Aurora the Magnificent Part 34

At sight of his danger he became very clear-headed. The man who sees a snare and walks into it deserves his fate, surely.

"It is time to stop it," he said. And he laid down for himself new rules of life.

Fortunately, he had at hand some absorbing books. Dostoiewsky's "Crime and Punishment" could effectively take him out of himself.

But the print was fine and crowded, he was weakened by illness, he was forced now and then to stop and rest with swimming head. Then at once would return, like the demon in fair disguise tempting some hermit of the desert, the thought, "What is Aurora doing? If Aurora knew I was ill, she would come." And the imagination of her coming would shed a feverish gladness all along those petulant, ill-treated, starved nerves.

"What have I to do with Aurora, or Aurora with me?" he would ask, furiously, the incongruity of what had happened to him calling forth sometimes a desperate laugh. But Nature laughs at man's ideas of congruity; remembering that, he could only hold his hands against his eyes and try to press the image of Aurora out of existence.

Gerald, however, was much stronger than his nerves. He could see his own case, even with a pulse at ninety, as well as another man's. And his will was firmer than might have been thought. He knew something of a human man's const.i.tution, how it can circ.u.mvent a man, or how a man, well on his guard, can circ.u.mvent it. He formed the project of interrupting his visits to the Hermitage.

After this resolution he regarded those returns of earth-born desire for Aurora's balmy touch and tranquilizing neighborhood as a man who had taken an heroic and sure remedy against ague might regard the fluctuations in his body of heat and cold continuing still for a little while. As to how Aurora would take his defection, all should be managed with so much art and politeness that the most sensitive could not be hurt. By the time the new important work which he would make his excuse was accomplished, his cure would have been accomplished as well.

Meanwhile, each time the door-bell rang--it was not often, certainly--his attention was taken from his book, and he listened. And so, on Mlle. Durand's French afternoon, Gerald, having heard the bell, was listening, but with his face to the fire and his back to the door.

When Giovanna knocked, "Forward!" he said, without turning. The door opened.

"_C'e quella signora._" "There is that lady," dubiously announced Giovanna.

Gerald turned, and beheld that lady filling the doorway.

Then it was as if a bright trumpet-blast of reality, breaking upon a bad dream, dispelled it; or as if a fresh wind, blowing over stagnant water, swept away the cloud of noxious gnats. All he had latterly been thinking and feeling seemed to Gerald insane, sickly, the instant he beheld Aurora's comradely smile. He was ashamed; he found himself on the verge of stupid, unexplainable tears.

"Well!" said Aurora.

At the sound they were placed back on the exact footing of their last meeting, before thinking and conjecturing about each other in absence had built up between them barriers of illusion.

"Well!" he said, but less pleasantly, because he was mortified by the awareness of himself as an uninviting sight, with his old dressing-gown, neglected beard, and the unpicturesque manifestations of a cold.

But Aurora's face was rea.s.suring; she did not confuse him with the accidents of his dressing-gown and beard and cold. Aurora's face beamed, so much was she rejoicing in her own excellent sense, which had told her that one look at each other would do a thousand times more to make things right between them than innumerable letters could have done.

"I didn't know what to think," she said, "so I came to find out. First I'd think you were mad at me, then I'd think you had gone away and written me, and the letter hadn't reached me, Gaetano had lost it on the road. Then I'd think you might be sick, and there was n.o.body to let your friends know. I don't know what I didn't think of. What made you not send me word?"

"I did not know you would be uneasy. I did not rightly measure, it seems, the depth of your kindness. I should certainly have written to you before long in case I had continued unable to go to see you."

"How long have you been sick?"

"I am not sick, dearest lady. I only have a cold. In order to make it go away more quickly I have to remain in the house. But how good, how very good of you to come! Sit down, please do, and warm yourself. I will ring for Giovanna, and she will make us some tea."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Gerald turned, and beheld that lady]

Aurora, smiling all the time with the pleasure she felt in not finding him angry or estranged or in any way altered toward her, took the arm-chair from which he had just risen, while he drew a lighter chair to the other side of the chimney-place. His fires were not like hers. Two half-burned sticks and a form of turf smoldered sparingly on a mound of hot ashes; he eagerly cast on a f.a.got, and added wood with, for once, an extravagant hand. Then, looking over at her, he smiled, too.

"Now tell me all about yourself," she commanded. "I want to know what you're doing for this cold of yours."

"Please let us not talk about my cold," he at once refused. "Let us talk about something agreeable. Tell me the news. I have not seen any one for days. I have been living in Russia with a poor young man who had committed a murder, also with a most sympathetic being who found the world outside an inst.i.tution for the feeble-minded too much for him." By a gesture toward the books on the table he gave her a clue to his meaning.

"You say you haven't seen any one for days," she said. "Now the Fosses, for instance, who are your best friends, don't you let them know when you're shut in?"

"You have no conception, evidently, of my bearishness, dear friend. They have. They never wonder when they do not see me or hear from me for weeks."

"I know, and it seems funny; it seems sort of forlorn to me. I saw them the other day and asked if any one had seen you since the night of the show. They said no, but didn't seem to think anything about it."

"It's not really long since then. How are they all?"

"All right, and busy as bees. They've no time to come and see me, or anybody else, I guess. Brenda's coming back to be married in May, and they're flying round getting her things ready. All her linen is being beautifully embroidered...."

