On their last day together Gerald had asked Aurora to find the key of a
certain desk-drawer and to bring him the miniature strong-box locked in
it. He had taken out one by one, to show her, the little store of
trinkets once belonging to his mother and given her from among them the
one he thought most charming, an old silver cross studded with amethysts
and pearls.
Her own house, when she reentered it, looked faintly unfamiliar, as if
she had been away much longer than she had by actual count. But her big
soft bed looked good to her, she told Estelle, after the bed of granite
framed in iron she had lately occupied.
She was in high good spirits. Gerald out of the woods, the amethyst
cross, Estelle and her beautiful commodious house returned to, vistas
ahead of good times and heart satisfactions, a sense of success and the
richness of life--Aurora was in splendid spirits.
Estelle and she slept together on the first night, so as to be able to
buzz until morning, as they had used to do in their young days, when one
of them was allowed to go on a visit to the other and stay overnight.
There ensued a very orgy of talk, a going over of all that had happened
since their separation, quite as if they had not once seen each other in
the interval.
It might have been thought, when their remarks finally became far
spaced, as they did between two and three of the morning, that this
happened because the streams were running dry as well as because the
talkers were growing sleepy; but no such thing. Each had loads more that
she might have told; but each, as had not been the case in the old days,
was keeping back something from the other. Each locked in her breast a
secret.
There had naturally been talk of Gerald. Estelle was immensely nice
about him, and Aurora appeared immensely frank, but yet both knew that
he was to be a delicate subject between them thenceforward, and that
thoughts relating to him could not be exchanged without reserve.
There had been laughter over Estelle's subterfuges in order not to let
it be learned from her, and this without directly lying, that Aurora was
actually living at Gerald's. "It's a case of a cold," she had explained
her friend's non-appearance upon one occasion, without mentioning whose
cold.
The details of Busteretto's illness and danger had caused him to be
reached for in the dark and kissed and cuddled anew.
"My, but it's nice to have you back!" Estelle said in the morning,
fixing a bright, fond gaze upon her friend across the little table in
the bedroom, where they sat in their wrappers eating breakfast. "A penny
for your thoughts, Nell. What are you thinking about?"
Nell smiled rather foolishly, then, putting Satan behind her in the
shape of a temptation to prevaricate, said:
"I was thinking what they were doing over there. Whether Gerald has had
a good night, and about Giovanna, and what it's all like without me.
It's hard for me now to think of the place without me. I miss myself
there."
"I suppose you'll be driving round to inquire sometime in the course of
the day," Estelle said, with true generosity; at which Aurora tried to
look as if she were not sure; she would think about it.
With arms around each other's waists they went through all the rooms for
Aurora to renew her pleasure in them after absence. They came to a
standstill before her portrait in the drawing-room.
"There's no mistake, he's talented," Estelle admitted good-humoredly,
after a considerable silence. "That's a fine portrait."
Aurora did not say she thought so, too. Alone in her room later, while
Estelle was dressing to go out together, she looked at the other
portrait to see if she were "any nearer educated up to it." It seemed to
her she was, a little bit.
She started to dress. Being given to homely rather than poetic fancies,
she subsequently thought of herself as having been, during the process
of making herself fine for the afternoon drive and call, like some Cape
Cod young one trotting happily along with her tin pail full of
blueberries, just before a big dog sprang out of the roadside tangle and
jostled the pail out of her hand, so that all the berries were
spilled....
Even as she was buttoning her gloves a letter came for her with a
parcel. All rosy with delight, she quickly found in her purse a reward
for Gaetano, the bringer. Without too much hurry, like a person not
eager to shorten a solid enjoyment, she opened the letter. It did not
strike her as surprising, certainly not as ominous, that Gerald should
write when he might expect to see her so soon. She read:
This is the fourth letter, dearest Aurora, that I have written you since
waking, after a very bad night, in such a black humor that you would
know I am quite myself again and life has resumed for me its natural
colors. I destroyed those letters one after the other because, although
written with the effort of my whole being to be what you call sweet,
they sounded to me insufferably disagreeable. And now whatever I write I
shall have to send because if I destroy this letter also I shall not
have time to write another before you come to see me as you promised.
And the reason for my wretched night was that I was haunted by all the
reasons there are why you should not come. They are so difficult to put
into words that I despair, after three attempts, of doing it in any but
an offensive manner. Pity, Aurora, the plight of your poor patient;
permit him not to go into them. Just--don't come.
Alas! that cannot be all. I have the vision of your puzzled face. Well,
then, it is for yourself, in part. I have no excuse for profiting by a
kindness that may be harmful to you. It is my duty to regard for you the
conventions you are big-heartedly willing to disregard. I deplore the
fact that I was ever so weak as to forget it.
But it is also for myself, who must not further be demoralized and
spoiled.
I must not, moreover, be laid further under obligations of gratitude,
the less, my dear Aurora, that gratitude is not precisely what I feel.
No. I so little dote upon life that I should be glad if a merciful
angel's attention had not been drawn to me, and I perhaps might have
escaped the dreary prolongation of years. I am sorry, but so it is.
Pray do not conceive any relation between what I have just written and
the request that follows. Will you be so kind as to return the object
belonging to me which I miss from the little table-drawer at the head of
my bed? You had no right to take it.
Vincent Johns is coming in a day or two. Do not think of me, therefore,
as lonely or neglected.
I find I must hurry or be too late. This letter is beastly and ought to
be torn up like the others. It simply cannot; it must go. I can only
pray, Aurora, that you will understand.
* * * * *
Aurora went back to the beginning and read the letter a second time.
