CHAPTER XLIV
After dinner that evening Miss Allen came up to where Mr. Livingstone and Mr. Crittenden stood together near the window and said to them, "Would it interest you at all to go to the soirée at Donna Antonia's to-morrow? She has been kind enough to offer me some cards of invitation, and it occurred to me—if you haven't anything better to do that evening—?"
Livingstone carried one hand to his heart, the other to his brow, and professed inability to recover from the shock. "My dear young lady, it's inhuman to shatter my nerves with a bomb-shell like that without a word of warning! You know well enough I'd gladly give one of my ears for an invitation to Donna Antonia's. Why then the false modesty, as who should say, 'If you've nothing more interesting on hand just step up and let me make you a Duke, do!'"
Miss Allen acknowledged the facetious intention of this with a suitable laugh and looked at Neale. He said, "Oh, of course I shall be glad to go."
"That's good then. I shall hope to see both of you."
When she had turned away to another group in the salon Livingstone put his head on one side and smiled down at his cigarette. "That's what comes of a little judicious attention bestowed in the right direction," he informed Neale. "I've been getting up at the unearthly hour that girl takes her breakfast for a fortnight now. Quite a charmer, isn't she?—though nothing to her friend Miss Mills. It's Miss Mills I'm interested in. Just wait till you see that joint production of American cash and European civilization! M-m-m! Hair like gold thread, and scads of money in her own right." He added, seriously, "Miss Allen hasn't, you know—money, I mean, too bad, isn't it? Her father is only a salaried man—something or other for Paris for the something or other sewing-machine company. Oh, no, I believe it's mowing machines,—or maybe twist drills—anyhow one of those missionaries from our own little home-paradise of cogs and gears. But of course the fair Allaine may make a lot herself if she really does get on the concert stage. Still you never can tell. There's an awful lot of interior wire-pulling to be done, managers and musical critics and so on, before anybody really is allowed to get to the bacon in the concert business, and is she really anywhere near professional skill, who knows? However, a pretty girl always stands enough sight better show than a plain one; or than a man. If she uses those dark eyes of hers to good account I should think 'most any manager or music critic would fall for her. She has a good skin, too; quite pleasant, that clear olive, though of course it's awfully common here in Italy. Just the same, a dark woman never has the éclat of a blonde. Wait till you see Miss Mills."
Neale broke in on his flow to remark in a suffocated voice that he had letters to write, and disappeared.
The soirée was horrible to Neale, a nightmare, a jittering wall through which he could by no means break to reach her, over which he could scarcely see at an immense distance her slim figure, dressed in yellow, a thin gold fillet binding her smooth dark head. She was talking, smiling, animated, at ease; and after she had played, much acclaimed. There was nothing surprising about that, thought Neale, applauding with all his might. Heavens, how beautifully she made music, how beautifully, how intelligently, with such a clear, sure certainty of her own powers! Of course everybody there admired her, paid court to her, made her the center of one group after another—always except the group where he stood! He felt heart-sick to be so cut off from her. As a matter of fact he was not in the least literally cut off from her. She kept relentlessly introducing him to one person after another whom he did not wish to meet. She kept coming up to him every time he had succeeded in shaking off a tiresome companion and was standing alone at last in a corner, looking everywhere over the curled, powdered, bobbing, restless, grinning crowd to catch a glimpse of her. There she would be at his elbow, gliding up from nowhere. He restrained an impulse to snatch at her and hold her there, because each time she melted away after she had said, "Won't you let me take you to Donna Antonia Pierleoni," or "to Miss Mills," or "to Signer Ambrogi," or to somebody or other with whom it was necessary to talk and on whom it was necessary to try to keep those wandering, seeking eyes of his. He took them in with the top-layer of his consciousness, one after another of the people with whom he was forced to talk. Donna Antonia Pierleoni, a haughty, elderly Roman lady who was, as Neale said to himself, feeding her haughty Roman face as though she scorned and despised lemon ice but would eat it since it seemed to be her duty. It amused him greatly to observe that after finishing one she took another at once.
