The loveliness of Florence at this point of the year, while inspiring
poets, made the rest feel helpless before the task of finding words for
it. Even Aurora, who could not be called contemplative, or highly
susceptible to influences of form and color, was heard to heave an
occasional great sigh, so was her heart oppressed, she could not think
why, during their drives among the hills around Florence, by the sight
of the spring flowers,--tulips, narcissi, fleur-de-lys, imagine it,
growing wild, as if gold pieces should lie scattered in the road for
passers to pick up!--and by the sight of the warm and tender tones of
the sky, and by the silver sparks of windows flashing back the sun where
the hazy city houses huddled around the Duomo's brown head and
shoulders, majestically lifted above them.
It was something in the air, Aurora thought, which forced her to sigh
with that half-sweet oppression and fatigue: the air was fragrant with a
scent which seemed to her upon sniffing it analytically to be the breath
of hyacinths; and the air was warm, it "let her down," she said.
Why, instead of delicious contentment, is a sort of melancholy, of
unrest, created in us by the beauty of spring, will somebody tell?
Aurora, when she thought she could do it without attracting the notice
of the other two, would slip from their presence sometimes, so as to
have a few minutes by herself and stop pretending to be so everlastingly
light of heart. For nothing in the world would she have had Tom know but
that his visit made her happy to the point of forgetting every subject
of care or annoyance.
Estelle, too, she would have preferred to deceive. She did her best, and
for hours at a time appeared serene and merry. During these periods she
sometimes did actually lose the sense of anxious suspense; but it kept
itself alive as an undercurrent to her laughter.
When she saw how well Tom and Estelle got along together, she became
less timid about arranging little absences from them; she even--such a
common feminine mind had Aurora--saw in the congeniality which permitted
them to remain for half an hour in each other's company without boredom
the foundation of a dream, dim and distant, it is true--the dream of
seeing Estelle one day settled in a fine home of her own. She feared,
though, there might be bridges to cross before that event. She dreaded
the bridges. She wished Tom might be diverted from what she feared was
his purpose. How satisfactory, if Estelle might prove the diversion.
Estelle would really have suited Tom much better than the person of, she
feared, his actual choice.
Of all this she was somewhat disconnectedly thinking when she ran away
from them one evening after dinner, leaving him still at the table
smoking his cigar, while Estelle hunted up in a guide-book for his
benefit some little matter of altitudes. A flash of good sense showed
her the previousness of her calculations, and she mentally withdrew her
hand from meddling. Fate would take its own way, anyhow.
She had gone upstairs with the excuse of wanting a fan. Her fan had
easily been found, but instead of returning to her guests, "They won't
miss me if I do stay away for ten minutes," she said, and walked to the
end of the broad hallway, out through the door that stood open on to the
portico roof--once glassed over for a party and dedicated to Flirtation.
How long ago that seemed! Here Gerald, a quite new acquaintance, had
told her about Manlio and Brenda. Poor young things, so unhappy then,
and now exultant. Brenda was just back from America. The wedding was set
for the ninth of May. Only eight days more to wait.
As Aurora, leaning over the balustrade and letting her eyes rest on the
garden, thought of their assured and perfect happiness, she remembered a
gross fly in the ointment. She had been told that Brenda would have to
agree to bring up her children in the Catholic church. The thing had
seemed to Aurora appalling. Upon her dropping some hint of her sentiment
to the caller who had communicated the fact, she had been further told
that very likely Brenda too would in time become a Catholic--as if that
made it any better. A descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers to become a
Roman Catholic! Any one but a heathen to change his religion!...
The figure of Abbe Johns rose before her mind. She refrained from
judgment in his case. His case, for intangible reasons, seemed separate
and different. But fear, as of formless bugaboos in the dark, burned in
her heart at the idea of his influence perhaps being able, creepily,
stealthily, to convert Gerald.
She turned her face upward to the sky of May and sent forth a little
prayer into the crystal clearness of the space lying between her and the
ear which she conceived of as receiving it, the ear of a Baptist God, as
opposed to a Roman Catholic God surrounded by saints and candles and
incense and tin flowers.
As she did this a high pink cloud caught her eye. Embers of sunset were
glowing over the river at the other side of the house. The sight of the
pink cloud, so pretty and far away, comforted Aurora like a good omen.
