I never heard what had become of her. I walked past the palace yesterday and saw that it was occupied ; but I took for granted it had changed hands.”’
“The Countess Scarabelli,”’ said my friend, “brought it to her husband as her marriage-portion.”
“‘T hope he appreciated it! There is a fountain.in the court, and there is a charming old garden beyond it. The Countess’s sitting-room looks into that garden. The staircase is of white marble, and there is a medallion by Luca della Robbia set into the wall at the place where it makes a bend. Before you come into the drawing-room you stand a moment in a great vaulted place hung round with faded tapestry, paved with bare tiles, and furnished only with three chairs. In the drawing-room, above the fireplace, is a superb Andrea del Sarto. The furniture is covered with pale sea-green.”’
My companion listened to all this.
“The Andrea del Sarto is there ; it’s magnificent. But the furniture is in pale red.”
“ Ah, they have changed it then—in twenty-seven years.”
“And there’s a portrait of Madame de Salvi,” continued my friend.
I was silent a moment. “I should like to see that.”
He too was silent. Then he asked, “‘ Why don’t you go and see it? If you knew the mother so well, why don’t you call upon the daughter ? ”’
* From what you tell me I am afraid.”
13
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“What have I told you to make you afraid ? ”
I looked a little at his ingenuous countenance. “‘ The mother was a very dangerous woman.”
The young Englishman began to blush again. “‘ The daughter is not,’’ he said.
“‘ Are you very sure ? ”’
He didn’t say he was sure, but he presently inquired in what way the Countess Salvi had been dangerous.
‘You must not ask me that,’’ I answered : “ for, after all, I desire to remember only what was good in her.” And as we walked back I begged him to render me the service of mentioning my name to his friend, and of saying that I had known her mother well and that I asked permission to come and see her.
oth.—I have seen that poor boy half-a-dozen times again, and a most amiable young fellow he is. He continues to represent to me, in the most extra- ordinary manner, my own young identity ; the cor- respondence is perfect at all points, save that he is a better boy than I. He is evidently acutely interested in his Countess, and leads quite the same life with her that I led with Madame de Salvi. He goes to see her every evening and stays half the night; these Florentines keep the most extraordinary hours. I remember, towards 3 A.M., Madame de Salvi used to turn me out. ‘‘ Come, come,’’ she would say, “ it’s time to go. If you were to stay later people might talk.”” I don’t know at what time he comes home, but I suppose his evening seems as short as mine did. To-day he brought me a message from his Contessa —a very gracious little speech. She remembered often to have heard her mother speak of me—she called me her English friend. All her mother’s friends were dear to her, and she begged I would do her the honour to come and see her. She is always at home of .an evening. Poor young Stanmer (he
14
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
is of the Devonshire Stanmers—a great property) reported this speech verbatim, and of course it cap’t in the least signify to him that a poor grizzled, battered soldier, old enough to be his father, should come to call upon his inmamorata. But I remember how it used to matter to me when other men came; that’s a point of difference. However, it’s only because I’m so old. At twenty-five I shouldn’t have been afraid of myself at fifty-two. Camerino was thirty-four—and then the others! She was always at home in the evening, and they all used to come. They were old Florentine names. But she used to let me stay after them all’; she thought an old English name as good. What a transcendent coquette!... But basta cost, as she used to say. I meant to go to-night to Casa Salvi, but I couldn’t bring myself to the point. I don’t know what I’m afraid of ; I used to be in a hurry enough to go there once. I suppose I am afraid of the very look of the place— of the old rooms, the old walls. I shall go to-morrow night. I am afraid of the very echoes.
toth.—She has the most extraordinary resemblance to her mother. When I went in I was tremendously startled ; I stood staring at her. I have just come home; it is past midnight; I have been all the evening at Casa Salvi. It is very warm—my window is open—I can look out on the river, gliding past in the starlight. So, of old, when I came home, I used to stand and look out. There are the same cypresses on the opposite hills.
Poor young Stanmer was there, and three or four other admirers; they all got up when I came in. I think I had been talked about, and there was some curiosity. But why should I have been talked about ? They were all youngish men—none of them of my time. She is a wonderful likeness of her mother ; I couldn’t get over it. Beautiful like her mother, and yet with
15
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
the same faults in her face; but with her mother’s perfect head and brow and sympathetic, almost pity- ing, eyes. Her face has just that peculiarity of her mother’s, which, of all human countenances that I have ever known, was the one that passed most quickly and completely from the expression of gaiety to that of repose. Repose, in her face, always suggested sadness; and while you were watching it witha kind of awe, and wondering of what tragic secret it was the token, it kindled, on the instant, into a radiant Italian smile. The Countess Scara- belli’s smiles to-night, however, were almost uninter- rupted. She greeted me—divinely, as her mother used to do; and young Stanmer sat in the corner of the sofa—as I used to do—and watched her while she talked: She is thin and very fair, and was dressed in light, vaporous black: that completes the resemblance. The house, the rooms, are almost absolutely the same ; there may be changes of detail, but they don’t modify the general effect. There are the same precious pictures on the walls of the salon —the same great dusky fresco in the concave ceiling. The daughter is not rich, I suppose, any more than the mother. The furniture is worn and faded, and I was admitted by a solitary servant who carried a twinkling taper before me up the great dark marble staircase.
‘ T have often heard of you,” said the Countess, as I sat down near her; “my mother often spoke of you.”
*‘ Often ? ’ I answered. ‘‘ I am surprised at that.”
“Why are you surprised? Were you not good friends ? ”
“Yes, for a certain time—very good friends. But I was sure she had forgotten me.”
“She never forgot,” said the Countess, looking at me intently and smiling. ‘‘ She was not like that.”
16
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“ She was not like most other women in any way,” I declared.
“Ah, she was charming,” cried the Countess, rattling open her fan. ‘‘I have always been very curious to see you. I have received an impression of you.”
“‘ A good one, I hope.”
She looked at me, laughing, and not answering this : it was just her mother’s trick.
“‘* My Englishman,’ she used to call you—‘ tl mio inglese.’ ”’
“‘T hope she spoke of me kindly,”’ I insisted.
The Countess, still laughing, gave a little shrug, balancing her hand to and fro. ‘‘So-so; I always supposed you had had a quarrel. You don’t mind my being frank like this—eh ? ”’
“‘T delight in it ; it reminds me of your mother.”
“Every one tells me that. But I am not clever like her. You will see for yourself.”
‘That speech,” I said, ‘‘ completes the resemblance. She was always pretending she was not clever; and in reality:
“In reality she was an angel, eh ? To escape from dangerous comparisons I will admit then that I am clever. That will make a difference. But let us talk of you. You are very—how shall I say it ?—very eccentric.”
“Ts that what your mother told you ? ”’
“To tell the truth, she spoke of you as a great Original. But aren’t all Englishmen eccentric? All except that one! ’’ and the Countess pointed to poor Stanmer, in his corner of the sofa.
“Oh, I know just what he is,” I said.
“ He’s as quiet as a lamb—he’s like all the world,” cried the Countess.
“ Like all the world—yes. He is in love with you.”
17 Cc
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
She looked at me with sudden gravity. ‘I don't object to your saying that for all the world—but I do for him.”
‘ Well,’”’ I went on, “he is peculiar in this: he is rather afraid of you.”’
Instantly she began to smile ; she turned her face toward Stanmer. He had seen that we were talking about him; he coloured and got up—then came toward us.
‘“‘T like men who are afraid of nothing,’’ said our hostess.
“I know what you want,” I said to Stanmer. “You want to know what the Signora Contessa says about you.”
Stanmer looked straight into her face, very gravely. ‘“‘T don’t care a straw what she says.”
“You are almost a match for the Signora Contessa,” I answered. ‘“‘ She declares she doesn’t care a pin’s head what you think.”
“I recognise the Countess’s style!’ Stanmer exclaimed, turning away.
“One would think,’’ said the Countess, “‘ that you were trying to make a quarrel between us.”
I watched him move away to another part of the great saloon; he stood in front of the Andrea del Sarto, looking up at it. But he was not seeing it ; he was listening to what we might say. I often stood there in just that way. ‘“‘ He can’t quarrel with you, any more than I could have quarrelled with your mother.”
“Ah, but you did. Something painful passed between you.”
“Yes, it was painful, but it was not a quarrel. I went away one day and never saw her again. That was all.’”’
The Countess looked at me gravely. “ What do you call it when a man does that ? ”
18
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“‘ It depends upon the case.”
“‘ Sometimes,’’ said the Countess in French, “ it’s a lacheté,”’
““ Yes, and sometimes, it’s an act of wisdom.”’
“ And sometimes,’’ rejoined the Countess, ‘‘ it’s a mistake.”’
I shook my head. “ For me it was no mistake.”’
She began to laugh again. ‘‘ Caro Signore, you’re a great original. What had my poor mother done to you?”
I looked at our young Englishman, who still had his back turned to us and was staring up at the picture. “I will tell you some other time,” I said.
“‘T shall certainly remind you ; I am very curious to know.” Then she opened and shut her fan two or three times, still looking at me. What eyes they have! ‘Tell me a little,” she went on, “if I may ask without indiscretion. Are you married ? ”
“No, Signora Contessa.”
“Isn't that at least a mistake 2”
“Do I look very unhappy ?
She dropped her head a little to one side.” “ For an Englishman—no ! ”’
“‘ Ah,” said I, laughing, ‘‘ you are quite as clever as your mother.”
‘‘ And they tell me that you are a great soldier,”’ she continued; “ you have lived in India. It was very kind of you, so far away, to have remembered our poor dear Italy.”’
‘* Qne always remembers Italy ; the distance makes no difference. I remembered it well the day I heard of your mother’s death ! ”
“ Ah, that was a sorrow!”’ said the Countess. ‘ There’s not a day that I don’t weep for her. But che vuole? She’s a saint in paradise.”’
“* Stcuro,”’ I answered ; and I looked some time at the ground. “ But tell me about yourself, dear lady,”’
ig
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
I asked at last, raising my eyes. ‘“‘ You have also had the sorrow of losing your husband.”
“IT am a poor widow, as you see. Che vuole? My husband died after three years of marriage.”
I waited for her to remark that the late Count Scarabelli was also a saint in paradise, but 1 waited in vain.
“ That was like your distinguished father,’’ I said.
‘Yes, he too died young. I can’t’be said to have known him; I was but of the age of my own little girl. But I weep for him all the more.”
Again I was silent for a moment.
‘Tt was in India too,” I said presently, ‘‘ that I heard of your mother’s second marriage.”’
The Countess raised her eyebrows.
‘In India, then, one hears of everything! Did that news please you ? ”’
‘Well, since you ask me—no.”’
‘“‘T understand that,’’ said the Countess, looking at her open fan. “I shall not marry again like that.”
‘“ That’s what your mother said to me,’’ I ventured to observe.
She was not offended, but she rose from her seat and stood looking at me a moment. Then:
“You should not have gone away!” she ex- claimed.
I stayed for another hour; it is a very pleasant house. Two or three of the men who were sitting there seemed very civil and intelligent ; one of them was a major of engineers, who offered me a profusion of information upon the new organisation of the Italian army. While he talked, however, I was observing our hostess, who was talking with the others ; very little, I noticed, with her young Inglese. She is altogether charming—full of frankness and freedom, of that inimitable dssinvoliura which in an Englishwoman would be vulgar, and which in her is
20
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
simply the perfection of apparent spontaneity. But for all her spontaneity she’s as subtle as a needle- point, and knows tremendously well what she is about. If she is not a consummate coquette.... What had she in her head when she said that I should not have gone away ?—Poor little Stanmer didn’t go away. I left him there at midnight.
12th.—I found him to-day sitting in the church of Santa Croce, into which I wandered to escape from the heat of the sun.
In the nave it was cool and dim ; he was staring at the blaze of candles on the great altar, and think- ing, I am sure, of his incomparable Countess. I sat down beside him, and after a while, as if to avoid the appearance of eagerness, he asked me how I had enjoyed my visit to Casa Salvi, and what I thought of the padrona.
“T think half-a-dozen things,” I said; ‘“ but I can only tell you one now. She’s an enchantress. You shall hear the rest when we have left the church.”
‘ An enchantress ? ’’ repeated Stanmer, looking at me askance.
He is a very simple youth, but who am I to blame him ?
“‘ A charmer,” I said ; ‘‘ a fascinatress ! ”’
He turned away, staring at the altar-candles.
“An artist — an actress,” I went on, rather brutally.
He gave me another glance.
“‘T think you are telling me all,’’ he said.
“No, no,.there is more.” And we sat a long time in silence.
At last he proposed that we should go out; and we passed in the street, where the shadows had begun to stretch themselves.
“IT don’t know what you mean by her being an actress,”’ he said, as we turned homeward.
aT
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
‘“‘T suppose not. Neither should I have known, if any one had said that to me.”
“You are thinking about the mother,” said Stanmer. ‘‘ Why are you always bringing her in ? ”’
“My dear boy, the analogy is so great ; it forces itself upon me.”
He stopped, and stood looking at me with his modest, perplexed young face. I thought he was going to exclaim, ‘‘ The analogy be hanged!” but he said after a moment :
“Well, what does it prove ? ”’
“‘T can’t say it proves anything; but it suggests @ great many things.”
“‘ Be so good as to mention a few,’’ he said, as we walked on.
‘You are not sure of her yourself,” I began.
“Never mind that—go on with your analogy.”
“ That’s a part of it. You are very much in love with her.”
“ That’s a part of it too, I suppose ? ”
“Yes, as I have told you before. You are in love with her, and yet you can’t make her out; that’s just where I was with regard to Madame de Salvi.”’
“And she too was an enchantress, an actress, an artist, and all the rest of it ? ”
““She was the most perfect coquette I ever knew, and the most dangerous, because the most finished.”
“What you mean, then, is that her daughter is a finished coquette ? ”’
“ T rather think so.”’
Stanmer walked along for some moments in silence.
“Seeing that you suppose me to be a—a great admirer of the Countess,” he said at last, “I am rae surprised at the freedom with which you speak of her.”
I confessed that I was surprised at it myself.
a2
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“But it’s on account of the interest I take in you.”
‘“‘T am immensely obliged to you! ”’ said the poor boy. “Ah, of course you don’t like it. That is, you like my interest—I don’t see how you can help liking that ; but you don’t like my freedom. That’s natural enough ; but, my dear young friend, I want only to help you. Ifa man had said to me—so many years ago—what I am saying to you, I should certainly also, at first, have thought him a great brute. But, after a little, I should have been grateful—I should have felt that he was helping me.”’
‘“‘’You seem to have been very well able to help yourself,’ said Stanmer. “ You tell me you made your escape.”’
“Yes, but it was at the cost of infinite perplexity —of what I may call keen suffering. I should like to save you all that.”
“I can only repeat—it is really very kind of you.”
“Don’t repeat it too often, or I shall begin to think you don’t mean it.”
““ Well,”’ said Stanmer, “I think this, at any rate —that you take an extraordinary responsibility in trying to put a man out of conceit of a woman who, as he believes, may make him very happy.”
I grasped his arm, and we stopped, going on with our talk like a couple of Florentines.
‘Do you wish to marry her ? ”’
He looked away, without meeting my eyes. “ It’s a great responsibility,” he repeated.
“‘ Before Heaven,” I said, ‘‘ I would have married the mother! You are exactly in my situation.”
‘Don’t you think you rather overdo the analogy ?”’ asked poor Stanmer.
“A little more, a little less—it doesn’t matter. I believe you are in my shoes. But of course if you
23
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
prefer it I will beg a thousand pardons and leave them to carry you where they will.”
He had been looking away, but now he slowly turned his face and met my eyes. ‘‘ You have gone too far to retreat ; what is it you know about her ? ”’
“ About this one—nothing. But about the other
“T care nothing about the other ! ”
“My dear fellow,’’ I said, “ they are mother and daughter—they are as like as two of Andrea’s Madonnas.”
“If they resemble each other, then, you were simply mistaken in the mother.”
I took his arm and we walked on again; there seemed no adequate reply to such a charge. ‘‘ Your state of mind brings back my own so completely,” I said presently. ‘‘ You admire her—you adore her, and yet, secretly, you mistrust her. You are en- chanted with her personal charm, her grace, her wit, her everything ; and yet in your private heart you are afraid of her.’’
“ Afraid of her ? ” 3
“Your mistrust keeps rising to the surface ; yo can’t rid yourself of the suspicion that at the bottom of all things she is hard and cruel, and you would be immensely relieved if some one should persuade you that your suspicion is right.”
Stanmer made no direct reply to this ; but before we reached the hotel he said, ‘‘ What did you ever know about the mother ? ”’
* It’s a terrible story,’ I answered.
He looked at me askance. ‘‘ What did she do? ”
‘‘Come to my rooms this evening and I will tell
ou.”
He declared he would, but he never came, Exactly the way I should have acted !
14th.—I went again, last evening, to Casa Salvi,
24
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
where I found the same little circle, with the addition of a couple of ladies. Stanmer was there, trying hard to talk to one of them, but making, I am sure, a very poor business of it. The Countess—well, the Countess was admirable. She greeted me like a friend of ten years, toward whom familiarity should not have engendered a want of ceremony ; she made me sit near her, and she asked me a dozen questions about my health and my occupations.
“T live in the past,’’ I said. “I go into the galleries, into the old palaces and the churches. To-day I spent an hour in Michael Angelo’s chapel, at San Lorenzo.”
“Ah, yes, that’s the past,’”’ said the Countess. “ Those things are very old.”
“‘ Twenty-seven years old,’’ I answered.
“Twenty-seven ? Aliro/”’
‘“‘I mean my own past,” I said. “I went to a great many of those places with your mother.”
‘‘ Ah, the pictures are beautiful,”’ murmured the Countess, glancing at Stanmer.
“ Have you lately looked at any of ‘hens "I asked. ‘‘ Have you gone to the galleries with him?”’
She hesitated a moment, smiling. ‘‘ It seems to me that your question is a little impertinent. But I think you are like that.”
“A little impertinent ? Never. As I say, your mother did me the honour more than once, to accompany me to the Uffizzi.”
“‘ My mother must have been very kind to you.”
