Gerald turned, and beheld that lady
Gerald turned, and beheld that lady
276“Now tell me all about yourself,” she commanded. “I want to know what you’re doing for this cold of yours.”
“Please let us not talk about my cold,” he at once refused. “Let us talk about something agreeable. Tell me the news. I have not seen any one for days. I have been living in Russia with a poor young man who had committed a murder, also with a most sympathetic being who found the world outside an institution for the feeble-minded too much for him.” By a gesture toward the books on the table he gave her a clue to his meaning.
“You say you haven’t seen any one for days,” she said. “Now the Fosses, for instance, who are your best friends, don’t you let them know when you’re shut in?”
“You have no conception, evidently, of my bearishness, dear friend. They have. They never wonder when they do not see me or hear from me for weeks.”
“I know, and it seems funny; it seems sort of forlorn to me. I saw them the other day and asked if any one had seen you since the night of the show. They said no, but didn’t seem to think anything about it.”
“It’s not really long since then. How are they all?”
“All right, and busy as bees. They’ve no time to come and see me, or anybody else, I guess. Brenda’s coming back to be married in May, and they’re flying round getting her things ready. All her linen is being beautifully embroidered....”
They went on talking, without much thought of what they said. It was immaterial, really, what they said, or even whether they listened to each other, while they had in277common the comfort of sitting together in front of the fire after a long separation filled with doubts and dismays. She told him about the Convalescents’ Home, the sum they had raised for it. No word, prudently, was spoken by either of her share in raising it. He told her about the Russian novels. A third person might perfectly have been present, for anything intimate in their conversation. Gerald was scrupulously careful, for his part, that this should be so. The third person would never have divined how far for the moment that chimney-corner transcended, in the sentiments of the parties seated before it, any other corner of the earth.
Aurora’s attention became closer when Gerald related his interviews with De Brézé and Costanzi, both of whom he had succeeded in convincing that Antonia had had nothing to do with intriguing them at theveglione, and had left to digest as best they could their curiosity concerning the mysterious masker mistaken for her. He had been obliged to give his word that he knew on absolutely good authority who this person was.
His attention, on the other hand, was complete when she told him how she had dealt with Ceccherelli; she was considerate enough to-day to make the effort to pronounce the gentleman’s cognomen.
“I was savage at him, you remember,” she said. “I was going to take his head off. Then when it came to it, and I had told him what I thought of him and the whole disgraceful scrape he had got me into–Oh, I went for him, hammer and tongs! Incidentally, I made him tell me what it was I had said. Pretty bad, wasn’t it!–Well, do you know, he cried, he felt so. He just cried on his knees, and didn’t try to get rid of any of the blame. All278he wanted was that I should forgive him. And what could I do? As long, particularly, as I knew that a good deal of the fault was my own.... So now he comes to the house with a look as if he’d just been baptized. And he tells me only stories fit, he says, for a convent. Here is a sample, if you’d like to hear. Mrs. X, as he called her, who lives in a palace not a thousand miles, he said, from Piazza degli Anti-nory, and who had given Mr. B. reasons for not liking her, was seen by him, in a suspiciously simple dress, going suspiciously on foot, in a little suspiciously out of the way street, at a considerable distance from Piazza degli Anti-nory. The gentleman followed her stealthily into a house he saw her enter, thinking, you know, he would find out something to her discredit. And what did he find out but that she was secretly visiting and relieving the poor! The brilliant society lady, whom he wished to be revenged on because, as I gathered, she had scorned his dishonorable love-making, was secretly the angel of the poor.... Don’t you think that’s a nice story? He tells me nothing now that’s less nice than that. We’re reformed characters. He has asked my permission to dedicate to me a beautiful piece of music he has just composed, and which is called–but in French–‘Prayer of the Evening.’”
Both of them were pleasantly aware of a tray placed on the table near them, as if descended from heaven, laden with teapot, bread and butter, jam. Neither of them really saw Giovanna, who brought it in, or was struck by the stern expression of her face.
Aurora, never sorry of something to eat, turned her attention to the tray. Gerald wished to serve her, and she first noticed his weakness when she saw the teapot tremble279slightly in his hand. She went on chattering, but she was observing him.
“Is your carriage waiting before the door?” he suddenly asked, after a space during which she had suspected that he was not properly attending to what she said. Aurora’s monogram, daintily executed, adorned the door-panels of her carriage.
“Yes,” she answered. “Why?”
As if he had not heard, he changed the subject. After a while he asked, again irrelevantly:
“How was it that Miss Madison did not come with you this afternoon?”
“She was going to a different tea-party.” Supposing that his question was a way of politely desiring news of Miss Madison, she went on to talk of her.
“She was going to her French teacher’s, who is having a French afternoon where they’re supposed to talk nothing but French. What would I have been doing there? But Estelle is getting to talk the French language exactly as well as her own.... That reminds me. A thing I’ve wanted to tell you. If you should notice that Busteretto seems to be rather more her dog than mine, don’t you say anything, or care. The fact is Estelle loves him more than I do. That’s all there is about it. Which isn’t saying that I don’t love him. But Estelle’s silly over him, in the regular old maid way, as I tell her. When he wouldn’t eat his dinner this noon, I had all I could do to make her eat hers, she was so troubled. And nothing ailed him, I guess, but that he’d picked up something in the kitchen. What I wanted to say was, don’t you think it’s because I don’t value your present, if you should notice by and by that I seem to have given up my claims to280Busteretto. That sort of alive present has a will of its own. The little thing took to her from the first more than he did to me. Shall I tell Estelle that you wished to be remembered?”
“Pray do.”
“She’ll be sorry to hear you’re sick. Don’t say that again, Gerald,” she silenced him, letting her anxiety at last plainly appear. “Don’t tell me you aren’t sick, for I know better. It’s been taking away my appetite to see you make believe to eat, and choke over it. Your cough is so tight it sounds as if it tore your lungs. Give me your hand. It’s as hot, dear boy, and as dry!... Wait, let me feel your pulse.”
He knew that his pulse was high, that his temples ached, that a disposition to shiver accompanied the volcanic heat of his blood.
He laughed at her light-headedly while with serious concentration she counted the beats in his wrist.
“I’m going to stop at Doctor Gage’s on my way home,” she said, letting go his hand, and not heeding what he said. “And I’m going to tell him to come and see you.”
