IV

Jackson Lemon had said to Dr. Feeder in the Park that he would call on

Mr. and Mrs. Freer; but three weeks were to elapse before he knocked at

their door in Jermyn Street. In the meantime he had met them at dinner

and Mrs. Freer had told him how much she hoped he would find time to come

and see her. She had not reproached him nor shaken her finger at him,

and her clemency, which was calculated and very characteristic of her,

touched him so much—for he was in fault, she was one of his mother’s

oldest and best friends—that he very soon presented himself. It was on a

fine Sunday afternoon, rather late, and the region of Jermyn Street

looked forsaken and inanimate; the native dulness of the brick scenery

reigned undisputed. Mrs. Freer, however, was at home, resting on a

lodging-house sofa—an angular couch draped in faded chintz—before she

went to dress for dinner. She made the young man very welcome; she told

him again how much she had been thinking of him; she had longed so for a

chance to talk with him. He immediately guessed what she had in her

mind, and he then remembered that Sidney Feeder had named to him what it

was this pair took upon themselves to say. This had provoked him at the

time, but he had forgotten it afterward; partly because he became aware

that same night of his wanting to make the “young marchioness” his own

and partly because since then he had suffered much greater annoyance.

Yes, the poor young man, so conscious of liberal intentions, of a large

way of looking at the future, had had much to irritate and disgust him.

He had seen the mistress of his affections but three or four times, and

had received a letter from Mr. Hardman, Lord Canterville’s solicitor,

asking him, in terms the most obsequious it was true, to designate some

gentleman of the law with whom the preliminaries of his marriage to Lady

Barbarina Clement might be arranged. He had given Mr. Hardman the name

of such a functionary, but he had written by the same post to his own

solicitor—for whose services in other matters he had had much occasion,

Jackson Lemon being distinctly contentious—instructing him that he was at

liberty to meet that gentleman, but not at liberty to entertain any

proposals as to the odious English idea of a settlement. If marrying

Jackson Lemon wasn’t settlement enough the house of Canterville had but

to alter their point of view. It was quite out of the question he should

alter his. It would perhaps be difficult to explain the strong dislike

he entertained to the introduction into his prospective union of this

harsh diplomatic element; it was as if they mistrusted him and suspected

him; as if his hands were to be tied so that he shouldn’t be able to

handle his own fortune as he thought best. It wasn’t the idea of parting

with his money that displeased him, for he flattered himself he had plans

of expenditure for his wife beyond even the imagination of her

distinguished parents. It struck him even that they were fools not to

have felt subtly sure they should make a much better thing of it by

leaving him perfectly free. This intervention of the solicitor was a

nasty little English tradition—totally at variance with the large spirit

of American habits—to which he wouldn’t submit. It wasn’t his way to

submit when he disapproved: why should he change his way on this occasion

when the matter lay so near him?

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 passage 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 God, 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 assumption 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

constitution 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 _prétendant_, 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 Suède_ 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 assembly 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 sturdy 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 assistance 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, constitute surely the noblest 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

ignoble, 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 “damn pleased”; that was the upshot

of Jackson Lemon’s passion. 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 recumbent; 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 massing

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 pass 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 noblest 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 noblewoman.”

“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 knob 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 assertion he went on: “Never, I assure 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.

“I’m going now—she may tell you whatever she likes.”

“I’m afraid we’ve displeased you,” she went on; “I’ve said too much what

I think. You must pardon me—it’s all for your mother.”

“It’s she whom I want Lady Barb to see!” Jackson exclaimed with the

inconsequence of filial affection.

“Deary me!” Mrs. Freer gently wailed.

“We shall go back to America to see how you get on,” her husband said;

“and if you succeed it will be a great precedent.”

“Oh I shall succeed!” And with this he took his departure. He walked

away with the quick step of a man labouring under a certain excitement;

walked up to Piccadilly and down past Hyde Park Corner. It relieved him

to measure these distances, for he was thinking hard, under the influence

of irritation, and it was as if his movement phrased his passion.

Certain lights flashed on him in the last half-hour turned to fire in

him; the more that they had a representative value and were an echo of

the common voice. If his prospects wore that face to Mrs. Freer they

would probably wear it to others; so he felt a strong sharp need to show

such others that they took a mean measure of his position. He walked and

walked till he found himself on the highway of Hammersmith. I have

represented him as a young man with a stiff back, and I may appear to

undermine this plea when I note that he wrote that evening to his

solicitor that Mr. Hardman was to be informed he would agree to any

proposals for settlements that this worthy should make. Jackson’s stiff

back was shown in his deciding to marry Lady Barbarina on any terms. It

had come over him through the action of this desire to prove he wasn’t

afraid—so odious was the imputation—that terms of any kind were very

superficial things. What was fundamental and of the essence of the

matter would be to secure the grand girl and _then_ carry everything out.

