Her Roman Lover
Chapter I
In the Crimson Salon
Twilight was coming into the great Roman salon where a slender American girl sat alone. On both sides of her were more rooms, large and vaulted, built by the great prince of a bygone age for the reception of other princes and their friends: a powerful and gorgeously iniquitous company, whose names survive in history and still lend a glamour to the visiting lists of Roman ladies.
It was long since the rooms had been emptied of this company, and in recent years the apartment had fallen into the hands of people from a new world, who had made of it a beautiful thing, such as it had been in the past, and rented it to friends just arrived from the same new world, who found themselves as much awed as it was in their nature to be, by surroundings of such vastness and dignity.
The little American girl looked very small and slight as she sat there alone in the dim and spacious room, which was hung splendidly with crimson damask, the crimson of so many Roman rooms that has faded during a century or so till the shrill reds of it are become mellowed into hints of pink. Regal chairs, high-backed and deep-seated, covered with the same damask, stood about in the comfortable and informal angles dear to modern eyes. A large table of black oak held bowls of flowers, and a few almost priceless carvings of old ivory,—things that showed vaguely through the gathering dusk, like the pale oval of the girl’s face, and the silver-pale fairness of her hair.
She was sitting close to a faint gleam of firelight, and her eyes were turned toward the window, where trees whose leaves were yellowing in the frosts of early winter showed against the sky. She sat quite motionless, seeming to watch the trees, while in the room dusk grew and grew, shadows gathering thickest in the domed ceiling that hung so far above her, and flowing down till they possessed the chamber utterly, and the little American disappeared in a vast gloom.
A feminine voice, clear, decided, and definitely modern, called suddenly from a distance.
“Anne, where are you?”
“Here,” answered Anne, from the darkness.
“If I could only find a light!” The voice, complaining humorously, was nearer. “The butler has forgotten my orders again, which is not to be won-dered at, since he probably did not understand them. Ah!”
The room became visible suddenly as the speaker entered it and touched an electric button near the door. But the light was reticent: it left shadows and the dignity of things not wholly revealed. It also showed touches of modern life, small low tables holding glass bowls of flowers, a book or two carelessly left as though from recent reading, and a silver tea-set evidently prepared for immediate use.
The woman who had just entered was a large and energetic creature, whose strongly moulded and handsome features expressed decision and independence. Perfect health of both body and mind was her great charm, and it could be felt by the sensitive observer that her character was broad, positive, benign like the daylight, and, like the daylight, without dimness or mystery.
She was not many years older than her niece, whose face seemed not yet to have emerged wholly from the recently banished twilight. The girl’s features were moulded with a certain tenderness, as though by a hand that made her for response to life rather than endurance of it. It was evident that she would suffer quickly, and with an intensity possible only to those in whom nerves and imagin-ation are vital forces. The buoyancy of youth, combined with candidness and poise of mental vision, relieved her personality of a something unsubstantial which was felt by those who saw her in moods of silence.
“How long have you been here? and why did n’t you ring for tea?” asked the older woman.
“I don’t know,” answered Anne vaguely. She bent forward, patting her soft hair into shape as she examined the tea-urn. “The lamp is out,” she said, still vaguely.
“Of course it is. I should ring for the butler at once if I knew how to speak to him. Where are the matches? Thank you. Now at last we shall have something hot. That fire—” She looked scornfully at the tiny grate with its flickering logs, but placed herself before it. Her excellent circulation was not proof against what was to her the chill of Italian rooms, and she wore a small Shetland jacket over her silk waist. Anne had not yet removed the furs she had been walking in.
“I do not know how we are to keep warm when the winter really sets in,” continued her aunt. “There are only these absurd fireplaces in the whole apartment, and one or two dreadful things the Romans have the impudence to call ‘American stoves.’ Sometimes, Anne, I wonder if we have not undertaken more than we are equal to. We have now been here two weeks and I do not yet know how to pronounce my butler’s name. It seems impossible to call him Dionysius to his face.”
“I think it is Dioniseo,” said Anne, with a good Italian accent; “and oh, Aunt Margaret, he is such a beautiful, wonderful butler!”
Her aunt was unresponsive. “He is too wonderful,” she said, and, looking above her, she added, “What enormous wall-space! I wonder why they made the ceiling so very high above the floor.”
Margaret Garrison had little temperamental understanding of her niece, but in their own land they belonged among those people whose culture and comparative wealth are inherited possessions. Since their country had become a nation, generations of their grandfathers had stood for something in the statesmanship and scholarship of national life. Generations of their grandmothers had moved through the social world with stately consciousness of supremacy in it. They had not usually been very rich, for the men of that day had other occupations than money-making. The industrial furnace of modern American life had not yet been cast, and the “aristocracy of wealth” was unknown.
