Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

“But,” said Mr. Noyes, nervously blowing his nose, “you lay down this proposition: ‘The minister’s got a job.’ Now I ask, what is it?”

Mr. Snell uncrossed his legs, and stooped to pick up a last, which he proceeded to scan with a shrewd, critical eye.

“Narrer foot,” he said to Mr. Hamblin.

“Private last--Doctor Hunter’s,” said Mr. Hamblin, laying down a boot upon which he was stitching an outer sole, and rising to make a ponderous, elephantine excursion across the quaking shop to the earthen water-pitcher, from which he took a generous draft.

“Well, Brother Snell,” said Mr. Noyes,--they were members together of a secret organization, of which Mr. Snell was P. G. W. T. F., “ain’t you going to tell us? What is this job? That is to say, what--is it?”

Brother Snell set his thumbs firmly in the armholes of his waistcoat, surveyed the smoke-stained pictures pasted on the wall, looked keen, and softly whistled. At last he condescended to explain.

“Preaching Uncle Capen’s funeral sermon.”

There was a subdued general laugh. Even Mr. Hamblin’s leathern apron shook.

Mr. Noyes, however, painfully looking down upon his beard to draw out a white hair, maintained his serious expression.

“I don’t see much ‘job’ in that,” he said. “A minister’s supposed to preach a hundred and four sermons in each and every year, and there’s plenty more where they come from. What’s one sermon more or less when stock costs nothing? It’s like wheeling gravel from the pit.”

Author of “The New Minister’s Great Opportunity”]

“O. K.,” said Mr. Snell; “if ’tain’t no trouble, then ’tain’t. But seeing’s you know, suppose you specify the materials for this particular discourse.”

Mr. Noyes looked a little disconcerted.

“Well,” he said, “of course I can’t set here and compose a funereal discourse offhand without no writing-desk; but there’s stock enough to make a sermon of any time.”

“Oh, come,” said Mr. Snell, “don’t sneak out; particularize.”

“Why,” said Mr. Noyes, “you’ve only to open the leds of your Bible, and choose a text, and then: When did this happen? Why did this happen? To who did this happen? and so forth and so on; and there’s your sermon. I’ve heard ’em so a hunderd times.”

“All right,” said Mr. Snell; “I don’t doubt, you know: but as for me, I for one never happened to hear of anything that Uncle Capen did but whitewash and saw wood. Now, what sort of an autobiographical sermon could you make out of sawing wood?”

Whereat Leander Buffum proceeded, by that harsh, guttural noise well known to country boys, to imitate the sound of sawing through a log.

His sally was warmly greeted.

“The minister might narrate,” said Mr. Blood, “what Uncle Capen said to Issachar, when Issachar told him that he charged high for sawing wood. ‘See here,’ says Uncle Capen, ‘s’pos’n’ I do. My arms are shorter ’n other folks’s, and it takes me just so much longer to do it.’”

“Well,” said Mr. Noyes, “I’m a fair man; always do exactly right is the rule I go by; and I will frankly admit now and here that if it’s a biographical discourse they want, they’ll have to cut corners.”

“Pre-cisely,” said Mr. Snell; “and that’s just what they do want.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Hamblin, laboriously rising and putting his spectacles into their silver case, for it was suppertime, “joking one side, if Uncle Capen never did set the pond afire, we’d all rather take his chances to-day, I guess, than those of some smarter men.”

At which Mr. Snell turned red; for he was a very smart man, and had just failed, to everybody’s surprise,--for there was no reason in the world why he should fail,--and had created more merriment for the public than joy among his creditors by paying a cent and a half on the dollar.

* * * * *

“Come in and sit down,” said Dr. Hunter as the young minister appeared at his office door; and he tipped back in his chair, and put his feet upon a table. “What’s the news?”

“Doctor,” said Mr. Holt, laughing, as he laid down his hat and took an arm-chair, “you told me to come to you for any information. Now, I want materials for a sermon on old Mr. Capen.”

The doctor looked at him with a half-amused expression, and then sending out a curl of blue smoke, he watched it as it rose melting into the general air.

“You don’t smoke, I believe?” he said to the minister.

Holt shook his head and smiled.

The doctor put his cigar back into his mouth, clasped one knee in his hands, and fixed his eyes in meditation on a one-eared Hippocrates looking down with a dirty face from the top of a bookcase. Perhaps the doctor was thinking of the two or three hundred complimentary visits he had been permitted to make upon Uncle Capen within ten years.

Presently a smile broke over his face.

“I must tell you before I forget it,” he said, “how Uncle Capen nursed one of my patients. Years and years ago I had John Ellis, our postmaster now, down with a fever. One night Uncle Capen watched; you know he was spry and active till he was ninety. Every hour he was to give Ellis a little ice-water, and when the first time came, he took a table-spoonful--there was only a dim light in the room--and poured the ice-water down Ellis’s neck. Well, Ellis jumped as much as so sick a man could, and then lifted his finger to his lips. ‘Here’s my mouth,’ said he. ‘Why, why,’ said Uncle Capen, ‘is that your mouth? I took that for a wrinkle in your forehead.’”

The minister laughed.

“I have heard a score of such stories to-day,” he said. “There seem to be enough of them; but I can’t find anything adapted to a sermon, and yet they seem to expect a detailed biography.”

