SUSANNAH AND THE ELDER
I
There was also a Younger.
He had just come down from Florence, where a white umbrella was no longer proof against the August sun, and where even the secular shades of the Uffizi had grown intolerable. But whether Viareggio were an effective substitute was a debatable question. To have sought refuge from the dim-roomed palaces above the Arno in a pink casino required other justification than that of greater security against the attacks of Phœbus, while the charms of a ragged pine wood and of a dubious monument to Shelley hardly threw the scale against the Piazza della Signoria. But there was their Ligurian Sea, as absurdly overcoloured as a lithograph, which one might splash in all day long, whereas in all Tuscany was there scarcely water enough to wet your finger withal. And, too, there were people.
So the Younger stood in the doorway of the Casino terrace and smiled. For while the Stabilimento, like all respectable Stabilimenti, was rigidly divided into two equal halves, with the dressing-rooms of the sheep on the right hand and those of the goats on the left of the central café, it was noticeable that the spectators tended to scatter themselves in precisely the opposite sense. What chiefly caused the Younger to smile, however, was that at the extreme right-hand corner table he recognised the back of the Elder. This personage, upon whom time had already impressed a seal only too legible, was what it pleased the Younger to call a type; and in types he conceived that he found a peculiar profit. Since the Elder, despite his worldly degree, was known in Florentine circles for his assiduity among the studios—not so much in the quality of patron of the arts as in that of amateur of the society to be found therein—what could be more in character than his present post? And if the Younger happened to be better acquainted with the back which he now beheld than with its patrician obverse, he found in that circumstance nothing to prevent his edging through the crowd to the extreme right-hand corner table.
“Ah, the long American painter!” cried the Elder, greeting him with the effusion whose secret is alone to the Latin race. “You have come to look for models, eh?” He waved his hand toward the more or less exposed forms disporting themselves on the sands below.
The Younger laughed.
“Your opportunities are limited here,” he said. “You should go to an American watering-place. There young men and maidens, old men and children, dressed and undressed, sport together with a promiscuity! You would imagine yourself by the waters of Eden.”
“Cosi?” The Elder looked up a moment. “But after all, a little formality is better—a little illusion.”
“Illusion!” cried the Younger. “In the red and white stripes so bountifully provided by the Stabilimento! I can conceive of no surer cure for love than to chain the unhappy victim to this corner and force him to behold his inamorata in the full horror of her dishabille. It would be a disillusionment which no passion could survive.”
“On the contrary,” rejoined the Elder, “you will shortly behold a vision whose like you might seek in vain beside your waters of Eden.”
The Younger laughed again.
“There is already a vision, is there? In red and white stripes? You must be worse off than usual, for this spectacle is positively indecent. It is more. It is revolting. There ought to be a law limiting public bathing to persons between the ages of—say—three and thirty-three, with special clauses excluding individuals of inadequate or intolerable dimensions!”
The Elder laughed in turn.
“That is why I am too vain to expose myself. There is an irrepressible democracy of the flesh which is fatal to the most exclusive triumphs of the tailor. But wait till you see Dulcinea.”
“Who is she this time?” inquired the Younger airily.
The Elder turned upon him a reproachful but an unoffended monocle:
“If she were respectable I would marry her to-morrow.”
“Ah!” uttered the Younger, slowly. “And are you respectable? Not, of course, that I mean to imply anything against a Marquis of Tuscany.”
The Elder dropped his monocle.
“What will you have? Things are like that. Besides, women don’t care. In fact they are all the more flattered to have been chosen last. It proves their pretensions.”
“O!” grinned the Younger. “And who is the last?”
“Nobody knows. Some say she is a diva from Paris; others that she is a danseuse from Vienna; and others—But she is here on some caprice. She is waiting for someone. I have tried to make her think it was for me. I have made eyes. I have smiled. I have sighed. I have wept. I have sent flowers. I have written poems. I have thrown myself in her path. But she does not look. She goes about like anybody. She has her—you know—with her——an old fat one.”
