“I think Effie will like to read that kind of history,” said her mother.
The child hung her head, and would not look at Colville; she was still shy with him; his absence must have seemed longer to a child, of course.
At lunch they talked of the Carnival sights that had begun to appear. He told of his call upon Mr. Waters, and of the old minister’s purpose to see all he could of the Carnival in order to judge intelligently of Savonarola’s opposition to it.
“Mr. Waters is a very good man,” said Mrs. Bowen, with the air of not meaning to approve him quite, nor yet to let any notion of his be made fun of in her presence. “But for my part I wish there were not going to be any Carnival; the city will be in such an uproar for the next two weeks.”
“O Mrs. Bowen!” cried Imogene reproachfully; Effie looked at her mother in apparent anxiety lest she should be meaning to put forth an unquestionable power and stop the Carnival.
“The last Carnival, I thought there was never going to be any end to it; I was so glad when Lent came.”
“Glad when Lent came!” breathed Imogene, in astonishment; but she ventured upon nothing more insubordinate, and Colville admired to see this spirited girl as subject to Mrs. Bowen as her own child. There is no reason why one woman should establish another woman over her, but nearly all women do it in one sort or another, from love of a voluntary submission, or from a fear of their own ignorance, if they are younger and more inexperienced than their lieges. Neither the one passion nor the other seems to reduce them to a like passivity as regards their husbands. They must apparently have a fetish of their own sex. Colville could see that Imogene obeyed Mrs. Bowen not only as a protégée but as a devotee.
“Oh, I suppose you will have to go through it all,” said Mrs. Bowen, in reward of the girl’s acquiescence.
“You’re rather out of the way of it up here,” said Colville. “You had better let me go about with the young ladies — if you can trust them to the care of an old fellow like me.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’re so very old, at all times,” replied Mrs. Bowen, with a peculiar look, whether indulgent or reproachful he could not quite make out.
But he replied, boldly, in his turn: “I have certainly my moments of being young still; I don’t deny it. There’s always a danger of their occurrence.”
“I was thinking,” said Mrs. Bowen, with a graceful effect of not listening, “that you would let me go too. It would be quite like old times.”
“Only too much honour and pleasure,” returned Colville, “if you will leave out the old times. I’m not particular about having them along.” Mrs. Bowen joined in laughing at the joke, which they had to themselves. “I was only consulting an explicit abhorrence of yours in not asking you to go at first,” he explained.
“Oh yes; I understand that.”
The excellence of the whole arrangement seemed to grow upon Mrs. Bowen. “Of course,” she said, “Imogene ought to see all she can of the Carnival. She may not have another chance, and perhaps if she had, he wouldn’t consent.”
“I’ll engage to get his consent,” said the girl. “What I was afraid of was that I couldn’t get yours, Mrs. Bowen.”
“Am I so severe as that?” asked Mrs. Bowen softly.
“Quite,” replied Imogene.
“Perhaps,” thought Colville, “it isn’t always silent submission.”
For no very good reason that any one could give, the Carnival that year was not a brilliant one. Colville’s party seemed to be always meeting the same maskers on the street, and the maskers did not greatly increase in numbers. There were a few more of them after nightfall, but they were then a little more bacchanal, and he felt it was better that the ladies had gone home by that time. In the pursuit of the tempered pleasure of looking up the maskers he was able to make the reflection that their fantastic and vivid dresses sympathised in a striking way with the architecture of the city, and gave him an effect of Florence which he could not otherwise have had. There came by and by a little attempt at a corso in Via Cerratani and Via Tornabuoni. There were some masks in carriages, and from one they actually threw plaster confetti; half a dozen bare-legged boys ran before and beat one another with bladders, Some people, but not many, watched the show from the windows, and the footways were crowded.
Having proposed that they should see the Carnival together, Colville had made himself responsible for it to the Bowen household. Imogene said, “Well is this the famous Carnival of Florence?”