V

“On Sundays now you might be at home,” he said to his wife in the

following month of March—more than six months after his marriage.

“Are the people any nicer on Sundays than they are on other days?” Lady

Barb asked from the depths of her chair and without looking up from a

stiff little book.

He waited ever so briefly before answering. “I don’t know whether they

are, but I think you might be.”

“I’m as nice as I know how to be. You must take me as I am. You knew

when you married me that I wasn’t American.”

Jackson stood before the fire toward which his wife’s face was turned and

her feet extended; stood there some time with his hands behind him and

his eyes dropped a little obliquely on Lady Barb’s bent head and

richly-draped figure. It may be said without delay that he was sore of

soul, and it may be added that he had a double cause. He knew himself on

the verge of the first crisis that had occurred between himself and his

wife—the reader will note that it had occurred rather promptly—and he was

annoyed at his annoyance. A glimpse of his state of mind before his

marriage has been given the reader, who will remember that at that period

our young man had believed himself lifted above possibilities of

irritation. When one was strong one wasn’t fidgety, and a union with a

species of calm goddess would of course be a source of repose. Lady Barb

was a calm, was an even calmer goddess still, and he had a much more

intimate view of her divinity than on the day he had led her to the

altar; but I’m not sure he felt either as firm or as easy.

“How do you know what people are?” he said in a moment. “You’ve seen so

few; you’re perpetually denying yourself. If you should leave New York

to-morrow you’d know wonderfully little about it.”

“It’s all just the same,” she pleaded. “The people are all exactly

alike. There’s only one sort.”

“How can you tell? You never see them.”

“Didn’t I go out every night for the first two months we were here?”

“It was only to about a dozen houses—those, I agree, always the same;

people, moreover, you had already met in London. You’ve got no general

impressions.”

She raised her beautiful blank face. “That’s just what I _have_ got; I

had them before I came. I see no difference whatever. They’ve just the

same names—just the same manners.”

Again for an instant Jackson hung fire; then he said with that practised

flat candour of which mention has already been made and which he

sometimes used in London during his courtship: “Don’t you like it over

here?”

Lady Barb had returned to her book, but she looked up again. “Did you

expect me to like it?”

“I hoped you would, of course. I think I told you so.”

“I don’t remember. You said very little about it; you seemed to make a

kind of mystery. I knew of course you expected me to live here, but I

didn’t know you expected me to like it.”

“You thought I asked of you the sacrifice, as it were.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Lady Barb. She got up from her chair and

tossed her unconsolatory volume into the empty seat. “I recommend you to

read that book,” she added.

“Is it interesting?”

“It’s an American novel.”

“I never read novels.”

“You had really better look at that one. It will show you the kind of

people you want me to know.”

“I’ve no doubt it’s very vulgar,” Jackson said. “I don’t see why you

read it.”

“What else can I do? I can’t always be riding in the Park. I hate the

Park,” she quite rang out.

“It’s just as good as your own,” said her husband.

She glanced at him with a certain quickness, her eyebrows slightly

lifted. “Do you mean the park at Pasterns?”

“No; I mean the park in London.”

“Oh I don’t care about London. One was only in London a few weeks.” She

had a horrible lovely ease.

Yet he but wanted to help her to turn round. “I suppose you miss the

country,” he suggested. It was his idea of life that he shouldn’t be

afraid of anything, not be afraid, in any situation, of knowing the worst

that was to be known about it; and the demon of a courage with which

discretion was not properly commingled prompted him to take soundings

that were perhaps not absolutely necessary for safety and yet that

revealed unmistakable rocks. It was useless to know about rocks if he

couldn’t avoid them; the only thing was to trust to the wind.

“I don’t know what I miss. I think I miss everything!” This was his

wife’s answer to his too-curious inquiry. It wasn’t peevish, for that

wasn’t the tone of a calm goddess; but it expressed a good deal—a good

deal more than Lady Barb, who was rarely eloquent, had expressed before.

Nevertheless, though his question had been precipitate, Jackson said to

himself that he might take his time to think over what her fewness of

words enclosed; he couldn’t help seeing that the future would give him

plenty of chance. He was in no hurry to ask himself whether poor Mrs.

Freer, in Jermyn Street, mightn’t after all have been right in saying

that when it came to marrying an English caste-product it wasn’t so

simple to be an American doctor—it might avail little even in such a case

to be the heir of all the ages. The transition was complicated, but in

his bright mind it was rapid, from the brush of a momentary contact with

such ideas to certain considerations which led him to go on after an

instant: “Should you like to go down into Connecticut?”

