Aurora the Magnificent Part 26

Gerald did not really care for talking. He could, it was true, sit up all night with Vincent Johns, discussing this subject and that; he could split hairs and wander into every intricacy of argument with men and artists; with women too he could sometimes be litigious. The bottom truth was nevertheless that he did not care for talking. It had happened to him to sigh for a world where n.o.body talked forever and ever.

What he cared for was faces. They were what discoursed to you, told the veracious story of lives and emotions--not lamely, as words do, mingling the trivial with the significant, but altogether perfectly. It rested with you to understand.

Mrs. Hawthorne in talk was cheap as echoes of a traveling-circus tent: you had the simple fooling of the clown, the plain good sense of the farmer's wife, the children's ebullient joy in the show. But Mrs.

Hawthorne in silence and abstraction was allied to things august and mysterious, things far removed from her own thoughts. These, while she sat in her foolish jewels, unsuitable by day, were very likely busy with her house, her dressmaker, the doings of her little set, gossip, the personal affairs--who knows?--of the painter painting her. But, profounder than words or thoughts, Mrs. Hawthorne's essential manner of being related her to those forces of the world which the ancient mind figured in the shapes of women. There was something present in her of the basic kindness of old Earth, who wants to feed everybody, is ready to give her breast to all the children. Her robust joyousness reposed, one felt, on a reality, some great fact that made angers and anxieties irrational.

The student of faces could not have maintained that he got these impressions of his sitter through his eyes. It was more, after all, like a reflection received on the sensitive plate of his heart.

One day Gerald began to hurry. He had had enough of it. The portrait was finished in a few hours. The ladies were not permitted to see it. They were made to wait until it was varnished and framed in one of the great, bright Florentine frames of which they were so fond.

Gerald, while they took their first long, rapt look, stood at one side, with a smile like a faun's when a faun is Mephistophelian.

Aurora, clasping her hands in a delight that could find no words to express it, made a sound like the coo of a dove.

Estelle echoed this exclamation, but her charmed surprise did not ring so true, if any one had been watchful enough to seize the shade of difference. Because, not having been made to give a promise, she had from time to time taken a look privately at the painting during its progress. Aurora had known of this and been sorely tempted to do the same, but had resisted the temptation, afraid of Gerald's bad opinion.

"My soul!" she murmured, really much moved.

Of course she knew that the portrait flattered her; but she felt as Lauras and Leonoras and Lucastas no doubt felt when their poets celebrated them under ideal forms in which their friends and families may have had trouble to recognize them. The pride of having inspired an immortal masterpiece must have stirred their hearts to grat.i.tude toward the gifted beings able to see them disenc.u.mbered from their faults, and fix them for the contemplation of their own eyes and their neighbors' as they had been at the best moment of their brightest hour.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aurora, clasping her hands in a delight that could find no words to express it, made a sound like the coo of a dove]

In the days when La Grande Mademoiselle was painted as Minerva, Aurora's portrait might have been called "Mrs. Hawthorne as Venus." The expression of her face was as void of history as the fair G.o.ddess's. The tender beam of pleasure lighting it suggested that she might that moment have been awarded the apple. The portrait was, nevertheless, in a way, "Aurora all over," as Estelle p.r.o.nounced it; but an Aurora whose imperfections had been smoothed out of existence, and with them her humor; an Aurora whose good working complexion, as she called it, had been turned to lilies and roses, her hair of mortal gold to immortal suns.h.i.+ne, and those sagacious...o...b.. of blue, which made friends for her by their twinkle, into melting azure stars.

The painter had, besides, glorified every detail of the setting: the rich fabric of the dress, the creamy feathers of the fan, even the roses of the breast-knot. The pearls and diamonds he had amused himself with making larger than they were, and filled these with a winking fire, those with a lambent l.u.s.ter. But Gerald had no mind when he indulged in satire to be gross. The whole was dainty, as s.h.i.+mmering as a soap-bubble, and of a fineness that rightly commended it to lovers of beautiful surfaces.