“It certainly doesn’t compare with the Carnival last year,” said Mrs. Bowen.
“Your reproach is just, Mrs. Bowen,” he acknowledged. “I’ve managed it badly. But you know I’ve been out of practice a great while there in Des Vaches.”
“Oh, poor Mr. Colville!” cried Imogene. “He isn’t altogether to blame.”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Bowen, humouring the joke in her turn. “It seems to me that if he had consulted us a little earlier, he might have done better.”
He drove home with the ladies, and Mrs. Bowen made him stay to tea. As if she felt that he needed to be consoled for the failure of his Carnival, she was especially indulgent with him. She played to him on the piano some of the songs that were in fashion when they were in Florence together before.
Imogene had never heard them; she had heard her mother speak of them. One or two of them were negro songs, such as very pretty young ladies used to sing without harm to themselves or offence to others; but Imogene decided that they were rather rowdy. “Dear me, Mrs. Bowen! Did you sing such songs? You wouldn’t let Effie!”
“No, I wouldn’t let Effie. The times are changed. I wouldn’t let Effie go to the theatre alone with a young gentleman.”
“The times are changed for the worse,” Colville began. “What harm ever came to a young man from a young lady’s going alone to the theatre with him?”
He stayed till the candles were brought in, and then went away only because, as he said, they had not asked him to stay to dinner.
He came nearly every day, upon one pretext or another, and he met them oftener than that at the teas and on the days of other ladies in Florence; for he was finding the busy idleness of the life very pleasant, and he went everywhere. He formed the habit of carrying flowers to the Palazzo Pinti, excusing himself on the ground that they were so cheap and so abundant as to be impersonal. He brought violets to Effie and roses to Imogene; to Mrs. Bowen he always brought a bunch of the huge purple anemones which grow so abundantly all winter long about Florence. “I wonder why purple anemones?” he asked her one day in presenting them to her.
“Oh, it is quite time I should be wearing purple,” she said gently.
“Ah, Mrs. Bowen!” he reproached her. “Why do I bring purple violets to Miss Effie?”
“You must ask Effie!” said Mrs. Bowen, with a laugh.
After that he stayed away forty-eight hours, and then appeared with a bunch of the red anemones, as large as tulips, which light up the meadow grass when it begins to stir from its torpor in the spring. “They grew on purpose to set me right with you,” he said, “and I saw them when I was in the country.”
It was a little triumph for him, which she celebrated by putting them in a vase on her table, and telling people who exclaimed over them that they were some Mr. Colville gathered in the country. He enjoyed his privileges at her house with the futureless satisfaction of a man. He liked to go about with the Bowens; he was seen with the ladies driving and walking, in most of their promenades. He directed their visits to the churches and the galleries; he was fond of strolling about with Effie’s daintily-gloved little hand in his. He took her to Giocosa’s and treated her to ices; he let her choose from the confectioner’s prettiest caprices in candy; he was allowed to bring the child presents in his pockets. Perhaps he was not as conscientious as he might have been in his behaviour with the little girl. He did what he could to spoil her, or at least to relax the severity of the training she had received; he liked to see the struggle
that went on in the mother’s mind against this, and then the other struggle with which she overcame her opposition to it. The worst he did was to teach Effie some picturesque Western phrases, which she used with innocent effectiveness; she committed the crimes against convention which he taught her with all the conventional elegance of her training. The most that he ever gained for her were some concessions in going out in weather that her mother thought unfit, or sitting up for half-hours after her bed-time. He ordered books for her from Goodban’s, and it was Colville now, and not the Rev. Mr. Morton, who read poetry aloud to the ladies on afternoons when Mrs. Bowen gave orders that she and Miss Graham should be denied to all other comers.
It was an intimacy; and society in Florence is not blind, and especially it is not dumb. The old lady who had celebrated Mrs. Bowen to him the first night at Palazzo Pinti led a life of active questions as to what was the supreme attraction to Colville there, and she referred her doubt to every friend with whom she drank tea. She philosophised the situation very scientifically, and if not very conclusively, how few are the absolute conclusions of science upon any point!
“He is a bachelor, and there is a natural affinity between bachelors and widows — much more than if he were a widower too. If he were a widower I should say it was undoubtedly mademoiselle. If he were a little bit younger, I should have no doubt it was madame; but men of that age have such an ambition to marry young girls! I suppose that they think it proves they are not so very old, after all. And certainly he isn’t too old to marry. If he were wise — which he probably isn’t, if he’s like other men in such matters — there wouldn’t be any question about Mrs. Bowen. Pretty creature! And so much sense! Too much for him. Ah, my dear, how we are wasted upon that sex!”
Mrs. Bowen herself treated the affair with masterly frankness. More than once in varying phrase, she said: “You are very good to give us so much of your time, Mr. Colville, and I won’t pretend I don’t know it. You’re helping me out with a very hazardous experiment. When I undertook to see Imogene through a winter in Florence, I didn’t reflect what a very gay time girls have at home, in Western towns especially. But I haven’t heard her breathe Buffalo once. And I’m sure it’s doing her a great deal of good here. She’s naturally got a very good mind; she’s very ambitious to be cultivated. She’s read a good deal, and she’s anxious to know history and art; and your advice and criticism are the greatest possible advantage to her.”
“Thank you,” said Colville, with a fine, remote dissatisfaction. “I supposed I was merely enjoying myself.”
He had lately begun to haunt his banker’s for information in regard to the Carnival balls, with the hope that something might be made out of them.
But either there were to be no great Carnival balls, or it was a mistake to suppose that his banker ought to know about them. Colville went experimentally to one of the people’s balls at a minor theatre, which he found advertised on the house walls. At half-past ten the dancing had not begun, but the masks were arriving; young women in gay silks and dirty white gloves; men in women’s dresses, with enormous hands; girls as pages; clowns, pantaloons, old women, and the like. They were all very good-humoured; the men, who far outnumbered the women, danced contentedly together. Colville liked two cavalry soldiers who waltzed with each other for an hour, and then went off to a battery on exhibition in the pit, and had as much electricity as they could hold. He liked also two young citizens who danced together as long as he stayed, and did not leave off even for electrical refreshment. He came away at midnight, pushing out of the theatre through a crowd of people at the door, some of whom were tipsy. This certainly would not have done for the ladies, though the people were civilly tipsy.
IX
The next morning Paolo, when he brought up Colville’s breakfast, brought the news that there was to be a veglione at the Pergola Theatre. This news revived Colville’s courage. “Paolo,” he said, “you ought to open a banking-house.” Paolo was used to being joked by foreigners who could not speak Italian very well; he smiled as if he understood.
The banker had his astute doubts of Paolo’s intelligence; the banker in Europe doubts all news not originating in his house; but after a day or two the advertisements in the newspapers carried conviction even to the banker.
When Colville went to the ladies with news of the veglione, he found that they had already heard of it. “Should you like to go?” he asked Mrs. Bowen.
“I don’t know. What do you think?” she asked in turn.
“Oh, it’s for you to do the thinking. I only know what I want.”
Imogene said nothing, while she watched the internal debate as it expressed itself in Mrs. Bowen’s face.
“People go in boxes,” she said thoughtfully; “but you would feel that a box wasn’t the same thing exactly?”
“We went on the floor,” suggested Colville.
“It was very different then. And, besides, Mrs. Finlay had absolutely no sense of propriety.” When a woman has explicitly condemned a given action, she apparently gathers courage for its commission under a little different conditions. “Of course, if we went upon the floor, I shouldn’t wish it to be known at all, though foreigners can do almost anything they like.”
“Really,” said Colville, “when it comes to that, I don’t see any harm in it.”