“Please do not! If I need a doctor, there is my own, an Italian, the same for years.”
“An Italian? Do you think they’re as good?”
“Better for my own case.”
“Gerald, it’s my advice to you to go right to bed and let your doctor come and prescribe. A cold is nothing in a way, but a neglected cold can grow into a mean sort of thing. Say you’ll do it. Don’t you know how good it will feel to you just to give in and go to bed and let some one else do all the looking after you? Oh, I wish I could speak Italian enough to have a talk with your Giovanna.”
281“Giovanna has taken care of me and mymalannifor years. She gives me tar-water, and rice-water, and tamarind-water, and linden-tea, and cassia. She threatened me this morning with a sinapism if I were not better by evening. I shall be better. I do not wish for a sinapism.”
“Is that a poultice on your chest? I guess it’s what you need. Now, if I have any influence with you, Gerald, if you love me one little bit, you’ll promise to go right to bed, and you’ll give me your doctor’s address so that on my way home I can leave word for him to come.”
“You shall not take that trouble. I can send Gaetano.”
“You promise me you’ll do it, then?”
“I seem to have been left no choice, dear lady.”
“That’s real sweet of you. You’ll go to bed the minute I’ve gone?”
“Yes. But don’t go quite yet!”
“With that temperature, I don’t see how you can care who stays or who goes, or anything in the world but to lay your head down on a pillow. I won’t stay any longer now. Go to bed like a good boy. To-morrow I’ll run in and see how you’re getting along.”
His last word was, after a moment of seeming embarrassment:
“I hope Miss Madison will be able to come with you next time.”
“Yes, yes,” said Aurora, lightly, taking it for a mere amiable message with which he was charging her for Estelle.
Fever no doubt colored all Gerald’s dreams that night, and was in part responsible next day for his thoughts, as he passed from languor to restlessness, and from impatience282back to the peace of the certain knowledge that before evening he should have visitors–fair visitors.
When it seemed to him nearly time for them, he ordered Giovanna to make the room of a beautiful and perfect neatness, hiding all the medicine bottles and humble signs that one is mortal. She was directed to lay across his white counterpane that square of brocade which often formed a background for his portraits. She was asked to brush his hair and beard, and wrap his shoulders in an ivory-white shawl, thick with silk embroideries, which had been his mother’s. In a little green bronze tripod a black pastille was set burning, which sent up, slow, thin, and wavering, a gray spiral of perfume.
Keenly as he was waiting, he yet did not know when the ladies arrived. He opened his eyes, and they were there, shedding around them a beautiful freshness of health and the world outside. Estelle, in a soft green velvet edged with silver fur, held toward him an immense bunch of flowers. Aurora, in a wine-colored cloth bordered with bands of black fox, tendered a basket heaped with fruit. Both smiled, and had the kind look of angels.
They sat down beside his bed. They talked with him; all was just as usual. They asked the old questions pertinent to the case, he made the old answers, and by an effort kept up for some minutes a drawing-room conversation with them.
Then Aurora said:
“Hush! You mustn’t talk any more!” And when he thought she was going away, he wondered to see her take off her gloves.
She stood over him; he wondered what she meant to do. She felt of his forehead with her cool hand. With her283palms, which were like her voice, of a velvet not too soft, she smoothed his forehead and temples; she stroked them over and over in a way that seemed to draw the ache out of his brain. Her fingers moved soothingly, magnetically, all around his eye-sockets, pressing down the eyelids and comforting them.
At first he resisted. Perversely he frowned, as if the thing increased his pain, annoyed him beyond words. He all but cried out to the well-meaning hands to stop.
“Doesn’t it feel good?” asked Aurora, anxiously.
He relaxed. Without opening his eyes, he nodded to thank her, and as he yielded himself up to the hands it seemed to him that those passes drew his spirit after them quite out of his body.
“I don’t think I’ll go up with you,” Estelle said unexpectedly when on the next day they stopped before the narrow yellow door in Borgo Pinti. “I’ll wait here in the carriage. I’m nervous myself to-day. Give my best regards to Gerald. I hope you’ll find him better.”
Aurora did not take time to examine into the possible reasons for her friend’s choice. She climbed the long stairs sturdily, managing her breath so that she did not have to stop and rest on the way.
She followed the stern Giovanna, unsubdued by the latter’s hard and jealous looks, to the door of her master’s chamber.
She went toward the bed, smiling at the sick man over an armful of white lilacs.
He half rose in his bed and quickly, disconnectedly, impetuously, said:
“My dear friend, this is most good of you. I’m sure I284thank you very much. I’m very, very much better, as you can see. I shall be out again in a day or two.” He was visibly trembling; his eyes flared with excitement. “That being the case, my dear lady, I earnestly beg you will not trouble to come like this every day.” He stopped to choke and cough, then wrenching himself free from strangulation–“Aurora,”–he changed his key and tune,–“do let me be ill in peace! Here I am on my back, with a loosened grip on everything, and it’s taking an unfair advantage to invade my privacy as you do. Take away those lilacs with you, won’t you, please? We haven’t any more vases to put them in; they’d have to be stuck in a bedroom water-jug. Giovanna won’t let me have flowers in my room, anyhow; she says they are bad for me. Don’t be offended! I know you mean nothing but to be kind, but the thing you are doing is devilish.... What do you think I am made of? I don’t want you to be offended, but I have got to say what I can to keep you from coming to this house and troubling me in my illness. I have got to say it plainly and fully because you, Aurora, never understand anything that is not said to you in so many words. I might try and try my best to convey the same idea to you in a gentle and gentlemanly way, and not a scrap of good would be done. I’ve got to talk like a beast. I wish to be alone. Is that clear? I’ve just struggled and waded my way out of one quagmire; I do not wish to enter another. Is that plain? I wish to feel free to be ill as much and as long as I choose. It concerns nobody. It concerns nobody if I die. It would be an excellent thing, saving me the trouble later of blowing out my brains.... My God, Aurora, have you understood?” he almost shouted.
“Yes,” said Aurora in a voice that sounded pale, even as285her face looked pale. “I have understood, and I won’t come again. Just one thing, Gerald. Put your arms under the bed clothes and keep them there.”
