Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales

Many of the stories told about him were false; but there was no doubt his moustache, his native ease and his native accent were the best of their kind.  He danced very badly; but Lady Agatha had frankly told several persons that that was nothing new to her, and in short she delighted—this, however, she didn’t tell—in Mr. Herman Longstraw.  What she enjoyed in America was the revelation of freedom, and there was no such proof of freedom as absolutely unrestricted discourse with a gentleman who dressed in crude skins when not in New York and who, in his usual pursuits, carried his life—as well as that of other persons—in his hand.  A gentleman whom she had sat next to at dinner in the early part of her visit had remarked to her that the United States were the paradise of women and of mechanics; and this had seemed to her at the time very abstract, for she wasn’t conscious as yet of belonging to either class.  In England she had been only a girl, and the principal idea connected with that was simply that for one’s misfortune one wasn’t a boy.  But she presently herself found the odd American world a true sojourn of the youthful blest; and this helped her to know that she must be one of the people mentioned in the axiom of her neighbour—people who could do whatever they wanted, had a voice in everything and made their taste and their ideas felt.  She saw what fun it was to be a woman in America, and that this was the best way to enjoy the New York winter—the wonderful brilliant New York winter, the queer long-shaped glittering city, the heterogeneous hours among which you couldn’t tell the morning from the afternoon or the night from either of them, the perpetual liberties and walks, the rushings-out and the droppings-in, the intimacies, the endearments, the comicalities, the sleigh-bells, the cutters, the sunsets on the snow, the ice-parties in the frosty clearness, the bright hot velvety houses, the bouquets, the bonbons, the little cakes, the big cakes, the irrepressible inspirations of shopping, the innumerable luncheons and dinners offered to youth and innocence, the quantities of chatter of quantities of girls, the perpetual motion of the “German,” the suppers at restaurants after the play, the way in which life was pervaded by Delmonico and Delmonico by the sense that though one’s hunting was lost, and this therefore so different, it was very nearly as good.  In all, through all, flowed a suffusion of loud unmodulated friendly sound which reminded her of an endless tuning of rather bad fiddles.

Lady Agatha was at present staying for a little change with Mrs. Lemon, and such adventures as that were part of the pleasure of her American season.  The house was too close, but physically the girl could bear anything, and it was all she had to complain of; for Mrs. Lemon, as we know, thought her a weird little specimen, and had none of those old-world scruples in regard to spoiling young people to which Lady Agatha herself now knew she must in the past have been unduly sacrificed.  In her own way—it was not at all her sister’s way—she liked to be of importance; and this was assuredly the case when she saw that Mrs. Lemon had apparently nothing in the world to do, after spending a part of the morning with her servants, but invent little distractions—many of them of the edible sort—for her guest.  She appeared to have several friends, but she had no society to speak of, and the people who entered her house came principally to see Lady Agatha.  This, as we have noted, was strikingly the case with Herman Longstraw.  The whole situation gave the young stranger a great feeling of success—success of a new and unexpected kind.  Of course in England she had been born successful, as it might be called, through her so emerging in one of the most beautiful rooms at Pasterns; but her present triumph was achieved more by her own effort—not that she had tried very hard—and by her merit.  It wasn’t so much what she said—since she could never equal for quantity the girls of New York—as the spirit of enjoyment that played in her fresh young face, with its pointless curves, and shone in her grey English eyes.  She enjoyed everything, even the street-cars, of which she made liberal use; and more than everything she enjoyed Mr. Longstraw and his talk about buffaloes and bears.  Mrs. Lemon promised to be very careful as soon as her son had begun to warn her; and this time she had a certain understanding of what she promised.  She thought people ought to make the matches they liked; she had given proof of this in her late behaviour to Jackson, whose own union was, to her sense, marked with all the arbitrariness of pure love.  Nevertheless she could see that Herman Longstraw would probably be thought rough in England; and it wasn’t simply that he was so inferior to Jackson, for, after all, certain things were not to be expected.  Jackson was not oppressed with his mother-in-law, having taken his precautions against such a danger; but he was certain he should give Lady Canterville a permanent advantage over him if her third daughter should while in America attach herself to a mere moustache.

