Dennis, our Epicurean sage, addressed us all as we lolled on his terrace,
drank his tea, and divided our attention between his fluent wisdom and
his spacious view of the Valdarno.
"The question is," he repeated, "what will Emma do? Will she be brave,
or, rather ordinary enough, to act for herself and him, or will she
refuse him because of what she thinks we shall think of them both? As we
calmly sit here she may be deciding. That is if you are sure, Harwood,
that Crocker was really bound for Emma's when you saw him."
"How could anybody mistake his beaming Emma face?" growled Harwood. "He
was marching like a squad of Bersaglieri." "And she knows that Crocker
wants it terribly?" added the Sage's wife.
"She does, indeed," sighed Frau Stern repentantly, "for that demon
(pointing to Harwood) did tell me and I haf, babylike, told her."
"Here is the case, then," resumed Dennis: "She knows we know Crocker
wants her and it, but she doesn't know he doesn't know she has it."
"Precisely, most clearly and gracefully put, my dear," laughed
Mrs. Dennis.
"And she knows, too," he pursued imperturbably, "that we may think he
wants her merely for it."
"Bravo!" puffed Harwood smokily from his camp-stool. "She is too clever
to expect any weak generosity from any of us. She believes we will think
the worst. And won't we? Viva Nietzsche, and perish pity!"
"Shame upon us, then," cried Frau Stern. "She will gif up that fine young
man for fear of our talk? Never!"
"She will send him away, dear Frau Stern, the moment he gives her the
chance," declared Dennis. "What else can she do? She can never take the
chance of our surmises. Behold us, the destroyers! The victims are
prepared."
"Can't we do something about it?" Harwood chuckled. "Repent? Be as
harmless as doves? Let's write a roundrobin solemnly stating that, to
the best of our knowledge and belief, he wants her for herself and
not for it."
"Gently," exclaimed Mrs. Dennis, as she blew out Harwood's poised and
lighted match. "You surely don't imagine Crocker will propose the very
day she shows it to him."
"My dear," protested Dennis, "don't we all know him well enough to
understand that any shock will produce that effect? If his mother died or
his horse, his vines got the scale, his Ghirlandaio sprung a crack, his
university gave him an honorary degree--these would all be reasons for
proposing to Emma. Dear old Crocker is like that; any jolt would affect
him that way."
"Has it occurred to anybody that Emma may have foreseen just this
complication and quietly got rid of it first?" suggested Mrs. Dennis, the
really practical member of our group, adding, "That's how I'd have served
you if I'd wanted him."
"Never," responded Dennis. "She loves it too well, and then she would
feel we felt she had spirited it away on purpose."
"Besides," continued Harwood, whose buried aspirations Emmawards had long
ago flowered into a minute analysis of her moods, "she is true blue, you
know. She will never serve us like that. She may immolate the mighty
Crocker upon the altar of our collective curiosity, but she will never
dodge us."
"Cannot we all go back to our own countries and leave them alone,"
suggested Frau Stern almost tearfully; "but no; we no longer haf
countries. Here we belong; elsewhere the air is too strong for our little
lungs. I pity us, and I pity more those poor young people. If only they
will but haf the sense to trample on our talk."
"That, too, would be a sensation," Dennis added cheerfully, and we went
our ways, as usual, without having reached anything so vulgar as a
conclusion.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Emma Verplanck stood in the _loggia_ of her tiny villa and
winced in the focus of the curiosities she despised. She scanned the
white road that rimmed her valley before descending sharply to Florence
beyond the hill, and especially the crescent of dust where an approaching
figure would first appear. Now and then, as if for a rest, her eye traced
the line of flaming willows down toward the plunge of her brook into the
larger valley, or the file of spectral poplars that led into the
vineyards hanging on the declivity of Fiesole. Above all, the gaunt and
gashed bulk of Monte Ceceri glistened hotly against a pale blue sky, for
if it was a backward April, the first stirring of summer was already in
the air. She thrilled with disgust as she asked herself why she dreaded
this call. Why should she fear lest an elementary test, a very simple
explanation such as she planned for that afternoon, should compromise an
established friendship?
Interrupting this self-examination the mighty but unwieldy form of Morton
Crocker loomed in the white dust crescent, and his premature panama
swiftly followed the curve of the low grey wall towards her gate. As his
steps were heard, her mind flew to the forbidding St. Michael on his gold
background in her den and she could fairly hear Harwood saying to all of
us, "Three to one on the Saint, who takes me?" The jangling of the bell
recalled her to Crocker, and she braced herself in the full sunlight to
receive him. For a moment, as he loomed in the archway, she indulged that
especial pride which we reserve for that which we might possess but
austerely deny ourselves.
Her mingled moods produced an unusual softness. Crocker felt it and
wondered as she gave him her hand and had him sit for a prudent moment
outside. All the hot way up the valley he had had a sense of a crisis. It
was odd to be summoned whither he had been drifting for four years, and
now the sight of Emma disarmed, perplexed him. It seemed ominous. One
finds such transparent kindness in clever people generally at parting,
when one would be remembered for one's self and not for a phrase. Then
Crocker for an instant glimpsed the wilder hope that the softening was
for him and not for an occasion. Emma had never seemed more desirable
than to-day. A white strand or two in her yellow hair, the tiny wrinkles
at the corners of her steady grey eyes, and the untimely thinness of her
long white fingers made him eager to ward off the advancing years at her
side, to keep unchanged, as it were, these precious evidences that she
had lived.
