“‘Wash, dress, be brief in praying.Few beads are best when once we go a Maying.’”
“‘Wash, dress, be brief in praying.Few beads are best when once we go a Maying.’”
385“I won’t pray, I won’t put on beads. But, see here, what about what they call in this country my collation? You know I’m a gump on an empty stomach.”
“We’ll have our coffee on the road, at a little inn-table out of doors in the sunrise.”
“Fine! By-by. See you again in about twenty minutes.”
Every fiber composing Aurora twittered with a distinct and separate glee while she hurried through her toilet, a little breathless, a little distracted, and mortally afraid Estelle would hear and come to ask questions. From her wardrobe she drew the things best suited to the day and her humor: a white India silk all softly spotted with appleblossoms, of which she had said when she considered acquiring it that it was too light-minded for her age and size, but yet, vaulting over those objections, had bought and had made up according to its own merits and not hers; a white straw hat with truncated steeple crown, the fashion of that year, small brim faced with moss-green velvet, bunch of green ostrich-tips, right at the front, held in place by band and buckle.
Her parasol was a thing of endless lace ruffles, her wrap a thing of vanity.
She passed out through the dressing-room, she crept down the stairs, laughing at her own remark that it was awfully like an elopement. The house was not yet astir; only the Ildegonda sweeping out the kitchen, and old Achille out in the garden picking early insects off his plants.
At the door she greeted Gerald with all the joy of meeting again a playmate. He had on the right playmate’s face. She gave him both hands, and he clasped them to386the elbow, shaking them with satisfactory fire, while their eyes laughed a common recognition of the adventure as a lark.
At the gate waited the open carriage, a city-square cabriolet, but clean and in repair, drawn by two strong little brown horses, with rosettes and feathers in their jingling bridles, ribbons in their whisking braided tails, and driven by a brown young man of twenty, with a feather, too, in his hat, which he wore aslant and crushed down over his right ear. To make the excursion pleasanter to himself, he was by permission taking along a companion of his own age, who occupied the low seat beside his elevated one, and in contrast with his vividness, the pride of life expressed by his cracking whip, the artistically singular sounds he made in his throat to encourage the horses, was a washed-out personality, good at most to do the jumping off and on, to readjust harness, to investigate the brake, or to offer alms from the lady in the carriage to the old man breaking stones in the roadside dust.
They were off; they sped through the gate of the Holy Cross, the fresh young horses making excellent time. Out of the city, along the river, across it, past hamlets, past villas, past churches andcamposanti, past vineyards andpoderiand peasants’ dwellings....
It seemed to Aurora that never had there been such a day, so fresh and unstained and perfect, a day inspiring such gladness in being. The sense of that priceless boon, the freedom of a whole long day together, elated her with a joy that knew only one shadow, and that unremarked for the first half of it–the shortness of the longest earthly day.
Now the horses slowed in their pace; the ascent had begun among the shady chestnut-trees. The driver’s friend387scrambled down and plodded alongside the horses; the driver himself descended and walked, cheering on his beasts with noises that nearly killed Aurora, she declared.
As it took them between four and five hours to reach their destination, and as Aurora chattered all the time, with little intervals of talk by Gerald, to report their conversation is unfeasible. Aurora, wanting in all that varied knowledge which those who are fond of reading get from books, had yet a lot to say that some unprejudiced ears found worth while. The dwellers upon earth and their ways had for her an immense and piercing interest. In vain had circumstances circumscribed her early life: neighbors, Sunday-school teacher, minister, village drunkard, fourth of July orator, had furnished comedy for her every day. The human happenings falling within her ken became good stories in their passage through a mind quick in its perception of inconsequence, faulty logic, pretense, all that constitutes the funny side of things. Aurora’s love of the funny story amounted to a fault. Aurora was not always above promoting laughter by narratives no subtler than a poke in your ribs. Aurora, in the vein of funny stories, could upon occasion be Falstaffian. But only one half of humanity had a chance to find out the latter. When in company of the other sex, by instinct and upbringing alike she minded her Ps and Qs.
Gerald said that Aurora on that day regaled him with over a thousand comic anecdotes, this being the expression of her frolicsome and exuberant mood. He furnished her with a few to add to her store, Italian ones, proving that he was not wholly without some share of her gift in that line; but he now and then politely stopped her flow and led her to admire with him the beauties of the road, natural388or architectural, a distant glimpse, a form, a fragrance. He would explain things to her, impart scraps of pertinent history, which she would appear trying to appreciate and imprint on her memory.
As he leaned back in the carriage at her side, bathed in the wavering green and gold light of the chestnut-trees among which the road wended, a recent description of him, which she had said over to herself, to qualify it by mitigating adjectives, seemed to her to have become altogether unfair. Gerald’s face, beneath the brim of his pliable white straw, bent down over the eyes and turned up at the back, Italian style, did not look sickly. On the contrary, it looked better and stronger since his illness; he even had a little color. He was not sad-eyed, either, that she could see, though his eyes must always be the thoughtful kind. As for spindle-shanked, he filled his loose woolen clothes better than before.
He had made himself modestly fine for the day to be spent in company of the fair: he had on a necktie which, if expressive of mood, declared his outlook on life to be cheerfuller: it was a vibrant tone of violet that accorded agreeably with his gray suit. A rose-geranium leaf and a stem or two of rusty-goldgaggia, odors that he loved, occupied at his buttonhole the place of those decorations which distinguished elderly gentlemen are sometimes envied for, and which–it is a commonplace–are not worthy to be exchanged for the flower Youth sticks at his coat to aid him to charm.
It grew very warm; the way, though pleasant, was beginning to seem long when they arrived. The old monastery, now a school of forestry; the Cross of Savoy, where pilgrims rest and dine, gleamed white in the cloudless389noon, amid the century-old trees that long ago, before Dante’s time even, earned for the spot its beautiful name of Vallombrosa, Umbrageous Vale.
Aurora was by this time starving again, and Gerald knew the pleasure of purveying to the demands of a stomach as untroubled by any back-thought relating to its functioning as that of a big bloomy goddess seated before a meal of ambrosia. He suggested that she accompany her artichoke omelet, her cutlet with the sauce of anchovy, parsley and mustard, by a little red wine. But she would not, even to be companionable. She could never bring herself to touch wine, any more than to use powder on her cheeks, which in truth did not need it, or a pencil to her eyebrows, which would have looked better for that accentuation.
In a state of physical and mental well-being such as can be bought only by an early rising, an inconsiderable breakfast, a long ride in the warmth of Tuscan mid-May, an abundant and repairing repast, taken, amid sweet conventual coolness, in company which leaves nothing to wish for beyond it, they went forth to spend the time that must be granted the horses for rest before the return to Florence.
After loitering in the inn garden, they went to look at the memorials relating to Saint John Gualberto, founder of the monastery. She listened to the picturesque history of his life, death, and miracles, but was not to be rendered sober-minded by any such thing. In the midst of Gerald’s instructive account of the holy abbot’s endeavors to purify the monastic orders from the stain of simony, her hand clutched his, and doing a delicate cake-walk she compelled him along with her, announcing, “The Hornet and the Bumble-bee went walking hand in hand!” Fancying this prank not to have been without success, she next performed an improvisedpas seulillustrative of the text, “The mountains shall skip like little lambs!”