It was not always, as I have hinted, that Mrs. Lemon entered completely into the views of her son, though in form she never failed to subscribe to them devoutly.  She had never yet, for instance, apprehended his reason for marrying poor Lady Barb.  This was a great secret, and she was determined, in her gentleness, that no one should ever know it.  For herself, she was sure that to the end of time she shouldn’t discover Jackson’s reason.  She might never ask about it, for that of course would betray her.  From the first she had told him she was delighted, there being no need of asking for explanations then, as the young lady herself, when she should come to know her, would explain.  But the young lady hadn’t yet explained and after this evidently never would.  She was very tall, very handsome, she answered exactly to Mrs. Lemon’s prefigurement of the daughter of a lord, and she wore her clothes, which were peculiar, but to one of her shape remarkably becoming, very well.  But she didn’t elucidate; we know ourselves that there was very little that was explanatory about Lady Barb.  So Mrs. Lemon continued to wonder, to ask herself, “Why that one, more than so many others who’d have been more natural?”  The choice struck her, as I have said, as quite arbitrary.  She found Lady Barb very different from other girls she had known, and this led her almost immediately to feel sorry for her daughter-in-law.  She felt how the girl was to be pitied if she found her husband’s people as peculiar as his mother found her, since the result of that would be to make her very lonesome.  Lady Agatha was different, because she seemed to keep nothing back; you saw all there was of her, and she was evidently not home-sick.  Mrs. Lemon could see that Barbarina was ravaged by this last ailment and was also too haughty to show it.  She even had a glimpse of the ultimate truth; namely, that Jackson’s wife had not the comfort of crying, because that would have amounted to a confession that she had been idiotic enough to believe in advance that, in an American town, in the society of doctors, she should escape such pangs.  Mrs. Lemon treated her with studied consideration—all the indulgence that was due to a young woman in the unfortunate position of having been married one couldn’t tell why.

The world, to the elder lady’s view, contained two great departments, that of people and that of things; and she believed you must take an interest either in one or the other.  The true incomprehensible in Lady Barb was that she cared for neither side of the show.  Her house apparently inspired her with no curiosity and no enthusiasm, though it had been thought magnificent enough to be described in successive columns of the native newspapers; and she never spoke of her furniture or her domestics, though she had a prodigious show of such possessions.  She was the same with regard to her acquaintance, which was immense, inasmuch as every one in the place had called on her.  Mrs. Lemon was the least critical woman in the world, but it had occasionally ruffled her just a little that her daughter-in-law should receive every one in New York quite in the same automatic manner.  There were differences, Mrs. Lemon knew, and some of them of the highest importance; but poor Lady Barb appeared never to suspect them.  She accepted every one and everything and asked no questions.  She had no curiosity about her fellow-citizens, and as she never assumed it for a moment she gave Mrs. Lemon no opportunity to enlighten her.  Lady Barb was a person with whom you could do nothing unless she left you an opening; and nothing would have been more difficult than to “post” her, as her mother-in-law would have said, against her will.  Of course she picked up a little knowledge, but she confounded and transposed American attributes in the most extraordinary way.  She had a way of calling every one Doctor; and Mrs. Lemon could scarcely convince her that this distinction was too precious to be so freely bestowed.  She had once said to that supporter that in New York there was nothing to know people by, their names were so very monotonous; and Mrs. Lemon had entered into this enough to see that there was something that stood out a good deal in Barbarina’s own prefix.  It is probable that during her short period of domestication complete justice was not done Lady Barb; she never—as an instance—got credit for repressing her annoyance at the poverty of the nominal signs and styles, a deep desolation.  That little speech to her husband’s mother was the most reckless sign she gave of it; and there were few things that contributed more to the good conscience she habitually enjoyed than her self-control on this particular point.

