I.
She was certainly a singular girl, and if he felt at the end that he
did n’t know her nor understand her, it is not surprising that he should
have felt it at the beginning. But he felt at the beginning what he
did not feel at the end, that her singularity took the form of a charm
which--once circumstances had made them so intimate--it was impossible
to resist or conjure away. He had a strange impression (it amounted
at times to a positive distress, and shot through the sense of
pleasure--morally speaking--with the acuteness of a sudden twinge of
neuralgia) that it would be better for each of them that they should
break off short and never see each other again. In later years he called
this feeling a foreboding, and remembered two or three occasions when he
had been on the point of expressing it to Georgina. Of course, in fact,
he never expressed it; there were plenty of good reasons for that. Happy
love is not disposed to assume disagreeable duties, and Raymond Benyon’s
love was happy, in spite of grave presentiments, in spite of the
singularity of his mistress and the insufferable rudeness of her
parents. She was a tall, fair girl, with a beautiful cold eye and a
smile of which the perfect sweetness, proceeding from the lips, was full
of compensation; she had auburn hair of a hue that could be qualified as
nothing less than gorgeous, and she seemed to move through life with a
stately grace, as she would have walked through an old-fashioned minuet.
Gentlemen connected with the navy have the advantage of seeing many
types of women; they are able to compare the ladies of New York with
those of Valparaiso, and those of Halifax with those of the Cape of Good
Hope. Eaymond Benyon had had these advantages, and being very fond
of women he had learnt his lesson; he was in a position to appreciate
Georgina Gressie’s fine points. She looked like a duchess,--I don’t mean
that in foreign ports Benyon had associated with duchesses,--and she
took everything so seriously. That was flattering for the young man,
who was only a lieutenant, detailed for duty at the Brooklyn navy-yard,
without a penny in the world but his pay, with a set of plain, numerous,
seafaring, God-fearing relations in New Hampshire, a considerable
appearance of talent, a feverish, disguised ambition, and a slight
impediment in his speech.
He was a spare, tough young man, his dark hair was straight and
fine, and his face, a trifle pale, was smooth and carefully drawn.
He stammered a little, blushing when he did so, at long intervals.
I scarcely know how he appeared on shipboard, but on shore, in his
civilian’s garb, which was of the neatest, he had as little as possible
an aroma of winds and waves. He was neither salt nor brown, nor red, nor
particularly “hearty.” He never twitched up his trousers, nor, so far as
one could see, did he, with his modest, attentive manner, carry himself
as one accustomed to command. Of course, as a subaltern, he had more
to do in the way of obeying. He looked as if he followed some sedentary
calling, and was, indeed, supposed to be decidedly intellectual. He
was a lamb with women, to whose charms he was, as I have hinted,
susceptible; but with men he was different, and, I believe, as much of a
wolf as was necessary. He had a manner of adoring the handsome, insolent
queen of his affections (I will explain in a moment why I call
her insolent); indeed, he looked up to her literally as well as
sentimentally; for she was the least bit the taller of the two. He had
met her the summer before, on the piazza of a hotel at Fort Hamilton, to
which, with a brother officer, in a dusty buggy, he had driven over from
Brooklyn to spend a tremendously hot Sunday,--the kind of day when the
navy-yard was loathsome; and the acquaintance had been renewed by his
calling in Twelfth Street on New-Year’s Day,--a considerable time
to wait for a pretext, but which proved the impression had not been
transitory. The acquaintance ripened, thanks to a zealous cultivation
(on his part) of occasions which Providence, it must be confessed,
placed at his disposal none too liberally; so that now Georgina took
up all his thoughts and a considerable part of his time. He was in love
with her, beyond a doubt; but he could not flatter himself that she was
in love with him, though she appeared willing (what was so strange) to
quarrel with her family about him. He did n’t see how she could really
care for him,--she seemed marked out by nature for so much greater
a fortune; and he used to say to her, “Ah, you don’t--there’s no use
talking, you don’t--really care for me at all!” To which she answered,
“Really? You are very particular. It seems to me it’s real enough if I
let you touch one of my fingertips! “That was one of her ways of being
insolent Another was simply her manner of looking at him, or at
other people (when they spoke to her), with her hard, divine blue
eye,--looking quietly, amusedly, with the air of considering (wholly
from her own point of view) what they might have said, and then turning
her head or her back, while, without taking the trouble to answer them,
she broke into a short, liquid, irrelevant laugh. This may seem to
contradict what I said just now about her taking the young lieutenant
in the navy seriously. What I mean is that she appeared to take him more
seriously than she took anything else. She said to him once, “At any
rate you have the merit of not being a shop-keeper;” and it was by this
epithet she was pleased to designate most of the young men who at that
time flourished in the best society of New York. Even if she had rather
a free way of expressing general indifference, a young lady is supposed
to be serious enough when she consents to marry you. For the rest,
as regards a certain haughtiness that might be observed in Geoigina
Gressie, my story will probably throw sufficient light upon it She
remarked to Benyon once that it was none of his business why she liked
him, but that, to please herself, she did n’t mind telling him she
thought the great Napoleon, before he was celebrated, before he had
command of the army of Italy, must have looked something like him;
and she sketched in a few words the sort of figure she imagined
the incipient Bonaparte to have been,--short, lean, pale, poor,
intellectual, and with a tremendous future under his hat Benyon asked
himself whether _he_ had a tremendous future, and what in the world
Geoigina expected of him in the coming years. He was flattered at the
comparison, he was ambitious enough not to be frightened at it, and he
guessed that she perceived a certain analogy between herself and the
Empress Josephine. She would make a very good empress. That was true;
Georgina was remarkably imperial. This may not at first seem to make it
more clear why she should take into her favor an aspirant who, on the
face of the matter, was not original, and whose Corsica was a flat New
England seaport; but it afterward became plain that he owed his brief
happiness--it was very brief--to her father’s opposition; her father’s
and her mother’s, and even her uncles’ and her aunts’. In those days,
in New York, the different members of a family took an interest in its
alliances, and the house of Gressie looked askance at an engagement
between the most beautiful of its daughters and a young man who was not
in a paying business. Georgina declared that they were meddlesome and
vulgar,--she could sacrifice her own people, in that way, without
a scruple,--and Benyon’s position improved from the moment that Mr.
