It was her letter which Colville found on his table and read by the
struggling light of his newly acquired candle. Then he sat down and
replied to it.
"Dear Mrs. Bowen,--I know that you mean some sort of kindness by me, and
I hope you will not think me prompted by any poor resentment in
declining to-morrow's lunch. I am satisfied that it is best for me to
go; and I am ashamed not to be gone already. But a ridiculous accident
has kept me, and when I came in and found your note I was just going to
write and ask your patience with my presence in Florence till Monday
morning.
"Yours sincerely, THEODORE COLVILLE."
He took his note down to the porter, who had lain down again in his
little booth, but sprang up with a cheerful request to be commanded.
Colville consulted him upon the propriety of sending the note to Palazzo
Pinti at once, and the porter, with his head laid in deprecation upon
one of his lifted shoulders, owned that it was perhaps the very least
little bit in the world late.
"Send it the first thing in the morning, then," said Colville.
Mrs. Bowen received it by the servant who brought her coffee to the
room, and she sent it without any word to Imogene. The girl came
instantly back with it. She was fully dressed, as if she had been up a
long time, and she wore a very plain, dull dress, in which one of her
own sex might have read the expression of a potential self-devotion.
"It's just as I wish it, Mrs. Bowen," she said, in a low key of
impassioned resolution. "_Now_, my conscience is at rest. And you have
done this for me, Mrs. Bowen!" She stood timidly with the door in her
hand, watching Mrs. Bowen's slight smile; then, as if at some sign in
it, she flew to the bed and kissed her, and so fled out of the room
again.
Colville slept late, and awoke with a vague sense of self-reproach,
which faded afterward to such poor satisfaction as comes to us from the
consciousness of having made the best of a bad business; some pangs of
softer regret mixed with this. At first he felt a stupid obligation to
keep indoors, and he really did not go out till after lunch. The
sunshine had looked cold from his window, and with the bright fire which
he found necessary in his room, he fancied a bitterness in the gusts
that caught up the dust in the piazza, and blew it against the line of
cabs on the other side; but when he got out into the weather he found
the breeze mild and the sun warm. The streets were thronged with people,
and at all the corners there were groups of cloaked and overcoated
talkers, soaking themselves full of the sunshine. The air throbbed, as
always, with the sound of bells, but it was a mellower and opener sound
than before, and looking at the purple bulk of one of those hills which
seem to rest like clouds at the end of each avenue in Florence, Colville
saw that it was clear of snow. He was going up through Via Cavour to
find Mr. Waters and propose a walk, but he met him before he had got
half-way to San Marco.
The old man was at a momentary stand-still, looking up at the Riccardi
Palace, and he received Colville with apparent forgetfulness of anything
odd in his being still in Florence. "Upon the whole," he said, without
preliminary of any sort, as Colville turned and joined him in walking
on, "I don't know any homicide that more distinctly proves the futility
of assassination as a political measure than that over yonder." He
nodded his head sidewise toward the palace as he shuffled actively along
at Colville's elbow.
"You might say that the moment when Lorenzino killed Alessandro was the
most auspicious for a deed of that kind. The Medici had only recently
been restored; Alessandro was the first ruler in Florence, who had worn
a title; no more reckless, brutal, and insolent tyrant ever lived, and
his right, even such as the Medici might have, to play the despot was
involved in the doubt of his origin; the heroism of the great siege
ought still to have survived in the people who withstood the forces of
the whole German Empire for fifteen months; it seems as if the taking
off of that single wretch should have ended the whole Medicean
domination; but there was not a voice raised to second the homicide's
appeal to the old love of liberty in Florence. The Medici party were
able to impose a boy of eighteen upon the most fiery democracy that ever
existed, and to hunt down and destroy Alessandro's murderer at their
leisure. No," added the old man thoughtfully, "I think that the friends
of progress must abandon assassination as invariably useless. The
trouble was not that Alessandro was alive, but that Florence was dead.
Assassination always comes too early or too late in any popular
movement. It may be," said Mr. Waters, with a carefulness to do justice
to assassination which made Colville smile, "that the modern scientific
spirits may be able to evolve something useful from the principle, but
considering the enormous abuses and perversions to which it is liable, I
am very doubtful of it--very doubtful."
Colville laughed. "I like your way of bringing a fresh mind to all these
questions in history and morals, whether they are conventionally settled
or not. Don't you think the modern scientific spirit could evolve
something useful out of the old classic idea of suicide?"
"Perhaps," said Mr. Waters; "I haven't yet thought it over. The worst
thing about suicide--and this must always rank it below political
assassination--is that its interest is purely personal. No man ever
kills himself for the good of others."