“Ah, that’s just the trouble,” said the doctor. “But let us go into the house. My wife remembers everything that ever happens, and she can post you up on Uncle Capen, if anybody can.”

So they crossed the dooryard into the house.

Mrs. Hunter was sewing; a neighbor, come to tea, was crocheting wristers for her grandson. They were both talking at once as the doctor opened the sitting-room door.

“Since neither of you appears to be listening,” he said, as they started up, “I won’t apologize for interrupting. Mr. Holt is collecting facts about Uncle Capen for his funeral sermon, and I thought that my good wife could help him out, if anybody could. So I will leave him.”

And the doctor, nodding, went into the hall for his coat and driving-gloves, and, going out, disappeared round the corner of the house.

“You will really oblige me very much, Mrs. Hunter,” said the minister--“or Mrs. French, if you can give me any particulars about old Mr. Capen’s life. His family seem to be rather sensitive, and they depend on a long, old-fashioned funeral sermon; and here I am utterly bare of facts.”

“Why, yes,” said Mrs. Hunter. “Of course. Now--”

“Why, yes; everybody knows all about him,” said Mrs. French.

And then they laid their work down and relapsed into meditation.

“Oh!” said Mrs. Hunter in a moment. “No, though--”

“Why, you know,” said Mrs. French--“no, I guess, on the whole--”

“You remember,” said the doctor’s wife to Mrs. French, with a faint smile, “the time he papered my east chamber, don’t you--how he made the pattern come?”

And then they both laughed gently for a moment.

“Well, I have always known him,” said Mrs. French; “but really, being asked so suddenly, it seems to drive everything out of my head.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hunter, “and it’s odd that I can’t think of exactly the thing just at this minute; but if I do, I will run over to the parsonage this evening.”

“Yes, so will I,” said Mrs. French. “I know that I shall think of oceans of things just as soon as you have gone.”

“Won’t you stay to tea?” said Mrs. Hunter as Holt rose to go. “The doctor has gone; but we never count on him.”

“No, I thank you,” said Mr. Holt. “If I am to invent a biography, I may as well be at it.”

Mrs. Hunter went with him to the door.

“I must just tell you,” she said, “one of Uncle Capen’s sayings. It was long ago, when I was first married, and came here. I had a young men’s Bible class in Sunday-school, and Uncle Capen came into it. He always wore a cap, and sat at meetings with the boys. So one Sunday we had in the lesson that verse,--you know,--that if all these things should be written, even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written; and there Uncle Capen stopped me, and said he, ‘I suppose that means the world as known to the ancients.’”

* * * * *

Holt put on his hat, and with a smile turned and went on his way toward the parsonage; but he remembered that he had promised to call at what the local paper termed “the late residence of the deceased,” where, on the one hundredth birthday of the centenarian, according to the poet’s corner:

“Friends, neighbors, and visitors he did receive
From early in the morning till dewy eve.”

So he turned his steps in that direction.

He opened the clicking latch of the gate and rattled the knocker on the front door of the little cottage, and a tall, motherly woman of the neighborhood appeared and ushered him in.

Uncle Capen’s unmarried daughter, a woman of sixty, her two brothers and their wives, and half a dozen neighbors were sitting in the tidy kitchen, where a crackling wood-fire in the stove was suggesting a hospitable cup of tea.

The minister’s appearance, breaking the formal gloom, was welcomed.

“Well,” said Miss Maria, “I suppose the sermon is all writ by this time. I think likely you’ve come down to read it to us.”

“No,” said Holt, “I have left the actual writing of it till I get all my facts. I thought perhaps you might have thought of something else.”

“No; I told you everything there was about Father yesterday,” she said. “I’m sure you can’t lack of things to put in; why, Father lived a hundred years--and longer, too, for he was a hundred years and six days, you remember.”

“You know,” said Holt, “there are a great many things that are very interesting to a man’s immediate friends that don’t interest the public.”

And he looked to Mr. Small for confirmation.

“Yes, that’s so,” said Mr. Small, nodding wisely.

“But, you see, Father was a centenarian,” said Maria, “and so that makes everything about him interesting. It’s a lesson to the young, you know.”

“Oh, yes, that’s so,” said Mr. Small, “if a man lives to be a centurion.”

“Well, you all knew our good friend,” said Mr. Holt. “If any of you will suggest anything, I shall be very glad to put it in.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

“There’s one interesting thing,” said one of the sons, a little old man much like his father; “that is, that none of his children have ever gone meandering off. We’ve all remained”--he might almost have said remained seated--“all our lives right about him.”

“I will allude to that,” said Mr. Holt. “I hope you have something else, for I am afraid of running short of material: you see, I am a stranger here.”

“Why, I hope there won’t be any trouble about it,” said Maria, in sudden consternation. “I was a little afraid to give it out to so young a man as you, and I thought some of giving the preference to Father Cobb; but I didn’t quite like to have it go out of the village, nor to deprive you of the opportunity, and they all assured me that you was smart. But if you’re feeling nervous, perhaps we’d better have him still; he’s always ready.”

“Just as you like,” said Holt, modestly; “if he would be willing to preach the sermon, we might leave it that way, and I will add a few remarks.”

