Volume Ii Part 22 (2/2)
I had thoughts, eyes, ears, and senses for one,--and one only. Judge, then, my astonishment when she saluted me, giving that little gesture with the hand your Florentines are such adepts in,--a species of salutation so full of most expressive meaning.
Short of a crow-quilled billet, neatly endorsed with her name, nothing could have spoken more plainly. It said, in a few words, ”Come up here, Jim, we shall be delighted to see you.” I accepted the augury, Bob, as we used to say in Virgil, and in less than a minute had forced my pa.s.sage through the dense crowd of the pit, and was mounting the box stairs, five steps at a spring. ”Whose box is No. 19?” said I to an official. ”Madame de Goranton,” was the reply. Awkward this; never had heard the name before; sounded like French; might be Swiss; possibly Belgian.
No time for debating the point, tapped and entered,--several persons within barring up the pa.s.sage to the front,--suddenly heard a well-known voice, which accosted me most cordially, and, to my intense surprise, saw before me Mrs. Gore Hampton! You know already all about her, Bob, and I need not recapitulate.
”I fancied you were going to pa.s.s your life in distant adoration yonder, Mr. Dodd,” said she, laughingly, while she tendered her hand for me to kiss. ”Adeline, dearest, let me present to you my friend Mr. Dodd.” A very cold--an icy recognition was the reply to this speech; and Adeline opened her fan, and said something behind it to an elderly dandy beside her, who laughed, and said, ”Parfaitement, ma foi!”
Registering a secret vow to be the death of the antiquated tiger aforesaid, I entered into conversation with Mrs. G. H., who, notwithstanding some unpleasant pa.s.sages between our families, expressed unqualified delight at the thought of meeting us all once more; inquired after my mother most affectionately; and asked if the girls were looking well, and whether they rode and danced as beautifully as ever. She made, between times, little efforts to draw her friend into conversation by some allusion to Mary Anne's grace or Cary's accomplishments; but all in vain. Adeline only met the advances with a cold stare, or a little half-smile of most sneering expression. It was not that she was distant and reserved towards me. No, Bob; her manner was downright contemptuous; it was insulting; and yet such was the fascination her beauty had acquired over me that I could have knelt at her feet in adoration of her. I have no doubt that she saw this. I soon perceived that Mrs. Gore Hampton did. There is a wicked consciousness in a woman's look as she sees a man ”hooked,” there's no mistaking. Her eyes expressed this sentiment now; and, indeed, she did not try to hide it.
She invited me to come home and sup with them. She half tried to make Adeline say a word or two in support of the invitation; but no, she would not even hear it; and when I accepted, she half peevishly declared she had got a bad headache, and would go to bed after the play. I tell you these trivial circ.u.mstances, Bob, just that you may fancy how irretrievably lost I was when such palpable signs of dislike could not discourage me. I felt this all--and acutely too; but somehow with no sense of defeat, but a stubborn, resolute determination to conquer them.
I went back to sup with Mrs. G. H., and Adeline kept her word and retired. There were a few men--foreigners of distinction--but I sat beside the hostess, and heard nothing but praises of that ”dear angel.”
These eulogies were mixed up with a certain tender pity that puzzled me sadly, since they always left the impression that either the angel had done something herself, or some one else had done it towards her, that called for all the most compa.s.sionate sentiments of the human heart.
As to any chance of her history--who she was, whence she came, and so on--it was quite out of the question; you might as well hope for the private life of some aerial spirit that descends in the midst of canvas clouds in a ballet. She was there--to be wors.h.i.+pped, wondered at, and admired, but not to be catechised.
I left Mrs. H.'s house at three in the morning,--a sadder but scarcely a wiser man. She charged me most solemnly not to mention to any one where I had been,--a precaution possibly suggested by the fact that I had lost sixty Napoleons at lansquenet,--a game at which I left herself and her friends deeply occupied when I came away. I was burning with impatience for Tiverton to come back to Florence. He had gone down to the Maremma to shoot snipe. For, although I was precluded by my promise from divulging about the supper, I bethought me of a clever stratagem by which I could obtain all the counsel and guidance without any breach of faith, and this was, to take him with me some evening to the pit, station him opposite to No. 19, and ask all about its occupants; he knows everybody everywhere, so that I should have the whole history of my unknown charmer on the easiest of all terms.
From that day and that hour, I became a changed creature. The gay follies of my fas.h.i.+onable friends gave me no pleasure. I detested b.a.l.l.s.
I abhorred theatres. _She_ ceased to frequent the opera. In fact, I gave the most unequivocal proof of my devotion to one by a most sweeping detestation of all the rest of mankind. Amidst my other disasters, I could not remember where Mrs. Gore Hampton lived. We had driven to her house after the theatre; it was a long way off, and seemed to take a very circuitous course to reach, but in what direction I had not the very vaguest notion of. The name of it, too, had escaped me, though she repeated it over several times when I was taking my leave of her. Of course, my omitting to call and pay my respects would subject me to every possible construction of rudeness and incivility, and here was, therefore, another source of irritation and annoyance to me.
My misanthropy grew fiercer. I had pa.s.sed through the sad stage, and now entered upon the combative period of the disease. I felt an intense longing to have a quarrel with somebody. I frequented _cafe's_, and walked the streets in a battle, murder, and sudden-death humor,--frowning at this man, scowling at that. But, have you never remarked, the caprice of Fortune is in this as in all other things? Be indifferent at play, and you are sure to win; show yourself regardless of a woman, and you are certain to hear she wants to make your acquaintance. Go out of a morning in a mood of universal love and philanthropy, and I'll take the odds that you have a duel on your hands before evening.