"I don't care," burst from Aurora, as if in reply to an inaudible criticism, "I just love it! I don't care if it is flattered. I could hug you for it, Gerald Fane. I think it's perfectly lovely. It's going to be a solid satisfaction. By and by, when my double chin has caught up with me, and I'm a homely old thing, and n.o.body knows what I did look like in my prime, I'll have this to show them. By that time, with my brain weakening, I hope I shall have come to thinking it was as like me as two peas. There's some reason for living now."

Every caller was taken to see the portrait, and heard Mrs. Hawthorne's opinion of the talented artist. The majority of visitors candidly shared her admiration, though not one woman among them can have failed to say to herself that the portrait was flattered. But with a portrait of oneself to have executed, who would not prefer the brush that makes beautiful?

Interest spread in the painter, whose work few even of the Florentines knew except from hearsay. No one who saw Mrs. Hawthorne's portrait was very clearly aware--such is fame!--that it was for Fane a departure.

Until it came to Leslie. She stood a long time before the painting, then exclaimed:

"What a joke!"

But she was inclined to take the same view as Mrs. Hawthorne, that when he could paint like that it was a pity Gerald should not do it oftener, to build up a reputation and fill his purse. She only would have advised him not to go quite so far another time in the same direction.

As Gerald, the portrait finished, came no more to the house, fairly as if modesty could not have endured the compliments showered upon him, Aurora with a communication to make had to square herself before her desk in the room of the red flowers and painstakingly pen a note.

Aurora, when taking pains, wrote the cleanest, clearest, most characterless hand that was ever seen outside of a school copy-book, and took pride in it. Aurora's language, when she applied herself to composition, lost the last vestige of color and life. She wrote:

"My dear Mr. Fane:

"You have not been to see us for a long time, and so I am obliged to write what I have to say. It is that our friends _cannot say enough_ in praise of your portrait of me, and Mrs. Bixby, an American who is staying at the pension Trollope, wants to have one just like it--one, of course, I mean, as much like her as that is like me, but not a bit more. But before she decides she wants to know what it will cost. And that brings me to the question, What is the price of my picture? Please, let me beg you to make it _a figure I shall not blush to pay_ for such a _fine piece of work_. Make it a price that agrees with my estimate of the picture rather than your _very modest_ one. I shall be glad, you ought to know, to pay anything you say. You couldn't, if you tried, make it seem too much for me to pay for _such a fine piece of work_. I have got up in the middle of the night and gone down to look at it with a candle, and stood till I began to sneeze, I like it so much, though I know it's too good-looking. So please set a good price on it and not _make me feel mean_ taking it. Then I'll tell Mrs. Bixby what I paid. She's got plenty of money, and even if she beats you down, it will be better if she knows I paid a big price. You have such a wonderful talent it ought to make your fortune, and so it will by and by. Don't forget that we are always glad to see you and that you haven't been for quite a while.

"Yours sincerely, "Aurora Hawthorne.

"P.S. What do you think Busteretto did? He saw me pouring some water into a bowl and imagined I was going to give him a bath.

So he went to hide under the grate. Then of course he had to have a bath, which he wouldn't have had to otherwise. He sends much love.

"Another P.S. I meant to tell you we have got a box for the veglione (I hope that is the way to spell it) on the last night of the Carnival. We have only asked the Fosses so far, and we want you to be sure to save that night to come with us."

Gerald, having read, sat down and wrote, with a disregard to the delicacy of his hair-lines and the shading of his down-strokes that would have furnished a poor example to anybody:

"The portrait, my dear Mrs. Hawthorne, is a gift, for which I will not even accept thanks, as it is, your kind opinion notwithstanding, absolutely without value. One sole point of interest it has, that of a future curiosity--the only thing of the kind that will have been painted in his whole lifetime by

"Your devoted friend, "G. F.

"Shall I find you at home this evening?"

CHAPTER XII

No festivity has quite the vast and varied glitter of a _veglione_.

