Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

  “And why should it be wasted in Fiftieth Street?”

  “The very qualities that are admired here would be a drawback to her there,” replied Mrs. Churchill. “A shy girl who cannot laugh and talk with everybody, who has never been out alone a step in her life, where would she be in New York?—I ask you that. While here, as you see, before she is eighteen—”

  “Isn’t the poor child eighteen yet? Why in the world do you want to marry her to any one for five years more at least?”

  Mrs. Churchill threw up her pretty hands. “How little you have learned about some things, Philip, in spite of your winters on the Nile and your Scotch shooting-box! I suppose it is because you have had no daughters to consider.”

  “Daughters?—I should think not!” was Dallas’s mental exclamation. Fanny, then, with all her sense, was going to make that same old mistake of supposing that a bachelor of thirty-seven and a mother of thirty-seven were of the same age.

  “Why, it’s infinitely better in every way that a nice girl like Eva should be married as soon as possible after her school-books are closed, Philip,” Mrs. Churchill went on; “for then, don’t you see, she can enter society—which is always so dangerous—safely; well protected, and yet quite at liberty as well. I mean, of course, in case she has a good husband. That is the mother’s business, the mother’s responsibility, and I think a mother who does not give her heart to it, her whole soul and energy, and choose well—I think such a mother an infamous woman. In this case I am sure I have chosen well; I am sure Eva will be happy with Pierre de Verneuil. They have the same ideas; they have congenial tastes, both being fond of music and art. And Pierre is a very lovable fellow; you will think so yourself when you see him.”

  “And you say she likes him?”

  “Very much. I should not have gone on with it, of course, if there had been any dislike. They are not formally betrothed as yet; that is to come soon; but the old Count (Pierre’s father) has been to see me, and everything is virtually arranged—a delightful man, the old Count. They are to make handsome settlements; not only are they rich, but they are not in the least narrow—as even the best Italians are, I am sorry to say. The Verneuils are cosmopolitans; they have been everywhere; their estate is near Brussels, but they spend most of their time in Paris. They will never tie Eva down in any small way. In addition, both father and son are extremely nice to me.”

  “Ah!” said Dallas, approvingly.

  “Yes; they have the French ideas about mothers; you know that in France the mother is and remains the most important person in the family.” As she said this, Mrs. Churchill unconsciously lifted herself and threw back her shoulders. Ordinarily the line from the knot of her hair behind to her waist was long and somewhat convex, while correspondingly the distance between her chin and her belt in front was surprisingly short: she was a plump woman, and she had fallen into the habit of leaning upon a certain beguiling steel board, which leads a happy existence in wrappings of white kid and perfumed lace.

  “Not only will they never wish to separate me from Eva,” she went on, still abnormally erect, “but such a thought would never enter their minds; they think it an honor and a pleasure to have me with them; the old Count assured me of it in those very words.”

  “And now we have the secret of the Belgian success,” said Dallas.

  “Yes. But I have not been selfish; I have tried to consider everything; I have investigated carefully. If you will stay half an hour longer you can see Pierre for yourself; and then I know that you will agree with me.”

  In less than half an hour the Belgian appeared—a slender, handsome young man of twenty-two, with an ease of manner and grace in movement which no American of that age ever had. With all his grace, however, and his air of being a man of the world, there was such a charming expression of kindliness and purity in his still boyish eyes that any mother, with her young daughter’s happiness at heart, might have been pardoned for coveting him as a son-in-law. This Dallas immediately comprehended. “You have chosen well,” he said to Fanny, when they were left for a moment alone; “the boy’s a jewel.”

  Before the arrival of Pierre, Eva Churchill, followed by her governess, had come out to join her mother on the terrace; Eva’s daily lessons were at an end, save that the music went on; Mlle. Legrand was retained as a useful companion.

  Following Pierre, two more visitors appeared, not together; one was an Englishman of fifty, small, meagre, plain in face; the other an American, somewhat younger, a short, ruddy man, dressed like an Englishman. Mrs. Churchill mentioned their names to Dallas: “Mr. Gordon-Gray.” “Mr. Ferguson.”

