Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  They had arrived late in the dull, soft winter afternoon. The landlord led the way himself to their apartment, and asked if they would have fire; a facchino came in and kindled roaring blazes on the hearths; at the same time a servant lighted all the candles on the tables and mantels. They both gracefully accepted the fees that Mrs. Lander made Clementina give them; the facchino kissed the girl’s hand. “My!” said Mrs. Lander, “I guess you never had your hand kissed before.”

  The hotel developed advantages which, if not those she was used to, were still advantages. The halls were warmed by a furnace, and she came to like the little logs burning in her rooms. In the care of her own fire, she went back to the simple time of her life in the country, and chose to kindle it herself when it died out, with the fagots of broom that blazed up so briskly.

  In the first days of her stay she made inquiry for the best American doctor in Florence; and she found him so intelligent that she at once put her liver in his charge, with a history of her diseases and symptoms of every kind. She told him that she was sure that he could have cured Mr. Lander, if he had only had him in time; she exacted a new prescription from him for herself, and made him order some quinine pills for Clementina against the event of her feeling debilitated by the air of Florence.

  XX.

  In these first days a letter came to Clementina from Mrs. Lander’s banker, enclosing the introduction which Mrs. Milray had promised to her sister-in-law. It was from Mr. Milray, as before, and it was in Mrs. Milray’s handwriting; but no message from her came with it. To Clementina it explained itself, but she had to explain it to Mrs. Lander. She had to tell her of Mrs. Milray’s behavior after the entertainment on the steamer, and Mrs. Lander said that Clementina had done just exactly right; and they both decided, against some impulses of curiosity in Clementina’s heart, that she should not make use of the introduction.

  The ‘Hotel des Financieres’ was mainly frequented by rich Americans full of ready money, and by rich Russians of large credit. Better Americans and worse, went, like the English, to smaller and cheaper hotels; and Clementina’s acquaintance was confined to mothers as shy and ungrammatical as Mrs. Lander herself, and daughters blankly indifferent to her. Mrs. Lander drove out every day when it did not rain, and she took Clementina with her, because the doctor said it would do them both good; but otherwise the girl remained pent in their apartment. The doctor found her a teacher, and she kept on with her French, and began to take lessons in Italian; she spoke with no one but her teacher, except when the doctor came. At the table d’hote she heard talk of the things that people seemed to come to Florence for: pictures, statues, palaces, famous places; and it made her ashamed of not knowing about them. But she could not go to see these things alone, and Mrs. Lander, in the content she felt with all her circumstances, seemed not to suppose that Clementina could care for anything but the comfort of the hotel and the doctor’s visits. When the girl began to get letters from home in answer to the first she had written back, boasting how beautiful Florence was, they assumed that she was very gay, and demanded full accounts of her pleasures. Her brother Jim gave something of the village news, but he said he supposed that she would not care for that, and she would probably be too proud to speak to them when she came home. The Richlings had called in to share the family satisfaction in Clementina’s first experiences, and Mrs. Richling wrote her very sweetly of their happiness in them. She charged her from the rector not to forget any chance of self-improvement in the allurements of society, but to make the most of her rare opportunities. She said that they had got a guide-book to Florence, with a plan of the city, and were following her in the expeditions they decided she must be making every day; they were reading up the Florentine history in Sismondi’s Italian Republics, and she bade Clementina be sure and see all the scenes of Savonarola’s martyrdom, so that they could talk them over together when she returned.

  Clementina wondered what Mrs. Richling would think if she told her that all she knew of Florence was what she overheard in the talk of the girls in the hotel, who spoke before her of their dances and afternoon teas, and evenings at the opera, and drives in the Cascine, and parties to Fiesole, as if she were not by.

  The days and weeks passed, until Carnival was half gone, and Mrs. Lander noticed one day that Clementina appeared dull. “You don’t seem to get much acquainted?” she suggested.

  “Oh, the’e’s plenty of time,” said Clementina.

