George Littlemore arrived in London on the twentieth of May, and one of
the first things he did was to go and see Waterville at the Legation,
where he mentioned that he had taken for the rest of the season a house
at Queen Anne’s Gate, so that his sister and her husband, who, under the
pressure of diminished rents, had let their own town residence, might
come up and spend a couple of months with him.
“One of the consequences of your having a house will be that you’ll have
to entertain the Texan belle,” our young man said.
Littlemore sat there with his hands crossed on his stick; he looked at
his friend with an eye that failed to kindle at the mention of this
lady’s name. “Has she got into European society?” he rather languidly
inquired.
“Very much, I should say. She has a house and a carriage and diamonds
and everything handsome. She seems already to know a lot of people; they
put her name in the _Morning Post_. She has come up very quickly; she’s
almost famous. Every one’s asking about her—you’ll be plied with
questions.”
Littlemore listened gravely. “How did she get in?”
“She met a large party at Longlands and made them all think her great
fun. They must have taken her up; she only wanted a start.”
Her old friend rallied after a moment to the interest of this news,
marking his full appreciation of it by a burst of laughter. “To think of
Nancy Beck! The people here do beat the Dutch! There’s no one they
won’t go after. They wouldn’t touch her in New York.”
“Oh New York’s quite old-fashioned and rococo,” said Waterville; and he
announced to Littlemore that Lady Demesne was very eager for his arrival
and wanted his aid to prevent her son’s bringing such a person into the
family. Littlemore was apparently not alarmed at her ladyship’s
projects, and intimated, in the manner of a man who thought them rather
impertinent, that he could trust himself to keep out of her way. “It
isn’t a proper marriage at any rate,” the second secretary urged.
“Why not if he loves her?”
“Oh if that’s all you want!”—which seemed a degree of cynicism startling
to his companion.
“Would you marry her yourself?”
“Certainly if I were in love with her.”
“You took care not to be that.”
“Yes, I did—and so Demesne had better have done. However, since he’s
bitten—!” But Littlemore let the rest of his sentence too indifferently
drop.
Waterville presently asked him how he would manage, in view of his
sister’s advent, about asking Mrs. Headway to his house; and he replied
that he would manage by simply not asking her. On this Waterville
pronounced him highly inconsistent; to which Littlemore rejoined that it
was very possible. But he asked whether they couldn’t talk about
something else than Mrs. Headway. He couldn’t enter into the young man’s
interest in her—they were sure to have enough of her later without such
impatience.
Waterville would have been sorry to give a false idea of his interest in
the wonderful woman; he knew too well the feeling had definite limits.
He had been two or three times to see her, but it was a relief to be able
to believe her quite independent of him. There had been no revival of
those free retorts which had marked their stay at Longlands. She could
dispense with assistance now; she knew herself in the current of success.
She pretended to be surprised at her good fortune, especially at its
rapidity; but she was really surprised at nothing. She took things as
they came and, being essentially a woman of action, wasted almost as
little time in elation as she would have done in despondence. She talked
a great deal about Lord Edward and Lady Margaret and such others of that
“standing” as had shown a desire for her acquaintance; professing to
measure perfectly the sources of a growing popularity. “They come to
laugh at me,” she said; “they come simply to get things to repeat. I
can’t open my mouth but they burst into fits. It’s a settled thing that
I’m a grand case of the American funny woman; if I make the least remark
they begin to roar. I must express myself somehow; and indeed when I
hold my tongue they think me funnier than ever. They repeat what I say
to a great person, and a great person told some of them the other night
that he wanted to hear me for himself. I’ll do for him what I do for the
others; no better and no worse. I don’t know how I do it; I talk the
only way I can. They tell me it isn’t so much the things I say as the
way I say them. Well, they’re very easy to please. They don’t really
care for me, you know—they don’t love me for myself and the way I want to
be loved; it’s only to be able to repeat Mrs. Headway’s ‘last.’ Every
one wants to have it first; it’s a regular race.” When she found what
was expected of her she undertook to supply the article in abundance—the
poor little woman worked hard at the vernacular. If the taste of London
lay that way she would do her best to gratify it; it was only a pity she
hadn’t known before: she would have made more extensive preparations.
