“Your friend—yours—the man you brought here, has Eva with him at this moment out on the bay!” said Fanny, vehemently.
“Well, what of that? You must look at it with Punta Palmas eyes, Fanny; at Punta Palmas it would be an ordinary event.”
“But my Eva is not a Punta Palmas girl, Horace Bartholomew!”
“She is as innocent as one, and I’ll answer for Rod. Come, be sensible, Fanny. They will be back before sunset, and no one in Sorrento—if that is what is troubling you so—need be any the wiser.”
“You do not know all,” said Fanny. “Oh, Horace—I must tell somebody—she fancies she cares for that man!” She wrung her hands again. “Couldn’t we follow them? Get a boat.”
“It would take an hour. And it would be a very conspicuous thing to do. Leave them alone—it’s much better; I tell you I’ll answer for Rod. Fancies she cares for him, does she? Well, he is a fine fellow; on the whole, the finest I know.”
The mother’s eyes flashed through her tears. “This from you?”
“I can’t help it; he is. Of course you do not think so. He has got no money; he has never been anywhere that you call anywhere; he doesn’t know anything about the only life you care for nor the things you think important. All the same, he is a man in a million. He is a man—not a puppet.”
Gentle Mrs. Churchill appeared for the moment transformed. She looked as though she could strike him. “Never mind your Quixotic ideas. Tell me whether he is in love with Eva; it all depends upon that.”
“I don’t know, I am sure,” answered Bartholomew. He began to think. “I can’t say at all; he would conceal it from me.”
“Because he felt his inferiority. I am glad he has that grace.”
“He wouldn’t be conscious of any inferiority save that he is poor. It would be that, probably, if anything; of course he supposes that Eva is rich.”
“Would to Heaven she were!” said the mother. “Added to every other horror of it, poverty, miserable poverty, for my poor child!” She sat down and hid her face.
“It may not be as bad as you fear, nor anything like it. Do cheer up a little, Fanny. When Eva comes back, ten to one you will find that nothing at all has happened—that it has been a mere ordinary excursion. And I promise you I will take Rod away with me to-morrow.”
Mrs. Churchill rose and began to pace to and fro, biting her lips, and watching the water. Mademoiselle, who was still hovering near, she waved impatiently away. “Let no one in,” she called to her.
There seemed, indeed, to be nothing else to do, as Bartholomew had said, save to wait. He sat down and discussed the matter a little.
Fanny paid no attention to what he was saying. Every now and then broken phrases of her own burst from her: “How much good will her perfect French and Italian, her German, Spanish, and even Russian, do her down in that barbarous wilderness?”—“In her life she has never even buttoned her boots. Do they think she can make bread?”—“And there was Gino. And poor Pierre.” Then, suddenly, “But it shall not be!”
“I have been wondering why you did not take that tone from the first,” said Bartholomew. “She is very young. She has been brought up to obey you implicitly. It would be easy enough, I should fancy, if you could once make up your mind to it.”
“Make up my mind to save her, you mean,” said the mother, bitterly. She did not tell him that she was afraid of her daughter. “Should you expect me to live at Punta Palmas?” she demanded, contemptuously, of her companion.
“That would depend upon Rod, wouldn’t it?” answered Bartholomew, rather unamiably. He was tired—he had been there an hour—of being treated like a door-mat.
At this Fanny broke down again, and completely. For it was only too true; it would depend upon that stranger, that farmer, that unknown David Rod, whether she, the mother, should or should not be with her own child.
A little before sunset the boat came into sight again round the western cliffs. Fanny dried her eyes. She was very pale. Little Mademoiselle, rigid with anxiety, watched from an upper window. Bartholomew rose to go down to the beach to receive the returning fugitives. “No,” said Fanny, catching his arm, “don’t go; no one must know before I do—no one.” So they waited in silence.
Down below, the little boat had rapidly approached. Eva had jumped out, and was now running up the rock stairway; she was always light-footed, but to her mother it seemed that the ascent took an endless time. At length there was the vision of a young, happy, rushing figure—rushing straight to Fanny’s arms. “Oh, mamma, mamma,” the girl whispered, seeing that there was no one there but Bartholomew, “he loves me! He has told me so! he has told me so!”
