Chapter III: Part 3

Some sense of his tenderness she must have had, for as she chatted gravely about his farming, about the lateness of the almond blossoms, about everything except people, who always tempted her sharp tongue, her manner became almost maternally solicitous. "To-day you shall have your first tea in my den, Crocker" (so much she presumed on her two years' seniority), she said at last, "and you are commanded to like my things." "What has thy servitor done to deserve this grace?" he managed to reply. "Nothing," she said, "graces never are for deserts. Or, rather, you poor fellow, you have been asked to tramp out here in this glare and really deserve to sit where it is cool." As they walked through the hall and the little drawing-room Crocker still felt uneasily that no road with Emma Verplanck could be quite as smooth as it seemed.

The den deserved its name, being a tiny brown room with a single arched window that looked askance at the cypresses and bell towers of Fiesole. Beside a couch, an Empire desk, and solid shelves of books, the den contained only a couple of chairs and the handful of things that Emma laughingly called her collection. As Crocker took in vaguely bits of Hispano-Moresque and mellow ivories, a broad medal or so and a well-poised Renaissance bronze, a Japanese painting on the lighted wall, and one or two drawings by great contemporaries, Emma's friends, he was amazed at the quality of everything. A sense of extreme fastidiousness rebuked, in a way, his more indiscriminate zeal as a collector. Uncomfortably near him on the dark wall he began to be aware of something marvellous on old gold when tea interrupted his observations. Tea with Emma was always engrossing. The mere practice and etiquette of it brought the gentlewoman in her into a lovely salience. Her hands and eyes became magical, her talk light and constant without insistency. A symbolist might imagine eternal correspondence between the amber brew and her sunny hair. It was easy to adore Emma at tea, and generally she did not resent a discreetly pronounced homage. But this afternoon she grew almost petulant with Crocker as they talked at random, and finally laughed out impatiently: "I really can't bear your ignoring my St Michael, especially as you have never seen him before and may never see him again. St. Michael, Mr. Morton Crocker."

"My respects," smiled Crocker, as he turned lazily toward the gilded panel. There was the warrior saint, his lines stiff, expressive and hieratic, his armour glistening in grey-blue fastened with embossed gilded clasps; here and there gorgeous hints of a crimson doublet--the unmistakable enamel, the grave and delicate tension of a masterpiece by the rare Venetian, Carlo Crivelli. Crocker gasped and started from his seat, losing at once his cup, his muffin, and his manners. "By Jove, Miss Verplanck, Emma, it's my missing St. Michael. Where did you ever find it? I must have it." His toasted muffin rolled unconsidered beside the spoon at his feet. Emma retrieved the cup--one of a precious six in old Meissen--he retained the saucer painfully gripped in both hands.

"I was afraid it was," she answered, "but look well and be sure."

"Of course we must be sure. You'll let me measure it, won't you? It's the only way." Assuming his permission he climbed awkwardly upon the chair, happily a stout Italian construction, and as she watched him with a strange pity, he read off from a pocket rule: "One metre thirty-seven. A shade taller than mine, but there is no frame. Thirty-one centimetres; the same thing. Yes, it is my missing St. Michael," and as he climbed down excitedly he hurried on: "How strange to find it here. I never talked to you about it, did I? That's odd, too. I've been hunting for it for years. You didn't know, I suppose. I want it awfully. What can we do about it?" For Crocker, this fairly amounted to a speech, and before replying Emma gave him time to sit down, and thrust another cup of tea into his unwilling hands. Having thus occupied and calmed him, she said, "I'm very sorry, I hoped it would turn out to be something else. I only learned last week that you wanted it. You have seldom talked about your collecting to me. There's nothing to do about it. I wish there were. You want it so much. But I can't give it to you. That wouldn't do. And I won't sell it to you. I wouldn't to anybody, and then that wouldn't do, either. So there we are. Only think of their talk, and you'll see the situation is impossible."

Crocker's eyes flashed. "There's a lot we might do about it if you will, Emma. Damn the St. Michael. If his case is so complicated, and I don't see it, leave him out of the reckoning between us. Can't you see what I need and want?"

"They wouldn't see it, and I'm shamefully afraid of them," she said simply, and then she added indignantly, "How could you dare, to-day? I can't trust you for any perception, can I?"

Not perceiving that her scruple was belated, Crocker blurted out ruefully. "I'm an ass, and I'm sorry and I'm not. It's what I have wanted to say these many days, and perhaps it might as well be so. But I've wounded you and for that I'm more than sorry."

"Let's not talk about it," Emma said gently. "Of course I'll forgive an old friend for saying a little more than he should. Only you must stop here. You'll forgive me, too, for owning your St. Michael. I'm honestly sorry it happened so. I would dismiss him if I could, for he is likely to cost me a good friend. But he creates a kind of impossibility between us, doesn't he, and for a while it's best you shouldn't come, not till things change with you. It's kindest so, isn't it, Crocker?"

There was more debate to this effect before the impassive St. Michael, until at last Crocker agreed impatiently, "You're right, Emma, or at least you have me at a disadvantage, which comes to the same thing. And yet it's all wrong. You are putting a painted saint between yourself and a friend who wants to be more. It's logical, but it isn't human. As for their talk, they'll talk, anyhow, and we might as well stand it together. I'm probably off for a long time, Emma. I hope you'll find your St. Michael companionable. When you decide to throw him out of the window, let me know. Forgive me again. Good-by." She gave him her hand silently and followed him out into the _loggia_. As she watched him striding angrily down the valley and away, she had the air of a woman who would have cried if she were not Emma Verplanck.

