The glass-domed “palm-room” of the Grand Continental Hotel Magnifique in
Rome is of vasty heights and distances, filled with a mellow green light
which filters down languidly through the upper foliage of tall palms,
so that the two hundred people who may be refreshing or displaying
themselves there at the tea-hour have something the look of under-water
creatures playing upon the sea-bed. They appear, however, to be unaware
of their condition; even the ladies, most like anemones of that
gay assembly, do not seem to know it; and when the Hungarian band
(crustacean-like in costume, and therefore well within the picture)
has sheathed its flying tentacles and withdrawn by dim processes, the
tea-drinkers all float out through the doors, instead of bubbling up
and away through the filmy roof. In truth, some such exit as that was
imagined for them by a young man who remained in the aquarium after they
had all gone, late one afternoon of last winter. They had been marvelous
enough, and to him could have seemed little more so had they made such a
departure. He could almost have gone that way himself, so charged was
he with the uplift of his belief that, in spite of the brilliant
strangeness of the hour just past, he had been no fish out of water.
While the waiters were clearing the little tables, he leaned back in his
chair in a content so rich it was nearer ecstasy. He could not bear to
disturb the possession joy had taken of him, and, like a half-awake boy
clinging to a dream that his hitherto unkind sweetheart has kissed him,
lingered on in the enchanted atmosphere, his eyes still full of all they
had beheld with such delight, detaining and smiling upon each revelation
of this fresh memory--the flashingly lovely faces, the dreamily lovely
faces, the pearls and laces of the anemone ladies, the color and
romantic fashion of the uniforms, and the old princes who had been
pointed out to him: splendid old men wearing white mustaches and single
eye-glasses, as he had so long hoped and dreamed they did.
“Mine own people!” he whispered. “I have come unto mine own at last.
Mine own people!” After long waiting (he told himself), he had seen
them--the people he had wanted to see, wanted to know, wanted to
be _of!_ Ever since he had begun to read of the “beau monde” in his
schooldays, he had yearned to know some such sumptuous reality as that
which had come true to-day, when, at last, in Rome he had seen--as he
wrote home that night--“the finest essence of Old-World society mingling
in Cosmopolis.”
Artificial odors (too heavy to keep up with the crowd that had
worn them) still hung about him; he breathed them deeply, his eyes
half-closed and his lips noiselessly formed themselves to a quotation
from one of his own poems:
While trails of scent, like cobweb's films
Slender and faint and rare,
Of roses, and rich, fair fabrics,
Cling on the stirless air,
The sibilance of voices,
At a wave of Milady's glove,
Is stilled--
He stopped short, interrupting himself with a half-cough of laughter as
he remembered the inspiration of these verses. He had written them three
months ago, at home in Cranston, Ohio, the evening after Anna McCord's
“coming-out tea.” “Milady” meant Mrs. McCord; she had “stilled” the
conversation of her guests when Mary Kramer (whom the poem called a
“sweet, pale singer”) rose to sing Mavourneen; and the stanza closed
with the right word to rhyme with “glove.” He felt a contemptuous pity
for his little, untraveled, provincial self of three months ago, if,
indeed, it could have been himself who wrote verses about Anna McCord's
“coming-out tea” and referred to poor, good old Mrs. McCord as “Milady”!
The second stanza had intimated a conviction of a kind which only poets
may reveal:
She sang to that great assembly,
They thought, as they praised her tone;
But she and my heart knew better:
Her song was for me alone.
He had told the truth when he wrote of Mary Kramer as pale and sweet,
and she was paler, but no less sweet, when he came to say good-by to
her before he sailed. Her face, as it was at the final moment of the
protracted farewell, shone before him very clearly now for a moment:
young, plaintive, white, too lamentably honest to conceal how much her
“God-speed” to him cost her. He came very near telling her how fond of
her he had always been; came near giving up his great trip to remain
with her always.
“Ah!” He shivered as one shivers at the thought of disaster narrowly
averted. “The fates were good that I only came near it!”
He took from his breast-pocket an engraved card, without having to
search for it, because during the few days the card had been in his
possession the action had become a habit.
“Comtesse de Vaurigard,” was the name engraved, and below was written in
pencil: “To remember Monsieur Robert Russ Mellin he promise to come to
tea Hotel Magnifique, Roma, at five o'clock Thursday.”
