Edith Wharton - Novel 15 Read online

  Mrs. Raycie had grown very pale: Lewis knew that she too was deeply perturbed about the sewers. “And the night-air,” she scarce-audibly sighed.

  But Mr. Raycie had taken up his main theme again. “In my opinion, if a young man travels at all, he must travel as extensively as his—er—means permit; must see as much of the world as he can. Those are my son’s sailing orders, Commodore; and here’s to his carrying them out to the best of his powers!”

  Black Dinah, removing the Virginia ham, or rather such of its bony structure as alone remained on the dish, had managed to make room for a bowl of punch from which Mr. Raycie poured deep ladlefuls of perfumed fire into the glasses ranged before him on a silver tray. The gentlemen rose, the ladies smiled and wept, and Lewis’s health and the success of the Grand Tour were toasted with an eloquence which caused Mr. Raycie, with a hasty nod to her daughters, and a covering rustle of starched flounces, to shepherd them softly from the room.

  “After all,” Lewis heard her murmur to them on the threshold, “your father’s using such language shows that he’s in the best of humour with dear Lewis.”

  

  II.

  In spite of his enforced potations, Lewis Raycie was up the next morning before sunrise.

  Unlatching his shutters without noise, he looked forth over the wet lawn merged in a blur of shrubberies, and the waters of the Sound dimly seen beneath a sky full of stars. His head ached but his heart glowed; what was before him was thrilling enough to clear a heavier brain than his.

  He dressed quickly and completely (save for his shoes), and then, stripping the flowered quilt from his high mahogany bed, rolled it in a tight bundle under his arm. Thus enigmatically equipped he was feeling his way, shoes in hand, through the darkness of the upper story to the slippery oak stairs, when he was startled by a candle-gleam in the pitch-blackness of the hall below. He held his breath, and leaning over the stair-rail saw with amazement his sister Mary Adeline come forth, cloaked and bonneted, but also in stocking-feet, from the passage leading to the pantry. She too carried a double burden: her shoes and the candle in one hand, in the other a large covered basket that weighed down her bare arm.

  Brother and sister stopped and stared at each other in the blue dusk: the upward slant of the candle-light distorted Mary Adeline’s mild features, twisting them into a frightened grin as Lewis stole down to join her.

  “Oh—” she whispered. “What in the world are you doing here? I was just getting together a few things for that poor young Mrs. Poe down the lane, who’s so ill—before mother goes to the store-room. You won’t tell, will you?”

  Lewis signalled his complicity, and cautiously slid open the bolt of the front door. They durst not say more till they were out of ear-shot. On the doorstep they sat down to put on their shoes; then they hastened on without a word through the ghostly shrubberies till they reached the gate into the lane.

  “But you, Lewis?” the sister suddenly questioned, with an astonished stare at the rolled-up quilt under her brother’s arm.

  “Oh, I—. Look here Addy—” he broke off and began to grope in his pocket—“I haven’t much about me…the old gentleman keeps me as close as ever…but here’s a dollar, if you think that poor Mrs. Poe could use it…I’d be too happy…consider it a privilege…”

  “Oh, Lewis, Lewis, how noble, how generous of you! Of course I can buy a few extra things with it…they never see meat unless I can bring them a bit, you know…and I fear she’s dying of a decline…and she and her mother are so fiery-proud…” She wept with gratitude, and Lewis drew a breath of relief. He had diverted her attention from the bed-quilt.

  “Ah, there’s the breeze,” he murmured, sniffing the suddenly chilled air.

  “Yes; I must be off; I must be back before the sun is up,” said Mary Adeline anxiously, “and it would never do if mother knew—”

  “She doesn’t know of your visits to Mrs. Poe?”

  A look of childish guile sharpened Mary Adeline’s undeveloped face. “She does, of course; but yet she doesn’t…we’ve arranged it so. You see, Mr. Poe’s an Atheist; and so father—”

  “I see,” Lewis nodded. “Well, we part here; I’m off for a swim,” he said glibly. But abruptly he turned back and caught his sister’s arm. “Sister, tell Mrs. Poe, please, that I heard her husband give a reading from his poems in New York two nights ago—”

  (“Oh, Lewis—you? But father says he’s a blasphemer!”)

