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Aurora the Magnificent

by Gertrude Hall Brownell · English · Gutenberg #30642 · 720,834 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Aurora the Magnificent

Author: Gertrude Hall Brownell

Illustrator: Gerald Leake


        
Release date: December 10, 2009 [eBook #30642]
                Most recently updated: January 5, 2021

Language: English

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        Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AURORA THE MAGNIFICENT ***




Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net





[Illustration: Alone in her room later ... she looked at the other
portrait]




AURORA THE MAGNIFICENT

BY

GERTRUDE HALL

AUTHOR OF "THE TRUTH ABOUT CAMILLA," "THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY," ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY GERALD LEAKE


NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.

1917




Copyright, 1916, 1917, by

The Century Co.

Published, March, 1917




TO

MY SISTER GRACE

WITHOUT WHOM THIS BOOK

WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN.

AND TO

MY DEAR HELEN R----,

WITHOUT WHOM IT WOULD

HAVE BEEN

DIFFERENT




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Alone in her room later ... she looked at the
other portrait                                             Frontispiece

                                                            FACING PAGE

After it she still stood a moment, looking toward the sanctuary      20

"I thought," said Mrs. Hawthorne, "that you were going to
come and take us sight-seeing"                                       82

Aurora, clasping her hands in a delight that could find no
words to express it, made a sound like the coo of a dove            200

Gerald turned, and beheld that lady                                 272

Aurora's eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little flame       290

Aurora, with a comedy of pride, threw up her chin, lifted
her arms, and turned as if on a pivot                               316

"Come, let us reason together, Aurora"                              384




AURORA THE MAGNIFICENT




CHAPTER I


Near sunset, one day in early October, not too long ago for some of us
to remember with distinctness, Mr. Foss, United States consul at
Florence, Italy, took a cab, as on other days, to the Porta Romana.
Here, where the out-of-town tariff comes into effect, he paid his man,
and set out to walk the rest of the way, thus meeting the various needs
he felt: that for economy,--he was a family man with daughters to
clothe,--that for exercise,--his wife told him he was growing fat,--and
the need in general for an opportunity to think. He had found that
walking aided reflection, that walking in beautiful places started the
spring of apt and generous ideas. Though in his modest way a scholar, he
was not as yet an author, but Florence had inspired him with the desire
to write a book.

Just beyond the Roman Gate begins the long Viale dei Colli,--Avenue of
the Hills,--which climbs and winds, broad, shady, quiet, between lines
of gardens and villas, occupied largely by foreigners, to the Piazzale,
whence Michelangelo's boyish colossus gazes with a slight frown across
Florence, outspread at his feet. Mr. Foss, as he mounted the easy grade,
and noted with a liking unabated after years the pleasantness of each
habitation glimpsed through iron railings and embowering green, thought
how privileged a person should feel, after all, whose affairs involved
residence in Italy.

This recognized good fortune had not been properly tasted before another
aspect of the thing presented itself for consideration....

The consul felt a sigh trying to escape him, and turning from the images
whose obtrusion had called it up from the depths, directed his attention
to a different set of subjects, unwilling at the moment to be troubled.

The glories and iniquities of that great family whose cannon-balls--or
pills?--adorn so many of the 'scutcheons on Florentine street-corners
and palace-fronts are what he selected as the theme for his meditations,
a choice which seems less odd when we know that his book, the labor and
pleasure of his spare hours, was a study of the Medici.

He had not been busy many minutes with their supplanted policies and
extinct ambitions before these dropped back into the past whence he had
drawn them, and his mind gave itself over to an exercise more curious
than reconstructing a dead epoch. A shortish, stoutish man, with a
beginning of baldness on his crown and gray in his mustache, was trying
by the whole force of a sympathetic imagination to fit himself into the
shoes, occupy the very skin, of a delicate young girl, to look at the
world through her eyes and feel life with her pulses.

Thus absorbed, he hardly saw the posts of his own carriage gate; he
passed unnoticing between his flower-beds, up his stone steps and came
to himself only when, rubbing the hands he had just washed, he entered
the dining-room and saw his wife.

"Where are the girls?" he asked even before kissing her, for the most
casual eye must be informed by the blank look of the table that instead
of being laid for half a dozen as usual, it was prepared for a meagre
two.

Mrs. Foss was fond of sitting in the dining-room, which had a glass door
into the garden on the side farthest from the road. There she read her
book while waiting for dinnertime and her husband. The good gentleman
did not always come directly home from his office. He had the love of
dropping into dim churches, of loitering on bridges, of fingering the
junk in old shops, but he was considerately never late for dinner.

Mrs. Foss rose to receive her husband's salutation, and while answering
his question settled herself at the table; for she had caught sight of a
domestic peeping in at the door to see if the masters were there to be
served.

"Leslie and Brenda went to call on the Hunts," she gave her account,
"and presently the Hunts' man came with a note from Mrs. Hunt, asking if
the girls could stay to dine and go to the theater. A box had just been
sent them. I was very glad to give my consent. Charlie will probably be
one of the party and bring them home. Or perhaps Gerald. Or they will be
put in a cab. I was delighted of the diversion for Brenda."

"And where's Lily?"

"She, too, is off having a good time. Fräulein was invited by some
German friends who were giving a _Kinder-sinfonie_. Awful things,
if you want my opinion. She asked if she might go and take Lily, and the
poor child was so eager about it I thought I would just for once let her
sit up late. She has so few pleasures of the kind."

Mrs. Foss had helped the soup, with a ladle, out of a tureen.

It was after her husband and she had emptied their soup-plates in
companionable silence that, leaning back to wait for the next course,
she asked her regular daily question.

"Well, anything new? Anything interesting at the consulate?"

Mr. Foss seemed in good faith to be searching his mind. Then he answered
vaguely:

"No; nothing in particular." All at once he smiled a smile of
remembrance. "Yes, I saw some Americans to-day." He nodded, after an
interval, with an appearance of relish. "The real thing."

"In what way, Jerome? But, first of all, who were they?"

"Wait a moment. I stuck their cards in my pocket to show you. They came
to see me at the consulate. No, they are in my other coat. One of them
was Mrs. Something Hawthorne, the other Miss Estelle Something."

"What did they want?"

"Everything--quite frankly everything. They have grown tired of their
hotel; they speak nothing but English and don't know a soul. They came
to find out from me how to go about getting a house and servants, horses
and carriage."

"Did they think that was part of a consul's duty?"

"They didn't think. They cast themselves on the breast of a
fellow-countryman. They caught at a plank."

"A house, horses. They are rich, then."

"So one would judge. Oh, yes, they're rich in a jolly, shameless,
old-fashioned American way."

"Well, it's a nice way." Mrs. Foss added limitingly: "When they're also
generous. One has noticed, however, hasn't one,"--she seemed on second
thought to be taking back something of her approval,--"a certain
reticence, as a rule, with regard to the display of wealth in people of
any real culture?"

"These aren't, my dear. It's as plain as that they're rich. And, for a
change, let me whisper to you, I found it pleasant. Not one tiresome
word about art did they utter in connection with this, their first,
visit to Italy."

"I can see you liked them, but what you have so far said doesn't
entirely help me to see why. Rich and ignorant Americans,
unfortunately--A light breaks upon me! They were pretty!"

A twinkle came into the consul's eyes, looking over at his wife, as one
is amused sometimes by a joke old and obvious.

His pause before answering seemed filled with an effort to visualize the
persons in question.

"Upon my word, Etta, I couldn't tell you." He laughed at his inability.

"By that token they were not beauties," said the wife.

"It seems likely you are right. At the same time"--he was still mentally
regarding his visitors--"one would never think of wishing them other
than they are."

"Describe them if you can. What age women?"

"My dear, there again you have me. Let us say that they are in the
flower of life. One of them, so much I did remark, was rather more
blooming than the other. Perhaps she was younger."

"The miss?"

"The married one. But perhaps it was only the difference between a rose
and--" he searched--"let us say a bunch of mignonette. The rose--here I
believe I tread safely on the road of description--had of that flower
the roundness and solidity, if nothing else."

"Stout?"

"We will call it well developed, nobly planned. But what would be the
good of telling you the color of these ladies' hair and eyes had I
noticed it? It will help you much more effectively to pick them out in a
crowd to be told they are very American."

"Voices, too, I suppose."

"Of course. You don't strictly mean high and nasal, do you? All I can
say with any positiveness is that one of them had what I will call a
warm voice--a voice, to make my meaning quite clear, like the crimson
heart on a valentine."

"I am enlightened. Was it the mignonette one?"

"No; the hardy-garden rose."

"And what did she say to you in her warm crimson voice?"

"I have told you. She called for help."

"You said, I hope, that your wife and daughters would be very happy to
call on them and be of use if they could."

"I did."

The time-tried, well-mated friends were looking over at each other
across the table, not expressing any more than at all times the quiet,
daily desire of each to further the interests and comforts of the other.

"Where are they staying?" the lady continued to question.

"Hôtel de la Paix."

"And they haven't any letters, introductions, addresses, anything?"

"Apparently not."

"Where are they from?"

"Let me see. Did they mention it? My dear, if they did, I don't recall
it."

"New York?"

"No. If I am to guess, I shouldn't guess that."

"Out West?"

"H-m, they might be. No, I guess they're Yankees."

"Boston?"

"If so, not aggressively. Where do most people come from? There's
nothing very distinctive about most."

"Perhaps it will be on their cards."

Then the Fosses talked of other things. But when Mrs. Foss, after
dinner, went upstairs for her scarf,--it was too cool now to sit out of
doors in the evening without a wrap,--she remembered the cards, and took
them out of her husband's pocket.

"Miss Estelle Madison," she read. "Mrs. Aurora Hawthorne." There was
nothing else. She continued a little longer to look at the bits of
pasteboard in her hand. "Well-sounding names, both of them--like names
in a play. Mrs. Aurora. She's a widow, then." Mrs. Foss considered. "Or
else divorced."

                   *       *       *       *       *

Jerome Foss sat out in the garden on fine evenings with his cigar, and
watched the serene oncoming of the night, because he loved to do this.
His wife stayed with him to be company, when, without an old-fashioned
ideal of married life, her natural bent would have urged her indoors,
where the lamps were, to read or sew or even play patience. But she
lingered contentedly and all seemed to her as it should be, with the two
of them sitting near each other in their garden chairs before the family
door-stone, he smoking, she getting the benefit of it by now and then
fanning his smoke toward her face. She liked the odor.

They only spoke to each other, as is common with married people, when
they had something to say, and so were often silent for long spaces.
That they had talked a great deal lately in the seclusion of their
bedroom, away from the ears of the children, was a reason why they
should not be very communicative to-night. They had threshed out the
matter foremost in their minds so thoroughly that there could be little
to add. Now and then, however, when they were alone, scraps of
conversation would occur, part of the long discussion continued from day
to day; which fragments, isolated from their context, might have sounded
odd enough to any one overhearing.

Thus it was to-night. After half an hour without a syllable, Mrs. Foss's
voice came out of the dark.

"When I was a young girl, there was a music-master, Jerome," she opened,
with no more preface than a shooting-star. "I don't know that he was
particularly fascinating, but he seemed so to me. I suppose he was
thirty, I was seventeen or eighteen. It was during my year at Miss
Meiggs's. Whether he really did anything to win my young affections I
can't tell at this distance, but at the time I imagined all sorts of
things, that he looked at me differently from the other girls, that his
voice was different when he addressed me, that an extreme delicacy was
all that kept him from declaring his love. Oh, I used to wish on the
first star, and I used to pull daisies to pieces, and I practiced, how I
practiced! Well, there was a rich girl in the school, older than I and
not nearly so good looking. The moment she graduated he proposed to her.
How did I feel? Jerome, the sun went out for good and all the day I
heard of their engagement. It was as serious as anything could ever be
in this world.--I'm sure I have told you about that music-master before,
Jerome.--Well, and what happened? At the age of twenty-two I cheerfully
married you. And I was not a scarred and burnt-out crater either, was
I?... In the interval, let me not neglect to mention, there had been
other flirtations and minor affairs. Thank Heaven, those things pass,"
the words came out devoutly. "It seems at the time as if only death
could end it, but two or three years will do a lot. And it's God's mercy
makes it so. How else could life be carried on?"

"In my case, Etta," the consul followed her story, after an interval,
"it was a landlady's daughter. I don't believe I have ever spoken of her
to you. I was in college, but I boarded outside the buildings. I wrote
to my father and begged him to let me go into business so that I could
earlier support a wife and family. The wise man let me go down to a
fruit-farm in Florida. You have noticed that I know something about
orange-growing. It was not quite a year before the dear divinity whose
name was Lottie found it too long to wait. I posted home. The room I had
once rented from her mother was let to a handsomer man. I took up my
studies where I had dropped them, and to all appearance there was little
harm done. But for a long time I thought I should die a bachelor."

"I know. Your cousin Fannie told me about it in the early days, before
we were engaged. It all goes to show.... And there again was Selina
Blackstone, one of my girlhood friends. She had a cough and they thought
her lungs affected and sent her South. There she met an unhappy boy in
the same case, only he, as it proved, really was in a bad way with his
lungs. The poor things fell desperately in love with each other, but her
parents wouldn't hear of their marrying, in which course they were
right. Now you would have thought from her face that the separation was
going to kill her. It didn't, that's all. He died, and she married. And
it can't be said of her that she was either shallow, or fickle, or
heartless. I knew her very well. Merely, time did the work that time was
set to do."

There was in the lady's tone an effect of protest against any view,
determination against any theory, but her own.

"There are the cases like Miss Seymour's, however," Mr. Foss brought in
softly, as one calls to another's attention a lapse of memory or a slip
in logic.

"Miss Seymour? Blanche? What about her?"

"That she is Miss Seymour, my dear, and to my mind a melancholy lesson.
Because Nature so plainly had not planned her for an old maid. Her
mother--who told me? I think it was Miss Brown--interfered with her
marrying the man she wished to, and she has accepted nothing in his
place. It has been an empty life. And so it goes. One can't be sure,
Etta."

"Jerome," Mrs. Foss's voice rose to a sharper protest and firmer
rejection, "those are the cases we simply must not allow ourselves to
think about. If we begin to think of cases like that...."

She did not finish and he said no more, but in the darkness through
which the fiery point of his cigar continued for some time to glow, it
is to be feared the faces of both went on to reflect for nobody to see
the working of those thoughts precisely which Mrs. Foss had said with so
much emphasis they must guard against.




CHAPTER II


Upon a day not much later in the month--a goodly day which thousands
without a doubt were thinking all too short for the useful or merely
delectable things they wanted to do--a certain young man in Florence
would, if he could, have treated this mellow golden masterpiece of
autumn's like a bad sketch, torn it across and dropped it into the
waste-basket. What is one to do with a day when nothing that has been
invented seems enough fun to pay for the bother? He did not wish to
paint, he did not wish to read, or to play on the piano, as he sometimes
did in solitude, with one hand, to solace himself by re-framing a
remembered melody. He did not wish to go out, but was restless from
staying in. He did not want to see the face of friend or foe, but could
no longer endure to be alone.

He stood for a moment in the middle of the floor, with his hands over
his face, the ends of his fingers pressing back his eyeballs, and got in
his throat a taste of the bitter waters which he felt as a perpetual
pool in the center of his heart. Next minute he sneered at himself, like
a schoolmaster at a boy who blubbers, and without further paltering put
on his hat, took up a very slender cane with a slender grasp of yellow
ivory, and ran down the long stairs of his house to the street.

"Air and exercise, air and exercise!" This prescription he repeated to
himself, and, surely enough, in a quarter of an hour felt better.

He was on Via Tornabuoni. Passing Giacosa's, he glanced in to see if it
were any one he knew taking tea so early behind the great plate glass
window. No, they were chance English. He halted before a shop farther on
to look at a display of jewelry, wondering that there should be fools
enough in the whole world to support one such dealer in turquoise
trinkets that at once drop out their stones; crude, big mosaics, and
everlasting little composition-silver copies of the Strozzi lantern.

He crossed the street and entered the bank, where he found the usual
table strewn with weeklies and monthlies for the advantage of those
clients who must be asked to wait. He seated himself with his face so
directed that if an acquaintance should enter, he need not bow, and
turned over the magazines one after the other. It hurt him like a direct
personal injury to find these authors all alike so shallow, dishonest,
giving the public not their thought or their experience, but something,
anything, it would buy.

"A little more air and exercise is what I evidently need," said the
young man, and again went out into the streets.

He turned toward the river, and had not followed the Lungarno for more
than ten yards before it was with him as when, looking out of the window
in despair at the weather, we see a break in the clouds. His step took
on alertness; his face lighted in the very nicest way.

The young lady on whom his eyes were fastened from afar did not see him.
She came at her usual step, a happy mean between quick and slow,
accompanied by a hatless serving-woman carrying a music-roll. She looked
straight before her, but her glance was absent. The passers could not
but notice her,--she had beauty enough for that, and was besides
conspicuous in wearing a costume entirely white,--but she was not
noticing them or the eyes that turned to keep her a moment longer in
sight. She looked rather shut in herself, rather silent; not really
proud and cold, but proud and cold as the feeling and modest and young
have to look if they are to keep their sacred precincts from the
intrusions of curiosity.

The young man approaching questioned her face to see if it were sad. No,
as far as he could tell, she was not in any way troubled. At the same
time he knew that it was neither a face nor a nature to be easily read.
Still, not to find her visibly sad comforted him.

She did not recognize the young man till he was almost near enough to
touch her, and she had heard her name called, "Brenda!"

Then her face showed a genuine, if moderate, pleasure.

"Gerald!"

"What are you doing?" he asked, with the freedom of a familiarity
reaching back over long years. He shortened his step to keep time with
hers, which she at the same moment lengthened.

"I have been for my singing-lesson."

"And where are you going?"

"Home."

"I haven't seen you for ages."

"You haven't come. One never sees you, one never meets you anywhere any
more."

Her English was different from the ordinary in having occasional Italian
turns and intonations. His partook of the same defect, but in a lesser
degree.

"But I have come," he stood up for himself, "and you were all out except
Lily. Didn't she tell you I was there? We had a long talk. She told me
her plans for the future. She is going to keep a school for poor
children. We discussed their diet and their flannels and every point of
their bringing-up. We invented things to do on holidays to give them a
good time. There is only one thing I can see leaving a doubt of this
school coming into being. It is that Lily has moments, she confessed to
me, of thinking almost equally well of a castle with a moat and
drawbridge and a page to walk before her carrying her prayer-book on a
cushion. She's a funny young one."

"It's partly Fräulein."

"How are they all?"

"Well, thank you. At least, I suppose they are well." She gave a slight
laugh at the humor of this. "You could hardly imagine how little I see
of them."

"What has happened?"

"They have been going around with some new people, some Americans. They
have been helping them to shop, and showing them the way one does things
over here. Mother, you know, is always so ready."

"Your mother is a dear."

"Leslie is just like her. But I am sure they both enjoy it, too. They
have not been home to lunch for a week."

"And you?"

"Oh, I am not needed where there are already two who do the thing so
much better than I could. I have not even seen the people. My day is
very full, you know. Piano and singing-lessons, and I am painting again
this winter, with Galletti, and I am going to a course of
_conferenze_ on Italian literature. That involves a lot of reading.
There are, besides, the other, the usual things, the--" Her voice stuck;
then, as she went on, deepened with the depth of a suppressed
impatience. "I wish one might be allowed not to do what is meant for
pleasure unless one takes pleasure in it. But going to teas and parties
is apparently as much a duty as school or church. Mother and Leslie at
least seem to think it so for me."

"I see their point, Brenda dear, don't you?" He was not looking at her
as with a gentle brotherliness he spoke this.

"You don't go to many parties yourself, Gerald."

"I am afraid nothing I do is fit to be an example to anybody. But it
doesn't matter about me. About you it does. I can't say to you all I
think. It would sound fulsome, and from such an old chum might make you
laugh. But, being as you are, Brenda, surely your mother is right in
thinking of _le monde_ as the proper setting for you. You know I'm
not fond of _le monde_, but it's because it hasn't enough such
ornaments as yourself. With the life that lies before you--"

"Who can possibly know what my life will be?" the girl asked quickly,
almost roughly.

"True, Brenda. I dare say I am talking like a fool." He left off,
wondering that for a moment he should actually have been speaking on the
side of convention.

They walked a few rods in silence. They had crossed the bridge, and were
headed for Porta Romana, the handmaiden trotting in their tracks, when
at a corner Gerald stopped, and, as if to change the subject, or to
regain favor by a felicitous suggestion, said:

"Do you remember my telling you of a painting I came upon in a little
old church on this street? _Scuola di Giotto_, they call it, but
the thing is undoubtedly Sienese. Have you the time? Shall we take a
moment to see it?"

"I should be glad. If you will walk home with me afterward, Gerald, I
might tell Gemma she can go."

There was an exchange of Italian between the young lady and the maid,
after which the latter turned, and with a busy, delighted effect about
the rear view of her walked back across the bridge to spend her gift of
an hour in what divertisements we shall never know.

