Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

  “What are you doing, Caroline? Those are my trunks, aren’t they? You may stop; I shall not leave Belmonte.”

  Nora, who had followed, led her back. “Your mother and aunt are so very anxious to go north, dear,” she explained. “Come and lie down; you must not tire yourself before the journey.”

  But Dorothy resisted. “Please call them, Nora; call them both; I must tell them. I know mamma; she will have me carried. But that is because she does not understand. When I tell her, it will be different. Please call them both.”

  When they came in—Mrs. Tracy alarmed, Mrs. North smiling as if prepared to be, outwardly, very indulgent—Dorothy was still standing in the centre of the room, the laces of her white dress fluttering in the soft breeze.

  “Mamma,” she said, “I must tell you. Aunt Charlotte, you have always been kind to me. I cannot go away; do not ask me.”

  “Sit down, Dorothy. Nora, make her sit down. You will not be asked to take a step, my daughter; everything is arranged; don’t trouble yourself even to think.”

  “You do not understand, mamma. But I myself have not understood until lately. I cannot leave Belmonte.”

  “But Dr. Hotham thinks you can,” interposed Mrs. Tracy, soothingly; “he knows how much strength you have. We are all going with you, and the journey will be very easy. You used to like Vevey.”

  “Let me stay here; I wish to stay here.”

  “But we have never intended to spend our lives at Bellosguardo,” answered Mrs. North, drawing her towards the divan and making her sit down.

  “Let me stay a little while longer, mamma.”

  “You mean that you will be willing to go later? But we think that now is the time. You have nothing to do save to rest here quietly, and then go to sleep; you will open your eyes in Vevey.”

  Dorothy, seated, her hands extended on her knees, looked up at her mother. “Mamma, you don’t know. There’s an ache that will not leave me. I haven’t told you about it. But I’m so unhappy!”

  Mrs. Tracy, hurrying forward, put her arm round the girl protectingly. Mrs. North, her face slightly flushed, whispered to Nora:

  “She is wandering. Please go and send some one immediately for the doctor. Write a note for the man to take with him.”

  In this way she got rid of Nora.

  Dorothy, alone with her mother and aunt, went on talking: “I didn’t know what it meant myself for ever so long. But now I do, and it’s all simple. I shall just stay quietly here. This is the best place. And you mustn’t mind, for it makes me very happy.”

  “My darling, have you written? What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Tracy.

  “What do I mean?” Dorothy repeated. She smiled; into her white face came a flush of color. “I mean that I shall see him very soon now. It won’t be long to wait.”

  “She has sent for him,” thought the aunt. “I was right; it is Owen.”

  “That is why I wish to stay here,” Dorothy went on. “Everything here is associated with Alan; he liked Belmonte so much.”

  “Alan?” breathed the aunt, amazed, but instantly concealing her amazement. Mrs. North quickly measured some drops from a phial containing a sedative.

  Dorothy let her head sink back against the cushions. “In the beginning I didn’t in the least know that I was going to feel it so. But that ache came, and it wouldn’t stop. I tried all sorts of things—don’t you remember? I tried studying. I tried music lessons. He used to urge me to sing. He liked long walks, and I never would go; so then I took long walks. You haven’t forgotten them, have you? But the ache went on, and I could not stand it. So I asked you to go to Paris. Paris has always been so funny and amusing. But it wasn’t funny any more. When we came back here I thought that perhaps some one coming up every day and staying a long time would make me forget. But having Waddy was worse than being alone, and at last I hated him. Owen Charrington, too! Owen used to make me laugh; I thought he would make me laugh again. But he didn’t at all. And when he asked me that last day to ride it was like a knife; for Alan always went with me, and would never say anything to spoil my pleasure. Yet he did not care about it really, though I insisted upon going day after day. That is the way it was about everything. But I’m paying for it now; I miss him so—I miss him so! Alan! Alan!—” And putting her thin hands over her face, Dorothy burst into miserable heart-broken sobs.

  Nora came running in; Mrs. North handed her the medicine glass.

  “Hysterics,” she said. “Give her those drops as soon as you can.”

  “I look to you, doctor, to get us out of this new difficulty,” said this lady the next day to Dr. Hotham. “She has taken this fixed idea that she does not wish to leave Belmonte. But the fixed idea of a girl of nineteen ought not to be a trouble to you. Can’t you suggest something? Has science no resources for such a case?”

  Dr. Hotham’s resource was to send to Rome for a colleague. The most distinguished English physician in Italy was called to Florence, and there was a consultation at Bellosguardo. When it was over Mrs. North came in to see the great man.

  His sentences were agreeable; they were also encouraging. After a time he spoke of the varying forms of nervous prostration; then he asked whether this very interesting young lady could have, by any possibility, something weighing upon her mind?

  “No, nothing,” replied the mother.

  “Ah! In that case time, I trust, is all that is necessary for a complete recovery.”

  “My own idea would be to take her north in spite of her disinclination to go,” Mrs. North went on. “A disinclination ought not to be important. The journey would soon be over. She could be kept under the influence of sedatives. But Dr. Hotham will not give his consent.”

  “I agree with him, madam. Do not force her; the effect upon the nervous system might be bad. Let her do whatever she fancies. Amuse her. What a pity there is no Corney Grain in Italy!”

  “Everything in the way of amusement has been tried. That is why I wish to take her away.”

  “Ah! I understood you to say, I think, that there is no hidden cause, no wish, no mental—ah—err—strain?”

  “Nothing of any consequence. She is hysterical sometimes; but that is owing to her physical weakness,” Mrs. North answered. And she said what she believed.

  A month later Dorothy, lying on a couch in her room, put out her hand to Nora. “I must give you some of my money, Nora, for your poor people—your orphans and the school and the hospital. I will give it to you to-morrow.”

  “You can help Nora to distribute it,” said Mrs. Tracy.

  “Dear Aunt Charlotte, how you hate to hear me speak of it! But I talk to Nora, you know, just as I please in the night.”

  “No; talk to me, too. Say whatever you like,” answered Mrs. Tracy, quickly.

  “It is so warm this evening that I can have all the windows open,” Dorothy went on. “Take the lamp out, Nora, please, and let in the moonlight; I like to see it shining across the floor.” She lay in silence for some minutes looking at the radiance. They had cut off her hair, thinking that its length and thickness might be taking something from her small store of strength. Her face, with the boyish locks, looked very childlike. “Do you remember that song, Aunt Charlotte, ‘Through the long days’? The moonlight makes me think of it. First, Felicia Philipps sang it one moonlight evening over at Villa Dorio. Then, after we were married, some one sang it here in the garden, and Alan said, when it was over— Oh, if I could only tell him once, just once, that I did love him! He never believed it—he never knew—”

  “Don’t cry, dear. Don’t.”

  “No; I don’t cry very often now,” Dorothy answered, her breast rising in one or two long sobs. “Last spring Waddy dared to sing that song again—Alan’s song! I could not see him after that.

  “Through the long days, the long days and the years—”

  “It will tire you to sing, de
ar.”

  “No; I like it.” And then, in a faint little thread of a voice, barely audible, but very sweet, she sang, lying there in the moonlight, the beautiful song:

  “Through the long days, the long days and the years,

  What will my loved one be,

  Parted from me, parted from me,

  Through the long days and years?

  “Never, ah, never on earth again—”

  It was her last song. Three days later she died. She passed away so quietly that they did not know it was death; they thought she was asleep.

  When at last they learned what it was, Mrs. North, standing beside the couch, white and stern, said, with rigid lips, “The doctors did not tell us.”

  But the doctors did not know.

  A Transplanted Boy

  * * *

  LORENZO came into the hall, bell in hand.

  Putting down his white gloves at the feet of the goddess Flora, he began his promenade: ding-dong past Jupiter and Juno; ding-dong past Mars and Venus, Neptune and Diana, Minerva and Apollo, until the last pedestal on the east was reached; here there was no goddess, only a leaping flame. There was a corresponding tongue of fire on the last pedestal of the west side opposite, and both of these architectural ornaments were made of wood, painted scarlet. On the north side there towered six windows as high as those of a church. These windows faced a flight of stone steps that went down in a dignified sweep, eighteen feet wide, to a landing adorned with a Muse; here, dividing into two wings, the staircase turned to the right and the left in noble curves, and descended to the square hall below. The massive iron-clamped portals of this lower hall were open; they were swung back early in the morning, in order that the horses might pass through on their way to the street; for there were horses in the stables of the court-yard within. They did pass through, making with the carts to which they were harnessed a thundering clatter which would have deafened the inmates of an American dwelling. But the old Pisan palace had been built in another fashion. This lower hall with its heavy pavement and great doors, the gallery above with the rows of life-sized statues, the broad sweep of the stone stairways—all these, a space that could have swallowed many modern houses entire, were but its entrance; and so massive were the floors that no one in the long ranges of rooms above had any intimation of the moment when their hallway was turned into a street. The outer portals remained swung back all day; but the light inner doors were opened and closed on demand by old Bianca, the portress, who lived in a dusky den under the staircase. This evening the sunset was so brilliant that even these inner doors stood open, and Bianca herself had come to the threshold, blinking a little as the radiance fell upon her patient, cloistered face.