Some sense of his tenderness she must have had, for as she chatted
gravely about his farming, about the lateness of the almond blossoms,
about everything except people, who always tempted her sharp tongue, her
manner became almost maternally solicitous. "To-day you shall have your
first tea in my den, Crocker" (so much she presumed on her two years'
seniority), she said at last, "and you are commanded to like my things."
"What has thy servitor done to deserve this grace?" he managed to reply.
"Nothing," she said, "graces never are for deserts. Or, rather, you poor
fellow, you have been asked to tramp out here in this glare and really
deserve to sit where it is cool." As they walked through the hall and the
little drawing-room Crocker still felt uneasily that no road with Emma
Verplanck could be quite as smooth as it seemed.
The den deserved its name, being a tiny brown room with a single arched
window that looked askance at the cypresses and bell towers of Fiesole.
Beside a couch, an Empire desk, and solid shelves of books, the den
contained only a couple of chairs and the handful of things that Emma
laughingly called her collection. As Crocker took in vaguely bits of
Hispano-Moresque and mellow ivories, a broad medal or so and a
well-poised Renaissance bronze, a Japanese painting on the lighted wall,
and one or two drawings by great contemporaries, Emma's friends, he was
amazed at the quality of everything. A sense of extreme fastidiousness
rebuked, in a way, his more indiscriminate zeal as a collector.
Uncomfortably near him on the dark wall he began to be aware of something
marvellous on old gold when tea interrupted his observations. Tea with
Emma was always engrossing. The mere practice and etiquette of it brought
the gentlewoman in her into a lovely salience. Her hands and eyes became
magical, her talk light and constant without insistency. A symbolist
might imagine eternal correspondence between the amber brew and her sunny
hair. It was easy to adore Emma at tea, and generally she did not resent
a discreetly pronounced homage. But this afternoon she grew almost
petulant with Crocker as they talked at random, and finally laughed out
impatiently: "I really can't bear your ignoring my St Michael, especially
as you have never seen him before and may never see him again. St.
Michael, Mr. Morton Crocker."
"My respects," smiled Crocker, as he turned lazily toward the gilded
panel. There was the warrior saint, his lines stiff, expressive and
hieratic, his armour glistening in grey-blue fastened with embossed
gilded clasps; here and there gorgeous hints of a crimson doublet--the
unmistakable enamel, the grave and delicate tension of a masterpiece by
the rare Venetian, Carlo Crivelli. Crocker gasped and started from his
seat, losing at once his cup, his muffin, and his manners. "By Jove, Miss
Verplanck, Emma, it's my missing St. Michael. Where did you ever find it?
I must have it." His toasted muffin rolled unconsidered beside the spoon
at his feet. Emma retrieved the cup--one of a precious six in old
Meissen--he retained the saucer painfully gripped in both hands.
"I was afraid it was," she answered, "but look well and be sure."
"Of course we must be sure. You'll let me measure it, won't you? It's the
only way." Assuming his permission he climbed awkwardly upon the chair,
happily a stout Italian construction, and as she watched him with a
strange pity, he read off from a pocket rule: "One metre thirty-seven. A
shade taller than mine, but there is no frame. Thirty-one centimetres;
the same thing. Yes, it is my missing St. Michael," and as he climbed
down excitedly he hurried on: "How strange to find it here. I never
talked to you about it, did I? That's odd, too. I've been hunting for it
for years. You didn't know, I suppose. I want it awfully. What can we do
about it?" For Crocker, this fairly amounted to a speech, and before
replying Emma gave him time to sit down, and thrust another cup of tea
into his unwilling hands. Having thus occupied and calmed him, she said,
"I'm very sorry, I hoped it would turn out to be something else. I only
learned last week that you wanted it. You have seldom talked about your
collecting to me. There's nothing to do about it. I wish there were. You
want it so much. But I can't give it to you. That wouldn't do. And I
won't sell it to you. I wouldn't to anybody, and then that wouldn't do,
either. So there we are. Only think of their talk, and you'll see the
situation is impossible."
Crocker's eyes flashed. "There's a lot we might do about it if you will,
Emma. Damn the St. Michael. If his case is so complicated, and I don't
see it, leave him out of the reckoning between us. Can't you see what I
need and want?"
"They wouldn't see it, and I'm shamefully afraid of them," she said
simply, and then she added indignantly, "How could you dare, to-day? I
can't trust you for any perception, can I?"
Not perceiving that her scruple was belated, Crocker blurted out
ruefully. "I'm an ass, and I'm sorry and I'm not. It's what I have wanted
to say these many days, and perhaps it might as well be so. But I've
wounded you and for that I'm more than sorry."