  “—And that he’s a great poet—a Great Poet. Tell her that from me, will you, please, Mary Adeline?”

  “Oh, brother, I couldn’t…we never speak of him,” the startled girl faltered, hurrying away.

  In the cove where the Commodore’s sloop had ridden a few hours earlier a biggish rowing-boat took the waking ripples. Young Raycie paddled out to her, fastened his skiff to the moorings, and hastily clambered into the boat.

  From various recesses in his pockets he produced rope, string, a carpet-layer’s needle, and other unexpected and incongruous tackle; then lashing one of the oars across the top of the other, and jamming the latter upright between the forward thwart and the bow, he rigged the flowered bed-quilt on this mast, knotted a rope to the free end of the quilt, and sat down in the stern, one hand on the rudder, the other on his improvised sheet.

  Venus, brooding silverly above a line of pale green sky, made a pool of glory in the sea as the dawn-breeze plumped the lover’s sail…

  On the shelving pebbles of another cove, two or three miles down the Sound, Lewis Raycie lowered his queer sail and beached his boat. A clump of willows on the shingle-edge mysteriously stirred and parted, and Treeshy Kent was in his arms.

  The sun was just pushing above a belt of low clouds in the east, spattering them with liquid gold, and Venus blanched as the light spread upward. But under the willows it was still dusk, a watery green dusk in which the secret murmurs of the night were caught.

  “Treeshy—Treeshy!” the young man cried, kneeling beside her—and then, a moment later: “My angel, are you sure that no one guesses—?”

  The girl gave a faint laugh which screwed up her funny nose. She leaned her head on his shoulder, her round forehead and rough braids pressed against his cheek, her hands in his, breathing quickly and joyfully.

  “I thought I should never get here,” Lewis grumbled, “with that ridiculous bed-quilt—and it’ll be broad day soon! To think that I was of age yesterday, and must come to you in a boat rigged like a child’s toy on a duck-pond! If you knew how it humiliates me—”

  “What does it matter, dear, since you’re of age now, and your own master?”

  “But am I, though? He says so—but it’s only on his own terms; only while I do what he wants! You’ll see…I’ve a credit of ten thousand dollars…ten…thou…sand…d’you hear?…placed to my name in a London bank; and not a penny here to bless myself with meanwhile…Why, Treeshy darling, why, what’s the matter?”

  She flung her arms about his neck, and through their innocent kisses he could taste her tears. “What is it, Treeshy?” he implored her.

  “I…oh, I’d forgotten it was to be our last day together till you spoke of London—cruel, cruel!” she reproached him; and through the green twilight of the willows her eyes blazed on him like two stormy stars. No other eyes he knew could express such elemental rage as Treeshy’s.

  “You little spitfire, you!” he laughed back somewhat chokingly. “Yes, it’s our last day—but not for long; at our age two years are not so very long, after all, are they? And when I come back to you I’ll come as my own master, independent, free—come to claim you in face of everything and everybody! Think of that, darling, and be brave for my sake…brave and patient…as I mean to be!” he declared heroically.

  “Oh, but you—you’ll see other girls; heaps and heaps of them; in those wicked old countries where they’re so lovely. My uncle Kent says the European countries are all wicked, even my own poor Italy…”

  “But you, Treeshy; you’ll be seein
g cousins Bill and Donald meanwhile—seeing them all day long and every day. And you know you’ve a weakness for that great hulk of a Bill. Ah, if only I stood six-foot-one in my stockings I’d go with an easier heart, you fickle child!” he tried to banter her.

  “Fickle? Fickle? Me—oh, Lewis!”

  He felt the premonitory sweep of sobs, and his untried courage failed him. It was delicious, in theory, to hold weeping beauty to one’s breast, but terribly alarming, he found, in practice. There came a responsive twitching in his throat.

  “No, no; firm as adamant, true as steel; that’s what we both mean to be, isn’t it, cara?”

  “Caro, yes,” she sighed, appeased.

