Great Short Novels of Henry James

  “Well, at any rate, they know that you have been visiting the ‘sights of the metropolis.’ They think—very naturally, as it seems to me—that when you take to visiting the sights of the metropolis with a little American girl, there is serious cause for alarm.” Lord Lambeth responded to this intimation by scornful laughter, and his companion continued, after a pause: “I said just now I didn’t want to know anything about the affair; but I will confess that I am curious to learn whether you propose to marry Miss Bessie Alden.”

  On this point Lord Lambeth gave his interlocutor no immediate satisfaction; he was musing, with a frown. “By Jove,” he said, “they go rather too far. They shall find me dangerous—I promise them.”

  Percy Beaumont began to laugh. “You don’t redeem your promises. You said the other day you would make your mother call.”

  Lord Lambeth continued to meditate. “I asked her to call,” he said simply.

  “And she declined?”

  “Yes; but she shall do it yet.”

  “Upon my word,” said Percy Beaumont, “if she gets much more frightened I believe she will.” Lord Lambeth looked at him, and he went on. “She will go to the girl herself.”

  “How do you mean she will go to her?”

  “She will beg her off, or she will bribe her. She will take strong measures.”

  Lord Lambeth turned away in silence, and his companion watched him take twenty steps and then slowly return. “I have invited Mrs. Westgate and Miss Alden to Branches,” he said, “and this evening I shall name a day.”

  “And shall you invite your mother and your sisters to meet them?”

  “Explicitly!”

  “That will set the duchess off,” said Percy Beaumont. “I suspect she will come.”

  “She may do as she pleases.”

  Beaumont looked at Lord Lambeth. “You do really propose to marry the little sister, then?”

  “I like the way you talk about it!” cried the young man. “She won’t gobble me down; don’t be afraid.”

  “She won’t leave you on your knees,” said Percy Beaumont. “What is the inducement?”

  “You talk about proposing: wait till I have proposed,” Lord Lambeth went on.

  “That’s right, my dear fellow; think about it,” said Percy Beaumont.

  “She’s a charming girl,” pursued his lordship.

  “Of course she’s a charming girl. I don’t know a girl more charming, intrinsically. But there are other charming girls nearer home.”

  “I like her spirit,” observed Lord Lambeth, almost as if he were trying to torment his cousin.

  “What’s the peculiarity of her spirit?”

  “She’s not afraid, and she says things out, and she thinks herself as good as anyone. She is the only girl I have ever seen that was not dying to marry me.”

  “How do you know that, if you haven’t asked her?”

  “I don’t know how; but I know it.”

  “I am sure she asked me questions enough about your property and your titles,” said Beaumont.

  “She has asked me questions, too; no end of them,” Lord Lambeth admitted. “But she asked for information, don’t you know.”

  “Information? Aye, I’ll warrant she wanted it. Depend upon it that she is dying to marry you just as much and just as little as all the rest of them.”

  “I shouldn’t like her to refuse me—I shouldn’t like that.”

  “If the thing would be so disagreeable, then, both to you and to her, in Heaven’s name leave it alone,” said Percy Beaumont.

  Mrs. Westgate, on her side, had plenty to say to her sister about the rarity of Mr. Beaumont’s visits and the nonappearance of the Duchess of Bayswater. She professed, however, to derive more satisfaction from this latter circumstance than she could have done from the most lavish attentions on the part of this great lady. “It is most marked,” she said—“most marked. It is a delicious proof that we have made them miserable. The day we dined with Lord Lambeth I was really sorry for the poor fellow.” It will have been gathered that the entertainment offered by Lord Lambeth to his American friends had not been graced by the presence of his anxious mother. He had invited several choice spirits to meet them; but the ladies of his immediate family were to Mrs. Westgate’s sense—a sense possibly morbidly acute—conspicuous by their absence.

  “I don’t want to express myself in a manner that you dislike,” said Bessie Alden; “but I don’t know why you should have so many theories about Lord Lambeth’s poor mother. You know a great many young men in New York without knowing their mothers.”

