No festivity has quite the vast and varied glitter of a _veglione_.
It takes a whole city to make a party so big and bright. And the last
_veglione_ of the season is rather brighter than the rest, as if
the spirit of revelry, inexhausted at the end of Carnival, made haste to
use itself up in fireworks before the cold dawn of Ash Wednesday.
The opera-house is cleared of its rows of seats, the stage united to the
parquet by a sloping floor. Every one of the boxes, rising tier above
tier in a jeweled horseshoe, offers the sight of a merry supper-party,
with spread table, twinkling candelabra, flowers, gala display.
Crowding floor and stage and lobbies, swarm the maskers. In the center
of the great floor the _corps de ballet_, regiment of sylphs in
tulle petticoats and pale-pink tights, performs its characteristic
evolutions to the pulsating strains of the opera orchestra. The public
dances in the remaining space--dances, promenades, and plays pranks, the
special diversion of the evening being to "intrigue" some one. They are
heard speaking in high squeaks, in bass rumbles, in any way that may
disguise the voice. Many are in costume,--Mephistos, Pierrots, Figaros,
Harlequins, but the most are in simple domino.
When a lady wishes to descend among the crowd she, in the darkness at
the back of the box, slips a domino over her ball-dress, a mask over her
features, and goes forth unknown to all save the cavalier on whose arm
she leans.
The only uncovered faces belong to gentlemen. These look often a little
foolish, a little bored, because the uncovered faces are the natural
objects of the maskers' impertinences, their part the rather barren
amusement of trying to divine who it is endeavoring to intrigue, or
puzzle, them, and wittily to parry personalities often more pointed than
the drawing-room permits.
The party in Aurora's box was large for the size of the box. She had
gone on inviting people, then brought hampers and hampers of good things
with which to feed them. There were the Fosses, Charlie with all the
Hunt girls, Landini, Lavin, the American doctor, the American dentist,
and Gerald.
Also Manlio. The Fosses had brought him. He had returned from furlough
some time before. It was known now to everybody that he was the
_fidanzato_ of Brenda Foss. There was no talk of his leaving the
army; on the contrary, he was rumored to have prospects of early
advancement to the grade of captain; wherefore the general public took
it for granted that the bride's parents were providing the indispensable
marriage portion.
Aurora's eyes, at a moment when Manlio's attention was elsewhere, rested
on him with a brooding, shining look. The symptoms of a great happiness,
though modestly muffled, were plain in his face. The Beautiful One was
coming back in the spring, already near, to marry him.
Aurora's affectionate look was just tinged with regret. She had suffered
a disappointment in connection with Manlio. An obstinate and
uncompromising woman beyond the ocean, when invited to join in a
harmless conspiracy, had preferred to do actually, to the tune of eight
thousand dollars, what the grasping creature should have been satisfied
with merely appearing to do. The happiness that pierced through Manlio's
calm, like a strong light through pale marble, came to him from the
bride elect's aunt, and Aurora felt robbed.
But Mrs. Foss's hand found hers under the table and gave it a warm
squeeze, whereupon Aurora's heart swelled in a way it had of doing. When
such a dilation took place, something simultaneously happened to her
eyes: the surrounding world was revealed to them as "too lovely for
anything." Dimples declared her joy.
"Won't somebody have something more?" she asked, with the spoon in her
hand poised over a bowl still half full of chicken mayonnaise.
But every one was done with eating; all were in haste to go down on to
the floor and find amusement, perhaps adventure, amid the fluctuating,
fascinating crowd.
The box was fairly deserted when the door opened again, and the eyes of
those left in it, turning to see who entered, were met by two unknown
maskers.
One wore the costume of a _bravo_ of old times, picturesque,
disreputable, an operatic _Sparafucile_ in tattered mantle and
ragged plume. The other was in a black satin domino, and had the face of
a crow, a great black beak projecting from a black mask.
They stood a little way inside of the door as if waiting to be
addressed. There was silence for a moment, while the others waited
likewise. Within the eye-holes of their masks the eyes of the intruders
glittered in the glassy, baffling way of eyes behind masks.
