by Henry James
Though she was smiling, there were tears in her voice as well as in her eyes. “My dear niece,” said Mr. Wentworth, softly. And Charlotte put out her arms and drew the Baroness toward her; while Robert Acton turned away, with his hands stealing into his pockets.
CHAPTER IV
A few days after the Baroness Munster had presented herself to her American kinsfolk she came, with her brother, and took up her abode in that small white house adjacent to Mr. Wentworth’s own dwelling of which mention has already been made. It was on going with his daughters to return her visit that Mr. Wentworth placed this comfortable cottage at her service; the offer being the result of a domestic colloquy, diffused through the ensuing twenty-four hours, in the course of which the two foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal of earnestness and subtlety. The discussion went forward, as I say, in the family circle; but that circle on the evening following Madame M; auunster’s return to town, as on many other occasions, included Robert Acton and his pretty sister. If you had been present, it would probably not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was treated as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment. This was not Mr. Wentworth’s way of treating any human occurrence. The sudden irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the Wentworths of an element not allowed for in its scheme of usual obligations required a readjustment of that sense of responsibility which constituted its principal furniture. To consider an event, crudely and baldly, in the light of the pleasure it might bring them was an intellectual exercise with which Felix Young’s American cousins were almost wholly unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely pursued in any section of human society. The arrival of Felix and his sister was a satisfaction, but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr. Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted to it as an extension of enjoyment. This function was ultimately assumed by Gertrude Wentworth, who was a peculiar girl, but the full compass of whose peculiarities had not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners. Gertrude, however, had to struggle with a great accumulation of obstructions, both of the subjective, as the metaphysicians say, and of the objective, order; and indeed it is no small part of the purpose of this little history to set forth her struggle. What seemed paramount in this abrupt enlargement of Mr. Wentworth’s sympathies and those of his daughters was an extension of the field of possible mistakes; and the doctrine, as it may almost be called, of the oppressive gravity of mistakes was one of the most cherished traditions of the Wentworth family.
“I don’t believe she wants to come and stay in this house,” said Gertrude; Madame Munster, from this time forward, receiving no other designation than the personal pronoun. Charlotte and Gertrude acquired considerable facility in addressing her, directly, as “Eugenia;” but in speaking of her to each other they rarely called her anything but “she.”
“Does n’t she think it good enough for her?” cried little Lizzie Acton, who was always asking unpractical questions that required, in strictness, no answer, and to which indeed she expected no other answer than such as she herself invariably furnished in a small, innocently-satirical laugh.
“She certainly expressed a willingness to come,” said Mr. Wentworth.
“That was only politeness,” Gertrude rejoined.
“Yes, she is very polite—very polite,” said Mr. Wentworth.
“She is too polite,” his son declared, in a softly growling tone which was habitual to him, but which was an indication of nothing worse than a vaguely humorous intention. “It is very embarrassing.”
“That is more than can be said of you, sir,” said Lizzie Acton, with her little laugh.
“Well, I don’t mean to encourage her,” Clifford went on.
“I ‘m sure I don’t care if you do!” cried Lizzie.
“She will not think of you, Clifford,” said Gertrude, gravely.
“I hope not!” Clifford exclaimed.
“She will think of Robert,” Gertrude continued, in the same tone.
Robert Acton began to blush; but there was no occasion for it, for every one was looking at Gertrude—every one, at least, save Lizzie, who, with her pretty head on one side, contemplated her brother.
“Why do you attribute motives, Gertrude?” asked Mr. Wentworth.
“I don’t attribute motives, father,” said Gertrude. “I only say she will think of Robert; and she will!”
“Gertrude judges by herself!” Acton exclaimed, laughing. “Don’t you, Gertrude? Of course the Baroness will think of me. She will think of me from morning till night.”
“She will be very comfortable here,” said Charlotte, with something of a housewife’s pride. “She can have the large northeast room. And the French bedstead,” Charlotte added, with a constant sense of the lady’s foreignness.