But Maria’s zeal for Father Cobb was a flash in the pan. He was a sickly farmer, a licensed preacher, who, when he was called upon occasionally to meet a sudden exigency, usually preached on the beheading of John the Baptist.

“I guess you’ve got things enough to write,” said Maria, consolingly; “you know how awfully a thing does drag out when you come to write it down on paper. Remember to tell how we’ve all stayed right here.”

* * * * *

When Holt went out, he saw Mr. Small beckoning him to come to where his green wagon stood under a tree.

“I must tell you,” he said, with an awkwardly repressed smile, “about a trade of Uncle Capen’s. He had a little lot up our way that they wanted for a schoolhouse, and he agreed to sell it for what it cost him, and the selectmen, knowing what it cost him,--fifty dollars,--agreed with him that way. But come to sign the deed, he called for a hundred dollars.

“‘How’s that?’ says they. ‘You bought it of Captain Sam Bowen for fifty dollars.’

“‘Yes, but see here,’ says Uncle Capen, ‘it’s cost me on an average five dollars a year for the ten year’ I’ve had it for manure and plowing and seed, and that’s fifty dollars more.’

“‘But you’ve sold the garden stuff off it, and had the money,’ says they.

“‘Yes,’ says Uncle Capen, ‘but that money’s spent and eat up long ago.’”

The minister smiled, shook hands with Mr. Small, and went home.

* * * * *

The church was crowded. Horses filled the sheds, horses were tied to the fences all up and down the street. Funerals are always popular in the country, and this one had a double element of attractiveness. The whole population of the town, having watched for years with a lively interest Uncle Capen’s progress to his hundredth birthday, expected now some electrical effect analogous to an apotheosis.

In the front pews were the chief mourners, filled with the sweet intoxication of preëminence.

The opening exercises were finished, a hymn was sung:

“Life is a span,”

and Father Cobb arose to make his introductory remarks.

He began with some reminiscences of the first time he saw Uncle Capen, some thirty years before, and spoke of viewing him even then as an aged man, and of having remarked to him that he was walking down the valley of life with one foot in the grave. He called attention to Uncle Capen’s virtues, and pointed out their connection with his longevity. He had not smoked for forty years; therefore, if the youth who were present desired to attain his age, let them not smoke. He had been a total abstainer, moreover, from his seventieth year; let them, if they would rival his longevity, follow his example. The good man closed with a feeling allusion to the relatives, in the front pew, mourning like the disciples of John the Baptist after his “beheadment.” Another hymn was sung:

“A vapor brief and swiftly gone.”

Then there was deep silence as the minister rose and gave out his text:

“I have been young, and now I am old.”

* * * * *

“At the time of the grand review in Washington,” he said, “that mighty pageant that fittingly closed the drama of the war, I was a spectator, crippled then by a gunshot wound, and unable to march. From an upper window I saw that host file by, about to record its greatest triumph by melting quietly into the general citizenship; a mighty, resistless army about to fade and leave no trace, except here and there a one-armed man, or a blue flannel jacket behind a plow. Often now, when I close my eyes, that picture rises, that gallant host, those tattered flags; and I hear the shouts that rose when my brigade, with their flaming scarfs, went trooping by. Little as I may have done as a humble member of that army, no earthly treasure could buy from me the thought of my fellowship with it, or even the memory of that great review.

“But that display was mere tinsel show compared with the great pageant that has moved before those few men who have lived through the whole length of the last hundred years.

“Before me lies the form of a man who, though he has passed his days with no distinction but that of an honest man, has lived through some of the most remarkable events of all the ages. For a hundred years a mighty pageant has been passing before him. I would rather have lived that hundred years than any other. I am deeply touched to reflect that he who lately inhabited this cold tenement of clay connects our generation with that of Washington. And it is impossible to speak of one whose great age draws together this assembly without recalling events through which he lived.

“Our friend was born in this village. This town then included the adjoining towns to the north and south. The region was then more sparsely settled, although many houses standing then have disappeared. While he was sleeping peacefully in the cradle, while he was opening on the world childhood’s wide, wondering eyes, those great men whose names are our perpetual benediction were planning for freedom from a foreign yoke. While he was passing through the happy years of early childhood, the fierce clash of arms resounded through the little strip of territory which then made up the United States. I can hardly realize that, as a child, he heard as a fresh, new, real story of the deeds of Lexington from the lips of men then young who had been in the fight; or listened, as one of an eager group gathered about the fireside, or in the old, now deserted taverns on the turnpike, to the story of Bunker Hill.

“And when, the yoke of tyranny thrown off in our country and in France, Lafayette, the mere mention of whose name brings tears to the eyes of every true American, came to see the America that he loved and that loved him, he on whose cold, rigid face I now look down joined in one of those enthusiastic throngs that made the visit like a Roman triumph.

“But turn to the world of nature, and think of the panoramic scenes that have passed before those now impassive eyes. In our friend’s boyhood, there was no practical mode of swift communication of news. In great emergencies, to be sure, some Paul Revere might flash his beacon light from a lofty tower; but news crept slowly over our hand-breadth nation, and it was months after a Presidential election before the result was generally known. He lived to see the telegraph flashing swiftly about the globe, annihilating time and space, and bringing the scattered nations into greater unity.

