Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster (page 2)

it, and would not have had the least scruple in using bolts and locks to put it into effect. There was plenty of brutality deep down in him, and one day Lilia nearly touched it.

It was the old question of going out alone.

“I always do it in England.”

“This is Italy.”

“Yes, but I’m older than you, and I’ll settle.”

“I am your husband,” he said, smiling. They had finished their mid-day meal, and he wanted to go and sleep. Nothing would rouse him up, until at last Lilia, getting more and more angry, said, “And I’ve got the money.”

He looked horrified.

Now was the moment to assert herself. She made the statement again. He got up from his chair.

“And you’d better mend your manners,” she continued, “for you’d find it awkward if I stopped drawing cheques.”

She was no reader of character, but she quickly became alarmed. As she said to Perfetta afterwards, “None of his clothes seemed to fit–too big in one place, too small in another.” His figure rather than his face altered, the shoulders falling forward till his coat wrinkled across the back and pulled away from his wrists. He seemed all arms. He edged round the table to where she was sitting, and she sprang away and held the chair between them, too frightened to speak or to move. He looked at her with round, expressionless eyes, and slowly stretched out his left hand.

Perfetta was heard coming up from the kitchen. It seemed to wake him up, and he turned away and went to his room without a word.

“What has happened?” cried Lilia, nearly fainting. “He is ill–ill.”

Perfetta looked suspicious when she heard the account. “What did you say to him?” She crossed herself.

“Hardly anything,” said Lilia and crossed herself also. Thus did the two women pay homage to their outraged male.

It was clear to Lilia at last that Gino had married her for money. But he had frightened her too much to leave any place for contempt. His return was terrifying, for he was frightened too, imploring her pardon, lying at her feet, embracing her, murmuring “It was not I,” striving to define things which he did not understand. He stopped in the house for three days, positively ill with physical collapse. But for all his suffering he had tamed her, and she never threatened to cut off supplies again.

Perhaps he kept her even closer than convention demanded. But he was very young, and he could not bear it to be said of him that he did not know how to treat a lady–or to manage a wife. And his own social position was uncertain. Even in England a dentist is a troublesome creature, whom careful people find difficult to class. He hovers between the professions and the trades; he may be only a little lower than the doctors, or he may be down among the chemists, or even beneath them. The son of the Italian dentist felt this too. For himself nothing mattered; he made friends with the people he liked, for he was that glorious invariable creature, a man. But his wife should visit nowhere rather than visit wrongly: seclusion was both decent and safe. The social ideals of North and South had had their brief contention, and this time the South had won.

It would have been well if he had been as strict over his own behaviour as he was over hers. But the incongruity never occurred to him for a moment. His morality was that of the average Latin, and as he was suddenly placed in the position of a gentleman, he did not see why he should not behave as such. Of course, had Lilia been different–had she asserted herself and got a grip on his character–he might possibly–though not probably–have been made a better husband as well as a better man, and at all events he could have adopted the attitude of the Englishman, whose standard is higher even when his practice is the same. But had Lilia been different she might not have married him.

The discovery of his infidelity–which she made by accident–destroyed such remnants of self-satisfaction as her life might yet possess. She broke down utterly and sobbed and cried in Perfetta’s arms. Perfetta was kind and even sympathetic, but cautioned her on no account to speak to Gino, who would be furious if he was suspected. And Lilia agreed, partly because she was afraid of him, partly because it was, after all, the best and most dignified thing to do. She had given up everything for him–her daughter, her relatives, her friends, all the little comforts and luxuries of a civilized life–and even if she had the courage to break away, there was no one who would receive her now. The Herritons had been almost malignant in their efforts against her, and all her friends had one by one fallen off. So it was better to live on humbly, trying not to feel, endeavouring by a cheerful demeanour to put things right. “Perhaps,” she thought, “if I have a child he will be different. I know he wants a son.”

Lilia had achieved pathos despite herself, for there are some situations in which vulgarity counts no longer. Not Cordelia nor Imogen more deserves our tears.

She herself cried frequently, making herself look plain and old, which distressed her husband. He was particularly kind to her when he hardly ever saw her, and she accepted his kindness without resentment, even with gratitude, so docile had she become. She did not hate him, even as she had never loved him; with her it was only when she was excited that the semblance of either passion arose. People said she was headstrong, but really her weak brain left her cold.