“But how do you know that she is not somebody?” demanded the Younger.
“Wait till you see!” admonished the Elder darkly. “Does anybody flâne about alone and refuse to speak? Does anybody wear diamonds in the day-time? Does anybody drag frills from the Rue de la Paix over the sands of the sea? Does anybody come to a hole like Viareggio when they might be at Venice or Scheveningen or Deauville?”
The Younger, highly entertained by this impassioned picture, was on the point of pursuing his inquiries when the Elder evinced a sudden excitement.
“Look!” he whispered, replacing his monocle.
The Younger looked. He saw a woman, extremely young, extremely pretty, extremely self-possessed, and even extremely chic, in her surrender of the red-and-white stripes of Viareggio for a bathing dress more modish, advance slowly toward the water. She was followed by an older lady, who had long since capitulated before the stoutness of middle life.
“Do you see?” cried the Elder. “Can anybody look like that and be respectable?”
“Of course,” laughed the Younger. “Why in the world haven’t you guessed?”
“Who, pray?” the Elder demanded.
“Why, who but an American?”
“O-o-o! I never thought of that.” And in the light of a new hypothesis he began to examine Dulcinea afresh. After a prolonged scrutiny he spoke again: “What do you make of the old one then, on your theory?”
“Why, who should she be but the girl’s mother?”
“Do mothers let their daughters go like that—even in America?”
“Like what? Her mother seems to be going farther than she.”
“Ah, yes; you haven’t seen,” rejoined the other. “But I don’t believe it,” he burst out. “How do you know?”
“How do I know?” mused the Younger. “How could I help knowing—after one look. Blood is thicker than water: an electric sympathy assures me!”
“Yes, an electric sympathy—when it is that one!” grinned the Elder.
“Well, then, look at their hair. Haven’t all Americans the same hair?”
The Elder glanced at him.
“You have, it is true. The mixture of races, I suppose. But that is not enough.”
“If you absolutely demand conviction, then, I know because they have been pointed out to me in Florence by other Americans.”
“Florence!” exclaimed the Elder. “Impossible! I would have seen them.”
“My dear Marquis,” retorted the Younger, “why should you have seen them? Do I have to inform you that Florence is one of the most considerable American cities on this globe? There are many people in Florence whom you do not see. As a matter of fact, I happen to know that they live there—in a villino outside the Porta Romana. I can even tell you that they have no contract for it—so complete in Florence is our knowledge about each other! They came more than a year ago, saying that they were to leave the next day. They have said so every day since; but the landlord is as sure of them as if he had a ten-year lease.”
“Who are they, then?” persisted the Elder. “What else do your friends say about them?”
“Who are they! That is the one thing that nobody knows,” replied the Younger.
“Ah, I told you they were not respectable!” proclaimed the Elder in triumph.
The Younger was touched in his country’s honour.
“My dear sir,” he objected warmly, “allow me to inform you that you entirely misconceive the case. I have not the slightest reason to suppose them other than the perfected bloom of respectability. Have you heard of our American inventions? Well, they are one of them—a mother and daughter, unattached. There are thousands in Florence. Rome is full of them. Certain Swiss and German cities contain only enough other inhabitants to lodge, feed, clothe, educate and divert them. In America you meet them on every corner. They have always emerged from some pre-existent, perhaps some inferior state of being, but without scandal; which, of course, is not to say that they are immune from the frailties of the race. But never be deceived by them again.”
The Elder smiled. “Must it be always that—a mother and a daughter? Can’t there be two daughters? Or another mother?”
“Never,” replied the Younger firmly. “If there are, then it’s another invention.”
“But there must be a man,” objected the Elder.
“No,” insisted the Younger, “there isn’t. There never is. You might ransack the universe and you wouldn’t find him. It’s like spontaneous combustion—and just as respectable.”
The object of this discussion being now indistinguishable in the dazzle of the Mediterranean, the Elder pursued his inquiry.