The church was closed. Gerald pulled the bell-handle of the next door. A
priest opened to them, and, seeing at a glance what was wanted, guided
them through a white-washed corridor to a living-room where a crucifix
hung on the wall and the table had a red cloth; by this into a dim and
stony sacristy, whence they emerged into the back of a darkling little
church, with shadowy candlesticks and kneeling-benches, the whole full
of a cold, complex odor of old incense and old humanity and, one could
fancy, old prayers.

The priest brought a lighted taper and, crossing to one of the side
altars, held it near the painting, which was all that well-dressed
people ever came for outside of hours.

The reddish light trembled over the figure of a majestic virgin, in the
diadem and mantle of a princess, bearing the palm of martyrs in her
hand. It was a very simple and noble face, beautiful in a separate way,
which not every one would perceive, so little in common had it with the
present-day fair ladies whose photographs are sold.

Gerald had taken the light from the priest's hands and was lifting,
lowering, shading it, experimenting, to bring out all that might still
be seen of the withdrawn image on its faintly glinting field of gold.
His face was keen with interest; the love of beautiful things in this
moment of satisfaction smoothed away from it every line of dejection and
irritability.

Brenda was examining the picture with an attention equal to his, but, if
one might so describe it, of a different color. Her admiration got its
life largely from Gerald's, whose tastes in art she was in the habit of
adopting blindfold. Of this, however, she was not aware, and gazed doing
good to her soul by the conscious and deliberate contemplation of a
masterpiece.

"Do you remember a great calm, white figure in the communal palace at
Siena?" Gerald asked, "with other figures of Virtues on the same wall?
Doesn't this remind you of them?"

Brenda answered abstractedly:

"Yes," and continued to look. "How amazing they are!" she fervently
exclaimed. He supposed she meant the saint's hands or eyes, but she
explained, "The Italians."

He did not take up the idea either to agree or to dispute; his mind was
busy with one Italian only, the painter of the picture before him.

The young girl's interest flagged sooner than his own; he felt her melt
from his side while he continued seeking proof in this detail and that
of the painter's identity.

When he turned to find her and to follow, she was kneeling on one of the
wooden forms, her gloved hands joined, her face toward the high altar.

He approved the courtesy of it, done, as he knew, in order that the
priest, who stood aside, waiting for them to finish, should not think
these barbarians who came into his church to see a work of art had no
respect for his shrines and holies. Having returned the light to the
priest Gerald himself, while waiting for Brenda, took a melancholy
religious attitude, his hat and cane held against his breast, and sent
his thoughts gropingly upward, where the solitary thing they encountered
was his poor mother in heaven. Heaven and the changes undergone by those
who enter there he could never make very real to himself. He thought of
her as she used to be, affectionate and ill.

At the stir of Brenda rising from her knees he, too, stirred, ready to
depart. She was bowing to the altar, making an obeisance so deep, so
beautifully reverent, that the priest could never have guessed she was
not a Catholic. After it she still stood a moment, looking toward the
sanctuary, like one with last fond words to say after the farewell; and
this excess of either regard for the priest's feelings or else a
devoutness he had not suspected in her quickened Gerald's attention. And
there in the dimness he saw what he had not seen in the broad light of
day, that his friend's little face, which had presented the effect of a
house with all the blinds drawn down, was lighted up behind the
blinds--oh, lighted as if for a feast!

He felt himself at sea. He had thought he knew the circumstances. Some
part, of course, nobody could know unless Brenda chose to tell them. But
what reason there should be for positive joy--

A suspicion flashed across his mind. He looked at her more closely, and
put it away.

She might have been the wisest of the virgins, the one who before any
other heard the music of the bridegroom and was first to light her lamp.
She stood as if listening to his footsteps.

[Illustration: After it she still stood a moment, looking toward the
sanctuary]

That such a simile should have been possible to Gerald shows how much
the expression of Brenda's face centered attention on itself, for her
white serge dress was in the fashion of that year, and it was not a
fashion to be remembered with any artistic joy. Gerald was never
reconciled to it.

He had the power to detach himself and at will see persons as if he
looked at them for the first time. So for a moment he saw Brenda as a
thing solely of form and color, a white shape against a ground of gloom,
and took new account of the fact that the little girl who had had
pigtails when he first knew her, and gone to the _Diaconesse_ with
lunch-basket and satchel of books, had from one season to the next,
stealthily, as it were, and while his back was turned, become beautiful.

More than that. He was looking at Brenda--he recognized it with a pulse
of exquisite interest--in her exact and particular hour. He had
surprised a rose at its moment of transition from bud to bloom, that
delicate and perfect moment when the natural beauty which women and
fruits and flowers have in common, reaching its height, hangs
poised--for such a pitifully short time, alas!--before it changes, if
not declines, to something less dewily fresh, less heart-movingly
untouched, less complete.

The artist could not long in this case be regarding the girl as part of
a picture; his human relation to the owner of that lifted profile
brought him back to wondering in what the quiet ecstasy it breathed
could have its source. He was touched by it, by the whole character, at
the moment, of her face, with its strength so nullified by gentleness.

When the will is strong and nature sensitive, what arms has youth with
which to prevail? What but the power to keep still and hold on? Nothing
was in Brenda's face so marked as that power, except, in this moment of
undisguise, while she thought herself unwatched, its singular happiness,
a mingling of tenderness, dedication, hope.

The genuine sympathy he felt for her made Gerald deserving of the
intuition that blessed him while he stood there trying to divine. An
interpretation of her secret offered itself, worthier of him as of her
than the suspicion of erewhile; one so beautiful, indeed, that he felt
uplifted by standing in its presence. All he had most cared for in his
life, the things that had touched and inspired him,--visions of
painters, dreams of poets, scenes of beauty, sweet of human
intercourse,--all the influences that make life dignified and fair,
seemed in their essence to be in the air around him, like scents of
flowers in the dark....

The wish to pray came over him again, yet he wanted to weep, too,
because as soon as his heart expanded a little the rusty splinter of a
knife corroding there reminded him that lofty sentiments, sincerities,
idealisms, have as their fruit in this life--dust, derision! He wondered
that without being any older one could feel as old as he did while
watching Brenda transfigured by her poor young dream.

Now for the second time she curtseyed to the altar. The priest moved,
Gerald moved, all three passed up the aisle, to a faint chink of coins
in Gerald's pocket where he groped for a fee. At the main altar the
priest dipped a rapid genuflexion.

As soon as they were outside Brenda began to talk about the picture, to
ask questions, as if the art of the Italians had been of all things
nearest to her heart, and Gerald was drawn into holding in the street
while they walked a sort of lecture on the primitives.

All the while, in an independent corner of his brain he was reflecting
upon the absurdity of supposing that because he was an old familiar of
the Fosses, and so fond of them all, he knew anything of their affairs
these days, when he saw them so seldom. Ever so many things could have
happened without his knowledge. The girls might have new friends and
admirers just as they had hats and dresses that he had never seen.

They were making their way while talking toward Porta Romana, and were
often obliged to step off the narrow sidewalk to make room for other
passers, the street being busy at that time of day.

Brenda was in the midst of an entirely pertinent remark when her voice
softly died, like the flame of a candle sucked out by a draft or like a
music-box run down. Gerald, looking round for the end of her sentence,
saw that she had sighted an acquaintance on the other side of the
street.

She nodded, without a smile, slowly. Just so must Beatrice have bowed in
these same streets of Florence when she passed the dreamy passionate
youth through whom we are acquainted with her name.

Gerald's eyes traveled across the way to see who might be the recipient
of the lady's most sweet salute, and hurriedly uncovered to an officer
of the Italian army who, holding his hand to his cap, stood at attention
till the two had passed.

Was the man pale or was it that one had never before noticed, meeting
him indoors and at evening, how strongly the black of his mustache and
brows contrasted with his skin? The suspicion that had for a moment
troubled Gerald in church returned as a stronger infection. Had Brenda
expected this? Did they concert such meetings?

He might have said to himself that a tryst which consisted in crossing
glances from opposite sides of the street was very innocent. In a moment
he did see that as the villas _fuori la porta_ must be reached
through the _porta_, a lover whose lady lived on Vial dei Colli
might without previous arrangement hope for a glimpse of her by walking
in its neighborhood.

As we have seen him doing more than once this afternoon, Gerald here
tried to get his clue from Brenda herself, her face, her atmosphere. Yet
he knew, as has already been said, that it was Brenda Foss's way to keep
these as much as she could from telling anything to the world. This
wariness notwithstanding a tinge of unaccustomed rose had spread through
the clear white of her cheek; her eyes had in them noticeably more life.
Emotion or mere self-consciousness?

On one point only he was satisfied: Brenda had done nothing that
involved deceit. Into the very structure of her face, which had almost
nothing left of the American look, was built a certain Puritan
truthfulness. She could conceal if she must, but hated to shuffle, to
prevaricate. She concealed exactly because of that.

"Go on with the Sienese masters, Gerald," she bade him, collectedly. "I
am listening, and learning a lot."

As they passed under the great arch of the Roman Gate, Gerald was saying
modestly:

"I don't know anything about them, really. I've just been impressed by a
thing or two. This Lorenzetti, for instance--" And so on up the
_viale_ to the house.

In the drawing-room they found Mrs. Foss and Leslie, who, just home from
town, tired and thirsty, had had tea brought to them, and were
strengthening themselves before even taking off their hats.

Their welcome to Gerald was mingled with reproaches of the sort that
flatters more than it hurts.

"It's perfect ages since we saw you. We thought you had forgotten us.
What have you been doing this long, long time?"

"It is you, who are never at home, my dear friends," Gerald took his
turn. "I was here a fortnight or so ago. Didn't Lily tell you? Of course
she told you, and you have forgotten, so it's I, properly, who should be
calling names."

"Have you been quite well, Gerald?" Mrs. Foss asked in her maternal
voice, after a more careful look at him.

"Certainly."

"I am glad you have come. I have been on the point more than once of
sending for you, but the days fly so! We have been busy, too."

She had poured cups of tea for Gerald and Brenda. All four were seated
and refreshing themselves.

It was a very large room, but a corner had been so arranged as to look
shut in and cozy. There stood the tea-table convenient to the sofa and,
surrounding it, a few chosen chairs in which one could sink and lean
back and be comfortable.

"Have you had a tiring day?" Brenda asked her mother, somewhat as if she
were tired herself at the mere thought of such a day as she supposed her
mother to have had.

"No," Mrs. Foss answered briskly; "it's rather fun. I don't mean that
one doesn't get tired after a fashion. Has Brenda told you, Gerald, how
we have lately been occupied?"

"Some new people, I think she said."

"Yes, some nice, funny Americans."

"Funny, you say?"

"I say it fondly, Gerald. Let me tell you a little about them, and you
will see what I mean. They are going to spend the winter here and wanted
a house. What house do you think they selected?"

"You really mustn't set me riddles, Mrs. Foss."

"For years we have seen it every time we drive to the Cascine, and seen
it with a certain curiosity--always deserted, always with closed blinds,
in its way the most beautiful house in Florence."

"The most--I can't think what house you mean."

"Of course not, with your tastes. But imagine some nice, rich Americans,
without either art education or the smallest affectation of such a
thing, and ask yourself what they would like. Why, a big, square,
clean-looking, new-looking, wealthy-looking house, of course, set in a
nice garden, with, at the end of the garden, a nice stable. I was
thankful to find the place had been kept up."

"But is there--on the Lungarno, did you say?"

"It is that house we have called the Haughty Hermitage, Gerald," Brenda
helped him.

"Oh, that! But surely one doesn't live in a house like that!"

"Your excellent reason?" inquired Leslie.

"I don't know,"--he hesitated,--"but surely one doesn't live in a house
like that!"

They had to laugh at the expression brought into his face by his sense
of a mysterious incongruity.

"No," he went on with knitted brows to reject the idea; "a house like
that--one doesn't come all the way from America to live in a house which
has no more atmosphere than that!"

"Ah, but that's the point, Gerald," said Mrs. Foss. "What you call
atmosphere these people avoid as they would an unsanitary odor.
Atmosphere! What would you say if you saw the things Leslie and I have
been helping them to buy and put into it! I love to buy, you know, even
when not for myself. I thought with joy, 'Now I shall at least go
through the form of acquiring certain objects I have lusted after for
years.' Delightful old things Jerome has discovered in antiquarians'
places, and that we shall never be able to afford. Do you think I could
persuade them to take one of these? I represented that the worm-holes
could be stopped up and varnished over, that the missing bits of inlay,
precious crumbs of pearl and ivory, could be replaced, the tapestries
renovated. In vain. They want everything new--hygienically new, fresh,
and shining. And, Gerald, prejudice apart, the idea is not without its
good side. The result is not so bad as you may think. Why, after all,
should my taste, your taste, prevail in their house, will you tell me?"

"For no reason in the world. This liberal view comes the easier to me
that I do not expect ever to see the interesting treasures you may have
collected from Peyron's and Janetti's."

"If it were no worse than that!" put in Leslie, and laughed a covered
laugh.

Mrs. Foss explained, after a like little laugh of her own.

"You see, things that we have seen till we have utterly ceased to see
them, the things that nobody who really lives in Florence ever dreams of
buying, are new to these people. They _love_ them. As a result, you
can guess. There will be in their apartments alabaster plates with
profiles of Dante and Michelangelo on a black center. There will be
mosaic tables with magnolias and irises. There will be Pliny's doves.
Think of it! There will be green bronze lamps and lizards--"

"And the fruit--tell about that, Mother!" Leslie prompted.

"There will be on the sideboard in the dining-room a perpetual dish of
magnificent fruit, marble, realistic to a degree. You know the kind."

"And you could stand by and let them--you and Leslie!" spoke Brenda, in
an astonishment almost seriously reproachful.

"My dear," Leslie took up their common defense, "one's feeling in this
case is: What does it matter? A little more, a little less.... It all
goes together. When they have those curtains, they might as well have
that fruit."

"At the same time, my dear children, let me tell you that the effect is
not displeasing," insisted Mrs. Foss. "Such at least is my humble
opinion. In its way it's all right. They are people of a certain kind,
and they have bought what they like, not what they thought they ought to
like. Thousands of people, if it were not for you artists perverting
them, would be thinking a marble lemon that you can't tell from a real
one a rare and dear possession. These people haven't known any artists.
They are innocent."

"They're awfully good fun," Leslie started loyally in to make up for
anything she had said which might seem to savor of mockery or dispraise.
"One enjoys being with them, if they aren't our usual sort. They are in
good spirits, really good--good spirits with roots to them. And that's
such a treat these days!"

From which it was supposable that Leslie had been living in circles
where the gaiety was hollow. The suggestion did not escape Gerald. But,
then, Leslie, just turned twenty-four, was rather given to judging
_these days_ as if she remembered something less modern, an
affectation found piquant by her friends in a particularly
young-looking, blond girl with a short nose. Gerald might have hoped
that her sigh meant nothing had not Leslie, awake to the implication of
her remark as soon as she had made it, gone hurriedly on to call
attention away from it.

"Yes, it's pleasant to be with them. It's a change. The world seems
simple and life easy. Life _is_ easy, with all that money. Besides,
Mrs. Hawthorne really is something of a dear. After all, if people make
much of one, one is pretty sure to like them. Haven't you found it so,
Gerald?"

"I don't know. I am trying to remember if there is anybody who has made
much of me."

"_We_ have made much of you."

"And don't think I temperately like you. I adore you all, as you well
know. You're the only people I do. By that sign there has been nobody
else kind enough to make much of me."

"You're so bad lately, Gerald; that's why," Mrs. Foss affectionately
chide him. "You never go anywhere. You neglect your friends. What have
you been doing with yourself? Is it work?"

"No; not more than usual. I work, but I'm not exactly absorbed--obsessed
by it. I don't know--" He seemed to search, and after a moment summed up
his vague difficulties: "It seems a case for quoting 'Hamlet.'" He was
bending forward, his elbows resting on his knees, as they could do
easily, his chair being low and his thin legs long. His thin, long hands
played with that slender cane of his, which he had set down and taken up
again, while he tried to recall the passage, and mumbled snatches of it:
"'This goodly firmament--congregation of vapors--Man delights not
me--no, nor'--the rest of it."

"But it won't do, Gerald dear; it won't do at all," Mrs. Foss addressed
him anxiously, between scolding and coaxing. "Shake yourself, boy! Force
yourself a little; it will be good for you. _Make_ yourself go to
places till this mood is past. What is it? Bad humor, spleen,
hypochondria? It doesn't belong with one of your age. We miss you
terribly, dear. Here we have had two of our Fridays, and you have not
been. And we have always counted on you. Charming men are scarce at
parties the world over. The Hunts have begun their little dances, too.
One used to see you there. And at Madame Bentivoglio's. She was asking
what had become of you. Promise, Gerald, that we shall see you at our
next Friday! We want to make it a nice, gay season. Will you promise?
Oh, here's Lily. Why didn't you tell us, Lily, that Gerald had come to
see us when we were out?"

A long-legged, limp-looking little girl with spectacles had come in. A
minute before she had been passing the door on her way to walk, and
catching the sound of a male voice in the drawing-room, insisted upon
listening till she had made sure whose it was. At the name Gerald she
had pulled away from her governess and burst into the drawing-room.

She stood still a moment after this impulsive entrance, and the
governess turned toward Mrs. Foss a face that, benign and enlightened
though it was, called up the memory of faces seen in good-humored German
comic papers. The expression of her smile said to the company that she
was guiltless in the matter of this invasion. Could one use severity
toward a little girl who suffered from asthma and weak eyes?

Lily, after her pause, went half shyly, half boldly to Gerald. He did
not kiss her,--she was ten years old,--but placed an arm loosely around
her as she stood near his knee.

"Did you forget it, Lily?"

"No, Mother, I didn't forget, but I never thought to speak of it. You
didn't tell me to, did you, Gerald?"

"No, we had so much else to talk about. Well, Lily, have you decided
what color the uniform must be for our orphanage? The thing is
important. It makes a great difference in an orphan's disposition
whether she goes dressed in a dirty gray or a fine, bright apricot
yellow."

"Gerald,"--Lily lowered her voice to make their conversation more
private,--"will you be the cuckoo?" As he gazed, she went earnestly on:
"We can't find anybody to do the cuckoo. I am going to be the
nightingale. Fräulein is going to be the drum. Leslie is going to be the
_Wachtel_. Mother is going to be the triangle. Brenda will play the
piano. Papa says that if he is to take part he must be the one who sings
on the comb and tissue-paper. But I am afraid to let him. You know he
hasn't a good ear. That leaves the cuckoo, the comb, and the rattle
still to find before we can have our _Kinder-sinfonie_. Which
should you like to be, Gerald?"

"What an opening for musical talent! But, my dear little lady, I'm not a
bit of good. I can't follow music by note any more than a cuckoo. I am
so sorry."

"But, Gerald, all you have to do is--"

"I have told you, Lili," said the governess in German, "that we would
take the gardener's boy and drill him for the cuckoo. Come now quickly,
dear child; we must go for our walk."

The casual, unimportant talk of ordinary occasions went on after the
interruption.

"And what do you hear from that charming friend of yours, the abbé,
Gerald?" And, "I hope you have good news from your son, Mrs. Foss." And,
"Do you know whether the Seymours have come back from the country?"

Gerald left the Fosses, warmed by his renewed sense of their friendship,
and believing that he would go very soon again to see them. But he did
not, and his feeling of shame was more definite than his gratitude when
he in time received a note from Mrs. Foss, kind as ever, asking him to
dine.




CHAPTER III


There was dancing at the Fosses' on two Fridays in the month. It was
their contribution toward the gaiety of the winter. They did not often
give a formal dinner, and when such an entertainment appeared to be
called for from them, planned it with forethought to make it serve as
many ends as it would. Every careful housewife will understand.

It was with Leslie that Mrs. Foss talked such matters over. The eldest
daughter was so sufficient as adjutant that one did not inquire whether
Brenda would have been useful if needed. The latter took no part in the
domestic councils which had for object to decide who should be asked to
dinner and of what the dinner should consist.

The question whom to invite to meet Professor Longstreet had taken Mrs.
Foss and Leslie time and reflection. The Fosses' only son had a great
regard for this man, one of the faculty during his period at Harvard,
and now that the travels of the professor's sabbatical year brought him
to Florence, the family was anxious to entertain him as dear John,
studying medicine in far-off Boston, would have wished.

The professor was engaged upon a new translation of the "Divine Comedy."
The guests had therefore better be chosen among their literary
acquaintance, thought Mrs. Foss. But Leslie was of the opinion that they
would do better to make the requisite just any gift or grace, and keep
an eye on having the company compose well and the table look beautiful.

When she reminded her mother that a dinner was owing the Balm de Brézés,
and that this would be a chance to pay the debt, Mrs. Foss objected:

"But I want to ask Gerald. I felt sorry for him last time he came. We
must look after him a little bit, you know."

Leslie did not show herself in any wise disposed to set aside Gerald's
claim, but expressed the idea that Gerald probably would not mind
meeting the De Brézés now. After all, the memories sweet and sour
associated with them had had time to lose their edge. And they could be
seated at the opposite end of the table.

