Aurora the Magnificent Part 43

"Oh, no!" Lily shook her head. "There is n.o.body I could marry."

"Why, I thought, Lily," he said, "that you were going to marry me!"

"No, Gerald," she replied promptly, but with gentleness and regret, so as not to hurt his feelings.

"I might come and live with you," she added, after a second, "and keep house for you. A cottage in the country, with beehives and ducks and a little donkey.... Gerald, do you know about Sir William Wallace?"

Though a chasm appeared to divide this subject from the last, Gerald shrewdly supposed a connection between them.

"Very little. You tell me."

"You haven't read 'The Scottish Chiefs'? I took it without permission and kept it out of Fraulein's sight. It grows light early now, you know, and I read it for hours before getting up. Then whenever I could, I read it in the daytime. And after they had left me at night, I read it with the pink candles of my birthday cake. I cried so much that when I finished I was ill with a fever and had to be kept in bed for three days."

"Why, when was this?"

"Two weeks ago."

"My poor little Lily, how came I not to be told of it? And you sent me such a beautiful remembrance when I was ill!--Well, Lily, I know now why you won't take me. I'm not much like Sir William Wallace, that's a fact.

I might grow like him in courage and prowess, perhaps, to please you, but I know that I should never be beautiful in kilts. It shall be as you say, dear. We'll be brother and sister instead. And now tell me more about this book, these Scottish.... Lily, do you see Mrs. Hawthorne on the doorstep? Do you gather that the signs she is making are meant for us? We came up together and I think she may wish to say she is ready to go, and will give me a lift back to town...."

"We came up together!" With great frequency in these days Gerald was going somewhere with Mrs. Hawthorne, not alone with her, but making one of four in an amiable party. Sometimes it was his fate to make conversation by the hour with Estelle, while Doctor Tom monopolized Aurora; on the other hand, he sometimes would succeed in getting his fingers among Occasion's hair, and secure Aurora for his share, while Dr. Tom was apportioned with the slenderer charmer. But the behavior of all was civilized and urbane, and if a thorn p.r.i.c.ked or nettle burned, the sufferer concealed his pain and spoiled n.o.body's fun.

Gerald would in reality have preferred to stay away, almost as much as Estelle and possibly Doctor Tom would have preferred him to do so. But just there the incalculable, the ungovernable, in human nature came into play. A golden thread, a mere hair, strong as a steel cable, drew him to the place where he could expect to find no comfort, and had no object to accomplish except just to be there, with his eyebrows one higher than the other.

Either Estelle liked to annoy him, or she was unfortunate in doing it without malice.

"Don't they make a n.o.ble-looking couple?" she asked him, gazing at Aurora and Tom outlined side by side against the light of the window.

"Yes," he felt obliged to say, and followed it quickly, without apology for the indiscretion of the question: "Are they going to marry?"

"That remains to be seen," she said in a way which made one desire to set the dog on her. "I cherish the hope. May I offer you another cigarette?"

He sometimes remained scandalously late in the evening after dining, in spite of--oh, by so much!--knowing better. He would wait, with an artist's beautiful air of time-forgetfulness, for Dr. Tom to get up to go. He would instantly, as if remembering himself, get up to go, too, and walk with the doctor as far as his hotel, they talking together like men with respect for each other's brains, and appreciation of each other's character and company, no subject of contention in the world.

Gerald pushed courtesy so far as to go with the doctor, by themselves, on certain visits to hospitals, to certain games of pallone, certain monasteries which ladies are not permitted to enter, Aurora rejoicing in the opportunities to "get good and acquainted" which she saw these two dear friends of hers take.

After the drive back from the wedding, Gerald resisted Aurora's suggestion that he enter the house with them and remain to dine. This he did with well-masked resentfulness. As it was not Dr. Bewick's last evening, but the evening before his last, Gerald did not see that delicacy strictly demanded his sacrifice. But Estelle had without so many compliments informed him that he was not to accept. She had particular reasons, she darkly enlightened him, for the request.

So, with a paltry excuse, he jumped out of the carriage before it reached the gate, and stood looking after it, holding his hat--the glossy _tuba_ which Giovanna had with her elbow stroked and stroked the right way of the silk, when she laid out her signorino's outfit for the wedding.

Earlier than usual after dinner Estelle retired, "to write up her diary," she said. Tom was left to have with Aurora that conversation which Estelle had besought him to have, and of which by a significant motion of the face she had reminded him before leaving the room. He came to the point very soon, the sooner to get it over.

"Nell," he said, and, leaning back, with one arm flung along the top of the sofa, the other offering to his lips a thick cigar, waited long enough for her to wonder what was coming, "you spend too much money."

