Aurora the Magnificent Part 29

These vestiges of Puritanism Aurora did not recognize as such, but yet her mind as she was practicing self-discipline turned, without seeking for the reason, toward the person who had done most to inculcate in her the doctrine that if you like to do a thing that itself is almost surely a sign of the thing being wicked, and that if you dislike it it is very probably your duty.

While she continued to appear the signora to whom the servants' eyes were accustomed, albeit a trifle more absent and unsmiling, she was to herself a young girl in a far country, living and moving in scenes of difficulty and misunderstanding with a sharp-chinned, narrow-chested, timidly-beloved just woman--her mother, long since laid to rest....

There was nothing from outside to dispel the faint heartache accompanying this retrospection; wind and rain against the windows were more proper to increase the melancholy, and Aurora, suddenly sick of staying up to be blue, wound her yarn to start for bed. But first, for just a moment, she would go down-stairs, she thought, and have a look at her portrait, for that was the most comforting thing to do that she could think of. She loved her portrait as a child loves its favorite toy.

This she was intending when the sound of the door-bell at once stopped and cheered her by the possibility it held out of some diversion. Vitale entered with a package.

Catching in what he said the name Gaetano, Aurora took it to mean that Gaetano had brought the package. He was waiting below, she did not doubt. Gaetano was Giovanna's nephew, and had more than once come on errands from Gerald. Saying, "_Aspettare_!" she hastened into her room for the porte-monnaie which resided in her top drawer. From this she drew a reward that should make the journey through night and rain from Gerald's house to hers seem no hardship. Her blues had vanished.

Before removing the rain-splashed newspaper, she gazed for a moment at the package, trying to guess what it could be. It was square, flat, about a foot and a half one way by a foot the other. What was Gerald Fane sending her like that without any enlightening missive? A note might be inside. She cut the string, took off the newspaper, to find a second wrapper of clean white drawing-paper. After touching and pinching, she guessed the object to be a picture-frame and picture.

Filled with curiosity, she pulled off the last wrapping, and with a face at first very blank stared before her....

It was a painting, one of the kind she had seen at Gerald's studio and not liked.

Different though it was from the portrait down-stairs,--as different as poverty from riches, as twilight from day,--she could yet see that this also was meant for a portrait of herself. She remembered tying that blue neckerchief over her head and under her chin one evening, trying to look like an Italian in her _pezzola_, to make the others laugh.

She stood the picture on the chair which she had pulled up before her so as to rest her feet on the rung, off the stone floor, still to be felt, she imagined, through the rug. Of course it was herself, but how disappointing--disappointing enough to shed tears over--to have this held up to her after that lovely being down-stairs! How unkind of her friend Gerald!

Unfair, too, for although this, in not being a beauty, was obviously more like her than the other, she could not admit that it was any truer.

She could not believe that she ever really looked like this, though she knew that it was the way she sometimes felt. How had Gerald known she ever felt like this?

That she was a person who ate well, slept well, felt well, loved fun, was giving and gay--that was all most people knew, or were ent.i.tled to know, of her; all she knew of herself a good deal of the time. Such things could never be the whole of any person, of course. Every one has had something to overcome. Some persons have had to overcome and overcome and overcome, one thing after another, one thing after another, that has tried to drag and keep them down. She had had--probably because, as her mother often told her, she was born with such a lot of the devil in her--a great many trials sent to her, for her discipline, no doubt, her cleansing; but she had come out of them still unreduced, still eager for a good time.

All persons are made up, in a way, of these experiences of the past, but they don't expose them in their faces, they forget them as much as they can.

Yes, as much as they can. How much is that? The only true sorrows being involved with one's affections, and the objects of one's love never far from one's thoughts, how much could a person be said to forget her sorrows, really?

Aurora reflected upon this for some time, staring the while at her portrait. The face looking back from the canvas was very like her, had she but known it, at this exact moment, while the thoughts produced, the memories wakened, by it subst.i.tuted for her ordinary hardiness the delicate look of a capacity for pain.

As she gazed at the portrait longer she liked it better; from minute to minute she became more reconciled, and found herself finally almost attracted. Something from it penetrated her for which she had no definition. It was perhaps the dignity of humanity confronting her in that strong and simple face framed by the kerchief, like a woman of the people's,--her own face, but not certainly as she saw it in the mirror; a humanity that out of the common materials offered to it day by day had rejected all that was mean and contrived to build up n.o.bleness.

Half perceiving that this portrait in its different way flattered her as much if not more than the portrait down-stairs, she, while modestly refusing to be fooled by the compliment, yet felt a motion of affectionate grat.i.tude toward Gerald for the sympathy which had enabled him to pierce beneath the surface and see that Bouncing Betsy had her feelings, too, her history; yes, her bitter tragedy.

While continuing with her eyes on the picture, she from time to time wiped them, and when the door-bell rang again, aware of being "a sight,"

took the precaution of retiring to her bedroom, so that if Vitale should come to announce a visit,--it was not yet nine o'clock,--she could the better make him understand that he must excuse her to the visitor; she was going to bed.

But learning from the servant that Signor Fane was below, she changed her mind, and chose unhesitatingly from her stock of useful infinitives the appropriate two: "_Dire venire_."

Gerald found her by the fire, her fur-cloak over her shoulders, her woolly afghan in her hands, and the picture on the chair before her.

"Well?" he asked expectantly, looking at it, too, after they had shaken hands.

"You've made me feel sorry for myself. What's the use?" she answered in a little sigh, keeping her reddened eyes turned away from him. "Hush!

Wait a moment! I was forgetting," she added, in comedy anticlimax, like a housewife who in the midst of a scene of sentiment should smell the dinner scorching. She jumped up, and went without the least noise to close the door to Estelle's room, returning from which she illogically fell to talking in a whisper.

