The man came back with nothing but the barren information, received from Giovanna, that the _signorino_ was absent, having gone to Leghorn.

"Well, here's a pretty howdydo!" thought Aurora, sore with surprise and the smart of injury. "If every time I refuse him he's going off like this to stay away for days and days, what am I going to do?"

CHAPTER XXIII

"If this is the way it was going to be, and I'd known it before, I'd have kept better watch over my affections," said Aurora to herself, reflecting upon Gerald in Leghorn, where he was bending his will industriously, no doubt, to the work of forgetting her.

Beside the large sharp thorn of this thought, she was troubled by what was a small, merely uncomfortable thorn: the knowledge of Gerald exposed so closely to the influence of Vincent, that persuasive young man of G.o.d, who bowed to images and believed in the Pope. At the end of every wearisome day she gave thanks that for still another twenty-four hours she had by grace of strength from on high been able to fight off the temptation to write to Gerald.

This for nine days--the nine days it takes for a wonder to become a commonplace or a scandal to lose its prominent place in conversation.

Then, in the way once sweetly habitual, there came a rapping at the door, the entrance of a servant, and the announcement, "_C'e il signorino_."

Aurora for a second either did not really grasp the import of the words or did not trust her senses. She asked:

"What _signorino_? _Signorino_ What?"

"The _signorino_ who has come back," said the servant, unable on the instant to recall the foreign name. And if he had felt interest in the complexion of one so far removed from him as his mistress, he might have seen her turn the hue of a cla.s.sic sunrise.

On her way down the stairs Aurora rejected the idea of a tumultuous reproachful greeting, such as, "Where have you been so long, you mean thing?" Or of a cool and cutting one, such as, "You're quite a stranger." She decided to behave like a nice person, and show respect for her friend's freedom, after having so explicitly left it to him.

The Italians performing the service of the house arranged it according to their own ideas of fitness, and on this warm afternoon the drawing-room was in soft-colored twilight, the Persian blinds being clasped, and their lower panels pushed out a very little so as to let in a modic.u.m of the whiteness of day.

Gerald stood, very collected, if a trifle pale, holding, like a proper votary, a bouquet--starry handful of sweet white hedge-roses,--which he offered as soon as Aurora entered, saying he had picked them for her that morning in the country near Castel di Poggio.

The meeting, in Aurora's jubilant sense of it, went off beautifully. She said in a pleasant, easy tone and her company English,

"So you've got back. It's awfully nice to see you again. How well you are looking. I was sure a change would do you good."

And Gerald said yes, he had found the sea air tonic. He had been staying with the Johns, Vincent's mother lived in Leghorn. He had worked a little, made a few drawings. Digressing, he mentioned a trifling gift he had brought her, and produced a small bra.s.s vessel, fitted with two hinged lids, meant to contain grains of incense for the altar. He said he had found it in an antiquarian's shop and thought she might care for it to drop her rings into; he supposed she took them off at night. Its shape seemed to him to possess more than common elegance.

Aurora called it adorable, and his giving it to her sweet. They talked as if they had been making believe, for the benefit of an audience, to be the most ordinary friends.

And each of them meanwhile, with heart and head gone slightly insane in secret, was considering a marvel. The long separation--it had been long to them--had recreated for both something of the capacity to receive a fresh impression of the other. The marvel to Aurora was that this choice being, with his intellectual brow (that was her adjective for Gerald's brow) his difference from others, all in the way of superiority to them, the indescribable fascination residing in his every feature, mood, or word, should be walking the world unclaimed and unattached, for her to take if she were so minded. Her to take! It was vertiginous.

And the marvel to him was, in beholding that bounteous temple of a soul, with its radiance of life, its share, so rich, of the mysterious something which made the earliest men care to build homes; its gifts, so large, of comfort and warmth--the marvel was that he should have dared aspire to conquer it, should have set that to himself as a thing he was going to persevere in trying to do until--until he had done it, he, puny, poor in inducements, light of weight.

The two of them, there could be no doubt of it, had pa.s.sed within the portals after which a change comes over the eyes, and those who enter see each other endowed with qualities raising the capacity for wonder to an ecstasy: so much engaging beauty, so much dearness, are not to be believed!... It can never be established whether the eyes only see truly when under this charm, or whether then more than at other times illusion makes of them its fool.

