“Where am I?” he asked, with what appeared to him very unnecessary feebleness of voice.
The young man begged his pardon in Italian, and when Colville repeated his question in that tongue, he told him that he was in Palazzo Pinti, whither he had been brought from the scene of his accident. He added that Colville must not talk till the doctor had seen him and given him leave, and he explained that he was himself a nurse from the hospital, who had been taking care of him.
Colville moved his head and felt the bandage upon it; he desisted in his attempt to lift his right arm to it before the attendant could interfere in behalf of the broken limb. He recalled dimly and fragmentarily long histories that he had dreamed, but he forbore to ask how long he had been in his present case, and he accepted patiently the apparition of the doctor and other persons who came and went, and were at his bedside or not there, as it seemed to him, between the opening and closing of an eye. As the days passed they acquired greater permanence and maintained a more uninterrupted identity. He was able to make quite sure of Mr. Morton and of Mr. Waters; Mrs. Bowen came in, leading Effie, and this gave him a great pleasure. Mrs. Bowen seemed to have grown younger and better. Imogene was not among the phantoms who visited him; and he accepted her absence as quiescently as he accepted the presence of the others. There was a cheerfulness in those who came that permitted him no anxiety, and he was too weak to invite it by any conjecture. He consented to be spared and to spare himself; and there were some things about the affair which gave him a singular and perhaps not wholly sane content. One of these was the man nurse who had evidently taken care of him throughout. He celebrated, whenever he looked at this capable person, his escape from being, in the odious helplessness of sickness, a burden upon the strength and sympathy of the two women for whom he had otherwise made so much trouble. His satisfaction in this had much to do with his recovery, which, when it once began, progressed rapidly to a point where he was told that Imogene and her mother were at a hotel in Florence, waiting till he should be strong enough to see them. It was Mrs. Bowen who told him this with an air which she visibly strove to render noncommittal and impersonal, but which betrayed, nevertheless, a faint apprehension for the effect upon him. The attitude of Imogene and her mother was certainly not one to have been expected of people holding their nominal relation to him, but Colville had been revising his impressions of events on the day of his accident; Imogene’s last look came back to him, and he could not think the situation altogether unaccountable.
“Have I been here a long time?” he asked, as if he had not heeded what she told him.
“About a fortnight,” answered Mrs. Bowen.
“And Imogene—how long has she been away?”
“Since they knew you would get well.”
“I will see them any time,” he said quietly.
“Do you think you are strong enough?”
“I shall never be stronger till I have seen them,” he returned, with a glance at her. “Yes; I want them to come today. I shall not be excited; don’t be troubled—if you were going to be,” he added. “Please send to them at once.”
Mrs. Bowen hesitated, but after a moment left the room. She returned in half an hour with a lady who revealed even to Colville’s languid regard evidences of the character which Mrs. Bowen had attributed to Imogene’s mother. She was a large, robust person, laced to sufficient shapeliness, and she was well and simply dressed. She entered the room with a waft of some clean, wholesome perfume, and a quiet temperament and perfect health looked out of her clear, honest eyes—the eyes of Imogene Graham, though the girl’s were dark and the woman’s were blue. When Mrs. Bowen had named them to each other, in withdrawing, Mrs. Graham took Colville’s weak left hand in her fresh, strong, right, and then lifted herself a chair to his bedside, and sat down.
“How do you do today, sir?” she said, with a touch of old-fashioned respectfulness in the last word. “Do you think you are quite strong enough to talk with me?”
“I think so,” said Colville, with a faint smile. “At least I can listen with fortitude.”
Mrs. Graham was not apparently a person adapted to joking. “I don’t know whether it will require much fortitude to hear what I have to say or not,” she said, with her keen gaze fixed upon him. “It’s simply this: I am going to take Imogene home.”
She seemed to expect that Colville would make some reply to this, and he said blankly, “Yes?”
“I came out prepared to consent to what she wished, after I had seen you, and satisfied myself that she was not mistaken; for I had always promised myself that her choice should be perfectly untrammelled, and I have tried to bring her up with principles and ideas that would enable her to make a good choice.”
“Yes,” said Colville again. “I’m afraid you didn’t take her temperament and her youth into account, and that she disappointed you.”
“No; I can’t say that she did. It isn’t that at all. I see no reason to blame her for her choice. Her mistake was of another kind.”
It appeared to Colville that this very sensible and judicial lady found an