  Mrs. Westgate looked at her sister and then turned away. “My dear Bessie, you are superb!” she said.

  “One thing is certain,” the young girl continued. “If I believed I were a cause of annoyance—however unwitting—to Lord Lambeth’s family, I should insist—”

  “Insist upon my leaving England,” said Mrs. Westgate.

  “No, not that. I want to go to the National Gallery again; I want to see Stratford-on-Avon and Canterbury Cathedral. But I should insist upon his coming to see us no more.”

  “That would be very modest and very pretty of you; but you wouldn’t do it now.”

  “Why do you say ‘now?’” asked Bessie Alden. “Have I ceased to be modest?”

  “You care for him too much. A month ago, when you said you didn’t, I believe it was quite true. But at present, my dear child,” said Mrs. Westgate, “you wouldn’t find it quite so simple a matter never to see Lord Lambeth again. I have seen it coming on.”

  “You are mistaken,” said Bessie. “You don’t understand.”

  “My dear child, don’t be perverse,” rejoined her sister.

  “I know him better, certainly, if you mean that,” said Bessie. “And I like him very much. But I don’t like him enough to make trouble for him with his family. However, I don’t believe in that.”

  “I like the way you say ‘however,’” Mrs. Westgate exclaimed. “Come; you would not marry him?”

  “Oh, no,” said the young girl.

  Mrs. Westgate for a moment seemed vexed. “Why not, pray?” she demanded.

  “Because I don’t care to,” said Bessie Alden.

  The morning after Lord Lambeth had had, with Percy Beaumont, that exchange of ideas which has just been narrated, the ladies at Jones’s Hotel received from his lordship a written invitation to pay their projected visit to Branches Castle on the following Tuesday. “I think I have made up a very pleasant party,” the young nobleman said. “Several people whom you know, and my mother and sisters, who have so long been regrettably prevented from making your acquaintance.” Bessie Alden lost no time in calling her sister’s attention to the injustice she had done the Duchess of Bayswater, whose hostility was now proved to be a vain illusion.

  “Wait till you see if she comes,” said Mrs. Westgate. “And if she is to meet us at her son’s house the obligation was all the greater for her to call upon us.”

  Bessie had not to wait long, and it appeared that Lord Lambeth’s mother now accepted Mrs. Westgate’s view of her duties. On the morrow, early in the afternoon, two cards were brought to the apartment of the American ladies—one of them bearing the name of the Duchess of Bayswater and the other that of the Countess of Pimlico. Mrs. Westgate glanced at the clock. “It is not yet four,” she said; “they have come early; they wish to see us. We will receive them.” And she gave orders that her visitors should be admitted. A few moments later they were introduced, and there was a solemn exchange of amenities. The duchess was a large lady, with a fine fresh color; the Countess of Pimlico was very pretty and elegant.

  The duchess looked about her as she sat down—looked not especially at Mrs. Westgate. “I daresay my son has told you that I have been wanting to come and see you,” she observed.

  “You are very kind,” said Mrs. Westgate, vaguely—her conscience not allowing her to assent to this proposition—and, indeed, not permitting her to enunciate her own with any appreciable e
mphasis.

  “He says you were so kind to him in America,” said the duchess.

  “We are very glad,” Mrs. Westgate replied, “to have been able to make him a little more—a little less—a little more comfortable.”

  “I think he stayed at your house,” remarked the Duchess of Bayswater, looking at Bessie Alden.

  “A very short time,” said Mrs. Westgate.

  “Oh!” said the duchess; and she continued to look at Bessie, who was engaged in conversation with her daughter.

  “Do you like London?” Lady Pimlico had asked of Bessie, after looking at her a good deal—at her face and her hands, her dress and her hair.

  “Very much indeed,” said Bessie.

  “Do you like this hotel?”

  “It is very comfortable,” said Bessie.

  “Do you like stopping at hotels?” inquired Lady Pimlico after a pause.

  “I am very fond of traveling,” Bessie answered, “and I suppose hotels are a necessary part of it. But they are not the part I am fondest of.”

