Gertrude Hall Brownell

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, 75and 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 76shown; 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 77to 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 78Paris 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, 79arched 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.

80Leslie 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.”

81“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 82Lily 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, 83and 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.

“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.

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

85The 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 86for 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 87professing 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 88through 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; 89clumsy, 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.”

90She 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, 91“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 92dressing-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 93plate; 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.”

94“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.

95“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. 96Gerald’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. 97He 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.

98Let 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 99her 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.”