Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (3 page)

 
          
“I
see,” Lewis nodded. “Well, we part here; I’m off for a swim,” he said glibly.
But abruptly he turned back and caught his sister’s arm. “Sister, tell Mrs.
Poe, please, that I heard her husband give a reading from his poems in
New York
two nights ago—”

 
          
(“Oh, Lewis—
you
?
But father says he’s a blasphemer!”)

 
          
“—
And
that he’s a great poet—a Great Poet. Tell her that from
me, will you, please, Mary Adeline?”

 
          
“Oh,
brother, I couldn’t…we never speak of him,” the startled girl faltered,
hurrying away.

 
          
In
the cove where the Commodore’s sloop had ridden a few hours earlier a biggish
rowing-boat took the waking ripples. Young Raycie paddled out to her, fastened
his skiff to the moorings, and hastily clambered into the boat.

 
          
From
various recesses in his pockets he produced rope, string, a carpet-layer’s
needle, and other unexpected and incongruous tackle; then lashing one of the
oars across the top of the other, and jamming the latter upright between the
forward thwart and the bow, he rigged the flowered bed-quilt on this mast,
knotted a rope to the free end of the quilt, and sat down in the stern, one
hand on the rudder, the other on his improvised sheet.

 
          
Venus,
brooding silverly above a line of pale green sky, made a pool of glory in the
sea as the dawn-breeze plumped the lover’s sail…

 
          
On
the shelving pebbles of another cove, two or three miles down the Sound, Lewis
Raycie lowered his queer sail and beached his boat. A clump of willows on the
shingle-edge mysteriously stirred and parted, and Treeshy
Kent
was in his arms.

 
          
The
sun was just pushing above a belt of low clouds in the east, spattering them
with liquid gold, and Venus blanched as the light spread upward. But under the
willows it was still dusk, a watery green dusk in which the secret murmurs of
the night were caught.

 
          
“Treeshy—Treeshy!”
the young man cried, kneeling beside her—and then, a moment later: “My angel,
are you sure that no one guesses—?”

 
          
The
girl gave a faint laugh which screwed up her funny nose. She leaned her head on
his shoulder, her round forehead and rough braids pressed against his cheek,
her hands in his, breathing quickly and joyfully.

 
          
“I
thought I should never get here,” Lewis grumbled, “with that ridiculous
bed-quilt—and it’ll be broad day soon! To think that I was of age yesterday,
and must come to you in a boat rigged like a child’s toy on a duck-pond! If you
knew how it humiliates me—”

 
          
“What
does it matter, dear, since you’re of age now, and your own master?”

 
          
“But
am I, though? He says so—but it’s only on his own terms; only while I do what
he wants! You’ll see…I’ve a credit of ten thousand dollars…ten…thou…sand…d’you
hear?…placed to my name in a London bank; and not a penny here to bless myself
with meanwhile…Why, Treeshy darling, why, what’s the matter?”

 
          
She
flung her arms about his neck, and through their innocent kisses he could taste
her tears. “What
is
it, Treeshy?” he
implored her.

 
          
“I…oh,
I’d forgotten it was to be our last day together till you spoke of London—cruel,
cruel!” she reproached him; and through the green twilight of the willows her
eyes blazed on him like two stormy stars. No other eyes he knew could express
such elemental rage as Treeshy’s.

 
          
“You
little spitfire, you!” he laughed back somewhat chokingly. “Yes, it’s our last
day—but not for long; at our age two years are not so very long, after all, are
they? And when I come back to you I’ll come as my own master, independent,
free—come to claim you in face of everything and everybody! Think of that, darling,
and be brave for my sake…brave and patient…as I mean to be!” he declared
heroically.

 
          
“Oh,
but you—you’ll see other girls; heaps and heaps of them; in those wicked old
countries where they’re so lovely. My uncle Kent says the European countries
are all wicked, even my own poor
Italy
…”

 
          
“But
you
, Treeshy; you’ll
be seeing cousins Bill and Donald meanwhile—seeing them all day long and every
day.
And you know you’ve a weakness for that great hulk of a Bill. Ah,
if only I stood six-foot-one in my stockings I’d go with an easier heart, you
fickle child!” he tried to banter her.

 
          
“Fickle?
Fickle?
Me
—oh, Lewis!”

 
          
He
felt the premonitory sweep of sobs, and his untried courage failed him. It was
delicious, in theory, to hold weeping beauty to one’s breast, but terribly
alarming, he found, in practice. There came a responsive twitching in his
throat.

 
          
“No,
no; firm as adamant, true as steel; that’s what we both mean to be, isn’t it,
cara?”

 
          
“Caro,
yes,” she sighed, appeased.

 
          
“And
you’ll write to me regularly, Treeshy—long long letters? I may count on that,
mayn’t I, wherever I am? And they must all be numbered, every one of them, so
that I shall know at once if I’ve missed one; remember!”

 
          
“And,
Lewis, you’ll wear them here?” (She touched his breast.) “Oh, not
all
,” she added, laughing, “for they’d
make such a big bundle that you’d soon have a hump in front like Pulcinella—but
always at least the last one, just the last one.
Promise!”

 
          
“Always,
I promise—as long as they’re kind,” he said, still struggling to take a
spirited line.

