Lady Barbarina Part 12

If she should see the others in the same way no doubt they'd be quite the same; and Lady Agatha sighed a little over the possibilities of life; for this peculiar way, especially regarded in connexion with gentlemen, had become very pleasant to her.

She had betrayed her sister more than she thought, even though Jackson didn't particularly show it in the tone in which he commented: "Of course she knows she's going to see your mother in the summer." His tone was rather that of irritation at so much harping on the very obvious.

"Oh it isn't only mamma," the girl said.

"I know she likes a cool house," Mrs. Lemon contributed.

"When she goes you had better bid her good-bye," Lady Agatha went on.

"Of course I shall bid her good-bye," said Mrs. Lemon, to whom apparently this remark was addressed.

"I'll never bid _you_ good-bye, Princess," Herman Longstraw interposed.

"You can bet your life on that."

"Oh it doesn't matter about me, for of course I shall come back; but if Barb once gets to England she never will."

"Oh my dear child!" Mrs. Lemon wailed, addressing her young visitor, but looking at her son, who on his side looked at the ceiling, at the floor, looked above all very conscious.

"I hope you don't mind my saying that, Jackson dear," Lady Agatha said to him, for she was very fond of her brother-in-law.

"Ah well then, she shan't go there," he threw off in a moment with a small strange dry laugh that attached his mother's eyes in shy penetration to his face.

"But you promised mamma, you know," said the girl with the confidence of her affection.

Jackson's countenance expressed to her none even of his very moderate hilarity. "Your mother, then, must bring her back."

"Get some of your navy people to supply an ironclad!" cried Mr.

Longstraw.

"It would be very pleasant if the Marchioness could come over," said Mrs.

Lemon.

"Oh she'd hate it more than poor Barb," Lady Agatha quickly replied. It didn't at all suit her to find a marchioness inserted into her field of vision.

"Doesn't she feel interested from what you've told her?" Lady Agatha's admirer inquired. But Jackson didn't heed his sister-in-law's answer-he was thinking of something else. He said nothing more, however, about the subject of his thought, and before ten minutes were over took his departure, having meanwhile neglected also to revert to the question of Lady Agatha's bringing her visit to his mother to a close. It wasn't to speak to him of this-for, as we know, she wished to keep the girl and somehow couldn't bring herself to be afraid of Herman Longstraw-that when her son took leave she went with him to the door of the house, detaining him a little while she stood on the steps, as people had always done in New York in her time, though it was another of the new fashions she didn't like, the stiffness of not coming out of the parlour. She placed her hand on his arm to keep him on the "stoop" and looked up and down into the lucid afternoon and the beautiful city-its chocolate-coloured houses so extraordinarily smooth-in which it seemed to her that even the most fastidious people ought to be glad to live. It was useless to attempt to conceal it: his marriage had made a difference and a worry, had put a barrier that she was yet under the painful obligation of trying to seem not to notice. It had brought with it a problem much more difficult than his old problem of how to make his mother feel herself still, as she had been in his childhood, the dispenser of his rewards.

The old problem had been easily solved, the new was a great tax. Mrs.

Lemon was sure her daughter-in-law didn't take her seriously, and that was a part of the barrier. Even if Barbarina liked her better than any one else this was mostly because she liked every one else so little.

Mrs. Lemon had in her nature no grain of resentment, and it wasn't to feed a sense of wrong that she permitted herself to criticise her son's wife. She couldn't help feeling that his marriage wasn't altogether fortunate if his wife didn't take his mother seriously. She knew she wasn't otherwise remarkable than as being his mother; but that position, which was no merit of hers-the merit was all Jackson's in being her son-affected her as one which, familiar as Lady Barb appeared to have been in England with positions of various kinds, would naturally strike the girl as very high and to be accepted as freely as a fine morning. If she didn't think of his mother as an indivisible part of him perhaps she didn't think of other things either; and Mrs. Lemon vaguely felt that, remarkable as Jackson was, he was made up of parts, and that it would never do that these should be rated lower one by one, since there was no knowing what that might end in. She feared that things were rather cold for him at home when he had to explain so much to his wife-explain to her, for instance, all the sources of happiness that were to be found in New York. This struck her as a new kind of problem altogether for a husband. She had never thought of matrimony without a community of feeling in regard to religion and country; one took those great conditions for granted just as one a.s.sumed that one's food was to be cooked; and if Jackson should have to discuss them with his wife he might, in spite of his great abilities, be carried into regions where he would get entangled and embroiled-from which even possibly he wouldn't come back at all. Mrs. Lemon had a horror of losing him in some way, and this fear was in her eyes as she stood by the doorway of her house and, after she had glanced up and down the street, eyed him a moment in silence. He simply kissed her again and said she would take cold.

