Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A Study
In Two Parts
The Coxon Fund
The Death of the Lion
The Diary of a Man of
Fifty
Sir Dominick Ferrand
Eugene Pickering
by
Henry James
DISCLAIMER
Daisy Miller:
A Study
In Two Parts
by
Henry James
PART I
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Daisy Miller
This little boy stepped forward and carefully selected three of the
coveted fragments, two of which he buried in the pocket of his
knickerbockers, depositing the other as promptly in another place.
He poked his alpenstock, lance-fashion, into Winterbourne’s bench
and tried to crack the lump of sugar with his teeth.
“Oh, blazes; it’s har-r-d!” he exclaimed, pronouncing the adjec-
tive in a peculiar manner.
Winterbourne had immediately perceived that he might have the
honor of claiming him as a fellow countryman. “Take care you don’t
hurt your teeth,” he said, paternally.
“I haven’t got any teeth to hurt. They have all come out. I have only
got seven teeth. My mother counted them last night, and one came
out right afterward. She said she’d slap me if any more came out. I
can’t help it. It’s this old Europe. It’s the climate that makes them
come out. In America they didn’t come out. It’s these hotels.”
Winterbourne was much amused. “If you eat three lumps of sugar,
your mother will certainly slap you,” he said.
“She’s got to give me some candy, then,” rejoined his young inter-
locutor. “I can’t get any candy here—any American candy. Ameri-
can candy’s the best candy.”
“And are American little boys the best little boys?” asked Winter-
bourne.
“I don’t know. I’m an American boy,” said the child.
“I see you are one of the best!” laughed Winterbourne.
“Are you an American man?” pursued this vivacious infant. And
then, on Winterbourne’s affirmative reply—”American men are the
best,” he declared.
His companion thanked him for the compliment, and the child,
who had now got astride of his alpenstock, stood looking about
him, while he attacked a second lump of sugar. Winterbourne won-
dered if he himself had been like this in his infancy, for he had been
brought to Europe at about this age.
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“I hope not,” said his sister. “I guess you have had enough candy,
and mother thinks so too.”
“I haven’t had any for ever so long—for a hundred weeks!” cried
the boy, still jumping about.
The young lady inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons
again; and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the
beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had
begun to perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself.
There had not been the slightest alteration in her charming com-
plexion; she was evidently neither offended nor flattered. If she
looked another way when he spoke to her, and seemed not particu-
larly to hear him, this was simply her habit, her manner. Yet, as he
talked a little more and pointed out some of the objects of interest
in the view, with which she appeared quite unacquainted, she gradu-
ally gave him more of the benefit of her glance; and then he saw
that this glance was perfectly direct and unshrinking. It was not,
however, what would have been called an immodest glance, for the
young girl’s eyes were singularly honest and fresh. They were won-
derfully pretty eyes; and, indeed, Winterbourne had not seen for a
long time anything prettier than his fair countrywoman’s various
features—her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth. He had a
great relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and
analyzing it; and as regards this young lady’s face he made several
observations. It was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expres-
sive; and though it was eminently delicate, Winterbourne mentally
accused it—very forgivingly—of a want of finish. He thought it
very possible that Master Randolph’s sister was a coquette; he was
sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial
little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became
obvious that she was much disposed toward conversation. She told
him that they were going to Rome for the winter—she and her
mother and Randolph. She asked him if he was a “real American”;
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Daisy Miller
she shouldn’t have taken him for one; he seemed more like a Ger-
man—this was said after a little hesitation—especially when he
spoke. Winterbourne, laughing, answered that he had met Germans
who spoke like Americans, but that he had not, so far as he remem-
bered, met an American who spoke like a German. Then he asked
her if she should not be more comfortable in sitting upon the bench
which he had just quitted. She answered that she liked standing up
and walking about; but she presently sat down. She told him she
was from New York State—”if you know where that is.” Winter-
bourne learned more about her by catching hold of her small, slip-
pery brother and making him stand a few minutes by his side.
“Tell me your name, my boy,” he said.
“Randolph C. Miller,” said the boy sharply. “And I’ll tell you her
name”; and he leveled his alpenstock at his sister.
“You had better wait till you are asked!” said this young lady calmly.
“I should like very much to know your name,” said Winterbourne.
“Her name is Daisy Miller!” cried the child. “But that isn’t her
real name; that isn’t her name on her cards.”
“It’s a pity you haven’t got one of my cards!” said Miss Miller.
“Her real name is Annie P. Miller,” the boy went on.
“Ask him his name,” said his sister, indicating Winterbourne.
But on this point Randolph seemed perfectly indifferent; he con-
tinued to supply information with regard to his own family. “My
father’s name is Ezra B. Miller,” he announced. “My father ain’t in
Europe; my father’s in a better place than Europe;.”
Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner
in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had
been removed to the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph im-
mediately added, “My father’s in Schenectady. He’s got a big busi-
ness. My father’s rich, you bet!”
“Well!” ejaculated Miss Miller, lowering her parasol and looking
at the embroidered border. Winterbourne presently released the child,
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who departed, dragging his alpenstock along the path. “He doesn’t
like Europe,” said the young girl. “He wants to go back.”
“To Schenectady, you mean?”
“Yes; he wants to go right home. He hasn’t got any boys here.
There is one boy here, but he always goes round with a teacher; they
won’t let him play.”
“And your brother hasn’t any teacher?” Winterbourne inquired.
“Mother thought of getting him one, to travel round with us.
There was a lady told her of a very good teacher; an American lady—
perhaps you know her—Mrs. Sanders. I think she came from Bos-
ton. She told her of this teacher, and we thought of getting him to
travel round with us. But Randolph said he didn’t want a teacher
traveling round with us. He said he wouldn’t have lessons when he
was in the cars. And we are in the cars about half the time. There
was an English lady we met in the cars—I think her name was Miss
Featherstone; perhaps you know her. She wanted to know why I
didn’t give Randolph lessons—give him ‘instruction,’ she called it. I
guess he could give me more instruction than I could give him. He’s
very smart.”
“Yes,” said Winterbourne; “he seems very smart.”
“Mother’s going to get a teacher for him as soon as we get to Italy.
Can you get good teachers in Italy?”
“Very good, I should think,” said Winterbourne.
“Or else she’s going to find some school. He ought to learn some
more. He’s only nine. He’s going to college.” And in this way Miss
Miller continued to converse upon the affairs of her family and
upon other topics. She sat there with her extremely pretty hands,
ornamented with very brilliant rings, folded in her lap, and with
her pretty eyes now resting upon those of Winterbourne, now wan-
dering over the garden, the people who passed by, and the beautiful
view. She talked to Winterbourne as if she had known him a long
time. He found it very pleasant. It was many years since he had
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Daisy Miller
heard a young girl talk so much. It might have been said of this
unknown young lady, who had come and sat down beside him upon
a bench, that she chattered. She was very quiet; she sat in a charm-
ing, tranquil attitude; but her lips and her eyes were constantly
moving. She had a soft, slender, agreeable voice, and her tone was
decidedly sociable. She gave Winterbourne a history of her move-
ments and intentions and those of her mother and brother, in Eu-
rope, and enumerated, in particular, the various hotels at which
they had stopped. “That English lady in the cars,” she said—”Miss
Featherstone—asked me if we didn’t all live in hotels in America. I
told her I had never been in so many hotels in my life as since I
came to Europe. I have never seen so many—it’s nothing but ho-
tels.” But Miss Miller did not make this remark with a querulous
accent; she appeared to be in the best humor with everything. She
declared that the hotels were very good, when once you got used to
their ways, and that Europe was perfectly sweet. She was not disap-
pointed—not a bit. Perhaps it was because she had heard so much
about it before. She had ever so many intimate friends that had
been there ever so many times. And then she had had ever so many
dresses and things from Paris. Whenever she put on a Paris dress she
felt as if she were in Europe.
“It was a kind of a wishing cap,” said Winterbourne.
“Yes,” said Miss Miller without examining this analogy; “it al-
ways made me wish I was here. But I needn’t have done that for
dresses. I am sure they send all the pretty ones to America; you see
the most frightful things here. The only thing I don’t like,” she pro-
ceeded, “is the society. There isn’t any society; or, if there is, I don’t
know where it keeps itself. Do you? I suppose there is some society
somewhere, but I haven’t seen anything of it. I’m very fond of soci-
ety, and I have always had a great deal of it. I don’t mean only in
Schenectady, but in New York. I used to go to New York every
winter. In New York I had lots of society. Last winter I had seven-
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teen dinners given me; and three of them were by gentlemen,” added
Daisy Miller. “I have more friends in New York than in
Schenectady—more gentleman friends; and more young lady friends
too,” she resumed in a moment. She paused again for an instant;
she was looking at Winterbourne with all her prettiness in her lively
eyes and in her light, slightly monotonous smile. “I have always
had,” she said, “a great deal of gentlemen’s society.”
Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed.
He had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fash-
ion; never, at least, save in cases where to say such things seemed a
kind of demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment. And
yet was he to accuse Miss Daisy Miller of actual or potential inconduite,
as they said at Geneva? He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long
that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the
American tone. Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to
appreciate things, had he encountered a young American girl of so
pronounced a type as this. Certainly she was very charming, but how
deucedly sociable! Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State?
Were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of
gentlemen’s society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an
unscrupulous young person? Winterbourne had lost his instinct in
this matter, and his reason could not help him. Miss Daisy Miller
looked extremely innocent. Some people had told him that, after all,
American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others had told him
that, after all, they were not. He was inclined to think Miss Daisy
Miller was a flirt—a pretty American flirt. He had never, as yet, had
any relations with young ladies of this category. He had known, here
in Europe, two or three women—persons older than Miss Daisy Miller,
and provided, for respectability’s sake, with husbands—who were great
coquettes—dangerous, terrible women, with whom one’s relations
were liable to take a serious turn. But this young girl was not a co-
quette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a
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Daisy Miller
bowed gravely to the young lady. “I have the honor to inform ma-
demoiselle that luncheon is upon the table.”
Miss Miller slowly rose. “See here, Eugenio!” she said; “I’m going
to that old castle, anyway.”
“To the Chateau de Chillon, mademoiselle?” the courier inquired.
“Mademoiselle has made arrangements?” he added in a tone which
struck Winterbourne as very impertinent.
Eugenio’s tone apparently threw, even to Miss Miller’s own appre-
hension, a slightly ironical light upon the young girl’s situation. She
turned to Winterbourne, blushing a little—a very little. “You won’t
back out?” she said.
“I shall not be happy till we go!” he protested.
“And you are staying in this hotel?” she went on. “And you are
really an American?”
The courier stood looking at Winterbourne offensively. The young
man, at least, thought his manner of looking an offense to Miss
Miller; it conveyed an imputation that she “picked up” acquaintan-
ces. “I shall have the honor of presenting to you a person who will
tell you all about me,” he said, smiling and referring to his aunt.
“Oh, well, we’ll go some day,” said Miss Miller. And she gave him
a smile and turned away. She put up her parasol and walked back to
the inn beside Eugenio. Winterbourne stood looking after her; and
as she moved away, drawing her muslin furbelows over the gravel,
said to himself that she had the tournure of a princess.
He had, however, engaged to do more than proved feasible, in
promising to present his aunt, Mrs. Costello, to Miss Daisy Miller.
As soon as the former lady had got better of her headache, he waited
upon her in her apartment; and, after the proper inquiries in regard
to her health, he asked her if she had observed in the hotel an Ameri-
can family—a mamma, a daughter, and a little boy.
“And a courier?” said Mrs. Costello. “Oh yes, I have observed them.
Seen them—heard them—and kept out of their way.” Mrs. Costello
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Daisy Miller
“She has that charming look that they all have,” his aunt resumed.
“I can’t think where they pick it up; and she dresses in perfection—
no, you don’t know how well she dresses. I can’t think where they
get their taste.”
“But, my dear aunt, she is not, after all, a Comanche savage.”
“She is a young lady,” said Mrs. Costello, “who has an intimacy
with her mamma’s courier.”
“An intimacy with the courier?” the young man demanded.
“Oh, the mother is just as bad! They treat the courier like a famil-
iar friend—like a gentleman. I shouldn’t wonder if he dines with
them. Very likely they have never seen a man with such good man-
ners, such fine clothes, so like a gentleman. He probably corresponds
to the young lady’s idea of a count. He sits with them in the garden
in the evening. I think he smokes.”
Winterbourne listened with interest to these disclosures; they
helped him to make up his mind about Miss Daisy. Evidently she
was rather wild. “Well,” he said, “I am not a courier, and yet she was
very charming to me.”
“You had better have said at first,” said Mrs. Costello with dig-
nity, “that you had made her acquaintance.”
“We simply met in the garden, and we talked a bit.”
“Tout bonnement! And pray what did you say?”
“I said I should take the liberty of introducing her to my admi-
rable aunt.”
“I am much obliged to you.”
“It was to guarantee my respectability,” said Winterbourne.
“And pray who is to guarantee hers?”
“Ah, you are cruel!” said the young man. “She’s a very nice young girl.”
“You don’t say that as if you believed it,” Mrs. Costello observed.
“She is completely uncultivated,” Winterbourne went on. “But
she is wonderfully pretty, and, in short, she is very nice. To prove
that I believe it, I am going to take her to the Chateau de Chillon.”
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“You two are going off there together? I should say it proved just
the contrary. How long had you known her, may I ask, when this
interesting project was formed? You haven’t been twenty-four hours
in the house.”
“I have known her half an hour!” said Winterbourne, smiling.
“Dear me!” cried Mrs. Costello. “What a dreadful girl!”
Her nephew was silent for some moments. “You really think, then,”
he began earnestly, and with a desire for trustworthy information—
”you really think that—” But he paused again.
“Think what, sir?” said his aunt.
“That she is the sort of young lady who expects a man, sooner or
later, to carry her off?”
“I haven’t the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to
do. But I really think that you had better not meddle with little
American girls that are uncultivated, as you call them. You have
lived too long out of the country. You will be sure to make some
great mistake. You are too innocent.”
“My dear aunt, I am not so innocent,” said Winterbourne, smil-
ing and curling his mustache.
“You are guilty too, then!”
Winterbourne continued to curl his mustache meditatively. “You
won’t let the poor girl know you then?” he asked at last.
“Is it literally true that she is going to the Chateau de Chillon
with you?”
“I think that she fully intends it.”
“Then, my dear Frederick,” said Mrs. Costello, “I must decline
the honor of her acquaintance. I am an old woman, but I am not
too old, thank Heaven, to be shocked!”
“But don’t they all do these things—the young girls in America?”
Winterbourne inquired.
Mrs. Costello stared a moment. “I should like to see my grand-
daughters do them!” she declared grimly.
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Daisy Miller
This seemed to throw some light upon the matter, for Winter-
bourne remembered to have heard that his pretty cousins in New
York were “tremendous flirts.” If, therefore, Miss Daisy Miller ex-
ceeded the liberal margin allowed to these young ladies, it was prob-
able that anything might be expected of her. Winterbourne was im-
patient to see her again, and he was vexed with himself that, by
instinct, he should not appreciate her justly.
Though he was impatient to see her, he hardly knew what he
should say to her about his aunt’s refusal to become acquainted with
her; but he discovered, promptly enough, that with Miss Daisy Miller
there was no great need of walking on tiptoe. He found her that
evening in the garden, wandering about in the warm starlight like
an indolent sylph, and swinging to and fro the largest fan he had
ever beheld. It was ten o’clock. He had dined with his aunt, had
been sitting with her since dinner, and had just taken leave of her
till the morrow. Miss Daisy Miller seemed very glad to see him; she
declared it was the longest evening she had ever passed.
“Have you been all alone?” he asked.
“I have been walking round with mother. But mother gets tired
walking round,” she answered.
“Has she gone to bed?”
“No; she doesn’t like to go to bed,” said the young girl. “She doesn’t
sleep—not three hours. She says she doesn’t know how she lives.
She’s dreadfully nervous. I guess she sleeps more than she thinks.
She’s gone somewhere after Randolph; she wants to try to get him
to go to bed. He doesn’t like to go to bed.”
“Let us hope she will persuade him,” observed Winterbourne.
“She will talk to him all she can; but he doesn’t like her to talk to
him,” said Miss Daisy, opening her fan. “She’s going to try to get
Eugenio to talk to him. But he isn’t afraid of Eugenio. Eugenio’s a
splendid courier, but he can’t make much impression on Randolph!
I don’t believe he’ll go to bed before eleven.” It appeared that
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Daisy Miller
be afraid,” she repeated. “Why should she want to know me?” Then
she paused again; she was close to the parapet of the garden, and in
front of her was the starlit lake. There was a vague sheen upon its
surface, and in the distance were dimly seen mountain forms. Daisy
Miller looked out upon the mysterious prospect and then she gave
another little laugh. “Gracious! she IS exclusive!” she said. Winter-
bourne wondered whether she was seriously wounded, and for a
moment almost wished that her sense of injury might be such as to
make it becoming in him to attempt to reassure and comfort her.
He had a pleasant sense that she would be very approachable for
consolatory purposes. He felt then, for the instant, quite ready to
sacrifice his aunt, conversationally; to admit that she was a proud,
rude woman, and to declare that they needn’t mind her. But before
he had time to commit himself to this perilous mixture of gallantry
and impiety, the young lady, resuming her walk, gave an exclama-
tion in quite another tone. “Well, here’s Mother! I guess she hasn’t
got Randolph to go to bed.” The figure of a lady appeared at a
distance, very indistinct in the darkness, and advancing with a slow
and wavering movement. Suddenly it seemed to pause.
“Are you sure it is your mother? Can you distinguish her in this
thick dusk?” Winterbourne asked.
“Well!” cried Miss Daisy Miller with a laugh; “I guess I know my
own mother. And when she has got on my shawl, too! She is always
wearing my things.”
The lady in question, ceasing to advance, hovered vaguely about
the spot at which she had checked her steps.
“I am afraid your mother doesn’t see you,” said Winterbourne.
“Or perhaps,” he added, thinking, with Miss Miller, the joke per-
missible—”perhaps she feels guilty about your shawl.”
“Oh, it’s a fearful old thing!” the young girl replied serenely. “I
told her she could wear it. She won’t come here because she sees
you.”
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gleaming, she was swinging her great fan about. No; it’s impossible
to be prettier than that, thought Winterbourne.
“There are half a dozen boats moored at that landing place,” he
said, pointing to certain steps which descended from the garden to
the lake. “If you will do me the honor to accept my arm, we will go
and select one of them.”
Daisy stood there smiling; she threw back her head and gave a
little, light laugh. “I like a gentleman to be formal!” she declared.
“I assure you it’s a formal offer.”
“I was bound I would make you say something,” Daisy went on.
“You see, it’s not very difficult,” said Winterbourne. “But I am
afraid you are chaffing me.”
“I think not, sir,” remarked Mrs. Miller very gently.
“Do, then, let me give you a row,” he said to the young girl.
“It’s quite lovely, the way you say that!” cried Daisy.
“It will be still more lovely to do it.”
“Yes, it would be lovely!” said Daisy. But she made no movement to
accompany him; she only stood there laughing.
“I should think you had better find out what time it is,” inter-
posed her mother.
“It is eleven o’clock, madam,” said a voice, with a foreign accent,
out of the neighboring darkness; and Winterbourne, turning, per-
ceived the florid personage who was in attendance upon the two
ladies. He had apparently just approached.
“Oh, Eugenio,” said Daisy, “I am going out in a boat!”
Eugenio bowed. “At eleven o’clock, mademoiselle?”
“I am going with Mr. Winterbourne—this very minute.”
“Do tell her she can’t,” said Mrs. Miller to the courier.
“I think you had better not go out in a boat, mademoiselle,”
Eugenio declared.
Winterbourne wished to Heaven this pretty girl were not so fa-
miliar with her courier; but he said nothing.
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It was not the place he should have chosen, but she had appointed
it. She came tripping downstairs, buttoning her long gloves, squeez-
ing her folded parasol against her pretty figure, dressed in the per-
fection of a soberly elegant traveling costume. Winterbourne was a
man of imagination and, as our ancestors used to say, sensibility; as
he looked at her dress and, on the great staircase, her little rapid,
confiding step, he felt as if there were something romantic going
forward. He could have believed he was going to elope with her. He
passed out with her among all the idle people that were assembled
there; they were all looking at her very hard; she had begun to chat-
ter as soon as she joined him. Winterbourne’s preference had been
that they should be conveyed to Chillon in a carriage; but she ex-
pressed a lively wish to go in the little steamer; she declared that she
had a passion for steamboats. There was always such a lovely breeze
upon the water, and you saw such lots of people. The sail was not
long, but Winterbourne’s companion found time to say a great many
things. To the young man himself their little excursion was so much
of an escapade—an adventure—that, even allowing for her habitual
sense of freedom, he had some expectation of seeing her regard it in
the same way. But it must be confessed that, in this particular, he
was disappointed. Daisy Miller was extremely animated, she was in
charming spirits; but she was apparently not at all excited; she was
not fluttered; she avoided neither his eyes nor those of anyone else;
she blushed neither when she looked at him nor when she felt that
people were looking at her. People continued to look at her a great
deal, and Winterbourne took much satisfaction in his pretty
companion’s distinguished air. He had been a little afraid that she
would talk loud, laugh overmuch, and even, perhaps, desire to move
about the boat a good deal. But he quite forgot his fears; he sat
smiling, with his eyes upon her face, while, without moving from
her place, she delivered herself of a great number of original reflec-
tions. It was the most charming garrulity he had ever heard. he had
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Daisy Miller
assented to the idea that she was “common”; but was she so, after
all, or was he simply getting used to her commonness? Her conver-
sation was chiefly of what metaphysicians term the objective cast,
but every now and then it took a subjective turn.
“What on earth are you so grave about?” she suddenly demanded,
fixing her agreeable eyes upon Winterbourne’s.
“Am I grave?” he asked. “I had an idea I was grinning from ear to
ear.”
“You look as if you were taking me to a funeral. If that’s a grin,
your ears are very near together.”
“Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?”
“Pray do, and I’ll carry round your hat. It will pay the expenses of
our journey.”
“I never was better pleased in my life,” murmured Winterbourne.
She looked at him a moment and then burst into a little laugh. “I
like to make you say those things! You’re a queer mixture!”
In the castle, after they had landed, the subjective element decid-
edly prevailed. Daisy tripped about the vaulted chambers, rustled
her skirts in the corkscrew staircases, flirted back with a pretty little
cry and a shudder from the edge of the oubliettes, and turned a
singularly well-shaped ear to everything that Winterbourne told her
about the place. But he saw that she cared very little for feudal an-
tiquities and that the dusky traditions of Chillon made but a slight
impression upon her. They had the good fortune to have been able
to walk about without other companionship than that of the custo-
dian; and Winterbourne arranged with this functionary that they
should not be hurried—that they should linger and pause wherever
they chose. The custodian interpreted the bargain generously—
Winterbourne, on his side, had been generous—and ended by leav-
ing them quite to themselves. Miss Miller’s observations were not
remarkable for logical consistency; for anything she wanted to say
she was sure to find a pretext. She found a great many pretexts in
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Daisy Miller
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Daisy Miller
PART II
WINTERBOURNE, who had returned to Geneva the day after his excur-
sion to Chillon, went to Rome toward the end of January. His aunt
had been established there for several weeks, and he had received a
couple of letters from her. “Those people you were so devoted to last
summer at Vevey have turned up here, courier and all,” she wrote.
“They seem to have made several acquaintances, but the courier con-
tinues to be the most intime. The young lady, however, is also very
intimate with some third-rate Italians, with whom she rackets about
in a way that makes much talk. Bring me that pretty novel of
Cherbuliez’s—Paule Mere—and don’t come later than the 23rd.”
In the natural course of events, Winterbourne, on arriving in Rome,
would presently have ascertained Mrs. Miller’s address at the Ameri-
can banker’s and have gone to pay his compliments to Miss Daisy.
“After what happened at Vevey, I think I may certainly call upon
them,” he said to Mrs. Costello.
“If, after what happens—at Vevey and everywhere—you desire to
keep up the acquaintance, you are very welcome. Of course a man
may know everyone. Men are welcome to the privilege!”
“Pray what is it that happens—here, for instance?” Winterbourne
demanded.
“The girl goes about alone with her foreigners. As to what hap-
pens further, you must apply elsewhere for information. She has
picked up half a dozen of the regular Roman fortune hunters, and
she takes them about to people’s houses. When she comes to a party
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she brings with her a gentleman with a good deal of manner and a
wonderful mustache.”
“And where is the mother?”
“I haven’t the least idea. They are very dreadful people.”
Winterbourne meditated a moment. “They are very ignorant—
very innocent only. Depend upon it they are not bad.”
“They are hopelessly vulgar,” said Mrs. Costello. “Whether or no
being hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad’ is a question for the metaphy-
sicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this
short life that is quite enough.”
The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen won-
derful mustaches checked Winterbourne’s impulse to go straight-
way to see her. He had, perhaps, not definitely flattered himself that
he had made an ineffaceable impression upon her heart, but he was
annoyed at hearing of a state of affairs so little in harmony with an
image that had lately flitted in and out of his own meditations; the
image of a very pretty girl looking out of an old Roman window
and asking herself urgently when Mr. Winterbourne would arrive.
If, however, he determined to wait a little before reminding Miss
Miller of his claims to her consideration, he went very soon to call
upon two or three other friends. One of these friends was an Ameri-
can lady who had spent several winters at Geneva, where she had
placed her children at school. She was a very accomplished woman,
and she lived in the Via Gregoriana. Winterbourne found her in a
little crimson drawing room on a third floor; the room was filled
with southern sunshine. He had not been there ten minutes when
the servant came in, announcing “Madame Mila!” This announce-
ment was presently followed by the entrance of little Randolph Miller,
who stopped in the middle of the room and stood staring at Win-
terbourne. An instant later his pretty sister crossed the threshold;
and then, after a considerable interval, Mrs. Miller slowly advanced.
“I know you!” said Randolph.
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Daisy Miller
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was saying to Daisy that I certainly hadn’t found any one like Dr.
Davis, and I didn’t believe I should. Oh, at Schenectady he stands
first; they think everything of him. He has so much to do, and yet
there was nothing he wouldn’t do for me. He said he never saw
anything like my dyspepsia, but he was bound to cure it. I’m sure
there was nothing he wouldn’t try. He was just going to try some-
thing new when we came off. Mr. Miller wanted Daisy to see Eu-
rope for herself. But I wrote to Mr. Miller that it seems as if I couldn’t
get on without Dr. Davis. At Schenectady he stands at the very top;
and there’s a great deal of sickness there, too. It affects my sleep.”
Winterbourne had a good deal of pathological gossip with Dr. Davis’s
patient, during which Daisy chattered unremittingly to her own com-
panion. The young man asked Mrs. Miller how she was pleased with
Rome. “Well, I must say I am disappointed,” she answered. “We had
heard so much about it; I suppose we had heard too much. But we
couldn’t help that. We had been led to expect something different.”
“Ah, wait a little, and you will become very fond of it,” said Win-
terbourne.
“I hate it worse and worse every day!” cried Randolph.
“You are like the infant Hannibal,” said Winterbourne.
“No, I ain’t!” Randolph declared at a venture.
“You are not much like an infant,” said his mother. “But we have
seen places,” she resumed, “that I should put a long way before
Rome.” And in reply to Winterbourne’s interrogation, “There’s
Zurich,” she concluded, “I think Zurich is lovely; and we hadn’t
heard half so much about it.”
“The best place we’ve seen is the City of Richmond!” said
Randolph.
“He means the ship,” his mother explained. “We crossed in that
ship. Randolph had a good time on the City of Richmond.”
“It’s the best place I’ve seen,” the child repeated. “Only it was
turned the wrong way.”
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Daisy Miller
“Well, we’ve got to turn the right way some time,” said Mrs. Miller
with a little laugh. Winterbourne expressed the hope that her daugh-
ter at least found some gratification in Rome, and she declared that
Daisy was quite carried away. “It’s on account of the society—the
society’s splendid. She goes round everywhere; she has made a great
number of acquaintances. Of course she goes round more than I
do. I must say they have been very sociable; they have taken her
right in. And then she knows a great many gentlemen. Oh, she
thinks there’s nothing like Rome. Of course, it’s a great deal pleasanter
for a young lady if she knows plenty of gentlemen.”
