Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The young painters had their jokes about it; even Mr. Morton smiled, and Mrs. Bowen recognised it. But Imogene did not smile; she regarded the lovers with an interest in them scarcely less intense than their interest in each other; and a cold perspiration of question broke out on Colville’s forehead. Was that her ideal of what her own engagement should be? Had she expected him to behave in that way to her, and to accept from her a devotion like that girl’s? How bitterly he must have disappointed her! It was so impossible to him that the thought of it made him feel that he must break all ties which bound him to anything like it. And yet he reflected that the time was when he could have been equal to that, and even more.

  After lunch the painters joined them again, and they all went together to visit the ruins of the Roman theatre and the stretch of Etruscan wall beyond it. The former seems older than the latter, whose huge blocks of stone lie as firmly and evenly in their courses as if placed there a year ago; the turf creeps to the edge at top, and some small trees nod along the crest of the wall, whose ancient face, clean and bare, looks sternly out over a vast prospect, now young and smiling in the first delight of spring. The piety or interest of the community, which guards the entrance to the theatre by a fee of certain centesimi, may be concerned in keeping the wall free from the grass and vines which are stealing the half-excavated arena back to forgetfulness and decay; but whatever agency it was, it weakened the appeal that the wall made to the sympathy of the spectators.

  They could do nothing with it; the artists did not take their sketch-blocks from their pockets. But in the theatre, where a few broken columns marked the place of the stage, and the stone benches of the auditorium were here and there reached by a flight of uncovered steps, the human interest returned.

  “I suspect that there is such a thing as a ruin’s being too old,” said Colville. “Our Etruscan friends made the mistake of building their wall several thousand years too soon for our purpose.”

  “Yes,” consented the young clergyman. “It seems as if our own race became alienated from us through the mere effect of time, don’t you think, sir? I mean, of course, terrestrially.”

  The artists looked uneasy, as if they had not counted upon anything of this kind, and they began to scatter about for points of view. Effie got her mother’s leave to run up and down one of the stairways, if she would not fall. Mrs. Bowen sat down on one of the lower steps, and Mr. Morton took his place respectfully near her.

  “I wonder how it looks from the top?” Imogene asked this of Colville, with more meaning than seemed to belong to the question properly.

  “There is nothing like going to see,” he suggested. He helped her up, giving her his hand from one course of seats to another. When they reached the point which commanded the best view of the whole, she sat down, and he sank at her feet, but they did not speak of the view.

  “Theodore, I want to tell you something,” she said abruptly. “I have heard from home.”

  “Yes?” he replied, in a tone in which he did his best to express a readiness for any fate.

  “Mother has telegraphed. She is coming out. She is on her way now. She will be here very soon.”

  Colville did not know exactly what to say to these passionately consecutive statements. “Well?” he said at last.

  “Well” — she repeated his word— “what do you intend to do?”

  “Intend to do in what event?” he asked, lifting his eyes for the first time to the eyes which he felt burning down upon him.

  “If she should refuse?”

  Again he could not command an instant answer, but when it came it was a fair one. “It isn’t for me to say what I shall do,” he replied gravely. “Or, if it is, I can only say that I will do whatever you wish.”

  “Do you wish nothing?”

  “Nothing but your happiness.”

  “Nothing but my happiness!” she retorted. “What is my happiness to me? Have I ever sought it?”

  “I can’t say,” he answered; “but if I did not think you would find it—”

  “I shall find it, if ever I find it, in yours,” she interrupted. “And what shall you do if my mother will not consent to our engagement?”

  The experienced and sophisticated man — for that in no ill way was what Colville was — felt himself on trial for his honour and his manhood by this simple girl, this child. He could not endure to fall short of her ideal of him at that moment, no matter what error or calamity the fulfilment involved. “If you feel sure that you love me, Imogene, it will make no difference to me what your mother says. I would be glad of her consent; I should hate to go counter to her will; but I know that I am good enough man to be true and keep you all my life the first in all my thoughts, and that’s enough for me. But if you have any fear, any doubt of yourself, now is the time—”

  Imogene rose to her feet as in some turmoil of thought or emotion that would not suffer her to remain quiet.

  “Oh, keep still!” “Don’t get up yet!” “Hold on a minute, please!” came from the artists in different parts of the theatre, and half a dozen imploring pencils were waved in the air.

  “They are sketching you,” said Colville, and she sank compliantly into her seat again.

  “I have no doubt for myself — no,” she said, as if there had been no interruption.

  “Then we need have no anxiety in meeting your mother,” said Colville, with a light sigh, after a moment’s pause. “What makes you think she will be unfavourable?”

  “I don’t think that; but I thought — I didn’t know but—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, now.” Her lips were quivering; he could see her struggle for self-control, but he could not see it unmoved.

  “Poor child!” he said, putting out his hand toward her.

  “Don’t take my hand; they’re all looking,” she begged.

  He forbore, and they remained silent and motionless a little while, before she had recovered herself sufficiently to speak again.

  “Then we are promised to each other, whatever happens,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And we will never speak of this again. But there is one thing. Did Mrs. Bowen ask you to tell Mr. Morton of our engagement?”

  “She said that I ought to do so.”

  “And did you say you would?”

  “I don’t know. But I suppose I ought to tell him.”

  “I don’t wish you to!” cried the girl.

  “You don’t wish me to tell him?”

  “No; I will not have it!”

  “Oh, very well; it’s much easier not. But it seems to me that it’s only fair to him.”

  “Did you think of that yourself?” she demanded fiercely.

  “No,” returned Colville, with sad self-recognition. “I’m afraid I’m not apt to think of the comforts and rights of other people. It was Mrs. Bowen who thought of it.”

  “I knew it!”

  “But I must confess that I agreed with her, though I would have preferred to postpone it till we heard from your family.” He was thoughtfully silent a moment; then he said, “But if their decision is to have no weight with us, I think he ought to be told at once.”

  “Do you think that I am flirting with him?”

  “Imogene!” exclaimed Colville reproachfully.

  “That’s what you imply; that’s what she implies.”

  “You’re very unjust to Mrs. Bowen, Imogene.”

  “Oh, you always defend her! It isn’t the first time you’ve told me I was unjust to her.”

  “I don’t mean that you are willingly unjust, or could be so, to any living creature, least of all to her. But I — we — owe her so much; she has been so patient.”

  “What do we owe her? How has she been patient?”

  “She has overcome her dislike to me.”

  “Oh, indeed!”

  “And — and I feel under obligation to her for — in a thousand little ways; and I should be glad to feel that we were acting with her approval; I shou
ld like to please her.”

  “You wish to tell Mr. Morton?”

  “I think I ought.”

  “To please Mrs. Bowen! Tell him, then! You always cared more to please her than me. Perhaps you stayed in Florence to please her!”

  She rose and ran down the broken seats and ruined steps so recklessly and yet so sure-footedly that it seemed more like a flight than a pace to the place where Mrs. Bowen and Mr. Morton were talking together.

  Colville followed as he could, slowly and with a heavy heart. A good thing develops itself in infinite and unexpected shapes of good; a bad thing into manifold and astounding evils. This mistake was whirling away beyond his recall in hopeless mazes of error. He saw this generous young spirit betrayed by it to ignoble and unworthy excess, and he knew that he and not she was to blame.

  He was helpless to approach her, to speak with her, to set her right, great as the need of that was, and he could see that she avoided him. But their relations remained outwardly undisturbed. The artists brought their sketches for inspection and comment, and, without speaking to each other, he and Imogene discussed them with the rest.

  When they started homeward the painters said they were coming a little way with them for a send-off, and then going back to spend the night in Fiesole. They walked beside the carriage, talking with Mrs. Bowen and Imogene, who had taken their places, with Effie between them, on the back seat; and when they took their leave, Colville and the young clergyman, who had politely walked with them, continued on foot a little further, till they came to the place where the highway to Florence divided into the new road and the old. At this point it steeply overtops the fields on one side, which is shored up by a wall some ten or twelve feet deep; and here round a sharp turn of the hill on the other side came a peasant driving a herd of the black pigs of the country.

  Mrs. Bowen’s horses were, perhaps, pampered beyond the habitual resignation of Florentine horses to all manner of natural phenomena; they reared at sight of the sable crew, and backing violently uphill, set the carriage across the road, with its hind wheels a few feet from the brink of the wall. The coachman sprang from his seat, the ladies and the child remained in theirs as if paralysed.

  Colville ran forward to the side of the carriage. “Jump, Mrs. Bowen! jump, Effie! Imogene—”

  The mother and the little one obeyed. He caught them in his arms and set them down. The girl sat still, staring at him with reproachful, with disdainful eyes.

  He leaped forward to drag her out; she shrank away, and then he flew to help the coachman, who had the maddened horses by the bit.

  “Let go!” he heard the young clergyman calling to him; “she’s safe!” He caught a glimpse of Imogene, whom Mr. Morton had pulled from the other side of the carriage. He struggled to free his wrist from the curb-bit chain of the horse, through which he had plunged it in his attempt to seize the bridle. The wheels of the carriage went over the wall; he felt himself whirled into the air, and then swung ruining down into the writhing and crashing heap at the bottom of the wall.

  XXI

  When Colville came to himself his first sensation was delight in the softness and smoothness of the turf on which he lay. Then the strange colour of the grass commended itself to his notice, and presently he perceived that the thing under his head was a pillow, and that he was in bed. He was supported in this conclusion by the opinion of the young man who sat watching him a little way off, and who now smiled cheerfully at the expression in the eyes which Colville turned inquiringly upon him.

  “Where am I?” he asked, with what appeared to him very unnecessary feebleness of voice.

  The young man begged his pardon in Italian, and when Colville repeated his question in that tongue, he told him that he was in Palazzo Pinti, whither he had been brought from the scene of his accident. He added that Colville must not talk till the doctor had seen him and given him leave, and he explained that he was himself a nurse from the hospital, who had been taking care of him.