  “I wish the’e was somebody you could go round with, and see the place. Shouldn’t you like to see the place?” Mrs. Lander pursued.

  “There’s no hurry about it, Mrs. Lander. It will stay as long as we do.”

  Mrs. Lander was thoughtfully silent. Then she said, “I declare, I’ve got half a mind to make you send that letta to Miss Milray, after all. What difference if Mrs. Milray did act so ugly to you? He never did, and she’s his sista.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to send it, Mrs. Landa; you mustn’t ask me to. I shall get along,” said Clementina. The recognition of her forlornness deepened it, but she was cheerfuller, for no reason, the next morning; and that afternoon, the doctor unexpectedly came upon a call which he made haste to say was not professional.

  “I’ve just come from another patient of mine, and I promised to ask if you had not crossed on the same ship with a brother of hers, — Mr. Milray.”

  Celementina and Mrs. Lander looked guiltily at each other. “I guess we did,” Mrs. Lander owned at last, with a reluctant sigh.

  “Then, she says you have a letter for her.”

  The doctor spoke to both, but his looks confessed that he was not ignorant of the fact when Mrs. Lander admitted, “Well Clementina, he’e, has.”

  “She wants to know why you haven’t delivered it,” the doctor blurted out.

  Mrs. Lander looked at Clementina. “I guess she ha’n’t quite got round to it yet, have you, Clementina?”

  The doctor put in: “Well, Miss Milray is rather a dangerous person to keep waiting. If you don’t deliver it pretty soon, I shouldn’t be surprised if she came to get it.” Dr. Welwright was a young man in the early thirties, with a laugh that a great many ladies said had done more than any one thing for them, and he now prescribed it for Clementina. But it did not seem to help her in the trouble her face betrayed.

  Mrs. Lander took the word, “Well, I wouldn’t say it to everybody. But you’re our doctor, and I guess you won’t mind it. We don’t like the way Mrs. Milray acted to Clementina, in the ship, and we don’t want to be beholden to any of her folks. I don’t know as Clementina wants me to tell you just what it was, and I won’t; but that’s the long and sho’t of it.”

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “I’ve never met Mrs. Milray, but Miss Milray has such a pleasant house, and likes to get young people about her. There are a good many young people in your hotel, though, and I suppose you all have a very good time here together.” He ended by speaking to Clementina, and now he said he had done his errand, and must be going.

  When he was gone, Mrs. Lander faltered, “I don’t know but what we made a mistake, Clementina.”

  “It’s too late to worry about it now,” said the girl.

  “We ha’n’t bound to stay in Florence,” said Mrs. Lander, thoughtfully. “I only took the rooms by the week, and we can go, any time, Clementina, if you are uncomf’table bein’ here on Miss Milray’s account. We could go to Rome; they say Rome’s a nice place; or to Egypt.”

  “Mrs. Milray’s in Egypt,” Clementina suggested.

  “That’s true,” Mrs. Lander admitted, with a sigh. After a while she went on, “I don’t know as we’ve got any right to keep the letter. It belongs to her, don’t it?”

  “I guess it belongs to me, as much as it does to her,” said Clementina. “If it’s to her, it’s for me. I am not going to send it, Mrs. Landa.”

  They were still in this conclusion when early in the following afternoon Miss Milray’s cards were brought up for Mrs. Lander and Miss Claxon.

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p; “Well, I decla’e!” cried Mrs. Lander. “That docta: must have gone straight and told her what we said.”

  “He had no right to,” said Clementina, but neither of them was displeased, and after it was over, Mrs. Lander said that any one would have thought the call was for her, instead of Clementina, from the way Miss Milray kept talking to her. She formed a high opinion of her; and Miss Milray put Clementina in mind of Mr. Milray; she had the same hair of chiseled silver, and the same smile; she moved like him, and talked like him; but with a greater liveliness. She asked fondly after him, and made Clementina tell her if he seemed quite well, and in good spirits; she was civilly interested in Mrs. Milray’s health. At the embarrassment which showed itself in the girl, she laughed and said, “Don’t imagine I don’t know all about it, Miss Claxon! My sister-in-law has owned up very handsomely; she isn’t half bad, as the English say, and I think she likes owning up if she can do it safely.”