"That's certainly against it. We oughtn't to countenance such an
abominably selfish practice. But you can't bring that charge against
euthanasy. What have you to say of that?"
"I have heard one of the most benevolent and tender-hearted men I ever
knew defend it in cases of hopeless suffering. But I don't know that I
should be prepared to take his ground. There appears to be something so
sacred about human life that we must respect it even in spite of the
prayers of the sufferer who asks us to end his irremediable misery."
"Well," said Colville, "I suspect we must at least class murder with the
ballet as a means of good. One might say there was still some virtue in
the primal, eldest curse against bloodshed."
"Oh, I don't by any means deny those things," said the old man, with the
air of wishing to be scrupulously just. "Which way are you walking?"
"Your way, if you will let me," replied Colville. "I was going to your
house to ask you to take a walk with me."
"Ah, that's good. I was reading of the great siege last night, and I
thought of taking a look at Michelangelo's bastions. Let us go together,
if you don't think you'll find it too fatiguing."
"I shall be ashamed to complain if I do."
"And you didn't go to Rome after all?" said Mr. Waters.
"No; I couldn't face the landlord with a petition so preposterous as
mine. I told him that I found I had no money to pay his bill till I had
seen my banker, and as he didn't propose that I should send him the
amount back from Rome, I stayed. Landlords have their limitations; they
are not imaginative, as a class."
"Well, a day more will make no great difference to you, I suppose," said
the old man, "and a day less would have been a loss to me. I shall miss
you."
"Shall you, indeed?" asked Colville, with a grateful stir of the heart.
"It's very nice of you to say that."
"Oh no. I meet few people who are willing to look at life objectively
with me, and I have fancied some such willingness in you. What I chiefly
miss over here is a philosophic lift in the human mind, but probably
that is because my opportunities of meeting the best minds are few, and
my means of conversing with them are small. If I had not the whole past
with me, I should feel lonely at times."
"And is the past such good company always?".
"Yes, in a sense it is. The past is humanity set free from circumstance,
and history studied where it was once life is the past rehumanised."
As if he found this rarefied air too thin for his lungs, Colville made
some ineffectual gasps at response, and the old man continued: "What I
mean is that I meet here the characters I read of, and commune with them
before their errors were committed, before they had condemned themselves
to failure, while they were still wise and sane, and still active and
vital forces."
"Did they all fail? I thought some of the bad fellows had a pretty fair
worldly success?"
"The blossom of decay."
"Oh! what black pessimism!"
"Not at all! Men fail, but man succeeds. I don't know what it all means,
or any part of it; but I have had moods in which it seemed as if the
whole, secret of the mystery were about to flash upon me. Walking along
in the full sun, in the midst of men, or sometimes in the solitude of
midnight, poring over a book, and thinking of quite other things, I have
felt that I had almost surprised it."
"But never quite?"
"Oh, it isn't too late yet."
"I hope you won't have your revelation before I get away from Florence,
or I shall see them burning you here like the great _frate_."
They had been walking down the Via Calzioli from the Duomo, and now they
came out into the Piazza della Signoria, suddenly, as one always seems
to do, upon the rise of the old palace and the leap of its tower into
the blue air. The history of all Florence is there, with memories of
every great time in bronze or marble, but the supreme presence is the
martyr who hangs for ever from the gibbet over the quenchless fire in
the midst.
"Ah, they _had_ to kill him!" sighed the old man. "It has always been so
with the benefactors. They have always meant mankind more good than any
one generation can bear, and it must turn upon them and destroy them."
"How will it be with you, then, when you have read us 'the riddle of the
painful earth'?"
"That will be so simple that every one will accept it willingly and
gladly, and wonder that no one happened to think of it before. And,
perhaps, the world is now grown old enough and docile enough to receive
the truth without resentment."
"I take back my charge of pessimism," said Colville. "You are an
optimist of the deepest dye."
They walked out of the Piazza and down to the Lung' Arno, through the
corridor of the Uffizzi, where the illustrious Florentines stand in
marble under the arches, all reconciled and peaceful and equal at last.
Colville shivered a little as he passed between the silent ranks of the
statues.
"I can't stand those fellows, to-day. They seem to feel such a smirk
satisfaction at having got out of it all."
They issued upon the river, and he went to the parapet and looked down
on the water. "I wonder," he mused aloud, "if it has the same Sunday
look to these Sabbathless Italians as it has to us."
"No; Nature isn't puritan," replied the old minister.
"Not at Haddam East Village?"
"No; there less than here; for she's had to make a harder fight for her
life there."
"Ah, then you believe in Nature--you're a friend of Nature?" asked
Colville, following the lines of an oily swirl in the current with
indolent eye.
