The courier stood looking at Winterbourne offensively. The young man, at least, thought his manner of looking an offense to Miss Miller; it conveyed an imputation that she “picked up” acquaintances. “I shall have the honor of presenting to you a person who will tell you all about me,” he said, smiling and referring to his aunt.
“Oh, well, we’ll go some day,” said Miss Miller. And she gave him a smile and turned away. She put up her parasol and walked back to the inn beside Eugenio. Winterbourne stood looking after her; and as she moved away, drawing her muslin furbelows over the gravel, said to himself that she had the tournure of a princess.
He had, however, engaged to do more than proved feasible, in promising to present his aunt, Mrs. Costello, to Miss Daisy Miller. As soon as the former lady had got better of her headache, he waited upon her in her apartment; and, after the proper inquiries in regard to her health, he asked her if she had observed in the hotel an American family — a mamma, a daughter, and a little boy.
“And a courier?” said Mrs. Costello. “Oh yes, I have observed them. Seen them — heard them — and kept out of their way.” Mrs. Costello was a widow with a fortune; a person of much distinction, who frequently intimated that, if she were not so dreadfully liable to sick headaches, she would probably have left a deeper impress upon her time. She had a long, pale face, a high nose, and a great deal of very striking white hair, which she wore in large puffs and rouleaux over the top of her head. She had two sons married in New York and another who was now in Europe.
This young man was amusing himself at Hamburg, and, though he was on his travels, was rarely perceived to visit any particular city at the moment selected by his mother for her own appearance there. Her nephew, who had come up to Vevey expressly to see her, was therefore more attentive than those who, as she said, were nearer to her. He had imbibed at Geneva the idea that one must always be attentive to one’s aunt. Mrs. Costello had not seen him for many years, and she was greatly pleased with him, manifesting her approbation by initiating him into many of the secrets of that social sway which, as she gave him to understand, she exerted in the American capital. She admitted that she was very exclusive; but, if he were acquainted with New York, he would see that one had to be. And her picture of the minutely hierarchical constitution of the society of that city, which she presented to him in many different lights, was, to Winterbourne’s imagination, almost oppressively striking.
He immediately perceived, from her tone, that Miss Daisy Miller’s place in the social scale was low. “I am afraid you don’t approve of them,” he said.
“They are very common,” Mrs. Costello declared. “They are the sort of Americans that one does one’s duty by not — not accepting.”
“Ah, you don’t accept them?” said the young man.
“I can’t, my dear Frederick. I would if I could, but I can’t.”
“The young girl is very pretty,” said Winterbourne in a moment.
“Of course she’s pretty. But she is very common.”
“I see what you mean, of course,” said Winterbourne after another pause.
“She has that charming look that they all have,” his aunt resumed. “I can’t think where they pick it up; and she dresses in perfection — no, you don’t know how well she dresses. I can’t think where they get their taste.”
“But, my dear aunt, she is not, after all, a Comanche savage.”
“She is a young lady,” said Mrs. Costello, “who has an intimacy with her mamma’s courier.”
“An intimacy with the courier?” the young man demanded.
“Oh, the mother is just as bad! They treat the courier like a familiar friend — like a gentleman. I shouldn’t wonder if he dines with them. Very likely they have never seen a man with such good manners, such fine clothes, so like a gentleman. He probably corresponds to the young lady’s idea of a count. He sits with them in the garden in the evening. I think he smokes.”
Winterbourne listened with interest to these disclosures; they helped him to make up his mind about Miss Daisy. Evidently she was rather wild. “Well,” he said, “I am not a courier, and yet she was very charming to me.”
“You had better have said at first,” said Mrs. Costello with dignity, “that you had made her acquaintance.”
“We simply met in the garden, and we talked a bit.”
“Tout bonnement! And pray what did you say?”
“I said I should take the liberty of introducing her to my admirable aunt.”
“I am much obliged to you.”
“It was to guarantee my respectability,” said Winterbourne.
“And pray who is to guarantee hers?”
“Ah, you are cruel!” said the young man. “She’s a very nice young girl.”
