Aurora, clasping her hands in a delight that could find no words to express it, made a sound like the coo of a dove
Aurora, clasping her hands in a delight that could find no words to express it, made a sound like the coo of a dove
In the days when La Grande Mademoiselle was painted as Minerva, Aurora’s portrait might have been called “Mrs. Hawthorne as Venus.” The expression of her face203was as void of history as the fair goddess’s. The tender beam of pleasure lighting it suggested that she might that moment have been awarded the apple. The portrait was, nevertheless, in a way, “Aurora all over,” as Estelle pronounced it; but an Aurora whose imperfections had been smoothed out of existence, and with them her humor; an Aurora whose good working complexion, as she called it, had been turned to lilies and roses, her hair of mortal gold to immortal sunshine, and those sagacious orbs of blue, which made friends for her by their twinkle, into melting azure stars.
The painter had, besides, glorified every detail of the setting: the rich fabric of the dress, the creamy feathers of the fan, even the roses of the breast-knot. The pearls and diamonds he had amused himself with making larger than they were, and filled these with a winking fire, those with a lambent luster. But Gerald had no mind when he indulged in satire to be gross. The whole was dainty, as shimmering as a soap-bubble, and of a fineness that rightly commended it to lovers of beautiful surfaces.
“I don’t care,” burst from Aurora, as if in reply to an inaudible criticism, “I just love it! I don’t care if it is flattered. I could hug you for it, Gerald Fane. I think it’s perfectly lovely. It’s going to be a solid satisfaction. By and by, when my double chin has caught up with me, and I’m a homely old thing, and nobody knows what I did look like in my prime, I’ll have this to show them. By that time, with my brain weakening, I hope I shall have come to thinking it was as like me as two peas. There’s some reason for living now.”
Every caller was taken to see the portrait, and heard Mrs. Hawthorne’s opinion of the talented artist. The majority204of visitors candidly shared her admiration, though not one woman among them can have failed to say to herself that the portrait was flattered. But with a portrait of oneself to have executed, who would not prefer the brush that makes beautiful?
Interest spread in the painter, whose work few even of the Florentines knew except from hearsay. No one who saw Mrs. Hawthorne’s portrait was very clearly aware–such is fame!–that it was for Fane a departure. Until it came to Leslie. She stood a long time before the painting, then exclaimed:
“What a joke!”
But she was inclined to take the same view as Mrs. Hawthorne, that when he could paint like that it was a pity Gerald should not do it oftener, to build up a reputation and fill his purse. She only would have advised him not to go quite so far another time in the same direction.
As Gerald, the portrait finished, came no more to the house, fairly as if modesty could not have endured the compliments showered upon him, Aurora with a communication to make had to square herself before her desk in the room of the red flowers and painstakingly pen a note.
Aurora, when taking pains, wrote the cleanest, clearest, most characterless hand that was ever seen outside of a school copy-book, and took pride in it. Aurora’s language, when she applied herself to composition, lost the last vestige of color and life. She wrote:
“My dear Mr. Fane:“You have not been to see us for a long time, and so I am obliged to write what I have to say. It is that our205friendscannot say enoughin praise of your portrait of me, and Mrs. Bixby, an American who is staying at the pension Trollope, wants to have one just like it–one, of course, I mean, as much like her as that is like me, but not a bit more. But before she decides she wants to know what it will cost. And that brings me to the question, What is the price of my picture? Please, let me beg you to make ita figure I shall not blush to payfor such afine piece of work. Make it a price that agrees with my estimate of the picture rather than yourvery modestone. I shall be glad, you ought to know, to pay anything you say. You couldn’t, if you tried, make it seem too much for me to pay forsuch a fine piece of work. I have got up in the middle of the night and gone down to look at it with a candle, and stood till I began to sneeze, I like it so much, though I know it’s too good-looking. So please set a good price on it and notmake me feel meantaking it. Then I’ll tell Mrs. Bixby what I paid. She’s got plenty of money, and even if she beats you down, it will be better if she knows I paid a big price. You have such a wonderful talent it ought to make your fortune, and so it will by and by. Don’t forget that we are always glad to see you and that you haven’t been for quite a while.“Yours sincerely,“Aurora Hawthorne.“P.S. What do you think Busteretto did? He saw me pouring some water into a bowl and imagined I was going to give him a bath. So he went to hide under the grate. Then of course he had to have a bath, which he wouldn’t have had to otherwise. He sends much love.“Another P.S. I meant to tell you we have got a box206for the veglione (I hope that is the way to spell it) on the last night of the Carnival. We have only asked the Fosses so far, and we want you to be sure to save that night to come with us.”
“My dear Mr. Fane:
“You have not been to see us for a long time, and so I am obliged to write what I have to say. It is that our205friendscannot say enoughin praise of your portrait of me, and Mrs. Bixby, an American who is staying at the pension Trollope, wants to have one just like it–one, of course, I mean, as much like her as that is like me, but not a bit more. But before she decides she wants to know what it will cost. And that brings me to the question, What is the price of my picture? Please, let me beg you to make ita figure I shall not blush to payfor such afine piece of work. Make it a price that agrees with my estimate of the picture rather than yourvery modestone. I shall be glad, you ought to know, to pay anything you say. You couldn’t, if you tried, make it seem too much for me to pay forsuch a fine piece of work. I have got up in the middle of the night and gone down to look at it with a candle, and stood till I began to sneeze, I like it so much, though I know it’s too good-looking. So please set a good price on it and notmake me feel meantaking it. Then I’ll tell Mrs. Bixby what I paid. She’s got plenty of money, and even if she beats you down, it will be better if she knows I paid a big price. You have such a wonderful talent it ought to make your fortune, and so it will by and by. Don’t forget that we are always glad to see you and that you haven’t been for quite a while.
“Yours sincerely,
“Aurora Hawthorne.
“P.S. What do you think Busteretto did? He saw me pouring some water into a bowl and imagined I was going to give him a bath. So he went to hide under the grate. Then of course he had to have a bath, which he wouldn’t have had to otherwise. He sends much love.
“Another P.S. I meant to tell you we have got a box206for the veglione (I hope that is the way to spell it) on the last night of the Carnival. We have only asked the Fosses so far, and we want you to be sure to save that night to come with us.”
Gerald, having read, sat down and wrote, with a disregard to the delicacy of his hair-lines and the shading of his down-strokes that would have furnished a poor example to anybody:
“The portrait, my dear Mrs. Hawthorne, is a gift, for which I will not even accept thanks, as it is, your kind opinion notwithstanding, absolutely without value. One sole point of interest it has, that of a future curiosity–the only thing of the kind that will have been painted in his whole lifetime by“Your devoted friend,“G. F.“Shall I find you at home this evening?”
“The portrait, my dear Mrs. Hawthorne, is a gift, for which I will not even accept thanks, as it is, your kind opinion notwithstanding, absolutely without value. One sole point of interest it has, that of a future curiosity–the only thing of the kind that will have been painted in his whole lifetime by
“Your devoted friend,
“G. F.
“Shall I find you at home this evening?”
No festivity has quite the vast and varied glitter of aveglione. It takes a whole city to make a party so big and bright. And the lastveglioneof the season is rather brighter than the rest, as if the spirit of revelry, inexhausted at the end of Carnival, made haste to use itself up in fireworks before the cold dawn of Ash Wednesday.
