The house where Gerald lived was the same one he had lived in since the days of Boston and Charlestown. His mother, coming to Florence with her two children, a boy of ten, a girl of seven, had needed to look for a modest corner in which to build their nest. The income of which she found herself possessed after settling up her husband’s affairs, even when supplemented by the allowance made her by his family, so little permitted of extravagance that she chose the topmost story of the house in Borgo Pinti, with those long, long stairs that perhaps had contributed to keep Gerald’s legs thin.
Its street door was narrow, its entrance-hall dark; the stone stairs climbed from darkness into semi-darkness, reaching the daylight when they likewise reached the Fanes’ landing. But the old house was not without dignity; all three loved it.
As you entered the Fanes’, there was another dark hall, very long, running to right and left. One small window opposite, on an inner court, was all that lighted it. This hall grew darker still, as well as narrower, after turning a corner to the left; then it turned to the right, and was lighter. At the end of it was a window from which, if you bent out, you saw far below you a garden.
The rooms, without being lofty and vaulted, like those on the ground and first floors, were pleasantly high, and paved with brick tiles. From the one large interior room164a window-door opened on to a terrace in the court–a deep brick terrace with a broad ledge on which stood a row of flower-pots. When water was wanted, you opened a little door in the kitchen wall and let your copper urn down, down, down into mossy-smelling blackness; you heard a splash and gurgle, and after proper exertions got it back brimming.
The Italian-ness of it all captivated the mother, who had been drawn to this dot on the map, where she was told one could live well at less expense than in the United States, by the lure of the idea of Italy. She was very humbly an artist. She had given drawing lessons to young ladies in an elegant seminary, and, when approaching middle age, married the father of one of these, a troubled, conscientious man whom the cares of an entangled and disintegrating business kept awake at night. When his need for feminine sympathy ceased, and administrators settled in their summary way the questions that had furrowed his brow, his widow’s wish to start life anew far from the scene of her worries had led to the balmy thought of Italy–Italy, where were all the wonders which had most glamour for her fancy.
She had loved it in an undiminished way to the end, had never really desired to go home, though she spoke of it sometimes when the chill of the stone floors and walls shook her fortitude, and the remembrance of furnace heat, gas-light, hot water on tap, glowed rosy as a promise of eternal summer. The children, however, were taught in their respective schools that artificial heat is insalubrious; they had Italian ideas and chilblains; not on account of any creature comfort that they missed would Florence have been changed back for Charlestown.
165In her picturing of days far ahead Mrs. Fane certainly saw Lucile, an accomplished young lady, receiving tributes of attention in the drawing-rooms of home; and Gerald, a young man of parts, finding recognition and fortune among his countrymen. To go home eventually was among her cloudy plans.
But Lucile died at sixteen, without adequate cause, one almost would have said. She merely had not the ruggedness, the resistance, needed to go on living among the rough winds of this world. The mother, a creature of old-fashioned gentleness and profound affections, survived her by only a few years.
A business matter then obliged Gerald to go to America, and had he liked the place, he might have taken up his abode there. It affected him like vinegar dropped in a wound, like street din heard from a hospital bed. He turned back, and the long stairs to his empty dwelling were dear and sweet to him on the day of his return.
This, then, had remained his home. His needs were simple, and he could live without applying himself to uncongenial work, though the allowance had been stopped, and the income, as Leslie had said, was incredibly small. The good Giovanna, who had been his mother’s servant, stayed on with hersignorino, and economized for him; the wages of an Italian servant were in those days no extravagance. He had no pleasures that cost money; he neither traveled nor went to fine restaurants. He wore neat, old well-brushed clothes, went afoot, gave to the poor single coppers. But he had liberty, worked when he pleased and as he pleased; he was content to be poor, so long as his poverty did not reach the point where it involves cutting a poor figure. Giovanna, prouder than her master, disliked166the thought offar cattiva figuraeven more than did he, and was careful in her household management to keep up a certain style, never forgetting the sprig of parsley on the platter beside the singlebraciolina.
At one period he had contemplated a change in his mode of living, had dreamed of entering the contest for laurels and gold, so as to afford a more appropriate setting for the beauty of his charmer. The Charmer had attained without need of him the setting she craved, and Gerald went on climbing his long stairs, painting in his so personal and unpopular way, and at night reading by light of a solitary lamp the choice and subtle masterpieces of many literatures.
“My land! shall weeverget to the top?” whispered Aurora to Estelle as, one behind the other, sliding their hands along the wall, they felt with their feet for the steps that led to Gerald’s door. “He told us they were long, and he warned us they were dark, but this!... I wonder why they don’t have a lamp going, or something.”
“Because there isn’t any image of the Virgin,” said Estelle, lightly. “It’s our just having come in from the sunshine makes it seem dark. It’s getting lighter. Cheer up! It’s good for you.”
“It’ll make me lose three pounds, I shouldn’t wonder.”
They spoke in whispers, because when they had pulled the bell-knob and the door had swung open, a voice from incalculable altitudes had shouted, “Chi è?” They had answered, as instructed, “Amici,” and now they pictured somebody listening to their shuffling ascent.
At the top, in fact, stood Giovanna, who regarded them167with an eye the color of strong black coffee and said, “Riverisco!”
The small old woman had a thin, bronze Dantesque face, molded by a thousand indignations–all directed against proper objects of indignation–to a settled severity; a face of narrow concentrated passions and perfect fidelity and a preference for few words. The friendly smiles of Aurora and Estelle produced in her a relenting. Courtesy here demanded a pleasant look, and Giovanna was always courteous. She stood aside for Gerald, who came to the very door to welcome these ladies.
The guests were now assembled. One of them was staying with Gerald–Abbé Johns, who had come for a few days from Leghorn, where he lived. The others were Mrs. Foss and Miss Seymour.
What had been in Mrs. Fane’s time the drawing-room had since become also a studio. The landlord had permitted his tenant to increase the light by extending the windows across the street-side wall. Beyond that, there were as few signs about of the art-trade as Gerald had affectations of the artist. The model-stand supporting books and things appeared like a low table; easel, canvases, portfolios, all the littering properties of a painter, had been shoved for the occasion into the next room, a spacious glory-hole which Giovanna did not permit to become dusty beyond the decent.
The result of removing, first, many of the things that made the room a drawing-room, then, most of the things that made it a studio, left the place rather bare. It was according to Gerald’s taste: few things in it, each having the merit of either beauty or interest, else the excuse of utility.
168Mrs. Foss had waited for Aurora’s arrival to make the tea. The feast was very simple. Gerald offered what his mother had used to offer. Giovanna cut the bread-and-butter as that genteel lady had taught her, and continued to buy the plum-cake at the same confectioner’s.
