After the Fosses had helped the lessees of the Haughty Hermitage to make
it habitable; found for them a coachman who had a little French and,
when told what they desired to buy, would take them to the proper shops;
provided them with a butler to the same extent a linguist, through whom
Estelle, who in Paris had ambitiously studied a manual of conversation,
could give her orders, they not unnaturally became less generous of
their company.
But they were not permitted to make the intervals long between visits.
The coachman wise in French was perpetually driving his spanking pair to
their gates, delivering a message, and waiting to take them down for
lunch or dinner with their joyfully welcoming and grateful friends. It
was not at all unpleasant. It was not prized preciously,--there was too
much of it and too urgently lavished,--but the lavishers were loved for
it by two women neither dry-hearted nor world-hardened. Leslie fell into
the way, when she was in town and had time, of running in to Aurora's,
where it would be cheerful and she looked for a laugh.
Leslie, having reached, as she considered, years of discretion, thought
fit to disregard the Florentine rule that young unmarried women must not
walk in the streets unattended. She had balanced the two inconveniences:
that of staying at home unless some one could go out with her, and that
of being spoken to in the street, and decided that it was less
unpleasant to hear a strange young man murmur as she passed, "Angel of
paradise!" or "Beautiful eyes!"--no grosser insult had ever been offered
her,--than to be bothered by a servant at her heels. The fact that she
looked American and was understood to be following the custom of her own
country secured her against any real misinterpretation.
It was chilly, Novemberish, and within the doors of Florentine domiciles
rather colder, for some reason, than in the open air. The Fosses kept
their house at a more human temperature than most people, but yet after
years of Italy did not heat very thoroughly: one drops into the way of
doing as others do, and grows accustomed to putting up with cold in
winter. Leslie often expressed the opinion that in America people really
exaggerate in the matter of heating their houses. Nevertheless, just for
the joy of the eyes and, through the eyes, of the depressed spirit, she
was glad to-day of the big fire dancing and crackling in Aurora's
chimney-place.
The upstairs sitting-room, where the ladies generally sat, might look
rather like a day nursery; yet after one had accepted it, with its
chintz of big red flowers and green foliage, its rich strawberry rug and
new gold picture-frames, it did seem to brighten one's mood. How think
grayly amid that dazzle and glow any more than feel cold before that
fire?
Leslie held her hands to the blaze, and with an amiable display of
interest inquired of their affairs, the progress made in "getting
settled." There was still a good deal to do of a minor sort.
Accounts were given her in a merry duet; purchases were shown; she was
told all that had happened since they last saw her, who had called, whom
they had been to see.
Casting about in her mind for further things to communicate, Aurora was
reminded of a small grievance.
"I thought your friend Mr. Fane was going to come and take us
sight-seeing," she said.
"Was it so arranged?"
"So I supposed."
"And he hasn't been?"
"Hide nor hair of him have we seen."
"I meant, hasn't he perhaps called while you were out?"
"He hasn't."
"Strange. It's not like him to be rude. But, then, he's not like himself
these days. You must excuse him."
"What's the matter with him? Isn't he well?"
"He's not ill in the usual sense. If he were, we should make him have a
doctor and hope to see him cured. It's worse than an illness. He is
blue--chronically blue."
"Why?"
"Oh, he has reasons. But the same reasons, of course, would not have
made a person of a different temperament change as he has changed."
"I don't suppose you want to tell us what the reasons are?" Very
tentatively this was said.
"Why ... ordinarily one would not feel free to do so, but you are sure
to hear about it before you have been here long. In Florence, you know,
everybody knows everything about everybody else. Not always the truth,
but in any case an interesting version. Oh, it behooves one to be
careful in Florence if one doesn't wish one's affairs known and talked
about. But in the case of Gerald there was nothing secret. Everybody
knows him, everybody knew when he was engaged to Violet Van Zandt,
everybody knows that she married some one else."
"Oh, the poor boy!"
"It's very simple, you see, commonplace as possible. But it's like the
old story of the poem: an old story, yet forever new. And the one to
whom it happens has his heart broken, one way or the other."
"And she married some one else?"
Both Aurora and Estelle were craning toward the speaker in a curiosity
full of sympathy.
