The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “The peacock has done for you, Mr. Searle,” said his cousin, “what he does only for very great people. A year ago there came here a great person—a grand old lady—to see my brother. I don’t think that since then he has spread his tail as wide for any one else—not by a dozen feathers.”

  “It’s not alone the peacock,” said Searle. “Just now there came slipping across my path a little green lizard, the first I ever saw, the lizard of literature! And if you’ve a ghost, broad daylight though it be, I expect to see him here. Do you know the annals of your house, Miss Searle?”

  “Oh dear, no! You must ask my brother for all those things.”

  “You ought to have a collection of legends and traditions. You ought to have loves and murders and mysteries by the roomful. I shall be ashamed of you if you haven’t.”

  “Oh Mr. Searle! We’ve always been a very well-behaved family,” she quite seriously pleaded. “Nothing out of the way has ever happened, I think.”

  “Nothing out of the way? Oh that won’t do! We’ve managed better than that in America. Why I myself!”—and he looked at her ruefully enough, but enjoying too his idea that he might embody the social scandal or point to the darkest drama of the Searles. “Suppose I should turn out a better Searle than you—better than you nursed here in romance and extravagance? Come, don’t disappoint me. You’ve some history among you all, you’ve some poetry, you’ve some accumulation of legend. I’ve been famished all my days for these things. Don’t you understand? Ah you can’t understand! Tell me,” he rambled on, “something tremendous. When I think of what must have happened here; of the lovers who must have strolled on this terrace and wandered under the beeches, of all the figures and passions and purposes that must have haunted these walls! When I think of the births and deaths, the joys and sufferings, the young hopes and the old regrets, the rich experience of life—!” He faltered a moment with the increase of his agitation. His humour of dismay at a threat of the commonplace in the history he felt about him had turned to a deeper reaction. I began to fear however that he was really losing his head. He went on with a wilder play. “To see it all called up there before me, if the Devil alone could do it I’d make a bargain with the Devil! Ah Miss Searle,” he cried, “I’m a most unhappy man!”

  “Oh dear, oh dear!” she almost wailed while I turned half away.

  “Look at that window, that dear little window!” I turned back to see him point to a small protruding oriel, above us, relieved against the purple brickwork, framed in chiselled stone and curtained with ivy.

  “It’s my little room,” she said.

  “Of course it’s a woman’s room. Think of all the dear faces—all of them so mild and yet so proud—that have looked out of that lattice, and of all the old-time women’s lives whose principal view of the world has been this quiet park! Every one of them was a cousin of mine. And you, dear lady, you’re one of them yet.” With which he marched toward her and took her large white hand. She surrendered it, blushing to her eyes and pressing her other hand to her breast. “You’re a woman of the past. You’re nobly simple. It has been a romance to see you. It doesn’t matter what I say to you. You didn’t know me yesterday, you’ll not know me to-morrow. Let me to-day do a mad sweet thing. Let me imagine in you the spirit of all the dead women who have trod the terrace- flags that lie here like sepulchral tablets in the pavement of a church. Let me say I delight in you!”—he raised her hand to his lips. She gently withdrew it and for a moment averted her face. Meeting her eyes the next instant I saw the tears had come. The Sleeping Beauty was awake.

  There followed an embarrassed pause. An issue was suddenly presented by the appearance of the butler bearing a letter. “A telegram, Miss,” he announced.

  “Oh what shall I do?” cried Miss Searle. “I can’t open a telegram. Cousin, help me.”

  Searle took the missive, opened it and read aloud: “I shall be home to dinner. Keep the American.”

  III

  “KEEP the American!” Miss Searle, in compliance with the injunction conveyed in her brother’s telegram (with something certainly of telegraphic curtness), lost no time in expressing the pleasure it would give her that our friend should remain. “Really you must,” she said; and forthwith repaired to the house- keeper to give orders for the preparation of a room.

  “But how in the world did he know of my being here?” my companion put to me.