Aurora had come in from the sunshine and cold with January roses in her cheeks and exhilaration in her blood. At sight of her beloved Mrs. Foss she laughed for joy. She rejoiced also to see Miss Seymour, who was one of her “likes,” and she was immensely interested to meet the abbé, whom she knew to be Gerald’s best friend, even as Estelle was hers. She loved Gerald for having just these people to meet them at tea, the ones he himself thought most of. She felt sweetly flattered at being made one of a company so choicely wise and good.
But the result was not exactly fortunate for the gaiety of the little party, if Aurora’s laugh had been counted upon to enliven it. Far from shy though she was, she developed a disinclination to-day to speak. She was impressed by the abbé, for whom her conversation did not seem to her good enough.
The young priest, a convert to Catholicism, was Gerald’s age, and had it not been for his collar, the cut of his coat, would have looked like a not at all unusual Englishman with blue eyes, curly black hair, a touch of warm color in his shaven cheeks. Unless you sat across the tea-table from him and now and then, while he quietly and unassumingly talked, met his eyes.
Some persons said that he looked ascetic, some austere, some angelic. Mrs. Foss, not finding the right adjective for his mixture of poise and humanity, was content to call him charming. Gerald, who had known him when they169were Vin and Raldi to each other and equally far from entering the Church, regarded him as simply the nicest fellow he knew. Aurora had no definition for him, but did not feel disposed to ripple on as usual in his hearing. Yet she would have liked to make friends with him, too. She would have said to him some such thing as, “What are the thoughts you have, which make you so calm, deep inside? But I know. We learned them at our mother’s knee, but in the fury of living, having fun, getting on, we never revisit the chamber where they are kept. You live in it.”
He was talking with Estelle like any other man whose conversation should not contain the faintest element of gallantry, and Estelle was talking to him with an ease that Aurora marveled at. Aurora marveled how Estelle could know, or seem to know, a lot of things which she had never before given sign of caring about. If the two of them were not conversing upon the symbolism of religious art! Having finished his tea, the abbé went to fetch a book from Gerald’s shelves, which he knew as well as his own, and Estelle was shown reproductions of carvings on old cathedrals.
Mrs. Foss, who had been talking of the Carnival now beginning, telling Aurora about corsi and coriandoli of the past as compared with the poor remnants of these customs, and describing the still undiminished glories of a veglione, perceiving finally that the usually merry lady was on her best behavior to the point of almost complete taciturnity, from necessity addressed herself more directly to Miss Seymour, who shared the sofa with her; and from talking ofveglionithe two slid into talking of Florentine affairs more personal.
170The task of entertaining Mrs. Hawthorne thus devolving upon Gerald, he took it up in a way that flatteringly presupposed in her an interest in general questions. His manner seemed to her very formal. She forgot that, innocent as their relations were, he yet could not before people speak to her with the lack of ceremony that in private made her feel they were such good friends. But even aside from this cool and correct manner, Gerald seemed to her different to-day–calmer, more serene, less needing sympathy, as if something of his friend the abbé had rubbed off on to him.
As he was going on, in language that reminded her of a book, she interrupted him.
“Don’t you want to show me your house?”
“I was going to suggest it,” he said at once. “There are several things I should like to show you. Will you come?”
She rose to follow, losing some of her constraint.
“It’s what we always do on the Cape. Any one comes for the first time, we show them all over our house.”
When they were outside the drawing-room door, she felt more like herself.
“Oh, I’m so glad I can’t tell you to see the place where you live!” she expanded.
They went down the long corridor, past a closed door which he disappointingly did not open.
“It’s a dark room we use to store things,” he explained. Neither did he open the door at the end of the hall. “It’s Vincent’s room,” he said.
They turned into the darker, narrower corridor, bent again, and went toward the little window high over somebody else’s garden. He ushered Mrs. Hawthorne into the kitchen, for here, near the ceiling, was the door-bell, and on171it the well-known coat of arms, crown and cannon-balls, which testified to the age and aristocracy of the house.
While he sought to interest her in this curiosity, Aurora was looking at everything besides; for Giovanna was making preparations for dinner, and Aurora’s thoughts were busy with the fowl she saw run on a long spit and waiting to be roasted before a bundle of sticks at the back of the sort of masonry counter that served as kitchen stove.
“They do have the queerest ways of doing things!” she murmured.
He took her across the passage and into the dining-room. He wished to show her an old china tea-set, quaintly embellished with noble palaces and parks, that had been his great-grandmother’s. There again she looked but casually at the thing he accounted fit for her examination, and carefully, if surreptitiously, at all the rest.
Last he showed her into the great square interior room with the glass door on to the terrace over the court, the room which had been his mother’s and was now his own, and where hung a portrait of his mother. On this Aurora fixed attentive and serious eyes, and had no need to feign feeling, for appropriate feelings welled in her heart.
“How gentle she looks!” she said softly. “And how much you must miss her!”
She stood for some time really trying to make acquaintance with the vanished woman through that faded pastel likeness of her in youth which Gerald kept where it had hung in her day, the portrait of herself which she womanishly preferred because, as she did not conceal, it flattered her.
“She looks like one of those people you would have just loved to lift the burdens off and make everything smooth172for,” Aurora said; “and yet she looks like one of those people who spend their whole lives trying to make things smooth for others.”
“Yes,” said Gerald to that artless description of the feminine woman his mother had been, and stood beside his guest, looking pensively up at the portrait.
All at once, Aurora felt like crying. It had been increasing, the oppression to her spirits, ever since she entered this house to which she had come filled with gay anticipation and innocent curiosity. It had struck her from the first moment as gloomy, and it was undoubtedly cold, with its three sticks of wood ceremoniously smoking in the unaccustomed chimney-place. Its esthetic bareness had affected her like the meagerness of poverty. And now it seemed to her sad, horribly so, haunted by the gentle ghosts of that mother and sister who had known and touched all these things, sat in the chairs, looked through the windows, and who conceivably came back in the twilight to flit over the uncarpeted floor and peer in the dim mirrors to see how much the grave had changed them. She shivered. Yes, cold and bare and sad seemed Gerald’s dwelling. And Gerald, whose very bearing was a dignified denial that anything about himself or his circumstances could call for compassion–Gerald, thin and without color, looked to her cold-pinched and under-nourished. She had a sense of his long evenings alone, drearily without fire, his solitary meals in that dining-room so unsuggestive of good cheer; she thought of that single candle on the night-table burning in this cold, large room where he went to bed in that bed of iron, laying his head on that small hair pillow, to dream bitter dreams of a fair girl’s treachery.
