Part 19 (2/2)
But within the hour he had come near quarreling with her, he also, and on more than one score.
It began with his making a pleasant remark upon her voice, which seemed to him worth cultivating. She brushed aside the idea of devoting study to the art of singing.
”But,” she said, ”Italo has brought me some songs. He plays them over and shows me how to sing them. We have lots of fun.” To give him an example, she broke forth, adapting her peculiarly American p.r.o.nunciation to Ceccherelli's peculiarly Italian intonations, ”'_Non so resistere, sei troppo bella!_'”
Gerald winced and darkened.
”Then there's this one,” she went on, ”'_Mia piccirella, deh, vieni allo mare!_' Do you want to hear me sing it like Miss Felixson, together with her dog, which always bursts out howling before she's done? I've heard them three times, and can do the couple of them to a T.”
”Please don't!” he hurriedly requested. ”I hope,” he added doubtfully, ”that you won't do it to amuse any of your other friends, either.” As she did not quickly a.s.sure him that she neither had done, nor ever would dream of doing, such a low thing, he went on, with the liberty of speech that amazingly prevailed between them: ”Extraordinary as it seems, you would be perfectly capable of it. And it would be a grave mistake.”
”I've done it for Italo when he was playing my accompaniment. For n.o.body else.”
”Mrs. Hawthorne, if that little man has become your singing-master, will you not intrust me with the honorable charge of likewise teaching you something? No, not painting. I should like to drill you in the p.r.o.nunciation of that little man's name. It is Ceccherelli.
Cec-che-rel-li. _Cec-che-rel-li._”
She shook her head.
”No use. I've got accustomed to the other now.”
He felt a spark dropped among the recesses where his inflammable temper was kept.
”Before you know it the fellow will be calling you Aurora!” he said, repressing the outburst of his wrath at this possibility.
”He does, my friend,” she answered him quietly. ”He can't say Hawthorne.
Do you hear him saying Hawthorne? He calls me Signora Aurora.”
”Then why not call him Signor Italo?”
”At this time of day? It would be too formal. He would wonder what he'd done to offend me.”
Gerald was reminded that since Christmas Ceccherelli had been wearing, instead of his silver turnip, a fine gold watch, her overt gift and his frank boast, which he conspicuously extracted from its chamois-skin case every time he needed to know the hour.
”Mrs. Hawthorne,” said Gerald, ”you have repeatedly said that you have what you call lots of fun with Ceccherelli. Would you mind giving me an idea of what the fun consists in? I wish to have light--that I may do the man justice. Left to myself, I should judge him to be the dullest, commonest, cheapest of inexpressibly vulgar, insignificant, pretentious, ugly, and probably dishonest, little men.” The adjectives came rolling out irrepressibly.
”Perhaps he is,” Aurora said serenely; ”but haven't you noticed, Stickly-p.r.i.c.kly, that about some things you and I don't feel alike?
Italo plays the piano in a way that perfectly delights me, he's good-hearted, and he makes me laugh. Isn't that enough?”
”In short, you like him. You like so many people, Mrs. Hawthorne, and of such various kinds, that though one is bound to be glad to be among your friends, one needn't--need one?--feel exactly flattered.”
She seemed to consider this, but instead of taking it up, went on with the subject of Italo.
”He entertains me. He knows all about everybody in Florence and tells me.”
”He gossips, you mean.”
Again she considered a moment before going on.
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