“Whether he’s better or worse I truly couldn’t tell you,” Aurora said in answer to Estelle’s first question. After a moment she added, “I can’t make him out.”
Estelle saw that she was deeply troubled, and, herself troubled at the sight, did not press her for explanations.
During the drive home Aurora made only one other remark. It was delivered with a certain emphasis.
“Onething I know: I sha’n’t gothereagain in a hurry!”
Her lilacs, after wondering a moment what to do with them, she had quietly deposited outside Gerald’s entrance-door.
It was unimaginable, of course, that the childhood’s friend should so disregard the rules of the game as to leave her old playmate’s curiosity long unsatisfied. Estelle accordingly learned before evening that Gerald had been guilty of an attack of nerves, in the course of which he had said something which Aurora did not like. What this was Aurora would not tell, saying it seemed unfair to repeat things Gerald had spoken while he was not himself and which he perhaps did not mean. From which Estelle judged that Aurora had already softened since she returned to the carriage looking as grim as she was grieved.
That Aurora had something on her mind no observant person could fail to see, and Estelle was not unprepared to hear her say as she did on the third morning at breakfast, after fidgeting a moment with a pinch of bread:
286“I’m so uneasy I don’t know what to do. That boy is much sicker than he knows,” she went on to justify her disquietude, “and he’s in a bad mood for getting well. I don’t believe Italian doctors know much, anyhow. I’ve heard that they still put leeches on you. All he has to take care of him, day and night, is that old servant-woman What’s-her-name, who, he told me himself, doctors him with herb-tea. I’m so uneasy! The sort of cold he has, I tell you, can turn any minute into something you don’t want. He’s all run down and a bad subject for pneumonia. I’m thinking I shall have to just go to the door and find out how he is.”
“You could send a servant to inquire,” suggested Estelle.
Aurora appeared to reflect; she might have been trying to find a reason for not taking the hint, but she said, “No; I should feel better satisfied to go myself.”
At the last moment, when they were ready to start, Estelle found Busteretto’s nose hot, and decided not to go. She stayed at home and called a doctor. For some days the pet had not seemed to her in quite his usual form.
Aurora, climbing Gerald’s stairs this time, felt very uncertain and rather small. The street door, when she had pulled the bell-handle, had unlatched with a click, but no voice had called down, and when she reached the top landing the door in front of her stood forbiddingly closed. She waited for some minutes, wondering whether she were doing right. Suppose Gerald were enough better to be up again and, Giovanna being out, should himself come to open the door. How would she feel, caught slinking back, after she had been requested loudly and roundly to stay away?
287Well, set aside how she felt, the object of her coming would have been reached, wouldn’t it? She would know that he was better. She rang and listened.
Certain, as soon as she heard them, whose footsteps were on the other side of the door, she held in readiness her Italian. She counted on understanding Giovanna’s answer to her question, for she had, as she boasted, “quite a vocabulary.” But much more than to this she trusted to the talent which Italians have for making their meaning clear through pantomime and facial expression.
As soon, in fact, as Giovanna opened the door, and before the woman had said a word in reply to “Come sta Signor Fane?” Aurora had understood.
Giovanna’s eyes, stained with recent weeping, looked up at the visitor without severity or aversion, seeking for sympathy; the unintelligible account she gave of her master’s condition was broken up with sighs.
Aurora felt her heart turn cold, and such agitation seize her as made her reckless of all but one thing.
“I shall have to see for myself,” she thought.
With the haste of fear, she flew before Giovanna down the long hallway, around the dark corner, to the door of Gerald’s room. It was half open. Checking herself on the threshold, she thrust in her head.
He was so lying in his bed that beyond the outlined shape under the covers she could see of him only a dark spot of hair. And she felt she must see his face, whether asleep or awake, to get some idea.... She tiptoed in with the least possible noise. At once, without turning, he asked something in Italian, and speaking forced him to cough; and after he had finished coughing, Aurora, who was near,288could hear his breathing rustle within him like wind among dead leaves.
Giovanna had gone to the head of his bed and whispered a communication. Upon which he twisted sharply around, and Aurora, moved by an overpowering impulse, rushed to his side.
“Hush!” she said at once. “Don’t try to talk; it makes you cough. I just wanted to know how you were. It would be funny, now don’t you think so yourself, if, such friends as we’ve been, I should stop caring anything about you because you were cross the other day? I had to come and see if there wasn’t something we could do for you.”
The attempt to speak choked him again; he had to lift himself finally quite up from his pillow to get breath. Quicker than Giovanna, Aurora snatched up a gray shawl from a chair to put over his shoulders. The room felt to her stagnantly cold. He stopped her hand in the act of folding him in, and she knew that it was not the Gerald of last time, this one who, with an afflictive little moan, clasped and pressed her hand.
She hushed him, every time he tried to speak, until his breathing had quieted down, when he came out despite her forbidding with a ragged, interrupted, but obstinate eagerness:
“How can I ever thank you enough for coming, dear, dear Aurora? I have lived in one prolonged nightmare ever since I saw you, knowing I had behaved like a blackguard, and fearing I should never have a chance to beg your pardon. I thought I should never see you again. And here you are, so generous, so kind!”
“Hush, Gerald! Don’t make anything of it. Of289course I came. Keep quiet now; you mustn’t try to talk.”
“Dearest woman,” he insisted, with his voice full of tears, “I don’t even know what I said to you, but I know that the whole thing was atrocious. You standing there like a big angel, with your innocent arms full of flowers, and I barking at you like a cur!”
“Nothing of the sort. You were sick. Who lays up anything against a sick man?”
“Excuse it in me like this, Aurora, if you can: that having such regard for you, I had pride before you and could not endure that you should see me when I felt myself to be a disgusting object. So, mortified to the point of torture, I lost my temper,–I’ve got that bad habit, you know,–and insanely railed to keep you off.”
“And didn’t succeed. Come, come; what nonsense all this is! Put it out of your mind and think of nothing but getting well. Now you–”
“It is not nearly so important that I should get well,” he testily persisted, “as that I should ask your forgiveness. It has been weighing upon me and burning like bedclothes of hot iron, the horror of having so meanly and ungratefully offended you.”
“Why should you feel so bad about it as long as I don’t? Put it all out of your mind, just as I do out of mine. There, it’s all right. Now keep still except to answer my questions. You’ve had the doctor?”
