Lady Barbarina Part 9

These reflexions and a hundred more had flowed freely through his mind for several days before his call in Jermyn Street, and they had engendered a lively indignation and a bitter sense of wrong. They had even introduced, as may be imagined, a certain awkwardness into his relations with the house of Canterville, of which indeed it may be said that these amenities were for the moment virtually suspended. His first interview with Lady Barb after his conference with the old couple, as he called her august elders, had been as frank, had been as sweet, as he could have desired. Lady Canterville had at the end of three days sent him an invitation-five words on a card-asking him to dine with them on the morrow quite _en famille_. This had been the only formal intimation that his engagement to her daughter was recognised; for even at the family banquet, which included half a dozen guests of pleasant address but vague affiliation, there had been no reference on the part either of his host or his hostess to the subject of their converse in Lord Canterville's den. The only allusion was a wandering ray, once or twice, in Lady Barb's own fine eyes. When, however, after dinner, she strolled away with him into the music-room, which was lighted and empty, to play for him something out of "Carmen," of which he had spoken at table, and when the young couple were allowed to enjoy for upwards of an hour, unmolested, the comparative privacy of that elegant refuge, he felt Lady Canterville definitely to count on him. She didn't believe in any serious difficulties. Neither did he then; and that was why it was not to be condoned that there should be a vain appearance of them. The arrangements, he supposed her ladyship would have said, were pending, and indeed they were; for he had already given orders in Bond Street for the setting of an extraordinary number of diamonds. Lady Barb, at any rate, during that hour he spent with her, had had nothing to say about arrangements; and it had been an hour of pure satisfaction. She had seated herself at the piano and had played perpetually, in a soft incoherent manner, while he leaned over the instrument, very close to her, and said everything that came into his head. She was braver and handsomer than ever and looked at him as if she liked him out and out.

This was all he expected of her, for it didn't belong to the cast of her beauty to betray a vulgar infatuation. That beauty was clearly all he had believed it from the first, and with something now thrown in, something ever so touching and stirring, which seemed to stamp her from that moment as his precious possession. He felt more than ever her intimate value and the great social outlay it had taken to produce such a mixture. Simple and girlish as she was, and not particularly quick in the give and take of conversation, she seemed to him to have a part of the history of England in her blood; she was the fine flower of generations of privileged people and of centuries of rich country-life.

Between these two of course was no glance at the question which had been put into the hands of Mr. Hardman, and the last thing that occurred to Jackson was that Lady Barb had views as to his settling a fortune upon her before their marriage. It may appear odd, but he hadn't asked himself whether his money operated on her in any degree as a bribe; and this was because, instinctively, he felt such a speculation idle-the point was essentially not to be ascertained-and because he was quite ready to take it for agreeable to her to continue to live in luxury. It was eminently agreeable to him to have means to enable her to do so. He was acquainted with the mingled character of human motives and glad he was rich enough to pretend to the hand of a young woman who, for the best of reasons, would be very expensive. After the good pa.s.sage in the music-room he had ridden with her twice, but hadn't found her otherwise accessible. She had let him know the second time they rode that Lady Canterville had directed her to make, for the moment, no further appointment with him; and on his presenting himself more than once at the house he had been told that neither the mother nor the daughter was at home: it had been added that Lady Barb was staying at Roehampton. In touching on that restriction she had launched at him just a distinguishable mute reproach-there was always a certain superior dumbness in her eyes-as if he were exposing her to an annoyance she ought to be spared, or taking an eccentric line on a question that all well-bred people treated in the conventional way.

His induction from this was not that she wished to be secure about his money, but that, like a dutiful English daughter, she received her opinions-on points that were indifferent to her-ready-made from a mamma whose fallibility had never been exposed. He knew by this that his solicitor had answered Mr. Hardman's letter and that Lady Canterville's coolness was the fruit of the correspondence. The effect of it was not in the least to make him come round, as he phrased it; he had not the smallest intention of doing that. Lady Canterville had spoken of the traditions of her family; but he had no need to go to his family for his own. They resided within himself; anything he had once undiscussably made up his mind to acquired in three minutes the force, and with that the due dignity of a tradition. Meanwhile he was in the detestable position of not knowing whether or no he were engaged. He wrote to Lady Barb to clear it up, to smooth it down-it being so strange she shouldn't receive him; and she addressed him in return a very pretty little letter, which had to his mind a fine by-gone quality, an old-fashioned, a last-century freshness that might have flowed, a little thinly, from the pen of Clarissa or Sophia. She professed that she didn't in the least understand the situation; that of course she would never give him up; that her mother had said there were the best reasons for their not going too fast; that, thank G.o.d, she was yet young and could wait as long as he would; but that she begged he wouldn't write her about money-matters: she had never been able to count even on her fingers. He felt in no danger whatever of making this last mistake; he only noted how Lady Barb thought it natural there should be a discussion; and this made it vivid to him afresh that he had got hold of a daughter of the Crusaders. His ingenious mind could appreciate this hereditary a.s.sumption at the very same time that, to light his own footsteps, it remained entirely modern.