Leslie was used to seeing them hang on her lips. "I do love to hear you
talk!" Aurora candidly said. "It doesn't make any difference whether I
know what you're talking about, it fascinates me, the way you say
things!" And the compliment disposed Leslie to talk to them no otherwise
than she talked with Lady Linbrook or Countess Costetti, leaving them to
grasp or not her allusions and fine shades. She was by a number of years
the youngest of the three drawn up to the fire; yet some advantage of
fluency, collectedness, habit of good society--a neat effect altogether
of authority, made her seem in a way the oldest.
"Violet," she began, like a grown person willing to indulge children
with a story, "is Madame Balm de Breze's sister. You saw Madame de Breze
that Friday evening at our house. Violet is very like her, only much
younger and a blonde. Amabel is--let us call things by their names in
the seclusion of this snug fireside--Amabel is scrawny; Violet was
ethereal. Amabel is sharp-featured; Violet's face was delicate and
clear-cut. I say _was_, because she has grown much stouter. We have
known them since they first came to Florence, and have been friends
without being passionately attached. They are Americans, but had lived
in Paris since Violet was a baby. They came here, orphans, because it is
cheaper. They used to live on the top floor of a stony old palace in Via
de' Servi, where they painted fans on silk, sending them to a firm in
Paris. Amabel did them exquisitely: shepherds and shepherdesses, corners
of old gardens, Cupids--Watteau effects, veritable miniature work. The
little sister was beginning to do them well, too; she painted only
flowers. Amabel had no objection to Violet marrying Gerald. He was as
far as possible from being a good match, but in those days both Amabel
and Violet seemed to live in an atmosphere that excluded the
consideration of things from a vulgar material point of view. Violet and
Gerald were alike in that, and so very much alike in their superfine
tastes and ways of thinking. _Nous autres_ who live upon this earth
wondered how they would keep the pot boiling in case of 'that not remote
contingent, _la famille_.' Gerald has an income simply tiny. You
would hardly believe how small. We supposed that now he would paint a
little more than he ever has done with the idea of pleasing the general
public and securing patronage. They were so much in love, anyhow, and
made such an interesting pair, that one's old romantic feelings were
gratified by seeing them together. They were to wait until she was
twenty-one, when a crumb of money in trust for her would fall due. Then
Amabel surprises us all by marrying De Breze. Violet of course lives
with them, and with them goes to Paris. And in Paris she becomes Madame
Pfaffenheim. _Tout bonnement!_"
"Oh, the wretch, the bad-hearted minx!"
"No," said Leslie, reflectively. She turned from the warmth of the fire
and let her eyes rest on the gray sky seen in wide patches through the
three great windows, arched at the top and blocked at the bottom by
wrought-iron guards, that admitted into the red and green room such very
floods of light--"no," Leslie repeated. "One is the sort of person one
is. The sin is to pretend. I don't believe Violet knew the sort of
person she was until it came to the test. She thought, very likely, that
she was all composed of poetry and fine sentiments and eternal love. She
wasn't; and there it is. When she had the chance actually to choose, she
preferred money, a fine establishment, luxury, and she took them. How
ghastly if, with that nature concealed in her behind the pearl and pale
roses, she had married poor Gerald! It's much better as it is, don't you
agree with me? I call him fortunate beyond words."
"Well, of course; that's one way of looking at it."
"It's his way. Gerald knows just how fortunate he has been, and it's
exactly that which makes him so miserable. At first, you understand, he
could lay the entire blame on the De Brezes; he was sure they had in
some mysterious way constrained her, and though he was angrily,
tragically, suicidally wretched, it was one kind of woe--a clean,
classic woe, I will call it. He believed it shared by her in the secret
of her uncongenial conjugal life. '_Ich grolle nicht_,' he could
say, and all that. But a year or two ago she came to Florence with
Pfaffenheim on a visit to her sister. I don't know how Gerald felt,
whether he tried to avoid her or tried to see her. That he saw her,
however, is certain. She is perfectly happy, my dears, in her marriage!
And that she should love Pfaffenheim, or be proud of him, is
inconceivable. So her happiness rests entirely upon the fact of her
riches and worldly consequence."
"Say what you please, I call her a nasty, mean thing!" exclaimed Aurora.
Leslie shrugged her shoulders, as if saying: "Have it your way; but a
more philosophical view is possible."
"She was looking very beautiful," she went on. "Much more beautiful than
before, but in such a different way! From diaphanous she has become
opaque; from airy, solid. She brought a most wonderful wardrobe, and,
kept in the background with her husband, two fat babies."
"I should think she would have been ashamed to come back here."
