by Henry James
“I will do anything in the world,” he rejoined, standing in front of her. “Should n’t you like to travel about and see something of the country? Won’t you go to Niagara? You ought to see Niagara, you know.”
“With you, do you mean?”
“I should be delighted to take you.”
“You alone?”
Acton looked at her, smiling, and yet with a serious air. “Well, yes; we might go alone,” he said.
“If you were not what you are,” she answered, “I should feel insulted.”
“How do you mean—what I am?”
“If you were one of the gentlemen I have been used to all my life. If you were not a queer Bostonian.”
“If the gentlemen you have been used to have taught you to expect insults,” said Acton, “I am glad I am what I am. You had much better come to Niagara.”
“If you wish to ‘amuse’ me,” the Baroness declared, “you need go to no further expense. You amuse me very effectually.”
He sat down opposite to her; she still held her fan up to her face, with her eyes only showing above it. There was a moment’s silence, and then he said, returning to his former question, “Have you sent that document to Germany?”
Again there was a moment’s silence. The expressive eyes of Madame M; auunster seemed, however, half to break it.
“I will tell you—at Niagara!” she said.
She had hardly spoken when the door at the further end of the room opened— the door upon which, some minutes previous, Eugenia had fixed her gaze. Clifford Wentworth stood there, blushing and looking rather awkward. The Baroness rose, quickly, and Acton, more slowly, did the same. Clifford gave him no greeting; he was looking at Eugenia.
“Ah, you were here?” exclaimed Acton.
“He was in Felix’s studio,” said Madame Munster. “He wanted to see his sketches.”
Clifford looked at Robert Acton, but said nothing; he only fanned himself with his hat. “You chose a bad moment,” said Acton; “you had n’t much light.”
“I had n’t any!” said Clifford, laughing.
“Your candle went out?” Eugenia asked. “You should have come back here and lighted it again.”
Clifford looked at her a moment. “So I have—come back. But I have left the candle!”
Eugenia turned away. “You are very stupid, my poor boy. You had better go home.”
“Well,” said Clifford, “good night!”
“Have n’t you a word to throw to a man when he has safely returned from a dangerous journey?” Acton asked.
“How do you do?” said Clifford. “I thought—I thought you were”— and he paused, looking at the Baroness again.
“You thought I was at Newport, eh? So I was—this morning.”
“Good night, clever child!” said Madame Munster, over her shoulder.
Clifford stared at her—not at all like a clever child; and then, with one of his little facetious growls, took his departure.
“What is the matter with him?” asked Acton, when he was gone. “He seemed rather in a muddle.”
Eugenia, who was near the window, glanced out, listening a moment. “The matter—the matter”—she answered. “But you don’t say such things here.”
“If you mean that he had been drinking a little, you can say that.”
“He does n’t drink any more. I have cured him. And in return— he ‘s in love with me.”
It was Acton’s turn to stare. He instantly thought of his sister; but he said nothing about her. He began to laugh. “I don’t wonder at his passion! But I wonder at his forsaking your society for that of your brother’s paint-brushes.”
Eugenia was silent a little. “He had not been in the studio. I invented that at the moment.”
“Invented it? For what purpose?”
“He has an idea of being romantic. He has adopted the habit of coming to see me at midnight—passing only through the orchard and through Felix’s painting-room, which has a door opening that way. It seems to amuse him,” added Eugenia, with a little laugh.
Acton felt more surprise than he confessed to, for this was a new view of Clifford, whose irregularities had hitherto been quite without the romantic element. He tried to laugh again, but he felt rather too serious, and after a moment’s hesitation his seriousness explained itself. “I hope you don’t encourage him,” he said. “He must not be inconstant to poor Lizzie.”
“To your sister?”
“You know they are decidedly intimate,” said Acton.
“Ah,” cried Eugenia, smiling, “has she—has she”—
“I don’t know,” Acton interrupted, “what she has. But I always supposed that Clifford had a desire to make himself agreeable to her.”
“Ah, par exemple!” the Baroness went on. “The little monster! The next time he becomes sentimental I will him tell that he ought to be ashamed of himself.”
Acton was silent a moment. “You had better say nothing about it.”
“I had told him as much already, on general grounds,” said the Baroness. “But in this country, you know, the relations of young people are so extraordinary that one is quite at sea. They are not engaged when you would quite say they ought to be. Take Charlotte Wentworth, for instance, and that young ecclesiastic. If I were her father I should insist upon his marrying her; but it appears to be thought there is no urgency. On the other hand, you suddenly learn that a boy of twenty and a little girl who is still with her governess—your sister has no governess? Well, then, who is never away from her mamma— a young couple, in short, between whom you have noticed nothing beyond an exchange of the childish pleasantries characteristic of their age, are on the point of setting up as man and wife.” The Baroness spoke with a certain exaggerated volubility which was in contrast with the languid grace that had characterized her manner before Clifford made his appearance. It seemed to Acton that there was a spark of irritation in her eye— a note of irony (as when she spoke of Lizzie being never away from her mother) in her voice. If Madame Munster was irritated, Robert Acton was vaguely mystified; she began to move about the room again, and he looked at her without saying anything. Presently she took out her watch, and, glancing at it, declared that it was three o’clock in the morning and that he must go.
“I have not been here an hour,” he said, “and they are still sitting up at the other house. You can see the lights. Your brother has not come in.”
“Oh, at the other house,” cried Eugenia, “they are terrible people! I don’t know what they may do over there. I am a quiet little humdrum woman; I have rigid rules and I keep them. One of them is not to have visitors in the small hours— especially clever men like you. So good night!”
Decidedly, the Baroness was incisive; and though Acton bade her good night and departed, he was still a good deal mystified.
The next day Clifford Wentworth came to see Lizzie, and Acton, who was at home and saw him pass through the garden, took note of the circumstance. He had a natural desire to make it tally with Madame M; auunster’s account of Clifford’s disaffection; but his ingenuity, finding itself unequal to the task, resolved at last to ask help of the young man’s candor. He waited till he saw him going away, and then he went out and overtook him in the grounds.
“I wish very much you would answer me a question,” Acton said. “What were you doing, last night, at Madame Munster’s?”
Clifford began to laugh and to blush, by no means like a young man with a romantic secret. “What did she tell you?” he asked.
“That is exactly what I don’t want to say.”
“Well, I want to tell you the same,” said Clifford; “and unless I know it perhaps I can’t.”
They had stopped in a garden path; Acton looked hard at his rosy young kinsman. “She said she could n’t fancy what had got into you; you appeared to have taken a violent dislike to her.”
Clifford stared, looking a little alarmed. “Oh, come,” he growled, “you don’t mean that!”
“And t
hat when—for common civility’s sake—you came occasionally to the house you left her alone and spent your time in Felix’s studio, under pretext of looking at his sketches.”
“Oh, come!” growled Clifford, again.
“Did you ever know me to tell an untruth?”
“Yes, lots of them!” said Clifford, seeing an opening, out of the discussion, for his sarcastic powers. “Well,” he presently added, “I thought you were my father.”
“You knew some one was there?”
“We heard you coming in.”
Acton meditated. “You had been with the Baroness, then?”
“I was in the parlor. We heard your step outside. I thought it was my father.”
“And on that,” asked Acton, “you ran away?”
“She told me to go—to go out by the studio.”
Acton meditated more intensely; if there had been a chair at hand he would have sat down. “Why should she wish you not to meet your father?”
“Well,” said Clifford, “father does n’t like to see me there.”
Acton looked askance at his companion and forbore to make any comment upon this assertion. “Has he said so,” he asked, “to the Baroness?”
“Well, I hope not,” said Clifford. “He has n’t said so—in so many words— to me. But I know it worries him; and I want to stop worrying him. The Baroness knows it, and she wants me to stop, too.”
“To stop coming to see her?”
“I don’t know about that; but to stop worrying father. Eugenia knows everything,” Clifford added, with an air of knowingness of his own.
“Ah,” said Acton, interrogatively, “Eugenia knows everything?”
“She knew it was not father coming in.”
“Then why did you go?”
Clifford blushed and laughed afresh. “Well, I was afraid it was. And besides, she told me to go, at any rate.”
“Did she think it was I?” Acton asked.
“She did n’t say so.”
Again Robert Acton reflected. “But you did n’t go,” he presently said; “you came back.”
“I could n’t get out of the studio,” Clifford rejoined. “The door was locked, and Felix has nailed some planks across the lower half of the confounded windows to make the light come in from above. So they were no use. I waited there a good while, and then, suddenly, I felt ashamed. I did n’t want to be hiding away from my own father. I could n’t stand it any longer. I bolted out, and when I found it was you I was a little flurried. But Eugenia carried it off, did n’t she?” Clifford added, in the tone of a young humorist whose perception had not been permanently clouded by the sense of his own discomfort.
“Beautifully!” said Acton. “Especially,” he continued, “when one remembers that you were very imprudent and that she must have been a good deal annoyed.”
“Oh,” cried Clifford, with the indifference of a young man who feels that however he may have failed of felicity in behavior he is extremely just in his impressions, “Eugenia does n’t care for anything!”
Acton hesitated a moment. “Thank you for telling me this,” he said at last. And then, laying his hand on Clifford’s shoulder, he added, “Tell me one thing more: are you by chance a little in love with the Baroness?”
“No, sir!” said Clifford, almost shaking off his hand.
CHAPTER X
The first sunday that followed Robert Acton’s return from Newport witnessed a change in the brilliant weather that had long prevailed. The rain began to fall and the day was cold and dreary. Mr. Wentworth and his daughters put on overshoes and went to church, and Felix Young, without overshoes, went also, holding an umbrella over Gertrude. It is to be feared that, in the whole observance, this was the privilege he most highly valued. The Baroness remained at home; she was in neither a cheerful nor a devotional mood. She had, however, never been, during her residence in the United States, what is called a regular attendant at divine service; and on this particular Sunday morning of which I began with speaking she stood at the window of her little drawing-room, watching the long arm of a rose-tree that was attached to her piazza, but a portion of which had disengaged itself, sway to and fro, shake and gesticulate, against the dusky drizzle of the sky. Every now and then, in a gust of wind, the rose-tree scattered a shower of water-drops against the window-pane; it appeared to have a kind of human movement—a menacing, warning intention. The room was very cold; Madame Munster put on a shawl and walked about. Then she determined to have some fire; and summoning her ancient negress, the contrast of whose polished ebony and whose crimson turban had been at first a source of satisfaction to her, she made arrangements for the production of a crackling flame. This old woman’s name was Azarina. The Baroness had begun by thinking that there would be a savory wildness in her talk, and, for amusement, she had encouraged her to chatter. But Azarina was dry and prim; her conversation was anything but African; she reminded Eugenia of the tiresome old ladies she met in society. She knew, however, how to make a fire; so that after she had laid the logs, Eugenia, who was terribly bored, found a quarter of an hour’s entertainment in sitting and watching them blaze and sputter. She had thought it very likely Robert Acton would come and see her; she had not met him since that infelicitous evening. But the morning waned without his coming; several times she thought she heard his step on the piazza; but it was only a window-shutter shaking in a rain-gust. The Baroness, since the beginning of that episode in her career of which a slight sketch has been attempted in these pages, had had many moments of irritation. But to-day her irritation had a peculiar keenness; it appeared to feed upon itself. It urged her to do something; but it suggested no particularly profitable line of action. If she could have done something at the moment, on the spot, she would have stepped upon a European steamer and turned her back, with a kind of rapture, upon that profoundly mortifying failure, her visit to her American relations. It is not exactly apparent why she should have termed this enterprise a failure, inasmuch as she had been treated with the highest distinction for which allowance had been made in American institutions. Her irritation came, at bottom, from the sense, which, always present, had suddenly grown acute, that the social soil on this big, vague continent was somehow not adapted for growing those plants whose fragrance she especially inclined to inhale and by which she liked to see herself surrounded—a species of vegetation for which she carried a collection of seedlings, as we may say, in her pocket. She found her chief happiness in the sense of exerting a certain power and making a certain impression; and now she felt the annoyance of a rather wearied swimmer who, on nearing shore, to land, finds a smooth straight wall of rock when he had counted upon a clean firm beach. Her power, in the American air, seemed to have lost its prehensile attributes; the smooth wall of rock was insurmountable. “Surely je n’en suis pas la,” she said to herself, “that I let it make me uncomfortable that a Mr. Robert Acton should n’t honor me with a visit!” Yet she was vexed that he had not come; and she was vexed at her vexation.
Her brother, at least, came in, stamping in the hall and shaking the wet from his coat. In a moment he entered the room, with a glow in his cheek and half-a-dozen rain-drops glistening on his mustache. “Ah, you have a fire,” he said.
“Les beaux jours sont passes,” replied the Baroness.
“Never, never! They have only begun,” Felix declared, planting himself before the hearth. He turned his back to the fire, placed his hands behind him, extended his legs and looked away through the window with an expression of face which seemed to denote the perception of rose-color even in the tints of a wet Sunday.
His sister, from her chair, looked up at him, watching him; and what she saw in his face was not grateful to her present mood. She was puzzled by many things, but her brother’s disposition was a frequent source of wonder to her. I say frequent and not constant, for there were long periods during which she gave her attention to other problems. Sometimes she had said to herself that his happy temper, his eternal gayety, was an affectat
ion, a pose; but she was vaguely conscious that during the present summer he had been a highly successful comedian. They had never yet had an explanation; she had not known the need of one. Felix was presumably following the bent of his disinterested genius, and she felt that she had no advice to give him that he would understand. With this, there was always a certain element of comfort about Felix— the assurance that he would not interfere. He was very delicate, this pure-minded Felix; in effect, he was her brother, and Madame Munster felt that there was a great propriety, every way, in that. It is true that Felix was delicate; he was not fond of explanations with his sister; this was one of the very few things in the world about which he was uncomfortable. But now he was not thinking of anything uncomfortable.
“Dear brother,” said Eugenia at last, “do stop making les yeux doux at the rain.”