“Into Connecticut?”

“That’s one of our States. It’s about as large as Ireland. I’ll take

you there if you like.”

“What does one do there?”

“We can try and get some hunting.”

“You and I alone?”

“Perhaps we can get a party to join us.”

“The people in the State?”

“Yes—we might propose it to them.”

“The tradespeople in the towns?”

“Very true—they’ll have to mind their shops,” Jackson said. “But we

might hunt alone.”

“Are there any foxes?”

“No, but there are a few old cows.”

Lady Barb had already noted that her husband sought the relief of a laugh

at her expense, and she was aware that this present opportunity was

neither worse nor better than some others. She didn’t mind that trick in

him particularly now, though in England it would have disgusted her; she

had the consciousness of virtue, an immense comfort, and flattered

herself she had learned the lesson of an altered standard of

fitness—besides which there were so many more disagreeable things in

America than being laughed at by one’s husband. But she pretended not to

like it because this made him stop, and above all checked discussion,

which with Jackson was habitually so facetious and consequently so

tiresome. “I only want to be left alone,” she said in answer—though

indeed it hadn’t the style of an answer—to his speech about the cows.

With this she wandered away to one of the windows that looked out on the

Fifth Avenue. She was very fond of these windows and had taken a great

fancy to the Fifth Avenue, which, in the high-pitched winter weather,

when everything sparkled, was bright and funny and foreign. It will be

seen that she was not wholly unjust to her adoptive country: she found it

delightful to look out of the window. This was a pleasure she had

enjoyed in London only in the most furtive manner; it wasn’t the kind of

thing that girls in England did. Besides, in London, in Hill Street,

there was nothing particular to see; whereas in the Fifth Avenue

everything and every one went by, and observation was made consistent

with dignity by the quantities of brocade and lace dressing the

embrasure, which somehow wouldn’t have been tidy in England and which

made an ambush without concealing the brilliant day. Hundreds of

women—the queer women of New York, who were unlike any that Lady Barb had

hitherto seen—passed the house every hour; and her ladyship was

infinitely entertained and mystified by the sight of their clothes. She

spent more time than she was aware of in this recreation, and had she

been addicted to returning upon herself, to asking herself for an account

of her conduct—an inquiry she didn’t indeed completely neglect, but made

no great form of—she must have had a wan smile for this proof of what she

appeared mainly to have come to America for, conscious though she was

that her tastes were very simple and that so long as she didn’t hunt it

didn’t much matter what she did.

Her husband turned about to the fire, giving a push with his foot to a

log that had fallen out of its place. Then he said—and the connexion

with the words she had just uttered was direct enough—“You really must

manage to be at home on Sundays, you know. I used to like that so much

in London. All the best women here do it. You had better begin to-day.

I’m going to see my mother. If I meet any one I’ll tell them to come.”

“Tell them not to talk so much,” said Lady Barb among her lace curtains.

“Ah, my dear,” Jackson returned, “it isn’t every one who has your

concision.” And he went and stood behind her in the window, putting his

arm round her waist. It was as much of a satisfaction to him as it had

been six months before, at the time the solicitors were settling the

matter, that this flower of an ancient stem should be worn upon his own

breast; he still thought its fragrance a thing quite apart, and it was as

clear as day to him that his wife was the handsomest woman in New York.

He had begun, after their arrival, by telling her this very often; but

the assurance brought no colour to her cheek, no light to her eyes: to be

the handsomest woman in New York, now that she was acquainted with that

city, plainly failed to strike her as a position in life. The reader

may, moreover, be informed that, oddly enough, Lady Barb didn’t

particularly believe this assertion. There were some very pretty women

in New York, and without in the least wishing to be like them—she had

seen no woman in America whom she desired to resemble—she envied them

some of their peculiar little freshnesses. It’s probable that her own

finest points were those of which she was most unconscious. But Jackson

was intensely aware of all of them; nothing could exceed the minuteness

of his appreciation of his wife. It was a sign of this that after he had

stood behind her a moment he kissed her very tenderly. “Have you any

message for my mother?” he asked.

“Please give her my love. And you might take her that book.”

“What book?”

“That nasty one I’ve been reading.”

“Oh bother your books!” he cried with a certain irritation as he went out

of the room.

