Part 16

It was a pleasantly expressive picture all the same, that of the group in the corner. The parti-coloured lady, who was by no means young, had so settled herself that she appeared imprisoned, penned in her place by two masterful men; and it would be natural to suppose that the two men were disputing for possession of her, but this effect was less easily contrived--since one of the men was English, of an odd unchivalrous tribe whose ways are beyond calculation. I don’t know what race had produced Madame de Baltasar--the united effort of them all, may be, for all their tongues were mingled in her shrieks; but there was no doubt concerning Don Mario--he was the last perfection of Latinity and he played his part. He was peerlessly beautiful, and he sat with his long fingers entwined about his knee, his eyes attentively upon the peony, his cold profile turned with utter correctness to his rival. He was far too mannerly, of course, to be jealous, to be hostile in any open movement; even when his rival failed to notice the lady’s glove on the floor it was only by the barest implication of a gesture that Don Mario rebuked and triumphed over him. A lady in a corner may rely on Don Mario; however hard she begins to find it to tighten that horrid loose fold under her chin, however mauve the powder on her cheek now shows upon the underlying crimson, Don Mario’s eyes are still fixed on her in deep unwavering attention. And Madame de Baltasar, I dare say, had by this time schooled herself to be blind to something that she might easily have seen, if she had chosen, in his steady regard--in that knightly “belgarde” which she accepted without scrutinizing it too closely; for he wasn’t troubled to hide the serene amused impudence with which he played his part. The crazy old ruin, with her cautious neckband and her ruddled wrinkles--he lent himself politely to her ancient game, remarking that she had grown careless in the handling of the orange lights in her hair, which were certainly fitful and obscured towards the roots. But a lady needn’t concern herself with the finer shades in Don Mario’s eloquent looks; he can be thoroughly trusted, at any rate in a public corner of a drawing-room.

An Englishman on the other hand, a candid young Briton, is a queer untutored thing of which you can never be really sure. The Marchesa’s nephew was pink and pleasant, and his undisguised interest in Madame de Baltasar might please her, you would think, for any one could see that it was much more genuine than Don Mario’s. It did please her, no doubt, and she liberally challenged and rallied him; she gave him more than his share, it was he who had the full blaze of her charms. He luminously faced them in return with the frankest interest and wonder; never, never had he seen such a wildly remarkable object. “Well, of all the queer old picture-cards--!” he said to himself; and he laughed with a volleying explosion at the freedom of her humour. He liked her too, the quaint old freak and spark that she was; you couldn’t help liking her loud familiar cackle, her point-blank coquetries discharged with such brass and bounce; she brisked you up and rattled you on in a style you don’t expect in the Marchesa’s solemn saloon. To Madame de Baltasar, no doubt, the pink British face was an open book, and in his barbaric fashion the young man was well enough, and she enjoyed herself. But then his barbarism was declared in a manner of simplicity which proved to her, yes, that these island-seamen are not to be trusted as one may trust Don Mario. The open young sailor, instead of turning his own more faulty profile to his rival and ousting him in triumph--what must he do but burst out pleasantly to the knightly Latin, appeal to him with mirthful eyes, join hands with him hilariously to watch the sport! It was so, there was no mistaking it; the young British monster had drawn the other man, his antagonist, into a partnership of youth, irreverent, unchivalrous, to watch the raree-show of this marvellous old bird and stimulate her to wilder efforts. And so naturally too, so ingenuously, like the great silly oaf that he really was, with his long legs and huge hands! It hadn’t so much as crossed his mind that a woman, still a fine woman in her ripeness, was signally honouring a man; he only saw a crazy jolly absurd old sport who made him laugh so heartily that he had to share the fun with his neighbour. One can’t be surprised if Madame de Baltasar asked herself what, in heaven’s name, they teach these young monsters in their barbaric wild.

I find it impossible to tear my eyes from the group. What, I wonder, does Don Mario think of the young Englishman? They were evidently much of an age; but Don Mario could regard himself, no doubt, as a highly experienced gentleman compared with this bubbling school-boy. He knew the world, he knew himself, he very well knew the lady; and I fear it must be inferred that he thought the Englishman a negligible simpleton. The school-boy’s familiarity could hardly please him, but he took it with his accomplished amenity, transformed it into a quiet and neutral kindness and handed it back; and the Englishman--ah, this is where the simple youth enjoys such an advantage, where he is unassailable--he saw no difference at all between what he gave and what he received again, he supposed they were the same. The same--his own thoughtless guffaw of companionship, Don Mario’s civilized and discriminating smile!--well might Don Mario feel that the barbarian took much for granted. Communication upon such terms is out of the question, with the Englishman ready to fall on your neck--in fact the islander’s arm was affectionately round Don Mario’s at this moment--if you decently mask your irony in a fine thin smile. But let it not be imagined that the Roman _civiltà_, heritage of the centuries, will exhibit any signal of discomfort, even with the hand of the savage patting it sociably and encouragingly on the back. Don Mario talked easily and with all his charm; he told a story, some experience of his own, for the entertainment of the lady. The details escape me, but it was a story in which the Englishman, listening closely, seemed to detect a drift and purpose, an approach to a point; and he listened still more carefully, gazing at the speaker, working it out in his mind; and his brow contracted, he was lost--but aha! he suddenly saw the light and he seized the point. “You mean you’re in _love_ with somebody,” he jovially exclaimed. The words fell with a strange clatter on the polished surface of the tale, but Don Mario had caught them up in a wink. “Why certainly,” he said--“I’m in love with Madame de Baltasar.” Lord!--for the moment it was too quick for the blank and simple youth; but relief came with the lady’s scream of delighted amusement, and he broke into the humour of the jest with resounding appreciation. A good fellow, this Don Whatever-he-is, and a sound old sport, Madame de What’s-her-name--and altogether a cheerier time than one would look for at Aunt Gertrude’s rather alarming tea-fight.