“And think, my hearers, for one moment of the wonders of electricity. Here is a power which we name, but do not know, that flashes through the sky, that shatters great trees, burns buildings, strikes men dead in the fields; and we have learned to lead it, all unseen, from our house-tops to the earth; we tame this mighty, secret, unknown power down into serving us as a daily messenger; and no man sets the limits now to the servitude that we shall yet bind it down to.

“‘NOW, WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS, WHAT ON EARTH THERE WAS IN IT ABOUT UNCLE CAPEN?’”]

“Again, my hearers, when our friend was well advanced in life, there was still no better mode of travel between distant points than the slow, rumbling stage-coach; many who are here remember well its delays and discomforts. He saw the first tentative efforts of that mighty factor steam to transport more swiftly. He saw the first railroad built in the country; he lived to see the land covered with the iron network.

“And what a transition is this! Pause for a moment to consider it. How much does this imply? With the late improvements in agricultural machinery, with the cheapening of steel rails, the boundless prairie farms of the West are now brought into competition with the fields of Great Britain in supplying the Englishman’s table, and seem not unlikely, within this generation, to break down the aristocratic holding of land, and so perhaps to undermine aristocracy itself.”

So the preacher continued, speaking of different improvements, and lastly of the invention of daguerreotypes and photographs. He called the attention of his hearers to this almost miraculous art of indelibly fixing the expression of a countenance, and drew a lesson as to the permanent effect of our daily looks and expression on those among whom we live. He considered at length the vast amount of happiness which had been caused by bringing pictures of loved ones within the reach of all, the increase of family affection and general good feeling which must have resulted from the invention, and suggested a possible lifting of the civilization of the older nations through the constant sending home, by prosperous adopted citizens, of photographs of themselves and of their homes, and referred to the effect which that must have had in new immigration.

Finally, he adverted to the fact that the sons of the deceased, who sat before him, had not yielded to the restless spirit of adventure, but had found “no place like home.”

“But I fear,” he said at last, “that the interest of my subject has made me transgress upon your patience; and with a word or two more I will close.

“When we remember what hard, trying things often arise within a single day, let us rightly estimate the patient well-doing of a man who has lived a blameless life for a hundred years. When we remember what harm, what sin, can be crowded into a single moment, let us rightly estimate the principle that kept him so close to the golden rule not for a day, not for a decade or a generation, but for a hundred years.

“And now, as we are about to lay his deserted body in the earth, let not our perceptions be dulled by the constant repetition in this world of death and burial. At this hour our friend is no longer aged; wrinkles and furrows, trembling limbs and snowy locks, he has left behind him, and he knows, we believe, to-day more than the wisest philosopher on earth. We may study and argue all our lives to discover the nature of life or the form it takes beyond the grave; but in one moment of swift transition the righteous man may learn it all. We differ widely one from another here in mental power. A slight hardening of some tissue of the brain might have left a Shakspere an attorney’s clerk. But in the brighter world no such impediments prevent, I believe, clear vision and clear expression; and differences of mind that seem world-wide here may vanish there. When the spirit breaks its earthly prison and flies away, who can tell how bright and free the humblest of us may come to be? There may be a more varied truth than we commonly think in the words, ‘The last shall be first.’

“Let this day be remembered. Let us think of the vast display of nature’s forces which was made within the long period of our old neighbor’s life; but let us also reflect upon the bright pageant that is now unrolling itself before him in a better world.”

* * * * *

That evening Miss Maria and her brothers, sitting in state in the little old house, received many a caller, and the conversation was chiefly upon one theme: not the funeral sermon, although that was commended as a frank and simple biographical discourse, but the great events which had accompanied Uncle Capen’s progress through this world, almost like those which Horace records in his ode to Augustus.

“That’s trew, every word,” said Apollos Carver. “When Uncle Capen was a boy there wasn’t one railroad in the hull breadth of the United States, and, just think, why, now you can go in a Pullerman car clear acrost to San Francisco. My daughter lives in Oakland, just across a ferry from there.”

“Well, then, there’s photographing,” said Captain Abel. “It doos seem amazing, as the minister said: you set down, and square yourself, and slick your hair, and stare stiddy into a funnel, and a man ducks his head under a covering, and, _pop!_ there you be as natural as life, if not more so. And when Uncle Capen was a young man there wasn’t nothing but portraits and mini’tures, and these black-paper-and-scissors portraits--what do they call ’em? Yes, sir, all that come in under his observation.”

“Yes,” said one of the sons, “it’s wonderful. My wife and me was took setting on a settee in the Garden of Eden, lions and tigers and other scriptural objects in the background.”

“And don’t forget the telegraph,” said Maria; “don’t forget that.”

“Trew,” said Apollos, “that’s another thing. I hed a message come oncet from my son that lives to Taunton. We was all so sca’t and faint when we see it that we didn’t none of us dast to open it, and finally the feller that druv over with it hed to open it fer us.”

“What was there in it?” said Mr. Small. “Sickness, death?”

“No; he wanted his thick coat expressed up. But my wife didn’t get over the shock for some time. Wonderful thing that telegraph. Here’s a man standing a hundred miles off, like enough, and harpooning an idea chock right into your mind.”

“Then that was a beautiful truth,” said Maria, “that Father and Shakspere would probably be changed round in heaven. I always said Father wasn’t appreciated here.”

