fro From the Other Side Stories of Transatlantic Travel By Henry B. Fuller Author of The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani With the Procession, etc. Boston and New York Houghton, Mifflin and Company COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY HENRY B. FULLER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CONTENTS PAGB THE GREATEST OF THESE I WHAT YOUTH CAN DO 94 THE PILGRIM SONS 142 PASQUALE S PICTURE 205 FROM THE OTHER SIDE THE GREATEST OF THESE YES, I think I may say that in gen eral my portraits are rather well thought of. By " my portraits " I mean, not those that other people paint of me, but those that I paint of them. Stanhope, too, shares the common opinion, though what we artists think of an opinion that is purely literary everybody knows. He is constantly referring to my "art." I seldom refer to his. That piques him. But I do not acknowledge that literature is an art, except, perhaps, in some secondary, subsidiary sense ; for of late, it is true, "we others" have rather fa vored that me tier. But we must frame our pictures. T,H 4 E. QR,EATEST OF THESE My : portraits, yes. My Trois Vieilles iF.emmes r^c&ived honorable mention at the last; Salo n ; -niy Woman of a Certain Age is just now causing considerable comment at Burlington House. All accounts agree ; all strike the same note : it is always and ever my "eye for character." The unified voice of appreciation never falls below " pene tration," and often enough it rises even to " divination." Stanhope, in his " art," tries for the same things, but he wastes a great many words, for his medium is wholly wrong. Sometimes I "probe a complicated nature to its depths ; " some times I " throw a flood of light upon the " And so forth, and so forth. Very well ; let them keep it up ; let them employ their " art " to glorify mine. I became acquainted with Madame Skjelderup-Brandt rather suddenly. But THE GREATEST OF THESE that is the way things go in Sicily, espe cially at Girgenti, where people feel as if they had about reached the Ultima Thule of the South, and where there exists, therefore, something of a dispo sition to hang together. Perhaps this comes from those last few hours in the train, where everybody seems to carry a gun or a revolver as a matter of course ; perhaps from the necessity of huddling together through the evening in the ho tel, from which no one thinks of issuing to the town on the hill above, or even to the humpy and betufted environs of the house itself ; perhaps from the fact that there is a single well-established route through the island for travelers, one and all, and from the feeling that it is better to make one s acquaintances near the beginning of it than near the end. I made the acquaintance of Madame Skjelderup-Brandt near the beginning (not that I learned her name till I met 3 THE GREATEST OF THESE her again, months afterward, at Flor ence). She came in to dinner, sat down beside me at table, and within three min utes we were on the best of terms. I saw at once that she had character ; my finger-tips tingled for a pencil ; I was almost for " getting " her on the table cloth. Her prompt friendliness was most opportune, for the Dutch baron, across the table, had just turned me down. In response to my modest salutation he had dropped his cold eye to his plate, and I thought I saw him communicating to that chill and self -sufficing utensil a sulky, even a dogged determination not to let me know him. Yet how was I to have apprehended that he was Dutch, and a baron, and proud of his family, and away from home for the first time ? "Leave him alone," mumbled Stan hope at my elbow. " I m going to," I responded. " So are the rest," I added, for there was a vacant seat on each side of him. 4 THE GREATEST OF THESE Madame Brandt leaned a little my way, as she busied herself in a review of her forks and spoons. " That young man has a good deal to learn," she said to me under her voice. She crinkled up her dark eyes with a kind of suppressed joviality, and drew her mouth down at one corner by a sort of half-protestant grimace. Did her ac cent produce the grimace, or did her grimace produce the accent ? It was the slightest accent in the world ; was it Hungarian ? I wondered. Then she said something perhaps the same thing over again to a pair of young girls on the other side of her. " He has indeed," I rejoined expres sively. Whereupon she crinkled those dusky eyes of hers for me once more, and I felt that we might easily become friends. I put Madame Brandt down for about forty-three. She ran to the plump, the robust, the durable, and she was dressed 5 THE GREATEST OF THESE in a way that achieved elegance with little sacrifice of individuality. Her dark hair was slightly grizzled ; her shrewd eyes still twinkled merrily under their fine black brows at a discomfiture that I was unable altogether to conceal ; and her sturdy little hands (they had ever so many rings, yet they contrived to ex press as few hands do a combination of good sense, good nature, and thorough going competence) still busied them selves with the forks and the spoons, as her straight, decided lips made a second shadowy grimace, the comment of a wide traveler on provincial pride wandering abroad for the first time. Our menu promised great things. The house was " of the first rank," and the dinner was to be of corresponding state. There were difficulties : the milk had to come sterilized from Palermo, and the meats were sent down all the way from Lombardy ; yet we got through the eight courses that our rank demanded. As the 6 THE GREATEST OF THESE fish came on, our number was increased by one : a middle-aged lady entered and sat down on the baron s right. She was a quiet little body, with a pale face and eyes of a timid and appealing blue. She seemed embarrassed, distressed, de tached. Stanhope figured her (a little later on, after allowing himself a due margin of time to get his literary en ginery into play) as some faded water- bloom, rudely uprooted, and floating away who could say whither ? This poetical analogy made no great impression upon me ; her face was far from offering itself with any particular degree of usefulness. However, we both agreed that she did look detached. "Decidedly so," affirmed Stanhope. " And if nobody speaks to her, I 11 do it myself." But Madame Brandt greeted her very kindly, with a sort of unceremonious good nature, as if for the tenth or twentieth time, and yet with a deli- 7 THE GREATEST OF THESE cate shade of consideration and con cern. " Your turn, now," I said to the baron, inaudibly, it is true. "Don t go on fussing over that fish-bone; it s only a pretense. Look up, I say." He must have heard me. He raised his eyes. His glance, though cool, was civil, and he gave her a word of conven tional greeting. "That s better," I commented. The little lady appeared to become a trifle more self-assured, more animated. " Something might be done with her, after all," I thought. "My revolt against the jeune fille has carried me to great lengths." "What is such a type doing in a ho tel," questioned Stanhope, " and in a hotel so far away from home at that? A domestic body, if ever I saw one ; she does n t even know how to take her place at a public table. She has cleared the entire distance between her own 8 THE GREATEST OF THESE home and this hotel in a single jump. Did you ever see anybody so timid, so deprecatory, so propitiatory, so " " Your language ! " I sighed. Then, "Why should she be frightened? We are only a dozen all told." Stanhope ran his eye round the table. " She makes us thirteen." " I am not superstitious," I declared. " Nor I. But what can have brought her so far, and have hurried her along so fast ? " he proceeded. " So far ? So fast ? " I repeated. " Oh, you literati will never take a thing as it is ; you will never be satisfied with a moment of arrested motion. Action, movement, progression, you must al ways have your little story going on." " But you will agree that she is from the far North. Don t you see the Bal tic in her complexion ? Don t you see the h m the Teutonic sky in her eyes?" " What I see is that you are coming 9 THE GREATEST OF THESE round to my way. Bravo ! It s surpris ing how seldom you do get my point of view." " Don t think I m trying to invade your province," he rejoined. "You won t mind if I wonder whether she is an invalid ? " " She hardly looks ill," I replied. " Worried, if you like, anxious, under some severe strain." " Undoubtedly. Now, there ; what did the lady on your right say to her ? " For Madame Brandt had addressed to the newcomer what seemed to be a few words of sympathetic inquiry, employ ing certain specific vocal lilts and inflec tions that she had already employed in addressing the two young girls just be yond. " How do / know ? " I asked rather pettishly. " Tell me what language the lady on my right was speaking in. Tell me what country the lady on my right is a native of. Tell me the name, coun- 10 THE GREATEST OF THESE try, rank, and title of the individual op posite who has undertaken to be silent in all the languages. Tell me the na tionality of that high-shouldered youth behind the <pergne, the one with those saffron eyes and that shock of snuff- brown hair. Give me the origins of the elderly ringleted female up at the head who has staked out her poodle at the table-leg. I know abbe s and lieutenants and curates, especially English ones ; there s nothing else I m sure of. Oh dear, what is that poor woman trying to tell the waiter ? He speaks Italian, English, and French ; won t any of the three serve her ? " The little lady from the North was looking up from her plate of belated soup into the waiter s face with an expression of perplexed appeal. " Can t you help her ? " growled Stan hope. I made some advance in French, but uselessly. Madame Brandt came to her n THE GREATEST OF THESE aid in her own special idiom, and then communicated with the waiter in Ger man. " Ah, you speak everything ! " I said to her with an abrupt informality not unlike her own. " Oh, we who come from the little countries ! " she returned, with a careless good humor. "But there are greater linguists than I in the house," and she pointed toward the chair opposite that still remained vacant. Just before the removal of the entre"e this chair came to be occupied. "Fourteen at last!" breathed Stan hope. Another woman entered, and the sor rowful little creature from the Northland, after a word passed with the newcomer in the only language of which she her self seemed to have a command, accom plished a depressed and inconspicuous exit. "Thirteen again ! " sighed Stanhope. 12 THE GREATEST OF THESE "Don t twang that string any longer," I remonstrated. The new arrival, who had come on with much directness and self-assurance, and had seated herself with all the self-posses sion in the world, gave the waiter a hint about the smoking lamp in Italian, favored the company with a brief but compre hensive salutation in French, unfolded her napkin, and achieved a swift and easy dominance of place, people, and occasion. It was one more "woman of a cer tain age." I trod on Stanhope s foot. "What do you think of this ?" was my meaning. My pressure was full of im plication, even of insinuation. He made no response, he whose intuitions are his constant boast. Of a certain age, yes. But what age ? Thirty - five ? Thirty - seven thirty- eight ? Single ? Married ? Widowed ? Divorced ? A lady or not ? Once more I trod on Stanhope s foot. This time his foot pushed mine away. 13 THE GREATEST OF THESE " Work it out for yourself," that was plainly what he meant. Well, then, a woman of thirty-seven ; rather tall than not ; neither stout nor thin, yet noticeably big - boned ; and dressed in black brocaded silk. Of ro bust constitution, perhaps, yet not in robust health. Her face pale, worn; not haggard, yet full of lines, weathered, apparently, by a long and open exposure to the storms of life. Her hair (none too carefully arranged) already turning gray. Her cheek-bones high -set and wonderfully assertive, what was her race ? Her eyes (of a bright, bold, hard blue) most markedly oblique, what was her lineage? Her wrists thick; her hands large and rather bony, yet white (even blanched) and well kept ; her nails carefully trimmed, but one or two of her finger-tips discolored as if by some liquid, not ink, what were her interests, what was her occupation ? Her chin firm, de cided, aggressive 14 THE GREATEST OF THESE (Artichokes ? Stewed in something or other ? No, thank you. Artichokes have no raison d etre beyond the pleasure they give one in picking them apart leaf by leaf, and for that they must be dry. I will wait for the roast.) firm, decided, aggressive. Her mouth if I may express myself so open ; I mean large, frank, without pre tense, guiltless of subterfuge. No diffi culty there. But those eyes, those cheek bones ! They puzzled me, fascinated me. They threw my thoughts forward to some new country that I had never seen, to some new people that I had never min gled with, to some new life broadly, irre concilably at variance with our own. The face they helped to form prompted me to the sketching out of some novel career altogether unique and individual, chal lenged me to reconstruct the chain of experiences that had led this singular woman over what rigors of unknown seas and mountains to the mild joys of this 15 THE GREATEST OF THESE blooming Sicilian spring. " She has lived," I thought ; " she has looked out for herself ; she has character, capacity. But she is so worn, so hard, so brusque, so bold. Is she is she " and I said it to myself in a whisper s whisper "is she respectable ? " I appealed to the table ; how were my commensals receiving her ? Just as they would receive anybody else, appar ently. Yet, was she accepted, or did she impose herself ? For she took the ini tiative from the start. She knew every body. Stanhope and I were the only new arrivals of the day. She greeted Madame Skjelderup-Brandt, well and good. She greeted the two gray doves by madame s side, and they modestly responded, better and better. She accosted the baron in German, and ex tracted a whole sentence from him in reply, best of all. She had a word for Toto tied to the table-leg, and received acknowledgments in some unclassified 16 THE GREATEST OF THESE jargon from Toto s mistress, highly satisfactory. But the English curate, he of the lank limbs and the underdone countenance? Ah, he is not cordial. (How long has he been in the house ?) And the curate s lady, with her desic cated physiognomy, is coldly mute. (How much does she know of the world ? ) And the head waiter himself, is his attitude that of friendly good will, or that of careless, open disrespect ? I felt Stanhope s foot against mine. I started. " I I beg pardon ! " " I was only saying," said the voice of the object of my conjectures, with her look partly on my face and partly on the label of my wine-bottle, " that you would have done better to select some local growth ; our Tempij, for example. Mar sala is generally fortified beyond all rea son." I glanced at Stanhope. I decided that her advances must have begun with him, and have reached me by a subsequent 17 THE GREATEST OF THESE stage. But I found them abrupt and irregular, all the same. " Marsala is a local growth, according to most people s notions of Sicily, is n t it ? " I asked. " Poor Marsala, after they have fin ished with it ! " she observed, taking her own bottle in hand. I shall not say that her voice was harsh or rough, though her vocal chords must have had their own peculiar ad justment. I shall not insist that her English had an accent ; least of all shall I insist upon what particular accent it may have been. She pushed her bottle across toward me. "Try it, anyway. It is nothing re markable, but you will see a difference." " Dear me," I thought, " this is most singular. I never saw such directness ; I never met such h m. She breaks down all barriers ; she dispenses with all conventions ; really, she lets in quite a 18 THE GREATEST OF THESE different air ; what quarter does it blow from?" I felt the eye of the curate s wife upon me, and would rather have had things different. " It is better," I acknowledged. " My next bottle shall be the same as yours." I am not sure that I should have put it just in that way with everybody. "You stay long enough, then, for a second?" Why should she want to know ? Why should she make her want known so baldly ? " A day or two," responded Stanhope. " We see the temples, and then move on - to other temples." " Like all the rest," she said. "Are they?" I asked. "We hoped they might be different." " You are like all the rest. Nobody stops long enough." " You stay longer ? " I remembered her reference to " our tempij." She looked thoughtfully into her glass. "Yes," she replied in an altered tone, 19 THE GREATEST OF THESE a tone of great quietness and restraint ; "I have been here some time." And she became silent. After a short lapse the conversation became general, and she reentered it. Travel-talk : we exchanged feeble no things about routes and accommoda tions ; we praised here, and we con demned there, all from the strict standpoint of personal experience. My Enigma touched on the hotels at Corfu, on the steamer for Tunis, on the express for Constantinople. She seemed to have been everywhere, to have seen every thing, to have met everybody. She evoked responses, more or less in kind, from every quarter. Madame Brandt grew restive under all this indifferent discourse ; I could see that she felt her self capable of handling better material. She veered off toward politics ; she had her own ideas on everything and a policy for everybody. Her "little country" was evidently outside the circle of great 20 THE GREATEST OF THESE things ; hers was a broad, external vi sion, and embraced all powers and poten tates in its easy and masterful sweep. Politics was her hobby ; so she mounted her steed and swung round the track finely; she kicked up a tremendous lot of dust, and took every hurdle without blinking an eyelash. But this demonstration led to no coun ter-demonstration from our neighbor over the way. To all other leads she would respond, but not to the lead political. She who appeared to know so much on every other subject was dumb on the subject of statecraft. At the first oppor tunity she gave the talk a strong twist in the direction of art and literature. She was better acquainted with the new men in Paris than I was myself, and she made easy casual references to men of the North whose names I had never even heard. She had a good deal to say about the later lights in Italian literature, especially some of the more dubious 21 THE GREATEST OF THESE ones, whom she appeared to have met personally ; and she commented with an unceremonious frankness on a few of the more fragrant practitioners of present- day French fiction. Stanhope became completely engrossed. She gave him intimate details about authors he was already familiar with ; she made sugges tions for readings in new authors whose names he had barely heard ; she launched him bodily upon all the currents and cross currents and counter-currents of Conti nental fiction, she almost swamped him. She led him on from fact to the ory, and from theory to practice, and from practice to ethics. Those strong white hands of hers took a firm grip upon the trunk of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and made a mighty rus tle overhead among its leaves. There was one moment when I almost thought I saw things as they were, all things save the speaker s self. She involved the whole table : the baron warmed 22 THE GREATEST OF THESE to life ; the curate flamed in protest ; the saffron-eyed young man (who turned out to be a Croat) clamored against her assumptions and conclusions ; until Madame Brandt, who was as deeply involved as anybody (and whose expres sions showed at once a wide tolerance and a generous idealism), became sud denly conscious of the presence of her offspring. These two young creatures sat there side by side, with downcast eyes and attentive ears, rather discon certed by an interchange of ideas that had never before come within their ken. Their mother, returning to herself, gave a shrug, laid her own hand upon the trunk of the tree, and quieted down its agitated foliage before too many leaves had detached themselves and come flut tering down in the wrong direction. The situation had been most promis ing, most inspiring. Ah, these young girls, these tedious young girls, how much they have to answer for ! 23 THE GREATEST OF THESE We were at the fruit. The disputant- in-chief stopped the waiter, looked over his offerings with a leisurely yet critical eye, made her choice, called for an extra plate, arranged her pears and grapes upon it, rose unceremoniously, bade us all a brusque yet good-tempered bon soir, and walked out of the room. I looked after her, with a certain intentness, perhaps. Then, turning back, I detected Madame Brandt looking with a like intentness at me. I smiled ; but she turned away without any change of expression. How long had her observa tions been going on ? I followed Stanhope into the smoking- room. We had it to ourselves. "Well?" said I. " Well ? " said he. "What is she?" I asked. " Make your own guess. I thought at the beginning that she might be one of those Baltic Germans." "She isn t." 24 THE GREATEST OF THESE " A Dane, then ? A Finn ? A Croat, another of them ? Or a a " I did not wait for further conjecture. "Time will show, perhaps. She is a linguist, remember ; she will lapse into her own tongue in due course. I m sure she has n t done so yet. When she does, may we be able to recognize it." "She spoke to the dog," submitted Stanhope. " Humph ! " said I. Then, "What is she doing here ? " I added. "She is a companion," he replied. " That black figured silk her one good gown." " If you are going to be farcical ! " I exclaimed. " Companion ! Did you ever meet any one less secondary, less subordinate ? " " She is a nurse, then ; or a female courier, she knows everything." " Female courier ? Female free lance would be better. Couriers and 25 THE GREATEST OF THESE such have their own dining-room here. She is an adventuress." " Don t be too hasty," said Stanhope. " Well, then, a grass widow, waiting for the husband or the remittance that never comes. She s been here some time, it seems." " Don t be so uncharitable," said Stan hope. "How she talked, before those chil dren ! " " She said what all thinking persons must believe." " That does n t help. Come, come, what is she, then ? " " A political agent, perhaps. She fol lowed every other lead but that of poli tics." " Would politics lead her to Gir- genti?" " This province is certainly a political factor; those sulphur - mines, all these communal disturbances " " Nonsense." 26 THE GREATEST OF THESE "Well, then, she is a"- " A what ? " I demanded. " A cosmopolite." "I see you are at the end of your string," I said. ii Girgenti sits whitey-gray on its high hilltop and looks out upon two worlds : landward, into the Inferno of the sul phur-mines ; seaward, over the Paradiso of the almond-groves. The two worlds were before us, where to choose : should we take the miseries of the sulphur- workers, evidenced by the dismal piles of refuse that disfigured the stripped and glaring hillsides of the interior, or should we follow that long and suave slope waterward, where bands of sing ing peasantry ply their mattocks under the tangled shade of vine and almond and olive, and where, on the last crest of the descending terraces, the yellow and battered temples of the old Greek 27 THE GREATEST OF THESE day look out upon the blueness of the sea and up into the blueness of the sky ? We chose as artists, not as philanthro pists, not as humanitarians : we took the groves, the vineyards, the temples. We were well into the latter half of February, the spring had fully de clared itself. We stepped from the cof fee-room out upon the terrace, to take a comprehensive glance over the field of our coming labors. The morning was cloudless ; the air was fresh, yet mild ; groups of cypress-trees rose straight and dark through the pink cloud-blooms of the almond-trees ; and the sea and the sky met in one high, clear, uncompro mising line that ran from the tossing hilltops on our left to the long, heaving promontory on our right. " Here lies our day s work before us ! " I cried, " map and panorama in one. There s the first of our temples down on the ridge just behind that olive-grove, and over yonder are two or three more. 28 THE GREATEST OF THESE Where is the one they make all those models and photographs of, I wonder, the one with the three or four columns and the bit of entablature ? " " More to the right," said Stanhope. " Yes, everything is laid out before us, truly. And what have you ever seen more Greek than this landscape, more marked by repose, moderation, symme try, suavity ? And how can we see it better than by continuing to stand pre cisely where we are ? " " You are right," I returned. " This is one of the loveliest landscapes in the world, so that our duty toward it is per fectly clear : we must trample on it, we must jump into the midst of it, we must violate it ; we must do everything but leave well enough alone. Come, the road down leads to the left." So, partly by means of the highroad, partly by following a rocky little foot way that took its willful course between ragged old stone walls through bean-beds, 29 THE GREATEST OF THESE barley-fields, and olive-groves, we passed down to the temple of Juno. The temple stands on a sandstone ledge, close to the massy ruins of the old town walls ; we seemed as high above the sea as ever. There was an empty carriage waiting under a gnarled old olive near one corner of the structure. Within the cella we saw the two daugh ters of Madame Brandt clambering over the vast broken blocks that strewed the pavement, and on the steps outside, with her back comfortably fitted into the flut ing of one of the worn and weathered columns of yellow sandstone, sat Madame Brandt herself. " You are early," she said, rising. " But we are earlier. Let me welcome you, let me guide you, let me introduce you," with a genial wave of the hand over the whole lovely prospect. Away above us was the rock of Athena, which we might climb for the view ; away be low us was Porto Empedocle with its 30 THE GREATEST OF THESE shipping, best seen from a distance. In the midst of the landscape the heart of the rose, she called it was the old church of San Nicola with its gardens. " Take everything," she added ; " take even this beautiful air, if you have a page in your sketch-book for anything like that." She became suddenly pensive. " Such a day, such an air," she went on presently, " would make a sick man well, if anything could." She seemed to look back toward the hotel. " Oh," said I, fingering my sketch book, as it stuck half out of my pocket, " I don t know that I shall do anything in particular. Landscape, architecture, all very nice, but no human interest. Good background, of course, but some thing more needed for the actual sub- ject." "There is human interest every where," she replied in the same pensive tone. " What else has kept me here ? " she added, half beneath her breath. 