Mr. Wentworth, with his cane and his gloves in his hand, went every
afternoon to call upon his niece. A couple of hours later she came over
to the great house to tea. She had let the proposal that she should
regularly dine there fall to the ground; she was in the enjoyment of
whatever satisfaction was to be derived from the spectacle of an old
negress in a crimson turban shelling peas under the apple trees.
Charlotte, who had provided the ancient negress, thought it must be a
strange household, Eugenia having told her that Augustine managed
everything, the ancient negress included—Augustine who was naturally
devoid of all acquaintance with the expurgatory English tongue. By far
the most immoral sentiment which I shall have occasion to attribute to
Charlotte Wentworth was a certain emotion of disappointment at finding
that, in spite of these irregular conditions, the domestic arrangements
at the small house were apparently not—from Eugenia’s peculiar point of
view—strikingly offensive. The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea;
she dressed as if for dinner. The tea-table offered an anomalous and
picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the
large piazza, or wandered about the garden in the starlight, with their
ears full of those sounds of strange insects which, though they are
supposed to be, all over the world, a part of the magic of summer
nights, seemed to the Baroness to have beneath these western skies an
incomparable resonance.
Mr. Wentworth, though, as I say, he went punctiliously to call upon
her, was not able to feel that he was getting used to his niece. It
taxed his imagination to believe that she was really his half-sister’s
child. His sister was a figure of his early years; she had been only
twenty when she went abroad, never to return, making in foreign parts a
willful and undesirable marriage. His aunt, Mrs. Whiteside, who had
taken her to Europe for the benefit of the tour, gave, on her return,
so lamentable an account of Mr. Adolphus Young, to whom the headstrong
girl had united her destiny, that it operated as a chill upon family
feeling—especially in the case of the half-brothers. Catherine had done
nothing subsequently to propitiate her family; she had not even written
to them in a way that indicated a lucid appreciation of their suspended
sympathy; so that it had become a tradition in Boston circles that the
highest charity, as regards this young lady, was to think it well to
forget her, and to abstain from conjecture as to the extent to which
her aberrations were reproduced in her descendants. Over these young
people—a vague report of their existence had come to his ears—Mr.
Wentworth had not, in the course of years, allowed his imagination to
hover. It had plenty of occupation nearer home, and though he had many
cares upon his conscience the idea that he had been an unnatural uncle
was, very properly, never among the number. Now that his nephew and
niece had come before him, he perceived that they were the fruit of
influences and circumstances very different from those under which his
own familiar progeny had reached a vaguely-qualified maturity. He felt
no provocation to say that these influences had been exerted for evil;
but he was sometimes afraid that he should not be able to like his
distinguished, delicate, lady-like niece. He was paralyzed and
bewildered by her foreignness. She spoke, somehow, a different
language. There was something strange in her words. He had a feeling
that another man, in his place, would accommodate himself to her tone;
would ask her questions and joke with her, reply to those pleasantries
of her own which sometimes seemed startling as addressed to an uncle.
But Mr. Wentworth could not do these things. He could not even bring
himself to attempt to measure her position in the world. She was the
wife of a foreign nobleman who desired to repudiate her. This had a
singular sound, but the old man felt himself destitute of the materials
for a judgment. It seemed to him that he ought to find them in his own
experience, as a man of the world and an almost public character; but
they were not there, and he was ashamed to confess to himself—much more
to reveal to Eugenia by interrogations possibly too innocent—the
unfurnished condition of this repository.
It appeared to him that he could get much nearer, as he would have
said, to his nephew; though he was not sure that Felix was altogether
safe. He was so bright and handsome and talkative that it was
impossible not to think well of him; and yet it seemed as if there were
something almost impudent, almost vicious—or as if there ought to be—in
a young man being at once so joyous and so positive. It was to be
observed that while Felix was not at all a serious young man there was
somehow more of him—he had more weight and volume and resonance—than a
number of young men who were distinctly serious. While Mr. Wentworth
meditated upon this anomaly his nephew was admiring him unrestrictedly.
