The Devourers Part 2

II

A gentle blue February was slipping out when March tore in with screaming winds and rushing rains. He pushed the diffident greenness back, and went whistling rudely across the lands. The chilly drenched season stood still. One morning Spring peeped round the corner and dropped a crocus or two and a primrose or two. She whisked off again, with the wind after her, but looked in later between two showers. And suddenly, one day, there she was, enthroned and garlanded.

Frost-spangles melted at her feet, and the larks rose.

Valeria borrowed Edith's garden-hat, tied it under her chin with a black ribbon, and went out into the young sunshine across the fields. Around her was the gloss of recent green, pushing upwards to the immature blue of the sky. And Tom, her husband, was dead.

Tom lay in the dark, away from it all, under it all, in the distant little cemetery of Nervi, where the sea that he loved shone and danced within a stone's-throw of his folded hands.

Tom's folded hands! That was all she could see of him when she closed her eyes and tried to recall him. She could not remember his face. Try as she would, shutting her eyes with concentrated will, the well-known features wavered and slipped away; and nothing remained before her but those dull white hands as she had seen them last--terrible, unapproachable hands!

Were those the hands Tom was so particular about and rather vain of--the hands she had patted and laid her cheek against? Were those hands--fixed, cessated, all-relinquishing--the hands that had painted the Italian landscapes she loved, and the other pictures she hated, because in them all stood Carlotta of Trastevere, rippling-haired, bare, and deliberate? Were those the hands that had rowed her and Uncle Giacomo in the little boat _Luisa_ on the Lake Maggiore?--the hands that had grasped hers suddenly at the Madonna del Monte the day she had put on her light blue dress, with the sailor collar and scarlet tie? She seemed to hear him say, with his droll English accent: "Volete essere sposina mia?" And she had laughed and answered him in the only two English words she knew, and which he himself had taught her across the table d'hote: "Please! Thank you!" Then they had both laughed, until Zio Giacomo had said that the Madonna would punish them.

The Madonna had punished them. She had struck him down in his twenty-sixth year, a few months after they were married, shattering his youth like a bubble of gla.s.s. Valeria had heard him, day after day, night after night, coughing his life away in little hard coughs and clearings of his throat; then in racking paroxysms that left him breathless and spent; then in a loose, easy cough that he scarcely noticed. They had gone from Florence, where it was too windy, to Nervi, where it was too hot; from Nice, where it was too noisy, to Airolo, where it was too dull; then, with a rush of hope, with hurried packing of coats and shawls, of paintbrushes and colours, of skates and snowshoes, they had journeyed up to Davos. And there the sun shone, and the baby was born; and Tom Avory went skating and bob-sleighing, and gained six pounds in eight weeks.

Then one day an American woman, whose son was dying, said to Valeria: "It is bad for your baby to stay up here. Send her away, or when she is fifteen she will start coughing too."

"Send her away!" Yes, the baby must be sent away. The deadly swarm of germs from all the stricken lungs seemed to Valeria to envelope her and her child like a cloud--the cloud of death. She could feel it, see it, taste it. The smell of it was on her pillow at night; the sheets and blankets exhaled it; her food was impregnated with it. She herself was full-grown, and strong and sound; but her baby--her fragile, rose-bud baby--was Tom's child, too! All Tom's brothers and sisters, except one little girl called Edith, who was in England, had died in their adolescence--one in Bournemouth; one in Torquay; one in Cannes; one, Tom's favourite sister, Sally, in Nervi--all fleeing from the death they carried within them. Now Davos had saved Tom. But the baby must be sent away.

They consulted three doctors. One said there was no hurry; another said there was no danger; the third said there was no knowing.

Valeria and Tom determined that they would not take risks. One snowy day they travelled down to Landquart. There Tom was to leave them and return to Davos. But the baby was crying, and Valeria was crying; so Tom jumped into the train after them, and said he would see them as far as Zurich, where Uncle Giacomo would be waiting to take them to Italy.

"Then you will be all right, helpless ones," he said, putting his arm round them both, as the little train carried them down towards the mists. And he gave his baby-girl a finger to clutch.

But Tom never reached Zurich. What reached Zurich was stern and awful, with limp, falling limbs and blood-stained mouth. The baby cried, and Valeria cried, and crowds and officials gathered round them. But Tom could help his helpless ones no more.

His will was found in his breast-pocket. "Sposina mia, with all my worldly goods I thee endow. Take our baby to England. Bury me in Nervi, near Sally. I have been very happy.--TOM."

These things Valeria Avory remembered as she walked in the soft English sunshine, crying under Edith's garden-hat. When she reached a little bridge across an angry stream, she leaned over the parapet to look at the water, and the borrowed hat fell off and floated away.

Valeria ran down the bank after it, but it was in midstream, resting lightly against a protruding stone. She threw sticks and pebbles at it, and it moved off and sailed on, with one black ribbon, like a thin arm, stretched behind it. Valeria ran along the sloping bank, sliding on slippery gra.s.s and wet stones; and the hat quivered and curtseyed away buoyantly on the miniature waves. When the stream elbowed off towards the wood, the hat bobbed along with it, and so did Valeria. As she and the stream and the hat turned the corner, she heard an exclamation of surprise, and, raising her flushed face, she saw a young man, in grey tweeds, fishing on the other side of the water.

