"Italia, oh, Italia, thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty which became
A funeral dower of present woes and past."
The words fell softly from the lips of Irene as she walked beneath the
shade of the orange and olive and lemon trees in the villa garden. The
balmy air was sweet with the breath of countless flowers, the birds sang
sweetly in the boughs above her head, and the blue waves of the Arno
ebbed and flowed at her feet with a pleasant murmur. Overhead the clear
blue sky of Italy, which poets have painted in deathless verse and
artists on immortal canvas, sparkled and glanced in all its radiant
sapphire beauty.
She was musing on the beauty and the sorrow of this lovely hapless land,
and the famous words of Byron came aptly to her lips. She repeated them
softly and sadly, and someone who had stolen upon her unaware answered
musingly:
"Do you believe with Byron that the gift of beauty is always fatal, Miss
Berlin?"
She started and flushed with annoyance. It was Julius Revington. He had
become her very shadow, seeming unable to exist out of her sight.
The beautiful girl in her white dress with the roses and myrtles in her
small hand, turned her face away pettishly.
"How you startled me, Mr. Revington," she said, in a tone of
displeasure. "I thought myself alone."
"You are very cruel to hide yourself out here in the orange ground,"
said the gentleman, sentimentally. "Do you know that I have been
searching for you everywhere?"
"No, I did not know it. If I had, I should have hidden myself in a
securer place than this," she replied, with all the frank cruelty of a
young girl.
"Miss Berlin, you are very cruel," complained the lover. "Sometimes I
really wonder whether you say such sharp things in earnest, or if you
are only coquetting."
The blue eyes flashed.
"I know nothing of coquetry," said Irene, sharply. "I mean everything
that I say."
He came nearer and looked under the brim of the shady hat at the lovely,
irritated face and sparkling eyes.
"Oh, Miss Berlin, why will you treat me so coldly when you know that I
love the very ground you walk upon?" he exclaimed, almost abjectly.
"I do not want your love," she answered, stamping her little foot
impatiently on the turf, as if the love he confessed for her lay
veritably beneath her feet.
His weakly, handsome face grew pale at her impetuous words.
"Wait, Irene, before you so cruelly reject me," he exclaimed. "You are
young, but not too young to know that it is wrong to trifle with the
human heart."
"I have not trifled with yours," she interrupted, flushing at the
imputation.
"But all the same your beauty has wiled my heart from me," he said. "I
have loved you from the first hour I saw your charming face. I lay my
heart, my hand, my fortune at your feet, Irene. Will you not take pity
on me and be my wife?"
The flowers fell from her hands down upon the sweet, green turf, and her
face grew pale with emotion. It was the first time a lover had ever
wooed her, yet she was a wife--a wife unwooed and unwon--yet bound, how
plainly she recalled the solemn, fateful words, by ties that no man
"should put asunder."
She looked at the dark, handsome face that showed at its best with that
light of love lingering on it. Between her and it another face arose,
languid, careless, indifferent, yet fascinating for the soul that looked
out of the bright, yet soft brown eyes. She remembered that she had
thought him handsome--handsomer than any of Bertha's and Elaine's
beaux--a flush rose slowly to her face as she remembered that she had
told him so.
"No wonder he despised me," she said to herself, and she turned back to
Mr. Revington trying to forget Guy Kenmore, for she was now ashamed of
the willfulness and spite she had displayed before him.
"Will you be my wife, Irene?" repeated her adoring lover.
"I cannot, Mr. Revington. I do not love you," she answered, in a gentler
tone than she had used to him before.
He threw himself impetuously at her feet and grasped her hands.
"Let me teach you to love me," he cried, abjectly.
Her crimson lips curled in faint scorn.
"I could not learn the lesson," she replied. "You are not the kind of
man whom I could love," and again the handsome face of Guy Kenmore rose
before her mind's eye.
"Why do I think of _him_?" she asked herself.
