The Europeans

She wandered about alone in the garden wondering what Mr. Brand would make of her words, which it had been a singular pleasure for her to utter. Shortly after, passing in front of the house, she saw at a distance two persons standing near the garden gate. It was Mr. Brand going away and bidding good-night to Charlotte, who had walked down with him from the house. Gertrude saw that the parting was prolonged. Then she turned her back upon it. She had not gone very far, however, when she heard her sister slowly following her. She neither turned round nor waited for her; she knew what Charlotte was going to say. Charlotte, who at last overtook her, in fact presently began; she had passed her arm into Gertrude’s.

“Will you listen to me, dear, if I say something very particular?”

“I know what you are going to say,” said Gertrude. “Mr. Brand feels very badly.”

“Oh, Gertrude, how can you treat him so?” Charlotte demanded. And as her sister made no answer she added, “After all he has done for you!”

“What has he done for me?”

“I wonder you can ask, Gertrude. He has helped you so. You told me so yourself, a great many times. You told me that he helped you to struggle with your—your peculiarities. You told me that he had taught you how to govern your temper.”

For a moment Gertrude said nothing. Then, “Was my temper very bad?” she asked.

“I am not accusing you, Gertrude,” said Charlotte.

“What are you doing, then?” her sister demanded, with a short laugh.

“I am pleading for Mr. Brand—reminding you of all you owe him.”

“I have given it all back,” said Gertrude, still with her little laugh. “He can take back the virtue he imparted! I want to be wicked again.”

Her sister made her stop in the path, and fixed upon her, in the darkness, a sweet, reproachful gaze. “If you talk this way I shall almost believe it. Think of all we owe Mr. Brand. Think of how he has always expected something of you. Think how much he has been to us. Think of his beautiful influence upon Clifford.”

“He is very good,” said Gertrude, looking at her sister. “I know he is very good. But he shouldn’t speak against Felix.”

“Felix is good,” Charlotte answered, softly but promptly. “Felix is very wonderful. Only he is so different. Mr. Brand is much nearer to us. I should never think of going to Felix with a trouble—with a question. Mr. Brand is much more to us, Gertrude.”

“He is very—very good,” Gertrude repeated. “He is more to you; yes, much more. Charlotte,” she added suddenly, “you are in love with him!”

“Oh, Gertrude!” cried poor Charlotte; and her sister saw her blushing in the darkness.

Gertrude put her arm round her. “I wish he would marry you!” she went on.

Charlotte shook herself free. “You must not say such things!” she exclaimed, beneath her breath.

“You like him more than you say, and he likes you more than he knows.”

“This is very cruel of you!” Charlotte Wentworth murmured.

But if it was cruel Gertrude continued pitiless. “Not if it’s true,” she answered. “I wish he would marry you.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“I mean to tell him so!” said Gertrude.

“Oh, Gertrude, Gertrude!” her sister almost moaned.

“Yes, if he speaks to me again about myself. I will say, ‘Why don’t you marry Charlotte? She’s a thousand times better than I.’”

“You are wicked; you are changed!” cried her sister.

“If you don’t like it you can prevent it,” said Gertrude. “You can prevent it by keeping him from speaking to me!” And with this she walked away, very conscious of what she had done; measuring it and finding a certain joy and a quickened sense of freedom in it.