She felt better and, her reverie borrowing a ray from the cloud, went on
to rejoice in the pleasantness of the garden which she might for the
time being call hers. So different from the gardens at home, but in its
set way how attractive it was, how suited to people with leisure, and a
certain stability of taste, and a liking for privacy!
Why, in that garden--which wasn't very large, either--you could almost
get lost among narrow paths bordered with shrubs. Even if the wide
wrought-iron front-gate were open, and the carriage-gate at the side
open as at this moment, you could be just as much shut off from outside
as in your own room, if you took your sewing or your book to that little
open air round with walls of smooth-trimmed laurel, and a stone table in
the middle, and stone seats.
Old Achille down there, still busy watering,--Achille who belonged to
the garden and was hired along with it, was a regular artist, thought
Aurora. The great oval bed in front of the house was at this season like
a huge bouquet, all arranged in a beautiful pattern. Then he had edged
every path with a band of pansies just inside the band of ivy
overrunning the mossy border stones--the sweetest thing. His pride was
pansies, he had planted them everywhere, the finest she had ever seen.
He had taken a prize once at a horticultural show, for his pansies.
The light died out of the pink cloud, and Aurora's pleasure in her
garden gradually died out too, while the quality of irony in her many
blessings smote her. For what is the use of having everything money can
buy or the bounty of spring afford if you at the same time are troubled
with a toothache? All this, so grand in itself, was like a good gift
wasted, as long as she was in a state of quarrel with her friend. It was
full two weeks since their exchange of letters. Two weeks of absolute
silence. Could it be possible that she should never see or hear from
Gerald again?
No, it could not, she said. It was part of having faith in him to deny
the possibility of his remaining furious forever at her hateful letter.
No, she would not believe it of him; she thought better of him. She was
much mistaken if he could be so mean. She would be willing to bet--
There, in fact, he was, at this very moment, entering the carriage-gate.
After one mad throb of incredulous exultation, Aurora's thoughts and
feelings were for a long minute limited to an intense and immobile
watchfulness. He walked over the gravel with his eyes on the door under
the portico. You would have thought his purpose set, and that he would
not pause until he had rung the bell.
But you would have thought wrong. Half-way between the gate and the
house he stood still and looked at the ground. He was holding the
slender cane one knew so well like a weapon of defense, as if ready to
make a resolute slash with it to vindicate his irresolution.
After a moment he turned, grinding his heel into the earth. It was then
that a voice called out above him, "Hello, Gerald!"
He turned again and removed his straw hat. He and the lady leaning from
the terrace looked at each other for the space of a few heart-beats with
mechanical, constrained smiles. Then she asked:
"Aren't you going to come in?"
Instead of making the obvious answer and setting about the obvious
thing, he appeared to be debating the point within himself. At the end
of his hesitation, he asked:
"Could I prevail upon you to give me five minutes in the garden?"
"Why, certainly," answered Aurora, appreciating the fact that Estelle
would be superfluous at the peace-making that must follow.
She went very lightly down the stairs. She could hear Estelle's and
Tom's voices still in the dining-room. Instead of going out by the usual
door, too near to their sharp ears, she turned with soft foot into the
big ball-room and passed out through that.
The great oval mound of flowers spread its odoriferous carpet before the
steps leading down from the house. She turned her back upon it and
followed a path bordered with pansies and ivy till Gerald saw her and
came to take her hand, saying:
"How good of you!"
"Well," she sighed, put by the bliss of her relief into a mood of
splendid carelessness as to how she, for her part, should carry off the
situation,--looking after her dignity and all that. "How jolly this is!
And you're all right again, Gerald. You're well enough to walk on your
legs and come and tell me so. Yes, you're looking quite yourself again.
Well,"--she sighed again heartily,--"it's good for sore eyes to see you.
You're sure now it's all right for you to be out of doors after sunset?
Hadn't we better go in?"
"This air is like a warm bath. I must not keep you long, anyhow."
"Oh, I haven't got a thing to do," she precipitately assured him. "Come,
we'll walk up and down the path,--hadn't we better?--so as not to be
standing still. Go ahead, now; tell me all about yourself. How do you
feel? Have you got entirely rid of your cough? And the stitch in your
side?"
