Early in Lent the weather treated Florence to what Aurora and Estelle
called a cold snap. Their surprise and indignation were extreme. That
Italy, sunny Italy, should feel herself free to have these alpine or
polar fancies!
Estelle showed what she thought of it by taking cold. Aurora affected
wearing her furs in the house. To increase their sense of ill usage,
they would now and then turn their faces away from the fire and sigh,
admiring how the air was dimmed by a puff of silver smoke. These
pilgrims from a Northern climate, who knew so well the sensation of
breath freezing in the nostrils and numbness seizing the nose when on
certain winter days they stepped from their houses into the snow-piled
streets at home, could not admit that in the City of Flowers one should
catch sight of one's breath,--indoors, too.
The little monthly roses, shivering but brave, blooming still, or
blooming already, out in the garden, bore witness, after all, to the
clemency of the winter, and upheld the city's title to its name. The
garden altogether was nearly as green as ever. Against alaternus, ivy,
myrtle, laurestine the season could not prevail. Aurora decided that the
blame for their discomfort rested with the house; she planned drastic
and fundamental improvements which it was quite certain the noble
landlord would not permit her to carry out.
What with Estelle being half sick and herself, as she claimed, half
frozen, Aurora at the end of a day during which the sun had not lighted
the world by one feeblest ray, and the night had closed down thick and
damp, was just a little disposed to low spirits. She had not been out,
and nobody had come to see her. She felt the weariness that follows for
certain sociable natures upon a long stretch of hours without renewal
from outside.
She sensibly reacted against it by making the sitting-room as cozy as
she could, drawing close the crushed-strawberry curtains, piling wood on
the fire, placing a screen so that it shielded her chair and table from
the draft; and, seated in her chimney-corner, took up a piece of
knitting.
She was not very fond of reading, and she was fond of knitting large
soft woolly afghans, of which she made presents to her friends. Reading
seemed to her, anyhow, a rather idle thing to be doing. Knitting came
under the head of work. How often had her story-paper been snatched from
her when she was a girl, and a sock to knit thrust in her hand, with the
bidding to be about something useful. How she had hated it. But now that
she was free she still had a better conscience when she knit.
To the click of her long wooden needles she thought, with more pleasure
than was afforded by any other vision at the moment, of a hot water
bottle gently warming the bed into which she meant to creep at exactly
nine o'clock. This hour she had set when at eight already the temptation
to go to bed and forget the unsatisfactory day in sound warm slumbers
had been so strong as to make yielding to it appear wrong.
These vestiges of Puritanism Aurora did not recognize as such, but yet
her mind as she was practicing self-discipline turned, without seeking
for the reason, toward the person who had done most to inculcate in her
the doctrine that if you like to do a thing that itself is almost surely
a sign of the thing being wicked, and that if you dislike it it is very
probably your duty.
While she continued to appear the signora to whom the servants' eyes
were accustomed, albeit a trifle more absent and unsmiling, she was to
herself a young girl in a far country, living and moving in scenes of
difficulty and misunderstanding with a sharp-chinned, narrow-chested,
timidly-beloved just woman--her mother, long since laid to rest....
There was nothing from outside to dispel the faint heartache
accompanying this retrospection; wind and rain against the windows were
more proper to increase the melancholy, and Aurora, suddenly sick of
staying up to be blue, wound her yarn to start for bed. But first, for
just a moment, she would go down-stairs, she thought, and have a look at
her portrait, for that was the most comforting thing to do that she
could think of. She loved her portrait as a child loves its favorite
toy.
This she was intending when the sound of the door-bell at once stopped
and cheered her by the possibility it held out of some diversion. Vitale
entered with a package.
Catching in what he said the name Gaetano, Aurora took it to mean that
Gaetano had brought the package. He was waiting below, she did not
doubt. Gaetano was Giovanna's nephew, and had more than once come on
errands from Gerald. Saying, "_Aspettare_!" she hastened into her
room for the porte-monnaie which resided in her top drawer. From this
she drew a reward that should make the journey through night and rain
from Gerald's house to hers seem no hardship. Her blues had vanished.
Before removing the rain-splashed newspaper, she gazed for a moment at
the package, trying to guess what it could be. It was square, flat,
about a foot and a half one way by a foot the other. What was Gerald
Fane sending her like that without any enlightening missive? A note
might be inside. She cut the string, took off the newspaper, to find a
second wrapper of clean white drawing-paper. After touching and
pinching, she guessed the object to be a picture-frame and picture.
Filled with curiosity, she pulled off the last wrapping, and with a face
at first very blank stared before her....
It was a painting, one of the kind she had seen at Gerald's studio and
not liked.
Different though it was from the portrait down-stairs,--as different as
poverty from riches, as twilight from day,--she could yet see that this
also was meant for a portrait of herself. She remembered tying that blue
neckerchief over her head and under her chin one evening, trying to look
like an Italian in her _pezzola_, to make the others laugh.
She stood the picture on the chair which she had pulled up before her so
as to rest her feet on the rung, off the stone floor, still to be felt,
she imagined, through the rug. Of course it was herself, but how
disappointing--disappointing enough to shed tears over--to have this
held up to her after that lovely being down-stairs! How unkind of her
friend Gerald!
Unfair, too, for although this, in not being a beauty, was obviously
more like her than the other, she could not admit that it was any truer.
She could not believe that she ever really looked like this, though she
knew that it was the way she sometimes felt. How had Gerald known she
ever felt like this?
That she was a person who ate well, slept well, felt well, loved fun,
was giving and gay--that was all most people knew, or were entitled to
know, of her; all she knew of herself a good deal of the time. Such
things could never be the whole of any person, of course. Every one has
had something to overcome. Some persons have had to overcome and
overcome and overcome, one thing after another, one thing after another,
that has tried to drag and keep them down. She had had--probably
because, as her mother often told her, she was born with such a lot of
the devil in her--a great many trials sent to her, for her discipline,
no doubt, her cleansing; but she had come out of them still unreduced,
still eager for a good time.
All persons are made up, in a way, of these experiences of the past, but
they don't expose them in their faces, they forget them as much as they
can.
Yes, as much as they can. How much is that? The only true sorrows being
involved with one's affections, and the objects of one's love never far
from one's thoughts, how much could a person be said to forget her
sorrows, really?
Aurora reflected upon this for some time, staring the while at her
portrait. The face looking back from the canvas was very like her, had
she but known it, at this exact moment, while the thoughts produced, the
memories wakened, by it substituted for her ordinary hardiness the
delicate look of a capacity for pain.