Miss Mills—oh, yes, this must be the girl Livingstone had been yarning about. Of course after praise from Livingstone it was to be expected that she'd look like a very high-priced wax image in a hair-dresser's window; and yet Neale's attention was caught for a moment by her pronunciation of a French phrase. Her inflection reminded him of Marise Allen's, and he hung about her for some time in the hope of hearing it again. Every time she repeated it, which she often did, he smiled down broadly on her. She was a pretty little thing. Livingstone was right. She was really quite an object of art, if that was what you called them.
Signer Ambrogi turned out to be in politics, an assistant Minister of Commerce or Industry or something. Why, he looked for all the world like a New York business man—might be old man Gates as he had been at forty-five. As they tried to talk to each other in French that was not very fluent on either side, Neale was reflecting that the Roman governing type had changed very little. This strongly-marked, clean-shaven, heavy-jowled head with its thick, hooked nose, bold eyes, hard mouth and wrinkled forehead, could be put without change in among the portraits of Roman Emperors.
They talked in their halting "lingua Franca" of business, of railroads, of the use of commercial fertilizers on Italian fields, of the conversion of water-power into electrical energy, and, finding Neale a good listener, the Italian told him about a power-plant in a volcanic region of Italy that ran its machinery by the steam escaping from the thin crust of earth over internal volcanic goings-on. For an instant Neale was quite stirred by this conception. It seemed a very neat idea, and it tickled him to have Italians turn such a traditionally American trick.
"Pretty good, pretty good!" he said applaudingly. "That's beating us at our own game."
"Pas si bête, en effet," said the other, well pleased by Neale's comment.
But this interlude was the only time when, even for a moment, Neale was delivered from his desolation at seeing her so far from his world, from any world he could possibly hope ever to make his own. That brilliant musician—how wonderful to be able to play the piano like that!—that beautiful young woman of the world, the center of this brilliant cosmopolitan crowd, friend of titled Roman ladies, and ministers—was it she whom he had followed in the street like any pushing, thick-skinned bumpkin, to whom he had poured out what he had never before breathed to any living being? What on earth could she think of him? For what kind of a flamboyant idiot did she take him? Well, the best thing to do—Great Scott, the only thing to do was to shut up and back out. As he walked home with Livingstone at midnight he had made up his mind to take the first train to Naples the next morning.
But he made no move whatever to do this, when the morning came. Dumb and stupid as a sheep, he made his way doggedly to the dining-room at the earliest hour, to see Miss Allen take her café-au-lait. As he went in at the door, he realized that his calculations were all wrong, that she had been up late the night before and would certainly sleep late that morning. But Livingstone had already seen him and hailed him. It was too late to go back and wait. He sat down, gloomily stirred the sugar into his coffee and listened to Livingstone fizz all over the place about the evening's entertainment which had uplifted him to exaltation. "You don't realize, Crittenden, what an opportunity that was to see exclusive Roman society, the kind that foreigners like us never meet, not the flashy, big-hotel, off-color crowd. Why, I was introduced to name after name that sounded like a page out of Roman history."
Neale thought with a passing grim irony that Livingstone's phrase was accurately turned—"introduced to names"—yea, verily. Well, names were what Livingstone was after.
"Oh, you up already, Miss Allen," said Livingstone, springing to seat her with an agility for which Neale hated him. He himself sat like a lump, incapable because of the sudden rush of blood to his head, of anything but nodding a silent answer to her greeting.
Livingstone needed no help in keeping up the conversation. He flowed on, delightedly passing in review every detail of the evening of which he had not missed a single one, apparently, from the way Donna Antonia's maid did her hair to the dandruff on the coat-collar of the old Visconti. "Of course I know he's a great musician and all that, but really if you will let your hair grow so long, you ought to have a pocket clothes-brush and use it, oughtn't you? Why don't you do it for him. Miss Allen? Every one says he is absolutely gone on you, that you could do anything with him!" He passed from this without transition to Miss Mills' toilette which had been, so it seemed, a veritable triumph.