Gressie--ill-advised Mr. Gressie--ordered the girl to have nothing to do
with him. Georgina was imperial in this--that she wouldn’t put up with
an order. When, in the house in Twelfth Street, it began to be talked
about that she had better be sent to Europe with some eligible friend,
Mrs. Portico, for instance, who was always planning to go, and who
wanted as a companion some young mind, fresh from manuals and extracts,
to serve as a fountain of history and geography,--when this scheme for
getting Georgina out of the way began to be aired, she immediately said
to Raymond Benyon, “Oh, yes, I ‘ll marry you!” She said it in such an
off-hand way that, deeply as he desired her, he was almost tempted to
answer, “But, my dear, have you really thought about it?”
This little drama went on, in New York, in the ancient days, when
Twelfth Street had but lately ceased to be suburban, when the squares
had wooden palings, which were not often painted; when there were
poplars in important thoroughfares and pigs in the lateral ways; when
the theatres were miles distant from Madison Square, and the battered
rotunda of Castle Garden echoed with expensive vocal music; when “the
park” meant the grass-plats of the city hall, and the Bloomingdale
road was an eligible drive; when Hoboken, of a summer afternoon, was a
genteel resort, and the handsomest house in town was on the corner
of the Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street. This will strike the modern
reader, I fear, as rather a primitive epoch; but I am not sure that the
strength of human passions is in proportion to the elongation of a city.
Several of them, at any rate, the most robust and most familiar,--love,
ambition, jealousy, resentment, greed,--subsisted in considerable force
in the little circle at which we have glanced, where a view by no means
favorable was taken of Raymond Benyon’s attentions to Miss Gressie.
Unanimity was a family trait among these people (Georgina was an
exception), especially in regard to the important concerns of life, such
as marriages and closing scenes. The Gressies hung together; they
were accustomed to do well for themselves and for each other. They did
everything well: got themselves born well (they thought it excellent to
be born a Gressie), lived well, married well, died well, and managed to
be well spoken of afterward. In deference to this last-mentioned habit,
I must be careful what I say of them. They took an interest in each
other’s concerns, an interest that could never be regarded as of a
meddlesome nature, inasmuch as they all thought alike about all their
affairs, and interference took the happy form of congratulation and
encouragement. These affairs were invariably lucky, and, as a general
thing, no Gressie had anything to do but feel that another Gressie had
been almost as shrewd and decided as he himself would have been. The
great exception to that, as I have said, was this case of Georgina, who
struck such a false note, a note that startled them all, when she told
her father that she should like to unite herself to a young man engaged
in the least paying business that any Gressie had ever heard of. Her two
sisters had married into the most flourishing firms, and it was not
to be thought of that--with twenty cousins growing up around her--she
should put down the standard of success. Her mother had told her a
fortnight before this that she must request Mr. Benyon to cease coming
to the house; for hitherto his suit had been of the most public and
resolute character. He had been conveyed up town from the Brooklyn
ferry, in the “stage,” on certain evenings, had asked for Miss Georgina
at the door of the house in Twelfth Street, and had sat with her in the
front parlor if her parents happened to occupy the back, or in the back
if the family had disposed itself in the front. Georgina, in her way,
was a dutiful girl, and she immediately repeated her mother’s admonition
to Beuyon. He was not surprised, for though he was aware that he had
not, as yet, a great knowledge of society, he flattered himself he could
tell when--and where--a young man was not wanted. There were houses in
Brooklyn where such an animal was much appreciated, and there the signs
were quite different They had been discouraging--except on Georgina’s
pail--from the first of his calling in Twelfth Street Mr. and Mrs.
Gressie used to look at each other in silence when he came in, and
indulge in strange, perpendicular salutations, without any shaking of
hands. People did that at Portsmouth, N.H., when they were glad to
see you; but in New York there was more luxuriance, and gesture had a
different value. He had never, in Twelfth Street, been asked to “take
anything,” though the house had a delightful suggestion, a positive
aroma, of sideboards,--as if there were mahogany “cellarettes” under
every table. The old people, moreover, had repeatedly expressed surprise
at the quantity of leisure that officers in the navy seemed to enjoy.