As she gazed at the portrait longer she liked it better; from minute to
minute she became more reconciled, and found herself finally almost
attracted. Something from it penetrated her for which she had no
definition. It was perhaps the dignity of humanity confronting her in
that strong and simple face framed by the kerchief, like a woman of the
people's,--her own face, but not certainly as she saw it in the mirror;
a humanity that out of the common materials offered to it day by day had
rejected all that was mean and contrived to build up nobleness.
Half perceiving that this portrait in its different way flattered her as
much if not more than the portrait down-stairs, she, while modestly
refusing to be fooled by the compliment, yet felt a motion of
affectionate gratitude toward Gerald for the sympathy which had enabled
him to pierce beneath the surface and see that Bouncing Betsy had her
feelings, too, her history; yes, her bitter tragedy.
While continuing with her eyes on the picture, she from time to time
wiped them, and when the door-bell rang again, aware of being "a sight,"
took the precaution of retiring to her bedroom, so that if Vitale should
come to announce a visit,--it was not yet nine o'clock,--she could the
better make him understand that he must excuse her to the visitor; she
was going to bed.
But learning from the servant that Signor Fane was below, she changed
her mind, and chose unhesitatingly from her stock of useful infinitives
the appropriate two: "_Dire venire_."
Gerald found her by the fire, her fur-cloak over her shoulders, her
woolly afghan in her hands, and the picture on the chair before her.
"Well?" he asked expectantly, looking at it, too, after they had shaken
hands.
"You've made me feel sorry for myself. What's the use?" she answered in
a little sigh, keeping her reddened eyes turned away from him. "Hush!
Wait a moment! I was forgetting," she added, in comedy anticlimax, like
a housewife who in the midst of a scene of sentiment should smell the
dinner scorching. She jumped up, and went without the least noise to
close the door to Estelle's room, returning from which she illogically
fell to talking in a whisper.
"Estelle's gone to bed. She's got a snow-balling old cold. I've rubbed
her chest with liniment, and tied up her throat in a compress, and given
her hot lemonade, and she lies there with a hot water bottle at her feet
and grease on her nose, and let's hope she'll feel better in the
morning."
"Let's hope, indeed. I'm very sorry to hear she's ill. But she's sure to
be better by to-morrow, isn't she, with all that care and those
remedies. I hope you haven't a cold, too, Mrs. Hawthorne. You almost
look," he said innocently, "as if you had. This weather is dreadful. You
haven't, have you, dear friend?"
"No; I guess what you see is just that I've been crying. Don't say
anything about it. Don't notice it. Never mind. Come and sit down by the
fire and get warm. Your hand was like ice."
"It's very bad out, and not much better in, except here by your generous
fireside. I haven't been warm all day."
"Why didn't you come before? It isn't what I call balmy here, but I
expect it's balmier than at your place."
With her kindly unconstraint she reached for one of his hands to test
its temperature. With a little cry of "Mercy me!" she closed his numb
fingers between her palms to warm them, as if the blaze could not have
accomplished this end so well as they.
He let it be, not with the same unconsciousness in the matter as she,
but hoping that the soft, warm infolding would somehow do him good. He
had come in the rather desperate hope of being done good to. As he had
been about to start out, having intended, when he sent the portrait, to
follow close upon it, he had found himself feeling so ill--feeling, at
the end of the dismal day, so indescribably burdened and ill and
apprehensive of worse things--that he had been on the point of giving it
up. But then the wish itself to escape from his bad feelings had
impelled him forth toward the spot glowing warmer and cheerier in his
thoughts than any other, where, if he could forget how ill he felt, he
would naturally feel better. Aurora's house during the days of painting
the first portrait had come to feel remarkably like home to him.
So when Aurora released his hand, saying, "Let's have the other," he
docilely gave it to her, though the fire had already partly thawed it.
Gratefully, with the hand set free, he covered both her kind hands,
which loved so much to warm things and feed things and pet things and
give away money.
Overcoming his ordinary stiffness, he pressed them right manfully, to
signify that he would not speak of her tears if she wished him not to,
but here was his sympathy, and with it his penitence, if so were that,
as she intimated, he had had a share in making them flow.
"So you are all alone this evening?" he asked in the voice that makes
whatever is said seem affectionate and comforting.
"Yes. I haven't even Busteretto. I let Estelle keep him on the foot of
her bed. She's perfectly devoted to him. And Clotilde is busy in her own
corner of the house, going over the bills. It takes lots of time."
"And where is the musician in ordinary, the gifted Italo?" he inquired,
with a smile meant to draw from her a smile.
She was caught without difficulty. "The gifted Checkerberry hasn't been
round lately," she smiled. "He won't expose himself to the night air for
some time. He's got laryngitis so he can't talk above a whisper." Her
eye twinkled and she laughed, though what she communicated was not on
the face of it very funny.
He was perhaps calling attention to this when he said, "Poor devil!"
"Yes," she agreed, achieving sobriety, "it's bad weather for
laryngitis," and went on with the weather, dropping Italo. "It's been a
mean sort of day, hasn't it? I haven't set foot outside. I was already
feeling kind of blue and making up my mind to go to bed when Gaetano
came with your present."
There was an intimation in her glance that this event had not made the
world appear any rosier.
Both turned to look at the picture. Their hands loosened naturally; they
sat apart.
"Can't you see why I had to paint it, Mrs. Hawthorne?" he asked,
speaking eagerly, and as if pressing his defense.
"How could I endure to have that thing down-stairs stand as my idea, my
sole idea, of you? And how could I bear to make you a gift, a sole gift,
of a piece of work I do not respect? This may be worth no more,--I think
differently,--but it is at least the best I can produce. It has my
sanction. You, too, believe me, will prefer it to the other after a
while."
She shook her head a little disconsolately.
"The other you can, if you must, keep in your drawing-room to make an
agreeable spot of color," he went on, reversing their parts and trying
to induce in her a lighter humor; "it has that perfectly legitimate use.
In your drawing-room, you know, Auroretta, among the pictures of your
choosing, it does not, in our Italian idiom, altogether disappear. This
one you will keep out of sight, but will look at now and then, if you
please; and I quite trust you, with time, to recognize that it was
painted by some one who understood and honored you more than there was
any evidence of his doing when he perpetrated, for a joke, that
bonbon-box subject down-stairs."
Mrs. Hawthorne, with soft and saddened eyes fixed on the portrait, again
shook her head, sighing, "Poor thing!"
