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George Meredith - "Sandra Belloni by George Meredith, v3"

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Ragged Lady, Complete

W >> William Dean Howells >> Ragged Lady, Complete




He treated Clementina as a person of mature judgment and a sage
discretion, and he accepted what comfort she could offer him when she
explained that it was everything for Mrs. Lander to have him to talk
with. "She gets tied of talking to me," she urged, "and there's nobody
else, now."

"Why don't she hire a valet de place, and talk to him? I'd hire one
myself for her. It would be a good deal cheaper for me. It's as much as I
can do to stand this weather as it is."

The vice-consul laughed forlornly in his exasperation, but he agreed with
Clementina when she said, in further excuse, that Mrs. Lander was really
very sick. He pushed back his hat, and scratched his head with a grimace.

"Of course, we've got to remember she's sick, and I shall need a little
sympathy myself if she keeps on at me this way. I believe I'll tell her
about my liver next time, and see how she likes it. Look here, Miss
Claxon! Couldn't we get her off to some of those German watering places
that are good for her complaints? I believe it would be the best thing
for her--not to mention me."

Mrs. Lander was moved by the suggestion which he made in person
afterwards; it appealed to her old nomadic instinct; but when the consul
was gone she gave it up. "We couldn't git the'e, Clementina. I got to
stay he'e till I git up my stren'th. I suppose you'd be glad enough to
have me sta't, now the'e's nobody he'e but me," she added, suspiciously.
"You git this scheme up, or him?"

Clementina did not defend herself, and Mrs. Lander presently came to her
defence. "I don't believe but what he meant it fo' the best--or you,
whichever it was, and I appreciate it; but all is I couldn't git off. I
guess this aia will do me as much good as anything, come to have it a
little coola."

They went every afternoon to the Lido, where a wheeled chair met them,
and Mrs. Lander was trundled across the narrow island to the beach. In
the evenings they went to the Piazza, where their faces and figures had
become known, and the Venetians gossipped them down to the last fact of
their relation with an accuracy creditable to their ingenuity in the
affairs of others. To them Mrs. Lander was the sick American, very rich,
and Clementina was her adoptive daughter, who would have her millions
after her. Neither knew the character they bore to the amiable and
inquisitive public of the Piazza, or cared for the fine eyes that aimed
their steadfast gaze at them along the tubes of straw-barreled Virginia
cigars, or across little cups of coffee. Mrs. Lander merely remarked that
the Venetians seemed great for gaping, and Clementina was for the most
part innocent of their stare.

She rested in the choice she had made in a content which was qualified by
no misgiving. She was sorry for Gregory, when she remembered him; but her
thought was filled with some one else, and she waited in faith and
patience for the answer which should come to the letter she had written.
She did not know where her letter would find him, or when she should hear
from him; she believed that she should hear, and that was enough. She
said to herself that she would not lose hope if no answer came for
months; but in her heart she fixed a date for the answer by letter, and
an earlier date for some word by cable; but she feigned that she did not
depend upon this; and when no word came she convinced herself that she
had not expected any.

It was nearing the end of the term which she had tacitly given her lover
to make the first sign by letter, when one morning Mrs. Lander woke her.
She wished to say that she had got the strength to leave Venice at last,
and she was going as soon as their trunks could be packed. She had
dressed herself, and she moved about restless and excited. Clementina
tried to reason her out of her haste; but she irritated her, and fixed
her in her determination. "I want to get away, I tell you; I want to get
away," she answered all persuasion, and there seemed something in her
like the wish to escape from more than the oppressive environment, though
she spoke of nothing but the heat and the smell of the canal. "I believe
it's that, moa than any one thing, that's kept me sick he'e," she said.
"I tell you it's the malariar, and you'll be down, too, if you stay."

She made Clementina go to the banker's, and get money to pay their
landlord's bill, and she gave him notice that they were going that
afternoon. Clementina wished to delay till they had seen the vice-consul
and the doctor; but Mrs. Lander broke out, "I don't want to see 'em,
either of 'em. The docta wants to keep me he'e and make money out of me;
I undastand him; and I don't believe that consul's a bit too good to take
a pussentage. Now, don't you say a wo'd to either of 'em. If you don't do
exactly what I tell you I'll go away and leave you he'e. Now, will you?"

