



Produced by Eve Sobol








LOUISA PALLANT

By Henry James




I

Never say you know the last words about any human heart! I was once
treated to a revelation which startled and touched me in the nature of a
person with whom I had been acquainted--well, as I supposed--for years,
whose character I had had good reasons, heaven knows, to appreciate and
in regard to whom I flattered myself I had nothing more to learn.

It was on the terrace of the Kursaal at Homburg, nearly ten years ago,
one beautiful night toward the end of July. I had come to the place that
day from Frankfort, with vague intentions, and was mainly occupied in
waiting for my young nephew, the only son of my sister, who had been
entrusted to my care by a very fond mother for the summer--I was
expected to show him Europe, only the very best of it--and was on his
way from Paris to join me. The excellent band discoursed music not too
abstruse, while the air was filled besides with the murmur of different
languages, the smoke of many cigars, the creak on the gravel of the
gardens of strolling shoes and the thick tinkle of beer-glasses. There
were a hundred people walking about, there were some in clusters at
little tables and many on benches and rows of chairs, watching
the others as if they had paid for the privilege and were rather
disappointed. I was among these last; I sat by myself, smoking my cigar
and thinking of nothing very particular while families and couples
passed and repassed me.

I scarce know how long I had sat when I became aware of a recognition
which made my meditations definite. It was on my own part, and the
object of it was a lady who moved to and fro, unconscious of my
observation, with a young girl at her side. I hadn't seen her for ten
years, and what first struck me was the fact not that she was Mrs. Henry
Pallant, but that the girl who was with her was remarkably pretty--or
rather first of all that every one who passed appeared extremely to
admire. This led me also to notice the young lady myself, and her
charming face diverted my attention for some time from that of her
companion. The latter, moreover, though it was night, wore a thin light
veil which made her features vague. The couple slowly walked and
walked, but though they were very quiet and decorous, and also very well
dressed, they seemed to have no friends. Every one observed but no
one addressed them; they appeared even themselves to exchange very few
words. Moreover they bore with marked composure and as if they were
thoroughly used to it the attention they excited. I am afraid it
occurred to me to take for granted that they were of an artful intention
and that if they hadn't been the elder lady would have handed the
younger over a little less to public valuation and not have sought so to
conceal her own face. Perhaps this question came into my mind too easily
just then--in view of my prospective mentorship to my nephew. If I was
to show him only the best of Europe I should have to be very careful
about the people he should meet--especially the ladies--and the
relations he should form. I suspected him of great innocence and was
uneasy about my office. Was I completely relieved and reassured when
I became aware that I simply had Louisa Pallant before me and that the
girl was her daughter Linda, whom I had known as a child--Linda grown up
to charming beauty?

The question was delicate and the proof that I was not very sure is
perhaps that I forbore to speak to my pair at once. I watched them a
while--I wondered what they would do. No great harm assuredly; but I was
anxious to see if they were really isolated. Homburg was then a great
resort of the English--the London season took up its tale there toward
the first of August--and I had an idea that in such a company as that
Louisa would naturally know people. It was my impression that she
"cultivated" the English, that she had been much in London and would
be likely to have views in regard to a permanent settlement there. This
supposition was quickened by the sight of Linda's beauty, for I knew
there is no country in which such attractions are more appreciated. You
will see what time I took, and I confess that as I finished my cigar I
thought it all over. There was no good reason in fact why I should have
rushed into Mrs. Pallant's arms. She had not treated me well and we had
never really made it up. Somehow even the circumstance that--after the
first soreness--I was glad to have lost her had never put us quite right
with each other; nor, for herself, had it made her less ashamed of her
heartless behaviour that poor Pallant proved finally no great catch. I
had forgiven her; I hadn't felt it anything but an escape not to have
married a girl who had in her to take back her given word and break
a fellow's heart for mere flesh-pots--or the shallow promise, as it
pitifully turned out, of flesh-pots. Moreover we had met since then--on
the occasion of my former visit to Europe; had looked each other in the
eyes, had pretended to be easy friends and had talked of the wickedness
of the world as composedly as if we were the only just, the only pure.
I knew by that time what she had given out--that I had driven her off by
my insane jealousy before she ever thought of Henry Pallant, before
she had ever seen him. This hadn't been before and couldn't be to-day
a ground of real reunion, especially if you add to it that she knew
perfectly what I thought of her. It seldom ministers to friendship, I
believe, that your friend shall know your real opinion, for he knows it
mainly when it's unfavourable, and this is especially the case if--let
the solecism pass!--he be a woman. I hadn't followed Mrs. Pallant's
fortunes; the years went by for me in my own country, whereas she led
her life, which I vaguely believed to be difficult after her husband's
death--virtually that of a bankrupt--in foreign lands. I heard of
her from time to time; always as "established" somewhere, but on each
occasion in a different place. She drifted from country to country, and
if she had been of a hard composition at the beginning it could never
occur to me that her struggle with society, as it might be called, would
have softened the paste. Whenever I heard a woman spoken of as "horribly
worldly" I thought immediately of the object of my early passion. I
imagined she had debts, and when I now at last made up my mind to recall
myself to her it was present to me that she might ask me to lend her
money. More than anything else, however, at this time of day, I was
sorry for her, so that such an idea didn't operate as a deterrent.

She pretended afterwards that she hadn't noticed me--expressing as
we stood face to face great surprise and wishing to know where I had
dropped from; but I think the corner of her eye had taken me in and she
had been waiting to see what I would do. She had ended by sitting down
with her girl on the same row of chairs with myself, and after a little,
the seat next to her becoming vacant, I had gone and stood before
her. She had then looked up at me a moment, staring as if she couldn't
imagine who I was or what I wanted; after which, smiling and extending
her hands, she had broken out: "Ah my dear old friend--what a delight!"
If she had waited to see what I would do in order to choose her own line
she thus at least carried out this line with the utmost grace. She was
cordial, friendly, artless, interested, and indeed I'm sure she was very
glad to see me. I may as well say immediately, none the less, that she
gave me neither then nor later any sign of a desire to contract a loan.
She had scant means--that I learned--yet seemed for the moment able to
pay her way. I took the empty chair and we remained in talk for an hour.
After a while she made me sit at her other side, next her daughter, whom
she wished to know me--to love me--as one of their oldest friends. "It
goes back, back, back, doesn't it?" said Mrs. Pallant; "and of course
she remembers you as a child." Linda smiled all sweetly and blankly, and
I saw she remembered me not a whit. When her mother threw out that they
had often talked about me she failed to take it up, though she looked
extremely nice. Looking nice was her strong point; she was prettier even
than her mother had been. She was such a little lady that she made me
ashamed of having doubted, however vaguely and for a moment, of her
position in the scale of propriety. Her appearance seemed to say that
if she had no acquaintances it was because she didn't want them--because
nobody there struck her as attractive: there wasn't the slightest
difficulty about her choosing her friends. Linda Pallant, young as
she was, and fresh and fair and charming, gentle and sufficiently shy,
looked somehow exclusive--as if the dust of the common world had never
been meant to besprinkle her. She was of thinner consistency than her
mother and clearly not a young woman of professions--except in so far as
she was committed to an interest in you by her bright pure candid smile.
No girl who had such a lovely way of parting her lips could pass for
designing.

As I sat between the pair I felt I had been taken possession of and that
for better or worse my stay at Homburg would be intimately associated
with theirs. We gave each other a great deal of news and expressed
unlimited interest in each other's history since our last meeting. I
mightn't judge of what Mrs. Pallant kept back, but for myself I quite
overflowed. She let me see at any rate that her life had been a good
deal what I supposed, though the terms she employed to describe it were
less crude than those of my thought. She confessed they had drifted,
she and her daughter, and were drifting still. Her narrative rambled
and took a wrong turn, a false flight, or two, as I thought Linda
noted, while she sat watching the passers, in a manner that betrayed no
consciousness of their attention, without coming to her mother's aid.
Once or twice Mrs. Pallant made me rather feel a cross-questioner, which
I had had no intention of being. I took it that if the girl never put in
a word it was because she had perfect confidence in her parent's ability
to come out straight. It was suggested to me, I scarcely knew how, that
this confidence between the two ladies went to a great length; that
their union of thought, their system of reciprocal divination, was
remarkable, and that they probably seldom needed to resort to the clumsy
and in some cases dangerous expedient of communicating by sound. I
suppose I made this reflexion not all at once--it was not wholly the
result of that first meeting. I was with them constantly for the next
several days and my impressions had time to clarify.

