by Grant Allen
‘But I ought to have thought of all this before I ever spoke to you at all,’ he went on earnestly. ‘I ought to have reflected how cruel it was of me to ask you for a promise when I couldn’t even tell whether I might ever be in a position to enable you to perform it. It was wrong of me, very wrong; and I felt angry with myself for having been led into doing it, the minute after I left you. But I was betrayed into my confession by the accidents of the moment. You must forgive me, because I had loved you so long — and so silently. I wouldn’t have spoken to you even then if I hadn’t imagined — it was ever so wrong and foolish of me, but still I imagined — that you seemed just then to be a little more interested than before in my work and my future. Oh, Miss Russell, I have loved you desperately; and I ventured, therefore, in a moment of haste to tell you that I loved you. But if you say yes to me to-day, it may be years and years, perhaps, before we can marry. I can’t say when or how I may ever begin to earn my livelihood at all by painting pictures.’
‘If I really loved a man, Mr. Winthrop,’ Gwen answered in a lower voice, ‘I shouldn’t be afraid to wait for him as long as ever circumstances compelled it — if I really loved him. And apart altogether from that question, which you say I am not at present to answer, I can’t believe that the world will be much longer yet in discovering that you have genius — yes, I will say genius. Mr. Churchill himself declares he is quite certain you have real genius.
Hiram smiled and shook his head incredulously. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘it is at least some comfort to me to know that, putting the matter in its most abstract form, you have no absolute objection to a long engagement. If you loved a man, you would be ready to wait for him. I knew you would, indeed, like every brave and true woman. I didn’t doubt that you could be steadfast enough to wait; I only doubted whether it would be just of any man to beg you to wait under such more than doubtful circumstances. But, remember, Miss Russell, I have this excuse to plead in my own case, that it wasn’t the passing fancy of a moment, but a love that has grown with me into my very being. There is only one more consideration now before I go on to ask you that final answer to my question, and it is this. You must reflect whether you would be willing to brave the anger of your father. I can’t disguise from myself the fact that Colonel Howard-Russell would be very ill satisfied at the idea of your waiting to marry a penniless unknown American painter.’
Gwen looked at him proudly, almost defiantly, as she answered in a clear bold tone, ‘If I loved a man really, Mr. Winthrop, I would marry him and wait for him as long as I chose, even if my father cast me off for it for ever the very next minute. If ever I marry I shall marry because I have consulted my own heart, and not because I have consulted my father.’
‘I knew that too,’ Hiram answered, with just a touch of triumph in his trembling voice. ‘I only spoke to you about it because I thought it right to clear the ground entirely for my final question. Then, Gwen, Gwen, Gwen — I will call you Gwen for this once in my life, if I never call you Gwen again as long as I live here; I have thought of you as Gwen for all these years, and I will think of you so still, whatever comes, till my dying minute — oh, Gwen, Gwen, Gwen, I ask you finally — and all my life hangs upon the question — can you love me, will you love me, do you love me?’
Gwen let him fold her passionately in his arms as she murmured twice, almost inaudibly, ‘I love you! I love you!’
Yes, yes, she couldn’t any longer herself withstand the conviction. She loved him. She loved him.
As for Hiram, the blood thrilled through his veins as though his heart would burst for very fulness. The dream of his existence had come true at last, and he cared for nothing else on earth now he had once heard Gwen say with her own dear lips that she loved him, she loved him.
CHAPTER XL. AFTER THE STORM.
When Gwen told the colonel the very same evening that she had actually gone and got herself engaged to that shock-headed Yankee painter fellow, the colonel’s wrath and grief and indignation were really something wonderful to observe and excellent to philosophise upon. The colonel raved, and stamped, and fretted; the colonel fumed in impotent rage, and talked grimly about his intentions and his paternal authority (just as if he had any); the colonel even swore strange Hindustani oaths at Gwen’s devoted head, and supplemented them by all the choicest and most dignified military expletives to be found in the vocabulary of his native language. But Gwen remained perfectly unmoved by all the colonel’s threats and imprecations; she flatly remarked that his testamentary dispositions were a subject in no way interesting or amusing to her, and stuck firm to her central contention, that it was she who was going to marry Hiram, and not her father, and that therefore she was the only person whose tastes and inclinations in the matter ought to be taken into any serious consideration. And though the colonel persisted in declaring that he for his part would never allow that Gwen was in any proper sense engaged to Hiram, Gwen herself stood to it stoutly that she was so engaged; and after all, her opinion on the subject was really by far the most important and conclusive of any.