There had been a good many things in her life in New York that cost her

an effort, but sending her love to her mother-in-law was not one of

these. She liked Mrs. Lemon better than any one she had seen in America;

she was the only person who seemed to Lady Barb really simple, as she

herself understood that quality. Many people had struck her as homely

and rustic and many others as pretentious and vulgar; but in Jackson’s

mother she had found the golden mean of a discretion, of a native

felicity and modesty and decency, which, as she would have said, were

really nice. Her sister, Lady Agatha, was even fonder of Mrs. Lemon; but

then Lady Agatha had taken the most extraordinary fancy to every one and

everything, and talked as if America were the most delightful country in

the world. She was having a lovely time—she already spoke the most

beautiful American—and had been, during the bright winter just drawing to

a close, the most prominent girl in New York. She had gone out at first

with her elder; but for some weeks past Lady Barb had let so many

occasions pass that Agatha threw herself into the arms of Mrs. Lemon, who

found her unsurpassably quaint and amusing and was delighted to take her

into society. Mrs. Lemon, as an old woman, had given up such vanities;

but she only wanted a motive, and in her good nature she ordered a dozen

new caps and sat smiling against the wall while her little English maid,

on polished floors, to the sound of music, cultivated the American step

as well as the American tone. There was no trouble in New York about

going out, and the winter wasn’t half over before the little English maid

found herself an accomplished diner, finding her way without any chaperon

at all to feasts where she could count on a bouquet at her plate. She

had had a great deal of correspondence with her own female parent on this

point, and Lady Canterville had at last withdrawn her protest, which in

the meantime had been perfectly useless. It was ultimately Lady

Canterville’s feeling that if she had married the handsomest of her

daughters to an American doctor she might let another become a

professional _raconteuse_—Agatha had written to her that she was expected

to talk so much—strange as such a destiny seemed for a girl of nineteen.

Mrs. Lemon had even a higher simplicity than Lady Barb imputed to her;

for she hadn’t noticed that Lady Agatha danced much oftener with Herman

Longstraw than with any one else. Jackson himself, though he went little

to balls, had discovered this truth, and he looked slightly preoccupied

when, after he had sat five minutes with his mother on the Sunday

afternoon through which I have invited the reader to trace so much more

than—I am afraid—is easily apparent of the progress of this simple story,

he learned that his sister-in-law was entertaining Mr. Longstraw in the

library. That young man had called half an hour before, and she had

taken him into the other room to show him the seal of the Cantervilles,

which she had fastened to one of her numerous trinkets—she was adorned

with a hundred bangles and chains—and the proper exhibition of which

required a taper and a stick of wax. Apparently he was examining it very

carefully, for they had been absent a good while. Mrs. Lemon’s

simplicity was further shown by the fact that she had not measured their

absence; it was only when Jackson questioned her that she remembered.

Herman Longstraw was a young Californian who had turned up in New York

the winter before and who travelled on his moustache, as they were

understood to say in his native State. This moustache and some of its

accompanying features were greatly admired; several ladies in New York

had been known to declare that they were as beautiful as a dream. Taken

in connexion with his tall stature, his familiar good nature and his

remarkable Western vocabulary they constituted his only social capital;

for of the two great divisions, the rich Californians and the poor

Californians, it was well known to which he belonged. Doctor Lemon had

viewed him as but a slightly mitigated cowboy, and was somewhat vexed at

his own parent, though also aware that she could scarcely figure to

herself what an effect such a form of speech as this remarkably straight

echo of the prairie would produce in the halls of Canterville. He had no

desire whatever to play a trick on the house to which he was allied, and

knew perfectly that Lady Agatha hadn’t been sent to America to become

entangled with a Californian of the wrong denomination. He had been

perfectly willing to bring her; he thought, a little vindictively, that

this would operate as a hint to her progenitors on what he might have

imagined doing if they hadn’t been so stupidly bent on Mr. Hardman.

Herman Longstraw, according to the legend, had been a trapper, a

squatter, a miner, a pioneer—had been everything that one could be in the

desperate parts of America, and had accumulated masses of experience

before the age of thirty. He had shot bears in the Rockies and buffaloes

on the plains; and it was even believed that he had brought down animals

of a still more dangerous kind among the haunts of men. There had been a

story that he owned a cattle-ranch in Arizona; but a later and apparently

more authentic version of it, though representing him as looking after

the cattle, didn’t depict him as their proprietor.

Many of the stories told about him were false; but there was no doubt his

moustache, his native ease and his native accent were the best of their

kind. He danced very badly; but Lady Agatha had frankly told several

persons that that was nothing new to her, and in short she

delighted—this, however, she didn’t tell—in Mr. Herman Longstraw. What

she enjoyed in America was the revelation of freedom, and there was no

such proof of freedom as absolutely unrestricted discourse with a

gentleman who dressed in crude skins when not in New York and who, in his

usual pursuits, carried his life—as well as that of other persons—in his

hand. A gentleman whom she had sat next to at dinner in the early part

of her visit had remarked to her that the United States were the paradise

of women and of mechanics; and this had seemed to her at the time very

abstract, for she wasn’t conscious as yet of belonging to either class.