I do remember, however, that it was on this first evening that Archie's
name came up. She attributed her own stay at Homburg to no refined nor
exalted motive--didn't put it that she was there from force of habit or
because a high medical authority had ordered her to drink the waters;
she frankly admitted the reason of her visit to have been simply that
she didn't know where else to turn. But she appeared to assume that
my behaviour rested on higher grounds and even that it required
explanation, the place being frivolous and modern--devoid of that
interest of antiquity which I had ever made so much of. "Don't you
remember--ever so long ago--that you wouldn't look at anything in Europe
that wasn't a thousand years old? Well, as we advance in life I suppose
we don't think that quite such a charm." And when I mentioned that I had
arrived because the place was as good as another for awaiting my nephew
she exclaimed: "Your nephew--what nephew? He must have come up of
late." I answered that his name was Archie Parker and that he was modern
indeed; he was to attain legal manhood in a few months and was in Europe
for the first time. My last news of him had been from Paris and I was
expecting to hear further from one day to the other. His father was
dead, and though a selfish bachelor, little versed in the care of
children, I was considerably counted on by his mother to see that he
didn't smoke nor flirt too much, nor yet tumble off an Alp.

Mrs. Pallant immediately guessed that his mother was my sister
Charlotte, whom she spoke of familiarly, though I knew she had scarce
seen her. Then in a moment it came to her which of the Parkers Charlotte
had married; she remembered the family perfectly from the old New York
days--"that disgustingly rich set." She said it was very nice having the
boy come out that way to my care; to which I replied that it was very
nice for the boy. She pronounced the advantage rather mine--I ought to
have had children; there was something so parental about me and I would
have brought them up so well. She could make an allusion like that--to
all that might have been and had not been--without a gleam of guilt
in her eye; and I foresaw that before I left the place I should have
confided to her that though I detested her and was very glad we had
fallen out, yet our old relations had left me no heart for marrying
another woman. If I had remained so single and so sterile the fault was
nobody's but hers. She asked what I meant to do with my nephew--to which
I replied that it was much more a question of what he would do with
me. She wished to know if he were a nice young man and had brothers and
sisters and any particular profession. I assured her I had really seen
little of him; I believed him to be six feet high and of tolerable
parts. He was an only son, but there was a little sister at home, a
delicate, rather blighted child, demanding all the mother's care.

"So that makes your responsibility greater, as it were, about the boy,
doesn't it?" said Mrs. Pallant.

"Greater? I'm sure I don't know."

"Why if the girl's life's uncertain he may become, some moment, all the
mother has. So that being in your hands--"

"Oh I shall keep him alive, I suppose, if you mean that," I returned.

"Well, WE won't kill him, shall we, Linda?" my friend went on with a
laugh.

"I don't know--perhaps we shall!" smiled the girl.




II

I called on them the next at their lodgings, the modesty of which was
enhanced by a hundred pretty feminine devices--flowers and photographs
and portable knick-knacks and a hired piano and morsels of old brocade
flung over angular sofas. I took them to drive; I met them again at
the Kursaal; I arranged that we should dine together, after the Homburg
fashion, at the same table d'hote; and during several days this
revived familiar intercourse continued, imitating intimacy if not quite
achieving it. I was pleased, as my companions passed the time for me
and the conditions of our life were soothing--the feeling of summer and
shade and music and leisure in the German gardens and woods, where we
strolled and sat and gossiped; to which may be added a vague sociable
sense that among people whose challenge to the curiosity was mainly not
irresistible we kept quite to ourselves. We were on the footing of old
friends who still had in regard to each other discoveries to make. We
knew each other's nature but didn't know each other's experience; so
that when Mrs. Pallant related to me what she had been "up to," as I
called it, for so many years, the former knowledge attached a hundred
interpretative footnotes--as if I had been editing an author who
presented difficulties--to the interesting page. There was nothing new
to me in the fact that I didn't esteem her, but there was relief in my
finding that this wasn't necessary at Homburg and that I could like her
in spite of it. She struck me, in the oddest way, as both improved
and degenerate; the two processes, in her nature, might have gone on
together. She was battered and world-worn and, spiritually speaking,
vulgarised; something fresh had rubbed off her--it even included the
vivacity of her early desire to do the best thing for herself--and
something rather stale had rubbed on. At the same time she betrayed
a scepticism, and that was rather becoming, for it had quenched the
eagerness of her prime, the mercenary principle I had so suffered from.
She had grown weary and detached, and since she affected me as more
impressed with the evil of the world than with the good, this was a
gain; in other words her accretion of indifference, if not of cynicism,
showed a softer surface than that of her old ambitions. Furthermore
I had to recognise that her devotion to her daughter was a kind of
religion; she had done the very best possible for Linda.

Linda was curious, Linda was interesting; I've seen girls I liked
better--charming as this one might be--but have never seen one who for
the hour you were with her (the impression passed somehow when she
was out of sight) occupied you so completely. I can best describe the
attention she provoked by saying that she struck you above all things
as a felicitous FINAL product--after the fashion of some plant or some
fruit, some waxen orchid or some perfect peach. She was clearly the
result of a process of calculation, a process patiently educative, a
pressure exerted, and all artfully, so that she should reach a high
point.

This high point had been the star of her mother's heaven--it hung
before her so unquenchably--and had shed the only light (in default of a
better) that was to shine on the poor lady's path. It stood her instead
of every other ideal. The very most and the very best--that was what the
girl had been led on to achieve; I mean of course, since no real miracle
had been wrought, the most and the best she was capable of. She was as
pretty, as graceful, as intelligent, as well-bred, as well-informed,
as well-dressed, as could have been conceived for her; her music, her
singing, her German, her French, her English, her step, her tone, her
glance, her manner, everything in her person and movement, from the
shade and twist of her hair to the way you saw her finger-nails were
pink when she raised her hand, had been carried so far that one found
one's self accepting them as the very measure of young grace. I regarded
her thus as a model, yet it was a part of her perfection that she had
none of the stiffness of a pattern. If she held the observation it was
because you wondered where and when she would break down; but she never
broke down, either in her French accent or in her role of educated
angel.