* * * * *

Crocker was right, we all did talk. And naturally, for had we not all been eagerly awaiting the collision announced by the cessation of his visits and the rumour that he was bound north. In council on Dennis's terrace, however, we came to no unanimous reading of the affair. Generally, we felt that even if Emma wanted a way out, which we guessed to be the fact, she would never expose herself to our batteries, and with regret we opined that there was no way, had we wished, to divest ourselves of our collective formidableness. On all sides we divined a deadlock, with Dennis the only dissenting voice. He insisted scornfully that we none of us knew Emma, that we underestimated both her emotional capacity and her resourcefulness, and, finally, in a burst of rash clairvoyancy he declared that she would give away both the St. Michael and herself, but in her own time and manner, and with some odd personal reservation that would content us all. We should see.

Given the rare mixture of the conventional and instinctive that was Emma Verplanck, something of the sort did indeed seem probable. For ten years she had inhabited her nook, becoming as much of a fixture among us as the Campanile below. She came, like so many, for the cheapness and dignity of it primarily. Here her little patrimony meant independence, safety from perfunctory and uncongenial contacts at home, and more positively all those purtenances of the gentlewoman that she required. But, unlike the merely thrifty Italianates, she never became blunted by our incessant tea giving and receiving. With familiarity, the ineffable sweetness of the country penetrated her with ever-new impressions. She loved the overlapping blue hills that stretched away endlessly from the rim of her valley, and the scarred crag that closed it from behind. She loved the climbing white roads, her chalky brook--sung as a river by the early poets--with its bordering poplars and willows and its processional display of violets, anemones, primroses, blueflags, and roses. She loved even better that constant passing trickle of fine intelligences which feeds the Arno valley as her brook refreshed its vineyard. The best of these came gladly to her, for she was an open and a disillusioned spirit, with something of a man's downrightness under her sensitive appreciation. Hers was the calm of a temperament fined but not dulled by conformity and experience. Mrs. Dennis, whose sources of information were excellent, said it was rather an unhappy girlish affair with an unworthy cousin. Within the limits of the possible, the Verplancks always married cousins, and Emma, it was thought, had in her 'teens paid sentimental homage to the family tradition. In any case she remained surprisingly youthful under her nearly forty years. Her capacity for intellectual adventure seemed only to increase as she passed from the first glow to proved impressions of books, art, persons, and the all-inclusive Tuscan nature.

Her Stuyvesant Square aunts, who were authorities on self-sacrifice, agreed that the only sacrifice Emma had made in a thoroughly selfish life was the purchase of the St. Michael. She had found it, on a visit in Romagna, in the hands of a noble family who knew its value and needed to sell it, but dreaded the vulgarity of a transaction through the antiquaries. To Emma, accordingly, whom they assumed to be rich, they offered it at a price staggering for her, though still cheap for it. From the first she had adored it. There had been a swift exchange of despatches with New York, and the St. Michael went home with her to Florence. After that adventure the small victoria, the stocky pony, and the solemn coachman had never reappeared. Emma walked to teas or, when she must, suffered the promiscuity of the trams. To those of us who knew the store she set by her equipage its exchange for the St. Michael indicated a fairly fanatical devotion. To her aunts it meant that she had spent her principal, which, in their eyes, was an approximation to the mysterious "sin against the Holy Ghost."

It was Dennis who speculated most audaciously, and perhaps truly, about the St. Michael. When he learned that Emma secreted it in her den, where she rarely admitted anyone, he maintained that it had become her incorporeal spouse. The daintiness with which it fingered a golden sword-hilt, as if fearing contamination, symbolised the aloofness of her spirit. The solitary enjoyment of a great impression of art made her den a sanctuary, absolving her from commoner or shared pleasures. And in a manner the Saint was the type of the ultra-virginal quality she had retained through much contact with books and life. For her to sell the St. Michael, Dennis felt, would be a sort of vending of her soul, to give it away in the present instance would imply, he insisted, an instinctive self-surrender of which he judged her incapable.

To Crocker's side of the affair we gave very little thought, considering that he, after all, had created the thrilling importance of the St. Michael. But our general attitude toward the unwonted was one of indifference, and Crocker was too unlike us to permit his orbit to be calculated. The element of foible in him was almost null. None of our guesses ever stuck to him, and we had grown weary of rediscovering that anything so simple could also be so impermeable to our ingenuity. In a word, Crocker's case was as much plainer than Emma's as noonday is than twilight. When one says that he was born in Boston and from birth dedicated to the Harvard nine, eleven, or crew--as it might befall; that he was graduated a candidate for the right clubs, that he took to stocks so naturally that he quickly and safely increased an ample inherited fortune, and this without neglecting horse, or rod, or gun; finally that he carried into maturity a fine boyish ease--when this has been said all has been told about Morton Crocker except the whimsical chance that made him an Italianate.