By this time Daisy had turned her attention again to Winter-
bourne. “I’ve been telling Mrs. Walker how mean you were!” the
young girl announced.
“And what is the evidence you have offered?” asked Winterbourne,
rather annoyed at Miss Miller’s want of appreciation of the zeal of an
admirer who on his way down to Rome had stopped neither at Bolo-
gna nor at Florence, simply because of a certain sentimental impa-
tience. He remembered that a cynical compatriot had once told him
that American women—the pretty ones, and this gave a largeness to
the axiom—were at once the most exacting in the world and the least
endowed with a sense of indebtedness.
“Why, you were awfully mean at Vevey,” said Daisy. “You wouldn’t
do anything. You wouldn’t stay there when I asked you.”
“My dearest young lady,” cried Winterbourne, with eloquence,
“have I come all the way to Rome to encounter your reproaches?”
“Just hear him say that!” said Daisy to her hostess, giving a twist
to a bow on this lady’s dress. “Did you ever hear anything so quaint?”
“So quaint, my dear?” murmured Mrs. Walker in the tone of a
partisan of Winterbourne.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Daisy, fingering Mrs. Walker’s ribbons.
“Mrs. Walker, I want to tell you something.”
“Mother-r,” interposed Randolph, with his rough ends to his
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41
Daisy Miller
“Neither do I,” subjoined Mrs. Miller. “You’ll get the fever, as sure as
you live. Remember what Dr. Davis told you!”
“Give her some medicine before she goes,” said Randolph.
The company had risen to its feet; Daisy, still showing her pretty
teeth, bent over and kissed her hostess. “Mrs. Walker, you are too
perfect,” she said. “I’m not going alone; I am going to meet a friend.”
“Your friend won’t keep you from getting the fever,” Mrs. Miller
observed.
“Is it Mr. Giovanelli?” asked the hostess.
Winterbourne was watching the young girl; at this question his
attention quickened. She stood there, smiling and smoothing her
bonnet ribbons; she glanced at Winterbourne. Then, while she
glanced and smiled, she answered, without a shade of hesitation,
“Mr. Giovanelli—the beautiful Giovanelli.”
“My dear young friend,” said Mrs. Walker, taking her hand plead-
ingly, “don’t walk off to the Pincio at this hour to meet a beautiful
Italian.”
“Well, he speaks English,” said Mrs. Miller.
“Gracious me!” Daisy exclaimed, “I don’t to do anything improper.
There’s an easy way to settle it.” She continued to glance at Winter-
bourne. “The Pincio is only a hundred yards distant; and if Mr.
Winterbourne were as polite as he pretends, he would offer to walk
with me!”
Winterbourne’s politeness hastened to affirm itself, and the young
girl gave him gracious leave to accompany her. They passed down-
stairs before her mother, and at the door Winterbourne perceived
Mrs. Miller’s carriage drawn up, with the ornamental courier whose
acquaintance he had made at Vevey seated within. “Goodbye,
Eugenio!” cried Daisy; “I’m going to take a walk.” The distance
from the Via Gregoriana to the beautiful garden at the other end of
the Pincian Hill is, in fact, rapidly traversed. As the day was splen-
did, however, and the concourse of vehicles, walkers, and loungers
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Daisy Miller
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The young girl looked at him more gravely, but with eyes that were
prettier than ever. “I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me,
or to interfere with anything I do.”
“I think you have made a mistake,” said Winterbourne. “You should
sometimes listen to a gentleman—the right one.”
Daisy began to laugh again. “I do nothing but listen to gentle-
men!” she exclaimed. “Tell me if Mr. Giovanelli is the right one?”
The gentleman with the nosegay in his bosom had now perceived
our two friends, and was approaching the young girl with obsequi-
ous rapidity. He bowed to Winterbourne as well as to the latter’s
companion; he had a brilliant smile, an intelligent eye; Winterbourne
thought him not a bad-looking fellow. But he nevertheless said to
Daisy, “No, he’s not the right one.”
Daisy evidently had a natural talent for performing introductions;
she mentioned the name of each of her companions to the other.
She strolled alone with one of them on each side of her; Mr.
Giovanelli, who spoke English very cleverly—Winterbourne after-
ward learned that he had practiced the idiom upon a great many
American heiresses—addressed her a great deal of very polite non-
sense; he was extremely urbane, and the young American, who said
nothing, reflected upon that profundity of Italian cleverness which
enables people to appear more gracious in proportion as they are
more acutely disappointed. Giovanelli, of course, had counted upon
something more intimate; he had not bargained for a party of three.
But he kept his temper in a manner which suggested far-stretching
intentions. Winterbourne flattered himself that he had taken his
measure. “He is not a gentleman,” said the young American; “he is
only a clever imitation of one. He is a music master, or a penny-a-
liner, or a third-rate artist. D__n his good looks!” Mr. Giovanelli
had certainly a very pretty face; but Winterbourne felt a superior
indignation at his own lovely fellow countrywoman’s not knowing
the difference between a spurious gentleman and a real one.
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Daisy Miller
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47
Daisy Miller
“It may be enchanting, dear child, but it is not the custom here,”
urged Mrs. Walker, leaning forward in her victoria, with her hands
devoutly clasped.
“Well, it ought to be, then!” said Daisy. “If I didn’t walk I should
expire.”
“You should walk with your mother, dear,” cried the lady from
Geneva, losing patience.
“With my mother dear!” exclaimed the young girl. Winterbourne
saw that she scented interference. “My mother never walked ten
steps in her life. And then, you know,” she added with a laugh, “I
am more than five years old.”
“You are old enough to be more reasonable. You are old enough,
dear Miss Miller, to be talked about.”
Daisy looked at Mrs. Walker, smiling intensely. “Talked about?
What do you mean?”
“Come into my carriage, and I will tell you.”
Daisy turned her quickened glance again from one of the gentle-
men beside her to the other. Mr. Giovanelli was bowing to and
fro, rubbing down his gloves and laughing very agreeably; Win-
terbourne thought it a most unpleasant scene. “I don’t think I
want to know what you mean,” said Daisy presently. “I don’t think
I should like it.”
Winterbourne wished that Mrs. Walker would tuck in her car-
riage rug and drive away, but this lady did not enjoy being defied, as
she afterward told him. “Should you prefer being thought a very
reckless girl?” she demanded.
“Gracious!” exclaimed Daisy. She looked again at Mr. Giovanelli,
then she turned to Winterbourne. There was a little pink flush in
her cheek; she was tremendously pretty. “Does Mr. Winterbourne
think,” she asked slowly, smiling, throwing back her head, and glanc-
ing at him from head to foot, “that, to save my reputation, I ought
to get into the carriage?”
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Daisy Miller
“Well, your earnestness has only offended her and put her off.”
“It has happened very well,” said Mrs. Walker. “If she is so per-
fectly determined to compromise herself, the sooner one knows it
the better; one can act accordingly.”
“I suspect she meant no harm,” Winterbourne rejoined.
“So I thought a month ago. But she has been going too far.”
“What has she been doing?”
“Everything that is not done here. Flirting with any man she could
pick up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the
evening with the same partners; receiving visits at eleven o’clock at
night. Her mother goes away when visitors come.”
“But her brother,” said Winterbourne, laughing, “sits up till mid-
night.”
“He must be edified by what he sees. I’m told that at their hotel
everyone is talking about her, and that a smile goes round among all
the servants when a gentleman comes and asks for Miss Miller.”
“The servants be hanged!” said Winterbourne angrily. “The poor
girl’s only fault,” he presently added, “is that she is very unculti-
vated.”
“She is naturally indelicate,” Mrs. Walker declared.
“Take that example this morning. How long had you known her
at Vevey?”
“A couple of days.”
“Fancy, then, her making it a personal matter that you should
have left the place!”
Winterbourne was silent for some moments; then he said, “I sus-
pect, Mrs. Walker, that you and I have lived too long at Geneva!”
And he added a request that she should inform him with what par-
ticular design she had made him enter her carriage.
“I wished to beg you to cease your relations with Miss Miller—
not to flirt with her—to give her no further opportunity to expose
herself—to let her alone, in short.”
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51
Daisy Miller
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Henry James
“Well, I told her that there was no use in her getting dressed be-
fore dinner if she was going to wait three hours,” responded Daisy’s
mamma. “I didn’t see the use of her putting on such a dress as that
to sit round with Mr. Giovanelli.”
“This is most horrible!” said Mrs. Walker, turning away and ad-
dressing herself to Winterbourne. “Elle s’affiche. It’s her revenge for
my having ventured to remonstrate with her. When she comes, I
shall not speak to her.”
Daisy came after eleven o’clock; but she was not, on such an occa-
sion, a young lady to wait to be spoken to. She rustled forward in
radiant loveliness, smiling and chattering, carrying a large bouquet,
and attended by Mr. Giovanelli. Everyone stopped talking and turned
and looked at her. She came straight to Mrs. Walker. “I’m afraid you
thought I never was coming, so I sent mother off to tell you. I wanted
to make Mr. Giovanelli practice some things before he came; you
know he sings beautifully, and I want you to ask him to sing. This is
Mr. Giovanelli; you know I introduced him to you; he’s got the
most lovely voice, and he knows the most charming set of songs. I
made him go over them this evening on purpose; we had the great-
est time at the hotel.” Of all this Daisy delivered herself with the
sweetest, brightest audibleness, looking now at her hostess and now
round the room, while she gave a series of little pats, round her
shoulders, to the edges of her dress. “Is there anyone I know?” she
asked.
“I think every one knows you!” said Mrs. Walker pregnantly, and
she gave a very cursory greeting to Mr. Giovanelli. This gentleman
bore himself gallantly. He smiled and bowed and showed his white
teeth; he curled his mustaches and rolled his eyes and performed all
the proper functions of a handsome Italian at an evening party. He
sang very prettily half a dozen songs, though Mrs. Walker afterward
declared that she had been quite unable to find out who asked him.
It was apparently not Daisy who had given him his orders. Daisy sat
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Daisy Miller
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Henry James
“Ah! thank you—thank you very much; you are the last man I
should think of flirting with. As I have had the pleasure of inform-
ing you, you are too stiff.”
“You say that too often,” said Winterbourne.
Daisy gave a delighted laugh. “If I could have the sweet hope of
making you angry, I should say it again.”
“Don’t do that; when I am angry I’m stiffer than ever. But if you
won’t flirt with me, do cease, at least, to flirt with your friend at the
piano; they don’t understand that sort of thing here.”
“I thought they understood nothing else!” exclaimed Daisy.
“Not in young unmarried women.”
“It seems to me much more proper in young unmarried women
than in old married ones,” Daisy declared.
“Well,” said Winterbourne, “when you deal with natives you must
go by the custom of the place. Flirting is a purely American custom;
it doesn’t exist here. So when you show yourself in public with Mr.
Giovanelli, and without your mother—”
“Gracious! poor Mother!” interposed Daisy.
“Though you may be flirting, Mr. Giovanelli is not; he means
something else.”
“He isn’t preaching, at any rate,” said Daisy with vivacity. “And if
you want very much to know, we are neither of us flirting; we are
too good friends for that: we are very intimate friends.”
“Ah!” rejoined Winterbourne, “if you are in love with each other,
it is another affair.”
She had allowed him up to this point to talk so frankly that he
had no expectation of shocking her by this ejaculation; but she im-
mediately got up, blushing visibly, and leaving him to exclaim men-
tally that little American flirts were the queerest creatures in the
world. “Mr. Giovanelli, at least,” she said, giving her interlocutor a
single glance, “never says such very disagreeable things to me.”
Winterbourne was bewildered; he stood, staring. Mr. Giovanelli
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Daisy Miller
had finished singing. He left the piano and came over to Daisy.
“Won’t you come into the other room and have some tea?” he asked,
bending before her with his ornamental smile.
Daisy turned to Winterbourne, beginning to smile again. He was
still more perplexed, for this inconsequent smile made nothing clear,
though it seemed to prove, indeed, that she had a sweetness and
softness that reverted instinctively to the pardon of offenses. “It has
never occurred to Mr. Winterbourne to offer me any tea,” she said
with her little tormenting manner.
“I have offered you advice,” Winterbourne rejoined.
“I prefer weak tea!” cried Daisy, and she went off with the bril-
liant Giovanelli. She sat with him in the adjoining room, in the
embrasure of the window, for the rest of the evening. There was an
interesting performance at the piano, but neither of these young
people gave heed to it. When Daisy came to take leave of Mrs.
Walker, this lady conscientiously repaired the weakness of which
she had been guilty at the moment of the young girl’s arrival. She
turned her back straight upon Miss Miller and left her to depart
with what grace she might. Winterbourne was standing near the
door; he saw it all. Daisy turned very pale and looked at her mother,
but Mrs. Miller was humbly unconscious of any violation of the
usual social forms. She appeared, indeed, to have felt an incongru-
ous impulse to draw attention to her own striking observance of
them. “Good night, Mrs. Walker,” she said; “we’ve had a beautiful
evening. You see, if I let Daisy come to parties without me, I don’t
want her to go away without me.” Daisy turned away, looking with
a pale, grave face at the circle near the door; Winterbourne saw that,
for the first moment, she was too much shocked and puzzled even
for indignation. He on his side was greatly touched.
“That was very cruel,” he said to Mrs. Walker.
“She never enters my drawing room again!” replied his hostess.
Since Winterbourne was not to meet her in Mrs. Walker’s draw-
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57
Daisy Miller
Sunday afternoon, having gone to St. Peter’s with his aunt, Winter-
bourne perceived Daisy strolling about the great church in com-
pany with the inevitable Giovanelli. Presently he pointed out the
young girl and her cavalier to Mrs. Costello. This lady looked at
them a moment through her eyeglass, and then she said:
“That’s what makes you so pensive in these days, eh?”
“I had not the least idea I was pensive,” said the young man.
“You are very much preoccupied; you are thinking of something.”
“And what is it,” he asked, “that you accuse me of thinking of?”
“Of that young lady’s—Miss Baker’s, Miss Chandler’s—what’s her
name?—Miss Miller’s intrigue with that little barber’s block.”
“Do you call it an intrigue,” Winterbourne asked—”an affair that
goes on with such peculiar publicity?”
“That’s their folly,” said Mrs. Costello; “it’s not their merit.”
“No,” rejoined Winterbourne, with something of that pensive-
ness to which his aunt had alluded. “I don’t believe that there is
anything to be called an intrigue.”
“I have heard a dozen people speak of it; they say she is quite
carried away by him.”
“They are certainly very intimate,” said Winterbourne.
Mrs. Costello inspected the young couple again with her optical
instrument. “He is very handsome. One easily sees how it is. She
thinks him the most elegant man in the world, the finest gentle-
man. She has never seen anything like him; he is better, even, than
the courier. It was the courier probably who introduced him; and if
he succeeds in marrying the young lady, the courier will come in for
a magnificent commission.”
“I don’t believe she thinks of marrying him,” said Winterbourne,
“and I don’t believe he hopes to marry her.”
“You may be very sure she thinks of nothing. She goes on from
day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age. I can
imagine nothing more vulgar. And at the same time,” added Mrs.
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Henry James
Costello, “depend upon it that she may tell you any moment that
she is ‘engaged.’”
“I think that is more than Giovanelli expects,” said Winterbourne.
“Who is Giovanelli?”
“The little Italian. I have asked questions about him and learned
something. He is apparently a perfectly respectable little man. I be-
lieve he is, in a small way, a cavaliere avvocato. But he doesn’t move
in what are called the first circles. I think it is really not absolutely
impossible that the courier introduced him. He is evidently im-
mensely charmed with Miss Miller. If she thinks him the finest gentle-
man in the world, he, on his side, has never found himself in per-
sonal contact with such splendor, such opulence, such expensive-
ness as this young lady’s. And then she must seem to him wonder-
fully pretty and interesting. I rather doubt that he dreams of marry-
ing her. That must appear to him too impossible a piece of luck. He
has nothing but his handsome face to offer, and there is a substan-
tial Mr. Miller in that mysterious land of dollars. Giovanelli knows
that he hasn’t a title to offer. If he were only a count or a marchese!
He must wonder at his luck, at the way they have taken him up.”
“He accounts for it by his handsome face and thinks Miss Miller
a young lady qui se passe ses fantaisies!” said Mrs. Costello.
“It is very true,” Winterbourne pursued, “that Daisy and her
mamma have not yet risen to that stage of—what shall I call it?—of
culture at which the idea of catching a count or a marchese begins.
I believe that they are intellectually incapable of that conception.”
“Ah! but the avvocato can’t believe it,” said Mrs. Costello.
Of the observation excited by Daisy’s “intrigue,” Winterbourne
gathered that day at St. Peter’s sufficient evidence. A dozen of the
American colonists in Rome came to talk with Mrs. Costello, who sat
on a little portable stool at the base of one of the great pilasters. The
vesper service was going forward in splendid chants and organ tones
in the adjacent choir, and meanwhile, between Mrs. Costello and her
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Daisy Miller
friends, there was a great deal said about poor little Miss Miller’s go-
ing really “too far.” Winterbourne was not pleased with what he heard,
but when, coming out upon the great steps of the church, he saw
Daisy, who had emerged before him, get into an open cab with her
accomplice and roll away through the cynical streets of Rome, he
could not deny to himself that she was going very far indeed. He felt
very sorry for her—not exactly that he believed that she had com-
pletely lost her head, but because it was painful to hear so much that
was pretty, and undefended, and natural assigned to a vulgar place
among the categories of disorder. He made an attempt after this to
give a hint to Mrs. Miller. He met one day in the Corso a friend, a
tourist like himself, who had just come out of the Doria Palace, where
he had been walking through the beautiful gallery. His friend talked
for a moment about the superb portrait of Innocent X by Velasquez
which hangs in one of the cabinets of the palace, and then said, “And
in the same cabinet, by the way, I had the pleasure of contemplating
a picture of a different kind—that pretty American girl whom you
pointed out to me last week.” In answer to Winterbourne’s inquiries,
his friend narrated that the pretty American girl—prettier than ever—
was seated with a companion in the secluded nook in which the great
papal portrait was enshrined.
“Who was her companion?” asked Winterbourne.
“A little Italian with a bouquet in his buttonhole. The girl is delight-
fully pretty, but I thought I understood from you the other day that she
was a young lady du meilleur monde.”
“So she is!” answered Winterbourne; and having assured himself
that his informant had seen Daisy and her companion but five min-
utes before, he jumped into a cab and went to call on Mrs. Miller.
She was at home; but she apologized to him for receiving him in
Daisy’s absence.
“She’s gone out somewhere with Mr. Giovanelli,” said Mrs. Miller.
“She’s always going round with Mr. Giovanelli.”
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“I never was sick, and I don’t mean to be!” the signorina declared.
“I don’t look like much, but I’m healthy! I was bound to see the
Colosseum by moonlight; I shouldn’t have wanted to go home with-
out that; and we have had the most beautiful time, haven’t we, Mr.
Giovanelli? If there has been any danger, Eugenio can give me some
pills. He has got some splendid pills.”
“I should advise you,” said Winterbourne, “to drive home as fast
as possible and take one!”
“What you say is very wise,” Giovanelli rejoined. “I will go and
make sure the carriage is at hand.” And he went forward rapidly.
Daisy followed with Winterbourne. He kept looking at her; she
seemed not in the least embarrassed. Winterbourne said nothing;
Daisy chattered about the beauty of the place. “Well, I have seen the
Colosseum by moonlight!” she exclaimed. “That’s one good thing.”
Then, noticing Winterbourne’s silence, she asked him why he didn’t
speak. He made no answer; he only began to laugh. They passed
under one of the dark archways; Giovanelli was in front with the
carriage. Here Daisy stopped a moment, looking at the young Ameri-
can. “Did you believe I was engaged, the other day?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter what I believed the other day,” said Winter-
bourne, still laughing.
“Well, what do you believe now?”
“I believe that it makes very little difference whether you are en-
gaged or not!”
He felt the young girl’s pretty eyes fixed upon him through the
thick gloom of the archway; she was apparently going to answer.
But Giovanelli hurried her forward. “Quick! quick!” he said; “if we
get in by midnight we are quite safe.”
Daisy took her seat in the carriage, and the fortunate Italian placed
himself beside her. “Don’t forget Eugenio’s pills!” said Winterbourne
as he lifted his hat.
“I don’t care,” said Daisy in a little strange tone, “whether I have
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Daisy Miller
Roman fever or not!” Upon this the cab driver cracked his whip,
and they rolled away over the desultory patches of the antique pave-
ment.
Winterbourne, to do him justice, as it were, mentioned to no one
that he had encountered Miss Miller, at midnight, in the Colos-
seum with a gentleman; but nevertheless, a couple of days later, the
fact of her having been there under these circumstances was known
to every member of the little American circle, and commented ac-
cordingly. Winterbourne reflected that they had of course known it
at the hotel, and that, after Daisy’s return, there had been an ex-
change of remarks between the porter and the cab driver. But the
young man was conscious, at the same moment, that it had ceased
to be a matter of serious regret to him that the little American flirt
should be “talked about” by low-minded menials. These people, a
day or two later, had serious information to give: the little American
flirt was alarmingly ill. Winterbourne, when the rumor came to
him, immediately went to the hotel for more news. He found that
two or three charitable friends had preceded him, and that they
were being entertained in Mrs. Miller’s salon by Randolph.
“It’s going round at night,” said Randolph—”that’s what made
her sick. She’s always going round at night. I shouldn’t think she’d
want to, it’s so plaguy dark. You can’t see anything here at night,
except when there’s a moon. In America there’s always a moon!”
Mrs. Miller was invisible; she was now, at least, giving her aughter
the advantage of her society. It was evident that Daisy was danger-
ously ill.
Winterbourne went often to ask for news of her, and once he saw
Mrs. Miller, who, though deeply alarmed, was, rather to his sur-
prise, perfectly composed, and, as it appeared, a most efficient and
judicious nurse. She talked a good deal about Dr. Davis, but Win-
terbourne paid her the compliment of saying to himself that she
was not, after all, such a monstrous goose. “Daisy spoke of you the
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other day,” she said to him. “Half the time she doesn’t know what
she’s saying, but that time I think she did. She gave me a message
she told me to tell you. She told me to tell you that she never was
engaged to that handsome Italian. I am sure I am very glad; Mr.
Giovanelli hasn’t been near us since she was taken ill. I thought he
was so much of a gentleman; but I don’t call that very polite! A lady
told me that he was afraid I was angry with him for taking Daisy
round at night. Well, so I am, but I suppose he knows I’m a lady. I
would scorn to scold him. Anyway, she says she’s not engaged. I
don’t know why she wanted you to know, but she said to me three
times, ‘Mind you tell Mr. Winterbourne.’ And then she told me to
ask if you remembered the time you went to that castle in Switzer-
land. But I said I wouldn’t give any such messages as that. Only, if
she is not engaged, I’m sure I’m glad to know it.”
But, as Winterbourne had said, it mattered very little. A week
after this, the poor girl died; it had been a terrible case of the fever.
Daisy’s grave was in the little Protestant cemetery, in an angle of the
wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring
flowers. Winterbourne stood there beside it, with a number of other
mourners, a number larger than the scandal excited by the young
lady’s career would have led you to expect. Near him stood Giovanelli,
who came nearer still before Winterbourne turned away. Giovanelli
was very pale: on this occasion he had no flower in his buttonhole;
he seemed to wish to say something. At last he said, “She was the
most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable”; and
then he added in a moment, “and she was the most innocent.”
Winterbourne looked at him and presently repeated his words,
“And the most innocent?”
“The most innocent!”
Winterbourne felt sore and angry. “Why the devil,” he asked,
“did you take her to that fatal place?”
Mr. Giovanelli’s urbanity was apparently imperturbable. He looked
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CHAPTER I
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months; but if they didn’t say he was to stay all summer as well it
was only because this was more than they ventured to hope. I re-
member that at dinner that evening he wore slippers, new and pre-
dominantly purple, of some queer carpet-stuff; but the Mulvilles
were still in the stage of supposing that he might be snatched from
them by higher bidders. At a later time they grew, poor dears, to
fear no snatching; but theirs was a fidelity which needed no help
from competition to make them proud. Wonderful indeed as, when
all was said, you inevitably pronounced Frank Saltram, it was not to
be overlooked that the Kent Mulvilles were in their way still more
extraordinary: as striking an instance as could easily be encountered
of the familiar truth that remarkable men find remarkable conve-
niences.
They had sent for me from Wimbledon to come out and dine,
and there had been an implication in Adelaide’s note—judged by
her notes alone she might have been thought silly—that it was a
case in which something momentous was to be determined or done.
I had never known them not be in a “state” about somebody, and I
dare say I tried to be droll on this point in accepting their invita-
tion. On finding myself in the presence of their latest discovery I
had not at first felt irreverence droop—and, thank heaven, I have
never been absolutely deprived of that alternative in Mr. Saltram’s
company. I saw, however—I hasten to declare it—that compared to
this specimen their other phoenixes had been birds of inconsider-
able feather, and I afterwards took credit to myself for not having
even in primal bewilderments made a mistake about the essence of
the man. He had an incomparable gift; I never was blind to it—it
dazzles me still. It dazzles me perhaps even more in remembrance
than in fact, for I’m not unaware that for so rare a subject the imagi-
nation goes to some expense, inserting a jewel here and there or
giving a twist to a plume. How the art of portraiture would rejoice
in this figure if the art of portraiture had only the canvas! Nature, in
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truth, had largely rounded it, and if memory, hovering about it,
sometimes holds her breath, this is because the voice that comes
back was really golden.
Though the great man was an inmate and didn’t dress, he kept
dinner on this occasion waiting, and the first words he uttered on
coming into the room were an elated announcement to Mulville
that he had found out something. Not catching the allusion and
gaping doubtless a little at his face, I privately asked Adelaide what
he had found out. I shall never forget the look she gave me as she
replied: “Everything!” She really believed it. At that moment, at any
rate, he had found out that the mercy of the Mulvilles was infinite.
He had previously of course discovered, as I had myself for that
matter, that their dinners were soignes. Let me not indeed, in saying
this, neglect to declare that I shall falsify my counterfeit if I seem to
hint that there was in his nature any ounce of calculation. He took
whatever came, but he never plotted for it, and no man who was so
much of an absorbent can ever have been so little of a parasite. He
had a system of the universe, but he had no system of sponging—
that was quite hand-to-mouth. He had fine gross easy senses, but it
was not his good-natured appetite that wrought confusion. If he
had loved us for our dinners we could have paid with our dinners,
and it would have been a great economy of finer matter. I make free
in these connexions with the plural possessive because if I was never
able to do what the Mulvilles did, and people with still bigger houses
and simpler charities, I met, first and last, every demand of reflexion,
of emotion—particularly perhaps those of gratitude and of resent-
ment. No one, I think, paid the tribute of giving him up so often,
and if it’s rendering honour to borrow wisdom I’ve a right to talk of
my sacrifices. He yielded lessons as the sea yields fish—I lived for a
while on this diet. Sometimes it almost appeared to me that his
massive monstrous failure—if failure after all it was—had been de-
signed for my private recreation. He fairly pampered my curiosity;
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but the history of that experience would take me too far. This is not
the large canvas I just now spoke of, and I wouldn’t have approached
him with my present hand had it been a question of all the features.
Frank Saltram’s features, for artistic purposes, are verily the anec-
dotes that are to be gathered. Their name is legion, and this is only
one, of which the interest is that it concerns even more closely sev-
eral other persons. Such episodes, as one looks back, are the little
dramas that made up the innumerable facets of the big drama—
which is yet to be reported.
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CHAPTER II
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the sense of being well set up on his legs, George Gravener had
actually ceased to tower. The universe he laid low had somehow
bloomed again—the usual eminences were visible. I wondered
whether he had lost his humour, or only, dreadful thought, had
never had any—not even when I had fancied him most
Aristophanesque. What was the need of appealing to laughter, how-
ever, I could enviously enquire, where you might appeal so confi-
dently to measurement? Mr. Saltram’s queer figure, his thick nose
and hanging lip, were fresh to me: in the light of my old friend’s fine
cold symmetry they presented mere success in amusing as the ref-
uge of conscious ugliness. Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener
looked as blank and parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular.
