Henry James

Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie

Henry James

(1843–1916)

Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie

(1900)

Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie

“It’s astonishing what you take for granted!” Lady Champer had exclaimed to her young friend at an early stage; and this might have served as a sign that even then the little plot had begun to thicken. The reflection was uttered at the time the outlook of the charming American girl in whom she found herself so interested was still much in the rough. They had often met, with pleasure to each, during a winter spent in Rome; and Lily had come to her in London towards the end of May with further news of a situation the dawn of which, in March and April, by the Tiber, the Arno and the Seine, had considerably engaged her attention. The Prince had followed Miss Gunton to Florence and then with almost equal promptitude to Paris, where it was both clear and comical for Lady Champer that the rigour of his uncertainty as to parental commands and remittances now detained him. This shrewd woman promised herself not a little amusement from her view of the possibilities of the case. Lily was on the whole showing a wonder; therefore the drama would lose nothing from her character, her temper, her tone. She was waiting—this was the truth she had imparted to her clever protectress—to see if her Roman captive would find himself drawn to London. Should he really turn up there she would the next thing start for America, putting him to the test of that wider range and declining to place her confidence till he should have arrived in New York at her heels. If he remained in Paris or returned to Rome she would stay in London and, as she phrased it, have a good time by herself. Did he expect her to go back to Paris for him? Why not in that case just as well go back to Rome at once? The first thing for her, Lily intimated to her London adviser, was to show what, in her position, she expected.

Her position meanwhile was one that Lady Champer, try as she would, had as yet succeeded neither in understanding nor in resigning herself not to understand. It was that of being extraordinarily pretty, amazingly free and perplexingly good, and of presenting these advantages in a positively golden light. How was one to estimate a girl whose nearest approach to a drawback—that is to an encumbrance—appeared to be a grandfather carrying on a business in an American city her ladyship had never otherwise heard of, with whom communication was all by cable and on the subject of ‘drawing’? Expression was on the old man’s part moreover as concise as it was expensive, consisting as it inveterately did of but the single word ‘Draw’. Lily drew, on every occasion in life, and it at least could not be said of the pair—when the ‘family idea’, as embodied in America, was exposed to criticism—that they were not in touch. Mr Gunton had given her further Mrs Brine, to come out with her, and with this provision and the perpetual pecuniary he plainly figured—to Lily’s own mind—as solicitous to the point of anxiety. Mrs Brine’s scheme of relations seemed in truth to be simpler still. There was a transatlantic ‘Mr Brine’, of whom she often spoke—and never in any other way; but she wrote for newspapers; she prowled in catacombs, visiting more than once even those of Paris; she haunted hotels; she picked up compatriots; she spoke above all a language that often baffled comprehension. She mattered, however, but little; she was mainly so occupied in having what Lily had likewise independently glanced at—a good time by herself. It was difficult enough indeed to Lady Champer to see the wonderful girl reduced to that, yet she was a little person who kept one somehow in presence of the incalculable. Old measures and familiar rules were of no use at all with her—she had so broken the moulds and so mixed the marks. What was confounding was her disparities—the juxtaposition in her of beautiful sun-flushed heights and deep dark holes. She had none of the things that the other things implied. She dangled in the air in a manner that made one dizzy; though one took comfort, at the worst, in feeling that one was there to catch her if she fell. Falling, at the same time, appeared scarce one of her properties, and it was positive for Lady Champer at moments that if one held out one’s arms one might be, after all, much more likely to be pulled up. That was really a part of the excitement of the acquaintance.

“Well,” said this friend and critic on one of the first of the London days, “say he does, on your return to your own country, go after you: how do you read, on that occurrence, the course of events?”

“Why, if he comes after me I’ll have him.”

“And do you think it so easy to ‘have’ him?”

Lily appeared, lovely and candid—and it was an air and a way she often had—to wonder what she thought. “I don’t know that I think it any easier than he seems to think it to have me. I know moreover that, though he wants awfully to see the country, he wouldn’t just now come to America unless to marry me; and if I take him at all,” she pursued, “I want first to be able to show him to the girls.”