“She will not like it,” said Gertrude; “not even if you pin little tidies all over the chairs.”
“Why not, dear?” asked Charlotte, perceiving a touch of irony here, but not resenting it.
Gertrude had left her chair; she was walking about the room; her stiff silk dress, which she had put on in honor of the Baroness, made a sound upon the carpet. “I don’t know,” she replied. “She will want something more—more private.”
“If she wants to be private she can stay in her room,” Lizzie Acton remarked.
Gertrude paused in her walk, looking at her. “That would not be pleasant,” she answered. “She wants privacy and pleasure together.”
Robert Acton began to laugh again. “My dear cousin, what a picture!”
Charlotte had fixed her serious eyes upon her sister; she wondered whence she had suddenly derived these strange notions. Mr. Wentworth also observed his younger daughter.
“I don’t know what her manner of life may have been,” he said; “but she certainly never can have enjoyed a more refined and salubrious home.”
Gertrude stood there looking at them all. “She is the wife of a Prince,” she said.
“We are all princes here,” said Mr. Wentworth; “and I don’t know of any palace in this neighborhood that is to let.”
“Cousin William,” Robert Acton interposed, “do you want to do something handsome? Make them a present, for three months, of the little house over the way.”
“You are very generous with other people’s things!” cried his sister.
“Robert is very generous with his own things,” Mr. Wentworth observed dispassionately, and looking, in cold meditation, at his kinsman.
“Gertrude,” Lizzie went on, “I had an idea you were so fond of your new cousin.”
“Which new cousin?” asked Gertrude.
“I don’t mean the Baroness!” the young girl rejoined, with her laugh. “I thought you expected to see so much of him.”
“Of Felix? I hope to see a great deal of him,” said Gertrude, simply.
“Then why do you want to keep him out of the house?”
Gertrude looked at Lizzie Acton, and then looked away.
“Should you want me to live in the house with you, Lizzie?” asked Clifford.
“I hope you never will. I hate you!” Such was this young lady’s reply.
“Father,” said Gertrude, stopping before Mr. Wentworth and smiling, with a smile the sweeter, as her smile always was, for its rarity; “do let them live in the little house over the way. It will be lovely!”
Robert Acton had been watching her. “Gertrude is right,” he said. “Gertrude is the cleverest girl in the world. If I might take the liberty, I should strongly recommend their living there.”
“There is nothing there so pretty as the northeast room,” Charlotte urged.
“She will make it pretty.
Leave her alone!” Acton exclaimed.
Gertrude, at his compliment, had blushed and looked at him: it was as if some one less familiar had complimented her. “I am sure she will make it pretty. It will be very interesting. It will be a place to go to. It will be a foreign house.”
“Are we very sure that we need a foreign house?” Mr. Wentworth inquired. “Do you think it desirable to establish a foreign house—in this quiet place?”
“You speak,” said Acton, laughing, “as if it were a question of the poor Baroness opening a wine-shop or a gaming-table.”
“It would be too lovely!” Gertrude declared again, laying her hand on the back of her father’s chair.
“That she should open a gaming-table?” Charlotte asked, with great gravity.
Gertrude looked at her a moment, and then, “Yes, Charlotte,” she said, simply.
“Gertrude is growing pert,” Clifford Wentworth observed, with his humorous young growl. “That comes of associating with foreigners.”
Mr. Wentworth looked up at his daughter, who was standing beside him; he drew her gently forward. “You must be careful,” he said. “You must keep watch. Indeed, we must all be careful. This is a great change; we are to be exposed to peculiar influences. I don’t say they are bad. I don’t judge them in advance. But they may perhaps make it necessary that we should exercise a great deal of wisdom and self-control. It will be a different tone.”
