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

Jackson Lemon, to dissipate his chagrin, had returned to the sessions of the medical congress, where, inevitably, he had fallen into the hands of Sidney Feeder, who enjoyed in this disinterested assembly the highest esteem.  It was Dr. Feeder’s earnest desire that his old friend should share his credit—all the more easily that the medical congress was, as the young physician observed, a perpetual symposium.  Jackson entertained the entire body at dinner—entertained it profusely and in a manner befitting one of the patrons of science rather than the humbler votaries; but these dissipations made him forget but for the hour the arrest of his relations with the house of Canterville.  It punctually came back to him that he was disconcerted, and Dr. Feeder saw it stamped on his brow.  Jackson Lemon, with his acute inclination to open himself, was on the point more than once of taking this sturdy friend into his confidence.  His colleague gave him easy occasion—asked him what it was he was thinking of all the time and whether the young marchioness had concluded she couldn’t swallow a doctor.  These forms of speech were displeasing to our baffled aspirant, whose fastidiousness was nothing new; but he had even deeper reasons for saying to himself that in such complicated cases as his there was no assistance in the Sidney Feeders.  To understand his situation one must know the world, and the children of Cincinnati, prohibitively provincial, didn’t know the world—at least the world with which this son of New York was now concerned.

“Is there a hitch in your marriage?  Just tell me that,” Sidney Feeder had said, taking things for granted in a manner that of itself testified to an innocence abysmal.  It is true he had added that he supposed he had no business to ask; but he had been anxious about it ever since hearing from Mr. and Mrs. Freer that the British aristocracy was down on the medical profession.  “Do they want you to give it up?  Is that what the hitch is about?  Don’t desert your colours, Jackson.  The suppression of pain, the mitigation of misery, constitute surely the noblest profession in the world.”

“My dear fellow, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jackson could only observe in answer to this.  “I haven’t told any one I was going to be married—still less have I told any one that any one objects to my profession.  I should like to see any one do it.  I’ve rather got out of the swim, but I don’t regard myself as the sort of person that people object to.  And I do expect to do something yet.”

“Come home, then, and do it.  And don’t crush me with grandeur if I say that the facilities for getting married are much greater over there.”

“You don’t seem to have found them very great,” Jackson sniffed.

“I’ve never had time really to go into them.  But wait till my next vacation and you’ll see.”

“The facilities over there are too great.  Nothing’s worth while but what’s difficult,” said Jackson with a sententious ring that quite distressed his mate.

“Well, they’ve got their backs up, I can see that.  I’m glad you like it.  Only if they despise your profession what will they say to that of your friends?  If they think you’re queer what would they think of me?” asked Sidney Feeder, whose spirit was not as a general thing in the least bitter, but who was pushed to this sharpness by a conviction that—in spite of declarations which seemed half an admission and half a denial—his friend was suffering worry, or really perhaps something almost like humiliation, for the sake of a good that might be gathered at home on every bush.

“My dear fellow, all that’s ‘rot’!”  This had been Jackson’s retort, which expressed, however, not half his feeling.  The other half was inexpressible, or almost, springing as it did from his depth of displeasure at its having struck even so genial a mind as Sidney Feeder’s that in proposing to marry a daughter of the highest civilisation he was going out of his way—departing from his natural line.  Was he then so ignoble, so pledged to inferior things, that when he saw a girl who—putting aside the fact that she hadn’t genius, which was rare, and which, though he prized rarity, he didn’t want—seemed to him the most naturally and functionally founded and seated feminine subject he had known, he was to think himself too different, too incongruous, to mate with her?  He would mate with whom he “damn pleased”; that was the upshot of Jackson Lemon’s passion.  Several days elapsed during which everybody—even the pure-minded, like poor Sidney—seemed to him very abject.

