“Oh, that’s all gone,” said Mrs. Bowen. “It was one of those convenient headaches — if you ever had them, you’d know — that go off at sunset.”
“But you’d have another to-morrow.”
“No, I’m safe for a whole fortnight from another.”
“Then you leave me without an excuse, and I was just wishing I had none,” said Colville.
After dinner Mrs. Bowen sent Effie to bed early to make up for the late hours of the night before, but she sat before the fire with Miss Graham rather late, talking Colville over, when he was gone.
“He’s very puzzling to me,” said Miss Graham. “Sometimes you think he’s nothing but an old cynic, from his talk, and then something so sweet and fresh comes out that you don’t know what to do. Don’t you think he has really a very poetical mind, and that he’s putting all the rest on?”
“I think he likes to make little effects,” said Mrs. Bowen judiciously. “He always did, rather.”
“Why, was he like this when he was young?”
“I don’t consider him very old now.”
“No, of course not. I meant when you knew him before.” Miss Graham had some needlework in her hand; Mrs. Bowen, who never even pretended to work at that kind of thing, had nothing in hers but the feather screen.
“He is old, compared with you, Imogene; but you’ll find, as you live along, that your contemporaries are always young. Mr. Colville is very much improved. He used to be painfully shy, but he put on a bold front, and now the bold front seems to have become a second nature with him.”
“I like it,” said Miss Graham, to her needle.
“Yes; but I suspect he’s still shy, at heart. He used to be very sentimental, and was always talking Ruskin. I think if he hadn’t talked Ruskin so much, Jenny Milbury might have treated him better. It was very priggish in him.”
“Oh, I can’t imagine Mr. Colville’s being priggish!”
“He’s very much improved. He used to be quite a sloven in his dress; you know how very slovenly most American gentlemen are in their dress, at any rate. I think that influenced her against him too.”
“He isn’t slovenly now,” suggested Miss Graham.
“Oh no; he’s quite swell,” said Mrs. Bowen, depriving the adjective of slanginess by the refinement of her tone.
“Well,” said Miss Graham, “I don’t see how you could have endured her after that. It was atrocious.”
“It was better for her to break with him, if she found out she didn’t love him, than to marry him. That,” said Mrs. Bowen, with a depth of feeling uncommon for her, “would have been a thousand times worse.”
“Yes, but she ought to have found out before she led him on so far.”
“Sometimes girls can’t. They don’t know themselves; they think they’re in love when they’re not. She was very impulsive, and of course she was flattered by it; he was so intellectual. But at last she found that she couldn’t bear it, and she had to tell him so.”
“Did she ever say why she didn’t love him?”
“No; I don’t suppose she could. The only thing I remember her saying was that he was ‘too much of a mixture.’”
“What did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Do you think he’s insincere?”
“Oh no. Perhaps she meant that he wasn’t single-minded.”
“Fickle?”
“No. He certainly wasn’t that in her case.”
“Undecided?”
“He was decided enough with her — at last.”
Imogene dropped the hopeless quest, “How can a man ever stand such a thing?” she sighed.
“He stood it very nobly. That was the best thing about it; he took it in the most delicate way. She showed me his letter. There wasn’t a word or a hint of reproach in it; he seemed to be anxious about nothing but her feeling badly for him. Of course he couldn’t help showing that he was mortified for having pursued her with attentions that were disagreeable to her; but that was delicate too. Yes, it was a very large-minded letter.”
“It was shocking in her to show it.”
“It wasn’t very nice. But it was a letter that any girl might have been proud to show.”
“Oh, she couldn’t have done it to gratify her vanity!”
“Girls are very queer, my dear,” said Mrs. Bowen, as if the fact were an abstraction. She mused upon the flat of her screen, while Miss Graham plied her needle in silence.
The latter spoke first. “Do you think he was very much broken by it?”
“You never can tell. He went out west then, and there he has stayed ever since. I suppose his life would have been very different if nothing of the kind had happened. He had a great deal of talent. I always thought I should hear of him in some way.”
“Well, it was a heartless, shameless thing! I don’t see how you can speak of it so leniently as you do, Mrs. Bowen. It makes all sorts of coquetry and flirtation more detestable to me than ever. Why, it has ruined his life!”
“Oh, he was young enough then to outlive it. After all, they were a boy and girl.”
“A boy and girl! How old were they?”
“He must have been twenty-three or four, and she was twenty.”
“My age! Do you call that being a girl?”
“She was old enough to know what she was about,” said Mrs. Bowen justly.
Imogene fell back in her chair, drawing out her needle the full length of its thread, and then letting her hand fall. “I don’t know. It seems as if I never should be grown up, or anything but a child. Yes, when I think of the way young men talk, they do seem boys. Why can’t they talk like Mr. Colville? I wish I could talk like him. It makes you forget how old and plain he is.”
She remained with her eyelids dropped in an absent survey of her sewing, while Mrs. Bowen regarded her with a look of vexation, impatience, resentment, on the last refinement of these emotions, which she banished from her face before Miss Graham looked up and said, with a smile “How funny it is to see Effie’s infatuation with him! She can’t take her eyes off him for a moment, and she follows him round the room so as not to lose a word he is saying. It was heroic of her to go to bed without a murmur before he left to-night.”
“Yes, she sees that he is good,” said Mrs. Bowen.
“Oh, she sees that he’s something very much more. Mr. Waters is good.”
Miss Graham had the best of the argument, and so Mrs. Bowen did not reply.
“I feel,” continued the young girl, “as if it were almost a shame to have asked him to go to that silly dancing party with us. It seems as if we didn’t appreciate him. I think we ought to have kept him for high aesthetic occasions and historical researches.”
“Oh, I don’t think Mr. Colville was very deeply offended at being asked to go with us.”
“No,” said Imogene, with another sigh, “he didn’t seem so. I suppose there’s always an undercurrent of sadness — of tragedy — in everything for him.”
“I don’t suppose anything of the kind,” cried Mrs. Bowen gaily. “He’s had time enough to get over it.”
“Do people ever get over such things?”
“Yes — men.”
“It must be because he was young, as you say. But if it had happened now?”
“Oh, it couldn’t happen now. He’s altogether too cool and calculating.”
“Do you think he’s cool and calculating?”
“No. He’s too old for a broken heart — a new one.”
“Mrs. Bowen,” demanded the girl solemnly, “could you forgive yourself for such a thing if you had done it?”
“Yes, perfectly well, if I wasn’t in love with him.”
“But if you’d made him think you were?” pursued the girl breathlessly.
“If I were a flirt — yes.”
“I couldn’t,” said Imogene, with tragic depth.
“Oh, be done with your intensities, and go to bed, Imogene,” said Mrs. Bowen, giving her a playful push.
VI
It was so long since Colville had been at a dancing party that Mrs. Bowen’s offer to take him to Madame Uccelli’s had first struck his sense of the ludicrous. Then it had begun to flatter him; it implied that he was still young enough to dance if he would, though he had stipulated that they were not to expect anything of the kind from him. He liked also the notion of being seen and accepted in Florentine society as the old friend of Mrs. Bowen’s, for he had not been long in discovering that her position in Florence was, among the foreign residents, rather authoritative. She was one of the very few Americans who were asked to Italian houses, and Italian houses lying even beyond the neutral ground of English-speaking intermarriages. She was not, of course, asked to the great Princess Strozzi ball, where the Florentine nobility appeared in the mediaeval pomp — the veritable costumes — of their ancestors; only a rich American banking family went, and their distinction was spoken of under the breath; but any glory short of this was within Mrs. Bowen’s reach. So an old lady who possessed herself of Colville the night before had told him, celebrating Mrs. Bowen at length, and boasting of her acceptance among the best English residents, who, next after the natives, seem to constitute the social ambition of Americans living in Italian cities.
It interested him to find that some geographical distinctions which are fading at home had quite disappeared in Florence. When he was there before, people from quite small towns in the East had made pretty Lina Ridgely and her friend feel the disadvantage of having come from the Western side of an imaginary line; he had himself been at the pains always to let people know, at the American watering-places where he spent his vacations, that though presently from Des Vaches, Indiana, he was really born in Rhode Island; but in Florence it was not at all necessary. He found in Mrs. Bowen’s house people from Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, New York, and Baltimore, all meeting as of apparently the same civilisation, and whether Mrs. Bowen’s own origin was, like that of the Etruscan cities, lost in the mists of antiquity, or whether she had sufficiently atoned for the error of her birth by subsequent residence in the national capital and prolonged sojourn in New York, it seemed certainly not to be remembered against her among her Eastern acquaintance. The time had been when the fact that Miss Graham came from Buffalo would have gone far to class her with the animal from which her native city had taken its name; but now it made no difference, unless it was a difference in her favour. The English spoke with the same vague respect of Buffalo and of Philadelphia; and to a family of real Bostonians Colville had the courage to say simply that he lived in Des Vaches, and not to seek to palliate the truth in any sort. If he wished to prevaricate at all, it was rather to attribute himself to Mrs. Bowen’s city in Ohio.
She and Miss Graham called for him with her carriage the next night, when it was time to go to Madame Uccelli’s.
“This gives me a very patronised and effeminate feeling,” said Colville, getting into the odorous dark of the carriage, and settling himself upon the front seat with a skill inspired by his anxiety not to tear any of the silken spreading white wraps that inundated the whole interior. “Being come for by ladies!” They both gave some nervous joyful laughs, as they found his hand in the obscurity, and left the sense of a gloved pressure upon it. “Is this the way you used to do in Vesprucius, Mrs. Bowen?”
“Oh no, indeed!” she answered. “The young gentlemen used to find out whether I was going, and came for me with a hack, and generally, if the weather was good, we walked home.”
“That’s the way we still do in Des Vaches. Sometimes, as a tremendous joke, the ladies come for us in leap-year. How do you go to balls in Buffalo, Miss Graham? Or, no; I withdraw the embarrassing question.” Some gleams from the street lamps, as they drove along, struck in through the carriage windows, and flitted over the ladies’ faces and were gone again. “Ah! this is very trying. Couldn’t you stop him at the next corner, and let me see how radiant you ladies really are? I may be in very great danger; I’d like to know just how much.”
“It wouldn’t be of any use,” cried the young girl gaily. “We’re all wrapped up, and you couldn’t form any idea of us. You must wait, and let us burst upon you when we come out of the dressing-room at Madame Uccelli’s.”
“But then it may be too late,” he urged. “Is it very far?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Bowen. “It’s ridiculously far. It’s outside the Roman Gate. I don’t see why people live at that distance.”
“In order to give the friends you bring the more pleasure of your company, Mrs. Bowen.”
“Ah! that’s very well. But you’re not logical.”
“No,” said Colville; “you can’t be logical and complimentary at the same time. It’s too much to ask. How delicious your flowers are!” The ladies each had a bouquet in her hand, which she was holding in addition to her fan, the edges of her cloak, and the skirt of her train.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Bowen; “we are so much obliged to you for them.”
“Why, I sent you no flowers,” said Colville, startled into untimely earnest.
“Didn’t you?” triumphed Mrs. Bowen. “I thought gentlemen always sent flowers to ladies when they were going to a ball with them. They used to, in Columbus.”
“And in Buffalo they always do,” Miss Graham added.
“Ah! they don’t in Des Vaches,” said Colville. They tried to mystify him further about the bouquets; they succeeded in being very gay, and in making themselves laugh a great deal. Mrs. Bowen was even livelier than the young girl.