  It soon appeared that Mr. Gordon-Gray and Mr. Ferguson were in the habit of looking in every afternoon, at about that hour, for a cup of tea. Dallas, who hated tea, leaned back in his chair and watched the scene, watched Fanny especially, with the amused eyes of a contemporary who remembers a different past. Fanny was looking dimpled and young; her tea was excellent, her tea-service elaborate (there was a samovar); her daughter was docile, her future son-in-law a Count and a pearl; in addition, her terrace was an enchanting place for lounging, attached as it was to a pink-faced villa that overlooked the sea.

  Nor were there wanting other soft pleasures. “Dear Mrs. Murray-Churchill, how delicious is this nest of yours!” said the Englishman, with quiet ardor; “I never come here without admiring it.”

  Fanny answered him in a steady voice, though there was a certain flatness in its tone: “Yes, it’s very pretty indeed.” Her face was red; she knew that Dallas was laughing; she would not look in his direction. Dallas, however, had taken himself off to the parapet, where he could have his laugh out at ease: to be called Mrs. Murray-Churchill as a matter of course in that way—what joy for Fanny!

  Eva was listening to the busy Mark Ferguson; he was showing her a little silver statuette which he had unearthed that morning in Naples, “in a dusty out-of-the-way shop, if you will believe it, where there was nothing else but rubbish—literally nothing. From the chasing I am inclined to think it’s fifteenth century. But you will need glasses to see it well; I can lend you a pair of mine.”

  “I can see it perfectly—thanks,” said Eva. “It is very pretty, I suppose.”

  “Pretty, Miss Churchill? Surely it’s a miracle!” Ferguson protested.

  Pierre, who was sitting near the mother, glanced across and smiled. Eva did not smile in reply; she was looking vaguely at the blackened silver; but when he came over to see for himself the miracle, then she smiled very pleasantly.

  Pierre was evidently deeply in love; he took no pains to conceal it; but during the two hours he spent there he made no effort to lure the young girl into the drawing-room, or even as far as the parapet. He was very well bred. At present he stood beside her and beside Mark Ferguson, and talked about the statuette. “It seems to me old Vienna,” he said.

  “Signor Bartalama,” announced Angelo, Mrs. Churchill’s man-servant, appearing at the long window of the drawing-room which served as one of the terrace doors; he held the lace curtains apart eagerly, with the smiling Italian welcome.

  Fanny had looked up, puzzled. But when her eyes fell upon the figure emerging from the lace she recognized it instantly. “Horace Bartholomew! Now from what quarter of the heavens do you drop this time?”

  “So glad you call it heaven,” said the new-comer, as she gave him her hand. “But from heaven indeed this time, Mrs. Churchill—I say so emphatically; from our own great, grand country—with the permission of the present company be it spoken.” And he bowed slightly to the Englishman and Pierre, his discriminating glance including even the little French governess, who smiled (though non-comprehendingly) in reply. “May I present to you a compatriot, Mrs. Churchill?” he went on. “I have taken the liberty of bringing him without waiting for formal permission; he is, in fact, in your drawing-room now. His credentials, however, are small and puny; they consist entirely of the one item
—that I like him.”

  “That will do perfectly,” said Fanny, smiling.

  Bartholomew went back to the window and parted the curtains. “Come,” he said. A tall man appeared. “Mrs. Churchill, let me present to you Mr. David Rod.”

  Mrs. Churchill was gracious to the stranger; she offered him a chair near hers, which he accepted; a cup of tea, which he declined; and the usual small questions of a first meeting, which only very original minds are bold enough to jump over. The stranger answered the questions promptly; he was evidently not original. He had arrived two days before; this was his first visit to Italy; the Bay of Naples was beautiful; he had not been up Vesuvius; he had not visited Pompeii; he was not afraid of fever; and he had met Horace Bartholomew in Florida the year before.

  “I am told they are beginning to go a great deal to Florida,” remarked Fanny.

  “I don’t go there; I live there,” Rod answered.

  “Indeed! in what part?” (She brought forward the only names she knew.) “St. Augustine, perhaps? Or Tallahassee?”

