"It would spoil my gloves," she said, in deprecating refusal.
"Let _me_ try it!" cried Imogene. "I'm not afraid of my gloves."
Colville yielded the pebble, looking at her with the thought of how
intoxicating he should once have found this bit of wilful _abandon_, but
feeling rather sorry for it now. "Oh, perhaps not?" he said, laying his
hand upon hers, and looking into her eyes.
She returned his look, and then she dropped the pebble and put her hand
back in her muff, and turned and ran up the bank. "There's the carriage.
It's time we should be going." At the top of the bank she became a
mirror of dignity, a transparent mirror to his eye. "Are you going back
to town, Mr. Colville?" she asked, with formal state. "We could set you
down anywhere!"
"Thank you, Miss Graham. I shall be glad to avail myself of your very
kind offer. Allow me." He handed her ceremoniously to the carriage; he
handed Effie Bowen even more ceremoniously to the carriage, holding his
hat in one hand while he offered the other. Then he mounted to the seat
in front of them. "The weather has changed," he said.
Imogene hid her face in her muff, and Effie Bowen bowed hers against
Imogene's shoulder.
A sense of the girl's beauty lingered in Colville's thought all day, and
recurred to him again and again; and the ambitious intensity and
enthusiasm of her talk came back in touches of amusement and compassion.
How divinely young it all was, and how lovely! He patronised it from a
height far aloof.
He was not in the frame of mind for the hotel table, and he went to
lunch, at a restaurant. He chose a simple trattoria, the first he came
to, and he took his seat at one of the bare, rude tables, where the
joint saucers for pepper and salt, and a small glass for toothpicks,
with a much-scraped porcelain box for matches, expressed an uncorrupted
Florentinity of custom. But when he gave his order in offhand Italian,
the waiter answered in the French which waiters get together for the
traveller's confusion in Italy, and he resigned himself to whatever
chance of acquaintance might befall him. The place had a companionable
smell of stale tobacco, and the dim light showed him on the walls of a
space dropped a step or two lower, at the end of the room, a variety of
sketches and caricatures. A waiter was laying a large table in this
space, and when Colville came up to examine the drawings he jostled him,
with due apologies, in the haste of a man working against time for
masters who will brook no delay. He was hurrying still when a party of
young men came in and took their places at the table, and began to rough
him for his delay. Colville could recognise several of them in the
vigorous burlesques on the walls, and as others dropped in the grotesque
portraitures made him feel as if he had seen them before. They all
talked at once, each man of his own interests, except when they joined
in a shout of mockery and welcome for some new-comer. Colville, at his
_risotto_, almost the room's length away, could hear what they thought,
one and another, of Botticelli and Michelangelo; of old Piloty's things
at Munich; of the dishes they had served to them, and of the quality of
the Chianti; of the respective merits of German and Italian tobacco; of
whether Inglehart had probably got to Venice yet; of the personal habits
of Billings, and of the question whether the want of modelling in
Simmons's nose had anything to do with his style of snoring; of the
overrated colouring of some of those Venetian fellows; of the delicacy
of Mino da Fiesole, and of the genius of Babson's tailor. Babson was
there to defend the cut of his trousers, and Billings and Simmons were
present to answer for themselves at the expense of the pictures of those
who had called their habits and features into question. When it came to
this all the voices joined in jolly uproar. Derision and denial broke
out of the tumult, and presently they were all talking quietly of a
reception which some of them were at the day before. Then Colville heard
one of them saying that he would like a chance to paint some lady whose
name he did not catch, and "She looks awfully sarcastic," one of the
young fellows said.
"They say she _is_," said another. "They say she's awfully
intellectual."
"Boston?" queried a third.
"No, Kalamazoo. The centre of culture is out there now."
"She knows how to dress, anyhow," said the first commentator. "I wonder
what Parker would talk to her about when he was painting her. He's never
read anything but Poe's 'Ullalume.'"
"Well, that's a good subject--'Ullalume.'"
