I
'Why, Cousin Raymond, how can you suppose? Why, she's only sixteen!'
'She told me she was seventeen,' said the young man, as if it made a
great difference.
'Well, only _just_!' Mrs. Temperly replied, in the tone of graceful,
reasonable concession.
'Well, that's a very good age for me. I'm very young.'
'You are old enough to know better,' the lady remarked, in her soft,
pleasant voice, which always drew the sting from a reproach, and enabled
you to swallow it as you would a cooked plum, without the stone. 'Why,
she hasn't finished her education!'
'That's just what I mean,' said her interlocutor. 'It would finish it
beautifully for her to marry me.'
'Have you finished yours, my dear?' Mrs. Temperly inquired. 'The way you
young people talk about marrying!' she exclaimed, looking at the
itinerant functionary with the long wand who touched into a flame the
tall gas-lamp on the other side of the Fifth Avenue. The pair were
standing, in the recess of a window, in one of the big public rooms of
an immense hotel, and the October day was turning to dusk.
'Well, would you have us leave it to the old?' Raymond asked. 'That's
just what I think--she would be such a help to me,' he continued. 'I
want to go back to Paris to study more. I have come home too soon. I
don't know half enough; they know more here than I thought. So it would
be perfectly easy, and we should all be together.'
'Well, my dear, when you do come back to Paris we will talk about it,'
said Mrs. Temperly, turning away from the window.
'I should like it better, Cousin Maria, if you trusted me a little
more,' Raymond sighed, observing that she was not really giving her
thoughts to what he said. She irritated him somehow; she was so full of
her impending departure, of her arrangements, her last duties and
memoranda. She was not exactly important, any more than she was humble;
she was too conciliatory for the one and too positive for the other. But
she bustled quietly and gave one the sense of being 'up to' everything;
the successive steps of her enterprise were in advance perfectly clear
to her, and he could see that her imagination (conventional as she was
she had plenty of that faculty) had already taken up its abode on one of
those fine _premiers_ which she had never seen, but which by instinct
she seemed to know all about, in the very best part of the quarter of
the Champs Elysees. If she ruffled him envy had perhaps something to do
with it: she was to set sail on the morrow for the city of his affection
and he was to stop in New York, where the fact that he was but half
pleased did not alter the fact that he had his studio on his hands and
that it was a bad one (though perhaps as good as any use he should put
it to), which no one would be in a hurry to relieve him of.
It was easy for him to talk to Mrs. Temperly in that airy way about
going back, but he couldn't go back unless the old gentleman gave him
the means. He had already given him a great many things in the past, and
with the others coming on (Marian's marriage-outfit, within three
months, had cost literally thousands), Raymond had not at present the
face to ask for more. He must sell some pictures first, and to sell them
he must first paint them. It was his misfortune that he saw what he
wanted to do so much better than he could do it. But he must really try
and please himself--an effort that appeared more possible now that the
idea of following Dora across the ocean had become an incentive. In
spite of secret aspirations and even intentions, however, it was not
encouraging to feel that he made really no impression at all on Cousin
Maria. This certitude was so far from agreeable to him that he almost
found it in him to drop the endearing title by which he had hitherto
addressed her. It was only that, after all, her husband had been
distantly related to his mother. It was not as a cousin that he was
interested in Dora, but as something very much more intimate. I know not
whether it occurred to him that Mrs. Temperly herself would never give
his displeasure the benefit of dropping the affectionate form. She might
shut her door to him altogether, but he would always be her kinsman and
her dear. She was much addicted to these little embellishments of human
intercourse--the friendly apostrophe and even the caressing hand--and
there was something homely and cosy, a rustic, motherly _bonhomie_, in
her use of them. She was as lavish of them as she was really careful in
the selection of her friends.
She stood there with her hand in her pocket, as if she were feeling for
something; her little plain, pleasant face was presented to him with a
musing smile, and he vaguely wondered whether she were fumbling for a
piece of money to buy him off from wishing to marry her daughter. Such
an idea would be quite in keeping with the disguised levity with which
she treated his state of mind. If her levity was wrapped up in the air
of tender solicitude for everything that related to the feelings of her
child, that only made her failure to appreciate his suit more
deliberate. She struck him almost as impertinent (at the same time that
he knew this was never her intention) as she looked up at him--her tiny
proportions always made her throw back her head and set something
dancing in her cap--and inquired whether he had noticed if she gave two
keys, tied together by a blue ribbon, to Susan Winkle, when that
faithful but flurried domestic met them in the lobby. She was thinking
only of questions of luggage, and the fact that he wished to marry Dora
was the smallest incident in their getting off.
'I think you ask me that only to change the subject,' he said. 'I don't
believe that ever in your life you have been unconscious of what you
have done with your keys.'
'Not often, but you make me nervous,' she answered, with her patient,
honest smile.
'Oh, Cousin Maria!' the young man exclaimed, ambiguously, while Mrs.
