OLD NEW YORK
FALSE DAWN
(_The ’Forties_)
By EDITH WHARTON
OLD NEW YORK
FALSE DAWN
THE OLD MAID
THE SPARK
NEW YEAR’S DAY
THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
SUMMER
THE REEF
THE MARNE
FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING
OLD NEW YORK
FALSE DAWN
(_The ’Forties_)
BY
EDITH WHARTON
AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC.
DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL
[Illustration: colophon]
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Copyright, 1923, by The Curtis Publishing Company_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FALSE DAWN
(_The ’Forties_)
PART I
FALSE DAWN
(_The ’Forties_)
I
Hay, verbena and mignonette scented the languid July day. Large
strawberries, crimsoning through sprigs of mint, floated in a bowl of
pale yellow cup on the verandah table: an old Georgian bowl, with
complex reflections on polygonal flanks, engraved with the Raycie arms
between lions’ heads. Now and again the gentlemen, warned by a menacing
hum, slapped their cheeks, their brows or their bald crowns; but they
did so as furtively as possible, for Mr. Halston Raycie, on whose
verandah they sat, would not admit that there were mosquitoes at High
Point.
The strawberries came from Mr. Raycie’s kitchen garden; the Georgian
bowl came from his great-grandfather (father of the Signer); the
verandah was that of his country-house, which stood on a height above
the Sound, at a convenient driving distance from his town house in Canal
Street.
“Another glass, Commodore,” said Mr. Raycie, shaking out a cambric
handkerchief the size of a table-cloth, and applying a corner of it to
his steaming brow.
Mr. Jameson Ledgely smiled and took another glass. He was known as “the
Commodore” among his intimates because of having been in the Navy in his
youth, and having taken part, as a midshipman under Admiral Porter, in
the war of 1812. This jolly sunburnt bachelor, whose face resembled
that of one of the bronze idols he might have brought back with him, had
kept his naval air, though long retired from the service; and his white
duck trousers, his gold-braided cap and shining teeth, still made him
look as if he might be in command of a frigate. Instead of that, he had
just sailed over a party of friends from his own place on the Long
Island shore; and his trim white sloop was now lying in the bay below
the point.
The Halston Raycie house overlooked a lawn sloping to the Sound. The
lawn was Mr. Raycie’s pride: it was mown with a scythe once a fortnight,
and rolled in the spring by an old white horse specially shod for the
purpose. Below the verandah the turf was broken by three round beds of
rose-geranium, heliotrope and Bengal roses, which Mrs. Raycie tended in
gauntlet gloves, under a small hinged sunshade that folded back on its
carved ivory handle. The house, remodelled and enlarged by Mr. Raycie on
his marriage, had played a part in the Revolutionary war as the
settler’s cottage where Benedict Arnold had had his headquarters. A
contemporary print of it hung in Mr. Raycie’s study; but no one could
have detected the humble outline of the old house in the majestic
stone-coloured dwelling built of tongued-and-grooved boards, with an
angle tower, tall narrow windows, and a verandah on chamfered posts,
that figured so confidently as a “Tuscan Villa” in Downing’s “Landscape
Gardening in America.” There was the same difference between the rude
lithograph of the earlier house and the fine steel engraving of its
successor (with a “specimen” weeping beech on the lawn) as between the
buildings themselves. Mr. Raycie had reason to think well of his
architect.
He thought well of most things related to himself by ties of blood or
interest. No one had ever been quite sure that he made Mrs. Raycie
happy, but he was known to have the highest opinion of her. So it was
with his daughters, Sarah Anne and Mary Adeline, fresher replicas of the
lymphatic Mrs. Raycie; no one would have sworn that they were quite at
ease with their genial parent, yet every one knew how loud he was in
their praises. But the most remarkable object within the range of Mr.
Raycie’s self-approval was his son Lewis. And yet, as Jameson Ledgely,
who was given to speaking his mind, had once observed, you wouldn’t have
supposed young Lewis was exactly the kind of craft Halston would have
turned out if he’d had the designing of his son and heir.
Mr. Raycie was a monumental man. His extent in height, width and
thickness was so nearly the same that whichever way he was turned one
had an almost equally broad view of him; and every inch of that mighty
circumference was so exquisitely cared for that to a farmer’s eye he
might have suggested a great agricultural estate of which not an acre is
untilled. Even his baldness, which was in proportion to the rest, looked
as if it received a special daily polish; and on a hot day his whole
person was like some wonderful example of the costliest irrigation.
There was so much of him, and he had so many planes, that it was
fascinating to watch each runnel of moisture follow its own particular
watershed. Even on his large fresh-looking hands the drops divided,
trickling in different ways from the ridges of the fingers; and as for
his forehead and temples, and the raised cushion of cheek beneath each
of his lower lids, every one of these slopes had its own particular
stream, its hollow pools and sudden cataracts; and the sight was never
unpleasant, because his whole vast bubbling surface was of such a clean
and hearty pink, and the exuding moisture so perceptibly flavoured with
expensive eau de Cologne and the best French soap.
Mrs. Raycie, though built on a less heroic scale, had a pale amplitude
which, when she put on her best watered silk (the kind that stood
alone), and framed her countenance in the innumerable blonde lace
ruffles and clustered purple grapes of her newest Paris cap, almost
balanced her husband’s bulk. Yet from this full-rigged pair, as the
Commodore would have put it, had issued the lean little runt of a Lewis,
a shrimp of a baby, a shaver of a boy, and now a youth as scant as an
ordinary man’s midday shadow.
