Генри Джеймс
Four Meetings
“And that nice little plate of fruit is for him?” I exclaimed.
Miss Spencer glanced at it tenderly. “They do that so prettily!” she murmured.
I felt helpless and irritated. “Come now, really,” I said; “do you approve of that long strong fellow accepting your funds?” She looked away from me; I was evidently giving her pain. The case was hopeless; the long strong fellow had “interested” her.
“Excuse me if I speak of him so unceremoniously,” I said. “But you are really too generous, and he is not quite delicate enough. He made his debts himself; he ought to pay them himself.”
“He has been foolish,” she answered; “I know that He has told me everything. We had a long talk this morning; the poor fellow threw himself upon my charity. He has signed notes to a large amount.”
“The more fool he!”
“He is in extreme distress; and it is not only himself. It is his poor wife.”
“Ah, he has a poor wife?”
“I didn’t know it; but he confessed everything. He married two years since, secretly.”
“Why secretly?”
Caroline Spencer glanced about her, as if she feared listeners. Then softly, in a little impressive tone,—“She was a countess!”
“Are you very sure of that?”
“She has written me a most beautiful letter.”
“Asking you for money, eh?”
“Asking me for confidence and sympathy,” said Miss Spencer. “She has been disinherited by her father. My cousin told me the story, and she tells it in her own way, in the letter. It is like an old romance. Her father opposed the marriage, and when he discovered that she had secretly disobeyed him he cruelly cast her off. It is really most romantic. They are the oldest family in Provence.”
I looked and listened in wonder. It really seemed that the poor woman was enjoying the “romance” of having a discarded countess-cousin, out of Provence, so deeply as almost to lose the sense of what the forfeiture of her money meant for her.
“My dear young lady,” I said, “you don’t want to be ruined for picturesqueness’ sake?”
“I shall not be ruined. I shall come back before long to stay with them. The Countess insists upon that.”
“Come back! You are going home, then?”
She sat for a moment with her eyes lowered, then with an heroic suppression of a faint tremor of the voice,—“I have no money for travelling!” she answered.
“You gave it all up?”
“I have kept enough to take me home.”
I gave an angry groan; and at this juncture Miss Spencer’s cousin, the fortunate possessor of her sacred savings and of the hand of the Provençal countess, emerged from the little dining-room. He stood on the threshold for an instant, removing the stone from a plump apricot which he had brought away from the table; then he put the apricot into his mouth, and while he let it sojourn there, gratefully, stood looking at us, with his long legs apart and his hands dropped into the pockets of his velvet jacket. My companion got up, giving him a thin glance which I caught in its passage, and which expressed a strange commixture of resignation and fascination,—a sort of perverted exaltation. Ugly, vulgar, pretentious, dishonest, as I thought the creature, he had appealed successfully to her eager and tender imagination. I was deeply disgusted, but I had no warrant to interfere, and at any rate I felt that it would be vain.
The young man waved his hand with a pictorial gesture. “Nice old court,” he observed. “Nice mellow old place. Good tone in that brick. Nice crooked old staircase.”
Decidedly, I could n’t stand it; without responding I gave my hand to Caroline Spencer. She looked at me an instant with her little white face and expanded eyes, and as she showed her pretty teeth I suppose she meant to smile.
“Don’t be sorry for me,” she said, “I am very sure I shall see something of this dear old Europe yet.”
I told her that I would not bid her goodby; I should find a moment to come back the next morning. Her cousin, who had put on his sombrero again, flourished it off at me by way of a bow, upon which I took my departure.
The next morning I came back to the inn, where I met in the court the landlady, more loosely laced than in the evening. On my asking for Miss Spencer,—“Partie, monsieu,” said the hostess. “She went away last night at ten o ‘clock, with her—her—not her husband, eh?—in fine, her monsieur. They went down to the American ship.” I turned away; the poor girl had been about thirteen hours in Europe.