He thought him a most delicate, generous, high-toned old gentleman,
with a very handsome head, of the ascetic type, which he promised
himself the profit of sketching. Felix was far from having made a
secret of the fact that he wielded the paint-brush, and it was not his
own fault if it failed to be generally understood that he was prepared
to execute the most striking likenesses on the most reasonable terms.
“He is an artist—my cousin is an artist,” said Gertrude; and she
offered this information to everyone who would receive it. She offered
it to herself, as it were, by way of admonition and reminder; she
repeated to herself at odd moments, in lonely places, that Felix was
invested with this sacred character. Gertrude had never seen an artist
before; she had only read about such people. They seemed to her a
romantic and mysterious class, whose life was made up of those
agreeable accidents that never happened to other persons. And it merely
quickened her meditations on this point that Felix should declare, as
he repeatedly did, that he was really not an artist. “I have never gone
into the thing seriously,” he said. “I have never studied; I have had
no training. I do a little of everything, and nothing well. I am only
an amateur.”
It pleased Gertrude even more to think that he was an amateur than to
think that he was an artist; the former word, to her fancy, had an even
subtler connotation. She knew, however, that it was a word to use more
soberly. Mr. Wentworth used it freely; for though he had not been
exactly familiar with it, he found it convenient as a help toward
classifying Felix, who, as a young man extremely clever and active and
apparently respectable and yet not engaged in any recognized business,
was an importunate anomaly. Of course the Baroness and her brother—she
was always spoken of first—were a welcome topic of conversation between
Mr. Wentworth and his daughters and their occasional visitors.
“And the young man, your nephew, what is his profession?” asked an old
gentleman—Mr. Broderip, of Salem—who had been Mr. Wentworth’s classmate
at Harvard College in the year 1809, and who came into his office in
Devonshire Street. (Mr. Wentworth, in his later years, used to go but
three times a week to his office, where he had a large amount of highly
confidential trust-business to transact.)
“Well, he’s an amateur,” said Felix’s uncle, with folded hands, and
with a certain satisfaction in being able to say it. And Mr. Broderip
had gone back to Salem with a feeling that this was probably a
“European” expression for a broker or a grain exporter.
“I should like to do your head, sir,” said Felix to his uncle one
evening, before them all—Mr. Brand and Robert Acton being also present.
“I think I should make a very fine thing of it. It’s an interesting
head; it’s very mediaeval.”
Mr. Wentworth looked grave; he felt awkwardly, as if all the company
had come in and found him standing before the looking-glass. “The Lord
made it,” he said. “I don’t think it is for man to make it over again.”
“Certainly the Lord made it,” replied Felix, laughing, “and he made it
very well. But life has been touching up the work. It is a very
interesting type of head. It’s delightfully wasted and emaciated. The
complexion is wonderfully bleached.” And Felix looked round at the
circle, as if to call their attention to these interesting points. Mr.
Wentworth grew visibly paler. “I should like to do you as an old
prelate, an old cardinal, or the prior of an order.”
“A prelate, a cardinal?” murmured Mr. Wentworth. “Do you refer to the
Roman Catholic priesthood?”
“I mean an old ecclesiastic who should have led a very pure, abstinent
life. Now I take it that has been the case with you, sir; one sees it
in your face,” Felix proceeded. “You have been very—a very moderate.
Don’t you think one always sees that in a man’s face?”
“You see more in a man’s face than I should think of looking for,” said
Mr. Wentworth coldly.
The Baroness rattled her fan, and gave her brilliant laugh. “It is a
risk to look so close!” she exclaimed. “My uncle has some peccadilloes
on his conscience.” Mr. Wentworth looked at her, painfully at a loss;
and in so far as the signs of a pure and abstinent life were visible in
his face they were then probably peculiarly manifest. “You are a _beau
vieillard_, dear uncle,” said Madame Münster, smiling with her foreign
eyes.
“I think you are paying me a compliment,” said the old man.