The Marchesa herself was finding it less enlivening; one of the dear boys had got into the wrong corner, the other was still missing, poor Nora Gilpin _would_ try to waylay the Principessa; and though the Marchesa was used to the sense that nothing in the world goes ever easily, she betrayed in her look the weight of all she was carrying. But she was grateful to the Principessa, and with cause; for so long as Miss Gilpin was kept at a distance the little American was indeed a treasure to an anxious hostess. Nothing gayer, nothing more ornamental and affable could be desired for a festival that threatened to languish. She sat on a round stool or tuffet, her small person erect, her knee tilted and her toe pointed like a porcelain shepherdess--a wonder of art, an exquisite toy of the eighteenth century; and one could infer how precious and rare the little figure must be from the fact that it was entirely perfect, not a finger broken, not a rose damaged on her decorative hat--which showed with what scrupulous care she had been packed and kept. One could almost have sworn that the tint of clear colour in her cheek was alert and alive, that it came and went with a living pulse; she was a triumph of the hand of the craftsman who produced her. And to think that she came, not from the cabinet of the Pompadour, but from the roaring market of democracy--how have they learnt such perfection of delicate workmanship over there? She seemed as manifestly the result of ages of inherited skill as Don Mario himself; at least I should say so, perhaps, but for the chance that again places them side by side before me. For Don Mario, the party in the corner having at last broken up, had returned to the Principessa; and he stood by her side, charmingly inclined, with glances more burning, less scorching, than those he had levelled at the orange-clouded fringe. And I now remark that with all Don Mario’s beautiful finish he doesn’t set one gaping at the price he must have cost; one sees in a moment than an object of that sort is not to be bought with money. “Not to be bought?”--I can imagine the tone of the Principessa, if she chose to speak: “He looks as though he weren’t to be bought? Why, it’s exactly _that_ that will fetch his price, and well he knows it. Not to be bought indeed!--I could tell you a little about that. Now there behind you--_there’s_ where money fails, if you like!”

She meant of course the Marchesa; and with the unspoken word of the china shepherdess in my ear I swing round towards the spectacle she faces. The sudden movement surprises the effect to which the Principessa no doubt alluded; I catch the Marchesa from the right point of view and I understand. The harassed soul was easier now, for the tropical intruder had departed and the simple seaman was re-established in more temperate company; the letter from Devonshire was no longer a reproach. The Marchesa breathed more freely; she stood for a moment unoccupied, resting upon her relief, almost persuaded that the world was leaving her in peace. She was no worldling, the good lady; neither she nor her forefathers had taken thought to be prepared for the world, to study the arts with which it may be repulsed, attracted, trodden under or turned to account. The Marchesa had no manners, no glances, no speeches--no raiment even, you might say--but those of her kindly nature, the well-meaning right-intending soul that she happened to be. She was not a work of art; and therein is the effect that she makes in her Roman palace, the effect you may surprise if you follow the word of the Principessa and look suddenly round. There clings about her, and she seems to diffuse it upon the company, a pallor of simple daylight, a grey uncertain glimmer from a morning in Devonshire; and it gives her a friendly gentle air, for it is the light to which she was born and it is natural to her; but to the Principessa, to Don Mario, even to the Roman palace, it is not a trifle disastrous. The pretty little work of art upon the tuffet was aware of it, and I could fancy that she bids me look, look again at _her_, to see how ghastly her china-tints have become in the dimness of a rainy English morning. I won’t say that--the Principessa exaggerated, perhaps defiantly; but it certainly was plain that she wasn’t intended to face the open weather. Good Aunt Gertrude, troubled and incompetent in facing the world, could be left out in rain and storm at any time, and none the worse. The fibre that is by this betokened is not, we understand, to be bought for money. The Principessa may be right, but I doubt whether she honestly wishes her child to acquire it. After all the Marchesa is about as ornamental as the waterproof in which as a girl she braved the weather of an uncertain climate.