“You don’t say that as if you believed it,” Mrs. Costello observed.
“She is completely uncultivated,” Winterbourne went on. “But she is wonderfully pretty, and, in short, she is very nice. To prove that I believe it, I am going to take her to the Chateau de Chillon.”
“You two are going off there together? I should say it proved just the contrary. How long had you known her, may I ask, when this interesting project was formed? You haven’t been twenty-four hours in the house.”
“I have known her half an hour!” said Winterbourne, smiling.
“Dear me!” cried Mrs. Costello. “What a dreadful girl!”
Her nephew was silent for some moments. “You really think, then,” he began earnestly, and with a desire for trustworthy information — “you really think that — ” But he paused again.
“Think what, sir?” said his aunt.
“That she is the sort of young lady who expects a man, sooner or later, to carry her off?”
“I haven’t the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do. But I really think that you had better not meddle with little American girls that are uncultivated, as you call them. You have lived too long out of the country. You will be sure to make some great mistake. You are too innocent.”
“My dear aunt, I am not so innocent,” said Winterbourne, smiling and curling his mustache.
Winterbourne remonstrated himself for this small but damning admission. He remembered the blustering, ruddy women at the billiard halls during his grade school years. Frederick, Fred, as a gawking teenager, had often been offered more than his fair share of pleasure by these doxies in whispered terms. Their vacant, painted smiles had, for the most part, little effect on him, and he never took advantage of their whisperings of entente cordiale. Winterbourne had, with his young American pals, professed to save himself for love, as was the custom in high society in his boyhood.
That threw limits on his observations of the billiard women, as his more vulgar friends called them. Young Fred had noticed a few of them around the hustlers one night, but once again paid them no mind — until one of them spoke. He whipped around, having lost his concentration and expecting trickery from a friend. “Excuse m — !,” he began to say, before abruptly stammering out an apology. A particularly fair-skinned girl called Rebecca, dressed with exceptional taste, held a handsome billiard stick of dark wood. Her sad almandine eyes held him for the moment, until she spoke. “I was assigned to this table by the man at the door for this night’s tournament. There is no grand prize, but won’t you let a lady on your team?”
Winterbourne, having regained his teenage composure, ejected, “But we would be so honored! Is that your stick? It is — very fine.” Though accustomed to few women players in the hall, and fewer allowed maces like the men, Winterbourne regarded her as a worthy challenger. She promptly won the game, which plunged him into a slightly dangerous habit of appreciating spunky, often difficult women.
An unlikely friendship formed and proceeded with caution, until one night, after Winterbourne lost what his mother would later call a nasty amount of under-the-table money to Rebecca. He had felt utterly stripped of his power as a young man. But somehow after this game, walking Rebecca home, he fel
t a burning desire for a woman such as this, who cared little for rules determined by her sex.
They had crossed the avenue and had just cleared the lamplight on the other side, when Rebecca turned to him as he blinked, and kissed him deeply. The unexpected closeness of her breath on his lips made him hot with a fire he hadn’t experienced thusly, and he pulled her into a tight embrace. They had walked quickly into the bushes to the side, Winterbourne leading her by hand. Rebecca had told him she knew he was a raffish man at heart, and he had turned her around smoothly, pushing his hands into her waist and massaging into her soft flesh, until his hands found her pubic bone and slid below it, her dress still on.
He heard her heaving breath and laughed, the heat of the spring around them, and the bloom of the night covering them in softness. She returned the laugh, and he let his hands wander until they found her soft, supple breasts beneath her shawl. Having had too much wine for both of their sakes, he let his tongue glide over her hardening nipples, one hand cupping her pubis roughly.
He could feel her abdomen tighten under him as he moved on top of her, and he rubbed his body over her in such a way as to rub his bulging trousers over her fine skirts, which prompted her to call him a rotten scoundrel. Rebecca had grasped the bulging mass lodged in his pant leg, stroking it until neither of them dared say a word.