"Estelle's gone to bed. She's got a snow-balling old cold. I've rubbed her chest with liniment, and tied up her throat in a compress, and given her hot lemonade, and she lies there with a hot water bottle at her feet and grease on her nose, and let's hope she'll feel better in the morning."

"Let's hope, indeed. I'm very sorry to hear she's ill. But she's sure to be better by to-morrow, isn't she, with all that care and those remedies. I hope you haven't a cold, too, Mrs. Hawthorne. You almost look," he said innocently, "as if you had. This weather is dreadful. You haven't, have you, dear friend?"

"No; I guess what you see is just that I've been crying. Don't say anything about it. Don't notice it. Never mind. Come and sit down by the fire and get warm. Your hand was like ice."

"It's very bad out, and not much better in, except here by your generous fireside. I haven't been warm all day."

"Why didn't you come before? It isn't what I call balmy here, but I expect it's balmier than at your place."

With her kindly unconstraint she reached for one of his hands to test its temperature. With a little cry of "Mercy me!" she closed his numb fingers between her palms to warm them, as if the blaze could not have accomplished this end so well as they.

He let it be, not with the same unconsciousness in the matter as she, but hoping that the soft, warm infolding would somehow do him good. He had come in the rather desperate hope of being done good to. As he had been about to start out, having intended, when he sent the portrait, to follow close upon it, he had found himself feeling so ill--feeling, at the end of the dismal day, so indescribably burdened and ill and apprehensive of worse things--that he had been on the point of giving it up. But then the wish itself to escape from his bad feelings had impelled him forth toward the spot glowing warmer and cheerier in his thoughts than any other, where, if he could forget how ill he felt, he would naturally feel better. Aurora's house during the days of painting the first portrait had come to feel remarkably like home to him.

So when Aurora released his hand, saying, "Let's have the other," he docilely gave it to her, though the fire had already partly thawed it.

Gratefully, with the hand set free, he covered both her kind hands, which loved so much to warm things and feed things and pet things and give away money.

Overcoming his ordinary stiffness, he pressed them right manfully, to signify that he would not speak of her tears if she wished him not to, but here was his sympathy, and with it his penitence, if so were that, as she intimated, he had had a share in making them flow.

"So you are all alone this evening?" he asked in the voice that makes whatever is said seem affectionate and comforting.

"Yes. I haven't even Busteretto. I let Estelle keep him on the foot of her bed. She's perfectly devoted to him. And Clotilde is busy in her own corner of the house, going over the bills. It takes lots of time."

"And where is the musician in ordinary, the gifted Italo?" he inquired, with a smile meant to draw from her a smile.

She was caught without difficulty. "The gifted Checkerberry hasn't been round lately," she smiled. "He won't expose himself to the night air for some time. He's got laryngitis so he can't talk above a whisper." Her eye twinkled and she laughed, though what she communicated was not on the face of it very funny.

He was perhaps calling attention to this when he said, "Poor devil!"

"Yes," she agreed, achieving sobriety, "it's bad weather for laryngitis," and went on with the weather, dropping Italo. "It's been a mean sort of day, hasn't it? I haven't set foot outside. I was already feeling kind of blue and making up my mind to go to bed when Gaetano came with your present."

There was an intimation in her glance that this event had not made the world appear any rosier.

Both turned to look at the picture. Their hands loosened naturally; they sat apart.

"Can't you see why I had to paint it, Mrs. Hawthorne?" he asked, speaking eagerly, and as if pressing his defense.

"How could I endure to have that thing down-stairs stand as my idea, my sole idea, of you? And how could I bear to make you a gift, a sole gift, of a piece of work I do not respect? This may be worth no more,--I think differently,--but it is at least the best I can produce. It has my sanction. You, too, believe me, will prefer it to the other after a while."

She shook her head a little disconsolately.

"The other you can, if you must, keep in your drawing-room to make an agreeable spot of color," he went on, reversing their parts and trying to induce in her a lighter humor; "it has that perfectly legitimate use.

In your drawing-room, you know, Auroretta, among the pictures of your choosing, it does not, in our Italian idiom, altogether disappear. This one you will keep out of sight, but will look at now and then, if you please; and I quite trust you, with time, to recognize that it was painted by some one who understood and honored you more than there was any evidence of his doing when he perpetrated, for a joke, that bonbon-box subject down-stairs."

Mrs. Hawthorne, with soft and saddened eyes fixed on the portrait, again shook her head, sighing, "Poor thing!"

"Not at all!" he protested almost peevishly. "Please not to suggest by pitying her that I have not represented there a fine, big, strong thing, built to stand up under anything! I could slay, with pleasure, at any time"--he diverged, carried away by a long-standing disgust,--"the pestiferous a.s.ses who call my things morbid. I am too careful to keep true to what I see. The difference between them--I mean the critics who call me morbid--and myself, is in the degree of sight."

"Don't get excited, Geraldino!" she checked fumings which she did not entirely understand. "What I meant was that looking at her has made me think of all the things that have gone wrong with me in my whole life.

Don't you call that a tribute? You couldn't have painted this picture if you hadn't suspected those things, and, honest, I don't see how you could suspect them. Ever since I came over here I've been so jolly.

Seems to me I've been nothing but jolly. I've been having such a good time! How you could see under it, I don't know. As a matter of fact, I've always been jolly between-times. Give me half a chance, let me get out of the frying-pan, I'd be ready in a minute to go on a picnic. But I've not been spared my troubles, Geraldino; you were right there."

At this reference to many sorrows, he found a thing to do more expressive than words. Sitting near each other as they were, he could reach her without rising; he bent forward and touched his lips commiseratingly to her hand.