  “And you’ll write to me regularly, Treeshy—long long letters? I may count on that, mayn’t I, wherever I am? And they must all be numbered, every one of them, so that I shall know at once if I’ve missed one; remember!”

  “And, Lewis, you’ll wear them here?” (She touched his breast.) “Oh, not all,” she added, laughing, “for they’d make such a big bundle that you’d soon have a hump in front like Pulcinella—but always at least the last one, just the last one. Promise!”

  “Always, I promise—as long as they’re kind,” he said, still struggling to take a spirited line.

  “Oh, Lewis, they will be, as long as yours are—and long long afterward…”

  Venus failed and vanished in the sun’s uprising.

  

  III.

  The crucial moment, Lewis had always known, would not be that of his farewell to Treeshy, but of his final interview with his father.

  On that everything hung: his immediate future as well as his more distant prospects. As he stole home in the early sunlight, over the dew-drenched grass, he glanced up apprehensively at Mr. Raycie’s windows, and thanked his stars that they were still tightly shuttered.

  There was no doubt, as Mrs. Raycie said, that her husband’s “using language” before ladies showed him to be in high good humour, relaxed and slippered, as it were—a state his family so seldom saw him in that Lewis had sometimes impertinently wondered to what awful descent from the clouds he and his two sisters owed their timorous being.

  It was all very well to tell himself, as he often did, that the bulk of the money was his mother’s, and that he could turn her round his little finger. What difference did that make? Mr. Raycie, the day after his marriage, had quietly taken over the management of his wife’s property, and deducted, from the very moderate allowance he accorded her, all her little personal expenses, even to the postage-stamps she used, and the dollar she put in the plate every Sunday. He called the allowance her “pin-money,” since, as he often reminded her, he paid all the household bills himself, so that Mrs. Raycie’s quarterly pittance could be entirely devoted, if she chose, to frills and feathers.

  “And will be, if you respect my wishes, my dear,” he always added. “I like to see a handsome figure well set-off, and not to have our friends imagine, when they come to dine, that Mrs. Raycie is sick above-stairs, and I’ve replaced her by a poor relation in allapacca.” In compliance with which Mrs. Raycie, at once flattered and terrified, spent her last penny in adorning herself and her daughters, and had to stint their bedroom fires, and the servants’ meals, in order to find a penny for any private necessity.

  Mr. Raycie had long since convinced his wife that this method of dealing with her, if not lavish, was suitable, and in fact “handsome”; when she spoke of the subject to her relations it was with tears of gratitude for her husband’s kindness in assuming the management of her property. As he managed it exceedingly well, her hard-headed brothers (glad to have the responsibility off their hands, and convinced that, if left to herself, she would have muddled her money away in ill-advised charities) were disposed to share her approval of Mr. Raycie; though her old mother sometimes said helplessly: “When I think that Lucy Ann can’t as much as have a drop of gruel brought up to her without his weighing the oatmeal…” But even that was only whispered, lest Mr. Raycie’s mysterious faculty of hearing what was said behind his back should bring sudden reprisals on the venerable lady to whom he always alluded, with a tremor in his genial voice, as “my dear mother-in-law—unless indeed she will allow me to call her, more briefly but more truly, my dear mother.”

  To Lewis, hitherto, Mr. Raycie had meted the same measure as to the females of the household. He had dressed him well, educated him expensively, lauded him to the skies—and counted every penny of his allowance. Yet there was a difference; and Lewis was as well aware of it as any one.

  The dream, the ambition, the passion of Mr. Raycie’s life, was (as his son knew) to found a Family; and he had only Lewis to found it with. He believed in primogeniture, in heirlooms, in entailed estates, in all the ritual of the English “landed” tradition. No one was louder than he in praise of the democratic institutions under which he lived; but he never thought of them as affecting that more private but more important institution, the Family; and to the Family all his care and all his thoughts were given. The result, as Lewis dimly guessed, was, that upon his own shrinking and inadequate head was centred all the passion contained in the vast expanse of Mr. Raycie’s breast. Lewis was his very own, and Lewis represented what was most dear to him; and for both these reasons Mr. Raycie set an inordinate value on the boy (a quite different thing, Lewis thought from loving him).

