Roman Fever and Other Stories

by Edith Wharton

  “Oh, they’re made—everything’s settled,” said Mrs. Newell, looking him squarely in the eye. “You’re wondering, of course, about the dot—Frenchmen never go off their heads to the extent of forgetting that; or at least their parents don’t allow them to.”

  Garnett murmured a vague assent, and she went on without the least appearance of resenting his curiosity: “It all came about so fortunately. Only fancy, just the week they met I got a little legacy from an aunt in Elmira—a good soul I hadn’t seen or heard of for years. I suppose I ought to have put on mourning for her, by the way, but it would have eaten up a good bit of the legacy, and I really needed it all for poor Hermy. Oh, it’s not a fortune, you understand—but the young man is madly in love, and has always had his own way, so after a lot of correspondence it’s been arranged. They saw Hermy this morning, and they’re enchanted.”

  “And the marriage takes place very soon?”

  “Yes, in a few weeks, here. His mother is an invalid and couldn’t have gone to England. Besides, the French don’t travel. And as Hermy has become a Catholic—”

  “Already?”

  Mrs. Newell stared. “It doesn’t take long. And it suits Hermy exactly—she can go to church so much oftener. So I thought,” Mrs. Newell concluded with dignity, “that a wedding at Saint Philippe du Roule would be the most suitable thing at this season.”

  “Dear me,” said Garnett, “I am left breathless—I can’t catch up with you. I suppose even the day is fixed, though Miss Hermione doesn’t mention it,” and he indicated the official announcement in his hand.

  Mrs. Newell laughed. “Hermy had to write that herself, poor dear, because my scrawl’s too hideous—but I dictated it. No, the day’s not fixed—that’s why I sent for you.” There was a splendid directness about Mrs. Newell. It would never have occurred to her to pretend to Garnett that she had summoned him for the pleasure of his company.

  “You’ve sent for me—to fix the day?” he enquired humourously.

  “To remove the last obstacle to its being fixed.”

  “I? What kind of an obstacle could I have the least effect on?”

  Mrs. Newell met his banter with a look which quelled it. “I want you to find her father.”

  “Her father? Miss Hermione’s—?”

  “My husband, of course. I suppose you know he’s living.”

  Garnett blushed at his own clumsiness. “I—yes—that is, I really knew nothing—” he stammered, feeling that each word added to it. If Hermione was unnoticeable, Mr. Newell had always been invisible. The young man had never so much as given him a thought, and it was awkward to come on him so suddenly at a turn of the talk.

  “Well, he is—living here in Paris,” said Mrs. Newell, with a note of asperity which seemed to imply that her friend might have taken the trouble to post himself on this point.

  “In Paris? But in that case isn’t it quite simple—?”

  “To find him? I dare say it won’t be difficult, though he’s rather mysterious. But the point is that I can’t go to him—and that if I write to him he won’t answer.”

  “Ah,” said Garnett thoughtfully.

  “And so you’ve got to find him for me, and tell him.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “That he must come to the wedding—that we must show ourselves together at church and afterward in the sacristy.”

  She delivered the behest in her sharp imperative key, the tone of the born commander. But for once Garnett ventured to question her orders.

  “And supposing he won’t come?”

  “He must if he cares for his daughter’s happiness. She can’t be married without him.”

  “Can’t be married?”

  “The French are like that—especially the old families. I was given to understand at once that my husband must appear—if only to establish the fact that we’re not divorced.”

  “Ah—you’re not, then?” escaped from Garnett.

  “Mercy no! Divorce is stupid. They don’t like it in Europe. And in this case it would have been the end of Hermy’s marriage. They wouldn’t think of letting their son marry the child of divorced parents.”

  “How fortunate, then—”

  “Yes; but I always think of such things beforehand. And of course I’ve told them that my husband will be present.”

  “You think he will consent?”

  “No; not at first; but you must make him. You must tell him how sweet Hermione is—and you must see Louis, and be able to describe their happiness. You must dine here to-night—he’s coming. We’re all dining with the Hubbards, and they expect you. They’ve given Hermy some very good diamonds—though I should have preferred a cheque, as she’ll be horribly poor. But I think Kate Hubbard means to do something about the trousseau—Hermy is at Paquin’s with her now. You’ve no idea how delightful all our friends have been.—Ah, here is one of them now,” she broke off smiling, as the door opened to admit, without preliminary announcement, a gentleman so glossy and ancient, with such a fixed unnatural freshness of smile and eye, that he gave Garnett the effect of having been embalmed and then enamelled. It needed not the exotic-looking ribbon in the visitor’s buttonhole, nor Mrs. Newell’s introduction of him as her friend Baron Schenkelderff, to assure Garnett of his connection with a race as ancient as his appearance.