“Yes, dear.”
“What’s he giving you?”
“You can see–there on the stand–those bottles.”
“And hot things on your chest?”
“Yes;semedilino. I don’t know what you call it in English.”
290“Flaxseed, I guess. How can poor old Giovanna do everything for you?”
“I don’t know,” he answered vaguely. “She does.”
Perceiving that by a reaction from his excitement he was suddenly fatigued to the point of no longer being able to speak at all or even keep his eyes open, she asked nothing more, but with a practised hand straightened his bolster, smoothed his pillow and drew the covers evenly and snugly up to his chin.
“Don’t you be afraid,” he heard her say above him, as it seemed to him a long time after, at the same moment that he felt her give his shoulder a little squeeze to impress her saying: “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
He entered a state which was neither quite sleep nor quite waking. He was not dreaming, yet the world within his eyelids was peopled with creatures and varied by incidents departing from the known and foreseen. Something malevolent pertained to the personalities, something disquieting to the actions; suffering and oppression resulted from his inability to get away from them. They came and went, one scene melted into another, sometimes beautiful, sometimes repulsive, a sickly disagreeableness being common to all, and the fatigue involved with watching the spectacle of them weighing like a physical burden.
But yet beneath the unrest of fever dreams there was in Gerald, after Aurora’s visit, as if a substratum of quiet and content. As a good Catholic, having confessed and received absolution, would be less troubled by either his symptoms or any visions that might come of Satan and his imps, so Gerald, with the weight of his sins of brutality and291ingratitude lifted off him, could feel almost passive with regard to the rest.
He had moments through the night of recognizing the deceptiveness of his senses. He knew, for instance, that the solemn clerical gentleman in a long black coat and tall hat whom he saw most tiresomely coming toward him down the street every time he opened his eyes was only a medicine bottle full of dark fluid, outlined against the dim candle-shine. And he knew that the tower of ice, solitary amid snows, lighthouse or tower of defense on some arctic coast, was nothing but a glass of water. And when it seemed to him, late, late in the night, that Aurora was in the room, he knew off and on that it was Giovanna, who through one of those metamorphoses common in fever had taken the likeness of Aurora. She lifted him to make him drink, and supported him while she held the glass to his lips, then laid him easily back. The delusions of fever had the sweet and foolish impossibility of fairy-stories: Aurora, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, placing upon his stiff and lacerated breast balsamic bandages of assuaging and beneficient warmth!...
The night was full of torrid heat and fiery light, in which everything looked unnatural, shifting, uncertain, but daylight, when it finally came, was of a crude coldness; under it everything returned to be itself, meager and stationary, and he knew that it was no phantasmagorical Aurora making preparations to wash his face.
He spoke no word to signify either pleasure or displeasure. He let it be, like a destiny too strong to withstand. With this acceptance there took place in him, body and spirit, a relaxing, as when supporting arms are felt by one who had been fearing a fall.
292In his not very clear-headed reflections upon himself and his state, he had passed into a different category of men, where what he did, particularly as regarded worldly proprieties, had little importance, because, ill as he felt, there seemed to him such a strong probability of his actions having no result. If, on the other hand, he could manage to pull through–and he found he cared to do this, cared so much more than he had supposed he ever could care, on such desperate days as those which had sometimes seen him re-examining his revolver–if he should recover, the gladness of his good fortune would outweigh any inconvenience created by his weakness now. Life is, and should be, dearer to man than anything else, except honor. He found it difficult to separate the idea of honor from life, and make it oppose letting this robust guardian angel fulfil her promise not to “let anything happen to him.”
Gerald had too often heard those well-meaning lies which friends and nurses tell the sick, to place faith altogether in Aurora’s cheerful asseverations from day to day that he was getting better.
Yet Aurora was not feigning. She entertained no doubt that with proper care he would get well. And she was providing the care. Hence a confidence which she did not allow any of those chilly creepy fears which come at about three o’clock in the morning to undermine. She was so strongly resolved to get him well, and felt so capable of doing it, that it would not seem unlikely her very hands in touching him had virtue and imparted health.
He said very little, even when the exertion of talking had ceased to make him cough. The fact that talk fatigued293him was reinforced by his old fancy that talk was superfluous. One lived, one looked, one felt....
She was glad he so willingly kept quiet, because as long as he had fever it was so much the best thing he could do. He did not have to tell her that he took comfort in having her there, that everything she did for him was exactly right, that her touch was blessed and had no more strangeness for him than that of a sister–nay, than his own. She too understood those wordless things which are shed from one person, like a radiance, and inhaled by another, like a scent.
In the long silences, she sometimes read a little by the shaded candle–she had chosen the night watch for her share and let his devoted old Giovanna wait on her master during the day. But very often she sat in her easy-chair near the bed doing nothing, just thinking her thoughts, marveling at the queerness, the surprises of life. Who could have dreamed that first time she entered this big brick-floored, white-washed room, and nearly cried because she found it so dreary, that she would come to feel at home in it; that by her doing the brown earthenware stove in the corner, cold since Mrs. Fane’s day, would again glow and purr; that over and over she would watch the row of flower-pots out on the terrace, with the stiff straw-colored remains in them of last year’s carnations, grow slowly visible in the dawn; that from their pastel portrait the eyes of the mother would watch her placing compresses on the brow of the son!
Before going for her rest, she always waited to see the doctor, who made an early visit. After they had reissued together from the sickroom, he was interviewed by her with the help of an interpreter, Clotilde, who was in and out of the house during all that period, making herself useful. Estelle instead came only for a moment daily, having a case of her own to nurse, who was down, poor crumb, with those measles-mumps-whooping cough of puppyhood, distemper.
Aurora’s eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little flame
Aurora’s eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little flame
295On the day when Doctor Batoni had agreed that with prudence there would be nothing more to fear, the patient might be regarded as having entered convalescence, Aurora covered him with a wide and warming smile.
“Je suis son bonne amie,” thus she translated the explanation of her unconcealed happiness, “I’m a good friend of his,” nodding at the old man with the full sweetness of her dimples; blushing a little, too, with the pride of addressing him directly in French.
That morning Aurora was so happy she could not hurry; humming an old psalm tune she dawdled about her room, the longer to enjoy her thoughts.