"Oh, no; not Violet. She was enchanted to show herself in her glory to
those who remembered her in the modest plumage of her girlhood. Florence
did not really like it, because she affected toward Florence the
attitude of one who comes to it from places immeasurably grander. You
would have thought Florence an amusing little hole where she long ago,
by some accident, had spent a month or two. She found us quaint,
provincial, old-fashioned. She was witty about us. She criticized us
with a freedom and publicity that made her funnier to us than we were
funny to her. It was not an endearing thing to do or a very intelligent
one. It was, in fact, rather antipathetic."
"Antip--I call it the actions of a _bug!_"
"You can see how it all left Gerald. The Violet he cared for was
obviously no more. Worse than that, she had probably never been.
Comforting knowledge, isn't it, that for years you have treasured
memories that had no reality to start from; that you have suffered
agonies of love without any real object. Nauseous! Intolerable! A
tragedy that is shown to have been all along a farce! To a man of
imagination, to a person as sincere as Gerald, you can see what it would
mean. You can see what it would leave behind it."
"I should think he would just despise her, and shake it off, and forget
her as she deserves."
"Your simple device, dear Aurora, is the one he adopted. But to have an
empty hollow where your beautiful hoard of pure gold was stored is a
thing it takes time to grow used to. He is not an unhappy lover now,
certainly; but he is a man who has been robbed, and he has fallen into
the habit of low spirits. It is a thousand pities his poor mother and
sister could not have been spared to make a home for him. Being too much
alone is bad for any one. He shuts himself in with his blues, and they
are growing more and more confirmed. Love is a curious thing." Leslie
said the latter separately and after a pause, as if from a particular
case she had been led to reviewing the whole subject. "It complicates
life so," she added, and rose to go.
They teased her to remain and lunch with them. But Leslie was suddenly
more tired at the contemplation of life than she had been when she came.
The total result of her call had not been to cheer her, for by an
uncomfortable stirring within, as soon as she had finished, she was made
to repent having talked to outsiders about things so personal, so
private, regarding Gerald--Gerald, who was infinitely reserved. It
seemed a crime against friendship. That somebody else would have been
sure to tell his story did not excuse her.
Leslie's mood to talk was over for that morning and she went home, but
not before she had been forced to take a bottle of perfume which she had
carelessly picked up off Aurora's toilet-table, sniffed, and praised;
also, lifted out of their vase, a bunch of orchids for her mother; and
for Lily the box of sweets that had stood invitingly open on the
sitting-room table.
* * * * *
Next time Aurora saw Gerald--it was on Viale Principe Amedeo--she waved
to him.
He did not see it. He was just aware of a victoria coming down the
middle of the street he was preparing to cross and of something
fluttering, but that it concerned him he did not suspect.
Then suddenly the victoria, like a huge Jack-in-the-box, shot up a
figure, and he recognized Mrs. Hawthorne standing at full height in the
moving carriage, and waving both hands, as he must suppose, nobody else
being near,--to him.
He lifted his hat. He saw her reach for the coachman and by touch make
him aware that she wished to stop. The horses were pulled up. Mrs.
Hawthorne, from the seat into which the jerk had thrown her, made
beckoning signs to him, laughing the while, and calling, "Mr. Fane! Mr.
Fane!"
He went to stand at the carriage-step.
"I thought," said Mrs. Hawthorne, "that you were going to come and take
us sight-seeing."
"I thought I was," said Gerald, with that scant smile of his; "but I was
not so fortunate as to find you at home."
It was true that he had gone to her door one afternoon, having
previously caught a glimpse of her in the heart of the city, shopping.
"You mean to say you came?"
"You did not find my card?"
"No; but it's all right. This is Miss Madison--Mr. Fane. We are
together. What have you got to do?"
Gerald looked as if the question had not been quite clear, and he waited
for some amplification of it before he could answer.
"Have you got anything very important to do? Aren't you lonesome? Don't
you want to jump in and come home with us? Wish you would."
Gerald smiled again in his remote way, and looked as if he knew, as any
one would know, that this was not meant to be taken seriously.
"I have just seen a beautiful spectacle," he said, after a vague
head-shake that thanked her shadowily for an unreal invitation. "A game
of _pallone_, which is the nearest to your football that boys have
over here. Beautiful bronzed athletes at exercise, a delightful sight,
statues in motion. I go to see them whenever I can.--The days are
becoming very short, are they not?"
"Yes. Jump in and come home with us. Tell you what we'll do. I'll go
down into the kitchen and make some soda biscuits that we'll have hot
for supper--with maple syrup. We've had a big box of sugar come."