In England she had been only a girl, and the principal idea connected

with that was simply that for one’s misfortune one wasn’t a boy. But she

presently herself found the odd American world a true sojourn of the

youthful blest; and this helped her to know that she must be one of the

people mentioned in the axiom of her neighbour—people who could do

whatever they wanted, had a voice in everything and made their taste and

their ideas felt. She saw what fun it was to be a woman in America, and

that this was the best way to enjoy the New York winter—the wonderful

brilliant New York winter, the queer long-shaped glittering city, the

heterogeneous hours among which you couldn’t tell the morning from the

afternoon or the night from either of them, the perpetual liberties and

walks, the rushings-out and the droppings-in, the intimacies, the

endearments, the comicalities, the sleigh-bells, the cutters, the sunsets

on the snow, the ice-parties in the frosty clearness, the bright hot

velvety houses, the bouquets, the bonbons, the little cakes, the big

cakes, the irrepressible inspirations of shopping, the innumerable

luncheons and dinners offered to youth and innocence, the quantities of

chatter of quantities of girls, the perpetual motion of the “German,” the

suppers at restaurants after the play, the way in which life was pervaded

by Delmonico and Delmonico by the sense that though one’s hunting was

lost, and this therefore so different, it was very nearly as good. In

all, through all, flowed a suffusion of loud unmodulated friendly sound

which reminded her of an endless tuning of rather bad fiddles.

Lady Agatha was at present staying for a little change with Mrs. Lemon,

and such adventures as that were part of the pleasure of her American

season. The house was too close, but physically the girl could bear

anything, and it was all she had to complain of; for Mrs. Lemon, as we

know, thought her a weird little specimen, and had none of those

old-world scruples in regard to spoiling young people to which Lady

Agatha herself now knew she must in the past have been unduly sacrificed.

In her own way—it was not at all her sister’s way—she liked to be of

importance; and this was assuredly the case when she saw that Mrs. Lemon

had apparently nothing in the world to do, after spending a part of the

morning with her servants, but invent little distractions—many of them of

the edible sort—for her guest. She appeared to have several friends, but

she had no society to speak of, and the people who entered her house came

principally to see Lady Agatha. This, as we have noted, was strikingly

the case with Herman Longstraw. The whole situation gave the young

stranger a great feeling of success—success of a new and unexpected kind.

Of course in England she had been born successful, as it might be called,

through her so emerging in one of the most beautiful rooms at Pasterns;

but her present triumph was achieved more by her own effort—not that she

had tried very hard—and by her merit. It wasn’t so much what she

said—since she could never equal for quantity the girls of New York—as

the spirit of enjoyment that played in her fresh young face, with its

pointless curves, and shone in her grey English eyes. She enjoyed

everything, even the street-cars, of which she made liberal use; and more

than everything she enjoyed Mr. Longstraw and his talk about buffaloes

and bears. Mrs. Lemon promised to be very careful as soon as her son had

begun to warn her; and this time she had a certain understanding of what

she promised. She thought people ought to make the matches they liked;

she had given proof of this in her late behaviour to Jackson, whose own

union was, to her sense, marked with all the arbitrariness of pure love.

Nevertheless she could see that Herman Longstraw would probably be

thought rough in England; and it wasn’t simply that he was so inferior to

Jackson, for, after all, certain things were not to be expected. Jackson

was not oppressed with his mother-in-law, having taken his precautions

against such a danger; but he was certain he should give Lady Canterville

a permanent advantage over him if her third daughter should while in

America attach herself to a mere moustache.

It was not always, as I have hinted, that Mrs. Lemon entered completely

into the views of her son, though in form she never failed to subscribe

to them devoutly. She had never yet, for instance, apprehended his

reason for marrying poor Lady Barb. This was a great secret, and she was

determined, in her gentleness, that no one should ever know it. For

herself, she was sure that to the end of time she shouldn’t discover

Jackson’s reason. She might never ask about it, for that of course would

betray her. From the first she had told him she was delighted, there

being no need of asking for explanations then, as the young lady herself,

when she should come to know her, would explain. But the young lady

hadn’t yet explained and after this evidently never would. She was very

tall, very handsome, she answered exactly to Mrs. Lemon’s prefigurement

of the daughter of a lord, and she wore her clothes, which were peculiar,

but to one of her shape remarkably becoming, very well. But she didn’t

elucidate; we know ourselves that there was very little that was

explanatory about Lady Barb. So Mrs. Lemon continued to wonder, to ask

herself, “Why that one, more than so many others who’d have been more

natural?” The choice struck her, as I have said, as quite arbitrary.

She found Lady Barb very different from other girls she had known, and

this led her almost immediately to feel sorry for her daughter-in-law.

