‘Ah, most kind of you to come so soon. Couldn’t you turn up at dinner?’
‘At dinner?’ Paul Overt repeated, not liking to ask whom St George was going to marry, but thinking only of that.
‘There are several people, I believe. Certainly St George. Or afterwards, if you like better. I believe my daughter expects—.’ He appeared to notice something in Overt’s upward face (on his steps he stood higher) which led him to interrupt himself, and the interruption gave him a momentary sense of awkwardness, from which he sought a quick issue. ‘Perhaps then you haven’t heard she’s to be married.’
‘To be married?’ Paul stared.
‘To Mr St George – it has just been settled. Odd marriage, isn’t it?’ Paul uttered no opinion on this point: he only continued to stare. ‘But I daresay it will do – she’s so awfully literary!’ said the General.
Paul had turned very red. ‘Oh, it’s a surprise – very interesting, very charming! I’m afraid I can’t dine – so many thanks!’
‘Well, you must come to the wedding!’ cried the General. ‘Oh, I remember that day at Summersoft. He’s a very good fellow.’
‘Charming – charming!’ Paul stammered, retreating. He shook hands with the General and got off. His face was red and he had the sense of its growing more and more crimson. All the evening at home – he went straight to his rooms and remained there dinnerless – his cheek burned at intervals as if it had been smitten. He didn’t understand what had happened to him, what trick had been played him, what treachery practised. ‘None, none,’ he said to himself. ‘I’ve nothing to do with it. I’m out of it – it’s none of my business.’ But that bewildered murmur was followed again and again by the incongruous ejaculation – ‘Was it a plan – was it a plan?’ Sometimes he cried to himself, breathless, ‘Am I a dupe – am I a dupe?’ If he was, he was an absurd and abject one. It seemed to him he had never lost her till now. He had renounced her, yes; but that was another affair – that was a closed but not a locked door. Now he felt as if the door had been slammed in his face. Did he expect her to wait – was she to give him his time like that: two years at a stretch? He didn’t know what he had expected – he only knew what he hadn’t. It wasn’t this – it wasn’t this. Mystification, bitterness and wrath rose and boiled in him when he thought of the deference, the devotion, the credulity with which he had listened to St George. The evening wore on and the light was long; but even when it had darkened he remained without a lamp. He had flung himself on the sofa, and he lay there through the hours with his eyes either closed or gazing into the gloom, in the attitude of a man teaching himself to bear something, to bear having been made a fool of. He had made it too easy – that idea passed over him like a hot wave. Suddenly, as he heard eleven o’clock strike, he jumped up, remembering what General Fancourt had said about his coming after dinner. He would go – he would see her at least; perhaps he should see what it meant. He felt as if some of the elements of a hard sum had been given him and the others were wanting: he couldn’t do his sum till he was in possession of them all.
He dressed quickly, so that by half-past eleven he was at Manchester Square. There were a good many carriages at the door – a party was going on; a circumstance which at the last gave him a slight relief, for now he would rather see her in a crowd. People passed him on the staircase; they were going away, going ‘on’, with the hunted, herdlike movement of London society at night. But sundry groups remained in the drawing-room, and it was some minutes, as she didn’t hear him announced, before he discovered her and spoke to her. In this short interval he had perceived that St George was there, talking to a lady before the fireplace; but he looked away from him, for the moment, and therefore failed to see whether the author of Shadowmere noticed him. At all events he didn’t come to him. Miss Fancourt did, as soon as she saw him; she almost rushed at him, smiling, rustling, radiant, beautiful. He had forgotten what her head, what her face offered to the sight; she was in white, there were gold figures on her dress, and her hair was like a casque of gold. In a single moment he saw she was happy, happy with a kind of aggressiveness, of splendour. But she would not speak to him of that, she would speak only of himself.
‘I’m so delighted; my father told me. How kind of you to come!’ She struck him as so fresh and brave, while his eyes moved over her, that he said to himself, irresistibly: ‘Why to him, why not to youth, to strength, to ambition, to a future? Why, in her rich young capacity, to failure, to abdication, to superannuation?’ In his thought, at that sharp moment, he blasphemed even against all that had been left of his faith in the peccable master. ‘I’m so sorry I missed you,’ she went on. ‘My father told me. How charming of you to have come so soon!’