Gerald again smiled his civil, but joyless, smile, and after another
vague head-shake that thanked, but eluded the question, he said: "They
are very indigestible; hot bread is not good for the health. At least,
that is what they tell us over here. We keep our bread two days before
eating it, or longer. But I am afraid I am detaining you."
The horses were jingling their bits, frisking their docked tails. The
driver, checking their restless attempts to start, was giving them
smothered thunder in Italian. Gerald withdrew by a step from the danger
to his shins.
[Illustration: "I thought," said Mrs. Hawthorne, "that you were going
to come and take us sight-seeing"]
"Oh, jump in!" said Mrs. Hawthorne for the third time. And because his
choice lay between saying curtly, "Impossible!" and letting the
impatient horses proceed, or else obeying, Gerald, who hated being rude
to women, found himself irresolutely climbing in, just long enough, as
he intended, to explain that he could not and must not go home with them
to the hot biscuits and syrup.
The little third seat had been let down for him; his knees were snugly
wedged in between those of the ladies. Aurora was beaming over at him;
Estelle was beaming, too. Aurora's smile was a blandishment; Estelle's
was a light. The horses were flying toward the Lungarno. And he gave up;
he helplessly gave up trying to find an excuse for asking to be set down
again and allowed to go his lonely way.
It might be entertaining, he tried to think, to see what they had done
to the Hermitage. But no! That was very sure to be revolting. If the
evening were to afford entertainment, it must be found in watching this
healthy and unhampered being who, just as certain fishes color the water
around them, seemed to affect the air in such a way that, coming near
enough, you were forced to like her, without ceasing to think her the
most impossible person that had ever found her way into cultivated
society.
The carriage-wheels crunched gravel; the horses' hoofs rang on the
pavement of a columned portico; the door was opened by a man in blue
livery.
Entering the wide hall, they faced an ample double staircase, between
the converging flights of which stood, closed, a great stately
white-and-gold door.
Gerald, as bidden, followed the ladies up the stairs to the cozier
sitting-room, where a fire, they hoped, had been kept up. In the
beginning dimness of an early twilight he first saw the big red flowers
and green, green leaves. He was left a moment alone while the ladies
took off their hats, and he sent his eyes traveling around him, prepared
really for something worse than they found, though the pictures on the
wall called from him the gesture of trying to sweep away an unpleasant
dream.
Aurora reappeared from her room in a business-like white apron.
"Now I'm going down to make the biscuit. Oh, no trouble. No trouble at
all. I want them myself. I'm homesick for some food that tastes like
home. Estelle will entertain you while I'm gone. I sha'n't be but a
minute."
Estelle sat in a low arm-chair close to the fire.
Gerald, to whom it did not seem cold enough for a fire, took a seat
nearer the windows, whence he could watch the fading sunset-end beyond
garden and street, river and hill.
He would have cared less, no doubt, to make himself not too dull company
for this stranger, had he known that there, before that fireplace, a few
days before, she had been placed in possession of the most intimate
facts of his humiliating destiny. Unsuspecting, in a mood rather more
amiable than usual, he asked, by way of entering into conversation,
whether she and her friend were not New-Englanders. It established the
sense of a bond, however light, to find that they and he were almost
townsmen. He had been born in Boston, or, at least, near it. His parents
had owned a house in Charlestown, where he had lived till he was ten
years old. They talked for a while of Boston.
He had heard a singular thing, he said, she might be able to tell him
how true: that in Boston a new medical method had arisen by which the
sick were said to be made well without the help of drugs. Mind cure, he
believed it was called. It seemed very extraordinary, and rather
interesting, if it were not all a fraud or a fable, that persons of the
most prosaic, as these had been described to him, should go about
professing to do for a fee the same thing that saints of old are
recorded to have done through their mysterious powers. The subject had
come into his mind--he went on making conversation--from recently
re-reading a book of George Sand's, _La Petite Fadette_, in which a
cure is performed which seemed to him very similar. If she had not read
the book, she must permit him to bring it for her perusal. He talked
about the book.
A maid brought in a lighted lamp, and, as is the pleasant custom of the
country, wished them a happy evening.
Very soon after it came Aurora, with a dab of flour on one cheek, which
the kitchen fire had warmed to a deeper pink.
"There," she said, "they're all ready for the oven. When we took the
house, all the stove we had was a big stone block thing with little
square holes. The cook fanned them with a turkey-wing. But now we've got
a range. Don't you want me to show you over the house? There'll be just
time before supper."