It was finally decided to ask the Balm de Brézés, Gerald, the Felixsons,
Miss Cecilia Brown, and Gideon Hart, all intelligent, all people who
could talk. It was further frugally resolved to have the dinner on a
Friday and let it be followed by the usual evening party, thus making
the same embellishment of the house do for two occasions, as well as
augmenting their visitor's opportunity to make acquaintance with the
Anglo-American colony in Florence.

                   *       *       *       *       *

All had been going so well, the guests were in such happy and talkative
form, that the minor matter of taking food had dragged, and the diners
were not ready to rise when a servant whispered to Mrs. Foss that the
first evening guest had arrived.

Mrs. Foss's eyes found those of Leslie, who understood the words
soundlessly framed, and excused herself from the table.

In the garnished and waiting drawing-room, lighted with candles, like a
shrine, and looking vast, with the furniture taken out of the way, she
found the Reverend Arthur Spottiswood, of whom it was not easy to think
that eagerness to dance had driven him to come so sharply on time. He
looked serious-minded, almost somber, and Leslie, though prepared to be
vivacious with peer or pauper, found it all duty and little fun to make
conversation with him until the next arrival should come to her relief.
The gentleman was Brenda's adorer, but Brenda would never, if she could
help it, let him have one moment with her. His love-charged eye inspired
in her the simple desire to flee. Singularly, this was, with one notable
exception, beautiful Brenda's only conquest, while Leslie, who was just
ordinarily pretty and wore a pince-nez, received tribute and proposals
from almost every unattached young fellow who drifted inside the circle
of her wide invisible net. Boys in particular had to pass through her
hands, receive good advice from her, be encouraged in their work,
cheered in their distance from home, and refused, and consoled for the
refusal, and sent away finally rather improved than otherwise. With very
little sentiment, she had a kind and cozy quality, like her mother.

The Satterlees were next to arrive, mother with son and daughter, and
Leslie was warm as never before in her welcome to them. The Reverend
Arthur was gently shed from her and with pleasure picked up by Isabel
Satterlee, who was charmed to have any kind of man to talk with.

Then arrived a group of unrelated people living for the moment at the
same pension in town and coming in the same conveyance. Among them was
Percy Lavin, who had the extraordinary tenor voice, and along with it an
exuberance of confidence in his future that made him as destructive of
coherence in company as a large frisking pup. Leslie had at the very
first meeting felt that it would be her sacred mission to attend to that
young man.

The hired pianist had come, he was unrolling his sheets of dance-music
and rolling them the contrary way. Mr. Hunt, the English banker, with
his wife and daughters, had come; and Maestro Vannuccini with his
signora on his arm; and a glittering young officer or two; and Landini,
Hunt's partner; and Charlie Hunt, the banker's nephew.

Charlie, bold through long acquaintance, asked, "Where are the others?"

Leslie told him, whereupon the young man said "Oh!" and his "Oh" sounded
blank, whether because it was apparent to him through her answer that
there had been indiscretion in his question, or because he wondered at
there being a dinner-party in this house and he not asked to it. Leslie
paid no attention, for at that moment the diners were beginning to
appear.

The drawing-room had two doors in the same wall: people coming from the
dining-room would enter by one of these, while those who came from the
street entered by the other, after passing through the small
reception-room where they left their things, and the larger
reception-room intervening between this and the drawing-room. Charlie
Hunt, talking with Mrs. Satterlee, let a casual eye roll away from her
middle-aged agreeableness to see who was entering by that different door
from the one which had given him passage. Curiosity, pure and simple.

Ah, so. Madame Balm de Brézé, spare, sharp, high-nosed, beaked and
clawed like a bird--a picked bird. Very elegant. It was clear to Charlie
Hunt why with a dinner to give one should care to secure her and her
husband. They looked so fiendishly aristocratic.

The Felixsons. Naturally. Felixson had to be asked when the guest of
honor was a scholar. Mrs. Felixson's warm brilliancy to-night bore
testimony to a good dinner. Abundance of meats and wines always turned
her a burning pink. It looked to Charlie like a new frock she was
wearing; he did not remember seeing her in it before.

Gideon Hart, the old sculptor. It was his picturesque white hair and
beard that people liked to see at their tables, for the old fellow,
thought Hunt, was phenomenally a bore. In this case patriotism explained
his presence. America quaintly loved his name.

And Cecilia Brown. But was it really Cecilia?... What had she been doing
to herself?... Oh. Her hair. Her hair was cropped and curled all over
her head like wicked Caracalla's. That was the fashion in England, he
had heard, where she had been spending the summer.

But who was this, at the end of the procession, after Mrs. Foss and
Brenda and the consul?

Hunt had a genuine surprise. Gerald Fane.

Now, wherefore Gerald Fane rather than Charlie Hunt?

Mrs. Foss, coming into the drawing-room, felt a glow of pleasure at the
scene meeting her eyes. The occasion, the success of it, had lifted life
for her above its usual plane. She could feel how blessed she was in
ways she did not sufficiently consider on common days when common cares
blinded her. It was a beautiful home, this of hers; here was a beautiful
room, with its mirrors and flowers and candle-light and happy guests.
She smiled at everybody and everything with a brooding sweetness.

Her sense of herself was satisfactory too at the moment. She felt her
dress--an old one, rejuvenated--to be becoming. She was young to have
grown children. Her blond hair did not show the silver threads among it.
She was as handsome in her older way as she had been when young, and she
was sure she was nicer. She had family and friends, all full of regard
for her. Her smile reflected the state of her mind and did one good to
see.

Her eyes resting upon Brenda--whom the reverend Arthur had tried to
capture the moment she appeared, and been baffled--Mrs. Foss in the
optimism of her mood said to herself that all would very likely go well
in that quarter; they ought not to worry as they did.

The pianist had struck up a polka. One still danced the polka in those
days, and the schottische and the dear old lancers, though the waltz was
already the favorite.

The floor was at first sparsely, then ever more thickly, sown with
hopping and revolving couples. Hunt, one arm curled around a young waist
in pink muslin, had enough of his mind to spare from the amount of talk
one has breath for while dancing to continue in a line of thought
started by an annoying little smart where a shred of skin had been
rubbed off his vanity when he saw Gerald come from the dining-room. He
mentally looked at himself and looked at Gerald, and after comparing the
pictures felt his astonishment increase. He could admit, as an excuse
for inviting Gerald instead of himself, that Gerald was an artist, and
this dinner had presumably been planned with the idea of having it
literary-artistic. But then--an artist! Gerald was so little of one. One
never heard of his selling a painting. In the darkest corners of his
friends' rooms you sometimes discovered one of his queer things--a gift,
hung there as a compliment. One might, furthermore, grant that it did
not matter that a man should be agreeable in appearance. But Gerald was
not even agreeable in disposition; he did not try to make himself
agreeable. What did the Fosses see in him?

The music had worked through a mighty flourish to a banging final chord.
Hunt escorted his lady to a chair, took the fan from her hand to fan her
with,--himself a little, too,--and while talking let his dark eye stray
from her and go roving, as was the habit of his eye.

It plunged through an open door into the quietly lighted library, where
the consul and his distinguished guest and a few more of the older or
staider people had withdrawn from the tumult and were having smokes and
conversation. They were considering a marble fragment, passing it from
hand to hand.

Hunt knew that fragment, and at sight of it looked cynical. The consul,
who had discovered it immured in an ancient garden-wall, believed it to
have been carved by Orcagna.

Old Hart had it in his hand. What he said could hardly be heard at that
distance; he passed it to Gerald with a look that seemed to ask for
corroboration. Gerald held it long and gazed seriously, with that
conceit in his own judgment which made him sometimes dispute the
attributions in no less a gallery than the Uffizi--say that a Verocchio
was not a Verocchio, a Giorgione not a Giorgione.

Charlie strained to catch some syllable of what he said. Vainly. The
pianist was preluding. Bertie Bentivoglio came to ask the girl in pink
to dance with him. From the chair she left empty Charlie moved nearer to
the library door, of half a mind to join the group in there. But Gerald,
upon whom Leslie had impressed it that he must do his duty and let there
be no wall-flowers, when the prelude had developed into a waltz returned
the marble into Hart's hand and came to the door. Whereupon Charlie
changed his mind and after saying "Hello, Gerald!" turned again, and the
young men stood looking over the scene side by side, two figures
contrasting in reality nearly as much as they did in Charlie's mental
image of them for purposes of comparison.

Any Rosina who sold buttonhole bouquets at the theater door could have
seen that Charlie was handsome, with his pale brown smoothness and
regularity of feature; the pretty mustache accentuating and not
concealing the neat and agreeable mold of his lip; the fine whiteness of
his teeth, his civilized and silken look altogether. The defects of his
face, if one could call them that, did not appear at first glance or
even at second. His forehead had begun to gain on his hair,--it ran up
at the sides in two points,--and his slightly prominent eyes were brown
in the same sense as a horn button or a bit of chestnut-shell is
brown,--while some eyes that we remember were brown like woodland pools
with autumn leaves at the bottom! He did not look English, yet did not
look quite Italian either. He was in fact both, and the thing evenly
balanced. The banker Hunt's brother had married an Italian; Charlie had
been born in Italy and hardly ever stirred out of it; on the other hand
he had found his society largely among the English and Americans in
Florence.

As he stood there, conforming gracefully to a recognized canon of manly
beauty, his neighbor Gerald, who would not have been noticed one way or
the other for his looks, yet from being beside him took on an
indescribable effect of eccentricity. The bone showed plainly around his
eye-sockets and at the bridge of his nose. One eyebrow became different
from the other the moment he regarded a thing analytically; and when he
smiled those who noticed such things could detect that nature had marked
him for recognition: there showed beneath his mustache three of the
broad front middle teeth whereof two are the common portion. For the
remainder, a slight beard veiled the character of his chin and jaw and a
little disguised the thinness of his throat. Above a large forehead his
dark hair rose on end in a bristling bank, like that of most Italian men
at the time. He looked solitary, unsociable, critical, but not
altogether ungentle. His forehead was full of the suggestion of
thoughts, his gray-blue eyes were full of the reflection of feelings,
that you could be comfortably sure he would not trouble you with.

"Well, Gerald, what are you doing with yourself these days?" asked
Charlie as they stood looking on, delaying to seek partners for the
dance. "Immortal masterpieces?"

This innocuous playfulness somehow jarred. Gerald looked down at Charlie
from the side of his eye,--he was by a couple of inches or so the
taller,--then asked in his turn, a little crustily:

"Do you really want to know?"

"Why, no, my dear fellow, I don't, if that's your reply. It was not
curiosity. I was only showing an amiable interest." His tone conveyed
that he had intended no offense and refused to take any; the
disagreeableness should be all on the same side.

"Thank you for the interest. I am doing much as usual," Gerald answered,
placated.

"Who is this professor from America whom the very select are invited to
meet?" Charlie asked after an interval, as if they had been on the best
of terms again.

The playfulness again was innocent, again might have been regarded as
almost an attempt to flatter; nevertheless it again jarred upon Gerald.
It was by an effort that he answered soberly and literally, without
betraying that the point of irony had irritated him, as, he did not
doubt, it was meant to irritate.

"Another translation of Dante?" Charlie made merry, when Gerald had
finished telling as much as he knew about the professor. "I tell you
what--I will set myself to translating the 'Divine Comedy'! It will give
me distinction, and then--it 's very simple,--I will never show my
translation!"

There was surely no harm in this. It was just stupid. Charlie's
_esprit_ was never of any fineness. He and Gerald had known each
other from the days when both went to M. Demonget's school, whence,
without having been friends, they had emerged intimates. It would have
been ridiculous for either to try to impress the other by the profundity
of his thoughts. Charlie was right in thinking of himself as standing in
a relation to Gerald that made him free to expose ideas in their
undress. And yet it was on this evening and this occasion that Gerald
said to himself for the first time definitely that he did not like
Charlie Hunt. An antipathy existing perhaps from the beginning had risen
to the point where it crossed the threshold of consciousness. No, he
neither liked nor thought well of him.

Luckily, it did not much matter, their relations were superficial.
Belonging in the same circles they must meet from time to time; but if
Gerald avoided him whenever it was decently feasible, he need not often
suffer as at this moment from the repressed nervous need to repudiate in
explicit terms his person, his society, his manners, his morals,
everything that was his. By way of beginning this avoidance, Gerald cast
his eyes more particularly about him in search of a partner. Charlie's
eyes too were wandering over the small and scattered number of ladies
still available to late comers.

Both of them knew every one present. Charlie had picked out with his eye
a still youthful mama, who would not, he believed, refuse to dance, but
would jest and appear flattered and, when after some hesitation she
consented, lean in his arms only a little more heavily than her
daughter. Gerald had singled a slender, faded woman in garments of ivory
lace, who, seated near Mme. Vannuccini in the far corner of the room,
was devoting herself to conversation as if she really had not cared to
dance. Gerald was moved to go and give her the chance of refusing, if
she were in total earnest. He remembered Blanche Seymour as a passionate
dancer still when he began to go to grownup parties.

Now her hair was gray, her face had lines, but she did not look
accustomed to them; there was plaintiveness in her expression, as if she
had been a young girl, really, made up for an elderly part in
theatricals, and did not like her part. It was some sense of this which
was attracting Gerald to her across the room. Leslie had ordered him to
dance, so dance he must. But the glare of festivity all around him did
something to his inner self comparable to a light too bright making the
eyes ache. Leslie would have told him that he picked up his party by the
wrong end. The general gaiety instead of infecting him, reinforced his
feeling that everybody, beneath the surface, was perplexed, bleeding,
afraid of the future, and had good cause to be.

The dinner had been interesting,--he had not been much affected, he was
glad to find, by the presence of the De Brézés,--but he had risen from
it haunted by the conviction that the Fosses were not happy. Nobody, if
one examined into it, was happy; all this pretense was pathetic to the
point of dreariness. Gerald knew everybody's affairs to some extent,
after spending most of his life in the same community, and a little city
where gossip is an elegant occupation. This person had made bad
investments; that one was crippled by the necessity to pay a son's
debts; this couple did not live in harmony, the husband was said to be
infatuated with a dancer. The fact that so much of their own fault
entered into people's misfortunes, while rousing rage, forced him to
pity, because the limitation of their intelligence had so much to do
with people's faults. He was in fact oppressed by the sense of the
limits set to all the lives around him in this beautiful little
Florence, his home, his love, sometimes his despair: the narrow actual
opportunities after the boundless illusions and hopes of youth; the
limited outlook, the limited breathing-room, the limited fortunes. Bars
at the windows, closed doors on every hand.

It was with the feeling that Miss Seymour was no more truly in holiday
spirits than was he that he turned toward her, as toward a spot of
shadow amid too fervid sunshine. It would be more congenial, drifting
with her to the languid measure of this very modern, morbidly emotional
waltz, knowing that, whatever their light talk, they alike felt life to
be a sad affair, than going through livelier evolutions with a young
person who would secretly desire him to flatter and flirt. An instinct
founded less upon male conceit than knowledge of his world drove the
young bachelor determined to remain unattached to seek in preference
women who would found no smallest hope upon his notice of them.

So, keeping at the edge of the room in order to be out of the way of the
dancers, he started on his way to Miss Seymour, while Charlie, whose
mood was as different from Gerald's as was his eye,--that brown eye
which looked upon the world as a barrel of very passable oysters, of
which he would open as many as he could get hold of,--started after.

The approach of a stormily whirling couple, waltzing _all'_
_italiana_, and then another and still another following, forced
them to suspend their journey. While they prudently waited, "Who is
that?" came from Charlie in a voice of acute curiosity.

Gerald, after half a glance at him, mechanically looked in the same
direction.

There stood at the door opening from the reception-room an unknown.

When it was said that our young men knew everybody at the Fosses'
soirée, it was not strictly meant that there might not be a person or
two whom they had not seen before: a plain little visiting cousin whom
the Bentivoglios had begged permission to bring; a new face of a young
Italian introduced by a fellow officer. But at the door now, displacing
a good deal of air, stood a real and striking unknown, in a Paris dress
and diamonds and a smile.

Gerald did not take the trouble to answer Charlie; to himself he said
that this was perhaps Mrs. Hawthorne, the Fosses' new friend.

Mrs. Foss had hastened to meet her. Leslie, disengaging herself from a
partner, left him standing in the middle of the room while she hastened
likewise. It must be Mrs. Hawthorne.

Gerald took back his eyes, and continued on his way to Miss Seymour. But
Charlie, always alive to the possibilities of a new acquaintance, always
eager to be first in the field, dropped his quest of the mama. With an
air of nonchalant abstraction he went to stand in the neighborhood of
the new arrival, conveniently at hand for an introduction. He saw then
that there were two fine new birds; the light and size of the one had at
first obscured the other, though she, too, had on a Paris dress and
diamonds and a smile. But the dress--though there could be little
difference in the women's age, both were young, without being unripe
girls,--was of soberer tones: a sage green moire with pale
coffee-colored lace; and the jewels were more modest, and the smile was
smaller, its beam did not carry so far, nor was perched on so
considerable an eminence.

As he had known she would do, Mrs. Foss after a moment looked about her
for men to introduce. And there he was.

Mrs. Hawthorne. Miss Madison.

Leslie had at the same moment brought up Captain Viviani, who spoke a
little English, and liked very much to practise it with the charming
American ladies, as he told them.

Mrs. Foss lingered awhile, helping the progress of the acquaintance by
bits of elucidation and compliment, then, when the thing was under way,
withdrew so adroitly that she was not missed. A young man, coming up to
importune Leslie for a promised dance, was allowed to carry her off;
Miss Madison, assured by the _capitano_ that he could dance the
American waltz, trusted herself, though a little doubtfully, to his
arms; and Charlie was left with Mrs. Hawthorne.

"Shall we take a turn?" he offered.

"Me?" The lady gave him a look sidewise from dewy blue eyes, as if to
see whether he were serious. He perceived that she with effort kept her
dimples from denting in. He could not be sure what the joke was. But she
went on, as if there had been no joke: "I was brought up a Baptist. My
pa and ma considered it wicked to dance, so would never let me learn. It
doesn't look very wicked to me."

She watched the dancers with an earnestly following eye, preoccupied, he
supposed, with the moral aspect of their embraces and gyrations.

"It looks easy enough," she said, with suppressed excitement, immensely
fascinated. "I should think anybody could do that. You hop on this foot,
you slide, you hop on that foot, you slide. I believe I could do it. No,
no, I mustn't let myself be tempted. I don't want to be a sight." Her
voice had wavered; it suddenly came out bold. "My land!" she exclaimed
full-bloodedly, "there goes a woman who's not a bit slimmer than me!
Look here, let's try. Not right before everybody. I see a side room
where it's nice and dark. Come on in there." As, hardly muffling a gleam
of peculiar and novel amusement, he escorted her toward the room
indicated, she reassured him, "I'm big, but I'm light on my feet."

Charlie was afterward fond of telling that he had taught Mrs. Hawthorne
to dance. But the single lesson he gave her did not of a truth take her
beyond the point where, holding hands with him, like children, and
counting one-two-three, she tried hopping on this foot, then on the
other. For Mrs. Foss, who seemed to have specially at heart that the new
people should enjoy themselves, in her idea of securing this end,
brought one person after the other to be introduced.

How carefully selected these were, or how diplomatically prepared, the
good hostess alone could know.

"Oh, I'm having such a good time!" Mrs. Hawthorne sighed from a full and
happy heart, later in the evening, having gone to sit beside her hostess
on the little corner sofa which that tired woman had selected for a
moment's rest. The dancing was passing before them. "It's the loveliest
party I ever was to. What delightful friends you have, Mrs. Foss, and
what a lot of them! I've made ever so many friends, too, this evening.
Mrs. Satterlee has told me about the Home she's interested in, and Miss
Seymour about the church-fair, and I've had a good talk with the
minister. Those are three nice girls of the banker's, aren't they?
Florence, Francesca, and Beatrice, commonly known as Flick, Fran, and
Trix, they told me. Mr. Hunt, the nephew, is nice, too; we get on like
sliding down-hill. They're all going to come and see me.--Mrs.
Foss,"--her attention had veered,--"do look at that little fellow
playing the piano! Isn't he _great_! But isn't he comical, too!
I've been noticing him all the evening. He fascinates me. I never heard
such splendid playing. The bouncing parts make my feet twitch to dance,
but the sighful, wind-in-the-willow parts make me want to just lean back
and close my eyes. I could listen till the cows come home. I call it a
wonderful gift."

Mrs. Foss looked over at the little Italian, the unpretentious musical
hack whom one sent for when there was to be dancing, and paid--it was
all he asked--so very little. Her eyebrows went up a point as she
smiled. It was true, she remarked it for the first time, that his hands
flew over the keys with an air of breezy virtuosity. He raised them from
the keyboard and brought them down again with the action of a snorting
high-stepping horse. When the passage was loud he nearly lifted himself
off the stool with pounding; when it was soft he tickled the ivories
with the delicacy of raindrops, at the same time diminishing his person
till he seemed the size of a fairy. Now and then he tossed his head, as
if champing a bit, and the bunch of black frizz over his left temple
trembled. A decidedly comic figure he appeared to Mrs. Foss.