After Archie had come the ladies were manifestly his greatest resource,
and all the world knows why a party of four is more convenient than a
party of three. My nephew had kept me waiting a week, with a serenity
all his own; but this very coolness was a help to harmony--so long, that
is, as I didn't lose my temper with it. I didn't, for the most part,
because my young man's unperturbed acceptance of the most various forms
of good fortune had more than anything else the effect of amusing me. I
had seen little of him for the last three or four years; I wondered what
his impending majority would have made of him--he didn't at all carry
himself as if the wind of his fortune were rising--and I watched
him with a solicitude that usually ended in a joke. He was a tall
fresh-coloured youth, with a candid circular countenance and a love
of cigarettes, horses and boats which had not been sacrificed to more
strenuous studies. He was reassuringly natural, in a supercivilised age,
and I soon made up my mind that the formula of his character was in the
clearing of the inward scene by his so preordained lack of imagination.
If he was serene this was still further simplifying. After that I had
time to meditate on the line that divides the serene from the inane, the
simple from the silly. He wasn't clever; the fonder theory quite defied
our cultivation, though Mrs. Pallant tried it once or twice; but on
the other hand it struck me his want of wit might be a good defensive
weapon. It wasn't the sort of density that would let him in, but
the sort that would keep him out. By which I don't mean that he had
shortsighted suspicions, but that on the contrary imagination would
never be needed to save him, since she would never put him in danger.
He was in short a well-grown well-washed muscular young American, whose
extreme salubrity might have made him pass for conceited. If he looked
pleased with himself it was only because he was pleased with life--as
well he might be, with the fortune that awaited the stroke of his
twenty-first year--and his big healthy independent person was
an inevitable part of that. I am bound to add that he was
accommodating--for which I was grateful. His habits were active, but
he didn't insist on my adopting them and he made numerous and generous
sacrifices for my society. When I say he made them for mine I must duly
remember that mine and that of Mrs. Pallant and Linda were now very
much the same thing. He was willing to sit and smoke for hours under the
trees or, adapting his long legs to the pace of his three companions,
stroll through the nearer woods of the charming little hill-range of the
Taunus to those rustic Wirthschaften where coffee might be drunk under
a trellis. Mrs. Pallant took a great interest in him; she made him, with
his easy uncle, a subject of discourse; she pronounced him a delightful
specimen, as a young gentleman of his period and country. She even
asked me the sort of "figure" his fortune might really amount to, and
professed a rage of envy when I told her what I supposed it to be. While
we were so occupied Archie, on his side, couldn't do less than converse
with Linda, nor to tell the truth did he betray the least inclination
for any different exercise. They strolled away together while their
elders rested; two or three times, in the evening, when the ballroom of
the Kursaal was lighted and dance-music played, they whirled over the
smooth floor in a waltz that stirred my memory. Whether it had the
same effect on Mrs. Pallant's I know not: she held her peace. We had on
certain occasions our moments, almost our half-hours, of unembarrassed
silence while our young companions disported themselves. But if at other
times her enquiries and comments were numerous on this article of my
ingenuous charge, that might very well have passed for a courteous
recognition of the frequent admiration I expressed for Linda--an
admiration that drew from her, I noticed, but scant direct response.
I was struck thus with her reserve when I spoke of her daughter--my
remarks produced so little of a maternal flutter. Her detachment, her
air of having no fatuous illusions and not being blinded by prejudice,
seemed to me at times to savour of affectation. Either she answered me
with a vague and impatient sigh and changed the subject, or else she
said before doing so: "Oh yes, yes, she's a very brilliant creature.
She ought to be: God knows what I've done for her!" The reader will have
noted my fondness, in all cases, for the explanations of things; as an
example of which I had my theory here that she was disappointed in the
girl. Where then had her special calculation failed? As she couldn't
possibly have wished her prettier or more pleasing, the pang must have
been for her not having made a successful use of her gifts. Had she
expected her to "land" a prince the day after leaving the schoolroom?
There was after all plenty of time for this, with Linda but
two-and-twenty. It didn't occur to me to wonder if the source of her
mother's tepidity was that the young lady had not turned out so nice a
nature as she had hoped, because in the first place Linda struck me
as perfectly innocent, and because in the second I wasn't paid, in
the French phrase, for supposing Louisa Pallant much concerned on that
score. The last hypothesis I should have invoked was that of private
despair at bad moral symptoms. And in relation to Linda's nature I had
before me the daily spectacle of her manner with my nephew. It was as
charming as it could be without betrayal of a desire to lead him on. She
was as familiar as a cousin, but as a distant one--a cousin who had been
brought up to observe degrees. She was so much cleverer than Archie
that she couldn't help laughing at him, but she didn't laugh enough to
exclude variety, being well aware, no doubt, that a woman's cleverness
most shines in contrast with a man's stupidity when she pretends to take
that stupidity for her law. Linda Pallant moreover was not a chatterbox;
as she knew the value of many things she knew the value of intervals.
There were a good many in the conversation of these young persons;
my nephew's own speech, to say nothing of his thought, abounding in
comfortable lapses; so that I sometimes wondered how their association
was kept at that pitch of continuity of which it gave the impression.
It was friendly enough, evidently, when Archie sat near her--near
enough for low murmurs, had such risen to his lips--and watched her with
interested eyes and with freedom not to try too hard to make himself
agreeable. She had always something in hand--a flower in her tapestry
to finish, the leaves of a magazine to cut, a button to sew on her glove
(she carried a little work-bag in her pocket and was a person of the
daintiest habits), a pencil to ply ever so neatly in a sketchbook
which she rested on her knee. When we were indoors--mainly then at her
mother's modest rooms--she had always the resource of her piano, of
which she was of course a perfect mistress.

These pursuits supported her, they helped her to an assurance under
such narrow inspection--I ended by rebuking Archie for it; I told him he
stared the poor girl out of countenance--and she sought further relief
in smiling all over the place. When my young man's eyes shone at her
those of Miss Pallant addressed themselves brightly to the trees and
clouds and other surrounding objects, including her mother and me.
Sometimes she broke into a sudden embarrassed happy pointless laugh.
When she wandered off with him she looked back at us in a manner that
promised it wasn't for long and that she was with us still in spirit.
If I liked her I had therefore my good reason: it was many a day since a
pretty girl had had the air of taking me so much into account. Sometimes
when they were so far away as not to disturb us she read aloud a little
to Mr. Archie. I don't know where she got her books--I never provided
them, and certainly he didn't. He was no reader and I fear he often
dozed.




III

I remember the first time--it was at the end of about ten days of
this--that Mrs. Pallant remarked to me: "My dear friend, you're quite
AMAZING! You behave for all the world as if you were perfectly ready to
accept certain consequences." She nodded in the direction of our young
companions, but I nevertheless put her at the pains of saying
what consequences she meant. "What consequences? Why the very same
consequences that ensued when you and I first became acquainted."

I hesitated, but then, looking her in the eyes, said: "Do you mean she'd
throw him over?"

"You're not kind, you're not generous," she replied with a quick colour.
"I'm giving you a warning."

"You mean that my boy may fall in love with your girl?"

"Certainly. It looks even as if the harm might be already done."

"Then your warning comes too late," I significantly smiled. "But why do
you call it a harm?"

"Haven't you any sense of the rigour of your office?" she asked. "Is
that what his mother has sent him out to you for: that you shall find
him the first wife you can pick up, that you shall let him put his head
into the noose the day after his arrival?"

"Heaven forbid I should do anything of the kind! I know moreover that
his mother doesn't want him to marry young. She holds it the worst of
mistakes, she feels that at that age a man never really chooses. He
doesn't choose till he has lived a while, till he has looked about and
compared."

"And what do you think then yourself?"

"I should like to say I regard the fact of falling in love, at whatever
age, as in itself an act of selection. But my being as I am at this time
of day would contradict me too much."

"Well then, you're too primitive. You ought to leave this place
tomorrow."

"So as not to see Archie fall--?"

"You ought to fish him out now--from where he HAS fallen--and take him
straight away."

I wondered a little. "Do you think he's in very far?"

"If I were his mother I know what I should think. I can put myself in
her place--I'm not narrow-minded. I know perfectly well how she must
regard such a question."

"And don't you know," I returned, "that in America that's not thought
important--the way the mother regards it?"

Mrs. Pallant had a pause--as if I mystified or vexed her. "Well, we're
not in America. We happen to be here."

"No; my poor sister's up to her neck in New York."

"I'm almost capable of writing to her to come out," said Mrs. Pallant.

"You ARE warning me," I cried, "but I hardly know of what! It seems
to me my responsibility would begin only at the moment your daughter
herself should seem in danger."

"Oh you needn't mind that--I'll take care of Linda."

But I went on. "If you think she's in danger already I'll carry him off
to-morrow."

"It would be the best thing you could do."

"I don't know--I should be very sorry to act on a false alarm. I'm very
well here; I like the place and the life and your society. Besides, it
doesn't strike me that--on her side--there's any real symptom."

She looked at me with an air I had never seen in her face, and if I
had puzzled her she repaid me in kind. "You're very annoying. You don't
deserve what I'd fain do for you."

What she'd fain do for me she didn't tell me that day, but we took up
the subject again. I remarked that I failed to see why we should
assume that a girl like Linda--brilliant enough to make one of the
greatest--would fall so very easily into my nephew's arms. Might
I enquire if her mother had won a confession from her, if she had
stammered out her secret? Mrs. Pallant made me, on this, the point
that they had no need to tell each other such things--they hadn't lived
together twenty years in such intimacy for nothing. To which I returned
that I had guessed as much, but that there might be an exception for
a great occasion like the present. If Linda had shown nothing it was a
sign that for HER the occasion wasn't great; and I mentioned that Archie
had spoken to me of the young lady only to remark casually and rather
patronisingly, after his first encounter with her, that she was a
regular little flower. (The little flower was nearly three years older
than himself.) Apart from this he hadn't alluded to her and had taken
up no allusion of mine. Mrs. Pallant informed me again--for which I
was prepared--that I was quite too primitive; after which she said: "We
needn't discuss the case if you don't wish to, but I happen to know--how
I obtained my knowledge isn't important--that the moment Mr. Parker
should propose to my daughter she'd gobble him down. Surely it's a
detail worth mentioning to you."

I sought to defer then to her judgement. "Very good. I'll sound him.
I'll look into the matter tonight."

"Don't, don't; you'll spoil everything!" She spoke as with some finer
view. "Remove him quickly--that's the only thing."