“Come, let us reason together, Aurora”
“Come, let us reason together, Aurora”
391There was artfulness, as has been suspected, in Aurora’s frequent jests upon her size. Their gross exaggeration was fondly counted upon to make her appear sylphlike by comparison with the images she raised.
To relieve the seriousness of Short Lessons on Great Subjects she presently invented interrupting them at intervals to introduce Gerald and herself to some rock or tree or mountain, as if it had been a poor person standing by neglected. “Jack Sprat,” she said, “and The Fat!” “A busted cream-puff,” she said, “and a drink of water!” Further, “Dino and Retta!” Finally, with imagination running dry, “Gerry and Rory!”
Yes, by such little jokes–what Leslie called Jokes of the First Category, Aurora sought to enliven the hour for Gerald. He never omitted to laugh, without being able to enter enough into her fun to join her in the same species. An incapacity. Still, there was no disguising the basking enjoyment possessing him, his love of her gaiety, if not at all moments of the form it took.
Finding it entrancing up there, they decided not to start for home till the last minute possible. A limit was set to the time they might linger by the necessity for some degree of daylight in making the descent. From the edge of the curving road the mountain dropped away without the protection of any parapet.
When they had found their ideal place in which to sit on the warm earth in the shade and look off over valleys and mountains into azure space, Aurora at last consented392to be still. She became dreamy, appeared sweetly fatigued, and was for a long time mute.
Though the mere quality of her voice still had power to stir Gerald’s heart to pleasure, yet to be silent with Aurora was pleasure of a different order from hearing her voice of rough velvet recount preposterous events or propound humorous riddles.
It looked from where they sat as if the land had at some time been fluid, and been tossing, green and purple, in a majestic storm, when some great word of command had fixed it in the midst of motion, and the waves became Apennines; then in an hour of peculiar affection for that plot of the earth a faultless artist from the skies had been set to oversee nature and man at their work there, and prevent the intrusion of one note not in harmony with his most distinguished dream.
“If Italy should perish and all else remain,” said Gerald, whose eyes had been feasting on beauties of line and color such as he conceived were not to be found outside this land of his idolatry, “the world would be irreparably impoverished. If all the world besides should perish and Italy remain, the world could still boast of infinite riches.”
Aurora gave a nod of at least partial assent. She was growing accustomed to the thought that Italy was the fairest of countries and Florence the fairest of Italian cities. She found herself beginning to like this creed.
In the quiet that descended upon them the native piety in each groped for some acknowledgment to make of his consciousness at the moment of unusual blessing. In him it took the form of a renewal, more devoted perhaps than ever, of the determination to maintain an uncompromising393purity of aim in his work. The incomparable scene stimulated within him a sense of power to produce things rivaling what lay under his eyes; he, atom, rivaling his Maker in the creation of beauty. In her it was a determination of greater loyalty toward the Provider of undeservedly happy days to man, whose heart is wicked from his birth, as her mother had been wont to tell her.
Hearing her hum very softly to herself, he asked what she sang. She said, her mother’s favorite hymn, and gave it aloud, with the words:
Father, what e’er of earthly blissThy sovereign will denies,Accepted at Thy throne of graceLet this petition rise:Give me a calm, a thankful heart,From every murmur free;The blessings of Thy grace impartAnd make me live to Thee.
Father, what e’er of earthly blissThy sovereign will denies,Accepted at Thy throne of graceLet this petition rise:Give me a calm, a thankful heart,From every murmur free;The blessings of Thy grace impartAnd make me live to Thee.
Like one with an impeccable ear, but with small esteem for his gifts as a singer, Gerald murmured the melody after her, just audibly, to show he cared to have his share in her memories.
But mainly the two of them thought of each other.
Gerald, regarding Aurora’s hands as they lay in her lap–innocent-looking, loyal-looking, rather large hands, which during his illness he had liked to think were Madonna hands, but when seen in health they were not, really–was amazed to remember the day when their making passes over his face had filled him with perverse repugnance.
And Aurora, remembering the first time she had seen394Gerald and nicknamed him Stickly-prickly, while feeling him more than three thousand miles removed from her, was amazed....
So they sat, two little dots, two trembling threads, against the screen of the universe and eternity, and their two selves, under the spell of a world-old enchantment, loomed so large to each that the universal and the eternal were to them two little dots, two threads.
Gerald saw how the afternoon was mellowing toward sunset.... And the important things of the day had not been touched upon.
Our hero had traversed great spaces in the region of sentiment during the two days allowed the Hermitage to stand or crumble without him. The first of them had been spent far from it, even as Aurora supposed, for the sake of letting the impression of having been laughed at wear off a little. Already for some time before that forced climax Gerald had been haunted by the feeling that he ought to offer himself to Aurora, as it were to regularize his status in her house. After hanging around as he had been doing, one might almost say that good manners demanded it. Her fashion, on that evening in the garden, of treating the idea that he could be enamoured of her assured him that she would refuse. He would have done his duty, and they would continue to drift, he shutting his eyes to the penalty awaiting his self-indulgence, the taxes of pain rolling up for the hour when her necessary departure would involve the uprooting of every last little flower in that wretched garden of his heart. With such a mental pattern of the future he had gone to bed at the end of the first day.
395On the next morning something perhaps in deep dreams which he did not remember, or in the happy manner of the new day lighting a scarlet geranium on the terrace ledge, or simply perhaps the whisper of an angel, had effected a change. A heart-throb, a stroke of magic, had so lifted him up that over the top of the wall edging the road of life for him he had seen a thrilling garden outstretched, smiling in the sun, a sight that so enkindled him with the witchery of its promises that he felt he should seek for a way into that garden till he found it; should, if necessary, demolish the wall.
That day he went walking on the hills beyond Settignano, and the new light, the intoxication, persisted–the vision of himself as Aurora’s lover. Why not? An escape from the past, a different adventure from all prefigured in his dull expectations before.... In his theory of living Gerald had always admitted the gallant advisability of burning ships. There was room in his theory of living for just such a divergence from design as he now meditated. When the call comes, summon it to never so improbable places, the poet and artist obeys. He had gone to bed on the second night with these thoughts and a plan for the morrow.
Now that morrow was wearing to an end and all the floating splendid courageous thoughts and feelings, brave in the assurance, along with the determination, of victory, must be somehow caught and compressed and turned into the language–how poverty-stricken, how stale!–of a proposal of marriage; even as a great variegated, gold-shot, butterfly-tinted, cloud-light tissue of the Orient is drawn into a colorless whipcord twist that it may pass through a little ring.
396As he revolved in his mind what he should say to start with, Gerald saw appropriateness for the first time in the methods of the historic Gaul, who seized by her hair the charming creature whom he felt allied to him by deep things, seated her on the horse before him, and rode away. But what he would have liked so much the best would have been to lay his head in Aurora’s willing lap, embrace her knees tenderly, and have her understand all without a word being spoken.