Suffering, however, is more independent of temperament, and the wisest of women could hardly have suffered more.

As for Gino, he was quite as boyish as ever, and carried his iniquities like a feather. A favourite speech of his was, “Ah, one ought to marry! Spiridione is wrong; I must persuade him. Not till marriage does one realize the pleasures and the possibilities of life.” So saying, he would take down his felt hat, strike it in the right place as infallibly as a German strikes his in the wrong place, and leave her.

One evening, when he had gone out thus, Lilia could stand it no longer. It was September. Sawston would be just filling up after the summer holidays. People would be running in and out of each other’s houses all along the road. There were bicycle gymkhanas, and on the 30th Mrs. Herriton would be holding the annual bazaar in her garden for the C.M.S. It seemed impossible that such a free, happy life could exist. She walked out on to the loggia. Moonlight and stars in a soft purple sky. The walls of Monteriano should be glorious on such a night as this. But the house faced away from them.

Perfetta was banging in the kitchen, and the stairs down led past the kitchen door. But the stairs up to the attic–the stairs no one ever used–opened out of the living-room, and by unlocking the door at the top one might slip out to the square terrace above the house, and thus for ten minutes walk in freedom and peace.

The key was in the pocket of Gino’s best suit–the English check–which he never wore. The stairs creaked and the key-hole screamed; but Perfetta was growing deaf. The walls were beautiful, but as they faced west they were in shadow. To see the light upon them she must walk round the town a little, till they were caught by the beams of the rising moon. She looked anxiously at the house, and started.

It was easy walking, for a little path ran all outside the ramparts. The few people she met wished her a civil good-night, taking her, in her hatless condition, for a peasant. The walls trended round towards the moon; and presently she came into its light, and saw all the rough towers turn into pillars of silver and black, and the ramparts into cliffs of pearl. She had no great sense of beauty, but she was sentimental, and she began to cry; for here, where a great cypress interrupted the monotony of the girdle of olives, she had sat with Gino one afternoon in March, her head upon his shoulder, while Caroline was looking at the view and sketching. Round the comer was the Siena gate, from which the road to England started, and she could hear the rumble of the diligence which was going down to catch the night train to Empoli. The next moment it was upon her, for the highroad came towards her a little before it began its long zigzag down the hill.

The driver slackened, and called to her to get in. He did not know who she was. He hoped she might be coming to the station.

“Non vengo!” she cried.

He wished her good-night, and turned his horses down the corner. As the diligence came round she saw that it was empty.

“Vengo . . .”

Her voice was tremulous, and did not carry. The horses swung off.

“Vengo! Vengo!”

He had begun to sing, and heard nothing. She ran down the road screaming to him to stop–that she was coming; while the distance grew greater and the noise of the diligence increased. The man’s back was black and square against the moon, and if he would but turn for an instant she would be saved. She tried to cut off the comer of the zigzag, stumbling over the great clods of earth, large and hard as rocks, which lay between the eternal olives. She was too late; for, just before she regained the road, the thing swept past her, thunderous, ploughing up choking clouds of moonlit dust.

She did not call any more, for she felt very ill, and fainted; and when she revived she was lying in the road, with dust in her eyes, and dust in her mouth, and dust down her ears. There is something very terrible in dust at night-time.

“What shall I do?” she moaned. “He will be so angry.”

And without further effort she slowly climbed back to captivity, shaking her garments as she went.

Ill luck pursued her to the end. It was one of the nights when Gino happened to come in. He was in the kitchen, swearing and smashing plates, while Perfetta, her apron over her head, was weeping violently. At the sight of Lilia he turned upon her and poured forth a flood of miscellaneous abuse. He was far more angry but much less alarming than he had been that day when he edged after her round the table. And Lilia gained more courage from her bad conscience than she ever had from her good one, for as he spoke she was seized with indignation and feared him no longer, and saw him for a cruel, worthless, hypocritical, dissolute upstart, and spoke in return.

Perfetta screamed for she told him everything–all she knew and all she thought. He stood with open mouth, all the anger gone out of him, feeling ashamed, and an utter fool. He was fairly and rightfully cornered. When had a husband so given himself away before? She finished; and he was dumb, for she had spoken truly. Then, alas! the absurdity of his own position grew upon him, and he laughed–as he would have laughed at the same situation on the stage.

