In that still air of the Florentine winter, time seems to share the
arrest of the natural forces, the repose of the elements. The pale blue
sky is frequently overcast, and it rains two days out of five;
sometimes, under extraordinary provocation from the north a snow-storm
whirls along under the low grey dome, and whitens the brown roofs, where
a growth of spindling weeds and grass clothes the tiles the whole year
round, and shows its delicate green above the gathered flakes. But for
the most part the winds are laid, and the sole change is from quiet sun
to quiet shower. This at least is the impression which remains in the
senses of the sojourning stranger, whose days slip away with so little
difference one from another that they seem really not to have passed,
but, like the grass that keeps the hillsides fresh round Florence all
the winter long, to be waiting some decisive change of season before
they begin.
The first of the Carnival sights that marked the lapse of a month since
his arrival took Colville by surprise. He could not have believed that
it was February yet if it had not been for the straggling maskers in
armour whom he met one day in Via Borgognissanti, with their visors up
for their better convenience in smoking. They were part of the chorus at
one of the theatres, and they were going about to eke out their salaries
with the gifts of people whose windows the festival season privileged
them to play under. The silly spectacle stirred Colville's blood a
little, as any sort of holiday preparation was apt to do. He thought
that it afforded him a fair occasion to call at Palazzo Pinti, where he
had not been so much of late as in the first days of his renewed
acquaintance with Mrs. Bowen. He had at one time had the fancy that Mrs.
Bowen was cool toward him. He might very well have been mistaken in
this; in fact, she had several times addressed him the politest
reproaches for not coming, but he made some evasion, and went only on
the days when she was receiving other people, and when necessarily he
saw very little of the family.
Miss Graham was always very friendly, but always very busy, drawing tea
from the samovar, and looking after others. Effie Bowen dropped her eyes
in re-established strangeness when she brought the basket of cake to
him. There was one moment when he suspected that he had been talked over
in family council, and put under a certain regimen. But he had no proof
of this, and it had really nothing to do with his keeping away, which
was largely accidental. He had taken up, with as much earnestness as he
could reasonably expect of himself, that notion of studying the
architectural expression of Florentine character at the different
periods. He had spent a good deal of money in books, he had revived his
youthful familiarity with the city, and he had made what acquaintance he
could with people interested in such matters. He met some of these in
the limited but very active society in which he mingled daily and
nightly. After the first strangeness to any sort of social life had worn
off, he found himself very fond of the prompt hospitalities which his
introduction at Mrs. Bowen's had opened to him. His host--or more
frequently it was his hostess--had sometimes merely an apartment at a
hotel; perhaps the family was established in one of the furnished
lodgings which stretch the whole length of the Lung' Arno on either
hand, and abound in all the new streets approaching the Cascine, and had
set up the simple and facile housekeeping of the sojourner in Florence
for a few months; others had been living in the villa or the palace they
had taken for years.
The more recent and transitory people expressed something of the
prevailing English and American aestheticism in the decoration of their
apartments, but the greater part accepted the Florentine drawing-room as
their landlord had imagined it for them, with furniture and curtains in
yellow satin, a cheap ingrain carpet thinly covering the stone floor,
and a fire of little logs ineffectually blazing on the hearth, and
flickering on the carved frames of the pictures on the wall and the
nakedness of the frescoed allegories in the ceiling. Whether of longer
or shorter stay, the sojourners were bound together by a common language
and a common social tradition; they all had a Day, and on that day there
was tea and bread and butter for every comer. They had one another to
dine; there were evening parties, with dancing and without dancing.
Colville even went to a fancy ball, where he was kept in countenance by
several other Florentines of the period of Romola. At all these places
he met nearly the same people, whose alien life in the midst of the
native community struck him as one of the phases of modern civilisation
worthy of note, if not particular study; for he fancied it destined to a
wider future throughout Europe, as the conditions in England and America
grow more tiresome and more onerous. They seemed to see very little of
Italian society, and to be shut out from practical knowledge of the
local life by the terms upon which they had themselves insisted. Our
race finds its simplified and cheapened London or New York in all its
Continental resorts now, but nowhere has its taste been so much studied
as in Italy, and especially in Florence. It was not, perhaps, the real
Englishman or American who had been considered, but a _forestière_
conventionalised from the Florentine's observation of many Anglo-Saxons.