“Surely, I am not the first woman that ever did so!” cried the
Baroness.
“I think you are,” said Mr. Wentworth gravely. And turning to Felix he
added, in the same tone, “Please don’t take my likeness. My children
have my daguerreotype. That is quite satisfactory.”
“I won’t promise,” said Felix, “not to work your head into something!”
Mr. Wentworth looked at him and then at all the others; then he got up
and slowly walked away.
“Felix,” said Gertrude, in the silence that followed, “I wish you would
paint my portrait.”
Charlotte wondered whether Gertrude was right in wishing this; and she
looked at Mr. Brand as the most legitimate way of ascertaining.
Whatever Gertrude did or said, Charlotte always looked at Mr. Brand. It
was a standing pretext for looking at Mr. Brand—always, as Charlotte
thought, in the interest of Gertrude’s welfare. It is true that she
felt a tremulous interest in Gertrude being right; for Charlotte, in
her small, still way, was an heroic sister.
“We should be glad to have your portrait, Miss Gertrude,” said Mr.
Brand.
“I should be delighted to paint so charming a model,” Felix declared.
“Do you think you are so lovely, my dear?” asked Lizzie Acton, with her
little inoffensive pertness, biting off a knot in her knitting.
“It is not because I think I am beautiful,” said Gertrude, looking all
round. “I don’t think I am beautiful, at all.” She spoke with a sort of
conscious deliberateness; and it seemed very strange to Charlotte to
hear her discussing this question so publicly. “It is because I think
it would be amusing to sit and be painted. I have always thought that.”
“I am sorry you have not had better things to think about, my
daughter,” said Mr. Wentworth.
“You are very beautiful, cousin Gertrude,” Felix declared.
“That’s a compliment,” said Gertrude. “I put all the compliments I
receive into a little money-jug that has a slit in the side. I shake
them up and down, and they rattle. There are not many yet—only two or
three.”
“No, it’s not a compliment,” Felix rejoined. “See; I am careful not to
give it the form of a compliment. I didn’t think you were beautiful at
first. But you have come to seem so little by little.”
“Take care, now, your jug doesn’t burst!” exclaimed Lizzie.
“I think sitting for one’s portrait is only one of the various forms of
idleness,” said Mr. Wentworth. “Their name is legion.”
“My dear sir,” cried Felix, “you can’t be said to be idle when you are
making a man work so!”
“One might be painted while one is asleep,” suggested Mr. Brand, as a
contribution to the discussion.
“Ah, do paint me while I am asleep,” said Gertrude to Felix, smiling.
And she closed her eyes a little. It had by this time become a matter
of almost exciting anxiety to Charlotte what Gertrude would say or
would do next.
She began to sit for her portrait on the following day—in the open air,
on the north side of the piazza. “I wish you would tell me what you
think of us—how we seem to you,” she said to Felix, as he sat before
his easel.
“You seem to me the best people in the world,” said Felix.
“You say that,” Gertrude resumed, “because it saves you the trouble of
saying anything else.”
The young man glanced at her over the top of his canvas. “What else
should I say? It would certainly be a great deal of trouble to say
anything different.”
“Well,” said Gertrude, “you have seen people before that you have
liked, have you not?”
“Indeed I have, thank Heaven!”
“And they have been very different from us,” Gertrude went on.
“That only proves,” said Felix, “that there are a thousand different
ways of being good company.”
“Do you think us good company?” asked Gertrude.
“Company for a king!”
Gertrude was silent a moment; and then, “There must be a thousand
different ways of being dreary,” she said; “and sometimes I think we
make use of them all.”
Felix stood up quickly, holding up his hand. “If you could only keep
that look on your face for half an hour—while I catch it!” he said. “It
is uncommonly handsome.”
“To look handsome for half an hour—that is a great deal to ask of me,”
she answered.
“It would be the portrait of a young woman who has taken some vow, some
pledge, that she repents of,” said Felix, “and who is thinking it over
at leisure.”
