Part 12

But here was old Platt; before we had noticed his entry he was bending over those very fingers, elegantly saluting Miss Gainsborough; and before she had time to forget herself he had skilfully escaped, he was out of her reach; and she sat very stiff and haughty, her head erect, trying to pretend that she hadn’t submitted to his easy liberty with her hand. She had, however--old Platt had been too quick for her; it looked terribly as though Platt, the old monkey, had caught her by surprise and compelled her to be polite to him. It was quite a humiliation for Miss Gainsborough, and I was ashamed to be aware of it. For all her magnificence a man like Platt had the advantage of her, because he was a supple and deft and nimble old wretch, versed in ingratiating arts, while she was accustomed to sit monumentally and to slash at her ease. It is the penalty that is paid by the straight-backed daughter of Warwickshire squires when she leaves her home, exposing herself to the arts and tricks of the foreigner. These outsiders don’t know the rules of the game, or they deliberately flout them with their underhand craft; they won’t see that the rules were laid down by the forefathers of Miss Gainsborough, and that it is not for any impertinent upstart from nowhere to tamper with what he didn’t invent. So Miss Gainsborough fumed in silence; and the devoted Lady Mullinger, pursued to the last by her fatality, thought it a good opportunity to show that she too was of her dear old friend’s opinion--give _her_ she said in emphatic undertones, a _man_, a _real_ man, not an effeminate old thing only fit to dance attendance in a drawing-room. “My good woman,” exclaimed Miss Gainsborough coarsely, “it’s late for _you_ to be asking for a man, real or sham. You and I must take what we can get, at our time o’ life.” Lady Mullinger heaved and cracked with her mirth--“Isn’t she _hard_ on me?” she gasped to the room. But Miss Gainsborough was still discomfited, and she had to remain where she was; she couldn’t now elope to leave old Platt with his advantage.

He was enjoying it very discreetly; nothing could be more graceful than his unconsciousness of Miss Gainsborough’s glare. He hovered about the room with little shrieks of admiration at its dingy adornments, he clasped his hands and fell back in enchantment before a picture, he seized upon Bashford and tenderly slapped him--“My dear boy, _don’t_ look so young and so buxom; it’s thoughtless and cruel of you--there!” Bashford received the dainty slap with all his sturdiness, and Mr. Platt made a pretty little face at him, pouting reproachfully; and then there were more shrieks of delight and a tinkle of laughter, for Mr. Platt had discovered a great row of briar-wood pipes, hanging in a rack on the wall, and he vowed and declared that he had _never_ seen such a darling old John Bull as Mr. Bashford--there, once more! “I ought to have brought a bull-dog and a hunting-crop,” he trilled playfully, “only I shouldn’t know which was which--fancy if I cropped the dog instead of hunting the bull! Now go away and don’t make me laugh, because I’ve got something dreadfully serious to say to Lady Mullinger, who’s a bad bad woman--aren’t you, sweet lady?”--and he skipped to her side, shaking his finger at her, and arranged himself very neatly on a stool at her feet. “Now don’t listen, any of you,” he cried; “it’s a secret--only it isn’t, for it’s the talk of the town; otherwise I’d hush it up, you poor dear thing, for the sake of our past.” He soothed her, patting her hand; and again he knew just how to disengage himself at the right instant, before Lady Mullinger in the surge of her agitation had time to act. He shot a glance of knowing intimacy at Miss Gainsborough in passing, and precisely managed to evade the heart-felt oath that she barked after him as he frisked away.