"Not at all!" he protested almost peevishly. "Please not to suggest by
pitying her that I have not represented there a fine, big, strong thing,
built to stand up under anything! I could slay, with pleasure, at any
time"--he diverged, carried away by a long-standing disgust,--"the
pestiferous asses who call my things morbid. I am too careful to keep
true to what I see. The difference between them--I mean the critics who
call me morbid--and myself, is in the degree of sight."
"Don't get excited, Geraldino!" she checked fumings which she did not
entirely understand. "What I meant was that looking at her has made me
think of all the things that have gone wrong with me in my whole life.
Don't you call that a tribute? You couldn't have painted this picture if
you hadn't suspected those things, and, honest, I don't see how you
could suspect them. Ever since I came over here I've been so jolly.
Seems to me I've been nothing but jolly. I've been having such a good
time! How you could see under it, I don't know. As a matter of fact,
I've always been jolly between-times. Give me half a chance, let me get
out of the frying-pan, I'd be ready in a minute to go on a picnic. But
I've not been spared my troubles, Geraldino; you were right there."
At this reference to many sorrows, he found a thing to do more
expressive than words. Sitting near each other as they were, he could
reach her without rising; he bent forward and touched his lips
commiseratingly to her hand.
He might have known that it would bring her story, but he had not
schemed for this, and, unwilling, yet eager, to hear, was a prey to
compunctions on more than one ground when, after a little gulp and
sniff, she burst forth:
"I've seen perfectly dreadful times, Geraldino. Some of them were the
sort of thing you can get over, but some of them--upon my word, I wonder
at myself how I've got over them as I have. The queer thing is--I
haven't, in a way. It will come over me sometimes, in the queerest
places, at the oddest moments, that I am still that woman to whom such
awful things happened, that I, playing my silly monkey-shines, am that
heart-broken woman."
"I know," murmured Gerald, and took her plump hands steadyingly between
his hard, thin ones.
"I've never had any sense," she let herself go. "Anybody can see that;
and when I was younger I had even less, naturally, than I have now.
Always, always, I wanted so to be happy! I wanted to have a good time. I
was born wanting to have a good time. And everything was against it. But
I managed somehow. One way or another, I got to the circus 'most every
time. My mother used to wonder what my finish would be, and try to lick
the Old Boy out of me. But it couldn't be done. I'm just like my father,
my dear old pa, who was a sinner. He let ma have her way in everything,
as he thought it right to do. Not, I guess, because he always liked her
way, but because after my sister, who was a beautiful child, died in
such a terrible way that I can't even bear to mention it,--she caught
fire,"--Aurora hurriedly interjected, "ma came so near going out of her
senses that pa humored her in everything. He thought the world of her;
so did we all, but it couldn't be called a happy home. There were three
boys, besides me,--I was the last,--and we were all such everlastingly
lively young ones, and ma was so strict! Pa was away most of the time
getting a living. My pa, you know, was a pilot. It wasn't a fat living
for so many of us, but that wouldn't have mattered long as we had enough
to eat. But ma, poor soul, because of that twist her mind had taken
through sorrow, was always seeing something wrong in everything we did;
she never could be quiet or contented. The boys didn't get so much of
it: they were off out of doors and later at their trades; but me, I was
kept in to help with the housework, and kept in for company, and kept in
for no other reason, I guess, than because my wicked heart longed so to
go out and play with the girls and boys. I dare say it was good for me.
Ma meant all right, that I know, but ma was all along a sick woman. We
realized later that though she was round and about, busy every minute,
she was sick for years with the trouble that finally took her away. I
don't want you to think I didn't have a real good mother, for I did--a
first-rate mother who did her honest best to make a good woman of me."
"I know, I know." By a reminding pressure of her hands he begged she
would trust him not to misunderstand.
"But my pa--you should have known my pa!" Aurora's face brightened
immensely, and Gerald suspected that it was like him she looked when she
screwed her lips to one side in a manner humorously suggesting a pipe at
the corner of her mouth, and said in a voice not her own, "Golly, Nell,
can't you whistle for a snifter?" He could almost see a sailor's
chin-whiskers.
"He took me with him once in a while. Golly, those were good times, if
you please! Free as air, all the peanuts I could eat, out in the boat
with my pa, and catch fish, and catch a steamer if we could. We had an 8
big as a house on our sail. He was as good a seaman, my pa was, as any
in East Boston, but he wasn't a hustler. But there, if he'd been a
hustler, he wouldn't have been my pa. Wouldn't for a house with a
brownstone front have had my pa any different from what he was. Grandma
was just the same sort, God bless her! easy-going, jolly, come a day, go
a day, do as she please and let you do as you please. I used to have
such lovely times at her house, summers, down on the Cape, before my
sister died!
"It was there I first knew Hattie--Estelle. Her aunt's house was next to
my grandma's. I used to think her the luckiest child that ever was born.
Seemed to me she had just about everything--a gold locket and chain,
bronze boots, and paper dolls by the dozen. We used to play together,
day in day out, one of those plays that last all the time, where you
pretend you're some one else and act it out in all you do. We kept it up
for years. I don't see that we've changed much with growing up. Seems to
me we were pretty near the same then as we are now, having our spats,
but having lots of fun, and wanting to share everything. Estelle lived
in East Boston, too, and was going to be a school-teacher. It seemed to
me that to be a school-teacher was just about the finest thing anybody
could do. That would have been my ambition, to be a school-teacher. But
I never got beyond the grammar school, I was needed at home to help
mother. Then my poor pa died--an accident down in the docks,"--Aurora,
lowering her voice, began to hurry and condense,--"then Ben, then Joe,
then--will you believe it?--Charlie, that I loved best. They all had the
same delicate constitution as ma, it turned out, and a predisposition to
the same trouble. Then finally, after going through with so much, my
poor mother went, too, and for that I could only be thankful. And I had
taken care of them all. I wasn't twenty-three when I was the last left.
Doesn't it seem strange! I sometimes can't believe it even now."
This rapid enumeration of calamities so great robbed them of terror and
pathos, yet Gerald had somewhat the startled, shocked feeling of a man
who knows he has been struck by a bullet, though his nerves have not yet
announced it by suffering.
Aurora, who after the passing of years could think of these things
without tears, yet in speaking of them to a sympathetic hearer had
obvious difficulty in keeping a stiff upper lip. Gerald turned away his
eyes while with her hand she covered and tried to stop her mouth's
trembling.
"Poor child!" he said, with a sincerity which saved the words from
insignificance.
