“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.”