Some reminiscence of his grand tour had beguiled a tedious convalescence and, following the gleam for want of more serious occupation, he had set sail for Naples with a motor-car in the hold. At thirty-three he brought the keenness of a girl to the galleries, the towns, and the ineffable whole thing. It was Tuscany that completed his capture. He bought a villa and, as his strength came back, began to add new vineyards and orchards to his estate. But this was his play; his serious work became collecting and more particularly, as has been hinted, the quest of the missing St. Michael. When he learned, as a man of means soon must, that good pictures may still be bought in Italy, he promptly succumbed to the covetousness of the collector, and the motor-car became predatory. Its tonneau had contained surreptitious Lottos and Carpaccios. Its gyrations became an object of interest to the Ministry of Public Instruction. Once on crossing the Alps it had been searched to the linings. While Crocker had his ups and downs as a collector, from the first his sense of reality stood him in stead. Being a Bostonian he naturally studied, but even before he at all knew why, he disregarded the pastiches and forgeries, and made unhesitatingly for the good panel in an array of rubbish.

It was this sense for reality that impelled him to settle where the rest of us merely perched. Fifty _contadini_ tilled his domain and actually began to earn out the costly improvements he had introduced. His wine and oil were sought by those who knew and were willing to pay. In the intervals of the major passion Crocker walked up and down the grassy roads superintending the larger operations. His muscular and hulking blondness--he had rowed four years--towered above the dark little men who served, feared, and worshipped him. Unlike the rest of us who preferred to live in a delightful Cloud Cuckoo Town, which happened to be Florence also, he had chosen to take root in Tuscany.

First he purged his castellated villa of the international abuses it had undergone for a century. It had hardly regained its fifteenth century spaciousness and simplicity before it began to fill up again, but this time with pictures and fittings of the time. In all directions he bought with enthusiasm, but his real vocation, after the cultivation of Emma's society, soon came to be the completion of his great and growing altar-piece by Carlo Crivelli. What is usually a frigid exercise, a mere ascertainment that the parts of a scattered ancona are at London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Boston, etc.--a patient compilation of measurements, documents and probabilities; what is generally a mere pretext for a solid article in a heavy journal--or at best a question of pasting photographs together in the order the artist intended--Crocker converted into an eager and most practical pursuit. Bit by bit he gradually reconstituted his Crivelli in its ancient glory of enamel on gold within its ornate mouldings. The quest prospered capitally until he stuck hopelessly at the missing St. Michael. As it stood for a couple of years complete except for the void where the St. Michael should be, the altar-piece represented less Crocker's abundant resources than his tireless patience and energy. He had picked up the first fragment, a slender St. Catherine of Alexandria demurely leaning upon her spiked wheel, at a provincial antiquary's in Romagna, not far from where the ancona had been impiously dismembered. Fortunately the original Gothic frame remained to give a clue to other panels. Next, word of a Crivelli Madonna with Donors at Christie's took him posthaste to London. Frame, period and measurements proved that it was the central panel, and the tiny donors, a husband and wife with a boy and girl, indicated that the wings had contained two female and two male saints. Between the St. Lucy (which turned up more than a year later in an un-heard-of Swedish collection, and was had only by a hard exchange for a rare Lorenzo Monaco and a plausible Fra Angelico) and the sumptuous St. Augustine, which was brought to the villa in a barrow by a little dealer, there was a longer interval. Meanwhile the frame had been reconstructed, and a niche for the missing saint rose in melancholy emptiness. A little before the sensational _rencontre_ in Emma's den, the chance of finding a rude pilgrim woodcut on the Quai Voltaire revealed the saint's identity. This ugly print informed the faithful that the "prodigious image" of Our Lady existed in the Church of the Carmelites at Borgo San Liberale. One might distinguish at the extreme right of the five compartments a willowy St. Michael in armour, like Chaucer's Squire in a black-letter folio, or if the identification had been doubtful, there was the name below in all letters.

When the print was shown to the scheming Harwood over the afternoon vermouth, he suspended a long discourse on the contemptible fate of being born an Anglo-Saxon, and it came over him with a blessed shock that Emma had the missing St. Michael. Penetrated by the joy of the situation, he hesitated for a moment whether to give the initiative to the man or the woman. A glance at Crocker's uncompromising sturdiness convinced him that on that side the situation might be quickly exhausted. Emma he could trust to do it full justice. Excusing himself abruptly, he made for Frau Stern's lodgings, and with the taste of Crocker's vermouth still in his faithless mouth, told her that Emma's Crivelli was no other than the missing St. Michael. To make matters sure he solemnly bound Frau Stern to secrecy. That accomplished, he strode whistling down through the purple twilight to his well-earned _fritto_ at Paoli's. The next day began our wondering what Emma would do. She did, as is known, a thing that her simple Knickerbocker ancestresses would have approved--presented Crocker to the St. Michael and left the decision modestly to the men. Behind the frankness of her procedure lay, perhaps, a curiosity to see how Crocker would bear himself in a delicate emergency. It was to be in some fashion his ordeal. Thus she might at least shake the appalling equanimity with which he had passed from the stage of comrade to that of suppliant. Not that she doubted him; nobody did that, but she resented a little in retrospect his silence on the subject of the great quest. Was it possible that for these five years he had chatted only about his college pranks, his fishing trips, his orchards and vineyards, and the views? As she reviewed their countless walks and teas, it really seemed as if he had never paid her the compliment of being impersonal. Well, that was ended now at any rate. A little misgiving filled her that she had never revealed the presence of the St. Michael to so good a play-fellow. A delicacy, knowing his incorrigible zeal as a collector, had restrained her, and then, as Dennis had guessed, her den was her sanctuary, admission to which implied an intimacy difficult to concede. Whatever the merits of the case, the rupture had produced in a milieu consumed by the desire to guess what Emma would do, at least one person who was solely interested in what Crocker's next move might be. For the first time in a singularly calculable life he had become an object of genuine curiosity.