“So it seemed to me at the time.”
“ At the time, only ? ”
‘* Well, if you prefer, so it seems to me now.”
‘“‘ Eh,”’ said the Countess, ‘‘ she made sacrifices.”
“To what, cara Signora? She was perfectly free. Your lamented father was dead—and she had not yet contracted her second marriage.”
25
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“If she was intending to marry again, it was all the more reason she should have been careful.”
I looked at her a moment; she met my eyes gravely, over the top of her fan. ‘“‘ Are you very careful ? ’’ I said.
She dropped her fan with a certain violence. ‘ Ah, yes, you are impertinent ! ”’
“Ah, no,” I said. ‘“‘ Remember that I am old enough to be your father; that I knew you when you were three years old. I may surely ask such questions. But you are right; one must do your mother justice. She was certainly thinking of her second marriage.”
“You have not forgiven her that!” said the Countess, very gravely.
“Have you ? ” I asked, more lightly.
“I don’t judge my mother. That is a mortal sin. My step-father was very kind to me.”’
‘““T remember him,” I said; ‘‘I saw him a great many times—your mother already received him.”’
My hostess sat with lowered eyes, saying nothing ; but she presently looked up.
‘‘ She was very unhappy with my father.”
“That I can easily believe. And your ap bathe —is he still living ? ”’
“‘ He died—before my mother.”’
“ Did he fight any more duels ? ”
‘‘He was killed in a duel,” said the Countess, discreetly.
It seems almost monstrous, especially as I can give no reason for it—but this announcement, instead of shocking me, caused me to feel a strange exhilara- tion. Most assuredly, after all these years, I bear the poor man no resentment. Of course I controlled my manner, and simply remarked to the Countess that as his fault had been, so was his punishment. I think, however, that the feeling of which I speak
26
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
was at the bottom of my saying to her that I hoped that, unlike her mother’s, her own brief married life had been happy.
“Tf it was not,” she said, ‘“‘I have forgotten it now.”’—I wonder if the late Count Scarabelli was also killed in a duel, and if his adversary . . . Is it on the books that his adversary, as well, shall perish by the pistol? Which of those gentlemen is he, I wonder? Is it reserved for poor little Stanmer to put a bullet into him? No; poor little Stanmer, I trust, will do as I did. And yet, unfortunately for him, that woman is consummately plausible. She was wonderfully nice last evening; she was really irresistible. Such frankness and freedom, and yet something so soft and womanly; such graceful gaiety, so much of the brightness, without any of the stiffness, of good breeding, and over it all some- thing so picturesquely simple and southern. She is a perfect Italian. But she comes honestly by it. After the talk I have just jotted down she changed her place, and the conversation for half an hour was general. Stanmer indeed said very little; partly, I suppose, because he is shy of talking a foreign tongue. Was I like that—was I so constantly silent? I suspect I was when I was perplexed, and Heaven knows that very often my perplexity was extreme. Before I went away I had a few more words ¢éte-2- téte with the Countess.
““T hope you are not leaving Florence yet,’’ she said ; “ you will stay a while longer ? ”’
I answered that I came only for a week, and that my week was over.
“I stay on from day to day, I am so much interested.”
“Eh, it’s the beautiful moment. I’m glad our city pleases you ! ”’
‘“‘ Florence pleases me—and I take a paternal
27
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
interest in our young friend,’ I added, glancing at Stanmer. “I have become very fond of him.”
“* Bel tipo inglese,’’ said my hostess. ‘‘ And he is very intelligent ; he has a beautiful mind.”
She stood there resting her smile and her clear, expressive eyes upon me.
“‘T don’t like to praise him too much,” I rejoined, “lest I should appear to praise myself; he reminds me so much of what I was at his age. If your beautiful mother were to come to life for an hour she would see the resemblance.”
She gave me a little amused stare.
“And yet you don’t look at all like him ! ”’
“Ah, you didn’t know me when I was twenty- five. Iwas very handsome! And, moreover, it isn’t that, it’s the mental resemblance. I was ingenuous, candid, trusting, like him.”
“Trusting ? I remember my mother once telling me that you were the most suspicious and jealous of men!”
“I fell into a suspicious mood, but I was, funda- mentally, not in the least addicted to thinking evil. I couldn't easily imagine any harm of any one.”
“And so you mean that Mr. Stanmer is in a suspicious mood ? ”
“Well, I méan that his situation is the same as mine.”
The Countess gave me one of her serious looks.
“‘Come,” she said, ‘‘ what was it—this famous situation of yours? I have heard you mention it before.”
“Your mother might have told you, since she occasionally did me the honour to speak of me.”
“All my mother ever told me was that you were a sad puzzle to her.”’
At this, of course, I laughed out—I laugh still as I write it.
28
THE ‘DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“ Well, then, that was my situation—I was a sad puzzle to a very clever woman.”
“And you mean, therefore, that I am a puzzle to poor Mr. Stanmer ? ”
“He is racking his brains to make you out. Remember it was you who said he was intelligent.”
She looked round at him, and as fortune would have it, his appearance at that moment quite con- firmed my assertion. He was lounging back in his chair with an air of indolence rather too marked for a drawing-room, and staring at the ceiling with the expression of a man who has just been asked a conundrum. Madame Scarabelli seemed struck with his attitude.
“Don’t you see,” I said, “he can’t read the riddle ? ”’
“You yourself,’’ she answered, ‘‘ said he was in- capable of thinking evil. I should be sorry to have him think any evil of me.”’
And she looked straight at me—seriously, appeal- ingly—with her beautiful candid brow. ‘
I inclined myself, smiling, in a manner which might have meant :
‘* How could that be possible ? ”
“I have a great esteem for him,” she went on ; “I want him to think well of me. If I am a puzzle to him, do me a little service. Explain me to him.”
‘“‘ Explain you, dear lady ? ”
“You are older and wiser than he. Make him understand me.”
She looked deep into my eyes for a moment, and then she turned away.
26th.—I have written nothing for a good many days, but meanwhile I have been half-a-dozen times to Casa Salvi. I have seen a good deal also of my young friend—had a good many walks and talks with him. I have proposed to him to come with me
29
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
to Venice for a fortnight, but he won’t listerr to the idea of leaving Florence. He is very happy in spite of his doubts, and I confess that in the perception of his happiness I have lived over again my own. This is so much the case that when, the other day, he at last made up his mind to ask me to tell him the wrong that Madame de Salvi had done me, I rather checked his curiosity. I told him that if he was bent upon knowing I would satisfy him, but that it seemed a pity, just now, to indulge in painful imagery.
“ But I thought you wanted so much to put me out of conceit of our friend.”
“‘T admit I am inconsistent, but there are various reasons for it. In the first place—it’s obvious—I am open to the charge of playing a double game. I profess an admiration for the Countess Scarabelli, for I accept her hospitality, and at the same time I attempt to poison your mind ; isn’t that the proper expression? I can’t exactly make up my mind to that, though my admiration for the Countess and my desire to prevent you from taking a foolish step are equally sincere. And then, in the second place you seem to me on the whole so happy! One hesitates to destroy an illusion, no matter how pernicious, that is so delightful while it lasts. These are the rare moments of life. To be young and ardent, in the midst of an Italian spring, and to believe in the moral perfection of a beautiful woman—what an admirable situation! Float with the current; [I'll stand on the brink and watch you.”’
“Your real reason is that you feel you have no case against the poor lady,” said Stanmer. ‘“ You admire her as much as I do.”
“‘ [ just admitted that I admired her. I never said she was a vulgar flirt ; her mother was an absolutely scientific one. Heaven knows I admired that! It’s a nice point, however, how much one is bound in
30
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
honour not to warn a young friend against a dangerous woman because one also has relations of civility with the lady.”
“In such a case,” said Stanmer, ‘‘ I would break off my relations.”
I looked at him, and I think I faughed.
“ Are you jealous of me, by chance ? ”’
He shook his head emphatically.
“‘ Not in the least ; I like to see you there, because your conduct contradicts your words.”
“I have always said that the Countess is fasci- nating.”
“ Otherwise,”’ said Stanmer, ‘in the case you speak of I would give the lady notice.”’
““ Give her notice ? ”’
““ Mention to her that you regard her with sus- picion, and that you propose to do your best to rescue a simple-minded youth from her wiles. That would be more loyal.” And he began to laugh again.
It is not the first time he has laughed at me; but I have never minded it, because I have always understood it.
“Is that what you recommend me to say to the Countess ? ” I asked.
‘“‘Recommend you!” he exclaimed, laughing again ; ‘“‘T recommend nothing. I may be the victim to be rescued, but I am at least not a partner to the con- spiracy. Besides,” he added in a moment, “ the Countess knows your state of mind.”
“‘ Has she told you so?”
Stanmer hesitated.
‘“‘She has begged me to listen to everything you may say against her. She declares that she has a good conscience.”’
“‘ Ah,” said I, “ she’s an accomplished woman | ”
And it is indeed very clever of her to take that tone. Stanmer afterwards assured me explicitly that
31
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
he has never given her a hint of the liberties I have taken in conversation with—what shall I call it ?— with her moral nature; she has guessed them for herself. She must hate me intensely, and yet her manner has always been so charming to me! She is truly an accomplished woman !
May 4th.—I have stayed away from Casa Salvi for a week, but I have lingered on in Florence, under a mixture of impulses. I have had it on my con- science not to go near the Countess again—and yet from the moment she is aware of the way I feel about her, it is open war. There need be no scruples on either side. She is as free to use every possible art to entangle poor Stanmer more closely as I am to clip her fine-spun meshes. Under the circum- stances, however, we naturally shouldn’t meet very cordially. But as regards her meshes, why, after all, should I clip them? It would really be very interest- ing to see Stanmer swallowed up. I should like to see how he would agree with her after she had devoured him—(to what vulgar imagery, by the way, does curiosity reduce a man!) Let him finish the story in his own way, as I finished it in mine. It is the same story; but why, a quarter of a century later, should it have the same dénotment? Let him make his own dénotment.
5th.— Hang it, however, I don’t want the poor boy to be miserable.
6th.—Ah, but did my dénotmeni then prove such a happy one?
7th.—He came to my room late last night ; he was much excited.
“‘ What was it she did to you ? ” he asked.
I answered him first with another question. ‘‘ Have you quarrelled with the Countess ? ”
But he only repeated his own. ‘‘ What was it she did to you?”
32
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“Sit down and I'll tell you.” And he sat there beside the candle, staring at me. ‘‘ There was a man always there—Count Camerino.”’
“The man she married ? ”
“The man she married. I was very much in love with her, and yet I didn’t trust her. I was sure that she lied ; I believed that she could be cruel. Never- theless, at moments, she had a charm which made it pure pedantry to be conscious of her faults; and while these moments lasted I would have done any- thing for her. Unfortunately, they didn’t last long. But you know what I mean ; am I not describing the Scarabelli ? ”’
“The Countess Scarabelli never lied!” cried Stanmer.
‘“That’s just what 1 would have said to any one who should have made the insinuation! But I sup- pose you are not asking me the question you put to me just now from dispassionate curiosity.”
‘‘A man may want to know! ”’ said the innocent fellow.
I couldn't help laughing out. “ This, at any rate, is my story. Camerino was always there; he was a sort of fixture in the house. If I had moments of dislike for the divine Bianca, I had no moments of liking for him. And yet he was a very agreeable fellow, very civil, very intelligent, not in the least disposed to make a quarrel with me. The trouble of course was simply that I was jealous of him. I don’t know, however, on what ground [ could have quarrelled with him, for I had no definite rights. I can’t say what I expected—I can’t say what, as the matter stood, I was prepared todo. With my name and my prospects, I might perfectly have offered her my hand. I am not sure that she would have accepted it—I am by no means clear that she wanted that. But she wanted, wanted keenly, to attach me
33 D
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
to her; she wanted to have me about. I should have been capable of giving up everything— England, my career, my family—simply to devote myself to her, to live near her and see her every day.”
“Why didn’t you do it, then ? ”’ asked Stanmer.
‘Why don’t you? ”’
‘“To be a proper rejoinder to my question,” he said, rather neatly, “‘ yours should be asked twenty- five years hence.”
‘“‘ It remains perfectly true that at a given moment I was capable of doing as I say. That was what she wanted —a rich, susceptible, credulous, convenient young Englishman established near her en permanence. And yet,” I added, ‘‘ I must do her complete justice. I honestly believe she was fond of me.’ At this Stanmer got up and walked to the window ; he stood looking out a moment, and then he turned round. ‘You know she was older than I,” I went on. ‘“‘Madame Scarabelli is older than you. One day in the garden, her mother asked me in an angry tone why I disliked Camerino ; for I had been at no pains to conceal my feeling about him, and something had just happened to bring it out. ‘I dislike him,’ I said, ‘because you like him so much.’ ‘I assure you I don’t like him,’ she answered. ‘He has all the appearance of being your lover,’ I retorted. It was a brutal speech, certainly, but any other man in my place would have made it. She took it very strangely ; she turned pale, but she was not indignant. ‘ How can he be my lover after what he has done?’ she asked. ‘What has he done?’ She hesitated a good while, then she said: ‘ He killed my husband.’ “Good heavens!’ I cried, ‘and you receive him ?’ Do you know what she said? She said, ‘Che vuole ?’””
“Ts that all ? ’ asked Stanmer.
“No; she went on to say that Camerino had
34
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
killed Count Salvi in a duel, and she admitted that her husband’s jealousy had been the occasion of it. The Count, it appeared, was a monster of jealousy —he had led her a dreadful life. He himself, mean- while, had been anything but irreproachable ; he had done a mortal injury to a man of whom he pretended to be a friend, and this affair had become notorious. The gentleman in question had demanded satisfaction for his outraged honour; but for some reason or other (the Countess, to do her justice, did not tell me that her husband was a coward), he had not as yet obtained it. The duel with Camerino had come on first; in an access of jealous fury the Count had struck Camerino in the face; and this outrage, I know not how justly, was deemed expiable before the other. By an extraordinary arrangement (the Italians have certainly no sense of fair play), the other man was allowed to be Camerino’s second. The duel was fought with swords, and the Count received a wound of which, though at first it was not expected to be fatal, he died on the following day. The matter was hushed up as much as possible for the sake of the Countess’s good name, and so successfully that it was presently observed that, among the public, the other gentleman had the credit of having put his blade through M. de Salvi. This gentleman took a fancy not to contradict the impression, and it was allowed to subsist. So long as he consented, it was of course in Camerino’s interest not to contradict it, as it left him much more free to keep up his intimacy with the Countess.”
Stanmer had listened to all this with extreme attention. ‘‘ Why didn’t ske contradict it ? ”
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘‘ I am bound to believe it was for the same reason. I was horrified, at any rate, by the whole story. I was extremely shocked at the Countess’s want of dignity in continuing to
35
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
see the man by whose hand her husband had fallen.’’
“The husband had been a great brute, and it was not known,” said Stanmer.
‘Its not being known made no difference. And as for Salvi having been a brute, that is but a way of saying that his wife, and the man whom his wife subsequently married, didn’t like him.”’
Stanmer looked extremely meditative ; his eyes were fixed on mine. ‘“ Yes, that marriage is hard to get over. It was not becoming.”
“ Ah,” said I, ‘‘ what a long breath I drew when I heard of it! I remember the place and the hour. It was at a hill-station in India, seven years after I had left Florence. The post brought me some English papers, and in one of them was a letter from Italy, with a lot of so-called ‘fashionable intelligence.’ There, among various scandals in high life, and other delectable items, I read that the Countess Bianca Salvi, famous for some years as the presiding genius of the most agreeable salon in Florence, was about to bestow her hand upon Count Camerino, a dis- tinguished Bolognese. Ah, my dear boy, it was a tremendous escape! I had been ready to marry the woman who was capable of that! But my instinct had warned me, and I had trusted my instinct.”
“* Instinct’s everything,’ as Falstaff says!’’ And Stanmer began to laugh. “ Did you tell Madame de Salvi that your instinct was against her ? ”’
““No; I told her that she frightened me, shocked me, horrified me.’’
“That’s about the same thing. And what did she say?”
** She asked me what I would have? I called her friendship with Camerino a scandal, and she answered that her husband had been a brute. Besides, no one knew it; therefore it was no scandal. Just your
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
argument! I retorted that this was odious reasoning, and that she had no moral sense. We had a passion- ate argument, and I declared I would never see her again. In the heat of my displeasure I left Florence, and I kept my vow. I never saw her again.”
“You couldn’t have been much in love with her,”’ said Stanmer.
“TI was not—three months after.”
“Tf you had been you would have come back— three days after.”’
‘‘So doubtless it seems to you. All I can say is that it was the great effort of my life. Being a military man, I have had on various occasions to face the enemy. But it was not then I needed my resolution ; it was when I left Florence in a post- chaise.”
Stanmer turned about the room two or three times, and then he said: “I don’t understand! I don’t understand why she should have told you that Camerino had killed her husband. It could anly damage her.” "
“‘ She was afraid it would damage her more that I should think he was her lover. She wished to say the thing that would most effectually persuade me that he was not her lover—that he could never be. And then she wished to get the credit of being very frank.”’
“Good heavens, how you must have analysed her | ’” cried my companion, staring.
“There is nothing so analytic as disillusionment. But there it is. She married Camerino.”
“Yes, I don’t like that,” said Stanmer. He was silent a while, and then he added—“ Perhaps she wouldn’t have done so if you had remained.”’
-He has a little innocent way! ‘ Very likely she would have dispensed with the ceremony,” I answered dryly.
| 37
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“Upon my word,” he said, ‘‘ you have analysed her!”
“You ought to be grateful tome. I have done for you what you seem unable to do for yourself.”
“T don’t see any Camerino in my case,’ he said.
“Perhaps among those gentlemen I can find one for you.”
“Thank you,” he cried; “I'll take care of that myself !’’ And he went away—satisfied, I hope.
1oth.—He’s an obstinate little wretch ; it irritates me to see him sticking to it.. Perhaps he is looking for his Camerino. I shall leave him at any rate to his fate ; it is growing insupportably hot.