“You laugh?” stammered Lilia.

“Ah!” he cried, “who could help it? I, who thought you knew and saw nothing–I am tricked–I am conquered. I give in. Let us talk of it no more.”

He touched her on the shoulder like a good comrade, half amused and half penitent, and then, murmuring and smiling to himself, ran quietly out of the room.

Perfetta burst into congratulations. “What courage you have!” she cried; “and what good fortune! He is angry no longer! He has forgiven you!”

Neither Perfetta, nor Gino, nor Lilia herself knew the true reason of all the misery that followed. To the end he thought that kindness and a little attention would be enough to set things straight. His wife was a very ordinary woman, and why should her ideas differ from his own? No one realized that more than personalities were engaged; that the struggle was national; that generations of ancestors, good, bad, or indifferent, forbad the Latin man to be chivalrous to the northern woman, the northern woman to forgive the Latin man. All this might have been foreseen: Mrs. Herriton foresaw it from the first.

Meanwhile Lilia prided herself on her high personal standard, and Gino simply wondered why she did not come round. He hated discomfort and yearned for sympathy, but shrank from mentioning his difficulties in the town in case they were put down to his own incompetence. Spiridione was told, and replied in a philosophical but not very helpful letter. His other great friend, whom he trusted more, was still serving in Eritrea or some other desolate outpost. And, besides, what was the good of letters? Friends cannot travel through the post.

Lilia, so similar to her husband in many ways, yearned for comfort and sympathy too. The night he laughed at her she wildly took up paper and pen and wrote page after page, analysing his character, enumerating his iniquities, reporting whole conversations, tracing all the causes and the growth of her misery. She was beside herself with passion, and though she could hardly think or see, she suddenly attained to magnificence and pathos which a practised stylist might have envied. It was written like a diary, and not till its conclusion did she realize for whom it was meant.

“Irma, darling Irma, this letter is for you. I almost forgot I have a daughter. It will make you unhappy, but I want you to know everything, and you cannot learn things too soon. God bless you, my dearest, and save you. God bless your miserable mother.”

Fortunately Mrs. Herriton was in when the letter arrived. She seized it and opened it in her bedroom. Another moment, and Irma’s placid childhood would have been destroyed for ever.

Lilia received a brief note from Harriet, again forbidding direct communication between mother and daughter, and concluding with formal condolences. It nearly drove her mad.

“Gently! gently!” said her husband. They were sitting together on the loggia when the letter arrived. He often sat with her now, watching her for hours, puzzled and anxious, but not contrite.

“It’s nothing.” She went in and tore it up, and then began to write–a very short letter, whose gist was “Come and save me.”

It is not good to see your wife crying when she writes–especially if you are conscious that, on the whole, your treatment of her has been reasonable and kind. It is not good, when you accidentally look over her shoulder, to see that she is writing to a man. Nor should she shake her fist at you when she leaves the room, under the impression that you are engaged in lighting a cigar and cannot see her.

Lilia went to the post herself. But in Italy so many things can be arranged. The postman was a friend of Gino’s, and Mr. Kingcroft never got his letter.

So she gave up hope, became ill, and all through the autumn lay in bed. Gino was distracted. She knew why; he wanted a son. He could talk and think of nothing else. His one desire was to become the father of a man like himself, and it held him with a grip he only partially understood, for it was the first great desire, the first great passion of his life. Falling in love was a mere physical triviality, like warm sun or cool water, beside this divine hope of immortality: “I continue.” He gave candles to Santa Deodata, for he was always religious at a crisis, and sometimes he went to her himself and prayed the crude uncouth demands of the simple. Impetuously he summoned all his relatives back to bear him company in his time of need, and Lilia saw strange faces flitting past her in the darkened room.

“My love!” he would say, “my dearest Lilia! Be calm. I have never loved any one but you.”

She, knowing everything, would only smile gently, too broken by suffering to make sarcastic repartees.

Before the child was born he gave her a kiss, and said, “I have prayed all night for a boy.”

Some strangely tender impulse moved her, and she said faintly, “You are a boy yourself, Gino.”