She felt how the girl was to be pitied if she found her husband’s people

as peculiar as his mother found _her_, since the result of that would be

to make her very lonesome. Lady Agatha was different, because she seemed

to keep nothing back; you saw all there was of her, and she was evidently

not home-sick. Mrs. Lemon could see that Barbarina was ravaged by this

last ailment and was also too haughty to show it. She even had a glimpse

of the ultimate truth; namely, that Jackson’s wife had not the comfort of

crying, because that would have amounted to a confession that she had

been idiotic enough to believe in advance that, in an American town, in

the society of doctors, she should escape such pangs. Mrs. Lemon treated

her with studied consideration—all the indulgence that was due to a young

woman in the unfortunate position of having been married one couldn’t

tell why.

The world, to the elder lady’s view, contained two great departments,

that of people and that of things; and she believed you must take an

interest either in one or the other. The true incomprehensible in Lady

Barb was that she cared for neither side of the show. Her house

apparently inspired her with no curiosity and no enthusiasm, though it

had been thought magnificent enough to be described in successive columns

of the native newspapers; and she never spoke of her furniture or her

domestics, though she had a prodigious show of such possessions. She was

the same with regard to her acquaintance, which was immense, inasmuch as

every one in the place had called on her. Mrs. Lemon was the least

critical woman in the world, but it had occasionally ruffled her just a

little that her daughter-in-law should receive every one in New York

quite in the same automatic manner. There were differences, Mrs. Lemon

knew, and some of them of the highest importance; but poor Lady Barb

appeared never to suspect them. She accepted every one and everything

and asked no questions. She had no curiosity about her fellow-citizens,

and as she never assumed it for a moment she gave Mrs. Lemon no

opportunity to enlighten her. Lady Barb was a person with whom you could

do nothing unless she left you an opening; and nothing would have been

more difficult than to “post” her, as her mother-in-law would have said,

against her will. Of course she picked up a little knowledge, but she

confounded and transposed American attributes in the most extraordinary

way. She had a way of calling every one Doctor; and Mrs. Lemon could

scarcely convince her that this distinction was too precious to be so

freely bestowed. She had once said to that supporter that in New York

there was nothing to know people by, their names were so very monotonous;

and Mrs. Lemon had entered into this enough to see that there was

something that stood out a good deal in Barbarina’s own prefix. It is

probable that during her short period of domestication complete justice

was not done Lady Barb; she never—as an instance—got credit for

repressing her annoyance at the poverty of the nominal signs and styles,

a deep desolation. That little speech to her husband’s mother was the

most reckless sign she gave of it; and there were few things that

contributed more to the good conscience she habitually enjoyed than her

self-control on this particular point.

Doctor Lemon was engaged in professional researches just now, which took

up a great deal of his time; and for the rest he passed his hours

unreservedly with his wife. For the last three months, therefore, he had

seen his other nearest relative scarcely more than once a week. In spite

of researches, in spite of medical societies, where Jackson, to her

knowledge, read papers, Lady Barb had more of her husband’s company than

she had counted on at the time she married. She had never known a

married pair to be so much together as she and Jackson; he appeared to

expect her to sit with him in the library in the morning. He had none of

the occupations of gentlemen and noblemen in England, for the element of

politics appeared to be as absent as the element of the chase. There

were politics in Washington, she had been told, and even at Albany, and

Jackson had proposed to introduce her to these cities; but the proposal,

made to her once at dinner, before several people, had excited such cries

of horror that it fell dead on the spot. “We don’t want you to see

anything of that kind,” one of the ladies had said, and Jackson had

appeared to be discouraged—that is if in regard to Jackson she could

really tell.

“Pray what is it you want me to see?” Lady Barb had asked on this

occasion.

“Well, New York and Boston (Boston if you want to very much, but not

otherwise), and then Niagara. But more than anything Newport.”

She was tired of their eternal Newport; she had heard of it a thousand

times and felt already as if she had lived there half her life; she was

sure, moreover, that she should hate the awful little place. This is

perhaps as near as she came to having a lively conviction on any American

subject. She asked herself whether she was then to spend her life in the

Fifth Avenue with alternations of a city of villas—she detested

villas—and wondered if that was all the great American country had to

offer her. There were times when she believed she should like the

backwoods and that the Far West might be a resource; for she had analysed

her feelings just deep enough to discover that when she had—hesitating a

good deal—turned over the question of marrying Jackson Lemon it was not

in the least of American barbarism she was afraid; her dread had been all

of American civilisation. She judged the little lady I have just quoted

a goose, but that didn’t make New York any more interesting. It would be

reckless to say that she suffered from an overdose of Jackson’s company,

since she quite felt him her most important social resource. She could

talk to him about England, about her own England, and he understood more

or less what she wished to say—when she wished to say anything, which was

not frequent. There were plenty of other people who talked about

England; but with them the range of allusion was always the hotels, of

which she knew nothing, and the shops and the opera and the photographs:

they had the hugest appetite for photographs. There were other people

who were always wanting her to tell them about Pasterns and the manner of

life there and the parties; but if there was one thing Lady Barb disliked

more than another it was describing Pasterns. She had always lived with

people who knew of themselves what such a place would be, without

demanding these pictorial efforts, proper only, as she vaguely felt, to

persons belonging to the classes whose trade was the arts of expression.