When she finally slept it was more deeply than usual, and she woke with a start of fear that it was past the time. The line of sky showing between the curtains retained no remembrance of the day. It must be late, certainly. Then she heard a faint stirring just outside her door, the thing probably which had drawn her out of a sound sleep. It was the rustle of some person listening at the crack.
She bounced from bed and went to open. It was as she expected, Giovanna; come, she supposed, to see if she were ready to go on duty. At Giovanna’s first words, though she did not entirely understand them, she became uneasy, because Giovanna interspersed them with sighs. Her voice sounded as if she might have been crying.
Aurora had grown accustomed to the fact that those hard old eyes of Giovanna’s took easily to tears, and that she296sighed by the thousand the moment she was in anxiety over hersignorino. She knew she must not take Giovanna’s fears at her own valuation. She gathered from her gestures now, combined with her talk, that Gerald, so quiet until to-day, had become restless. Giovanna impersonated him tossing and throwing his arms out of the bed-covers. Aurora, though not permitting herself to be alarmed, hurried with her dressing.
“Ain’t it always so,” she questioned her own image in the glass, “that the moment you feel safe something goes wrong?”
When she tiptoed into the big dim room where Gerald lay, she could not at first make out what it was that had troubled Giovanna to the point of tears. He seemed quiet enough. After she had taken his pulse and temperature, her heart subsided with a blessed relief.
He could not tell her, because he did not himself know, that just because he was better he, paradoxically, was worse. Thoughts and responsibilities had begun to trouble him again.
“Should you mind very much,” he asked suddenly, “if I worked off my nervousness by singing? I have kept still, so as not to worry you, exactly as long as I can.”
“Certainly,” she said, “go ahead. I never knew you were a singer. What are you going to sing?”
She waited with a certain curiosity.
He began chanting. “B, a, ba; B, e, be–babe! B, i, bi–babebi! B, o, bo–babebibo! B, u, bu–babebibobu!” Then he went on to the letter C, “C, a, ca! C, e, ce–cace! C, i, ci–caceci!” and to D, and so on, one after the other, through all the consonants in the alphabet.
“The queerest rigmarole you ever heard!” Aurora297called that simple Italian spelling-exercise for little beginners. It might have been funny to hear him, only it was disquieting, he did it so earnestly and so obstinately kept it up.
When he had finished, Aurora held a sedative powder all nicely wrapped in a wet wafer ready for him. He knew what it was and gratefully gulped it, composing himself after it to wait in patience and self-control for its operation. Aurora, reposing on the magic of drugs like a witch on the power of incantations, watched for the drooping of his eyelids and relaxing of his frown.
He had lain still for so long that she was congratulating herself upon the result thus easily obtained, when he opened his eyes, twice as wide-awake as before, and began to talk, as if really the object of an opiate were not to stupefy a man, but to rouse him fully. Under its influence he was almost garrulous. His vivacity partook of delirium. All that passed through his mind pressed forward indiscriminately into utterance, as if the sentinels placed on guard over his thoughts had been taking an hour off.
Aurora heard him in wonder and perplexity. He was not incoherent, he was not extravagant. He was merely talkative, expansive, and this in his case was obviously pathological. She wondered also to see how handsome he could look, with his eyes alight; his cheek-bones burning, pink as paint; his hair, grown long, lying in dark locks over a luminous forehead.
She tried to think of something that would abate all this. She was searching her nurse’s memory for some further sedative by which to counteract a first one gone wrong, when the thread of her medical meditation snapped, her attention fastened upon what Gerald was saying.298Because she had a suspicion that it was about Violet he was talking. And she had from the first been curious about Violet and his feelings with regard to her. As curious as if she had been jealous.
“There is a person–” he said, in the suppressed voice of one communicating a secret, “of whom I used to dream very often. Not because I wished to. In the days when I wished to, she came seldom. But when I dreaded it, she began to come, and do what I would, oppose to her what hardness I could, she could be so sinisterly dreadful and unkind that it was like a knife in me. Try to shut her out as I might, she would force her way in and make me suffer. Why? Why did she want to?... I will tell you what I believe. Some women feel their beauty to depend upon their power to create suffering. If not happy suffering, then the other kind. If men grow indifferent to it, they feel their beauty passing, and if it goes there is nothing left that they care for. The unremitting quest of their lives therefore is to feed the blood of men to their beauty, and if they can not do it in any other manner they pick the locks of sleep and get at them in that way. But the last time this person came, a surprise awaited her. And the same, I will confess, awaited me. My heart was like so much sawdust, so far as one drop of blood that she could wring from it. And now she won’t come again, I believe, for why should she come? She will look a little anxiously in the glass, very likely, to see if she has begun to fade. I should be sorry to know that the least of her golden hairs had faded–they were so lovely. It’s wrong all the same to practise sorcery. You don’t, Aurora, that is one reason why I like to be with you. Women as God made them are strong enough, He knows! It’s unfair to299use sorcery besides, to make themselves beautiful to the point of distraction, and desired to the point of pain. And then their barbarous methods! That low game of using a man’s weakness for the increase of their own glory, making a jealous fool wilfully out of a decent fellow, and a baby out of a self-respecting man. You, Aurora, you are good as good bread, you are restful as a bank of moss. You would never do what the others do. Would you, Aurora? You needn’t answer me. I know.”
“If what you mean is that I’m not much of a co-quette,” she came in quickly, to prevent his continuing, “I guess you’re right. Take it since I was born, I’ve been called a good many things, but in all my life I don’t remember anybody calling me that,–a co-quette. But you’re talking lots more than is good for you, brother. Now I want you to quiet down and give those sleepy-drops a chance to work. Here I’ve fixed you something else that will help them. It’s just a drink with nothing in it but something nice and cooling. Smells pleasant, doesn’t it? This’ll do the trick.”
Slipping an arm under his neck, she lifted him, propped him against herself, and held the glass to his mouth. Instead of words pouring out, the calming draught flowed in. It was a slow process; he drank by small swallows and wished after each one to stop, but she gently forced him to go on. When it was finished and he turned his head away from the glass, he found it resting on her shoulder. He settled his cheek warmly against it, like a child burying his face in the pillow. With a long sigh he relaxed.
“Now, Aurora,” he said solemnly, “be per–fect–ly still.”