"Only up to a certain point." Mr. Waters seemed to be patient of any
direction which the other might be giving the talk. "Nature is a savage.
She has good impulses, but you can't trust her altogether."
"Do you know," said Colville, "I don't think there's very much of her
left in us after we reach a certain point in life? She drives us on at a
great pace for a while, and then some fine morning we wake up and find
that Nature has got tired of us and has left us to taste and conscience.
And taste and conscience are by no means so certain of what they want
you to do as Nature was."
"Yes," said the minister, "I see what you mean." He joined Colville in
leaning on the parapet, and he looked out on the river as if he saw his
meaning there. "But by the time we reach that point in life most of us
have got the direction which Nature meant us to take, and there's no
longer any need of her driving us on."
"And what about the unlucky fellows who haven't got the direction, or
haven't kept it?"
"They had better go back to it."
"But if Nature herself seemed to change her mind about you?"
"Ah, you mean persons of weak will. They are a great curse to themselves
and to everybody else."
"I'm not so sure of that," said Colville. "I've seen cases in which a
strong will looked very much more like the devil."
"Yes, a perverted will. But there can be no good without a strong will.
A weak will means inconstancy. It means, even in good, good attempted
and relinquished, which is always a terrible thing, because it is sure
to betray some one who relied upon its accomplishment."
"And in evil? Perhaps the evil, attempted and relinquished, turns into
good."
"Oh, never!" replied the minister fervently. "There is something very
mysterious in what we call evil. Apparently it has infinitely greater
force and persistence than good. I don't know why it should be so. But
so it appears."
"You'll have the reason of that along with the rest of the secret when
your revelation comes," said Colville, with a smile. He lifted his eyes
from the river, and looked up over the clustering roofs beyond it to the
hills beyond them, flecked to the crest of their purple slopes with the
white of villas and villages. As if something in the beauty of the
wonderful prospect had suggested the vision of its opposite, he said,
dreamily, "I don't think I shall go to Rome to-morrow, after all. I will
go to Des Vaches! Where did you say you were walking, Mr. Waters? Oh
yes! You told me. I will cross the bridge with you. But I couldn't stand
anything quite so vigorous as the associations of the siege this
afternoon. I'm going to the Boboli Gardens, to debauch myself with a
final sense of nerveless despotism, as it expressed itself in marble
allegory and formal alleys. The fact is that if I stay with you any
longer I shall tell you something that I'm too old to tell and you're
too old to hear." The old man smiled, but offered no urgence or comment,
and at the thither end of the bridge Colville said hastily, "Good-bye.
If you ever come to Des Vaches, look me up."
"Good-bye," said the minister. "Perhaps we shall meet in Florence
again."
"No, no. Whatever happens, that won't."
They shook hands and parted. Colville stood a moment, watching the
slight bent figure of the old man as he moved briskly up the Via de'
Bardi, turning his head from, side to side, to look at the palaces as he
passed, and so losing himself in the dim, cavernous curve of the street.
As soon as he was out of sight, Colville had an impulse to hurry after
him and rejoin him; then he felt like turning about and going back to
his hotel.
But he shook himself together into the shape of resolution, however
slight and transient. "I must do _something_ I intended to do," he said,
between his set teeth, and pushed on up through the Via Guicciardini. "I
will go to the Boboli because I _said_ I would."
As he walked along, he seemed to himself to be merely crumbling away in
this impulse and that, in one abortive intent and another. What did it
all mean? Had he been his whole life one of these weak wills which are a
curse to themselves and others, and most a curse when they mean the
best? Was that the secret of his failure in life? But for many years he
had seemed to succeed, to be as other men were, hard, practical men; he
had once made a good newspaper, which was certainly not a dream of
romance. Had he given that up at last because he was a weak will? And
now was he running away from Florence because his will was weak? He
could look back to that squalid tragedy of his youth, and see that a
more violent, a more determined man could have possessed himself of the
girl whom he had lost. And now would it not be more manly, if more
brutal, to stay here, where a hope, however fleeting, however fitful, of
what might have been, had revisited him in the love of this young girl?
He felt sure, if anything were sure, that something in him, in spite of
their wide disparity of years, had captured her fancy, and now, in his
abasement, he felt again the charm of his own power over her. They were
no farther apart in years than many a husband and wife; they would grow
more and more together; there was youth enough in his heart yet; and who
was pushing him away from her, forbidding him this treasure that he had
but to put out his hand and make his own? Some one whom through all his
thoughts of another he was trying to please, but whom he had made
finally and inexorably his enemy. Better stay, then, something said to
him; and when he answered, "I will," something else reminded him that
this also was not willing but unwilling.