"I'm afraid it's all dark," said Estelle. "Let me ring and have them
light up. Think of a city house without gas!"
"No, they'd be too long. I can take a lamp."
She went for it to her dressing-room, and came back with one easy to
carry, long in the stem and small in the tank, from which, to make it
brighter, she had lifted off the shade. Gerald reached to take it from
her, but she refused his help.
"The weight's nothing. I want you to be free to look around. Coming,
Estelle?"
"I'll join you in a minute."
They went down the wide stairs side by side. She led through a door, at
the right, as you entered the house, of the main door.
"Here's one of the parlors. We have four on this floor, between big and
little. Four parlors and a dining-room. Doesn't that seem a good many
for two lone women?"
The unshaded lamplight showed a crowd of furniture, modern, muffled,
expensive, the lack of simplicity in design of which was further
rendered dreadful to the artist by every device to make it still less
simple, embroidered scarfs thrown over chair-backs, varicolored textiles
depending from the mantel-shelf, drooping over the mirror, down pillows
of every shape and tint piled in sofa-corners. Nothing was left
undecorated. The waste-basket even wore a fat satin bow, like a pet
poodle. Every horizontal surface was encumbered with knick-knacks.
"This is where we have people come when we don't know them very well,"
said Mrs. Hawthorne, hardly concealing her pride. "We couldn't ask the
minister to come right upstairs, as we did you. How do you--"
"Mrs. Hawthorne," came hurriedly from Gerald, "I beg you will not ask me
how I like it! It is a peculiarity like--like not liking oysters. I
can't bear to be asked how I like things."
"How funny! But, then, you're different from other people, aren't you?
That's what makes you so interesting."
She preceded him into the next room, which was not so bad as the first
for the reason that, as she explained, "they hadn't yet finished with
it." He seized the occasion almost eagerly to praise the chairs.
"We found them here when we came," she informed him. "There was a good
lot of furniture of this big, bare sort; clumsy, I call it. We stored
some of it in the top rooms, but Leslie Foss begged me so to let these
stay that we just had the seats covered over with this new stuff and
left them."
When she opened the next door and stepped into the space beyond it
seemed as if her lamp had dwindled to a taper, the room was so vast. It
had nine great windows, five in an unbroken row on the front of the
house the entire width of which it occupied. Aurora's light was faintly
reflected in a polished floor; it twinkled in the myriad motionless
drops of two great crystal chandeliers.
"Ah," exclaimed Gerald in a long sigh. "This is superb!"
"Yes," she said, "but you might as well try to furnish all outdoors. You
see that we haven't done anything beyond putting up curtains. We never
use it. All those chairs along the walls are going to be regilded when
we can get them to come and fetch them. Things move awfully slowly over
here, don't they, even if you're willing to pay."
"What a ball-room!"
"Yes. Wish we could give a ball; but we only know about a dozen people.
We've got to wait till we know enough at least for two sets of a
quadrille."
She was moving across the wide floor, holding her torch-like lamp high
the better to illumine the great pale, silent emptiness. No longer
hearing his footsteps echoing behind hers, she looked over her shoulder;
whereupon he hurriedly joined her, without explaining why he had lagged.
"This," she said, as turning to the left they passed from the ball-room
into a small oval room the domed ceiling of which was all tenderly
bepainted with Cupids and garlands--"this is almost my favorite."
She set down her lamp on a table of rose-tinged marble, and dropped for
a minute on to a little rococo settee.
"The things in here we found just as you see them."
"So I imagined."
"All but the ornaments on the mantel."
"Very astute in me; I divined that, too."
"We liked it, so we left it. Pretty, ain't it? Oh, beg pardon!" She
blushed and looked at him sidelong, laughing. "That was a bad break!
That came mighty near to being the forbidden question how you like it.
All the same, it is pretty, _is it not_?"
"Extremely. Extremely pretty."
"There are going to be some tapestries presently. Oh, don't be afraid!
Not those old worsted things full of maggots, but beautiful new ones,
painted by hand, all in these same delicate colors. A story in four
scenes, one for each panel. The 'Fountain of Love' is the subject. It
sounds to me like something Biblical, Sunday-schoolish, but Mr. Hunt
says, no, _it is not_."
"Mr. Hunt--"
"The nephew, Charlie. You know him, don't you? He's getting them done
for me. He's a great friend of mine. He's helped me a lot to buy
things."