  “Oh, I hate traveling,” said the Countess of Pimlico and transferred her attention to Mrs. Westgate.

  “My son tells me you are going to Branches,” the duchess presently resumed.

  “Lord Lambeth has been so good as to ask us,” said Mrs. Westgate, who perceived that her visitor had now begun to look at her, and who had her customary happy consciousness of a distinguished appearance. The only mitigation of her felicity on this point was that, having inspected her visitor’s own costume, she said to herself, “She won’t know how well I am dressed!”

  “He has asked me to go, but I am not sure I shall be able,” murmured the duchess.

  “He had offered us the p-prospect of meeting you,” said Mrs. Westgate.

  “I hate the country at this season,” responded the duchess.

  Mrs. Westgate gave a little shrug. “I think it is pleasanter than London.”

  But the duchess’s eyes were absent again; she was looking very fixedly at Bessie. In a moment she slowly rose, walked to a chair that stood empty at the young girl’s right hand, and silently seated herself. As she was a majestic, voluminous woman, this little transaction had, inevitably, an air of somewhat impressive intention. It diffused a certain awkwardness, which Lady Pimlico, as a sympathetic daughter, perhaps desired to rectify in turning to Mrs. Westgate.

  “I daresay you go out a great deal,” she observed.

  “No, very little. We are strangers, and we didn’t come here for society.”

  “I see,” said Lady Pimlico. “It’s rather nice in town just now.”

  “It’s charming,” said Mrs. Westgate. “But we only go to see a few people—whom we like.”

  “Of course one can’t like everyone,” said Lady Pimlico.

  “It depends upon one’s society,” Mrs. Westgate rejoined.

  The Duchess meanwhile had addressed herself to Bessie. “My son tells me the young ladies in America are so clever.”

  “I am glad they made so good an impression on him,” said Bessie, smiling.

  The Duchess was not smiling; her large fresh face was very tranquil. “He is very susceptible,” she said. “He thinks everyone clever, and sometimes they are.”

  “Sometimes,” Bessie assented, smiling still.

  The duchess looked at her a little and then went on; “Lambeth is very susceptible, but he is very volatile, too.”

  “Volatile?” asked Bessie.

  “He is very inconstant. It won’t do to depend on him.”

  “Ah,” said Bessie, “I don’t recognize that description. We have depended on him greatly—my sister and I—and he has never disappointed us.”

  “He will disappoint you yet,” said the duchess.

  Bessie gave a little laugh, as if she were amused at the duchess’s persistency. “I suppose it will depend on what we expect of him.”

  “The less you expect, the better,” Lord Lambeth’s mother declared.

  “Well,” said Bessie, “we expect nothing unreasonable.”

  The duchess for a moment was silent, though she appeared to have more to say. “Lambeth says he has seen so much of you,” she presently began.

  “He has been to see us very often; he has been very kind,” said Bessie Alden.

  “I daresay you are used to that. I am told there is a great deal of that in America.”

  “A great deal of kindness?” the young girl inquired, smiling.

  “Is that what you call it? I know you have different expressions.”

  “We certainly don’t always understand each other,” said Mrs. Westgate, the termination of whose interview with Lady Pimlico allowed her to give her attention to their elder visitor.

  “I am speaking of the young men calling so much upon the young ladies,” the duchess explained.

  “But surely in England,” said Mrs. Westgate, “the young ladies don’t call upon the young men?”

  “Some of them do—almost!” Lady Pimlico declared. “What the young men are a great parti.”

  “Bessie, you must make a note of that,” said Mrs. Westgate. “My sister,” she added, “is a model traveler. She writes down all the curious facts she hears in a little book she keeps for the purpose.”

  The duchess was a little flushed; she looked all about the room, while her daughter turned to Bessie. “My brother told us you were wonderfully clever,” said Lady Pimlico.

  “He should have said my sister,” Bessie answered—“when she says such things as that.”

  “Shall you be long at Branches?” the duchess asked, abruptly, of the young girl.

  “Lord Lambeth has asked us for three days,” said Bessie.

