Rough-Hewn Part 48

The idea that he had only five days in Rome fell on him like a thunderbolt, as though he had had no idea of it till that moment. Had he said he had only five days in Rome?

He walked along, looking up at the green waves of feathery foliage which foamed down over the fawn-colored walls from the verdure of the gardens inside. What a beautiful spot Rome was! He had not begun to appreciate it on his last visit. It was wonderful! Such light! He had never seen such sunlight anywhere.

Ah, here was number a hundred and twenty, a fine great doorway in the wall, with a gleaming bra.s.s plate, marked Pierleoni, at which Neale looked with pleasure. He walked on some distance, as far as he could go and keep the house in view, and, crossing over, walked slowly back. He was not now in the least ashamed of his conduct. By this time it seemed quite natural and suitable to him, just what any one would have done in his place. Of course he wanted to know about his great-uncle. Who would not?

He had made the trip to the end of the street and back perhaps a dozen times, his pulse beating more and more quickly, when from a distance he saw a little door beside the great one open, and a tall girl in a familiar light gray street-dress step out. But she was not alone. Beside her walked a man, a tall, stooped old man with a black coat and a wide-brimmed black felt hat. The girl's hand was on his arm. Neale felt as astonished and grieved as though he had caught his best friend cheating him at cards. It had never occurred to him that she might not be alone! And yet he now remembered that she had said "we."

He walked along behind them at a considerable distance, feeling for the first time rather foolish, a sensation which instantly took wings as he saw them, after turning into another street, stop at a door in the wall and ring. Perhaps she was going to leave him there. Neale gave a great start forward.

But perhaps she was going in with him? He halted where he stood, feeling very sick of himself and angrily resolving to turn his back on them and go off about his business. He had never played the born fool so in his life!

But he did not turn his back on them. He stood observing them, while they went through a leave-taking which seemed to him very formal and long-drawn-out; and when the old man went in and the infernal gate actually shut behind him, Neale started forward with a bound.

But he reflected at once that it was too absurd to meet her here, in a quarter of Rome where no business of his could possibly have brought him at that hour. The cautious, adroit thing to do was to walk along behind her at a distance, till she had turned into a thoroughfare with shops, where he might conceivably be strolling. While he was making this sagacious plan, his feet bore him rapidly up beside her, where he took off his hat and said, "Good morning, Miss Allen," with a wide smile of satisfaction which he knew must look nothing less than imbecile.

Well, he had done what he had set out to do.

She gave him a "good morning, Mr. Crittenden," that showed no surprise, and with great tact began the talk on the only basis which gave him a reasonable claim on her time. "You want to hear how somebody in Rome knows about your great-uncle Burton, don't you? I'm afraid it's like so many other things that sound mysterious and interesting. It will only be quite flat and commonplace when you really know. It is no more than this. When I was a little girl in America, and then later when I was in college for a couple of years, I was sent to spend my summers in Ashley, visiting an old cousin of my father's." She looked at him from under her broad-brimmed blue hat, with a mock-regretful air, one eyebrow raised whimsically, and made a little apologetic gesture with her shoulders.

"That's all," she said, smiling and shaking her head.

"Oh, _no_, it's not all!" Neale cried to himself with intense conviction.

Aloud he said, "But I want to hear more about what kind of a place it is. You see, to tell the truth, I'd forgotten that I had any Great-uncle Burton. And I never was in Ashley. Think of being in Florence and getting a letter saying that a saw-mill in Vermont has suddenly become yours!"

"I should call it a most nice sort of surprise," remarked the girl with a quaintly un-English turn of phrase which he had already noticed and thought the most delightful thing in the world.

"And I'm on my way back to America now to see about it."

"What does that mean--to 'see about it'?" she inquired.

"Oh, sell it, of course."

She was horrified. "_Sell_ it? To whom?"

"Oh, to anybody who'll buy it."

"Sell that darling old house, and those glorious elms. Sell that beautiful leaded-gla.s.s door, with the cool white marble steps leading up to it, and the big peony-bushes, and the syringas and that cold pure spring-water that runs all day and all night in the wooden trough. Sell that home! And to anybody!" She paused where she was, looking at him out of wide, shocked eyes. Neale was profoundly thankful for anything that would make her look straight at him like that.