"I suppose she's read it?"
"She's read 'most everything, they say."
"What's an Ullalume, anyway, Parker?"
One of the group sprang up from the table and drew on the wall what he
labelled "An Ullalume." Another rapidly depicted Parker in the moment of
sketching a young lady; her portrait had got as far as the eyes and nose
when some one protested: "Oh, hello! No personalities."
The draughtsman said, "Well, all right!" and sat down again.
"Hall talked with her the most. What did she say, Hall?"
"Hall can't remember words in three syllables, but he says it was mighty
brilliant and mighty deep."
"They say she's a niece of Mrs. Bowen's. She's staying with Mrs. Bowen."
Then it was the wisdom and brilliancy and severity of Imogene Graham
that these young men stood in awe of! Colville remembered how the minds
of girls of twenty had once dazzled him. "And yes," he mused, "she must
have believed that we were talking literature in the Cascine. Certainly
I should have thought it an intellectual time when I was at that age,"
he owned to himself with forlorn irony.
The young fellows went on to speak of Mrs. Bowen, whom it seemed they
had known the winter before. She had been very polite to them; they
praised her as if she were quite an old woman.
"But she must have been a very pretty girl," one of them put in.
"Well, she has a good deal of style yet."
"Oh yes, but she never could have been a beauty like the other one."
On her part, Imogene was very sober when she met Mrs. Bowen, though she
had come in flushed and excited from the air and the morning's
adventure. Mrs. Bowen was sitting by the fire, placidly reading; a vase
of roses on the little table near her diffused the delicate odour of
winter roses through the room; all seemed very still and dim, and of
another time, somehow.
Imogene kept away from the fire, sitting down, in the provisional
fashion of women, with her things on; but she unbuttoned her pelisse and
flung it open. Effie had gone to her room.
"Did you have a pleasant drive?" asked Mrs. Bowen.
"Very," said the girl.
"Mr. Morton brought you these roses," continued Mrs. Bowen.
"Oh," said Imogene, with a cold glance at them.
"The Flemmings have asked us to a party Thursday. There is to be
dancing."
"The Flemmings?"
"Yes." As if she now saw reason to do so, Mrs. Bowen laid the book face
downward in her lap. She yawned a little, with her hand on her mouth.
"Did you meet any one you knew?"
"Yes; Mr. Colville." Mrs. Bowen cut her yawn in half. "We got out to
walk in the Cascine, and we saw him coming in at the gate. He came up
and asked if he might walk with us."
"Did you have a pleasant walk?" asked Mrs. Bowen, a breath more chillily
than she had asked if they had a pleasant drive.
"Yes, pleasant enough. And then we came back and went down the river
bank, and he skipped stones, and we took him to his hotel."
"Was there anybody you knew in the Cascine?"
"Oh no; the place was a howling wilderness. I never saw it so deserted,"
said the girl impatiently. "It was terribly hot walking. I thought I
should burn up."
Mrs. Bowen did not answer anything; she let the book lie in her lap.
"What an odd person Mr. Colville is!" said Imogene, after a moment.
"Don't you think he's very different from other gentlemen?"
"Why?"
"Oh, he has such a peculiar way of talking."
"What peculiar way?"
"Oh, I don't know. Plenty of the young men I see talk cynically, and I
do sometimes myself--desperately, don't you know. But then I know very
well we don't mean anything by it."
"And do you think Mr. Colville does? Do you think he talks cynically?"
Imogene leaned back in her chair and reflected. "No," she returned
slowly, "I can't say that he does. But he talks lightly, with a kind of
touch and go that makes you feel that he has exhausted all feeling. He
doesn't parade it at all. But you hear between the words, don't you
know, just as you read between the lines in some kinds of poetry. Of
course it's everything in knowing what he's been through. He's perfectly
unaffected; and don't you think he's good?"
"Oh yes," sighed Mrs. Bowen. "In his way."
