Collected Stories by Henry James
‘That is what mamma has brought us here for,’ she said; ‘she doesn’t like it if we don’t dance.’
‘How does she know whether she likes it or not? You have always danced.’
‘Once I didn’t,’ said Lady Barberina.
He told her that, at any rate, he would settle it with her mother, and persuaded her to wander with him into the conservatory, where there were coloured lights suspended among the plants, and a vault of verdure overhead. In comparison with the other rooms the conservatory was dusky and remote. But they were not alone; half a dozen other couples were in possession. The gloom was rosy with the slopes of azalea, and suffused with mitigated music, which made it possible to talk without consideration of one’s neighbours. Nevertheless, though it was only in looking back on the scene later that Lady Barberina perceived this, these dispersed couples were talking very softly. She did not look at them; it seemed to her that, virtually, she was alone with Jackson Lemon. She said something about conservatories, about the fragrance of the air; for all answer to which he asked her, as he stood there before her, a question by which she might have been exceedingly startled.
‘How do people who marry in England ever know each other before marriage? They have no chance.’
‘I am sure I don’t know,’ said Lady Barberina; ‘I never was married.’
‘It’s very different in my country. There a man may see much of a girl; he may come and see her, he may be constantly alone with her. I wish you allowed that over here.’
Lady Barberina suddenly examined the less ornamental side of her fan, as if it had never occurred to her before to look at it. ‘It must be so very odd, America,’ she murmured at last.
‘Well, I guess in that matter we are right; over here it’s a leap in the dark.’
‘I am sure I don’t know,’ said the girl. She had folded her fan; she stretched out her arm mechanically and plucked a sprig of azalea.
‘I guess it doesn’t signify, after all,’ Jackson Lemon remarked. ‘They say that love is blind at the best.’ His keen young face was bent upon hers; his thumbs were in the pockets of his trousers; he smiled a little, showing his fine teeth. She said nothing, but only pulled her azalea to pieces. She was usually so quiet that this small movement looked restless.
‘This is the first time I have seen you in the least without a lot of people,’ he went on.
‘Yes, it’s very tiresome,’ she said.
‘I have been sick of it; I didn’t want to come here to-night.’
She had not met his eyes, though she knew they were seeking her own. But now she looked at him a moment. She had never objected to his appearance, and in this respect she had no repugnance to overcome. She liked a man to be tall and handsome, and Jackson Lemon was neither; but when she was sixteen, and as tall herself as she was to be at twenty, she had been in love (for three weeks) with one of her cousins, a little fellow in the Hussars, who was shorter even than the American, shorter consequently than herself. This proved that distinction might be independent of stature – not that she ever reasoned it out. Jackson Lemon’s facial spareness, his bright little eye, which seemed always to be measuring things, struck her as original, and she thought them very cutting, which would do very well for a husband of hers. As she made this reflection, of course it never occurred to her that she herself might be cut; she was not a sacrificial lamb. She perceived that his features expressed a mind – a mind that would be rather effective. She would never have taken him for a doctor; though, indeed, when all was said, that was very negative and didn’t account for the way he imposed himself.
‘Why, then, did you come?’ she asked, in answer to his last speech.
‘Because it seems to me after all better to see you in this way than not to see you at all; I want to know you better.’
‘I don’t think I ought to stay here,’ said Lady Barberina, looking round her.
‘Don’t go till I have told you I love you,’ murmured the young man.
She made no exclamation, indulged in no start; he could not see even that she changed colour. She took his request with a noble simplicity, with her head erect and her eyes lowered.
‘I don’t think you have a right to tell me that.’
‘Why not?’ Jackson Lemon demanded. ‘I wish to claim the right; I wish you to give it to me.’
‘I can’t – I don’t know you. You have said it yourself.’
‘Can’t you have a little faith? That will help us to know each other better. It’s disgusting, the want of opportunity; even at Pasterns I could scarcely get a walk with you. But I have the greatest faith in you. I feel that I love you, and I couldn’t do more than that at the end of six months. I love your beauty – I love you from head to foot. Don’t move, please don’t move.’ He lowered his tone; but it went straight to her ear, and it must be believed that it had a certain eloquence. For himself, after he had heard himself say these words, all his being was in a glow. It was a luxury to speak to her of her beauty; it brought him nearer to her than he had ever been. But the colour had come into her face, and it seemed to remind him that her beauty was not all. ‘Everything about you is sweet and noble,’ he went on; ‘everything is dear to me. I am sure you are good. I don’t know what you think of me; I asked Lady Beauchemin to tell me, and she told me to judge for myself. Well, then, I judge you like me. Haven’t I a right to assume that till the contrary is proved? May I speak to your father? That’s what I want to know. I have been waiting; but now what should I wait for longer? I want to be able to tell him that you have given me some hope. I suppose I ought to speak to him first. I meant to, to-morrow, but meanwhile, to-night, I thought I would just put this in. In my country it wouldn’t matter particularly. You must see all that over there for yourself. If you should tell me not to speak to your father, I wouldn’t; I would wait. But I like better to ask your leave to speak to him than to ask his to speak to you.’
