Aurora the Magnificent Part 22

Mrs. Foss had waited for Aurora's arrival to make the tea. The feast was very simple. Gerald offered what his mother had used to offer. Giovanna cut the bread-and-b.u.t.ter as that genteel lady had taught her, and continued to buy the plum-cake at the same confectioner's.

Aurora had come in from the suns.h.i.+ne and cold with January roses in her cheeks and exhilaration in her blood. At sight of her beloved Mrs. Foss she laughed for joy. She rejoiced also to see Miss Seymour, who was one of her "likes," and she was immensely interested to meet the abbe, whom she knew to be Gerald's best friend, even as Estelle was hers. She loved Gerald for having just these people to meet them at tea, the ones he himself thought most of. She felt sweetly flattered at being made one of a company so choicely wise and good.

But the result was not exactly fortunate for the gaiety of the little party, if Aurora's laugh had been counted upon to enliven it. Far from shy though she was, she developed a disinclination to-day to speak. She was impressed by the abbe, for whom her conversation did not seem to her good enough.

The young priest, a convert to Catholicism, was Gerald's age, and had it not been for his collar, the cut of his coat, would have looked like a not at all unusual Englishman with blue eyes, curly black hair, a touch of warm color in his shaven cheeks. Unless you sat across the tea-table from him and now and then, while he quietly and una.s.sumingly talked, met his eyes.

Some persons said that he looked ascetic, some austere, some angelic.

Mrs. Foss, not finding the right adjective for his mixture of poise and humanity, was content to call him charming. Gerald, who had known him when they were Vin and Raldi to each other and equally far from entering the Church, regarded him as simply the nicest fellow he knew. Aurora had no definition for him, but did not feel disposed to ripple on as usual in his hearing. Yet she would have liked to make friends with him, too.

She would have said to him some such thing as, "What are the thoughts you have, which make you so calm, deep inside? But I know. We learned them at our mother's knee, but in the fury of living, having fun, getting on, we never revisit the chamber where they are kept. You live in it."

He was talking with Estelle like any other man whose conversation should not contain the faintest element of gallantry, and Estelle was talking to him with an ease that Aurora marveled at. Aurora marveled how Estelle could know, or seem to know, a lot of things which she had never before given sign of caring about. If the two of them were not conversing upon the symbolism of religious art! Having finished his tea, the abbe went to fetch a book from Gerald's shelves, which he knew as well as his own, and Estelle was shown reproductions of carvings on old cathedrals.

Mrs. Foss, who had been talking of the Carnival now beginning, telling Aurora about corsi and coriandoli of the past as compared with the poor remnants of these customs, and describing the still undiminished glories of a veglione, perceiving finally that the usually merry lady was on her best behavior to the point of almost complete taciturnity, from necessity addressed herself more directly to Miss Seymour, who shared the sofa with her; and from talking of _veglioni_ the two slid into talking of Florentine affairs more personal.

The task of entertaining Mrs. Hawthorne thus devolving upon Gerald, he took it up in a way that flatteringly presupposed in her an interest in general questions. His manner seemed to her very formal. She forgot that, innocent as their relations were, he yet could not before people speak to her with the lack of ceremony that in private made her feel they were such good friends. But even aside from this cool and correct manner, Gerald seemed to her different to-day--calmer, more serene, less needing sympathy, as if something of his friend the abbe had rubbed off on to him.

As he was going on, in language that reminded her of a book, she interrupted him.

"Don't you want to show me your house?"

"I was going to suggest it," he said at once. "There are several things I should like to show you. Will you come?"

She rose to follow, losing some of her constraint.

"It's what we always do on the Cape. Any one comes for the first time, we show them all over our house."

When they were outside the drawing-room door, she felt more like herself.

"Oh, I'm so glad I can't tell you to see the place where you live!" she expanded.

They went down the long corridor, past a closed door which he disappointingly did not open.

"It's a dark room we use to store things," he explained. Neither did he open the door at the end of the hall. "It's Vincent's room," he said.

They turned into the darker, narrower corridor, bent again, and went toward the little window high over somebody else's garden. He ushered Mrs. Hawthorne into the kitchen, for here, near the ceiling, was the door-bell, and on it the well-known coat of arms, crown and cannon-b.a.l.l.s, which testified to the age and aristocracy of the house.

While he sought to interest her in this curiosity, Aurora was looking at everything besides; for Giovanna was making preparations for dinner, and Aurora's thoughts were busy with the fowl she saw run on a long spit and waiting to be roasted before a bundle of sticks at the back of the sort of masonry counter that served as kitchen stove.

"They do have the queerest ways of doing things!" she murmured.

He took her across the pa.s.sage and into the dining-room. He wished to show her an old china tea-set, quaintly embellished with n.o.ble palaces and parks, that had been his great-grandmother's. There again she looked but casually at the thing he accounted fit for her examination, and carefully, if surrept.i.tiously, at all the rest.

