Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Of course the man knew French. He ought to have tried him with that in the beginning. What did Hoskins say then?” asked Elmore impatiently.

  “He didn’t say anything: that was all the French he knew.”

  Elmore broke into a cry of laughter, and laughed on and on with the wild excess of a sad man when once he unpacks his heart in that way. His wife did not, perhaps, feel the absurdity as keenly as he, but she gladly laughed with him, for it smoothed her way to have him in this humor. “Mr. Hoskins just took him by the arm, and said, ‘Here! you come along with me,’ and led him up to the princess, where Lily was sitting; and when the princess had explained to him, Lily rose, and mustered up enough French to say, ‘Je vous prie, monsieur, de danser avec moi,’ and after that they were the greatest friends.”

  “That was very pretty in her; it was sovereignly gracious,” said Elmore.

  “Oh, if an American girl is left to manage for herself she can always manage!” cried Mrs. Elmore.

  “Well, and what else?” asked her husband.

  “Oh, I don’t know that it amounts to anything,” said Mrs. Elmore; but she did not delay further.

  It appeared from what she went on to say that in the German, which began not long after midnight, there was a figure fancifully called the symphony, in which musical toys were distributed among the dancers in pairs; the possessor of a small pandean pipe, or tin horn, went about sounding it, till he found some lady similarly equipped, when he demanded her in the dance. In this way a tall mask, to whom a penny trumpet had fallen, was stalking to and fro among the waltzers, blowing the silly plaything with a disgusted air, when Lily, all unconscious of him, where she sat with her hand in that of her faithful princess, breathed a responsive note. The mask was instantly at her side, and she was whirling away in the waltz. She tried to make him out, but she had already danced with so many people that she was unable to decide whether she had seen this mask before. He was not disguised except by the little visor of black silk, coming down to the point of his nose; his blond whiskers escaped at either side, and his blond moustache swept beneath, like the whiskers and moustaches of fifty other officers present, and he did not speak. This was a permissible caprice of his, but if she were resolved to make him speak, this also was a permissible caprice. She made a whole turn of the room in studying up the Italian sentence with which she assailed him: “Perdoni, Maschera; ma cosa ha detto? Non ho ben inteso.”

  “Speak English, Mask,” came the reply. “I did not say anything.” It came certainly with a German accent, and with a foreigner’s deliberation; but it came at once, and clearly.

  The English astonished her, and somehow it daunted her, for the mask spoke very gravely; but she would not let him imagine that he had put her down, and she rejoined laughingly, “Oh, I knew that you hadn’t spoken, but I thought I would make you.”

  “You think you can make one do what you will?” asked the mask.

  “Oh, no. I don’t think I could make you tell me who you are, though I should like to make you.”

  “And why should you wish to know me? If you met me in Piazza, you would not recognize my salutation.”

  “How do you know that?” demanded Lily. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, it is understood yet already,” answered the mask. “Your compatriot, with whom you live, wishes to be well seen by the Italians, and he would not let you bow to an Austrian.”

  “That is not so,” exclaimed Lily indignantly.

  “Professor Elmore wouldn’t be so mean; and if he would, I shouldn’t.” She was frightened, but she felt her spirit rising, too. “You seem to know so well who I am: do you think it is fair for you to keep me in ignorance?”

  “I cannot remain masked without your leave. Shall I unmask? Do you insist?”

  “Oh, no,” she replied. “You will have to unmask at supper, and then I shall see you. I’m not impatient. I prefer to keep you for a mystery.”

  “You will be a mystery to me even when you unmask,” replied the mask gravely.

  Lily was ill at ease, and she gave a little, unsuccessful laugh. “You seem to take the mystery very coolly,” she said in default of anything else.

  “I have studied the American manner,” replied the mask. “In America they take everything coolly: life and death, love and hate — all things.”

  “How do you know that? You have never been in America.”

  “That is not necessary, if the Americans come here to show us.”

  “They are not true Americans, if they show you that,” cried the girl.

  “No?”

  “But I see that you are only amusing yourself.”

  “And have you never amused yourself with me?”

  “How could I,” she demanded, “if I never saw you before?”

  “But are you sure of that?” She did not answer, for in this masquerade banter she had somehow been growing unhappy. “Shall I prove to you that you have seen me before? You dare not let me unmask.”

  “Oh, I can wait till supper. I shall know then that I have never seen you before. I forbid you to unmask till supper! Will you obey?” she cried anxiously.

  “I have obeyed in harder things,” replied the mask.

  She refused to recognize anything but meaningless badinage in his words. “Oh, as a soldier, yes! — you must be used to obeying orders.” He did not reply, and she added, releasing her hand and slipping it into his arm, “I am tired now; will you take me back to the princess?”

  He led her silently to her place, and left her with a profound bow.

  “Now,” said the princess, “they shall give you a little time to breathe. I will not let them make you dance every minute. They are indiscreet. You shall not take any of their musical instruments, and so you can fairly escape till supper.”

  “Thank you,” said Lily absently, “that will be the best way”; and she sat languidly watching the dancers. A young naval officer who spoke English ran across the floor to her.

  “Come,” he cried, “I shall have twenty duels on my hands if I let you rest here, when there are so many who wish to dance with you.” He threw a pipe into her lap, and at the same moment a pipe sounded from the other side of the room.

  “This is a conspiracy!” exclaimed the girl. “I will not have it! I am not going to dance any more.” She put the pipe back into his hands; he placed it to his lips, and sounded it several times, and then dropped it into her lap again with a laugh, and vanished in the crowd.

  “That little fellow is a rogue,” said the princess. “But he is not so bad as some of them. Monsieur,” she cried in French to the fair-whiskered, tall mask who had already presented himself before Lily, “I will not permit it, if it is for a trick. You must unmask. I will dispense mademoiselle from dancing with you.”

  The mask did not reply, but turned his eyes upon Lily with an appeal which the holes of the visor seemed to intensify. “It is a promise,” she said to the princess, rising in a sort of fascination. “I have forbidden him to unmask before supper.”

  “Oh, very well,” answered the princess, “if that is the case. But make him bring you back soon: it is almost time.”

  “Did you hear, Mask?” asked the girl, as they waltzed away. “I will only make two turns of the room with you.”

  “Perdoni?”

  “This is too bad!” she exclaimed. “I will not be trifled with in this way. Either speak English, or unmask at once.”

  The mask again answered in Italian, with a repeated apology for not understanding. “You understand very well,” retorted Lily, now really indignant, “and you know that this passes a jest.”

  “Can you speak German?” asked the mask in that tongue.

  “Yes, a little, but I do not choose to speak it. If you have anything to say to me you can say it in English.”

  “I cannot understand English,” replied the mask, still in German, and now Lily thought the voice seemed changed; but she clung to her belief that it was some hoax played at her expen
se, and she continued her efforts to make him answer her in English. The two turns round the room had stretched to half a dozen in this futile task, but she felt herself powerless to leave the mask, who for his part betrayed signs of embarrassment, as if he had undertaken a ruse of which he repented. A confused movement in the crowd and a sudden cessation of the music recalled her to herself, and she now took her partner’s arm and hurried with him toward the place where she had left the princess. But the princess had already gone into the supper-room, and she had no other recourse than to follow with the stranger.

  As they entered the supper-room she removed her little visor, and she felt, rather than saw, the mask put up his hand and lift away his own: he turned his head, and looked down upon her with the face of a man she had never seen before.

  “Ah, you are there!” she heard the princess’s voice calling to her from one of the tables. “How tired you look! Here — here! I will make you drink this glass of wine.”

  The officer who brought her the wine gave her his arm and led her to the princess, and the late mask mixed with the two-score other tall blond officers.

  The night which stretched so far into the day ended at last, and she followed Hoskins down to their gondola. He entered the boat first, to give her his hand in stepping from the riva; at the same moment she involuntarily turned at the closing of the door behind her, and found at her side the tall blond mask, or one of the masks, if there were two who had danced with her. He caught her hand suddenly to his lips, and kissed it.

  “Adieu — forgive!” he murmured in English, and then vanished indoors again.

  “Owen,” said Mrs. Elmore dramatically at the end of her narration, “who do you think it could have been?”

  “I have no doubt as to who it was, Celia,” replied Elmore, with a heat evidently quite unexpected to his wife, “and if Lily has not been seriously annoyed by the matter, I am glad that it has happened. I have had my regrets — my doubts — whether I did not dismiss that man’s pretensions too curtly, too unkindly. But I am convinced now that we did exactly right, and that she was wise never to bestow another thought upon him. A man capable of contriving a petty persecution of this sort — of pursuing a young girl who had rejected him in this shameless fashion, — is no gentleman.”

  “It was a persecution,” said Mrs. Elmore, with a dazed air, as if this view of the case had not occurred to her.

  “A miserable, unworthy persecution!” repeated her husband.

  “Yes.”

  “And we are well rid of him. He has relieved me by this last performance, immensely; and I trust that if Lily had any secret lingering regrets, he has given her a final lesson. Though I must say, in justice to her, poor girl, she didn’t seem to need it.”

  Mrs. Elmore listened with a strange abeyance; she looked beaten and bewildered, while he vehemently uttered these words. She could not meet his eyes, with her consciousness of having her intended romance thrown back upon her hands; and he seemed in nowise eager to meet hers, for whatever consciousness of his own. “Well, it isn’t certain that he was the one, after all,” she said.

  XII.

  Long after the ball Lily seemed to Elmore’s eye not to have recovered her former tone. He thought she went about languidly, and that she was fitful and dreamy, breaking from moods of unwonted abstraction in bursts of gayety as unnatural. She did not talk much of the ball; he could not be sure that she ever recurred to it of her own motion. Hoskins continued to come a great deal to the house, and she often talked with him for a whole evening; Elmore fancied she was very serious in these talks.