He acted with his usual simplicity. To Emma he wrote a brief note upbraiding her for fearing the voices of the valley, professing his eagerness to return when the St. Michael had been put out of the reckoning, and declaring that if it were not soon, he would willy-nilly come back and see how things were between them. It was a letter that wounded Emma, yet somehow warmed her, too, and from its reception we found her in an unwonted attitude of nonconformity to the verdicts of the valley. She began to speak up in behalf of this or that human specimen under our diminishing lenses with the unsubtle and disconcerting bluntness of Morton Crocker himself. The phenomenon kept alive our waning interest during nearly a year of waiting. As for Crocker he gave it out ostentatiously that he was bound for a wonderful Cima in Northumbria and afterward was to try dry-fly fishing on the Itchen. Beyond that he had no plans. All this was characteristically the truth; he bought the Cima, wrote of his baskets to Harwood, but stayed away past his melons, his grapes and his olives. By early winter we heard of him shooting the moose in New Brunswick, and later planning a system of art education in the Massachusetts schools, and it was not till the brisk days of March that we learned the west wind was bringing him our way again.

Meanwhile Emma had acquired a few more grey hairs and had resolutely declined to dispossess herself of the St. Michael. A couple of months after Crocker's leave-taking, a note had come to her from Crespi, the unfrocked priest and consummate antiquarian, who, to the point of improvising a _chef d'oeuvre_, will furnish anything that this gilded age demands. Crespi most respectfully begged to represent an urgent client, a Russian prince, who desired a fine Crivelli. Would the most gentle Miss Verplanck haply part with hers? The price should be what she chose to name. It was no question of money, but of obliging a client whom Crespi could ill afford to disappoint. Emma curtly declined the offer. The St. Michael was valued for personal reasons and was not for sale. Six weeks later came a more insidious suggestion. The Director of the Uffizi, learning that she possessed a masterpiece of a school sparsely represented in the first Italian gallery, pleading that such an object should not pass from Italy, and representing a number of generous art-lovers who desired to add it to the collections under his care, made the following offer, trusting, however, not to any pecuniary inducement but to her loyalty as an honorary citizen of Florence. The price named was something less than the London value, but its acceptance would have perpetually endowed the victoria, and perhaps--. If the malicious Harwood had not passed the word that the offer was a ruse of the wily Crocker, we all believed that she would have accepted. Indeed, we regretted her obduracy. It would have been such a capital way out, with no sacrifice of her scruples nor waiver of our collective impressiveness. So Harwood came in for mild reprehension, the Sage Dennis remarking with some asperity that when the gods have provided us with farces, comedies, and tragedies in from one to five acts it is unseemly to string them out to six or seven.

Early March, then, saw the deadlock unbroken. The St. Michael had not been dislodged. Emma still was unwavering so far as we knew. We were unable, had we willed, to divest ourselves of our deterrent attributes. But the situation had changed to this extent that Crocker was said to be on his way down to oversee a new system of spring tillage in person.

Emma took his approach with something between terror and an unwonted resignation. From the day when he had planted himself firmly beside her fireplace with a boyish wonder at finding himself so much at home, he had represented the incalculable in her carefully planned life. Declining to accept the attitude of other people toward her, he had almost upset her attitude toward herself. He was the first man since the scapegrace cousin who had neither feared nor yet provoked her sharp tongue. While he relished her wit, it had always been with an unspoken deprecation of its cutting edge. He gave her a queer feeling of having allowances made for her--a condescension that in anybody but this big, likable boy she would have requited with sarcasm. But against him the _cheveux de frise_ she successfully presented to the world seemed of no avail. He knew it was not timber but twigs, and that at worst one was scratched and not impaled. Day by day she watched the cropping of the long line of flaming willow plumes that escorted her brook toward the level. The line dwindled as the shorn pollards gave up their withes to bind the vines to the dwarf maples. She felt the miles between herself and Crocker lessening, and (at rare moments) her scruples ready to be garnered for some sweet and ill-defined but surely serviceable use. But she would not have been Emma Verplanck if the manner of her not impossible surrender had not troubled her more than the act itself. Any lack of tact on the part of the husbandman might still spoil things. She had a whimsical sense that any one of the flaming willows might refuse its contribution to the vineyard should the pruner approach with anything short of a persuasive "_con permesso_."

Crocker's "by your leave" was so far from persuasive that it left her with a panicky desire to run away--again a new sensation. He wrote:

"DEAR EMMA--

"We have had an endless year to think it over, and the only change on my side is that I need you more than ever. I will go away for real reasons, for your reasons, but for no others. If it is only their talk that separates us, their talk has had twelve good months and shall have no more. I must see you. May I come tomorrow at the old hour?

"As always yours,

"MORTON CROCKER."

Something between wrath and dismay was the result of this challenge. She sat down to answer him according to his impudence, and the words would not come. The greatness of the required sacrifice came over her and therewith the desire to temporise. The voice of many Knickerbocker ancestresses spoke in her, and between herself and a real emergency she interposed the impenetrable buckler of a conventionality. She wrote:

"PENSIOIN SCHALCK, Bad Weisstein, Austrian Tyrol.