Now he cleared his throat, took a reasonable air, a tone almost of banter, to say what, influenced by the long precedent of their converse together, he could say only in that manner, covering up as best he could the fact that his heart trembled and burned.
“Shall we resume our conversation of last Friday?” he asked, with a fine imitation of the comradely ease which had marked all their intercourse that day.
He was looking over the valley, as if still preoccupied with its beauty rather than with her.
Thus misled, she did not guess right. She said:
“About Charlie, you mean? Just fancy, I haven’t thought of him once all day! Little varmint! Don’t I wish I had the spanking of him! But I guess it would lame my arm.”
“Not about Charlie. I asked would you marry me, and you said you would not. Will you to-day?”
“Not for a farm!” she answered, with emphasis equal to her precipitation.
“Why not?” he asked, undisconcerted.
“Because.”
“Come, let us reason together, Aurora.” He changed position, arranging himself on his elbow so as to be able397to look at her. His eyes were steady. “For a man to ask a woman to marry him is of course the greatest piece of impertinence of which he could be guilty. But from such impertinences, Auroretta, has been derived every beautiful thing that has blessed our poor world from the beginning. No man is good enough for any woman, let that stand for an axiom. But there again, Auroretta, it’s not according to merit that those rewards, gentle and beautiful ladies, are dispensed. I have rather less to offer than any man in the world, but I am bold because you, dear, are just the one to be blind.”
“Oh, it’s notthat, of course,” said Aurora, hurriedly.
“Don’t suppose for a moment that I am troubled by the size of your fortune or the size of my own. You haven’t any money, dear. Others have your money. I have almost to laugh at the splendid speed with which that open granary of yours will be eaten clean by all the birds coming to pick one seed at a time.”
“You needn’t laugh, then. Some of it is going to be pinned to me solid, so that nothing can get it away from me, not even I myself.”
“I am sorry to hear it. The other was so complete. Well, if you had nothing, I should still have just enough to keep us from hunger, though perhaps not from cold in these dear old stone houses of Italy. And you–I know you well enough to be sure of it–you are exactly the one to learn how much there can be in life besides its luxuries. Since my illness, too, Aurora, let me confide to you, there have been in me reawakenings.... I have felt the beginning–I am speaking with reference to my work,–I have felt intimations–No, it is too difficult to express without seeming to boast, which is horribly unlucky. In398short, I have felt that I might do the turn still of forcing a careless generation to pay attention.”
“Oh, Gerald, how nice it is to have you say that!” she warmly rejoiced. “I’m so glad to hear it!”
“Now tell me why it is you won’t marry me. Stop, dear. Don’t say because you are not in love with me. I have difficulty in seeing how any one in her right senses could be in love with me. It would be enough, dear, that you should be to me as you were during those happy, happy days when I was so beastly ill. You are so generous, it would be merely fulfilling your nature. And I, upon my word, dear, would try to deserve it. I would give you reason to be kind. I am not without scraps of honor–wholly; I would do my best to make you happy.”
“No,”–she shook her head decidedly,–“no, Gerry,” she added, to take the sharp edge off her refusal, “no, Gerry; Rory won’t.”
“You have only to lose by it, that is obvious, and I to gain, and nothing could equal the indecency of insistence on my part; but I feel that I am going to persist to the point of persecution. You are fond of me, you know. I only dare to say you are fond of me because you have said it yourself more than once. And you are always sincere, and I wouldn’t be likely to forget. Now, if you are fond of me,–very, very fond, you have said repeatedly,–why do you refuse? I wouldn’t be a bore of a husband, I promise. I would leave you a great deal of liberty.”
“No, Geraldino; no.”
“You needn’t tell me there’s somebody else. I don’t believe it. Though you feel only fondness for me, I know that you are not in love with anybody else. When one is in love, there is no room in life for such warm and dear399friendship as you have frankly shown me. It’s that, after all, which has given me courage.”
“No, no; there’s nobody else.”
“Well, then, why can’t you? Why won’t you?”
“I–” She hesitated, as if to think. There was a silence. Then she asked slowly, like one who finds some difficulty in laying her tongue on the right words: “Do you remember all those things you said that evening in the garden, the night you came in to meet Tom for the first time? How you wouldn’t for anything in the whole world let yourself get tangled up again with caring for a person?”
“Perfectly. I could only picture it as meaning more of trouble and unrest. But things change, dear. We change. There has taken place in me since that, no matter for what reason, an increase of self-confidence and confidence in fate such as turns men into nuisances or makes them successful. In the last twenty-four hours particularly. Now, as I look at the inconvenience of getting tangled up again with caring for a person, I find I don’t mean at all to suffer. I mean to bother you until you say yes, and then to be happy. You could never wilfully torment me, I know; you are incapable of it. Then, when you have graciously consented to marry me, I feel as if I might build up my life on new lines.”
“I can’t, Geraldino; I can’t.”
“You can’t. So you have said. And I have asked you to tell me your reasons, that I may combat them one by one.”
“It’s no use. We’re too different.”
“That we are different, thank God! is a reason for and not against.”
400“No, no; not when it’s such a huge difference. We’re like–a bird and a fish.”
“Don’t call me a fish. I object.”
“We don’t think the same about hardly anything.”
“But we feel alike on everything of importance.”
“There’s hardly a thing I do that’s quite right as you see it. No, don’t take the trouble to contradict me; let me do the talking for a minute. You’re so critical and so conventional and so correct! No matter how much you say you aren’t, youare. And while we’re like this I don’t have to care. I rather enjoy shocking you. And while I’m none of your business, you don’t have to care what I do or what I’m like. We can have our fun and be awfully fond of each other, and it’s all serene and right. But if I were Mrs. Gerald Fane, all my faults and shortcomings, my not knowing the things that everybody in your society knows, my not having any elegant accomplishments, would show up so glaring that I should know you must be mortified. You couldn’t help it.”
“Stop, dear! You enrage me. You put me beside myself. You are so superficial. And dense. And you hold me up to myself in the features of a beastly cad! I won’t have it. For one thing, let me tell you that if I were the Lord Ronald Macdonald of that song we’ve heard Miss Felixson sing, and you were that canny lass Leezie Lindsay, I should know jolly well that after I’d carried you off to the Hielands my bride and my darling to be, it would be a very short time before Lady Ronald Macdonald had all the airs and tricks of speech of my sisters and cousins. That, however, is neither here nor there. Who wants you to be different? Aurora, if you only knew yourself! Ceres, or Summer, or Peace sitting among the wheat-sheaves,401what would it matter that she had not been educated at a fashionable boarding-school? Let her just breathe and be,–beautiful, benign, and any man not utterly a fool will prefer to lie at her knees, keeping still while her silence appeases and reconciles him, to hearing the most brilliant conversation of a lady novelist.”