This elderly sprite had no call to envy the buxom freshness of anybody; he was beautifully pink and buoyant and clear-eyed. Stout he was, but trimly and compactly stout, and his gay little feet twinkled in agile movement. He didn’t remain with us for long; he _had_ to tear himself away, because he was expecting two professors and a doctor of divinity under his own humble roof, and since Lady Mullinger had been untrue to him--“not that I can wonder at _that_, with a dangerous youth like Bashford”--he must trip round and beat up another pretty girl or two for his party; and as for the faithless woman herself, “Oh, my dearest Bash, be very gentle with her--she’s so impulsive”; and with the flutter of a handkerchief, with chirruping cries, with pattering boots, Mr. Platt scattered his leave-taking over the company and was gone. And when he was safely outside, behind the closed door--ah, I should like to have seen him then! Did he pause and turn, did he make an odious and vulgar sign in the direction of the company? I can very well imagine that he did so, and small blame to him. He had brought off a bright and engaging little _scena_ without a hitch, in the teeth of his restive audience; and I can’t believe that he wasn’t deliberately playing with his skill, or that he didn’t smile to himself upon the staircase, tasting the thought of Miss Gainsborough’s expression upon the closing of the door. He knew what he was about.

“Huh!” said Miss Gainsborough--as nearly as I can represent her comment; and she said no more upon that subject, she talked for a few minutes to Bashford upon other matters, and then she made an exceedingly royal departure. Lady Mullinger and I had the appearance of forming a “lane”; Bashford armed her down it and escorted her to the staircase. When he returned Lady Mullinger flounced at him with an outburst of volubility that she was now able to let loose. She wasn’t afraid of old Bashford, and she relapsed into her natural exuberance, as though with the removal of a tightened belt; she fell to work with determination upon the diet that she craved. She abounded upon the topic of Platt--his origin so dubious, his history so mysterious, his connexions so questionable; Lady Mullinger, as one who never listened to scandal, knew nothing _against_ the man, and of course one met him everywhere; but she had been told for a _fact_ that he was involved in that horrid business of--well, you remember it, and how he had suddenly left Rome, so strangely, just before it all came out; and of course it’s no secret that he stays here now because he _daren’t_ go home--yes, Lady Mullinger had had _that_ on the best authority; and nobody hated to be censorious more than she, but in our little friendly Roman circle one must be careful; and after all what _did_ happen exactly in that other affair, the affair of the sacristan and the suppressed pamphlet?--because if Bashford knew, Lady Mullinger felt that she _ought_ to ask him to tell her plainly; and by this time she had quite forgotten that there was a third person present, and on the shock of accidentally meeting my interested gaze she gave a lurch and a plunge, sheering heavily aside into the reflection that for her part she liked to believe the best of everybody, and had always maintained that Mr. Platt was a very good-natured amusing old person. And now she really must fly, with a thousand thanks to dear Mr. Bashford for his charming hospitality.

So she fled--it was a disorderly rout; and with the fall of repose and silence upon the comfortable room I began to follow. But Bashford held me; he was obscurely aware of a burden upon his mind that he wished to throw off. “Give me time,” he seemed to say, detaining me with a firm broad hand. There was plenty of time, and he laboured with his difficulty unhurried. He couldn’t allow a young stranger to carry off the impression that his tea-party hadn’t been quite--hadn’t been exactly--hadn’t been what you might call--; but this line of attack led nowhere, and with the silence still unbroken he cast around for another. Every approach seemed blocked by his loyalty to his guests, but he arrived at last. “A good soul, her ladyship,” said he; and then, drawing a bolder breath--“Tongue runs away with her a bit, at times.” Oh, I quite understood; it may happen to any of us. “It’s my belief,” said Bashford, “that some people _must_ have their talk--keeps ’em alive, if you see what I mean.” He looked up gravely for my effusive assent and found his way now more freely. “That’s what I like about old Martha Gainsborough,” he reflected; “she talks very fierce, but there’s no mischief about her. It’s my belief that some people _will_ make mischief--keeps ’em going, if you see what I mean. Now what I like about old Martha--” The circle of his locution was narrow; he was surprised to find himself at the same point again so soon. He broke away--“There’s plenty of good stuff in old Martha; and that keeps _her_ alive; so she’s no need to pull her friends to pieces.” He frowned approvingly on the phrase, and it started a smile. “Except to their faces,” he added with humour. He had brought me to the door, and he dismissed me warmly. “And mind you,” he called after me, “she’s a very good soul, her ladyship.” I knew who was, anyhow.