Then she turned to the accompanying parcel and noticed that it was done
up in a shabby piece of old newspaper. It contained a pair of fur-lined
velvet shoes, a bow-knot of blue satin ribbon, and a bottle of almond
milk, things of her own which through carelessness had been left behind.
She could not know that the honest Giovanna alone was responsible for
this return of her property. Coming at that moment, it formed the
occasion for two stinging tears rising to the edge of Aurora's eyes. She
swept them away with the back of her glove, and forbade any more to
follow. To prevent them she took her lips between her teeth, and with
all her strength called upon her pride.
She read Gerald's letter over again, really trying to understand, to be
fair, to interpret it in the high-minded way he would wish.
"When all is said, it amounts to this,"--she reached the end of that
exercise by a short cut,--"he wants to be let alone."
And after every allowance had been made for him, and all due deference
paid to his excellent reasons, still it seemed to her what she couldn't
call anything but a poor return. Because his letter was bound to hurt
her, and he must have known it. His sending it, therefore, argued a lack
of any very deep affection for her. After she had come, just from his
own words and actions, to supposing....
"This is what you get for not remembering that if a person is
practically a foreigner you can never expect to know them except in
spots," she admonished herself.
* * * * *
After they had driven in the Cascine and around the Viali for the
sunshine and air, Aurora asked suddenly:
"Haven't we had enough of this?" and ordered the coachman to go home.
"Why!" exclaimed Estelle, astonished, "I thought we were going to Gerald
Fane's to see how he's getting along!"
"No, I guess we won't. I think it's time, after living with him for
three weeks, that I began to look after my reputation, don't you?" said
Aurora, with a forced lightness of rather bitter effect.
"I had a note from him, anyhow, just before we came out," she added
after a moment. "He's doing all right."
Estelle understood that something was wrong. Aurora could not
successfully pretend with her. Aurora's transparent face, as she now
took note of it, betrayed hidden perplexity and chagrin. Estelle asked
no questions, not needing to be told that Gerald's note had worked the
change. Despite her affection for her friend, indeed, just because of
that affection, Estelle was quietly glad of it. Her thought caressed the
secret which has been referred to, a scheme which for some weeks had
given her an excited feeling of having between her fingers the thread of
the Fates.
After Estelle had gone to her own room for the night, Aurora sat down to
compose an answer to Gerald's letter. She had reflected a good deal
since receiving it, and out of confusion and complexity singled one
clear and simple thought or two.
Gerald had never said or intimated that she had forced herself upon him
when he was too ill to help it; but the truth was she had done that,
after all his shying rocks at her, too, to keep her off. Nor had Gerald
suggested that one of his reasons for wishing her not to haunt his
bedside was a fear of her becoming inconveniently fond of him. A hint
could be found, if one chose, that he feared becoming too fond of her,
but of the other no vestige, no shadow, or ghost of a shadow. Yet by
those two points the spirit of Aurora's reply must be inspired.
Centuries of civilization have ground into the female of the species one
particular lesson.
So the irascible man's nervous, hurried and harried scrawl, written with
sputtering pen that at several places tore clean through the paper, and
written under the compulsion of his soul and his good sense, received
from the best of women an answer in her calmest hand, deliberately
calculated to give him pain, at the same time as to convey to him
unambiguously that, as far as she was concerned, he was freer than the
birds of the air. She wrote:
My dear friend Gerald,
What I want principally to say is just _don't worry_. Don't
worry for fear I'll come, and don't worry for fear I won't
understand, and don't worry because you think my feelings may be
hurt. And above all the rest, don't worry about
_gratitude_, for I don't feel you owe me any at all. Don't
you think for a moment that I saved your life. You were not as
sick as you imagine, I guess. It was a very light case, or how
would you have got over it so soon? You were not near as sick,
according to all accounts, as poor Busteretto, who has been
having what they call here the _cimurro_. I took you in
hand because _I am a nurse_ and I couldn't keep my hands
off, just as an old fire-engine horse will start to gallop when
he hears a fire-alarm even if he isn't on the job. If it had
been Italo Ceccherelli who was sick I would have been tempted in
just the same way; so you see there is no occasion for
gratitude. Put it out of your mind.
Now about the thing I took from the drawer of your night-stand.
I am very sorry I can't give it back, because I flung it out in
the middle of the river. That is what I did with it, and I am
not sorry either. You know that we at home don't look upon
certain things as you apparently do over here. We think it a
disgrace for a man to kill himself. I myself am old-fashioned
enough to think that that door leads to hell. I have been
astonished to find that over here it is thought quite
respectable, that some Italians look upon it as an honorable
way, for instance, of paying their debts, and a natural way of
getting over an unhappy love-affair. As I know you have a good
many foreign ideas, and as you have once or twice made a remark
that showed me you thought of that solution of difficulties as a
possible one, I grabbed your nasty old pistol when I found it in
the little drawer, and it reposes now at the bottom of the Arno.
Don't get another, Gerald. No burglars are going to enter your
house to steal your Roman tear-bottle or your books. When you
are so blue you feel like killing yourself, say your prayers. I
am very glad your friend the abbe is going to come and stay with
you. He is a _good influence_, I feel sure, and a good
friend.
I suppose I shall see you again some time, even if I don't do
the visiting. But don't be in any hurry, not on my account. I
hope that in the meantime you will get back your strength
quickly. Remember that you will have to be very careful for
quite a long time, because a relapse is _an awfully mean
thing_.
Good-by, my dear Gerald. Please accept the very best wishes of
Yours sincerely,
Aurora Hawthorne.
P.S. I did not write four letters and tear three of them up,
like you. I wrote one and corrected it, and here I have copied
it out for you, hoping that in it I have made my meaning as
clear to you as you made yours clear to me in your letter.