If he had been a.n.a.lytical on the subject of his sentiment for Aurora, as so often on other subjects, and said to himself that he saw this woman in a golden transfiguring light because he was in good primordial fashion in love with her--because, that is to say, obscure affinities of flesh and blood united with the esteem created by her virtues to make of him a candle which the touch of her finger-tip miraculously could light--he would have felt it as a blessed and not a base secret at the bottom of his attachment.

While they talked of the weather, as they fell to doing when they had disposed of the subject of the little incense-holder; and, after that, while they talked of Leghorn and the various seaside places which Aurora had to choose from for her summer sojourn, a vastly deep conversation was taking place between them, which we think it not amiss to report, because by the nature of things the words they would say aloud on this occasion would be meager and colorless by comparison with the things they would feel and to some extent convey to each other through mere proximity.

"O Aurora," exhaled from Gerald, while, looking not far from his usual self, he said that Ardenza by the sea, a mere three miles from Leghorn, was a very pretty place, "Aurora, you are warmth, you are shelter, you are rest. I have no hearth or home except as you let me in out of the desperate cold of loneliness, and grant me to warm myself at your big heart. You should see, woman dear, that my thankfulness would make you happy. Nature, the divine, so formed you that my love would kindle yours. And when you had given your hand into mine I should find paths of violets, enchanted paths, for us to walk in which you could never find without me, nor I find for myself. Put up no petty shield against me, Aurora; fight me with no petty lance, for I verily am that guest you were awaiting when on balmy spring evenings you felt, and knew not why, that your life was incomplete."

And Aurora, mechanically pulling off her rings and putting them into the bra.s.s receptacle, then taking them out of it and putting them back on her fingers, while she chattered, describing the advantages of a furnished villa at Antiniano, to be preferred because they were some Italian friends of Leslie's who desired to let it, was in her inmost speaking to the inmost of Gerald. The hardly self-conscious meanings within her bosom made as if an extension of her in the air, comparable to the halo around the moon on a misty night; and this atomized radiance had language, it said: "Oh, to draw your head down where it desires to be! To warm and comfort you! To be to you everything you need! I lean to you, I cling to you like a vine with every winding tendril. But I am so afraid of you! so afraid! I am of common, you of finest, clay. How can I give into any hand so much power to hurt me? If I were to dare it, then find I could not make you happy, your disappointment would be my heart-break, and my tragedy might spoil your life. But this know, Gerald, dearer to me for having been so unhappy, nothing my life could contain without you would seem to me so good as life with you in a poor workman's attic, under falling snow, and I to make it home for you!"

While two souls thus trembled and gravitated toward each other, bathing in each other's light, it is almost mortifying to have to show to what degree that which took place at the surface was different and inferior; to what degree the fine abandon of words spoken and actions performed in thought was replaced by a shivering prudence keeping guard on one side, and on the other a deplorable timidity trying awkwardly to be bold.

Heard through the door, the scene that ensued between these two curious lovers, when they had worked their way through preliminaries and come to the point at which they had parted after the day at Vallombrosa, must particularly have seemed lacking in purple and poetry; for then the soft light in Aurora's eyes would not have been seen, nor the deep flash in Gerald's, as he by a point scored felt himself nearer to the goal.

"Now, what made you run off like that, I want to know," Aurora asked in the flowing American which she reserved for real friends and sincere moments, "after you'd said when you left me at the door, 'Good-by till to-morrow'?"

"My reasons were several, all simple," he replied, with a faun-look up from the corner of his eye, which watched her expression. "First, I wished to flee from that newspaper article--dreadful!--till the danger of any reference to it in my hearing was greatly reduced. Then, aside from a slight natural need to recover myself, I felt I must for manners'

sake allow a little time to pa.s.s before I approached you again on the subject of marrying me. One scruples to make himself a bore. It therefore would be better not to see you, and, in order not to see you, better not to be in town. Lastly, Auroretta, I conceived the infernal ambition to make you suffer from absence the minutest fraction of what I should suffer myself."

"Don't say a word! I've missed you so my bones felt hollowed out!"