All of which is recorded to show how he, in going to see Mrs. Freer, was prepared much less to be angry with people who, like her husband and herself a month before, had given it out that he was engaged to a peer’s daughter, than to resent the insinuation that there were obstacles to such a prospect.  He sat with the lady of Jermyn Street alone for half an hour in the sabbatical stillness.  Her husband had gone for a walk in the Park—he always walked in the Park of a Sunday.  All the world might have been there and Jackson and Mrs. Freer in sole possession of the district of Saint James’s.  This perhaps had something to do with making him at last so confidential; they had such a margin for easy egotism and spreading sympathy.  Mrs. Freer was ready for anything—in the critical, the “real” line; she treated him as a person she had known from the age of ten; asked his leave to continue recumbent; talked a great deal about his mother and seemed almost, for a while, to perform the earnest functions of that lady.  It had been wise of her from the first not to allude, even indirectly, to his having neglected so long to call; her silence on this point was in the best taste.  Jackson had forgotten how it was a habit with her, and indeed a high accomplishment, never to reproach people with these omissions.  You might have left her alone for months or years, her greeting was always the same; she never was either too delighted to see you or not delighted enough.  After a while, however, he felt her silence to be in some measure an allusion; she appeared to take for granted his devoting all his hours to a certain young lady.  It came over him for a moment that his compatriots took a great deal for granted; but when Mrs. Freer, rather abruptly sitting up on her sofa, said to him half-simply, half-solemnly: “And now, my dear Jackson, I want you to tell me something!”—he saw that, after all, she kept within bounds and didn’t pretend to know more about his business than he himself did.  In the course of a quarter of an hour—so appreciatively she listened—he had given her much information.  It was the first time he had said so much to any one, and the process relieved him even more than he would have supposed.  There were things it made clear to him by bringing them to a point—above all, the fact that he had been wronged.  He made no mention whatever of its being out of the usual way that, as an American doctor, he should sue for the hand of a marquis’s daughter; and this reserve was not voluntary, it was quite unconscious.  His mind was too full of the sudden rudeness of the Cantervilles and the sordid side of their want of confidence.

He couldn’t imagine that while he talked to Mrs. Freer—and it amazed him afterwards that he should have chattered so; he could account for it but by the state of his nerves—she should be thinking only of the strangeness of the situation he sketched for her.  She thought Americans as good as other people, but she didn’t see where, in American life, the daughter of a marquis would, as she phrased it, work in.  To take a simple instance—they coursed through Mrs. Freer’s mind with extraordinary speed—wouldn’t she always expect to go in to dinner first?  As a novelty and for a change, over there, they might like to see her do it—there might be even a pressure for places at the show.  But with the increase of every kind of sophistication that was taking place in America the humorous view to which she would owe her immediate ease mightn’t continue to be taken; and then where would poor Lady Barb be?  This was in truth a scant instance; but Mrs. Freer’s vivid imagination—much as she had lived in Europe she knew her native land so well—saw a host of others massing themselves behind it.  The consequence of all of which was that after listening to her young friend in the most engaging silence she raised her clasped hands, pressed them against her breast, lowered her voice to a tone of entreaty and, with all the charming cheer of her wisdom, uttered three words: “My dear Jackson, don’t—don’t—don’t.”

“Don’t what?”  He took it at first coldly.

“Don’t neglect the chance you have of getting out of it.  You see it would never do.”

He knew what she meant by his chance of getting out of it; he had in his many meditations of course not overlooked that.  The ground the old couple had taken about settlements—and the fact that Lady Beauchemin hadn’t come back to him to tell him, as she promised, that she had moved them, proved how firmly they were rooted—would have offered an all-sufficient pretext to a man who should have repented of his advances.  Jackson knew this, but knew at the same time that he had not repented.  The old couple’s want of imagination didn’t in the least alter the fact that the girl was, in her perfection, as he had told her father, one of the rarest of types.  Therefore he simply said to Mrs. Freer that he didn’t in the least wish to get out of it; he was as much in it as ever and intended to remain in it.  But what did she mean, he asked in a moment, by her statement that it would never do?  Why wouldn’t it do?  Mrs. Freer replied by another question—should he really like her to tell him?  It wouldn’t do because Lady Barb wouldn’t be satisfied with her place at dinner.  She wouldn’t be content—in a society of commoners—with any but the best; and the best she couldn’t expect (and it was to be supposed he didn’t expect her) always grossly to monopolise; as people of her sort, for that matter, did so successfully grab it in England.

