James is sometimes accused of being stuffy. His prose may now be deemed old fashioned, but for
all that he is still in the first rank and well worth a modern
aficionado’s time. You can find his work at Project Gutenberg. If you’ve never read him till now, start with Daisy Miller or Washington Square –
the latter as beautiful, subtle and brutal as fiction ever gets.
—
She
had taken up her niece – there was little doubt of that. One wet
afternoon, some four months earlier than the occurrence lately
narrated, this young lady had been seated alone with a book. To say
she was so occupied is to say that her solitude did not press upon
her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilising quality and her
imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of
fresh taste in her situation which the arrival of an unexpected
visitor did much to correct. The visitor had not been announced; the
girl heard her at last walking about the adjoining room. It was in an
old house at Albany, a large, square, double house, with a notice of
sale in the windows of one of the lower apartments. There were two
entrances, one of which had long been out of use but had never been
removed. They were exactly alike – large white doors, with an
arched frame and wide side-lights, perched upon little “stoops”
of red stone, which descended sidewise to the brick pavement of the
street. The two houses together formed a single dwelling, the
party-wall having been removed and the rooms placed in communication.
These rooms, above-stairs, were extremely numerous, and were painted
all over exactly alike, in a yellowish white which had grown sallow
with time. On the third floor there was a sort of arched passage,
connecting the two sides of the house, which Isabel and her sisters
used in their childhood to call the tunnel and which, though it was
short and well lighted, always seemed to the girl to be strange and
lonely, especially on winter afternoons. She had been in the house,
at different periods, as a child; in those days her grandmother lived
there. Then there had been an absence of ten years, followed by a
return to Albany before her father’s death. Her grandmother, old
Mrs Archer, had exercised, chiefly within the limits of the family, a
large hospitality in the early period, and the little girls often
spent weeks under her roof – weeks of which Isabel had the happiest
memory. The manner of life was different from that of her own home –
larger, more plentiful, practically more festal; the discipline of
the nursery was delightfully vague and the opportunity of listening
to the conversation of one’s elders (which with Isabel was a
highly-valued pleasure) almost unbounded. There was a constant coming
and going; her grandmother’s sons and daughters and their children
appeared to be in the enjoyment of standing invitations to arrive and
remain, so that the house offered to a certain extent the appearance
of a bustling provincial inn kept by a gentle old landlady who sighed
a great deal and never presented a bill. Isabel of course knew
nothing about bills; but even as a child she thought her
grandmother’s home romantic. There was a covered piazza behind it,
furnished with a swing which was a source of tremulous interest; and
beyond this was a long garden, sloping down to the stable and
containing peach-trees of barely credible familiarity. Isabel had
stayed with her grandmother at various seasons, but somehow all her
visits had a flavour of peaches. On the other side, across the
street, was an old house that was called the Dutch House – a
peculiar structure dating from the earliest colonial time, composed
of bricks that had been painted yellow, crowned with a gable that was
pointed out to strangers, defended by a rickety wooden paling and
standing sidewise to the street. It was occupied by a primary school
for children of both sexes, kept or rather let go, by a demonstrative
lady of whom Isabel’s chief recollection was that her hair was
fastened with strange bedroomy combs at the temples and that she was
the widow of some one of consequence. The little girl had been
offered the opportunity of laying a foundation of knowledge in this
establishment; but having spent a single day in it, she had protested
against its laws and had been allowed to stay at home, where, in the
September days, when the windows of the Dutch House were open, she
used to hear the hum of childish voices repeating the multiplication
table – an incident in which the elation of liberty and the pain of
exclusion were indistinguishably mingled. The foundation of her
knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s
house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people,
she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with
frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down.
When she had found one to her taste – she was guided in the
selection chiefly by the frontispiece – she carried it into a
mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was
called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it
had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it
was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty
smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of
furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the
disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and
with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations
almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old haircloth sofa in
especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The
place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was
properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had
been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly
slender little girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this
silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights
had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon
the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had
no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory
that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side – a place
which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different
moods, a region of delight or of terror.
It
was in the “office” still that Isabel was sitting on that
melancholy afternoon of early spring which I have just mentioned. At
this time she might have had the whole house to choose from, and the
room she had selected was the most depressed of its scenes. She had
never opened the bolted door nor removed the green paper (renewed by
other hands) from its sidelights; she had never assured herself that
the vulgar street lay beyond. A crude, cold rain fell heavily; the
spring-time was indeed an appeal – and it seemed a cynical,
insincere appeal – to patience. Isabel, however, gave as little
heed as possible to cosmic treacheries; she kept her eyes on her book
and tried to fix her mind. It had lately occurred to her that her
mind was a good deal of a vagabond, and she had spent much ingenuity
in training it to a military step and teaching it to advance, to
halt, to retreat, to perform even more complicated manoeuvres, at the
word of command. Just now she had given it marching orders and it had
been trudging over the sandy plains of a history of German Thought.
Suddenly she became aware of a step very different from her own
intellectual pace; she listened a little and perceived that some one
was moving in the library, which communicated with the office. It
struck her first as the step of a person from whom she was looking
for a visit, then almost immediately announced itself as the tread of
a woman and a stranger – her possible visitor being neither. It had
an inquisitive, experimental quality which suggested that it would
not stop short of the threshold of the office; and in fact the
doorway of this apartment was presently occupied by a lady who paused
there and looked very hard at our heroine. She was a plain, elderly
woman, dressed in a comprehensive waterproof mantle; she had a face
with a good deal of rather violent point.
“Oh,”
she began, “is that where you usually sit?” She looked about at
the heterogeneous chairs and tables.
“Not
when I have visitors,” said Isabel, getting up to receive the
intruder.
She
directed their course back to the library while the visitor continued
to look about her. “You seem to have plenty of other rooms; they’re
in rather better condition. But everything’s immensely worn.”
“Have
you come to look at the house?” Isabel asked. “The servant will
show it to you.”
“Send
her away; I don’t want to buy it. She has probably gone to look for
you and is wandering about upstairs; she didn’t seem at all
intelligent. You had better tell her it’s no matter.” And then,
since the girl stood there hesitating and wondering, this unexpected
critic said to her abruptly: “I suppose you’re one of the
daughters?”
Isabel
thought she had very strange manners. “It depends upon whose
daughters you mean.”
“The
late Mr Archer’s – and my poor sister’s.”
“Ah,”
said Isabel slowly, “you must be our crazy Aunt Lydia!”
“Is
that what your father told you to call me? I’m your Aunt Lydia, but
I’m not at all crazy: I haven’t a delusion! And which of the
daughters are you?”
“I’m
the youngest of the three, and my name’s Isabel.”
“Yes;
the others are Lilian and Edith. And are you the prettiest?”
“I
haven’t the least idea,” said the girl.
“I
think you must be.” And in this way the aunt and the niece made
friends.
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