Aurora, unused to the mode of procedure at a _veglione_, asked
helplessly in a whisper of Landini:
"What shall I say to them?"
He spoke for her then, in Italian, because he thought it probable that
these were Florentines who had come into a strange box for a lark.
"Good evening," he said. "Will you speak, or sing, and let us know what
we can do for your service?"
The bravo, lifting two long hands in loose and torn black gloves,
rapidly made signs, like the deaf and dumb.
"You speak too loud," said Gerald. "We are deafened. Let the lady
speak."
The black domino, with a shrug of the shoulders and a gesture of
black-gloved hands excusing the limitations of a bird, answered by a
simple caw.
Aurora now found her tongue and her cue:
"And is it yourselves?" she burst in rollickingly. "Proud to meet you!
Will you partake?"
With a hospitable sweep of the arm, intelligible to speakers of any
language, she made them free of her supper-table, where the candles
still twinkled over an appetizing abundance.
Gerald watched sharply, saying to himself: "If they accept, we shall at
least see their chins."
But upon the invitation _Sparafucile_, with farcical demonstrations
of greed, reached forth his long fingers in the flapping gloves, seized
cakes, white grapes, mandarins, nuts, and stuffed them into his wide
pockets; while the black domino grasped the neck of a bottle of
champagne and possessed herself of a glass. A caw of thanks issued from
the black beak, and from the bravo, as with their booty the two
retreated to the door, there proceeded, as unexpected as upsetting, a
whoop of rejoicing so loud that those near him fell back as if from the
danger of an explosion. In the midst of this consternation the maskers
were gone.
"My land! did you hear that?" cried Aurora, who had clapped both hands
over the pit of her stomach. "Goodness! he's scared the liver-pin out of
me! Who d'you suppose they were?"
Landini lost not another minute before asking Mrs. Hawthorne if they
should go down together for a turn.
Gerald had been on the point of asking the same thing. He had almost
uttered the first word when Landini anticipated him. He felt a sharp
prick of annoyance with himself for not having been quicker as much as
with Landini for having been so quick. A little jealousy was quite in
order with regard to Mrs. Hawthorne now, on the simple ground of that
more intimate footing of friendship established between them by the
portrait. With the expression of courteous mournfulness proper in an
outrivaled cavalier, he made the gesture silently of having been at the
lady's service. Manlio did the same.
The singular blonde, with Nubian lip and Parisian hair, Miss Deliverance
Jones, or, more commonly, Livvy, who spent this evening at the farther
end of the box making her own reflections on the European doings of
which she got glimpses, held up a white satin domino for her mistress's
arms. Gerald precipitated himself, took it from the maid and held it in
her place. He tried to meet his friend's glance, hoping for some
faintest sign of participation in his regret at not having been
"spryer." For the space of a second, just before she fastened on her
mask, he caught her eye. Brief and bright as the illumination of summer
lightning, a look of fun flashed over her face. She winked at him.
Landini ceremoniously held his arm for her and Gerald saw them leave
together with a lessened objection.
Gerald had for some time past suspected that Landini was paying court to
Mrs. Hawthorne. Whether the lady were aware of it he could not tell.
Gerald had not believed the man had a chance, although, women being
incalculable, one can never feel quite easy. But now he could almost
have found it in himself to pity the somewhat singular man--Italian in
fact, English in manner, Oriental in looks,--if so were he had built up
any little practical dream on the fair widow's acceptance of him. To the
possibility of a sentimental dream Gerald did not accord one single
thought.
He seated himself, to wait for their return. Only Manlio was left in the
box besides himself. Manlio, consecrated to the worship of one afar,
cared little to mix with the profane and noisy multitude. As Gerald
leaned forth to see the couple that had just left them reappear
down-stairs, Manlio, whose eyes followed his, remarked very sincerely,
when the large easily-recognized white domino came into sight "_E
buona_!" which can be translated either, "She is kind," or "She is
good."
