Dorothy, and Other Italian Stories

"How in the world do you happen to be in Florence at this time of year?" she said, cordially, giving him her hand. "There isn't a soul in the place."

"That is the reason I came."

"And the reason we did, too," she said, laughing. "I am delighted to have met you; one soul is very acceptable. You must come and see me immediately. I hope you are going to stay."

"Thanks; you are very kind. But I leave to-morrow morning."

"Then you must come to-night; come to dinner at seven. It is impossible you should have another engagement when there is no one to be engaged to – unless it be the pictures; I believe they do not go away for the summer."

"I really have an engagement, Miss Harrison; you are very kind, but I am forced to decline."

"Dismiss your carriage, then, and drive back with me; I will set you down at your hotel. It will be a visit of some sort."

He obeyed. Miss Harrison's fine horses started, and moved with slow stateliness down the winding road, where the beggars had not yet begun to congregate; it was not "the season" for beggars; they were still at the sea-shore.

Miss Harrison talked on various subjects. They had been in Switzerland, and it had rained continuously; they had seen nothing but fog. They had come over the St. Gothard, and their carriage had broken down. They had been in Venice, and had found malaria there. They had been in Padua, Verona, and Bologna, and all three had become frightfully modern and iconoclastic. Nothing was in the least satisfactory, and Margaret had not been well; she was quite anxious about her.

Mr. Morgan "hoped" that it was nothing serious.

"I don't know whether it is or not," replied Miss Harrison. "Margaret is rather a serious sort of a person, I think."

She looked at him as if for confirmation, but he did not pursue the subject. Instead, he asked after her own health.

"Oh, I am as usual. It is only your real invalids who are always well; they enjoy their poor health, you know. And what have you been doing since I last saw you? I hope nothing out of the way. Let me see – Trieste and Tarascon; you have probably been in – Transylvania?"

"That would be somewhat out of the way, wouldn't it? But I have not been there; I have been in various nearer places, engaged rather systematically in amusing myself."

"Did you succeed? If you did you are a man of genius. One must have a rare genius, I think, to amuse one's self in that way at forty. Of course I mean thirty-five, you know; but forty is a better conversational word – it classifies. And you were amused?"

"Immensely."

"So much so that you have to come to Florence in September to rest after it!"

"Yes."

Miss Harrison talked on. He listened, and made the necessary replies. The carriage entered the city, crossed the Carraja bridge, and turned towards his hotel.

"Can you not come for half an hour this evening, after your engagement is over?" she said. "I shall be all alone, for Margaret cannot be there before midnight; she went into the country this morning with Madame Ferri – some sort of a fête at a villa, a native Florentine affair. You have not asked much about her, I think, considering how constantly you were with her last spring," she added, looking at him calmly.

"I have been remiss; pardon it."

"It is only forgetfulness, of course. That is not a fault nowadays; it is a virtue, and, what is more, highly fashionable. But there is one little piece of news I must tell you about my niece: she is going to be married."

"That is not little; it is great. Please present to her my sincere good wishes and congratulations."

"I am sorry you cannot present them yourself. But at least you can come and see me for a little while this evening – say about ten. The grandson of your grandfather should be very civil to old Ruth Harrison for old times' sake." Here the carriage stopped at his door. "Remember, I shall expect you," she said, as he took leave.

At about the hour she had named he went to see her; he found her alone, knitting. It was one of her idiosyncrasies to knit stockings "for the poor." No doubt there were "poor" enough to wear them; but as she made a great many, and as they were always of children's size and black, her friends sometimes thought, with a kind of amused dismay, of the regiment of little funereal legs running about for which she was responsible.

He had nothing especial to say; his intention was to remain the shortest time possible; he could see the hands of the clock, and he noted their progress every now and then through the twenty minutes he had set for himself.