“You can talk beautifully, Gerald, that’s one sure thing; but talk me over you can’t. Seems to me I should have to be crazy to forget all in a moment what I’ve said over and over to myself, and drilled myself not to lose sight of. After you asked me the other day, though I knew it was just on the spur of the moment, I thought it all out in the night as much as if it had been serious, and I saw what would be the one safe course for little me. I mustn’t; that’s all there is to it. Everything is wrong for it to turn out happy in the end. I’m terribly fond of you, but I should be scared to death of you, simply scared to death, as a husband. We’re not the same kind. If I could forget it on my own account, I have only to remember how it would strike Estelle. And Estelle’s got no end of horse sense. It’s according to horse sense we must act when it comes to settling the real things of life. I expect”–she had the effect of turning a page or a corner; she dropped from heights of argument to low plains–“I expect I shall be big as a mountain by and by. I don’t see any help for it. I starve myself, I drink hot water, I take exercise,–nearly walk my legs off,–and the next time I get weighed I’ve gained three pounds! What’s the use? Then, I’m older than you.”
“Not at all. I’m older than the everlasting hills; you are the youngest thing that lives.”
“That’s all right, but you were twenty-eight your last402birthday, and I’m thirty. I’m afraid my character’s already pretty well fixed in its present form. When it comes over me, for instance, to play the clown, I’ve got to do it or burst. And you’re naturally a tyrant, you know.”
“I am. I am critical, carping, conventional, and a tyrant, everything you say, but just because I am those things, you ought to be able to see, dear Aurora–because I am those things and know it, they are the things least to be feared in me. Do you suppose Marcus Aurelius was really calm and philosophical? Because he, on the contrary, was anxious and passionate, he wrote those maxims to try to live by. When youwouldgo and be a negress, did I make a scene? I gnashed my teeth and gnawed my knuckles, but when I saw you afterward, wasn’t I decently decent?”
“Yes, but you took to your bed. If I were Mrs. Gerald, and the Pope of Rome sent for me to do Lew Dockstader for him and his cardinals, you know you wouldn’t let me go.”
“You are wrong. I should make a point of it. I should only ask to be permitted to retire into solitude until all the vulgar people had stopped talking about it.”
“Ah, you’re a dear, funny boy; but put it out of your mind, Geraldino, do, dear, when we’re so happy as it is. Let’s go on just as we’ve been going; you know yourself that it’s the wisest, and what really you would prefer. If you’ve asked me to-day–mind, I don’t say youhave; but if you have–to save my vanity and back up the proposal you didn’t really mean the other day,–because you’re always such a gentleman; you’d rather die than not behave403like a gentleman,–let it go at that. But if you should feel now that you’ve got to back up your declaration that you’re going to persist and follow this up, just ask me over again every few days to show there’s no unkind feeling, and I promise it will be safe; I’ll refuse you every time. It’ll be our little standing joke. For don’t you go dreaming that I’m going to let go of you! You can call me pudgy if I let you get away. I love you too dearly. Wasn’t everything all right and lovely until the other day when you came out with that stilted speech, ‘doing you the honor’? We’ll take up again just where we left off, and bimeby make fun of all this. You who’ve read all the books ever written, don’t you know of cases where two like us went on being just friends, and taking comfort in each other on and on to the end of the tale?”
“There have been examples, yes, a very few, and not on the whole encouraging.”
“You know we never thought of anything else until three days ago, and were perfectly contented. Let’s call all this in between a mistake, like taking the wrong road and having to turn back to be where we were before. Let’s go back.”
“Yes, let’s go back. I won’t bore you any more.”
He had all in an instant changed to cool dryness. They would get no further along with talk on this occasion, that was clear. And to clasp her knees, laying his head on her lap, and penetrate her in silence with the conviction that they belonged together in a manner that turned all the sensible things she said into folly, could not be done outside the world of dreams and fancies. He jumped to his feet.
404“I meant, you know, let’s go back to Florence. I’m afraid it’s high time. We ought to have daylight at least until we get to the foot of the mountain.”
“Cross, Geraldino?”
“Not at all.”
“Good friends as ever?”
“Assuredly.”
“Oh, I’ve had such a beautiful day!” she sighed, getting up by the help of his two hands, and brushing down her dress. “I certainly do love to be with you!”
With the inconsequence of a woman she wanted, in order to console him for rejecting him, to make him sure she loved him deeply nevertheless; and so she said, turning upon him eyes of sweetest, sincerest affection, “I certainly do love to be with you!”
In the carriage they were silent, like people tired out by the long day, talked out, and certain of each other’s consent to be still.
The two young fellows on the box were quiet, too. The horses now needed no encouragement to go; the scraping of the brake gave evidence rather of the need to hold them back. The driver’s friend, named appropriately Pilade, sat hunched with chilly sleepiness; but Angelo, the driver, was kept visibly alert by the responsibility of making a safe descent in the fast-failing light. Owing to the dilatoriness of thesignorithey had been later in starting than was prudent.
When they emerged at last from the shadow of the chestnut-trees and the brake blessedly was released, it was accomplished evening. The dome of the firmament spread above them so wonderful for darkly luminous serenity that405the signori behind in the carriage arranged themselves to contemplate it comfortably, with their feet on the forward bench, their heads propped on the back of the seat.
Thus they passed through glimmering hamlets, between high walls of orchards, past iron gates opening into cypress avenues with dim villas at the other end, terraces of vine-garlanded olive-trees, all of a dark silvery blue, and did not vouchsafe a look at anything but the inverted cup of the nocturnal sky.
Even this they did not see more than in a secondary way, for the interposing thoughts and images.
The eyes of both were wide, and in their fixity the lights of heaven were glassed. The face of the one burned with a red spot on the visibly-defined cheek-bone; the cheeks of the other were, for a marvel, pale.
Aurora, uplifted on a great wonder and pride and illogical happiness, was thinking of the days to come, the immediate to-morrows, rich in a tenderness profounder still than that which had linked her before to the companion staring at the stars beside her; she thought of how she should through a wise firmness and God’s help steer their course into ways of a safer and longer happiness than that which he had tendered.
“It would seem rather unnecessary–” came from him through the transparent darkness in what was to the young driver’s ears a monotonous bar of insignificant sound, “it would seem to me almost imbecile, to say to you that I love you, when for months I have been hovering around you, as must have been evident to the dullest, like the care-burthened honey-fly, possessed with the fixed desire to hide his murmurs in the rose. When for months I have been, in fact, like a dog with his nose on your footprints, asking406nothing but to lie down at your feet with his muzzle on your shoe.”
She impulsively felt for his hand, and pushed her own into it. “Don’t say another word, Gerald. I daresn’t do what you wish, I just daresn’t. I’m plain scared to! And I’m such a fool that I’m nearer to it this minute than I like to be by a long sight. I’m fond enough of you for almost anything, and you know it, but I must keep my level head. It can’t be done–a greyhound tied down to a mudturtle. I know what I’m like,–no disparagement meant, Mrs. Hawthorne,–and what you’re like, and I won’t let myself forget. I’m looking out first of all for myself, but I’m looking out for you, too, dear boy. Don’t say any more about it to-night, Gerald, please, with the stars shining like that, and the air so sweet that all the fairy-tales you ever heard seem possible. I want to keep solid earth under my feet.”
