The Europeans

“No; I have been to see her.”

“What is the matter with her?”

“Well,” said Mr. Wentworth, “I infer she has tired of us.”

Acton pretended to sit down, but he was restless; he found it impossible to talk with Mr. Wentworth. At the end of ten minutes he took up his hat and said that he thought he would “go off.” It was very late; it was ten o’clock.

His quiet-faced kinsman looked at him a moment. “Are you going home?” he asked.

Acton hesitated, and then answered that he had proposed to go over and take a look at the Baroness.

“Well, you are honest, at least,” said Mr. Wentworth, sadly.

“So are you, if you come to that!” cried Acton, laughing. “Why shouldn’t I be honest?”

The old man opened the North American again, and read a few lines. “If we have ever had any virtue among us, we had better keep hold of it now,” he said. He was not quoting.

“We have a Baroness among us,” said Acton. “That’s what we must keep hold of!” He was too impatient to see Madame Münster again to wonder what Mr. Wentworth was talking about. Nevertheless, after he had passed out of the house and traversed the garden and the little piece of road that separated him from Eugenia’s provisional residence, he stopped a moment outside. He stood in her little garden; the long window of her parlor was open, and he could see the white curtains, with the lamp-light shining through them, swaying softly to and fro in the warm night wind. There was a sort of excitement in the idea of seeing Madame Münster again; he became aware that his heart was beating rather faster than usual. It was this that made him stop, with a half-amused surprise. But in a moment he went along the piazza, and, approaching the open window, tapped upon its lintel with his stick. He could see the Baroness within; she was standing in the middle of the room. She came to the window and pulled aside the curtain; then she stood looking at him a moment. She was not smiling; she seemed serious.

“Mais entrez donc!” she said at last. Acton passed in across the window-sill; he wondered, for an instant, what was the matter with her. But the next moment she had begun to smile and had put out her hand. “Better late than never,” she said. “It is very kind of you to come at this hour.”

“I have just returned from my journey,” said Acton.

“Ah, very kind, very kind,” she repeated, looking about her where to sit.

“I went first to the other house,” Acton continued. “I expected to find you there.”

She had sunk into her usual chair; but she got up again, and began to move about the room. Acton had laid down his hat and stick; he was looking at her, conscious that there was in fact a great charm in seeing her again. “I don’t know whether I ought to tell you to sit down,” she said. “It is too late to begin a visit.”

“It’s too early to end one,” Acton declared; “and we needn’t mind the beginning.”

She looked at him again, and, after a moment, dropped once more into her low chair, while he took a place near her. “We are in the middle, then?” she asked. “Was that where we were when you went away? No, I haven’t been to the other house.”

“Not yesterday, nor the day before, eh?”

“I don’t know how many days it is.”

“You are tired of it,” said Acton.

She leaned back in her chair; her arms were folded. “That is a terrible accusation, but I have not the courage to defend myself.”

“I am not attacking you,” said Acton. “I expected something of this kind.”

“It’s a proof of extreme intelligence. I hope you enjoyed your journey.”

“Not at all,” Acton declared. “I would much rather have been here with you.”

“Now you are attacking me,” said the Baroness. “You are contrasting my inconstancy with your own fidelity.”

“I confess I never get tired of people I like.”

“Ah, you are not a poor wicked foreign woman, with irritable nerves and a sophisticated mind!”

“Something has happened to you since I went away,” said Acton, changing his place.

“Your going away—that is what has happened to me.”

“Do you mean to say that you have missed me?” he asked.

“If I had meant to say it, it would not be worth your making a note of. I am very dishonest and my compliments are worthless.”

Acton was silent for some moments. “You have broken down,” he said at last.

Madame Münster left her chair, and began to move about.

“Only for a moment. I shall pull myself together again.”

“You had better not take it too hard. If you are bored, you needn’t be afraid to say so—to me at least.”

“You shouldn’t say such things as that,” the Baroness answered. “You should encourage me.”

“I admire your patience; that is encouraging.”

“You shouldn’t even say that. When you talk of my patience you are disloyal to your own people. Patience implies suffering; and what have I had to suffer?”

“Oh, not hunger, not unkindness, certainly,” said Acton, laughing. “Nevertheless, we all admire your patience.”