Miss Harrison talked on various subjects, but said nothing more concerning her niece; nor did he, on his side, ask a question. After a while she came to fashions in art. "It is the most curious thing," she said, "how people obediently follow each other along a particular road, like a flock of sheep, no matter what roads, equally good and possibly better, open to the right and the left. Now there are the wonderfully spirited frescos of Masaccio at the Carmine, frescos which were studied and copied by Raphael himself and Michael Angelo. Yet that church has no vogue; it is not fashionable to go there; Ruskin has not written a maroon-colored pamphlet about it, and Baedeker gives it but a scant quarter-page, while the other churches have three and four. Now it seems to me that – "

But what it seemed Morgan never knew, because here she paused as the door opened. "Ah, there is Margaret, after all," she said. "I did not expect her for three hours."

Miss Stowe came across the large room, throwing back her white shawl and taking off her little plumed hat as she came. She did not perceive that any one was present save her aunt; the light was not bright, and the visitor sat in the shadow.

"It was very stupid," she said. "Do not urge me to go again." And then she saw him.

He rose, and bowed. After an instant's delay she spoke his name, and put out her hand, which he took as formally as she gave it. Miss Harrison was voluble. She was "so pleased" that Margaret had returned earlier than was expected; she was "so pleased" that the visitor happened to be still there. She seemed indeed to be pleased with everything, and talked for them both; in truth, save for replies to her questions, they were quite silent. The visitor remained but a short quarter of an hour, and then took leave, saying good-bye at the same time, since he was to go early in the morning.

"To Trent?" said Miss Harrison.

"To Tadmor, I think, this time," he answered, smiling.

The next morning opened with a dull gray rain. Morgan was late in rising, missed his train, and was obliged to wait until the afternoon. About eleven he went out, under an umbrella, and, after a while, tired of the constant signals and clattering followings of the hackmen, who could not comprehend why a rich foreigner should walk, he went into the Duomo. The vast church, never light even on a bright day, was now sombre, almost dark, the few little twinkling tapers, like stars, on an altar at the upper end, only serving to make the darkness more visible. He walked down to the closed western entrance, across whose wall outside rises slowly, day by day, the new façade under its straw-work screen. Here he stood still, looking up the dim expanse, with the dusky shadows, like great winged, formless ghosts, hovering over him.

One of the south doors, the one near the choir, was open, and through it a slender ray of gray daylight came in, and tried to cross the floor. But its courage soon failed in that breadth and gloom, and it died away before it had gone ten feet. A blind beggar sat in a chair at this entrance, his patient face faintly outlined against the ray; there seemed to be no one else in the church save the sacristan, whose form could be dimly seen moving about, renewing the lights burning before the far-off chapels.

The solitary visitor strolled back and forth in the shadow. After a while he noted a figure entering through the ray. It was that of a woman; it had not the outlines of the usual church beggar; it did not stoop or cringe; it was erect and slender, and stepped lightly; it was coming down towards the western end, where he was pacing to and fro. He stopped and stood still, watching it. It continued to approach – and at last brushed against him. Coming in from the daylight, it could see nothing in the heavy shadow.

"Excuse me, Miss Stowe," he said; "I should have spoken. My eyes are accustomed to this light, and I recognized you; but of course you could not see me."

She had started back as she touched him; now she moved away still farther.

"It is grandly solitary here on a rainy day, isn't it?" he continued. "I used often to come here during a storm. It makes one feel as if already disembodied – as if he were a shade, wandering on the gray, unknown outskirts of another world."

She had now recovered herself, and, turning, began to walk back towards the ray at the upper door. He accompanied her. But the Duomo is vast, and cannot be crossed in a minute. He went on talking about the shadows; then stopped.

"I am glad of this opportunity to give you my good wishes, Miss Stowe," he said, as they went onward. "I hope you will be quite happy."

"I hope the same, certainly," she answered. "Yet I fail to see any especially new reason for good wishes from you just at present."

"Ah, you do not know that I know. But Miss Harrison told me yesterday – told me that you were soon to be married. If you have never forgiven me, in the light of your present happiness I think you should do so now."

She had stopped. "My aunt told you?" she said, while he was still speaking. But now, as he paused, she walked on. He could not see her face; although approaching the ray, they were still in the shadow, and her head was turned from him.

"As to forgiveness, it is I who should ask forgiveness from you," she said, after some delay, during which there was no sound but their footsteps on the mosaic pavement.