She wanted to turn to him protesting:
173“Oh, I can’t stand it! What makes you do it?”
His next words changed the current of her thoughts.
“I have another portrait of my mother,” he said; “one I painted, which I will show you if you care to see it.”
She cheered up.
“Do! do!” she urged heartily. “I’m crazy to see something you’ve painted.”
“You won’t care for my painting,” he pronounced without hesitation; “but the portrait gives a good idea of my mother, I think, when she was older than this.”
They returned to the drawing-room, where their friends were in the same way engaged as when they left them. One pair was looking at a large illustrated book; the other two sat leaning toward each other talking in undertones.
“The bird which you see,” the abbé was saying, “with the smaller birds crowding around him, is a pelican. The pelican, you know, who opens his breast to feed his young, is a symbol of the Church.”
“It’s not true, though, that the pelican does that,” Estelle was on the point of saying with American freedom, “any more than that a scorpion surrounded by fire commits suicide. I read it in a Sunday paper where a lot of old superstitions were exploded.” But she tactfully did nothing of the sort. She appeared instructed and impressed.
What Miss Seymour was saying to Mrs. Foss would have sounded a little singular to any one overhearing. The two women had been friends for years, but never come so near to each other as, it chanced, they did that afternoon, when all fell so favorably for a heart to heart talk.
“I feel as if I had lost a key!” said Miss Seymour, and looked like a bewildered princess turned old by a wicked174fairy’s spell. “When I possessed it I thought nothing of it. It opened all the doors, but I didn’t know what it was made them so easy to open. Only now, when it’s gone, I know the value of that little golden key.”
“I know,” said Mrs. Foss, sympathetically. “There’s no use in us women pretending we don’t mind! Those who really and truly don’t must be great philosophers or great fools, or else selfless to a degree that is rarer even than philosophy....”
Gerald and Aurora crossed the room unhailed and entered the room beyond, where dusty canvases, many deep, stood face to the wall.
He found the unframed painting of his mother and placed it on the easel. The short winter day was waning, but near the window where the easel stood there was still light enough to see by.
Aurora looked a long time without saying anything; Gerald did not speak either. After the length of time one allows for the examination of a picture, he took away that one and put another in its place; and so on until he had shown her a dozen.
“I don’t know what to say,” she finally got out, as if from under a crushing burden of difficulty to express herself.
“Please don’t try!” he begged quickly. “And please not to care a bit if you don’t like them.”
She let out her breath as at the easing of a strain. He heard it.
“I won’t be so offensive,” he went on, “as to say that in not liking them you merely add yourself to the majority, nor yet that my feelings are in no wise hurt by your failure to like them. But I do wish you to know that I think175it a sin and a shame to get a person like you, who can’t pretend a bit, before a lot of beastly canvases inevitably repugnant to your mood and temperament, and make you uncomfortable with the feeling that compliments are expected.”
“All right, then; I won’t tell any lies.” She added in a sigh, “I did want so much to like them!”
And he would never know what shining bubble burst there. She had wanted so much, as she said, to like them, and, as she did not say, to buy some of them, a great many of them, and make him rich with her gold.
He replied to her sigh:
“You are very kind.”
After a moment spent gazing at the last painting placed on the easel, as if she hoped tardily to discover some merit in it, she said:
“I don’t know a thing about painting, so nothing I could say about your way of doing it could matter one way or the other. But I have eyes to see the way things and people look. Tell me, now, honest Injun, do they look that way to you–the way you paint them?”
He laughed.
“Mrs. Hawthorne, no! Emphatically, no. And emphatically yes. When I look at them as you do, in the street, across the table, they look to me probably just as they do to you; but when I sit down to paint them–yes, they look to me as I have shown them looking in these portraits.”
“But they’re so sad! So sad it’s cruel!” she objected.
“Oh, no,” he objected to her objection; “it’s not quite as bad as that.”
176“They make me perfectly miserable.”
He whipped the canvas off the easel, saying dryly:
“Don’t think of them again!”
It looked like impatience. With hands thrust in his pockets he took a purposeless half-turn in the room, then came back to her side.
“If you totally detest them, I am sorry,” he said mildly. “I had wanted to offer you one, a little, unobtrusive one to stick in some corner, a token of the artist’s regard.”
“Oh, do! do!” she grasped at his friendly tender. “Find a little cheerful one, if you can. I shall love to have it.”
He selected a small panel of a single tall, palely expanding garden poppy, more gray than violet, against a background of shade. Flower though it was, it still affected one like the portrait of a lady wronged and suffering.
In the drawing-room to which they returned Giovanna had lighted a lamp. The fire had properly caught and was burning more brightly; the place looked rosy and warm, after the winter twilight filling the other room and the chill that reigned there.
Aurora returned to the tea-table; with a disengaged air she reached for plum-cake. She ascertained with comfort that Mrs. Foss did not look sad or Estelle ill used; that the abbé was as serene as ever and Miss Seymour, after her talk with Mrs. Foss, rather serener than usual. Gerald was far jollier than any of his portraits. To make sure that she was no depressing object herself, she smiled the warmest, sunniest smile she was capable of.
“Do come and talk a little bit with me, before I have to go home!” she unexpectedly called out to the abbé.
177When at the end of the long evening spent together smoking and talking the two friends separated for the night, Gerald went to his room as did Vincent to his. But Gerald had no more than pulled off his necktie when he changed his mind, went back to the drawing-room, crossed the tobacco-scented space where something seemed to linger of the warmth of goodfellowship, and entered the farther room.
A doubt had risen in his mind. He could not wait till morning to see his work with a fresh eye, an eye as fresh as Mrs. Hawthorne’s, and satisfy himself as to whether he, so careful of truth, had unconsciously come to exaggerating, falsifying his impressions, grown guilty of hollow mannerisms.
Whatever he had said, he had been stung by Mrs. Hawthorne’s liking his paintings so little. It was easy to console oneself remembering the poor lady’s ignorance of art. The truth might be that something was wrong with the pictures, which suspicion had driven the artist to go and have a dispassionate look at them in the frigid hour between twelve and one of the night. If a person is on the way to becoming a morbid ass he cannot find it out too soon.
Gerald’s dogma was that the first duty of a picture is to be beautiful. His critics did not give sufficient attention to that aspect of his work, he privately thought; they were put off by what they mistakenly called its queerness, its mere difference from the academic, the conventional. This was bitter, because he had always so loved beautiful lines, beautiful tints, had insisted that the very texture, of his painting should have the beauty of fine-grained skin.
