Aurora, unable to see beyond the footlights, had never dreamed but
Gerald was among the audience. Her capers had at moments been definitely
directed at him. Discovering that he had kept away, she was not so much
hurt as puzzled.
"Who'd have thought he cared enough about it to be so mean!" she said to
herself. "Well," she said further, "let him alone. He'll come round in a
day or two."
She really expected him that same day. When he did not come, or the day
after, or the day after that, she tried to recall passage for passage
their talk on the subject of the show. She did not remember his saying
anything that amounted to giving her a choice between renouncing it or
renouncing his friendship.
Then she reviewed all she knew of him; and his present conduct, if he
were by this avoidance trying to punish her for doing what it was the
prerogative of her native independence to do, did not seem in accordance
with his known regard for the rights of others.
Aurora did not know what to think. From hour to hour she looked for a
call, a message, a letter, and because the time while waiting seemed
long, she neglected to note that the actual time elapsed was not more
than Gerald had sometimes allowed to pass without her attributing his
silence to offence. He had his work, he had other friends; Abbe Johns
might be in town again visiting him. This silence, however, had a
different value, she thought, from other silences. They had seemed so
much better friends after their confidences that long evening over the
fire; she expected more of him than she had done before it.
At other moments she was disposed to find fault with herself. She
supposed she was a big coarse thing, unable to appreciate the feelings
of a man who apparently hadn't as many thicknesses of skin as other
folks.
It was at such a moment, when she made allowances for him, that she
thought of writing, making it easy for him to drop his grouch and
return. But here Aurora felt a difficulty. Aurora thought well, in a
general way, of her powers as a letter-writer, and she was proud of her
beautifully legible Spencerian hand; but for such a letter as she wished
to send Gerald fine shades of expression were needed beyond what she
could compass. She was fond of Gerald; in this letter she must not be
too fond, yet she must be fond enough. What hope that a blockhead would
strike the exact middle of so fine a line?
She could obviate the difficulty by sending him a formal invitation to
dinner. But suppose she should receive formal regrets?
After that the whole thing must be left to him; the tactful letter meant
to hurry him back would no longer be possible.
"Oh, bother!" said Aurora, and formed a better, bolder plan.
Aurora had not seen the plays, had not read the books, where the going
of the heroine to visit the hero at his house for whatever good reason
under the sun has such damaging results for her fair fame. Aurora was
innocent of good society's hopeless narrowness on the subject. If she
made a secret of her plan to Estelle it was merely because Estelle had
permitted herself wise words one day, warnings, with regard to Gerald,
in whom she specifically did not wish her friend to "become interested."
"You're too different," Estelle had said. "You're like a fish and a
bird. I won't say I don't like him. He's nice in a way, but it's not our
way, Nell. You'd be miserable with him, first or last."
"My dear," Aurora had replied, "if you knew the sort of thing we talk
about when you're not there you wouldn't worry. If you can see Gerald
Fane in the part of my beau you must be cracked. And if you think I'm
soft on him, you're only a little bit less cracked. Can't you see we're
just friends? It's nice for him to come here and it's nice for us to
have him. We want friends, don't we?"
"All I say is don't go ahead with your eyes shut till you find before
you know it that you're landed in a case of, 'Mother, I can't live
without him!' For, Nell, it won't do, you know it won't."
"My dearest girl, of course I know, but not half so well as he knows!
Bless you, Hat, do you forget all Leslie told us about him and his
affair? And do you forget my little affair? Do you suppose either of us
wants to try again?"
"Indeed, I hope you will try again, both of you. But not together, Nell.
I've got the man all picked out for you; you know perfectly I mean Tom
Bewick. There's the one for you, Nell. Big, healthy, kind. Good sense.
Good temper. Your own kind of person, Nell, and not a queer bird from a
menagerie. Don't go and spoil everything by getting tangled up over
here. You know as well as I do that Gerald Fane, take him just as a man,
can't hold a candle to Doctor Tom."
"I've never thought of comparing them. I don't see any use in doing it.
Tom's Tom and Gerald's Gerald. So far as Gerald goes, you can set your
heart at rest and bank on this: I know just as well as you do, and he
knows just as well as I do, that we couldn't pull in harness together
any more than--just as you say, a fish and a bird. Neither of us is
thinking of such a thing. But why mustn't a fish and a bird have
anything to say to each other? He might like the cut of her fins and she
might fancy the color of his wings. They could sympathize together,
couldn't they, if nothing else?" Aurora's eyebrows had with this tried
to signify her entire capacity to take care of herself and her own
business.
But not wishing to rouse any further uneasiness in her friend, she no
more after that spoke frankly of Gerald whenever he came into her mind.
And when she declined Estelle's invitation to go with her to Mlle.
Durand's, where she would hear the pupils of the latter recite Corneille
and Racine, she did not tell her what she had planned to do instead,
fully intending, however, to reveal it later.
* * * * *
Gerald meanwhile did not flatter himself imagining Aurora unhappy
because he stayed away longer than had lately been quite usual. Time
dragged with him, but the calendar told him that just so many days, no
more, had passed. He pictured her going her cheerful gait, occasionally
saying, perhaps, "I wonder what has become of Stickly-prickly?"
He had not gone to the mid-Lent entertainment as a matter of course.
Aurora had shown small knowledge of him when she thought he would
consent to see her disport herself before the public as a negress. On
the day after, when he learned that she had been the star of the evening
as a negro, his frenzied disgust itself warned him of the injustice, the
impropriety, of exhibiting it to her. He chose to remain away until it
should have sufficiently worn down to be governable. By that time the
poor man had developed an illness, that cold of which for some weeks he
had been carrying around in his bones the premonition.
With reddened eyelids and thickened nose, a sore throat and a cough, he
felt himself no fit object for a lady's sight. He stayed in to take care
of himself.
Giovanna knew what to do for her _signorino_ when he was
_raffreddato_. She built a little fire in the studio; she brought
his light meals to him in his arm-chair before it. She administered
remedies. His bed was warmed at night by her _scaldino_. Gaetano
was sent to Vieusseux's for an armful of books. All day Gerald sat by
the fire and read, and sometimes dozed and dreamed, and read again. And
days passed, while his cold held on.
He thought of writing Aurora to tell her. But if he told her, she would
at once come to see him; of so much one could be sure. And he did not
want her to come. The eccentric fellow did not want her to come
precisely because he wanted her to come so much.
"This is the way it begins," he said to himself, with horror, when he
became fully aware that his nerves, now that he could not go to find
Aurora when he chose, were suggesting to him all the time that the
presence of Aurora was needed to quiet that sense of want, of
maladjustment to conditions, haunting him like the desire for sleep.