31 THE GREATEST OF THESE Then she shook herself, and her old brusque gayety came uppermost again. " I m human ; I m interesting. So are my girls ; make something out of them." " Nothing better, I m sure," said Stan hope. He began to climb up into the cella; the two doves were to be sum moned forthwith. The division of labor begun in the hotel drawing-room on the previous evening was to continue, then : he had entertained the daughters with the last battle of flowers at Palermo, while I had listened to the mother on the policy of Russia in Central Asia. Stanhope thinks the young girl indis pensable ; he drags her into all his sto ries, and is always trying to force her into my pictures. "Don t let me disturb your daugh ters," I hastened to say. "You are here yourself ; you re in the foreground; you re practically posed already." " But my girls are thought rather pret ty," insisted Madame Brandt stoutly, 32 THE GREATEST OF THESE from the length of battered cornice on which she had seated herself. " H m," said I in return; "the prin cipal thing isn t prettiness, nor even beauty. The principal interest is in expression ; and expression comes from experience, and experience follows on participation in life." " Well, I have participated," she re joined ; " I m not insipid, if my poor girls do seem so. I have n t vegetated ; I have I have banged about consid erable. Is that the way you say it, banged about considerable ? I am so fond of using those expressions, though I have n t kept up my English as I should. But do you consider me very much battered and defaced?" "I would n t have you the least changed, unless you choose to change the slant of your head the merest shade to the left." "Very well." Then, "You needn t come, children. Run and pick some 33 THE GREATEST OF THESE flowers ; let the gentleman help you. Only don t go very far." " There," I said, " now I have every thing I want, you, and the temple, and a bit of the town wall, and some of the tombs in the wall (you said they were tombs, I think), and a stretch of the sea-line No, it s too much ; move back to your column, please ; I shall take you just for yourself." "Very well." She moved back. "But I m not sure," she went on, with a little air of close scrutiny, " that I like to find a man under thirty preferring old women to younger ones." "Character is the great thing," I in sisted. " Besides you are to pass on me, not as a man, but as an artist." " There is a difference," she observed. " You will go to Florence ? " she asked presently, with a studied little effect of absentness. "It is full of pensions, and the pensions are full of dear old la dies." 34 THE GREATEST OF THESE "Life-histories, and all that," I ad mitted. " But I find the same thing here/ I said, with intention. " Here ? Ah, I see," she replied, as she glanced upward at the weatherworn stretch of entablature that still bridged over spaces here and there between the columns ; " one old ruin reposing in the shadow of another ! " She gave a quiz zical squeeze and twinkle to those dark eyes of hers. " Of course I don t mean you ! " " Do you mean yourself ? Are you really so world-worn ? And I thought you seemed such a good young man ! " I suppose I am a good young man, when you come to it ; but why throw it in my face ? " No, I don t mean myself," I protested. " Oh, I know what you would say," she went on, with a shrug. " It is sim ply that you are fond of reading human documents, is that the way you ex press it ? fond of reading human docu- 35 THE GREATEST OF THESE ments, provided they have n t come too lately from the press." " Precisely. Gothic, black letter, un cials, hieroglyphs, anything, in fact, with sufficient age and character to make it interesting." " And you rather like to puzzle things out for yourself ? " " I don t like to be helped too much, of course." "And you generally decipher your manuscript in the end ? " "Why, yes, generally." She rubbed a forefinger over the face of her column, and detached a tiny sea- shell or two from its bed in the yellow mass. " Well, the hotel library is full of old things ; some of them fall to pieces in your hands." " And others are so strongly and stiffly bound that you can hardly force them to lie open. But I shall read them yet." . " Only don t take hold of them upside 36 THE GREATEST OF THESE down ; you would injure your own eyes and do injustice to the author s text." She fixed her look on my pencil. " How far have you got with me ? " " I have finished. But I think I shall put in the water-line and a bit of the coast, after all, to remind you that you are four hundred feet above the sea." " What is four hundred ? I am used to four thousand," she declared reck lessly. " Four thousand ?" "Yes. I tramp over the mountains. I love them. They do me good." Then, "Well, if you have finished, I may move, I suppose. I must have those children back." "Here they come," I said. "Their hands are full of flowers." So were Stanhope s. The pains he is capable of taking with mere chits of six teen and eighteen ! He makes himself absurd. " Come, girls," cried Madame Brandt 37 THE GREATEST OF THESE joyfully, "come and see what has hap pened to your mother ! " The girls approached with shy smiles of decorous expectation. " Yes, here I am, true enough," de clared Madame Brandt, as she looked over the drawing. " Only " and she stopped. Only what ? What did she find amiss, in Heaven s name ? It was but a rapid impromptu, not fifty strokes all told, yet I had caught the woman unmis takably. " Only you have n t exactly made a Norwegian of me, after all." She was a Norwegian, then ? I should never have guessed it. It is easy enough now to descant upon Madame Skjelde- rup-Brandt s out-of-door quality, to talk about the high, clear atmosphere of the North, to dwell on the fresh tang of the breezes from across the fjords. . . . Es- prit d escalier. I must have seemed a bit crestfallen. 38 THE GREATEST OF THESE I must have looked as if I expected to be told that I had simply worked my own nationality into the portrait, most odious of all comments. I think she saw that she must make amends. " No, you have not made a good Nor wegian of me ; but that may be because I am not a good Norwegian. You look into me and see me for what I am. You make me an American." There, she had said it, after all, and said it as bluntly as you please. "Why, really" -I began protest- ingly. " You see more than the mere me," she went on quickly. " You see my hopes, my aspirations ; you detect my secret and cherished preferences ; you" "Why, really " I began again, puz zled. " It is a real piece of divination ! " she cried, her actual words, I assure you. " How could you know that I have a son in Milwaukee ? He has been over there 39 THE GREATEST OF THESE two years, and he is making his everlast ing fortune, or so I hope. * Everlast ing fortune, is that well said ? Ah, thanks. And how could you know that I have a sister-in-law in Minnesota ? She has been over there seven. She likes it ; she won t come back, except every third summer for a few weeks. And how could you know that it has been the dream of my life to go over there, too ? I think of nothing else ; I read their papers ; I even allow my daughters to go picking flowers round ruined temples with new young men. . . . Oh, how you see through me, how you understand me, how you frighten me ! " " Why, really " - I began once more, half flattered ; while Stanhope gave me a curious glance as if to ask, " What has been going on here ? What is the woman trying to bring about ? " " But whatever in the world am I do ing," proceeded Madame Brandt, "with a Greek temple and a Mediterranean 40 THE GREATEST OF THESE horizon behind me? Your background should have been quite a different one. You should have stood me in front of an elevator," she threw out her plump arms to indicate a capacity of a million bushels, " or else in front of a sky scraper. Ah, what a lovely, picturesque word, sky - scraper ! I m so glad to have a chance to use it ! " I reached out for the drawing. "I will change it," I volunteered. "Yes," said Stanhope; "change it from a souvenir to a prophecy." " No," responded Madame Brandt ; "let it stay as it is, a souvenir and a prophecy combined." So Madame Brandt remained Grseco- American, to the exclusion of her native Norway, that was the "little coun try." And if she were Norwegian, why might not the other two ladies be Nor wegian as well ? "You are not without compatriots here ? " I was feeble enough to remark. 41 THE GREATEST OF THESE "By no means," she assented. "The little lady who sat opposite us at dinner last night may be one of them ? " "Yes." "And the other lady who sat opposite us might be one of them, too ? " "No." She concentrated her attention on the sketch. " You are so clever," she said, her precise words : "you see into every thing ; there are no secrets from you ; everything is an open book to you, or will be, in the end." And, " No help from me," were those the words she barely saved herself from saying ? " I shall value this," she went on. " I shall lay it at the top of my trunk ; it will be the first thing I unpack and put up in place at Syracuse." Stanhope and the two daughters were seated on a wrecked and prostrate col umn, busy with the innocent blooms of the springtide. 42 THE GREATEST OF THESE " You go so soon ? " " Almost at once. The carriage wait ing there under the tree will take us straight to the station." " Oh, fie ! " said I, myself casting about for some floral offering that would suitably grace this departure, " one might almost tax you with seeing Gir- genti between trains ! " " Quite the contrary. We have been here a long time, much longer than I could have foreseen. This is the last of my visits to the ruins, my farewell. But I think I may go now with a good conscience. My girls " " I see. Quite right. The question is whether you can stay with a good con science. I am no more an advocate than you yourself of overplain speaking at a public dinner-table. You are right in wishing to remove your daughters be yond the range of beyond the range of" "Beyond the range of Greek art. 43 THE GREATEST OF THESE Precisely. They are almost too young for temples after the first fortnight." " The lady who is not Norwegian," I began, " it may be that you do not altogether approve of her ? " Madame Brandt looked at me with quite a new expression ; was it a smile, was it a frown, or was it a combination of the two ? " The question is whether she will al together approve of me" " What charming humility ! " I cried. " But I should never have charged you with affectation." "Affectation is my sole fault," she said dryly. " I must do the best I can to remedy it." She summoned her girls. " Yes, we must go, but I hope that you will be in no hurry to leave ; there is a great deal of interest here." " There will be less," I said gallantly. "Oh, youth, youth!" I thought I heard her murmur, " how far is it to be depended upon ? " 44 THE GREATEST OF THESE III We saw Madame Brandt off for Cata nia and Syracuse, and then went on with our temples. We passed hither and thi ther, through lane and grove and field and orchard, and took those entrancing old ruins one after another in all their dis- persedness and variety. Some of them still stood upright on their stocky old legs, and lifted their battered foreheads manfully into the blue ; others had frankly collapsed, and lay there, so many futile and mortifying heaps of loose bones, amidst the self-renewing and in domitable greenery of the spring. The last temple of all consisted, as Stanhope put it, of nothing but a pair of legs and a jaw-bone. We found this scanty relic in a farmyard that stood high up on the sheer edge of a deep watercourse, a winding chasm, whose sides were densely muffled with almonds and shimmering olives, and whose bottom was paved with 45 THE GREATEST OF THESE groves of orange-trees in the last glowing stages of fruition* Nothing was left of the temple but a pair of broken, stumpy columns, and a bit of sculptured cornice (in the egg-and-dart pattern) which lay buried in the ground before the farm house door, that was the jaw-bone. Through the velvety cleft of the water way we looked up to the town high above on its hilltop, and presently we began the ascent to the hotel, passing through one of those steep and rugged and curi ous sandstone channelings that so abound in the environs of Girgenti, and that might pass either as the work of the artificers of the old Greek days, or equally well as the work of Nature herself, the oldest artificer of all. At lunch we found the places of Ma dame Brandt and her two daughters oc cupied by a French marquis, an abbe (his companion), and a missionary bishop from Arizona. The Dutch baron was again in isolation, as neither of the two 46 THE GREATEST OF THESE Norwegian ladies (so I called them for convenience sake) appeared at table. However, he conversed amicably with the marquis, on the basis of the Alma- nach de Gotha, I suppose. But their talk had no interest for me ; the absence of the three ladies of the evening before (I am not referring in any way to the two girls) robbed the meal of all its flavor. Just before the arrival of the cheese the bishop began on the cowboys and the Chinese, but I am not at all sure that I gave him due attention. After lunch the bishop and the curate drew together for a confab, the marquis and his abbe settled down in the drawing- room for a game of piquet, and Stanhope and I tramped up to the town to get the cathedral off our minds. The cathedral was dull, the towns people were exasperating, and the views, however magnificent, no longer possessed complete novelty. We clattered through a good many streets and squares with a 47 THE GREATEST OF THESE pack of dirty and mannerless little boys at our heels, until the homicidal spirit that is said to be in the air of the place began to stir dangerously in our own breasts. "This won t do," said Stanhope, at last. " We ve seen about everything there is, and I don t want to fill up the remaining hours with murder. What shall we do ? Where shall we go ? " "That church we were told about," I suggested, " the one with the gar dens." " It must be down under that group of stone-pines. Come, it s only half a mile ; let s try it." We descended toward the church the old church of San Nicola that had been so pointedly commended by Ma dame Brandt. Behind the church there is a little old disused monastery, with bits of dog-tooth and zigzag mouldings about its Norman doors and windows ; below the monastery there is a garden with an 48 THE GREATEST OF THESE orange-grove and a long pillared walk under grapevines ; above the garden there is a mossy and neglected terrace that lies under the shadow of a spread ing pine-tree ; and seated upon the ter race, with a book in her hand, we en countered the amazon of yester- eve s dinner-table. " Dear me ! " said Stanhope, rather blankly, as I felt. I thought, too, that I detected displeasure in his tone, re pugnance, possibly. The lady sat in a rude wooden chair ; she had a drooping and dejected aspect. The book looked like a volume of poetry, and she held it with a peculiar twist of her thick, peasant-like wrist, upon which she wore a silver chain bracelet, whose links were larger and clumsier than they need have been. She was still in black, and if her face had seemed lined and worn in the tempered light of the dinner- table lamp, how much more so did it seem in the searching light of day ! 49 THE GREATEST OF THESE " She is absolutely haggard," I mur mured, "and as pale as you please. This is sad, sad indeed." She looked up with the complete self- possession that I had already assigned to her as her special attribute, and gave us a kind of wan smile that had, how ever, its own tinge of the informal and the familiar. It really amounted to a summons to approach, or if I may use another law term to a piece of special pleading. So I shall state it, at least, though, to tell the truth, her peculiar physiog nomy complicated the problem consider ably. Her prominent cheek-bones quite brought confusion into any established scheme of values ; and the singular ob liquity of her eyes added another diffi culty to the precise reading and render ing of her expression. Above all, she called for a background of her own. She was not the woman of the night before, yet that cry was just as acute and in- 50 THE GREATEST OF THESE sistent now as then. No Sicilian gar den, no still and shimmering sea, could fill in the frame ; she called for some thing broader, bleaker, ruggeder, than either imagination or memory was able to supply. "They set out this chair whenever they see me coming," she said. "I will ask them to bring two more." " You come here frequently, then ? " asked Stanhope. " I have come here three or four times a week for the last month or more." The woman who had admitted us ap peared again from the range of disused convent offices on the far side of the church. They seemed to serve at once as homestead, stableyard, storehouse, and playground for an abundant progeny. She held her baby on one arm, and with the other she worked a second heavy chair across the jolting irregularities of the terrace. She made some apologetic remark in her native Sicilian. THE GREATEST OF THESE "This is the other one," said our self- appointed hostess, interpreting, " the last one. There is no third. One of you must stand." "I will," said Stanhope promptly. " Never mind me, anyway ; I will move about a bit. There seems to be plenty all around here to see." I made no doubt of his willingness to escape from such a milieu. The woman retired with her baby, and Stanhope followed her to see the rarities of the place. " You are fond of this spot ? " I said to my companion. "Very," she acquiesced. "This is the part of Girgenti that wears the best and the longest. And I have made friends with the people. What companionship is there in all those cold, empty temples ? " Not an archaeological student, evident ly, nor one of those trifling sketchers. "The longest," I carried these words over and lingered on them with a 52 THE GREATEST OF THESE marked emphasis. " You count time by the month here ? " " To me a month is a month, yes. There are others to whom each month is a year." I was not ready yet to ask her in so many words what kept her here ; that would come later. " And you are fond of poetry, too," I observed, with an eye on her book. She placed the volume on the balus trade of the terrace : it was Leopardi. Stanhope himself might easily have found a place there, had he but chosen. Sometimes I think him overchoice, over- careful. His very profession should de mand, if not more tolerance, at least a greater catholicity of taste. She turned the book over, so that it lay face downward. "I should have brought something different," she said vaguely. " You are sad enough as it is ? " I ven tured. 53 THE GREATEST OF THESE " This is not the world that it was meant to be," she returned. " Things do go awry," I admitted. " We ourselves are warped, wronged, twisted. Our natural rights " I paused. It was on the subject of natural rights that she had been most vehement the evening before : the dis cussion had involved the right to die, the right to live, even the right to slay. I was hoping for a fuller utterance from her. "I am afraid I am thinking, not of natural rights," she replied, "but of un natural wrongs. I have been down into the sulphur-mines once more." Was Stanhope right ? Was she a po litical agitator ? She was clever, I saw, and might be dangerous, I felt certain. " Yes," said I, " things are desperately bad hereabouts, I know. Could it be in any other land than Italy that such " She glanced at me with a new expres sion. It was covert, it was fleeting ; but 54 THE GREATEST OF THESE I had never seen it before, either on her face or on another s. "In my country," I went on, "some thing would be done. But the Italian - when it comes to practical affairs, you know. Can you imagine that we in America would for a moment allow " " I am not sure of the utility or of the justice of international comparisons," she broke in. "There is always the tendency to compare the foreign reality, not with our own reality, but with our own local ideal." " But in your country ? " I urged. She was silent for a moment. A shadow of that strange new expression stole over her face. " I have no coun try. Or, better, all countries are my country, now." I was to learn little, I saw. "They are the most wretched of the wretched," I said, turning back. " I should be glad to help them." " Can nothing be done ? " I asked. 55 THE GREATEST OF THESE " By me ? By one poor alien woman, when government, when the collective intelligence of the race, fails to solve the problem ? No, I have renounced general beneficence, along with general ideas. I have one or two families that I help," she added simply. This, then, was her cue : she was turning from rights to duties. A more obtuse observer than I would not have failed to perceive penitence in her atti tude, and regret, even remorse, in her voice. Instinctively I put a bit of dra pery about her, and made her the genius of Reparation, of Expiation. I determined not to allow my disap proval of her to become too manifest, but I had no idea of permitting the duties of to-day to crowd out the rights of yester day. " You give the poor creatures the right to die," I suggested. " You do not deny the right of suicide to the wretched, the downtrodden, any more than to the in- 56 THE GREATEST OF THESE delibly disgraced, the hopelessly crippled, the mortally ill, the"- It was this doctrine that had brought the curate to his feet in protest Do not consider me over-insistent ; I am sure that I was but justifiably interested. " The mortally ill ! " she sighed. She looked across the garden, and through the high flat tufts of the pines, and up the hill slope beyond ; I fancied for a moment that her eye rested on the ter race of the hotel. " They have only to wait ! " she breathed ; " they have only to wait ! " She half rose, and as she settled back into her chair she shook out the folds of her skirt. I was conscious of some faint perfume was it sweet, was it pungent ? that seemed to emanate from her. I instantly figured her as less of a culprit and more of a victim, though a victim to herself, indeed. A varied catalogue of drugs, stimulants, anodynes, passed through my mind. For two or three 57 THE GREATEST OF THESE moments I saw her own course of life as one long, slow suicide. Stanhope passed below us, personally conducted through the garden. He paused over three or four children who were engaged in weeding out a vegetable bed, and I saw him stop for a moment before a donkey tethered to a medlar- tree. He took out his notebook, for the children s aprons and the donkey s ears, I suppose : such details appear neces sary, to him. " But there is the right to kill," I in sisted softly, " the right of indigent and overburdened relatives to relieve at once the strain upon themselves and upon a hopeless and agonizing victim ; the right, too, of a deceived and outraged husband to " I seemed to see the brown volume on the balustrade stamped with a new title : Tue-la ! It was this last right that she had most vigorously denied and combated 58 THE GREATEST OF THESE the night before. The baron from Ley- den had pleased himself by opposing her ; he appeared to hold (or to have adopted for the nonce) the old-established notion of woman as property, a doc trine that struck sparks from her mind and from her eyes as instantaneously as a blow strikes sparks from a flint. Would a spark be struck now ? Do not consider me indiscreet; I am sure that I was but properly curious. But no further spark was struck. She looked at me a little doubtfully, I thought, and began to arrange the bit of ruching at her neck with one of those large, blanched, bony hands. And I noticed just behind her ear a very perceptible scar. " That is a literary question, after all," she observed merely. But it was more than a literary question ; for I saw in a flash a woman at variance with her hus band, and subject (perhaps justifiably) to his violence. 