11th.—I went this evening to bid farewell to: the Scarabelli. There was no one there; she was alone in her great dusky drawing-room, which was lighted only by a couple of candles, with the immense windows open over the garden. She was dressed in white ; she was deucedly pretty. She asked me of course why I had been so long without coming.
‘“‘T think you say that only for form,” I answered. “ T imagine you know.”
“‘ Che ! what have I done ? ”’
““ Nothing at all. You are too wise for that.”’
She looked at me awhile. “I think you are a little crazy.” “Ah no, I am only too sane. I have too much reason rather than too little.”’
“You have at any rate what we call a fixed idea.”
“There is no harm in that so long as it’s a good one.”
“‘ But yours is abominable !”’ she exclaimed with a laugh.
“Of course you can’t like me or my ideas. All things considered, you have treated me with wonder- ful kindness, and I thank you and kiss your hands. I leave Florence to-morrow.”
38
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
“‘ I won't say I’m sorry ! ”’ she said, laughing again. “But I am very glad to have seen you. I always wondered about you. You are a curiosity.”
“Yes, you must find me so. A man who can resist your charms! The fact is, I can’t. This even- ing you are enchanting ; and it is the first time I have been alone with you.”
She gave no heed to this; she turned away. But in a moment she came back, and stood looking at me, and her beautiful solemn eyes seemed to shine in the dimness of the room.
“‘ How could you treat my mother so ? ”’ she asked.
““ Treat her so ? ”’
“ How could you desert the most charming woman in the world ? ”’
“‘ It was not a case of desertion ; and if it had been it seems to me she was consol
At this moment there was the sound of a step in the ante-chamber, and I saw that the Countess per- ceived it to be Stanmer’s.
“That wouldn’t have happened,” she murmured. “‘ My poor mother needed a protector.”
Stanmer came in, interrupting our talk, and looking at me, I thought, with a little air of bravado. He must think me indeed a tiresome, meddlesome bore ; and upon my word, turning it all over, I wonder at his docility. After all, he’s five-and-twenty—and yet, I must add, it does irritate me—the way he sticks ! He was followed in a moment by two or three of the regular Italians, and I made my visit short.
“‘ Good-bye, Countess,’’ I said; and she gave me her hand in silence. ‘‘ Do you need a protector ? ’’ I added, softly.
She looked at me from head to foot, and then, almost angrily :
“ Yes, Signore.”
But, to deprecate her anger, I kept her hand an
39
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
instant, and then bent my venerable head and kissed it. I think I appeased her.
Botoena, 14th.—I left Florence on the 11th, and have been here these three days. Delightful old Italian town—but it lacks the charm of my Florentine secret.
I wrote that last entry five days ago, late at night, after coming back from Casa Salvi. I afterwards fell asleep in my chair; the night was half over when I woke up. Instead of going to bed, I stood a long time at the window, looking out at the river. It was a warm, still night, and the first faint streaks of sunrise were in the sky. Presently I heard a slow footstep beneath my window, and looking down, made out by the aid of a street-lamp that Stanmer was but just coming home. I called to him to come to my rooms, and, after an interval, he made his appearance.
“I want to bid you good-bye,” I said; ‘I shall depart in the morning. Don’t go to the trouble of saying you are sorry. Of course you are not ; I must have bullied you immensely.”
He made no attempt to say he was sorry, but he said he was very glad to have made my acquaintance.
“Your conversation,” he said, with his little innocent air, ‘‘ has been very suggestive.”
““ Have you found Camerino ? ”’ I asked, smiling.
“‘ T have given up the search.”
“Well,” I said, ““some day when you find that you have made a great mistake, remember I told you so.”
He looked for a minute as if he were trying to anticipate that day by the exercise of his reason.
“ Has it ever occurred to you that you may have made a great mistake ? ”
“* Oh yes ; everything occurs to one sooner or later.”
That’s what I said to him; but I didn’t say that
40
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
the question, pointed by his candid young counten- ance, had, for the moment, a greater force than it had ever had before.
And then he asked me whether, as things had turned out, I myself had been so especially happy.
Paris, December 17th.—A note from young Stan- mer, whom I saw in Florence—a remarkable little note, dated Rome, and worth transcribing.
““ My Dear General,—I have tt at heart to tell you that I was married a week ago to the Countess Salvi- Scarabelli. You talked me tnto a great muddle ; but a month after that tt was all very clear. Things that involve a risk ave like the Christian faith ; they must be seen from the tnside.— Yours ever, E. S.
“P.S.—A fig for analogies unless you can find an analogy for my happiness | ”’
His happiness makes him very clever. I hope it will last !—I mean his cleverness, not his happiness.
Lonpon, April 19th, 1877.—Last night, at Lady H ’s, [met Edmund Stanmer, who married Bianca Salvi’s daughter. I heard the other day that they had come to England. A handsome young fellow, with a fresh contented face. He reminded me of Florence, which I didn’t pretend to forget; but it was rather awkward, for I remember I used to dis- parage that woman to him. [I had a complete theory about her. But he didn’t seem at all stiff; on the contrary, he appeared to enjoy our encounter. I asked him if his wife were there. I had to do that.
“Oh yes, she’s in one of the other rooms. Come and make her acquaintance ; I want you to know her.”
“ You forget that I do know her.”
“Oh no, you don’t; you never did.” And he gave a little significant laugh.
I didn’t feel like facing the cs-devant Scarabelli at that moment ; so I said that I was leaving the house, but that I would do myself the honour of calling upon
41
THE DIARY OF A MAN OF FIFTY
his wife. We talked for a minute of something else, and then, suddenly, breaking off and looking at me, he laid his hand on my arm. I must do him the justice to say that he looks felicitous.
““ Depend upon it, you were wrong !”’ he said.
“* My dear young friend,” I answered, “‘ imagine the alacrity with which I concede it.”
Something else again was spoken of, but in an instant he repeated his movement.
“Depend upon it, you were wrong.”’
“IT am sure the Countess has forgiven me,’’ I said, “and in that case you ought to bear no grudge. As I have had the honour to say, I will call upon her immediately.”
“TI was not alluding to my wife,’’ he answered. “TI was thinking of your own story.”
“* My own story ? ”’
““So many years ago. Was it not rather a mis- take? ”’
I looked at him a moment ; he’s positively rosy.
“That’s not a question to solve in a London crush.”
And I turned away.
22nd.—I haven’t yet called on the ct-devani ; I am afraid of finding her at home. And that boy’s words have been thrumming in my ears—‘‘ Depend upon it, you were wrong. Wasn’t it rather a mistake?’ Was I wrong—was it a mistake? Was I too cautious— too suspicious—too logical ? Was it really a protector she needed—a man who might have helped her? Would it have been for his benefit to believe in her, and was her fault only that I had forsaken her? Was the poor woman very unhappy? God forgive me, how the questions come crowding in! If I marred her happiness, I certainly didn’t ‘make my own. And I might have made it—eh? That’s a charming discovery for a man of my age !
42
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
43
I
Mrs. Daintry stood on her steps a moment, to address a parting injunction to her little domestic, whom she had induced a few days before, by earnest and friendly argument—the only coercion or persua- sion this enlightened mistress was ever known to use —to crown her ruffled tresses with a cap; and then, slowly and with deliberation, she descended to the street. As soon as her back was turned, her maid- servant closed the door, not with violence, but in- audibly, quickly, and firmly ; so that when she reached the bottom of the steps and looked up again at the front—as she always did before leaving it, to assure herself that everything was well—the folded wings of her portal were presented to her, smooth and shining, as wings should be, and ornamented with the large silver plate on which the name of her late husband was inscribed—which she had brought with her when, taking the inevitable course of good Bostonians, she had transferred her household goods from the “‘ hill ”’ to the ‘‘ new land,” and the exhibition of which, as an act of conjugal fidelity, she preferred—how much, those who knew her could easily understand—to the more distinguished modern fashion of suppressing the domiciliary label. She stood still for a minute on the pavement, looking at the closed aperture of her dwelling and asking herself a question ; not that there was anything extraordinary in that, for she
45
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
never spared herself in this respect. She would greatly have preferred that her servant should not shut the door till she had reached the sidewalk and dismissed her, as it were, with that benevolent, that almost maternal, smile with which it was a part of Mrs. Daintry’s religion to encourage and reward her domestics. She liked to know that her door was being held open behind her until she should pass out of sight of the young woman standing in the hall. There was a want of respect in shutting her out so precipitately ; it was almost like giving her a push down the steps. What Mrs. Daintry asked herself was, whether she should not do right to ascend the steps again, ring the bell, and request Beatrice, the parlour-maid, to be so good as to wait a little longer. She felt that this would have been a pro- ceeding of some importance, and she presently decided against it. There were a good many reasons, and she thought them over as she took her way slowly up Newbury Street, turning as soon as possible into Commonwealth Avenue; for she was very fond of the south side of this beautiful prospect, and the autumn sunshine to-day was delightful. During the moment that she paused, looking up at her house, she had had time to see that everything was as fresh and bright as she could desire. It looked a little too new, perhaps, and Florimond would not like that ; for of course his great fondness was for the antique, which was the reason for his remaining year after year in Europe, where, as a young painter of considerable, if not of the highest, promise, he had opportunities to study the most dilapidated buildings. It was a comfort to Mrs. Daintry, however, to be able to say to herself that he would be struck with her living really very nicely—more nicely, in many ways, than he could possibly be accommodated—that she was sure of—in a small dark appartement de garcon in
46
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
Paris, on the uncomfortable side of the Seine. Her state of mind at present was such that she set the highest value on anything that could possibly help to give Florimond a pleasant impression. Nothing could be too small to count, she said to herself; for she knew that Florimond was both fastidious and observant. Everything that would strike him agree- ably would contribute to detain him, so that if there were only enough agreeable things he would perhaps stay four or five months, instead of three, as he had promised—the three that were to date from the day of his arrival in Boston, not from that (an important difference) of his departure from Liverpool, which was about to take place.
It was Florimond that Mrs. Daintry had had in mind when, on emerging from the little vestibule, she gave the direction to Beatrice about the position of the door-mat—in which the young woman, so carefully selected, as a Protestant, from the British Provinces, had never yet taken the interest that her mistress expected from such antecedents. It was Florimond also that she had thought of in putting before her parlour-maid the question of donning a badge of servitude in the shape of a neat little muslin coif, adorned with pink ribbon and stitched together by Mrs. Daintry’s own beneficent fingers. Naturally there was no obvious connexion between the parlour- maid’s coiffure and the length of Florimond’s stay ; that detail was to be only a part of the general effect of American life. It was still Florimond that was uppermost as his mother, on her way up the hill, turned over in her mind that question of the ceremony of the front-door. He had been living in a country in which servants observed more forms, and he would doubtless be shocked at Beatrice’s want of patience. An accumulation of such anomalies would at last undermine his loyalty. He would not care for them
47
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
for himself, of course, but he would care about them for her ; coming from France, where, as she knew by his letters, and indeed by her own reading—for she made a remarkably free use of the Atheneum—that the position of a mother was one of the most exalted, he could not fail to be frotssé at any want of consideration for his surviving parent. As an artist, he could not make up his mind to live in Boston; but he was a good son for all that. He had told her frequently that they might easily live together if she would only come to Paris; but of course she could not do that, with Joanna and her six children round in Clarendon Street, and her responsibilities to her daughter multiplied in the highest degree. Besides, during that winter she spent in Paris, when Florimond was definitely making up his mind, and they had in the evening the most charming conversations, interrupted only by the repeated care of winding-up the lamp, or applying the bellows to the obstinate little fire— during that winter she had felt that Paris was not her element. She had gone to the lectures at the Sor- bonne, and she had visited the Louvre as few people did it, catalogue in hand, taking the catalogue volume by volume; but all the while she was thinking of Joanna and her new baby, and how the other three (that was the number then) were getting on while their mother was so much absorbed with the last. Mrs. Daintry, familiar as she was with these anxieties, had not the step of a grandmother ; for a mind that was always intent had the effect of refreshing and brightening her years. Responsibility with her was not a weariness, but a joy—at least it was the nearest approach to a joy that she knew, and she did not regard her life as especially cheerless; there were many others that were more denuded. She moved with circumspection, but without reluctance, holding up her head and looking at every one she met with a
48
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
clear, unaccusing gaze. This expression showed that she took an interest, as she ought, in everything that concerned her fellow-creatures ; but there was that also in her whole person which indicated that she went no farther than Christian charity required. It was only with regard to Joanna and that vociferous houseful—so fertile in problems, in opportunities for devotion—that she went really very far. And now to-day, of course, in this matter of Florimond’s visit, after an absence of six years; which was perhaps more on her mind than anything had ever been. People who met Mrs. Daintry after she had traversed the Public Garden—she always took that way—and begun to ascend the charming slope of Beacon Street, would never, in spite of the relaxation of her pace as she measured this eminence, have mistaken her for a little old lady who should have crept out, vaguely and timidly, to inhale one of the last mild days. It was easy to see that she was not without a duty, or at least a reason—and indeed Mrs. Daintry had never in her life been left in this predicament. People who knew her ever so little would have felt that she was going to call on a relation ; and if they had been to the manner born they would have added a mental hope that her relation was prepared for her visit. No one would have doubted this, however, who had been aware that her steps were directed to the habitation of Miss Lucretia Daintry. Her sister-in-law, her husband’s only sister, lived in that commodious nook which is known as Mount Vernon Place; and Mrs. Daintry therefore turned off at Joy Street. By the time she did so, she had quite settled in her mind the question of Beatrice’s behaviour in connexion with the front-door. She had decided that it would never do to make a formal remonstrance, for it was plain that, in spite of the Old-World training which she hoped the girl might have imbibed in Nova Scotia
49 E
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
(where, until lately, she learned, there had been an English garrison), she would in such a case expose herself to the danger of desertion; Beatrice would not consent to stand there holding the door open for nothing. And after all, in the depths of her con- science Mrs. Daintry was not sure that she ought to ; she was not sure that this was an act of homage that one human being had a right to exact of another, simply because this other happened to wear a little muslin cap with pink ribbons. It was a service that ministered to her importance, to her dignity, not to her hunger or thirst; and Mrs. Daintry, who had had other foreign advantages besides her winter in Paris, was quite aware that in the United States the machinery for that former kind of tribute was very undeveloped. It was a luxury that one ought not to pretend to enjoy—it was a luxury, indeed, that she probably ought not to presume to desire. At the bottom of her heart Mrs. Daintry suspected that such hankerings were criminal. And yet, turning the thing over, as she turned everything, she could not help coming back to the idea that it would be very pleasant, it would be really delightful, if Beatrice herself, as a result of the growing refinement of her taste, her transplantation to a society after all more elaborate than that of Nova Scotia, should perceive the fitness, the felicity, of such an attitude. This perhaps was too much to hope; but it did not much matter, for before she had turned into Mount Vernon Place Mrs. Daintry had invented a compromise. She would continue to talk to her parlour-maid until she should reach the bottom of her steps, making earnestly one remark after the other over her shoulder, so that Beatrice would be obliged to remain on the threshold. It is true that it occurred to her that the girl might not attach much importance to these Parthian observa- tions, and would perhaps not trouble herself to wait
50
® A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
for their natural term ; but this idea was too fraught with embarrassment to be long entertained. It must be added that this was scarcely a moment for Mrs. Daintry to go much into the ethics of the matter, for she felt that her call upon her sister-in-law was the consequence ofa tolerably unscrupulous determination.