At sight of his danger he became very clear-headed. The man who sees a
snare and walks into it deserves his fate, surely.
"It is time to stop it," he said. And he laid down for himself new rules
of life.
Fortunately, he had at hand some absorbing books. Dostoiewsky's "Crime
and Punishment" could effectively take him out of himself.
But the print was fine and crowded, he was weakened by illness, he was
forced now and then to stop and rest with swimming head. Then at once
would return, like the demon in fair disguise tempting some hermit of
the desert, the thought, "What is Aurora doing? If Aurora knew I was
ill, she would come." And the imagination of her coming would shed a
feverish gladness all along those petulant, ill-treated, starved nerves.
"What have I to do with Aurora, or Aurora with me?" he would ask,
furiously, the incongruity of what had happened to him calling forth
sometimes a desperate laugh. But Nature laughs at man's ideas of
congruity; remembering that, he could only hold his hands against his
eyes and try to press the image of Aurora out of existence.
Gerald, however, was much stronger than his nerves. He could see his own
case, even with a pulse at ninety, as well as another man's. And his
will was firmer than might have been thought. He knew something of a
human man's constitution, how it can circumvent a man, or how a man,
well on his guard, can circumvent it. He formed the project of
interrupting his visits to the Hermitage.
After this resolution he regarded those returns of earth-born desire for
Aurora's balmy touch and tranquilizing neighborhood as a man who had
taken an heroic and sure remedy against ague might regard the
fluctuations in his body of heat and cold continuing still for a little
while. As to how Aurora would take his defection, all should be managed
with so much art and politeness that the most sensitive could not be
hurt. By the time the new important work which he would make his excuse
was accomplished, his cure would have been accomplished as well.
Meanwhile, each time the door-bell rang--it was not often,
certainly--his attention was taken from his book, and he listened. And
so, on Mlle. Durand's French afternoon, Gerald, having heard the bell,
was listening, but with his face to the fire and his back to the door.
When Giovanna knocked, "Forward!" he said, without turning. The door
opened.
"_C'e quella signora._" "There is that lady," dubiously announced
Giovanna.
Gerald turned, and beheld that lady filling the doorway.
Then it was as if a bright trumpet-blast of reality, breaking upon a bad
dream, dispelled it; or as if a fresh wind, blowing over stagnant water,
swept away the cloud of noxious gnats. All he had latterly been thinking
and feeling seemed to Gerald insane, sickly, the instant he beheld
Aurora's comradely smile. He was ashamed; he found himself on the verge
of stupid, unexplainable tears.
"Well!" said Aurora.
At the sound they were placed back on the exact footing of their last
meeting, before thinking and conjecturing about each other in absence
had built up between them barriers of illusion.
"Well!" he said, but less pleasantly, because he was mortified by the
awareness of himself as an uninviting sight, with his old dressing-gown,
neglected beard, and the unpicturesque manifestations of a cold.
But Aurora's face was reassuring; she did not confuse him with the
accidents of his dressing-gown and beard and cold. Aurora's face beamed,
so much was she rejoicing in her own excellent sense, which had told her
that one look at each other would do a thousand times more to make
things right between them than innumerable letters could have done.
"I didn't know what to think," she said, "so I came to find out. First
I'd think you were mad at me, then I'd think you had gone away and
written me, and the letter hadn't reached me, Gaetano had lost it on the
road. Then I'd think you might be sick, and there was nobody to let your
friends know. I don't know what I didn't think of. What made you not
send me word?"
"I did not know you would be uneasy. I did not rightly measure, it
seems, the depth of your kindness. I should certainly have written to
you before long in case I had continued unable to go to see you."
"How long have you been sick?"
"I am not sick, dearest lady. I only have a cold. In order to make it go
away more quickly I have to remain in the house. But how good, how very
good of you to come! Sit down, please do, and warm yourself. I will ring
for Giovanna, and she will make us some tea."
[Illustration: Gerald turned, and beheld that lady]
Aurora, smiling all the time with the pleasure she felt in not finding
him angry or estranged or in any way altered toward her, took the
arm-chair from which he had just risen, while he drew a lighter chair to
the other side of the chimney-place. His fires were not like hers. Two
half-burned sticks and a form of turf smoldered sparingly on a mound of
hot ashes; he eagerly cast on a fagot, and added wood with, for once, an
extravagant hand. Then, looking over at her, he smiled, too.
"Now tell me all about yourself," she commanded. "I want to know what
you're doing for this cold of yours."
"Please let us not talk about my cold," he at once refused. "Let us talk
about something agreeable. Tell me the news. I have not seen any one for
days. I have been living in Russia with a poor young man who had
committed a murder, also with a most sympathetic being who found the
world outside an institution for the feeble-minded too much for him." By
a gesture toward the books on the table he gave her a clue to his
meaning.
"You say you haven't seen any one for days," she said. "Now the Fosses,
for instance, who are your best friends, don't you let them know when
you're shut in?"
"You have no conception, evidently, of my bearishness, dear friend. They
have. They never wonder when they do not see me or hear from me for
weeks."
"I know, and it seems funny; it seems sort of forlorn to me. I saw them
the other day and asked if any one had seen you since the night of the
show. They said no, but didn't seem to think anything about it."
"It's not really long since then. How are they all?"
"All right, and busy as bees. They've no time to come and see me, or
anybody else, I guess. Brenda's coming back to be married in May, and
they're flying round getting her things ready. All her linen is being
beautifully embroidered...."
They went on talking, without much thought of what they said. It was
immaterial, really, what they said, or even whether they listened to
each other, while they had in common the comfort of sitting together in
front of the fire after a long separation filled with doubts and
dismays. She told him about the Convalescents' Home, the sum they had
raised for it. No word, prudently, was spoken by either of her share in
raising it. He told her about the Russian novels. A third person might
perfectly have been present, for anything intimate in their
conversation. Gerald was scrupulously careful, for his part, that this
should be so. The third person would never have divined how far for the
moment that chimney-corner transcended, in the sentiments of the parties
seated before it, any other corner of the earth.
Aurora's attention became closer when Gerald related his interviews with
De Breze and Costanzi, both of whom he had succeeded in convincing that
Antonia had had nothing to do with intriguing them at the
_veglione_, and had left to digest as best they could their
curiosity concerning the mysterious masker mistaken for her. He had been
obliged to give his word that he knew on absolutely good authority who
this person was.
His attention, on the other hand, was complete when she told him how she
had dealt with Ceccherelli; she was considerate enough to-day to make
the effort to pronounce the gentleman's cognomen.