The only way in which they had not made themselves offensive was
by always remaining in the other room; though at times even this
detachment, to which he owed some delightful moments, presented itself
to Benyon as a form of disapprobation. Of course, after Mrs. Gressie’s
message, his visits were practically at an end; he would n’t give the
girl up, but he would n’t be beholden to her father for the opportunity
to converse with her. Nothing was left for the tender couple--there
was a curious mutual mistrust in their tenderness--but to meet in the
squares, or in the topmost streets, or in the sidemost avenues, on
the afternoons of spring. It was especially during this phase of their
relations that Georgina struck Benyon as imperial Her whole person
seemed to exhale a tranquil, happy consciousness of having broken a law.
She never told him how she arranged the matter at home, how she found it
possible always to keep the appointments (to meet him out of the house)
that she so boldly made, in what degree she dissimulated to her parents,
and how much, in regard to their continued acquaintance, the old people
suspected and accepted. If Mr. and Mrs. Gressie had forbidden him the
house, it was not, apparently, because they wished her to walk with him
in the Tenth Avenue or to sit at his side under the blossoming lilacs
in Stuyvesant Square. He didn’t believe that she told lies in Twelfth
Street; he thought she was too imperial to lie; and he wondered what she
said to her mother when, at the end of nearly a whole afternoon of vague
peregrination with her lover, this bridling, bristling matron asked her
where she had been. Georgina was capable of simply telling the truth;
and yet if she simply told the truth, it was a wonder that she had not
been simply packed off to Europe.
Benyon’s ignorance of her pretexts is a proof that this rather
oddly-mated couple never arrived at perfect intimacy,--in spite of a
fact which remains to be related. He thought of this afterwards, and
thought how strange it was that he had not felt more at liberty to ask
her what she did for him, and how she did it, and how much she suffered
for him. She would probably not have admitted that she suffered at all,
and she had no wish to pose for a martyr. Benyon remembered this, as
I say, in the after years, when he tried to explain to himself certain
things which simply puzzled him; it came back to him with the vision,
already faded, of shabby cross-streets, straggling toward rivers, with
red sunsets, seen through a haze of dust, at the end; a vista through
which the figures of a young man and a girl slowly receded and
disappeared,--strolling side by side, with the relaxed pace of desultory
talk, but more closely linked as they passed into the distance, linked
by its at last appearing safe to them--in the Tenth Avenue--that the
young lady should take his arm. They were always approaching that
inferior thoroughfare; but he could scarcely have told you, in those
days, what else they were approaching. He had nothing in the world but
his pay, and he felt that this was rather a “mean” income to offer Miss
Gressie. Therefore he did n’t put it forward; what he offered, instead,
was the expression--crude often, and almost boyishly extravagant--of a
delighted admiration of her beauty, the tenderest tones of his voice,
the softest assurances of his eye and the most insinuating pressure of
her hand at those moments when she consented to place it in his arm.
All this was an eloquence which, if necessary, might have been condensed
into a single sentence; but those few words were scarcely needful, when
it was as plain that he expected--in general--she would marry him, as it
was indefinite that he counted upon her for living on a few hundreds
a year. If she had been a different girl he might have asked her to
wait,--might have talked to her of the coming of better days, of his
prospective promotion, of its being wiser, perhaps, that he should leave
the navy and look about for a more lucrative career. With Georgina it
was difficult to go into such questions; she had no taste whatever for
detail. She was delightful as a woman to love, because when a young man
is in love he discovers that; but she could not be called helpful, for
she never suggested anything. That is, she never had done so till the
day she really proposed--for that was the form it took--to become his
wife without more delay. “Oh, yes, I will marry you;” these words, which
I quoted a little way back, were not so much the answer to something he
had said at the moment, as the light conclusion of a report she had just
made, for the first time, of her actual situation in her father’s house.
“I am afraid I shall have to see less of you,” she had begun by saying.
“They watch me so much.”
“It is very little already,” he answered. “What is once or twice a
week?”
“That’s easy for you to say. You are your own master, but you don’t know
what I go through.”
“Do they make it very bad for you, dearest? Do they make scenes?” Benyon
asked.
“No, of course not. Don’t you know us enough to know how we behave? No
scenes,--that would be a relief. However, I never make them myself, and
I never will--that’s one comfort for you, for the future, if you want to
know. Father and mother keep very quiet, looking at me as if I were one
of the lost, with hard, screwing eyes, like gimlets. To me they scarcely
say anything, but they talk it all over with each other, and try and
decide what is to be done. It’s my belief that father has written to the
people in Washington--what do you call it! the Department--to have you
moved away from Brooklyn,--to have you sent to sea.”
“I guess that won’t do much good. They want me in Brooklyn, they don’t
want me at sea.”
“Well, they are capable of going to Europe for a year, on purpose to
take me,” Geoigina said.
“How can they take you, if you won’t go? And if you should go, what good
would it do, if you were only to find me here when you came back, just
the same as you left me?”