59 THE GREATEST OF THESE I had another glimpse of Stanhope, still following mother and babe ; he was making the circuit of a vast tank that was half filled with brown water. He slipped along its broad, smooth stone borders, and leaned over its unprotected edge to count the pipes that crossed its bottom and that were brought to sight by the slanting sunbeams. I wondered how many children had been drowned there. I saw him make another entry in his notebook, the number of them, perhaps. " The right to live and to love, is that a literary question, too ? " I insinu ated smoothly ; " the right of those to whom fortune never comes, yet from whom youth and spirit are day by day departing ; the right of her who has waited, waited, yet before whom no wooer has ever appeared " I looked at the book once more ; it now seemed stamped with still another title,. Les Demi-Vierges, a work that 60 THE GREATEST OF THESE my companion had herself cited the even ing before. Do not consider me indelicate ; I am sure that I was only only But I can trust to your kind discernment to find the word. I shall not say that she had expressed too pointed an opinion on this last mat ter, which had been approached but re motely, of course, and indeed very largely by implication. Nobody had been too definite about it, except the saffron-eyed young Croat ; though why should so very young a man have entered into the thing at all ? My companion moved a little uneasily, and her glance, which had hitherto been bold and frank enough in all conscience, fell to the pavement with something that resembled modesty, an offended mod esty, if you will. " Whether it is a literary question or not," she responded, "it is a question that need not be discussed too freely." 61 THE GREATEST OF THESE She rose, and reached out for her book, as if to move away. Yet I saw her as a woman who had taken much more than a mere book or so into her own hands. She did move away, but at the head of the steps she paused. She gave me a perfectly inexplicable glance out of those slanting eyes of hers. " Ah," she said, " you are a man, a young man." "Yes," I rejoined very steadily, "I am a young man. And you," I hastened to add, "you are a woman, and an un happy woman." I still felt a large mea sure of distaste for her, but distaste did not altogether bar the way to pity. " You are wrong," she replied. " I am seldom unhappy unless I stop to think, and I seldom stop to think unless I am idle. I have been idle, I acknow ledge." She glanced back over the terrace : there, she made it plain, was the scene of her idleness. I was not sorry to have happened along and to have brought her 62 THE GREATEST OF THESE idle hour to an end. Then she trans ferred her glance to me. Could she have meant to imply that the time passed in conversation with a clever young man of the world was simply But, no ; no. " Yes, you are young," she went on ; "and the great gifts of the gods are yours to enjoy, strength, youth, free dom." Freedom ? Was she viewing me as a bachelor or as an American ? No mat ter ; I was equally free from matrimonial entanglements and from social and politi cal oppression. We descended into the garden, and she began to walk toward the gate at the bot tom of it. " I leave you here," she said. "I have a key to the gate; I shall go up by a shorter path." "You will find it rough, I m afraid." " Most paths are rough." She paused, and looked at me for the last time. " Yes, you have youth and freedom." 63 THE GREATEST OF THESE I declare ! She was insisting on my youth just as the other woman had in sisted on my goodness. Why annoy one so ? "Youth and freedom," she repeated. " May you learn to use the one before you have outgrown the other," and she walked rapidly away. Of course I shall outgrow my youth. But had I misused my freedom ? Stanhope returned, as I stood there in speculation. " Come with me," he said. " I have found off there an old Roman sanctuary made over into a Norman chapel ; and I dare say there will be some good things to see in the church itself." He looked after the retreating figure on its way to the foot of the garden. The woman, though she was not mov ing slowly, seemed to have a thoughtful, even a mournful droop of the head. " What is the matter ? " asked Stan hope. "Is she hurt?" 64 THE GREATEST OF THESE Hurt ? " I echoed. " By what ? " " Is she offended ? " "Offended? With whom?" We passed through some beds of peas and radishes to the sanctuary. It was a square Roman erection to which an early Gothic vaulting had been added. Through the broken pavement we caught sight of a burial-chamber beneath, with some remains of bones. " Well," said Stanhope, as we viewed together a few leg-bones and some thin broken segments of human skulls, " I suppose you know now all that you wanted to know; you have cracked the cocoanut and drained the milk. Cer tainly I gave you the opportunity, - almost made it ; openly, shamelessly, it might have been said." I was silent. He looked at me quiz zically. " Come, what is her country ? Is she Finn, Swede, Polack, Servian, Icelandic, Montenegrin . . . ? " 65 THE GREATEST OF THESE "I I don t know," I replied. " Then, what is she doing here ? " he went on. " Companion, governess, nurse, courier, student, author, reformer, ex ile ... ? " "I I don t think she said," I mur mured. "Well, then, what is her status?" he proceeded. " Maid, wife, widow . . . ? " "I I was just coming to that," I responded, " when when she went away." " Well," observed Stanhope, frilling the leaves of his notebook, " I, at least, have something to show for the after noon." He looked across over the back wall of the garden and up along the olive slopes that rose behind. A black figure, ascending to the hotel with little change in bearing, had just passed in front of the inclosing walls of a farmyard. Then he looked back suddenly at me. " Yes, I left you alone with her," he 66 THE GREATEST OF THESE said, with an expression not easy to fa thom, " but perhaps I should have done better by staying there with you." IV We left Girgenti early the next morn ing. I had no further converse with the sphinx of the garden. She had come down to dinner the evening before, as had her companion; and they might have sat together had they chosen, for the Dutch baron had slipped away dur ing the afternoon. But they did not appear over-desirous of the public avowal of some hidden and secret tie ; for the lady who was Norwegian held her place and kept her eyes on her plate, while the lady who was not Norwegian moved down to the other end of the table and kept her eyes on hers. A change had come, and other changes seemed impending. We took our early coffee, and then stepped out on the terrace for one final 67 THE GREATEST OF THESE look over the site of old Agrigentum, "the most beautiful city of mortals." The morning sun touched up our foun tain, our flower-pots, and our box-hedges, and drove slantingly across the long, many-windowed front of the house itself. I heard a slight cough overhead. I turned, and saw a young man at one of the upper windows. I started ; I shud dered. Never had I beheld such pallor, such emaciation. His light, long, thin hair fell over temples absolutely color less, and his bright blue eyes burned and stared with an unnatural largeness and brilliancy. He coughed once more, and again ; he caught at his breast with his slender, bony, bloodless hand. But an other hand was clutching at him, the very hand of Death. Presently, at the window next be yond, appeared the figure of the little lady from the North. Her own eyes were as blue as his ; her own face was almost as colorless. She passed and re- 68 THE GREATEST OF THESE passed the window several times, and I saw the various objects that she carried in her hands, flasks, brushes, slippers, pieces of underclothing. I found myself wondering whether the two windows be longed to the same room, and whether the window next beyond lighted the room of the other woman. The head waiter came to tell us that the bus was ready to leave. " There is more to know than ever," I murmured, as I followed Stanhope through the house. " You are entitled to know about her, at least," he conceded. "Ask the waiter." " As if I would ! " I returned, with pride, and with some pique. We were passing through the wide hallway that led across the middle of the house to the front. " Look at the register, then. I Ve seen a sort of guest -book lying about here somewhere, I believe." 69 THE GREATEST OF THESE " Here it is, now," I rejoined, step ping toward a small table. " Bah ! it s only a fortnight old ! " " Fatality ! " commented Stanhope. " Have you got the sticks and umbrellas ? Come along, then." We left the problem unsolved, and joined the general stream of travel east ward. New types presented themselves at new places, and Girgenti and its den izens ceased to occupy my thoughts. At Syracuse, for example, we met an inter esting group from New Orleans, who added their Southern accent to the soft and melting tones of Sicily ; and we studied the four officers who came in to dinner every evening and made more noise at their own little table than the whole forty tourists did at their big one ; and we took a solid pleasure in the head waiter, who looked like a brigand, if anybody ever did, but who was as good- natured and painstaking as you please. At Catania we came across the baron 70 THE GREATEST OF THESE from Leyden, as sepulchrally silent as ever ; and we parleyed through one long dinner with a large family group from England, all brothers and sisters, all bachelors and spinsters, who were doing the island amicably in a body, a com pact and sturdy little English hamlet on the move. Perhaps their thatch was more or less out of repair and their chimney-pots were a bit broken and bat tered, and their windows stuffed here and there with wisps of old straw ; but they were one and all keeping out wind and weather most gallantly, and all seemed capable of holding together for many years to come. At Taormina we became rather ecclesiastical again. We met the missionary bishop in the Greek theatre, and we grazed the curate and his wife in one of the Gothic palaces. But principally we delighted in our own Hun garian prince, a tall, slender, ethereal person who submitted to the crude wines of the house with a touching patience, THE GREATEST OF THESE and who kept a bald-headed valet busy half the day in brushing trousers on the promenade below our windows. But we did not meet Madame Skjel- derup-Brandt and those two inevitable daughters ; we did not meet the pathetic little lady from the North ; we did not meet the problematical person from Everywhere and Nowhere ; nor did we receive the slightest sign or token of that hopeless young consumptive upon whom the hand of Death was already laid. Nothing occurred to bring this group to mind it was a group, I felt perfectly convinced until we reached Messina. The clientele of the Hotel Trinacria, there, is largely native professional and commercial and largely masculine. The guests dine at two long tables. Ours had a sprinkling of ladies ; the other was filled with lawyers and mer chants, for a guess ; only one vacant seat was left there. I sat facing the 72 THE GREATEST OF THESE door at the nearer of the tables. My vis-a-vis was a Calabrian marquis, they told me, who had come over from the mainland to spend his substance in riot ous living, and whose manipulation of macaroni was riotous enough, in all con science. But never mind him : the lady from Everywhere came in, passed us by, went on to the other table, and took that one vacant seat. She was her earlier self once more. She wore the figured black silk dress and the silver bracelet. She made her entree with easy self-possession, and sat down among all those men with as much aplomb as you please. As she passed by she recognized us. She gave us a bow and a faint, tired smile. " She has forgiven you," said Stan hope. " Forgiven me ? For what ? " " She is a noble, generous, broad- minded creature, I am sure," said he. " Humph ! " said I. 73 THE GREATEST OF THESE Though I could not keep her in view, because I sat with my back to the other table, I was conscious enough of her presence among that incongruous crowd of nondescripts. " Group ! I should think it was a group ! " She was conversing freely in Italian with her neighbors, right and left. But the room was crowded and noisy, and her talk was difficult to overhear. And only by turning could I catch, now and then, a glimpse of her face. But what I did see and hear in that room was the last of her. I left in the morning for Naples. I never met her again. I did not even think of her until months after ward in Florence. We followed the spring northward. It was a spring of springs : the spring of Sicily in February ; the spring of the Bay of Naples in March ; the spring of Rome in April ; and the spring of the Val d Arno in May, the last of them the loveliest and best. 74 THE GREATEST OF THESE The heart of the Florentine spring discloses itself in the Cascine, most noble and unaffected of parks, with Monte Morello looming up big on one side, and the Arno slipping smoothly past its poplars on the other. And the heart of the Cascine is the wide Piazzale, where the band comes to play just be fore sunset, and where the carabiniere in blue and black sits stiff on his tall horse to turn the tide of landaus and cabs and victorias and four-in-hands backward to the city. On one side of the Piazzale people assemble under the arcades of the Casino to eat their ices and to gos sip ; on the other side they sit on stone benches round the big fountain-basin to listen to the music and to watch the world pass by. In what other place does out-of-door society show itself more gracious, more urbane ? I had enjoyed a long and intimate acquaintance with the arcades, so this time I chose the fountain. Upon one 75 THE GREATEST OF THESE of the benches, close by a bed of cinera ria, a lady was seated, alone. I recog nized at once the grizzled hair, the dark eyes that crinkled up in welcome, and the chubby little hand that motioned me to take the place beside her. It was Madame Skjelderup-Brandt. I was heartily glad to see her. The intervening months dropped out in stantly ; it was like the forcing together of the two ends of an accordion : Syra cuse, Taormina, Sorrento, and Rome all issued forth in a single tumultuous, re sounding concord, and nothing was left between Girgenti and Florence. " Well, I have decided to go." This she said without one syllable of introduction. " What ! " I cried. " Just as I come ? " She laughed. " I mean that I have decided to go to America. Next month." " Good ! " I cried again. " They will like you." " I hope so," she responded. " I want 76 THE GREATEST OF THESE to like America, and I want America to like me. I am qualifying for the trip, you see." She gave a sort of humorous pat to the blue stone slab on which we were seated, and cast an indulgent smile over such of the middle public as sat on other benches and surveyed the passing of the great. "I should have expected to see you on wheels," I observed. " I think I do as well here on this bench as I should in one of those odious cabs with a big green umbrella strapped on behind, and a bundle of hay stowed away under the driver s legs. Yes, I am mingling with the populace ; I am catching the true spirit of democracy." " Do you need to qualify for demo cracy ? Norway itself is democratic. You have no titled nobility." Madame Brandt drew herself up. "We have our old families." And I saw that she herself belonged to one of the oldest and best of them. 77 THE GREATEST OF THESE But she let herself down again almost immediately. " My girls are qualifying, too." She waved her hand in a general way toward the arcades of the Casino, where, through the lined-up carriages and above the heads of the crowd that hemmed in the band, we saw people busy over their ices and syrups at the little round iron tables. " They have gone off with some young man or other." "Poor children!" I sighed. "You are putting them through a course that is fairly heroic ; it will be make or break, I fear. You force them to eat ices with strange men in Florence; you compel them to overhear dubious table-talk at Girgenti " Madame Brandt looked at me with a slow seriousness ; then, without further preamble, " The poor young man died," she said. " Hein ? " said I. " That poor young consumptive in Si- 78 THE GREATEST OF THESE cily. He died, after all. His mother has gone back to Christiania." " Ah ! " I exclaimed. " His mother, to be sure ! Poor little woman ! " " Yes, it was hard for her, and for all the rest of us. I knew what was coming, but there was no need of my remaining longer. There were others quite as will ing and far more able." "There was one other, perhaps you mean." I threw out this in a fine burst of intuition. "One other, then. You didn t like her," added Madame Brandt, eying me narrowly. " I never understood her." " Yet you are clever ; you claim a good deal for yourself. You understood me." " Not at first. Even your nationality was a puzzle to me." "Washers?" " It is yet." " Is there so much difference, then, between a Norwegian and a Russian ?" 79 THE GREATEST OF THESE " A Russian ! " I jumped to my feet. " A Russian ! I see, I see ! A Rus sia^ a Calmuck, a Cossack, a Tartar ! Yes, yes ; it is as plain as day ! " Here was the key at last. I saw the woman now in the right light and with the proper background. " I see ! " I cried again. " I under stand. I Ve got the landscape that she needs. There is a big plain behind her, one of those immense steppes," I threw out my arms to indicate the wide flat reaches of mid-Russia, " and it s covered with snow breast-deep, and the wind goes raging across the " Madame Brandt touched my arm. " Sit down, please ; people are beginning to notice you." I took my place once more on that cold blue slab. "The wind goes raging across that bare, unbroken stretch ; and upon the horizon there is a town with those bulbous domes on all its church- towers ; and in the middle distance there 80 THE GREATEST OF THESE is a forlorn wooden village, with peasants in boots and blouses, and their hair cut square just above their shoulders; and through the village there is a train of sledges moving along on the way to Si beria ; and there is a company of sol diers with " " Siberia," repeated Madame Brandt in a low, pitying tone. " You may well say Siberia." " Hein ? " I ejaculated again. "The mines," said Madame Brandt simply. " Was she in them ? " " No, he was ; he died of consumption, too, poor young man." " He ? Her lover ? " " Her husband. He was young when they took him away. He was old enough when they brought him back." " Her husband ! " I had another burst of insight. "I know, I know; I have read their books. He was a student, and she was a student, and they made 81 THE GREATEST OF THESE a student marriage. Then they con spired ; they were apprehended ; they were put on trial ; they were " I was rising to my feet once more, but Madame Brandt held me down. " I do not know," she said. " He was a minor government official, I believe, and she was a merchant s daughter from the far southeast. He was in the mines eight years. He died six months after his return, less than a year ago. She did everything in the world to save his life, and went everywhere in the world with him ; and after his death she came back to the South for rest, change, study " " She went into the mines, too," I sug gested, "at Girgenti. How could she bear to do it ? " " She is a woman of rock, of iron," replied Madame Brandt, " and she has her own ideas of duty." Madame Brandt brought out this last word with a singular emphasis, and 82 THE GREATEST OF THESE looked me long and steadily straight in the face. "Duty?" " Duty, I said, duty, duty." " I understand you, I think." "You do not," she ejaculated brusque ly. "You do not," she repeated, in answer to my look of protesting sur prise. "You have densely, willfully misunderstood all along. Why do you suppose that woman spent six weeks in such a place as Girgenti ? To sketch the ruins ? To break blossoms from the almond-trees ? Not at all ; she was there to help the young man s mother keep her son alive." "It was fortunate that his mother could bring so experienced a nurse." "Bring? Nurse?" Madame Brandt tapped her foot smartly on the gravel. " They met in Sicily itself." " It was fortunate, then, that she en countered so trustworthy an acquaint ance." 83 THE GREATEST OF THESE "Acquaintance?" Madame Brandt s eyes snapped, and she tugged viciously at the tips of her gloves. " They met at Girgenti for the first time." " It was fortunate, then, that " - " Understand me," said Madame Brandt sharply. " They were total stran gers ; they were thrown together by the mere chance of travel, and held together by that noble creature s sympathetic heart and sense of duty. Why did she look so pale, so haggard ? Because she had yielded up ungrudgingly the last traces of her youthful good looks, be cause she had made herself live through all those dreadful days once more, in her efforts to spare another woman the sor row that had been her own." I poked among the cineraria with my stick. " But why was she so blunt, so bold?" " Why was / so blunt, so bold ? You were nonplused by my directness, I could see. I was simply a person of age and 84 THE GREATEST OF THESE experience welcoming a person much younger, an habituee giving greeting to a stranger just arrived." " She was certainly a woman of expe rience," I conceded, " and as surely an habituee." " Experience ! " cried Madame Brandt in a strident tone. "You have not heard the half. They had waited too long with that poor boy. At the last hour they hurried him south as fast as they could. He was doomed. I saw it ; she saw it ; the hotel-keepers saw it. Toward the end, no house would take him in for more than a night. At one place they were turned away from the very door, on the first sight of the poor boy s dying face. She went with them, fought for them, took charge of every thing, for the young man was almost past speech, and his mother had nothing but her own native Norwegian ; until, at Messina at Messina he had to be taken to the hospital. She went with 85 THE GREATEST OF THESE him, nursed him, stayed with him till he died. She paid his doctors and attend ants ; she saw his body prepared for the return home ; she herself accompanied that poor mother as far back as Venice. She is an angel, if ever" Madame Brandt sat there rigid on her seat. Her lips were trembling, but her words came out in a new tone, as if she had set her throat in a vise and did not dare to move it. A tear had started in each of her blinking eyes, her nostrils were inflated, and a tremor seemed to be running through the arms that she held tight against her sides. I remembered two or three other women who had reached this same effect before my eyes, yet never except under the influence of some strong suppressed indignation. But what had Madame Brandt to be in dignant about ? She turned full on me, quite oblivious to the holiday crowd around. " And you, you doubted her, you dis- 86 THE GREATEST OF THESE paraged her, you disrespected her ! And I I let you ; I was to blame, too ! But you seemed so clever, so experienced ; you claimed to read character and to know the world. I thought I could trust her to you ; I felt that nothing could as sail her " She gave a gurgling sob, twitched her handkerchief out of her pocket, and burst into tears. By this time we had attracted the at tention of the crowd most finely. I tried as best I might to quiet the poor woman down; but I was none too successful. It was most embarrassing. I was relieved to see the coming of her two daughters ; they cleared the last of the standing carriages, and advanced slowly across the intervening stretch of fine gravel. There was a man with them : it was Stanhope, as I might have divined. He came along with a new and peculiar air ; if there had been only one girl, I should certainly have said that he 87 THE GREATEST OF THESE was approaching to ask the maternal blessing. The sight of Madame Brandt in tears - or rather, the sight of that handker chief before her face made them quicken their steps. She did not lower her handkerchief to the solicitous inquir ies of the girls ; she rose, pushed them along before her, felt round in the dark for Stanhope s hand, which, when found, she gripped firmly and gave a long, vig orous shake, and then she walked away and took the girls with her. Her pre