Where Angels Fear to Tread Part 16

He had spoken at random. To his delight she suddenly collapsed. Her hand fell from the window. Her face was red with more than the reflection of evening.

"My interview--how do you know of it?"

"From Perfetta, if it interests you."

"Who ever is Perfetta?"

"The woman who must have let you in."

"In where?"

"Into Signor Carella's house."

"Mr. Herriton!" she exclaimed. "How could you believe her? Do you suppose that I would have entered that man's house, knowing about him all that I do? I think you have very odd ideas of what is possible for a lady. I hear you wanted Harriet to go. Very properly she refused.

Eighteen months ago I might have done such a thing. But I trust I have learnt how to behave by now."

Philip began to see that there were two Miss Abbotts--the Miss Abbott who could travel alone to Monteriano, and the Miss Abbott who could not enter Gino's house when she got there. It was an amusing discovery.

Which of them would respond to his next move?

"I suppose I misunderstood Perfetta. Where did you have your interview, then?"

"Not an interview--an accident--I am very sorry--I meant you to have the chance of seeing him first. Though it is your fault. You are a day late.

You were due here yesterday. So I came yesterday, and, not finding you, went up to the Rocca--you know that kitchen-garden where they let you in, and there is a ladder up to a broken tower, where you can stand and see all the other towers below you and the plain and all the other hills?"

"Yes, yes. I know the Rocca; I told you of it."

"So I went up in the evening for the sunset: I had nothing to do. He was in the garden: it belongs to a friend of his."

"And you talked."

"It was very awkward for me. But I had to talk: he seemed to make me.

You see he thought I was here as a tourist; he thinks so still. He intended to be civil, and I judged it better to be civil also."

"And of what did you talk?"

"The weather--there will be rain, he says, by tomorrow evening--the other towns, England, myself, about you a little, and he actually mentioned Lilia. He was perfectly disgusting; he pretended he loved her; he offered to show me her grave--the grave of the woman he has murdered!"

"My dear Miss Abbott, he is not a murderer. I have just been driving that into Harriet. And when you know the Italians as well as I do, you will realize that in all that he said to you he was perfectly sincere.

The Italians are essentially dramatic; they look on death and love as spectacles. I don't doubt that he persuaded himself, for the moment, that he had behaved admirably, both as husband and widower."

"You may be right," said Miss Abbott, impressed for the first time.

"When I tried to pave the way, so to speak--to hint that he had not behaved as he ought--well, it was no good at all. He couldn't or wouldn't understand."

There was something very humorous in the idea of Miss Abbott approaching Gino, on the Rocca, in the spirit of a district visitor. Philip, whose temper was returning, laughed.

"Harriet would say he has no sense of sin."

"Harriet may be right, I am afraid."

"If so, perhaps he isn't sinful!"

Miss Abbott was not one to encourage levity. "I know what he has done," she said. "What he says and what he thinks is of very little importance."

Philip smiled at her crudity. "I should like to hear, though, what he said about me. Is he preparing a warm reception?"

"Oh, no, not that. I never told him that you and Harriet were coming.

You could have taken him by surprise if you liked. He only asked for you, and wished he hadn't been so rude to you eighteen months ago."

"What a memory the fellow has for little things!" He turned away as he spoke, for he did not want her to see his face. It was suffused with pleasure. For an apology, which would have been intolerable eighteen months ago, was gracious and agreeable now.

She would not let this pa.s.s. "You did not think it a little thing at the time. You told me he had a.s.saulted you."

"I lost my temper," said Philip lightly. His vanity had been appeased, and he knew it. This tiny piece of civility had changed his mood. "Did he really--what exactly did he say?"

"He said he was sorry--pleasantly, as Italians do say such things. But he never mentioned the baby once."

What did the baby matter when the world was suddenly right way up?

Philip smiled, and was shocked at himself for smiling, and smiled again.

For romance had come back to Italy; there were no cads in her; she was beautiful, courteous, lovable, as of old. And Miss Abbott--she, too, was beautiful in her way, for all her gaucheness and conventionality.

She really cared about life, and tried to live it properly. And Harriet--even Harriet tried.

This admirable change in Philip proceeds from nothing admirable, and may therefore provoke the gibes of the cynical. But angels and other practical people will accept it reverently, and write it down as good.

"The view from the Rocca (small gratuity) is finest at sunset," he murmured, more to himself than to her.

"And he never mentioned the baby once," Miss Abbott repeated. But she had returned to the window, and again her finger pursued the delicate curves. He watched her in silence, and was more attracted to her than he had ever been before. She really was the strangest mixture.

"The view from the Rocca--wasn't it fine?"

"What isn't fine here?" she answered gently, and then added, "I wish I was Harriet," throwing an extraordinary meaning into the words.

"Because Harriet--?"

She would not go further, but he believed that she had paid homage to the complexity of life. For her, at all events, the expedition was neither easy nor jolly. Beauty, evil, charm, vulgarity, mystery--she also acknowledged this tangle, in spite of herself. And her voice thrilled him when she broke silence with "Mr. Herriton--come here--look at this!"

She removed a pile of plates from the Gothic window, and they leant out of it. Close opposite, wedged between mean houses, there rose up one of the great towers. It is your tower: you stretch a barricade between it and the hotel, and the traffic is blocked in a moment. Farther up, where the street empties out by the church, your connections, the Merli and the Capocchi, do likewise. They command the Piazza, you the Siena gate.

No one can move in either but he shall be instantly slain, either by bows or by crossbows, or by Greek fire. Beware, however, of the back bedroom windows. For they are menaced by the tower of the Aldobrandeschi, and before now arrows have stuck quivering over the washstand. Guard these windows well, lest there be a repet.i.tion of the events of February 1338, when the hotel was surprised from the rear, and your dearest friend--you could just make out that it was he--was thrown at you over the stairs.

"It reaches up to heaven," said Philip, "and down to the other place."

The summit of the tower was radiant in the sun, while its base was in shadow and pasted over with advertis.e.m.e.nts. "Is it to be a symbol of the town?"

She gave no hint that she understood him. But they remained together at the window because it was a little cooler and so pleasant. Philip found a certain grace and lightness in his companion which he had never noticed in England. She was appallingly narrow, but her consciousness of wider things gave to her narrowness a pathetic charm. He did not suspect that he was more graceful too. For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

Citizens came out for a little stroll before dinner. Some of them stood and gazed at the advertis.e.m.e.nts on the tower.

"Surely that isn't an opera-bill?" said Miss Abbott.

Philip put on his pince-nez. "'Lucia di Lammermoor. By the Master Donizetti. Unique representation. This evening.'