Her carriage was one of the few private equipages that drove up to Madame Uccelli’s door; most people had not even come in a remise, but, after the simple Florentine fashion, had taken the little cabs, which stretched in a long line up and down the way; the horses had let their weary heads drop, and were easing their broken knees by extending their forelegs while they drowsed; the drivers, huddled in their great-coats, had assembled around the doorway to see the guests alight, with that amiable, unenvious interest of the Italians in the pleasure of others. The deep sky glittered with stars; in the corner of the next villa garden the black plumes of some cypresses blotted out their space among them.
“Isn’t it Florentine?” demanded Mrs. Bowen, giving the hand which Colville offered in helping her out of the carriage a little vivid pressure, full of reminiscence and confident sympathy. A flush of youth warmed his heart; he did not quail even when the porter of the villa intervened between her and her coachman, whom she was telling when to come back, and said that the carriages were ordered for three o’clock.
“Did you ever sit up so late as that in Des Vaches?” asked Miss Graham mischievously.
“Oh yes; I was editor of a morning paper,” he explained. But he did not like the imputation of her question.
Madame Uccelli accepted him most hospitably among her guests when he was presented. She was an American who had returned with her Italian husband to Italy, and had long survived him in the villa which he had built with her money. Such people grow very queer with the lapse of time. Madame Uccelli’s character remained inalienably American, but her manners and customs had become largely Italian; without having learned the language thoroughly, she spoke it very fluently, and its idioms marked her Philadelphia English. Her house was a menagerie of all the nationalities; she was liked in Italian society, and there were many Italians; English-speaking Russians abounded; there were many genuine English, Germans, Scandinavians, Protestant Irish, American Catholics, and then Americans of all kinds. There was a superstition of her exclusiveness among her compatriots, but one really met every one there sooner or later; she was supposed to be a convert to the religion of her late husband, but no one really knew what religion she was of, probably not even Madame Uccelli herself. One thing you were sure of at her house, and that was a substantial supper; it is the example of such resident foreigners which has corrupted the Florentines, though many native families still hold out against it.
The dancing was just beginning, and the daughter
of Madame Uccelli, who spoke both English and Italian much better than her mother, came forward and possessed herself of Miss Graham, after a polite feint of pressing Mrs. Bowen to let her find a partner for her.
Mrs. Bowen cooed a gracious refusal, telling Fanny Uccelli that she knew very well that she never danced now. The girl had not much time for Colville; she welcomed him, but she was full of her business of starting the dance, and she hurried away without asking him whether she should introduce him to some lady for the quadrille that was forming. Her mother, however, asked him if he would not go out and get himself some tea, and she found a lady to go with him to the supper-room. This lady had daughters whom apparently she wished to supervise while they were dancing, and she brought Colville back very soon. He had to stand by the sofa where she sat till Madame Uccelli found him and introduced him to another mother of daughters. Later he joined a group formed by the father of one of the dancers and the non-dancing husband of a dancing wife. Their conversation was perfunctory; they showed one another that they had no pleasure in it.
Presently the father went to see how his daughter looked while dancing; the husband had evidently no such curiosity concerning his wife; and Colville went with the father, and looked at Miss Graham. She was very beautiful, and she obeyed the music as if it were her breath; her face was rapt, intense, full of an unsmiling delight, which shone in her dark eyes, glowing like low stars. Her abandon interested Colville, and then awed him; the spectacle of that young, unjaded capacity for pleasure touched him with a profound sense of loss. Suddenly Imogene caught sight of him, and with the coming of a second look in her eyes the light of an exquisite smile flashed over her face. His heart was in his throat.
“Your daughter?” asked the fond parent at his elbow. “That is mine yonder in red.”
Colville did not answer, nor look at the young lady in red. The dance was ceasing; the fragments of those kaleidoscopic radiations were dispersing themselves; the tormented piano was silent.
The officer whom Imogene had danced with brought her to Mrs. Bowen, and resigned her with the regulation bow, hanging his head down before him as if submitting his neck to the axe. She put her hand in Colville’s arm, where he stood beside Mrs. Bowen. “Oh, do take me to get something to eat!”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 265
