The Europeans. Henry Foss James

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ she was at an enormous fair—that the entertainment and the désagréments were very much the same. She found herself alternately smiling and shrinking; the show was very curious, but it was probable, from moment to moment, that one would be jostled. The Baroness had never seen so many people walking about before; she had never been so mixed up with people she did not know. But little by little she felt that this fair was a more serious undertaking. She went with her brother into a large public garden, which seemed very pretty, but where she was surprised at seeing no carriages. The afternoon was drawing to a close; the coarse, vivid grass and the slender tree-boles were gilded by the level sunbeams—gilded as with gold that was fresh from the mine. It was the hour at which ladies should come out for an airing and roll past a hedge of pedestrians, holding their parasols askance. Here, however, Eugenia observed no indications of this custom, the absence of which was more anomalous as there was a charming avenue of remarkably graceful, arching elms in the most convenient contiguity to a large, cheerful street, in which, evidently, among the more prosperous members of the bourgeoisie, a great deal of pedestrianism went forward. Our friends passed out into this well lighted promenade, and Felix noticed a great many more pretty girls and called his sister’s attention to them. This latter measure, however, was superfluous; for the Baroness had inspected, narrowly, these charming young ladies.

      “I feel an intimate conviction that our cousins are like that,” said Felix.

      The Baroness hoped so, but this is not what she said. “They are very pretty,” she said, “but they are mere little girls. Where are the women—the women of thirty?”

      “Of thirty-three, do you mean?” her brother was going to ask; for he understood often both what she said and what she did not say. But he only exclaimed upon the beauty of the sunset, while the Baroness, who had come to seek her fortune, reflected that it would certainly be well for her if the persons against whom she might need to measure herself should all be mere little girls. The sunset was superb; they stopped to look at it; Felix declared that he had never seen such a gorgeous mixture of colors. The Baroness also thought it splendid; and she was perhaps the more easily pleased from the fact that while she stood there she was conscious of much admiring observation on the part of various nice-looking people who passed that way, and to whom a distinguished, strikingly-dressed woman with a foreign air, exclaiming upon the beauties of nature on a Boston street corner in the French tongue, could not be an object of indifference. Eugenia’s spirits rose. She surrendered herself to a certain tranquil gaiety. If she had come to seek her fortune, it seemed to her that her fortune would be easy to find. There was a promise of it in the gorgeous purity of the western sky; there was an intimation in the mild, unimpertinent gaze of the passers of a certain natural facility in things.

      “You will not go back to Silberstadt, eh?” asked Felix.

      “Not tomorrow,” said the Baroness.

      “Nor write to the Reigning Prince?”

      “I shall write to him that they evidently know nothing about him over here.”

      “He will not believe you,” said the young man. “I advise you to let him alone.”

      Felix himself continued to be in high good humor. Brought up among ancient customs and in picturesque cities, he yet found plenty of local color in the little Puritan metropolis. That evening, after dinner, he told his sister that he should go forth early on the morrow to look up their cousins.

      “You are very impatient,” said Eugenia.

      “What can be more natural,” he asked, “after seeing all those pretty girls today? If one’s cousins are of that pattern, the sooner one knows them the better.”

      “Perhaps they are not,” said Eugenia. “We ought to have brought some letters—to some other people.”

      “The other people would not be our kinsfolk.”

      “Possibly they would be none the worse for that,” the Baroness replied.

      Her brother looked at her with his eyebrows lifted. “That was not what you said when you first proposed to me that we should come out here and fraternize with our relatives. You said that it was the prompting of natural affection; and when I suggested some reasons against it you declared that the voix du sang should go before everything.”

      “You remember all that?” asked the Baroness.

      “Vividly! I was greatly moved by it.”

      She was walking up and down the room, as she had done in the morning; she stopped in her walk and looked at her brother. She apparently was going to say something, but she checked herself and resumed her walk. Then, in a few moments, she said something different, which had the effect of an explanation of the suppression of her earlier thought. “You will never be anything but a child, dear brother.”

      “One would suppose that you, madam,” answered Felix, laughing, “were a thousand years old.”

      “I am—sometimes,” said the Baroness.

      “I will go, then, and announce to our cousins the arrival of a personage so extraordinary. They will immediately come and pay you their respects.”

      Eugenia paced the length of the room again, and then she stopped before her brother, laying her hand upon his arm. “They are not to come and see me,” she said. “You are not to allow that. That is not the way I shall meet them first.” And in answer to his interrogative glance she went on. “You will go and examine, and report. You will come back and tell me who they are and what they are; their number, gender, their respective ages—all about them. Be sure you observe everything; be ready to describe to me the locality, the accessories—how shall I say it?—the mise en scène. Then, at my own time, at my own hour, under circumstances of my own choosing, I will go to them. I will present myself—I will appear before them!” said the Baroness, this time phrasing her idea with a certain frankness.

      “And what message am I to take to them?” asked Felix, who had a lively faith in the justness of his sister’s arrangements.

      She looked at him a moment—at his expression of agreeable veracity; and, with that justness that he admired, she replied, “Say what you please. Tell my story in the way that seems to you most—natural.” And she bent her forehead for him to kiss.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      The next day was splendid, as Felix had prophesied; if the winter had suddenly leaped into spring, the spring had for the moment as quickly leaped into summer. This was an observation made by a young girl who came out of a large square house in the country, and strolled about in the spacious garden which separated it from a muddy road. The flowering shrubs and the neatly-disposed plants were basking in the abundant light and warmth; the transparent shade of the great elms—they were magnificent trees—seemed to thicken by the hour; and the intensely habitual stillness offered a submissive medium to the sound of a distant church-bell. The young girl listened to the church-bell; but she was not dressed for church. She was bare-headed; she wore a white muslin waist, with an embroidered border, and the skirt of her dress was of colored muslin. She was a young lady of some two or three and twenty years of age, and though a young person of her sex walking bare-headed in a garden, of a Sunday morning in spring-time, can, in the nature of things, never be a displeasing object, you would not have pronounced this innocent Sabbath-breaker СКАЧАТЬ