The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “Why of course, mother.”

  “She has done as much as if you hadn’t been sure.”

  “I wasn’t in the least sure—and she has done everything.”

  “She has been too good—but we‘ve done something. I hope you don’t leave out your father,” Lady Agnes amplified as Nick’s glance appeared for a moment to question her “we.”

  “Never, never!” Nick uttered these words perhaps a little mechanically, but the next minute he added as if suddenly moved to think what he could say that would give his mother most pleasure: “Of course his name has worked for me. Gone as he is he’s still a living force.” He felt a good deal of a hypocrite, but one didn’t win such a seat every day in the year. Probably indeed he should never win another.

  “He hears you, he watches you, he rejoices in you,” Lady Agnes opined.

  This idea was oppressive to Nick—that of the rejoicing almost as much as of the watching. He had made his concession, but, with a certain impulse to divert his mother from following up her advantage, he broke out: “Julia’s a tremendously effective woman.”

  “Of course she is!” said Lady Agnes knowingly.

  “Her charming appearance is half the battle”—Nick explained a little coldly what he meant. But he felt his coldness an inadequate protection to him when he heard his companion observe with something of the same sapience:

  “A woman’s always effective when she likes a person so much.”

  It discomposed him to be described as a person liked, and so much, and by a woman; and he simply said abruptly: “When are you going away?”

  “The first moment that’s civil—to-morrow morning. You‘ll stay on I hope.”

  “Stay on? What shall I stay on for?”

  “Why you might stay to express your appreciation.”

  Nick considered. “I’ve everything to do.”

  “I thought everything was done,” said Lady Agnes.

  “Well, that’s just why,” her son replied, not very lucidly. “I want to do other things—quite other things. I should like to take the next train,” And he looked at his watch.

  “When there are people coming to dinner to meet you?”

  “They’ll meet you—that’s better.”

  “I’m sorry any one’s coming,” Lady Agnes said in a tone unencouraging to a deviation from the reality of things. “I wish we were alone—just as a family. It would please Julia to-day to feel that we are one. Do stay with her to-morrow.”

  “How will that do—when she’s alone?”

  “She won’t be alone, with Mrs. Gresham.”

  “Mrs. Gresham doesn’t count.”

  “That’s precisely why I want you to stop. And her cousin, almost her brother: what an idea that it won’t do! Haven’t you stayed here before when there has been no one?”

  “I’ve never stayed much, and there have always been people. At any rate it’s now different.”

  “It’s just because it’s different. Besides, it isn’t different and it never was,” said Lady Agnes, more incoherent in her earnestness than it often happened to her to be. “She always liked you and she likes you now more than ever—if you call that different!” Nick got up at this and, without meeting her eyes, walked to one of the windows, where he stood with his back turned and looked out on the great greenness. She watched him a moment and she might well have been wishing, while he appeared to gaze with intentness, that it would come to him with the same force as it had come to herself—very often before, but during these last days more than ever—that the level lands of Harsh, stretching away before the window, the French garden with its symmetry, its screens and its statues, and a great many more things of which these were the superficial token, were Julia’s very own to do with exactly as she liked. No word of appreciation or envy, however, dropped from the young man’s lips, and his mother presently went on: “What could be more natural than that after your triumphant contest you and she should have lots to settle and to talk about—no end of practical questions, no end of urgent business? Aren’t you her member, and can’t her member pass a day with her, and she a great proprietor?”

  Nick turned round at this with an odd expression. “Her member—am I hers?”

  Lady Agnes had a pause—she had need of all her tact. “Well, if the place is hers and you represent the place—!” she began. But she went no further, for Nick had interrupted her with a laugh.

  “What a droll thing to ‘represent,’ when one thinks of it! And what does it represent, poor stupid little borough with its strong, though I admit clean, smell of meal and its curiously fat-faced inhabitants? Did you ever see such a collection of fat faces turned up at the hustings? They looked like an enormous sofa, with the cheeks for the gathers and the eyes for the buttons.”

  “Oh well, the next time you shall have a great town,” Lady Agnes returned, smiling and feeling that she was tactful.

  “It will only be a bigger sofa! I’m joking, of course?” Nick pursued, “and I ought to be ashamed of myself. They’ve done me the honour to elect me and I shall never say a word that’s not civil about them, poor dears. But even a new member may blaspheme to his mother.”

  “I wish you’d be serious to your mother”—and she went nearer him.

  “The difficulty is that I’m two men; it’s the strangest thing that ever was,” Nick professed with his bright face on her. “I’m two quite distinct human beings, who have scarcely a point in common; not even the memory, on the part of one, of the achievements or the adventures of the other. One man wins the seat but it’s the other fellow who sits in it.”

  “Oh Nick, don’t spoil your victory by your perversity!” she cried as she clasped her hands to him.

  “I went through it with great glee—I won’t deny that: it excited me, interested me, amused me. When once I was in it I liked it. But now that I’m out of it again–-!”

  “Out of it?” His mother stared. “Isn’t the whole point that you’re in?”

  “Ah now I’m only in the House of Commons.”

