"Yes. Don't take her yet," said Colville.
Mrs. Bowen rustled softly into the chair which Effie had left to get
into Colville's lap. Neither of them spoke, and he was so richly content
with the peace, the tacit sweetness of the little moment, that he would
have been glad to have it silently endure forever. If any troublesome
question of his right to such a moment of bliss obtruded itself upon
him, he did not concern himself with it.
"We shall have another hot day to-morrow," said Mrs. Bowen at length. "I
hope you will find your room comfortable."
"Yes: it's at the back of the hotel, mighty high, and wide, and no sun
ever comes into it except when they show it to foreigners in winter.
Then they get a few rays to enter as a matter of business, on condition
that they won't detain them. I dare say I shall stay there some time. I
suppose you will be getting away from Florence very soon.
"Yes. But I haven't decided where to go yet."
"Should you like some general expression of my gratitude for all you've
done for me, Mrs. Bowen?"
"No; I would rather not. It has been a great pleasure--to Effie."
"Oh, a luxury beyond the dreams of avarice." They spoke in low tones,
and there was something in the hush that suggested to Colville the
feasibility of taking into his unoccupied hand one of the pretty hands
which the pale night-light showed him lying in Mrs. Bowen's lap. But he
forbore, and only sighed. "Well, then, I will say nothing. But I shall
keep on thinking all my life."
She made no answer.
"When you are gone, I shall have to make the most of Mr. Waters," he
said.
"He is going to stop all summer, I believe."
"Oh yes. When I suggested to him the other day that he might find it too
hot, he said that he had seventy New England winters to thaw out of his
blood, and that all the summers he had left would not be more than he
needed. One of his friends told him that he could cook eggs in his
piazza in August, and he said that he should like nothing better than to
cook eggs there. He's the most delightfully expatriated compatriot I've
ever seen."
"Do you like it?"
"It's well enough for him. Life has no claims on him any more. I think
it's very pleasant over here, now that everybody's gone," added
Colville, from a confused resentfulness of collectively remembered Days
and Afternoons and Evenings. "How still the night is!"
A few feet clapping by on the pavement below alone broke the hush.
"Sometimes I feel very tired of it all, and want to get home," sighed
Mrs. Bowen.
"Well, so do I."
"I can't believe it's right staying away from the country so long."
People often say such things in Europe.
"No, I don't either, if you've got anything to do there."
"You can always make something to do there."
"Oh yes." Some young young men, breaking from a street near by, began to
sing. "We shouldn't have that sort of thing at home."
"No," said Mrs. Bowen pensively.
"I heard just such singing before I fell asleep the night after that
party at Madame Uccelli's, and it filled me with fury."
"Why should it do that?"
"I don't know. It seemed like voices from our youth--Lina."
She had no resentment of his use of her name in the tone with which she
asked: "Did you hate that so much?"
"No; the loss of it."
They both fetched a deep breath.
"The Uccellis have a villa near the baths of Lucca," said Mrs. Bowen.
"They have asked me to go."
"Do you think of going?" inquired Colville. "I've always fancied it must
be pleasant there."
"No; I declined. Sometimes I think I will just stay on in Florence."
"I dare say you'd find it perfectly comfortable. There's nothing like
having the range of one's own house in summer." He looked out of the
window on the blue-black sky.
"'And deepening through their silent spheres,
Heaven over heaven rose the night,'"
he quoted. "It's wonderful! Do you remember how I used to read _Mariana
in the South_ to you and poor Jenny? How it must have bored her! What an
ass I was!"
"Yes," said Mrs. Bowen breathlessly, in sympathy with his reminiscence
rather than in agreement with his self-denunciation.
Colville broke into a laugh, and then she began to laugh to; but not
quite willingly as it seemed.
Effie started from her sleep. "What--what is it?" she asked, stretching
and shivering as half-wakened children do.
"Bed-time," said her mother promptly, taking her hand to lead her away.
"Say good-night to Mr. Colville."
The child turned and kissed him. "Good night," she murmured.