“And you say go?”
“I say whatever you say.”
Mrs. Bowen looked from him to Imogene. “I don’t either,” she said finally, and they understood that she meant the harm which he had not seen.
“Which of us has been so good as to deserve this?” asked Colville.
“Oh, you have all been good,” she said. “We shall go in masks and dominoes,” she continued. “Nothing will happen, and who should know us if anything did?” They had received tickets to the great Borghese ball, which is still a fashionable and desired event of the Carnival to foreigners in Florence; but their preconceptions of the veglione threw into the shade the entertainment which the gentlemen of Florence offered to favoured sojourners.
“Come,” said Mrs. Bowen, “you must go with us and help us choose our dominoes.”
A prudent woman does not do an imprudent thing by halves. Effie was to be allowed to go to the veglione too, and she went with them to the shop where they were to hire their dominoes. It would be so much more fun, Mrs. Bowen said, to choose the dresses in the shop than to have them sent home for you to look at. Effie was to be in black; Imogene was to have a light blue domino, and Mrs. Bowen chose a purple one; even where their faces were not to be seen they considered their complexions in choosing the colours. If you happened to find a friend, and wanted to unmask, you would not want to look horrid. The shop people took the vividest interest in it all, as if it were a new thing to them, and these were the first foreigners they had ever served with masks and dominoes. They made Mrs. Bowen and Imogene go into an inner room and come out for the mystification of Colville, hulking about in the front shop with his mask and domino on.
“Which is which?” the ladies both challenged him, in the mask’s conventional falsetto, when they came out.
With a man’s severe logic he distinguished them according to their silks, but there had been time for them to think of changing, and they took off their masks to laugh in his face.
They fluttered so airily about among the pendent masks and dominoes, from which they shook a ghostly perfume of old carnivals, that his heart leaped.
“Ah, you’ll never be so fascinating again!” he cried. He wanted to take them in his arms, they were both so delicious; a man has still only that primitive way of expressing his supreme satisfaction in women. “Now, which am I?” he demanded of them, and that made them laugh again. He had really put his arm about Effie.
“Do you think you will know your papa at the veglione?” asked one of the shop-women, with a mounting interest in the amiable family party.
They all laughed; the natural mistake seemed particularly droll to Imogene.
�
�Come,” cried Mrs. Bowen; “it’s time we should be going.”
That was true; they had passed so long a time in the shop that they did not feel justified in seriously attempting to beat down the price of their dresses. They took them at the first price. The woman said with reason that it was Carnival, and she could get her price for the things.
They went to the veglione at eleven, the ladies calling for Colville, as before, in Mrs. Bowen’s carriage. He felt rather sheepish, coming out of his room in his mask and domino, but the corridors of the hotel were empty, and for the most part dark; there was no one up but the porter, who wished him a pleasant time in as matter-of-fact fashion as if he were going out to an evening party in his dress coat. His spirits mounted in the atmosphere of adventure which the ladies diffused about them in the carriage; Effie Bowen laughed aloud when he entered, in childish gaiety of heart.
The narrow streets roared with the wheels of cabs and carriages coming and going; the street before the theatre was so packed that it was some time before they could reach the door. Masks were passing in and out; the nervous joy of the ladies expressed itself in a deep-drawn quivering sigh. Their carriage door was opened by a servant of the theatre, who wished them a pleasant veglione, and the next moment they were in the crowded vestibule, where they paused a moment, to let Imogene and Effie really feel that they were part of a masquerade.
“Now, keep all together,” said Mrs. Bowen, as they passed through the inner door of the vestibule, and the brilliantly lighted theatre flashed its colours and splendours upon them. The floor of the pit had been levelled to that of the stage, which, stripped of the scenic apparatus, opened vaster spaces for the motley crew already eddying over it in the waltz. The boxes, tier over tier, blazed with the light of candelabra which added their sparkle to that of the gas jets.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 270