‘Does that surprise you?’ Paul Overt asked.
‘The first day? No, from you – nothing that’s nice.’ She was interrupted by a lady who bade her good-night, and he seemed to read that it cost her nothing to speak to one in that tone; it was her old bounteous, demonstrative way, with a certain added amplitude that time had brought; and if it began to operate on the spot, at such a juncture in her history, perhaps in the other days too it had meant just as little or as much – a sort of mechanical charity, with the difference now that she was satisfied, ready to give but asking nothing. Oh, she was satisfied – and why shouldn’t she be? Why shouldn’t she have been surprised at his coming the first day – for all the good she had ever got from him? As the lady continued to hold her attention Paul Overt turned from her with a strange irritation in his complicated artistic soul and a kind of disinterested disappointment. She was so happy that it was almost stupid – it seemed to deny the extraordinary intelligence he had formerly found in her. Didn’t she know how bad St George could be, hadn’t she perceived the deplorable thinness—? If she didn’t she was nothing, and if she did why such an insolence of serenity? This question expired as our young man’s eyes settled at last upon the genius who had advised him in a great crisis. St George was still before the chimney-piece, but now he was alone (fixed, waiting, as if he meant to remain after every one), and he met the clouded gaze of the young friend who was tormented with uncertainty as to whether he had the right (which his resentment would have enjoyed) to regard himself as his victim. Somehow, the fantastic inquiry I have just noted was answered by St George’s aspect. It was as fine in its way as Marian Fancourt’s – it denoted the happy human being; but somehow it represented to Paul Overt that the author of Shadowmere had now definitively ceased to count – ceased to count as a writer. As he smiled a welcome across the room he was almost banal, he was almost smug. Paul had the impression that for a moment he hesitated to make a movement forward, as if he had a bad conscience; but the next they had met in the middle of the room and had shaken hands, expressively, cordially on St George’s part. Then they had passed together to where the elder man had been standing, while St George said: ‘I hope you are never going away again. I have been dining here; the General told me.’ He was handsome, he was young, he looked as if he had still a great fund of life. He bent the friendliest, most unconfessing eyes upon Paul Overt; asked him about everything, his health, his plans, his late occupations, the new book. ‘When will it be out – soon, soon, I hope? Splendid, eh? That’s right; you’re a comfort! I’ve read you all over again, the last six months.’ Paul waited to see if he would tell him what the General had told him in the afternoon, and what Miss Fancourt, verbally at least, of course had not. But as it didn’t come out he asked at last: ‘Is it true, the great news I hear, that you’re to be married?’
‘Ah, you have heard it then?’
‘Didn’t the General tell you?’ Paul Overt went on.
‘Tell me what?’
‘That he mentioned it to me this afternoon?’
‘My dear fellow, I don’t remember. We’ve been in the midst of people. I’m sorry, in that case, that I lose the pleasure, myself, of announcing to you a fact that touches me so nearly. It is a fact, strange as it may appear. It has only just be
come one. Isn’t it ridiculous?’ St George made this speech without confusion, but on the other hand, so far as Paul could see, without latent impudence. It appeared to his interlocutor that, to talk so comfortably and coolly, he must simply have forgotten what had passed between them. His next words, however, showed that he had not, and they had, as an appeal to Paul’s own memory, an effect which would have been ludicrous if it had not been cruel. ‘Do you recollect the talk we had at my house that night, into which Miss Fancourt’s name entered? I’ve often thought of it since.’
‘Yes – no wonder you said what you did,’ said Paul, looking at him.
‘In the light of the present occasion? Ah! but there was no light then. How could I have foreseen this hour?’
‘Didn’t you think it probable?’
‘Upon my honour, no,’ said Henry St George. ‘Certainly, I owe you that assurance. Think how my situation has changed.’
‘I see – I see,’ Paul murmured.