"Yes," she half laughed. "Wouldn't one think it enough to sort of subdue
anybody, take the starch out of them for some time? When I came out of
that house of sickness I couldn't think of anything else but sickness
and death. It stuck to me like the smell of disinfectants after you've
been in a hospital. I couldn't think of anything but that it would take
me next. I supposed I must be affected, too. But the doctor examined me,
and do you know what he said? 'Sound as a trout,' he said. 'You're so
sound,' he said, 'you're so healthy, that we'll have to shoot you to get
you to the resurrection.' Then I felt better. He was a new doctor that
we'd called in toward the end. He knew how I was situated, and as he
seemed to think I'd make a good nurse, he got me a chance in the City
Hospital, where I could get my training. And Hattie, dear Hattie, what a
friend she's been! She and her ma and pa made me come and make my home
with them. It's since then that we've been like sisters."
At the sound, appositely occurring, of a cough in the neighboring room,
Aurora stopped and listened.
"Dear me!" she whispered. "D'you suppose she's lying awake?"
"She may be coughing in her sleep," he suggested.
"Yes," Aurora said dubiously, after further listening, and hearing
nothing more. "And if I should go in to see, I might wake her. The
bell-rope is right at the head of her bed; all she has to do is pull it
if she wants somebody to come. I was entertaining you with the story of
my life, wasn't I? Where had I got to? Oh, yes. There in the hospital I
just loved it. Perhaps you can't see how I could. I just did. I had lots
of hard work. The training was sort of thrown in in my case with other
duties, but there were the other nurses and the house-doctors, I grew
chummy with them all. I had fun with the patients, too. You don't know
how much good it does you to watch anybody get well; the majority get
well. It's good for them, besides, to have you jolly."
"Your gaiety of heart makes me think of the grass, Aurora, the blessed
ineradicable grass, that will grow anywhere, that you see pushing up
between the paving-stones of the hard city, and finding a foothold on
the blank of the rock, and fringing the top of the ruined castle, and
hiding the new-made graves."
Aurora, always simple-mindedly charmed with a compliment, paused long
enough to investigate Gerald's comparison, then resumed, with the effect
of taking a plunge into deep waters:
"But it was there I met the fellow who did me the worst turn of any....
"They brought him in with broken ribs one rainy night, after he'd been
knocked down in the street by a team and kicked by the horses. I wasn't
his regular nurse, but I was in and out of his room, and if he rang
while his regular nurse was at her meals, I'd go. Everybody knows that
when a man's sick he's liable to get sweet on this or that one of his
nurses.
"How I could have been mistaken in Jim Barton I can't see now. Since
knowing him, if I ever see anybody that looks a bit like him, I shun
them like poison, because I know as well as I need to that however nice
they may appear, you can't depend upon them. But before I knew him I'd
never stop to distrust anybody.
"It began with our setting up jokes together; he could be awfully funny
even when he was swearing like a pirate about his luck landing him in a
hospital. Bad language didn't seem so awful coming from him, because he
was so light-complexioned and boyish-looking. He was only passing
through the city, in an awful hurry to get West, when he got hurt, and
he was madder than a hornet at the delay. But after a while he quieted
down, because he'd got something else to think about, which was getting
me to go along with him to California, where he'd bought a share in a
mine. And me, star idiot of the world, it seemed the grandest thing that
had ever happened. I'd never had anybody in love with me that way
before. The boys had always liked me, but I'd been like another fellow
among them, and I'd never more than just been silly for a week or two at
a time over one fellow and another at a distance. And here was a solid
offer from a perfectly splendid man who had everything, money included.
They'd found several thousand dollars on him when he was picked up. And
the yarns he told about gold-mines!... But it wasn't that, it wasn't the
gold-mines, it was 'the way with him' that caught me. I guess when
you're in love you're no judge of your man. We two, I tell you, seemed
made for each other. He was as fond of a good time as I, and he loved
fun, like me. We were going to California to make our everlasting
fortune. You'd have thought there was no more doubt about it than the
Gospels being true. And the good times we were going to have while doing
it were nothing to the good times we'd have after, when I'd have my
diamonds and he'd have his horses and things. As I said, the diamonds
weren't needed; I'd have gone with him anywhere just for the fun of
being together. I couldn't see what I'd done to deserve my blessings. I
guess he was in love, too, as far as it was in him to be; I'll do him
that justice.
"Hattie and her ma, while they had nothing to say against Jim, wanted me
to wait awhile. But Jim couldn't wait. The moment he was well enough he
wanted to be off. And I didn't care much about waiting either. I felt as
if I'd known him all my life. So they said nothing more and gave us a
perfectly lovely wedding from their house. They didn't see through him
any more than I did, and in a way it wasn't strange, because he wasn't
hiding anything in particular or misrepresenting anything. He believed
all he said about the big money he was going to make and the grand times
we should have. He was born with the sort of nature that always believes
things are going to turn out right without labor and perseverance on
your part. He wasn't fond of work, that's sure. What we ought to have
done was find out something about his past; but even that, I guess,
wouldn't have opened our eyes, with him before us looking like one of
ourselves. And it wasn't a very long past; he was young. He came of good
folks, I guess. I never saw them, but there are ways of telling. Good
folks, but not wealthy, and so as to get rich easily he had tried one
thing after another. He was quick' discouraged, and the moment the thing
didn't look so big or easy he wanted to throw it over and try something
else. Then I've come to the conclusion he loved change for its own
sake--go somewhere else, take a new name, and start a new business,
talking big. It came out after he died that he'd been known under half a
dozen names in as many States. There simply wasn't anything _to_
him. I don't believe he meant to act like a skunk, but, then, he hadn't
any principles either to keep him from acting like a skunk, or meaner
than a skunk, when it came to getting himself out of difficulty. And I,
for my sins, had to marry such a fellow as that! It was like there had
stood the good times I'd always wanted, right before me in the body, and
I took them for better, for worse, and got what my ma said I deserved to
get when she tried to cure me of my fancy for good times!"
"Don't!" protested Gerald, softly. "Don't regard as wrong what was so
natural. All who have the benefit of knowing you must thank the stars
which permitted your beautiful love of life to survive the dreadfulness
of which you have given me a glimpse."
"The dreadfulness, Geraldino! I haven't told you anything yet of the
dreadfulness. I haven't come to it. I haven't come to what makes
her"--she nodded toward the portrait,--"look like that."
"Then tell me!" he encouraged her.
"It isn't Jim. When I think of Jim, it only makes me mad. My heart is
hard as stone toward him." She clenched her jaws and looked, in fact,
rather grim. "That he's dead doesn't change it. I hope I forgive him as
a Christian ought to who asks forgiveness for her own trespasses. I know
I don't feel revengeful. There wasn't enough _to_ Jim for me to
wish him punished in hell. But if you think I have any sentiment because
I used to love him, or that I was sorry I woke up from my fool dream
when I once had seen it was a dream--Not a bit of it. There was a time,
though, when I first began to suspect and understand, that makes me
rather sick to think of even now. I was so far from home, you see. I
hadn't a friend, and I wouldn't for worlds have written back to my old
friends that I'd made a bad bargain--not while I wasn't dead sure. And I
kept on hoping.
