Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales

Lady Barb’s relations with Mrs. Vanderdecken consisted mainly in wondering, while she talked, what she wanted of her, and in looking, with her sculptured eyes, at her visitor’s clothes, in which there was always much to examine.  “Oh Doctor Feeder!” “Now Doctor Feeder!” “Well Doctor Feeder”—these exclamations, on Mrs. Chew’s lips, were an undertone in Lady Barb’s consciousness.  When we say she liked her husband’s confrère, as he never failed to describe himself, we understand that she smiled on his appearance and gave him her hand, and asked him if he would have tea.  There was nothing nasty, as they so analytically said in London, about Lady Barb, and she would have been incapable of inflicting a deliberate snub on a man who had the air of standing up so squarely to any purpose he might have in hand.  But she had nothing of her own at all to say to Sidney Feeder.  He apparently had the art of making her shy, more shy than usual—since she was always a little so; she discouraged him, discouraged him completely and reduced him to naught.  He wasn’t a man who wanted drawing out, there was nothing of that in him, he was remarkably copious; but she seemed unable to follow him in any direction and half the time evidently didn’t know what he was saying.  He tried to adapt his conversation to her needs; but when he spoke of the world, of what was going on in society, she was more at sea even than when he spoke of hospitals and laboratories and the health of the city and the progress of science.  She appeared indeed after her first smile when he came in, which was always charming, scarcely to see him—looking past him and above him and below him, everywhere but at him, till he rose to go again, when she gave him another smile, as expressive of pleasure and of casual acquaintance as that with which she had greeted his entry: it seemed to imply that they had been having delightful communion.  He wondered what the deuce Jackson Lemon could find interesting in such a woman, and he believed his perverse, though gifted, colleague not destined to feel her in the long run enrich or illuminate his life.  He pitied Jackson, he saw that Lady Barb, in New York, would neither assimilate nor be assimilated; and yet he was afraid, for very compassion, to betray to the poor man how the queer step he had taken—now so dreadfully irrevocable—might be going to strike most others.  Sidney Feeder was a man of a strenuous conscience, who did loyal duty overmuch and from the very fear he mightn’t do it enough.  In order not to appear to he called upon Lady Barb heroically, in spite of pressing engagements and week after week, enjoying his virtue himself as little as he made it fruitful for his hostess, who wondered at last what she had done to deserve this extremity of appreciation.

She spoke of it to her husband, who wondered also what poor Sidney had in his head and yet naturally shrank from damping too brutally his zeal.  Between the latter’s wish not to let Jackson see his marriage had made a difference and Jackson’s hesitation to reveal to him that his standard of friendship was too high, Lady Barb passed a good many of those numerous hours during which she asked herself if they were the “sort of thing” she had come to America for.  Very little had ever passed between her and her husband on the subject of the most regular of her bores, a clear instinct warning her that if they were ever to have scenes she must choose the occasion well, and this odd person not being an occasion.  Jackson had tacitly admitted that his “confrère” was anything she chose to think him; he was not a man to be guilty in a discussion of the disloyalty of damning a real friend with praise that was faint.  If Lady Agatha had been less of an absentee from her sister’s fireside, meanwhile, Doctor Feeder would have been better entertained; for the younger of the English pair prided herself, after several months of New York, on understanding everything that was said, on interpreting every sound, no matter from what lips the monstrous mystery fell.  But Lady Agatha was never at home; she had learned to describe herself perfectly by the time she wrote her mother that she was always on the go.  None of the innumerable victims of old-world tyranny welcomed to the land of freedom had yet offered more lavish incense to that goddess than this emancipated London debutante.  She had enrolled herself in an amiable band known by the humorous name of “the Tearers”—a dozen young ladies of agreeable appearance, high spirits and good wind, whose most general characteristic was that, when wanted, they were to be sought anywhere in the world but under the roof supposed to shelter them.  They browsed far from the fold; and when Sidney Feeder, as sometimes happened, met Lady Agatha at other houses, she was in the hands of the irrepressible Longstraw.  She had come back to her sister, but Mr. Longstraw had followed her to the door.  As to passing it, he had received direct discouragement from her brother-in-law; but he could at least hang about and wait for her.  It may be confided to the reader at the risk of discounting the effect of the only passage in this very level narrative formed to startle that he never had to wait very long.