All these things, Lewis himself mused, dangling his legs from the
verandah rail, were undoubtedly passing through the minds of the four
gentlemen grouped about his father’s bowl of cup.
Mr. Robert Huzzard, the banker, a tall broad man, who looked big in any
company but Mr. Raycie’s, leaned back, lifted his glass, and bowed to
Lewis.
“Here’s to the Grand Tour!”
“Don’t perch on that rail like a sparrow, my boy,” Mr. Raycie said
reprovingly; and Lewis dropped to his feet, and returned Mr. Huzzard’s
bow.
“I wasn’t thinking,” he stammered. It was his too frequent excuse.
Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, the banker’s younger brother, Mr. Ledgely and Mr.
Donaldson Kent, all raised their glasses and cheerily echoed: “The Grand
Tour!”
Lewis bowed again, and put his lips to the glass he had forgotten. In
reality, he had eyes only for Mr. Donaldson Kent, his father’s cousin, a
silent man with a lean hawk-like profile, who looked like a retired
Revolutionary hero, and lived in daily fear of the most trifling risk or
responsibility.
To this prudent and circumspect citizen had come, some years earlier,
the unexpected and altogether inexcusable demand that he should look
after the daughter of his only brother, Julius Kent. Julius had died in
Italy--well, that was his own business, if he chose to live there. But
to let his wife die before him, and to leave a minor daughter, and a
will entrusting her to the guardianship of his esteemed elder brother,
Donaldson Kent Esquire, of Kent’s Point, Long Island, and Great Jones
Street, New York--well, as Mr. Kent himself said, and as his wife said
for him, there had never been anything, anything whatever, in Mr. Kent’s
attitude or behaviour, to justify the ungrateful Julius (whose debts he
had more than once paid) in laying on him this final burden.
The girl came. She was fourteen, she was considered plain, she was small
and black and skinny. Her name was Beatrice, which was bad enough, and
made worse by the fact that it had been shortened by ignorant foreigners
to Treeshy. But she was eager, serviceable and good-tempered, and as Mr.
and Mrs. Kent’s friends pointed out, her plainness made everything easy.
There were two Kent boys growing up, Bill and Donald; and if this
penniless cousin had been compounded of cream and roses--well, she would
have taken more watching, and might have rewarded the kindness of her
uncle and aunt by some act of wicked ingratitude. But this risk being
obviated by her appearance, they could be goodnatured to her without
afterthought, and to be goodnatured was natural to them. So, as the
years passed, she gradually became the guardian of her guardians; since
it was equally natural to Mr. and Mrs. Kent to throw themselves in
helpless reliance on every one whom they did not nervously fear or
mistrust.
“Yes, he’s off on Monday,” Mr. Raycie said, nodding sharply at Lewis,
who had set down his glass after one sip. “Empty it, you shirk!” the nod
commanded; and Lewis, throwing back his head, gulped down the draught,
though it almost stuck in his lean throat. He had already had to take
two glasses, and even this scant conviviality was too much for him, and
likely to result in a mood of excited volubility, followed by a morose
evening and a head the next morning. And he wanted to keep his mind
clear that day, and to think steadily and lucidly of Treeshy Kent.
Of course he couldn’t marry her--yet. He was twenty-one that very day,
and still entirely dependent on his father. And he wasn’t altogether
sorry to be going first on this Grand Tour. It was what he had always
dreamed of, pined for, from the moment when his infant eyes had first
been drawn to the prints of European cities in the long upper passage
that smelt of matting. And all that Treeshy had told him about Italy had
confirmed and intensified the longing. Oh, to have been going there
with her--with her as his guide, his Beatrice! (For she had given him a
little Dante of her father’s, with a steel-engraved frontispiece of
Beatrice; and his sister Mary Adeline, who had been taught Italian by
one of the romantic Milanese exiles, had helped her brother out with the
grammar.)
The thought of going to Italy with Treeshy was only a dream; but later,
as man and wife, they would return there, and by that time, perhaps, it
was Lewis who would be her guide, and reveal to her the historic marvels
of her birthplace, of which after all she knew so little, except in
minor domestic ways that were quaint but unimportant.
The prospect swelled her suitor’s bosom, and reconciled him to the idea
of their separation. After all, he secretly felt himself to be still a
boy, and it was as a man that he would return: he meant to tell her that
when they met the next day. When he came back his character would be
formed, his knowledge of life (which he already thought considerable)
would be complete; and then no one could keep them apart. He smiled in
advance to think how little his father’s shouting and booming would
impress a man on his return from the Grand Tour....
The gentlemen were telling anecdotes about their own early experiences
in Europe. None of them--not even Mr. Raycie--had travelled as
extensively as it was intended that Lewis should; but the two Huzzards
had been twice to England on banking matters, and Commodore Ledgely, a
bold man, to France and Belgium as well--not to speak of his early
experiences in the Far East. All three had kept a vivid and amused
recollection, slightly tinged with disapprobation, of what they had
seen--“Oh, those French wenches,” the Commodore chuckled through his
white teeth--but poor Mr. Kent, who had gone abroad on his honeymoon,
had been caught in Paris by the revolution of 1830, had had the fever in
Florence, and had nearly been arrested as a spy in Vienna; and the only
satisfactory episode in this disastrous, and never repeated, adventure,
had been the fact of his having been mistaken for the Duke of Wellington
(as he was trying to slip out of a Viennese hotel in his courier’s blue
surtout) by a crowd who had been--“Well, very gratifying in their
enthusiasm,” Mr. Kent admitted.