“You all detest me!” cried the Baroness, with a sudden vehemence, turning her back toward him.

“You make it hard,” said Acton, getting up, “for a man to say something tender to you.” This evening there was something particularly striking and touching about her; an unwonted softness and a look of suppressed emotion. He felt himself suddenly appreciating the fact that she had behaved very well. She had come to this quiet corner of the world under the weight of a cruel indignity, and she had been so gracefully, modestly thankful for the rest she found there. She had joined that simple circle over the way; she had mingled in its plain, provincial talk; she had shared its meagre and savorless pleasures. She had set herself a task, and she had rigidly performed it. She had conformed to the angular conditions of New England life, and she had had the tact and pluck to carry it off as if she liked them. Acton felt a more downright need than he had ever felt before to tell her that he admired her and that she struck him as a very superior woman. All along, hitherto, he had been on his guard with her; he had been cautious, observant, suspicious. But now a certain light tumult in his blood seemed to tell him that a finer degree of confidence in this charming woman would be its own reward. “We don’t detest you,” he went on. “I don’t know what you mean. At any rate, I speak for myself; I don’t know anything about the others. Very likely, you detest them for the dull life they make you lead. Really, it would give me a sort of pleasure to hear you say so.”

Eugenia had been looking at the door on the other side of the room; now she slowly turned her eyes toward Robert Acton. “What can be the motive,” she asked, “of a man like you—an honest man, a galant homme—in saying so base a thing as that?”

“Does it sound very base?” asked Acton, candidly. “I suppose it does, and I thank you for telling me so. Of course, I don’t mean it literally.”

The Baroness stood looking at him. “How do you mean it?” she asked.

This question was difficult to answer, and Acton, feeling the least bit foolish, walked to the open window and looked out. He stood there, thinking a moment, and then he turned back. “You know that document that you were to send to Germany,” he said. “You called it your ‘renunciation.’ Did you ever send it?”

Madame Münster’s eyes expanded; she looked very grave. “What a singular answer to my question!”

“Oh, it isn’t an answer,” said Acton. “I have wished to ask you, many times. I thought it probable you would tell me yourself. The question, on my part, seems abrupt now; but it would be abrupt at any time.”

The Baroness was silent a moment; and then, “I think I have told you too much!” she said.

This declaration appeared to Acton to have a certain force; he had indeed a sense of asking more of her than he offered her. He returned to the window, and watched, for a moment, a little star that twinkled through the lattice of the piazza. There were at any rate offers enough he could make; perhaps he had hitherto not been sufficiently explicit in doing so. “I wish you would ask something of me,” he presently said. “Is there nothing I can do for you? If you can’t stand this dull life any more, let me amuse you!”

The Baroness had sunk once more into a chair, and she had taken up a fan which she held, with both hands, to her mouth. Over the top of the fan her eyes were fixed on him. “You are very strange tonight,” she said, with a little laugh.

“I will do anything in the world,” he rejoined, standing in front of her. “Shouldn’t you like to travel about and see something of the country? Won’t you go to Niagara? You ought to see Niagara, you know.”

“With you, do you mean?”

“I should be delighted to take you.”

“You alone?”

Acton looked at her, smiling, and yet with a serious air. “Well, yes; we might go alone,” he said.

“If you were not what you are,” she answered, “I should feel insulted.”

“How do you mean—what I am?”

“If you were one of the gentlemen I have been used to all my life. If you were not a queer Bostonian.”

“If the gentlemen you have been used to have taught you to expect insults,” said Acton, “I am glad I am what I am. You had much better come to Niagara.”

“If you wish to ‘amuse’ me,” the Baroness declared, “you need go to no further expense. You amuse me very effectually.”

He sat down opposite to her; she still held her fan up to her face, with her eyes only showing above it. There was a moment’s silence, and then he said, returning to his former question, “Have you sent that document to Germany?”

Again there was a moment’s silence. The expressive eyes of Madame Münster seemed, however, half to break it.

“I will tell you—at Niagara!” she said.

She had hardly spoken when the door at the further end of the room opened—the door upon which, some minutes previous, Eugenia had fixed her gaze. Clifford Wentworth stood there, blushing and looking rather awkward. The Baroness rose, quickly, and Acton, more slowly, did the same. Clifford gave him no greeting; he was looking at Eugenia.

“Ah, you were here?” exclaimed Acton.

“He was in Felix’s studio,” said Madame Münster. “He wanted to see his sketches.”

Clifford looked at Robert Acton, but said nothing; he only fanned himself with his hat. “You chose a bad moment,” said Acton; “you hadn’t much light.”

“I hadn’t any!” said Clifford, laughing.

“Your candle went out?” Eugenia asked. “You should have come back here and lighted it again.”

Clifford looked at her a moment. “So I have—come back. But I have left the candle!”

Eugenia turned away. “You are very stupid, my poor boy. You had better go home.”

“Well,” said Clifford, “good-night!”

“Haven’t you a word to throw to a man when he has safely returned from a dangerous journey?” Acton asked.

“How do you do?” said Clifford. “I thought—I thought you were–” and he paused, looking at the Baroness again.

“You thought I was at Newport, eh? So I was—this morning.”

“Good-night, clever child!” said Madame Münster, over her shoulder.

Clifford stared at her—not at all like a clever child; and then, with one of his little facetious growls, took his departure.

“What is the matter with him?” asked Acton, when he was gone. “He seemed rather in a muddle.”

Eugenia, who was near the window, glanced out, listening a moment. “The matter—the matter”—she answered. “But you don’t say such things here.”

“If you mean that he had been drinking a little, you can say that.”

“He doesn’t drink any more. I have cured him. And in return—he’s in love with me.”

It was Acton’s turn to stare. He instantly thought of his sister; but he said nothing about her. He began to laugh. “I don’t wonder at his passion! But I wonder at his forsaking your society for that of your brother’s paint-brushes.”

Eugenia was silent a little. “He had not been in the studio. I invented that at the moment.”

“Invented it? For what purpose?”

“He has an idea of being romantic. He has adopted the habit of coming to see me at midnight—passing only through the orchard and through Felix’s painting-room, which has a door opening that way. It seems to amuse him,” added Eugenia, with a little laugh.

Acton felt more surprise than he confessed to, for this was a new view of Clifford, whose irregularities had hitherto been quite without the romantic element. He tried to laugh again, but he felt rather too serious, and after a moment’s hesitation his seriousness explained itself. “I hope you don’t encourage him,” he said. “He must not be inconstant to poor Lizzie.”

“To your sister?”

“You know they are decidedly intimate,” said Acton.

“Ah,” cried Eugenia, smiling, “has she—has she–”

“I don’t know,” Acton interrupted, “what she has. But I always supposed that Clifford had a desire to make himself agreeable to her.”

“Ah, par exemple!” the Baroness went on. “The little monster! The next time he becomes sentimental I will him tell that he ought to be ashamed of himself.”

Acton was silent a moment. “You had better say nothing about it.”

“I had told him as much already, on general grounds,” said the Baroness. “But in this country, you know, the relations of young people are so extraordinary that one is quite at sea. They are not engaged when you would quite say they ought to be. Take Charlotte Wentworth, for instance, and that young ecclesiastic. If I were her father I should insist upon his marrying her; but it appears to be thought there is no urgency. On the other hand, you suddenly learn that a boy of twenty and a little girl who is still with her governess—your sister has no governess? Well, then, who is never away from her mamma—a young couple, in short, between whom you have noticed nothing beyond an exchange of the childish pleasantries characteristic of their age, are on the point of setting up as man and wife.” The Baroness spoke with a certain exaggerated volubility which was in contrast with the languid grace that had characterized her manner before Clifford made his appearance. It seemed to Acton that there was a spark of irritation in her eye—a note of irony (as when she spoke of Lizzie being never away from her mother) in her voice. If Madame Münster was irritated, Robert Acton was vaguely mystified; she began to move about the room again, and he looked at her without saying anything. Presently she took out her watch, and, glancing at it, declared that it was three o’clock in the morning and that he must go.

“I have not been here an hour,” he said, “and they are still sitting up at the other house. You can see the lights. Your brother has not come in.”

“Oh, at the other house,” cried Eugenia, “they are terrible people! I don’t know what they may do over there. I am a quiet little humdrum woman; I have rigid rules and I keep them. One of them is not to have visitors in the small hours—especially clever men like you. So good-night!”

Decidedly, the Baroness was incisive; and though Acton bade her good-night and departed, he was still a good deal mystified.

The next day Clifford Wentworth came to see Lizzie, and Acton, who was at home and saw him pass through the garden, took note of the circumstance. He had a natural desire to make it tally with Madame Münster’s account of Clifford’s disaffection; but his ingenuity, finding itself unequal to the task, resolved at last to ask help of the young man’s candor. He waited till he saw him going away, and then he went out and overtook him in the grounds.

“I wish very much you would answer me a question,” Acton said. “What were you doing, last night, at Madame Münster’s?”

Clifford began to laugh and to blush, by no means like a young man with a romantic secret. “What did she tell you?” he asked.

“That is exactly what I don’t want to say.”

“Well, I want to tell you the same,” said Clifford; “and unless I know it perhaps I can’t.”

They had stopped in a garden path; Acton looked hard at his rosy young kinsman. “She said she couldn’t fancy what had got into you; you appeared to have taken a violent dislike to her.”

Clifford stared, looking a little alarmed. “Oh, come,” he growled, “you don’t mean that!”

“And that when—for common civility’s sake—you came occasionally to the house you left her alone and spent your time in Felix’s studio, under pretext of looking at his sketches.”

“Oh, come!” growled Clifford, again.

“Did you ever know me to tell an untruth?”

“Yes, lots of them!” said Clifford, seeing an opening, out of the discussion, for his sarcastic powers. “Well,” he presently added, “I thought you were my father.”

“You knew someone was there?”

“We heard you coming in.”

Acton meditated. “You had been with the Baroness, then?”

“I was in the parlor. We heard your step outside. I thought it was my father.”

“And on that,” asked Acton, “you ran away?”

“She told me to go—to go out by the studio.”

Acton meditated more intensely; if there had been a chair at hand he would have sat down. “Why should she wish you not to meet your father?”

“Well,” said Clifford, “father doesn’t like to see me there.”

Acton looked askance at his companion and forbore to make any comment upon this assertion. “Has he said so,” he asked, “to the Baroness?”

“Well, I hope not,” said Clifford. “He hasn’t said so—in so many words—to me. But I know it worries him; and I want to stop worrying him. The Baroness knows it, and she wants me to stop, too.”

“To stop coming to see her?”

“I don’t know about that; but to stop worrying father. Eugenia knows everything,” Clifford added, with an air of knowingness of his own.

“Ah,” said Acton, interrogatively, “Eugenia knows everything?”

“She knew it was not father coming in.”

“Then why did you go?”

Clifford blushed and laughed afresh. “Well, I was afraid it was. And besides, she told me to go, at any rate.”

“Did she think it was I?” Acton asked.

“She didn’t say so.”

Again Robert Acton reflected. “But you didn’t go,” he presently said; “you came back.”

“I couldn’t get out of the studio,” Clifford rejoined. “The door was locked, and Felix has nailed some planks across the lower half of the confounded windows to make the light come in from above. So they were no use. I waited there a good while, and then, suddenly, I felt ashamed. I didn’t want to be hiding away from my own father. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I bolted out, and when I found it was you I was a little flurried. But Eugenia carried it off, didn’t she?” Clifford added, in the tone of a young humorist whose perception had not been permanently clouded by the sense of his own discomfort.

“Beautifully!” said Acton. “Especially,” he continued, “when one remembers that you were very imprudent and that she must have been a good deal annoyed.”

“Oh,” cried Clifford, with the indifference of a young man who feels that however he may have failed of felicity in behavior he is extremely just in his impressions, “Eugenia doesn’t care for anything!”

Acton hesitated a moment. “Thank you for telling me this,” he said at last. And then, laying his hand on Clifford’s shoulder, he added, “Tell me one thing more: are you by chance a little in love with the Baroness?”

“No, sir!” said Clifford, almost shaking off his hand.

CHAPTER X

The first sunday that followed Robert Acton’s return from Newport witnessed a change in the brilliant weather that had long prevailed. The rain began to fall and the day was cold and dreary. Mr. Wentworth and his daughters put on overshoes and went to church, and Felix Young, without overshoes, went also, holding an umbrella over Gertrude. It is to be feared that, in the whole observance, this was the privilege he most highly valued. The Baroness remained at home; she was in neither a cheerful nor a devotional mood. She had, however, never been, during her residence in the United States, what is called a regular attendant at divine service; and on this particular Sunday morning of which I began with speaking she stood at the window of her little drawing-room, watching the long arm of a rose tree that was attached to her piazza, but a portion of which had disengaged itself, sway to and fro, shake and gesticulate, against the dusky drizzle of the sky. Every now and then, in a gust of wind, the rose tree scattered a shower of water-drops against the window-pane; it appeared to have a kind of human movement—a menacing, warning intention. The room was very cold; Madame Münster put on a shawl and walked about. Then she determined to have some fire; and summoning her ancient negress, the contrast of whose polished ebony and whose crimson turban had been at first a source of satisfaction to her, she made arrangements for the production of a crackling flame. This old woman’s name was Azarina. The Baroness had begun by thinking that there would be a savory wildness in her talk, and, for amusement, she had encouraged her to chatter. But Azarina was dry and prim; her conversation was anything but African; she reminded Eugenia of the tiresome old ladies she met in society. She knew, however, how to make a fire; so that after she had laid the logs, Eugenia, who was terribly bored, found a quarter of an hour’s entertainment in sitting and watching them blaze and sputter. She had thought it very likely Robert Acton would come and see her; she had not met him since that infelicitous evening. But the morning waned without his coming; several times she thought she heard his step on the piazza; but it was only a window-shutter shaking in a rain-gust. The Baroness, since the beginning of that episode in her career of which a slight sketch has been attempted in these pages, had had many moments of irritation. But today her irritation had a peculiar keenness; it appeared to feed upon itself. It urged her to do something; but it suggested no particularly profitable line of action. If she could have done something at the moment, on the spot, she would have stepped upon a European steamer and turned her back, with a kind of rapture, upon that profoundly mortifying failure, her visit to her American relations. It is not exactly apparent why she should have termed this enterprise a failure, inasmuch as she had been treated with the highest distinction for which allowance had been made in American institutions. Her irritation came, at bottom, from the sense, which, always present, had suddenly grown acute, that the social soil on this big, vague continent was somehow not adapted for growing those plants whose fragrance she especially inclined to inhale and by which she liked to see herself surrounded—a species of vegetation for which she carried a collection of seedlings, as we may say, in her pocket. She found her chief happiness in the sense of exerting a certain power and making a certain impression; and now she felt the annoyance of a rather wearied swimmer who, on nearing shore, to land, finds a smooth straight wall of rock when he had counted upon a clean firm beach. Her power, in the American air, seemed to have lost its prehensile attributes; the smooth wall of rock was insurmountable. “Surely je n’en suis pas là,” she said to herself, “that I let it make me uncomfortable that a Mr. Robert Acton shouldn’t honor me with a visit!” Yet she was vexed that he had not come; and she was vexed at her vexation.

Her brother, at least, came in, stamping in the hall and shaking the wet from his coat. In a moment he entered the room, with a glow in his cheek and half-a-dozen rain-drops glistening on his moustache. “Ah, you have a fire,” he said.

“Les beaux jours sont passés,” replied the Baroness.

“Never, never! They have only begun,” Felix declared, planting himself before the hearth. He turned his back to the fire, placed his hands behind him, extended his legs and looked away through the window with an expression of face which seemed to denote the perception of rose-color even in the tints of a wet Sunday.

His sister, from her chair, looked up at him, watching him; and what she saw in his face was not grateful to her present mood. She was puzzled by many things, but her brother’s disposition was a frequent source of wonder to her. I say frequent and not constant, for there were long periods during which she gave her attention to other problems. Sometimes she had said to herself that his happy temper, his eternal gaiety, was an affectation, a pose; but she was vaguely conscious that during the present summer he had been a highly successful comedian. They had never yet had an explanation; she had not known the need of one. Felix was presumably following the bent of his disinterested genius, and she felt that she had no advice to give him that he would understand. With this, there was always a certain element of comfort about Felix—the assurance that he would not interfere. He was very delicate, this pure-minded Felix; in effect, he was her brother, and Madame Münster felt that there was a great propriety, every way, in that. It is true that Felix was delicate; he was not fond of explanations with his sister; this was one of the very few things in the world about which he was uncomfortable. But now he was not thinking of anything uncomfortable.