Edith Wharton: New Year's Day, False Dawn, The Old Maid & The Spark (4 Books in One Edition). Edith Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ the ladies to wash up the teacups (as was still the habit in genteel families) betook themselves to Mr. Raycie’s study.

      What Mr. Raycie studied in this apartment — except the accounts, and ways of making himself unpleasant to his family — Lewis had never been able to discover. It was a small bare formidable room; and the young man, who never crossed the threshold but with a sinking of his heart, felt it sink lower than ever. “NOW!” he thought.

      Mr. Raycie took the only easy-chair, and began.

      “My dear fellow, our time is short, but long enough for what I have to say. In a few hours you will be setting out on your great journey: an important event in the life of any young man. Your talents and character — combined with your means of improving the opportunity — make me hope that in your case it will be decisive. I expect you to come home from this trip a man — ”

      So far, it was all to order, so to speak; Lewis could have recited it beforehand. He bent his head in acquiescence.

      “A man,” Mr. Raycie repeated, “prepared to play a part, a considerable part, in the social life of the community. I expect you to be a figure in New York; and I shall give you the means to be so.” He cleared his throat. “But means are not enough — though you must never forget that they are essential. Education, polish, experience of the world; these are what so many of our men of standing lack. What do they know of Art or Letters? We have had little time here to produce either as yet — you spoke?” Mr. Raycie broke off with a crushing courtesy.

      “I— oh, no,” his son stammered.

      “Ah; I thought you might be about to allude to certain blasphemous penny-a-liners whose poetic ravings are said to have given them a kind of pothouse notoriety.”

      Lewis reddened at the allusion but was silent, and his father went on:

      “Where is our Byron — our Scott — our Shakespeare? And in painting it is the same. Where are our Old Masters? We are not without contemporary talent; but for works of genius we must still look to the past; we must, in most cases, content ourselves with copies . . . Ah, here I know, my dear boy, I touch a responsive chord! Your love of the arts has not passed unperceived; and I mean, I desire, to do all I can to encourage it. Your future position in the world — your duties and obligations as a gentleman and a man of fortune — will not permit you to become, yourself, an eminent painter or a famous sculptor; but I shall raise no objection to your dabbling in these arts as an amateur — at least while you are travelling abroad. It will form your taste, strengthen your judgment, and give you, I hope, the discernment necessary to select for me a few masterpieces which shall NOT be copies. Copies,” Mr. Raycie pursued with a deepening emphasis, “are for the less discriminating, or for those less blessed with this world’s goods. Yes, my dear Lewis, I wish to create a gallery: a gallery of Heirlooms. Your mother participates in this ambition — she desires to see on our walls a few original specimens of the Italian genius. Raphael, I fear, we can hardly aspire to; but a Domenichino, an Albano, a Carlo Dolci, a Guercino, a Carlo Maratta — one or two of Salvator Rosa’s noble landscapes . . . you see my idea? There shall be a Raycie Gallery; and it shall be your mission to get together its nucleus.” Mr. Raycie paused, and mopped his flowing forehead. “I believe I could have given my son no task more to his liking.”

      “Oh, no, sir, none indeed!” Lewis cried, flushing and paling. He had in fact never suspected this part of his father’s plan, and his heart swelled with the honour of so unforeseen a mission. Nothing, in truth, could have made him prouder or happier. For a moment he forgot love, forgot Treeshy, forgot everything but the rapture of moving among the masterpieces of which he had so long dreamed, moving not as a mere hungry spectator but as one whose privilege it should at least be to single out and carry away some of the lesser treasures. He could hardly take in what had happened, and the shock of the announcement left him, as usual, inarticulate.

      He heard his father booming on, developing the plan, explaining with his usual pompous precision that one of the partners of the London bank in which Lewis’s funds were deposited was himself a noted collector, and had agreed to provide the young traveller with letters of introduction to other connoisseurs, both in France and Italy, so that Lewis’s acquisitions might be made under the most enlightened guidance.

      “It is,” Mr. Raycie concluded, “in order to put you on a footing of equality with the best collectors that I have placed such a large sum at your disposal. I reckon that for ten thousand dollars you can travel for two years in the very best style; and I mean to place another five thousand to your credit” — he paused, and let the syllables drop slowly into his son’s brain: “five thousand dollars for the purchase of works of art, which eventually — remember — will be yours; and will be handed on, I trust, to your sons’ sons as long as the name of Raycie survives” — a length of time, Mr. Raycie’s tone seemed to imply, hardly to be measured in periods less extensive than those of the Egyptian dynasties.

      Lewis heard him with a whirling brain. FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS! The sum seemed so enormous, even in dollars, and so incalculably larger when translated into any continental currency, that he wondered why his father, in advance, had given up all hope of a Raphael . . . “If I travel economically,” he said to himself, “and deny myself unnecessary luxuries, I may yet be able to surprise him by bringing one back. And my mother — how magnanimous, how splendid! Now I see why she has consented to all the little economies that sometimes seemed so paltry and so humiliating . . . ”

      The young man’s eyes filled with tears, but he was still silent, though he longed as never before to express his gratitude and admiration to his father. He had entered the study expecting a parting sermon on the subject of thrift, coupled with the prospective announcement of a “suitable establishment” (he could even guess the particular Huzzard girl his father had in view); and instead he had been told to spend his princely allowance in a princely manner, and to return home with a gallery of masterpieces. “At least,” he murmured to himself, “it shall contain a Correggio.”

      “Well, sir?” Mr. Raycie boomed.

      “Oh, sir — ” his son cried, and flung himself on the vast slope of the parental waistcoat.

      Amid all these accumulated joys there murmured deep down in him the thought that nothing had been said or done to interfere with his secret plans about Treeshy. It seemed almost as if his father had tacitly accepted the idea of their unmentioned engagement; and Lewis felt half guilty at not confessing to it then and there. But the gods are formidable even when they unbend; never more so, perhaps, than at such moments . . .

Part 2.

      4.

      Table of Contents

      LEWIS RAYCIE stood on a projecting rock and surveyed the sublime spectacle of Mont Blanc.

      It was a brilliant August day, and the air, at that height, was already so sharp that he had had to put on his fur-lined pelisse. Behind him, at a respectful distance, was the travelling servant who, at a signal, had brought it up to him; below, in the bend of the mountain road, stood the light and elegant carriage which had carried him thus far on his travels.

      Scarcely more than a year had passed since he had waved a farewell to New York from the deck of the packet-ship headed down the bay; yet, to the young man confidently facing Mont Blanc, nothing seemed left in him of that fluid and insubstantial being, the former Lewis Raycie, save a lurking and abeyant fear of Mr. Raycie senior. Even that, however, was so attenuated by distance and time, so far sunk below the horizon, and anchored on the far side of the globe, that it stirred in its sleep only when a handsomely folded and wafered letter in his parent’s СКАЧАТЬ