"MY DEAR CROCKER--

"It would be pleasant to see you and talk over your trip, but you see by this address it is for the present impossible. As always,

"Cordially yours,

"EMMA VERPLANCK."

When Crocker found Emma's valley as effectually barred as if a battery guarded the approaches, he gave way to a deep resentment. Instinctively hating anything like a trick, to be tricked by Emma at this point was intolerable. His gloom was such that he confided to the malicious Harwood a profound disgust with the irreality of the life Italianate. The _podere_ should be sold as soon as it could be put in order. Such pictures as the Italian Government coveted, it should keep, the rest should go to the Museum at Boston. He himself would grow orange trees in North Cuba where there were things to shoot and, thank heaven, no civilisation. Harwood came breathlessly to Dennis's with the tale, gloating openly that there was to be a seventh act if not an eighth.

A long hard day with his bailiff and the peasants restored Crocker's poise. He looked for the hundredth time over into Emma's valley and divined her attitude. Dreading an interview, she had left the way open to parley. She virtually pleaded for a delay. It was a new and, in a way, delightful sensation to be feared. For the first time in any human relation he exploited a personal advantage and wrote, addressing Bad Weisstein:

"DEAREST EMMA--

"You have wanted a delay. Well, you have it--probably a week already. Make the most of it, for two weeks from this date--I give you time to recover from your journey--I am coming for tea in the old way. Meanwhile you can hardly imagine the impatience of

"Yours more than ever,

"MORTON CROCKER."

Whether Crocker or Emma was more miserable during the fortnight even Dennis could not have told. But there was in his woe something of the sublime stolidity of the man who is going to stand up to be shot or reprieved, whereas she suffered the uncertainty of the soldier who has been drawn to make up the "firing party" for a comrade. She feared that she would not have courage enough to despatch him, and then she feared she would. Meantime the days passed, and she woke up one morning with an odd little shiver reminding her that it was no longer possible to get a note to him by way of Bad Weisstein. Nor had she the heart to move to a nearer coign of constructive absence. Of half measures she was, after all, a foe. Her determination to send Crocker away daily increased, and the implacable St. Michael seemed to command that course. "You are not for him. You represent a whole artificial world in which he cannot breathe. I, the finest incarnation of the most exquisite mannerism of a bygone time, am your spiritual spouse, and you may not lightly renounce me. You have devoted yourself to graceful irrealities and must now abide by your choice." Thus the St. Michael had spoken in a dream in the troubled hours before daybreak, and when Emma went to her den late the next morning she confronted him and admitted, "You are right, St. Michael. It's all true." That afternoon Crocker was coming for tea, and if her New York aunts could have known, even they would have granted that, for the second time in a thoroughly selfish life, Emma was displaying capacities for self-sacrifice.

As Emma and Crocker shook hands that afternoon, one might see that both had aged a little, but he most. Something of the appealing boyishness had gone out of his eyes. He had become her contemporary. A certain moral advantage, too, had passed to his side and she, whose prerogative it had been to take the leading part, now waited for him to begin. As if on honour to do nothing abruptly, he sketched his year for her--his sports and committees, his kinsfolk and hers; their fresh, invigorating, half-made land. She listened almost in silence until he turned to her and said:

"With me, Emma, it is and always will be the same. You know that. Has anything changed with you?"

"I don't think so, Crocker. How can I tell? I'm glad you're here, in spite of the shabby trick I've played you. Let me say just that I'm heartily glad to see an old friend."

"No, I must have more than that or less. I want much more than that."

"You want too much. You want more than I can give to anybody. O! Why can't you see it all? You are alive, even here in Florence but, I, I am no longer a real person that can love or be loved. Can't you see that I am only a sensibility that absorbs the sweetness of this valley, a mere bundle of scruples and fears, a weather-cock veering with the talk of the rest of them? Think of that and take back what you have thought about me."

"Emma, you admit a need, and that is very sweet to me. You want some one to strengthen you against all this that you call the valley. Mightn't that helper be I?"

"You shan't be committed to anything so hopeless."

"It isn't as hopeless as it seems. The strength of the valley is only in its weakness, and we shall be strong together."

"I have forgotten how to be strong, for years I have only been clever."

"You'd be dull enough with me as you well know. I can do that for both. But don't talk as if there were some fate between us. There can be none except your indifference, and I believe you do care a little and will more."

"Of course, I care, Crocker, but not as you wish. You have refreshed me in this opiate air. You have represented the real country I have exchanged for this illusion, the real life I might have lived had I been braver or more fortunate. But you can have no part in what I have come to be. Go, for both our sakes."

"Not for any such reason. I can't surrender my happiness for a phrase; I can't leave you to these delusions about yourself."

"It is no delusion; I wish it were. It's in my blood and breeding. For generations my people have lived the unreal life. I am the fine flower of my race, and in coming to this valley of dreams and this no-life I am merely fulfilling a destiny--a fate, as you say--and coming to my own."

"But Emma, the worthy Verplancks?"