"I will tell Signor Ceccherelli what you say," she amiably promised. "I
am sure it will please him."

Leslie, whose responsibilities kept her from dancing her young fill at
her own parties, sought Mrs. Hawthorne still later in the evening, when
she thought that lady might have had enough of Mr. Hunt senior sitting
beside her. The heavy old banker was not considered very entertaining,
and everybody in Florence knew his way of sticking at the side of a
good-looking woman. Lest this one, so evidently making herself pleasant,
should be unduly taxed, Leslie stepped in to free her, tactfully
interested the banker in a game of cards going on upstairs, and took the
place he vacated--took it for just a minute, as a bird perches.

"No, you don't!" Mrs. Hawthorne laid a hand on her arm when she seemed
near dashing off to bring somebody else to present. "You've done the
social act till you ought to be tired, if you aren't. Sit here by me a
moment and take it easy. This party doesn't need any nursing. It's the
loveliest party I ever was to."

Leslie looked off in front of her to verify the statement, and
unreluctantly settled down on the little sofa to rest awhile. She liked
Mrs. Hawthorne. One could not help liking her, as she had had occasion
to assert and reassert in defense against a vague body of reasons for
not adopting the new-comer into the sacred circle of friends, or
launching her on the waters of their little world. Now, as they chatted,
she said to herself again that if Mrs. Hawthorne's homeliness of phrase
were not a simple thing of playfulness, a disclaimer of the affectation
of elegance in talk as stilted, bumptious, unsuited to a proper modesty,
it could very well pass for that. Mrs. Hawthorne seldom expressed
herself quite seriously. As she seldom looked serious either, one could
hardly hear her say it was the loveliest party she ever was to without
suspecting her of a humorous intention. By the sly gleam of her eye one
should know she was doing it to amuse you, imitating a child, a
country-woman, a shop-girl, for the sake of promoting an easy
pleasantness. With her bearing of entire dignity, her honest
handsomeness, her air of secure and generous wealth, she was truly not
one whom the ordinary public would feel disposed to seek reasons for
excluding. Leslie and her mother had refrained from presenting to her
particular persons in the company. All remarks heard from those who had
been presented led to an almost certainty that the new Americans were a
success.

"Do look at Estelle!" exclaimed Mrs. Hawthorne. "She's been dancing one
dance after the other, and sits there now looking cool as a cucumber. I
would have her life if it could make me into a bone like her. Miss
Foss,"--she was diverted from the envious contemplation of
Estelle,--"who is that lovely girl over there?"

"Which one? There are so many to-night!"

"The white one with the knob of dark hair down in her neck. An Italian,
I guess. Rather small. See who I mean? There. She's going to speak to
the little fellow at the piano."

Leslie looked, but did not at once answer. The girl in white was indeed
strangely, at this moment poignantly, lovely. Some intensity of
repressed feeling made her cheek of a white-rose pallor, and her dark
eyes, those spots of velvet shadow, mysteriously deep. She had gone
where the piano stood in a bower of palm and bamboo, with Signor
Ceccherelli seated before it, busy wiping the sweat of his brow. More
than one had gone to him that evening to ask for some favorite piece.
She was perhaps just requesting him to play The Blue Danube, or La
Manola or Bavardage, and it was merely the romantic way of her beauty to
express a sense of doom. She spoke quietly to the pianist, who looked at
her while she spoke and when she ceased made with his head a motion of
assent. She turned and went from the room.

"It is my sister Brenda," said Leslie. "How singular you should not
recognize her!"

"I've never met her, my dear. You don't remember. The time I came to tea
she was in town taking a music lesson. The time I came to dinner she was
in bed with a headache. Well, well, she's not a bit like the rest of
you, is she? I took her for an Italian."

"She was only twelve when we came over here, it has somehow molded her.
I was seventeen; too old, I fancy, to change. Brenda is going back to
America before long, to be with our aunt, father's sister, for whom
Brenda was named. It was only decided a day or two ago, when we heard
from some friends who are going and will take her under their wing. And
if she goes there's no telling when she will come back, you see, because
with every change of administration father may be recalled. And Italy
has been her home so long, all her friends are here. It's no wonder she
doesn't look exactly light of heart."

"No, poor child!"

There was a sympathetic silence, after which, "Who is that?" Mrs.
Hawthorne asked, to take their minds off the intrusive sadnesses of
life. With her gaze across the room she counted, "One, two, three, four,
to the left of the piano, with his hands behind him and a round glass in
his eye."

Leslie looked over at a figure of whom it was natural to ask who that
was, it so surely looked like Somebody--though Mrs. Hawthorne had very
likely asked because, merely, in her eyes he was queer. It was an oldish
man, dressed with marked elegance, white tie, white waistcoat, white
flower at his lapel. The whole of worldly wisdom dwelt in his weary eye.
He had yellow and withered cheeks, black hair with a dash of white above
the ears, and a mustache whose thickest part curved over his mouth like
a black lacquer box-lid, while its long ends, stiff as thorns of a
thorn-tree, projected on either side far beyond his face.

"His name is Balm de Brézé, vicomte. He is by birth a Belgian, I think;
the title, however, is French. He has lived mostly in Paris, but now
spends about half of his time here. He married a friend of ours, an
American. There is Amabel, in ruby velvet, just inside the library door.
A good deal younger than he, yet they seem appropriately matched,
somehow."

"She looks about as foreign as he does. Who's the one she's talking to,
handsome, dark as night? Never saw such a dark skin before except on a
cullud puss'n."

"I know. He might be an Arab, only he's very good Tuscan. It's Mr.
Landini,--Hunt and Landini."

"Ah, the bankers. They do my business, but I've never seen the heads
before to-night."

Mrs. Hawthorne's eyes wandered, as if she said, "Whom else do I want to
know about?" and Leslie made internal comment upon the fact that Mrs.
Hawthorne's interest was quickened by those individuals precisely whom
they had withheld, for reasons, from presenting to her.

Mrs. Hawthorne suddenly pressed closer, and with a little chuckle
grasped Leslie's knee, by this affectionate touch to make herself
forgiven for the disrespect about to be shown.

"And who's Stickly-prickly?"

Leslie had to laugh, too. Impossible not to know which one was meant of
all the people in the direction of Mrs. Hawthorne's glance. He was
leaning against the wall between two chairs deserted by the fair,
looking off with a slightly mournful indifference at everything and at
nothing. His mustache ended in upturned points, his beard was pointed,
his hair stood up in little points. He gave the impression besides of
one whose nervous temper put out porcupine shafts to keep you off.

"It's one of our very best friends, Mrs. Hawthorne. Dear old Gerald! Mr.
Fane. Shall I go get him and bring him over?"

"No, don't. I should be scared of him."

"Let me! His prickles are harmless. He has heard us speak of you so
much! See, he is looking over at us wistfully, in a way that plainly
suggests our course. Here comes Charlie Hunt, who will keep you amused
while I fetch Gerald; then we will go in together and have an ice."

Charlie Hunt, modern moth without fear or shyness, but with a great deal
of caution, was indeed returning for the third or fourth time to Mrs.
Hawthorne's side, drawn by the sparkle of eyes and tresses and smiles
and diamonds. Francesca had already described him that evening to
another young lady as dancing attendance on the new American. He dropped
into the seat vacated by Leslie, addressed Mrs. Hawthorne as if they had
been friends for at least weeks, and made conversation joyfully easy by
getting at once on to a playful footing.

Leslie meanwhile steered her course toward Gerald. The music had started
up again, men were presenting themselves to maidens with their request
for the favor.... Leslie threaded her way between the first on the
floor. Her eyes were naturally turned toward the object of her search;
some intention toward him was probably apparent in her look. As if he
had not seen it, or as if, having seen it, he scented in her approach
some conspiracy against his peace, Gerald in a moment during which her
eye was not on him quietly vanished.

Missing him, Leslie looked about in some surprise, then entered the door
by which inevitably he must have passed. She gave a glance around the
library; Gerald did not seem to be there. Mystified, she looked more
carefully at the faces to be seen through the thin tobacco smoke. No,
Gerald's was not among them. Gerald, acquainted with the house, knew the
door, of course, of the kind frequent in Italian houses, the little door
indistinguishable from the wall, by which one could leave the library,
and after crossing the landing of the kitchen stairs, reach the
dining-room. From the dining-room, then, one could come into the
entrance hall, whence go upstairs, or out into the garden, or, as one
pleased, back into the drawing-room. Leslie did not think the matter of
sufficient importance to pursue the chase farther.

The dancing was suspended while the musician had sandwiches and glasses
of a fragrant and delicious-looking but weak punch. The Fosses' waiter
knew him well and fraternally attended to his wants.

The dining-room, though large, would not permit all the couples to enter
at once, so ices and cakes were borne from the table by cavaliers to
expectant ladies in the antechamber, on the stairs, and in the farther
rooms.

The musician after eating to his satisfaction took the time for a
cigarette, which he enjoyed, not in the library, but in cool and
peaceful isolation on the top step of the kitchen stairs. Refreshed, he
briskly went back to his piano, persuaded that the young people were
sighing to see him there. With new vigor he struck up a march. The crowd
in the dining-room thinned.

Mrs. Hawthorne and Miss Madison, with Charlie Hunt and Doctor Chandler,
one of the Americans from the pension, lingered on in the corner where,
with the migration of so many to the ball-room, all four had been able
to find chairs. Mrs. Hawthorne, of the fair moon-face, was as a matter
of course eating sweet stuff; Miss Madison, contrariwise, sipped a small
cup of black coffee. Miss Madison, no need to say, had a neat jaw-bone
to show--collarbones, too. She was not pretty, her features were hardly
worth describing, but yet it was an attractive face, as merry as it was
fundamentally shrewd, as sensible as it was sprightly. The frank, almost
business-like manner of her setting out to have a good time at the party
ensured her having at least a lively one, and her partners not finding
it slow. She at once and impartially interested herself in the men
brought up to her, and sought to interest them. Her flirtatiousness was,
however, sedate--in its way, moral--not intended to have any result
beyond the enlivenment of the hour.

Miss Madison had been finding exhilaration and delight this evening in
dancing, and when presently the alluring strains of a waltz came
floating to their ears, she looked at Chandler, and he in the same
manner looked at her; whereupon she rose, as if words had been
exchanged, took his arm, and they deserted for the ball-room. Charlie
Hunt was left ensconced in an intimate nook alone with Mrs. Hawthorne.

But he had hardly a moment in which to enjoy the feeling of advantage
this gave him before his cousin Francesca came looking for him. They
were going, she said. Father was sleepy, and mother said they must go.
If he wanted a lift home, he must hurry up. Charlie had come with them,
on the box near the driver, there being five already inside the landau.
Gallantry should perhaps have made him answer that rather than be
dragged away at this moment he would walk. But gallantry was dumb.
Charlie was not fond of walking. It was a great convenience, an economy
as well, being permitted to make use of his aunt's carriage.

Having delivered her message, Francesca had gone to put on her things,
and Charlie, after expressions of regret over the inevitable, asked Mrs.
Hawthorne whither she would wish to be taken before he left.

Let him not bother, she answered; she could find her friends without
help.

They separated. Walking slowly, she looked for faces of acquaintances.
She glanced in at the ball-room door. They were dancing still, but not
nearly so many. She turned into the reception-room, whence she could
reënter the ball-room at the other end without danger of collision, and
reach that comfortable blue satin sofa, now standing empty. There she
would sit looking on till Estelle joined her, when they would set about
making their adieux. The carriage must have been waiting for them ever
so long.

She had sat a minute, unconsciously smiling to herself, because the
sensations and impressions of the evening were all so pleasant, when
something occurred to her as desirable to be done. She rose to carry out
her idea.

The dancing had stopped; the floor was clear except in the neighborhood
of the walls, where couples stood or sat recovering breath and coolness.
She started to cross the long room. She did not skirt it because the
direct line to her destination was by the middle; she did not go fast
because there was no occasion, and it was not her way. She advanced like
a goodly galleon pushing along the sea with finely curved bows, all
sails set to catch the breeze. Her mind was entirely on her idea, and
she did not at first feel herself to be conspicuous. But all the eyes in
the room, before she had gone half her way, were fastened upon her, a
natural and legitimate mark. One might now without impertinence have the
satisfaction of a good look at the newly come American who had taken the
big house on the Lungarno; the women might study the fashion of her hair
and dress.

She was smiling faintly, but fixedly; she smiled, indeed, all the time,
as if smiles had been an indispensable article of wear at a party. The
least of her smiles brought dimples into view, and her dimples seemed
multitudinous, though there were really only three in her face and one
of those irregular things called apple-seeds. Her agreeably blunted
features and peachy roundness of cheek belonged to a good-humored,
unimposing type, which took on a certain nobility in her case from being
carried high on a strong, round neck over a splendid broad breast,
partly bare this evening, and seen to be white as milk, as swans'-down,
as pearl.

If one had tried to define the look which left one so little doubt as to
her nationality, one would perhaps have said it was a combination of
fearlessness and accessibility. She feared not you, nor should you fear
her; she counted on your friendliness, you might count on hers.

She was a person simple in the main. The colors she had selected to wear
accorded with the rest, showing little intricacy of taste. The two silks
composing her dress were respectively the blue of a summer morning and
the pink of a rose. From cushioned and dimpled shoulders the bodice
tapered to as fine a waist as a Paris dressmaker had found possible to
bring about in a woman who, despite a veritable yearning to look
slender, cared also for freedom to breathe, and, as she said with a
sigh, guessed she must make up her mind to be happy without looking like
a toothpick. At the back of the waist, the dress leapt suddenly out and
away from the dorsal column--every lady's dress did that for a season or
two at the time we are telling of, and at every step she took the back
of her skirt gave a bob, for the bustle was supplemented by three or
four concealed semi-circles of thin steel, reeds we called them, which
hit against you as you went and sprang lightly away from your heels.

The arrangement of Mrs. Hawthorne's hair equalled in artificiality the
mode of her dress: the front locks were clipped and twisted into little
curls, the back locks drawn to the top of the head, where they were
disposed in silken loops and rolls, at the top of which, like a flag
planted on a hill, stood an aigrette, a sparkle and two whiffs.

It may not sound pretty, it was not, but the eye of that day had become
used to it, as eyes have since become used to fashions no prettier, and
as Mrs. Hawthorne's hair was of a soft sunny tint it was that evening
admired by more than one, as was her intrinsically ugly beautiful gown,
which gave a little jerky rebound every time she placed one of those
neat solid satin-shod feet before the other in her progress across the
now attentive room.

She had taken off her long white gloves to eat a cake--or cakes; she was
carrying them loosely swinging from one dimpled hand.

In the middle of the room self-consciousness overtook her. With the
awakening sense of eyes upon her, she looked first to one side, then to
the other. Her smile broadened while growing by just a tinge sheepish;
she seemed to waver and consider turning from her course and finishing
her journey close along the wall, like a mouse....

She finally did not, nor yet hurried. She made her smile explain to
whoever was looking on that a person was excusable for making this sort
of mistake, that it hurt nobody, that one need not and did not care;
that she was sure they did not like her any less for it; they would not
if they knew how void of offense toward them all was her heart; that
having exposed herself to being looked at, she hoped they liked her
looks. Her dress was a very good dress, her laces were very good lace,
and the maid who had done her hair was considered a first-rate hand at
doing hair.

So she was carrying it off, and her smile was only a little
self-conscious, only a shade embarrassed, when from among the men
standing near the library door, for which she was directly making, there
stepped out one to meet her, not unlike a slender needle darting toward
a large, rounded magnet as it comes into due range.

More sensitive than she, feeling the situation much more uncomfortably
for his country-woman than she felt it for herself, a foreign-looking
fellow, who had not quite forgotten that he was an American, after a
moment's hard struggle against his impulse, hastened forward to shorten
for her that uncompanioned course across the floor under ten thousand
search-lights.

"I'm looking for somebody," said Mrs. Hawthorne, with the smile of a
child.

The voice which had made one man think of the crimson heart on a
valentine reminded this other of rough velvet.

He showed his eccentric three front teeth in a responding smile that had
a touch of the faun, and asked whimsically:

"Will I do?"

"Help me to find Mr. Foss, and you'll do perfectly," she said merrily.
"I haven't seen him more than just to shake hands this whole evening,
and I do want to have a little talk before I go."

"If I am not mistaken, we shall find him in the library." He offered his
arm.

"I may have appeared to be doing something else, Mrs. Hawthorne, but I
have really been looking for you the last hour," said the consul when he
had been found. "I wanted to have a little talk. How are you enjoying
Florence?"

"Oh, we're having an elegant time, thanks to that dear wife of yours and
that dear girl, Leslie. I don't know what we should have done without
them and you."

"But the city itself, Florence, doesn't it enchant you?"

"We--ell, yes. N-n-n-no. Yes and no. That's it. You want me to tell the
truth, don't you? Some of it does, and some of it doesn't. Some of it, I
guess, will take me a long time to get used to. It's terribly different
from what we expected--I, in particular. You see, I came here because an
old friend used to talk so much about it. Florence the Fair! The City of
Lilies! He said Italy was the most beautiful country in the world, and
Florence the most beautiful city in Italy. So my expectations were way
up.--Oh, I don't know; it's hard to tell. I don't exactly remember now
what I did expect. I guess my picture of it was something like the New
Jerusalem on an Easter day. But I shall get used to this, like to the
taste of olives. It must be all right, for the friend I was speaking of
had the finest mind I've ever known. I'm green as turnip-tops, of
course, but I shall get educated up to it, I suppose. Give me time."

"Mrs. Hawthorne, hear me prophesy," said Mr. Foss. "In six months you
will love it all. It's the fate of us who come here from new countries.
It will steal in upon you, grow upon you, beset and besot you, till you
like no other place in the world so well."

"Will it? Well, if you say so. The Judge--the friend I was speaking
of,--said so much of the same kind that the minute I thought of coming
to Europe, right after I'd said, 'I'll go to Paris,' I said to myself,
'I'll go to Florence.'"

"Your friend was a judge of places."

"It wasn't he alone influenced me. He was sick a long time, and I used
to read aloud to him, and one spell, when his mind for some reason or
other was running on Italy, every book he chose had the scene laid here.
There were whole pages of description, and anything so lovely, so
luscious, as the places and people described I never did dream. I didn't
understand more than a quarter, but I swallowed it all and gloated. The
woman who wrote those books certainly did have an imagination. O
Antonia, let me meet you and have a good look at you so I can tell
a--hm, the owner of an imagination when I see one again!"

"Antonia, did you say?" The consul smiled.

"That was the writer's name. You know the books I mean?"

"I have read a work or two of Antonia's, yes. She lives near Florence,
you know, on another of these little hills."

"Oh, does she!"

"Her name is Mrs. Grangeon. She is an Englishwoman, with an
extraordinary sense of, and feeling for, Italy. She is, at her best, a
poet; at her worst, slightly deficient, perhaps, in humor. But her
passion for Italy is genuine, and I have no doubt she sees it as glowing
as the pictures she makes of it."

"Her books are 'grand, John'! If I never had come here, I never should
have appreciated them or her--making up that wonderful world, all
pomegranates and jasmin-stars, and curls like clustering blue-black
grapes, and staturesque limbs, out of the back of her head. Yes, and the
golden dust of centuries, and time's mellow caressing touch--oh, I wish
I could remember it all!"

"Mrs. Hawthorne, we must take you in hand. Be it ours to initiate you.
Come, what have you been to see?"

"Treasures of art? We haven't had time yet. We've been getting a house
fit to live in. When you asked me how I liked Florence, I ought to have
begun by that end. I love my house, Mr. Foss. I love my garden. I love
the Lungarno. And the Casheeny. And Boboly. And the drive up here. And
the stores! I positively dote on those little bits of stores on the
jewelers' bridge."

"Well, well, that's quite enough to begin with."

"Now that we're going to have some time to spare, we mean to go
sight-seeing like other folks."

"How I wish, dear Mrs. Hawthorne, that I were not such a busy man!
But"--Mr. Foss had a look of bright inspiration--"should I on that
account be dejected? Here is Mr. Fane--"

He turned to Gerald, who, after bringing up Mrs. Hawthorne, had stood
near, a silent third, waiting to act further as her escort by and by.
Meanwhile he had been listening with a varied assortment of feelings and
a boundless fatigue of spirit.

"Mr. Fane," said the consul, "who is not nearly so busy a man as I, and
is the most sympathetic, well-informed cicerone you could find. When we
wish to be sure our visiting friends shall see Florence under the best
possible circumstances, we turn them over to Mr. Fane."

Gerald's face struggled into a sourish smile, and he bowed ironical
thanks for the compliment. Lifting his head, he shot a glance of
reproachful interrogation at the consul. Was his friend doing this
humorously, to tease him, or was the man simply not thinking?