The opera-house is cleared of its rows of seats, the stage united to the parquet by a sloping floor. Every one of the boxes, rising tier above tier in a jeweled horseshoe, offers the sight of a merry supper-party, with spread table, twinkling candelabra, flowers, gala display.
Crowding floor and stage and lobbies, swarm the maskers. In the center of the great floor thecorps de ballet, regiment of sylphs in tulle petticoats and pale-pink tights, performs its characteristic evolutions to the pulsating strains of the opera orchestra. The public dances in the remaining space–dances, promenades, and plays pranks, the special diversion of the evening being to “intrigue” some one. They are heard speaking in high squeaks, in bass rumbles, in any way that may disguise the voice. Many are in costume,–Mephistos, Pierrots, Figaros, Harlequins, but the most are in simple domino.
When a lady wishes to descend among the crowd she, in the darkness at the back of the box, slips a domino over her208ball-dress, a mask over her features, and goes forth unknown to all save the cavalier on whose arm she leans.
The only uncovered faces belong to gentlemen. These look often a little foolish, a little bored, because the uncovered faces are the natural objects of the maskers’ impertinences, their part the rather barren amusement of trying to divine who it is endeavoring to intrigue, or puzzle, them, and wittily to parry personalities often more pointed than the drawing-room permits.
The party in Aurora’s box was large for the size of the box. She had gone on inviting people, then brought hampers and hampers of good things with which to feed them. There were the Fosses, Charlie with all the Hunt girls, Landini, Lavin, the American doctor, the American dentist, and Gerald.
Also Manlio. The Fosses had brought him. He had returned from furlough some time before. It was known now to everybody that he was thefidanzatoof Brenda Foss. There was no talk of his leaving the army; on the contrary, he was rumored to have prospects of early advancement to the grade of captain; wherefore the general public took it for granted that the bride’s parents were providing the indispensable marriage portion.
Aurora’s eyes, at a moment when Manlio’s attention was elsewhere, rested on him with a brooding, shining look. The symptoms of a great happiness, though modestly muffled, were plain in his face. The Beautiful One was coming back in the spring, already near, to marry him.
Aurora’s affectionate look was just tinged with regret. She had suffered a disappointment in connection with Manlio. An obstinate and uncompromising woman beyond209the ocean, when invited to join in a harmless conspiracy, had preferred to do actually, to the tune of eight thousand dollars, what the grasping creature should have been satisfied with merely appearing to do. The happiness that pierced through Manlio’s calm, like a strong light through pale marble, came to him from the bride elect’s aunt, and Aurora felt robbed.
But Mrs. Foss’s hand found hers under the table and gave it a warm squeeze, whereupon Aurora’s heart swelled in a way it had of doing. When such a dilation took place, something simultaneously happened to her eyes: the surrounding world was revealed to them as “too lovely for anything.” Dimples declared her joy.
“Won’t somebody have something more?” she asked, with the spoon in her hand poised over a bowl still half full of chicken mayonnaise.
But every one was done with eating; all were in haste to go down on to the floor and find amusement, perhaps adventure, amid the fluctuating, fascinating crowd.
The box was fairly deserted when the door opened again, and the eyes of those left in it, turning to see who entered, were met by two unknown maskers.
One wore the costume of abravoof old times, picturesque, disreputable, an operaticSparafucilein tattered mantle and ragged plume. The other was in a black satin domino, and had the face of a crow, a great black beak projecting from a black mask.
They stood a little way inside of the door as if waiting to be addressed. There was silence for a moment, while the others waited likewise. Within the eye-holes of their masks the eyes of the intruders glittered in the glassy, baffling way of eyes behind masks.
210Aurora, unused to the mode of procedure at aveglione, asked helplessly in a whisper of Landini:
“What shall I say to them?”
He spoke for her then, in Italian, because he thought it probable that these were Florentines who had come into a strange box for a lark.
“Good evening,” he said. “Will you speak, or sing, and let us know what we can do for your service?”
The bravo, lifting two long hands in loose and torn black gloves, rapidly made signs, like the deaf and dumb.
“You speak too loud,” said Gerald. “We are deafened. Let the lady speak.”
The black domino, with a shrug of the shoulders and a gesture of black-gloved hands excusing the limitations of a bird, answered by a simple caw.
Aurora now found her tongue and her cue:
“And is it yourselves?” she burst in rollickingly. “Proud to meet you! Will you partake?”
With a hospitable sweep of the arm, intelligible to speakers of any language, she made them free of her supper-table, where the candles still twinkled over an appetizing abundance.
Gerald watched sharply, saying to himself: “If they accept, we shall at least see their chins.”
But upon the invitationSparafucile, with farcical demonstrations of greed, reached forth his long fingers in the flapping gloves, seized cakes, white grapes, mandarins, nuts, and stuffed them into his wide pockets; while the black domino grasped the neck of a bottle of champagne and possessed herself of a glass. A caw of thanks issued from the black beak, and from the bravo, as with their booty the two retreated to the door, there proceeded, as unexpected211as upsetting, a whoop of rejoicing so loud that those near him fell back as if from the danger of an explosion. In the midst of this consternation the maskers were gone.
“My land! did you hear that?” cried Aurora, who had clapped both hands over the pit of her stomach. “Goodness! he’s scared the liver-pin out of me! Who d’you suppose they were?”
Landini lost not another minute before asking Mrs. Hawthorne if they should go down together for a turn.
Gerald had been on the point of asking the same thing. He had almost uttered the first word when Landini anticipated him. He felt a sharp prick of annoyance with himself for not having been quicker as much as with Landini for having been so quick. A little jealousy was quite in order with regard to Mrs. Hawthorne now, on the simple ground of that more intimate footing of friendship established between them by the portrait. With the expression of courteous mournfulness proper in an outrivaled cavalier, he made the gesture silently of having been at the lady’s service. Manlio did the same.
The singular blonde, with Nubian lip and Parisian hair, Miss Deliverance Jones, or, more commonly, Livvy, who spent this evening at the farther end of the box making her own reflections on the European doings of which she got glimpses, held up a white satin domino for her mistress’s arms. Gerald precipitated himself, took it from the maid and held it in her place. He tried to meet his friend’s glance, hoping for some faintest sign of participation in his regret at not having been “spryer.” For the space of a second, just before she fastened on her mask, he caught her eye. Brief and bright as the illumination of212summer lightning, a look of fun flashed over her face. She winked at him.
Landini ceremoniously held his arm for her and Gerald saw them leave together with a lessened objection.
Gerald had for some time past suspected that Landini was paying court to Mrs. Hawthorne. Whether the lady were aware of it he could not tell. Gerald had not believed the man had a chance, although, women being incalculable, one can never feel quite easy. But now he could almost have found it in himself to pity the somewhat singular man–Italian in fact, English in manner, Oriental in looks,–if so were he had built up any little practical dream on the fair widow’s acceptance of him. To the possibility of a sentimental dream Gerald did not accord one single thought.
He seated himself, to wait for their return. Only Manlio was left in the box besides himself. Manlio, consecrated to the worship of one afar, cared little to mix with the profane and noisy multitude. As Gerald leaned forth to see the couple that had just left them reappear down-stairs, Manlio, whose eyes followed his, remarked very sincerely, when the large easily-recognized white domino came into sight “È buona!” which can be translated either, “She is kind,” or “She is good.”
Gerald felt the warmth of an increased liking for him, because of the perspicacity he showed. They lighted cigarettes, and together looked over the marvelous scene, so rich in color and life, while they talked of things that bore no relation to it, serious things and manly–politics.
