Selected Short Stories by James Henry;

Author:James, Henry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

II

NEARLY two years after Guy Firminger had spent that friendly hour in Mrs. Gosselin’s little garden in Hampshire this far-seeing woman was enabled (by the return of her son, who in New York, in an English bank, occupied a position in which they all rejoiced, to such great things might it possibly lead) to resume possession, for the season, of the little London house which her husband had left her to live in, but which her native thrift, in determining her to let it for a term, had converted into a source of income. Hugh Gosselin, who was thirty years old, and at twenty-three, before his father’s death, had been dispatched to America to exert himself, was understood to be doing very well—so well that his devotion to the interests of his employers had been rewarded, for the first time, with a real holiday. He was to remain in England from May to August, undertaking, as he said, to make it all right if during this time his mother should occupy (to contribute to his entertainment) the habitation in Chester Street. He was a small, preoccupied young man, with a sharpness as acquired as a new hat; he struck his mother and sister as intensely American. For the first few days after his arrival they were startled by his intonations, though they admitted that they had an escape when he reminded them that he might have brought with him an accent embodied in a wife.

“When you do take one,” said Mrs. Gosselin, who regarded such an accident over there as inevitable, “you must charge her high for it.”

It was not with this question, however, that the little family in Chester Street was mainly engaged, but with the last incident in the extraordinary succession of events which, like a chapter of romance, had in the course of a few months converted their vague and impecunious friend into a personage envied and honored. It was as if a blight had been cast on all Guy Firminger’s hindrances. On the day Hugh Gosselin sailed from New York the delicate little boy at Bosco had succumbed to an attack of diphtheria. His father had died of typhoid the previous winter at Naples; his uncle, a few weeks later, had had a fatal accident in the hunting-field. So strangely, so rapidly had the situation cleared up, had his fate and theirs worked for him. Guy had opened his eyes one morning to an earldom which carried with it a fortune not alone nominally but really great. Mrs. Gosselin and Mary had not written to him, but they knew he was at Bosco; he had remained there after the funeral of the late little lord. Mrs. Gosselin, who heard everything, had heard somehow that he was behaving with the greatest consideration, giving the guardians, the trustees, whatever they were called, plenty of time to do everything. Everything was comparatively simple; in the absence of collaterals there were so few other people concerned. The principal relatives were

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