"I was savage at him, you remember," she said. "I was going to take his
head off. Then when it came to it, and I had told him what I thought of
him and the whole disgraceful scrape he had got me into--Oh, I went for
him, hammer and tongs! Incidentally, I made him tell me what it was I
had said. Pretty bad, wasn't it!--Well, do you know, he cried, he felt
so. He just cried on his knees, and didn't try to get rid of any of the
blame. All he wanted was that I should forgive him. And what could I do?
As long, particularly, as I knew that a good deal of the fault was my
own.... So now he comes to the house with a look as if he'd just been
baptized. And he tells me only stories fit, he says, for a convent. Here
is a sample, if you'd like to hear. Mrs. X, as he called her, who lives
in a palace not a thousand miles, he said, from Piazza degli Anti-nory,
and who had given Mr. B. reasons for not liking her, was seen by him, in
a suspiciously simple dress, going suspiciously on foot, in a little
suspiciously out of the way street, at a considerable distance from
Piazza degli Anti-nory. The gentleman followed her stealthily into a
house he saw her enter, thinking, you know, he would find out something
to her discredit. And what did he find out but that she was secretly
visiting and relieving the poor! The brilliant society lady, whom he
wished to be revenged on because, as I gathered, she had scorned his
dishonorable love-making, was secretly the angel of the poor.... Don't
you think that's a nice story? He tells me nothing now that's less nice
than that. We're reformed characters. He has asked my permission to
dedicate to me a beautiful piece of music he has just composed, and
which is called--but in French--'Prayer of the Evening.'"
Both of them were pleasantly aware of a tray placed on the table near
them, as if descended from heaven, laden with teapot, bread and butter,
jam. Neither of them really saw Giovanna, who brought it in, or was
struck by the stern expression of her face.
Aurora, never sorry of something to eat, turned her attention to the
tray. Gerald wished to serve her, and she first noticed his weakness
when she saw the teapot tremble slightly in his hand. She went on
chattering, but she was observing him.
"Is your carriage waiting before the door?" he suddenly asked, after a
space during which she had suspected that he was not properly attending
to what she said. Aurora's monogram, daintily executed, adorned the
door-panels of her carriage.
"Yes," she answered. "Why?"
As if he had not heard, he changed the subject. After a while he asked,
again irrelevantly:
"How was it that Miss Madison did not come with you this afternoon?"
"She was going to a different tea-party." Supposing that his question
was a way of politely desiring news of Miss Madison, she went on to talk
of her.
"She was going to her French teacher's, who is having a French afternoon
where they're supposed to talk nothing but French. What would I have
been doing there? But Estelle is getting to talk the French language
exactly as well as her own.... That reminds me. A thing I've wanted to
tell you. If you should notice that Busteretto seems to be rather more
her dog than mine, don't you say anything, or care. The fact is Estelle
loves him more than I do. That's all there is about it. Which isn't
saying that I don't love him. But Estelle's silly over him, in the
regular old maid way, as I tell her. When he wouldn't eat his dinner
this noon, I had all I could do to make her eat hers, she was so
troubled. And nothing ailed him, I guess, but that he'd picked up
something in the kitchen. What I wanted to say was, don't you think it's
because I don't value your present, if you should notice by and by that
I seem to have given up my claims to Busteretto. That sort of alive
present has a will of its own. The little thing took to her from the
first more than he did to me. Shall I tell Estelle that you wished to be
remembered?"
"Pray do."
"She'll be sorry to hear you're sick. Don't say that again, Gerald," she
silenced him, letting her anxiety at last plainly appear. "Don't tell me
you aren't sick, for I know better. It's been taking away my appetite to
see you make believe to eat, and choke over it. Your cough is so tight
it sounds as if it tore your lungs. Give me your hand. It's as hot, dear
boy, and as dry!... Wait, let me feel your pulse."
He knew that his pulse was high, that his temples ached, that a
disposition to shiver accompanied the volcanic heat of his blood.
He laughed at her light-headedly while with serious concentration she
counted the beats in his wrist.
"I'm going to stop at Doctor Gage's on my way home," she said, letting
go his hand, and not heeding what he said. "And I'm going to tell him to
come and see you."
"Please do not! If I need a doctor, there is my own, an Italian, the
same for years."
"An Italian? Do you think they're as good?"
"Better for my own case."
"Gerald, it's my advice to you to go right to bed and let your doctor
come and prescribe. A cold is nothing in a way, but a neglected cold can
grow into a mean sort of thing. Say you'll do it. Don't you know how
good it will feel to you just to give in and go to bed and let some one
else do all the looking after you? Oh, I wish I could speak Italian
enough to have a talk with your Giovanna."
"Giovanna has taken care of me and my _malanni_ for years. She
gives me tar-water, and rice-water, and tamarind-water, and linden-tea,
and cassia. She threatened me this morning with a sinapism if I were not
better by evening. I shall be better. I do not wish for a sinapism."
"Is that a poultice on your chest? I guess it's what you need. Now, if I
have any influence with you, Gerald, if you love me one little bit,
you'll promise to go right to bed, and you'll give me your doctor's
address so that on my way home I can leave word for him to come."
"You shall not take that trouble. I can send Gaetano."
"You promise me you'll do it, then?"
"I seem to have been left no choice, dear lady."
"That's real sweet of you. You'll go to bed the minute I've gone?"
"Yes. But don't go quite yet!"
"With that temperature, I don't see how you can care who stays or who
goes, or anything in the world but to lay your head down on a pillow. I
won't stay any longer now. Go to bed like a good boy. To-morrow I'll run
in and see how you're getting along."
His last word was, after a moment of seeming embarrassment:
"I hope Miss Madison will be able to come with you next time."
"Yes, yes," said Aurora, lightly, taking it for a mere amiable message
with which he was charging her for Estelle.
* * * * *
Fever no doubt colored all Gerald's dreams that night, and was in part
responsible next day for his thoughts, as he passed from languor to
restlessness, and from impatience back to the peace of the certain
knowledge that before evening he should have visitors--fair visitors.
When it seemed to him nearly time for them, he ordered Giovanna to make
the room of a beautiful and perfect neatness, hiding all the medicine
bottles and humble signs that one is mortal. She was directed to lay
across his white counterpane that square of brocade which often formed a
background for his portraits. She was asked to brush his hair and beard,
and wrap his shoulders in an ivory-white shawl, thick with silk
embroideries, which had been his mother's. In a little green bronze
tripod a black pastille was set burning, which sent up, slow, thin, and
wavering, a gray spiral of perfume.
Keenly as he was waiting, he yet did not know when the ladies arrived.
He opened his eyes, and they were there, shedding around them a
beautiful freshness of health and the world outside. Estelle, in a soft
green velvet edged with silver fur, held toward him an immense bunch of
flowers. Aurora, in a wine-colored cloth bordered with bands of black
fox, tendered a basket heaped with fruit. Both smiled, and had the kind
look of angels.
