Yet she had said to him: “You’ve looked me well over and you’ve decided I’m a fool!” She had wept when he touched her with his hand, so pitiably thin; but the tears that filled her eyes then were already in them, because he had insisted upon talking reproachfully to her about Arturo Liana and those foolish Bastoni. That did not distress her now; she had let the Bastoni play around because they were funny and danced well, as she explained; and she was sorry if that had distressed Arturo, but there was no harm in it, she was sure; and since Orbison seemed to wish it, she would snub the Bastoni and be so nice to Arturo that he’d forget. She did not really believe the Englishman thought her a fool because he compared her to a fairy child playing with explosives; and her strong impression was that a girl’s picturesqueness suffers no damage by a gentleman’s persuading himself that other gentlemen are becoming explosive on her account.
Her eyes, still upon the mirror, grew large and bright with a stirred appreciation: the image before her was of a personage, that wonderful lady who had given him, he said, the final loveliness of the hour of greatest beauty he had known in all his life. Claire had resolved never to tell him that she was the lady, and she was determined to maintain her resolution. Her only problem, therefore, was to think of the best way of letting him find it out for himself.
She had not thought of any way at all when she and her mother went into the refectory for lunch; but she had the pleasure of seeing that his colour heightened — as she was aware her own did — when she nodded to him. Miss Orbison joined him in returning her salutation; Claire murmured her mother’s name to them; and, when the meal was finished, the four people walked together out into the garden and together drank their coffee at a table placed beside Orbison’s long chair. Mrs. Ambler noticed that it was a relief to him to get back to this chair.
“I should think you’d have luncheon brought to you here outdoors,” she said. “The chairs in the refectory are so uncomfortably stiff.”
He shook his head and smiled. “No. One clings to ordinary habits, doing what other people do as long as one can. Besides, this really isn’t a proper place to eat — not from a porcelain plate, at least; I’m afraid they’d not understand if I asked for vine leaves. Do you know the whole story of Raona, Miss Ambler? Do you know the beginning of it?”
“No,” she said, looking at him with a full straight gaze, not lacking in a mysterious gravity. “I don’t even know the end of it, Mr. Orbison.”
At that, his glance swept away from her quickly, and he pointed down the coast to their left. “The first Greeks landed just there,” he said; and he told her of the storm that had driven the mariners back down the strait and forced this landing. She hung upon his story, never looking away from him, while Mrs. Ambler and Miss Orbison produced embroideries and plied their needles, listening, too, in the dreamy manner of sewing ladies. He talked of antique peoples as if they were human and comprehensible, not dried data of a dried historian; and, having one so intently gazing a listener as never before inspired him, he told her of the Greek fighting down the coast, of the coming of the war fleets of Alcibiades, sweeping the sea before them, of the perishing of that navy and of the strange death of Archimedes, and of Plato’s sailing back to Athens after his wicked last repartee to the tyrant Dionysius.
“How lovely!” Claire cried at this, and she clasped her hands together, delighted with the ancient witticism. “I always thought Plato must be about the same as the square of the hypotenuse, or metempsychosis — until this afternoon. I’d never have believed there was anybody in the world who could make me wish I’d known him, Mr. Orbison!”
Miss Orbison looked at her watch. “Dear me! It’s almost tea-time already. Charles, you do have a silver tongue!”
“I think you mean it’s metal because it can be used so long without wearing out,” he said; and glancing over his shoulder, he shook his head. “There’s a gentleman I fear thinks it must be of iron; I hadn’t noticed him. He has the air of a long-suffering poet, waiting a chance to speak to Miss Ambler.”
The gentleman was Arturo Liana. He stood by the precipice railing, fiddling pensively with his straw hat and a walking stick, too patiently courteous to interrupt by a closer approach. Claire was not pleased to remember that she had determined to be nice to him; for now, at last, the man at her side had become infinitely more to her than the man at a distance. She gave the invalid a softly reproachful glance eloquent of her meaning: “All right,” she said to him, entirely in this ocular demonstration. “I’ll obey you and be an angel to him; but it’s foolish and drags me miserably away from you.”
