George MacDonald - "Weighed and Wanting"

John Greenleaf Whittier - "The Frost Spirit and Others from Poems of Nature,"

John Greenleaf Whittier - "Personal Poems I"

Tobias Smollett - "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle"

The Descent of Man and Other Stories

E >> Edith Wharton >> The Descent of Man and Other Stories




Nothing was said to mark her capitulation; but Lethbury noticed that
the visiting ceased, and that the dressmaker's bills diminished. At
the same time, Mrs. Lethbury made it known that Jane had taken up
charities; and before long Jane's conversation confirmed this
announcement. At first Lethbury congratulated himself on the change;
but Jane's domesticity soon began to weigh on him. During the day
she was sometimes absent on errands of mercy; but in the evening she
was always there. At first she and Mrs. Lethbury sat in the
drawing-room together, and Lethbury smoked in the library; but
presently Jane formed the habit of joining him there, and he began
to suspect that he was included among the objects of her
philanthropy.

Mrs. Lethbury confirmed the suspicion. "Jane has grown very
serious-minded lately," she said. "She imagines that she used to
neglect you, and she is trying to make up for it. Don't discourage
her," she added innocently.

Such a plea delivered Lethbury helpless to his daughter's
ministrations: and he found himself measuring the hours he spent
with her by the amount of relief they must be affording her mother.
There were even moments when he read a furtive gratitude in Mrs.
Lethbury's eye.

But Lethbury was no hero, and he had nearly reached the limit of
vicarious endurance when something wonderful happened. They never
quite knew afterward how it had come about, or who first perceived
it; but Mrs. Lethbury one day gave tremulous voice to their
inferences.

"Of course," she said, "he comes here because of Elise." The young
lady in question, a friend of Jane's, was possessed of attractions
which had already been found to explain the presence of masculine
visitors.

Lethbury risked a denial. "I don't think he does," he declared.

"But Elise is thought very pretty," Mrs. Lethbury insisted.

"I can't help that," said Lethbury doggedly.

He saw a faint light in his wife's eyes; but she remarked
carelessly: "Mr. Budd would be a very good match for Elise."

Lethbury could hardly repress a chuckle: he was so exquisitely aware
that she was trying to propitiate the gods.

For a few weeks neither said a word; then Mrs. Lethbury once more
reverted to the subject.

"It is a month since Elise went abroad," she said.

"Is it?"

"And Mr. Budd seems to come here just as often--"

"Ah," said Lethbury with heroic indifference; and his wife hastily
changed the subject.

Mr. Winstanley Budd was a young man who suffered from an excess of
manner. Politeness gushed from him in the driest seasons. He was
always performing feats of drawing-room chivalry, and the approach
of the most unobtrusive female threw him into attitudes which
endangered the furniture. His features, being of the cherubic order,
did not lend themselves to this role; but there were moments when he
appeared to dominate them, to force them into compliance with an
aquiline ideal. The range of Mr. Budd's social benevolence made its
object hard to distinguish. He spread his cloak so indiscriminately
that one could not always interpret the gesture, and Jane's
impassive manner had the effect of increasing his demonstrations:
she threw him into paroxysms of politeness.

At first he filled the house with his amenities; but gradually it
became apparent that his most dazzling effects were directed
exclusively to Jane. Lethbury and his wife held their breath and
looked away from each other. They pretended not to notice the
frequency of Mr. Budd's visits, they struggled against an imprudent
inclination to leave the young people too much alone. Their
conclusions were the result of indirect observation, for neither of
them dared to be caught watching Mr. Budd: they behaved like
naturalists on the trail of a rare butterfly.

In his efforts not to notice Mr. Budd, Lethbury centred his
attentions on Jane; and Jane, at this crucial moment, wrung from him
a reluctant admiration. While her parents went about dissembling
their emotions, she seemed to have none to conceal. She betrayed
neither eagerness nor surprise; so complete was her unconcern that
there were moments when Lethbury feared it was obtuseness, when he
could hardly help whispering to her that now was the moment to lower
the net.

Meanwhile the velocity of Mr. Budd's gyrations increased with the
ardor of courtship: his politeness became incandescent, and Jane
found herself the centre of a pyrotechnical display culminating in
the "set piece" of an offer of marriage.

