Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (2 page)

 
          
“How
my poor brother Julius could have lived in
Europe
! Well, look at the consequences—” he used
to say, as if poor Treeshy’s plainness gave an awful point to his moral.

 
          
“There’s
one thing in Paris, my
boy, that
you must be warned
against: those gambling-hells in the Pally Royle,” Mr.
Kent
insisted. “I never set foot in the places
myself; but a glance at the outside was enough.”

 
          
“I
knew a feller that was fleeced of a fortune there,” Mr. Henry Huzzard
confirmed; while the Commodore, at his tenth glass, chuckled with moist eyes:
“The trollops, oh, the trollops—”

 
          
“As
for
Vienna
—” said Mr.
Kent
.

 
          
“Even
in
London
,” said Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, “a young man
must be on his look-out against gamblers. Every form of swindling is practised,
and the touts are always on the look-out for greenhorns; a term,” he added
apologetically, “which they apply to any traveller new to the country.”

 
          
“In
Paris
,” said Mr.
Kent
, “I was once within an ace of being
challenged to fight a duel.” He fetched a sigh of horror and relief, and
glanced reassuredly down the Sound in the direction of his own peaceful roof-tree.

 
          
“Oh,
a duel,” laughed the Commodore. “A man can fight duels here. I fought a dozen
when I was a young feller in New Erleens.” The Commodore’s mother had been a
southern lady, and after his father’s death had spent some years with her
parents in
Louisiana
, so that her son’s varied experiences had
begun early. “‘Bout women,” he smiled confidentially, holding out his empty
glass to Mr. Raycie.

 
          
“The
ladies—!” exclaimed Mr.
Kent
in a voice of warning.

 
          
The
gentlemen
rose
to their feet, the Commodore quite as
promptly and steadily as the others. The drawing-room window opened, and from
it emerged Mrs. Raycie, in a ruffled sarsenet dress and Point de Paris cap,
followed by her two daughters in starched organdy with pink spencers. Mr.
Raycie looked with proud approval at his womenkind.

 
          
“Gentlemen,”
said Mrs. Raycie, in a perfectly even voice, “supper is on the table, and if
you will do Mr. Raycie and myself the favour—”

 
          
“The
favour ma’am,” said Mr. Ambrose
Huzzard,
“is on your
side, in so amiably inviting us.”

 
          
Mrs.
Raycie curtsied, the gentlemen bowed, and Mr. Raycie said: “Your arm to Mrs.
Raycie, Huzzard. This little farewell party is a family affair, and the other
gentlemen must content themselves with my two daughters. Sarah Anne, Mary
Adeline—”

 
          
The
Commodore and Mr. John Huzzard advanced ceremoniously toward the two girls, and
Mr.
Kent
, being a cousin, closed the procession between Mr. Raycie and Lewis.

 
          
Oh,
that supper table! The vision of it used sometimes to rise before Lewis
Raycie’s eyes in outlandish foreign places; for though not a large or
fastidious eater when he was at home, he was afterward, in lands of
chestnut-flour and garlic and queer bearded sea-things, to suffer many pangs of
hunger at the thought of that opulent board. In the centre stood the Raycie
epergne of pierced silver, holding aloft a bunch of June roses surrounded by
dangling baskets of sugared almonds and striped peppermints; and grouped about
this decorative “motif” were
Lowestoft
platters heavy with piles of raspberries, strawberries and the first
Delaware
peaches. An outer flanking of heaped-up
cookies, crullers, strawberry short-cake, piping hot corn-bread and deep golden
butter in moist blocks still bedewed from the muslin swathings of the dairy,
led the eye to the Virginia ham in front of Mr. Raycie, and the twin dishes of
scrambled eggs on toast and broiled blue-fish over which his wife presided.
Lewis could never afterward fit into this intricate pattern the “side-dishes”
of devilled turkey-legs and creamed chicken hash, the sliced cucumbers and
tomatoes, the heavy silver jugs of butter-coloured cream, the floating-island,
“slips” and lemon jellies that were somehow interwoven with the solider
elements of the design; but they were all there, either together or successively,
and so were the towering piles of waffles reeling on their foundations, and the
slender silver jugs of maple syrup perpetually escorting them about the table
as black Dinah replenished the supply.

 
          
They
ate—oh, how they all ate!—though the ladies were supposed only to nibble; but
the good things on Lewis’s plate remained untouched until, ever and again, an
admonishing glance from Mr. Raycie, or an entreating one from Mary Adeline,
made him insert a languid fork into the heap.

 
          
And
all the while Mr. Raycie continued to hold forth.

 
          
“A
young man, in my opinion, before setting up for
himself
,
must see the world; form his taste; fortify his judgment. He must study the
most famous monuments, examine the organization of foreign societies, and the
habits and customs of those older civilizations whose yoke it has been our
glory to cast off. Though he may see in them much to deplore and to reprove—”
(“Some of the gals, though,” Commodore Ledgely was heard to interject)—“much
that will make him give thanks for the privilege of having been born and
brought up under our own Free Institutions, yet I believe he will also”—Mr.
Raycie conceded it with magnanimity—“be able to learn much.”

 
          
“The
Sundays, though,” Mr.
Kent
hazarded warningly; and Mrs. Raycie breathed
across to her son: “Ah, that’s what
I
say!”