They went on talking, without much thought of what they said. It was immaterial, really, what they said, or even whether they listened to each other, while they had in common the comfort of sitting together in front of the fire after a long separation filled with doubts and dismays. She told him about the Convalescents' Home, the sum they had raised for it. No word, prudently, was spoken by either of her share in raising it. He told her about the Russian novels. A third person might perfectly have been present, for anything intimate in their conversation. Gerald was scrupulously careful, for his part, that this should be so. The third person would never have divined how far for the moment that chimney-corner transcended, in the sentiments of the parties seated before it, any other corner of the earth.

Aurora's attention became closer when Gerald related his interviews with De Breze and Costanzi, both of whom he had succeeded in convincing that Antonia had had nothing to do with intriguing them at the _veglione_, and had left to digest as best they could their curiosity concerning the mysterious masker mistaken for her. He had been obliged to give his word that he knew on absolutely good authority who this person was.

His attention, on the other hand, was complete when she told him how she had dealt with Ceccherelli; she was considerate enough to-day to make the effort to p.r.o.nounce the gentleman's cognomen.

"I was savage at him, you remember," she said. "I was going to take his head off. Then when it came to it, and I had told him what I thought of him and the whole disgraceful sc.r.a.pe he had got me into--Oh, I went for him, hammer and tongs! Incidentally, I made him tell me what it was I had said. Pretty bad, wasn't it!--Well, do you know, he cried, he felt so. He just cried on his knees, and didn't try to get rid of any of the blame. All he wanted was that I should forgive him. And what could I do?

As long, particularly, as I knew that a good deal of the fault was my own.... So now he comes to the house with a look as if he'd just been baptized. And he tells me only stories fit, he says, for a convent. Here is a sample, if you'd like to hear. Mrs. X, as he called her, who lives in a palace not a thousand miles, he said, from Piazza degli Anti-nory, and who had given Mr. B. reasons for not liking her, was seen by him, in a suspiciously simple dress, going suspiciously on foot, in a little suspiciously out of the way street, at a considerable distance from Piazza degli Anti-nory. The gentleman followed her stealthily into a house he saw her enter, thinking, you know, he would find out something to her discredit. And what did he find out but that she was secretly visiting and relieving the poor! The brilliant society lady, whom he wished to be revenged on because, as I gathered, she had scorned his dishonorable love-making, was secretly the angel of the poor.... Don't you think that's a nice story? He tells me nothing now that's less nice than that. We're reformed characters. He has asked my permission to dedicate to me a beautiful piece of music he has just composed, and which is called--but in French--'Prayer of the Evening.'"

Both of them were pleasantly aware of a tray placed on the table near them, as if descended from heaven, laden with teapot, bread and b.u.t.ter, jam. Neither of them really saw Giovanna, who brought it in, or was struck by the stern expression of her face.

Aurora, never sorry of something to eat, turned her attention to the tray. Gerald wished to serve her, and she first noticed his weakness when she saw the teapot tremble slightly in his hand. She went on chattering, but she was observing him.

"Is your carriage waiting before the door?" he suddenly asked, after a s.p.a.ce during which she had suspected that he was not properly attending to what she said. Aurora's monogram, daintily executed, adorned the door-panels of her carriage.

"Yes," she answered. "Why?"

As if he had not heard, he changed the subject. After a while he asked, again irrelevantly:

"How was it that Miss Madison did not come with you this afternoon?"

"She was going to a different tea-party." Supposing that his question was a way of politely desiring news of Miss Madison, she went on to talk of her.

"She was going to her French teacher's, who is having a French afternoon where they're supposed to talk nothing but French. What would I have been doing there? But Estelle is getting to talk the French language exactly as well as her own.... That reminds me. A thing I've wanted to tell you. If you should notice that Busteretto seems to be rather more her dog than mine, don't you say anything, or care. The fact is Estelle loves him more than I do. That's all there is about it. Which isn't saying that I don't love him. But Estelle's silly over him, in the regular old maid way, as I tell her. When he wouldn't eat his dinner this noon, I had all I could do to make her eat hers, she was so troubled. And nothing ailed him, I guess, but that he'd picked up something in the kitchen. What I wanted to say was, don't you think it's because I don't value your present, if you should notice by and by that I seem to have given up my claims to Busteretto. That sort of alive present has a will of its own. The little thing took to her from the first more than he did to me. Shall I tell Estelle that you wished to be remembered?"

"Pray do."

"She'll be sorry to hear you're sick. Don't say that again, Gerald," she silenced him, letting her anxiety at last plainly appear. "Don't tell me you aren't sick, for I know better. It's been taking away my appet.i.te to see you make believe to eat, and choke over it. Your cough is so tight it sounds as if it tore your lungs. Give me your hand. It's as hot, dear boy, and as dry!... Wait, let me feel your pulse."

He knew that his pulse was high, that his temples ached, that a disposition to shiver accompanied the volcanic heat of his blood.

He laughed at her light-headedly while with serious concentration she counted the beats in his wrist.

"I'm going to stop at Doctor Gage's on my way home," she said, letting go his hand, and not heeding what he said. "And I'm going to tell him to come and see you."

"Please do not! If I need a doctor, there is my own, an Italian, the same for years."

"An Italian? Do you think they're as good?"

"Better for my own case."

"Gerald, it's my advice to you to go right to bed and let your doctor come and prescribe. A cold is nothing in a way, but a neglected cold can grow into a mean sort of thing. Say you'll do it. Don't you know how good it will feel to you just to give in and go to bed and let some one else do all the looking after you? Oh, I wish I could speak Italian enough to have a talk with your Giovanna."

"Giovanna has taken care of me and my _malanni_ for years. She gives me tar-water, and rice-water, and tamarind-water, and linden-tea, and ca.s.sia. She threatened me this morning with a sinapism if I were not better by evening. I shall be better. I do not wish for a sinapism."