He was no conspicuous colorist, of course, he did not by178temperament revel in the glow of rich, bold, endlessly varied tints. It was a limitation, which his work naturally reflected. This was marked in fact by modesty and melancholy of color-scheme. But that did not interfere with beauty, he maintained. He had been thrilled by the discovery in the Siena gallery of an old master with the same predilections as he, an antipathy apparently to the vivid, crying, self-assertive colors, which he accordingly with admirable simplicity left out, and interpreted the world all in blues and greens, grays and violets, whites of many degrees and tones and meanings.
“They’re so sad that it’s cruel!” Mrs. Hawthorne had voiced the instinctive objection of her earth-loving, life-praising disposition to the view he took of people and things. But what was there to do about it? When he looked at a sitter to render his personality sincerely, that was the way he saw him. If he had been limited to rendering a human being in the single aspect he wore while walking from the drawing-room to the dinner-table with a lady on his arm and a rich meal in prospect, he would have given up painting, it interested him so little. Most of the portrait-painters in vogue did thus paint the surface and nothing besides. Gerald had no envy of their large fees at the price of such boredom as he would have suffered in their place.
He held a canvas to the light of his candle. It was an old one of Amabel. She had not been sitting for him, he had made this sketch from a distance while she worked on her side. It was easy to see that the room was cold, that the woman with the pinched aristocratic nose, the little shawl over her shoulders, was poor, determined and anxious. If Mrs. Foss had said, “But Amabel never was as179hollow-cheeked as that, nor ever looked pathetic in the least,” Gerald could only have answered, “I swear to you this is how she looked to me on that day.”
He studied the portrait of his mother, one of his earliest, bad in a way, but excellent in the matter of likeness. His mother no more than Amabel had been a pathetic person, Mrs. Foss would certainly have said. To which Gerald might have answered that she was not so during an afternoon call; but that the most characteristic thing about that gentle and delicate woman had been the fact of her living so much in the life of others and being open to endless sorrows through them. The dim affectionate eyes, the deprecating half-smile of his mother, engaged sympathy for the unfair plight.
Last, he took up a portrait of Violet. She had been in the perfection of young beauty; she had had no capacity for deep feeling, really,–why did an aroma of sadness escape from that dainty colored shadow of her? Why, but because of the artist’s yearning sense that beauty is transitory, and the loveliest girl subject to destiny, and the future full of pitfalls for the fragility of all flesh!
“Imagine a barnyard fowl, a common white hen pecking among the gravel,” Gerald once illustrated his view-point, “and imagine hovering over it a hawk, which it hasn’t seen. Does it make no difference in your sense of the hen thatyousee the hawk?”
“It comes to this,” Leslie on a certain occasion summed up Gerald’s case: “Gerald isn’t satisfied to paint the thing that’s before him. All he cares to paint is the soul of things, and what you finally see expressed on the canvas is his pity for everything that has the misfortune to be born into an unsatisfactory world. Gerald can’t see a180thing as being common: the moment he narrows his eyes to look for purposes of art, it becomes to him exceptional, unique. I asked him once, as a joke, to paint me a simple, large, bright orange squash, in a field. And he did. A masterpiece. One can’t say that the squash isn’t large, orange, and true to life. But what a squash! It has an amount of personal distinction, an air of rarity and remoteness, that would make you think twice, nay, three times, before making such a precious product of the sacred earth into pies!”
When he was chilled through and his hands were numb, Gerald remembered to pick up his candle and go to bed. No change of opinion, it is needless to say, had resulted from his midnight inquiry.
A point of natural spite made him say that he did not ask people to like his pictures. All he asked was permission to go on painting as he pleased, obscure and independent, the sincere apostle of a peculiar creed, working out his problems with conscience and fidelity. If fate might send him critics whose opinion he valued he would be properly grateful. He felt the need of criticism and companionship, in his work, but had no regard for his fellow artists in Florence. His thoughts turned sometimes with envy toward Paris, where modern art had some vitality, and artist life the advantage of stimulating associations. There was a good deal of talk at the time, and some derision, of a new phase called impressionism, whose chief seat was Paris.
As for the opinion of such a person as Mrs. Hawthorne, it obviously had no value. But while the artist could brush her aside in the character of critic, it remained a little181galling to the man to know he figured in her mind as a painter who did not know how to paint.
“Can’t paint for sour apples!” he seemed to hear her reporting to Estelle, and got in his mouth the taste of the apples.
When Gerald asked Mrs. Hawthorne to sit for him, she stared in his face without a word.
“Don’t be afraid,” he hastened to reassure her; “I engage to paint a portrait you will like.”
She felt herself blush for the dismay she had not been able to conceal, and to hide this embarrassment she lifted to her face–not the handkerchief or the bouquet with which beauty is wont to cover the telltale signal in the cheek, but a wee dog, as white as a handkerchief and no less sweet than a bouquet. She rubbed her nose fondlingly in the soft silk of his breast, while, tickled, he tried, with baby growls and an exposure of sharp pin teeth, to get a bite at it.
Gerald looked on with simple pleasure. Because he had given Aurora that dog. On the day of making a scene because she was to receive a dog from Hunt he had set to work to find one for her himself, the prior possession of which would make it natural to decline Charlie’s, if, as Gerald doubted, Charlie’s offer had been anything more than facile compliment. And now, instead of the torment to his nerves of seeing her fondle and kiss a brute of Charlie’s, he had the not disagreeable spectacle of her pressing to her warm and rosy face an animal that related her caresses, even if loosely and distantly, to a less unworthy object. Sour and sad, dried up and done with women, a man still has feelings.
183It would be unfair not to add that something better than primeval jealousy actuated Gerald, at the same time as, no doubt, some tincture of that. A sort of impersonal delicacy made the idea disagreeable to him of a dear, nice woman cherishing with the foolish fondness such persons bestow on their pets the gift of a friend whom she, in taking his loyalty for granted, overrated, as he thought.
The dog he had selected to present to her belonged to a breed for which he had respect as well as affection, crediting to Maltese terriers, besides all the sterling dog virtues, a discretion, a fineness of feeling, rare enough among humans. That Gerald kept no dog was due to the fact that he was still under the impression of the illness and death of his last, Lucile’s pet and his mother’s, who had been his companion until a year or two before, a senile, self-controlled little personage of the Maltese variety.
Having decided to give Mrs. Hawthorne a dog, Gerald had spent some hours watching the several components of one litter as they disported themselves in the flagged court of a peasant house, and had fixed upon one dusty ball of fluff rather than another upon solid indications of character.