In fact, the more the colonel declaimed against Hiram, the more profoundly convinced did Gwen become in her own heart that she thoroughly loved and admired him. And the final consequence of the colonel’s violent opposition was merely this, that at the end of three weeks or so Gwen was as madly in love with her American painter fellow as any woman on this earth had ever yet been with a favoured lover.
As for poor Hiram, he was absolutely in the seventh heaven for the time being, and though a little later on he began to reproach himself bitterly at times for having tied down Gwen so prematurely to his own exceedingly doubtful fortunes, he could think as yet of nothing on earth but his delight at having actually won the love of the lady of his one long impassioned daydream.
On the day after Gwen had accepted Hiram’s timid offer, Colin Churchill met Miss Howard-Russell accidentally in the Corso.
‘Oh, Miss Russell,’ he said, ‘will you come on Sunday next to see my model, Cecca, married to her old Calabrian lover? She’s very anxious you should come and assist, and she begged me most particularly to invite you. She says you’re a friend of hers, and that the other day you did her and her lover a good service.’
‘Tell her I’ll be there, Mr. Churchill,’ Gwen answered, smiling curiously, ‘and tell her too that I have acted upon her advice, and she will understand you. Where’s the wedding to be, and when must I be there?’
‘At ten o’clock, close by our house, at Santa Maria of the Beautiful Ladies. She was to have been married a fortnight ago quite suddenly; but she changed her mind in a hurry at the last moment, because she hadn’t got all her things ready. It’ll be a dreadful loss to me, of course; for when once a model marries, you can never get her to sit again half as well as she used to do; but Cecca had a lover, it seems, who had followed her devotedly to Rome all the way from Monteleone; and she played fast-and-loose with him at first and rode the high horse, on the strength of her being so much admired and earning so much money as a model; and now she’s seized with a sudden remorse, it appears, and wants to make it all up with him again and get married immediately.’
Gwen smiled a silent smile of quiet comprehension. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘One can easily understand it. I shall be there, Mr. Churchill; you may depend upon me. And your cousin the — Miss Wroe, I mean — will she be there also?’
‘Oh yes,’ Colin answered lightly, ‘Minna’s coming too. She and Cecca have most mysteriously struck up quite a singular and sudden friendship.’
‘I shall be glad to meet her again,’ Gwen said simply. Somehow, when once one has settled firmly one’s own affections, one feels a newborn and most benevolent desire to expedite to the best of one’s abilities everybody else’s little pending matrimonial arrangements.
So on Sunday Cecca was duly married, and the colonel and the earl were induced by Gwen to be present at the ceremony; though the colonel had his scruples upon the point, for, like most old Anglo-Indians of his generatio
n, he was profoundly evangelical in his religious views, and regarded a Roman Catholic church as a place only to be visited under protest, by way of a show, with every decent expression of distaste and irreverence. Still, he knew his duty as a father; and when Gwen declared that if he didn’t accompany her she would take Cousin Dick alone, and go without him, the colonel reflected wisely that she would probably meet that shock-headed Yankee painter fellow after the ceremony, and have another chance of talking over this absurd engagement she imagined she’d contracted with him. So he went himself to mount guard over her, and to give that Yankee fellow a piece of his mind if occasion offered.
And when the wedding was over, the whole party of guests, including Hiram and Audouin, adjourned for breakfast to the big room at Colin Churchill’s studio, which had been laid out and decorated by Cecca and Minna and the people at the trattoria the evening before for that very purpose. And the Italian peasant folk sat by themselves at one end of the long wooden table, and the English excellencies also by themselves at the other. And Colin proposed the bride’s health in his very best Tuscan: and Giuseppe made answer with native Italian eloquence in the nearest approach he could attain to the same exalted northerly dialect. And everybody said it was a great success, and even Cecca herself felt immensely proud and very happy. But I’m afraid my insular English readers will still harbour an unworthy prejudice against poor simple easy-going Calabrian Cecca, for no better reason than just because she tried, in a moment of ordinary Italian jealousy, to poison Minna Wroe in a cup of coffee. Such are the effects of truculent Anglo-Saxon narrowness and exclusiveness.