“Well,” said Apollos, “’tis always so; we don’t begin to realize the value of a thing tell we lose it. Now that we sort o’ stand and gaze at Uncle Capen at a fair distance, as it were, he looms. If he only hedn’t kep’ so quiet always about these ’ere wonders; a man really ought, in justice to himself, to blow his own horn jest a little. But that was a grand discourse, wasn’t it, now?”

“Oh, yes,” said Maria, “though I felt nervous for the young man; but when you come to think what materials he had to make a sermon out of, why, how could he help it? And yet I doubt not he takes all the credit to himself.”

“I should really have liked to have heard Father Cobb treat the subject,” said Mrs. Small, rising to go, and nodding to her husband. “’Twas a grand theme. But it was a real chance for the new minister. Such an opportunity doesn’t happen not once in a lifetime.”

* * * * *

The next morning, after breakfast, on his way home from the post-office, the minister stopped in at Dr. Hunter’s office.

The doctor was reading a newspaper.

Holt took a chair in silence.

The doctor laid down the paper and eyed him quizzically, and then slowly shook his head.

“I don’t know about you ministers,” he said. “I attended the funeral; I heard the biographical discourse; I understand it gave great satisfaction. I have reflected on it over night, and now, what I want to know is, what on earth there was in it about Uncle Capen?”

The minister smiled.

“I think,” he replied, “that all that I said about Uncle Capen was strictly true.”

[4] Reprinted from ~The Century~ for August, 1883, and included in the author’s volume of short stories “Five Hundred Dollars,” published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston.

BEAUTY IN EDEN

BY ALFRED NOYES

When Beauty, white
As lilies in Eden night,
Woke for the deepening heavens’ delight,

Her rosy looks
Taught laughter to the brooks,
And were the world’s first gospel-books.

And wild things came,
By loveliness made tame,
And fawned on her pure feet with eyes of flame.

Yet, though her splendor
Made the fierce earth surrender,
And drew those burning panthers to attend her;

Though in her bowers,
She ruled harmonious hours,
And rode her lions with a leash of flowers;

They did not lose
The suppleness of their thews,
Nor that fierce might, loved by the warrior Muse.

Music hath fire,
Passion and deep desire,
That now plumb hell, and now to heaven aspire.

Yet, to be strong,
Must that tumultuous throng
Never escape the reins that guide the song.

So, gloriously,
She ruled earth, sky, and sea,
Being herself the law of harmony.

Strong charioteer,
The steeds are thine to steer!
Rule our weak souls! Bring back the Golden Year.

CAMILLA’S FIRST AFFAIR

BY GERTRUDE HALL

Author of “What Camilla did with Her Money,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY EMIL POLLAK-OTTENDORFF

Never did there live a pretty woman so poor in faith as Camilla, where the protestations of her adorers were concerned.[5] It was certainly not when they professed to find her charming that she was incredulous, nor yet when they declared themselves _épris_. It was when they asserted for their sentiments, durability; for themselves, the same conspicuous constancy as distinguishes the north star.

Particularly during the period when she was known as Princess Elaguine, and lived in Paris, was comment made--in those circles where it is thought no shame to talk over lovely ladies--upon the ultimate inaccessibility of the princess, who was yet so ready to be courted. She liked the society of men, delighted in the atmosphere of their lively admiration, accepted their compliments as animals in the Zoo will swallow buns. But she no more reposed confidence in them than she would have reached with her hand through the bars of the wild-beast cages.

A singular case. For she was Italian, and though her eyes were cool and green, there lurked in her face somewhere--her lips, perhaps, or her eyelids, or her cheeks or chin--what physiognomist could tell?--a promise of warmth and richness that drew foolish fellows to press on and on--till they came to a barrier, beyond which she looked at them with ironical eyes which told them that, sorry for them though she was, she did not believe in them one little bit. Not one of her critics had the intelligence, probably, to guess what was at bottom of it. (Yet how common it is, when you find a person afraid of dogs, to discover that he was bitten when a child!) And far from Camilla would it have been to set them on the right scent.

The truth was, in her mind there lived the memory--quite fresh still when she chose to recall it, so deep a mark had it made--of a passage in her youth to which was referable the line of a whole life with regard to the tender passion. It was the memory, as you have guessed, of her first affair.

* * * * *

It was in Florence, where she was born and brought up. They were tarradiddles which she told later about her origin: that her mother was a Roman marchesa and her father court physician to Victor Emmanuel II, and that her name was Cordez. Her name, as a matter of truth, was Bugiani. Her mother had at one time waited on customers in a village _osteria_, at another had been a house-servant. The man who called her daughter was something or other at the railway-station. Her aunt was a cook. Her sister Bianca worked in a little shop on Porta Rossa at making straw-braid into hats, with other gossiping little women who ate their simple lunch out of a piece of newspaper. Her brother Olindo was apprenticed to a gardener.

When the truth about Camilla comes out, anybody may know how it happened that she received an education so immeasurably above that enjoyed by the rest of her family--as fine an education for a woman as Florence could afford. The elegant boarding-school where she lived ten months of the year, the Institut Heller, had a reputation to maintain.

Her two-months’ vacation Camilla spent at home, perforce, with her plebeian family, in the hot city.