51
II
LUCRETIA DAINTRY was at home, for a wonder ; but she kept her visitor waiting a quarter of an hour, during which this lady had plenty of time to consider her errand afresh. She was a little ashamed of it; but she did not so much mind being put to shame by Lucretia, for Lucretia did things that were much more ambiguous than any she should have thought of doing. It was even for this that Mrs. Daintry had picked her out, among so many relations, as the object of an appeal in its nature somewhat ambiguous. Neverthe- less, her heart beat a little faster than usual as she sat in the quiet parlour, looking about her for the thousandth time at Lucretia’s “‘ things,’’ and observing that she was faithful to her old habit of not having her furnace lighted until long after every one else. Miss Daintry had her own habits, and she was the only person her sister-in-law knew who had more reasons than herself. Her taste was of the old fashion, and her drawing-room embraced neither festoons nor Persian rugs, nor plates and plagues upon the wall, nor faded stuffs suspended from unexpected projections, Most of the articles it contained dated from the year 1830 ; and a sensible, reasonable, rectangular arrange- ment of them abundantly answered to their owner’s conception of the decorative. A rosewood sofa against the wall, surmounted by an engraving from Kaulbach ; a neatly drawn carpet, faded, but little worn, and
52
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
sprigged with a floral figure ; a chimney-piece of black marble, veined with yellow, garnished with an empire clock and antiquated lamps ; half-a-dozen large mirrors, with very narrow frames; and an immense glazed screen representing, in the livid tints of early worsted- work, a ruined temple overhanging a river—these were some of the more obvious of Miss Daintry’s treasures. Her sister-in-law was a votary of the newer school, and had made sacrifices to have everything in black and gilt; but she could not fail to see that Lucretia had some very good pieces. It was a wonder how she made them last, for Lucretia had never been supposed to know much about the keeping of a house, and no one would have thought of asking her how she treated the marble floor of her vestibule, or what measures she took in the spring with regard to her curtains. Her work in life lay outside. She took an interest in questions and institutions, sat on committees, and had views on Female Suffrage—a movement which she strongly opposed. She even wrote letters sometimes to the Transcript, not “ chatty”’ and jocular, and signed with a fancy name, but “ over ’’ her initials, as the phrase was—every one recognised them—and bearing on some important topic. She was not, how- ever, in the faintest degree slipshod or dishevelled, like some of the ladies of the newspaper and the forum ; she had no ink on her fingers, and she wore her bonnet as scientifically poised as the dome of the State House. When you rang at her door-bell you were never kept waiting, and when you entered her dwelling you were not greeted with those culinary odours which, pervading halls and parlours, had in certain other cases been described as the right smell in the wrong place. If Mrs. Daintry was made to wait some time before her hostess appeared, there was nothing extraordinary in this, for none of her friends came down directly, and she never did herself. To come down directly would
53
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
have seemed to her to betray a frivolous eagerness for the social act. The delay, moreover, not only gave her, as I have said, opportunity to turn over her errand afresh, but enabled her to say to herself, as she had often said before, that though Lucretia had no taste, she had some very good things, and to wonder both how she had kept them so well, and how she had originally got them. Mrs. Daintry knew that they proceeded from her mother and her aunts, who had been supposed to distribute among the children of the second generation the accumulations of the old house in Federal Street, where many Daintrys had been born in the early part of the century. Of course she knew nothing of the principles on which the distribution had been made, but all she could say was that Lucretia had evidently been first in the field. There was apparently no limit to what had come to her. Mrs. Daintry was not obliged to look, to assure herself that there was another clock in the back parlour—which would seem to indicate that all the clocks had fallen to Lucretia. She knew of four other timepieces in other parts of the house, for of course in former years she had often been upstairs ; it was only in comparatively recent times that she had renounced that practice. There had been a period when she ascended to the second story as a matter of course, without asking leave. On seeing that her sister-in-law was in neither of the parlours, she mounted and talked with Lucretia at the door of her bedroom, if it happened to be closed. And there had been another season when she stood at the foot of the staircase, and, lifting her voice, inquired of Miss Daintry—who called down with some shrillness in return—whether she might climb, while the maid- servant, wandering away with a vague cachinnation, left her to her own devices. But both of these phases belonged to the past. Lucretia never came into her bedroom to-day, nor did she presume to penetrate into
34
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
Lucretia’s ; so that she did not know for a long time whether she had renewed her chintz nor whether she had hung in that bower the large photograph of Florimond, presented by Mrs. Daintry herself to his aunt, which had been placed in neither of the parlours. Mrs. Daintry would have given a good deal to know whether this memento had been honoured with a place in her sister-in-law’s “‘ chamber ’’—it was by this name, on each side, that these ladies designated their sleeping-apartment ; but she could not bring herself to ask directly, for it would be embarrassing to learn— what was possible—that Lucretia had not paid the highest respect to Florimond’s portrait. The point was cleared up by its being revealed to her accidentally that the photograph—an expensive and very artistic one, taken in Paris—had been relegated to the spare- room, or guest-chamber. Miss Daintry was very hospitable, and constantly had friends of her own sex staying with her. They were very apt to be young women in their twenties; and one of them had remarked to Mrs. Daintry that her son’s pertrait—he must be wonderfully handsome—was the first thing she saw when she woke up in the morning. Certainly Florimond was handsome; but his mother had a lurking suspicion that, in spite of his beauty, his aunt was not fond of him. She doubtless thought he ought to come back and settle down in Boston ; he was the first of the Daintrys who had had so much in common with Paris. Mrs. Daintry knew as a fact that, twenty- eight years before, Lucretia, whose opinions even at that period were already wonderfully formed, had not approved of the romantic name which, in a moment of pardonable weakness, she had conferred upon her rosy babe. The spinster (she had been as much of a spinster at twenty as she was to-day) had accused her of making a fool of the child. Every one was reading ald ballads in Boston then, and Mrs. Daintry had
55
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
found the name in a ballad. It doubled any anxiety she might feel with regard to her present business to think that, as certain foreign newspapers which her son sent her used to say about ambassadors, Florimond was perhaps not a persona grata to his aunt. She reflected, however, that if his fault were in his absenting himself, there was nothing that would remedy it so effectively as his coming home. She reflected, too, that if she and Lucretia no longer took liberties with each other, there was still something a little indiscreet in her purpose this morning. But it fortified and consoled her for everything to remember, as she sat looking at the empire clock, which was a very handsome one, that her husband at least had been disinterested.
Miss Daintry found her visitor in this attitude, and thought it was an expression of impatience ; which led her to explain that she had been on the roof of her house with a man who had come to see about repairing it. She had walked all over it, and peeped over the cornice, and riot been in the least dizzy ; and had come to the conclusion that one ought to know a great deal more about one’s roof than was usual.
“I am sure you have never been over yours,”’ she said to her sister-in-law.
Mrs. Daintry confessed with some embarrassment that she had not, and felt, as she did so, that she was superficial and slothful. It annoyed her to reflect that while she supposed, in her new house, she had thought of everything, she had not thought of this important feature. There was no one like Lucretia for giving one such reminders.
“IT will send Florimond up when he comes,’’ she said ; ‘‘ he will tell me all about it.”
“Do you suppose he knows about roofs, except tumbledown ones, in his little pictures? I am afraid it will make him giddy.’’ This had been Miss Daintry’s rejoinder, and the tone of it was not altogether re- . 56
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
assuring. She was nearly fifty years old; she had a plain, fresh, delightful face, and in whatever part of the world she might have been met, an attentive observer of American life would not have had the least difficulty in guessing what phase of it she represented. She represented the various and en- lightened activities which cast their rapid shuttle— in the comings and goings of eager workers—from one side to the other of Boston Common. She had in an eminent degree the physiognomy, the accent, the costume, the conscience, and the little eyeglass, of her native place. She had never sacrificed to the graces, but she inspired unlimited confidence. Moreover, if she was thoroughly in sympathy with the New England capital, she reserved her liberty; she had a great charity, but she was independent and witty ; and if she was as earnest as other people, she was not quite so serious. Her voice was a little masculine ; and it had been said of her that she didn’t care in the least how she looked. This was far from true, for she would not for the world have looked better than she thought was right for so plain a woman.
Mrs. Daintry was fond of calculating consequences ; but she was not a coward, and she arrived at her business as soon as possible.
“ You know that Florimond sails on the zoth of this month. He will get home by the 1st of December.”
“Oh yes, my dear, I know it ; everybody is talking about it. I have heard it thirty times. That’s where Boston is so small,’’ Lucretia Daintry remarked.
“Well, it’s big enough for me,”’ said her sister-in- law. ‘“‘ And of course people notice his coming back ; it shows that everything that has been said is false, and that he really does like us.”’
“He likes his mother, I hope; about the rest I don’t know that it matters.”
‘ Well, it certainly will be pleasant to have him,”
37
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
said Mrs. Daintry, who was not content with her companion’s tone, and wished to extract from her some recognition of the importance of Florimond’s advent. “It will prove how unjust so much of the talk has been.”’
“My dear woman, I don’t know anything about the talk. We make too much fuss about everything. Florimond was an infant when I last saw him.”
This was open to the interpretation that too much fuss had been made about Florimond—an idea that accorded ill with the project that had kept Mrs. Daintry waiting a quarter of an hour while her hostess walked about on the roof. But Miss Daintry con- tinued, and in a moment gave her sister-in-law the best opportunity she could have hoped for. ‘I don’t suppose he will bring with him either salvation or the other thing ; and if he has decided to winter among the bears, it will matter much more to him than to any one else. But I shall be very glad to see him if he behaves himself ; and I needn’t tell you that if there is anything I can do for him ” and Miss Daintry, tightening her lips together a little, paused, suiting her action to the idea that professions were usually humbug.
‘“‘ There is indeed something you can do for him,” her sister-in-law hastened to respond ; “ or something you can do for me, at least,’’ she added, more dis- creetly.
“ Call it for both of you. What is it?” and Miss Daintry put on her eyeglass.
‘“‘T know you like to do kindnesses, when they are veal ones; and you almost always have some one staying with you for the winter.”
Miss Daintry stared. ‘“‘ Do you want to put him to live with me? ”
“No, indeed! Do you think I could part with him? It’s another person—a lady!”
58
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
“A lady! Is he going to bring a woman with him 2”
“My dear Lucretia, you won’t wait. I want to make it as pleasant for him as possible. In that case he may stay longer. He has promised three months ; but I should so like to keep him till the summer. It would make me very happy.”’
“Well, my dear, keep him, then, if you can.”’
“‘ But I can’t, unless I am helped.”
“And you want me to help you? Tell me what I must do. Should you wish me to make love to him? ”’
Mrs. Daintry’s hesitation at this point was almost as great as if she had found herself obliged to say yes. She was well aware that what she had come to suggest was very delicate ; but it seemed to her at the present moment more delicate than ever. Still, her cause was good, because it was the cause of maternal devotion. “What I should like you to do would be to ask Rachel Torrance to spend the winter with you.”
Miss Daintry had not sat so much on committees without getting used to queer proposals, and she had long since ceased to waste time in expressing a vain surprise. Her method was Socratic; she usually entangled her interlocutor in a net of questions.
‘“ Ah, do you want her to make love to him ? ”
“No, I don’t want any love at all. In such a matter as that I want Florimond to be perfectly free. But Rachel is such an attractive girl; she is so artistic and so bright.”’
“JT don’t doubt it; but I can’t invite all the attractive girls in the country. Why don’t you ask her yourself ? ”’
‘“‘It would be too marked. And then Florimond might not like her in the same house ; he would have too much of her. Besides, she is no relation of mine, you know ; the cousinship—such as it is, it is not very close—is on your side. I have reason to believe she
359
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
would like to come ; she knows so little of Boston, and admires it so much. It is astonishing how little idea the New York people have. She would be different from any one here, and that would make a pleasant change for Florimomd. She was in Europe so much when she was young. She speaks French perfectly, and Italian, I think, too; and she was brought up in a kind of artistic way. Her father never did any- thing ; but even when he hadn’t bread to give his children, he always arranged to have a studio, and they gave musical parties. That’s the way Rachel was brought up. But they tell me that it hasn’t in the least spoiled her; it has only made her very familiar with life.’’
“Familiar with rubbish!’’ Miss Daintry ejaculated.
““ My dear Lucretia, I assure you she is a very good girl, or I never would have proposed such a plan as this. She paints very well herself, and tries to sell her pictures. They are dreadfully poor—I don’t mean the pictures, but Mrs. Torrance and the rest—and they live in Brooklyn, in some second-rate boarding- house. With that, Rachel has everything about her that would enable her to appreciate Boston. Ofcourse it would be a real kindness, because there would be one less to pay for at the boarding-house. You haven’t a son, sO you can’t understand how a mother feels. I want to prepare everything, to have everything pleasantly arranged. I want to deprive him of every pretext for going away before the summer ; because in August—I don’t know whether I have told you—I have a kind of idea of going back with him myself. I am so afraid he will miss the artistic side. I don’t mind saying that to you, Lucretia, for I have heard you say yourself that you thought it had been left out here. Florimond might go and see Rachel Torrance every day if he liked ; of course, being his cousin, and calling her Rachel, it couldn't attract any
60
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
particular attention. I shouldn’t much care if it did,”’ Mrs. Daintry went on, borrowing a certain bravado that in calmer moments was eminently foreign to her nature from the impunity with which she had hitherto proceeded. Her project, as she heard herself unfold it, seemed to hang together so well that she felt something of the intoxication of success. “I shouldn’t care if it did,’’ she repeated, ‘‘so long as Florimond had a little of the conversation that he is accustomed to, and I was not in perpetual fear of his starting off.”
Miss Daintry had listened attentively while her sister-in-law spoke, with eager softness, passing from point to point with a crescendo of lucidity, like a woman who had thought it all out and had the consciousness of many reasons on her side. There had been moment- ary pauses, of which Lucretia had not taken advantage, so that Mrs. Daintry rested at last in the enjoyment of a security that was almost complete and that her companion’s first question was not of a nature to dispel.
“ It’s so long since I have seen her. Is she pretty?” Miss Daintry inquired.
“She is decidedly striking; she has magnificent hair!” her visitor answered, almost with enthusiasm.
‘Do you want Florimond to marry her ? ”
This, somehow, was less pertinent. ‘‘ Ah no, my dear,” Mrs. Daintry rejoined, very judicially. ‘‘ That is not the kind of education—the kind of milteu—one would wish for the wife of one’s son.” She knew, moreover, that her sister-in-law knew her opinion about the marriage of young people. It was a sacrament more high and holy than any words could express, the propriety and timeliness of which lay deep in the hearts of the contracting parties, below all interference from parents and friends ; it was an inspiration from above, and she would no more have
61
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
thought of laying a train to marry her son than she would have thought of breaking open his letters. More relevant even than this, however, was the fact that she did not believe he would wish to make a wife of a girl from a slipshod family in Brooklyn, however little he might care to lose sight of the artistic side. It will be observed that she gave Florimond the credit of being a very discriminating young man ; and she indeed discriminated for him in cases in which she would not have presumed to discriminate for herself.
‘‘ My dear Susan, you are simply the most immoral woman in Boston!’’ These were the words of which, after a moment, her sister-in-law delivered herself.
Mrs. Daintry turned a little pale. ‘‘ Don’t you think it would be right ? ” she asked quickly.
“To sacrifice the poor girl to Florimond’s amuse- ment ? What has she done that you should wish to play her such a trick? ’’ Miss Daintry did not look shocked: she never looked shocked, for even when she was annoyed she was never frightened ; but after a moment she broke into a loud, uncompromisng laugh—a laugh which her sister-in-law knew of old and regarded as a peculiarly dangerous form of criticism.
“I don’t see why she should be sacrificed. She would have a lovely time if she were to come on. She would consider it the greatest kindness to be asked.”’
‘To be asked to come and amuse Florimond.”
Mrs. Daintry hesitated a moment. “I don’t see why she should object to that. Florimond is certainly not beneath a person’s notice. Why, Lucretia, you speak as if there were something disagreeable about Florimond.”
“My dear Susan,” said Miss Daintry, “I am willing to believe that he is the first young man of his time ; but, all the same, it isn’t a thing to do.”
62
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
“‘ Well, I have thought of it in every possible way, and I haven’t seen any harm in it. It isn’t as if she were giving up anything to come.”’
“ You have thought of it too much, perhaps. Stop thinking for a while. I should have imagined you were more scrupulous.”
Mrs. Daintry was silent a moment; she took her sister-in-law’s asperity very meekly, for she felt that if she had been wrong in what she proposed she deserved a severe judgement. But why was she wrong? She clasped her hands in her lap and rested her eyes with extreme seriousness upon Lucretia’s little pince-nez, inviting her to judge her, and too much interested in having the question of her culpability settled to care whether or no she were hurt. “ It is very hard to know what is right,” she said presently. “Of course it is only a plan; I wondered how it would strike you.”
“You had better leave Florimond alone,’ Miss Daintry answered. ‘‘I don’t see why you should spread so many carpets for him. Let him shift for himself. If he doesn’t like Boston, Boston can spare him.”’
“You are not nice about him; no, you are not, Lucretia! ’’ Mrs. Daintry cried, with a slight tremor in her voice.
“ Of course I am not as nice as you—he is not my son; but I am trying to be nice about Rachel Torrance.”
“‘T am sure she would like him—she would delight in him!” Mrs. Daintry broke out.
‘“ That’s just what I’m afraid of ; I couldn’t stand that.”
“Well, Lucretia, I am not convinced,” Mrs. Daintry said, rising, with perceptible coldness.’ ‘‘ It is very hard to be sure one is not unjust. Of course I shall not expect you to send for her; but I shall
63
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
think of her with a good deal of compassion, all winter, in that dingy place in Brooklyn. And if you have some one else with you—and I am sure you will, because you always do, unless you remain alone on purpose this year, to put me in the wrong—if you have some one else I shall keep saying to myself: ‘Well, after all, it might have been Rachel!’ ”
Miss Daintry gave another of her loud laughs at the idea that she might remain alone “ on purpose.” “IT shall have a visitor, but it will be some one who will not amuse Florimond in the least. If he wants to go away, it won’t be for anything in this house that he will stay.”
“T really don’t see why you should hate him,”’ said poor Mrs. Daintry.
“Where do you find that? On the contrary, I appreciate him very highly. That’s just why I think it very possible that a girl like Rachel Torrance— an odd, uninstructed girl, who hasn’t had great advantages—may fall in love with him and break her heart.”’
Mrs. Daintry’s clear eyes expanded. “Is that what you are afraid of ? ”’
“Do you suppose my solicitude is for Florimond ? An accident of that sort—if she were to show him her heels at the end—might perhaps do him good. But I am thinking of the girl, since you say you don’t want him to marry her.”
“It was not for that that I suggested what I did. I don’t want him to marry any one—TI have no plans for that,” Mrs. Daintry said, as if she were resenting an imputation.
“‘ Rachel Torrance least of all! ’’ And Miss Daintry indulged still again in that hilarity, so personal to herself, which sometimes made the subject look so little jocular to others. ‘“‘ My dear Susan, I don’t blame you,” she said; “for I suppose mothers are
64
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
necessarily unscrupulous. But that is why the rest of us should hold them in check.”
“It’s merely an assumption, that she would fall in love with him,” Mrs. Daintry continued, with a certain majesty ; “there is nothing to prove it, and I am not bound to take it for granted.”’
“In other words, you don’t care if she should! Precisely ; that, I suppose, is your véle. I am glad I haven’t any children; it is very sophisticating. For so good a woman, you are very bad. Yes, you ave good, Susan ; and you ave bad.”
“T don’t know that I pretend to be particularly good,’’ Susan remarked, with the warmth of one who had known something of the burden of such a reputation, as she moved toward the door.
‘You have a conscience, and it will wake up,” her companion returned. “It will come over you in the watches of the night that your idea was—as I have said—immoral.”’
Mrs. Daintry paused in the hall, and stood there looking at Lucretia. It was just possible that she was being laughed at, for Lucretia’s deepest mirth was sometimes silent—that is, one heard the laughter several days later. Suddenly she coloured to the roots of her hair, as if the conviction of her error had come over her. Was it possible she had been corrupted by an affection in itself so pure? “I only want to do right,” she said softly. ‘I would rather he should never come home than that I should go too far.”
She was turning away, but her sister-in-law held her a moment and kissed her. “‘ You are a delightful woman, but I won’t ask Rachel Torrance!” This was the understanding on which they separated.