He was very still, too. After a long moment he half300lifted his head and with a long soft sigh replaced it, as if to renew his sense of a resting-place so sweet. With all her heart Aurora lent herself to this, glad to witness, as she thought, the belated effect of the soporific. In a few minutes he would be asleep.
“Aurora,” he suddenly said, wakeful as earlier, but without moving his heavy head or opening his eyes, “do you remember the first evening I ever saw you? You came down the middle of the room all by yourself, like something in the theater, where the stage has been cleared for the principal character to make an effect. You were a fine large lady in a sky-blue frock with bursts of pink, your hair spangled with diamonds, a fan in one hand, a long pair of gloves in the other. That at least is what everybody else saw that looked at you. But me, what I seemed to see was America coming toward me draped in the stars and stripes. Now you know how I feel about my dear country. If I loved it why should I have fixed my abode once and for all over here? And yet when I saw it coming toward me across the room, with your eyes and smile and look of Home, I felt like the tiredest traveler and exile in the whole world, who wants nothing, nothing, but to get Home again. It was like a moment’s insanity. I almost wonder that I resisted it, the desire to lay my head on your shoulder and cry, Aurora, and tell you about it, then never move again, or say another word.”
Aurora readjusted her position so as to make his leaning on her even easier. She brought a warm cover safe-guardingly around him.
“Poor Geraldino!” she pitied him in the lonely past.
“Then do you remember the first time I went to see you,” he asked, “and you introduced me, dearest woman,301room by room, to the somewhat gruesome mysteries of your house? You walked before me holding a lamp. In the ball-room, hazy with vastness, you held the lamp high, like a torch. And I had a vision of you as America again, or Liberty, or Something, lighting the way for me.... But I treated the fancy as one treats fancies. I did not in the least intend to cultivate the acquaintance begun with your picking me up by the loose skin of the neck and plumping me down on the little seat of your victoria.”
“Why–Gerald!” she drawled in a tone of reproach purposely funny. “Didn’t you want to come?”
“I wantednotto come!” he answered, with normal spirit. “But you kept saying Jump in. When a lady has said Jump in three times it acts like a spell, a man has got to jump.”
“But when it came to the hot bread and syrup, brother, you know you were glad to be there. You kept your superior look, but you ate all I buttered for you. It did me good to see you.”
“Yes,” he grew dreamy again, “it took me back. It took me back to so many things I had nearly forgotten. And when at the end of the evening I was leaving, do you remember, Aurora, wrapping in paper some pieces of maple-sugar and forcing me to take them home in my pocket? I felt absurdly like a little boy and again you seemed like big America; something exhaled from you that made me think of slanting silver-gray roofs and the New England spring of appleblossoms and warbling robins; yes, and of October foliage intolerably bright, and Fourth of July celebrations. Not things I dote on, exactly, but things I was born to, and restful to me after my years of chasing302what is not to be caught, wanting what is not to be had, seeking all the time to adjust myself, to adjust myself, to the harshness of life, the treachery, the unaccountability, the relentlessness–restful as this heavenly shoulder, on which I have wished how many hundred times to lay my head like this and not move again, or speak again, or have anything ever change. Aurora, don’t say a word, dear. Particularly, kindest Aurora, don’t make any of your little jokes. Keep perfectly still, like a good darling, and let me forget everything except where my head is, and be perfectly happy.”
As seriously as if a god had commanded it, Aurora preserved the silence and immobility requested of her, only making her shoulder as much wider and softer and more comforting as she could by wanting it to be so.
When by and by she felt him slip a little as he began to lose himself in sleep, she clasped her hands around him supportingly and held him in place.
A single candle burned in the room, with a book to shade it. Aurora’s eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little flame where it was reflected in a mirror on the wall opposite, but she did not see it at all, so absorbed was she in her thoughts. In her feelings, too. In the wonder of the hour. This remarkable Gerald, with his head packed full of knowledge, with his speech that charmed you as whistling does an adder, with his capacity to paint pictures that the rest could not even understand, and then his rarity, the sweetness of his manners, the fascination of all that unknown in him which came, she had concluded, from his foreign bringing-up–he had wanted ever since he first saw her just to lay his head on her shoulder and rest....
303Her common ordinary shoulder. What did he see in her? Taking for granted that he saw something, Aurora attributed this unknown quality in herself to God, and thanked Him. She tightened her clasp about Gerald, the better to feel him there. The power of the sleeping-potion had overtaken him completely. Thoughts that moistened her eyes resulted from feeling her arms full of the breathing warmth of a beloved form. Those defrauded maternal arms! That other, who would have been five years old at this time, and would have been called little Dan, after Dan, her big father, how she would have nursed him through his childish ailments, how she would have held him and rocked him! No, she would never stop yearning over him. One must suppose that God knows best.
Gerald’s breathing was deep and quiet. When sure that it could be done without waking him, she let him gently down on to the pillow.
She stood beside the bed for a few minutes, in her soft garment of cashmere and swansdown which made no more sound when she moved than did her velvet shoes; she watched him sleep with emotions of gratitude beyond possibility of expression to any one but that old intimate, God. He was getting well so surely and fast. He would shortly be as well as ever.
Confident that he would want nothing more for the rest of the night, she arranged herself in her easy-chair for a good sleep, too.
On the next day she divined from his half troubled look at her, and the shy modesty of his manner, that he was wondering whether he had actually babbled last night, or in a mild delirium dreamed the whole thing. Not from304her might he find out. Her easy, matter-of-fact way made any such passage seem at least unlikely.
Having slept during the night she did not retire to rest during the day, but let Giovanna go about her long neglected affairs and in her place looked after Gerald, who had waked from his deep sleep immensely refreshed. He would not need a constant watcher beside him after this, during night or day.
“What shall I do to amuse you?” she asked him, to make an interruption after she had felt him watching her through half closed lids for some time. “Don’t you want me to read to you?”
“I think not, Aurora. Thank you just as much.”
“Well, then, how shall I entertain you? Do you want me to be a gold-fish for you?”
“How do you ‘be a gold-fish,’ Aurora?”
“Look!” But the instant she changed her face into a gold-fish’s and waggled up through imaginary water, opening and shutting her mouth like a rubber valve, he hid his eyes, crying sharply, “Please stop! I don’t want to see it.”
The gold-fish personality was dropped.
