THE MISTAKES OF TWO PEOPLE.
Itseemed an extraordinary chance which brought those two people together upon that dirty little Neapolitan steamer. But then any incident of our human lives, divorced from the chain of cause and effect that has been forging since the world began, would seem an extraordinary chance, just as this did, which really was not extraordinary at all.
For the lady had been busy all winter in Rome copying in the Borghese Gallery, and it was not until she had found herself almost alone among the deserted rooms, whence all her companions of the year had fled before fear of the fever, that she had also sought some place where she could paint, and rest from painting when she would, the remainder of the summer. This and a second-class railway-ticket were what had brought her to Naples, where she had driven to the Mole and embarked upon the little steamer just five minutes before the gentleman, who had come from Rome in a first-class carriage, also stepped upon it.
His appearance there, just upon that day of all days, might be called stranger than hers. For, really, there was no reason whatever for his being there that sleepy midsummer day. Indeed, reason had nothing whatever to do with it. It was brought about by something quite remote from reason—by an indescribable longing, which was perhaps, however, as unyielding a link in the chain of cause and effect—or of destiny, let us say—as any more visible and tangible one.
These two people were not entirely strangers to each other. Fifteen years before they had spent a summer together in an old farm-house far away beyond where the sun would set this evening behind old Roman Baiæ. That farm-house was wonderfully picturesque, although picturesqueness had been none of its original builder's intention. It had been a sort of manor-house, built by a blond and robust English family in memory of the Elizabethan mansion in which, father and son and son's son, they had thriven and decayed across the sea. Generations had come and gone since then. The Tudor gables and overhanging stories, like the Tudor nose in Westminster Abbey, had felt the tooth of time. The nose is imperious still, although its royal end is broken off, and it points heavenward with its regal pride not in the least abated with its proportions. Unlike the Tudor nose, the Tudor gables had weakened, and sunk and bulged in all sorts of picturesquely-pusillanimous lines and curves under a soft veil of moss. The house had become a medley of quaint humps and protuberances, huddled together without rhyme or reason by the taste or needs of each succeeding heir. But, flooded and dashed with blooming, radiant neglect, throttled with many-fingered vines, the gray centre of a rainbow of wild brier, syringa, hollyhocks and sunflowers, it was a delight to artistic eyes.
"It's only 'cos pa's enjoyed such pore health for long back, and we bein' all girls, that the ole place looks so like creation," would always say one of the "girls," thus apologetic of the dilapidation and decay which were the chief means of the family's support. For never an artist passed that way that he did not stay his steps and beg to be sheltered by that quaint old roof for at least a day or two. And when, gone hence, the strolling artist would sing of the idyllic nook he had found in a crescent of hills by the sea, where heaven came down to earth and board was but two dollars a week, others of his kind would be sure to be lured by echo of his strain to the same spot.
Thus every summer for three years the house had been full of boarders. Its owners gained thus the means to live during all the year, and also were able to secure a reservoir of gossip and tittle-tattle from which to draw refreshing streams during all the arid days betweenOctober's late dahlias and the earliest roses of June.
The two people upon the Neapolitan steamer had met for the first time in the great dining-room one noon of June. It was at a farmer's dinner of beef, potatoes and dandelion-greens, finished with a sort of machicolated decoration of square pieces of rhubarb pie set beside each plate in saucers—nicked saucers, whereon indigo mandarins floated airily over sky-blue hills on their pious way from one indigo pagoda to another. Dancing vines at the open windows spread quaint, shifting embroidery over the coarse tablecloth, yellow walls and unpainted floor. The drowsy hum of bees was heard above the iron clatter of knives and forks. Sweet incense of myriad rose-censers floated above the vulgar odors of the meal, and the open doorway with its flat white doorstone was a picture-frame sculptured in foliage and bloom around a foreground of wild garden, of black sea-weed and sea-shell, roughened rocks, and then a borderless stretch of blue glittering sea and sky. There were half a dozen men and women around the table, who chanced at the moment the new boarder appeared to be elevating half a dozen noses in the air before the alkaline fumes of the hot biscuits.