"At first we had a real good time. We lived in a miner's cottage, but
that seemed sort of jolly. I'd been used to hard work all my life, so I
didn't mind that, and I wanted him to have as nice a home as any man
could on the same money. So I cleaned and contrived and baked and brewed
and fixed up. I wanted him to be pleased with me and proud among the
other men. But pretty soon I found I didn't care to make acquaintances,
because I was ashamed of the way Jim did. He kept putting all his money
into the mine, sending good money after bad, and let me keep house on
nothing, and then was in a worse and worse temper because the mine
didn't pan out and things weren't more comfortable at home. I began to
wake up in the night and lie there in a cold sweat, clean scairt. I
haven't told you that we were looking for an addition to the family.
That's one reason I was so scairt. But I shut my teeth, and said I to
myself, 'This baby's going to have a chance if his mother can give it to
him by not getting excited or letting things prey on her mind.' So I
kept a hold on myself and didn't let anything count except guarding that
baby. I seemed to care more about it than all the rest of the world put
together. Oh, I can't begin to tell you how much more than for all the
rest of the world put together. I don't know that a man would
understand."
"Yes, he would; of course he would," spoke Gerald, gently reverent, yet
a little impatient; then he qualified his assertion: "He could imagine,
I mean to say, how you would have felt that way."
"Well, that matter was going to be put safely through, no matter what.
The first mistake I made was not making friends with my women neighbors,
so that everybody in Elsinore supposed that Jim's wife was the same
stripe as he,--or that's what I thought they supposed,--and when I
needed friends I couldn't think of any to turn to except those at home.
The other mistake I made was not to write them at home and tell them the
truth and then wait for them to send me money to come. But I guess my
mind stopped working when the shock came."
Aurora appeared to brace herself, while decently considering how to
minimize to her audience the brutality of her next revelation.
"Jim cleared out one night while I was asleep, taking every cent we'd
got and every last thing he could hope to turn into a cent," she said,
hardening her voice and lips. Gerald was given a moment in which to
visualize the situation, before she went on: "I guess, as I said before,
that I wasn't in my right mind for a spell; all I could think of was
getting home to my own folks, and I was going to do it somehow, though I
hadn't a cent. I hadn't even my wedding-ring. I'd put it off because my
finger had grown fatter, and he'd taken even that to go and try his luck
somewhere else.--What do you think of it?" she mechanically added.
She was pale, remembering these things. Gerald drew in a long, unsteady
breath, oppressed.
"I was going to get home somehow," Aurora repeated, "and I wasn't going
to waste time waiting for anything. And how was I going to do it? I
don't suppose I really thought; I followed instinct like an animal. I
hid in a freight-car going East--"
A definite difficulty here stopped Aurora. While she felt for words in
which to clothe what followed, the images in her mind made her eyes,
which were not seeing the things actually before them, more descriptive
of the anguish of remembered scenes than her words were likely to be.
"I'm going to skip all that, Gerald." With a gesture, she suddenly
rolled up a part of her story and threw it aside. "But when I came to
see and understand rightly again, weeks after, in a hospital at Denver,
I cried, oh! how I cried, and didn't care what became of me. Because I'd
lost him; they hadn't succeeded in saving him. He had lived, mind you,"
she emphasized with pride--"he had lived a little while, he was all
right, perfect in every way--a son."
His due of tears was not withheld from the wee frustrated god. Aurora
gave up talking, so as to have her cry in quietness.
Gerald, holding back a sound of distress, twisted on his chair, not
daring to recall himself to Aurora's notice either by speaking or
touching her.
"I'm plain sorry for myself," she explained her tears while trying to
stop them. "You can't be sorry, for their own sakes, for the little
children who go back to God without knowing anything of this life's
troubles. It's for myself I'm sorry. I never can bring up those times
without the _feeling_ of them coming over me again, and then, as I
tell you, I'm sorry for that poor fool in her empty house, and then in
the thundering freight-car, and then in the hospital. I see her outside
of me just as plain as I would another person. Then, too"--she dried her
eyes as if this time for good--"I feel a burning here"--she touched her
breast--"like anger. Angry. I feel angry at being robbed, in a way I
never seem to get over. To think I might have had him all my life, like
millions of other women, and I never even saw him! And he was as real to
me all those months before!... I don't see how I could have loved him
more than I did. I'm hungry for him sometimes, just as I might be for
food. And then I'm angry and rebellious. But I couldn't tell you against
who. It isn't God, certainly. He's our best friend, all we've got to
rely on. And He's been mighty good to me. There in Denver, when I hadn't
a friend or a penny, He raised up friends for me and gave me the most
wonderful luck.
"I stayed right there in Denver till less than a year ago. I guess
you've heard me speak of the Judge. The doctor in the hospital where
they carried me was his son; that's how it all came about--friends, good
luck, money, everything. When I say I found friends, let me mention that
I found enemies, too, the meanest, the bitterest! I--but there"--she
interrupted herself as, on the very verge of further confidences, a
change of mind was effected in her by sudden weariness or by a deterrent
thought, or both--"I guess I've talked enough about myself for one
evening. I didn't have a soft time of it there in Denver," she summed up
the remainder of her story, "but I'd got back to being my old self.
You'd never have known what I'd been through. I was just about as you've
known me here. Funny, isn't it,"--Aurora seemed almost ashamed,
apologetic,--"how the disposition you're born with hangs on?"
"Golden disposition," Gerald commented soothingly. Timid about looking
directly at her just yet, he looked instead at the portrait, whereon lay
the shadow of the events just related.
After a little period of thought in silence Aurora said, with the
shamefaced air she took when venturing to talk of high things:
"I heard a sermon once on the text, 'Mary kept all these things in her
heart.' The minister said that it wasn't only Mary who did this, but
ordinary women, so often. And I know from myself how true it is. You see
a woman all dressed up at a party, laughing with the others, dancing
perhaps, and she'll be saying inside of herself, 'If baby had lived,
he'd have been three years old.' Or thirteen, or thirty. I've no doubt
it goes on as long as she lives. And she can see him before her just as
plain, as he would have been.... My baby would have been five last
October."