Gerald felt the warmth of an increased liking for him, because of the
perspicacity he showed. They lighted cigarettes, and together looked
over the marvelous scene, so rich in color and life, while they talked
of things that bore no relation to it, serious things and
manly--politics.
Charlie came in with Francesca, who at the door doffed her domino and
mask. Both, heated from dancing, were ready for a rest and a little more
of the Champagne-cup.
"By the way, Gerald," said Charlie, "that's a jolly good painting, old
chap, you made of our charming hostess."
"Glad you like it!" answered Gerald carelessly, without irony.
He did not at the moment dislike Charlie.
He was genially inclined to-night toward all the world. While he had
been tying on his white cravat before the glass in preparation for the
_veglione_, it had dawned on him, to his surprise and glimmering
relief, that he felt something resembling pleasure in the prospect of
the confused and promiscuous affair he was enlisted for. He had
constated that something like normal responsiveness to the common
exterior solicitations to enjoyment was returning to his spirit, his
nerves. The tang of life was pleasant to his palate.
A dim gladness moved him, as at coming across a precious thing one had
supposed lost, in remembering that he was young....
He laid all this to the mere passage of time, and thanked the gods that
unless one dies of one's hurts one finally recovers.
Under these circumstances it is conceivable that he should not
momentarily feel hate or impatience toward any fellow-passenger on the
amusing old Ship of the World.
Scraps of poetry stirred in the wells of memory where they are dropped
and lost sight of. "I feel peaceful as old age," he quoted.
But his eye falling on the white carnation which Giovanna, knowing her
signorino was going _in serata_, had provided for his buttonhole,
lines less grey came to his lips: "_Neque tu choreas_...." He
fished for the half-forgotten words. "_Donec virenti canities
abest...._"
Because a positive sense of health pervaded him, he, with a philosophy
founded upon observation, remarked that by this sign no doubt he was on
the verge of an illness. But he absentmindedly neglected the practices
preventive of misfortune, believed in not solely by the _popolino_
of Italy, but recommended to him in boyhood by the excellent physician
who after curing his mumps had taught him to make horns with his fingers
against calamity of any sort that might threaten.
So, being in a good humor, and made further contented by the uplifting
privilege of a broad unmistakable wink from a lady, he did not dislike
Charlie as usual; he even, as he looked at him, lustrous-eyed,
clear-skinned, smooth, lighting his cigarette at a candle, wondered why
one should not like him. He had his good qualities. Mere vitality is
one. Those points of conduct that called upon him the disdain of persons
more fastidious with regard to their actions, secret or revealed, than
he, were not productive, after all, of much harm....
With eyes narrowed, as when he was examining a face to paint it, Gerald
watched the handsome fellow in an animated cousinly dispute with
Francesca--with the result, really against his hope, of finding himself,
instead of aided by his effort of good-will to discover new virtues,
confirmed in his previous disesteem. He could make himself almost love
Charlie by picturing him afflicted, humiliated, sorrowful. But he could
not picture him sorrowful except for narrowly personal misfortunes, such
as poverty, sickness. One could not even be sure, with a face of so
little generosity or moral consciousness as Charlie's, that he would
under all circumstances be incapable of active malignity....
The latter thought Gerald had the justice to sweep aside with an
unspoken apology.
"Of course, you, Charlie, never could admit that a cousin and a female
might know better than you!" Francesca was contending noisily. "It
happens that I have lately looked up, with some care, the costumes of
the _trecento_...."
"My dear girl!" interrupted Charlie. "You will be insisting next that an
_incroyable_ is a Greek, or that creature, that sort of Italian
bandit who gave the disgusting roar, is a French marquis.... Lend me
your glass, will you? I think I see some one I know."
"It's Trix," he said after a moment, "making signs to us from the
Sartorio's box. They want us to come over. Come on, let's go."
Manlio and Gerald were again left alone in the silent company of the
pale coffee-with-milk-colored maid, who unnoticed crept nearer and
nearer the front of the box to peep at the brilliant house.