"What sort of a man _could_ you love, Miss Berlin?" he asked, almost
despairingly, and again the proud, handsome, indifferent face of Guy
Kenmore rose tormentingly before her.
"Why do I think of _him_?" she asked herself again, in wonder, and
forgetting to answer the question of the kneeling man. She had drawn her
hand away from his frenzied clasp, and now he gently plucked at her
dress to draw her attention.
"Irene, my love, my darling, my beautiful queen, take pity on me, and do
not reject me," he cried, pleadingly. "Tell me what manner of man you
could love, and I will make myself over by your model. I could do
anything, be anything, for your sweet sake!"
Again the blue eyes looked at him in faint scorn, and the red lips
curled.
"Do get up from the ground, Mr. Revington," she said. "It is quite
undignified; I dislike it very much."
He was too much carried away by his passion to observe the slight
inflection of scorn in her tone.
"No, I will not rise," he answered. "I will kneel at your feet, like the
veriest slave, until you retract your cruel refusal, and give me leave
to hope."
"But I cannot do so," she answered, more gently. "Do be reasonable, and
drop the subject, Mr. Revington. It is quite impossible, this that you
ask. I do not love you, and I cannot be your wife."
"You might learn to love me," he persisted, almost sullenly.
"Never. You do not realize my ideal," the girl replied, with an
unconscious blush.
"Tell me what your ideal is like, Irene," said her kneeling lover.
"I have read some lines that fit him," she replied, half dreamily, half
to herself, and still with that soft blush on her beautiful face. "I
will repeat them to you."
Yet she seemed to have forgotten him, as she fixed her eyes on the blue,
rolling waves of the Arno, and the words fell like music from her
beautiful lips:
"He to whom I give affection
Must have princely mein and guise.
If devotion lay below me,
I would stoop not for the prize
Bend down to me very lowly,
But bend always from above;
I would scorn where I could pity,
I must honor where I love.
"Did he come as other lovers
With his praises low and sweet,
Did he woo in the old phrases,
Kneeling humbly at my feet--
How my heart would be unfettered,
And my thoughts soar free and high,
As a bird that beats at morning
'Gainst the gateway of the sky.
"He must hold his perfect manhood,
He must keep his place of pride;
Bring me fond words as a lover,
And true words as friend and guide.
So in him my fate would meet me,
Life's surrender all complete,
Fearlessly I'd take my future,
And I'd lay it at his feet!"
Her ideal lover, so unlike himself, sent a blush of shame tingling to
his cheeks. He sprang hastily to his feet and looked down at her from
his tall hight sullenly.
"You are unlike all the women I have ever met before," he said, with
repressed anger. "You would have a man play the master, not the slave."
And in his heart he longed to be her master then and compel her love in
return for that which glowed in his heart.
She looked up at him with a slight smile.
"You misunderstand me," she replied. "I could not tolerate a master as
you mean it--a tyrant. Still less could I love a slave. My ideal must
have manly dignity and gracious pride. He must look like Jean Ingelow's
Laurance:
"'A mouth for mastery and manful work,
A certain brooding sweetness in the eyes,
A brow the harbor of grave thought, and hair
Saxon of hue.'"
"So I must change my looks as well as my nature before I can please my
lady," he said with sudden bitterness.
"Yes," she answered, with a light and careless laugh, for, to do her
justice, she did not dream how deep his love lay in his heart. She
believed him weak and fickle, as his face indicated, and as he was. If
he had won her, lovely and charming as she was, he must have wearied of
her in time, as it was his nature to do; but being unattainable she at
once became the one thing precious in his sight, without which he could
never know happiness.
He went away and left her to her solitude under the orange tree with its
glistening green leaves, its waxen-white flowers and golden globes of
fruit. She looked a little sadly at the flowers which had fallen from
her hands and which her kneeling lover had crushed into the turf.
"The great booby," she said indignantly to herself. "He has
remorselessly crushed all my beautiful flowers."
Was it an omen?