We Two Part 54

"There, now, let us go home," she exclaimed. "My head aches a little still, but we won't let it spoil our last day but one in Florence.

Didn't we talk of San Miniato for this afternoon?"

It was something of a relief to find, on returning, an invitation to dinner for that evening which Raeburn could not well refuse. Erica kept up bravely through the afternoon, but when she was once more alone her physical powers gave way. She was lying on her bed sick and faint and weary, and with the peculiarly desolate feeling which comes to most people when they are ill in a hotel with all the unheeding bustle going on around them. Then came a knock at her door.

"Entrate," she said quickly, welcoming any fresh voice which would divert her mind from the weary longing for her mother. A sort of wild hope sprung up within her that some woman friend would be sent to her, that Gladys Farrant, or old Mrs. Osmond, or her secularist friend Mrs.

MacNaughton, whom she loved best of all, would suddenly find themselves in Florence and come to her in her need.

There entered a tall, overworked waiter. He looked first at her, then at the note in his hand, spelling out the direction with a puzzled face.

"Mess Rabi Rabi Rabi Rabi an?" he asked hesitatingly.

"Grazie," she replied, almost s.n.a.t.c.hing it from him. The color rushed to her cheeks as she saw the writing was Brian's, and the instant the waiter had closed the door she tore open the envelope with trembling hands.

It was a last appeal, written after he had returned from wandering among the Apennines, worn out in body and shaken from the n.o.ble fort.i.tude of the morning. The strong pa.s.sionate words woke an answering thrill in Erica's heart. He asked her to think it all over once more, he had gone away too hastily. If she could change her mind, could see any possible hope for the future, would she write to him? If he heard nothing from her, he would understand what the silence meant. This was in brief the substance of the letter, but the words had a pa.s.sionate, unrestrained intensity which showed they had been written by a man of strong nature overwrought by suffering and excitement.

He was here, in the very hotel. Might she not write to him? Might she not send him some sort of message write just a word of indefinite hope which would comfort and relieve herself as well as him? "If I do not hear from you, I shall understand what your silence means." Ah! But would he understand? What had she said this morning to him? Scarcely anything the merest broken bits of sentences, the poorest, coldest confession of love.

Her writing case lay open on the table beside the bed with an unfinished letter to Aunt Jean, begun before they had started for Fiesole. She s.n.a.t.c.hed up paper and pen, and trembling so much that she could scarcely support herself she wrote two brief lines.

"Darling, I love you, and always must love you, first and best."

Then she lay back again exhausted, looking at the poor little weak words which would not contain a thousandth part of the love in heart. Yet, though the words were true, would they perhaps convey a wrong meaning to him? Ought she to send them? On the other hand would he indeed understand the silence the silence which seemed now intolerable to her?

She folded the note and directed it, the tumult in her heart growing wilder as she did so. Once more there raged the battle which she had fought in the amphitheatre that morning, and she was not so strong now; she was weakened by physical pain, and to endure was far harder. It seemed to her that her whole life would be unbearable if she did not send him that message. And to send it was so fatally easy; she had merely to ring, and then in a few minutes the note would be in his hands.

It was a little narrow slip of a room; all her life long she could vividly recall it. The single bed pushed close to the wall, the writing table with its gay-patterned cloth, the hanging wardrobe with gla.s.s doors, the walls trellised with roses, and on the ceiling a painting of some white swans eternally swimming in an ultra-marine lake. The window, unshuttered, but veiled by muslin curtains, looked out upon the Arno; from her bed she could see the lights on the further bank. On the wall close beside her was a little round wooden projection. If it had been a rattlesnake she could not have gazed at it more fixedly. Then she looked at the printed card above, and the words written in French and English, German, and Italian, seemed to fall mechanically on her brain, though burning thoughts seethed there, too.

"Ring once for hot water, twice for the chamber maid, three times for the waiter."

Merely to touch that ivory k.n.o.b, and then by the lightest pressure of the finger tips a whole world of love and happiness and rest might open for her, and life would be changed forever.

Again and again she was on the point of yielding, but each time she resisted, and each resistance made her stronger. At length, with a fearful effort, she turned her face away and buried it in the pillow, clinging with all her might to the ironwork of the bed.

For at least an hour the most frightful hour of her life she did not dare to stir. At last when her hands were stiff and sore with that rigid grasping, when it seemed as if her heart had been wrenched out of her and had left nothing but an aching void, she sat up and tore both Brian's note and her reply into a thousand pieces; then, in a weary, lifeless way, made her preparations for the night.

But sleep was impossible. The struggle was over forever, but the pain was but just begun, and she was still a young girl with the best part of her life stretching out before her. She did not toss about restlessly, but lay very still, just enduring her misery, while all the every-day sounds came to her from without laughter in the next room from two talkative American girls, doors opening and shutting, boots thrown down, electric bells rung, presently her father's step and voice.

"Has Miss Raeburn been up long?"

"Sairtenlee, sair, yes," replied the English-speaking waiter. "The signorina sleeps, doubtless."

Then came a pause, and in another minute her father's door was closed and locked.

Noisy parties of men shouting out some chorus sung at one of the theatres pa.s.sed along the Lung' Arno, and tw.a.n.ging mandolins wandered up and down in the moonlight. The sound of that harshest and most jarring of all musical instruments was every after hateful to her. She could not hear one played without a shudder.

Slowly and wearily the night wore on. Sometimes she stole to the window, and looked out on the sleeping city, on the peaceful Arno which was bathed in silvery moonlight, and on the old, irregular houses, thinking what struggles and agonies this place had witnessed in past times, and realizing what an infinitesimal bit of the world's sufferings she was called to bear. Sometimes she lighted a candle and read, sometimes prayed, but for the most part just lay still, silently enduring, learning, though she did not think it, the true meaning of pain.