His companion went on, as if, now that the subject had been broached, he was, as a man of imagination and tact, perfectly ready to give every satisfaction – being able to enter fully into everything another might feel. ‘But it’s not only that – for honestly, at my age, I never dreamed – a widower, with big boys and with so little else! It has turned out differently from any possible calculation, and I am fortunate beyond all measure. She has been so free, and yet she consents. Better than any one else perhaps – for I remember how you liked her, before you went away, and how she liked you – you can intelligently congratulate me.’
‘She has been so free!’ Those words made a great impression on Paul Overt, and he almost writhed under that irony in them as to which it little mattered whether it was intentional or casual. Of course she had been free and, appreciably perhaps, by his own act; for was not St George’s allusion to her having liked him a part of the irony too? ‘I thought that by your theory you disapproved of a writer’s marrying.’
‘Surely – surely. But you don’t call me a writer?’
‘You ought to be ashamed,’ said Paul.
‘Ashamed of marrying again?’
‘I won’t say that – but ashamed of your reasons.’
‘You must let me judge of them, my friend.’
‘Yes; why not? For you judged wonderfully of mine.’
The tone of these words appeared suddenly, for Henry St George, to suggest the unsuspected. He stared as if he read a bitterness in them. ‘Don’t you think I have acted fair?’
‘You might have told me at the time, perhaps.’
‘My dear fellow, when I say I couldn’t pierce futurity!’
‘I mean afterwards.’
St George hesitated. ‘After my wife’s death?’
‘When this idea came to you.’
‘Ah, never, never! I wanted to save you, rare and precious as you are.’
‘Are you marrying Miss Fancourt to save me?’
‘Not absolutely, but it adds to the pleasure. I shall be the making of you,’ said St George, smiling. ‘I was greatly struck, after our talk, with the resolute way you quitted the country and still more, perhaps, with your force of character in remaining abroad. You’re very strong – you’re wonderfully strong.’
Paul Overt tried to sound his pleasant eyes; the strange thing was that he appeared sincere – not a mocking fiend. He turned away, and as he did so he heard St George say something about his giving them the proof, being the joy of his old age. He faced him again, taking another look. ‘Do you mean to say you’ve stopped writing?’
‘My dear fellow, of course I have. It’s too late. Didn’t I tell you?’
‘I can’t believe it!’
‘Of course you can’t – with your own talent! No, no; for the rest of my life I shall only read you.’
‘Does she know that – Miss Fancourt?’
‘She will – she will.’ Our young man wondered whether St George meant this as a covert intimation that the assistance he should derive from that young lady’s fortune, moderate as it was, would make the difference of putting it in his power to cease to work, ungratefully, an exhausted vein. Somehow, standing there in the ripeness of his successful manhood, he did not suggest that any of his veins were exhausted. ‘Don’t you remember the moral I offered myself to you – that night – as pointing?’ St George continued. ‘Consider, at any rate, the warning I am at present.’
This was too much – he was the mocking fiend. Paul separated from him with a mere nod for good-night; the sense that he might come back to him some time in the far future but could not fraternise with him now. It was necessary to his sore spirit to believe for the hour that he had a grievance – all the more cruel for not being a legal one. It was doubtless in the attitude of hugging this wrong that he descended the stairs without taking leave of Miss Fancourt, who had not been in view at the moment he quitted the room. He was glad to get out into the honest, dusky, unsophisticating night, to move fast, to take his way home on foot. He walked a long time, missing his way, not thinking of it. He was thinking of too many other things. His steps recovered their direction, however, and at the end of an hour he found himself before his door, in the small, inexpensive, empty street. He lingered, questioning himself still, before going in, with nothing around and above him but moonless blackness, a bad lamp or two and a few far-away dim stars. To these last faint features he raised his eyes; he had been saying to himself that there would have been mockery indeed if now, on his new foundation, at the end of a year, St George should put forth something with his early quality – something of the type of Shadowmere and finer than his finest. Greatly as he admired his talent Paul literally hoped such an incident would not occur; it seemed to him just then that he scarcely should be able to endure it. St George’s words were still in his ears, ‘You’re very strong – wonderfully strong.’ Was he really? Certainly, he would have to be; and it would be a sort of revenge. Is he? the reader may ask in turn, if his interest has followed the perplexed young man so far. The best answer to that perhaps is that he is doing his best but that it is too soon to say. When the new book came out in the autumn Mr and Mrs St George found it really magnificent. The former still has published nothing, but Paul Overt does not even yet feel safe. I may say for him, however, that if this event were to befall he would really be the very first to appreciate it: which is perhaps a proof that St George was essentially right and that Nature dedicated him to intellectual, not to personal passion.