Temperly looked humanely at some totally uninteresting people who came
straggling into the great hot, frescoed, velvety drawing-room, where it
was as easy to see you were in an hotel as it was to see that, if you
were, you were in one of the very best. Mrs. Temperly, since her
husband's death, had passed much of her life at hotels, where she
flattered herself that she preserved the tone of domestic life free from
every taint and promoted the refined development of her children; but
she selected them as well as she selected her friends. Somehow they
became better from the very fact of her being there, and her children
were smuggled in and out in the most extraordinary way; one never met
them racing and whooping, as one did hundreds of others, in the lobbies.
Her frequentation of hotels, where she paid enormous bills, was part of
her expensive but practical way of living, and also of her theory that,
from one week to another, she was going to Europe for a series of years
as soon as she had wound up certain complicated affairs which had
devolved upon her at her husband's death. If these affairs had dragged
on it was owing to their inherent troublesomeness and implied no doubt
of her capacity to bring them to a solution and to administer the very
considerable fortune that Mr. Temperly had left. She used, in a
superior, unprejudiced way, every convenience that the civilisation of
her time offered her, and would have lived without hesitation in a
lighthouse if this had contributed to her general scheme. She was now,
in the interest of this scheme, preparing to use Europe, which she had
not yet visited and with none of whose foreign tongues she was
acquainted. This time she was certainly embarking.
She took no notice of the discredit which her young friend appeared to
throw on the idea that she had nerves, and betrayed no suspicion that he
believed her to have them in about the same degree as a sound,
productive Alderney cow. She only moved toward one of the numerous doors
of the room, as if to remind him of all she had still to do before
night. They passed together into the long, wide corridor of the hotel--a
vista of soft carpet, numbered doors, wandering women and perpetual
gaslight--and approached the staircase by which she must ascend again to
her domestic duties. She counted over, serenely, for his enlightenment,
those that were still to be performed; but he could see that everything
would be finished by nine o'clock--the time she had fixed in advance.
The heavy luggage was then to go to the steamer; she herself was to be
on board, with the children and the smaller things, at eleven o'clock
the next morning. They had thirty pieces, but this was less than they
had when they came from California five years before. She wouldn't have
done that again. It was true that at that time she had had Mr. Temperly
to help: he had died, Raymond remembered, six months after the
settlement in New York. But, on the other hand, she knew more now. It
was one of Mrs. Temperly's amiable qualities that she admitted herself
so candidly to be still susceptible of development. She never professed
to be in possession of all the knowledge requisite for her career; not
only did she let her friends know that she was always learning, but she
appealed to them to instruct her, in a manner which was in itself an
example.
When Raymond said to her that he took for granted she would let him come
down to the steamer for a last good-bye, she not only consented
graciously but added that he was free to call again at the hotel in the
evening, if he had nothing better to do. He must come between nine and
ten; she expected several other friends--those who wished to see the
last of them, yet didn't care to come to the ship. Then he would see all
of them--she meant all of themselves, Dora and Effie and Tishy, and even
Mademoiselle Bourde. She spoke exactly as if he had never approached her
on the subject of Dora and as if Tishy, who was ten years of age, and
Mademoiselle Bourde, who was the French governess and forty, were
objects of no less an interest to him. He felt what a long pull he
should have ever to get round her, and the sting of this knowledge was
in his consciousness that Dora was really in her mother's hands. In Mrs.
Temperly's composition there was not a hint of the bully; but none the
less she held her children--she would hold them for ever. It was not
simply by tenderness; but what it was by she knew best herself. Raymond
appreciated the privilege of seeing Dora again that evening as well as
on the morrow; yet he was so vexed with her mother that his vexation
betrayed him into something that almost savoured of violence--a fact
which I am ashamed to have to chronicle, as Mrs. Temperly's own urbanity
deprived such breaches of every excuse. It may perhaps serve partly as
an excuse for Raymond Bestwick that he was in love, or at least that he
thought he was. Before she parted from him at the foot of the staircase
he said to her, 'And of course, if things go as you like over there,
Dora will marry some foreign prince.'
She gave no sign of resenting this speech, but she looked at him for
the first time as if she were hesitating, as if it were not instantly
clear to her what to say. It appeared to him, on his side, for a moment,
that there was something strange in her hesitation, that abruptly, by an
inspiration, she was almost making up her mind to reply that Dora's
marriage to a prince was, considering Dora's peculiarities (he knew that
her mother deemed her peculiar, and so did he, but that was precisely
why he wished to marry her), so little probable that, after all, once
such a union was out of the question, _he_ might be no worse than
another plain man. These, however, were not the words that fell from
Mrs. Temperly's lips. Her embarrassment vanished in her clear smile. 'Do
you know what Mr. Temperly used to say? He used to say that Dora was the
pattern of an old maid--she would never make a choice.'
'I hope--because that would have been too foolish--that he didn't say
she wouldn't have a chance.'
'Oh, a chance! what do you call by that fine name?' Cousin Maria
exclaimed, laughing, as she ascended the stair.