Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (4 page)

 
          
Opposite
sat Mrs. Raycie, immaculate also, but paler than usual, as became a mother
about to part from her only son; and between the two was Sarah Anne, unusually
pink, and apparently occupied in trying to screen her sister’s empty seat.
Lewis greeted them, and seated himself at his mother’s right.

 
          
Mr.
Raycie drew out his guillochee repeating watch, and detaching it from its heavy
gold chain laid it on the table beside him.

 
          
“Mary
Adeline is late again. It is a somewhat unusual thing for a sister to be late
at the last meal she is to take—for two years—with her only brother.”

 
          
“Oh, Mr. Raycie!”
Mrs. Raycie faltered.

 
          
“I
say, the idea is peculiar. Perhaps,” said Mr. Raycie sarcastically, “I am going
to be blessed with a
peculiar
daughter.”

 
          
“I’m
afraid Mary Adeline is beginning a sick headache, sir. She tried to get up, but
really could not,” said Sarah Anne in a rush.

 
          
Mr.
Raycie’s only reply was to arch ironic
eyebrows,
and
Lewis hastily intervened: “I’m sorry, sir; but it may be my fault—”

 
          
Mrs.
Raycie paled, Sarah Anne, purpled, and Mr. Raycie echoed with punctilious
incredulity: “Your—fault?”

 
          
“In
being the occasion, sir, of last night’s too-sumptuous festivity—”

 
          
“Ha—ha—ha!”
Mr. Raycie laughed, his thunders instantly dispelled.

 
          
He
pushed back his chair and nodded to his son with a smile; and the two, leaving
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…

 
          
  

 
          
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 writing was handed out across the
desk of some continental counting-house. Mr. Raycie senior did not write often,
and when he did it was in a bland and stilted strain. He felt at a disadvantage
on paper, and his natural sarcasm was swamped in the rolling periods which it
cost him hours of labour to bring forth; so that the dreaded quality lurked for
his son only in the curve of certain letters, and in a positively awful way of
writing out, at full length, the word “Esquire”.

 
          
It
was not that Lewis had broken with all the memories of his past of a year ago.
Many still lingered in him, or rather had been transferred to the new man he
had become—as for instance his tenderness for Treeshy Kent, which, somewhat to
his surprise, had obstinately resisted all the assaults of English keepsake
beauties and almond-eyed houris of the East. It startled him at times, to find
Treeshy’s short dusky face, with its round forehead, the widely spaced eyes and
the high cheek-bones, starting out at him suddenly in the street of some
legendary town, or in a landscape of languid beauty, just as he had now and
again been arrested in an exotic garden by the very scent of the verbena under
the verandah at home. His travels had confirmed rather than weakened the family
view of Treeshy’s plainness; she could not be made to fit into any of the
patterns of female beauty so far submitted to him; yet there she was, ensconced
in his new heart and mind as deeply as in the old, though her kisses seemed
less vivid, and the peculiar rough notes of her voice hardly reached him.
Sometimes, half irritably, he said to himself that with an effort he could
disperse her once for all; yet she lived on in him, unseen yet ineffaceable, like
the image on a daguerreotype plate, no less there because so often invisible.

 
          
To
the new Lewis, however, the whole business was less important than he had once
thought it. His suddenly acquired maturity made Treeshy seem a petted child
rather than the guide, the Beatrice, he had once considered her; and he
promised himself, with an elderly smile, that as soon as he got to Italy he
would write her the long letter for which he was now considerably in her debt.