Gerald was beginning to think that Landini kept Mrs. Hawthorne rather
longer than was fair when the door opened to let them in, with Estelle
and Leslie and Percy and Doctor Baldwin, all laughing together.
"Well, have you intrigued any one?" Gerald asked Aurora.
"Me? Oh, _I_ wouldn't be up to any such pranks," she said. "Has any
one been intriguing you?"
"I haven't been down, Mrs. Hawthorne. I have stayed quietly here, hoping
to go down with you, if you will be so good, merely intriguing myself
meanwhile--" he dropped his voice so as to be heard of her only,--"with
wondering what kept you so awfully long."
"Interesting company, funny sights."
"Are you too tired to come down again and give me a dance?"
"Bless your soul, I'm not tired, but I'm going home."
"_Going home?_"
"Man, do you know what time it is?"
"I know, of course. But you can't mean you are going home. You only came
at midnight, and it's less than half-past two. Hosts of people stay
until the big chandelier goes out."
"Ah, don't try to talk me over! It's time I sought my downy, if I want
to get up in the morning. We're going to begin Lent like good girls,
Estelle and I, by going to church."
Gerald was certain these excuses were hollow. It was obvious, at the
same time, that Mrs. Hawthorne was bent on leaving. He was vexed. He
wondered what her real reason was, as men so often do, after women have
taken pains to give them in detail their reasons, and tried, ignoring
what she said, to get some light from her face.
It looked to him excited in a smothered way. He at once connected this
repressed excitement with Landini; but then, the face was mirthful, too,
in the same lurking manner, and the proposals of a serious man could
hardly affect even the most frivolous quite like a comic valentine.
He finally preferred the simplest interpretation: she had seen as much
as she wanted to; she was prosaically sleepy and going home to bed.
"Good night," she said. "Come soon to see us! Adieu; no,
_ory-vwaw_."
"Am I not permitted to take you to your carriage?"
After seeing them tucked in their snug coupe and hearing this wheel off,
Gerald returned to the great hall. He without question would remain
until the big light was extinguished. Colors, forms, sparkle, golden
haze--a painter must be dead or a duffer to leave before the gay glory
of it faded and was dispersed in the gray dawn.
The scene viewed from near had its cheapness, its crudity, like those
poor painted faces of the dancers pirouetting in the midst of a public
they can more surely enchant from the distance of the stage. The
costumes, so many of them, came from humble costumers who let them from
year to year without renewal of the tinsel or freshening of the ribbons.
But those very things gave to this page of life its depth of interest,
gave reality to this romance.
The ball was taking a slightly rougher, noisier character as it
approached the end. Some of the boxes were darkened, but the floor was
full, even after the tired _ballerine_ had been permitted by the
management to go home.
Gerald himself now became one of the slightly bored-looking men he had
observed earlier, strolling about, _claque_ under arm, in the rigid
black and white which took on an effect of austerity amid the
blossom-colors of the costumes. He sincerely hoped no one would approach
him to intrigue him, and the hope found expression, more than he knew,
in his countenance. He felt unable to meet such an adventure in a manner
that would satisfy his taste. It marked a fundamental difference between
him, at bottom a New-Englander, and his friends of Latin blood, he
thought, that he had not the limberness, the laisser-aller, the lack of
self-consciousness and stupid shame, which enables them so
good-humoredly to take the chance of appearing fools. And so before this
romance he was only a reader; they were it--the romance.
He could deplore his own gray role, but not change it; he therefore
wished anew, every time a merry masker looked as though she might intend
accosting him that she would think better of it and leave him in
deserved neglect. He had his wish; he was in the whole evening teased by
nobody whatever.
His eyes, straying over the crowd, sought for known faces. All Florence
had turned out for the occasion, but some of it had by this time gone
home. Most of the men he knew had women on their arms, and from their
silence or talkativeness one might without undue cynicism determine
whether these were their own wives and daughters or wives and daughters
of others.