He answered, “Then we shall be brothers.”

He lay outside the room with his head against the door like a dog. When they came to tell him the glad news they found him half unconscious, and his face was wet with tears.

As for Lilia, some one said to her, “It is a beautiful boy!” But she had died in giving birth to him.

Chapter 5

At the time of Lilia’s death Philip Herriton was just twenty-four years of age–indeed the news reached Sawston on his birthday. He was a tall, weakly-built young man, whose clothes had to be judiciously padded on the shoulders in order to make him pass muster. His face was plain rather than not, and there was a curious mixture in it of good and bad. He had a fine forehead and a good large nose, and both observation and sympathy were in his eyes. But below the nose and eyes all was confusion, and those people who believe that destiny resides in the mouth and chin shook their heads when they looked at him.

Philip himself, as a boy, had been keenly conscious of these defects. Sometimes when he had been bullied or hustled about at school he would retire to his cubicle and examine his features in a looking-glass, and he would sigh and say, “It is a weak face. I shall never carve a place for myself in the world.” But as years went on he became either less self-conscious or more self-satisfied. The world, he found, made a niche for him as it did for every one. Decision of character might come later–or he might have it without knowing. At all events he had got a sense of beauty and a sense of humour, two most desirable gifts. The sense of beauty developed first. It caused him at the age of twenty to wear parti-coloured ties and a squashy hat, to be late for dinner on account of the sunset, and to catch art from Burne-Jones to Praxiteles. At twenty-two he went to Italy with some cousins, and there he absorbed into one aesthetic whole olive-trees, blue sky, frescoes, country inns, saints, peasants, mosaics, statues, beggars. He came back with the air of a prophet who would either remodel Sawston or reject it. All the energies and enthusiasms of a rather friendless life had passed into the championship of beauty.

In a short time it was over. Nothing had happened either in Sawston or within himself. He had shocked half-a-dozen people, squabbled with his sister, and bickered with his mother. He concluded that nothing could happen, not knowing that human love and love of truth sometimes conquer where love of beauty fails.

A little disenchanted, a little tired, but aesthetically intact, he resumed his placid life, relying more and more on his second gift, the gift of humour. If he could not reform the world, he could at all events laugh at it, thus attaining at least an intellectual superiority. Laughter, he read and believed, was a sign of good moral health, and he laughed on contentedly, till Lilia’s marriage toppled contentment down for ever. Italy, the land of beauty, was ruined for him. She had no power to change men and things who dwelt in her. She, too, could produce avarice, brutality, stupidity–and, what was worse, vulgarity. It was on her soil and through her influence that a silly woman had married a cad. He hated Gino, the betrayer of his life’s ideal, and now that the sordid tragedy had come, it filled him with pangs, not of sympathy, but of final disillusion.

The disillusion was convenient for Mrs. Herriton, who saw a trying little period ahead of her, and was glad to have her family united.

“Are we to go into mourning, do you think?” She always asked her children’s advice where possible.

Harriet thought that they should. She had been detestable to Lilia while she lived, but she always felt that the dead deserve attention and sympathy. “After all she has suffered. That letter kept me awake for nights. The whole thing is like one of those horrible modern plays where no one is in ‘the right.’ But if we have mourning, it will mean telling Irma.”

“Of course we must tell Irma!” said Philip.

“Of course,” said his mother. “But I think we can still not tell her about Lilia’s marriage.”

“I don’t think that. And she must have suspected something by now.”

“So one would have supposed. But she never cared for her mother, and little girls of nine don’t reason clearly. She looks on it as a long visit. And it is important, most important, that she should not receive a shock. All a child’s life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes–morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education. That is why I have been so careful about talking of poor Lilia before her.”

“But you forget this wretched baby. Waters and Adamson write that there is a baby.”

“Mrs. Theobald must be told. But she doesn’t count. She is breaking up very quickly. She doesn’t even see Mr. Kingcroft now. He, thank goodness, I hear, has at last consoled himself with someone else.”

“The child must know some time,” persisted Philip, who felt a little displeased, though he could not tell with what.

“The later the better. Every moment she is developing.”

“I must say it seems rather hard luck, doesn’t it?”

“On Irma? Why?”