“How my poor brother Julius could have lived in Europe! Well, look at
the consequences--” he used to say, as if poor Treeshy’s plainness gave
an awful point to his moral.
“There’s one thing in Paris, my boy, that you must be warned against:
those gambling-hells in the Pally Royle,” Mr. Kent insisted. “I never
set foot in the places myself; but a glance at the outside was enough.”
“I knew a feller that was fleeced of a fortune there,” Mr. Henry Huzzard
confirmed; while the Commodore, at his tenth glass, chuckled with moist
eyes: “The trollops, oh, the trollops--”
“As for Vienna--” said Mr. Kent.
“Even in London,” said Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, “a young man must be on his
look-out against gamblers. Every form of swindling is practised, and the
touts are always on the look-out for greenhorns; a term,” he added
apologetically, “which they apply to any traveller new to the country.”
“In Paris,” said Mr. Kent, “I was once within an ace of being challenged
to fight a duel.” He fetched a sigh of horror and relief, and glanced
reassuredly down the Sound in the direction of his own peaceful
roof-tree.
“Oh, a duel,” laughed the Commodore. “A man can fight duels here. I
fought a dozen when I was a young feller in New Erleens.” The
Commodore’s mother had been a southern lady, and after his father’s
death had spent some years with her parents in Louisiana, so that her
son’s varied experiences had begun early. “’Bout women,” he smiled
confidentially, holding out his empty glass to Mr. Raycie.
“The ladies--!” exclaimed Mr. Kent in a voice of warning.
The gentlemen rose to their feet, the Commodore quite as promptly and
steadily as the others. The drawing-room window opened, and from it
emerged Mrs. Raycie, in a ruffled sarsenet dress and Point de Paris cap,
followed by her two daughters in starched organdy with pink spencers.
Mr. Raycie looked with proud approval at his womenkind.
“Gentlemen,” said Mrs. Raycie, in a perfectly even voice, “supper is on
the table, and if you will do Mr. Raycie and myself the favour--”
“The favour, ma’am,” said Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, “is on your side, in so
amiably inviting us.”
Mrs. Raycie curtsied, the gentlemen bowed, and Mr. Raycie said: “Your
arm to Mrs. Raycie, Huzzard. This little farewell party is a family
affair, and the other gentlemen must content themselves with my two
daughters. Sarah Anne, Mary Adeline--”
The Commodore and Mr. John Huzzard advanced ceremoniously toward the two
girls, and Mr. Kent, being a cousin, closed the procession between Mr.
Raycie and Lewis.
Oh, that supper-table! The vision of it used sometimes to rise before
Lewis Raycie’s eyes in outlandish foreign places; for though not a large
or fastidious eater when he was at home, he was afterward, in lands of
chestnut-flour and garlic and queer bearded sea-things, to suffer many
pangs of hunger at the thought of that opulent board. In the centre
stood the Raycie _épergne_ of pierced silver, holding aloft a bunch of
June roses surrounded by dangling baskets of sugared almonds and striped
peppermints; and grouped about this decorative “motif” were Lowestoft
platters heavy with piles of raspberries, strawberries and the first
Delaware peaches. An outer flanking of heaped-up cookies, crullers,
strawberry short-cake, piping hot corn-bread and deep golden butter in
moist blocks still bedewed from the muslin swathings of the dairy, led
the eye to the Virginia ham in front of Mr. Raycie, and the twin dishes
of scrambled eggs on toast and broiled blue-fish over which his wife
presided. Lewis could never afterward fit into this intricate pattern
the “side-dishes” of devilled turkey-legs and creamed chicken hash, the
sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, the heavy silver jugs of butter-coloured
cream, the floating-island, “slips” and lemon jellies that were somehow
interwoven with the solider elements of the design; but they were all
there, either together or successively, and so were the towering piles
of waffles reeling on their foundations, and the slender silver jugs of
maple syrup perpetually escorting them about the table as black Dinah
replenished the supply.
They ate--oh, how they all ate!--though the ladies were supposed only to
nibble; but the good things on Lewis’s plate remained untouched until,
ever and again, an admonishing glance from Mr. Raycie, or an entreating
one from Mary Adeline, made him insert a languid fork into the heap.
And all the while Mr. Raycie continued to hold forth.
“A young man, in my opinion, before setting up for himself, must see the
world; form his taste; fortify his judgment. He must study the most
famous monuments, examine the organization of foreign societies, and the
habits and customs of those older civilizations whose yoke it has been
our glory to cast off. Though he may see in them much to deplore and to
reprove--” (“Some of the gals, though,” Commodore Ledgely was heard to
interject)--“much that will make him give thanks for the privilege of
having been born and brought up under our own Free Institutions, yet I
believe he will also”--Mr. Raycie conceded it with magnanimity--“be able
to learn much.”
“The Sundays, though,” Mr. Kent hazarded warningly; and Mrs. Raycie
breathed across to her son: “Ah, that’s what _I_ say!”
Mr. Raycie did not like interruption; and he met it by growing visibly
larger. His huge bulk hung a moment, like an avalanche, above the
silence which followed Mr. Kent’s interjection and Mrs. Raycie’s murmur;
then he crashed down on both.