A tall, gray-whiskered old gentleman in uniform passed him--none other
than Antonia's friend, General Costanzi--who was trying to retain all
his dignity while beset by two frolicsome little creatures looking like
the chorus in "Faust," who, suspended one on each of his arms, were
trying to win from him a promise to take them to supper. He sent toward
Gerald a look of comical long-suffering, to which Gerald replied by a
nod vaguely congratulatory, and a smile that courteously wished him luck
in that lottery.
The painter Castagnola, broad-blown, debonair, passed him, in a costume
of sterling and royal magnificence, copied from a portrait of Francis
First whom he in feature resembled. At his side, with gold cymbals in
her hands, went a figure in floating robes of daffodil gauze, a dancer
from one of the frescoes of Pompeii, wearing a mask--four inches of
black velvet--only for the form. Her bare shoulders and arms, of an
insolent beauty, forbade any mistake as to her identity. Gerald knew,
like the rest, that it was Castagnola's model.
Charlie passed him, at a little distance, with a laughing lady hitched
to his elbow. Her mask swung from her hand--the ball was wearing to its
end, and masks are hot. The hood of her rose-colored domino had been
pushed back from a mass of ruffled black hair; her eyes and teeth
gleamed with equal brightness and directness of purpose. It was
suggested to Gerald by her air and manner that she had forgotten the
spectators. Her freedom from constraint was shared by Charlie. Seeing
them together reminded Gerald that Charlie was after all Italian,--one
forgot it sometimes. He tried to remember which of the bits of scandal
tossed on to the dust-heap at the back of his memory was the one fitting
this Signora Sartorio.
They passed out of sight, and he forgot them in the interest of the next
thing.
Carlo Guerra, like him alone, stopped to chat with him. Guerra, a
pleasant figure in Anglo-American as well as Florentine circles, with
his fine head of a monk whom circumstances have rendered worldly, had,
before inheriting his comfortable income, been a journalist. He still
enjoyed above all things the exercise of the critical faculty, and had
much to say this evening about a recent exhibition of paintings.
Gerald was hearing it with proper interest when some part of his
attention was drawn away by a sound across the house. It was, softened
by distance, that species of lion's roar, incredibly large as issuing
from a human throat, and comical from such a disproportion, which had
startled the audience several times already that evening. Gerald turned,
without much thinking, to look off in the direction whence it came and
single out the figure with which it was associated, when he was
surprised to find the figure he sought almost under his nose. Not more
than six feet from him were to be seen the tattered mantle and ragged
plume of _Sparafucile_; likewise the thick crow's-beak of the black
domino.
The two were looking at him and, his impression was, laughing. He
fancied they were on the point of speaking to him,--he had thought
earlier in the evening when they came into the box that they might be
acquaintances,--but the crow suddenly pressed tittering against the
bandit, pushing and pulling him away. In a moment they were lost among
the crowd.
Who, then, had been accountable for the roar at the other end of the
house? An imitator? A double? Gerald suspected a masked-ball device
intended to intrigue. He gave it no more thought, but proceeded, started
on that line by the episode, to reflect on the singularity, yes, the
crassness, of Mrs. Hawthorne's determination to leave the ball early.
The secret of it was, of course, that she had no imagination, no
education of the imagination. A _veglione_ was caviar to her. This
wonderful scene, beheld for the first time, perhaps the only time in
life, and she had had to go to bed just as if they had been in Boston or
Charlestown! If one must go to church in such a case, it was Gerald's
opinion, one does not go to bed at all. But she belonged to the class of
people who would miss the last act of an opera rather than miss a train
or allow the beans to burn. A bread-and-butter person, a sluggish,
fat-brained person, elementary, not awakened and sharpened to
appreciation and wonder. If he had not been in such a good humor he
might have been cross, scornful of her; as it was, he indulgently
thought her merely too flatly healthy in every taste for anything but
the wilds of Cape Cod to which she sometimes playfully referred.
