“I hated to leave her,” said Clementina. “I don’t believe she’s very well.”
“Isn’t she always ill?” demanded Miss Milray. She embraced the girl again, as if once were not enough. “Clementina, if Mrs. Lander won’t give you to me, I’m going to steal you. Do you know what I want you to do tonight? I want you to stand up with me, and receive, till the dancing begins, as if it were your coming-out. I mean to introduce everybody to you. You’ll be easily the prettiest girl, there, and you’ll have the nicest gown, and I don’t mean that any of your charms shall be thrown away. You won’t be frightened?”
“No, I don’t believe I shall,” said Clementina. “You can tell me what to do.”
The dress she wore was of pale green, like the light seen in thin woods; out of it shone her white shoulders, and her young face, as if rising through the verdurous light. The artists, to a man and woman, wished to paint her, and severally told her so, during the evening which lasted till morning. She was not surprised when Lord Lioncourt appeared, toward midnight, and astonished Miss Milray by claiming acquaintance with Clementina. He asked about Mrs. Lander, and whether she had got to Florence without losing the way; he laughed but he seemed really to care. He took Clementina out to supper, when the time came; and she would have topped him by half a head as she leaned on his arm, if she had not considerately drooped and trailed a little after him.
She could not know what a triumph he was making for her; and it was merely part of the magic of the time that Mr. Ewins should come in presently with one of the ladies. He had arrived in Florence that day, and had to be brought unasked. He put on the effect of an old friend with her; but Clementina’s curiosity was chiefly taken with a tall American, whom she thought very handsome. His light yellow hair was brushed smooth across his forehead like a well-behaving boy’s; he was dressed like the other men, but he seemed not quite happy in his evening coat, and his gloves which he smote together uneasily from time to time. He appeared to think that somehow the radiant Clementina would know how he felt; he did not dance, and he professed to have found himself at the party by a species of accident. He told her that he was out in Europe looking after a patent right that he had just taken hold of, and was having only a middling good time. He pretended surprise to hear her say that she was having a first-rate time, and he tried to reason her out of it. He confessed that from the moment he came into the room he had made up his mind to take her to supper, and had never been so disgusted in his life as when he saw that little lord toddling off with her, and trying to look as large as life. He asked her what a lord was like, anyway, and he made her laugh all the time.
He told her his name, G. W. Hinkle, and asked whether she would be likely to remember it if they ever met again.
Another man who interested her very much was a young Russian, with curling hair and neat, small features who spoke better English than she did, and said he was going to be a writer, but had not yet decided whether to write in Russian or French; she supposed he had wanted her advice, but he did not wait for it, or seem to expect it. He was very much in earnest, while he fanned her, and his earnestness amused her as much as the American’s irony. He asked which city of America she came from, and when she said none, he asked which part of America. She answered New England, and he said, “Oh, yes, that is where they have the conscience.” She did not know what he meant, and he put before her the ideal of New England girlhood which he had evolved from reading American novels. “Are you like that?” he demanded.
She laughed, and said, “Not a bit,” and asked him if he had ever met such an American girl, and he said, frankly, No; the American girls were all mercenary, and cared for nothing but money, or marrying titles. He added that he had a title, but he would not wear it.
Clementina said she did not believe she cared for titles, and then he said, “But you care for money.” She denied it, but as if she had confessed it, he went on: “The only American that I have seen with that conscience was a man. I will tell you of him, if you wish.”
He did not wait for her answer. “It was in Naples — at Pompeii. I saw at the first glance that he was different from other Americans, and I resolved to know him. He was there in company with a stupid boy, whose tutor he was; and he told me that he was studying to be a minister of the Protestant church. Next year he will go home to be consecrated. He promised to pass through Florence in the spring, and he will keep his word. Every act, every word, every thought of his is regulated by conscience. It is terrible, but it is beautiful.” All the time, the Russian was fanning Clementina, with every outward appearance of flirtation. “Will you dance again? No? I should like to draw such a character as his in a romance.”