What she said with her voice was less pathetic, though she sighed as she rose. “I suppose so. Probably wants me to take a walk. Oh, very well!”
She gave the man in the chair another look, one that meant, “You’re doing this!” Then she turned away, and, rearranging her expression to a more welcoming aspect, walked briskly toward Arturo. She did not reach him, however, without being intercepted.
Giuseppe Bastoni rose from the bench where he had been sitting beyond a clustering shrubbery, and stepped forth to stand bowing before her.
“Miss Ambler — you please?”
She stopped. “Yes?”
“I please like to invite you. You will come to dance? Music at Salone nice good zis assternoon. You please enjoy to come?”
“No,” she said; and she intended the coldness with which she spoke and looked at him to be observed by the person whose suggestion she thought she was obeying. “No, I believe not.”
Giuseppe stared through his monocle. “No? You don’t like?”
“Not to-day.”
“No? You don’t like to come because we go to Naple’ sometime, my brozzer an’ me?”
“I haven’t any idea what you mean,” she said. “I must go on; I’m keeping Mr. Liana waiting.”
“Oh, yes! Meester Liana!” Giuseppe stood aside, and bowed deeply. “You don’ like keep Meester Liana to wait. Ob, no! Excuse!”
He turned at once and strode out of the garden, while Claire, continuing upon her way to Arturo, glanced brightly back over her shoulder at the man in the long chair.
“You see?” she seemed to ask. “Are you satisfied with me?”
But he did not appear to be satisfied; and she was puzzled. “Good gracious!” she thought. “Isn’t there any pleasing you at all?”
Apparently there wasn’t, for he frowned heavily; and the unfortunate Arturo paid for it. She was anything but angelic to him during their walk.
XVI
ARTURO complained of this gently as they stood in the cloister for a few moments at parting, upon their return. Twilight had fallen, the air was still; the only sound they heard, except a gurgle of water in the pink marble fountain, was a lonely melody played upon a reed pipe far away and high above them, on a cliff side rising behind the narrow town. It was the Pastorale; and Arturo’s sigh was as wistful as the tune.
“You were so kind last night,” he said. “It was heaven for me, even before you sang. To-day you drop me over the precipice again. I never can know what I do to displease you.”
“Nothing at all, Arturo.”
“Then why do you treat me so?”
“Good gracious!” she exclaimed. “It seems to me I treat you pretty well. You saw how I snubbed that poor little Giuseppe Bastoni, merely because you were waiting to speak to me. I thought he made it pretty plain that he was offended, and of course that’s the end of me for both him and his brother. Well, I did that for you, didn’t I?”
“But if you did, you seem to resent that you did it,” Arturo said. “You have found some fault with everything I have said. If I say, ‘It is fine weather,’ you say, ‘It is bad weather’! When I ask why you believe so, you begin to whistle and you whistle for half an hour!”
“Then don’t ask me why I believe it’s bad weather. That’s simple, isn’t it?”
“Ah!” he said. “The sun could be so bright if you would let it! Why can’t I please you a l
ittle?” Claire looked at him seriously. “You do.”
“I can’t think so to-day. Yesterday I could. It is an eternal up-and-down!”
“No,” she said. “I like you as well to-day as I did yesterday. I’m always pleased with you, Arturo.”
“Is that all?” he asked. “Just ‘pleased’? Just you ‘like’?”
“Oh, dear!” she said, and she shook her head despairingly. “There it is! Whenever I give you the chance, you say things like that! Don’t you see that I spend half my time with you trying to keep you from asking such questions?”
“Yes, I do,” he answered. “I am afraid it is what you have wish’.”
“What is?”
Arturo looked at her steadily, with dark, sad eyes. “Yes, I think it is true. You have wish’ that I should want to ask such questions but that I should not ask them. I think you like men to be in love with you but not to trouble you by telling you. Isn’t it true?”
