Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

  Miss Jane came to look, and then (in order that she should see to advantage) her niece pulled the cord and rolled the window-shade up to the top, letting in a broad shaft of sunset light, which fell directly across the tea-table and the persons in attendance there. Rose took this moment to carry her aunt’s cup back to the table; and, having put it down, she remained standing by Felicia’s side while she began, composedly, a conversation with Alan Mackenzie. Mackenzie responded: his head immediately assumed the little bend which with him signified devoted listening; he stood, meanwhile, exactly where Rose had intended that he should stand—namely, in front of the two ladies, facing them. Felicia, even in her youth, had had no beauty; now all the faults of her sharp features were pitilessly magnified by the same clear light which brought out the fine-grained purity of Rose’s complexion and turned her golden hair into glittering glory. Felicia was too intelligent to cherish illusions about her appearance; she quivered under the radiance in which the golden motes danced; she too had color now, but it was an ugly vermilion in spots and streaks. She glanced at Mackenzie; he was listening to Rose; now he was offering one of his civil little questions—those attentive, never-failing small interrogatories for which he was celebrated.

  “I should like to strangle him!” thought the older woman, bitterly. “I believe he would keep up those everlasting little questions on his death-bed. In reality, he doesn’t care the turn of his finger for that screaming popinjay. Yet he stands there and listens to her, and will do it unflinchingly as long as she talks, if it’s all night.”

  The popinjay at this moment turned, and fired back at Felicia her own gun. “You are tired, Miss Philipps. Doesn’t she look tired, Mr. Mackenzie?”

  Mackenzie turned obediently; he inspected Felicia’s flushed face. “Yes—ah, really, I am afraid you are tired,” he said, kindly.

  Felicia, unable to bear his gaze, seized her gloves and fled.

  But the popinjay could not sing, and had no invitation to stay. Alan Mackenzie loved music. As he never spoke of the love, but few persons had discovered it; Felicia was one of the few.

  It was nearly eleven o’clock before the song began. They had gone out, after dinner, to the small stone terrace that opened from the drawing-room, in order to look at the valley by the light of the moon. “For we really like our view when we don’t have to talk about it,” Mrs. Tracy explained. After a while, “Come, Felicia,” she said.

  Felicia went within and opened the piano; Mrs. Tracy, following, sank into the easiest chair; Mrs. North placed herself in the doorway, with her face towards the moonlight. Dorothy remained outside, using the hammock as a swing, pushing herself to and fro slowly by a touch on the parapet now and then. On the other side of the terrace, in a garden-chair, sat the second guest.

  Felicia’s voice was a contralto which had not a range of many notes, but each one of the notes was perfect. Her singing was for a room only; it was intimate, personal; perhaps too personal sometimes. The words were, for her, a part of it as much as the melody.

  “Through the long days and years

  What will my loved one be,

  Parted from me,

  Through the long days and years?”

  The music upon which these words were borne was indescribably sweet. Dorothy had stopped swinging. But it was the melody that held her vaguely given attention; she paid no heed to the spoken syllables.

  “Never on earth again

  Shall I before her stand,

  Touch lip or hand,

  Never on earth again,”

  sang the voice, the strains floating out to the moonlight in a passion of sorrow. Dorothy was now looking at the tower of Belmonte, near by. “I wish our villa had a tower,” was the thought in her mind. As her gaze turned, she saw that Mac­kenzie’s eyes were resting upon her, and she smiled back at him, making a mute little gesture of applause.

  “But while my darling lives,

  Peaceful I journey on,

  Not quite alone,

  Not while my darling lives.”

  And now the music rose to that last courage, that acceptance of grief as the daily portion of one’s life, which is the highest pathos. Then there was a silence.

  Dorothy made her little motion of applause again, save that this time the applause was audible; the words on her lips, ready to utter, were, “How pretty that is!” Perhaps Mackenzie divined what these words would be, for, with a quick movement, he rose and went to the end of the terrace, where he stood with his back towards her, looking down the valley. But Dorothy had accomplished her duty; she was perfectly willing to be silent; she sank lazily back in the hammock again, and resumed her swinging.

