Rough-Hewn/Chapter 43
CHAPTER XLIII
The dream-like Arabian Night unexpectedness which had descended on Neale the evening before, on the roof, continued shimmeringly to wrap everything in improbability. Instead of receiving his unfamiliar name with the vague, conventional smile of a new acquaintance, the girl raised her eyebrows high in a long, delicate arch and cried out, "You are! Really! The one who has inherited Crittenden's?" Seeing Neale's look of almost appalled amazement, she broke into a sudden laugh. Neale had never heard any one laugh like that, almost like some one singing, so clear and purely produced was its little trill. And yet it had been as sudden and spontaneous as a gush of water from a spring.
"I don't wonder you look astonished," she told him, "But you see when I was a little girl I used often to play in and out of old Mr. Crittenden's house and mill. I've never seen anything since in all my life that seemed as wonderful and mighty to me as the way the saw used to gnash its teeth at the great logs and slowly, shriekingly tear them apart into boards. Didn't you use to love the moss on the old water-wheel, too?"
"I never saw the mill or the house," he told her. "I never saw my great-uncle but once or twice in my life." He was too amazed to do anything but answer her literally and baldly.
"Why, how in the world …?" she began to ask, and then as a bell from one of the innumerable church belfries outside began clangorously to strike the hour, she glanced at her wrist-watch, and shook her head. "It's breakfast-time," she said. She nodded, smiled and turned away, stepping down the corridor with a light, supple gait. Neale had never seen any one walk like that, as though every step were in time to music.
He went back to his room to wash his hands and brush his clothes, which showed signs of contact with dusty Roman walls and roofs. When, ten minutes later, he went into the dining-room, five or six people were already at table, Livingstone among them. Miss Oldham, the head of the pension, introduced the newcomer to the others, mentioning names on both sides. To Neale's surprise, Miss Allen did not explain (as he had opened his mouth to do) that she had already seen and talked to Mr. Crittenden that morning. Instead, she now gave him the conventional smile he had expected ten minutes before, accepted the introduction as though she had never seen his face and went on drinking her café-au-lait.
More Arabian Nights. What did this mean? Neale swallowed the reference he had begun to their earlier meeting. Miss Oldham said to him with the wearily playful accent of the conscientious pension-keeper, fostering cheerful talk around her table, "I understand, Mr. Crittenden, that you and Miss Allen are in a way related, as I might say."
Livingstone joined in with his usual sprightliness: "Yes, Crittenden, why didn't you tell me you had a fellow-townswoman in Rome? Last evening when I went back into the salon and told the assembled company about you and your inheritance there was Mademoiselle Allaine, who had often, in her remote childhood, climbed on the respected knees of Monsieur your Great-uncle."
Miss Allen smiled quietly over her cup, remarked that it would have taken a bolder child than she had ever been to climb on the knees of old Mr. Crittenden, and, looking at her watch, rose to go. "Music, divine music?" inquired Livingstone.
"Yes, divine music," she answered lightly. "We are getting ready to play at a soirée at Donna Antonia Pierleoni's. I'm due there at half past nine to try out the piano in a new position in the room."
"Clear out there by half-past nine!" cried Livingstone, as if exhausted by the idea.
She did not seem to consider that this required any answer, made a graceful inclination of the head to the company at table and went off.
Neale was repeating to himself, in mortal terror of forgetting it, "Pierleoni. Pierleoni." He drank his coffee and ate his roll as though he had a train to catch, and, rushing back to his room, seized his hat and made off to the nearest café to consult the directory. With a sigh of relief he found that there was only one Pierleoni, and that the address was indeed as Livingstone had said, far away in the rich, new, fashionable quarter. He set off on foot, but before he had walked five minutes he was overcome with panic lest he be late, and hailed a rickety cab. Thinking of nothing but the precious address which he had committed to memory; he shouted it out to the cabman. Halfway there, he suddenly remembered that he had no possible business at that address. He had a horrid vision of driving up to the door, having the portiere ask him his errand, perhaps of having Miss Allen look out of the window and see the scene.
This threw him into such a fright that for an instant he could think of no escape and sat passive, borne along to his fate by the unconscious cabman. Then his wits came back to him, he called out to the cabman to drive to number seventy-five and not a hundred and twenty; and having thus snatched himself from destruction, perceived that they were even then turning into the street. At number seventy-five he descended, hastily paid the driver a good deal more than was due him, stepped into the house, inquired if a gentleman by the name of Robinson lived there, professed surprise and regret on hearing that he did not and walked on, settling his neck-tie nervously.