“If these ladies are of origin and habits so out of the ordinary, do they have names?”
“Rather! They are called Perkins, I believe. The young lady is Susannah. Her mamma is known behind her back as The General.”
The Elder repeated these soft appellations to himself. Then he asked:
“What do they do with themselves? Why have I never met them in the world?”
“For the excellent reason that they don’t go. They know no one. They see the dressmaker and a few other Americans, and basta.”
“Ah! There must be something queer!” burst out the Elder. “You haven’t told me all. Otherwise how could they help not knowing everybody and going everywhere?”
The Younger let out an exaggerated sigh.
“That is precisely what I have been trying to explain to you,” he answered. “But it is true,” he added; “I haven’t told you all.”
“Ah, I knew! What is it?” The Elder was hectic in his eagerness.
“Well,” replied the Younger, looking for his effect, “Susannah is one of your literary ladies. She writes a novel. Not novels, you understand, but a novel. Some ladies keep house. Other ladies embroider tea-cloths. A few occupy themselves with dogs, or reforms. Susannah writes a novel. She is a portentous blue-stocking.”
“Blue stocking! On that leg! Never!” exploded the Elder. “I would give a thousand francs to know her!”
The Younger regarded his companion quizzically.
“Would you really?”
“O you young men!” cried the Elder. “I don’t know what you are made of nowadays. In my time there was more fire. I repeat it—I would give a thousand francs to know her, and it would be nothing.”
“All right,” smiled the Younger. “I’ll take you.”
“Take me? Where?” asked the mystified Elder.
“Why, to Susannah—for a thousand francs.”
“To Susannah! My poor young man, little you know about it. I have been here a month, and it isn’t so easy as you think.”
“On the contrary,” contradicted the Younger suavely, “it is far easier than you think. I happen to know a good deal about it, for I am personally acquainted with her. I have shaken her hand, I have dined at the villino, I——”
“Mother of Heaven!” The Elder furiously clutched his arm. “You know her, and you talk like this! You sit here calmly! You laugh! You lead me by the nose! You——”
Words failed him, and he could only work his fingers into the Younger’s muscles.
That young man tasted of his advantage.
“You see in America they are all like that.”
“And you are here to say so? Then you are either a monster or a liar.”
“Also,” continued the Younger placidly, “you must remember that I am a poor devil of an artist, while Susannah——”
“Ah, I will marry her yet!” cried the Elder with a new enthusiasm. “Take me! Take me!”
“To Susannah, you mean? For a thousand francs? I will. But wait till she comes out of the water.”
II
If Susannah and her mother were an American invention, the Younger began to take as much pleasure in them as if he had invented them himself. And indeed, in a way, he had. Hitherto his acquaintance with them had been less cordial, if anything, than his acquaintance with the Elder. If Susannah had maintained an armed truce, as it were, because they were both strangers in a strange land, he had cultivated Susannah merely as a type. There was a lack, all around, of personalities. But now that he had lightly thrown Susannah to the lions he experienced a more particular interest in her case. He promised himself from the reaction of his two types some such entertainment as one might expect from the encounter of an irresistible force with an immovable obstacle.
He was not long re-established in Florence before the Elder repaired one day to the Younger’s studio.
“It is all arranged,” he announced importantly. “I am going to marry her.”
The Younger, it must be confessed, was a little surprised that Susannah should have fallen so soon. But he kept his guard.
“My dear marquis, let me congratulate you! Have you set the day?”
“O, the details have yet to be arranged. But I have spoken to her mother.”
A light began to break upon the Younger.
“And The General is favourable?”
“The General is favourable—most favourable. She could not be favourable enough.”
I have not explained that Susannah’s parent, in virtue of a striking resemblance to the Father of her Country, and of certain military qualities which she possessed, was known among her fellow exiles as The General.
“I hope Susannah was equally favourable,” the Younger lightly threw out.
“She was not there. But after the mother has given her assurance——”
The Younger began incontinently to laugh.
“My poor marquis! Didn’t you know?”
