“Let him laugh who wins,” said Ford, triumphantly. The old streaked stone wall, if dreary, was at least high; no one saw him but one very wet and bedraggled little bird, who was in the tree above. This bird was so much cheered (it must have been that) that he immediately chirruped one note quite briskly, and coming out on a drier twig, began to arrange his soaked feathers.
“Now,” said Ford, “we will have those shoes dried, whether you like it or not. No more imprudence allowed. How angry you were when I said we might find a pair in the village that you could wear! Of course I meant children’s size.” He had drawn her hand through his arm, and was going towards the gate.
But she freed herself and stopped. “It is all a mistake,” she said, hurriedly. “It means nothing. I am not myself to-day. Do not think of it.”
“Certainly I shall not trouble myself to think of it much when—what is so much better—I have it.”
“No; it is nothing. Forget it. I shall not see you again. I am going back to America immediately—next week.”
He looked at her as she uttered these short sentences. Then he took her hands in his. “I know about the loss of your fortune, Katharine; you need not tell me. No, Sylvia did not betray you. I heard it quite by chance from another source while I was still in Heidelberg. That is the reason I came.”
“The reason you came!” she repeated, moving from him, with the old proud light coming back into her eyes. “You thought I would be overwhelmed—you thought that I would be so broken that I would be glad—you pitied me—you came to help me? And you were sure—” She stopped; her voice was shaking.
“Yes, Katharine, I did pity you. Yes, I came to help you if you would let me. But I was not sure. I was sure of nothing but my own obstinate love, which burst out uncontrollably when I thought of you in trouble. I have never thought of you in that way before; you have always had everything. The thought has brought me straight to your side.”
But she was not softened. “I withdraw all I have said,” she answered. “You have taken advantage.”
“As it happens, you have said nothing. As to taking advantage, of course I took advantage: I was glad enough to see your pale face and sad eyes. But that is because you have always carried things with such a high hand. First and last, I have had a great deal of bad treatment.”
“That is not true.”
“Very well; then it is not. It shall be as you please. Do you want me to go down on my knees to you on this wet gravel?”
But she still turned from him.
“Katharine,” he said, in a graver tone, “I am sorry on your account that your fortune is gone, or nearly gone; but on my own, how can I help being glad? It was a barrier between us, which, as I am, and as you are—but principally as you are—would have been, I fear, a hopeless one. I doubt if I should ever have surmounted it. Your loss brings you nearer to me—the woman I deeply love, love in spite of myself. Now if you are my wife—and a tenderly loved wife you will be—you will in a measure be dependent upon your husband, and that is very sweet to a self-willed man like myself. Perhaps in time I can even make it sweet to you.”
A red spot burned in each of her cheeks. “It is very hard,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“Well, on the whole, life is hard,” answered John Ford. But the expression in his eyes was more tender than his words. At any rate, it seemed to satisfy her.
“Do you know what I am going to do?” he said, some minutes later. “I am going to make Benjamin Franklin light a fire on one of those old literary hearths at the château. Your shoes shall be dried in the presence of Corinne herself (who must, however, have worn a much larger pair). And while they are drying I will offer a formal apology for any past want of respect, not only to Corinne, but to all the other portraits, especially to that blue-eyed Madame Necker in her very tight white satin gown. We will drink their healths in some of the native wine. If you insist, I will even make an effort to admire the yellow turban.”
He carried out his plan. Benjamin Franklin, tempted by the fee offered, and relying no doubt upon the gloomy weather as a barrier against discovery, made a bright fire upon one of the astonished hearths, and brought over a flask of native wine, a little loaf, and some fine grapes. Ford arranged these on a spindle-legged table, and brought forward an old tapestried arm-chair for Katharine. Then while she sat sipping her wine and drying her shoes before the crackling flame, he went gravely round the room, glass in hand, pausing before each portrait to bow ceremoniously and drink to its health and long life—probably in a pictorial sense. When he had finished the circuit, “Here’s to you all, charming vanished ladies of the past,” he said; “may you each have every honor in the picturesque, powdered, unorthographic age to which you belong, and never by any possibility step over into ours!”
“That last touch has spoiled the whole,” said the lady in the tapestried chair.
But Ford declared that an expression in Madame Necker’s blue eye approved his words.
He now came back to the hearth. “This will never do,” he said. “The shoes are not drying; you must take them off.” And with that he knelt down and began to unbutton them. But Katharine, agreeing to obey orders, finished the task herself. The old custodian, who had been standing in the doorway laughing at Ford’s portrait pantomime, now saw an opportunity to make himself useful; he came forward, took one of the shoes, put it upon his hand, and, kneeling down, held it close to the flame. The shoes were little boots of dark cloth like the habit, slender, dainty, and made with thin soles; they were for riding, not walking. Ford brought forward a second arm-chair and sat down. “The old room looks really cheerful,” he said. “The portraits are beginning to thaw; presently we shall see them smile.”
Katharine too was smiling. She was also blushing a little. The blush and slight embarrassment made her look like a school-girl.
“Where shall we go for the winter?” said Ford. “I can give you one more winter over here, and then I must go home and get to work again. And as we have so little foreign time left, I suggest that we lose none of it, and begin our married life at once. Don’t be alarmed; he does not understand a word of English. Shall we say, then, next week?”
“No.”
“Are you waiting to know me better? Take me, and make me better.”
“What are your principal faults—I mean besides those I already know?” she said, shielding her face from the heat of the fire with her riding gauntlets.
“I have very few. I like my own way; but it is always a good way. My opinions are rather decided ones; but would you like an undecided man? I do not enjoy general society, but I am extremely fond of the particular. I think that is all.”
“And your obstinacy?”
“Only firmness.”
“You are narrow, prejudiced; you do not believe in progress of any kind. You would keep women down with an iron hand.”
“A velvet one.”
The custodian now took the other shoe.
“He will certainly stretch them with that broad palm of his,” said Ford. “But perhaps it is as well; you have a habit of wearing shoes that are too small. What ridiculous little affairs those are! Will twelve pairs a year content you?”
A flush rose in her cheeks; she made no reply.
“It will be very hard for you to give up your independence, your control of things,” he said.
But she turned towards him with a very sweet expression in her eyes. “You will do it all for me,” she answered.
He rose, walked about the room, coming back to lean over the gilded top of her chair and say, with emphasis, “What in the world does that old wretch mean by staying here so persistently all this time?”
She laughed. Benjamin Franklin, looking up from his task, laughed too—probably on general principles of sociability and appreciation of his fee.
“To go back to your faults,” she said; “please come and
sit down, and acknowledge them. You have a very jealous nature.”
“You are mistaken. However, if you like jealousy, I can easily take it up.”
“It will not be necessary. It is already there.”
“You are thinking of some particular instance; of whom did you suppose I was jealous?”
But she would not say.
After a while he came back to it. “You thought I was jealous of Lorimer Percival,” he said.
The custodian now announced that both shoes were dry; she put them on, buttoning them with an improvised button-hook made of a hair-pin. The old man stood straightening himself after his bent posture; he still smiled—probably on the same general principles. The afternoon was drawing towards its close; Ford asked him to bring round the horses. He went out; they could hear his slow, careful tread on each of the slippery stairs. Katharine had risen; she went to the mirror to adjust her riding-hat. Ford came up and stood behind her. “Do you remember when I looked at you in the glass, in this same way, a year ago?” he said.
“How you talked to me that day about my poor little book! You made me feel terribly.”
“I am sorry. Forgive it.”
“But you do not forgive the book?”
“I will forget it, instead. You will write no more.”
“Always so sure! However, I will promise, if you acknowledge that you have a jealous disposition.”
She spoke gayly. He watched her in the glass a moment, then drew her away. “Whether I have a jealous disposition or not I do not know,” he answered. “But I was never jealous of Lorimer Percival; I held him in too light estimation. And I did not believe—no, not at any time—that you loved him; he was not a man whom you would love. Why you allowed yourself to become engaged to him I do not know; but I suspect it was because he flattered what you thought your literary talent. I do not believe you would ever have married him; you would have drawn back at the last moment. To be engaged to him was one thing, to marry him another. You kept your engagement along for months, when there was no reason at all for the delay. If you had married him I should have thought the less of you, but I should not have been jealous.” He paused. “I might never have let you know it, Katharine,” he went on, “but I prefer that there should be nothing but the truth between us. I know that it was Percival who broke the engagement at the last, and not you. I knew it when I was here in the summer. He himself told me when I met him in Scotland just after his marriage.”
She broke from him. “How base are all men!” she said, in a voice unlike her own.
“In him it was simply egotism. He knew that I had known of his engagement to you, and he wished me to appreciate that in order to marry that sweet young girl, who was quite without fortune, he had been obliged to make, and had made, a great sacrifice.”
“Great indeed!” she commented, bitterly. “You do well to commend him.”
“I do not commend him. I simply say that he was following out his nature. Being a poet, he is what is called sympathetic, you know; and he wanted my appreciation and sympathy—I will not say applause.”
She was standing with her back towards him. She now walked towards the door. But her courage failed, she sank into a chair and covered her face with her hands. “It is too much,” she said. “You wait until I have lost my fortune and am overwhelmed; you wait until I am rejected, cast aside; and then you come and win from me an avowal of my love, telling me afterwards—afterwards”— Her voice broke, she burst into tears.
“Telling you afterwards nothing but that I love you. Telling you afterwards that I have not had one really happy moment since our conversation in this old house a year ago. Telling you afterwards that my life has resolved itself into but one unceasing, tormenting wish—the wish, Katharine, that you would love me, I suppose I ought to say a little, but I mean a great deal. Look at me; is this humble enough for you?”
He drew her hands away; she saw that he was kneeling at her feet; and, not only that, but she saw also something very like a mist in the gray eyes she had always thought too cold.
In the library of Mr. John Ford, near New York, there hangs in the place of honor a water-color sketch of an old yellow château. Beneath it, ranged by themselves, are all the works of that eloquent authoress and noble woman, Madame de Staël.
“You admire her?” said a visitor recently, in some surprise. “To me she always seemed a—a little antique, you know.”
“She is antiquity itself! But she once lent me her house, and I am grateful. By-the-way, Katharine, I never told you, although I found it out afterwards: Benjamin Franklin understood English, after all.”
UNCOLLECTED STORIES
Contents
“‘Miss Grief’”
“In Sloane Street”
“Miss Grief”
* * *
“A CONCEITED FOOL” is a not uncommon expression. Now, I know that I am not a fool, but I also know that I am conceited. But, candidly, can it be helped if one happens to be young, well and strong, passably good-looking, with some money that one has inherited and more that one has earned—in all, enough to make life comfortable—and if upon this foundation rests also the pleasant superstructure of a literary success? The success is deserved, I think: certainly it was not lightly gained. Yet even with this I fully appreciate its rarity. Thus, I find myself very well entertained in life: I have all I wish in the way of society, and a deep, though of course carefully concealed, satisfaction in my own little fame; which fame I foster by a gentle system of non-interference. I know that I am spoken of as “that quiet young fellow who writes those delightful little studies of society, you know;” and I live up to that definition.
A year ago I was in Rome, and enjoying life particularly. I had a large number of my acquaintances there, both American and English, and no day passed without its invitation. Of course I understood it: it is seldom that you find a literary man who is good-tempered, well-dressed, sufficiently provided with money, and amiably obedient to all the rules and requirements of “society.” “When found, make a note of it;” and the note was generally an invitation.
One evening, upon returning to my lodgings, my man Simpson informed me that a person had called in the afternoon, and upon learning that I was absent had left not a card, but her name—“Miss Grief.” The title lingered—Miss Grief! “Grief has not so far visited me here,” I said to myself, dismissing Simpson and seeking my little balcony for a final smoke, “and she shall not now. I shall take care to be ‘not at home’ to her if she continues to call.” And then I fell to thinking of Isabel Abercrombie, in whose society I had spent that and many evenings: they were golden thoughts.
The next day there was an excursion; it was late when I reached my rooms, and again Simpson informed me that Miss Grief had called.
“Is she coming continuously?” I said, half to myself.
“Yes, sir: she mentioned that she should call again.”
“How does she look?”
“Well, sir, a lady, but not so prosperous as she was, I should say,” answered Simpson, discreetly.
“Young?”
“No, sir.”
“Alone?”
“A maid with her, sir.”
But once outside in my little high-up balcony with my cigar, I again forgot Miss Grief and whatever she might represent. Who would not forget in that moonlight, with Isabel Abercrombie’s face to remember?
The stranger came a third time, and I was absent; then she let two days pass, and began again. It grew to be a regular dialogue between Simpson and myself when I came in at night: “Grief to-day?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What time?”
“Four, sir.”
“Happy the man,” I thought, “who can keep her confined to a particular hour!”
But I should not have treated my visitor so cavalierly if I had not felt sure that she was eccentric a
nd unconventional—qualities extremely tiresome in a woman no longer young or attractive. If she were not eccentric she would not have persisted in coming to my door day after day in this silent way, without stating her errand, leaving a note, or presenting her credentials in any shape. I made up my mind that she had something to sell—a bit of carving or some intaglio supposed to be antique. It was known that I had a fancy for oddities. I said to myself, “She has read or heard of my ‘Old Gold’ story, or else ‘The Buried God,’ and she thinks me an idealizing ignoramus upon whom she can impose. Her sepulchral name is at least not Italian; probably she is a sharp country-woman of mine, turning, by means of the present æsthetic craze, an honest penny when she can.”
She had called seven times during a period of two weeks without seeing me, when one day I happened to be at home in the afternoon, owing to a pouring rain and a fit of doubt concerning Miss Abercrombie. For I had constructed a careful theory of that young lady’s characteristics in my own mind, and she had lived up to it delightfully until the previous evening, when with one word she had blown it to atoms and taken flight, leaving me standing, as it were, on a desolate shore, with nothing but a handful of mistaken inductions wherewith to console myself. I do not know a more exasperating frame of mind, at least for a constructor of theories. I could not write, and so I took up a French novel (I model myself a little on Balzac). I had been turning over its pages but a few moments when Simpson knocked, and, entering softly, said, with just a shadow of a smile on his well-trained face, “Miss Grief.” I briefly consigned Miss Grief to all the Furies, and then, as he still lingered—perhaps not knowing where they resided—I asked where the visitor was.
“Outside, sir—in the hall. I told her I would see if you were at home.”
“She must be unpleasantly wet if she had no carriage.”
“No carriage, sir: they always come on foot. I think she is a little damp, sir.”
Constance Fenimore Woolson Page 74