Mr. Wentworth was rather wide of the mark in suspecting that Clifford had begun to pay unscrupulous compliments to his brilliant cousin; for the young man had really more scruples than he received credit for in his family. He had a certain transparent shamefacedness which was in itself a proof that he was not at his ease in dissipation. His collegiate peccadilloes had aroused a domestic murmur as disagreeable to the young man as the creaking of his boots would have been to a house-breaker. Only, as the house-breaker would have simplified matters by removing his chaussures, it had seemed to Clifford that the shortest cut to comfortable relations with people—relations which should make him cease to think that when they spoke to him they meant something improving—was to renounce all ambition toward a nefarious development. And, in fact, Clifford’s ambition took the most commendable form. He thought of himself in the future as the well-known and much-liked Mr. Wentworth, of Boston, who should, in the natural course of prosperity, have married his pretty cousin, Lizzie Acton; should live in a wide-fronted house, in view of the Common; and should drive, behind a light wagon, over the damp autumn roads, a pair of beautifully matched sorrel horses. Clifford’s vision of the coming years was very simple; its most definite features were this element of familiar matrimony and the duplication of his resources for trotting. He had not yet asked his cousin to marry him; but he meant to do so as soon as he had taken his degree. Lizzie was serenely conscious of his intention, and she had made up her mind that he would improve. Her brother, who was very fond of this light, quick, competent little Lizzie, saw on his side no reason to interpose. It seemed to him a graceful social law that Clifford and his sister should become engaged; he himself was not engaged, but everyone else, fortunately, was not such a fool as he. He was fond of Clifford, as well, and had his own way—of which it must be confessed he was a little ashamed—of looking at those aberrations which had led to the young man’s compulsory retirement from the neighboring seat of learning. Acton had seen the world, as he said to himself; he had been to China and had knocked about among men. He had learned the essential difference between a nice young fellow and a mean young fellow, and was satisfied that there was no harm in Clifford. He believed—although it must be added that he had not quite the courage to declare it—in the doctrine of wild oats, and thought it a useful preventive of superfluous fears. If Mr. Wentworth and Charlotte and Mr. Brand would only apply it in Clifford’s case, they would be happier; and Acton thought it a pity they should not be happier. They took the boy’s misdemeanors too much to heart; they talked to him too solemnly; they frightened and bewildered him. Of course there was the great standard of morality, which forbade that a man should get tipsy, play at billiards for money, or cultivate his sensual consciousness; but what fear was there that poor Clifford was going to run a tilt at any great standard? It had, however, never occurred to Acton to dedicate the Baroness Münster to the redemption of a refractory collegian. The instrument, here, would have seemed to him quite too complex for the operation. Felix, on the other hand, had spoken in obedience to the belief that the more charming a woman is the more numerous, literally, are her definite social uses.

Eugenia herself, as we know, had plenty of leisure to enumerate her uses. As I have had the honor of intimating, she had come four thousand miles to seek her fortune; and it is not to be supposed that after this great effort she could neglect any apparent aid to advancement. It is my misfortune that in attempting to describe in a short compass the deportment of this remarkable woman I am obliged to express things rather brutally. I feel this to be the case, for instance, when I say that she had primarily detected such an aid to advancement in the person of Robert Acton, but that she had afterwards remembered that a prudent archer has always a second bowstring. Eugenia was a woman of finely-mingled motive, and her intentions were never sensibly gross. She had a sort of aesthetic ideal for Clifford which seemed to her a disinterested reason for taking him in hand. It was very well for a fresh-colored young gentleman to be ingenuous; but Clifford, really, was crude. With such a pretty face he ought to have prettier manners. She would teach him that, with a beautiful name, the expectation of a large property, and, as they said in Europe, a social position, an only son should know how to carry himself.

Once Clifford had begun to come and see her by himself and for himself, he came very often. He hardly knew why he should come; he saw her almost every evening at his father’s house; he had nothing particular to say to her. She was not a young girl, and fellows of his age called only upon young girls. He exaggerated her age; she seemed to him an old woman; it was happy that the Baroness, with all her intelligence, was incapable of guessing this. But gradually it struck Clifford that visiting old women might be, if not a natural, at least, as they say of some articles of diet, an acquired taste. The Baroness was certainly a very amusing old woman; she talked to him as no lady—and indeed no gentleman—had ever talked to him before.

“You should go to Europe and make the tour,” she said to him one afternoon. “Of course, on leaving college you will go.”

“I don’t want to go,” Clifford declared. “I know some fellows who have been to Europe. They say you can have better fun here.”

“That depends. It depends upon your idea of fun. Your friends probably were not introduced.”

“Introduced?” Clifford demanded.

“They had no opportunity of going into society; they formed no relations.” This was one of a certain number of words that the Baroness often pronounced in the French manner.

“They went to a ball, in Paris; I know that,” said Clifford.