Doctor Lemon was engaged in professional researches just now, which took up a great deal of his time; and for the rest he passed his hours unreservedly with his wife.  For the last three months, therefore, he had seen his other nearest relative scarcely more than once a week.  In spite of researches, in spite of medical societies, where Jackson, to her knowledge, read papers, Lady Barb had more of her husband’s company than she had counted on at the time she married.  She had never known a married pair to be so much together as she and Jackson; he appeared to expect her to sit with him in the library in the morning.  He had none of the occupations of gentlemen and noblemen in England, for the element of politics appeared to be as absent as the element of the chase.  There were politics in Washington, she had been told, and even at Albany, and Jackson had proposed to introduce her to these cities; but the proposal, made to her once at dinner, before several people, had excited such cries of horror that it fell dead on the spot.  “We don’t want you to see anything of that kind,” one of the ladies had said, and Jackson had appeared to be discouraged—that is if in regard to Jackson she could really tell.

“Pray what is it you want me to see?” Lady Barb had asked on this occasion.

“Well, New York and Boston (Boston if you want to very much, but not otherwise), and then Niagara.  But more than anything Newport.”

She was tired of their eternal Newport; she had heard of it a thousand times and felt already as if she had lived there half her life; she was sure, moreover, that she should hate the awful little place.  This is perhaps as near as she came to having a lively conviction on any American subject.  She asked herself whether she was then to spend her life in the Fifth Avenue with alternations of a city of villas—she detested villas—and wondered if that was all the great American country had to offer her.  There were times when she believed she should like the backwoods and that the Far West might be a resource; for she had analysed her feelings just deep enough to discover that when she had—hesitating a good deal—turned over the question of marrying Jackson Lemon it was not in the least of American barbarism she was afraid; her dread had been all of American civilisation.  She judged the little lady I have just quoted a goose, but that didn’t make New York any more interesting.  It would be reckless to say that she suffered from an overdose of Jackson’s company, since she quite felt him her most important social resource.  She could talk to him about England, about her own England, and he understood more or less what she wished to say—when she wished to say anything, which was not frequent.  There were plenty of other people who talked about England; but with them the range of allusion was always the hotels, of which she knew nothing, and the shops and the opera and the photographs: they had the hugest appetite for photographs.  There were other people who were always wanting her to tell them about Pasterns and the manner of life there and the parties; but if there was one thing Lady Barb disliked more than another it was describing Pasterns.  She had always lived with people who knew of themselves what such a place would be, without demanding these pictorial efforts, proper only, as she vaguely felt, to persons belonging to the classes whose trade was the arts of expression.  Lady Barb of course had never gone into it; but she knew that in her own class the business was not to express but to enjoy, not to represent but to be represented—though indeed this latter liability might involve offence; for it may be noted that even for an aristocrat Jackson Lemon’s wife was aristocratic.

Lady Agatha and her visitor came back from the library in course of time, and Jackson Lemon felt it his duty to be rather cold to Herman Longstraw.  It wasn’t clear to him what sort of a husband his sister-in-law would do well to look for in America—if there were to be any question of husbands; but as to that he wasn’t bound to be definite provided he should rule out Mr. Longstraw.  This gentleman, however, was not given to noticing shades of manner; he had little observation, but very great confidence.

“I think you had better come home with me,” Jackson said to Lady Agatha; “I guess you’ve stayed here long enough.”

“Don’t let him say that, Mrs. Lemon!” the girl cried.  “I like being with you so awfully.”

“I try to make it pleasant,” said Mrs. Lemon.  “I should really miss you now; but perhaps it’s your mother’s wish.”  If it was a question of defending her guest from ineligible suitors Mrs. Lemon felt of course that her son was more competent than she; though she had a lurking kindness for Herman Longstraw and a vague idea that he was a gallant genial specimen of unsophisticated young America.

“Oh mamma wouldn’t see any difference!” Lady Agatha returned with pleading blue eyes on her brother-in-law.  “Mamma wants me to see every one; you know she does.  That’s what she sent me to America for; she knows—for we’ve certainly told her enough—that it isn’t like England.  She wouldn’t like it if I didn’t sometimes stay with people; she always wanted us to stay at other houses.  And she knows all about you, Mrs. Lemon, and she likes you immensely.  She sent you a message the other day and I’m afraid I forgot to give it you—to thank you for being so kind to me and taking such a lot of trouble.  Really she did, but I forgot it.  If she wants me to see as much as possible of America it’s much better I should be here than always with Barb—it’s much less like one’s own country.  I mean it’s much nicer—for a girl,” said Lady Agatha affectionately to Mrs. Lemon, who began also to look at Jackson under the influence of this uttered sweetness which was like some quaint little old air, she thought, played upon a faded spinet with two girlish fingers.