Charlie came in with Francesca, who at the door doffed her domino and mask. Both, heated from dancing, were ready for a rest and a little more of the Champagne-cup.
213“By the way, Gerald,” said Charlie, “that’s a jolly good painting, old chap, you made of our charming hostess.”
“Glad you like it!” answered Gerald carelessly, without irony.
He did not at the moment dislike Charlie.
He was genially inclined to-night toward all the world. While he had been tying on his white cravat before the glass in preparation for theveglione, it had dawned on him, to his surprise and glimmering relief, that he felt something resembling pleasure in the prospect of the confused and promiscuous affair he was enlisted for. He had constated that something like normal responsiveness to the common exterior solicitations to enjoyment was returning to his spirit, his nerves. The tang of life was pleasant to his palate.
A dim gladness moved him, as at coming across a precious thing one had supposed lost, in remembering that he was young....
He laid all this to the mere passage of time, and thanked the gods that unless one dies of one’s hurts one finally recovers.
Under these circumstances it is conceivable that he should not momentarily feel hate or impatience toward any fellow-passenger on the amusing old Ship of the World.
Scraps of poetry stirred in the wells of memory where they are dropped and lost sight of. “I feel peaceful as old age,” he quoted.
But his eye falling on the white carnation which Giovanna, knowing her signorino was goingin serata, had provided for his buttonhole, lines less grey came to his lips: “Neque tu choreas....” He fished for the half-forgotten words. “Donec virenti canities abest....”
214Because a positive sense of health pervaded him, he, with a philosophy founded upon observation, remarked that by this sign no doubt he was on the verge of an illness. But he absentmindedly neglected the practices preventive of misfortune, believed in not solely by thepopolinoof Italy, but recommended to him in boyhood by the excellent physician who after curing his mumps had taught him to make horns with his fingers against calamity of any sort that might threaten.
So, being in a good humor, and made further contented by the uplifting privilege of a broad unmistakable wink from a lady, he did not dislike Charlie as usual; he even, as he looked at him, lustrous-eyed, clear-skinned, smooth, lighting his cigarette at a candle, wondered why one should not like him. He had his good qualities. Mere vitality is one. Those points of conduct that called upon him the disdain of persons more fastidious with regard to their actions, secret or revealed, than he, were not productive, after all, of much harm....
With eyes narrowed, as when he was examining a face to paint it, Gerald watched the handsome fellow in an animated cousinly dispute with Francesca–with the result, really against his hope, of finding himself, instead of aided by his effort of good-will to discover new virtues, confirmed in his previous disesteem. He could make himself almost love Charlie by picturing him afflicted, humiliated, sorrowful. But he could not picture him sorrowful except for narrowly personal misfortunes, such as poverty, sickness. One could not even be sure, with a face of so little generosity or moral consciousness as Charlie’s, that he would under all circumstances be incapable of active malignity....
215The latter thought Gerald had the justice to sweep aside with an unspoken apology.
“Of course, you, Charlie, never could admit that a cousin and a female might know better than you!” Francesca was contending noisily. “It happens that I have lately looked up, with some care, the costumes of thetrecento....”
“My dear girl!” interrupted Charlie. “You will be insisting next that anincroyableis a Greek, or that creature, that sort of Italian bandit who gave the disgusting roar, is a French marquis.... Lend me your glass, will you? I think I see some one I know.”
“It’s Trix,” he said after a moment, “making signs to us from the Sartorio’s box. They want us to come over. Come on, let’s go.”
Manlio and Gerald were again left alone in the silent company of the pale coffee-with-milk-colored maid, who unnoticed crept nearer and nearer the front of the box to peep at the brilliant house.
Gerald was beginning to think that Landini kept Mrs. Hawthorne rather longer than was fair when the door opened to let them in, with Estelle and Leslie and Percy and Doctor Baldwin, all laughing together.
“Well, have you intrigued any one?” Gerald asked Aurora.
“Me? Oh,Iwouldn’t be up to any such pranks,” she said. “Has any one been intriguing you?”
“I haven’t been down, Mrs. Hawthorne. I have stayed quietly here, hoping to go down with you, if you will be so good, merely intriguing myself meanwhile–” he dropped his voice so as to be heard of her only,–“with wondering what kept you so awfully long.”
“Interesting company, funny sights.”
216“Are you too tired to come down again and give me a dance?”
“Bless your soul, I’m not tired, but I’m going home.”
“Going home?”
“Man, do you know what time it is?”
“I know, of course. But you can’t mean you are going home. You only came at midnight, and it’s less than half-past two. Hosts of people stay until the big chandelier goes out.”
“Ah, don’t try to talk me over! It’s time I sought my downy, if I want to get up in the morning. We’re going to begin Lent like good girls, Estelle and I, by going to church.”
Gerald was certain these excuses were hollow. It was obvious, at the same time, that Mrs. Hawthorne was bent on leaving. He was vexed. He wondered what her real reason was, as men so often do, after women have taken pains to give them in detail their reasons, and tried, ignoring what she said, to get some light from her face.
It looked to him excited in a smothered way. He at once connected this repressed excitement with Landini; but then, the face was mirthful, too, in the same lurking manner, and the proposals of a serious man could hardly affect even the most frivolous quite like a comic valentine.
He finally preferred the simplest interpretation: she had seen as much as she wanted to; she was prosaically sleepy and going home to bed.
“Good night,” she said. “Come soon to see us! Adieu; no,ory-vwaw.”
“Am I not permitted to take you to your carriage?”
After seeing them tucked in their snug coupé and hearing this wheel off, Gerald returned to the great hall. He217without question would remain until the big light was extinguished. Colors, forms, sparkle, golden haze–a painter must be dead or a duffer to leave before the gay glory of it faded and was dispersed in the gray dawn.
The scene viewed from near had its cheapness, its crudity, like those poor painted faces of the dancers pirouetting in the midst of a public they can more surely enchant from the distance of the stage. The costumes, so many of them, came from humble costumers who let them from year to year without renewal of the tinsel or freshening of the ribbons. But those very things gave to this page of life its depth of interest, gave reality to this romance.
The ball was taking a slightly rougher, noisier character as it approached the end. Some of the boxes were darkened, but the floor was full, even after the tiredballerinehad been permitted by the management to go home.
Gerald himself now became one of the slightly bored-looking men he had observed earlier, strolling about,claqueunder arm, in the rigid black and white which took on an effect of austerity amid the blossom-colors of the costumes. He sincerely hoped no one would approach him to intrigue him, and the hope found expression, more than he knew, in his countenance. He felt unable to meet such an adventure in a manner that would satisfy his taste. It marked a fundamental difference between him, at bottom a New-Englander, and his friends of Latin blood, he thought, that he had not the limberness, the laisser-aller, the lack of self-consciousness and stupid shame, which enables them so good-humoredly to take the chance of appearing fools. And so before this romance he was only a reader; they were it–the romance.
He could deplore his own gray rôle, but not change it; he218therefore wished anew, every time a merry masker looked as though she might intend accosting him that she would think better of it and leave him in deserved neglect. He had his wish; he was in the whole evening teased by nobody whatever.
His eyes, straying over the crowd, sought for known faces. All Florence had turned out for the occasion, but some of it had by this time gone home. Most of the men he knew had women on their arms, and from their silence or talkativeness one might without undue cynicism determine whether these were their own wives and daughters or wives and daughters of others.