Last he showed her into the great square interior room with the gla.s.s door on to the terrace over the court, the room which had been his mother's and was now his own, and where hung a portrait of his mother.

On this Aurora fixed attentive and serious eyes, and had no need to feign feeling, for appropriate feelings welled in her heart.

"How gentle she looks!" she said softly. "And how much you must miss her!"

She stood for some time really trying to make acquaintance with the vanished woman through that faded pastel likeness of her in youth which Gerald kept where it had hung in her day, the portrait of herself which she womanishly preferred because, as she did not conceal, it flattered her.

"She looks like one of those people you would have just loved to lift the burdens off and make everything smooth for," Aurora said; "and yet she looks like one of those people who spend their whole lives trying to make things smooth for others."

"Yes," said Gerald to that artless description of the feminine woman his mother had been, and stood beside his guest, looking pensively up at the portrait.

All at once, Aurora felt like crying. It had been increasing, the oppression to her spirits, ever since she entered this house to which she had come filled with gay antic.i.p.ation and innocent curiosity. It had struck her from the first moment as gloomy, and it was undoubtedly cold, with its three sticks of wood ceremoniously smoking in the unaccustomed chimney-place. Its esthetic bareness had affected her like the meagerness of poverty. And now it seemed to her sad, horribly so, haunted by the gentle ghosts of that mother and sister who had known and touched all these things, sat in the chairs, looked through the windows, and who conceivably came back in the twilight to flit over the uncarpeted floor and peer in the dim mirrors to see how much the grave had changed them. She s.h.i.+vered. Yes, cold and bare and sad seemed Gerald's dwelling. And Gerald, whose very bearing was a dignified denial that anything about himself or his circ.u.mstances could call for compa.s.sion--Gerald, thin and without color, looked to her cold-pinched and under-nourished. She had a sense of his long evenings alone, drearily without fire, his solitary meals in that dining-room so unsuggestive of good cheer; she thought of that single candle on the night-table burning in this cold, large room where he went to bed in that bed of iron, laying his head on that small hair pillow, to dream bitter dreams of a fair girl's treachery.

She wanted to turn to him protesting:

"Oh, I can't stand it! What makes you do it?"

His next words changed the current of her thoughts.

"I have another portrait of my mother," he said; "one I painted, which I will show you if you care to see it."

She cheered up.

"Do! do!" she urged heartily. "I'm crazy to see something you've painted."

"You won't care for my painting," he p.r.o.nounced without hesitation; "but the portrait gives a good idea of my mother, I think, when she was older than this."

They returned to the drawing-room, where their friends were in the same way engaged as when they left them. One pair was looking at a large ill.u.s.trated book; the other two sat leaning toward each other talking in undertones.

"The bird which you see," the abbe was saying, "with the smaller birds crowding around him, is a pelican. The pelican, you know, who opens his breast to feed his young, is a symbol of the Church."

"It's not true, though, that the pelican does that," Estelle was on the point of saying with American freedom, "any more than that a scorpion surrounded by fire commits suicide. I read it in a Sunday paper where a lot of old superst.i.tions were exploded." But she tactfully did nothing of the sort. She appeared instructed and impressed.

What Miss Seymour was saying to Mrs. Foss would have sounded a little singular to any one overhearing. The two women had been friends for years, but never come so near to each other as, it chanced, they did that afternoon, when all fell so favorably for a heart to heart talk.

"I feel as if I had lost a key!" said Miss Seymour, and looked like a bewildered princess turned old by a wicked fairy's spell. "When I possessed it I thought nothing of it. It opened all the doors, but I didn't know what it was made them so easy to open. Only now, when it's gone, I know the value of that little golden key."

"I know," said Mrs. Foss, sympathetically. "There's no use in us women pretending we don't mind! Those who really and truly don't must be great philosophers or great fools, or else selfless to a degree that is rarer even than philosophy...."

Gerald and Aurora crossed the room unhailed and entered the room beyond, where dusty canvases, many deep, stood face to the wall.

He found the unframed painting of his mother and placed it on the easel.

The short winter day was waning, but near the window where the easel stood there was still light enough to see by.

Aurora looked a long time without saying anything; Gerald did not speak either. After the length of time one allows for the examination of a picture, he took away that one and put another in its place; and so on until he had shown her a dozen.

"I don't know what to say," she finally got out, as if from under a crus.h.i.+ng burden of difficulty to express herself.

"Please don't try!" he begged quickly. "And please not to care a bit if you don't like them."

She let out her breath as at the easing of a strain. He heard it.

"I won't be so offensive," he went on, "as to say that in not liking them you merely add yourself to the majority, nor yet that my feelings are in no wise hurt by your failure to like them. But I do wish you to know that I think it a sin and a shame to get a person like you, who can't pretend a bit, before a lot of beastly canvases inevitably repugnant to your mood and temperament, and make you uncomfortable with the feeling that compliments are expected."

"All right, then; I won't tell any lies." She added in a sigh, "I did want so much to like them!"