She was rather a pretty little thing, with blue eyes, a collar all awry, and the headless, leafless stalks of what had once been red roses standing up valiantly in her brown hair.
"What a flutter-budget!" he thought as he saw by the swift, birdlike motion of her head that indeed flowers must needs have more than flower-like frames to remain long undecapitated amid all that breeziness.
And indeed "flutter-budget" was not amiss as a descriptive word for her who sang oftener than she spoke, because it was her nature to, and who danced more naturally than she walked, because God had made her so.
It was rather ridiculous to think of her painting pictures. One could scarcely imagine her doing anything that required a moment's repose, and therefore was not unnatural the remark whispered by the monochromatic Miss Grey into the ear of the water-colored Miss Bray as the newcomer floated to her seat: "Shepaint! Mmnph! I wouldn't trust her to paint a yellow dog!"
Miss Grey, by the by, didn't paint: she only taught Art in five lessons at seventy-five cents a lesson.
But the monochromatic maiden was right. Annie Deane would have made a queer mess of painting a yellow dog. But if one chose to give her an order for a flower-piece, then would be seen how she rivalled the pearly finish of Nature—how she gathered the rare tints, the marvellous transparencies and shadows, the breath-broken dewiness, almost even the fragrance of field and garden favorites, upon her paper. Thus in time even the yellow-dog sceptic was brought to realize that there are artistic triumphs even for one who quails and cowers before the ochreous canine.
"Shall I help you to some more of the greens?" were his first words to her, seeing her indigo mandarins loom up dimly from her nearly empty plate.
"No, thank you, but I will trouble you for the vinegar," were her first words to him.
There was nothing novel or suggestive in this, was there? Is there often anything novel or suggestive in the first greetings we exchange as we float upon the sea of life with those who hereafter will cause our wreck or share it?
These two people, He and She, became great friends that summer. Her fresh, blithe nature was pleasant to him, although, it may be confessed, its manifestations were sometimes confusing. He was of rather elephantine temperament, as he was also heroic of stature and handsome. He was so unswift of speech and motion that she could dance around him a dozen times before he could say "Jack Robinson;" which, by the way, he never did say. She often got sadly in the way of his slow, conscientious sketching from Nature, but he did not complain, for she was pleasant, he thought, to look upon, even though his palette dried and the cloud-shadow on hill and sea floated miles away while he did so.
It was not a sentimental relation that grew up between them. How could it be when everybody said there was "no sentiment in Ben Shaw, or even in his pictures"? They were never known to raise any clamor concerning their "kinship of souls" and all the usual sentimental etcetera. They liked each other, and took "solid comfort" in the companionship that made that summer's sketching so much pleasanter than had sketching ever been for either of them before. That was all.
It was not very long before he very naturally took the place of teacher and she of pupil, for it was an open secret that she aspired to higher art than still life, while he, although not six months her senior, had been longer a student than she. Simpletons that they both were, they grappled audaciously with the purple, gold-filtered, ever-elusive and brooding mystery of the distant hills, and struggled with the infinite suggestiveness of the great, awful sea. They came home every night from both grapple and struggle with canvases as expressive of the mighty influences they had labored with as a child's fairy-tale hints at the divine splendor of mystery of the book of Revelation, and sat down to their supper of cold beef and doughnuts believing they feasted on ambrosia and nectar, and lived as divinely as were those not Massachusetts but Thessalian hills. How insolent is youth, and how foolish, to us who have outlived it!
Unsymmetrical as this friendship was—that is, so dwarfed on the sentimental side—there was one of those two silly mortals who thus fooled themselves with the fancy that this was Olympus and their green apple-sauce honey of Hymettus who would not have changed places with the divinest divinity of all the immortal host.