Gerald was not so devoid of the right masculine spark as not to recognize the moment for one of which advantage should be taken by any creature capable of growing a mustache. The thing to be done was to put his arms around her like a man, and lay his head on her shoulder like a child, and treat as not existing the barriers which she described as dividing them.
Often enough in his life Gerald had wished he might have been a masterful man, capable of the like things. But already a vague sickness of soul had succeeded his momentarily dominant mood. Distrust filled him–of his own character, his aims, his talent, his health, and his destiny. His dreams had but recently taken the form in which he had that day expressed them; he had not grown into them. Under the depressing effect of failure he was no more sure407than she had professed to be that the proposed union would not be a rash mistake. He saw the wisdom of a return to his gray policy of wanting nothing, asking nothing. Heaviness possessed him; he made no motion.
Signs of the nearing city came thicker and thicker; the street lamps became frequent and consecutive. Aurora sat up and composed her appearance. The lighted house-fronts threw back the skies to inexpressible altitudes.
She continued aloud for Gerald to hear a conversation she had been holding mentally:
“Estelle says we must go away somewhere for the summer, because it’s awfully hot down here in Florence, we’re told. We’re thinking of taking some sort of place at the seashore for the bathing season. You’ll be coming down to visit us, won’t you? Then by and by, when I’ve had pretty near enough of the kind of life I’m leading, tell you what I’m thinking I’ll do. Give up the house I’ve got and take another, different, and fit it up for a children’s hospital, a small one, of course, to be within my means, and run it myself, and do what I can of the nursing. I’ve been thinking of it for some time as a good thing to do instead of spending my money and nothing to show for it. It would be something to do for the sake of little Dan, to make it so it wouldn’t be the same as if he never had passed through the world. Then I shall have my work just as you have yours, Gerald. And so we’ll live on, each so interested in all the other does. And you’ll come to see me, and I’ll go to see you–chaperoned, if you insist, though I understand a studio can be visited without impropriety, and–”
“You can leave me out of your plans for the future. I am going away to forget you.”
408“Oh, no, you’re not. You’re coming to see me to-morrow. Five o’clock at the very latest, hear?”
“I’m afraid you will have to excuse me.”
“You wouldn’t break my heart like that for anything, Gerald Fane! You wouldn’t let the foolish doings of this day destroy all the months have built up! You’re not so mean. When I tell you it’ll be all right and just as it was before–”
But he stubbornly would not agree, and they quarreled, as so often, half in play, half in real exasperation, each calling the other selfish.
But at her door, when he took her hands to thank her for the day she had given him, he dropped quite naturally, “Until to-morrow, then,” and she entered her great white hall with a happy, shining face.
In the half-light of the solitary hall-lamp the white-and-gold door between the curving halves of the stairway stood open on to the blackness of the unlighted ball-room. At the threshold appeared Estelle, and stood with folded arms until the servant who answered the bell had been heard retreating down the back stairs. She came forward with a tired, troubled, pallid, and severe face.
“Well, I’m glad you’ve got back!” she said, as much as to say that she had given up looking for her. And as Aurora unexpectedly cast mischievous, muscular arms around her and tried to squeeze the breath out of her, she gasped amid spasms of resistance: “Stop! Don’t try to pacify me! I’m in no mood for fooling! I’m as cross with you as I can be!”
“You little slate-pencil! You little lemon-drop, you!” said Aurora, squeezing harder, then suddenly letting go.
409“I’m in no mood to be funny, you–you county-fair prize punkin! I’ve been worried half to death. Where’ve you been so long, ’way into the night, long past eleven o’clock?”
“Didn’t you find my note on the pin-cushion? That informed you where I’ve been.”
“I thought you must have met with an accident, to make you so terribly late, or else made up your mind to go off with that young man for good and all. Tell you the truth, I didn’t quite know which I should prefer, which would be better for you in the end.”
“Do you mean to tell me you’ve been sitting here all day stewing and fretting about that? Didn’t you ever in your life go buggy-riding with a feller, and did it always ends with the grand plunge? You know it didn’t. You know you could ride from Provincetown to Boston, with the moon shining, too, and not even exchange a chaste salute.”
“Nell, there’s one thing I know, and it’s that my scolding and warning and beseeching will do exactly as much good as an old cow mooing with her neck stretched over a stone wall. You know what I think. I’ve had plenty of time for reflection, walking up and down the floor in there in the dark; and long before you finally got home I’d made up my mind not to be an idiot and make myself a nuisance trying to influence you. It’s your funeral. What you choose to do is none of my business. What I said when you came in just escaped me.–Stand off and let me look at you.”
While making the request, she herself drew off to get a more comprehensive view of her friend.
Something of the sunshine, the mountain sweetness, the410unpolluted breezes and wide perspectives of the heights, the dreams of the starlit homeward ride, the triumph in man’s love, was shining forth from Aurora, with her fresh sunburn, her untidied hair, and softly luminous eyes. Estelle felt herself suddenly on the point of tears. But she stiffened.
“Well, you do look as if you’d had a good time, you crazy thing!” she said dryly. “What made you put your best dress on if you were going to sit round on the ground? You’ve got it all grass stains. Oh, Nell,” she melted, “while you’ve been off gallivanting, I’ve just about worried myself sick over a paper Leslie left. I’ve been longing for you to get back to see what you make of it.”
“A paper? What do you mean?”
“A newspaper. Come on upstairs. I left it on the desk. Leslie called in the forenoon, but I had gone out. Then she came again in the afternoon, so I knew it must be something special. But I simply couldn’t bring myself to see her and let her know you’d gone off for the whole day with Gerald Fane. So I got the maid to tell her we were both out. Everybody does that over here. Anyhow, I went and stood on the terrace while the maid was delivering my message. So Leslie went off, but she left this Italian paper for the maid to give us. And, my dear,–now don’t faint,–there’s a long piece in it about you.”
“For goodness’ sakes! About me? Why? Where?”
“There. It isn’t marked, and I was the longest time trying to discover why Leslie had left the paper. After I’d gone all over it hunting for a marked passage, I thought it must be a mistake and that she’d simply left it because she was tired of carrying it round, and the maid hadn’t understood. But going over it column by column,411I at last saw the word Hawthorne and those other names. ’Una Americana’–‘An American’–the article is entitled. It looks to me, Nell, as if your whole life’s history might be printed there.”
“For the land’s sake! Now, who do you suppose can have done that? What on earth would anybody want to–”
“I’ve been puzzling over it and puzzling over it till I’m about played out trying to make sense of it, and my head aches like fury. Oh, never mind my head! Now you’ve got back I don’t care.”
“And your French doesn’t help you to translate it?”
“Yes, it does help–some. I can pick out lots of words, and here and there a whole sentence; but what I can’t get at is the spirit of the whole, whether it’s meant to be friendly or not.”
“Have you tried with a dictionary? Where’s the dictionary? Get it, and we’ll pick it out if it takes all night.”
“Indeed, I wish I had a dictionary. Mine’s French-English. I asked Clotilde if she had an Italian-English or an Italian-French, and she said yes, but at home. Isn’t it provoking? I certainly wasn’t going to show this to her, and get her to translate it for me before I’d consulted with you.”