In my scrap of a residence—he had a worldling’s eye for its futile
conveniences, but never a comrade’s joke—I sounded Frank Saltram
in his ears; a circumstance I mention in order to note that even then
I was surprised at his impatience of my enlivenment. As he had
never before heard of the personage it took indeed the form of im-
patience of the preposterous Mulvilles, his relation to whom, like
mine, had had its origin in an early, a childish intimacy with the
young Adelaide, the fruit of multiplied ties in the previous genera-
tion. When she married Kent Mulville, who was older than Gravener
and I and much more amiable, I gained a friend, but Gravener prac-
tically lost one. We reacted in different ways from the form taken by
what he called their deplorable social action—the form (the term
was also his) of nasty second-rate gush. I may have held in my ‘for
interieur’ that the good people at Wimbledon were beautiful fools,
but when he sniffed at them I couldn’t help taking the opposite line,
for I already felt that even should we happen to agree it would al-
ways be for reasons that differed. It came home to me that he was
admirably British as, without so much as a sociable sneer at my
bookbinder, he turned away from the serried rows of my little French
library.
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“Of course I’ve never seen the fellow, but it’s clear enough he’s a
humbug.”
“Clear ‘enough’ is just what it isn’t,” I replied; “if it only were!”
That ejaculation on my part must have been the beginning of what
was to be later a long ache for final frivolous rest. Gravener was
profound enough to remark after a moment that in the first place
he couldn’t be anything but a Dissenter, and when I answered that
the very note of his fascination was his extraordinary speculative
breadth my friend retorted that there was no cad like your culti-
vated cad, and that I might depend upon discovering—since I had
had the levity not already to have enquired—that my shining light
proceeded, a generation back, from a Methodist cheesemonger. I
confess I was struck with his insistence, and I said, after reflexion:
“It may be—I admit it may be; but why on earth are you so sure?”—
asking the question mainly to lay him the trap of saying that it was
because the poor man didn’t dress for dinner. He took an instant to
circumvent my trap and come blandly out the other side.
“Because the Kent Mulvilles have invented him. They’ve an infallible
hand for frauds. All their geese are swans. They were born to be duped,
they like it, they cry for it, they don’t know anything from anything,
and they disgust one—luckily perhaps!—with Christian charity.” His
vehemence was doubtless an accident, but it might have been a strange
foreknowledge. I forget what protest I dropped; it was at any rate some-
thing that led him to go on after a moment: “I only ask one thing—it’s
perfectly simple. Is a man, in a given case, a real gentleman?”
“A real gentleman, my dear fellow—that’s so soon said!”
“Not so soon when he isn’t! If they’ve got hold of one this time he
must be a great rascal!”
“I might feel injured,” I answered, “if I didn’t reflect that they
don’t rave about me.”
“Don’t be too sure! I’ll grant that he’s a gentleman,” Gravener pres-
ently added, “if you’ll admit that he’s a scamp.”
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CHAPTER III
IF THAT FIRST NIGHT was one of the liveliest, or at any rate was the
freshest, of my exaltations, there was another, four years later, that
was one of my great discomposures. Repetition, I well knew by this
time, was the secret of Saltram’s power to alienate, and of course one
would never have seen him at his finest if one hadn’t seen him in his
remorses. They set in mainly at this season and were magnificent,
elemental, orchestral. I was quite aware that one of these atmospheric
disturbances was now due; but none the less, in our arduous at-
tempt to set him on his feet as a lecturer, it was impossible not to
feel that two failures were a large order, as we said, for a short course
of five. This was the second time, and it was past nine o’clock; the
audience, a muster unprecedented and really encouraging, had for-
tunately the attitude of blandness that might have been looked for
in persons whom the promise of (if I’m not mistaken) An Analysis
of Primary Ideas had drawn to the neighbourhood of Upper Baker
Street. There was in those days in that region a petty lecture-hall to
be secured on terms as moderate as the funds left at our disposal by
the irrepressible question of the maintenance of five small Saltrams—
I include the mother—and one large one. By the time the Saltrams,
of different sizes, were all maintained we had pretty well poured out
the oil that might have lubricated the machinery for enabling the
most original of men to appear to maintain them.
It was I, the other time, who had been forced into the breach,
standing up there for an odious lamplit moment to explain to half a
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She let her charming gay eyes rest on me. “You don’t look humili-
ated a bit, and if you did I should let you off, disappointed as I am;
for the mysterious quality you speak of is just the quality I came to
see.”
“Oh, you can’t ‘see’ it!” I cried.
“How then do you get at it?”
“You don’t! You mustn’t suppose he’s good-looking,” I added.
“Why his wife says he’s lovely!”
My hilarity may have struck her as excessive, but I confess it broke
out afresh. Had she acted only in obedience to this singular plea, so
characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram’s part, of what was irritating in the
narrowness of that lady’s point of view? “Mrs. Saltram,” I explained,
“undervalues him where he’s strongest, so that, to make up for it
perhaps, she overpraises him where he’s weak. He’s not, assuredly,
superficially attractive; he’s middle-aged, fat, featureless save for his
great eyes.”
“Yes, his great eyes,” said my young lady attentively. She had evi-
dently heard all about his great eyes—the beaux yeux for which
alone we had really done it all.
“They’re tragic and splendid—lights on a dangerous coast. But
he moves badly and dresses worse, and altogether he’s anything but
smart.”
My companion, who appeared to reflect on this, after a moment
appealed. “Do you call him a real gentleman?”
I started slightly at the question, for I had a sense of recognising
it: George Gravener, years before, that first flushed night, had put
me face to face with it. It had embarrassed me then, but it didn’t
embarrass me now, for I had lived with it and overcome it and dis-
posed of it. “A real gentleman? Emphatically not!”
My promptitude surprised her a little, but I quickly felt how little
it was to Gravener I was now talking. “Do you say that because
he’s—what do you call it in England?—of humble extraction?”
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“Not a bit. His father was a country school-master and his mother
the widow of a sexton, but that has nothing to do with it. I say it
simply because I know him well.”
“But isn’t it an awful drawback?”
“Awful—quite awful.”
“I mean isn’t it positively fatal?”
“Fatal to what? Not to his magnificent vitality.”
Again she had a meditative moment. “And is his magnificent vi-
tality the cause of his vices?”
“Your questions are formidable, but I’m glad you put them. I was
thinking of his noble intellect. His vices, as you say, have been much
exaggerated: they consist mainly after all in one comprehensive defect.”
“A want of will?”
“A want of dignity.”
“He doesn’t recognise his obligations?”
“On the contrary, he recognises them with effusion, especially in
public: he smiles and bows and beckons across the street to them.
But when they pass over he turns away, and he speedily loses them
in the crowd. The recognition’s purely spiritual—it isn’t in the least
social. So he leaves all his belongings to other people to take care of.
He accepts favours, loans, sacrifices—all with nothing more deter-
rent than an agony of shame. Fortunately we’re a little faithful band,
and we do what we can.” I held my tongue about the natural chil-
dren, engendered, to the number of three, in the wantonness of his
youth. I only remarked that he did make efforts—often tremen-
dous ones. “But the efforts,” I said, “never come to much: the only
things that come to much are the abandonments, the surrenders.”
“And how much do they come to?”
“You’re right to put it as if we had a big bill to pay, but, as I’ve told
you before, your questions are rather terrible. They come, these mere
exercises of genius, to a great sum total of poetry, of philosophy, a
mighty mass of speculation, notation, quotation. The genius is there,
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you see, to meet the surrender; but there’s no genius to support the
defence.”
“But what is there, after all, at his age, to show?”
“In the way of achievement recognised and reputation established?”
I asked. “To ‘show’ if you will, there isn’t much, since his writing,
mostly, isn’t as fine, isn’t certainly as showy, as his talk. Moreover
two-thirds of his work are merely colossal projects and announce-
ments. ‘Showing’ Frank Saltram is often a poor business,” I went
on: “we endeavoured, you’ll have observed, to show him to-night!
However, if he had lectured he’d have lectured divinely. It would
just have been his talk.”
“And what would his talk just have been?”
I was conscious of some ineffectiveness, as well perhaps as of a
little impatience, as I replied: “The exhibition of a splendid intel-
lect.” My young lady looked not quite satisfied at this, but as I wasn’t
prepared for another question I hastily pursued: “The sight of a
great suspended swinging crystal—huge lucid lustrous, a block of
light—flashing back every impression of life and every possibility of
thought!”
This gave her something to turn over till we had passed out to the
dusky porch of the hall, in front of which the lamps of a quiet
brougham were almost the only thing Saltram’s treachery hadn’t
extinguished. I went with her to the door of her carriage, out of
which she leaned a moment after she had thanked me and taken her
seat. Her smile even in the darkness was pretty. “I do want to see
that crystal!”
“You’ve only to come to the next lecture.”
“I go abroad in a day or two with my aunt.”
“Wait over till next week,” I suggested. “It’s quite worth it.”
She became grave. “Not unless he really comes!” At which the
brougham started off, carrying her away too fast, fortunately for my
manners, to allow me to exclaim “Ingratitude!”
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CHAPTER IV
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band had in the long run done most for herself; and the warm con-
fidence with which he had laid his length upon them was a pressure
gentle compared with her stiffer persuadability. I’m bound to say he
didn’t criticise his benefactors, though practically he got tired of
them; she, however, had the highest standards about eleemosynary
forms. She offered the odd spectacle of a spirit puffed up by depen-
dence, and indeed it had introduced her to some excellent society.
She pitied me for not knowing certain people who aided her and
whom she doubtless patronised in turn for their luck in not know-
ing me. I dare say I should have got on with her better if she had
had a ray of imagination—if it had occasionally seemed to occur to
her to regard Saltram’s expressions of his nature in any other man-
ner than as separate subjects of woe. They were all flowers of his
character, pearls strung on an endless thread; but she had a stub-
born little way of challenging them one after the other, as if she
never suspected that he had a character, such as it was, or that defi-
ciencies might be organic; the irritating effect of a mind incapable
of a generalisation. One might doubtless have overdone the idea
that there was a general licence for such a man; but if this had hap-
pened it would have been through one’s feeling that there could be
none for such a woman.
I recognised her superiority when I asked her about the aunt of
the disappointed young lady: it sounded like a sentence from an
English-French or other phrase-book. She triumphed in what she
told me and she may have triumphed still more in what she with-
held. My friend of the other evening, Miss Anvoy, had but lately
come to England; Lady Coxon, the aunt, had been established here
for years in consequence of her marriage with the late Sir Gregory
of that name. She had a house in the Regent’s Park, a Bath-chair
and a fernery; and above all she had sympathy. Mrs. Saltram had
made her acquaintance through mutual friends. This vagueness
caused me to feel how much I was out of it and how large an inde-
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accident, that, as a lecturer, would still make the paying public aware
of our great man, but the fact remained that in the case of an inspi-
ration so unequal there was treachery, there was fallacy at least, in
the very conception of a series. In our scrutiny of ways and means
we were inevitably subject to the old convention of the synopsis,
the syllabus, partly of course not to lose the advantage of his grand
free hand in drawing up such things; but for myself I laughed at our
playbills even while I stickled for them. It was indeed amusing work
to be scrupulous for Frank Saltram, who also at moments laughed
about it, so far as the comfort of a sigh so unstudied as to be cheer-
ful might pass for such a sound. He admitted with a candour all his
own that he was in truth only to be depended on in the Mulvilles’
drawing-room. “Yes,” he suggestively allowed, “it’s there, I think,
that I’m at my best; quite late, when it gets toward eleven—and if
I’ve not been too much worried.” We all knew what too much worry
meant; it meant too enslaved for the hour to the superstition of
sobriety. On the Saturdays I used to bring my portmanteau, so as
not to have to think of eleven o’clock trains. I had a bold theory that
as regards this temple of talk and its altars of cushioned chintz, its
pictures and its flowers, its large fireside and clear lamplight, we
might really arrive at something if the Mulvilles would but charge
for admission. Here it was, however, that they shamelessly broke
down; as there’s a flaw in every perfection this was the inexpugnable
refuge of their egotism. They declined to make their saloon a mar-
ket, so that Saltram’s golden words continued the sole coin that
rang there. It can have happened to no man, however, to be paid a
greater price than such an enchanted hush as surrounded him on
his greatest nights. The most profane, on these occasions, felt a pres-
ence; all minor eloquence grew dumb. Adelaide Mulville, for the
pride of her hospitality, anxiously watched the door or stealthily
poked the fire. I used to call it the music-room, for we had antici-
pated Bayreuth. The very gates of the kingdom of light seemed to
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open and the horizon of thought to flash with the beauty of a sun-
rise at sea.
In the consideration of ways and means, the sittings of our little
board, we were always conscious of the creak of Mrs. Saltram’s shoes.
She hovered, she interrupted, she almost presided, the state of affairs
being mostly such as to supply her with every incentive for enquiring
what was to be done next. It was the pressing pursuit of this knowl-
edge that, in concatenations of omnibuses and usually in very wet
weather, led her so often to my door. She thought us spiritless crea-
tures with editors and publishers; but she carried matters to no great
effect when she personally pushed into back-shops. She wanted all
moneys to be paid to herself: they were otherwise liable to such strange
adventures. They trickled away into the desert—they were mainly at
best, alas, a slender stream. The editors and the publishers were the
last people to take this remarkable thinker at the valuation that has
now pretty well come to be established. The former were half-dis-
traught between the desire to “cut” him and the difficulty of finding a
crevice for their shears; and when a volume on this or that portentous
subject was proposed to the latter they suggested alternative titles
which, as reported to our friend, brought into his face the noble blank
melancholy that sometimes made it handsome. The title of an un-
written book didn’t after all much matter, but some masterpiece of
Saltram’s may have died in his bosom of the shudder with which it
was then convulsed. The ideal solution, failing the fee at Kent Mulville’s
door, would have been some system of subscription to projected trea-
tises with their non-appearance provided for—provided for, I mean,
by the indulgence of subscribers. The author’s real misfortune was
that subscribers were so wretchedly literal. When they tastelessly en-
quired why publication hadn’t ensued I was tempted to ask who in
the world had ever been so published. Nature herself had brought
him out in voluminous form, and the money was simply a deposit on
borrowing the work.
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CHAPTER V
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expected, but on our way back to town he forestalled any little tri-
umph I might have been so artless as to express by the observation
that such a man was—a hundred times!—a man to use and never a
man to be used by. I remember that this neat remark humiliated me
almost as much as if virtually, in the fever of broken slumbers, I
hadn’t often made it myself. The difference was that on Gravener’s
part a force attached to it that could never attach to it on mine. He
was ABLE to use people—he had the machinery; and the irony of
Saltram’s being made showy at Clockborough came out to me when
he said, as if he had no memory of our original talk and the idea
were quite fresh to him: “I hate his type, you know, but I’ll be hanged
if I don’t put some of those things in. I can find a place for them: we
might even find a place for the fellow himself.” I myself should have
had some fear—not, I need scarcely say, for the “things” themselves,
but for some other things very near them; in fine for the rest of my
eloquence.
Later on I could see that the oracle of Wimbledon was not in this
case so appropriate as he would have been had the polities of the
gods only coincided more exactly with those of the party. There was
a distinct moment when, without saying anything more definite to
me, Gravener entertained the idea of annexing Mr. Saltram. Such a
project was delusive, for the discovery of analogies between his body
of doctrine and that pressed from headquarters upon
Clockborough—the bottling, in a word, of the air of those lungs for
convenient public uncorking in corn-exchanges—was an experiment
for which no one had the leisure. The only thing would have been
to carry him massively about, paid, caged, clipped; to turn him on
for a particular occasion in a particular channel. Frank Saltram’s
channel, however, was essentially not calculable, and there was no
knowing what disastrous floods might have ensued. For what there
would have been to do The Empire, the great newspaper, was there
to look to; but it was no new misfortune that there were delicate
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CHAPTER VI
I HAD ALMOST AVOIDED the general election, but some of its conse-
quences, on my return, had smartly to be faced. The season, in
London, began to breathe again and to flap its folded wings. Confi-
dence, under the new Ministry, was understood to be reviving, and
one of the symptoms, in a social body, was a recovery of appetite.
People once more fed together, and it happened that, one Saturday
night, at somebody’s house, I fed with George Gravener. When the
ladies left the room I moved up to where he sat and begged to con-
gratulate him. “On my election?” he asked after a moment; so that
I could feign, jocosely, not to have heard of that triumph and to be
alluding to the rumour of a victory still more personal. I dare say I
coloured however, for his political success had momentarily passed
out of my mind. What was present to it was that he was to marry
that beautiful girl; and yet his question made me conscious of some
discomposure—I hadn’t intended to put this before everything. He
himself indeed ought gracefully to have done so, and I remember
thinking the whole man was in this assumption that in expressing
my sense of what he had won I had fixed my thoughts on his “seat.”
We straightened the matter out, and he was so much lighter in hand
than I had lately seen him that his spirits might well have been fed
from a twofold source. He was so good as to say that he hoped I
should soon make the acquaintance of Miss Anvoy, who, with her
aunt, was presently coming up to town. Lady Coxon, in the coun-
try, had been seriously unwell, and this had delayed their arrival. I
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the eleventh hour; so that I found Miss Anvoy bravely playing host-
ess without even Gravener’s help, since, to make matters worse, he
had just sent up word that the House, the insatiable House, with
which he supposed he had contracted for easier terms, positively
declined to release him. I was struck with the courage, the grace and
gaiety of the young lady left thus to handle the fauna and flora of
the Regent’s Park. I did what I could to help her to classify them,
after I had recovered from the confusion of seeing her slightly dis-
concerted at perceiving in the guest introduced by her intended the
gentleman with whom she had had that talk about Frank Saltram. I
had at this moment my first glimpse of the fact that she was a per-
son who could carry a responsibility; but I leave the reader to judge
of my sense of the aggravation, for either of us, of such a burden,
when I heard the servant announce Mrs. Saltram. From what im-
mediately passed between the two ladies I gathered that the latter
had been sent for post-haste to fill the gap created by the absence of
the mistress of the house. “Good!” I remember crying, “she’ll be put
by me;” and my apprehension was promptly justified. Mrs. Saltram
taken in to dinner, and taken in as a consequence of an appeal to
her amiability, was Mrs. Saltram with a vengeance. I asked myself
what Miss Anvoy meant by doing such things, but the only answer
I arrived at was that Gravener was verily fortunate. She hadn’t hap-
pened to tell him of her visit to Upper Baker Street, but she’d cer-
tainly tell him to-morrow; not indeed that this would make him
like any better her having had the innocence to invite such a person
as Mrs. Saltram on such an occasion. It could only strike me that I
had never seen a young woman put such ignorance into her clever-
ness, such freedom into her modesty; this, I think, was when, after
dinner, she said to me frankly, with almost jubilant mirth: “Oh you
don’t admire Mrs. Saltram?” Why should I? This was truly a young
person without guile. I had briefly to consider before I could reply
that my objection to the lady named was the objection often ut-
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tered about people met at the social board—I knew all her stories.
Then as Miss Anvoy remained momentarily vague I added: “Those
about her husband.”
“Oh yes, but there are some new ones.”
“None for me. Ah novelty would be pleasant!”
“Doesn’t it appear that of late he has been particularly horrid?”
“His fluctuations don’t matter”, I returned, “for at night all cats
are grey. You saw the shade of this one the night we waited for him
together. What will you have? He has no dignity.”
Miss Anvoy, who had been introducing with her American dis-
tinctness, looked encouragingly round at some of the combinations
she had risked. “It’s too bad I can’t see him.”
“You mean Gravener won’t let you?”
“I haven’t asked him. He lets me do everything.”
“But you know he knows him and wonders what some of us see
in him.”
“We haven’t happened to talk of him,” the girl said.
“Get him to take you some day out to see the Mulvilles.”
“I thought Mr. Saltram had thrown the Mulvilles over.”
“Utterly. But that won’t prevent his being planted there again, to
bloom like a rose, within a month or two.”
Miss Anvoy thought a moment. Then, “I should like to see them,”
she said with her fostering smile.
“They’re tremendously worth it. You mustn’t miss them.”
“I’ll make George take me,” she went on as Mrs. Saltram came up
to interrupt us. She sniffed at this unfortunate as kindly as she had
smiled at me and, addressing the question to her, continued: “But
the chance of a lecture—one of the wonderful lectures? Isn’t there
another course announced?”
“Another? There are about thirty!” I exclaimed, turning away and
feeling Mrs. Saltram’s little eyes in my back. A few days after this I
heard that Gravener’s marriage was near at hand—was settled for
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was to marry and whom he had brought out the other Sunday. I
could see that this presentation had been happy, for Mrs. Mulville
commemorated it after her sole fashion of showing confidence in a
new relation. “She likes me—she likes me”: her native humility ex-
ulted in that measure of success. We all knew for ourselves how she
liked those who liked her, and as regards Ruth Anvoy she was more
easily won over than Lady Maddock.
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CHAPTER VII
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would have help however, the same help I myself had once had, in
resisting its tendency to make one cross.
“What help do you mean?”
“That of the member for Clockborough.”
She stared, smiled, then returned: “Why my idea has been to help
him!”
She had helped him—I had his own word for it that at Clockborough
her bedevilment of the voters had really put him in. She would do so
doubtless again and again, though I heard the very next month that this
fine faculty had undergone a temporary eclipse. News of the catastro-
phe first came to me from Mrs. Saltram, and it was afterwards con-
firmed at Wimbledon: poor Miss Anvoy was in trouble—great disas-
ters in America had suddenly summoned her home. Her father, in New
York, had suffered reverses, lost so much money that it was really vexa-
tious as showing how much he had had. It was Adelaide who told me
she had gone off alone at less than a week’s notice.
“Alone? Gravener has permitted that?”
“What will you have? The House of Commons!”
I’m afraid I cursed the House of Commons: I was so much inter-
ested. Of course he’d follow her as soon as he was free to make her
his wife; only she mightn’t now be able to bring him anything like
the marriage-portion of which he had begun by having the virtual
promise. Mrs. Mulville let me know what was already said: she was
charming, this American girl, but really these American fathers—!
What was a man to do? Mr. Saltram, according to Mrs. Mulville,
was of opinion that a man was never to suffer his relation to money
to become a spiritual relation—he was to keep it exclusively mate-
rial. “Moi pas comprendre!” I commented on this; in rejoinder to
which Adelaide, with her beautiful sympathy, explained that she
supposed he simply meant that the thing was to use it, don’t you
know? but not to think too much about it. “To take it, but not to
thank you for it?” I still more profanely enquired. For a quarter of
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an hour afterwards she wouldn’t look at me, but this didn’t prevent
my asking her what had been the result, that afternoon—in the
Regent’s Park, of her taking our friend to see Miss Anvoy.
“Oh so charming!” she answered, brightening. “He said he
recognised in her a nature he could absolutely trust.”
“Yes, but I’m speaking of the effect on herself.”
Mrs. Mulville had to remount the stream. “It was everything one
could wish.”
Something in her tone made me laugh. “Do you mean she gave
him—a dole?”
“Well, since you ask me!”
“Right there on the spot?”
Again poor Adelaide faltered. “It was to me of course she gave it.”
I stared; somehow I couldn’t see the scene. “Do you mean a sum
of money?”
“It was very handsome.” Now at last she met my eyes, though I
could see it was with an effort. “Thirty pounds.”
“Straight out of her pocket?”
“Out of the drawer of a table at which she had been writing. She
just slipped the folded notes into my hand. He wasn’t looking; it
was while he was going back to the carriage.” “Oh,” said Adelaide
reassuringly, “I take care of it for him!” The dear practical soul
thought my agitation, for I confess I was agitated, referred to the
employment of the money. Her disclosure made me for a moment
muse violently, and I dare say that during that moment I wondered
if anything else in the world makes people so gross as unselfishness.
I uttered, I suppose, some vague synthetic cry, for she went on as if
she had had a glimpse of my inward amaze at such passages. “I
assure you, my dear friend, he was in one of his happy hours.”
But I wasn’t thinking of that. “Truly indeed these Americans!” I
said. “With her father in the very act, as it were, of swindling her
betrothed!”
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Mrs. Mulville stared. “Oh I suppose Mr. Anvoy has scarcely gone
bankrupt—or whatever he has done—on purpose. Very likely they
won’t be able to keep it up, but there it was, and it was a very beau-
tiful impulse.”
“You say Saltram was very fine?”
“Beyond everything. He surprised even me.”
“And I know what you’ve enjoyed.” After a moment I added: “Had
he peradventure caught a glimpse of the money in the table-drawer?”
At this my companion honestly flushed. “How can you be so
cruel when you know how little he calculates?”
“Forgive me, I do know it. But you tell me things that act on my
nerves. I’m sure he hadn’t caught a glimpse of anything but some
splendid idea.”
Mrs. Mulville brightly concurred. “And perhaps even of her beau-
tiful listening face.”
“Perhaps even! And what was it all about?”
“His talk? It was apropos of her engagement, which I had told
him about: the idea of marriage, the philosophy, the poetry, the
sublimity of it.” It was impossible wholly to restrain one’s mirth at
this, and some rude ripple that I emitted again caused my compan-
ion to admonish me. “It sounds a little stale, but you know his
freshness.”
“Of illustration? Indeed I do!”
“And how he has always been right on that great question.”
“On what great question, dear lady, hasn’t he been right?”
“Of what other great men can you equally say it?—and that he
has never, but never, had a deflexion?” Mrs. Mulville exultantly de-
manded.
I tried to think of some other great man, but I had to give it up.
“Didn’t Miss Anvoy express her satisfaction in any less diffident way
than by her charming present?” I was reduced to asking instead.
“Oh yes, she overflowed to me on the steps while he was getting
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CHAPTER VIII
GEORGE GRAVENER didn’t follow her, for late in September, after the
House had risen, I met him in a railway-carriage. He was coming
up from Scotland and I had just quitted some relations who lived
near Durham. The current of travel back to London wasn’t yet strong;
at any rate on entering the compartment I found he had had it for
some time to himself. We fared in company, and though he had a
blue-book in his lap and the open jaws of his bag threatened me
with the white teeth of confused papers, we inevitably, we even at
last sociably conversed. I saw things weren’t well with him, but I
asked no question till something dropped by himself made, as it
had made on another occasion, an absence of curiosity invidious.
He mentioned that he was worried about his good old friend Lady
Coxon, who, with her niece likely to be detained some time in
America, lay seriously ill at Clockborough, much on his mind and
on his hands.
“Ah Miss Anvoy’s in America?”
“Her father has got into horrid straits—has lost no end of money.”
I waited, after expressing due concern, but I eventually said: “I hope
that raises no objection to your marriage.”
“None whatever; moreover it’s my trade to meet objections. But it
may create tiresome delays, of which there have been too many, from
various causes, already. Lady Coxon got very bad, then she got much
better. Then Mr. Anvoy suddenly began to totter, and now he seems
quite on his back. I’m afraid he’s really in for some big reverse. Lady
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Coxon’s worse again, awfully upset by the news from America, and she
sends me word that she must have Ruth. How can I supply her with
Ruth? I haven’t got Ruth myself!”
“Surely you haven’t lost her?” I returned.
“She’s everything to her wretched father. She writes me every post—
telling me to smooth her aunt’s pillow. I’ve other things to smooth;
but the old lady, save for her servants, is really alone. She won’t receive
her Coxon relations—she’s angry at so much of her money going to
them. Besides, she’s hopelessly mad,” said Gravener very frankly.
I don’t remember whether it was this, or what it was, that made me
ask if she hadn’t such an appreciation of Mrs. Saltram as might render
that active person of some use.
He gave me a cold glance, wanting to know what had put Mrs.
Saltram into my head, and I replied that she was unfortunately never
out of it. I happened to remember the wonderful accounts she had
given me of the kindness Lady Coxon had shown her. Gravener
declared this to be false; Lady Coxon, who didn’t care for her, hadn’t
seen her three times. The only foundation for it was that Miss Anvoy,
who used, poor girl, to chuck money about in a manner she must
now regret, had for an hour seen in the miserable woman—you
could never know what she’d see in people—an interesting pretext
for the liberality with which her nature overflowed. But even Miss
Anvoy was now quite tired of her. Gravener told me more about the
crash in New York and the annoyance it had been to him, and we
also glanced here and there in other directions; but by the time we
got to Doncaster the principal thing he had let me see was that he
was keeping something back. We stopped at that station, and, at the
carriage-door, some one made a movement to get in. Gravener ut-
tered a sound of impatience, and I felt sure that but for this I should
have had the secret. Then the intruder, for some reason, spared us
his company; we started afresh, and my hope of a disclosure re-
turned. My companion held his tongue, however, and I pretended
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to meet this unexpected hint that I could help him. I saw that I
could from the insincere tone in which he pursued: “I’ve criticised
her of course, I’ve contended with her, and it has been great fun.”