"Yes, you were very harsh. But I forgave you long ago. I was a dolt, and deserved your sharp words. But I want very much to hear you say that you forgive me."

"There is nothing to forgive."

"That is gently spoken. It is your marriage present to me, and I feel the better for it."

A minute later they had reached the ray and the door. He could see her face now. "How ill you look!" he said, involuntarily. "I noticed it last evening. It is not conventional to say so, but it is at least a real regret. He should take better care of you."

The blind beggar, hearing their footsteps, had put out his hand. "Do not go yet," said Morgan, giving him a franc. "See how it is raining outside. Walk with me once around the whole interior for the sake of the pleasant part of our Florentine days – for there was a pleasant part; it will be our last walk together."

She assented silently, and they turned into the shadow again.

"I am going to make a confession," he said, as they passed the choir; "it can make no difference now, and I prefer that you should know it. I did not realize it myself at the time, but I see now – that is, I have discovered since yesterday – that I was in love with you, more or less, from the beginning."

She made no answer, and they passed under Michael Angelo's grand, unfinished statue, and came around on the other side.

"Of course I was fascinated with Beatrice; in one way I was her slave. Still, when I said to you, 'Forgive me; I am in love with some one else,' I really think it was more to see what you would say or do than any feeling of loyalty to her."

Again she said nothing. They went down the north aisle.

"I wish you would tell me," he said, leaving the subject of himself and turning to her, "that you are fully and really happy in this marriage of yours. I hope you are, with all my heart; but I should like to hear it from your own lips."

She made a gesture as if of refusal; but he went on. "Of course I know I have no right; I ask it as a favor."

They were now in deep obscurity, almost darkness; but something seemed to tell him that she was suffering.

"You are not going to do that wretched thing – marry without love?" he said, stopping abruptly. "Do not, Margaret, do not! I know you better than you know yourself, and you will not be able to bear it. Some women can; but you could not. You have too deep feelings – too – "

He did not finish the sentence, for she had turned from him suddenly, and was walking across the dusky space in the centre of the great temple whose foundations were so grandly laid six centuries ago.

But he followed her and stopped her, almost by force, taking both her hands in his. "You must not do this," he said; "you must not marry in that way. It is dangerous; it is horrible; for you, it is a crime." Then, as he stood close to her and saw two tears well over and drop from her averted eyes, "Margaret! Margaret!" he said, "rather than that, it would have been better to have married even me."

She drew her hands from his, and covered her face; she was weeping.

"Is it too late?" he whispered. "Is there a possibility – I love you very deeply," he added. And, cold and indifferent as Florence considered him, his voice was broken.

When they came round to the ray again, he gave the blind beggar all the small change he had about him; the old man thought it was a paper golconda.

"You owe me another circuit," he said; "you did not speak through fully half of the last one."

So they went around a second time.

"Tell me when you first began to think about me," he said, as they passed the choir. "Was it when you read that letter?"

"It was an absurd letter."

"On the contrary, it was a very good one, and you know it. You have kept it?"

"No; I burned it long ago."

"Not so very long! However, never fear; I will write you plenty more, and even better ones. I will go away on purpose."

They crossed the east end, under the great dome, and came around on the other side.

"You said some bitter things to me in that old amphitheatre, Margaret; I shall always hate the place. But after all – for a person who was quite indifferent – were you not just a little too angry?"

"It is easy to say that now," she answered.

They went down the north aisle.

"Why did you stop and leave the room so abruptly when you were singing that song I asked for – you know, the 'Semper Fidelis?'"

"My voice failed."

"No; it was your courage. You knew then that you were no longer 'fidelis' to that former love of yours, and you were frightened by the discovery."

They reached the dark south end.

"And now, as to that former love," he said, pausing. "I will never ask you again; but here and now, Margaret, tell me what it was."

"It was not 'a fascination' – like yours," she answered.

"Do not be impertinent, especially in a church. Mrs. Lovell was not my only fascination, I beg to assure you; remember, I am thirty-six years old. But now – what was it?"

"A mistake."

