The Aspern Papers, Louisa Pallant, The Modern Warning (1 volume, London & New York: Macmillan & Co., 1888)/The Modern Warning/Chapter 2
II
The next morning after breakfast Mrs. Grice had a conversation with her son in her own room. Agatha had not yet appeared, and she explained that the girl was sleeping late, having been much fatigued by her excursion the day before as well as by the excitement of her brother's arrival. Macarthy thought it a little singular that she should bear her fatigue so much less well than her mother, but he understood everything in a moment, as soon as the old lady drew him toward her with her little conscious, cautious face, taking his hand in hers. She had had a long and important talk with Agatha the previous evening, after they went upstairs, and she had extracted from the girl some information which she had within a day or two begun very much to desire.
'It's about Sir Rufus Chasemore. I couldn't but think you would wonder—just as I was wondering myself,' said Mrs. Grice. 'I felt as if I couldn't be satisfied till I had asked. I don't know how you will feel about it. I am afraid it will upset you a little; but anything that you may think—well, yes, it is the case.'
'Do you mean she is engaged to be married to your Englishman?' Macarthy demanded, with a face that suddenly flushed.
'No, she's not engaged. I presume she wouldn't take that step without finding out how you'd feel. In fact that's what she said last night.'
'I feel like thunder, I feel like hell!' Macarthy exclaimed; 'and I hope you'll tell her so.'
Mrs. Grice looked frightened and pained. 'Well, my son, I'm glad you've come, if there is going to be any trouble.'
'Trouble—what trouble should there be? He can't marry her if she won't have him.'
'Well, she didn't say she wouldn't have him; she said the question hadn't come up. But she thinks it would come up if she were to give him any sort of opening. That's what I thought and that's what I wanted to make sure of.'
Macarthy looked at his mother for some moments in extreme seriousness; then he took out his watch and looked at that. 'What time is the first boat?' he asked.
'I don't know—there are a good many.'
'Well, we'll take the first—we'll quit this.' And the young man put back his watch and got up with decision.
His mother sat looking at him rather ruefully. 'Would you feel so badly if she were to do it?'
'She may do it without my consent; she shall never do it with,' said Macarthy Grice.
'Well, I could see last evening, by the way you acted—' his mother murmured, as if she thought it her duty to try and enter into his opposition.
'How did I act, ma'am?'
'Well, you acted as if you didn't think much of the English.'
'Well, I don't,' said the young man.
'Agatha noticed it and she thought Sir Rufus noticed it too.'
'They have such thick hides in general that they don't notice anything. But if he is more sensitive than the others perhaps it will keep him away.'
'Would you like to wound him, Macarthy?' his mother inquired, with an accent of timid reproach.
'Wound him? I should like to kill him! Please to let Agatha know that we'll move on,' the young man added.
Mrs. Grice got up as if she were about to comply with this injunction, but she stopped in the middle of the room and asked of her son, with a quaint effort at conscientious impartiality which would have made him smile if he had been capable of smiling in such a connection, 'Don't you think that in some respects the English are a fine nation?'
'Well, yes; I like them for pale ale and notepaper and umbrellas; and I got a firstrate trunk there the other day. But I want my sister to marry one of her own people.'
'Yes, I presume it would be better,' Mrs. Grice remarked. 'But Sir Rufus has occupied very high positions in his own country.'
'I know the kind of positions he has occupied; I can tell what they were by looking at him. The more he has done of that the more intensely he represents what I don't like.'
'Of course he would stand up for England,' Mrs. Grice felt herself compelled to admit.
'Then why the mischief doesn't he do so instead of running round after Americans?' Macarthy demanded.
'He doesn't run round after us; but we knew his sister, Lady Bolitho, in Rome. She is a most sweet woman and we saw a great deal of her; she took a great fancy to Agatha. I surmise that she mentioned us to him pretty often when she went back to England, and when he came abroad for his autumn holiday, as he calls it—he met us first in the Engadine, three or four weeks ago, and came down here with us—it seemed as if we already knew him and he knew us. He is very talented and he is quite well off.'
'Mother,' said Macarthy Grice, going close to the old lady and speaking very gravely, 'why do you know so much about him? Why have you gone into it so?'
'I haven't gone into it; I only know what he has told us.'
'But why have you given him the right to tell you? How does it concern you whether he is well off?'
The poor woman began to look flurried and scared. 'My son, I have given him no right; I don't know what you mean. Besides, it wasn't he who told us he is well off; it was his sister.'
'It would have been better if you hadn't known his sister,' said the young man, gloomily.
'Gracious, Macarthy, we must know some one!' Mrs. Grice rejoined, with a flicker of spirit.
'I don't see the necessity of your knowing the English.'
'Why Macarthy, can't we even know them?' pleaded his mother.
'You see the sort of thing it gets you into.'
'It hasn't got us into anything. Nothing has been done.'
'So much the better, mother darling,' said the young man. 'In that case we will go on to Venice. Where is he going?'
'I don't know, but I suppose he won't come on to Venice if we don't ask him.'