Gerald remembered how sweet he had always thought it of her to wish to
stop and fondle little children, often wee beggars, stuffing little
grimy fists with pennies, not avoiding to touch soiled little cheeks
with her clean gloves. He had attributed this propensity to a simple
womanly talent for motherliness.
"I've got this to be thankful for," she came out again from silence,
farther down along the line of her meditations, "that he did live for a
few hours. I've got a son, just as much as if he'd grown to be a man."
She was dry-eyed, almost joyful in this.
"Yes, yes," hurried Gerald, consolingly; "that's what you must always
think of--that and not the other things. You must lay hold of that
thought and feel rich in it. But hear me, dear friend--me, trying to
suggest ways to you of being brave and cheerful! You, who do from
god-given temperament what I can only see as a right aim of aspiration,
by light of a certain philosophy arrived at in my own way, through my
own experiences. Philosophy is not the right word, either; the feeling I
have is mainly esthetic. In order not to be too unhappy in this world,
in order to have a little serenity, we must forgive everything, Aurora;
that is what I have clearly seen. It's the only way. We must forgive
events just as we forgive persons. And we must love life. I who so much
of the time hate life, yet know better. We must love it as we must love
our enemies. The wherefore is a mystery, but peace of heart and beauty
of life are involved with doing it. We mustn't mind being wounded,
crucified. We mustn't mind anything, Aurora! We mustn't be angry, the
gestures of it are ugly. I, who am always being angry, who sometimes
groan aloud my thoughts are so blasphemously bitter, I am telling you
what I at bottom know. The game is so unfair, it calls for magnanimity
on our part to stake handsomely and lose patiently. Patience, that's it!
We must be patient--patient as a cab-horse! Pride and dignity demand
that we be patient, absolutely. For the sake of certain beautiful things
and sweet people in the world, we must give it a good name. But hear me!
Hear me giving counsels to you--you who without formulating these ideas
act on them, whilst with me they are things which I see as fit to be
done but can never hope to do."
"You, too, Gerald, poor boy," was Aurora's simple reply--"you, too, have
had lots to try you."
He swept aside by a gesture the subject of his trials, removed it
altogether from the horizon, unwilling really that the interest be
shifted from her to him. She was equally determined, now that he had
sympathized with her, to sympathize with him.
"I know you have," she insisted; "I know you've had lots to try you,
just as you knew that I'd had lots. And you're so high-strung, so
sensitive ... I never knew anybody like you. But there are good times
coming for you; I'm sure of it."
"I don't in the least expect them." He laughed a little harshly. He had
winced at her description of him as sensitive, high-strung. "Dear
incurable optimist, I don't in the least expect them. It's not because
there will be compensation that I hold it the decentest thing to put up
with the _mechancetes_ of fate, fate's ingenious stabs in the
tender, as they come, without giving the exhibition of one's
vulnerability, or poisoning one's system with hate!"
"But there will," she continued to insist, "there will be compensations.
I know it just as well.... You have so much talent, it's perfectly
wonderful, and it's only a question of time your having the success you
deserve. I, of course, am not educated up to your paintings, but even I
am beginning to see something more than I did at first. I can see, for
instance, that almost any fine painter, with a command of his colors,
could have done the picture down-stairs, but that only you in the whole
world could have done this one here. But, I say again, my opinion isn't
worth anything. But there's Leslie, who knows all about art and such
things, doesn't she? Well, she 's told me how wonderful you are. From
what she's told me I'm perfectly sure you'll make your mark in the
world."
Again Gerald swept her words aside like noxious obscuring cobwebs. "What
is, few know, and what will be, nobody knows whatever," he said. "But of
all things, I beg, I beg you will not think of me as a misunderstood
genius! Art is not a passion with me, it is--an interest. And don't hold
out for a lure that will reconcile me, my dear friend, anything so
vulgar as success! The single hope I have, when I am the most hopeful,
is that simply my metal, my resistance, may never quite fail. I shall
not have success, dear lady, though in your kindness you predict it. I
shall go on and on seeing with different eyes from other people, carving
my cherry-stones in my own way, and made unsociable by the failure of
others to see how superior my way is. I shall go on growing more
eccentric and solitary, and call myself lucky quite beyond my merits if
those particular snares which the devil Melancholy sets for the solitary
may be escaped, that I may neither drink, nor drug myself, nor shoot
myself, nor marry the cook!"
"Don't talk like that, Gerald!" cried Aurora. "Don't say anything so
awful! Now keep still while I talk, listen while I tell you. You're
going on painting in your own way, but some one--see?--some one is going
to arise bright enough to recognize how perfectly wonderful your
pictures are. Keep still. You mustn't despise success, you know, success
is what everybody needs and wants. You're going to succeed. Keep still.
Stupid people will want to buy your pictures because the people who know
about such things have told the public how wonderful they are. Then
you'll grow rich and famous. You won't be either eccentric or solitary.
You'll have hosts of admiring friends. I guess you could have them now,
if you wanted to. You won't be melancholy. You'll be happy. In your home
there will be a nice wife. Why are you supposing you'll never marry? A
dear true beautiful girl who thinks the world of you and that you think
the world of. And when you're an old gentleman with your grandchildren
playing at your knee, you'll say to yourself, 'Aurora told me so!'"
She was all cheering smiles and dimples again.
"Be sure you remember now," she said, holding up a finger and shaking it
to mark her bidding, "to say to yourself, 'Aurora told me so!'"
It was a pity almost that Gerald should not have gone home at that
point. He would have left with undividedly fond and approving feelings;
he would have left tied to Aurora by a thousand sweet humanities in
common, as well as impressed afresh by the depth and mysteriousness of
woman. But he had either forgotten or was disregarding the hour--the
clock on the mantelpiece, like most ornamental clocks, was not going;
the bliss of being warm for the first time in days, warm through and
through, warm to the middle of his heart, made him careless of
correctness; and so he stayed on, to be rudely jarred by and by out of
his contentment, and take with him finally into the night a renewed,
even sharpened, perception of those exasperating faults which made Mrs.
Hawthorne, as he named it, impossible.
Because they seemed to be on such solid terms of friendship after the
long evening before the fire, when they had sorrowed together and
sympathized; when he had been permitted to hold and press her hands;
when with a veritable mutual outgoing of the heart they had vied in
prophesying for each other fair and happy days, Gerald found the
boldness--and found it without much strain--the boldness to utter a
request which had burned on his lips before, but which he had repressed,
saying to himself that what Mrs. Hawthorne did was no affair of his.
"Aurora," he said--she was after this evening Mrs. Hawthorne to him only
in the hearing of others,--"Aurora, I want to ask a favor, a great
favor."
