by Grant Allen
One minute later, Mrs. Egremont and Sir Emilius entered the room together.
Hubert rose to introduce them. “Mother,” he said, bringing her forward with natural pride, “I find to my surprise the Marchese and — er — and Signorina Tornabuoni have arrived unexpectedly. Allow me to introduce you; the Marchese Tornabuoni, the Marchesa Fede; my mother, Mrs. Egremont.”
The Italian bowed low with Florentine empressement “Charmed,” he muttered between his white teeth, “charmed to make your acquaintance.”
“And my uncle, Sir Emilius Rawson,” Hubert added, glancing round at him.
A curious shade of expression flitted for a second across the Marchese’s face, which did not escape Hubert’s keen notice. His future father-in-law was not an Englishman; yet it was clear he was quite as visibly impressed by Sir Emilius’s title as the veriest of snobs in our most snobbish of islands. “And Sir Emilius,” he went on, bowing again, “delighted to meet you. We had heard you were staying here — the concierge told us — but we did not connect you, somehow, with Mrs. Egremont’s party. Fede, my dear, you omitted to tell me that Sir Emilius Rawson was Mr. Hubert’s uncle.” As he said it, he was reflecting inwardly that an English Sir, even if only a knight, was usually wealthy. Beer gains no coronet till it has sold its million bottles.
“I didn’t know it,” Fede answered, with an apologetic smile.— “Hubert — er — never happened to mention it to me.”
“We had — so many other things to talk about,” Hubert adventured, with a smile, in the vain attempt to keep his eye simultaneously on his uncle, his mother, the Marchese, and Fede.
Sir Emilius came to the rescue. He had diagnosed his man at a single glance — sound common sense, a head for affairs, hot-tempered, placable, overworks his digestion. “I was only plain Dr. Rawson when the signorina was in England,” he put in. “A royal duke had luckily, soon after, a bad attack of gout — and — you behold me a baronet!”
“Abaronet!” the Marchese echoed. That was good, a baronet! He recollected to have heard that, while knighthoods are sometimes cheap, unless a man has money enough to support the hereditary dignity he can never attain to the honor of a baronetcy.
Soup intervened — the inevitable Julienne. The Marchese addressed himself to it with Italian promptitude. “I understand,” he answered. “Physician in ordinary — that kind of thing, isn’t it? A very good profession. The one unmistakably beneficent calling — for I don’t count priests — and also paying. We are partners in business, Sir Emilius. I deal in Chianti, you deal in gout; between us we ought to catch most of the world in our net, I fancy.”
Sir Emilius smiled. “And we do,” he answered.
Throughout the rest of dinner it gradually dawned on Hubert’s mind that the haughty Italian aristocrat was gently engaged in exploring the question, not whether his prospective son-in-law was the equal in birth, rank, breeding, and position of the Marchesa Fede, but whether his fortune was one worth a sensible man’s acceptance for his marriage-able daughter. Once by mere chance, indeed, Mrs. Egremont happened to allude in passing to her place in Devonshire. The Marchese was down upon her at once. “Ah, you live in Devonshire,” he said, wrestling with the table d’hote chicken. “I have heard it is most beautiful. You have a house — a country house there. Delightful, delightful! Your English country seats, they are always so charming!”
“Our views are exquisite,” Hubert put in. “We look down upon a sweet little Devonshire river.”
“Yes, no doubt,” the Marchese said, helping himself to Yvorne. In England you have always such magnificent timber. A park, I suppose?” and he looked at Mrs. Egremont with insinuating inquiry.
“Yes, a charming old park,” Mrs. Egremont answered quietly, “in a beautiful village.”
“Deer?” the Marchese inquired. He cared nothing for Nature, but he knew very well that deer in England were a symbol of extreme wealth and county position.
“A few fallow deer,” Mrs. Egremont answered, wondering why he asked the question. “They look sweet under the shade of the spreading oaks in Devon.”
The Marchese scored one good point in favor of the family. People with fallow deer are people of consideration.
