Then she appeared to understand. "Another marriage?" And she looked at the others. Felix was chattering to Gertrude; Charlotte, at a distance, was watching them; and Mr. Brand, in quite another quarter, was turning his back to them, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his large head on one side, was looking at the small, tender crescent of a young moon. "It ought to be Mr. Brand and Charlotte," said Eugenia, "but it does n"t look like it."
"There," Acton answered, "you must judge just now by contraries. There is more than there looks to be. I expect that combination one of these days; but that is not what I meant."
"Well," said the Baroness, "I never guess my own lovers; so I can"t guess other people"s."
Acton gave a loud laugh, and he was about to add a rejoinder when Mr.
Wentworth approached his niece. "You will be interested to hear," the old man said, with a momentary aspiration toward jocosity, "of another matrimonial venture in our little circle."
"I was just telling the Baroness," Acton observed.
"Mr. Acton was apparently about to announce his own engagement," said Eugenia.
Mr. Wentworth"s jocosity increased. "It is not exactly that; but it is in the family. Clifford, hearing this morning that Mr. Brand had expressed a desire to tie the nuptial knot for his sister, took it into his head to arrange that, while his hand was in, our good friend should perform a like ceremony for himself and Lizzie Acton."
The Baroness threw back her head and smiled at her uncle; then turning, with an intenser radiance, to Robert Acton, "I am certainly very stupid not to have thought of that," she said. Acton looked down at his boots, as if he thought he had perhaps reached the limits of legitimate experimentation, and for a moment Eugenia said nothing more. It had been, in fact, a sharp knock, and she needed to recover herself. This was done, however, promptly enough. "Where are the young people?" she asked.
"They are spending the evening with my mother."
"Is not the thing very sudden?"
Acton looked up. "Extremely sudden. There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious impulse to precipitate the affair."
"The impulse," said the Baroness, "was the charms of your very pretty sister."
"But my sister"s charms were an old story; he had always known her."
Acton had begun to experiment again.
Here, however, it was evident the Baroness would not help him. "Ah, one can"t say! Clifford is very young; but he is a nice boy."
"He "s a likeable sort of boy, and he will be a rich man." This was Acton"s last experiment. Madame Munster turned away.
She made but a short visit and Felix took her home. In her little drawing-room she went almost straight to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and, with a candle uplifted, stood looking into it. "I shall not wait for your marriage," she said to her brother. "To-morrow my maid shall pack up."
"My dear sister," Felix exclaimed, "we are to be married immediately!
Mr. Brand is too uncomfortable."
But Eugenia, turning and still holding her candle aloft, only looked about the little sitting-room at her gimcracks and curtains and cushions. "My maid shall pack up," she repeated. "Bonte divine, what rubbish! I feel like a strolling actress; these are my "properties.""
"Is the play over, Eugenia?" asked Felix.
She gave him a sharp glance. "I have spoken my part."
"With great applause!" said her brother.
"Oh, applause--applause!" she murmured. And she gathered up two or three of her dispersed draperies. She glanced at the beautiful brocade, and then, "I don"t see how I can have endured it!" she said.
"Endure it a little longer. Come to my wedding."
"Thank you; that "s your affair. My affairs are elsewhere."
"Where are you going?"
"To Germany--by the first ship."
"You have decided not to marry Mr. Acton?"
"I have refused him," said Eugenia.
Her brother looked at her in silence. "I am sorry," he rejoined at last.
"But I was very discreet, as you asked me to be. I said nothing."
"Please continue, then, not to allude to the matter," said Eugenia.
Felix inclined himself gravely. "You shall be obeyed. But your position in Germany?" he pursued.
"Please to make no observations upon it."
"I was only going to say that I supposed it was altered."
"You are mistaken."
"But I thought you had signed"--
"I have not signed!" said the Baroness.
Felix urged her no further, and it was arranged that he should immediately a.s.sist her to embark.
Mr. Brand was indeed, it appeared, very impatient to consummate his sacrifice and deliver the nuptial benediction which would set it off so handsomely; but Eugenia"s impatience to withdraw from a country in which she had not found the fortune she had come to seek was even less to be mistaken. It is true she had not made any very various exertion; but she appeared to feel justified in generalizing--in deciding that the conditions of action on this provincial continent were not favorable to really superior women. The elder world was, after all, their natural field. The unembarra.s.sed directness with which she proceeded to apply these intelligent conclusions appeared to the little circle of spectators who have figured in our narrative but the supreme exhibition of a character to which the experience of life had imparted an inimitable pliancy. It had a distinct effect upon Robert Acton, who, for the two days preceding her departure, was a very restless and irritated mortal. She pa.s.sed her last evening at her uncle"s, where she had never been more charming; and in parting with Clifford Wentworth"s affianced bride she drew from her own finger a curious old ring and presented it to her with the prettiest speech and kiss. Gertrude, who as an affianced bride was also indebted to her gracious bounty, admired this little incident extremely, and Robert Acton almost wondered whether it did not give him the right, as Lizzie"s brother and guardian, to offer in return a handsome present to the Baroness. It would have made him extremely happy to be able to offer a handsome present to the Baroness; but he abstained from this expression of his sentiments, and they were in consequence, at the very last, by so much the less comfortable. It was almost at the very last that he saw her--late the night before she went to Boston to embark.
"For myself, I wish you might have stayed," he said. "But not for your own sake."
"I don"t make so many differences," said the Baroness. "I am simply sorry to be going."
"That "s a much deeper difference than mine," Acton declared; "for you mean you are simply glad!"
Felix parted with her on the deck of the ship. "We shall often meet over there," he said.
"I don"t know," she answered. "Europe seems to me much larger than America."
Mr. Brand, of course, in the days that immediately followed, was not the only impatient spirit; but it may be said that of all the young spirits interested in the event none rose more eagerly to the level of the occasion. Gertrude left her father"s house with Felix Young; they were imperturbably happy and they went far away. Clifford and his young wife sought their felicity in a narrower circle, and the latter"s influence upon her husband was such as to justify, strikingly, that theory of the elevating effect of easy intercourse with clever women which Felix had propounded to Mr. Wentworth. Gertrude was for a good while a distant figure, but she came back when Charlotte married Mr. Brand. She was present at the wedding feast, where Felix"s gayety confessed to no change. Then she disappeared, and the echo of a gayety of her own, mingled with that of her husband, often came back to the home of her earlier years. Mr. Wentworth at last found himself listening for it; and Robert Acton, after his mother"s death, married a particularly nice young girl.
The End