Yet it clearly couldn’t have been such great fun as to make it im-
proper for me presently to ask if Miss Anvoy had nothing at all
settled on herself. To this he replied that she had only a trifle from
her mother—a mere four hundred a year, which was exactly why it
would be convenient to him that she shouldn’t decline, in the face
of this total change in her prospects, an accession of income which
would distinctly help them to marry. When I enquired if there were
no other way in which so rich and so affectionate an aunt could
cause the weight of her benevolence to be felt, he answered that
Lady Coxon was affectionate indeed, but was scarcely to be called
rich. She could let her project of the Fund lapse for her niece’s ben-
efit, but she couldn’t do anything else. She had been accustomed to
regard her as tremendously provided for, and she was up to her eyes
in promises to anxious Coxons. She was a woman of an inordinate
conscience, and her conscience was now a distress to her, hovering
round her bed in irreconcilable forms of resentful husbands, por-
tionless nieces and undiscoverable philosophers.
We were by this time getting into the whirr of fleeting platforms,
the multiplication of lights. “I think you’ll find,” I said with a laugh,
“that your predicament will disappear in the very fact that the phi-
losopher is undiscoverable.”
He began to gather up his papers. “Who can set a limit to the
ingenuity of an extravagant woman?”
“Yes, after all, who indeed?” I echoed as I recalled the extrava-
gance commemorated in Adelaide’s anecdote of Miss Anvoy and
the thirty pounds.
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CHAPTER IX
THE THING I had been most sensible of in that talk with George
Gravener was the way Saltram’s name kept out of it. It seemed to me
at the time that we were quite pointedly silent about him; but after-
wards it appeared more probable there had been on my companion’s
part no conscious avoidance. Later on I was sure of this, and for the
best of reasons—the simple reason of my perceiving more com-
pletely that, for evil as well as for good, he said nothing to Gravener’s
imagination. That honest man didn’t fear him—he was too much
disgusted with him. No more did I, doubtless, and for very much
the same reason. I treated my friend’s story as an absolute confi-
dence; but when before Christmas, by Mrs. Saltram, I was informed
of Lady Coxon’s death without having had news of Miss Anvoy’s
return, I found myself taking for granted we should hear no more
of these nuptials, in which, as obscurely unnatural, I now saw I had
never too disconcertedly believed. I began to ask myself how people
who suited each other so little could please each other so much. The
charm was some material charm, some afffinity, exquisite doubt-
less, yet superficial some surrender to youth and beauty and pas-
sion, to force and grace and fortune, happy accidents and easy con-
tacts. They might dote on each other’s persons, but how could they
know each other’s souls? How could they have the same prejudices,
how could they have the same horizon? Such questions, I confess,
seemed quenched but not answered when, one day in February,
going out to Wimbledon, I found our young lady in the house. A
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passion that had brought her back across the wintry ocean was as
much of a passion as was needed. No impulse equally strong indeed
had drawn George Gravener to America; a circumstance on which,
however, I reflected only long enough to remind myself that it was
none of my business. Ruth Anvoy was distinctly different, and I felt
that the difference was not simply that of her marks of mourning.
Mrs. Mulville told me soon enough what it was: it was the differ-
ence between a handsome girl with large expectations and a hand-
some girl with only four hundred a year. This explanation indeed
didn’t wholly content me, not even when I learned that her mourn-
ing had a double cause—learned that poor Mr. Anvoy, giving way
altogether, buried under the ruins of his fortune and leaving next to
nothing, had died a few weeks before.
“So she has come out to marry George Gravener?” I commented.
“Wouldn’t it have been prettier of him to have saved her the trouble?”
“Hasn’t the House just met?” Adelaide replied. “And for Mr.
Gravener the House—!” Then she added: “I gather that her having
come is exactly a sign that the marriage is a little shaky. If it were
quite all right a self-respecting girl like Ruth would have waited for
him over there.”
I noted that they were already Ruth and Adelaide, but what I said
was: “Do you mean she’ll have had to return to make it so?”
“No, I mean that she must have come out for some reason inde-
pendent of it.” Adelaide could only surmise, however, as yet, and
there was more, as we found, to be revealed. Mrs. Mulville, on hear-
ing of her arrival, had brought the young lady out in the green landau
for the Sunday. The Coxons were in possession of the house in
Regent’s Park, and Miss Anvoy was in dreary lodgings. George
Gravener had been with her when Adelaide called, but had assented
graciously enough to the little visit at Wimbledon. The carriage,
with Mr. Saltram in it but not mentioned, had been sent off on
some errand from which it was to return and pick the ladies up.
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Gravener had left them together, and at the end of an hour, on the
Saturday afternoon, the party of three had driven out to Wimbledon.
This was the girl’s second glimpse of our great man, and I was inter-
ested in asking Mrs. Mulville if the impression made by the first
appeared to have been confirmed. On her replying after consider-
ation, that of course with time and opportunity it couldn’t fail to
be, but that she was disappointed, I was sufficiently struck with her
use of this last word to question her further.
“Do you mean you’re disappointed because you judge Miss Anvoy
to be?”
“Yes; I hoped for a greater effect last evening. We had two or three
people, but he scarcely opened his mouth.”
“He’ll be all the better to-night,” I opined after a moment. Then
I pursued: “What particular importance do you attach to the idea
of her being impressed?”
Adelaide turned her mild pale eyes on me as for rebuke of my
levity. “Why the importance of her being as happy as we are!”
I’m afraid that at this my levity grew. “Oh that’s a happiness al-
most too great to wish a person!” I saw she hadn’t yet in her mind
what I had in mine, and at any rate the visitor’s actual bliss was
limited to a walk in the garden with Kent Mulville. Later in the
afternoon I also took one, and I saw nothing of Miss Anvoy till
dinner, at which we failed of the company of Saltram, who had
caused it to be reported that he was indisposed and lying down.
This made us, most of us—for there were other friends present—
convey to each other in silence some of the unutterable things that
in those years our eyes had inevitably acquired the art of expressing.
If a fine little American enquirer hadn’t been there we would have
expressed them otherwise, and Adelaide would have pretended not
to hear. I had seen her, before the very fact, abstract herself nobly;
and I knew that more than once, to keep it from the servants, man-
aging, dissimulating cleverly, she had helped her husband to carry
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him bodily to his room. Just recently he had been so wise and so
deep and so high that I had begun to get nervous—to wonder if by
chance there were something behind it, if he were kept straight for
instance by the knowledge that the hated Pudneys would have more
to tell us if they chose. He was lying low, but unfortunately it was
common wisdom with us in this connexion that the biggest splashes
took place in the quietest pools. We should have had a merry life
indeed if all the splashes had sprinkled us as refreshingly as the wa-
ters we were even then to feel about our ears. Kent Mulville had
been up to his room, but had come back with a face that told as few
tales as I had seen it succeed in telling on the evening I waited in the
lecture-room with Miss Anvoy. I said to myself that our friend had
gone out, but it was a comfort that the presence of a comparative
stranger deprived us of the dreary duty of suggesting to each other,
in respect of his errand, edifying possibilities in which we didn’t
ourselves believe. At ten o’clock he came into the drawing-room
with his waistcoat much awry but his eyes sending out great signals.
It was precisely with his entrance that I ceased to be vividly con-
scious of him. I saw that the crystal, as I had called it, had begun to
swing, and I had need of my immediate attention for Miss Anvoy.
Even when I was told afterwards that he had, as we might have
said to-day, broken the record, the manner in which that attention
had been rewarded relieved me of a sense of loss. I had of course a
perfect general consciousness that something great was going on: it
was a little like having been etherised to hear Herr Joachim play.
The old music was in the air; I felt the strong pulse of thought, the
sink and swell, the flight, the poise, the plunge; but I knew some-
thing about one of the listeners that nobody else knew, and Saltram’s
monologue could reach me only through that medium. To this hour
I’m of no use when, as a witness, I’m appealed to—for they still
absurdly contend about it—as to whether or no on that historic
night he was drunk; and my position is slightly ridiculous, for I’ve
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never cared to tell them what it really was I was taken up with.
What I got out of it is the only morsel of the total experience that is
quite my own. The others were shared, but this is incommunicable.
I feel that now, I’m bound to say, even in thus roughly evoking the
occasion, and it takes something from my pride of clearness. How-
ever, I shall perhaps be as clear as is absolutely needful if I remark
that our young lady was too much given up to her own intensity of
observation to be sensible of mine. It was plainly not the question
of her marriage that had brought her back. I greatly enjoyed this
discovery and was sure that had that question alone been involved
she would have stirred no step. In this case doubtless Gravener would,
in spite of the House of Commons, have found means to rejoin her.
It afterwards made me uncomfortable for her that, alone in the lodg-
ing Mrs. Mulville had put before me as dreary, she should have in any
degree the air of waiting for her fate; so that I was presently relieved at
hearing of her having gone to stay at Coldfield. If she was in England
at all while the engagement stood the only proper place for her was
under Lady Maddock’s wing. Now that she was unfortunate and rela-
tively poor, perhaps her prospective sister-in-law would be wholly
won over.
There would be much to say, if I had space, about the way her
behaviour, as I caught gleams of it, ministered to the image that had
taken birth in my mind, to my private amusement, while that other
night I listened to George Gravener in the railway-carriage. I watched
her in the light of this queer possibility—a formidable thing cer-
tainly to meet—and I was aware that it coloured, extravagantly per-
haps, my interpretation of her very looks and tones. At Wimbledon
for instance it had appeared to me she was literally afraid of Saltram,
in dread of a coercion that she had begun already to feel. I had come
up to town with her the next day and had been convinced that,
though deeply interested, she was immensely on her guard. She
would show as little as possible before she should be ready to show
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CHAPTER X
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“Awful?”
“Why, to have anything to do with such an idea one’s self.”
“I’m sure you needn’t!” and Mrs. Mulville tossed her head.
“He isn’t good enough!” I went on; to which she opposed a sound
almost as contentious as my own had been. This made me, with
genuine immediate horror, exclaim: “You haven’t influenced her, I
hope!” and my emphasis brought back the blood with a rush to
poor Adelaide’s face. She declared while she blushed—for I had
frightened her again—that she had never influenced anybody and
that the girl had only seen and heard and judged for herself. He had
influenced her, if I would, as he did every one who had a soul: that
word, as we knew, even expressed feebly the power of the things he
said to haunt the mind. How could she, Adelaide, help it if Miss
Anvoy’s mind was haunted? I demanded with a groan what right a
pretty girl engaged to a rising M.P. had to have a mind; but the only
explanation my bewildered friend could give me was that she was so
clever. She regarded Mr. Saltram naturally as a tremendous force for
good. She was intelligent enough to understand him and generous
enough to admire.
“She’s many things enough, but is she, among them, rich enough?”
I demanded. “Rich enough, I mean, to sacrifice such a lot of good
money?”
“That’s for herself to judge. Besides, it’s not her own money; she
doesn’t in the least consider it so.”
“And Gravener does, if not his own; and that’s the whole diffi-
culty?”
“The difficulty that brought her back, yes: she had absolutely to
see her poor aunt’s solicitor. It’s clear that by Lady Coxon’s will she
may have the money, but it’s still clearer to her conscience that the
original condition, definite, intensely implied on her uncle’s part, is
attached to the use of it. She can only take one view of it. It’s for the
Endowment or it’s for nothing.”
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were they absolutely candid? Could they indeed be, in their posi-
tion—would it even have been to be desired? Yes, she had sent for
me to ask no less than that of me—whether there was anything
dreadful kept back. She made no allusion whatever to George
Gravener—I thought her silence the only good taste and her gaiety
perhaps a part of the very anxiety of that discretion, the effect of a
determination that people shouldn’t know from herself that her re-
lations with the man she was to marry were strained. All the weight,
however, that she left me to throw was a sufficient implication of
the weight HE had thrown in vain. Oh she knew the question of
character was immense, and that one couldn’t entertain any plan for
making merit comfortable without running the gauntlet of that ter-
rible procession of interrogation-points which, like a young ladies’
school out for a walk, hooked their uniform noses at the tail of
governess Conduct. But were we absolutely to hold that there was
never, never, never an exception, never, never, never an occasion for
liberal acceptance, for clever charity, for suspended pedantry—for
letting one side, in short, outbalance another? When Miss Anvoy
threw off this appeal I could have embraced her for so delightfully
emphasising her unlikeness to Mrs. Saltram. “Why not have the
courage of one’s forgiveness,” she asked, “as well as the enthusiasm
of one’s adhesion?”
“Seeing how wonderfully you’ve threshed the whole thing out,” I
evasively replied, “gives me an extraordinary notion of the point
your enthusiasm has reached.”
She considered this remark an instant with her eyes on mine, and
I divined that it struck her I might possibly intend it as a reference
to some personal subjection to our fat philosopher, to some aberra-
tion of sensibility, some perversion of taste. At least I couldn’t inter-
pret otherwise the sudden flash that came into her face. Such a
manifestation, as the result of any word of mine, embarrassed me;
but while I was thinking how to reassure her the flush passed away
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in a smile of exquisite good nature. “Oh you see one forgets so won-
derfully how one dislikes him!” she said; and if her tone simply
extinguished his strange figure with the brush of its compassion, it
also rings in my ear to-day as the purest of all our praises. But with
what quick response of fine pity such a relegation of the man him-
self made me privately sigh “Ah poor Saltram!” She instantly, with
this, took the measure of all I didn’t believe, and it enabled her to go
on: “What can one do when a person has given such a lift to one’s
interest in life?”
“Yes, what can one do?” If I struck her as a little vague it was
because I was thinking of another person. I indulged in another
inarticulate murmur—”Poor George Gravener!” What had become
of the lift he had given that interest? Later on I made up my mind
that she was sore and stricken at the appearance he presented of
wanting the miserable money. This was the hidden reason of her
alienation. The probable sincerity, in spite of the illiberality, of his
scruples about the particular use of it under discussion didn’t efface
the ugliness of his demand that they should buy a good house with
it. Then, as for his alienation, he didn’t, pardonably enough, grasp
the lift Frank Saltram had given her interest in life. If a mere specta-
tor could ask that last question, with what rage in his heart the man
himself might! He wasn’t, like her, I was to see, too proud to show
me why he was disappointed.
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CHAPTER XI
I was unable this time to stay to dinner: such at any rate was the
plea on which I took leave. I desired in truth to get away from my
young lady, for that obviously helped me not to pretend to satisfy
her. How could I satisfy her? I asked myself—how could I tell her
how much had been kept back? I didn’t even know and I certainly
didn’t desire to know. My own policy had ever been to learn the
least about poor Saltram’s weaknesses—not to learn the most. A
great deal that I had in fact learned had been forced upon me by his
wife. There was something even irritating in Miss Anvoy’s crude
conscientiousness, and I wondered why, after all, she couldn’t have
let him alone and been content to entrust George Gravener with
the purchase of the good house. I was sure he would have driven a
bargain, got something excellent and cheap. I laughed louder even
than she, I temporised, I failed her; I told her I must think over her
case. I professed a horror of responsibilities and twitted her with her
own extravagant passion for them. It wasn’t really that I was afraid
of the scandal, the moral discredit for the Fund; what troubled me
most was a feeling of a different order. Of course, as the beneficiary
of the Fund was to enjoy a simple life-interest, as it was hoped that
new beneficiaries would arise and come up to new standards, it
wouldn’t be a trifle that the first of these worthies shouldn’t have
been a striking example of the domestic virtues. The Fund would
start badly, as it were, and the laurel would, in some respects at least,
scarcely be greener from the brows of the original wearer. That idea,
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however, was at that hour, as I have hinted, not the source of solici-
tude it ought perhaps to have been, for I felt less the irregularity of
Saltram’s getting the money than that of this exalted young woman’s
giving it up. I wanted her to have it for herself, and I told her so before
I went away. She looked graver at this than she had looked at all,
saying she hoped such a preference wouldn’t make me dishonest.
It made me, to begin with, very restless—made me, instead of
going straight to the station, fidget a little about that many-coloured
Common which gives Wimbledon horizons. There was a worry for
me to work off, or rather keep at a distance, for I declined even to
admit to myself that I had, in Miss Anvoy’s phrase, been saddled
with it. What could have been clearer indeed than the attitude of
recognising perfectly what a world of trouble The Coxon Fund would
in future save us, and of yet liking better to face a continuance of
that trouble than see, and in fact contribute to, a deviation from
attainable bliss in the life of two other persons in whom I was deeply
interested? Suddenly, at the end of twenty minutes, there was pro-
jected across this clearness the image of a massive middle-aged man
seated on a bench under a tree, with sad far-wandering eyes and
plump white hands folded on the head of a stick—a stick I
recognised, a stout gold-headed staff that I had given him in de-
voted days. I stopped short as he turned his face to me, and it hap-
pened that for some reason or other I took in as I had perhaps never
done before the beauty of his rich blank gaze. It was charged with
experience as the sky is charged with light, and I felt on the instant
as if we had been overspanned and conjoined by the great arch of a
bridge or the great dome of a temple. Doubtless I was rendered
peculiarly sensitive to it by something in the way I had been giving
him up and sinking him. While I met it I stood there smitten, and
I felt myself responding to it with a sort of guilty grimace. This
brought back his attention in a smile which expressed for me a cheer-
ful weary patience, a bruised noble gentleness. I had told Miss Anvoy
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that he had no dignity, but what did he seem to me, all unbuttoned
and fatigued as he waited for me to come up, if he didn’t seem
unconcerned with small things, didn’t seem in short majestic? There
was majesty in his mere unconsciousness of our little conferences
and puzzlements over his maintenance and his reward.
After I had sat by him a few minutes I passed my arm over his big
soft shoulder—wherever you touched him you found equally little
firmness—and said in a tone of which the suppliance fell oddly on
my own ear: “Come back to town with me, old friend—come back
and spend the evening.” I wanted to hold him, I wanted to keep
him, and at Waterloo, an hour later, I telegraphed possessively to
the Mulvilles. When he objected, as regards staying all night, that
he had no things, I asked him if he hadn’t everything of mine. I had
abstained from ordering dinner, and it was too late for preliminaries
at a club; so we were reduced to tea and fried fish at my rooms—
reduced also to the transcendent. Something had come up which
made me want him to feel at peace with me—and which, precisely,
was all the dear man himself wanted on any occasion. I had too
often had to press upon him considerations irrelevant, but it gives
me pleasure now to think that on that particular evening I didn’t
even mention Mrs. Saltram and the children. Late into the night we
smoked and talked; old shames and old rigours fell away from us; I
only let him see that I was conscious of what I owed him. He was as
mild as contrition and as copious as faith; he was never so fine as on
a shy return, and even better at forgiving than at being forgiven. I
dare say it was a smaller matter than that famous night at Wimbledon,
the night of the problematical sobriety and of Miss Anvoy’s initia-
tion; but I was as much in it on this occasion as I had been out of it
then. At about 1.30 he was sublime.
He never, in whatever situation, rose till all other risings were
over, and his breakfasts, at Wimbledon, had always been the princi-
pal reason mentioned by departing cooks. The coast was therefore
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gulf, kept up the nastiest fire. I never doubted they had a strong
case, and I had been from the first for not defending him—reason-
ing that if they weren’t contradicted they’d perhaps subside. This
was above all what I wanted, and I so far prevailed that I did arrest
the correspondence in time to save our little circle an infliction heavier
than it perhaps would have borne. I knew, that is I divined, that
their allegations had gone as yet only as far as their courage, con-
scious as they were in their own virtue of an exposed place in which
Saltram could have planted a blow. It was a question with them
whether a man who had himself so much to cover up would dare
his blow; so that these vessels of rancour were in a manner afraid of
each other. I judged that on the day the Pudneys should cease for
some reason or other to be afraid they would treat us to some rev-
elation more disconcerting than any of its predecessors. As I held
Mrs. Saltram’s letter in my hand it was distinctly communicated to
me that the day had come—they had ceased to be afraid. “I don’t
want to know the worst,” I presently declared.
“You’ll have to open the letter. It also contains an enclosure.”
I felt it—it was fat and uncanny. “Wheels within wheels!” I ex-
claimed. “There’s something for me too to deliver.”
“So they tell me—to Miss Anvoy.”
I stared; I felt a certain thrill. “Why don’t they send it to her
directly?”
Mrs. Saltram hung fire. “Because she’s staying with Mr. and Mrs.
Mulville.”
“And why should that prevent?”
Again my visitor faltered, and I began to reflect on the grotesque,
the unconscious perversity of her action. I was the only person save
George Gravener and the Mulvilles who was aware of Sir Gregory
Coxon’s and of Miss Anvoy’s strange bounty. Where could there
have been a more signal illustration of the clumsiness of human
affairs than her having complacently selected this moment to fly in
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the face of it? “There’s the chance of their seeing her letters. They
know Mr. Pudney’s hand.”
Still I didn’t understand; then it flashed upon me. “You mean
they might intercept it? How can you imply anything so base?” I
indignantly demanded
“It’s not I—it’s Mr. Pudney!” cried Mrs. Saltram with a flush. “It’s
his own idea.”
“Then why couldn’t he send the letter to you to be delivered?”
Mrs. Saltram’s embarrassment increased; she gave me another hard
look. “You must make that out for yourself.”
I made it out quickly enough. “It’s a denunciation?”
“A real lady doesn’t betray her husband!” this virtuous woman
exclaimed.
I burst out laughing, and I fear my laugh may have had an effect
of impertinence. “Especially to Miss Anvoy, who’s so easily shocked?
Why do such things concern her?” I asked, much at a loss.
“Because she’s there, exposed to all his craft. Mr. and Mrs. Pudney
have been watching this: they feel she may be taken in.”
“Thank you for all the rest of us! What difference can it make
when she has lost her power to contribute?”
Again Mrs. Saltram considered; then very nobly: “There are other
things in the world than money.” This hadn’t occurred to her so
long as the young lady had any; but she now added, with a glance at
my letter, that Mr. and Mrs. Pudney doubtless explained their mo-
tives. “It’s all in kindness,” she continued as she got up.
“Kindness to Miss Anvoy? You took, on the whole, another view
of kindness before her reverses.”
My companion smiled with some acidity “Perhaps you’re no safer
than the Mulvilles!”
I didn’t want her to think that, nor that she should report to the
Pudneys that they had not been happy in their agent; and I well
remember that this was the moment at which I began, with consid-
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CHAPTER XII
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Gravener and her sweet young friend—a state of things but half satis-
factory to her so long as the advantage resulting to Mr. Saltram failed
to disengage itself from the merely nebulous state. She intimated that
her sweet young friend was, if anything, a trifle too reserved; she also
intimated that there might now be an opening for another clever young
man. There never was the slightest opening, I may here parenthesise,
and of course the question can’t come up to-day. These are old frus-
trations now. Ruth Anvoy hasn’t married, I hear, and neither have I.
During the month, toward the end, I wrote to George Gravener to
ask if, on a special errand, I might come to see him, and his answer
was to knock the very next day at my door. I saw he had immediately
connected my enquiry with the talk we had had in the railway-car-
riage, and his promptitude showed that the ashes of his eagerness
weren’t yet cold. I told him there was something I felt I ought in
candour to let him know—I recognised the obligation his friendly
confidence had laid on me.
“You mean Miss Anvoy has talked to you? She has told me so
herself,” he said.
“It wasn’t to tell you so that I wanted to see you,” I replied; “for it
seemed to me that such a communication would rest wholly with
herself. If however she did speak to you of our conversation she
probably told you I was discouraging.”
“Discouraging?”
“On the subject of a present application of The Coxon Fund.”
“To the case of Mr. Saltram? My dear fellow, I don’t know what
you call discouraging!” Gravener cried.
“Well I thought I was, and I thought she thought I was.”
“I believe she did, but such a thing’s measured by the effect. She’s
not ‘discouraged,’” he said.
“That’s her own affair. The reason I asked you to see me was that
it appeared to me I ought to tell you frankly that—decidedly!—I
can’t undertake to produce that effect. In fact I don’t want to!”
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“It’s very good of you, damn you!” my visitor laughed, red and
really grave. Then he said: “You’d like to see that scoundrel publicly
glorified—perched on the pedestal of a great complimentary pen-
sion?”
I braced myself. “Taking one form of public recognition with
another it seems to me on the whole I should be able to bear it.
When I see the compliments that are paid right and left I ask myself
why this one shouldn’t take its course. This therefore is what you’re
entitled to have looked to me to mention to you. I’ve some evidence
that perhaps would be really dissuasive, but I propose to invite Mss
Anvoy to remain in ignorance of it.”
“And to invite me to do the same?”
“Oh you don’t require it—you’ve evidence enough. I speak of a
sealed letter that I’ve been requested to deliver to her.”
“And you don’t mean to?”
“There’s only one consideration that would make me,” I said.
Gravener’s clear handsome eyes plunged into mine a minute, but
evidently without fishing up a clue to this motive—a failure by which
I was almost wounded. “What does the letter contain?”
“It’s sealed, as I tell you, and I don’t know what it contains.”
“Why is it sent through you?”
“Rather than you?” I wondered how to put the thing. “The only
explanation I can think of is that the person sending it may have
imagined your relations with Miss Anvoy to be at an end—may
have been told this is the case by Mrs. Saltram.”
“My relations with Miss Anvoy are not at an end,” poor Gravener
stammered.
Again for an instant I thought. “The offer I propose to make you
gives me the right to address you a question remarkably direct. Are
you still engaged to Miss Anvoy?”
“No, I’m not,” he slowly brought out. “But we’re perfectly good
friends.”
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ning of his decline. It was also naturally a new grievance for his
wife, who began to believe in him as soon as he was blighted, and
who at this hour accuses us of having bribed him, on the whim of a
meddlesome American, to renounce his glorious office, to become,
as she says, like everybody else. The very day he found himself able
to publish he wholly ceased to produce. This deprived us, as may
easily be imagined, of much of our occupation, and especially de-
prived the Mulvilles, whose want of self-support I never measured
till they lost their great inmate. They’ve no one to live on now.
Adelaide’s most frequent reference to their destitution is embodied
in the remark that dear far-away Ruth’s intentions were doubtless
good. She and Kent are even yet looking for another prop, but no
one presents a true sphere of usefulness. They complain that people
are self-sufficing. With Saltram the fine type of the child of adop-
tion was scattered, the grander, the elder style. They’ve got their
carriage back, but what’s an empty carriage? In short I think we
were all happier as well as poorer before; even including George
Gravener, who by the deaths of his brother and his nephew has
lately become Lord Maddock. His wife, whose fortune clears the
property, is criminally dull; he hates being in the Upper House, and
hasn’t yet had high office. But what are these accidents, which I
should perhaps apologise for mentioning, in the light of the great
eventual boon promised the patient by the rate at which The Coxon
Fund must be rolling up?
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CHAPTER I
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CHAPTER II
I MAY AS WELL SAY at once that this little record pretends in no degree
to be a picture either of my introduction to Mr. Paraday or of cer-
tain proximate steps and stages. The scheme of my narrative allows
no space for these things, and in any case a prohibitory sentiment
would hang about my recollection of so rare an hour. These meagre
notes are essentially private, so that if they see the light the insidious
forces that, as my story itself shows, make at present for publicity
will simply have overmastered my precautions. The curtain fell lately
enough on the lamentable drama. My memory of the day I alighted
at Mr. Paraday’s door is a fresh memory of kindness, hospitality,
compassion, and of the wonderful illuminating talk in which the
welcome was conveyed. Some voice of the air had taught me the
right moment, the moment of his life at which an act of unexpected
young allegiance might most come home to him. He had recently
recovered from a long, grave illness. I had gone to the neighbouring
inn for the night, but I spent the evening in his company, and he
insisted the next day on my sleeping under his roof. I hadn’t an
indefinite leave: Mr. Pinhorn supposed us to put our victims through
on the gallop. It was later, in the office, that the rude motions of the
jig were set to music. I fortified myself, however, as my training had
taught me to do, by the conviction that nothing could be more
advantageous for my article than to be written in the very atmo-
sphere. I said nothing to Mr. Paraday about it, but in the morning,
after my remove from the inn, while he was occupied in his study,
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save me. There had been a big brush of wings, the flash of an opa-
line robe, and then, with a great cool stir of the air, the sense of an
angel’s having swooped down and caught me to his bosom. He held
me only till the danger was over, and it all took place in a minute.