“The Sundays--the Sundays? Well, what of the Sundays? What is there to
frighten a good Episcopalian in what we call the Continental Sunday? I
presume that we’re all Churchmen here, eh? No puling Methodists or
atheistical Unitarians at my table tonight, that I’m aware of? Nor will
I offend the ladies of my household by assuming that they have secretly
lent an ear to the Baptist ranter in the chapel at the foot of our lane.
No? I thought not! Well, then, I say, what’s all this flutter about the
Papists? Far be it from me to approve of their heathenish
doctrines--but, damn it, they go to church, don’t they? And they have a
real service, as we do, don’t they? And real clergy, and not a lot of
nondescripts dressed like laymen, and damned badly at that, who chat
familiarly with the Almighty in their own vulgar lingo? No, sir”--he
swung about on the shrinking Mr. Kent--“it’s not the Church I’m afraid
of in foreign countries, it’s the sewers, sir!”
Mrs. Raycie had grown very pale: Lewis knew that she too was deeply
perturbed about the sewers. “And the night-air,” she scarce-audibly
sighed.
But Mr. Raycie had taken up his main theme again. “In my opinion, if a
young man travels at all, he must travel as extensively as
his--er--means permit; must see as much of the world as he can. Those
are my son’s sailing orders, Commodore; and here’s to his carrying them
out to the best of his powers!”
Black Dinah, removing the Virginia ham, or rather such of its bony
structure as alone remained on the dish, had managed to make room for a
bowl of punch from which Mr. Raycie poured deep ladlefuls of perfumed
fire into the glasses ranged before him on a silver tray. The gentlemen
rose, the ladies smiled and wept, and Lewis’s health and the success of
the Grand Tour were toasted with an eloquence which caused Mrs. Raycie,
with a hasty nod to her daughters, and a covering rustle of starched
flounces, to shepherd them softly from the room.
“After all,” Lewis heard her murmur to them on the threshold, “your
father’s using such language shows that he’s in the best of humour with
dear Lewis.”
II
In spite of his enforced potations, Lewis Raycie was up the next morning
before sunrise.
Unlatching his shutters without noise, he looked forth over the wet lawn
merged in a blur of shrubberies, and the waters of the Sound dimly seen
beneath a sky full of stars. His head ached but his heart glowed; what
was before him was thrilling enough to clear a heavier brain than his.
He dressed quickly and completely (save for his shoes), and then,
stripping the flowered quilt from his high mahogany bed, rolled it in a
tight bundle under his arm. Thus enigmatically equipped he was feeling
his way, shoes in hand, through the darkness of the upper story to the
slippery oak stairs, when he was startled by a candle-gleam in the
pitch-blackness of the hall below. He held his breath, and leaning over
the stair-rail saw with amazement his sister Mary Adeline come forth,
cloaked and bonneted, but also in stocking-feet, from the passage
leading to the pantry. She too carried a double burden: her shoes and
the candle in one hand, in the other a large covered basket that weighed
down her bare arm.
Brother and sister stopped and stared at each other in the blue dusk:
the upward slant of the candle-light distorted Mary Adeline’s mild
features, twisting them into a frightened grin as Lewis stole down to
join her.
“Oh--” she whispered. “What in the world are you doing here? I was just
getting together a few things for that poor young Mrs. Poe down the
lane, who’s so ill--before mother goes to the storeroom. You won’t tell,
will you?”
Lewis signalled his complicity, and cautiously slid open the bolt of the
front door. They durst not say more till they were out of ear-shot. On
the doorstep they sat down to put on their shoes; then they hastened on
without a word through the ghostly shrubberies till they reached the
gate into the lane.
“But you, Lewis?” the sister suddenly questioned, with an astonished
stare at the rolled-up quilt under her brother’s arm.
“Oh, I--. Look here, Addy--” he broke off and began to grope in his
pocket--“I haven’t much about me ... the old gentleman keeps me as close
as ever ... but here’s a dollar, if you think that poor Mrs. Poe could
use it ... I’d be too happy ... consider it a privilege....”
“Oh, Lewis, Lewis, how noble, how generous of you! Of course I can buy a
few extra things with it ... they never see meat unless I can bring them
a bit, you know ... and I fear she’s dying of a decline ... and she and
her mother are so fiery-proud....” She wept with gratitude, and Lewis
drew a breath of relief. He had diverted her attention from the
bed-quilt.
“Ah, there’s the breeze,” he murmured, sniffing the suddenly chilled
air.
“Yes; I must be off; I must be back before the sun is up,” said Mary
Adeline anxiously, “and it would never do if mother knew--”
“She doesn’t know of your visits to Mrs. Poe?”
A look of childish guile sharpened Mary Adeline’s undeveloped face.
“She _does_, of course; but yet she doesn’t ... we’ve arranged it so.
You see, Mr. Poe’s an Atheist; and so father--”
“I see,” Lewis nodded. “Well, we part here; I’m off for a swim,” he said
glibly. But abruptly he turned back and caught his sister’s arm.
“Sister, tell Mrs. Poe, please, that I heard her husband give a reading
from his poems in New York two nights ago--”
(“Oh, Lewis--_you_? But father says he’s a blasphemer!”)
“--And that he’s a great poet--a Great Poet. Tell her that from me, will
you, please, Mary Adeline?”
“Oh, brother, I couldn’t ... we never speak of him,” the startled girl
faltered, hurrying away.
In the cove where the Commodore’s sloop had ridden a few hours earlier a
biggish rowing-boat took the waking ripples. Young Raycie paddled out
to her, fastened his skiff to the moorings, and hastily clambered into
the boat.