But he had been so well conjectured that he was hemmed round with a very
fair illusion of his national circumstances.
It was not that he had his English or American doctor to prescribe for
him when sick, and his English or American apothecary to compound his
potion; it was not that there was an English tailor and an American
dentist, an English bookseller and an English baker, and chapels of
every shade of Protestantism, with Catholic preaching in English every
Sunday. These things were more or less matters of necessity, but
Colville objected that the barbers should offer him an American shampoo;
that the groceries should abound in English biscuit and our own canned
fruit and vegetables, and that the grocers' clerks should be ambitious
to read the labels of the Boston baked beans. He heard--though he did
not prove this by experiment--that the master of a certain trattoria had
studied the doughnut of New England till he had actually surpassed the
original in the qualities that have undermined our digestion as a
people. But above all it interested him to see that intense expression
of American civilisation, the horse-car, triumphing along the
magnificent avenues that mark the line of the old city walls; and he
recognised an instinctive obedience to an abtruse natural law in the
fact that whereas the omnibus, which the Italians have derived from the
English, was not filled beyond its seating capacity, the horse-car was
overcrowded without and within at Florence, just as it is with us who
invented it.
"I wouldn't mind even that," he said one day to the lady who was drawing
him his fifth or sixth cup of tea for that afternoon, and with whom he
was naturally making this absurd condition of things a matter of
personal question; "but you people here pass your days in a round of
unbroken English, except when you talk with your servants. I'm not sure
you don't speak English with the shop people. I can hardly get them to
speak Italian to me."
"Perhaps they think you can speak English better," said the lady.
This went over Florence; in a week it was told to Colville as something
said to some one else. He fearlessly reclaimed it as said to himself,
and this again was told. In the houses where he visited he had the
friendly acceptance of any intelligent and reasonably agreeable person
who comes promptly and willingly when he is asked, and seems always to
have enjoyed himself when he goes away. But besides this sort of general
favour, he enjoyed a very pleasing little personal popularity which came
from his interest in other people, from his good-nature, and from his
inertness. He slighted no acquaintance, and talked to every one with the
same apparent wish to be entertaining. This was because he was incapable
of the cruelty of open indifference when his lot was cast with a dull
person, and also because he was mentally too lazy to contrive pretences
for getting away; besides he did not really find anybody altogether a
bore, and he had no wish to shine. He listened without shrinking to
stories that he had heard before, and to things that had already been
said to him; as has been noted, he had himself the habit of repeating
his ideas with the recklessness of maturity, for he had lived long
enough to know that this can be done with almost entire safety.
He haunted the studios a good deal, and through a retrospective affinity
with art, and a human sympathy with the sacrifice which it always
involves, he was on friendly terms with sculptors and painters who were
not in every case so friendly with one another. More than once he saw
the scars of old rivalries, and he might easily have been an adherent of
two or three parties. But he tried to keep the freedom of the different
camps without taking sides; and he felt the pathos of the case when they
all told the same story of the disaster which the taste for bric-à-brac
had wrought to the cause of art; how people who came abroad no longer
gave orders for statues and pictures, but spent their money on curtains
and carpets, old chests and chairs, and pots and pans. There were some
among these artists whom he had known twenty years before in Florence,
ardent and hopeful beginners; and now the backs of their grey or bald
heads, as they talked to him with their faces towards their work, and a
pencil or a pinch of clay held thoughtfully between their fingers,
appealed to him as if he had remained young and prosperous, and they had
gone forward to age and hard work. They were very quaint at times. They
talked the American slang of the war days and of the days before the
war; without a mastery of Italian, they often used the idioms of that
tongue in their English speech. They were dim and vague about the
country, with whose affairs they had kept up through the newspapers.
Here and there one thought he was going home very soon; others had
finally relinquished all thoughts of return. These had, perhaps without
knowing it, lost the desire to come back; they cowered before the
expensiveness of life in America, and doubted of a future with which,
indeed, only the young can hopefully grapple. But in spite of their
accumulated years, and the evil times on which they had fallen, Colville
thought them mostly very happy men, leading simple and innocent lives in
a world of the ideal, and rich in the inexhaustible beauty of the city,
the sky, the air. They all, whether they were ever going back or not,
were fervent Americans, and their ineffaceable nationality marked them,
perhaps, all the more strongly for the patches of something alien that
overlaid it in places. They knew that he was or had been a newspaper
man; but if they secretly cherished the hope that he would bring them to
the _dolce lume_ of print, they never betrayed it; and the authorship of
his letter about the American artists in Florence, which he printed in
the _American Register_ at Paris, was not traced to him for a whole
week.