With my manuscript back on my hands I understood the phenom-
enon better, and the reflexions I made on it are what I meant, at the
beginning of this anecdote, by my change of heart. Mr. Pinhorn’s
note was not only a rebuke decidedly stern, but an invitation imme-
diately to send him—it was the case to say so—the genuine article,
the revealing and reverberating sketch to the promise of which, and
of which alone, I owed my squandered privilege. A week or two
later I recast my peccant paper and, giving it a particular applica-
tion to Mr. Paraday’s new book, obtained for it the hospitality of
another journal, where, I must admit, Mr. Pinhorn was so far vindi-
cated as that it attracted not the least attention.
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CHAPTER III
I WAS FRANKLY, at the end of three days, a very prejudiced critic, so that
one morning when, in the garden, my great man had offered to read
me something I quite held my breath as I listened. It was the written
scheme of another book—something put aside long ago, before his
illness, but that he had lately taken out again to reconsider. He had
been turning it round when I came down on him, and it had grown
magnificently under this second hand. Loose liberal confident, it might
have passed for a great gossiping eloquent letter—the overflow into
talk of an artist’s amorous plan. The theme I thought singularly rich,
quite the strongest he had yet treated; and this familiar statement of
it, full too of fine maturities, was really, in summarised splendour, a
mine of gold, a precious independent work. I remember rather pro-
fanely wondering whether the ultimate production could possibly keep
at the pitch. His reading of the fond epistle, at any rate, made me feel
as if I were, for the advantage of posterity, in close correspondence
with him—were the distinguished person to whom it had been affec-
tionately addressed. It was a high distinction simply to be told such
things. The idea he now communicated had all the freshness, the
flushed fairness, of the conception untouched and untried: it was
Venus rising from the sea and before the airs had blown upon her. I
had never been so throbbingly present at such an unveiling. But when
he had tossed the last bright word after the others, as I had seen cash-
iers in banks, weighing mounds of coin, drop a final sovereign into
the tray, I knew a sudden prudent alarm.
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“My dear master, how, after all, are you going to do it? It’s infi-
nitely noble, but what time it will take, what patience and indepen-
dence, what assured, what perfect conditions! Oh for a lone isle in a
tepid sea!”
“Isn’t this practically a lone isle, and aren’t you, as an
encircling medium, tepid enough?” he asked, alluding with a laugh
to the wonder of my young admiration and the narrow limits of his
little provincial home. “Time isn’t what I’ve lacked hitherto: the
question hasn’t been to find it, but to use it. Of course my illness
made, while it lasted, a great hole—but I dare say there would have
been a hole at any rate. The earth we tread has more pockets than a
billiard-table. The great thing is now to keep on my feet.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
Neil Paraday looked at me with eyes—such pleasant eyes as he
had—in which, as I now recall their expression, I seem to have seen
a dim imagination of his fate. He was fifty years old, and his illness
had been cruel, his convalescence slow. “It isn’t as if I weren’t all
right.”
“Oh if you weren’t all right I wouldn’t look at you!” I tenderly
said.
We had both got up, quickened as by this clearer air, and he had
lighted a cigarette. I had taken a fresh one, which with an intenser
smile, by way of answer to my exclamation, he applied to the flame
of his match. “If I weren’t better I shouldn’t have thought of that!”
He flourished his script in his hand.
“I don’t want to be discouraging, but that’s not true,” I returned.
“I’m sure that during the months you lay here in pain you had visi-
tations sublime. You thought of a thousand things. You think of
more and more all the while. That’s what makes you, if you’ll par-
don my familiarity, so respectable. At a time when so many people
are spent you come into your second wind. But, thank God, all the
same, you’re better! Thank God, too, you’re not, as you were telling
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temporary. That was what had happened: the poor man was to be
squeezed into his horrible age. I felt as if he had been overtaken on
the crest of the hill and brought back to the city. A little more and
he would have dipped down the short cut to posterity and escaped.
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CHAPTER IV
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nient, you know, for a lady who goes in for the larger latitude. ‘Ob-
sessions, by Miss So-and-so,’ would look a little odd, but men are
more naturally indelicate. Have you peeped into ‘Obsessions’?” Mr.
Morrow continued sociably to our companion.
Paraday, still absent, remote, made no answer, as if he hadn’t heard
the question: a form of intercourse that appeared to suit the cheer-
ful Mr. Morrow as well as any other. Imperturbably bland, he was a
man of resources—he only needed to be on the spot. He had pock-
eted the whole poor place while Paraday and I were wool-gathering,
and I could imagine that he had already got his “heads.” His sys-
tem, at any rate, was justified by the inevitability with which I re-
plied, to save my friend the trouble: “Dear no—he hasn’t read it.
He doesn’t read such things!” I unwarily added.
“Things that are too far over the fence, eh?” I was indeed a god-
send to Mr. Morrow. It was the psychological moment; it deter-
mined the appearance of his note-book, which, however, he at first
kept slightly behind him, even as the dentist approaching his victim
keeps the horrible forceps. “Mr. Paraday holds with the good old
proprieties—I see!” And thinking of the thirty-seven influential jour-
nals, I found myself, as I found poor Paraday, helplessly assisting at
the promulgation of this ineptitude. “There’s no point on which
distinguished views are so acceptable as on this question—raised
perhaps more strikingly than ever by Guy Walsingham—of the per-
missibility of the larger latitude. I’ve an appointment, precisely in
connexion with it, next week, with Dora Forbes, author of ‘The
Other Way Round,’ which everybody’s talking about. Has Mr.
Paraday glanced at ‘The Other Way Round’?” Mr. Morrow now
frankly appealed to me. I took on myself to repudiate the supposi-
tion, while our companion, still silent, got up nervously and walked
away. His visitor paid no heed to his withdrawal; but opened out
the note-book with a more fatherly pat. “Dora Forbes, I gather,
takes the ground, the same as Guy Walsingham’s, that the larger
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latitude has simply got to come. He holds that it has got to be squarely
faced. Of course his sex makes him a less prejudiced witness. But an
authoritative word from Mr. Paraday—from the point of view of
his sex, you know—
would go right round the globe. He takes the line that we haven’t
got to face it?”
I was bewildered: it sounded somehow as if there were three sexes.
My interlocutor’s pencil was poised, my private responsibility great.
I simply sat staring, none the less, and only found presence of mind
to say: “Is this Miss Forbes a gentleman?”
Mr. Morrow had a subtle smile. “It wouldn’t be ‘Miss’—there’s a
wife!”
“I mean is she a man?”
“The wife?”—Mr. Morrow was for a moment as confused as my-
self. But when I explained that I alluded to Dora Forbes in person he
informed me, with visible amusement at my being so out of it, that
this was the “pen-name” of an indubitable male—he had a big red
moustache. “He goes in for the slight mystification because the ladies
are such popular favourites. A great deal of interest is felt in his acting
on that idea—which is clever, isn’t it?—and there’s every prospect of
its being widely imitated.” Our host at this moment joined us again,
and Mr. Morrow remarked invitingly that he should be happy to
make a note of any observation the movement in question, the bid
for success under a lady’s name, might suggest to Mr. Paraday. But the
poor man, without catching the allusion, excused himself, pleading
that, though greatly honoured by his visitor’s interest, he suddenly
felt unwell and should have to take leave of him—have to go and lie
down and keep quiet. His young friend might be trusted to answer
for him, but he hoped Mr. Morrow didn’t expect great things even of
his young friend. His young friend, at this moment, looked at Neil
Paraday with an anxious eye, greatly wondering if he were doomed to
be ill again; but Paraday’s own kind face met his question reassur-
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ingly, seemed to say in a glance intelligible enough: “Oh I’m not ill,
but I’m scared: get him out of the house as quietly as possible.” Get-
ting newspaper-men out of the house was odd business for an emis-
sary of Mr. Pinhorn, and I was so exhilarated by the idea of it that I
called after him as he left us: “Read the article in The Empire and
you’ll soon be all right!”
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CHAPTER V
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life’s his work, and this is the place to observe him. What he has to
tell us he tells us with this perfection. My dear sir, the best inter-
viewer is the best reader.”
Mr. Morrow good-humouredly protested. “Do you mean to say
that no other source of information should be open to us?”
“None other till this particular one—by far the most copious—
has been quite exhausted. Have you exhausted it, my dear sir? Had
you exhausted it when you came down here? It seems to me in our
time almost wholly neglected, and something should surely be done
to restore its ruined credit. It’s the course to which the artist himself
at every step, and with such pathetic confidence, refers us. This last
book of Mr. Paraday’s is full of revelations.”
“Revelations?” panted Mr. Morrow, whom I had forced again into
his chair.
“The only kind that count. It tells you with a perfection that
seems to me quite final all the author thinks, for instance, about the
advent of the ‘larger latitude.’”
“Where does it do that?” asked Mr. Morrow, who had picked up
the second volume and was insincerely thumbing it.
“Everywhere—in the whole treatment of his case. Extract the
opinion, disengage the answer—those are the real acts of homage.”
Mr. Morrow, after a minute, tossed the book away. “Ah but you
mustn’t take me for a reviewer.”
“Heaven forbid I should take you for anything so dreadful! You
came down to perform a little act of sympathy, and so, I may con-
fide to you, did I. Let us perform our little act together. These pages
overflow with the testimony we want: let us read them and taste
them and interpret them. You’ll of course have perceived for your-
self that one scarcely does read Neil Paraday till one reads him aloud;
he gives out to the ear an extraordinary full tone, and it’s only when
you expose it confidently to that test that you really get near his
style. Take up your book again and let me listen, while you pay it
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passed round into the front garden, and by listening intently enough
I could presently hear the outer gate close behind him with a bang.
I thought again of the thirty-seven influential journals and won-
dered what would be his revenge. I hasten to add that he was mag-
nanimous: which was just the most dreadful thing he could have
been. The Tatler published a charming chatty familiar account of
Mr. Paraday’s “Home-life,” and on the
wings of the thirty-seven influential journals it went, to use Mr.
Morrow’s own expression, right round the globe.
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CHAPTER VII
THE YOUNG LADY in the dining-room had a brave face, black hair, blue
eyes, and in her lap a big volume. “I’ve come for his autograph,” she
said when I had explained to her that I was under bonds to see people
for him when he was occupied. “I’ve been waiting half an hour, but
I’m prepared to wait all day.” I don’t know whether it was this that
told me she was American, for the propensity to wait all day is not in
general characteristic of her race. I was enlightened probably not so
much by the spirit of the utterance as by some quality of its sound. At
any rate I saw she had an individual patience and a lovely frock, to-
gether with an expression that played among her pretty features like a
breeze among flowers. Putting her book on the table she showed me
a massive album, showily bound and full of autographs of price. The
collection of faded notes, of still more faded “thoughts,” of quota-
tions, platitudes, signatures, represented a formidable purpose.
I could only disclose my dread of it. “Most people apply to Mr.
Paraday by letter, you know.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t answer. I’ve written three times.”
“Very true,” I reflected; “the sort of letter you mean goes straight
into the fire.”
“How do you know the sort I mean?” My interlocutress had
blushed and smiled, and in a moment she added: “I don’t believe he
gets many like them!”
“I’m sure they’re beautiful, but he burns without reading.” I didn’t
add that I had convinced him he ought to.
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access to the great ones of the earth; there were people moreover
whose signatures she had presumably secured without a personal
interview. She couldn’t have worried George Washington and
Friedrich Schiller and Hannah More. She met this argument, to my
surprise, by throwing up the album without a pang. It wasn’t even
her own; she was responsible for none of its treasures. It belonged to
a girl-friend in America, a young lady in a western city. This young
lady had insisted on her bringing it, to pick up more autographs:
she thought they might like to see, in Europe, in what company
they would be. The “girl-friend,” the western city, the immortal
names, the curious errand, the idyllic faith, all made a story as strange
to me, and as beguiling, as some tale in the Arabian Nights. Thus it
was that my informant had encumbered herself with the ponderous
tome; but she hastened to assure me that this was the first time she
had brought it out. For her visit to Mr. Paraday it had simply been
a pretext. She didn’t really care a straw that he should write his name;
what she did want was to look straight into his face.
I demurred a little. “And why do you require to do that?”
“Because I just love him!” Before I could recover from the agitat-
ing effect of this crystal ring my companion had continued: “Hasn’t
there ever been any face that you’ve wanted to look into?”
How could I tell her so soon how much I appreciated the oppor-
tunity of looking into hers? I could only assent in general to the
proposition that there were certainly for every one such yearnings,
and even such faces; and I felt the crisis demand all my lucidity, all
my wisdom. “Oh yes, I’m a student of physiognomy. Do you mean,”
I pursued, “that you’ve a passion for Mr. Paraday’s books?”
“They’ve been everything to me and a little more beside—I know
them by heart. They’ve completely taken hold of me. There’s no
author about whom I’m in such a state as I’m in about Neil Paraday.”
“Permit me to remark then,” I presently returned, “that you’re
one of the right sort.”
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“What do they care for the thoughts and style? They didn’t even
understand you. I’m not sure,” I added, “that I do myself, and I
dare say that you by no means make me out.”
She had got up to go, and though I wanted her to succeed in not
seeing Neil Paraday I wanted her also, inconsequently, to remain in
the house. I was at any rate far from desiring to hustle her off. As
Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, upstairs, was still saving our friend in her
own way, I asked my young lady to let me briefly relate, in illustra-
tion of my point, the little incident of my having gone down into
the country for a profane purpose and been converted on the spot
to holiness. Sinking again into her chair to listen she showed a deep
interest in the anecdote. Then thinking it over gravely she returned
with her odd intonation: “Yes, but you do see him!” I had to admit
that this was the case; and I wasn’t so prepared with an effective
attenuation as I could have wished. She eased the situation off, how-
ever, by the charming quaintness with which she finally said: “Well,
I wouldn’t want him to be lonely!” This time she rose in earnest, but
I persuaded her to let me keep the album to show Mr. Paraday. I
assured her I’d bring it back to her myself. “Well, you’ll find my
address somewhere in it on a paper!” she sighed all resignedly at the
door.
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CHAPTER VIII
I BLUSH TO CONFESS IT, but I invited Mr. Paraday that very day to
transcribe into the album one of his most characteristic passages. I
told him how I had got rid of the strange girl who had brought it—
her ominous name was Miss Hurter and she lived at an hotel; quite
agreeing with him moreover as to the wisdom of getting rid with
equal promptitude of the book itself. This was why I carried it to
Albemarle Street no later than on the morrow. I failed to find her at
home, but she wrote to me and I went again; she wanted so much
to hear more about Neil Paraday. I returned repeatedly, I may briefly
declare, to supply her with this information. She had been immensely
taken, the more she thought of it, with that idea of mine
about the act of homage: it had ended by filling her with a generous
rapture. She positively desired to do something sublime for him,
though indeed I could see that, as this particular flight was difficult,
she appreciated the fact that my visits kept her up. I had it on my
conscience to keep her up: I neglected nothing that would contrib-
ute to it, and her conception of our cherished author’s indepen-
dence became at last as fine as his very own. “Read him, read him—
that will be an education in decency,” I constantly repeated; while,
seeking him in his works even as God in nature, she represented
herself as convinced that, according to my assurance, this was the
system that had, as she expressed it, weaned her. We read him to-
gether when I could find time, and the generous creature’s sacrifice
was fed by our communion. There were twenty selfish women about
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whom I told her and who stirred her to a beautiful rage. Immedi-
ately after my first visit her sister, Mrs. Milsom, came over from
Paris, and the two ladies began to present, as they called it, their
letters. I thanked our stars that none had been presented to Mr.
Paraday. They received invitations and dined out, and some of these
occasions enabled Fanny Hurter to perform, for consistency’s sake,
touching feats of submission. Nothing indeed would now have in-
duced her even to look at the object of her admiration. Once, hear-
ing his name announced at a party, she instantly left the room by
another door and then straightway quitted the house. At another
time when I was at the opera with them—Mrs. Milsom had invited
me to their box—I attempted to point Mr. Paraday out to her in the
stalls. On this she asked her sister to change places with her and,
while that lady devoured the great man through a powerful glass,
presented, all the rest of the evening, her inspired back to the house.
To torment her tenderly I pressed the glass upon her, telling her
how wonderfully near it brought our friend’s handsome head. By
way of answer she simply looked at me in charged silence, letting
me see that tears had gathered in her eyes. These tears, I may re-
mark, produced an effect on me of which the end is not yet. There
was a moment when I felt it my duty to mention them to Neil
Paraday, but I was deterred by the reflexion that there were ques-
tions more relevant to his happiness.
These question indeed, by the end of the season, were reduced to
a single one—the question of reconstituting so far as might be pos-
sible the conditions under which he had produced his best work.
Such conditions could never all come back, for there was a new one
that took up too much place; but some perhaps were not beyond
recall. I wanted above all things to see him sit down to the subject
he had, on my making his acquaintance, read me that admirable
sketch of. Something told me there was no security but in his doing
so before the new factor, as we used to say at Mr. Pinhorn’s, should
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near the master. I addressed from that fine residence several com-
munications to a young lady in London, a young lady whom, I
confess, I quitted with reluctance and whom the reminder of what
she herself could give up was required to make me quit at all. It adds
to the gratitude I owe her on other grounds that she kindly allows
me to transcribe from my letters a few of the passages in which that
hateful sojourn is candidly commemorated.
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CHAPTER IX
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were already ensconced. If the front glass isn’t open on his dear old
back perhaps he’ll survive. Bigwood, I believe, is very grand and
frigid, all marble and precedence, and I wish him well out of the
adventure. I can’t tell you how much more and more your attitude
to him, in the midst of all this, shines out by contrast. I never will-
ingly talk to these people about him, but see what a comfort I find
it to scribble to you! I appreciate it—it keeps me warm; there are no
fires in the house. Mrs. Wimbush goes by the calendar, the tem-
perature goes by the weather, the weather goes by God knows what,
and the Princess is easily heated. I’ve nothing but my acrimony to
warm me, and have been out under an umbrella to restore my cir-
culation. Coming in an hour ago I found Lady Augusta Minch rum-
maging about the hall. When I asked her what she was looking for
she said she had mislaid something that Mr. Paraday had lent her. I
ascertained in a moment that the article in question is a manu-
script, and I’ve a foreboding that it’s the noble morsel he read me six
weeks ago. When I expressed my surprise that he should have ban-
died about anything so precious (I happen to know it’s his only
copy—in the most beautiful hand in all the world) Lady Augusta
confessed to me that she hadn’t had it from himself, but from Mrs.
Wimbush, who had wished to give her a glimpse of it as a salve for
her not being able to stay and hear it read.
“‘Is that the piece he’s to read,’ I asked, ‘when Guy Walsingham
arrives?’
“‘It’s not for Guy Walsingham they’re waiting now, it’s for Dora
Forbes,’ Lady Augusta said. ‘She’s coming, I believe, early to-mor-
row. Meanwhile Mrs. Wimbush has found out about him, and is
actively wiring to him. She says he also must hear him.’
“‘You bewilder me a little,’ I replied; ‘in the age we live in one gets
lost among the genders and the pronouns. The clear thing is that
Mrs. Wimbush doesn’t guard such a treasure so jealously as she
might.’
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“‘Poor dear, she has the Princess to guard! Mr. Paraday lent her
the manuscript to look over.’
“‘She spoke, you mean, as if it were the morning paper?’
“Lady Augusta stared—my irony was lost on her. ‘She didn’t have
time, so she gave me a chance first; because unfortunately I go to-
morrow to Bigwood.’
“‘And your chance has only proved a chance to lose it?’
“‘I haven’t lost it. I remember now—it was very stupid of me to
have forgotten. I told my maid to give it to Lord Dorimont—or at
least to his man.’
“‘And Lord Dorimont went away directly after luncheon.’
“‘Of course he gave it back to my maid—or else his man did,’
said Lady Augusta. ‘I dare say it’s all right.’
“The conscience of these people is like a summer sea. They haven’t
time to look over a priceless composition; they’ve only time to kick
it about the house. I suggested that the ‘man,’ fired with a noble
emulation, had perhaps kept the work for his own perusal; and her
ladyship wanted to know whether, if the thing shouldn’t reappear
for the grand occasion appointed by our hostess, the author wouldn’t
have something else to read that would do just as well. Their ques-
tions are too delightful! I declared to Lady Augusta briefly that noth-
ing in the world can ever do so well as the thing that does best; and
at this she looked a little disconcerted. But I added that if the manu-
script had gone astray our little circle would have the less of an
effort of attention to make. The piece in question was very long—it
would keep them three hours.
“‘Three hours! Oh the Princess will get up!’ said Lady Augusta.
“‘I thought she was Mr. Paraday’s greatest admirer.’
“‘I dare say she is—she’s so awfully clever. But what’s the use of
being a Princess—‘
“‘If you can’t dissemble your love?’ I asked as Lady Augusta was
vague. She said at any rate she’d question her maid; and I’m hoping
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that when I go down to dinner I shall find the manuscript has been
recovered.”
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CHAPTER X
“IT HAS NOT BEEN RECOVERED,” I wrote early the next day, “and I’m
moreover much troubled about our friend. He came back from
Bigwood with a chill and, being allowed to have a fire in his room,
lay down a while before dinner. I tried to send him to bed and
indeed thought I had put him in the way of it; but after I had gone
to dress Mrs. Wimbush came up to see him, with the inevitable
result that when I returned I found him under arms and flushed
and feverish, though decorated with the rare flower she had brought
him for his button-hole. He came down to dinner, but Lady Au-
gusta Minch was very shy of him. To-day he’s in great pain, and the
advent of ces dames—I mean of Guy Walsingham and Dora
Forbes—doesn’t at all console me. It does Mrs. Wimbush, however,
for she has consented to his remaining in bed so that he may be all
right to-morrow for the listening circle. Guy Walsingham’s already
on the scene, and the Doctor for Paraday also arrived early. I haven’t
yet seen the author of ‘Obsessions,’ but of course I’ve had a mo-
ment by myself with the Doctor. I tried to get him to say that our
invalid must go straight home—I mean to-morrow or next day; but
he quite refuses to talk about the future. Absolute quiet and warmth
and the regular administration of an important remedy are the points
he mainly insists on. He returns this afternoon, and I’m to go back
to see the patient at one o’clock, when he next takes his medicine. It
consoles me a little that he certainly won’t be able to read—an exer-
tion he was already more than unfit for. Lady Augusta went off after
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have always treated women. Dora Forbes, it’s true, at the present hour,
is immensely pushed by Mrs. Wimbush and has sat for his portrait to
the young artists she protects, sat for it not only in oils but in monu-
mental alabaster.
What happened at Prestidge later in the day is of course
contemporary history. If the interruption I had whimsically sanc-
tioned was almost a scandal, what is to be said of that general scatter
of the company which, under the Doctor’s rule, began to take place
in the evening? His rule was soothing to behold, small comfort as I
was to have at the end. He decreed in the interest of his patient an
absolutely soundless house and a consequent break-up of the party.
Little country practitioner as he was, he literally packed off the Prin-
cess. She departed as promptly as if a revolution had broken out,
and Guy Walsingham emigrated with her. I was kindly permitted to
remain, and this was not denied even to Mrs. Wimbush. The privi-
lege was withheld indeed from Dora Forbes; so Mrs. Wimbush kept
her latest capture temporarily concealed. This was so little, how-
ever, her usual way of dealing with her eminent friends that a couple
of days of it exhausted her patience, and she went up to town with
him in great publicity. The sudden turn for the worse her afflicted
guest had, after a brief improvement, taken on the third night raised
an obstacle to her seeing him before her retreat; a fortunate circum-
stance doubtless, for she was fundamentally disappointed in him.
This was not the kind of performance for which she had invited
him to Prestidge, let alone invited the Princess. I must add that
none of the generous acts marking her patronage of intellectual and
other merit have done so much for her reputation as her lending
Neil Paraday the most beautiful of her numerous homes to die in.
He took advantage to the utmost of the singular favour. Day by day
I saw him sink, and I roamed alone about the empty terraces and
gardens. His wife never came near him, but I scarcely noticed it: as
I paced there with rage in my heart I was too full of another wrong.
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times I believe her, but I’ve quite ceased to believe myself. The only
thing for us at all events is to go on seeking and hoping together;
and we should be closely united by this firm tie even were we not at
present by another.
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have taken as a very bad joke any intimation that this present sense
of juvenility was still in store for me. It won’t last, at any rate; so I
had better make the best of it. But I confess it surprises me. I have
led too serious a life; but that perhaps, after all, preserves one’s youth.
At all events, I have travelled too far, I have worked too hard, I have
lived in brutal climates and associated with tiresome people. When
a man has reached his fifty-second year without being, materially,
the worse for wear—when he has fair health, a fair fortune, a tidy
conscience and a complete exemption from embarrassing relatives—
I suppose he is bound, in delicacy, to write himself happy. But I
confess I shirk this obligation. I have not been miserable; I won’t go
so far as to say that—or at least as to write it. But happiness—
positive happiness—would have been something different. I don’t
know that it would have been better, by all measurements—that it
would have left me better off at the present time. But it certainly
would have made this difference—that I should not have been re-
duced, in pursuit of pleasant images, to disinter a buried episode of
more than a quarter of a century ago. I should have found enter-
tainment more—what shall I call it?—more contemporaneous. I
should have had a wife and children, and I should not be in the way
of making, as the French say, infidelities to the present. Of course
it’s a great gain to have had an escape, not to have committed an act
of thumping folly; and I suppose that, whatever serious step one
might have taken at twenty-five, after a struggle, and with a violent
effort, and however one’s conduct might appear to be justified by
events, there would always remain a certain element of regret; a
certain sense of loss lurking in the sense of gain; a tendency to won-
der, rather wishfully, what might have been. What might have been,
in this case, would, without doubt, have been very sad, and what
has been has been very cheerful and comfortable; but there are nev-
ertheless two or three questions I might ask myself. Why, for in-
stance, have I never married—why have I never been able to care
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for any woman as I cared for that one? Ah, why are the mountains
blue and why is the sunshine warm? Happiness mitigated by imper-
tinent conjectures—that’s about my ticket.
6TH.—I knew it wouldn’t last; it’s already passing away. But I have
spent a delightful day; I have been strolling all over the place. Every-
thing reminds me of something else, and yet of itself at the same
time; my imagination makes a great circuit and comes back to the
starting-point. There is that well-remembered odour of spring in
the air, and the flowers, as they used to be, are gathered into great
sheaves and stacks, all along the rugged base of the Strozzi Palace. I
wandered for an hour in the Boboli Gardens; we went there several
times together. I remember all those days individually; they seem to
me as yesterday. I found the corner where she always chose to sit—
the bench of sun-warmed marble, in front of the screen of ilex, with
that exuberant statue of Pomona just beside it. The place is exactly
the same, except that poor Pomona has lost one of her tapering fin-
gers. I sat there for half an hour, and it was strange how near to me she
seemed. The place was perfectly empty—that is, it was filled with
HER. I closed my eyes and listened; I could almost hear the rustle of
her dress on the gravel. Why do we make such an ado about death?
What is it, after all, but a sort of refinement of life? She died ten years
ago, and yet, as I sat there in the sunny stillness, she was a palpable,
audible presence. I went afterwards into the gallery of the palace, and
wandered for an hour from room to room. The same great pictures
hung in the same places, and the same dark frescoes arched above
them. Twice, of old, I went there with her; she had a great under-
standing of art. She understood all sorts of things. Before the Ma-
donna of the Chair I stood a long time. The face is not a particle like
hers, and yet it reminded me of her. But everything does that. We
stood and looked at it together once for half an hour; I remember
perfectly what she said.
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“So was I. And among the pictures, which do you like best?”
“Oh, a great many.”
“So did I; but I had certain favourites.”
Again the young man hesitated a little, and then he confessed that
the group of painters he preferred, on the whole, to all others, was
that of the early Florentines.
