It is hard for any man to deny merits attributed to him, especially if he has been ascribing to himself the opposite demerits. But Colville summoned his dispersed forces to protest against this.
“Oh, no, no,” he cried. “Anything but that. My conduct has been selfish and shameful. If you could understand all—”
“I think I do understand all — at least far more, I regret to say, than my daughter has been willing to tell me. And I am more than satisfied with you. I thank you and honour you.”
“Oh no; don’t say that,” pleaded Colville. “I really can’t stand it.”
“And when I came here it was with the full intention of approving and confirming Imogene’s decision. But I was met at once by a painful and surprising state of things. You are aware that you have been very sick?”
“Dimly,” said Colville.
“I found you very sick, and I found my daughter frantic at the error which she had discovered in herself — discovered too late, as she felt.” Mrs. Graham hesitated, and then added abruptly, “She had found out that she did not love you.”
“Didn’t love me?” repeated Colville feebly.
“She had been conscious of the truth before, but she had stifled her misgivings insanely, and, as I feel, almost wickedly, pushing on, and saying to herself that when you were married, then there would be no escape, and she must love you.”
“Poor girl! poor child! I see, I see.”
“But the accident that was almost your death saved her from that miserable folly and iniquity. Yes,” she continued, in answer to the protest in his face, “folly and iniquity. I found her half crazed at your bedside. She was fully aware of your danger, but while she was feeling all the remorse that she ought to feel — that any one could feel — she was more and more convinced that she never had loved you and never should. I can give you no idea of her state of mind.”
“Oh, you needn’t! you needn’t! Poor, poor child!”
“Yes, a child indeed. If it had not been for the pity I felt for her — But no matter about that. She saw at last that if your heroic devotion to her” — Colville did his best to hang his pillowed head for shame— “if your present danger did not awaken her to some such feeling for you as she had once imagined she had; if they both only increased her despair and self-abhorrence, then the case was indeed hopeless. She was simply distracted. I had to tear her away almost by force. She has had a narrow escape from brain-fever. And now I have come to implore, to demand” — Mrs. Graham, with all her poise and calm, was rising to the hysterical key— “her release from a fate that would be worse than death for such a girl. I mean marrying without the love of her whole soul. She esteems you, she respects you, she admires you, she likes you; but—” Mrs. Graham pressed her lips together, and her eyes shone.
“She is free,” said Colville, and with the words a mighty load rolled from his heart. “There is no need to demand anything.”
“I know.”
“There hasn’t been an hour, an instant, during — since I — we — spoke together that I wouldn’t have released her if I could have known what you tell me now.”
“Of course! — of course!”
“I have had my fears — my doubts; but whenever I approached the point I found no avenue by which we could reach a clearer understanding. I could not say much without seeming to seek for myself the release I was offering her.”
“Naturally. And what added to her wretchedness was the suspicion at the bottom of all that she had somehow forced herself upon you — misunderstood you, and made you say and do things to spare her that you would not have done voluntarily.” This was advanced tentatively. In the midst of his sophistications Colville had, as most of his sex have, a native, fatal, helpless truthfulness, which betrayed him at the most unexpected moments, and this must now have appeared in his countenance. The lady rose haughtily. She had apparently been considering him, but, after all, she must have been really considering her daughter. “If anything of the kind was the case,” she said, “I will ask you to spare her the killing knowledge. It’s quite enough for me to know it. And allow me to say, Mr. Colville, that it would have been far kinder in you—”
“Ah, think, my dear madam!” he exclaimed. “How could I?”
She did think, evidently, and when she spoke it was with a generous emotion, in which there was no trace of pique.
“You couldn’t. You have done right; I feel that, and I will trust you to say anything you will to my daughter.”
“To your daughter? Shall I see her?”
“She came with me. She wished to beg your forgiveness.”
Colville lay silent. “There is no forgiveness to be asked or granted,” he said, at length. “Why should she suffer the pain of seeing me? — for it would be nothing else. What do you think? Will it do her any good hereafter? I don’t care for myself.”
“I don’t know what to think,” said Mrs. Graham. “She is a strange child. She may have some idea of reparation.”
“Oh, beseech her from me not to imagine that any reparation is due! Where there has been an error there must be blame; but wherever it lies in ours, I am sure it isn’t at her door. Tell her I say this; tell her that I acquit her with all my heart of every shadow of wrong; that I am not unhappy, but glad for her sake and my own that this has ended as it has.” He stretched his left hand across the coverlet to her, and said, with the feebleness of exhaustion, “Good-bye. Bid her good-bye for me.”
Mrs. Graham pressed his hand and went out. A moment after the door was flung open, and Imogene burst into the room. She threw herself on her knees beside his bed. “I will pray to you!” she said, her face intense with the passions working in her soul. She seemed choking with words which would not come; then, with an inarticulate cry that must stand for all, she caught up the hand that lay limp on the coverlet; she crushed it against her lips, and ran out of the room.
He sank into a deathly torpor, the physical refusal of his brain to take account of what had passed. When he woke from it, little Effie Bowen was airily tiptoeing about the room, fondly retouching its perfect order. He closed his eyes, and felt her come to him and smooth the sheet softly under his chin. Then he knew she must be standing with clasped hands admiring the effect. Some one called her in whisper from the door. It closed, and all was still again.
XXII
Colville got himself out of the comfort and quiet of Mrs. Bowen’s house as soon as he could. He made the more haste because he felt that if he could have remained with the smallest trace of self-respect, he would have been glad to stay there for ever.
Even as it was, the spring had advanced to early summer, and the sun was lying hot and bright in the piazzas, and the shade dense and cool in the narrow streets, before he left Palazzo Pinti; the Lung’ Arno was a glare of light that struck back from the curving line of the buff houses; the river had shrivelled to a rill in its bed; the black cypresses were dim in the tremor of the distant air on the hill-slopes beyond; the olives seemed to swelter in the sun, and the villa walls to burn whiter and whiter. At evening the mosquito began to wind his tiny horn. It was the end of May, and nearly everybody but the Florentines had gone out of Florence, dispersing to Villa Reggio by the sea, to the hills of Pistoja, and to the high, cool air of Siena. More than once Colville had said that he was keeping Mrs. Bowen after she ought to have got away, and she had answered that she liked hot weather, and that this was not comparable to the heat of Washington in June. She was looking very well, and younger and prettier than she had since the first days of their renewed acquaintance in the winter. Her southern complexion enriched itself in the sun; sometimes when she came into his room from outdoors the straying brown hair curled into loose rings on her temples, and her cheeks glowed a deep red.
She said those polite things to appease him as long as he was not well enough to go away, but she did not try to detain him after his strength sufficiently returned. It was the blow on the head that kept him longest. After his broken arm and his other b
ruises were quite healed, he was aware of physical limits to thinking of the future or regretting the past, and this sense of his powerlessness went far to reconcile him to a life of present inaction and oblivion. Theoretically he ought to have been devoured by remorse and chagrin, but as a matter of fact he suffered very little from either. Even in people who are in full possession of their capacity for mental anguish one observes that after they have undergone a certain amount of pain they cease to feel.
Colville amused himself a good deal with Effie’s endeavours to entertain him and take care of him. The child was with him every moment that she could steal from her tasks, and her mother no longer attempted to stem the tide of her devotion. It was understood that Effie should joke and laugh with Mr. Colville as much as she chose; that she should fan him as long as he could stand it; that she should read to him when he woke, and watch him when he slept. She brought him his breakfast, she petted him and caressed him, and wished to make him a monster of dependence and self-indulgence. It seemed to grieve her that he got well so fast.
The last night before he left the house she sat on his knee by the window looking out beyond the firefly twinkle of Oltrarno, to the silence and solid dark of the solemn company of hills beyond. They had not lighted the lamps because of the mosquitoes, and they had talked till her head dropped against his shoulder.
Mrs. Bowen came in to get her. “Why, is she asleep?”
“Yes. Don’t take her yet,” said Colville.
Mrs. Bowen rustled softly into the chair which Effie had left to get into Colville’s lap. Neither of them spoke, and he was so richly content with the peace, the tacit sweetness of the little moment, that he would have been glad to have it silently endure forever. If any troublesome question of his right to such a moment of bliss obtruded itself upon him, he did not concern himself with it.
“We shall have another hot day to-morrow,” said Mrs. Bowen at length. “I hope you will find your room comfortable.”
“Yes: it’s at the back of the hotel, mighty high, and wide, and no sun ever comes into it except when they show it to foreigners in winter. Then they get a few rays to enter as a matter of business, on condition that they won’t detain them. I dare say I shall stay there some time. I suppose you will be getting away from Florence very soon.
“Yes. But I haven’t decided where to go yet.”
“Should you like some general expression of my gratitude for all you’ve done for me, Mrs. Bowen?”
“No; I would rather not. It has been a great pleasure — to Effie.”
“Oh, a luxury beyond the dreams of avarice.” They spoke in low tones, and there was something in the hush that suggested to Colville the feasibility of taking into his unoccupied hand one of the pretty hands which the pale night-light showed him lying in Mrs. Bowen’s lap. But he forbore, and only sighed. “Well, then, I will say nothing. But I shall keep on thinking all my life.”
She made no answer.
“When you are gone, I shall have to make the most of Mr. Waters,” he said.
“He is going to stop all summer, I believe.”
“Oh yes. When I suggested to him the other day that he might find it too hot, he said that he had seventy New England winters to thaw out of his blood, and that all the summers he had left would not be more than he needed. One of his friends told him that he could cook eggs in his piazza in August, and he said that he should like nothing better than to cook eggs there. He’s the most delightfully expatriated compatriot I’ve ever seen.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s well enough for him. Life has no claims on him any more. I think it’s very pleasant over here, now that everybody’s gone,” added Colville, from a confused resentfulness of collectively remembered Days and Afternoons and Evenings. “How still the night is!”
A few feet clapping by on the pavement below alone broke the hush.
“Sometimes I feel very tired of it all, and want to get home,” sighed Mrs. Bowen.
“Well, so do I.”
“I can’t believe it’s right staying away from the country so long.” People often say such things in Europe.
“No, I don’t either, if you’ve got anything to do there.”
“You can always make something to do there.”
“Oh yes.” Some young young men, breaking from a street near by, began to sing. “We shouldn’t have that sort of thing at home.”
“No,” said Mrs. Bowen pensively.
“I heard just such singing before I fell asleep the night after that party at Madame Uccelli’s, and it filled me with fury.”
“Why should it do that?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like voices from our youth — Lina.”
She had no resentment of his use of her name in the tone with which she asked: “Did you hate that so much?”
“No; the loss of it.”
They both fetched a deep breath.
“The Uccellis have a villa near the baths of Lucca,” said Mrs. Bowen. “They have asked me to go.”
“Do you think of going?” inquired Colville. “I’ve always fancied it must be pleasant there.”
“No; I declined. Sometimes I think I will just stay on in Florence.”
“I dare say you’d find it perfectly comfortable. There’s nothing like having the range of one’s own house in summer.” He looked out of the window on the blue-black sky.
“‘And deepening through their silent spheres,
Heaven over heaven rose the night,’”
he quoted. “It’s wonderful! Do you remember how I used to read Mariana in the South to you and poor Jenny? How it must have bored her! What an ass I was!”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Bowen breathlessly, in sympathy with his reminiscence rather than in agreement with his self-denunciation.
Colville broke into a laugh, and then she began to laugh to; but not quite willingly as it seemed.
Effie started from her sleep. “What — what is it?” she asked, stretching and shivering as half-wakened children do.
“Bed-time,” said her mother promptly, taking her hand to lead her away. “Say good-night to Mr. Colville.”
The child turned and kissed him. “Good night,” she murmured.
“Good night, you sleepy little soul!” It seemed to Colville that he must be a pretty good man, after all, if this little thing loved him so.
“Do you always kiss Mr. Colville good-night?” asked her mother when she began to undo her hair for her in her room.
“Sometimes. Don’t you think it’s nice?”
“Oh yes; nice enough.”
Colville sat by the window a long time thinking Mrs. Bowen might come back; but she did not return.
Mr. Waters came to see him the next afternoon at his hotel.
“Are you pretty comfortable here?” he asked.
“Well, it’s a change,” said Colville. “I miss the little one awfully.”
“She’s a winning child,” admitted the old man. “That combination of conventionality and naïveté is very captivating. I notice it in the mother.”
“Yes, the mother has it too. Have you seen them to-day?”
“Yes; Mrs. Bowen was sorry to be out when you came.”
“I had the misfortune to miss them. I had a great mind to go again to-night.”
The old man said nothing to this. “The fact is,” Colville went on, “I’m so habituated to being there that I’m rather spoiled.”
“Ah, it’s a nice place,” Mr. Waters admitted.
“Of course I made all the haste I could to get away, and I have the reward of a good conscience. But I don’t find that the reward is very great.”
The old gentleman smiled. “The difficulty is to know conscience from self-interest.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt of it in my case,” said Colville. “If I’d consulted my own comfort and advantage, I should still be at Palazzo Pinti.”
“I dare say they would have been glad to keep you.”
“Do you really
think so?” asked Colville, with sudden seriousness. “I wish you would tell me why. Have you any reason — grounds? Pshaw! I’m absurd!” He sank back into the easy-chair from whose depths he had pulled himself in the eagerness of his demand, and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “Mr. Waters, you remember my telling you of my engagement to Miss Graham?”
“Yes.”
“That is broken off — if it were ever really on. It was a great mistake for both of us — a tragical one for her, poor child, a ridiculous one for me. My only consolation is that it was a mistake and no more; but I don’t conceal from myself that I might have prevented it altogether if I had behaved with greater wisdom and dignity at the outset. But I’m afraid I was flattered by an illusion of hers that ought to have pained and alarmed me, and the rest followed inevitably, though I was always just on the point of escaping the consequences of my weakness — my wickedness.”
“Ah, there is something extremely interesting in all that,” said the old minister thoughtfully. “The situation used to be figured under the old idea of a compact with the devil. His debtor was always on the point of escaping, as you say, but I recollect no instance in which he did not pay at last. The myth must have arisen from man’s recognition of the inexorable sequence of cause from effect, in the moral world, which even repentance cannot avert. Goethe tries to imagine an atonement for Faust’s trespass against one human soul in his benefactions to the race at large; but it is a very cloudy business.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 287