“I have taken no vow, no pledge,” said Gertrude, very gravely; “I have
nothing to repent of.”
“My dear cousin, that was only a figure of speech. I am very sure that
no one in your excellent family has anything to repent of.”
“And yet we are always repenting!” Gertrude exclaimed. “That is what I
mean by our being dreary. You know it perfectly well; you only pretend
that you don’t.”
Felix gave a quick laugh. “The half hour is going on, and yet you are
handsomer than ever. One must be careful what one says, you see.”
“To me,” said Gertrude, “you can say anything.”
Felix looked at her, as an artist might, and painted for some time in
silence.
“Yes, you seem to me different from your father and sister—from most of
the people you have lived with,” he observed.
“To say that one’s self,” Gertrude went on, “is like saying—by
implication, at least—that one is better. I am not better; I am much
worse. But they say themselves that I am different. It makes them
unhappy.”
“Since you accuse me of concealing my real impressions, I may admit
that I think the tendency—among you generally—is to be made unhappy too
easily.”
“I wish you would tell that to my father,” said Gertrude.
“It might make him more unhappy!” Felix exclaimed, laughing.
“It certainly would. I don’t believe you have seen people like that.”
“Ah, my dear cousin, how do you know what I have seen?” Felix demanded.
“How can I tell you?”
“You might tell me a great many things, if you only would. You have
seen people like yourself—people who are bright and gay and fond of
amusement. We are not fond of amusement.”
“Yes,” said Felix, “I confess that rather strikes me. You don’t seem to
me to get all the pleasure out of life that you might. You don’t seem
to me to enjoy..... Do you mind my saying this?” he asked, pausing.
“Please go on,” said the girl, earnestly.
“You seem to me very well placed for enjoying. You have money and
liberty and what is called in Europe a ‘position.’ But you take a
painful view of life, as one may say.”
“One ought to think it bright and charming and delightful, eh?” asked
Gertrude.
“I should say so—if one can. It is true it all depends upon that,”
Felix added.
“You know there is a great deal of misery in the world,” said his
model.
“I have seen a little of it,” the young man rejoined. “But it was all
over there—beyond the sea. I don’t see any here. This is a paradise.”
Gertrude said nothing; she sat looking at the dahlias and the
currant-bushes in the garden, while Felix went on with his work. “To
‘enjoy,’” she began at last, “to take life—not painfully, must one do
something wrong?”
Felix gave his long, light laugh again. “Seriously, I think not. And
for this reason, among others: you strike me as very capable of
enjoying, if the chance were given you, and yet at the same time as
incapable of wrong-doing.”
“I am sure,” said Gertrude, “that you are very wrong in telling a
person that she is incapable of that. We are never nearer to evil than
when we believe that.”
“You are handsomer than ever,” observed Felix, irrelevantly.
Gertrude had got used to hearing him say this. There was not so much
excitement in it as at first. “What ought one to do?” she continued.
“To give parties, to go to the theatre, to read novels, to keep late
hours?”
“I don’t think it’s what one does or one doesn’t do that promotes
enjoyment,” her companion answered. “It is the general way of looking
at life.”
“They look at it as a discipline—that’s what they do here. I have often
been told that.”
“Well, that’s very good. But there is another way,” added Felix,
smiling: “to look at it as an opportunity.”
“An opportunity—yes,” said Gertrude. “One would get more pleasure that
way.”
“I don’t attempt to say anything better for it than that it has been my
own way—and that is not saying much!” Felix had laid down his palette
and brushes; he was leaning back, with his arms folded, to judge the
effect of his work. “And you know,” he said, “I am a very petty
personage.”
“You have a great deal of talent,” said Gertrude.
“No—no,” the young man rejoined, in a tone of cheerful impartiality, “I
have not a great deal of talent. It is nothing at all remarkable. I
assure you I should know if it were. I shall always be obscure. The
world will never hear of me.” Gertrude looked at him with a strange
feeling. She was thinking of the great world which he knew and which
she did not, and how full of brilliant talents it must be, since it
could afford to make light of his abilities. “You needn’t in general
attach much importance to anything I tell you,” he pursued; “but you
may believe me when I say this,—that I am little better than a
good-natured feather-head.”