"No, listen to me. For generations the Verplancks have been what people expected them to be, incarnate formulas of etiquette and timid living. They took their colour from the gossiping society in which they seemed to live. They prudently married other Verplancks, cousins or cousins' cousins. They hoarded their little fortunes without increasing them, and if what they called the rabble had not peopled New York and raised the price of land, which my people were merely too stolid to sell, we should long ago have gone under in penury. We have led nobody and made nothing, but have been maintained by stronger forces and persons, toward whom we have always taken the air of doing a favour. That mistake at least I shall not make with you, Crocker. I want you to feel the full nullity of me. As I see you now I have a twinge because my great grandfather, who was a small banker, would have called yours, who was a farmer--you see I have looked you up--not 'Mister' but 'My Good Man.'"

For a moment she paused, and Crocker groped for a reply. "All this may be true, Emma," he said at last, "and yet mean very little to you and me. Besides, I'm quite willing you should call me your Good Man. In fact, I'd rather like it."

"You must take me seriously--you shall. I cannot marry. I'm married already. Dennis says I am. Come and see my bridegroom." And she fairly dragged the bewildered Crocker into her den and set him once more before the missing St. Michael.

"There he is, an incarnated weakness and fastidiousness. His hand is too delicate to draw his own sword. If he really cast out Satan, it must have been by merely staring him down. His helmet rests with no weight upon his curled and perfumed locks--his buckles are soft gold where iron should be. He represents the dull, collective, aristocratic intolerance of Heaven for the only individualist it ever managed to produce. He pretends to be a warrior and is as feminine as your St. Catherine. He is the imperturbable champion of celestial good form, and Dennis, who sees through things, says he is my spiritual husband. He is the weakest of the weak and is too strong for you, Crocker."

For a space that seemed minutes they faced each other, Emma excited, with a diffused indignation that defied impartially the missing St. Michael and the puzzled man before her; Crocker with a perplexity that renewed the old boyish expression in his eyes. He seemed to be thinking, and, as he thought, the tension of Emma's attitude relaxed, she forgot to look at the St. Michael and wondered at the even, steady patience of the big likable boy she was dismissing. She pitied him in advance for the futile argument he must be revolving. She had despatched him as in duty bound and was both sorry and glad.

But his counterplea when it came was of a disconcerting briefness and potency. He said very slowly, "Yes, I see it all. There is your spiritual husband; there are they" (indicating the valley with a sweep of a big hand), "and there are you, Emma, caught in a web of baffling and false ideas; and here am I, a real man who loves you, fearing neither the St. Michael nor them" (another gesture) "nor your doubts. I set myself, Morton Crocker, your lover, against them all and take my own so."

There was a frightened second in which his sturdy arms closed about her. There was a little shudder, as the same big hand that had defied the valley sought her head and pressed it to his shoulder. When Emma at last looked up the mockery she always carried in her eyes had given place to a new serenity, and her hand reached up timidly for his.

Crocker and Emma--we now instinctively gave him the precedence--were inconsiderate enough to remove themselves without making clear the fate of the no longer missing St. Michael. We still speculated indolently as to the nature of the afterpiece in which we assumed this ex-hero of our comedy might yet appear. Then we learned that Emma was to be married without delay from the stone manor house under the Taconics where her people had dwelt since patroon days. Only a handful of friends with Crocker's nearest kin and her inevitable New York aunts were to be present. These venerable ladies had admitted that in marrying, even opulently, out of the family, Emma had once more shown velleities of self-sacrifice. Then we heard of Crocker and Emma on his boat along the coast "Down East." Later we were shocked by rumours of a canoe trip through Canadian waterways. Hereupon the usually benevolent Dennis protested as he glanced approvingly at the well-kept Tuscan landscape. "Crocker needn't rub it in," he opined. "Why, it's the same scrubby spruce tree from the Plains of Abraham to James's Bay-and Emma, who hated being bored! Why, it's marriage by capture; it's barbaric." "It's worse; it's rheumatic," shuddered Harwood as he declined Marsala and took whisky. "But he'll have to bring her back to civilisation some time, if only to hospital. We shall have her again." "He will bring her back, but we shall never have her again," said Dennis solemnly. "She has renounced us and all our works." "Renouncing our works isn't so difficult," smiled Mrs. Dennis, and then the talk drifted elsewhere, to new Emmas who were just beginning to eat the Tuscan lotus.

Before the year had turned to June again we had nearly forgotten our runaways, when a quite unusual activity about her villa and Crocker's warned us that they were coming back. Harwood had seen in transit a box which he thought corresponded to the St. Michael's stature, but was not sure. In a few days came a circular note from Crocker through Dennis saying that they were fairly settled and he glad to see any or all of us. She, however, was still fatigued by the journey and must for a time keep her room.

Harwood straightway volunteered to undertake the preliminary reconnaissance, while Frau Stern engaged to penetrate to Emma herself.

On a beatific afternoon we sat in council on Dennis's terrace awaiting the envoys. Below, the misty plain rose on and on till it gathered into an amber surge in Monte Morello and rippled away again through the Fiesolan hills. Nearer, torrid bell-towers pierced the shimmering reek, like stakes in a sweltering lagoon. In the centre of all, the great dome swam lightly, a gigantic celestial buoy in a vaporous sea. The spell that bound us all was doubly potent that day. The sense of a continuous life that had made the dome and the belfries an inevitable emanation from the clean crumbling earth, lulled us all, and we hardly stirred when Harwood bustled in, saying, "Cheer up. I have seen Crocker, and it isn't there." "You mean," said the cautious Dennis, "that Crocker still possesses only the hole, aperture, frame, or niche that the missing St. Michael may yet adorn." "I only know that it isn't there now," growled Harwood. "I deal merely in facts, but you may get theories, if you must have them, from Frau Stern, who heroically forced her way to Emma over Crocker's prostrate form."