A tall, gray-whiskered old gentleman in uniform passed him–none other than Antonia’s friend, General Costanzi–who was trying to retain all his dignity while beset by two frolicsome little creatures looking like the chorus in “Faust,” who, suspended one on each of his arms, were trying to win from him a promise to take them to supper. He sent toward Gerald a look of comical long-suffering, to which Gerald replied by a nod vaguely congratulatory, and a smile that courteously wished him luck in that lottery.
The painter Castagnola, broad-blown, debonair, passed him, in a costume of sterling and royal magnificence, copied from a portrait of Francis First whom he in feature resembled. At his side, with gold cymbals in her hands, went a figure in floating robes of daffodil gauze, a dancer from one of the frescoes of Pompeii, wearing a mask–four inches of black velvet–only for the form. Her bare shoulders and arms, of an insolent beauty, forbade any mistake as to her identity. Gerald knew, like the rest, that it was Castagnola’s model.
Charlie passed him, at a little distance, with a laughing219lady hitched to his elbow. Her mask swung from her hand–the ball was wearing to its end, and masks are hot. The hood of her rose-colored domino had been pushed back from a mass of ruffled black hair; her eyes and teeth gleamed with equal brightness and directness of purpose. It was suggested to Gerald by her air and manner that she had forgotten the spectators. Her freedom from constraint was shared by Charlie. Seeing them together reminded Gerald that Charlie was after all Italian,–one forgot it sometimes. He tried to remember which of the bits of scandal tossed on to the dust-heap at the back of his memory was the one fitting this Signora Sartorio.
They passed out of sight, and he forgot them in the interest of the next thing.
Carlo Guerra, like him alone, stopped to chat with him. Guerra, a pleasant figure in Anglo-American as well as Florentine circles, with his fine head of a monk whom circumstances have rendered worldly, had, before inheriting his comfortable income, been a journalist. He still enjoyed above all things the exercise of the critical faculty, and had much to say this evening about a recent exhibition of paintings.
Gerald was hearing it with proper interest when some part of his attention was drawn away by a sound across the house. It was, softened by distance, that species of lion’s roar, incredibly large as issuing from a human throat, and comical from such a disproportion, which had startled the audience several times already that evening. Gerald turned, without much thinking, to look off in the direction whence it came and single out the figure with which it was associated, when he was surprised to find the figure he sought almost under his nose. Not more than six feet220from him were to be seen the tattered mantle and ragged plume ofSparafucile; likewise the thick crow’s-beak of the black domino.
The two were looking at him and, his impression was, laughing. He fancied they were on the point of speaking to him,–he had thought earlier in the evening when they came into the box that they might be acquaintances,–but the crow suddenly pressed tittering against the bandit, pushing and pulling him away. In a moment they were lost among the crowd.
Who, then, had been accountable for the roar at the other end of the house? An imitator? A double? Gerald suspected a masked-ball device intended to intrigue. He gave it no more thought, but proceeded, started on that line by the episode, to reflect on the singularity, yes, the crassness, of Mrs. Hawthorne’s determination to leave the ball early. The secret of it was, of course, that she had no imagination, no education of the imagination. Aveglionewas caviar to her. This wonderful scene, beheld for the first time, perhaps the only time in life, and she had had to go to bed just as if they had been in Boston or Charlestown! If one must go to church in such a case, it was Gerald’s opinion, one does not go to bed at all. But she belonged to the class of people who would miss the last act of an opera rather than miss a train or allow the beans to burn. A bread-and-butter person, a sluggish, fat-brained person, elementary, not awakened and sharpened to appreciation and wonder. If he had not been in such a good humor he might have been cross, scornful of her; as it was, he indulgently thought her merely too flatly healthy in every taste for anything but the wilds of Cape Cod to which she sometimes playfully referred.
221He here perceived that he had entirely lost the thread of Guerra’s talk, and that Guerra, probably aware of it, had moved to another subject. It was hearing the name Hawthorne that had startled him to attention.
“I saw you earlier in the evening in a box with Mrs. Hawthorne,” Guerra said, “whom, you remember, I had the pleasure of meeting at Mrs. Grangeon’s.”
After considering a moment with a half-smile, he nodded and pronounced in the tone of an impartial critic, “Simpatica!” Then, after considering another moment, nodded again. “Ha gli occhi di donna buona.” Which means, or nearly, “She has good eyes.” And Gerald’s esteem for Guerra was immensely raised, for while thinking very well of him, he would yet not have expected a man like Guerra to discern so much at a first meeting. A worldling like Guerra might so naturally have said “È bella!” for Aurora that evening in her best frock, had beenbella–beautiful; or he might have said, “Begli occhi!” for her shining blue eyes admitted of that description. That Guerra had said what he said indicated finer feeling than Gerald had given him credit for.
Still lingering in desultory talk, the former journalist now asked:
“Have you seen the Grangeon?”
“No,” said Gerald. “Is she here?”
“Yes; she is with the Rostopchine, in a box of the third order.” He looked up and around to find the box with his eyes, and after a moment indicated it to Gerald. “There! Do you see them? The Rostopchine in pale purple, and the Grangeon in an Indian thing all incrusted with green beetle-wings, a thing for a museum. They are talking with a uniform whom I do not know. She was222speaking of you this evening–Antonia, asking me what you are doing. She has great faith in your talent.”
Gerald’s lip curled a little sourly, and he stood looking upward without reply.
Turning to look down through her jeweled lorgnette and running her eyes over the crowd, Antonia now saw him. Recognition lighted her face to unexpected liveliness. She fluttered her hand to him demonstratively.
After bowing and smiling, he stood quietly, with face upturned, receiving her showered greetings.
He had a certain knowledge of Antonia. She was capable of entirely dropping the remembrance of her bad treatment of him; perhaps forgetting it really, but likelier choosing merely that he should forget it. She permitted herself the caprices of a spoiled beauty.
A classic golden fillet this evening bound her gray locks; a jewel depending from it sparkled upon the deeply lined forehead of a brain-worker. Her irreparably withered neck was clasped by an Indian necklace, showy as a piece of stage jewelry. Light-minded smiles wreathed her heavy face. Where her sleeves stopped there began the soft and serried wrinkles of those long, long buttonless gloves which Sarah Bernhardt had brought into fashion.
It was not difficult to see in what illusion Antonia chose to live to-night. Her readers might even, perhaps, have determined which of her own heroines she personated.
For all these things Gerald liked his old friend the more.
Her lips framed the words, “Come up! Come up!” while her hand made the equivalent signs.
He nodded assent, and with Guerra walking beside him started on his way. Guerra under the central box excused himself and turned back, having already paid his223respects. Gerald, once out in the lobby, advanced more uncertainly, finally hesitated and stopped.
He was not sure he wished to see Antonia in circumstances which would not allow him to express his resentment of her behavior toward the friend whom with her formal permission he had brought to her house. It was owed to Mrs. Hawthorne not to let the incident pass. He had ceased to be furious at Antonia; he had not written in cold blood the wrathful, finishing letter planned in heat of brain. That, after all, was Antonia as he had always known her and been her friend: Antonia, capable of heroisms and generosities, fineness and insight, density and petulance. One could not drop the great woman into the waste-basket because on one occasion more she had been perverse and the sufferer happened to be oneself. But the great woman, thought Gerald, needed a sober word spoken to her. In conclusion, he would not go to see her, no, until he could have it out with her.