 
          
“Oh,
Lewis, they will be, as long as yours are—and long long afterward…”

 
          
Venus
failed and vanished in the sun’s uprising.

 
          
  

 
          
The
crucial moment, Lewis had always known, would not be that of his farewell to
Treeshy, but of his final interview with his father.

 
          
On
that everything hung: his immediate future as well as his more distant
prospects. As he stole home in the early sunlight, over the dew-drenched grass,
he glanced up apprehensively at Mr. Raycie’s windows, and thanked his stars
that they were still tightly shuttered.

 
          
There
was no doubt, as Mrs. Raycie said, that her husband’s “using language” before
ladies showed him to be in high good humour, relaxed and slippered, as it
were—a state his family so seldom saw him in that Lewis had sometimes
impertinently wondered to what awful descent from the clouds he and his two
sisters owed their timorous being.

 
          
It
was all very well to tell himself, as he often did, that the bulk of the money
was his mother’s, and that he could turn her round his little finger. What
difference did that make? Mr. Raycie, the day after his marriage, had quietly
taken over the management of his wife’s property, and deducted, from the very
moderate allowance he accorded her, all her little personal expenses, even to
the postage-stamps she used, and the dollar she put in the plate every Sunday.
He called the allowance her “pin-money,” since, as he often reminded her, he
paid all the household bills himself, so that Mrs. Raycie’s quarterly pittance
could be entirely devoted, if she chose, to frills and feathers.

 
          
“And
will be, if you respect my wishes, my dear,” he always added. “I like to see a
handsome figure well set-off, and not to have our friends imagine, when they
come to dine, that Mrs. Raycie is sick above-stairs, and I’ve replaced her by a
poor relation in allapacca.” In compliance with which Mrs. Raycie, at once
flattered and terrified, spent her last penny in adorning herself and her
daughters, and had to stint their bedroom fires, and the servants’ meals, in
order to find a penny for any private necessity.

 
          
Mr.
Raycie had long since convinced his wife that this method of dealing with her,
if not lavish, was suitable, and in fact “handsome”; when she spoke of the
subject to her relations it was with tears of gratitude for her husband’s
kindness in assuming the management of her property. As he managed it
exceedingly well, her hard-headed brothers (glad to have the responsibility off
their hands, and convinced that, if left to herself, she would have muddled her
money away in ill-advised charities) were disposed to share her approval of Mr.
Raycie; though her old mother sometimes said helplessly: “When I think that
Lucy Ann can’t as much as have a drop of gruel brought up to her without his
weighing the oatmeal…” But even that was only whispered, lest Mr. Raycie’s
mysterious faculty of hearing what was said behind his back should bring sudden
reprisals on the venerable lady to whom he always alluded, with a tremor in his
genial voice, as “my dear mother-in-law—unless indeed she will allow me to call
her, more briefly but more truly, my dear mother.”

 
          
To
Lewis, hitherto, Mr. Raycie had meted the same measure as to the females of the
household. He had dressed him well, educated him expensively, lauded him to the
skies—and counted every penny of his allowance. Yet there was a difference; and
Lewis was as well aware of it as any one.

 
          
The
dream, the ambition, the passion of Mr. Raycie’s life, was (as his son knew) to
found a Family; and he had only Lewis to found it with. He believed in
primogeniture, in heirlooms, in entailed estates, in all the ritual of the
English “landed” tradition. No one was louder than he in praise of the
democratic institutions under which he lived; but he never thought of them as
affecting that more private but more important institution, the Family; and to
the Family all his care and all his thoughts were given. The result, as Lewis
dimly guessed, was, that upon his own shrinking and inadequate head was centred
all the passion contained in the vast expanse of Mr. Raycie’s breast. Lewis was
his very own,
and Lewis represented what was most dear
to him; and for both these reasons Mr. Raycie set an inordinate value on the
boy (a quite different thing, Lewis thought from loving him).

 
          
Mr.
Raycie was particularly proud of his son’s taste for letters. Himself not a
wholly unread man, he admired intensely what he called the “cultivated
gentleman”—and that was what Lewis was evidently going to be. Could he have
combined with this tendency a manlier
frame,
and an
interest in the few forms of sport then popular among gentlemen, Mr. Raycie’s
satisfaction would have been complete; but whose is, in this disappointing
world? Meanwhile he flattered himself that, Lewis being still young and
malleable, and his health certainly mending, two years of travel and adventure
might send him back a very different figure, physically as well as mentally.
Mr. Raycie had himself travelled in his youth, and was persuaded that the
experience was formative; he secretly hoped for the return of a bronzed and
broadened Lewis, seasoned by independence and adventure, and having discreetly
sown his wild oats in foreign pastures, where they would not contaminate the
home crop.

 
          
All
this Lewis guessed; and he guessed as well that these two wander-years were
intended by Mr. Raycie to lead up to a marriage and an establishment after Mr.
Raycie’s own heart, but in which Lewis was not to have even a consulting voice.

 
          
“He’s
going to give me all the advantages—for his own purpose,” the young man summed
it up as he went down to join the family at the breakfast table.

 
          
Mr.
Raycie was never more resplendent than at that moment of the day and season.
His spotless white duck trousers, strapped under kid boots, his thin kerseymere
coat, and drab piqué waistcoat crossed below a snowy stock, made him look as
fresh as the morning and as appetizing as the peaches and cream banked before
him.