"Oh! Business in _Florence!"_
"Well, if I stayed, I should tell you what disguise I"m going to the ball in."
"I knew it was that. What do you think would be a good character for me?"
"I don"t know. The serpent of old Nile would be pretty good for you."
"Oh, I know you don"t think it!" she cried fondly. She had now let him take her hand, and he stood holding it at arm"s-length. Effie Bowen came into the room. "Good-bye," said Imogene, with an instant a.s.sumption of society manner.
"Good-bye," said Colville, and went out.
"Oh, Mr. Colville!" she called, before he got to the outer door.
"Yes," he said, starting back.
She met him midway of the dim corridor. "Only to--" She put her arms about his neck and sweetly kissed him.
Colville went out into the sunlight feeling like some strange, newly invented kind of scoundrel--a rascal of such recent origin and introduction that he had not yet had time to cla.s.sify himself and ascertain the exact degree of his turpitude. The task employed his thoughts all that day, and kept him vibrating between an instinctive conviction of monstrous wickedness and a logical and well-reasoned perception that he had all the facts and materials for a perfectly good conscience. He was the betrothed lover of this poor child, whose affection he could not check without a degree of brutality for which only a better man would have the courage. When he thought of perhaps refusing her caresses, he imagined the shock it would give her, and the look of grief and mystification that would come into her eyes, and he found himself incapable of that cruel rect.i.tude. He knew that these were the impulses of a white and loving soul; but at the end of all his argument they remained a terror to him, so that he lacked nothing but the will to fly from Florence and shun her altogether till she had heard from her family. This, he recalled, with bitter self-reproach was what had been his first inspiration; he had spoken of it to Mrs. Bowen, and it had still everything in its favour except that it was impossible.
Imogene returned to the salotto, where the little girl was standing with her face to the window, drearily looking out; her back expressed an inner desolation which revealed itself in her eyes when Imogene caught her head between her hands, and tilted up her face to kiss it.
"What is the matter, Effie?" she demanded gaily.
"Nothing."
"Oh yes, there is."
"Nothing that you will care for. As long as he"s pleasant to you, you don"t care what he does to me."
"What has he done to you?"
"He didn"t take the slightest notice of me when I came into the room. He didn"t speak to me, or even look at me."
Imogene caught the little grieving, quivering face to her breast "He is a wicked, wicked wretch! And I will give him the awfulest scolding he ever had when he comes here again. I will teach him to neglect my pet. I will let him understand that if he doesn"t notice you, he needn"t notice me. I will tell you, Effie--I"ve just thought of a way. The next time he comes we will both receive him. We will sit up very stiffly on the sofa together, and just answer Yes, No, Yes, No, to everything he says, till he begins to take the hint, and learns how to behave himself. Will you?"
A smile glittered through the little girl"s tears; but she asked, "Do you think it would be very polite?"
"No matter, polite or not, it"s what he deserves. Of course, as soon as he begins to take the hint, we will be just as we always are."
Imogene despatched a note, which Colville got the next morning, to tell him of his crime, and apprise him of his punishment, and of the sweet compunction that had pleaded for him in the breast of the child. If he did not think he could help play the comedy through, he must come prepared to offer Effie some sort of atonement.
It was easy to do this: to come with his pockets full of presents, and take the little girl on his lap, and pour out all his troubled heart in the caresses and tendernesses which would bring him no remorse. He humbled himself to her thoroughly, and with a strange sincerity in the harmless duplicity, and promised, if she would take him back into favour, that he would never offend again. Mrs. Bowen had sent word that she was not well enough to see him; she had another of her headaches; and he sent back a sympathetic and respectful message by Effie, who stood thoughtfully at her mother"s pillow after she had delivered it, fingering the bouquet Colville had brought her, and putting her head first on this side, and then on that to admire it.
"I think Mr. Colville and Imogene are much more affectionate than they used to be," she said.
Mrs. Bowen started up on her elbow. "What do you mean, Effie?"
"Oh, they"re both so good to me."
"Yes," said her mother, dropping back to her pillow. "Both?"
"Yes; he"s the _most_ affectionate."
The mother turned her face the other way. "Then he must be," she murmured.