He would only speak to answer, she soon found; the moment she stopped
talking silence fell. Had he nothing to say to her, then? Or did he find
it difficult somehow to talk? She was so determined to make the
atmosphere cozy, friendly, happy--make the atmosphere as it had used to
be between them--so determined, that she jabbered on like a magpie, like
a mill, about this, that, and the other, sprinkling in little jokes in
her own manner, and little stories in her own taste, accompanied by her
rich--on this occasion slightly nervous gurgle.
"Aurora dear," he said at last, with an effect of mournful patience as
much as of protest, "what makes you? I am here to beg your forgiveness,
and you put me off with what Mrs. Moriarty said to Mrs. O'Flynn. Do you
call it kind?"
A knot tied itself in Aurora's throat, which she could not loosen so as
to go on. If she had tried to speak she would have betrayed the fact
that those simple words had, like a pump, fetched the tears up from her
heart into her throat. He had his chance now to do all the talking.
"Couldn't we sit down somewhere for a minute? Should you mind?" His
gesture vaguely designated the green inclosure, where the stone table
stood, pale among the dark laurels.
But when they were seated, he only pressed his hands into his
eye-sockets and kept them there.
"I am ridiculous!" he muttered and shook himself straight. After an
ineffectual, suffocated attempt to begin, "I am ridiculous!" he said
again, and without further concession to weakness started in: "I ought
to have written you, Aurora. But I had seemed to be so unfortunate in
writing I did not dare to try it again. Heaven knows what I wrote. I
don't; but it must have been a prodigy of caddishness to offend you so
deeply. It doesn't do much good to say I am sorry."
"Your letter was all right," broke in Aurora. "I only didn't understand
at first. Afterwards I did. I tell you, that letter _was all
right_."
"It was written in a mood--a perplexity, a despair, you have no means of
understanding, dear Aurora. When your answer showed me what I had done,
I could have cut my throat, but I could not have come to tell you I was
not the monster of ingratitude I appeared to be. Not that a man can't
get out of bed, if there is reason enough, and take himself somehow
where he wants to be, but because of a sick man's unreasonable nerves,
which can start him raving and make him a thing to laugh at. I had the
common sense, thank Heaven! to see that I must wait. Then, as the days
passed, it all quieted down. Vincent was with me, a tranquilizing
neighborhood.
"It seemed finally as if it might be almost better to let things rest as
they were, to let that be the way of separating from you. I had almost
made up my mind to do it, Aurora. Vincent has had me out for various
airings, I have gone on several walks alone, but till to-day I avoided
to take the road toward this house. I am so used to pain that I've grown
stoical, you know, Aurora. I can stand any pain. I shut my teeth and
say, 'It will have to stop some time.' But all at once it became too
strong for me--not the pain, or the wish to see you, but the feeling
that I could not bear to have you thinking me ungrateful. I, who hate
ingratitude as the blackest thing in the wide world, to pass with you,
with you, for an ungrateful beast!"
"Don't! don't, Gerald!" Aurora hushed him. "I can't let you talk like
that. You know you couldn't be ungrateful, nor I couldn't think it of
you."
"No, I'm not ungrateful. I'm not, dear," he caressingly asseverated, and
closing her two hands between his treasured them against his cheek. "I
want you to be altogether sure of it. If I did not recognize the
enormity of my debt to you, Aurora, what a clod I must be! Not, mind
you, because, it is just possible to think, I owe you my life. Not that,
but because you were so kind. Because you were so kind, so kind--" he
reiterated feelingly, "and I a troublesome, cantankerous, distinctly
unappetizing object in his helpless bed. Don't think there was one touch
or gesture of these dear hands that take away headaches that I do not
remember with gratitude."
"There was nothing to be grateful for, nothing at all," insisted Aurora.
"And so when I wrote you in that brutal manner, dear,--"
"That letter was all right," Aurora vigorously snatched away from him
the turn to talk, in order to defend him from this misery of
compunction. "It was prompted by the most gentlemanly feelings, by real
unselfishness and consideration for me. You didn't want me talked about
on your account, and you put it as delicately as possible. Only I was a
fool; I went off the handle, and wrote while I was mad and hurt and
wanted to hurt back. But, bless you, I understand it all perfectly now.
You needn't say another word. I understand the letter, Gerald, and I
understand you."