“Why ‘first’?” Lady Champer asked. “Wouldn’t it do as well last?”

“Oh, I should want them to see me in Rome too,” said Lily. “But, dear me, I’m afraid I want a good many things! What I most want of course is that he should show me unmistakably what he wants. Unless he wants me more than anything else in the world I don’t want him. Besides, I hope he doesn’t think I’m going to be married anywhere but in my own place.”

“I see,” said Lady Champer. “It’s for your wedding you want the girls. And it’s for the girls you want the Prince.”

“Well, we’re all bound by that promise. And of course you’ll come!”

“Ah, my dear child—!” Lady Champer gasped.

“You can come with the old Princess. You’ll be just the right company for her.”

The elder friend considered afresh, with depth, the younger’s beauty and serenity. “You are, love, beyond everything!”

The beauty and serenity took on for a moment a graver cast. “Why do you so often say that to me?”

“Because you so often make it the only thing to say. But you’ll some day find out why,” Lady Champer added with an intention of encouragement.

Lily Gunton, however, was a young person to whom encouragement looked queer; she had grown up without need of it, and it seemed indeed scarce required in her situation. “Do you mean you believe his mother won’t come?”

“Over mountains and seas to see you married?—and to be seen also of the girls? If she does, I will. But we had perhaps better,” Lady Champer wound up, “not count our chickens before they’re hatched.” To which, with one of the easy returns of gaiety that were irresistible in her, Lily made answer that neither of the ladies in question struck her quite as chickens.

The Prince at all events presented himself in London with a promptitude that contributed to make the warning gratuitous. Nothing could have exceeded, by this time, Lady Champer’s appreciation of her young friend, whose merits ‘town’ at the beginning of June threw into renewed relief; but she had the imagination of greatness and, though she believed she tactfully kept it to herself, she thought what the young man had thus done a great deal for a Roman prince to do. Take him as he was, with the circumstances—and they were certainly peculiar, and he was charming—it was a far cry for him from Piazza Colonna to Clarges Street. If Lady Champer had the imagination of greatness, which the Prince in all sorts of ways gratified, Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie—it was vain to pretend the contrary—was not great in any particular save one. She was great when she ‘drew’. It was true that at the beginning of June she did draw with unprecedented energy and in a manner that, though Mrs Brine’s remarkable nerve apparently could stand it, fairly made a poor baronet’s widow, little as it was her business, hold her breath. It was none of her business at all, yet she talked of it even with the Prince himself—to whom it was indeed a favourite subject and whose greatness, oddly enough, never appeared to shrink in the effect it produced upon him. The line they took together was that of wondering if the scale of Lily’s drafts made really most for the presumption that the capital at her disposal was rapidly dwindling, or for that of its being practically infinite. “Many a fellow,” the young man smiled, “would marry her to pull her up.” He was in any case of the opinion that it was an occasion for deciding—one way or the other—quickly. Well, he did decide—so quickly that within the week Lily communicated to her friend that he had offered her his hand, his heart, his fortune and all his titles, grandeurs and appurtenances. She had given him his answer, and he was in bliss; though nothing, as yet, was settled but that.

Tall, fair, active, educated, amiable, simple, carrying so naturally his great name and pronouncing so kindly Lily’s small one, the happy youth, if he was one of the most ancient of princes, was one of the most modern of Romans. This second character it was his special aim and pride to cultivate. He would have been pained at feeling himself an hour behind his age; and he had a way—both touching and amusing to some observers—of constantly comparing his watch with the dial of the day’s news. It was in fact easy to see that in deciding to ally himself with a young alien of vague origin, whose striking beauty was reinforced only by her presumptive money, he had even put forward a little the fine hands of his timepiece. No one else, however—not even Lady Champer, and least of all Lily herself—had quite taken the measure, in this connection, of his merit. The quick decision he had spoken of was really a flying leap. He desired incontestably to rescue Miss Gunton’s remainder; but to rescue it he had to take it for granted, and taking it for granted was nothing less than—at whatever angle considered—a risk. He never, naturally, used the word to her, but he distinctly faced a peril. The sense of what he had staked on a vague return gave him, at the height of the London season, bad nights, or rather bad mornings—for he danced with his intended, as a usual thing, conspicuously, till dawn—besides obliging him to take, in the form of long explanatory, argumentative and persuasive letters to his mother and sisters, his uncles, aunts, cousins and preferred confidants, large measures of justification at home. The family sense was strong in his huge old house, just as the family array was numerous; he was dutifully conscious of the trust reposed in him, and moved from morning till night, he perfectly knew, as the observed of a phalanx of observers; whereby he the more admired himself for his passion, precipitation and courage. He had only a probability to go upon, but he was—and by the romantic tradition of his race—so in love that he should surely not be taken in.

