"Perhaps it is the only real thing in life," Vickers replied from some unknown depth within him.
"No, no! How can you say that? You who know what life can be. Never! That is what they tried to teach me at school. But I did not believe it. I escaped. I wanted to sing. I wanted my own life." She became grave, and added under her breath: "And I shall get it. That is best, best, best!" She broke into a run down the sun-flecked road, and they emerged breathless in an olive orchard beside the lake. Her body panted as she threw herself down on the gra.s.s. "Now!" she smiled, her skin all rose; "can you say that?" And her voice chanted, "To live,--my friend,--to LIVE! And you and I are made to live,--isn"t it so?"
The artist in Vickers, the young man of romance, his heart tender with sentiment, responded to the creed. But woven with the threads of this artist temperament were other impulses that stirred. The pilgrim in the act of penitence and ecstatic devotion was beautiful, too, and real,--ah, very real, as he was to know....
They supped that afternoon in a little wine shop looking towards the great dome swimming above Rome. And as the sun shot level and golden over the Campagna, lighting the old, gray tombs, they drove back to the city along the ancient Latin road. The wonderful plain, the most human landscape in the world, began to take twilight shadows. Rome hung, in a mist of sun, like a mirage in the far distance, and between them and the city flowed the ma.s.sive arches of an aqueduct, and all about were the crumbling tombs, half hidden by the sod. The carriage rolled monotonously onwards. The woman"s eyes nearly closed; she looked dreamily out through the white lids, fringed with heavy auburn lashes. She still hummed from time to time the old refrain of Vickers"s song. Thus they returned, hearing the voice of the old world in its peculiar hour.
"I am glad that I have had it--that I have lived--a little. This, this!--I can sing to-night! You must come and sit on my balcony and look at the stars while I sing to you--the music of the day."
As the Porta San Paolo drew near, Vickers remarked:--
"I shall write you a song of Venice,--that is the music for you."
"Venice, and Paris, and Vienna, and Rome,--all! I love them all!"
She reached her arms to the great cities of the earth, seeing herself in triumph, singing to mult.i.tudes the joy of life.... "Come to-night,--I will sing for you!"...
On the porter"s table at the hotel lay a thick letter for Mrs. Conry. It bore the printed business address,--THE CONRY CONSTRUCTION COMPANY. Mrs.
Conry took it negligently in her white hand. "You will come later?" she said, smiling back at the young man.
Sitting crowded in front of Arragno"s and sipping a liqueur, Fosd.i.c.k remarked to Vickers: "So you have run across the Conry? Of course I know her. I saw her in Munich the first time. The little girl still with her?
Then it was Vienna.... She"s got as far as Rome! Been over here two or three years studying music. Pretty-good voice, and a better figure. Oh, Stacia is much of a siren."
Vickers moved uneasily and in reply to a question Fosd.i.c.k continued:--
"Widow--gra.s.s widow--properly linked--who knows? Our pretty country-women have such a habit of trotting around by themselves for their own delectation that you never can tell how to place them. She may be divorced--she may be the other thing! You can"t tell. But she is a very handsome woman."...
Mrs. Conry herself told Vickers the facts, as they sat at a little restaurant on the Aventine where they loved to go to watch the night steal across the Palatine.
"... He offered me my education--my chance. I took it. I went to the conservatory at Cincinnati. Then he wanted to marry me, and promised to send me abroad to study more."... Her tone was dry, impartially recounting the fact. Then her eyes dropped, and Vickers"s cigarette glowed between them as they leaned across the little iron table.... "I was a child then--did not know anything. I married him. The first years business was poor, and he could not let me have the money. When times got better, he let me come--kept his promise. I have been here nearly three years, back two or three times. And now," her voice dropped, "I must go back for good--soon."
Nothing more. But it seemed to Vickers as if a ghost had risen from the river mist and come to sit between them. That the woman was paying a price for her chance, a heavy price, he could see. They walked back to the city between the deserted vineyards. As they crossed the river, Mrs. Conry stopped, and remarked sombrely, "A bargain is a bargain the world over, is it not?"
Vickers felt the warm breathing woman close to him, felt her brooding eyes.
"One pays," he murmured, "I suppose!"
She threw up her hand in protest, and they walked on into the lighted city.
Occasionally Fosd.i.c.k joined their excursions, and after one of them he said to Vickers:--
"My friend, she is wonderful; more so every time I see her. But beneath that soft, rounded body, with its smooth white skin, is something hard. Oh, I know the eyes and the hair and the throat and the voice! I, too, am a man. Paint her, if you like, or set her to music. She is for _bel canto_ and moonlight and the voice of Rome. But there is a world outside this all, my friend, to which you and I belong, and _you_ rather more than I....
Stacia Conry doesn"t belong at all."
"Which means?" demanded Vickers steadily of the burly Fosd.i.c.k.
"Take care that you don"t get stuck in the sea of Sarga.s.so. I think something bitter might rise out of all that loveliness."
Nevertheless, instead of going to the Maloya with Fosd.i.c.k, Vickers stayed on in Rome, and September found him there and Mrs. Conry, too, having returned to the city from the mountain resort, where she had left the little girl with her governess. They roamed the deserted city, and again began to work on the songs which Mrs. Conry hoped to give in concerts on her return to America. Very foolish of the young man, and the woman, thus to prolong the moment of charm, to linger in the Sarga.s.so Sea! But at least with the man, the feeling that kept him in Rome those summer months was pure and fine, the sweetest and the best that man may know, where he gives of his depths with no thought of reward, willing to accept the coming pain.... Little Delia, who had seen quite as much of Vickers as her mother, said to him the day she left with her governess:--
"We"re going home soon--before Thanksgiving. I"m so glad! And you"ll be there, too?"
