The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “You’ve got to be a very great man, you know,” she said to him in the middle of the lake. “I don’t know what you mean about my salon, but I am ambitious.”

  “We must look at life in a large, bold way,” he concurred while he rested his oars.

  “That’s what I mean. If I didn’t think you could I wouldn’t look at you.”

  “I could what?”

  “Do everything you ought—everything I imagine, I dream of. You are clever: you can never make me believe the contrary after your speech on Tuesday, Don’t speak to me! I’ve seen, I’ve heard, and I know what’s in you. I shall hold you to it. You’re everything you pretend not to be.”

  Nick looked at the water while she talked. “Will it always be so amusing?” he asked.

  “Will what always be?”

  “Why my career.”

  “Shan’t I make it so?”

  “Then it will be yours—it won’t be mine,” said Nick.

  “Ah don’t say that—don’t make me out that sort of woman! If they should say it’s me I’d drown myself.”

  “If they should say what’s you?”

  “Why your getting on. If they should say I push you and do things for you. Things I mean that you can’t do yourself.”

  “Well, won’t you do them? It’s just what I count on.”

  “Don’t be dreadful,” Julia said. “It would be loathsome if I were thought the cleverest. That’s not the sort of man I want to marry.”

  “Oh I shall make you work, my dear!”

  “Ah that–-!” she sounded in a tone that might come back to a man after years.

  “You’ll do the great thing, you’ll make my life the best life,” Nick brought out as if he had been touched to deep conviction. “I daresay that will keep me in heart.”

  “In heart? Why shouldn’t you be in heart?” And her eyes, lingering on him, searching him, seemed to question him still more than her lips.

  “Oh it will be all right!” he made answer.

  “You’ll like success as well as any one else. Don’t tell me—you’re not so ethereal!”

  “Yes, I shall like success.”

  “So shall I! And of course I’m glad you’ll now be able to do things,” Julia went on. “I’m glad you’ll have things. I’m glad I’m not poor.”

  “Ah don’t speak of that,” Nick murmured. “Only be nice to my mother. We shall make her supremely happy.”

  “It wouldn’t be for your mother I’d do it—yet I’m glad I like your people,” Mrs. Dallow rectified. “Leave them to me!”

  “You’re generous—you’re noble,” he stammered.

  “Your mother must live at Broadwood; she must have it for life. It’s not at all bad.”

  “Ah Julia,” her companion replied, “it’s well I love you!”

  “Why shouldn’t you?” she laughed; and after this no more was said between them till the boat touched shore. When she had got out she recalled that it was time for luncheon; but they took no action in consequence, strolling in a direction which was not that of the house. There was a vista that drew them on, a grassy path skirting the foundations of scattered beeches and leading to a stile from which the charmed wanderer might drop into another division of Mrs. Dallow’s property. She said something about their going as far as the stile, then the next instant exclaimed: “How stupid of you—you’ve forgotten Mr. Hoppus!”

  Nick wondered. “We left him in the temple of Vesta. Darling, I had other things to think of there.”

  “I’ll send for him,” said Julia.

  “Lord, can you think of him now?” he asked.

  “Of course I can—more than ever.”

  “Shall we go back for him?”—and he pulled up.

  She made no direct answer, but continued to walk, saying they would go as far as the stile. “Of course I know you’re fearfully vague,” she presently resumed.

  “I wasn’t vague at all. But you were in such a hurry to get away.”

  “It doesn’t signify. I’ve another at home.”

  “Another summer-house?” he more lightly suggested.

  “A copy of Mr. Hoppus.”

  “Mercy, how you go in for him! Fancy having two!”

  “He sent me the number of the magazine, and the other’s the one that comes every month.”

  “Every month; I see”—but his manner justified considerably her charge of vagueness. They had reached the stile and he leaned over it, looking at a great mild meadow and at the browsing beasts in the distance.

  “Did you suppose they come every day?” Julia went on.

  “Dear no, thank God!” They remained there a little; he continued to look at the animals and before long added: “Delightful English pastoral scene. Why do they say it won’t paint?”

  “Who says it won’t?”

  “I don’t know—some of them. It will in France; but somehow it won’t here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mrs. Dallow demanded.

  He appeared unable to satisfy her on this point; instead of answering her directly he at any rate said: “Is Broadwood very charming?”

