Rough-Hewn Part 50

"Not much, that's a fact," agreed Neale, reflecting that he did not seem to either.

She asked him suddenly, "But really why _didn't_ you accept?"

"Do you want to know?" he asked warningly.

"Yes, I really wonder."

"Simplest reason in the world. I didn't like Donna Antonia Pierleoni very well. She seemed to me like a bad-tempered, stupid old lady, mightily full of her own importance. Why under the sun _should_ I go and have tea with such a person?"

"Eh bien...!" she breathed out a long, soft e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of surprise, looking at him very queerly.

"You're thinking I'm very rude to say such a thing about a friend of yours," he said, hanging his head.

"I'm thinking no such thing at all," she contradicted him. "I don't believe you could _imagine_ what I'm thinking."

"You never said a truer thing," Neale admitted ruefully.

"Well, I'll tell you," she said, "though it couldn't be interesting to anybody but me. I was thinking that I had never heard anybody before who spoke the truth right out about somebody who had wealth and position."

"You mustn't blame me for it!" Neale excused himself. "I'm a regular outsider on all that sort of thing--you remember the Sioux Indian in the eighteenth century who was taken to see the court at Versailles? How he strolled around in his blanket and couldn't make out what all the bowing and sc.r.a.ping was about? Well, he and I are about on a level of blank ignorance of social distinctions."

"But you don't _wish_ to know," the girl divined, "you don't care if you _are_ an outsider. Why, I believe," she said with a little burst of astonishment, "I believe you'd rather be an outsider."

He looked apologetic. "That's part of my dumbness, don't you see? I just can't conceive why anybody should bother his head about it. _I_ tell you," he hit on the right phrase of explanation, "I just don't know any better."

"Would you learn?" she pressed him more closely.

"Not if I could run faster than the person who was trying to teach me!"

he confessed helplessly.

The girl broke into another laugh. There never was anybody who laughed like that, with her lips, and her gleaming, dancing eyes, and her eyebrows--even her hands had a droll little gesture of delightedly giving him up. What in the world had ever made him imagine that her expression was pensive or her eyes wistful?

"Do you mind?" he asked, rather uncertain what she was laughing at, and hoping it was not at him.

"Oh, I _like_ it!" she told him, heartily. "But it's the very first time I ever ran into it. It makes me laugh, it's so unexpected."

"Well, it has its disadvantages," he broke in, seeing an opening to say something that had been on his conscience for two days. "It makes you do all sorts of unusual and unconventional things without meaning to at all. Like my talking to you yesterday morning, for instance, in the corridor of the pension, when I hadn't been introduced to you."

She stopped laughing, her face all blank with surprise. "Why, that was not unconventional! People at the same pension never wait for introductions. And anyhow I'm not a _jeune fille du monde_. I'm just a music-student. If you only knew how _some_ people try to take advantage of that! Why, what in the world made you think it was not all right?"

"Well, when you didn't say anything about it at the breakfast table, when Miss Oldham introduced us, the way you looked as though you'd never seen me before. I thought you--I thought I--well, why _didn't_ you mention we'd just been talking?"

"Oh--" She remembered the incident. "Why didn't I? Why _should_ I? You always hide what you don't have to tell, don't you?"

Neale pondered this negligent axiom for a time, and then said hesitatingly, "But if the servants happened to mention it?"

"Oh," she explained quickly, as if mentioning something that went without saying, "oh, of course I told the servants not to speak of it."

"You did!" He felt that he was looking through what he had always thought was the opaque surface of things, and seeing a great deal more going on there than he had dreamed. "But can you count on them?"

She continued to be as surprised at his surprise as he at the whole manoeuver. "Oh, of course you can never count on servants unless there's something in it for them. I gave them a little tip apiece."

"You _did_!" He could only stupidly repeat his exclamation. "What did they say?"

"Why, they found it perfectly natural. They won't mention it--not of course unless somebody else tips them more, and I don't see why anybody should, do you?"