  “I shall go,” the duchess declared, “and my daughter, too.”

  “That will be charming!” Bessie rejoined.

  “Delightful!” murmured Mrs. Westgate.

  “I shall expect to see a great deal of you,” the duchess continued. “When I go to Branches I monopolize my son’s guests.”

  “They must be most happy,” said Mrs. Westgate very graciously.

  “I want immensely to see it—to see the castle,” said Bessie to the duchess. “I have never seen one—in England, at least; and you know we have none in America.”

  “Ah, you are fond of castles?” inquired her Grace.

  “Immensely!” replied the young girl. “It has been the dream of my life to live in one.”

  The duchess looked at her a moment, as if she hardly knew how to take this assurance, which, from her Grace’s point of view, was either very artless or very audacious. “Well,” she said, rising, “I will show you Branches myself.” And upon this the two great ladies took their departure.

  “What did they mean by it?” asked Mrs. Westgate, when they were gone.

  “They meant to be polite,” said Bessie, “because we are going to meet them.”

  “It is too late to be polite,” Mrs. Westgate replied almost grimly. “They meant to overawe us by their fine manners and their grandeur, and to make you lâcher prise.”

  “Lâcher prise? What strange things you say!” murmured Bessie Alden.

  “They meant to snub us, so that we shouldn’t dare to go to Branches,” Mrs. Westgate continued.

  “On the contrary,” said Bessie, “the duchess offered to show me the place herself.”

  “Yes, you may depend upon it she won’t let you out of her sight. She will show you the place from morning till night.”

  “You have a theory for everything,” said Bessie.

  “And you apparently have none for anything.”

  “I saw no attempt to ‘overawe’ us,” said the young girl. “Their manners were not fine.”

  “They were not even good!” Mrs. Westgate declared.

  Bessie was silent a while, but in a few moments she observed that she had a very good theory. “They came to look at me,” she said, as if this had been a very ingenious hypothesis. Mrs. Westgate did it justice; she greeted it with a smile and pronounced it mo
st brilliant, while, in reality, she felt that the young girl’s skepticism, or her charity, or, as she had sometimes called it appropriately, her idealism, was proof against irony. Bessie, however, remained meditative all the rest of that day and well on into the morrow.

  On the morrow, before lunch, Mrs. Westgate had occasion to go out for an hour, and left her sister writing a letter. When she came back she met Lord Lambeth at the door of the hotel, coming away. She thought he looked slightly embarrassed; he was certainly very grave. “I am sorry to have missed you. Won’t you come back?” she asked.

  “No,” said the young man, “I can’t. I have seen your sister. I can never come back.” Then he looked at her a moment and took her hand. “Goodbye, Mrs. Westgate,” he said. “You have been very kind to me.” And with what she thought a strange, sad look in his handsome young face, he turned away.

  She went in, and she found Bessie still writing her letter; that is, Mrs. Westgate perceived she was sitting at the table with the pen in her hand and not writing. “Lord Lambeth has been here,” said the elder lady at last.

  Then Bessie got up and showed her a pale, serious face. She bent this face upon her sister for some time, confessing silently and a little pleading. “I told him,” she said at last, “that we could not go to Branches.”

  Mrs. Westgate displayed just a spark of irritation. “He might have waited,” she said with a smile, “till one had seen the castle.” Later, an hour afterward, she said, “Dear Bessie, I wish you might have accepted him.”

  “I couldn’t,” said Bessie gently.

  “He is an excellent fellow,” said Mrs. Westgate.

  “I couldn’t,” Bessie repeated.

  “If it is only,” her sister added, “because those women will think that they succeeded—that they paralyzed us!”

  Bessie Alden turned away; but presently she added, “They were interesting; I should have liked to see them again.”

  “So should I!” cried Mrs. Westgate significantly.

  “And I should have liked to see the castle,” said Bessie. “But now we must leave England,” she added.

  Her sister looked at her. “You will not wait to go to the National Gallery?”

  “Not now.”

  “Nor to Canterbury Cathedral?”