"Go ahead. I guess it's granted."
"I wish I felt sure; but I'm afraid. Say you will not take part in the
amateur variety show at _mi-careme_."
"Sakes!" cried Aurora, staring at him with round eyes. "Ask me something
easy! Ask me something else! I can't do that."
"You can. Of course you can, if you wish to. You have only to give some
excuse."
"An excuse? Not for a farm! I don't want to. I've bound myself. They
expect me as much as anything. I couldn't back out. It's so near the
time, too. Why, it's to make money for the Convalescents' Home. I'm a
big feature of the show."
"I know you are, and I have a perfect horror of what you may do. I can't
bear to think of the public sitting there gaping at you and laughing."
"The public will be composed of friends. It's all private. Give it up?
Not much! I tell you, it's nuts to me! I expect to have lots of fun.
You've never seen, Geraldino, how funny I can be. You'll see that
night."
"The voice runs that you're going to appear as a nigger mammy and sing
plantation songs."
"Oh, does it? Well, that seems innocent. What objection do you see to
that?"
"I did not call my request reasonable, dearest Aurora. I begged a
personal favor. You know the sort of nerves I have. It is like pouring
acid on them to think of you making a show of yourself."
She laughed, but would not yield; she treated his proposition like a
spoiled child's demand for the moon, and, after condescending to tease
like a boy, he woke suddenly to the fact of being ridiculous. He dropped
the subject with the abruptness that causes the opponent nearly to
topple over in surprise.
He had sat for a long moment in silence when, realizing that this
appeared ill-humored and a piece of effrontery, he started in haste to
talk again, choosing the first subject that came into his mind, which
was a thing he had meant to tell Aurora this evening, but had not
remembered until this moment. The wide distance between the subject he
dropped and the subject he took up would show, it was hoped, how
definitely he washed his hands of her doings.
"If you have wished for revenge on our friend Antonia," he said, "you
can be satisfied. She is in the most singular sort of difficulty."
"Oh, is she? I'm sorry," said Aurora. "Bless you! I never wished her any
harm."
"I went to see her yesterday. I had saved up my grievance and felt the
need to lay it before her. I think one should give an old friend who has
behaved badly the chance to make reparation, don't you? After being
angry as you saw me, I yet did not want to break with her. She was very
kind to me when I was young. At the same time I could not let her
rudeness to you pass. But I found her in such trouble already when I
went to see her yesterday that I said not one word of my grievance. It
will have to wait."
"You needn't think you must pick her up on my account. I don't care. But
what was the matter?"
"Two of her oldest friends, through an unaccountable mistake, turned
into enemies. Both insist that under cover of a mask at the last
_veglione_ she insulted them. Unfortunately, her best friends are
not kept by their actual knowledge of her from thinking it just possible
she might desire to amuse herself with getting a claw into them. She has
more than once given offense to her friends by putting them into her
books. But Antonia swore to me that she was innocent, and begged me to
convince De Breze. The villa she lives in is his property, and he has
requested her to vacate it. The other aggrieved one, General Costanzi,
she fears may succeed in preventing the publication of her next novel by
threat of a libel suit."
"Well, that sounds bad. But what do they say she's done?"
"The poor woman doesn't even know what she is supposed to have said;
insulted them is all she can gather. Both maintain that though she tried
to alter her voice they recognized her, and will not accept her word for
it that she wore no such disguise as they describe. Which reminds me
that the offender, or the offender's double, for I have an idea there
were two masked alike, came into your box early in the evening with a
companion. You have not forgotten--that black domino with the crow's
beak?"
Aurora jumped on her seat with a cry of "Goodness gracious!"
"What is it?" he asked, looking at her more attentively. She appeared
aghast.
She did not answer at once, tensely trying to think.
"Well," she finally exclaimed, relaxing into limpness, "I've been and
gone and done it!"
And as he waited--
"I guess I did that insulting," she added, and wiped her brow.
He thought for a moment that she might be acting out a joke, but in the
next accepted her perturbation as genuine.
"Can't you see through it even now I've told you?" she asked.
He shook his head.
"Did you suppose I didn't really know those two who came into the box,
the one who roared and the one who cawed? Well, I'm a better actress
than I supposed."
"But--"
"And did you really suppose I was going home to bed just as the fun was
at its height? There again you're simpler than I thought. Land! Don't I
wish now that I had gone home!"
"And you--"
"We'd heard so much from everybody of the pranks they play at these
vegliones of yours that we wanted to play one, too--we wanted to
intrigue you and a lot of other people. The trouble seems to be we did
it too well. Land! I wish I hadn't done it! I wish Heaven I'd consulted
you, or some one--We hatched it all up with Italo and Clotilde."
"Italo and Clotilde!"
"They were the two who came into the box and didn't say a word, for fear
of being known by their voices. Then, after you had so politely seen us
off, Estelle and I in the carriage put on black dominos and crows'
beaks, and after driving around a couple of blocks came back and found
Italo and Clotilde waiting for us. Clotilde had put off her black domino
in the dressing-room; she was dressed under it exactly like her brother.
D'you see now how we worked it? Estelle took Clotilde's arm, and I took
Italo's; we separated and kept apart, and it was as if there had only
been one couple, the same as there had been since the beginning of the
evening."
"I see."
"I've been dying to tell you about it ever since, but I just haven't
told you. I don't know what I was waiting for. I guess I was enjoying
letting you stay fooled. I had the greatest time, bad cess to it!
talking to some people I knew and to a lot that I didn't. Italo would
whisper to me beforehand what to say, and I'd say it. I didn't always
know what it was about, but nothing was further from my mind than to
wish to insult anybody. I was so excited I didn't always notice what I
did say, it just seemed playful and funny and in the spirit of the rest.
I went up to Charlie Hunt and spoke to him. I put a flea in his ear, and
I'm positive from his face that he didn't know me. I came near going up
to you when you were talking with that Mr. Guerra, but I was too much
afraid you'd recognize me; you're so sharp, and, then, you're the one
most particularly who has heard me talk with my English accent, which I
put on on the night of the _veglione_ so as not to be known."
"Your English accent? That explains."
"What?"
"Your English accent is a caricature of Antonia's."
"I don't have to tell you, I suppose, that I had no idea of personating
Antonia."
"The very difference between the original and your imitation might seem
the result of an effort on her part to disguise her speech."
"I've been a fool, of course, and some of the blame is mine, but just
let me get hold of Italo and watch me shake the teeth out of his
confounded little head. I remember perfectly speaking to the old general
that we saw at Antonia's that day and to the old viscount who came to my
ball."
