"And your French doesn't help you to translate it?"

"Yes, it does help--some. I can pick out lots of words, and here and there a whole sentence; but what I can't get at is the spirit of the whole, whether it's meant to be friendly or not."

"Have you tried with a dictionary? Where's the dictionary? Get it, and we'll pick it out if it takes all night."

"Indeed, I wish I had a dictionary. Mine's French-English. I asked Clotilde if she had an Italian-English or an Italian-French, and she said yes, but at home. Isn't it provoking? I certainly wasn't going to show this to her, and get her to translate it for me before I'd consulted with you."

"Bother!" said Aurora, thoughtfully, with her eyes on the cryptic print.

Estelle sat close, examining the sheet over her shoulder. "_Elena_ means Helen, doesn't it? I guess it must, as it comes here before Barton. They've got my old name. And there's Bewick--Bewick, and here's Colorado. They've got the whole thing, fast enough. It's the doing of an enemy; there can be no doubt of that."

"I know who you're thinking about."

"Charlie Hunt, of course. Scamp! Worm! c.o.c.kroach! Low down, ungrateful, pop-eyed pig!" Nor did the reviling stop there. For the s.p.a.ce of about forty seconds Aurora was unpublishable.

"But how on earth did he get at it?" wondered Estelle.

"After he'd opened that letter of mine, he wrote to the amiable writer thereof and asked for information."

"Honestly, Nell, I don't think he's had time."

"I guess he has--just time. The languishing Iona hurried for once. Well, I don't care!" Aurora folded the paper tight and flung it from her.

"Enemies may do what they please; I've got friends. If everything comes out as it really happened, I haven't anything to fear, except that it's mighty unpleasant. It's only lies, and people believing them, that could do me harm. I've got friends in Florence. Oh, not many true ones, I don't suppose. It's paying my way that has made me popular, I'm not such a gump as not to know that. But some true friends I've got, and their backing will be my stay. One friend I've got--" Pride and a sudden battle-light flashed in Aurora's eye. "One friend I've got, who if I gave the word would kill Charlie Hunt for this, or put him in a fair way to dying. I do believe, Hat, that Gerald Fane would call Charlie Hunt out to fight a duel to punish him for a slur on me. Oh, he can fence just as well as the Italians he was brought up with. I've seen the fencing-swords in his studio. But"--she calmed down--"I wouldn't permit that sort of thing. It's ridiculous. I don't believe in it."

Cooling to normal, she laughed, with a return to the light of reality.

"He doesn't believe in it, either, I shouldn't suppose."

CHAPTER XXII

Leslie, arriving early next day, read off the newspaper article, making a free translation of it, as follows:

When a thing is too successful, it is seldom natural; and so when there appeared in our city a _signora_, blond of hair, azure of eye, with the complexion of delicate, luminous roses, red and white, whose name was at once Aurora and _Albaspina_,--Hawthorne,--floral counterpart of dawn, we should have had suspicions. That we had none does not prevent our feeling no very great surprise when we learn that the bearer of the poetic and more than appropriate name is called in sober truth Elena Barton. The more beautiful name was adopted by a child acting out its fairy-stories; it was remembered and re-adopted by a woman when she wished to detach her life from a past which neither charity, fidelity, nor devotion to a sacred duty had succeeded in keeping from sorrow and the deadly aspersions of malignity.

The _gentilissima_ person of the irradiating smile, which, however briefly seen, must be long remembered, whom we have grown accustomed this winter to meeting in the salons where a.s.sembles all that is most distinguished among foreigners, whose name we have grown accustomed to finding foremost in every work of charity, has a t.i.tle to our esteem far beyond the ordinary member of an indolent and favored cla.s.s. To alleviate suffering has been the chosen work of those hands that Florence also has found ever open and ready with their help. It was in effect the extent of their beneficence which brought about the black imbroglio from which Elena Barton chose to flee and take refuge in the City of Flowers under the _soave_ and harmonious name by which we know her.

Her life had been for several years devoted to the care of an old man afflicted with a most malignant and terrible cancer in the face. She had filled toward him so perfectly the part of a daughter that his grat.i.tude made her upon his death an equal sharer in his fortune with the children of his blood. Thence the law-case Bewick _versus_ Barton, which for a period filled the city of Denver in Colorado of the United States as if with poisonous fumes. The literal daughters, two in number, who had shown no filial love for the unfortunate old man, in trying to annul their father's will, left nothing undone or unspoken that could help their _turpe_, or evil, purpose, even attempting to prove that not only had the devoted nurse been their father's _amante_--[You can guess what that is, Aurora. They are much simpler here than we at home about calling things by their names, and much more outspoken on all subjects], but had likewise been the _amante_ of the son, sole member of the family who supported her claim to the share of the fortune appointed by the father. Justice in the event prevailed, but a tired and broken woman emerged from the conflict. What to do to regain a little of that pleasure in living which blackening calumnies and rodent ill-will, even when not victorious, can destroy in the upright and feeling nature? The imagination which had prompted in childhood the acting out of fairy-stories here came into play: Leave behind the scene of sorrows, take ship, and point the prow toward the land of orange and myrtle, of golden marbles and wine-colored sunsets; change name, begin again, do good under a beautiful appellation which the poor should learn to love and speak in their prayers to the last of their days....