"Did he help you to buy the pictures?"
"Yes. He knows the dealers, and gets them to make fair prices. I think
it perfectly wonderful how cheap everything is over here. He helped me
to buy these, too." She lifted the chain of pink corals, graduated from
the size of a pea to that of a hazelnut, which with their delicate
living color brightened her winter dress. "I can't say, though," she
dropped, "that I found these particularly cheap. Hush!" she broke off.
"It's Hat! Quick!" she whispered, "let's get behind the door and say
'Boo!' as she comes in."
Amazingly, incredibly to him, this grown woman appeared about to
ensconce herself.
"But won't it make her jump?" he asked, supposing it to be Miss Madison
for whom the little surprise was intended.
"Of course it'll make her jump. No matter how often I do it, she jumps.
That's the fun."
"Mrs. Hawthorne, please!" he begged nervously. "As a very special favor
to me, don't! It would make me jump, too--horribly."
She stood listening while the footsteps turned away and faded
fruitlessly. With a look of disappointment, as at opportunity missed,
she took up her lamp and moved on.
"And here," she said, leaving the oval room by the door opposite to the
one they had come through, "is the dining-room. Which takes us back to
the hall and completes the circle."
This room, of a fine new Pompeian red, was lighted. The table was set; a
butler busied himself at the sideboard. Gerald's eye was caught by the
brightness of a china basket piled high with sumptuous fruit, and
similarly caught the next moment by the pattern of the curtains, in
which the same rampant red lion was innumerably repeated on a ground of
wide-meshed lace.
"Wouldn't it be a lovely house to give a party in?" she asked him.
"Isn't it exactly right to give a party in? There are two big spare
chambers upstairs at the back that would do, one for gentlemen, one for
ladies, to lay off their things in. No use; we shall have to give a
party."
Having returned upstairs, he was without any false delicacy shown her
bedroom and her friend's bedroom and their dressing-rooms, as well as
given a peep into the two spare rooms, as yet incompletely furnished,
that he might get an idea how beautiful these were going to be when
finally industry and good taste had been brought to bear on them.
* * * * *
At dinner, which Mrs. Hawthorne seemed to have a fixed preference for
calling supper, it was Gerald who did most of the talking. The ladies
abandoned the lead to him, and listened with flattering attention while
he called into use his not too sadly rusted social gifts. He related
what he knew about the Indian Prince whose monument at the far end of
the Cascine had roused their interest. He explained the Misericordia. He
asked if they had noticed the wonderful figures of babies over the
colonnade of the Foundling Hospital, and told them how the "infantile
asylum," as he rendered it, was managed. He tried to amuse them by the
episodes from which certain streets in Florence have derived their
names, Street of the Dead Woman, Street of the Dissatisfied, Burg of the
Blithe.
Whenever he stopped there was silence, which he hastened again to break.
"You talk like Leslie," suddenly remarked Mrs. Hawthorne.
But now came the hot biscuits and the syrup, borne in by the mystified
butler at the same time as the more conventional dessert prepared by the
cook.
Aurora smiled at the biscuits' beautiful brown and, having broken one to
test its lightness, nodded in self-approval.
"They're all right. Now you want to put on lots of butter," she said.
"Here, that's not near enough," she reproved him. She reached over, took
his biscuit, buttered it as she thought it should be buttered, and
returned it to his plate; then, while eating, watched him eat with eyes
that expressed her simple love of feeding up any one, man or animal, so
lean as he.
There had been shining in Aurora's eyes all this evening, when they
rested on him, a look of great kindness, the consequence of knowing how
badly life had treated him, and desiring that compensation should be
made. He could not fail to feel that warm ray playing over his bleak
surface. He could not but think what nice eyes Mrs. Hawthorne had.
When he asked her if she knew how to make many other such delicious
things it became her turn to talk. Estelle here joined in, and they
exalted the fare of home, affecting the fiction of having found nothing
but frogs' legs, cocks' combs, and snails to feed upon since they struck
Italy. Blueberry-pie--did Mr. Fane remember it? Fried oysters! Buckwheat
cakes!
He said he remembered, but did not confess to any great emotion.
"You wait till Thursday," said Aurora. "It's Thanksgiving. We're going
to have chicken-pie, roast turkey, mince-pie, squash-pie, everything but
cranberry sauce. We can't get the cranberries. Will you come?"
In haste and confusion he said, alas! it would be impossible, wholly
impossible, intimating that he was a man of a thousand engagements and
occupations.
But after an interval, and talk of other things, he inquired, with an
effect of enormous discretion, whether he might without too great
impertinence ask who was coming to eat that wonderful Thanksgiving
dinner which her own hands, he must suppose, would largely have to
prepare.
"Just the Fosses. All the Fosses."
"Ah, Mr. Foss will feel agreeably like the great Turk."
"You mean he'll be the only man? I guess he can stand it. We thought of
asking Charlie Hunt, too, but he's English and would seem an outsider at
this particular gathering. Wish you'd come. You're such a friend of
theirs. Come on, come!"
"Mrs. Hawthorne, you are so very unusually kind. If you would leave it
open, and then when the day arrives, if I should find I could do so
without--without--"
"Oh, yes. Come if you can. And be sure, now, you come!"
They were still sitting at the table--dinner had been retarded by the
circumstantial round of the house--when music resounding through the
echoing rooms stopped the talk.
It was the piano across the hall that had been briskly and powerfully
attacked. The "Royal March" of Italy was played, first baldly, then with
manifold clinging and wreathing variations.
Aurora signed to the servant to open the dining-room door. All three at
the table sat in silence till the end of the piece.
Gerald wondered what the evening caller could be who made the moments of
waiting light to himself in this fanciful manner.
"It's Italo," said Mrs. Hawthorne, rising. "I call him Italo because I
never can remember his other name. Come, let's go into the parlor."
It was all rosily lighted. Candles set on the piano at each side of the
music-rest enkindled glossy high lights on the nose-bump and forehead
bosses of Signor Ceccherelli, who at Mrs. Hawthorne's appearance sprang
up to salute. She reached him her hand, over which he deeply bowed.
"You're to play all those lovely things I'm so fond of," she directed
him. "'The Swallow and the Prisoner,' 'The Butterflies,' 'The Cascade of
Pearls.' And don't forget the 'Souvenir of Saint Helena.' Then the one
of the soldiers marching off and the soldiers coming home again. All our
favorites. Mr. Fane-- Are you acquainted with each other? Italo--you'll
have to tell him your name yourself. All I can think of is
Checkerberry."
"Yes, yes, we are acquainted," said Gerald, hurriedly. "We have seen
each other many times. _Come sta?_"
"Oh, he can speak English."
"A leetle," Ceccherelli modestly admitted.
"He understands everything I say. We have great conversations. He comes
every evening when he isn't engaged to play somewhere else."
She went to sit on the gorgeous brocade sofa, arranging herself amid the
multitude of cushions so as to listen long and happily. Estelle
preferring a straight-backed chair, Gerald took the other corner of
Aurora's sofa. Immediately Ceccherelli opened with "Souvenir de
Sainte-Helene." Aurora, respectful to the artist, talked in a whisper.
"He's so talented! You simply couldn't count the pieces he can play. We
do enjoy it so! We haven't anything in particular to do evenings if no
one calls. We don't often go out. We haven't been here long enough to
know many people. And aside from his magnificent playing, the little man
is such good company! We do have fun! There, I mustn't talk, I'm keeping
you from listening."
Gerald settled back, too, as if to listen, but to do the contrary was
his fixed purpose, even though the pianist, at last appreciated, put
into his playing so much feeling and force. Gerald's eyes went wandering
among the clutter of bric-a-brac, from a green bronze lizard to a mosaic
picture of Roman peasants, from a leaning tower of Pisa to a Sorrento
box. Then they rose to the paintings. He closed them.
The music was describing a hero's death-bed, besieged by dreams of
battle, at moments so noisy that Gerald had to open his eyes again for a
look of curiosity at the person who could produce so much sound. As he
watched him and his nose, like the magnified beak of a hen,--the nose of
a man who loves to talk,--he tried a little to imagine those merry
evenings spoken of by Aurora. The fellow looked almost ludicrously
solemn at this moment. He took himself and his art right seriously,
there could be no doubt of it. His face was a map of the emotions
expressed by the music, and wore, besides, according to his conception
of the part, the look of a great man unacclaimed by his own generation.
_Dio!_ what an ugly little man!
Gerald closed his eyes again.
The last cannon was fired over the hero's grave, the music stopped. The
ladies applauded. Gerald, smiling sickly, clapped his hands, too,
without, it might have been observed, making any noise to speak of.
Estelle went to the piano to compliment the player more articulately,
and loitered there, practising her French while he perfected himself in
English, by mutual aid.