Mrs. Lethbury imparted the news to her husband one evening after
their daughter had gone to bed. The announcement was made and
received with an air of detachment, as though both feared to be
betrayed into unseemly exultation; but Lethbury, as his wife ended,
could not repress the inquiry, "Have they decided on a day?"

Mrs. Lethbury's superior command of her features enabled her to look
shocked. "What can you be thinking of? He only offered himself at
five!"

"Of course--of course--" stammered Lethbury--"but nowadays people
marry after such short engagements--"

"Engagement!" said his wife solemnly. "There is no engagement."

Lethbury dropped his cigar. "What on earth do you mean?"

"Jane is thinking it over."

_"Thinking it over?"_ "She has asked for a month before deciding."

Lethbury sank back with a gasp. Was it genius or was it madness? He
felt incompetent to decide; and Mrs. Lethbury's next words showed
that she shared his difficulty.

"Of course I don't want to hurry Jane--"

"Of course not," he acquiesced.

"But I pointed out to her that a young man of Mr. Budd's impulsive
temperament might--might be easily discouraged--"

"Yes; and what did she say?"

"She said that if she was worth winning she was worth waiting for."






VI





The period of Mr. Budd's probation could scarcely have cost him as
much mental anguish as it caused his would-be parents-in-law.

Mrs. Lethbury, by various ruses, tried to shorten the ordeal, but
Jane remained inexorable; and each morning Lethbury came down to
breakfast with the certainty of finding a letter of withdrawal from
her discouraged suitor.

When at length the decisive day came, and Mrs. Lethbury, at its
close, stole into the library with an air of chastened joy, they
stood for a moment without speaking; then Mrs. Lethbury paid a
fitting tribute to the proprieties by faltering out: "It will be
dreadful to have to give her up--"

Lethbury could not repress a warning gesture; but even as it escaped
him, he realized that his wife's grief was genuine.

"Of course, of course," he said, vainly sounding his own emotional
shallows for an answering regret. And yet it was his wife who had
suffered most from Jane!

He had fancied that these sufferings would be effaced by the milder
atmosphere of their last weeks together; but felicity did not soften
Jane. Not for a moment did she relax her dominion: she simply
widened it to include a new subject. Mr. Budd found himself under
orders with the others; and a new fear assailed Lethbury as he saw
Jane assume prenuptial control of her betrothed. Lethbury had never
felt any strong personal interest in Mr. Budd; but, as Jane's
prospective husband, the young man excited his sympathy. To his
surprise, he found that Mrs. Lethbury shared the feeling.

"I'm afraid he may find Jane a little exacting," she said, after an
evening dedicated to a stormy discussion of the wedding
arrangements. "She really ought to make some concessions. If he
_wants_ to be married in a black frock-coat instead of a dark gray
one--" She paused and looked doubtfully at Lethbury.

"What can I do about it?" he said.

"You might explain to him--tell him that Jane isn't always--"

Lethbury made an impatient gesture. "What are you afraid of? His
finding her out or his not finding her out?"

Mrs. Lethbury flushed. "You put it so dreadfully!"

Her husband mused for a moment; then he said with an air of cheerful
hypocrisy: "After all, Budd is old enough to take care of himself."

But the next day Mrs. Lethbury surprised him. Late in the afternoon
she entered the library, so breathless and inarticulate that he
scented a catastrophe.

"I've done it!" she cried.

"Done what?"

"Told him." She nodded toward the door. "He's just gone. Jane is
out, and I had a chance to talk to him alone."

Lethbury pushed a chair forward and she sank into it.

"What did you tell him? That she is _not_ always--"

Mrs. Lethbury lifted a tragic eye. "No; I told him that she always
_is_--"

"Always _is_--?"

"Yes."

There was a pause. Lethbury made a call on his hoarded philosophy.
He saw Jane suddenly reinstated in her evening seat by the library
fire; but an answering chord in him thrilled at his wife's heroism.

"Well--what did he say?"

Mrs. Lethbury's agitation deepened. It was clear that the blow had
fallen.

"He...he said...that we...had never understood Jane...
or appreciated her..." The final syllables were lost in her
handkerchief, and she left him marvelling at the mechanism of a
woman.