They sat down beside his bed. They talked with him; all was just as
usual. They asked the old questions pertinent to the case, he made the
old answers, and by an effort kept up for some minutes a drawing-room
conversation with them.
Then Aurora said:
"Hush! You mustn't talk any more!" And when he thought she was going
away, he wondered to see her take off her gloves.
She stood over him; he wondered what she meant to do. She felt of his
forehead with her cool hand. With her palms, which were like her voice,
of a velvet not too soft, she smoothed his forehead and temples; she
stroked them over and over in a way that seemed to draw the ache out of
his brain. Her fingers moved soothingly, magnetically, all around his
eye-sockets, pressing down the eyelids and comforting them.
At first he resisted. Perversely he frowned, as if the thing increased
his pain, annoyed him beyond words. He all but cried out to the
well-meaning hands to stop.
"Doesn't it feel good?" asked Aurora, anxiously.
He relaxed. Without opening his eyes, he nodded to thank her, and as he
yielded himself up to the hands it seemed to him that those passes drew
his spirit after them quite out of his body.
* * * * *
"I don't think I'll go up with you," Estelle said unexpectedly when on
the next day they stopped before the narrow yellow door in Borgo Pinti.
"I'll wait here in the carriage. I'm nervous myself to-day. Give my best
regards to Gerald. I hope you'll find him better."
Aurora did not take time to examine into the possible reasons for her
friend's choice. She climbed the long stairs sturdily, managing her
breath so that she did not have to stop and rest on the way.
She followed the stern Giovanna, unsubdued by the latter's hard and
jealous looks, to the door of her master's chamber.
She went toward the bed, smiling at the sick man over an armful of white
lilacs.
He half rose in his bed and quickly, disconnectedly, impetuously, said:
"My dear friend, this is most good of you. I'm sure I thank you very
much. I'm very, very much better, as you can see. I shall be out again
in a day or two." He was visibly trembling; his eyes flared with
excitement. "That being the case, my dear lady, I earnestly beg you will
not trouble to come like this every day." He stopped to choke and cough,
then wrenching himself free from strangulation--"Aurora,"--he changed
his key and tune,--"do let me be ill in peace! Here I am on my back,
with a loosened grip on everything, and it's taking an unfair advantage
to invade my privacy as you do. Take away those lilacs with you, won't
you, please? We haven't any more vases to put them in; they'd have to be
stuck in a bedroom water-jug. Giovanna won't let me have flowers in my
room, anyhow; she says they are bad for me. Don't be offended! I know
you mean nothing but to be kind, but the thing you are doing is
devilish.... What do you think I am made of? I don't want you to be
offended, but I have got to say what I can to keep you from coming to
this house and troubling me in my illness. I have got to say it plainly
and fully because you, Aurora, never understand anything that is not
said to you in so many words. I might try and try my best to convey the
same idea to you in a gentle and gentlemanly way, and not a scrap of
good would be done. I've got to talk like a beast. I wish to be alone.
Is that clear? I've just struggled and waded my way out of one quagmire;
I do not wish to enter another. Is that plain? I wish to feel free to be
ill as much and as long as I choose. It concerns nobody. It concerns
nobody if I die. It would be an excellent thing, saving me the trouble
later of blowing out my brains.... My God, Aurora, have you understood?"
he almost shouted.
"Yes," said Aurora in a voice that sounded pale, even as her face looked
pale. "I have understood, and I won't come again. Just one thing,
Gerald. Put your arms under the bed clothes and keep them there."
* * * * *
"Whether he's better or worse I truly couldn't tell you," Aurora said in
answer to Estelle's first question. After a moment she added, "I can't
make him out."
Estelle saw that she was deeply troubled, and, herself troubled at the
sight, did not press her for explanations.
During the drive home Aurora made only one other remark. It was
delivered with a certain emphasis.
"_One_ thing I know: I sha'n't go _there_ again in a hurry!"
Her lilacs, after wondering a moment what to do with them, she had
quietly deposited outside Gerald's entrance-door.
* * * * *
It was unimaginable, of course, that the childhood's friend should so
disregard the rules of the game as to leave her old playmate's curiosity
long unsatisfied. Estelle accordingly learned before evening that Gerald
had been guilty of an attack of nerves, in the course of which he had
said something which Aurora did not like. What this was Aurora would not
tell, saying it seemed unfair to repeat things Gerald had spoken while
he was not himself and which he perhaps did not mean. From which Estelle
judged that Aurora had already softened since she returned to the
carriage looking as grim as she was grieved.
That Aurora had something on her mind no observant person could fail to
see, and Estelle was not unprepared to hear her say as she did on the
third morning at breakfast, after fidgeting a moment with a pinch of
bread:
"I'm so uneasy I don't know what to do. That boy is much sicker than he
knows," she went on to justify her disquietude, "and he's in a bad mood
for getting well. I don't believe Italian doctors know much, anyhow.
I've heard that they still put leeches on you. All he has to take care
of him, day and night, is that old servant-woman What's-her-name, who,
he told me himself, doctors him with herb-tea. I'm so uneasy! The sort
of cold he has, I tell you, can turn any minute into something you don't
want. He's all run down and a bad subject for pneumonia. I'm thinking I
shall have to just go to the door and find out how he is."
"You could send a servant to inquire," suggested Estelle.
Aurora appeared to reflect; she might have been trying to find a reason
for not taking the hint, but she said, "No; I should feel better
satisfied to go myself."
At the last moment, when they were ready to start, Estelle found
Busteretto's nose hot, and decided not to go. She stayed at home and
called a doctor. For some days the pet had not seemed to her in quite
his usual form.
Aurora, climbing Gerald's stairs this time, felt very uncertain and
rather small. The street door, when she had pulled the bell-handle, had
unlatched with a click, but no voice had called down, and when she
reached the top landing the door in front of her stood forbiddingly
closed. She waited for some minutes, wondering whether she were doing
right. Suppose Gerald were enough better to be up again and, Giovanna
being out, should himself come to open the door. How would she feel,
caught slinking back, after she had been requested loudly and roundly to
stay away?
Well, set aside how she felt, the object of her coming would have been
reached, wouldn't it? She would know that he was better. She rang and
listened.
Certain, as soon as she heard them, whose footsteps were on the other
side of the door, she held in readiness her Italian. She counted on
understanding Giovanna's answer to her question, for she had, as she
boasted, "quite a vocabulary." But much more than to this she trusted to
the talent which Italians have for making their meaning clear through
pantomime and facial expression.
As soon, in fact, as Giovanna opened the door, and before the woman had
said a word in reply to "_Come sta Signor Fane?_" Aurora had
understood.
