A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories Part 14

"That little fellow is a rogue," said the princess. "But he is not so bad as some of them. Monsieur," she cried in French to the fair-whiskered, tall mask who had already presented himself before Lily, "I will not permit it, if it is for a trick. You must unmask. I will dispense mademoiselle from dancing with you."

The mask did not reply, but turned his eyes upon Lily with an appeal which the holes of the visor seemed to intensify. "It is a promise," she said to the princess, rising in a sort of fascination. "I have forbidden him to unmask before supper."

"Oh, very well," answered the princess, "if that is the case. But make him bring you back soon: it is almost time."

"Did you hear, Mask?" asked the girl, as they waltzed away. "I will only make two turns of the room with you."

"Perdoni?"

"This is too bad!" she exclaimed. "I will not be trifled with in this way. Either speak English, or unmask at once."

The mask again answered in Italian, with a repeated apology for not understanding. "You understand very well," retorted Lily, now really indignant, "and you know that this pa.s.ses a jest."

"Can you speak German?" asked the mask in that tongue.

"Yes, a little, but I do not choose to speak it. If you have anything to say to me you can say it in English."

"I cannot understand English," replied the mask, still in German, and now Lily thought the voice seemed changed; but she clung to her belief that it was some hoax played at her expense, and she continued her efforts to make him answer her in English. The two turns round the room had stretched to half a dozen in this futile task, but she felt herself powerless to leave the mask, who for his part betrayed signs of embarra.s.sment, as if he had undertaken a ruse of which he repented. A confused movement in the crowd and a sudden cessation of the music recalled her to herself, and she now took her partner's arm and hurried with him toward the place where she had left the princess. But the princess had already gone into the supper-room, and she had no other recourse than to follow with the stranger.

As they entered the supper-room she removed her little visor, and she felt, rather than saw, the mask put up his hand and lift away his own: he turned his head, and looked down upon her with the face of a man she had never seen before.

"Ah, you are there!" she heard the princess's voice calling to her from one of the tables. "How tired you look! Here--here! I will make you drink this gla.s.s of wine."

The officer who brought her the wine gave her his arm and led her to the princess, and the late mask mixed with the two-score other tall blond officers.

The night which stretched so far into the day ended at last, and she followed Hoskins down to their gondola. He entered the boat first, to give her his hand in stepping from the _riva_; at the same moment she involuntarily turned at the closing of the door behind her, and found at her side the tall blond mask, or one of the masks, if there were two who had danced with her. He caught her hand suddenly to his lips, and kissed it.

"Adieu--forgive!" he murmured in English, and then vanished indoors again.

"Owen," said Mrs. Elmore dramatically at the end of her narration, "who do you think it could have been?"

"I have no doubt as to who it was, Celia," replied Elmore, with a heat evidently quite unexpected to his wife, "and if Lily has not been seriously annoyed by the matter, I am glad that it has happened. I have had my regrets--my doubts--whether I did not dismiss that man's pretensions too curtly, too unkindly. But I am convinced now that we did exactly right, and that she was wise never to bestow another thought upon him. A man capable of contriving a petty persecution of this sort--of pursuing a young girl who had rejected him in this shameless fashion,--is no gentleman."

"It _was_ a persecution," said Mrs. Elmore, with a dazed air, as if this view of the case had not occurred to her.

"A miserable, unworthy persecution!" repeated her husband.

"Yes."

"And we are well rid of him. He has relieved _me_ by this last performance, immensely; and I trust that if Lily had any secret lingering regrets, he has given her a final lesson. Though I must say, in justice to her, poor girl, she didn't seem to need it."

Mrs. Elmore listened with a strange abeyance; she looked beaten and bewildered, while he vehemently uttered these words. She could not meet his eyes, with her consciousness of having her intended romance thrown back upon her hands; and he seemed in nowise eager to meet hers, for whatever consciousness of his own. "Well, it isn't certain that he was the one, after all," she said.

XII.

Long after the ball Lily seemed to Elmore's eye not to have recovered her former tone. He thought she went about languidly, and that she was fitful and dreamy, breaking from moods of unwonted abstraction in bursts of gayety as unnatural. She did not talk much of the ball; he could not be sure that she ever recurred to it of her own motion. Hoskins continued to come a great deal to the house, and she often talked with him for a whole evening; Elmore fancied she was very serious in these talks.

He wondered if Lily avoided him, or whether this was only an illusion of his; but in any case, he was glad that the girl seemed to find so much comfort in Hoskins's company, and when it occurred to him he always said something to encourage his visits. His wife was singularly quiescent at this time, as if, having accomplished all she wished in Lily's presence at the princess's ball, she was willing to rest for a while from further social endeavor. Life was falling into the dull routine again, and after the past shocks his nerves were gratefully clothing themselves in the old habits of tranquillity once more, when one day a letter came from the overseers of Patmos University, offering him the presidency of that inst.i.tution on condition of his early return. The board had in view certain changes, intended to bring the university abreast with the times, which they hoped would meet his approval.