XII. CORSO

There was no doubt that I had climbed to good purpose when I reached Miss Gainsborough’s _piano nobile_ in the Corso. Here was grandeur!--such a pomp of high mirrors and gilded garlands and red brocades, such a blaze of candlelight and crystal, as gave old Martha the sumptuous background that became her. She stood on the hearth-rug, upright as ever, her hand upon the crutch of an ebony wand; she stood in all her panoply to receive the world. She was flanked by a pair of supporters, two gentlemen already in attendance; and the world approached her across a shining floor that was broad enough to make the world feel very small and trifling, or very large and uncouth, before it gained her presence. But she took my hand with kindness, though she spoke with acerbity; and she seemed to hold me under her protection, like a friend, while she presented me loftily to the gentlemen in waiting. One of these I recognized at once; he had the bright dark eyes, the musical voice, the sharp-lipped smile of Father Holt--who recalled our meeting in the church and gracefully renewed our acquaintance. The other was an old man with a great patriarchal head, snowily bearded--a picturesque old figure, bedecked in careful negligence of black velvet and creamy silk; he was very loud and deaf, and he accepted my introduction with abounding heartiness.

Miss Gainsborough was holding a banquet; and Father Holt and Mr. Vickery (the patriarch) had been retained for the occasion as a pair of faithful henchmen, who would kindly be at hand to beat off the crowd when she collapsed. She was giving them their directions to this effect when the crowd began to gather, and I own there was some disillusionment again for me in the sight of the trio who first appeared. Miss Gainsborough’s drawing-room glowed and shone, prepared for all the brilliance of a historic capital; and anybody might have felt that high expectations sagged a trifle when there presently drifted through the curtained portal the long plain faces of the Clarksons. They, poor creatures, had perhaps the same reflection, discovering me upon the hearth-rug; when for once you dine in the Corso it is flat to encounter the mere Briton to whom you have been kind in your lodging. But other faces quickly crowded upon us, and the room was filled with chatter and stir; the party was a large one, and among the gathering of many strangers Miss Agnes and I, trying to make conversation as we looked at the show, might imagine that we beheld the flower of historic pride. I at least was ready to make the most of it, for the honour of the Corso and of ourselves; but Miss Agnes blinked more doubtfully with her short-sighted eyes and appeared dissatisfied. Was it possible that old Martha was putting us off with our own sort, a rabble of floating touristry--whom she swept together and polished off from time to time with a perfunctory banquet? Yes, when a few minutes later I was sent to dinner with Miss Gadge it seemed all too probable.

How we do despise each other, we simple pilgrims! There is no meanness to which we are ashamed of stooping if only we may so persuade the rest of the herd that we are not as they, gaping in the rawness of innocent wonder. Miss Gadge and I were quite capable, I believe, of deliberately lying to each other about our condition and rank in the general pilgrimage; there was instant rivalry between us, a competition into which we dropped as a matter of course. Even after long years it might make us both uncomfortably flush to recall the sound of our voices as we plied one another with the well-known strokes--for they are all well-known, the possibilities of the game have been ransacked a thousand times over. Not one of us all, I suppose, ever really deceived another; and yet we are unable to talk with candour and freedom--and Miss Gadge is by no means a spiritless talker--until we have paid our debt to the devouring snobbery which overtakes us in Rome. I try to smother some degrading puffs and flourishes of my own that return to me; but I may claim that no less vivid in memory are the struttings and bouncings of Miss Gadge. The game was drawn when at last we abandoned it, and we have never since had occasion to start it again. Years have flown, and if Miss Gadge and I were to meet once more at a dinner-party in the Corso we should meet as strangers; yet I can hear the insinuating tone in which she would begin by asking me whether this was my first visit to Rome. “Not quite!” I should answer, with a dangerous ironic smile; and I should allow her to commit herself further before crushing her with the load of my superiority. I should find, furthermore, that it isn’t easy to crush a bouncer of such experience as Miss Gadge.