Colville was a frequent visitor of Mr. Waters, who had a lodging in
Piazza San Marco, of the poverty which can always be decent in Italy. It
was bare, but for the books that furnished it; with a table for his
writing, on a corner of which he breakfasted, a wide sofa with cushions
in coarse white linen that frankly confessed itself a bed by night, and
two chairs of plain Italian walnut; but the windows, which had no sun,
looked out upon the church and the convent sacred to the old Socinian
for the sake of the meek, heroic mystic whom they keep alive in all the
glory of his martyrdom. No two minds could well have been further apart
than the New England minister and the Florentine monk, and no two souls
nearer together, as Colville recognised with a not irreverent smile.
When the old man was not looking up some point of his saint's history in
his books, he was taking with the hopefulness of youth and the patience
of age a lesson in colloquial Italian from his landlady's daughter,
which he pronounced with a scholarly scrupulosity and a sincere atonic
Massachusetts accent. He practised the language wherever he could,
especially at the trattoria where he dined, and where he made occasions
to detain the waiter in conversation. They humoured him, out of their
national good-heartedness and sympathy, and they did what they could to
realise a strange American dish for him on Sundays--a combination of
stockfish and potatoes boiled, and then fried together in small cakes.
They revered him as a foreign gentleman of saintly amiability and
incomprehensible preferences; and he was held in equal regard at the
next green-grocer's where he spent every morning five centessimi for a
bunch of radishes and ten for a little pat of butter to eat with his
bread and coffee; he could not yet accustom himself to mere bread and
coffee for breakfast, though he conformed as completely as he could to
the Italian way of living. He respected the abstemiousness of the race;
he held that it came from a spirituality of nature to which the North
was still strange, with all its conscience and sense of individual
accountability. He contended that he never suffered in his small
dealings with these people from the dishonesty which most of his
countrymen complained of; and he praised their unfailing gentleness of
manner; this could arise only from goodness of heart, which was perhaps
the best kind of goodness after all.
None of these humble acquaintance of his could well have accounted for
the impression they all had that he was some sort of ecclesiastic. They
could never have understood--nor, for that matter, could any one have
understood through European tradition--the sort of sacerdotal office
that Mr. Waters had filled so long in the little deeply book-clubbed New
England village where he had outlived most of his flock, till one day he
rose in the midst of the surviving dyspeptics and consumptives and,
following the example of Mr. Emerson, renounced his calling for ever. By
that time even the pale Unitarianism thinning out into paler doubt was
no longer tenable with him. He confessed that while he felt the Divine
goodness more and more, he believed that it was a mistake to preach any
specific creed or doctrine, and he begged them to release him from their
service. A young man came to fill his place in their pulpit, but he kept
his place in their hearts. They raised a subscription of seventeen
hundred dollars and thirty-five cents; another being submitted to the
new button manufacturer, who had founded his industry in the village, he
promptly rounded it out to three thousand, and Mr. Waters came to
Florence. His people parted with him in terms of regret as delicate as
they were awkward, and their love followed him. He corresponded
regularly with two or three ladies, and his letters were sometimes read
from his pulpit.
Colville took the Piazza San Marco in on his way to Palazzo Pinti on the
morning when he had made up his mind to go there, and he stood at the
window looking out with the old man, when some more maskers passed
through the place--two young fellows in old Florentine dress, with a
third habited as a nun.
"Ah," said the old man gently, "I wish they hadn't introduced the nun!
But I suppose they can't help signalising their escape from the
domination of the Church on all occasions. It's a natural reaction. It
will all come right in time."
"You preach the true American gospel," said Colville.
"Of course; there is no other gospel. That is the gospel."
"Do you suppose that Savonarola would think it had all come out right,"
asked Colville, a little maliciously, "if he could look from the window
with us here and see the wicked old Carnival, that he tried so hard to
kill four hundred years ago, still alive? And kicking?" he added, in
cognisance of the caper of one of the maskers.