cise form of adieu to me well, to con fess the truth, I am not quite sure that I determined it. "These Russians," I said thoughtfully to Stanhope, as we passed through one of those avenues of lindens and beeches back to the city. " What about them ? " " They are a study, a study. For 88 THE GREATEST OF THESE example, there was the young fellow we met last summer in Bedford Place : he had come over to London to learn English." " I remember," said Stanhope. " He was so nai f, so good-natured, so uncouth, so confiding, so disposed to assume a general friendliness on all sides, like a big Newfoundland puppy. He had the sweetest smile I ever saw, and the most appealing eyes. He was as frank and simple and direct as one of the frankest and simplest and most direct of our own people could have been ; and yet there was something more, something be yond " " Yes, there was something beyond ; we did n t get it." "And there was the Russian prince who Have you been meeting any Russians to-day ?" he asked suddenly. " No, not to-day." " the Russian prince who was lec turing at Geneva on his country s his tory and literature. He was as brilliant 89 THE GREATEST OF THESE and polished as a Frenchman, as sympa thetic and informal as an American ; but behind all that " " Behind all that there was the some thing more ? " "Yes. I didn t pay the best atten tion to his lecture, perhaps ; but he him self gave me the man-to-man feeling as no man ever did before." " And there was the Russian lady," I went on, " whom we met last month in Rome at the Farnesina. I took her for an American at first, she was so alert, so competent, so enthusiastic, so unconscious of self ; but " " The * something more/ again ? I know what it was in this case, at least ; it was earnestness and solidity of tem perament. Although she had the showy surface of a woman in society, her tex ture was altogether without the sleazy, flimsy " "Take care," said I, dabbing at the shrubbery with my stick. " There may 90 THE GREATEST OF THESE be some Americans passing along be hind this hedge." " Let them pass," he said ; " there are other temperaments that I find more ad mirable than theirs." "And there was even the pension- keeper we met day before yesterday," I went on, " in the Via Landino ; what was that wonderful consonantal spree on her door-plate ? You remember her ? that great, broad, pink-and-white human cliff ; and with what a cosmic stare her old blue eyes blazed upon us from under those straight yellow brows ! An inter view of two minutes, she had no quar ters for us, but one of a striking inti macy and directness. She dismissed us with a sort of gruff, brusque kindness ; but for that two minutes there seemed to be nothing between us, she almost abolished the atmosphere ! " "The Russians, yes," said Stanhope. " The breadth of life is theirs, and the belief in themselves, and all clearness THE GREATEST OF THESE of vision. They face the great realities, and see them for what they are ; they come up close to us and blow the fresh young breath of the near future into our faces. We Americans are young, too ; and our own youth responds to theirs or should." " Or should/ " For he seemed to be offering me the choice between confess ing myself unresponsive or confessing myself unsophisticated. " We ought to visit them at home," I added. " So we ought." " Will you go there with me this com ing summer ? " " I am going the other way." "To America?" I inquired. " To America ; with Madame Brandt and her her party." " I understand she has a fondness for America." " America will develop a fondness for her." I snatched a branch of laurel from the 92 THE GREATEST OF THESE hedge, and stripped its leaves off one by one as we moved on. "H m," said I; "I hope so, I am sure. She is something of a character in her way ; and character is the first of things, except, you understand, the penetrative portrayal of it." 93 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO You might have knocked us down with a feather. One very small feather would have done for us both. And yet we are not persons to be sur prised easily, my husband and I. In fact, we had about reached the stage where we were beginning to feel that our capacity for surprise was as good as exhausted. For we have traveled in our time, understand. We have spent the better part of our days in a constant moving from place to place ; we have contrived to see nearly all that is really worth seeing ; we have taken a good many ditches and hedges, and have man aged to be in at more than one death. " Poking about " as that young Ameri- 94 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO can at Venice whimsically expressed it has come to be our second nature ; I suppose we shall keep up our poking about as long as we last. How it came that we never had poked our way into Monte Citorio until the day before yesterday is more than I can ex plain. For we have been in Rome half a dozen times or so we even passed a whole winter here a few years ago. But I was forty before I ever went to the Crystal Palace ; while as for the Tower well, I have n t been there yet. We drifted into Monte Citorio quite by accident though we may have had some slight curiosity to see how far our own parliamentary forms had been mas tered by the Latin races. They have the forms, apparently with a difference. How much there may be behind the forms well, Ethelbert has his doubts on that score. He spoke the man who was to show us what youth could do, the man who 95 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO was to demonstrate what might be ac complished by playing the game with a complete mastery of the pieces actually on the board. If that other youth could but have been there ! the American, I mean ; for he was clever enough to appreciate cleverness. His name let me think ; I shall have it in a moment. Oh, yes ; it was Stanhope not the least bit American, eh ? One would have expected it to be Dwiggins, or McDurkle, or something of that sort. Still, his name suited him well enough he was quite the gentleman. How ever, he would sprawl, and never worse than when we took him with us out on the water. He would sit over to one side, and let those long legs of his fall wherever might happen. Then he would dabble his hand over the edge of the gondola, and waggle his head at the pal aces as we moved along, and bring the whole scheme of European civilization to the judgment-bar. The old world, he 96 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO thought, gave no chance to youth, to merit, to cleverness ; humble talent was allowed no opportunity to rise. Had he but gone with us to the session of the Chamber of Deputies at Monte Citorio ! And Elizabeth Harkins, that plain, dull girl, plain and dull even for Birmingham, the girl we would now and then take to Burano or to the Lido out of sheer pity ; to think that I should have lived to see her charioteer ing through the Corso as a princess ! In the face of such facts as these what can the minor gentry do ? They can but lament the power of gold and take a firmer clutch on the arms of their ances tral chairs. I think of him and I think of her, and ask myself what situation could be more bizarre. But one : suppose he had been her servant instead of the Duchess s ! The Duchess but I shall reach all that in good time. We arrived at the Chamber near the 97 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO close of the session. We were hardly in our seats before a new speaker entered the tribune. He was a young man scarcely over thirty. A handsomer face and figure, a more distinguished and self- assured bearing, it would be impossible to conceive. And as for fluency of ut terance and ready grace of gesture but those are gifts common to all Ital ians. I was immensely impressed, and at once. So was Ethelbert, as I could see ; though his attitude toward youth and toward the grace, ardor, and impetus of youth is not of the most sympathetic. Possibly he draws comparisons and feels himself at a disadvantage. Sometimes I draw them too in a reasonable spirit of charity. I did so on this occasion tempering my admiration with the thought that Ethelbert had always been a good husband, and my ardor with the thought that I was going on fifty-eight. But as regards mere age, I might have gone further and still kept within bounds ; WHAT YOUTH CAN DO for the Duchess herself was going on sixty-three. Now, I am intending to be perfectly frank. To me, then, there has always been something delightfully sinister (if I may put it that way) in one of those clear olive complexions, especially when a dark young beard seems to be doing its best to break through the bounds set by a vigilant barber who, however, will hear of nothing more than a trim little black mustache swirling airily be neath a pair of delicate and disdainful nostrils. (I do not mean to represent that there is anything in the facial aspect of my Ethelbert to jog the imagination ; his complexion even as it addresses the eye of affection is but a motley massing of reds and yellows, and his nose is a plain, every-day organ that serves well enough for smelling, but that would hardly appeal to the chisel of the sculptor. And those dear old blue eyes of his - no, there is nothing that is aesthetically 99 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO striking about my Ethelbert, and I am glad enough of it.) And I will say that I enjoy a round white neck that rises column-like from a deep chest and a pair of well-squared shoulders a combina tion as common here as it is rare among ourselves. (Still, I would not have my husband changed. His sloping shoulders and his long, craning neck will serve in the future as they have served in the past ; and those thin, scraggly, reddish- gray curls that assemble behind his ears I would be the last to replace by dark, dense, crisp locks waving on the proud forehead of any youthful and fiery orator that you may bring forward.) And I will add, without any false delicacy, else why be fifty-seven, or why keep in mind the precedent established by the Duchess ? that I view with pleasure a youth whose lithe and graceful body is arrayed with correctness and elegance in an exquisite frock coat, the triumph of the first of tailors ; for Ethelbert and 100 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO I say it more in sorrow than in anger is but too likely to put on whatever may hang upon the nearest hook. In other words, though I am an old body of fifty- seven and as good and faithful a wife as I know how to be, I delight in youth, in comeliness, in elegance, in cleverness, in spirit, in eloquence I do, I do, I do ; and all these combined and more stood there in the tribune before me. Ah, poor dear old Duchess ! comprendre, c est pardonner. I found myself leaning over the edge of the balcony I dare say my interest and my admiration were obvious enough. Ah, that young man ! how imperious his manner, how scornful the lilt of his head, the droop of his eyelid, how fluent his utterance, how confident and master ful his gesture ! " Ask some one who he is, and what he is talking about," I whispered to my husband. " Sit up, Sophronia," he returned, looking at me out of the corner of his 101 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO eye. " I know already what he is talk ing about," he added shortly. I am always forgetting that Ethelbert is proud of his knowledge of the Con tinental languages. I myself can read Italian, but I am far from able to deal with the free flow of forensic oratory. " Is it about the vines ? " I asked. " Is it about drainage ? Is he trying to get a railway run through his province ? Or perhaps it s naval estimates," I added, with conciliatory intent. When Ethelbert was in the Commons the naval estimates were always on his mind. " It is a question of state," he replied laconically. Not often is Ethelbert so vaguely grandiloquent. "A question of state," thought I ; "so much the better that s just what it ought to be. Nothing less would have met my ideal." And then I did sit up, almost satisfied for the nonce. The debate went on. There were 102 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO cheers for my speaker, and there were interruptions from the opposition. But there was no wandering of thoughts or of eyes on anybody s part ; the Cham ber was crowded, and he enjoyed the un divided attention of everybody present. Now and then an ironical laugh would ring out, and I saw more than one face wearing a satirical smile. But my young man had his hand upon the house and held it there. He repaid scorn with scorn ; with a beautiful movement of throat and torso he would acknowledge the encouragement of his own support ers, and he had an easy and supple turn of the wrist to avert the impertinences of the other side. Everything marked him for a man who was going to have his own way. At last, " I must know his name ! " I panted. " Ask somebody," I urged my husband. " That old gentleman be side you looks as if he might be able to tell you." 103 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO Ethelbert turned to his nearest neigh bor, a stout, bald-headed little old fellow who was viewing the scene with a smile of cynical enjoyment. He answered our inquiry with a slight curl of his lip and a dilating nostril. I conceived a dislike for him at once. "The speaker is the Prince of Cras- segno," he said. I had never heard the title before. " Ask him what province, what city," I persisted. " The prince is Venetian," responded the old gentleman, lifting his eyebrows a trifle. "He sits for the city of Venice?" asked Ethelbert. " Ah, no. But he is Venetian." " He is young for his position," I sug gested, looking across the tip of Ethel- bert s nose. The little gentleman gave his shoul ders an indescribable shrug. " Young, yes. But the Duchess of Dogliano was 104 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO older. And the Prince of Crassegno was older still." " The Duchess of Dogliano ! " I gasped. " His patron," responded the old gentleman politely. " And the Prince of Crassegno ? " sug gested Ethelbert, copying the other s emphasis. I heeded not the reply if there was one. Enough was enough, for the time being. I fixed my eye firmly upon the young orator in the tribune. I recog nized him. The set of his head, the beautiful outline of his nose and chin, the lithe grace of neck and waist and limb, the very tones of his voice how often had I seen them, heard them, upon the water-steps of the Duchess s own pal ace, or from the poop of her gondola as he dexterously guided the craft through the emblazoned piles that hedged in her doorway ! And now he was here he was risen to this ! 105 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO The session soon broke up. We flocked down and out with the crowd. Before the door stood a number of handsome carriages with coachmen and footmen in handsome liveries. In the stateliest of these equipages a lady sat waiting alone. It was Elizabeth Harkins her, at least, I recognized in a moment, though I had not seen her for three good years. She looked well and happy, and really not so plain as I had remem bered her. The trappings of social state surrounded her ; the stamp of success seemed impressed upon her. Such things do make a difference. We bowed to her, much wondering. She returned our salutation with a gracious gravity too plainly she was no longer the Eliza beth of Venetian days. All the same, though, we might have advanced toward her with a word of greeting, but that a gentleman, issuing from the great door way of Monte Citorio, stepped quickly up to the carriage, jumped in lightly, 1 06 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO and ordered the coachman ahead. I looked after him as the carriage crossed the Piazza Colonna to turn into the Corso. He was my orator none other. Ethelbert stood there, helpless, dum- founded. Not so I. " This is too much !" I exclaimed ; " let me learn the truth I must, I must ! " I turned back to the door for authentic official information ; the beadle who stood there under the archway seemed, by virtue of his cocked hat and his brass-knobbed staff, the per son to give it. " Who are they ? " I cried to him, as the carriage rounded the big column in the middle of the square and careered on toward the cafft tables set out on the corner. The man looked at me in astonishment even indignation. If I had been a single shade less exigent, less vehement, I am sure he would have turned his back upon me and walked off without a word. He caught me out of the way of a pair 107 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO of trampling steeds that may have served my cause too and said simply : "Their excellencies the prince and princess of Crassegno." " The prince and princess of Cras segno ! " I echoed feebly, as Ethelbert, recovering himself, took me by the arm and led me to a cab. " The prince and princess of Crassegno." Yet the prin cess of Crassegno was Elizabeth Har- kins, whose people made bolts and pad locks in Birmingham, and the prince of Crassegno was the Piero whom time and time again I had seen punting a scowful of firewood up a back canal to the rear door of the palace of the Duchess of Dogliano ! ii Yes, you might have knocked us both down with a feather. The world of to-day it confounds me utterly ! But let me compose myself ; there is a good deal for me to explain. 108 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO I will begin with the Duchess she seems to have been the fountain-head of the whole stream of events. There is no doubt that, in her day, the Duchess was a competent and energetic woman in the management of her affairs ; the only trouble is that she was allowed to manage them too long. She drifted into her dotage so gradually that nobody knew just when to draw a line and to put those affairs into other hands. It was during this debatable interval be tween competence and incompetence that the damage was done. However, there is a good deal to be said on her behalf. She had been a widow for twenty years ; she had no children of her own nor had she any reason for taking very kindly to those turbulent nephews of hers ; and the magnificent vacuity of Palazzo Dogliano came after a while to be more than the poor lonely old crea ture could stand. Then Piero happened along. 109 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO Piero arrived one October afternoon on a scow as our young American friend called it. He brought a load of brushwood and fagots across the lagoon from one of the Duchess s estates on the mainland. I saw him arrive I wit nessed his debut. We were on rather intimate terms with the Duchess, and little went on that we did not observe. Between her and us there was only a narrow little calle and the stub-end, if I may say so, of a canal ; smells from her kitchen were always finding their way into our dining-room, and the windows of our salotto commanded everybody and everything that passed in and out of her big water-gate. And when Piero finally came to take up his quarters in the pal ace itself but I am going faster than I should. Piero was between twenty-five and twenty-six. His physical perfections, as he came along with his boatload of brush- wood, were just as manifest as when I no WHAT YOUTH CAN DO saw him in the Chamber last Tuesday ; and his mental qualities were doubtless equally present in full potentiality. His bearing was already a compound of self- possession and disdain, and he conducted himself even then with a gravity and discretion that made him a marked man among his kind. A wretched yellow dog was yelping contentiously at the fore of the boat as Piero first swam into our ken ; when he noticed us looking down he silenced the cur as if its yelping were a reflection on his own dignity. Piero crossed the lagoon a number of times with his loads of brushwood, and I thought more than once that his skill in handling that clumsy old craft of his was great enough to entitle him to an opportunity in a higher field. Presently such an opportunity was bestowed upon him. One morning the big door of the palace opened, and we saw the Duchess standing on her cracked old marble steps and blinking her dim old eyes in the in WHAT YOUTH CAN DO morning sun as its beams struck up from the glassy surface of the Canalazzo. Im mediately her gondola came grazing along one of her tall gold-and-purple pali, but the gondolier in charge was no longer the seasoned and faithful old Antonio, who had served her so many years. No ; in his stead stood a lithe and graceful youth in blue serge ; he had a deep blue ribbon fluttering on his wide straw hat, and a Roman sash barred in red and orange and violet bound round his waist, and a sailor shirt cut lower in the neck than I, as a modest but uncompromising Christian, found it possible completely to approve. With an easy but deter mined self-assertion he laid down his oar, brushed aside a pair of officious and en cumbering maids, and helped the old lady into her boat with incomparable grace and deference. If Ethelbert had ever put me into a carriage with half the tactful gallantry of Piero it was Piero, of course putting the Duchess into 112 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO her gondola, I should have died of pride and pleasure. But I am alive yet, and expect to stay so for many years to come. After this the Duchess lived on the water and kept Piero in his summer tog gery (another word of young Stanhope s) as long as she possibly could a little longer, that is, than was fit or sensible. For the past year she had not gone out upon the water oftener than once or twice a month ; now she went out almost every day. She had been in the habit of rising at noon ; now she began to start out on her excursions at eleven, or even at ten one morning they brought her down with her hamper and her wine bottles at half-past nine. Piero simply took charge of her he imposed him self upon her. He was kind, but firm ; he was devoted, but never in the least degree servile ; he directed her, he com manded her, and I imagine there were times when he even hectored her dis creetly, of course. I believe this was 113 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO just what she wanted just what she required. Her poor wandering wits were beginning to need some prop, and her poor old wandering legs were doubtless better in a gondola than they could have been anywhere else. Every morning she came doddering down and she doddered delightfully, just as a real duch ess should. But, alas ! she simpered too, and her simpering was that of the ver iest school -girl. Piero would respond to these simperings with an indulgent smile, and then settle her among her cushions, and lay hold on his oar, and throw up his beautiful head, and bend his strong back, and turn his supple wrist, and start her off for a day at Tor- cello, or along the Brenta, or heaven knows where. At last the poor old soul had found an interest in life. We would encounter them now and then in different parts of the lagoon. We went out a good deal ourselves, and 114 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO once in a while we would ask that poor Elizabeth Harkins to go with us. She had nobody but an aunt, who knew lit tle enough what to do for her or how to do it. Sometimes that young Stanhope would go with us too, and as often as decency permitted we would invite one from among the native youth who were always dangling after Elizabeth with in tentions more or less clearly defined. There were two or three minor titles among them some of them were counts and the like; and there were others more or less remotely connected with noble houses they could put coronets on their cards. Some of them were in the army ; one was a lieutenant, I re member, and another a captain. They all tried to show a proper interest in the Birmingham heiress and a not improper interest in the Birmingham millions. Stanhope would quiz them to their very faces, until I told him it would n t do. One afternoon we passed the Duchess WHAT YOUTH CAN DO and her Piero near San Lazzaro. We had the Duchess s two nephews with us. They were dangling also but not over- seriously, for their expectations from their aunt were such that they felt no real need of paying court to a foreign heiress. In fact, their ideals, as I hap pened to know, were very definite indeed, and they were under no necessity of go ing abroad to realize them. We passed within a few yards of the other craft, and I must say that the two young men took the languishing satisfaction of their aunt in very good part. Not in the least did they appear to disapprove of the firm, alert, decorous, determined atten tions paid their elderly relative by her new attendant. They rather laughed, indeed, and seemed glad to feel that the old soul was so easy in her mind. The time, however, was not far distant when they were to be none too easy in their own minds. That was the time, too, when the Birmingham millions came to 116 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO seem worthy of more serious considera tion, and when the slightest movement of the worthy Piero gave them the deep est concern not to say alarm. The autumn went on. Nobody was especially keen about Elizabeth Harkins, and Giorgio and Teodoro appeared to assume the propriety and inflexibility of their aunt s ultimate intentions toward them. Piero kept up his ornate, perse vering, ingratiating ministrations, and carried himself with an unfailing tact, dignity, and discretion. He used all these qualities in bestowing his acquaint ance upon us (this came about only a few weeks before we took our departure for a winter in Naples), and he almost made it seem as if he were doing us a favor. I must say that his manners were perfect. He never quarreled noisily with other gondoliers ; he never made pert com ments on passing tourists. Little did I appreciate such forbearance until the time of our departure from the place ! 