As for the particular crowd that old Martha had collected that evening, the suspicion of Miss Agnes was confirmed. We were a fortuitous lot, jetsam of the hotels and the boarding-houses, with only Father Holt and Mr. Vickery to give us a stiffening of the real Rome. They toiled, I have no doubt, manfully; but they were outside my range (Miss Gainsborough kept them jealously near herself--not that she seemed likely to collapse), and I was plump in the midst of the conversation, everybody knows the kind, which we pilgrims make for ourselves when we assemble together. It begins with the unseemly game I have described, and when this has been played to a draw it goes on to an endless chant, recurring points of admiration and exclamation, over the churches and the ruins and the hill-towns that have stirred our gushing affections. The dear sweet places, we name them in succession; and like Berta when she grew so lyrical over Gower Street and the hansom-cabs, we hardly need more than the sweet pretty names--they are conversation enough by themselves. Hark to the swelling chorus!--our shrewd hostess knew she could trust us, her body-guard was merely for her own protection against a clack of ecstasy that bored her to death. She at her end of the table was again declaiming, arraigning, denouncing in her grandest manner; the rest of us left the world to its fate, and assured each other that Assisi--that Perugia--that Siena--needed no more words to express what we all agreed that they were. In half a dozen eager colloquies about the table this truth was upheld.

Take the case, for example--not of Miss Gadge, occupied for the moment with her other neighbour; but take the case of Miss Turnbull, who happened to have arrived that very day from Assisi, where she had spent a fortnight alone with her feelings. These, she was clear, were unutterable; but so were mine, and when we threw them together the effect was instant. “Assisi!” we both exclaimed in an outburst. Miss Julia Turnbull--she was a fair and flushed young woman of thirty; and she had travelled up and down over Italy, quite by herself, and had never had the smallest difficulty with the Italians. Wherever she went it was the same story--nothing but perfect friendliness and delightful manners. Treat an Italian as you would treat anybody else, and he will behave accordingly--if this result of Miss Turnbull’s experience seems ambiguously worded, nothing could be plainer or franker than her ringing laugh and her broad blue gaze. With these she had made all sorts and conditions of friends in her walks around Assisi; she had talked to every one she met, they told her of their joys and troubles--dear things, they seemed to feel that Miss Turnbull was akin to themselves; and perhaps there _was_ something of the south, something of the soil in her--she couldn’t otherwise account for it. Anyhow she had realized that it was among the peasants and the simple folk of the country, not among the professors and the theologians, that (to use her own image) one “touched the heart of things Franciscan”; and she had not only touched it, she had borne it away with her, and some day perhaps she would put it in a little book--but it would evidently take her a long while to think of the necessary words. And so meanwhile, “Assisi!”--the book, for Miss Turnbull and me, was already in the cry of the name.

“A book? who’s going to write a book?”--Miss Gadge caught up the echo with a pounce. Miss Gadge was small and lean and dry, with a pair of nippers that clawed and lacerated her nose to maintain their hold against her emphatic nods and jerks. If we were talking of books we might be interested to know the name of the grey-haired lady on the other side of the table--“but don’t seem to be noticing her; look presently,” said Miss Gadge; and in a very unnecessary whisper she breathed a literary _nom de guerre_ of thumping circulation, I believe, in those days. That simple old lady, so unobtrusive in her plain white shawl, was _she_; and Miss Gadge was her friend and had the privilege of travelling with her on an Italian tour--a tour undertaken for a purpose that Miss Gadge oughtn’t really to mention, but that she did confide to us because we were interested in books. Emmeline (so Miss Gadge referred to the authoress) had a new novel shaping in her mind, and this time she was going to “bring in Italy”; and so she had come to Italy to _take_ it in, as you might say, before bringing it in--she was one who felt that a novel was only of value in so far as it was sincere. And if you have ever had the chance of watching a novelist (a sincere one) while he or she is simply waiting, imbibing and inhaling the atmosphere that is presently to be brought in--you can believe that Miss Gadge was almost afraid, at times, of interrupting the studies and meditations of her friend, lest she should mar such an exceedingly delicate process. It isn’t as though it were merely a matter of taking notes and accumulating facts; Emmeline constantly remarked to Miss Gadge that it was something far more intimate that she desired. She already had her “plot” quite clear in her head--it had come to her at Bournemouth; the atmosphere could only sink in gradually, taken on the spot.