“Bother!” said Aurora, thoughtfully, with her eyes on the cryptic print. Estelle sat close, examining the sheet over her shoulder. “Elenameans Helen, doesn’t it? I guess it must, as it comes here before Barton. They’ve got my old name. And there’s Bewick–Bewick, and here’s Colorado. They’ve got the whole thing, fast enough. It’s the doing of an enemy; there can be no doubt of that.”
“I know who you’re thinking about.”
412“Charlie Hunt, of course. Scamp! Worm! Cockroach! Low down, ungrateful, pop-eyed pig!” Nor did the reviling stop there. For the space of about forty seconds Aurora was unpublishable.
“But how on earth did he get at it?” wondered Estelle.
“After he’d opened that letter of mine, he wrote to the amiable writer thereof and asked for information.”
“Honestly, Nell, I don’t think he’s had time.”
“I guess he has–just time. The languishing Iona hurried for once. Well, I don’t care!” Aurora folded the paper tight and flung it from her. “Enemies may do what they please; I’ve got friends. If everything comes out as it really happened, I haven’t anything to fear, except that it’s mighty unpleasant. It’s only lies, and people believing them, that could do me harm. I’ve got friends in Florence. Oh, not many true ones, I don’t suppose. It’s paying my way that has made me popular, I’m not such a gump as not to know that. But some true friends I’ve got, and their backing will be my stay. One friend I’ve got–” Pride and a sudden battle-light flashed in Aurora’s eye. “One friend I’ve got, who if I gave the word would kill Charlie Hunt for this, or put him in a fair way to dying. I do believe, Hat, that Gerald Fane would call Charlie Hunt out to fight a duel to punish him for a slur on me. Oh, he can fence just as well as the Italians he was brought up with. I’ve seen the fencing-swords in his studio. But”–she calmed down–“I wouldn’t permit that sort of thing. It’s ridiculous. I don’t believe in it.”
Cooling to normal, she laughed, with a return to the light of reality. “He doesn’t believe in it, either, I shouldn’t suppose.”
Leslie, arriving early next day, read off the newspaper article, making a free translation of it, as follows:
When a thing is too successful, it is seldom natural; and so when there appeared in our city asignora, blond of hair, azure of eye, with the complexion of delicate, luminous roses, red and white, whose name was at once Aurora andAlbaspina,–Hawthorne,–floral counterpart of dawn, we should have had suspicions. That we had none does not prevent our feeling no very great surprise when we learn that the bearer of the poetic and more than appropriate name is called in sober truth Elena Barton. The more beautiful name was adopted by a child acting out its fairy-stories; it was remembered and re-adopted by a woman when she wished to detach her life from a past which neither charity, fidelity, nor devotion to a sacred duty had succeeded in keeping from sorrow and the deadly aspersions of malignity.
Thegentilissimaperson of the irradiating smile, which, however briefly seen, must be long remembered, whom we have grown accustomed this winter to meeting in the salons where assembles all that is most distinguished among foreigners, whose name we have grown accustomed to finding foremost in every work of charity, has a title to our esteem far beyond the ordinary member of an indolent and favored414class. To alleviate suffering has been the chosen work of those hands that Florence also has found ever open and ready with their help. It was in effect the extent of their beneficence which brought about the black imbroglio from which Elena Barton chose to flee and take refuge in the City of Flowers under thesoaveand harmonious name by which we know her.
Her life had been for several years devoted to the care of an old man afflicted with a most malignant and terrible cancer in the face. She had filled toward him so perfectly the part of a daughter that his gratitude made her upon his death an equal sharer in his fortune with the children of his blood. Thence the law-case BewickversusBarton, which for a period filled the city of Denver in Colorado of the United States as if with poisonous fumes. The literal daughters, two in number, who had shown no filial love for the unfortunate old man, in trying to annul their father’s will, left nothing undone or unspoken that could help theirturpe, or evil, purpose, even attempting to prove that not only had the devoted nurse been their father’samante–[You can guess what that is, Aurora. They are much simpler here than we at home about calling things by their names, and much more outspoken on all subjects], but had likewise been theamanteof the son, sole member of the family who supported her claim to the share of the fortune appointed by the father. Justice in the event prevailed, but a tired and broken woman emerged from the conflict. What to do to regain a little of that pleasure in living which blackening calumnies and rodent ill-will, even when not victorious, can destroy in the upright and feeling nature? The imagination which had prompted in childhood the acting out of fairy-stories here came into415play: Leave behind the scene of sorrows, take ship, and point the prow toward the land of orange and myrtle, of golden marbles and wine-colored sunsets; change name, begin again, do good under a beautiful appellation which the poor should learn to love and speak in their prayers to the last of their days....
“The rest, Aurora dear, is pure flattery, which it becomes me not to speak nor you to hear. I won’t read it.”
“Well, I never!” breathed Aurora. “Who did it?”
“We did it! My father and your Doctor Bewick and Carlo Guerra and I. We did it to be before anybody else, set the worst that could be brought up against you in a light that explains and justifies. We did our best to fix the public mind and show it what it should think. You know what the mind of the public is. We’ve hypnotized the beast, I hope; it has taken its bent from us.”
“But–”
“This was the way of it, my dear. The day after Brenda’s wedding I was at the Fontanas,–she was a Miss Andrews, you know, of Indianapolis,–and there was Charlie, too, and there was likewise Madame Sartorio, who is Colonel Fontana’s niece by his first marriage. We were talking in a little group when something, I forget what, was said about you, Aurora. Charlie–for what reason would be hard to think, unless one had a sharp scent for what goes on under one’s nose–Charlie interrupted, to introduce as a sort of parenthesis, ‘Mrs. Hawthorne, whose real name, by the way, is Helen Barton.’ The others were naturally taken aback, except Madame Sartorio, who could not quite disguise a cat-smile. For a moment none of us416knew what to say, and Charlie went on, with his air of knowing such a lot more than anybody else–
“‘Yes. It seems that all winter we have been warming in our bosom, so to speak, the heroine of acause célèbreat a place called Colorado in America.’”
“That was enough for me. I stopped him.
“‘Don’t say any more, Charlie. All I wish to know about Mrs. Hawthorne is what she cares to tell me herself,’ and I insisted that the conversation should return to other things.
“When I got home I told mother, and she repeated to me what you, Aurora, confided to her when we first knew you. We told father, and when Doctor Bewick came that evening to say good-by we consulted, and here in this newspaper you have the result, put into Italian journalese by Carlo Guerra, whom we called in to aid us. He likes you so much, Aurora; did you know it? He met you at Antonia’s. So there you have the whole story. I’m bitterly ashamed of Charlie, my dear, and I’m sorry about him, too. One never looked upon him as a particularly fine fellow, still, one liked him. He had never done anything that disqualified him for a sort of liking, and we’ve all grown up together.” Leslie wrinkled her forehead in puzzlement. “It’s curious, somehow, to think of him, who, we have said so often, has no real inside, as being sufficiently under the dominion of a passion to care to please his lady by offering up you, who have, after all, been to him a source of a good many pleasures, with your open house, invitations to dinner, and so on. I don’t quite understand it.”