65 F
III
Miss DAINTRY, after her visitor had left her, recognised that she had been a little brutal; for Susan’s pro- position did not really strike her as so heinous. Her eagerness to protect the poor girl in Brooklyn was not a very positive quantity, inasmuch as she had an impression that this young lady was on the whole very well able to take care of herself. What her talk with Mrs. Daintry had really expressed was the lukewarmness of her sentiment with regard to Flori- mond. She had no wish to help his mother lay carpets for him, as she said. Rightly or wrongly, she had a conviction that he was selfish, that he was spoiled, that he was conceited ; and she thought Lucretia Daintry meant for better things than the service of sugaring for the young man’s lips the pill of a long-deferred visit to Boston. It was quite indifferent to her that he should be conscious, in that city, of unsatisfied needs. At bottom, she had never forgiven him for having sought another way of salvation. Moreover, she had a strong sense of humour, and it amused her more than a little that her sister-in-law—of all women in Boston—should have come to her on that particular errand. It completed the irony of the situation that one should frighten Mrs. Daintry—just a little—about what she had undertaken ; and more than once that day Lucretia had, with a smile, the vision of Susan’s 66
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
countenance as she remarked to her that she was immoral. In reality, and speaking seriously, she did not consider Mrs. Daintry’s inspiration unpardonable ; what was very positive was simply that she had no wish to invite Rachel Torrance for the benefit of her nephew. She was by no means sure that she should like the girl for her own sake, and it was still less apparent that she should like her for that of Florimond. With all this, however, Miss Daintry had a high love of justice; she revised her social accounts from time to time to see that she had not cheated any one. She thought over her interview with Mrs. Daintry the next day, and it occurred to her that she had been a little unfair. But she scarcely knew what to do to repair her mistake, by which Rachel Torrance also had suffered, perhaps ; for after all, if it had not been wicked of her sister- in-law to ask such a favour, it had at least been cool ; and the penance that presented itself to Lucretia Daintry did not take the form of despatching a letter to Brooklyn. An accident came to her help, and four days after the conversation I have narrated she wrote her a note which explains itself and which I will presently transcribe. Meanwhile Mrs. Daintry, on her side, had held an examination of her heart; and though she did not think she had been very civilly treated, the result of her reflexions was to give her a fit of remorse. Lucretia was right: she had been anything but scrupulous; she had skirted the edge of an abyss. Questions of conduct had long been familiar to her; and the cardinal rule of life in her eyes was, that before one did anything which involved in any degree the happiness or the interest of another, one should take one’s motives out of the closet in which they are usually laid away and give them a thorough airing. This operation, undertaken before her visit to Lucretia, had been
67
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
cursory and superficial; for now that she repeated it, she discovered among the recesses of her spirit a number of nut-like scruples which she was astonished to think she should have overlooked. She had really been very wicked, and there was no doubt abour her proper penance. It consisted of a letter to her sister- in-law, in which she completely disavowed her little project, attributing it to momentary intermission of her reason. She saw it would never do, and she was quite ashamed of herself. She did not exactly thank Miss Daintry for the manner in which she had admonished her, but she spoke as one saved from a great danger, and assured her relative of Mount Vernon Place that she should not soon again expose herself. This letter crossed with Miss Daintry’s missive, which ran as follows :—
My DEAR Susan—I have been thinking over our conversation of last Tuesday, and I am afraid I went rather too far in my condemnation of your idea with regard to Rachel Torrance. If I expressed myself in a manner to wound your feelings, I can assure you of my great regret. Nothing could have been further from my thoughts than the belief that you are wanting in delicacy. I know very well that you were prompted by the highest sense of duty. It is possible, however, I think, that your sense of duty to poor Florimond is a little too high. You think of him too much as that famous dragon of antiquity—wasn’t it in Crete, or some- where ?—to whom young virgins had to be sacrificed. It may relieve your mind, however, to hear that this particular virgin will probably, during the coming winter, be provided for. Yesterday, at Doll’s, where I had gone in to look at the new pictures (there is a striking Appleton Brown), I met Pauline Mesh, whom I had not seen for ages, and had half an hour’s talk with her. She seems to me to have come out very much this winter, and to have altogether a higher tone. In short, she is much enlarged, and seems to want to take an interest in some-
68
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
thing. Ofcourse you will say: Has she not her children ? But, somehow, they don’t seem to fill her life. You must remember that they are very small as yet to fill anything. Anyway, she mentioned to me her great disappointment in having had to give up her sister, who was to have come on from Baltimore to spend the greater part of the winter. Rosalie is very pretty, and Pauline expected to give a lot of Germans, and make things generally pleasant. I shouldn’t wonder if she thought something might happen that would make Rosalie a fixture in our city. She would have liked this immensely ; for, whatever Pauline’s faults may be, she has plenty of family feeling. But her sister has suddenly got engaged in Baltimore (I believe it’s much easier than here), so that the visit has fallen through. Pauline seemed to be quite in despair, for she had made all sorts of beauti- fications in one of her rooms, on purpose for Rosalie ; and not only had she wasted her labour (you know how she goes into those things, whatever we may think, sometimes, of her taste), but she spoke as if it would make a great difference in her winter; said she should suffer a great deal from loneliness. She says Boston is no place for a married woman, standing on her own merits; she can’t have any sort of time unless she hitches herself to some attractive girl who will help her to pull the social car. You know that isn’t what every one says, and how much talk there has been the last two or three winters about the frisky young matrons. Well, however that may be, I don’t pretend to know much about it, not being in the married set. Pauline spoke as if she were really quite high and dry, and I felt so sorry for her that it suddenly occurred to me to say something about Rachel Torrance. I remembered that she is related to Donald Mesh in about the same degree as she is to me—a degree nearer, therefore, than to Florimond. Pauline didn’t seem to think much of the relationship—it’s so remote; but when I told her that Rachel (strange as it might appear) would probably be thankful for a season in Boston, and might be a good
69
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
substitute for Rosalie, why she quite jumped at the idea. She has never seen her, but she knows who she is—fortunately, for I could never begin to explain. She seems to think such a girl will be quite a novelty in this place. I don’t suppose Pauline can do her any particular harm, from what you tell me of Miss Torrance ; and, on the other hand, I don’t know that she could injure Pauline. She is certainly very kind (Pauline, of course), and I have no doubt she will immediately write to Brooklyn, and that Rachel will come on. Florimond won’t, of course, see as much of her as if she were staying with me, and I don’t know that he will particularly care about Pauline Mesh, who, you know, is intenselyAmerican ; but they will go out a great deal, and he will meet them (if he takes the trouble), and I have no doubt that Rachel will take the edge off the east wind for him. At any rate I have perhaps done her a good turn. I must confess to you—and it won’t surprise you—that I was thinking of her, and not of him, when I spoke to Pauline. Therefore I don’t feel that I have taken a risk, but I don’t much care if I have. I have my views, but I never worry. I recommend you not to do so either— for you go, I know, from one extreme to the other. I have told you my little story ; itwasonmy mind. Aren’t you glad to see the lovely snow ?—Ever affectionately yours, i,
P.S.—The more I think of it, the more convinced I am that you wll worry now about the danger for Rachel. Why did I drop the poison into your mind ? Of course I didn’t say a word about you or Florimond.
This epistle reached Mrs. Daintry, as I have intimated, about an hour after her letter to her sister-in-law had been posted ; but it is characteristic of her that she did not for a moment regret having made a retractation rather humble in form, and which proved, after all, scarcely to have been needed. The delight of having done that duty carried her over the sense of having given herself away. Her
7O
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
sister-in-law spoke from knowledge when she wrote that phrase about Susan’s now beginning to worry from the opposite point of view. Her conscience, like the good Homer, might sometimes nod; but when it woke, it woke with a start; and for many a day afterward its vigilance was feverish. For the moment her emotions were mingled. She thought Lucretia very strange, and that she was scarcely in a position to talk about one’s going from one extreme to the other. It was good news to her that Rachel Torrance would probably be on the ground after all, and she was delighted that on Lucretia the responsibility of such a fact should rest. This re- sponsibility, even after her revulsion, as we know, she regarded as grave ; she exhaled an almost voluptuous sigh when she thought of having herself escaped from it. What she did not quite understand was Lucretia’s apology, and her having, even if Florimond’s happiness were not her motive, taken almost the very step which three days before she had so severely criticised. This was puzzling, for Lucretia was usually so consistent. But all the same Mrs. Daintry did not repent of her own penance; on the contrary, she took more and more comfort in it. If, with that, Rachel Torrance should be really useful, it would be delightful.
7T
IV
FLORIMOND DaINTRY had stayed at home for three days after his arrival ; he had sat close to the fire, in his slippers, every now and then casting a glance over his shoulders at the hard white world which seemed to glare at him from the other side of the window-panes. He was very much afraid of the cold, and he was not in a hurry to go out and meet it. He had met it, on disembarking in New York, in the shape of a wave of frozen air, which had travelled from some remote point in the West (he was told), on purpose, apparently, to smite him in the face. That portion of his organism tingled yet with it, though the gasping, bewildered look which sat upon his features during the first few hours had quite left it. I am afraid it will be thought he was a young man of small courage ; and on a point so delicate I do not hold myself obliged to pronounce. It is only fair to add that it was delightful to him to be with his mother and that they easily spent three days in talking. Moreover he had the company of Joanna and her children, who, after a little delay, occasioned apparently by their waiting to see whether he would not first come to them, had arrived in a body and had spent several hours. As regards the majority of them, they had repeated this visit several times in the three days, Joanna being obliged to remain at home with the two younger ones. There were four older ones, and their grandmother’s house was open to them
72
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
as a second nursery. The first day, their Uncle ‘lorimond thought them charming; and, as he had srought a French toy for each, it is probable that this mpression was mutual. The second day, their little -uddy bodies and woollen clothes seemed to him to 1ave a positive odour of the cold—it was disagreeable .O0 him, and he spoke to his mother about their “‘ wintry smell.’’ The third day they had become very familiar ; -hey called him ‘“ Florry ’’; and he had made up his mind that, to let them loose in that way on his mother, Joanna must be rather wanting in delicacy—not nentioning this deficiency, however, as yet, for he saw that his mother was not prepared for it. She 2vidently thought it proper, or at least it seemed ‘nevitable, that either she should be round at Joanna’s or the children should be round in Newbury Street ; or “‘ Joanna’s ’”’ evidently represented primarily the sound of small, loud voices, and the hard breathing ‘hat signalised the intervals of romps. Florimond was rather disappointed in his sister, seeing. her after a long separation ; he remarked to his mother that she seemed completely submerged. As Mrs. Daintry spent most of her time under the waves with her daughter, she had grown to regard this element as sufficiently favourable to life, and was rather surprised when Florimond said to her that he was sorry to see she and his sister appeared to have been converted into a pair of bonnes d’enfants. Afterward, however, she perceived what he meant; she was not aware, until he called her attention to it, that the little Merrimans took up an enormous place in the in- tellectual economy of two households. “‘ You ought to remember that they exist for you, and not you for them,” Florimond said to her in a tone of friendly admonition ; and he remarked on another occasion that the perpetual presence of children was a great injury to conversation—it kept it down so much ;
73
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
and that in Boston they seemed to be present even when they were absent, inasmuch as most of the talk was about them. Mrs. Daintry did not stop to ask herself what her son knew of Boston, leaving it years before, as a boy, and not having so much as looked out of the window since his return; she was taken up mainly with noting certain little habits of speech which he evidently had formed, and in won- dering how they would strike his fellow-citizens. He was very definite and trenchant ; he evidently knew perfectly what he thought ; and though his manner was not defiant—he had, perhaps, even too many of the forms of politeness, as if sometimes, for mysterious reasons, he were playing upon you—the tone in which he uttered his opinions did not appear exactly to give you the choice. And then apparently he had a great many ; there was a moment when Mrs. Daintry vaguely foresaw that the little house in Newbury Street would be more crowded with Florimond’s views than it had ever been with Joanna’s children. She hoped very much people would like him, and she hardly could see why they should fail to find him agreeable. To herself he was sweeter than any grandchild ; he was as kind as if he had been a devoted parent. Florimond had but a small acquaintance with his brother-in-law ; but after he had been at home forty-eight hours he found that he bore Arthur Merriman a grudge, and was ready to think rather ill of him—having a theory that he ought to have held up Joanna and interposed to save her mother. Arthur Merriman was a young and brilliant commission-merchant, who had not married Joanna Daintry for the sake of Florimond, and, doing an active business all day in East Boston, had a perfectly good conscience in leaving his children’s mother and grandmother to establish their terms of intercourse.
Florimond, however, did not particularly wonder
74
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
why his brother-in-law had not been round to bid him welcome. It was for Mrs. Daintry that this anxiety was reserved ; and what made it worse was her uncertainty as to whether she should be justified in mentioning the subject to Joanna. It might wound Joanna to suggest to her that her husband was derelict—especially if she did not think so, and she certainly gave her mother no opening ; and on the other hand Florimond might have ground for com- plaint if Arthur should continue not to notice him. Mrs. Daintry earnestly desired that nothing of this sort should happen, and took refuge in the hope that Florimond would have adopted the foreign theory of visiting, in accordance with which the newcomer was to present himself first. Meanwhile the young man, who had looked upon a meeting with his brother-in- law as a necessity rather than a privilege, was simply conscious of a reprieve ; and up in Clarendon Street, as Mrs. Daintry said, it never occurred to Arthur Merriman to take this social step, nor to his wife to propose it to him. Mrs. Merriman simply took for granted that her brother would be round early some morning to see the children. A day or two later the couple dined at her mother’s, and that virtually settled the question. It is true that Mrs. Daintry, in later days, occasionally recalled the fact that, after all, Joanna’s husband never had called upon Florimond ; and she even wondered why Florimond, who some- times said bitter things, had not made more of it. The matter came back at moments when, under the pres- sure of circumstances which, it must be confessed, were rare, she found herself giving assent to an axiom that sometimes reached her ears. This axiom, it must be added, did not justify her in the particular case I have mentioned, for the full purport of it was that the queerness of Bostonians was collective, not individual.
There was no doubt, however, that it was Flori-
75
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
mond’s place to call first upon his aunt, and this was a duty of which she could not hesitate to remind him. By the time he took his way across the long expanse of the new land and up the charming hill which con- stitutes, as it were, the speaking face of Boston, the temperature either had relaxed, or he had got used, even in his mother’s hot little house, to his native air. He breathed the bright cold sunshine with pleasure ; he raised his eyes to the arching blueness, and thought he had never seen a dome so magnificently painted. He turned his head this way and that, as he walked (now that he had recovered his legs, he foresaw that he should walk a good deal), and freely indulged his most valued organ, the organ that had won him such reputation as he already enjoyed. In the little artistic circle in which he moved in Paris, Florimond Daintry was thought to have a great deal of eye. His power of rendering was questioned, his execution had been called pretentious and feeble ; but a conviction had somehow been diffused that he saw things with extraordinary intensity. Noone could tell better than he what to paint, and what not to paint, even though his interpretation were sometimes rather too sketchy. It will have been guessed that he was an impressionist ; and it must be admitted that this was the character in which he proceeded on his visit to Miss Daintry. He was constantly shutting one eye, to see the better with the other, making a little telescope by curving one of his hands together, waving these members in the air with vague pictorial gestures, pointing at things which, when people turned to follow his direction, seemed to mock the vulgar vision by eluding it. I do not mean that he practised these devices as he walked along Beacon Street, into which he had crossed shortly after leaving his mother’s house ; but now that he had broken the ice he acted quite in the spirit of the reply he had made to a friend 76
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
in Paris, shortly before his departure, who asked him why he was going back to America—“ I am going to see how it looks.” He was of course very conscious of his eye; and his effort to cultivate it was both intuitive and deliberate. He spoke of it freely, as he might have done of a valuable watch or a horse. He was always trying to get the visual impression ; asking himself, with regard to such and such an object or a place, of what its “‘ character’ would consist. There is no doubt he really saw with great intensity ; and the reader will probably feel that he was welcome to this ambiguous privilege. It was not important for him that things should be beautiful ; what he sought to discover was their identity—the signs by which he should know them. He began this inquiry as soon as he stepped into Newbury Street from his mother’s door, and he was destined to continue it for the first few weeks of his stay in Boston. As time went on, his attention relaxed ; for one couldn’t do more than see, as he said to his mother and another person ; and he had seen. Then the novelty wore off—the novelty which is often so absurdly great in the eyes of the American who returns to his native land after a few years spent in the foreign element—an effect to be accounted for only on the supposition that in the secret parts of his mind he recognises the aspect of life in Europe as, through long heredity, the more familiar ; so that superficially, having no interest to oppose it, it quickly supplants the domestic type, which, upon his return, becomes supreme, but with its credit in many cases appreciably and permanently diminished. Flori- mond painted a few things while he was in America, though he had told his mother he had come home to rest ; but when, several months later, in Paris, he showed his ‘‘ notes,’ as he called them, to a friend, the young Frenchman asked him if Massachusetts were really so much like Andalusia.
77
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
There was certainly nothing Andalusian in the prospect as Florimond traversed the artificial bosom of the Back Bay. He had made his way promptly into Beacon Street, and he greatly admired that vista. The long straight avenue lay airing its newness in the frosty day, and all its individual facades, with their neat, sharp ornaments, seemed to have been scoured, with a kind of friction, by the hard, salutary light. Their brilliant browns and drabs, their rosy surfaces of brick, made a variety of fresh, violent tones, such as Florimond liked to memorise, and the large clear windows of their curved fronts faced each other, across the street, like candid, inevitable eyes. There was something almost terrible in the windows ; Florimond had forgotten how vast and clean they were, and how, in their sculptured frames, the New England air seemed, like a zealous housewife, to polish and preserve them. A great many ladies were looking out, and groups of children, in the drawing-rooms, were flat- tening their noses against the transparent plate. Here and there, behind it, the back of a statuette or the symmetry of a painted vase, erect on a pedestal, pre- sented itself to the street, and enabled the passer to construct, more or less, the room within—its frescoed ceilings, its new silk sofas, its untarnished fixtures. This continuity of glass constituted a kind of exposure, within and without, and gave the street the appearance of an enormous corridor in which the public and the private were familiar and intermingled. But it was all very cheerful and commodious, and seemed to speak of diffused wealth, of intimate family life, of comfort constantly renewed. All sorts of things in the region of the temperature had happened during the few days that Florimond had been in the country. The cold wave had spent itself, a snowstorm had come and gone, and the air, after this temporary relaxation, had renewed its keenness. The snow, which had fallen
78
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
in but moderate abundance, was heaped along the side of the pavement ; it formed a radiant cornice on the housetops and crowned the windows with a plain white cap. It deepened the colour of everything else, made all surfaces look ruddy, and at a distance sent into the air a thin, delicate mist—a vaporous blur—which occasionally softened an edge. The upper part of Beacon Street seemed to Florimond charming—the long, wide, sunny slope, the uneven line of the older houses, the contrasted, differing, bulging fronts, the painted bricks, the tidy facings, the immaculate doors, the burnished silver plates, the denuded twigs of the far extent of the Common, on the other side; and to crown the eminence and complete the picture, high in the air, poised in the right place, over everything that clustered below, the most felicitous object in Boston— the gilded dome of the State House. It was in the shadow of this monument, as we know, that Miss Daintry lived ; and Florimond, who was always lucky, had the good fortune to find her at home.