“Know what?” demanded that nobleman uneasily.
“That the mother has nothing to do with it?”
“How has she nothing to do with it? She has everything to do with it. Isn’t Susannah her daughter?”
“I have no reason to suspect the contrary. But in our country—you know——”
“Well, what about this extraordinary country of yours?”
“Why, in our country”—the Younger put it as gently as he could—“we don’t ask the mother.”
“What in the world do you do then? Is it like the Rape of the Sabines, par exemple! Do you ride in and carry them off?”
“O, not a bit! Sometimes they ride in and carry us off. But we—we are more discreet. We go in very softly and ask them if they’ll come.”
“Without waking the mother up? I see! It’s another invention.” The Elder was visibly annoyed.
“Come!” cried the Younger: “You needn’t be so fierce. I didn’t invent it. You had better be congratulating yourself that The General didn’t gobble you up on the spot—for herself.”
The marquis looked very blank.
“Then I have done nothing?” he asked at last.
“Caro marchese,” began the Younger soothingly, “to have gained a friend is always to have done something. It is very well to have The General on your side. It will make her all the more amenable when you come to the matter of settlements. For I must warn you before it is too late that——”
“What?” The Elder braced himself as for another blow.
“That we don’t make settlements.”
It was as if suddenly the Elder had seen a mountain slide into the sea.
“What the devil do you make then?”
“We,” replied the Younger with a particular inflection, “make love!”
“Oh!” ejaculated the Elder.
And he turned on his heel.
III
He let several suns go down on a certain stiffness which he felt toward his young adviser. But that it was no more than a stiffness was proven by his eventual reappearance. The Younger in the meantime was more or less in the dark as to the progress of events. He knew that there was no break as yet; but his previous acquaintance with Susannah and The General had not been such as to entitle him to their confidences. He was accordingly much pleased when the Elder came back.
“This time I am ready for you,” observed that worthy. “And I might add that she is ready for me.”
The Younger’s intentions had been of the best; but if you make a pass at a fencer his wrist will spring instinctively into play.
“Which one?” he inquired, with a smile.
“Do you ask?” retorted the Elder.
“I stand corrected. Of course, you will have to take them both. Have they given their word?”
“Ah—do you mean that the old one will be hard to shake off?” put the Elder, with something less of assurance.
“Not at all. I mean that neither of them can be shaken off. It is a particularity of the case. It is like the Siamese twins. Whoever takes one, takes both. It is the one case of plural marriage tolerated in my country.”
“In that case,” rejoined the Elder unperturbed, “there will be no trouble about the settlements.”
The Younger took his pink with a laugh. “Then you have been making the other thing. Have you asked her yet?”
“No. But it comes to the same. I have sounded her.”
“O! And she rang true? How did you manage it?”
The Elder took his step without a tremour. “I offered her a present and she accepted it.”
The Younger left him an instant in his security.
“Yes? What was it?”
“An antique pendant. At this moment it is hanging against her heart.”
The Younger took this picture in, but he repressed a laugh.
“My dear marquis, you might give her seventy-three pendants, and I presume her heart is large enough to hang all of them against it. But that would prove nothing.”
The Elder looked reproach before he proffered it:
“You assure me she is respectable. How can she receive presents from a man, how can her mother allow her to receive presents, unless she means something?”
“Perfectly well,” laughed the Younger irritatingly.
“And is that another, may I ask, of your famous inventions?” put the Elder with some irony.
“It is perhaps the most famous of all,” replied the younger, without a qualm. “We are a philosophic people. We take what comes, whether it be diamonds or bankruptcy.”
“Yes, but young girls!” burst out the Elder. “Can they take diamonds and keep their characters?”
“Perfectly well! What have diamonds to do with character? The young girls do not attach the exaggerated importance to material things which you do here. They receive necklaces, tiaras, stomachers, as the merest natural tribute to their charms, and as simply as they would receive wild flowers. It means nothing.”
The Elder gasped.