"But he sees through you. Oh, quite! Nothing escapes him, and pretty
soon he lets out that he has seen through you, and then you feel so
_flat_! Oh, it's perfectly intoxicating to be with him. I would give the
world to talk as he does."
"What was your talk all about?"
"Oh, I don't know. I suppose it would have been called rather
intellectual."
Mrs. Bowen smiled infinitesimally. But after a moment she said gravely,
"Mr. Colville is very much older than you. He's old enough to be your
father."
"Yes, I know that. You feel that he feels old, and it's perfectly
tragical. Sometimes when he turns that slow, dull, melancholy look on
you, he seems a thousand years old."
"I don't mean that he's positively old," said Mrs. Bowen. "He's only old
comparatively."
"Oh yes; I understand that. And I don't mean that he really seems a
thousand years old. What I meant was, he seems a thousand years off, as
if he were still young, and had got left behind somehow. He seems to be
on the other side of some impassable barrier, and you want to get over
there and help him to our side, but you can't do it. I suppose his
talking in that light way is merely a subterfuge to hide his feeling, to
make him forget."
Mrs. Bowen fingered the edges of her book. "You mustn't let your fancy
run away with you, Imogene," she said, with a little painful smile.
"Oh, I _like_ to let it run away with me. And when I get such a subject
as Mr. Colville, there's no stopping. I can't stop, and I don't _wish_
to stop. Shouldn't you have thought that he would have been perfectly
crushed at the exhibition he made of himself in the Lancers last night?
He wasn't the least embarrassed when he met me, and the only allusion he
made to it was to say that he had been up late, and had danced too much.
Wasn't it wonderful he could do it? Oh, if _I_ could do that!"
"I wish he could have avoided the occasion for his bravado," said Mrs.
Bowen.
"I think I was a little to blame, perhaps," said the girl. "I beckoned
him to come and take the vacant place."
"I don't see that that was an excuse," returned Mrs. Bowen primly.
Imogene seemed insensible to the tone, as it concerned herself; it only
apparently reminded her of something. "Guess what Mr. Colville said,
when I had been silly, and then tried to make up for it by being very
dignified all of a sudden?"
"I don't know. How had you been silly?"
The servant brought in some cards. Imogene caught up the pelisse which
she had been gradually shedding as she sat talking to Mrs. Bowen, and
ran out of the room by another door.
They did not recur to the subject. But that night, when Mrs. Bowen went
to say good night to Effie, after the child had gone to bed, she
lingered.
"Effie," she said at last, in a husky whisper, "what did Imogene say to
Mr. Colville to-day that made him laugh?"
"I don't know," said the child. "They kept laughing at so many things."
"Laughing?"
"Yes; he laughed. Do you mean toward the last, when he had been throwing
stones into the river?"
"It must have been then."
The child stretched herself drowsily. "Oh I couldn't understand it all.
She wanted to throw a stone in the river, but he told her she had better
not. But that didn't make _him_ laugh. She was so very stiff just
afterward that he said the weather had changed, and that made _us_
laugh."
"Was that all?"
"We kept laughing ever so long. I never saw any one like Mr. Colville.
How queerly the fire shines on your face! It gives you such a beautiful
complexion."
"Does it?"
"Yes, lovely." The child's mother stooped over and kissed her. "You're
the prettiest mamma in the world," she said, throwing her arms round her
neck. "Sometimes I can't tell whether Imogene is prettier or not, but
to-night I'm certain you are. Do you like to have me think that?"
"Yes--yes. But don't pull me down so; you hurt my neck. Good night."
The child let her go. "I haven't said my prayer yet, mamma. I was
thinking."
"Well, say it now, then," said the mother gently.
When the child had finished she turned upon her cheek. "Good night,
mamma."
Mrs. Bowen went about the room a little while, picking up its pretty
disorder. Then she sat down in a chair by the hearth, where a log was
still burning. The light of the flame flickered upon her face, and threw
upon the ceiling a writhing, fantastic shadow, the odious caricature of
her gentle beauty.