“What!” she cried; but even in her own ears the indignation she put into her voice had a sound somewhat enfeebled. Confronted with so simple yet exact a statement of fact, she was at a loss; and, indeed, she felt both helpless and foolish. She could find nothing better to do than to employ a stencil that she herself knew was too worn with coquettes’ usage to be an adequate defence. “I never heard anything so unjust in all my life!”
“Then you do wish me to tell you?”
“To tell me what?” she said impatiently; but in the same instant she understood her mistake and that he would reply, “I love you!” She stepped back from him quickly, her hands fluttering in hasty gestures of negation. “No! I don’t mean that; I don’t mean to ask you such a question. Arturo, please—”
“Then what I said of you is true.”
“Oh, dear me!” And with that, she uttered some little incoherent sounds of petulant distress; then fell back upon another and even more useless stencil: “Arturo, don’t you understand?”
“I am afraid so,” he said quietly; but there was something in his voice that made her catch her breath. “You needn’t be disturbed. I will not say what you fear I would say. I will never say it.”
“Arturo—”
“That is all,” he said.
Then they stood facing each other, not speaking. Her stencils had not aided her; she knew herself accused but defenseless before the accusation; and helplessly, in her confusion, she found nothing at all to say. She had a sensation as of becoming smaller; and Arturo as he stood before her, slender but vague in the twilight, with tragedy in his dark and gentle eyes, was like a tall judge of her.
The white columns of the cloister and the outlines of the marble fountain, in the wan light, were to remain in her memory as a background like the architectural shapings of a shadowy judgment seat where she had been unable to clear herself of a true charge. But Arturo was an unreproachful judge. Orbison had spoken of him as Hamlet; and just such a sorrowful dignity invested the young Italian in this parting with the American girl; for a parting it was — a final one. Foreseeing Providence has been kind in not making us, also, foreseeing; and so we do not know what is to remain most keenly in our memories. Claire’s thoughts were more annoying than acutely painful and were principally occupied with herself; she no more knew that for years afterward she was unavailingly to remember Arturo Liana as he stood looking at her now in the gray cloister than she knew that this was the last time she would ever see him.
He bowed to her gravely, and left her. “Oh, well—” she murmured; and she sighed a deep sigh, in which naturally a little anger mingled with other emotions; for she could not be put at a disadvantage and remain wholly unresentful. “Well, it’s what I get!” she thought, meaning that she had been punished for obeying a too virtuous gentleman’s suggestions. Then, going into the long corridor in the interior of the hotel, she discovered this gentleman seated alone at a small tea table where he was lingering with some cold cups and saucers and the end of a cigarette.
She immediately placed herself in a chair opposite him at the table. “Well, what was the matter?” she asked.
“When, Miss Ambler?”
“When I did what you’d told me I ought to do.”
“My dear young lady!” he objected. “I have too many culpabilities of my own; I don’t tell people what they ought to do.”
“You told me,” she said sharply. “Certainly you did. And I do wish you wouldn’t call me a ‘dear young lady,’ Mr. Orbison. You’re not my uncle; you’re not old enough.”
“I’m afraid I am,” he said, smiling. “At least I’m afraid I feel so.”
“No, you don’t,” she returned quickly. “You haven’t been watching me like an uncle — not a bit — and I haven’t been like a niece being watched!”
“I beg your pardon,” he said with some awkwardness, and returned to her opening question. “What was the matter when?”
“I think you’re evading. You know perfectly you did tell me what you thought I ought to do — what you and Mr. Rennie and Arturo Liana’s mother thought I ought to do. You told me this morning and infuriated me. You said that if I had any decency I’d be nice to Arturo and drop the baron and Giuseppe.”
“No, I”
“Yes, you did, absolutely. So I’ve done it. You saw me freeze Giuseppe Bastoni when I left you this afternoon to join Arturo. You were looking — I saw you were; and I snubbed Giuseppe the worst I know how. He knew I meant it, and he and his brother will understand perfectly that it’s permanent. I think he was in a cold rage when I went by him. Then I looked back to see if I had done what I meant to, which was just to please you, and I saw I hadn’t. You looked like the siroc! Does it make you bitter to have a girl try to please you?”
