THE OTHER MAN
In Florence the nascent swan-feathers of Anne Champneys grew into
perfect plumage. She was like a spirit new-born to another world,
with all the dun-colored ties of a darker existence swept away, and
only a residue of thought and feeling left of its former experience.
This bright and rosy world, enriched by nature and art, was so new,
its values were so different, that at first she was dazed into
dumbness by it.
She came face to face with beauty and art made a part of daily
life. She thought she had never seen color, or flowers, or even a
real sky, until now. An existence unimaginably rich, vistas that
receded into an almost fabled past, opened and spread before her
glamourously. The vividness of her impressions, her reaction to
this new phase of experience, the whole-souled ardor with which
she flung herself into the study of Italian, her eagerness to know
more, her delight in the fine old house in which they had set up
their household gods, amused and charmed Mrs. Vandervelde. She
felt as if she were teaching and training an unspoiled, delighted,
and delightful child, and contact with this fresh and eager spirit
stimulated her own.
Many of her former school friends, girls belonging to fine
Florentine families, some now noble matrons, mothers of families,
one or two great conventual superioresses, still resided in the
city, and these welcomed their beloved Marcia delightedly. There
were, too, the American and English colonies, and a coterie of
well-known artists. Marcia Vandervelde was a born hostess, a center
around which the brightest and cleverest naturally revolved. She
changed the large, drafty rooms of the old palace into charming
reflections of her own personality. A woman of wide sympathies and
cultivated tastes, she delighted in the clever cosmopolitan society
that gathered in her drawing-room; and it was in this opalescent
social sea that she launched young Mrs. Champneys.
Mrs. Champneys was at first but a mild success, a sort of pale
luminosity reflected from the more dominant Mrs. Vandervelde. But it
so happened, that a gifted young Italian lost his heart at sight to
her red hair and green eyes, and discovering that she had no heart
of her own--at least, none for him--he wrote, in a sort of frenzy of
inspiration, a very fine sonnet sequence narrating his hapless
passion. The poet had been as extravagantly assertive as poets in
love usually are, and the sonnets were really notable; so the young
man was swept into a gust of fame; all Italy read his verse and
sympathized with him. The object of a popular poet's romantic and
unfortunate love is always the object of curiosity and interest, as
Anne Champneys discovered to her surprise and annoyance.
"He was such a little idiot!" she told Marcia Vandervelde,
disgustedly. "Always sighing and rolling his eyes, and looking at
one like a sick calf,--more than once I was tempted to catch him by
the shoulders and shake him!"
"He's a poet, my child," said Mrs. Vandervelde, mischievously, "and
you're the lady in the case. It's been the making of him, and it
hasn't done you any harm: you'll be a legend in your own lifetime."
Marcia was quite right. The poet's love clung to Anne like an
intangible perfume, and a halo of romance encircled her red head.
The Florentines discovered that she was beautiful; the English and
Americans, cooler in judgment, found her charming. And a noted
German artist came along and declared that he had found in her his
ideal Undine.
Mrs. Peter remained unchanged and unimpressed. She shrugged
indifferent shoulders; she wasn't particularly interested in herself
as the object of poetic adoration.
She was, however, immensely interested in the beauty and romance of
Florence. The street crowds, so vivacious, so good-humored, the
vivid Florentine faces, enchanted her. More astonishing than storied
buildings, or even imperishable art, were the figures that moved
across the red-and-gold background of the city's history,--figures
like Dante, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and that great prior of San
Marco whose "soul went out in fire." Curiously enough, it was
Savonarola who made the most profound impression upon her. It seemed
to her that the immortal monk still dominated Florence, and when
she saw his old worn crucifix in his cell at San Marco, something
awoke in her spirit,--a sense of religious values. Religion, then,
was not a mere fixed convention, subscribed to as a sort of proof of
conservatism and respectability; religion was really a fixed
reality, an eternal power. She read everything that she could lay
her hands on covering the history of Fra Girolamo. Then she bought a
picture of his red Indian-like visage, and hung it up in her room.
