Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 2/Chapter 10
ARTURO complained of this gently as they stood in the cloister for a few moments at parting, upon their return. Twilight had fallen, the air was still; the only sound they heard, except a gurgle of water in the pink marble fountain, was a lonely melody played upon a reed pipe far away and high above them, on a cliffside rising behind the narrow town. It was the Pastorale; and Arturo's sigh was as wistful as the tune.
"You were so kind last night," he said. "It was heaven for me, even before you sang. To-day you drop me over the precipice again. I never can know what I do to displease you."
"Nothing at all, Arturo."
"Then why do you treat me so?"
"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "It seems to me I treat you pretty well. You saw how I snubbed that poor little Giuseppe Bastoni, merely because you were waiting to speak to me. I thought he made it pretty plain that he was offended, and of course that's the end of me for both him and his brother. Well, I did that for you, didn't I?"
"But if you did, you seem to resent that you did it," Arturo said. "You have found some fault with everything I have said. If I say, 'It is fine weather,' you say, 'It is bad weather'! When I ask why you believe so, you begin to whistle and you whistle for half an hour!"
"Then don't ask me why I believe it's bad weather. That's simple, isn't it?"
"Ah!" he said. "The sun could be so bright if you would let it! Why can't I please you a little?"
Claire looked at him seriously. "You do."
"I can't think so to-day. Yesterday I could. It is an eternal up-and-down!"
"No," she said. "I like you as well to-day as I did yesterday. I'm always pleased with you, Arturo."
"Is that all?" he asked. "Just 'pleased'? Just you 'like'?"
"Oh, dear!" she said, and she shook her head despairingly. "There it is! Whenever I give you the chance, you say things like that! Don't you see that I spend half my time with you trying to keep you from asking such questions?"
"Yes, I do," he answered. "I am afraid it is what you have wish'."
"What is?"
Arturo looked at her steadily, with dark, sad eyes. "Yes, I think it is true. You have wish' that I should want to ask such questions but that I should not ask them. I think you like men to be in love with you but not to trouble you by telling you. Isn't it true?"
"What!" she cried; but even in her own ears the indignation she put into her voice had a sound somewhat enfeebled. Confronted with so simple yet exact a statement of fact, she was at a loss; and, indeed, she felt both helpless and foolish. She could find nothing better to do than to employ a stencil that she herself knew was too worn with coquettes' usage to be an adequate defence. "I never heard anything so unjust in all my life!"
"Then you do wish me to tell you?"
"To tell me what?" she said impatiently; but in the same instant she understood her mistake and that he would reply, "I love you!" She stepped back from him quickly, her hands fluttering in hasty gestures of negation. "No! I don't mean that; I don't mean to ask you such a question. Arturo, please"
"Then what I said of you is true."
"Oh, dear me!" And with that, she uttered some little incoherent sounds of petulant distress; then fell back upon another and even more useless stencil: "Arturo, don't you understand?"
"I am afraid so," he said quietly; but there was something in his voice that made her catch her breath. "You needn't be disturbed. I will not say what you fear I would say. I will never say it."
"Arturo"
"That is all," he said.
Then they stood facing each other, not speaking. Her stencils had not aided her; she knew herself accused but defenseless before the accusation; and helplessly, in her confusion, she found nothing at all to say. She had a sensation as of becoming smaller; and Arturo as he stood before her, slender but vague in the twilight, with tragedy in his dark and gentle eyes, was like a tall judge of her.
The white columns of the cloister and the outlines of the marble fountain, in the wan light, were to remain in her memory as a background like the architectural shapings of a shadowy judgment seat where she had been unable to clear herself of a true charge. But Arturo was an unreproachful judge. Orbison had spoken of him as Hamlet; and just such a sorrowful dignity invested the young Italian in this parting with the American girl; for a parting it was—a final one. Foreseeing Providence has been kind in not making us, also, foreseeing; and so we do not know what is to remain most keenly in our memories. Claire's thoughts were more annoying than acutely painful and were principally occupied with herself; she no more knew that for years afterward she was unavailingly to remember Arturo Liana as he stood looking at her now in the gray cloister than she knew that this was the last time she would ever see him.
He bowed to her gravely, and left her. "Oh, well" she murmured; and she sighed a deep sigh, in which naturally a little anger mingled with other emotions; for she could not be put at a disadvantage and remain wholly unresentful. "Well, it's what I get!" she thought, meaning that she had been punished for obeying a too virtuous gentleman's suggestions. Then, going into the long corridor in the interior of the hotel, she discovered this gentleman seated alone at a small tea table where he was lingering with some cold cups and saucers and the end of a cigarette.
She immediately placed herself in a chair opposite him at the table. "Well, what was the matter?" she asked.
"When, Miss Ambler?"
"When I did what you'd told me I ought to do."
"My dear young lady!" he objected. "I have too many culpabilities of my own; I don't tell people what they ought to do."
"You told me," she said sharply. "Certainly you did. And I do wish you wouldn't call me a 'dear young lady,' Mr. Orbison. You're not my uncle; you're not old enough."
"I'm afraid I am," he said, smiling. "At least I'm afraid I feel so."
"No, you don't," she returned quickly. "You haven't been watching me like an uncle—not a bit—and I haven't been like a niece being watched!"
"I beg your pardon," he said with some awkwardness, and returned to her opening question. "What was the matter when?"