From various recesses of his pockets he produced rope, string, a
carpet-layer’s needle, and other unexpected and incongruous tackle;
then, lashing one of the oars across the top of the other, and jamming
the latter upright between the forward thwart and the bow, he rigged the
flowered bed-quilt on this mast, knotted a rope to the free end of the
quilt, and sat down in the stern, one hand on the rudder, the other on
his improvised sheet.
Venus, brooding silverly above a line of pale green sky, made a pool of
glory in the sea as the dawn-breeze plumped the lover’s sail....
* * * * *
On the shelving pebbles of another cove, two or three miles down the
Sound, Lewis Raycie lowered his queer sail and beached his boat. A
clump of willows on the shingle-edge mysteriously stirred and parted,
and Treeshy Kent was in his arms.
The sun was just pushing above a belt of low clouds in the east,
spattering them with liquid gold, and Venus blanched as the light spread
upward. But under the willows it was still dusk, a watery green dusk in
which the secret murmurs of the night were caught.
“Treeshy--Treeshy!” the young man cried, kneeling beside her--and then,
a moment later: “My angel, are you sure that no one guesses--?”
The girl gave a faint laugh which screwed up her funny nose. She leaned
her head on his shoulder, her round forehead and rough braids pressed
against his cheek, her hands in his, breathing quickly and joyfully.
“I thought I should never get here,” Lewis grumbled, “with that
ridiculous bed-quilt--and it’ll be broad day soon! To think that I was
of age yesterday, and must come to you in a boat rigged like a child’s
toy on a duck-pond! If you knew how it humiliates me--”
“What does it matter, dear, since you’re of age now, and your own
master?”
“But am I, though? He says so--but it’s only on his own terms; only
while I do what he wants! You’ll see ... I’ve a credit of ten thousand
dollars ... ten ... thou ... sand ... d’you hear?... placed to my name
in a London bank; and not a penny here to bless myself with
meanwhile.... Why, Treeshy darling, why, what’s the matter?”
She flung her arms about his neck, and through their innocent kisses he
could taste her tears. “What _is_ it, Treeshy?” he implored her.
“I ... oh, I’d forgotten it was to be our last day together till you
spoke of London--cruel, cruel!” she reproached him; and through the
green twilight of the willows her eyes blazed on him like two stormy
stars. No other eyes he knew could express such elemental rage as
Treeshy’s.
“You little spitfire, you!” he laughed back somewhat chokingly. “Yes,
it’s our last day--but not for long; at our age two years are not so
very long, after all, are they? And when I come back to you I’ll come as
my own master, independent, free--come to claim you in face of
everything and everybody! Think of that, darling, and be brave for my
sake ... brave and patient ... as I mean to be!” he declared
heroically.
“Oh, but you--you’ll see other girls; heaps and heaps of them; in those
wicked old countries where they’re so lovely. My uncle Kent says the
European countries are all wicked, even my own poor Italy....”
“But _you_, Treeshy; you’ll be seeing cousins Bill and Donald
meanwhile--seeing them all day long and every day. And you know you’ve a
weakness for that great hulk of a Bill. Ah, if only I stood six-foot-one
in my stockings I’d go with an easier heart, you fickle child!” he tried
to banter her.
“Fickle? Fickle? _Me_--oh, Lewis!”
He felt the premonitory sweep of sobs, and his untried courage failed
him. It was delicious, in theory, to hold weeping beauty to one’s
breast, but terribly alarming, he found, in practice. There came a
responsive twitching in his throat.
“No, no; firm as adamant, true as steel; that’s what we both mean to be,
isn’t it, _cara_?”
“_Caro_, yes,” she sighed, appeased.
“And you’ll write to me regularly, Treeshy--long long letters? I may
count on that, mayn’t I, wherever I am? And they must all be numbered,
every one of them, so that I shall know at once if I’ve missed one;
remember!”
“And, Lewis, you’ll wear them here?” (She touched his breast.) “Oh, not
_all_,” she added, laughing, “for they’d make such a big bundle that
you’d soon have a hump in front like Pulcinella--but always at least the
last one, just the last one. Promise!”
“Always, I promise--as long as they’re kind,” he said, still struggling
to take a spirited line.
“Oh, Lewis, they will be, as long as yours are--and long long
afterward....”
Venus failed and vanished in the sun’s uprising.
III
The crucial moment, Lewis had always known, would be not that of his
farewell to Treeshy, but of his final interview with his father.
On that everything hung: his immediate future as well as his more
distant prospects. As he stole home in the early sunlight, over the
dew-drenched grass, he glanced up apprehensively at Mr. Raycie’s
windows, and thanked his stars that they were still tightly shuttered.
There was no doubt, as Mrs. Raycie said, that her husband’s “using
language” before ladies showed him to be in high good humour, relaxed
and slippered, as it were--a state his family so seldom saw him in that
Lewis had sometimes impertinently wondered to what awful descent from
the clouds he and his two sisters owed their timorous being.
It was all very well to tell himself, as he often did, that the bulk of
the money was his mother’s, and that he could turn her round his little
finger. What difference did that make? Mr. Raycie, the day after his
marriage, had quietly taken over the management of his wife’s property,
and deducted, from the very moderate allowance he accorded her, all her
little personal expenses, even to the postage-stamps she used, and the
dollar she put in the plate every Sunday. He called the allowance her
“pin-money,” since, as he often reminded her, he paid all the household
bills himself, so that Mrs. Raycie’s quarterly pittance could be
entirely devoted, if she chose, to frills and feathers.