And so instead of seeking Antonia in her box, Gerald cut short his difficulty by going home. It was high time; it had been Lent for hours. If Antonia wereintrigataat his failure to appear, it would only be in keeping with the fanciful circumstances of the hour and place.
Early in Lent the weather treated Florence to what Aurora and Estelle called a cold snap. Their surprise and indignation were extreme. That Italy, sunny Italy, should feel herself free to have these alpine or polar fancies!
Estelle showed what she thought of it by taking cold. Aurora affected wearing her furs in the house. To increase their sense of ill usage, they would now and then turn their faces away from the fire and sigh, admiring how the air was dimmed by a puff of silver smoke. These pilgrims from a Northern climate, who knew so well the sensation of breath freezing in the nostrils and numbness seizing the nose when on certain winter days they stepped from their houses into the snow-piled streets at home, could not admit that in the City of Flowers one should catch sight of one’s breath,–indoors, too.
The little monthly roses, shivering but brave, blooming still, or blooming already, out in the garden, bore witness, after all, to the clemency of the winter, and upheld the city’s title to its name. The garden altogether was nearly as green as ever. Against alaternus, ivy, myrtle, laurestine the season could not prevail. Aurora decided that the blame for their discomfort rested with the house; she planned drastic and fundamental improvements which it was quite certain the noble landlord would not permit her to carry out.
225What with Estelle being half sick and herself, as she claimed, half frozen, Aurora at the end of a day during which the sun had not lighted the world by one feeblest ray, and the night had closed down thick and damp, was just a little disposed to low spirits. She had not been out, and nobody had come to see her. She felt the weariness that follows for certain sociable natures upon a long stretch of hours without renewal from outside.
She sensibly reacted against it by making the sitting-room as cozy as she could, drawing close the crushed-strawberry curtains, piling wood on the fire, placing a screen so that it shielded her chair and table from the draft; and, seated in her chimney-corner, took up a piece of knitting.
She was not very fond of reading, and she was fond of knitting large soft woolly afghans, of which she made presents to her friends. Reading seemed to her, anyhow, a rather idle thing to be doing. Knitting came under the head of work. How often had her story-paper been snatched from her when she was a girl, and a sock to knit thrust in her hand, with the bidding to be about something useful. How she had hated it. But now that she was free she still had a better conscience when she knit.
To the click of her long wooden needles she thought, with more pleasure than was afforded by any other vision at the moment, of a hot water bottle gently warming the bed into which she meant to creep at exactly nine o’clock. This hour she had set when at eight already the temptation to go to bed and forget the unsatisfactory day in sound warm slumbers had been so strong as to make yielding to it appear wrong.
These vestiges of Puritanism Aurora did not recognize226as such, but yet her mind as she was practicing self-discipline turned, without seeking for the reason, toward the person who had done most to inculcate in her the doctrine that if you like to do a thing that itself is almost surely a sign of the thing being wicked, and that if you dislike it it is very probably your duty.
While she continued to appear the signora to whom the servants’ eyes were accustomed, albeit a trifle more absent and unsmiling, she was to herself a young girl in a far country, living and moving in scenes of difficulty and misunderstanding with a sharp-chinned, narrow-chested, timidly-beloved just woman–her mother, long since laid to rest....
There was nothing from outside to dispel the faint heartache accompanying this retrospection; wind and rain against the windows were more proper to increase the melancholy, and Aurora, suddenly sick of staying up to be blue, wound her yarn to start for bed. But first, for just a moment, she would go down-stairs, she thought, and have a look at her portrait, for that was the most comforting thing to do that she could think of. She loved her portrait as a child loves its favorite toy.
This she was intending when the sound of the door-bell at once stopped and cheered her by the possibility it held out of some diversion. Vitale entered with a package.
Catching in what he said the name Gaetano, Aurora took it to mean that Gaetano had brought the package. He was waiting below, she did not doubt. Gaetano was Giovanna’s nephew, and had more than once come on errands from Gerald. Saying, “Aspettare!” she hastened into her room for the porte-monnaie which resided in her top drawer. From this she drew a reward that should make227the journey through night and rain from Gerald’s house to hers seem no hardship. Her blues had vanished.
Before removing the rain-splashed newspaper, she gazed for a moment at the package, trying to guess what it could be. It was square, flat, about a foot and a half one way by a foot the other. What was Gerald Fane sending her like that without any enlightening missive? A note might be inside. She cut the string, took off the newspaper, to find a second wrapper of clean white drawing-paper. After touching and pinching, she guessed the object to be a picture-frame and picture. Filled with curiosity, she pulled off the last wrapping, and with a face at first very blank stared before her....
It was a painting, one of the kind she had seen at Gerald’s studio and not liked.
Different though it was from the portrait down-stairs,–as different as poverty from riches, as twilight from day,–she could yet see that this also was meant for a portrait of herself. She remembered tying that blue neckerchief over her head and under her chin one evening, trying to look like an Italian in herpezzola, to make the others laugh.
She stood the picture on the chair which she had pulled up before her so as to rest her feet on the rung, off the stone floor, still to be felt, she imagined, through the rug. Of course it was herself, but how disappointing–disappointing enough to shed tears over–to have this held up to her after that lovely being down-stairs! How unkind of her friend Gerald!
Unfair, too, for although this, in not being a beauty, was obviously more like her than the other, she could not admit that it was any truer. She could not believe that she ever really looked like this, though she knew that it was the228way she sometimes felt. How had Gerald known she ever felt like this?
That she was a person who ate well, slept well, felt well, loved fun, was giving and gay–that was all most people knew, or were entitled to know, of her; all she knew of herself a good deal of the time. Such things could never be the whole of any person, of course. Every one has had something to overcome. Some persons have had to overcome and overcome and overcome, one thing after another, one thing after another, that has tried to drag and keep them down. She had had–probably because, as her mother often told her, she was born with such a lot of the devil in her–a great many trials sent to her, for her discipline, no doubt, her cleansing; but she had come out of them still unreduced, still eager for a good time.
All persons are made up, in a way, of these experiences of the past, but they don’t expose them in their faces, they forget them as much as they can.
Yes, as much as they can. How much is that? The only true sorrows being involved with one’s affections, and the objects of one’s love never far from one’s thoughts, how much could a person be said to forget her sorrows, really?
Aurora reflected upon this for some time, staring the while at her portrait. The face looking back from the canvas was very like her, had she but known it, at this exact moment, while the thoughts produced, the memories wakened, by it substituted for her ordinary hardiness the delicate look of a capacity for pain.
As she gazed at the portrait longer she liked it better; from minute to minute she became more reconciled, and found herself finally almost attracted. Something from it penetrated her for which she had no definition. It was229perhaps the dignity of humanity confronting her in that strong and simple face framed by the kerchief, like a woman of the people’s,–her own face, but not certainly as she saw it in the mirror; a humanity that out of the common materials offered to it day by day had rejected all that was mean and contrived to build up nobleness.
Half perceiving that this portrait in its different way flattered her as much if not more than the portrait down-stairs, she, while modestly refusing to be fooled by the compliment, yet felt a motion of affectionate gratitude toward Gerald for the sympathy which had enabled him to pierce beneath the surface and see that Bouncing Betsy had her feelings, too, her history; yes, her bitter tragedy.