'I don't believe any delicacy would prevent him,' Macarthy rejoined. 'But he loathes me; that's an advantage.'
'He loathes you—when he wanted so to know you?'
'Oh yes, I understand. Well, now he knows me! He knows he hates everything I like and I hate everything he likes.'
'He doesn't imagine you hate your sister, I suppose!' said the old lady, with a little vague laugh.
'Mother,' said Macarthy, still in front of her with his hands in his pockets, 'I verily believe I should hate her if she were to marry him.'
'Oh, gracious, my son, don't, don't!' cried Mrs. Grice, throwing herself into his arms with a shudder of horror and burying her face on his shoulder.
Her son held her close and as he bent over her he went on: 'Dearest mother, don't you see that we must remain together, that at any rate we mustn't be separated by different ideas, different associations and institutions? I don't believe any family has ever had more of the feeling that holds people closely together than we have had: therefore for heaven's sake let us keep it, let us find our happiness in it as we always have done. Of course Agatha will marry some day; but why need she marry in such a way as to make a gulf? You and she are all I have, and—I may be selfish—I should like very much to keep you.'
'Of course I will let her know the way you feel,' said the old lady, a moment later, rearranging her cap and her shawl and putting away her pocket-handkerchief.
'It's a matter she certainly ought to understand. She would wish to, unless she is very much changed,' Macarthy added, as if he saw all this with high lucidity.
'Oh, she isn't changed—she'll never change!' his mother exclaimed, with rebounding optimism. She thought it wicked not to take cheerful views.
'She wouldn't if she were to marry an Englishman,' he declared, as Mrs. Grice left him to go to her daughter.
She told him an hour later that Agatha would be quite ready to start for Venice on the morrow and that she said he need have no fear that Sir Rufus Chasemore would follow them. He was naturally anxious to know from her what words she had had with Agatha, but the only very definite information he extracted was to the effect that the girl had declared with infinite feeling that she would never marry an enemy of her country. When he saw her later in the day he thought she had been crying; but there was nothing in her manner to show that she resented any pressure her mother might have represented to her that he had put upon her or that she was making a reluctant sacrifice. Agatha Grice was very fond of her brother, whom she knew to be upright, distinguished and exceedingly mindful of the protection and support that he owed her mother and herself. He was perverse and obstinate, but she was aware that in essentials he was supremely tender, and he had always been very much the most eminent figure in her horizon.
No allusion was made between them to Sir Rufus Chasemore, though the silence on either side was rather a conscious one, and they talked of the prospective pleasures of Venice and of the arrangements Macarthy would be able to make in regard to his mother's spending another winter in Rome. He was to accompany them to Venice and spend a fortnight with them there, after which he was to return to London to terminate his business and then take his way back to New York. There was a plan of his coming to see them again later in the winter, in Rome, if he should succeed in getting six weeks off. As a man of energy and decision, though indeed of a somewhat irritable stomach, he made light of the Atlantic voyage: it was a rest and a relief, alternating with his close attention to business. That the disunion produced by the state of Mrs. Grice's health was a source of constant regret and even of much depression to him was well known to his mother and sister, who would not have broken up his home by coming to live in Europe if he had not insisted upon it. Macarthy was in the highest degree conscientious; he was capable of suffering the extremity of discomfort in a cause which he held to be right. But his mother and sister were his home, all the same, and in their absence he was perceptibly desolate. Fortunately it had been hoped that a couple of southern winters would quite set Mrs. Grice up again and that then everything in America would be as it had been before. Agatha's affection for her brother was very nearly as great as his affection for herself; but it took the form of wishing that his loneliness might be the cause of his marrying some thoroughly nice girl, inasmuch as after all her mother and she might not always be there. Fraternal tenderness in Macarthy's bosom followed a different logic. He was so fond of his sister that he had a secret hope that she would never marry at all. He had spoken otherwise to his mother, because that was the only way not to seem offensively selfish; but the essence of his thought was that on the day Agatha should marry she would throw him over. On the day she should marry an Englishman she would not throw him over—she would betray him. That is she would betray her country, and it came to the same thing. Macarthy's patriotism was of so intense a hue that to his own sense the national life and his own life flowed in an indistinguishable current.
The particular Englishman he had his eye upon now was not, as a general thing, visible before luncheon. He had told Agatha, who mentioned it to her brother, that in the morning he was immersed in work—in letter-writing. Macarthy wondered what his work might be, but did not condescend to inquire. He was enlightened however by happening by an odd chance to observe an allusion to Sir Rufus in a copy of the London Times which he took up in the reading-room of the hotel. This occurred in a letter to the editor of the newspaper, the writer of which accused Agatha's friend of having withheld from the public some information to which the public was entitled. The information had respect to 'the situation in South Africa', and Sir Rufus was plainly an agent of the British government, the head of some kind of department or sub-department. This did not make Macarthy like him any better. He was displeased with the idea of England's possessing colonies at all and considered that she had acquired them by force and fraud and held them by a frail and unnatural tenure. It appeared to him that any man who occupied a place in this unrighteous system must have false, detestable views.