After that, Lethbury faced the future with an undaunted eye. They
had done their duty--at least his wife had done hers--and they were
reaping the usual harvest of ingratitude with a zest seldom accorded
to such reaping. There was a marked change in Mr. Budd's manner, and
his increasing coldness sent a genial glow through Lethbury's
system. It was easy to bear with Jane in the light of Mr. Budd's
disapproval.

There was a good deal to be borne in the last days, and the brunt of
it fell on Mrs. Lethbury. Jane marked her transition to the married
state by an appropriate but incongruous display of nerves. She
became sentimental, hysterical and reluctant. She quarrelled with
her betrothed and threatened to return the ring. Mrs. Lethbury had
to intervene, and Lethbury felt the hovering sword of destiny. But
the blow was suspended. Mr. Budd's chivalry was proof against all
his bride's caprices, and his devotion throve on her cruelty.
Lethbury feared that he was too faithful, too enduring, and longed
to urge him to vary his tactics. Jane presently reappeared with the
ring on her finger, and consented to try on the wedding-dress; but
her uncertainties, her reactions, were prolonged till the final day.

When it dawned, Lethbury was still in an ecstasy of apprehension.
Feeling reasonably sure of the principal actors, he had centred his
fears on incidental possibilities. The clergyman might have a
stroke, or the church might burn down, or there might be something
wrong with the license. He did all that was humanly possible to
avert such contingencies, but there remained that incalculable
factor known as the hand of God. Lethbury seemed to feel it groping
for him.

In the church it almost had him by the nape. Mr. Budd was late; and
for five immeasurable minutes Lethbury and Jane faced a churchful of
conjecture. Then the bridegroom appeared, flushed but chivalrous,
and explaining to his father-in-law under cover of the ritual that
he had torn his glove and had to go back for another.

"You'll be losing the ring next," muttered Lethbury; but Mr. Budd
produced this article punctually, and a moment or two later was
bearing its wearer captive down the aisle.

At the wedding-breakfast Lethbury caught his wife's eye fixed on him
in mild disapproval, and understood that his hilarity was exceeding
the bounds of fitness. He pulled himself together, and tried to
subdue his tone; but his jubilation bubbled over like a
champagne-glass perpetually refilled. The deeper his draughts, the
higher it rose.

It was at the brim when, in the wake of the dispersing guests, Jane
came down in her travelling-dress and fell on her mother's neck.

"I can't leave you!" she wailed, and Lethbury felt as suddenly
sobered as a man under a douche. But if the bride was reluctant her
captor was relentless. Never had Mr. Budd been more dominant, more
aquiline. Lethbury's last fears were dissipated as the young man
snatched Jane from her mother's bosom and bore her off to the
brougham.

The brougham rolled away, the last milliner's girl forsook her post
by the awning, the red carpet was folded up, and the house door
closed. Lethbury stood alone in the hall with his wife. As he turned
toward her, he noticed the look of tired heroism in her eyes, the
deepened lines of her face. They reflected his own symptoms too
accurately not to appeal to him. The nervous tension had been
horrible. He went up to her, and an answering impulse made her lay a
hand on his arm. He held it there a moment.

"Let us go off and have a jolly little dinner at a restaurant," he
proposed.

There had been a time when such a suggestion would have surprised
her to the verge of disapproval; but now she agreed to it at once.

"Oh, that would be so nice," she murmured with a great sigh of
relief and assuagement.

Jane had fulfilled her mission after all: she had drawn them
together at last.






THE RECKONING

I





"THE marriage law of the new dispensation will be: _Thou shalt not
be unfaithful--to thyself_."

A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the
haze of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband
descended from his improvised platform, saw him merged in a
congratulatory group of ladies. Westall's informal talks on "The New
Ethics" had drawn about him an eager following of the mentally
unemployed--those who, as he had once phrased it, liked to have
their brain-food cut up for them. The talks had begun by accident.
Westall's ideas were known to be "advanced," but hitherto their
advance had not been in the direction of publicity. He had been, in
his wife's opinion, almost pusillanimously careful not to let his
personal views endanger his professional standing. Of late, however,
he had shown a puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down the
gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the
relation of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a
few admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner
opinions a larger circulation by summing them up in a series of
talks at the Van Sideren studio.