He here perceived that he had entirely lost the thread of Guerra's talk,
and that Guerra, probably aware of it, had moved to another subject. It
was hearing the name Hawthorne that had startled him to attention.
"I saw you earlier in the evening in a box with Mrs. Hawthorne," Guerra
said, "whom, you remember, I had the pleasure of meeting at Mrs.
Grangeon's."
After considering a moment with a half-smile, he nodded and pronounced
in the tone of an impartial critic, "_Simpatica_!" Then, after
considering another moment, nodded again. "_Ha gli occhi di donna
buona._" Which means, or nearly, "She has good eyes." And Gerald's
esteem for Guerra was immensely raised, for while thinking very well of
him, he would yet not have expected a man like Guerra to discern so much
at a first meeting. A worldling like Guerra might so naturally have said
"_E bella_!" for Aurora that evening in her best frock, had been
_bella_--beautiful; or he might have said, "_Begli occhi_!"
for her shining blue eyes admitted of that description. That Guerra had
said what he said indicated finer feeling than Gerald had given him
credit for.
Still lingering in desultory talk, the former journalist now asked:
"Have you seen the Grangeon?"
"No," said Gerald. "Is she here?"
"Yes; she is with the Rostopchine, in a box of the third order." He
looked up and around to find the box with his eyes, and after a moment
indicated it to Gerald. "There! Do you see them? The Rostopchine in pale
purple, and the Grangeon in an Indian thing all incrusted with green
beetle-wings, a thing for a museum. They are talking with a uniform whom
I do not know. She was speaking of you this evening--Antonia, asking me
what you are doing. She has great faith in your talent."
Gerald's lip curled a little sourly, and he stood looking upward without
reply.
Turning to look down through her jeweled lorgnette and running her eyes
over the crowd, Antonia now saw him. Recognition lighted her face to
unexpected liveliness. She fluttered her hand to him demonstratively.
After bowing and smiling, he stood quietly, with face upturned,
receiving her showered greetings.
He had a certain knowledge of Antonia. She was capable of entirely
dropping the remembrance of her bad treatment of him; perhaps forgetting
it really, but likelier choosing merely that he should forget it. She
permitted herself the caprices of a spoiled beauty.
A classic golden fillet this evening bound her gray locks; a jewel
depending from it sparkled upon the deeply lined forehead of a
brain-worker. Her irreparably withered neck was clasped by an Indian
necklace, showy as a piece of stage jewelry. Light-minded smiles
wreathed her heavy face. Where her sleeves stopped there began the soft
and serried wrinkles of those long, long buttonless gloves which Sarah
Bernhardt had brought into fashion.
It was not difficult to see in what illusion Antonia chose to live
to-night. Her readers might even, perhaps, have determined which of her
own heroines she personated.
For all these things Gerald liked his old friend the more.
Her lips framed the words, "Come up! Come up!" while her hand made the
equivalent signs.
He nodded assent, and with Guerra walking beside him started on his way.
Guerra under the central box excused himself and turned back, having
already paid his respects. Gerald, once out in the lobby, advanced more
uncertainly, finally hesitated and stopped.
He was not sure he wished to see Antonia in circumstances which would
not allow him to express his resentment of her behavior toward the
friend whom with her formal permission he had brought to her house. It
was owed to Mrs. Hawthorne not to let the incident pass. He had ceased
to be furious at Antonia; he had not written in cold blood the wrathful,
finishing letter planned in heat of brain. That, after all, was Antonia
as he had always known her and been her friend: Antonia, capable of
heroisms and generosities, fineness and insight, density and petulance.
One could not drop the great woman into the waste-basket because on one
occasion more she had been perverse and the sufferer happened to be
oneself. But the great woman, thought Gerald, needed a sober word spoken
to her. In conclusion, he would not go to see her, no, until he could
have it out with her.
And so instead of seeking Antonia in her box, Gerald cut short his
difficulty by going home. It was high time; it had been Lent for hours.
If Antonia were _intrigata_ at his failure to appear, it would only
be in keeping with the fanciful circumstances of the hour and place.