Aurora the Magnificent Part 37

He could not tell her, because he did not himself know, that just because he was better he, paradoxically, was worse. Thoughts and responsibilities had begun to trouble him again.

"Should you mind very much," he asked suddenly, "if I worked off my nervousness by singing? I have kept still, so as not to worry you, exactly as long as I can."

"Certainly," she said, "go ahead. I never knew you were a singer. What are you going to sing?"

She waited with a certain curiosity.

He began chanting. "B, a, ba; B, e, be--babe! B, i, bi--babebi! B, o, bo--babebibo! B, u, bu--babebibobu!" Then he went on to the letter C, "C, a, ca! C, e, ce--cace! C, i, ci--caceci!" and to D, and so on, one after the other, through all the consonants in the alphabet.

"The queerest rigmarole you ever heard!" Aurora called that simple Italian spelling-exercise for little beginners. It might have been funny to hear him, only it was disquieting, he did it so earnestly and so obstinately kept it up.

When he had finished, Aurora held a sedative powder all nicely wrapped in a wet wafer ready for him. He knew what it was and gratefully gulped it, composing himself after it to wait in patience and self-control for its operation. Aurora, reposing on the magic of drugs like a witch on the power of incantations, watched for the drooping of his eyelids and relaxing of his frown.

He had lain still for so long that she was congratulating herself upon the result thus easily obtained, when he opened his eyes, twice as wide-awake as before, and began to talk, as if really the object of an opiate were not to stupefy a man, but to rouse him fully. Under its influence he was almost garrulous. His vivacity partook of delirium. All that pa.s.sed through his mind pressed forward indiscriminately into utterance, as if the sentinels placed on guard over his thoughts had been taking an hour off.

Aurora heard him in wonder and perplexity. He was not incoherent, he was not extravagant. He was merely talkative, expansive, and this in his case was obviously pathological. She wondered also to see how handsome he could look, with his eyes alight; his cheek-bones burning, pink as paint; his hair, grown long, lying in dark locks over a luminous forehead.

She tried to think of something that would abate all this. She was searching her nurse's memory for some further sedative by which to counteract a first one gone wrong, when the thread of her medical meditation snapped, her attention fastened upon what Gerald was saying.

Because she had a suspicion that it was about Violet he was talking. And she had from the first been curious about Violet and his feelings with regard to her. As curious as if she had been jealous.

"There is a person--" he said, in the suppressed voice of one communicating a secret, "of whom I used to dream very often. Not because I wished to. In the days when I wished to, she came seldom. But when I dreaded it, she began to come, and do what I would, oppose to her what hardness I could, she could be so sinisterly dreadful and unkind that it was like a knife in me. Try to shut her out as I might, she would force her way in and make me suffer. Why? Why did she want to?... I will tell you what I believe. Some women feel their beauty to depend upon their power to create suffering. If not happy suffering, then the other kind.

If men grow indifferent to it, they feel their beauty pa.s.sing, and if it goes there is nothing left that they care for. The unremitting quest of their lives therefore is to feed the blood of men to their beauty, and if they can not do it in any other manner they pick the locks of sleep and get at them in that way. But the last time this person came, a surprise awaited her. And the same, I will confess, awaited me. My heart was like so much sawdust, so far as one drop of blood that she could wring from it. And now she won't come again, I believe, for why should she come? She will look a little anxiously in the gla.s.s, very likely, to see if she has begun to fade. I should be sorry to know that the least of her golden hairs had faded--they were so lovely. It's wrong all the same to practise sorcery. You don't, Aurora, that is one reason why I like to be with you. Women as G.o.d made them are strong enough, He knows!

It's unfair to use sorcery besides, to make themselves beautiful to the point of distraction, and desired to the point of pain. And then their barbarous methods! That low game of using a man's weakness for the increase of their own glory, making a jealous fool wilfully out of a decent fellow, and a baby out of a self-respecting man. You, Aurora, you are good as good bread, you are restful as a bank of moss. You would never do what the others do. Would you, Aurora? You needn't answer me. I know."