There had been disappointment in the first stages of his journey, and
that had gone hard with Mellin. Europe had been his goal so long, and
his hopes of pleasure grew so high when (after his years of saving and
putting by, bit by bit, out of his salary in a real-estate office)
he drew actually near the shining horizon. But London, his first
stopping-place, had given him some dreadful days. He knew nobody, and
had not understood how heavily sheer loneliness--which was something he
had never felt until then--would weigh upon his spirits. In Cranston,
where the young people “grew up together,” and where he met a dozen
friends on the street in a half-hour's walk, he often said that he
“liked to be alone with himself.” London, after his first excitement in
merely being there, taught him his mistake, chilled him with weeks of
forbidding weather, puzzled and troubled him.
He was on his way to Paris when (as he recorded in his journal) a light
came into his life. This illumination first shone for him by means of
one Cooley, son and inheritor of all that had belonged to the late great
Cooley, of Cooley Mills, Connecticut. Young Cooley, a person of
cheery manners and bright waistcoats, was one of Mellin's few
sea-acquaintances; they had played shuffleboard together on the steamer
during odd half-hours when Mr. Cooley found it possible to absent
himself from poker in the smoking-room; and they encountered each other
again on the channel boat crossing to Calais.
_“Hey!”_ was Mr. Cooley's lively greeting. “I'm meetin' lots of people
I know to-day. You runnin' over to Paris, too? Come up to the boat-deck
and meet the Countess de Vaurigard.”
“Who?” said Mellin, red with pleasure, yet fearing that he did not hear
aright.
“The Countess de Vaurigard. Queen! met her in London. Sneyd introduced
me to her. You remember Sneyd on the steamer? Baldish Englishman--red
nose--doesn't talk much--younger brother of Lord Rugden, so he says.
Played poker some. Well, _yes!_”
“I saw him. I didn't meet him.”
“You didn't miss a whole lot. Fact is, before we landed I almost had him
sized up for queer, but when he introduced me to the Countess I saw my
mistake. He must be the real thing. _She_ certainly is! You come along
up and see.”
So Mellin followed, to make his bow before a thin, dark, charmingly
pretty young woman, who smiled up at him from her deck-chair through
an enhancing mystery of veils; and presently he found himself sitting
beside her. He could not help trembling slightly at first, but he would
have giving a great deal if, by some miraculous vision, Mary Kramer and
other friends of his in Cranston could have seen him engaged in what he
thought of as “conversational badinage” with the Comtesse de Vaurigard.
Both the lady and her name thrilled him. He thought he remembered the
latter in Froissart: it conjured up “baronial halls” and “donjon keeps,”
rang resonantly in his mind like “Let the portcullis fall!” At home he
had been wont to speak of the “oldest families in Cranston,” complaining
of the invasions of “new people” into the social territory of the
McCords and Mellins and Kramers--a pleasant conception which the
presence of a De Vaurigard revealed to him as a petty and shameful
fiction; and yet his humility, like his little fit of trembling, was
of short duration, for gay geniality of Madame de Vaurigard put him
amazingly at ease.
At Calais young Cooley (with a matter-of-course air, and not seeming to
feel the need of asking permission) accompanied her to a compartment,
and Mellin walked with them to the steps of the coach, where he paused,
murmuring some words of farewell.
Madame de Vaurigard turned to him with a prettily assumed dismay.
“What! You stay at Calais?” she cried, pausing with one foot on the step
to ascend. “Oh! I am sorry for you. Calais is ter-rible!”
“No. I am going on to Paris.”
“So? You have frien's in another coach which you wish to be wiz?”
“No, no, indeed,” he stammered hastily.
“Well, my frien',” she laughed gayly, “w'y don' you come wiz us?”
Blushing, he followed Cooley into the coach, to spend five happy hours,
utterly oblivious of the bright French landscape whirling by outside the
window.
There ensued a month of conscientious sightseeing in Paris, and that
unfriendly city afforded him only one glimpse of the Countess. She
whizzed by him in a big touring-car one afternoon as he stood on an
“isle of safety” at the foot of the Champs Elysees. Cooley was driving
the car. The raffish, elderly Englishman (whose name, Mellin knew,
was Sneyd) sat with him, and beside Madame de Vaurigard in the tonneau
lolled a gross-looking man--unmistakably an American--with a jovial,
red, smooth-shaven face and several chins. Brief as the glimpse was,
Mellin had time to receive a distinctly disagreeable impression of this
person, and to wonder how Heaven could vouchsafe the society of Madame
de Vaurigard to so coarse a creature.