  “No; I live on the southern coast; at Punta Palmas?”

  “How Spanish that is! Perhaps you have one of those old Spanish plantations?” She had now exhausted all her knowledge of the State save a vague memory of her school geography: “Where are the Everglades?” “They are in the southern part of Florida. They are shallow lakes filled with trees.” But the stranger could hardly live in such a place as that.

  “No,” answered Rod; “my plantation isn’t old and it isn’t Spanish; it’s a farm, and quite new. I am over here now to get hands for it.”

  “Hands?”

  “Yes, laborers—Italians. They work very well in Florida.”

  Eva and Mademoiselle Legrand had turned with Pierre to look at the magnificent sunset. “Did you receive the flowers I sent this morning?” said Pierre, bending his head so that if Eva should glance up when she answered, he should be able to look into her eyes.

  “Yes; they were beautiful,” said Eva, giving the hoped-for glance.

  “Yet they are not in the drawing-room.”

  “You noticed that?” she said, smiling. “They are in the music-room; Mademoiselle put them there.”

  “They are the flowers for Mozart, are they not?” said Mademoiselle—“heliotrope and white lilies; and we have been studying Mozart this morning. The drawing-room, as you know, Monsieur le Comte, is always full of roses.”

  “And how do you come on with Mozart?” asked Pierre.

  “As usual,” answered Eva. “Not very well, I suppose.”

  Mademoiselle twisted her handkerchief round her fingers. She was passionately fond of music; it seemed to her that her pupil, who played accurately, was not. Pierre also was fond of music, and played with taste. He had not perceived Eva’s coldness in this respect simply because he saw no fault in her.

  “I want to make up a party for the Deserto,” he went on, “to lunch there. Do you think Madame Churchill will consent?”

  “Probably,” said Eva.

  “I hope she will. For when we are abroad together, under the open sky, then it sometimes happens I can stay longer by your side.”

  “Yes; we never have very long talks, do we?” remarked Eva, reflectively.

  “Do you desire them?” said Pierre, with ardor. “Ah, if you could know how I do! With me it is one long thirst. Say that you share the feeling, even if only a little; give me that pleasure.”

  “No,” said Eva laughing, “I don’t share it at all. Because, if we should have longer talks, you would find out too clearly that I am not clever.”

  “Not clever!” said Pierre, with all his heart in his eyes. Then, with his unfailing politeness, he included Mademoiselle. “She is clever, Mademoiselle?”

  “She is good,” answered Mademoiselle, gravely. “Her heart has a depth—but a depth!”

  “I shall fill it all,” murmured Pierre to Eva. “It is not that I myself am anything, but my love is so great, so vast; it holds you as the sea holds Capri. Some time—some time, you must let me try to tell you!”

  Eva glanced at him. Her eyes had for the moment a vague expression of curiosity.

  This little conversation had been carried on in French; Mademoiselle spoke no English, and Pierre would have been incapable of the rudeness of excluding her by means of a foreign tongue.

  II

  The pink villa was indeed a delicious nest, to use the Englishman’s phrase. It crowned one of the perpendicular cliffs of Sorrento, its rosy façade overlooking what is perhaps the most beautiful expanse of water in the world—the Bay of Naples. The broad terrace stretched from the drawing room windows to the verge of the precipice; leaning against its strong stone parapet, with one’s elbows comfortably supported on the flat top (which supported also several battered goddesses of marble), enjoying the shade of a lemon-tree set in a great vase of tawny terra-cotta—leaning thus, one could let one’s idle gaze drop straight down into the deep blue water below, or turn it to the white line of Naples opposite, shining under castled heights, to Vesuvius with its plume of smoke, or to beautiful dark Ischia rising from the waves in the west, guarding the entrance to the sea. On each side, close at hand, the cliffs of Sorrento stretched away, tipped with their villas, with their crowded orange and lemon groves. Each villa had its private stairway leading to the beach below; strange dark passages, for the most part cut in the solid rock, winding down close to the face of the cliff, so that every now and then a little rock-window can let in a gleam of light to keep up the spirits of those who are descending. For every one does descend: to sit and read among the rocks; to bathe from the bathing-house on the fringe of beach; to embark for a row to the grottos or a sail to Capri.