"I suppose not, Delia," the young man replied. But as it happened he was the first to go back....
That late September day they had returned from a ramble in the hills. It was nearly midnight when the cab rattled up the deserted streets to their hotel. As Vickers bade his companion good-night, with some word about a long-projected excursion to Volterra, she said:--
"Come in and I will sing for a while. I don"t feel like sleep.... Yes, come! Perhaps it will be the last of all our good times."
In the large dark apartment the night wind was drawing over the roofs of the hill through the open windows, fluttering stray sheets of music along the stone floor. Mrs. Conry lighted a candle on the piano, and throwing aside her hat and veil, dropping her gloves on the floor, struck some heavy chords. She sang the song they had been working over, the song of Venice, with a swaying melody as of floating water-gra.s.ses. Then she plunged into a throbbing aria,--singing freely, none too accurately, but with a pa.s.sion and self-forgetfulness which promised greater things than the concert performer. From this on to other s.n.a.t.c.hes of opera, to songs, wandering as the mood took her, coming finally to the street song that Vickers had woven into his composition for Rome, with its high, sad note. There her voice stopped, died in a cry half stifled in the throat, and leaving the piano she came to the window. A puff of wind blew out the candle. With the curtains swaying in the night wind, they stood side by side looking down into the dark city, dotted irregularly with points of light, and up above the Janiculum to the shining stars.
"Rome, Rome," she murmured, and the words sighed past the young man"s ears,--"and life--LIFE!"
It was life that was calling them, close together, looking forth into the night, their hearts beating, the longing to grasp it, to go out alone into the night for it. Freedom, and love, and life,--they beckoned! Vickers saw her eyes turn to him in the dark....
"And now I go," he said softly. He found his way to the door in the dark salon, and as he turned he saw her white figure against the swaying curtain, and felt her eyes following him.
In his room he found the little blue despatch, sent up from his banker, which announced his brother"s death, and the next morning he left by the early express for the north to catch the Cherbourg boat. As he pa.s.sed Mrs.
Conry"s salon he slipped under the door the despatch with a note, which ended, "I know that we shall see each other again, somewhere, somehow!" and from the piazza he sent back an armful of great white _fleur-de-lys_. Later that morning, while Vickers was staring at the vintage in the Umbrian Valley and thinking of the woman all white and bronze with the gray eyes, Mrs. Conry was reading his note. A bitter smile curved her lips, as she gathered up the white flowers and laid them on the piano.
CHAPTER XVI
One winter day while Vickers Price was "selling nails," as he still expressed his business career, there came in his mail a queer little scrawl, postmarked Pittsburg. It was from Delia Conry, and it ran:--
"We"ve been home a month. We live in a hotel. I don"t like it. The bird you gave me died. Mother says she"ll get me a new one. I wish I could see you.
Love from Delia."
But not a word from Mrs. Conry! Fosd.i.c.k, drifting through Rome on his way to Turkestan, wrote:--
"... What has become of the Conry? She has disappeared from the cities of Europe with her melodious songs and beautiful hair. Are you touring the States with her? Or has she rediscovered Mr. Conry--for a period of seclusion? ... To think of you serving hardware to the barbarians across the counter enlivens my dull moments. From the Sarga.s.so Sea to St.
Louis,--there is a leap for you, my dear."...
While he "served hardware to the barbarians" and in other respects conformed to the life of a privileged young American gentleman, Vickers Price dreamed of those Roman days, the happiest of his life. If that night they two had taken life in their hands? ... Could the old Colonel have read his son"s heart,--if from the pinnacle of his years filled with ripe deeds he could have comprehended youth,--he might have been less sure that the hardware business was to be "the making of Vick"!
What had come to her? Had she accepted her lot, once back in the groove of fate, or had she rebelled, striking out for her own vivid desire of joy and song, of fame? Vickers would have liked to hear that she had rebelled, was making her own life,--had taken the other road than the one he had accepted for himself. His tender, idealizing heart could not hold a woman to the sterner courses of conduct.
For, as Fosd.i.c.k had told him in Rome, the young man was a Sentimentalist with no exact vision of life. His heart was perpetually distorting whatever his mind told him was fact. This woman, with her beauty, her love of music, had touched him at the lyric moment of life, when reality was but the unstable foundation for dream. Life as might be, glowing, colored, and splendid,--life as it was within him, not as this hideous maelstrom all about him reported. And why not the I, the I! cried the spirit of youth, the egotistic spirit of the age. For all reply there was the bent, gray head of the Colonel at his desk in the office beside him. "One sentiment against another," Fosd.i.c.k might say....
Finally Stacia Conry wrote, a little note: she was to be in St. Louis on the fourteenth for a short time and hoped that he would call on her at the hotel. A perfectly proper, colorless little note, written in an unformed hand, with a word or two misspelled,--the kind of note that gave no indication of the writer, but seemed like the voice of a stranger. However, as Vickers reflected, literary skill, the power to write personal little notes did not go necessarily with a talent for music--or for life. Nannie Lawton wrote intimate notes, and other women, single and married, whom Vickers had come to know these past months. But their cleverest phrases could not stir his pulses as did this crude production.
The woman who was waiting for him in the little hotel parlor, however, gave him a curious shock,--she was so different in her rich street costume from the woman in black and white, whose picture had grown into his memory. She seemed older, he thought, thus accounting for that strange idealizing power of the mind to select from a face what that face has specially given it and create an altogether new being, with its own lineaments graven in place of actual bone and tissue. It takes time to correct this ideal misreport of the soul, to accept the fact! Except for the one glance from the gray eyes which she gave him as they shook hands, Stacia Conry did not stir the past.
But she was voluble of the present.