“If you want the genuine thing you ought to come out on the plains,” Mr. Longstraw interposed with bright sincerity.  “I guess that was your mother’s idea.  Why don’t you all come out?”  He had been looking intently at Lady Agatha while the remarks I have just repeated succeeded each other on her lips—looking at her with a fascinated approbation, for all the world as if he had been a slightly slow-witted English gentleman and the girl herself a flower of the West, a flower that knew the celebrated language of flowers.  Susceptible even as Mrs. Lemon was he made no secret of the fact that Lady Agatha’s voice was music to him, his ear being much more accessible than his own inflexions would have indicated.  To Lady Agatha those inflexions were not displeasing, partly because, like Mr. Herman himself in general, she had not a perception of shades; and partly because it never occurred to her to compare them with any other tones.  He seemed to her to speak a foreign language altogether—a romantic dialect through which the most comical meanings gleamed here and there.

“I should like it above all things,” she said in answer to his last observation.

“The scenery’s ahead of anything round here,” Mr. Longstraw went on.

Mrs. Lemon, as we have gathered, was the mildest of women; but, as an old New Yorker, she had no patience with some of the new fashions.  Chief among these was the perpetual reference, which had become common only within a few years, to the outlying parts of the country, the States and Territories of which children, in her time, used to learn the names, in their order, at school, but which no one ever thought of going to or talking about.  Such places, in her opinion, belonged to the geography-books, or at most to the literature of newspapers, but neither to society nor to conversation; and the change—which, so far as it lay in people’s talk, she thought at bottom a mere affectation—threatened to make her native land appear vulgar and vague.  For this amiable daughter of Manhattan the normal existence of man, and still more of women, had been “located,” as she would have said, between Trinity Church and the beautiful Reservoir at the top of the Fifth Avenue—monuments of which she was personally proud; and if we could look into the deeper parts of her mind I am afraid we should discover there an impression that both the countries of Europe and the remainder of her own continent were equally far from the centre and the light.

“Well, scenery isn’t everything,” she made soft answer to Mr. Longstraw; “and if Lady Agatha should wish to see anything of that kind all she has got to do is to take the boat up the Hudson.”  Mrs. Lemon’s recognition of this river, I should say, was all it need have been; she held the Hudson existed for the purpose of supplying New Yorkers with poetical feelings, helping them to face comfortably occasions like the present and, in general, meet foreigners with confidence—part of the oddity of foreigners being their conceit about their own places.

“That’s a good idea, Lady Agatha; let’s take the boat,” said Mr. Longstraw.  “I’ve had great times on the boats.”

Lady Agatha fixed on her amoroso her singular charming eyes, eyes of which it was impossible to say at any moment whether they were the shyest or the frankest in the world; and she was not aware while this contemplation lasted that her brother-in-law was observing her.  He was thinking of certain things while he did so, of things he had heard about the English; who still, in spite of his having married into a family of that nation, appeared to him very much through the medium of hearsay.  They were more passionate than the Americans, and they did things that would never have been expected; though they seemed steadier and less excitable there was much social evidence to prove them more wildly impulsive.

“It’s so very kind of you to propose that,” Lady Agatha said in a moment to Mrs. Lemon.  “I think I’ve never been in a ship—except of course coming from England.  I’m sure mamma would wish me to see the Hudson.  We used to go in immensely for boating in England.”

“Did you boat in a ship?” Herman Longstraw asked, showing his teeth hilariously and pulling his moustaches.

“Lots of my mother’s people have been in the navy.”  Lady Agatha perceived vaguely and good-naturedly that she had said something the odd Americans thought odd and that she must justify herself.  Something most unnatural was happening to her standard of oddity.

“I really think you had better come back to us,” Jackson repeated: “your sister’s very lonely without you.”

