Part 51 (1/2)
The man came back with nothing but the barren information, received from Giovanna, that the _signorino_ was absent, having gone to Leghorn.
”Well, here's a pretty howdydo!” thought Aurora, sore with surprise and the smart of injury. ”If every time I refuse him he's going off like this to stay away for days and days, what am I going to do?”
CHAPTER XXIII
”If this is the way it was going to be, and I'd known it before, I'd have kept better watch over my affections,” said Aurora to herself, reflecting upon Gerald in Leghorn, where he was bending his will industriously, no doubt, to the work of forgetting her.
Beside the large sharp thorn of this thought, she was troubled by what was a small, merely uncomfortable thorn: the knowledge of Gerald exposed so closely to the influence of Vincent, that persuasive young man of G.o.d, who bowed to images and believed in the Pope. At the end of every wearisome day she gave thanks that for still another twenty-four hours she had by grace of strength from on high been able to fight off the temptation to write to Gerald.
This for nine days--the nine days it takes for a wonder to become a commonplace or a scandal to lose its prominent place in conversation.
Then, in the way once sweetly habitual, there came a rapping at the door, the entrance of a servant, and the announcement, ”_C'e il signorino_.”
Aurora for a second either did not really grasp the import of the words or did not trust her senses. She asked:
”What _signorino_? _Signorino_ What?”
”The _signorino_ who has come back,” said the servant, unable on the instant to recall the foreign name. And if he had felt interest in the complexion of one so far removed from him as his mistress, he might have seen her turn the hue of a cla.s.sic sunrise.
On her way down the stairs Aurora rejected the idea of a tumultuous reproachful greeting, such as, ”Where have you been so long, you mean thing?” Or of a cool and cutting one, such as, ”You're quite a stranger.” She decided to behave like a nice person, and show respect for her friend's freedom, after having so explicitly left it to him.
The Italians performing the service of the house arranged it according to their own ideas of fitness, and on this warm afternoon the drawing-room was in soft-colored twilight, the Persian blinds being clasped, and their lower panels pushed out a very little so as to let in a modic.u.m of the whiteness of day.
Gerald stood, very collected, if a trifle pale, holding, like a proper votary, a bouquet--starry handful of sweet white hedge-roses,--which he offered as soon as Aurora entered, saying he had picked them for her that morning in the country near Castel di Poggio.
The meeting, in Aurora's jubilant sense of it, went off beautifully. She said in a pleasant, easy tone and her company English,
”So you've got back. It's awfully nice to see you again. How well you are looking. I was sure a change would do you good.”
And Gerald said yes, he had found the sea air tonic. He had been staying with the Johns, Vincent's mother lived in Leghorn. He had worked a little, made a few drawings. Digressing, he mentioned a trifling gift he had brought her, and produced a small bra.s.s vessel, fitted with two hinged lids, meant to contain grains of incense for the altar. He said he had found it in an antiquarian's shop and thought she might care for it to drop her rings into; he supposed she took them off at night. Its shape seemed to him to possess more than common elegance.
Aurora called it adorable, and his giving it to her sweet. They talked as if they had been making believe, for the benefit of an audience, to be the most ordinary friends.
And each of them meanwhile, with heart and head gone slightly insane in secret, was considering a marvel. The long separation--it had been long to them--had recreated for both something of the capacity to receive a fresh impression of the other. The marvel to Aurora was that this choice being, with his intellectual brow (that was her adjective for Gerald's brow) his difference from others, all in the way of superiority to them, the indescribable fascination residing in his every feature, mood, or word, should be walking the world unclaimed and unattached, for her to take if she were so minded. Her to take! It was vertiginous.
And the marvel to him was, in beholding that bounteous temple of a soul, with its radiance of life, its share, so rich, of the mysterious something which made the earliest men care to build homes; its gifts, so large, of comfort and warmth--the marvel was that he should have dared aspire to conquer it, should have set that to himself as a thing he was going to persevere in trying to do until--until he had done it, he, puny, poor in inducements, light of weight.
The two of them, there could be no doubt of it, had pa.s.sed within the portals after which a change comes over the eyes, and those who enter see each other endowed with qualities raising the capacity for wonder to an ecstasy: so much engaging beauty, so much dearness, are not to be believed!... It can never be established whether the eyes only see truly when under this charm, or whether then more than at other times illusion makes of them its fool.
If he had been a.n.a.lytical on the subject of his sentiment for Aurora, as so often on other subjects, and said to himself that he saw this woman in a golden transfiguring light because he was in good primordial fas.h.i.+on in love with her--because, that is to say, obscure affinities of flesh and blood united with the esteem created by her virtues to make of him a candle which the touch of her finger-tip miraculously could light--he would have felt it as a blessed and not a base secret at the bottom of his attachment.
While they talked of the weather, as they fell to doing when they had disposed of the subject of the little incense-holder; and, after that, while they talked of Leghorn and the various seaside places which Aurora had to choose from for her summer sojourn, a vastly deep conversation was taking place between them, which we think it not amiss to report, because by the nature of things the words they would say aloud on this occasion would be meager and colorless by comparison with the things they would feel and to some extent convey to each other through mere proximity.
”O Aurora,” exhaled from Gerald, while, looking not far from his usual self, he said that Ardenza by the sea, a mere three miles from Leghorn, was a very pretty place, ”Aurora, you are warmth, you are shelter, you are rest. I have no hearth or home except as you let me in out of the desperate cold of loneliness, and grant me to warm myself at your big heart. You should see, woman dear, that my thankfulness would make you happy. Nature, the divine, so formed you that my love would kindle yours. And when you had given your hand into mine I should find paths of violets, enchanted paths, for us to walk in which you could never find without me, nor I find for myself. Put up no petty s.h.i.+eld against me, Aurora; fight me with no petty lance, for I verily am that guest you were awaiting when on balmy spring evenings you felt, and knew not why, that your life was incomplete.”
And Aurora, mechanically pulling off her rings and putting them into the bra.s.s receptacle, then taking them out of it and putting them back on her fingers, while she chattered, describing the advantages of a furnished villa at Antiniano, to be preferred because they were some Italian friends of Leslie's who desired to let it, was in her inmost speaking to the inmost of Gerald. The hardly self-conscious meanings within her bosom made as if an extension of her in the air, comparable to the halo around the moon on a misty night; and this atomized radiance had language, it said: ”Oh, to draw your head down where it desires to be! To warm and comfort you! To be to you everything you need! I lean to you, I cling to you like a vine with every winding tendril. But I am so afraid of you! so afraid! I am of common, you of finest, clay. How can I give into any hand so much power to hurt me? If I were to dare it, then find I could not make you happy, your disappointment would be my heart-break, and my tragedy might spoil your life. But this know, Gerald, dearer to me for having been so unhappy, nothing my life could contain without you would seem to me so good as life with you in a poor workman's attic, under falling snow, and I to make it home for you!”
While two souls thus trembled and gravitated toward each other, bathing in each other's light, it is almost mortifying to have to show to what degree that which took place at the surface was different and inferior; to what degree the fine abandon of words spoken and actions performed in thought was replaced by a s.h.i.+vering prudence keeping guard on one side, and on the other a deplorable timidity trying awkwardly to be bold.