"If what you mean is that I'm not much of a co-quette," she came in quickly, to prevent his continuing, "I guess you're right. Take it since I was born, I've been called a good many things, but in all my life I don't remember anybody calling me that,--a co-quette. But you're talking lots more than is good for you, brother. Now I want you to quiet down and give those sleepy-drops a chance to work. Here I've fixed you something else that will help them. It's just a drink with nothing in it but something nice and cooling. Smells pleasant, doesn't it? This'll do the trick."

Slipping an arm under his neck, she lifted him, propped him against herself, and held the gla.s.s to his mouth. Instead of words pouring out, the calming draught flowed in. It was a slow process; he drank by small swallows and wished after each one to stop, but she gently forced him to go on. When it was finished and he turned his head away from the gla.s.s, he found it resting on her shoulder. He settled his cheek warmly against it, like a child burying his face in the pillow. With a long sigh he relaxed.

"Now, Aurora," he said solemnly, "be per--fect--ly still."

He was very still, too. After a long moment he half lifted his head and with a long soft sigh replaced it, as if to renew his sense of a resting-place so sweet. With all her heart Aurora lent herself to this, glad to witness, as she thought, the belated effect of the soporific. In a few minutes he would be asleep.

"Aurora," he suddenly said, wakeful as earlier, but without moving his heavy head or opening his eyes, "do you remember the first evening I ever saw you? You came down the middle of the room all by yourself, like something in the theater, where the stage has been cleared for the princ.i.p.al character to make an effect. You were a fine large lady in a sky-blue frock with bursts of pink, your hair spangled with diamonds, a fan in one hand, a long pair of gloves in the other. That at least is what everybody else saw that looked at you. But me, what I seemed to see was America coming toward me draped in the stars and stripes. Now you know how I feel about my dear country. If I loved it why should I have fixed my abode once and for all over here? And yet when I saw it coming toward me across the room, with your eyes and smile and look of Home, I felt like the tiredest traveler and exile in the whole world, who wants nothing, nothing, but to get Home again. It was like a moment's insanity. I almost wonder that I resisted it, the desire to lay my head on your shoulder and cry, Aurora, and tell you about it, then never move again, or say another word."

Aurora readjusted her position so as to make his leaning on her even easier. She brought a warm cover safe-guardingly around him.

"Poor Geraldino!" she pitied him in the lonely past.

"Then do you remember the first time I went to see you," he asked, "and you introduced me, dearest woman, room by room, to the somewhat gruesome mysteries of your house? You walked before me holding a lamp. In the ball-room, hazy with vastness, you held the lamp high, like a torch. And I had a vision of you as America again, or Liberty, or Something, lighting the way for me.... But I treated the fancy as one treats fancies. I did not in the least intend to cultivate the acquaintance begun with your picking me up by the loose skin of the neck and plumping me down on the little seat of your victoria."

"Why--Gerald!" she drawled in a tone of reproach purposely funny.

"Didn't you want to come?"

"I wanted _not_ to come!" he answered, with normal spirit. "But you kept saying Jump in. When a lady has said Jump in three times it acts like a spell, a man has got to jump."

"But when it came to the hot bread and syrup, brother, you know you were glad to be there. You kept your superior look, but you ate all I b.u.t.tered for you. It did me good to see you."

"Yes," he grew dreamy again, "it took me back. It took me back to so many things I had nearly forgotten. And when at the end of the evening I was leaving, do you remember, Aurora, wrapping in paper some pieces of maple-sugar and forcing me to take them home in my pocket? I felt absurdly like a little boy and again you seemed like big America; something exhaled from you that made me think of slanting silver-gray roofs and the New England spring of appleblossoms and warbling robins; yes, and of October foliage intolerably bright, and Fourth of July celebrations. Not things I dote on, exactly, but things I was born to, and restful to me after my years of chasing what is not to be caught, wanting what is not to be had, seeking all the time to adjust myself, to adjust myself, to the harshness of life, the treachery, the unaccountability, the relentlessness--restful as this heavenly shoulder, on which I have wished how many hundred times to lay my head like this and not move again, or speak again, or have anything ever change.

Aurora, don't say a word, dear. Particularly, kindest Aurora, don't make any of your little jokes. Keep perfectly still, like a good darling, and let me forget everything except where my head is, and be perfectly happy."

As seriously as if a G.o.d had commanded it, Aurora preserved the silence and immobility requested of her, only making her shoulder as much wider and softer and more comforting as she could by wanting it to be so.