XXII.
It was six o’clock in the morning before Miss Milray sent Clementina home in her carriage. She would have kept her to breakfast, but Clementina said she ought to go on Mrs. Lander’s account, and she wished to go on her own.
She thought she would steal to bed without waking her, but she was stopped by the sound of groans when she entered their apartment; the light gushed from Mrs. Lander’s door. Maddalena came out, and blessed the name of her Latin deity (so much more familiar and approachable than the Anglo-Saxon divinity) that Clementina had come at last, and poured upon her the story of a night of suffering for Mrs. Lander. Through her story came the sound of Mrs. Lander’s voice plaintively reproachful, summoning Clementina to her bedside. “Oh, how could you go away and leave me? I’ve been in such misery the whole night long, and the docta didn’t do a thing for me. I’m puffectly wohn out, and I couldn’t make my wants known with that Italian crazy-head. If it hadn’t been for the portyary comin’ in and interpretin’, when the docta left, I don’t know what I should have done. I want you should give him a twenty-leary note just as quick as you see him; and oh, isn’t the docta comin’?”
Clementina set about helping Maddalena put the room, which was in an impassioned disorder, to rights; and she made Mrs. Lander a cup of her own tea, which she had brought from S. S. Pierces in passing through Boston; it was the first thing, the sufferer said, that had saved her life. Clementina comforted her, and promised her that the doctor should be there very soon; and before Mrs. Lander fell away to sleep, she was so far out of danger as to be able to ask how Clementina had enjoyed herself, and to be glad that she had such a good time.
The doctor would not wake her when he came; he said that she had been through a pretty sharp gastric attack, which would not recur, if she ate less of the most unwholesome things she could get, and went more into the air, and walked a little. He did not seem alarmed, and he made Clementina tell him about the dance, which he had been called from to Mrs. Lander’s bed of pain. He joked her for not having missed him; in the midst of their fun, she caught herself in the act of yawning, and the doctor laughed, and went away.
Maddalena had to call her, just before dinner, when Mrs. Lander had been awake long enough to have sent for the doctor to explain the sort of gone feeling which she was now the victim of. It proved, when he came, to be hunger, and he prescribed tea and toast and a small bit of steak. Before he came she had wished to arrange for going home at once, and dying in her own country. But his opinion so far prevailed with her that she consented not to telegraph for berths. “I presume,” she said, “it’ll do, any time before the icebugs begin to run. But I d’ know, afta this, Clementina, as I can let you leave me quite as you be’n doin’. There was a lot of flowas come for you, this aftanoon, but I made Maddalena put ’em on the balcony, for I don’t want you should get poisoned with ’em in your sleep; I always head they was dangerous in a person’s ‘bed room. I d’ know as they are, eitha.”
Maddalena seemed to know that Mrs. Lander was speaking of the flowers. She got them and gave them to Clementina, who found they were from some of the men she had danced with. Mr. Hinkle had sent a vast bunch of violets, which presently began to give out their sweetness in the warmth of the room, and the odor brought him before her with his yellow hair, scrupulously par
ted at the side, and smoothly brushed, showing his forehead very high up. Most of the gentlemen wore their hair parted in the middle, or falling in a fringe over their brows; the Russian’s was too curly to part, and Lord Lioncourt had none except at the sides.
She laughed, and Mrs. Lander said, “Tell about it, Clementina,” and she began with Mr. Hinkle, and kept coming back to him from the others. Mrs. Lander wished most to know how that lord had got down to Florence; and Clementina said he was coming to see her.
“Well, I hope to goodness he won’t come to-day, I a’n’t fit to see anybody.”
“Oh, I guess he won’t come till to-morrow,” said Clementina; she repeated some of the compliments she had got, and she told of all Miss Milray’s kindness to her, but Mrs. Lander said, “Well, the next time, I’ll thank her not to keep you so late.” She was astonished to hear that Mr. Ewins was there, and “Any of the nasty things out of the hotel the’e?” she asked.
