Aurora the Magnificent Part 25

"Well, who is coming? There is nothing sly about that."

"I sha'n't tell you. This much I will tell you, though--" she added with the frankness usual to her, "I don't look forward to it much."

It was on the end of his tongue to ask next morning how her dinner had gone off, but on second thoughts he left it for her to speak of when she was ready.

She at first appeared much as on other days, but when she had lapsed into silence and fallen into thought her expression became a shade gloomy. He had noticed that when her eyes were rather more grey than blue it was the sign of a cloud in her sky.

"Might one ask the lady sitting for her picture to look pleasant?" he said.

"Yes, yes," she remembered herself; "I will try to look pleasant. But I feel cross."

"Well?... What went wrong with your dinner?"

"Oh, I made a fool of myself."

"That sounds serious. Was it?"

"Yes. No. Oh, I don't know. I don't suppose it was really serious....

But the whole thing has made me cross."

She labored under an urgent necessity to tell somebody all about it, that was evident.

"You see," she plunged without preamble into her confidence, "from the beginning, I didn't want that party! I love to have folks to dinner, any number, all the time. You know I just love a jollification. But this was different, as I knew it was going to be. It began with Charlie Hunt telling me--or, not exactly telling, I forget how it came out--that yesterday was his birthday. I said, 'Come and celebrate with us!' I was thinking of making a big cake and sticking it full of pink candles. And from that simple beginning, blessed if I know how it happened, except my always wanting to say yes to anything anybody proposes, it came to be a regular dinner-party, the kind they give over here, with courses and wines and finger-bowls, all the frills, and twelve people, not friends of mine at all, barely acquaintances, but people Charlie Hunt thought it would be nice to ask. Well, it was my fault, every bit of it, and n.o.body else's. I've no business to say all those joyful yeses if I don't mean them. Good enough for me if I have to swallow my pill afterwards without so much as making a face. It wasn't so bad, after all, everything went all right, thanks to Clotilde and Charlie. Only I wasn't having much fun. Charlie had planned how people should sit, and Mr. Landini was on one side of me, and he was making himself terribly agreeable. He means all right, but his talk, as I guess you know, isn't a bit my kind. And last night, I don't mind telling you--" her voice dropped to a note confidentially low, "with his compliments and incinerations, you'd almost have thought he was sweet on me. Only I know better. And so, as I say, I wasn't having much fun. Then I don't know what got into me. They were pa.s.sing the fruit. I got up and went to the sideboard and took one of those fine hot-house looking peaches out of our permanent a.s.sortment that needs dusting every few days, and I came back to my seat and offered that marble fruit with a fetching smile to Mr. Landini. He looked as if he felt I was bestowing a very particular favor. He took it--and it dropped out of his hand on to the plate with a crash that laid it in smithereens.... You can see why I am cross."

"I shouldn't be surprised, dear woman, if he were cross, too."

"He was perfect! I respected him! Liked him better than I ever had before! I never saw anything so well done as the way he carried it off!

I was never so uncomfortable in all my life, though we united in laughing, ha, ha.... Charlie would have taken my head off, if he had dared, afterwards in a corner of the parlor. But the first word he said, I cut in, short as pie-crust, 'Young man,' I said, 'if you aren't careful I shall sit on you. Do you know how much I weigh?' And I meant it."

Gerald prudently placed a paint-brush across his mouth, and shut his teeth on it as on a bridle-bit, to excuse his saying nothing in the way of comment on what he had heard.

Mrs. Hawthorne told him next day at the first opportunity, like one eager to make reparation for an injustice, "It's all right now! A beautiful plate came yesterday afternoon from Ginori's where my dinner-set was bought--a plate, you know, to match the one that got broken. As if I cared anything about the old plate! And along with it Mr. Landini's card, with such a nice message written on it. Don't you think it white in him? When it was all my fault. And in the evening Charlie Hunt came and was sweet as pie. We're just as good friends as ever. I'm ashamed of myself for having felt so put out. Forget anything I said that didn't seem quite kind. He's all right. It's me that's crochety.... Isn't that picture far enough along for you to let me see it?"

"No, Mrs. Hawthorne."

"Will you let me see it when it's far enough along?"

"No."

"I think you're real mean. How much longer will it take to finish it?"

"Does sitting bore you so much?"

"Land, no! Bore me? I perfectly love it! It's like taking a sea-voyage with some one. You see more of them in a week or two than you would in the same number of years on land. I'm getting to feel I know you quite well."