The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially, on
the fact that they had a studio. Van Sideren's pictures were chiefly
valuable as accessories to the _mise en scene_ which differentiated
his wife's "afternoons" from the blighting functions held in long
New York drawing-rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends
whiskey-and-soda instead of tea. Mrs. Van Sideren, for her part, was
skilled in making the most of the kind of atmosphere which a
lay-figure and an easel create; and if at times she found the
illusion hard to maintain, and lost courage to the extent of almost
wishing that Herbert could paint, she promptly overcame such moments
of weakness by calling in some fresh talent, some extraneous
re-enforcement of the "artistic" impression. It was in quest of such
aid that she had seized on Westall, coaxing him, somewhat to his
wife's surprise, into a flattered participation in her fraud. It was
vaguely felt, in the Van Sideren circle, that all the audacities
were artistic, and that a teacher who pronounced marriage immoral
was somehow as distinguished as a painter who depicted purple grass
and a green sky. The Van Sideren set were tired of the conventional
color-scheme in art and conduct.

Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of
marriage; she might indeed have claimed her husband as a disciple.
In the early days of their union she had secretly resented his
disinclination to proclaim himself a follower of the new creed; had
been inclined to tax him with moral cowardice, with a failure to
live up to the convictions for which their marriage was supposed to
stand. That was in the first burst of propagandism, when, womanlike,
she wanted to turn her disobedience into a law. Now she felt
differently. She could hardly account for the change, yet being a
woman who never allowed her impulses to remain unaccounted for, she
tried to do so by saying that she did not care to have the articles
of her faith misinterpreted by the vulgar. In this connection, she
was beginning to think that almost every one was vulgar; certainly
there were few to whom she would have cared to intrust the defence
of so esoteric a doctrine. And it was precisely at this point that
Westall, discarding his unspoken principles, had chosen to descend
from the heights of privacy, and stand hawking his convictions at
the street-corner!

It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously focussed
upon herself Mrs. Westall's wandering resentment. In the first
place, the girl had no business to be there. It was "horrid"--Mrs.
Westall found herself slipping back into the old feminine
vocabulary--simply "horrid" to think of a young girl's being allowed
to listen to such talk. The fact that Una smoked cigarettes and
sipped an occasional cocktail did not in the least tarnish a certain
radiant innocency which made her appear the victim, rather than the
accomplice, of her parents' vulgarities. Julia Westall felt in a hot
helpless way that something ought to be done--that some one ought to
speak to the girl's mother. And just then Una glided up.

"Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!" Una fixed her with large
limpid eyes. "You believe it all, I suppose?" she asked with
seraphic gravity.

"All--what, my dear child?"

The girl shone on her. "About the higher life--the freer expansion
of the individual--the law of fidelity to one's self," she glibly
recited.

Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning blush.

"My dear Una," she said, "you don't in the least understand what
it's all about!"

Miss Van Sideren stared, with a slowly answering blush. "Don't
_you_, then?" she murmured.

Mrs. Westall laughed. "Not always--or altogether! But I should like
some tea, please."

Una led her to the corner where innocent beverages were dispensed.
As Julia received her cup she scrutinized the girl more carefully.
It was not such a girlish face, after all--definite lines were
forming under the rosy haze of youth. She reflected that Una must be
six-and-twenty, and wondered why she had not married. A nice stock
of ideas she would have as her dower! If _they_ were to be a part of
the modern girl's trousseau--

Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start. It was as though some
one else had been speaking--a stranger who had borrowed her own
voice: she felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental
ventriloquism. Concluding suddenly that the room was stifling and
Una's tea too sweet, she set down her cup, and looked about for
Westall: to meet his eyes had long been her refuge from every
uncertainty. She met them now, but only, as she felt, in transit;
they included her parenthetically in a larger flight. She followed
the flight, and it carried her to a corner to which Una had
withdrawn--one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van Sideren
attributed the success of her Saturdays. Westall, a moment later,
had overtaken his look, and found a place at the girl's side. She
bent forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back, listening, with the
depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to flattery, enabling him
to swallow the strongest doses without apparent grossness of
appetite. Julia winced at her own definition of the smile.