"Do you remember what you said?"
"Not exactly, but in both cases it seemed harmless. I wouldn't have said
it if it hadn't seemed harmless. I couldn't have wished to insult them,
how could any one suppose it? To the general it was something about a
horse."
Gerald gave a sound of raging disgust.
Aurora waited, watching him.
"Was it very bad?" she asked finally, and held her breath for his
answer.
"Just as bad as possible. Ceccherelli deserves to be flayed. Is the man
mad? And what, may I ask, did you say to De Breze?"
"I only remember it was something about ermine. I forgot until this
moment that I meant to ask Italo what the joke was about ermine. Was
that too very bad?"
"Just as bad as possible. No, rather worse. Both relate to ancient bits
of scandal that no one would dare refer to--that would place a man
referring to them in the necessity to fight a duel. Mind you, mean and
discredited scandal. I won't resurrect it to enlighten you. You can
interrogate Signor Ceccherelli, who has really distinguished himself in
his quality of habitue of this house and your particular friend."
"I know you're angry, Gerald; I don't wonder you're ready to call names.
But the thing is simple, isn't it, after all, now that I understand. The
harm done isn't such as can never be mended. All I have to do is write
to Antonia and tell her I was the black crow, or, if you advise, write
to the two gentlemen I've offended."
"Heavens, no! you can't do that!"
"Why can't I?"
"You can't; that's all. You can't admit that that little vermin is on
terms of intimacy with you permitting his prompting your Carnival
witticisms, and you can't hope to make any one in Florence believe you
didn't understand what you were saying."
"Yes, I can, my friend; I can make them believe. I can speak the truth.
I can, at all events, prove that Antonia had nothing whatever to do with
it."
"No, no, no, I tell you! You can do nothing whatever about it. Your name
must not be allowed to appear in the matter at all. It would serve
Ceccherelli right that his part in the disgraceful business should be
known, dangerous little beast that he is. He would receive a lesson, and
an excellent thing it would be; but that, again, might involve you. One
couldn't trust him to keep your name out of it. Besides, it would very
likely ruin him, disgusting little beggar."
"You leave him to me! He roared his throat to a frazzle the other night,
and can't make a sound, but he'll come round as soon as he's better, and
then if I don't give it to him! Little cuss!... But I'm to blame, too,
Gerald. You told me over and over that I oughtn't to encourage him to
gossip as I did, but I went right on doing it because it was as good as
a play to hear him tell his queer stories in his queer English. It
amused me, I've no other excuse. I sort of knew all the time that it was
wrong. And so he got bolder and bolder and finally overstepped the line.
And now I've got my come-uppance. I'll settle him, trust _me_, and
I'll write to Antonia, and I'll write the two gentlemen, if you'll just
tell me where to write."
"Must I tell you again that you are above all things to do nothing of
the kind? Not certainly if you think of continuing to live in Florence.
Leave the matter to me. I am well acquainted with everybody in question
and shall be able to satisfy them, I hope, while leaving them completely
in the dark as to the real culprit."
Mrs. Hawthorne appeared to hesitate.
"I really should feel better if I could confess," she said. "It would
take a whole load off my chest. You see, I don't know your ways of doing
over here; that would be my way. They might all forgive me and say I was
just a fool. But if they didn't, and, as you seem to fear, made Florence
too unpleasant to hold me, luckily I'm not tied down. I'm free. I can
pull up stakes when I please and go pitch my tent elsewhere."
"The delightful independence of riches! The grandeur and detachment of
your point of view!" he spoke in a flare of excited bitterness. "What
you have said is equivalent to saying that your friends of Florence are
a matter of complete indifference to you!"
"I _love_ my friends of Florence, and you know it, Gerald Fane! And
I don't believe they'd ever turn against me, no matter what trouble I'd
made for myself at that confounded veglione. So I don't look to leaving
Florence just yet a while. You know I was only talking. I felt perfectly
safe--But it's astonishing to me, dear boy, how ready you are to get mad
at me. When you know me so well, too. You ought to be ashamed."
"I am, dear. It's my temper that's bad. And you're so kind," he meekly
subsided. "But you _are_ trying, you know," he added, after a
moment, with returning vivacity, "what with the extreme bad taste of
your masked ball adventures, and your obstinate determination to publish
them, and then your insane obstinacy to make a show of yourself as a
colored nurse in this vaudeville--But I forgot, I had sworn to myself
not to speak of that again. May I count upon you at least to leave
entirely to me the matter of exculpating Antonia to General Costanzi and
De Breze?"
"Oh, very well, if you think best."
"Will you promise solemnly to be silent on the whole matter?"
"All right. But I don't like it, Gerald. If I've done wrong, I should
feel lots easier in my mind if I could tell."
"That feeling of yours is precisely what I wish to guard against. Do
believe that in this matter the old Florentine I am knows better than
you. Promise."
"All right, I promise."
After a moment, "There's no chance, is there, of your changing your mind
about the other matter"--he asked sheepishly,--"the matter which I must
not mention? No, I supposed not. I am perfectly aware of my presumption
in making any suggestion to you on the subject. But if you knew how the
thought of it torments me...."
"You'll get over it when you see me. You'll just laugh with the rest."
"Enough. Good night," he said stiffly, but it is doubtful that the word
of leave-taking was anything more than a mode of expressing displeasure,
or that departure would immediately have succeeded upon his rising from
his chair, had not a sound of coughing from the neighboring room called
up before him an image of Harriet Estelle, wide awake, with a stern and
feverish eye fixed on the clock.
He was startled into a consciousness of the lateness of the hour.
"Good night!" he repeated in a guilty whisper. "I daren't look at my
watch. I'm afraid I've kept you shockingly late."
* * * * *
The night, when Gerald went out into it, was quieter and dryer. The
streets were altogether empty. He had quite forgotten having felt ill
earlier in the evening, and did not remember it even when he found his
teeth chattering as a result of coming out into the penetrating night
air after sitting so close to the fire. A thing he did remember, as he
took out the large iron key to the door of home, was that after all
Helen Aurora telling him her story he did not know how she came to be
Mrs. Hawthorne. There must have been a second marriage there in Denver,
one of those little-considered episodes in American life, perhaps, that
are hardly thought worth mentioning. She sometimes spoke of "the judge."
She had spoken to-night of a doctor, son of the judge. No, he decided,
it could not be either of them. The second husband, whoever he had been,
had clearly not been important, and he was dead, for Mrs. Foss had told
him explicitly that Aurora was a real, and not what is called in America
a grass, widow. From this second husband it must have been that she
derived her wealth.