In the morning Mrs. Bowen received a note from her banker covering a
despatch by cable from America. It was from Imogene's mother; it
acknowledged the letters they had written, and announced that she sailed
that day for Liverpool. It was dated at New York, and it was to be
inferred that after perhaps writing in answer to their letters, she had
suddenly made up her mind to come out.
"Yes, that is it," said Imogene, to whom Mrs. Bowen hastened with the
despatch. "Why should she have telegraphed to _you_?" she asked coldly,
but with a latent fire of resentment in her tone.
"You must ask her when she comes," returned Mrs. Bowen, with all her
gentleness. "It won't be long now."
They looked as if they had neither of them slept; but the girl's vigil
seemed to have made her wild and fierce, like some bird that has beat
itself all night against its cage, and still from time to time feebly
strikes the bars with its wings. Mrs. Bowen was simply worn to apathy.
"What shall you do about this?" she asked.
"Do about it? Oh, I will think. I will try not to trouble you."
"Imogene!"
"I shall have to tell Mr. Colville. But I don't know that I shall tell
him at once. Give me the despatch, please." She possessed herself of it
greedily, offensively. "I shall ask you not to speak of it."
"I will do whatever you wish."
"Thank you."
Mrs. Bowen left the room, but she turned immediately to re-open the door
she had closed behind her.
"We were to have gone to Fiesole to-morrow," she said inquiringly.
"We can still go if the day is fine," returned the girl. "Nothing is
changed. I wish very much to go. Couldn't we go to-day?" she added, with
eager defiance.
"It's too late to-day," said Mrs. Bowen quietly. "I will write to remind
the gentlemen."
"Thank you. I wish we could have gone to-day."
"You can have the carriage if you wish to drive anywhere," said Mrs.
Bowen.
"I will take Effie to see Mrs. Amsden." But Imogene changed her mind,
and went to call upon two Misses Guicciardi, the result of an
international marriage, whom Mrs. Bowen did not like very well. Imogene
drove with them to the Cascine, where they bowed to a numerous military
acquaintance, and they asked her if Mrs. Bowen would let her join them
in a theatre party that evening: they were New-Yorkers by birth, and it
was to be a theatre party in the New York style; they were to be
chaperoned by a young married lady; two young men cousins of theirs,
just out from America, had taken the box.
When Imogene returned home she told Mrs. Bowen that she had accepted
this invitation. Mrs. Bowen said nothing, but when one of the young men
came up to hand Imogene down to the carriage, which was waiting with the
others at the gate, she could not have shown a greater tolerance of his
second-rate New Yorkiness if she had been a Boston dowager offering him
the scrupulous hospitalities of her city.
Imogene came in at midnight; she hummed an air of the opera as she took
off her wraps and ornaments in her room, and this in the quiet of the
hour had a terrible, almost profane effect: it was as if some other kind
of girl had whistled. She showed the same nonchalance at breakfast,
where she was prompt, and answered Mrs. Bowen's inquiries about her
pleasure the night before with a liveliness that ignored the polite
resolution that prompted them.
Mr. Morton was the first to arrive, and if his discouragement began at
once, the first steps masked themselves in a reckless welcome, which
seemed to fill him with joy, and Mrs. Bowen with silent perplexity. The
girl ran on about her evening at the opera, and about the weather, and
the excursion they were going to make; and after an apparently needless
ado over the bouquet which he brought her, together with one for Mrs.
Bowen, she put it into her belt, and made Colville notice it when he
came: he had not thought to bring flowers.
He turned from her hilarity with anxious question to Mrs. Bowen, who did
not meet his eye, and who snubbed Effie when the child found occasion to
whisper: "_I_ think Imogene is acting very strangely, for _her_; don't
you, mamma? It seems as if going with those Guicciardi girls just once
had spoiled her."
"Don't make remarks about people, Effie," said her mother sharply. "It
isn't nice in little girls, and I don't want you to do it. You talk too
much lately."
Effie turned grieving away from this rejection, and her face did not
light up even at the whimsical sympathy in Colville's face, who saw that
she had met a check of some sort; he had to take her on his knee and
coax and kiss her before her wounded feelings were visibly healed. He
put her down with a sighing wish that some one could take him up and
soothe his troubled sensibilities too, and kept her hand in his while he
sat waiting for the last of those last moments in which the hurrying
delays of ladies preparing for an excursion seem never to end.
When they were ready to get into the carriage, the usual contest of
self-sacrifice arose, which Imogene terminated by mounting to the front
seat; Mr. Morton hastened to take the seat beside her, and Colville was
left to sit with Effie and her mother. "You old people will be safer
back there," said Imogene. It was a little joke which she addressed to
the child, but a gleam from her eye as she turned to speak to the young
man at her side visited Colville in desperate defiance. He wondered what
she was about in that allusion to an idea which she had shrunk from so
sensitively hitherto. But he found himself in a situation which he could
not penetrate at any point. When he spoke with Mrs. Bowen, it was with a
dark undercurrent of conjecture as to how and when she expected him to
tell Mr. Morton of his relation to Imogene, or whether she still
expected him to do it; when his eyes fell upon the face of the young
man, he despaired as to the terms in which he should put the fact; any
form in which he tacitly dramatised it remained very embarrassing, for
he felt bound to say that while he held himself promised in the matter,
he did not allow her to feel herself so.
A sky of American blueness and vastness, a mellow sun, and a delicate
breeze did all that these things could for them, as they began the long,
devious climb of the hills crowned by the ancient Etruscan city. At
first they were all in the constraint of their own and one another's
moods, known or imagined, and no talk began till the young clergyman
turned to Imogene and asked, after a long look at the smiling landscape,
"What sort of weather do you suppose they are having at Buffalo to-day?"
