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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
In 'Old New York' by Edith Wharton, readers are transported back to the Gilded Age of New York City through a collection of four novellas detailing the lives of the elite social circles. Wharton's meticulous attention to detail and insightful social commentary brings to life the opulence and hypocrisy of the time period. Her elegant prose and astute observations on class distinctions and societal expectations make this a classic work of American literature that continues to resonate with readers today. Each novella in the collection offers a unique glimpse into the lives of the wealthy and privileged, shedding light on the complexities and contradictions of their world. Edith Wharton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author known for her novels exploring class and societal norms, draws upon her own experiences as a member of the upper class to craft these compelling narratives. Her keen insight into human nature and the dynamics of high society make 'Old New York' a must-read for those interested in rich and nuanced depictions of the past.
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Old New York
Table of Contents
False Dawn
Part 1.
1.
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 were 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 the 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 epergne 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 Mr. 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.”
2.
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 store-room. 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 in 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.
3.
THE crucial moment, Lewis had always known, would not be 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 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 guillochee 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.