"Oh yes; why not? By this time he knows that his puritanism was all a
mistake, unless as a thing for the moment only. I should rather like to
have Savonarola here with us; he would find these costumes familiar;
they are of his time. I shall make a point of seeing all I can of the
Carnival, as part of my study of Savonarola, if nothing else."
"I'm afraid you'll have to give yourself limitations," said Colville, as
one of the maskers threw his arm round the mock-nun's neck. But the old
man did not see this, and Colville did not feel it necessary to explain
himself.
The maskers had passed out of the piazza, now, and "Have you seen our
friends at Palazzo Pinti lately?" said Mr. Waters.
"Not very," said Colville. "I was just on my way there."
"I wish you would make them my compliments. Such a beautiful young
creature."
"Yes," said Colville; "she is certainly a beautiful girl."
"I meant Mrs. Bowen," returned the old man quietly.
"Oh, I thought you meant Miss Graham. Mrs. Bowen is my contemporary, and
so I didn't think of her when you said young. I should have called her
pretty rather than beautiful."
"No; she's beautiful. The young girl is good-looking--I don't deny that;
but she is very crude yet."
Colville laughed. "Crude in looks? I should have said Miss Graham was
rather crude in mind, though I'm not sure I wouldn't have stopped at
saying _young_."
"No," mildly persisted the old man; "she couldn't be crude in mind
without being crude in looks."
"You mean," pursued Colville, smiling, but not wholly satisfied, "that
she hasn't a lovely nature?"
"You never can know what sort of nature a young girl has. Her nature
depends so much upon that of the man whose fate she shares."
"The woman is what the man makes her? That is convenient for the woman,
and relieves her of all responsibility."
"The man is what the woman makes him, too, but not so much so. The man
was cast into a deep sleep, you know----"
"And the woman was what he dreamed her. I wish she were."
"In most cases she is," said Mr. Waters.
They did not pursue the matter. The truth that floated in the old
minister's words pleased Colville by its vagueness, and flattered the
man in him by its implication of the man's superiority. He wanted to say
that if Mrs. Bowen were what the late Mr. Bowen had dreamed her, then
the late Mr. Bowen, when cast into his deep sleep, must have had Lina
Ridgely in his eye. But this seemed to be personalising the fantasy
unwarrantably, and pushing it too far. For like reason he forbore to say
that if Mr. Waters's theory were correct, it would be better to begin
with some one whom nobody else had dreamed before; then you could be
sure at least of not having a wife to somebody else's mind rather than
your own. Once on his way to Palazzo Pinti, he stopped, arrested by a
thought that had not occurred to him before in relation to what Mr.
Waters had been saying, and then pushed on with the sense of security
which is the compensation the possession of the initiative brings to our
sex along with many responsibilities. In the enjoyment of this, no man
stops to consider the other side, which must wait his initiative,
however they mean to meet it.
In the Por San Maria Colville found masks and dominoes filling the shop
windows and dangling from the doors. A devil in red and a clown in white
crossed the way in front of him from an intersecting street; several
children in pretty masquerading dresses flashed in and out among the
crowd. He hurried to the Lung' Arno, and reached the palace where Mrs.
Bowen lived, with these holiday sights fresh in his mind. Imogene turned
to meet him at the door of the apartment, running from the window where
she had left Effie Bowen still gazing.
"We saw you coming," she said gaily, without waiting to exchange formal
greetings. "We didn't know at first but it might be somebody else
disguised as you. We've been watching the maskers go by. Isn't it
exciting?"
"Awfully," said Colville, going to the window with her, and putting his
arm on Effie's shoulder, where she knelt in a chair looking out. "What
have you seen?"
"Oh, only two Spanish students with mandolins," said Imogene; "but you
can see they're _beginning_ to come."
"They'll stop now," murmured Effie, with gentle disappointment; "it's
commencing to rain."
"Oh, too bad!" wailed the young girl. But just then two mediaeval
men-at-arms came in sight, carrying umbrellas. "Isn't that too
delicious? Umbrellas and chain-armour!"