"At Buffalo?" she repeated, as if the place had only a dim existence in
her remotest consciousness. "Oh! The ice isn't near out of the lake yet.
You can't count on it before the first of May."
"And the first of May comes sooner or later, according to the season,"
said Colville. "I remember coming on once in the middle of the month,
and the river was so full of ice between Niagara Falls and Buffalo that
I had to shut the car window that I'd kept open all the way through
Southern Canada. But we have very little of that local weather at home;
our weather is as democratic and continental as our political
constitution. Here it's March or May any time from September till June,
according as there's snow on the mountains or not."
The young man smiled. "But don't you like," he asked with deference,
"this slow, orderly advance of the Italian spring, where the flowers
seem to come out one by one, and every blossom has its appointed time?"
"Oh yes, it's very well in its way; but I prefer the rush of the
American spring; no thought of mild weather this morning; a warm, gusty
rain to-morrow night; day after to-morrow a burst of blossoms and
flowers and young leaves and birds. I don't know whether we were made
for our climate or our climate was made for us, but its impatience and
lavishness seem to answer some inner demand of our go-ahead souls. This
happens to be the week of the peach blossoms here, and you see their
pink everywhere to-day, and you don't see anything else in the blossom
line. But imagine the American spring abandoning a whole week of her
precious time to the exclusive use of peach blossoms! She wouldn't do
it; she's got too many other things on hand."
Effie had stretched out over Colville's lap, and with her elbow sunk
deep in his knee, was resting her chin in her hand and taking the facts
of the landscape thoroughly in. "Do they have just a week?" she asked.
"Not an hour more or less," said Colville. "If they found an almond
blossom hanging round anywhere after their time came, they would make an
awful row; and if any lazy little peach-blow hadn't got out by the time
their week was up, it would have to stay in till next year; the pear
blossoms wouldn't let it come out."
"Wouldn't they?" murmured the child, in dreamy sympathy with this
belated peach-blow.
"Well, that's what people say. In America it would be allowed to come
out any time. It's a free country."
Mrs. Bowen offered to draw Effie back to a posture of more decorum, but
Colville put his arm round the little girl. "Oh, let her stay! It
doesn't incommode me, and she must be getting such a novel effect of the
landscape."
The mother fell back into her former attitude of jaded passivity. He
wondered whether she had changed her mind about having him speak to Mr.
Morton; her quiescence might well have been indifference; one could have
said, knowing the whole situation, that she had made up her mind to let
things take their course, and struggle with them no longer.
He could not believe that she felt content with him; she must feel far
otherwise; and he took refuge, as he had the power of doing, from the
discomfort of his own thoughts in jesting with the child, and mocking
her with this extravagance and that; the discomfort then became merely a
dull ache that insisted upon itself at intervals, like a grumbling
tooth.
The prospect was full of that mingled wildness and subordination that
gives its supreme charm to the Italian landscape; and without elements
of great variety, it combined them in infinite picturesqueness. There
were olive orchards and vineyards, and again vineyards and olive
orchards. Closer to the farm-houses and cottages there were peaches and
other fruit trees and kitchen-gardens; broad ribbons of grain waved
between the ranks of trees; around the white villas the spires of the
cypresses pierced the blue air. Now and then they came to a villa with
weather-beaten statues strutting about its parterres. A mild, pleasant
heat brooded upon the fields and roofs, and the city, dropping lower and
lower as they mounted, softened and blended its towers and monuments in
a sombre mass shot with gleams of white.
Colville spoke to Imogene, who withdrew her eyes from it with a sigh,
after long brooding upon the scene. "You can do nothing with it, I see."
"With what?"
"The landscape. It's too full of every possible interest. What a history
is written all over it, public and private! If you don't take it simply
like any other landscape, it becomes an oppression. It's well that
tourists come to Italy so ignorant, and keep so. Otherwise they couldn't
live to get home again; the past would crush them."
Imogene scrutinised him as if to extract some personal meaning from his
words, and then turned her head away. The clergyman addressed him with
what was like a respectful toleration of the drolleries of a gifted but
eccentric man, the flavour of whose talk he was beginning to taste.
"You don't really mean that one shouldn't come to Italy as well informed
as possible?"
"Well, I did," said Colville, "but I don't."
The young man pondered this, and Imogene started up with an air of
rescuing them from each other--as if she would not let Mr. Morton think
Colville trivial or Colville consider the clergyman stupid, but would do
what she could to take their minds off the whole question. Perhaps she
was not very clear as to how this was to be done; at any rate she did
not speak, and Mrs. Bowen came to her support, from whatever motive of
her own. It might have been from a sense of the injustice of letting Mr.
Morton suffer from the complications that involved herself and the
others. The affair had been going very hitchily ever since they started,
with the burden of the conversation left to the two men and that
helpless girl; if it were not to be altogether a failure she must
interfere.
"Did you ever hear of Gratiano when you were in Venice?" she asked Mr.
Morton.
"Is he one of their new water-colourists?" returned the young man. "I
heard they had quite a school there now."
"No," said Mrs. Bowen, ignoring her failure as well as she could; "he
was a famous talker; he loved to speak an infinite deal of nothing more
than any man in Venice."
"An ancestor of mine, Mr. Morton," said Colville; "a poor, honest man,
who did his best to make people forget that the ladies were silent.
Thank you, Mrs. Bowen, for mentioning him. I wish he were with us
to-day."