Louisa Pallant | Page 4

was expecting to hear further from one day to the
other. His father was dead, and though a selfish bachelor, little versed
in the care of children, I was considerably counted on by his mother to
see that he didn't smoke nor flirt too much, nor yet tumble off an Alp.
Mrs. Pallant immediately guessed that his mother was my sister
Charlotte, whom she spoke of familiarly, though I knew she had scarce
seen her. Then in a moment it came to her which of the Parkers
Charlotte had married; she remembered the family perfectly from the
old New York days--"that disgustingly rich set." She said it was very
nice having the boy come out that way to my care; to which I replied
that it was very nice for the boy. She pronounced the advantage rather
mine--I ought to have had children; there was something so parental
about me and I would have brought them up so well. She could make
an allusion like that--to all that might have been and had not
been--without a gleam of guilt in her eye; and I foresaw that before I
left the place I should have confided to her that though I detested her
and was very glad we had fallen out, yet our old relations had left me
no heart for marrying another woman. If I had remained so single and
so sterile the fault was nobody's but hers. She asked what I meant to do
with my nephew--to which I replied that it was much more a question
of what he would do with me. She wished to know if he were a nice
young man and had brothers and sisters and any particular profession. I
assured her I had really seen little of him; I believed him to be six feet
high and of tolerable parts. He was an only son, but there was a little
sister at home, a delicate, rather blighted child, demanding all the
mother's care.
"So that makes your responsibility greater, as it were, about the boy,
doesn't it?" said Mrs. Pallant.
"Greater? I'm sure I don't know."
"Why if the girl's life's uncertain he may become, some moment, all the
mother has. So that being in your hands--"
"Oh I shall keep him alive, I suppose, if you mean that," I returned.
"Well, WE won't kill him, shall we, Linda?" my friend went on with a
laugh.
"I don't know--perhaps we shall!" smiled the girl.

II
I called on them the next at their lodgings, the modesty of which was
enhanced by a hundred pretty feminine devices--flowers and
photographs and portable knick-knacks and a hired piano and morsels
of old brocade flung over angular sofas. I took them to drive; I met
them again at the Kursaal; I arranged that we should dine together, after
the Homburg fashion, at the same table d'hote; and during several days
this revived familiar intercourse continued, imitating intimacy if not
quite achieving it. I was pleased, as my companions passed the time for
me and the conditions of our life were soothing--the feeling of summer
and shade and music and leisure in the German gardens and woods,
where we strolled and sat and gossiped; to which may be added a vague
sociable sense that among people whose challenge to the curiosity was
mainly not irresistible we kept quite to ourselves. We were on the
footing of old friends who still had in regard to each other discoveries
to make. We knew each other's nature but didn't know each other's
experience; so that when Mrs. Pallant related to me what she had been
"up to," as I called it, for so many years, the former knowledge attached
a hundred interpretative footnotes--as if I had been editing an author
who presented difficulties--to the interesting page. There was nothing
new to me in the fact that I didn't esteem her, but there was relief in my
finding that this wasn't necessary at Homburg and that I could like her
in spite of it. She struck me, in the oddest way, as both improved and
degenerate; the two processes, in her nature, might have gone on
together. She was battered and world-worn and, spiritually speaking,
vulgarised; something fresh had rubbed off her--it even included the
vivacity of her early desire to do the best thing for herself--and
something rather stale had rubbed on. At the same time she betrayed a
scepticism, and that was rather becoming, for it had quenched the
eagerness of her prime, the mercenary principle I had so suffered from.
She had grown weary and detached, and since she affected me as more
impressed with the evil of the world than with the good, this was a gain;
in other words her accretion of indifference, if not of cynicism, showed