When Jackson Lemon came in his wife’s visitors were on the point of leaving her; and he didn’t even ask his colleague to remain, for he had something particular to say to Lady Barb.

“I haven’t put to you half the questions I wanted—I’ve been talking so much to Doctor Feeder,” the dressy Mrs. Chew said, holding the hand of her hostess in one of her own and toying at one of Lady Barb’s ribbons with the other.

“I don’t think I’ve anything to tell you; I think I’ve told people everything,” Lady Barb answered rather wearily.

“You haven’t told me much!” Mrs. Vanderdecken richly radiated.

“What could one tell you?  You know everything,” Jackson impatiently laughed.

“Ah no—there are some things that are great mysteries for me!” this visitor promptly pronounced.  “I hope you’re coming to me on the seventeenth,” she added to Lady Barb.

“On the seventeenth?  I believe we go somewhere.”

“Do go to Mrs. Vanderdecken’s,” said Mrs. Chew; “you’ll see the cream of the cream.”

“Oh gracious!” Mrs. Vanderdecken vaguely cried.

“Well, I don’t care; she will, won’t she, Doctor Feeder?—the very pick of American society.”  Mrs. Chew stuck to her point.

“Oh I’ve no doubt Lady Barb will have a good time,” said Sidney Feeder.  “I’m afraid you miss the bran,” he went on with irrelevant jocosity to Jackson’s bride.  He always tried the jocose when other elements had failed.

“The bran?”  Jackson’s bride couldn’t think.

“Where you used to ride—in the Park.”

“My dear fellow, you speak as if we had met at the circus,” her husband interposed.  “I haven’t married a mountebank!”

“Well, they put some stuff on the road,” Sidney Feeder explained, not holding much to his joke.

“You must miss a great many things,” said Mrs. Chew tenderly.

“I don’t see what,” Mrs. Vanderdecken tinkled, “except the fogs and the Queen.  New York’s getting more and more like London.  It’s a pity—you ought to have known us thirty years ago.”

“You’re the queen here,” said Jackson Lemon, “but I don’t know what you know about thirty years ago.”

“Do you think she doesn’t go back?—she goes back to the last century!” cried Mrs. Chew.

“I daresay I should have liked that,” said Lady Barb; “but I can’t imagine.”  And she looked at her husband—a look she often had—as if she vaguely wished him to do something.

He was not called upon, however, to take any violent steps, for Mrs. Chew presently said, “Well, Lady Barb, good-bye”; Mrs. Vanderdecken glared genially and as for excess of meaning at her hostess and addressed a farewell, accompanied very audibly with his title, to her host; and Sidney Feeder made a joke about stepping on the trains of the ladies’ dresses as he accompanied them to the door.  Mrs. Chew had always a great deal to say at the last; she talked till she was in the street and then she addressed that prospect.  But at the end of five minutes Jackson Lemon was alone with his wife, to whom he then announced a piece of news.  He prefaced it, however, by an inquiry as he came back from the hall.

“Where’s Agatha, my dear?”

“I haven’t the least idea.  In the streets somewhere, I suppose.”

“I think you ought to know a little more.”

“How can I know about things here?  I’ve given her up.  I can do nothing with her.  I don’t care what she does.”

“She ought to go back to England,” Jackson said after a pause.

“She ought never to have come.”

“It was not my proposal, God knows!” he sharply returned.

“Mamma could never know what it really is,” his wife more quietly noted.

“No, it hasn’t been as yet what your mother supposed!  The man Longstraw wants to marry her and has made a formal proposal.  I met him half an hour ago in Madison Avenue, and he asked me to come with him into the Columbia Club.  There, in the billiard-room, which to-day is empty, he opened himself—thinking evidently that in laying the matter before me he was behaving with extraordinary propriety.  He tells me he’s dying of love and that she’s perfectly willing to go and live in Arizona.”

“So she is,” said Lady Barb.  “And what did you tell him?”