When Gwen and Minna went into Cecca’s dressing-room to take off their bonnets (for Colin insisted that they should make a day of it), Gwen was suddenly moved by that benevolent instinct aforesaid to make a confidante of the pretty little governess — who, by the way, had got a new and more fashionable bonnet from a Roman Parisian milliner expressly for the happy occasion. Poor little thing! after all, it was very natural she should be dreadfully in love with her handsome clever sculptor cousin. ‘I myself very nearly fell in love with him once, indeed,’ Gwen murmured to herself philosophically, with the calm inner confidence of a newly-found affection. So she said to Minna with a meaning look, after a few arch little remarks about Colin’s success as a rising sculptor, ‘I have something to tell you, Miss Wroe, that I think will please you. I tell it to you because I know the subject is one you’re much interested in; but, if you please you must treat it as a secret — a very great secret. I’m — well, to tell you the truth, Miss Wroe, I’m engaged to be married.’
Minna’s face turned pale as death, and she gasped faintly, but she answered nothing.
Gwen saw the cause of her anxiety at once, and hastened eagerly to reassure her.
‘And if you’ll promise not to say a word about it to anybody on earth, I’ll tell you who it is — it’s your cousin’s American friend, Mr. Hiram Winthrop.’
Minna looked at her for a second in a transport of joy, and then burst suddenly into a flood of tears.
Gwen didn’t for a moment pretend to misunderstand her. She knew what the tears meant, and she sympathised with them too deeply not to show her understanding frankly and openly. After all, the little governess was really at heart just a woman even as she herself was. ‘There, there, dear,’ she said, laying Minna’s head upon her shoulder tenderly; ‘cry on, cry on; cry as much as ever you want to; it’ll do you good and relieve you. I know all about it, and I was sure you mistook me for a moment, and had got a wrong notion into your head, somehow; and that was why I took the liberty of telling you my little secret. It’s all right, dear; don’t be in the least afraid about it. Here, Cecca, quick; a glass of water!’
Cecca brought the water hastily, and then looking up with a wondering look into the tall Englishwoman’s clear-cut face, she asked sternly, ‘What is this you have been saying to the dear little signorina?’
Gwen laid Minna down in a chair, after loosening her bonnet, and bathing her forehead with water; and then taking Cecca aside, she whispered to her softly, ‘It’s all right. Don’t be afraid that I had forgotten or repented. I was telling her something that has pleased and delighted her. I am — I am going to be married, too, Cecca; but not to the master, to somebody else — to another artist, who has loved me for years, Signora Cecca; only mind, it’s a secret, and you mustn’t say a word for worlds to anybody about it.
Cecca smiled, and nodded knowingly. ‘I see,’ she said with a perfect shower of gestures. ‘I see. It is well, indeed. To the American! Felicitations, signorina.’
‘Hush, hush!’ Gwen cried, putting her hand upon the beautiful model’s mouth hastily. ‘Not a word about it, I beg of you! Well now, dear, how are you feeling after the water? Are you better? are you better?’
‘Thank you, Miss Russell; it was only a minute’s faintness. I thought —— It’s all right now. I’m better, Miss Russell, I’m better.’
Gwen looked at her tenderly as if she had been a sister. ‘Your name’s Minna, dear, I think,’ she said; ‘isn’t it?’
Minna nodded acquiescence.
‘And mine, I dare say you know, is Gwen. In future let us always call one another Gwen and Minna.’
She held out her arms caressingly, and Minna, forgetful at once of all her old wrath and jealousy of the grand young lady, nestled into them with a childlike look of unspeakable gratitude. ‘It’s very kind of you,’ she cried, kissing Gwen’s lull red lips two or three times over, ‘so very, very kind of you. You can’t tell how much you’ve relieved me, Miss Russell. You know — I’m so very fond —— so very fond —— so very fond of dear Colin.’
Gwen kissed her in return sympathetically.
‘I know you are, dear,’ she answered warmly.