The titanic reformer remained, a shadowy but very deep power, in the
background of her consciousness, and it was this long-dead preacher
who taught her to pray. He won her profoundest reverence and faith,
because he had been true, he had sealed his faith with his life; she
felt that she could trust him. His honesty appealed to her own.
It was such curious phases as this of the girl's unfolding
character, that made her a never-failing source of interest to
Marcia Vandervelde. Under her superimposed, surface indifference,
Marcia reflected, Anne had a deep strain of pure unworldliness, vast
possibilities. Give Anne an ideal, once arouse her enthusiasm, and
she was capable of tossing aside the world for it. Marcia was vastly
interested, too, in the serene detachment of the girl's attitude
toward all those with whom she came in contact. One might evoke
interest, sympathy, compassion, even a quiet friendliness, but her
heart remained quiet, aloof, secure from invasion. Handsome young
men who fell in love with her--and there were several such--seemed
unable to stir any emotion in her, except perhaps, an impatient
resentment. Marcia, of course, knew nothing of Glenn Mitchell. But
Anne Champneys remembered him poignantly. She had learned her
lesson.
They had been some six or eight months in Florence when Mr. Berkeley
Hayden put in his appearance, somewhat to Mrs. Vandervelde's
surprise. She had not expected this! She studied her old friend
speculatively. H'm! She remembered the pale face of the young
Italian poet whose sad sonnets all Italy was reading with delight.
Then she looked at the red-headed source of those sonnets,--and she
had no doubt as to the cause of Mr. Hayden's appearance in Florence
at this time,--and wondered a bit. The situation gave a fillip to
her imagination; it was piquant. One wondered how it would end.
Peter Champneys? Marcia scented disruption, where that impalpable
relationship was concerned. She was ignorant as to Anne's real
feelings and intentions in regard to her absentee husband. Anne
never mentioned him. She bore his name, she held herself rigidly
aloof from all lovers; herein one saw her sole concessions to the
tie binding her. Marcia didn't see how it was possible that the two
should avoid hating each other; the mere fact that they had been
arbitrarily forced upon each other by the imperious will of old
Chadwick, would inevitably militate against any hope of future
affection between them. And now here was Berkeley Hayden, quite as
imperious as Chadwick Champneys had ever been, and who was quite as
successful in getting what he wanted.
Anne had welcomed Mr. Hayden gladly. She was honestly delighted to
see him. Florence had taught her, signally, the depths of her own
lack of culture, and this biting knowledge increased her respect for
Mr. Berkeley Hayden. Marcia was immensely clever, charmingly
cultivated, a woman of the world in the best sense, but Anne's
native shrewdness told her that Marcia's knowledge was not equal to
Hayden's. His culture was surer and deeper. He was more than a mere
amateur; he _knew_. He stood apart, in her mind, and just a little
higher than anybody else. She turned to him eagerly, and there was
established between them, almost unconsciously, the most potent,
perfect, and dangerous of all relationships, because it is the most
beautiful and natural,--that, in which the man is the teacher and
the woman the pupil.
Hayden saw her, too, to greater advantage, here under this
Florentine sky, against the background of perhaps the most beautiful
city in the world. She glowed, splendidly young and vivid. She did
not laugh often, but when she did, it was like a peal of music; it
came straight from her heart and went direct to yours. It was as
catching as fire, as exhilarating as the chime of sleigh-bells on a
frosty Thanksgiving morning, as clear and true as a redbird's
whistle; and it had tucked away in it a funny, throaty chuckle so
irresistibly infectious that suspicious old St. Anthony himself,
would have joined in accord with it, had he heard its silver echo
in his wilderness. Berkeley Hayden's immortal soul stood on the
tiptoe of ecstasy when Anne Champneys laughed.
