They mounted, accordingly, into a great barouche--a vehicle as to which the Baroness found nothing to criticise but the price that was asked for it and the fact that the coachman wore a straw hat.
(At Silberstadt Madame Munster had had liveries of yellow and crimson.) They drove into the country, and the Baroness, leaning far back and swaying her lace-fringed parasol, looked to right and to left and surveyed the way-side objects.
After a while she pronounced them "affreux." Her brother remarked that it was apparently a country in which the foreground was inferior to the plans recules: and the Baroness rejoined that the landscape seemed to be all foreground.
Felix had fixed with his new friends the hour at which he should bring his sister; it was four o'clock in the afternoon.
The large, clean-faced house wore, to his eyes, as the barouche drove up to it, a very friendly aspect; the high, slender elms made lengthening shadows in front of it.
The Baroness descended; her American kinsfolk were stationed in the portico. Felix waved his hat to them, and a tall, lean gentleman, with a high forehead and a clean shaven face, came forward toward the garden gate. Charlotte Wentworth walked at his side. Gertrude came behind, more slowly.
Both of these young ladies wore rustling silk dresses.
Felix ushered his sister into the gate. "Be very gracious," he said to her. But he saw the admonition was superfluous.
Eugenia was prepared to be gracious as only Eugenia could be.
Felix knew no keener pleasure than to be able to admire his sister unrestrictedly; for if the opportunity was frequent, it was not inveterate. When she desired to please she was to him, as to every one else, the most charming woman in the world.
Then he forgot that she was ever anything else; that she was sometimes hard and perverse; that he was occasionally afraid of her. Now, as she took his arm to pass into the garden, he felt that she desired, that she proposed, to please, and this situation made him very happy. Eugenia would please.
The tall gentleman came to meet her, looking very rigid and grave.
But it was a rigidity that had no illiberal meaning.
Mr. Wentworth's manner was pregnant, on the contrary, with a sense of grand responsibility, of the solemnity of the occasion, of its being difficult to show sufficient deference to a lady at once so distinguished and so unhappy.
Felix had observed on the day before his characteristic pallor; and now he perceived that there was something almost cadaverous in his uncle's high-featured white face.
But so clever were this young man's quick sympathies and perceptions that he already learned that in these semi-mortuary manifestations there was no cause for alarm.
His light imagination had gained a glimpse of Mr. Wentworth's spiritual mechanism, and taught him that, the old man being infinitely conscientious, the special operation of conscience within him announced itself by several of the indications of physical faintness.
The Baroness took her uncle's hand, and stood looking at him with her ugly face and her beautiful smile.
"Have I done right to come?" she asked.
"Very right, very right," said Mr. Wentworth, solemnly. He had arranged in his mind a little speech; but now it quite faded away.
He felt almost frightened. He had never been looked at in just that way--with just that fixed, intense smile--by any woman; and it perplexed and weighed upon him, now, that the woman who was smiling so and who had instantly given him a vivid sense of her possessing other unprecedented attributes, was his own niece, the child of his own father's daughter.
The idea that his niece should be a German Baroness, married "morganatically" to a Prince, had already given him much to think about. Was it right, was it just, was it acceptable?
He always slept badly, and the night before he had lain awake much more even than usual, asking himself these questions.
The strange word "morganatic" was constantly in his ears; it reminded him of a certain Mrs. Morgan whom he had once known and who had been a bold, unpleasant woman.
He had a feeling that it was his duty, so long as the Baroness looked at him, smiling in that way, to meet her glance with his own scrupulously adjusted, consciously frigid organs of vision; but on this occasion he failed to perform his duty to the last.
He looked away toward his daughters. "We are very glad to see you," he had said. "Allow me to introduce my daughters--
Miss Charlotte Wentworth, Miss Gertrude Wentworth."
The Baroness thought she had never seen people less demonstrative.
But Charlotte kissed her and took her hand, looking at her sweetly and solemnly. Gertrude seemed to her almost funereal, though Gertrude might have found a source of gayety in the fact that Felix, with his magnificent smile, had been talking to her; he had greeted her as a very old friend. When she kissed the Baroness she had tears in her eyes. Madame Munster took each of these young women by the hand, and looked at them all over.
Charlotte thought her very strange-looking and singularly dressed; she could not have said whether it was well or ill.
She was glad, at any rate, that they had put on their silk gowns--especially Gertrude. "My cousins are very pretty," said the Baroness, turning her eyes from one to the other.
"Your daughters are very handsome, sir."
Charlotte blushed quickly; she had never yet heard her personal appearance alluded to in a loud, expressive voice.
Gertrude looked away--not at Felix; she was extremely pleased.
It was not the compliment that pleased her; she did not believe it; she thought herself very plain. She could hardly have told you the source of her satisfaction; it came from something in the way the Baroness spoke, and it was not diminished--it was rather deepened, oddly enough--by the young girl's disbelief.
Mr. Wentworth was silent; and then he asked, formally, "Won't you come into the house?"
"These are not all; you have some other children," said the Baroness.
"I have a son," Mr. Wentworth answered.