The Front Yard Part 19

[Ill.u.s.tration: "f.a.n.n.y PUT OUT HER HANDS WITH A BITTER CRY"]

"What will her life be now? What must she go through, perhaps--what pain, privation--my darling, my own little child!"

The wedding was to take place within the month; Rod said that he could not be absent longer from his farm. f.a.n.n.y, breaking her silence, suggested to Bartholomew that the farm might be given up; there were other occupations.

"I advise you not to say a word of that sort to Rod," Bartholomew answered. "His whole heart is in that farm, that colony he has built up down there. You must remember that he was brought up there himself, or rather came up. It's all he knows, and he thinks it the most important thing in life; I was going to say it's all he cares for, but of course now he has added Eva."

Pierre came once. He saw only the mother.

When he left her he went round by way of the main street of Sorrento in order to pa.s.s a certain small inn. His carriage was waiting to take him back to Castellamare, but there was some one he wished to look at first.

It was after dark; he could see into the lighted house through the low uncurtained windows, and he soon came upon the tall outline of the young farmer seated at a table, his eyes bent upon a column of figures. The Belgian surveyed him from head to foot slowly. He stood there gazing for five minutes. Then he turned away. "_That_, for Americans!" he murmured in French, snapping his fingers in the darkness. But there was a mist in his boyish eyes all the same.

The pink villa witnessed the wedding. f.a.n.n.y never knew how she got through that day. She was calm; she did not once lose her self-control.

They were to sail directly for New York from Naples, and thence to Florida; the Italian colonists were to go at the same time.

"Mamma comes next year," Eva said to everybody. She looked indescribably beautiful; it was the radiance of a complete happiness, like a halo.

By three o'clock they were gone, they were crossing the bay in the little Naples steamer. No one was left at the villa with f.a.n.n.y--it was her own arrangement--save Horace Bartholomew.

"She won't mind being poor," he said, consolingly, "she won't mind anything--with _him_. It is one of those sudden, overwhelming loves that one sometimes sees; and after all, f.a.n.n.y, it is the sweetest thing life offers."

"And the mother?" said f.a.n.n.y.

THE STREET OF THE HYACINTH

I

It was a street in Rome--narrow, winding, not over-clean. Two vehicles meeting there could pa.s.s only by grazing the doors and windows on either side, after the usual excited whip-cracking and shouts which make the new-comer imagine, for his first day or two, that he is proceeding at a perilous speed through the sacred city of the soul.

But two vehicles did not often meet in the street of the Hyacinth. It was not a thoroughfare, not even a convenient connecting link; it skirted the back of the Pantheon, the old buildings on either side rising so high against the blue that the sun never came down lower than the fifth line of windows, and looking up from the pavement was like looking up from the bottom of a well. There was no foot-walk, of course; even if there had been one no one would have used it, owing to the easy custom of throwing from the windows a few ashes and other light trifles for the city refuse-carts, instead of carrying them down the long stairs to the door below. They must be in the street at an appointed hour, must they not? Very well, then--there they were; no one but an unreasonable foreigner would dream of objecting.

But unreasonable foreigners seldom entered the street of the Hyacinth.

There were, however, two who lived there one winter not long ago, and upon a certain morning in the January of that winter a third came to see these two. At least he asked for them, and gave two cards to the Italian maid who answered his ring; but when, before he had time to even seat himself, the little curtain over the parlor door was raised again, and Miss Macks entered, she came alone. Her mother did not appear. The visitor was not disturbed by being obliged to begin conversation immediately; he was an old Roman sojourner, and had stopped fully three minutes at the end of the fourth flight of stairs to re-gain his breath before he mounted the fifth and last to ring Miss Macks's bell. Her card was tacked upon the door: "Miss Ettie F. Macks." He surveyed it with disfavor, while the little, loose-hung bell rang a small but exceedingly shrill and ill-tempered peal, like the barking of a small cur. "Why in the world doesn't she put her mother's card here instead of her own?" he said to himself. "Or, if her own, why not simply 'Miss Macks,' without that nickname?"

But Miss Macks's mother had never possessed a visiting-card in her life.

Miss Macks was the visiting member of the family; and this was so well understood at home, that she had forgotten that it might not be the same abroad. As to the "Ettie," having been called so always, it had not occurred to her to make a change. Her name was Ethelinda Faith, Mrs.

Macks having thus combined euphony and filial respect--the first t.i.tle being her tribute to aesthetics, the second her tribute to the memory of her mother.

"I am so very glad to see you, Mr. Noel," said Miss Macks, greeting her visitor with much cordial directness of voice and eyes. "I have been expecting you. But you have waited so long--three days!"

Raymond Noel, who thought that under the circ.u.mstances he had been unusually courteous and prompt, was rather surprised to find himself thus put at once upon the defensive.

