by Henry James
“You haven’t mentioned why you married him. Perhaps you don’t remember,” Mrs. Portico broke out, with her masculine laugh.
“Oh, yes; I loved him!”
“And you have got over that?”
Georgina hesitated a moment. “Why, no, Mrs. Portico, of course I haven’t; Raymond’s a splendid fellow.”
“Then why don’t you live with him? You don’t explain that.”
“What would be the use when he’s always away? How can one live with a man that spends half his life in the South Seas? If he was n’t in the navy it would be different; but to go through everything,—I mean everything that making our marriage known would bring upon me,—the scolding and the exposure and the ridicule, the scenes at home,—to go through it all, just for the idea, and yet be alone here, just as I was before, without my husband after all,—with none of the good of him,”—and here Georgina looked at her hostess as if with the certitude that such an enumeration of inconveniences would touch her effectually,—”really, Mrs. Portico, I am bound to say I don’t think that would be worth while; I haven’t the courage for it.”
“I never thought you were a coward,” said Mrs. Portico.
“Well, I am not,—if you will give me time. I am very patient.”
“I never thought that, either.”
“Marrying changes one,” said Georgina, still smiling.
“It certainly seems to have had a very peculiar effect upon you. Why don’t you make him leave the navy, and arrange your life comfortably, like every one else?”
“I would n’t for the world interfere with his prospects—with his promotion. That is sure to come for him, and to come quickly, he has such talents. He is devoted to his profession; it would ruin him to leave it.”
“My dear young woman, you are a wonderful creature!” Mrs. Portico exclaimed, looking at her companion as if she had been in a glass case.
“So poor Raymond says,” Georgina answered, smiling more than ever.
“Certainly, I should have been very sorry to marry a navy man; but if I had married him, I should stick to him, in the face of all the scoldings in the universe!”
“I don’t know what your parents may have been; I know what mine are,”, Georgina replied, with some dignity. “When he’s a captain, we shall come out of hiding.”
“And what shall you do meanwhile? What will you do with your children? Where will you hide them? What will you do with this one?”
Georgina rested her eyes on her lap for a minute; then, raising them, she met those of Mrs. Portico. “Somewhere in Europe,” she said, in her sweet tone.
“Georgina Gressie, you ‘re a monster!” the elder lady cried.
“I know what I am about, and you will help me,” the girl went on.
“I will go and tell your father and mother the whole story,—that’s what I will do!”
“I am not in the least afraid of that, not in the least. You will help me,—I assure you that you will.”
“Do you mean I will support the child?”
Georgina broke into a laugh. “I do believe you would, if I were to ask you! But I won’t go so far as that; I have something of my own. All I want you to do is to be with me.”
“At Genoa,—yes, you have got it all fixed! You say Mr. Benyon is so fond of the place. That’s all very well; but how will he like his infant being deposited there?”
“He won’t like it at all. You see I tell you the whole truth,” said Georgina, gently.
“Much obliged; it’s a pity you keep it all for me! It is in his power, then, to make you behave properly. He can publish your marriage if you won’t; and if he does you will have to acknowledge your child.”
“Publish, Mrs. Portico? How little you know my Raymond! He will never break a promise; he will go through fire first.”
“And what have you got him to promise?’
“Never to insist on a disclosure against my will; never to claim me openly as his wife till I think it is time; never to let any one know what has passed between us if I choose to keep it still a secret—to keep it for years—to keep it forever. Never to do anything in the matter himself, but to leave it to me. For this he has given me his solemn word of honor. And I know what that means!”
Mrs. Portico, on the sofa, fairly bounded.
“You do know what you are about And Mr. Benyon strikes me as more fantastic even than yourself. I never heard of a man taking such an imbecile vow. What good can it do him?”
“What good? The good it did him was that, it gratified me. At the time he took it he would have made any promise under the sun. It was a condition I exacted just at the very last, before the marriage took place. There was nothing at that moment he would have refused me; there was nothing I could n’t have made him do. He was in love to that degree—but I don’t want to boast,” said Georgina, with quiet grandeur. “He wanted—he wanted—” she added; but then she paused.
“He does n’t seem to have wanted much!” Mrs. Portico cried, in a tone which made Georgina turn to the window, as if it might have reached the street.