On the way home, in the deserted winter dusk, Westall surprised his
wife by a sudden boyish pressure of her arm. "Did I open their eyes
a bit? Did I tell them what you wanted me to?" he asked gaily.

Almost unconsciously, she let her arm slip from his. "What _I_
wanted--?"

"Why, haven't you--all this time?" She caught the honest wonder of
his tone. "I somehow fancied you'd rather blamed me for not talking
more openly--before--You've made me feel, at times, that I was
sacrificing principles to expediency."

She paused a moment over her reply; then she asked quietly: "What
made you decide not to--any longer?"

She felt again the vibration of a faint surprise. "Why--the wish to
please you!" he answered, almost too simply.

"I wish you would not go on, then," she said abruptly.

He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the
darkness.

"Not go on--?"

"Call a hansom, please. I'm tired," broke from her with a sudden
rush of physical weariness.

Instantly his solicitude enveloped her. The room had been infernally
hot--and then that confounded cigarette smoke--he had noticed once
or twice that she looked pale--she mustn't come to another Saturday.
She felt herself yielding, as she always did, to the warm influence
of his concern for her, the feminine in her leaning on the man in
him with a conscious intensity of abandonment. He put her in the
hansom, and her hand stole into his in the darkness. A tear or two
rose, and she let them fall. It was so delicious to cry over
imaginary troubles!

That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the
subject of his talk. He combined a man's dislike of uncomfortable
questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding them; and she
knew that if he returned to the subject he must have some special
reason for doing so.

"You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon. Did I
put the case badly?"

"No--you put it very well."

"Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have me
go on with it?"

She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention
deepening her sense of helplessness.

"I don't think I care to hear such things discussed in public."

"I don't understand you," he exclaimed. Again the feeling that his
surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own attitude.
She was not sure that she understood herself.

"Won't you explain?" he said with a tinge of impatience.

Her eyes wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been the
scene of so many of their evening confidences. The shaded lamps, the
quiet-colored walls hung with mezzotints, the pale spring flowers
scattered here and there in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sevres,
recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment in which the evenings
of her first marriage had been passed--a wilderness of rosewood and
upholstery, with a picture of a Roman peasant above the
mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in "statuary marble" between the
folding-doors of the back drawing-room. It was a room with which she
had never been able to establish any closer relation than that
between a traveller and a railway station; and now, as she looked
about at the surroundings which stood for her deepest
affinities--the room for which she had left that other room--she was
startled by the same sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity. The
prints, the flowers, the subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed
to typify a superficial refinement that had no relation to the
deeper significances of life.

Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.

"I don't know that I can explain," she faltered.

He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the
hearth. The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn face,
which had a kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the
surface-refinement of its setting.

"Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?" he asked.

"In our ideas--?"

"The ideas I am trying to teach. The ideas you and I are supposed to
stand for." He paused a moment. "The ideas on which our marriage was
founded."

The blood rushed to her face. He had his reasons, then--she was sure
now that he had his reasons! In the ten years of their marriage, how
often had either of them stopped to consider the ideas on which it
was founded? How often does a man dig about the basement of his
house to examine its foundation? The foundation is there, of
course--the house rests on it--but one lives abovestairs and not in
the cellar. It was she, indeed, who in the beginning had insisted on
reviewing the situation now and then, on recapitulating the reasons
which justified her course, on proclaiming, from time to time, her
adherence to the religion of personal independence; but she had long
ceased to feel the need of any such ideal standards, and had
accepted her marriage as frankly and naturally as though it had been
based on the primitive needs of the heart, and needed no special
sanction to explain or justify it.

"Of course I still believe in our ideas!" she exclaimed.

"Then I repeat that I don't understand. It was a part of your theory
that the greatest possible publicity should be given to our view of
marriage. Have you changed your mind in that respect?"

She hesitated. "It depends on circumstances--on the public one is
addressing. The set of people that the Van Siderens get about them
don't care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine. They are
attracted simply by its novelty."

"And yet it was in just such a set of people that you and I met, and
learned the truth from each other."

"That was different."

"I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs that
such things never _are_ discussed before young girls; but that is
beside the point, for I don't remember seeing any young girl in my
audience to-day--"

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.