“Never mind about him!” Aurora flicked him aside. “I don’t care. And you say Tom helped. And he never417told me, or wrote me a word about it. I had a letter from him this morning. Well, well. You certainly did make a good-sounding story of it, among you. And the main facts are true, far as they go; I can’t say they aren’t. But, oh, my dear Leslie, there was a lot more to it than that. I’ve got to tell you, so’s not to feel like a fraud. You’re so sharp; you know me pretty well by this time, and I guess you don’t suppose in me any of those awfully ‘fine feelin’s’ that could make a blighted flower of me because, while innocent as a babe unborn, I’d been dragged through the courts by wicked enemies. My enemies were pretty wicked; I stick to that. Cora Bewick, off living abroad studying some strange religion, while her kind old pa was dying at home, and she never once coming near him till he was under ground; Idell Friebus, never coming into his room except with her nose wrinkled up with disgust at the smell of disinfectants–or disgust at him, it was none too plain which. They made a fine pair of daughters. But when it came to fighting over the will, the lawyers on the Bewick side gave out just what it was that a perfectly noble woman would have done in my place of the old man’s nurse. And my lawyers would have it that everything that didn’t accord with that ideal simply must be kept dark, or public feeling would go against us. It’s that that made it so nasty–pretending, and avoiding this, and keeping off the other. It amounted to lying, no matter what they said. But they told me if I didn’t do as my counsel instructed me, the result would be the worst lie of all. I should be believed guilty of just that undue influence I was accused of, and lose the money into the bargain. So I had to hedge and shuffle and mislead.... And me under oath to tell the truth! You needn’t wonder418if I’m sick still at the thought of it, or wonder that I’d like to forget it. The truth was Ididknow beforehand the Judge meant to leave me one fourth of his money, and I was tickled to death. I gloried in it. I loved to imagine the rage it would throw his wicked daughters in, and his mean little miserable son-in-law. I was glad, besides, out and out, to think I should have the money. I plain wanted it, I did. Maybe a real noble woman wouldn’t have. Maybe it showed a degraded nature. Well, that’s the way it was. Sometimes I feel disposed to be ashamed of it, but mostly I don’t. For one thing, I felt then and I feel now, I deserved that money by a long sight more than those bad-hearted girls of his. I was a comfort to Judge Bewick. I won’t say I earned the money, it was too much: but there were some hours of my tending him, poor soul, when it did seem to me a nurse came pretty near earning anything the patient could afford to pay. All the same, I would have done what I did for the old boy if he hadn’t had a cent, I had so much respect for him, as much as for my own father, and I felt I owed so much to his son. Then about his son, the doctor. If Cora’s old nurse-girl, who was kept on in the house as a servant, though she was past her usefulness, lied in court when she said she saw Tom and me kissing at such an hour, in such a place, still, the truth was that I had at different times kissed Tom. You can’t tell why it seems all right to you to kiss one man when it would seem a very queer thing to do to kiss another. When Tom had been away for any length of time, I always kissed him when he came back; it seemed natural to both of us. But there in court I had to try to appear as if I never could have descended to committing such an immoral act, as well as to give the impression that if I’d419known the old man had any notion of making me co-heir with his own children I would have strained every nerve to stop it, called them all in to help me curb him if necessary. Pshaw! the humbug of it turns my stomach now. Leslie, my verdict is, you can’t come through a law-suitclean. I’d give a good deal to cut that page out of my life.”
Aurora’s eyes, filled with the shadows of the past, and her face, with the dimples expunged, were to Leslie almost unfamiliar. Aurora, oppressed in her moral nature, gave a glimpse of herself that would change and enlarge the composite of her aspects carried in Leslie’s mind.
“There, stop thinking of it!” said Estelle. “You always work yourself up so.”
“The point of my coming bright and early like this,” Leslie nimbly managed a diversion, “was, as you have guessed, to catch you before you could possibly go out. My mother desires you, dear ladies, to accompany me back to lunch–a triumphal lunch, Aurora, to grace which she has collected those special pillars of society whose countenance and support ought to make you scornful of any little weed-like growth of gossip that might sprout up from seed of Charlie’s sowing. You know them all more or less, having been associated with every one of them in some form of beneficence. I might more accurately describe it: having donated largely to each of their pet charities. It is not a very admirable world–” Leslie’s young face took that little air of knowing the world which sometimes amused old gentlemen so much, “it is a selfish society, not indisposed, or, I am afraid, altogether displeased, to believe evil of its neighbor, and not always disinclined to turn and rend its favorites. But it would be a pity, really, if you420should have poured forth upon it as you have done, Aurora, money and smiles, bouquets and banquets and sunbeams, good-will and baby-socks and knitted afghans, and it did not rise up when you are attacked and say, ‘No. An exception has to be made in this case. We have all been bought!’”
Aurora, who had been listening with expanded, gathering-in eyes, cheeks flushing deeper and deeper, turned her head sharply away to try to keep from falling or being seen two unaccountable tears half blinding her.
The sight of her, by infection, moistened the eyes of the other women.
Estelle sought a quick way out of the emotional silence.
“Nell,” she said, albeit with cracked voice, “if we’re going out to lunch, I guess we ought to be dressing. Go along, child, put on your best bib and tucker.”
“Oh, my best bib and tucker!” wailed Aurora. “Sent to the cleaner’s this morning, all green stains at the back!”
If Leslie had not called it a triumphal lunch, it might not have appeared so very different from any other women’s lunch at the season of roses. Leslie herself, though, found in it the flavor of old-fashioned romance, just faintly platitudinous, in which poetic justice is done. Mrs. Foss, the more simple-minded organizer of it, felt that she should remember it as an occasion when she had risen to the level, placed the right cards in the fist of destiny, and created an event worthy to take rank at least with those little triumphs of good housewives at whose home the president of their husband’s company arrived one night unlocked for and was entertained with brilliant credit.
To the heroine of the feast, no need to say it was an inexpressibly421exciting, grand, and memorable occasion. Aurora hardly knew herself, so much the object of attention and graciousness. She was in the mood to give half of her goods to the poor. After the hostess had risen and made a little speech, Aurora, unexpectedly to herself, and as if under inspiration, responded by a little speech of her own, composed on the spot. It was drowned at the end by hand-clapping all around the table. Aurora seemed to herself to be living in a fairy-story.
As it was after five o’clock when she reached home, she was sure she would find Gerald waiting for her. She had the whole day long been looking forward with a sweet agitation to the moment of being with him and telling him all about it.
She was more disappointed than she remembered ever being, even as a child, not to find him or any word from him. She did not allow it to become later by more than half an hour before she scratched a line and sent the coachman to his house with it.
The man came back with nothing but the barren information, received from Giovanna, that thesignorinowas absent, having gone to Leghorn.
“Well, here’s a pretty howdydo!” thought Aurora, sore with surprise and the smart of injury. “If every time I refuse him he’s going off like this to stay away for days and days, what am I going to do?”