The house stood in a wide, pleasant street, and had a handsome entrance. The main door, open all day, let you under a high arched way. The door to the ground floor gave on this, and the staircase climbed from it to the upper stories, each occupied by a different family. This passage ended in a court, with a plot of earth and an oleander or two; on this opened the modest quarters of the Bugiani, who in consideration of certain favors performed certain duties.

From all such Camilla was exempt. Antenore--Babbo, she called him--never suggested that she should work in the summer like Bianca, at straw-braiding or some such thing. It went against the grain, but what would you? Being reserved for a different destiny, she must not be creating for herself a past she might blush for, nor yet hardening her hands with labor. So she never answered the night ring at the big front door, never touched the huge pump-handle in the court, by which this house, boasting every modern convenience, was supplied with water in all its kitchens.

Every morning at nine she appeared in the _portone_ dressed for the street, a picture of the well-born, well-bred young lady who never steps out unescorted. But where was her maid, where her duenna? About this matter there was simply nothing to be done. A bitter necessity to Antenore that his young daughters should run about Florence unattended--part of the hardship that drew from him so often the remark that Poverty is a Pig.

Had he been able, however, to keep a constant eye upon Camilla, he would have seen nothing to blame. She went quietly and swiftly, looking neither to right nor left, her well-brought-up eyes slid away from those of Man, appearing to prefer the paving-stones. She conducted herself like the young ladies of good family among whom she had lived; her clothes were such as theirs, their traditions had perfectly become hers; whether escorted or not, she was not to be taken for any but one of them.

Down the long street she walked to the Institut Heller, which occupied the first floor of a characteristic brown Florentine palazzo, at the corner of a wide sunny piazza with a marble-faced old church. Camilla went there to practise. As she had no piano at home, it had been arranged that she should continue during vacation to use the Pleyel upright in the school music-room, and incidentally redirect Mademoiselle Heller’s mail. The servant left as caretaker could neither write nor read.

So at nine daily Camilla would set forth, in a pale yellow batiste and a black hat with a plume, carrying gloves and a parasol. Her charming eyebrows were obscured by the “fringe” which had come into fashion--for this was 1879; a thick braid hung down her neck, where it was turned back and fastened with a velvet bow.

She was not yet very pretty. The green sepals wrapped the folded rose-leaves rather straightly, the future rose hardly yet knew itself to be a rose. Antenore had no such great need to feel uneasiness at the thought of bees and butterflies.

Her little head, of course, was full of the vague dreams of sixteen, which does not mean the dreams of a New England maiden of sixteen. Camilla’s grandmother had been married before that age, one of her schoolmates, only fifteen, had left school to become affianced; the Veronese Juliet, it will be remembered, was fourteen. Though Camilla fulfilled the European ideal of a _jeune fille_, unstained by so much as an unauthorized breath, and had the pretty, virginal air of such, she may be described, rather than as a stick of green wood, as a little bonfire in preparation--dry brush and resinous pine, all duly laid and for the present cold, but ready to sparkle and flame when the Torch should come.

Unconscious of this, she could still think of forty things besides love. Her chief sentiment in reaching the freedom of the streets was that it would be pleasant to be for several hours away from home, to have a series of cool, empty, palatial rooms all to herself--to practise, yes, but also to read and to look out of the window.

That was her chief sentiment on the fifth of July. By the fifteenth--But it cannot be said that Camilla ever honestly regretted the relative simplicity which she lost that summer.

With all her air of minding her own distinguished affairs, she yet saw everything. She knew by sight the tenants of the house, of course, for whom the Babbo and Olindo, or Aunt Battistina and Bianca, combining forces, agitated the stiff pump-handle. She was familiar with the faces she passed daily on her way. And she naturally remarked, the second time he appeared there, a youth, an idle, slender _damerino_, who seemed waiting for something, on the opposite side of the street. The third time she saw him, she wondered whom he was there for. The breath-catching possibility striking her that he waited to see her come forth--for that style of thing was done in Florence in those days--she gave him his share of an abstracted look, taking in the house fronts and the lamp-post near which he stood. A handsome man, young, the faintest smear of charcoal-dust on his upper lip--seventeen, perhaps. A son of family, quite certainly.

No, he was not there for her sake; he remained watching the door, while pretending not to, after she had passed. For somebody else, then, living in the same house. She had seen him half a dozen times before she could determine whom. One evening she recognized him in the shadowy form hanging about the stairs, once even in the court--her court! She knew all by that time, and scorned him. It was the French maid on the second floor. This person took a child out for the air every morning; she went to the Fortezza, where the little one could play.

And he, a gentleman, could degrade himself to pursue that creature! Parisian, yes, but ugly, and not a day less than twenty-five.

The rather sweet, hungry, expectant, young-dog look of a boy belonging to circles where the maidens are so guarded that if there is to be romance it must be sought where there are greater facilities, mollified her not at all. It disgusted her. It disgusted her to the point finally that, running into him unexpectedly under the archway, she drew herself up and gave him a look in which was expressed all that decent people, _la gente per bene_, think of such bad taste, a prolonged, punishing, proud look; then passed on, her heart thumping with the excitement of the thing.

On the day following, glancing from the tail of her eye to see whether he were at his usual post, she did not find him. Before she had reached the end of the street he passed her, then lingered and allowed her to pass. She did it in a hurry, with downcast eyes and rising color. Reaching Miss Heller’s, she rang with all her might. Never, it seemed to her, never had old Italia in her distant kitchen been so slow in pulling the wire that released the catch and allowed the little door cut in the large one to swing inward.