Lady Barb of course had never gone into it; but she knew that in her own

class the business was not to express but to enjoy, not to represent but

to be represented—though indeed this latter liability might involve

offence; for it may be noted that even for an aristocrat Jackson Lemon’s

wife was aristocratic.

Lady Agatha and her visitor came back from the library in course of time,

and Jackson Lemon felt it his duty to be rather cold to Herman Longstraw.

It wasn’t clear to him what sort of a husband his sister-in-law would do

well to look for in America—if there were to be any question of husbands;

but as to that he wasn’t bound to be definite provided he should rule out

Mr. Longstraw. This gentleman, however, was not given to noticing shades

of manner; he had little observation, but very great confidence.

“I think you had better come home with me,” Jackson said to Lady Agatha;

“I guess you’ve stayed here long enough.”

“Don’t let him say that, Mrs. Lemon!” the girl cried. “I like being with

you so awfully.”

“I try to make it pleasant,” said Mrs. Lemon. “I should really miss you

now; but perhaps it’s your mother’s wish.” If it was a question of

defending her guest from ineligible suitors Mrs. Lemon felt of course

that her son was more competent than she; though she had a lurking

kindness for Herman Longstraw and a vague idea that he was a gallant

genial specimen of unsophisticated young America.

“Oh mamma wouldn’t see any difference!” Lady Agatha returned with

pleading blue eyes on her brother-in-law. “Mamma wants me to see every

one; you know she does. That’s what she sent me to America for; she

knows—for we’ve certainly told her enough—that it isn’t like England.

She wouldn’t like it if I didn’t sometimes stay with people; she always

wanted us to stay at other houses. And she knows all about you, Mrs.

Lemon, and she likes you immensely. She sent you a message the other day

and I’m afraid I forgot to give it you—to thank you for being so kind to

me and taking such a lot of trouble. Really she did, but I forgot it.

If she wants me to see as much as possible of America it’s much better I

should be here than always with Barb—it’s much less like one’s own

country. I mean it’s much nicer—for a girl,” said Lady Agatha

affectionately to Mrs. Lemon, who began also to look at Jackson under the

influence of this uttered sweetness which was like some quaint little old

air, she thought, played upon a faded spinet with two girlish fingers.

“If you want the genuine thing you ought to come out on the plains,” Mr.

Longstraw interposed with bright sincerity. “I guess that was your

mother’s idea. Why don’t you all come out?” He had been looking

intently at Lady Agatha while the remarks I have just repeated succeeded

each other on her lips—looking at her with a fascinated approbation, for

all the world as if he had been a slightly slow-witted English gentleman

and the girl herself a flower of the West, a flower that knew the

celebrated language of flowers. Susceptible even as Mrs. Lemon was he

made no secret of the fact that Lady Agatha’s voice was music to him, his

ear being much more accessible than his own inflexions would have

indicated. To Lady Agatha those inflexions were not displeasing, partly

because, like Mr. Herman himself in general, she had not a perception of

shades; and partly because it never occurred to her to compare them with

any other tones. He seemed to her to speak a foreign language

altogether—a romantic dialect through which the most comical meanings

gleamed here and there.

“I should like it above all things,” she said in answer to his last

observation.

“The scenery’s ahead of anything round here,” Mr. Longstraw went on.

Mrs. Lemon, as we have gathered, was the mildest of women; but, as an old

New Yorker, she had no patience with some of the new fashions. Chief

among these was the perpetual reference, which had become common only

within a few years, to the outlying parts of the country, the States and

Territories of which children, in her time, used to learn the names, in

their order, at school, but which no one ever thought of going to or

talking about. Such places, in her opinion, belonged to the

geography-books, or at most to the literature of newspapers, but neither

to society nor to conversation; and the change—which, so far as it lay in

people’s talk, she thought at bottom a mere affectation—threatened to

make her native land appear vulgar and vague. For this amiable daughter

of Manhattan the normal existence of man, and still more of women, had

been “located,” as she would have said, between Trinity Church and the

beautiful Reservoir at the top of the Fifth Avenue—monuments of which she

was personally proud; and if we could look into the deeper parts of her

mind I am afraid we should discover there an impression that both the

countries of Europe and the remainder of her own continent were equally

far from the centre and the light.