Snowy after strenuous purifications at the hands of Giovanna, sweet-smelling from the pinch of orris powder rubbed in his fur, and brave with a cherry ribbon, he was taken from the breast of Gerald’s overcoat and deposited in the hands of Aurora, whose delight expressed itself in sounds suggestive of an ogreish craving to eat the little beast, interspersed with endearments of dim import, such as, “Diddums! Wasums! Tiddledewinkums!” Estelle’s did the same. There was no difference in the affection the two instantly bestowed on this dog. Aurora remarked184later on that Busteretto couldn’t be blamed for not knowing which was his mother.
Sensitively timid, yet bold in his half dozen inches with curiosity of life and the exuberant gladness of youth, Busteretto could frisk and he could tremble. He was cowed by the sight of fearful things, beetles and big dogs, but next moment, with budding valor, would dash to investigate them. He twinkled when he ran, his bark lifted him off his four feet. Withal something exquisite marked him even among Maltese puppies, which Aurora felt without art to define it. She said he reminded her of the new moon when it is no bigger than a fingernail. If with the tip of his rose-petal tongue he laid the lick of fondness and approval on the end of your nose, you felt two things: that the salute had come directed by the purest heart-guidance, and that the nose had something about it subtly right. You were flattered.
When Gerald encouraged Mrs. Hawthorne to decide for herself how she should like to be painted, with what habiliments, appurtenances and surroundings, she decided first of all to have Busteretto on her lap,–but that was afterward given up: he wiggled. Then her white ostrich fan in her hand, her pearls around her neck, her diamond stars in her hair, a cluster of roses at her corsage, her best dress on, and an opera-cloak thrown over the back of her chair.
Catching, as she thought, a look of irony on Gerald’s face, she had a return of suspicion.
“See here,” she said, observing him narrowly, “there’s no trick about this, is there?”
“Not the shadow of one. Please trust me, Mrs. Hawthorne. This is to be a portrait entirely satisfactory as185well as entirely resembling. It is like you to desire to be painted with your plumes and pearls and roses, and they are very becoming. I shall put them in with pleasure. I know you do not believe I can paint a portrait to suit you. Very well. Grant me the favor of a chance to try. We shall see.”
It was true that she did not believe it, but she was so willing to hope. One of the upstairs rooms at the back was chosen for the sittings because the light through its windows was the least variable. The necessary artist’s baggage was brought over from Gerald’s, and the work began.
Charcoal in hand, he regarded Mrs. Hawthorne quietly and lengthily through half-closed eyes.
“You have not one good feature,” he said, as if thinking aloud.
“Oh!”–she started out of the pose they had after much experimenting decided upon–“oh! is that the way you’re going to pay me for keeping still on a chair by the hour?”
“You have no eyebrows to speak of.”
“What do you mean? Yes, I have, too; lots of them; lovely ones. Only they don’t show up. They’re fair, to match my hair.”
“You are undershot.”
“What’s that?”
“Your lower jaw closes outside of your upper.”
“Oh, but so little! Just enough to take the curse off an otherwise too perfect beauty.”
As she curled up the corners of her mouth in an affected smirk, he quickly shifted his glance, with a horrible suspicion that she was crossing her eyes. As she had pronounced186the word perfect “parfect,” he presumed that she was making herself look, for the remainder, like Antonia. It was her latest vaudeville turn, imitating Antonia. He was careful not to look again in her direction until she had stopped doing what annoyed him furiously. He could not hope to make her understand to what point the debasing of beauty to brutal comic uses wounded him.
“Faultless features,” he went on after a time, in commentary on his earlier remark, “do not by any means always make a beautiful face,” politely leading her to suppose he meant that to be without them was no great misfortune.
Estelle came into the room for company. She brought her sewing, one of those elegant pieces of handiwork that give to idleness a good conscience. Gerald felt her delicately try to get acquainted with him. She was not as altogether void of intellectual curiosity as her friend. She would seem to care about discovering further what sort of man he was mentally, what his ideas were on a variety of subjects. Also, but even more delicately, to interest him, just a little bit, in her own self and ideas.
He was grateful to her, and did what he could to show himself responsive. With the portrait began the period of a less perfunctory relation between them. They had talks sometimes that Aurora declared, without trace of envy, were ’way above her head.
Estelle was waking to an interest in the art and history of the Old World. She was “reading up” on these things. She was also “working at” her French, and would in a little systematic way she had excuse herself at the same hour daily, saying she must go and get her lessons. Not feeling quite the enterprise to study two languages at one187time, she had given the preference to French, as being the more generally useful in Europe.
Gerald now made the acquaintance of a new member of the household. She came into the room bearing a small tray with a hot-water pot and a cup. She took this to Aurora, who helped herself to plain hot water, explaining:
“I am trying to ‘redooce.’ This is good for what ails me, they say. But I could never in the world think of it. Clotilde thinks of it for me, and she’s that punctual! Clotilde, you’re too punctual with this stuff. You don’t suppose I like it?”
“But think, Madame, of the sylph’s form that it will give you!” replied Clotilde, in respectably good English.
“I do think of it. Give me another cup. Mr. Fane, this is Miss–no, I won’t launch on that name. It’s Italo’s sister, who has saved our lives and become our greatest blessing.”
Clotilde exposed in smiling a fine array of white teeth. She was not at all like her brother, but well-grown, white and pink beneath her neat head-dress of crisp black hair. She impressed Gerald as belonging to a different and better class. If she were vulgar, it was at least not in the same way. She appeared like that paradox, a lady of the working-class, with a distinguishing air of capability, good humor, and openness. The latter Gerald was not disposed absolutely to trust, but he was glad to trust all the rest.
No sooner had she left the room than Aurora and Estelle in one voice started telling him about her. He learned that she and Italo were not what they called “own” brother and sister, but only half. Their father, being left by the death of his wife with a young family on his hands, had in feeble despair married the cook, become the father of188one more child, and died. Italo was that latest born. The children of the first wife had then been taken by her folks, while their step-mother retained her own chick, assisted from a distance by the prouder portion of the family to educate and give him a trade. He had chosen an art instead, and by it was rising in the world. There had been published a waltz of his composing, dedicated by permission to a name with a coronet over it. He lived with and supported his good soul of a mother, and saw something of his half-brethren, all of them through lack of fortune condemned to small ways of life, like himself.
Clotilde, the best-hearted, was his favorite and he hers. She recognized his gifts, she further regarded him as a man of spirit, or wit.
“It must be,” reflected Gerald, “that the fellow can stir up a laugh.”