He believed-or he thought he believed-that in the end he should marry his gorgeous girl on his own terms; but in the interval there was a sensible indignity in being challenged and checked. One effect of it indeed was to make him desire the young woman more intensely. When she wasn't before his eyes in the flesh she hovered before him as an image, and this image had reasons of its own for making him at hours fairly languid with love.

There were moments, however, when he wearied of the mere enshrined memory-it was too impalpable and too thankless. Then it befell that Jackson Lemon for the first time in his life dropped and gave way-gave way, that is, to the sense of sadness. He felt alone in London, and very much out of it, in spite of all the acquaintances he had made and the bills he had paid; he felt the need of a greater intimacy than any he had formed-save of course in the case of Lady Barb. He wanted to vent his disgust, to relieve himself, from the New York point of view. He felt that in engaging in a contest with the great house of Canterville he was after all rather single. That singleness was of course in a great measure an inspiration; but it pinched him hard at moments. Then it would have pleased him could his mother have been near; he used to talk of his affairs a great deal with this delightful parent, who had a delicate way of advising him in the sense he liked best. He had even gone so far as to wish he had never laid eyes on Lady Barb, but had fallen in love instead with some one or other of the rarer home-products.

He presently came back of course to the knowledge that in the United States there was-and there could be-nothing nearly so rare as the young lady who had in fact appealed to him so straight, for was it not precisely as a high resultant of the English climate and the British const.i.tution that he valued her? He had relieved himself, from his New York point of view, by speaking his mind to Lady Beauchemin, who confessed that she was infinitely vexed with her parents. She agreed with him that they had made a great mistake; they ought to have left him free; and she expressed her confidence that such freedom could only have been, in him, for her family, like the silence of the sage, golden. He must let them down easily, must remember that what was asked of him had been their custom for centuries. She didn't mention her authority as to the origin of customs, but she promised him she would say three words to her father and mother which would make it all right. Jackson answered that customs were all very well, but that really intelligent people recognised at sight, and then indeed quite enjoyed, the right occasion for departing from them; and with this he awaited the result of Lady Beauchemin's remonstrance. It had not as yet been perceptible, and it must be said that this charming woman was herself not quite at ease.

When on her venturing to hint to her mother that she thought a wrong line had been taken with regard to her sister's _pretendant_, Lady Canterville had replied that Mr. Lemon's unwillingness to settle anything was in itself a proof of what they had feared, the unstable nature of his fortune-since it was useless to talk (this gracious lady could be very decided) as if there could be any serious reason but that one-on meeting this argument, as I say, Jackson's protectress felt considerably baffled.

It was perhaps true, as her mother said, that if they didn't insist upon proper pledges Barbarina might be left in a few years with nothing but the stars and stripes-this odd phrase was a quotation from Mr. Lemon-to cover her withal. Lady Beauchemin tried to reason it out with Lady Marmaduke; but these were complications unforeseen by Lady Marmaduke in her project of an Anglo-American society. She was obliged to confess that Mr. Lemon's fortune couldn't have the solidity of long-established things; it was a very new fortune indeed. His father had made the greater part of it all in a lump, a few years before his death, in the extraordinary way in which people made money in America; that of course was why the son had those singular professional attributes. He had begun to study to be a doctor very young, before his expectations were so great. Then he had found he was very clever and very fond of it, and had kept on because after all, in America, where there were no country gentlemen, a young man had to have something to do, don't you know? And Lady Marmaduke, like an enlightened woman, intimated that in such a case she thought it in much better taste not to try to sink anything.

"Because in America, don't you see?" she reasoned, "you can't sink it-nothing _will_ sink. Everything's floating about-in the newspapers."

And she tried to console her friend by remarking that if Mr. Lemon's fortune was precarious it was at all events so big. That was just the trouble for Lady Beauchemin, it was so big and yet they were going to lose it. He was as obstinate as a mule; she was sure he would never come round. Lady Marmaduke declared he really _would_ come round; she even offered to bet a dozen pair of _gants de Suede_ on it; and she added that this consummation lay quite in the hands of Barbarina. Lady Beauchemin promised herself to contend with her sister, as it was not for nothing she had herself caught the glamour of her friend's international scheme.