  “Mr. Mackenzie, wasn’t that exquisite?” said Mrs. Tracy’s voice within.

  Mackenzie, thus summoned, crossed the terrace and re-entered the drawing-room. Felicia kept her seat at the piano; as Mrs. Tracy was standing behind her, and as Mrs. North’s head was turned away, she was freed for the moment from feminine observation, and she therefore gave herself the luxury of letting all the pathos and passion with which she had sung remain unsubdued in her eyes, which met his as he came up.

  “Lovely, wasn’t it? But so sad,” continued Mrs. Tracy.

  “Yes,” Mackenzie answered; “it is rather sad.” Then, “What song is it, Miss Philipps?” he inquired. “I do not remember having heard it before.”

  “‘Through the long days,’” answered Felicia, who was now looking at the piano keys.

  “Ah! And the composer?”

  “Francis Boott.”

  “Ah! Francis Boott, yes. And the words?” His head had now its attentive little bend.

  “They are by John Hay.” To herself she added: “You shall stop your little questions; you shall say something different!” And again she looked up at him, her eyes strangely lustrous.

  And then at last he did say, “May I take the music home with me? You shall have it again to-morrow. It is a very beautiful song.”

  Felicia rolled up the sheet and gave it to him, her hand slightly rigid as she did so from repressed emotion.

  At midnight the two guests took leave, Mrs. Tracy accompanying them down to the entrance portal. The irregular open space, or piazza, before the house had a weird appearance; the roadway looked like beaten silver; the short grass had the hue and gleam of new tin; the atmosphere all about was as visibly white as it is visibly black on a dark night.

  “It’s the moment exactly for our ghost to come out and clank his chains,” said the lady of the house. “This intensely white moonlight is positively creepy; it is made for hobgoblins and sheeted spectres; the Belmonte monk must certainly be dancing on the top of his tower.”

  “Oh no,” said Felicia; “it’s St. Mark’s eve, so we’re all under good protection. Hear the nightingales.”

  She was in high spirits; her words came out between little laughs like giggles. Mrs. Tracy watched the two figures cross the grass and turn down the narrow passage whence the road descends in zigzags to Florence.

  “Poor Felicia,” she said, when she had returned up the stairs to the drawing-room; “she is talking about St. Mark’s eve, in order, I suppose, to bring up the idea of St. Agnes’s. It’s late, isn’t it? They must want to walk!”

  “They?” said Mrs. North. “She.”

  “Well, then, I wish she could,” responded Mrs. Tracy. Going to the terrace door, she looked out. “Where is Dorothy?”

  “I sent her to bed; she was almost asleep in the hammock. If there is one thing she likes better than another, it is to curl herself up in some impossible place and fall asleep. Would you mind closing the glass doors? The nightingales hoot so.”

  Mrs. Tracy closed and fastened the terrace entrance for the night.

  “What do you mean by saying that you
wish she could?” Mrs. North went on. “You wouldn’t have Alan Mackenzie marry that plain-looking, ill-tempered old maid, would you?”

  “Perhaps she is ill-tempered just because she is an old maid, Laura. And as to looks—if she were happy—”

  “Mercy! Are the Mackenzie millions to be devoted to the public charity of making a Felicia Philipps happy?”

  “Why, isn’t it as good an object as a picture-gallery? Or even an orphan asylum? Felicia would be a great deal happier than all the happiness combined of the whole three hundred orphans out at St. Martin’s at a Christmas dinner,” suggested Charlotte Tracy, laughing.

  “Absurd! Rose Hatherbury is the one—if it’s any one in Florence.”

  “Oh, Rose is too young for him.”

  “In years, yes. But Rose’s heart can be any age she pleases. Alan isn’t really old in the least; but he was born middle-aged; he is the essence of middle-age and mediocrity; one always knows beforehand what he will say, for it will simply be, on every occasion, the most polite and the most commonplace thing that could possibly be devised under the circumstances. How came you to ask him to stay to dinner?”

  “Felicia made me. Funny, wasn’t it, to see Waddy hang on, hoping for an invitation too.”

  “You might have given him one. It would have entertained Dorothy.”