He knew him only as a fixture at the piano, but could well accommodate the idea of a species of buffoonery to that boldly jutting nose of his. He fancied thatmaldicenza, gossip further spiced with backbiting, would form the chief baggage of his wit. If he possessed sharp ears, his opportunities for picking up knowledge of other people’s affairs were certainly unusual. He passed from house to house, playing accompaniments, drumming for dancing, so insignificant on his screw-stool that many no doubt talked before him as if nobody had been there.
Gerald did not dislike Ceccherelli, really, only had him on his nerves in relation to Aurora. He felt him, indeed, rather likeable at a distance, as part of a story; he had the good point of being an individual. Gerald was in general touched to benevolence at sight of a poor devil elated by his little draught of success. To Ceccherelli without a doubt189the patronage of the wealthy American represented success. Ceccherelli pulling out his gold watch was a disarming vision.
Gerald cherished a hope, born of curiosity, that he might witness some exhibition of Ceccherelli’sspirito, or wit, and upon an evening when the pianist dropped in after dinner was on the alert for manifestations....
It may here be inserted that upon being asked to remain for dinner Gerald had artfully delayed answering until he had made sure that Clotilde did not dine with the ladies. Their familiarity had made him fear it. Highly as he was prepared to esteem Clotilde, the meal would, with her making the fourth, have lost for him those points on account of which he prized it. But he gathered that she found it more convenient to take her meals in private. In rejoicing for himself, he rejoiced also for her, eating in holy peace, as he pictured her doing, the dishes of her country, cooked with oil and onion; pouring the wine of her country from a good fat flask such as never found its place on the table of the strangers.
To go back: Gerald when after dinner the pianist came to make music for the ladies, was hoping for some example of that brightness for which he had a reputation with three persons, possibly more. But Ceccherelli remained on the piano-stool and never once raised his voice. Estelle and Aurora went in turns to chat with him there, but not one witty word reached Gerald. Then he had the sense to see that it was he, Gerald, who acted as a spoil-feast, a dampener. He got an outside view of himself, stiff, dry, critical, ungenial-looking. It was not to be wondered at that the flow of spirits was dried up in the man of temperament by his vicinity. He suspected, catching a side-look from the190pianist’s small brown eye, that the little man who did not care to speak aloud in his hearing yet had plenty to say on the subject of him in a different entourage.
This notwithstanding, it was only when Gerald got whiffs and echoes of Ceccherelli through Aurora that he called him a pest.
“Italo says,” she began, after a silence such as often fell while she posed and he painted, “that Mr. Landini has the evil eye.”
“What rubbish!”
“Glad to hear you say so. I don’t believe there’s any such thing, myself. But Italo swears there is, and has told me story upon story to prove it. He wants me to wear a coral horn and poke it at Mr. Landini whenever he comes near me.”
“Wherefore a coral horn? You can more cheaply, and quite as effectually, make horns of your fingers, like this. I should strongly advise you not to let the object of this precaution catch you doing it.... I should think, Mrs. Hawthorne, you would be ashamed to let that inferior little individual corrupt your mind.”
Fancying it teased him, she pursued, “What do you think he says besides? That Mr. Landini’s color isn’t natural, but a juice, he says, a dye, that he stains himself with.”
“For the love of Heaven, why?”
“That’s what I wanted to know. Why go to all that trouble for the sake of looking like a darkey? But Italo says, says Italo, that it gives him more success with the ladies. His difference from other men obliges them to look at him, then his eyes do the rest.”
“I only hope your laugh is sincere, Mrs. Hawthorne, and191that you do not allow this poisonous nonsense to affect your feelings towards–”
“Don’t be afraid. If I did, I shouldn’t be having him to dinner, should I? And he’s coming to-night.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Quite a party. You weren’t asked, because we know you now. You would have managed by sly questions to find out who else was coming and then you wouldn’t have come.”
“Well, who is coming? There is nothing sly about that.”
“I sha’n’t tell you. This much I will tell you, though–” she added with the frankness usual to her, “I don’t look forward to it much.”
It was on the end of his tongue to ask next morning how her dinner had gone off, but on second thoughts he left it for her to speak of when she was ready.
She at first appeared much as on other days, but when she had lapsed into silence and fallen into thought her expression became a shade gloomy. He had noticed that when her eyes were rather more grey than blue it was the sign of a cloud in her sky.
“Might one ask the lady sitting for her picture to look pleasant?” he said.
“Yes, yes,” she remembered herself; “I will try to look pleasant. But I feel cross.”
“Well?... What went wrong with your dinner?”
“Oh, I made a fool of myself.”
“That sounds serious. Was it?”
“Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t suppose it was really serious.... But the whole thing has made me cross.”
192She labored under an urgent necessity to tell somebody all about it, that was evident.
“You see,” she plunged without preamble into her confidence, “from the beginning, I didn’t want that party! I love to have folks to dinner, any number, all the time. You know I just love a jollification. But this was different, as I knew it was going to be. It began with Charlie Hunt telling me–or, not exactly telling, I forget how it came out–that yesterday was his birthday. I said, ‘Come and celebrate with us!’ I was thinking of making a big cake and sticking it full of pink candles. And from that simple beginning, blessed if I know how it happened, except my always wanting to say yes to anything anybody proposes, it came to be a regular dinner-party, the kind they give over here, with courses and wines and finger-bowls, all the frills, and twelve people, not friends of mine at all, barely acquaintances, but people Charlie Hunt thought it would be nice to ask. Well, it was my fault, every bit of it, and nobody else’s. I’ve no business to say all those joyful yeses if I don’t mean them. Good enough for me if I have to swallow my pill afterwards without so much as making a face. It wasn’t so bad, after all, everything went all right, thanks to Clotilde and Charlie. Only I wasn’t having much fun. Charlie had planned how people should sit, and Mr. Landini was on one side of me, and he was making himself terribly agreeable. He means all right, but his talk, as I guess you know, isn’t a bit my kind. And last night, I don’t mind telling you–” her voice dropped to a note confidentially low, “with his compliments and incinerations, you’d almost have thought he was sweet on me. Only I know better. And so, as I say, I wasn’t having much fun. Then I don’t know what got193into me. They were passing the fruit. I got up and went to the sideboard and took one of those fine hot-house looking peaches out of our permanent assortment that needs dusting every few days, and I came back to my seat and offered that marble fruit with a fetching smile to Mr. Landini. He looked as if he felt I was bestowing a very particular favor. He took it–and it dropped out of his hand on to the plate with a crash that laid it in smithereens.... You can see why I am cross.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised, dear woman, if he were cross, too.”