Clementina promised, and broke her word. She went to the vice-consul and
told him she had broken it, and she agreed with him that he had better
not come unless Mrs. Lander sent for him. The doctor promptly imagined
the situation and said he would come in casually during the morning, so
as not to alarm the invalid's suspicions. He owned that Mrs. Lander was
getting no good from remaining in Venice, and if it were possible for her
to go, he said she had better go somewhere into cooler and higher air.

His opinion restored him to Mrs. Lander's esteem, when it was expressed
to her, and as she was left to fix the sum of her debt to him, she made
it handsomer than anything he had dreamed of. She held out against seeing
the vice-consul till the landlord sent in his account. This was for the
whole month which she had just entered upon, and it included fantastic
charges for things hitherto included in the rent, not only for the
current month, but for the months past when, the landlord explained, he
had forgotten to note them. Mrs. Lander refused to pay these demands, for
they touched her in some of those economies which the gross rich practice
amidst their profusion. The landlord replied that she could not leave his
house, either with or without her effects, until she had paid. He
declared Clementina his prisoner, too, and he would not send for the
vice-consul at Mrs. Lander's bidding. How far he was within his rights in
all this they could not know, but he was perhaps himself doubtful, and he
consented to let them send for the doctor, who, when he came, behaved
like anything but the steadfast friend that Mrs. Lander supposed she had
bought in him. He advised paying the account without regard to its
justice, as the shortest and simplest way out of the trouble; but Mrs.
Lander, who saw him talking amicably and even respectfully with the
landlord, when he ought to have treated him as an extortionate scamp,
returned to her former ill opinion of him; and the vice-consul now
appeared the friend that Doctor Tradonico had falsely seemed. The doctor
consented, in leaving her to her contempt of him, to carry a message to
the vice-consul, though he came back, with his finger at the side of his
nose, to charge her by no means to betray his bold championship to the
landlord.

The vice-consul made none of those shows of authority which Mrs. Lander
had expected of him. She saw him even exchanging the common decencies
with the landlord, when they met; but in fact it was not hard to treat
the smiling and courteous rogue well. In all their disagreement he had
looked as constantly to the comfort of his captives as if they had been
his chosen guests. He sent Mrs. Lander a much needed refreshment at the
stormiest moment of her indignation, and he deprecated without retort the
denunciations aimed at him in Italian which did not perhaps carry so far
as his conscience. The consul talked with him in a calm scarcely less
shameful than that of Dr. Tradonico; and at the end of their parley which
she had insisted upon witnessing, he said:

"Well, Mrs. Lander, you've got to stand this gouge or you've got to stand
a law suit. I think the gouge would be cheaper in the end. You see, he's
got a right to his month's rent."

"It ain't the rent I ca'e for: it's the candles, and the suvvice, and the
things he says we broke. It was undastood that everything was to be in
the rent, and his two old chaias went to pieces of themselves when we
tried to pull 'em out from the wall; and I'll neva pay for 'em in the
wo'ld."

"Why," the vice-consul pleaded, "it's only about forty francs for the
whole thing--"

"I don't care if it's only fotty cents. And I must say, Mr. Bennam,
you're about the strangest vice-consul, to want me to do it, that I eva
saw."

The vice-consul laughed unresentfully. "Well, shall I send you a lawyer?"

"No!" Mrs. Lander retorted; and after a moment's reflection she added,
"I'm goin' to stay my month, and so you may tell him, and then I'll see
whetha he can make me pay for that breakage and the candles and suvvice.
I'm all wore out, as it is, and I ain't fit to travel, now, and I don't
know when I shall be. Clementina, you can go and tell Maddalena to stop
packin'. Or, no! I'll do it."

She left the room without further notice of the consul, who said ruefully
to Clementina, "Well, I've missed my chance, Miss Claxon, but I guess
she's done the wisest thing for herself."

"Oh, yes, she's not fit to go. She must stay, now, till it's coola. Will
you tell the landlo'd, or shall--"

"I'll tell him," said the vice-consul, and he had in the landlord. He
received her message with the pleasure of a host whose cherished guests
have consented to remain a while longer, and in the rush of his good
feeling he offered, if the charge for breakage seemed unjust to the
vice-consul, to abate it; and since the signora had not understood that
she was to pay extra for the other things, he would allow the vice-consul
to adjust the differences between them; it was a trifle, and he wished
above all things to content the signora, for whom he professed a cordial
esteem both on his own part and the part of all his family.