"Wasn't it clever of me to think of the portrait?"

"Go 'way! D'you see anything green in my eye? As I was saying, I'm getting to know you pretty well. You get mad awful' easy, don't you? But you don't hate people, really, nearly as much as I do, that it takes a lot to make mad. There are people in this world that I hate--oh, how I hate 'em! I hate 'em so I could almost put their eyes out. But you, Stickly-p.r.i.c.kly, when it comes right down to it, I notice you make a lot of allowance for people. Do you know, when it comes right down to it, you're one of the patientest persons I know. I'd take my chances with you for a judge a lot sooner than I'd like to with loads of people who aren't half so ready to call you a blame' fool."

"While you have been making these valuable discoveries in character, what do you suppose I have been doing, Mrs. Hawthorne?" asked Gerald, after the time it would take to bow ceremoniously in acknowledgement of a compliment.

"Oh, finding out things about me, I suppose."

"Not things. One thing. I had known you for some length of time before my felicitous invention of the portrait, you remember, and as you are barely more elusive than the primary colors, or more intricate than the three virtues, I did not suppose I had anything more to learn. But I had. It can't be said I didn't suspect it. I had seen signs of it. I smelled it, as it were. But I had no idea of its extent, its magnitude, its importance. It is simply amazing, bewildering, funny."

"For goodness' sake, what?" she cried, breathless with interest.

"I can't tell you. It would ill become me to say. The least mention of it on my part would be the height of impertinence. The thing is none of my business. Be so kind as to resume the pose, Mrs. Hawthorne, and to keep very, very still, like a good girl. Do not speak, please, for some time; I am working on your mouth."

Gerald had indeed been astonished, amused, appalled. He had in a general way known that Mrs. Hawthorne was prodigal, the impression one received of her at first sight prepared one to find her generous; but he had formed no idea of the ease and magnificence with which she got rid of money.

In the time so far devoted to painting her he had grown quite accustomed to a little scene that almost daily repeated itself--a scene which he, busy at his side of the room, was presumably not supposed to see, or, if he saw it, to think anything about.

Clotilde would come in with a look of great discretion, a smile of great modesty, and stand hesitating, like a person with a communication to make, but not sufficient boldness to interrupt. Aurora, always glad to drop the pose, would excuse herself to Gerald and ask what Clotilde wanted. Clotilde would then approach and speak low,--not so low, however, but that in spite of him messages and meanings were telegraphed to Gerald's brain. The look itself of the unsealed envelopes in Clotilde's hand was to Gerald's eye full of information. She would sometimes extract and unfold a doc.u.ment for Aurora to look at; but Aurora would wave it aside with a careless, "You know I couldn't read it if I wanted to." At the end of the murmured conference Aurora would say, "Will you go and get my porte-monnaie? It's in my top drawer," and when this had been brought, her dimpled hand would take from it and give to Clotilde bills of twenty, of fifty, of a hundred francs, hardly appearing to count. Sometimes she would say: "I'm afraid I haven't enough. I shall have to make out a check."

Gerald's _flair_, and knowledge of his Florence, enabled him perfectly to divine what was in question. He was only puzzled as to why these transactions should not have taken place at a more private hour, and acutely observed that they took place when they could, this being when Estelle was out of the way. Clotilde also had _flair_.

After Clotilde had retired, Aurora one morning, having imperfectly understood what her money was wanted for, puckered her brows over the letters that, through an oversight, had remained in her hands. She held one out to Gerald to translate. It was from the united chorus-singers of Florence, a simple, direct, and ingenuous appeal for a gratuity. Another letter was from a poor young girl who wished for money to buy her wedding outfit. Another from a poor man out of work.

Gerald could have laughed. But he did not; nor made any remark. He did not dislike seeing those voracious maws stuffed with a fat morsel. He knew as much of the real poverty in Florence as of the innocent impudence of many poor, with their lingering medieval outlook upon the relations of the poor and the rich. He sided with those against these.

Singularly, perhaps, he regarded himself as belonging among the latter, the rich. He was glad the chorus-singers and the _sposina_ and the worried _padre di famiglia_ were going to be made glad by rich crumbs from Aurora's board. But he could not help uneasiness for the future, when the famished locusts, still approaching single scout, should precipitate themselves in battalions, when the whole of Florence should have got the glad tidings and gathered impetus....

Well, Clotilde was there. Clotilde would know pertinent discourses to hold to the brazen beggars when their shamelessness pa.s.sed bounds.

