Part 37 (2/2)
”Yes,” he grew dreamy again, ”it took me back. It took me back to so many things I had nearly forgotten. And when at the end of the evening I was leaving, do you remember, Aurora, wrapping in paper some pieces of maple-sugar and forcing me to take them home in my pocket? I felt absurdly like a little boy and again you seemed like big America; something exhaled from you that made me think of slanting silver-gray roofs and the New England spring of appleblossoms and warbling robins; yes, and of October foliage intolerably bright, and Fourth of July celebrations. Not things I dote on, exactly, but things I was born to, and restful to me after my years of chasing what is not to be caught, wanting what is not to be had, seeking all the time to adjust myself, to adjust myself, to the harshness of life, the treachery, the unaccountability, the relentlessness--restful as this heavenly shoulder, on which I have wished how many hundred times to lay my head like this and not move again, or speak again, or have anything ever change.
Aurora, don't say a word, dear. Particularly, kindest Aurora, don't make any of your little jokes. Keep perfectly still, like a good darling, and let me forget everything except where my head is, and be perfectly happy.”
As seriously as if a G.o.d had commanded it, Aurora preserved the silence and immobility requested of her, only making her shoulder as much wider and softer and more comforting as she could by wanting it to be so.
When by and by she felt him slip a little as he began to lose himself in sleep, she clasped her hands around him supportingly and held him in place.
A single candle burned in the room, with a book to shade it. Aurora's eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little flame where it was reflected in a mirror on the wall opposite, but she did not see it at all, so absorbed was she in her thoughts. In her feelings, too. In the wonder of the hour. This remarkable Gerald, with his head packed full of knowledge, with his speech that charmed you as whistling does an adder, with his capacity to paint pictures that the rest could not even understand, and then his rarity, the sweetness of his manners, the fascination of all that unknown in him which came, she had concluded, from his foreign bringing-up--he had wanted ever since he first saw her just to lay his head on her shoulder and rest....
Her common ordinary shoulder. What did he see in her? Taking for granted that he saw something, Aurora attributed this unknown quality in herself to G.o.d, and thanked Him. She tightened her clasp about Gerald, the better to feel him there. The power of the sleeping-potion had overtaken him completely. Thoughts that moistened her eyes resulted from feeling her arms full of the breathing warmth of a beloved form. Those defrauded maternal arms! That other, who would have been five years old at this time, and would have been called little Dan, after Dan, her big father, how she would have nursed him through his childish ailments, how she would have held him and rocked him! No, she would never stop yearning over him. One must suppose that G.o.d knows best.
Gerald's breathing was deep and quiet. When sure that it could be done without waking him, she let him gently down on to the pillow.
She stood beside the bed for a few minutes, in her soft garment of cashmere and swansdown which made no more sound when she moved than did her velvet shoes; she watched him sleep with emotions of grat.i.tude beyond possibility of expression to any one but that old intimate, G.o.d.
He was getting well so surely and fast. He would shortly be as well as ever.
Confident that he would want nothing more for the rest of the night, she arranged herself in her easy-chair for a good sleep, too.
On the next day she divined from his half troubled look at her, and the shy modesty of his manner, that he was wondering whether he had actually babbled last night, or in a mild delirium dreamed the whole thing. Not from her might he find out. Her easy, matter-of-fact way made any such pa.s.sage seem at least unlikely.
Having slept during the night she did not retire to rest during the day, but let Giovanna go about her long neglected affairs and in her place looked after Gerald, who had waked from his deep sleep immensely refreshed. He would not need a constant watcher beside him after this, during night or day.
”What shall I do to amuse you?” she asked him, to make an interruption after she had felt him watching her through half closed lids for some time. ”Don't you want me to read to you?”
”I think not, Aurora. Thank you just as much.”
”Well, then, how shall I entertain you? Do you want me to be a gold-fish for you?”
”How do you 'be a gold-fish,' Aurora?”
”Look!” But the instant she changed her face into a gold-fish's and waggled up through imaginary water, opening and shutting her mouth like a rubber valve, he hid his eyes, crying sharply, ”Please stop! I don't want to see it.”
The gold-fish personality was dropped.
”Very well, then,” she said, with unimpaired serenity, ”shall I do a squirrel gnawing a nut? Every family its own circus.”
”If you do it, I will not look. How can you endure, lovely as you are, to make yourself ugly--grotesque?”
”Aren't you rather hard to suit to-day, mister? Shall I be a hen, then, scratching for her chicks? That's mild.”
”No, no, no. Yes. No. I don't know about the hen. Let me have a sample.”
He watched her, critically and provisionally, while with comfortable, motherly, half-suppressed chest-sounds, and a round eye c.o.c.ked for finds among the dirt, remarkably altogether the appearance of a pensive white hen, she made believe to scratch up the earth with her feet. A rather sympathetic performance, he allowed, her imitation of the hen, calling up before one the vision of a farmyard, a brood of downy yellow chicks, a duckpond, suns.h.i.+ne, green things.
He let her do it as long as she would, or rather until to vary the thing she increased the comic beyond the line he fixed. When midday found him grudgingly laughing at her cackling, it seemed improbable certainly that midnight had seen him sleeping in her arms. But underlying their laughter was a consciousness in each that day of a thing uniting them which had not been there before.
Sitting bolstered up in bed to eat his first real meal, he looked, with his long hair parted in the middle and brushed down over his hollow temples, like one of those old masters in the Ewe-fitsy, Aurora told him. A St. John the Baptist, she specified.
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