She had thought it a disadvantage of old to live in Arizona, in Dakotah,
in the newly-admitted States; but now she saw that, as she phrased it to
herself, this was the best thing that ever had happened to her. She
tried to recover the weird things she had heard out there, and keenly
regretted she hadn’t taken them down in writing; she drummed up the
echoes of the Rocky Mountains and practised the intonations of the
Pacific slope. When she saw her audience in convulsions she argued that
this was success: she inferred that had she only come five years sooner
she might have married a Duke. That would have been even a greater
attraction for the London world than the actual proceedings of Sir Arthur
Demesne, who, however, lived sufficiently in the eye of society to
justify the rumour that there were bets about town as to the issue of his
already protracted courtship. It was food for curiosity to see a young
man of his pattern—one of the few “earnest” young men of the Tory side,
with an income sufficient for tastes more vivid than those by which he
was known—make up to a lady several years older than himself, whose fund
of Texan slang was even larger than her stock of dollars. Mrs. Headway
had got a good many new ideas since her arrival in London, but she had
also not lost her grasp of several old ones. The chief of these—it was
now a year old—was that Sir Arthur was the very most eligible and,
shrewdly considered, taking one thing with another, most valuable young
man in the world. There were of course a good many things he wasn’t. He
wasn’t amusing; he wasn’t insinuating; he wasn’t of an absolutely
irrepressible ardour. She believed he was constant, but he was certainly
not eager. With these things, however, she could perfectly dispense; she
had in particular quite outlived the need of being amused. She had had a
very exciting life, and her vision of happiness at present was to be
magnificently bored. The idea of complete and uncriticised
respectability filled her soul with satisfaction; her imagination
prostrated itself in the presence of this virtue. She was aware she had
achieved it but ill in her own person; but she could now at least connect
herself with it by sacred ties. She could prove in that way what was her
deepest feeling. This was a religious appreciation of Sir Arthur’s great
quality—his smooth and rounded, his blooming lily-like exemption from
social flaws.
She was at home when Littlemore went to see her and surrounded by several
visitors to whom she was giving a late cup of tea and to whom she
introduced her tall compatriot. He stayed till they dispersed, in spite
of the manœuvres of a gentleman who evidently desired to outlinger him,
but who, whatever might have been his happy fortune on former visits,
received on this occasion no encouragement from their hostess. He looked
at Littlemore slowly, beginning with his boots and travelling up as if to
discover the reason of so unexpected a preference, and then, with no
salutation to him, left the pair face to face.
“I’m curious to see what you’ll do for me now you’ve got your sister with
you,” Mrs. Headway presently remarked, having heard of this circumstance
from Rupert Waterville. “I realise you’ll have to do something, you
know. I’m sorry for you, but I don’t see how you can get off. You might
ask me to dine some day when she’s dining out. I’d come even then, I
think, because I want to keep on the right side of you.”
“I call that the wrong side,” said Littlemore.
“Yes, I see. It’s your sister that’s on the right side. You’re in
rather a bad fix, ain’t you? You’ve got to be ‘good’ and mean, or you’ve
got to be kind with a little courage. However, you take those things
very quietly. There’s something in you that exasperates me. What does
your sister think of me? Does she hate me?” Nancy persisted.
“She knows nothing about you.”
“Have you told her nothing?”
“Never a word.”
“Hasn’t she asked you? That shows how she hates me. She thinks I ain’t
creditable to America. I know _that_ way of doing it. She wants to show
people over here that, however they may be taken in by me, she knows much
better. But she’ll have to ask you about me; she can’t go on for ever.
Then what’ll you say?”
“That you’re the biggest ‘draw’ in Europe.”
“Oh shucks!” she cried, out of her repertory.
“Haven’t you got into European society?”
“Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. It’s too soon to see. I can’t tell this
season. Every one says I’ve got to wait till next, to see if it’s the
same. Sometimes they take you right up for a few weeks and then just
drop you anywhere. You’ve got to make it a square thing somehow—to drive
in a nail.”
“You speak as if it were your coffin,” said Littlemore.
“Well, it _is_ a kind of coffin. I’m burying my past!”
