The vice-consul was not sure how far his powers went in the situation
with which Mrs. Lander had finally embarrassed him. But he met the new
difficulties with patience, and he agreed with Clementina that they
ought to see if Mrs. Lander had left any written expression of her
wishes concerning the event. She had never spoken of such a chance, but
had always looked forward to getting well and going home, so far as the
girl knew, and the most careful search now brought to light nothing that
bore upon it. In the absence of instructions to the contrary, they did
what they must, and the body, emptied of its life of senseless worry and
greedy care, was laid to rest in the island cemetery of Venice.
When all was over, the vice-consul ventured an observation which he had
hitherto delicately withheld. The question of Mrs. Lander's kindred had
already been discussed between him and Clementina, and he now felt that
another question had duly presented itself. “You didn't notice,” he
suggested, “anything like a will when we went over the papers?” He
had looked carefully for it, expecting that there might have been some
expression of Mrs. Lander's wishes in it. “Because,” he added, “I happen
to know that Mr. Milray drew one up for her; I witnessed it.”
“No,” said Clementina, “I didn't see anything of it. She told me she had
made a will; but she didn't quite like it, and sometimes she thought she
would change it. She spoke of getting you to do it; I didn't know but
she had.”
The vice-consul shook his head. “No. And these relations of her
husband's up in Michigan; you don't know where they live, exactly?”
“No. She neva told me; she wouldn't; she didn't like to talk about them;
I don't even know their names.”
The vice-consul thoughtfully scratched a corner of his chin through his
beard. “If there isn't any will, they're the heirs. I used to be a sort
of wild-cat lawyer, and I know that much law.”
“Yes,” said Clementina. “She left them five thousand dollas apiece. She
said she wished she had made it ten.”
“I guess she's made it a good deal more, if she's made it anything. Miss
Claxon, don't you understand that if no will turns up, they come in for
all her money.
“Well, that's what I thought they ought to do,” said Clementina.
“And do you understand that if that's so, you don't come in for
anything? You must excuse me for mentioning it; but she has told
everybody that you were to have it, and if there is no will--”
He stopped and bent an eye of lack-lustre compassion on the girl, who
replied, “Oh, yes. I know that; it's what I always told her to do. I
didn't want it.”
“You didn't want it?”
“No.”
“Well!” The vice-consul stared at her, but he forbore the comment that
her indifference inspired. He said after a pause, “Then what we've got
to do is to advertise for the Michigan relations, and let 'em take any
action they want to.”
“That's the only thing we could do, I presume.”
This gave the vice-consul another pause. At the end of it he got to his
feet. “Is there anything I can do for you, Miss Claxon?”
She went to her portfolio and produced Mrs. Lander's letter of credit.
It had been made out for three thousand pounds, in Clementina's name as
well as her own; but she had lived wastefully since she had come abroad,
and little money remained to be taken up. With the letter Clementina
handed the vice-consul the roll of Italian and Austrian bank-notes which
she had drawn when Mrs. Lander decided to leave Venice; they were to the
amount of several thousand lire and golden. She offered them with the
insensibility to the quality of money which so many women have, and
which is always so astonishing to men. “What must I do with these?” she
asked.
“Why, keep them! returned the vice-consul on the spur of his surprise.
“I don't know as I should have any right to,” said Clementina. “They
were hers.”
“Why, but”--The vice-consul began his protest, but he could not end it
logically, and he did not end it at all. He insisted with Clementina
that she had a right to some money which Mrs. Lander had given her
during her life; he took charge of the bank-notes in the interest of the
possible heirs, and gave her his receipt for them. In the meantime he
felt that he ought to ask her what she expected to do.
“I think,” she said, “I will stay in Venice awhile.”
The vice-consul suppressed any surprise he might have felt at a decision
given with mystifying cheerfulness. He answered, Well, that was right;
and for the second time he asked her if there was anything he could do
for her.
“Why, yes,” she returned. “I should like to stay on in the house here,
if you could speak for me to the padrone.”
“I don't see why you shouldn't, if we can make the padrone understand
it's different.”
“You mean about the price?” The vice-consul nodded. “That's what I want
you should speak to him about, Mr. Bennam, if you would. Tell him that
I haven't got but a little money now, and he would have to make it very
reasonable. That is, if you think it would be right for me to stay, afta
the way he tried to treat Mrs. Lander.”