Meanwhile Gerald could see that she enjoyed this distributing of good things among her fellow-citizens. Not that she was strongly disposed to charity. He did not believe she gave away anything of her own, but she loved to see Aurora give. After a life spent in a home where the lumps of sugar were counted and the coffee-beans kept under lock and key, it attracted her like wild, incredible romance.

It would have hurt her to behold this unproductive output, no doubt, had it not been a mere foreigner who lost what her own people gained,--money, besides, that could never have benefited her, and that came nearer to benefiting her when spent in that manner than in another.

Clotilde, loyal in service, giving more than good measure, offering all the pleasant fruits of a visible devotion, could yet not be expected to have--or, to state it more fairly, was not supposed by Gerald to have--any real bowels for this outsider, who might for one thing be drawing from bottomless gold-mines, or, if she were not, would suffer a ruin she had richly deserved. And might it not in aftertimes profit her, Clotilde, to have been instrumental to this person and that in obtaining money from the millionaire? The shops recognized such a t.i.tle to reward, and offered it regularly to such private middlemen as herself for a careful guiding of the dispensing hand, and this without the feeling on any side that it was the payment of the unjust steward.

Gerald did not in the least despise Clotilde, poor Clotilde, with her nose like a little white trumpet between her downy pink and white cheeks, for this business-like outlook and use of her position. It would have been different if she had been a friend and gentleman.

The portrait did not progress rapidly. Gerald was not hurrying. On Gerald's lips as he painted there played an ambiguous smile, privately derisive of his work and the fun he was having.

No problems, no effort, none of those searching doubts of oneself that produce heart-sickness; nor yet any of those exaltations that cause one to forget the hour of meals. Curious that it should have been fun all the same!... His reply to which was that only a very poor observer could think it curious that the lower man within a man should feel it fun to be indulged. Fortunately, a natural limit was set to this Capuan period.

He would come from the winter world into the room which the American kept enervatingly warm, a pernicious practice. One could not deny, however, that the body relaxed in it with a sense of well-being, after steeling itself to resist the insidious Italian cold, exuding from damp pavements and blown on the sharp tramontana; that cold which is never, if measured by the thermometer, severe, but against which clothing seems ineffectual. The blood does not react against it; the blood shrinks away, and stagnates around the heart.

He would change his coat for a velveteen jacket, not in order to be picturesque, but to keep his coat-cuffs clean. He was as particular as an old maid, Aurora told him, before he had been caught absentmindedly wiping paint off on his hair.

The fair model would get her chair-legs into correspondence with certain chalk-marks on the carpet, be helped to find her pose, and having made herself comfortable, turn on him blue eyes, with a faint brown shadow under them--blue eyes that wore a sheepish look until she presently forgot she was sitting for her picture. She was pressed to keep her opera-cloak over her shoulders, lest she take cold in her decollete; the high fur collar made an effective background for her face. Then he would fall to painting, and the hours of the forenoon would fly.

An amiable woman would now and then make a remark, easily jocular.

Another amiable woman--soothing presences, both--would answer. Or he would answer; there would be an interlude of familiar talk, rest, and laughing, and throwing a ball for a scampering puppy. At noon an end to labor. He would remain for lunch, that meal of cheery luxury, immorally abundant. After it he would still linger in this house, bright and warm with fires, smoking cigarettes in a chair as luxuriously soft as those curling clouds on which are seen throning the G.o.ds in ceiling frescos, and grow further day by day into the intimacy of the amiable women. In full afternoon they would ask him if he would go out with them in their carriage, take an airing, and return for dinner; or, if he obstinately declined, might they set him down somewhere. He would make a point of not accepting, and hurry off afoot with his damp umbrella.

Although Gerald had enlightened contempt for the sensuous comfort he was taking in the fleshpots of the Hermitage, there was in it one element which he did not a.n.a.lyze merely to despise.

He was aware of it most often after Estelle had left the room. He settled down then for a time of heightened well-being. It was observable that the sitter also took on a faintly different air. Often at that moment she would vaguely, purposelessly, smile over to him, and he would smile in absolute reciprocity. They would not seize the opportunity for more personal exchange of talk. All would go on as before. He had nothing to say to Aurora or she to him that could not have been said before an army of witnesses. Yet it was to him as if a touch of magic had removed an impediment, and the mysterious effluvium which made the vicinity of Mrs. Hawthorne calming, healing to him, had a chance to flow and steep his nerves in a blessed quiet, a quiet which--one hardly knows how to describe such a thing--was at the same time excitement.