I didn't at all like the idea of removing him quickly; it seemed too
summary, too extravagant, even if presented to him on specious grounds;
and moreover, as I had told Mrs. Pallant, I really had no wish to
change my scene. It was no part of my promise to my sister that, with
my middle-aged habits, I should duck and dodge about Europe. So
I temporised. "Should you really object to the boy so much as a
son-in-law? After all he's a good fellow and a gentleman."

"My poor friend, you're incredibly superficial!" she made answer with an
assurance that struck me.

The contempt in it so nettled me in fact that I exclaimed: "Possibly!
But it seems odd that a lesson in consistency should come from YOU."

I had no retort from her on this, rather to my surprise, and when she
spoke again it was all quietly. "I think Linda and I had best withdraw.
We've been here a month--it will have served our purpose."

"Mercy on us, that will be a bore!" I protested; and for the rest of
the evening, till we separated--our conversation had taken place after
dinner at the Kursaal--she said little, preserving a subdued and almost
injured air. This somehow didn't appeal to me, since it was absurd that
Louisa Pallant, of all women, should propose to put me in the wrong. If
ever a woman had been in the wrong herself--! I had even no need to go
into that. Archie and I, at all events, usually attended the ladies back
to their own door--they lived in a street of minor accommodation at a
certain distance from the Rooms--where we parted for the night late,
on the big cobblestones, in the little sleeping German town, under
the closed windows of which, suggesting stuffy interiors, our cheerful
English partings resounded. On this occasion indeed they rather
languished; the question that had come up for me with Mrs. Pallant
appeared--and by no intention of mine--to have brushed the young couple
with its chill. Archie and Linda too struck me as conscious and dumb.

As I walked back to our hotel with my nephew I passed my hand into his
arm and put to him, by no roundabout approach, the question of whether
he were in serious peril of love.

"I don't know, I don't know--really, uncle, I don't know!" was, however,
all the satisfaction I could extract from the youth, who hadn't the
smallest vein of introspection. He mightn't know, but before we reached
the inn--we had a few more words on the subject--it seemed to me that
_I_ did. His mind wasn't formed to accommodate at one time many subjects
of thought, but Linda Pallant certainly constituted for the moment its
principal furniture. She pervaded his consciousness, she solicited
his curiosity, she associated herself, in a manner as yet informal and
undefined, with his future. I could see that she held, that she beguiled
him as no one had ever done. I didn't betray to him, however, that
perception, and I spent my night a prey to the consciousness that, after
all, it had been none of my business to provide him with the sense of
being captivated. To put him in relation with a young enchantress was
the last thing his mother had expected of me or that I had expected of
myself. Moreover it was quite my opinion that he himself was too young
to be a judge of enchantresses. Mrs. Pallant was right and I had given
high proof of levity in regarding her, with her beautiful daughter, as
a "resource." There were other resources--one of which WOULD be most
decidedly to clear out. What did I know after all about the girl except
that I rejoiced to have escaped from marrying her mother? That mother,
it was true, was a singular person, and it was strange her conscience
should have begun to fidget in advance of my own. It was strange she
should so soon have felt Archie's peril, and even stranger that she
should have then wished to "save" him. The ways of women were infinitely
subtle, and it was no novelty to me that one never knew where they would
turn up. As I haven't hesitated in this report to expose the irritable
side of my own nature I shall confess that I even wondered if my old
friend's solicitude hadn't been a deeper artifice. Wasn't it possibly a
plan of her own for making sure of my young man--though I didn't quite
see the logic of it? If she regarded him, which she might in view of his
large fortune, as a great catch, mightn't she have arranged this little
comedy, in their personal interest, with the girl?

That possibility at any rate only made it a happier thought that I
should win my companion to some curiosity about other places. There were
many of course much more worth his attention than Homburg. In the course
of the morning--it was after our early luncheon--I walked round to Mrs.
Pallant's to let her know I was ready to take action; but even while I
went I again felt the unlikelihood of the part attributed by my fears
and by the mother's own, so far as they had been roused, to Linda.
Certainly if she was such a girl as these fears represented her she
would fly at higher game. It was with an eye to high game, Mrs. Pallant
had frankly admitted to me, that she had been trained, and such an
education, to say nothing of such a performer, justified a hope of
greater returns. A young American, the fruit of scant "modelling," who
could give her nothing but pocket-money, was a very moderate prize,
and if she had been prepared to marry for ambition--there was no such
hardness in her face or tone, but then there never is--her mark would
be inevitably a "personage" quelconque. I was received at my friend's
lodging with the announcement that she had left Homburg with her
daughter half an hour before. The good woman who had entertained the
pair professed to know nothing of their movements beyond the fact that
they had gone to Frankfort, where, however, it was her belief that they
didn't intend to remain. They were evidently travelling beyond. Sudden,
their decision to move? Oh yes, the matter of a moment. They must have
spent the night in packing, they had so many things and such pretty
ones; and their poor maid, all the morning, had scarce had time to
swallow her coffee. But they clearly were ladies accustomed to come and
go. It didn't matter--with such rooms as hers she never wanted: there
was a new family coming in at three.




IV

This piece of strategy left me staring and made me, I must confess,
quite furious. My only consolation was that Archie, when I told him,
looked as blank as myself, and that the trick touched him more nearly,
for I was not now in love with Louisa. We agreed that we required an
explanation and we pretended to expect one the next day in the shape of
a letter satisfactory even to the point of being apologetic. When I say
"we" pretended I mean that I did, for my suspicion that he knew what had
been on foot--through an arrangement with Linda--lasted only a moment.
If his resentment was less than my own his surprise was equally great.
I had been willing to bolt, but I felt slighted by the ease with which
Mrs. Pallant had shown she could part with us. Archie professed no
sense of a grievance, because in the first place he was shy about it and
because in the second it was evidently not definite to him that he had
been encouraged--equipped as he was, I think, with no very particular
idea of what constituted encouragement. He was fresh from the wonderful
country in which there may between the ingenuous young be so little
question of "intentions." He was but dimly conscious of his own and
could by no means have told me whether he had been challenged or been
jilted. I didn't want to exasperate him, but when at the end of three
days more we were still without news of our late companions I observed
that it was very simple:--they must have been just hiding from us; they
thought us dangerous; they wished to avoid entanglements. They had found
us too attentive and wished not to raise false hopes. He appeared to
accept this explanation and even had the air--so at least I inferred
from his asking me no questions--of judging the matter might be delicate
for myself. The poor youth was altogether much mystified, and I smiled
at the image in his mind of Mrs. Pallant fleeing from his uncle's
importunities. We decided to leave Homburg, but if we didn't pursue our
fugitives it wasn't simply that we were ignorant of where they were. I
could have found that out with a little trouble, but I was deterred by
the reflexion that this would be Louisa's reasoning. She was a dreadful
humbug and her departure had been a provocation--I fear it was in that
stupid conviction that I made out a little independent itinerary with
Archie. I even believed we should learn where they were quite soon
enough, and that our patience--even my young man's--would be longer than
theirs. Therefore I uttered a small private cry of triumph when three
weeks later--we happened to be at Interlaken--he reported to me that he
had received a note from Miss Pallant. The form of this confidence was
his enquiring if there were particular reasons why we should longer
delay our projected visit to the Italian lakes. Mightn't the fear of the
hot weather, which was moreover at that season our native temperature,
cease to operate, the middle of September having arrived? I answered
that we would start on the morrow if he liked, and then, pleased
apparently that I was so easy to deal with, he revealed his little
secret. He showed me his letter, which was a graceful natural
document--it covered with a few flowing strokes but a single page of
note-paper--not at all compromising to the young lady. If, however, it
was almost the apology I had looked for--save that this should have come
from the mother--it was not ostensibly in the least an invitation. It
mentioned casually--the mention was mainly in the words at the head
of her paper--that they were on the Lago Maggiore, at Baveno; but it
consisted mainly of the expression of a regret that they had had so
abruptly to leave Homburg. Linda failed to say under what necessity they
had found themselves; she only hoped we hadn't judged them too harshly
and would accept "this hasty line" as a substitute for the omitted
good-bye. She also hoped our days were passing pleasantly and with the
same lovely weather that prevailed south of the Alps; and she remained
very sincerely and with the kindest remembrances--!