  Colville moved his head and felt the bandage upon it; he desisted in his attempt to lift his right arm to it before the attendant could interfere in behalf of the broken limb. He recalled dimly and fragmentarily long histories that he had dreamed, but he forbore to ask how long he had been in his present case, and he accepted patiently the apparition of the doctor and other persons who came and went, and were at his bedside or not there, as it seemed to him, between the opening and closing of an eye. As the days passed they acquired greater permanence and maintained a more uninterrupted identity. He was able to make quite sure of Mr. Morton and of Mr. Waters; Mrs. Bowen came in, leading Effie, and this gave him a great pleasure. Mrs. Bowen seemed to have grown younger and better. Imogene was not among the phantoms who visited him; and he accepted her absence as quiescently as he accepted the presence of the others. There was a cheerfulness in those who came that permitted him no anxiety, and he was too weak to invite it by any conjecture. He consented to be spared and to spare himself; and there were some things about the affair which gave him a singular and perhaps not wholly sane content. One of these was the man nurse who had evidently taken care of him throughout. He celebrated, whenever he looked at this capable person, his escape from being, in the odious helplessness of sickness, a burden upon the strength and sympathy of the two women for whom he had otherwise made so much trouble. His satisfaction in this had much to do with his recovery, which, when it once began, progressed rapidly to a point where he was told that Imogene and her mother were at a hotel in Florence, waiting till he should be strong enough to see them. It was Mrs. Bowen who told him this with an air which she visibly strove to render non-committal and impersonal, but which betrayed, nevertheless, a faint apprehension for the effect upon him. The attitude of Imogene and her mother was certainly not one to have been expected of people holding their nominal relation to him, but Colville had been revising his impressions of events on the day of his accident; Imogene’s last look came back to him, and he could not think the situation altogether unaccountable.

  “Have I been here a long time?” he asked, as if he had not heeded what she told him.

  “About a fortnight,” answered Mrs. Bowen.

  “And Imogene — how long has she been away?”

  “Since they knew you would get well.”

  “I will see them any time,” he said quietly.

  “Do you think you are strong enough?”

  “I shall never be stronger till I have seen them,” he returned, with a glance at her. “Yes; I want them to come to-day. I shall not be excited; don’t be troubled — if you were going to be,” he added. “Please send to them at once.”

  Mrs. Bowen hesitated, but after a moment left the room. She returned in half an hour with a lady who revealed even to Colville’s languid regard evidences of the character which Mrs. Bowen had attributed to Imogene’s mother. She was a large, robust person, laced to sufficient shapeliness, and she was well and simply dressed. She entered the room with a waft of some clean, wholesome perfume, and a quiet temperament and perfect health looked out of her clear, honest eyes — the eyes of Imogene Graham, though the girl’s were dark and the woman’s were blue. When Mrs. Bowen had named them to each other, in withdrawing, Mrs. Graham took Colville’s weak left hand in her fresh, strong, right, and then lifted herself a chair to his bedside, and sat down.

  “How do you do to-day, sir?” she said, with a touch of old-fashioned respectfulness in the last word. “Do you think you are quite strong enough to talk with me?”

  “I think so,” said Colville, with a faint smile. “At least I can listen with fortitude.”

  Mrs. Graham was not apparently a person adapted to joking. “I don’t know whether it will require much fortitude to hear what I have to say or not,” she said, with her keen gaze fixed upon him. “It’s simply this: I am going to take Imogene home.”

  She seemed to expect that Colville would make some reply to this, and he said blankly, “Yes?”

  “I came out prepared to consent to
what she wished, after I had seen you, and satisfied myself that she was not mistaken; for I had always promised myself that her choice should be perfectly untrammelled, and I have tried to bring her up with principles and ideas that would enable her to make a good choice.”

  “Yes,” said Colville again. “I’m afraid you didn’t take her temperament and her youth into account, and that she disappointed you.”

  “No; I can’t say that she did. It isn’t that at all. I see no reason to blame her for her choice. Her mistake was of another kind.”

  It appeared to Colville that this very sensible and judicial lady found an intellectual pleasure in the analysis of the case, which modified the intensity of her maternal feeling in regard to it, and that, like many people who talk well, she liked to hear herself talk in the presence of another appreciative listener. He did not offer to interrupt her, and she went on. “No, sir, I am not disappointed in her choice. I think her chances of happiness would have been greater, in the abstract, with one nearer her own age; but that is a difference which other things affect so much that it did not alarm me greatly. Some people are younger at your age than at hers. No, sir, that is not the point.” Mrs. Graham fetched a sigh, as if she found it easier to say what was not the point than to say what was, and her clear gaze grew troubled. But she apparently girded herself for the struggle. “As far as you are concerned, Mr. Colville, I have not a word to say. Your conduct throughout has been most high-minded and considerate and delicate.”