The vice-consul gave the point some thought, and decided that the
attempted extortion need not make any difference with Clementina, if she
could get the right terms. He said he did not believe the padrone was a
bad fellow, but he liked to take advantage of a stranger when he could;
we all did. When he came to talk with him he found him a man of heart if
not of conscience. He entered into the case with the prompt intelligence
and vivid sympathy of his race, and he made it easy for Clementina to
stay till she had heard from her friends in America. For himself and
for his wife, he professed that she could not stay too long, and they
proposed that if it would content the signorina still further they would
employ Maddalena as chambermaid till she wished to return to Florence;
she had offered to remain if the signorina stayed.
“Then that is settled,” said Clementina with a sigh of relief; and she
thanked the vice-consul for his offer to write to the Milrays for her,
and said that she would rather write herself.
She meant to write as soon as she heard from Mr. Hinkle, which could
not be long now, for then she could be independent of the offers of help
which she dreaded from Miss Milray, even more than from Mrs. Milray; it
would be harder to refuse them; and she entered upon a passage of her
life which a nature less simple would have found much more trying.
But she had the power of taking everything as if it were as much to be
expected as anything else. If nothing at all happened she accepted the
situation with implicit resignation, and with a gayety of heart which
availed her long, and never wholly left her.
While the suspense lasted she could not write home as frankly as before,
and she sent off letters to Middlemount which treated of her delay in
Venice with helpless reticence. They would have set another sort of
household intolerably wondering and suspecting, but she had the comfort
of knowing that her father would probably settle the whole matter by
saying that she would tell what she meant when she got round to it; and
apart from this she had mainly the comfort of the vice-consul's society.
He had little to do besides looking after her, and he employed himself
about this in daily visits which the padrone and his wife regarded as
official, and promoted with a serious respect for the vice-consular
dignity. If the visits ended, as they often did, in a turn on the Grand
Canal, and an ice in the Piazza, they appealed to the imagination of
more sophisticated witnesses, who decided that the young American girl
had inherited the millions of the sick lady, and become the betrothed
of the vice-consul, and that they were thus passing the days of their
engagement in conformity to the American custom, however much at
variance with that of other civilizations.
This view of the affair was known to Maddalena, but not to Clementina,
who in those days went back in many things to the tradition of her life
at Middlemount. The vice-consul was of a tradition almost as simple, and
his longer experience set no very wide interval between them. It
quickly came to his telling her all about his dead wife and his married
daughters, and how, after his home was broken up, he thought he would
travel a little and see what that would do for him. He confessed that
it had not done much; he was always homesick, and he was ready to go as
soon as the President sent out a consul to take his job off his hands.
He said that he had not enjoyed himself so much since he came to Venice
as he was doing now, and that he did not know what he should do if
Clementina first got her call home. He betrayed no curiosity as to
the peculiar circumstances of her stay, but affected to regard it as
something quite normal, and he watched over her in every way with a
fatherly as well as an official vigilance which never degenerated into
the semblance of any other feeling. Clementina rested in his care in
entire security. The world had quite fallen from her, or so much of it
as she had seen at Florence, and in her indifference she lapsed into
life as it was in the time before that with a tender renewal of
her allegiance to it. There was nothing in the conversation of the
vice-consul to distract her from this; and she said and did the things
at Venice that she used to do at Middlemount, as nearly as she could; to
make the days of waiting pass more quickly, she tried to serve herself
in ways that scandalized the proud affection of Maddalena. It was not
fit for the signorina to make her bed or sweep her room; she might sew
and knit if she would; but these other things were for servants like
herself. She continued in the faith of Clementina's gentility, and saw
her always as she had seen her first in the brief hour of her social
splendor in Florence. Clementina tried to make her understand how
she lived at Middlemount, but she only brought before Maddalena the
humiliating image of a contadina, which she rejected not only in
Clementina's behalf, but that of Miss Milray. She told her that she was
laughing at her, and she was fixed in her belief when the girl laughed
at that notion. Her poverty she easily conceived of; plenty of signorine
in Italy were poor; and she protected her in it with the duty she did
not divide quite evenly between her and the padrone.
The date which Clementina had fixed for hearing from Hinkle by cable
had long passed, and the time when she first hoped to hear from him by
letter had come and gone. Her address was with the vice-consul as Mrs.