“He was perfect! I respected him! Liked him better than I ever had before! I never saw anything so well done as the way he carried it off! I was never so uncomfortable in all my life, though we united in laughing, ha, ha.... Charlie would have taken my head off, if he had dared, afterwards in a corner of the parlor. But the first word he said, I cut in, short as pie-crust, ‘Young man,’ I said, ‘if you aren’t careful I shall sit on you. Do you know how much I weigh?’ And I meant it.”
Gerald prudently placed a paint-brush across his mouth, and shut his teeth on it as on a bridle-bit, to excuse his saying nothing in the way of comment on what he had heard.
Mrs. Hawthorne told him next day at the first opportunity, like one eager to make reparation for an injustice, “It’s all right now! A beautiful plate came yesterday afternoon from Ginori’s where my dinner-set was bought–a plate, you know, to match the one that got broken. As if I cared anything about the old plate! And along with it Mr. Landini’s card, with such a nice message written on it. Don’t you think it white in him? When it was all my fault. And in the evening Charlie Hunt came and was194sweet as pie. We’re just as good friends as ever. I’m ashamed of myself for having felt so put out. Forget anything I said that didn’t seem quite kind. He’s all right. It’s me that’s crochety.... Isn’t that picture far enough along for you to let me see it?”
“No, Mrs. Hawthorne.”
“Will you let me see it when it’s far enough along?”
“No.”
“I think you’re real mean. How much longer will it take to finish it?”
“Does sitting bore you so much?”
“Land, no! Bore me? I perfectly love it! It’s like taking a sea-voyage with some one. You see more of them in a week or two than you would in the same number of years on land. I’m getting to feel I know you quite well.”
“Wasn’t it clever of me to think of the portrait?”
“Go ’way! D’you see anything green in my eye? As I was saying, I’m getting to know you pretty well. You get mad awful’ easy, don’t you? But you don’t hate people, really, nearly as much as I do, that it takes a lot to make mad. There are people in this world that I hate–oh, how I hate ’em! I hate ’em so I could almost put their eyes out. But you, Stickly-prickly, when it comes right down to it, I notice you make a lot of allowance for people. Do you know, when it comes right down to it, you’re one of the patientest persons I know. I’d take my chances with you for a judge a lot sooner than I’d like to with loads of people who aren’t half so ready to call you a blame’ fool.”
“While you have been making these valuable discoveries in character, what do you suppose I have been doing, Mrs.195Hawthorne?” asked Gerald, after the time it would take to bow ceremoniously in acknowledgement of a compliment.
“Oh, finding out things about me, I suppose.”
“Not things. One thing. I had known you for some length of time before my felicitous invention of the portrait, you remember, and as you are barely more elusive than the primary colors, or more intricate than the three virtues, I did not suppose I had anything more to learn. But I had. It can’t be said I didn’t suspect it. I had seen signs of it. I smelled it, as it were. But I had no idea of its extent, its magnitude, its importance. It is simply amazing, bewildering, funny.”
“For goodness’ sake, what?” she cried, breathless with interest.
“I can’t tell you. It would ill become me to say. The least mention of it on my part would be the height of impertinence. The thing is none of my business. Be so kind as to resume the pose, Mrs. Hawthorne, and to keep very, very still, like a good girl. Do not speak, please, for some time; I am working on your mouth.”
Gerald had indeed been astonished, amused, appalled. He had in a general way known that Mrs. Hawthorne was prodigal, the impression one received of her at first sight prepared one to find her generous; but he had formed no idea of the ease and magnificence with which she got rid of money.
In the time so far devoted to painting her he had grown quite accustomed to a little scene that almost daily repeated itself–a scene which he, busy at his side of the room, was presumably not supposed to see, or, if he saw it, to think anything about.
196Clotilde would come in with a look of great discretion, a smile of great modesty, and stand hesitating, like a person with a communication to make, but not sufficient boldness to interrupt. Aurora, always glad to drop the pose, would excuse herself to Gerald and ask what Clotilde wanted. Clotilde would then approach and speak low,–not so low, however, but that in spite of him messages and meanings were telegraphed to Gerald’s brain. The look itself of the unsealed envelopes in Clotilde’s hand was to Gerald’s eye full of information. She would sometimes extract and unfold a document for Aurora to look at; but Aurora would wave it aside with a careless, “You know I couldn’t read it if I wanted to.” At the end of the murmured conference Aurora would say, “Will you go and get my porte-monnaie? It’s in my top drawer,” and when this had been brought, her dimpled hand would take from it and give to Clotilde bills of twenty, of fifty, of a hundred francs, hardly appearing to count. Sometimes she would say: “I’m afraid I haven’t enough. I shall have to make out a check.”
Gerald’sflair, and knowledge of his Florence, enabled him perfectly to divine what was in question. He was only puzzled as to why these transactions should not have taken place at a more private hour, and acutely observed that they took place when they could, this being when Estelle was out of the way. Clotilde also hadflair.
After Clotilde had retired, Aurora one morning, having imperfectly understood what her money was wanted for, puckered her brows over the letters that, through an oversight, had remained in her hands. She held one out to Gerald to translate. It was from the united chorus-singers of Florence, a simple, direct, and ingenuous appeal for a197gratuity. Another letter was from a poor young girl who wished for money to buy her wedding outfit. Another from a poor man out of work.
Gerald could have laughed. But he did not; nor made any remark. He did not dislike seeing those voracious maws stuffed with a fat morsel. He knew as much of the real poverty in Florence as of the innocent impudence of many poor, with their lingering medieval outlook upon the relations of the poor and the rich. He sided with those against these. Singularly, perhaps, he regarded himself as belonging among the latter, the rich. He was glad the chorus-singers and thesposinaand the worriedpadre di famigliawere going to be made glad by rich crumbs from Aurora’s board. But he could not help uneasiness for the future, when the famished locusts, still approaching single scout, should precipitate themselves in battalions, when the whole of Florence should have got the glad tidings and gathered impetus....
Well, Clotilde was there. Clotilde would know pertinent discourses to hold to the brazen beggars when their shamelessness passed bounds. Meanwhile Gerald could see that she enjoyed this distributing of good things among her fellow-citizens. Not that she was strongly disposed to charity. He did not believe she gave away anything of her own, but she loved to see Aurora give. After a life spent in a home where the lumps of sugar were counted and the coffee-beans kept under lock and key, it attracted her like wild, incredible romance.