"Good night, you sleepy little soul!" It seemed to Colville that he must
be a pretty good man, after all, if this little thing loved him so.
"Do you always kiss Mr. Colville good-night?" asked her mother when she
began to undo her hair for her in her room.
"Sometimes. Don't you think it's nice?"
"Oh yes; nice enough."
Colville sat by the window a long time thinking Mrs. Bowen might come
back; but she did not return.
Mr. Waters came to see him the next afternoon at his hotel.
"Are you pretty comfortable here?" he asked.
"Well, it's a change," said Colville. "I miss the little one awfully."
"She's a winning child," admitted the old man. "That combination of
conventionality and _naïveté_ is very captivating. I notice it in the
mother."
"Yes, the mother has it too. Have you seen them to-day?"
"Yes; Mrs. Bowen was sorry to be out when you came."
"I had the misfortune to miss them. I had a great mind to go again
to-night."
The old man said nothing to this. "The fact is," Colville went on, "I'm
so habituated to being there that I'm rather spoiled."
"Ah, it's a nice place," Mr. Waters admitted.
"Of course I made all the haste I could to get away, and I have the
reward of a good conscience. But I don't find that the reward is very
great."
The old gentleman smiled. "The difficulty is to know conscience from
self-interest."
"Oh, there's no doubt of it in my case," said Colville. "If I'd
consulted my own comfort and advantage, I should still be at Palazzo
Pinti."
"I dare say they would have been glad to keep you."
"Do you really think so?" asked Colville, with sudden seriousness. "I
wish you would tell me why. Have you any reason--grounds? Pshaw! I'm
absurd!" He sank back into the easy-chair from whose depths he had
pulled himself in the eagerness of his demand, and wiped his forehead
with his handkerchief. "Mr. Waters, you remember my telling you of my
engagement to Miss Graham?"
"Yes."
"That is broken off--if it were ever really on. It was a great mistake
for both of us--a tragical one for her, poor child, a ridiculous one for
me. My only consolation is that it was a mistake and no more; but I
don't conceal from myself that I might have prevented it altogether if I
had behaved with greater wisdom and dignity at the outset. But I'm
afraid I was flattered by an illusion of hers that ought to have pained
and alarmed me, and the rest followed inevitably, though I was always
just on the point of escaping the consequences of my weakness--my
wickedness."
"Ah, there is something extremely interesting in all that," said the old
minister thoughtfully. "The situation used to be figured under the old
idea of a compact with the devil. His debtor was always on the point of
escaping, as you say, but I recollect no instance in which he did not
pay at last. The myth must have arisen from man's recognition of the
inexorable sequence of cause from effect, in the moral world, which even
repentance cannot avert. Goethe tries to imagine an atonement for
Faust's trespass against one human soul in his benefactions to the race
at large; but it is a very cloudy business."
"It isn't quite a parallel case," said Colville, rather sulkily. He had,
in fact, suffered more under Mr. Waters's generalisation than he could
from a more personal philosophy of the affair.
"Oh no; I didn't think that," consented the old man.
"And I don't think I shall undertake any extended scheme of drainage or
subsoiling in atonement for my little dream," Colville continued,
resenting the parity of outline that grew upon him in spite of his
protest. They were both silent for a while, and then Colville cried out,
"Yes, yes; they are alike. _I_ dreamed, too, of recovering and restoring
my own lost and broken past in the love of a young soul, and it was in
essence the same cruelly egotistic dream; and it's nothing in my defence
that it was all formless and undirected at first, and that as soon as I
recognised it I abhorred it."
"Oh yes, it is," replied the old man, with perfect equanimity. "Your
assertion is the hysterical excess of Puritanism in all times and
places. In the moral world we are responsible only for the wrong that we
intend. It can't be otherwise."
"And the evil that's suffered from the wrong we didn't intend?"
"Ah, perhaps that isn't evil."
"It's pain!"
"It's pain, yes."
"And to have wrung a young and innocent heart with the anguish of
self-doubt, with the fear of wrong to another, with the shame of an
error such as I allowed, perhaps encouraged her to make--"
"Yes," said the old man. "The young suffer terribly. But they recover.
