Pietro Ghisleri Part 37

"The last I heard was that she was much worse. She behaves in the most unaccountable way. She has the look of a woman in some very great mental distress--pursued and haunted by something very painful from which she cannot escape."

"I had the same feeling about her the last time I saw her. I know that look very well. I have seen it in your face, sometimes, as well as in hers."

"In mine?" Ghisleri looked keenly at her, as though to ascertain whether she meant more than she said, for the first time in his acquaintance with her. "When did I ever show you that I was in trouble?" he asked.

"That was some time ago. You have changed since your illness. You used to look hara.s.sed sometimes, like a man who has a wound in the heart.

Perhaps it is only something which depends on the way your eyes are made. The first time I ever noticed it was--yes, I remember very well--it was more than a year ago, that night when you spoke your poem in the Shrove Tuesday masquerade. It was not when you were talking to me. You looked perfectly diabolical then. It was later. I saw you standing alone in a doorway after a dance."

"What a memory you have! I was probably in a bad humour. I generally am, even now."

"Why do you say even now?" asked Laura, watching his face.

"Oh, I hardly know," he answered. "All sorts of things have happened to me since then, to simplify my existence. At that time it was very particularly complicated."

"And how have you simplified it?" She put the question innocently enough, and quite thoughtlessly, not even guessing at the truth.

"It has been simplified for me. It came near being simplified into being no existence at all. A few inches made the difference."

"Yes," said Laura, thoughtfully, "the greatest of all differences to you."

"And none at all to any one else," added Ghisleri, with a dry laugh.

She turned her great dark eyes upon him. The lids drooped a little as she scrutinised his face somewhat coldly, but with an odd interest.

"I suppose that might be quite true," she said at last. "Perhaps it is.

But I do not like you any the better for saying it in that way."

Ghisleri was silent, but he met her gaze quietly and without flinching, until she looked away. She sighed a little as she took up a bit of embroidery she was doing for some garment of little Herbert's.

"Why do you sigh?" he asked, not expecting that she would answer the question.

"For some one," she said simply, and she began to make a few st.i.tches.

He knew that she was thinking of Maddalena dell' Armi, and his heart smote him.

"I was wrong to say it," he answered, in a more gentle tone. "There was perhaps one exception to the rule."

Ghisleri grew even more careful of his speech after that. But he did not see Laura often before she went away northward for the summer. The spring was going fast, and the time was coming when Rome would be its quiet old-fashioned self again for those few who loved it well enough to face the heat of July and August. Almost every one was thinking of going away. The Prince and Princess of Gerano were going out to the castle earlier than usual, for the news of Adele grew steadily worse. Francesco now had the doctor out regularly three times a week, and was forced to lead an existence he detested. His wife was by this time quite unable to get rest without taking very large quant.i.ties of chloral, and at times her sufferings were such that it seemed almost advisable to give her morphia. Every one, however, who brought intelligence from Gerano agreed in saying that she did her best to keep up, and seemed to dread the idea of an illness which might keep her permanently in her room. Whenever she felt able she insisted on driving out and on going through the regular round of monotonous country occupations. Her father and step-mother therefore determined to go out and help Francesco to take care of her, and make her existence as bearable as possible. Amongst all her friends she was spoken of with the utmost compa.s.sion, and no one ever suggested that her illness could proceed from any such cause as Ghisleri believed to be at the root of it.

A few days before Laura Arden was to go away Donald came to Pietro's room in the morning, with a very grave face. Lady Herbert, he said, thought that Ghisleri would understand why she did not write, but sent Donald in person with a verbal message. She was going away, and was about to give up the apartment in which she had spent the winter, without any intention of taking it again in the following year. There were certain things that had belonged to Lord Herbert--Lady Herbert had no home and did not like to send them to Lord Lulworth--would Ghisleri take charge of them in her absence? Pietro, of course, a.s.sented, and two hours later Donald arrived with a large carriage load of boxes. Ghisleri looked on with a very unpleasant sensation in his throat as his old friend's effects were brought up stairs and deposited in a room where he kept such things of his own. When they were all piled together in a corner, he took an old green curtain and covered them with it, spreading it carefully over them with his own hands. Then he locked the door and went away. Some men and women when they die seem to leave something of life behind them, which the mere sight of anything that has belonged to them has power to recall most vividly to the perceptions of those who have known them and loved them. Ghisleri understood Laura Arden's feeling about her husband's belongings. He knew, or thought he knew, that from the moment her child had been given to her, she had desired that no material object should revive the sorrow she had felt so deeply.

The memory she cherished was wholly spiritual, and upon its remaining so her peace of mind largely depended. The one Herbert was to live in the other--and there must not be two. Not every one, perhaps, would have understood her so readily.

The day came for bidding her good-bye. It was with a somewhat heavy heart that he went up the stairs of her house for the last time. Much of the little happiness he had known during the past months was a.s.sociated with the place and with her, and not a little of the sorrow as well. The drawing-room was bare, and had lost the comfortable, inhabited look which even a furnished lodging takes from all the little objects a woman brings to it, and which she alone knows how to dispose and arrange as though they were in constant use, thereby at once producing the impression that the habitation she has chosen has been lived in long.