Without shadow of attempt at evasion, she said:

"Tom, I do."

"You've got to retrench, girl. You've got to be more careful."

"Yes, I suppose I've got to."

"Let's be practical. How are you going to do it?"

"I don't know, Tom. It's so easy to spend and so hard to hold on to your money! If any one had told me a year ago I could get rid of as much money in one year as I have done, I shouldn't have known how I could do it without opening the window and throwing it out."

"Well, I'm glad you don't deny a bent toward extravagance."

"I don't deny anything that means I spend a lot of money. I have more sense. The facts are there."

"You've already broken into your capital, haven't you?"

"Did Hattie tell you that or did you guess? It's true, I have; but--"

she tried to place the harm done in a harmless light--"it isn't so bad but that if I saved for a little while I could make it up again."

"If! True; but are you going to, Nell? That's the question."

"Oh, Tom, I never ought to have been given any money if I was to hold on to it!" Aurora almost groaned. "I didn't know at first. I was pleased as Punch. I lay awake nights just to gloat and feel grand. I tell _you_, I meant to hold on to it! I tell _you_, it wasn't going to get away from me after that good fight we made for it! But--" the effect of a mental groan was repeated--"the whole thing isn't as I thought it would be, not a bit."

She stopped, and while she tried to coordinate her ideas, Dr. Tom quietly waited for explanation or ill.u.s.tration of her meaning.

"I don't like money, there's the whole of it!" she gave him the sum of her attempt in one cast.

Dr. Tom continued to wait, smoking.

"In fact, I hate it."

Dr. Tom continued to wait, without interrupting, or trying to help her disentangle her thought, of which he had in truth no inkling.

"I hate it, and I love it, both. That's truer, I suppose. But I can't be at rest with it."

"Never fear, girl,"--his tone was humorous,--"you'll get used to it.

Just from watching you, I should have fancied you were pretty well used to it already."

"When I was a child it was just the same way with candy," she went on with her own train of thought, not minding his; "I loved it--and gobbled it right up. Some of the girls made theirs last and last. I ate mine at once. And it wasn't only because I was a pig with no self-control. I wanted to have done with it and go back to a sensible life. With this money I have the same feeling--and then another feeling that I sort of can't account for, as if I wanted to get rid of it because there was something wrong in me having it."

"That money? You sure earned it!" he came out vigorously. "Don't be a goose, Nell."

"I wasn't thinking of what you think. But I'm afraid I am a goose, Tom, an awful goose, and I'm ashamed of it. I somehow can't feel it right--there!--to have more than the rest. Come right down to it, I feel mean in having something the rest haven't got, and keeping it from them, like a nasty fat boy stuffing pie with a lot of hungry ragam.u.f.fins looking on. I know it isn't good common sense, or how could rich people be so all right and calm in their minds as they are, and have everybody's respect? Rich people are all right, I've always sort of looked up to them, with their advantages and things. I haven't a bit of fault to find. But Tom, I suppose the amount of it is I was born poor and I go on having the feelings of the poor. If any one asks me for anything and appears to need it, I've got to give it or feel too mean to live. Me, Nell, who was poor myself for so long, how would I look hardening my heart against any one who came and wanted to borrow? I'd be ashamed to look them in the eye."

"With that view of it, of course I can see why your money wouldn't last long."

"Oh, I'm extravagant besides, I'll own to that; that's the _real_ trouble. I want to buy everything that takes my eye, I want to make everything run smooth, like on greased wheels, and to have all the faces around me look pleased, and everybody liking me. I love the feeling of luxury and festivity, and oh, I just love a grand good time! That's what the money was given to me for, wasn't it, so that I could have a grand good time? But when I've indulged myself, Tom, I wouldn't have the face, if I had the heart, to say no to anybody that came along and wanted me to indulge them, too. Now, I don't want you to go thinking this is generosity, Tom, or a good heart, or that I have any sneaking idea in my own bosom that it's anything of the sort. I'd be a regular--low-down--soggy--sinful sowbug, I'd be too dirt-mean to live, if I pretended it was that. When I was poor I never was generous; I never thought of it. I worked hard for what I got; and was in the same boat exactly as the rest; I was ent.i.tled to the little bit I'd worked for. But now it's different. It's like I'd won the big prize in the lottery. I can't be stingy with it and not blush. I can't sit there like a swollen wood-tick and be rich all by myself."

"All right, Nell; all right. It's a perfectly understandable way of looking at it, if it is rather far-fetched. But good-by to the hard-earned thousands. You won't have a smitch of them left."