“Very well, then,” she said, with unimpaired serenity, “shall I do a squirrel gnawing a nut? Every family its own circus.”
“If you do it, I will not look. How can you endure, lovely as you are, to make yourself ugly–grotesque?”
“Aren’t you rather hard to suit to-day, mister? Shall I be a hen, then, scratching for her chicks? That’s mild.”
“No, no, no. Yes. No. I don’t know about the hen. Let me have a sample.”
He watched her, critically and provisionally, while with305comfortable, motherly, half-suppressed chest-sounds, and a round eye cocked for finds among the dirt, remarkably altogether the appearance of a pensive white hen, she made believe to scratch up the earth with her feet. A rather sympathetic performance, he allowed, her imitation of the hen, calling up before one the vision of a farmyard, a brood of downy yellow chicks, a duckpond, sunshine, green things.
He let her do it as long as she would, or rather until to vary the thing she increased the comic beyond the line he fixed. When midday found him grudgingly laughing at her cackling, it seemed improbable certainly that midnight had seen him sleeping in her arms. But underlying their laughter was a consciousness in each that day of a thing uniting them which had not been there before.
Sitting bolstered up in bed to eat his first real meal, he looked, with his long hair parted in the middle and brushed down over his hollow temples, like one of those old masters in the Ewe-fitsy, Aurora told him. A St. John the Baptist, she specified.
She chipped the top off his egg and cut finger sizes of bread for him, so that he might have it in the foreign way he preferred.
While he languidly ate, yet with pleasure, the door softly swung inward, revealing faces of women,–Estelle, Clotilde, Livvy, Giovanna,–all equally kind, all craning for the delight of a peep at him eating his soft-boiled egg.
Because he was still weak, tears came into his eyes, and because he could not permit them to be seen, he waved and haggardly smiled toward the smiling and nodding faces without inviting them nearer.
306Women! women!... What a great deal of room they had occupied in his life! How much he owed them for affection,–mother, sister, servant-girl, friends....
He had known from whispers and rustlings, from a sort of instinct, latterly from Giovanna’s own lips, that his house since the coming of “that lady” to undertake the government of his sickroom had been full of people, making practical and easy the carrying out of her plots. Abundance of people and abundance of money. Old Giovanna grumbled bitterly at this invasion, but she did it inside of herself, sanely recognizing that she had subject for gratitude. Her hot dark eye looked all she thought, and her lips moved as she soundlessly said all she felt; but when she dropped into the dark church of Santa Maria degli Angeli for a moment’s devotion she did not fail to ask Maria to bless “that lady” and give her great good. After which she begged Her by the seven swords of Her sorrow to hasten the day that should clear the house of the whole horde of strangers, and permit her to resume the quiet life with her signorino.
Gerald, whose nature felt the oppression of material benefits as much as Giovanna felt jealousy with regard to her rights and loves, resolved that the sole seemly return for generosity in this case would be an equal generosity, consisting in an acceptance pure of every shadow, either of obligation, or reserve, or regret.
Since the doctor said it would do the invalid no harm to admit a visitor or two, Aurora wrote to Mrs. Foss. She came at once with Leslie. Both on the occasion of this call were perfect, in tact, in warmth, in friendship. And yet307with them, and the sense of the World and the World’s point of view which they inevitably brought, change entered the house.
The vacuous, almost happy languor of the sick was replaced in Gerald by an irritable gloominess, decently repressed, but unconcealable.
“There’s no mistake; you’re getting well,” remarked Aurora, when the unrest of a mind troubled by many things expressed itself in indignation against innocent inanimate objects, a drop of candle wax for burning, an ivory paper-cutter for snapping in his impatient hand. “You’re getting well. I guess I can go home and feel easy about you.”
And sooner than Giovanna had dared to hope when most fervently she invoked the Holy Mother, lo! the intruders, mistress and maids, bag and baggage, had left in their places room and silence. So much sooner than expected that Giovanna, clasping in her hands an incredible fee, almost found it in herself to feel regret.
On their last day together Gerald had asked Aurora to find the key of a certain desk-drawer and to bring him the miniature strong-box locked in it. He had taken out one by one, to show her, the little store of trinkets once belonging to his mother and given her from among them the one he thought most charming, an old silver cross studded with amethysts and pearls.
Her own house, when she reëntered it, looked faintly unfamiliar, as if she had been away much longer than she had by actual count. But her big soft bed looked good to her, she told Estelle, after the bed of granite framed in iron she had lately occupied.
She was in high good spirits. Gerald out of the woods, the amethyst cross, Estelle and her beautiful commodious house returned to, vistas ahead of good times and heart satisfactions, a sense of success and the richness of life–Aurora was in splendid spirits.
Estelle and she slept together on the first night, so as to be able to buzz until morning, as they had used to do in their young days, when one of them was allowed to go on a visit to the other and stay overnight. There ensued a very orgy of talk, a going over of all that had happened since their separation, quite as if they had not once seen each other in the interval.
It might have been thought, when their remarks finally became far spaced, as they did between two and three of309the morning, that this happened because the streams were running dry as well as because the talkers were growing sleepy; but no such thing. Each had loads more that she might have told; but each, as had not been the case in the old days, was keeping back something from the other. Each locked in her breast a secret.
There had naturally been talk of Gerald. Estelle was immensely nice about him, and Aurora appeared immensely frank, but yet both knew that he was to be a delicate subject between them thenceforward, and that thoughts relating to him could not be exchanged without reserve.
There had been laughter over Estelle’s subterfuges in order not to let it be learned from her, and this without directly lying, that Aurora was actually living at Gerald’s. “It’s a case of a cold,” she had explained her friend’s non-appearance upon one occasion, without mentioning whose cold.
The details of Busteretto’s illness and danger had caused him to be reached for in the dark and kissed and cuddled anew.
“My, but it’s nice to have you back!” Estelle said in the morning, fixing a bright, fond gaze upon her friend across the little table in the bedroom, where they sat in their wrappers eating breakfast. “A penny for your thoughts, Nell. What are you thinking about?”
Nell smiled rather foolishly, then, putting Satan behind her in the shape of a temptation to prevaricate, said:
“I was thinking what they were doing over there. Whether Gerald has had a good night, and about Giovanna, and what it’s all like without me. It’s hard for me now to think of the place without me. I miss myself there.”
310“I suppose you’ll be driving round to inquire sometime in the course of the day,” Estelle said, with true generosity; at which Aurora tried to look as if she were not sure; she would think about it.
With arms around each other’s waists they went through all the rooms for Aurora to renew her pleasure in them after absence. They came to a standstill before her portrait in the drawing-room.
“There’s no mistake, he’s talented,” Estelle admitted good-humoredly, after a considerable silence. “That’s a fine portrait.”
Aurora did not say she thought so, too. Alone in her room later, while Estelle was dressing to go out together, she looked at the other portrait to see if she were “any nearer educated up to it.” It seemed to her she was, a little bit.
She started to dress. Being given to homely rather than poetic fancies, she subsequently thought of herself as having been, during the process of making herself fine for the afternoon drive and call, like some Cape Cod young one trotting happily along with her tin pail full of blueberries, just before a big dog sprang out of the roadside tangle and jostled the pail out of her hand, so that all the berries were spilled....
Even as she was buttoning her gloves a letter came for her with a parcel. All rosy with delight, she quickly found in her purse a reward for Gaetano, the bringer. Without too much hurry, like a person not eager to shorten a solid enjoyment, she opened the letter. It did not strike her as surprising, certainly not as ominous, that Gerald should write when he might expect to see her so soon. She read:
311This is the fourth letter, dearest Aurora, that I have written you since waking, after a very bad night, in such a black humor that you would know I am quite myself again and life has resumed for me its natural colors. I destroyed those letters one after the other because, although written with the effort of my whole being to be what you call sweet, they sounded to me insufferably disagreeable. And now whatever I write I shall have to send because if I destroy this letter also I shall not have time to write another before you come to see me as you promised. And the reason for my wretched night was that I was haunted by all the reasons there are why you should not come. They are so difficult to put into words that I despair, after three attempts, of doing it in any but an offensive manner. Pity, Aurora, the plight of your poor patient; permit him not to go into them. Just–don’t come.
Alas! that cannot be all. I have the vision of your puzzled face. Well, then, it is for yourself, in part. I have no excuse for profiting by a kindness that may be harmful to you. It is my duty to regard for you the conventions you are big-heartedly willing to disregard. I deplore the fact that I was ever so weak as to forget it.
But it is also for myself, who must not further be demoralized and spoiled.
I must not, moreover, be laid further under obligations of gratitude, the less, my dear Aurora, that gratitude is not precisely what I feel. No. I so little dote upon life that I should be glad if a merciful angel’s attention had not been drawn to me, and I perhaps might have escaped the dreary prolongation of years. I am sorry, but so it is.
Pray do not conceive any relation between what I have just written and the request that follows. Will you be so312kind as to return the object belonging to me which I miss from the little table-drawer at the head of my bed? You had no right to take it.
Vincent Johns is coming in a day or two. Do not think of me, therefore, as lonely or neglected.
I find I must hurry or be too late. This letter is beastly and ought to be torn up like the others. It simply cannot; it must go. I can only pray, Aurora, that you will understand.
Aurora went back to the beginning and read the letter a second time. Then she turned to the accompanying parcel and noticed that it was done up in a shabby piece of old newspaper. It contained a pair of fur-lined velvet shoes, a bow-knot of blue satin ribbon, and a bottle of almond milk, things of her own which through carelessness had been left behind. She could not know that the honest Giovanna alone was responsible for this return of her property. Coming at that moment, it formed the occasion for two stinging tears rising to the edge of Aurora’s eyes. She swept them away with the back of her glove, and forbade any more to follow. To prevent them she took her lips between her teeth, and with all her strength called upon her pride.
She read Gerald’s letter over again, really trying to understand, to be fair, to interpret it in the high-minded way he would wish.
“When all is said, it amounts to this,”–she reached the end of that exercise by a short cut,–“he wants to be let alone.”
And after every allowance had been made for him, and all due deference paid to his excellent reasons, still it313seemed to her what she couldn’t call anything but a poor return. Because his letter was bound to hurt her, and he must have known it. His sending it, therefore, argued a lack of any very deep affection for her. After she had come, just from his own words and actions, to supposing....
“This is what you get for not remembering that if a person is practically a foreigner you can never expect to know them except in spots,” she admonished herself.
After they had driven in the Cascine and around the Viali for the sunshine and air, Aurora asked suddenly:
“Haven’t we had enough of this?” and ordered the coachman to go home.
“Why!” exclaimed Estelle, astonished, “I thought we were going to Gerald Fane’s to see how he’s getting along!”
“No, I guess we won’t. I think it’s time, after living with him for three weeks, that I began to look after my reputation, don’t you?” said Aurora, with a forced lightness of rather bitter effect.
“I had a note from him, anyhow, just before we came out,” she added after a moment. “He’s doing all right.”
Estelle understood that something was wrong. Aurora could not successfully pretend with her. Aurora’s transparent face, as she now took note of it, betrayed hidden perplexity and chagrin. Estelle asked no questions, not needing to be told that Gerald’s note had worked the change. Despite her affection for her friend, indeed, just because of that affection, Estelle was quietly glad of it. Her thought caressed the secret which has been referred to, a scheme which for some weeks had given her an excited feeling of having between her fingers the thread of the Fates.
314After Estelle had gone to her own room for the night, Aurora sat down to compose an answer to Gerald’s letter. She had reflected a good deal since receiving it, and out of confusion and complexity singled one clear and simple thought or two.
Gerald had never said or intimated that she had forced herself upon him when he was too ill to help it; but the truth was she had done that, after all his shying rocks at her, too, to keep her off. Nor had Gerald suggested that one of his reasons for wishing her not to haunt his bedside was a fear of her becoming inconveniently fond of him. A hint could be found, if one chose, that he feared becoming too fond of her, but of the other no vestige, no shadow, or ghost of a shadow. Yet by those two points the spirit of Aurora’s reply must be inspired. Centuries of civilization have ground into the female of the species one particular lesson.
So the irascible man’s nervous, hurried and harried scrawl, written with sputtering pen that at several places tore clean through the paper, and written under the compulsion of his soul and his good sense, received from the best of women an answer in her calmest hand, deliberately calculated to give him pain, at the same time as to convey to him unambiguously that, as far as she was concerned, he was freer than the birds of the air. She wrote: