Part 49 (1/2)

CHAPTER XLIV

After dinner that evening Miss Allen came up to where Mr. Livingstone and Mr. Crittenden stood together near the window and said to them, ”Would it interest you at all to go to the soiree at Donna Antonia's to-morrow? She has been kind enough to offer me some cards of invitation, and it occurred to me--if you haven't anything better to do that evening--?”

Livingstone carried one hand to his heart, the other to his brow, and professed inability to recover from the shock. ”My dear young lady, it's inhuman to shatter my nerves with a bomb-sh.e.l.l like that without a word of warning! You know well enough I'd gladly give one of my ears for an invitation to Donna Antonia's. Why then the false modesty, as who should say, 'If you've nothing more interesting on hand just step up and let me make you a Duke, do!'”

Miss Allen acknowledged the facetious intention of this with a suitable laugh and looked at Neale. He said, ”Oh, of course I shall be glad to go.”

”That's good then. I shall hope to see both of you.”

When she had turned away to another group in the salon Livingstone put his head on one side and smiled down at his cigarette. ”That's what comes of a little judicious attention bestowed in the right direction,”

he informed Neale. ”I've been getting up at the unearthly hour that girl takes her breakfast for a fortnight now. Quite a charmer, isn't she?--though nothing to her friend Miss Mills. It's Miss Mills I'm interested in. Just wait till you see _that_ joint production of American cash and European civilization! M-m-m! Hair like gold thread, and scads of money in her own right.” He added seriously, ”Miss Allen hasn't, you know--money, I mean, too bad, isn't it? Her father is only a salaried man--something or other for Paris for the something or other sewing-machine company. Oh, no, I believe it's mowing machines,--or maybe twist drills--anyhow one of those missionaries from our own little home-paradise of cogs and gears. But of course the fair Allaine may make a lot herself if she really does get on the concert stage. Still you never can tell. There's an awful lot of interior wire-pulling to be done, managers and musical critics and so on, before anybody really is allowed to get to the bacon in the concert business, and is she really anywhere near professional skill, who knows? However, a pretty girl always stands enough sight better show than a plain one; or than a man.

If she uses those dark eyes of hers to good account I should think 'most any manager or music critic would fall for her. _She_ has a good skin, too; quite pleasant, that clear olive, though of course it's awfully common here in Italy. Just the same, a dark woman never has the _eclat_ of a blonde. Wait till you see Miss Mills.”

Neale broke in on his flow to remark in a suffocated voice that he had letters to write, and disappeared.

The soiree was horrible to Neale, a nightmare, a glittering wall through which he could by no means break to reach her, over which he could scarcely see at an immense distance her slim figure, dressed in yellow, a thin gold fillet binding her smooth dark head. She was talking, smiling, animated, at ease; and after she had played, much acclaimed.

There was nothing surprising about _that_, thought Neale, applauding with all his might. Heavens, how beautifully she made music, how beautifully, how intelligently, with such a clear, sure certainty of her own powers! Of course everybody there admired her, paid court to her, made her the center of one group after another--always except the group where he stood! He felt heart-sick to be so cut off from her. As a matter of fact he was not in the least literally cut off from her. She kept relentlessly introducing him to one person after another whom he did not wish to meet. She kept coming up to him every time he had succeeded in shaking off a tiresome companion and was standing alone at last in a corner, looking everywhere over the curled, powdered, bobbing, restless, grinning crowd to catch a glimpse of her. There she would be at his elbow, gliding up from nowhere. He restrained an impulse to s.n.a.t.c.h at her and hold her there, because each time she melted away after she had said, ”Won't you let me take you to Donna Antonia Pierleoni,” or ”to Miss Mills,” or ”to Signor Ambrogi,” or to somebody or other with whom it was necessary to talk and on whom it was necessary to try to keep those wandering, seeking eyes of his. He took them in with the top-layer of his consciousness, one after another of the people with whom he was forced to talk. Donna Antonia Pierleoni, a haughty, elderly Roman lady who was, as Neale said to himself, feeding her haughty Roman face as though she scorned and despised lemon ice but _would_ eat it since it seemed to be her duty. It amused him greatly to observe that after finis.h.i.+ng one she took another at once.

Miss Mills--oh, yes, this must be the girl Livingstone had been yarning about. Of course after praise from Livingstone it was to be expected that she'd look like a very high-priced wax image in a hair-dresser's window; and yet Neale's attention was caught for a moment by her p.r.o.nunciation of a French phrase. Her inflection reminded him of Marise Allen's, and he hung about her for some time in the hope of hearing it again. Every time she repeated it, which she often did, he smiled down broadly on her. She was a pretty little thing. Livingstone was right.

She was really quite an object of art, if that was what you called them.

Signor Ambrogi turned out to be in politics, an a.s.sistant Minister of Commerce or Industry or something. Why, he looked for all the world like a New York business man--might be old man Gates as he had been at forty-five. As they tried to talk to each other in French that was not very fluent on either side, Neale was reflecting that the Roman governing type had changed very little. This strongly-marked, clean-shaven, heavy-jowled head with its thick, hooked nose, bold eyes, hard mouth and wrinkled forehead, could be put without change in among the portraits of Roman Emperors.

They talked in their halting ”lingua Franca” of business, of railroads, of the use of commercial fertilizers on Italian fields, of the conversion of water-power into electrical energy, and, finding Neale a good listener, the Italian told him about a power-plant in a volcanic region of Italy that ran its machinery by the steam escaping from the thin crust of earth over internal volcanic goings-on. For an instant Neale was quite stirred by this conception. It seemed a very neat idea, and it tickled him to have Italians turn such a traditionally American trick.

”Pretty good, pretty good!” he said applaudingly. ”That's beating us at our own game.”

”Pas si bete, en effet,” said the other, well pleased by Neale's comment.

But this interlude was the only time when, even for a moment, Neale was delivered from his desolation at seeing her so far from his world, from any world he could possibly hope ever to make his own. That brilliant musician--how wonderful to be able to play the piano like that!--that beautiful young woman of the world, the center of this brilliant cosmopolitan crowd, friend of t.i.tled Roman ladies, and ministers--was it she whom he had followed in the street like any pus.h.i.+ng, thick-skinned b.u.mpkin, to whom he had poured out what he had never before breathed to any living being? What on earth could she think of him? For what kind of a flamboyant idiot did she take him? Well, the best thing to do--Great Scott, the _only_ thing to do was to shut up and back out. As he walked home with Livingstone at midnight he had made up his mind to take the first train to Naples the next morning.

But he made no move whatever to do this, when the morning came. Dumb and stupid as a sheep, he made his way doggedly to the dining-room at the earliest hour, to see Miss Allen take her cafe-au-lait. As he went in at the door, he realized that his calculations were all wrong, that she had been up late the night before and would certainly sleep late that morning. But Livingstone had already seen him and hailed him. It was too late to go back and wait. He sat down, gloomily stirred the sugar into his coffee and listened to Livingstone fizz all over the place about the evening's entertainment which had uplifted him to exaltation. ”You don't _realize_, Crittenden, what an opportunity that was to see exclusive Roman society, the kind that foreigners like us never meet, not the flashy, big-hotel, off-color crowd. Why, I was introduced to name after name that sounded like a page out of Roman history.”

Neale thought with a pa.s.sing grim irony that Livingstone's phrase was accurately turned--”introduced to names”--yea, verily. Well, names were what Livingstone was after.

”Oh, you up already, Miss Allen,” said Livingstone, springing to seat her with an agility for which Neale hated him. He himself sat like a lump, incapable because of the sudden rush of blood to his head, of anything but nodding a silent answer to her greeting.

Livingstone needed no help in keeping up the conversation. He flowed on, delightedly pa.s.sing in review every detail of the evening of which he had not missed a single one, apparently, from the way Donna Antonia's maid did her hair to the dandruff on the coat-collar of the old Visconti. ”Of course I know he's a great musician and all that, but really if you will let your hair grow so long, you ought to have a pocket clothes-brush and _use_ it, oughtn't you? Why don't you do it for him, Miss Allen? Every one says he is absolutely gone on you, that you could do anything with him!” He pa.s.sed from this without transition to Miss Mills' toilette which had been, so it seemed, a veritable triumph.

”Yes, yes, wasn't it beautiful! Eugenia's clothes are simply wonderful.”

Miss Allen broke in to say enthusiastically, ”She has the most never-failing taste.”

”A never-failing pocket-book,” corrected Livingstone. ”You don't get far with mere taste _dans ce bas monde_.”