Her hostess noticed the movement and went on: “Oh, my dear, if I ever do tell your story, I will tell it so that people will hear it!”
“You never will tell it. What I mean is, that Raymond wanted the sanction—of the affair at the church—because he saw that I would never do without it. Therefore, for him, the sooner we had it the better, and, to hurry it on, he was ready to take any pledge.”
“You have got it pat enough,” said Mrs. Portico, in homely phrase. “I don’t know what you mean by sanctions, or what you wanted of ‘em!”
Georgina got up, holding rather higher than before that beautiful head which, in spite of the embarrassments of this interview, had not yet perceptibly abated of its elevation. “Would you have liked me to—to not marry?”
Mrs. Portico rose also, and, flushed with the agitation of unwonted knowledge,—it was as if she had discovered a skeleton in her favorite cupboard,—faced her young friend for a moment. Then her conflicting sentiments resolved themselves into an abrupt question, uttered,—for Mrs. Portico,—with much solemnity: “Georgina Gressie, were you really in love with him?”
The question suddenly dissipated the girl’s strange, studied, wilful coldness; she broke out, with a quick flash of passion,—a passion that, for the moment, was predominantly anger, “Why else, in Heaven’s name, should I have done what I have done? Why else should I have married him? What under the sun had I to gain?”
A certain quiver in Georgina’s voice, a light in her eye which seemed to Mrs. Portico more spontaneous, more human, as she uttered these words, caused them to affect her hostess rather less painfully than anything she had yet said. She took the girl’s hand and emitted indefinite, admonitory sounds. “Help me, my dear old friend, help me,” Georgina continued, in a low, pleading tone; and in a moment Mrs. Portico saw that the tears were in her eyes.
“You ‘re a queer mixture, my child,” she exclaimed. “Go straight home to your own mother, and tell her everything; that is your best help.”
“You are kinder than my mother. You must n’t judge her by yourself.”
“What can she do to you? How can she hurt you? We are not living in pagan times,” said Mrs. Portico, who was seldom so historical “Besides, you have no reason to speak of your mother—to think of her, even—so! She would have liked you to marry a man of some property; but she has always been a good mother to you.”
At this rebuke Georgina suddenly kindled again; she was, indeed, as Mrs. Portico had said, a queer mixture. Conscious, evidently, that she could not satisfactorily justify her present stiffness, she wheeled round upon a grievance which absolved her from self-defence. “Why, then, did he make that promise, if he loved me? No man who really loved me would have made it,—and no man that was a man, as I understand being a man! He might have seen that I only did it to test him,—to see if he wanted to take advantage of being left free himself. It is a proof that he does n’t love me
,—not as he ought to have done; and in such a case as that a woman is n’t bound to make sacrifices!”
Mrs. Portico was not a person of a nimble intellect; her mind moved vigorously, but heavily; yet she sometimes made happy guesses. She saw that Georgia’s emotions were partly real and partly fictitious; that, as regards this last matter, especially, she was trying to “get up” a resentment, in order to excuse herself. The pretext was absurd, and the good lady was struck with its being heartless on the part of her young visitor to reproach poor Benyon with a concession on which she had insisted, and which could only be a proof of his devotion, inasmuch as he left her free while he bound himself. Altogether, Mrs. Portico was shocked and dismayed at such a want of simplicity in the behavior of a young person whom she had hitherto believed to be as candid as she was elegant, and her appreciation of this discovery expressed itself in the uncompromising remark: “You strike me as a very bad girl, my dear; you strike me as a very bad girl!”
PART II
III.