I was so struck with this that I stopped short. “That was exactly
my taste!” And then I passed my hand into his arm and we went our
way again.
We sat down on an old stone bench in the Cascine, and a solemn
blank-eyed Hermes, with wrinkles accentuated by the dust of ages,
stood above us and listened to our talk.
“The Countess Salvi died ten years ago,” I said.
My companion admitted that he had heard her daughter say so.
“After I knew her she married again,” I added. “The Count Salvi
died before I knew her—a couple of years after their marriage.”
“Yes, I have heard that.”
“And what else have you heard?”
My companion stared at me; he had evidently heard nothing.
“She was a very interesting woman—there are a great many things
to be said about her. Later, perhaps, I will tell you. Has the daughter
the same charm?”
“You forget,” said my young man, smiling, “that I have never seen
the mother.”
“Very true. I keep confounding. But the daughter—how long have
you known her?”
“Only since I have been here. A very short time.”
“A week?”
For a moment he said nothing. “A month.”
“That’s just the answer I should have made. A week, a month—it
was all the same to me.”
“I think it is more than a month,” said the young man.
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9TH.—I have seen that poor boy half a dozen times again, and a
most amiable young fellow he is. He continues to represent to me,
in the most extraordinary manner, my own young identity; the cor-
respondence is perfect at all points, save that he is a better boy than
I. He is evidently acutely interested in his Countess, and leads quite
the same life with her that I led with Madame de Salvi. He goes to
see her every evening and stays half the night; these Florentines
keep the most extraordinary hours. I remember, towards 3 A.M.,
Madame de Salvi used to turn me out.—”Come, come,” she would
say, “it’s time to go. If you were to stay later people might talk.” I
don’t know at what time he comes home, but I suppose his evening
seems as short as mine did. Today he brought me a message from
his Contessa—a very gracious little speech. She remembered often
to have heard her mother speak of me—she called me her English
friend. All her mother’s friends were dear to her, and she begged I
would do her the honour to come and see her. She is always at home
of an evening. Poor young Stanmer (he is of the Devonshire
Stanmers—a great property) reported this speech verbatim, and of
course it can’t in the least signify to him that a poor grizzled, bat-
tered soldier, old enough to be his father, should come to call upon
his inammorata. But I remember how it used to matter to me when
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other men came; that’s a point of difference. However, it’s only be-
cause I’m so old. At twenty-five I shouldn’t have been afraid of my-
self at fifty-two. Camerino was thirty-four—and then the others!
She was always at home in the evening, and they all used to come.
They were old Florentine names. But she used to let me stay after
them all; she thought an old English name as good. What a tran-
scendent coquette! … But basta cosi as she used to say. I meant to
go tonight to Casa Salvi, but I couldn’t bring myself to the point. I
don’t know what I’m afraid of; I used to be in a hurry enough to go
there once. I suppose I am afraid of the very look of the place—of
the old rooms, the old walls. I shall go tomorrow night. I am afraid
of the very echoes.
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what tragic secret it was the token, it kindled, on the instant, into a
radiant Italian smile. The Countess Scarabelli’s smiles tonight, how-
ever, were almost uninterrupted. She greeted me—divinely, as her
mother used to do; and young Stanmer sat in the corner of the
sofa—as I used to do—and watched her while she talked. She is
thin and very fair, and was dressed in light, vaporous black that
completes the resemblance. The house, the rooms, are almost abso-
lutely the same; there may be changes of detail, but they don’t modify
the general effect. There are the same precious pictures on the walls
of the salon—the same great dusky fresco in the concave ceiling.
The daughter is not rich, I suppose, any more than the mother. The
furniture is worn and faded, and I was admitted by a solitary ser-
vant, who carried a twinkling taper before me up the great dark
marble staircase.
“I have often heard of you,” said the Countess, as I sat down near
her; “my mother often spoke of you.”
“Often?” I answered. “I am surprised at that.”
“Why are you surprised? Were you not good friends?”
“Yes, for a certain time—very good friends. But I was sure she had
forgotten me.”
“She never forgot,” said the Countess, looking at me intently and
smiling. “She was not like that.”
“She was not like most other women in any way,” I declared.
“Ah, she was charming,” cried the Countess, rattling open her
fan. “I have always been very curious to see you. I have received an
impression of you.”
“A good one, I hope.”
She looked at me, laughing, and not answering this: it was just
her mother’s trick.
“‘My Englishman,’ she used to call you—’il mio Inglese.’”
“I hope she spoke of me kindly,” I insisted.
The Countess, still laughing, gave a little shrug balancing her hand
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to and fro. “So-so; I always supposed you had had a quarrel. You
don’t mind my being frank like this—eh?”
“I delight in it; it reminds me of your mother.”
“Every one tells me that. But I am not clever like her. You will see
for yourself.”
“That speech,” I said, “completes the resemblance. She was al-
ways pretending she was not clever, and in reality—”
“In reality she was an angel, eh? To escape from dangerous com-
parisons I will admit, then, that I am clever. That will make a differ-
ence. But let us talk of you. You are very—how shall I say it?—very
eccentric.”
“Is that what your mother told you?”
“To tell the truth, she spoke of you as a great original. But aren’t
all Englishmen eccentric? All except that one!” and the Countess
pointed to poor Stanmer, in his corner of the sofa.
“Oh, I know just what he is,” I said.
“He’s as quiet as a lamb—he’s like all the world,” cried the Countess.
“Like all the world—yes. He is in love with you.”
She looked at me with sudden gravity. “I don’t object to your
saying that for all the world—but I do for him.”
“Well,” I went on, “he is peculiar in this: he is rather afraid of
you.”
Instantly she began to smile; she turned her face toward Stanmer.
He had seen that we were talking about him; he coloured and got
up—then came toward us.
“I like men who are afraid of nothing,” said our hostess.
“I know what you want,” I said to Stanmer. “You want to know
what the Signora Contessa says about you.”
Stanmer looked straight into her face, very gravely. “I don’t care a
straw what she says.”
“You are almost a match for the Signora Contessa,” I answered.
“She declares she doesn’t care a pin’s head what you think.”
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“And they tell me that you are a great soldier,” she continued;
“you have lived in India. It was very kind of you, so far away, to have
remembered our poor dear Italy.”
“One always remembers Italy; the distance makes no difference. I
remembered it well the day I heard of your mother’s death!”
“Ah, that was a sorrow!” said the Countess. “There’s not a day
that I don’t weep for her. But che vuole? She’s a saint its paradise.”
“Sicuro,” I answered; and I looked some time at the ground. “But
tell me about yourself, dear lady,” I asked at last, raising my eyes.
“You have also had the sorrow of losing your husband.”
“I am a poor widow, as you see. Che vuole? My husband died
after three years of marriage.”
I waited for her to remark that the late Count Scarabelli was also
a saint in paradise, but I waited in vain.
“That was like your distinguished father,” I said.
“Yes, he too died young. I can’t be said to have known him; I was
but of the age of my own little girl. But I weep for him all the more.”
Again I was silent for a moment.
“It was in India too,” I said presently, “that I heard of your mother’s
second marriage.”
The Countess raised her eyebrows.
“In India, then, one hears of everything! Did that news please
you?”
“Well, since you ask me—no.”
“I understand that,” said the Countess, looking at her open fan.
“I shall not marry again like that.”
“That’s what your mother said to me,” I ventured to observe.
She was not offended, but she rose from her seat and stood look-
ing at me a moment. Then—“You should not have gone away!” she
exclaimed. I stayed for another hour; it is a very pleasant house.
Two or three of the men who were sitting there seemed very civil
and intelligent; one of them was a major of engineers, who offered
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14TH.—I went again, last evening, to Casa Salvi, where I found the
same little circle, with the addition of a couple of ladies. Stanmer
was there, trying hard to talk to one of them, but making, I am sure,
a very poor business of it. The Countess—well, the Countess was
admirable. She greeted me like a friend of ten years, toward whom
familiarity should not have engendered a want of ceremony; she
made me sit near her, and she asked me a dozen questions about my
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last evening; she was really irresistible. Such frankness and freedom,
and yet something so soft and womanly; such graceful gaiety, so
much of the brightness, without any of the stiffness, of good breed-
ing, and over it all something so picturesquely simple and southern.
She is a perfect Italian. But she comes honestly by it. After the talk
I have just jotted down she changed her place, and the conversation
for half an hour was general. Stanmer indeed said very little; partly,
I suppose, because he is shy of talking a foreign tongue. Was I like
that—was I so constantly silent? I suspect I was when I was per-
plexed, and Heaven knows that very often my perplexity was ex-
treme. Before I went away I had a few more words tete-a-tete with
the Countess.
“I hope you are not leaving Florence yet,” she said; “you will stay
a while longer?”
I answered that I came only for a week, and that my week was
over.
“I stay on from day to day, I am so much interested.”
“Eh, it’s the beautiful moment. I’m glad our city pleases you!”
“Florence pleases me—and I take a paternal interest to our young
friend,” I added, glancing at Stanmer. “I have become very fond of
him.”
“Bel tipo inglese,” said my hostess. “And he is very intelligent; he
has a beautiful mind.”
She stood there resting her smile and her clear, expressive eyes
upon me.
“I don’t like to praise him too much,” I rejoined, “lest I should
appear to praise myself; he reminds me so much of what I was at his
age. If your beautiful mother were to come to life for an hour she
would see the resemblance.”
She gave me a little amused stare.
“And yet you don’t look at all like him!”
“Ah, you didn’t know me when I was twenty-five. I was very hand-
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some! And, moreover, it isn’t that, it’s the mental resemblance. I was
ingenuous, candid, trusting, like him.”
“Trusting? I remember my mother once telling me that you were
the most suspicious and jealous of men!”
“I fell into a suspicious mood, but I was, fundamentally, not in
the least addicted to thinking evil. I couldn’t easily imagine any harm
of any one.”
“And so you mean that Mr. Stanmer is in a suspicions mood?”
“Well, I mean that his situation is the same as mine.”
The Countess gave me one of her serious looks. “Come,” she said,
“what was it—this famous situation of yours? I have heard you
mention it before.”
“Your mother might have told you, since she occasionally did me
the honour to speak of me.”
“All my mother ever told me was that you were—a sad puzzle to her.”
At this, of course, I laughed out—I laugh still as I write it.
“Well, then, that was my situation—I was a sad puzzle to a very
clever woman.”
“And you mean, therefore, that I am a puzzle to poor Mr. Stanmer?”
“He is racking his brains to make you out. Remember it was you
who said he was intelligent.”
She looked round at him, and as fortune would have it, his ap-
pearance at that moment quite confirmed my assertion. He was
lounging back in his chair with an air of indolence rather too marked
for a drawing-room, and staring at the ceiling with the expression of
a man who has just been asked a conundrum. Madame Scarabelli
seemed struck with his attitude.
“Don’t you see,” I said, “he can’t read the riddle?”
“You yourself,” she answered, “said he was incapable of thinking
evil. I should be sorry to have him think any evil of me.”
And she looked straight at me—seriously, appealingly—with her
beautiful candid brow.
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26TH.—I have written nothing for a good many days, but mean-
while I have been half a dozen times to Casa Salvi. I have seen a
good deal also of my young friend—had a good many walks and
talks with him. I have proposed to him to come with me to Venice
for a fortnight, but he won’t listen to the idea of leaving Florence.
He is very happy in spite of his doubts, and I confess that in the
perception of his happiness I have lived over again my own. This is
so much the case that when, the other day, he at last made up his
mind to ask me to tell him the wrong that Madame de Salvi had
done me, I rather checked his curiosity. I told him that if he was
bent upon knowing I would satisfy him, but that it seemed a pity,
just now, to indulge in painful imagery.
“But I thought you wanted so much to put me out of conceit of
our friend.”
“I admit I am inconsistent, but there are various reasons for it. In
the first place—it’s obvious—I am open to the charge of playing a
double game. I profess an admiration for the Countess Scarabelli, for
I accept her hospitality, and at the same time I attempt to poison your
mind; isn’t that the proper expression? I can’t exactly make up my
mind to that, though my admiration for the Countess and my desire
to prevent you from taking a foolish step are equally sincere. And
then, in the second place, you seem to me, on the whole, so happy!
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MAY 4TH.—I have stayed away from Casa Salvi for a week, but I
have lingered on in Florence, under a mixture of impulses. I have
had it on my conscience not to go near the Countess again—and
yet from the moment she is aware of the way I feel about her, it is
open war. There need be no scruples on either side. She is as free to
use every possible art to entangle poor Stanmer more closely as I am
to clip her fine-spun meshes. Under the circumstances, however, we
naturally shouldn’t meet very cordially. But as regards her meshes,
why, after all, should I clip them? It would really be very interesting
to see Stanmer swallowed up. I should like to see how he would
agree with her after she had devoured him—(to what vulgar imag-
ery, by the way, does curiosity reduce a man!) Let him finish the
story in his own way, as I finished it in mine. It is the same story;
but why, a quarter of a century later, should it have the same
denoument? Let him make his own denoument.
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Stanmer turned about the room two or three times, and then he
said: “I don’t understand! I don’t understand why she should have
told you that Camerino had killed her husband. It could only dam-
age her.”
“She was afraid it would damage her more that I should think he
was her lover. She wished to say the thing that would most effectu-
ally persuade me that he was not her lover—that he could never be.
And then she wished to get the credit of being very frank.”
“Good heavens, how you must have analysed her!” cried my com-
panion, staring.
“There is nothing so analytic as disillusionment. But there it is.
She married Camerino.”
“Yes, I don’t lime that,” said Stanmer. He was silent a while, and
then he added—”Perhaps she wouldn’t have done so if you had
remained.”
He has a little innocent way! “Very likely she would have dis-
pensed with the ceremony,” I answered, drily.
“Upon my word,” he said, “you have analysed her!”
“You ought to he grateful to me. I have done for you what you
seem unable to do for yourself.”
“I don’t see any Camerino in my case,” he said.
“Perhaps among those gentlemen I can find one for you.”
“Thank you,” he cried; “I’ll take care of that myself!” And he
went away—satisfied, I hope.
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windows open over the garden. She was dressed in white; she was
deucedly pretty. She asked me, of course, why I had been so long
without coming.
“I think you say that only for form,” I answered. “I imagine you
know.”
“Che! what have I done?”
“Nothing at all. You are too wise for that.”
She looked at me a while. “I think you are a little crazy.”
“Ah no, I am only too sane. I have too much reason rather than
too little.”
“You have, at any rate, what we call a fixed idea.”
“There is no harm in that so long as it’s a good one.”
“But yours is abominable!” she exclaimed, with a laugh.
“Of course you can’t like me or my ideas. All things considered,
you have treated me with wonderful kindness, and I thank you and
kiss your hands. I leave Florence tomorrow.”
“I won’t say I’m sorry!” she said, laughing again. “But I am very
glad to have seen you. I always wondered about you. You are a curi-
osity.”
“Yes, you must find me so. A man who can resist your charms!
The fact is, I can’t. This evening you are enchanting; and it is the
first time I have been alone with you.”
She gave no heed to this; she turned away. But in a moment she
came back, and stood looking at me, and her beautiful solemn eyes
seemed to shine in the dimness of the room.
“How could you treat my mother so?” she asked.
“Treat her so?”
“How could you desert the most charming woman in the world?”
“It was not a case of desertion; and if it had been it seems to me
she was consoled.”
At this moment there was the sound of a step in the ante-cham-
ber, and I saw that the Countess perceived it to be Stanmer’s.
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“Your conversation,” he said, with his little innocent air, “has been
very suggestive.”
“Have you found Camerino?” I asked, smiling.
“I have given up the search.”
“Well,” I said, “some day when you find that you have made a
great mistake, remember I told you so.”
He looked for a minute as if he were trying to anticipate that day
by the exercise of his reason.
“Has it ever occurred to you that you may have made a great mis-
take?”
“Oh yes; everything occurs to one sooner or later.”
That’s what I said to him; but I didn’t say that the question, pointed
by his candid young countenance, had, for the moment, a greater
force than it had ever had before.
And then he asked me whether, as things had turned out, I myself
had been so especially happy.
“My dear General—I have it at heart to tell you that I was married
a week ago to the Countess Salvi-Scarabelli. You talked me into a
great muddle; but a month after that it was all very clear. Things
that involve a risk are like the Christian faith; they must be seen
from the inside.—Yours ever, E. S.
“P. S.—A fig for analogies unless you can find an analogy for my
happiness!”
His happiness makes him very clever. I hope it will last—I mean
his cleverness, not his happiness.
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Sir Dominick
Ferrand
by
Henry James
“THERE ARE SEVERAL OBJECTIONS to it, but I’ll take it if you’ll alter it,”
Mr. Locket’s rather curt note had said; and there was no waste of
words in the postscript in which he had added: “If you’ll come in and
see me, I’ll show you what I mean.” This communication had reached
Jersey Villas by the first post, and Peter Baron had scarcely swallowed
his leathery muffin before he got into motion to obey the editorial
behest. He knew that such precipitation looked eager, and he had no
desire to look eager—it was not in his interest; but how could he
maintain a godlike calm, principled though he was in favour of it, the
first time one of the great magazines had accepted, even with a cruel
reservation, a specimen of his ardent young genius?
It was not till, like a child with a sea-shell at his ear, he began to be
aware of the great roar of the “underground,” that, in his third-class
carriage, the cruelty of the reservation penetrated, with the taste of
acrid smoke, to his inner sense. It was really degrading to be eager in
the face of having to “alter.” Peter Baron tried to figure to himself at
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that moment that he was not flying to betray the extremity of his
need, but hurrying to fight for some of those passages of superior
boldness which were exactly what the conductor of the “Promiscu-
ous Review” would be sure to be down upon. He made believe—as
if to the greasy fellow-passenger opposite—that he felt indignant;
but he saw that to the small round eye of this still more downtrod-
den brother he represented selfish success. He would have liked to
linger in the conception that he had been “approached” by the Pro-
miscuous; but whatever might be thought in the office of that peri-
odical of some of his flights of fancy, there was no want of vividness
in his occasional suspicion that he passed there for a familiar bore.
The only thing that was clearly flattering was the fact that the Pro-
miscuous rarely published fiction. He should therefore be associ-
ated with a deviation from a solemn habit, and that would more
than make up to him for a phrase in one of Mr. Locket’s inexorable
earlier notes, a phrase which still rankled, about his showing no
symptom of the faculty really creative. “You don’t seem able to keep
a character together,” this pitiless monitor had somewhere else re-
marked. Peter Baron, as he sat in his corner while the train stopped,
considered, in the befogged gaslight, the bookstall standard of lit-
erature and asked himself whose character had fallen to pieces now.
Tormenting indeed had always seemed to him such a fate as to have
the creative head without the creative hand.
It should be mentioned, however, that before he started on his
mission to Mr. Locket his attention had been briefly engaged by an
incident occurring at Jersey Villas. On leaving the house (he lived at
No. 3, the door of which stood open to a small front garden), he
encountered the lady who, a week before, had taken possession of
the rooms on the ground floor, the “parlours” of Mrs. Bundy’s ter-
minology. He had heard her, and from his window, two or three
times, had even seen her pass in and out, and this observation had
created in his mind a vague prejudice in her favour. Such a preju-
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dice, it was true, had been subjected to a violent test; it had been
fairly apparent that she had a light step, but it was still less to be
overlooked that she had a cottage piano. She had furthermore a
little boy and a very sweet voice, of which Peter Baron had caught
the accent, not from her singing (for she only played), but from her
gay admonitions to her child, whom she occasionally allowed to
amuse himself—under restrictions very publicly enforced—in the
tiny black patch which, as a forecourt to each house, was held, in
the humble row, to be a feature. Jersey Villas stood in pairs, semi-
detached, and Mrs. Ryves—such was the name under which the
new lodger presented herself—had been admitted to the house as
confessedly musical. Mrs. Bundy, the earnest proprietress of No. 3,
who considered her “parlours” (they were a dozen feet square), even
more attractive, if possible, than the second floor with which Baron
had had to content himself—Mrs. Bundy, who reserved the draw-
ing-room for a casual dressmaking business, had threshed out the
subject of the new lodger in advance with our young man, re-
minding him that her affection for his own person was a proof
that, other things being equal, she positively preferred tenants who
were clever.
This was the case with Mrs. Ryves; she had satisfied Mrs. Bundy
that she was not a simple strummer. Mrs. Bundy admitted to Peter
Baron that, for herself, she had a weakness for a pretty tune, and
Peter could honestly reply that his ear was equally sensitive. Every-
thing would depend on the “touch” of their inmate. Mrs. Ryves’s
piano would blight his existence if her hand should prove heavy or
her selections vulgar; but if she played agreeable things and played
them in an agreeable way she would render him rather a service
while he smoked the pipe of “form.” Mrs. Bundy, who wanted to
let her rooms, guaranteed on the part of the stranger a first-class
talent, and Mrs. Ryves, who evidently knew thoroughly what she
was about, had not falsified this somewhat rash prediction. She never
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The aftertaste of the later conference was also intense for Peter
Baron, who quitted his editor with his manuscript under his arm.
He had had the question out with Mr. Locket, and he was in a
flutter which ought to have been a sense of triumph and which
indeed at first he succeeded in regarding in this light. Mr. Locket
had had to admit that there was an idea in his story, and that was a
tribute which Baron was in a position to make the most of. But
there was also a scene which scandalised the editorial conscience
and which the young man had promised to rewrite. The idea that
Mr. Locket had been so good as to disengage depended for clearness
mainly on this scene; so it was easy to see his objection was perverse.
This inference was probably a part of the joy in which Peter Baron
walked as he carried home a contribution it pleased him to classify
as accepted. He walked to work off his excitement and to think in
what manner he should reconstruct. He went some distance with-
out settling that point, and then, as it began to worry him, he looked
vaguely into shop-windows for solutions and hints. Mr. Locket lived
in the depths of Chelsea, in a little panelled, amiable house, and
Baron took his way homeward along the King’s Road. There was a
new amusement for him, a fresher bustle, in a London walk in the
morning; these were hours that he habitually spent at his table, in
the awkward attitude engendered by the poor piece of furniture,
one of the rickety features of Mrs. Bundy’s second floor, which had
to serve as his altar of literary sacrifice. If by exception he went out
when the day was young he noticed that life seemed younger with
it; there were livelier industries to profit by and shop-girls, often
rosy, to look at; a different air was in the streets and a chaff of traffic
for the observer of manners to catch. Above all, it was the time
when poor Baron made his purchases, which were wholly of the
wandering mind; his extravagances, for some mysterious reason, were
all matutinal, and he had a foreknowledge that if ever he should
ruin himself it would be well before noon. He felt lavish this morn-
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CHAPTER II
“I DARESAY it will be all right; he seems quiet now,” said the poor
lady of the “parlours” a few days later, in reference to their litigious
neighbour and the precarious piano. The two lodgers had grown
regularly acquainted, and the piano had had much to do with it.
Just as this instrument served, with the gentleman at No. 4, as a
theme for discussion, so between Peter Baron and the lady of the
parlours it had become a basis of peculiar agreement, a topic, at any
rate, of conversation frequently renewed. Mrs. Ryves was so prepos-
sessing that Peter was sure that even if they had not had the piano
he would have found something else to thresh out with her. Fortu-
nately however they did have it, and he, at least, made the most of
it, knowing more now about his new friend, who when, widowed
and fatigued, she held her beautiful child in her arms, looked dimly
like a modern Madonna. Mrs. Bundy, as a letter of furnished lodg-
ings, was characterised in general by a familiar domestic severity in
respect to picturesque young women, but she had the highest con-
fidence in Mrs. Ryves. She was luminous about her being a lady,
and a lady who could bring Mrs. Bundy back to a gratified recogni-
tion of one of those manifestations of mind for which she had an
independent esteem. She was professional, but Jersey Villas could
be proud of a profession that didn’t happen to be the wrong one—
they had seen something of that. Mrs. Ryves had a hundred a year
(Baron wondered how Mrs. Bundy knew this; he thought it un-
likely Mrs. Ryves had told her), and for the rest she depended on
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her lovely music. Baron judged that her music, even though lovely,
was a frail dependence; it would hardly help to fill a concert-room,
and he asked himself at first whether she played country-dances at
children’s parties or gave lessons to young ladies who studied above
their station.
Very soon, indeed, he was sufficiently enlightened; it all went fast,
for the little boy had been almost as great a help as the piano. Sidney
haunted the doorstep of No. 3 he was eminently sociable, and had
established independent relations with Peter, a frequent feature of
which was an adventurous visit, upstairs, to picture books criticised
for not being all geegees and walking sticks happily more conform-
able. The young man’s window, too, looked out on their acquain-
tance; through a starched muslin curtain it kept his neighbour be-
fore him, made him almost more aware of her comings and goings
than he felt he had a right to be. He was capable of a shyness of
curiosity about her and of dumb little delicacies of consideration.
She did give a few lessons; they were essentially local, and he ended
by knowing more or less what she went out for and what she came
in from. She had almost no visitors, only a decent old lady or two,
and, every day, poor dingy Miss Teagle, who was also ancient and
who came humbly enough to governess the infant of the parlours.
Peter Baron’s window had always, to his sense, looked out on a good
deal of life, and one of the things it had most shown him was that
there is nobody so bereft of joy as not to be able to command for
twopence the services of somebody less joyous. Mrs. Ryves was a
struggler (Baron scarcely liked to think of it), but she occupied a
pinnacle for Miss Teagle, who had lived on—and from a noble nurs-
ery—into a period of diplomas and humiliation.
Mrs. Ryves sometimes went out, like Baron himself, with manu-
scripts under her arm, and, still more like Baron, she almost always
came back with them. Her vain approaches were to the music-sell-
ers; she tried to compose—to produce songs that would make a hit.
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however, of the observation this outrage had led him to make, and,
for further assurance, he knocked on the wood with his knuckle. It
sounded from that position commonplace enough, but his suspi-
cion was strongly confirmed when, again standing beside the desk,
he put his head beneath the lifted lid and gave ear while with an
extended arm he tapped sharply in the same place. The back was
distinctly hollow; there was a space between the inner and the outer
pieces (he could measure it), so wide that he was a fool not to have
noticed it before. The depth of the receptacle from front to rear was
so great that it could sacrifice a certain quantity of room without
detection. The sacrifice could of course only be for a purpose, and
the purpose could only be the creation of a secret compartment.
Peter Baron was still boy enough to be thrilled by the idea of such a
feature, the more so as every indication of it had been cleverly con-
cealed. The people at the shop had never noticed it, else they would
have called his attention to it as an enhancement of value. His leg-
endary lore instructed him that where there was a hiding-place there
was always a hidden spring, and he pried and pressed and fumbled
in an eager search for the sensitive spot. The article was really a
wonder of neat construction; everything fitted with a closeness that
completely saved appearances.
It took Baron some minutes to pursue his inquiry, during which
he reflected that the people of the shop were not such fools after all.
They had admitted moreover that they had accidentally neglected
this relic of gentility—it had been overlooked in the multiplicity of
their treasures. He now recalled that the man had wanted to polish
it up before sending it home, and that, satisfied for his own part
with its honourable appearance and averse in general to shiny furni-
ture, he had in his impatience declined to wait for such an opera-
tion, so that the object had left the place for Jersey Villas, carrying
presumably its secret with it, two or three hours after his visit. This
secret it seemed indeed capable of keeping; there was an absurdity
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CHAPTER III
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“What article?”
“The one you seem to wish to write, embodying this new matter.”
“Oh, I don’t wish to write it!” Peter exclaimed. And then he bade
his host good-by.
“Good-by,” said Mr. Locket. “Mind you, I don’t say that I think
there’s nothing in it.”
“You would think there was something in it if you were to see my
documents.”
“I should like to see the secret compartment,”
the caustic editor rejoined. “Copy me out some extracts.”
“To what end, if there’s no question of their being of use to you?”
“I don’t say that—I might like the letters themselves.”
“Themselves?”
“Not as the basis of a paper, but just to publish—for a sensation.”
“They’d sell your number!” Baron laughed.
“I daresay I should like to look at them,” Mr. Locket conceded
after a moment. “When should I find you at home?”
“Don’t come,” said the young man. “I make you no offer.”