“And your estates, Sir Emilius,” the Italian went on, with a bland smile of suggestion; “are they also in Devonshire?”
The doctor smiled in return. “My estates,” he replied, “are entirely in Harley Street.”
“Ah, I see,” the Marchese echoed, at fault for once in an English allusion. “Town Property. Most lucrative!”
Sir Emilius found himself ignominiously compelled to elucidate his little joke. “Harley Street,” he explained drily, “is the doctors’ quarter in London. It is wholly given over to medical men, you know — a paradise of pill-makers. I own no houses there — not even my own — which is merely leasehold. But you seemed so absolutely at home in England, Marchese, that I thought you would appreciate my — er — my delicate and playful way of putting it.”
The Marchese nodded assent. “How stupid of me,” he exclaimed. “I understand, of course; I catch your idea. You mean to say, your estate is the profits of your profession.”
“Quite so,” Sir Emilius answered, with an eye on the salad.
The Marchese did not attempt to conceal the scope of his inquiries. “Then the park in Devonshire came to you through your husband, madame?” he suggested tentatively.
“No,” Mrs. Egremont answered, hardly perceiving his drift. “Nothing came to me through my husband.. It was my dear father’s place, and I inherited it from him. It will be Hubert’s after me.” She spoke with the unobtrusive and pleasing confidence of an English lady.
“That’s odd,” the Marchese continued, applying the common pump with less skill than vigor. “It did not go to Sir Emilius. I thought that in England property descended always to the eldest son. You have the law of primogeniture.”
“I am only Mrs. Egremont’s half-brother,” Sir Emilius interposed, clearer sighted than his sister. “Our mother was twice married. The first time to my father, a doctor at Norwich, a mere professional man, who left me unfortunately nothing to speak of, but what brains I may possess; the second time to a well-to-do. Devonshire squire, who bequeathed to my sister his estate and fortune. Which is why I am a poor devil of a doctor in Harley Street, while she rolls in her carriage down, the slopes of Dartmoor.”
“I see,” the Marchese answered; “a double household. Yet—” he took Sir Emilius’s social measure with a frank glance of observation—” I should say you made a very fair interest on the brains which you tell me were all the inheritance your father left you.”
“My brother is one of the most distinguished medical men in London” Mrs. Egremont put in, with sisterly pride.
“And my sister is one of the most confiding women in England,” Sir Emilius added, in the same half undertone.
The Marchese was well satisfied. The pump had acted. These were the very points he wanted to know. To-morrow, of course, he would have a formal talk with Hubert and his uncle, to settle the details of this business arrangement, this partnership into which Fede was thinking of entering. He would learn in full precisely how much the young man was worth, and how much he proposed to settle on Fede. A house? An income? An estate? A remainder? Meanwhile, however, he was so far satisfied with his preliminary inquiries that he waived further question. He could gather that the Egremonts were “the right sort of people” — people with whom a man of Property (with a capital initial) might safely conclude an alliance on his daughter’s behalf, provided all other things turned out favorable. So the Marchese was affable. Affability was his forte. He diverged upon Florence. And when the Marchese was once well launched upon Florentine gossip, he was always interesting.
As for Fede, she sat and smiled with a smile that alone was better than talking. She did not say much, but the little she said pleased her future mother-in-law. As they went out of the salle à manger, Hubert gave a significant glance at his mother.
Mrs. Egremont bent towards him; her lips moved slightly. “She is charming, dear, charming,” the mother said, in a low sweet voice. And they passed on to the veranda.
“It’s a lovely evening,” Hubert observed. “Let us take a stroll through the grounds.” And he glanced up at the moon, now seen through the waving tops of the larches.
The Marchese hesitated. If he had known nothing at all of Hubert’s position and prospects, he would have met the suggestion with a prompt negative. But as Mrs. Egremont was a squiress in Devonshire, and as Hubert was her only son and heir to the Property, the Marchese decided, after a moment’s pause, that there could be no great harm in letting the young people stroll out by themselves for a few minutes together — if he and Mrs. Egremont followed in the wake and kept a good lookout upon them.