“If this is the way it was going to be, and I’d known it before, I’d have kept better watch over my affections,” said Aurora to herself, reflecting upon Gerald in Leghorn, where he was bending his will industriously, no doubt, to the work of forgetting her.
Beside the large sharp thorn of this thought, she was troubled by what was a small, merely uncomfortable thorn: the knowledge of Gerald exposed so closely to the influence of Vincent, that persuasive young man of God, who bowed to images and believed in the Pope. At the end of every wearisome day she gave thanks that for still another twenty-four hours she had by grace of strength from on high been able to fight off the temptation to write to Gerald.
This for nine days–the nine days it takes for a wonder to become a commonplace or a scandal to lose its prominent place in conversation. Then, in the way once sweetly habitual, there came a rapping at the door, the entrance of a servant, and the announcement, “C’è il signorino.”
Aurora for a second either did not really grasp the import of the words or did not trust her senses. She asked:
“Whatsignorino?SignorinoWhat?”
“Thesignorinowho has come back,” said the servant, unable on the instant to recall the foreign name. And if he had felt interest in the complexion of one so far removed from him as his mistress, he might have seen her turn the hue of a classic sunrise.
423On her way down the stairs Aurora rejected the idea of a tumultuous reproachful greeting, such as, “Where have you been so long, you mean thing?” Or of a cool and cutting one, such as, “You’re quite a stranger.” She decided to behave like a nice person, and show respect for her friend’s freedom, after having so explicitly left it to him.
The Italians performing the service of the house arranged it according to their own ideas of fitness, and on this warm afternoon the drawing-room was in soft-colored twilight, the Persian blinds being clasped, and their lower panels pushed out a very little so as to let in a modicum of the whiteness of day.
Gerald stood, very collected, if a trifle pale, holding, like a proper votary, a bouquet–starry handful of sweet white hedge-roses,–which he offered as soon as Aurora entered, saying he had picked them for her that morning in the country near Castel di Poggio.
The meeting, in Aurora’s jubilant sense of it, went off beautifully. She said in a pleasant, easy tone and her company English,
“So you’ve got back. It’s awfully nice to see you again. How well you are looking. I was sure a change would do you good.”
And Gerald said yes, he had found the sea air tonic. He had been staying with the Johns, Vincent’s mother lived in Leghorn. He had worked a little, made a few drawings. Digressing, he mentioned a trifling gift he had brought her, and produced a small brass vessel, fitted with two hinged lids, meant to contain grains of incense for the altar. He said he had found it in an antiquarian’s shop and thought she might care for it to drop her rings into;424he supposed she took them off at night. Its shape seemed to him to possess more than common elegance.
Aurora called it adorable, and his giving it to her sweet. They talked as if they had been making believe, for the benefit of an audience, to be the most ordinary friends.
And each of them meanwhile, with heart and head gone slightly insane in secret, was considering a marvel. The long separation–it had been long to them–had recreated for both something of the capacity to receive a fresh impression of the other. The marvel to Aurora was that this choice being, with his intellectual brow (that was her adjective for Gerald’s brow) his difference from others, all in the way of superiority to them, the indescribable fascination residing in his every feature, mood, or word, should be walking the world unclaimed and unattached, for her to take if she were so minded. Her to take! It was vertiginous.
And the marvel to him was, in beholding that bounteous temple of a soul, with its radiance of life, its share, so rich, of the mysterious something which made the earliest men care to build homes; its gifts, so large, of comfort and warmth–the marvel was that he should have dared aspire to conquer it, should have set that to himself as a thing he was going to persevere in trying to do until–until he had done it, he, puny, poor in inducements, light of weight.
The two of them, there could be no doubt of it, had passed within the portals after which a change comes over the eyes, and those who enter see each other endowed with qualities raising the capacity for wonder to an ecstasy: so much engaging beauty, so much dearness, are not to be believed!... It can never be established whether the425eyes only see truly when under this charm, or whether then more than at other times illusion makes of them its fool.
If he had been analytical on the subject of his sentiment for Aurora, as so often on other subjects, and said to himself that he saw this woman in a golden transfiguring light because he was in good primordial fashion in love with her–because, that is to say, obscure affinities of flesh and blood united with the esteem created by her virtues to make of him a candle which the touch of her finger-tip miraculously could light–he would have felt it as a blessed and not a base secret at the bottom of his attachment.
While they talked of the weather, as they fell to doing when they had disposed of the subject of the little incense-holder; and, after that, while they talked of Leghorn and the various seaside places which Aurora had to choose from for her summer sojourn, a vastly deep conversation was taking place between them, which we think it not amiss to report, because by the nature of things the words they would say aloud on this occasion would be meager and colorless by comparison with the things they would feel and to some extent convey to each other through mere proximity.
“O Aurora,” exhaled from Gerald, while, looking not far from his usual self, he said that Ardenza by the sea, a mere three miles from Leghorn, was a very pretty place, “Aurora, you are warmth, you are shelter, you are rest. I have no hearth or home except as you let me in out of the desperate cold of loneliness, and grant me to warm myself at your big heart. You should see, woman dear, that my thankfulness would make you happy. Nature, the divine, so formed you that my love would kindle yours. And when you had given your hand into mine I should426find paths of violets, enchanted paths, for us to walk in which you could never find without me, nor I find for myself. Put up no petty shield against me, Aurora; fight me with no petty lance, for I verily am that guest you were awaiting when on balmy spring evenings you felt, and knew not why, that your life was incomplete.”
And Aurora, mechanically pulling off her rings and putting them into the brass receptacle, then taking them out of it and putting them back on her fingers, while she chattered, describing the advantages of a furnished villa at Antiniano, to be preferred because they were some Italian friends of Leslie’s who desired to let it, was in her inmost speaking to the inmost of Gerald. The hardly self-conscious meanings within her bosom made as if an extension of her in the air, comparable to the halo around the moon on a misty night; and this atomized radiance had language, it said: “Oh, to draw your head down where it desires to be! To warm and comfort you! To be to you everything you need! I lean to you, I cling to you like a vine with every winding tendril. But I am so afraid of you! so afraid! I am of common, you of finest, clay. How can I give into any hand so much power to hurt me? If I were to dare it, then find I could not make you happy, your disappointment would be my heart-break, and my tragedy might spoil your life. But this know, Gerald, dearer to me for having been so unhappy, nothing my life could contain without you would seem to me so good as life with you in a poor workman’s attic, under falling snow, and I to make it home for you!”
While two souls thus trembled and gravitated toward each other, bathing in each other’s light, it is almost mortifying to have to show to what degree that which took427place at the surface was different and inferior; to what degree the fine abandon of words spoken and actions performed in thought was replaced by a shivering prudence keeping guard on one side, and on the other a deplorable timidity trying awkwardly to be bold.
Heard through the door, the scene that ensued between these two curious lovers, when they had worked their way through preliminaries and come to the point at which they had parted after the day at Vallombrosa, must particularly have seemed lacking in purple and poetry; for then the soft light in Aurora’s eyes would not have been seen, nor the deep flash in Gerald’s, as he by a point scored felt himself nearer to the goal.