by Henry James
“You were not on the ship?” he said.
“No, I was not on the ship. I have been in Europe these three years.”
He bowed once more, solemnly, and motioned me to be seated again. I sat down, but it was only for the purpose of observing him an instant; I saw it was time I should return to my sister. Miss Spencer’s cousin was a queer fellow. Nature had not shaped him for a Raphaelesque or Byronic attire, and his velvet doublet and naked neck were not in harmony with his facial attributes. His hair was cropped close to his head; his ears were large and ill-adjusted to the same. He had a lackadaisical carriage and a sentimental droop which were peculiarly at variance with his keen, strange-colored eyes. Perhaps I was prejudiced, but I thought his eyes treacherous. He said nothing for some time; he leaned his hands on his cane and looked up and down the street Then at last, slowly lifting his cane and pointing with it, “That’s a very nice bit,” he remarked, softly. He had his head on one side, and his little eyes were half closed. I followed the direction of his stick; the object it indicated was a red cloth hung out of an old window. “Nice bit of color,” he continued; and without moving his head he transferred his half-closed gaze to me. “Composes well,” he pursued. “Make a nice thing.” He spoke in a hard vulgar voice.
“I see you have a great deal of eye,” I replied. “Your cousin tells me you are studying art.” He looked at me in the same way without answering, and I went on with deliberate urbanity, “I suppose you are at the studio of one of those great men.”
Still he looked at me, and then he said softly, “Gérôme.”
“Do you like it?” I asked.
“Do you understand French?” he said.
“Some kinds,” I answered.
He kept his little eyes on me; then he said, “J’adore la peinture!”
“Oh, I understand that kind!” I rejoined. Miss Spencer laid her hand upon her cousin’s arm with a little pleased and fluttered movement; it was delightful to be among people who were on such easy terms with foreign tongues. I got up to take leave, and asked Miss Spencer where, in Paris, I might have the honor of waiting upon her. To what hotel would she go?
She turned to her cousin inquiringly, and he honored me again with his little languid leer. “Do you know the Hôtel des Princes?”
“I know where it is.”
“I shall take her there.”
“I congratulate you,” I said to Caroline Spencer. “I believe it is the best inn in the world; and in case I should still have a moment to call upon you here, where are you lodged?”
“Oh, it’s such a pretty name,” said Miss Spencer gleefully. “À la Belle Normande.”
As I left them her cousin gave me a great flourish with his picturesque hat.
III.
My sister, as it proved, was not sufficiently restored to leave Havre by the afternoon train; so that, as the autumn dusk began to fall, I found myself at liberty to call at the sign of the Fair Norman. I must confess that I had spent much of the interval in wondering what the disagreeable thing was that my charming friend’s disagreeable cousin had been telling her. The “Belle Normande” was a modest inn in a shady bystreet, where it gave me satisfaction to think Miss Spencer must have encountered local color in abundance. There was a crooked little court, where much of the hospitality of the house was carried on; there was a staircase climbing to bedrooms on the outer side of the wall; there was a small trickling fountain with a stucco statuette in the midst of it; there was a little boy in a white cap and apron cleaning copper vessels at a conspicuous kitchen door; there was a chattering landlady, neatly laced, arranging apricots and grapes into an artistic pyramid upon a pink plate. I looked about, and on a green bench outside of an open door labelled Salle à Manger, I perceived Caroline Spencer. No sooner had I looked at her than I saw that something had happened since the morning. She was leaning back on her bench, her hands were clasped in her lap, and her eyes were fixed upon the landlady, at the other side of the court, manipulating her apricots.
But I saw she was not thinking of apricots. She was staring absently, thoughtfully; as I came near her I perceived that she had been crying. I sat down on the bench beside her before she saw me; then, when she had done so, she simply turned round, without surprise, and rested her sad eyes upon me. Something very bad indeed had happened; she was completely changed.
I immediately charged her with it. “Your cousin has been giving you bad news; you are in great distress.”
For a moment she said nothing, and I supposed that she was afraid to speak, lest her tears should come back. But presently I perceived that in the short time that had elapsed since my leaving her in the morning she had shed them all, and that she was now softly stoical, intensely composed.
“My poor cousin is in distress,” she said at last. “His news was bad.” Then, after a brief hesitation, “He was in terrible want of money.”
“In want of yours, you mean?”
“Of any that he could get—honestly. Mine was the only money.”
“And he has taken yours?”
She hesitated again a moment, but her glance, meanwhile, was pleading. “I gave him what I had.”
I have always remembered the accent of those words as the most angelic bit of human utterance I had ever listened to; but then, almost with a sense of personal outrage, I jumped up. “Good heavens!” I said, “do you call that getting, it honestly?”
I had gone too far; she blushed deeply. “We will not speak of it,” she said.
“We must speak of it,” I answered, sitting down again. “I am your friend; it seems to me you need one. What is the matter with your cousin?”
“He is in debt.”
“No doubt! But what is the special fitness of your paying his debts?”
“He has told me all his story; I am very sorry for him.”
“So am I! But I hope he will give you back your money.”
“Certainly he will; as soon as he can.”
“When will that be?”
“When he has finished his great picture.”
“My dear young lady, confound his great picture! Where is this desperate cousin?”
She certainly hesitated now. Then,—”At his dinner,” she answered.
I turned about and looked through the open door into the salle à manger. There, alone at the end of a long table, I perceived the object of Miss Spencer’s compassion, the bright young art-student. He was dining too attentively to notice me at first; but in the act of setting down a well-emptied wineglass he caught sight of my observant attitude. He paused in his repast, and, with his head on one side and his meagre jaws slowly moving, fixedly returned my gaze. Then the landlady came lightly brushing by with her pyramid of apricots.
“And that nice little plate of fruit is for him?” I exclaimed.
Miss Spencer glanced at it tenderly. “They do that so prettily!” she murmured.
I felt helpless and irritated. “Come now, really,” I said; “do you approve of that long strong fellow accepting your funds?” She looked away from me; I was evidently giving her pain. The case was hopeless; the long strong fellow had “interested” her.
“Excuse me if I speak of him so unceremoniously,” I said. “But you are really too generous, and he is not quite delicate enough. He made his debts himself; he ought to pay them himself.”
“He has been foolish,” she answered; “I know that He has told me everything. We had a long talk this morning; the poor fellow threw himself upon my charity. He has signed notes to a large amount.”
“The more fool he!”
“He is in extreme distress; and it is not only himself. It is his poor wife.”
“Ah, he has a poor wife?”
“I didn’t know it; but he confessed everything. He married two years since, secretly.”
“Why secretly?”
Caroline Spencer glanced about her, as if she feared listeners. Then softly, in a little impressive tone,—”She was a countess!”
“Are
you very sure of that?”
“She has written me a most beautiful letter.”
“Asking you for money, eh?”
“Asking me for confidence and sympathy,” said Miss Spencer. “She has been disinherited by her father. My cousin told me the story, and she tells it in her own way, in the letter. It is like an old romance. Her father opposed the marriage, and when he discovered that she had secretly disobeyed him he cruelly cast her off. It is really most romantic. They are the oldest family in Provence.”
I looked and listened in wonder. It really seemed that the poor woman was enjoying the “romance” of having a discarded countess-cousin, out of Provence, so deeply as almost to lose the sense of what the forfeiture of her money meant for her.
“My dear young lady,” I said, “you don’t want to be ruined for picturesqueness’ sake?”
“I shall not be ruined. I shall come back before long to stay with them. The Countess insists upon that.”
“Come back! You are going home, then?”
She sat for a moment with her eyes lowered, then with an heroic suppression of a faint tremor of the voice,—”I have no money for travelling!” she answered.
“You gave it all up?”
“I have kept enough to take me home.”
I gave an angry groan; and at this juncture Miss Spencer’s cousin, the fortunate possessor of her sacred savings and of the hand of the Provençal countess, emerged from the little dining-room. He stood on the threshold for an instant, removing the stone from a plump apricot which he had brought away from the table; then he put the apricot into his mouth, and while he let it sojourn there, gratefully, stood looking at us, with his long legs apart and his hands dropped into the pockets of his velvet jacket. My companion got up, giving him a thin glance which I caught in its passage, and which expressed a strange commixture of resignation and fascination,—a sort of perverted exaltation. Ugly, vulgar, pretentious, dishonest, as I thought the creature, he had appealed successfully to her eager and tender imagination. I was deeply disgusted, but I had no warrant to interfere, and at any rate I felt that it would be vain.
The young man waved his hand with a pictorial gesture. “Nice old court,” he observed. “Nice mellow old place. Good tone in that brick. Nice crooked old staircase.”
Decidedly, I could n’t stand it; without responding I gave my hand to Caroline Spencer. She looked at me an instant with her little white face and expanded eyes, and as she showed her pretty teeth I suppose she meant to smile.
“Don’t be sorry for me,” she said, “I am very sure I shall see something of this dear old Europe yet.”
I told her that I would not bid her goodby; I should find a moment to come back the next morning. Her cousin, who had put on his sombrero again, flourished it off at me by way of a bow, upon which I took my departure.
The next morning I came back to the inn, where I met in the court the landlady, more loosely laced than in the evening. On my asking for Miss Spencer,—”Partie, monsieu,” said the hostess. “She went away last night at ten o ‘clock, with her—her—not her husband, eh?—in fine, her monsieur. They went down to the American ship.” I turned away; the poor girl had been about thirteen hours in Europe.
IV.
I myself, more fortunate, was there some five years longer. During this period I lost my friend Latouche, who died of a malarious fever during a tour in the Levant. One of the first things I did on my return was to go up to Grimwinter to pay a consolatory visit to his poor mother. I found her in deep affliction, and I sat with her the whole of the morning that followed my arrival (I had come in late at night), listening to her tearful descant and singing the praises of my friend. We talked of nothing else, and our conversation terminated only with the arrival of a quick little woman who drove herself up to the door in a “carryall,” and whom I saw toss the reins upon the horse’s back with the briskness of a startled sleeper throwing back the bed-clothes. She jumped out of the carryall and she jumped into the room. She proved to be the minister’s wife and the great town-gossip, and she had evidently, in the latter capacity, a choice morsel to communicate. I was as sure of this as I was that poor Mrs. Latouche was not absolutely too bereaved to listen to her. It seemed to me discreet to retire; I said I believed I would go and take a walk before dinner.
“And, by the way,” I added, “if you will tell me where my old friend Miss Spencer lives, I will walk to her house.”
The minister’s wife immediately responded. Miss Spencer lived in the fourth house beyond the “Baptist church; the Baptist church was the one on the right, with that queer green thing over the door; they called it a portico, but it looked more like an old-fashioned bedstead.
“Yes, do go and see poor Caroline,” said Mrs. Latouche. “It will refresh her to see a strange face.”
“I should think she had had enough of strange faces!” cried the minister’s wife.
“I mean, to see a visitor,” said Mrs. Latouche, amending her phrase.
“I should think she had had enough of visitors!” her companion rejoined. “But you don’t mean to stay ten years,” she added, glancing at me.
“Has she a visitor of that sort?” I inquired, perplexed.
“You will see the sort!” said the minister’s wife. “She’s easily seen; she generally sits in the front yard. Only take care what you say to her, and be very sure you are polite.”
“Ah, she is so sensitive?”
The minister’s wife jumped up and dropped me a curtsey, a most ironical curtsey.
“That’s what she is, if you please. She’s a countess!”
And pronouncing this word with the most scathing accent, the little woman seemed fairly to laugh in the Countess’s face. I stood a moment, staring, wondering, remembering.
“Oh, I shall be very polite!” I cried; and grasping my hat and stick, I went on my way.
I found Miss Spencer’s residence without difficulty. The Baptist church was easily identified, and the small dwelling near it, of a rusty white, with a large central chimney-stack and a Virginia creeper, seemed naturally and properly the abode of a frugal old maid with a taste for the picturesque. As I approached I slackened my pace, for I had heard that some one was always sitting in the front yard, and I wished to reconnoitre. I looked cautiously over the low white fence which separated the small garden-space from the unpaved street; but I descried nothing in the shape of a countess. A small straight path led up to the crooked doorstep, and on either side of it was a little grass-plot, fringed with currant-bushes. In the middle of the grass, on either side, was a large quince-tree, full of antiquity and contortions, and beneath one of the quince-trees were placed a small table and a couple of chairs. On the table lay a piece of unfinished embroidery and two or three books in bright-colored paper covers. I went in at the gate and paused halfway along the path, scanning the place for some farther token of its occupant, before whom—I could hardly have said why—I hesitated abruptly to present myself. Then I saw that the poor little house was very shabby. I felt a sudden doubt of my right to intrude; for curiosity had been my motive, and curiosity here seemed singularly indelicate. While I hesitated, a figure appeared in the open doorway and stood there looking at me. I immediately recognized Caroline Spencer, but she looked at me as if she had never seen me before. Gently, but gravely and timidly, I advanced to the doorstep, and then I said, with an attempt at friendly badinage,—
“I waited for you over there to come back, but you never came.”
“Waited where, sir?” she asked softly, and her light-colored eyes expanded more than before.
She was much older; she looked tired and wasted.
“Well,” I said, “I waited at Havre.”
She stared; then she recognized me. She smiled and blushed and clasped her two hands together. “I remember you now,” she said. “I remember that day.” But she stood there, neither coming out nor asking me to come in. She was embarrassed.
I, too, felt a little awkward. I poked my sti
ck into the path. “I kept looking out for you, year after year,” I said.
“You mean in Europe?” murmured Miss Spencer.
“In Europe, of course! Here, apparently, you are easy enough to find.”
She leaned her hand against the unpainted doorpost, and her head fell a little to one side. She looked at me for a moment without speaking, and I thought I recognized the expression that one sees in women’s eyes when tears are rising. Suddenly she stepped out upon the cracked slab of stone before the threshold and closed the door behind her. Then she began to smile intently, and I saw that her teeth were as pretty as ever. But there had been tears too.