Читать книгу Aurora the Magnificent - Gertrude Hall Brownell - Страница 3

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Near sunset, one day in early October, not too long ago for some of us to remember with distinctness, Mr. Foss, United States consul at Florence, Italy, took a cab, as on other days, to the Porta Romana. Here, where the out-of-town tariff comes into effect, he paid his man, and set out to walk the rest of the way, thus meeting the various needs he felt: that for economy,–he was a family man with daughters to clothe,–that for exercise,–his wife told him he was growing fat,–and the need in general for an opportunity to think. He had found that walking aided reflection, that walking in beautiful places started the spring of apt and generous ideas. Though in his modest way a scholar, he was not as yet an author, but Florence had inspired him with the desire to write a book.

Just beyond the Roman Gate begins the long Viale dei Colli,–Avenue of the Hills,–which climbs and winds, broad, shady, quiet, between lines of gardens and villas, occupied largely by foreigners, to the Piazzale, whence Michelangelo’s boyish colossus gazes with a slight frown across Florence, outspread at his feet. Mr. Foss, as he mounted the easy grade, and noted with a liking unabated after years the pleasantness of each habitation glimpsed through iron railings 4and embowering green, thought how privileged a person should feel, after all, whose affairs involved residence in Italy.

This recognized good fortune had not been properly tasted before another aspect of the thing presented itself for consideration....

The consul felt a sigh trying to escape him, and turning from the images whose obtrusion had called it up from the depths, directed his attention to a different set of subjects, unwilling at the moment to be troubled.

The glories and iniquities of that great family whose cannon-balls–or pills?–adorn so many of the ’scutcheons on Florentine street-corners and palace-fronts are what he selected as the theme for his meditations, a choice which seems less odd when we know that his book, the labor and pleasure of his spare hours, was a study of the Medici.

He had not been busy many minutes with their supplanted policies and extinct ambitions before these dropped back into the past whence he had drawn them, and his mind gave itself over to an exercise more curious than reconstructing a dead epoch. A shortish, stoutish man, with a beginning of baldness on his crown and gray in his mustache, was trying by the whole force of a sympathetic imagination to fit himself into the shoes, occupy the very skin, of a delicate young girl, to look at the world through her eyes and feel life with her pulses.

Thus absorbed, he hardly saw the posts of his own carriage gate; he passed unnoticing between his flower-beds, up his stone steps and came to himself only when, rubbing the hands he had just washed, he entered the dining-room and saw his wife.

“Where are the girls?” he asked even before kissing her, 5for the most casual eye must be informed by the blank look of the table that instead of being laid for half a dozen as usual, it was prepared for a meagre two.

Mrs. Foss was fond of sitting in the dining-room, which had a glass door into the garden on the side farthest from the road. There she read her book while waiting for dinnertime and her husband. The good gentleman did not always come directly home from his office. He had the love of dropping into dim churches, of loitering on bridges, of fingering the junk in old shops, but he was considerately never late for dinner.

Mrs. Foss rose to receive her husband’s salutation, and while answering his question settled herself at the table; for she had caught sight of a domestic peeping in at the door to see if the masters were there to be served.

“Leslie and Brenda went to call on the Hunts,” she gave her account, “and presently the Hunts’ man came with a note from Mrs. Hunt, asking if the girls could stay to dine and go to the theater. A box had just been sent them. I was very glad to give my consent. Charlie will probably be one of the party and bring them home. Or perhaps Gerald. Or they will be put in a cab. I was delighted of the diversion for Brenda.”

“And where’s Lily?”

“She, too, is off having a good time. Fräulein was invited by some German friends who were giving a Kinder-sinfonie. Awful things, if you want my opinion. She asked if she might go and take Lily, and the poor child was so eager about it I thought I would just for once let her sit up late. She has so few pleasures of the kind.”

Mrs. Foss had helped the soup, with a ladle, out of a tureen.

6It was after her husband and she had emptied their soup-plates in companionable silence that, leaning back to wait for the next course, she asked her regular daily question.

“Well, anything new? Anything interesting at the consulate?”

Mr. Foss seemed in good faith to be searching his mind. Then he answered vaguely:

“No; nothing in particular.” All at once he smiled a smile of remembrance. “Yes, I saw some Americans to-day.” He nodded, after an interval, with an appearance of relish. “The real thing.”

“In what way, Jerome? But, first of all, who were they?”