"I think you're evading. You know perfectly you did tell me what you thought I ought to do—what you and Mr. Rennie and Arturo Liana's mother thought I ought to do. You told me this morning and infuriated me. You said that if I had any decency I'd be nice to Arturo and drop the baron and Giuseppe."
"No, I"
"Yes, you did, absolutely. So I've done it. You saw me freeze Giuseppe Bastoni when I left you this afternoon to join Arturo. You were looking—I saw you were; and I snubbed Giuseppe the worst I know how. He knew I meant it, and he and his brother will understand perfectly that it's permanent. I think he was in a cold rage when I went by him. Then I looked back to see if I had done what I meant to, which was just to please you, and I saw I hadn't. You looked like the siroc! Does it make you bitter to have a girl try to please you?"
He did not reply at once; and she took a cigarette from a silver case lying open before him on the table, and lighted it herself, as he seemed unaware. "Well, does it? What was wrong with what I did?"
"I'll tell you," he said thoughtfully. "I didn't propose a line of conduct for you this morning. You said I'd been watching you and asked me what I saw. Among other things, I said I hadn't been able to understand how any girl could give such fellows as the Bastoni any ground for conceiving, however mistakenly, that they were perhaps rivals with so splendid a young man as Arturo Liana. But whatever harm there was in it had been done; I didn't suggest an attempt to undo it by making those two wolfish creatures more poisonously young Liana's enemies than ever."
"What?" she cried.
"Why, yes," he said calmly. "That was what you must have accomplished. Don't you see it?"
She looked at him almost fiercely. "I did exactly what you as much as told me to. You've just admitted you reproached me with giving the Bastoni a chance to think they were Arturo's rivals. Well, I snubbed Giuseppe, practically in Arturo's presence. Now you attack me for making him his enemy instead of his rival. No, I don't see it!"
"I'll try to make it clearer, Miss Ambler. The truth is, the Bastoni have the reputation of being pretty bad hats. You naturally wouldn't have known that; but there's no doubt of it; and there are quite a number of other bad hats in the place they come from and the villages between Raona and there. You know most of the landowners don't go to their own estates unless they're heavily armed and guarded by the carabinieri; it isn't altogether a safe neighbourhood except for foreigners like us—they let us alone because we increase the revenue. Well, the Bastoni know what their own reputation is; and that they're fairly notorious among the Italians for selling spurious antique jewellery to foreigners and as associates of the other bad hats—and young Liana is an Italian. Don't you see what conclusion this Giuseppe would come to in his mind? You'd formerly been most gracious to him and his brother. Then abruptly, with Liana present, you snub him and go to Liana. Of course he'd think Liana had been saying things about him to you and ruined him with you. That's why I seemed disturbed when you looked back at me. Don't you understand, Miss Ambler?"
Claire's head drooped and so did her eyelids; she slowly crushed her cigarette down into an ash tray upon the table. "You do think I'm a fool," she said in a low voice. "It seems a little unjust when I did only what I thought you wanted me to do. I didn't want to do it. Do you think I wanted to go away from you and walk with Arturo? I suppose you'll tell me now that you didn't suggest my being nice to him, either!"
"No," Orbison said. "I didn't."
She looked up slowly. "No?"
"I didn't suggest your doing anything at all," he insisted. "Certainly not that you be 'nice' to a young man obviously suffering on your account—not unless you meant to accept him. Naturally, if you didn't mean to do that, your being 'nice' to him would only increase his torture."
"Well, then," she said, smiling suddenly. "I've pleased you about that, at least. I was the very devil to him! When we got back from our walk just now we had rather a scene; he virtually denounced me as a trifler. Then he stalked off, and I don't know when he'll be back. That is to say, my being 'nice' to him because you suggested it merely made us both wretched and on that account I'm sure you're pleased with me at last, Mr. Orbison!"
"Pleased with you at last!" he repeated in a tone ironically rueful; and he laughed. "Much you bother yourself whether I'm pleased with you or not!"
"No," she returned. "That won't do." She put her forearms on the table and leaned toward him, keeping her gaze gravely and unwaveringly upon his. "I'm serious; it won't do. You know how much I care to please you and I know you know it."
"I don't," he protested; and as his pallid cheeks once more showed colour in response to words of hers, pain came into his eyes, and he had the look of a man who struggles, but struggles feebly, through lack of strength. "I don't know anything of the kind. It's nonsense, and you mustn't" He contrived to utter another laugh. "You are an astonishing young woman, I must say! Is your conception of ethics based solely upon the pleasing of the nearest available man?"
"Go on," she said, not moving, nor letting her eyes fall from his. "'The nearest available man,' you say. Very well—insult me all you please! We both know that pleasing you is all I care about; but something you don't know is that I've already pleased you more than anyone else ever did. I know it, though; and do you think that while I have that in my mind I'll ever give up going on trying to please you? Do you?"
He seemed to struggle with an increasing pain. "Upon my word, I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes, you do," she said, and her eyes grew brighter; her voice was tremulous but happy. "We both know."
"Indeed I—I" Stammering, he made an effort to rise from his chair; but he had no strength, and, in difficulties with the table, could not at once get upon his feet. His sister, coming into the corridor at that moment, ran to help him.
"Charles!" she cried. "You might have fallen! Why didn't you ask Miss Ambler to help you?"
Claire answered her, but kept her eyes upon the flushed and panting invalid. "He knew I wouldn't," she said. "Not to help him get away!" And at that the stout and hearty Miss Orbison, after a sharper glance at both of them, looked seriously disturbed.