  Baron Schenkelderff greeted his hostess with paternal playfulness, and the young man with an ease which might have been acquired on the Stock Exchange and in the dressing-rooms of “leading ladies.” He spoke a faultless colourless English, from which one felt he might pass with equal mastery to half a dozen other languages. He inquired patronisingly for the excellent Hubbards, asked his hostess if she did not mean to give him a drop of tea and a cigarette, remarked that he need not ask if Hermione was still closeted with the dress-maker, and, on the waiter’s coming in answer to his ring, ordered the tea himself, and added a request for fine champagne. It was not the first time that Garnett had seen such minor liberties taken in Mrs. Newell’s drawing-room, but they had hitherto been taken by persons who had at least the superiority of knowing what they were permitting themselves, whereas the young man felt almost sure that Baron Schenkelderff’s manner was the most distinguished he could achieve; and this deepened the disgust with which, as the minutes passed, he yielded to the conviction that the Baron was Mrs. Newell’s aunt.

  IV.

  GARNETT had always foreseen that Mrs. Newell might some day ask him to do something he should greatly dislike. He had never gone so far as to conjecture what it might be, but had simply felt that if he allowed his acquaintance with her to pass from spectatorship to participation he must be prepared to find himself, at any moment, in a queer situation.

  The moment had come; and he was relieved to find that he could meet it by refusing her request. He had not always been sure that she would leave him this alternative. She had a way of involving people in her complications without their being aware of it; and Garnett had pictured himself in holes so tight that there might not be room for a wriggle. Happily in this case he could still move freely. Nothing compelled him to act as an intermediary between Mrs. Newell and her husband, and it was preposterous to suppose that, even in a life of such perpetual upheaval as hers, there were no roots which struck deeper than her casual intimacy with himself. She had simply laid hands on him because he happened to be within reach, and he would put himself out of reach by leaving for London on the morrow.

  Having thus inwardly asserted his independence, he felt free to let his fancy dwell on the strangeness of the situation. He had always supposed that Mrs. Newell, in her flight through life, must have thrown a good many victims to the wolves, and had assumed that Mr. Newell had been among the number. That he had been dropped overboard at an early stage in the lady’s career seemed probable from the fact that neither his wife nor his daughter ever mentioned him. Mrs. Newell was incapable of reticence, and if her husband had still been an active element in her life he would certainly have figured in her
conversation. Garnett, if he thought of the matter at all, had concluded that divorce must long since have eliminated Mr. Newell; but he now saw how he had underrated his friend’s faculty for using up the waste material of life. She had always struck him as the most extravagant of women, yet it turned out that by a miracle of thrift she had for years kept a superfluous husband on the chance that he might some day be useful. The day had come, and Mr. Newell was to be called from his obscurity. Garnett wondered what had become of him in the interval, and in what shape he would respond to the evocation. The fact that his wife feared he might not respond to it at all seemed to show that his exile was voluntary, or had at least come to appear preferable to other alternatives; but if that were the case it was curious he should not have taken legal means to free himself. He could hardly have had his wife’s motives for wishing to maintain the vague tie between them; but conjecture lost itself in trying to picture what his point of view was likely to be, and Garnett, on his way to the Hubbards’ dinner that evening, could not help regretting that circumstances denied him the opportunity of meeting so enigmatic a person. The young man’s knowledge of Mrs. Newell’s methods made him feel that her husband might be an interesting study. This, however, did not affect his resolve to keep clear of the business. He entered the Hubbards’ dining-room with the firm intention of refusing to execute Mrs. Newell’s commission, and if he changed his mind in the course of the evening it was not owing to that lady’s persuasions.

  Garnett’s curiosity as to the Hubbards’ share in Hermione’s marriage was appeased before he had been five minutes at their table.

  Mrs. Woolsey Hubbard was an expansive blonde, whose ample but disciplined outline seemed the result of a well-matched struggle between her cook and her corset-maker. She talked a great deal of what was appropriate in dress and conduct, and seemed to regard Mrs. Newell as a final arbiter on both points. To do or to wear anything inappropriate would have been extremely mortifying to Mrs. Hubbard, and she was evidently resolved, at the price of eternal vigilance, to prove her familiarity with what she frequently referred to as “the right thing.” Mr. Hubbard appeared to have no such preoccupations. Garnett, if called on to describe him, would have done so by saying that he was the American who always pays. The young man, in the course of his foreign wanderings, had come across many fellow-citizens of Mr. Hubbard’s type in the most diverse company and surroundings; and wherever they were to be found, they always had their hands in their pockets. Mr. Hubbard’s standard of gentility was the extent of a man’s capacity to “foot the bill”; and as no one but an occasional compatriot cared to dispute the privilege with him he seldom had reason to doubt his social superiority.

  Garnett, nevertheless, did not believe that this lavish pair were, as Mrs. Newell would have phrased it, “putting up” Hermione’s dot. They would go very far in diamonds but they would hang back from securities. Their readiness to pay was indefinably mingled with a dread of being expected to, and their prodigalities would take flight at the first hint of coercion. Mrs. Newell, who had had a good deal of experience in managing this type of millionaire, could be trusted not to arouse their susceptibilities, and Garnett was therefore certain that the chimerical legacy had been extracted from other pockets. There were none in view but those of Baron Schenkelderff, who, seated at Mrs. Hubbard’s right, with a new order in his buttonhole, and a fresh glaze upon his features, enchanted that lady by his careless references to crowned heads and his condescending approval of the champagne. Garnett was more than ever certain that it was the Baron who was paying; and it was this conviction which made him suddenly resolve that, at any cost, Hermione’s marriage must take place. He had felt no special interest in the marriage except as one more proof of Mrs. Newell’s extraordinary capacity; but now it appealed to him from the girl’s own stand-point. For he saw, with a touch of compunction, that in the mephitic air of her surroundings a love-story of miraculous freshness had flowered. He had only to intercept the glances which the young couple exchanged to find himself transported to the candid region of romance. It was evident that Hermione adored and was adored; that the lovers believed in each other and in every one about them, and that even the legacy of the defunct aunt had not been too great a strain on their faith in human nature.

