Aurora the Magnificent Part 28

Gerald was certain these excuses were hollow. It was obvious, at the same time, that Mrs. Hawthorne was bent on leaving. He was vexed. He wondered what her real reason was, as men so often do, after women have taken pains to give them in detail their reasons, and tried, ignoring what she said, to get some light from her face.

It looked to him excited in a smothered way. He at once connected this repressed excitement with Landini; but then, the face was mirthful, too, in the same lurking manner, and the proposals of a serious man could hardly affect even the most frivolous quite like a comic valentine.

He finally preferred the simplest interpretation: she had seen as much as she wanted to; she was prosaically sleepy and going home to bed.

"Good night," she said. "Come soon to see us! Adieu; no, _ory-vwaw_."

"Am I not permitted to take you to your carriage?"

After seeing them tucked in their snug coupe and hearing this wheel off, Gerald returned to the great hall. He without question would remain until the big light was extinguished. Colors, forms, sparkle, golden haze--a painter must be dead or a duffer to leave before the gay glory of it faded and was dispersed in the gray dawn.

The scene viewed from near had its cheapness, its crudity, like those poor painted faces of the dancers pirouetting in the midst of a public they can more surely enchant from the distance of the stage. The costumes, so many of them, came from humble costumers who let them from year to year without renewal of the tinsel or freshening of the ribbons.

But those very things gave to this page of life its depth of interest, gave reality to this romance.

The ball was taking a slightly rougher, noisier character as it approached the end. Some of the boxes were darkened, but the floor was full, even after the tired _ballerine_ had been permitted by the management to go home.

Gerald himself now became one of the slightly bored-looking men he had observed earlier, strolling about, _claque_ under arm, in the rigid black and white which took on an effect of austerity amid the blossom-colors of the costumes. He sincerely hoped no one would approach him to intrigue him, and the hope found expression, more than he knew, in his countenance. He felt unable to meet such an adventure in a manner that would satisfy his taste. It marked a fundamental difference between him, at bottom a New-Englander, and his friends of Latin blood, he thought, that he had not the limberness, the laisser-aller, the lack of self-consciousness and stupid shame, which enables them so good-humoredly to take the chance of appearing fools. And so before this romance he was only a reader; they were it--the romance.

He could deplore his own gray role, but not change it; he therefore wished anew, every time a merry masker looked as though she might intend accosting him that she would think better of it and leave him in deserved neglect. He had his wish; he was in the whole evening teased by n.o.body whatever.

His eyes, straying over the crowd, sought for known faces. All Florence had turned out for the occasion, but some of it had by this time gone home. Most of the men he knew had women on their arms, and from their silence or talkativeness one might without undue cynicism determine whether these were their own wives and daughters or wives and daughters of others.

A tall, gray-whiskered old gentleman in uniform pa.s.sed him--none other than Antonia's friend, General Costanzi--who was trying to retain all his dignity while beset by two frolicsome little creatures looking like the chorus in "Faust," who, suspended one on each of his arms, were trying to win from him a promise to take them to supper. He sent toward Gerald a look of comical long-suffering, to which Gerald replied by a nod vaguely congratulatory, and a smile that courteously wished him luck in that lottery.

The painter Castagnola, broad-blown, debonair, pa.s.sed him, in a costume of sterling and royal magnificence, copied from a portrait of Francis First whom he in feature resembled. At his side, with gold cymbals in her hands, went a figure in floating robes of daffodil gauze, a dancer from one of the frescoes of Pompeii, wearing a mask--four inches of black velvet--only for the form. Her bare shoulders and arms, of an insolent beauty, forbade any mistake as to her ident.i.ty. Gerald knew, like the rest, that it was Castagnola's model.

Charlie pa.s.sed him, at a little distance, with a laughing lady hitched to his elbow. Her mask swung from her hand--the ball was wearing to its end, and masks are hot. The hood of her rose-colored domino had been pushed back from a ma.s.s of ruffled black hair; her eyes and teeth gleamed with equal brightness and directness of purpose. It was suggested to Gerald by her air and manner that she had forgotten the spectators. Her freedom from constraint was shared by Charlie. Seeing them together reminded Gerald that Charlie was after all Italian,--one forgot it sometimes. He tried to remember which of the bits of scandal tossed on to the dust-heap at the back of his memory was the one fitting this Signora Sartorio.

They pa.s.sed out of sight, and he forgot them in the interest of the next thing.