“And would they be capable of refusing one after that?”
“Perfectly.”
“Madre di Dio! What a society! What taste! What——” He could say no more. But even in the rapids he felt that the Younger was the only one to pilot him ashore. “Do you positively mean to tell me, then, that I am nowhere?”
The Younger relented a little.
“Of course I cannot read the secrets of Susannah’s heart. For all I know you may be enshrined within its inmost recess. I only tell you that the pendant, by itself, means nothing.”
The Elder looked lost.
“Do I accomplish nothing, then, by what I have done?”
“Only,” improvised the Younger briskly, “by following it up. A pendant is very well, but it is not enough. You see, in America anybody might give her a pendant—the plumber, the ice-man, the under-taker. You must do more. You must offer solid proofs of your state of heart. You must find out what Susannah wants. If it is something which can be made to order, into which you can put something of yourself, all the better. Then she will know that you are in earnest, and will act accordingly.”
The Elder took it seriously—not in a pique, but as under the enlarging influence of new ideas.
“I have heard her speak of something,” he uttered slowly, interrogatively.
“What was it?”
“Do you remember those door knockers at Palazzo Testadura? Bronze? By Benvenuto Cellini?”
“The Neptune, you mean?”
“Yes. She said she wished they had them at the villino. They have nothing but an iron finger or something, you know. I could have them copied—by way of a beginning.”
“Yes!” cried the Younger in a final burst of inspiration. “And to give the personal note, to suggest delicately the idea of your knocking at her door, you could have the Neptune’s head modeled after your own!”
IV
Thus it came about that the genetic word was spoken. To stop its effect was now beyond the power of man. Thenceforward it remained for the Younger only to stand by and admire his handiwork.
Events were by no means slow in materialising. The Elder quickly reported on the knockers. Melconi, the sculptor, had taken a cast and was to remodel the head in accordance with the Younger’s suggestion. The prospective donor was already engaged upon a sequence of sonnets—in the manner of Petrarch, he said—to accompany the gift. In the meantime he had ascertained that Susannah would not draw a tranquil breath until she possessed a certain heraldic shield, an old stone coat-of-arms which hung high above the street on the corner of a house across the Arno. He had accordingly entered into negotiation with the owner of the house, had acquired for a fabulous sum the shield in question and had borne it in triumph to the expectant Susannah.
This was but the beginning. The Younger no longer needed to offer suggestions. The Elder’s own imagination was fertilised, and now that he knew how ladies were wooed in America he purposed to win Susannah. That young woman expressed no fleeting fancy which her admirer did not at once embody for her in some form of art. She could not look with favour on the moon but that the marquis would run to order of his jeweller a replica of that heavenly orb, in material far more precious than the original. He could think only in terms of the idea which the Younger had implanted in his mind. The door of the villino swung unceasingly to messengers from the goldsmith, the dealer in antiques, the florist, the pastry cook. Even the upholsterer went, and to all was displayed an equal hospitality.
At this the Younger began to feel a secret irritation. He was amused. He was gratified to find his types turn out so typical. But it seemed to him they overdid it. He had not really supposed that Susannah was so bad as that. It verged on the scandalous. Unless—but it could mean only one thing.
Matters, however, proved not to be so simple, after all. There came a day when the Elder entered the studio in a state of mind more perturbed than any he had yet betrayed.
“She has refused me,” he called out. “What do you think of that?”
The Younger did not know what to think of it. While, on the one hand, he could not restrain a certain gratification at Susannah’s discernment, he deprecated, on the other, her amazing course with regard to the presents. But the Elder left him no time to muse.
“And what do you suppose she said?” he continued excitedly. “She said she wasn’t sure how much I really cared for her. How much! She holds out her hand for everything I bring and then she agreeably withdraws it when she sees nothing more. After I have made myself the talk of the town!”
“Well, you know what I told you,” remarked the Younger, who was much at sea. “Did you expect to bribe her?”
“Yes, I know what you told me. And I know what to think of such people.”