Sir Rufus Chasemore turned up on the terrace in the afternoon and bore himself with the serenity of a man unconscious of the damaging inferences that had been formed about him. Macarthy neither avoided him nor sought him out—he even relented a little toward him mentally when he thought of the loss he was about to inflict on him; but when the Englishman approached him and appeared to wish to renew their conversation of the evening before it struck him that he was wanting in delicacy. There was nothing strange in that however, for delicacy and tact were not the strong point of one's transatlantic cousins, with whom one had always to dot one's i's. It seemed to Macarthy that Sir Rufus Chasemore ought to have guessed that he cared little to keep up an acquaintance with him, though indeed the young American would have been at a loss to say how he was to guess it, inasmuch as he would have resented the imputation that he himself had been rude enough to make such a fact patent. The American ladies were in their apartments, occupied in some manner connected with their intended retreat, and there was nothing for Macarthy but to stroll up and down for nearly half an hour with the personage who was so provokingly the cause of it. It had come over him now that he should have liked extremely to spend several days on the lake of Como. The place struck him as much more delicious than it had done while he chafed the day before at the absence of his relations. He was angry with the Englishman for forcing him to leave it and still more angry with him for showing so little responsibility or even perception in regard to the matter. It occurred to him while he was in this humour that it might be a good plan to make himself so disagreeable that Sir Rufus would take to his heels and never reappear, fleeing before the portent of such an insufferable brother-in-law. But this plan demanded powers of execution which Macarthy did not flatter himself that he possessed: he felt that it was impossible to him to divest himself of his character of a polished American gentleman.
If he found himself dissenting from most of the judgments and opinions which Sir Rufus Chasemore happened to express in the course of their conversation there was nothing perverse in that: it was a simple fact apparently that the Englishman had nothing in common with him and was predestined to enunciate propositions to which it was impossible for him to assent. Moreover how could he assent to propositions enunciated in that short, offhand, clipping tone, with the words running into each other and the voice rushing up and down the scale? Macarthy, who spoke very slowly, with great distinctness and in general with great correctness, was annoyed not only by his companion's intonation but by the odd and, as it seemed to him, licentious application that he made of certain words. He struck him as wanting in reverence for the language, which Macarthy had an idea, not altogether unjust, that he himself deeply cherished. He would have admitted that these things were small and not great, but in the usual relations of life the small things count more than the great, and they sufficed at any rate to remind him of the essential antipathy and incompatibility which he had always believed to exist between an Englishman and an American. They were, in the very nature of things, disagreeable to each other—both mentally and physically irreconcilable. In cases where this want of correspondence had been bridged over it was because the American had made weak concessions, had been shamefully accommodating. That was a kind of thing the Englishman, to do him justice, never did; he had at least the courage of his prejudices. It was not unknown to Macarthy that the repugnance in question appeared to be confined to the American male, as was shown by a thousand international marriages, which had transplanted as many of his countrywomen to unnatural British homes. That variation had to be allowed for, and the young man felt that he was allowing for it when he reflected that probably his own sister liked the way Sir Rufus Chasemore spoke. In fact he was intimately convinced she liked it, which was a reason the more for their quitting Cadenabbia the next morning.
Sir Rufus took the opposite point of view quite as much as himself, only he took it gaily and familiarly and laughed about it, as if he were amused at the preferences his companion betrayed and especially amused that he should hold them so gravely, so almost gloomily. This sociable jocosity, as if they had known each other three months was what appeared to Macarthy so indelicate. They talked no politics and Sir Rufus said nothing more about America; but it stuck out of the Englishman at every pore that he was a resolute and consistent conservative, a prosperous, accomplished, professional, official Tory. It gave Macarthy a kind of palpitation to think that his sister had been in danger of associating herself with such arrogant doctrines. Not that a woman's political creed mattered; but that of her husband did. He had an impression that he himself was a passionate democrat, an unshrinking radical. It was a proof of how far Sir Rufus's manner was from being satisfactory to his companion that the latter was unable to guess whether he already knew of the sudden determination of his American friends to leave Cadenabbia or whether their intention was first revealed to him in Macarthy's casual mention of it, which apparently put him out not at all, eliciting nothing more than a frank, cheerful expression of regret. Macarthy somehow mistrusted a man who could conceal his emotions like that. How could he have known they were going unless Agatha had told him, and how could Agatha have told him, since she could not as yet have seen him? It did not even occur to the young man to suspect that she might have conveyed the unwelcome news to him by a letter. And if he had not known it why was he not more startled and discomfited when Macarthy dealt the blow? The young American made up his mind at last that the reason why Sir Rufus was not startled was that he had thought in advance it would be no more than natural that the newly-arrived brother should wish to spoil his game. But in that case why was he not angry with him for such a disposition? Why did he come after him and insist on talking with him? There seemed to Macarthy something impudent in this incongruity—as if to the mind of an English statesman the animosity of a Yankee lawyer were really of too little account.