It would have hurt her to behold this unproductive output, no doubt, had it not been a mere foreigner who lost what her own people gained,–money, besides, that could never have benefited her, and that came nearer to benefiting198her when spent in that manner than in another. Clotilde, loyal in service, giving more than good measure, offering all the pleasant fruits of a visible devotion, could yet not be expected to have–or, to state it more fairly, was not supposed by Gerald to have–any real bowels for this outsider, who might for one thing be drawing from bottomless gold-mines, or, if she were not, would suffer a ruin she had richly deserved. And might it not in aftertimes profit her, Clotilde, to have been instrumental to this person and that in obtaining money from the millionaire? The shops recognized such a title to reward, and offered it regularly to such private middlemen as herself for a careful guiding of the dispensing hand, and this without the feeling on any side that it was the payment of the unjust steward.
Gerald did not in the least despise Clotilde, poor Clotilde, with her nose like a little white trumpet between her downy pink and white cheeks, for this businesslike outlook and use of her position. It would have been different if she had been a friend and gentleman.
The portrait did not progress rapidly. Gerald was not hurrying. On Gerald’s lips as he painted there played an ambiguous smile, privately derisive of his work and the fun he was having.
No problems, no effort, none of those searching doubts of oneself that produce heart-sickness; nor yet any of those exaltations that cause one to forget the hour of meals. Curious that it should have been fun all the same!... His reply to which was that only a very poor observer could think it curious that the lower man within a man should feel it fun to be indulged. Fortunately, a natural limit was set to this Capuan period.
199He would come from the winter world into the room which the American kept enervatingly warm, a pernicious practice. One could not deny, however, that the body relaxed in it with a sense of well-being, after steeling itself to resist the insidious Italian cold, exuding from damp pavements and blown on the sharp tramontana; that cold which is never, if measured by the thermometer, severe, but against which clothing seems ineffectual. The blood does not react against it; the blood shrinks away, and stagnates around the heart.
He would change his coat for a velveteen jacket, not in order to be picturesque, but to keep his coat-cuffs clean. He was as particular as an old maid, Aurora told him, before he had been caught absentmindedly wiping paint off on his hair.
The fair model would get her chair-legs into correspondence with certain chalk-marks on the carpet, be helped to find her pose, and having made herself comfortable, turn on him blue eyes, with a faint brown shadow under them–blue eyes that wore a sheepish look until she presently forgot she was sitting for her picture. She was pressed to keep her opera-cloak over her shoulders, lest she take cold in her décolleté; the high fur collar made an effective background for her face. Then he would fall to painting, and the hours of the forenoon would fly.
An amiable woman would now and then make a remark, easily jocular. Another amiable woman–soothing presences, both–would answer. Or he would answer; there would be an interlude of familiar talk, rest, and laughing, and throwing a ball for a scampering puppy. At noon an end to labor. He would remain for lunch, that meal of cheery luxury, immorally abundant. After it he would200still linger in this house, bright and warm with fires, smoking cigarettes in a chair as luxuriously soft as those curling clouds on which are seen throning the gods in ceiling frescos, and grow further day by day into the intimacy of the amiable women. In full afternoon they would ask him if he would go out with them in their carriage, take an airing, and return for dinner; or, if he obstinately declined, might they set him down somewhere. He would make a point of not accepting, and hurry off afoot with his damp umbrella.
Although Gerald had enlightened contempt for the sensuous comfort he was taking in the fleshpots of the Hermitage, there was in it one element which he did not analyze merely to despise.
He was aware of it most often after Estelle had left the room. He settled down then for a time of heightened well-being. It was observable that the sitter also took on a faintly different air. Often at that moment she would vaguely, purposelessly, smile over to him, and he would smile in absolute reciprocity. They would not seize the opportunity for more personal exchange of talk. All would go on as before. He had nothing to say to Aurora or she to him that could not have been said before an army of witnesses. Yet it was to him as if a touch of magic had removed an impediment, and the mysterious effluvium which made the vicinity of Mrs. Hawthorne calming, healing to him, had a chance to flow and steep his nerves in a blessed quiet, a quiet which–one hardly knows how to describe such a thing–was at the same time excitement.
Gerald did not really care for talking. He could, it was true, sit up all night with Vincent Johns, discussing this subject and that; he could split hairs and wander into201every intricacy of argument with men and artists; with women too he could sometimes be litigious. The bottom truth was nevertheless that he did not care for talking. It had happened to him to sigh for a world where nobody talked forever and ever.
What he cared for was faces. They were what discoursed to you, told the veracious story of lives and emotions–not lamely, as words do, mingling the trivial with the significant, but altogether perfectly. It rested with you to understand.
Mrs. Hawthorne in talk was cheap as echoes of a traveling-circus tent: you had the simple fooling of the clown, the plain good sense of the farmer’s wife, the children’s ebullient joy in the show. But Mrs. Hawthorne in silence and abstraction was allied to things august and mysterious, things far removed from her own thoughts. These, while she sat in her foolish jewels, unsuitable by day, were very likely busy with her house, her dressmaker, the doings of her little set, gossip, the personal affairs–who knows?–of the painter painting her. But, profounder than words or thoughts, Mrs. Hawthorne’s essential manner of being related her to those forces of the world which the ancient mind figured in the shapes of women. There was something present in her of the basic kindness of old Earth, who wants to feed everybody, is ready to give her breast to all the children. Her robust joyousness reposed, one felt, on a reality, some great fact that made angers and anxieties irrational.
The student of faces could not have maintained that he got these impressions of his sitter through his eyes. It was more, after all, like a reflection received on the sensitive plate of his heart.
202One day Gerald began to hurry. He had had enough of it. The portrait was finished in a few hours. The ladies were not permitted to see it. They were made to wait until it was varnished and framed in one of the great, bright Florentine frames of which they were so fond.
Gerald, while they took their first long, rapt look, stood at one side, with a smile like a faun’s when a faun is Mephistophelian.
Aurora, clasping her hands in a delight that could find no words to express it, made a sound like the coo of a dove.
Estelle echoed this exclamation, but her charmed surprise did not ring so true, if any one had been watchful enough to seize the shade of difference. Because, not having been made to give a promise, she had from time to time taken a look privately at the painting during its progress. Aurora had known of this and been sorely tempted to do the same, but had resisted the temptation, afraid of Gerald’s bad opinion.
“My soul!” she murmured, really much moved.
Of course she knew that the portrait flattered her; but she felt as Lauras and Leonoras and Lucastas no doubt felt when their poets celebrated them under ideal forms in which their friends and families may have had trouble to recognize them. The pride of having inspired an immortal masterpiece must have stirred their hearts to gratitude toward the gifted beings able to see them disencumbered from their faults, and fix them for the contemplation of their own eyes and their neighbors’ as they had been at the best moment of their brightest hour.