  His first glance at the Comte Louis du Trayas showed Garnett that, by some marvel of fitness, Hermione had happened on a kindred nature. If the young man’s long mild features and shortsighted glance revealed no special force of character, they showed a benevolence and simplicity as incorruptible as her own, and declared that their possessor, whatever his failings, would never imperil the illusions she had so wondrously preserved. The fact that the girl took her good fortune naturally, and did not regard herself as suddenly snatched from the jaws of death, added poignancy to the situation; for if she missed this way of escape, and was thrown back on her former life, the day of discovery could not be long deferred. It made Garnett shiver to think of her growing old between her mother and Schenkelderff, or such successors of the Baron’s as might probably attend on Mrs. Newell’s waning fortunes; for it was clear to him that the Baron marked the first stage in his friend’s decline. When Garnett took leave that evening he had promised Mrs. Newell that he would try to find her husband.

  V.

  IF Mr. Newell read in the papers the announcement of his daughter’s marriage it did not cause him to lift the veil of seclusion in which his wife represented him as shrouded.

  A round of the American banks in Paris failed to give Garnett his address, and it was only in chance talk with one of the young secretaries of the Embassy that he was put on Mr. Newell’s track. The secretary’s father, it appeared, had known the Newells some twenty years earlier. He had had business relations with Mr. Newell, who was then a man of property, with factories or something of the kind, the narrator thought, somewhere in Western New York. There had been at this period, for Mrs. Newell, a phase of large hospitality and showy carriages in Washington and at Narragansett. Then her husband had had reverses, had lost heavily in Wall Street, and had finally drifted abroad and disappeared from sight. The young man did not know at what point in his financial decline Mr. Newell had parted company with his wife and daughter; “though you may bet your hat,” he philosophically concluded, “that the old girl hung on as long as there were any pickings.” He did not himself know Mr. Newell’s address, but opined that it might be extracted from a certain official of the Consulate, if Garnett could give a sufficiently good reason for the request; and here in fact Mrs. Newell’s emissary learned that her husband was to be found in an obscure street of the Luxembourg quarter.

  In order to be near the scene of action, Garnett went to breakfast at his usual haunt, determined to despatch his business as early in the day as politeness allowed. The head waiter welcomed him to a table near that of the transatlantic sage, who sat in his customary corner, his head tilted back against the blistered mirror at an angle suggesting that in a freer civilisation his feet would have sought the same level. He greeted Garnett affably and the two exchanged their usual generalisations on life till the sage rose to go; whereupon it occurred to Garnett to accompany him. His friend took the offer in good part, merely remarking that he was going to the Luxembourg gardens, where it was his invariable habit, on good days, to feed the sparrows with the remains of his breakfast roll; and Garnett replied that, as it happened, his own business lay in the same direction.

  “Perhaps, by the way,” he added, “you can tell me how to find the rue Panonceaux, where I must go presently. I thought I knew this quarter fairly well, but I have never heard of it.”

  His companion came to a halt on the narrow pavement, to the confusion of the dense and desultory traffic which flows through the old streets of the Latin quarter. He fixed his mild eye on Garnett and gave a twist to the cigar which lingered in the corner of his mouth.

  “The rue Panonceaux? It is an out-of-the-way hole, but I can tell you how to find it,” he answered.

  He m
ade no motion to do so, however, but continued to bend on the young man the full force of his interrogative gaze; then he added: “Would you mind telling me your object in going there?”

  Garnett looked at him with surprise: a question so unblushingly personal was strangely out of keeping with his friend’s usual attitude of detachment. Before he could reply, however, the other had continued: “Do you happen to be in search of Samuel C. Newell?”

  “Why, yes, I am,” said Garnett with a start of conjecture.

  His companion uttered a sigh. “I supposed so,” he said resignedly; “and in that case,” he added, “we may as well have the matter out in the Luxembourg.”

  Garnett had halted before him with deepening astonishment. “But you don’t mean to tell me—?” he stammered.

  The little man made a motion of assent. “I am Samuel C. Newell,” he said; “and if you have no objection, I prefer not to break through my habit of feeding the sparrows. We are five minutes late as it is.”

  He quickened his pace without awaiting a reply from Garnett, who walked beside him in unsubdued wonder till they reached the Luxembourg gardens, where Mr. Newell, making for one of the less frequented alleys, seated himself on a bench and drew the fragment of a roll from his pocket. His coming was evidently expected, for a shower of little dusky bodies at once descended on him, and the gravel fluttered with battling beaks and wings as he distributed his dole.