"I'm not afraid of that-I've a shawl!" Mrs. Lemon, who was very small and very fair, with pointed features and an elaborate cap, pa.s.sed her life in a shawl, and owed to this habit her reputation for being an invalid-an idea she scorned, naturally enough, inasmuch as it was precisely her shawl that, as she believed, kept every ill at bay. "Is it true Barbarina won't come back?" she then asked.

"I don't know that we shall ever find out; I don't know that I shall take her to England," Jackson distinctly returned.

She looked more anxious still. "Didn't you promise, dear?"

"I don't know that I promised-not absolutely."

"But you wouldn't keep her here against her will?" quavered Mrs. Lemon.

"I guess she'll get used to it," he returned with a levity that misrepresented the state of his nerves.

Mrs. Lemon looked up and down the street again and gave a little sigh.

"What a pity she isn't American!" She didn't mean this as a reproach, a hint of what might have been; it was simply embarra.s.sment resolved into speech.

"She couldn't have been American," said Jackson with decision.

"Couldn't she, dear?" His mother spoke with conscientious respect; she felt there were imperceptible reasons in this.

"It was just as she is that I wanted her," Jackson added.

"Even if she won't come back?" Mrs. Lemon went on with wonder.

"Oh she has got to come back!" Jackson said as he went down the steps.

VI

Lady Barb, after this, didn't decline to see her New York acquaintances on Sunday afternoons, though she refused for the present to enter into a project of her husband's, who thought it would be pleasant she should entertain his friends on the evening of that day. Like all good Americans, Doctor Lemon devoted much consideration to the great question of how, in his native land, society was to be brought into being. It seemed to him it would help on the good cause, for which so many Americans are ready to lay down their lives, if his wife should, as he jocularly called it, open a saloon. He believed, or tried to believe, the _salon_ now possible in New York on condition of its being reserved entirely for adults; and in having taken a wife out of a country in which social traditions were rich and ancient he had done something toward qualifying his own house-so splendidly qualified in all strictly material respects-to be the scene of such an effort. A charming woman accustomed only to the best on each side, as Lady Beauchemin said, what mightn't she achieve by being at home-always to adults only-in an easy early inspiring comprehensive way and on the evening of the seven when worldly engagements were least numerous? He laid this philosophy before Lady Barb in pursuance of a theory that if she disliked New York on a short acquaintance she couldn't fail to like it on a long. Jackson believed in the New York mind-not so much indeed in its literary artistic philosophic or political achievements as in its general quickness and nascent adaptability. He clung to this belief, for it was an indispensable neat block in the structure he was attempting to rear. The New York mind would throw its glamour over Lady Barb if she would only give it a chance; for it was thoroughly bright responsive and sympathetic. If she would only set up by the turn of her hand a blest snug social centre, a temple of interesting talk in which this charming organ might expand and where she might inhale its fragrance in the most convenient and luxurious way, without, as it were, getting up from her chair; if she would only just try this graceful good-natured experiment-which would make every one like _her_ so much too-he was sure all the wrinkles in the gilded scroll of his fate would be smoothed out. But Lady Barb didn't rise at all to his conception and hadn't the least curiosity about the New York mind.

She thought it would be extremely disagreeable to have a lot of people tumbling in on Sunday evening without being invited; and altogether her husband's sketch of the Anglo-American saloon seemed to her to suggest crude familiarity, high vociferation-she had already made a remark to him about "screeching women"-and random extravagant laughter. She didn't tell him-for this somehow it wasn't in her power to express, and, strangely enough, he never completely guessed it-that she was singularly deficient in any natural or indeed acquired understanding of what a saloon might be. She had never seen or dreamed of one-and for the most part was incapable of imagining a thing she hadn't seen. She had seen great dinners and b.a.l.l.s and meets and runs and races; she had seen garden-parties and bunches of people, mainly women-who, however, didn't screech-at dull stuffy teas, and distinguished companies collected in splendid castles; but all this gave her no clue to a train of conversation, to any idea of a social agreement that the interest of talk, its continuity, its acc.u.mulations from season to season, shouldn't be lost. Conversation, in Lady Barb's experience, had never been continuous; in such a case it would surely have been a bore. It had been occasional and fragmentary, a trifle jerky, with allusions that were never explained; it had a dread of detail-it seldom pursued anything very far or kept hold of it very long.

There was something else she didn't say to her husband in reference to his visions of hospitality, which was that if she should open a saloon-she had taken up the joke as well, for Lady Barb was eminently good-natured-Mrs. Vanderdecken would straightway open another, and Mrs.

Vanderdecken's would be the more successful of the two. This lady, for reasons Lady Barb had not yet explored, pa.s.sed for the great personage of New York; there were legends of her husband's family having behind them a fabulous antiquity. When this was alluded to it was spoken of as something incalculable and lost in the dimness of time. Mrs.