  “Well, to tell the truth, Laura, I am a little afraid of Waddy; he is so handsome!”

  “She doesn’t care for him.”

  “She likes him.”

  “Yes, as she likes a dozen more. If she has a fancy for one over another, it is, I think, for Owen Charrington,” continued the mother. “She would have to live in England. But I dare say his people would take to her; they are very nice, you know—his people.”

  “How can you talk so! Dorothy is thoroughly American; she would be wretched in England. When she marries—which I hope won’t be for five or six years more—she must marry one of our own countrymen, of course. The idea!”

  “Very well; I’ve no objection. But in that case we must take her home again before long,” said Laura North, rising. As she spoke she indulged in a stretch, with her long arms extended first horizontally, and then slowly raised until they were perpendicular above her head, the very finger-tips taking part in the satisfactory elongation.

  “How I wish I could do that!” said Charlotte Tracy, enviously. “But you don’t say ‘Ye-ough’ at the end, as you ought to.”

  They put out the wax-candles and left the room together, Mrs. Tracy lighting the way with a Tuscan lamp, its long chains dangling. “By this time Felicia, ‘delicately treading the clear pellucid air,’ is going through the Porta Romana,” she suggested.

  “Never in the world! She has taken him round by the Viale dei Colli; she won’t let him off for two good hours yet,” responded Mrs. North.

  II

  “On Thursday, January 8th, at the English church, Florence, by the Reverend J. Chaloner-Bouverie, Alan Mackenzie, to Dorothy, daughter of the late Captain Richard North, United States Navy.”—Galignani’s Messenger of January 10, 1882.

  III

  It was St. Mark’s eve again, April 24th, and again there were many visitors at Bellosguardo. Upon this occasion they were assembled at Belmonte, the villa with the old battlemented tower, where Mr. and Mrs. Alan Mackenzie were receiving their Florentine friends for the first time since their marriage; they had been travelling in Sicily and southern Italy through the winter months.

  “We shall be going home in 1883, I suppose,” Mackenzie had said to the ladies of Villa Dorio; “I shall be obliged to go then; or at least it would be better to go. In the meanwhile, as Dorothy appears to be rather fond of Bellosguardo—don’t you think so?—I have had the idea of taking Belmonte for a time. That is, if you yourselves intend to continue here?”

  “Oh, we shall continue, we shall continue,” Mrs. Tracy had answered, laughing. “For detached American ladies, who haven’t yet come to calling themselves old—for the cultivated superfluous and the intelligent remainders—there is nothing like Europe!”

  The flat highways down in the Arno Valley, west of Bel­losguardo, are deep in dust even as early as April; the villages, consisting for the most part of a shallow line of houses on each side of the road, almost join hands, so that it is not the dust alone that afflicts the pedestrian, but children, dogs, the rinds of fruit and vegetables—all the far-reaching untidiness of a Southern race that lives in the street. The black-eyed women sit in chairs at the edge of the dry gutter, plaiting straw; up to middle-age they are all handsome, with thick hair and soft, dark eyes. On this April afternoon they laughed (waiting with Italian politeness until she had passed) as an Englishwoman trudged by them on her way back to Florence. Her plain dress was short, revealing long shoes white with dust; her unbeautiful face was mottled by the heat; she looked tired enough to lie down and die. But to the straw-plaiting matrons she was simply ridiculous, or else mad; for how otherwise should a foreigner be toiling along their plebeian highway on foot, when she could so easily have a carriage? Felicia was finishing her daily walk of miles—a walk without an object save to tire herself. As she passed the olive-crowned heights of Bellosguardo rising on the right, she lifted her eyes.

  “He is there, seeing everybody. All the same people who were there a year ago to-day. And what are they thinking—perhaps saying? ‘See this dull, middle-aged man, with that flighty little creature for a wife! She cares nothing for him; she turns him round her finger, and always will.’ O fool! fool too noble to see or to doubt; simple, generous nature, never asserting itself, always repressed, that I understood, while all these other people, that girl at the head of them, only laughed at it!”