She no longer thought of herself as Nancy Simms; she knew herself
now as Anne Champneys, a newer and better personality dominating
that old, unhappy, ignorant self. If at times the man glimpsed that
other shadowy self of hers, it was part of her mysterious appeal,
her enthralling, baffling charm. It invested her with a shade of
inscrutable, prescient sorrow, as of old unhappy far-off things. He
hadn't the faintest idea of Nancy Simms, a creature utterly foreign
to his experience. And because she did not love him, Anne Champneys
never spoke of that old self, never confided in him. He did not know
her as she had been, he only knew her as she was now. That, however,
fully satisfied his critical taste. The marvel of her alabaster
skin, fleckless and flawless, the glory of her glittering red hair,
the sea-depths of her cool, gray-green eyes, the reserve of her
expression, the virginal curve of her lip, enchanted him. He liked
the tall, slender strength of her, the lightness of her step, her
grace when she danced, her spirited pose when she rode. Here was the
woman, the one woman, to bear his name, to be the mistress of his
house. She was the only woman he had ever really wished to marry.
And she was nominally married to Peter Champneys.
Hayden was honorable. Had hers been a real marriage, had she been a
happy wife, he would have respected the tie that bound her, and
gone his way. But the situation was exceptional. She wasn't really a
wife at all, and like Mrs. Vandervelde, he could see in such a
marriage nothing but a cause for mutual disgust and dislike. Well,
then, if he loved her, and Peter Champneys didn't, he certainly was
not working Peter Champneys any harm in winning away from him a wife
he didn't want. Why should he stand aside and let her go, for such a
shadow as that ceremony had been? The Champneys money? That meant
nothing weighed in the balance with his desire. He could give her as
much, and more, than she would forego. Mrs. Berkeley Hayden would
eclipse Mrs. Peter Champneys.
Deliberately, then, but delicately, after his fashion, Hayden set
himself to win Anne Champneys. He felt that his passion for her gave
him the right. He meant to make her happy. She could have her
marriage annulled. Then she would become Mrs. Berkeley Hayden. Even
the fact that he really knew very little about her did not trouble
him. He coveted her, and he meant to have her.
He read the young Italian's sonnets, which she had inspired, and
they made him thoughtful. He could readily understand the depths of
feeling such a woman could arouse. Had she no heart, as the Italian
lamented? He wondered. It came to him that she was, in truth,
detached, sufficient to herself, an ungregarious creature moving
solitarily in a mysterious world all her own. What did she think?
What did she feel? He didn't know. He was allowed to see certain
aspects of her intelligence, and her quickness of perception, the
delicacy of her fancy, her childlike and morning freshness, and a
pungently shrewd Americanism that flashed out at odd and unexpected
moments, never failed to delight him. But her deeper thoughts, her
real feelings, her heart, remained sealed and closed to him.
He saw half-pleasedly, half-jealously the interest she aroused in
other men. Nothing but her almost unbelievable indifference held his
jealousy in check. He reflected with satisfaction that she was
on a friendlier footing with him than with any other man of her
acquaintance, that she had a more instant welcome for him than for
any other, and for which cause he was cordially hated by several
otherwise amiable gentlemen. And then he waxed gloomy, remembering
how emotionless, how impersonal, that friendship really was. At
times he laughed at himself wryly, recalling the passionate
friendship other women had lavished upon him, and how wearisome it
had been to him, how he had wished to escape it. If but a modicum of
that passion had been bestowed upon him by this girl, how changed
the world would be for him!
And in the meantime Anne Champneys liked him serenely, was grateful
to him, aware that his intellect was as a key that was unlocking her
own; welcomed him openly and was maddeningly respectful to him. This
made him rage. What did she think he was, anyhow? An old professor,
an antiquarian, an archæologist? She might as well consider him an
antediluvian at once!
"Marcia," he said to Mrs. Vandervelde one evening, "I want you to
tell me all you know about this Champneys business. Just exactly how
does the affair stand?" Anne had been carried off by some American
friends, the smart throng that had filled Mrs. Vandervelde's rooms
had gone, and Hayden and his hostess had the big, softly lighted
drawing-room to themselves. At his query Mrs. Vandervelde turned in
her chair, shading her eyes with her hand the better to observe him.
"Why, you know as much as I do, Berkeley! You know how and why the
marriage was contracted, and what hinges upon it," said she,
cautiously.