As one moon after another waxed baby-faced and then pined away to a wan shadow the friends became more inseparable than ever. And, behold! seeing these things, all the masculine boarders and the "girls" of the manor-house looked at each other obliquely with an expression that consorts best with paganism and pig-tails, while the lady-boarders smiled with that exasperating significance which when given to one's own affairs makes one yearn for the smiler's scalp. But in spite of these oblique glances and significant smiles, in spite of everything indicative of the contrary, they were not an atom in love with each other.
Unless they both of them fibbed! Which young people in their circumstances were never known to do.
Nevertheless, one day Annie Deane was sitting in an embrasured window writing, school-girl fashion, upon an atlas in her lap. She wore a blue gingham dress in the style of a loose blouse. The skirt was short, and had no scruples about revealing two nicely-booted feet crossed one over the other, the toe of one pointing to the zenith, the other toward the coast of Europe. This was her sketching-costume, and she had not found time to change it for the more conventional one in which she usually took tea, as she was hurrying to finish a letter in time for the butcher, who would soon pass by on his return from Mansfield, to take to the post-office at Baysville.
The room was spacious, and tried its best to be gloomy. The canopied bed against the wall was hung with funereal drapery, and reminded one somehow of aCinque-centotomb. When an occupant was extended there the resemblance could not but be dolorously striking. A tremendous old chest of drawers opposite, mighty among furniture as Goliath among men, hung its brass rings massively downward; and I was forcibly reminded of that chest of drawers the other day when I saw how the sainted dead of imperial Rome were packed away in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus. Imagine a chest of drawers which gives an impression that upon pulling its brass rings one will see, not dainty garments frothy with lace and ruffles, but a spectacle of rich animal mould and white holy bones! There were one or two dignified old chairs—judicial, majestic chairs, which evidently imagined that they impressed the vulgar radicals of this New World with the idea that in their own country they had been thrones or something of that sort. It was a most dignified and impressive room inspite of its rag carpet, its cane-seated rockers, camp-stools, books, the sketches pinned upon the walls, flowers, and all the odds and ends of feminine finery that betrayed the levity of its modern habit. That is, perhaps one might better say it would have been dignified and impressive had one ever been able to see it otherwise than as merely an architectural background, like the chairs behind Giovanni Bellini's gracious Madonnas, to the pretty picture of youth and content writing there by the seaward window. Everybody always spoke of Annie Deane as "little," although she was five feet four in her stockings. Everybody always ran away with the impression—and treated her accordingly—that she was very young, although she had seen every day of twenty-five years. "I was born young, and have never learned much of anything since," she would laughingly say when somebody had called her "child" and advised her about her manners.
Shewasa child spiritually, and it certainly seemed as if she would never be spiritually grown up. Her father had died at sixty, so springy of step, so airy of movement, so jaunty, so natty, so nice in his No. 3 gaiters and his nobby hats, that to see him ten paces off one would have sworn he had not twenty years upon his canary-bird head. Annie was like him, and her head swung and swayed, fluttered and tiptilted on its graceful neck, as much as his had done as a young canary-bird's ways are like an old one's.
"Ef the air of that girl ain't enough to make a hoss larf!" said, with edifying perseverance, the youngest and burnt-umberest of the burnt-umber maidens with whom they boarded.
Miss Roberta Editha was sentimental and thirty-five. She pressed a vision of beauty to her virginal breast. Years before she had cut from some illustrated paper a very pretty picture representing some strolling actor who played Hamlet and Claude Melnotte upon the boards of rural theatres. It had miraculously large eyes, a small mouth with downward curves, and flat rings of hair upon its pallid brow. Its air was generally cankered and worm-eaten, but Miss Roberta ("Old Bob," some of the graceless artists called her behind her back) interpreted that air as expressive of a soul which found this life of too rank and coarse a flavor for its daily food. She had cut out this woodcut, and had worn it for years in a massive heirloom locket around her long, brown neck.