"Good; but I want more."

"It was a will-o'-the-wisp that I thought was real."

"Better; but not enough."

"You ask too much, I think."

"I shall always ask it; I am horribly selfish; I warn you beforehand that I expect everything, in the most relentless way."

"Well, then, it was a fancy, Trafford, that I mistook for – " And the Duomo alone knows how the sentence was ended.

As they passed, for the third time, on their way towards the door, the mural tablet to Giotto, Morgan paused. "I have a sort of feeling that I owe it to the old fellow," he said. "I have always been his faithful disciple, and now he has rewarded me with a benediction. On the next high-festival his tablet shall be wreathed with the reddest of roses and a thick bank of heliotrope, as an acknowledgment of my gratitude."

It was; and no one ever knew why. If it had been in "the season," the inquiring tourists would have been rendered distracted by the impossibility of finding out; but to the native Florentines attending mass at the cathedral, to whom the Latin inscription, "I am he through whom the lost Art of Painting was revived," remains a blank, it was only a tribute to some "departed friend."

"And he is as much my friend as though he had not departed something over five centuries ago," said Trafford; "of that I feel convinced."

"I wonder if he knows any better, now, how to paint an angel leaning from the sky," replied Margaret.

"Have you any idea why Miss Harrison invented that enormous fiction about you?" he said, as they drove homeward.

"Not the least. We must ask her."

They found her in her easy-chair, beginning a new stocking. "I thought you were in Tadmor," she said, as Trafford came in.

"I started; but came back to ask a question. Why did you tell me that this young lady was going to be married?"

"Well, isn't she?" said Miss Harrison, laughing. "Sit down, you two, and confess your folly. Margaret has been ill all summer with absolute pining – yes, you have, child, and it is a woman's place to be humble. And you, Trafford, did not look especially jubilant, either, for a man who has been immensely amused during the same space of time. I did what I could for you by inventing a sort of neutral ground upon which you could meet and speak. It is very neutral for the other man, you know, when the girl is going to be married; he can speak to her then as well as not! I was afraid last night that you were not going to take advantage of my invention; but I see that it has succeeded (in some mysterious way out in all this rain) better than I knew. It was, I think," she concluded, as she commenced on a new needle, "a sort of experiment of mine – a Florentine experiment."

Trafford burst into a tremendous laugh, in which, after a moment, Margaret joined.

"I don't know what you two are laughing at," said Miss Harrison, surveying them. "I should think you ought to be more sentimental, you know."

"To confess all the truth, Aunt Ruth," said Trafford, going across and sitting down beside her, "Margaret and I have tried one or two of those experiments already!"

A WAITRESS

AS the evening was delightful, their coffee was served in the garden. Modesta brought out a low table and a tray; then, returning to the kitchen, she came forth again with the coffee-pot, fresh from the fire, and filled the two cups, one for Dennison, the other for his guest, Edward Gray. The coffee was fragrant, very hot, very black. John Dennison never took at night more than this one small cupful; but it was necessary that the quality of the drops within should be of the purest, and Peppino, the cook, knew that he must not fail. The dinner which had preceded the coffee had been excellent.

"Well, Jack, you live well!" Gray had remarked, after he had spent two days with his former school-fellow.

"Yes, good cooking has become a sine qua non with me," Dennison answered. "I don't take much, but it must be just so; I can't put up with even a trifling deficiency. I give Peppino very high wages for this economical land; but, on my side, I require of him unfailingly his very best skill. I am afraid," he added, with a quizzical smile, "that I couldn't get through my day and cultivate lofty thoughts if I did not feel certain that at the end of it there would be a capital little dinner waiting on the table. Physical comfort has become enormously important to me. Result: I'm corpulent!"

"Oh no," said Gray.

"Well on the way to it, then. Do you remember how lean I used to be?"

"You look in much better trim than you did when – "

"When I was young. You needn't hesitate about saying it; we're in the same box in that respect. How old do we call ourselves now?"

"We're fifty-two," answered Gray. "But I to-day look fifty-eight or nine, and you about forty. To me, Jack, it's marvellous – your youth."

