"And how will that help? He must have some explanation, and I will have to make it. What shall it be?"
Imogene did not answer. She said: "I will not have any one know what is between me and Mr. Colville till I have heard from home. If they try to refuse, then it will be for him to take me against their will. But if he doesn"t choose to do that, then he shall be free, and I won"t have him humiliated a second time before the world. _This_ time _he_ shall be the one to reject. And I don"t care who suffers. The more I prize the person, the gladder I shall be; and if I could suffer before everybody I would. If people ever find it out, I will tell them that it was he who broke it off." She rose again from her chair, and stood flushed and thrilling with the notion of her self-sacrifice. Out of the tortuous complexity of the situation she had evolved this brief triumph, in which she rejoiced as if it were enduring success. But she suddenly fell from it in the dust. "Oh, what can I do for him? How can I make him feel more and more that I would give up anything, everything, for him! It"s because he asks nothing and wants nothing that it"s so hard! If I could see that he was unhappy, as I did once! If I could see that he was at all different since--since----Oh, what I dread is this smooth tranquillity! If our lives could only be stormy and full of cares and anxieties and troubles that I could take on myself, then, then I shouldn"t be afraid of the future! But I"m afraid they won"t be so--no, I"m afraid that they will be easy and quiet, and then what shall I do? O Mrs. Bowen, do you think he cares for me?"
Mrs. Bowen turned white; she did not speak.
The girl wrung her hands. "Sometimes it seems as if he didn"t--as if I had forced myself on him through a mistake, and he had taken me to save me from the shame of knowing that I had made a mistake. Do you think that is true? If you can only tell me that it isn"t--Or, no! If it is true, tell me that! _That_ would be real mercy."
The other trembled, as if physically beaten upon by this appeal. But she gathered herself together rigidly. "How can I answer you such a thing as that? I mustn"t listen to you; you mustn"t ask me." She turned and left the girl standing still in her att.i.tude of imploring. But in her own room, where she locked herself in, sobs mingled with the laughter which broke crazily from her lips as she removed this ribbon and that jewel, and pulled the bracelets from her wrists. A man would have plunged from the house and walked the night away; a woman must wear it out in her bed.
XX
In the morning Mrs. Bowen received a note from her banker covering a despatch by cable from America. It was from Imogene"s mother; it acknowledged the letters they had written, and announced that she sailed that day for Liverpool. It was dated at New York, and it was to be inferred that after perhaps writing in answer to their letters, she had suddenly made up her mind to come out.
"Yes, that is it," said Imogene, to whom Mrs. Bowen hastened with the despatch. "Why should she have telegraphed to _you_?" she asked coldly, but with a latent fire of resentment in her tone.
"You must ask her when she comes," returned Mrs. Bowen, with all her gentleness. "It won"t be long now."
They looked as if they had neither of them slept; but the girl"s vigil seemed to have made her wild and fierce, like some bird that has beat itself all night against its cage, and still from time to time feebly strikes the bars with its wings. Mrs. Bowen was simply worn to apathy.
"What shall you do about this?" she asked.
"Do about it? Oh, I will think. I will try not to trouble you."
"Imogene!"
"I shall have to tell Mr. Colville. But I don"t know that I shall tell him at once. Give me the despatch, please." She possessed herself of it greedily, offensively. "I shall ask you not to speak of it."
"I will do whatever you wish."
"Thank you."
Mrs. Bowen left the room, but she turned immediately to re-open the door she had closed behind her.
"We were to have gone to Fiesole to-morrow," she said inquiringly.
"We can still go if the day is fine," returned the girl. "Nothing is changed. I wish very much to go. Couldn"t we go to-day?" she added, with eager defiance.
"It"s too late to-day," said Mrs. Bowen quietly. "I will write to remind the gentlemen."
"Thank you. I wish we could have gone to-day."
"You can have the carriage if you wish to drive anywhere," said Mrs.
Bowen.
"I will take Effie to see Mrs. Amsden." But Imogene changed her mind, and went to call upon two Misses Guicciardi, the result of an international marriage, whom Mrs. Bowen did not like very well. Imogene drove with them to the Cascine, where they bowed to a numerous military acquaintance, and they asked her if Mrs. Bowen would let her join them in a theatre party that evening: they were New-Yorkers by birth, and it was to be a theatre party in the New York style; they were to be chaperoned by a young married lady; two young men cousins of theirs, just out from America, had taken the box.
When Imogene returned home she told Mrs. Bowen that she had accepted this invitation. Mrs. Bowen said nothing, but when one of the young men came up to hand Imogene down to the carriage, which was waiting with the others at the gate, she could not have shown a greater tolerance of his second-rate New Yorkiness if she had been a Boston dowager offering him the scrupulous hospitalities of her city.
Imogene came in at midnight; she hummed an air of the opera as she took off her wraps and ornaments in her room, and this in the quiet of the hour had a terrible, almost profane effect: it was as if some other kind of girl had whistled. She showed the same nonchalance at breakfast, where she was prompt, and answered Mrs. Bowen"s inquiries about her pleasure the night before with a liveliness that ignored the polite resolution that prompted them.
Mr. Morton was the first to arrive, and if his discouragement began at once, the first steps masked themselves in a reckless welcome, which seemed to fill him with joy, and Mrs. Bowen with silent perplexity. The girl ran on about her evening at the opera, and about the weather, and the excursion they were going to make; and after an apparently needless ado over the bouquet which he brought her, together with one for Mrs.
Bowen, she put it into her belt, and made Colville notice it when he came: he had not thought to bring flowers.
