Colville looked absently at the cards. “The fact is,” he said, to the little bowing, smiling man; “I don’t know but I shall be obliged to postpone my going till Monday.” He smiled too, trying to give the fact a jocose effect, and added, “I find myself out of money, and I’ve no means of paying your bill till I can see my bankers.”
After all his heroic intention, this was as near as he could come to asking the landlord to let him send the money from Rome.
The little man set his head on one side.
“Oh, well, occupy the room until Monday, then,” he cried hospitably. “It is quite at your disposition. You will not want the omnibus?”
“No, I shall not want the omnibus,” said Colville, with a laugh, doubtless not perfectly intelligible to the landlord, who respectfully joined him in it.
He did not mean to stop that night without writing to Mrs. Bowen, and assuring her that though an accident had kept him in Florence till Monday, she need not be afraid of seeing him again. But he could not go back to his room yet; he wandered about the town, trying to pick himself up from the ruin into which he had fallen again, and wondering with a sort of alien compassion what was to become of his aimless, empty existence. As he passed through the Piazza San Marco he had half a mind to pick a pebble from the gardened margin of the fountain there and toss it against the Rev. Mr. Waters’s window, and when he put his skullcap out, to ask that optimistic agnostic what a man had best do with a life that had ceased to interest him. But, for the time being, he got rid of himself as he best could by going to the opera. They professed to give Rigoletto, but it was all Mrs. Bowen and Imogene Graham to Colville.
It was so late when he got back to his hotel that the outer gate was shut, and he had to wake up the poor little porter, as on that night when he returned from Madame Uccelli’s. The porter was again equal to his duty, and contrived to light a new candle to show him the way to his room. The repetition, almost mechanical, of this small chicane made Colville smile, and this apparently encouraged the porter to ask, as if he supposed him to have been in society somewhere—
“You have amused yourself this evening?”
“Oh, very much.”
“I am glad. There is a letter for you.”
“A letter! Where?”
“I sent it to your room. It came just before midnight.”
XIII
Mrs. Bowen sat before the hearth in her salon, with her hands fallen in her lap. At thirty-eight the emotions engrave themselves more deeply in the face than they do in our first youth, or than they will when we have really aged, and the pretty woman looked haggard.
Imogene came in, wearing a long blue robe, flung on as if with desperate haste; her thick hair fell crazily out of a careless knot, down her back. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said, with quivering lips, at the sight of which Mrs. Bowen’s involuntary smile hardened. “Isn’t it eleven yet?” she added, with a glance at the clock. “It seems years since I went to bed.”
“It’s been a long day,” Mrs. Bowen admitted. She did not ask Imogene why she could not sleep, perhaps because she knew already, and was too honest to affect ignorance.
The girl dropped into a chair opposite her, and began to pull her fingers through the long tangle of her hair, while she drew her breath in sighs that broke at times on her lips; some tears fell down her cheeks unheeded. “Mrs. Bowen,” she said, at length, “I should like to know what right we have to drive anyone from Florence? I should think people would call it rather a high-handed proceeding if it were known.”
Mrs. Bowen met this feebleness promptly. “It isn’t likely to be known. But we are not driving Mr. Colville away.”
“He is going.”
“Yes; he said he would go.”
“Don’t you believe he will go?”
“I believe he will do what he says.”
“He has been very kind to us all; he has been as good!”
“No one feels that more than I,” said Mrs. Bowen, with a slight tremor in her voice. She faltered a moment. “I can’t let you say those things to me, Imogene.”
“No; I know it’s wrong. I didn’t know what I was saying. Oh, I wish I could tell what I ought to do! I wish I could make up my mind. Oh, I can’t let him go—so. I—I don’t know what to think any more. Once it was clear, but now I’m not sure; no, I’m not sure.”
“Not sure about what?”
“I think I am the one to go away, if anyone.”
“You know you can’t go away,” said Mrs. Bowen, with weary patience.
“No, of course not. Well, I shall never see anyone like him.”
Mrs. Bowen made a start in her chair, as if she had no longer the power to remain quiet, but only placed herself a little more rigidly in it.
“No,” the girl went on, as if uttering a hopeless reverie. “He made every moment interesting. He was always thinking of us—he never thought of himself. He did as much for Effie as for anyone; he tried just as hard to make himself interesting to her. He was unselfish. I have seen him at places being kind to the stupidest people. You never caught him choosing out the stylish or