His private agitation of course deepened when, to do honour to her engagement and as if she would have been ashamed to do less, Lily ‘drew’ again most gloriously; but he managed to smile beautifully on her asking him if he didn’t want her to be splendid, and at his worst hours he went no further than to wish that he might be married on the morrow. Unless it were the next day, or at most the next month, it really at moments seemed best that it should never be at all. On the most favourable view—with the solidity of the residuum fully assumed—there were still minor questions and dangers. A vast America, arching over his nuptials, bristling with expectant bridesmaids and underlaying their feet with expensive flowers, stared him in the face and prompted him to the reflection that if she dipped so deep into the mere remote overflow her dive into the fount itself would verily be a header. If she drew at such a rate in London how wouldn’t she draw at Poughkeepsie? he asked himself, and practically asked Lady Champer; yet bore the strain of the question, without an answer, so nobly that when, with small delay, Poughkeepsie seemed simply to heave with reassurances, he regarded the ground as firm and his tact as rewarded. “And now at last, dearest,” he said, “since everything’s so satisfactory, you will write?” He put it appealingly, endearingly, yet as if he could scarce doubt.

“Write, love? Why,” she replied, “I’ve done nothing but write! I’ve written ninety letters.”

“But not to mamma,” he smiled.

“Mamma?”—she stared. “My dear boy, I’ve not at this time of day to remind you that I’ve the misfortune to have no mother. I lost mamma, you know, as you lost your father, in childhood. You may be sure,” said Lily Gunton, “that I wouldn’t otherwise have waited for you to prompt me.”

There came into his face a kind of amiable convulsion. “Of course, darling, I remember—your beautiful mother (she must have been beautiful!) whom I should have been so glad to know. I was thinking of my mamma—who’ll be so delighted to hear from you.” The Prince spoke English in perfection—had lived in it from the cradle and appeared, particularly when alluding to his home and family, to matters familiar and of fact, or to those of dress and sport, of general recreation, to draw such a comfort from it as made the girl think of him as scarce more a foreigner than a pleasant, auburn, slightly awkward, slightly slangy and extremely well-tailored young Briton would have been. He sounded ‘mamma’ like a rosy English schoolboy; yet just then, for the first time, the things with which he was connected struck her as in a manner strange and far-off. Everything in him, none the less—face and voice and tact, above all his deep desire—laboured to bring them near and make them natural. This was intensely the case as he went on: “Such a little letter as you might send would really be awfully jolly.”

“My dear child,” Lily replied on quick reflection, “I’ll write to her with joy the minute I hear from her. Won’t she write to me?”

The Prince just visibly flushed. “In a moment if you’ll only—”

“Write to her first?”

“Just pay her a little—no matter how little—your respects.”

His attenuation of the degree showed perhaps a sense of a weakness of position; yet it was no perception of this that made the girl immediately say: “Oh, caro, I don’t think I can begin. If you feel that she won’t—as you evidently do—is it because you’ve asked her and she has refused?” The next moment, “I see you have!” she exclaimed. His rejoinder to this was to catch her in his arms, to press his cheek to hers, to murmur a flood of tender words in which contradiction, confession, supplication and remonstrance were oddly confounded; but after he had sufficiently disengaged her to allow her to speak again his effusion was checked by what came. “Do you really mean you can’t induce her?” It renewed itself on the first return of ease; or it, more correctly perhaps, in order to renew itself, took this return—a trifle too soon—for granted. Singular, for the hour, was the quickness with which ease could leave them—so blissfully at one as they were; and, to be brief, it had not come back even when Lily spoke of the matter to Lady Champer. It is true that she waited but little to do so. She then went straight to the point. “What would you do if his mother doesn’t write?”

