The Europeans

Madame Münster looked at him, and her eye exhibited a slight responsive spark. She touched her lips to a glass of wine, and then she said, “Describe them. Give me a picture.”

Felix drained his own glass. “Well, it’s in the country, among the meadows and woods; a wild sort of place, and yet not far from here. Only, such a road, my dear! Imagine one of the Alpine glaciers reproduced in mud. But you will not spend much time on it, for they want you to come and stay, once for all.”

“Ah,” said the Baroness, “they want me to come and stay, once for all? Bon.”

“It’s intensely rural, tremendously natural; and all overhung with this strange white light, this far-away blue sky. There’s a big wooden house—a kind of three-story bungalow; it looks like a magnified Nuremberg toy. There was a gentleman there that made a speech to me about it and called it a ‘venerable mansion;’ but it looks as if it had been built last night.”

“Is it handsome—is it elegant?” asked the Baroness.

Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. “It’s very clean! No splendors, no gilding, no troops of servants; rather straight-backed chairs. But you might eat off the floors, and you can sit down on the stairs.”

“That must be a privilege. And the inhabitants are straight-backed too, of course.”

“My dear sister,” said Felix, “the inhabitants are charming.”

“In what style?”

“In a style of their own. How shall I describe it? It’s primitive; it’s patriarchal; it’s the ton of the golden age.”

“And have they nothing golden but their ton? Are there no symptoms of wealth?”

“I should say there was wealth without symptoms. A plain, homely way of life: nothing for show, and very little for—what shall I call it?—for the senses; but a great aisance, and a lot of money, out of sight, that comes forward very quietly for subscriptions to institutions, for repairing tenements, for paying doctor’s bills; perhaps even for portioning daughters.”

“And the daughters?” Madame Münster demanded. “How many are there?”

“There are two, Charlotte and Gertrude.”

“Are they pretty?”

“One of them,” said Felix.

“Which is that?”

The young man was silent, looking at his sister. “Charlotte,” he said at last.

She looked at him in return. “I see. You are in love with Gertrude. They must be Puritans to their finger-tips; anything but gay!”

“No, they are not gay,” Felix admitted. “They are sober; they are even severe. They are of a pensive cast; they take things hard. I think there is something the matter with them; they have some melancholy memory or some depressing expectation. It’s not the epicurean temperament. My uncle, Mr. Wentworth, is a tremendously high-toned old fellow; he looks as if he were undergoing martyrdom, not by fire, but by freezing. But we shall cheer them up; we shall do them good. They will take a good deal of stirring up; but they are wonderfully kind and gentle. And they are appreciative. They think one clever; they think one remarkable!”

“That is very fine, so far as it goes,” said the Baroness. “But are we to be shut up to these three people, Mr. Wentworth and the two young women—what did you say their names were—Deborah and Hephzibah?”

“Oh, no; there is another little girl, a cousin of theirs, a very pretty creature; a thorough little American. And then there is the son of the house.”

“Good!” said the Baroness. “We are coming to the gentlemen. What of the son of the house?”

“I am afraid he gets tipsy.”

“He, then, has the epicurean temperament! How old is he?”

“He is a boy of twenty; a pretty young fellow, but I am afraid he has vulgar tastes. And then there is Mr. Brand—a very tall young man, a sort of lay-priest. They seem to think a good deal of him, but I don’t exactly make him out.”

“And is there nothing,” asked the Baroness, “between these extremes—this mysterious ecclesiastic and that intemperate youth?”

“Oh, yes, there is Mr. Acton. I think,” said the young man, with a nod at his sister, “that you will like Mr. Acton.”

“Remember that I am very fastidious,” said the Baroness. “Has he very good manners?”

“He will have them with you. He is a man of the world; he has been to China.”

Madame Münster gave a little laugh. “A man of the Chinese world! He must be very interesting.”

“I have an idea that he brought home a fortune,” said Felix.

“That is always interesting. Is he young, good-looking, clever?”

“He is less than forty; he has a baldish head; he says witty things. I rather think,” added the young man, “that he will admire the Baroness Münster.”

“It is very possible,” said this lady. Her brother never knew how she would take things; but shortly afterwards she declared that he had made a very pretty description and that on the morrow she would go and see for herself.

