Aurora the Magnificent Part 7

Hawthorne whither she would wish to be taken before he left.

Let him not bother, she answered; she could find her friends without help.

They separated. Walking slowly, she looked for faces of acquaintances.

She glanced in at the ball-room door. They were dancing still, but not nearly so many. She turned into the reception-room, whence she could reenter the ball-room at the other end without danger of collision, and reach that comfortable blue satin sofa, now standing empty. There she would sit looking on till Estelle joined her, when they would set about making their adieux. The carriage must have been waiting for them ever so long.

She had sat a minute, unconsciously smiling to herself, because the sensations and impressions of the evening were all so pleasant, when something occurred to her as desirable to be done. She rose to carry out her idea.

The dancing had stopped; the floor was clear except in the neighborhood of the walls, where couples stood or sat recovering breath and coolness.

She started to cross the long room. She did not skirt it because the direct line to her destination was by the middle; she did not go fast because there was no occasion, and it was not her way. She advanced like a goodly galleon pushing along the sea with finely curved bows, all sails set to catch the breeze. Her mind was entirely on her idea, and she did not at first feel herself to be conspicuous. But all the eyes in the room, before she had gone half her way, were fastened upon her, a natural and legitimate mark. One might now without impertinence have the satisfaction of a good look at the newly come American who had taken the big house on the Lungarno; the women might study the fashion of her hair and dress.

She was smiling faintly, but fixedly; she smiled, indeed, all the time, as if smiles had been an indispensable article of wear at a party. The least of her smiles brought dimples into view, and her dimples seemed mult.i.tudinous, though there were really only three in her face and one of those irregular things called apple-seeds. Her agreeably blunted features and peachy roundness of cheek belonged to a good-humored, unimposing type, which took on a certain n.o.bility in her case from being carried high on a strong, round neck over a splendid broad breast, partly bare this evening, and seen to be white as milk, as swans'-down, as pearl.

If one had tried to define the look which left one so little doubt as to her nationality, one would perhaps have said it was a combination of fearlessness and accessibility. She feared not you, nor should you fear her; she counted on your friendliness, you might count on hers.

She was a person simple in the main. The colors she had selected to wear accorded with the rest, showing little intricacy of taste. The two silks composing her dress were respectively the blue of a summer morning and the pink of a rose. From cushioned and dimpled shoulders the bodice tapered to as fine a waist as a Paris dressmaker had found possible to bring about in a woman who, despite a veritable yearning to look slender, cared also for freedom to breathe, and, as she said with a sigh, guessed she must make up her mind to be happy without looking like a toothpick. At the back of the waist, the dress leapt suddenly out and away from the dorsal column--every lady's dress did that for a season or two at the time we are telling of, and at every step she took the back of her skirt gave a bob, for the bustle was supplemented by three or four concealed semi-circles of thin steel, reeds we called them, which hit against you as you went and sprang lightly away from your heels.

The arrangement of Mrs. Hawthorne's hair equalled in artificiality the mode of her dress: the front locks were clipped and twisted into little curls, the back locks drawn to the top of the head, where they were disposed in silken loops and rolls, at the top of which, like a flag planted on a hill, stood an aigrette, a sparkle and two whiffs.

It may not sound pretty, it was not, but the eye of that day had become used to it, as eyes have since become used to fashions no prettier, and as Mrs. Hawthorne's hair was of a soft sunny tint it was that evening admired by more than one, as was her intrinsically ugly beautiful gown, which gave a little jerky rebound every time she placed one of those neat solid satin-shod feet before the other in her progress across the now attentive room.

She had taken off her long white gloves to eat a cake--or cakes; she was carrying them loosely swinging from one dimpled hand.

In the middle of the room self-consciousness overtook her. With the awakening sense of eyes upon her, she looked first to one side, then to the other. Her smile broadened while growing by just a tinge sheepish; she seemed to waver and consider turning from her course and finishing her journey close along the wall, like a mouse....

She finally did not, nor yet hurried. She made her smile explain to whoever was looking on that a person was excusable for making this sort of mistake, that it hurt n.o.body, that one need not and did not care; that she was sure they did not like her any less for it; they would not if they knew how void of offense toward them all was her heart; that having exposed herself to being looked at, she hoped they liked her looks. Her dress was a very good dress, her laces were very good lace, and the maid who had done her hair was considered a first-rate hand at doing hair.

So she was carrying it off, and her smile was only a little self-conscious, only a shade embarra.s.sed, when from among the men standing near the library door, for which she was directly making, there stepped out one to meet her, not unlike a slender needle darting toward a large, rounded magnet as it comes into due range.

More sensitive than she, feeling the situation much more uncomfortably for his country-woman than she felt it for herself, a foreign-looking fellow, who had not quite forgotten that he was an American, after a moment's hard struggle against his impulse, hastened forward to shorten for her that uncompanioned course across the floor under ten thousand search-lights.

"I'm looking for somebody," said Mrs. Hawthorne, with the smile of a child.

The voice which had made one man think of the crimson heart on a valentine reminded this other of rough velvet.

He showed his eccentric three front teeth in a responding smile that had a touch of the faun, and asked whimsically:

"Will I do?"