  For an instant she seemed not to understand and to be on the point of laying her finger quickly to her lips with a “Hush!”—as if the late Sir Nicholas might have heard the “only.” Then while a comprehension of the young man’s words promptly superseded that impulse she replied with force: “You’ll be in the Lords the day you determine to get there.”

  This futile remark made Nick laugh afresh, and not only laugh, but kiss her, which was always an intenser form of mystification for poor Lady Agnes and apparently the one he liked best to inflict; after which he said: “The odd thing is, you know, that Harsh has no wants. At least it’s not sharply, not articulately conscious of them. We all pretended to talk them over together, and I promised to carry them in my heart of hearts. But upon my honour I can’t remember one of them. Julia says the wants of Harsh are simply the national wants—rather a pretty phrase for Julia. She means she does everything for the place; she‘s really their member and this house in which we stand their legislative chamber. Therefore the lacunae I’ve undertaken to fill out are the national wants. It will be rather a job to rectify some of them, won’t it? I don’t represent the appetites of Harsh—Harsh is gorged. I represent the ideas of my party. That’s what Julia says.”

  “Oh never mind what Julia says!” Lady Agnes broke out impatiently. This impatience made it singular that the very next word she uttered should be: “My dearest son, I wish to heaven you’d marry her. It would be so fitting now!” she added.

  “Why now?” Nick frowned.

  “She has shown you such sympathy, such devotion.”

  “Is it for that she has shown it?”

  “Ah you might feel—I can’t tell you!” said Lady Agnes reproachfully.

  He blushed at this, as if what he did feel was the reproach. “Must I marry her because you like her?”

  “I? Why we’re all as fond of her as we can be.”

  “Dear mother, I hope that any woman I ever may marry will be a pers
on agreeable not only to you, but also, since you make a point of it, to Grace and Biddy. But I must tell you this—that I shall marry no woman I’m not unmistakably in love with.”

  “And why are you not in love with Julia—charming, clever, generous as she is?” Lady Agnes laid her hands on him—she held him tight. “Dearest Nick, if you care anything in the world to make me happy you’ll stay over here to-morrow and be nice to her.”

  He waited an instant. “Do you mean propose to her?”

  “With a single word, with the glance of an eye, the movement of your little finger”—and she paused, looking intensely, imploringly up into his face—”in less time than it takes me to say what I say now, you may have it all.” As he made no answer, only meeting her eyes, she added insistently: “You know she’s a fine creature—you know she is!”

  “Dearest mother, what I seem to know better than anything else in the world is that I love my freedom. I set it far above everything.”

  “Your freedom? What freedom is there in being poor?” Lady Agnes fiercely demanded. “Talk of that when Julia puts everything she possesses at your feet!”

  “I can’t talk of it, mother—it’s too terrible an idea. And I can’t talk of her, nor of what I think of her. You must leave that to me. I do her perfect justice.”

  “You don’t or you’d marry her to-morrow,” she passionately argued. “You’d feel the opportunity so beautifully rare, with everything in the world to make it perfect. Your father would have valued it for you beyond everything. Think a little what would have given him pleasure. That’s what I meant when I spoke just now of us all. It wasn’t of Grace and Biddy I was thinking—fancy!—it was of him. He’s with you always; he takes with you, at your side, every step you take yourself. He’d bless devoutly your marriage to Julia; he’d feel what it would be for you and for us all. I ask for no sacrifice and he’d ask for none. We only ask that you don’t commit the crime–-!”

  Nick Dormer stopped her with another kiss; he murmured “Mother, mother, mother!” as he bent over her. He wished her not to go on, to let him off; but the deep deprecation in his voice didn’t prevent her saying:

  “You know it—you know it perfectly. All and more than all that I can tell you you know.” He drew her closer, kissed her again, held her as he would have held a child in a paroxysm, soothing her silently till it could abate. Her vehemence had brought with it tears; she dried them as she disengaged herself. The next moment, however, she resumed, attacking him again: “For a public man she’d be the perfect companion. She’s made for public life—she’s made to shine, to be concerned in great things, to occupy a high position and to help him on. She’d back you up in everything as she has backed you in this. Together there’s nothing you couldn’t do. You can have the first house in England—yes, the very first! What freedom is there in being poor? How can you do anything without money, and what money can you make for yourself—what money will ever come to you? That’s the crime—to throw away such an instrument of power, such a blessed instrument of good.”

  “It isn’t everything to be rich, mother,” said Nick, looking at the floor with a particular patience—that is with a provisional docility and his hands in his pockets. “And it isn’t so fearful to be poor.”

  “It’s vile—it’s abject. Don’t I know?”

  “Are you in such acute want?” he smiled.

  “Ah don’t make me explain what you’ve only to look at to see!” his mother returned as if with a richness of allusion to dark elements in her fate.

  “Besides,” he easily went on, “there’s other money in the world than Julia’s. I might come by some of that.”

  “Do you mean Mr. Carteret’s?” The question made him laugh as her feeble reference five minutes before to the House of Lords had done. But she pursued, too full of her idea to take account of such a poor substitute for an answer: “Let me tell you one thing, for I’ve known Charles Carteret much longer than you and I understand him better. There’s nothing you could do that would do you more good with him than to marry Julia. I know the way he looks at things and I know exactly how that would strike him. It would please him, it would charm him; it would be the thing that would most prove to him that you’re in earnest. You need, you know, to do something of that sort,” she said as for plain speaking.

  “Haven’t I come in for Harsh?” asked Nick.

  “Oh he’s very canny. He likes to see people rich. Then he believes in them—then he’s likely to believe more. He’s kind to you because you’re your father’s son; but I’m sure your being poor takes just so much off.”

  “He can remedy that so easily,” said Nick, smiling still. “Is my being kept by Julia what you call my making an effort for myself?”

  Lady Agnes hesitated; then “You needn’t insult Julia!” she replied.

  “Moreover, if I’ve her money I shan’t want his,” Nick unheedingly remarked.

  Again his mother waited before answering; after which she produced: “And pray wouldn’t you wish to be independent?”

  “You’re delightful, dear mother—you’re very delightful! I particularly like your conception of independence. Doesn’t it occur to you that at a pinch I might improve my fortune by some other means than by making a mercenary marriage or by currying favour with a rich old gentleman? Doesn’t it occur to you that I might work?”

  “Work at politics? How does that make money, honourably?”

  “I don’t mean at politics.”

  “What do you mean then?”—and she seemed to challenge him to phrase it if he dared. This demonstration of her face and voice might have affected him, for he remained silent and she continued: “Are you elected or not?”

  “It seems a dream,” he rather flatly returned.

  “If you are, act accordingly and don’t mix up things that are as wide asunder as the poles!” She spoke with sternness and his silence appeared again to represent an admission that her sternness counted for him. Possibly she was touched by it; after a few moments, at any rate, during which nothing more passed between them, she appealed to him in a gentler and more anxious key, which had this virtue to touch him that he knew it was absolutely the first time in her life she had really begged for anything. She had never been obliged to beg; she had got on without it and most things had come to her. He might judge therefore in what a light she regarded this boon for which in her bereft old age she humbled herself to be a suitor. There was such a pride in her that he could feel what it cost her to go on her knees even to her son. He did judge how it was in his power to gratify her; and as he was generous and imaginative he was stirred and shaken as it came over him in a wave of figurative suggestion that he might make up to her for many things. He scarcely needed to hear her ask with a pleading wail that was almost tragic: “Don’t you see how things have turned out for us? Don’t you know how unhappy I am, don’t you know what a bitterness–-?” She stopped with a sob in her voice and he recognised vividly this last tribulation, the unhealed wound of her change of life and her lapse from eminence to flatness. “You know what Percival is and the comfort I have of him. You know the property and what he’s doing with it and what comfort I get from that! Everything’s dreary but what you can do for us. Everything’s odious, down to living in a hole with one’s girls who don’t marry. Grace is impossible—I don’t know what’s the matter with her; no one will look at her, and she’s so conceited with it—sometimes I feel as if I could beat her! And Biddy will never marry, and we’re three dismal women in a filthy house, and what are three dismal women, more or less, in London?”

  So with an unexpected rage of self-exposure she poured out her disappointments and troubles, tore away the veil from her sadness and soreness. It almost scared him to see how she hated her life, though at another time it might have been amusing to note how she despised her gardenless house. Of course it wasn’t a country-house, and she couldn’t get used to that. Better than he could do—for it was the sort of thing into which in any case a woman enters m
ore than a man—she felt what a lift into brighter air, what a regilding of his sisters’ possibilities, his marriage to Julia would effect for them. He couldn’t trace the difference, but his mother saw it all as a shining picture. She hung the bright vision before him now—she stood there like a poor woman crying for a kindness. What was filial in him, all the piety he owed, especially to the revived spirit of his father, more than ever present on a day of such public pledges, became from one moment to the other as the very handle to the door of the chamber of concessions. He had the impulse, so embarrassing when it is a question of consistent action, to see in a touching, an interesting light any forcibly presented side of the life of another: such things effected a union with something in his life, and in the recognition of them was no soreness of sacrifice and no consciousness of merit.

  Rapidly, at present, this change of scene took place before his spiritual eye. He found himself believing, because his mother communicated the belief, that it depended but on his own conduct richly to alter the social outlook of the three women who clung to him and who declared themselves forlorn. This was not the highest kind of motive, but it contained a spring, it touched into life again old injunctions and appeals. Julia’s wide kingdom opened out round him and seemed somehow to wear the face of his own possible future. His mother and sisters floated in the rosy element as if he had breathed it about them. “The first house in England” she had called it; but it might be the first house in Europe, the first in the world, by the fine air and the high humanities that should fill it. Everything beautiful in his actual, his material view seemed to proclaim its value as never before; the house rose over his head as a museum of exquisite rewards, and the image of poor George Dallow hovered there obsequious, expressing that he had only been the modest, tasteful organiser, or even upholsterer, appointed to set it all in order and punctually retire. Lady Agnes’s tone in fine penetrated further than it had done yet when she brought out with intensity: “Don’t desert us—don’t desert us.”