Vanderdecken was young, pretty, clever, incredibly pretentious, Lady Barb thought, and had a wonderfully artistic house. Ambition was expressed, further, in every rustle of her garments; and if she was the first lady in America, "bar none"-this had an immense sound-it was plain she intended to retain the character. It was not till after she had been several months in New York that Lady Barb began to perceive this easy mistress of the field, crying out, gracious goodness, before she was hurt, to have flung down the glove; and when the idea presented itself, lighted up by an incident I have no s.p.a.ce to report, she simply blushed a little (for Mrs. Vanderdecken) and held her tongue. She hadn't come to America to bandy words about "precedence" with such a woman as that. She had ceased to think of that convenience-of course one was obliged to think in England; though an instinct of self-preservation, old and deep-seated, led her not to expose herself to occasions on which her imputed claim might be tested. This had at bottom much to do with her having, very soon after the first flush of the honours paid her on her arrival and which seemed to her rather grossly overdone, taken the line of scarcely going out. "They can't keep _that_ up!" she had said to herself; and in short she would stay, less boringly both for herself and for others, at home. She had a sense that whenever and wherever she might go forth she should meet Mrs. Vanderdecken, who would withhold or deny or contest or even magnanimously concede something-poor Lady Barb could never imagine what. She didn't try to, and gave little thought to all this; for she wasn't p.r.o.ne to confess to herself fears, especially fears from which terror was absent. What in the world _had_ Mrs.

Vanderdecken that she, Barbarina Lemon (what a name!), could want? But, as I have said, it abode within her as a presentiment that if she should set up a drawing-room in the foreign style (based, that is, on the suppression of prattling chits and hobbledehoys) this sharp skirmisher would be beforehand with her. The continuity of conversation, oh that she would certainly go in for-there was no one so continuous as Mrs.

Vanderdecken. Lady Barb, as I have related, didn't give her husband the surprise of confiding to him these thoughts, though she had given him some other surprises. He would have been decidedly astonished, and perhaps after a bit a little encouraged, at finding her liable to any marked form of exasperation.

On the Sunday afternoon she was visible; and at one of these junctures, going into her drawing-room late, he found her entertaining two ladies and a gentleman. The gentleman was Sidney Feeder and one of the ladies none other than Mrs. Vanderdecken, whose ostensible relations with her were indeed of the most cordial nature. Intending utterly to crush her-as two or three persons, not perhaps conspicuous for a narrow accuracy, gave out that she privately declared-Mrs. Vanderdecken yet wished at least to study the weak points of the invader, to penetrate herself with the character of the English girl. Lady Barb verily appeared to have for the representative of the American patriciate a mysterious fascination. Mrs. Vanderdecken couldn't take her eyes off her victim and, whatever might be her estimate of her importance, at least couldn't let her alone. "Why does she come to see me?" poor Lady Barb asked herself. "I'm sure I don't want to see her; she has done enough for civility long ago." Mrs. Vanderdecken had her own reasons, one of which was simply the pleasure of looking at the Doctor's wife, as she habitually called the daughter of the Cantervilles. She wasn't guilty of the rashness of depreciating the appearance of so markedly fine a young woman, but professed a positive unbounded admiration for it, defending it on many occasions against those of the superficial and stupid who p.r.o.nounced her "left nowhere" by the best of the home-grown specimens.

Whatever might have been Lady Barb's weak points, they included neither the curve of her cheek and chin, the setting of her head on her throat, nor the quietness of her deep eyes, which were as beautiful as if they had been blank, like those of antique busts. "The head's enchanting-perfectly enchanting," Mrs. Vanderdecken used to say irrelevantly and as if there were only one head in the place. She always used to ask about the Doctor-which was precisely another reason why she came. She dragged in the Doctor at every turn, asking if he were often called up at night; found it the greatest of luxuries, in a word, to address Lady Barb as the wife of a medical man and as more or less _au courant_ of her husband's patients. The other lady, on this Sunday afternoon, was a certain little Mrs. Chew, who had the appearance of a small but very expensive doll and was always asking Lady Barb about England, which Mrs. Vanderdecken never did. The latter discoursed on a purely American basis and with that continuity of which mention has already been made, while Mrs. Chew engaged Sidney Feeder on topics equally local. Lady Barb liked Sidney Feeder; she only hated his name, which was constantly in her ears during the half-hour the ladies sat with her, Mrs. Chew having, like so many persons in New York, the habit, which greatly annoyed her, of re-apostrophising and re-designating every one present.

Lady Barb's relations with Mrs. Vanderdecken consisted mainly in wondering, while she talked, what she wanted of her, and in looking, with her sculptured eyes, at her visitor's clothes, in which there was always much to examine. "Oh Doctor Feeder!" "Now Doctor Feeder!" "Well Doctor Feeder"-these exclamations, on Mrs. Chew's lips, were an undertone in Lady Barb's consciousness. When we say she liked her husband's confrere, as he never failed to describe himself, we understand that she smiled on his appearance and gave him her hand, and asked him if he would have tea.