"You can't expect them to let their chain-armour get rusty," said
Colville. "You ought to have been with me--minstrels in scale-armour,
Florentines of Savonarola's times, nuns, clowns, demons, fairies--no end
to them."
"It's very well saying we ought to have been with you; but we can't go
anywhere alone."
"I didn't say alone," said Colville. "Don't you think Mrs. Bowen would
trust you with me to see these Carnival beginnings?" He had not meant at
all to do anything of this kind, but that had not prevented his doing
it.
"How do we know, when she hasn't been asked?" said Imogene, with a touch
of burlesque dolor, such as makes a dignified girl enchanting, when she
permits it to herself. She took Effie's hand in hers, the child having
faced round from the window, and stood smoothing it, with her lovely
head pathetically tilted on one side.
"What haven't I been asked yet?" demanded Mrs. Bowen, coming lightly
toward them from a door at the side of the _salon_. She gave her hand to
Colville with the prettiest grace, and a cordiality that brought a flush
to her cheek. There had really been nothing between them but a little
unreasoned coolness, if it were even so much as that; say rather a
dryness, aggravated by time and absence, and now, as friends do, after a
thing of that kind, they were suddenly glad to be good to each other.
"Why, you haven't been asked how you have been this long time," said
Colville.
"I have been wanting to tell you for a whole week," returned Mrs. Bowen,
seating the rest and taking a chair for herself. "Where have you been?"
"Oh, shut up in my cell at Hotel d'Atene, writing a short history of the
Florentine people for Miss Effie."
"Effie, take Mr. Colville's hat," said her mother. "We're going to make
you stay to lunch," she explained to him.
"Is that so?" he asked, with an effect of polite curiosity.
"Yes." Imogene softly clapped her hands, unseen by Mrs. Bowen, for
Colville's instruction that all was going well. If it delights women to
pet an undangerous friend of our sex, to use him like one of themselves,
there are no words to paint the soft and flattered content with which
his spirit purrs under their caresses. "You must have nearly finished
the history," added Mrs. Bowen.
"Well, I could have finished it," said Colville, "if I had only begun
it. You see, writing a short history of the Florentine people is such
quick work that you have to be careful how you actually put pen to
paper, or you're through with it before you've had any fun out of it."
"I think Effie will like to read that kind of history," said her mother.
The child hung her head, and would not look at Colville; she was still
shy with him; his absence must have seemed longer to a child, of course.
At lunch they talked of the Carnival sights that had begun to appear. He
told of his call upon Mr. Waters, and of the old minister's purpose to
see all he could of the Carnival in order to judge intelligently of
Savonarola's opposition to it.
"Mr. Waters is a very good man," said Mrs. Bowen, with the air of not
meaning to approve him quite, nor yet to let any notion of his be made
fun of in her presence. "But for my part I wish there were not going to
be any Carnival; the city will be in such an uproar for the next two
weeks."
"O Mrs. Bowen!" cried Imogene reproachfully; Effie looked at her mother
in apparent anxiety lest she should be meaning to put forth an
unquestionable power and stop the Carnival.
"The last Carnival, I thought there was never going to be any end to it;
I was so glad when Lent came."
"Glad when _Lent_ came!" breathed Imogene, in astonishment; but she
ventured upon nothing more insubordinate, and Colville admired to see
this spirited girl as subject to Mrs. Bowen as her own child. There is
no reason why one woman should establish another woman over her, but
nearly all women do it in one sort or another, from love of a voluntary
submission, or from a fear of their own ignorance, if they are younger
and more inexperienced than their lieges. Neither the one passion nor
the other seems to reduce them to a like passivity as regards their
husbands. They must apparently have a fetish of their own sex. Colville
could see that Imogene obeyed Mrs. Bowen not only as a _protégée_ but as
a devotee.
"Oh, I suppose _you_ will have to go through it all," said Mrs. Bowen,
in reward of the girl's acquiescence.
"You're rather out of the way of it up here," said Colville. "You had
better let me go about with the young ladies--if you can trust them to
the care of an old fellow like me."
"Oh, I don't think you're so very old, at all times," replied Mrs.
Bowen, with a peculiar look, whether indulgent or reproachful he could
not quite make out.
But he replied, boldly, in his turn: "I have certainly my moments of
being young still; I don't deny it. There's always a danger of their
occurrence."
