Gerald saw how the afternoon was mellowing toward sunset.... And the important things of the day had not been touched upon.

Our hero had traversed great s.p.a.ces in the region of sentiment during the two days allowed the Hermitage to stand or crumble without him. The first of them had been spent far from it, even as Aurora supposed, for the sake of letting the impression of having been laughed at wear off a little. Already for some time before that forced climax Gerald had been haunted by the feeling that he ought to offer himself to Aurora, as it were to regularize his status in her house. After hanging around as he had been doing, one might almost say that good manners demanded it. Her fashion, on that evening in the garden, of treating the idea that he could be enamoured of her a.s.sured him that she would refuse. He would have done his duty, and they would continue to drift, he shutting his eyes to the penalty awaiting his self-indulgence, the taxes of pain rolling up for the hour when her necessary departure would involve the uprooting of every last little flower in that wretched garden of his heart. With such a mental pattern of the future he had gone to bed at the end of the first day.

On the next morning something perhaps in deep dreams which he did not remember, or in the happy manner of the new day lighting a scarlet geranium on the terrace ledge, or simply perhaps the whisper of an angel, had effected a change. A heart-throb, a stroke of magic, had so lifted him up that over the top of the wall edging the road of life for him he had seen a thrilling garden outstretched, smiling in the sun, a sight that so enkindled him with the witchery of its promises that he felt he should seek for a way into that garden till he found it; should, if necessary, demolish the wall.

That day he went walking on the hills beyond Settignano, and the new light, the intoxication, persisted--the vision of himself as Aurora's lover. Why not? An escape from the past, a different adventure from all prefigured in his dull expectations before.... In his theory of living Gerald had always admitted the gallant advisability of burning ships.

There was room in his theory of living for just such a divergence from design as he now meditated. When the call comes, summon it to never so improbable places, the poet and artist obeys. He had gone to bed on the second night with these thoughts and a plan for the morrow.

Now that morrow was wearing to an end and all the floating splendid courageous thoughts and feelings, brave in the a.s.surance, along with the determination, of victory, must be somehow caught and compressed and turned into the language--how poverty-stricken, how stale!--of a proposal of marriage; even as a great variegated, gold-shot, b.u.t.terfly-tinted, cloud-light tissue of the Orient is drawn into a colorless whipcord twist that it may pa.s.s through a little ring.

As he revolved in his mind what he should say to start with, Gerald saw appropriateness for the first time in the methods of the historic Gaul, who seized by her hair the charming creature whom he felt allied to him by deep things, seated her on the horse before him, and rode away. But what he would have liked so much the best would have been to lay his head in Aurora's willing lap, embrace her knees tenderly, and have her understand all without a word being spoken.

Now he cleared his throat, took a reasonable air, a tone almost of banter, to say what, influenced by the long precedent of their converse together, he could say only in that manner, covering up as best he could the fact that his heart trembled and burned.

"Shall we resume our conversation of last Friday?" he asked, with a fine imitation of the comradely ease which had marked all their intercourse that day.

He was looking over the valley, as if still preoccupied with its beauty rather than with her.

Thus misled, she did not guess right. She said:

"About Charlie, you mean? Just fancy, I haven't thought of him once all day! Little varmint! Don't I wish I had the spanking of him! But I guess it would lame my arm."

"Not about Charlie. I asked would you marry me, and you said you would not. Will you to-day?"

"Not for a farm!" she answered, with emphasis equal to her precipitation.

"Why not?" he asked, undisconcerted.

"Because."

"Come, let us reason together, Aurora." He changed position, arranging himself on his elbow so as to be able to look at her. His eyes were steady. "For a man to ask a woman to marry him is of course the greatest piece of impertinence of which he could be guilty. But from such impertinences, Auroretta, has been derived every beautiful thing that has blessed our poor world from the beginning. No man is good enough for any woman, let that stand for an axiom. But there again, Auroretta, it's not according to merit that those rewards, gentle and beautiful ladies, are dispensed. I have rather less to offer than any man in the world, but I am bold because you, dear, are just the one to be blind."

"Oh, it's not _that_, of course," said Aurora, hurriedly.