"Then that lets me out for the present," said the vice-consul, when
Clementina repeated Mrs. Lander's acquiescence in the landlord's
proposals, and he took his straw hat, and called a gondola from the
nearest 'traghetto', and bargained at an expense consistent with his
salary, to have himself rowed back to his own garden-gate.

The rest of the day was an era of better feeling between Mrs. Lander and
her host than they had ever known, and at dinner he brought in with his
own hand a dish which he said he had caused to be specially made for her.
It was so tempting in odor and complexion that Mrs. Lander declared she
must taste it, though as she justly said, she had eaten too much already;
when it had once tasted it she ate it all, against Clementina's
protestations; she announced at the end that every bite had done her
good, and that she never felt better in her life. She passed a happy
evening, with renewed faith in the air of the lagoon; her sole regret now
was that Mr. Lander had not lived to try it with her, for if he had she
was sure he would have been alive at that moment.

She allowed herself to be got to bed rather earlier than usual; before
Clementina dropped asleep she heard her breathing with long, easy, quiet
respirations, and she lost the fear of the landlord's dish which had
haunted her through the evening. She was awakened in the morning by a
touch on her shoulder. Maddalena hung over her with a frightened face,
and implored her to come and look at the signora, who seemed not at all
well. Clementina ran into her room, and found her dead. She must have
died some hours before without a struggle, for the face was that of
sleep, and it had a dignity and beauty which it had not worn in her life
of self-indulgent wilfulness for so many years that the girl had never
seen it look so before.




XXXIV.

The vice-consul was not sure how far his powers went in the situation
with which Mrs. Lander had finally embarrassed him. But he met the new
difficulties with patience, and he agreed with Clementina that they ought
to see if Mrs. Lander had left any written expression of her wishes
concerning the event. She had never spoken of such a chance, but had
always looked forward to getting well and going home, so far as the girl
knew, and the most careful search now brought to light nothing that bore
upon it. In the absence of instructions to the contrary, they did what
they must, and the body, emptied of its life of senseless worry and
greedy care, was laid to rest in the island cemetery of Venice.

When all was over, the vice-consul ventured an observation which he had
hitherto delicately withheld. The question of Mrs. Lander's kindred had
already been discussed between him and Clementina, and he now felt that
another question had duly presented itself. "You didn't notice," he
suggested, "anything like a will when we went over the papers?" He had
looked carefully for it, expecting that there might have been some
expression of Mrs. Lander's wishes in it. "Because," he added, "I happen
to know that Mr. Milray drew one up for her; I witnessed it."

"No," said Clementina, "I didn't see anything of it. She told me she had
made a will; but she didn't quite like it, and sometimes she thought she
would change it. She spoke of getting you to do it; I didn't know but she
had."

The vice-consul shook his head. "No. And these relations of her husband's
up in Michigan; you don't know where they live, exactly?"

"No. She neva told me; she wouldn't; she didn't like to talk about them;
I don't even know their names."

The vice-consul thoughtfully scratched a corner of his chin through his
beard. "If there isn't any will, they're the heirs. I used to be a sort
of wild-cat lawyer, and I know that much law."

"Yes," said Clementina. "She left them five thousand dollas apiece. She
said she wished she had made it ten."

"I guess she's made it a good deal more, if she's made it anything. Miss
Claxon, don't you understand that if no will turns up, they come in for
all her money.

"Well, that's what I thought they ought to do," said Clementina.

"And do you understand that if that's so, you don't come in for anything?
You must excuse me for mentioning it; but she has told everybody that you
were to have it, and if there is no will--"

He stopped and bent an eye of lack-lustre compassion on the girl, who
replied, "Oh, yes. I know that; it's what I always told her to do. I
didn't want it."

"You didn't want it?"

"No."

"Well!" The vice-consul stared at her, but he forbore the comment that
her indifference inspired. He said after a pause, "Then what we've got to
do is to advertise for the Michigan relations, and let 'em take any
action they want to."

"That's the only thing we could do, I presume."

This gave the vice-consul another pause. At the end of it he got to his
feet. "Is there anything I can do for you, Miss Claxon?"