The Younger shrugged his shoulders.
“If that is the way you take it, I begin to think Susannah is right.”
The Elder threw him a look.
“But what does she want?” he cried, clasping his hands dramatically in the air. “What does she want that I can’t give her? What is she now, compared to what she would be as my wife?”
The Younger examined his finger nails.
“You have already had some opportunity to learn that an American girl is the most unfettered creature in the universe. She may think it more amusing to stay so than to become an Italian marchioness.”
“I thought you said they were respectable—your famous jeunes filles,” exclaimed the Elder sarcastically.
The Younger shrugged his shoulders.
“At any rate she won’t stay jeune forever. And what is she now, compared to what she would become? She is nobody, whereas my wife——” A handsome gesture left the Younger to figure that personage. “Then she evidently finds the attractions of this country superior to the rather problematical ones—if you will pardon me!—of her own. She says every day she is going, but she never goes.”
“Well, she is at least free to go. And you must remember that America is gilded with the associations of an unbitted youth. There is but an open door between her and an iridescent dream. When Europe has no more to offer her champing spirit she has but to step back into that happy hunting-ground of the jeune fille. Whereas with you—the door would close behind her.”
The Elder put this from him with a twist of head and hand. “Excuse me, caro mio, if I seem to allude to personal matters. But you will remember that at Viareggio, that first time, you attributed something of your own coolness to—to the fact——”
“Of being a pauper?” filled out the Younger cheerfully. “Yes.”
“Well, if I must say it, she could do much worse than to marry me. Doesn’t she know?”
“That is true,” admitted the Younger, studying his nails anew. From another these facts somehow came with less grace. So he contented himself with adding: “But she might also do better.”
“How?” interrogated the Elder, turning savagely upon him. “What more, I ask you, can a respectable girl want? In God’s name, what more?”
The Younger suddenly knew that he approved enough of Susannah’s discernment to suspend judgment upon her bad taste.
“Perhaps what you call ‘respectability,’ for one thing,” he suggested. “And for another——” He pulled up. “Yet she has that already. So why should she want it?”
“What?” demanded the Elder. “I will give her whatever she wants. What is it?”
The way in which he shouted it made the Younger look out of the window.
“Youth,” he replied.
There was a silence. There was such a silence that the Younger knew he had been a fool. He turned around with the intention of smoothing things over a bit, and the look which he caught on the Elder’s face deepened his pang.
But the marquis, giving him no time, passed it off.
“Eh, my young friend, you have hit it on the head. But never mind. I have not made myself the talk of the town for nothing. And Miss Susannah shall find it out. I will go on as I have begun. I will pay her such attention, I will give her such presents, that even she—even she—will find that she is compromised. Then I will tell you whom she will marry.”
And with this delicate intimation he stalked away.
V
This was how it came to the Younger that more might lie in experiments than one foresaw. He did not like at all that insinuation that the marquis would catch Susannah by foul means if not by fair. But, however he might dislike the Elder’s tactics, the Younger felt his own share of the responsibility.
The two men met one morning at the gate of the villino—the Younger going in, the Elder coming out. They exchanged ceremonious salutations, as usual.
“I have just brought the knockers,” said the latter. “I am much obliged for that clever suggestion of yours. The head is a speaking likeness.”
The Younger smiled uncomfortably.
“Yes? And what does our young lady think of them?”
“She is very pretty. She says they are too charming to put out here on the door. She must keep them by her.”
The Younger stepped inside and slammed the gate in the other’s face. Could a spectator then have seen both sides of the wall he would have observed each gentleman, very red, contemplating for a moment the closed door. He would finally have beheld them turn and walk away—the Elder slowly, shrugging his shoulders; the Younger in haste, his head held high.
He found Susannah in the sala, laughing over the obnoxious knockers. The sight of it angered him the more.
“My dear young lady,” he cried out, “you have made a fool of yourself long enough. You must go home.”
Susannah stopped laughing, for very surprise. She examined the flushed Younger curiously, as if he had been a strange beast in a cage.