Lander's had been, and he could not be ignorant of her disappointment
when he brought her letters which she said were from home. On the
surface of things it could only be from home that she wished to hear,
but beneath the surface he read an anxiety which mounted with each
gratification of this wish. He had not seen much of the girl while
Hinkle was in Venice; Mrs. Lander had not begun to make such constant
use of him until Hinkle had gone; Mrs. Milray had told him of
Clementina's earlier romance, and it was to Gregory that the vice-consul
related the anxiety which he knew as little in its nature as in its
object.
Clementina never doubted the good faith or constancy of her lover; but
her heart misgave her as to his well-being when it sank at each failure
of the vice-consul to bring her a letter from him. Something must have
happened to him, and it must have been something very serious to keep
him from writing; or there was some mistake of the post-office. The
vice-consul indulged himself in personal inquiries to make sure that the
mistake was not in the Venetian post-office; but he saw that he brought
her greater distress in ascertaining the fact. He got to dreading a look
of resolute cheerfulness that came into her face, when he shook his
head in sign that there were no letters, and he suffered from the covert
eagerness with which she glanced at the superscriptions of those he
brought and failed to find the hoped-for letter among them. Ordeal for
ordeal, he was beginning to regret his trials under Mrs. Lander. In them
he could at least demand Clementina's sympathy, but against herself this
was impossible. Once she noted his mute distress at hers, and broke into
a little laugh that he found very harrowing.
“I guess you hate it almost as much as I do, Mr. Bennam.”
“I guess I do. I've half a mind to write the letter you want, myself.”
“I've half a mind to let you--or the letter I'd like to write.”
It had come to her thinking she would write again to Hinkle; but she
could not bring herself to do it. She often imagined doing it; she had
every word of such a letter in her mind; and she dramatized every fact
concerning it from the time she should put pen to paper, to the time
when she should get back the answer that cleared the mystery of his
silence away. The fond reveries helped her to bear her suspense; they
helped to make the days go by, to ease the doubt with which she lay down
at night, and the heartsick hope with which she rose up in the morning.
One day, at the hour of his wonted visit, she saw the vice-consul from
her balcony coming, as it seemed to her, with another figure in his
gondola, and a thousand conjectures whirled through her mind, and then
centred upon one idea. After the first glance she kept her eyes down,
and would not look again while she told herself incessantly that it
could not be, and that she was a fool and a goose and a perfect coot, to
think of such a thing for a single moment. When she allowed herself, or
forced herself, to look a second time; as the boat drew near, she had to
cling to the balcony parapet for support, in her disappointment.
The person whom the vice-consul helped out of the gondola was an elderly
man like himself, and she took a last refuge in the chance that he might
be Hinkle's father, sent to bring her to him because he could not come
to her; or to soften some terrible news to her. Then her fancy fluttered
and fell, and she waited patiently for the fact to reveal itself.
There was something countrified in the figure of the man, and something
clerical in his face, though there was nothing in his uncouth best
clothes that confirmed this impression. In both face and figure there
was a vague resemblance to some one she had seen before, when the
vice-consul said:
“Miss Claxon, I want to introduce the Rev. Mr. James B. Orson, of
Michigan.” Mr. Orson took Clementina's hand into a dry, rough grasp,
while he peered into her face with small, shy eyes. The vice-consul
added with a kind of official formality, “Mr. Orson is the half-nephew
of Mr. Lander,” and then Clementina now knew whom it was that he
resembled. “He has come to Venice,” continued the vice-consul, “at
the request of Mrs. Lander; and he did not know of her death until I
informed him of the fact. I should have said that Mr. Orson is the son
of Mr. Lander's half-sister. He can tell you the balance himself.” The
vice-consul pronounced the concluding word with a certain distaste, and
the effect of gladly retiring into the background.
“Won't you sit down?” said Clementina, and she added with one of the
remnants of her Middlemount breeding, “Won't you let me take your hat?”
Mr. Orson in trying to comply with both her invitations, knocked his
well worn silk hat from the hand that held it, and sent it rolling
across the room, where Clementina pursued it and put it on the table.
“I may as well say at once,” he began in a flat irresonant voice, “that
I am the representative of Mrs. Lander's heirs, and that I have a letter
from her enclosing her last will and testament, which I have shown to
the consul here--”
“Vice-consul,” the dignitary interrupted with an effect of rejecting any
part in the affair.