He winced at this—he was tired to death of her past. He changed the
subject and turned her on to London, a topic as to which her freshness of
view and now unpremeditated art of notation were really interesting,
displayed as they were at the expense of most of her new acquaintances
and of some of the most venerable features of the great city. He himself
looked at England from the outside as much as it was possible to do; but
in the midst of her familiar allusions to people and things known to her
only since yesterday he was struck with the truth that she would never
really be initiated. She buzzed over the surface of things like a fly on
a window-pane. This surface immensely pleased her; she was flattered,
encouraged, excited; she dropped her confident judgements as if she were
scattering flowers, talked about her intentions, her prospects, her
discoveries, her designs. But she had really learnt no more about
English life than about the molecular theory. The words in which he had
described her of old to Waterville came back to him: “_Elle ne doute de
rien_!” Suddenly she jumped up; she was going out to dine and it was
time to dress. “Before you leave I want you to promise me something,”
she said off-hand, but with a look he had seen before and that pressed on
the point—oh so intensely! “You’ll be sure to be questioned about me.”
And then she paused.
“How do people know I know you?”
“You haven’t ‘blown’ about it? Is that what you mean? You can be a
brute when you try. They do know it at any rate. Possibly I may have
told them. They’ll come to you to ask about me. I mean from Lady
Demesne. She’s in an awful state. She’s so afraid of it—of the way he
wants me.”
In himself too, after all, she could still press the spring of careless
mirth. “_I’m_ not afraid, if you haven’t yet brought it off.”
“Well, he can’t make up his mind. I appeal to him so, yet he can’t quite
place me where he’d have to have me.” Her lucidity and her detachment
were both grotesque and touching.
“He must be a poor creature if he won’t take you as you are. I mean for
the sweet sake of what you are,” Littlemore added.
This wasn’t a very gallant form, but she made the best of it. “Well—he
wants to be very careful, and so he ought!”
“If he asks too many questions he’s not worth marrying,” Littlemore
rather cheaply opined.
“I beg your pardon—he’s worth marrying whatever he does; he’s worth
marrying for _me_. And I want to marry him—that’s what I want to do.”
Her old friend had a pause of some blankness. “Is he waiting for me to
settle it?”
“He’s waiting for I don’t know what—for some one to come and tell him
that I’m the sweetest of the sweet. Then he’ll believe it. Some one who
has been out there and knows all about me. Of course you’re the man,
you’re created on purpose. Don’t you remember how I told you in Paris he
wanted to ask you? He was ashamed and gave it up; he tried to forget me.
But now it’s all on again—only meanwhile his mother has been at him. She
works night and day, like a weasel in a hole, to persuade him that I’m
too much beneath him. He’s very fond of her and very open to influence;
I mean from her—not from any one else. Except me of course. Oh I’ve
influenced him, I’ve explained everything fifty times over. But some
memories, you know, are like those lumpish or pointed things you can’t
get into your trunk—they won’t pack anyway; and he keeps coming back to
them. He wants every little speck explained. He won’t come to you
himself, but his mother will, or she’ll send some of her people. I guess
she’ll send the lawyer—the family solicitor they call him. She wanted to
send him out to America to make inquiries, only she didn’t know where to
send. Of course I couldn’t be expected to give the places—they’ve got to
find _them_ out the best way they can. She knows all about you and has
made up to your sister; a big proof, as she never makes up to any one.
So you see how much I know. She’s waiting for you; she means to hold you
with her glittering eye. She has an idea she _can_—can make you say
what’ll meet her views. Then she’ll lay it before Sir Arthur. So you’ll
be so good as to have none—not a view.”
Littlemore had, however disguisedly, given her every attention; but the
conclusion left him all too consciously staring. “You don’t mean that
anything I can say will make a difference?”
“Don’t be affected! You know it will as well as I.”
“You make him out not only a laggard in love but almost a dastard in
war.”
“Never mind what I make him out. I guess if I can understand him you can
accept him. And I appeal to you solemnly. You can save me or you can
lose me. If you lose me you’ll be a coward. And if you say a word
against me I’ll be lost.”
“Go and dress for dinner—that’s your salvation,” Littlemore returned as
he quitted her at the head of the stairs.