But however different in temperament, certain of their inherited ideals were identical, and they were both possessed of a seriousness of character which colored their view of life, and the sense of their relation to it. In the older woman this seriousness took the practical form of utilitarian works, in the girl it found expression in periods of thoughtfulness, and an occasional brooding which was not always a happy one.
Margaret Garrison had never been to Europe before, and now gave up her New England home for the winter because of her husband, who had suffered a dangerous breakdown from nervous strain on the stock exchange, and been ordered to cruise on a sailing vessel. One had been found bound for African ports, and expecting to arrive in the Mediterranean toward spring.
It was in expectation of this arrival, as well as in order to remain upon the same hemisphere with her husband, that Margaret had decided to spend the winter in Rome, and invite her niece to go with her.
Anne’s mother had died when she was a baby, and her father, an amiable and futile person, was quite willing that his daughter should fall into safe hands and leave him free to follow the golf ball through its seasonable migrations.
But now after two weeks of the experiment Mrs. Garrison stood shivering by an ineffective fire and wondering if she had made a mistake.
“What were you thinking about all alone in the dark?” she asked.
“I was thinking how wonderful it was to be in Rome, and trying to imagine that the spirits of all the wicked men and beautiful women who had walked through these rooms were crowding about me.”
“Then I think it is time you had your tea. Mrs. Wallace was here soon after you went out, and she told me things about Roman society which made me feel that I should not have brought a child like you into it. It might have been better to have presented no letters and kept ourselves busy with sight-seeing.”
“What did Mrs. Wallace tell you that was so dreadful about Roman society?” asked the girl.
“It seems—” Margaret hesitated before continuing; “it seems quite an immoral world.”
“We are not immoral,” said Anne. “No one could mistake us for that, and it will be fun to look on at the others who—may be! For my part, I love this dear, mysterious old world, and I don’t care how wicked it is.”
At this moment Dioniseo appeared noiselessly with a card on the silver plate.
“Who can it be?” wondered Anne, looking at it. “Gino Curatulo. Do you remember the name?”
“No, but then I cannot remember any of their names. Ask him if it is a gentleman.”
Dioniseo, who was indeed a beautiful butler with the smile of warm and radiant friendliness which belongs to so many Italian servants, replied, indeed, yes. All society knew Signor Curatulo; many a time had he, Dioniseo, served him at dinners, and taken special charge of his coat at evening receptions.
“I think he must be the Italian I talked with so long at the Von Liebnitzes’,” said Margaret, when Anne had translated. “He is very dark, very foreign, but seems nice, and is quite young, though he has been to Africa and knows some of the ports Tom is to visit. I asked him to call, which was quite wrong, they say, because in Rome the men one meets always leave their cards as a matter of course. I suppose he thought me an ignorant person, which is just what I am. Ask him to come in, and we will have some fresh tea. Ancora—thé,” she said, waving her hand toward the table and addressing Dioniseo, who smiled again, assuring the Signora that she would soon speak perfect Italian.
“I think I remember Curatulo,” said Anne. “He talked with you some time, and was pointed out to me as an explorer who no longer explores and a writer who no longer writes. It is strange that, being still young, he should have done so much and already stopped doing it.”
To the American women Gino Curatulo could not seem other than an extravagantly foreign figure as he presented himself before them. There was an exquisitely careful elaboration to his dress; he wore a boutonnière, and had a monocle suspended from his neck, his short mustache tipped gallantly upward, and as he bowed to the married woman he carried her hand to his lips. These things, added to an excessive swarthiness of skin and the slight accent of his otherwise excellent English, made him appear to Margaret an almost artificial figure. An Italian marquis in an American play would be “made up” in much the same way and seem no more improbable; but Margaret Garrison had never been to Europe before, nor conceived of other type of manliness than that represented by the comparatively large-boned and simply-dressed man of her own land, nor of other manners than his informal, undecorative courtesy.
Anne had traveled more. The Latin gentleman, as seen in the best hotels and restaurants, was not unknown to her, but she was conscious that never before had she conversed with so highly finished a product of the social world in which she was about to make her first adventure.
Neither aunt nor niece was aware with what penetrating curiosity his well-trained European eyes were looking upon them, nor could they have imagined that they seemed strange to him, as belonging to a type of American to which he was unaccustomed. Their simplicity and social unconsciousness, something of unworldliness and lack of coquetry in their dress,—Mrs. Garrison had not troubled to remove her Shetland jacket before his entrance,—were unusual, and seemed a little crude to the Italian, though refreshing to a vision inured as his was to the cultivation of charm, the attempt to attract, which, in greater or less degrees of subtlety, are evident in all the women of his world.