His voice had sunk almost to a whisper; but, though it trembled, his emotion gave it peculiar intensity. He had the same attitude, his thumbs in his trousers, his attentive head, his smile, which was a matter of course; no one would have imagined what he was saying. She had listened without moving, and at the end she raised her eyes. They rested on his a moment, and he remembered, a good while later, the look which passed her lids.
‘You may say anything that you please to my father, but I don’t wish to hear any more. You have said too much, considering how little idea you have given me before.’
‘I was watching you,’ said Jackson Lemon.
Lady Barberina held her head higher, looking straight at him. Then, quite seriously, ‘I don’t like to be watched,’ she remarked.
‘You shouldn’t be so beautiful, then. Won’t you give me a word of hope?’ he added.
‘I have never supposed I should marry a foreigner,’ said Lady Barberina.
‘Do you call me a foreigner?’
‘I think your ideas are very different, and your country is different; you have told me so yourself.’
‘I should like to show it to you; I would make you like it.’
‘I am not sure what you would make me do,’ said Lady Barberina, very honestly.
‘Nothing that you don’t want.’
‘I am sure you would try,’ she declared, with a smile.
‘Well,’ said Jackson Lemon, ‘after all, I am trying now.’
To this she simply replied she must go to her mother, and he was obliged to lead her out of the conservatory. Lady Canterville was not immediately found, so that he had time to murmur as they went, ‘Now that I have spoken, I am very happy.’
‘Perhaps you are happy too soon,’ said the girl.
‘Ah, don’t say that, Lady Barb.’
‘Of course I must think of it.’
‘Of course you must!’ said Jackson Lemon. ‘I will speak to your father to-morrow.’
‘I can’t fancy what he will say.’
‘How can he dislike me?’ the young man asked, in a to
‘I don’t see why not; but if I speak to him I daresay he will be at home,’ she answered.
‘It will be worth his while!’
Jackson Lemon left the house reflecting that as he had never proposed to a girl before he could not be expected to know how women demean themselves in this emergency. He had heard, indeed, that Lady Barb had had no end of offers; and though he thought it probable that the number was exaggerated, as it always is, it was to be supposed that her way of appearing suddenly to have dropped him was but the usual behaviour for the occasion.
III
AT her mother’s the next day she was absent from luncheon, and Lady Canterville mentioned to him (he didn’t ask) that she had gone to see a dear old great-aunt, who was also her godmother, and who lived at Roehampton. Lord Canterville was not present, but our young man was informed by his hostess that he had promised her he would come in exactly at three o’clock. Jackson Lemon lunched with Lady Canterville and the children, who appeared in force at this repast, all the younger girls being present, and two little boys, the juniors of the two sons who were in their teens. Jackson, who was very fond of children, and thought these absolutely the finest in the world – magnificent specimens of a magnificent brood, such as it would be so satisfactory in future days to see about his own knee – Jackson felt that he was being treated as one of the family, but was not frightened by what he supposed the privilege to imply. Lady Canterville betrayed no consciousness whatever of his having mooted the question of becoming her son-in-law, and he believed that her eldest daughter had not told her of their talk the night before. This idea gave him pleasure; he liked to think that Lady Barb was judging him for herself. Perhaps, indeed, she was taking counsel of the old lady at Roehampton: he believed that he was the sort of lover of whom a godmother would approve. Godmothers in his mind were mainly associated with fairy-tales (he had had no baptismal sponsors of his own); and that point of view would be favourable to a young man with a great deal of gold who had suddenly arrived from a foreign country – an apparition, surely, sufficiently elfish. He made up his mind that he should like Lady Canterville as a mother-in-law; she would be too well-bred to meddle. Her husband came in at three o’clock, just after they had left the table, and said to Jackson Lemon that it was very good in him to have waited.
‘I haven’t waited,’ Jackson replied, with his watch in his hand; ‘you are punctual to the minute.’
I know not how Lord Canterville may have judged his young friend, but Jackson Lemon had been told more than once in his life that he was a very good fellow, but rather too literal. After he had lighted a cigarette in his lordship’s ‘den’, a large brown apartment on the ground-floor, which partook at once of the nature of an office and of that of a harness-room (it could not have been called in any degree a library), he went straight to the point in these terms: ‘Well now, Lord Canterville, I feel as if I ought to let you know without more delay that I am in love with Lady Barb, and that I should like to marry her.’ So he spoke, puffing his cigarette, with his conscious but unextenuating eye fixed on his host.
