Edith Wharton - Novel 15 Read Online Free

“You
little spitfire, you!” he laughed back somewhat chokingly. “Yes, it’s our last
day—but not for long; at our age two years are not so very long, after all, are
they? And when I come back to you I’ll come as my own master, independent,
free—come to claim you in face of everything and everybody! Think of that, darling,
and be brave for my sake…brave and patient…as I mean to be!” he declared
heroically.
                 “Oh,
but you—you’ll see other girls; heaps and heaps of them; in those wicked old
countries where they’re so lovely. My uncle Kent says the European countries
are all wicked, even my own poor Italy …”
                 “But you , Treeshy; you’ll
be seeing cousins Bill and Donald meanwhile—seeing them all day long and every
day. And you know you’ve a weakness for that great hulk of a Bill. Ah,
if only I stood six-foot-one in my stockings I’d go with an easier heart, you
fickle child!” he tried to banter her.
                 “Fickle? Fickle? Me —oh, Lewis!”
                 He
felt the premonitory sweep of sobs, and his untried courage failed him. It was
delicious, in theory, to hold weeping beauty to one’s breast, but terribly
alarming, he found, in practice. There came a responsive twitching in his
throat.
                 “No,
no; firm as adamant, true as steel; that’s what we both mean to be, isn’t it,
cara?”
                 “Caro,
yes,” she sighed, appeased.
                 “And
you’ll write to me regularly, Treeshy—long long letters? I may count on that,
mayn’t I, wherever I am? And they must all be numbered, every one of them, so
that I shall know at once if I’ve missed one; remember!”
                 “And,
Lewis, you’ll wear them here?” (She touched his breast.) “Oh, not all ,” she added, laughing, “for they’d
make such a big bundle that you’d soon have a hump in front like Pulcinella—but
always at least the last one, just the last one. Promise!”
                 “Always,
I promise—as long as they’re kind,” he said, still struggling to take a
spirited line.
                 “Oh,
Lewis, they will be, as long as yours are—and long long afterward…”
                 Venus
failed and vanished in the sun’s uprising.
                   
     
  III.
 
 
                 The
crucial moment, Lewis had always known, would not be that of his farewell to
Treeshy, but of his final interview with his father.
                 On
that everything hung: his immediate future as well as his more distant
prospects. As he stole home in the early sunlight, over the dew-drenched grass,
he glanced up apprehensively at Mr. Raycie’s windows, and thanked his stars
that they were still tightly shuttered.
                 There
was no doubt, as Mrs. Raycie said, that her husband’s “using language” before
ladies showed him to be in high good humour, relaxed and slippered, as it
were—a state his family so seldom saw him in that Lewis had sometimes
impertinently wondered to what awful descent from the clouds he and his two
sisters owed their timorous being.
                 It
was all very well to tell himself, as he often did, that the bulk of the money
was his mother’s, and that he could turn her round his little finger. What
difference did that make? Mr. Raycie, the day after his marriage, had quietly
taken over the management of his wife’s property, and deducted, from the very
moderate allowance he accorded her, all her little personal expenses, even to
the postage-stamps she used, and the dollar she put in the plate every Sunday.
He called the allowance her “pin-money,” since, as he often reminded her, he
paid all the household bills himself, so that Mrs. Raycie’s quarterly pittance
could be entirely devoted, if she chose, to frills and feathers.