“She’s much more lonely with me.  We’re perpetually having differences.  Barb’s dreadfully vexed because I like America instead of—instead of—”  And Lady Agatha paused a moment; for it just occurred to her that this might be treacherous.

“Instead of what?” Jackson inquired.

“Instead of perpetually wanting to go to England, as she does,” she went on, only giving her phrase a little softer turn; for she felt the next moment that Barb could have nothing to hide and must of course have the courage of her opinions.  “Of course England’s best, but I daresay I like to be bad,” the girl said artlessly.

“Oh there’s no doubt you’re awfully bad,” Mr. Longstraw broke out, with joyous eagerness.  Naturally he couldn’t know that what she had principally in mind was an exchange of opinions that had taken place between her sister and herself just before she came to stay with Mrs. Lemon.  This incident, of which he himself was the occasion, might indeed have been called a discussion, for it had carried them quite into the cold air of the abstract.  Lady Barb had said she didn’t see how Agatha could look at such a creature as that—an odious familiar vulgar being who had not about him the rudiments of a gentleman.  Lady Agatha had replied that Mr. Longstraw was familiar and rough and that he had a twang and thought it amusing to talk to her as “the Princess”; but that he was a gentleman for all that and was tremendous fun whatever one called him—it didn’t seem to matter what one called any one or anything there.  Her sister had returned to this that if he was rough and familiar he couldn’t be a gentleman, inasmuch as that was just what a gentleman meant—a man who was civil and well-bred and well-born.  Lady Agatha had argued that such a point was just where she differed; that a man might perfectly be a gentleman and yet be rough, and even ignorant, so long as he was really nice.  The only thing was that he should be really nice, which was the case with Mr. Longstraw, who, moreover, was quite extraordinarily civil—as civil as a man could be.  And then Lady Agatha herself made the strongest point she had ever made in her life (she had never been so inspired) in saying that Mr. Longstraw was rough perhaps, but not rude—a distinction altogether wasted on her sister, who declared that she hadn’t come to America, of all places, to learn what a gentleman was.  The discussion in short had been a trifle grim.  I know not whether it was the tonic effect on them too, alien organisms as they were, of the fine winter weather, or that of Lady Barb’s being bored and having nothing else to do; but Lord Canterville’s daughters went into the question with the moral earnestness of a pair of approved Bostonians.  It was part of Lady Agatha’s view of her admirer that he after all much resembled other tall people with smiling eyes and tawny moustaches who had ridden a good deal in rough countries and whom she had seen in other places.  If he was more familiar he was also more alert; still, the difference was not in himself, but in the way she saw him—the way she saw everybody in America.  If she should see the others in the same way no doubt they’d be quite the same; and Lady Agatha sighed a little over the possibilities of life; for this peculiar way, especially regarded in connexion with gentlemen, had become very pleasant to her.

She had betrayed her sister more than she thought, even though Jackson didn’t particularly show it in the tone in which he commented: “Of course she knows she’s going to see your mother in the summer.”  His tone was rather that of irritation at so much harping on the very obvious.

“Oh it isn’t only mamma,” the girl said.

“I know she likes a cool house,” Mrs. Lemon contributed.

“When she goes you had better bid her good-bye,” Lady Agatha went on.

“Of course I shall bid her good-bye,” said Mrs. Lemon, to whom apparently this remark was addressed.

“I’ll never bid you good-bye, Princess,” Herman Longstraw interposed.  “You can bet your life on that.”

“Oh it doesn’t matter about me, for of course I shall come back; but if Barb once gets to England she never will.”

“Oh my dear child!” Mrs. Lemon wailed, addressing her young visitor, but looking at her son, who on his side looked at the ceiling, at the floor, looked above all very conscious.

“I hope you don’t mind my saying that, Jackson dear,” Lady Agatha said to him, for she was very fond of her brother-in-law.

“Ah well then, she shan’t go there,” he threw off in a moment with a small strange dry laugh that attached his mother’s eyes in shy penetration to his face.

“But you promised mamma, you know,” said the girl with the confidence of her affection.

Jackson’s countenance expressed to her none even of his very moderate hilarity.  “Your mother, then, must bring her back.”

“Get some of your navy people to supply an ironclad!” cried Mr. Longstraw.

“It would be very pleasant if the Marchioness could come over,” said Mrs. Lemon.

“Oh she’d hate it more than poor Barb,” Lady Agatha quickly replied.  It didn’t at all suit her to find a marchioness inserted into her field of vision.

“Doesn’t she feel interested from what you’ve told her?” Lady Agatha’s admirer inquired.  But Jackson didn’t heed his sister-in-law’s answer—he was thinking of something else.  He said nothing more, however, about the subject of his thought, and before ten minutes were over took his departure, having meanwhile neglected also to revert to the question of Lady Agatha’s bringing her visit to his mother to a close.  It wasn’t to speak to him of this—for, as we know, she wished to keep the girl and somehow couldn’t bring herself to be afraid of Herman Longstraw—that when her son took leave she went with him to the door of the house, detaining him a little while she stood on the steps, as people had always done in New York in her time, though it was another of the new fashions she didn’t like, the stiffness of not coming out of the parlour.  She placed her hand on his arm to keep him on the “stoop” and looked up and down into the lucid afternoon and the beautiful city—its chocolate-coloured houses so extraordinarily smooth—in which it seemed to her that even the most fastidious people ought to be glad to live.  It was useless to attempt to conceal it: his marriage had made a difference and a worry, had put a barrier that she was yet under the painful obligation of trying to seem not to notice.  It had brought with it a problem much more difficult than his old problem of how to make his mother feel herself still, as she had been in his childhood, the dispenser of his rewards.  The old problem had been easily solved, the new was a great tax.  Mrs. Lemon was sure her daughter-in-law didn’t take her seriously, and that was a part of the barrier.  Even if Barbarina liked her better than any one else this was mostly because she liked every one else so little.  Mrs. Lemon had in her nature no grain of resentment, and it wasn’t to feed a sense of wrong that she permitted herself to criticise her son’s wife.  She couldn’t help feeling that his marriage wasn’t altogether fortunate if his wife didn’t take his mother seriously.  She knew she wasn’t otherwise remarkable than as being his mother; but that position, which was no merit of hers—the merit was all Jackson’s in being her son—affected her as one which, familiar as Lady Barb appeared to have been in England with positions of various kinds, would naturally strike the girl as very high and to be accepted as freely as a fine morning.  If she didn’t think of his mother as an indivisible part of him perhaps she didn’t think of other things either; and Mrs. Lemon vaguely felt that, remarkable as Jackson was, he was made up of parts, and that it would never do that these should be rated lower one by one, since there was no knowing what that might end in.  She feared that things were rather cold for him at home when he had to explain so much to his wife—explain to her, for instance, all the sources of happiness that were to be found in New York.  This struck her as a new kind of problem altogether for a husband.  She had never thought of matrimony without a community of feeling in regard to religion and country; one took those great conditions for granted just as one assumed that one’s food was to be cooked; and if Jackson should have to discuss them with his wife he might, in spite of his great abilities, be carried into regions where he would get entangled and embroiled—from which even possibly he wouldn’t come back at all.  Mrs. Lemon had a horror of losing him in some way, and this fear was in her eyes as she stood by the doorway of her house and, after she had glanced up and down the street, eyed him a moment in silence.  He simply kissed her again and said she would take cold.

“I’m not afraid of that—I’ve a shawl!”  Mrs. Lemon, who was very small and very fair, with pointed features and an elaborate cap, passed her life in a shawl, and owed to this habit her reputation for being an invalid—an idea she scorned, naturally enough, inasmuch as it was precisely her shawl that, as she believed, kept every ill at bay.  “Is it true Barbarina won’t come back?” she then asked.

“I don’t know that we shall ever find out; I don’t know that I shall take her to England,” Jackson distinctly returned.

She looked more anxious still.  “Didn’t you promise, dear?”

“I don’t know that I promised—not absolutely.”

“But you wouldn’t keep her here against her will?” quavered Mrs. Lemon.

“I guess she’ll get used to it,” he returned with a levity that misrepresented the state of his nerves.