"Yes, yes, wasn't it beautiful! Eugenia's clothes are simply wonderful." Miss Allen broke in to say enthusiastically, "She has the most never-failing taste."
"A never-failing pocket-book," corrected Livingstone. "You don't get far with mere taste dans ce bas monde."
Miss Allen finished her coffee, and, setting down her cup, remarked, "You two Americans seem to have made a most agreeable impression last evening. Donna Antonia called me back to say that Signor Ambrogi would be glad to see more of you. She wished me to ask you both if you couldn't come to have tea with her and with Signor Ambrogi this afternoon at five."
Livingstone fell back in his chair, dramatically. "The long struggle is over, Crittenden. Our fortunes are made!" he cried with his usual facetiousness, but by the expression on his face he was really moved and dazzled. "Kindly convey to Donna Antonia Pierleoni the assurance of our condescending regards and say that if we can spare the time from the press of other more important duties …"
Neale said plainly and bluntly, "I'm afraid I'd better excuse myself. I have a previous engagement."
The other two turned on him with faces of astonishment. "You're not going?" cried Livingstone, appalled.
"Why should I break an engagement?" said Neale.
"Why should you?" Livingstone gaped at him. "Only the trifling, insignificant reason that Donna Antonia is one of the greatest grandes dames in Rome, and Ambrogi one of the coming men in the government."
"Has that anything to do with me?" Neale asked with the sincerest incapacity to imagine any reason why it should. He was stricken with anticipatory boredom at the idea of having to make talk again with that disagreeable old woman.
Livingstone wondered if Crittenden had really understood from whom the invitation came. "Don't you remember meeting her? The one with the wonderfully high-bred type?"
"Oh, I remember her all right, the old lady with the predatory sharpness of beak and claw that's called aristocratic," said Neale, trying to get a rise out of Livingstone. That was usually easy enough, but he was now too genuinely concerned to defend his standards. "Now, Crittenden," he said, laying down his napkin and speaking from his heart, "to seem not to wish to continue the acquaintance of a lady who makes a civil advance—it simply isn't done!"
"Oh, go on!" said Neale, laughing at the idea. "Much she'd care what an impecunious American in a pension does or doesn't do!"
Livingstone had recovered himself enough to reflect that Neale's refusal would not at all•hinder his own acceptance—in fact, on the contrary—"Well, well, no matter," he said with a change of manner, "perhaps you're right. Without a knowledge of the language, conversation in a small group is rather—Five o'clock, did you say, Miss Allen?"
"Yes, five," she answered. She went on, with a manner suddenly gay, "Perceive the difference in human fate. At five you will be taking tea with personages, and I shall be scurrying to take a belated music lesson."
"Why at that hour?" inquired Livingstone.
"I've put it off to help Eugenia get settled here. For she's coming over, bag and baggage, Joséphine and Mlle. Tollet, to live with us for a while. Isn't that jolly?"
Livingstone was visibly affected. He flushed a little, and cleared his throat before he asked with a careful reassumption of his usual airy manner, "Might I perhaps, if it is not indiscreet to ask, be permitted to breathe out upon the air a request to be informed what possible reason any one can have for leaving the golden bath-tubs (if I may so express myself) of the Grand Hotel, and sojourning at the respectable but hardly luxurious Pensione Oldham?"
"That's what I asked her last night when she told me. But it seems she's just tired of gilded bath-tubs (if I may borrow the expression) and wants a change."
"I might say without exaggeration that she would be reasonably sure of getting it," surmised Livingstone, looking around him.
Neale could think of nothing to add to the conversation. You never could get a word in edgeways when Livingstone was in the room, anyhow. His mind was full of something else too. "A music lesson at five." The name Visconti was as apt to be in the directory as Pierleoni had been.
At five he saw her go into the little gate in the wall from which during the next hour he did not take his eyes. He stood in the doorway of an apartment house across the street, and when the portiere came out responsibly to ask whom he wished to see, Neale told him in English, seriously with a long breath, "The girl I've lost my head over." As he accompanied this unintelligible information with a large tip, as his clothes were respectable, as he was evidently a foreigner, and had moreover a rather strange spark of excitement in his eyes, the portiere pocketed the tip, looked with respect at Neale's powerful proportions, and went discreetly back to his own affairs.