"Let's not talk about it," Emma said gently. "Of course I'll forgive an
old friend for saying a little more than he should. Only you must stop
here. You'll forgive me, too, for owning your St. Michael. I'm honestly
sorry it happened so. I would dismiss him if I could, for he is likely to
cost me a good friend. But he creates a kind of impossibility between us,
doesn't he, and for a while it's best you shouldn't come, not till things
change with you. It's kindest so, isn't it, Crocker?"
There was more debate to this effect before the impassive St. Michael,
until at last Crocker agreed impatiently, "You're right, Emma, or at
least you have me at a disadvantage, which comes to the same thing.
And yet it's all wrong. You are putting a painted saint between yourself
and a friend who wants to be more. It's logical, but it isn't human. As
for their talk, they'll talk, anyhow, and we might as well stand it
together. I'm probably off for a long time, Emma. I hope you'll find your
St. Michael companionable. When you decide to throw him out of the
window, let me know. Forgive me again. Good-by." She gave him her hand
silently and followed him out into the _loggia_. As she watched him
striding angrily down the valley and away, she had the air of a woman who
would have cried if she were not Emma Verplanck.
* * * * *
Crocker was right, we all did talk. And naturally, for had we not all
been eagerly awaiting the collision announced by the cessation of his
visits and the rumour that he was bound north. In council on Dennis's
terrace, however, we came to no unanimous reading of the affair.
Generally, we felt that even if Emma wanted a way out, which we guessed
to be the fact, she would never expose herself to our batteries, and with
regret we opined that there was no way, had we wished, to divest
ourselves of our collective formidableness. On all sides we divined a
deadlock, with Dennis the only dissenting voice. He insisted scornfully
that we none of us knew Emma, that we underestimated both her emotional
capacity and her resourcefulness, and, finally, in a burst of rash
clairvoyancy he declared that she would give away both the St. Michael
and herself, but in her own time and manner, and with some odd personal
reservation that would content us all. We should see.
Given the rare mixture of the conventional and instinctive that was Emma
Verplanck, something of the sort did indeed seem probable. For ten years
she had inhabited her nook, becoming as much of a fixture among us as the
Campanile below. She came, like so many, for the cheapness and dignity of
it primarily. Here her little patrimony meant independence, safety from
perfunctory and uncongenial contacts at home, and more positively all
those purtenances of the gentlewoman that she required. But, unlike the
merely thrifty Italianates, she never became blunted by our incessant tea
giving and receiving. With familiarity, the ineffable sweetness of the
country penetrated her with ever-new impressions. She loved the
overlapping blue hills that stretched away endlessly from the rim of her
valley, and the scarred crag that closed it from behind. She loved the
climbing white roads, her chalky brook--sung as a river by the early
poets--with its bordering poplars and willows and its processional
display of violets, anemones, primroses, blueflags, and roses. She loved
even better that constant passing trickle of fine intelligences which
feeds the Arno valley as her brook refreshed its vineyard. The best of
these came gladly to her, for she was an open and a disillusioned spirit,
with something of a man's downrightness under her sensitive appreciation.
Hers was the calm of a temperament fined but not dulled by conformity and
experience. Mrs. Dennis, whose sources of information were excellent,
said it was rather an unhappy girlish affair with an unworthy cousin.
Within the limits of the possible, the Verplancks always married cousins,
and Emma, it was thought, had in her 'teens paid sentimental homage to
the family tradition. In any case she remained surprisingly youthful
under her nearly forty years. Her capacity for intellectual adventure
seemed only to increase as she passed from the first glow to proved
impressions of books, art, persons, and the all-inclusive Tuscan nature.
Her Stuyvesant Square aunts, who were authorities on self-sacrifice,
agreed that the only sacrifice Emma had made in a thoroughly selfish life
was the purchase of the St. Michael. She had found it, on a visit in
Romagna, in the hands of a noble family who knew its value and needed to
sell it, but dreaded the vulgarity of a transaction through the
antiquaries. To Emma, accordingly, whom they assumed to be rich, they
offered it at a price staggering for her, though still cheap for it. From
the first she had adored it. There had been a swift exchange of
despatches with New York, and the St. Michael went home with her to
Florence. After that adventure the small victoria, the stocky pony, and
the solemn coachman had never reappeared. Emma walked to teas or, when
she must, suffered the promiscuity of the trams. To those of us who knew
the store she set by her equipage its exchange for the St. Michael
indicated a fairly fanatical devotion. To her aunts it meant that she had
spent her principal, which, in their eyes, was an approximation to the
mysterious "sin against the Holy Ghost."
It was Dennis who speculated most audaciously, and perhaps truly, about
the St. Michael. When he learned that Emma secreted it in her den, where
she rarely admitted anyone, he maintained that it had become her
incorporeal spouse. The daintiness with which it fingered a golden
sword-hilt, as if fearing contamination, symbolised the aloofness of her
spirit. The solitary enjoyment of a great impression of art made her den
a sanctuary, absolving her from commoner or shared pleasures. And in a
manner the Saint was the type of the ultra-virginal quality she had
retained through much contact with books and life. For her to sell the
St. Michael, Dennis felt, would be a sort of vending of her soul, to give
it away in the present instance would imply, he insisted, an instinctive
self-surrender of which he judged her incapable.