“I told him I was convinced it would never do and that at any rate I could have nothing to say to it.  I told him explicitly in short what I had told him virtually before.  I said we should send Aggie straight back to England, and that if they had the courage they must themselves broach the question over there.”

“When shall you send her back?” asked Lady Barb.

“Immediately—by the very first steamer.”

“Alone, like an American girl?”

“Don’t be rough, Barb,” Jackson replied.  “I shall easily find some people—lots of them are sailing now.”

“I must take her myself,” Lady Barb observed in a moment.  “I brought her out—so I must restore her to my mother’s hands.”

He had expected this and believed he was prepared for it, but when it came he found his preparation not complete.  He had no answer to make—none at least that seemed to him to go to the point.  During these last weeks it had come over him with a quiet irresistible unmerciful force that Mrs. Dexter Freer had been right in saying to him that Sunday afternoon in Jermyn Street, the summer before, that he would find it wasn’t so simple to be an American.  Such a character was complicated in just the measure that she had foretold by the difficulty of domesticating any wife at all liberally chosen.  The difficulty wasn’t dissipated by his having taken a high tone about it; it pinched him from morning till night, it hurt him like a misfitting shoe.  His high tone had given him courage when he took the great step; but he began to perceive that the highest tone in the world couldn’t change the nature of things.  His ears tingled as he inwardly noted that if the Dexter Freers, whom he had thought alike abject in their hopes and their fears, had been by ill luck spending the winter in New York, they would have found his predicament as good fun as they could wish.  Drop by drop the conviction had entered his mind—the first drop had come in the form of a word from Lady Agatha—that if his wife should return to England she would never again later recross the Atlantic.  That word from the competent source had been the touch from the outside at which often a man’s fear crystallises.  What she would do, how she would resist—this he wasn’t yet prepared to tell himself; but he felt every time he looked at her that the beautiful woman he had adored was filled with a dumb insuperable ineradicable purpose.  He knew that if she should plant herself firm no power on earth would move her; and her blooming antique beauty and the general loftiness of her breeding came fast to seem to him but the magnificent expression of a dense patient ponderous power to resist.  She wasn’t light, she wasn’t supple, and after six months of marriage he had made up his mind that she wasn’t intelligent—in spite of all which she would elude him.  She had married him, she had come into his fortune and his consideration—for who was she after all? he was on occasion so angry as to ask himself, remembering that in England Lady Claras and Lady Florences were as thick as blackberries—but she would have nothing to do, if she could help it, with his country.  She had gone in to dinner first in every house in the place, but this hadn’t satisfied her.  It had been simple to be an American in the good and easy sense that no one else in New York had made any difficulties; the difficulties had sprung from the very, the consummate, make of her, which were after all what he had married her for, thinking they would be a fine temperamental heritage for his brood.  So they would, doubtless, in the coming years and after the brood should have appeared; but meanwhile they interfered with the best heritage of all—the nationality of his possible children.  She would do indeed nothing violent; he was tolerably certain of that.  She wouldn’t return to England without his consent; only when she should return it would be once for all.  His one possible line, then, was not to take her back—a position replete with difficulties, since he had in a manner given his word; she herself giving none at all beyond the formal promise murmured at the altar.  She had been general, but he had been specific; the settlements he had made were a part of that.  His difficulties were such as he couldn’t directly face.  He must tack in approaching so uncertain a coast.  He said to his wife presently that it would be very inconvenient for him to leave New York at that moment: she must remember their plans had been laid for a later move.  He couldn’t think of letting her make the voyage without him, and on the other hand they must pack her sister off without delay.  He would therefore make instant inquiry for a chaperon, and he relieved his irritation by cursing the name and every other attribute of Herman Longstraw.

Lady Barb didn’t trouble herself to denounce this gentleman; her manner was that of having for a long time expected the worst.  She simply remarked after having listened to her husband for some minutes in silence: “I’d quite as lief she should marry Doctor Feeder!”