“May I, papa?” Fede asked, looking up at him.
“Shall we, madame?” the Marchese asked Mrs. Egremont in turn, with more Italian correctness.
“The young people would probably prefer to go out alone,” Sir Emilius suggested. He had once been young himself, and had not quite forgotten it.
To Luigi Tornabuoni, however, the suggestion was revolutionary. A young girl stroll out in the grounds of an hotel for ten minutes alone with her prospective lover! Impossible! impossible! But he understood these English, and dissembled his feelings. “It’s a lovely night,” he said. “I should enjoy a stroll myself. Fede, my love, run upstairs and fetch a light wrap — Mrs. Egremont, can she bring down a shawl or cape for you? You will help me to chaperon them?”
“Oh, would you ask my maid, in number twenty, for my Cashmere shawl, dear!” Mrs. Egremont said, with a motherly smile at Fede.
The Marchese noted two things; first, that she smiled; and second, that she brought a maid abroad with her when she traveled. “Looks coiny,” he thought to himself; “coiny! I shouldn’t be surprised if Fede, after all, without in the least knowing it, has managed to patch up a very good match for herself. But, mother of heaven, how foolishly they do arrange these things in England!”
They strolled out into the grounds. It was one of those serene October evenings, rare further north, when the odor of pine and the buzz of insects seem to echo summer. The larches swayed and trembled in the moonlight. The three seniors walked behind; Fede and Hubert walked on in front, just far enough away to say those little nothings which were nearest to their hearts at that moment of meeting. The paths wound irregularly among shrubs and trees, and it was not even impossible — behind a clump of rhododendrons — but this book may perhaps be read in families.
Hubert fixed a white rose in Fede’s bosom as she walked. She looked down at it, blushing. “You look sweeter than ever, Fede,” he said, gazing hard at her.
“Do I, darling? If I do, for your sake, I’m glad of it.”
“And that dress becomes you so! Oh, Fede, what a delight! I’ve been so dreaming of you, and longing for you. And you?”
“Well, what do you think, Hubert?”
“I think — you’ve missed me.”
“Clever boy! Who told you?”
“The usual little bird, I fancy, Fede.”
Fede clasped her hands in the passionate Italian fashion. A British matron would have called it theatrical; but to Hubert, who knew how naturally she did it, it was charming. “Ah, darling, that same little bird came and perched on the vine by my bedroom window,” she said, with a deep tremor; “and what do you think it sang to me all day long?— ‘Tweet, tweet, tweet; Hu-bert, Hu-bert, Hu-bert, Hubert! You love him; he loves you — Hubert, Hubert.”
She said it with a delicious imitation of the song of the beccafico. Her tongue trilled like a bird’s; her breast rose and fell sweetly. It was a simple trick, but it made his heart beat hard within him.
“And how much have you missed me?” Hubert asked once more, breaking forth with one of those eternal nothings of love which lovers of all ages have asked and answered in a thousand languages.
Fede stretched her two arms as wide as they would go. “As much as that!” she answered, laughing, “As much as the world! As much as all the way from Florence to England!”
He leaned forward pleadingly. “Just one, Fede; just one!” They were abreast of the rhododendrons.
Fede glanced round her with a nervous look. Papa was too near. “Not here, dear; not here,” she said, in a faint voice of dissent. But her eyes belied her.
Hubert snatched it, and walked on. His hand was on her arm. “And my mother, darling?” he asked, more with pride than anxiety.
“Oh, Hubert, there can only be one opinion about your mother.”
“So I think,” he answered. “But I wanted you to love her.”
“I shall, I’m sure. She’s so soft, so gentle. And she looks so young, too. Yet very sympathetic. I’m sure I shall feel to her more like a sister than a daughter.”
“Her heart is young,” Hubert answered truthfully.
“And her face, and her figure! But not too young. She has also the look of a woman who has suffered.”
“She lost my father young,” Hubert replied. “But she loves me so much, she is happy now, I think. And it makes her happy to secure my happiness. All has turned out so well! Do you know, Fede, the first sight of your father’s face completely reassured me.”