While continuing with her eyes on the picture, she from time to time wiped them, and when the door-bell rang again, aware of being “a sight,” took the precaution of retiring to her bedroom, so that if Vitale should come to announce a visit,–it was not yet nine o’clock,–she could the better make him understand that he must excuse her to the visitor; she was going to bed.
But learning from the servant that Signor Fane was below, she changed her mind, and chose unhesitatingly from her stock of useful infinitives the appropriate two: “Dire venire.”
Gerald found her by the fire, her fur-cloak over her shoulders, her woolly afghan in her hands, and the picture on the chair before her.
“Well?” he asked expectantly, looking at it, too, after they had shaken hands.
“You’ve made me feel sorry for myself. What’s the use?” she answered in a little sigh, keeping her reddened eyes turned away from him. “Hush! Wait a moment!230I was forgetting,” she added, in comedy anticlimax, like a housewife who in the midst of a scene of sentiment should smell the dinner scorching. She jumped up, and went without the least noise to close the door to Estelle’s room, returning from which she illogically fell to talking in a whisper.
“Estelle’s gone to bed. She’s got a snow-balling old cold. I’ve rubbed her chest with liniment, and tied up her throat in a compress, and given her hot lemonade, and she lies there with a hot water bottle at her feet and grease on her nose, and let’s hope she’ll feel better in the morning.”
“Let’s hope, indeed. I’m very sorry to hear she’s ill. But she’s sure to be better by to-morrow, isn’t she, with all that care and those remedies. I hope you haven’t a cold, too, Mrs. Hawthorne. You almost look,” he said innocently, “as if you had. This weather is dreadful. You haven’t, have you, dear friend?”
“No; I guess what you see is just that I’ve been crying. Don’t say anything about it. Don’t notice it. Never mind. Come and sit down by the fire and get warm. Your hand was like ice.”
“It’s very bad out, and not much better in, except here by your generous fireside. I haven’t been warm all day.”
“Why didn’t you come before? It isn’t what I call balmy here, but I expect it’s balmier than at your place.”
With her kindly unconstraint she reached for one of his hands to test its temperature. With a little cry of “Mercy me!” she closed his numb fingers between her palms to warm them, as if the blaze could not have accomplished this end so well as they.
He let it be, not with the same unconsciousness in the231matter as she, but hoping that the soft, warm infolding would somehow do him good. He had come in the rather desperate hope of being done good to. As he had been about to start out, having intended, when he sent the portrait, to follow close upon it, he had found himself feeling so ill–feeling, at the end of the dismal day, so indescribably burdened and ill and apprehensive of worse things–that he had been on the point of giving it up. But then the wish itself to escape from his bad feelings had impelled him forth toward the spot glowing warmer and cheerier in his thoughts than any other, where, if he could forget how ill he felt, he would naturally feel better. Aurora’s house during the days of painting the first portrait had come to feel remarkably like home to him.
So when Aurora released his hand, saying, “Let’s have the other,” he docilely gave it to her, though the fire had already partly thawed it. Gratefully, with the hand set free, he covered both her kind hands, which loved so much to warm things and feed things and pet things and give away money.
Overcoming his ordinary stiffness, he pressed them right manfully, to signify that he would not speak of her tears if she wished him not to, but here was his sympathy, and with it his penitence, if so were that, as she intimated, he had had a share in making them flow.
“So you are all alone this evening?” he asked in the voice that makes whatever is said seem affectionate and comforting.
“Yes. I haven’t even Busteretto. I let Estelle keep him on the foot of her bed. She’s perfectly devoted to him. And Clotilde is busy in her own corner of the house, going over the bills. It takes lots of time.”
232“And where is the musician in ordinary, the gifted Italo?” he inquired, with a smile meant to draw from her a smile.
She was caught without difficulty. “The gifted Checkerberry hasn’t been round lately,” she smiled. “He won’t expose himself to the night air for some time. He’s got laryngitis so he can’t talk above a whisper.” Her eye twinkled and she laughed, though what she communicated was not on the face of it very funny.
He was perhaps calling attention to this when he said, “Poor devil!”
“Yes,” she agreed, achieving sobriety, “it’s bad weather for laryngitis,” and went on with the weather, dropping Italo. “It’s been a mean sort of day, hasn’t it? I haven’t set foot outside. I was already feeling kind of blue and making up my mind to go to bed when Gaetano came with your present.”
There was an intimation in her glance that this event had not made the world appear any rosier.
Both turned to look at the picture. Their hands loosened naturally; they sat apart.
“Can’t you see why I had to paint it, Mrs. Hawthorne?” he asked, speaking eagerly, and as if pressing his defense.
“How could I endure to have that thing down-stairs stand as my idea, my sole idea, of you? And how could I bear to make you a gift, a sole gift, of a piece of work I do not respect? This may be worth no more,–I think differently,–but it is at least the best I can produce. It has my sanction. You, too, believe me, will prefer it to the other after a while.”
She shook her head a little disconsolately.
“The other you can, if you must, keep in your drawing-room233to make an agreeable spot of color,” he went on, reversing their parts and trying to induce in her a lighter humor; “it has that perfectly legitimate use. In your drawing-room, you know, Auroretta, among the pictures of your choosing, it does not, in our Italian idiom, altogether disappear. This one you will keep out of sight, but will look at now and then, if you please; and I quite trust you, with time, to recognize that it was painted by some one who understood and honored you more than there was any evidence of his doing when he perpetrated, for a joke, that bonbon-box subject down-stairs.”
Mrs. Hawthorne, with soft and saddened eyes fixed on the portrait, again shook her head, sighing, “Poor thing!”
“Not at all!” he protested almost peevishly. “Please not to suggest by pitying her that I have not represented there a fine, big, strong thing, built to stand up under anything! I could slay, with pleasure, at any time”–he diverged, carried away by a long-standing disgust,–“the pestiferous asses who call my things morbid. I am too careful to keep true to what I see. The difference between them–I mean the critics who call me morbid–and myself, is in the degree of sight.”
“Don’t get excited, Geraldino!” she checked fumings which she did not entirely understand. “What I meant was that looking at her has made me think of all the things that have gone wrong with me in my whole life. Don’t you call that a tribute? You couldn’t have painted this picture if you hadn’t suspected those things, and, honest, I don’t see how you could suspect them. Ever since I came over here I’ve been so jolly. Seems to me I’ve been nothing but jolly. I’ve been having such a good time! How you could see under it, I don’t know.234As a matter of fact, I’ve always been jolly between-times. Give me half a chance, let me get out of the frying-pan, I’d be ready in a minute to go on a picnic. But I’ve not been spared my troubles, Geraldino; you were right there.”
At this reference to many sorrows, he found a thing to do more expressive than words. Sitting near each other as they were, he could reach her without rising; he bent forward and touched his lips commiseratingly to her hand.
He might have known that it would bring her story, but he had not schemed for this, and, unwilling, yet eager, to hear, was a prey to compunctions on more than one ground when, after a little gulp and sniff, she burst forth:
“I’ve seen perfectly dreadful times, Geraldino. Some of them were the sort of thing you can get over, but some of them–upon my word, I wonder at myself how I’ve got over them as I have. The queer thing is–I haven’t, in a way. It will come over me sometimes, in the queerest places, at the oddest moments, that I am still that woman to whom such awful things happened, that I, playing my silly monkey-shines, am that heart-broken woman.”
“I know,” murmured Gerald, and took her plump hands steadyingly between his hard, thin ones.
