VIII
In that still air of the Florentine winter, time seems to share thearrest of the natural forces, the repose of the elements. The pale bluesky is frequently overcast, and it rains two days out of five;sometimes, under extraordinary provocation from the north a snow-stormwhirls along under the low grey dome, and whitens the brown roofs, wherea growth of spindling weeds and grass clothes the tiles the whole yearround, and shows its delicate green above the gathered flakes. But forthe most part the winds are laid, and the sole change is from quiet sunto quiet shower. This at least is the impression which remains in thesenses of the sojourning stranger, whose days slip away with so littledifference one from another that they seem really not to have passed,but, like the grass that keeps the hillsides fresh round Florence allthe winter long, to be waiting some decisive change of season beforethey begin.
The first of the Carnival sights that marked the lapse of a month sincehis arrival took Colville by surprise. He could not have believed thatit was February yet if it had not been for the straggling maskers inarmour whom he met one day in Via Borgognissanti, with their visors upfor their better convenience in smoking. They were part of the chorus atone of the theatres, and they were going about to eke out their salarieswith the gifts of people whose windows the festival season privilegedthem to play under. The silly spectacle stirred Colville's blood alittle, as any sort of holiday preparation was apt to do. He thoughtthat it afforded him a fair occasion to call at Palazzo Pinti, where hehad not been so much of late as in the first days of his renewedacquaintance with Mrs. Bowen. He had at one time had the fancy that Mrs.Bowen was cool toward him. He might very well have been mistaken inthis; in fact, she had several times addressed him the politestreproaches for not coming, but he made some evasion, and went only onthe days when she was receiving other people, and when necessarily hesaw very little of the family.
Miss Graham was always very friendly, but always very busy, drawing teafrom the samovar, and looking after others. Effie Bowen dropped her eyesin re-established strangeness when she brought the basket of cake tohim. There was one moment when he suspected that he had been talked overin family council, and put under a certain regimen. But he had no proofof this, and it had really nothing to do with his keeping away, whichwas largely accidental. He had taken up, with as much earnestness as hecould reasonably expect of himself, that notion of studying thearchitectural expression of Florentine character at the differentperiods. He had spent a good deal of money in books, he had revived hisyouthful familiarity with the city, and he had made what acquaintance hecould with people interested in such matters. He met some of these inthe limited but very active society in which he mingled daily andnightly. After the first strangeness to any sort of social life had wornoff, he found himself very fond of the prompt hospitalities which hisintroduction at Mrs. Bowen's had opened to him. His host--or morefrequently it was his hostess--had sometimes merely an apartment at ahotel; perhaps the family was established in one of the furnishedlodgings which stretch the whole length of the Lung' Arno on eitherhand, and abound in all the new streets approaching the Cascine, and hadset up the simple and facile housekeeping of the sojourner in Florencefor a few months; others had been living in the villa or the palace theyhad taken for years.
The more recent and transitory people expressed something of theprevailing English and American aestheticism in the decoration of theirapartments, but the greater part accepted the Florentine drawing-room astheir landlord had imagined it for them, with furniture and curtains inyellow satin, a cheap ingrain carpet thinly covering the stone floor,and a fire of little logs ineffectually blazing on the hearth, andflickering on the carved frames of the pictures on the wall and thenakedness of the frescoed allegories in the ceiling. Whether of longeror shorter stay, the sojourners were bound together by a common languageand a common social tradition; they all had a Day, and on that day therewas tea and bread and butter for every comer. They had one another todine; there were evening parties, with dancing and without dancing.Colville even went to a fancy ball, where he was kept in countenance byseveral other Florentines of the period of Romola. At all these placeshe met nearly the same people, whose alien life in the midst of thenative community struck him as one of the phases of modern civilisationworthy of note, if not particular study; for he fancied it destined to awider future throughout Europe, as the conditions in England and Americagrow more tiresome and more onerous. They seemed to see very little ofItalian society, and to be shut out from practical knowledge of thelocal life by the terms upon which they had themselves insisted. Ourrace finds its simplified and cheapened London or New York in all itsContinental resorts now, but nowhere has its taste been so much studiedas in Italy, and especially in Florence. It was not, perhaps, the realEnglishman or American who had been considered, but a _forestiere_conventionalised from the Florentine's observation of many Anglo-Saxons.But he had been so well conjectured that he was hemmed round with a veryfair illusion of his national circumstances.