Then matter-of-factly, she pulled his prick out of his pants and started rubbing her petite frame over it, grinding her hips into his until she felt an orgasm creeping up on her and taking them both hostage for a few happy seconds. Little did Winterbourne’s aunt know that any of this happened, as Rebecca and Winterbourne spoke little after that night, and she pursued and wed an unfortunately stuffy accountant from Brussels.
Pulled back into the current conversation with his aunt, Winterbourne attempted to give her a polite smile. Mrs. Costello paled.
“You are guilty too, then!”
Winterbourne continued to curl his mustache meditatively. “You won’t let the poor girl know you then?” he asked at last.
“Is it literally true that she is going to the Chateau de Chillon with you?”
“I think that she fully intends it.”
“Then, my dear Frederick,” said Mrs. Costello, “I must decline the honor of her acquaintance. I am an old woman, but I am not too old, thank Heaven, to be shocked!”
“But don’t they all do these things — the young girls in America?” Winterbourne inquired.
Mrs. Costello stared a moment. “I should like to see my granddaughters do them!” she declared grimly.
This seemed to throw some light upon the matter, for Winterbourne remembered to have heard that his pretty cousins in New York were “tremendous flirts.” If, therefore, Miss Daisy Miller exceeded the liberal margin allowed to these young ladies, it was probable that anything might be expected of her. Winterbourne was impatient to see her again, and he was vexed with himself that, by instinct, he should not appreciate her justly.
Though he was impatient to see her, he hardly knew what he should say to her about his aunt’s refusal to become acquainted with her; but he discovered, promptly enough, that with Miss Daisy Miller there was no great need of walking on tiptoe. He found her that evening in the garden, wandering about in the warm starlight like an indolent sylph, and swinging to and fro the largest fan he had ever beheld. It was ten o’clock. He had dined with his aunt, had been sitting with her since dinner, and had just taken leave of her till the morrow. Miss Daisy Miller seemed very glad to see him; she declared it was the longest evening she had ever passed.
“Have you been all alone?” he asked.
“I have been walking round with mother. But mother gets tired walking round,” she answered.
“Has she gone to bed?”
“No; she doesn’t like to go to bed,” said the young girl. “She doesn’t sleep — not three hours. She says she doesn’t know how she lives. She’s dreadfully nervous. I guess she sleeps more than she thinks. She’s gone somewhere after Randolph; she wants to try to get him to go to bed. He doesn’t like to go to bed.”
“Let us hope she will persuade him,” observed Winterbourne.
“She will talk to him all she can; but he doesn’t like her to talk to him,” said Miss Daisy, opening her fan. “She’s going to try to get Eugenio to talk to him. But he isn’t afraid of Eugenio. Eugenio’s a splendid courier, but he can’t make much impression on Randolph! I don’t believe he’ll go to bed before eleven.” It appeared that Randolph’s vigil was in fact triumphantly prolonged, for Winterbourne strolled about with the young girl for some time without meeting her mother. “I have been looking round for that lady you want to introduce me to,” his companion resumed. “She’s your aunt.” Then, on Winterbourne’s admitting the fact and expressing some curiosity as to how she had learned it, she said she had heard all about Mrs. Costello from the chambermaid.
She was very quiet and very comme il faut; she wore white puffs; she spoke to no one, and she never dined at the table d’hote. Every two days she had a headache. “I think that’s a lovely description, headache and all!” said Miss Daisy, chattering along in her thin, gay voice. “I want to know her ever so much. I know just what your aunt would be; I know I should like her. She would be very exclusive. I like a lady to be exclusive; I’m dying to be exclusive myself. Well, we are exclusive, mother and I. We don’t speak to everyone — or they don’t speak to us. I suppose it’s about the same thing. Anyway, I shall be ever so glad to know your aunt.”
Winterbourne was embarrassed. “She would be most happy,” he said; “but I am afraid those headaches will interfere.”
The young girl looked at him through the dusk. “But I suppose she doesn’t have a headache every day,” she said sympathetically.
Winterbourne was silent a moment. “She tells me she does,” he answered at last, not knowing what to say.