Jackson Lemon, to dissipate his chagrin, had returned to the sessions of the medical congress, where, inevitably, he had fallen into the hands of Sidney Feeder, who enjoyed in this disinterested a.s.sembly the highest esteem. It was Dr. Feeder's earnest desire that his old friend should share his credit-all the more easily that the medical congress was, as the young physician observed, a perpetual symposium. Jackson entertained the entire body at dinner-entertained it profusely and in a manner befitting one of the patrons of science rather than the humbler votaries; but these dissipations made him forget but for the hour the arrest of his relations with the house of Canterville. It punctually came back to him that he was disconcerted, and Dr. Feeder saw it stamped on his brow.

Jackson Lemon, with his acute inclination to open himself, was on the point more than once of taking this st.u.r.dy friend into his confidence.

His colleague gave him easy occasion-asked him what it was he was thinking of all the time and whether the young marchioness had concluded she couldn't swallow a doctor. These forms of speech were displeasing to our baffled aspirant, whose fastidiousness was nothing new; but he had even deeper reasons for saying to himself that in such complicated cases as his there was no a.s.sistance in the Sidney Feeders. To understand his situation one must know the world, and the children of Cincinnati, prohibitively provincial, didn't know the world-at least the world with which this son of New York was now concerned.

"Is there a hitch in your marriage? Just tell me that," Sidney Feeder had said, taking things for granted in a manner that of itself testified to an innocence abysmal. It is true he had added that he supposed he had no business to ask; but he had been anxious about it ever since hearing from Mr. and Mrs. Freer that the British aristocracy was down on the medical profession. "Do they want you to give it up? Is that what the hitch is about? Don't desert your colours, Jackson. The suppression of pain, the mitigation of misery, const.i.tute surely the n.o.blest profession in the world."

"My dear fellow, you don't know what you're talking about," Jackson could only observe in answer to this. "I haven't told any one I was going to be married-still less have I told any one that any one objects to my profession. I should like to see any one do it. I've rather got out of the swim, but I don't regard myself as the sort of person that people object to. And I do expect to do something yet."

"Come home, then, and do it. And don't crush me with grandeur if I say that the facilities for getting married are much greater over there."

"You don't seem to have found them very great," Jackson sniffed.

"I've never had time really to go into them. But wait till my next vacation and you'll see."

"The facilities over there are too great. Nothing's worth while but what's difficult," said Jackson with a sententious ring that quite distressed his mate.

"Well, they've got their backs up, I can see that. I'm glad you like it.

Only if they despise your profession what will they say to that of your friends? If they think you're queer what would they think of me?" asked Sidney Feeder, whose spirit was not as a general thing in the least bitter, but who was pushed to this sharpness by a conviction that-in spite of declarations which seemed half an admission and half a denial-his friend was suffering worry, or really perhaps something almost like humiliation, for the sake of a good that might be gathered at home on every bush.

"My dear fellow, all that's 'rot'!" This had been Jackson's retort, which expressed, however, not half his feeling. The other half was inexpressible, or almost, springing as it did from his depth of displeasure at its having struck even so genial a mind as Sidney Feeder's that in proposing to marry a daughter of the highest civilisation he was going out of his way-departing from his natural line. Was he then so ign.o.ble, so pledged to inferior things, that when he saw a girl who-putting aside the fact that she hadn't genius, which was rare, and which, though he prized rarity, he didn't want-seemed to him the most naturally and functionally founded and seated feminine subject he had known, he was to think himself too different, too incongruous, to mate with her? He would mate with whom he "d.a.m.n pleased"; that was the upshot of Jackson Lemon's pa.s.sion. Several days elapsed during which everybody-even the pure-minded, like poor Sidney-seemed to him very abject.