For an instant the mother drew herself away. Eva, left alone, and mindful of nothing but her own bliss, looked so radiant with happiness that Bartholomew (being a man) could not help sympathizing with her. “You will have to give it up,” he said to Fanny, significantly. Then he took his hat and went away.
Fifteen minutes later his place was filled by David Rod.
“Ah! you have come. I must have a few words of conversation with you, Mr. Rod,” said Fanny, in an icy tone. “Eva, leave us now.”
“Oh no, mamma, not now; never again, I hope,” answered the girl. She spoke with secure confidence; her eyes were fixed upon her lover’s face.
“Do you call this honorable behavior, Mr. Rod?” Fanny began. She saw that Eva would not go.
“Why, I hope so,” answered Rod, surprised. “I have come at once, as soon as I possibly could, Mrs. Churchill (I had to take the boat back first, you know), to tell you that we are engaged; it isn’t an hour old yet—is it, Eva?” He looked at Eva smilingly, his eyes as happy as her own.
“It is the custom to ask permission,” said Fanny, stiffly.
“I have never heard of the custom, then; that is all I can say,” answered Rod, with good-natured tranquillity, still looking at the girl’s face, with its rapt expression, its enchanting joy.
“Please to pay attention; I decline to consent, Mr. Rod; you cannot have my daughter.”
“Mamma—” said Eva, coming up to her.
“No, Eva; if you will remain here—which is most improper—you will have to hear it all. You are so much my daughter’s inferior, Mr. Rod, that I cannot, and I shall not, consent.”
At the word “inferior,” a slight shock passed over Eva from head to foot. She went swiftly to her lover, knelt down and pressed her lips to his brown hand, hiding her face upon it.
He raised her tenderly in his arms, and thus embraced, they stood there together, confronting the mother—confronting the world.
Fanny put out her hands with a bitter cry. “Eva!”
The girl ran to her, clung to her. “Oh, mamma, I love you dearly. But you must not try to separate me from David. I could not leave him—I never will.”
“Let us go in, to our own room,” said the mother, in a broken voice.
“Yes; but speak to David first, mamma.”
Rod came forward and offered his arm. He was sorry for the mother’s grief, which, however, in such intensity as this, he could not at all understand. But though he was sorry, he was resolute, he was even stern; in his dark beauty, his height and strength, he looked indeed, as Bartholomew had said, a man.
At the sight of his offered arm Mrs. Churchill recoiled; she glanced all round the terrace as though to get away from it; she even glanced at the water; it almost seemed as if she would have liked to take her child and plunge with her to the depths below. But one miserable look at Eva’s happy, trustful eyes still watching her lover’s face cowed her; she took the offered arm. And then Rod went with her, supporting her gently into the house, and through it to her own room, where he left her with her daughter. That night the mother rose from her sleepless couch, lit a shaded taper, and leaving it on a distant table, stole softly to Eva’s side. The girl was in a deep slumber,
her head pillowed on her arm. Fanny, swallowing her tears, gazed at her sleeping child. She still saw in the face the baby outlines of years before, her mother’s eye could still distinguish in the motionless hand the dimpled fingers of the child. The fair hair, lying on the pillow, recalled to her the short flossy curls of the little girl who had clung to her skirts, who had had but one thought—“mamma.”
“What will her life be now? What must she go through, perhaps—what pain, privation—my darling, my own little child!”
The wedding was to take place within the month; Rod said that he could not be absent longer from his farm. Fanny, breaking her silence, suggested to Bartholomew that the farm might be given up; there were other occupations.
“I advise you not to say a word of that sort to Rod,” Bartholomew answered. “His whole heart is in that farm, that colony he has built up down there. You must remember that he was brought up there himself, or rather came up. It’s all he knows, and he thinks it the most important thing in life; I was going to say it’s all he cares for, but of course now he has added Eva.”
Pierre came once. He saw only the mother.