When by and by she felt him slip a little as he began to lose himself in sleep, she clasped her hands around him supportingly and held him in place.

A single candle burned in the room, with a book to shade it. Aurora's eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little flame where it was reflected in a mirror on the wall opposite, but she did not see it at all, so absorbed was she in her thoughts. In her feelings, too. In the wonder of the hour. This remarkable Gerald, with his head packed full of knowledge, with his speech that charmed you as whistling does an adder, with his capacity to paint pictures that the rest could not even understand, and then his rarity, the sweetness of his manners, the fascination of all that unknown in him which came, she had concluded, from his foreign bringing-up--he had wanted ever since he first saw her just to lay his head on her shoulder and rest....

Her common ordinary shoulder. What did he see in her? Taking for granted that he saw something, Aurora attributed this unknown quality in herself to G.o.d, and thanked Him. She tightened her clasp about Gerald, the better to feel him there. The power of the sleeping-potion had overtaken him completely. Thoughts that moistened her eyes resulted from feeling her arms full of the breathing warmth of a beloved form. Those defrauded maternal arms! That other, who would have been five years old at this time, and would have been called little Dan, after Dan, her big father, how she would have nursed him through his childish ailments, how she would have held him and rocked him! No, she would never stop yearning over him. One must suppose that G.o.d knows best.

Gerald's breathing was deep and quiet. When sure that it could be done without waking him, she let him gently down on to the pillow.

She stood beside the bed for a few minutes, in her soft garment of cashmere and swansdown which made no more sound when she moved than did her velvet shoes; she watched him sleep with emotions of grat.i.tude beyond possibility of expression to any one but that old intimate, G.o.d.

He was getting well so surely and fast. He would shortly be as well as ever.

Confident that he would want nothing more for the rest of the night, she arranged herself in her easy-chair for a good sleep, too.

On the next day she divined from his half troubled look at her, and the shy modesty of his manner, that he was wondering whether he had actually babbled last night, or in a mild delirium dreamed the whole thing. Not from her might he find out. Her easy, matter-of-fact way made any such pa.s.sage seem at least unlikely.

Having slept during the night she did not retire to rest during the day, but let Giovanna go about her long neglected affairs and in her place looked after Gerald, who had waked from his deep sleep immensely refreshed. He would not need a constant watcher beside him after this, during night or day.

"What shall I do to amuse you?" she asked him, to make an interruption after she had felt him watching her through half closed lids for some time. "Don't you want me to read to you?"

"I think not, Aurora. Thank you just as much."

"Well, then, how shall I entertain you? Do you want me to be a gold-fish for you?"

"How do you 'be a gold-fish,' Aurora?"

"Look!" But the instant she changed her face into a gold-fish's and waggled up through imaginary water, opening and shutting her mouth like a rubber valve, he hid his eyes, crying sharply, "Please stop! I don't want to see it."

The gold-fish personality was dropped.

"Very well, then," she said, with unimpaired serenity, "shall I do a squirrel gnawing a nut? Every family its own circus."

"If you do it, I will not look. How can you endure, lovely as you are, to make yourself ugly--grotesque?"

"Aren't you rather hard to suit to-day, mister? Shall I be a hen, then, scratching for her chicks? That's mild."

"No, no, no. Yes. No. I don't know about the hen. Let me have a sample."

He watched her, critically and provisionally, while with comfortable, motherly, half-suppressed chest-sounds, and a round eye c.o.c.ked for finds among the dirt, remarkably altogether the appearance of a pensive white hen, she made believe to scratch up the earth with her feet. A rather sympathetic performance, he allowed, her imitation of the hen, calling up before one the vision of a farmyard, a brood of downy yellow chicks, a duckpond, suns.h.i.+ne, green things.

He let her do it as long as she would, or rather until to vary the thing she increased the comic beyond the line he fixed. When midday found him grudgingly laughing at her cackling, it seemed improbable certainly that midnight had seen him sleeping in her arms. But underlying their laughter was a consciousness in each that day of a thing uniting them which had not been there before.

Sitting bolstered up in bed to eat his first real meal, he looked, with his long hair parted in the middle and brushed down over his hollow temples, like one of those old masters in the Ewe-fitsy, Aurora told him. A St. John the Baptist, she specified.