“Ah, there are balls and balls; especially in Paris. No, you must go, you know; it is not a thing from which you can dispense yourself. You need it.”

“Oh, I’m very well,” said Clifford. “I’m not sick.”

“I don’t mean for your health, my poor child. I mean for your manners.”

“I haven’t got any manners!” growled Clifford.

“Precisely. You don’t mind my assenting to that, eh?” asked the Baroness with a smile. “You must go to Europe and get a few. You can get them better there. It is a pity you might not have come while I was living in—in Germany. I would have introduced you; I had a charming little circle. You would perhaps have been rather young; but the younger one begins, I think, the better. Now, at any rate, you have no time to lose, and when I return you must immediately come to me.”

All this, to Clifford’s apprehension, was a great mixture—his beginning young, Eugenia’s return to Europe, his being introduced to her charming little circle. What was he to begin, and what was her little circle? His ideas about her marriage had a good deal of vagueness; but they were in so far definite as that he felt it to be a matter not to be freely mentioned. He sat and looked all round the room; he supposed she was alluding in some way to her marriage.

“Oh, I don’t want to go to Germany,” he said; it seemed to him the most convenient thing to say.

She looked at him a while, smiling with her lips, but not with her eyes.

“You have scruples?” she asked.

“Scruples?” said Clifford.

“You young people, here, are very singular; one doesn’t know where to expect you. When you are not extremely improper you are so terribly proper. I dare say you think that, owing to my irregular marriage, I live with loose people. You were never more mistaken. I have been all the more particular.”

“Oh, no,” said Clifford, honestly distressed. “I never thought such a thing as that.”

“Are you very sure? I am convinced that your father does, and your sisters. They say to each other that here I am on my good behavior, but that over there—married by the left hand—I associate with light women.”

“Oh, no,” cried Clifford, energetically, “they don’t say such things as that to each other!”

“If they think them they had better say them,” the Baroness rejoined. “Then they can be contradicted. Please contradict that whenever you hear it, and don’t be afraid of coming to see me on account of the company I keep. I have the honor of knowing more distinguished men, my poor child, than you are likely to see in a life-time. I see very few women; but those are women of rank. So, my dear young Puritan, you needn’t be afraid. I am not in the least one of those who think that the society of women who have lost their place in the vrai monde is necessary to form a young man. I have never taken that tone. I have kept my place myself, and I think we are a much better school than the others. Trust me, Clifford, and I will prove that to you,” the Baroness continued, while she made the agreeable reflection that she could not, at least, be accused of perverting her young kinsman. “So if you ever fall among thieves don’t go about saying I sent you to them.”

Clifford thought it so comical that he should know—in spite of her figurative language—what she meant, and that she should mean what he knew, that he could hardly help laughing a little, although he tried hard. “Oh, no! oh, no!” he murmured.

“Laugh out, laugh out, if I amuse you!” cried the Baroness. “I am here for that!” And Clifford thought her a very amusing person indeed. “But remember,” she said on this occasion, “that you are coming—next year—to pay me a visit over there.”

About a week afterwards she said to him, point-blank, “Are you seriously making love to your little cousin?”

“Seriously making love”—these words, on Madame Münster’s lips, had to Clifford’s sense a portentous and embarrassing sound; he hesitated about assenting, lest he should commit himself to more than he understood. “Well, I shouldn’t say it if I was!” he exclaimed.

“Why wouldn’t you say it?” the Baroness demanded. “Those things ought to be known.”

“I don’t care whether it is known or not,” Clifford rejoined. “But I don’t want people looking at me.”

“A young man of your importance ought to learn to bear observation—to carry himself as if he were quite indifferent to it. I won’t say, exactly, unconscious,” the Baroness explained. “No, he must seem to know he is observed, and to think it natural he should be; but he must appear perfectly used to it. Now you haven’t that, Clifford; you haven’t that at all. You must have that, you know. Don’t tell me you are not a young man of importance,” Eugenia added. “Don’t say anything so flat as that.”

“Oh, no, you don’t catch me saying that!” cried Clifford.