He told himself that he was acting like an imbecile, but he could not seem to consider that important fact seriously. Having started in to do anything, naturally he liked to put it through. Everybody did. And he really would like to know how under the sun a dark-eyed girl in Rome happened to know anything about his Great-uncle Burton. Any one would feel a natural human curiosity on that score. And he had only five days in Rome.
The idea that he had only five days in Rome fell on him like a thunderbolt, as though he had had no idea of it till that moment. Had he said he had only five days in Rome?
He walked along, looking up at the green waves of feathery foliage which foamed down over the fawn-colored walls from the verdure of the gardens inside. What a beautiful spot Rome was! He had not begun to appreciate it on his last visit. It was wonderful! Such light! He had never seen such sunlight anywhere.
Ah, here was number a hundred and twenty, a fine great doorway in the wall, with a gleaming brass plate, marked Pierleoni, at which Neale looked with pleasure. He walked on some distance, as far as he could go and keep the house in view, and, crossing over, walked slowly back. He was not now in the least ashamed of his conduct. By this time it seemed quite natural and suitable to him, just what any one would have done in his place. Of course he wanted to know about his great-uncle. Who would not?
He had made the trip to the end of the street and back perhaps a dozen times, his pulse beating more and more quickly, when from a distance he saw a little door beside the great one open, and a tall girl in a familiar light gray street-dress step out. But she was not alone. Beside her walked a man, a tall, stooped old man with a black coat and a wide-brimmed black felt hat. The girl's hand was on his arm. Neale felt as astonished and grieved as though he had caught his best friend cheating him at cards. It had never, occurred to him that she might not be alone! And yet. he now remembered that she had said "we."
He walked along behind them at a considerable distance, feeling for the first time rather foolish, a sensation which instantly took wings as he saw them, after turning into another street, stop at a door in the wall and ring. Perhaps she was going to leave him there. Neale gave a great start forward.
But perhaps she was going in with him? He halted where he stood, feeling very sick of himself and angrily resolving to turn his back on them and go off about his business. He had never played the born fool so in his life!
But he did not turn his back on them. He stood observing them, while they went through a leave-taking which seemed to him very formal and long-drawn-out; and when the old man went in and the infernal gate actually shut behind him, Neale started forward with a bound.
But he reflected at once that it was too absurd to meet her here, in a quarter of Rome where no business of his could possibly have brought him at that hour. The cautious, adroit thing to do was to walk along behind her at a distance, till she had turned into a thoroughfare with shops, where he might conceivably be strolling. While he was making this sagacious plan, his feet bore him rapidly up beside her, where he took off his hat and said, "Good morning, Miss Allen," with a wide smile of satisfaction which he knew must look nothing less than imbecile.
Well, he had done what he had set out to do.
She gave him a "good morning, Mr. Crittenden," that showed no surprise, and with great tact began the talk on the only basis which gave him a reasonable claim on her time. "You want to hear how somebody in Rome knows about your great-uncle Burton, don't you? I'm afraid it's like so many other things that sound mysterious and interesting. It will only be quite flat and commonplace when you really know. It is no more than this. When I was a little girl in America, and then later when I was in college for a couple of years, I was sent to spend my summers in Ashley, visiting an old cousin of my father's." She looked at him from under her broad-brimmed blue hat, with a mock-regretful air, one eyebrow raised whimsically, and made a little apologetic gesture with her shoulders. "That's all," she said, smiling and shaking her head.
"Oh, no, it's not all!" Neale cried to himself with intense conviction.
Aloud he said, "But I want to hear more about what kind of a place it is. You see, to tell the truth, I'd forgotten that I had any Great-uncle Burton. And I never was in Ashley, Think of being in Florence and getting a letter saying that a saw mill in Vermont has suddenly become yours!"
"I should call it a most nice sort of surprise," remarked the girl with a quaintly un-English turn of phrase which he had already noticed and thought the most delightful thing in the world.
"And I'm on my way back to America now to see about it."
"What does that mean—to 'see about it'?" she inquired.
"Oh, sell it, of course."
She was horrified. "Sell it? To whom?"
"Oh, to anybody who'll buy it."