  “Have you never been there? It shows how you’ve treated me. We used to go there in August. George had ideas about it,” she added. She had never affected not to speak of her late husband, especially with Nick, whose kinsman he had in a manner been and who had liked him better than some others did.

  “George had ideas about a great many things.”

  Yet she appeared conscious it would be rather odd on such an occasion to take this up. It was even odd in Nick to have said it. “Broadwood’s just right,” she returned at last. “It’s neither too small nor too big, and it takes care of itself. There’s nothing to be done: you can’t spend a penny.”

  “And don’t you want to use it?”

  “We can go and stay with them,” said Julia.

  “They’ll think I bring them an angel.” And Nick covered her white hand, which was resting on the stile, with his own large one.

  “As they regard you yourself as an angel they’ll take it as natural of you to associate with your kind.”

  “Oh my kind!” he quite wailed, looking at the cows.

  But his very extravagance perhaps saved it, and she turned away from him as if starting homeward, while he began to retrace his steps with her. Suddenly she said: “What did you mean that night in Paris?”

  “That night–-?”

  “When you came to the hotel with me after we had all dined at that place with Peter.”

  “What did I mean–-?”

  “About your caring so much for the fine arts. You seemed to want to frighten me.”

  “Why should you have been frightened? I can’t imagine what I had in my head: not now.”

  “You are vague,” said Julia with a little flush.

  “Not about the great thing.”

  “The great thing?”

  “That I owe you everything an honest man has to offer. How can I care about the fine arts now?”

  She stopped with lighted eyes on him. “Is it because you think you owe it—” and she paused, still with the heightened colour in her cheek, then went on—”that you’ve spoken to me as you did there?” She tossed her head toward the lake.

  “I think I spoke to you because I couldn’t help it.”

  “You are vague!” And she walked on again.

  “You affect me differently from any other woman.”

  “Oh other women–-! Why shouldn’t you care about the fine arts now?” she added.

  “There’ll be no time. All my days and my years will be none too much for what you expect of me.”

  “I don’t expect you to give up anything. I only expect you to do more.”

  “To do more I must do less. I’ve no talent.”

  “No talent?”

  “I mean for painting.”

  Julia pulled up again. “That’s odious! You have—you must.”

  He burst out laughing. “You’re altogether delightful
. But how little you know about it—about the honourable practice of any art!”

  “What do you call practice? You’ll have all our things—you’ll live in the midst of them.”

  “Certainly I shall enjoy looking at them, being so near them.”

  “Don’t say I’ve taken you away then.”

  “Taken me away–-?”

  “From the love of art. I like them myself now, poor George’s treasures. I didn’t of old so much, because it seemed to me he made too much of them—he was always talking.”

  “Well, I won’t always talk,” said Nick.

  “You may do as you like—they’re yours.”

  “Give them to the nation,” Nick went on.

  “I like that! When we’ve done with them.”

  “We shall have done with them when your Vandykes and Moronis have cured me of the delusion that I may be of their family. Surely that won’t take long.”

  “You shall paint me,” said Julia.

  “Never, never, never!” He spoke in a tone that made his companion stare—then seemed slightly embarrassed at this result of his emphasis. To relieve himself he said, as they had come back to the place beside the lake where the boat was moored, “Shan’t we really go and fetch Mr. Hoppus?”

  She hesitated. “You may go; I won’t, please.”

  “That’s not what I want.”

  “Oblige me by going. I’ll wait here.” With which she sat down on the bench attached to the little landing.

  Nick, at this, got into the boat and put off; he smiled at her as she sat there watching him. He made his short journey, disembarked and went into the pavilion; but when he came out with the object of his errand he saw she had quitted her station, had returned to the house without him. He rowed back quickly, sprang ashore and followed her with long steps. Apparently she had gone fast; she had almost reached the door when he overtook her.

  “Why did you basely desert me?” he asked, tenderly stopping her there.

  “I don’t know. Because I’m so happy.”

  “May I tell mother then?”

  “You may tell her she shall have Broadwood.”