“Oh, well!” said Georgina, with her lovely smile, “of course they think
that absence would cure me of--cure me of--” And she paused, with a
certain natural modesty, not saying exactly of what.
“Cure you of what, darling? Say it, please say it,” the young man
murmured, drawing her hand surreptitiously into his arm.
“Of my absurd infatuation!”
“And would it, dearest?”
“Yes, very likely. But I don’t mean to try. I sha’n’t go to Europe,--not
when I don’t want to. But it’s better I should see less of you,--even
that I should appear--a little--to give you up.”
“A little? What do you call a little?”
Georgina said nothing, for a moment. “Well, that, for instance, you
should n’t hold my hand quite so tight!” And she disengaged this
conscious member from the pressure of his arm.
“What good will that do?” Benyon asked,
“It will make them think it ‘s all over,--that we have agreed to part.”
“And as we have done nothing of the kind, how will that help us?”
They had stopped at the crossing of a street; a heavy dray was lumbering
slowly past them. Georgina, as she stood there, turned her face to
her lover, and rested her eyes for some moments on his own. At last:
“Nothing will help us; I don’t think we are very happy,” she answered,
while her strange, ironical, inconsequent smile played about her
beautiful lips.
“I don’t understand how you see things. I thought you were going to say
you would marry me!” Benyon rejoined, standing there still, though the
dray had passed.
“Oh, yes, I will marry you!” And she moved away, across the street. That
was the manner in which she had said it, and it was very characteristic
of her. When he saw that she really meant it, he wished they were
somewhere else,--he hardly knew where the proper place would be,--so
that he might take her in his arms. Nevertheless, before they separated
that day he had said to her he hoped she remembered they would be very
poor, reminding her how great a change she would find it She answered
that she should n’t mind, and presently she said that if this was all
that prevented them the sooner they were married the better. The next
time he saw her she was quite of the same opinion; but he found, to his
surprise, it was now her conviction that she had better not leave her
father’s house. The ceremony should take place secretly, of course; but
they would wait awhile to let their union be known.
“What good will it do us, then?” Raymond Benyon asked.
Georgina colored. “Well, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you!”
Then it seemed to him that he did know. Yet, at the same time, he could
not see why, once the knot was tied, secrecy should be required. When
he asked what special event they were to wait for, and what should give
them the signal to appear as man and wife, she answered that her parents
would probably forgive her, if they were to discover, not too abruptly,
after six months, that she had taken the great step. Benyon supposed
that she had ceased to care whether they forgave her or not; but he
had already perceived that women are full of inconsistencies. He had
believed her capable of marrying him out of bravado, but the pleasure of
defiance was absent if the marriage was kept to themselves. Now, too, it
appeared that she was not especially anxious to defy,--she was disposed
rather to manage, to cultivate opportunities and reap the fruits of a
waiting game.
“Leave it to me. Leave it to me. You are only a blundering man,”
Georgina said. “I shall know much better than you the right moment for
saying, ‘Well, you may as well make the best of it, because we have
already done it!’”
That might very well be, but Benyon did n’t quite understand, and he was
awkwardly anxious (for a lover) till it came over him afresh that
there was one thing at any rate in his favor, which was simply that
the loveliest girl he had ever seen was ready to throw herself into his
arms. When he said to her, “There is one thing I hate in this plan of
yours,--that, for ever so few weeks, so few days, your father should
support my wife,”--when he made this homely remark, with a little flush
of sincerity in his face, she gave him a specimen of that unanswerable
laugh of hers, and declared that it would serve Mr. Gressie right for
being so barbarous and so horrid. It was Benyon’s view that from the
moment she disobeyed her father, she ought to cease to avail herself
of his protection; but I am bound to add that he was not particularly
surprised at finding this a kind of honor in which her feminine
nature was little versed. To make her his wife first--at the earliest
moment--whenever she would, and trust to fortune, and the new influence
he should have, to give him, as soon thereafter as possible, complete
possession of her,--this rather promptly presented itself to the young
man as the course most worthy of a person of spirit. He would be only
a pedant who would take nothing because he could not get everything at
once. They wandered further than usual this afternoon, and the dusk was
thick by the time he brought her back to her father’s door. It was not
his habit to como so near it, but to-day they had so much to talk about
that he actually stood with her for ten minutes at the foot of the
steps. He was keeping her hand in his, and she let it rest there while
she said,--by way of a remark that should sum up all their reasons and
reconcile their differences,--
“There’s one great thing it will do, you know; it will make me safe.”
“Safe from what?”
“From marrying any one else.”