“And will be, if you respect my wishes, my dear,” he always added. “I
like to see a handsome figure well set-off, and not to have our friends
imagine, when they come to dine, that Mrs. Raycie is sick above-stairs,
and I’ve replaced her by a poor relation in _allapacca_.” In compliance
with which Mrs. Raycie, at once flattered and terrified, spent her last
penny in adorning herself and her daughters, and had to stint their
bedroom fires, and the servants’ meals, in order to find a penny for any
private necessity.
Mr. Raycie had long since convinced his wife that this method of dealing
with her, if not lavish, was suitable, and in fact “handsome”; when she
spoke of the subject to her relations it was with tears of gratitude for
her husband’s kindness in assuming the management of her property. As he
managed it exceedingly well, her hard-headed brothers (glad to have the
responsibility off their hands, and convinced that, if left to herself,
she would have muddled her money away in ill-advised charities) were
disposed to share her approval of Mr. Raycie; though her old mother
sometimes said helplessly: “When I think that Lucy Ann can’t as much as
have a drop of gruel brought up to her without his weighing the
oatmeal....” But even that was only whispered, lest Mr. Raycie’s
mysterious faculty of hearing what was said behind his back should bring
sudden reprisals on the venerable lady to whom he always alluded, with a
tremor in his genial voice, as “my dear mother-in-law--unless indeed she
will allow me to call her, more briefly but more truly, my dear mother.”
To Lewis, hitherto, Mr. Raycie had meted the same measure as to the
females of the household. He had dressed him well, educated him
expensively, lauded him to the skies--and counted every penny of his
allowance. Yet there was a difference; and Lewis was as well aware of it
as any one.
The dream, the ambition, the passion of Mr. Raycie’s life, was (as his
son knew) to found a Family; and he had only Lewis to found it with. He
believed in primogeniture, in heirlooms, in entailed estates, in all the
ritual of the English “landed” tradition. No one was louder than he in
praise of the democratic institutions under which he lived; but he never
thought of them as affecting that more private but more important
institution, the Family; and to the Family all his care and all his
thoughts were given. The result, as Lewis dimly guessed, was, that upon
his own shrinking and inadequate head was centred all the passion
contained in the vast expanse of Mr. Raycie’s breast. Lewis was his
very own, and Lewis represented what was most dear to him; and for both
these reasons Mr. Raycie set an inordinate value on the boy (a quite
different thing, Lewis thought from loving him).
Mr. Raycie was particularly proud of his son’s taste for letters.
Himself not a wholly unread man, he admired intensely what he called the
“cultivated gentleman”--and that was what Lewis was evidently going to
be. Could he have combined with this tendency a manlier frame, and an
interest in the few forms of sport then popular among gentlemen, Mr.
Raycie’s satisfaction would have been complete; but whose is, in this
disappointing world? Meanwhile he flattered himself that, Lewis being
still young and malleable, and his health certainly mending, two years
of travel and adventure might send him back a very different figure,
physically as well as mentally. Mr. Raycie had himself travelled in his
youth, and was persuaded that the experience was formative; he secretly
hoped for the return of a bronzed and broadened Lewis, seasoned by
independence and adventure, and having discreetly sown his wild oats in
foreign pastures, where they would not contaminate the home crop.
All this Lewis guessed; and he guessed as well that these two
wander-years were intended by Mr. Raycie to lead up to a marriage and an
establishment after Mr. Raycie’s own heart, but in which Lewis’s was not
to have even a consulting voice.
“He’s going to give me all the advantages--for his own purpose,” the
young man summed it up as he went down to join the family at the
breakfast table.
Mr. Raycie was never more resplendent than at that moment of the day and
season. His spotless white duck trousers, strapped under kid boots, his
thin kerseymere coat, and drab _piqué_ waistcoat crossed below a snowy
stock, made him look as fresh as the morning and as appetizing as the
peaches and cream banked before him.
Opposite sat Mrs. Raycie, immaculate also, but paler than usual, as
became a mother about to part from her only son; and between the two was
Sarah Anne, unusually pink, and apparently occupied in trying to screen
her sister’s empty seat. Lewis greeted them, and seated himself at his
mother’s right.
Mr. Raycie drew out his _guillochée_ repeating watch, and detaching it
from its heavy gold chain laid it on the table beside him.
“Mary Adeline is late again. It is a somewhat unusual thing for a sister
to be late at the last meal she is to take--for two years--with her only
brother.”
“Oh, Mr. Raycie!” Mrs. Raycie faltered.
“I say, the idea is peculiar. Perhaps,” said Mr. Raycie sarcastically,
“I am going to be blessed with a _peculiar_ daughter.”
“I’m afraid Mary Adeline is beginning a sick headache, sir. She tried to
get up, but really could not,” said Sarah Anne in a rush.
Mr. Raycie’s only reply was to arch ironic eyebrows, and Lewis hastily
intervened: “I’m sorry, sir; but it may be my fault--”
Mrs. Raycie paled, Sarah Anne, purpled, and Mr. Raycie echoed with
punctilious incredulity: “Your--fault?”
“In being the occasion, sir, of last night’s too-sumptuous festivity--”
“Ha--ha--ha!” Mr. Raycie laughed, his thunders instantly dispelled.
He pushed back his chair and nodded to his son with a smile; and the
two, leaving the ladies to wash up the teacups (as was still the habit
in genteel families) betook themselves to Mr. Raycie’s study.