“A feather-head?” she repeated.
“I am a species of Bohemian.”
“A Bohemian?” Gertrude had never heard this term before, save as a
geographical denomination; and she quite failed to understand the
figurative meaning which her companion appeared to attach to it. But it
gave her pleasure.
Felix had pushed back his chair and risen to his feet; he slowly came
toward her, smiling. “I am a sort of adventurer,” he said, looking down
at her.
She got up, meeting his smile. “An adventurer?” she repeated. “I should
like to hear your adventures.”
For an instant she believed that he was going to take her hand; but he
dropped his own hands suddenly into the pockets of his painting-jacket.
“There is no reason why you shouldn’t,” he said. “I have been an
adventurer, but my adventures have been very innocent. They have all
been happy ones; I don’t think there are any I shouldn’t tell. They
were very pleasant and very pretty; I should like to go over them in
memory. Sit down again, and I will begin,” he added in a moment, with
his naturally persuasive smile.
Gertrude sat down again on that day, and she sat down on several other
days. Felix, while he plied his brush, told her a great many stories,
and she listened with charmed avidity. Her eyes rested upon his lips;
she was very serious; sometimes, from her air of wondering gravity, he
thought she was displeased. But Felix never believed for more than a
single moment in any displeasure of his own producing. This would have
been fatuity if the optimism it expressed had not been much more a hope
than a prejudice. It is beside the matter to say that he had a good
conscience; for the best conscience is a sort of self-reproach, and
this young man’s brilliantly healthy nature spent itself in objective
good intentions which were ignorant of any test save exactness in
hitting their mark. He told Gertrude how he had walked over France and
Italy with a painter’s knapsack on his back, paying his way often by
knocking off a flattering portrait of his host or hostess. He told her
how he had played the violin in a little band of musicians—not of high
celebrity—who traveled through foreign lands giving provincial
concerts. He told her also how he had been a momentary ornament of a
troupe of strolling actors, engaged in the arduous task of interpreting
Shakespeare to French and German, Polish and Hungarian audiences.
While this periodical recital was going on, Gertrude lived in a
fantastic world; she seemed to herself to be reading a romance that
came out in daily numbers. She had known nothing so delightful since
the perusal of _Nicholas Nickleby_. One afternoon she went to see her
cousin, Mrs. Acton, Robert’s mother, who was a great invalid, never
leaving the house. She came back alone, on foot, across the fields—this
being a short way which they often used. Felix had gone to Boston with
her father, who desired to take the young man to call upon some of his
friends, old gentlemen who remembered his mother—remembered her, but
said nothing about her—and several of whom, with the gentle ladies
their wives, had driven out from town to pay their respects at the
little house among the apple trees, in vehicles which reminded the
Baroness, who received her visitors with discriminating civility, of
the large, light, rattling barouche in which she herself had made her
journey to this neighborhood. The afternoon was waning; in the western
sky the great picture of a New England sunset, painted in crimson and
silver, was suspended from the zenith; and the stony pastures, as
Gertrude traversed them, thinking intently to herself, were covered
with a light, clear glow. At the open gate of one of the fields she saw
from the distance a man’s figure; he stood there as if he were waiting
for her, and as she came nearer she recognized Mr. Brand. She had a
feeling as of not having seen him for some time; she could not have
said for how long, for it yet seemed to her that he had been very
lately at the house.
“May I walk back with you?” he asked. And when she had said that he
might if he wanted, he observed that he had seen her and recognized her
half a mile away.
“You must have very good eyes,” said Gertrude.
“Yes, I have very good eyes, Miss Gertrude,” said Mr. Brand. She
perceived that he meant something; but for a long time past Mr. Brand
had constantly meant something, and she had almost got used to it. She
felt, however, that what he meant had now a renewed power to disturb
her, to perplex and agitate her. He walked beside her in silence for a
moment, and then he added, “I have had no trouble in seeing that you
are beginning to avoid me. But perhaps,” he went on, “one needn’t have
had very good eyes to see that.”