"Help me to find Mr. Foss, and you'll do perfectly," she said merrily.

"I haven't seen him more than just to shake hands this whole evening, and I do want to have a little talk before I go."

"If I am not mistaken, we shall find him in the library." He offered his arm.

"I may have appeared to be doing something else, Mrs. Hawthorne, but I have really been looking for you the last hour," said the consul when he had been found. "I wanted to have a little talk. How are you enjoying Florence?"

"Oh, we're having an elegant time, thanks to that dear wife of yours and that dear girl, Leslie. I don't know what we should have done without them and you."

"But the city itself, Florence, doesn't it enchant you?"

"We--ell, yes. N-n-n-no. Yes and no. That's it. You want me to tell the truth, don't you? Some of it does, and some of it doesn't. Some of it, I guess, will take me a long time to get used to. It's terribly different from what we expected--I, in particular. You see, I came here because an old friend used to talk so much about it. Florence the Fair! The City of Lilies! He said Italy was the most beautiful country in the world, and Florence the most beautiful city in Italy. So my expectations were way up.--Oh, I don't know; it's hard to tell. I don't exactly remember now what I did expect. I guess my picture of it was something like the New Jerusalem on an Easter day. But I shall get used to this, like to the taste of olives. It must be all right, for the friend I was speaking of had the finest mind I've ever known. I'm green as turnip-tops, of course, but I shall get educated up to it, I suppose. Give me time."

"Mrs. Hawthorne, hear me prophesy," said Mr. Foss. "In six months you will love it all. It's the fate of us who come here from new countries.

It will steal in upon you, grow upon you, beset and besot you, till you like no other place in the world so well."

"Will it? Well, if you say so. The Judge--the friend I was speaking of,--said so much of the same kind that the minute I thought of coming to Europe, right after I'd said, 'I'll go to Paris,' I said to myself, 'I'll go to Florence.'"

"Your friend was a judge of places."

"It wasn't he alone influenced me. He was sick a long time, and I used to read aloud to him, and one spell, when his mind for some reason or other was running on Italy, every book he chose had the scene laid here.

There were whole pages of description, and anything so lovely, so luscious, as the places and people described I never did dream. I didn't understand more than a quarter, but I swallowed it all and gloated. The woman who wrote those books certainly did have an imagination. O Antonia, let me meet you and have a good look at you so I can tell a--hm, the owner of an imagination when I see one again!"

"Antonia, did you say?" The consul smiled.

"That was the writer's name. You know the books I mean?"

"I have read a work or two of Antonia's, yes. She lives near Florence, you know, on another of these little hills."

"Oh, does she!"

"Her name is Mrs. Grangeon. She is an Englishwoman, with an extraordinary sense of, and feeling for, Italy. She is, at her best, a poet; at her worst, slightly deficient, perhaps, in humor. But her pa.s.sion for Italy is genuine, and I have no doubt she sees it as glowing as the pictures she makes of it."

"Her books are 'grand, John'! If I never had come here, I never should have appreciated them or her--making up that wonderful world, all pomegranates and jasmin-stars, and curls like cl.u.s.tering blue-black grapes, and staturesque limbs, out of the back of her head. Yes, and the golden dust of centuries, and time's mellow caressing touch--oh, I wish I could remember it all!"

"Mrs. Hawthorne, we must take you in hand. Be it ours to initiate you.

Come, what have you been to see?"

"Treasures of art? We haven't had time yet. We've been getting a house fit to live in. When you asked me how I liked Florence, I ought to have begun by that end. I love my house, Mr. Foss. I love my garden. I love the Lungarno. And the Casheeny. And Boboly. And the drive up here. And the stores! I positively dote on those little bits of stores on the jewelers' bridge."

"Well, well, that's quite enough to begin with."

"Now that we're going to have some time to spare, we mean to go sight-seeing like other folks."

"How I wish, dear Mrs. Hawthorne, that I were not such a busy man!

But"--Mr. Foss had a look of bright inspiration--"should I on that account be dejected? Here is Mr. Fane--"

He turned to Gerald, who, after bringing up Mrs. Hawthorne, had stood near, a silent third, waiting to act further as her escort by and by.

Meanwhile he had been listening with a varied a.s.sortment of feelings and a boundless fatigue of spirit.

"Mr. Fane," said the consul, "who is not nearly so busy a man as I, and is the most sympathetic, well-informed cicerone you could find. When we wish to be sure our visiting friends shall see Florence under the best possible circ.u.mstances, we turn them over to Mr. Fane."

Gerald's face struggled into a sourish smile, and he bowed ironical thanks for the compliment. Lifting his head, he shot a glance of reproachful interrogation at the consul. Was his friend doing this humorously, to tease him, or was the man simply not thinking?

The consul looked innocent of any sly intention; he was all of a jocund smile; the consul, who should have known better, wore the air of doing him a pleasure and her a pleasure and a pleasure to himself; the air of thinking that any normally const.i.tuted young man would be grateful for such a chance.

"I shall be most happy," said Gerald, with irreproachable and misleading politeness.

Mrs. Hawthorne turned to him readily.