“Yes,” Clementina said, “the’e we’e, and some of them we’e very nice. They wanted to know if I wouldn’t join them, and have an aftanoon of our own here in the hotel, so that people could come to us all at once.”
She went back to the party, and described the rest of it. When she came to the part about the Russian, she told what he had said of American girls being fond of money, and wanting to marry foreign noblemen.
Mrs. Lander said, “Well, I hope you a’n’t a going to get married in a hurry, anyway, and when you do I hope you’ll pick out a nice American.”
“Oh, yes,” said Clementina.
Mrs. Lander had their dinner brought to their apartment. She cheered up, and she was in some danger of eating too much, but with Clementina’s help she denied herself. Their short evening was one of the gayest; Clementina declared she was not the least sleepy, but she went to bed at nine, and slept till nine the next day.
Mrs. Lander, the doctor confessed, the second morning, was more shaken up by her little attack than he had expected; but she decided to see the gentleman who had asked to call on Clementina. Lord Lioncourt did not come quite so soon as she was afraid he might, and when he came he talked mostly to Clementina. He did not get to Mrs. Lander until just before he was going. She hospitably asked him what his hurry was, and then he said that he was off for Rome, that evening at seven. He was nice about hoping she was comfortable in the hotel, and he sympathized with her in her wish that there was a set-bowl in her room; she told him that she always tried to have one, and he agreed that it must be very convenient where any one was, as she said, sick so much.
Mr. Hinkle came a day later; and then it appeared that he had a mother whose complaints almost exactly matched Mrs. Lander’s. He had her photograph with him, and showed it; he said if you had no wife to carry round a photograph of, you had better carry your mother’s; and Mrs. Lander praised him for being a good son. A good son, she added, always made a good husband; and he said that was just what he told the young ladies himself, but it did not seem to make much impression on them. He kept Clementina laughing; and he pretended that he was going to bring a diagram of his patent right for her to see, because she would be interested in a gleaner like that; and he said he wished her father could see it, for it would be sure to interest the kind of man Mrs. Lander described him to be. “I’ll be along up there just about the time you get home, Miss Clementina. When did you say it would be?”
“I don’t know; pretty ea’ly in the spring, I guess.”
She looked at Mrs. Lander, who said, “Well, it depends upon how I git up my health. I couldn’t bea’ the voyage now.”
Mr. Hinkle said, “No, best look out for your health, if it takes all summer. I shouldn’t want you to hurry on my account. Your time is my time. All I want is for Miss Clementina, here, to personally conduct me to her father. If I could get him to take hold of my gleaner in New England, we could make the blueberry crop worth twice what it is.”
Mrs. Lander perceived that he was joking; and she asked what he wanted to run away for when the young Russian’s card came up. He said, “Oh, give every man a chance,” and he promised that he would look in every few days, and see how she was getting along. He opened the door after he had gone out, and put his head in to say in confidence to Mrs. Lander, but so loud that Clementina could hear, “I suppose she’s told you who the belle of the ball was, the other night? Went out to supper with a lord!” He seemed to think a lord was such a good joke that if you mentioned one you had to laugh.
The Russian’s card bore the name Baron Belsky, with the baron crossed out in pencil, and he began to attack in Mrs. Lander the demerits of the American character, as he had divined them. He instructed her that her countrymen existed chiefly to make money; that they were more shopkeepers than the English and worse snobs; that their women were trivial and their men sordid; that their ambition was to unite their families with the European aristocracies; and their doctrine of liberty and equality was a shameless hypocrisy. This followed hard upon her asking, as she did very promptly, why he had scratched out the title on his card. He told her that he wished to be known solely as an artist, and he had to explain to her that he was not a painter, but was going to be a novelist. She taxed him with never having been in America, but he contended that as all America came to Europe he had the materials for a study of the national character at hand, without the trouble of crossing the ocean. In return she told him that she had not been the least sea-sick during the voyage, and that it was no trouble at all; then he abruptly left her and went over to beg a cup of tea from Clementina, who sat behind the kettle by the window.