"The rest, Aurora dear, is pure flattery, which it becomes me not to speak nor you to hear. I won't read it."

"Well, I never!" breathed Aurora. "Who did it?"

"We did it! My father and your Doctor Bewick and Carlo Guerra and I. We did it to be before anybody else, set the worst that could be brought up against you in a light that explains and justifies. We did our best to fix the public mind and show it what it should think. You know what the mind of the public is. We've hypnotized the beast, I hope; it has taken its bent from us."

"But--"

"This was the way of it, my dear. The day after Brenda's wedding I was at the Fontanas,--she was a Miss Andrews, you know, of Indianapolis,--and there was Charlie, too, and there was likewise Madame Sartorio, who is Colonel Fontana's niece by his first marriage. We were talking in a little group when something, I forget what, was said about you, Aurora. Charlie--for what reason would be hard to think, unless one had a sharp scent for what goes on under one's nose--Charlie interrupted, to introduce as a sort of parenthesis, 'Mrs. Hawthorne, whose real name, by the way, is Helen Barton.' The others were naturally taken aback, except Madame Sartorio, who could not quite disguise a cat-smile. For a moment none of us knew what to say, and Charlie went on, with his air of knowing such a lot more than anybody else--

"'Yes. It seems that all winter we have been warming in our bosom, so to speak, the heroine of a _cause celebre_ at a place called Colorado in America.'"

"That was enough for me. I stopped him.

"'Don't say any more, Charlie. All I wish to know about Mrs. Hawthorne is what she cares to tell me herself,' and I insisted that the conversation should return to other things.

"When I got home I told mother, and she repeated to me what you, Aurora, confided to her when we first knew you. We told father, and when Doctor Bewick came that evening to say good-by we consulted, and here in this newspaper you have the result, put into Italian journalese by Carlo Guerra, whom we called in to aid us. He likes you so much, Aurora; did you know it? He met you at Antonia's. So there you have the whole story.

I'm bitterly ashamed of Charlie, my dear, and I'm sorry about him, too.

One never looked upon him as a particularly fine fellow, still, one liked him. He had never done anything that disqualified him for a sort of liking, and we've all grown up together." Leslie wrinkled her forehead in puzzlement. "It's curious, somehow, to think of him, who, we have said so often, has no real inside, as being sufficiently under the dominion of a pa.s.sion to care to please his lady by offering up you, who have, after all, been to him a source of a good many pleasures, with your open house, invitations to dinner, and so on. I don't quite understand it."

"Never mind about him!" Aurora flicked him aside. "I don't care. And you say Tom helped. And he never told me, or wrote me a word about it. I had a letter from him this morning. Well, well. You certainly did make a good-sounding story of it, among you. And the main facts are true, far as they go; I can't say they aren't. But, oh, my dear Leslie, there was a lot more to it than that. I've got to tell you, so's not to feel like a fraud. You're so sharp; you know me pretty well by this time, and I guess you don't suppose in me any of those awfully 'fine feelin's' that could make a blighted flower of me because, while innocent as a babe unborn, I'd been dragged through the courts by wicked enemies. My enemies were pretty wicked; I stick to that. Cora Bewick, off living abroad studying some strange religion, while her kind old pa was dying at home, and she never once coming near him till he was under ground; Idell Friebus, never coming into his room except with her nose wrinkled up with disgust at the smell of disinfectants--or disgust at him, it was none too plain which. They made a fine pair of daughters. But when it came to fighting over the will, the lawyers on the Bewick side gave out just what it was that a perfectly n.o.ble woman would have done in my place of the old man's nurse. And my lawyers would have it that everything that didn't accord with that ideal simply must be kept dark, or public feeling would go against us. It's that that made it so nasty--pretending, and avoiding this, and keeping off the other. It amounted to lying, no matter what they said. But they told me if I didn't do as my counsel instructed me, the result would be the worst lie of all. I should be believed guilty of just that undue influence I was accused of, and lose the money into the bargain. So I had to hedge and shuffle and mislead.... And me under oath to tell the truth! You needn't wonder if I'm sick still at the thought of it, or wonder that I'd like to forget it. The truth was I _did_ know beforehand the Judge meant to leave me one fourth of his money, and I was tickled to death. I gloried in it. I loved to imagine the rage it would throw his wicked daughters in, and his mean little miserable son-in-law. I was glad, besides, out and out, to think I should have the money. I plain wanted it, I did. Maybe a real n.o.ble woman wouldn't have. Maybe it showed a degraded nature. Well, that's the way it was. Sometimes I feel disposed to be ashamed of it, but mostly I don't. For one thing, I felt then and I feel now, I deserved that money by a long sight more than those bad-hearted girls of his. I was a comfort to Judge Bewick. I won't say I earned the money, it was too much: but there were some hours of my tending him, poor soul, when it did seem to me a nurse came pretty near earning anything the patient could afford to pay. All the same, I would have done what I did for the old boy if he hadn't had a cent, I had so much respect for him, as much as for my own father, and I felt I owed so much to his son. Then about his son, the doctor. If Cora's old nurse-girl, who was kept on in the house as a servant, though she was past her usefulness, lied in court when she said she saw Tom and me kissing at such an hour, in such a place, still, the truth was that I had at different times kissed Tom. You can't tell why it seems all right to you to kiss one man when it would seem a very queer thing to do to kiss another. When Tom had been away for any length of time, I always kissed him when he came back; it seemed natural to both of us. But there in court I had to try to appear as if I never could have descended to committing such an immoral act, as well as to give the impression that if I'd known the old man had any notion of making me co-heir with his own children I would have strained every nerve to stop it, called them all in to help me curb him if necessary. Pshaw! the humbug of it turns my stomach now. Leslie, my verdict is, you can't come through a law-suit _clean_. I'd give a good deal to cut that page out of my life."