  I answered that he had probably heard from his solicitor of the other’s visit. “Mr. Simmons and that gentleman must have had another interview since your arrival in England. Simmons, for reasons of his own, has made known to him your journey to this neighbourhood, and Mr. Searle, learning this, has immediately taken for granted that you’ve formally presented yourself to his sister. He’s hospitably inclined and wishes her to do the proper thing by you. There may even,” I went on, “be more in it than that. I’ve my little theory that he’s the very phoenix of usurpers, that he has been very much struck with what the experts have had to say for you, and that he wishes to have the originality of making over to you your share—so limited after all—of the estate.”

  “I give it up!” my friend mused. “Come what come will!”

  “You, of course,” said Miss Searle, reappearing and turning to me, “are included in my brother’s invitation. I’ve told them to see about a room for you. Your luggage shall immediately be sent for.”

  It was arranged that I in person should be driven over to our little inn and that I should return with our effects in time to meet Mr. Searle at dinner. On my arrival several hours later I was immediately conducted to my room. The servant pointed out to me that it communicated by a door and a private passage with that of my fellow visitor. I made my way along this passage—a low narrow corridor with a broad latticed casement through which there streamed upon a series of grotesquely sculptured oaken closets and cupboards the vivid animating glow of the western sun —knocked at his door and, getting no answer, opened it. In an armchair by the open window sat my friend asleep, his arms and legs relaxed and head dropped on his breast. It was a great relief to see him rest thus from his rhapsodies, and I watched him for some moments before waking him. There was a faint glow of colour in his cheek and a light expressive parting of his lips, something nearer to ease and peace than I had yet seen in him. It was almost happiness, it was almost health. I laid my hand on his arm and gently shook it. He opened his eyes, gazed at me a moment, vaguely recognised me, then closed them again. “Let me dream, let me dream!”

  “What are you dreaming about?”

  A moment passed before his answer came. “About a tall woman in a quaint black dress, with yellow hair and a sweet, sweet smile, and a soft low delicious voice! I’m in love with her.”

  “It’s better to see her than to dream about her,” I said. “Get up and dress; then we’ll go down to dinner and meet her.”

  “Dinner—dinner—?” And he gradually opened his eyes again. “Yes, upon my word I shall dine!”

  “Oh you’re all right!” I declared for the twentieth time as he rose to his feet. “You’ll live to bury Mr. Simmons.” He told me he had spent the hours of my absence with Miss Searle—they had strolled together half over the place. “You must be very intimate,” I smiled.

  “She’s intimate with ME. Goodness knows what rigmarole I’ve treated her to!” They had parted an hour ago; since when, he believed, her brother had arrived.

  The slow-fading twilight was still in the great drawing-room when we came down. The housekeeper had told us this apartment was rarely used, there being others, smaller and more convenient, for the same needs. It seemed now, however, to be occupied in my comrade’s honour. At the furthest end, rising to the roof like a royal tomb in a cathedral, was a great chimney-piece of chiselled white marble, yellowed by time, in which a light fire was crackling. Before the fire stood a small short man, with his hands behind him; near him was Miss Searle, so transformed by her dress that at first I scarcely knew her. There was in our ent
rance and reception something remarkably chilling and solemn. We moved in silence up the long room; Mr. Searle advanced slowly, a dozen steps, to meet us; his sister stood motionless. I was conscious of her masking her visage with a large white tinselled fan, and that her eyes, grave and enlarged, watched us intently over the top of it. The master of Lackley grasped in silence the proffered hand of his kinsman and eyed him from head to foot, suppressing, I noted, a start of surprise at his resemblance to Sir Joshua’s portrait. “This is a happy day.” And then turning to me with an odd little sharp stare: “My cousin’s friend is my friend.” Miss Searle lowered her fan.