"Italo," Mrs. Hawthorne interrupted them, "play that lovely thing of
your own now--you know, the one we're so crazy about, that by and by
turns into a waltz."
Without laying upon the ladies the tiresome necessity of pressing him,
the composer plunged into this masterpiece, and Gerald sat back again,
wondering what the little man thought of hearing himself called Italo by
the fair _forestiera_. He was dimly troubled, knowing that there is
no hope of an Italian ever really understanding the ways of being and
doing of American women, and especially an Italian of that class. But
then it would be equally difficult to make this American woman
understand just how the Italian might misunderstand her.
He permitted himself a direct look at her, where she rested among the
cushions, with eyes closed again and a smile diffused all over her face;
her whole person, indeed, permeated with the essence of a smile.
Extraordinary that, loving music so much, one could so much love such
music.
She surprised him by opening her eyes and whispering:
"Don't you want to smoke?" showing that for a moment at least she had
not been thinking of music. "You can, if you want to. Here, we've got
some. Don't go and think, now, that Estelle and I have taken to smoking.
Heavens above! We sent out for them the other night when Charlie Hunt
was here."
She reached across the table near her and handed him a box of
cigarettes.
He was very glad to light one. To smoke is soothing, and he felt the
need of it. Added to his vague distress at the spectacle of such
familiarity from these ladies to that impossible little Italian, a
ferment of resentment was disquieting him apropos of Hunt--those works
of art of which Hunt had facilitated the purchase.
Hunt, of a truth, ever since the first mention of him that evening had
been like a fish bone in Gerald's throat.
He checked his thoughts, recognizing that it is not sane or safe to
permit oneself to interpret the conduct of a person whom one does not
like. The chances of being misled are too great. He uprooted a suspicion
dishonoring to both.
Let it be taken for assured, then, that Hunt had in this case no
interest to forward beyond his love for making himself important. After
all, if the ladies liked bad pictures!... Yet it was a shame that he
should frequent their house, be accepted as their friend, invited by
them, made much of in their innocent and generous way, then should make
fun of them. Permissible, if you choose, to make fun of funny people,
but you must not at the same time make use of their kindness. A precept
for the perfect gentleman, in Florence or elsewhere: You can make fun of
persons, or you can cultivate their friendship, but not both things at
once. And Gerald, without proof, felt certain that Charlie Hunt spread
good stories about Aurora.
Mrs. Innes, his mother's old friend, meeting him at Vieusseux's
reading-room a few days before, had detained him for a chat, and in the
course of it asked him if he knew this Mrs. Hawthorne of whom the Fosses
appeared so fond. An amusing type, she must be. Seeing that statue of
the she-wolf and little Romulus and Remus at the foot of Vial de' Colli,
it seemed she had asked what it meant, and said she didn't believe it.
It indefinably hurt him, incommoded some nerve of envenomed
sensitiveness--yes, annoyed him like sand in his salad, to think of his
country-woman, with the good faith of a dog in her face, so quoted as to
make her ridiculous by a fellow wanting in human vitals, like Hunt.
He would have liked, had it been possible, to ask a few frank questions
of Mrs. Hawthorne, and find out more certainly what he should think. He
would have liked to warn her against trusting her enormous ignorance to
one who would have so little good-humor and protectiveness toward that
baby-eyed giant-child. Really, instinct ought to teach her better whom
to make her confident as respected that grave affair.
Singularly, when next the music stopped, Mrs. Hawthorne, after she with
true politeness had taken the box of cigarettes to the other of her
guests, spoke of Hunt. Perhaps her thoughts, too, had gone straying, and
mysteriously encountered some straying thought of his.
"Charlie Hunt," she said, "is coming on Sunday morning to take us to the
picture-galleries. We're going to play hooky from church. His work,
don't you see, keeps him at the bank on week days till everything of
that sort is closed."
"Mrs. Hawthorne," cried Gerald and sat up in unaffected indignation,
while mustache, beard, hair, everything about him appeared to bristle,
"I thought _I_ had been engaged to take you sight-seeing! I thought
it was to be _my_ honor and privilege. Mrs. Hawthorne, my dear
friend, if you do not wish deeply to hurt me, deeply to hurt me, you
will write to Mr. Hunt at once, this evening, and I will post the
letter, that you have thought better of that immoral plan for Sunday
morning, and are going to church like a good Christian woman. And
to-morrow, Mrs. Hawthorne, at whatever time will be convenient for you,
I will come and take you to the Uffizi."