All of which is recorded to show how he, in going to see Mrs. Freer, was prepared much less to be angry with people who, like her husband and herself a month before, had given it out that he was engaged to a peer's daughter, than to resent the insinuation that there were obstacles to such a prospect. He sat with the lady of Jermyn Street alone for half an hour in the sabbatical stillness. Her husband had gone for a walk in the Park-he always walked in the Park of a Sunday. All the world might have been there and Jackson and Mrs. Freer in sole possession of the district of Saint James's. This perhaps had something to do with making him at last so confidential; they had such a margin for easy egotism and spreading sympathy. Mrs. Freer was ready for anything-in the critical, the "real" line; she treated him as a person she had known from the age of ten; asked his leave to continue rec.u.mbent; talked a great deal about his mother and seemed almost, for a while, to perform the earnest functions of that lady. It had been wise of her from the first not to allude, even indirectly, to his having neglected so long to call; her silence on this point was in the best taste. Jackson had forgotten how it was a habit with her, and indeed a high accomplishment, never to reproach people with these omissions. You might have left her alone for months or years, her greeting was always the same; she never was either too delighted to see you or not delighted enough. After a while, however, he felt her silence to be in some measure an allusion; she appeared to take for granted his devoting all his hours to a certain young lady. It came over him for a moment that his compatriots took a great deal for granted; but when Mrs. Freer, rather abruptly sitting up on her sofa, said to him half-simply, half-solemnly: "And now, my dear Jackson, I want you to tell me something!"-he saw that, after all, she kept within bounds and didn't pretend to know more about his business than he himself did. In the course of a quarter of an hour-so appreciatively she listened-he had given her much information. It was the first time he had said so much to any one, and the process relieved him even more than he would have supposed. There were things it made clear to him by bringing them to a point-above all, the fact that he had been wronged. He made no mention whatever of its being out of the usual way that, as an American doctor, he should sue for the hand of a marquis's daughter; and this reserve was not voluntary, it was quite unconscious. His mind was too full of the sudden rudeness of the Cantervilles and the sordid side of their want of confidence.

He couldn't imagine that while he talked to Mrs. Freer-and it amazed him afterwards that he should have chattered so; he could account for it but by the state of his nerves-she should be thinking only of the strangeness of the situation he sketched for her. She thought Americans as good as other people, but she didn't see where, in American life, the daughter of a marquis would, as she phrased it, work in. To take a simple instance-they coursed through Mrs. Freer's mind with extraordinary speed-wouldn't she always expect to go in to dinner first? As a novelty and for a change, over there, they might like to see her do it-there might be even a pressure for places at the show. But with the increase of every kind of sophistication that was taking place in America the humorous view to which she would owe her immediate ease mightn't continue to be taken; and then where would poor Lady Barb be? This was in truth a scant instance; but Mrs. Freer's vivid imagination-much as she had lived in Europe she knew her native land so well-saw a host of others ma.s.sing themselves behind it. The consequence of all of which was that after listening to her young friend in the most engaging silence she raised her clasped hands, pressed them against her breast, lowered her voice to a tone of entreaty and, with all the charming cheer of her wisdom, uttered three words: "My dear Jackson, don't-don't-don't."

"Don't what?" He took it at first coldly.

"Don't neglect the chance you have of getting out of it. You see it would never do."

He knew what she meant by his chance of getting out of it; he had in his many meditations of course not overlooked that. The ground the old couple had taken about settlements-and the fact that Lady Beauchemin hadn't come back to him to tell him, as she promised, that she had moved them, proved how firmly they were rooted-would have offered an all-sufficient pretext to a man who should have repented of his advances.

Jackson knew this, but knew at the same time that he had not repented.

The old couple's want of imagination didn't in the least alter the fact that the girl was, in her perfection, as he had told her father, one of the rarest of types. Therefore he simply said to Mrs. Freer that he didn't in the least wish to get out of it; he was as much in it as ever and intended to remain in it. But what did she mean, he asked in a moment, by her statement that it would never do? Why wouldn't it do?

Mrs. Freer replied by another question-should he really like her to tell him? It wouldn't do because Lady Barb wouldn't be satisfied with her place at dinner. She wouldn't be content-in a society of commoners-with any but the best; and the best she couldn't expect (and it was to be supposed he didn't expect her) always grossly to monopolise; as people of her sort, for that matter, did so successfully grab it in England.

"What do you mean by commoners?" Jackson rather grimly demanded.

"I mean you and me and my poor husband and Dr. Feeder," said Mrs. Freer.

"I don't see how there can be commoners where there aren't lords. It's the lord that makes the commoner, and _vice versa_."

"Won't a lady do as well? Our Lady Barb-a single English girl-can make a million inferiors."

"She will be, before anything else, my wife; and she won't on the whole think it any less vulgar to talk about inferiors than I do myself."

"I don't know what she'll talk about, my dear Jackson, but she'll think; and her thoughts won't be pleasant-I mean for others. Do you expect to sink her to your own rank?"