"Don't suppose for a moment that I am troubled by the size of your fortune or the size of my own. You haven't any money, dear. Others have your money. I have almost to laugh at the splendid speed with which that open granary of yours will be eaten clean by all the birds coming to pick one seed at a time."

"You needn't laugh, then. Some of it is going to be pinned to me solid, so that nothing can get it away from me, not even I myself."

"I am sorry to hear it. The other was so complete. Well, if you had nothing, I should still have just enough to keep us from hunger, though perhaps not from cold in these dear old stone houses of Italy. And you--I know you well enough to be sure of it--you are exactly the one to learn how much there can be in life besides its luxuries. Since my illness, too, Aurora, let me confide to you, there have been in me reawakenings.... I have felt the beginning--I am speaking with reference to my work,--I have felt intimations--No, it is too difficult to express without seeming to boast, which is horribly unlucky. In short, I have felt that I might do the turn still of forcing a careless generation to pay attention."

"Oh, Gerald, how nice it is to have you say that!" she warmly rejoiced.

"I'm so glad to hear it!"

"Now tell me why it is you won't marry me. Stop, dear. Don't say because you are not in love with me. I have difficulty in seeing how any one in her right senses could be in love with me. It would be enough, dear, that you should be to me as you were during those happy, happy days when I was so beastly ill. You are so generous, it would be merely fulfilling your nature. And I, upon my word, dear, would try to deserve it. I would give you reason to be kind. I am not without sc.r.a.ps of honor--wholly; I would do my best to make you happy."

"No,"--she shook her head decidedly,--"no, Gerry," she added, to take the sharp edge off her refusal, "no, Gerry; Rory won't."

"You have only to lose by it, that is obvious, and I to gain, and nothing could equal the indecency of insistence on my part; but I feel that I am going to persist to the point of persecution. You are fond of me, you know. I only dare to say you are fond of me because you have said it yourself more than once. And you are always sincere, and I wouldn't be likely to forget. Now, if you are fond of me,--very, very fond, you have said repeatedly,--why do you refuse? I wouldn't be a bore of a husband, I promise. I would leave you a great deal of liberty."

"No, Geraldino; no."

"You needn't tell me there's somebody else. I don't believe it. Though you feel only fondness for me, I know that you are not in love with anybody else. When one is in love, there is no room in life for such warm and dear friendship as you have frankly shown me. It's that, after all, which has given me courage."

"No, no; there's n.o.body else."

"Well, then, why can't you? Why won't you?"

"I--" She hesitated, as if to think. There was a silence. Then she asked slowly, like one who finds some difficulty in laying her tongue on the right words: "Do you remember all those things you said that evening in the garden, the night you came in to meet Tom for the first time? How you wouldn't for anything in the whole world let yourself get tangled up again with caring for a person?"

"Perfectly. I could only picture it as meaning more of trouble and unrest. But things change, dear. We change. There has taken place in me since that, no matter for what reason, an increase of self-confidence and confidence in fate such as turns men into nuisances or makes them successful. In the last twenty-four hours particularly. Now, as I look at the inconvenience of getting tangled up again with caring for a person, I find I don't mean at all to suffer. I mean to bother you until you say yes, and then to be happy. You could never wilfully torment me, I know; you are incapable of it. Then, when you have graciously consented to marry me, I feel as if I might build up my life on new lines."

"I can't, Geraldino; I can't."

"You can't. So you have said. And I have asked you to tell me your reasons, that I may combat them one by one."

"It's no use. We're too different."

"That we are different, thank G.o.d! is a reason for and not against."

"No, no; not when it's such a huge difference. We're like--a bird and a fish."

"Don't call me a fish. I object."

"We don't think the same about hardly anything."

"But we feel alike on everything of importance."

"There's hardly a thing I do that's quite right as you see it. No, don't take the trouble to contradict me; let me do the talking for a minute.

You're so critical and so conventional and so correct! No matter how much you say you aren't, you _are_. And while we're like this I don't have to care. I rather enjoy shocking you. And while I'm none of your business, you don't have to care what I do or what I'm like. We can have our fun and be awfully fond of each other, and it's all serene and right. But if I were Mrs. Gerald Fane, all my faults and shortcomings, my not knowing the things that everybody in your society knows, my not having any elegant accomplishments, would show up so glaring that I should know you must be mortified. You couldn't help it."