  The first thing that struck me in Mr. Searle’s appearance was his very limited stature, which was less by half a head than that of his sister. The second was the preternatural redness of his hair and beard. They intermingled over his ears and surrounded his head like a huge lurid nimbus. His face was pale and attenuated, the face of a scholar, a dilettante, a comparer of points and texts, a man who lives in a library bending over books and prints and medals. At a distance it might have passed for smooth and rather blankly composed; but on a nearer view it revealed a number of wrinkles, sharply etched and scratched, of a singularly aged and refined effect. It was the complexion of a man of sixty. His nose was arched and delicate, identical almost with the nose of my friend. His eyes, large and deep-set, had a kind of auburn glow, the suggestion of a keen metal red-hot—or, more plainly, were full of temper and spirit. Imagine this physiognomy—grave and solemn, grotesquely solemn, in spite of the bushy brightness which made a sort of frame for it—set in motion by a queer, quick, defiant, perfunctory, preoccupied smile, and you will have an imperfect notion of the remarkable presence of our host; something better worth seeing and knowing, I perceived as I quite breathlessly took him in, than anything we had yet encountered. How thoroughly I had entered into sympathy with my poor picked-up friend, and how effectually I had associated my sensibilities with his own, I had not suspected till, within the short five minutes before the signal for dinner, I became aware, without his giving me the least hint, of his placing himself on the defensive. To neither of us was Mr. Searle sympathetic. I might have guessed from her attitude that his sister entered into our thoughts. A marked change had been wrought in her since the morning; during the hour, indeed—as I read in the light of the wondering glance he cast at her—that had elapsed since her parting with her cousin. She had not yet recovered from some great agitation. Her face was pale and she had clearly been crying. These notes of trouble gave her a new and quite perverse dignity, which was further enhanced by something complimentary and commemorative in her dress.

  Whether it was taste or whether it was accident I know not; but the amiable creature, as she stood there half in the cool twilight, half in the arrested glow of the fire as it spent itself in the vastness of its marble cave, was a figure for a painter. She was habited in some faded splendour of sea-green crape and silk, a piece of millinery which, though it must have witnessed a number of dull dinners, preserved still a festive air. Over her white shoulders she wore an ancient web of the most precious and venerable lace and about her rounded throat a single series of large pearls. I went in with her to dinner, and Mr. Searle, following with my friend, took his arm, as the latter afterwards told me, and pretended jocosely to conduct him. As dinner proceeded the feeling grew within me that a drama had begun to be played in which the three persons before me were actors—each of a really arduous part. The character allotted to my friend, however, was certainly the least easy to represent with effect, though I overflowed with the desire that he should acquit himself to his honour. I seemed to see him urge his faded faculties to take their cue and perform. The poor fellow tried to do himself credit more seriously than ever in his old best days. With Miss Searle, credulous passive and pitying, he had finally flung aside all vanity and propriety and shown the bottom of his fantastic heart. But with our host there might be no talking of nonsense nor taking of liberties; there and then, if ever, sat a consummate conservative, breathing the fumes of hereditary privilege and security. For an hour, accordingly, I saw my poor protege attempt, all in pain, to meet a new decorum. He set himself the task of appearing very American, in order that his appreciation of everything Mr. Searle represented might seem purely disinterested. What his kinsman had expected him to be I know not; but I made Mr. Searle out as annoyed, in spite of his exaggerated urbanity, at finding him so harmless. Our host was not the man to show his hand, but I think his best card had been a certain implicit confidence that so provincial a parasite would hardly have good manners.

  He led the conversation to the country we had left; rather as if a leash had been attached to the collar of some lumpish and half- domesticated animal the tendency of whose movements had to be recognised. He spoke of it indeed as of some fabled planet, alien to the British orbit, lately proclaimed to have the admixture of atmospheric gases required to support animal life, but not, save under cover of a liberal afterthought, to be admitted into one’s regular conception of things. I, for my part, felt nothing but regret that the spheric smoothness of his universe should be disfigured by the extrusion even of such inconsiderable particles as ourselves.