"Sell that darling old house, and those glorious elms. Sell that beautiful leaded-glass door, with the cool white marble steps leading up to it, and the big peony-bushes, and the syringas and that cold pure spring-water that runs all day and all night in the wooden trough. Sell that home! And to anybody!" She paused where she was, looking at him out of wide, shocked eyes. Neale was profoundly thankful for anything that would make her look straight at him like that.
"But, you see," he told her, "I hadn't the least idea about that darling old house, or the elms or the spring-water or anything. I never heard a word about it till this minute. I think the only thing is for you to start in and tell me everything."
As she hesitated, professing with an outward opening of her palms that she really didn't know exactly where to begin, he prompted her.
"Well, begin at the beginning. How in the world do you get there?"
"Oh, if you want to know from the beginning," she told him, "I must tell you at once that you change cars at Hoosick Jimction. Always, always, no matter from which direction you approach, you must change cars at Hoosick Junction, and wait an hour or so there." Seeing on his face a rather strange expression, she feared that he had lost the point of her little pleasantry, and inquired, "But perhaps it is that you do not know Hoosick Junction."
"Oh, yes, I know Hoosick Junction all right." He said it with a long breath of wonder. "I changed cars at Hoosick Junction to get here!"
"Eh bien, and then a train finally takes you from Hoosick Junction. You sit pressing your little nose against the window, waiting to see the mountains, and when the first one heaves up softly, all blue against the horizon, you feel a happy ache in your throat, and you look harder than ever. And by and by some one calls out 'Shley!' (you know he means Ashley) and you take your little satchel and stumble down the aisle, and the conductor lifts you down the steps and there is dear old Cousin Hetty with her wrinkled face shining on you. She only gives you a dry little peck on your lips, quick and hard, and says, 'Well, Marise, you got here, I see,' but you feel all over you, warm, how glad she is to see you. And you hug her a great deal till she says, 'there! there!' but you know she likes it very much."
She was talking as she walked, as if her words were set to music, her voice all little ripples, and bright upward and downward swoops like swallows flying, her hands and arms and shoulders and eyebrows acting a delicate pantomime of illustration, the pale, pure olive of her face flushed slightly with her animation. Every time she flashed a quick look up at him to make sure he was not bored, Neale caught his breath. He felt as though he were drinking the strongest kind of wine, he had the half-scared, half-enchanted feeling of a man who knows he is going to get very drunk, and has little idea of what will happen when he does.
"Yes, and then, and then?" he prompted her, eagerly.
"Well, and then you get into a phaeton. Oh, I don't suppose you have ever seen a phaeton!"
"Yes, I have," he contradicted her. "I've driven my grandfather miles in one when I was a little boy."
"Oh, you know, then, about this sort of—you have perhaps lived in a place like Ashley?" She was as eager as though it had been a question of finding that they were of the same family.
"I spent all my summers in West Adams, not so very far from Vermont."
"Ah then, you can understand what I tell you!" she said with satisfaction. "And in the phaeton you jog through the village, past the church, under the elms, with the white houses each under its thick green trees, and such green, green grass everywhere—not like Italy, all brown and parched; and then down the road till the turn-off for Crittenden's. For, you see, I also go to Crittenden's. My Cousin Hetty's home is one of the three or four houses that stand around your great-uncle's house and mill. And so up the road to Crittenden's between the mountains closer and higher, up into the quiet valley." Her voice deepened on the last words, and so did her eyes. She was silent a moment, looking out unseeingly on the tropical palms and bright, huge flowers of the Pincian Gardens through which they were now walking.
"Eh bien, since it's you who are going home, you drive on a little farther than my Cousin Hetty's house, until up before you slopes a lovely meadow, smooth, bright, shining green, like the enamel green field in the Limbo where Dante puts Electra and Hector and Cæsar. At the top of the slope, a long line of splendid, splendid elms, like this, you know …" with her two hands and a free, upward gesture of her arms, she showed the airy opening-out of the wine-glass elms, "and back of them a long old house, ever so long, because everything is fastened along together, house, porch, woodshed, hay-barn, carriage-shed, horse-barn." She laughed at the recollection, turning to him. "You've seen those long New England farm-homes? I remember a city man said once that you could see the head of the lady of the house leaning from one window and the head of a cow from another. He thought that the most crushing thing that could be said, but I think those homes perfectly delightful, homely, with a cachet of their own, not copied from houses in other countries. And really, you know," she turned serious, thinking suddenly that perhaps he needed reassurance, "really, it's just as clean as any other way of living. You're just as far away from the animals as with any other barn, because you have so much woodshed and hay-barn and things between you."