The note contained no message from her mother, and it was open to me to
suppose, as I should prefer, either that Mrs. Pallant hadn't known she
was writing or that they wished to make us think she hadn't known. The
letter might pass as a common civility of the girl's to a person with
whom she had been on easy terms. It was, however, for something more
than this that my nephew took it; so at least I gathered from the
touching candour of his determination to go to Baveno. I judged it idle
to drag him another way; he had money in his own pocket and was quite
capable of giving me the slip. Yet--such are the sweet incongruities of
youth--when I asked him to what tune he had been thinking of Linda since
they left us in the lurch he replied: "Oh I haven't been thinking at
all! Why should I?" This fib was accompanied by an exorbitant blush.
Since he was to obey his young woman's signal I must equally make out
where it would take him, and one splendid morning we started over the
Simplon in a post-chaise.

I represented to him successfully that it would be in much better taste
for us to alight at Stresa, which as every one knows is a resort
of tourists, also on the shore of the major lake, at about a mile's
distance from Baveno. If we stayed at the latter place we should have to
inhabit the same hotel as our friends, and this might be awkward in view
of a strained relation with them. Nothing would be easier than to go and
come between the two points, especially by the water, which would give
Archie a chance for unlimited paddling. His face lighted up at the
vision of a pair of oars; he pretended to take my plea for discretion
very seriously, and I could see that he had at once begun to calculate
opportunities for navigation with Linda. Our post-chaise--I had insisted
on easy stages and we were three days on the way--deposited us at Stresa
toward the middle of the afternoon, and it was within an amazingly short
time that I found myself in a small boat with my nephew, who pulled us
over to Baveno with vigorous strokes. I remember the sweetness of the
whole impression. I had had it before, but to my companion it was new,
and he thought it as pretty as the opera: the enchanting beauty of the
place and, hour, the stillness of the air and water, with the romantic
fantastic Borromean Islands set as great jewels in a crystal globe. We
disembarked at the steps by the garden-foot of the hotel, and somehow
it seemed a perfectly natural part of the lovely situation that I should
immediately become conscious of Mrs. Pallant and her daughter seated on
the terrace and quietly watching us. They had the air of expectation,
which I think we had counted on. I hadn't even asked Archie if he had
answered Linda's note; this was between themselves and in the way of
supervision I had done enough in coming with him.

There is no doubt our present address, all round, lacked a little the
easiest grace--or at least Louisa's and mine did. I felt too much the
appeal of her exhibition to notice closely the style of encounter of the
young people. I couldn't get it out of my head, as I have sufficiently
indicated, that Mrs. Pallant was playing a game, and I'm afraid she saw
in my face that this suspicion had been the motive of my journey. I had
come there to find her out. The knowledge of my purpose couldn't help
her to make me very welcome, and that's why I speak of our meeting
constrainedly. We observed none the less all the forms, and the
admirable scene left us plenty to talk about. I made no reference before
Linda to the retreat from Homburg. This young woman looked even prettier
than she had done on the eve of that manoeuvre and gave no sign of an
awkward consciousness. She again so struck me as a charming clever girl
that I was freshly puzzled to know why we should get--or should have
got--into a tangle about her. People had to want to complicate a
situation to do it on so simple a pretext as that Linda was in every way
beautiful. This was the clear fact: so why shouldn't the presumptions
be in favour of every result of it? One of the effects of that cause,
on the spot, was that at the end of a very short time Archie proposed to
her to take a turn with him in his boat, which awaited us at the foot of
the steps. She looked at her mother with a smiling "May I, mamma?" and
Mrs. Pallant answered "Certainly, darling, if you're not afraid." At
this--I scarcely knew why--I sought the relief of laughter: it must have
affected me as comic that the girl's general competence should suffer
the imputation of that particular flaw. She gave me a quick slightly
sharp look as she turned away with my nephew; it appeared to challenge
me a little--"Pray what's the matter with YOU?" It was the first
expression of the kind I had ever seen in her face. Mrs. Pallant's
attention, on the other hand, rather strayed from me; after we had been
left there together she sat silent, not heeding me, looking at the lake
and mountains--at the snowy crests crowned with the flush of evening.
She seemed not even to follow our young companions as they got into
their boat and pushed off. For some minutes I respected her mood; I
walked slowly up and down the terrace and lighted a cigar, as she had
always permitted me to do at Homburg. I found in her, it was true,
rather a new air of weariness; her fine cold well-bred face was pale;
I noted in it new lines of fatigue, almost of age. At last I stopped in
front of her and--since she looked so sad--asked if she had been having
bad news.

"The only bad news was when I learned--through your nephew's note to
Linda--that you were coming to us."

"Ah then he wrote?"

"Certainly he wrote."

"You take it all harder than I do," I returned as I sat down beside her.
And then I added, smiling: "Have you written to his mother?"

Slowly at last, and more directly, she faced me. "Take care, take care,
or you'll have been more brutal than you'll afterwards like," she said
with an air of patience before the inevitable.

"Never, never! Unless you think me brutal if I ask whether you knew when
Linda wrote."

She had an hesitation. "Yes, she showed me her letter. She wouldn't have
done anything else. I let it go because I didn't know what course was
best. I'm afraid to oppose her to her face."

"Afraid, my dear friend, with that girl?"

"That girl? Much you know about her! It didn't follow you'd come. I
didn't take that for granted."

"I'm like you," I said--"I too am afraid of my nephew. I don't venture
to oppose him to his face. The only thing I could do--once he wished
it--was to come with him."

"I see. Well, there are grounds, after all, on which I'm glad," she
rather inscrutably added.

"Oh I was conscientious about that! But I've no authority; I can neither
drive him nor stay him--I can use no force," I explained. "Look at the
way he's pulling that boat and see if you can fancy me."

"You could tell him she's a bad hard girl--one who'd poison any good
man's life!" my companion broke out with a passion that startled me.

At first I could only gape. "Dear lady, what do you mean?"

She bent her face into her hands, covering it over with them, and so
remained a minute; then she continued a little differently, though as
if she hadn't heard my question: "I hoped you were too disgusted with
us--after the way we left you planted."

"It was disconcerting assuredly, and it might have served if Linda
hadn't written. That patched it up," I gaily professed. But my gaiety
was thin, for I was still amazed at her violence of a moment before. "Do
you really mean that she won't do?" I added.

She made no direct answer; she only said after a little that it didn't
matter whether the crisis should come a few weeks sooner or a few weeks
later, since it was destined to come at the first chance, the favouring
moment. Linda had marked my young man--and when Linda had marked a
thing!

"Bless my soul--how very grim--" But I didn't understand. "Do you mean
she's in love with him?"

"It's enough if she makes him think so--though even that isn't
essential."

Still I was at sea. "If she makes him think so? Dear old friend, what's
your idea? I've observed her, I've watched her, and when all's said what
has she done? She has been civil and pleasant to him, but it would have
been much more marked if she hadn't. She has really shown him, with her
youth and her natural charm, nothing more than common friendliness. Her
note was nothing; he let me see it."

"I don't think you've heard every word she has said to him," Mrs.
Pallant returned with an emphasis that still struck me as perverse.

"No more have you, I take it!" I promptly cried. She evidently meant
more than she said; but if this excited my curiosity it also moved, in a
different connexion, my indulgence.

"No, but I know my own daughter. She's a most remarkable young woman."

"You've an extraordinary tone about her," I declared "such a tone as
I think I've never before heard on a mother's lips. I've had the same
impression from you--that of a disposition to 'give her away,' but never
yet so strong."

At this Mrs. Pallant got up; she stood there looking down at me. "You
make my reparation--my expiation--difficult!" And leaving me still more
astonished she moved along the terrace.

I overtook her presently and repeated her words. "Your reparation--your
expiation? What on earth are you talking about?"

"You know perfectly what I mean--it's too magnanimous of you to pretend
you don't."

"Well, at any rate," I said, "I don't see what good it does me, or what
it makes up to me for, that you should abuse your daughter."

"Oh I don't care; I shall save him!" she cried as we went, and with an
extravagance, as I felt, of sincerity. At the same moment two ladies,
apparently English, came toward us--scattered groups had been sitting
there and the inmates of the hotel were moving to and fro--and I
observed the immediate charming transition, the fruit of such years
of social practice, by which, as they greeted us, her tension and her
impatience dropped to recognition and pleasure. They stopped to speak
to her and she enquired with sweet propriety as to the "continued
improvement" of their sister. I strolled on and she presently rejoined
me; after which she had a peremptory note. "Come away from this--come
down into the garden." We descended to that blander scene, strolled
through it and paused on the border of the lake.