Miss Daisy Miller stopped and stood looking at him. Her prettiness was still visible in the darkness; she was opening and closing her enormous fan. “She doesn’t want to know me!” she said suddenly. “Why don’t you say so? You needn’t be afraid. I’m not afraid!” And she gave a little laugh.
Winterbourne fancied there was a tremor in her voice; he was touched, shocked, mortified by it. “My dear young lady,” he protested, “she knows no one. It’s her wretched health.”
The young girl walked on a few steps, laughing still. “You needn’t be afraid,” she repeated. “Why should she want to know me?” Then she paused again; she was close to the parapet of the garden, and in front of her was the starlit lake. There was a vague sheen upon its surface, and in the distance were dimly seen mountain forms. Daisy Miller looked out upon the mysterious prospect and then she gave another little laugh. “Gracious! she is exclusive!” she said. Winterbourne wondered whether she was seriously wounded, and for a moment almost wished that her sense of injury might be such as to make it becoming in him to attempt to reassure and comfort her. He had a pleasant sense that she would be very approachable for consolatory purposes.
He felt then, for the instant, quite ready to sacrifice his aunt, conversationally; to admit that she was a proud, rude woman, and to declare that they needn’t mind her. But before he had time to commit himself to this perilous mixture of gallantry and impiety, the young lady, resuming her walk, gave an exclamation in quite another tone. “Well, here’s Mother! I guess she hasn’t got Randolph to go to bed.” The figure of a lady appeared at a distance, very indistinct in the darkness, and advancing with a slow and wavering movement. Suddenly it seemed to pause.
“Are you sure it is your mother? Can you distinguish her in this thick dusk?” Winterbourne asked.
“Well!” cried Miss Daisy Miller with a laugh; “I guess I know my own mother. And when she has got on my shawl, too! She is always wearing my things.”
The lady in question, ceasing to advance, hovered vaguely about the spot at which she had checked her steps.
“I am afraid your mother doesn’t see y
ou,” said Winterbourne. “Or perhaps,” he added, thinking, with Miss Miller, the joke permissible — “perhaps she feels guilty about your shawl.”
“Oh, it’s a fearful old thing!” the young girl replied serenely. “I told her she could wear it. She won’t come here because she sees you.”
“Ah, then,” said Winterbourne, “I had better leave you.”
“Oh, no; come on!” urged Miss Daisy Miller.
“I’m afraid your mother doesn’t approve of my walking with you.”
Miss Miller gave him a serious glance. “It isn’t for me; it’s for you — that is, it’s for her. Well, I don’t know who it’s for! But mother doesn’t like any of my gentlemen friends. She’s right down timid. She always makes a fuss if I introduce a gentleman. But I do introduce them — almost always. If I didn’t introduce my gentlemen friends to Mother,” the young girl added in her little soft, flat monotone, “I shouldn’t think I was natural.”
“To introduce me,” said Winterbourne, “you must know my name.” And he proceeded to pronounce it.
“Oh, dear, I can’t say all that!” said his companion with a laugh. But by this time they had come up to Mrs. Miller, who, as they drew near, walked to the parapet of the garden and leaned upon it, looking intently at the lake and turning her back to them. “Mother!” said the young girl in a tone of decision. Upon this the elder lady turned round. “Mr. Winterbourne,” said Miss Daisy Miller, introducing the young man very frankly and prettily. “Common,” she was, as Mrs. Costello had pronounced her; yet it was a wonder to Winterbourne that, with her commonness, she had a singularly delicate grace.
Her mother was a small, spare, light person, with a wandering eye, a very exiguous nose, and a large forehead, decorated with a certain amount of thin, much frizzled hair. Like her daughter, Mrs. Miller was dressed with extreme elegance; she had enormous diamonds in her ears. So far as Winterbourne could observe, she gave him no greeting — she certainly was not looking at him. Daisy was near her, pulling her shawl straight. “What are you doing, poking round here?” this young lady inquired, but by no means with that harshness of accent which her choice of words may imply.
Literary Love Page 3