As he spoke we heard Frau Stern's timid, well-meaning ring, and in a moment her smile filled the archway.

"We don't need to ask if you have news," cried Mrs. Dennis from afar.

"If I haf news. Guess what it is. It is too lovely. You cannot think? Well, there will be a baby next autumn, what you call it?" "Michaelmas, I suppose," grunted Harwood through his pipe-smoke and subsided into indifference.

"All this is most charming and interesting, Frau Stern," expostulated Dennis, "but, as our enthusiastic friend Harwood delicately hints, what we really let you go for was to locate the Missing St. Michael." "I haf almost forgot that," she apologised as she nibbled her _brioche_, "Emma was so happy. But for the bothersome St. Michael there is no change. I saw it in what she calls her new den. She laughed to me and said, 'I cannot let him have it, you see, you would all say he married me for it.'"

"Bravo!" shouted Dennis and Harwood in unison, and the Sage added with unction, "So she has not been able to renounce us utterly."

"It is not now for long," rejoined Frau Stern, "it is only to the time we haf said." "Michaelmas," repeated Harwood disgustedly.

"Yes, that is it," she pursued tranquilly, "Emma told me in confidence, 'To Crocker I cannot give it because of you all, but to our child I may, and it shall do with it what it will.' Now do you prevail, Misters Dennis and Harwood?"

"We are a bit downcast but not discomfited," acknowledged Dennis, while Harwood remained glumly within his smoke. "Emma has escaped us, but she still pays us the tribute of a subterfuge. It is enough, we will forgive her, even if her way lies from us dozers here. For to-day the same sunshine drenches her and us. It is a bond. Let us enjoy it while we may."

THE LUSTRED POTS

"Haul away, Sam. This is the real thing" came from the depths of the well. Sam Cleghorn stumbled in the gloom towards the windlass, avoiding on the way a rude handpump and two heaps of dirt and broken pottery that sloped threateningly upon the low curb, where balanced a perforated disc of marble, the great bottom-stone of the well. All these properties caught a little light from a beam that came through a slit in the wall, casting most of its uncertain bloom up into a low groined vault, the heavy round arches of which were separated from squat piers by clumsy brackets. Outside at the level of the reticulated stone floor one could hear the rushing of a river. As Cleghorn leaned over the well-mouth before seizing the crank, a glimmer of yellow light flooded his face and again came up the hollow impatient cry, "Haul away, Sam. This lot's a good one, and it's mine." Replying "All right, Dick," Cleghorn bent to the crank. With much creaking the coils crept along the spindle and the light burden began to rise jerkily.

* * * * *

Although neither the well nor the vaulted cellar chamber belonged to Sam Cleghorn or to Dick Webb, their presence and actions there were not surreptitious. Stanton Mayhew, who ignorantly owned the well, had given them plenary permission to pump and dig, mildly pitying their apparent lunacy. The palace above was his in virtue of his sensible preference for living twice as well on the Arno for half the cost on the Hudson. This rule of two, like so many foreign residents of Florence, he unquestioningly obeyed, and it constituted practically the whole of his philosophy and maxims. Hence he was not the man to prize a Tuscan well dug in the fourteenth century, cleaned perhaps never, and gradually filled to the brim with what the forwardlooking past benightedly took for rubbish. So when Cleghorn and Webb made him an overture for the right to clean the well, he had genially replied, "Why, go ahead, boys, and enjoy yourselves. It's you who ought to be paid, but for your healths' sake you really ought to wait till I've punched some decent windows through that damp cellar wall and let the air in."

If neither Sam nor Dick waited even a day, it was because each was a bit afraid that the other would begin alone. College mates, collectors both, they were fast friends in a way and rivals beyond dispute. Their common taste for antiquity and adequacy of means had made their graduate course chiefly one of travel. And when travel wore out its novelty they naturally settled in the easiest, as the least exacting, European city, occupying two halves of one floor in the same palace. Their apartments started full, and quickly overflowed with objects of curiosity and art--all old, for their knowledge was considerable; some fine, for neither was without taste. But taste neither had in any austere sense, for they collected art much as a dredge collects marine specimens. Nothing came amiss to them. Wood, ivory, silver, bronze, marble, plaster--they repudiated no material or period. Stuffs, glass, pictures, porcelains, potteries--it was all one to them so the object were old and rare. Inevitably, then, they had come to primitive pots, and simultaneously, for they not only watched each other closely, but almost read each other's minds. And when they came to primitive pots it was certain that they would beg, borrow, or steal a well, since in old wells, and cisterns, besides less mentionable places, primitive pots abide. Many pots were there, as we shall see, from the first, and the maids and children of the centuries, by way of concealing breakages, have usually made notable secondary contributions. So when amiable Stanton Mayhew freely conceded a most ancient well to Cleghorn and Webb, it was like receiving Pandora's box, with the difference that the well might safely be opened.