V

The charm of the evening had deepened, the stillness was like a solemn
expression on a beautiful face and the whole air of the place divine.
In the fading light my nephew's boat was too far out to be perceived.
I looked for it a little and then, as I gave it up, remarked that from
such an excursion as that, on such a lake and at such an hour, a young
man and a young woman of common sensibility could only come back doubly
pledged to each other.

To this observation Mrs. Pallant's answer was, superficially at least,
irrelevant; she said after a pause: "With you, my dear man, one has
certainly to dot one's 'i's.' Haven't you discovered, and didn't I tell
you at Homburg, that we're miserably poor?"

"Isn't 'miserably' rather too much--living as you are at an expensive
hotel?"

Well, she promptly met this. "They take us en pension, for ever so
little a day. I've been knocking about Europe long enough to learn all
sorts of horrid arts. Besides, don't speak of hotels; we've spent half
our life in them and Linda told me only last night that she hoped never
to put her foot into one again. She feels that when she comes to such a
place as this she ought, if things were decently right, to find a villa
of her own."

"Then her companion there's perfectly competent to give her one. Don't
think I've the least desire to push them into each other's arms--I only
ask to wash my hands of them. But I should like to know why you want, as
you said just now, to save him. When you speak as if your daughter were
a monster I take it you're not serious."

She was facing me in the rich short twilight, and to describe herself as
immeasurably more serious perhaps than she had ever been in her life she
had only to look at me without protestation. "It's Linda's standard. God
knows I myself could get on! She's ambitious, luxurious, determined to
have what she wants--more 'on the make' than any one I've ever seen.
Of course it's open to you to tell me it's my own fault, that I was
so before her and have made her so. But does that make me like it any
better?"

"Dear Mrs. Pallant, you're wonderful, you're terrible," I could only
stammer, lost in the desert of my thoughts.

"Oh yes, you've made up your mind about me; you see me in a certain way
and don't like the trouble of changing. Votre siege est fait. But you'll
HAVE to change--if you've any generosity!" Her eyes shone in the summer
dusk and the beauty of her youth came back to her.

"Is this a part of the reparation, of the expiation?" I demanded. "I
don't see what you ever did to Archie."

"It's enough that he belongs to you. But it isn't for you I do it--it's
for myself," she strangely went on.

"Doubtless you've your own reasons--which I can't penetrate. But can't
you sacrifice something else? Must you sacrifice your only child?"

"My only child's my punishment, my only child's my stigma!" she cried in
her exaltation.

"It seems to me rather that you're hers."

"Hers? What does SHE know of such things?--what can she ever feel? She's
cased in steel; she has a heart of marble. It's true--it's true," said
Louisa Pallant. "She appals me!"

I laid my hand on my poor friend's; I uttered, with the intention of
checking and soothing her, the first incoherent words that came into my
head and I drew her toward a bench a few steps away. She dropped upon
it; I placed myself near her and besought her to consider well what she
said. She owed me nothing and I wished no one injured, no one denounced
or exposed for my sake.

"For your sake? Oh I'm not thinking of you!" she answered; and indeed
the next moment I thought my words rather fatuous. "It's a satisfaction
to my own conscience--for I HAVE one, little as you may think I've a
right to speak of it. I've been punished by my sin itself. I've been
hideously worldly, I've thought only of that, and I've taught her to be
so--to do the same. That's the only instruction I've ever given her, and
she has learned the lesson so well that now I see it stamped there in
all her nature, on all her spirit and on all her form, I'm horrified at
my work. For years we've lived that way; we've thought of nothing else.
She has profited so well by my beautiful influence that she has gone far
beyond the great original. I say I'm horrified," Mrs. Pallant dreadfully
wound up, "because she's horrible."

"My poor extravagant friend," I pleaded, "isn't it still more so to hear
a mother say such things?"

"Why so, if they're abominably true? Besides, I don't care what I say if
I save him."

I could only gape again at this least expected of all my adventures. "Do
you expect me then to repeat to him--?"

"Not in the least," she broke in; "I'll do it myself." At this I uttered
some strong inarticulate protest, but she went on with the grimmest
simplicity: "I was very glad at first, but it would have been better if
we hadn't met."

"I don't agree to that, for you interest me," I rather ruefully
professed, "immensely."

"I don't care if I do--so I interest HIM."

"You must reflect then that your denunciation can only strike me as,
for all its violence, vague and unconvincing. Never had a girl less the
appearance of bearing such charges out. You know how I've admired her."

"You know nothing about her! _I_ do, you see, for she's the work of my
hand!" And Mrs. Pallant laughed for bitterness. "I've watched her for
years, and little by little, for the last two or three, it has come over
me. There's not a tender spot in her whole composition. To arrive at a
brilliant social position, if it were necessary, she would see me drown
in this lake without lifting a finger, she would stand there and see
it--she would push me in--and never feel a pang. That's my young lady!"
Her lucidity chilled me to the soul--it seemed to shine so flawless. "To
climb up to the top and be splendid and envied there," she went on--"to
do that at any cost or by any meanness and cruelty is the only thing she
has a heart for. She'd lie for it, she'd steal for it, she'd kill for
it!" My companion brought out these words with a cold confidence that
had evidently behind it some occult past process of growth. I watched
her pale face and glowing eyes; she held me breathless and frowning, but
her strange vindictive, or at least retributive, passion irresistibly
imposed itself. I found myself at last believing her, pitying her more
than I pitied the subject of her dreadful analysis. It was as if she had
held her tongue for longer than she could bear, suffering more and more
the importunity of the truth. It relieved her thus to drag that to the
light, and still she kept up the high and most unholy sacrifice. "God
in his mercy has let me see it in time, but his ways are strange that he
has let me see it in my daughter. It's myself he has let me see--myself
as I was for years. But she's worse--she IS, I assure you; she's worse
than I intended or dreamed." Her hands were clasped tightly together in
her lap; her low voice quavered and her breath came short; she looked up
at the southern stars as if THEY would understand.

"Have you ever spoken to her as you speak to me?" I finally asked. "Have
you ever put before her this terrible arraignment?"

"Put it before her? How can I put it before her when all she would have
to say would be: 'You, YOU, you base one, who made me--?'"

"Then why do you want to play her a trick?"

"I'm not bound to tell you, and you wouldn't see my point if I did. I
should play that boy a far worse one if I were to stay my hand."

Oh I had my view of this. "If he loves her he won't believe a word you
say."

"Very possibly, but I shall have done my duty."

"And shall you say to him," I asked, "simply what you've said to me?"

"Never mind what I shall say to him. It will be something that will
perhaps helpfully affect him. Only," she added with her proud decision,
"I must lose no time."

"If you're so bent on gaining time," I said, "why did you let her go out
in the boat with him?"

"Let her? how could I prevent it?"

"But she asked your permission."

"Ah that," she cried, "is all a part of all the comedy!"

It fairly hushed me to silence, and for a moment more she said nothing.
"Then she doesn't know you hate her?" I resumed.

"I don't know what she knows. She has depths and depths, and all of them
bad. Besides, I don't hate her in the least; I just pity her for what
I've made of her. But I pity still more the man who may find himself
married to her."

"There's not much danger of there being any such person," I wailed, "at
the rate you go on."

"I beg your pardon--there's a perfect possibility," said my companion.
"She'll marry--she'll marry 'well.' She'll marry a title as well as a
fortune.

"It's a pity my nephew hasn't a title," I attempted the grimace of
suggesting.

She seemed to wonder. "I see you think I want that, and that I'm acting
a part. God forgive you! Your suspicion's perfectly natural. How can any
one TELL," asked Louisa Pallant--"with people like us?"

Her utterance of these words brought tears to my eyes. I laid my hand
on her arm, holding her a while, and we looked at each other through the
dusk. "You couldn't do more if he were my son."

"Oh if he had been your son he'd have kept out of it! I like him for
himself. He's simple and sane and honest--he needs affection."

"He would have quite the most remarkable of mothers-in-law!" I
commented.

