Part 29 (2/2)

”It's very bad out, and not much better in, except here by your generous fireside. I haven't been warm all day.”

”Why didn't you come before? It isn't what I call balmy here, but I expect it's balmier than at your place.”

With her kindly unconstraint she reached for one of his hands to test its temperature. With a little cry of ”Mercy me!” she closed his numb fingers between her palms to warm them, as if the blaze could not have accomplished this end so well as they.

He let it be, not with the same unconsciousness in the matter as she, but hoping that the soft, warm infolding would somehow do him good. He had come in the rather desperate hope of being done good to. As he had been about to start out, having intended, when he sent the portrait, to follow close upon it, he had found himself feeling so ill--feeling, at the end of the dismal day, so indescribably burdened and ill and apprehensive of worse things--that he had been on the point of giving it up. But then the wish itself to escape from his bad feelings had impelled him forth toward the spot glowing warmer and cheerier in his thoughts than any other, where, if he could forget how ill he felt, he would naturally feel better. Aurora's house during the days of painting the first portrait had come to feel remarkably like home to him.

So when Aurora released his hand, saying, ”Let's have the other,” he docilely gave it to her, though the fire had already partly thawed it.

Gratefully, with the hand set free, he covered both her kind hands, which loved so much to warm things and feed things and pet things and give away money.

Overcoming his ordinary stiffness, he pressed them right manfully, to signify that he would not speak of her tears if she wished him not to, but here was his sympathy, and with it his penitence, if so were that, as she intimated, he had had a share in making them flow.

”So you are all alone this evening?” he asked in the voice that makes whatever is said seem affectionate and comforting.

”Yes. I haven't even Busteretto. I let Estelle keep him on the foot of her bed. She's perfectly devoted to him. And Clotilde is busy in her own corner of the house, going over the bills. It takes lots of time.”

”And where is the musician in ordinary, the gifted Italo?” he inquired, with a smile meant to draw from her a smile.

She was caught without difficulty. ”The gifted Checkerberry hasn't been round lately,” she smiled. ”He won't expose himself to the night air for some time. He's got laryngitis so he can't talk above a whisper.” Her eye twinkled and she laughed, though what she communicated was not on the face of it very funny.

He was perhaps calling attention to this when he said, ”Poor devil!”

”Yes,” she agreed, achieving sobriety, ”it's bad weather for laryngitis,” and went on with the weather, dropping Italo. ”It's been a mean sort of day, hasn't it? I haven't set foot outside. I was already feeling kind of blue and making up my mind to go to bed when Gaetano came with your present.”

There was an intimation in her glance that this event had not made the world appear any rosier.

Both turned to look at the picture. Their hands loosened naturally; they sat apart.

”Can't you see why I had to paint it, Mrs. Hawthorne?” he asked, speaking eagerly, and as if pressing his defense.

”How could I endure to have that thing down-stairs stand as my idea, my sole idea, of you? And how could I bear to make you a gift, a sole gift, of a piece of work I do not respect? This may be worth no more,--I think differently,--but it is at least the best I can produce. It has my sanction. You, too, believe me, will prefer it to the other after a while.”

She shook her head a little disconsolately.

”The other you can, if you must, keep in your drawing-room to make an agreeable spot of color,” he went on, reversing their parts and trying to induce in her a lighter humor; ”it has that perfectly legitimate use.

In your drawing-room, you know, Auroretta, among the pictures of your choosing, it does not, in our Italian idiom, altogether disappear. This one you will keep out of sight, but will look at now and then, if you please; and I quite trust you, with time, to recognize that it was painted by some one who understood and honored you more than there was any evidence of his doing when he perpetrated, for a joke, that bonbon-box subject down-stairs.”

Mrs. Hawthorne, with soft and saddened eyes fixed on the portrait, again shook her head, sighing, ”Poor thing!”

”Not at all!” he protested almost peevishly. ”Please not to suggest by pitying her that I have not represented there a fine, big, strong thing, built to stand up under anything! I could slay, with pleasure, at any time”--he diverged, carried away by a long-standing disgust,--”the pestiferous a.s.ses who call my things morbid. I am too careful to keep true to what I see. The difference between them--I mean the critics who call me morbid--and myself, is in the degree of sight.”

”Don't get excited, Geraldino!” she checked fumings which she did not entirely understand. ”What I meant was that looking at her has made me think of all the things that have gone wrong with me in my whole life.

Don't you call that a tribute? You couldn't have painted this picture if you hadn't suspected those things, and, honest, I don't see how you could suspect them. Ever since I came over here I've been so jolly.

Seems to me I've been nothing but jolly. I've been having such a good time! How you could see under it, I don't know. As a matter of fact, I've always been jolly between-times. Give me half a chance, let me get out of the frying-pan, I'd be ready in a minute to go on a picnic. But I've not been spared my troubles, Geraldino; you were right there.”

At this reference to many sorrows, he found a thing to do more expressive than words. Sitting near each other as they were, he could reach her without rising; he bent forward and touched his lips commiseratingly to her hand.

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