It was the Ideal of her Yearning Soul. "Never till I meet a Being like this will I give my heart," she had said, now these many years. Once she thought she had met that Being: it was the natty clerk who sold her calico and clothes-pins at Mansfield. But when that mercenary Hylas married a Baysville widow with money she wept a while, and then saw clearly through her tears that the deceiver looked not in the least like a Being, but only like a very commonplace man. Once again it was an artist who had boarded with them a summer, and whose red hair fell over his rosy brow in a manner that indicated a possible Being. But it turned out that this artist was married and the father of a thriving family; whereupon he too faded out of Roberta Editha's ideal world into the prosaic region where are not Beings, but only men and women. After that it was several artists, all of whom in turn had died, under some blight, out from the thoughts of the burnt-umber maiden. Latterly she had been bending soulful eyes upon Ben Shaw, sure that at last in his lineaments she could trace the adored image. Ben's eyes were neither miraculously large nor superlatively dark: neither had he a small mouth with downward curves. He was blond and robust, inclined to be rather high-colored, especially after dinner, which proved his digestion defective or that appetite outran it; but, setting such little discrepancies aside, she was sure her Ideal was there.
But while Roberta Editha described Annie Deane's airy manners in such unflattering terms, it is more than probable that Ben Shaw would be saying to the latter at that very moment, "Never lose your youthful nature, and always preserve your young ways, Annie: they are your greatest charm." For this was a habit with Ben Shaw.
She was smiling and bridling now as she wrote by the seaward window, although she must have known that nothing could see her save that turquoise crescent of sea, the blue arch of the sky and the swaying rose-globes and leaves that shadowed her paper. She could not even dip her pen into the ink like anybody else, but must needs poise over it for a breezy instant, just as a humming-bird flutters over honeyed flowers.
She had just written these words: "Truly, mamma dear, he has never said a word of love to me, and yet, strange as it may seem, I am as sure that he loves me as—"
A voice called up from the southern-wood thicket under her window, where somebody, rubicund with stooping, was picking burdock-burrs from off his trousers' legs, "Miss Deane, will you go with me to see the sunset from Castle Rock? We can be home in time for supper."
When the butcher rattled by in company with a staring calf's head and quivering pig's liver, nobody hailed him from the Tudor mansion. Roberta Editha was kneading bread on top of a flour-barrel in the buttery; Ethelberta was picking over currants on the back doorstep; and Miss Bray stood a little way off toward the lichen-grown stone wall blocking in her Antignone wailing over Polynices. Miss Bray had chosen the elder and more commonplace Ethelberta for her suggestion of a position, rather than the younger and more poetic Roberta Editha, for the simple reason that the former's attitude over her currants was more suggestive of an heroic corpse on her knees and less of a chastised infant than Roberta's would be under any circumstances.
Rowena, the eldest of the "girls," was busy at that moment, if the truth must be told, in looking to see if any of the boarders had carelessly left bureau-drawers or writing-desks unlocked. The boarders were all absent upon hill or shore, the invalid father slept in his chair, the mother in Baysville cemetery, and the Tudor mansion was still.
On a monster rock a mile or more away two figures made silhouettes against the jewelled sunset.
"Annie," said one of the figures, "I did not wish to make a sensation by telling it first at the supper-table, and I wantyourcongratulations before any others. I have sold myEsmeralda. I go to Boston to-morrow, and shall sail for Europe next week."
Her sight was darkened, her heart stood still. Life seemed to die out of her with one horrible pang. Nevertheless, in an instant her head tiptilted, and she twittered her congratulations as airily as if the whole universe had burst into a sudden marvel of bloom and beauty and she were the first humming-bird born into it.
"Always keep your young nature and preserve your young ways, Annie," he said admiringly: "they are your greatest charm."
Then they turned and walked supperward together.