"Reflect then, my dearest, upon the sufferings you are preparing for yourself if you haven't a kinder answer for me than the other day to the same question. All the reasons you gave for saying no were such bad ones, founded upon a bad opinion of me. I can't take your refusal for final, don't you see, without first being sure I have convinced you at least that you are wrong in thinking me a fish or a mudturtle, and wrong in attributing a lack of intelligence to me which could betray me into confusing great things with little, little with great."

"Oh, Gerald, you oughtn't to keep on trying! I do wish you wouldn't! No!

Don't say any more about it!" she pleaded in weak anguish. "You oughtn't to go on battering against the little bit of common sense I've got left."

"Common sense! I advise you to speak of it!" he affected to jeer, remarkably braced by her misery. "Common sense, as represented by a decent concern for your good name, ought to prompt you enter as quickly as you can into an engagement with me. I met our dear Doctor Batoni in the street yesterday on my way home from the station, and he amiably asked how was my _fidanzata_, or betrothed? It was a difficult moment for me, because he told me that _you_ had told him you were that."

"I told him nothing of the sort! I said I was your friend, in French."

"A friend, in French, may mean a good deal. Save your reputation, dear; I give you the chance."

"What nonsense! I explained to him as well as I could, in French, that I was there taking care of you because I was your friend."

"You are hopelessly compromised. Look to me to set you right."

"Gerald, I shall do nothing of the kind."

"Ah, I see that your prejudices hold firm. I was afraid of it when I came." His mask of flippancy slipped for a moment; deep feeling made his voice uncertain. "I am not that hardy and masterful man, Aurora, who could break them down and clutch you above their ruin. But you will find me very faithful to a hope--which, in fact, to relinquish now would be beyond what I can expect of my courage." He resumed bluffness. "I told Vincent he might look for my return to-morrow."

"No, sir!" she came out with lively directness. "You're not going back to Leghorn if I can help it! I--I have a plan."

"You have a plan? From your face I am afraid not a good one. You look so dubious."

"Perhaps it isn't a good one, but it's the only way I can see. Listen."

She looked down at her hands, and kept him waiting. "One evening last winter at a party a young Italian naval officer got talking to me in a green bower under a pink paper lantern away from the rest. Something in the atmosphere, I guess, made him want to talk to somebody of his love-affairs, and he chose me, though we scarcely knew each other. He told me he had been very much in love with an American girl, but they hadn't the money to marry on or the hope of ever having it--like Brenda and Manlio at first. Yet they couldn't keep apart, and so they just became engaged, knowing it couldn't end as an engagement is supposed to do. In that way they could see each other all they wanted, and be seen together without anybody making a remark. And then when she was obliged to go home and it had to end, it looked merely like a broken engagement."

"And you propose--"

"We might try it, Gerald. Then if it didn't work well, if I found I was all the time outraging your sensibilities, and you hurting my feelings, we'd call it off. In any case we'd give ourselves plenty of time to realize our foolishness. And you'd promise that when the time came you'd go like a lamb, with a pleasant face, not saving up anything against me.

Make up your mind, now, that it'll have to be a long, _long_ engagement--if we don't repent and break it off inside a week. But as it seems so likely we will, let's don't tell the others right off, Gerald; not, anyhow, for a week or ten days."

"Admired Aurora, it surely is the most immoral proposition that ever came from fair lady so well brought up as you!" cried Gerald, in a proper state of excitement. But yet, such were his limitations, nothing in any proportion with the throbbing fire inside him, the immensity of his incredulous joy, appeared on his outside, where merely the mollified lines of his face gave him a look of greater youth, and his cool-colored eyes let through a faint testimony of the inward light. "I accept without hesitation. I promise whatever you ask. From this moment onward we are _fidanzati_, then. And, my blessed Auroretta, you who are such a hand at calling names, have your servant's permission to call him all the names you can think of that signify an ineffable blunderer on the day when you succeed in freeing yourself from him!"

Many more things were said, not worth recording. But at last devout silence reigned. In the twilight room, with all the bad pictures and trivial ornamentation, to shut out the offense of which he had once closed his eyes, Gerald now closed them again to concentrate more perfectly upon the rapture of feeling Aurora's shoulder beneath his cheek.