The Embezzler

by Louis Auchincloss

  She never once spoke to her mother and hardly once to me. Even to Mr. Baylies, who, as I later learned, chartered yachts on which to take Mrs. Hyde and her family cruising, she was only grudgingly attentive. She seemed entirely concerned with herself and her mannerisms; she kept pushing back her long dark hair from her brow and running her finger tips along the wall and over the surfaces of whatever objects she happened to pass. Her deportment was in marked, probably intentional contrast to her mother’s large, disciplined movements, but she had charm, the charm of a pre-Raphaelite gamine. If she spoiled some of her effect by a petulant restlessness, she made it up in the exquisiteness of her physical details: in her finely carved, upturned nose, in her aristocratic high cheek bones, in her large brown brooding eyes. She bore no resemblance to her mother but neither, as I later found out, did her brothers. The distant clubman of Tuxedo Park must have had strong genes.

  It was obvious, as we strolled about, that I was to walk with Angelica while her mother paired off with Mr. Baylies. It was equally obvious that this was her mother’s plan, not Angelica’s, for the latter made no effort to be even tolerably pleasant. Indeed, the mere fact that I was her mother’s discovery seemed to brand me as a simpleton, if not an actual fraud. If I admired an artifact she would stare at it silently, as if she would never have otherwise observed it, and then murmur affectedly: “Yes, it’s delicious, isn’t it? Absolutely too yummy!”

  “You sound as if you were in a pastry shop,” I remonstrated the fifth time that she did this.

  She turned to me wide-eyed. “But isn’t that exactly how one is meant to sound?”

  “See here, Miss Hyde, why do you take me for such a nincompoop?”

  “But I don’t, I assure you. I take you for an eager, up-and-coming American youth.”

  “Which to you is the height of inanity.”

  “Which to me, Mr. Prime, is the height of nothingness,” she retorted in a sharper tone. “Don’t worry. Europe isn’t going to do you a bit of harm. We guarantee to send you back the same as when you came.”

  “We? Do you speak for Europe, Miss Hyde?”

  “If I do, it’s because I’ve earned the right. By having been made to swim all my life in seas of deliciousness. Oh, don’t misunderstand me,” she added with a surprising rush of anger in her tone. “I’m not being snooty. I’m simply sick to death of Americans who wander about in Europe ohing and ahing. I’m a jaded Daisy Miller if you like. A Daisy Miller who’s stayed over here too long and lost her color. For that’s what happens to us, you know. We don’t die of fevers, as poor old doddering Mr. James thinks. We simply fade.”

  “Your mother hasn’t.”

  “No, but then Mother’s not quite human.” Angelica, like all the Hydes, as I was soon to learn, could be quite independent out of her mother’s earshot. “She actually eats culture.”

  It suddenly provoked me that this girl, who had thrust upon her all the things in Europe that I had come to seek, should be so churlish about them.

  “I know your type,” I said scornfully. “You’re the kind of daughter who likes to slam Mamma without letting go of the apron strings. You can be as snotty as you like, but will you budge an inch without her?”

  Angelica’s surprise at this was not feigned. “Budge where?”

  “Will you come out with me tonight and see Paris? Will you give up chapels and chaperones and have a look at life?”

  “Men who suggest improprieties always call it living.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “You’re very pushing, Mr. Prime. I don’t know what I’ve said to give you the idea I might be willing to run around Paris with you.”

  “Why everything!” I exclaimed. “You sneer at Europe and my presuming to want any part of it. You seem to regard it a kind of privately issued book that only you know. Well, I’ll bet I could show you parts of Paris you haven’t dreamed about, Angelica Hyde. Or only dreamed about. And it’ll be a perfectly proper tour, too. You needn’t worry. Only we won’t take your mother.”

  “A pity,” she murmured. “She’d love it so.”

  “I’m glad you’ll concede her that much humanity. But tonight I’m just asking you.”