Somewhat later than usual she joined her father the next morning in the coffee room.

"Brian tells me he is off today," was Raeburn's greeting. "It seems that he must see that patient at Genoa again, and he wants to get a clear fortnight in Switzerland."

"Is it nor rather early for Switzerland?"

"I should have thought so, but he knows more about it than I do. He has written to try to persuade your friend, Mr. Farrant, to join him in the Whitsuntide recess."

"Oh, I am glad of that," said Erica, greatly relieved.

Directly after breakfast she went out with her father, going first of all to French's bank, where Raeburn had to change a circular note.

"It is upstairs," he said as they reached the house. "Don't you trouble to come up; you'll have stairs enough presently at the Uffizzi."

"Very well," she replied, "I will wait for you here."

She stood in the doorway looking out thoughtfully at the busy Tornabuoni and its gay shops; but in a minute a step she knew sounded on the staircase, and the color rushed to her cheeks.

"I have just said goodbye to your father," said Brian. "I am leaving Florence this morning. You must forgive me for having written last night. I ought not to have done it, and I understood your silence."

He spoke calmly, in the repressed voice of a man who holds "pa.s.sion in a leash." Erica was thankful to have the last sight of him thus calm and strong and self-restrained. It was a n.o.bler side of love than that which had inspired his letter n.o.bler because freer from thought of self.

"I am so glad you will have Donovan," she said. "Goodbye."

He took her hand in his, pressed it, and turned away without a word.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII. "Right Onward"

Therefore my Hope arose From out her swound and gazed upon Thy face.

And, meeting there that soft subduing look Which Peter's spirit shook Sunk downward in a rapture to embrace Thy pierced hands and feet with kisses close, And prayed Thee to a.s.sist her evermore To "reach the things before." E. B. Browning

"I'm really thankful it is the last time I shall have to get this abominable paper money," said Raeburn, coming down the stairs. "Just count these twos and fives for me, dear; fifteen of each there should be."

At that moment Brian had just pa.s.sed the tall, white column disappearing into the street which leads to the Borgo Ogni Santi. Erica turned to begin her new chapter of life heavily handicapped in the race for once more that deadly faintness crept over her, a numbing, stifling pressure, as if Pain in physical form had seized her heart in his cold clasp. But with all her strength she fought against it, forcing herself to count the hateful little bits of paper, and thankful that her father was too much taken up with the arrangement of his purse to notice her.

"I am glad we happened to meet Brian," he remarked; "he goes by an earlier train that I thought. Now, little son Eric, where shall we go?

We'll have a day of unmitigated pleasure and throw care to the winds.

I'll even forswear Vieusseux; there won't be much news today."

"Let us take the Pitti Palace first," said Erica, knowing that the fresh air and the walk would be the only chance for her.

She walked very quickly with the feeling that, if she were still for a single moment, she should fall down. And, luckily, Raeburn thought her paleness accounted for by yesterday's headache and the wakeful night, and never suspected the true state of the case. On they went, past fascinating marble shops and jewelers' windows filled with Florentine mosaics, across the Ponte Vecchio, down a shady street, and into the rough-hewn, grim-looking palace. It was to Erica like a dream of pain, the surroundings were so lovely, the suns.h.i.+ne so perfect, and her own heart so sore.

But within that old palace she found the true cure for sore hearts. She remembered having looked with Brian at an "Ecce Home," by Carlo Dolci and thought she would like to see it again. It was not a picture her father would have cared for, and she left him looking at Raphael's "Three Ages of Man," and went by herself into the little room which is called the "Hall of Ulysses." The picture was a small one and had what are considered the usual faults of the painter, but it was the first "Ecce h.o.m.o" that Erica had ever cared for; and, whatever the shortcomings of the execution, the ideal was a most beautiful one.

The traces of physical pain were not brought into undue prominence, appearing not at all in the face, which was full of unutterable calm and dignity. The deep, brown eyes had the strange power which belongs to some pictures; they followed you all over the room there was no escaping them. They were hauntingly sad eyes, eyes in which there lurked grief unspeakable; not the grief which attends bodily pain, but the grief which grieves for others the grief which grieves for humanity, for its thousand ills and ignorances, its doubts and denials, its sins and sufferings. There was no bitterness in it, no restlessness, no questioning. It was the grief of a n.o.ble strong man whose heart is torn by the thought of the sin and misery of his brothers, but who knows that the Father can, and will, turn the evil into the means of glorious gain.

As Erica looked, the true meaning of pain seemed to flash upon her.

Dimly she had apprehended it in the days of her atheism, had clung to the hope that the pain of the few brought the gain of the many; but now the hope became certainty, the faith became open vision. For was it not all here, written in clearest characters, in the life of the Ideal Man?

And is not what was true for him, true for us too? We talk much about "Christ our example," and struggle painfully along the uphill road of the "Imitation of Christ," meaning by that too often a vague endeavor to be "good," to be patient, to be not entirely absorbed in the things which are seen. But when pain comes, when the immense misery and evil in the world are borne in upon us, we too often stumble, or fail utterly, just because we do not understand our sons.h.i.+p; because we forget that Christians must be sin-bearers like their Master, pain bearers like their Master; because we will let ourselves be blinded by the mystery of evil and the mystery of pain, instead of fixing our eyes as Christ did, on the joy that those mysteries are sure to bring. "Lo, I come to do Thy will." And what is the will of even a good earthly father but the best possible for all his children?

Erica saw for the first time that no pain she had ever suffered had been a wasted thing, nor had it merely taught her personally some needful lesson; it had been rather her allotted service, her share of pain-bearing, sin-bearing, Christ-following; her opportunity of doing the "Will" not self-chosen, but given to her as one of the best of gifts by the Father Himself.