“Why,” she said, “what is the matter with you? Do you feel ill? Shall I ring for Gilda?”
The Younger flung his hat into a chair.
“I do feel ill! You and the marquis make me ill between you!”
“Oh, the marquis!” Susannah glanced at the knockers and smiled. “Yes, I remember. You introduced the marquis to me. Didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he snapped. “That’s why I’m here now.”
She laughed.
“What funny creatures men are! They never think of things beforehand. And they said you were clever.”
“I never told you so,” he retorted rather dully. “You’d better wait till you get things from headquarters.”
“So had you,” she rapped out. “Who told you, I was making a fool of myself?”
“Nobody! Nobody needed to! What under the sun do you mean by filling your house with his truck?”
“What business is it of yours?” demanded Susannah hotly. “You don’t care anything about us!”
“What if I don’t? I care about seeing my country made a scandal.”
Susannah again looked at him curiously a moment.
“O! If you are so patriotic I wonder you don’t go home yourself. Wouldn’t that be the easiest way out of your—” she smiled—“your troubles?”
“No! That wouldn’t stop anything. I want things stopped. I want you to go.”
“Well, well!” she exclaimed. “You are in a hurry all of a sudden. It seems to me that you ask a good deal of people you have done so little for—though perhaps you have done a good deal. Is that all?”
“No!” he cried. “Since you ask, I want you to send him back all these things—every single one of them.”
She looked at him more curiously still.
“What! All these pretty things! Why, we’re only just beginning to get comfortable. And see! He just brought me something else.”
She held up the knockers, as if they had been two dolls. The Younger shrugged his shoulders and walked to the end of the room.
“What are you going to do?” he suddenly threw at her. “Are you going to marry him?”
She laughed softly.
“Him? O no! No! And I don’t even think he really wants me to. It’s a sort of game, you see,” she added, with a confiding seriousness.
“Dio mio! I do see. I have seen for a good while. How long are you going to keep it up?”
“I don’t think you really deserve to know,” she said, with her head on one side. “But since you ask, and since you began it, I will tell you.” She assumed an air of great mystery. “I’m going to keep it up till he brings me the gold salt cellars!”
He stared at her. But she faced him out. And when he walked away to a window she threw him a question in turn.
“Now that I’ve told you what you wanted to know, will you tell me something?”
“What is it?” He faced partly about.
“Just how did the game begin? What did you tell him, I mean? You see, his—his manners—were so different before you came and after.”
The Younger laughed curtly.
“I told him you were respectable.”
At this he looked out of the window again.
“Oh—respectable,” said Susannah behind him. “You told him I was respectable? That was very kind of you—I’m sure.” And then the Eternal Feminine came out with a sob. “You horrid man! You perfectly horrid man! You’re just——”
She flounced out of the room.
VI
The Elder stood at the gate of the villino. It was a post familiar enough to him, and the particular object upon which his eyes rested was scarcely less so. But the juxtaposition was unusual. For the panel before him was embellished by that replica of Benvenuto’s knocker, to which reference has already so frequently been made. What manner of omen could it be? He studied the knocker. He studied the door. And finally it occurred to him to apply the one with some vehemence to the other.
In response to this overture a flip-flap of slippers clattered across the flagging within, and the door was opened by Gilda in person. Again the Elder wondered. For hitherto the door, obeying some secret impulse, had betrayed no hint of human agency. The maid, however, left him no time to parley:
“O signor marchese! The ladies have gone to America. Did he forget?”
“Diavolo!” ejaculated that personage.
“Yes, about a quarter of an hour ago. They said they told him they were going, but in case he forgot and came again—the marchese has made such a habit!—to let him know they were leaving by the Genoa train, at eleven. There is still time.”
The Elder looked at his watch.
“Is there still time?” he uttered slowly. He stared at the sea god who so splendidly brandished in his own image the trident before his eyes.