  She hesitated, and for a moment I thought she might actually be going to accept. Then she closed her lips suddenly in a tight little line and turned away to join Mrs. Hyde. “I’m sorry, Mr. Prime. I have letters that I simply must write tonight.”

  “Coward!”

  She made no reply to this, but her silence conceded that the last word had been mine. From that moment there was no idea of my returning to New York. I had decided that I was going to see a great deal of Angelica Hyde.

  The next day, I skulked about the Hydes’ hotel until I saw Mrs. Hyde come out and walk to her victoria. Then I pretended to be passing by and raised my hat.

  “Why, Mr. Prime,” she said in her strong, pleasant tone, “what good fortune sends you just as I’m tempted to give up my shopping for a drive in the Bois? Get in. Now don’t tell me you have business. No young man as well dressed as yourself could have business on a spring morning like this!”

  We had not traveled as far as the Rond Point before I discovered that Angelica had revealed my proposition and that her mother had placed the worst construction on it. Yet she bore me no grudge. She was European enough to expect a young man to go as far as he could. Only the girl was blamed if he succeeded.

  “I’ve been thinking about your mother,” she now went on, a bit incongruously, to observe. “It brought back those dear dead days in Newport. I remember how well she did in the archery contests. We were all Dianas then. I was so sorry to hear she had died.”

  The tone was certainly matter-of-fact. Mrs. Hyde accepted many things, and death was one of them. Yet it was so long since I had been with anyone who had even perfunctorily mentioned Mother that to my mortification I found my eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I miss her so terribly.”

  “That’s all right, dear boy. Those tears do you credit. I wonder how many of my brood would shed them a year after I’ve gone. Tell me now about yourself and what you’re going to do with your life. Will you be like your uncles? I seem to recall that they went in rather heavily for the social game.”

  “They all married fortunes,” I explained, glad of the chance to set the record straight. “I shall have to earn my own way. Father wants me to go into the stock market, and maybe I shall. But in the meantime I have this.” I tried to take in Paris with a wave of my arm. “All this that you’re going to show me.”

  “‘The time is short, the interim is mine,’” she quoted with an approving nod. “I like you, Guy Prime. Why don’t you come cruising with us this summer? Darling Henry Baylies has chartered a boat to do the Greek islands, and I’m helping him make up the party. A handsome, unattached young man who wants to see beautiful things is always welcome. Come along!”

  Obviously, I did not need to be asked twice. All that spring and summer I was part of Mrs. Hyde’s travelling court. We cruised in the Mediterranean, but not until August, and in the intervening weeks I followed her about, staying in a hotel in Venice near the palazzo that was loaned to her and in another in Florence where she had rented a villa. In her immediate household were Angelica, two older sons who came and went, a dark old maiden sister of Mr. Hyde, an Italian courier and two Irish maids. Floating on the outskirts, besides myself and Mr. Baylies, were an old professor of Greek at Harvard and a beautiful dark Italian prince, with sleepy blue eyes, who bore the unlikely name of Giulio de Medici. But they had one thing in common. I had never before been with people who took such a serious interest in the art of living. I found it altogether exhilarating.

  My father was less enthusiastic. He wrote me at length about Mrs. Hyde, saying that he could never trust a woman who felt she was too good for her native land and who sneered at her own antecedents. Mrs. Hyde, it seemed, did not scruple to speculate that her own ancient Knickerbocker family was of Jewish origin.
Father had no patience with this kind of mockery. Also, he warned me, the Hydes had a lot less money than they seemed to have. “It’s not that I want you to be a fortune hunter,” he concluded, “but girls with extravagant tastes and small means make trying wives. Take it from one who learned the hard way.”

  I was not worried about Angelica’s fortune; I could leave such considerations to her mother’s obvious candidate, the needy Medici. I felt quite able now to earn all the fortune that Angelica would ever need; all I had to do was to earn Angelica. For that, in those first Italian weeks, had become my all-possessing ambition. I was giddy with the fantasy of taking her back to New York as a kind of captive bride, of returning to the golden capital of Philistia leading a beautiful hostage princess from the dark jungles of an old world culture. The New York that was beginning, now that I seemed indefinitely to have given up work, to regard me as another of its lotus eaters, would have to change its mind. Even Rex would have to change his.