There was one man in Florence whom I especially desired to fix a quarrel upon,--this was Morris, or, as he was now called, Sir Morris Penrhyn. A fellow who unquestionably ought to have had very different claims on my regard, but who now, in this perversion of my feelings, struck me as exactly the man to shoot or be shot by. Don't you know that sensation, Bob, in which a man feels that he must select a particular person, quite apart from any misfortune he is suffering under, and make _him_ pay its penalty? It is a species of antipathy that defies all reason, and, indeed, your attempt to argue yourself out of it only serves to strengthen and confirm its hold on you.
Morris and I had ceased to speak when we met; we merely saluted coldly, and with that rigid observance of a courtesy that makes the very easiest prelude to a row, each party standing ready prepared to say ”check”
whenever the other should chance to make a wrong move. Perhaps I am not justified in saying so much of _him_, but I know that I do not exaggerate my own intentions. I fancied--what will a man not fancy in one of these eccentric stages of his existence?--that Morris saw my purpose, and evaded me. I argued myself into the notion that he was deficient in personal courage, and constructed upon this idea a whole edifice of absurdity.
I am ashamed, even before you, to acknowledge the extent to which my stupid infatuation blinded me; perhaps the best penalty to pay for it is an open confession.
I overtook our valet one morning with a letter in my governor's hand addressed to Sir Morris Penrhyn, and on inquiring, discovered that he and my father had been in close correspondence for the three days previous. At once I jumped to the conclusion that I was, somehow or other, the subject of these epistles, and in a fit of angry indignation I drove off to Morris's hotel.
When a man gets himself into a thorough pa.s.sion on account of some supposed injury, which even to himself he is unable to define, his state is far from enviable. When I reached the hotel, I was in the hot stage of my anger, and could scarcely brook the delay of sending in my card.
The answer was, ”Sir Morris did not receive.” I asked for pen and ink to write a note, and scribbled something most indiscreet and offensive. I am glad to say that I cannot now remember a line of it. The reply came that my ”note should be attended to,” and with this information I issued forth into the street half wild with rage.
I felt that I had given a deadly provocation, and must now look out for some ”friend” to see me through the affair. Tiverton was absent, and amongst all my acquaintances I could not pitch upon one to whose keeping I liked to entrust my honor. I turned into several _cafs_, I strolled into the club, I drove down to the Cascini, but in vain; and at last was walking homeward, when I caught sight of a friendly face from the window of a travelling-carriage that drove rapidly by, and, hurrying after, just came up as it stopped at the door of the Htel d'Italie.
You may guess my astonishment as I felt my hand grasped cordially by no other than our old neighbor at Bruff, Dr. Belton, the physician of our county dispensary. Five minutes explained his presence there. He had gone out to Constantinople as the doctor to our Emba.s.sy, and by some piece of good luck and his own deservings to boot, had risen to the post of Private Secretary to the Amba.s.sador, and was selected by him to carry home some very important despatches, to the rightful consideration of which his own presence at the Foreign Office was deemed essential.
Great as was the difference between, his former and his present station, it was insignificant in comparison with the change worked in himself.
The country doctor, of diffident manners and retiring habits, grateful for the small civilities of small patrons, cautiously veiling his conscious superiority under an affected ignorance, was now become a consummate man of the world,--calm, easy, and self-possessed. His very appearance had undergone an alteration, and he held himself more erect, and looked not only handsomer but taller. These were the first things that struck me; but as we conversed together, I found him the same hearty, generous fellow I had ever known him, neither elated by his good fortune, nor, what is just as common a fault, contemptuously pretending that it was only one-half of his deserts.
One thing alone puzzled me, it was that he evinced no desire to come and see our family, who had been uniformly kind and good-natured to him; in fact, when I proposed it, he seemed so awkward and embarra.s.sed that I never pressed my invitation, but changed the topic. I knew that there bad been, once on a time, some pa.s.sages between my sister Mary Anne and him, and therefore supposed that possibly there might have been something or other that rendered a meeting embarra.s.sing. At all events, I accepted his half-apology on the ground of great fatigue, and agreed to dine with him.
What a pleasant dinner it was! He related to me all the story of his life, not an eventful one as regarded incident, but full of those traits which make up interest for an individual. You felt as you listened that it was a thoroughly good fellow was talking to you, and that if he were not to prove successful in life, it was just because his were the very qualities rogues trade on for their own benefit. There was, moreover, a manly sense of independence about him, a consciousness of self-reliance that never approached conceit, but served to nerve his courage and support his spirit, which gave him an almost heroism in my eyes, and I own, too, suggested a most humiliating comparison with my own nature.
I opened my heart freely to him about everything, and in particular about Morris; and although I saw plainly enough that he took very opposite views to mine about the whole matter, he agreed to stop in Florence for a day, and act as my friend in the transaction. This being so far arranged, I started for Carrara, which, being beyond the Tuscan frontier, admits of our meeting without any risk of interruption,--for that it must come to such I am fully determined on. The fact is, Bob, my note is a ”stunner,” and, as I won't retract, Morris has no alternative but to come out.
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