What Mr. Raycie studied in this apartment--except the accounts, and ways
of making himself unpleasant to his family--Lewis had never been able to
discover. It was a small bare formidable room; and the young man, who
never crossed the threshold but with a sinking of his heart, felt it
sink lower than ever. “_Now!_” he thought.
Mr. Raycie took the only easy-chair, and began.
“My dear fellow, our time is short, but long enough for what I have to
say. In a few hours you will be setting out on your great journey: an
important event in the life of any young man. Your talents and
character--combined with your means of improving the opportunity--make
me hope that in your case it will be decisive. I expect you to come home
from this trip a man--”
So far, it was all to order, so to speak; Lewis could have recited it
beforehand. He bent his head in acquiescence.
“A man,” Mr. Raycie repeated, “prepared to play a part, a considerable
part, in the social life of the community. I expect you to be a figure
in New York; and I shall give you the means to be so.” He cleared his
throat. “But means are not enough--though you must never forget that
they are essential. Education, polish, experience of the world; these
are what so many of our men of standing lack. What do they know of Art
or Letters? We have had little time here to produce either as yet--you
spoke?” Mr. Raycie broke off with a crushing courtesy.
“I--oh, no,” his son stammered.
“Ah; I thought you might be about to allude to certain blasphemous
penny-a-liners whose poetic ravings are said to have given them a kind
of pothouse notoriety.”
Lewis reddened at the allusion but was silent, and his father went on:
“Where is our Byron--our Scott--our Shakespeare? And in painting it is
the same. Where are our Old Masters? We are not without contemporary
talent; but for works of genius we must still look to the past; we must,
in most cases, content ourselves with copies.... Ah, here, I know, my
dear boy, I touch a responsive chord! Your love of the arts has not
passed unperceived; and I mean, I desire, to do all I can to encourage
it. Your future position in the world--your duties and obligations as a
gentleman and a man of fortune--will not permit you to become, yourself,
an eminent painter or a famous sculptor; but I shall raise no objection
to your dabbling in these arts as an amateur--at least while you are
travelling abroad. It will form your taste, strengthen your judgment,
and give you, I hope, the discernment necessary to select for me a few
masterpieces which shall _not_ be copies. Copies,” Mr. Raycie pursued
with a deepening emphasis, “are for the less discriminating, or for
those less blessed with this world’s goods. Yes, my dear Lewis, I wish
to create a gallery: a gallery of Heirlooms. Your mother participates
in this ambition--she desires to see on our walls a few original
specimens of the Italian genius. Raphael, I fear, we can hardly aspire
to; but a Domenichino, an Albano, a Carlo Dolci, a Guercino, a Carlo
Maratta--one or two of Salvator Rosa’s noble landscapes ... you see my
idea? There shall be a Raycie Gallery; and it shall be your mission to
get together its nucleus.” Mr. Raycie paused, and mopped his flowing
forehead. “I believe I could have given my son no task more to his
liking.”
“Oh, no, sir, none indeed!” Lewis cried, flushing and paling. He had in
fact never suspected this part of his father’s plan, and his heart
swelled with the honour of so unforeseen a mission. Nothing, in truth,
could have made him prouder or happier. For a moment he forgot love,
forgot Treeshy, forgot everything but the rapture of moving among the
masterpieces of which he had so long dreamed, moving not as a mere
hungry spectator but as one whose privilege it should at least be to
single out and carry away some of the lesser treasures. He could hardly
take in what had happened, and the shock of the announcement left him,
as usual, inarticulate.
He heard his father booming on, developing the plan, explaining with his
usual pompous precision that one of the partners of the London bank in
which Lewis’s funds were deposited was himself a noted collector, and
had agreed to provide the young traveller with letters of introduction
to other connoisseurs, both in France and Italy, so that Lewis’s
acquisitions might be made under the most enlightened guidance.
“It is,” Mr. Raycie concluded, “in order to put you on a footing of
equality with the best collectors that I have placed such a large sum at
your disposal. I reckon that for ten thousand dollars you can travel for
two years in the very best style; and I mean to place another five
thousand to your credit”--he paused, and let the syllables drop slowly
into his son’s brain: “five thousand dollars for the purchase of works
of art, which eventually--remember--will be yours; and will be handed
on, I trust, to your sons’ sons as long as the name of Raycie
survives”--a length of time, Mr. Raycie’s tone seemed to imply, hardly
to be measured in periods less extensive than those of the Egyptian
dynasties.
Lewis heard him with a whirling brain. _Five thousand dollars!_ The sum
seemed so enormous, even in dollars, and so incalculably larger when
translated into any continental currency, that he wondered why his
father, in advance, had given up all hope of a Raphael.... “If I travel
economically,” he said to himself, “and deny myself unnecessary
luxuries, I may yet be able to surprise him by bringing one back. And my
mother--how magnanimous, how splendid! Now I see why she has consented
to all the little economies that sometimes seemed so paltry and so
humiliating....”
The young man’s eyes filled with tears, but he was still silent, though
he longed as never before to express his gratitude and admiration to his
father. He had entered the study expecting a parting sermon on the
subject of thrift, coupled with the prospective announcement of a
“suitable establishment” (he could even guess the particular Huzzard
girl his father had in view); and instead he had been told to spend his
princely allowance in a princely manner, and to return home with a
gallery of masterpieces. “At least,” he murmured to himself, “it shall
contain a Correggio.”