To see her face with that quite new, housekeeping, matter-of-fact, practical look gave him the most absurd and illogical amusement. He laughed outright. "Oh, don't think for a moment that I would object," he cried gaily. "I'm not a bit fastidious. I wouldn't care how near the cows were—if they were nice cows!"
She thought for an instant he might be laughing at her, and peered keenly into his face, a more openly observing look than she had as yet given him. What she saw evidently reassured her, for she went on with a lighter tone, "Truly it has its own sort of architectural beauty. It doesn't have a bit of the packing-box, brought-in-and-dumped-down look that most dwelling-houses have, no matter how they're planned. It seems to have grown that way. The long, low old farm-house, weathered so beautifully, it looks like an outcrop of the very earth itself, like a ridge or rock or a fold in a field."
It was about at this time that Neale began to lose the capacity of listening to what she was saying. With the best will in the world he could not keep his mind on it. He found that he felt a giddy, dazzled uncertainty of where he was putting his feet and tried to pull himself together. He must really notice a little more what he was about. Her quick, rising and falling, articulate speech, her quick, flashing changes of expression, the play of her flexible hands and shoulders—no, how could he listen to what she was saying?
But she was asking him a question now. She was saying, "You're not really going to sell all that, to just anybody!"
"But really," he answered, helplessly honest, "it sounds wonderful as you tell it, but what could I do with it? I couldn't very well go to live in Ashley, Vermont, could I?"
"Why not?" she asked. "A good many people have."
"Well! But …" he began, incapable of forming any answer, incapable of thinking of anything but the dark softness of her gaze on him. What was it they were talking about? Oh, yes, about selling out at Ashley. "Oh, but I have other plans. I am just about to go to China."
"China! Why to China?"
Neale lost his head entirely … "notice more what he was about?" He had not the least idea what he was about. He said to her rather wildly, "I hardly know myself why I am going to China. I'd like, if you will let me—I'd like ever so much to tell you—about it. And see what you think. You know about Ashley, don't you see?" He was aware that the last of what he had said had no shadow of connection with the first, but that seemed of no importance whatever to him.
They were standing now near a low wall, under some thick dark ilex trees, a fountain dripping musically before them. Mechanically they sat down, looking earnestly at each other. "You see," began Neale, "I'm trying to find my way. I was in business in the States, and getting along all right … 'getting on,' I mean, as they say. And then I got to wondering. It seemed as though, as though … I wasn't sure it was what I wanted to do with my life, just to buy low and sell high, all my life long. Perhaps there was more to it than I could make out. It certainly seemed to suit a lot of folks, fine. But I couldn't seem to see it. I was all right. Nothing the matter. Only I couldn't … why, I tell you, I felt like a perfectly good torch that wouldn't catch on fire. I couldn't seem to care enough about it to make it worth while to really tear in and do it. And I thought maybe if I got off a little way from it … sometimes you do see the sense of things better that way. So I went away. I took a year off. I'd saved a little money, enough for that. And I've been trying to figure something out. Of course I've been enjoying the traveling around, too. Perhaps that's the real reason why I want to go to China, just to keep going, see new things, get away, keep free. But I think about the other a good deal … what can I do with my life … that's sort of worth while, you know, if only in a very small way. I'm a very ordinary man, no gifts, no talents, but I have lots of energy and health. It seems as though there ought to be something … doesn't it?"
He had stumbled on, breathlessly, involuntarily, hardly aware that he was speaking at all, aware only that she was listening. With her head bent, her eyes fixed on the ground, the pure pale olive of her face like a pearl in the shadow of her hat, she was listening intently. He knew, as he had never known anything else, that she was listening to what he really meant, not to what he was saying in those poor, plain, broken words.
And yet, how could he go on?
The sudden plunge he had made, deep into an element new to him, the utter strangeness of his having thus spoken out what he had before but shyly glanced at, the awfulness of having opened his heart to the day, his shut, shut heart.… Good God, what was he doing?
At his silence, she raised her face towards him. To his amazement her eyes were shining wet with tears. And yet there was no sadness in her face. She was smiling at him, a wavering, misty smile.
She stood up, made a little, flexible, eloquent gesture with her hands and arms and shoulders, as if to explain to him that she could not trust herself to speak, and, still smiling at him, the tears still in her eyes, walked rapidly away.