‘And you needn’t be afraid; I’m sure he loves you, he can’t help loving you. You dear little thing, he must be a stone indeed if he doesn’t love you. Cecca says he does, and Cecca’s really a wonderful woman at finding out all these things immediately by a kind of instinct. But if ever you dare to call me Miss Russell again from this very minute forward, why, really, Minna, I solemnly declare I shall be awfully angry with you.’
Minna smiled and promised cheerfully. In truth, at that moment her heart was full to overflowing. Her rivals — both of her real or imaginary rivals — were at last safely disposed of, and if only now she could be perfectly sure that Colin loved her! Gwen said so, and Cecca said so, but Colin didn’t. If only Colin would once say to her in so many words, ‘Minna, I love you. Will you marry me?’ Oh, how happy she would be, if only he would say so!
CHAPTER XLI. AUDOUIN’S MISTAKE.
Lothrop Audouin walked round a little tremblingly to the Villa Panormi. He wasn’t generally a shy or nervous man, but on this particular afternoon he felt an unwonted agitation in his breast, for he was bound to the Villa on a very special errand; and he was glad when he saw Gwen Howard-Russell walking about alone in the alleys of the garden, for it saved him the necessity of having to make a formal call upon her in the big salon. Gwen saw him coming, and moved towards the heavy iron gate to meet him.
She gave him her hand with one of her sunniest smiles, and Audouin took it, as he always did, with antique Massachusetts ceremoniousness. Then he turned with her, almost by accident as it were, down the path bordered by the orange-trees, and began to talk as he loved so well to talk, about the trees, and the flowers, and the green-grey lizards, that sat sunning themselves lazily upon the red Roman tiles which formed the stiff and formal garden edging.
‘Though these are not my own flowers, you know, Miss Russell,’ he said at last, looking at her a little curiously. ‘These are not my own flowers; and indeed everything here in Rome, even nature itself, always seems to me so overlaid by the all-pervading influence of art that I fail to feel at home with the very lilies and violets in this artificial atmosphere In America, you know, my surroundings are so absolutely those of unmixed nature: I lead the life of a perfect hermit in an u
nsophisticated and undesecrated wilderness.’
‘Mr. Winthrop has told me a great deal about Lakeside,’ Gwen answered lightly, and Audouin took it as a good omen that she should have remembered the very name of his woodland cottage. ‘You live quite among the primæval forest, don’t you, by a big shallow bend in Lake Ontario?’
‘Yes, quite among the primæval forest indeed; from my study window I look out upon nothing but the green pines, and the rocky ravine, and the great blue sheet of Ontario for an infinite background. Not a house or a sign of life to be seen anywhere, except the flying-squirrels darting about among the branches of the hickories.’
‘But don’t you get very tired and lonely there, with nobody but yourself and your servants? Don’t you feel dreadfully the want of congenial cultivated society?’
Audouin sighed pensively to hide the beating of his heart at that simple question.
Surely, surely, the beautiful queenly Englishwoman was leading up to his hand! Surely she must know what was the natural interpretation for him to put upon her last inquiry! It is gross presumptuousness on the part of any man to ask a woman for the priceless gift of her whole future unless you have good reason to think that you are not wholly without hope of a favourable answer; but Gwen Howard-Russell must certainly mean to encourage him in the bold plunge he was on the verge of taking. It is hard for a chivalrous man to ask a woman that supreme question at any time: harder still when, like Lothrop Audouin, he has left it till time has begun to sprinkle his locks with silver. But Gwen was evidently not wholly averse to his proposition: he would break the ice between them and venture at last upon a declaration.
‘Well,’ he answered slowly, looking at Gwen half askance in a timid fashion very unlike his usual easy airy gallantry, ‘I usen’t to think it so, Miss Howard; I usen’t to think it so. I had my books and my good companions — Plato, and Montaigne, and Burton, and Rabelais. I loved the woods and the flowers and the living creatures, and all my life long, you know, I have been a fool to nature, a fool to nature. Perhaps there was a little spice of misanthropy, too, in my desire to fly from a base, degrading, materialised civilisation. I didn’t feel lonely in those days; — no, in those days, in those days, Miss Russell, I didn’t feel lonely.’