Carlo Guerra, like him alone, stopped to chat with him. Guerra, a pleasant figure in Anglo-American as well as Florentine circles, with his fine head of a monk whom circ.u.mstances have rendered worldly, had, before inheriting his comfortable income, been a journalist. He still enjoyed above all things the exercise of the critical faculty, and had much to say this evening about a recent exhibition of paintings.

Gerald was hearing it with proper interest when some part of his attention was drawn away by a sound across the house. It was, softened by distance, that species of lion's roar, incredibly large as issuing from a human throat, and comical from such a disproportion, which had startled the audience several times already that evening. Gerald turned, without much thinking, to look off in the direction whence it came and single out the figure with which it was a.s.sociated, when he was surprised to find the figure he sought almost under his nose. Not more than six feet from him were to be seen the tattered mantle and ragged plume of _Sparafucile_; likewise the thick crow's-beak of the black domino.

The two were looking at him and, his impression was, laughing. He fancied they were on the point of speaking to him,--he had thought earlier in the evening when they came into the box that they might be acquaintances,--but the crow suddenly pressed t.i.ttering against the bandit, pus.h.i.+ng and pulling him away. In a moment they were lost among the crowd.

Who, then, had been accountable for the roar at the other end of the house? An imitator? A double? Gerald suspected a masked-ball device intended to intrigue. He gave it no more thought, but proceeded, started on that line by the episode, to reflect on the singularity, yes, the cra.s.sness, of Mrs. Hawthorne's determination to leave the ball early.

The secret of it was, of course, that she had no imagination, no education of the imagination. A _veglione_ was caviar to her. This wonderful scene, beheld for the first time, perhaps the only time in life, and she had had to go to bed just as if they had been in Boston or Charlestown! If one must go to church in such a case, it was Gerald's opinion, one does not go to bed at all. But she belonged to the cla.s.s of people who would miss the last act of an opera rather than miss a train or allow the beans to burn. A bread-and-b.u.t.ter person, a sluggish, fat-brained person, elementary, not awakened and sharpened to appreciation and wonder. If he had not been in such a good humor he might have been cross, scornful of her; as it was, he indulgently thought her merely too flatly healthy in every taste for anything but the wilds of Cape Cod to which she sometimes playfully referred.

He here perceived that he had entirely lost the thread of Guerra's talk, and that Guerra, probably aware of it, had moved to another subject. It was hearing the name Hawthorne that had startled him to attention.

"I saw you earlier in the evening in a box with Mrs. Hawthorne," Guerra said, "whom, you remember, I had the pleasure of meeting at Mrs.

Grangeon's."

After considering a moment with a half-smile, he nodded and p.r.o.nounced in the tone of an impartial critic, "_Simpatica_!" Then, after considering another moment, nodded again. "_Ha gli occhi di donna buona._" Which means, or nearly, "She has good eyes." And Gerald's esteem for Guerra was immensely raised, for while thinking very well of him, he would yet not have expected a man like Guerra to discern so much at a first meeting. A worldling like Guerra might so naturally have said "_e bella_!" for Aurora that evening in her best frock, had been _bella_--beautiful; or he might have said, "_Begli occhi_!"

for her s.h.i.+ning blue eyes admitted of that description. That Guerra had said what he said indicated finer feeling than Gerald had given him credit for.

Still lingering in desultory talk, the former journalist now asked:

"Have you seen the Grangeon?"

"No," said Gerald. "Is she here?"

"Yes; she is with the Rostopchine, in a box of the third order." He looked up and around to find the box with his eyes, and after a moment indicated it to Gerald. "There! Do you see them? The Rostopchine in pale purple, and the Grangeon in an Indian thing all incrusted with green beetle-wings, a thing for a museum. They are talking with a uniform whom I do not know. She was speaking of you this evening--Antonia, asking me what you are doing. She has great faith in your talent."

Gerald's lip curled a little sourly, and he stood looking upward without reply.

Turning to look down through her jeweled lorgnette and running her eyes over the crowd, Antonia now saw him. Recognition lighted her face to unexpected liveliness. She fluttered her hand to him demonstratively.

After bowing and smiling, he stood quietly, with face upturned, receiving her showered greetings.

He had a certain knowledge of Antonia. She was capable of entirely dropping the remembrance of her bad treatment of him; perhaps forgetting it really, but likelier choosing merely that he should forget it. She permitted herself the caprices of a spoiled beauty.