Here had ensued a most delicate negotiation concerning the division of the spoil. A mathematical partition of the fragmentary material that an old Italian well contains is extremely difficult if at all possible. After much debate it was agreed that after they struck pay dirt, each should dig in turn, each to have the bucketful that came under his trowel or fingers. Scattered fragments of the same pot and other complications were to be adjudicated by Mayhew, whose ignorance and disinterestedness were safe to assume. But the well gave up quantities of noncontentious matter before Mayhew's services were required. The first five feet had revealed nothing but fragments of kitchen pottery of our time and a fairly perfect hoopskirt of Garibaldian date. A little lower had emerged the skeleton of a cat. Similar tragedies were in evidence, on an average, at every quarter century of depth. Between the second and third cat, lay Ginori imitations of Sevres and Wedgewood, scraps too of gilded glass--the earnest of better things below. Five cats down, some eighteenth-century apothecary pots, damaged but amenable to repair, had inaugurated the alternation of buckets under the agreement. It were tedious to follow the ascending scale of excellence as the digging went deeper. Enough to say that below the mixed ingredients and the nethermost cat they found a homogeneous layer of beautiful fourteenth-century shards, affording many buckets full, and promising delicate adjudication to the referee.

Before the lustred pots themselves shed a baleful gleam over this narrative, something should obviously be said about Italian wells and why they contain pots. Beyond those casually acquired from careless or secretive servants, there is, if the well be old and of good make, a certain number of intact pieces put in to serve as a filter. Often a group of pitchers or similar crocks is imprisoned between the two bottom-stones. Sometimes there are two such layers. After this filter had been made there was frequently scattered a bushel or more of small shards above. From these by careful sorting complete or nearly complete pieces may be recovered. Through all this mass of whole or broken pottery the water had to find its way up, for the cement sides of an Italian well are watertight. Thus, barring the indiscretions of housemaids and cats, the early Italians drank pure water.

Naturally Cleghorn and Webb were conversant with these refinements of mediaeval hydraulics. In fact when Webb, the sturdier of the two, hauled up the bottom-stone all dripping, Cleghorn promptly declared that in the sense of the contract it was a bucketful; hence his first go at the now uncovered pots. So heated grew the debate, that finally the grimy excavators climbed to the upper air and appealed to Mayhew, who promptly denied the quibble, deciding that stones and pots were not interchangeable. The diversion drew attention from the great perforated disc itself, and as the sullen Cleghorn let the exultant Webb down upon the ancient pots, it lay badly bestowed near the curb on the crumbling slope of a rubbish heap. And now Cleghorn with bitterness of heart was reeling up Webb's find. As the coils broadened on the windlass a small iron bucket rose above the parapet, brimming with something that glinted metallically under the dirt. Beside the bucket flapped the rude swing in which the entrances and exits of the partners were made. As Cleghorn grasped the bail and swung the precious cargo clear of the well, came up once more the voice of Webb: "Hustle, Old Man, I'm keen to see them, they feel good."

Good they were indeed. Cleghorn, who for fifteen years had haunted shops and museums had never seen the like in equal compass. As he took them cautiously one by one and held them high in the uncertain light, each revealed a desirable point. Here was a coat of arms, a date, the initial of an owner. There were grotesque birds and beasts. Differing in form and colour, the entire lot agreed in possessing that dull early Italian lustre, which perhaps accidental and less distinguished than that of Spain, is even dearer in a collector's eyes. They hinted of all enamelled things that come out of the East--of the peacock reflections of the tiles of Damascus and Cordova, of the franker polychromy of Rhodian kilns, of the subtler bloom of the dishes of Moorish Spain, of the brassier glazes of Minorca and Sicily--all these things lay enticingly in epitome in these lustred Italian pots, as they glimmered with a furtive splendour. Yes, they were a good lot, thought Cleghorn as he placed them reverently on the flagging. It was the find of a lifetime. A man with nothing else in his cupboard must be mentioned respectfully among collectors from Dan to Beersheba.

Again the impatient voice of Webb below: "Hurry up, I say. It's getting cold: the water is gaining."

"All right," called Cleghorn, giving a few strokes of the pump, but never taking his eyes from the lustred pots. Then as if by a sudden inspiration he asked, "Any more in that lot, Dick?"

"Not a one," cried Webb jubilantly, "there was just a bucketful and a squeeze at that. But there may be others beneath. There's another bottom-stone, and it's your next turn. But why don't you hurry up?"

A scowl passed over Cleghorn's thin face set unswervingly towards the pots. They glimmered in the shadow with an unholy phosphorescence--green, blue, carmine, strange purplish browns. So the glittering coils of the serpent may have bewildered our first Mother. There were other pots below, reflected Cleghorn, yes, but there never could be again such a batch as these. And then his dazed eye for a second left the fascinating pots, and mechanically searched the vaulted chamber. To his excited gaze the rubbish heaps centring about the curb seemed already in movement. The massive bottom-stone overhung the parapet, resting only on loose dirt and shards. With horror he noted that a breath might send it down. If it slipped, whose were the lustred pots? Against his will the phrase said itself over and over again throbbingly behind his eyes, and again he forgot everything in the vision of the lustred pots.

"Damn it, hurry up," came thunderously from below. Cleghorn stumbled with a curious hesitation between the crank and the poised bottom-stone. The clumsy movement loosened a handful of shards which went clattering down; the great stone slid, caught on the parapet, and hung once more in uncertain oscillation. Profanity unrestrained transpired from the mouth of the well.