The consul looked innocent of any sly intention; he was all of a jocund
smile; the consul, who should have known better, wore the air of doing
him a pleasure and her a pleasure and a pleasure to himself; the air of
thinking that any normally constituted young man would be grateful for
such a chance.

"I shall be most happy," said Gerald, with irreproachable and misleading
politeness.

Mrs. Hawthorne turned to him readily.

"Any time you say. Let me tell you where we live."




CHAPTER IV


The room in which Mrs. Hawthorne went to bed an hour or two after taking
leave of the dwindling company at Villa Foss was large and luxurious.
Its windows were enormous, arched at the top and reaching the floor. A
wrought-iron railing outside made them safe. In the angle of the wall
between two of them--it was a corner room--stood a mirror nearly the
size of the windows, in a broad frame of carved and gilt wood, resting
on a marble shelf that supported besides two alabaster vases holding
bunches of roses.

In the corner opposite to the mirror and placed "catty-corner," as the
occupier worded it, stood the stateliest of beds, upholstered and draped
in heavy watered silk of a dull, even dingy, yellow. Its hangings were
gathered at the top into the hollow of a great gold coronet, whence they
spread and fell in folds that were looped back with silk cords. The
walls were covered by that same texture of dull gold, held in place by
tarnished gilt moldings.

Mrs. Hawthorne had wanted all this dusty and faded splendor removed,--it
seemed to her the possible lurking-place of mice or worse,--but the
agent would not hear of it. The noble landlord was not really eager to
let.

So Mrs. Hawthorne, to brighten the room in spite of it, for she wished
to keep it for her own, having taken a fancy to the fresco
overhead,--that fascinating chariot driven among clouds by a radiant
youth surrounded by smiling, flower-scattering maidens,--Mrs. Hawthorne
to "gay up" the room, as she said, had hung windows and doors with
draperies of her favorite cornflower blue, and covered the chairs with
the same. On the floor she had stretched a pearl-gray carpet all aglow
with wreaths of roses tied with ribbons of blue; and over the carpet--at
the bedside, before the dressing-table, in front of the fireplace--laid
down white bear-skins.

To cover further the yellow silk, she had hung in one panel of it a
painting of the "Madonna della Seggiola," in another, Carlo Dolci's
"Angel of the Annunciation," and in another, Carlo Dolci's Magdalen
clasping the box of ointment--all works of art bought in Via dei Fossi,
framed in great gilt-wood frames, like the mirror.

The lace curtains under the cornflower blue brocade were like Brussels
wedding veils seen through a magnifying glass.

Yes, the room had been made to look bright. It had lamps of
cream-colored biscuit, painted with roses and crowned with pink shades;
it had polished brass fire-irons. But the point of supreme brightness
was the dressing-table, where glittered in orderly display Mrs.
Hawthorne's American toilet silver, mirror, trays, brushes, boxes,
bottles--solid, shining, richly embossed.

There was just one thing in all the room that looked poor, workaday. It
was on the small table at the head of the bed, beside the candle-stick
and match-safe, a black book, the commonest kind of Bible, such a Bible
as is dispensed by those who have to furnish the sacred writings in
large numbers--Sunday schools, for instance.

It was in fact a Sunday-school prize that now lay on the night-stand, in
what the sober volume presented to a pious little girl must have thought
strange company. Cover to cover with it, cheek by jowl, lay a book on
etiquette.

It was for the Bible, however, that Mrs. Hawthorne reached after she had
got into bed. She found her place. She read in it every night before
sleeping, to keep a promise made long ago, and avoid the reproaches of a
person gone from this earth, but who still, she never questioned, could
be pleased or displeased with her actions.

She did not always try to understand or follow; when she was sleepy she
read merely with her eyes. To-night her mind was too full of personal
things to permit of strict attention to the text. As she enumerated the
wonders of the House that Solomon built for the Lord, there formed no
picture of it in her mind.

"I wonder what knops are," she said to herself drowsily. "I must
remember to ask Hattie."

There was a stir. Both doors of her room were open; the little
unobtrusive one into the dressing-room for air,--the window there stood
wide open through the night,--the large one into the sitting-room so as
to leave a free road to Miss Madison's room beyond. Through this now
slipped a slender form in a soft, fur-bordered wrapper, and with front
locks done up in curling-kids.

"You in bed?"

"Yes; I'm just reading my chapter."

"Livvy gone?"

Livvy, or Miss Deliverance Jones, was the maid they had brought from
America, a New York negress of the most faintly colored complexion, with
hair mysteriously blond. Her head was egg-shaped, her nose slightly
flat, her lip voluptuous, her brown-black eye sad as a homesick
monkey's; but she could wind a chocolate veil about her face and stylish
hat, and walk forth happy in the fancy that she passed for white. She
was an accomplished dressmaker and hair-dresser; she moreover had spent
some time in the service of a beauty-doctor. The ladies had secured her
just before sailing, and liked her, but did not talk freely when she was
present.

"Yes, she's gone."

"I'm not a bit sleepy, are you? I'm too excited. Let's talk."

She climbed on to her friend's bed, gathered her knees to her chin, and
hugged them, with the effect of hugging to herself a great happiness.

Mrs. Hawthorne closed her Bible and put it aside. The single candle by
which she had been reading showed the shining mirthfulness of the eyes
with which the two regarded each other.

"Wasn't it fun?"

"Oh, wasn't it!"

They spoke softly, whether because the suggestion of the late hour was
upon them, or they thought, without thinking, that Livvy might still be
near. They whispered like school-girls who have come together in
forbidden fun.

"I never did have such a good time."

"Nor I, neither. Oh, Hat, _isn't it_ fun!"

"_Isn't it_, just!"

"See here, Hat, you've got to teach me to dance. I was almost crazy this
evening, I wanted so to be dancing with the rest. Where d'you learn?"

"I went to dancing-school, my dear."

"No! Did you?"

"Yes, I did; all one winter. What are you thinking about? I've been to
parties in my life. Not many, but I've been. There was the Home Club
party----"

"Yes, of course. I remember how I teased once to go to the Home Club
party; but ma wouldn't let me. I hadn't anything to put on, anyhow. But
I'd have gone in my shirt if they'd let me. The nearest to a real party
I'd been to before to-night was a clam-bake. I don't count church
sociables. Out West there used to be celebrations in a sort of bar-room
place, but even I couldn't stand those. To think I've always yearned so
to have a good time, and now I'm having it! Oh, Hat, wasn't it lovely!
That's a mighty nice house of the Fosses. How good it looked, all fixed
up! The flowers and candles, one room opening into the other, everything
just right. Hat, Mrs. Foss is the finest woman I ever knew, and in my
opinion makes the most elegant appearance. She's the one I'd choose to
be like if I could. Just watch me copy-cat her. You'll see. 'My dear
Mrs. Hawthorne, pray don't speak of the trouble! It's been nothing but a
pleasure. Be sure you call upon us whenever we can be of the smallest
service.'"

"You've caught her, Nell, you silly thing! Down to the ground."

"I'm going to pattern after her till it comes natural. How sweet they
all are! How kind they've been!" Mrs. Hawthorne grew dreamy.

"Your dress, Nell, was a perfect success," the other ran on--"perfect.
How did you think mine looked? I'll tell you a compliment I got for you,
if you'll tell me one you got for me. If not, I'll save it up in my
secret breast till you're ready to make a trade."

"To think," said Mrs. Hawthorne, still engrossed by her dream of absent
and bygone things, "that we're the same little girls--and one of them
barefoot!--who used to play house together on a sand-heap of old Cape
Cod and pin on any old rag that would tail along the ground and play
ladies! 'My dear Mrs. Madison, how do you do?'"

"'My dear Mrs. Hawthorne, my toes are just as sore as they can be!'"

"'That comes, my dear Mrs. Madison, of you dancing like a crazy woman
from ten o'clock till one, in tight shoes!'--Mrs. Hawthorne! Mrs.
Madison! Aurora! Estelle! To think, after all these years, we should be
playing our old play that we played at Wellfleet and East Boston, only
playing it with real things, in Paris and Florence!"

"Nell, I'm so afraid of forgetting and calling you Nell that every time
I catch myself near doing it I can feel the cold sweat break out on my
brow."

"What would it matter? We aren't impostors, Hat. We're just having fun,
and don't want our real names to queer it. If they should slip out when
we aren't thinking, they'd simply sound like nicknames we've got for
each other. But they won't slip out. I'm too fond of calling you
Estelle. Don't you _love_ to call me Aurora? Hat, how did I behave,
far as you could see?"

"Nell, if I hadn't known you, and had just been seeing you for the first
time, I should have said to myself: 'What a fine, good-looking,
beautifully dressed, refined, and ladylike woman that is! Wish t' I
might make her acquaintance.' And what would you have said, if you'd
seen me, never having met me before?"

"I should have said: 'What a bright, smart, intelligent, and rarely
beautiful girl! So well dressed, too, and slender as a worm! A queen of
society. I do like her looks! She's the spittin' image of my little
friend Hattie Carver, the schoolmarm in East Boston, that I used to
know!' Oh, Hat, the _queerest_ thing! What do you suppose I saw
this evening at that lovely house full of lovely people? I was in the
library learning to dance. And I looked up and there was what I took to
be a young man smoking a cigarette. Next thing, I saw that his dress was
low-necked almost down to the waist. Hat, it was a _woman_ smoking!
a woman with her hair cut short. I never saw anything like it, except an
old Irishwoman once, with her pipe."

"Seems to me I've heard of ladies in Europe doing it, and it being
considered all right. I _have_ heard that some do it in New York,
but I guess they're careful not to be seen."

"Well, it does seem a queer thing to do!--Go ahead, Hat; what was the
compliment?"

"Sure, now, you've got one for me?"

"Sure."

"It was What's-his-name, the English fellow we see every time we go in
to Cook's--Mr. Dysart. Leslie says he comes of a very good family. He
said to me, 'How very charming Mrs. Hawthorne is looking this evening!'"

"Hattie, that man's a humbug, that man's leading a double life. He said
to me, 'How very charming Miss Madison is looking this evening!' He
did."

"Go 'way! You're making it up to save trouble."

"No, I ain't! Stop, Hattie! I know! I _am not_. Confusion upon it!
You've made me so nervous when I talk that I can't say ain't without
jumping as if I'd sat on a pin!"

"Nell Goodwin, look me square in the eye. How many times did you say
ain't at the party this evening?"

"Not once; I swear it. I was looking out every minute. 'I am not,' I
said; 'We are not,' I said; 'He doesn't,' I said; 'He isn't,' I said.
There! Between you'n' I, Hat, it's a dreadful nuisance, keeping my mind
on the way I talk. I hope I shall come in time to talking lofty without
thinking about it. Why do I have to, Hat, after all? I've lived among
educated people. Wasn't the Judge highly educated? And nobody ever found
fault with my way of talking. My folks all had been to school and read
books. And didn't I go to school till I was fourteen? And didn't I
graduate from the grammar school with the rest? What's the matter with
my natural way of talking?"

"It's all right at home, Nell, but it's different over here. They're a
different kind of people we're thrown with."

"This pernickety way of talking never sounds cozy or friendly one bit.
We're as good as anybody, of course, but when I say 'I am not, he does
not,' I always feel as if I were setting up to be better than the
rest!--Oh, it isn't, is it? Oh, do you say so? 'Between you and I' isn't
correct? But I thought you told me.... To Jericho, Hattie! How's a
feller ever going to get to know?"

"Listen, Nell, while I go over it again. When you say----"

"Ah, no! Not at this time of night, Estelle! Let me live in ignorance
till morning! You know all those sorts of things, my dear Estelle,
because you're paid by the government to know them. I don't; but I know
lots and lots of things that are a sight funnier."

She grabbed one of the pillows and flung it at her friend, who flung it
back at her; and the simple creatures laughed.

Aurora re-tied in a bow the blue ribbon that closed the collar of her
nightgown, and settled back again, with her arms out on the white satin
quilt, flowered with roses and lined with blue. The two braids of her
fair hair lay, one on each side, down her big, frank, undisguised bosom.

"You heaping dish of vanilla ice-cream!" said Hattie.

"You stick of rhubarb!" said Nell. "Stop, Hat! Behave! Do you suppose
all the people we've invited to come and see us will come?"

"Doctor Chandler will come. And the Hunt girls will come. And Madame
Bentivoglio I guess will come."

"Yes, and the Satterlees I'm sure will come. And Mrs. Seymour and her
daughter that I said I'd help with the church fair. And the minister;
what was it? Spottiswood."

"And won't the Mr. Hunt come that you seemed to be having such a good
time with?"

"Yes, he'll come. He'll come to-morrow, I shouldn't wonder. Then that
thinnish fellow with the hair like a hearth-brush--did you meet him? Mr.
Fane, a great friend of the Fosses. He's coming to take us
sight-seeing." She yawned a wide, audible yawn. "I only hope there'll be
some fun in it. Confound you, Hat, go to bed!"




CHAPTER V


After the Fosses had helped the lessees of the Haughty Hermitage to make
it habitable; found for them a coachman who had a little French and,
when told what they desired to buy, would take them to the proper shops;
provided them with a butler to the same extent a linguist, through whom
Estelle, who in Paris had ambitiously studied a manual of conversation,
could give her orders, they not unnaturally became less generous of
their company.

But they were not permitted to make the intervals long between visits.
The coachman wise in French was perpetually driving his spanking pair to
their gates, delivering a message, and waiting to take them down for
lunch or dinner with their joyfully welcoming and grateful friends. It
was not at all unpleasant. It was not prized preciously,--there was too
much of it and too urgently lavished,--but the lavishers were loved for
it by two women neither dry-hearted nor world-hardened. Leslie fell into
the way, when she was in town and had time, of running in to Aurora's,
where it would be cheerful and she looked for a laugh.

Leslie, having reached, as she considered, years of discretion, thought
fit to disregard the Florentine rule that young unmarried women must not
walk in the streets unattended. She had balanced the two inconveniences:
that of staying at home unless some one could go out with her, and that
of being spoken to in the street, and decided that it was less
unpleasant to hear a strange young man murmur as she passed, "Angel of
paradise!" or "Beautiful eyes!"--no grosser insult had ever been offered
her,--than to be bothered by a servant at her heels. The fact that she
looked American and was understood to be following the custom of her own
country secured her against any real misinterpretation.

It was chilly, Novemberish, and within the doors of Florentine domiciles
rather colder, for some reason, than in the open air. The Fosses kept
their house at a more human temperature than most people, but yet after
years of Italy did not heat very thoroughly: one drops into the way of
doing as others do, and grows accustomed to putting up with cold in
winter. Leslie often expressed the opinion that in America people really
exaggerate in the matter of heating their houses. Nevertheless, just for
the joy of the eyes and, through the eyes, of the depressed spirit, she
was glad to-day of the big fire dancing and crackling in Aurora's
chimney-place.

The upstairs sitting-room, where the ladies generally sat, might look
rather like a day nursery; yet after one had accepted it, with its
chintz of big red flowers and green foliage, its rich strawberry rug and
new gold picture-frames, it did seem to brighten one's mood. How think
grayly amid that dazzle and glow any more than feel cold before that
fire?

Leslie held her hands to the blaze, and with an amiable display of
interest inquired of their affairs, the progress made in "getting
settled." There was still a good deal to do of a minor sort.

Accounts were given her in a merry duet; purchases were shown; she was
told all that had happened since they last saw her, who had called, whom
they had been to see.

Casting about in her mind for further things to communicate, Aurora was
reminded of a small grievance.

"I thought your friend Mr. Fane was going to come and take us
sight-seeing," she said.

"Was it so arranged?"

"So I supposed."

"And he hasn't been?"

"Hide nor hair of him have we seen."

"I meant, hasn't he perhaps called while you were out?"

"He hasn't."

"Strange. It's not like him to be rude. But, then, he's not like himself
these days. You must excuse him."

"What's the matter with him? Isn't he well?"

"He's not ill in the usual sense. If he were, we should make him have a
doctor and hope to see him cured. It's worse than an illness. He is
blue--chronically blue."

"Why?"

"Oh, he has reasons. But the same reasons, of course, would not have
made a person of a different temperament change as he has changed."

"I don't suppose you want to tell us what the reasons are?" Very
tentatively this was said.

"Why ... ordinarily one would not feel free to do so, but you are sure
to hear about it before you have been here long. In Florence, you know,
everybody knows everything about everybody else. Not always the truth,
but in any case an interesting version. Oh, it behooves one to be
careful in Florence if one doesn't wish one's affairs known and talked
about. But in the case of Gerald there was nothing secret. Everybody
knows him, everybody knew when he was engaged to Violet Van Zandt,
everybody knows that she married some one else."

"Oh, the poor boy!"

"It's very simple, you see, commonplace as possible. But it's like the
old story of the poem: an old story, yet forever new. And the one to
whom it happens has his heart broken, one way or the other."

"And she married some one else?"

Both Aurora and Estelle were craning toward the speaker in a curiosity
full of sympathy.

Leslie was used to seeing them hang on her lips. "I do love to hear you
talk!" Aurora candidly said. "It doesn't make any difference whether I
know what you're talking about, it fascinates me, the way you say
things!" And the compliment disposed Leslie to talk to them no otherwise
than she talked with Lady Linbrook or Countess Costetti, leaving them to
grasp or not her allusions and fine shades. She was by a number of years
the youngest of the three drawn up to the fire; yet some advantage of
fluency, collectedness, habit of good society--a neat effect altogether
of authority, made her seem in a way the oldest.

"Violet," she began, like a grown person willing to indulge children
with a story, "is Madame Balm de Brézé's sister. You saw Madame de Brézé
that Friday evening at our house. Violet is very like her, only much
younger and a blonde. Amabel is--let us call things by their names in
the seclusion of this snug fireside--Amabel is scrawny; Violet was
ethereal. Amabel is sharp-featured; Violet's face was delicate and
clear-cut. I say _was_, because she has grown much stouter. We have
known them since they first came to Florence, and have been friends
without being passionately attached. They are Americans, but had lived
in Paris since Violet was a baby. They came here, orphans, because it is
cheaper. They used to live on the top floor of a stony old palace in Via
de' Servi, where they painted fans on silk, sending them to a firm in
Paris. Amabel did them exquisitely: shepherds and shepherdesses, corners
of old gardens, Cupids--Watteau effects, veritable miniature work. The
little sister was beginning to do them well, too; she painted only
flowers. Amabel had no objection to Violet marrying Gerald. He was as
far as possible from being a good match, but in those days both Amabel
and Violet seemed to live in an atmosphere that excluded the
consideration of things from a vulgar material point of view. Violet and
Gerald were alike in that, and so very much alike in their superfine
tastes and ways of thinking. _Nous autres_ who live upon this earth
wondered how they would keep the pot boiling in case of 'that not remote
contingent, _la famille_.' Gerald has an income simply tiny. You
would hardly believe how small. We supposed that now he would paint a
little more than he ever has done with the idea of pleasing the general
public and securing patronage. They were so much in love, anyhow, and
made such an interesting pair, that one's old romantic feelings were
gratified by seeing them together. They were to wait until she was
twenty-one, when a crumb of money in trust for her would fall due. Then
Amabel surprises us all by marrying De Brézé. Violet of course lives
with them, and with them goes to Paris. And in Paris she becomes Madame
Pfaffenheim. _Tout bonnement!_"

"Oh, the wretch, the bad-hearted minx!"

"No," said Leslie, reflectively. She turned from the warmth of the fire
and let her eyes rest on the gray sky seen in wide patches through the
three great windows, arched at the top and blocked at the bottom by
wrought-iron guards, that admitted into the red and green room such very
floods of light--"no," Leslie repeated. "One is the sort of person one
is. The sin is to pretend. I don't believe Violet knew the sort of
person she was until it came to the test. She thought, very likely, that
she was all composed of poetry and fine sentiments and eternal love. She
wasn't; and there it is. When she had the chance actually to choose, she
preferred money, a fine establishment, luxury, and she took them. How
ghastly if, with that nature concealed in her behind the pearl and pale
roses, she had married poor Gerald! It's much better as it is, don't you
agree with me? I call him fortunate beyond words."

"Well, of course; that's one way of looking at it."

"It's his way. Gerald knows just how fortunate he has been, and it's
exactly that which makes him so miserable. At first, you understand, he
could lay the entire blame on the De Brézés; he was sure they had in
some mysterious way constrained her, and though he was angrily,
tragically, suicidally wretched, it was one kind of woe--a clean,
classic woe, I will call it. He believed it shared by her in the secret
of her uncongenial conjugal life. '_Ich grolle nicht_,' he could
say, and all that. But a year or two ago she came to Florence with
Pfaffenheim on a visit to her sister. I don't know how Gerald felt,
whether he tried to avoid her or tried to see her. That he saw her,
however, is certain. She is perfectly happy, my dears, in her marriage!
And that she should love Pfaffenheim, or be proud of him, is
inconceivable. So her happiness rests entirely upon the fact of her
riches and worldly consequence."

"Say what you please, I call her a nasty, mean thing!" exclaimed Aurora.

Leslie shrugged her shoulders, as if saying: "Have it your way; but a
more philosophical view is possible."