Mrs. Pallant gave a small dry laugh--she wasn't joking. We lingered
by the lake while I thought over what she had said to me and while she
herself apparently thought. I confess that even close at her side and
under the strong impression of her sincerity, her indifference to the
conventional graces, my imagination, my constitutional scepticism began
to range. Queer ideas came into my head. Was the comedy on HER side and
not on the girl's, and was she posturing as a magnanimous woman at
poor Linda's expense? Was she determined, in spite of the young lady's
preference, to keep her daughter for a grander personage than a young
American whose dollars were not numerous enough--numerous as they
were--to make up for his want of high relationships, and had she
invented at once the boldest and the subtlest of games in order to keep
the case in her hands? If she was prepared really to address herself to
Archie she would have to go very far to overcome the mistrust he would
be sure to feel at a proceeding superficially so sinister? Was she
prepared to go far enough? The answer to these doubts was simply the way
I had been touched--it came back to me the next moment--when she used
the words "people like us." Their effect was to wring my heart. She
seemed to kneel in the dust, and I felt in a manner ashamed that I had
let her sink to it. She said to me at last that I must wait no longer, I
must go away before the young people came back. They were staying long,
too long; all the more reason then she should deal with my nephew that
night. I must drive back to Stresa, or if I liked I could go on foot:
it wasn't far--for an active man. She disposed of me freely, she was so
full of her purpose; and after we had quitted the garden and returned to
the terrace above she seemed almost to push me to leave her--I felt her
fine consecrated hands fairly quiver on my shoulders. I was ready to do
as she prescribed; she affected me painfully, she had given me a "turn,"
and I wanted to get away from her. But before I went I asked her why
Linda should regard my young man as such a parti; it didn't square after
all with her account of the girl's fierce ambitions. By that account
these favours to one so graceless were a woeful waste of time.

"Oh she has worked it all out; she has regarded the question in every
light," said Mrs. Pallant. "If she has made up her mind it's because she
sees what she can do."

"Do you mean that she has talked it over with you?"

My friend's wonderful face pitied my simplicity. "Lord! for what do you
take us? We don't talk things over to-day. We know each other's point of
view and only have to act. We observe the highest proprieties of speech.
We never for a moment name anything ugly--we only just go at it. We can
take definitions, which are awkward things, for granted."

"But in this case," I nevertheless urged, "the poor thing can't possibly
be aware of your point of view."

"No," she conceded--"that's because I haven't played fair. Of course she
couldn't expect I'd cheat. There ought to be honour among thieves. But
it was open to her to do the same."

"What do you mean by the same?"

"She might have fallen in love with a poor man. Then I should have been
'done.'"

"A rich one's better; he can do more," I replied with conviction.

At this she appeared to have, in the oddest way, a momentary revulsion.
"So you'd have reason to know if you had led the life that we have!
Never to have had really enough--I mean to do just the few simple things
we've wanted; never to have had the sinews of war, I suppose you'd call
them, the funds for a campaign; to have felt every day and every hour
the hard eternal pinch and found the question of dollars and cents--and
so horridly few of them--mixed up with every experience, with every
impulse: that DOES make one mercenary, does make money seem a good
beyond all others; which it's quite natural it should! And it's why
Linda's of the opinion that a fortune's always a fortune. She knows all
about that of your nephew, how it's invested, how it may be expected to
increase, exactly on what sort of footing it would enable her to live.
She has decided that it's enough, and enough is as good as a feast. She
thinks she could lead him by the nose, and I dare say she could. She'll
of course make him live in these countries; she hasn't the slightest
intention of casting her pearls--but basta!" said my friend. "I think
she has views upon London, because in England he can hunt and shoot, and
that will make him leave her more or less to herself."

"I don't know about his leaving her to herself, but it strikes me that
he would like the rest of that matter very much," I returned. "That's
not at all a bad programme even from Archie's point of view."

"It's no use thinking of princes," she pursued as if she hadn't heard
me. "They're most of them more in want of money even than we. Therefore
'greatness' is out of the question--we really recognised that at an
early stage. Your nephew's exactly the sort of young man we've always
built upon--if he wasn't, so impossibly, your nephew. From head to foot
he was made on purpose. Dear Linda was her mother's own daughter when
she recognised him on the spot! One's enough of a prince to-day when
one's the right American: such a wonderful price is set on one's
not being the wrong! It does as well as anything and it's a great
simplification. If you don't believe me go to London and see." She had
come with me out to the road. I had said I would walk back to Stresa and
we stood there in the sweet dark warmth. As I took her hand, bidding
her good-night, I couldn't but exhale a compassion. "Poor Linda, poor
Linda!"

"Oh she'll live to do better," said Mrs. Pallant.

"How can she do better--since you've described all she finds Archie as
perfection?"

She knew quite what she meant. "Ah better for HIM!"

I still had her hand--I still sought her eyes. "How came it you could
throw me over--such a woman as you?"

"Well, my friend, if I hadn't thrown you over how could I do this for
you?" On which, disengaging herself, she turned quickly away.




VI

I don't know how deeply she flushed as she made, in the form of her
question, this avowal, which was a retraction of a former denial and
the real truth, as I permitted myself to believe; but was aware of the
colour of my own cheeks while I took my way to Stresa--a walk of half an
hour--in the attenuating night. The new and singular character in which
she had appeared to me produced in me an emotion that would have made
sitting still in a carriage impossible. This same stress kept me up
after I had reached my hotel; as I knew I shouldn't sleep it was useless
to go to bed. Long, however, as I deferred this ceremony, Archie had
not reappeared when the inn-lights began here and there to be dispensed
with. I felt even slightly anxious for him, wondering at possible
mischances. Then I reflected that in case of an accident on the lake,
that is of his continued absence from Baveno--Mrs. Pallant would already
have dispatched me a messenger. It was foolish moreover to suppose
anything could have happened to him after putting off from Baveno by
water to rejoin me, for the evening was absolutely windless and more
than sufficiently clear and the lake as calm as glass. Besides I had
unlimited confidence in his power to take care of himself in a much
tighter place. I went to my room at last; his own was at some distance,
the people of the hotel not having been able--it was the height of
the autumn season--to make us contiguous. Before I went to bed I had
occasion to ring for a servant, and I then learned by a chance enquiry
that my nephew had returned an hour before and had gone straight to
his own quarters. I hadn't supposed he could come in without my seeing
him--I was wandering about the saloons and terraces--and it had not
occurred to me to knock at his door. I had half a mind to do so now--I
was so anxious as to how I should find him; but I checked myself, for
evidently he had wanted to dodge me. This didn't diminish my curiosity,
and I slept even less than I had expected. His so markedly shirking our
encounter--for if he hadn't perceived me downstairs he might have looked
for me in my room--was a sign that Mrs. Pallant's interview with him
would really have come off. What had she said to him? What strong
measures had she taken? That almost morbid resolution I still seemed to
hear the ring of pointed to conceivable extremities that I shrank from
considering. She had spoken of these things while we parted there as
something she would do for me; but I had made the mental comment in
walking away from her that she hadn't done it yet. It wouldn't truly be
done till Archie had truly backed out. Perhaps it was done by this time;
his avoiding me seemed almost a proof. That was what I thought of most
of the night. I spent a considerable part of it at my window, looking
out to the couchant Alps. HAD he thought better of it?--was he making up
his mind to think better of it? There was a strange contradiction in the
matter; there were in fact more contradictions than ever. I had taken
from Louisa what she told me of Linda, and yet that other idea made me
ashamed of my nephew. I was sorry for the girl; I regretted her loss of
a great chance, if loss it was to be; and yet I hoped her mother's grand
treachery--I didn't know what to call it--had been at least, to her
lover, thoroughgoing. It would need strong action in that lady to
justify his retreat. For him too I was sorry--if she had made on him the
impression she desired. Once or twice I was on the point of getting into
my dressing-gown and going forth to condole with him. I was sure he
too had jumped up from his bed and was looking out of his window at the
everlasting hills.