  “And you don’t think,” asked Mrs. Lander, “that Clementina done wrong to dance that way?”

  Clementina blushed, and Miss Milray laughed again. “If you’ll let Miss Claxon come to a little party I’m giving she may do her dance at my house; but she sha’n’t be obliged to do it, or anything she doesn’t like. Don’t say she hasn’t a gown ready, or something of that kind! You don’t know the resources of Florence, and how the dress makers here doat upon doing impossible things in no time at all, and being ready before they promise. If you’ll put Miss Claxon in my hands, I’ll see that she’s dressed for my dance. I live out on one of the hills over there, that you see from your windows” — she nodded toward them— “in a beautiful villa, too cold for winter, and too hot for summer, but I think Miss Claxon can endure its discomfort for a day, if you can spare her, and she will consent to leave you to the tender mercies of your maid, and—” Miss Milray paused at the kind of unresponsive blank to which she found herself talking, and put up her lorgnette, to glance from Mrs. Lander to Clementina. The girl said, with embarrassment, “I don’t think I ought to leave Mrs. Landa, just now. She isn’t very well, and I shouldn’t like to leave her alone.”

  “But we’re just as much obliged to you as if she could come,” Mrs. Lander interrupted; “and later on, maybe she can. You see, we han’t got any maid, yit. Well, we did have one at Woodlake, but she made us do so many things for her, that we thought we should like to do a few things for ouaselves, awhile.”

  If Miss Milray perhaps did not conceive the situation, exactly, she said, Oh, they were quite right in that; but she might count upon Miss Claxon for her dance, might not she; and might not she do anything in her power for them? She rose to go, but Mrs. Lander took her at her word, so far as to say, Why, yes, if she could tell Clementina the best place to get a dress she guessed the child would be glad enough to come to the dance.

  “Tell her!” Miss Milray cried. “I’ll take her! Put on your hat, my dear,” she said to Clementina, “and come with me now. My carriage is at your door.”

  Clementina looked at Mrs. Lander, who said, “Go, of cou’se, child. I wish I could go, too.”

  “Do come, too,” Miss Milray entreated.

  “No, no,” said Mrs. Lander, flattered. “I a’n’t feeling very well, to-day. I guess I’m better off at home. But don’t you hurry back on my account, Clementina.” While the girl was gone to put on her hat she talked on about her. “She’s the best gul in the wo’ld, and she won’t be one of the poorest; and I shall feel that I’m doin’ just what Mr. Landa would have wanted I should. He picked her out himself, moa than three yea’s ago, when we was drivin’ past her house at Middlemount, and it was to humor him afta he was gone, moa than anything else, that I took her. Well, she wa’n’t so very easy to git, either, I can tell you.” She cut short her history of the affair to say when Clementina came back, “I want you should do the odderin’ yourself, Miss Milray, and not let her scrimp with the money. She wants to git some visitin’ cahds; and if you miss anything about her that she’d ought to have, or that any otha yong lady’s got, won’t you just git it for her?”

  As soon as she imagined the case, Miss Milray set herself to overcome Mrs. Lander’s reluctance from a maid. She prevailed with her to try the Italian woman whom she sent her, and in a day the genial Maddalena had effaced the whole tradition of the bleak Ellida. It was not essential to the understanding which instantly established itself between them that they should have any language in common. They babbled at each other, Mrs. Lander in her Bostonized Yankee, and Maddalena in her gutteral Florentine, and Mrs. Lander was flattered to find how well she knew Italian.