"She was looking very beautiful," she went on. "Much more beautiful than
before, but in such a different way! From diaphanous she has become
opaque; from airy, solid. She brought a most wonderful wardrobe, and,
kept in the background with her husband, two fat babies."

"I should think she would have been ashamed to come back here."

"Oh, no; not Violet. She was enchanted to show herself in her glory to
those who remembered her in the modest plumage of her girlhood. Florence
did not really like it, because she affected toward Florence the
attitude of one who comes to it from places immeasurably grander. You
would have thought Florence an amusing little hole where she long ago,
by some accident, had spent a month or two. She found us quaint,
provincial, old-fashioned. She was witty about us. She criticized us
with a freedom and publicity that made her funnier to us than we were
funny to her. It was not an endearing thing to do or a very intelligent
one. It was, in fact, rather antipathetic."

"Antip--I call it the actions of a _bug!_"

"You can see how it all left Gerald. The Violet he cared for was
obviously no more. Worse than that, she had probably never been.
Comforting knowledge, isn't it, that for years you have treasured
memories that had no reality to start from; that you have suffered
agonies of love without any real object. Nauseous! Intolerable! A
tragedy that is shown to have been all along a farce! To a man of
imagination, to a person as sincere as Gerald, you can see what it would
mean. You can see what it would leave behind it."

"I should think he would just despise her, and shake it off, and forget
her as she deserves."

"Your simple device, dear Aurora, is the one he adopted. But to have an
empty hollow where your beautiful hoard of pure gold was stored is a
thing it takes time to grow used to. He is not an unhappy lover now,
certainly; but he is a man who has been robbed, and he has fallen into
the habit of low spirits. It is a thousand pities his poor mother and
sister could not have been spared to make a home for him. Being too much
alone is bad for any one. He shuts himself in with his blues, and they
are growing more and more confirmed. Love is a curious thing." Leslie
said the latter separately and after a pause, as if from a particular
case she had been led to reviewing the whole subject. "It complicates
life so," she added, and rose to go.

They teased her to remain and lunch with them. But Leslie was suddenly
more tired at the contemplation of life than she had been when she came.
The total result of her call had not been to cheer her, for by an
uncomfortable stirring within, as soon as she had finished, she was made
to repent having talked to outsiders about things so personal, so
private, regarding Gerald--Gerald, who was infinitely reserved. It
seemed a crime against friendship. That somebody else would have been
sure to tell his story did not excuse her.

Leslie's mood to talk was over for that morning and she went home, but
not before she had been forced to take a bottle of perfume which she had
carelessly picked up off Aurora's toilet-table, sniffed, and praised;
also, lifted out of their vase, a bunch of orchids for her mother; and
for Lily the box of sweets that had stood invitingly open on the
sitting-room table.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Next time Aurora saw Gerald--it was on Viale Principe Amedeo--she waved
to him.

He did not see it. He was just aware of a victoria coming down the
middle of the street he was preparing to cross and of something
fluttering, but that it concerned him he did not suspect.

Then suddenly the victoria, like a huge Jack-in-the-box, shot up a
figure, and he recognized Mrs. Hawthorne standing at full height in the
moving carriage, and waving both hands, as he must suppose, nobody else
being near,--to him.

He lifted his hat. He saw her reach for the coachman and by touch make
him aware that she wished to stop. The horses were pulled up. Mrs.
Hawthorne, from the seat into which the jerk had thrown her, made
beckoning signs to him, laughing the while, and calling, "Mr. Fane! Mr.
Fane!"

He went to stand at the carriage-step.

"I thought," said Mrs. Hawthorne, "that you were going to come and take
us sight-seeing."

"I thought I was," said Gerald, with that scant smile of his; "but I was
not so fortunate as to find you at home."

It was true that he had gone to her door one afternoon, having
previously caught a glimpse of her in the heart of the city, shopping.

"You mean to say you came?"

"You did not find my card?"

"No; but it's all right. This is Miss Madison--Mr. Fane. We are
together. What have you got to do?"

Gerald looked as if the question had not been quite clear, and he waited
for some amplification of it before he could answer.

"Have you got anything very important to do? Aren't you lonesome? Don't
you want to jump in and come home with us? Wish you would."

Gerald smiled again in his remote way, and looked as if he knew, as any
one would know, that this was not meant to be taken seriously.

"I have just seen a beautiful spectacle," he said, after a vague
head-shake that thanked her shadowily for an unreal invitation. "A game
of _pallone_, which is the nearest to your football that boys have
over here. Beautiful bronzed athletes at exercise, a delightful sight,
statues in motion. I go to see them whenever I can.--The days are
becoming very short, are they not?"

"Yes. Jump in and come home with us. Tell you what we'll do. I'll go
down into the kitchen and make some soda biscuits that we'll have hot
for supper--with maple syrup. We've had a big box of sugar come."

Gerald again smiled his civil, but joyless, smile, and after another
vague head-shake that thanked, but eluded the question, he said: "They
are very indigestible; hot bread is not good for the health. At least,
that is what they tell us over here. We keep our bread two days before
eating it, or longer. But I am afraid I am detaining you."

The horses were jingling their bits, frisking their docked tails. The
driver, checking their restless attempts to start, was giving them
smothered thunder in Italian. Gerald withdrew by a step from the danger
to his shins.

[Illustration: "I thought," said Mrs. Hawthorne, "that you were going
to come and take us sight-seeing"]

"Oh, jump in!" said Mrs. Hawthorne for the third time. And because his
choice lay between saying curtly, "Impossible!" and letting the
impatient horses proceed, or else obeying, Gerald, who hated being rude
to women, found himself irresolutely climbing in, just long enough, as
he intended, to explain that he could not and must not go home with them
to the hot biscuits and syrup.

The little third seat had been let down for him; his knees were snugly
wedged in between those of the ladies. Aurora was beaming over at him;
Estelle was beaming, too. Aurora's smile was a blandishment; Estelle's
was a light. The horses were flying toward the Lungarno. And he gave up;
he helplessly gave up trying to find an excuse for asking to be set down
again and allowed to go his lonely way.

It might be entertaining, he tried to think, to see what they had done
to the Hermitage. But no! That was very sure to be revolting. If the
evening were to afford entertainment, it must be found in watching this
healthy and unhampered being who, just as certain fishes color the water
around them, seemed to affect the air in such a way that, coming near
enough, you were forced to like her, without ceasing to think her the
most impossible person that had ever found her way into cultivated
society.

The carriage-wheels crunched gravel; the horses' hoofs rang on the
pavement of a columned portico; the door was opened by a man in blue
livery.

Entering the wide hall, they faced an ample double staircase, between
the converging flights of which stood, closed, a great stately
white-and-gold door.

Gerald, as bidden, followed the ladies up the stairs to the cozier
sitting-room, where a fire, they hoped, had been kept up. In the
beginning dimness of an early twilight he first saw the big red flowers
and green, green leaves. He was left a moment alone while the ladies
took off their hats, and he sent his eyes traveling around him, prepared
really for something worse than they found, though the pictures on the
wall called from him the gesture of trying to sweep away an unpleasant
dream.

Aurora reappeared from her room in a business-like white apron.

"Now I'm going down to make the biscuit. Oh, no trouble. No trouble at
all. I want them myself. I'm homesick for some food that tastes like
home. Estelle will entertain you while I'm gone. I sha'n't be but a
minute."

Estelle sat in a low arm-chair close to the fire.

Gerald, to whom it did not seem cold enough for a fire, took a seat
nearer the windows, whence he could watch the fading sunset-end beyond
garden and street, river and hill.

He would have cared less, no doubt, to make himself not too dull company
for this stranger, had he known that there, before that fireplace, a few
days before, she had been placed in possession of the most intimate
facts of his humiliating destiny. Unsuspecting, in a mood rather more
amiable than usual, he asked, by way of entering into conversation,
whether she and her friend were not New-Englanders. It established the
sense of a bond, however light, to find that they and he were almost
townsmen. He had been born in Boston, or, at least, near it. His parents
had owned a house in Charlestown, where he had lived till he was ten
years old. They talked for a while of Boston.

He had heard a singular thing, he said, she might be able to tell him
how true: that in Boston a new medical method had arisen by which the
sick were said to be made well without the help of drugs. Mind cure, he
believed it was called. It seemed very extraordinary, and rather
interesting, if it were not all a fraud or a fable, that persons of the
most prosaic, as these had been described to him, should go about
professing to do for a fee the same thing that saints of old are
recorded to have done through their mysterious powers. The subject had
come into his mind--he went on making conversation--from recently
re-reading a book of George Sand's, _La Petite Fadette_, in which a
cure is performed which seemed to him very similar. If she had not read
the book, she must permit him to bring it for her perusal. He talked
about the book.

A maid brought in a lighted lamp, and, as is the pleasant custom of the
country, wished them a happy evening.

Very soon after it came Aurora, with a dab of flour on one cheek, which
the kitchen fire had warmed to a deeper pink.

"There," she said, "they're all ready for the oven. When we took the
house, all the stove we had was a big stone block thing with little
square holes. The cook fanned them with a turkey-wing. But now we've got
a range. Don't you want me to show you over the house? There'll be just
time before supper."

"I'm afraid it's all dark," said Estelle. "Let me ring and have them
light up. Think of a city house without gas!"

"No, they'd be too long. I can take a lamp."

She went for it to her dressing-room, and came back with one easy to
carry, long in the stem and small in the tank, from which, to make it
brighter, she had lifted off the shade. Gerald reached to take it from
her, but she refused his help.

"The weight's nothing. I want you to be free to look around. Coming,
Estelle?"

"I'll join you in a minute."

They went down the wide stairs side by side. She led through a door, at
the right, as you entered the house, of the main door.

"Here's one of the parlors. We have four on this floor, between big and
little. Four parlors and a dining-room. Doesn't that seem a good many
for two lone women?"

The unshaded lamplight showed a crowd of furniture, modern, muffled,
expensive, the lack of simplicity in design of which was further
rendered dreadful to the artist by every device to make it still less
simple, embroidered scarfs thrown over chair-backs, varicolored textiles
depending from the mantel-shelf, drooping over the mirror, down pillows
of every shape and tint piled in sofa-corners. Nothing was left
undecorated. The waste-basket even wore a fat satin bow, like a pet
poodle. Every horizontal surface was encumbered with knick-knacks.

"This is where we have people come when we don't know them very well,"
said Mrs. Hawthorne, hardly concealing her pride. "We couldn't ask the
minister to come right upstairs, as we did you. How do you--"

"Mrs. Hawthorne," came hurriedly from Gerald, "I beg you will not ask me
how I like it! It is a peculiarity like--like not liking oysters. I
can't bear to be asked how I like things."

"How funny! But, then, you're different from other people, aren't you?
That's what makes you so interesting."

She preceded him into the next room, which was not so bad as the first
for the reason that, as she explained, "they hadn't yet finished with
it." He seized the occasion almost eagerly to praise the chairs.

"We found them here when we came," she informed him. "There was a good
lot of furniture of this big, bare sort; clumsy, I call it. We stored
some of it in the top rooms, but Leslie Foss begged me so to let these
stay that we just had the seats covered over with this new stuff and
left them."

When she opened the next door and stepped into the space beyond it
seemed as if her lamp had dwindled to a taper, the room was so vast. It
had nine great windows, five in an unbroken row on the front of the
house the entire width of which it occupied. Aurora's light was faintly
reflected in a polished floor; it twinkled in the myriad motionless
drops of two great crystal chandeliers.

"Ah," exclaimed Gerald in a long sigh. "This is superb!"

"Yes," she said, "but you might as well try to furnish all outdoors. You
see that we haven't done anything beyond putting up curtains. We never
use it. All those chairs along the walls are going to be regilded when
we can get them to come and fetch them. Things move awfully slowly over
here, don't they, even if you're willing to pay."

"What a ball-room!"

"Yes. Wish we could give a ball; but we only know about a dozen people.
We've got to wait till we know enough at least for two sets of a
quadrille."

She was moving across the wide floor, holding her torch-like lamp high
the better to illumine the great pale, silent emptiness. No longer
hearing his footsteps echoing behind hers, she looked over her shoulder;
whereupon he hurriedly joined her, without explaining why he had lagged.

"This," she said, as turning to the left they passed from the ball-room
into a small oval room the domed ceiling of which was all tenderly
bepainted with Cupids and garlands--"this is almost my favorite."

She set down her lamp on a table of rose-tinged marble, and dropped for
a minute on to a little rococo settee.

"The things in here we found just as you see them."

"So I imagined."

"All but the ornaments on the mantel."

"Very astute in me; I divined that, too."

"We liked it, so we left it. Pretty, ain't it? Oh, beg pardon!" She
blushed and looked at him sidelong, laughing. "That was a bad break!
That came mighty near to being the forbidden question how you like it.
All the same, it is pretty, _is it not_?"

"Extremely. Extremely pretty."

"There are going to be some tapestries presently. Oh, don't be afraid!
Not those old worsted things full of maggots, but beautiful new ones,
painted by hand, all in these same delicate colors. A story in four
scenes, one for each panel. The 'Fountain of Love' is the subject. It
sounds to me like something Biblical, Sunday-schoolish, but Mr. Hunt
says, no, _it is not_."

"Mr. Hunt--"

"The nephew, Charlie. You know him, don't you? He's getting them done
for me. He's a great friend of mine. He's helped me a lot to buy
things."

"Did he help you to buy the pictures?"

"Yes. He knows the dealers, and gets them to make fair prices. I think
it perfectly wonderful how cheap everything is over here. He helped me
to buy these, too." She lifted the chain of pink corals, graduated from
the size of a pea to that of a hazelnut, which with their delicate
living color brightened her winter dress. "I can't say, though," she
dropped, "that I found these particularly cheap. Hush!" she broke off.
"It's Hat! Quick!" she whispered, "let's get behind the door and say
'Boo!' as she comes in."

Amazingly, incredibly to him, this grown woman appeared about to
ensconce herself.

"But won't it make her jump?" he asked, supposing it to be Miss Madison
for whom the little surprise was intended.

"Of course it'll make her jump. No matter how often I do it, she jumps.
That's the fun."

"Mrs. Hawthorne, please!" he begged nervously. "As a very special favor
to me, don't! It would make me jump, too--horribly."

She stood listening while the footsteps turned away and faded
fruitlessly. With a look of disappointment, as at opportunity missed,
she took up her lamp and moved on.

"And here," she said, leaving the oval room by the door opposite to the
one they had come through, "is the dining-room. Which takes us back to
the hall and completes the circle."

This room, of a fine new Pompeian red, was lighted. The table was set; a
butler busied himself at the sideboard. Gerald's eye was caught by the
brightness of a china basket piled high with sumptuous fruit, and
similarly caught the next moment by the pattern of the curtains, in
which the same rampant red lion was innumerably repeated on a ground of
wide-meshed lace.

"Wouldn't it be a lovely house to give a party in?" she asked him.
"Isn't it exactly right to give a party in? There are two big spare
chambers upstairs at the back that would do, one for gentlemen, one for
ladies, to lay off their things in. No use; we shall have to give a
party."

Having returned upstairs, he was without any false delicacy shown her
bedroom and her friend's bedroom and their dressing-rooms, as well as
given a peep into the two spare rooms, as yet incompletely furnished,
that he might get an idea how beautiful these were going to be when
finally industry and good taste had been brought to bear on them.

                   *       *       *       *       *

At dinner, which Mrs. Hawthorne seemed to have a fixed preference for
calling supper, it was Gerald who did most of the talking. The ladies
abandoned the lead to him, and listened with flattering attention while
he called into use his not too sadly rusted social gifts. He related
what he knew about the Indian Prince whose monument at the far end of
the Cascine had roused their interest. He explained the Misericordia. He
asked if they had noticed the wonderful figures of babies over the
colonnade of the Foundling Hospital, and told them how the "infantile
asylum," as he rendered it, was managed. He tried to amuse them by the
episodes from which certain streets in Florence have derived their
names, Street of the Dead Woman, Street of the Dissatisfied, Burg of the
Blithe.

Whenever he stopped there was silence, which he hastened again to break.

"You talk like Leslie," suddenly remarked Mrs. Hawthorne.

But now came the hot biscuits and the syrup, borne in by the mystified
butler at the same time as the more conventional dessert prepared by the
cook.

Aurora smiled at the biscuits' beautiful brown and, having broken one to
test its lightness, nodded in self-approval.

"They're all right. Now you want to put on lots of butter," she said.
"Here, that's not near enough," she reproved him. She reached over, took
his biscuit, buttered it as she thought it should be buttered, and
returned it to his plate; then, while eating, watched him eat with eyes
that expressed her simple love of feeding up any one, man or animal, so
lean as he.

There had been shining in Aurora's eyes all this evening, when they
rested on him, a look of great kindness, the consequence of knowing how
badly life had treated him, and desiring that compensation should be
made. He could not fail to feel that warm ray playing over his bleak
surface. He could not but think what nice eyes Mrs. Hawthorne had.

When he asked her if she knew how to make many other such delicious
things it became her turn to talk. Estelle here joined in, and they
exalted the fare of home, affecting the fiction of having found nothing
but frogs' legs, cocks' combs, and snails to feed upon since they struck
Italy. Blueberry-pie--did Mr. Fane remember it? Fried oysters! Buckwheat
cakes!

He said he remembered, but did not confess to any great emotion.

"You wait till Thursday," said Aurora. "It's Thanksgiving. We're going
to have chicken-pie, roast turkey, mince-pie, squash-pie, everything but
cranberry sauce. We can't get the cranberries. Will you come?"

In haste and confusion he said, alas! it would be impossible, wholly
impossible, intimating that he was a man of a thousand engagements and
occupations.

But after an interval, and talk of other things, he inquired, with an
effect of enormous discretion, whether he might without too great
impertinence ask who was coming to eat that wonderful Thanksgiving
dinner which her own hands, he must suppose, would largely have to
prepare.

"Just the Fosses. All the Fosses."

"Ah, Mr. Foss will feel agreeably like the great Turk."

"You mean he'll be the only man? I guess he can stand it. We thought of
asking Charlie Hunt, too, but he's English and would seem an outsider at
this particular gathering. Wish you'd come. You're such a friend of
theirs. Come on, come!"

"Mrs. Hawthorne, you are so very unusually kind. If you would leave it
open, and then when the day arrives, if I should find I could do so
without--without--"

"Oh, yes. Come if you can. And be sure, now, you come!"

They were still sitting at the table--dinner had been retarded by the
circumstantial round of the house--when music resounding through the
echoing rooms stopped the talk.

It was the piano across the hall that had been briskly and powerfully
attacked. The "Royal March" of Italy was played, first baldly, then with
manifold clinging and wreathing variations.

Aurora signed to the servant to open the dining-room door. All three at
the table sat in silence till the end of the piece.

Gerald wondered what the evening caller could be who made the moments of
waiting light to himself in this fanciful manner.

"It's Italo," said Mrs. Hawthorne, rising. "I call him Italo because I
never can remember his other name. Come, let's go into the parlor."

It was all rosily lighted. Candles set on the piano at each side of the
music-rest enkindled glossy high lights on the nose-bump and forehead
bosses of Signor Ceccherelli, who at Mrs. Hawthorne's appearance sprang
up to salute. She reached him her hand, over which he deeply bowed.

"You're to play all those lovely things I'm so fond of," she directed
him. "'The Swallow and the Prisoner,' 'The Butterflies,' 'The Cascade of
Pearls.' And don't forget the 'Souvenir of Saint Helena.' Then the one
of the soldiers marching off and the soldiers coming home again. All our
favorites. Mr. Fane-- Are you acquainted with each other? Italo--you'll
have to tell him your name yourself. All I can think of is
Checkerberry."

"Yes, yes, we are acquainted," said Gerald, hurriedly. "We have seen
each other many times. _Come sta?_"

"Oh, he can speak English."

"A leetle," Ceccherelli modestly admitted.

"He understands everything I say. We have great conversations. He comes
every evening when he isn't engaged to play somewhere else."

She went to sit on the gorgeous brocade sofa, arranging herself amid the
multitude of cushions so as to listen long and happily. Estelle
preferring a straight-backed chair, Gerald took the other corner of
Aurora's sofa. Immediately Ceccherelli opened with "Souvenir de
Sainte-Hélène." Aurora, respectful to the artist, talked in a whisper.

"He's so talented! You simply couldn't count the pieces he can play. We
do enjoy it so! We haven't anything in particular to do evenings if no
one calls. We don't often go out. We haven't been here long enough to
know many people. And aside from his magnificent playing, the little man
is such good company! We do have fun! There, I mustn't talk, I'm keeping
you from listening."

Gerald settled back, too, as if to listen, but to do the contrary was
his fixed purpose, even though the pianist, at last appreciated, put
into his playing so much feeling and force. Gerald's eyes went wandering
among the clutter of bric-à-brac, from a green bronze lizard to a mosaic
picture of Roman peasants, from a leaning tower of Pisa to a Sorrento
box. Then they rose to the paintings. He closed them.