  Angelica had been very sullen when she found that I had attached myself to her mother’s entourage, and for the first week in Venice she would not vouchsafe me a word. But under the double pressure of Mrs. Hyde’s bland refusal to recognize her ill-temper and my own perpetual cheerfulness in the face of every snub, she began grudgingly to accept my presence and even to address an occasional sarcasm to me. I am sure that she had no intention of being coy, but her conduct was precisely the kind to inflame me. I had had enough easy conquests, and my romantic nature, Victorian in flavor, thirsted for an aloof heroine. By the time we embarked in Genoa on “The Loon” I was violently in love.

  I do not wish to give the impression that my feeling for Angelica was entirely self-generated. She could be very charming when she wished. In the brief moments of that summer when she emerged from her moody preoccupation she gave us all a good time. She had a rough, rather rowdy laugh and an energy under her pallor that was exciting. Even that old eunuch Mr. Baylies was fond of her. Indeed, all of her mother’s men friends were. She was markedly less popular with the ladies. Madame Bourget in Paris had told me frankly that she disliked her, and the Hyde aunt obviously disapproved. But what did I care for the warnings of older women? What did they really resent in Angelica but her sex appeal?

  I could not make out her relationship with Giulio de Medici. He seemed content to be charming to everyone, in a lazy sort of way, without particularly distinguishing Angelica, and she treated him only a couple of degrees more warmly than she did me. Yet she was clearly concerned about him if anything was wrong. On our first two days under way he was violently seasick, and Angelica sent me half a dozen times to his stateroom to find out how he was.

  “Is he really a prince?” I could not help asking her.

  “Oh, yes. You can find him in Gotha, if you know how to look. It’s not as simple as the Social Register.”

  “But surely there aren’t any more Medici. I’ve read Colonel Young, and he says they’re extinct.”

  Angelica smiled, but she did not immediately dismiss the subject as I had expected her to. “There’s a younger branch. It even produced two rather obscure popes in the eighteenth century. Oh, you can be sure that anything Mother comes up with is pure as pure I”

  “And I?”

  She laughed her rasping laugh as she gazed over the dancing blue of the sea. “Oh, you’re purest Yankee, of course. Purest New York. You might have stepped out of a novel by Harold Bell Wright. Just the way Giulio might have stepped out of The Golden Bowl. Do you remember Prince Amerigo’s eyes, like palace windows thrown open to the golden air?”

  “Or to a golden fortune,” I suggested dryly.

  “Yes, poor Giulio,” she said with compassion, “he needs one, doesn’t he? You must go sit with him. He’s so wretched, and he doesn’t like me to see him that way. It’s his Italian pride.”

  “I’ll sit with him all day if you’ll do one thing for me.”

  “What’s that, dear boy?” she demanded, in parody of her mother’s tone.

  “When we get to Naples let me take you out to lunch. Just the two of us. Just once.”

  “To lunch? What an innocent meal! How you’ve changed since Senlis. What could possibly happen at lunch? Very well. I hereby remise and release, or give, assign and transfer, as the lawyers say, to Guy Prime and the heirs of his body (is that right?) one lunch in Naples!”

  Well, quite a lot did happen at that lunch, despite her sarcasm, for I proposed to her. I was certainly not accepted, but then neither was I insulted. It is a rare woman who resents a serious proposition of marriage from an eligible young man. Angelica was upset; indeed she was so nervous and agitated that she could not look me in the face. My finishing stroke was a masterpiece.

  “I’m not going to talk about this any more now,” I told her, “except to make one statement. You have insisted upon regarding me as a dilettante and an idler with no serious purpose in Europe or anywhere else. That may have once been true, but it’s true no longer. I have a purpose in life now, and I’m deadly serious about it.”