She went to her portfolio and produced Mrs. Lander's letter of credit. It
had been made out for three thousand pounds, in Clementina's name as well
as her own; but she had lived wastefully since she had come abroad, and
little money remained to be taken up. With the letter Clementina handed
the vice-consul the roll of Italian and Austrian bank-notes which she had
drawn when Mrs. Lander decided to leave Venice; they were to the amount
of several thousand lire and golden. She offered them with the
insensibility to the quality of money which so many women have, and which
is always so astonishing to men. "What must I do with these?" she asked.

"Why, keep them! returned the vice-consul on the spur of his surprise.

"I don't know as I should have any right to," said Clementina. "They were
hers."

"Why, but"--The vice-consul began his protest, but he could not end it
logically, and he did not end it at all. He insisted with Clementina that
she had a right to some money which Mrs. Lander had given her during her
life; he took charge of the bank-notes in the interest of the possible
heirs, and gave her his receipt for them. In the meantime he felt that he
ought to ask her what she expected to do.

"I think," she said, "I will stay in Venice awhile."

The vice-consul suppressed any surprise he might have felt at a decision
given with mystifying cheerfulness. He answered, Well, that was right;
and for the second time he asked her if there was anything he could do
for her.

"Why, yes," she returned. "I should like to stay on in the house here, if
you could speak for me to the padrone."

"I don't see why you shouldn't, if we can make the padrone understand
it's different."

"You mean about the price?" The vice-consul nodded. "That's what I want
you should speak to him about, Mr. Bennam, if you would. Tell him that I
haven't got but a little money now, and he would have to make it very
reasonable. That is, if you think it would be right for me to stay, afta
the way he tried to treat Mrs. Lander."

The vice-consul gave the point some thought, and decided that the
attempted extortion need not make any difference with Clementina, if she
could get the right terms. He said he did not believe the padrone was a
bad fellow, but he liked to take advantage of a stranger when he could;
we all did. When he came to talk with him he found him a man of heart if
not of conscience. He entered into the case with the prompt intelligence
and vivid sympathy of his race, and he made it easy for Clementina to
stay till she had heard from her friends in America. For himself and for
his wife, he professed that she could not stay too long, and they
proposed that if it would content the signorina still further they would
employ Maddalena as chambermaid till she wished to return to Florence;
she had offered to remain if the signorina stayed.

"Then that is settled," said Clementina with a sigh of relief; and she
thanked the vice-consul for his offer to write to the Milrays for her,
and said that she would rather write herself.

She meant to write as soon as she heard from Mr. Hinkle, which could not
be long now, for then she could be independent of the offers of help
which she dreaded from Miss Milray, even more than from Mrs. Milray; it
would be harder to refuse them; and she entered upon a passage of her
life which a nature less simple would have found much more trying. But
she had the power of taking everything as if it were as much to be
expected as anything else. If nothing at all happened she accepted the
situation with implicit resignation, and with a gayety of heart which
availed her long, and never wholly left her.

While the suspense lasted she could not write home as frankly as before,
and she sent off letters to Middlemount which treated of her delay in
Venice with helpless reticence. They would have set another sort of
household intolerably wondering and suspecting, but she had the comfort
of knowing that her father would probably settle the whole matter by
saying that she would tell what she meant when she got round to it; and
apart from this she had mainly the comfort of the vice-consul's society.
He had little to do besides looking after her, and he employed himself
about this in daily visits which the padrone and his wife regarded as
official, and promoted with a serious respect for the vice-consular
dignity. If the visits ended, as they often did, in a turn on the Grand
Canal, and an ice in the Piazza, they appealed to the imagination of more
sophisticated witnesses, who decided that the young American girl had
inherited the millions of the sick lady, and become the betrothed of the
vice-consul, and that they were thus passing the days of their engagement
in conformity to the American custom, however much at variance with that
of other civilizations.