It was not that he had his English or American doctor to prescribe forhim when sick, and his English or American apothecary to compound hispotion; it was not that there was an English tailor and an Americandentist, an English bookseller and an English baker, and chapels ofevery shade of Protestantism, with Catholic preaching in English everySunday. These things were more or less matters of necessity, butColville objected that the barbers should offer him an American shampoo;that the groceries should abound in English biscuit and our own cannedfruit and vegetables, and that the grocers' clerks should be ambitiousto read the labels of the Boston baked beans. He heard--though he didnot prove this by experiment--that the master of a certain trattoria hadstudied the doughnut of New England till he had actually surpassed theoriginal in the qualities that have undermined our digestion as apeople. But above all it interested him to see that intense expressionof American civilisation, the horse-car, triumphing along themagnificent avenues that mark the line of the old city walls; and herecognised an instinctive obedience to an abtruse natural law in thefact that whereas the omnibus, which the Italians have derived from theEnglish, was not filled beyond its seating capacity, the horse-car wasovercrowded without and within at Florence, just as it is with us whoinvented it.
"I wouldn't mind even that," he said one day to the lady who was drawinghim his fifth or sixth cup of tea for that afternoon, and with whom hewas naturally making this absurd condition of things a matter ofpersonal question; "but you people here pass your days in a round ofunbroken English, except when you talk with your servants. I'm not sureyou don't speak English with the shop people. I can hardly get them tospeak Italian to me."
"Perhaps they think you can speak English better," said the lady.
This went over Florence; in a week it was told to Colville as somethingsaid to some one else. He fearlessly reclaimed it as said to himself,and this again was told. In the houses where he visited he had thefriendly acceptance of any intelligent and reasonably agreeable personwho comes promptly and willingly when he is asked, and seems always tohave enjoyed himself when he goes away. But besides this sort of generalfavour, he enjoyed a very pleasing little personal popularity which camefrom his interest in other people, from his good-nature, and from hisinertness. He slighted no acquaintance, and talked to every one with thesame apparent wish to be entertaining. This was because he was incapableof the cruelty of open indifference when his lot was cast with a dullperson, and also because he was mentally too lazy to contrive pretencesfor getting away; besides he did not really find anybody altogether abore, and he had no wish to shine. He listened without shrinking tostories that he had heard before, and to things that had already beensaid to him; as has been noted, he had himself the habit of repeatinghis ideas with the recklessness of maturity, for he had lived longenough to know that this can be done with almost entire safety.
He haunted the studios a good deal, and through a retrospective affinitywith art, and a human sympathy with the sacrifice which it alwaysinvolves, he was on friend
ly terms with sculptors and painters who werenot in every case so friendly with one another. More than once he sawthe scars of old rivalries, and he might easily have been an adherent oftwo or three parties. But he tried to keep the freedom of the differentcamps without taking sides; and he felt the pathos of the case when theyall told the same story of the disaster which the taste for bric-a-brachad wrought to the cause of art; how people who came abroad no longergave orders for statues and pictures, but spent their money on curtainsand carpets, old chests and chairs, and pots and pans. There were someamong these artists whom he had known twenty years before in Florence,ardent and hopeful beginners; and now the backs of their grey or baldheads, as they talked to him with their faces towards their work, and apencil or a pinch of clay held thoughtfully between their fingers,appealed to him as if he had remained young and prosperous, and they hadgone forward to age and hard work. They were very quaint at times. Theytalked the American slang of the war days and of the days before thewar; without a mastery of Italian, they often used the idioms of thattongue in their English speech. They were dim and vague about thecountry, with whose affairs they had kept up through the newspapers.Here and there one thought he was going home very soon; others hadfinally relinquished all thoughts of return. These had, perhaps withoutknowing it, lost the desire to come back; they cowered before theexpensiveness of life in America, and doubted of a future with which,indeed, only the young can hopefully grapple. But in spite of theiraccumulated years, and the evil times on which they had fallen, Colvillethought them mostly very happy men, leading simple and innocent lives ina world of the ideal, and rich in the inexhaustible beauty of the city,the sky, the air. They all, whether they were ever going back or not,were fervent Americans, and their ineffaceable nationality marked them,perhaps, all the more strongly for the patches of something alien thatoverlaid it in places. They knew that he was or had been a newspaperman; but if they secretly cherished the hope that he would bring them tothe _dolce lume_ of print, they never betrayed it; and the authorship ofhis letter about the American artists in Florence, which he printed inthe _American Register_ at Paris, was not traced to him for a wholeweek.
Colville was a frequent visitor of Mr. Waters, who had a lodging inPiazza San Marco, of the poverty which can always be decent in Italy. Itwas bare, but for the books that furnished it; with a table for hiswriting, on a corner of which he breakfasted, a wide sofa with cushionsin coarse white linen that frankly confessed itself a bed by night, andtwo chairs of plain Italian walnut; but the windows, which had no sun,looked out upon the church and the convent sacred to the old Socinianfor the sake of the meek, heroic mystic whom they keep alive in all theglory of his martyrdom. No two minds could well have been further apartthan the New England minister and the Florentine monk, and no two soulsnearer together, as Colville recognised with a not irreverent smile.
When the old man was not looking up some point of his saint's history inhis books, he was taking with the hopefulness of youth and the patienceof age a lesson in colloquial Italian from his landlady's daughter,which he pronounced with a scholarly scrupulosity and a sincere atonicMassachusetts accent. He practised the language wherever he could,especially at the trattoria where he dined, and where he made occasionsto detain the waiter in conversation. They humoured him, out of theirnational good-heartedness and sympathy, and they did what they could torealise a strange American dish for him on Sundays--a combination ofstockfish and potatoes boiled, and then fried together in small cakes.They revered him as a foreign gentleman of saintly amiability andincomprehensible preferences; and he was held in equal regard at thenext green-grocer's where he spent every morning five centessimi for abunch of radishes and ten for a little pat of butter to eat with hisbread and coffee; he could not yet accustom himself to mere bread andcoffee for breakfast, though he conformed as completely as he could tothe Italian way of living. He respected the abstemiousness of the race;he held that it came from a spirituality of nature to which the Northwas still strange, with all its conscience and sense of individualaccountability. He contended that he never suffered in his smalldealings with these people from the dishonesty which most of hiscountrymen complained of; and he praised their unfailing gentleness ofmanner; this could arise only from goodness of heart, which was perhapsthe best kind of goodness after all.
None of these humble acquaintance of his could well have accounted forthe impression they all had that he was some sort of ecclesiastic. Theycould never have understood--nor, for that matter, could any one haveunderstood through European tradition--the sort of sacerdotal officethat Mr. Waters had filled so long in the little deeply book-clubbed NewEngland village where he had outlived most of his flock, till one day herose in the midst of the surviving dyspeptics and consumptives and,following the example of Mr. Emerson, renounced his calling for ever. Bythat time even the pale Unitarianism thinning out into paler doubt wasno longer tenable with him. He confessed that while he felt the Divinegoodness more and more, he believed that it was a mistake to preach anyspecific creed or doctrine, and he begged them to release him from theirservice. A young man came to fill his place in their pulpit, but he kepthis place in their hearts. They raised a subscription of seventeenhundred dollars and thirty-five cents; another being submitted to thenew button manufacturer, who had founded his industry in the village, hepromptly rounded it out to three thousand, and Mr. Waters came toFlorence. His people parted with him in terms of regret as delicate asthey were awkward, and their love followed him. He correspondedregularly with two or three ladies, and his letters were sometimes readfrom his pulpit.
Colville took the Piazza San Marco in on his way to Palazzo Pinti on themorning when he had made up his mind to go there, and he stood at thewindow looking out with the old man, when some more maskers passedthrough the place--two young fellows in old Florentine dress, with athird habited as a nun.
"Ah," said the old man gently, "I wish they hadn't introduced the nun!But I suppose they can't help signalising their escape from thedomination of the Church on all occasions. It's a natural reaction. Itwill all come right in time."
"You preach the true American gospel," said Colville.
"Of course; there is no other gospel. That is the gospel."
"Do you suppose that Savonarola would think it had all come out right,"asked Colville, a little maliciously, "if he could look from the windowwith us here and see the wicked old Carnival, that he tried so hard tokill four hundred years ago, still alive? And kicking?" he added, incognisance of the caper of one of the maskers.
"Oh yes; why not? By this time he knows that his puritanism was all amistake, unless as a thing for the moment only. I should rather like tohave Savonarola here with us; he would find these costumes familiar;they are of his time. I shall make a point of seeing all I can of theCarnival, as part of my study of Savonarola, if nothing else."
"I'm afraid you'll have to give yourself limitations," said Colville, asone of the maskers threw his arm round the mock-nun's neck. But the oldman did not see this, and Colville did not feel it necessary to explainhimself.
The maskers had passed out of the piazza, now, and "Have you seen ourfriends at Palazzo Pinti lately?" said Mr. Waters.
"Not very," said Colville. "I was just on my way there."
"I wish you would make them my compliments. Such a beautiful youngcreature."
"Yes," said Colville; "she is certainly a beautiful girl."
"I meant Mrs. Bowen," returned the old man quietly.
"Oh, I thought you meant Miss Graham. Mrs. Bowen is my contemporary, andso I didn't think of her when you said young. I should have called herpretty rather than beautiful."
"No; she's beautiful. The young girl is good-looking--I don't deny that;but she is very crude yet."
Colville laughed. "Crude in looks? I should have said Miss Graham wasrather crude in mind, though I'm not sure I wouldn't have stopped atsaying _young_."
"No," mildly persisted the old man; "she couldn't be crude in mindwithout being crude in looks."
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"You mean," pursued Colville, smiling, but not wholly satisfied, "thatshe hasn't a lovely nature?"
"You never can know what sort of nature a young girl has. Her naturedepends so much upon that of the man whose fate she shares."
"The woman is what the man makes her? That is convenient for the woman,and relieves her of all responsibility."
"The man is what the woman makes him, too, but not so much so. The manwas cast into a deep sleep, you know----"
"And the woman was what he dreamed her. I wish she were."
"In most cases she is," said Mr. Waters.
They did not pursue the matter. The truth that floated in the oldminister's words pleased Colville by its vagueness, and flattered theman in him by its implication of the man's superiority. He wanted to saythat if Mrs. Bowen were what the late Mr. Bowen had dreamed her, thenthe late Mr. Bowen, when cast into his deep sleep, must have had LinaRidgely in his eye. But this seemed to be personalising the fantasyunwarrantably, and pushing it too far. For like reason he forbore to saythat if Mr. Waters's theory were correct, it would be better to beginwith some one whom nobody else had dreamed before; then you could besure at least of not having a wife to somebody else's mind rather thanyour own. Once on his way to Palazzo Pinti, he stopped, arrested by athought that had not occurred to him before in relation to what Mr.Waters had been saying, and then pushed on with the sense of securitywhich is the compensation the possession of the initiative brings to oursex along with many responsibilities. In the enjoyment of this, no manstops to consider the other side, which must wait his initiative,however they mean to meet it.
In the Por San Maria Colville found masks and dominoes filling the shopwindows and dangling from the doors. A devil in red and a clown in whitecrossed the way in front of him from an intersecting street; severalchildren in pretty masquerading dresses flashed in and out among thecrowd. He hurried to the Lung' Arno, and reached the palace where Mrs.Bowen lived, with these holiday sights fresh in his mind. Imogene turnedto meet him at the door of the apartment, running from the window whereshe had left Effie Bowen still gazing.
"We saw you coming," she said gaily, without waiting to exchange formalgreetings. "We didn't know at first but it might be somebody elsedisguised as you. We've been watching the maskers go by. Isn't itexciting?"
"Awfully," said Colville, going to the window with her, and putting hisarm on Effie's shoulder, where she knelt in a chair looking out. "Whathave you seen?"
"Oh, only two Spanish students with mandolins," said Imogene; "but youcan see they're _beginning_ to come."
"They'll stop now," murmured Effie, with gentle disappointment; "it'scommencing to rain."
"Oh, too bad!" wailed the young girl. But just then two mediaevalmen-at-arms came in sight, carrying umbrellas. "Isn't that toodelicious? Umbrellas and chain-armour!"
"You can't expect them to let their chain-armour get rusty," saidColville. "You ought to have been with me--minstrels in scale-armour,Florentines of Savonarola's times, nuns, clowns, demons, fairies--no endto them."
"It's very well saying we ought to have been with you; but we can't goanywhere alone."
"I didn't say alone," said Colville. "Don't you think Mrs. Bowen wouldtrust you with me to see these Carnival beginnings?" He had not meant atall to do anything of this kind, but that had not prevented his doingit.
"How do we know, when she hasn't been asked?" said Imogene, with a touchof burlesque dolor, such as makes a dignified girl enchanting, when shepermits it to herself. She took Effie's hand in hers, the child havingfaced round from the window, and stood smoothing it, with her lovelyhead pathetically tilted on one side.
"What haven't I been asked yet?" demanded Mrs. Bowen, coming lightlytoward them from a door at the side of the _salon_. She gave her hand toColville with the prettiest grace, and a cordiality that brought a flushto her cheek. There had really been nothing between them but a littleunreasoned coolness, if it were even so much as that; say rather adryness, aggravated by time and absence, and now, as friends do, after athing of that kind, they were suddenly glad to be good to each other.
"Why, you haven't been asked how you have been this long time," saidColville.
"I have been wanting to tell you for a whole week," returned Mrs. Bowen,seating the rest and taking a chair for herself. "Where have you been?"
"Oh, shut up in my cell at Hotel d'Atene, writing a short history of theFlorentine people for Miss Effie."
"Effie, take Mr. Colville's hat," said her mother. "We're going to makeyou stay to lunch," she explained to him.
"Is that so?" he asked, with an effect of polite curiosity.
"Yes." Imogene softly clapped her hands, unseen by Mrs. Bowen, forColville's instruction that all was going well. If it delights women topet an undangerous friend of our sex, to use him like one of themselves,there are no words to paint the soft and flattered content with whichhis spirit purrs under their caresses. "You must have nearly finishedthe history," added Mrs. Bowen.
"Well, I could have finished it," said Colville, "if I had only begunit. You see, writing a short history of the Florentine people is suchquick work that you have to be careful how you actually put pen topaper, or you're through with it before you've had any fun out of it."
"I think Effie will like to read that kind of history," said her mother.
The child hung her head, and would not look at Colville; she was stillshy with him; his absence must have seemed longer to a child, of course.
At lunch they talked of the Carnival sights that had begun to appear. Hetold of his call upon Mr. Waters, and of the old minister's purpose tosee all he could of the Carnival in order to judge intelligently ofSavonarola's opposition to it.
"Mr. Waters is a very good man," said Mrs. Bowen, with the air of notmeaning to approve him quite, nor yet to let any notion of his be madefun of in her presence. "But for my part I wish there were not going tobe any Carnival; the city will be in such an uproar for the next twoweeks."
"O Mrs. Bowen!" cried Imogene reproachfully; Effie looked at her motherin apparent anxiety lest she should be meaning to put forth anunquestionable power and stop the Carnival.
"The last Carnival, I thought there was never going to be any end to it;I was so glad when Lent came."
"Glad when _Lent_ came!" breathed Imogene, in astonishment; but sheventured upon nothing more insubordinate, and Colville admired to seethis spirited girl as subject to Mrs. Bowen as her own child. There isno reason why one woman should establish another woman over her, butnearly all women do it in one sort or another, from love of a voluntarysubmission, or from a fear of their own ignorance, if they are youngerand more inexperienced than their lieges. Neither the one passion northe other seems to reduce them to a like passivity as regards theirhusbands. They must apparently have a fetish of their own sex. Colvillecould see that Imogene obeyed Mrs. Bowen not only as a _protegee_ but asa devotee.
"Oh, I suppose _you_ will have to go through it all," said Mrs. Bowen,in reward of the girl's acquiescence.
"You're rather out of the way of it up here," said Colville. "You hadbetter let me go about with the young ladies--if you can trust them tothe care of an old fellow like me."
"Oh, I don't think you're so very old, at all times," replied Mrs.Bowen, with a peculiar look, whether indulgent or reproachful he couldnot quite make out.
But he replied, boldly, in his turn: "I have certainly my moments ofbeing young still; I don't deny it. There's always a danger of theiroccurrence."
"I was thinking," said Mrs. Bowen, with a graceful effect of notlistening, "that you would let me go too. It would be quite like oldtimes."
"Only too much honour and pleasure," returned Colville, "if you willleave out the old times. I'm not particular about having them along."Mrs. Bowen joined in laughing at the joke, which they had to themselves."I was only consulting an explicit abhorrence of yours in not asking youto go at first," he explained.
"Oh yes; I understand that."
The excellence of
the whole arrangement seemed to grow upon Mrs. Bowen."Of course," she said, "Imogene ought to see all she can of theCarnival. She may not have another chance, and perhaps if she had, _he_wouldn't consent."
"I'll engage to get _his_ consent," said the girl. "What I was afraid ofwas that I couldn't get yours, Mrs. Bowen."
"Am I so severe as that?" asked Mrs. Bowen softly.
"Quite," replied Imogene.
"Perhaps," thought Colville, "it isn't always silent submission."
For no very good reason that any one could give, the Carnival that yearwas not a brilliant one. Colville's party seemed to be always meetingthe same maskers on the street, and the maskers did not greatly increasein numbers. There were a few more of them after nightfall, but they werethen a little more bacchanal, and he felt it was better that the ladieshad gone home by that time. In the pursuit of the tempered pleasure oflooking up the maskers he was able to make the reflection that theirfantastic and vivid dresses sympathised in a striking way with thearchitecture of the city, and gave him an effect of Florence which hecould not otherwise have had. There came by and by a little attempt at a_corso_ in Via Cerratani and Via Tornabuoni. There were some masks incarriages, and from one they actually threw plaster _confetti_; half adozen bare-legged boys ran before and beat one another with bladders,Some people, but not many, watched the show from the windows, and thefootways were crowded.
Having proposed that they should see the Carnival together, Colville hadmade himself responsible for it to the Bowen household. Imogene said,"Well is this the famous Carnival of Florence?"
"It certainly doesn't compare with the Carnival last year," said Mrs.Bowen.
"Your reproach is just, Mrs. Bowen," he acknowledged. "I've managed itbadly. But you know I've been out of practice a great while there in DesVaches."
"Oh, poor Mr. Colville!" cried Imogene. "He isn't altogether to blame."
"I don't know," said Mrs. Bowen, humouring the joke in her turn. "Itseems to me that if he had consulted us a little earlier, he might havedone better."
He drove home with the ladies, and Mrs. Bowen made him stay to tea. Asif she felt that he needed to be consoled for the failure of hisCarnival, she was especially indulgent with him. She played to him onthe piano some of the songs that were in fashion when they were inFlorence together before.
Imogene had never heard them; she had heard her mother speak of them.One or two of them were negro songs, such as very pretty young ladiesused to sing without harm to themselves or offence to others; butImogene decided that they were rather rowdy. "Dear me, Mrs. Bowen! Did_you_ sing such songs? You wouldn't let Effie!"
"No, I wouldn't let Effie. The times are changed. I wouldn't let Effiego to the theatre alone with a young gentleman."
"The times are changed for the worse," Colville began. "What harm evercame to a young man from a young lady's going alone to the theatre withhim?"
He stayed till the candles were brought in, and then went away onlybecause, as he said, they had not asked him to stay to dinner.
He came nearly every day, upon one pretext or another, and he met themoftener than that at the teas and on the days of other ladies inFlorence; for he was finding the busy idleness of the life verypleasant, and he went everywhere. He formed the habit of carryingflowers to the Palazzo Pinti, excusing himself on the ground that theywere so cheap and so abundant as to be impersonal. He brought violets toEffie and roses to Imogene; to Mrs. Bowen he always brought a bunch ofthe huge purple anemones which grow so abundantly all winter long aboutFlorence. "I wonder why _purple_ anemones?" he asked her one day inpresenting them to her.
"Oh, it is quite time I should be wearing purple," she said gently.
"Ah, Mrs. Bowen!" he reproached her. "Why do I bring purple violets toMiss Effie?"
"You must ask Effie!" said Mrs. Bowen, with a laugh.
After that he stayed away forty-eight hours, and then appeared with abunch of the red anemones, as large as tulips, which light up the meadowgrass when it begins to stir from its torpor in the spring. "They grewon purpose to set me right with you," he said, "and I saw them when Iwas in the country."
It was a little triumph for him, which she celebrated by putting them ina vase on her table, and telling people who exclaimed over them thatthey were some Mr. Colville gathered in the country. He enjoyed hisprivileges at her house with the futureless satisfaction of a man. Heliked to go about with the Bowens; he was seen with the ladies drivingand walking, in most of their promenades. He directed their visits tothe churches and the galleries; he was fond of strolling about withEffie's daintily-gloved little hand in his. He took her to Giocosa's andtreated her to ices; he let her choose from the confectioner's prettiestcaprices in candy; he was allowed to bring the child presents in hispockets. Perhaps he was not as conscientious as he might have been inhis behaviour with the little girl. He did what he could to spoil her,or at least to relax the severity of the training she had received; heliked to see the struggle that went on in the mother's mind againstthis, and then the other struggle with which she overcame her oppositionto it. The worst he did was to teach Effie some picturesque Westernphrases, which she used with innocent effectiveness; she committed thecrimes against convention which he taught her with all the conventionalelegance of her training. The most that he ever gained for her were someconcessions in going out in weather that her mother thought unfit, orsitting up for half-hours after her bed-time. He ordered books for herfrom Goodban's, and it was Colville now, and not the Rev. Mr. Morton,who read poetry aloud to the ladies on afternoons when Mrs. Bowen gaveorders that she and Miss Graham should be denied to all other comers.
It was an intimacy; and society in Florence is not blind, and especiallyit is not dumb. The old lady who had celebrated Mrs. Bowen to him thefirst night at Palazzo Pinti led a life of active questions as to whatwas the supreme attraction to Colville there, and she referred her doubtto every friend with whom she drank tea. She philosophised the situationvery scientifically, and if not very conclusively, how few are theabsolute conclusions of science upon any point!
"He is a bachelor, and there is a natural affinity between bachelors andwidows--much more than if he were a widower too. If he were a widower Ishould say it was undoubtedly mademoiselle. If he were a little _bit_younger, I should have no doubt it was madame; but men of that age havesuch an ambition to marry young girls! I suppose that they think itproves they are not so very old, after all. And certainly he isn't tooold to marry. If he were wise--which he probably isn't, if he's likeother men in such matters--there wouldn't be any question about Mrs.Bowen. Pretty creature! And so much sense! Too much for him. Ah, mydear, how we are wasted upon that sex!"
Mrs. Bowen herself treated the affair with masterly frankness. More thanonce in varying phrase, she said: "You are very good to give us so muchof your time, Mr. Colville, and I won't pretend I don't know it. You'rehelping me out with a very hazardous experiment. When I undertook to seeImogene through a winter in Florence, I didn't reflect what a very gaytime girls have at home, in Western towns especially. But I haven'theard her breathe Buffalo once. And I'm sure it's doing her a great dealof good here. She's naturally got a very good mind; she's very ambitiousto be cultivated. She's read a good deal, and she's anxious to knowhistory and art; and your advice and criticism are the greatest possibleadvantage to her."
"Thank you," said Colville, with a fine, remote dissatisfaction. "Isupposed I was merely enjoying myself."
He had lately begun to haunt his banker's for information in regard tothe Carnival balls, with the hope that something might be made out ofthem.
But either there were to be no great Carnival balls, or it was a mistaketo suppose that his banker ought to know about them. Colville wentexperimentally to one of the people's balls at a minor theatre, which hefound advertised on the house walls. At half-past ten the dancing hadnot begun, but the masks were arriving; young women in gay silks anddirty white gloves; men in women's dresses, with enormous hands; girlsas pages; clowns, pantaloons, o
ld women, and the like. They were allvery good-humoured; the men, who far outnumbered the women, dancedcontentedly together. Colville liked two cavalry soldiers who waltzedwith each other for an hour, and then went off to a battery onexhibition in the pit, and had as much electricity as they could hold.He liked also two young citizens who danced together as long as hestayed, and did not leave off even for electrical refreshment. He cameaway at midnight, pushing out of the theatre through a crowd of peopleat the door, some of whom were tipsy. This certainly would not have donefor the ladies, though the people were civilly tipsy.
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