Gertrude was silent a moment, in deference to her father’s speech; then she spoke in a manner that was not in the least an answer to it. “I want to see how they will live. I am sure they will have different hours. She will do all kinds of little things differently. When we go over there it will be like going to Europe. She will have a boudoir. She will invite us to dinner—very late. She will breakfast in her room. “
Charlotte gazed at her sister again. Gertrude’s imagination seemed to her to be fairly running riot. She had always known that Gertrude had a great deal of imagination—she had been very proud of it. But at the same time she had always felt that it was a dangerous and irresponsible faculty; and now, to her sense, for the moment, it seemed to threaten to make her sister a strange person who should come in suddenly, as from a journey, talking of the peculiar and possibly unpleasant things she had observed. Charlotte’s imagination took no journeys whatever; she kept it, as it were, in her pocket, with the other furniture of this receptacle—a thimble, a little box of peppermint, and a morsel of court-plaster. “I don’t believe she would have any dinner—or any breakfast,” said Miss Wentworth. “I don’t believe she knows how to do anything herself. I should have to get her ever so many servants, and she would n’t like them.”
“She has a maid,” said Gertrude; “a French maid. She mentioned her.”
“I wonder if the maid has a little fluted cap and red slippers,” said Lizzie Acton. “There was a French maid in that play that Robert took me to see. She had pink stockings; she was very wicked.”
“She was a soubrette,” Gertrude announced, who had never seen a play in her life. “They call that a soubrette. It will be a great chance to learn French.” Charlotte gave a little soft, helpless groan. She had a vision of a wicked, theatrical person, clad in pink stockings and red shoes, and speaking, with confounding volubility, an incomprehensible tongue, flitting through the sacred penetralia of that large, clean house. “That is one reason in favor of their coming here,” Gertrude went on. “But we can make Eugenia speak French to us, and Felix. I mean to begin—the next time.”
Mr. Wentworth had kept her standing near him, and he gave her his earnest, thin, unresponsive glance again. “I want you to make me a promise, Gertrude,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked, smiling.
“Not to get excited. Not to allow these—these occurrences to be an occasion for excitement.”
She looked down at him a moment, and then she shook her head. “I don’t think I can promise that, father. I am excited already.”
Mr. Wentworth was silent a while; they all were silent, as if in recognition of something audacious and portentous.
“I think they had better go to the other house,” said Charlotte, quietly.
“I shall keep them in the other house,” Mr. Wentworth subjoined, more pregnantly.
Gertrude turned away; then she looked across at Robert Acton. Her cousin Robert was a great friend of hers; she often looked at him this way instead of saying things. Her glance on this occasion, however, struck him as a substitute for a larger volume of diffident utterance than usual, inviting him to observe, among other things, the inefficiency of her father’s design—if design it was—for diminishing, in the interest of quiet nerves, their occasions of contact with their foreign relatives. But Acton immediately complimented Mr. Wentworth upon his liberality. “That ‘s a very nice thing to do,” he said, “giving them the little house. You will have treated them handsomely, and, whatever happens, you will be glad of it.” Mr. Wentworth was liberal, and he knew he was liberal. It gave him pleasure to know it, to feel it, to see it recorded; and this pleasure is the only palpable form of self-indulgence with which the narrator of these incidents will be able to charge him.