It will doubtless seem to the reader very singular that, in spite of this reflection, which appeared to sum up her judgment of the matter, Mrs. Portico should, in the course of a very few days, have consented to everything that Georgina asked of her. I have thought it well to narrate at length the first conversation that took place between them, but I shall not trace further the details of the girl’s hard pleading, or the steps by which—in the face of a hundred robust and salutary convictions—the loud, kind, sharp, simple, sceptical, credulous woman took under her protection a damsel whose obstinacy she could not speak of without getting red with anger. It was the simple fact of Georgina’s personal condition that moved her; this young lady’s greatest eloquence was the seriousness of her predicament She might be bad, and she had a splendid, careless, insolent, fair-faced way of admitting it, which at moments, incoherently, inconsistently, and irresistibly, resolved the harsh confession into tears of weakness; but Mrs. Portico had known her from her rosiest years, and when Georgina declared that she could n’t go home, that she wished to be with her and not with her mother, that she could n’t expose herself,—how could she?—and that she must remain with her and her only till the day they should sail, the poor lady was forced to make that day a reality. She was overmastered, she was cajoled, she was, to a certain extent, fascinated. She had to accept Georgina’s rigidity (she had none of her own to oppose to it; she was only violent, she was not continuous), and once she did this, it was plain, after all, that to take her young friend to Europe was to help her, and to leave her alone was not to help her. Georgina literally frightened Mrs. Portico into compliance. She was evidently capable of strange things if thrown upon her own devices.
So, from one day to another Mrs. Portico announced that she was really at last about to sail for foreign lands (her doctor having told her that if she did n’t look out she would get too old to enjoy them), and that she had invited that robust Miss Gressie, who could stand so long on her feet, to accompany her. There was joy in the house of Gressie at this announcement, for though the danger was over, it was a great general advantage to Georgina to go, and the Gressies were always elated at the prospect of an advantage. There was a danger that she might meet Mr. Benyon on the other side of the world; but it didn’t seem likely that Mrs. Portico would lend herself to a plot of that kind. If she had taken it into her head to favor their love affair, she would have done it frankly, and Georgina would have been married by this time. Her arrangements were made as quickly as her decision had been—or rather had appeared—slow; for this concerned those agile young men down town. Georgina was perpetually at her house; it was understood in Twelfth Street that she was talking over her future travels with her kind friend. Talk there was, of course to a considerable degree; but after it was settled they should start nothing more was said about the motive of the journey. Nothing was said, that is, till the night before they sailed; then a few words passed between them. Georgina had already taken leave of her relations in Twelfth Street, and was to sleep at Mrs. Portico’s in order to go down to the ship at an early hour. The two ladies were sitting together in the firelight, silent, with the consciousness of corded luggage, when the elder one suddenly remarked to her companion that she seemed to be taking a great deal upon herself in assuming that Raymond Benyon wouldn’t force her hand. He might choose to acknowledge his child, if she didn’t; there were promises and promises, and many people would consider they had been let off when circumstances were so altered. She would have to reckon with Mr. Benyon more than she thought.
“I know what I am about,” Georgina answered. “There is only one promise, for him. I don’t know what you mean by circumstances being altered.”
“Everything seems to me to be changed,” poor Mrs. Portico murmured, rather tragically.
“Well, he is n’t, and he never will! I am sure of him,—as sure as that I sit here. Do you think I would have looked at him if I had n’t known he was a man of his word?”
“You have chosen him well, my dear,” said Mrs. Portico, who by this time was reduced to a kind of bewildered acquiescence.
“Of course I have chosen him well! In such a matter as this he will be perfectly splendid.” Then suddenly, “Perfectly splendid,—that’s why I cared for him!” she repeated, with a flash of incongruous passion.
This seemed to Mrs. Portico audacious to the point of being sublime; but she had given up trying to understand anything that the girl might say or do. She understood less and less, after they had disembarked in England and begun to travel southward; and she understood least of all when, in the middle of the winter, the event came off with which, in imagination, she had tried to familiarize herself, but which, when it occurred, seemed to her beyond measure strange and dreadful. It took place at Genoa, for Georgina had made up her mind that there would be more privacy in a big town than in a little; and she wrote to America that both Mrs. Portico and she had fallen in love with the place and would spend two or three months there. At that time people in the United States knew much less than to-day about the comparative attractions of foreign cities, and it was not thought surprising that absent New Yorkers should wish to linger in a seaport where they might find apartments, according to Georgina’s report, in a palace painted in fresco by Vandyke and Titian. Georgina, in her letters, omitted, it will be seen, no detail that could give color to Mrs. Portico’s long stay at Genoa. In such a palace—where the travellers hired twenty gilded rooms for the most insignificant sum—a remarkably fine boy came into the world. Nothing could have been more successful and comfortable than this transaction. Mrs. Portico was almost appalled at the facility and felicity of it. She was by this time in a pretty bad way, and—what had never happened to her before in her life—she suffered from chronic depression of spirits. She hated to have to lie, and now she was lying all the time. Everything she wrote home, everything that had been said or done in connection with their stay in Genoa, was a lie. The way they remained indoors to avoid meeting chance compatriots was a lie. Compatriots, in Genoa, at that period, were very rare; but nothing could exceed the businesslike completeness of Georgina’s precautions. Her nerves, her self-possession, her apparent want of feeling, excited on Mrs. Portico’s part a kind of gloomy suspense; a morbid anxiety to see how far her companion would go took possession of the excellent woman, who, a few months before, hated to fix her mind on disagreeable things.