When he left her he went round by way of the main street of Sorrento in order to pass a certain small inn. His carriage was waiting to take him back to Castellamare, but there was some one he wished to look at first. It was after dark; he could see into the lighted house through the low uncurtained windows, and he soon came upon the tall outline of the young farmer seated at a table, his eyes bent upon a column of figures. The Belgian surveyed him from head to foot slowly. He stood there gazing for five minutes. Then he turned away. “That, for Americans!” he murmured in French, snapping his fingers in the darkness. But there was a mist in his boyish eyes all the same.
The pink villa witnessed the wedding. Fanny never knew how she got through that day. She was calm; she did not once lose her self-control.
They were to sail directly for New York from Naples, and thence to Florida; the Italian colonists were to go at the same time.
“Mamma comes next year,” Eva said to everybody. She looked indescribably beautiful; it was the radiance of a complete happiness, like a halo.
By three o’clock they were gone, they were crossing the bay in the little Naples steamer. No one was left at the villa with Fanny—it was her own arrangement—save Horace Bartholomew.
“She won’t mind being poor,” he said, consolingly, “she won’t mind anything—with him. It is one of those sudden, overwhelming loves that one sometimes sees; and after all, Fanny, it is the sweetest thing life offers.”
“And the mother?” said Fanny.
The Street of the Hyacinth
* * *
IT was a street in Rome—narrow, winding, not over-clean. Two vehicles meeting there could pass only by grazing the doors and windows on either side, after the usual excited whip-cracking and shouts which make the new-comer imagine, for his first day or two, that he is proceeding at a perilous speed through the sacred city of the soul.
But two vehicles did not often meet in the street of the Hyacinth. It was not a thoroughfare, not even a convenient connecting link; it skirted the back of the Pantheon, the old buildings on either side rising so high against the blue that the sun never came down lower than the fifth line of windows, and looking up from the pavement was like looking up from the bottom of a well. There was no foot-walk, of course; even if there had been one no one would have used it, owing to the easy custom of throwing from the windows a few ashes and other light trifles for the city refuse-carts, instead of carrying them down the long stairs to the door below. They must be in the street at an appointed hour, must they not? Very well, then—there they were; no one but an unreasonable foreigner would dream of objecting.
But unreasonable foreigners seldom entered the street of the Hyacinth. There were, however, two who lived there one winter not long ago, and upon a certain morning in the January of that winter a third came to see these two. At least he asked for them, and gave two cards to the Italian maid who answered his ring; but when, before he had time to even seat himself, the little curtain over the parlor door was raised again, and Miss Macks entered, she came alone. Her mother did not appear. The visitor was not disturbed by being obliged to begin conversation immediately; he was an old Roman sojourner, and had stopped fully three minutes at the end of the fourth flight of stairs to regain his breath before he mounted the fifth and last to ring Miss Macks’s bell. Her card was tacked upon the door: “Miss Ettie F. Macks.” He surveyed it with disfavor, while the little, loose-hung bell rang a small but exceedingly shrill and ill-tempered peal, like the barking of a small cur. “Why in the world doesn’t she put her mother’s card here instead of her own?” he said to himself. “Or, if her own, why not simply ‘Miss Macks,’ without that nickname?”
But Miss Macks’s mother had never possessed a visiting-card in her life. Miss Macks was the visiting member of the family; and this was so well understood at home, that she had forgotten that it might not be the same abroad. As to the “Ettie,” having been called so always, it had not occurred to her to make a change. Her name was Ethelinda Faith, Mrs. Macks having thus combined euphony and filial respect—the first title being her tribute to æsthetics, the second her tribute to the memory of her mother.
“I am so very glad to see you, Mr. Noel,” said Miss Macks, greeting her visitor with much cordial directness of voice and eyes. “I have been expecting you. But you have waited so long—three days!”
Raymond Noel, who thought that under the circumstances he had been unusually courteous and prompt, was rather surprised to find himself thus put at once upon the defensive.
“We are not always able to carry out our wishes immediately, Miss Macks,” he replied, smiling a little. “I was hampered by several previously made engagements.”