“The old Princess—to you?” Her ladyship had not had time to mount guard in advance over the tone of this, which was doubtless (as she instantly, for that matter, herself became aware) a little too much that of ‘Have you really expected she would?’ What Lily had expected found itself therefore not unassisted to come out—and came out indeed to such a tune that with all kindness, but with a melancholy deeper than any she had ever yet in the general connection used, Lady Champer was moved to remark that the situation might have been found more possible had a little more historic sense been brought to it. “You’re the dearest thing in the world, and I can’t imagine a girl’s carrying herself in any way, in a difficult position, better than you do; only I’m bound to say I think you ought to remember that you’re entering a very great house, of tremendous antiquity, fairly groaning under the weight of ancient honours, the heads of which—through the tradition of the great part they’ve played in the world—are accustomed to a great deal of deference. The old Princess, my dear, you see”—her ladyship gathered confidence a little as she went—“is a most prodigious personage.”

“Why, Lady Champer, of course she is, and that’s just what I like her for!” said Lily Gunton.

“She has never in her whole life made an advance, any more than any one has ever dreamed of expecting it of her. It’s a pity that while you were there you didn’t see her, for I think it would have helped you to understand. However, as you did see his sisters, the two Duchesses and dear little Donna Claudia, you know how charming they all can be. They only want to be nice, I know, and I dare say that on the smallest opportunity you’ll hear from the Duchesses.”

The plural had a sound of splendour, but Lily quite kept her head. “What do you call an opportunity? Am I not giving them, by accepting their son and brother, the best—and in fact the only—opportunity they could desire?”

“I like the way, darling,” Lady Champer smiled, “you talk about ‘accepting’!”

Lily thought of this—she thought of everything. “Well, say it would have been a better one still for them if I had refused him.”

Her friend caught her up. “But you haven’t.”

“Then they must make the most of the occasion as it is.” Lily was very sweet, but very lucid. “The Duchesses may write or not, as they like; but I’m afraid the Princess simply must.” She hesitated, but after a moment went on: “He oughtn’t to be willing moreover that I shouldn’t expect to be welcomed.”

“He isn’t!” Lady Champer blurted out.

Lily jumped at it. “Then he has told you? It’s her attitude?”

She had spoken without passion, but her friend was scarce the less frightened. “My poor child, what can he do?”

Lily saw perfectly. “He can make her.”

Lady Champer turned it over, but her fears were what was clearest. “And if he doesn’t?”

“If he ‘doesn’t’?” The girl ambiguously echoed it.

“I mean if he can’t.”

Well, Lily, more cheerfully, declined, for the hour, to consider this. He would certainly do for her what was right; so that after all, though she had herself put the question, she disclaimed the idea that an answer was urgent. There was time, she conveyed—which Lady Champer only desired to believe; a faith moreover somewhat shaken in the latter when the Prince entered her room the next day with the information that there was none—none at least to leave everything in the air. Lady Champer had not yet made up her mind as to which of these young persons she liked most to draw into confidence, nor as to whether she most inclined to take the Roman side with the American or the American side with the Roman. But now in truth she was settled; she gave proof of it in the increased lucidity with which she spoke for Lily.

“Wouldn’t the Princess depart—a—from her usual attitude for such a great occasion?”

The difficulty was a little that the young man so well understood his mother. “The devil of it is, you see, that it’s for Lily herself, so much more, she thinks the occasion great.”

Lady Champer mused. “If you hadn’t her consent I could understand it. But from the moment she thinks the girl good enough for you to marry—”

“Ah, she doesn’t!” the Prince gloomily interposed. “However,” he explained, “she accepts her because there are reasons—my own feeling, now so my very life, don’t you see? But it isn’t quite open arms. All the same, as I tell Lily, the arms would open.”