When at midday she was obliged to come out again, the gallant was standing sentry across the way. She was aware of him following her at a just respectful distance.

To be followed by a man is frightening, for Man is a Hunter. There is a difference, though, in the degree of disagreeableness of the fright, if the Hunter is so desirable-looking as to be himself an imaginable object of hunt.

Next day it was the same thing. At a just respectful distance he followed her to school and back. On the day after that, the same. When this proceeding had been kept up for three days, it took rightly the aspect of romance, filling the thoughts of sixteen with surmises, tremors, a sense of initiation, and the excitement of a great secret.

On the fourth morning, as she was reaching the school, he passed ahead of her, and pushed a letter under the door.

It was inscribed, “To the First who shall enter.” It ran thus:

Signorina,

I write to crave your pardon, and to explain my apparent
impertinence in following you on the street. But how could a man
of any sensibility endure the thought of so much _grazia_ and
_gentilezza_ walking unprotected in a city with whose iniquities
he is but too well acquainted? I cannot conceive of the false
security or the remissness that so exposes a dove to falcons. Fear
not that I shall myself presume to offer the offense which it is
my determination to prevent others from offering. Regard me solely
as a _cavaliere_ whose courage and strength are dedicated to your
service.

Suo devotissimo,
~Giulio Forti~.

How delicate! How knightly! Her climbing of the stairs was sleep-walking. She adjusted the slats of the blind so that, unseen, she could look at him where he loitered in the doorway across the street. He must have very little to do, really, to afford all that time. But of course it was vacation for him as for her. And he had the resource of cigarettes. Now he was talking with the porter, of whom he had just begged a light. He took off his straw hat to fan himself with it, for even on the shady side of the freshly watered street it was hot weather. He was a pretty boy--her words for him were “a handsome man”--with a covering of close black astrakhan to his small round head, a speaking eye, dainty features, and a warm-toned skin agreeably sprinkled with freckles. He wore the carefully fitted clothes of a good class, new, but not too new, and a light silk cravat chosen with thought.

Camilla that day omitted scales and exercises. Her piano could be heard in the street. She played her show pieces, “Les Cloches du Monastère,” “Les Soupirs,” “La Caressante,” various Chopin waltzes.

When she came forth at noon, and her body-guard sprang from his door to fall into the relation of a dog at her heels, he first begged wistfully with his eyes to know by a look from her that he was understood and forgiven. She gave him the look he wanted. A moment later he hustled off the sidewalk a man who, he considered, had passed her too closely. There was a high word or two, then the workman grumblingly fell away from the irate young gentleman shaking his slender cane.

They were new heavens and new earth between which Camilla now moved forth at morning, with an oleander at her breast, token that she was a woman and adorned herself to be the more loved. For there was no supposing that the vague fever in her veins, glowing by day and filling the night with dreams, had not been caught, by a contagion as strange as subtle, from the fever in his brown eyes.

At the end of a week his face, when upon reaching the school he hurried forward without a word to pull the bell-handle for her, was pale with anguish, and his eyes catching hers expressed urgent reproach. On the morning following he unexpectedly pressed inside the door after her, and pushed it to. They stood alone in the great stone hallway. He was obviously agitated, and her heart had stopped.

“Signorina,” he burst forth, hoarse with the sincerity of his emotion, “what have I done? I wish to know what you have against me. Never do you give me a look, never a smile. You regard me with horror, it is evident. And why? Why? I must find out before I live another day. If I am repulsive to you I had best go and drown myself. Why, tell me, do you act toward me as if I were either invisible or else a little dust in the street? Am I a toad, a reptile, in your eyes?”

Camilla had clenched one hand and pressed it over her heart; she lifted the other to her throat. Giulio was not surprised that a young girl should be terrified in the circumstances to the point of fainting. In this great moment the exhibition of her timidity must not make him timid. Trembling at his own courage, he took her hands, in part to reassure and if necessary support, in part to conquer further. He pressed them with all his strength, and commanded, imploringly, “Look at me in the face, and see whether I am such a monster! See whether you find in my eyes anything but love and by loyalty! Look, I beg, look! Look!” He waited, straining her hands.

Camilla, thus masterfully summoned, slowly lifted her face and looked. Both of them looked volumes.

The next thing, he was gently grasping her head. She averted her lips with unaffected shrinking. He very respectfully kissed her hair. He hoped he knew how a well-brought-up man behaves with a well-brought-up young girl.

A hard parrot voice, coming from above, out of sight, made them both jump. “Who is there?” It was Italia, who, when she had pulled the wire that governed the street-door, was wont to come down from her kitchen and let the visitor in at the door of the first floor. Seeing no one, she was making inquiry.

“It’s Camilla,” was called to her from below. “I am coming. I am resting a minute. Leave the door open.”

The stone-floored echoing hallway where they stood was vast as a royal ballroom. At the farther end, broad, low stairs vanishing upward; on the right, the long wall, unbroken save by one door--the ground floor was reserved by the owner, always absent; at the left, three open arches letting into a court, the bottom of a wide shaft with windows, over which a square of burning blue sky. The pavement of this court was green with the damp of centuries; a stone coping, projecting from the wall, hemmed in enough earth to support a spindling rose-tree.