“Vice-consul, I should say,--and I wish to lay them both before you, in
order that--”
“Oh, that is all right,” said Clementina sweetly. “I'm glad there is a
will. I was afraid there wasn't any at all. Mr. Bennam and I looked for
it everywhe'e.” She smiled upon the Rev. Mr. Orson, who silently handed
her a paper. It was the will which Milray had written for Mrs. Lander,
and which, with whatever crazy motive, she had sent to her husband's
kindred. It provided that each of them should be given five thousand
dollars out of the estate, and that then all should go to Clementina. It
was the will Mrs. Lander told her she had made, but she had never seen
the paper before, and the legal forms hid the meaning from her so
that she was glad to have the vice-consul make it clear. Then she said
tranquilly, “Yes, that is the way I supposed it was.”
Mr. Orson by no means shared her calm. He did not lift his voice, but
on the level it had taken it became agitated. “Mrs. Lander gave me the
address of her lawyer in Boston when she sent me the will, and I made a
point of calling on him when I went East, to sail. I don't know why she
wished me to come out to her, but being sick, I presume she naturally
wished to see some of her own family.”
He looked at Clementina as if he thought she might dispute this, but she
consented at her sweetest, “Oh, yes, indeed,” and he went on:
“I found her affairs in a very different condition from what she
seemed to think. The estate was mostly in securities which had not been
properly looked after, and they had depreciated until they were some of
them not worth the paper they were printed on. The house in Boston is
mortgaged up to its full value, I should say; and I should say that Mrs.
Lander did not know where she stood. She seemed to think that she was a
very rich woman, but she lived high, and her lawyer said he never could
make her understand how the money was going. Mr. Lander seemed to
lose his grip, the year he died, and engaged in some very unfortunate
speculations; I don't know whether he told her. I might enter into
details--”
“Oh, that is not necessary,” said Clementina, politely, witless of the
disastrous quality of the facts which Mr. Orson was imparting.
“But the sum and substance of it all is that there will not be more than
enough to pay the bequests to her own family, if there is that.”
Clementina looked with smiling innocence at the vice-consul.
“That is to say,” he explained, “there won't be anything at all for you,
Miss Claxon.”
“Well, that's what I always told Mrs. Lander I ratha, when she brought
it up. I told her she ought to give it to his family,” said Clementina,
with a satisfaction in the event which the vice-consul seemed unable to
share, for he remained gloomily silent. “There is that last money I drew
on the letter of credit, you can give that to Mr. Orson.”
“I have told him about that money,” said the vice-consul, dryly. “It
will be handed over to him when the estate is settled, if there isn't
enough to pay the bequests without it.”
“And the money which Mrs. Landa gave me before that,” she pursued,
eagerly. Mr. Orson had the effect of pricking up his ears, though it was
in fact merely a gleam of light that came into his eyes.
“That's yours,” said the vice-consul, sourly, almost savagely. “She
didn't give it to you without she wanted you to have it, and she didn't
expect you to pay her bequests with it. In my opinion,” he burst out,
in a wrathful recollection of his own sufferings from Mrs. Lander, “she
didn't give you a millionth part of your due for all the trouble she
made you; and I want Mr. Orson to understand that, right here.”
Clementina turned her impartial gaze upon Mr. Orson as if to verify the
impression of this extreme opinion upon him; he looked as if he neither
accepted nor rejected it, and she concluded the sentence which the
vice-consul had interrupted. “Because I ratha not keep it, if there
isn't enough without it.”
The vice-consul gave way to violence. “It's none of your business
whether there's enough or not. What you've got to do is to keep what
belongs to you, and I'm going to see that you do. That's what I'm here
for.” If this assumption of official authority did not awe Clementina,
at least it put a check upon her headlong self-sacrifice. The
vice-consul strengthened his hold upon her by asking, “What would you
do. I should like to know, if you gave that up?”
“Oh, I should get along,” she returned, light-heartedly, but upon
questioning herself whether she should turn to Miss Milray for help,
or appeal to the vice-consul himself, she was daunted a little, and she
added, “But just as you say, Mr. Bennam.”
“I say, keep what fairly belongs to you. It's only two or three hundred
dollars at the outside,” he explained to Mr. Orson's hungry eyes; but
perhaps the sum did not affect the country minister's imagination as
trifling; his yearly salary must sometimes have been little more.
The whole interview left the vice-consul out of humor with both parties
to the affair; and as to Clementina, between the ideals of a perfect
little saint, and a perfect little simpleton he remained for the present
unable to class her.