“I might make you one,” the editor hinted. “Don’t trouble your-
self; I shall probably destroy them.” With this Peter Baron took his
departure, waiting however just afterwards, in the street near the
house, as if he had been looking out for a stray hansom, to which he
would not have signalled had it appeared. He thought Mr. Locket
might hurry after him, but Mr. Locket seemed to have other things
to do, and Peter Baron returned on foot to Jersey Villas.
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CHAPTER IV
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upon his sofa. She had been informed that he wished to speak to
her, and as she placed on the malodorous luminary an oily shade of
green pasteboard she expressed the friendly hope that there was
nothing wrong with his ‘ealth.
The young man rose from his couch, pulling himself together
sufficiently to reply that his health was well enough but that his
spirits were down in his hoots. He had a strong disposition to “draw”
his landlady on the subject of Mrs. Ryves, as well as a vivid convic-
tion that she constituted a theme as to which Mrs. Bundy would
require little pressure to tell him even more than she knew. At the
same time he hated to appear to pry into the secrets of his absent
friend; to discuss her with their bustling hostess resembled too much
for his taste a gossip with a tattling servant about an unconscious
employer. He left out of account however Mrs. Bundy’s knowledge
of the human heart, for it was this fine principle that broke down
the barriers after he had reflected reassuringly that it was not med-
dling with Mrs. Ryves’s affairs to try and find out if she struck such
an observer as happy. Crudely, abruptly, even a little blushingly, he
put the direct question to Mrs. Bundy, and this led tolerably straight
to another question, which, on his spirit, sat equally heavy (they
were indeed but different phases of the same), and which the good
woman answered with expression when she ejaculated: “Think it a
liberty for you to run down for a few hours? If she do, my dear sir,
just send her to me to talk to!” As regards happiness indeed she
warned Baron against imposing too high a standard on a young
thing who had been through so much, and before he knew it he
found himself, without the responsibility of choice, in submissive
receipt of Mrs. Bundy’s version of this experience. It was an inter-
esting picture, though it had its infirmities, one of them congenital
and consisting of the fact that it had sprung essentially from the
virginal brain of Miss Teagle. Amplified, edited, embellished by the
richer genius of Mrs. Bundy, who had incorporated with it and now
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wistfully, first, over the lengthened picture of the Calais boat, till
they could look after it, as it moved rumbling away, in a spell of
silence which seemed to confess—especially when, a moment later,
their eyes met—that it produced the same fond fancy in each. The
presence of the boy moreover was no hindrance to their talking in a
manner that they made believe was very frank. Peter Baron pres-
ently told his companion what it was he had taken a journey to ask,
and he had time afterwards to get over his discomfiture at her ap-
pearance of having fancied it might be something greater. She seemed
disappointed (but she was forgiving) on learning from him that he
had only wished to know if she judged ferociously his not having
complied with her request to respect certain seals.
“How ferociously do you suspect me of having judged it?” she
inquired.
“Why, to the extent of leaving the house the next moment.”
They were still lingering on the great granite pier when he touched
on this matter, and she sat down at the end while the breeze, warmed
by the sunshine, ruffled the purple sea. She coloured a little and
looked troubled, and after an instant she repeated interrogatively:
“The next moment?”
“As soon as I told you what I had done. I was scrupulous about
this, you will remember; I went straight downstairs to confess to
you. You turned away from me, saying nothing; I couldn’t imag-
ine—as I vow I can’t imagine now—why such a matter should ap-
pear so closely to touch you. I went out on some business and when
I returned you had quitted the house. It had all the look of my
having offended you, of your wishing to get away from me. You
didn’t even give me time to tell you how it was that, in spite of your
advice, I determined to see for myself what my discovery repre-
sented. You must do me justice and hear what determined me.”
Mrs. Ryves got up from her scat and asked him, as a particular
favour, not to allude again to his discovery. It was no concern of
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hers at all, and she had no warrant for prying into his secrets. She
was very sorry to have been for a moment so absurd as to appear to
do so, and she humbly begged his pardon for her meddling. Saying
this she walked on with a charming colour in her cheek, while he
laughed out, though he was really bewildered, at the endless capri-
ciousness of women. Fortunately the incident didn’t spoil the hour,
in which there were other sources of satisfaction, and they took
their course to her lodgings with such pleasant little pauses and ex-
cursions by the way as permitted her to show him the objects of
interest at Dover. She let him stop at a wine-merchant’s and buy a
bottle for luncheon, of which, in its order, they partook, together
with a pudding invented by Miss Teagle, which, as they hypocriti-
cally swallowed it, made them look at each other in an intimacy of
indulgence. They came out again and, while Sidney grubbed in the
gravel of the shore, sat selfishly on the Parade, to the disappoint-
ment of Miss Teagle, who had fixed her hopes on a fly and a ladylike
visit to the castle. Baron had his eye on his watch—he had to think
of his train and the dismal return and many other melancholy things;
but the sea in the afternoon light was a more appealing picture; the
wind had gone down, the Channel was crowded, the sails of the
ships were white in the purple distance. The young man had asked
his companion (he had asked her before) when she was to come
back to Jersey Villas, and she had said that she should probably stay
at Dover another week. It was dreadfully expensive, but it was do-
ing the child all the good in the world, and if Miss Teagle could go
up for some things she should probably be able to manage an exten-
sion. Earlier in the day she had said that she perhaps wouldn’t re-
turn to Jersey Villas at all, or only return to wind up her connection
with Mrs. Bundy. At another moment she had spoken of an early
date, an immediate reoccupation of the wonderful parlours. Baron
saw that she had no plan, no real reasons, that she was vague and, in
secret, worried and nervous, waiting for something that didn’t de-
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CHAPTER V
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neglected, with a sense that after all it was rather a relief not to be
sitting so close to Sir Dominick Ferrand, who had become dread-
fully distracting; at the very moment at which he habitually ad-
dressed his preliminary invocation to the muse, he was agitated by
the arrival of a telegram which proved to be an urgent request from
Mr. Locket that he would immediately come down and see him.
This represented, for poor Baron, whose funds were very low, an-
other morning sacrificed, but somehow it didn’t even occur to him
that he might impose his own time upon the editor of the Promis-
cuous, the keeper of the keys of renown. He had some of the plas-
ticity of the raw contributor. He gave the muse another holiday,
feeling she was really ashamed to take it, and in course of time found
himself in Mr. Locket’s own chair at Mr. Locket’s own table—so
much nobler an expanse than the slippery slope of the davenport—
considering with quick intensity, in the white flash of certain words
just brought out by his host, the quantity of happiness, of emanci-
pation that might reside in a hundred pounds.
Yes, that was what it meant: Mr. Locket, in the twenty-four hours,
had discovered so much in Sir Dominick’s literary remains that his
visitor found him primed with an offer. A hundred pounds would
be paid him that day, that minute, and no questions would be ei-
ther asked or answered. “I take all the risks, I take all the risks,” the
editor of the Promiscuous repeated. The letters were out on the
table, Mr. Locket was on the hearthrug, like an orator on a plat-
form, and Peter, under the influence of his sudden ultimatum, had
dropped, rather weakly, into the seat which happened to be nearest
and which, as he became conscious it moved on a pivot, he whirled
round so as to enable himself to look at his tempter with an eye
intended to be cold. What surprised him most was to find Mr. Locket
taking exactly the line about the expediency of publication which
he would have expected Mr. Locket not to take. “Hush it all up; a
barren scandal, an offence that can’t be remedied, is the thing in the
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world that least justifies an airing—” some such line as that was the
line he would have thought natural to a man whose life was spent in
weighing questions of propriety and who had only the other day
objected, in the light of this virtue, to a work of the most disinter-
ested art. But the author of that incorruptible masterpiece had put
his finger on the place in saying to his interlocutor on the occasion
of his last visit that, if given to the world in the pages of the Promis-
cuous, Sir Dominick’s aberrations would sell the edition. It was not
necessary for Mr. Locket to reiterate to his young friend his phrase
about their making a sensation. If he wished to purchase the “rights,”
as theatrical people said, it was not to protect a celebrated name or to
lock them up in a cupboard. That formula of Baron’s covered all the
ground, and one edition was a low estimate of the probable perfor-
mance of the magazine.
Peter left the letters behind him and, on withdrawing from the
editorial presence, took a long walk on the Embankment. His im-
pressions were at war with each other—he was flurried by possibili-
ties of which he yet denied the existence. He had consented to trust
Mr. Locket with the papers a day or two longer, till he should have
thought out the terms on which he might—in the event of certain
occurrences—be induced to dispose of them. A hundred pounds
were not this gentleman’s last word, nor perhaps was mere unrea-
soning intractability Peter’s own. He sighed as he took no note of
the pictures made by barges—sighed because it all might mean
money. He needed money bitterly; he owed it in disquieting quar-
ters. Mr. Locket had put it before him that he had a high responsi-
bility—that he might vindicate the disfigured truth, contribute a
chapter to the history of England. “You haven’t a right to suppress
such momentous facts,” the hungry little editor had declared, think-
ing how the series (he would spread it into three numbers) would
be the talk of the town. If Peter had money he might treat himself
to ardour, to bliss. Mr. Locket had said, no doubt justly enough,
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that there were ever so many questions one would have to meet
should one venture to play so daring a game. These questions, em-
barrassments, dangers—the danger, for instance, of the cropping-
up of some lurking litigious relative—he would take over unreserv-
edly and bear the brunt of dealing with. It was to be remembered
that the papers were discredited, vitiated by their childish pedigree;
such a preposterous origin, suggesting, as he had hinted before, the
feeble ingenuity of a third-rate novelist, was a thing he should have
to place himself at the positive disadvantage of being silent about.
He would rather give no account of the matter at all than expose
himself to the ridicule that such a story would infallibly excite.
Couldn’t one see them in advance, the clever, taunting things the
daily and weekly papers would say? Peter Baron had his guileless
side, but he felt, as he worried with a stick that betrayed him the
granite parapets of the Thames, that he was not such a fool as not to
know how Mr. Locket would “work” the mystery of his marvellous
find. Nothing could help it on better with the public than the im-
penetrability of the secret attached to it. If Mr. Locket should only
be able to kick up dust enough over the circumstances that had
guided his hand his fortune would literally be made. Peter thought
a hundred pounds a low bid, yet he wondered how the Promiscu-
ous could bring itself to offer such a sum—so large it loomed in the
light of literary remuneration as hitherto revealed to our young man.
The explanation of this anomaly was of course that the editor
shrewdly saw a dozen ways of getting his money back. There would
be in the “sensation,” at a later stage, the making of a book in large
type—the book of the hour; and the profits of this scandalous vol-
ume or, if one preferred the name, this reconstruction, before an
impartial posterity, of a great historical humbug, the sum “down,”
in other words, that any lively publisher would give for it, figured
vividly in Mr. Locket’s calculations. It was therefore altogether an
opportunity of dealing at first hand with the lively publisher that
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CHAPTER VI
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CHAPTER VII
“I’VE HAD TIME TO LOOK a little further into what we’re prepared to
do, and I find the case is one in which I should consider the advis-
ability of going to an extreme length,” said Mr. Locket. Jersey Villas
the next morning had had the privilege of again receiving the editor
of the Promiscuous, and he sat once more at the davenport, where
the bone of contention, in the shape of a large, loose heap of papers
that showed how much they had been handled, was placed well in
view. “We shall see our way to offering you three hundred, but we
shouldn’t, I must positively assure you, see it a single step further.”
Peter Baron, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his hands in
his pockets, crept softly about the room, repeating, below his breath
and with inflections that for his own sake he endeavoured to make
humorous: “Three hundred—three hundred.” His state of mind
was far from hilarious, for he felt poor and sore and disappointed;
but he wanted to prove to himself that he was gallant—was made,
in general and in particular, of undiscourageable stuff. The first thing
he had been aware of on stepping into his front room was that a four-
wheeled cab, with Mrs. Ryves’s luggage upon it, stood at the door of
No. 3. Permitting himself, behind his curtain, a pardonable peep, he
saw the mistress of his thoughts come out of the house, attended by
Mrs. Bundy, and take her place in the modest vehicle. After this his eyes
rested for a long time on the sprigged cotton back of the landlady, who
kept bobbing at the window of the cab an endlessly moralising old
head. Mrs. Ryves had really taken flight—he had made Jersey Villas
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sun to make some grudging amends. This was a sign that he might
go out; he had a vague perception that there were things to be done.
He had work to look for, and a cheaper lodging, and a new idea
(every idea he had ever cherished had left him), in addition to which
the promised little word was to be dropped at Mr. Locket’s door. He
looked at his watch and was surprised at the hour, for he had noth-
ing but a heartache to show for so much time. He would have to
dress quickly, but as he passed to his bedroom his eye was caught by
the little pyramid of letters which Mr. Locket had constructed on
his davenport. They startled him and, staring at them, he stopped
for an instant, half-amused, half-annoyed at their being still in ex-
istence. He had so completely destroyed them in spirit that he had
taken the act for granted, and he was now reminded of the orderly
stages of which an intention must consist to be sincere. Baron went
at the papers with all his sincerity, and at his empty grate (where
there lately had been no fire and he had only to remove a horrible
ornament of tissue-paper dear to Mrs. Bundy) he burned the collec-
tion with infinite method. It made him feel happier to watch the
worst pages turn to illegible ashes—if happiness be the right word
to apply to his sense, in the process, of something so crisp and crack-
ling that it suggested the death-rustle of bank-notes.
When ten minutes later he came back into his sitting-room, he
seemed to himself oddly, unexpectedly in the presence of a bigger
view. It was as if some interfering mass had been so displaced that
he could see more sky and more country. Yet the opposite houses
were naturally still there, and if the grimy little place looked lighter
it was doubtless only because the rain had indeed stopped and the
sun was pouring in. Peter went to the window to open it to the
altered air, and in doing so beheld at the garden gate the humble
“growler” in which a few hours before he had seen Mrs. Ryves take
her departure. It was unmistakable—he remembered the knock-
kneed white horse; but this made the fact that his friend’s luggage
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back, the first thing, to tell him, and of course his share of the money
would be the half. She was rosy, jubilant, natural, she chattered like
a happy woman. She said they must do more, ever so much more.
Mr. Morrish had practically promised he would take anything that
was as good as that. She had kept her cab because she was going to
Dover; she couldn’t leave the others alone. It was a vehicle infirm
and inert, but Baron, after a little, appreciated its pace, for she had
consented to his getting in with her and driving, this time in ear-
nest, to Victoria. She had only come to tell him the good news—
she repeated this assurance more than once. They talked of it so
profoundly that it drove everything else for the time out of his head—
his duty to Mr. Locket, the remarkable sacrifice he had just achieved,
and even the odd coincidence, matching with the oddity of all the
others, of her having reverted to the house again, as if with one of
her famous divinations, at the very moment the trumpery papers,
the origin really of their intimacy, had ceased to exist. But she, on
her side, also had evidently forgotten the trumpery papers: she never
mentioned them again, and Peter Baron never boasted of what he
had done with them. He was silent for a while, from curiosity to see
if her fine nerves had really given her a hint; and then later, when it
came to be a question of his permanent attitude, he was silent, pro-
digiously, religiously, tremulously silent, in consequence of an ex-
traordinary conversation that he had with her.
This conversation took place at Dover, when he went down to
give her the money for which, at Mr. Morrish’s bank, he had ex-
changed the cheque she had left with him. That cheque, or rather
certain things it represented, had made somehow all the difference
in their relations. The difference was huge, and Baron could think
of nothing but this confirmed vision of their being able to work
fruitfully together that would account for so rapid a change. She
didn’t talk of impossibilities now—she didn’t seem to want to stop
him off; only when, the day following his arrival at Dover with the
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fifty pounds (he had after all to agree to share them with her—he
couldn’t expect her to take a present of money from him), he re-
turned to the question over which they had had their little scene the
night they dined together—on this occasion (he had brought a port-
manteau and he was staying) she mentioned that there was some-
thing very particular she had it on her conscience to tell him before
letting him commit himself. There dawned in her face as she ap-
proached the subject a light of warning that frightened him; it was
charged with something so strange that for an instant he held his
breath. This flash of ugly possibilities passed however, and it was
with the gesture of taking still tenderer possession of her, checked
indeed by the grave, important way she held up a finger, that he
answered: “Tell me everything—tell me!”
“You must know what I am—who I am; you must know espe-
cially what I’m not! There’s a name for it, a hideous, cruel name. It’s
not my fault! Others have known, I’ve had to speak of it—it has
made a great difference in my life. Surely you must have guessed!”
she went on, with the thinnest quaver of irony, letting him now
take her hand, which felt as cold as her hard duty. “Don’t you see
I’ve no belongings, no relations, no friends, nothing at all, in all the
world, of my own? I was only a poor girl.”
“A poor girl?” Baron was mystified, touched, distressed, piecing
dimly together what she meant, but feeling, in a great surge of pity,
that it was only something more to love her for.
“My mother—my poor mother,” said Mrs. Ryves.
She paused with this, and through gathering tears her eyes met
his as if to plead with him to understand. He understood, and drew
her closer, but she kept herself free still, to continue: “She was a
poor girl—she was only a governess; she was alone, she thought he
loved her. He did—I think it was the only happiness she ever knew.
But she died of it.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you tell me—it’s so grand of you!” Baron mur-
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Eugene Pickering
by
Henry James
CHAPTER I
IT WAS AT Homburg, several years ago, before the gam-ing had been
suppressed. The evening was very warm, and all the world was gath-
ered on the terrace of the Kursaal and the esplanade below it to
listen to the excellent orchestra; or half the world, rather, for the
crowd was equally dense in the gaming-rooms around the tables.
Everywhere the crowd was great. The night was perfect, the season
was at its height, the open windows of the Kursaal sent long shafts
of unnatural light into the dusky woods, and now and then, in the
intervals of the music, one might almost hear the clink of the napo-
leons and the metallic call of the croupiers rise above the watching
silence of the saloons. I had been strolling with a friend, and we at
last prepared to sit down. Chairs, however, were scarce. I had cap-
tured one, but it seemed no easy matter to find a mate for it. I was
on the point of giving up in despair, and proposing an adjournment
to the silken ottomans of the Kursaal, when I observed a young
man lounging back on one of the objects of my quest, with his feet
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supported on the rounds of another. This was more than his share
of luxury, and I promptly approached him. He evidently belonged
to the race which has the credit of knowing best, at home and abroad,
how to make itself comfortable; but something in his appearance
suggested that his present attitude was the result of inadvertence
rather than of egotism. He was staring at the conductor of the or-
chestra and listening intently to the music. His hands were locked
round his long legs, and his mouth was half open, with rather a
foolish air. “There are so few chairs,” I said, “that I must beg you to
surrender this second one.” He started, stared, blushed, pushed the
chair away with awkward alacrity, and murmured something about
not having noticed that he had it.
“What an odd-looking youth!” said my companion, who had
watched me, as I seated myself beside her.
“Yes, he is odd-looking; but what is odder still is that I have seen
him before, that his face is familiar to me, and yet that I can’t place
him.” The orchestra was playing the Prayer from Der Freischutz,
but Weber’s lovely music only deepened the blank of memory. Who
the deuce was he? where, when, how, had I known him? It seemed
extraordinary that a face should be at once so familiar and so strange.
We had our backs turned to him, so that I could not look at him
again. When the music ceased we left our places, and I went to
consign my friend to her mamma on the terrace. In passing, I saw
that my young man had departed; I concluded that he only strik-
ingly resembled some one I knew. But who in the world was it he
resembled? The ladies went off to their lodgings, which were near
by, and I turned into the gaming-rooms and hovered about the circle
at roulette. Gradually I filtered through to the inner edge, near the
table, and, looking round, saw my puzzling friend stationed oppo-
site to me. He was watching the game, with his hands in his pock-
ets; but singularly enough, now that I observed him at my leisure,
the look of familiarity quite faded from his face. What had made us
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call his appearance odd was his great length and leanness of limb,
his long, white neck, his blue, prominent eyes, and his ingenuous,
unconscious absorption in the scene before him. He was not hand-
some, certainly, but he looked peculiarly amiable and if his overt
wonderment savoured a trifle of rurality, it was an agreeable con-
trast to the hard, inexpressive masks about him. He was the verdant
offshoot, I said to myself, of some ancient, rigid stem; he had been
brought up in the quietest of homes, and he was having his first
glimpse of life. I was curious to see whether he would put anything
on the table; he evidently felt the temptation, but he seemed paraly-
sed by chronic embarrassment. He stood gazing at the chinking
complexity of losses and gains, shaking his loose gold in his pocket,
and every now and then passing his hand nervously over his eyes.
Most of the spectators were too attentive to the play to have many
thoughts for each other; but before long I noticed a lady who evi-
dently had an eye for her neighbours as well as for the table. She was
seated about half-way between my friend and me, and I presently
observed that she was trying to catch his eye. Though at Homburg, as
people said, “one could never be sure,” I yet doubted whether this
lady were one of those whose especial vocation it was to catch a
gentleman’s eye. She was youthful rather than elderly, and pretty rather
than plain; indeed, a few minutes later, when I saw her smile, I thought
her wonderfully pretty. She had a charming gray eye and a good deal
of yellow hair disposed in picturesque disorder; and though her fea-
tures were meagre and her complexion faded, she gave one a sense of
sentimental, artificial gracefulness. She was dressed in white muslin
very much puffed and filled, but a trifle the worse for wear, relieved
here and there by a pale blue ribbon. I used to flatter myself on guess-
ing at people’s nationality by their faces, and, as a rule, I guessed aright.
This faded, crumpled, vaporous beauty, I conceived, was a German—
such a German, somehow, as I had seen imagined in literature. Was
she not a friend of poets, a correspondent of philosophers, a muse, a
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across at the lady in white muslin, she was drawing in a very goodly
pile of gold with her little blue-gemmed claw. Good luck and bad, at
the Homburg tables, were equally undemonstrative, and this happy
adventuress rewarded her young friend for the sacrifice of his inno-
cence with a single, rapid, upward smile. He had innocence enough
left, however, to look round the table with a gleeful, conscious laugh,
in the midst of which his eyes encountered my own. Then suddenly
the familiar look which had vanished from his face flickered up un-
mistakably; it was the boyish laugh of a boyhood’s friend. Stupid fel-
low that I was, I had been looking at Eugene Pickering!
Though I lingered on for some time longer he failed to recognise
me. Recognition, I think, had kindled a smile in my own face; but,
less fortunate than he, I suppose my smile had ceased to be boyish.
Now that luck had faced about again, his companion played for
herself—played and won, hand over hand. At last she seemed dis-
posed to rest on her gains, and proceeded to bury them in the folds
of her muslin. Pickering had staked nothing for himself, but as he
saw her prepare to withdraw he offered her a double napoleon and
begged her to place it. She shook her head with great decision, and
seemed to bid him put it up again; but he, still blushing a good
deal, pressed her with awkward ardour, and she at last took it from
him, looked at him a moment fixedly, and laid it on a number. A
moment later the croupier was raking it in. She gave the young man
a little nod which seemed to say, “I told you so;” he glanced round
the table again and laughed; she left her chair, and he made a way
for her through the crowd. Before going home I took a turn on the
terrace and looked down on the esplanade. The lamps were out, but
the warm starlight vaguely illumined a dozen figures scattered in
couples. One of these figures, I thought, was a lady in a white dress.
I had no intention of letting Pickering go without reminding him
of our old acquaintance. He had been a very singular boy, and I was
curious to see what had become of his singularity. I looked for him
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the next morning at two or three of the hotels, and at last I discov-
ered his whereabouts. But he was out, the waiter said; he had gone
to walk an hour before. I went my way, confident that I should
meet him in the evening. It was the rule with the Homburg world
to spend its evenings at the Kursaal, and Pickering, apparently, had
already discovered a good reason for not being an exception. One of
the charms of Homburg is the fact that of a hot day you may walk
about for a whole afternoon in unbroken shade. The umbrageous
gardens of the Kursaal mingle with the charming Hardtwald, which
in turn melts away into the wooded slopes of the Taunus Moun-
tains. To the Hardtwald I bent my steps, and strolled for an hour
through mossy glades and the still, perpendicular gloom of the fir-
woods. Suddenly, on the grassy margin of a by-path, I came upon a
young man stretched at his length in the sun-checkered shade, and
kicking his heels towards a patch of blue sky. My step was so noise-
less on the turf that, before he saw me, I had time to recognise
Pickering again. He looked as if he had been lounging there for
some time; his hair was tossed about as if he had been sleeping; on
the grass near him, beside his hat and stick, lay a sealed letter. When
he perceived me he jerked himself forward, and I stood looking at
him without introducing myself—purposely, to give him a chance
to recognise me. He put on his glasses, being awkwardly near-sighted,
and stared up at me with an air of general trustfulness, but without
a sign of knowing me. So at last I introduced myself. Then he jumped
up and grasped my hands, and stared and blushed and laughed, and
began a dozen random questions, ending with a demand as to how
in the world I had known him.
“Why, you are not changed so utterly,” I said; “and after all, it’s
but fifteen years since you used to do my Latin exercises for me.”
“Not changed, eh?” he answered, still smiling, and yet speaking
with a sort of ingenuous dismay.
Then I remembered that poor Pickering had been, in those Latin
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in ten words. You, I suppose, have had all kinds of adventures and
travelled over half the world. I remember you had a turn for deeds
of daring; I used to think you a little Captain Cook in roundabouts,
for climbing the garden fence to get the ball when I had let it fly
over. I climbed no fences then or since. You remember my father, I
suppose, and the great care he took of me? I lost him some five
months ago. From those boyish days up to his death we were always
together. I don’t think that in fifteen years we spent half a dozen
hours apart. We lived in the country, winter and summer, seeing
but three or four people. I had a succession of tutors, and a library
to browse about in; I assure you I am a tremendous scholar. It was a
dull life for a growing boy, and a duller life for a young man grown,
but I never knew it. I was perfectly happy.” He spoke of his father at
some length, and with a respect which I privately declined to emu-
late. Mr. Pickering had been, to my sense, a frigid egotist, unable to
conceive of any larger vocation for his son than to strive to repro-
duce so irreproachable a model. “I know I have been strangely
brought up,” said my friend, “and that the result is something gro-
tesque; but my education, piece by piece, in detail, became one of
my father’s personal habits, as it were. He took a fancy to it at first
through his intense affection for my mother and the sort of worship
he paid her memory. She died at my birth, and as I grew up, it
seems that I bore an extraordinary likeness to her. Besides, my fa-
ther had a great many theories; he prided himself on his conserva-
tive opinions; he thought the usual American laisser-aller in educa-
tion was a very vulgar practice, and that children were not to grow
up like dusty thorns by the wayside. “So you see,” Pickering went
on, smiling and blushing, and yet with something of the irony of
vain regret, “I am a regular garden plant. I have been watched and
watered and pruned, and if there is any virtue in tending I ought to
take the prize at a flower show. Some three years ago my father’s
health broke down, and he was kept very much within doors. So,
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troubled frown, and then flung it back on the grass with a sigh.
“How long do you expect to be in Europe?” I asked.
“Six months I supposed when I came. But not so long—now!”
And he let his eyes wander to the letter again.
“And where shall you go—what shall you do?”
“Everywhere, everything, I should have said yesterday. But now it
is different.”
I glanced at the letter—interrogatively, and he gravely picked it
up and put it into his pocket. We talked for a while longer, but I saw
that he had suddenly become preoccupied; that he was apparently
weighing an impulse to break some last barrier of reserve. At last he
suddenly laid his hand on my arm, looked at me a moment appeal-
ingly, and cried, “Upon my word, I should like to tell you every-
thing!”
“Tell me everything, by all means,” I answered, smiling. “I desire
nothing better than to lie here in the shade and hear everything.”