Afterward we don't suffer so much, but we don't recover. I wouldn't
defend you against yourself if I thought you seriously in the wrong. If
you know yourself to be, you shouldn't let me."
Thus put upon his honour, Colville was a long time thoughtful. "How can
I tell?" he asked. "You know the facts; you can judge."
"If I were to judge at all, I should say you were likely to do a greater
wrong than any you have committed."
"I don't understand you."
"Miss Graham is a young girl, and I have no doubt that the young
clergyman--what was his name?"
"Morton. Do you think--do you suppose there was anything in that?"
demanded Colville, with eagerness, that a more humorous observer than
Mr. Waters might have found ludicrous. "He was an admirable young
fellow, with an excellent head and a noble heart. I underrated him at
one time, though I recognised his good qualities afterward; but I was
afraid she did not appreciate him."
"I'm not so sure of that," said the old man, with an astuteness of
manner which Colville thought authorised by some sort of definite
knowledge.
"I would give the world if it were so!" he cried fervently.
"But you are really very much more concerned in something else."
"In what else?"
"Can't you imagine?"
"No," said Colville; but he felt himself growing very red in the face.
"Then I have no more to say."
"Yes, speak!" And after an interval Colville added, "Is it anything
about--you hinted at something long ago--Mrs. Bowen?"
"Yes;" the old man nodded his head. "Do you owe her nothing?"
"Owe her nothing? Everything! My life! What self-respect is left me!
Immeasurable gratitude! The homage of a man saved from himself as far as
his stupidity and selfishness would permit! Why, I--I love her!" The
words gave him courage. "In every breath and pulse! She is the most
beautiful and gracious and wisest and best woman in the world! I have
loved her ever since I met her here in Florence last winter. Good
heavens! I must have always loved her! But," he added, falling from the
rapture of this confession, "she simply loathes _me_!"
"It was certainly not to your credit that you were willing at the same
time to marry some one else."
"Willing! I wasn't willing! I was bound hand and foot! Yes--I don't care
what you think of my weakness--I was not a free agent. It's very well to
condemn one's-self, but it may be carried too far; injustice to others
is not the only injustice, or the worst. What I was willing to do was to
keep my word--to prevent that poor child, if possible, from ever finding
out her mistake."
If Colville expected this heroic confession to impress his listener he
was disappointed. Mr. Waters made him no reply, and he was obliged to
ask, with a degree of sarcastic impatience, "I suppose you scarcely
blame me for that?"
"Oh, I don't know that I blame people for things. There are times when
it seems as if we were all puppets, pulled this way or that, without
control of our own movements. Hamlet was able to browbeat Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern with his business of the pipe; but if they had been in
a position to answer they might have told him that it required far less
skill to play upon a man than any other instrument. Most of us, in fact,
go sounding on without any special application of breath or fingers,
repeating the tunes that were played originally upon other men. It
appears to me that you suffered yourself to do something of the kind in
this affair. We are a long time learning to act with common-sense or
even common sanity in what are called matters of the affections. A
broken engagement may be a bad thing in some cases, but I am inclined to
think that it is the very best thing that could happen in most cases
where it happens. The evil is done long before; the broken engagement is
merely sanative, and so far beneficent."
The old gentleman rose, and Colville, dazed by the recognition of his
own cowardice and absurdity, did not try to detain him. But he followed
him down to the outer gate of the hotel. The afternoon sun was pouring
into the piazza a sea of glimmering heat, into which Mr. Waters plunged
with the security of a salamander. He wore a broad-brimmed Panama hat, a
sack coat of black alpaca, and loose trousers of the same material, and
Colville fancied him doubly defended against the torrid waves not only
by the stored cold of half a century of winters at Haddam East Village,
but by an inner coolness of spirit, which appeared to diffuse itself in
an appreciable atmosphere about him. It was not till he was gone that
Colville found himself steeped in perspiration, and glowing with a
strange excitement.