V
It may seem that I have assumed on the part of the reader too great a curiosity about the impressions of this young man, who was not very remarkable, and who has not even the recommendation of being the hero of our perhaps too descriptive tale. The reader will already have discovered that a hero fails us here ; but if I go on at all risks to say a few words about Florimond, he will perhaps understand the better why this part has not been filled. Miss Daintry’s nephew was not very original ; it was his own illusion that he had in a considerable degree the value of rareness. Even this youthful conceit was not rare, for it was not of heroic proportions, and was liable to lapses and discouragements. He was a fair, slim, civil young man, and you would never have guessed from his appearance that he was an impressionist. He was neat and sleek and quite anti-Bohemian, and in spite of his looking about him as he walked, his figure was much more in harmony with the Boston landscape than he supposed. He was a little vain, a little affected, a little pretentious, a little good-looking, a little amusing, a little spoiled, and at times a little tiresome. If he was disagreeable, however, it was also only a little ; he did not carry anything to a very high. pitch ; he was accomplished, industrious, successful— all in the minor degree. He was fond of his mother and fond of himself; he also liked the people who . 80
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
liked him. Such people could belong only to the class of good listeners, for Florimond, with the least en- couragement (he was very susceptible to that), would ‘chatter by the hour. As he was very observant, and knew a great many stories, his talk was often enter- taining, especially to women, many of whom thought him wonderfully sympathetic. It may be added that he was still very young and fluid, and neither his defects nor his virtues had a great consistency. He was fond of the society of women, and had an idea that he knew a great deal about that element of humanity. He believed himself to know everything about art, and almost everything about life, and he expressed himself as much as possible in the phrases that are current in studios. He spoke French very well, and it had rubbed off on his English.
His aunt listened to him attentively, with her nippers on her nose. She had been a little restless at first, and, to relieve herself, had vaguely punched the sofa-cushion which lay beside her—a gesture that her friends always recognised ; they knew it to express a particular emotion. Florimond, whose egotism was candid and confiding, talked for an hour about himself —about what he had done, and what he intended to do, what he had said and what had been said to him ; about his habits, tastes, achievements, peculiarities, which were apparently so numerous; about the decorations of his studio in Paris ; about the character of the French, the works of Zola, the theory of art for art, the American type, the “stupidity ’’ of his mother’s new house—though of course it had some things that were knowing—the pronunciation of Joanna’s children, the effect of the commission- business on Arthur Merriman’s conversation, the effect of everything on his mother, Mrs. Daintry, and the effect of Mrs. Daintry on her son Florimond. The young man had an epithet which he constantly intro-
81 G
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
duced to express disapproval ; when he spoke of the architecture of his mother’s house, over which she had taken great pains (she remembered the gabled fronts of Nuremberg), he said that a certain effect had : been dreadfully missed, that the character of the doorway was simply “crass.’”” He expressed, how- ever, a lively sense of the bright cleanness of American interiors, ‘“‘ Oh, as for that,” he said, “‘ the place is kept—it’s kept;’’ and, to give an image of this idea, he put his gathered fingers to his lips an instant, seemed to kiss them or blow upon them, and then opened them into the air. Miss Daintry had never encountered this gesture before; she had heard it described by travelled persons; but to see her own nephew in the very act of it led her to administer another thump to the sofa-cushion. She finally got this article under control, and sat more quiet, with her hands clasped upon it, while her visitor continued to discourse. In pursuance of his character as an impressionist, he gave her a great many impres- sions; but it seemed to her that as he talked, he simply exposed himself—exposed his egotism, his little pretensions. Lucretia Daintry, as we know, had a love of justice, and though her opinions were apt to be very positive, her charity was great and her judgements were not harsh ; moreover, there was in her composition not a drop of acrimony. Neverthe- less, she was, as the phrase is, rather hard on poor little Florimond ; and to explain her severity we are bound to assume that in the past he had in some way offended her. To-day, at any rate, it seemed to her that he patronised his maiden-aunt. He scarcely asked about her health, but took for granted on her part an unlimited interest in his own sensations. It came over her afresh that his mother had been absurd in thinking that the usual resources of Boston would not have sufficed to maintain him ; and she smiled a 82
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
little grimly at the idea that a special provision should have been made. This idea presently melted into another, over which she was free to regale herself only after her nephew had departed. For the moment she contented herself with saying to him, when a pause in his young eloquence gave her a chance—“ You will have a great many people to go and see. You pay the penalty of being a Bostonian ; you have several hundred cousins. One pays for everything.”’
Florimond lifted his eyebrows. “I pay for that every day of my life. Have I got to go and see them all?”
“‘ All—every one,” said his aunt, who in reality did not hold this obligation in the least sacred.
‘“‘ And to say something agreeable to them all? ”’ the young man went on.
“Oh no, that is not necessary,’ Miss Daintry rejoined, with more exactness. ‘‘ There are one or two, however, who always appreciate a pretty speech.” She added in an instant, “ Do you remember Mrs. Mesh ? ”’
“Mrs. Mesh?” Florimond apparently did not remember.
“The wife of Donald Mesh; your grandfathers were first cousins. I don’t mean her grandfather, but her husband’s. If you don’t remember her, I suppose he married her after you went away.”
“I remember Donald ; but I never knew he was a relation. He was single then, I think.”
“ Well, he’s double now,” said Miss Daintry ; “ he’s triple, I may say, for there are two ladies in the house.”
‘If you mean he’s a polygamist—are there Mor- mons even here?” Florimond, leaning back in his chair, with his elbow on the arm, and twisting with his gloved fingers the point of a small fair moustache, did not appear to have been arrested by this account of Mr. Mesh’s household ; for he almost immediately
83
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
asked, in a large, detached way—“ Are there any nice women here ? ”’
“It depends on what you mean by nice women ; there are some very sharp ones.”
‘“‘ Oh, I don’t like sharp ones,”’ Florimond remarked, in a tone which made his aunt long to throw her sofa-cushion at his head. ‘‘ Are there any pretty ones ? ”’
She looked at him a moment, hesitating. ‘ Rachel Torrance is pretty, in a strange, unusual way— black hair and blue eyes, a serpentine figure, old coins in her tresses ; that sort of thing.”
‘“‘T have seen a good deal of that sort of thing,” said Florimond, abstractedly.
“That I know nothing about. I mention Pauline Mesh’s as one of the houses that you ought to go to, and where I know you are expected.”
‘“‘T remember now that my mother has said some- thing about that. But who is the woman with coins in her hair?—what has she to do with Pauline Mesh ? ”
“* Rachel is staying with her; she came from New York a week ago, and I believe she means to spend the winter. She isn’t a woman, she’s a girl.”
“* My mother didn’t speak of her,” said Florimond ; “ but I don’t think she would recommend me a girl with a serpentine figure.”’
“Very likely not,” Miss Daintry answered, dryly. “Rachel Torrance is a far-away cousin of Donald Mesh, and consequently of mine and of yours. She’s an artist, like yourself; she paints flowers on little panels and plaques.”’
“‘ Like myself ?—I never painted a plaque in my life | ’’ exclaimed Florimond, staring.
“Well, she’s a model also; you can paint her if you like ; she has often been painted, I believe.”
w&. Florimond had begun to caress the other tip of his 84
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
moustache. “I don’t care for women who have been painted before. I like to find them out. Besides, I want to rest this winter.”
His aunt was disappointed ; she wished to put him into relation with Rachel Torrance, and his indiffer- ence was an obstacle. The meeting was sure to take place sooner or later, but she would have him glad to precipitate it, and, above all, to quicken her nephew's susceptibilities. ‘‘ Take care you are not found out yourself !’’ she exclaimed, tossing away her sofa- cushion and getting up.
Florimond did not see what she meant, and he accordingly bore her no rancour ; but when, before he took his leave, he said to her, rather irrelevantly, that if he should find himself in the mood during his stay in Boston, he should like to do her portrait—she had such a delightful face—she almost thought the speech a deliberate impertinence. ‘‘ Do you mean that you have discovered me—that no one has suspected it before ? ’’ she inquired with a laugh, and a little flush in the countenance that he was so good as to appreciate.
Florimond replied, with perfect coolness and good- nature, that he didn’t know about this, but that he was sure no one had seen her in just the way he saw her ; and he waved his hand in the air with strange circular motions, as if to evoke before him the image of a canvas, with a figure just rubbed in. He repeated this gesture, or something very like it, by way of farewell, when he quitted his aunt, and she thought him insufferably patronising.
This is why she wished him, without loss of time, to make the acquaintance of Rachel Torrance, whose treatment of his pretensions she thought would be salutary. It may now be communicated to the reader—after a delay proportionate to the momentous- hess of the fact—that this had been the idea which
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
suddenly flowered in her brain, as she sat face to face with her irritating young visitor. It had vaguely shaped itself after her meeting with that strange girl from Brooklyn, whom Mrs. Mesh, all gratitude—for she liked strangeness— promptly brought to see her ; and her present impression of her nephew rapidly completed it. She had not expected to take an interest in Rachel Torrance, and could not see why, through a freak of Susan’s, she should have been called upon to think so much about her; but, to her surprise, she perceived that Mrs. Daintry’s proposed victim was not the usual forward girl. She perceived at the same time that it had been ridiculous to think of Rachel as a victim—to suppose that she was in danger of vainly fixing her affections upon Florimond. She was much more likely to triumph than to suffer ; and if her visit to Boston were to produce bitter fruits, it would not be she who should taste them. She had a striking, oriental head, a beautiful smile, a manner of dressing which carried out her exotic type, and a great deal of experience and wit. She evidently knew the world, as one knows it when one has to live by its help. If she had an aim in life, she would draw her bow well above the tender breast of Florimond Daintry. With all this, she certainly was an honest, obliging girl, and had a sense of humour which was a fortunate obstacle to her falling into a pose. Her coins and amulets and seamless garments were, for her, a part of the general joke of one’s looking like a Circassian or a Smyrniote—an accident for which nature was responsible ; and it may be said of her that she took herself much less seriously than other people took her. This was a defect for which Lucretia Daintry had a great kindness; especially as she quickly saw that Rachel was not of an insipid paste, as even triumphant coquettes sometimes are. In spite of her poverty and the opportunitiesther beauty 86
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
must have brought her, she had not yet seen fit to marry—which was a proof that she was clever as well as disinterested. It looks dreadfully cold-blooded as I write it here, but the notion that this capable creature might administer poetic justice to Florimond gave a measurable satisfaction to Miss Daintry. He was in distinct need of a snub, for down in Newbury Street his mother was perpetually swinging the censer ; and no young nature could stand that sort of thing— least of all such a nature as Florimond’s. She said to herself that such a ‘“ putting in his place” as he might receive from Rachel Torrance would probably be a permanent correction. She wished his good, as she wished the good of every one ; and that desire was at the bottom of her vision. She knew perfectly what she should like: she should like him to fall in love with Rachel, as he probably would, and to have no doubt of her feeling immensely honoured. She should like Rachel to encourage him just enough—just so far as she might, without being false. A little would do, for Florimond would always take his success for granted. To this point did the study of her nephew’s moral regeneration bring the excellent woman who a few days before had accused his mother of a lack of morality. His mother was thinking only of his pleasure ; ske was thinking of his immortal spirit. She should like Rachel to tell him at the end that he was a presumptuous little boy, and that since it was his business to render ‘‘ impressions,”” he might see what he could do with that of having been jilted. This extraordinary flight of fancy on Miss Daintry’s part was caused in some degree by the high spirits which sprang from her conviction, after she met the young lady, that Mrs. Mesh’s companion was not in danger ; for even when she wrote to her sister-in-law in the manner the reader knows, her conscience was not wholly at rest. There was still a risk, and she
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
knew not why she should take risks for Florimond. Now, however, she was prepared to be perfectly happy when she should hear that the young man was con- stantly in Arlington Street ; and at the end of a little month she enjoyed this felicity.
88
VI
Mrs. MEsH sat on one side of the fire, and Florimond on the other; he had by this time acquired the privilege of a customary seat. He had taken a general view of Boston. It was like a first introduction, for before his going to live in Paris he had been too young to judge ; and the result of this survey was the con- viction that there was nothing better than Mrs. Mesh’s drawing-room. She was one of the few persons whom one was certain to find at home after five o’clock ; and the place itself was agreeable to Florimond, ‘who was very fastidious about furniture and decorations. He was willing to concede that Mrs. Mesh (the relation- ship had not yet seemed close enough to justify him in calling her Pauline) knew a great deal about such matters ; though it was clear that she was indebted for some of her illumination to Rachel Torrance, who had induced her to make several changes. These two ladies, between them, represented a great fund of taste; with a difference that was a result of Rachel’s know- ing clearly beforehand what she liked (Florimond called her, at least, by her baptismal name), and Mrs. Mesh’s only knowing it after a succession of experi- ments, of transposings and drapings, all more or less ingenious and expensive. If Florimond liked Mrs. Mesh’s drawing-room better than any other corner of Boston, he also had his preference in regard to its phases and hours. It was most charming in the winter
89
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
twilight, by the glow of the fire, before the lamps had been brought in. The ruddy flicker played over many objects, making them look more mysterious than Florimond had supposed anything could look in Boston, and, among others, upon Rachel Torrance, who, when she moved about the room in a desultory way (never so much enfoncée, as Florimond said, in a chair as Mrs. Mesh was), certainly attracted and detained the eye. The young man from his corner (he was almost as much enfoncé as Mrs. Mesh) used to watch her ; and he could easily see what his aunt had meant by saying she had a serpentine figure. She was slim and flexible, she took attitudes which would have been awkward in other women, but which her charming pliancy made natural. She reminded him of a celebrated actress in Paris who was the ideal of tortuous thinness. Miss Torrance used often to seat herself for a short time at the piano ; and though she never had been taught this art (she played only by ear), her musical feeling was such that she charmed the twilight hour. Mrs. Mesh sat on one side of the fire, as I have said, and Florimond on the other; the two might have been found in this relation—listening, face to face—almost any day in the week. Mrs. Mesh raved about her new friend, as they said in Boston—I mean about Rachel Torrance, not about Florimond Daintry. She had at last got hold of a mind that understood her own (Mrs. Mesh’s mind contained depths of mystery), and she sacrificed herself, generally, to throw her companion into relief. Her sacrifice was rewarded, for the girl was universally liked and admired ; she was a new type altogether ; she was the lioness of the winter. Flori- mond had an opportunity to see his native town in one of its fits of enthusiasm. He had heard of the infatuations of Boston, literary and social ; of its capacity for giving itself with intensity to a temporary : 90
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
topic ; and he was now conscious, on all sides, of the breath of New England discussion. Some one had said to him—or had said to some one, who repeated it—that there was no place like Boston for taking up with such seriousness a second-rate spinster from Brooklyn. But Florimond himself made no criticism ; for, as we know, he speedily fell under the charm of Rachel Torrance’s personality. He was perpetually talking with Mrs. Mesh about it; and when Mrs. Mesh herself descanted on the subject, he listened with the utmost attention. At first, on his return, he rather feared the want of topics ; he foresaw that he should miss the talk of the studios, of the theatres, of the boulevard, of a little circle of ‘‘ naturalists ”’ (in litera- ture and art) to which he belonged, without sharing all its views. But he presently perceived that Boston, too, had its actualities, and that it even had this in common with Paris—that it gave its attention most willingly to a female celebrity. If he had had any hope of being himself the lion of the winter, it had been dissipated by the spectacle of his cousin’s success. He saw that while she was there he could only be a subject of secondary reference. He bore her no grudge for this. I must hasten to declare that from the pettiness of this particular jealousy poor Flori- mond was quite exempt. Moreover, he was swept along by the general chorus; and he perceived that when one changes one’s sky, one inevitably changes, more or less, one’s standard. Rachel Torrance was neither an actress, nor a singer, nor a beauty, nor one of the ladies who were chronicled in the Figaro, nor the author of a successful book, nor a person of the great world ; she had neither a future, nor a past, nor a posi- tion, nor even a husband, to make her identity more solid ; she was a simple American girl, of the class that lived in penstons (a class of which Florimond had ever entertained a theoretic horror); and yet she had
gI
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
profited to the degree of which our young man was witness, by those treasures of sympathy constantly in reserve in the American public (as has already been intimated) for the youthful-feminine. If Florimond was struck with all this, it may be imagined whether or not his mother thought she had been clever when it occurred to her (before any one else) that Rachel would be a resource for the term of hibernation. She had forgotten all her scruples and hesitations; she only knew she had seen very far. She was proud of her prescience, she was even amused with it ; and for the moment she held her head rather high. No one knew of it but Lucretia—for she had never confided it to Joanna, of whom she would have been more afraid in such a connexion even than of her sister-in-law ; but Mr, and Mrs, Merriman perceived an unusual lightness in her step, a fitful sparkle in her eye. It was of course easy for them to make up their mind that she was exhilarated to this degree by the presence of her son ; especially as he seemed to be getting on beautifully in Boston.
“She stays out longer every day ; she is scarcely ever home to tea,’’ Mrs. Mesh remarked, looking up at the clock on the chimney-piece.
Florimond could not fail to know to whom she alluded, for it has been intimated that between these two there was much conversation about Rachel Torrance. “It’s funny, the way the girls run about alone here,’’ he said, in the amused, contemplative tone in which he frequently expressed himself on the subject of American life. ‘‘ Rachel stays out after dark, and no one thinks any the worse of her.”