The music was describing a hero's death-bed, besieged by dreams of
battle, at moments so noisy that Gerald had to open his eyes again for a
look of curiosity at the person who could produce so much sound. As he
watched him and his nose, like the magnified beak of a hen,--the nose of
a man who loves to talk,--he tried a little to imagine those merry
evenings spoken of by Aurora. The fellow looked almost ludicrously
solemn at this moment. He took himself and his art right seriously,
there could be no doubt of it. His face was a map of the emotions
expressed by the music, and wore, besides, according to his conception
of the part, the look of a great man unacclaimed by his own generation.

_Dio!_ what an ugly little man!

Gerald closed his eyes again.

The last cannon was fired over the hero's grave, the music stopped. The
ladies applauded. Gerald, smiling sickly, clapped his hands, too,
without, it might have been observed, making any noise to speak of.
Estelle went to the piano to compliment the player more articulately,
and loitered there, practising her French while he perfected himself in
English, by mutual aid.

"Italo," Mrs. Hawthorne interrupted them, "play that lovely thing of
your own now--you know, the one we're so crazy about, that by and by
turns into a waltz."

Without laying upon the ladies the tiresome necessity of pressing him,
the composer plunged into this masterpiece, and Gerald sat back again,
wondering what the little man thought of hearing himself called Italo by
the fair _forestiera_. He was dimly troubled, knowing that there is
no hope of an Italian ever really understanding the ways of being and
doing of American women, and especially an Italian of that class. But
then it would be equally difficult to make this American woman
understand just how the Italian might misunderstand her.

He permitted himself a direct look at her, where she rested among the
cushions, with eyes closed again and a smile diffused all over her face;
her whole person, indeed, permeated with the essence of a smile.
Extraordinary that, loving music so much, one could so much love such
music.

She surprised him by opening her eyes and whispering:

"Don't you want to smoke?" showing that for a moment at least she had
not been thinking of music. "You can, if you want to. Here, we've got
some. Don't go and think, now, that Estelle and I have taken to smoking.
Heavens above! We sent out for them the other night when Charlie Hunt
was here."

She reached across the table near her and handed him a box of
cigarettes.

He was very glad to light one. To smoke is soothing, and he felt the
need of it. Added to his vague distress at the spectacle of such
familiarity from these ladies to that impossible little Italian, a
ferment of resentment was disquieting him apropos of Hunt--those works
of art of which Hunt had facilitated the purchase.

Hunt, of a truth, ever since the first mention of him that evening had
been like a fish bone in Gerald's throat.

He checked his thoughts, recognizing that it is not sane or safe to
permit oneself to interpret the conduct of a person whom one does not
like. The chances of being misled are too great. He uprooted a suspicion
dishonoring to both.

Let it be taken for assured, then, that Hunt had in this case no
interest to forward beyond his love for making himself important. After
all, if the ladies liked bad pictures!... Yet it was a shame that he
should frequent their house, be accepted as their friend, invited by
them, made much of in their innocent and generous way, then should make
fun of them. Permissible, if you choose, to make fun of funny people,
but you must not at the same time make use of their kindness. A precept
for the perfect gentleman, in Florence or elsewhere: You can make fun of
persons, or you can cultivate their friendship, but not both things at
once. And Gerald, without proof, felt certain that Charlie Hunt spread
good stories about Aurora.

Mrs. Innes, his mother's old friend, meeting him at Vieusseux's
reading-room a few days before, had detained him for a chat, and in the
course of it asked him if he knew this Mrs. Hawthorne of whom the Fosses
appeared so fond. An amusing type, she must be. Seeing that statue of
the she-wolf and little Romulus and Remus at the foot of Vial de' Colli,
it seemed she had asked what it meant, and said she didn't believe it.

It indefinably hurt him, incommoded some nerve of envenomed
sensitiveness--yes, annoyed him like sand in his salad, to think of his
country-woman, with the good faith of a dog in her face, so quoted as to
make her ridiculous by a fellow wanting in human vitals, like Hunt.

He would have liked, had it been possible, to ask a few frank questions
of Mrs. Hawthorne, and find out more certainly what he should think. He
would have liked to warn her against trusting her enormous ignorance to
one who would have so little good-humor and protectiveness toward that
baby-eyed giant-child. Really, instinct ought to teach her better whom
to make her confident as respected that grave affair.

Singularly, when next the music stopped, Mrs. Hawthorne, after she with
true politeness had taken the box of cigarettes to the other of her
guests, spoke of Hunt. Perhaps her thoughts, too, had gone straying, and
mysteriously encountered some straying thought of his.

"Charlie Hunt," she said, "is coming on Sunday morning to take us to the
picture-galleries. We're going to play hooky from church. His work,
don't you see, keeps him at the bank on week days till everything of
that sort is closed."

"Mrs. Hawthorne," cried Gerald and sat up in unaffected indignation,
while mustache, beard, hair, everything about him appeared to bristle,
"I thought _I_ had been engaged to take you sight-seeing! I thought
it was to be _my_ honor and privilege. Mrs. Hawthorne, my dear
friend, if you do not wish deeply to hurt me, deeply to hurt me, you
will write to Mr. Hunt at once, this evening, and I will post the
letter, that you have thought better of that immoral plan for Sunday
morning, and are going to church like a good Christian woman. And
to-morrow, Mrs. Hawthorne, at whatever time will be convenient for you,
I will come and take you to the Uffizi."




CHAPTER VI


And so because, in his uncalled-for chivalry, he had made himself guide
to a lady in a ball-room, Gerald, one thing leading to another, was once
more committed to serving as a guide in Florence.

He had filled the part so often, at the appeal of one good friend and
another, that he had sworn never again to be caught, cajoled, or hired.
He could have hated the Ghiberti doors had such a thing not been
impossible. He did rather hate the Santissima Annunziata. And now it was
all to do over again.

It might be adduced, as a mitigation of his misfortune, that this was
different.

This was sometimes very different.

A singular thing about acquaintance with Mrs. Hawthorne was that it had
in a sense no beginning. One started fairly in the middle. No sooner did
one meet her than one seemed to have known her long and know her well.
Most people found this so. One therefore readily slid into speaking
one's mind to Mrs. Hawthorne, dispensing with the formal affectation of
a perfect respect for her every act and opinion, secure in the
recognition that anger, sulkiness, the self-love that easily takes
umbrage, were as far from her breezy sturdiness as the scrupulosities of
an anxious refinement.

That one could say what one pleased to Mrs. Hawthorne put more life into
intercourse with her, naturally, than there would have been if, with her
limitations, one had been forced to be entirely and tamely circumspect.

"Mrs. Hawthorne," cried Gerald, "do me the very real favor, will you,
like a dear good woman, of not calling the most venerable of the
primitives Simma Bewey!"

It was astonishing what things Gerald Fane could say without losing his
effect of a complete, even considerate politeness.

"But that's the way it's written," said Mrs. Hawthorne.

"You will pardon the liberty I take of contradicting you; it is not. It
gives me goose-flesh. Cimabue!"

"Very well. I'll try to remember. But it doesn't matter what I call him;
his Madonna is no beauty. Do you mean to tell me there was a time when
people admired faces like that? She gives me a pain."

"That is not the point; her beauty is not the point. Besides, she is
beautiful."

"Oh, very well. If you'd like to have me look like her, I can."

She tipped her head to one side, lengthened her jaw, pointed her hand,
and by a knack she had for mimicry made herself vaguely resemble the
large-eyed, small-mouthed, pale and serious Lady of Heaven before whose
portrait by the old master this dialogue took place.

"It is really a very poor joke, Mrs. Hawthorne," Gerald said, with mouth
distorted by the conflict between laughter and disgust. "To travesty a
dignified and sacred thing is a very poor pastime. Of course I laugh.
Miss Madison laughs, and I laugh. I think very poorly of it, all the
same. You would do much better to frame your mind to an attitude of
respect and try to understand. I can't say, though, that I think it
unnatural you should not at first appreciate the earliest old masters.
We will go to look at something more obvious."

"Wait a moment. These fascinate me, they're so queer and so awful. I
tell you those old codgers of the time you say these belong to had
strong nerves and stomachs. All these wounds and dripping blood and
hollow ribs and criminals being boiled in caldrons, and having their
heads cut off and arrows shot into them!... I guess you're right; we'd
better move on to something more cheerful."

Miss Madison was never guilty of the foolishness that fell from Mrs.
Hawthorne's gross and unconcerned ignorance. Miss Madison took modesty
and tact with her, as well as keenness of eye, when she went to
picture-galleries and museums. But this, strange to say, did not make
her the more acceptable companion of the two to their guide. What Miss
Madison did never seemed so important as what her larger, weightier
friend did. The one personality to a singular extent eclipsed the other,
who was accustomed to this to the point of not feeling it. A laughing
lack of conceit in both women marvelously simplified their relation.

Gerald, in choosing pictures for their enjoyment, avoided with a
conscientiousness of very special brand to halt with them before
paintings fit to please their unpracticed eyes but which he did not
think worthy of admiration. He likewise passed Venuses, Eves, Truths,
all nudities, without remark or pause, acquainted of old with the
simple-minded prudery of certain Americans, and not disrespectful to it.

"Mrs. Hawthorne," he said, "to be ignorant is no sin. One may have been
doing beautiful, gracious, useful and merciful things while others were
cultivating the arts and sciences. But ignorance on any subject is not
in itself beautiful or desirable. One should therefore not be complacent
in it, proud of it. With a little humility, Mrs. Hawthorne, what can one
not hope to accomplish? Now, please, Mrs. Hawthorne, drop all
preconception, and use your eyes. Look at that angel."

"Do you mean to tell me I could live long enough to think that angel
beautiful? With those Chinese eyes?... Give it up, my friend, why do you
want to bother?"

"Because, Mrs. Hawthorne, you have essentially a good brain. You are at
the back of all a very intelligent woman--"

"Go 'way with you! You know that if you feed me taffy enough you can
make me see and say anything you want."

"--a very intelligent woman. And I am so constituted that I simply
cannot go on living in the same world with a really intelligent
woman--my friend, besides--who does not see the difference between
Raphael and Guido Reni, and likes one exactly as well as the other. I
ache to change it!"

"Go ahead. We don't want you to die. But I'm afraid it'll take surgery.
You'll have to drill a hole in my thick head to get the things you mean
into that good brain so full of real intelligence."

"If you wouldn't be flippant!"

"What's that?"

"If you would bring reverence to the study of things done by great
people, and that people of great taste and learning have collected for
our joy and improvement!"

"See here! Don't you want me to have a little fun while we do Florence?
I don't see how I can stand it, if we're to be solemn as those old
saints with mouldy green complexions."

"We're not to be solemn. I have done these galleries solemnly times
enough, Heaven knows. But we're to be attentive, respectful, of an open
and receptive mind. We're not to say outrageous things in the mere
desire to shock our guide, or tease him."

"You don't mean to say you think that I--?"

"It's not funny."

"It mayn't be funny--but it's fun! Go on and lecture. You haven't got a
bit of fun in you."

"Yes, I have!" said Gerald, and with a creeping smile--grudging at
first, then brighter--looked Mrs. Hawthorne in the eye, while such fun
as lived in him traveled over the bridge of their glances, and she was
permitted to get a glimpse of his underlying relish.

"All I ask of you, Mrs. Hawthorne," he said, finally, "is that you will
not let your innocence on these subjects appear when you are with
others. I don't say pretend. Just keep still, be silent! It does not
matter when you are with me. When you are with me I beg of you to be
yourself. But with others.... You would become the talk of the town,
and--" he shuddered, "I should most horribly hate it!"

                   *       *       *       *       *

"Mrs. Hawthorne," he said, with a quiver of annoyance in his voice a few
days later, "did I not implore you not to let it be known in Florence
how you are affected by the proudest treasures of her world-famous
collections?"

"Yes, you told me. But I didn't promise."

"And now I am asked--with laughter and mockery--whether I have seen Mrs.
Hawthorne giving an imitation of a Madonna by Simma Bewey, and heard
Mrs. Hawthorne on the subject of G. Ottow and Others."

"Didn't you say--with laughter? Well, then, it's all right. Don't you
care. I just got to training and did it to make them a little sport.
Didn't they tell you about my Native of Italy eating Macaroni?"

"Mrs. Hawthorne, you are just a bad big school-girl--a bad big
school-girl--"

"'Hark, from the tomb!'" said Mrs. Hawthorne, in lieu of anything more
scintillating.

"A bad big school-girl, and I will have nothing more to do with you. If
you delight in being the talk of the town, all you have to do is allow
your friend Mr. Hunt in his spare hours to take you to see such things
as I have not yet had the honor of showing you."

"Blessed if I--Look here, you aren't mad in earnest? Sooner'n lose you,
I won't say another word. There! I've been Tchee-mah-boo-eh's Madonna
for the last time. Don't be cross with little T. T.--Talk of the Town!"

"If you had any discrimination, any reticence ..."

"No reticence? Does that mean can't keep anything to myself? You don't
know me!"

"You even tell your age."

"You aren't going to find fault with me for _that_?"

"Yes. At your age one should know better. It is part of your general and
too great frankness."

They upon occasions came near quarreling, but not seriously, her
disposition to quarrel was so small. Yet, two could not be outspoken and
one of them irritable, and those rocks never even be grazed.

She unwarily enlarged to him one day upon her disappointment in
Florence. By this time, she said, she was growing used to it, she didn't
notice so much the things she didn't like. But at first, with her
expectation high, her imagination inflamed by the Judge's and Antonia's
eloquence, the narrow streets, in some of them no sidewalks even, the
gloomy bars at the windows, the muddy river with the dirty old houses
huddled on the bank, the stuffy churches with the average height of the
Italian populace marked on the pillars by a dubious grindy brown tint,
the dreadful beggars, the black fingernails, the smells....

"Mrs. Hawthorne!" came from Gerald, who with difficulty had let her go
on thus far, "those were all you noticed, were they? In the most
wonderful city in the whole world, those are all you find to talk about!
The narrow streets, the beggars, the smells. Mrs. Hawthorne--" he nearly
trembled with the effort to keep calm, "this is obviously not the place
for you. You should have gone to ... to Switzerland! Instead of a
sunburned hill-side, with sober silver olives and solemn black
cypresses, and a pair of beautiful calm white oxen plowing, you would
have seen a nice grass-green pasture, at the foot of blinding peaks, cut
by an arsenic-green stream, on whose bank a red and white cow feeding!
Then among the habitations all would have been well-regulated, the
churches swept, perhaps even ventilated, the people washed, clean
aprons, clean caps, no beggars, no disorder, no crimes. And there would
have been no disturbing manifestations of genius, either; no troublesome
masterpieces or other evidences of a little fire in the blood. It would
have suited you perfectly."

"I guess you mean that to be cutting, don't you?"

"Let me try to tell you how much I liked New York, when I went back
there some years ago after an absence of ten or eleven years. I had some
idea, you know, of perhaps returning to live in America. Well, I
shivered. I shut my eyes. I held my ears. I fled. I remained just the
time I was forced to by the affairs of my poor mother and, as I tell
you, I fled!"

"Why, what's the matter with New York?"

"I will tell you what is the matter with New York, with Boston, with all
the places in America that I have seen again since I was grown up--"

"No! Stop! Don't say anything against America. It's the one way to make
me mad.--I didn't know you felt the same way about Florence. You aren't
an Italian, are you? It's because we're both alike Americans that we sit
here fighting so chummily."




CHAPTER VII


Lending her spacious front room for the Christmas bazaar in aid of the
church, and beholding it full of bustle and brightness, was the thing
that brought to the acute stage Mrs. Hawthorne's longing to see her
whole house the scene of some huge good time: she sent out innumerable
invitations to a ball. Mrs. Foss's card was inclosed with hers. It was a
farewell party given for Brenda, whose day of sailing was very near. The
frequent inquiry how Brenda should be crossing the ocean so late in the
year met with the answer that her traveling companions had a brother
whose wedding had been timed thus awkwardly for them.

On the morning of the day before the ball Gerald came to see Mrs.
Hawthorne. He was still intrusting the servant with his message when
Aurora, leaning over the railing of the hallway above, called down to
him, "Come right upstairs!"

He was aware of unusual activities all around--workmen, the sound of
hammering, housemaids plying brooms and brushes. Leslie Foss, with her
hat on, looked from the dining-room and said, "Hello, Gerald!" too busy
for anything more. Fräulein seemed to be with her, helping at something.

The great central white-and-gold door, to-day open, permitted a glimpse,
as he started up the stairs, of a man on a step-ladder fitting tall
wax-candles into one of the great chandeliers. From unseen quarters
floated Estelle's voice, saying, "_Ploo bah! Nong, ploo hoe!_"

Mrs. Hawthorne met him at the head of the stairs. The slight disorder of
her hair, usually so tidy, pointed to unusual exertions on her part,
also. Her face was flushed with excitement and, to judge by her
wreathing smiles, with happiness.

"I saw you coming," she greeted him. "_Riverisco! Beata Lei! Mamma
mia!_ And do you know how I saw you? Come here."

She led the way to the back, where the window-door stood open on to the
roof of the portico, which formed a terrace.

"See? I've had it glassed in for to-morrow night. We couldn't say we
hadn't plenty of rooms before, and plenty of room in them. That's just
the trouble: there aren't any nooks in this big, square house. So I've
made one. This is Flirtation Alcove. Here a loving couple can come to
cool off after dancing and look up at the stars together. Oh, it's going
to be so pretty! You can't tell anything about it as it looks now; I've
only got these few things in it. But the gardeners are going to bring
all sorts of tall plants and flowers in pots. Just wait till to-morrow
night!"

"You are very busy, I am afraid, Mrs. Hawthorne. I ought not to take
your time."

"Can't you sit down a minute?"

"I have come to ask a favor."

"I guess I can say it's granted even before you ask."

"I should like to retract my refusal of your very kind invitation for
to-morrow evening. I have explained to you my weak avoidance of crowds.
I have determined to overcome it in this case, and I want your
permission to bring a friend."

"That? How can you ask? Bring ten! Bring twenty! Bring as many as you've
got! As for coming yourself, I'm tickled to death that you've
reconsidered."

"It's not quite as simple as it seems, Mrs. Hawthorne. I shall have to
tell you more."

At her indication, he took the other half of the little dumpling sofa
which had seemed to her an appropriate piece of furniture for Flirtation
Alcove, and which, with a rug on the floor, formed so far its only
decoration. In the clear, bare morning light of outdoors, which bathed
them, she still looked triumphantly fresh, but he looked tired.

"It is Lieutenant Giglioli for whom I have come to beg an invitation.
You perhaps know whom I mean."

"Let me see. I can't tell. Quite a few officers have been introduced,
but I never can get their names."

"Hasn't Mrs. Foss or Leslie ever spoken of him?"

"Not so far as I can remember. In what way do you mean?"

"They evidently have not." He seemed to be given pause by this and need
to gather force from reflection before going on, as he did after a
moment, overcoming his repugnance. "He is the reason for poor Brenda
being packed off to America."

"Oh, is that it?"

"He came to see me last evening and spent most of the night talking of
her. We were barely acquainted before; but he knew I am a close friend
of the Fosses, and in that necessity to ease their hearts with talk
which Italians seem to feel he chose me. I felt sorry for him."

"She's turned him down?"

"No; she loves him."

Again Gerald stopped, as after making a communication of great gravity.
Mrs. Hawthorne, listening with breathless interest, made no sound that
urged him to go on. The fact he had announced seemed solemn to both
alike, with the vision floating between them of Brenda's white-rose face
and deer's eyes, the feeling they had in common that Brenda, for
indefinable reasons, was not like ordinary mortals, and that what she
felt was more significant, more important.

"But he has nothing beside his officer's pay," Gerald went on when the
surprise of his revelation had been allowed time to pass, "and she on
her side has nothing but what her parents might give her, who, you
probably know, have no great abundance. His proposals were made to them,
as is the custom in this country, and have been formally declined."

He left it to her to appreciate the situation created by this, and,
while thinking on his side, ran the point of the slender cane which he
had not abandoned round and round the same figure of the rug-pattern at
their feet.

"They are both too poor. I see," said Mrs. Hawthorne; but added quickly,
as if she had not really seen: "It seems sort of funny, though, doesn't
it, to let that keep them, if they're fond of each other?"

"Oh, it's not that. However fond, they couldn't marry without her
bringing her husband a fixed portion. It is the law in this country, in
the case of officers of the army,--to keep up the dignity of that
impressive body, you understand. In the case of a lieutenant the
_dote_, or dowry, must be forty thousand francs. I learned the
exact sum for the first time last night."

"How much is that? Let me see,"--Mrs. Hawthorne did mental arithmetic,
rather quickly for a woman,--"eight thousand dollars. And the Fosses
can't give it."

"Of their ability to give it if they wished to I am no judge. I dare say
they could, though with their son John going before long to hang out his
shingle, as they call it, I doubt if it could be without bleeding
themselves. But they are not convinced that the sacrifice ought to be
made." He frowned at the pattern on the rug, and suddenly cut at it
impatiently with his stick. "It is a singular story, in which everybody
is right and the result wrong, horribly wrong!"