IV
I myself, more fortunate, was there some five years longer. During this period I lost my friend Latouche, who died of a malarious fever during a tour in the Levant. One of the first things I did on my return was to go up to Grimwinter to pay a consolatory visit to his poor mother. I found her in deep affliction, and I sat with her the whole of the morning that followed my arrival (I had come in late at night), listening to her tearful descant and singing the praises of my friend. We talked of nothing else, and our conversation terminated only with the arrival of a quick little woman who drove herself up to the door in a “carryall,” and whom I saw toss the reins upon the horse’s back with the briskness of a startled sleeper throwing back the bed-clothes. She jumped out of the carryall and she jumped into the room. She proved to be the minister’s wife and the great town-gossip, and she had evidently, in the latter capacity, a choice morsel to communicate. I was as sure of this as I was that poor Mrs. Latouche was not absolutely too bereaved to listen to her. It seemed to me discreet to retire; I said I believed I would go and take a walk before dinner.
“And, by the way,” I added, “if you will tell me where my old friend Miss Spencer lives, I will walk to her house.”
The minister’s wife immediately responded. Miss Spencer lived in the fourth house beyond the “Baptist church; the Baptist church was the one on the right, with that queer green thing over the door; they called it a portico, but it looked more like an old-fashioned bedstead.
“Yes, do go and see poor Caroline,” said Mrs. Latouche. “It will refresh her to see a strange face.”
“I should think she had had enough of strange faces!” cried the minister’s wife.
“I mean, to see a visitor,” said Mrs. Latouche, amending her phrase.
“I should think she had had enough of visitors!” her companion rejoined. “But you don’t mean to stay ten years,” she added, glancing at me.
“Has she a visitor of that sort?” I inquired, perplexed.
“You will see the sort!” said the minister’s wife. “She’s easily seen; she generally sits in the front yard. Only take care what you say to her, and be very sure you are polite.”
“Ah, she is so sensitive?”
The minister’s wife jumped up and dropped me a curtsey, a most ironical curtsey.
“That’s what she is, if you please. She’s a countess!”
And pronouncing this word with the most scathing accent, the little woman seemed fairly to laugh in the Countess’s face. I stood a moment, staring, wondering, remembering.
“Oh, I shall be very polite!” I cried; and grasping my hat and stick, I went on my way.
I found Miss Spencer’s residence without difficulty. The Baptist church was easily identified, and the small dwelling near it, of a rusty white, with a large central chimney-stack and a Virginia creeper, seemed naturally and properly the abode of a frugal old maid with a taste for the picturesque. As I approached I slackened my pace, for I had heard that some one was always sitting in the front yard, and I wished to reconnoitre. I looked cautiously over the low white fence which separated the small garden-space from the unpaved street; but I descried nothing in the shape of a countess. A small straight path led up to the crooked doorstep, and on either side of it was a little grass-plot, fringed with currant-bushes. In the middle of the grass, on either side, was a large quince-tree, full of antiquity and contortions, and beneath one of the quince-trees were placed a small table and a couple of chairs. On the table lay a piece of unfinished embroidery and two or three books in bright-colored paper covers. I went in at the gate and paused halfway along the path, scanning the place for some farther token of its occupant, before whom—I could hardly have said why—I hesitated abruptly to present myself. Then I saw that the poor little house was very shabby. I felt a sudden doubt of my right to intrude; for curiosity had been my motive, and curiosity here seemed singularly indelicate. While I hesitated, a figure appeared in the open doorway and stood there looking at me. I immediately recognized Caroline Spencer, but she looked at me as if she had never seen me before. Gently, but gravely and timidly, I advanced to the doorstep, and then I said, with an attempt at friendly badinage,—
“I waited for you over there to come back, but you never came.”
“Waited where, sir?” she asked softly, and her light-colored eyes expanded more than before.
She was much older; she looked tired and wasted.
“Well,” I said, “I waited at Havre.”
She stared; then she recognized me. She smiled and blushed and clasped her two hands together. “I remember you now,” she said. “I remember that day.” But she stood there, neither coming out nor asking me to come in. She was embarrassed.
I, too, felt a little awkward. I poked my stick into the path. “I kept looking out for you, year after year,” I said.
“You mean in Europe?” murmured Miss Spencer.
“In Europe, of course! Here, apparently, you are easy enough to find.”
She leaned her hand against the unpainted doorpost, and her head fell a little to one side. She looked at me for a moment without speaking, and I thought I recognized the expression that one sees in women’s eyes when tears are rising. Suddenly she stepped out upon the cracked slab of stone before the threshold and closed the door behind her. Then she began to smile intently, and I saw that her teeth were as pretty as ever. But there had been tears too.
“Have you been there ever since?” she asked, almost in a whisper.