The Neapolitan steamer was greasy and smelled of garlic and bitumen. The red-shirted sailors were singing "Santa Lucia" from high and low, and a stalwart contadina was accompanying them with her tambourine down in the third-class place. Very few passengers were scattered about the deck, and the general speech was of the Blue Grotto. Evidently, of the first-class passengers only two were making more than an excursion from Naples, the excursionists intending to return with the steamer after a peep into the famous cave.
One of these two persons was rather a remarkable-looking lady. She wore a jaunty hat many years too young for the face: it didnotshade. Her coquettish jacket and short skirt made her from a distance—a very long one—seem like a girl of eighteen. She wore her hair in a girlish braid—alas, woefully faded! She was airy of motion and coquettish of gesture, evidently one of those sad women who, burying their heads from the sight of the passing years, fancy that Time forgets to touch them.
The other person was a handsome gentleman of more than forty. The Hyperion curls had been thicker on his brow than now, and his shadow more slender, but it by no means follows that he wasas bald as Cæsar or as bulky as the Belvidere Torso. He was dressed in elegant travelling costume, and, as well-dressed men must be, with coat evidently of London make and trousers Parisian.
As he dropped a handsome travelling-satchel on the coal-flecked seat beside the lady's color-box he chanced to meet her eye. It was a curious meeting of eyes that had last met so differently. He had only time to commune with his secret soul, "What a larky old girl!" when a look of half-startled recognition came into his face.
It was reflected in hers, and a humming-bird tremor passed over her.
"Was this not formerly Miss Deane?" he asked.
"ItisMiss Deane, Mr. Shaw," twittered the lady, with head tiptilted like a frosted flower.
Alas! what a tyrant is that power which makes and moulds us like potter's clay to her own patterns, whether of glory or shame, and whom we call Nature!—a tyrant which forms us into that which we would cry and pray not to be were there any ear to be moved by our beseeching. Alas, poor Annie! It was not her fault that Nature took a canary-bird for her model. And it is the fault of none of us that the graces of our youth become grotesquenesses with our forties.
"Who would ever have dreamed of our meeting here? And to think you are still Miss Deane!" he exclaimed with obtuseness pre-eminently masculine. "But you are very pale: does the motion of the steamer make you ill?"
Nearer and nearer came the opalescent isle, drawn like a jewelled chariot by thousands of blue coursers with foaming mouths.
After fifteen minutes or so of vague reminiscences and comparisons of experiences of travel the gentleman seemed to fall into a brown study and to become almost rudely oblivious of his companion's presence. His eyes were riveted upon the island with a strange intensity. Could the airy little old maid by his side have heard the beating of the heart in that broad bachelor bosom, she would have been astonished, as would almost anybody else, to hear its sentimental music. "At last, after all these cruel years!" was its refrain.
Cruelty was evidently a discipline that did not impoverish his physical system.
Upon the beach was a scene of uproar and confusion. Brown-faced peasant-girls, with dark eyes like wild sylvan creatures, thrust wilted flowers into the travellers' hands and clamored forsoldi. Fisher-boys, almost as naked as bronze cupids, yelled offers to guide anybody and everybody up the heights to the village. Bright-shirted and bare-legged boatmen, with Indian locks and huge gold crescents in their ears, bellowed to each other, while weatherbeaten crones screamed till they were hoarse that here were the saddled donkeys on whichi signoricould ride.
Mr. Shaw assisted Miss Deane—whom, until he saw her nearly pulled in pieces between two donkey-women, he had quite forgotten—upon one of the most docile-looking of the animals.
She mounted with such thistledown sprightliness that she nearly went over the saddle and down on the other side. He looked astonished as she fluttered above his hat, and then—forgot her.
If any one find this portly bachelor discourteous and basely recreant to certain of the best memories of his manhood, let that one stop a moment and think. This frisky lady, who always seemed carrying on a most desperate flirtation with some invisible adorer, was certainly not the Annie of his summer in the Tudor mansion. She was spiritually not a day older than Annie, but her face was very much older; and what, after all, is the same soul to us if the casket is strange? What is a young face grown old to us who knew its youth and have not seen its changing? Moreover, that perennial youth of hers, touching and sad as it may possibly seem when thought about, would have been the object of your ridicule could you have seen it face to face.
Much as we may prate of natures ever young, there is no more melancholy sight in the world than soul and body that miss step with each other in this heavy and forced march called Life. Why should we seek to keep our hearts young, we whomust die? For unto youth or youthfulness what is death but darkness and night at noonday?
Then another thing to excuse Mr. Shaw's apparent neglect: he was approaching a crisis of his own life, and what are the convulsions of a universe compared to those quicker heart-beats which we call Crises in our little lives?
After assisting Miss Deane he mounted another donkey, and rode, not exactly like paladin of old, but like a portly and absent-minded modern tourist, silently by her side up the steep path, whither their luggage followed them upon the heads of women.
Between their donkeys strode a bare-legged woman in a ragged petticoat. She was bronzed and wrinkled, with straggling hair thrust through with a silver arrow, and coarse brown chemise falling widely open over an unlovely neck and breast. She uttered many a strident yell, accentuated by heavy thwacks of her club upon her donkeys' flanks. She was dirty, wild-eyed and hideous. It were as difficult to imagine her comely and young as to believe this little dried-up old girl had not been a flirting old maid from her cradle.
Ah, but Nature is cruel to woman! Freshness and beauty of flesh are hers, not that she may rejoice in her own beauty and freshness, but that she may become the mother of men. Bearing children, in the bearing dies one beauty and charm after another, just as trees die, leaf by leaf, which have enriched the world by their allotted harvests. Childless, her beauty and freshness die of her unfruitfulness, while Nature's pet offspring, man, waxes strong and proud years after all her leaves have fallen.
Look at these three people: the handsome and robust bachelor was the oldest of them all.
"What a capital model she would make for an Erinnys hunting Orestes to his fate!" thought Miss Deane.
She was bumping up and down in her saddle like a rubber ball. Nevertheless, in the pauses of those bumps she had time enough to grow very angry at something she saw. She turned a regular Spitzenberg red as she detected the searching, passionate gaze her companion bent upon every pretty islander they met. She saw the black-eyed girl with a huge bundle of fagots on her head, the brown-eyed one with immense building-timbers pressing down her curly locks, the blue-eyed one with copper water-jar gleaming goldenly over her dagger-thrust braids, smile significantly after coquettishly returning his gaze.
They are not so guileless as one might think, those picturesque, brown-skinned island-girls. Too many foreign artists have come this way, and too many strong-limbed, full-chested girls have become first their models, then mothers of their children, and then their wedded wives, not now-a-days to look upon every gazingforestiereas a possible husband, or at least lover.
Yet is it true that not one of them dreamed of the feeling beneath that immaculately-laundried shirt-bosom as the wearer turned away from them, one girl after another. Why should they, forsooth? Had not even Ben Shaw's own friends always declared there was no sentiment in him, or even in his pictures?
At one of her donkeys' stumbles over the lava-stones the driver yelled so horribly in Miss Deane's ears that that lady's discomfort puckered her face up like a frozen apple.
Mr. Shaw saw it. "By Jove!" he remarked to his donkey, who laid back its ears and pretended to understand English, "I must have been very veally ever to find that face pretty! But there's one thing sure: she has taken on a thousand girlish airs and graces with every year she has lived since then."
Poor Annie! Not an air or a grace had she more than fifteen years before. And how was she to know that she was too old for a girl's ways, she who had never ceased to be a girl to become wife and mother?
Quoth Mr. Shaw to the driver, "My good woman, if you will drive these beasts with less noise it will be better for yourbuona mancia."
The "good woman" stared. She had done a good deal of staring since they left the beach far down below. Her eyesin this moment looked out fiercer than ever from the bed of wrinkles folded about them by many a tropical sun and scorching sirocco. "Has the signor ever been upon the island before?" she asked a moment later.
"Si, madre mia: I was here one summer several years ago. I lived in yonder palm-shaded house facing toward Sicily. I painted pictures here. Afterward I went away to my own country." Then he added, with melancholy intonation, half under his breath, "I ought to have returned long ago: I have come only to-day."
Miss Deane was looking over the tops of lava-walls that narrowed in their climbing way. She saw pale-green vineyards changing color and trembling in the sea air like a maiden under her lover's first kiss. Gloomy stone-pines guarded the hills like eternal sentinels. Through dim gray-green olive-thickets houses that seemed of alabaster shimmered and shone in the sunshine.
They had now climbed so high up the orange- and lemon-flecked sides of the island that Vesuvius yonder seemed to sink low and slumberously upon the bosom of the radiant bay, while Naples across the little stretch of sea showed vaguely white in the golden distance, scarcely more real than a city sculptured in snow beneath an August sun. Up from vineyard and thicket, down from the village and the cactus-pencilled heights beyond, came the long-drawn, melancholy wail which is the islander's song at his labor, but which is weird and mournful enough to be the swan-song of a parting soul to its mate.
She was aroused from her artistic dreaminess by the croaking of a voice broken by years of vociferous yellings: "Dio mio! si: you painted Antonia Pisano. Yes, yes, I remember. You painted her over on yonder cliff, from whence she watched the barca of her lover Giuseppe gone fishing for coral over on the African coast. You called the pictureGood-bye, Sweetheart. Si, I remember. You were handsomer than you are now, and your shoulders were not so broad. There were patches all over your velveteen blouse, and you remained here after all the other foreign artists were gone, because the money came not with which you must pay Giaccomo for the macaroni you had eaten for months, and the barber Angelo in the piazza for the canvases and colors you had used in painting Antonia all the months of that summer. Si, si, I remember."
The handsome bachelor looked distressed at the coarsely-vivid realism with which the woman pictured that most idyllic summer of his life.
Miss Deane considerately pretended not to have heard, and kept her blue eyes vaguely set in the direction of the dread volcano dreaming in the arms of the bay. But she had mistaken the cause of her countryman's embarrassment. And who would not have done so, believing as all the world does that romance and robustness mate not together?
"Yes, I was very poor in those days. Many and many a dinner did I go without, that I might buy a new kerchief for Antonia or send to Naples for another string of beads for her neck. Those patches betrayed only half my poverty, for nobody knew that I put them there myself to save the few soldi a seamstress would demand, that I might give Antonia another festa and worship her wild grace as she danced the tarantella and rattled her castanets upon the moonlighted roof of some fisher-friend's house."
He seemed to address Miss Deane, for he spoke in English. She, in common politeness, could not do less than say, "Indeed! And who was Antonia?"
"She is the loveliest creature on the island, and as good as she is beautiful. She came as straight from the heart of Nature as a flower or a bird's song. Neither poetry nor painting could ever grasp the freshness of her wild sweetness: one must see her to know the abject poverty of their highest efforts."
To hear such adolescent rubbish from middle-aged lips what sensible mortal would not have giggled in his sleeve?
Strangely enough, it was the donkey-woman who proved her good sense and surprised them both not only by laughing discordantly aloud, but by speaking invery broken but intelligible English: "Si, si, I remember. And why have you come back to the island, signor?"
Actually, the bachelor blushed. "To marry Antonia," he said as bashfully as if he weighed one hundred instead of two hundred and twenty pounds, "and to remain on this savagely-beautiful isle all the rest of my life."