"But, you see," he told her, "I hadn't the least idea about that darling old house, or the elms or the spring-water or anything. I never heard a word about it till this minute. I think the only thing is for you to start in and tell me everything."

As she hesitated, professing with an outward opening of her palms that she really didn't know exactly where to begin, he prompted her.

"Well, begin at the beginning. How in the world do you get there?"

"Oh, if you want to know from the beginning," she told him, "I must tell you at once that you change cars at Hoosick Junction. Always, always, no matter from which direction you approach, you must change cars at Hoosick Junction, and wait an hour or so there." Seeing on his face a rather strange expression, she feared that he had lost the point of her little pleasantry, and inquired, "But perhaps it is that you do not know Hoosick Junction."

"Oh, yes, I know Hoosick Junction all right." He said it with a long breath of wonder. "_I_ changed cars at Hoosick Junction to get here!"

"Eh bien, and then a train finally takes you from Hoosick Junction. You sit pressing your little nose against the window, waiting to see the mountains, and when the first one heaves up softly, all blue against the horizon, you feel a happy ache in your throat, and you look harder than ever. And by and by some one calls out 'Shley!' (you know he means Ashley) and you take your little satchel and stumble down the aisle, and the conductor lifts you down the steps and there is dear old Cousin Hetty with her wrinkled face shining on you. She only gives you a dry little peck on your lips, quick and hard, and says, 'Well, Marise, you got here, I see,' but you feel all over you, _warm_, how glad she is to see you. And you hug her a great deal till she says, 'there! there!' but you know she likes it very much."

She was talking as she walked, as if her words were set to music, her voice all little ripples, and bright upward and downward swoops like swallows flying, her hands and arms and shoulders and eyebrows acting a delicate pantomime of ill.u.s.tration, the pale, pure olive of her face flushed slightly with her animation. Every time she flashed a quick look up at him to make sure he was not bored, Neale caught his breath. He felt as though he were drinking the strongest kind of wine, he had the half-scared, half-enchanted feeling of a man who knows he is going to get very drunk, and has little idea of what will happen when he does.

"Yes, and then, and then?" he prompted her, eagerly.

"Well, and then you get into a phaeton. Oh, I don't suppose you have ever seen a phaeton!"

"Yes, I have," he contradicted her. "I've driven my grandfather miles in one when I was a little boy."

"Oh, you _know_, then, about this sort of--you have perhaps lived in a place like Ashley?" She was as eager as though it had been a question of finding that they were of the same family.

"I spent all my summers in West Adams, not so very far from Vermont."

"Ah then, you can understand what I tell you!" she said with satisfaction. "And in the phaeton you jog through the village, past the church, under the elms, with the white houses each under its thick green trees, and such green, green gra.s.s everywhere--not like Italy, all brown and parched; and then down the road till the turn-off for Crittenden's. For, you see, I also go to Crittenden's. My Cousin Hetty's home is one of the three or four houses that stand around your great-uncle's house and mill. And so up the road to Crittenden's between the mountains closer and higher, up into the quiet valley." Her voice deepened on the last words, and so did her eyes. She was silent a moment, looking out unseeingly on the tropical palms and bright, huge flowers of the Pincian Gardens through which they were now walking.

"Eh bien, since it's you who are going home, you drive on a little farther than my Cousin Hetty's house, until up before you slopes a lovely meadow, smooth, bright, shining green, like the enamel green field in the Limbo where Dante puts Electra and Hector and Caesar. At the top of the slope, a long line of splendid, splendid elms, like this, you know ..." with her two hands and a free, upward gesture of her arms, she showed the airy opening-out of the winegla.s.s elms, "and back of them a long old house, ever so long, because everything is fastened along together, house, porch, woodshed, hay-barn, carriage-shed, horse-barn."

She laughed at the recollection, turning to him. "You've seen those long New England farm-homes? I remember a city man said once that you could see the head of the lady of the house leaning from one window and the head of a cow from another. He thought that the most crushing thing that could be said, but _I_ think those homes perfectly delightful, homely, with a _cachet_ of their own, not copied from houses in other countries.

And really, you know," she turned serious, thinking suddenly that perhaps he needed rea.s.surance, "really, it's just as _clean_ as any other way of living. You're just as far away from the animals as with any other barn, because you have so much woodshed and hay-barn and things between you."

To see her face with that quite new, housekeeping, matter-of-fact, practical look gave him the most absurd and illogical amus.e.m.e.nt. He laughed outright. "Oh, don't think for a moment that I would object," he cried gaily. "I'm not a bit fastidious. I wouldn't care _how_ near the cows were--if they were nice cows!"

She thought for an instant he might be laughing at her, and peered keenly into his face, a more openly observing look than she had as yet given him. What she saw evidently rea.s.sured her, for she went on with a lighter tone, "Truly it has its own sort of architectural beauty. It doesn't have a bit of the packing-box, brought-in-and-dumped-down look that most dwelling-houses have, no matter how they're planned. It seems to have grown that way. The long, low old farm-house, weathered so beautifully, it looks like an outcrop of the very earth itself, like a ridge or rock or a fold in a field."

It was about at this time that Neale began to lose the capacity of listening to what she was saying. With the best will in the world he could not keep his mind on it. He found that he felt a giddy, dazzled uncertainty of where he was putting his feet and tried to pull himself together. He must really notice a little more what he was about. Her quick, rising and falling, articulate speech, her quick, flashing changes of expression, the play of her flexible hands and shoulders--no, how could he listen to what she was saying?

But she was asking him a question now. She was saying, "You're not really going to _sell_ all that, to just _any_body?"

"But really," he answered, helplessly honest, "it sounds wonderful as you tell it, but what could _I_ do with it? I couldn't very well go to _live_ in Ashley, Vermont, could I?"

"Why not?" she asked. "A good many people have."

"Well! But ..." he began, incapable of forming any answer, incapable of thinking of anything but the dark softness of her gaze on him. What was it they were talking about? Oh, yes, about selling out at Ashley. "Oh, but I have other plans. I am just about to go to China."

"_China!_ Why to China?"

Neale lost his head entirely ... "notice more what he was about?" He had not the least idea what he was about. He said to her rather wildly, "I hardly know myself why I am going to China. I'd like, if you will let me--I'd like ever so much to tell you--about it. And see what you think. You know about Ashley, don't you see?" He was aware that the last of what he had said had no shadow of connection with the first, but that seemed of no importance whatever to him.

They were standing now near a low wall, under some thick dark ilex trees, a fountain dripping musically before them. Mechanically they sat down, looking earnestly at each other. "You see," began Neale, "I'm trying to find my way. I was in business in the States, and getting along all right ... 'getting on,' I mean, as they say. And then I got to wondering. It seemed as though, as though ... I wasn't sure it was what I wanted to do with my life, just to buy low and sell high, all my life long. Perhaps there was more to it than I could make out. It certainly seemed to suit a lot of folks, fine. But I couldn't seem to see it. I was all right. Nothing the matter. Only I couldn't ... why, I tell you, I felt like a perfectly good torch that wouldn't catch on fire. I couldn't seem to _care_ enough about it to make it worth while to really tear in and do it. And I thought maybe if I got off a little way from it ... sometimes you do see the sense of things better that way. So I went away. I took a year off. I'd saved a little money, enough for that.

And I've been trying to figure something out. Of course I've been enjoying the traveling around, too. Perhaps that's the real reason why I want to go to China, just to keep going, see new things, get away, keep free. But I think about the other a good deal ... what can I do with my life ... that's sort of _worth while_, you know, if only in a very small way. I'm a very ordinary man, no gifts, no talents, but I have lots of energy and health. It seems as though there ought to be _some_thing ...

doesn't it?"

He had stumbled on, breathlessly, involuntarily, hardly aware that he was speaking at all, aware only that she was listening. With her head bent, her eyes fixed on the ground, the pure pale olive of her face like a pearl in the shadow of her hat, she was listening intently. He knew, as he had never known anything else, that she was listening to what he really meant, not to what he was saying in those poor, plain, broken words.

And yet, how could he go on?

The sudden plunge he had made, deep into an element new to him, the utter strangeness of his having thus spoken out what he had before but shyly glanced at, the awfulness of having opened his heart to the day, his shut, shut heart.... Good G.o.d, what was he doing?

At his silence, she raised her face towards him. To his amazement her eyes were shining wet with tears. And yet there was no sadness in her face. She was smiling at him, a wavering, misty smile.

She stood up, made a little, flexible, eloquent gesture with her hands and arms and shoulders, as if to explain to him that she could not trust herself to speak, and, still smiling at him, the tears still in her eyes, walked rapidly away.