“A three days’ visit at most, over there, is all I should have found possible,” Madame Munster remarked to her brother, after they had taken possession of the little white house. “It would have been too intime—decidedly too intime. Breakfast, dinner, and tea en famille—it would have been the end of the world if I could have reached the third day.” And she made the same observation to her maid Augustine, an intelligent person, who enjoyed a liberal share of her confidence. Felix declared that he would willingly spend his life in the bosom of the Wentworth family; that they were the kindest, simplest, most amiable people in the world, and that he had taken a prodigious fancy to them all. The Baroness quite agreed with him that they were simple and kind; they were thoroughly nice people, and she liked them extremely. The girls were perfect ladies; it was impossible to be more of a lady than Charlotte Wentworth, in spite of her little village air. “But as for thinking them the best company in the world,” said the Baroness, “that is another thing; and as for wishing to live porte ; aga porte with them, I should as soon think of wishing myself back in the convent again, to wear a bombazine apron and sleep in a dormitory.” And yet the Baroness was in high good humor; she had been very much pleased. With her lively perception and her refined imagination, she was capable of enjoying anything that was characteristic, anything that was good of its kind. The Wentworth household seemed to her very perfect in its kind— wonderfully peaceful and unspotted; pervaded by a sort of dove-colored freshness that had all the quietude and benevolence of what she deemed to be Quakerism, and yet seemed to be founded upon a degree of material abundance for which, in certain matters of detail, one might have looked in vain at the frugal little court of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. She perceived immediately that her American relatives thought and talked very little about money; and this of itself made an impression upon Eugenia’s imagination. She perceived at the same time that if Charlotte or Gertrude should ask their father for a very considerable sum he would at once place it in their hands; and this made a still greater impression. The greatest impression of all, perhaps, was made by another rapid induction. The Baroness had an immediate conviction that Robert Acton would put his hand into his pocket every day in the week if that rattle-pated little sister of his should bid him. The men in this country, said the Baroness, are evidently very obliging. Her declaration that she was looking for rest and retirement had been by no means wholly untrue; nothing that the Baroness said was wholly untrue. It is but fair to add, perhaps, that nothing that she said was wholly true. She wrote to a friend in Germany that it was a return to nature; it was like drinking new milk, and she was very fond of new milk. She said to herself, of course, that it would be a little dull; but there can be no better proof of her good spirits than the fact that she thought she should not mind its being a little dull. It seemed to her,
when from the piazza of her eleemosynary cottage she looked out over the soundless fields, the stony pastures, the clear-faced ponds, the rugged little orchards, that she had never been in the midst of so peculiarly intense a stillness; it was almost a delicate sensual pleasure. It was all very good, very innocent and safe, and out of it something good must come. Augustine, indeed, who had an unbounded faith in her mistress’s wisdom and far-sightedness, was a great deal perplexed and depressed. She was always ready to take her cue when she understood it; but she liked to understand it, and on this occasion comprehension failed. What, indeed, was the Baroness doing dans cette galere? what fish did she expect to land out of these very stagnant waters? The game was evidently a deep one. Augustine could trust her; but the sense of walking in the dark betrayed itself in the physiognomy of this spare, sober, sallow, middle-aged person, who had nothing in common with Gertrude Wentworth’s conception of a soubrette, by the most ironical scowl that had ever rested upon the unpretending tokens of the peace and plenty of the Wentworths. Fortunately, Augustine could quench skepticism in action. She quite agreed with her mistress—or rather she quite out-stripped her mistress—in thinking that the little white house was pitifully bare. “Il faudra,” said Augustine, “lui faire un peu de toilette. ” And she began to hang up portieres in the doorways; to place wax candles, procured after some research, in unexpected situations; to dispose anomalous draperies over the arms of sofas and the backs of chairs. The Baroness had brought with her to the New World a copious provision of the element of costume; and the two Miss Wentworths, when they came over to see her, were somewhat bewildered by the obtrusive distribution of her wardrobe. There were India shawls suspended, curtain-wise, in the parlor door, and curious fabrics, corresponding to Gertrude’s metaphysical vision of an opera-cloak, tumbled about in the sitting-places. There were pink silk blinds in the windows, by which the room was strangely bedimmed; and along the chimney-piece was disposed a remarkable band of velvet, covered with coarse, dirty-looking lace. “I have been making myself a little comfortable,” said the Baroness, much to the confusion of Charlotte, who had been on the point of proposing to come and help her put her superfluous draperies away. But what Charlotte mistook for an almost culpably delayed subsidence Gertrude very presently perceived to be the most ingenious, the most interesting, the most romantic intention. “What is life, indeed, without curtains?” she secretly asked herself; and she appeared to herself to have been leading hitherto an existence singularly garish and totally devoid of festoons.