Aurora's eyes, filled with the shadows of the past, and her face, with the dimples expunged, were to Leslie almost unfamiliar. Aurora, oppressed in her moral nature, gave a glimpse of herself that would change and enlarge the composite of her aspects carried in Leslie's mind.

"There, stop thinking of it!" said Estelle. "You always work yourself up so."

"The point of my coming bright and early like this," Leslie nimbly managed a diversion, "was, as you have guessed, to catch you before you could possibly go out. My mother desires you, dear ladies, to accompany me back to lunch--a triumphal lunch, Aurora, to grace which she has collected those special pillars of society whose countenance and support ought to make you scornful of any little weed-like growth of gossip that might sprout up from seed of Charlie's sowing. You know them all more or less, having been a.s.sociated with every one of them in some form of beneficence. I might more accurately describe it: having donated largely to each of their pet charities. It is not a very admirable world--"

Leslie's young face took that little air of knowing the world which sometimes amused old gentlemen so much, "it is a selfish society, not indisposed, or, I am afraid, altogether displeased, to believe evil of its neighbor, and not always disinclined to turn and rend its favorites.

But it would be a pity, really, if you should have poured forth upon it as you have done, Aurora, money and smiles, bouquets and banquets and sunbeams, good-will and baby-socks and knitted afghans, and it did not rise up when you are attacked and say, 'No. An exception has to be made in this case. We have all been bought!'"

Aurora, who had been listening with expanded, gathering-in eyes, cheeks flushing deeper and deeper, turned her head sharply away to try to keep from falling or being seen two unaccountable tears half blinding her.

The sight of her, by infection, moistened the eyes of the other women.

Estelle sought a quick way out of the emotional silence.

"Nell," she said, albeit with cracked voice, "if we're going out to lunch, I guess we ought to be dressing. Go along, child, put on your best bib and tucker."

"Oh, my best bib and tucker!" wailed Aurora. "Sent to the cleaner's this morning, all green stains at the back!"

If Leslie had not called it a triumphal lunch, it might not have appeared so very different from any other women's lunch at the season of roses. Leslie herself, though, found in it the flavor of old-fashioned romance, just faintly plat.i.tudinous, in which poetic justice is done.

Mrs. Foss, the more simple-minded organizer of it, felt that she should remember it as an occasion when she had risen to the level, placed the right cards in the fist of destiny, and created an event worthy to take rank at least with those little triumphs of good housewives at whose home the president of their husband's company arrived one night unlocked for and was entertained with brilliant credit.

To the heroine of the feast, no need to say it was an inexpressibly exciting, grand, and memorable occasion. Aurora hardly knew herself, so much the object of attention and graciousness. She was in the mood to give half of her goods to the poor. After the hostess had risen and made a little speech, Aurora, unexpectedly to herself, and as if under inspiration, responded by a little speech of her own, composed on the spot. It was drowned at the end by hand-clapping all around the table.

Aurora seemed to herself to be living in a fairy-story.

As it was after five o'clock when she reached home, she was sure she would find Gerald waiting for her. She had the whole day long been looking forward with a sweet agitation to the moment of being with him and telling him all about it.

She was more disappointed than she remembered ever being, even as a child, not to find him or any word from him. She did not allow it to become later by more than half an hour before she scratched a line and sent the coachman to his house with it.