“Yes; but this was a little different, wasn’t it? This was something important—not like an invitation to lunch or dinner, or the usual idle society talk.”
He looked at her; she was quite in earnest.
“I suppose it to be different,” he answered. “You must remember how little you have told me.”
“I thought I told you a good deal! However, the atmosphere of a reception is no place for such subjects, and I can understand that you did not take it in. That is the reason I asked you to come and see me here. Shall I begin at once? It seems rather abrupt.”
“I enjoy abruptness; I have not heard any for a long time.”
“That I can understand, too; I suppose the society here is all finished off—there are no rough ends.”
“There are ends. If not rough, they are often sharp.”
But Miss Macks did not stop to analyze this; she was too much occupied with her own subject.
“I will begin immediately, then,” she said. “It will be rather long; but if you are to understand me you ought, of course, to know the whole.”
“My chair is very comfortable,” replied Noel, placing his hat and gloves on the sofa near him, and taking an easy position with his head back.
Miss Macks thought that he ought to have said, “The longer it is, the more interesting,” or something of that sort. She had already described him to her mother as “not over-polite. Not rude in the least, you know—as far as possible from that; wonderfully smooth-spoken; but yet, somehow—awfully indifferent.” However, he was Raymond Noel; and that, not his politeness or impoliteness, was her point.
“To begin with, then, Mr. Noel, a year ago I had never read one word you have written; I had never even heard of you. I suppose you think it strange that I should tell you this so frankly; but, in the first place, it will give you a better idea of my point of view; and, in the second, I feel a friendly interest in your taking measures to introduce your writings into the community where I lived. It is a very intelligent community. Naturally, a writer wants his articles read. What else does he write them for?”
&nbs
p; “Perhaps a little for his own entertainment,” suggested her listener.
“Oh no! He would never take so much trouble just for that.”
“On the contrary, many would take any amount just for that. Successfully to entertain one’s self—that is one of the great successes of life.”
Miss Macks gazed at him; she had a very direct gaze.
“This is just mere talk,” she said, not impatiently, but in a business-like tone. “We shall never get anywhere if you take me up so. It is not that your remarks are not very cultivated and interesting, and all that, but simply that I have so much to tell you.”
“Perhaps I can be cultivated and interesting dumbly. I will try.”
“You are afraid I am going to be diffuse; I see that. So many women are diffuse! But I shall not be, because I have been thinking for six months just what I should say to you. It was very lucky that I went with Mrs. Lawrence to that reception where I met you. But if it had not happened as it did I should have found you out all the same. I should have looked for your address at all the bankers’, and if it was not there I should have inquired at all the hotels. But it was delightful luck getting hold of you in this way almost the very minute I enter Rome!”
She spoke so simply and earnestly that Noel did not say that he was immensely honored, and so forth, but merely bowed his acknowledgments.
“To go back. I shall give you simply heads,” pursued Miss Macks. “If you want details, ask, and I will fill them in. I come from the West. Tuscolee Falls is the name of our town. We had a farm there, but we did not do well with it after Mr. Spurr’s death, so we rented it out. That is how I come to have so much leisure. I have always had a great deal of ambition; by that I mean that I did not see why things that had once been done could not be done again. It seemed to me that the point was—just determination. And then, of course, I always had the talent. I made pictures when I was a very little girl. Mother has them still, and I can show them to you. It is just like all the biographies, you know. They always begin in childhood, and astonish the family. Well, I had my first lessons from a drawing-teacher who spent a summer in Tuscolee. I can show you what I did while with him. Then I attended, for four years, the Young Ladies’ Seminary in the county-town, and took lessons while there. I may as well be perfectly frank and tell the whole, which is that everybody was astonished at my progress, and that I was myself. All sorts of things are prophesied out there about my future. You see, the neighborhood is a very generous-spirited one, and they like to think they have discovered a genius at their own doors. My telling you all this sounds, I know, rather conceited, Mr. Noel. But if you could see my motive, and how entirely without conceit my idea of myself really is, you would hold me free from that charge. It is only that I want you to know absolutely the whole.”
Constance Fenimore Woolson Page 49