The young man said: "Hang it all! Good-bye, trout!" And Valeria said: "Can you catch my hat?"

He caught it with great difficulty, holding it with the thick end of his rod, and flattering it towards him with patient man[oe]uvres.

"My trout!" he murmured. "I had been after that fat fellow for three days." Then he dragged the large splashing hat out of the water and held it up. "Here's your hat." It had never been a beautiful hat; it was a dreary-looking thing that Edith had had much wear out of. It had not the appearance of a hat worth fishing three days for.

"Oh, thank you so much! How shall I reach it?" said Valeria, extending a small muddy hand from her side of the stream.

"I suppose I must bring it across," said the young man, still holding the dripping adornment at arm's length.

"Oh no!" said Valeria. "Throw it."

The young man laughed, and said: "Don't try to catch! It will give you a cold." He flung the hat across, and it fell flat and sodden at Valeria's feet.

"Oh dear!" she said, picking it up, with puckered brows, while the black tulle ruffles fell from it, soft and soaking. "What shall I do with it now? I can't put it on. And I don't think I can carry it, walking along these slippery banks."

"Well, throw it back again," said the young man, "and I'll carry it for you."

So she threw the heavy melancholy thing at him, and they walked along, with the water between them, smiling at each other. On the bridge they met, and shook hands.

"I am sorry about your fishes," she said.

"My fishes?" He laughed. "Oh, never mind them. I am sorry about your hat." Then, noting the damp ringlets on her forehead and the dimple in her cheek, he added: "What will you put on when you come to-morrow?"

"To-morrow?" she asked, raising simple eyes.

"Yes; will you?" he said, blushing a little, for he was very young. "At this time"--he looked at his watch--"about eleven o'clock?"

Valeria blushed, too--a sudden crimson flush that left her face white and waxen. "Is it eleven o'clock?" she exclaimed. "Are you sure?"

"Yes; what is the matter?"

"The baby!" gasped Valeria. "I had forgotten the baby!" And she turned and ran down the bridge and across the fields, her black gown flying, the wet hat flapping at her side.

She reached home breathless. The nurse was on the verandah, waiting. "Am I late, Wilson?" she panted.

"Yes, madam," said the nurse, with tight and acid lips.

"How is baby?" gasped Valeria.

"The baby," said the woman, gazing at her, sphinx-like and severe, "is hungry."

III

The young man went to fish in the little stream every day, but he only caught his fat trout. The dimpled girl in mourning did not come again.

His holiday was ended, and he returned to his rooms in London, but he left a love-letter for Valeria on the bank, pinned to the crumpled black ruffle that had fallen off her hat, and with a stone on it to keep it down.

Valeria found the love-letter. She had stayed indoors a week, repenting.

Then Spring and her youth joined hands, and drew her out of doors and across the fields again. She went, blushing and faltering, with a bunch of violets pinned at her belt. No one saw her but a tail-flicking, windy-haired pony in a meadow, who frisked suddenly after her and made her shiver.

Close to the stream her eye caught the tattered black ruffle and the note pinned to it. The young man wrote that his name was Frederick Allen; that he was reading for the Bar and writing for newspapers. He said that she had haunting eyes, and that they would probably never meet again. He wondered whether she had found the baby, and where she had forgotten it, and what baby it was. And she _might_ have turned round just once to wave him farewell! He hoped she would not be displeased if he said that he loved her, and would never forget her. Would she tell him her name? Only her name! Please, please! He was hers in utter devotion, FREDERICK.

Valeria went back in a dream and looked up the word "haunting" in her English-Italian Dictionary. She did not remember his eyes: they were blue, she thought, or perhaps brown. But his face was clear and sunburnt, and his smooth-parted hair was bright when he took off his hat on the bridge.

She thought she would simply return his letter. Then she decided that she would add a few words of rebuke. Finally one rainy day, when everybody had seemed cross, and Edith had answered rudely, and the baby had screamed for Wilson who was not there, Valeria, with qualms and twinges, took a sheet of paper and wrote her name on it. The paper had a black border. Valeria suddenly fell on her knees and kissed the black border, and prayed that Tom might forgive her. Then she burned it, and went to her baby, who was quarrelling with everything and trying to kill an India-rubber sheep.

Yet one day in April--an April swooning with soft suggestions, urging its own evanescence and the fleeting sweetness of life--Mr. Frederick Allen, in his London lodgings, received two letters instead of one.

Hannah, the pert maid who brought them to his room, lingered while he opened them. In the first was a cheque for six guineas from a periodical; in the other was a visiting-card:

VALERIA NINA AVORY.

"Who the d.i.c.kens...?" he said, turning the card over. "Here!" and he threw it across to Hannah. "Here's a French modiste, or something, if you want falals!"