  She was looking at a boy who was leaning over the parapet opposite. This boy, with one arm round a small dog whom he had lifted to the top of the wall by his side, was gazing at the tawny water of the Arno as it glided past the house; for the old palace was in the Lung’ Arno of Pisa, the sunny street that follows the river like a quay, its water-side lying open to the stream, protected by a low wall. Bianca was evidently thinking of this boy and the summons of the clanging bell above; whether he cared for the bell or not, he seemed to feel at last the power of her mild gaze directed upon his back, for, swinging himself down from the parapet, he crossed the street, and with his dog at his heels, entered the palace. He went up the right-hand stairway, glancing as he passed at the two stone caryatides which upheld the balustrade at the landing; these were girls who had probably been intended for mermaids; but their fish endings were vague compared with the vividly human expression of their anxious young countenances—an anxiety oddly insisted upon by the unknown house-sculptor who had chiselled them according to his fantasy hundreds of years before. Freshly arrived Americans, not yet broken in to the light foreign breakfast, and frozen from January to March, were accustomed to declare that the faces of these caryatides reflected in advance all the miseries of the pension, that is, all the hardship of winter life in Italy which assails the surprised and undefended pilgrim from the United States. But the boy who was coming up the stairs, though American, was not freshly arrived; in his mind the caryatides illustrated, more or less, a charming story which his mother had told him—the story of the Little Mermaid; he was fond of their anxious stone cheeks on that account.

  The Casa Corti was not an ordinary pension. In the first place, it had the distinction of occupying the whole of the Rondinelli palace, with the great shield of the Rondinellis (showing their six heraldic swallows sitting on their tails) over its door; in the second, it had been in the hands of one family for four generations, and was to go down in the same line. The establishment could accommodate seventy persons. Three-fourths of the seventy were always English, drawn hither by the fact that Madame Corti was of English descent. A few Americans were allowed to enter, and an occasional foreigner was received as a favor. In the pension phraseology the English were “we,” their transatlantic cousins “the Americans,” and all the rest “foreigners.” As Lorenzo’s bell ceased many doors opened, and from the various quarters into which the old Ghibelline residence had for its present purposes been divided—from high rooms overlooking the river and adorned with frescos to low-browed cells in the attic under the eaves; from apartments that looked upon small inner courts like yellow wells, wells that resounded with the jingle of dish-washing from morning till night; from short staircases descending at unexpected points, and from others equally unlooked for which mounted from secret chambers in the half-story (chambers whose exact situation always remained a mystery to the rest of the house)—from all of these, and from two far-off little dwellings perched like tents on the roof, came the guests of the pension on their way to the dining-room and dinner. For they were all guests: the word patron or boarder was unknown. In the same way the head of the establishment was not by any means the boarding-house-keeper or the landlady: she was the proprietress. She had inherited her pension as other people inherit an estate, and she managed it in much the same autocratic fashion.

  When all her guests were seated, this proprietress herself rustled in, a little late. Her attire was elaborate: a velvet gown made with a train, an amber star in the hair, and a chain of large amber beads wound three times round the throat, and falling in a long loop to the belt. She entered with a gliding step, pressing her dimpled hands together as she advanced, and giving a series of little bends from the waist upward, which were intended as general salutation to the company; her smile meanwhile gradually extended itself, until, as her chair was drawn out with a flourish by Lorenzo, it became broad enough to display her teeth as she sank gracefully into her place at the head of her table, and, with a final bow to the right and the left, unfolded her napkin. Her duty as regarded civility being now done, she broke off a morsel of bread, and took a rapid survey of her seventy, with the mixture of sharp personal dislike and the business views which forced her to accept them visible as usual in her eyes behind her smile.

  Her seventy appeared, as they always did, eminently respectable. There were three English curates; there were English husbands and wives of the travelling and the invalid varieties; there were four or five blooming English girls with pink cheeks and very straight backs; and there were dozens of English old maids, and of that species of relict that returns naturally to spinsterhood after the funeral, without having acquired, from passing through it, any of the richer tints and more ample outlines that belong to the married state. In addition there were several Americans, and a few “foreigners.”

  Lorenzo and his assistants were carrying away the soup-plates when two more guests entered late. This was high crime. Madame’s eyes, looking smaller than ever, gleamed like two sparks as they passed. For if one were so unfortunate as to be late for dinner at Casa Corti the custom was to make an apologetic little bow to madame as one entered—entered with hasty, repentant step (having passed, outside the door, the whole miscellane
ous force of the establishment gathered together with cans of hot water to wash the forks). But these two had made no bow, and madame had known that they would not; so she talked to her right-hand neighbor, Captain Sholto Fraser, R.N., and carefully pretended not to see them. The delinquents were Americans (madame would have said “Of course!”), a pretty little woman who looked much younger than her age (which was thirty-three), and the boy who had adorned the parapet with his sprawling person—a mother and son. They found their empty chairs waiting for them at the far end of the room. The boy’s place was at his mother’s left hand; on her right she had one of the curates.

  “Late again!” began this gentleman. “We shall have to impose a fine upon you, Mrs. Roscoe; we shall indeed.” And he made, playfully, a menacing gesture with his large, very well kept hand.

  “Ought I to come for the soup?” inquired the lady, surveying the plateful before her with a slight curl of her lip.

  “Nay; when it is cold!” remonstrated her neighbor. “Be more reasonable, pray.” He regarded her smilingly.

  “Oh, reasonable women are horrid!” responded Mrs. Roscoe. “I should never think of coming down until later,” she went on, “only Maso—he likes the soup.” The boy was eating rapidly. She watched him for a moment. “I don’t see how he can!” she added.