“If she’d make the first step? Hum!” said Lady Champer, not without the note of grimness. “She’ll be obstinate.”

The young man, with a melancholy eye, quite coincided. “She’ll be obstinate.”

“So that I strongly recommend you to manage it,” his friend went on after a pause. “It strikes me that if the Princess can’t do it for Lily she might at least do it for you. Any girl you marry becomes thereby somebody.”

“Of course—doesn’t she? She certainly ought to do it for me. I’m after all the head of the house.”

“Well then, make her!” said Lady Champer a little impatiently.

“I will. Mamma adores me, and I adore her.”

“And you adore Lily, and Lily adores you—therefore everybody adores everybody, especially as I adore you both. With so much adoration all round, therefore, things ought to march.”

“They shall!” the young man declared with spirit. “I adore you too—you don’t mention that; for you help me immensely. But what do you suppose she’ll do if she doesn’t?”

The agitation already visible in him ministered a little to vagueness; but his friend after an instant disembroiled it. “What do I suppose Lily will do if your mother remains stiff?” Lady Champer faltered, but she let him have it. “She’ll break.”

His wondering eyes became strange. “Just for that?”

“You may certainly say it isn’t much—when people love as you do.”

“Ah, I’m afraid then Lily doesn’t!”—and he turned away in his trouble.

She watched him while he moved, not speaking for a minute. “My dear young man, are you afraid of your mamma?”

He faced short about again. “I’m afraid of this—that if she does do it she won’t forgive her. She will do it—yes. But Lily will be for her, in consequence, ever after, the person who has made her submit herself. She’ll hate her for that—and then she’ll hate me for being concerned in it.” The Prince presented it all with clearness—almost with charm. “What do you say to that?”

His friend had to think. “Well, only, I fear, that we belong, Lily and I, to a race unaccustomed to counting with such passions. Let her hate!” she, however, a trifle inconsistently wound up.

“But I love her so!”

“Which?” Lady Champer asked it almost ungraciously; in such a tone at any rate that, seated on the sofa with his elbows on his knees, his much-ringed hands nervously locked together and his eyes of distress wide open, he met her with visible surprise. What she met him with is perhaps best noted by the fact that after a minute of it his hands covered his bent face and she became aware she had drawn tears. This produced such regret in her that before they parted she did what she could to attenuate and explain—making a great point, at all events, of her rule, with Lily, of putting only his own side of the case. “I insist awfully, you know, on your greatness!”

He jumped up, wincing. “Oh, that’s horrid.”

“I don’t know. Whose fault is it then, at any rate, if trying to help you may have that side?” This was a question that, with the tangle he had already to unwind, only added a twist; yet she went on as if positively to add another. “Why on earth don’t you, all of you, leave them alone?”

“Leave them—?”

“All your Americans.”

“Don’t you like them then—the women?”

She hesitated. “No. Yes. They’re an interest. But they’re a nuisance. It’s a question, very certainly, if they’re worth the trouble they give.”

This at least it seemed he could take in. “You mean that one should be quite sure first what they are worth?”

He made her laugh now. “It would appear that you never can be. But also really that you can’t keep your hands off.”

He fixed the social scene an instant with his heavy eye. “Yes. Doesn’t it?”

“However,” she pursued as if he again a little irritated her, “Lily’s position is quite simple.”

“Quite. She just loves me.”

“I mean simple for herself. She really makes no differences. It’s only we—you and I—who make them all.”

The Prince wondered. “But she tells me she delights in us; has, that is, such a sense of what we are supposed to ‘represent’.”