“What do you mean by commoners?” Jackson rather grimly demanded.

“I mean you and me and my poor husband and Dr. Feeder,” said Mrs. Freer.

“I don’t see how there can be commoners where there aren’t lords.  It’s the lord that makes the commoner, and vice versa.”

“Won’t a lady do as well?  Our Lady Barb—a single English girl—can make a million inferiors.”

“She will be, before anything else, my wife; and she won’t on the whole think it any less vulgar to talk about inferiors than I do myself.”

“I don’t know what she’ll talk about, my dear Jackson, but she’ll think; and her thoughts won’t be pleasant—I mean for others.  Do you expect to sink her to your own rank?”

Dr. Lemon’s bright little eyes rested more sharply on his hostess.  “I don’t understand you and don’t think you understand yourself.”  This was not absolutely candid, for he did understand Mrs. Freer to a certain extent; it has been related that before he asked Lady Barb’s hand of her parents there had been moments when he himself doubted if a flower only to be described as of the social hothouse, that is of aristocratic air, would flourish in American earth.  But an intimation from another person that it was beyond his power to pass off his wife—whether she were the daughter of a peer or of a shoemaker—set all his blood on fire.  It quenched on the instant his own perception of difficulties of detail and made him feel only that he was dishonoured—he the heir of all the ages—by such insinuations.  It was his belief—though he had never before had occasion to put it forward—that his position, one of the best in the world, had about it the felicity that makes everything possible.  He had had the best education the age could offer, for if he had rather wasted his time at Harvard, where he entered very young, he had, as he believed, been tremendously serious at Heidelberg and at Vienna.  He had devoted himself to one of the noblest of professions—a profession recognised as such everywhere but in England—and had inherited a fortune far beyond the expectation of his earlier years, the years when he cultivated habits of work which alone (or rather in combination with talents that he neither exaggerated nor undervalued) would have conduced to distinction.  He was one of the most fortunate inhabitants of an immense fresh rich country, a country whose future was admitted to be incalculable, and he moved with perfect ease in a society in which he was not overshadowed by others.  It seemed to him, therefore, beneath his dignity to wonder whether he could afford, socially speaking, to marry according to his taste.  He pretended to general strength, and what was the use of strength if you weren’t prepared to undertake things timid people might find difficult?  It was his plan to marry the woman he desired and not be afraid of her afterward.  The effect of Mrs. Freer’s doubt of his success was to represent to him that his own character wouldn’t cover his wife’s; she couldn’t have made him feel worse if she had told him that he was marrying beneath him and would have to ask for indulgence.  “I don’t believe you know how much I think that any woman who marries me will be doing very well,” he promptly added.

“I’m very sure of that; but it isn’t so simple—one’s being an American,” Mrs. Freer rejoined with a small philosophic sigh.

“It’s whatever one chooses to make it.”

“Well, you’ll make it what no one has done yet if you take that young lady to America and make her happy there.”

“Do you think our country, then, such a very dreadful place?”

His hostess had a pause.  “It’s not a question of what I think, but of what she will.”

Jackson rose from his chair and took up his hat and stick.  He had actually turned a little pale with the force of his emotion; there was a pang of wrath for him in this fact that his marriage to Lady Barbarina might be looked at as too high a flight.  He stood a moment leaning against the mantelpiece and very much tempted to say to Mrs. Freer that she was a vulgar-minded old woman.  But he said something that was really more to the point.  “You forget that she’ll have her consolations.”