117 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO The Venetian tourist headed for the ho tels on the Canalazzo is one person ; the Venetian tourist headed for the railway station is another. For the arriving guest, deference ; for the parting guest, such caustic comment, such pert and airy insolence, as you could scarce imagine. Ah, the remarks passed upon our per sons, our clothes, our luggage, our char acters, during that half hour to the sta tion ! Ethelbert would not give me the substance of these comments except in softened paraphrase. Even on those terms, I was almost speechless with in dignation think of my being called a frump, and worse (that s what it came to, and I understood it, despite my husband s care) ; while Ethelbert himself (one pass ing boatman asked our own man to what menagerie he was taking that giraffe) reached the landing-stage in a disposi tion to seize the first convenient weapon and resort to the extreme of physical violence. 118 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO " We will never come back to this odi ous town again," I said. " Never, never ! " But the next spring found us back once more, and in the very same lodg ings. in It was a spring of the right kind. I have heard of Venetian Aprils that moved toward their close through one long, unbroken succession of rainy days ; this year, however, there was an almost uninterrupted reign of sunlight days to tempt people out and to keep them out. We spent half our time upon the water ; Ethelbert even learned to row gondolier fashion, of course. But we could not observe that our du cal neighbor took the same advantage of season and conditions. We concluded that she had tired of the water and of her waterman some other whim, doubt less, had engaged her aged attention. The smells from her kitchen constantly 119 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO addressed our noses, but we had been in our lodgings almost a fortnight before the sight of her person greeted our eyes. One afternoon her gondola of state came gliding up to her water -steps. It was manned now, as once before, by old An tonio, tanned, gnarled, weather-beaten. Yes, the handsome Piero was, after all, a mere ephemeral toy. The big door was thrown open, and out came the Duchess, doddering as delightfully as ever. A maid or two fluttered about, as of old, but their mis tress placed her chief dependence upon quite another individual a young man on whose arm she was leaning heavily. This young man s clothing suggested a kind of semi-livery, or hemi-semi-livery at least such was the effect of his tie and of a possible stripe down his trou ser-leg. But his manner suggested the equal, the intimate. He ordered the maids about with a confident superior ity, and addressed a brief and imperi- 120 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO cms command to old Antonio, on the poop. The Duchess s face, more an tique and vacuous than ever, wore a fond simper of measureless content, as she clasped the young man s arm and looked up youthfully into his face. Once more, it was Piero. I saw what it had come to: he had mastered her; he had laid down a track for her and was running her over it daily; he filled her up and started her off; he dominated her, he administered her ; and she was happy and content to have it so. We never hit upon the precise title for Piero s office ; after all, we shall not claim too close a knowledge of the in ternal economy of a great and opulent ducal household. Sometimes we called him her steward, sometimes her cham berlain, sometimes her major-domo. He was all these, we learned, and more. We learned one thing besides : that he had removed us from the list of his ac quaintances. We tried him once or twice 121 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO we put ourselves in his way. He never averted his eyes ; he simply looked, not at us, but through us, past us, beyond us. This was something of a feat, and he did it very cleverly. He had lodgings in the palace itself, of course. The Duchess had given him a handsome room, or rather a whole apartment ; and it was on the plan no- bile, at that. One room of his suite was fitted up as a bureau or, shall I say, a study ? and was in plain view from Ethelbert s own bedchamber. By lean ing out over the window-sill and taking a painful twist a little to the left sure, meanwhile, that Ethelbert had a good hold on me from behind I was able one day to take a comprehensive view of this study and to make a full inventory of its contents. Such tapestries, such carved furniture ! I am certain the Duchess herself had nothing better. I learned from our maid, who knew the maids in the other house (surely you and 122 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO I, dear reader, ought to be on terms of complete confidence by this time), that he had occupied this apartment but a week or two. When next we saw him he had shed the last slight vestige of any possi ble livery. What to call him now, we knew not her friend, perhaps ; her agent ; her confidential adviser. And the next time the gondola went out, the Duchess and her adviser sat under its solemn black canopy side by side, while old Antonio plied his oar hypnotically, as one deep in some awesome dream. It was not long before other windows in the extended flank of Palazzo Dogliano came to contribute to our spectacle ; other actors began to appear and to play their parts with a robustious passion. Among them, the nephews. Giorgio, in particular, would dash into the place and make the lofty old rooms ring with his tempestuous indignation ; there were times when I felt almost compelled to close our windows. And more than 123 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO once Teodoro appeared between the cur tains, his face whiter than they were, and his hands coupled in a desperate clasp. The two would run through the whole range of protest and supplication. There would be pounded fists as well as clasped ones, and red faces as well as white. And then they would come down to their boat tense with indignation or limp with utter despair, as the case might be. And next day the same thing over again with variations. Of course there was only one explana tion for all this : the Duchess was doing something with her property. We asked ourselves whether the confidential Piero was getting all of it, or only half. Piero s own tones, as the waves of controversy swashed against our willing walls, gave us little help. They were never loud ; they were seldom so distinct that poor Ethelbert, for all his straining, could make out what he said. But they were always firm, cold, even, doggedly sure; 124 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO they were the tones of a man who had definite rights, who knew that there was solid ground under his feet. We felt sure that things were going his way that he was already loading the spoils into his chariot. It would not have sur prised us very much to look out some fine morning and find that he had walked off over night with the palace itself. But the palace continued to stand where it had always stood, and more people began to come to it. Elderly dowagers would arrive in gondolas and would potter up the cracked and weedy old steps ; antique survivals of both sexes would come panting and fidgeting up to the street entrance, picking at their attendants and squabbling among themselves; and grave, smooth-shaven persons carrying portfolios under their arms would pass in with bent heads and contracted brows. And then, through the open windows, the mild May air would bring a swelling chorus of charges, 125 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO protests, arguments, contentions. We felt the situation as keenly as if present perhaps, in a sense, we were. It was simple enough : the Duchess, seated on a roseate cloud, had been flinging down a golden shower upon her favorite, quite in the manner of the allegorical fresco on the ceiling of her big drawing- room, and the whole clan, half crazy with fear and apprehension, had come together to put a stop to it. The favorite faced the united family and their advisers as composedly as he had faced the younger members of it. I dare say he found these new antagonists worthier of his steel, and gave them a chance to run their fingers over his edge. I venture the opinion that they could have found nothing sharper, chiller, more inexorable. What had come to him was to remain with him that was soon seen by all. Every gift of the Duchess was found to be secured to him by full legal forms. As to the aggregate of 126 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO these gifts, there were all kinds of rumors afloat. Some said that things had been stopped in time, and that the losses would not come to more than a mere hundred thousand francs ; others said two hundred thousand ; others still said half a million, and added a small estate or so on the mainland. The family pocketed their losses, to whatever amount, and a conservator was appointed to take charge of the remain der of the property. Piero left Venice with his booty ; the Duchess languished for a year in a private retreat, passing off, finally, in a kind of senile evapora tion, so to speak ; and the hopeful Gior gio no longer a possibly favored heir, but merely one of a large connection under the impartial hand of a general ad ministrator went off to Florence, where Elizabeth Harkins and her aunt were reported to have taken an apartment for a term of years. 127 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO IV Friday. I have not learned the pre cise amount of money that our aspiring youth carried away, but I have just been told what he did with it. Young Stan hope is the one who informed me I met him on the Pincian this afternoon, after having lost sight of him for some three seasons. I need not describe our surroundings as we leaned over the par apet together ; I dare say the carriages were circulating, and the dandies were lounging, and the band was playing, and the sun was setting it s usually that way. Nor shall I enlarge on the special providence that brought this sprightly and well-informed youngster along just in the nick of time. " Where did he go after leaving Ven ice ? " I asked. " To Florence ? " Stanhope laughed. " You are too fast a good deal too fast." He took the whole thing most light- 128 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO heartedly almost light-headedly. But who could expect an American to feel with any great keenness the deteriora tion of old-world aristocracy ? " Have you ever heard of a place called Crassegno ? " he asked presently. " There is a place of that name, then ? Where ? " " It is a few miles to the north of Vi- cenza, among the foothills of the Alps ; it s a mere village." " That s where he came from, is it ? " " No ; that s where he went." "Dear me! What for?" " To make his investment. Crassegno is a tiny town, but it has its resident nobility. They live in palaces that s what they call them. They dry up in them ; they shake about in them. Such pride ; such poverty ! Every peck of chestnuts counts ; the death of a cow is more than the passing of one of the fam ily. Everything sold save the walls, the roofs, the floors. They starve, but they 129 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO starve with decorum. Noblesse oblige, and all that." " I know," I said sadly. So goes the world in these degenerate days. "But what a singular place to choose for the investment of one s one s savings ! " " Not at all ! " returned the young man cheerfully. " Not at all ! For among those decayed nobles there was one to serve precisely the purposes of our hero. He was an old man of sev enty. He had lost his wealth, his health, his wife and children, and most of his senses ; the struggle had been too long and too hard. One foot was in the grave, and the other was dragging after. He had absolutely but one thing left his title. He was a prince the prince of Crassegno. A mere count might have found it easier. Still, I don t know ; you are either in the circle or not ; and if you are in " " Precisely," said I, with deepest sym pathy. " One must stand by his order." 130 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO " Well, our friend steered straight for this venerable wreck. He wanted a fa ther." "A father? I imagine him to have had one already ; I cannot conceive of such talents totally disassociated from blood, from race. Poor fellow! he ought to have been acknowledged ! " "A father and a title that s what he wanted ; especially a title. He ar ranged with this old man to adopt him more legal forms. He laid out a good two thirds of his means in that way. He bought a father. And if his father was the prince of Crassegno, why, he was the prince of Crassegno too ; he par ticipated in the title." " I see," said I. " The old gentleman spent the remain der of his days in unhoped-for affluence, while Don Pietro Francesco Maria della Fortuna, Principe di " " I see," said I again. " Don Pietro no mere Piero could serve to name 131 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO him, now was advanced one more stage in his career." " Exactly. Then he prepared for the next. The remaining third of his for tune no very great sum, either, to tell the real truth would serve to keep him respectably for six months or a year. He was ready now to enter the matrimo nial market a noble with an ancient title and the heir to a princely estate." " Princely in one sense, at least. But he needed money as much as ever more than ever." " More than ever, yes. But he had better means than ever for getting it. He entered the matrimonial market, as I say. Not in Venice itself ; there are other towns where visiting heiresses are more numerous. Besides, in Venice " " I should say so ! " I gurgled. " He went to Florence. In Florence, of course, Anglo-Saxon heiresses are supposed to swarm. There is one Flor entine pension, you know, that is little 132 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO less than a matrimonial exchange. The young officers congregate there ; the landlady lives on the commissions " " I know all that," I said. " Well, his ideas were correct enough. There was one heiress in Florence that winter, at least ! " " But he was not the vsdy prttendant" " I dare say not." " Nor the only one from Venice." "Do you mean to tell me that the Duchess s nephews " " One of them was there ; the hot- tempered one ; Count Giorgio was that his name ? " " A battle royal ! " I exclaimed. " No echo of it reached you ? " "We were in Cairo." " The whole town rang." " I can imagine with such elements involved." " Think of the origins of the first and the rank of the second." " Consider the sheer strength and ca- 133 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO pacity of the one and the noisy impotence of the other." "All society was involved." "Our young man was received ? " " Almost everywhere. Out of curios ity, largely." " How did he carry himself ? " " Like a prince." " Suaviter in modo ? " I suggested smoothly. " No ! " Stanhope almost shouted ; " fortiter in re ! He was no carpet- knight ; he swung a battle-axe. He did not pirouette through society ; he tram pled. He did not stroke the social beast through the bars ; he broke into its cage and throttled it into submission. The suaviter in modo came later." " Oh, the lion in love ! to return to the cage." "By later I mean at Crassegno among his own people." " Then he was not in love ? " "He may have been. He may be 134 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO still. They have got along well enough together." " So she took him and let the other go?" "There were a good many consid erations involved. But the first and foremost was this : Elizabeth Harkins wanted to be a princess merely to be a countess was not enough." " And she wanted to marry a man as well as a prince ? " "Well, she did," Stanhope assented heartily. " He was something in him self ; he took her off her feet. Besides, she had good ground for supposing that his own fortune was such as to make hers no special object." " So she took him and the Harkins millions passed into his hands." " They did ; millions and millions a key to unlock everything in the world." " Another stage," said I, drumming on the balustrade and looking at the ring of revolving carriages. " Then they i35 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO moved on to the capital ? " I suggested. " They threw themselves into the Roman arena ? " " No. They went back to their little hill-town and lived there for a year ; that was the place where the millions were to tell. The old prince put his other foot into the grave, and the young prince was left with a free hand. At the end of the year he owned the whole town and all its inhabitants, the whole country-side and all its people, the whole province and all its industries and interests." " How do you mean ? " " It was the suaviter in modo. He settled down there and performed for them. He had a complete command of the instrument and entertained them magnificently. He gave them a good deal of diapason and plenty of vox hu- mana. He ran the whole gamut from grand seigneur to peasant, and back again. He satisfied their ideal ; he got into their hearts. He gave them an 136 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO astonishing combination of the familiar and the majestic they clung to their old-time ideas and exacted that their prince should seem the prince indeed. The Birmingham millions played their p ar t a large and probably a funda mental part. They formed the * great organ itself! Schools, hospitals, and churches rained on the devoted pro vince. Debts were paid, loans were made, bridges and roads were constructed at his private cost. The townspeople had masses without end, and festas every fortnight or so. Such doings, such changes ! I have seen them all with my own eyes. He captivated them com pletely their heads, their hearts, their fancy. He put them all in his pocket and buttoned them up there. Then he told them that he wanted to go to " "That he wanted to go to Parlia ment ! " "Precisely. Nobody ventured to op pose him. Nobody thought of voting i37 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO against him. He was elected unani mously, and he can go back on the same terms as often as he chooses." " Well, he has found his fulcrum." "And he will move his world." "Yes," said I, "this poor Old World that gives no opportunity to merit, to talent " " Talent ! " he repeated, laughing. " It is n t talent ; it s genius ! " The carriages were moving past us in their whirling little circle ; the sinking sun was shining level in our eyes, and the spokes of many wheels spun and twin kled in its rays ; the band was braying even more loudly than usual. "This is all very confusing," I mur mured, putting my hand to my forehead. " I need rest and quiet ; take me home." Saturday. She has sent me a card : The Princess of Crassegno At home Friday, December tenth Music. 138 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO And do not let me overlook the CORO NET. Ethelbert sat back in his easy chair, fanning himself (it was n t warm) with the last edition of the Popolo Romano. " We go, I suppose ? " I asked. " We find our place once more in the list of his acquaintances ? " " So all these wonders are true, then ? " my husband inquired faintly. " This young man Stanhope has been there and has seen things with his own eyes, has he?" "Yes," I replied; "he visited them for a week at Crassegno itself." Ethelbert gave a long, deep sigh. I don t want ever to hear another such from him. It was an audible confession that he was a poor, feeble, ineffective old man who had done little with his past and could hope to do nothing with his future. His whiskers took on a mel ancholy droop that was inexpressibly af fecting. He remained silent. WHAT YOUTH CAN DO "These Americans ! " I said. " They can go anywhere and do anything. I al most wish I had been born one myself." Ethelbert fluttered his newspaper fee bly, and looked at me with tired, abashed, apologetic eyes. " He has carried his point, Sophronia," with a downward glance toward the printed column. " He did n t talk that day for nothing." " Carried it ? I knew he would ! " Ethelbert folded up the paper very slowly and very carefully. " His youth and good looks brought him favor and money." "Yes, and his money brought him a title." "And his title," pursued Ethelbert musingly, "brought him a wife with a fortune." " And the fortune opened his way into Parliament." "And his place in Parliament will bring him a He will enter the cabinet 140 WHAT YOUTH CAN DO in time," Ethelbert went on, with a faint, broken gasp. " I see him ambassador even prime minister, perhaps " "You generous old dear!" I cried, reaching down to kiss him. "And then," proceeded Ethelbert, pressing the thorn to his breast, " when this kingdom becomes a republic " " Stop, my husband ! " I cried ; " not a word more ! " Then, " We will go," I added rapidly. "We shall pass the rest of our natural life in Italy, and we must not deny ourselves the refreshment that comes from resting in the shadow of the great ! " 141 THE PILGRIM SONS SS. PANANGLIA, St. George s Channel. I AM not the Rose. Nor shall I pre tend that I have been often near it. Little more can I claim, indeed, than to have caught occasional glimpses of it through the park palings. For me, how ever, this has always been enough ; if it could but have continued to be enough for my wife, as well ! There came the day when, at last, I fairly brushed against the Rose. This occurred on the promenade-deck of the Seraphic, her fourth day out. My wife and I were undertaking our first trip abroad. We are now upon our second. Not that we had had no previous ex perience in travel far from it. We had been to Southern California ; we had 142 THE PILGRIM SONS spent a February at Jacksonville ; we had even visited Canada. In fact, I shall not try to enumerate the many hotel porches on which we had sat to observe the pleasures of other people. But this passive part suited me well enough, for my tastes are quiet ; if only these same conditions could have continued to suit my wife, as well ! But no ; all this was not to be is not to be, just yet. We have, indeed, seen the citron palace ; and we have seen the ice palace ; and we have seen the corn palace ; but none of these will suffice. To-day our faces are turned toward the sawdust palace ; and this, wind and weather permitting, we shall reach be fore many hours are past. The sawdust palace the epithet is not my own. No ; I am indebted for it to old Brown, who has interrupted his researches in Hampshire (researches on our behalf) to pen the page of welcome which was put into my hand at Queens- 143 THE PILGRIM SONS town an hour ago. His full phrase is, " the portal of the sawdust palace." It stands open for us, he says. Between you and me, old Brown his pen once in hand is apt to be a bit florid. And since his publication of the " Genealogy of the Pshaw Fam ily " (two vols., quarto, half morocco), his consciousness of his literary qualifi cations has heightened this peculiarity. But I must not allow myself to slur him, for without some hints from him I never could have drawn up the present docu ment my first attempt, as you must see plainly enough. My wife was once a happy woman, and that, too, not many months ago. But slowly and imperceptibly so slowly and imperceptibly that I could never note its actual beginning discontent gathered like a cloud above her. Pre sently this cloud began to discharge itself in a mistlike drizzle of words. At first I was somewhat slow, let me frankly own, 144 THE PILGRIM SONS in moving toward an understanding. But after a little the drizzle became a pretty sharp shower ; and the shower, in turn, became a regular, heavy down pour. And in the midst of this down pour came a thunderclap and a neat bit of lightning. Then I understood. Per haps I should have understood before. But I am only a plain, plodding person, no cleverer than another ; and, besides, who, please tell me, would have expected so sudden a turn in a sensible woman of forty-two ? "I am getting tired of all this," de clared my wife. We were just back from the Catskills. We had decorated the hotel porch there just as quietly, as in dustriously, as unobtrusively as we had decorated scores of others. " I want to go somewhere that s worth while, and see somebody that s of some account, and be a little of somebody myself, if possible. I want to go to Europe." " Very well," said I, as soon as I had THE PILGRIM SONS recovered my composure ; " you