Giovanna's eyes, stained with recent weeping, looked up at the visitor
without severity or aversion, seeking for sympathy; the unintelligible
account she gave of her master's condition was broken up with sighs.
Aurora felt her heart turn cold, and such agitation seize her as made
her reckless of all but one thing.
"I shall have to see for myself," she thought.
With the haste of fear, she flew before Giovanna down the long hallway,
around the dark corner, to the door of Gerald's room. It was half open.
Checking herself on the threshold, she thrust in her head.
He was so lying in his bed that beyond the outlined shape under the
covers she could see of him only a dark spot of hair. And she felt she
must see his face, whether asleep or awake, to get some idea.... She
tiptoed in with the least possible noise. At once, without turning, he
asked something in Italian, and speaking forced him to cough; and after
he had finished coughing, Aurora, who was near, could hear his breathing
rustle within him like wind among dead leaves.
Giovanna had gone to the head of his bed and whispered a communication.
Upon which he twisted sharply around, and Aurora, moved by an
overpowering impulse, rushed to his side.
"Hush!" she said at once. "Don't try to talk; it makes you cough. I just
wanted to know how you were. It would be funny, now don't you think so
yourself, if, such friends as we've been, I should stop caring anything
about you because you were cross the other day? I had to come and see if
there wasn't something we could do for you."
The attempt to speak choked him again; he had to lift himself finally
quite up from his pillow to get breath. Quicker than Giovanna, Aurora
snatched up a gray shawl from a chair to put over his shoulders. The
room felt to her stagnantly cold. He stopped her hand in the act of
folding him in, and she knew that it was not the Gerald of last time,
this one who, with an afflictive little moan, clasped and pressed her
hand.
She hushed him, every time he tried to speak, until his breathing had
quieted down, when he came out despite her forbidding with a ragged,
interrupted, but obstinate eagerness:
"How can I ever thank you enough for coming, dear, dear Aurora? I have
lived in one prolonged nightmare ever since I saw you, knowing I had
behaved like a blackguard, and fearing I should never have a chance to
beg your pardon. I thought I should never see you again. And here you
are, so generous, so kind!"
"Hush, Gerald! Don't make anything of it. Of course I came. Keep quiet
now; you mustn't try to talk."
"Dearest woman," he insisted, with his voice full of tears, "I don't
even know what I said to you, but I know that the whole thing was
atrocious. You standing there like a big angel, with your innocent arms
full of flowers, and I barking at you like a cur!"
"Nothing of the sort. You were sick. Who lays up anything against a sick
man?"
"Excuse it in me like this, Aurora, if you can: that having such regard
for you, I had pride before you and could not endure that you should see
me when I felt myself to be a disgusting object. So, mortified to the
point of torture, I lost my temper,--I've got that bad habit, you
know,--and insanely railed to keep you off."
"And didn't succeed. Come, come; what nonsense all this is! Put it out
of your mind and think of nothing but getting well. Now you--"
"It is not nearly so important that I should get well," he testily
persisted, "as that I should ask your forgiveness. It has been weighing
upon me and burning like bedclothes of hot iron, the horror of having so
meanly and ungratefully offended you."
"Why should you feel so bad about it as long as I don't? Put it all out
of your mind, just as I do out of mine. There, it's all right. Now keep
still except to answer my questions. You've had the doctor?"
"Yes, dear."
"What's he giving you?"
"You can see--there on the stand--those bottles."
"And hot things on your chest?"
"Yes; _semedilino_. I don't know what you call it in English."
"Flaxseed, I guess. How can poor old Giovanna do everything for you?"
"I don't know," he answered vaguely. "She does."
Perceiving that by a reaction from his excitement he was suddenly
fatigued to the point of no longer being able to speak at all or even
keep his eyes open, she asked nothing more, but with a practised hand
straightened his bolster, smoothed his pillow and drew the covers evenly
and snugly up to his chin.
"Don't you be afraid," he heard her say above him, as it seemed to him a
long time after, at the same moment that he felt her give his shoulder a
little squeeze to impress her saying: "I won't let anything happen to
you."
* * * * *
He entered a state which was neither quite sleep nor quite waking. He
was not dreaming, yet the world within his eyelids was peopled with
creatures and varied by incidents departing from the known and foreseen.
Something malevolent pertained to the personalities, something
disquieting to the actions; suffering and oppression resulted from his
inability to get away from them. They came and went, one scene melted
into another, sometimes beautiful, sometimes repulsive, a sickly
disagreeableness being common to all, and the fatigue involved with
watching the spectacle of them weighing like a physical burden.
But yet beneath the unrest of fever dreams there was in Gerald, after
Aurora's visit, as if a substratum of quiet and content. As a good
Catholic, having confessed and received absolution, would be less
troubled by either his symptoms or any visions that might come of Satan
and his imps, so Gerald, with the weight of his sins of brutality and
ingratitude lifted off him, could feel almost passive with regard to the
rest.
He had moments through the night of recognizing the deceptiveness of his
senses. He knew, for instance, that the solemn clerical gentleman in a
long black coat and tall hat whom he saw most tiresomely coming toward
him down the street every time he opened his eyes was only a medicine
bottle full of dark fluid, outlined against the dim candle-shine. And he
knew that the tower of ice, solitary amid snows, lighthouse or tower of
defense on some arctic coast, was nothing but a glass of water. And when
it seemed to him, late, late in the night, that Aurora was in the room,
he knew off and on that it was Giovanna, who through one of those
metamorphoses common in fever had taken the likeness of Aurora. She
lifted him to make him drink, and supported him while she held the glass
to his lips, then laid him easily back. The delusions of fever had the
sweet and foolish impossibility of fairy-stories: Aurora, as if it were
the most natural thing in the world, placing upon his stiff and
lacerated breast balsamic bandages of assuaging and beneficient
warmth!...
The night was full of torrid heat and fiery light, in which everything
looked unnatural, shifting, uncertain, but daylight, when it finally
came, was of a crude coldness; under it everything returned to be
itself, meager and stationary, and he knew that it was no
phantasmagorical Aurora making preparations to wash his face.
He spoke no word to signify either pleasure or displeasure. He let it
be, like a destiny too strong to withstand. With this acceptance there
took place in him, body and spirit, a relaxing, as when supporting arms
are felt by one who had been fearing a fall.
In his not very clear-headed reflections upon himself and his state, he
had passed into a different category of men, where what he did,
particularly as regarded worldly proprieties, had little importance,
because, ill as he felt, there seemed to him such a strong probability
of his actions having no result. If, on the other hand, he could manage
to pull through--and he found he cared to do this, cared so much more
than he had supposed he ever could care, on such desperate days as those
which had sometimes seen him re-examining his revolver--if he should
recover, the gladness of his good fortune would outweigh any
inconvenience created by his weakness now. Life is, and should be,
dearer to man than anything else, except honor. He found it difficult to
separate the idea of honor from life, and make it oppose letting this
robust guardian angel fulfil her promise not to "let anything happen to
him."