Among these was a modification of the name, which was hereafter to be Patmos University and Military Inst.i.tute. The board not only believed that popular feeling demanded the introduction of military drill into the college, but they felt that a college which had been closed at the beginning of the Rebellion, through the dedication of its president and nearly all its students to the war, could in no way so gracefully recognize this proud fact of its history as by hereafter making war one of the arts which it taught. The board explained that of course Mr.

Elmore would not be expected to take charge of this branch of instruction at once. A competent military a.s.sistant would be provided, and continued under him as long as he should deem his services essential. The letter closed with a cordial expression of the desire of Elmore's old friends to have him once more in their midst, at the close of labors which they were sure would do credit to the good old university and to the whole city of Patmos.

Elmore read this letter at breakfast, and silently handed it to his wife: they were alone, for Lily, as now often happened, had not yet risen. "Well?" he said, when she had read it in her turn. She gave it back to him with a look in her dimmed eyes which he could not mistake.

"I see there is no doubt of your feeling, Celia," he added.

"I don't wish to urge you," she replied, "but yes, I should like to go back. Yes, I am homesick. I have been afraid of it before, but this chance of returning makes it certain."

"And you see nothing ridiculous in my taking the presidency of a military inst.i.tute?"

"They say expressly that they don't expect you to give instruction in that branch."

"No, not immediately, it seems," he said, with his pensive irony. "And the history?"

"Haven't you almost got notes enough?"

Elmore laughed sadly. "I have been here two years. It would take me twenty years to write such a history of Venice as I ought not to be ashamed to write; it would take me five years to scamp it as I thought of doing. Oh, I dare say I had better go back. I have neither the time nor the money to give to a work I never was fit for,--of whose magnitude even I was unable to conceive."

"Don't say that!" cried his wife, with the old sympathy. "You will write it yet, I know you will. I would rather spend all my days in this--watery mausoleum than have you talk so, Owen!"

"Thank you, my dear; but the work won't be lost even if I give it up at this point. I can do something with my material, I suppose. And you know that if I didn't _wish_ to give up my project I couldn't. It's a sign of my unfitness for it that I'm able to abandon it. The man who is born to write the history of Venice will have no volition in the matter: he cannot leave it, and he will not die till he has finished it." He feebly crushed a bit of bread in his fingers as he ended with this burst of feeling, and he shook his head in sad negation to his wife's tender protest,--"Oh, you will come back some day to finish it!"

"No one ever comes back to finish a history of Venice," he said.

"Oh, yes, you will," she returned. "But you need the rest from this kind of work, now, just as you needed rest from your college work before. You need a change of standpoint,--and the American standpoint will be the very thing for you."

"Perhaps so, perhaps so," he admitted. "At any rate, this is a handsome offer, and most kindly made, Celia. It's a great compliment. I didn't suppose they valued me so much."

"Of course they valued you, and they will be very glad to get you. I call it merely letting the historic material ripen in your mind, or else I shouldn't let you accept. And I shall be glad to go home, Owen, on Lily's account. The child is getting no good here: she's drooping."

"Drooping?"

"Yes. Don't you see how she mopes about?"

"I'm afraid--that--I have--noticed."

He was going to ask why she was drooping; but he could not. He said, recurring to the letter of the overseers, "So Patmos is a city."

"Of course it is by this time," said his wife, "with all that prosperity!"

Now that they were determined to go, their little preparations for return were soon made; and a week after Elmore had written to accept the offer of the overseers, they were ready to follow his letter home. Their decision was a blow to Hoskins under which he visibly suffered; and they did not realize till then in what fond and affectionate friendship he held them. He now frankly spent his whole time with them; he disconsolately helped them pack, and he did all that a consul can do to secure free entry for some objects of Venice that they wished to get in without payment of duties at New York.

He said a dozen times, "I don't know what I _will_ do when you're gone"; and toward the last he alarmed them for his own interests by beginning to say, "Well, I don't see but what I will have to go along."

The last night but one Lily felt it her duty to talk to him very seriously about his future and what he owed to it. She told him that he must stay in Italy till he could bring home something that would honor the great, precious, suffering country for which he had fought so n.o.bly, and which they all loved. She made the tears come into her eyes as she spoke, and when she said that she should always be proud to be a.s.sociated with one of his works, Hoskins's voice was quite husky in replying: "Is that the way you feel about it?" He went away promising to remain at least till he finished his bas-relief of Westward, and his figure of the Pacific Slope; and the next morning he sent around by a _facchino_ a note to Lily.

She ran it through in the presence of the Elmores, before whom she received it, and then, with a cry of "I think Mr. Hoskins is too _bad_!"