"Oh, dear me!" sighed Mrs. Hawthorne, feeling with him even before
understanding.

"I ought perhaps to say," he corrected, "everybody is good and
well-meaning, but has been unwise. And everybody now has to pay."

"I've thought right along that the Fosses had some reason for not being
very happy," said Mrs. Hawthorne, "and I guessed it was something about
Brenda. But they never said anything, and I didn't try to make out.
Brenda doesn't take to me, somehow, as the others do. I'm not her kind,
of course; but I do adore her from afar. She's so beautiful! She's like
a person in a story-book, who at the end dies, looking at the sunset
over the sea, or else marries the prince."

"Yes, Brenda is wonderful."

"I never should take her for an American."

"She's not like one, and yet she is. She has grown up in this country
and breathed in its ideas and feelings till she even looks Italian. Her
parents are the sort of Americans that fifty years of foreign countries
wouldn't budge; but they began later. Still, it is because Brenda is
American, after all, that cruelties are being committed. Her family have
taken it for granted that one of them couldn't really be in love with an
Italian, least of all that joke, a dapper and decorative Italian officer
that a girl buys at a fixed price for her husband. And Brenda can't say
to them: 'But I am. I am in love with just such a man. The happiness of
my life depends upon your finding the vulgar sum of money with which to
buy him for me.' Because of the American-ness all round, Brenda can't
say that to them, and because she doesn't say it, they are in doubt,
they only half apprehend, they don't understand. The one thing they are
sure of is that to marry a foreigner is a mistake. And the one safe
thing they see to do, when Brenda's face, combined with her entire
reserve toward them, has begun to torment them seriously, is to send her
away where, if the truth be that she mysteriously is 'interested in' an
Italian, the change of scene may help to put him out of her head."

"So that's why they're sending her home!"

"There are no better or dearer people in the world, kind, true, just;
but"--Gerald held in, and showed how much he hated to make any sort of
reservation--"in this they have been to blame. They bring growing girls
to Italy, where, such is their confidence in I don't know what quality
supposed to be inherent and to produce immunity from love of Italian
men, they never dream that there might happen to them an Italian
son-in-law."

He gave her a moment to realize how rash this was; then hurried, as if
wishing to get through as quickly as possible with the disagreeable, if
not disgraceful, task of criticizing his friends and of gossiping:

"During the progress of the affair Mrs. Foss lets all go on as the
little affairs and flirtations of her own youth were allowed to go on at
home. She likes her daughters to be admired. It is only proper they
should make conquests, have beaus. Leslie has had flirtations with
Italians as well as with others, and come out of them without impairing
that sense of humor which permits her to see as funny that one should
succumb to the attractions of one of those only half-understood men, who
may either be playing a comedy of love while in truth pursuing a
fortune, or, if in earnest, are rather alarming, with the hint of
jealous ferocity in their eyes. With Mrs. Foss's knowledge, Brenda,
during a whole summer at the seaside, receives Giglioli's letters,
written at first, or partly, in English, which he is learning with her
help. With this excuse of English, it is a correspondence and courtship
_dans toutes les règles_. Brenda is not asked by an American mother
to show her letters or his. Giglioli, with his traditions, could not
have imagined such a thing if the parents were unwilling to receive him
as a suitor. Brenda herself--one will never know about Brenda, how it
began, what she thought or hoped. She is very young; no doubt she did
hope. Children seldom know much about their parents' means. She very
likely thought hers could make her the present of a dowry, as they had
made her other presents. But when she discovered their attitude toward
the whole matter, with dignity and delicacy she let all be as they
desired, incapable of pressing them to tax their resources to give her a
thing their prejudice is so strongly set against. They did what they
thought best, and have hung in doubt ever since as to whether it was
best; for though Brenda gives her confidence to none of them, and they
do not press her to give it, with that respect for a child's liberty
which is also American, they are growing more and more uneasy with the
suspicion that it was serious on her part, too. They love her
extraordinarily, and she has always dearly loved them. They show their
love by protecting her youth from a step she may repent. She shows hers
by being strong, poor love, and trying not to grieve them with the
revelation of her heart. And they are making one another wretched."

For a moment Mrs. Hawthorne had nothing to say, busy with pondering what
she had heard. "I don't see how, if she really loves this Italian, she
could give him up so gracefully," she finally said.

"She has not given him up, Mrs. Hawthorne," said Gerald. "Believe me,
she has not. She has some plan, some dream, for bringing about the good
end in time without aid from her parents. I am sure of it. No, she has
not given him up." He had before him, vivid in memory, the image of
Brenda in the little church, and was looking at that, though his eyes
were on Mrs. Hawthorne's friendly and attentive face. "She is at the
wonderful hour of her love," he said, "when the world is transfigured
and life lifted above the every-day into regions of poetry; when the
simple fact of his existence justifies the plan of creation, when to
wait a hundred years for him would seem no more difficult than to wait a
day, and to perform the labors of Hercules no more than breaking off so
many roses. She is sure of him, the immortality of his passion, as she
is sure of herself. So they are above circumstances, and nothing that
friend or foe can do should trouble their essential serenity."

"How wonderful!" breathed Mrs. Hawthorne, after a little silence in
which Gerald had been thinking with a very sickness of sympathy of
Brenda and the sinister propensity of the Fates for bringing to nothing
the most valiant dreams and hopes; and Mrs. Hawthorne had been thinking
entirely of Gerald, whose own heart was so much more certainly revealed
by what he said than could be anybody else's.

"Unfortunately,"--he turned abruptly to another part of his
subject,--"he is not of the same temperament. She has some project, I
imagine, for earning the money for her dowry, poor child, by music,
singing, painting. But he does not know her vows of fidelity, because
her parents did use their authority so far as gently to request her not
to write to him or see him; and she promised, and a promise with Brenda
is binding. And he has felt his honor involved in not writing or meeting
her. But, though separated, they have been in the same city; they could
hope to catch a glimpse of each other now and then. Heaven only knows
how often he has stood to see her pass, or watched her window, and lived
on such things as unhappy lovers find to live on. After all, the faith
that when he dreamed of her she dreamed of him, that as he kissed a
glove she kissed a silver button, was a life, something to go on with. I
dare say, too, he cherished the hope of some miracle,--it is so natural
to hope!... But now they are sending her away, and it seems to him the
black end of everything."

"I see. And what you want is--"

"To be driven half a world apart for indefinite periods, more than
probably forever, without one look, one word of leave-taking, is truly
too much. Granted that they are not to have each other, they ought not
to be torn in two like a bleeding body. Let them have to remember a few
last beautiful moments!"

Mrs. Hawthorne had become pensive. He watched her sidewise, trying to
divine what turn her thoughts were taking. Her prolonged silence made
him uneasy.

"It wouldn't be wrong, you think?" she asked finally. "Mrs. Foss
wouldn't be cross with us?"

"If it is wrong, my dear Mrs. Hawthorne, let it be wrong!" he cried
impetuously. "If any one is cross, we will bow our heads meekly--after
having done what we regarded as merciful. Let us not permit a cruelty it
was in our power to prevent!"

But Mrs. Hawthorne continued to disquiet him by hesitating, while her
face suggested the travels of her thought all around and in and out of
the question under consideration.

"You don't think it would perhaps be cruel to Brenda?" she laid before
him another difficulty in the way of making up her mind. "Mightn't it
just ruin the evening for her, with the painfulness of good-bys? Or, if
she doesn't in the least expect him, the shock of the surprise?"

"If I know that beautiful girl, passionate as an Italian under her
American self-control, it will be the blessed shock of an answered
prayer. She prays nightly, never doubt it, that Heaven may manage for
her just such a surprise."

He was growing afraid of the calm common sense that tried to see the
thing from every side and weight the merits of each person's point of
view. Feeling it intolerable to be refused, he suddenly appealed to her
pity, away from her justice.

"Oh, Mrs. Hawthorne, life is so unkind, and to be always wise simply
deadly! A few memories to treasure are all the good we finally have of
our miserable days, and to catch at a moment of gold without care that
it will have to be paid for is the only way to have in our hands in all
our lives anything but copper and lead; yes, dull lead, common copper."
He covered his face and pressed his eyes, in a way he had when the world
seemed too hopeless and baffling; then as suddenly straightened up,
remarking more quietly, "The Fosses are too wise."

"They have my sympathy, I must say, Mr. Fane," Mrs. Hawthorne hurriedly
defended herself against being moved. "I should be just as much afraid
as they to have my daughter marry a foreigner."

"Mrs. Hawthorne, you ought to be afraid to have your daughter marry
anybody." He gathered heat again and vehemence. "As regards Italians, we
are all one mass of superstitions. We are always comparing our best with
their bad. As a matter of truth, our best and their best and the best
the world over are one as good as the other, and our worst can't be
exceeded by anything Italy can show. If you make the difficulty that we
are different, our point of view different, I object that Brenda's is
not so different. The international marriages that turn out well make no
noise, but there are plenty of them. I have seen any number in the
ordinary middle classes. No, parents are twice as old as their children;
that is the trouble and always will be. The older people by prudence
secure a certain thing, but it's not the thing youth wanted. The older
see a certain thing as preferable, because they are old; but the young
were right for themselves, for a time, at least, until they, too, grew
old and saw a long peace and comfort as superior to a brief love and
rapture. Brenda is not shallow or changeable; it may be her one chance
of happiness that her parents in their anxious affection are trying to
remove her from, and which she will cling to with every invisible fiber
of her being until she conquers, or turns into a dismal old maid. Brenda
is not like other girls. Love is serious to her. She never played with
it as Leslie has always done, and as American girls do, yes, in
Massachusetts and Virginia alike. She is an earnest, simple, sincere,
constant nature, very much, in fact, like him."

"You seem to like him. Is he such a fine man really?"

"I don't know a finer, in his way."

"Good looking?"

"Mrs. Hawthorne, what a frivolous question! But he is. He is one of the
most completely handsome men I know. Rather short, that's all."

"Oh, what a pity!"

"But, if you must insist on that sort of symmetry, Brenda is not tall.
He is a kind of Italian, more common than one thinks, that doesn't get
into literature, having nothing exciting, mysterious, wicked, or even
conspicuously picturesque about him. After being a good son,--they are
very often good sons,--he will be a good husband and a good father, like
his own father before him. He is without vanity, while looking like a
square-built, stocky, responsible Romeo. Devoted to duty, passionate for
order, absolutely punctilious in matters of honor and courtesy, he is a
good citizen, a good soldier. He belongs to excellent people, I
gathered, whose fortune, once larger, is very small. They live in the
Abruzzi, I think he said. He is the eldest son and hope of the house.
His gratitude to them comes first of all, he made me understand. He
would be an _indegno_, unworthy of esteem and love, if that were
not so. He had never cared for pleasures, he told me; even in the time
not demanded by the service he studied. He wished to be useful to his
country; he looked for the advancement to be gained by solid capacity in
military things. He felt older than his years, he said, from being the
eldest of the family and always carrying responsibilities. He committed
no follies of youth, had no quarrels, made no debts. His companions
sometimes laughed at him for this prosaic seriousness. But he had
friends, for he is of a manly, modest sort. One evening during Carnival
last year certain of these friends dropped in on their way to a dance, a
costume party at the house of Americans, and seeing him so absorbed by
duties and studies, thought it a lark to tempt him from these and take
him along. And he, to astonish them for once, he says, let it happen,
they assuring him that he would be well received if presented as their
friend. One of them had on two costumes, one on top of the other, of
which he lent him one, a monk's frock and cowl. So they went. At the
ball was Brenda as the Snow-queen. And the fatal thing happened at very
first sight of her. It is a repetition of _Romeo and Juliet_, as
you see. He had shunned women as the rivals of duty and work. He
believes his instantaneous adoration owing to the fact that Brenda so
far surpassed all he had ever known,--a being entirely formed of light
and snow and fragrance.... I am using his words. Her very name is sweet
to Italian lips. He permitted himself the dreams of other men. He
permitted himself to hope. And then!... These things he told me with
actual tears in the finest dark eyes I have perhaps ever seen, and
without seeming any the less manly for them. He told me, and I believed
him. He came to me, poor fellow, because it was the nearest he could
come to Brenda, and he trusted, I suppose, that I would tell her he had
been. It was a way of sending her a message. He talked more than half
the night, walking the floor, then throwing himself into a chair and
grasping his head. I can't tell you all he said, but it filled me with
pity and respect. It made me his friend."

Mrs. Hawthorne looked soft and sympathetic, but far away, and when he
stopped did not speak, engrossed, it was to be hoped, by the story just
told.

He continued, though discouraged:

"He wanted to know if I thought he would be guilty of an unpardonable
breach should he ask permission to write her one letter before she left.
This parting without farewell is the last bitter touch to his tragedy.
Brenda, when it had been decided that she should leave, sent word to him
by that little pianist who comes here. Again through the same channel he
received word that the day of departure was fixed. Can you think what it
means, Mrs. Hawthorne? Have you in your experience or imagination the
wherewith to form any conception, dear Mrs. Hawthorne, of what it means?
The day of departure fixed! The day of parting! Do you realize? No more
sight or sound of each other! The end! The sea between! Silence! And it
is to befall on Saturday of this week, and we are at Wednesday!"

"All right, Mr. Fane; bring him!" she said in haste. "You've made me
want to cry. I mustn't let myself cry; it makes my nose red. What did
you say his name is?"

"Giglioli."

"Spell it. Gig--no, it's no use. What's the other part of his name?"

"Manlio."

"That's a little better. I guess he'll have to be Manlio to me. Bring
him along, whatever happens, and then let's pray hard to have everything
happen right."

                   *       *       *       *       *

Not much later on the same day Mrs. Hawthorne's brougham might have been
seen climbing Viale dei Colli, with the lady inside, alone, engaged in
meditation.

"It would be a pity," she was thinking, as she alighted before Villa
Foss, "that a little matter of eight thousand dollars should stand in
the way of perfect bliss!"




CHAPTER VIII


So many forces had been enlisted, into so many hands the white card
given, to make Mrs. Hawthorne's ball a success, that it could hardly
fail to be somewhat splendid. On a platform raised in one corner of the
ball-room sat the little orchestra assembled and conducted by Signor
Ceccherelli, who, from his mien, might have been the creator of these
musicians and originator of all music.

Charlie Hunt was floor-master, and busy enough. Another might perhaps
have done as much and not appeared so busy. The cotillion especially
gave him a great deal to do. Everybody understood that he had planned
all the figures and bought the favors. Some received an impression that
the ball was entirely managed by him, who was such a very great friend
of the hostess's. Some even carried home an idea that the hostess never
did anything without consulting him, and more often than not besought
him to do it for her.

This sounds cruder than it actually was. Charlie was looking most
handsome and high-bred. Animation shone from his eyes, his teeth, his
skin, over which he now and then swept a fine white silk handkerchief.
He danced devotedly every minute during which he was not engaged in
making others dance. Mrs. Hawthorne, gazing after him with a benignant
smile, was truly grateful to him for putting into her party so much
"go." It was his atmosphere rather than his words--though he did drop
words, but not many or really in bad taste--that made him appear the one
indispensable person in the house.

Mrs. Foss stood near the central door with Mrs. Hawthorne, receiving.
She had not omitted from her list one acquaintance in Florence of the
suitable class. Everybody was there; the style of invitation-card sent
had suggested a grand occasion.

All the persons she had seen at the Fosses on the first Friday evening
at their house Mrs. Hawthorne saw again, and many more. Balm de Brézé,
with a gallantry of old style, bent his black-lacquer mustache over her
glove. The dark Landini pressed her hand with a pinch the warmth of
which pricked her attention, and she found his eyes fixed on her with
more the air of seeing her than is common at a first meeting.

Suddenly her heart thumped like a school-girl's. Gerald was coming, and
with him an officer who must surely be Manlio. She tried to keep down
her emotion, but the pink of her face deepened, a trembling seized her
smile.

The Italian was as white as paper, his mustache and brows made spots of
ink on it; his eyes were as deep and still as wells in the night. She
could hardly doubt that his heart was in a tumult, but he spoke without
disaster to his voice, thanking her in a formal phrase. She perceived,
from a distinct advantage over him in height, how faultlessly handsome
he was in a quiet, unmagnetic way. Never had she seen anything to equal
the whiteness of his teeth except her pearls in their black velvet case.

After having paid his duty to her, he remained for some minutes speaking
with Mrs. Foss, who appeared as kind, while he appeared as calm and
natural, as if time had moved back, and they were still at last spring
and the beginning of his visits. Of all concerned Aurora was the least
collected.

"I can't help it!" she murmured to Gerald, while the other two were
talking together. "I'm all of a tremble. I feel as if I were Brenda; and
at the same time I feel as if I were him--or he."

Mrs. Foss turned to them to say she believed everybody had arrived, and
with Giglioli moved away from the door. Gerald asked Mrs. Hawthorne if
they should waltz, but she refused, because she ought to be looking
after the people who were not dancing and seeing that every one had a
good time. She should dance only once that evening, she told him, and it
should be with Mr. Foss, who had promised to dance at her party if she
would promise to dance with him.

Mr. Foss was seen approaching, and Mrs. Hawthorne smiled and sparkled in
anticipation of the jokes they would exchange on her fairy weight and
his youthful limberness.

Gerald sent his eyes around the room to see if any one were free whom it
would be a sort of duty to ask to dance. He did not look for pleasure
from dancing, the less so that Charlie Hunt, on the perpetual jump, and
dancing with a perfection almost unmanly, had brought the exercise into
temporary discredit with him. Miss Madison was dancing, Miss Seymour was
dancing, Leslie was dancing, Brenda--his eyes were unable to find. In a
doorway, and not quite as festive in looks as the majority, which gave
to the room the effect of an animated flower-bed, he perceived a figure
in snuff-brown silk, just in front of which, soberly watching the
dancers, was a little girl in a short dress of embroidered white, a blue
hair-ribbon and blue enamel locket. At once dropping his search for a
partner, Gerald went to join this pair, thinking, as he approached, that
Lily without her spectacles was beginning to have a look of Brenda,--a
Brenda with less beauty, but more originality; more--what could one call
it?--geniality, perhaps.

"Oh, Gerald!"--the little girl caught his hand without ceasing for more
than a second to watch the ball-room floor,--"I have promised to go home
willingly at ten o'clock!" It was spoken in a gentle wail.

"My child," said Fräulein, "you must begin to prepare, for I fear it
cannot be far from ten."

"Oh, Fräulein, don't keep talking about it! _Please!_"

"When you leave this pleasure, Lili, remember, there will be still that
other pleasure of the long ride home in the night and the moonlight."

"Yes." Lily, glad again, turned wholly to Gerald, the music having
stopped. "Mrs. Hawthorne told mother that if she would let me come I
should be taken home in her own carriage, with all the furs around us
and a hot water-box for our feet, so that we never could catch cold.
Wasn't it sweet of her? And we've both already had ices and cakes,
before anybody else, because she said we must. Don't you think she's
sweet, Gerald?"

"Sweet as honey," he said.

"Oh, Gerald,"--Lily's tone was fairly lamentable,--"have you seen the
baskets of favors that are going to be given away by and by? There are
roses of red silk, and lilies of white velvet, and chocolate cigars, and
fans, and bonbonnières, and silver bangles! Then funny ones of little
monkeys and ducks and things. And I have to go home willingly,
cheerfully, promptly, at ten o'clock!"

"Lily, if any lady is so good and so misguided as to honor me with a
favor, I will bring it to you in my pocket to-morrow or soon after, I
promise."

"What hour is it, Herr Fane?" asked Fräulein over Lily's head.

Gerald drew out his watch and hesitated, sincerely sorry.

"To be exact, it is three minutes and three quarters to ten," he said.

Lily's mouth dropped open, and out of the small dark hollow one could
fear for a second that a cry of protest or revolt might come; but the
very next moment it was seen that Lily had returned to be the best child
in the world and the most honorable.

"Good night, Gerald!" she said, with a wistfully willing, cheerful,
ready face. "You won't forget?"

He was left in the oval room, and as the dancers who had come in to
occupy its seats seemed all to be in pairs, he remained aloof. He took
the occasion to have a look at the panels, which he had not before seen,
the tapestries, which were not tapestries, but paintings on rep. He
remembered--the Fountain of Love, not Biblical.

The fountain, surely enough, spouted from a marble dolphin squeezed in
the chubby arms of a marble Love, and was four times repeated, at
different hours of the day and seasons of the year. In spring, at dawn,
a maiden filled her cup at it. At noon, in summer, the same maiden and a
youth drank from it with cheeks close together. In autumn, at sunset,
the maiden, sadder of countenance, stared at the fountain, visibly
wrapped in memories. In winter the fountain stood solitary and frozen,
Cupid had a hood of snow, the purplish twilight landscape was drowned in
melancholy.

Gerald's mind made an excursion from the things before him to the studio
where those facile works of art had been produced. The place was
imaginary, and the artist not altogether clear, but the features of the
second figure which he saw, the visitor at the studio, were well-known
to him, and the sentiments of the artist receiving the order to treat a
subject in four large panels for a rich _forestiera_ not difficult
to estimate.

           

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