To Crocker's side of the affair we gave very little thought, considering
that he, after all, had created the thrilling importance of the St.
Michael. But our general attitude toward the unwonted was one of
indifference, and Crocker was too unlike us to permit his orbit to be
calculated. The element of foible in him was almost null. None of our
guesses ever stuck to him, and we had grown weary of rediscovering that
anything so simple could also be so impermeable to our ingenuity. In a
word, Crocker's case was as much plainer than Emma's as noonday is than
twilight. When one says that he was born in Boston and from birth
dedicated to the Harvard nine, eleven, or crew--as it might befall; that
he was graduated a candidate for the right clubs, that he took to stocks
so naturally that he quickly and safely increased an ample inherited
fortune, and this without neglecting horse, or rod, or gun; finally that
he carried into maturity a fine boyish ease--when this has been said all
has been told about Morton Crocker except the whimsical chance that made
him an Italianate.
Some reminiscence of his grand tour had beguiled a tedious convalescence
and, following the gleam for want of more serious occupation, he had set
sail for Naples with a motor-car in the hold. At thirty-three he brought
the keenness of a girl to the galleries, the towns, and the ineffable
whole thing. It was Tuscany that completed his capture. He bought a villa
and, as his strength came back, began to add new vineyards and orchards
to his estate. But this was his play; his serious work became collecting
and more particularly, as has been hinted, the quest of the missing St.
Michael. When he learned, as a man of means soon must, that good pictures
may still be bought in Italy, he promptly succumbed to the covetousness
of the collector, and the motor-car became predatory. Its tonneau had
contained surreptitious Lottos and Carpaccios. Its gyrations became an
object of interest to the Ministry of Public Instruction. Once on
crossing the Alps it had been searched to the linings. While Crocker had
his ups and downs as a collector, from the first his sense of reality
stood him in stead. Being a Bostonian he naturally studied, but even
before he at all knew why, he disregarded the pastiches and forgeries,
and made unhesitatingly for the good panel in an array of rubbish.
It was this sense for reality that impelled him to settle where the rest
of us merely perched. Fifty _contadini_ tilled his domain and actually
began to earn out the costly improvements he had introduced. His wine and
oil were sought by those who knew and were willing to pay. In the
intervals of the major passion Crocker walked up and down the grassy
roads superintending the larger operations. His muscular and hulking
blondness--he had rowed four years--towered above the dark little men who
served, feared, and worshipped him. Unlike the rest of us who preferred
to live in a delightful Cloud Cuckoo Town, which happened to be Florence
also, he had chosen to take root in Tuscany.
First he purged his castellated villa of the international abuses it had
undergone for a century. It had hardly regained its fifteenth century
spaciousness and simplicity before it began to fill up again, but this
time with pictures and fittings of the time. In all directions he bought
with enthusiasm, but his real vocation, after the cultivation of Emma's
society, soon came to be the completion of his great and growing
altar-piece by Carlo Crivelli. What is usually a frigid exercise, a mere
ascertainment that the parts of a scattered ancona are at London, Berlin,
St. Petersburg, Boston, etc.--a patient compilation of measurements,
documents and probabilities; what is generally a mere pretext for a solid
article in a heavy journal--or at best a question of pasting photographs
together in the order the artist intended--Crocker converted into an
eager and most practical pursuit. Bit by bit he gradually reconstituted
his Crivelli in its ancient glory of enamel on gold within its ornate
mouldings. The quest prospered capitally until he stuck hopelessly at the
missing St. Michael. As it stood for a couple of years complete except
for the void where the St. Michael should be, the altar-piece represented
less Crocker's abundant resources than his tireless patience and energy.
He had picked up the first fragment, a slender St. Catherine of
Alexandria demurely leaning upon her spiked wheel, at a provincial
antiquary's in Romagna, not far from where the ancona had been impiously
dismembered. Fortunately the original Gothic frame remained to give a
clue to other panels. Next, word of a Crivelli Madonna with Donors at
Christie's took him posthaste to London. Frame, period and measurements
proved that it was the central panel, and the tiny donors, a husband and
wife with a boy and girl, indicated that the wings had contained two
female and two male saints. Between the St. Lucy (which turned up more
than a year later in an un-heard-of Swedish collection, and was had only
by a hard exchange for a rare Lorenzo Monaco and a plausible Fra
Angelico) and the sumptuous St. Augustine, which was brought to the villa
in a barrow by a little dealer, there was a longer interval. Meanwhile
the frame had been reconstructed, and a niche for the missing saint rose
in melancholy emptiness. A little before the sensational _rencontre_ in
Emma's den, the chance of finding a rude pilgrim woodcut on the Quai
Voltaire revealed the saint's identity. This ugly print informed the
faithful that the "prodigious image" of Our Lady existed in the Church of
the Carmelites at Borgo San Liberale. One might distinguish at the
extreme right of the five compartments a willowy St. Michael in armour,
like Chaucer's Squire in a black-letter folio, or if the identification
had been doubtful, there was the name below in all letters.