This he had said in Italian. But he continued, half musingly, in his mother tongue: "I could not take her away with methen, even though I loved her with all my heart and she was willing to share my poverty. I had not the heart to see her pine and pale in narrow city streets. I knew that she was a wild flower that would lose fragrance and beauty, would die, if transplanted from its native soil. I went away to earn money enough that I might come back and live with my darling where only she could live at her best. I have worked hard for her in all these years. I know I ought to have come sooner, but it insensibly grew a habit with me each year to wait yet one year more, that I might come to her a little richer. But I have come at last. I have sent her letters and presents each year, and she has written me often through some amanuensis, for she cannot write herself; and I am come to her able to say truly that she is the only woman I ever loved, or ever imagined myself to have loved, in all my life."
How little that man dreamed who heard him say this—that one heard him who for fifteen long years had guarded in the purest crystal of her memory the belief, "though all things fade and die, and even he forget me, yetoncehe loved me"! This to her, the faded, slight little old maid, thumping up and down on her donkey like a Neapolitan girl's fist on her tambourine, whose crystal-guarded treasure turned to dust before her eyes, and who knew thus for the first time that it was but a spurious treasure she had guarded since that summer by the sea!
She seemed somehow much smaller and paler, more faded and wrinkled, than before, when the donkey-woman laughed again. That unlovely creature said, with witch-like laughter, "You told Antonia that you loved her better than Giuseppe ever could—that you would marry her and make her a signora who should wear a gold ring and have shoes for every day. You went away saying that you would come back when you had sold your pictures. You have not come back until to-day, and you come back to laugh at poor Antonia for being such a fool as to believe a foreign signor would tell the truth to an island-girl."
She gave a thundering thwack upon the donkeys' flanks as the party rushed across the tiny lava-paved piazza where all the island was gathered to see the new arrivals pass on through a dusky-arched street to the albergo-door.
The cook, chambermaid, landlord, facchino and landlady rushed to bid the travellers welcome in island fashion. The landlord was barefooted; the landlady was the fruitful bough from which hung an apple-shaped infant; the cook, chambermaid and facchino were each armed with the insignia of their different professions—stewpan, broom and blacking-brush.
Returning their salutations, the gentleman and lady descended from their steeds. Mr. Shaw turned to pay the donkey-woman for her services.
And, behold! she lifted up once more that hoarse, broken voice to croak with frightful glee, "Make it a good buona mancia, Signor Ben, for the sake of old times. It was Giuseppe who answered your letters: I am Antonia his wife, mother of his ten children. It should be a good, a brave buona mancia that I did not wait for you—not thirteen years, not even six months, only till Giuseppe came home from his coral-fishing."
Till her dying day the little old maid will never forget the look that settled upon his face after the first paralyzed moment in which he realized the woman's meaning. It was such a look that she hastily averted her eyes and tremblingly followed the chambermaid up the wide stone stairs.
She never saw him afterward, for he left the island that same evening. But she heard of him only last summer. He has married a sprightly girl of eighteen, and has some renown in his own country—that of being the heaviest eater, sleeper, talker andsitterof the Lotus Club.
As his friends always said, he has no sentiment, even in his pictures.
As for Miss Deane, she is no older now than then. The volatile drops in her blood effervesce as of old, and her flirtation is as desperate with that invisible adorer as if she were twenty instead of—more.
But it is true that sometimes, at long intervals, she takes a bit of yellow paper from a secret place, and her spectacles grow dim (she wears them only in private) as she reads, in a feminine hand that seems to skip and chipper all over the page, "Truly, mamma dear, he has never said a word of love to me, and yet, strange as it may seem, I am as sure that he loves me as—" Then she usually giggles, in queer, mirthless fashion, as she chirrups, "What a ridiculous little goosie I was!" before she folds the paper away for another long repose, readjusts her coquettish but scanty frizzes, and goes down stairs again to her invisible adorer and her perpetual flirtation.
And nobody hears the wail in her foolish old-young heart as she goes: "Ah, why might it not have been?"
Alas! why not?
For then she might have been less lively, and he less dead, both grown side by side into richer, fuller, sweeter ripeness for the great harvester whom we call Death.
Margaret Bertha Wright.