“Reassured you, darling? Why did you need reassuring?”
“Well, I thought he might demand so much in the way of noble birth and all that sort of thing. But now I see him, I feel my fears were wholly groundless — or at least exaggerated. I fancied a Tornabuoni with a six hundred year old name would think so little of us. Yet — if you don’t mind my saying so — I couldn’t help noticing he was visibly impressed, when Uncle Emilius came in, by a brand new baronetcy.”
Fede glanced at her lover proudly. “If he wasn’t satisfied with you, dear,” she said, “he must be exacting! And besides, we Florentines think so much of England. It’s fashionable in Florence to be half-English, you know. All the best families intermarry with Englishmen.”
“I’m glad of that,” Hubert answered, as they passed a second clump of taller trees, “for it tells on my side.... Now — quick, Fede darling — another.”
There was an interval of twenty seconds for refreshments.
“Besides,” Fede went on next minute, glancing back along the path, and trying hard to look as if nothing had happened, “ — what were we talking about — let me see! Oh, yes; the baronetcy! Well — you mustn’t mind my saying it, dear — it’s Florentine, you know, to be strictly businesslike; and papa knows quite enough of England to know that a baronetcy means money. So I was glad to hear you had a title laid on in the family to impress him.”
“But I haven’t money, Fede. You must understand that. It’s all my mother’s.”
“I know, darling, I know; and to me, that’s nothing. I would marry you, Hubert, if we had to earn our bread and to live in a hovel. But papa’s not in love with you, of course; and that makes all the difference! He’s a man of business, papa; and he’ll want to know soon all about your position and prospects and so forth. I had never thought about those; so I was ever so glad to hear a number of things that your mother and uncle said at dinner; because I knew it would satisfy him — and — and — and—”
“And bring our marriage nearer.”
Fede clasped his arm ecstatically. “Marriage!” she cried. “Oh, Hubert, I don’t mind about that. I only want to be near you! This is joy enough for me! This is life with the halo on it!”
CHAPTER VI.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE.
“You were wrong in what you said this afternoon, Uncle Emilius,” Hubert began that evening, as soon as the Tornabuoni had left the salon. “You were wrong when you said, ‘You fall in love with the girls you see; how the dickens can you fall in love with the girls you don’t see?’ The mystery of love goes much deeper than that. There is another and a far profounder side to it.”
“So young men always think when they’re in love themselves,” Sir Emili
us replied, with middle-aged tolerance for the follies of youth. “They see everything through the rose-colored glasses of their fancy. But they see through those glasses in another sense when they’re twenty years older.”
Hubert paused for a second, reflectively. They were sitting with Mrs. Egremont in her private room. “Mother,” he said, turning to her, “you must help me. Uncle Emilius is altogether too resolutely scientific. And yet not philosophically scientific either; for falling in love, after all, is a great fact and factor in the history of humanity; and, like every other powerful component of our nature, it must be there for something.”
“It is there,” Uncle Emilius replied, “for the very simple purpose of making men and women, at the turning point of life, enter into what is after all a very irrational union with one another, viewed from the standpoint of their personal convenience. To be the father of a family — as I know by experience — is no easy sinecure; to be the mother of a family is still less of an amusement, Julia, when one comes to face its meaning fairly. If we acted as was wisest for our own convenience alone, we would shirk the duty of raising up future generations of men. But there, nature intervenes with the illusion of love; she cajoles us into believing, for a moment, that this, that, or the other particular woman is absolutely indispensable to our happiness or our very existence. As soon as we have made the step irrevocable, and committed ourselves to this husband or that wife, as the case may be, for the whole of a lifetime, we find out our mistake, and discover that any other person of modern attractiveness and tolerable manners would probably have done about equally well for us.”
Hubert played with his cigarette-holder for a moment before he replied. Then he answered quietly, “I still maintain your view is neither scientific nor philosophical. You omit to take into consideration the very essence of love — its fastidious selectiveness.”