“I am forced to go away to-morrow,” Giulio, still short-breathed with emotion, whispered spasmodically; “and how can I go without learning my fate from you? I am compelled to visit my married sister and be absent for two eternal weeks. My family is obliged to stay in town through the summer, you know, by my grandmother’s serious illness; but my parents insist that I shall go for the change. I vow I will not! I will disobey, and incur I know not what from their displeasure, unless you promise to answer the letters I shall write you. Do you promise? Viareggio. Poste Restante. I will not compromise you by remaining longer. On the way home make me happy by a glance now and then, when it will not be observed. Farewell, my soul! I am your slave!”

Among the letters to be redirected to Mademoiselle Heller she found his first letter. She answered it there at the school, when she ought to have been practising. In the two weeks of his absence she received about twenty letters, for in the ardor of his passion he sometimes wrote twice a day. The same did she.

As life was far from monotonous at the Mediterranean watering-place, where in beautiful striped tights of white and blue he took glorious swims twice a day, one might suppose that bits of news, information, anecdote, a little fun, would have found their way into his letters. Not at all. They were love-letters neat. He would write:

How, O my adored _fidanzata_, can I live through the days and
months and years that must pass before the blessing of the
sacerdote will have given me the right to call you mine, wholly,
wholly, and forever, mine! When I think that at the end of summer
I must, as my parents have decided, go to Zurich to complete my
studies, and be divided from you by mountains as well as months, I
feel that, in view of the anguish of that distance and waiting, it
had almost been better had I never met the beam of your beauteous
eye. But courage! Let us take courage, thinking of our future
happiness.

She would write:

In the night, in dreams, you are always with me. I cannot sleep
but you are there; and so I find myself, when I am not ardently
wishing for a letter, sighing for the night and dreams. _Caro mio
bene_, should you ever love me less, how could I endure it? If ever
your heart should change toward me, if ever another should have
the place with you which it is my joy and honor to hold, keep it a
secret from me, I conjure you! I might kill myself, or perhaps you!

A day earlier than she had expected, he stood at the Heller entrance, in time to slip in with her. He folded her to his breast, both of them breathless and throbbing. But again with a brusk instinctive movement she got her lips out of the way, and he controlled his impulse. A man who respects himself respects his own affianced. He pressed a long, silent kiss upon her brow.

Raising a warning finger, she listened a second, then sang out to Italia, “I am going to rest a minute before doing the stairs. Let the door stand open for me.”

They seated themselves on the bottom steps for a good long scene in whispers.

Never were there such facilities, for Italia would not again think of the door, save to suppose that Camilla had come in by it and shut it behind her. Any one descending could be heard long before seen. Giulio had time to tiptoe out, Camilla would appear to be just arriving. When the danger was past, she could let Giulio in again.

The facilities were, in fact, too great! These young things had leisure to say everything a thousand times over.

Both of them knew a great deal about lovers, from general rumor and private confidence, from drama, book, and song. Their wide-awake Latin minds had early incorporated all that lore, and they acted now in as grown-up a manner as they knew. Camilla developed an umbrageous mood one day, during which she questioned him about his past. Oh, nothing of the smallest consequence, he said, with regard to a certain _francese_. He had had the opportunity to render her a service, once, when she was caught in the rain with her little charge. He had chanced to be carrying an umbrella, that was all. After that, he had continued the acquaintance, just a little, from courtesy.

Novices, they played their parts according to romantic conventions known to both, beneath which the unconventional heart did in the case of each after its nature.

It appeared, as gradually as a flower fades on its stalk, that even he, even in vacation, had duties occasionally, engagements, pressing engagements sometimes, things that must be attended to for his father, or mother, or grandmother. He would have to consult his watch. Sometimes he could stay only a minute.

She asked him one day why he was in such a heavy humor, so silent. He asked sadly in reply how he could be different, living in a house where all were so deeply concerned over the condition of his poor grandmother. Added to this, his aunt was arriving to see her mother, and was bringing his cousins. They would take up his whole time for the next few days.

Camilla looked at him attentively. Murmuring, “My idol!” he drew her cheek down to his shoulder and imprisoned her hands in those pretty, dry, brown hands of his, which had the gift of pleasing her so much.

“La Caressante,” as it rang forth from her window on certain of those soft, summer mornings, might have been mistaken for a musical imitation of artillery sputtering amid the varied sounds of battle, “Les Soupirs” for the note-portrayal of a wreck tossed in a stormy swell.

One morning, with the affected briskness of a man who does his best to put a good face on a tiresome business, he said, “Expect me not, my Camilla, to-morrow. I am sent off to visit my married sister up at Vicchio. A sudden decision. My family, saying that I have grown thin, as I have, indeed, with the cruel anxiety of our secret, believe I need the change. A dreadful bore, but what can I do?”

“Another married sister? How many more married sisters, _caro mio_, have you in your pocket?”

“There is still another--three in all. I was born long after them, the only man-child, which gives an excuse to old friends of the family for saying that my parents spoil me. And I am sorry to tell you, Camilla, that you must not write to me there, for there is no such thing as _poste restante_. The letters are brought to the villa by a peasant and my sister distributes them. Nor shall I find it possible to write you, for I could not post a letter unknown.”