“Don’t go away or I shall think I’ve offended you.  You can’t console an injured noblewoman.”

“How will she be injured?  People will be charming to her.”

“They’ll be charming to her—charming to her!”  These words fell from the lips of Dexter Freer, who had opened the door of the room and stood with the knob in his hand, putting himself into relation to his wife’s talk with their visitor.  This harmony was achieved in an instant.  “Of course I know whom you mean,” he said while he exchanged greetings with Jackson.  “My wife and I—naturally we’re great busybodies—have talked of your affair and we differ about it completely.  She sees only the dangers, while I see all the advantages.”

“By the advantages he means the fun for us,” Mrs. Freer explained, settling her sofa-cushions.

Jackson looked with a certain sharp blankness from one of these disinterested judges to the other; even yet they scarce saw how their misdirected freedom wrought on him.  It was hardly more agreeable to him to know that the husband wished to see Lady Barb in America than to know that the wife waved away such a vision.  There was that in Dexter Freer’s face which seemed to forecast the affair as taking place somehow for the benefit of the spectators.  “I think you both see too much—a great deal too much—in the whole thing,” he rather coldly returned.

“My dear young man, at my age I may take certain liberties,” said Dexter Freer.  “Do what you’ve planned—I beseech you to do it; it has never been done before.”  And then as if Jackson’s glance had challenged this last assertion he went on: “Never, I assure you, this particular thing.  Young female members of the British aristocracy have married coachmen and fishmongers and all that sort of thing; but they’ve never married you and me.”

“They certainly haven’t married the ‘likes’ of either of you!” said Mrs. Freer.

“I’m much obliged to you for your advice.”  It may be thought that Jackson Lemon took himself rather seriously, and indeed I’m afraid that if he hadn’t done so there would have been no occasion even for this summary report of him.  But it made him almost sick to hear his engagement spoken of as a curious and ambiguous phenomenon.  He might have his own ideas about it—one always had about one’s engagement; but the ideas that appeared to have peopled the imagination of his friends ended by kindling a small hot expanse in each of his cheeks.  “I’d rather not talk any more about my little plans,” he added to his host.  “I’ve been saying all sorts of absurd things to Mrs. Freer.”

“They’ve been most interesting and most infuriating,” that lady declared.  “You’ve been very stupidly treated.”

“May she tell me when you go?” her husband asked of the young man.

“I’m going now—she may tell you whatever she likes.”

“I’m afraid we’ve displeased you,” she went on; “I’ve said too much what I think.  You must pardon me—it’s all for your mother.”

“It’s she whom I want Lady Barb to see!” Jackson exclaimed with the inconsequence of filial affection.

“Deary me!” Mrs. Freer gently wailed.

“We shall go back to America to see how you get on,” her husband said; “and if you succeed it will be a great precedent.”

“Oh I shall succeed!”  And with this he took his departure.  He walked away with the quick step of a man labouring under a certain excitement; walked up to Piccadilly and down past Hyde Park Corner.  It relieved him to measure these distances, for he was thinking hard, under the influence of irritation, and it was as if his movement phrased his passion.  Certain lights flashed on him in the last half-hour turned to fire in him; the more that they had a representative value and were an echo of the common voice.  If his prospects wore that face to Mrs. Freer they would probably wear it to others; so he felt a strong sharp need to show such others that they took a mean measure of his position.  He walked and walked till he found himself on the highway of Hammersmith.  I have represented him as a young man with a stiff back, and I may appear to undermine this plea when I note that he wrote that evening to his solicitor that Mr. Hardman was to be informed he would agree to any proposals for settlements that this worthy should make.  Jackson’s stiff back was shown in his deciding to marry Lady Barbarina on any terms.  It had come over him through the action of this desire to prove he wasn’t afraid—so odious was the imputation—that terms of any kind were very superficial things.  What was fundamental and of the essence of the matter would be to secure the grand girl and then carry everything out.