"I am afraid," he said, letting go her hands and drawing a little apart,
as if the most complete misunderstanding, after all, separated them,--"I
am afraid you do not entirely. But this much at least is clear to you,
isn't it, dear, that whatever I may be, I am not ungrateful? Whatever I
may do, you are to remember that I couldn't be ungrateful to you,
Aurora. If I should seem to be behaving ever so, ever so shabbily, still
you must know that behind it, under it, I am the very contrary of
ungrateful." He pressed his hands to his eyes again, and was still for a
minute, before announcing, "I shall not come to see you for a long
time."
The astonished and acute attention of her whole being was indefinably
expressed by the silence in which she now listened.
"I am going to keep away from you," he went on, "till I feel out of
danger."
"Why, what's the matter now?" she asked, with the vehemence of her
surprise and disappointment.
"A trifle, woman dear. Oh, Lord, I see I shall have to go into it!
Haven't you the imagination to see, you unaccountable person, how an
unhappy mortal might be affected by such circumstances as destiny so
lately prepared for your poor servant's trying? Day by day, night after
night, that insidious kindness, that penetrating gentleness, that
stupefying atmosphere of a woman's care and sympathy.... Didn't you tell
me once yourself--" Gerald's voice stiffened, and he pulled himself up
again, discarding weakness,--"Didn't you once tell me yourself--in your
impossible English, almost as bad as mine--that a sick man is 'liable to
fall in love with his nurse?' And, dear girl, I will not do it. I
categorically refuse. It is too horrible. I have done with all that. I
have just managed to creep up on to the dry sand, and you ask me to
embark again on those same waters. I will not do it. It is finished.
That slavery! that unrest! and fever! and jealousy! No, not again. I
have served my sentence. Too many times I have waked in the black of
night and waited for daylight, wishing I had been dust for a hundred
years. I know now that in order to have a little peace a person must not
want anything. That is the price. We mustn't want anything, Aurora. We
mustn't want anything, we mustn't mind anything, we mustn't care about
anything, we must submit to everything!" This counsel of perfection came
from Gerald almost in a sob. "We sha'n't be happy like that, naturally,
but we sha'n't be too wretched for expression, either. It's the lesson
of life. I have learned it, and I will not expose myself to the old
chances again. 'He who loves for the first time is a god,' says the
poet, 'but he who loves for the second time is a fool,' he goes on to
say. And so, Aurora--"
"You make me laugh!" exclaimed Aurora in a snort of simple scorn.
"And so, Aurora, I am going to keep away from you for--I am not at the
present moment quite able to say how long."
"You're going to do nothing of the sort! There now!" burst from Aurora.
"I'm not going to permit any such foolishness." She firmly proceeded to
pile up a barricade against his preposterous intention. "Now, Gerald,
you pay attention to what I say, child. Can't you see for yourself, now
you've put it into words, what nonsense all this is? You could no more,
in your sane and waking moments, be sentimentally in love with me, and
you know it, than, I guess, I could with you, fond of you as I am. No,
that isn't putting it strongly enough," she gallantly amended; "you
couldn't do it, it stands to reason, even so easily as I could. What you
felt was just the result of you being so weak, all full of fever dreams
and delusions. And you still believe in it a little because you aren't
yet good and strong. I thought you were, just at first, because you come
so near looking it. But I know that condition. After a sickness you
plump up, you get back your color, and all the while you can be so weak
you could burst out crying if any one pointed a finger at you. You're
trembling with nervousness this minute. You're all sunk together, as if
your backbone couldn't hold you up. It's because the weakness of your
illness is still on you, as anybody could see. Now you listen to what
I've got to say. The wisest thing you can do, young man, instead of
keeping away and having ideas and waiting till these gradually wear
off--the best thing you can do, I say, is to stay right at my side and
get sobered up by contact with things as they actually are. Not only the
best thing, but a lot fairer to me, doesn't it seem so to you? How do
you think I like to have you go kiting off the moment I've got you back
again? When I've missed you so! Now, Geraldino, rely on Auroretta. Let
her manage this case. Don't you be afraid; she'll cure you in two
frisks."
"It just might be, you know, that you were right," said Gerald,
dubiously, with the modesty of tone that would beseem a girl after a
bucket of cold water had quelled her hysterics. "The truth is you do not
appear to me this evening at all as I have been carrying you in my
remembrance."