It takes a whole city to make a party so big and bright. And the last _veglione_ of the season is rather brighter than the rest, as if the spirit of revelry, inexhausted at the end of Carnival, made haste to use itself up in fireworks before the cold dawn of Ash Wednesday.

The opera-house is cleared of its rows of seats, the stage united to the parquet by a sloping floor. Every one of the boxes, rising tier above tier in a jeweled horseshoe, offers the sight of a merry supper-party, with spread table, twinkling candelabra, flowers, gala display.

Crowding floor and stage and lobbies, swarm the maskers. In the center of the great floor the _corps de ballet_, regiment of sylphs in tulle petticoats and pale-pink tights, performs its characteristic evolutions to the pulsating strains of the opera orchestra. The public dances in the remaining s.p.a.ce--dances, promenades, and plays pranks, the special diversion of the evening being to "intrigue" some one. They are heard speaking in high squeaks, in ba.s.s rumbles, in any way that may disguise the voice. Many are in costume,--Mephistos, Pierrots, Figaros, Harlequins, but the most are in simple domino.

When a lady wishes to descend among the crowd she, in the darkness at the back of the box, slips a domino over her ball-dress, a mask over her features, and goes forth unknown to all save the cavalier on whose arm she leans.

The only uncovered faces belong to gentlemen. These look often a little foolish, a little bored, because the uncovered faces are the natural objects of the maskers' impertinences, their part the rather barren amus.e.m.e.nt of trying to divine who it is endeavoring to intrigue, or puzzle, them, and wittily to parry personalities often more pointed than the drawing-room permits.

The party in Aurora's box was large for the size of the box. She had gone on inviting people, then brought hampers and hampers of good things with which to feed them. There were the Fosses, Charlie with all the Hunt girls, Landini, Lavin, the American doctor, the American dentist, and Gerald.

Also Manlio. The Fosses had brought him. He had returned from furlough some time before. It was known now to everybody that he was the _fidanzato_ of Brenda Foss. There was no talk of his leaving the army; on the contrary, he was rumored to have prospects of early advancement to the grade of captain; wherefore the general public took it for granted that the bride's parents were providing the indispensable marriage portion.

Aurora's eyes, at a moment when Manlio's attention was elsewhere, rested on him with a brooding, s.h.i.+ning look. The symptoms of a great happiness, though modestly m.u.f.fled, were plain in his face. The Beautiful One was coming back in the spring, already near, to marry him.

Aurora's affectionate look was just tinged with regret. She had suffered a disappointment in connection with Manlio. An obstinate and uncompromising woman beyond the ocean, when invited to join in a harmless conspiracy, had preferred to do actually, to the tune of eight thousand dollars, what the grasping creature should have been satisfied with merely appearing to do. The happiness that pierced through Manlio's calm, like a strong light through pale marble, came to him from the bride elect's aunt, and Aurora felt robbed.

But Mrs. Foss's hand found hers under the table and gave it a warm squeeze, whereupon Aurora's heart swelled in a way it had of doing. When such a dilation took place, something simultaneously happened to her eyes: the surrounding world was revealed to them as "too lovely for anything." Dimples declared her joy.

"Won't somebody have something more?" she asked, with the spoon in her hand poised over a bowl still half full of chicken mayonnaise.

But every one was done with eating; all were in haste to go down on to the floor and find amus.e.m.e.nt, perhaps adventure, amid the fluctuating, fascinating crowd.

The box was fairly deserted when the door opened again, and the eyes of those left in it, turning to see who entered, were met by two unknown maskers.

One wore the costume of a _bravo_ of old times, picturesque, disreputable, an operatic _Sparafucile_ in tattered mantle and ragged plume. The other was in a black satin domino, and had the face of a crow, a great black beak projecting from a black mask.

They stood a little way inside of the door as if waiting to be addressed. There was silence for a moment, while the others waited likewise. Within the eye-holes of their masks the eyes of the intruders glittered in the gla.s.sy, baffling way of eyes behind masks.