"I was thinking," said Mrs. Bowen, with a graceful effect of not
listening, "that you would let me go too. It would be quite like old
times."
"Only too much honour and pleasure," returned Colville, "if you will
leave out the old times. I'm not particular about having them along."
Mrs. Bowen joined in laughing at the joke, which they had to themselves.
"I was only consulting an explicit abhorrence of yours in not asking you
to go at first," he explained.
"Oh yes; I understand that."
The excellence of the whole arrangement seemed to grow upon Mrs. Bowen.
"Of course," she said, "Imogene ought to see all she can of the
Carnival. She may not have another chance, and perhaps if she had, _he_
wouldn't consent."
"I'll engage to get _his_ consent," said the girl. "What I was afraid of
was that I couldn't get yours, Mrs. Bowen."
"Am I so severe as that?" asked Mrs. Bowen softly.
"Quite," replied Imogene.
"Perhaps," thought Colville, "it isn't always silent submission."
For no very good reason that any one could give, the Carnival that year
was not a brilliant one. Colville's party seemed to be always meeting
the same maskers on the street, and the maskers did not greatly increase
in numbers. There were a few more of them after nightfall, but they were
then a little more bacchanal, and he felt it was better that the ladies
had gone home by that time. In the pursuit of the tempered pleasure of
looking up the maskers he was able to make the reflection that their
fantastic and vivid dresses sympathised in a striking way with the
architecture of the city, and gave him an effect of Florence which he
could not otherwise have had. There came by and by a little attempt at a
_corso_ in Via Cerratani and Via Tornabuoni. There were some masks in
carriages, and from one they actually threw plaster _confetti_; half a
dozen bare-legged boys ran before and beat one another with bladders,
Some people, but not many, watched the show from the windows, and the
footways were crowded.
Having proposed that they should see the Carnival together, Colville had
made himself responsible for it to the Bowen household. Imogene said,
"Well is this the famous Carnival of Florence?"
"It certainly doesn't compare with the Carnival last year," said Mrs.
Bowen.
"Your reproach is just, Mrs. Bowen," he acknowledged. "I've managed it
badly. But you know I've been out of practice a great while there in Des
Vaches."
"Oh, poor Mr. Colville!" cried Imogene. "He isn't altogether to blame."
"I don't know," said Mrs. Bowen, humouring the joke in her turn. "It
seems to me that if he had consulted us a little earlier, he might have
done better."
He drove home with the ladies, and Mrs. Bowen made him stay to tea. As
if she felt that he needed to be consoled for the failure of his
Carnival, she was especially indulgent with him. She played to him on
the piano some of the songs that were in fashion when they were in
Florence together before.
Imogene had never heard them; she had heard her mother speak of them.
One or two of them were negro songs, such as very pretty young ladies
used to sing without harm to themselves or offence to others; but
Imogene decided that they were rather rowdy. "Dear me, Mrs. Bowen! Did
_you_ sing such songs? You wouldn't let Effie!"
"No, I wouldn't let Effie. The times are changed. I wouldn't let Effie
go to the theatre alone with a young gentleman."
"The times are changed for the worse," Colville began. "What harm ever
came to a young man from a young lady's going alone to the theatre with
him?"
He stayed till the candles were brought in, and then went away only
because, as he said, they had not asked him to stay to dinner.
He came nearly every day, upon one pretext or another, and he met them
oftener than that at the teas and on the days of other ladies in
Florence; for he was finding the busy idleness of the life very
pleasant, and he went everywhere. He formed the habit of carrying
flowers to the Palazzo Pinti, excusing himself on the ground that they
were so cheap and so abundant as to be impersonal. He brought violets to
Effie and roses to Imogene; to Mrs. Bowen he always brought a bunch of
the huge purple anemones which grow so abundantly all winter long about
Florence. "I wonder why _purple_ anemones?" he asked her one day in
presenting them to her.
"Oh, it is quite time I should be wearing purple," she said gently.
"Ah, Mrs. Bowen!" he reproached her. "Why do I bring purple violets to
Miss Effie?"
"You must ask Effie!" said Mrs. Bowen, with a laugh.