There was nothing nasty, as they so a.n.a.lytically said in London, about Lady Barb, and she would have been incapable of inflicting a deliberate snub on a man who had the air of standing up so squarely to any purpose he might have in hand. But she had nothing of her own at all to say to Sidney Feeder. He apparently had the art of making her shy, more shy than usual-since she was always a little so; she discouraged him, discouraged him completely and reduced him to naught. He wasn't a man who wanted drawing out, there was nothing of that in him, he was remarkably copious; but she seemed unable to follow him in any direction and half the time evidently didn't know what he was saying. He tried to adapt his conversation to her needs; but when he spoke of the world, of what was going on in society, she was more at sea even than when he spoke of hospitals and laboratories and the health of the city and the progress of science. She appeared indeed after her first smile when he came in, which was always charming, scarcely to see him-looking past him and above him and below him, everywhere but at him, till he rose to go again, when she gave him another smile, as expressive of pleasure and of casual acquaintance as that with which she had greeted his entry: it seemed to imply that they had been having delightful communion. He wondered what the deuce Jackson Lemon could find interesting in such a woman, and he believed his perverse, though gifted, colleague not destined to feel her in the long run enrich or illuminate his life. He pitied Jackson, he saw that Lady Barb, in New York, would neither a.s.similate nor be a.s.similated; and yet he was afraid, for very compa.s.sion, to betray to the poor man how the queer step he had taken-now so dreadfully irrevocable-might be going to strike most others. Sidney Feeder was a man of a strenuous conscience, who did loyal duty overmuch and from the very fear he mightn't do it enough. In order not to appear to he called upon Lady Barb heroically, in spite of pressing engagements and week after week, enjoying his virtue himself as little as he made it fruitful for his hostess, who wondered at last what she had done to deserve this extremity of appreciation.

She spoke of it to her husband, who wondered also what poor Sidney had in his head and yet naturally shrank from damping too brutally his zeal.

Between the latter's wish not to let Jackson see his marriage had made a difference and Jackson's hesitation to reveal to him that his standard of friendship was too high, Lady Barb pa.s.sed a good many of those numerous hours during which she asked herself if they were the "sort of thing" she had come to America for. Very little had ever pa.s.sed between her and her husband on the subject of the most regular of her bores, a clear instinct warning her that if they were ever to have scenes she must choose the occasion well, and this odd person not being an occasion. Jackson had tacitly admitted that his "confrere" was anything she chose to think him; he was not a man to be guilty in a discussion of the disloyalty of d.a.m.ning a real friend with praise that was faint. If Lady Agatha had been less of an absentee from her sister's fireside, meanwhile, Doctor Feeder would have been better entertained; for the younger of the English pair prided herself, after several months of New York, on understanding everything that was said, on interpreting every sound, no matter from what lips the monstrous mystery fell. But Lady Agatha was never at home; she had learned to describe herself perfectly by the time she wrote her mother that she was always on the go. None of the innumerable victims of old-world tyranny welcomed to the land of freedom had yet offered more lavish incense to that G.o.ddess than this emanc.i.p.ated London debutante.

She had enrolled herself in an amiable band known by the humorous name of "the Tearers"-a dozen young ladies of agreeable appearance, high spirits and good wind, whose most general characteristic was that, when wanted, they were to be sought anywhere in the world but under the roof supposed to shelter them. They browsed far from the fold; and when Sidney Feeder, as sometimes happened, met Lady Agatha at other houses, she was in the hands of the irrepressible Longstraw. She had come back to her sister, but Mr. Longstraw had followed her to the door. As to pa.s.sing it, he had received direct discouragement from her brother-in-law; but he could at least hang about and wait for her. It may be confided to the reader at the risk of discounting the effect of the only pa.s.sage in this very level narrative formed to startle that he never had to wait very long.

When Jackson Lemon came in his wife's visitors were on the point of leaving her; and he didn't even ask his colleague to remain, for he had something particular to say to Lady Barb.

"I haven't put to you half the questions I wanted-I've been talking so much to Doctor Feeder," the dressy Mrs. Chew said, holding the hand of her hostess in one of her own and toying at one of Lady Barb's ribbons with the other.

"I don't think I've anything to tell you; I think I've told people everything," Lady Barb answered rather wearily.

"You haven't told _me_ much!" Mrs. Vanderdecken richly radiated.

"What could one tell you? You know everything," Jackson impatiently laughed.

"Ah no-there are some things that are great mysteries for me!" this visitor promptly p.r.o.nounced. "I hope you're coming to me on the seventeenth," she added to Lady Barb.