Aurora laughed and reinforced her expression of jolly
matter-of-factness, looking into his eyes with eyes of sanative fun.
He looked back at her with meditative scrutiny, one eyebrow raised a
little above the other.
She had reigned in his thoughts very largely in her appearance of his
nurse, with her soft, loose robes, the blue of pensive twilights, her
fair hair in easy-feeling braids, her white hands bare of ornaments. She
sat near him now in a snug satin dinner-dress full of whalebones and
hooks and eyes. It had elbow sleeves terminating in full frills of
Duchess lace; a square-cut neck, likewise be-laced, framing an open
space in part obscured again by a jeweled medallion on a gold chain. She
had on rings and bracelets, a bow-knot in her hair. She had in fact
"dressed up" for Tom Bewick, wishing him to see with his eyes what good
she got out of the fortune with whose origin he was acquainted.
"Gracious goodness!" She bounced to her feet. "Here I was forgetting!
Gerald," she said in haste, "I'm sorry, but we'll have to go indoors.
They'll be wondering where I am, and starting the hunt for me."
"They? You have guests?"
"Only one. Come in, Gerald. I want you to meet him. You've heard me
speak of Judge Bewick in Denver, where I lived so long. Well, this is
his son, Doctor Thomas Bewick. He's in Florence just for a visit. It's a
wonder, come to think of it, that you haven't heard of his being here.
We've been going everywhere and seeing everything and giving
dinner-parties. Well, never tell me again that news spreads so fast in
Florence! Come on. I want you to know each other. You'll be sure to like
him."
"I don't think I will. I mean that I don't think I will go into the
house with you, Aurora."
"Now, Gerald," she said in a warning voice, at which black clouds of
impending displeasure loomed over the horizon, "this isn't the way to
begin. Don't be odd and trying. I should feel hurt, now truly, if I had
to think your regard for me wasn't equal to doing such a little thing
for me as this. Tom's one of my very best friends, and he's heard us
talk so much of you. He's seen your painting of me. I do want you to
know him, and I want him to know you. Then, too, Gerald dear, and this
is the main reason, I want you to get good and rested, and to take a
little wine before you start for home. Though you say the air is like a
warm bath, your hands are cold, I notice."
Too tired from the emotions of the evening to make any valid resistance,
emptied in fact of all feeling except a flat sort of bewilderment,
Gerald followed, like a little boy in fear of rough-handling from his so
much bigger nurse.
They found Estelle and Tom in the parlor.
"Well, I was wondering what had become of you!" cried Estelle as Aurora
appeared in the doorway, and behind her shoulder the shadowy, unexpected
face of Gerald.
"Tom," said Aurora, "this is my friend Mr. Fane that you've heard us
talk so much about, the painter, you know, who painted that picture of
me up there. And this is Doctor Bewick, Gerald, to whom I am under a
thousand obligations, besides the obligation of his having probably
saved my life out in Denver, not so many years ago, when I was
dangerously ill."
Aurora was luminous with gladness. Aurora was so glad that she had not
the concentration or the decency to attempt to hide it. She did not know
of the flagrant betrayal of her feelings; she was not guarding against
it, because her delight itself absorbed all her powers of thought. She
stood there, a monument unveiled. And all the reason for it that one
could see was that pindling, hollow-eyed young fellow who had entered
the room in her wake.
Those who have not quarreled with a loved one, and known the pain of the
fear that he may be lost to them, will surely never know the keenest
joy. It takes the escape, the contrast, to make happiness shine out as
brightly as it is capable of doing.
The two men, after conversation had engaged between them, promoted and
helped along by the greater lingual readiness of the ladies, observed
each other. This they did indirectly and as if doing nothing of the
kind. But Estelle, as profoundly uneasy as if she had foreseen already
the fate of the fat to end in the fire, was aware of it. She noted in
Gerald's stiffly adjusted face the unself-conscious eyebrows, formidably
different one from the other; she noted how Doctor Tom, sturdy and
self-collected as he was, kept knocking the ashes of his cigar into an
inkstand full of ink.
It struck her whimsically that she had seen before something kindred to
what was taking place under her eyes: in a barnyard at home, two
crimson-helmeted champions, with neck-feathers slightly risen on end,
standing opposed, ocularly taking each other's measure.