All these things, Lewis himself mused, dangling his legs from the verandah rail, were undoubtedly passing through the minds of the four gentlemen grouped about his father’s bowl of cup.
Mr. Robert Huzzard, the banker, a tall broad man, who looked big in any company but Mr. Raycie’s, leaned back, lifted his glass, and bowed to Lewis.
“Here’s to the Grand Tour!”
“Don’t perch on that rail like a sparrow, my boy,” Mr. Raycie said reprovingly; and Lewis dropped to his feet, and returned Mr. Huzzard’s bow.
“I wasn’t thinking,” he stammered. It was his too frequent excuse.
Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, the banker’s younger brother, Mr. Ledgely and Mr. Donaldson Kent, all raised their glasses and cheerily echoed: “The Grand Tour!”
Lewis bowed again, and put his lips to the glass he had forgotten. In reality, he had eyes only for Mr. Donaldson Kent, his father’s cousin, a silent man with a lean hawk-like profile, who looked like a retired Revolutionary hero, and lived in daily fear of the most trifling risk or responsibility.
To this prudent and circumspect citizen had come, some years earlier, the unexpected and altogether inexcusable demand that he should look after the daughter of his only brother, Julius Kent. Julius had died in Italy — well, that was his own business, if he chose to live there. But to let his wife die before him, and to leave a minor daughter, and a will entrusting her to the guardianship of his esteemed elder brother, Donaldson Kent Esquire, of Kent’s Point, Long Island, and Great Jones Street, New York — well, as Mr. Kent himself said, and as his wife said for him, there had never been anything, anything whatever, in Mr. Kent’s attitude or behaviour, to justify the ungrateful Julius (whose debts he had more than once paid) in laying on him this final burden.
The girl came. She was fourteen, she was considered plain, she was small and black and skinny. Her name was Beatrice, which was bad enough, and made worse by the fact that it had been shortened by ignorant foreigners to Treeshy. But she was eager, serviceable, and good-tempered, and as Mr. and Mrs. Kent’s friends pointed out, her plainness made everything easy. There were two Kent boys growing up, Bill and Donald; and if this penniless cousin had been compounded of cream and roses — well, she would have taken more watching, and might have rewarded the kindness of her uncle and aunt by some act of wicked ingratitude. But this risk being obviated by her appearance, they could be goodnatured to her without afterthought, and to be goodnatured was natural to them. So as the years passed, she gradually became the guardian of her guardians; since it was equally natural to Mr. and Mrs. Kent to throw themselves in helpless reliance on every one whom they did not nervously fear or mistrust.
“Yes, he’s off on Monday,” Mr. Raycie said, nodding sharply at Lewis, who had set down his glass after one sip. “Empty it, you shirk!” the nod commanded; and Lewis, throwing back his head, gulped down the draught, though it almost stuck in his lean throat. He had already had to take two glasses, and even this scant conviviality was too much for him, and likely to result in a mood of excited volubility, followed by a morose evening and a head the next morning. And he wanted to keep his mind clear that day, and to think steadily and lucidly of Treeshy Kent.
Of course he couldn’t marry her — yet. He was twenty-one that very day, and still entirely dependent on his father. And he wasn’t altogether sorry to be going first on this Grand Tour. It was what he had always dreamed of, pined for, from the moment when his infant eyes had first been drawn to the prints of the European cities in the long upper passage that smelt of matting. And all that Treeshy had told him about Italy had confirmed and intensified the longing. Oh, to have been going there with her — with her as his guide, his Beatrice! (For she had given him a little Dante of her father’s, with a steel-engraved frontispiece of Beatrice; and his sister Mary Adeline, who had been taught Italian by one of the romantic Milanese exiles, had helped her brother out with the grammar.)
The thought of going to Italy with Treeshy was only a dream; but later, as man and wife, they would return there, and by that time, perhaps, it was Lewis who would be her guide, and reveal to her the historic marvels of her birthplace, of which after all she knew so little, except in minor domestic ways that were quaint but unimportant.
The prospect swelled her suitor’s bosom, and reconciled him to the idea of their separation. After all, he secretly felt himself to be still a boy, and it was as a man that he would return: he meant to tell her that when they met the next day. When he came back his character would be formed, his knowledge of life (which he already thought considerable) would be complete; and then no one could keep them apart. He smiled in advance to think how little his father’s shouting and booming would impress a man on his return from the Grand Tour . . .
The gentlemen were telling anecdotes about their own early experiences in Europe. None of them — not even Mr. Raycie — had travelled as extensively as it was intended that Lewis should; but the two Huzzards had been twice to England on banking matters, and Commodore Ledgely, a bold man, to France and Belgium as well — not to speak of his early experiences in the Far East. All three had kept a vivid and amused recollection slightly tinged with disapprobation, of what they had seen — “Oh, those French wenches,” the Commodore chuckled through his white teeth — but poor Mr. Kent, who had gone abroad on his honeymoon, had been caught in Paris by the revolution of 1830, had had the fever in Florence, and had nearly been arrested as a spy in Vienna; and the only satisfactory episode in this disastrous, and never repeated, adventure, had been the fact of his having been mistaken for the Duke of Wellington (as he was trying to slip out of a Viennese hotel in his courier’s blue surtout) by a crowd who had been — “Well, very gratifying in their enthusiasm,” Mr. Kent admitted.
“How my poor brother Julius could have lived in Europe! Well, look at the consequences — ” he used to say, as if poor Treeshy’s plainness gave an awful point to his moral.
“There’s one thing in Paris, my boy, that you must be warned against: those gambling-hells in the Pally Royle,” Mr. Kent insisted. “I never set foot in the places myself; but a glance at the outside was enough.”
“I knew a feller that was fleeced of a fortune there,” Mr. Henry Huzzard confirmed; while the Commodore, at his tenth glass, chuckled with moist eyes: “The trollops, oh, the trollops — ”
“As for Vienna — ” said Mr. Kent.
“Even in London,” said Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, “a young man must be on his look-out against gamblers. Every form of swindling is practised, and the touts are always on the look-out for greenhorns; a term,” he added apologetically, “which they apply to any traveller new to the country.”
“In Paris,” said Mr. Kent, “I was once within an ace of being challenged to fight a duel.” He fetched a sigh of horror and relief, and glanced reassuredly down the Sound in the direction of his own peaceful roof-tree.
“Oh, a duel,” laughed the Commodore. “A man can fight duels here. I fought a dozen when I was a young feller in New Erleens.” The Commodore’s mother had been a southern lady, and after his father’s death had spent some years with her parents in Louisiana, so that her son’s varied experiences had begun early. “‘Bout women,” he smiled confidentially, holding out his empty glass to Mr. Raycie.
“The ladies —!” exclaimed Mr. Kent in a voice of warning.
The gentlemen rose to their feet, the Commodore quite as promptly and steadily as the others. The drawing-room window opened, and from it emerged Mrs. Raycie, in a ruffled sarsenet dress and Point de Paris cap, followed by her two daughters in starched organdy with pink spencers. Mr. Raycie looked with proud approval at his womenkind.
“Gentlemen,”