"No," said Clementina, "I don't want you to say anything about me to
him."
"No, no!" said Baron Belsky, waving his band reassuringly. "I would not
mention your name!"
Mr. Ewins came in, and the Russian said he must go. Mrs. Lander tried to
detain him, too, as she had tried to keep Mr. Hinkle, but he was
inexorable. Mr. Ewins looked at the door when it had closed upon him.
Mrs. Lander said, "That is one of the gentlemen that Clementina met the
otha night at the dance. He is a baron, but he scratches it out. You'd
ought to head him go on about Americans."
"Yes," said Mr. Ewins coldly. "He's at our hotel, and he airs his
peculiar opinions at the table d'hote pretty freely. He's a revolutionist
of some kind, I fancy." He pronounced the epithet with an abhorrence
befitting the citizen of a state born of revolution and a city that had
cradled the revolt. "He's a Nihilist, I believe."
Mrs. Lander wished to know what that was, and he explained that it was a
Russian who wanted to overthrow the Czar, and set up a government of the
people, when they were not prepared for liberty.
"Then, maybe he isn't a baron at all," said Mrs. Lander.
"Oh, I believe he has a right to his title," Ewins answered. "It's a
German one."
He said he thought that sort of man was all the more mischievous on
account of his sincerity. He instanced a Russian whom a friend of his
knew in Berlin, a man of rank like this fellow: he got to brooding upon
the condition of working people and that kind of thing, till he renounced
his title and fortune and went to work in an iron foundry.
Mr. Ewins also spoke critically of Mrs. Milray. He had met her in Egypt;
but you soon exhausted the interest of that kind of woman. He professed a
great concern that Clementina should see Florence in just the right way,
and he offered his services in showing her the place.
The Russian came the next day, and almost daily after that, in the
interest with which Clementina's novel difference from other American
girls seemed to inspire him. His imagination had transmuted her simple
Yankee facts into something appreciable to a Slav of his temperament. He
conceived of her as the daughter of a peasant, whose beauty had charmed
the widow of a rich citizen, and who was to inherit the wealth of her
adoptive mother. He imagined that the adoption had taken place at a much
earlier period than the time when Clementina's visit to Mrs. Lander
actually began, and that all which could be done had been done to efface
her real character by indulgence and luxury.
His curiosity concerning her childhood, her home, her father and mother,
her brothers and sisters, and his misunderstanding of everything she told
him, amused her. But she liked him, and she tried to give him some notion
of the things he wished so much to know. It always ended in a
dissatisfaction, more or less vehement, with the outcome of American
conditions as he conceived them.
"But you," he urged one day, "you who are a daughter of the fields and
woods, why should you forsake that pure life, and come to waste yourself
here?"
"Why, don't you think it's very nice in Florence?" she asked, with eyes
of innocent interest.
"Nice! Nice! Do we live for what is nice? Is it enough that you have what
you Americans call a nice time?"
Clementina reflected. "I wasn't doing much of anything at home, and I
thought I might as well come with Mrs. Lander, if she wanted me so much."
She thought in a certain way, that he was meddling with what was not his
affair, but she believed that he was sincere in his zeal for the ideal
life he wished her to lead, and there were some things she had heard
about him that made her pity and respect him; his self-exile and his
renunciation of home and country for his principles, whatever they were;
she did not understand exactly. She would not have liked never being able
to go back to Middlemount, or to be cut off from all her friends as this
poor young Nihilist was, and she said, now, "I didn't expect that it was
going to be anything but a visit, and I always supposed we should go back
in the spring; but now Mrs. Lander is beginning to think she won't be
well enough till fall."
"And why need you stay with her?"
"Because she's not very well," answered Clementina, and she smiled, a
little triumphantly as well as tolerantly.
"She could hire nurses and doctors, all she wants with her money."
"I don't believe it would be the same thing, exactly, and what should I
do if I went back?"
"Do? Teach! Uplift the lives about you."
"But you say it is better for people to live simply, and not read and
think so much."
"Then labor in the fields with them."
Clementina laughed outright. "I guess if anyone saw me wo'king in the
fields they would think I was a disgrace to the neighbahood."
Belsky gave her a stupified glare through his spectacles. "I cannot
undertand you Americans."
"Well, you must come ova to America, then, Mr. Belsky"--he had asked her
not to call him by his title--"and then you would."
"No, I could not endure the disappointment. You have the great
opportunity of the earth. You could be equal and just, and simple and
kind. There is nothing to hinder you. But all you try to do is to get
more and more money."
"Now, that isn't faia, Mr. Belsky, and you know it."
"Well, then, you joke, joke--always joke. Like that Mr. Hinkle. He wants
to make money with his patent of a gleaner, that will take the last grain
of wheat from the poor, and he wants to joke--joke!"
Clementina said, "I won't let you say that about Mr. Hinkle. You don't
know him, or you wouldn't. If he jokes, why shouldn't he?"