They mounted, accordingly, into a great barouche—a vehicle as to which the Baroness found nothing to criticise but the price that was asked for it and the fact that the coachman wore a straw hat. (At Silberstadt Madame Münster had had liveries of yellow and crimson.) They drove into the country, and the Baroness, leaning far back and swaying her lace-fringed parasol, looked to right and to left and surveyed the way-side objects. After a while she pronounced them affreux. Her brother remarked that it was apparently a country in which the foreground was inferior to the plans reculés; and the Baroness rejoined that the landscape seemed to be all foreground. Felix had fixed with his new friends the hour at which he should bring his sister; it was four o’clock in the afternoon. The large, clean-faced house wore, to his eyes, as the barouche drove up to it, a very friendly aspect; the high, slender elms made lengthening shadows in front of it. The Baroness descended; her American kinsfolk were stationed in the portico. Felix waved his hat to them, and a tall, lean gentleman, with a high forehead and a clean shaven face, came forward toward the garden gate. Charlotte Wentworth walked at his side. Gertrude came behind, more slowly. Both of these young ladies wore rustling silk dresses. Felix ushered his sister into the gate. “Be very gracious,” he said to her. But he saw the admonition was superfluous. Eugenia was prepared to be gracious as only Eugenia could be. Felix knew no keener pleasure than to be able to admire his sister unrestrictedly; for if the opportunity was frequent, it was not inveterate. When she desired to please she was to him, as to everyone else, the most charming woman in the world. Then he forgot that she was ever anything else; that she was sometimes hard and perverse; that he was occasionally afraid of her. Now, as she took his arm to pass into the garden, he felt that she desired, that she proposed, to please, and this situation made him very happy. Eugenia would please.

The tall gentleman came to meet her, looking very rigid and grave. But it was a rigidity that had no illiberal meaning. Mr. Wentworth’s manner was pregnant, on the contrary, with a sense of grand responsibility, of the solemnity of the occasion, of its being difficult to show sufficient deference to a lady at once so distinguished and so unhappy. Felix had observed on the day before his characteristic pallor; and now he perceived that there was something almost cadaverous in his uncle’s high-featured white face. But so clever were this young man’s quick sympathies and perceptions that he already learned that in these semi-mortuary manifestations there was no cause for alarm. His light imagination had gained a glimpse of Mr. Wentworth’s spiritual mechanism, and taught him that, the old man being infinitely conscientious, the special operation of conscience within him announced itself by several of the indications of physical faintness.

The Baroness took her uncle’s hand, and stood looking at him with her ugly face and her beautiful smile. “Have I done right to come?” she asked.

“Very right, very right,” said Mr. Wentworth, solemnly. He had arranged in his mind a little speech; but now it quite faded away. He felt almost frightened. He had never been looked at in just that way—with just that fixed, intense smile—by any woman; and it perplexed and weighed upon him, now, that the woman who was smiling so and who had instantly given him a vivid sense of her possessing other unprecedented attributes, was his own niece, the child of his own father’s daughter. The idea that his niece should be a German Baroness, married “morganatically” to a Prince, had already given him much to think about. Was it right, was it just, was it acceptable? He always slept badly, and the night before he had lain awake much more even than usual, asking himself these questions. The strange word “morganatic” was constantly in his ears; it reminded him of a certain Mrs. Morgan whom he had once known and who had been a bold, unpleasant woman. He had a feeling that it was his duty, so long as the Baroness looked at him, smiling in that way, to meet her glance with his own scrupulously adjusted, consciously frigid organs of vision; but on this occasion he failed to perform his duty to the last. He looked away toward his daughters. “We are very glad to see you,” he had said. “Allow me to introduce my daughters—Miss Charlotte Wentworth, Miss Gertrude Wentworth.”

The Baroness thought she had never seen people less demonstrative. But Charlotte kissed her and took her hand, looking at her sweetly and solemnly. Gertrude seemed to her almost funereal, though Gertrude might have found a source of gaiety in the fact that Felix, with his magnificent smile, had been talking to her; he had greeted her as a very old friend. When she kissed the Baroness she had tears in her eyes. Madame Münster took each of these young women by the hand, and looked at them all over. Charlotte thought her very strange-looking and singularly dressed; she could not have said whether it was well or ill. She was glad, at any rate, that they had put on their silk gowns—especially Gertrude. “My cousins are very pretty,” said the Baroness, turning her eyes from one to the other. “Your daughters are very handsome, sir.”

Charlotte blushed quickly; she had never yet heard her personal appearance alluded to in a loud, expressive voice. Gertrude looked away—not at Felix; she was extremely pleased. It was not the compliment that pleased her; she did not believe it; she thought herself very plain. She could hardly have told you the source of her satisfaction; it came from something in the way the Baroness spoke, and it was not diminished—it was rather deepened, oddly enough—by the young girl’s disbelief. Mr. Wentworth was silent; and then he asked, formally, “Won’t you come into the house?”

“These are not all; you have some other children,” said the Baroness.

“I have a son,” Mr. Wentworth answered.

“And why doesn’t he come to meet me?” Eugenia cried. “I am afraid he is not so charming as his sisters.”

“I don’t know; I will see about it,” the old man declared.

“He is rather afraid of ladies,” Charlotte said, softly.

“He is very handsome,” said Gertrude, as loud as she could.

“We will go in and find him. We will draw him out of his cachette.” And the Baroness took Mr. Wentworth’s arm, who was not aware that he had offered it to her, and who, as they walked toward the house, wondered whether he ought to have offered it and whether it was proper for her to take it if it had not been offered. “I want to know you well,” said the Baroness, interrupting these meditations, “and I want you to know me.”

“It seems natural that we should know each other,” Mr. Wentworth rejoined. “We are near relatives.”

“Ah, there comes a moment in life when one reverts, irresistibly, to one’s natural ties—to one’s natural affections. You must have found that!” said Eugenia.