“Well, scenery isn’t everything,” she made soft answer to Mr. Longstraw;

“and if Lady Agatha should wish to see anything of that kind all she has

got to do is to take the boat up the Hudson.” Mrs. Lemon’s recognition

of this river, I should say, was all it need have been; she held the

Hudson existed for the purpose of supplying New Yorkers with poetical

feelings, helping them to face comfortably occasions like the present

and, in general, meet foreigners with confidence—part of the oddity of

foreigners being their conceit about their own places.

“That’s a good idea, Lady Agatha; let’s take the boat,” said Mr.

Longstraw. “I’ve had great times on the boats.”

Lady Agatha fixed on her _amoroso_ her singular charming eyes, eyes of

which it was impossible to say at any moment whether they were the shyest

or the frankest in the world; and she was not aware while this

contemplation lasted that her brother-in-law was observing her. He was

thinking of certain things while he did so, of things he had heard about

the English; who still, in spite of his having married into a family of

that nation, appeared to him very much through the medium of hearsay.

They were more passionate than the Americans, and they did things that

would never have been expected; though they seemed steadier and less

excitable there was much social evidence to prove them more wildly

impulsive.

“It’s so very kind of you to propose that,” Lady Agatha said in a moment

to Mrs. Lemon. “I think I’ve never been in a ship—except of course

coming from England. I’m sure mamma would wish me to see the Hudson. We

used to go in immensely for boating in England.”

“Did you boat in a ship?” Herman Longstraw asked, showing his teeth

hilariously and pulling his moustaches.

“Lots of my mother’s people have been in the navy.” Lady Agatha

perceived vaguely and good-naturedly that she had said something the odd

Americans thought odd and that she must justify herself. Something most

unnatural was happening to her standard of oddity.

“I really think you had better come back to us,” Jackson repeated: “your

sister’s very lonely without you.”

“She’s much more lonely _with_ me. We’re perpetually having differences.

Barb’s dreadfully vexed because I like America instead of—instead of—”

And Lady Agatha paused a moment; for it just occurred to her that this

might be treacherous.

“Instead of what?” Jackson inquired.

“Instead of perpetually wanting to go to England, as she does,” she went

on, only giving her phrase a little softer turn; for she felt the next

moment that Barb could have nothing to hide and must of course have the

courage of her opinions. “Of course England’s best, but I daresay I like

to be bad,” the girl said artlessly.

“Oh there’s no doubt you’re awfully bad,” Mr. Longstraw broke out, with

joyous eagerness. Naturally he couldn’t know that what she had

principally in mind was an exchange of opinions that had taken place

between her sister and herself just before she came to stay with Mrs.

Lemon. This incident, of which he himself was the occasion, might indeed

have been called a discussion, for it had carried them quite into the

cold air of the abstract. Lady Barb had said she didn’t see how Agatha

could look at such a creature as that—an odious familiar vulgar being who

had not about him the rudiments of a gentleman. Lady Agatha had replied

that Mr. Longstraw was familiar and rough and that he had a twang and

thought it amusing to talk to her as “the Princess”; but that he was a

gentleman for all that and was tremendous fun whatever one called him—it

didn’t seem to matter what one called any one or anything there. Her

sister had returned to this that if he was rough and familiar he couldn’t

be a gentleman, inasmuch as that was just what a gentleman meant—a man

who was civil and well-bred and well-born. Lady Agatha had argued that

such a point was just where she differed; that a man might perfectly be a

gentleman and yet be rough, and even ignorant, so long as he was really

nice. The only thing was that he should be really nice, which was the

case with Mr. Longstraw, who, moreover, was quite extraordinarily

civil—as civil as a man could be. And then Lady Agatha herself made the

strongest point she had ever made in her life (she had never been so

inspired) in saying that Mr. Longstraw was rough perhaps, but not rude—a

distinction altogether wasted on her sister, who declared that she hadn’t

come to America, of all places, to learn what a gentleman was. The

discussion in short had been a trifle grim. I know not whether it was

the tonic effect on them too, alien organisms as they were, of the fine

winter weather, or that of Lady Barb’s being bored and having nothing

else to do; but Lord Canterville’s daughters went into the question with

the moral earnestness of a pair of approved Bostonians. It was part of

Lady Agatha’s view of her admirer that he after all much resembled other

tall people with smiling eyes and tawny moustaches who had ridden a good

deal in rough countries and whom she had seen in other places. If he was

more familiar he was also more alert; still, the difference was not in

himself, but in the way she saw him—the way she saw everybody in America.

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 assumed 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, passed 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 embarrassment 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.