“‘ Oh, well, she’s old enough,’ Mrs. Mesh rejoined, with a little sigh, which seemed to suggest that Rachel’s age was really affecting. Her eyes had been opened by Florimond to many of the peculiarities of the society that surrounded her; and though she had
92
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
spent only as many months in Europe as her visitor had spent years, she now sometimes spoke as if: she thought the manners of Boston more odd even than he could pretend to do. She was very quick at picking up an idea, and there was nothing she desired more than to have the last on every subject. This winter, from her two new friends, Florimond and Rachel, she had extracted a great many that were new to her; the only trouble was that, coming from different sources, they sometimes contradicted each other. Many of them, however, were very vivifying ; they added a new zest to that prospect of life which had always, in winter, the denuded bushes, the solid pond, the plank-covered walks, the exaggerated bridge, the patriotic statues, the dry, hard texture of the Public Garden for its foreground, and for its middle distance the pale, frozen twigs, stiff in the windy sky that whistled over the Common, the domestic dome of the State House, familiar in the untinted air, and the competitive spires of a liberal faith. Mrs. Mesh had an active imagination, and plenty of time on her hands. Her two children were young, and they slept a good deal; she had explained to Florimond, who observed that she was a great deal less in the nursery than his sister, that she pretended only to give her attention to their waking hours. “I have people for the rest of the time,” she said; and the rest of the time was considerable ; so that there were very few obstacles to her cultivation of ideas. There was one in her mind now, and I may as well impart it to the reader without delay. She was not quite so delighted with Rachel Torrance as she had been a month ago ; it seemed to her that the young lady took up—socially speaking—too much room in the house; and she wondered how long she intended to remain, and whether it would be possible, without a direct request, to induce her to take her way back to Brooklyn.
93
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
This last was the conception with which she was at present engaged ; she was at moments much pressed by it, and she had thoughts of taking Florimond Daintry into her confidence. This, however, she determined not to do, lest he should regard it as a sign that she was jealous of her companion. I know not whether she was, but this I know—that Mrs. Mesh was a woman of a high ideal and would not for the world have appeared so. If she was jealous, this would imply that she thought Florimond was in love with Rachel; and she could only object to that on the ground of being in love with him herself. She was not in love with him, and had no intention of being ; of this the reader, possibly alarmed, may definitely rest assured. Moreover, she did not think him in love with Rachel; as to her reason for this reserve, I need not, perhaps, be absolutely outspoken. She was not jealous, she would have said ; she was only oppressed—she was a little over-ridden. Rachel pervaded her house, pervaded her life, pervaded Boston ; every one thought it necessary to talk to her about Rachel, to rave about her in the Boston manner, which seemed to Mrs. Mesh, in spite of the Puritan tradition, very much more unbridled than that of Baltimore. They thought it would give her pleasure ; but by this time she knew everything about Rachel. The girl had proved rather more of a figure than she expected ; and though she could not be called pre- tentious, she had the air, in staying with Pauline Mesh, of conferring rather more of a favour than she received. This was absurd for a person who was, after all, though not in her first youth, only a girl, and who, as Mrs. Mesh was sure from her biography—for Rachel had related every item—had never before had such unrestricted access to the fleshpots. The fleshpots were full, under Donald Mesh’s roof, and his wife could easily believe that the poor girl would not be in
94
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
a hurry to return to her boarding-house in Brooklyn. For that matter there were lots of people in Boston who would be delighted that she should come to them. It was doubtless an inconsistency on Mrs. Mesh’s part that if she was overdone with the praises of Rachel Torrance which fell from every lip, she should not herself have forborne to broach the topic. But I have sufficiently intimated that it had a perverse fascination for her; it is true she did not speak of Rachel only to praise her. Florimond, in truth, was a little weary of the young lady’s name; he had plenty of topics of his own, and he had his own opinion about Rachel Torrance. He did not take up Mrs. Mesh’s remark as to her being old enough.
“You must wait till she comes in. Please ring for tea,’’ said Mrs. Mesh, after a pause. She had noticed that Florimond was comparing his watch with her clock ; it occurred to her that he might be going.
“Qh, I always wait, you know; I like to see her when she has been anywhere. She tells one all about it, and describes everything so well.”
Mrs. Mesh looked at him a moment. “She sees a great deal more in things than I am usually able to discover. She sees the most extraordinary things in Boston.”’
“Well, so do I,”’ said Florimond, placidly.
“Well, I don’t, I must say!” She asked him to ring again ; and then, with a slight irritation, accused him of not ringing hard enough ; but before he could repeat the operation she left her chair and went herself to the bell. After this she stood before the fire a moment, gazing into it; then suggested to Florimond that he should put on a log.
“Ts it necessary—when your servant is coming in a moment ?” the young man asked, unexpectedly, without moving. In an instant, however, he rose; and then he explained that this was only his little joke.
95
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
“Servants are too stupid,’ said Mrs. Mesh. ‘“‘ But I spoil you. What would your mother say?” She watched him while he placed the log. She was plump, and she was not tall; but she was a very pretty woman. She had round brown eyes, which looked as if she had been crying a little—she had nothing in life to cry about; and dark, wavy hair, which here and there, in short, crisp tendrils, escaped artfully from the form in which it was dressed. When she smiled, she showed very pretty teeth; and the combination of her touching eyes and her parted lips was at such moments almost bewitching. She was accustomed to express herself in humorous super- latives, in pictorial circumlocutions ; and had acquired in Boston the rudiments of a social dialect which, to be heard in perfection, should be heard on the lips of a native. Mrs. Mesh had picked it up; but it must be confessed that she used it without originality. It was an accident that on this occasion she had not expressed her wish for her tea by saying that she should like a pint or two of that Chinese fluid.
““My mother believes I can’t be spoiled,” said Florimond, giving a little push with his toe to the stick that he had placed in the embers ; after which he sank back into his chair, while Mrs. Mesh resumed possession of her own. ‘‘ I am ever fresh—ever pure.”
“You are ever conceited. I don’t see what you find so extraordinary in Boston,” Mrs. Mesh added, reverting to his remark of a moment before.
“Oh, everything! the ways of the people, their ideas, their peculiar cachet. The very expression of their faces amuses me.”
‘““ Most of them have no expression at all.”
“Oh, you are used to it,”’ Florimond said. “‘ You have become one of themselves ; you have ceased to notice.”
“I am more of a stranger than you; I was born
96
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
beneath other skies. Is it possible that you don’t know yet that I am a native of Baltimore? ‘ Mary- land, my Maryland !’ ”’
‘‘ Have they got so much expression in Maryland ? No, I thank you ; no tea. Is it possible,” Florimond went on, with the familiarity of pretended irritation, “is it possible that you haven’t noticed yet that I never take it? Bowtsson fade, éceuranie, as Balzac calls it.”
“Ah, well, if you don’t take it on account of Balzac !’’ said Mrs. Mesh. “I never saw a man who had such fantastic reasons. Where, by the way, is the volume of that depraved old author you promised to bring me? ”
“When do you think he flourished? You call everything old, in this country, that isn’t in the morning paper. I haven’t brought you the volume, because I don’t want to bring you presents,” Florimond said ; “‘ I want you to love me for myself, as they say in Paris.”
“Don’t quote what they say in Paris! Don’t profane this innocent bower with those fearful words! ”’ Mrs. Mesh rejoined, with a jocose intention. ‘‘ Dear lady, your son is not everything we could wish!” she added in the same mock-dramatic tone, as the curtain of the door was lifted, and Mrs. Daintry rather timidly advanced. Mrs. Daintry had come to satisfy a curiosity, after all quite legitimate ; she could no longer resist the impulse to ascertain for herself, so far as she might, how Rachel Torrance and Florimond were getting on. She had had no definite expectation of finding Florimond at Mrs. Mesh’s; but she supposed that at this hour of the afternoon—it was already dark, and the ice, in many parts of Beacon Street, had a polish which gleamed through the dusk—she should find Rachel. ‘“ Your son has lived too long in far-off lands ; he has dwelt among outworn things,” Mrs. Mesh went on, as
97 H
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
she conducted her visitor to a chair. “ Dear lady, you are not as Balzac was ; do you start at the mention of his name ?—therefore you will have some tea in a little painted cup.”
Mrs. Daintry was not bewildered, though it may occur to the reader that she might have been; she was only a little disappointed. She had hoped she might have occasion to talk about Florimond ; but the young man’s presence was a denial of this privilege. ‘‘ I am afraid Rachel is not at home,”’ she remarked. “T am afraid she will think I have not been very attentive.”
“‘ She will be in in a moment ; we are waiting for her,’’ Florimond said.. ‘‘ It’s impossible she should think any harm of you. I have told her too much good.”
“ Ah, Mrs. Daintry, don’t build too much on what he has told her! MHe’s a false and faithless man ! ” Pauline Mesh interposed ; while the good lady from Newbury Street, smiling at this adjuration, but looking a little grave, turned from one of her companions to the other. Florimond had relapsed into his chair by the fireplace ; he sat contemplating the embers, and fingering the tip of his moustache. Mrs. Daintry imbibed her tea, and told how often she had slipped coming down the hill. These expedients helped her to wear a quiet face ; but in reality she was nervous, and she felt rather foolish. It came over her that she was rather dishonest ; she had presented herself at Mrs. Mesh’s in the capacity of a spy. The reader already knows she was subject to sudden revulsions of feeling. There is an adage about repenting at leisure ; but Mrs. Daintry always repented in a hurry. There was something in the air— something im- palpable, magnetic—that told her she had better not have come; and even while she conversed with Mrs. Mesh she wondered what this mystic element could
98
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
be. Of course she had been greatly preoccupied, these last weeks ; for it had seemed to her that her plan with regard to Rachel Torrance was succeeding only too well. Florimond had frankly accepted her in the spirit in which she had been offered, and it was very plain that she was helping him to pass his winter. He was constantly at the house—Mrs. Daintry could not tell exactly how often; but she knew very well that in Boston, if one saw anything of a person, one saw a good deal. At first he used to speak of it ; for two or three weeks he had talked a good deal about Rachel Torrance. More lately, his allusions had become few ; yet to the best of Mrs. Daintry’s belief his step was often in Arlington Street. This aroused her suspicions, and at times it troubled her conscience ; there were moments when she wondered whether, in arranging a genial winter for Florimond, she had also prepared a season of torment for herself. Was he in love with the girl, or had he already discovered that the girl was in love with him? The delicacy of either situation would account for his silence. Mrs. Daintry said to herself that it would be a grim joke if she should prove to have plotted only too well. It was her sister-in-law’s warning in especial that haunted her imagination, and she scarcely knew, at times, whether more to hope that Florimond might have been smitten, or to pray that Rachel might remain indifferent. It was impossible for Mrs. Daintry to shake off the sense of responsibility ; she could not shut her eyes to the fact that she had been the prime mover. It was all very well to say that the situation, as it stood, was of Lucretia’s making; the thing never would have come into Lucretia’s head if she had not laid it before her. Unfortunately, with the quiet life she led, she had very little chance to observe; she went out so little, that she was reduced to guessing what the manner of the two young persons might be to
99
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
each other when they met in society, and she should have thought herself wanting in delicacy if she had sought to be intimate with Rachel Torrance. Now that her plan was in operation, she could make no attempt to foster it, to acknowledge it in the face of Heaven. Fortunately, Rachel had so many attentions, that there was no fear of her missing those of Newbury Street. She had dined there once, in the first days of her sojourn, without Pauline and Donald, who had declined, and with Joanna and Joanna’s husband for all ‘‘ company.”’ Mrs. Daintry had noticed nothing particular then, save that Arthur Merriman talked rather more than usual—though he was always a free talker—and had bantered Rachel rather more familiarly than was perhaps necessary (considering that he, after all, was not her cousin) on her ignorance of Boston, and her thinking that Pauline Mesh could tell her anything about it. On this occasion Florimond talked very little ; of course he could not say much when Arthur was in such extraordinary spirits. She knew by this time all that Florimond thought of his brother-in-law, and she herself had to confess that she liked Arthur better in his jaded hours, even though then he was a little cynical. Mrs. Daintry had been perhaps a little disappointed in Rachel, whom she saw for the first time in several years. The girl was less peculiar than she remembered her being, savoured less of the old studio, the musical parties, the creditors waiting at the door. However, people in Boston found her unusual, and Mrs. Daintry reflected, with a twinge at her de- pravity, that perhaps she had expected something too dishevelled. At any rate, several weeks had elapsed since then, and there had been plenty of time for Miss Torrance to attach herself to Florimond. It was less than ever Mrs. Daintry’s wish that he should (even in this case) ask her to be his wife. It seemed to her 100
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
less than ever the way her son should marry—because he had got entangled with a girl in consequence of his mother’s rashness. It occurred to her, of course, that she might warn the young man; but when it came to the point she could not bring herself to speak. She had never discussed the question of love with him, and she didn’t know what ideas he might have brought with him from Paris. It was too delicate; it might put notions into his head. He might say something strange and French, which she shouldn’t like; and then perhaps she should feel bound to warn Rachel herself—a complication from which she absolutely shrank. It was part of her embarrassment now, as she sat in Mrs. Mesh’s drawing-room, that she should probably spoil Florimond’s entertainment for this afternoon, and that such a crossing of his inclination would make him the more dangerous. He had told her that he was waiting for Rachel to come in; and at the same time, in view of the lateness of the hour and her being on foot, when she herself should take her leave he would be bound in decency to accompany her. As for remaining after Rachel should come in, that was an indiscretion which scarcely seemed to her possible. Mrs. Daintry was an American mother, and she knew what the elder generation owes to the younger. If Florimond had come there to call on a young lady, he didn’t, as they used to say, want any mothers round. She glanced covertly at her son, to try and find some comfort in his countenance ; for her perplexity was heavy. But she was struck only with his looking very handsome, as he lounged there in the firelight, and with his being very much at home. This did not lighten her byrden, and she expressed all the weight of it—in the midst of Mrs. Mesh’s flights of comparison—in an irrelevant little sigh. At such a time her only comfort could be the thought that at ali events she had not betrayed herself to Lucretia.
Tot
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
She had scarcely exchanged a word with Lucretia about Rachel since that young lady’s arrival; and she had observed in silence that Miss Daintry now had a guest in the person of a young woman who had lately opened a kindergarten. This reticence might surely pass for natural.
Rachel came in before long, but even then Mrs. Daintry ventured to stay a little. The visitor from Brooklyn embraced Mrs. Mesh, who told her that, prodigal as she was, there was no fatted calf for her return ; she must content herself with cold tea. Nothing could be more charming than her manner, which was full of native archness ; and it seemed to Mrs. Daintry that she directed her pleasantries at Florimond with a grace that was intended to be irresistible. The relation between them was a relation of ‘‘ chaff,’ and consisted, on one side and the other, in alternations of attack and defence. Mrs. Daintry reflected that she should not wish her son to have a wife who should be perpetually turning him into a joke ; for it seemed to her, perhaps, that Rachel Torrance put in her thrusts rather faster than Florimond could parry them. She was evidently rather wanting in the faculty of reverence, and Florimond panted a little. They presently went into an adjoining room, where the lamplight was brighter; Rachel wished to show the young man an old painted fan, which she had brought back from the repairer’s. They remained there ten minutes. Mrs. Daintry, as she sat with Mrs. Mesh, heard their voices much intermingled. She wished very much to confide herself a little to Pauline—to ask her whether she thought Rachel was in love with Florimond. But she had a fore- boding that this would not be safe; Pauline was capable of repeating her question to the others, of calling out to Rachel to come back and answer it. She contented herself, therefore, with asking her
102
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
hostess about the little Meshes, and regaling her with anecdotes of Joanna’s progeny.
‘Don’t you ever have your little ones with you at this hour? ’’ she inquired. ‘“‘ You know this is what Longfellow calls the children’s hour.”’
Mrs. Mesh hesitated a moment. ‘ Well, you know, one can’t have everything at once. I have my social duties now ; [have my guests. I have Miss Torrance —you see she is not a person one can overlook.”’
‘I suppose not,” said poor Mrs. Daintry, remem- bering how little she herself had overlooked her.
‘Have you done brandishing that superannuated relic ?’’ Mrs. Mesh asked of Rachel and Florimond, as they returned to the fireside. ‘‘ I should as soon think of fanning myself with the fire-shovel ! ”’
““He has broken my heart,’’ Rachel said. ‘ He tells me it is not a Watteau.”’
“Do you believe everything he tells you, my dear ? His word is the word of the betrayer.”’
“ Well, I know Watteau didn’t paint fans,’’ Flori- mond remarked, ‘‘ any more than Michael Angelo.”
“IT suppose you think he painted ceilings,’’ said Rachel Torrance. “I have painted a great many myself.”
“A great many ceilings? I should like to see that!’ Florimond exclaimed.
Rachel Torrance, with her usual promptness, adopted this fantasy. ‘‘ Yes, I have decorated half the churches in Brooklyn; you know how many there are.”
“If you mean fans, I wish men carried them,”’ the young man went on; “I should like to have one de votre facon.”
‘You're cool enough as you are ; I should be sorry to give you anything that would make you cooler | ”’
This retort, which may not strike the reader by its Originality, was pregnant enough for Mrs. Daintry ; it
103
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
seemed to her to denote that the situation was critical ; and she proposed to retire. Florimond walked home with her ; but it was only as they reached their door that she ventured to say to him what had been on her tongue’s end since they left Arlington Street.
“ Florimond, I want to ask you something. I think it is important, and you mustn't be surprised. Are you in love with Rachel Torrance ? ”’
Florimond stared, in the light of the street-lamp. The collar of his overcoat was turned up ; he stamped a little as he stood still; the breath of the February evening pervaded the empty vistas of the “‘ new land.”’ “In love with Rachel Torrance? Jamats de la vie! What put that into your head ? ”
“Seeing you with her, that way, this evening. You know you are very attentive.”’
“‘ How do you mean, attentive ? ”
“You go there very often. Isn’t it almost every day?”