  Mr. Raycie was particularly proud of his son’s taste for letters. Himself not a wholly unread man, he admired intensely what he called the “cultivated gentleman”—and that was what Lewis was evidently going to be. Could he have combined with this tendency a manlier frame, and an interest in the few forms of sport then popular among gentlemen, Mr. Raycie’s satisfaction would have been complete; but whose is, in this disappointing world? Meanwhile he flattered himself that, Lewis being still young and malleable, and his health certainly mending, two years of travel and adventure might send him back a very different figure, physically as well as mentally. Mr. Raycie had himself travelled in his youth, and was persuaded that the experience was formative; he secretly hoped for the return of a bronzed and broadened Lewis, seasoned by independence and adventure, and having discreetly sown his wild oats in foreign pastures, where they would not contaminate the home crop.

  All this Lewis guessed; and he guessed as well that these two wander-years were intended by Mr. Raycie to lead up to a marriage and an establishment after Mr. Raycie’s own heart, but in which Lewis was not to have even a consulting voice.

  “He’s going to give me all the advantages—for his own purpose,” the young man summed it up as he went down to join the family at the breakfast table.

  Mr. Raycie was never more resplendent than at that moment of the day and season. His spotless white duck trousers, strapped under kid boots, his thin kerseymere coat, and drab piqué waistcoat crossed below a snowy stock, made him look as fresh as the morning and as appetizing as the peaches and cream banked before him.

  Opposite sat Mrs. Raycie, immaculate also, but paler than usual, as became a mother about to part from her only son; and between the two was Sarah Anne, unusually pink, and apparently occupied in trying to screen her sister’s empty seat. Lewis greeted them, and seated himself at his mother’s right.

  Mr. Raycie drew out his guillochee repeating watch, and detaching it from its heavy gold chain laid it on the table beside him.

  “Mary Adeline is late again. It is a somewhat unusual thing for a sister to be late at the last meal she is to take—for two years—with her only brother.”

  “Oh, Mr. Raycie!” Mrs. Raycie faltered.

  “I say, the idea is peculiar. Perhaps,” said Mr. Raycie sarcastically, “I am going to be blessed with a peculiar daughter.”

  “I’m afraid Mary Adeline is beginning a sick headache, sir. She tried to get up, but really could not,” said Sarah Anne in a rush.

  Mr. Raycie’s only reply was to arch ironic eyebrows, and Lewis hastily intervened: “I’m sorry, sir; but it may be my fault—” />
  Mrs. Raycie paled, Sarah Anne, purpled, and Mr. Raycie echoed with punctilious incredulity: “Your—fault?”

  “In being the occasion, sir, of last night’s too-sumptuous festivity—”

  “Ha—ha—ha!” Mr. Raycie laughed, his thunders instantly dispelled.

  He pushed back his chair and nodded to his son with a smile; and the two, leaving the ladies to wash up the teacups (as was still the habit in genteel families) betook themselves to Mr. Raycie’s study.

  What Mr. Raycie studied in this apartment—except the accounts, and ways of making himself unpleasant to his family—Lewis had never been able to discover. It was a small bare formidable room; and the young man, who never crossed the threshold but with a sinking of his heart, felt it sink lower than ever. “Now!” he thought.

  Mr. Raycie took the only easy-chair, and began.

  “My dear fellow, our time is short, but long enough for what I have to say. In a few hours you will be setting out on your great journey: an important event in the life of any young man. Your talents and character—combined with your means of improving the opportunity—make me hope that in your case it will be decisive. I expect you to come home from this trip a man—”

  So far, it was all to order, so to speak; Lewis could have recited it beforehand. He bent his head in acquiescence.

  “A man,” Mr. Raycie repeated, “prepared to play a part, a considerable part, in the social life of the community. I expect you to be a figure in New York; and I shall give you the means to be so.” He cleared his throat. “But means are not enough—though you must never forget that they are essential. Education, polish, experience of the world; these are what so many of our men of standing lack. What do they know of Art or Letters? We have had little time here to produce either as yet—you spoke?” Mr. Raycie broke off with a crushing courtesy.