“I’ve never had any sense,” she let herself go. “Anybody can see that; and when I was younger I had even less, naturally, than I have now. Always, always, I wanted so to be happy! I wanted to have a good time. I was born wanting to have a good time. And everything was against it. But I managed somehow. One way or another, I got to the circus ’most every time. My mother used to wonder what my finish would be, and try to lick the Old Boy out of me. But it couldn’t be done. I’m just like my father, my dear old pa, who was a sinner. He let ma235have her way in everything, as he thought it right to do. Not, I guess, because he always liked her way, but because after my sister, who was a beautiful child, died in such a terrible way that I can’t even bear to mention it,–she caught fire,”–Aurora hurriedly interjected, “ma came so near going out of her senses that pa humored her in everything. He thought the world of her; so did we all, but it couldn’t be called a happy home. There were three boys, besides me,–I was the last,–and we were all such everlastingly lively young ones, and ma was so strict! Pa was away most of the time getting a living. My pa, you know, was a pilot. It wasn’t a fat living for so many of us, but that wouldn’t have mattered long as we had enough to eat. But ma, poor soul, because of that twist her mind had taken through sorrow, was always seeing something wrong in everything we did; she never could be quiet or contented. The boys didn’t get so much of it: they were off out of doors and later at their trades; but me, I was kept in to help with the housework, and kept in for company, and kept in for no other reason, I guess, than because my wicked heart longed so to go out and play with the girls and boys. I dare say it was good for me. Ma meant all right, that I know, but ma was all along a sick woman. We realized later that though she was round and about, busy every minute, she was sick for years with the trouble that finally took her away. I don’t want you to think I didn’t have a real good mother, for I did–a first-rate mother who did her honest best to make a good woman of me.”
“I know, I know.” By a reminding pressure of her hands he begged she would trust him not to misunderstand.
236“But my pa–you should have known my pa!” Aurora’s face brightened immensely, and Gerald suspected that it was like him she looked when she screwed her lips to one side in a manner humorously suggesting a pipe at the corner of her mouth, and said in a voice not her own, “Golly, Nell, can’t you whistle for a snifter?” He could almost see a sailor’s chin-whiskers.
“He took me with him once in a while. Golly, those were good times, if you please! Free as air, all the peanuts I could eat, out in the boat with my pa, and catch fish, and catch a steamer if we could. We had an 8 big as a house on our sail. He was as good a seaman, my pa was, as any in East Boston, but he wasn’t a hustler. But there, if he’d been a hustler, he wouldn’t have been my pa. Wouldn’t for a house with a brownstone front have had my pa any different from what he was. Grandma was just the same sort, God bless her! easy-going, jolly, come a day, go a day, do as she please and let you do as you please. I used to have such lovely times at her house, summers, down on the Cape, before my sister died!
“It was there I first knew Hattie–Estelle. Her aunt’s house was next to my grandma’s. I used to think her the luckiest child that ever was born. Seemed to me she had just about everything–a gold locket and chain, bronze boots, and paper dolls by the dozen. We used to play together, day in day out, one of those plays that last all the time, where you pretend you’re some one else and act it out in all you do. We kept it up for years. I don’t see that we’ve changed much with growing up. Seems to me we were pretty near the same then as we are now, having our spats, but having lots of fun, and wanting to share everything. Estelle lived in East Boston, too, and237was going to be a school-teacher. It seemed to me that to be a school-teacher was just about the finest thing anybody could do. That would have been my ambition, to be a school-teacher. But I never got beyond the grammar school, I was needed at home to help mother. Then my poor pa died–an accident down in the docks,”–Aurora, lowering her voice, began to hurry and condense,–“then Ben, then Joe, then–will you believe it?–Charlie, that I loved best. They all had the same delicate constitution as ma, it turned out, and a predisposition to the same trouble. Then finally, after going through with so much, my poor mother went, too, and for that I could only be thankful. And I had taken care of them all. I wasn’t twenty-three when I was the last left. Doesn’t it seem strange! I sometimes can’t believe it even now.”
This rapid enumeration of calamities so great robbed them of terror and pathos, yet Gerald had somewhat the startled, shocked feeling of a man who knows he has been struck by a bullet, though his nerves have not yet announced it by suffering.
Aurora, who after the passing of years could think of these things without tears, yet in speaking of them to a sympathetic hearer had obvious difficulty in keeping a stiff upper lip. Gerald turned away his eyes while with her hand she covered and tried to stop her mouth’s trembling.
“Poor child!” he said, with a sincerity which saved the words from insignificance.
“Yes,” she half laughed. “Wouldn’t one think it enough to sort of subdue anybody, take the starch out of them for some time? When I came out of that house of sickness I couldn’t think of anything else but sickness and death. It stuck to me like the smell of disinfectants238after you’ve been in a hospital. I couldn’t think of anything but that it would take me next. I supposed I must be affected, too. But the doctor examined me, and do you know what he said? ‘Sound as a trout,’ he said. ‘You’re so sound,’ he said, ‘you’re so healthy, that we’ll have to shoot you to get you to the resurrection.’ Then I felt better. He was a new doctor that we’d called in toward the end. He knew how I was situated, and as he seemed to think I’d make a good nurse, he got me a chance in the City Hospital, where I could get my training. And Hattie, dear Hattie, what a friend she’s been! She and her ma and pa made me come and make my home with them. It’s since then that we’ve been like sisters.”
At the sound, appositely occurring, of a cough in the neighboring room, Aurora stopped and listened.
“Dear me!” she whispered. “D’you suppose she’s lying awake?”
“She may be coughing in her sleep,” he suggested.
“Yes,” Aurora said dubiously, after further listening, and hearing nothing more. “And if I should go in to see, I might wake her. The bell-rope is right at the head of her bed; all she has to do is pull it if she wants somebody to come. I was entertaining you with the story of my life, wasn’t I? Where had I got to? Oh, yes. There in the hospital I just loved it. Perhaps you can’t see how I could. I just did. I had lots of hard work. The training was sort of thrown in in my case with other duties, but there were the other nurses and the house-doctors, I grew chummy with them all. I had fun with the patients, too. You don’t know how much good it does you to watch anybody get well; the majority get well. It’s good for them, besides, to have you jolly.”
239“Your gaiety of heart makes me think of the grass, Aurora, the blessed ineradicable grass, that will grow anywhere, that you see pushing up between the paving-stones of the hard city, and finding a foothold on the blank of the rock, and fringing the top of the ruined castle, and hiding the new-made graves.”
Aurora, always simple-mindedly charmed with a compliment, paused long enough to investigate Gerald’s comparison, then resumed, with the effect of taking a plunge into deep waters:
“But it was there I met the fellow who did me the worst turn of any....
“They brought him in with broken ribs one rainy night, after he’d been knocked down in the street by a team and kicked by the horses. I wasn’t his regular nurse, but I was in and out of his room, and if he rang while his regular nurse was at her meals, I’d go. Everybody knows that when a man’s sick he’s liable to get sweet on this or that one of his nurses.
“How I could have been mistaken in Jim Barton I can’t see now. Since knowing him, if I ever see anybody that looks a bit like him, I shun them like poison, because I know as well as I need to that however nice they may appear, you can’t depend upon them. But before I knew him I’d never stop to distrust anybody.