When she came out at six Neale was struck speechless. He had spent the entire hour thinking how she looked, remembering every detail of her beauty. And yet it was as though he saw for the first time that noble carriage of her head and shoulders, that heart-taking curve of her long fine brows, the smooth pale oval of her face, the touching wistfulness, the seeking look in her dark eyes. That was before she saw him. When he came up to her she broke at once into a laugh, her face sparkling and merry, a delicate malice in the mobile lines of her red lips.
"Oh, Mr. Crittenden, I've been wanting to see you! To share a joke with you! Such a joke! That invitation to tea, you know. You see, you were really the one Signor Ambrogi wants to see, you were the only one Donna Antonia spoke of. But I knew it would hurt Mr. Livingstone so, if he were left out. I made her understand that. So she said, 'Oh, well, if you insist, he can come too.' It's rather—don't you think, it is?—rather a joke?" She began to laugh again. "Don't you see it, the scene when he walks in alone—the good Livingstone in his best clothes,so happy and so important, with his best brand of European conversation in the show-window—a comparison most likely of Caravaggio's theory of treating wall spaces with Correggio's. And what Ambrogi wants to discuss is American railroad terminal facilities! Ambrogi is a man of the people. He's made his own way up from the bottom. He has probably never heard of Correggio in his life. And doesn't see why he should," she finished with a peal of laughter.
Neale laughed, but he did not find it as comic as she. "I'd no idea of all that," he said uncomfortably. "Perhaps I ought to have gone. It rather looks like putting poor old Livingstone in a hole."
"Oh, no; oh, no," she reassured him. "They'll be good to him. They may look at each other once or twice. But nothing more. He'll never know. He doesn't, Mr. Livingstone—often he doesn't know."
"Not much, that's a fact," agreed Neale, reflecting that he did not seem to either.
She asked him suddenly, "But really why didn't you accept?"
"Do you want to know?" he asked warningly.
"Yes, I really wonder."
"Simplest reason in the world. I didn't like Donna Antonia Pierleoni very well. She seemed to me like a bad-tempered, stupid old lady, mightily full of her own importance. Why under the sun should I go and have tea with such a person?"
"Eh bien …!" she breathed out a long, soft ejaculation of surprise, looking at him very queerly.
"You're thinking I'm very rude to say such a thing about a friend of yours," he said, hanging his head.
"I'm thinking no such thing at all," she contradicted him. "I don't believe you could imagine what I'm thinking."
"You never said a truer thing," Neale admitted ruefully.
"Well, I'll tell you," she said, "though it couldn't be interesting to anybody but me. I was thinking that I had never heard anybody before who spoke the truth right out about somebody who had wealth and position."
"You mustn't blame me for it!" Neale excused himself. "I'm a regular outsider on all that sort of thing—you remember the Sioux Indian in the eighteenth century who was taken to see the court at Versailles? How he strolled around in his blanket and couldn't make out what all the bowing and scraping was about? Well, he and I are about on a level of blank ignorance of social distinctions."
"But you don't wish to know," the girl divined, "you don't care if you are an outsider. Why, I believe," she said with a little burst of astonishment, "I believe you'd rather be an outsider."
He looked apologetic. "That's part of my dumbness, don't you see? I just can't conceive why anybody should bother his head about it. I tell you," he hit on the right phrase of explanation, "I just don't know any better."
"Would you learn?" she pressed him more closely.
"Not if I could run faster than the person who was trying to teach me!" he confessed helplessly.
The girl broke into another laugh. There never was anybody who laughed like that, with her lips, and her gleaming, dancing eyes, and her eyebrows—even her hands had a droll little gesture of delightedly giving him up. What in the world had ever made him imagine that her expression was pensive or her eyes wistful?
"Do you mind?" he asked, rather uncertain what she was laughing at, and hoping it was not at him.