No man, as I have intimated, bore better being looked at than this noble personage; he seemed to bloom in the envious warmth of human contemplation, and never appeared so faultless as when he was most exposed. ‘My dear fellow, my dear fellow,’ he murmured, almost in disparagement, stroking his ambrosial beard from before the empty fireplace. He lifted his eyebrows, but he looked perfectly good-natured.
‘Are you surprised, sir?’ Jackson Lemon asked.
‘Why, I suppose any one is surprised at a man wanting one of his children. He sometimes feels the weight of that sort of thing so much, you know. He wonders what the devil another man wants of them.’ And Lord Canterville laughed pleasantly out of the copious fringe of his lips.
‘I only want one of them,’ said Jackson Lemon, laughing too, but with a lighter organ.
‘Polygamy would be rather good for the parents. However, Louisa told me the other night that she thought you were looking the way you speak of.’
‘Yes, I told Lady Beauchemin that I love Lady Barb, and she seemed to think it was natural.’
‘Oh yes, I suppose there’s no want of nature in it! But, my dear fellow, I really don’t know what to say.’
‘Of course you’ll have to think of it.’ Jackson Lemon, in saying this, felt that he was making the most liberal concession to the point of view of his interlocutor; being perfectly aware that in his own country it was not left much to the parents to think of.
‘I shall have to talk it over with my wife.’
‘Lady Canterville has been very kind to me; I hope she will continue.’
‘My dear fellow, we are excellent friends. No one could appreciate you more than Lady Canterville. Of course we can only consider such a question on the – a – the highest grounds. You would never want to marry without knowing, as it were, exactly what you are doing. I, on my side, naturally, you know, am bound to do the best I can for my own child. At the same time, of course, we don’t want to spend our time in – a – walking round the horse. We want to keep to the main line.’ It was settled between them after a little that the main line was that Jackson Lemon knew to a certainty the state of his affections and was in a position to pretend to the hand of a young lady who, Lord Canterville might say – of course, you know, without any swagger – had a right to expect to do well, as the women call it.
‘I should think she had,’ Jackson Lemon said; ‘she’s a beautiful type.’
Lord Canterville stared a moment. ‘She is a clever, well-grown girl, and she takes her fences like a grasshopper. Does she know all this, by the way?’ he added.
‘Oh yes, I told her last night.’
Again Lord Canterville had the air, unusual with him, of returning his companion’s scrutiny. ‘I am not sure that you ought to have done that, you know.’
‘I couldn’t have spoken to you first – I couldn’t,’ said Jackson Lemon. ‘I meant to, but it stuck in my crop.’
‘They don’t in your country, I guess,’ his lordship returned, smiling.
‘Well, not as a general thing; however, I find it very pleasant to discuss with you now.’ And in truth it was very pleasant. Nothing could be easier, friendlier, more informal, than Lord Canterville’s manner, which implied all sorts of equality, especially that of age and fortune, and made Jackson Lemon feel at the end of three minutes almost as if he too were a beautifully preserved and somewhat straitened nobleman of sixty, with the views of a man of the world about his own marriage. The young American perceived that Lord Canterville waived the point of his having spoken first to the girl herself, and saw in this indulgence a just concession to the ardour of young affection. For Lord Canterville seemed perfectly to appreciate the sentimental side – at least so far as it was embodied in his visitor – w
‘Well, she didn’t box my ears. She told me that she would think of it, but that I must speak to you. But, naturally, I shouldn’t have said what I did to her if I hadn’t made up my mind during the last fortnight that I am not disagreeable to her.’
‘Ah, my dear young man, women are odd cattle!’ Lord Canterville exclaimed, rather unexpectedly. ‘But of course you know all that,’ he added in an instant; ‘you take the general risk.’
‘I am perfectly willing to take the general risk; the particular risk is small.’
‘Well, upon my honour I don’t really know my girls. You see a man’s time, in England, is tremendously taken up; but I dare say it’s the same in your country. Their mother knows them – I think I had better send for their mother. If you don’t mind I’ll just suggest that she join us here.’
‘I’m rather afraid of you both together, but if it will settle it any quicker—’ said Jackson Lemon. Lord Canterville rang the bell, and, when a servant appeared, despatched him with a message to her ladyship. While they were waiting, the young man remembered that it was in his power to give a more definite account of his pecuniary basis. He had simply said before that he was abundantly able to marry; he shrank from putting himself forward as a billionaire. He had a fine taste, and he wished to appeal to Lord Canterville primarily as a gentleman. But now that he had to make a double impression, he bethought himself of his millions, for millions were always impressive. ‘I think it only fair to let you know that my fortune is really very considerable,’ he remarked.