A few days after the Baroness Munster had presented herself to her American kinsfolk she came, with her brother, and took up her abode in that small white house adjacent to Mr. Wentworth's own dwelling of which mention has already been made.
It was on going with his daughters to return her visit that Mr. Wentworth placed this comfortable cottage at her service; the offer being the result of a domestic colloquy, diffused through the ensuing twenty-four hours, in the course of which the two foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal of earnestness and subtlety. The discussion went forward, as I say, in the family circle; but that circle on the evening following Madame M; auunster's return to town, as on many other occasions, included Robert Acton and his pretty sister.
If you had been present, it would probably not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was treated as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment.
This was not Mr. Wentworth's way of treating any human occurrence.
The sudden irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the Wentworths of an element not allowed for in its scheme of usual obligations required a readjustment of that sense of responsibility which constituted its principal furniture.
To consider an event, crudely and baldly, in the light of the pleasure it might bring them was an intellectual exercise with which Felix Young's American cousins were almost wholly unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely pursued in any section of human society.
The arrival of Felix and his sister was a satisfaction, but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic satisfaction.
It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr. Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted to it as an extension of enjoyment. This function was ultimately assumed by Gertrude Wentworth, who was a peculiar girl, but the full compass of whose peculiarities had not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners.
Gertrude, however, had to struggle with a great accumulation of obstructions, both of the subjective, as the metaphysicians say, and of the objective, order; and indeed it is no small part of the purpose of this little history to set forth her struggle.
What seemed paramount in this abrupt enlargement of Mr. Wentworth's sympathies and those of his daughters was an extension of the field of possible mistakes; and the doctrine, as it may almost be called, of the oppressive gravity of mistakes was one of the most cherished traditions of the Wentworth family.
"I don't believe she wants to come and stay in this house," said Gertrude; Madame Munster, from this time forward, receiving no other designation than the personal pronoun.
Charlotte and Gertrude acquired considerable facility in addressing her, directly, as "Eugenia;" but in speaking of her to each other they rarely called her anything but "she."
"Does n't she think it good enough for her?" cried little Lizzie Acton, who was always asking unpractical questions that required, in strictness, no answer, and to which indeed she expected no other answer than such as she herself invariably furnished in a small, innocently-satirical laugh.
"She certainly expressed a willingness to come," said Mr. Wentworth.
"That was only politeness," Gertrude rejoined.
"Yes, she is very polite--very polite," said Mr. Wentworth.
"She is too polite," his son declared, in a softly growling tone which was habitual to him, but which was an indication of nothing worse than a vaguely humorous intention.
"It is very embarrassing."
"That is more than can be said of you, sir," said Lizzie Acton, with her little laugh.
"Well, I don't mean to encourage her," Clifford went on.
"I 'm sure I don't care if you do!" cried Lizzie.
"She will not think of you, Clifford," said Gertrude, gravely.
"I hope not!" Clifford exclaimed.
"She will think of Robert," Gertrude continued, in the same tone.
Robert Acton began to blush; but there was no occasion for it, for every one was looking at Gertrude--every one, at least, save Lizzie, who, with her pretty head on one side, contemplated her brother.
"Why do you attribute motives, Gertrude?" asked Mr. Wentworth.
"I don't attribute motives, father," said Gertrude.
"I only say she will think of Robert; and she will!"
"Gertrude judges by herself!" Acton exclaimed, laughing.
"Don't you, Gertrude? Of course the Baroness will think of me.
She will think of me from morning till night."
"She will be very comfortable here," said Charlotte, with something of a housewife's pride. "She can have the large northeast room.
And the French bedstead," Charlotte added, with a constant sense of the lady's foreignness.
"She will not like it," said Gertrude; "not even if you pin little tidies all over the chairs."
"Why not, dear?" asked Charlotte, perceiving a touch of irony here, but not resenting it.
Gertrude had left her chair; she was walking about the room; her stiff silk dress, which she had put on in honor of the Baroness, made a sound upon the carpet. "I don't know," she replied.
"She will want something more--more private."
"If she wants to be private she can stay in her room,"
Lizzie Acton remarked.
Gertrude paused in her walk, looking at her. "That would not be pleasant," she answered. "She wants privacy and pleasure together."
Robert Acton began to laugh again. "My dear cousin, what a picture!"
Charlotte had fixed her serious eyes upon her sister; she wondered whence she had suddenly derived these strange notions.
Mr. Wentworth also observed his younger daughter.
"I don't know what her manner of life may have been," he said;