“It began with our setting up jokes together; he could be awfully funny even when he was swearing like a pirate about his luck landing him in a hospital. Bad language didn’t seem so awful coming from him, because he was so light-complexioned and boyish-looking. He was only passing through the city, in an awful hurry to get West, when he got hurt, and he was madder than a hornet at240the delay. But after a while he quieted down, because he’d got something else to think about, which was getting me to go along with him to California, where he’d bought a share in a mine. And me, star idiot of the world, it seemed the grandest thing that had ever happened. I’d never had anybody in love with me that way before. The boys had always liked me, but I’d been like another fellow among them, and I’d never more than just been silly for a week or two at a time over one fellow and another at a distance. And here was a solid offer from a perfectly splendid man who had everything, money included. They’d found several thousand dollars on him when he was picked up. And the yarns he told about gold-mines!... But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the gold-mines, it was ‘the way with him’ that caught me. I guess when you’re in love you’re no judge of your man. We two, I tell you, seemed made for each other. He was as fond of a good time as I, and he loved fun, like me. We were going to California to make our everlasting fortune. You’d have thought there was no more doubt about it than the Gospels being true. And the good times we were going to have while doing it were nothing to the good times we’d have after, when I’d have my diamonds and he’d have his horses and things. As I said, the diamonds weren’t needed; I’d have gone with him anywhere just for the fun of being together. I couldn’t see what I’d done to deserve my blessings. I guess he was in love, too, as far as it was in him to be; I’ll do him that justice.
“Hattie and her ma, while they had nothing to say against Jim, wanted me to wait awhile. But Jim couldn’t wait. The moment he was well enough he wanted to be241off. And I didn’t care much about waiting either. I felt as if I’d known him all my life. So they said nothing more and gave us a perfectly lovely wedding from their house. They didn’t see through him any more than I did, and in a way it wasn’t strange, because he wasn’t hiding anything in particular or misrepresenting anything. He believed all he said about the big money he was going to make and the grand times we should have. He was born with the sort of nature that always believes things are going to turn out right without labor and perseverance on your part. He wasn’t fond of work, that’s sure. What we ought to have done was find out something about his past; but even that, I guess, wouldn’t have opened our eyes, with him before us looking like one of ourselves. And it wasn’t a very long past; he was young. He came of good folks, I guess. I never saw them, but there are ways of telling. Good folks, but not wealthy, and so as to get rich easily he had tried one thing after another. He was quick’ discouraged, and the moment the thing didn’t look so big or easy he wanted to throw it over and try something else. Then I’ve come to the conclusion he loved change for its own sake–go somewhere else, take a new name, and start a new business, talking big. It came out after he died that he’d been known under half a dozen names in as many States. There simply wasn’t anythingtohim. I don’t believe he meant to act like a skunk, but, then, he hadn’t any principles either to keep him from acting like a skunk, or meaner than a skunk, when it came to getting himself out of difficulty. And I, for my sins, had to marry such a fellow as that! It was like there had stood the good times I’d always wanted,242right before me in the body, and I took them for better, for worse, and got what my ma said I deserved to get when she tried to cure me of my fancy for good times!”
“Don’t!” protested Gerald, softly. “Don’t regard as wrong what was so natural. All who have the benefit of knowing you must thank the stars which permitted your beautiful love of life to survive the dreadfulness of which you have given me a glimpse.”
“The dreadfulness, Geraldino! I haven’t told you anything yet of the dreadfulness. I haven’t come to it. I haven’t come to what makes her”–she nodded toward the portrait,–“look like that.”
“Then tell me!” he encouraged her.
“It isn’t Jim. When I think of Jim, it only makes me mad. My heart is hard as stone toward him.” She clenched her jaws and looked, in fact, rather grim. “That he’s dead doesn’t change it. I hope I forgive him as a Christian ought to who asks forgiveness for her own trespasses. I know I don’t feel revengeful. There wasn’t enoughtoJim for me to wish him punished in hell. But if you think I have any sentiment because I used to love him, or that I was sorry I woke up from my fool dream when I once had seen it was a dream–Not a bit of it. There was a time, though, when I first began to suspect and understand, that makes me rather sick to think of even now. I was so far from home, you see. I hadn’t a friend, and I wouldn’t for worlds have written back to my old friends that I’d made a bad bargain–not while I wasn’t dead sure. And I kept on hoping.
“At first we had a real good time. We lived in a miner’s cottage, but that seemed sort of jolly. I’d been used to hard work all my life, so I didn’t mind that, and243I wanted him to have as nice a home as any man could on the same money. So I cleaned and contrived and baked and brewed and fixed up. I wanted him to be pleased with me and proud among the other men. But pretty soon I found I didn’t care to make acquaintances, because I was ashamed of the way Jim did. He kept putting all his money into the mine, sending good money after bad, and let me keep house on nothing, and then was in a worse and worse temper because the mine didn’t pan out and things weren’t more comfortable at home. I began to wake up in the night and lie there in a cold sweat, clean scairt. I haven’t told you that we were looking for an addition to the family. That’s one reason I was so scairt. But I shut my teeth, and said I to myself, ‘This baby’s going to have a chance if his mother can give it to him by not getting excited or letting things prey on her mind.’ So I kept a hold on myself and didn’t let anything count except guarding that baby. I seemed to care more about it than all the rest of the world put together. Oh, I can’t begin to tell you how much more than for all the rest of the world put together. I don’t know that a man would understand.”
“Yes, he would; of course he would,” spoke Gerald, gently reverent, yet a little impatient; then he qualified his assertion: “He could imagine, I mean to say, how you would have felt that way.”
“Well, that matter was going to be put safely through, no matter what. The first mistake I made was not making friends with my women neighbors, so that everybody in Elsinore supposed that Jim’s wife was the same stripe as he,–or that’s what I thought they supposed,–and when I needed friends I couldn’t think of any to turn to except244those at home. The other mistake I made was not to write them at home and tell them the truth and then wait for them to send me money to come. But I guess my mind stopped working when the shock came.”
Aurora appeared to brace herself, while decently considering how to minimize to her audience the brutality of her next revelation.
“Jim cleared out one night while I was asleep, taking every cent we’d got and every last thing he could hope to turn into a cent,” she said, hardening her voice and lips. Gerald was given a moment in which to visualize the situation, before she went on: “I guess, as I said before, that I wasn’t in my right mind for a spell; all I could think of was getting home to my own folks, and I was going to do it somehow, though I hadn’t a cent. I hadn’t even my wedding-ring. I’d put it off because my finger had grown fatter, and he’d taken even that to go and try his luck somewhere else.–What do you think of it?” she mechanically added.
She was pale, remembering these things. Gerald drew in a long, unsteady breath, oppressed.
“I was going to get home somehow,” Aurora repeated, “and I wasn’t going to waste time waiting for anything. And how was I going to do it? I don’t suppose I really thought; I followed instinct like an animal. I hid in a freight-car going East–”
A definite difficulty here stopped Aurora. While she felt for words in which to clothe what followed, the images in her mind made her eyes, which were not seeing the things actually before them, more descriptive of the anguish of remembered scenes than her words were likely to be.
245“I’m going to skip all that, Gerald.” With a gesture, she suddenly rolled up a part of her story and threw it aside. “But when I came to see and understand rightly again, weeks after, in a hospital at Denver, I cried, oh! how I cried, and didn’t care what became of me. Because I’d lost him; they hadn’t succeeded in saving him. He had lived, mind you,” she emphasized with pride–“he had lived a little while, he was all right, perfect in every way–a son.”