“Wait a moment. I stuck their cards in my pocket to show you. They came to see me at the consulate. No, they are in my other coat. One of them was Mrs. Something Hawthorne, the other Miss Estelle Something.”

“What did they want?”

“Everything–quite frankly everything. They have grown tired of their hotel; they speak nothing but English and don’t know a soul. They came to find out from me how to go about getting a house and servants, horses and carriage.”

“Did they think that was part of a consul’s duty?”

“They didn’t think. They cast themselves on the breast of a fellow-countryman. They caught at a plank.”

“A house, horses. They are rich, then.”

“So one would judge. Oh, yes, they’re rich in a jolly, shameless, old-fashioned American way.”

“Well, it’s a nice way.” Mrs. Foss added limitingly: “When they’re also generous. One has noticed, however, hasn’t one,”–she seemed on second thought to be taking 7back something of her approval,–“a certain reticence, as a rule, with regard to the display of wealth in people of any real culture?”

“These aren’t, my dear. It’s as plain as that they’re rich. And, for a change, let me whisper to you, I found it pleasant. Not one tiresome word about art did they utter in connection with this, their first, visit to Italy.”

“I can see you liked them, but what you have so far said doesn’t entirely help me to see why. Rich and ignorant Americans, unfortunately–A light breaks upon me! They were pretty!”

A twinkle came into the consul’s eyes, looking over at his wife, as one is amused sometimes by a joke old and obvious.

His pause before answering seemed filled with an effort to visualize the persons in question.

“Upon my word, Etta, I couldn’t tell you.” He laughed at his inability.

“By that token they were not beauties,” said the wife.

“It seems likely you are right. At the same time”–he was still mentally regarding his visitors–“one would never think of wishing them other than they are.”

“Describe them if you can. What age women?”

“My dear, there again you have me. Let us say that they are in the flower of life. One of them, so much I did remark, was rather more blooming than the other. Perhaps she was younger.”

“The miss?”

“The married one. But perhaps it was only the difference between a rose and–” he searched–“let us say a bunch of mignonette. The rose–here I believe I tread safely on the road of description–had of that flower the roundness and solidity, if nothing else.”

8“Stout?”

“We will call it well developed, nobly planned. But what would be the good of telling you the color of these ladies’ hair and eyes had I noticed it? It will help you much more effectively to pick them out in a crowd to be told they are very American.”

“Voices, too, I suppose.”

“Of course. You don’t strictly mean high and nasal, do you? All I can say with any positiveness is that one of them had what I will call a warm voice–a voice, to make my meaning quite clear, like the crimson heart on a valentine.”

“I am enlightened. Was it the mignonette one?”

“No; the hardy-garden rose.”

“And what did she say to you in her warm crimson voice?”

“I have told you. She called for help.”

“You said, I hope, that your wife and daughters would be very happy to call on them and be of use if they could.”

“I did.”

The time-tried, well-mated friends were looking over at each other across the table, not expressing any more than at all times the quiet, daily desire of each to further the interests and comforts of the other.

“Where are they staying?” the lady continued to question.

“Hôtel de la Paix.”

“And they haven’t any letters, introductions, addresses, anything?”

“Apparently not.”

“Where are they from?”

“Let me see. Did they mention it? My dear, if they did, I don’t recall it.”

9“New York?”

“No. If I am to guess, I shouldn’t guess that.”

“Out West?”

“H-m, they might be. No, I guess they’re Yankees.”

“Boston?”

“If so, not aggressively. Where do most people come from? There’s nothing very distinctive about most.”

“Perhaps it will be on their cards.”

Then the Fosses talked of other things. But when Mrs. Foss, after dinner, went upstairs for her scarf,–it was too cool now to sit out of doors in the evening without a wrap,–she remembered the cards, and took them out of her husband’s pocket.

“Miss Estelle Madison,” she read. “Mrs. Aurora Hawthorne.” There was nothing else. She continued a little longer to look at the bits of pasteboard in her hand. “Well-sounding names, both of them–like names in a play. Mrs. Aurora. She’s a widow, then.” Mrs. Foss considered. “Or else divorced.”