 
          
Mr.
Raycie did not like interruption; and he met it by growing visibly larger. His
huge bulk hung a moment, like an avalanche, above the silence which followed
Mr.
Kent
’s interjection and Mrs. Raycie’s murmur; then he crashed down on both.

 
          
“The Sundays—the Sundays?
Well, what of the Sundays? What is
there to frighten a good Episcopalian in what we call the Continental Sunday? I
presume that we’re all Churchmen here, eh? No puling Methodists or atheistical
Unitarians at my table
tonight, that
I’m aware of? Nor
will I offend the ladies of my household by assuming that they have secretly
lent an ear to the Baptist ranter in the chapel at the foot of our lane. No? I
thought not! Well, then, I say, what’s all this flutter about the Papists? Far
be it from me to approve of their heathenish doctrines—but, damn it, they go to
church,
don’t
they? And they have a real service, as
we do, don’t
they
? And real
clergy,
and not a lot of nondescripts dressed like laymen, and damned badly at that,
who chat familiarly with the Almighty in their own vulgar lingo? No, sir”—he
swung about on the shrinking Mr.
Kent
—“it’s not the Church I’m afraid of in
foreign
countries,
it’s the sewers, sir!”

 
          
Mrs.
Raycie had grown very pale: Lewis knew that she too was deeply perturbed about
the sewers. “And the night-air,” she scarce-audibly sighed.

 
          
But
Mr. Raycie had taken up his main theme again. “In my opinion, if a young man
travels at all, he must travel as extensively as his—er—means permit; must see
as much of the world as he can. Those are my son’s sailing orders, Commodore;
and here’s to his carrying them out to the best of his powers!”

 
          
Black
Dinah, removing the Virginia ham, or rather such of its bony structure as alone
remained on the dish, had managed to make room for a bowl of punch from which
Mr. Raycie poured deep ladlefuls of perfumed fire into the glasses ranged
before him on a silver tray. The gentlemen rose, the ladies smiled and wept,
and Lewis’s health and the success of the Grand Tour were toasted with an
eloquence which caused Mr. Raycie, with a hasty nod to her daughters, and a
covering rustle of starched flounces, to shepherd them softly from the room.

 
          
“After
all,” Lewis heard her murmur to them on the threshold, “your father’s using
such language shows that he’s in the best of humour with dear Lewis.”

 
          
  

 
          
In
spite of his enforced potations, Lewis Raycie was up the next morning before
sunrise.

 
          
Unlatching
his shutters without noise, he looked forth over the wet lawn merged in a blur
of shrubberies, and the waters of the Sound dimly seen beneath a sky full of
stars. His head ached but his heart glowed; what was before him was thrilling
enough to clear a heavier brain than his.

 
          
He
dressed quickly and completely (save for his shoes), and then, stripping the
flowered quilt from his high mahogany bed, rolled it in a tight bundle under
his arm. Thus enigmatically equipped he was feeling his way, shoes in hand,
through the darkness of the upper story to the slippery oak stairs, when he was
startled by a candle-gleam in the pitch-blackness of the hall below. He held
his breath, and leaning over the stair-rail saw with amazement his sister Mary
Adeline come forth, cloaked and bonneted, but also in stocking-feet, from the
passage leading to the pantry. She too carried a double burden: her shoes and
the candle in one hand, in the other a large covered basket that weighed down
her bare arm.

 
          
Brother
and sister stopped and stared at each other in the blue dusk: the upward slant
of the candle-light distorted Mary Adeline’s mild features, twisting them into
a frightened grin as Lewis stole down to join her.

 
          
“Oh—”
she whispered. “What in the world are you doing here? I was just getting
together a few things for that poor young Mrs. Poe down the lane, who’s so
ill—before mother goes to the store-room. You won’t tell, will you?”

 
          
Lewis
signalled his complicity, and cautiously slid open the bolt of the front door.
They durst not say more till they were out of ear-shot. On the doorstep they
sat down to put on their shoes; then they hastened on without a word through
the ghostly shrubberies till they reached the gate into the lane.

 
          
“But
you, Lewis?” the sister suddenly questioned, with an astonished stare at the
rolled-up quilt under her brother’s arm.

 
          
“Oh, I—.
Look here Addy—” he broke off and began to grope in
his pocket—“I haven’t much about me…the old gentleman keeps me as close as
ever…but here’s a dollar, if you think that poor Mrs. Poe could use it…I’d be
too happy…consider it a privilege…”

 
          
“Oh, Lewis, Lewis, how noble, how generous of you!
Of course
I can buy a few extra things with it…they never see meat unless I can bring
them a bit, you know…and I fear she’s dying of a decline…and she and her mother
are so fiery-proud…” She wept with gratitude, and Lewis drew a breath of
relief. He had diverted her attention from the bed-quilt.

 
          
“Ah,
there’s the breeze,” he murmured, sniffing the suddenly chilled air.

 
          
“Yes;
I must be off; I must be back before the sun is up,” said Mary Adeline
anxiously, “and it would never do if mother knew—”

 
          
“She
doesn’t know of your visits to Mrs. Poe?”

 
          
A
look of childish guile sharpened Mary Adeline’s undeveloped face. “She
does
, of course; but yet she
doesn’t…we’ve arranged it so. You see, Mr. Poe’s an Atheist; and so father—”