He turned from her hilarity with anxious question to Mrs. Bowen, who did not meet his eye, and who snubbed Effie when the child found occasion to whisper: "_I_ think Imogene is acting very strangely, for _her_; don"t you, mamma? It seems as if going with those Guicciardi girls just once had spoiled her."
"Don"t make remarks about people, Effie," said her mother sharply. "It isn"t nice in little girls, and I don"t want you to do it. You talk too much lately."
Effie turned grieving away from this rejection, and her face did not light up even at the whimsical sympathy in Colville"s face, who saw that she had met a check of some sort; he had to take her on his knee and coax and kiss her before her wounded feelings were visibly healed. He put her down with a sighing wish that some one could take him up and soothe his troubled sensibilities too, and kept her hand in his while he sat waiting for the last of those last moments in which the hurrying delays of ladies preparing for an excursion seem never to end.
When they were ready to get into the carriage, the usual contest of self-sacrifice arose, which Imogene terminated by mounting to the front seat; Mr. Morton hastened to take the seat beside her, and Colville was left to sit with Effie and her mother. "You old people will be safer back there," said Imogene. It was a little joke which she addressed to the child, but a gleam from her eye as she turned to speak to the young man at her side visited Colville in desperate defiance. He wondered what she was about in that allusion to an idea which she had shrunk from so sensitively hitherto. But he found himself in a situation which he could not penetrate at any point. When he spoke with Mrs. Bowen, it was with a dark undercurrent of conjecture as to how and when she expected him to tell Mr. Morton of his relation to Imogene, or whether she still expected him to do it; when his eyes fell upon the face of the young man, he despaired as to the terms in which he should put the fact; any form in which he tacitly dramatised it remained very embarra.s.sing, for he felt bound to say that while he held himself promised in the matter, he did not allow her to feel herself so.
A sky of American blueness and vastness, a mellow sun, and a delicate breeze did all that these things could for them, as they began the long, devious climb of the hills crowned by the ancient Etruscan city. At first they were all in the constraint of their own and one another"s moods, known or imagined, and no talk began till the young clergyman turned to Imogene and asked, after a long look at the smiling landscape, "What sort of weather do you suppose they are having at Buffalo to-day?"
"At Buffalo?" she repeated, as if the place had only a dim existence in her remotest consciousness. "Oh! The ice isn"t near out of the lake yet.
You can"t count on it before the first of May."
"And the first of May comes sooner or later, according to the season,"
said Colville. "I remember coming on once in the middle of the month, and the river was so full of ice between Niagara Falls and Buffalo that I had to shut the car window that I"d kept open all the way through Southern Canada. But we have very little of that local weather at home; our weather is as democratic and continental as our political const.i.tution. Here it"s March or May any time from September till June, according as there"s snow on the mountains or not."
The young man smiled. "But don"t you like," he asked with deference, "this slow, orderly advance of the Italian spring, where the flowers seem to come out one by one, and every blossom has its appointed time?"
"Oh yes, it"s very well in its way; but I prefer the rush of the American spring; no thought of mild weather this morning; a warm, gusty rain to-morrow night; day after to-morrow a burst of blossoms and flowers and young leaves and birds. I don"t know whether we were made for our climate or our climate was made for us, but its impatience and lavishness seem to answer some inner demand of our go-ahead souls. This happens to be the week of the peach blossoms here, and you see their pink everywhere to-day, and you don"t see anything else in the blossom line. But imagine the American spring abandoning a whole week of her precious time to the exclusive use of peach blossoms! She wouldn"t do it; she"s got too many other things on hand."
Effie had stretched out over Colville"s lap, and with her elbow sunk deep in his knee, was renting her chin in her hand and taking the facts of the landscape thoroughly in. "Do they have just a week?" she asked.
"Not an hour more or less," said Colville. "If they found an almond blossom hanging round anywhere after their time came, they would make an awful row; and if any lazy little peach-blow hadn"t got out by the time their week was up, it would have to stay in till next year; the pear blossoms wouldn"t let it come out."
"Wouldn"t they?" murmured the child, in dreamy sympathy with this belated peach-blow.
"Well, that"s what people say. In America it would be allowed to come out any time. It"s a free country."
Mrs. Bowen offered to draw Effie back to a posture of more decorum, but Colville put his arm round the little girl. "Oh, let her stay! It doesn"t incommode me, and she must be getting such a novel effect of the landscape."
The mother fell back into her former att.i.tude of jaded pa.s.sivity. He wondered whether she had changed her mind about having him speak to Mr.
Morton; her quiescence might well have been indifference; one could have said, knowing the whole situation, that she had made up her mind to let things take their course, and struggle with them no longer.
He could not believe that she felt content with him; she must feel far otherwise; and he took refuge, as he had the power of doing, from the discomfort of his own thoughts in jesting with the child, and mocking her with this extravagance and that; the discomfort then became merely a dull ache that insisted upon itself at intervals, like a grumbling tooth.
The prospect was full of that mingled wildness and subordination that gives its supreme charm to the Italian landscape; and without elements of great variety, it combined them in infinite picturesqueness. There were olive orchards and vineyards, and again vineyards and olive orchards. Closer to the farm-houses and cottages there were peaches and other fruit trees and kitchen-gardens; broad ribbons of grain waved between the ranks of trees; around the white villas the spires of the cypresses pierced the blue air. Now and then they came to a villa with weather-beaten statues strutting about its parterres. A mild, pleasant heat brooded upon the fields and roofs, and the city, dropping lower and lower as they mounted, softened and blended its towers and monuments in a sombre ma.s.s shot with gleams of white.
Colville spoke to Imogene, who withdrew her eyes from it with a sigh, after long brooding upon the scene. "You can do nothing with it, I see."
"With what?"