  Miss Milray had begun being nice to Clementina in fealty to her brother, who so seldom made any proof of her devotion to him, and to whom she had remained passionately true through his shady past. She was eager to humor his whim for the little country girl who had taken his fancy, because it was his whim, and not because she had any hopes that Clementina would justify it. She had made Dr. Welwright tell her all he knew about her, and his report of her grace and beauty had piqued her curiosity; his account of the forlorn dullness of her life with Mrs. Lander in their hotel had touched her heart. But she was still skeptical when she went to get her letter of introduction; when she brought Clementina home from the dressmaker’s she asked if she might kiss her, and said she was already in love with her.

  Her love might have made her wish to do everything for her that she now began to do, but it simplified the situation to account for her to the world as the ward of Mrs. Lander, who was as rich as she was vulgar, and it was with Clementina in this character that Miss Milray began to make the round of afternoon teas, and inspired invitations for her at pleasant houses, by giving a young ladies’ lunch for her at her own. Before the night of her little dance, she had lost any misgiving she had felt at first, in the delight of seeing Clementina take the world as if she had thought it would always behave as amiably as that, and as if she had forgotten her unkind experiences to the contrary. She knew from Mrs. Lander how the girls at their hotel had left her out, but Miss Milray could not see that Clementina met them with rancor, when her authority brought them together. If the child was humiliated by her past in the gross lonely luxury of Mrs. Lander’s life or the unconscious poverty of her own home, she did not show it in the presence of the world that now opened its arms to her. She remained so tranquil in the midst of all the novel differences, that it made her friend feel rather vulgar in her anxieties for her, and it was not always enough to find that she had not gone wrong simply because she had hold still, and had the gift of waiting for things to happen. Sometimes when Miss Milray had almost decided that her passivity was the calm of a savage, she betrayed so sweet and grateful a sense of all that was done for her, that her benefactress decided that she was not rustic, but was sylvan in a way of her own, and not so much ignorant as innocent. She discovered that she was not ignorant even of books, but with no literary effect from them she had transmitted her reading into the substance of her native gentleness, and had both ideas and convictions. When Clementina most affected her as an untried wilderness in the conventional things she most felt her equality to any social fortune that might befall her, and then she would have liked to see her married to a title, and taking the glory of this world with an unconsciousness that experience would never wholly penetrate. But then again she felt that this would be somehow a profanation, and she wanted to pack her up and get her back to Middlemount before anything of the kind should happen. She gave Milray these impressions of Clementina in the letter she wrote to thank him for her, and to scold him for sending the girl to her. She accused him of wishing to get off on her a riddle which he could not read himself; but she owned that the charm of Clementina’s mystery was worth a thousand times the fatigue of trying to guess her out and that she was more and more infatuated with her every day.

  In the meantime, Miss Milray’s little dance grew upon her till it became a very large one that filled her villa to overflowing when the time came for it. She lived on one of the f
ine avenues of the Oltrarno region, laid out in the brief period of prosperity which Florence enjoyed as the capital of Italy. The villa was built at that time, and it was much newer than the house on Seventeenth street in New York, where she spent the girlhood that had since prolonged itself beyond middle life with her. She had first lived abroad in the Paris of the Second Empire, and she had been one winter in Rome, but she had settled definitely in Florence before London became an American colony, so that her friends were chiefly Americans, though she had a wide international acquaintance. Perhaps her habit of taking her brother’s part, when he was a black sheep, inclined her to mercy with people who had not been so blameless in their morals as they were in their minds and manners. She exacted that they should be interesting and agreeable, and not too threadbare; but if they had something that decently buttoned over the frayed places, she did not frown upon their poverty. Bohemians of all kinds liked her; Philistines liked her too; and in such a place as Florence, where the Philistines themselves are a little Bohemian, she might be said to be very popular. You met persons whom you did not quite wish to meet at her house, but if these did not meet you there, it was your loss.

  XI.

  On the night of the dance the line of private carriages, remises and cabs, lined the Viale Ariosto for a mile up and down before her gates, where young artists of both sexes arrived on foot. By this time her passion for Clementina was at its height. She had Maddalena bring her out early in the evening, and made her dress under her own eye and her French maid’s, while Maddalena went back to comfort Mrs. Lander.