The day after this he closeted himself for an hour with his sister-in-law, taking great pains to set forth to her the reasons why she shouldn’t marry her Californian.  Jackson was kind, he was affectionate; he kissed her and put his arm round her waist, he reminded her that he and she were the best of friends and that she had always been awfully nice to him: therefore he counted on her.  She’d break her mother’s heart, she’d deserve her father’s curse, and she’d get him, Jackson, into a pickle from which no human power might ever disembroil him.  Lady Agatha listened and cried, she returned his kiss very affectionately and admitted that her father and mother would never consent to such a marriage; and when he told her that he had made arrangements that she should sail for Liverpool, with some charming people, the next day but one, she embraced him again and assured him she could never thank him enough for all the trouble he had taken about her.  He flattered himself he had convinced and in some degree comforted her, and he reflected with complacency that even should his wife take it into her head Barb would never get ready to embark for her native land between a Monday and a Wednesday.  The next morning Lady Agatha failed to appear at breakfast, though as she usually rose very late her absence excited no immediate alarm.  She hadn’t rung her bell and was supposed still to be sleeping.  But she had never yet slept later than mid-day; and as this hour approached her sister went to her room.  Lady Barb then discovered that she had left the house at seven o’clock in the morning and had gone to meet Mr. Longstraw at a neighbouring corner.  A little note on the table explained it very succinctly, and put beyond the power of the Jackson Lemons to doubt that by the time this news reached them their wayward sister had been united to the man of her preference as closely as the laws of the State of New York could bind her.  Her little note set forth that as she knew she should never be permitted to marry him she had resolved to marry him without permission, and that directly after the ceremony, which would be of the simplest kind, they were to take a train for the Far West.

Our record is concerned only with the remote consequences of this affair, which made of course a great deal of trouble for poor Jackson.  He pursued the fugitives to remote rocky fastnesses and finally overtook them in California; but he hadn’t the boldness to propose to them to separate, for he promptly made out that Herman Longstraw was at least as well married as himself.  Lady Agatha was already popular in the new States, where the history of her elopement, emblazoned in enormous capitals, was circulated in a thousand newspapers.  This question of the newspapers had been for our troubled friend one of the most definite results of his sister-in-law’s coup de tête.  His first thought had been of the public prints and his first exclamation a prayer that they shouldn’t get hold of the story.  They had, however, got hold of it with a myriad wildly-waved hands and were scattering it broadcast over the world.  Lady Barb never caught them in the act—she succeeded perfectly in not seeing what she needn’t; but an affectionate friend of the family, travelling at that time in the United States, made a parcel of some of the leading journals, and sent them to Lord Canterville.  This missive elicited from her ladyship a letter, addressed to her son-in-law, which shook the young man’s position to the base.  The phials of a rank vulgarity had been opened on the house of Canterville, and the noble matron demanded that in compensation for the affronts and injuries heaped upon her family, and bereaved and dishonoured as she was, she should at least be allowed to look on the face of her second daughter.  “I suppose you’ll not, for very pity, be deaf to such a prayer as that,” said Lady Barb; and though loth to record a second act of weakness on the part of a man with pretensions to be strong, I may not disguise the fact that poor Jackson, who blushed dreadfully over the newspapers and felt afresh as he read them the force of Mrs. Freer’s terrible axiom, poor Jackson paid a visit to the office of the Cunarders.  He said to himself later on that it was the newspapers that had done it; he couldn’t decently appear to be on their side: they made it so hard to deny that the country was impossible at a time when one was in need of all one’s arguments.  Lady Barb, before sailing, definitely refused to mention any week or month as the date of their prearranged return to New York.  Very many weeks and months have elapsed since then, and she gives no sign of coming back.  She will never fix a date.  She is much missed by Mrs. Vanderdecken, who still alludes to her—still says the line of the shoulders was superb; putting the statement pensively in the past tense.  Lady Beauchemin and Lady Marmaduke are much disconcerted; the international project has not, in their view, received an impetus.