“Ah, but the question is, will you understand it? No matter; you
think me a queer fellow already. It’s not easy, either, to tell you what
I feel—not easy for so queer a fellow as I to tell you in how many
ways he is queer!” He got up and walked away a moment, passing
his hand over his eyes, then came back rapidly and flung himself on
the grass again. “I said just now I always supposed I was happy; it’s
true; but now that my eyes are open, I see I was only stultified. I was
like a poodle-dog that is led about by a blue ribbon, and scoured
and combed and fed on slops. It was not life; life is learning to know
one’s self, and in that sense I have lived more in the past six weeks
than in all the years that preceded them. I am filled with this fever-
ish sense of liberation; it keeps rising to my head like the fumes of
strong wine. I find I am an active, sentient, intelligent creature,
with desires, with passions, with possible convictions—even with
what I never dreamed of, a possible will of my own! I find there is a
world to know, a life to lead, men and women to form a thousand
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relations with. It all lies there like a great surging sea, where we must
plunge and dive and feel the breeze and breast the waves. I stand
shivering here on the brink, staring, longing, wondering, charmed
by the smell of the brine and yet afraid of the water. The world
beckons and smiles and calls, but a nameless influence from the
past, that I can neither wholly obey nor wholly resist, seems to hold
me back. I am full of impulses, but, somehow, I am not full of
strength. Life seems inspiring at certain moments, but it seems ter-
rible and unsafe; and I ask myself why I should wantonly measure
myself with merciless forces, when I have learned so well how to
stand aside and let them pass. Why shouldn’t I turn my back upon
it all and go home to—what awaits me?—to that sightless, sound-
less country life, and long days spent among old books? But if a
man IS weak, he doesn’t want to assent beforehand to his weakness;
he wants to taste whatever sweetness there may be in paying for the
knowledge. So it is that it comes back—this irresistible impulse to
take my plunge—to let myself swing, to go where liberty leads me.”
He paused a moment, fixing me with his excited eyes, and perhaps
perceived in my own an irrepressible smile at his perplexity. “‘Swing
ahead, in Heaven’s name,’ you want to say, ‘and much good may it
do you.’ I don’t know whether you are laughing at my scruples or at
what possibly strikes you as my depravity. I doubt,” he went on
gravely, “whether I have an inclination toward wrong-doing; if I
have, I am sure I shall not prosper in it. I honestly believe I may
safely take out a license to amuse myself. But it isn’t that I think of,
any more than I dream of, playing with suffering. Pleasure and pain
are empty words to me; what I long for is knowledge—some other
knowledge than comes to us in formal, colourless, impersonal pre-
cept. You would understand all this better if you could breathe for
an hour the musty in-door atmosphere in which I have always lived.
To break a window and let in light and air—I feel as if at last I must
act!”
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“Act, by all means, now and always, when you have a chance,” I
answered. “But don’t take things too hard, now or ever. Your long
confinement makes you think the world better worth knowing than
you are likely to find it. A man with as good a head and heart as
yours has a very ample world within himself, and I am no believer
in art for art, nor in what’s called ‘life’ for life’s sake. Nevertheless,
take your plunge, and come and tell me whether you have found
the pearl of wisdom.” He frowned a little, as if he thought my sym-
pathy a trifle meagre. I shook him by the hand and laughed. “The
pearl of wisdom,” I cried, “is love; honest love in the most conve-
nient concentration of experience! I advise you to fall in love.” He
gave me no smile in response, but drew from his pocket the letter of
which I have spoken, held it up, and shook it solemnly. “What is
it?” I asked.
“It is my sentence!”
“Not of death, I hope!”
“Of marriage.”
“With whom?”
“With a person I don’t love.”
This was serious. I stopped smiling, and begged him to explain.
“It is the singular part of my story,” he said at last. “It will remind
you of an old-fashioned romance. Such as I sit here, talking in this
wild way, and tossing off provocations to destiny, my destiny is settled
and sealed. I am engaged, I am given in marriage. It’s a bequest of
the past—the past I had no hand in! The marriage was arranged by
my father, years ago, when I was a boy. The young girl’s father was
his particular friend; he was also a widower, and was bringing up his
daughter, on his side, in the same severe seclusion in which I was
spending my days. To this day I am unacquainted with the origin of
the bond of union between our respective progenitors. Mr. Vernor
was largely engaged in business, and I imagine that once upon a
time he found himself in a financial strait and was helped through it
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of new shirts. I supposed that was the way that all marriages were
made; I had heard of their being made in heaven, and what was my
father but a divinity? Novels and poems, indeed, talked about fall-
ing in love; but novels and poems were one thing and life was an-
other. A short time afterwards he introduced me to a photograph of
my predestined, who has a pretty, but an extremely inanimate, face.
After this his health failed rapidly. One night I was sitting, as I
habitually sat for hours, in his dimly-lighted room, near his bed, to
which he had been confined for a week. He had not spoken for
some time, and I supposed he was asleep; but happening to look at
him I saw his eyes wide open, and fixed on me strangely. He was
smiling benignantly, intensely, and in a moment he beckoned to
me. Then, on my going to him—’I feel that I shall not last long,’ he
said; ‘but I am willing to die when I think how comfortably I have
arranged your future.’ He was talking of death, and anything but
grief at that moment was doubtless impious and monstrous; but
there came into my heart for the first time a throbbing sense of
being over-governed. I said nothing, and he thought my silence was
all sorrow. ‘I shall not live to see you married,’ he went on, ‘but
since the foundation is laid, that little signifies; it would be a selfish
pleasure, and I have never thought of myself but in you. To foresee
your future, in its main outline, to know to a certainty that you will
be safely domiciled here, with a wife approved by my judgment,
cultivating the moral fruit of which I have sown the seed—this will
content me. But, my son, I wish to clear this bright vision from the
shadow of a doubt. I believe in your docility; I believe I may trust
the salutary force of your respect for my memory. But I must re-
member that when I am removed you will stand here alone, face to
face with a hundred nameless temptations to perversity. The fumes
of unrighteous pride may rise into your brain and tempt you, in the
interest of a vulgar theory which it will call your independence, to
shatter the edifice I have so laboriously constructed. So I must ask
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“Yes; but she speaks English so well that you wouldn’t know it.
She is very clever. Her husband is dead.”
I laughed involuntarily at the conjunction of these facts, and
Pickering’s clear glance seemed to question my mirth. “You have
been so bluntly frank with me,” I said, “that I too must be frank.
Tell me, if you can, whether this clever Madame Blumenthal, whose
husband is dead, has given a point to your desire for a suspension of
communication with Smyrna.”
He seemed to ponder my question, unshrinkingly. “I think not,”
he said, at last. “I have had the desire for three months; I have known
Madame Blumenthal for less than twenty-four hours.”
“Very true. But when you found this letter of yours on your place
at breakfast, did you seem for a moment to see Madame Blumenthal
sitting opposite?”
“Opposite?”
“Opposite, my dear fellow, or anywhere in the neighbourhood.
In a word, does she interest you?”
“Very much!” he cried, joyously.
“Amen!” I answered, jumping up with a laugh. “And now, if we
are to see the world in a month, there is no time to lose. Let us begin
with the Hardtwald.”
Pickering rose, and we strolled away into the forest, talking of
lighter things. At last we reached the edge of the wood, sat down on
a fallen log, and looked out across an interval of meadow at the long
wooded waves of the Taunus. What my friend was thinking of I
can’t say; I was meditating on his queer biography, and letting my
wonderment wander away to Smyrna. Suddenly I remembered that
he possessed a portrait of the young girl who was waiting for him
there in a white-walled garden. I asked him if he had it with him.
He said nothing, but gravely took out his pocket-book and drew
forth a small photograph. It represented, as the poet says, a simple
maiden in her flower—a slight young girl, with a certain childish
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“What, after all, is life but sensation, and sensation but decep-
tion?—reality that pales before the light of one’s dreams as Octavia’s
dull beauty fades beside mine? But let me believe in some intenser
bliss, and seek it in the arms of death!”
“It seems decidedly passionate,” I said. “Has the tragedy ever been
acted?”
“Never in public; but Madame Blumenthal tells me that she had
it played at her own house in Berlin, and that she herself undertook
the part of the heroine.”
Pickering’s unworldly life had not been of a sort to sharpen his
perception of the ridiculous, but it seemed to me an unmistakable
sign of his being under the charm, that this information was very
soberly offered. He was preoccupied, he was irresponsive to my ex-
perimental observations on vulgar topics—the hot weather, the inn,
the advent of Adelina Patti. At last, uttering his thoughts, he an-
nounced that Madame Blumenthal had proved to be an extraordi-
narily interesting woman. He seemed to have quite forgotten our long
talk in the Hartwaldt, and betrayed no sense of this being a confes-
sion that he had taken his plunge and was floating with the current.
He only remembered that I had spoken slightingly of the lady, and he
now hinted that it behoved me to amend my opinion. I had received
the day before so strong an impression of a sort of spiritual fastidious-
ness in my friend’s nature, that on hearing now the striking of a new
hour, as it were, in his consciousness, and observing how the echoes
of the past were immediately quenched in its music, I said to myself
that it had certainly taken a delicate hand to wind up that fine ma-
chine. No doubt Madame Blumenthal was a clever woman. It is a
good German custom at Homburg to spend the hour preceding din-
ner in listening to the orchestra in the Kurgarten; Mozart and
Beethoven, for organisms in which the interfusion of soul and sense is
peculiarly mysterious, are a vigorous stimulus to the appetite. Pickering
and I conformed, as we had done the day before, to the fashion, and
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never been spoken to before, and she offered me, formally, all the
offices of a woman’s friendship.”
“Which you as formally accepted?”
“To you the scene sounds absurd, I suppose, but allow me to say I
don’t care!” Pickering spoke with an air of genial defiance which
was the most inoffensive thing in the world. “I was very much moved;
I was, in fact, very much excited. I tried to say something, but I
couldn’t; I had had plenty to say before, but now I stammered and
bungled, and at last I bolted out of the room.”
“Meanwhile she had dropped her tragedy into your pocket!”
“Not at all. I had seen it on the table before she came in. After-
wards she kindly offered to read German aloud with me, for the
accent, two or three times a week. ‘What shall we begin with?’ she
asked. ‘With this!’ I said, and held up the book. And she let me take
it to look it over.”
I was neither a cynic nor a satirist, but even if I had been, I might
have been disarmed by Pickering’s assurance, before we parted, that
Madame Blumenthal wished to know me and expected him to in-
troduce me. Among the foolish things which, according to his own
account, he had uttered, were some generous words in my praise, to
which she had civilly replied. I confess I was curious to see her, but
I begged that the introduction should not be immediate, for I wished
to let Pickering work out his destiny alone. For some days I saw
little of him, though we met at the Kursaal and strolled occasionally
in the park. I watched, in spite of my desire to let him alone, for the
signs and portents of the world’s action upon him—of that portion
of the world, in especial, of which Madame Blumenthal had consti-
tuted herself the agent. He seemed very happy, and gave me in a
dozen ways an impression of increased self-confidence and matu-
rity. His mind was admirably active, and always, after a quarter of
an hour’s talk with him, I asked myself what experience could really
do, that innocence had not done, to make it bright and fine. I was
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CHAPTER II
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“She has a great charm, and, literally, I know no harm of her. Yet for
all that, I am not going to speak to her; I am not going near her box.
I am going to leave her to say, if she does me the honour to observe
the omission, that I too have gone over to the Philistines. It’s not
that; it is that there is something sinister about the woman. I am too
old for it to frighten me, but I am good-natured enough for it to
pain me. Her quarrel with society has brought her no happiness,
and her outward charm is only the mask of a dangerous discontent.
Her imagination is lodged where her heart should be! So long as
you amuse it, well and good; she’s radiant. But the moment you let
it flag, she is capable of dropping you without a pang. If you land
on your feet you are so much the wiser, simply; but there have been
two or three, I believe, who have almost broken their necks in the
fall.”
“You are reversing your promise,” I said, “and giving me an opin-
ion, but not an anecdote.”
“This is my anecdote. A year ago a friend of mine made her ac-
quaintance in Berlin, and though he was no longer a young man,
and had never been what is called a susceptible one, he took a great
fancy to Madame Blumenthal. He’s a major in the Prussian artil-
lery—grizzled, grave, a trifle severe, a man every way firm in the
faith of his fathers. It’s a proof of Anastasia’s charm that such a man
should have got into the habit of going to see her every day of his
life. But the major was in love, or next door to it! Every day that he
called he found her scribbling away at a little ormolu table on a lot
of half-sheets of note-paper. She used to bid him sit down and hold
his tongue for a quarter of an hour, till she had finished her chapter;
she was writing a novel, and it was promised to a publisher. Clorinda,
she confided to him, was the name of the injured heroine. The major,
I imagine, had never read a work of fiction in his life, but he knew
by hearsay that Madame Blumenthal’s literature, when put forth in
pink covers, was subversive of several respectable institutions. Be-
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ago when he told me the tale, he had not beheld her again.”
“By Jove, it’s a striking story,” I said. “But the question is, what
does it prove?”
“Several things. First (what I was careful not to tell my friend),
that Madame Blumenthal cared for him a trifle more than he sup-
posed; second, that he cares for her more than ever; third, that the
performance was a master-stroke, and that her allowing him to force
an interview upon her again is only a question of time.”
“And last?” I asked.
“This is another anecdote. The other day, Unter den Linden, I
saw on a bookseller’s counter a little pink-covered romance—
’Sophronia,’ by Madame Blumenthal. Glancing through it, I ob-
served an extraordinary abuse of asterisks; every two or three pages
the narrative was adorned with a portentous blank, crossed with a
row of stars.”
“Well, but poor Clorinda?” I objected, as Niedermeyer paused.
“Sophronia, my dear fellow, is simply Clorinda renamed by the
baptism of fire. The fair author came back, of course, and found
Clorinda tumbled upon the floor, a good deal scorched, but, on the
whole, more frightened than hurt. She picks her up, brushes her
off, and sends her to the printer. Wherever the flames had burnt a
hole she swings a constellation! But if the major is prepared to drop
a penitent tear over the ashes of Clorinda, I shall not whisper to him
that the urn is empty.”
Even Adelina Patti’s singing, for the next half-hour, but half availed
to divert me from my quickened curiosity to behold Madame
Blumenthal face to face. As soon as the curtain had fallen again I
repaired to her box and was ushered in by Pickering with zealous
hospitality. His glowing smile seemed to say to me, “Ay, look for
yourself, and adore!” Nothing could have been more gracious than
the lady’s greeting, and I found, somewhat to my surprise, that her
prettiness lost nothing on a nearer view. Her eyes indeed were the
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finest I have ever seen—the softest, the deepest, the most intensely
responsive. In spite of something faded and jaded in her physiog-
nomy, her movements, her smile, and the tone of her voice, espe-
cially when she laughed, had an almost girlish frankness and spon-
taneity. She looked at you very hard with her radiant gray eyes, and
she indulged while she talked in a superabundance of restless, rather
affected little gestures, as if to make you take her meaning in a cer-
tain very particular and superfine sense. I wondered whether after a
while this might not fatigue one’s attention; then meeting her charm-
ing eyes, I said, Not for a long time. She was very clever, and, as
Pickering had said, she spoke English admirably. I told her, as I
took my seat beside her, of the fine things I had heard about her
from my friend, and she listened, letting me go on some time, and
exaggerate a little, with her fine eyes fixed full upon me. “Really?”
she suddenly said, turning short round upon Pickering, who stood
behind us, and looking at him in the same way. “Is that the way you
talk about me?”
He blushed to his eyes, and I repented. She suddenly began to
laugh; it was then I observed how sweet her voice was in laughter.
We talked after this of various matters, and in a little while I
complimented her on her excellent English, and asked if she had
learnt it in England.
“Heaven forbid!” she cried. “I have never been there and wish
never to go. I should never get on with the—” I wondered what she
was going to say; the fogs, the smoke, or whist with sixpenny
stakes?—”I should never get on,” she said, “with the aristocracy! I
am a fierce democrat—I am not ashamed of it. I hold opinions
which would make my ancestors turn in their graves. I was born in
the lap of feudalism. I am a daughter of the crusaders. But I am a
revolutionist! I have a passion for freedom—my idea of happiness is
to die on a great barricade! It’s to your great country I should like to
go. I should like to see the wonderful spectacle of a great people free
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Before I had time to assent Madame Patti’s voice rose wheeling like
a skylark, and rained down its silver notes. “Ah, give me that art,” I
whispered, “and I will leave you your passion!” And I departed for
my own place in the orchestra. I wondered afterwards whether the
speech had seemed rude, and inferred that it had not on receiving a
friendly nod from the lady, in the lobby, as the theatre was empty-
ing itself. She was on Pickering’s arm, and he was taking her to her
carriage. Distances are short in Homburg, but the night was rainy,
and Madame Blumenthal exhibited a very pretty satin-shod foot as
a reason why, though but a penniless widow, she should not walk
home. Pickering left us together a moment while he went to hail
the vehicle, and my companion seized the opportunity, as she said,
to beg me to be so very kind as to come and see her. It was for a
particular reason! It was reason enough for me, of course, I answered,
that she had given me leave. She looked at me a moment with that
extraordinary gaze of hers which seemed so absolutely audacious in
its candour, and rejoined that I paid more compliments than our
young friend there, but that she was sure I was not half so sincere.
“But it’s about him I want to talk,” she said. “I want to ask you
many things; I want you to tell me all about him. He interests me;
but you see my sympathies are so intense, my imagination is so
lively, that I don’t trust my own impressions. They have misled me
more than once!” And she gave a little tragic shudder.
I promised to come and compare notes with her, and we bade her
farewell at her carriage door. Pickering and I remained a while, walk-
ing up and down the long glazed gallery of the Kursaal. I had not
taken many steps before I became aware that I was beside a man in
the very extremity of love. “Isn’t she wonderful?” he asked, with an
implicit confidence in my sympathy which it cost me some ingenu-
ity to elude. If he were really in love, well and good! For although,
now that I had seen her, I stood ready to confess to large possibili-
ties of fascination on Madame Blumenthal’s part, and even to cer-
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more dear to me than this one. Yet in the midst of it I have the
painful sense of my friend being half afraid of me; of his thinking
me terrible, strange, perhaps a trifle out of my wits. Poor me! If he
only knew what a plain good soul I am, and how I only want to
know him and befriend him!”
These words were full of a plaintive magnanimity which made
mistrust seem cruel. How much better I might play providence over
Pickering’s experiments with life if I could engage the fine instincts
of this charming woman on the providential side! Pickering’s secret
was, of course, his engagement to Miss Vernor; it was natural enough
that he should have been unable to bring himself to talk of it to
Madame Blumenthal. The simple sweetness of this young girl’s face
had not faded from my memory; I could not rid myself of the sus-
picion that in going further Pickering might fare much worse. Ma-
dame Blumenthal’s professions seemed a virtual promise to agree
with me, and, after some hesitation, I said that my friend had, in
fact, a substantial secret, and that perhaps I might do him a good
turn by putting her in possession of it. In as few words as possible I
told her that Pickering stood pledged by filial piety to marry a young
lady at Smyrna. She listened intently to my story; when I had fin-
ished it there was a faint flush of excitement in each of her cheeks.
She broke out into a dozen exclamations of admiration and com-
passion. “What a wonderful tale—what a romantic situation! No
wonder poor Mr. Pickering seemed restless and unsatisfied; no won-
der he wished to put off the day of submission. And the poor little
girl at Smyrna, waiting there for the young Western prince like the
heroine of an Eastern tale! She would give the world to see her pho-
tograph; did I think Mr. Pickering would show it to her? But never
fear; she would ask nothing indiscreet! Yes, it was a marvellous story,
and if she had invented it herself, people would have said it was
absurdly improbable.” She left her seat and took several turns about
the room, smiling to herself, and uttering little German cries of
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wonderment. Suddenly she stopped before the piano and broke into
a little laugh; the next moment she buried her face in the great
bouquet of roses. It was time I should go, but I was indisposed to
leave her without obtaining some definite assurance that, as far as
pity was concerned, she pitied the young girl at Smyrna more than
the young man at Homburg.
“Of course you know what I wished in telling you this,” I said,
rising. “She is evidently a charming creature, and the best thing he
can do is to marry her. I wished to interest you in that view of it.”
She had taken one of the roses from the vase and was arranging it
in the front of her dress. Suddenly, looking up, “Leave it to me,
leave it to me!” she cried. “I am interested!” And with her little blue-
gemmed hand she tapped her forehead. “I am deeply interested!”
And with this I had to content myself. But more than once the
next day I repented of my zeal, and wondered whether a providence
with a white rose in her bosom might not turn out a trifle too hu-
man. In the evening, at the Kursaal, I looked for Pickering, but he
was not visible, and I reflected that my revelation had not as yet, at
any rate, seemed to Madame Blumenthal a reason for prescribing a
cooling-term to his passion. Very late, as I was turning away, I saw
him arrive—with no small satisfaction, for I had determined to let
him know immediately in what way I had attempted to serve him.
But he straightway passed his arm through my own and led me off
towards the gardens. I saw that he was too excited to allow me to
speak first.
“I have burnt my ships!” he cried, when we were out of earshot of
the crowd. “I have told her everything. I have insisted that it’s simple
torture for me to wait with this idle view of loving her less. It’s well
enough for her to ask it, but I feel strong enough now to override
her reluctance. I have cast off the millstone from round my neck. I
care for nothing, I know nothing, but that I love her with every
pulse of my being—and that everything else has been a hideous
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dream, from which she may wake me into blissful morning with a
single word!”
I held him off at arm’s-length and looked at him gravely. “You
have told her, you mean, of your engagement to Miss Vernor?”
“The whole story! I have given it up—I have thrown it to the
winds. I have broken utterly with the past. It may rise in its grave
and give me its curse, but it can’t frighten me now. I have a right to
be happy, I have a right to be free, I have a right not to bury myself
alive. It was not I who promised—I was not born then. I myself, my
soul, my mind, my option—all this is but a month old! Ah,” he
went on, “if you knew the difference it makes—this having chosen
and broken and spoken! I am twice the man I was yesterday! Yester-
day I was afraid of her; there was a kind of mocking mystery of
knowledge and cleverness about her, which oppressed me in the
midst of my love. But now I am afraid of nothing but of being too
happy!”
I stood silent, to let him spend his eloquence. But he paused a
moment, and took off his hat and fanned himself. “Let me perfectly
understand,” I said at last. “You have asked Madame Blumenthal to
be your wife?”
“The wife of my intelligent choice!”
“And does she consent?”
“She asks three days to decide.”
“Call it four! She has known your secret since this morning. I am
bound to let you know I told her.”
“So much the better!” cried Pickering, without apparent resent-
ment or surprise. “It’s not a brilliant offer for such a woman, and in
spite of what I have at stake, I feel that it would be brutal to press
her.”
“What does she say to your breaking your promise?” I asked in a
moment.
Pickering was too much in love for false shame. “She tells me that
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she loves me too much to find courage to condemn me. She agrees
with me that I have a right to be happy. I ask no exemption from
the common law. What I claim is simply freedom to try to be!”
Of course I was puzzled; it was not in that fashion that I had
expected Madame Blumenthal to make use of my information. But
the matter now was quite out of my hands, and all I could do was to
bid my companion not work himself into a fever over either for-
tune.
The next day I had a visit from Niedermeyer, on whom, after our
talk at the opera, I had left a card. We gossiped a while, and at last
he said suddenly, “By the way, I have a sequel to the history of
Clorinda. The major is at Homburg!”
“Indeed!” said I. “Since when?”
“These three days.”
“And what is he doing?”
“He seems,” said Niedermeyer, with a laugh, “to be chiefly occu-
pied in sending flowers to Madame Blumenthal. That is, I went
with him the morning of his arrival to choose a nosegay, and noth-
ing would suit him but a small haystack of white roses. I hope it was
received.”
“I can assure you it was,” I cried. “I saw the lady fairly nestling her
head in it. But I advise the major not to build upon that. He has a
rival.”
“Do you mean the soft young man of the other night?”
“Pickering is soft, if you will, but his softness seems to have served
him. He has offered her everything, and she has not yet refused it.”
I had handed my visitor a cigar, and he was puffing it in silence. At
last he abruptly asked if I had been introduced to Madame
Blumenthal, and, on my affirmative, inquired what I thought of
her. “I will not tell you,” I said, “or you’ll call ME soft.”
He knocked away his ashes, eyeing me askance. “I have noticed
your friend about,” he said, “and even if you had not told me, I
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should have known he was in love. After he has left his adored, his
face wears for the rest of the day the expression with which he has
risen from her feet, and more than once I have felt like touching his
elbow, as you would that of a man who has inadvertently come into
a drawing-room in his overshoes. You say he has offered our friend
everything; but, my dear fellow, he has not everything to offer her.
He evidently is as amiable as the morning, but the lady has no taste
for daylight.”
“I assure you Pickering is a very interesting fellow,” I said.
“Ah, there it is! Has he not some story or other? Isn’t he an or-
phan, or a natural child, or consumptive, or contingent heir to great
estates? She will read his little story to the end, and close the book
very tenderly and smooth down the cover; and then, when he least
expects it, she will toss it into the dusty limbo of her other romances.
She will let him dangle, but she will let him drop!”
“Upon my word,” I cried, with heat, “if she does, she will be a
very unprincipled little creature!”
Niedermeyer shrugged his shoulders. “I never said she was a saint!”
Shrewd as I felt Niedermeyer to be, I was not prepared to take his
simple word for this event, and in the evening I received a commu-
nication which fortified my doubts. It was a note from Pickering,
and it ran as follows:—
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of a few hours. It was dark when I arrived, and the city was sheeted
in a cold autumnal rain. Pickering had stumbled, with an indiffer-
ence which was itself a symptom of distress, on a certain musty old
Mainzerhof, and I found him sitting over a smouldering fire in a
vast dingy chamber which looked as if it had grown gray with watch-
ing the ennui of ten generations of travellers. Looking at him, as he
rose on my entrance, I saw that he was in extreme tribulation. He
was pale and haggard; his face was five years older. Now, at least, in
all conscience, he had tasted of the cup of life! I was anxious to
know what had turned it so suddenly to bitterness; but I spared him
all importunate curiosity, and let him take his time. I accepted tac-
itly his tacit confession of distress, and we made for a while a feeble
effort to discuss the picturesqueness of Cologne. At last he rose and
stood a long time looking into the fire, while I slowly paced the
length of the dusky room.
“Well!” he said, as I came back; “I wanted knowledge, and I cer-
tainly know something I didn’t a month ago.” And herewith, calmly
and succinctly enough, as if dismay had worn itself out, he related
the history of the foregoing days. He touched lightly on details; he
evidently never was to gush as freely again as he had done during
the prosperity of his suit. He had been accepted one evening, as
explicitly as his imagination could desire, and had gone forth in his
rapture and roamed about till nearly morning in the gardens of the
Conversation-house, taking the stars and the perfumes of the sum-
mer night into his confidence. “It is worth it all, almost,” he said,
“to have been wound up for an hour to that celestial pitch. No man,
I am sure, can ever know it but once.” The next morning he had
repaired to Madame Blumenthal’s lodging and had been met, to his
amazement, by a naked refusal to see him. He had strode about for
a couple of hours—in another mood—and then had returned to
the charge. The servant handed him a three-cornered note; it con-
tained these words: “Leave me alone to-day; I will give you ten min-
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own philosophy, if left to take its time, was adequate to the occa-
sion. After his story was once told I referred to his grievance but
once—that evening, later, as we were about to separate for the night.
“Suffer me to say that there was some truth in her account of your
relations,” I said. “You were using her intellectually, and all the while,
without your knowing it, she was using you. It was diamond cut
diamond. Her needs were the more superficial, and she got tired of
the game first.” He frowned and turned uneasily away, but without
contradicting me. I waited a few moments, to see if he would re-
member, before we parted, that he had a claim to make upon me.
But he seemed to have forgotten it.
The next day we strolled about the picturesque old city, and of
course, before long, went into the cathedral. Pickering said little; he
seemed intent upon his own thoughts. He sat down beside a pillar
near a chapel, in front of a gorgeous window, and, leaving him to
his meditations, I wandered through the church. When I came back
I saw he had something to say. But before he had spoken I laid my
hand on his shoulder and looked at him with a significant smile. He
slowly bent his head and dropped his eyes, with a mixture of assent
and humility. I drew forth from where it had lain untouched for a
month the letter he had given me to keep, placed it silently on his
knee, and left him to deal with it alone.
Half an hour later I returned to the same place, but he had gone,
and one of the sacristans, hovering about and seeing me looking for
Pickering, said he thought he had left the church. I found him in
his gloomy chamber at the inn, pacing slowly up and down. I should
doubtless have been at a loss to say just what effect I expected the
letter from Smyrna to produce; but his actual aspect surprised me.
He was flushed, excited, a trifle irritated.
“Evidently,” I said, “you have read your letter.”
“It is proper I should tell you what is in it,” he answered. “When
I gave it to you a month ago, I did my friends injustice.”
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