When the print was shown to the scheming Harwood over the afternoon
vermouth, he suspended a long discourse on the contemptible fate of being
born an Anglo-Saxon, and it came over him with a blessed shock that Emma
had the missing St. Michael. Penetrated by the joy of the situation, he
hesitated for a moment whether to give the initiative to the man or the
woman. A glance at Crocker's uncompromising sturdiness convinced him that
on that side the situation might be quickly exhausted. Emma he could
trust to do it full justice. Excusing himself abruptly, he made for Frau
Stern's lodgings, and with the taste of Crocker's vermouth still in his
faithless mouth, told her that Emma's Crivelli was no other than the
missing St. Michael. To make matters sure he solemnly bound Frau Stern to
secrecy. That accomplished, he strode whistling down through the purple
twilight to his well-earned _fritto_ at Paoli's. The next day began our
wondering what Emma would do. She did, as is known, a thing that her
simple Knickerbocker ancestresses would have approved--presented Crocker
to the St. Michael and left the decision modestly to the men. Behind the
frankness of her procedure lay, perhaps, a curiosity to see how Crocker
would bear himself in a delicate emergency. It was to be in some fashion
his ordeal. Thus she might at least shake the appalling equanimity with
which he had passed from the stage of comrade to that of suppliant. Not
that she doubted him; nobody did that, but she resented a little in
retrospect his silence on the subject of the great quest. Was it possible
that for these five years he had chatted only about his college pranks,
his fishing trips, his orchards and vineyards, and the views? As she
reviewed their countless walks and teas, it really seemed as if he had
never paid her the compliment of being impersonal. Well, that was ended
now at any rate. A little misgiving filled her that she had never
revealed the presence of the St. Michael to so good a play-fellow. A
delicacy, knowing his incorrigible zeal as a collector, had restrained
her, and then, as Dennis had guessed, her den was her sanctuary,
admission to which implied an intimacy difficult to concede. Whatever the
merits of the case, the rupture had produced in a milieu consumed by the
desire to guess what Emma would do, at least one person who was solely
interested in what Crocker's next move might be. For the first time in a
singularly calculable life he had become an object of genuine curiosity.
He acted with his usual simplicity. To Emma he wrote a brief note
upbraiding her for fearing the voices of the valley, professing his
eagerness to return when the St. Michael had been put out of the
reckoning, and declaring that if it were not soon, he would willy-nilly
come back and see how things were between them. It was a letter that
wounded Emma, yet somehow warmed her, too, and from its reception we
found her in an unwonted attitude of nonconformity to the verdicts of the
valley. She began to speak up in behalf of this or that human specimen
under our diminishing lenses with the unsubtle and disconcerting
bluntness of Morton Crocker himself. The phenomenon kept alive our waning
interest during nearly a year of waiting. As for Crocker he gave it out
ostentatiously that he was bound for a wonderful Cima in Northumbria and
afterward was to try dry-fly fishing on the Itchen. Beyond that he had no
plans. All this was characteristically the truth; he bought the Cima,
wrote of his baskets to Harwood, but stayed away past his melons, his
grapes and his olives. By early winter we heard of him shooting the moose
in New Brunswick, and later planning a system of art education in the
Massachusetts schools, and it was not till the brisk days of March that
we learned the west wind was bringing him our way again.
Meanwhile Emma had acquired a few more grey hairs and had resolutely
declined to dispossess herself of the St. Michael. A couple of months
after Crocker's leave-taking, a note had come to her from Crespi, the
unfrocked priest and consummate antiquarian, who, to the point of
improvising a _chef d'oeuvre_, will furnish anything that this gilded
age demands. Crespi most respectfully begged to represent an urgent
client, a Russian prince, who desired a fine Crivelli. Would the most
gentle Miss Verplanck haply part with hers? The price should be what she
chose to name. It was no question of money, but of obliging a client
whom Crespi could ill afford to disappoint. Emma curtly declined the
offer. The St. Michael was valued for personal reasons and was not for
sale. Six weeks later came a more insidious suggestion. The Director of
the Uffizi, learning that she possessed a masterpiece of a school
sparsely represented in the first Italian gallery, pleading that such an
object should not pass from Italy, and representing a number of generous
art-lovers who desired to add it to the collections under his care, made
the following offer, trusting, however, not to any pecuniary inducement
but to her loyalty as an honorary citizen of Florence. The price named
was something less than the London value, but its acceptance would have
perpetually endowed the victoria, and perhaps--. If the malicious
Harwood had not passed the word that the offer was a ruse of the wily
Crocker, we all believed that she would have accepted. Indeed, we
regretted her obduracy. It would have been such a capital way out, with
no sacrifice of her scruples nor waiver of our collective
impressiveness. So Harwood came in for mild reprehension, the Sage
Dennis remarking with some asperity that when the gods have provided us
with farces, comedies, and tragedies in from one to five acts it is
unseemly to string them out to six or seven.
Early March, then, saw the deadlock unbroken. The St. Michael had not
been dislodged. Emma still was unwavering so far as we knew. We were
unable, had we willed, to divest ourselves of our deterrent attributes.
But the situation had changed to this extent that Crocker was said to be
on his way down to oversee a new system of spring tillage in person.
Emma took his approach with something between terror and an unwonted
resignation. From the day when he had planted himself firmly beside her
fireplace with a boyish wonder at finding himself so much at home, he had
represented the incalculable in her carefully planned life. Declining to
accept the attitude of other people toward her, he had almost upset her
attitude toward herself. He was the first man since the scapegrace cousin
who had neither feared nor yet provoked her sharp tongue. While he
relished her wit, it had always been with an unspoken deprecation of its
cutting edge. He gave her a queer feeling of having allowances made for
her--a condescension that in anybody but this big, likable boy she would
have requited with sarcasm. But against him the _cheveux de frise_ she
successfully presented to the world seemed of no avail. He knew it was
not timber but twigs, and that at worst one was scratched and not
impaled. Day by day she watched the cropping of the long line of flaming
willow plumes that escorted her brook toward the level. The line dwindled
as the shorn pollards gave up their withes to bind the vines to the dwarf
maples. She felt the miles between herself and Crocker lessening, and (at
rare moments) her scruples ready to be garnered for some sweet and
ill-defined but surely serviceable use. But she would not have been Emma
Verplanck if the manner of her not impossible surrender had not troubled
her more than the act itself. Any lack of tact on the part of the
husbandman might still spoil things. She had a whimsical sense that any
one of the flaming willows might refuse its contribution to the vineyard
should the pruner approach with anything short of a persuasive "_con
permesso_."
Crocker's "by your leave" was so far from persuasive that it left her
with a panicky desire to run away--again a new sensation. He wrote:
"DEAR EMMA--
"We have had an endless year to think it over, and the only change on my
side is that I need you more than ever. I will go away for real reasons,
for your reasons, but for no others. If it is only their talk that
separates us, their talk has had twelve good months and shall have no
more. I must see you. May I come tomorrow at the old hour?
"As always yours,
"MORTON CROCKER."
Something between wrath and dismay was the result of this challenge. She
sat down to answer him according to his impudence, and the words would
not come. The greatness of the required sacrifice came over her and
therewith the desire to temporise. The voice of many Knickerbocker
ancestresses spoke in her, and between herself and a real emergency she
interposed the impenetrable buckler of a conventionality. She wrote:
"PENSIOIN SCHALCK, Bad Weisstein, Austrian Tyrol.
"MY DEAR CROCKER--
"It would be pleasant to see you and talk over your trip, but you see by
this address it is for the present impossible. As always,
"Cordially yours,
"EMMA VERPLANCK."
When Crocker found Emma's valley as effectually barred as if a battery
guarded the approaches, he gave way to a deep resentment. Instinctively
hating anything like a trick, to be tricked by Emma at this point was
intolerable. His gloom was such that he confided to the malicious Harwood
a profound disgust with the irreality of the life Italianate. The
_podere_ should be sold as soon as it could be put in order. Such
pictures as the Italian Government coveted, it should keep, the rest
should go to the Museum at Boston. He himself would grow orange trees in
North Cuba where there were things to shoot and, thank heaven, no
civilisation. Harwood came breathlessly to Dennis's with the tale,
gloating openly that there was to be a seventh act if not an eighth.
A long hard day with his bailiff and the peasants restored Crocker's
poise. He looked for the hundredth time over into Emma's valley and
divined her attitude. Dreading an interview, she had left the way open to
parley. She virtually pleaded for a delay. It was a new and, in a way,
delightful sensation to be feared. For the first time in any human
relation he exploited a personal advantage and wrote, addressing Bad
Weisstein:
"DEAREST EMMA--
"You have wanted a delay. Well, you have it--probably a week already.
Make the most of it, for two weeks from this date--I give you time to
recover from your journey--I am coming for tea in the old way. Meanwhile
you can hardly imagine the impatience of
"Yours more than ever,
"MORTON CROCKER."
Whether Crocker or Emma was more miserable during the fortnight even
Dennis could not have told. But there was in his woe something of the
sublime stolidity of the man who is going to stand up to be shot or
reprieved, whereas she suffered the uncertainty of the soldier who has
been drawn to make up the "firing party" for a comrade. She feared that
she would not have courage enough to despatch him, and then she feared
she would. Meantime the days passed, and she woke up one morning with an
odd little shiver reminding her that it was no longer possible to get a
note to him by way of Bad Weisstein. Nor had she the heart to move to a
nearer coign of constructive absence. Of half measures she was, after
all, a foe. Her determination to send Crocker away daily increased, and
the implacable St. Michael seemed to command that course. "You are not
for him. You represent a whole artificial world in which he cannot
breathe. I, the finest incarnation of the most exquisite mannerism of a
bygone time, am your spiritual spouse, and you may not lightly renounce
me. You have devoted yourself to graceful irrealities and must now abide
by your choice." Thus the St. Michael had spoken in a dream in the
troubled hours before daybreak, and when Emma went to her den late the
next morning she confronted him and admitted, "You are right, St.
Michael. It's all true." That afternoon Crocker was coming for tea, and
if her New York aunts could have known, even they would have granted
that, for the second time in a thoroughly selfish life, Emma was
displaying capacities for self-sacrifice.