The features of Gino Curatulo were not insignificant, and though Anne could not have told in what part of the Italian’s face were evidences of a violent and uncontrolled life, she felt that such life was there, and to a degree that was lacking in her American friends; but where the aunt disliked such things as were different from those she had known, the niece delighted in them and was not displeased with the visitor as he bowed to her low and formally, giving her one swift glance from intelligent and expressive eyes.
Etiquette demanded that he should talk to the married woman, and he did so; though he looked frequently at the young girl who sat silently a little in the shadow. It was not usual for American girls to be silent and sit in the shadow, and Curatulo had known many Americans. He felt that she was watching him, but felt it without embarrassment, and talked quietly to her aunt in the almost perfect English spoken by so many Romans.
“You have here a charming apartment,” he said. “I do not know of another at once so beautiful, so dignified, and so like a home. There was no comfort in Roman rooms until Americans and English came to live among us.”
“Do you not complain that there are too many Americans among you?” asked Mrs. Garrison.
The Italian looked from one to the other of his hostesses with a slight and friendly smile. “Madame, you will find some here who are not—as yourselves.”
“I suppose you know them all?”
“All? No, madame, I am not so much sought after as that. Some—yes.”
“I have been hearing a great deal about your Roman world, American, English, and otherwise. Do you advise me to introduce this child to it?”
His eyes turned again to Anne, and lingered there as though wishing she would speak.
Anne smiled at him. “I am quite old,” she said.
His eyes still lingered upon her though he did not reply. He was thinking that never before had he seen hair so pale, or skin so fair.
“You find here a world—like any other,” he said, turning to the older woman.
“But there I cannot agree with you,” she answered decidedly. “All worlds are different, all worlds and all men. You, Mr. Curatulo— Do I pronounce it correctly?”
“Charmingly, madame.”
“You are different, very different from any one we have ever seen before.”
He laughed, a pleasant laugh that was slightly subdued. Anne remembered the pleasantness after he had gone; she also remembered that it had been subdued, and wondered whether life or courtesy had made it so.
“I shall hope to prove to you and Miss Warren before the end of the season that we are not strangers,” he said.
They spoke again of the waters and ports visited by the absent husband, and Curatulo seemed to know them all.
“I do not understand how, living in Rome so many years, you have still found time to travel so much,” said Margaret.
“When I was very young I was fond of joining exploring parties,” he explained simply. “And I have also seen some volunteer service in our African colonies. When my mother was ill I came home to be with her and—I have stayed.”
“They tell me,” said Margaret, “that you Latins care more for your mothers than do the men of my own race.”
“From what I have heard, madame, it seems to be true. Love of the mother is a cult with us Italians. I have friends who have given the devotion of their life to their mothers. She was their actual Romance, whom no sweetheart—no wife—could displace.”
“And when your mother was well again you did not go back?”
“I never went back—” A look of unmistakable and profound sadness came suddenly into his face, and he paused, looking into his tea-cup as though seeing through it into some unhappy memory.
“I should think that after a splendid free life such as you have known in Africa, you would often find this life, the fashionable life of a large city, very dull,” said Margaret.
“Who says that I do not find it often very dull,” he answered, and putting down his tea-cup he rose. “Madame, I have already stayed beyond the limit of time prescribed by good manners. Please forgive me.”
“Yes, if you will come again and stay just as long,” answered Margaret, with her frank and pleasant smile.
“I shall be happy if I may come often enough to persuade you that I am not a strange animal, but a man like others you have met,” he said; and though he answered Mrs. Garrison, his eyes as he spoke were upon Anne Warren.
The smile on his dark and recently sombre face was like an irradiation, and the life and warmth of it held an almost magnetic charm for the two Americans. He appeared to them a distinguished figure of mobile and expressive personality, lit by the flame of a great variety of feelings.
“How delightful he is,—in spite of being a foreigner,” exclaimed the older woman the moment her guest was out of hearing.
“Is not a foreigner a man?” asked Anne mockingly; “is he not warmed with heat, and chilled with cold? does he not hunger and thirst, as we do?”
Her face had lost its look of reverie, and was now alert with pleasure.
“I wonder,” she added, “ why he looked so unhappy when he spoke of staying in Rome after his mother’s illness. He was thinking of something or some one—I think it was some one—who was not his mother.”