"Stop, dear! You enrage me. You put me beside myself. You are so superficial. And dense. And you hold me up to myself in the features of a beastly cad! I won't have it. For one thing, let me tell you that if I were the Lord Ronald Macdonald of that song we've heard Miss Felixson sing, and you were that canny la.s.s Leezie Lindsay, I should know jolly well that after I'd carried you off to the Hielands my bride and my darling to be, it would be a very short time before Lady Ronald Macdonald had all the airs and tricks of speech of my sisters and cousins. That, however, is neither here nor there. Who wants you to be different? Aurora, if you only knew yourself! Ceres, or Summer, or Peace sitting among the wheat-sheaves, what would it matter that she had not been educated at a fashionable boarding-school? Let her just breathe and be,--beautiful, benign, and any man not utterly a fool will prefer to lie at her knees, keeping still while her silence appeases and reconciles him, to hearing the most brilliant conversation of a lady novelist."

"You can talk beautifully, Gerald, that's one sure thing; but talk me over you can't. Seems to me I should have to be crazy to forget all in a moment what I've said over and over to myself, and drilled myself not to lose sight of. After you asked me the other day, though I knew it was just on the spur of the moment, I thought it all out in the night as much as if it had been serious, and I saw what would be the one safe course for little me. I mustn't; that's all there is to it. Everything is wrong for it to turn out happy in the end. I'm terribly fond of you, but I should be scared to death of you, simply scared to death, as a husband. We're not the same kind. If I could forget it on my own account, I have only to remember how it would strike Estelle. And Estelle's got no end of horse sense. It's according to horse sense we must act when it comes to settling the real things of life. I expect"--she had the effect of turning a page or a corner; she dropped from heights of argument to low plains--"I expect I shall be big as a mountain by and by. I don't see any help for it. I starve myself, I drink hot water, I take exercise,--nearly walk my legs off,--and the next time I get weighed I've gained three pounds! What's the use? Then, I'm older than you."

"Not at all. I'm older than the everlasting hills; you are the youngest thing that lives."

"That's all right, but you were twenty-eight your last birthday, and I'm thirty. I'm afraid my character's already pretty well fixed in its present form. When it comes over me, for instance, to play the clown, I've got to do it or burst. And you're naturally a tyrant, you know."

"I am. I am critical, carping, conventional, and a tyrant, everything you say, but just because I am those things, you ought to be able to see, dear Aurora--because I am those things and know it, they are the things least to be feared in me. Do you suppose Marcus Aurelius was really calm and philosophical? Because he, on the contrary, was anxious and pa.s.sionate, he wrote those maxims to try to live by. When you _would_ go and be a negress, did I make a scene? I gnashed my teeth and gnawed my knuckles, but when I saw you afterward, wasn't I decently decent?"

"Yes, but you took to your bed. If I were Mrs. Gerald, and the Pope of Rome sent for me to do Lew Dockstader for him and his cardinals, you know you wouldn't let me go."

"You are wrong. I should make a point of it. I should only ask to be permitted to retire into solitude until all the vulgar people had stopped talking about it."

"Ah, you're a dear, funny boy; but put it out of your mind, Geraldino, do, dear, when we're so happy as it is. Let's go on just as we've been going; you know yourself that it's the wisest, and what really you would prefer. If you've asked me to-day--mind, I don't say you _have_; but if you have--to save my vanity and back up the proposal you didn't really mean the other day,--because you're always such a gentleman; you'd rather die than not behave like a gentleman,--let it go at that.

But if you should feel now that you've got to back up your declaration that you're going to persist and follow this up, just ask me over again every few days to show there's no unkind feeling, and I promise it will be safe; I'll refuse you every time. It'll be our little standing joke.

For don't you go dreaming that I'm going to let go of you! You can call me pudgy if I let you get away. I love you too dearly. Wasn't everything all right and lovely until the other day when you came out with that stilted speech, 'doing you the honor'? We'll take up again just where we left off, and bimeby make fun of all this. You who've read all the books ever written, don't you know of cases where two like us went on being just friends, and taking comfort in each other on and on to the end of the tale?"

"There have been examples, yes, a very few, and not on the whole encouraging."