“I have not avoided you,” said Gertrude, without looking at him.
“I think you have been unconscious that you were avoiding me,” Mr.
Brand replied. “You have not even known that I was there.”
“Well, you are here now, Mr. Brand!” said Gertrude, with a little
laugh. “I know that very well.”
He made no rejoinder. He simply walked beside her slowly, as they were
obliged to walk over the soft grass. Presently they came to another
gate, which was closed. Mr. Brand laid his hand upon it, but he made no
movement to open it; he stood and looked at his companion. “You are
very much interested—very much absorbed,” he said.
Gertrude glanced at him; she saw that he was pale and that he looked
excited. She had never seen Mr. Brand excited before, and she felt that
the spectacle, if fully carried out, would be impressive, almost
painful. “Absorbed in what?” she asked. Then she looked away at the
illuminated sky. She felt guilty and uncomfortable, and yet she was
vexed with herself for feeling so. But Mr. Brand, as he stood there
looking at her with his small, kind, persistent eyes, represented an
immense body of half-obliterated obligations, that were rising again
into a certain distinctness.
“You have new interests, new occupations,” he went on. “I don’t know
that I can say that you have new duties. We have always old ones,
Gertrude,” he added.
“Please open the gate, Mr. Brand,” she said; and she felt as if, in
saying so, she were cowardly and petulant. But he opened the gate, and
allowed her to pass; then he closed it behind himself. Before she had
time to turn away he put out his hand and held her an instant by the
wrist.
“I want to say something to you,” he said.
“I know what you want to say,” she answered. And she was on the point
of adding, “And I know just how you will say it;” but these words she
kept back.
“I love you, Gertrude,” he said. “I love you very much; I love you more
than ever.”
He said the words just as she had known he would; she had heard them
before. They had no charm for her; she had said to herself before that
it was very strange. It was supposed to be delightful for a woman to
listen to such words; but these seemed to her flat and mechanical. “I
wish you would forget that,” she declared.
“How can I—why should I?” he asked.
“I have made you no promise—given you no pledge,” she said, looking at
him, with her voice trembling a little.
“You have let me feel that I have an influence over you. You have
opened your mind to me.”
“I never opened my mind to you, Mr. Brand!” Gertrude cried, with some
vehemence.
“Then you were not so frank as I thought—as we all thought.”
“I don’t see what anyone else had to do with it!” cried the girl.
“I mean your father and your sister. You know it makes them happy to
think you will listen to me.”
She gave a little laugh. “It doesn’t make them happy,” she said.
“Nothing makes them happy. No one is happy here.”
“I think your cousin is very happy—Mr. Young,” rejoined Mr. Brand, in a
soft, almost timid tone.
“So much the better for him!” And Gertrude gave her little laugh again.
The young man looked at her a moment. “You are very much changed,” he
said.
“I am glad to hear it,” Gertrude declared.
“I am not. I have known you a long time, and I have loved you as you
were.”
“I am much obliged to you,” said Gertrude. “I must be going home.”
He on his side, gave a little laugh.
“You certainly do avoid me—you see!”
“Avoid me, then,” said the girl.
He looked at her again; and then, very gently, “No I will not avoid
you,” he replied; “but I will leave you, for the present, to yourself.
I think you will remember—after a while—some of the things you have
forgotten. I think you will come back to me; I have great faith in
that.”
This time his voice was very touching; there was a strong, reproachful
force in what he said, and Gertrude could answer nothing. He turned
away and stood there, leaning his elbows on the gate and looking at the
beautiful sunset. Gertrude left him and took her way home again; but
when she reached the middle of the next field she suddenly burst into
tears. Her tears seemed to her to have been a long time gathering, and
for some moments it was a kind of glee to shed them. But they presently
passed away. There was something a little hard about Gertrude; and she
never wept again.