  The afternoon which followed the first visit of Philip Dallas to the pink villa found him there a second time; again he was on the terrace with Fanny. The plunging sea-birds of the terrace’s mosaic floor were partially covered by a large Persian rug, and it was upon this rich surface that the easy-chairs were assembled, and also the low tea-table, which was of a construction so solid that no one could possibly knock it over. A keen observer had once said that that table was in itself a sufficient indication that Fanny’s house was furnished to attract masculine, not feminine, visitors (a remark which was perfectly true).

  “You are the sun of a system of masculine planets, Fanny,” said Dallas. “After long years, that is how I find you.”

  “Oh, Philip—we who live so quietly!”

  “So is the sun quiet, I suppose; I have never heard that he howled. Mr. Gordon-Gray, Mark Ferguson, Pierre de Verneuil, Horace Bartholomew, unknown Americans. Do they come to see Eva or you?”

  “They come to see the view—as you do; to sit in the shade and talk. I give very good dinners too,” Fanny added, with simplicity.

  “O romance! good dinners on the Bay of Naples!”

  “Well, you may laugh; but nothing draws men of a certain age—of a certain kind, I mean; the most satisfactory men, in short—nothing draws them so surely as a good dinner delicately served,” announced Fanny, with decision. “Please go and ring for the tea.”

  “I don’t wonder that they all hang about you,” remarked Dallas as he came back, his eyes turning from the view to his hostess in her easy-chair. “Your villa is admirable, and you yourself, as you sit there, are the personification of comfort, the personification, too, of gentle, sweet, undemonstrative affectionateness. Do you know that, Fanny?”

  Fanny, with a very pink blush, busied herself in arranging the table for the coming cups.

  Dallas smiled inwardly. “She thinks I am in love with her because I said that about affectionateness,” he thought. “Oh, the fatuity of women!”

  At this moment Eva came out, and presently appeared Mr. Gordon-Gray and Mark Ferguson. A little later came Horace Bartholomew. The tea had been brought; Eva handed the cups. Dallas, looking at her,
was again struck by something in the manner and bearing of Fanny’s daughter. Or rather he was not struck by it; it was an impression that made itself felt by degrees, as it had done the day before—a slow discovery that the girl was unusual.

  She was tall, dressed very simply in white. Her thick smooth flaxen hair was braided in two long flat tresses behind, which were doubled and gathered up with a ribbon, so that they only reached her shoulders. This school-girl coiffure became her young face well. Yes, it was a very young face. Yet it was a serious face too. “Our American girls are often serious, and when they are brought up under the foreign system it really makes them too quiet,” thought Dallas. Eva had a pair of large gray eyes under dark lashes: these eyes were thoughtful; sometimes they were dull. Her smooth complexion was rather brown. The oval of her face was perfect. Though her dress was so child-like, her figure was womanly; the poise of her head was noble, her step light and free. Nothing could be more unlike the dimpled, smiling mother than was this tall, serious daughter who followed in her train. Dallas tried to recall Edward Churchill (Edward Murray Churchill), but could not; he had only seen him once. “He must have been an obstinate sort of fellow,” he said to himself. The idea had come to him suddenly from something in Eva’s expression. Yet it was a sweet expression; the curve of the lips was sweet.

  “She isn’t such a very pretty girl, after all,” he reflected, summing her up finally before he dismissed her. “Fanny is a clever woman to have made it appear that she is.”

  At this moment Eva, having finished her duties as cup-bearer, walked across the terrace and stood by the parapet, outlined against the light.

  “By Jove she’s beautiful!” thought Dallas.

  Fanny’s father had not liked Edward Churchill; he had therefore left his money tied up in such a way that neither Churchill nor any children whom he might have should be much benefited by it; Fanny herself, though she had a comfortable income for life, could not dispose of it. This accounted for the very small sum belonging to Eva: she had only the few hundreds that came to her from her father.