The old lady in the shawl was placidly attending to her dinner, and we could observe her without indiscretion. I had for my part a real curiosity in doing so. In those far-away years it wasn’t every day that I saw a novelist, and I looked upon the mild brow of Emmeline with questioning wonder. From that smooth forehead they had sprung, those generously passionate romances that had been considered too rich and ripe--all the men in them were “clean-limbed,” all the women “deep-breasted”--for Miss Turnbull to read as a school-girl. Oh she _had_ read them, you may be sure, and she warmly agreed with Miss Gadge that there was nothing in their frankness which could inflame a wholesome mind. Indeed Miss Turnbull often thought that if, as a woman grown, she possessed some power of appreciating the big things, the real things, the human things, she largely owed it to her long immersion in the romances of Emmeline. There comes a time, no doubt, when we turn to life itself, to the book of the heart, rather than to an imaginary picture of it, however sincere; a mere novel then loses its hold on us and we reach out to our kind. Yes, yes--but what so painfully impressed Miss Gadge, for one, was the vainness of our attempts in that direction; our lives are isolated, barriers divide us--I am not sure that Miss Gadge had ever been able to feel she had truly attained to the life of another, for all her striving. Ah, to that Miss Turnbull had much to say; there are currents, divinations, magnetic chords--but though there is much to say about them, it appears to be difficult to say it clearly; Miss Turnbull got entangled in the chords to such an extent that she lost her bearing in the currents. But Miss Gadge was ready with the true conclusion; in these perplexities, in these obstructions, it is the genius of the artist that will point the way. Where the rest of us fumble and hesitate the novelist marches straight; he knows, _she_ knows, how to throw down the barrier and to unlock the soul. There she sits, bless her, just across the table; and if she seems to be thinking of nothing but the lobster’s limb that she is tapping and cracking so busily--type of how many a heart that she has smitten and laid gaping with her pen--one needn’t doubt that she is taking in, at this very moment, more of the meaning of life than the rest of us put together. Perhaps we shall find that she has brought it in, with Italy, when we read her next.

The conversation of these ladies had joined hands across me; they were so much more familiar than I was with the hearts and chords and barriers that I could have nothing to say. But they didn’t appear to get very far with the subject of their discussion; they soon managed to lose it in the difficulty of agreeing what it was. Miss Gadge thought that essentially it was the spirit in which she and Emmeline were conducting their tour; and if that were so it was obvious that Miss Gadge should first describe, without interruption, the nature and the quality of the spirit. This she was quite willing to do--taking as an illustration a day they had lately spent among the “ghosts of the centuries” (I quote Emmeline) in the Campagna; and she began the day in much detail, dwelling on the tone in which Emmeline had said of the Appian Way, “It speaks to me, it speaks to me!”--like that. But Miss Turnbull’s view of the subject in hand was different; and she slanted off to _her_ view by a rapid cut at a drooping youth who sat exactly opposite to me, nursing his chin in a slender and very flexible hand. “Mr. Pole, say you agree with me; say you think that on the plane of art--” Miss Turnbull was great upon “planes”; but we all know the slipperiness of that one, and she crashed heavily when the youth Pole, after listening unmoved for a minute or two, sighed out some cruel and insidious comment. Such a languorous slim-throated slender-handed youth--he was just what Deering had planned to be, what Deering perceived that he daily more fatally failed of being; I thought compassionately of Deering as I noticed the waxen nose and the relaxed waistcoat of the youth Pole. He tripped up Miss Turnbull on her plane, gave a limpid glance at the havoc of her fall, and returned to the seclusion of his graceful attitude.