“Well, sir?” Mr. Raycie boomed.
“Oh, sir--” his son cried, and flung himself on the vast slope of the
parental waistcoat.
Amid all these accumulated joys there murmured deep down in him the
thought that nothing had been said or done to interfere with his secret
plans about Treeshy. It seemed almost as if his father had tacitly
accepted the idea of their unmentioned engagement; and Lewis felt half
guilty at not confessing to it then and there. But the gods are
formidable even when they unbend; never more so, perhaps, than at such
moments....
PART II
IV
Lewis Raycie stood on a projecting rock and surveyed the sublime
spectacle of Mont Blanc.
It was a brilliant August day, and the air, at that height, was already
so sharp that he had had to put on his fur-lined pelisse. Behind him, at
a respectful distance, was the travelling servant who, at a signal, had
brought it up to him; below, in the bend of the mountain road, stood the
light and elegant carriage which had carried him thus far on his
travels.
Scarcely more than a year had passed since he had waved a farewell to
New York from the deck of the packet-ship headed down the bay; yet, to
the young man confidently facing Mont Blanc, nothing seemed left in him
of that fluid and insubstantial being, the former Lewis Raycie, save a
lurking and abeyant fear of Mr. Raycie senior. Even that, however, was
so attenuated by distance and time, so far sunk below the horizon, and
anchored on the far side of the globe, that it stirred in its sleep only
when a handsomely folded and wafered letter in his parent’s writing was
handed out across the desk of some continental counting-house. Mr.
Raycie senior did not write often, and when he did it was in a bland and
stilted strain. He felt at a disadvantage on paper, and his natural
sarcasm was swamped in the rolling periods which it cost him hours of
labour to bring forth; so that the dreaded quality lurked for his son
only in the curve of certain letters, and in a positively awful way of
writing out, at full length, the word _Esquire_.
It was not that Lewis had broken with all the memories of his past of a
year ago. Many still lingered in him, or rather had been transferred to
the new man he had become--as for instance his tenderness for Treeshy
Kent, which, somewhat to his surprise, had obstinately resisted all the
assaults of English keepsake beauties and almond-eyed houris of the
East. It startled him, at times, to find Treeshy’s short dusky face,
with its round forehead, the widely spaced eyes and the high
cheek-bones, starting out at him suddenly in the street of some
legendary town, or in a landscape of languid beauty, just as he had now
and again been arrested in an exotic garden by the very scent of the
verbena under the verandah at home. His travels had confirmed rather
than weakened the family view of Treeshy’s plainness; she could not be
made to fit into any of the patterns of female beauty so far submitted
to him; yet there she was, ensconced in his new heart and mind as deeply
as in the old, though her kisses seemed less vivid, and the peculiar
rough notes of her voice hardly reached him. Sometimes, half irritably,
he said to himself that with an effort he could disperse her once for
all; yet she lived on in him, unseen yet ineffaceable, like the image on
a daguerreotype plate, no less there because so often invisible.
To the new Lewis, however, the whole business was less important than he
had once thought it. His suddenly acquired maturity made Treeshy seem a
petted child rather than the guide, the Beatrice, he had once considered
her; and he promised himself, with an elderly smile, that as soon as he
got to Italy he would write her the long letter for which he was now
considerably in her debt.
His travels had first carried him to England. There he spent some weeks
in collecting letters and recommendations for his tour, in purchasing
his travelling-carriage and its numerous appurtenances, and in driving
in it from cathedral town to storied castle, omitting nothing, from
Abbotsford to Kenilworth, which deserved the attention of a cultivated
mind. From England he crossed to Calais, moving slowly southward to the
Mediterranean; and there, taking ship for the Piræus, he plunged into
pure romance, and the tourist became a Giaour.
It was the East which had made him into a new Lewis Raycie; the East, so
squalid and splendid, so pestilent and so poetic, so full of knavery
and romance and fleas and nightingales, and so different, alike in its
glories and its dirt, from what his studious youth had dreamed. After
Smyrna and the bazaars, after Damascus and Palmyra, the Acropolis,
Mytilene and Sunium, what could be left in his mind of Canal Street and
the lawn above the Sound? Even the mosquitoes, which seemed at first the
only connecting link, were different, because he fought with them in
scenes so different; and a young gentleman who had journeyed across the
desert in Arabian dress, slept under goats’-hair tents, been attacked by
robbers in the Peloponnesus and despoiled by his own escort at Baalbek,
and by customs’ officials everywhere, could not but look with a smile on
the terrors that walk New York and the Hudson river. Encased in security
and monotony, that other Lewis Raycie, when his little figure bobbed up
to the surface, seemed like a new-born babe preserved in alcohol. Even
Mr. Raycie senior’s thunders were now no more than the far-off murmur of
summer lightning on a perfect evening. Had Mr. Raycie ever really
frightened Lewis? Why, now he was not even frightened by Mont Blanc!
He was still gazing with a sense of easy equality at its awful pinnacles
when another travelling-carriage paused near his own, and a young man,
eagerly jumping from it, and also followed by a servant with a cloak,
began to mount the slope. Lewis at once recognized the carriage, and the
light springing figure of the young man, his blue coat and swelling
stock, and the scar slightly distorting his handsome and eloquent mouth.
It was the Englishman who had arrived at the Montanvert inn the night
before with a valet, a guide, and such a cargo of books, maps and
sketching-materials as threatened to overshadow even Lewis’s outfit.