He did not reply at once; and she took a cigarette from a silver case lying open before him on the table, and lighted it herself, as he seemed unaware. “Well, does it? What was wrong with what I did?”
“I’ll tell you,” he said thoughtfully. “I didn’t propose a line of conduct for you this morning. You said I’d been watching you and asked me what I saw. Among other things, I said I hadn’t been able to understand how any girl could give such fellows as the Bastoni any ground for conceiving, however mistakenly, that they were perhaps rivals with so splendid a young man as Arturo Liana. But whatever harm there was in it had been done; I didn’t suggest an attempt to undo it by making those two wolfish creatures more poisonously young Liana’s enemies than ever.”
“What?” she cried.
“Why, yes,” he said calmly. “That was what you must have accomplished. Don’t you see it?”
She looked at him almost fiercely. “I did exactly what you as much as told me to. You’ve just admitted you reproached me with giving the Bastoni a chance to think they were Arturo’s rivals. Well, I snubbed Giuseppe, practically in Arturo’s presence. Now you attack me for making him his enemy instead of his rival. No, I don’t see it!”
“I’ll try to make it clearer, Miss Ambler. The truth is, the Bastoni have the reputation of being pretty bad hats. You naturally wouldn’t have known that; but there’s no doubt of it; and there are quite a number of other bad hats in the place they come from and the villages between Raona and there. You know most of the landowners don’t go to their own estates unless they’re heavily armed and guarded by the carabinieri; it isn’t altogether a safe neighbourhood except for foreigners like us — they let us alone because we increase the revenue. Well, the Bastoni know what their own reputation is; and that they’re fairly notorious among the Italians for selling spurious antique jewellery to foreigners and as associates of the other bad hats — and young Liana is an Italian. Don’t you see what conclusion this Giuseppe would come to in his mind? You’d formerly been most gracious to him and his brother. Then abruptly, with Liana present, you snub him and go to Liana. Of course he’d think Liana had been saying things about him to you and ruined him with you. That’s why I seemed disturbed when you looked back at me. Don’t you understand, Miss Ambler?”
Claire’s head drooped and so did her eyelids; she slowly crushed her cigarette down into an ash tray upon the table. “You do think I’m a fool,” she said in a low voice. “It seems a little unjust when I did only what I thought you wanted me to do. I didn’t want to do it. Do you think I wanted to go away from you and walk with Arturo? I suppose you’ll tell me now that you didn’t suggest my being nice to him, either!”
“No,” Orbison said. “I didn’t.”
She looked up slowly. “No?”
“I didn’t suggest your doing anything at all,” he insisted. “Certainly not that you be ‘nice’ to a young man obviously suffering on your account — not unless you meant to accept him. Naturally, if you didn’t mean to do that, your being ‘nice’ to him would only increase his torture.”
“Well, then,” she said, smiling suddenly. “I’ve pleased you about that, at least. I was the very devil to him! When we got back from our walk just now we had rather a scene; he virtually denounced me as a trifler. Then he stalked off, and I don’t know when he’ll be back. That is to say, my being ‘nice’ to him because you suggested it merely made us both wretched and on that account I’m sure you’re pleased with me at last, Mr. Orbison!”
“Pleased with you at last!” he repeated in a tone ironically rueful; and he laughed. “Much you bother yourself whether I’m pleased with you or not!”
“No,” she returned. “That won’t do.” She put her forearms on the table and leaned toward him, keeping her gaze gravely and unwaveringly upon his. “I’m serious; it won’t do. You know how much I care to please you and I know you know it.”
“I don’t,” he protested; and as his pallid cheeks once more showed colour in response to words of hers, pain came into his eyes, and he had the look of a man who struggles, but struggles feebly, through lack of strength. “I don’t know anything of the kind.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 427