“Ah, my girl, if you were to do that--!” Benyon exclaimed; but he did
n’t mention the other branch of the contingency. Instead of this, he
looked up at the blind face of the house--there were only dim lights in
two or three windows, and no apparent eyes--and up and down the empty
street, vague in the friendly twilight; after which he drew Georgina
Gressie to his breast and gave her a long, passionate kiss. Yes,
decidedly, he felt, they had better be married. She had run quickly up
the steps, and while she stood there, with her hand on the bell, she
almost hissed at him, under her breath, “Go away, go away; Amanda’s
coming!” Amanda was the parlor-maid, and it was in those terms that the
Twelfth Street Juliet dismissed her Brooklyn Romeo. As he wandered back
into the Fifth Avenue, where the evening air was conscious of a vernal
fragrance from the shrubs in the little precinct of the pretty Gothic
church ornamenting that charming part of the street, he was too absorbed
in the impression of the delightful contact from which the girl had
violently released herself to reflect that the great reason she had
mentioned a moment before was a reason for their marrying, of course,
but not in the least a reason for their not making it public. But, as I
said in the opening lines of this chapter, if he did not understand his
mistress’s motives at the end, he cannot be expected to have understood
them at the beginning.
II.
Mrs. Portico, as we know, was always talking about going to Europe;
but she had not yet--I mean a year after the incident I have just
related--put her hand upon a youthful cicerone. Petticoats, of course,
were required; it was necessary that her companion should be of the sex
which sinks most naturally upon benches, in galleries and cathredrals,
and pauses most frequently upon staircases that ascend to celebrated
views. She was a widow, with a good fortune and several sons, all of
whom were in Wall Street, and none of them capable of the relaxed pace
at which she expected to take her foreign tour. They were all in a state
of tension. They went through life standing. She was a short, broad,
high-colored woman, with a loud voice, and superabundant black hair,
arranged in a way peculiar to herself,--with so many combs and bands
that it had the appearance of a national coiffure. There was an
impression in New York, about 1845, that the style was Danish; some one
had said something about having seen it in Schleswig-Holstein.
Mrs. Portico had a bold, humorous, slightly flamboyant look; people who
saw her for the first time received an impression that her late husband
had married the daughter of a barkeeper or the proprietress of a
menageria. Her high, hoarse, good-natured voice seemed to connect her in
some way with public life; it was not pretty enough to suggest that she
might have been an actress. These ideas quickly passed away, however,
even if you were not sufficiently initiated to know--as all the
Grossies, for instance, knew so well--that her origin, so far from
being enveloped in mystery, was almost the sort of thing she might have
boasted of. But in spite of the high pitch of her appearance, she didn’t
boast of anything; she was a genial, easy, comical, irreverent person,
with a large charity, a democratic, fraternizing turn of mind, and a
contempt for many worldly standards, which she expressed not in the
least in general axioms (for she had a mortal horror of philosophy), but
in violent ejaculations on particular occasions. She had not a grain of
moral timidity, and she fronted a delicate social problem as sturdily as
she would have barred the way of a gentleman she might have met in her
vestibule with the plate-chest The only thing which prevented her being
a bore in orthodox circles was that she was incapable of discussion. She
never lost her temper, but she lost her vocabulary, and ended quietly
by praying that Heaven would give her an opportunity to _show_ what she
believed.
She was an old friend of Mr. and Mrs. Gressie, who esteemed her for the
antiquity of her lineage and the frequency of her subscriptions, and to
whom she rendered the service of making them feel liberal,--like
people too sure of their own position to be frightened. She was their
indulgence, their dissipation, their point of contact with dangerous
heresies; so long as they continued to see her they could not be accused
of being narrow-minded,--a matter as to which they were perhaps vaguely
conscious of the necessity of taking their precautions. Mrs. Portico
never asked herself whether she liked the Gressies; she had no
disposition for morbid analysis, she accepted transmitted associations,
and she found, somehow, that her acquaintance with these people helped
her to relieve herself. She was always making scenes in their
drawing-room, scenes half indignant, half jocose, like all her
manifestations, to which it must be confessed that they adapted
themselves beautifully. They never “met” her in the language of
controversy; but always collected to watch her, with smiles and
comfortable platitudes, as if they envied her superior richness of
temperament She took an interest in Georgina, who seemed to her
different from the others, with suggestions about her of being likely
not to marry so unrefreshingly as her sisters had done, and of a high,
bold standard of duty. Her sisters had married from duty, but Mrs.
Portico would rather have chopped off one of her large, plump hands than
behave herself so well as that She had, in her daughterless condition, a
certain ideal of a girl that should be beautiful and romantic, with
lustrous eyes, and a little persecuted, so that she, Mrs. Portico, might
get her out of her troubles. She looked to Georgina, to a considerable
degree, to gratify her in this way; but she had really never understood
Geoigina at all She ought to have been shrewd, but she lacked this
refinement, and she never understood anything until after many
disappointments and vexations. It was difficult to startle her, but she
was much startled by a communication that this young lady made her one
fine spring morning. With her florid appearance and her speculative
mind, she was probably the most innocent woman in New York.
Georgina came very early,--earlier even than visits were paid in New
York thirty years ago; and instantly, without any preface, looking her
straight in the face, told Mrs. Portico that she was in great trouble
and must appeal to her for assistance. Georgina had in her aspect no
symptom of distress; she was as fresh and beautiful as the April
day itself; she held up her head and smiled, with a sort of familiar
bravado, looking like a young woman who would naturally be on good terms
with fortune. It was not in the least in the tone of a person making a
confession or relating a misadventure that she presently said: “Well,
you must know, to begin with--of course, it will surprise you--that I ‘m
married.”
“Married, Georgina Grossie!” Mrs. Portico repeated in her most resonant
tones.
Georgina got up, walked with her majestic step across the room, and
closed the door. Then she stood there, her back pressed against the
mahogany panels, indicating only by the distance she had placed between
herself and her hostess the consciousness of an irregular position. “I
am not Georgina Gressie! I am Georgina Benyon,--and it has become plain,
within a short time, that the natural consequence will take place.”
Mrs. Portico was altogether bewildered. “The natural consequence?” she
exclaimed, staring.
“Of one’s being married, of course,--I suppose you know what that is. No
one must know anything about it. I want you to take me to Europe.”
Mrs. Portico now slowly rose from her place, and approached her visitor,
looking at her from head to foot as she did so, as if to challenge the
truth of her remarkable announcement. She rested her hands on Georgina’s
shoulders a moment, gazing into her blooming face, and then she drew her
closer and kissed her. In this way the girl was conducted back to the
sofa, where, in a conversation of extreme intimacy, she opened Mrs.
Portico’s eyes wider than they had ever been opened before. She was
Raymond Benyon’s wife; they had been married a year, but no one knew
anything about it. She had kept it from every one, and she meant to go
on keeping it. The ceremony had taken place in a little Episcopal church
at Harlem, one Sunday afternoon, after the service. There was no one in
that dusty suburb who knew them; the clergyman, vexed at being detained,
and wanting to go home to tea, had made no trouble; he tied the knot
before they could turn round. It was ridiculous how easy it had been.
Raymond had told him frankly that it must all be under the rose, as the
young lady’s family disapproved of what she was doing. But she was of
legal age, and perfectly free; he could see that for himself. The parson
had given a grunt as he looked at her over his spectacles. It was not
very complimentary; it seemed to say that she was indeed no chicken. Of
course she looked old for a girl; but she was not a girl now, was she?
Raymond had certified his own identity as an officer in the United
States Navy (he had papers, besides his uniform, which he wore), and
introduced the clergyman to a friend he had brought with him, who was
also in the navy, a venerable paymaster. It was he who gave Georgina
away, as it were; he was an old, old man, a regular grandmother, and
perfectly safe. He had been married three times himself. After the
ceremony she went back to her father’s; but she saw Mr. Benyon the next
day. After that, she saw him--for a little while--pretty often. He
was always begging her to come to him altogether; she must do him that
justice. But she wouldn’t--she wouldn’t now--perhaps she would n’t
ever. She had her reasons, which seemed to her very good, but were very
difficult to explain. She would tell Mrs. Portico in plenty of time what
they were. But that was not the question now, whether they were good or
bad; the question was for her to get away from the country for several
months,--far away from any one who had ever known her. She would like
to go to some little place in Spain or Italy, where she should be out of
the world until everything was over.
Mrs. Portico’s heart gave a jump as this serene, handsome, familiar
girl, sitting there with a hand in hers, and pouring forth this
extraordinary tale, spoke of everything being over. There was a glossy
coldness in it, an unnatural lightness, which suggested--poor Mrs.
Portico scarcely knew what. If Georgina was to become a mother, it
was to be supposed she was to remain a mother. She said there was a
beautiful place in Italy--Genoa--of which Raymond had often spoken--and
where he had been more than once,--he admired it so much; could n’t
they go there and be quiet for a little while? She was asking a great
favor,--that she knew very well; but if Mrs. Portico would n’t take her,
she would find some one who would. They had talked of such a journey
so often; and, certainly, if Mrs. Portico had been willing before, she
ought to be much more willing now. The girl declared that she must do
something,--go somewhere,--keep, in one way or another, her situation
unperceived. There was no use talking to her about telling,--she would
rather die than tell. No doubt it seemed strange, but she knew what she
was about. No one had guessed anything yet,--she had succeeded perfectly
in doing what she wished,--and her father and mother believed--as Mrs.
Portico had believed,--had n’t she?--that, any time the last year,
Raymond Beuyon was less to her than he had been before. Well, so he was;
yes, he was. He had gone away--he was off, Heaven knew where--in the
Pacific; she was alone, and now she would remain alone. The family
believed it was all over,--with his going back to his ship, and other
things, and they were right: for it _was_ over, or it would be soon.
Mrs. Portico, by this time, had grown almost afraid of her young friend;
_she_ had so little fear, she had even, as it were, so little shame. If
the good lady had been accustomed to analyzing things a little more,
she would have said she had so little conscience. She looked at Georgina
with dilated eyes,--her visitor was so much the calmer of the two,--and
exclaimed, and murmured, and sunk back, and sprung forward, and wiped
her forehead with her pocket-handkerchief! There were things she didn’t
understand; that they should all have been so deceived, that they should
have thought Georgina was giving her lover up (they flattered themselves
she was discouraged, or had grown tired of him), when she was really
only making it impossible she should belong to any one else. And with
this, her inconsequence, her capriciousness, her absence of motive, the
way she contradicted herself, her apparent belief that she could hush up
such a situation forever! There was nothing shameful in having married
poor Mr. Benyon, even in a little church at Harlem, and being given away
by a paymaster. It was much more shameful to be in such a state without
being prepared to make the proper explanations. And she must have
seen very little of her husband; she must have given him up--so far
as meeting him went--almost as soon as she had taken him. Had not Mrs.
Gressie herself told Mrs. Portico (in the preceding October, it must
have been) that there now would be no need of sending Georgina away,
inasmuch as the affair with the little navy man--a project in every way
so unsuitable--had quite blown over?
“After our marriage I saw him less, I saw him a great deal less,”
Georgina explained; but her explanation only appeared to make the
mystery more dense.
“I don’t see, in that case, what on earth you married him for!”
“We had to be more careful; I wished to appear to have given him up. Of
course we were really more intimate,--I saw him differently,” Georgina
said, smiling.
“I should think so! I can’t for the life of me see why you were n’t
discovered.”
“All I can say is we weren’t No doubt it’s remarkable. We managed very
well,--that is, I managed,--he did n’t want to manage at all. And then,
father and mother are incredibly stupid!”
Mrs. Portico exhaled a comprehensive moan, feeling glad, on the whole,
that she had n’t a daughter, while Georgina went on to furnish a few
more details. Raymond Benyon, in the summer, had been ordered from
Brooklyn to Charlestown, near Boston, where, as Mrs. Portico perhaps
knew, there was another navy-yard, in which there was a temporary press
of work, requiring more oversight He had remained there several months,
during which he had written to her urgently to come to him, and during
which, as well, he had received notice that he was to rejoin his ship a
little later. Before doing so he came back to Brooklyn for a few weeks
to wind up his work there, and then she had seen him--well, pretty
often. That was the best time of all the year that had elapsed since
their marriage. It was a wonder at home that nothing had then been
guessed; because she had really been reckless, and Benyon had even tried
to force on a disclosure. But they _were_ stupid, that was very certain.
He had besought her again and again to put an end to their false
position, but she did n’t want it any more than she had wanted it
before. They had rather a bad parting; in fact, for a pair of lovers, it
was a very queer parting indeed. He did n’t know, now, the thing she had
come to tell Mrs. Portico. She had not written to him. He was on a very
long cruise. It might be two years before he returned to the United
States. “I don’t care how long he stays away,” Georgina said, very
simply.
“You haven’t mentioned why you married him. Perhaps you don’t remember,”
Mrs. Portico broke out, with her masculine laugh.
“Oh, yes; I loved him!”
“And you have got over that?”
Georgina hesitated a moment. “Why, no, Mrs. Portico, of course I
haven’t; Raymond’s a splendid fellow.”
“Then why don’t you live with him? You don’t explain that.”
“What would be the use when he’s always away? How can one live with a
man that spends half his life in the South Seas? If he was n’t in
the navy it would be different; but to go through everything,--I mean
everything that making our marriage known would bring upon me,--the
scolding and the exposure and the ridicule, the scenes at home,--to go
through it all, just for the idea, and yet be alone here, just as I
was before, without my husband after all,--with none of the good of
him,”--and here Georgina looked at her hostess as if with the
certitude that such an enumeration of inconveniences would touch her
effectually,--“really, Mrs. Portico, I am bound to say I don’t think
that would be worth while; I haven’t the courage for it.”
“I never thought you were a coward,” said Mrs. Portico.
“Well, I am not,--if you will give me time. I am very patient.”
“I never thought that, either.”
“Marrying changes one,” said Georgina, still smiling.
“It certainly seems to have had a very peculiar effect upon you. Why
don’t you make him leave the navy, and arrange your life comfortably,
like every one else?”
“I would n’t for the world interfere with his prospects--with his
promotion. That is sure to come for him, and to come quickly, he has
such talents. He is devoted to his profession; it would ruin him to
leave it.”
“My dear young woman, you are a wonderful creature!” Mrs. Portico
exclaimed, looking at her companion as if she had been in a glass case.
“So poor Raymond says,” Georgina answered, smiling more than ever.
“Certainly, I should have been very sorry to marry a navy man; but if I
had married him, I should stick to him, in the face of all the scoldings
in the universe!”
“I don’t know what your parents may have been; I know what mine are,”,
Georgina replied, with some dignity. “When he’s a captain, we shall come
out of hiding.”
“And what shall you do meanwhile? What will you do with your children?
Where will you hide them? What will you do with this one?”
Georgina rested her eyes on her lap for a minute; then, raising them,
she met those of Mrs. Portico. “Somewhere in Europe,” she said, in her
sweet tone.
“Georgina Gressie, you ‘re a monster!” the elder lady cried.
“I know what I am about, and you will help me,” the girl went on.
“I will go and tell your father and mother the whole story,--that’s what
I will do!”
“I am not in the least afraid of that, not in the least. You will help
me,--I assure you that you will.”
“Do you mean I will support the child?”
Georgina broke into a laugh. “I do believe you would, if I were to ask
you! But I won’t go so far as that; I have something of my own. All I
want you to do is to be with me.”
“At Genoa,--yes, you have got it all fixed! You say Mr. Benyon is so
fond of the place. That’s all very well; but how will he like his infant
being deposited there?”
“He won’t like it at all. You see I tell you the whole truth,” said
Georgina, gently.
“Much obliged; it’s a pity you keep it all for me! It is in his power,
then, to make you behave properly. _He_ can publish your marriage if you
won’t; and if he does you will have to acknowledge your child.”
“Publish, Mrs. Portico? How little you know my Raymond! He will never
break a promise; he will go through fire first.”
“And what have you got him to promise?’
“Never to insist on a disclosure against my will; never to claim me
openly as his wife till I think it is time; never to let any one know
what has passed between us if I choose to keep it still a secret--to
keep it for years--to keep it forever. Never to do anything in the
matter himself, but to leave it to me. For this he has given me his
solemn word of honor. And I know what that means!”
Mrs. Portico, on the sofa, fairly bounded.
“You _do_ know what you are about And Mr. Benyon strikes me as more
fantastic even than yourself. I never heard of a man taking such an
imbecile vow. What good can it do him?”
“What good? The good it did him was that, it gratified me. At the
time he took it he would have made any promise under the sun. It was
a condition I exacted just at the very last, before the marriage took
place. There was nothing at that moment he would have refused me;
there was nothing I could n’t have made him do. He was in love to that
degree--but I don’t want to boast,” said Georgina, with quiet grandeur.
“He wanted--he wanted--” she added; but then she paused.
“He does n’t seem to have wanted much!” Mrs. Portico cried, in a tone
which made Georgina turn to the window, as if it might have reached the
street.
Her hostess noticed the movement and went on: “Oh, my dear, if I ever do
tell your story, I will tell it so that people will hear it!”
“You never will tell it. What I mean is, that Raymond wanted the
sanction--of the affair at the church--because he saw that I would never
do without it. Therefore, for him, the sooner we had it the better, and,
to hurry it on, he was ready to take any pledge.”
“You have got it pat enough,” said Mrs. Portico, in homely phrase. “I
don’t know what you mean by sanctions, or what _you_ wanted of ‘em!”
Georgina got up, holding rather higher than before that beautiful head
which, in spite of the embarrassments of this interview, had not yet
perceptibly abated of its elevation. “Would you have liked me to--to not
marry?”
Mrs. Portico rose also, and, flushed with the agitation of unwonted
knowledge,--it was as if she had discovered a skeleton in her favorite
cupboard,--faced her young friend for a moment. Then her conflicting
sentiments resolved themselves into an abrupt question, uttered,--for
Mrs. Portico,--with much solemnity: “Georgina Gressie, were you really
in love with him?”
The question suddenly dissipated the girl’s strange, studied, wilful
coldness; she broke out, with a quick flash of passion,--a passion that,
for the moment, was predominantly anger, “Why else, in Heaven’s name,
should I have done what I have done? Why else should I have married him?
What under the sun had I to gain?”
A certain quiver in Georgina’s voice, a light in her eye which seemed to
Mrs. Portico more spontaneous, more human, as she uttered these words,
caused them to affect her hostess rather less painfully than anything
she had yet said. She took the girl’s hand and emitted indefinite,
admonitory sounds. “Help me, my dear old friend, help me,” Georgina
continued, in a low, pleading tone; and in a moment Mrs. Portico saw
that the tears were in her eyes.
“You ‘re a queer mixture, my child,” she exclaimed. “Go straight home to
your own mother, and tell her everything; that is your best help.”
“You are kinder than my mother. You must n’t judge her by yourself.”
“What can she do to you? How can she hurt you? We are not living in
pagan times,” said Mrs. Portico, who was seldom so historical “Besides,
you have no reason to speak of your mother--to think of her, even--so!
She would have liked you to marry a man of some property; but she has
always been a good mother to you.”
At this rebuke Georgina suddenly kindled again; she was, indeed, as Mrs.
Portico had said, a queer mixture. Conscious, evidently, that she could
not satisfactorily justify her present stiffness, she wheeled round upon
a grievance which absolved her from self-defence. “Why, then, did he
make that promise, if he loved me? No man who really loved me would have
made it,--and no man that was a man, as I understand being a man! He
might have seen that I only did it to test him,--to see if he wanted to
take advantage of being left free himself. It is a proof that he does
n’t love me,--not as he ought to have done; and in such a case as that a
woman is n’t bound to make sacrifices!”
Mrs. Portico was not a person of a nimble intellect; her mind moved
vigorously, but heavily; yet she sometimes made happy guesses. She saw
that Georgia’s emotions were partly real and partly fictitious; that,
as regards this last matter, especially, she was trying to “get up” a
resentment, in order to excuse herself. The pretext was absurd, and the
good lady was struck with its being heartless on the part of her young
visitor to reproach poor Benyon with a concession on which she had
insisted, and which could only be a proof of his devotion, inasmuch as
he left her free while he bound himself. Altogether, Mrs. Portico was
shocked and dismayed at such a want of simplicity in the behavior of a
young person whom she had hitherto believed to be as candid as she was
elegant, and her appreciation of this discovery expressed itself in the
uncompromising remark: “You strike me as a very bad girl, my dear; you
strike me as a very bad girl!”