Neale stood looking at her, a little consternation mingling with his astonishment. This was what it was to have been brought up in what people called a civilized way, this smooth mastery of concealment ...

how easy it had been for her, at the breakfast table yesterday, not to give the faintest hint she had just been talking animatedly with him; and this morning not the faintest hint to Livingstone that she was laughing at his expense. Why, that lovely face was just like a mask. You hadn't the least idea what was going on behind it.

There was a silence. She was looking up at him with a new expression, almost timidly. "You don't like my hiding things?" she asked him, coming to a stop. They were near the pension now, standing in the twilight on a deserted street.

He aroused himself to shrug his shoulders and answer evasively, "Oh, it's not in the least any business of mine."

"But you don't like it?" she insisted, looking straight at him with the deadly soft gaze that always made him lose his head entirely. "It's of no consequence--none," he murmured. But she still looked at him. He tried to think of some other evasive answer, but in the confusion of his mind he could not think at all. And he must say _something_. With alarm, with horror, he heard himself saying baldly, as he would to a man, to an intimate, the literal truth, "Well, no, not so very well, if you really want to know."

It was as though he had seen himself swinging an ax at an angle that would bring the edge deep into his own flesh. He felt it cut deep and bleed. He dared not look at her. He wished to G.o.d he had gone on straight to Naples.

Somehow he _was_ looking at her. Her face was deeply flushed. She looked as though he had struck her in the face. Well, now it was certainly all over. He might as well turn around and walk away and never look at her again.

He said blunderingly, in a trembling voice, "I'm _so_ sorry! I didn't mean to say that. It's no business of mine. I'm awfully ashamed of myself. _Please_ forget it. What do _you_ care what I think? I'm n.o.body, n.o.body at all."

"Why did you say that?" she asked him in a low voice, with a driving intensity of accent, as though more than anything else she must have an answer from him.

"Well, you asked me," he said in abject misery, aware of the hideous, flat futility of such an answer. If only he were an expansive Italian now, he could think of some way openly to abase himself, instead of standing there callously and dully. "Oh, please don't think of it again," he implored her, wis.h.i.+ng he could get down on his knees to beg her pardon.

She drew a long breath and put her hand to her heart. "It's the first time anybody ever told the truth to me, you see," she said faintly, with a strange accent. "I ... I'll like it ... I think ... when I can get my breath."

To his amazement he saw that she was trying bravely to smile at him.

To his greater amazement he s.n.a.t.c.hed up both her hands and carried them roughly and pa.s.sionately to his lips.

CHAPTER XLV

During the interminable process of hanging the skirt of that yellow dress for Donna Antonia's soiree, Marise kept thinking of the Pantheon.

The dressmaker's lodging was near there. If they could only be done with those draperies she would have time to step into the place which she loved best in Rome. She cast a look at herself in the cracked mirror which was all the inexpensive little dressmaker could afford. "I'm afraid it's higher on the right hip," she said, and settled with a sigh to endure more pinnings and unpinnings. "Strange, how important it is for the correct playing of Beethoven," she thought ironically, "that the drapery on one hip shall not be higher than on the other." She caught a glimpse of herself as she thought this, and frowned to see her lip curled in a cold, ugly line of distaste. Her thoughts were showing more and more on her face. She knew well enough what Mme. Vallery would say.

She would say, "Don't pretend, dear child, that you don't know perfectly well that the kind of dress you wear has a great deal to do with everything that anybody cares about, and that the kind of people you must depend on to make your music profitable are the kind who care nothing about music and altogether about looks."

That was true, of course, but all the same it did make Marise sick to have people call a "soiree musicale" what really was a "sartorial evening." Of course it was understood that people were hypocritical about everything. She granted that they never called anything by its right name. But she did wish they would leave music alone! She _cared_ about that!

"That's right now," she said aloud, looking intently from one hip to the other. "Perhaps a _little_ more--no, it will do as it is."

She would have time for the Pantheon after all--ten minutes at least.