“Oh, she thinks she has. Americans think they have all sorts of things; but they haven’t. That’s just it”—Lady Champer was philosophic. “Nothing but their Americanism. If you marry anything you marry that; and if your mother accepts anything that’s what she accepts.” Then, though the young man followed the demonstration with an apprehension almost pathetic, she gave him without mercy the whole of it. “Lily’s rigidly logical. A girl—as she knows girls—is ‘welcomed’, on her engagement, before anything else can happen, by the family of her young man; and the motherless girl, alone in the world, more punctually than any other. His mother—if she’s a ‘lady’—takes it upon herself. Then the girl goes and stays with them. But she does nothing before. Tirez-vous de là.”

The young man sought on the spot to obey this last injunction, and his effort presently produced a flash. “Oh, if she’ll come and stay with us”—all would, easily, be well! The flash went out, however, when Lady Champer returned: “Then let the Princess invite her.”

Lily a fortnight later simply said to her, from one hour to the other, “I’m going home,” and took her breath away by sailing on the morrow with the Bransbys. The tense cord had somehow snapped; the proof was in the fact that the Prince, dashing off to his good friend at this crisis an obscure, an ambiguous note, started the same night for Rome. Lady Champer, for the time, sat in darkness, but during the summer many things occurred; and one day in the autumn, quite unheralded and with the signs of some of them in his face, the Prince appeared again before her. He was not long in telling her his story, which was simply that he had come to her, all the way from Rome, for news of Lily and to talk of Lily. She was prepared, as it happened, to meet his impatience; yet her preparation was but little older than his arrival and was deficient moreover in an important particular. She was not prepared to knock him down, and she made him talk to gain time. She had however, to understand, put a primary question: “She never wrote then?”

“Mamma? Oh yes—when she at last got frightened at Miss Gunton’s having become so silent. She wrote in August; but Lily’s own decisive letter—letter to me, I mean—crossed with it. It was too late—that put an end.”

“A real end?”

Everything in the young man showed how real. “On the ground of her being willing no longer to keep up, by the stand she had taken, such a relation between mamma and me. But her rupture,” he wailed, “keeps it up more than anything else.”

“And is it very bad?”

“Awful, I assure you. I’ve become for my mother a person who has made her make, all for nothing, an unprecedented advance, a humble submission; and she’s so disgusted, all round, that it’s no longer the same old charming thing for us to be together. It makes it worse for her that I’m still madly in love.”

“Well,” said Lady Champer after a moment, “if you’re still madly in love I can only be sorry for you.”

“You can do nothing for me?—don’t advise me to go over?”

She had to take a longer pause. “You don’t at all know then what has happened?—that old Mr Gunton has died and left her everything?”

All his vacancy and curiosity came out in a wild echo. “‘Everything’?”

“She writes me that it’s a great deal of money.”

“You’ve just heard from her then?”

“This morning. I seem to make out,” said Lady Champer, “an extraordinary number of dollars.”

“Oh, I was sure it was!” the young man moaned.

“And she’s engaged,” his friend went on, “to Mr Bransby.”

He bounded, rising before her. “Mr Bransby?”

“‘Adam P.’—the gentleman with whose mother and sisters she went home. They, she writes, have beautifully welcomed her.”

“Dio mio!” The Prince stared; he had flushed with the blow, and the tears had come into his eyes. “And I believed she loved me!”

“I didn’t!” said Lady Champer with some curtness.

He gazed about; he almost rocked; and, unconscious of her words, he appealed, inarticulate and stricken. At last, however, he found his voice. “What on earth then shall I do? I can less than ever go back to mamma!”

She got up for him, she thought for him, pushing a better chair into her circle. “Stay here with me, and I’ll ring for tea. Sit there nearer the fire—you’re cold.”

“Awfully!” he confessed as he sank. “And I believed she loved me!” he repeated as he stared at the fire.

“I didn’t!” Lady Champer once more declared. This time, visibly, he heard her, and she immediately met his wonder. “No—it was all the rest; your great historic position, the glamour of your name and your past. Otherwise what she stood out for wouldn’t be excusable. But she has the sense of such things, and they were what she loved.” So, by the fire, his hostess explained it, while he wondered the more.

“I thought that last summer you told me just the contrary.”

It seemed, to do her justice, to strike her. “Did I? Oh, well, how does one know? With Americans one is lost!”

The End