第2章

"Rush? not in the least.I take it uncommon easy.""Ah I'm bound to say you do!" Mrs.Nettlepoint returned with inconsequence.I guessed at a certain tension between the pair and a want of consideration on the young man's part, arising perhaps from selfishness.His mother was nervous, in suspense, wanting to be at rest as to whether she should have his company on the voyage or be obliged to struggle alone.But as he stood there smiling and slowly moving his fan he struck me somehow as a person on whom this fact wouldn't sit too heavily.He was of the type of those whom other people worry about, not of those who worry about other people.Tall and strong, he had a handsome face, with a round head and close-curling hair; the whites of his eyes and the enamel of his teeth, under his brown moustache, gleamed vaguely in the lights of the Back Bay.I made out that he was sunburnt, as if he lived much in the open air, and that he looked intelligent but also slightly brutal, though not in a morose way.His brutality, if he had any, was bright and finished.I had to tell him who I was, but even then I saw how little he placed me and that my explanations gave me in his mind no great identity or at any rate no great importance.I foresaw that he would in intercourse make me feel sometimes very young and sometimes very old, caring himself but little which.He mentioned, as if to show our companion that he might safely be left to his own devices, that he had once started from London to Bombay at three quarters of an hour's notice.

"Yes, and it must have been pleasant for the people you were with!""Oh the people I was with--!" he returned; and his tone appeared to signify that such people would always have to come off as they could.

He asked if there were no cold drinks in the house, no lemonade, no iced syrups; in such weather something of that sort ought always to be kept going.When his mother remarked that surely at the club they WERE kept going he went on: "Oh yes, I had various things there; but you know I've walked down the hill since.One should have something at either end.May I ring and see?" He rang while Mrs.Nettlepoint observed that with the people they had in the house, an establishment reduced naturally at such a moment to its simplest expression--they were burning up candle-ends and there were no luxuries--she wouldn't answer for the service.The matter ended in her leaving the room in quest of cordials with the female domestic who had arrived in response to the bell and in whom Jasper's appeal aroused no visible intelligence.

She remained away some time and I talked with her son, who was sociable but desultory and kept moving over the place, always with his fan, as if he were properly impatient.Sometimes he seated himself an instant on the window-sill, and then I made him out in fact thoroughly good-looking--a fine brown clean young athlete.He failed to tell me on what special contingency his decision depended;he only alluded familiarly to an expected telegram, and I saw he was probably fond at no time of the trouble of explanations.His mother's absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him she had grown used to spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some close storeroom, among old preserve-pots, while the dull maid-servant held the candle awry.I don't know whether this same vision was in his own eyes; at all events it didn't prevent his saying suddenly, as he looked at his watch, that I must excuse him--he should have to go back to the club.He would return in half an hour--or in less.He walked away and I sat there alone, conscious, on the dark dismantled simplified scene, in the deep silence that rests on American towns during the hot season--there was now and then a far cry or a plash in the water, and at intervals the tinkle of the bells of the horse-cars on the long bridge, slow in the suffocating night--of the strange influence, half-sweet, half-sad, that abides in houses uninhabited or about to become so, in places muffled and bereaved, where the unheeded sofas and patient belittered tables seem (like the disconcerted dogs, to whom everything is alike sinister) to recognise the eve of a journey.

After a while I heard the sound of voices, of steps, the rustle of dresses, and I looked round, supposing these things to denote the return of Mrs.Nettlepoint and her handmaiden with the refection prepared for her son.What I saw however was two other female forms, visitors apparently just admitted, and now ushered into the room.

They were not announced--the servant turned her back on them and rambled off to our hostess.They advanced in a wavering tentative unintroduced way--partly, I could see, because the place was dark and partly because their visit was in its nature experimental, a flight of imagination or a stretch of confidence.One of the ladies was stout and the other slim, and I made sure in a moment that one was talkative and the other reserved.It was further to be discerned that one was elderly and the other young, as well as that the fact of their unlikeness didn't prevent their being mother and daughter.

Mrs.Nettlepoint reappeared in a very few minutes, but the interval had sufficed to establish a communication--really copious for the occasion--between the strangers and the unknown gentleman whom they found in possession, hat and stick in hand.This was not my doing--for what had I to go upon?--and still less was it the doing of the younger and the more indifferent, or less courageous, lady.She spoke but once--when her companion informed me that she was going out to Europe the next day to be married.Then she protested "Oh mother!" in a tone that struck me in the darkness as doubly odd, exciting my curiosity to see her face.

It had taken the elder woman but a moment to come to that, and to various other things, after I had explained that I myself was waiting for Mrs.Nettlepoint, who would doubtless soon come back.