“If the marchese hastens,” replied the interested Gilda. “My padrona——”
But the Elder quenched her with a silver lira and strode away. Even after he had ordered a cabman to hurry him to the station, though, he did not really believe he would go in. Indeed, by the time he reached the station he was quite sure he would not go in. That would be too——Yet he jumped out of the carriage before it stopped, and ran through to the platform. He would just find out! And he charged into the arms of the Younger, who was strolling up and down with a cigarette.
“It is true, eh?” asked the Elder, collecting himself against this new surprise. For the moment it escaped him that he and the Younger were no longer on the best of terms.
“It looks like it,” replied the other. “Shall I take you to the compartment?”
The Elder did not answer. But he followed his companion, replacing his monocle on the way; and presently, in all truth, he beheld Susannah and The General enthroned amid mountains of luggage.
“Why, we began to think you weren’t coming!” cried Susannah, smiling out of the window. “That would have been a nice way to treat us!”
The Elder made an extravagant bow.
“If you give no hint——”
Susannah laughed. “No one ever got so many hints. We have told you every day. We told you yesterday.”
The Elder passed it off with a shrug.
“How soon may we expect you back?”
Susannah shook her finger out of the window.
“Never! We are through with Europe.”
“O!” The marquis laughed. “And how about America?”
“Dear me!” cried Susannah. “There’s no comparison!”
“So I have understood!” exclaimed the Elder gaily, glancing at the Younger.
“I don’t think you understand well enough, though,” objected Susannah. “You don’t seem to understand that, after all, people make more difference than things. And the people there are different. It isn’t just that they don’t act like monkeys the first time they see you on the beach. It isn’t that they aren’t taken in so easily, and that they don’t make such fools of themselves. They are nicer. They are kinder. They have some decency and some self-respect.”
She quite lost her climaxes in her haste to get it out, and in her smile there was something very pointed.
As for the marquis, he again made a profound bow.
“They are very superior beings, I am sure. But you seem to have been some time in coming to this conclusion.”
Susannah’s head dropped a little to one side.
“Not so long as you might think,” she said. “I reached it at Viareggio, last summer.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed the marquis. “And may one ask how, with such a weight upon your mind, you succeeded in deferring your departure so long?”
“Why, yes! And what is more, I will tell you. I was waiting to furnish the villino. It wasn’t quite complete, you know, until the other day. Did I tell you,” she asked, turning to the Younger, “that the marquis had given me the loveliest little gold salt cellars?”
“Your furniture will be much admired in your American home,” remarked the Elder pleasantly.
“O dear no!” cried Susannah. “I wouldn’t have anything in my American home to remind me of Europe. We have left the villino, just as it stands, to the new tenant.”
“Ah! You must have got something very handsome for so completely equipped an establishment—even to gold salt cellars,” exclaimed the Elder, with an amiable smile.
“Perhaps I might have,” replied Susannah; “but the new tenant could scarcely have afforded that.”
“And may I ask who the happy man may be?” inquired the Elder, with perhaps a shade of interest.
“O, it isn’t a man at all,” said Susannah. “It’s our maid, you know—Gilda. She has been so good—the one good person in Europe, I believe. We bought the house for her, and took the trouble to have a complete inventory put in the deed—down to the door-knockers—so that there might be no misunderstanding about it.”
Whatever the Elder might have had for that was spoiled by the guard, who hurried toward them, locking the compartment doors. Turning to the Younger the Elder took his arm.
“Well,” he said, “it seems to me that we are forsaken!”
He was admirable. He had never been so admirable. The Younger, however, gently disengaged himself.
“Pardon me. I am sorry to seem rude, but—I am going, too.”
And he made for the door before the guard should lock it.
“Par-ten-za!” shouted that functionary, with energy.
The two young people stood together at the window, looking down at the Elder. For an instant the Younger’s heart smote him. But something from the eyes nearer his own hardened him again to the cruelty of youth.
“O, by the way,” he called, as the train jolted into motion: “Don’t forget! You owe me, you know, a thousand francs!”