Jerome Foss sat out in the garden on fine evenings with his cigar, and watched the serene oncoming of the night, because he loved to do this. His wife stayed with him to be company, when, without an old-fashioned ideal of married life, her natural bent would have urged her indoors, where the lamps were, to read or sew or even play patience. But she lingered contentedly and all seemed to her as it should be, with the two of them sitting near each other in their garden chairs before the family door-stone, he smoking, she getting the benefit of it by now and then fanning his smoke toward her face. She liked the odor.

They only spoke to each other, as is common with married 10people, when they had something to say, and so were often silent for long spaces. That they had talked a great deal lately in the seclusion of their bedroom, away from the ears of the children, was a reason why they should not be very communicative to-night. They had threshed out the matter foremost in their minds so thoroughly that there could be little to add. Now and then, however, when they were alone, scraps of conversation would occur, part of the long discussion continued from day to day; which fragments, isolated from their context, might have sounded odd enough to any one overhearing.

Thus it was to-night. After half an hour without a syllable, Mrs. Foss’s voice came out of the dark.

“When I was a young girl, there was a music-master, Jerome,” she opened, with no more preface than a shooting-star. “I don’t know that he was particularly fascinating, but he seemed so to me. I suppose he was thirty, I was seventeen or eighteen. It was during my year at Miss Meiggs’s. Whether he really did anything to win my young affections I can’t tell at this distance, but at the time I imagined all sorts of things, that he looked at me differently from the other girls, that his voice was different when he addressed me, that an extreme delicacy was all that kept him from declaring his love. Oh, I used to wish on the first star, and I used to pull daisies to pieces, and I practiced, how I practiced! Well, there was a rich girl in the school, older than I and not nearly so good looking. The moment she graduated he proposed to her. How did I feel? Jerome, the sun went out for good and all the day I heard of their engagement. It was as serious as anything could ever be in this world.–I’m sure I have told you about that music-master before, Jerome.–Well, and what happened? At the 11age of twenty-two I cheerfully married you. And I was not a scarred and burnt-out crater either, was I?... In the interval, let me not neglect to mention, there had been other flirtations and minor affairs. Thank Heaven, those things pass,” the words came out devoutly. “It seems at the time as if only death could end it, but two or three years will do a lot. And it’s God’s mercy makes it so. How else could life be carried on?”

“In my case, Etta,” the consul followed her story, after an interval, “it was a landlady’s daughter. I don’t believe I have ever spoken of her to you. I was in college, but I boarded outside the buildings. I wrote to my father and begged him to let me go into business so that I could earlier support a wife and family. The wise man let me go down to a fruit-farm in Florida. You have noticed that I know something about orange-growing. It was not quite a year before the dear divinity whose name was Lottie found it too long to wait. I posted home. The room I had once rented from her mother was let to a handsomer man. I took up my studies where I had dropped them, and to all appearance there was little harm done. But for a long time I thought I should die a bachelor.”

“I know. Your cousin Fannie told me about it in the early days, before we were engaged. It all goes to show.... And there again was Selina Blackstone, one of my girlhood friends. She had a cough and they thought her lungs affected and sent her South. There she met an unhappy boy in the same case, only he, as it proved, really was in a bad way with his lungs. The poor things fell desperately in love with each other, but her parents wouldn’t hear of their marrying, in which course they were right. Now you would have thought from her face that the separation was going 12to kill her. It didn’t, that’s all. He died, and she married. And it can’t be said of her that she was either shallow, or fickle, or heartless. I knew her very well. Merely, time did the work that time was set to do.”

There was in the lady’s tone an effect of protest against any view, determination against any theory, but her own.

“There are the cases like Miss Seymour’s, however,” Mr. Foss brought in softly, as one calls to another’s attention a lapse of memory or a slip in logic.

“Miss Seymour? Blanche? What about her?”

“That she is Miss Seymour, my dear, and to my mind a melancholy lesson. Because Nature so plainly had not planned her for an old maid. Her mother–who told me? I think it was Miss Brown–interfered with her marrying the man she wished to, and she has accepted nothing in his place. It has been an empty life. And so it goes. One can’t be sure, Etta.”

“Jerome,” Mrs. Foss’s voice rose to a sharper protest and firmer rejection, “those are the cases we simply must not allow ourselves to think about. If we begin to think of cases like that....”

She did not finish and he said no more, but in the darkness through which the fiery point of his cigar continued for some time to glow, it is to be feared the faces of both went on to reflect for nobody to see the working of those thoughts precisely which Mrs. Foss had said with so much emphasis they must guard against.