  He wondered if Lily avoided him, or whether this was only an illusion of his; but in any case, he was glad that the girl seemed to find so much comfort in Hoskins’s company, and when it occurred to him he always said something to encourage his visits. His wife was singularly quiescent at this time, as if, having accomplished all she wished in Lily’s presence at the princess’s ball, she was willing to rest for a while from further social endeavor. Life was falling into the dull routine again, and after the past shocks his nerves were gratefully clothing themselves in the old habits of tranquillity once more, when one day a letter came from the overseers of Patmos University, offering him the presidency of that institution on condition of his early return. The board had in view certain changes, intended to bring the university abreast with the times, which they hoped would meet his approval.

  Among these was a modification of the name, which was hereafter to be Patmos University and Military Institute. The board not only believed that popular feeling demanded the introduction of military drill into the college, but they felt that a college which had been closed at the beginning of the Rebellion, through the dedication of its president and nearly all its students to the war, could in no way so gracefully recognize this proud fact of its history as by hereafter making war one of the arts which it taught. The board explained that of course Mr. Elmore would not be expected to take charge of this branch of instruction at once. A competent military assistant would be provided, and continued under him as long as he should deem his services essential. The letter closed with a cordial expression of the desire of Elmore’s old friends to have him once more in their midst, at the close of labors which they were sure would do credit to the good old university and to the whole city of Patmos.

  Elmore read this letter at breakfast, and silently handed it to his wife: they were alone, for Lily, as now often happened, had not yet risen. “Well?” he said, when she had read it in her turn. She gave it back to him with a look in her dimmed eyes which he could not mistake. “I see there is no doubt of your feeling, Celia,” he added.

  “I don’t wish to urge you,” she replied, “but yes, I should like to go back. Yes, I am homesick. I have been afraid of it before, but this chance of returning makes it certain.”

  “And you see nothing ridiculous in my taking the presidency of a military institute?”

  “They say expressly that they don’t expect you to give instruction in that branch.”

  “No, not immediately, it seems,” he said, with his pensive irony. “And the history?”

  “Haven’t you almost got notes enough?”

  Elmore laughed sadly. “I have been here two years. It would take me twenty years to write such a history of Venice as I ought not to be ashamed to write; it would take me five years to scamp it as I thought of doing. Oh, I dare say I had better go back. I have neither the time nor the money to give to a work I never was fit for, — of whose magnitude even I was unable to conceive.”

  “Don’t say that!” cried his wife, with the old sympathy. “You will write it yet, I know you will. I would rather spend all my days in this — watery mausoleum than have you talk so, Owen!”

  “Thank you, my dear; but the work won’t be lost even if I give it up at this point. I can do something with my material, I suppose. And you know that if I didn’t wish to give up my project I couldn’t. It’s a sign of my unfitness for it that I’m able to abandon it. The man who is born to write the history of Venice will have no volition in the matter: he cannot leave it, and he will not die till he has finished it.” He feebly crushed a bit of bread in his fingers as he ended with this burst of feeling, and he shook his head in sad negation to his wife’s tender protest,— “Oh, you will come back some day to finish it!”

  “No one ever comes back to finish a history of Venice,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, you will,” she returned. “But you need the rest from this kind of work, now, just as you needed rest from your college work before. You need a change of standpoint, — and the American standpoint will be the very thing for you.”

  “Perhaps so, perhaps so,” he admitted. “At any rate, this is a handsome offer, and most kindly made, Celia. It’s a great compliment. I didn’t suppose they valued me so much.”

  “Of course they valued you, and they will be very glad to get you. I call it merely letting the historic material ripen in your mind, or else I shouldn’t let you accept. An
d I shall be glad to go home, Owen, on Lily’s account. The child is getting no good here: she’s drooping.”

  “Drooping?”

  “Yes. Don’t you see how she mopes about?”

  “I’m afraid — that — I have — noticed.”

  He was going to ask why she was drooping; but he could not. He said, recurring to the letter of the overseers, “So Patmos is a city.”

  “Of course it is by this time,” said his wife, “with all that prosperity!”

  Now that they were determined to go, their little preparations for return were soon made; and a week after Elmore had written to accept the offer of the overseers, they were ready to follow his letter home. Their decision was a blow to Hoskins under which he visibly suffered; and they did not realize till then in what fond and affectionate friendship he held them. He now frankly spent his whole time with them; he disconsolately helped them pack, and he did all that a consul can do to secure free entry for some objects of Venice that they wished to get in without payment of duties at New York.

  He said a dozen times, “I don’t know what I will do when you’re gone”; and toward the last he alarmed them for his own interests by beginning to say, “Well, I don’t see but what I will have to go along.”

  The last night but one Lily felt it her duty to talk to him very seriously about his future and what he owed to it. She told him that he must stay in Italy till he could bring home something that would honor the great, precious, suffering country for which he had fought so nobly, and which they all loved. She made the tears come into her eyes as she spoke, and when she said that she should always be proud to be associated with one of his works, Hoskins’s voice was quite husky in replying: “Is that the way you feel about it?” He went away promising to remain at least till he finished his bas-relief of Westward, and his figure of the Pacific Slope; and the next morning he sent around by a facchino a note to Lily.