He made an impatient gesture. "I want to know what she's going to
do. Surely she isn't going to allow herself to be bound by that old
lunatic's will, is she?"
"He wasn't an old lunatic; he was an old genius. Jason had an almost
superstitious reverence for his judgment. Somehow, his plans always
managed to come out all right,--in the end. Even when they seemed
wild, they came out all right. They're still coming out all right."
"And you think this insane marriage is likely to come out all right
in the end, too?" he asked sharply.
"I don't know. Stranger things have happened. Why shouldn't this?"
"Why should it? That fellow Champneys--"
"Is said to be a great painter. At least, he is certainly a very
successful one. Whether or not he can make good as Anne Champneys's
husband remains to be seen." Mrs. Vandervelde was not above the
innate feminine cattiness. Hayden rose abruptly and began to pace
the room. He was vaguely aware that he had been astrally scratched
across the nose.
"And you think a girl like Anne will be willing to play patient
Griselda?" he asked, scornfully.
"I don't know. You think she shouldn't?"
"I think she shouldn't. I tell you frankly he doesn't deserve it."
"Oh, as for that!" said Mrs. Vandervelde, airily.
Hayden paused in his restless walk, and looked at her earnestly.
"Berkeley," said she, changing her light tone, "am I to understand
that you are--really in earnest?"
"I am so much in earnest," he replied, deliberately, "that I do not
mind telling you, Marcia, that I want this girl. More, I mean to
have her, if I can make her care for me."
She considered this carefully. He had never known what it meant to
have his wishes thwarted, and now he would move heaven and earth to
win Anne Champneys. Well, but!--She liked Hayden, and she didn't
think, all things considered, that Anne Champneys could do better,
if she wished to have her marriage to Peter annulled, than to marry
Berkeley. But how would Jason consider such a move? Jason had been
greatly attached to old Mr. Champneys. Indeed, his connection with
that astute old wizard had just about doubled their income. Jason
wouldn't be likely to look with friendly eyes upon this bringing to
naught, what he knew had been Champneys's fondest scheme. She said,
after a pause:
"Does Anne know?"
"Who knows what Anne knows? But on the face of it, I should say
she doesn't. At least, she doesn't appear to. I have been
very--circumspect," said he, moodily. And he added angrily: "She
seems to regard me as a sort of cicerone, a perambulating, vocal
Baedeker!"
Mrs. Vandervelde smiled openly. "It is your surest hold upon her. I
shouldn't cavil at it, if I were you. To Anne you are the sum total
of human knowledge. Your dictum is the last word to be said about
anything."
But Berkeley still looked sulky. The idea of being what Sydney Smith
said Macaulay was--_a book in breeches_--didn't appeal to him at
all.
"What would you advise me to do?" he asked, after a pause.
She said reflectively: "Let her alone for a while, Berkeley. If her
liking for you grows naturally into affection,--and it may, you
know,--that would be best. If you try to force it, you may drive her
from you altogether. I tell you frankly, she is not in the least
interested in any man as a lover, so far as I can judge."
He was forced to admit the truth of this. She wasn't. She seemed to
dislike any faintest sign of loverliness from any man toward her.
Hayden had observed her icy attitude toward the painter who had
fancied he found in her his ideal Undine, and who showed too openly
his desire to help her gain a soul for herself. The idea that she
might look at him as she had looked at the painter was highly
unpleasant to him. He asked again:
"But what am I to do?"
"Nothing," said Mrs. Vandervelde, succinctly.
"But suppose she falls in love with somebody else."
"She is more likely to fall in love with you, I should imagine, if
you keep quiet for a while and allow her to do so. Just remain her
guide, philosopher, and friend, can't you?"
The clever, cosmopolitan Mr. Berkeley Hayden tugged at his short
mustache and looked astonishingly like a sulky school-boy.
"Well, if you think that's the best thing I can do--" he began.
"I know it is," said she. And she reflected that even the cleverest
man, when he is really in love, is something of a fool.
