“This is rather luxurious for us,” said Mrs. Bowen. “It’s a compromise with Effie. She wanted me to take her to Giacosa’s this afternoon.”
“I thought you would come,” whispered the child to Colville.
Her mother made a little face of mock surprise at her. “Don’t give yourself away, Effie.”
“Why, let us go to Giacosa’s too,” said Colville, taking the ice. “We shall be the only foreigners there, and we shall not even feel ourselves foreign. It’s astonishing how the hot weather has dispersed the tourists. I didn’t see a Baedeker on the whole way up here, and I walked down Via Tornabuoni across through Porta Rosso and the Piazza della Signoria and the Uffizzi. You’ve no idea how comfortable and homelike it was—all the statues loafing about in their shirtsleeves, and the objects of interest stretching and yawning round, and having a good rest after their winter’s work.”
Effie understood Colville’s way of talking well enough to enjoy this; her mother did not laugh.
“Walked?” she asked.
“Certainly. Why not?”
“You are getting well again. You’ll soon be gone too.”
“I’ve got well. But as to being gone, there’s no hurry. I rather think I shall wait now to see how long you stay.”
“We may keep you all summer,” said Mrs. Bowen, dropping her eyelids indifferently.
“Oh, very well. All summer it is, then. Mr. Waters is going to stay, and he is such a very cool old gentleman that I don’t think one need fear the wildest antics of the mercury where he is.”
When Colville had finished his ice, Mrs. Bowen led the way to the salotto; and they all sat down by the window there and watched the sunset die on San Miniato. The bronze copy of Michelangelo’s David, in the Piazzale below the church, blackened in perfect relief against the pink sky and then faded against the grey while they talked. They were so domestic that Colville realised with difficulty that this was an image of what might be rather than what really was; the very ease with which he could apparently close his hand upon the happiness within his grasp unnerved him. The talk strayed hither and thither, and went and came aimlessly. A sound of singing floated in from the kitchen, and Effie eagerly asked her mother if she might go and see Maddalena. Maddalena’s mother had come to see her, and she was from the mountains.
“Yes, go,” said Mrs. Bowen; “but don’t stay too long.”
“Oh, I will be back in time,” said the child, and Colville remembered that he had proposed going to Giacosa’s.
“Yes; don’t forget.” He had forgotten it himself.
“Maddalena is the cook,” explained Mrs. Bowen. “She sings ballads to Effie that she learned from her mother, and I suppose Effie wants to hear them at first hand.”
“Oh yes,” said Colville dreamily.
They were alone now, and each little silence seemed freighted with a meaning deeper than speech.
“Have you seen Mr. Waters today?” asked Mrs. Bowen, after one of these lapses.
“Yes; he came this afternoon.”
“He is a very strange old man. I should think he would be lonely here.”
“He seems not to be. He says he finds company in the history of the place. And his satisfaction at having got out of Haddam East Village is perennial.”
“But he will want to go back there before he dies.”
“I don’t know. He thinks not. He’s a strange old man, as you say. He has the art of putting all sorts of ideas into people’s heads. Do you know what we talked about this afternoon?”
“No, I don’t,” murmured Mrs. Bowen.
“About you. And he encouraged me to believe—imagine—that I might speak to you—ask—tell you that—I loved you, Lina.” He leaned forward and took one of the hands that lay in her lap. It trembled with a violence inconceivable in relation to the perfect quiet of her attitude. But she did not try to take it away. “Could you—do you love me?”
“Yes,” she whispered; but here she sprang up and slipped from his hold altogether, as with an inarticulate cry of rapture he released her hand to take her in his arms.
He followed her a pace or two. “And you will—will be my wife?” he pursued eagerly.
“Never!” she answered, and now Colville stopped short, while a cold bewilderment bathed him from head to foot. It must be some sort of jest, though he could not tell where the humour was, and he could not treat it otherwise than seriously.
“Lina, I have loved you from the first moment that I saw you this winter, and Heaven knows how long before!”
“Yes; I know that.”
“And every moment.”
“Oh, I know that too.”
“Even if I had no sort of hope that you cared for me, I loved you so much that I must tell you before we parted—”
“I expected that—I intended it.”
“You intended it! and you do love me! And yet you won’t—Ah, I don’t understand!”
“How could you understand? I love you—I blush and burn for shame to think that I love you. But I will never marry you; I can at least help doing that, and I can still keep some little trace of self-respect. How you must really despise me, to think of anything else, after all that has happened! Did you suppose that I was merely waiting till that poor girl’s back was turned, as you were? Oh, how can you be yourself, and still be yourself? Yes, Jenny Wheelwright was right. You are too much of a mixture, Theodore Colville”—her calling him so showed how often she had thought of him so—“too much for her, too much for Imogene, too much for me; too much for any woman except some wretched creature who enjoys being trampled on and dragged through the dust, as you have dragged me.”
“I dragged you through the dust? There hasn’t been a moment in the past six months when I wouldn’t have rolled myself in it to please