Georgina went very far indeed; she did everything in her power to dissimulate the origin of her child. The record of its birth was made under a false name, and he was baptized at the nearest church by a Catholic priest. A magnificent contadina was brought to light by the doctor in a village in the hills, and this big, brown, barbarous creature, who, to do her justice, was full of handsome, familiar smiles and coarse tenderness, was constituted nurse to Raymond Benyon’s son. She nursed him for a fortnight under the mother’s eye, and she was then sent back to her village with the baby in her arms and sundry gold coin knotted into a corner of her rude pock
et-handkerchief. Mr. Gressie had given his daughter a liberal letter of credit on a London banker, and she was able, for the present, to make abundant provision for the little one. She called Mrs. Portico’s attention to the fact that she spent none of her money on futilities; she kept it all for her small pensioner in the Genoese hills. Mrs. Portico beheld these strange doings with a stupefaction that occasionally broke into passionate protest; then she relapsed into a brooding sense of having now been an accomplice so far that she must be an accomplice to the end. The two ladies went down to Rome—Georgina was in wonderful trim—to finish the season, and here Mrs. Portico became convinced that she intended to abandon her offspring. She had not driven into the country to see the nursling before leaving Genoa,—she had said that she could n’t bear to see it in such a place and among such people. Mrs. Portico, it must be added, had felt the force of this plea,—felt it as regards a plan of her own, given up after being hotly entertained for a few hours, of devoting a day, by herself, to a visit to the big contadina. It seemed to her that if she should see the child in the sordid hands to which Georgina had consigned it she would become still more of a participant than she was already. This young woman’s blooming hardness, after they got to Borne, acted upon her like a kind of Medusa-mask. She had seen a horrible thing, she had been mixed up with it, and her motherly heart had received a mortal chill. It became more clear to her every day that, though Georgina would continue to send the infant money in considerable quantities, she had dispossessed herself of it forever. Together with this induction a fixed idea settled in her mind,—the project of taking the baby herself, of making him her own, of arranging that matter with the father. The countenance she had given Georgina up to this point was an effective pledge that she would not expose her; but she could adopt the child without exposing her; she could say that he was a lovely baby—he was lovely, fortunately—whom she had picked up in a poor village in Italy,—a village that had been devastated by brigands. She would pretend—she could pretend; oh, yes, of course, she could pretend! Everything was imposture now, and she could go on to lie as she had begun. The falsity of the whole business sickened her; it made her so yellow that she scarcely knew herself in her glass. None the less, to rescue the child, even if she had to become falser still, would be in some measure an atonement for the treachery to which she had already lent herself. She began to hate Georgina, who had drawn her into such an atrocious current, and if it had not been for two considerations she would have insisted on their separating. One was the deference she owed to Mr. and Mrs. Gressie, who had reposed such a trust in her; the other was that she must keep hold of the mother till she had got possession of the infant Meanwhile, in this forced communion, her aversion to her companion increased; Georgina came to appear to her a creature of brass, of iron; she was exceedingly afraid of her, and it seemed to her now a wonder of wonders that she should ever have trusted her enough to come so far. Georgina showed no consciousness of the change in Mrs. Portico, though there was, indeed, at present, not even a pretence of confidence between the two. Miss Gressie—that was another lie, to which Mrs. Portico had to lend herself—was bent on enjoying Europe, and was especially delighted with Rome. She certainly had the courage of her undertaking, and she confessed to Mrs. Portico that she had left Raymond Benyon, and meant to continue to leave him, in ignorance of what had taken place at Genoa. There was a certain confidence, it must be said, in that. He was now in Chinese waters, and she probably should not see him for years.