Here Anne herself came in and the three dined together, a statuesque
maid in a yellow bodice and a purple skirt waiting on them. Agata's
"Si?" was like a flute-note, and the two women loved to see her
moving about their rooms. It was like having Hebe wait on them.
Anne turned to Hayden eagerly. She wished his opinion of a piece of
tapestry an antiquarian in the Via Ricasoli wished to sell her.
Would he go and look at it with her? And there was an old lamp she
fancied but of the genuineness of which she wasn't sure. And she
added, dropping her voice, that she'd gotten a copy of one of Fra
Girolamo Savonarola's sermons, beautifully done on vellum, evidently
by some loving monkish follower of his. Didn't he want to see it?
She looked at him eagerly. Mrs. Vandervelde, catching his eye,
smiled.
Hayden played his part beautifully, concealing the tumult of his
feelings under the polished surface of the serene manner that Anne
so greatly admired. He made himself indispensable; he gave her his
best, unstintedly, and Hayden at his best was inimitable. Marcia
Vandervelde regarded him with new respect and admiration. Berkeley
was really wonderful!
When he took his departure, Anne Champneys felt that the glamour of
Florence had departed with him. It was as if the sunshine had been
withdrawn, along with that polished presence, that gem-like mind.
She missed him to an extent that astonished her. She thought that
even Giotto's Campanile looked bleak, the day Berkeley Hayden left.
"I'm going to miss you hideously," she told him truthfully.
"I hope so," he said guardedly. He did not wish to show too plainly
how overjoyed he was at that admission. "And I'm going to hope
you'll find me necessary in New York. I'm looking forward to seeing
you in New York, you know. I have two new pictures I want you to
see."
Her face brightened. "Your being there will make me glad to go back
to New York," she said happily. And Hayden had to resist a wild
impulse to shout, to catch her in his arms. He went away with hope
in his heart.
But Mrs. Vandervelde, watching her closely, thought she was too
open in her regret. N-no, Anne wasn't in love with Hayden--yet. She
picked up her studies, to which he had given impetus, with too
hearty a zest. And when he wrote her amusing, witty, delightful
letters, she was too willing to have Marcia read them.
They remained in Italy six months or so more; and then one day Anne
returned from a picnic, and said to Marcia abruptly:
"Would you mind if I asked you to leave Florence,--if I should want
to go home?"
Marcia said quietly: "No. If you wish to go, we will go. Are you
tired of Italy?"
Anne Champneys looked at her with wide eyes. For a moment she
hesitated, then ran to Marcia, and clung to her with her head
against her friend's shoulder.
"You're so good to me--and I care so much for you,--I'll tell you
the truth," she said in a whisper. "I--I heard something to-day,
Marcia,--_he's_ coming to Rome--soon. And of course he'll come here,
too."
"He?--Who?"
"Peter Champneys," said Peter's wife, and literally shook in her
shoes. Her clasp tightened. Marcia put her arms around her, and
felt, to her surprise, that Anne was frightened.
"You are sure?"
"Yes. I heard it accidentally, but I am sure. You know how pretty
the Arno is at the spot where we picnicked. We strolled about, and
I--didn't want to talk to anybody, so I slipped away by myself.
There were a couple of English artists painting near by, and just as
I came up I overheard what they were saying. Marcia,--they were
talking about--_him_. They said he'd been called to Rome to paint
somebody's picture,--the pope's, maybe,--and they'd probably see him
here, later. They seemed to be--friends of his, from the way they
spoke." She shivered. "Italy isn't big enough to hold us two!" she
said, desperately. "Marcia, I can't--run the risk of meeting Peter
Champneys. Not until I have to. I--I've got to get away!" Her voice
broke.
"All right, dear. We'll go," said Marcia, soothingly. "Jason's about
finished his work in Brazil, and he'll be back in New York by this.
Do you want to go directly home?"
"Yes," said Anne Champneys. "Italy's a very little place compared
with America. Let's go back to America, Marcia."
Mrs. Vandervelde stroked the red head. It seemed to her that fate
was playing into Mr. Berkeley Hayden's hands.