"Oh, I like it!" she told him, heartily. "But it's the very first time I ever ran into it. It makes me laugh, it's so unexpected."
"Well, it has its disadvantages," he broke in, seeing an opening to say something that had been on his conscience for two days. "It makes you do all sorts of unusual and unconventional things without meaning to at all. Like my talking to you yesterday morning, for instance, in the corridor of the pension, when I hadn't been introduced to you."
She stopped laughing, her face all blank with surprise. "Why, that was not unconventional! People at the same pension never wait for introductions. And anyhow I'm not a jeune fille du monde. I'm just a music-student. If you only knew how some people try to take advantage of that! Why, what in the world made you think it was not all right?"
"Well, when you didn't say anything about it at the breakfast table, when Miss Oldham introduced us, the way you looked as though you'd never seen me before. I thought you—I thought I—well, why didn't you mention we'd just been talking?"
"Oh—" She remembered the incident. "Why didn't I? Why should I? You always hide what you don't have to tell, don't you?"
Neale pondered this negligent axiom for a time, and then said hesitatingly, "But if the servants happened to mention it?"
"Oh," she explained quickly, as if mentioning something that went without saying, "oh, of course I told the servants not to speak of it."
"You did!" He felt that he was looking through what he had always thought was the opaque surface of things, and seeing a great deal more going on there than he had dreamed. "But can you count on them?"
She continued to be as surprised at his surprise as he at the whole manœuver. "Oh, of course you can never count on servants unless there's something in it for them. I gave them a little tip apiece."
"You did!" He could only stupidly repeat his exclamation. "What did they say?"
"Why, they found it perfectly natural. They won't mention it—not of course unless somebody else tips them more, and I don't see why anybody should, do you?"
Neale stood looking at her, a little consternation mingling with his astonishment. This was what it was to have been brought up in what people called a civilized way, this smooth mastery of concealment … how easy it had been for her, at the breakfast table yesterday, not to give the faintest hint she had just been talking animatedly with him; and this morning not the faintest hint to Livingstone that she was laughing at his expense. Why, that lovely face was just like a mask. You hadn't the least idea what was going on behind it.
There was a silence. She was looking up at him with a new expression, almost timidly. "You don't like my hiding things?" she asked him, coming to a stop. They were near the pension now, standing in the twilight on a deserted street.
He aroused himself to shrug his shoulders and answer evasively, "Oh, it's not in the least any business of mine."
"But you don't like it?" she insisted, looking straight at him with the deadly soft gaze that always made him lose his head entirely. "It's of no consequence—none," he murmured. But she still looked at him. He tried to think of some other evasive answer, but in the confusion of his mind he could not think at all. And he must say something. With alarm, with horror, he heard himself saying baldly, as he would to a man, to an intimate, the literal truth, "Well, no, not so very well, if you really want to know."
It was as though he had seen himself swinging an ax at an angle that would bring the edge deep into his own flesh. He felt it cut deep and bleed. He dared not look at her. He wished to God he had gone on straight to Naples.
Somehow he was looking at her. Her face was deeply flushed. She looked as though he had struck her in the face. Well, now it was certainly all over. He might as well turn around and walk away and never look at her again.
He said blunderingly, in a trembling voice, "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to say that. It's no business of mine. I'm awfully ashamed of myself. Please forget it. What do you care what I think? I'm nobody, nobody at all."
"Why did you say that?" she asked him in a low voice, with a driving intensity of accent, as though more than anything else she must have an answer from him.
"Well, you asked me," he said in abject misery, aware of the hideous, flat futility of such an answer. If only he were an expansive Italian now, he could think of some way openly to abase himself, instead of standing there callously and dully. "Oh, please don't think or it again," he implored her, wishing he could get down on his knees to beg her pardon.
She drew a long breath and put her hand to her heart. "It's the first time anybody ever told the truth to me, you see," she said faintly, with a strange accent. "I … I'll like it … I think … when I can get my breath."
To his amazement he saw that she was trying bravely to smile at him.
To his greater amazement he snatched up both her hands and carried them roughly and passionately to his lips.