  XVI

  He lost no time in going down to see Mr. Carteret, to whom he had written immediately after the election and who had answered him in twelve revised pages of historical parallel. He used often to envy Mr. Carteret’s leisure, a sense of which came to him now afresh, in the summer evening, as he walked up the hill toward the quiet house where enjoyment had ever been mingled for him with a vague oppression. He was a little boy again, under Mr. Carteret’s roof—a little boy on whom it had been duly impressed that in the wide, plain, peaceful rooms he was not to “touch.” When he paid a visit to his father’s old friend there were in fact many things—many topics—from which he instinctively kept his hands. Even Mr. Chayter, the immemorial blank butler, who was so like his master that he might have been a twin brother, helped to remind him that he must be good. Mr. Carteret seemed to Nick a very grave person, but he had the sense that Chayter thought him rather frivolous.

  Our young man always came on foot from the station, leaving his portmanteau to be carried: the direct way was steep and he liked the slow approach, which gave him a chance to look about the place and smell the new-mown hay. At this season the air was full of it—the fields were so near that it was in the clean, still streets. Nick would never have thought of rattling up to Mr. Carteret’s door, which had on an old brass plate the proprietor’s name, as if he had been the principal surgeon. The house was in the high part, and the neat roofs of other houses, lower down the hill, made an immediate prospect for it, scarcely counting, however, since the green country was just below these, familiar and interpenetrating, in the shape of small but thick-tufted gardens. Free garden-growths flourished in all the intervals, but the only disorder of the place was that there were sometimes oats on the pavements. A crooked lane, with postern doors and cobble-stones, opened near Mr. Carteret’s house and wandered toward the old abbey; for the abbey was the secondary fact of Beauclere—it came after Mr. Carteret. Mr. Carteret sometimes went away and the abbey never did; yet somehow what was most of the essence of the place was that it could boast of the resident in the squarest of the square red houses, the one with the finest of the arched hall-windows, in three divisions, over the widest of the last-century doorways. You saw the great church from the doorstep, beyond gardens of course, and in the stillness you could hear the flutter of the birds that circled round its huge short towers. The towers had been finished only as time finishes things, by lending assurances to their lapses. There is something right in old monuments that have been wrong for centuries: some such moral as that was usually in Nick’s mind as an emanation of Beauclere when he saw the grand line of the roof ride the sky and draw out its length.

  When the door with the brass plate was opened and Mr. Chayter appeared in the middle distance—he always advanced just to the same spot, as a prime minister receives an ambassador—Nick felt anew that he would be wonderfully like Mr. Carteret if he had had an expression. He denied himself this freedom, never giving a sign of recognition, often as the young man had been at the house. He was most attentive to the visitor’s wants, but apparently feared that if he allowed a familiarity it might go too far. There was always the same question to be asked—had Mr. Carteret finished his nap? He usually had not finished it, and this left Nick what he liked—time to smoke a cigarette in the garden or even to take before dinner a turn about the place. He observed now, every time he came, that Mr. Carteret’s nap lasted a little longer. There was each year a little more strength to be gathered for the ceremony of dinner: this was the principal symptom—almost the only one—that the clear-cheeked old gentleman gave of not being so fresh as of yore. He was still wonderful for his age. To-day he was particularly careful: Chayter went so far as to mention to Nick that four gentlemen were expected to dinner—an exuberance perhaps partly explained by the circumstance that Lord Bottomley was one of them.

  The prospect of Lord Bottomley was somehow not stirring; it only made the young man say to himself with a quick, thin sigh, “This time I am in for it!” And he immediately had the unpolitical sense again that there was nothing so pleasant as the way the quiet bachelor house had its best rooms on the big garden, which seemed to advance into them through their wide windows and ruralise their dulness.

  “I expect it will be a lateish eight, sir,” said Mr. Chayter, superintending in the library the production of tea on a large scale. Everything at Mr. Carteret’s seemed to Nick on a larger scale than anywhere else—the tea-cups, the knives and forks, the door-handles, the chair-backs, the legs of mutton, the candles, and the lumps of coal: they represented and apparently exhausted the master’s sense of pleasing effect, for the house was not otherwise decorated. Nick thought it really hideous, but he was capable at any time of extracting a degree of amusement from anything strongly characteristic, and Mr. Carteret’s interior expressed a whole view of life. Our young man was generous enough to find in it a hundred instructive intimations even while it came over him—as it always did at Beauclere—that this was the view he himself was expected to take. Nowhere were the boiled eggs at breakfast so big or in such big receptacles; his own shoes, arranged in his room, looked to him vaster there than at home. He went out into the garden and remembered what enormous strawberries they should have for dinner. In the house was a great deal of Landseer, of oilcloth, of woodwork painted and “grained.”