Florimond hesitated, and, in spite of the frigid dusk, his mother could see that there was irritation in his eye. ‘“‘ Where else can I go, in this precious place? It’s the pleasantest house here.”
“Yes, I suppose it’s very pleasant,’’ Mrs. Daintry murmured. ‘‘ But I would rather have you return to Paris than go there too often,’ she added, with sudden energy.
“* How do you mean, too often? Qu’est-ce gut vous prend, ma mére ?’’ said Florimond.
“Is Rachel—Rachel in love with you? ’’ she in- quired solemnly. She felt that this question, though her heart beat as she uttered it, should not be mitigated by a circumlocution.
“Good heavens ! mother, fancy talking about love in this temperature !’”’ Florimond exclaimed. “ Let one at least get into the house.”
Mrs. Daintry followed him reluctantly ; for she
104
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
always had a feeling that if anything disagreeable were to be done one should not make it less drastic by selecting agreeable conditions. In the drawing- room, before the fire, she returned to her inquiry. “‘ My son, you have not answered me about Rachel.”’
“Is she in love with me? Why, very possibly ! ”’
“ Are you serious, Florimond ? ”’
“Why shouldn’t I be? I have seen the way women go off.”
Mrs. Daintry was silent a moment. ‘“ Florimond, Is it true ? ”’ she said presently.
“Is what true? I don’t see where you want to come out.”’
“Is it true that that girl has fixed her affec- tions——-”’ and Mrs. Daintry’s voice dropped.
“Upon me, ma mére? I don’t say it’s true, but I say it’s possible. You ask me, and I can only answer you. I am not swaggering, I am simply giving you decent satisfaction. You wouldn’t have me think it impossible that a woman should fall in love with me? You know what women are, and how there is nothing, in that way, too queer for them to do.”
Mrs. Daintry, in spite of the knowledge of her sex that she might be supposed to possess, was not pre- pared to rank herself on the side of this axiom. “I wished to warn you,” she simply said ; ‘‘ do be very careful.”
“Yes, I'll be careful; but I can’t give up the house.”
“There are other houses, Florimond.”
“ Yes, but there is a special charm there.”
‘“‘T would rather you should return to Paris than do any harm.”
“Oh, I shan’t do any harm; don’t worry, ma mére,’’ said Florimond.
It was a relief to Mrs. Daintry to have spoken,
105
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
and she endeavoured not to worry. It was doubtless this effort that, for the rest of the winter, gave her a somewhat rigid, anxious look. People who met her in Beacon Street missed something from her face. It was her usual confidence in the clearness of human duty ; and some of her friends explained the change by saying that she was disappointed about Florimond ~——she was afraid he was not particularly liked.
106
VII
By the first of March this young man had received a good many optical impressions, and had noted in water -colours several characteristic winter effects. He had perambulated Boston in every direction, he had even extended his researches to the suburbs ; and if his eye had been curious, his eye was now almost satisfied. He perceived that even amid the simple civilisation of New England there was material for the naturalist ; and in Washington Street, of a winter’s afternoon, it came home to him that it was a fortunate thing the impressionist was not exclusively pre- occupied with the beautiful. He became familiar with the slushy streets, crowded with thronging pedestrians and obstructed horse-cars, bordered with strange, promiscuous shops, which seemed at once violent and indifferent, overhung with snowbanks from the house tops ; the avalanche that detached itself at intervals fell with an enormous thud amid the dense processions of women, made for a moment a clear space, splashed with whiter snow, on the pavement, and contributed to the gaiety of the Puritan capital. Supreme in the thoroughfare was the rigid groove of the railway, where oblong receptacles, of fabulous capacity, governed by familiar citizens, jolted and jingled eternally, close on each other’s rear, absorbing and emitting innumerable Specimens of a single type. The road on either side, buried in mounds of pulverised, mud-coloured ice, was 107
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
ploughed across by labouring vehicles, and traversed periodically by the sisterhood of ‘shoppers,’ laden with satchels and parcels, and protected by a round- backed policeman. Florimond looked at the shops, saw the women disgorged, surging, ebbing, dodged the avalanches, squeezed in and out of the horse-cars, made himself, on their little platforms, where flatness was enforced, as perp@ndicular as possible. The horses steamed in the sunny air, the conductor punched the tickets and poked the passengers, some of whom were under and some above, and all alike stabled in trampled straw. They were precipitated, collectively, by stoppages and starts; the tight, silent interior stuffed itself more and more, and the whole machine heaved and reeled in its interrupted course. Flori- mond had forgotten the look of many things, the details of American publicity ; in some cases, indeed, he only pretended to himself that he had forgotten them, because it helped to entertain him. The houses —a bristling, jagged line of talls and shorts, a parti- coloured surface, expressively commercial — were spotted with staring signs, with labels and pictures, with advertisements familiar, colloquial, vulgar ; the air was traversed with the tangle of the telegraph, with festoons of bunting, with banners not of war, with inexplicable loops and ropes ; the shops, many of them enormous, had heterogeneous fronts, with queer juxta- positions in the articles that peopled them, an in- completeness of array, the stamp of the latest modern ugliness. They had pendant stuffs in the doorways, and flapping tickets outside. Every fifty yards there was a ‘‘candy store’’; in the intervals was the painted panel of a chiropodist, representing him in his pro- fessional attitude. Behind the plates of glass, in the hot interiors, behind the counters, were pale, familiar, delicate, tired faces of women, with polished hair and glazed complexions. Florimond knew their voices; he 108
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
knew how women would speak when their hair was “ treated,’’ as they said in the studios, like that. But the women that passed through the streets were the main spectacle. Florimond had forgotten their extra- ordinary numerosity, and the impression that they produced of a deluge of petticoats. He could see that they were perfectly at home on the road ; they had an air of possession, of perpetual equipment, a look, in the eyes, of always meeting the gaze of crowds, always seeing people pass, noting things in shop windows, and being on the watch at crossings; many of them evidently passed most of their time in these conditions, and Florimond wondered what sort of tntérieurs they could have. He felt at moments that he was in a city of women, in a country of women. The same im- pression came to him dans le monde, as he used to say, for he made the most incongruous application of his little French phrases to Boston. The talk, the social life, were so completely in the hands of the ladies, the masculine note was so subordinate, that on certain occasions he could have believed himself (putting the brightness aside) in a country stricken by a war, where the men had all gone to the army, or in a seaport half depopulated by the absence of its vessels. This idea had intermissions ; for instance, when he walked out to Cambridge. In this little excursion he often indulged ; he used to go and see one of his college mates, who was now a tutor at Harvard. Hestretched away across the long, mean bridge that spans the mouth of the Charles—a mile of wooden piles, sup- porting a brick pavement, a roadway deep in mire, and a rough timber fence, over which the pedestrian enjoys a view of the frozen bay, the backs of many new houses, and a big brown marsh. The horse-cars bore him company, relieved here of the press of the streets, though not of their internal congestion, and constitut- ing the principal feature of the wide, blank avenue,
109
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
where the puddles lay large across the bounding rails. He followed their direction through a middle region, in which the small wooden houses had an air of tent-like impermanence, and the February mornings, splendid and indiscreet, stared into bare windows and seemed to make civilisation transparent. Further, the suburb remained wooden, but grew neat, and the painted houses looked out on the car-track with an expression almost of superiority. At Harvard, the buildings were square and fresh ; they stood in a yard planted with slender elms, which the winter had reduced to spindles ; the town stretched away from the horizontal palings of the collegiate precinct, low, flat, and immense, with vague, featureless spaces and the air of a clean encampment. Florimond remembered that when the summer came in, the whole place was transformed. It was pervaded by verdure and dust, the slender elms became profuse, arching over the unpaved streets, the green shutters bowed themselves before the windows, the flowers and creeping-plants bloomed in the small gardens, and on the piazzas, in the gaps of dropped awnings, light dresses arrested the eye. At night, in the warm darkness—for Cambridge is not festooned with lamps—the bosom of nature would seem to palpitate, there would be a smell of earth and vege- tation—a smell more primitive than the odour of Europe—and the air would vibrate with the sound of insects. All this was in reserve, if one would have patience, especially from March to June; but for the present the seat of the University struck our poor little critical Florimond as rather hard and bare. As the winter went on, and the days grew longer, he knew that Mrs. Daintry often believed him to be in Arling- ton Street when he was walking out to see his friend the tutor, who had once spent a winter in Paris and never tired of talking about it. It is to be feared that he did not undeceive her so punctually as he might ; IIo
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
for, in the first place, he was at Mrs. Mesh’s very often ; in the second, he failed to understand how worried his mother was; and in the third, the idea that he should be thought to have the peace of mind of a brilliant girl in his keeping was not disagreeable to him.
One day his Aunt Lucretia found him in Arlington Street ; it occurred to her about the middle of the winter that, considering she liked Rachel Torrance so much, she had not been to see her very often. She had little time for such indulgences; but she caught a moment in its flight, and was told at Mrs. Mesh’s door that this lady had not yet come in, but that her com- panion was accessible. Florimond was in his custom- ary chair by the chimney-corner (his aunt perhaps did not know quite how customary it was), and Rachel, at the piano, was regaling him with a composition of Schubert. Florimond, up to this time, had not become very intimate with his aunt, who had not, as it were, given him the key of her house, and in whom he detected a certain want of interest in his affairs. He had a limited sympathy with people who were interested only in their own, and perceived that Miss Daintry belonged to this preoccupied and ungraceful class. It seemed to him that it would have been more becoming in her to feign at least a certain attention to the professional and social prospects of the most promising of her nephews. If there was one thing that Florimond disliked more than another, it was an eager self-absorption ; and he could not see that it was any better for people to impose their personality upon committees and charities than upon general society. He would have modified this judge- ment of his kinswoman, with whom he had dined but once, if he could have guessed with what anxiety she watched for the symptoms of that salutary change which she expected to see wrought in him by the
III
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
fascinating independence of Rachel Torrance. If she had dared, she would have prompted the girl a little ; she would have confided to her this secret desire. But the matter was delicate ; and Miss Daintry was shrewd enough to see that everything must be spon- taneous. When she paused at the threshold of Mrs. Mesh’s drawing-room, looking from one of her young companions to the other, she felt a slight pang, for she feared they were getting on too well. Rachel was pouring sweet music into the young man’s ears, and turning to look at him over her shoulder while she played ; and he, with his head tipped back and his eyes on the ceiling, hummed an accompaniment which occasionally became an articulate remark. Harmoni- ous intimacy was stamped upon the scene, and poor Miss Daintry was not struck with its being in any degree salutary. She was not reassured when, after ten minutes, Florimond took his departure ; she could see that he was irritated by the presence of a third person ; and this was a proof that Rachel had not yet begun to do her duty by him. It is possible that when the two ladies were left together, her disap- pointment would have led her to betray her views, had not Rachel almost immediately said to her: “My dear cousin, I am so glad you have come; I might not have seen you again. I go away in three days.”
“Go away? Where do you go to? ”
“‘ Back to Brooklyn,” said Rachel, smiling sweetly.
“Why on earth—I thought you had come here to stay for six months ? ”
‘‘QOh, you know, six months would be a terrible visit for these good people ; and of course no time was fixed. That would have been very absurd. I have been here an immense time already. It was to be as things should go.”
“ And haven’t they gone well?”
¥T2
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
“Oh yes, they have gone beautifully.”
“ Then why in the world do you leave ? ”
“Well, you know, I have duties at home. My mother coughs a good deal, and they write me dismal letters.”
“ They are ridiculous, selfish people. You are going home because your mother coughs ? I don’t believe a word of it!’’ Miss Daintry cried. ‘‘ You have some other reason. Something has happened here; it has become disagreeable. Be so good as to tell me the whole story.”’
Rachel answered that there was not any story to tell, and that her reason consisted entirely of conscien- tious scruples as to absenting herself so long from her domestic circle. Miss Daintry esteemed conscien- tious scruples when they were well placed, but she thought poorly on the present occasion of those of Mrs. Mesh’s visitor ; they interfered so much with her own sense of fitness. ‘‘ Has Florimond been making love to you? ”’ she suddenly inquired. ‘‘ You mustn’t mind that—beyond boxing his ears.”’
Her question appeared to amuse Miss Torrance exceedingly ; and the girl, a little inarticulate with her mirth, answered very positively that the young man had done her no such honour.
‘““T am very sorry to hear it,” said Lucretia; “I was in hopes he would give you a chance to take him down. He needs it very much. He’s dreadfully puffed up.”
‘“‘ He’s an amusing little man ! ”’
Miss Daintry put on her nippers. ‘‘ Don’t tell me it’s you that are in love! ”’
“Oh dear, no!. I like big, serious men ; not small Frenchified gentlemen, like Florimond. Excuse me if he’s your nephew, but you began it. Though I am fond of art,” the girl added, ‘‘ I don’t think I am fond of artists.”’
113 I
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
“ Do you call Florimond an artist ? ”’
Rachel Torrance hesitated a little, smiling. ‘‘ Yes, when he poses for Pauline Mesh.”’
This rejoinder for a moment left Miss Daintry in visible perplexity ; then a sudden light seemed to come to her. She flushed a little; what she found was more than she was looking for. She thought of many things quickly, and among others she thought that she had accomplished rather more than she intended. “Have you quarrelled with Pauline?” she said presently.
‘“‘ No, but she is tired of me.”
‘‘ Everything has not gone well, then, and you have another reason for going home than your mother’s cough ? ”’
“ Yes, if you must know, Pauline wants me to go. I didn’t feel free to tell you that; but since you guess it——— ’’ said Rachel, with her rancourless smile.
““ Has she asked you to decamp ? ”
“Qh dear, no! for what do you take us? But she absents herself from the house; she stays away all day. I have to play to Florimond to console him.”’
“So you have been fighting about him? ’”’ Miss Daintry remarked, perversely.
“Ah, my dear cousin, what have you got in your head? Fighting about sixpence! if you knew how Florimond bores me! I play to him to keep him silent. I have heard everything he has to say, fifty times over ! ”
Miss Daintry sank back in her chair; she was completely out of her reckoning. “I think he might have made love to you a little!’ she exclaimed, in- coherently.
“So do I! but he didn’t—not a crumb. He is afraid of me—thank heaven ! ”’
“ It isn’t for you he comes, then ?”’ Miss Daintry appeared to cling to her theory.
114
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
“No, my dear cousin, it isn’t |”
““ Just now, as he sat there, one could easily have supposed it. He didn’t at all like my interrup- tion.”
‘That was because he was waiting for Pauline to come in. He will wait that way an hour. You may imagine whether he likes me for boring her so that, as I tell you, she can’t stay in the house. I am out my- self as much as possible. But there are days when I drop with fatigue; then I must rest. I can assure you that it’s fortunate that I go so soon.”
“Is Pauline in love with him?” Miss Daintry asked, gravely.
“Not a grain. She is the best little woman in the world.”
“ Except for being a goose. Why, then, does she object to your company—after being so enchanted with you ? ”
‘* Because even the best little woman in the world must object to something. She has everything in life, and nothing to complain of. Her children sleep all day, and her cook is a jewel. Her husband adores her, and she is perfectly satisfied with Mr. Mesh. I act on her nerves, and I think she believes I regard her as rather silly to care so much for Florimond. Excuse me again ! ”’
“ You contradict yourself. She does care for him, then ?”’
‘‘ Oh, as she would care for anew coupé! She likes to have a young man of her own—fresh from Paris —quite to herself. She has everything else—why shouldn’t she have that? She thinks your nephew very original, and he thinks her what she is—the prettiest woman in Boston. They have an idea that they are making a ‘celebrated friendship ’—like Horace Walpole and Madame du Deffand. They sit there face to face—they are as innocent as the shovel
15
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
and tongs. But, all the same, I am in the way, and Pauline is provoked that I am not jealous.”’
Miss Daintry got up with energy. ‘“‘She’s a vain, hollow, silly little creature, and you are quite right to go away; you are worthy of better company. Only you will not go back to Brooklyn, in spite of your mother’s cough; you will come straight to Mount Vernon Place.”
Rachel hesitated to agree to this. She appeared to think it was her duty to quit Boston altogether ; and she gave as a reason that she had already refused other invitations. But Miss Daintry had a better reason than this—a reason that glowed in her indig- nant breast. It was she who had been the cause of the girl’s being drawn into this sorry adventure ; it was she who should charge herself with the reparation. The conversation I have related took place on a Tuesday ; and it was settled that on the Friday Miss Torrance should take up her abode for the rest of the winter under her Cousin Lucretia’s roof. This lady left the house without having seen Mrs. Mesh.
On Thursday she had a visit from her sister-in-law, the motive of which was not long in appearing. All winter Mrs. Daintry had managed to keep silent on the subject of her doubts and fears. Discretion and dignity recommended this course ; and the topic was a painful one to discuss with Lucretia, for the bruises of their primary interview still occasionally throbbed. But at the first sign of alleviation the excellent woman overflowed, and she lost no time in announcing to Lucretia, as a heaven-sent piece of news, that Rachel had been called away by the illness of poor Mrs. Tor- rance and was to leave Boston from one day to the other. Florimond had given her this information the evening before, and it had made her so happy that she couldn’t help coming to let Lucretia know that they were Safe. Lucretia listened to her announcement in
116
A NEW ENGLAND WINTER
silence, fixing her eyes on her sister-in-law with an expression that the latter thought singular ; but when Mrs. Daintry, expanding still further, went on to say that she had spent a winter of misery, that the harm the two together (she and Lucretia) might have done was never out of her mind, for Florimond’s assiduity in Arlington Street had become notorious, and she had been told that the most cruel things were said—when Mrs. Daintry, expressing herself to this effect, added that from the present moment she breathed, the danger was over, the sky was clear, and her conscience might take a holiday—her hostess broke into the most pro- longed, the most characteristic and most bewildering fit of laughter in which she had ever known her to indulge. They were safe, Mrs. Daintry had said ? For Lucretia this was true, now, of herself, at least ; she was secure from the dangers of her irritation ; her sense of the whole affair had turned to hilarious music. The contrast that rose before her between her visitor’s anxieties and the real position of the parties, her quick vision of poor Susan’s dismay in case that reality should meet her eyes, among the fragments of her squandered scruples—these things smote