"We are not always able to carry out our wishes immediately, Miss Macks," he replied, smiling a little. "I was hampered by several previously made engagements."

"Yes; but this was a little different, wasn't it? This was something important--not like an invitation to lunch or dinner, or the usual idle society talk."

He looked at her; she was quite in earnest.

"I suppose it to be different," he answered. "You must remember how little you have told me."

"I thought I told you a good deal! However, the atmosphere of a reception is no place for such subjects, and I can understand that you did not take it in. That is the reason I asked you to come and see me here. Shall I begin at once? It seems rather abrupt."

"I enjoy abruptness; I have not heard any for a long time."

"That I can understand, too; I suppose the society here is all finished off--there are no rough ends."

"There are ends. If not rough, they are often sharp."

But Miss Macks did not stop to a.n.a.lyze this; she was too much occupied with her own subject.

"I will begin immediately, then," she said. "It will be rather long; but if you are to understand me you ought, of course, to know the whole."

"My chair is very comfortable," replied Noel, placing his hat and gloves on the sofa near him, and taking an easy position with his head back.

Miss Macks thought that he ought to have said, "The longer it is, the more interesting," or something of that sort. She had already described him to her mother as "not over-polite. Not rude in the least, you know--as far as possible from that; wonderfully smooth-spoken; but yet, somehow--awfully indifferent." However, he was Raymond Noel; and that, not his politeness or impoliteness, was her point.

"To begin with, then, Mr. Noel, a year ago I had never read one word you have written; I had never even heard of you. I suppose you think it strange that I should tell you this so frankly; but, in the first place, it will give you a better idea of my point of view; and, in the second, I feel a friendly interest in your taking measures to introduce your writings into the community where I lived. It is a very intelligent community. Naturally, a writer wants his articles read. What else does he write them for?"

"Perhaps a little for his own entertainment," suggested her listener.

"Oh no! He would never take so much trouble just for that."

"On the contrary, many would take any amount just for that. Successfully to entertain one's self--that is one of the great successes of life."

Miss Macks gazed at him; she had a very direct gaze.

"This is just mere talk," she said, not impatiently, but in a business-like tone. "We shall never get anywhere if you take me up so.

It is not that your remarks are not very cultivated and interesting, and all that, but simply that I have so much to tell you."

"Perhaps I can be cultivated and interesting dumbly. I will try."

"You are afraid I am going to be diffuse; I see that. So many women are diffuse! But I shall not be, because I have been thinking for six months just what I should say to you. It was very lucky that I went with Mrs.

Lawrence to that reception where I met you. But if it had not happened as it did I should have found you out all the same. I should have looked for your address at all the bankers', and if it was not there I should have inquired at all the hotels. But it was delightful luck getting hold of you in this way almost the very minute I enter Rome!"

She spoke so simply and earnestly that Noel did not say that he was immensely honored, and so forth, but merely bowed his acknowledgments.

"To go back. I shall give you simply heads," pursued Miss Macks. "If you want details, ask, and I will fill them in. I come from the West.

Tuscolee Falls is the name of our town. We had a farm there, but we did not do well with it after Mr. Spurr's death, so we rented it out. That is how I come to have so much leisure. I have always had a great deal of ambition; by that I mean that I did not see why things that had once been done could not be done again. It seemed to me that the point was--just determination. And then, of course, I always had the talent. I made pictures when I was a very little girl. Mother has them still, and I can show them to you. It is just like all the biographies, you know.

They always begin in childhood, and astonish the family. Well, I had my first lessons from a drawing-teacher who spent a summer in Tuscolee. I can show you what I did while with him. Then I attended, for four years, the Young Ladies' Seminary in the county-town, and took lessons while there. I may as well be perfectly frank and tell the whole, which is that everybody was astonished at my progress, and that I was myself. All sorts of things are prophesied out there about my future. You see, the neighborhood is a very generous-spirited one, and they like to think they have discovered a genius at their own doors. My telling you all this sounds, I know, rather conceited, Mr. Noel. But if you could see my motive, and how entirely without conceit my idea of myself really is, you would hold me free from that charge. It is only that I want you to know absolutely the whole."

"I quite understand," answered her visitor.

"Well, I hope you do. I went on at home after that by myself, and I did a good deal. I work pretty rapidly, you see. Then came my last lessons, from a third teacher. He was a young man from New York. He had consumption, poor fellow! and cannot last long. He wasn't of much use to me in actual work. His ideas were completely different from those of my other teachers, and, indeed, from my own. He was unreliable, too, and his temper was uneven. However, I had a good deal of respect for his opinion, and _he_ told me to get your art-articles and read them. It wasn't easy. Some of them are scattered about in the magazines and papers, you know. However, I am pretty determined, and I kept at it until I got them all. Well, they made a great impression upon me. You see, they were new." She paused. "But I doubt, Mr. Noel, whether we should ever entirely agree," she added, looking at him reflectively.