shall. I will look into the matter at once." I did so, and made my report. " We can go on the Economia to Glas gow," I informed her, " for eighty dollars apiece ; or on the Vulgaria for seventy ; or the Vaterland will set us down for a little more at Southampton about a hundred, if we don t ask for their best." "Yes," responded my wife, with flash ing eyes ; " or we can pay a decent price for decent accommodations, and cross with a crowd of people that will be worth while. We can go by the Seraphic, which sails three weeks from to-day ; or by the Archangelic, which sails a week later." " We can, my dear," I replied. " We will." We did. By the Seraphic, that is to say, as I have indicated at the beginning. I my self should have preferred the sailing of a week later. A few days more would have seen my affairs put into a slightly better condition. We should also have 146 THE PILGRIM SONS been able to do justice to the winter wardrobe of our Emmy, at Wellesley, and I should have had an opportunity for drawing up a code of paternal instructions for the use of George, at Cornell. I be lieve that my wife herself might have made her outfitting a more complete suc cess, and I believe, too, that she would have enjoyed the extra seven days clari- onification of her plans and intentions among our friends and neighbors. But the choice of boats which she seemed to have presented to me became, in reality, no choice at all. For some occult reason, it was the Seraphic, or nothing, and the Seraphic of that particular date, and no other date. It was the Seraphic of that particular date. My wife looked as well as she should have looked in her new brown ulster; and she had three bouquets of fair size (however come by) on the mid dle table of the saloon, and half a dozen estimable people to wave her adieu from 147 THE PILGRIM SONS the pier. I smelt the bouquets, and then went up and waved with the rest, and out we slid. My wife is a most worthy and deserv ing woman, and if she develops into the heroine of this tale it will be because my theme becomes stronger than I am and runs away with me. She has been a good wife and mother, a joy to her fam ily, and a credit to the community, and as such I shall continue to think of her still. But I will acknowledge that ever since that evening at the horse show I have been more or less uneasy in my mind. I spoke to old Brown about it. I my self am rather easy-going, and old Brown is more so. He laughed, as I might have known he would. " Of course she noticed how they were all dressed," he chuckled. " Is n t she a woman ? " " But she knew their names, and their faces, and their connections and histories 148 THE PILGRIM SONS box after box. You told me so, your self." " Oh, well," observed old Brown, mere ly. But his carelessness was not at all reassuring. You know how things are arranged at the horse show : the brutes in the mid dle and the humans massed concentri cally in the amphitheatre around them. Of the two orders of beings, the humans (some of them) attract by far the more attention. Those of some position, am bition, or pretension occupy a circle of boxes ranged round the front of the am phitheatre, while persons of less promi nence accommodate themselves on long lines of seats behind. Between the boxes and the central arena there runs an ellip tical promenade, round which the per sons of less prominence may saunter and may scrutinize at close range man s best friend on the one hand or man himself on the other. It seems to me that most of the persons of less prominence prefer 149 THE PILGRIM SONS man himself. I am of that humbler rank (or used to be), and I acknowledge freely that I have always had more interest in the human than in the brute side of the spectacle. I take things I insist upon it quite simply and easily, with no op pressive sense of my own merits, with no harassing belief that I am getting less than my just dues, and certainly with no overmastering desire to reform the uni verse. Such a spectacle, therefore, as the horse show I have always viewed with a placid pleasure, telling off that brilliant promenade, season after season, in staid enjoyment. And there was a time when my wife could do it, too, and do it with as full a content. But last year developed a difference. I made my customary suggestion that we descend from our places and take our usual view of things from a nearer point and a lower level. But my wife hung back, and, if I understood correctly, she murmured something about such a course 150 THE PILGRIM SONS being contrary to her ideas of dignity. I half surmised, in my dull fashion, that perhaps my wife fancied herself entitled rather to a place in a box than to the mere privilege of the floor : how do I know, indeed, but that she panted for a big number placarded into the small of her back, and a place in the cavalcade of the ring ? But, really (as I felt), we were not rich (at least, not over-rich), we were not clever, we were not showy, we were wholly unlikely ever to achieve notoriety of any kind whatever, and I am afraid that our presence in so conspicuous a place as a box (for I say nothing about the ring) would have required a word of justification or at least, of explanation. " Very well/ I said, settling back in my seat. " But I see several ladies of the best set walking in the promenade." "They can afford to," said my wife shortly, and took a firm hold on the arm of her chair. So we remained sitting where we were, THE PILGRIM SONS prepared to enjoy our new access of dig nity to the full. Never before had we troubled ourselves with such an idea. But I was just as well pleased ; I pre ferred to see in the faces of other men s wives, rather than in the face of my own, the abject abandonment to the worship of worldly success and the half-veiled envy of the homage that such success is only too certain to bring. But as the evening wore on, my wife grew perceptibly restless. At length, old Brown came lumbering along, and she rose as if she had reached some decision. My wife has no great esteem for old Brown what he might think or might remark would give her very little con cern ; so I knew what she was going to say before she said it : she felt tired and cramped, and she thought it would rest her to walk round just once, if Mr. Brown So off they went. It was impossible to follow their progress over that vast and 152 THE PILGRIM SONS crowded oval ; but I know (now) just how my wife s face must have looked during the whole of that momentous course. It wore the same look of over strained attention that I observed during our earliest tramps up and down the promenade-deck of the Seraphic, par ticularly at such moments as we hap pened to be passing the doors or port holes of a certain extensive suite de luxe ; for the Seraphic pushes luxury to the utmost bounds of a bewildering and abandoned ostentation, and can give you absolutely anything that you are able to pay for. Yes, my wife s eyes, her ears, her inmost being, must have been alert and straining for some intimate but in stantaneous revelation ; her face must have blazoned the hope of brushing against some gorgeous manifestation or other, and of carrying away some part of the gilding. But when she returned to her place her expression was impatient, disappointed, and she resumed her seat THE PILGRIM SONS with a little sigh and with a vexed twitch at her toilette. "Their box was empty, after all," Brown whispered to me. "Whose?" I demanded severely. I did not recognize his right to be so con fidential on such a theme. But Brown only laughed with such an assumption of familiarity that I could almost have slapped his face. "They will need me some time again," Brown added presently in his musing, semi-detached fashion. "What for?" I asked, quite in the dark, but willing to be switched off on to another track for the good-will I bear to Brown himself, who is a dear old chap, after all, and one of my real friends. Of course, slapping his face, or even think ing of it, was quite beside the question. But old Brown chuckled to himself and lumbered off again to buy his passage to Liverpool, it seemed ; for the next time I saw him it was in the saloon of i54 THE PILGRIM SONS the Seraphic. He was just adding a fourth bouquet to my wife s collection. " This is good of you," I cried, shaking his hand warmly. I shook, and shook, and gradually merged my thanks into a good-by. "There goes the bell, you know. You don t want to be carried off, do you ? Not but that I should like to have you, though," I added cordially, and I meant it. "H m I don t know," replied old Brown in a leisurely voice. " I should n t mind ; I d just as soon be." And a smile overtook his wide mouth and his kind old eyes. He then transferred these eyes to the fourth bouquet. " Not much, is it ? " he said apologetically ; " but every little helps." " Helps ? " I repeated resentfully. And then I noticed that my wife s other baskets were all of the same size and style, and were all tagged by the same hand. But I did not make my observa tion public. We must bear and forbear, THE PILGRIM SONS and Ellen has always been a good wife and mother and friend. "But look at those!" exclaimed old Brown, with the considerate air of one who contrives a pitying diversion. I thanked him inwardly, and followed the hand that pointed down the saloon to the middle section of the middle table. Here half a dozen enormous floral fabri cations, beribboned and becarded, formed the nucleus of a vast and elaborate dis play ; they nodded and flaunted above a score of minor manifestations of the flo rist s art, and round them half a hundred men and women pressed, and crowded, and fluttered, and fingered, and won dered, and smelt. " They re aboard," said Brown laconi cally. "They! Who?" My eye fastened itself on a great mass of nodding roses, over which were crossed the English and American flags. Old Brown hitched up his shoulder. 156 THE PILGRIM SONS " The Pilgrim Sons," he replied. " They re going back." The crowd ebbed and flowed. Shoul ders and elbows clashed against one an other ; noses buried themselves in the blossoms ; hands patted the big bows of saffron and blue ; eyes devoured the well-known names on the cards and the angularly scratched addenda that supple mented them. And in the fore of the fight, contending with the rest, I saw my own wife. Our eyes met. I turned mine away at once, but not before I had seen Ellen achieve a sudden effect of sated curiosity, almost of wearied indifference. In spite of myself, I glanced at her again ; within this five seconds of grace she had gone so far as to achieve an amused patron age for the- distempered interest of the rest. It is at such moments as this that I freely acknowledge my wife s right to a career. When I turned round again, she was i57 THE PILGRIM SONS beside us. She had a passenger-list in her hand. It was the very first one that I saw I don t know how she contrived to get hold of it so soon. It seemed to be folded for easy reference. She thanked Brown civilly enough for the flowers not so civilly but that I added some more thanks of my own to hers ; and presently she discovered that his name was in cluded in the list. I might have guessed for myself that he was going ; but then, as I say, I am no cleverer than another. " Yes," said old Brown genially, " I m crossing again." "What for this time ? " I asked. " Tombstones same as before," he replied. " I m going to give a little fur ther attention to the graves of the Wash- ingtons, and I ve got two or three new families to fix out : town records, parish registers, coats of arms from old monu ments that sort of thing. Don t you want something in my line ? Don t you want to be traced back to Edward III. 158 THE PILGRIM SONS or somebody ? Come, say yes ; I 11 do it for my actual expenses." " No, I don t," I replied. " My father kept a country store at Schenectady, and my grandfather farmed it in Vermont, and that s all there is to it." " Why, Theodore ! " said my wife. Now why should my wife have said, " Why, Theodore " ? It nettled me. "They behaved themselves," I said, therefore, " and paid their debts, and brought up their children properly. It strikes me, do you know, that that s reaching a pretty high average in such a world as ours." " Yes ; but did n t any of em come over ? " persisted old Brown. He was looking at me jocularly from above his spectacles, and I suddenly recalled his ability to take a facetious view of his own profession. " Come, say they came over about 1630 or 1636. Say they were of good yeoman stock in Warwick or North ampton. Give me something to start THE PILGRIM SONS on ! " cried old Brown, in the accents of a mock pleading. " Perhaps they did, and perhaps they didn t," I replied. " Perhaps they were and perhaps they were n t. I don t know, and I don t care." " Dear me ! " exclaimed Brown. " Is that the way you talk ? Don t you want the right crest on your stationery ? Don t you want the proper coat of arms on your carriage ? Don t you want to be decently received by your English cousins when you go to visit in your dear old home ? Don t you want Dear me, I, never saw such a man in my life ! " My wife paused in the creasing and re- creasing of her list. " I can remember my grandmother saying that she was a second cousin of Lord " - my partner began ; but the bell jangled out once more, the last section of the departing crowd gave a final rush, and I was left in the same ignorance as regarded the aristocratic connection of the other side 160 THE PILGRIM SONS of the house that I had enjoyed for the past twenty years not to speak of the twenty-five before. The weather was fairly good at the start, and continued so for a day or two. We spent a good deal of time in the open air ; we walked up and down the deck, as we saw other people doing, and some times we laid ourselves out on chairs, as we saw still others preferring to do. We walked, yes ; but with this differ ence : the rest of the company changed from side to side, according as the sun moved, or the wind shifted, or the deck hands willed. But we, I noticed, regard less of wind or weather, or of our own convenience, or that of other people, walked habitually on the port side. I myself should have preferred a change, if only for the sake of change ; but my wife knows what she wants, and what she wants I usually want too. Only, while I had eyes for the horizon, the yards, the pushing prow, the hundreds 161 THE PILGRIM SONS of nautical novelties all about me, Ellen had eyes for the doors of the suites de luxe alone. There came a change. The ocean heaved and tumbled and the sky went gray. Ellen lay composedly in her deck- chair, and I retired to my cabin. For two days I fed on the swinging of cur tains and the straining of partitions, with a spoonful or two of oatmeal gruel in between, while the big waves tum bled on a horizon brought miraculously near, and old Father Ocean seemed bent on showing how many kinds of fool he could be. My seclusion was complete. Ellen remained above ; I had made no acquaintances ; I had not even taken occasion to go over the passenger-list. In time I tottered up to air and sunlight. Ellen herself had suffered never a qualm. It is at such a juncture as this that a husband may feel his inferiority to his wife; Ellen s, I acknowledge, is a more masterful spirit than mine. 162 THE PILGRIM SONS Old Brown came tramping along, as I lay there feebly in my chair not close to Ellen s, for the deck steward had seen fit to part us. Old Brown looked red and rosy, and atrociously competent and healthy as he stood before me at his angle of forty-five degrees oh, how it was rolling ! but he did not condole with me nor patronize me. I could n t have struck him if he had. He knew it ; his treatment of me is always fair. "They are on deck, too," he an nounced. He had planted himself before me in complete disdain of any prop. All at once he changed his angle of incli nation from starboard to port, and substi tuted a background of sea for a back ground of sky. " Who ? " I asked feebly, for he made me dizzy. " The Pilgrims," he responded. " The New York one is in the smoking-room, and the Boston one is reading Vanity Fair abaft." 163 THE PILGRIM SONS "Do go away," I said pettishly, and turned my poor weak head to the other side. And turning thus, I saw my wife. She stood about twenty-five feet away, and she was duplicating old Brown s shiftings and slantings with an immense spirit and promptness and precision. You might have thought her the daughter, the wife, the mother, of sailors ; you might have fancied her as having navigated the high seas on a dolphin s back from time im memorial. I felt like a weak rag beside her. I am one. Immediately in front of her were two children a pair of prepossessing little things of seven and eight, who were at tired discreetly and tastefully in modi fied sailor style. Each was attended by a nurse, arrayed after her kind. Ellen was petting these children, try ing to engage and to hold their attention. And I recall now though I did not notice it then that this little group 164 THE PILGRIM SONS was posed before the entrance to one of the cabines de luxe ; and I have thought since that Ellen knew it, and meant it to be so. Now Ellen, as I have said before, has been a good mother to my children : she attended to all their little aches and pains and always saw that their wardrobes were kept up in proper fashion. But I never observed that her liking for her own chil dren extended to children generally I should never have figured her as posing for a picture of Caritas. So I wondered, naturally enough, what she was after. " That is n t the Rose," said old Brown, as he waved his finger-tips toward the little group of children and attendants. " It s only the buds and some of the out lying foliage. And as for the stalk that is in the smoking-room, as I have already explained. But the Rose, the real rose, the real heart of the rose, is there, within/ as the dramatist would say." And he waved his finger-tips again 165 THE PILGRIM SONS toward the door beside which my wife was standing. " I thought you d gone," I groaned. I drew my rug over my face I hardly knew why. " I have n t," responded old Brown placidly. "The Rose remains within the greenhouse," he proceeded. "She disdains to be refreshed by the general shower, but is revived by the application of her own private watering-pot thrice daily." " Good heavens ! " I mumbled, from beneath my shelter, "are you talking about some lady who takes her meals in her cabin instead of in the saloon ? " " I am," said old Brown. " And do you want to tell me who she is ? " " I do," said old Brown. " And will you go away as soon as you have told me, and leave me alone ? " " I will," said old Brown. I rose again to the surface. " Who is 166 THE PILGRIM SONS she, then?" I asked, showing the tip of my nose above my rug. Old Brown spoke never a word. He took a passenger-list from his pocket, folded it in a particular manner, laid it on my chest, pointed to some six or eight lines of broken type, and walked away. And then I knew. I saw that I was in almost immediate contact with one of our most eminent families. I had never yet seen a single member of it, but for months past I had heard their plans canvassed and criticised in society and in the newspapers, and now I was a witness to the actual carry ing out of them. I was now breathing the same air with these distinguished voyagers, and this air was, properly enough, the broad zone of neutral atmo sphere that separates America from Eng land. For the eminent family, root and branch, had completely renounced the New World and were about to resume an interrupted allegiance to the Old. 167 THE PILGRIM SONS The instant I read their names, I saw the real reason for my wife s peculiar conduct. I saw now why she had prome naded at the horse show ; I saw why we had left on one particular steamer and on one particular date ; I saw why she had busied herself over the flowers and flags on the saloon table at the, hour of departure ; I saw why we had done all our tramping on only one side of the ship ; and I saw the motive of my wife s attention to the brace of nautical infants. Oh, Ellen, Ellen ! Do you wonder now, dear reader, that I withhold our family name ? I returned to the list in sheer self-de fense. There were the two men, and their two wives, and their five or six associated children, and the valets and maids and nurses (lumped as such, with out the dignity of their own proper names). " Why, there must be as many as eighteen of them ! " I exclaimed to myself. 168 THE PILGRIM SONS " Eighteen ? There are more than two dozen of them," said a voice at my elbow old Brown s. "Brown," I cried, "you promised to go away. As soon as I can stand on my feet I 11 kill you ! " " I did go away," he rejoined serenely. " I went as far as the smoking-room door. I Ve come back again." I threw the list down on to the deck, and drew my rug close round my throat and chin. Brown picked up the list with no indi cation of offense : he is one of the few who know how to make allowance for a seasick man. "There s an uncle, too," he said, "and a sister-in-law. And here in the B s is the secretary under his own name, of course. And the governess is in the L s. And the coachman is in the second cabin he s going home, too. Did you ever go through a riot on shipboard ? " asked old Brown suddenly. "Perhaps I should 169 THE PILGRIM SONS say a mutiny, though, since we are at sea." " What do you mean ? " I asked. I was feeling miserable enough, but almost anybody can take an interest in a fight, and at almost any time. " They have em in the fire-room some times, when the day is extra hot and the force a little short-handed. And they have em in the second cabin sometimes, when a servant they re having one there now. The coachman is a decent enough young fellow, but the resolutions passed by a clique among the second- class passengers declare him a menial, and they protest that " Old Brown gesticulated the rest of his statement to some dark clouds on the northern horizon. " There 11 be another riot, too, on shore," he proceeded with an unabated cheerfulness. " Some fine day the family will dine in their private apartment and send the secretary and the governess 170 THE PILGRIM SONS down to the general table d hote as another of our eminent families once did in Paris. Then the whole cosmopolitan clientele of a big hotel, declining to ac knowledge the primacy of our eminent family, will rise in its wrath and"- Old Brown again waved the end of his sentence to the clouds, whose darkness might well have typified the storm he shrank from depicting. " However," he ambled on presently, " it s pleasant enough to see them finally united among themselves. The strength of union is required for such an under taking as theirs, eh ? " Then I recalled the quarrel that throughout a whole autumn had rever berated among the hills of Western Massachusetts and had started a long train of rattling echoes in the columns of the public prints. The headship of the clan was in dispute. The Boston side had claimed primacy ; they were the elder branch, they maintained ; they 171 THE PILGRIM SONS had always held to the original ground, and they avowed themselves the better exponents and guardians of the traditions of the line. The New York side dis puted this primacy ; they were the richer, the more numerous, the more brilliant, the more widely known ; they w^ere too much of the living present to lay any great stress on tradition, and they glozed over their change of base in the early twenties by declaring that in leaving Shawmut for Manhattan they had but left the skirts of the arena for the centre of it. The quarrel was pushed to the break ing point, when suddenly a bright light seemed to burst, a wider horizon to open, a greater cause and a greater opportunity to make themselves manifest, and both factions, uniting, embraced the common idea of seeking peace and amity in a fresh wide field beyond the sea. " Brave thing to do," commented old Brown simply. "The antique Pilgrim spirit still survives, eh ? " 172 THE PILGRIM SONS That night there was another change in the weather, and the next morning we found a corresponding change in the deck arrangements. For in the interval those black clouds had risen and emptied themselves upon us, and had left us with a clear sky, a shifted wind, and a gen eral shake-up of chairs. Ellen and I came together again on the other side of the ship, and alongside of us there was an orderly range of wicker-chairs not mere O. C. ones, like our own which the deck steward had never ventured to disperse. There were four or five of them ; they had a distinct air of individ uality and elegance, and they were all marked on the back with the appropriate initials. I knew what those initials were before I looked to see, but I shall not give them here. Nor shall I speculate on the the chance that brought these chairs and ours together. I drowsed in one chair, with a supine and lethargic effect of which I should i73 THE PILGRIM SONS have been heartily ashamed on land ; next me reclined Ellen (in her neat brown ulster, or whatever), passive, placid, de corous ; beyond Ellen, upon the nearest of the wicker-chairs, lay another woman who was too thoroughly wrapped up to be easily distinguishable, even by any body who had seen her before. I never had, but I divined instantly who she was the Rose. This was the total re sult of one of my completely conscious intervals. But it was enough, and I dozed off again. Presently a slight sound startled me: a book had slipped from its niche in the folded coverings of our bemuffled neigh bor, and had fallen with a smart slap on to the deck. I half turned my head and half opened my eyes : an eager woman in a brown ulster had already seized the volume and was returning it to its owner with a quick officiousness that almost made me blush. Was it Ellen, my wife, as for an instant I imagined ? No, no, THE PILGRIM SONS congratulate me on the fact ; it was only a misguided creature dressed just like her, who had sat opposite us during my first (and only) dinner, and who had been hovering upon the circumference of high fashion ever since. Ellen ? No. That admirable woman made not the slightest sign never stirred, never opened her eyes, never moved a feature. Yet I could stake my life that she sensed the whole situation, tingled with it, felt it, heard it, almost saw it. How do I know, you ask. Dear reader, observe carefully the next cat you happen to encounter lying before a kitchen fire. You may say to me that she is in a careless doze ; but I say to you that she is in a state of high and unin terrupted nervous tension. She knows where you are, and what you are about, and just what the chances are of your stepping on her tail. So with Ellen. I knew I could trust her, and presently I slid off placidly into another nap. THE PILGRIM SONS In time I became dimly conscious of a little conversation going on close at hand. It was irregular, broken, full of lapses and revivals, casual, indifferent as if neither participant had much to say, or cared very much whether she said it or no. But it was a conversation, all the same, and the voice of one speaker was the voice of my wife, and the voice of the other speaker was the voice of the Rose. " What did you talk about ? " I asked Ellen, when next we were alone. " Oh, nothing in particular," she re plied, with a vague but complacent smile. " But how how ? " No ; that ques tion I could not bring myself to put. Could you yourself, dear friend, have blurted out the inquiry that paused upon my lips? the inquiry, "How did you start the talk ? " As for myself, I have imagined a dozen beginnings. Not the sea, nor the weather ; no such bungling as that for my clever Ellen. Perhaps the fringes of their rugs became entangled ; 176 THE PILGRIM SONS perhaps they spilled beef-tea on each other ; perhaps Ellen abducted the stew ard from the other woman, and then apologized for it ; perhaps she contrived to squeeze a finger between the two chairs and made the other woman apolo gize to her. Perhaps but no matter ; they became acquainted. You may expect me to have done as much with the men of the party as my wife did with the women. But I accom plished nothing of the kind. I indeed encountered the two (they were cousins) in the smoking-room once or twice, but I had no words with them. They were big, well-kept, well-fed, handsome fellows, whose faces and bearing hinted at large possibilities in the direction of an ex-ter ritorial career ; and I believe that one of them, at least (the New York one), would have spoken to me if I had only spoken to him. He looked at me now and then (he was my junior by a few years) as if he detected in my make-up the qualities 177 THE PILGRIM SONS proper to a discreet and sympathetic con fidant ; and indeed I will not dispute the justice of the expectation that he should have taken me into one of those leathery angles behind the card-tables and frankly have given me his explanation, his apo logy, his whatever for his own unique and exceptional course. Nothing of the kind, however, came about. I am no diplo mat, and I am unduly shy, perhaps, in the presence of celebrity ; besides, he seemed so brooded over by a vast yet uncertain future, that I would no sooner have interrupted his meditative smoke upon the deck of the Seraphic than one of his own forefathers would have inter rupted the prayer of a Bradford or a Carver upon the deck of the Mayflower. So I left him to the flatteries of those who fawned and to the cumbersome con scientiousness of those others who, with a Spartan -like aloofness, held out for equality to the total exclusion of frater nity, and contented myself with talking 178 THE PILGRIM SONS things over, not with the subject himself, but with my wife and old Brown. " You thought he seemed lonely, eh ? " observed Brown. " Well, that s the fate of eminence, of celebrity, of leadership in a great cause. I guess the others were lonely, too, were n t they ? " The others ? Did he mean the secre tary and the governess ? " Yes, the others the great-great- great-grandfathers. And their loneliness was n t for a single week, either ; they had eight or nine of it." "What s time got to do with it?" I objected. "It isn t the number of weeks you are on the water ; it s having gone on the water, to start with. That s where the nerve comes in or the folly." " They did n t have anybody to pass bouillon and sandwiches in the middle of the forenoon," continued Brown, with his eye on the distant figure of the sidling deck-steward. " They did n t have a ten- course dinner served at twilight." 179 THE PILGRIM SONS " It is n t the food," I moaned ; " it s the being able to eat it or not able." " They did n t have twin screws and water-tight compartments and double bottoms," went on old Brown tiresomely. " They did n t post up five hundred miles every noon in the companionway." " I don t care if they did n t," I growled. " I only wish this had been a leaky old tub, too, and that we, as well as they, had had to put back to port before we had fairly got started." " Why, Theodore ! " said my wife. " Oh, well," continued Brown sooth ingly, " I m not disputing your heroism, nor that of the Queen s new lieges, either. Perhaps they are more heroic than they themselves realize. I don t know whether they have had as tough a time as you dur ing this present cruise, but I expect they are going to have one all right enough after landing." " How do you mean ? " asked my wife. " Well, that s the way it was with their 180 THE PILGRIM SONS ancestors, two hundred and fifty years ago. Disheartened by the ruggedness of the country, by the rigors of the climate, by the hostility of the aborigines " began the old fellow soaringly ; I almost saw his finger tracing its way over the page of history. " Dear me, Brown," I interrupted ; " if you re quoting, give us your author and page and paragraph." This rebuke had its effect ; Brown closed the volume of history, and when he resumed, it was in his own words and his own way. " Well," he said, " New England may be rugged, but old England is rugged, too. Talk about a stony-hearted Fleet Street ! why, the whole West End is adamantine ! / never walked through it, as a social aspirant, but I Ve heard of others who have, and who only limped back footsore for their pains." My wife stiffened up a little in her chair, tilting her chin, and setting her 181 THE PILGRIM SONS lips in a firm, straight line. You might have fancied that here, at least, was one whose baggage contained shoes suited to the byways of Belgravia. "And then the dreadful English cli mate," pursued old Brown, suavely. " Those benumbing winters, those chill ing springs ; the cutting blasts of May, the nipping frosts of June so deadly to the newcomer in London. I have heard that ambitious strangers sometimes have to chafe their noses even as late as July. I have never been frost-bitten, because I have never exposed myself." He smoothed his hands in a self-gratula- tory manner. Ellen turned her head slowly to one side and seemed to be inflating her nos trils with a breath of confident pride. Behold one, I almost heard her say, who is fully capable of guarding her own pro boscis. "And then the natives," proceeded old Brown, with his irritating affectation 182 THE PILGRIM SONS of reverie. "They don t, indeed, rush forth from their wigwams to scalp the newly arrived stranger nothing so crude, so sudden. They are much more cruel than that : they draw the flaps of their tents close to, and leave him to perish slowly in the cold outside. No thing can placate them except rich gifts ; if they send you a snakeskin, you return it filled with a more politic stuffing than gunpowder. You remit gold and silver yea, and precious stones; you contrib ute costly vessels and sumptuous raiment and " - Absurd old Brown ; Bancroft or Isaiah it was all alike to him ; he could quote one as crookedly as the other. " And if you would join in their dances and eke persuade them to join in yours, you must double the gold and treble the jewels and heap up the rustling cou pon" Old Brown threw back his head and took in a deep breath. " Ain t it good 183 THE PILGRIM SONS to be at sea ! " he exclaimed, "miles and miles away from all that empty folly ! " Ellen all this time had been studying Brown with a growing disapproval, and these last words of his apparently has tened her determination, long since evi dent, to speak. " It seems to me," she said coldly, " that it s right enough for people to know what they want, and to try to get it, and to go wherever they must go to get it. The early settlers knew what they wanted, and what they did n t want. They knew what they could stand, and what they could n t stand. They stood things not to their taste as long as they could, and then they made a change. And it seems to me [woman s - club phrase, again] that others may have the same privilege. " " Of course," said old Brown, with a ready acquiescence which showed his perception of having gone too far. " If you don t like the religious ritual of Eng- 184 THE PILGRIM SONS land, you go to America. If you don t like the social ritual of America, you go to England. Turn and turn about it s all fair. Sometimes one thing seems the important thing; sometimes an other." " I don t believe that is just what Ellen means," I put in, for I felt that I was now coming to a better understand ing of my spouse. " I think she means that it s kind of exasperating to be con scious of your ability to play a large part, and yet to be hampered by a cramped stage and indifferent scenery and an audience that isn t well, that is n t quite so distinguished as some other one you have in mind. H m ! " " Of course," admitted old Brown again. "It must be awful to have lots of money and yet to feel all the time that there s no way of spending it at home to your advantage and credit. Glory, I might add, too. If that s overstrong, I 11 make it vainglory. Think of those 185 THE PILGRIM SONS poor Southerners who used to have to come away up to New York to work off their dollars, because there was no strik ing opportunity of doing so in their own district. Cotton - fields traveled then ; rents and dividends travel now." " Those poor people precisely," said Ellen sympathetically. "I was always so sorry for them, too." " You were n t any such thing," I pro tested. "You never thought anything about it you know you didn t. You were n t old enough." " Well, anyway, I m sorry for them now." " No, you re not, either ; they have n t got any more money nowadays." " I mean " began my wife, in a vexed tone. Then she stopped, disdain ful of my little sally. " You re begin ning to feel better, are n t you ? " she said. " Had n t you better let them carry away that plate of orange peel ? " I was beginning to feel better so 186 THE PILGRIM SONS much better that when we resumed our comments and speculations after lunch (to which meal I actually went down) I was able to assist in devising a career such as should be possible in England for a gentleman, a scholar, and a land lord : " For of course they 11 have es tates there, too," said my thoughtful Ellen. And we agreed between our selves, despite old Brown, that perhaps our late compatriots could seize and meant to seize larger opportunities than those connected merely with balls, dinners, and house parties, that they might be among the first-strung cables in the vast bridge that was soon and indis- solubly to unite But I am no post prandial orator, as yet ; so I will refrain. However, we generously extended them invitations in the direction of literature and art and science (as patrons, at least), and in the direction of philanthropy, of education, even of politics ; " seeing," said Ellen again, "that England is a 187 THE PILGRIM SONS country where it is possible for a gen tleman and a scholar and a landlord to make his weight felt in the governing of things. He is sure, also, of being treated with deference by the populace " " Even if he does n t deserve it," I broke in. " It s very pleasant," rejoined my wife, " to be treated with deference, whether you deserve it or not. And it s a coun try, too, where the very tradespeople " " Ellen ! " I cried, " no more. My fa ther kept a country store at Schenect " My wife turned her back on me and walked away. With her the past is past ; her face is set toward the future. All through the afternoon I continued to pick up. Toward dinner-time I took a turn or two over the deck in a fairly sprightly style ; it seemed as absurd that I should ever have been seasick as it had seemed, on land, that I ever could be, or, as it had seemed during the actual trou ble, that I ever could be anything else, 1 88 THE PILGRIM SONS or ever had been anything else. That evening, as I was in good health and spirits, and fully presentable, Ellen brought me to the notice of the lady whom I have alluded to throughout, thanks to Brown s fancy, under a floral designation. My partner thought (and properly enough, I m sure) that she might strain her interest in that direc tion so far as to bring forward her own husband, and I must say that I was very graciously received. I carefully toned down the jauntiness that was the inevi table accompaniment of the great and agreeable reaction from which I was now profiting ; I was discreet, brief, and a bit distingu^ (I had never made a conscious study of being any of the three before), and Ellen has assured me more than once since that happy hour that I may very well hope for a satisfactory partici pation in her own luminous future. The next day I made the acquaintance of the two men. I had ten minutes talk 189 THE PILGRIM SONS with one of them up near the chart-room door ; and if it had really been a day (a full day, instead of a mere fragmental half day to finish the trip) something memorable might have been said. But it was the eleventh hour well-nigh, indeed, on to the twelfth ; it was no time for confession, nor for profession. But the new Englishman was friendly and approachable enough, and communica tive enough, too, toward a ten-minute acquaintance. I was very much pleased with him, and very much pleased with myself. I trust, too, that he was pleased with me ; for seldom have I been more solicitous about the impression I might be making on one so much my junior. Is it necessary for me to state that my wife and I subsequently met these distinguished neo-Anglicans on land ? I trust not. But I must disabuse you, in mere honesty, of the idea that we met them repeatedly, or that we became in any great degree intimate with them. 190 THE PILGRIM SONS They, indeed, entertained us but only once. Perhaps we expected more un til we recalled old Brown s caustic obser vation that our friends would probably not go to the trouble of establishing themselves in England merely for the purpose of entertaining their former fel low citizens. We went down into War wick presently : Ellen said something about the attractions of the midland counties. The sole function to which our fellow voyagers bade us was quite small and simple (though, indeed, taste ful and tactful), and it was given while things were on the provisional footing that preceded the family s full and for mal establishment. But it brought Ellen into immediate contact with three or four people of the kind she wanted to reach, and circumstances made it almost as easy for her to follow them up in the country as in town. You have heard, dear reader, of the Indian juggler and the mango-tree that sprouts and mounts before your very 191 THE PILGRIM SONS eyes. Well, Ellen is a social mango- grower, if ever one existed on this planet. Let the tiniest blade of opportunity show itself upon the bare, hard field of soci ety, and she detects it, she coaxes it, she manipulates it ; it grows, it towers, it spreads, and presently we are sitting un der its shade and weaving chaplets from its foliage for our triumphant brows. At least, this is the sort of thing I am anticipating; nor are you to imagine for a moment that Ellen has foregone to any great degree her cultivation of the Rose. At this very moment, while I am penning these few pages, Ellen herself sits near me, revolving in her mind the phrases which she shall employ in an nouncing to our English friends our re turn to English shores, and I am sure that her choicest drops of epistolary dew will fall upon the petals of the Rose. I hope our friends will be as kind as she expects. For we, too, dear reader, have elected 192 THE PILGRIM SONS to join the younger band of pilgrims ; we, too, have determined to traverse the vasty deep in pursuit of a higher and brighter ideal ; we, too, shall strive to merit the tolerance of the great and the deference of the less. I shall not say, however, that we are prompted to this course through any triumph achieved in their new field by our immediate predecessors. For they have not triumphed ; they have established themselves creditably, and that is all. Though they were of the first magnitude at home, they are but un distinguished stars of moderate lustre, in the great constellation of old world so ciety. The British empire has encom passed them in its vast maw like so many unconsidered trifles, and seems to hold that wide orifice distended, as if to say, " Send on as many more as you please." This attitude of the British beast awes yet fascinates us. I am like a tomtit before an anaconda, or a novice climbing the terraces of Monte Carlo, or THE PILGRIM SON S a provincial magnate just stepping into Wall Street. We feel the full magnitude of the monster for the first time, but we hope to make a bigger mouthful than some others have done ; to confess the precise truth, we scent a foeman worthy of our steel. No too facile triumph for my Ellen. I have every confidence in her ; I am certain of her coming out on top. So we return, now, to grapple with the dragon in good earnest. St. George be with us. Our own George, however, remains behind, disdainful and distrustful of the project. He has an American education, he declares, and means to have an Amer ican career. Very well ; he is of age, and must do as he sees fit. But Emmy accompanies us, and we feel that for an American girl of good position and breed ing and education any career is possi ble. And little Tommy accompanies us too. He is destined for Eton, and will face the future light-heartedly enough in 194 THE PILGRIM SONS a high hat and a wide collar. On the Pananglia to-day it is we who occupy a suite de luxe ; we are a little choice of ourselves, and have people to peep into our portholes, just as we ourselves once but never mind. Am I a snob ? Nay, nay, dear reader, be not too ready with your reply. It is I who have asked the question, so allow me to be the one to answer it ; I much prefer it that way. Why, in the first place, then, do I put myself this ques tion ? Because, whatever my faults, I hope I am too much of a man to draw attention to the mote that is in my wife s eye while remaining regardless of any possible beam in my own. Am I, then, a snob ? I am afraid so. No great one, I trust ; no incorrigible one, I am sure. Perhaps I have only the making of one, only the bare beginning of one per haps only the latent possibility that lurks in us one and all. But it is there ; I feel it, and I confess it. I deplore it, I THE PILGRIM SONS almost blush for it ; sometimes I strug gle, however feebly, against it. But I am an Anglo-Saxon, like unto you, pitying reader ; and have enjoyed the atmosphere of social advantage and privilege and leisure as you, also, may have done, or may not have done. If not, that is the only difference between us the only reason why you are not a snob, too. You are an Anglo-Saxon, as well as I, and snobbery is in your blood as well as in mine. No civilization has yet reached that high stage in which all the virtues and graces are combined. If you have political inequality, as in Italy or Spain, then some measure of equality in every-day social intercourse is apt to be evolved, you meet as man to man, and the snob suffocates before he is born. If, on the other hand, you have political equality, as in America or England, then social inequality is like enough to follow, the natural kindliness of human inter course is chilled, and the snob luxuriates. 196 THE PILGRIM SONS I didn t understand old Brown to say (you have, of course, detected this high philosophy as his, rather than mine) that this sort of thing came about in direct obedience to some ascertained law. No ; he was no bolder than to hint at some obscure, inexplicable principle of balance, of compensation, which prevented all the good things of life from gravitating to gether toward some one angle in the ter restrial framework. In the early winter of our political and social history (he further explained) the frozen soil of hard material conditions gave no hold for this particular plant, and the shrewd blasts of a keen democracy would have nipped any daring shoot that might have ap peared. But the gentler days of spring time have now supervened ; the warm sun of prosperity shines upon us, the grateful breezes of amenity now fan the land, and the sprouting plant of snob- bism waxes high, cumbers the soil where the early Pilgrim foot was planted, and is 197 THE PILGRIM SONS even wafting its insidious thistle-down (if the old fellow is to be believed) to ward the hitherto unsophisticated prairies of the Middle West. About this last, I am not so sure, having never been beyond the Alleghanies ; but it seems probable enough. If it has n t reached them al ready, it is upon the way, all the same ; if it does n t overtake them to-day, it will do so to-morrow. We shall all be snobs, sooner or later, dear reader; and I re gard myself as less an offender than a victim. And these remarks of mine and Brown s you are to take not as an apology, but simply as an explanation. But even here the idea of compensation comes in : we are evolving a much needed standard of manners and usages, and we are establishing an entente cordiale be tween the two grand divisions of our race. And as regards the construction of the great bridge that is to join the shores of the new world to those of the old, Ellen and I prefer to do our share at the 198 THE PILGRIM SONS beginning rather than at the end. We would rather string the earlier cables than merely be members of the throng of foot-passengers that later will tramp over the completed structure. We may look for your praise, not your blame, it seems to me, in view of such an ambition. Old Brown is doing what he can to help us on. I refer once more to his letter, which was thrust into my hands at Queenstown, an hour or two ago. His researches on our behalf in Hampshire have been crowned with complete success he has found us an ancestor and a pedigree. I expected no less, indeed, after his brilliant genealogical triumph in the cause of the Pilgrim Sons. For he has at length joined the Rose to the par ent stem, and has impressed upon the whole clan the stamp of the highest dis tinction. It shows upon their silver, their linen, their note-paper, their park gates, their carriage panels ; perhaps, in a frenzy of inexorable consistency, he 199 THE PILGRIM SONS has even branded it upon their butlers and footmen. After such an achieve ment, what was it to discover connec tions for us among the county families of Hampshire ? My wife s grandmother was right her second cousin was in deed a lord ; and if I could find words to express my sense of the tact, the discretion, the suavity with which Ellen will make her approaches to these peo ple, I should set them down here, you may be sure. But I will simply state that she has declared her intention to resume her intimacy with the Mayflow ers. That s what she calls it an " in timacy." But I will not recast her phraseology. We say, " To-morrow is Friday," and " Next month is March ; " and the same implied forecast of certainty I shall permit to the tongue of my clever wife. I look upon that "intimacy" as one of the certitudes of the immediate future. Yes, old Brown s letter is distinctly 200 THE PILGRIM SONS elate ; he feels his own triumph. Yet one passage in it has a cynical and sub- acid quality that would annoy me, if I did not regard the whole thing as a mere rhetorical exercise ; for Brown s infirmity is growing upon him with the years, and sometimes he is florid and artificial be yond all bounds of taste or reason. His present page makes, indeed, no direct reference to the Pilgrim Sons, but what he does say gives me for the first time occasion to doubt that there may be any solid satisfaction in the fabric of their success. " And now," he writes, in his last para graph, "welcome to the sawdust palace; its portal stands open for you. It is mag nificent enough without, and if it is all hollowness within, may you not discover that too soon. But I warn you that it is founded on a sapless selfishness, and that its crumbling walls are always calling for repair, and that the latest comers must contribute the greatest share of the labor. 201 THE PILGRIM SONS All your spare hours you dance away on sawdust, until your poor knees sink be neath you as the result of your arduous and aimless scufflings. You feed on saw dust, and the more you are stuffed with it the hollower and hungrier you become. You think in sawdust, and your poor brain becomes dry and disintegrate, and finally blows away. You dream of saw dust, and wake from the frantic rivalries of the scrambling throng to the real busi ness of the day, which is to furnish saw dust and more sawdust. You must con tribute it incessantly, strictly of the grade and quality that the supervisors require, and the more you give the more you may. And in the end you sigh for the wholesome forest where grew all the great trunks that have been betrayed and dismembered merely to provide ma terial for so much empty and crumbling folly." This is old Brown at his best or worst. I repeat these observations to 202 THE PILGRIM SONS Ellen, and she says, "Fudge!" She even seizes the letter, tears it up, and flings the fragments through the port hole. This is not altogether civil to Brown, who has really done us a sub stantial favor; but it is just the act to restore my confidence and courage, and I I need something of the kind. Certainly the recollection of the coun try store at Schenectady (which is no longer so freely mentioned) has no sus taining quality in it. But more than once to-day, in the in tervals of laborious composition, I have found myself with my eyes fixed on the distant Welsh coast, repeating half aud ibly such phrases from Brown s letter as I am able to recall. Did he intend it for a caution, a gibe, a warning, a taunt? Ah, well; the steamer-chairs are being collected in heaps, the stewards are hourly becoming more oppressively attentive, the invalids are crawling up to air and sunlight, the gulls are circling round 203 THE PILGRIM SONS our stern, the deck-hands are busy with bunting and with the brass-work of the gunwales, I myself am just preparing to dress for my reception into the vast community of native Englishry ; and be fore many hours are past, we shall begin to know. 204 PASQUALE S PICTURE " BUT supposing he were not to come, after all ? " asks old Assunta with some anxiety. " Never fear, madre mia," returns Pasquale, confidently. " Have I not said that he is a gran signor inglese? He will do as he has promised." Ah, that was a day long remembered in Murano. What a wave of excitement rippled over the town, what an impulse of curiosity brought everybody flocking to old Assunta s house! Not really everybody, of course ; for Murano was not quite so small a place as that no, indeed ! Ah, those forestieri ! they seemed to suppose that our Murano con sisted of nothing but the basilica and the 205 PASQUALE S PICTURE bead-factory. As if there were not the palace with the winged lion standing on his column in the square before it, and the broad canal with the bridge crossing over it in one big arch, and the gondolas lying there by the riva as many as fif teen or twenty at a time ! What more would you have what more was there in Venice itself ? Small ? There was Torcello ; that was truly of a smallness. But Murano ? not at all ! Most of the gondolas are lying by the riva to-day, almost under the windows of the old house where Assunta lives with her son Pasquale and her orphaned niece Lucia. The finest of all the boats is Pas quale s own, and the smartest of all the boatmen is Pasquale himself with good reason, too ; our brave Pasquale is the hero of the hour. For the gran signor with whom he spent a day on the lagoon last week is coming to Murano expressly to make Pasquale s picture. They had gone together to Torcello, and to San 206 PASQUALE S PICTURE Michele, and to the Lido in fine, where had they not been with that box on three legs and a hole in one side ? Pasquale has not seen the result of all this gon- doliering, but his faith is great. So he stands here this sunny afternoon amidst his circle of friends and acquaintances ; and he wears a mighty black felt hat upon his shapely head, and the big collar of a wonderful new plaid shirt his mother s express make lies over his broad, square shoulders; and Assunta regards him with a fond pride, and Lucia with a timid adoration, and Girolamo, whose own boat is not nearly so fine as Pasquale s, with a consuming envy, while everybody, flocking down and around, choruses the advantage of having made such a friend. And, best of all, the picture is to re main Pasquale s own. Remind your selves, friends, of the pittore tedesco the German painter who came here last year. He made Pasquale s picture. Ah, 207 PASQUALE S PICTURE yes, to be sure ; that pale little young man, so cross and snappy, with specta cles j u st like an old woman. Fancy our Pasquale in spectacles ; impossi ble ! Well, he made Pasquale get out that old black cloak, that he hardly ever thinks of wearing ; and he had him stand this way, you know, as he would never stand of his own mind in the world ; and he made his lips too red, and his cheeks as brown as why, really as brown as that coat ; and in the end he just handed him a couple of francs, with never a " grazie," and went off without giving us more than half a chance to see the picture. Ah, but it was a bad pic ture ma, brutto ; we did n t want to see it hah ! But the signor inglese, you understand Ah, but here is the signor inglese coming up the canal this very moment. Oh joy ! oh transport ! And his blue eyes are twinkling merrily, and all his white teeth show in a gay smile, and the 208 PASQUALE S PICTURE sunlight glints across his yellow beard ; and he has a pair of long brown woolen stockings on his legs, and a broad blue cap, with a big blue topknot in the mid dle, set sidewise on his curly head. Not like our Pasquale tut? altro ; but a gallant gentleman indeed, old Assunta ungrudgingly assents. And here is little Gigi turning multitudinous handsprings upon the pavement, and up there is old Catarina at her window, sourly surveying the whole scene. Aha ! when has old Catarina ever had a guest like this ? And everybody hastens to help the signer alight. Ho, there ! pass out the three- legged box with the hole in it ! Here, Gigi, you young rascal, take this other box full of bottles and things, and mind you have a care ! Welcome, Eccellenza, to Murano ! And little Lucia, how happy she is ! Thanks to this gracious gentleman, they shall have Pasquale with them always, after this. When he goes to Venice 209 PASQUALE S PICTURE now and then, he will yet leave himself behind in Murano ; and if he should ever happen to spend a week on the main land again ah, what a long, long week it would be ! they should still see him every day of his absence all the same. Ah, what a joy this portrait would al ways remain for them ! But, oh me, who is this that comes tripping so pertly and so airily across the bridge ? Who but that artful Giu- seppina, with her black lovelocks, and those hateful blue ribbons, and that odi ous string of yellow beads around her neck ! Why should she be coming along just at this time ? Why was n t she at the Fabbrica, where she belonged ? Any body could have beads enough who worked where they were made ! So fa miliar, too, with Pasquale, and so saucy toward the signor ! Oh dear, oh dear ! where was the day s pleasure now ? S accomodi, Eccellenza. Where shall we stand this strange machine ? And 210 PASQUALE S PICTURE where shall we put all these curious little bottles, each with a different color and each with a different smell ? Yes, that will do very well bene, benissimo. And now we will proceed with the picture without loss of time. Let the good Pas- quale stand just about here, please, and rest his eye about there, and keep very quiet just a moment. Now, then. Giro- lamo sniffs ; he has seen the same thing done Dio mio, how many times ! over in Venice itself. Assunta crushes him with one look. Quiet, please, my friends. A deep silence falls, while the great miracle is being wrought. An old crone scuffling by is frozen into stone by a multitude of hisses. Not a soul whis pers. There, now ; that s all. What ! done already ? Why, that Ger man painter worked two or three hours, and even then J Sh ! the signer is ask ing old Assunta for a dark room and a candle-end. Mystery ! Perplexed Assunta what shall she do ? A dark room and 211 PASQUALE S PICTURE a candle ! What would the parroco say to this ? he who had given them all, only last Sunday, so fatherly a warning against the powers of darkness. Was this all quite quite right and proper ? Oh, yes, indeed ; right and proper, and quite indispensable. So the magician is lost to the general gaze for a few min utes. When he returns his finger-tips are more or less stained and discolored, and he carries in one hand a square sheet of glass which he treats very carefully and scrutinizes closely, with one eye shut. Oho ! this, then, is the picture ! Come now ; let us see how it looks. Yes, but is it the picture, after all ? How can it be? this poor, pale, yellow affair that is not to be seen at all save when held just so, and that looks quite as much like anybody else as like Pas- quale. Our new friend is doubtless very kind and very clever, and means well enough ; but Pasquale himself is quite crestfallen, and Assunta looks very 212 PASQUALE S PICTURE dubious indeed, and Girolamo smiles in open derision ; while poor little grieved and disappointed Lucia almost bursts into tears when Giuseppina ah, that Giuseppina ! touches Pasquale s shoul der ever so lightly, and saucily says : " Our Pasquale has become a forestiere himself proprio un tedesco ; he must have his pair of spectacles too ! " But the signer takes all this with a careless smile; then, in due course, he pulls out a sharp lead pencil, and makes a few dots and scratches here and there on the shadowy face before him. Giro lamo laughs aloud ; the enraged Assunta glares with almost equal severity on both. And then the signor, with a reproving shake of the head, sets down the glass very carefully in full sunlight, and directs everybody to fall back beyond the pos sibility of throwing a shadow upon the image. So, then, there is something more to be done still ; perhaps this is n t the real picture after all. Why, look ! 213 PASQUALE S PICTURE look ! I beg of you ! The signor has placed a bit of paper under the glass, and the paper is turning black before our very eyes ! This, then, is the pic ture, the real picture, at last ! Evviva ! Ev- Quiet, my good people, for just a mo ment more. One or two small things still to be done, and then the picture will be ready to look at, to touch, to do what you please with. But for the present, pazienza. Then comes the last act of all in this thrilling drama : the signor whips out a sharp little pair of scissors from his vest pocket, trims the picture along the edges, fastens it deftly upon a stiff piece of cardboard, gives it a parting rub with his elbow, and then, holding it high overhead in his splotched and stained fingers, gayly cries : " Eccolo ! Ecco nostro bravo Pas- qtiale ! " And then, with a flourishing bow and an added " Complimenti," he hands it over to the gondolier. 214 PASQUALE S PICTURE At last, the picture ! It is stupendo ; it is magnifico ! Wonder ; delight ; ec stasy ! When has Pasquale ever been so proud and happy ? When has Lucia ever felt so sweet and tremulous a joy ? And when, when has old Assunta ever been beheld in such a transport as this ? With a loud scream of delight she catches the picture from Pasquale s hand, kisses it again and again, and bursts into a flood of happy tears. " Look ! " she cries ; " look, Lucia ! See the eyes, the mouth, the hair, and every single little button on the shirt ! Ah, veramente, it is my own dear son ! " Oh, was there another such son in all Murano ? And was there an other such picture in all the world ? Comparative quiet comes presently ; and the signor, who has been constrained for the moment to turn away his face, humbly thankful, perhaps, to have been made the instrument of so great a joy, becomes himself again; and with mischief in his eye he turns to Pasquale. 215 PASQUALE S PICTURE " I can make you another picture just as well as not, if you say. Would n t you like one for" And he glances teas- ingly from Giuseppina to Lucia. Poor Pasquale glances back from Lu cia to Giuseppina, and shuffles and blushes and stammers, and finally de clares oh, how reluctantly ! that this one will be quite enough. Ahi, that Giuseppina ! she is to blame for this. And only see her now : setting that necklace, that her mother never lets her wear except on Sundays and festas, and throwing contritely coquettish glances at the signor, and only too openly hoping that he will offer to make her picture as well. But he does nothing of the kind. He merely looks at his soiled fingers obviously it is his habit to relegate un pleasant details to an assistant and says that his little task is done, then, and that if they will allow him to wash his hands he will get his things together and try to reach Venice before sunset. 216 PASQUALE S PICTURE What ! leave immediately ? Old As- sunta will not hear of such a thing. Their poor house and everything it con tains is at the disposal of his illustrious highness. So for a half hour or more the little courtyard is brightened with all the hospitality of fervent gratitude. There is a table spread under the arbor, with bread and cheese and wine for everybody who chooses to partake. And the big bunch of grapes that has been ripening this past week for the parrocds Sunday dinner is cut down and placed beside the signer s plate. Can anything be too good for him ? No, indeed ; and so \hQparroco must wait. Ho, friends, the gran signor stands to depart ! Hi, Gigi, you little monkey, lend a hand again with all those things ! Ha, what is it you have let drop ? Alas ! it is the glass picture that falls upon the pavement and breaks into a thousand fragments, you careless wicked boy ! No matter, my friends ; you have the paper 217 PASQUALE S PICTURE picture all safe, and that is the chief concern. So, then, good-by. Oh, but dismiss that other boatman, there ; the brave Pasquale will himself conduct his Excellency back to Venice. Again, then, addio! A rivederci! Buon viaggio ! Addio, Eccellenza ! And so they go down the canal, Pasquale s vast hat flapping to and fro in exact accord with the rhythmi cal movements of his strong and supple frame, and the gran signor gayly waving his cap with one hand and vigorously brandishing his stick with the other, until a quick turn in the middle distance puts them altogether out of sight. ii What need to say how precious the picture became in old Assunta s eyes ; how jealously it was guarded from all harm or mishap ; how proudly it was displayed before the admiring gaze of friends and privileged visitors ? With what care was it put away in that par- 218 PASQUALE S PICTURE ticular little drawer where she kept her crucifix and the rosary blessed by the good Pio Nono ; and with what state was it brought out on that Sunday when Francesco and his wife came over from the Fondamenta Nuove ! How many times she told the story of the picture, and how many people listened to her tale ! But if the picture were precious now, how doubly precious was it to become hereafter. Oh, fatal day the day when Pasquale went over the lagoon to Venice, and was brought back stark and drip ping, with his dark locks all matted to gether and his bright eyes forever closed. A curse upon the times ! First it was theferrovia that stretched its vast length across the water and drove the poor boatmen of Mestre from the lagoon. Now it is the vapori that go puffing and shrieking up and down the reaches of the Canalazzo, crowded with swarms of chat tering, heartless strangers; that make 219 PASQUALE S PICTURE night hideous and day detestable ; that undermine incessantly the foundations of church and palace ; and that rob our dear sons of their livelihood and even of their lives. For so much had the steam ers done for the unfortunate Pasquale within one little month from that day in Murano, and within a week from their first appearance on the Canal. Care lessly emerging from a narrow rio that had its outlet near a landing-place, he encountered one of these passing mon sters, and had been caught, overturned, entangled, held under, drowned. Ter rible was old Assunta s anguish when they brought his dead body back to Mu rano ; and less violent, but no less in tense and inconsolable, had been her grief when, the day following, the little funeral train glided back from San Michele and left Pasquale still to float on, and eter nally, with all the Venice that had been and was not. Arrived at the doorway of the stricken 220 PASQUALE S PICTURE and desolate house, Lucia hastened on ahead. When Assunta entered the fa miliar but blighted chamber, the picture, now fastened on the wall, met her first glance. Ah, the picture ! In her great distress she had all but forgotten it, and now her Pasquale, dead and buried though he be, smiles gravely and fondly down upon her. After her first loud and passionate outcry the possibilities of peace and reconciliation seem less and less remote. A thousand blessings upon the good Madonna who had sent so kind a friend to leave them such a memo rial as this ! Tears of gratitude mingle with tears of grief, and the acuteness of her first sorrow is over and past. Their Pasquale is with them yet. The picture shall remain where it now is, a perpetual shrine, and he shall be present to them always, always morning, noon, and night. There are those upon whom fate en joins the graceless task of being cruel to 221 PASQUALE S PICTURE be kind ; and there are those to whom it assigns the infinitely harder lot of being kind but to be cruel. The genial young gentleman who whiled away an idle af ternoon in that old Italian town never knew what a trail of doubt and despair and utter desolation his visit left, in the end, behind him. And may he never learn ! It is only the third morning after Pas- quale s death, and Assunta stands there before his picture, her hands tightly clasped together and her face clouded with doubt and anxiety. She rubs her old eyes ; can it be that they are coming to be less sharp and sure than they have been heretofore ? Hardly ; for note that birdcage in the window across the Canal she can see plainly every stick of it, and the bird inside, as well. She looks about the room anxiously. Can it be that it is less clearly lighted than usual ? No ; for the sunlight streams freely in, illuminating every object about her. 222 PASQUALE S PICTURE What, then, is the trouble ? Can it be in the picture itself ? Let us hear what Lucia thinks about it. And Lucia, be ing called, looks at the picture for a mo ment, very intently and very seriously. " Madonna mia, but it seems to be fading," she murmurs. Fading. Ah, my gay and gracious young ama teur, are you quite sure that in all the haste and excitement of the moment you carried out completely every step of your process? Let us but hope so, for old Assunta s sake. " Oh, what a pity it is," she says a little sadly, "that it should not have stayed as it was at first. But no matter ; it is still our Pasquale caro ! " A sudden thought strikes Lucia. She looks anxiously, timidly, compassionately at the old woman, yet cannot find the heart to say a word. But she watches the picture. There seems to be no change at the end of one hour ; none at the end of two. By afternoon, however, 223 PASQUALE S PICTURE there is a change the picture is dim mer ; only a little, but dimmer all the same. Assunta sees it too. And they both feel together that the picture not merely has faded, but is fading all the time. And neither dares ask the other how all this is going to end. Assunta feels that something must be done, and done at once. To whom shall she turn ? Who will be most likely to as sist her at this juncture ? She comes to a decision : she will go to the libraio y that little old man who keeps a shop around the corner, who sells books that the learned can read, who has that beautiful image of the Madonna in his window ; and who, come to think, was the very one who sold her that print of the blessed St. Francis only a fortnight ago. Why had n t she thought of him before ? There was a man who would know all about pictures, indeed ! let him be consulted without loss of time. And the libraio comes blinking to the front of his 224 PASQUALE S PICTURE dingy little shop, and holds the picture up to the light with his fat hands, and rambles vaguely through a maze of words that has to do with everything but his own entire ignorance of the matter, and sends poor Assunta home with a dazed head and an aching heart. She dreads to-morrow. How will the picture look then ? she asks herself a thousand times over. When to-morrow comes she is standing before the picture which is now duller and dimmer than ever questioning, with locked fingers and a tear-worn face, if no agency nor any power can stop this dread fatality. Is she doomed to remain in helpless con templation of such slow-wrought ruin ? Must she watch powerlessly the sparkle fade from those bright eyes, the smile pass away from those fond lips ? No ; there is help for her there must be somehow, somewhere. She will go to the parroco, who has never failed her yet in time of need. She will lay the whole 225 PASQUALE S PICTURE matter before him and pray for his as sistance. So, with the picture in her hand, she trudges confidently through the sun the fierce and blinding sun, the cruel, remorseless, destructive sun, that is but too surely undoing all that he had done for them to the house of the parish priest. And the parroco listens to her kindly and patiently, and twitches at his shabby gown, and tugs at his grimy col lar, and hems and haws, and rolls his blue handkerchief into a big round ball to rub his sharp old nose, and hopes that with faith and patience all may yet be well and and Oh, who would have believed it ? Who could have thought it true ? The parroco himself, her main prop, her chief reliance, to fail her at a time like this ! Sick and dizzy and de spairing, she turns her weary steps home ward. The picture goes on fading. Every half hour brings its difference now. 226 PASQUALE S PICTURE With a strong light and an intent regard the several features may yet be distin guished ; but they are fading, fading, fading all the time, as stars do before the crude and garish coming of the cold first light of a winter morning ; and now and then some one of them goes out alto gether and for aye. Finally comes the day Assunta is at home alone when even the outline of the general mass fades away as all else has faded, and the old woman, pressing her fingers to her ach ing eyes, and giving out a bitter and hopeless cry, feels that now, indeed, Pas- quale has gone from her forever, and that a universal darkness has overtaken all things. " I have lost him twice ! " she wails, and falls back utterly crushed and broken. And yet after all this, does there not remain one final resort that cannot fail ? Is there not one power to whom she can make a last and sure appeal ? She rises from the fragments of her scanty repast, 227 PASQUALE S PICTURE new vigor in her step and fresh resolu tion in her face. She locks the door, crosses the courtyard, turns down the riva, and directs her steps toward the ca thedral. The neighbors cannot counsel her; \heparroco cannot assist her; she will appeal to the pity of the Blessed Madonna herself. Lucia returned home at twilight. The house stood deserted : no light, no fire, no inmates. On the table were the scanty remnants of Assunta s midday meal, but Assunta herself was nowhere to be seen, nor had she been observed about the place at any time during the afternoon. Some vague instinct prompted the girl to direct her search toward the cathedral. She entered the dim precincts of the church at dusk, just as a lingering devo tee or two were passing out, and as the sacristan, in his blue blouse, was taking up the last panful of sweepings from the seared and crackled pavement. Aside from him there appeared to be no one 228 PASQUALE S PICTURE within ; the church seemed to stand alto gether empty. Or, no ; not quite. For from the darkening glory of the apse an immemorial Madonna frowned down her grim and inexorable refusal ; while on the chill altar steps below, a heartbroken old woman, with a faded brown card clutched in her stiffening ringers, bowed her gray head meekly and eternally be fore this court of last appeal. 229 CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS^ U. S. A. BLECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. RENEWALS ONLY TEL. NO. 642-3405 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. ED LD Ofcu EC 2 21-10 Ml 27 197000 LD21A-60m-3, 70 (N5382slO)476-A-32 General Library University of California Berkeley THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY A L C O L M A C N E I L BOOKS N - OLD - RARE