“I have heard this morning from that American I met in Pompeii” he began. “He is coming northward, and I am going down to meet him in Rome.”
Mrs. Lander caught the word, and called across the room, “Why, a’n’t that whe’e that lo’d’s gone?”
Clementina said yes, and while the kettle boiled, she asked if Baron Belsky were going soon.
“Oh, in a week or ten days, perhaps. I shall know when he arrives. Then I shall go. We write to each other every day.” He drew a letter from his breast pocket. “This will give you the idea of his character,” and he read, “If we believe that the hand of God directs all our actions, how can we set up our theories of conduct against what we feel to be his inspiration?”
“What do you think of that?” he demanded.
“I don’t believe that God directs our wrong actions,” said Clementina.
“How! Is there anything outside of God?
“I don’t know whether there is or not. But there is something that tempts me to do wrong, sometimes, and I don’t believe that is God.”
The Russian seemed struck. “I will write that to him!”
“No,” said Clementina, “I don’t want you to say anything about me to him.”
“No, no!” said Baron Belsky, waving his band reassuringly. “I would not mention your name!”
Mr. Ewins came in, and the Russian said he must go. Mrs. Lander tried to detain him, too, as she had tried to keep Mr. Hinkle, but he was inexorable. Mr. Ewins looked at the door when it had closed upon him. Mrs. Lander said, “That is one of the gentlemen that Clementina met the otha night at the dance. He is a baron, but he scratches it out. You’d ought to head him go on about Americans.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Ewins coldly. “He’s at our hotel, and he airs his peculiar opinions at the table d’hote pretty freely. He’s a revolutionist of some kind, I fancy.” He pronounced the epithet with an abhorrence befitting the citizen of a state born of revolution and a city that had cradled the revolt. “He’s a Nihilist, I believe.”
Mrs. Lander wished to know what that was, and he explained that it was a Russian who wanted to overthrow the Czar, and set up a government of the people, when they were not prepared for liberty.
“Then, maybe he isn’t a baron at all,” said Mrs. Lander.
“Oh, I believe he has a right to his title,” Ewins answered. “It’s a German one.”
He said he thought th
at sort of man was all the more mischievous on account of his sincerity. He instanced a Russian whom a friend of his knew in Berlin, a man of rank like this fellow: he got to brooding upon the condition of working people and that kind of thing, till he renounced his title and fortune and went to work in an iron foundry.
Mr. Ewins also spoke critically of Mrs. Milray. He had met her in Egypt; but you soon exhausted the interest of that kind of woman. He professed a great concern that Clementina should see Florence in just the right way, and he offered his services in showing her the place.
The Russian came the next day, and almost daily after that, in the interest with which Clementina’s novel difference from other American girls seemed to inspire him. His imagination had transmuted her simple Yankee facts into something appreciable to a Slav of his temperament. He conceived of her as the daughter of a peasant, whose beauty had charmed the widow of a rich citizen, and who was to inherit the wealth of her adoptive mother. He imagined that the adoption had taken place at a much earlier period than the time when Clementina’s visit to Mrs. Lander actually began, and that all which could be done had been done to efface her real character by indulgence and luxury.
His curiosity concerning her childhood, her home, her father and mother, her brothers and sisters, and his misunderstanding of everything she told him, amused her. But she liked him, and she tried to give him some notion of the things he wished so much to know. It always ended in a dissatisfaction, more or less vehement, with the outcome of American conditions as he conceived them.
“But you,” he urged one day, “you who are a daughter of the fields and woods, why should you forsake that pure life, and come to waste yourself here?”
“Why, don’t you think it’s very nice in Florence?” she asked, with eyes of innocent interest.
“Nice! Nice! Do we live for what is nice? Is it enough that you have what you Americans call a nice time?”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 651