“Yes, you must come to Germany,” Madame Münster continued. “I will show you how people can be talked about, and yet not seem to know it. You will be talked about, of course, with me; it will be said you are my lover. I will show you how little one may mind that—how little I shall mind it.”

Clifford sat staring, blushing and laughing. “I shall mind it a good deal!” he declared.

“Ah, not too much, you know; that would be uncivil. But I give you leave to mind it a little; especially if you have a passion for Miss Acton. Voyons; as regards that, you either have or you have not. It is very simple to say it.”

“I don’t see why you want to know,” said Clifford.

“You ought to want me to know. If one is arranging a marriage, one tells one’s friends.”

“Oh, I’m not arranging anything,” said Clifford.

“You don’t intend to marry your cousin?”

“Well, I expect I shall do as I choose!”

The Baroness leaned her head upon the back of her chair and closed her eyes, as if she were tired. Then opening them again, “Your cousin is very charming!” she said.

“She is the prettiest girl in this place,” Clifford rejoined.

“‘In this place’ is saying little; she would be charming anywhere. I am afraid you are entangled.”

“Oh, no, I’m not entangled.”

“Are you engaged? At your age that is the same thing.”

Clifford looked at the Baroness with some audacity. “Will you tell no one?”

“If it’s as sacred as that—no.”

“Well, then—we are not!” said Clifford.

“That’s the great secret—that you are not, eh?” asked the Baroness, with a quick laugh. “I am very glad to hear it. You are altogether too young. A young man in your position must choose and compare; he must see the world first. Depend upon it,” she added, “you should not settle that matter before you have come abroad and paid me that visit. There are several things I should like to call your attention to first.”

“Well, I am rather afraid of that visit,” said Clifford. “It seems to me it will be rather like going to school again.”

The Baroness looked at him a moment.

“My dear child,” she said, “there is no agreeable man who has not, at some moment, been to school to a clever woman—probably a little older than himself. And you must be thankful when you get your instructions gratis. With me you would get it gratis.”

The next day Clifford told Lizzie Acton that the Baroness thought her the most charming girl she had ever seen.

Lizzie shook her head. “No, she doesn’t!” she said.

“Do you think everything she says,” asked Clifford, “is to be taken the opposite way?”

“I think that is!” said Lizzie.

Clifford was going to remark that in this case the Baroness must desire greatly to bring about a marriage between Mr. Clifford Wentworth and Miss Elizabeth Acton; but he resolved, on the whole, to suppress this observation.

CHAPTER IX

It seemed to Robert Acton, after Eugenia had come to his house, that something had passed between them which made them a good deal more intimate. It was hard to say exactly what, except her telling him that she had taken her resolution with regard to the Prince Adolf; for Madame Münster’s visit had made no difference in their relations. He came to see her very often; but he had come to see her very often before. It was agreeable to him to find himself in her little drawing-room; but this was not a new discovery. There was a change, however, in this sense: that if the Baroness had been a great deal in Acton’s thoughts before, she was now never out of them. From the first she had been personally fascinating; but the fascination now had become intellectual as well. He was constantly pondering her words and motions; they were as interesting as the factors in an algebraic problem. This is saying a good deal; for Acton was extremely fond of mathematics. He asked himself whether it could be that he was in love with her, and then hoped he was not; hoped it not so much for his own sake as for that of the amatory passion itself. If this was love, love had been overrated. Love was a poetic impulse, and his own state of feeling with regard to the Baroness was largely characterized by that eminently prosaic sentiment—curiosity. It was true, as Acton with his quietly cogitative habit observed to himself, that curiosity, pushed to a given point, might become a romantic passion; and he certainly thought enough about this charming woman to make him restless and even a little melancholy. It puzzled and vexed him at times to feel that he was not more ardent. He was not in the least bent upon remaining a bachelor. In his younger years he had been—or he had tried to be—of the opinion that it would be a good deal “jollier” not to marry, and he had flattered himself that his single condition was something of a citadel. It was a citadel, at all events, of which he had long since leveled the outworks. He had removed the guns from the ramparts; he had lowered the draw-bridge across the moat. The draw-bridge had swayed lightly under Madame Münster’s step; why should he not cause it to be raised again, so that she might be kept prisoner? He had an idea that she would become—in time at least, and on learning the conveniences of the place for making a lady comfortable—a tolerably patient captive. But the draw-bridge was never raised, and Acton’s brilliant visitor was as free to depart as she had been to come. It was part of his curiosity to know why the deuce so susceptible a man was not in love with so charming a woman. If her various graces were, as I have said, the factors in an algebraic problem, the answer to this question was the indispensable unknown quantity. The pursuit of the unknown quantity was extremely absorbing; for the present it taxed all Acton’s faculties.