All the party were dressed as for the road, gray with dust, and to all
appearances in a merry mood. Mellin's heart gave a leap when he saw that
the Countess recognized him. Her eyes, shining under a white veil, met
his for just the instant before she was quite by, and when the machine
had passed a little handkerchief waved for a moment from the side of the
tonneau where she sat.
With that he drew the full breath of Romance.
He had always liked to believe that _“grandes dames”_ leaned back in
the luxurious upholstery of their victorias, landaulettes, daumonts or
automobiles with an air of inexpressible though languid hauteur. The
Newport letter in the Cranston Telegraph often referred to it. But
the gayety of that greeting from the Countess' little handkerchief
was infinitely refreshing, and Mellin decided that animation was more
becoming than hauteur--even to a _“grande dame.”_
That night he wrote (almost without effort) the verses published in the
Cranston Telegraph two weeks later. They began:
_Marquise, ma belle_, with your kerchief of
lace
Awave from your flying car,
And your slender hand--
The hand to which he referred was the same which had arrested his
gondola and his heart simultaneously, five days ago, in Venice. He was
on his way to the station when Madame de Vaurigard's gondola shot out
into the Grand Canal from a narrow channel, and at her signal both boats
paused.
“Ah! but you fly away!” she cried, lifting her eyebrows mournfully,
as she saw the steamer-trunk in his gondola. “You are goin' return to
America?”
“No. I'm just leaving for Rome.”
“Well, in three day' _I_ am goin' to Rome!” She clapped her hands
lightly and laughed. “You know this is three time' we meet jus' by
chance, though that second time it was so quick--_pff_! like that--we
didn't talk much togezzer! Monsieur Mellin,” she laughed again, “I think
we mus' be frien's. Three time'--an' we are both goin' to Rome! Monsieur
Mellin, you believe in _Fate_?”
With a beating heart he did.
Thence came the invitation to meet her at the Magnifique for tea, and
the card she scribbled for him with a silver pencil. She gave it with
the prettiest gesture, leaning from her gondola to his as they parted.
She turned again, as the water between them widened, and with her “_Au
revoir_” offered him a faintly wistful smile to remember.
All the way to Rome the noises of the train beat out the measure of his
Parisian verses:
_Marquise, ma belle_, with your kerchief of
lace
Awave from your flying car--
He came out of his reverie with a start. A dozen men and women, dressed
for dinner, with a gold-fish officer or two among them, swam leisurely
through the aquarium on their way to the hotel restaurant. They were the
same kind of people who had sat at the little tables for tea--people of
the great world, thought Mellin: no vulgar tourists or “trippers” among
them; and he shuddered at the remembrance of his pension (whither it was
time to return) and its conscientious students of Baedeker, its dingy
halls and permanent smell of cold food. Suddenly a high resolve lit his
face: he got his coat and hat from the brass-and-blue custodian in the
lobby, and without hesitation entered the “bureau.”
“I 'm not quite satisfied where I am staying--where I'm stopping, that
is,” he said to the clerk. “I think I'll take a room here.”
“Very well, sir. Where shall I send for your luggage?”
“I shall bring it myself,” replied Mellin coldly, “in my cab.”
He did not think it necessary to reveal the fact that he was staying at
one of the cheaper pensions; and it may be mentioned that this reticence
(as well as the somewhat chilling, yet careless, manner of a gentleman
of the “great world” which he assumed when he returned with his trunk
and bag) very substantially increased the rate put upon the room he
selected at the Magnifique. However, it was with great satisfaction
that he found himself installed in the hotel, and he was too recklessly
exhilarated, by doing what he called the “right thing,” to waste any
time wondering what the “right thing” would do to the diminishing pad of
express checks he carried in the inside pocket of his waistcoat.
“Better live a fortnight like a gentleman,” he said, as he tossed his
shoes into a buhl cabinet, “than vegetate like a tourist for a year.”
He had made his entrance into the “great world” and he meant to hold his
place in it as one “to the manor born.” Its people should not find
him lacking: he would wear their manner and speak their language--no
gaucherie should betray him, no homely phrase escape his lips.
This was the chance he had always hoped for, and when he fell asleep
in his gorgeous, canopied bed, his soul was uplifted with happy
expectations.