A multitudinous clangor of bells and a dozen neighboring chimes rang
noon; then the rectangular oblongs of hot sunlight that fell from the
windows upon the carpet of Mellin's room began imperceptibly to shift
their angles and move eastward. From the stone pavement of the street
below came the sound of horses pawing and the voices of waiting cabmen;
then bells again, and more bells; clamoring the slow and cruel afternoon
into the past. But all was silent in Mellin's room, save when, from time
to time, a long, shuddering sigh came from the bed.
The unhappy young man had again drawn the coverlet over his head, but
not to sleep: it was more like a forlorn and desperate effort to hide,
as if he crept into a hole, seeking darkness to cover the shame and fear
that racked his soul. For though his shame had been too great to let him
confess to young Cooley and ask for help, his fear was as great as
his shame; and it increased as the hours passed. In truth his case was
desperate. Except the people who had stripped him, Cooley was the
only person in all of Europe with whom he had more than a very casual
acquaintance. At home, in Cranston, he had no friends susceptible
to such an appeal as it was vitally necessary for him to make. His
relatives were not numerous: there were two aunts, the widows of his
father's brothers, and a number of old-maid cousins; and he had an uncle
in Iowa, a country minister whom he had not seen for years. But he could
not cable to any of these for money; nor could he quite conjure his
imagination into picturing any of them sending it if he did. And even to
cable he would have to pawn his watch, which was an old-fashioned one of
silver and might not bring enough to pay the charges.
He began to be haunted by fragmentary, prophetic visions--confused but
realistic in detail, and horridly probable--of his ejectment from the
hotel, perhaps arrest and trial. He wondered what they did in Italy to
people who “beat” hotels; and, remembering what some one had told him
of the dreadfulness of Italian jails, convulsive shudderings seized upon
him.
The ruddy oblongs of sunlight crawled nearer to the east wall of the
room, stretching themselves thinner and thinner, until finally they
were not there at all, and the room was left in deepening grayness.
Carriages, one after the other, in unintermittent succession, rumbled
up to the hotel-entrance beneath the window, bringing goldfish for
the Pincio and the fountains of Villa Borghese. Wild strains from the
Hungarian orchestra, rhapsodical twankings of violins, and the runaway
arpeggios of a zither crazed with speed-mania, skipped along the
corridors and lightly through Mellin's door. In his mind's eye he saw
the gay crowd in the watery light, the little tables where only
five days ago he had sat with the loveliest of all the anemone-like
ladies....
The beautifully-dressed tea-drinkers were there now, under the green
glass dome, prattling and smiling, those people he had called his own.
And as the music sounded louder, faster, wilder and wilder with the
gipsy madness--then in that darkening bedchamber his soul became
articulate in a cry of humiliation--
“God in His mercy forgive me, how raw I was!”
A vision came before his closed eyes; the maple-bordered street in
Cranston, the long, straight, wide street where Mary Kramer lived; a
summer twilight; Mary in her white muslin dress on the veranda steps,
and a wistaria vine climbing the post beside her, half-embowering her.
How cool and sweet and good she looked! How dear--and how _kind_!--she
had always been to him.
Dusk stole through the windows: the music ceased and the tea-hour was
over. The carriages were departing, bearing the gay people who went
away laughing, calling last words to one another, and, naturally, quite
unaware that a young man, who, five days before, had adopted them and
called them “his own,” was lying in a darkened room above them, and
crying like a child upon his pillow.