But I am bound to say that when we met in the morning for breakfast he
showed few traces of ravage. Youth is strange; it has resources that
later experience seems only to undermine. One of these is the masterly
resource of beautiful blankness. As we grow older and cleverer we think
that too simple, too crude; we dissimulate more elaborately, but with an
effect much less baffling. My young man looked not in the least as if he
had lain awake or had something on his mind; and when I asked him what
he had done after my premature departure--I explained this by saying I
had been tired of waiting for him; fagged with my journey I had wanted
to go to bed--he replied: "Oh nothing in particular. I hung about the
place; I like it better than this one. We had an awfully jolly time
on the water. _I_ wasn't in the least fagged." I didn't worry him with
questions; it struck me as gross to try to probe his secret. The only
indication he gave was on my saying after breakfast that I should go
over again to see our friends and my appearing to take for granted he
would be glad to come too. Then he let fall that he'd stop at Stresa--he
had paid them such a tremendous visit; also that he had arrears of
letters. There was a freshness in his scruples about the length of his
visits, and I knew something about his correspondence, which consisted
entirely of twenty pages every week from his mother. But he soothed my
anxiety so little that it was really this yearning that carried me back
to Baveno. This time I ordered a conveyance, and as I got into it he
stood watching me from the porch of the hotel with his hands in his
pockets. Then it was for the first time that I saw in the poor youth's
face the expression of a person slightly dazed, slightly foolish even,
to whom something disagreeable has happened. Our eyes met as I observed
him, and I was on the point of saying "You had really better come with
me" when he turned away. He went into the house as to escape my call. I
said to myself that he had been indeed warned off, but that it wouldn't
take much to bring him back.

The servant to whom I spoke at Baveno described my friends as in a
summer-house in the garden, to which he led the way. The place at large
had an empty air; most of the inmates of the hotel were dispersed on
the lake, on the hills, in picnics, excursions, visits to the
Borromean Islands. My guide was so far right as that Linda was in
the summer-house, but she was there alone. On finding this the case
I stopped short, rather awkwardly--I might have been, from the way I
suddenly felt, an unmasked hypocrite, a proved conspirator against her
security and honour. But there was no embarrassment in lovely Linda; she
looked up with a cry of pleasure from the book she was reading and held
out her hand with engaging frankness. I felt again as if I had no right
to that favour, which I pretended not to have noticed. This gave no
chill, however, to her pretty manner; she moved a roll of tapestry
off the bench so that I might sit down; she praised the place as a
delightful shady corner. She had never been fresher, fairer, kinder; she
made her mother's awful talk about her a hideous dream. She told me
her mother was coming to join her; she had remained indoors to write
a letter. One couldn't write out there, though it was so nice in other
respects: the table refused to stand firm. They too then had pretexts
of letters between them--I judged this a token that the situation was
tense. It was the only one nevertheless that Linda gave: like Archie she
was young enough to carry it off. She had been used to seeing us always
together, yet she made no comment on my having come over without him. I
waited in vain for her to speak of this--it would only be natural; her
omission couldn't but have a sense. At last I remarked that my nephew
was very unsociable that morning; I had expected him to join me, but he
hadn't seemed to see the attraction.

"I'm very glad. You can tell him that if you like," said Linda Pallant.

I wondered at her. "If I tell him he'll come at once."

"Then don't tell him; I don't want him to come. He stayed too long last
night," she went on, "and kept me out on the water till I don't know
what o'clock. That sort of thing isn't done here, you know, and every
one was shocked when we came back--or rather, you see, when we didn't! I
begged him to bring me in, but he wouldn't. When we did return--I almost
had to take the oars myself--I felt as if every one had been sitting up
to time us, to stare at us. It was awfully awkward."

These words much impressed me; and as I have treated the reader to
most of the reflexions--some of them perhaps rather morbid--in which I
indulged on the subject of this young lady and her mother, I may as
well complete the record and let him know that I now wondered whether
Linda--candid and accomplished maiden--entertained the graceful thought
of strengthening her hold of Archie by attempting to prove he had
"compromised" her. "Ah no doubt that was the reason he had a bad
conscience last evening!" I made answer. "When he came back to Stresa he
sneaked off to his room; he wouldn't look me in the face."

But my young lady was not to be ruffled. "Mamma was so vexed that she
took him apart and gave him a scolding. And to punish ME she sent me
straight to bed. She has very old-fashioned ideas--haven't you, mamma?"
she added, looking over my head at Mrs. Pallant, who had just come in
behind me.

I forget how her mother met Linda's appeal; Louisa stood there with two
letters, sealed and addressed, in her hand. She greeted me gaily and
then asked her daughter if she were possessed of postage-stamps.
Linda consulted a well-worn little pocket-book and confessed herself
destitute; whereupon her mother gave her the letters with the request
that she would go into the hotel, buy the proper stamps at the office,
carefully affix them and put the letters into the box. She was to pay
for the stamps, not have them put on the bill--a preference for which
Mrs. Pallant gave reasons. I had bought some at Stresa that morning and
was on the point of offering them when, apparently having guessed my
intention, the elder lady silenced me with a look. Linda announced
without reserve that she hadn't money and Louisa then fumbled for a
franc. When she had found and bestowed it the girl kissed her before
going off with the letters.

"Darling mother, you haven't any too many of them, have you?" she
murmured; and she gave me, sidelong, as she left us, the prettiest
half-comical, half-pitiful smile.

"She's amazing--she's amazing," said Mrs. Pallant as we looked at each
other.

"Does she know what you've done?"

"She knows I've done something and she's making up her mind what it is.
She'll satisfy herself in the course of the next twenty-four hours--if
your nephew doesn't come back. I think I can promise you he won't."

"And won't she ask you?"

"Never!"

"Shan't you tell her? Can you sit down together in this summer-house,
this divine day, with such a dreadful thing as that between you?"

My question found my friend quite ready. "Don't you remember what I
told you about our relations--that everything was implied between us
and nothing expressed? The ideas we have had in common--our perpetual
worldliness, our always looking out for chances--are not the sort of
thing that can be uttered conveniently between persons who like to keep
up forms, as we both do: so that, always, if we've understood each other
it has been enough. We shall understand each other now, as we've always
done, and nothing will be changed. There has always been something
between us that couldn't be talked about."

"Certainly, she's amazing--she's amazing," I repeated; "but so are you."
And then I asked her what she had said to my boy.

She seemed surprised. "Hasn't he told you?"

"No, and he never will."

"I'm glad of that," she answered simply.

"But I'm not sure he won't come back. He didn't this morning, but he had
already half a mind to."

"That's your imagination," my companion said with her fine authority.
"If you knew what I told him you'd be sure."

"And you won't let me know?"

"Never, dear friend."

"And did he believe you?"

"Time will show--but I think so."

"And how did you make it plausible to him that you should take so
unnatural a course?"

For a moment she said nothing, only looking at me. Then at last: "I told
him the truth."

"The truth?"

"Take him away--take him away!" she broke out. "That's why I got rid of
Linda, to tell you you mustn't stay--you must leave Stresa to-morrow.
This time it's you who must do it. I can't fly from you again--it costs
too much!" And she smiled strangely.

"Don't be afraid; don't be afraid. We'll break camp again to-morrow--ah
me! But I want to go myself," I added. I took her hand in farewell, but
spoke again while I held it. "The way you put it, about Linda, was very
bad?"

"It was horrible."

I turned away--I felt indeed that I couldn't stay. She kept me from
going to the hotel, as I might meet Linda coming back, which I was far
from wishing to do, and showed me another way into the road. Then she
turned round to meet her daughter and spend the rest of the morning
there with her, spend it before the bright blue lake and the snowy
crests of the Alps. When I reached Stresa again I found my young man
had gone off to Milan--to see the cathedral, the servant said--leaving a
message for me to the effect that, as he shouldn't be back for a day or
two, though there were numerous trains, he had taken a few clothes. The
next day I received telegram-notice that he had determined to go on to
Venice and begged I would forward the rest of his luggage. "Please don't
come after me," this missive added; "I want to be alone; I shall do no
harm." That sounded pathetic to me, in the light of what I knew, and I
was glad to leave him to his own devices. He proceeded to Venice and I
re-crossed the Alps. For several weeks after this I expected to discover
that he had rejoined Mrs. Pallant; but when we met that November in
Paris I saw he had nothing to hide from me save indeed the secret of
what our extraordinary friend had said to him. This he concealed from
me then and has concealed ever since. He returned to America before
Christmas--when I felt the crisis over. I've never again seen the
wronger of my youth. About a year after our more recent adventure her
daughter Linda married, in London, a young Englishman the heir to a
large fortune, a fortune acquired by his father in some prosaic but
flourishing industry. Mrs. Gimingham's admired photographs--such is
Linda's present name--may be obtained from the principal stationers. I
am convinced her mother was sincere. My nephew has not even yet changed
his state, my sister at last thinks it high time. I put before her as
soon as I next saw her the incidents here recorded, and--such is the
inconsequence of women--nothing can exceed her reprobation of Louisa
Pallant.








End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Louisa Pallant, by Henry James

*** 