THE PATAGONIA
I
THE houses were dark in the August night and the perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps, was a foreshortened desert. The club on the hill alone, from its semicylindrical front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in the hot stillness the click of a pair of billiard balls. As ‘every one’ was out of town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure, were profaning the tables. The heat was insufferable and I thought with joy of the morrow, of the deck of the steamer, the freshening breeze, the sense of getting out to sea. I was even glad of what I had learned in the afternoon at the office of the company – that at the eleventh hour an old ship with a lower standard of speed had been put on in place of the vessel in which I had taken my passage. America was roasting, England might very well be stuffy, and a slow passage (which at that season of the year would probably also be a fine one) was a guarantee of ten or twelve days of fresh air.
I strolled down the hill without meeting a creature, though I could see through the palings of the Common that that recreative expanse was peopled with dim forms. I remembered Mrs Nettlepoint’s house – she lived in those days (they are not so distant, but there have been changes) on the waterside, a little way beyond the spot at which the Public Garden terminates; and I reflected that like myself she would be spending the night in Boston if it were true that, as had been mentioned to me a few days before at Mount Desert, she was to embark on the morrow for Liverpool. I presently saw this
appearance confirmed by a light above her door and in two or three of her windows, and I determined to ask for her, having nothing to do till bedtime. I had come out simply to pass an hour, leaving my hotel to the blaze of its gas and the perspiration of its porters; but it occurred to me that my old friend might very well not know of the substitution of the Patagonia for the Scandinavia, so that it would be an act of consideration to prepare her mind. Besides, I could offer to help her, to look after her in the morning: lone women are grateful for support in taking ship for far countries.
As I stood on her doorstep I remembered that as she had a son she might not after all be so lone; yet at the same time it was present to me that Jasper Nettlepoint was not quite a young man to lean upon, having (as I at least supposed) a life of his own and tastes and habits which had long since drawn him away from the maternal side. If he did happen just now to be at home my solicitude would of course seem officious; for in his many wanderings – I believed he had roamed all over the globe – he would certainly have learned how to manage. None the less I was very glad to show Mrs Nettlepoint I thought of her. With my long absence I had lost sight of her; but I had liked her of old; she had been a close friend of my sisters; and I had in regard to her that sense which is pleasant to those who, in general, have grown strange or detached – the feeling that she at least knew all about me. I could trust her at any time to tell people what a respectable person I was. Perhaps I was conscious of how little I deserved this indulgence when it came over me that for years I had not communicated with her. The measure of this neglect was given by my vagueness of mind about her son. However, I really belonged nowadays to a different generation: I was more the old lady’s contemporary than Jasper’s.
Mrs Nettlepoint was at home: I found her in her back drawing-room, where the wide windows opened upon the water. The room was dusky – it was too hot for lamps – and she sat slowly moving her fan and looking out on the little arm of the sea which is so pretty at night, reflecting the lights of Cambridgeport and Charlestown. I supposed she was musing upon the loved ones she was to leave behind, her married daughters, her grandchildren; but she struck a note more specifically Bostonian as she said to me, pointing with her fan to the Back Bay – ‘I shall see nothing more charming than that over there, you know!’ She made me very welcome, but her son had told her about the Patagonia, for which she was sorry, as this would mean a longer voyage. She was a poor creature on shipboard and mainly confined to her cabin, even in weather extravagantly termed fine – as if any weather could be fine at sea.