第36章

I shall never forget the impression made on me by the decorous luxury of that big house,standing amidst its old trees,halfway up the gentle slope that rose steadily from the historic highway where poor Andre was captured.I can see now the heavy stone pillars of its portico vignetted in a flush of tenderest green,the tulips just beginning to flame forth their Easter colours in the well-kept beds,the stately,well-groomed evergreens,the vivid lawns,the clipped hedges.And like an overwhelming wave of emotion that swept all before it,the impressiveness of wealth took possession of me.For here was a kind of wealth I had never known,that did not exist in the West,nor even in the still Puritan environs of Boston where I had visited.It took itself for granted,proclaimed itself complacently to have solved all problems.By ignoring them,perhaps.But I was too young to guess this.It was order personified,gaining effect at every turn by a multitude of details too trivial to mention were it not for the fact that they entered deeply into my consciousness,until they came to represent,collectively,the very flower of achievement.It was a wealth that accepted tribute calmly,as of inherent right.Law and tradition defended its sanctity more effectively than troops.Literature descended from her high altar to lend it dignity;and the long,silent library displayed row upon row of the masters,appropriately clad in morocco or calf,--Smollett,Macaulay,Gibbon,Richardson,Fielding,Scott,Dickens,Irving and Thackeray,as though each had striven for a tablet here.Art had denied herself that her canvases might be hung on these walls;and even the Church,on that first Sunday of my visit,forgot the blood of her martyrs that she might adorn an appropriate niche in the setting.The clergyman,at one of the dinner parties,gravely asked a blessing as upon an Institution that included and absorbed all other institutions in its being....

The note of that house was a tempered gaiety.Guests arrived from New York,spent the night and departed again without disturbing the even tenor of its ways.Unobtrusive servants ministered to their wants,--and to mine....

Conybear was there,and two classmates from Boston,and we were treated with the amiable tolerance accorded to college youths and intimates of the son of the house.One night there was a dance in our honour.Nor have I forgotten Jerry's sister,Nathalie,whom I had met at Class Days,a slim and willowy,exotic young lady of the Botticelli type,with a crown of burnished hair,yet more suggestive of a hothouse than of spring.She spoke English with a French accent.Capricious,impulsive,she captured my interest because she put a high value on her favour;she drove me over the hills,informing me at length that I was sympathique--different from the rest;in short,she emphasized and intensified what Imay call the Weathersfield environment,stirred up in me new and vague aspirations that troubled yet excited me.

Then there was Mrs.Kyme,a pretty,light-hearted lady,still young,who seemed to have no intention of growing older,who romped and played songs for us on the piano.The daughter of an old but now impecunious Westchester family,she had been born to adorn the position she held,she was adapted by nature to wring from it the utmost of the joys it offered.

From her,rather than from her husband,both of the children seemed to have inherited.I used to watch Mr.Grosvenor Kyme as he sat at the end of the dinner-table,dark,preoccupied,taciturn,symbolical of a wealth new to my experience,and which had about it a certain fabulous quality.

It toiled not,neither did it spin,but grew as if by magic,day and night,until the very conception of it was overpowering.What must it be to have had ancestors who had been clever enough to sit still until a congested and discontented Europe had begun to pour its thousands and hundreds of thousands into the gateway of the western world,until that gateway had become a metropolis?ancestors,of course,possessing what now suddenly appeared to me as the most desirable of gifts--since it reaped so dazzling a harvest-business foresight.From time to time these ancestors had continued to buy desirable corners,which no amount of persuasion had availed to make them relinquish.Lease them,yes;sell them,never!By virtue of such a system wealth was as inevitable as human necessity;and the thought of human necessity did not greatly bother me.Mr.Kyme's problem of life was not one of making money,but of investing it.One became automatically a personage....

It was due to one of those singular coincidences--so interesting a subject for speculation--that the man who revealed to me this golden romance of the Kyme family was none other than a resident of my own city,Mr.Theodore Watling,now become one of our most important and influential citizens;a corporation lawyer,new and stimulating qualification,suggesting as it did,a deus ex machina of great affairs.

That he,of all men,should come to Weathersfield astonished me,since Iwas as yet to make the connection between that finished,decorous,secluded existence and the source of its being.The evening before my departure he arrived in company with two other gentlemen,a Mr.Talbot and a Mr.Saxes,whose names were spoken with respect in a sphere of which I had hitherto taken but little cognizance-Wall Street.Conybear informed me that they were "magnates,"...We were sitting in the drawing-room at tea,when they entered with Mr.Watling,and no sooner had he spoken to Mrs.Kyme than his quick eye singled me out of the group.