"What?" asked the child.
"Nothing. I didn"t know I spoke."
The little girl stood a while still playing with her flowers. "I think Mr. Colville is about the pleasantest gentleman that comes here. Don"t you, mamma?"
"Yes."
"He"s so interesting, and says such nice things. I don"t know whether children ought to think of such things, but I wish I was going to marry some one like Mr. Colville. Of course I should want to be tolerably old if I did. How old do you think a person ought to be to marry him?"
"You mustn"t talk of such things, Effie," said her mother.
"No; I suppose it isn"t very nice." She picked out a bud in her bouquet, and kissed it; then she held the nosegay at arm"s-length before her, and danced away with it.
XVII
In the ensuing fortnight a great many gaieties besides the Egyptian ball took place, and Colville went wherever he and Imogene were both invited.
He declined the quiet dinners which he liked, and which his hearty appet.i.te and his habit of talk fitted him to enjoy, and accepted invitations to all sorts of evenings and At Homes, where dancing occupied a modest corner of the card, and usurped the chief place in the pleasures. At these places it was mainly his business to see Imogene danced with by others, but sometimes he waltzed with her himself, and then he was complimented by people of his own age, who had left off dancing, upon his vigour. They said they could not stand that sort of thing, though they supposed, if you kept yourself in practice, it did not come so hard. One of his hostesses, who had made a party for her daughters, told him that he was an example to everybody, and that if middle-aged people at home mingled more in the amus.e.m.e.nts of the young, American society would not be the silly, insipid, boy-and-girl affair that it was now. He went to these places in the character of a young man, but he was not readily accepted or recognised in that character.
They gave him frumps to take out to supper, mothers and maiden aunts, and if the mothers were youngish, they threw off on him, and did not care for his talk.
At one of the parties Imogene seemed to become aware for the first time that the lapels of his dress-coat were not faced with silk.
"Why don"t you have them so?" she asked. "All the _other_ young men have. And you ought to wear a _boutonniere_."
"Oh, I think a man looks rather silly in silk lapels at my--" He arrested himself, and then continued: "I"ll see what the tailor can do for me. In the meantime, give me a bud out of your bouquet."
"How sweet you are!" she sighed. "You do the least thing so that it is ten times as good as if any one else did it."
The same evening, as he stood leaning against a doorway, behind Imogene and a young fellow with whom she was beginning a quadrille, he heard her taking him to task.
"Why do you say "Sir" to Mr. Colville?"
"Well, I know the English laugh at us for doing it, and say it"s like servants; but I never feel quite right answering just "Yes" and "No" to a man of his age."
This was one of the Inglehart boys, whom he met at nearly all of these parties, and not all of whom were so respectful. Some of them treated him upon an old-boy theory, joking him as freely as if he were one of themselves, laughing his antiquated notions of art to scorn, but condoning them because he was good-natured, and because a man could not help being of his own epoch anyway. They put a caricature of him among the rest on the walls of their _trattoria_, where he once dined with them.
Mrs. Bowen did not often see him when he went to call upon Imogene, and she was not at more than two or three of the parties. Mrs. Amsden came to chaperon the girl, and apparently suffered an increase of unrequited curiosity in regard to his relations to the Bowen household, and the extraordinary development of his social activity. Colville not only went to all those evening parties, but he was in continual movement during the afternoon at receptions and at "days," of which he began to think each lady had two or three. Here he drank tea, cup after cup, in reckless excitement, and at night when he came home from the dancing parties, dropping with fatigue, he could not sleep till toward morning.
He woke at the usual breakfast-hour, and then went about drowsing throughout the day till the tea began again in the afternoon. He fell asleep whenever he sat down, not only in the reading-room at Viesseux"s, where he disturbed the people over their newspapers by his demonstrations of somnolence, but even at church, whither he went one Sunday to please Imogene, and started awake during the service with the impression that the clergyman had been making a joke. Everybody but Imogene was smiling. At the cafe he slept without scruple, selecting a corner seat for the purpose, and proportioning his _buonamano_ to the indulgence of the _giovane_. He could not tell how long he slept at these places, but sometimes it seemed to him hours.