THE TRAGIC MUSE. Генри Джеймс

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СКАЧАТЬ by the seen limits of his apprehension, but it almost revels as such horizons recede. We shall see quickly enough how accurate a measure it might have taken of Nicholas Dormer. There was food for suspicion perhaps in the wandering blankness that sat at moments in his eyes, as if he had no attention at all, not the least in the world, at his command; but it is no more than just to add without delay that this discouraging symptom was known among those who liked him by the indulgent name of dreaminess. By his mother and sisters, for instance, his dreaminess was constantly noted. He is the more welcome to the benefit of such an interpretation as there is always held to be something engaging in the combination of the muscular and the musing, the mildness of strength.

      After some time, an interval during which these good people might have appeared to have come, individually, to the Palais de l’Industrie much less to see the works of art than to think over their domestic affairs, the young man, rousing himself from his reverie, addressed one of the girls.

      “I say, Biddy, why should we sit moping here all day? Come and take a turn about with me.”

      His younger sister, while he got up, leaned forward a little, looking round her, but she gave for the moment no further sign of complying with his invitation.

      “Where shall we find you, then, if Peter comes?” asked the other Miss Dormer, making no movement at all.

      “I daresay Peter won’t come. He’ll leave us here to cool our heels.”

      “Oh Nick dear!” Biddy exclaimed in a small sweet voice of protest. It was plainly her theory that Peter would come, and even a little her fond fear that she might miss him should she quit that spot.

      “We shall come back in a quarter of an hour. Really I must look at these things,” Nick declared, turning his face to a marble group which stood near them on the right — a man with the skin of a beast round his loins, tussling with a naked woman in some primitive effort of courtship or capture.

      Lady Agnes followed the direction of her son’s eyes and then observed: “Everything seems very dreadful. I should think Biddy had better sit still. Hasn’t she seen enough horrors up above?”

      “I daresay that if Peter comes Julia’ll be with him,” the elder girl remarked irrelevantly.

      “Well then he can take Julia about. That will be more proper,” said Lady Agnes.

      “Mother dear, she doesn’t care a rap about art. It’s a fearful bore looking at fine things with Julia,” Nick returned.

      “Won’t you go with him, Grace?”— and Biddy appealed to her sister.

      “I think she has awfully good taste!” Grace exclaimed, not answering this inquiry.

      “Don’t say nasty things about her!” Lady Agnes broke out solemnly to her son after resting her eyes on him a moment with an air of reluctant reprobation.

      “I say nothing but what she’d say herself,” the young man urged. “About some things she has very good taste, but about this kind of thing she has no taste at all.”

      “That’s better, I think,” said Lady Agnes, turning her eyes again to the “kind of thing” her son appeared to designate.

      “She’s awfully clever — awfully!” Grace went on with decision.

      “Awfully, awfully!” her brother repeated, standing in front of her and smiling down at her.

      “You are nasty, Nick. You know you are,” said the young lady, but more in sorrow than in anger.

      Biddy got up at this, as if the accusatory tone prompted her to place herself generously at his side. “Mightn’t you go and order lunch — in that place, you know?” she asked of her mother. “Then we’d come back when it was ready.”

      “My dear child, I can’t order lunch,” Lady Agnes replied with a cold impatience which seemed to intimate that she had problems far more important than those of victualling to contend with.

      “Then perhaps Peter will if he comes. I’m sure he’s up in everything of that sort.”

      “Oh hang Peter!” Nick exclaimed. “Leave him out of account, and do order lunch, mother; but not cold beef and pickles.”

      “I must say — about him — you’re not nice,” Biddy ventured to remark to her brother, hesitating and even blushing a little.

      “You make up for it, my dear,” the young man answered, giving her chin — a very charming, rotund, little chin — a friendly whisk with his forefinger.

      “I can’t imagine what you’ve got against him,” her ladyship said gravely.

      “Dear mother, it’s disappointed fondness,” Nick argued. “They won’t answer one’s notes; they won’t let one know where they are nor what to expect. ‘Hell has no fury like a woman scorned’; nor like a man either.”

      “Peter has such a tremendous lot to do — it’s a very busy time at the embassy; there are sure to be reasons,” Biddy explained with her pretty eyes.

      “Reasons enough, no doubt!” said Lady Agnes — who accompanied these words with an ambiguous sigh, however, as if in Paris even the best reasons would naturally be bad ones.

      “Doesn’t Julia write to you, doesn’t she answer you the very day?” Grace asked, looking at Nick as if she were the bold one.

      He waited, returning her glance with a certain severity. “What do you know about my correspondence? No doubt I ask too much,” he went on; “I’m so attached to them. Dear old Peter, dear old Julia!”

      “She’s younger than you, my dear!” cried the elder girl, still resolute.

      “Yes, nineteen days.”

      “I’m glad you know her birthday.”

      “She knows yours; she always gives you something,” Lady Agnes reminded her son.

      “Her taste is good then, isn’t it, Nick?” Grace Dormer continued.

      “She makes charming presents; but, dear mother, it isn’t her taste. It’s her husband’s.”

      “How her husband’s?”

      “The beautiful objects of which she disposes so freely are the things he collected for years laboriously, devotedly, poor man!”

      “She disposes of them to you, but not to others,” said Lady Agnes. “But that’s all right,” she added, as if this might have been taken for a complaint of the limitations of Julia’s bounty. “She has to select among so many, and that’s a proof of taste,” her ladyship pursued.

      “You can’t say she doesn’t choose lovely ones,” Grace remarked to her brother in a tone of some triumph.

      “My dear, they’re all lovely. George Dallow’s judgement was so sure, he was incapable of making a mistake,” Nicholas Dormer returned.

      “I don’t see how you can talk of him, he was dreadful,” СКАЧАТЬ