And now there arrived, there crossed the room with a quick step, there shook hands ceremoniously with the Marchesa, a personage whose appearance in that company I hadn’t at all expected. Deering!--who could have supposed that Deering would present himself here, and that too at the very hour which is consecrated to the plush and marble of the real Rome in the Via Nazionale? He caught my eye as he crossed the room, and he smiled, as I thought, self-consciously; it put him slightly to the blush that I should see him attending the mild tea-pot of the Marchesa. She greeted him with pleased effusion and drew him aside; I wasn’t near enough to hear their talk, but the Marchesa had evidently much to say, and Deering listened with his well-known gleam of sarcastic observation. He was quite becomingly at his ease, and his flower-droop was markedly successful--it was clearly one of his more slender days; but I noticed that in the patched and tattered saloon, which had struck me as the topmost height of all the Romanism I had met with, the careful composition of his Roman clothing looked alien and singular. He may have been dressed in the taste of the real Rome, but the result was to make him appear as much of a stranger in the palace of the Dark Shops as the forlorn Marchesa herself. That good lady presently released him, and he made his way towards me--but with a signal to me to wait as he did so, for he stopped momentarily in passing beside the Marchesa’s nephew and laid a light finger on his shoulder. The young seaman looked round, nodded familiarly and went on with his talk. I shall never get to the end of Deering, and I told him so when he joined me; for I didn’t see how or where these excellent people should fit into the circle of his associations, those with which he had dazzled me when we met last month by the Tortoises. I had been supposing that _my_ way, though it was he who had smarted me on it, was steadily leading me further from the world he had sketched so brilliantly as his own. Yes, said Deering, I might well be surprised; but he could assure me it was much more surprising to himself. He had no intention, however, of lingering--he proposed that I should come away with him at once. Could he fly so soon?--it seemed abrupt, but he waved off my scruple and led me immediately to the Marchesa to take our leave. “Good-bye, Aunt Gertrude,” he said--“I fear I must be going.” “Good-bye, dear boy,” returned the Marchesa; “come very soon and see me again.”

He was the missing nephew!--the stroke of his revelation of the fact was thoroughly successful, for it took me absurdly by surprise. My thought travelled back to the poor flimsy mountebanks of the Via Nazionale, and I perceived that they had divined my detached and scornful Deering, him with the gypsy in his blood, even more shrewdly than I had supposed--or rather, no doubt, they had had fuller information than mine. He had told them nothing, but they knew all about him, trust them--they knew how firmly his other foot was planted upon a solider world than theirs. When Deering and I now issued from the portal of the classic name I stopped him, I pointed to the name and the vast grey palace-front, and I asked him how he had had the face to talk to me in my innocence about his “real Rome” of the tram-lines and the plate-glass windows--with all this within a few yards of us at the very moment. Had he been ashamed of me, unwilling to present me to Aunt Gertrude and the monument of history up his sleeve?--no indeed, and I didn’t even put the question, for Deering’s motives are much loftier than this. Rather it was magnificent of him, I confessed, to drop the palace, disregard the grandiose name, neglect it as unworthy of mention compared with the company of the mountebanks at the marble-topped table. But how he had deceived me--I now trusted his word no more, and I began to see trickery of some sort even in that chance encounter with him the other day by the English tea-room; he was probably then on his way to join the Marchesa in her afternoon drive on the Pincio. And it was he, perverse and double-lived, who had for a brother that soul of open candour I had just been studying. “I have never consented,” said Deering rather primly, “to be judged in the light of my relations. I take my way, and I gave you the opportunity of taking it too. You have bungled it so shockingly that it has brought you to this.”

It had brought us in fact to the neighbouring Square of the Tortoises; there were the four boys crouched beneath the bowl of the fountain, clutching the tails of the tortoises in the ripple of the water, the dapple of the sunlight. Where would Deering’s line have brought me if I had clung to him throughout? In the end, it would seem, to the palace of the Marchesa, which I had reached on my own account; what I may have missed on the way to it I shall never know. I could declare to him, none the less, that I had seen many things of singular mark, things that I should never have discovered in the state of romantic innocence which he had been the first to corrupt; and for this I thanked him, though on the matter of Rome’s reality I was even now in confusion as deep as ever. My authorities wouldn’t agree; and on the whole I maintained to Deering that my own romance, when now and then I had caught a glimpse of it between the heads of the crowd, had to my eye a more substantial look than most of the realities that had been offered me in the place of it. What had he to say to that? Well then he had to say, regretfully but distinctly, that I was incurable; and one of the Botticelli hands was laid upon my arm in a gesture that resigned me, with tenderness, with compassion, with finality, to the sad ravages of my illusion. “Go back to your books,” he sighed; “I have done my best--good-bye!” It was touchingly felt and spoken; the attitude was striking. But his farewell, I am glad to say, was only rhetorical. We shuffled for a long while to and fro across the sunny little square, discussing my month of blunders.

LONDON: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD. CHISWICK PRESS, TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.