A cla.s.sic golden fillet this evening bound her gray locks; a jewel depending from it sparkled upon the deeply lined forehead of a brain-worker. Her irreparably withered neck was clasped by an Indian necklace, showy as a piece of stage jewelry. Light-minded smiles wreathed her heavy face. Where her sleeves stopped there began the soft and serried wrinkles of those long, long b.u.t.tonless gloves which Sarah Bernhardt had brought into fas.h.i.+on.

It was not difficult to see in what illusion Antonia chose to live to-night. Her readers might even, perhaps, have determined which of her own heroines she personated.

For all these things Gerald liked his old friend the more.

Her lips framed the words, "Come up! Come up!" while her hand made the equivalent signs.

He nodded a.s.sent, and with Guerra walking beside him started on his way.

Guerra under the central box excused himself and turned back, having already paid his respects. Gerald, once out in the lobby, advanced more uncertainly, finally hesitated and stopped.

He was not sure he wished to see Antonia in circ.u.mstances which would not allow him to express his resentment of her behavior toward the friend whom with her formal permission he had brought to her house. It was owed to Mrs. Hawthorne not to let the incident pa.s.s. He had ceased to be furious at Antonia; he had not written in cold blood the wrathful, finis.h.i.+ng letter planned in heat of brain. That, after all, was Antonia as he had always known her and been her friend: Antonia, capable of heroisms and generosities, fineness and insight, density and petulance.

One could not drop the great woman into the waste-basket because on one occasion more she had been perverse and the sufferer happened to be oneself. But the great woman, thought Gerald, needed a sober word spoken to her. In conclusion, he would not go to see her, no, until he could have it out with her.

And so instead of seeking Antonia in her box, Gerald cut short his difficulty by going home. It was high time; it had been Lent for hours.

If Antonia were _intrigata_ at his failure to appear, it would only be in keeping with the fanciful circ.u.mstances of the hour and place.

CHAPTER XIII

Early in Lent the weather treated Florence to what Aurora and Estelle called a cold snap. Their surprise and indignation were extreme. That Italy, sunny Italy, should feel herself free to have these alpine or polar fancies!

Estelle showed what she thought of it by taking cold. Aurora affected wearing her furs in the house. To increase their sense of ill usage, they would now and then turn their faces away from the fire and sigh, admiring how the air was dimmed by a puff of silver smoke. These pilgrims from a Northern climate, who knew so well the sensation of breath freezing in the nostrils and numbness seizing the nose when on certain winter days they stepped from their houses into the snow-piled streets at home, could not admit that in the City of Flowers one should catch sight of one's breath,--indoors, too.

The little monthly roses, s.h.i.+vering but brave, blooming still, or blooming already, out in the garden, bore witness, after all, to the clemency of the winter, and upheld the city's t.i.tle to its name. The garden altogether was nearly as green as ever. Against alaternus, ivy, myrtle, laurestine the season could not prevail. Aurora decided that the blame for their discomfort rested with the house; she planned drastic and fundamental improvements which it was quite certain the n.o.ble landlord would not permit her to carry out.

What with Estelle being half sick and herself, as she claimed, half frozen, Aurora at the end of a day during which the sun had not lighted the world by one feeblest ray, and the night had closed down thick and damp, was just a little disposed to low spirits. She had not been out, and n.o.body had come to see her. She felt the weariness that follows for certain sociable natures upon a long stretch of hours without renewal from outside.

She sensibly reacted against it by making the sitting-room as cozy as she could, drawing close the crushed-strawberry curtains, piling wood on the fire, placing a screen so that it s.h.i.+elded her chair and table from the draft; and, seated in her chimney-corner, took up a piece of knitting.

She was not very fond of reading, and she was fond of knitting large soft woolly afghans, of which she made presents to her friends. Reading seemed to her, anyhow, a rather idle thing to be doing. Knitting came under the head of work. How often had her story-paper been s.n.a.t.c.hed from her when she was a girl, and a sock to knit thrust in her hand, with the bidding to be about something useful. How she had hated it. But now that she was free she still had a better conscience when she knit.

To the click of her long wooden needles she thought, with more pleasure than was afforded by any other vision at the moment, of a hot water bottle gently warming the bed into which she meant to creep at exactly nine o'clock. This hour she had set when at eight already the temptation to go to bed and forget the unsatisfactory day in sound warm slumbers had been so strong as to make yielding to it appear wrong.