  “But I wish you weren’t!” she cried, looking up at me with tears in her eyes. “I never meant to do this to you!”

  “But you have,” I insisted, keeping my eyes fixed on hers, until she looked down again. “Will you concede that you have?”

  I had to take her silence for consent, and we returned to the yacht. Angelica was too depressed to go to Pompeii. I had accomplished, however, all that I had looked for, and things thereafter were different between us. She no longer treated me as the village idiot, and it was tacitly agreed that I should thenceforth be a member of her little group on each expedition ashore. She sometimes even flirted with me, particularly if Giulio was present, which gave me my first hint that she might be trying to excite his interest. But that was perfectly all right. Competition had always aroused me to greater efforts. I would flirt back vigorously, even seizing her hand in front of Giulio, who did not seem in the least to mind, until she had firmly to pull it away, I did not delude myself that I was wanning her, but I saw that I was tolerated. That was all that I needed for a start.

  Everyone else accepted me now as Angelica’s swain. Her brothers, Ted and Lionel, tall, bony, rangy dandies, with high shrill arrogant voices who condescended outrageously to all of us and still somehow managed to retain their Hyde charm, treated me with the friendly contempt that men mete out to those ©i their sex who have found favor with their sisters. And Giulio was positively outrageous in the pains that he took to show me that my path was clear.

  I thought it was only fair to advise Mrs. Hyde of my intentions, which most probably ran counter to her own, but she refused to allow me. Sitting by her deck chair on a glorious blue and gold morning as we steamed towards Athens, the flow of my discourse was firmly arrested by the gentle placing of her large cold hand on mine.

  “Do you know something, Guy, about our little cruise?” she asked. “The older people are much the happier. We are beyond the age of sentimental complications. It is popular to lament the passing of the ‘heyday of the blood,’ but how sad an occasion that is depends on what one has left. I find the quest of beautiful and ancient things in the company of those whose minds I respect and whose bodies I no longer desire a summum bonum that I could not have imagined in my younger years. You see, I am being very frank with you, dear boy. I spent my honeymoon on a yacht in this very Mediterranean, and I was deeply in love with my husband. Yet I find this the pleasanter excursion. I trust I do not embarrass you?”

  “Not at all,” I replied with a sigh. “There have been moments this summer when I would have gladly exchanged ages with you.”

  “Ah, but you must never think that way! That is not the way to live at all. Life is like a good meal; each morsel has its particular savor and purpose. The sweet is just as vital as the soup. You must concentrate on each minute of living.”

  “And then on eternity, I suppose. You Catholics have it both here and there, don’t you?”

  “Do we strike you as Pollyann
a? Don’t worry. We have our doubts. Oh, yes, hideous black ones. But I don’t talk about mine. I want to enjoy my life and enjoy this cruise. And I don’t think I’m going to enjoy them any more by hearing of romantic complications.”

  So that was that, and she directed the conversation to the discoveries at Tiryns and Mycenae that we would shortly be visiting. Wonderful woman! I knew even then, young as I was, that hers must be the secret of living. How could I seize it? How could I make it mine?

  Angelica’s mood seemed to darken as we approached the coast of Greece, and when we docked at Athens she complained of a fever and would not leave her cabin. She refused to have any visitors, and I could only send her notes and flowers. She seemed well enough, however, on the third day to join our caravan of four motors to drive to Mycenae, and I was allowed to go in the one that took her and Mrs. Hyde. All the way, over those long fields, through purple hills and under a leaden sky, she brooded behind her automobile veil. Mrs. Hyde and I talked of Agamemnon and his doomed family and discussed theories of the fall of Troy.

  It was not until the first morning of our stay in Mycenae, when I followed Angelica alone to the Lion’s Gate, that we had any talk. She seemed pathetically white and sad in the white dress that accentuated the darkness of her long hair.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” I said. “Why, when you make such a point of disobliging your mother in little things, do you try so hard to oblige her in big ones?”