This view of the affair was known to Maddalena, but not to Clementina,
who in those days went back in many things to the tradition of her life
at Middlemount. The vice-consul was of a tradition almost as simple, and
his longer experience set no very wide interval between them. It quickly
came to his telling her all about his dead wife and his married
daughters, and how, after his home was broken up, he thought he would
travel a little and see what that would do for him. He confessed that it
had not done much; he was always homesick, and he was ready to go as soon
as the President sent out a consul to take his job off his hands. He said
that he had not enjoyed himself so much since he came to Venice as he was
doing now, and that he did not know what he should do if Clementina first
got her call home. He betrayed no curiosity as to the peculiar
circumstances of her stay, but affected to regard it as something quite
normal, and he watched over her in every way with a fatherly as well as
an official vigilance which never degenerated into the semblance of any
other feeling. Clementina rested in his care in entire security. The
world had quite fallen from her, or so much of it as she had seen at
Florence, and in her indifference she lapsed into life as it was in the
time before that with a tender renewal of her allegiance to it. There was
nothing in the conversation of the vice-consul to distract her from this;
and she said and did the things at Venice that she used to do at
Middlemount, as nearly as she could; to make the days of waiting pass
more quickly, she tried to serve herself in ways that scandalized the
proud affection of Maddalena. It was not fit for the signorina to make
her bed or sweep her room; she might sew and knit if she would; but these
other things were for servants like herself. She continued in the faith
of Clementina's gentility, and saw her always as she had seen her first
in the brief hour of her social splendor in Florence. Clementina tried to
make her understand how she lived at Middlemount, but she only brought
before Maddalena the humiliating image of a contadina, which she rejected
not only in Clementina's behalf, but that of Miss Milray. She told her
that she was laughing at her, and she was fixed in her belief when the
girl laughed at that notion. Her poverty she easily conceived of; plenty
of signorine in Italy were poor; and she protected her in it with the
duty she did not divide quite evenly between her and the padrone.

The date which Clementina had fixed for hearing from Hinkle by cable had
long passed, and the time when she first hoped to hear from him by letter
had come and gone. Her address was with the vice-consul as Mrs. Lander's
had been, and he could not be ignorant of her disappointment when he
brought her letters which she said were from home. On the surface of
things it could only be from home that she wished to hear, but beneath
the surface he read an anxiety which mounted with each gratification of
this wish. He had not seen much of the girl while Hinkle was in Venice;
Mrs. Lander had not begun to make such constant use of him until Hinkle
had gone; Mrs. Milray had told him of Clementina's earlier romance, and
it was to Gregory that the vice-consul related the anxiety which he knew
as little in its nature as in its object.

Clementina never doubted the good faith or constancy of her lover; but
her heart misgave her as to his well-being when it sank at each failure
of the vice-consul to bring her a letter from him. Something must have
happened to him, and it must have been something very serious to keep him
from writing; or there was some mistake of the post-office. The
vice-consul indulged himself in personal inquiries to make sure that the
mistake was not in the Venetian post-office; but he saw that he brought
her greater distress in ascertaining the fact. He got to dreading a look
of resolute cheerfulness that came into her face, when he shook his head
in sign that there were no letters, and he suffered from the covert
eagerness with which she glanced at the superscriptions of those he
brought and failed to find the hoped-for letter among them. Ordeal for
ordeal, he was beginning to regret his trials under Mrs. Lander. In them
he could at least demand Clementina's sympathy, but against herself this
was impossible. Once she noted his mute distress at hers, and broke into
a little laugh that he found very harrowing.

"I guess you hate it almost as much as I do, Mr. Bennam."

"I guess I do. I've half a mind to write the letter you want, myself."

"I've half a mind to let you--or the letter I'd like to write."

It had come to her thinking she would write again to Hinkle; but she
could not bring herself to do it. She often imagined doing it; she had
every word of such a letter in her mind; and she dramatized every fact
concerning it from the time she should put pen to paper, to the time when
she should get back the answer that cleared the mystery of his silence
away. The fond reveries helped her to bear her suspense; they helped to
make the days go by, to ease the doubt with which she lay down at night,
and the heartsick hope with which she rose up in the morning.

One day, at the hour of his wonted visit, she say the vice-consul from
her balcony coming, as it seemed to her, with another figure in his
gondola, and a thousand conjectures whirled through her mind, and then
centred upon one idea. After the first glance she kept her eyes down, and
would not look again while she told herself incessantly that it could not
be, and that she was a fool and a goose and a perfect coot, to think of
such a thing for a single moment. When she allowed herself, or forced
herself, to look a second time; as the boat drew near, she had to cling
to the balcony parapet for support, in her disappointment.

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