As Emma and Crocker shook hands that afternoon, one might see that both
had aged a little, but he most. Something of the appealing boyishness
had gone out of his eyes. He had become her contemporary. A certain
moral advantage, too, had passed to his side and she, whose prerogative
it had been to take the leading part, now waited for him to begin. As
if on honour to do nothing abruptly, he sketched his year for her--his
sports and committees, his kinsfolk and hers; their fresh,
invigorating, half-made land. She listened almost in silence until he
turned to her and said:
"With me, Emma, it is and always will be the same. You know that. Has
anything changed with you?"
"I don't think so, Crocker. How can I tell? I'm glad you're here, in
spite of the shabby trick I've played you. Let me say just that I'm
heartily glad to see an old friend."
"No, I must have more than that or less. I want much more than that."
"You want too much. You want more than I can give to anybody. O! Why
can't you see it all? You are alive, even here in Florence but, I, I am
no longer a real person that can love or be loved. Can't you see that I
am only a sensibility that absorbs the sweetness of this valley, a mere
bundle of scruples and fears, a weather-cock veering with the talk of
the rest of them? Think of that and take back what you have thought
about me."
"Emma, you admit a need, and that is very sweet to me. You want some one
to strengthen you against all this that you call the valley. Mightn't
that helper be I?"
"You shan't be committed to anything so hopeless."
"It isn't as hopeless as it seems. The strength of the valley is only in
its weakness, and we shall be strong together."
"I have forgotten how to be strong, for years I have only been clever."
"You'd be dull enough with me as you well know. I can do that for
both. But don't talk as if there were some fate between us. There can
be none except your indifference, and I believe you do care a little
and will more."
"Of course, I care, Crocker, but not as you wish. You have refreshed me
in this opiate air. You have represented the real country I have
exchanged for this illusion, the real life I might have lived had I been
braver or more fortunate. But you can have no part in what I have come to
be. Go, for both our sakes."
"Not for any such reason. I can't surrender my happiness for a phrase; I
can't leave you to these delusions about yourself."
"It is no delusion; I wish it were. It's in my blood and breeding. For
generations my people have lived the unreal life. I am the fine flower of
my race, and in coming to this valley of dreams and this no-life I am
merely fulfilling a destiny--a fate, as you say--and coming to my own."
"But Emma, the worthy Verplancks?"
"No, listen to me. For generations the Verplancks have been what people
expected them to be, incarnate formulas of etiquette and timid living.
They took their colour from the gossiping society in which they seemed to
live. They prudently married other Verplancks, cousins or cousins'
cousins. They hoarded their little fortunes without increasing them, and
if what they called the rabble had not peopled New York and raised the
price of land, which my people were merely too stolid to sell, we should
long ago have gone under in penury. We have led nobody and made nothing,
but have been maintained by stronger forces and persons, toward whom we
have always taken the air of doing a favour. That mistake at least I
shall not make with you, Crocker. I want you to feel the full nullity of
me. As I see you now I have a twinge because my great grandfather, who
was a small banker, would have called yours, who was a farmer--you see I
have looked you up--not 'Mister' but 'My Good Man.'"
For a moment she paused, and Crocker groped for a reply. "All this may be
true, Emma," he said at last, "and yet mean very little to you and me.
Besides, I'm quite willing you should call me your Good Man. In fact, I'd
rather like it."
"You must take me seriously--you shall. I cannot marry. I'm married
already. Dennis says I am. Come and see my bridegroom." And she fairly
dragged the bewildered Crocker into her den and set him once more before
the missing St. Michael.
"There he is, an incarnated weakness and fastidiousness. His hand is too
delicate to draw his own sword. If he really cast out Satan, it must have
been by merely staring him down. His helmet rests with no weight upon his
curled and perfumed locks--his buckles are soft gold where iron should
be. He represents the dull, collective, aristocratic intolerance of
Heaven for the only individualist it ever managed to produce. He pretends
to be a warrior and is as feminine as your St. Catherine. He is the
imperturbable champion of celestial good form, and Dennis, who sees
through things, says he is my spiritual husband. He is the weakest of the
weak and is too strong for you, Crocker."
For a space that seemed minutes they faced each other, Emma excited, with
a diffused indignation that defied impartially the missing St. Michael
and the puzzled man before her; Crocker with a perplexity that renewed
the old boyish expression in his eyes. He seemed to be thinking, and, as
he thought, the tension of Emma's attitude relaxed, she forgot to look at
the St. Michael and wondered at the even, steady patience of the big
likable boy she was dismissing. She pitied him in advance for the futile
argument he must be revolving. She had despatched him as in duty bound
and was both sorry and glad.
But his counterplea when it came was of a disconcerting briefness and
potency. He said very slowly, "Yes, I see it all. There is your spiritual
husband; there are they" (indicating the valley with a sweep of a big
hand), "and there are you, Emma, caught in a web of baffling and false
ideas; and here am I, a real man who loves you, fearing neither the St.