Dr. Lemon's bright little eyes rested more sharply on his hostess. "I don't understand you and don't think you understand yourself." This was not absolutely candid, for he did understand Mrs. Freer to a certain extent; it has been related that before he asked Lady Barb's hand of her parents there had been moments when he himself doubted if a flower only to be described as of the social hothouse, that is of aristocratic air, would flourish in American earth. But an intimation from another person that it was beyond his power to pa.s.s off his wife-whether she were the daughter of a peer or of a shoemaker-set all his blood on fire. It quenched on the instant his own perception of difficulties of detail and made him feel only that he was dishonoured-he the heir of all the ages-by such insinuations. It was his belief-though he had never before had occasion to put it forward-that his position, one of the best in the world, had about it the felicity that makes everything possible. He had had the best education the age could offer, for if he had rather wasted his time at Harvard, where he entered very young, he had, as he believed, been tremendously serious at Heidelberg and at Vienna. He had devoted himself to one of the n.o.blest of professions-a profession recognised as such everywhere but in England-and had inherited a fortune far beyond the expectation of his earlier years, the years when he cultivated habits of work which alone (or rather in combination with talents that he neither exaggerated nor undervalued) would have conduced to distinction. He was one of the most fortunate inhabitants of an immense fresh rich country, a country whose future was admitted to be incalculable, and he moved with perfect ease in a society in which he was not overshadowed by others. It seemed to him, therefore, beneath his dignity to wonder whether he could afford, socially speaking, to marry according to his taste. He pretended to general strength, and what was the use of strength if you weren't prepared to undertake things timid people might find difficult? It was his plan to marry the woman he desired and not be afraid of her afterward. The effect of Mrs. Freer's doubt of his success was to represent to him that his own character wouldn't cover his wife's; she couldn't have made him feel worse if she had told him that he was marrying beneath him and would have to ask for indulgence. "I don't believe you know how much I think that any woman who marries me will be doing very well," he promptly added.

"I'm very sure of that; but it isn't so simple-one's being an American,"

Mrs. Freer rejoined with a small philosophic sigh.

"It's whatever one chooses to make it."

"Well, you'll make it what no one has done yet if you take that young lady to America and make her happy there."

"Do you think our country, then, such a very dreadful place?"

His hostess had a pause. "It's not a question of what I think, but of what she will."

Jackson rose from his chair and took up his hat and stick. He had actually turned a little pale with the force of his emotion; there was a pang of wrath for him in this fact that his marriage to Lady Barbarina might be looked at as too high a flight. He stood a moment leaning against the mantelpiece and very much tempted to say to Mrs. Freer that she was a vulgar-minded old woman. But he said something that was really more to the point. "You forget that she'll have her consolations."

"Don't go away or I shall think I've offended you. You can't console an injured n.o.blewoman."

"How will she be injured? People will be charming to her."

"They'll be charming to her-charming to her!" These words fell from the lips of Dexter Freer, who had opened the door of the room and stood with the k.n.o.b in his hand, putting himself into relation to his wife's talk with their visitor. This harmony was achieved in an instant. "Of course I know whom you mean," he said while he exchanged greetings with Jackson.

"My wife and I-naturally we're great busybodies-have talked of your affair and we differ about it completely. She sees only the dangers, while I see all the advantages."

"By the advantages he means the fun for us," Mrs. Freer explained, settling her sofa-cushions.

Jackson looked with a certain sharp blankness from one of these disinterested judges to the other; even yet they scarce saw how their misdirected freedom wrought on him. It was hardly more agreeable to him to know that the husband wished to see Lady Barb in America than to know that the wife waved away such a vision. There was that in Dexter Freer's face which seemed to forecast the affair as taking place somehow for the benefit of the spectators. "I think you both see too much-a great deal too much-in the whole thing," he rather coldly returned.

"My dear young man, at my age I may take certain liberties," said Dexter Freer. "_Do_ what you've planned-I beseech you to do it; it has never been done before." And then as if Jackson's glance had challenged this last a.s.sertion he went on: "Never, I a.s.sure you, this particular thing.

Young female members of the British aristocracy have married coachmen and fishmongers and all that sort of thing; but they've never married you and me."

"They certainly haven't married the 'likes' of either of you!" said Mrs.

Freer.

"I'm much obliged to you for your advice." It may be thought that Jackson Lemon took himself rather seriously, and indeed I'm afraid that if he hadn't done so there would have been no occasion even for this summary report of him. But it made him almost sick to hear his engagement spoken of as a curious and ambiguous phenomenon. He might have his own ideas about it-one always had about one's engagement; but the ideas that appeared to have peopled the imagination of his friends ended by kindling a small hot expanse in each of his cheeks. "I'd rather not talk any more about my little plans," he added to his host. "I've been saying all sorts of absurd things to Mrs. Freer."

"They've been most interesting and most infuriating," that lady declared.

"You've been very stupidly treated."

"May she tell me when you go?" her husband asked of the young man.