"Yes, I'm plump. I no longer worry; I take life easily. But it's such an immense change in every way that I've stopped watching it myself. Why, I remember when I liked pictures that tell a story, good heavens! and books with a moral, and iron-fronted blocks, and plenty of gaslight."

"Well, it's awfully tempting," said Gray, slowly, as he looked about him.

"Plenty of gaslight?"

"No; this place – the whole thing."

They were sitting at one end of a flower-bordered walk which leads to a terrace with a parapet; from here opens out a panorama of the velvety hills of Tuscany, with a crowd of serried mountain-peaks rising behind them; below, in the narrow valley of a winding stream, is the small mediæval town of Tre Ponti, or Three Bridges. The garden retains a distinctly monastic air, though its last monk took leave of it several hundred years ago; here are no statues of goddesses and muses, so common in Italy; instead there are two worn stone crosses, with illegible Latin inscriptions at their bases. An arcade along one side is paved with flag-stones, and has the air of a cloister; at its end is a fresco representing a monk with his finger on his lips, as if inculcating silence; the face is dim, all save the eyes, but these have a strange vitality, and appear to follow the gazer with intelligence as he turns away. There are two ancient sundials, and there is a relic which excites curiosity – a flight of stone steps attached to a high boundary wall; the steps go up for a distance of eight or nine feet, and then stop, leading to nothing. On the north and west, where it stretches to the verge of the hill, the garden is open, defended only by its parapet. Across its south edge it is shut in by the irregular stone house called Casa Colombina. On the east there is the boundary wall already mentioned, and above this wall there rises outside, not fifteen yards away, a massive square battlemented tower, one hundred and thirty feet high, named Torre Colombina, or Tower of the Dove. This tower is now occupied only by owls, and travellers suppose vaguely that it belongs in some way to the little church of Santa Lucia, which nestles at its feet; they even fancy that it is the campanile for Santa Lucia's bells. But the great stone Tower of the Dove dates from the thirteenth century, and although Santa Lucia cannot be called young, her two hundred and fifty years are nothing to the greater antiquity of her ponderous, overshadowing neighbor. Santa Lucia's bells, indeed, would be lost in the Tower of the Dove. The saint has but three, each twelve inches in length, and the miniature peal is suspended in a belfry about as large as a pigeon-house which perches on the roof of her own small temple – a yellow sanctuary adorned with a flat pointed façade which looks (it is a characteristic of many church façades in Italy) as if it would come up and off if pulled strongly at the top, like the front of a box or the slide of a lantern.

Edward Gray's compliment had drawn from Dennison a disparaging "Oh, it's all dilapidated, forlorn – "

"Spare your adjectives," responded the other man. "They're pure hypocrisy. You needn't pretend you don't like it!"

"Of course I don't pretend. Haven't I lived here for nearly twenty years because I do like it? That tells the story."

"Though my occupation at home is the making of boiler-plate," Gray continued, pursuing the current of his own thoughts, "and though I couldn't and wouldn't live here as you do, giving up your own country (the greatest country in the world), yet don't imagine, Jack, that I can't take it in!"

He had risen while speaking. Now he went down to the parapet and stood looking at the view. Each mountain-peak was bathed in the light of sunset; all was softly fair – the ineffable loveliness of Italy. He came back. "It's probable that I take it in more than you do," he went on.

"Oh yes, of course; new-comers always think so. They think that we don't comprehend either the country or the people because we take them calmly. They believe that they themselves show far more discrimination in only coming now and then. For in that way they preserve their power of appreciating; they don't grow dull-eyed and stupid as we do."

"Exactly. That's just what I think," answered Gray. "What do you suppose those stairs were for?" he added, as he sat down again beside the table and lighted a cigarette.

"Probably they led to a small out-door pulpit which has fallen down. The whole top of this hill was covered by a monastery – a fortified place, I believe, with four towers. Only one of the towers remains, and nothing above ground of all the other buildings but that piece of high wall; I dare say there are plenty of substructures and vaults below. But though the monastery has gone, this old garden of the monks remains very much as it was, I fancy."