Once more Ghisleri sat in the familiar chair near the open window, and once more Laura took her place in the corner of the great sofa.

"I have come to say good-bye," he began. "You are still decided to go to-morrow, I suppose."

"Yes. I have not changed my plans. Please do not come to the station to see me off, nor send flowers, nor do any of the things which are generally done. I would rather not see any one I know after leaving this house."

"May I write to you?" asked Ghisleri.

"Of course. Why not?"

"I do not know, I am sure. I thought it better to ask you. Some women hate correspondence except with their nearest and dearest. I will give you the news of Rome during the wild gaiety of July and August."

"Are you not going away at all?" asked Laura, in some surprise. "You ought to; it will do you good."

"I hardly know. I like to be alone in summer. It gives one time to think. One has a chance of leading a sensible life when n.o.body is here to see. The days pa.s.s pleasantly--plenty of reading, a diet of watermelon and sherbet, and a little repentance--it is magnificent treatment for the liver."

Laura looked at him and then laughed very softly.

"You seem amused," said Ghisleri, gravely. "What I say is quite true--the result of long experience."

"I was not laughing at what you said, but at the idea that you should still think it worth while to make such speeches to me."

"If I can make you laugh at all it is worth while."

"At all events, it is good of you to say so. Which of the three subjects do you mean to take for your letters to me--your reading, your food, or your repentance?"

"The food would be the simplest and safest topic. You can read for yourself what you please. Repentance, when it is not a habit, is rarely well done. But one can say the most charming things about strawberries, peaches, and figs, without ever offending any one's taste."

"I think you grow worse as you grow older," said Laura, still smiling.

"But if you would take your programme seriously, it would not be a bad thing, I fancy. Seriously, however, you ought to get away from Rome."

"I should be tempted to go and stay a week near you, if I went away at all," said Ghisleri.

Laura did not answer at once. She glanced at him with a vague suspicion in her eyes which disappeared almost instantly, and then took two or three st.i.tches in her embroidery before she spoke.

"I would rather you should not do that," she said at last. "I may as well tell you what I think about it. To me, and to you, it seems thoroughly absurd that you should not see me whenever we choose to meet.

There are many reasons why I should look upon you as a friend, and why you should come more often than any other man I know. But the world thinks differently. My mother has spoken to me about it more than once, and in one way she is right. You know what a place this is, and how every one talks about everybody. Unfortunately, I believe that you are one of the men about whose private affairs society is most busy. I cannot help it now. I have no right to say anything about your life, past or present, but you have told me enough about yourself to make me understand why there is always gossip about you, and why there always will be. Then, too, you will never make people believe that you did not fight that duel about me, for you cannot tell any one what you told me.

The consequence is, that you and I look at it all from one point of view, and the world sees it from quite another. I think it is better to say all this once, and to be done with it. As we shall not meet for several months, people will forget to talk. Am I right to speak to you?"

"Perfectly right," answered Ghisleri. An expression of pain had settled on his lean face while she had been talking, and did not disappear at once. Laura saw it and was silent for a moment.

"I am sorry if I have hurt you," she said presently. "Perhaps I was wrong."

"No, you were quite right," Ghisleri replied. "You would have been very wrong indeed not to tell me. If you did not, who would? But I had no suspicion of all this. I believed that for once they might let me alone, considering what you are--and what I am. The contrast might protect you in the eyes of some persons. Lady Herbert Arden--and Pietro Ghisleri."

He p.r.o.nounced his own name with the utmost bitterness.

"Please do not speak of yourself in that way," said Laura, with something like entreaty in her voice.

"It is true enough," he answered. "An intelligent being might understand that I could be useful to you, but not that you--" He stopped short, and his tone changed. "I am talking nonsense," he said briefly, by way of explaining the truth.

"I think you are, in a way," said Laura, quietly. "It is your old habit of exaggeration. You make me an impossible creature between an archangel and the good mamma in children's story books, and you refer to yourself as to a satanic monster whom no honest woman could call her friend. You are quite right. It is sheer nonsense. If you stay in Rome to repent, as you suggest in fun, do it in earnest. I am not talking of your sins, which are not half so bad as you pretend, but of this silly view you insist upon taking of your own life. If you must think perpetually of yourself, judge yourself by some reasonable standard. You live in the world and you have no right to expect to find that you are a saint. If that is what you wish, take vows, turn monk, and starve yourself up to heaven if you can. And if you chance to think of me, do not set me on a pedestal, and build a church over me, and pray at me. I do not like that sort of thing--it is all unnatural and absurd. I am a woman and nothing else, better than some by force of circ.u.mstances, and not so good as some others, perhaps for the same reason. All the rest that you imagine is sentimental trash, and not worth the time it takes you to think it.

You will not be wasting your summer if you can get rid of it all by the time we meet in the autumn."