  “I knew in a general way of our having somehow ramified over there,” Mr. Searle mentioned; “but had scarcely followed it more than you pretend to pick up the fruit your long-armed pear tree may drop, on the other side of your wall, in your neighbour’s garden. There was a man I knew at Cambridge, a very odd fellow, a decent fellow too; he and I were rather cronies; I think he afterwards went to the Middle States. They’ll be, I suppose, about the Mississippi? At all events, there was that great-uncle of mine whom Sir Joshua painted. He went to America, but he never got there. He was lost at sea. You look enough like him to make one fancy he DID get there and that you’ve kept him alive by one of those beastly processes—I think you have ‘em over there: what do you call it, ‘putting up’ things? If you’re he you’ve not done a wise thing to show yourself here. He left a bad name behind him. There’s a ghost who comes sobbing about the house every now and then, the ghost of one to whom he did a wrong.”

  “Oh mercy ON us!” cried Miss Searle in simple horror.

  “Of course YOU know nothing of such things,” he rather dryly allowed. “You’re too sound a sleeper to hear the sobbing of ghosts.”

  “I’m sure I should like immensely to hear the sobbing of a ghost,” said my friend, the light of his previous eagerness playing up into his eyes. “Why does it sob? I feel as if that were what we’ve come above all to learn.”

  Mr. Searle eyed his audience a moment gaugingly; he held the balance as to measure his resources. He wished to do justice to his theme. With the long finger-nails of his left hand nervously playing against the tinkling crystal of his wineglass and his conscious eyes betraying that, small and strange as he sat there, he knew himself, to his pleasure and advantage, remarkably impressive, he dropped into our untutored minds the sombre legend of his house. “Mr. Clement Searle, from all I gather, was a young man of great talents but a weak disposition. His mother was left a widow early in life, with two sons, of whom he was the elder and the more promising. She educated him with the greatest affection and care. Of course when he came to manhood she wished him to marry well. His means were quite sufficient to enable him to overlook the want of money in his wife; and Mrs. Searle selected a young lady who possessed, as she conceived, every good gift save a fortune—a fine proud handsome girl, the daughter of an old friend, an old lover I suspect, of her own. Clement, however, as it appeared, had either chosen otherwise or was as yet unprepared to choose. The young lady opened upon him in vain the battery of her attractions; in vain his mother urged her cause. Clement remained cold, insensible, inflexible. Mrs. Searle had a character which appears to have gone out of fashion in my family nowadays; she was a great manager, a maitresse-femme. A proud passionate imperious woman, she had had immense cares and ever so many law-suits; they had sharpened her temper and her will. She susp
ected that her son’s affections had another object, and this object she began to hate. Irritated by his stubborn defiance of her wishes she persisted in her purpose. The more she watched him the more she was convinced he loved in secret. If he loved in secret of course he loved beneath him. He went about the place all sombre and sullen and brooding. At last, with the rashness of an angry woman, she threatened to bring the young lady of her choice—who, by the way, seems to have been no shrinking blossom—to stay in the house. A stormy scene was the result. He threatened that if she did so he would leave the country and sail for America. She probably disbelieved him; she knew him to be weak, but she overrated his weakness. At all events the rejected one arrived and Clement Searle departed. On a dark December day he took ship at Southampton. The two women, desperate with rage and sorrow, sat alone in this big house, mingling their tears and imprecations. A fortnight later, on Christmas Eve, in the midst of a great snowstorm long famous in the country, something happened that quickened their bitterness. A young woman, battered and chilled by the storm, gained entrance to the house and, making her way into the presence of the mistress and her guest, poured out her tale. She was a poor curate’s daughter out of some little hole in Gloucestershire. Clement Searle had loved her—loved her all too well! She had been turned out in wrath from her father’s house; his mother at least might pity her—if not for herself then for the child she was soon to bring forth. Hut the poor girl had been a second time too trustful. The women, in scorn, in horror, with blows possibly, drove her forth again into the storm. In the storm she wandered and in the deep snow she died. Her lover, as you know, perished in that hard winter weather at sea; the news came to his mother late, but soon enough. We’re haunted by the curate’s daughter!”