* * * * *
Gerald had too often heard those well-meaning lies which friends and
nurses tell the sick, to place faith altogether in Aurora's cheerful
asseverations from day to day that he was getting better.
Yet Aurora was not feigning. She entertained no doubt that with proper
care he would get well. And she was providing the care. Hence a
confidence which she did not allow any of those chilly creepy fears
which come at about three o'clock in the morning to undermine. She was
so strongly resolved to get him well, and felt so capable of doing it,
that it would not seem unlikely her very hands in touching him had
virtue and imparted health.
He said very little, even when the exertion of talking had ceased to
make him cough. The fact that talk fatigued him was reinforced by his
old fancy that talk was superfluous. One lived, one looked, one felt....
She was glad he so willingly kept quiet, because as long as he had fever
it was so much the best thing he could do. He did not have to tell her
that he took comfort in having her there, that everything she did for
him was exactly right, that her touch was blessed and had no more
strangeness for him than that of a sister--nay, than his own. She too
understood those wordless things which are shed from one person, like a
radiance, and inhaled by another, like a scent.
In the long silences, she sometimes read a little by the shaded
candle--she had chosen the night watch for her share and let his devoted
old Giovanna wait on her master during the day. But very often she sat
in her easy-chair near the bed doing nothing, just thinking her
thoughts, marveling at the queerness, the surprises of life. Who could
have dreamed that first time she entered this big brick-floored,
white-washed room, and nearly cried because she found it so dreary, that
she would come to feel at home in it; that by her doing the brown
earthenware stove in the corner, cold since Mrs. Fane's day, would again
glow and purr; that over and over she would watch the row of flower-pots
out on the terrace, with the stiff straw-colored remains in them of last
year's carnations, grow slowly visible in the dawn; that from their
pastel portrait the eyes of the mother would watch her placing
compresses on the brow of the son!
* * * * *
[Illustration: Aurora's eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little
flame]
Before going for her rest, she always waited to see the doctor, who made
an early visit. After they had reissued together from the sickroom, he
was interviewed by her with the help of an interpreter, Clotilde, who
was in and out of the house during all that period, making herself
useful. Estelle instead came only for a moment daily, having a case of
her own to nurse, who was down, poor crumb, with those
measles-mumps-whooping cough of puppyhood, distemper.
On the day when Doctor Batoni had agreed that with prudence there would
be nothing more to fear, the patient might be regarded as having entered
convalescence, Aurora covered him with a wide and warming smile.
"_Je suis son bonne amie_," thus she translated the explanation of
her unconcealed happiness, "I'm a good friend of his," nodding at the
old man with the full sweetness of her dimples; blushing a little, too,
with the pride of addressing him directly in French.
That morning Aurora was so happy she could not hurry; humming an old
psalm tune she dawdled about her room, the longer to enjoy her thoughts.
When she finally slept it was more deeply than usual, and she woke with
a start of fear that it was past the time. The line of sky showing
between the curtains retained no remembrance of the day. It must be
late, certainly. Then she heard a faint stirring just outside her door,
the thing probably which had drawn her out of a sound sleep. It was the
rustle of some person listening at the crack.
She bounced from bed and went to open. It was as she expected, Giovanna;
come, she supposed, to see if she were ready to go on duty. At
Giovanna's first words, though she did not entirely understand them, she
became uneasy, because Giovanna interspersed them with sighs. Her voice
sounded as if she might have been crying.
Aurora had grown accustomed to the fact that those hard old eyes of
Giovanna's took easily to tears, and that she sighed by the thousand the
moment she was in anxiety over her _signorino_. She knew she must
not take Giovanna's fears at her own valuation. She gathered from her
gestures now, combined with her talk, that Gerald, so quiet until
to-day, had become restless. Giovanna impersonated him tossing and
throwing his arms out of the bed-covers. Aurora, though not permitting
herself to be alarmed, hurried with her dressing.
"Ain't it always so," she questioned her own image in the glass, "that
the moment you feel safe something goes wrong?"
When she tiptoed into the big dim room where Gerald lay, she could not
at first make out what it was that had troubled Giovanna to the point of
tears. He seemed quiet enough. After she had taken his pulse and
temperature, her heart subsided with a blessed relief.
He could not tell her, because he did not himself know, that just
because he was better he, paradoxically, was worse. Thoughts and
responsibilities had begun to trouble him again.
"Should you mind very much," he asked suddenly, "if I worked off my
nervousness by singing? I have kept still, so as not to worry you,
exactly as long as I can."
"Certainly," she said, "go ahead. I never knew you were a singer. What
are you going to sing?"
She waited with a certain curiosity.
He began chanting. "B, a, ba; B, e, be--babe! B, i, bi--babebi! B, o,
bo--babebibo! B, u, bu--babebibobu!" Then he went on to the letter C,
"C, a, ca! C, e, ce--cace! C, i, ci--caceci!" and to D, and so on, one
after the other, through all the consonants in the alphabet.
"The queerest rigmarole you ever heard!" Aurora called that simple
Italian spelling-exercise for little beginners. It might have been funny
to hear him, only it was disquieting, he did it so earnestly and so
obstinately kept it up.
When he had finished, Aurora held a sedative powder all nicely wrapped
in a wet wafer ready for him. He knew what it was and gratefully gulped
it, composing himself after it to wait in patience and self-control for
its operation. Aurora, reposing on the magic of drugs like a witch on
the power of incantations, watched for the drooping of his eyelids and
relaxing of his frown.
He had lain still for so long that she was congratulating herself upon
the result thus easily obtained, when he opened his eyes, twice as
wide-awake as before, and began to talk, as if really the object of an
opiate were not to stupefy a man, but to rouse him fully. Under its
influence he was almost garrulous. His vivacity partook of delirium. All
that passed through his mind pressed forward indiscriminately into
utterance, as if the sentinels placed on guard over his thoughts had
been taking an hour off.
Aurora heard him in wonder and perplexity. He was not incoherent, he was
not extravagant. He was merely talkative, expansive, and this in his
case was obviously pathological. She wondered also to see how handsome
he could look, with his eyes alight; his cheek-bones burning, pink as
paint; his hair, grown long, lying in dark locks over a luminous
forehead.
She tried to think of something that would abate all this. She was
searching her nurse's memory for some further sedative by which to
counteract a first one gone wrong, when the thread of her medical
meditation snapped, her attention fastened upon what Gerald was saying.
Because she had a suspicion that it was about Violet he was talking. And
she had from the first been curious about Violet and his feelings with
regard to her. As curious as if she had been jealous.
"There is a person--" he said, in the suppressed voice of one
communicating a secret, "of whom I used to dream very often. Not because
I wished to. In the days when I wished to, she came seldom. But when I
dreaded it, she began to come, and do what I would, oppose to her what
hardness I could, she could be so sinisterly dreadful and unkind that it
was like a knife in me. Try to shut her out as I might, she would force
her way in and make me suffer. Why? Why did she want to?... I will tell
you what I believe. Some women feel their beauty to depend upon their
power to create suffering. If not happy suffering, then the other kind.
If men grow indifferent to it, they feel their beauty passing, and if it
goes there is nothing left that they care for. The unremitting quest of
their lives therefore is to feed the blood of men to their beauty, and
if they can not do it in any other manner they pick the locks of sleep
and get at them in that way. But the last time this person came, a
surprise awaited her. And the same, I will confess, awaited me. My heart
was like so much sawdust, so far as one drop of blood that she could
wring from it. And now she won't come again, I believe, for why should
she come? She will look a little anxiously in the glass, very likely, to
see if she has begun to fade. I should be sorry to know that the least
of her golden hairs had faded--they were so lovely. It's wrong all the
same to practise sorcery. You don't, Aurora, that is one reason why I
like to be with you. Women as God made them are strong enough, He knows!
It's unfair to use sorcery besides, to make themselves beautiful to the
point of distraction, and desired to the point of pain. And then their
barbarous methods! That low game of using a man's weakness for the
increase of their own glory, making a jealous fool wilfully out of a
decent fellow, and a baby out of a self-respecting man. You, Aurora, you
are good as good bread, you are restful as a bank of moss. You would
never do what the others do. Would you, Aurora? You needn't answer me. I
know."
"If what you mean is that I'm not much of a co-quette," she came in
quickly, to prevent his continuing, "I guess you're right. Take it since
I was born, I've been called a good many things, but in all my life I
don't remember anybody calling me that,--a co-quette. But you're talking
lots more than is good for you, brother. Now I want you to quiet down
and give those sleepy-drops a chance to work. Here I've fixed you
something else that will help them. It's just a drink with nothing in it
but something nice and cooling. Smells pleasant, doesn't it? This'll do
the trick."
Slipping an arm under his neck, she lifted him, propped him against
herself, and held the glass to his mouth. Instead of words pouring out,
the calming draught flowed in. It was a slow process; he drank by small
swallows and wished after each one to stop, but she gently forced him to
go on. When it was finished and he turned his head away from the glass,
he found it resting on her shoulder. He settled his cheek warmly against
it, like a child burying his face in the pillow. With a long sigh he
relaxed.
"Now, Aurora," he said solemnly, "be per--fect--ly still."
He was very still, too. After a long moment he half lifted his head and
with a long soft sigh replaced it, as if to renew his sense of a
resting-place so sweet. With all her heart Aurora lent herself to this,
glad to witness, as she thought, the belated effect of the soporific. In
a few minutes he would be asleep.
"Aurora," he suddenly said, wakeful as earlier, but without moving his
heavy head or opening his eyes, "do you remember the first evening I
ever saw you? You came down the middle of the room all by yourself, like
something in the theater, where the stage has been cleared for the
principal character to make an effect. You were a fine large lady in a
sky-blue frock with bursts of pink, your hair spangled with diamonds, a
fan in one hand, a long pair of gloves in the other. That at least is
what everybody else saw that looked at you. But me, what I seemed to see
was America coming toward me draped in the stars and stripes. Now you
know how I feel about my dear country. If I loved it why should I have
fixed my abode once and for all over here? And yet when I saw it coming
toward me across the room, with your eyes and smile and look of Home, I
felt like the tiredest traveler and exile in the whole world, who wants
nothing, nothing, but to get Home again. It was like a moment's
insanity. I almost wonder that I resisted it, the desire to lay my head
on your shoulder and cry, Aurora, and tell you about it, then never move
again, or say another word."
Aurora readjusted her position so as to make his leaning on her even
easier. She brought a warm cover safe-guardingly around him.
"Poor Geraldino!" she pitied him in the lonely past.
"Then do you remember the first time I went to see you," he asked, "and
you introduced me, dearest woman, room by room, to the somewhat gruesome
mysteries of your house? You walked before me holding a lamp. In the
ball-room, hazy with vastness, you held the lamp high, like a torch. And
I had a vision of you as America again, or Liberty, or Something,
lighting the way for me.... But I treated the fancy as one treats
fancies. I did not in the least intend to cultivate the acquaintance
begun with your picking me up by the loose skin of the neck and plumping
me down on the little seat of your victoria."
"Why--Gerald!" she drawled in a tone of reproach purposely funny.
"Didn't you want to come?"
"I wanted _not_ to come!" he answered, with normal spirit. "But you
kept saying Jump in. When a lady has said Jump in three times it acts
like a spell, a man has got to jump."
"But when it came to the hot bread and syrup, brother, you know you were
glad to be there. You kept your superior look, but you ate all I
buttered for you. It did me good to see you."
"Yes," he grew dreamy again, "it took me back. It took me back to so
many things I had nearly forgotten. And when at the end of the evening I
was leaving, do you remember, Aurora, wrapping in paper some pieces of
maple-sugar and forcing me to take them home in my pocket? I felt
absurdly like a little boy and again you seemed like big America;
something exhaled from you that made me think of slanting silver-gray
roofs and the New England spring of appleblossoms and warbling robins;
yes, and of October foliage intolerably bright, and Fourth of July
celebrations. Not things I dote on, exactly, but things I was born to,
and restful to me after my years of chasing what is not to be caught,
wanting what is not to be had, seeking all the time to adjust myself, to
adjust myself, to the harshness of life, the treachery, the
unaccountability, the relentlessness--restful as this heavenly shoulder,
on which I have wished how many hundred times to lay my head like this
and not move again, or speak again, or have anything ever change.
Aurora, don't say a word, dear. Particularly, kindest Aurora, don't make
any of your little jokes. Keep perfectly still, like a good darling, and
let me forget everything except where my head is, and be perfectly
happy."
As seriously as if a god had commanded it, Aurora preserved the silence
and immobility requested of her, only making her shoulder as much wider
and softer and more comforting as she could by wanting it to be so.
When by and by she felt him slip a little as he began to lose himself in
sleep, she clasped her hands around him supportingly and held him in
place.
A single candle burned in the room, with a book to shade it. Aurora's
eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little flame where it was
reflected in a mirror on the wall opposite, but she did not see it at
all, so absorbed was she in her thoughts. In her feelings, too. In the
wonder of the hour. This remarkable Gerald, with his head packed full of
knowledge, with his speech that charmed you as whistling does an adder,
with his capacity to paint pictures that the rest could not even
understand, and then his rarity, the sweetness of his manners, the
fascination of all that unknown in him which came, she had concluded,
from his foreign bringing-up--he had wanted ever since he first saw her
just to lay his head on her shoulder and rest....
Her common ordinary shoulder. What did he see in her? Taking for granted
that he saw something, Aurora attributed this unknown quality in herself
to God, and thanked Him. She tightened her clasp about Gerald, the
better to feel him there. The power of the sleeping-potion had overtaken
him completely. Thoughts that moistened her eyes resulted from feeling
her arms full of the breathing warmth of a beloved form. Those defrauded
maternal arms! That other, who would have been five years old at this
time, and would have been called little Dan, after Dan, her big father,
how she would have nursed him through his childish ailments, how she
would have held him and rocked him! No, she would never stop yearning
over him. One must suppose that God knows best.
Gerald's breathing was deep and quiet. When sure that it could be done
without waking him, she let him gently down on to the pillow.
She stood beside the bed for a few minutes, in her soft garment of
cashmere and swansdown which made no more sound when she moved than did
her velvet shoes; she watched him sleep with emotions of gratitude
beyond possibility of expression to any one but that old intimate, God.
He was getting well so surely and fast. He would shortly be as well as
ever.
Confident that he would want nothing more for the rest of the night, she
arranged herself in her easy-chair for a good sleep, too.
* * * * *
On the next day she divined from his half troubled look at her, and the
shy modesty of his manner, that he was wondering whether he had actually
babbled last night, or in a mild delirium dreamed the whole thing. Not
from her might he find out. Her easy, matter-of-fact way made any such
passage seem at least unlikely.
Having slept during the night she did not retire to rest during the day,
but let Giovanna go about her long neglected affairs and in her place
looked after Gerald, who had waked from his deep sleep immensely
refreshed. He would not need a constant watcher beside him after this,
during night or day.
"What shall I do to amuse you?" she asked him, to make an interruption
after she had felt him watching her through half closed lids for some
time. "Don't you want me to read to you?"
"I think not, Aurora. Thank you just as much."
"Well, then, how shall I entertain you? Do you want me to be a gold-fish
for you?"
"How do you 'be a gold-fish,' Aurora?"
"Look!" But the instant she changed her face into a gold-fish's and
waggled up through imaginary water, opening and shutting her mouth like
a rubber valve, he hid his eyes, crying sharply, "Please stop! I don't
want to see it."
The gold-fish personality was dropped.
"Very well, then," she said, with unimpaired serenity, "shall I do a
squirrel gnawing a nut? Every family its own circus."
"If you do it, I will not look. How can you endure, lovely as you are,
to make yourself ugly--grotesque?"
"Aren't you rather hard to suit to-day, mister? Shall I be a hen, then,
scratching for her chicks? That's mild."
"No, no, no. Yes. No. I don't know about the hen. Let me have a sample."
He watched her, critically and provisionally, while with comfortable,
motherly, half-suppressed chest-sounds, and a round eye cocked for finds
among the dirt, remarkably altogether the appearance of a pensive white
hen, she made believe to scratch up the earth with her feet. A rather
sympathetic performance, he allowed, her imitation of the hen, calling
up before one the vision of a farmyard, a brood of downy yellow chicks,
a duckpond, sunshine, green things.
He let her do it as long as she would, or rather until to vary the thing
she increased the comic beyond the line he fixed. When midday found him
grudgingly laughing at her cackling, it seemed improbable certainly that
midnight had seen him sleeping in her arms. But underlying their
laughter was a consciousness in each that day of a thing uniting them
which had not been there before.
* * * * *
Sitting bolstered up in bed to eat his first real meal, he looked, with
his long hair parted in the middle and brushed down over his hollow
temples, like one of those old masters in the Ewe-fitsy, Aurora told
him. A St. John the Baptist, she specified.
She chipped the top off his egg and cut finger sizes of bread for him,
so that he might have it in the foreign way he preferred.
While he languidly ate, yet with pleasure, the door softly swung inward,
revealing faces of women,--Estelle, Clotilde, Livvy, Giovanna,--all
equally kind, all craning for the delight of a peep at him eating his
soft-boiled egg.
Because he was still weak, tears came into his eyes, and because he
could not permit them to be seen, he waved and haggardly smiled toward
the smiling and nodding faces without inviting them nearer.
Women! women!... What a great deal of room they had occupied in his
life! How much he owed them for affection,--mother, sister,
servant-girl, friends....
* * * * *
He had known from whispers and rustlings, from a sort of instinct,
latterly from Giovanna's own lips, that his house since the coming of
"that lady" to undertake the government of his sickroom had been full of
people, making practical and easy the carrying out of her plots.
Abundance of people and abundance of money. Old Giovanna grumbled
bitterly at this invasion, but she did it inside of herself, sanely
recognizing that she had subject for gratitude. Her hot dark eye looked
all she thought, and her lips moved as she soundlessly said all she
felt; but when she dropped into the dark church of Santa Maria degli
Angeli for a moment's devotion she did not fail to ask Maria to bless
"that lady" and give her great good. After which she begged Her by the
seven swords of Her sorrow to hasten the day that should clear the house
of the whole horde of strangers, and permit her to resume the quiet life
with her signorino.
Gerald, whose nature felt the oppression of material benefits as much as
Giovanna felt jealousy with regard to her rights and loves, resolved
that the sole seemly return for generosity in this case would be an
equal generosity, consisting in an acceptance pure of every shadow,
either of obligation, or reserve, or regret.
* * * * *
Since the doctor said it would do the invalid no harm to admit a visitor
or two, Aurora wrote to Mrs. Foss. She came at once with Leslie. Both on
the occasion of this call were perfect, in tact, in warmth, in
friendship. And yet with them, and the sense of the World and the
World's point of view which they inevitably brought, change entered the
house.
The vacuous, almost happy languor of the sick was replaced in Gerald by
an irritable gloominess, decently repressed, but unconcealable.
"There's no mistake; you're getting well," remarked Aurora, when the
unrest of a mind troubled by many things expressed itself in indignation
against innocent inanimate objects, a drop of candle wax for burning, an
ivory paper-cutter for snapping in his impatient hand. "You're getting
well. I guess I can go home and feel easy about you."
And sooner than Giovanna had dared to hope when most fervently she
invoked the Holy Mother, lo! the intruders, mistress and maids, bag and
baggage, had left in their places room and silence. So much sooner than
expected that Giovanna, clasping in her hands an incredible fee, almost
found it in herself to feel regret.