Part 38 (2/2)
It's hard for me now to think of the place without me. I miss myself there.”
”I suppose you'll be driving round to inquire sometime in the course of the day,” Estelle said, with true generosity; at which Aurora tried to look as if she were not sure; she would think about it.
With arms around each other's waists they went through all the rooms for Aurora to renew her pleasure in them after absence. They came to a standstill before her portrait in the drawing-room.
”There's no mistake, he's talented,” Estelle admitted good-humoredly, after a considerable silence. ”That's a fine portrait.”
Aurora did not say she thought so, too. Alone in her room later, while Estelle was dressing to go out together, she looked at the other portrait to see if she were ”any nearer educated up to it.” It seemed to her she was, a little bit.
She started to dress. Being given to homely rather than poetic fancies, she subsequently thought of herself as having been, during the process of making herself fine for the afternoon drive and call, like some Cape Cod young one trotting happily along with her tin pail full of blueberries, just before a big dog sprang out of the roadside tangle and jostled the pail out of her hand, so that all the berries were spilled....
Even as she was b.u.t.toning her gloves a letter came for her with a parcel. All rosy with delight, she quickly found in her purse a reward for Gaetano, the bringer. Without too much hurry, like a person not eager to shorten a solid enjoyment, she opened the letter. It did not strike her as surprising, certainly not as ominous, that Gerald should write when he might expect to see her so soon. She read:
This is the fourth letter, dearest Aurora, that I have written you since waking, after a very bad night, in such a black humor that you would know I am quite myself again and life has resumed for me its natural colors. I destroyed those letters one after the other because, although written with the effort of my whole being to be what you call sweet, they sounded to me insufferably disagreeable. And now whatever I write I shall have to send because if I destroy this letter also I shall not have time to write another before you come to see me as you promised.
And the reason for my wretched night was that I was haunted by all the reasons there are why you should not come. They are so difficult to put into words that I despair, after three attempts, of doing it in any but an offensive manner. Pity, Aurora, the plight of your poor patient; permit him not to go into them. Just--don't come.
Alas! that cannot be all. I have the vision of your puzzled face. Well, then, it is for yourself, in part. I have no excuse for profiting by a kindness that may be harmful to you. It is my duty to regard for you the conventions you are big-heartedly willing to disregard. I deplore the fact that I was ever so weak as to forget it.
But it is also for myself, who must not further be demoralized and spoiled.
I must not, moreover, be laid further under obligations of grat.i.tude, the less, my dear Aurora, that grat.i.tude is not precisely what I feel.
No. I so little dote upon life that I should be glad if a merciful angel's attention had not been drawn to me, and I perhaps might have escaped the dreary prolongation of years. I am sorry, but so it is.
Pray do not conceive any relation between what I have just written and the request that follows. Will you be so kind as to return the object belonging to me which I miss from the little table-drawer at the head of my bed? You had no right to take it.
Vincent Johns is coming in a day or two. Do not think of me, therefore, as lonely or neglected.
I find I must hurry or be too late. This letter is beastly and ought to be torn up like the others. It simply cannot; it must go. I can only pray, Aurora, that you will understand.
Aurora went back to the beginning and read the letter a second time.
Then she turned to the accompanying parcel and noticed that it was done up in a shabby piece of old newspaper. It contained a pair of fur-lined velvet shoes, a bow-knot of blue satin ribbon, and a bottle of almond milk, things of her own which through carelessness had been left behind.
She could not know that the honest Giovanna alone was responsible for this return of her property. Coming at that moment, it formed the occasion for two stinging tears rising to the edge of Aurora's eyes. She swept them away with the back of her glove, and forbade any more to follow. To prevent them she took her lips between her teeth, and with all her strength called upon her pride.
She read Gerald's letter over again, really trying to understand, to be fair, to interpret it in the high-minded way he would wish.
”When all is said, it amounts to this,”--she reached the end of that exercise by a short cut,--”he wants to be let alone.”
And after every allowance had been made for him, and all due deference paid to his excellent reasons, still it seemed to her what she couldn't call anything but a poor return. Because his letter was bound to hurt her, and he must have known it. His sending it, therefore, argued a lack of any very deep affection for her. After she had come, just from his own words and actions, to supposing....
”This is what you get for not remembering that if a person is practically a foreigner you can never expect to know them except in spots,” she admonished herself.
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