After that he stayed away forty-eight hours, and then appeared with a
bunch of the red anemones, as large as tulips, which light up the meadow
grass when it begins to stir from its torpor in the spring. "They grew
on purpose to set me right with you," he said, "and I saw them when I
was in the country."
It was a little triumph for him, which she celebrated by putting them in
a vase on her table, and telling people who exclaimed over them that
they were some Mr. Colville gathered in the country. He enjoyed his
privileges at her house with the futureless satisfaction of a man. He
liked to go about with the Bowens; he was seen with the ladies driving
and walking, in most of their promenades. He directed their visits to
the churches and the galleries; he was fond of strolling about with
Effie's daintily-gloved little hand in his. He took her to Giocosa's and
treated her to ices; he let her choose from the confectioner's prettiest
caprices in candy; he was allowed to bring the child presents in his
pockets. Perhaps he was not as conscientious as he might have been in
his behaviour with the little girl. He did what he could to spoil her,
or at least to relax the severity of the training she had received; he
liked to see the struggle that went on in the mother's mind against
this, and then the other struggle with which she overcame her opposition
to it. The worst he did was to teach Effie some picturesque Western
phrases, which she used with innocent effectiveness; she committed the
crimes against convention which he taught her with all the conventional
elegance of her training. The most that he ever gained for her were some
concessions in going out in weather that her mother thought unfit, or
sitting up for half-hours after her bed-time. He ordered books for her
from Goodban's, and it was Colville now, and not the Rev. Mr. Morton,
who read poetry aloud to the ladies on afternoons when Mrs. Bowen gave
orders that she and Miss Graham should be denied to all other comers.
It was an intimacy; and society in Florence is not blind, and especially
it is not dumb. The old lady who had celebrated Mrs. Bowen to him the
first night at Palazzo Pinti led a life of active questions as to what
was the supreme attraction to Colville there, and she referred her doubt
to every friend with whom she drank tea. She philosophised the situation
very scientifically, and if not very conclusively, how few are the
absolute conclusions of science upon any point!
"He is a bachelor, and there is a natural affinity between bachelors and
widows--much more than if he were a widower too. If he were a widower I
should say it was undoubtedly mademoiselle. If he were a little _bit_
younger, I should have no doubt it was madame; but men of that age have
such an ambition to marry young girls! I suppose that they think it
proves they are not so very old, after all. And certainly he isn't too
old to marry. If he were wise--which he probably isn't, if he's like
other men in such matters--there wouldn't be any question about Mrs.
Bowen. Pretty creature! And so much sense! Too much for him. Ah, my
dear, how we are wasted upon that sex!"
Mrs. Bowen herself treated the affair with masterly frankness. More than
once in varying phrase, she said: "You are very good to give us so much
of your time, Mr. Colville, and I won't pretend I don't know it. You're
helping me out with a very hazardous experiment. When I undertook to see
Imogene through a winter in Florence, I didn't reflect what a very gay
time girls have at home, in Western towns especially. But I haven't
heard her breathe Buffalo once. And I'm sure it's doing her a great deal
of good here. She's naturally got a very good mind; she's very ambitious
to be cultivated. She's read a good deal, and she's anxious to know
history and art; and your advice and criticism are the greatest possible
advantage to her."
"Thank you," said Colville, with a fine, remote dissatisfaction. "I
supposed I was merely enjoying myself."
He had lately begun to haunt his banker's for information in regard to
the Carnival balls, with the hope that something might be made out of
them.
But either there were to be no great Carnival balls, or it was a mistake
to suppose that his banker ought to know about them. Colville went
experimentally to one of the people's balls at a minor theatre, which he
found advertised on the house walls. At half-past ten the dancing had
not begun, but the masks were arriving; young women in gay silks and
dirty white gloves; men in women's dresses, with enormous hands; girls
as pages; clowns, pantaloons, old women, and the like. They were all
very good-humoured; the men, who far outnumbered the women, danced
contentedly together. Colville liked two cavalry soldiers who waltzed
with each other for an hour, and then went off to a battery on
exhibition in the pit, and had as much electricity as they could hold.
He liked also two young citizens who danced together as long as he
stayed, and did not leave off even for electrical refreshment. He came
away at midnight, pushing out of the theatre through a crowd of people
at the door, some of whom were tipsy. This certainly would not have done
for the ladies, though the people were civilly tipsy.