Jackson Lemon has a house in London and he rides in the Park with his wife, who is as beautiful as the day and who a year ago presented him with a little girl exhibiting features that he already scans for the look of race—whether in hope or in fear to-day is more than my muse has revealed.  He has occasional scenes with Lady Barb during which the look of race is very clear in her own countenance; but they never terminate in a visit to the Cunarders.  He’s exceedingly restless and is constantly crossing to the Continent; but he returns with a certain abruptness, for he hates meeting the Dexter Freers, who seem to pervade the more comfortable parts of Europe.  He dodges them in every town.  Sidney Feeder feels very badly about him; it’s months since Jackson has sent him any “results.”  The excellent fellow goes very often, in a consolatory spirit, to see Mrs. Lemon, but has not yet been able to answer her standing question—“Why that girl more than another?”  Lady Agatha Longstraw and her husband arrived a year ago in England, and Mr. Longstraw’s personality had immense success during the last London season.  It’s not exactly known what they live on, though perfectly known that he’s looking for something to do.  Meanwhile it’s as good as known that their really quite responsible brother-in-law supports them.

THE SIEGE OF LONDON

I

That solemn piece of upholstery the curtain of the Comédie Française had fallen upon the first act of the piece, and our two Americans had taken advantage of the interval to pass out of the huge hot theatre in company with the other occupants of the stalls.  But they were among the first to return, and they beguiled the rest of the intermission with looking at the house, which had lately been cleansed of its historic cobwebs and ornamented with frescoes illustrative of the classic drama.  In the month of September the audience at the Théâtre Français is comparatively thin, and on this occasion the drama—L’Aventurière of Emile Augier—had no pretensions to novelty.  Many of the boxes were empty, others were occupied by persons of provincial or nomadic appearance.  The boxes are far from the stage, near which our spectators were placed; but even at a distance Rupert Waterville was able to appreciate details.  He was fond of appreciating details, and when he went to the theatre he looked about him a good deal, making use of a dainty but remarkably powerful glass.  He knew that such a course was wanting in true distinction and that it was indelicate to level at a lady an instrument often only less injurious in effect than a double-barrelled pistol; but he was always very curious, and was sure, in any case, that at that moment, at that antiquated play—so he was pleased to qualify the masterpiece of a contemporary—he shouldn’t be observed by any one he knew.  Standing up therefore with his back to the stage he made the circuit of the boxes while several other persons near him performed the operation with even greater coolness.

“Not a single pretty woman,” he remarked at last to his friend; an observation which Littlemore, sitting in his place and staring with a bored expression at the new-looking curtain, received in perfect silence.  He rarely indulged in these optical excursions; he had been a great deal in Paris and had ceased to vibrate more than a few times a day; he believed the French capital could have no more surprises for him, though it had had a good many in former days.  Waterville was still in the stage of surprise; he suddenly expressed this emotion.  “By Jove, I beg your pardon, I beg her pardon!  There is after all a woman who may be called”—he paused a little, inspecting her—“an approach to a beauty!”

“How near an approach?” Littlemore responded.

“An unusual kind—an indescribable kind.”  Littlemore was not heeding his answer, but presently heard himself appealed to.  “I say, I wish very much you’d do me a favour.”

“I did you a favour in coming here,” said Littlemore.  “It’s insufferably hot, and the play’s like a dinner that has been dressed by the kitchen-maid.  The actors are all doublures.”

“It’s simply to answer me this: is she respectable now?” Waterville demanded, inattentive to his friend’s epigram.

Littlemore gave a groan, without turning his head.  “You’re always wanting to know if they’re respectable.  What on earth can it matter?”

“I’ve made such mistakes—I’ve lost all confidence,” said poor Waterville, to whom European civilisation had not ceased to be a novelty and who during the last six months had found himself confronted with problems for which his training had little prepared him.  Whenever he encountered a very nice-looking woman he was sure to discover that she belonged to the class represented by the heroine of M. Augier’s drama; and whenever his attention rested upon a person of a florid style of attraction there was the strongest probability that she would turn out a countess.  The countesses often looked so unnaturally cheap and the others unnaturally expensive.  Littlemore distinguished at a glance; he never made mistakes.

“Simply for looking at them it doesn’t matter, I suppose,” Waterville ingenuously sighed.

“You stare at them all alike,” Littlemore went on, still without moving; “except indeed when I tell you they aren’t decent—then your eyes, my dear man, grow as large as saucers.”