Michael nor them" (another gesture) "nor your doubts. I set myself,
Morton Crocker, your lover, against them all and take my own so."
There was a frightened second in which his sturdy arms closed about her.
There was a little shudder, as the same big hand that had defied the
valley sought her head and pressed it to his shoulder. When Emma at last
looked up the mockery she always carried in her eyes had given place to a
new serenity, and her hand reached up timidly for his.
Crocker and Emma--we now instinctively gave him the precedence--were
inconsiderate enough to remove themselves without making clear the fate
of the no longer missing St. Michael. We still speculated indolently as
to the nature of the afterpiece in which we assumed this ex-hero of our
comedy might yet appear. Then we learned that Emma was to be married
without delay from the stone manor house under the Taconics where her
people had dwelt since patroon days. Only a handful of friends with
Crocker's nearest kin and her inevitable New York aunts were to be
present. These venerable ladies had admitted that in marrying, even
opulently, out of the family, Emma had once more shown velleities of
self-sacrifice. Then we heard of Crocker and Emma on his boat along the
coast "Down East." Later we were shocked by rumours of a canoe trip
through Canadian waterways. Hereupon the usually benevolent Dennis
protested as he glanced approvingly at the well-kept Tuscan landscape.
"Crocker needn't rub it in," he opined. "Why, it's the same scrubby
spruce tree from the Plains of Abraham to James's Bay-and Emma, who hated
being bored! Why, it's marriage by capture; it's barbaric." "It's worse;
it's rheumatic," shuddered Harwood as he declined Marsala and took
whisky. "But he'll have to bring her back to civilisation some time, if
only to hospital. We shall have her again." "He will bring her back, but
we shall never have her again," said Dennis solemnly. "She has renounced
us and all our works." "Renouncing our works isn't so difficult," smiled
Mrs. Dennis, and then the talk drifted elsewhere, to new Emmas who were
just beginning to eat the Tuscan lotus.
Before the year had turned to June again we had nearly forgotten our
runaways, when a quite unusual activity about her villa and Crocker's
warned us that they were coming back. Harwood had seen in transit a box
which he thought corresponded to the St. Michael's stature, but was not
sure. In a few days came a circular note from Crocker through Dennis
saying that they were fairly settled and he glad to see any or all of
us. She, however, was still fatigued by the journey and must for a time
keep her room.
Harwood straightway volunteered to undertake the preliminary
reconnaissance, while Frau Stern engaged to penetrate to Emma herself.
On a beatific afternoon we sat in council on Dennis's terrace awaiting
the envoys. Below, the misty plain rose on and on till it gathered into
an amber surge in Monte Morello and rippled away again through the
Fiesolan hills. Nearer, torrid bell-towers pierced the shimmering reek,
like stakes in a sweltering lagoon. In the centre of all, the great dome
swam lightly, a gigantic celestial buoy in a vaporous sea. The spell that
bound us all was doubly potent that day. The sense of a continuous life
that had made the dome and the belfries an inevitable emanation from the
clean crumbling earth, lulled us all, and we hardly stirred when Harwood
bustled in, saying, "Cheer up. I have seen Crocker, and it isn't there."
"You mean," said the cautious Dennis, "that Crocker still possesses only
the hole, aperture, frame, or niche that the missing St. Michael may yet
adorn." "I only know that it isn't there now," growled Harwood. "I deal
merely in facts, but you may get theories, if you must have them, from
Frau Stern, who heroically forced her way to Emma over Crocker's
prostrate form."
As he spoke we heard Frau Stern's timid, well-meaning ring, and in a
moment her smile filled the archway.
"We don't need to ask if you have news," cried Mrs. Dennis from afar.
"If I haf news. Guess what it is. It is too lovely. You cannot think?
Well, there will be a baby next autumn, what you call it?" "Michaelmas, I
suppose," grunted Harwood through his pipe-smoke and subsided into
indifference.
"All this is most charming and interesting, Frau Stern," expostulated
Dennis, "but, as our enthusiastic friend Harwood delicately hints,
what we really let you go for was to locate the Missing St. Michael."
"I haf almost forgot that," she apologised as she nibbled her
_brioche_, "Emma was so happy. But for the bothersome St. Michael
there is no change. I saw it in what she calls her new den. She
laughed to me and said, 'I cannot let him have it, you see, you would
all say he married me for it.'"
"Bravo!" shouted Dennis and Harwood in unison, and the Sage added with
unction, "So she has not been able to renounce us utterly."
"It is not now for long," rejoined Frau Stern, "it is only to the time we
haf said." "Michaelmas," repeated Harwood disgustedly.
"Yes, that is it," she pursued tranquilly, "Emma told me in confidence,
'To Crocker I cannot give it because of you all, but to our child I may,
and it shall do with it what it will.' Now do you prevail, Misters Dennis
and Harwood?"
"We are a bit downcast but not discomfited," acknowledged Dennis,
while Harwood remained glumly within his smoke. "Emma has escaped us,
but she still pays us the tribute of a subterfuge. It is enough, we
will forgive her, even if her way lies from us dozers here. For to-day
the same sunshine drenches her and us. It is a bond. Let us enjoy it
while we may."