Toward the middle of August he was obliged to leave home for some days; an old friend, with whom he had been associated in China, had begged him to come to Newport, where he lay extremely ill. His friend got better, and at the end of a week Acton was released. I use the word “released” advisedly; for in spite of his attachment to his Chinese comrade he had been but a half-hearted visitor. He felt as if he had been called away from the theatre during the progress of a remarkably interesting drama. The curtain was up all this time, and he was losing the fourth act; that fourth act which would have been so essential to a just appreciation of the fifth. In other words, he was thinking about the Baroness, who, seen at this distance, seemed a truly brilliant figure. He saw at Newport a great many pretty women, who certainly were figures as brilliant as beautiful light dresses could make them; but though they talked a great deal—and the Baroness’s strong point was perhaps also her conversation—Madame Münster appeared to lose nothing by the comparison. He wished she had come to Newport too. Would it not be possible to make up, as they said, a party for visiting the famous watering-place and invite Eugenia to join it? It was true that the complete satisfaction would be to spend a fortnight at Newport with Eugenia alone. It would be a great pleasure to see her, in society, carry everything before her, as he was sure she would do. When Acton caught himself thinking these thoughts he began to walk up and down, with his hands in his pockets, frowning a little and looking at the floor. What did it prove—for it certainly proved something—this lively disposition to be “off” somewhere with Madame Münster, away from all the rest of them? Such a vision, certainly, seemed a refined implication of matrimony, after the Baroness should have formally got rid of her informal husband. At any rate, Acton, with his characteristic discretion, forbore to give expression to whatever else it might imply, and the narrator of these incidents is not obliged to be more definite.

He returned home rapidly, and, arriving in the afternoon, lost as little time as possible in joining the familiar circle at Mr. Wentworth’s. On reaching the house, however, he found the piazzas empty. The doors and windows were open, and their emptiness was made clear by the shafts of lamp-light from the parlors. Entering the house, he found Mr. Wentworth sitting alone in one of these apartments, engaged in the perusal of the North American Review. After they had exchanged greetings and his cousin had made discreet inquiry about his journey, Acton asked what had become of Mr. Wentworth’s companions.

“They are scattered about, amusing themselves as usual,” said the old man. “I saw Charlotte, a short time since, seated, with Mr. Brand, upon the piazza. They were conversing with their customary animation. I suppose they have joined her sister, who, for the hundredth time, was doing the honors of the garden to her foreign cousin.”

“I suppose you mean Felix,” said Acton. And on Mr. Wentworth’s assenting, he said, “And the others?”

“Your sister has not come this evening. You must have seen her at home,” said Mr. Wentworth.

“Yes. I proposed to her to come. She declined.”

“Lizzie, I suppose, was expecting a visitor,” said the old man, with a kind of solemn slyness.

“If she was expecting Clifford, he had not turned up.”

Mr. Wentworth, at this intelligence, closed the North American Review and remarked that he had understood Clifford to say that he was going to see his cousin. Privately, he reflected that if Lizzie Acton had had no news of his son, Clifford must have gone to Boston for the evening: an unnatural course of a summer night, especially when accompanied with disingenuous representations.

“You must remember that he has two cousins,” said Acton, laughing. And then, coming to the point, “If Lizzie is not here,” he added, “neither apparently is the Baroness.”

Mr. Wentworth stared a moment, and remembered that queer proposition of Felix’s. For a moment he did not know whether it was not to be wished that Clifford, after all, might have gone to Boston. “The Baroness has not honored us tonight,” he said. “She has not come over for three days.”

“Is she ill?” Acton asked.