  She hastened on, passed through the city gate, and made her way down the dirty, evil-smelling Borgo San Frediano to San Spirito beyond, where, high up in an old palace, she had a small apartment crowded with artistic trumpery. After climbing the long stairs, and letting herself in with a latch-key, she entered her minute drawing-room, and sank into a chair, her feet, in their dusty shoes, like two blocks of wood on the matting before her. And the plates and the plaques and the pots, the bits of silk and tapestry and embroidery, the old sketches and old busts and old shrines that adorned the walls, looked down upon her with their usual heterogeneous glimmer. This time the glimmer seemed personally sarcastic, seemed inhuman.

  While she sat there, the people at Belmonte were beginning to take leave. Rose was to remain (with Miss Jane Wood). As Waddy Brunetti was to remain also, the Misses Sebright looked at Rose with envy. Six of the sisters were now united in a single admiration. For Owen Charrington had gone to Australia before Christmas—it was about the time that Dorothy’s engagement had been announced—and he had not returned; admiration could not stretch to the antipodes. Waddy, too, had been absent through January, February, and March; but he was now at home again, so there was some use in going once more to teas and receptions.

  “How lovely Mrs. Mackenzie is looking!” said Miss Maria Wood on the way down to Florence.

  She had accepted a seat in Mrs. Grimston’s carriage, and it was that lady who answered her.

  “Yes—fairly; it’s her youth more than anything else. Strictly speaking, there are but two kinds of beauty—dimpled youth like that, and the noble outline and bearing that come from distinguished birth.”

  This was a double shot. For Rose certainly had no dimples, and the birth of distinction pointed of course to the widowed countess. But Julian, who sat facing his mother, had no longer any courage to resist; his poor little eyes, like those of a sick monkey, had shed their two slow tears on Christmas eve, when, at last allowed to retreat to his own (cold) room, he had accepted drearily the tidings of Dorothy’s engagement, and had given up his struggle against fate.

  Mr. Illingsworth walked down the hill with Mrs. Sebright, her girls following at a little distance, two and two. “Don’t I miss one of your cha
rming daughters?” he said, gallantly, as, happening to look back at the turn of a zigzag, he caught sight of the procession coming round the higher bend.

  “Dear me! I wish he might miss three or four!” thought the mother. But this was nothing worse on her part than a natural desire to translate three or four of them to richer atmospheres—a Yorkshire country-house, for instance, or a good vicarage; even army life in India would do. Meanwhile she was replying, “Yes—Nora; Nora has been at St. Martin’s Orphan House, out in the country, since Christmas. She is greatly interested in the work there; so much so that I have consented to let her remain.”

  Nora’s secret only one person had discovered, and this one was the benevolent stranger, Charlotte Tracy, who had happened to see the expression in the girl’s eyes for one instant, when the news of Alan Mackenzie’s engagement had come upon her suddenly, and taken her (as it took all Florence) by surprise. The American lady, instantly comprehending, had (while her own face showed nothing) screened Nora skilfully from observation for several minutes. And ever since she had kept her knowledge hidden away very closely in a shaded corner of her heart.

  “A true Sister of Charity,” Mr. Illingsworth had responded to the mother’s reply about the orphan house. But as he said this he was thinking, “And if I had married, as I came so near doing, I, too, might have had at my heels this moment—great heavens!—just such another red-cheeked, affectionate train!”

  That evening the ladies who had dined at Belmonte were taking their coffee in the garden; there was no moon, but the splendid stars gave a light of their own as they spangled the dark-blue sky. From the open door of the boudoir at this end of the house, the light, streaming forth, fell upon Dorothy as she sat talking to Rose. After a while the gentlemen joined the ladies; and then Waddy talked to Rose. But while he talked, his eyes followed the hostess, who was now strolling up and down the honeysuckle path with one of her guests. Some one asked Waddy to sing. Nothing loath, he went within, brought out Dorothy’s guitar, and sang one of Tosti’s serenades. The song and his voice, a melodious tenor, accorded so perfectly with the old Italian garden that there was much applause. And then Waddy, having moved his chair into the shadow of the trees, sent forth after a while from the darkness, unasked, a second song, and this time the words were English: