The Aspern Papers, Louisa Pallant, The Modern Warning (1 volume, London & New York: Macmillan & Co., 1888)/Louisa Pallant/Chapter 3

by Henry James (1843-1916)

III

I remember well the first time—it was at the end of about ten days of this—that Mrs. Pallant remarked to me: 'My dear friend, you are quite amazing! You behave for all the world as if you were perfectly ready to accept certain consequences.' She nodded in the direction of our young companions, but I nevertheless put her at the pains of saying what consequences she meant. 'What consequences?' she repeated. 'Why, the consequences that ensued when you and I first became acquainted.'

I hesitated a moment and then, looking her in the eyes, I said, 'Do you mean that she would throw him over?'

'You are not kind, you are not generous,' she replied, colouring quickly. 'I am giving you a warning.'

'You mean that my boy may fall in love with her?'

'Certainly. It looks even as if the harm might be already done.'

'Then your warning is too late,' I said, smiling. 'But why do you call it a harm?'

'Haven't you any sense of responsibility?' she asked. 'Is that what his mother sent him out to you for—that you should find him a wife—let him put his head into a noose the day after his arrival?'

'Heaven forbid I should do anything of the kind! I know moreover that his mother doesn't want him to marry young. She thinks it's a mistake and that at that age a man never really chooses. He doesn't choose till he has lived awhile—till he has looked about and compared.'

'And what do you think yourself?'

'I should like to say I consider that love itself, however young, is a sufficient choice. But my being a bachelor at this time of day would contradict me too much.'

'Well then, you're too primitive. You ought to leave this place to-morrow.'

'So as not to see Archie tumble in?'

'You ought to fish him out now and take him with you.'

'Do you think he is in very far?' I inquired.

'If I were his mother I know what I should think. I can put myself in her place—I am not narrow—I know perfectly well how she must regard such a question.'

'And don't you know that in America that's not thought important—the way the mother regards it?'

Mrs. Pallant was silent a moment, as if I partly mystified and partly vexed her. 'Well, we are not in America; we happen to be here.'

'No; my poor sister is up to her neck in New York.'

'I am almost capable of writing to her to come out,' said Mrs. Pallant.

'You are warning me,' I exclaimed, 'but I hardly know of what. It seems to me that my responsibility would begin only at the moment when it should appear that your daughter herself was in danger.'

'Oh, you needn't mind that; I'll take care of her.'

'If you think she is in danger already I'll take him away to-morrow,' I went on.

'It would be the best thing you could do.'

'I don't know. I should be very sorry to act on a false alarm. I am very well here; I like the place and the life and your society. Besides, it doesn't strike me that—on her side—there is anything.'

She looked at me with an expression that I had never seen in her face, and if I had puzzled her she repaid me in kind. 'You are very annoying; you don't deserve what I would do for you.'

What she would do for me she did not tell me that day, but we took up the subject again. I said to her that I did not really see why we should assume that a girl like Linda—brilliant enough to make one of the greatest matches—would fall into my nephew's arms. Might I inquire whether her mother had won a confession from her—whether she had stammered out her secret? Mrs. Pallant answered that they did not need to tell each other such things—they had not lived together twenty years in such intimacy for nothing. To this I rejoined that I had guessed as much but that there might be an exception for a great occasion like the present. If Linda had shown nothing it was a sign that for her the occasion was not great; and I mentioned that Archie had not once spoken to me of the young lady, save to remark casually and rather patronisingly, after his first encounter with her, that she was a regular little flower. (The little flower was nearly three years older than himself.) Apart from this he had not alluded to her and had taken up no allusion of mine. Mrs. Pallant informed me again (for which I was prepared) that I was quite too primitive; and then she said: 'We needn't discuss the matter if you don't wish to, but I happen to know—how I obtained my knowledge is not important—that the moment Mr. Pringle should propose to my daughter she would gobble him down. Surely it's a detail worth mentioning to you.'

'Very good. I will sound him. I will look into the matter to-night.'

'Don't, don't; you will spoil everything!' she murmured, in a peculiar tone of discouragement. 'Take him off—that's the only thing.'

I did not at all like the idea of taking him off; it seemed too summary, unnecessarily violent, even if presented to him on specious grounds; and, moreover, as I had told Mrs. Pallant, I really had no wish to move. I did not consider it a part of my bargain with my sister that, with my middle-aged habits, I should duck and dodge about Europe. So I said: 'Should you really object to the boy so much as a son-in-law? After all he's a good fellow and a gentleman.'

'My poor friend, you are too superficial—too frivolous,' Mrs Pallant rejoined, with considerable bitterness.

There was a vibration of contempt in this which nettled me, so that I exclaimed, 'Possibly; but it seems odd that a lesson in consistency should come from you.'

I had no retort from her; but at last she said, quietly: 'I think Linda and I had better go away. We have been here a month—that's enough.'

'Dear me, that will be a bore!' I ejaculated; and for the rest of the evening, until we separated (our conversation had taken place after dinner, at the Kursaal), she remained almost silent, with a subdued, injured air. This, somehow, did not soothe me, as it ought to have done, for it was too absurd that Louisa Pallant, of all women, should propose to put me in the wrong. If ever a woman had been in the wrong herself———! Archie and I usually attended the ladies back to their own door—they lived in a street of minor accommodation, at a certain distance from the Rooms—and we parted for the night late, on the big cobble-stones, in the little sleeping German town, under the closed windows of which, suggesting stuffy interiors, our English farewells sounded gay. On this occasion however they were not gay, for the difficulty that had come up, for me, with Mrs. Pallant appeared to have extended by a mysterious sympathy to the young couple. They too were rather conscious and dumb.

As I walked back to our hotel with my nephew I passed my hand into his arm and asked him, by no roundabout approach to the question, whether he were in serious peril of love.

'I don't know, I don't know'—really, uncle, I don't know!'—this was all the satisfaction I could extract from the youth, who had not the smallest vein of introspection. He might not know, but before we reached the inn (we had a few more words on the subject), it seemed to me that I did. His mind was not made to contain many objects at once, but Linda Pallant for the moment certainly constituted its principal furniture. She pervaded his consciousness, she solicited his curiosity, she associated herself, in a manner as yet undefined and unformulated, with his future. I could see that she was the first intensely agreeable impression of his life. I did not betray to him, however, how much I saw, and I slept not particularly well, for thinking that, after all, it had been none of my business to provide him with intensely agreeable impressions. To find him a wife was the last thing that his mother had expected of me or that I had expected of myself. Moreover it was quite my opinion that he himself was too young to be a judge of wives. Mrs. Pallant was right and I had been strangely superficial in regarding her, with her beautiful daughter, as a 'resource.' There were other resources and one of them would be most decidedly to go away. What did I know after all about the girl except that I was very glad to have escaped from marrying her mother? That mother, it was true, was a singular person, and it was strange that her conscience should have begun to fidget before my own did and that she was more anxious on my nephew's behalf than I was. The ways of women were mysterious and it was not a novelty to me that one never knew where one would find them. As I have not hesitated in this narrative to reveal the irritable side of my own nature I will confess that I even wondered whether Mrs. Pallant's solicitude had not been a deeper artifice. Was it not possibly a plan of her own for making sure of my young man—though I did not quite see the logic of it? If she regarded him, as she might in view of his large fortune, as a great catch, might she not have arranged this little comedy, in their personal interest, with the girl?

That possibility at any rate only made it a happier thought that I should carry the boy away to visit other cities. There were many assuredly much more worthy of his attention than Homburg. In the course of the morning (it was after our early luncheon) I walked round to Mrs. Pallant's, to let her know that this truth had come over me with force; and while I did so I again felt the unlikelihood of the part attributed by my fears and by the mother's own, if they were real, to Linda. Certainly if she was such a girl as these fears represented her she would fly at higher game. It was with an eye to high game, Mrs. Pallant had frankly admitted to me, that she had been trained, and such an education, to say nothing of such a subject, justified a hope of greater returns. A young American who could give her nothing but pocket-money was a very moderate prize, and if she were prepared to marry for ambition (there was no such hardness in her face or tone, but then there never is), her mark would be at the least an English duke. I was received at Mrs. Pallant's lodgings with the announcement that she had left Homburg with her daughter half an hour before. The good woman who had entertained the pair professed to know nothing of their movements beyond the fact that they had gone to Frankfort, where however it was her belief that they did not intend to remain. They were evidently travelling beyond. Sudden? Oh yes, tremendously sudden. They must have spent the night in packing, they had so many things and such pretty ones; and their poor maid all the morning had scarcely had time to swallow her coffee. But they evidently were ladies accustomed to come and go. It did not matter: with such rooms as hers she never wanted; there was a new family coming in at three o'clock.