“On us, perhaps. We have morals and behaviour also, and I don’t think this continual secrecy improves them.”

“There’s no need to twist the thing round to that,” said Harriet, rather disturbed.

“Of course there isn’t,” said her mother. “Let’s keep to the main issue. This baby’s quite beside the point. Mrs. Theobald will do nothing, and it’s no concern of ours.”

“It will make a difference in the money, surely,” said he.

“No, dear; very little. Poor Charles provided for every kind of contingency in his will. The money will come to you and Harriet, as Irma’s guardians.”

“Good. Does the Italian get anything?”

“He will get all hers. But you know what that is.”

“Good. So those are our tactics–to tell no one about the baby, not even Miss Abbott.”

“Most certainly this is the proper course,” said Mrs. Herriton, preferring “course” to “tactics” for Harriet’s sake. “And why ever should we tell Caroline?”

“She was so mixed up in the affair.”

“Poor silly creature. The less she hears about it the better she will be pleased. I have come to be very sorry for Caroline. She, if any one, has suffered and been penitent. She burst into tears when I told her a little, only a little, of that terrible letter. I never saw such genuine remorse. We must forgive her and forget. Let the dead bury their dead. We will not trouble her with them.”

Philip saw that his mother was scarcely logical. But there was no advantage in saying so. “Here beginneth the New Life, then. Do you remember, mother, that was what we said when we saw Lilia off.?”

“Yes, dear; but now it is really a New Life, because we are all at accord. Then you were still infatuated with Italy. It may be full of beautiful pictures and churches, but we cannot judge a country by anything but its men.”

“That is quite true,” he said sadly. And as the tactics were now settled, he went out and took an aimless and solitary walk.

By the time he came back two important things had happened. Irma had been told of her mother’s death, and Miss Abbott, who had called for a subscription, had been told also.

Irma had wept loudly, had asked a few sensible questions and a good many silly ones, and had been content with evasive answers. Fortunately the school prize-giving was at hand, and that, together with the prospect of new black clothes, kept her from meditating on the fact that Lilia, who had been absent so long, would now be absent for ever.

“As for Caroline,” said Mrs. Herriton, “I was almost frightened. She broke down utterly. She cried even when she left the house. I comforted her as best I could, and I kissed her. It is something that the breach between her and ourselves is now entirely healed.”

“Did she ask no questions–as to the nature of Lilia’s death, I mean?”

“She did. But she has a mind of extraordinary delicacy. She saw that I was reticent, and she did not press me. You see, Philip, I can say to you what I could not say before Harriet. Her ideas are so crude. Really we do not want it known in Sawston that there is a baby. All peace and comfort would be lost if people came inquiring after it.”

His mother knew how to manage him. He agreed enthusiastically. And a few days later, when he chanced to travel up to London with Miss Abbott, he had all the time the pleasant thrill of one who is better informed. Their last journey together had been from Monteriano back across Europe. It had been a ghastly journey, and Philip, from the force of association, rather expected something ghastly now.

He was surprised. Miss Abbott, between Sawston and Charing Cross, revealed qualities which he had never guessed her to possess. Without being exactly original, she did show a commendable intelligence, and though at times she was gauche and even uncourtly, he felt that here was a person whom it might be well to cultivate.

At first she annoyed him. They were talking, of course, about Lilia, when she broke the thread of vague commiseration and said abruptly, “It is all so strange as well as so tragic. And what I did was as strange as anything.”

It was the first reference she had ever made to her contemptible behaviour. “Never mind,” he said. “It’s all over now. Let the dead bury their dead. It’s fallen out of our lives.”

“But that’s why I can talk about it and tell you everything I have always wanted to. You thought me stupid and sentimental and wicked and mad, but you never really knew how much I was to blame.”

“Indeed I never think about it now,” said Philip gently. He knew that her nature was in the main generous and upright: it was unnecessary for her to reveal her thoughts.

“The first evening we got to Monteriano,” she persisted, “Lilia went out for a walk alone, saw that Italian in a picturesque position on a wall, and fell in love. He was shabbily dressed, and she did not even know he was the son of a dentist. I must tell you I was used to this sort of thing. Once or twice before I had had to send people about their business.

“Yes; we counted on you,” said Philip, with sudden sharpness. After all, if she would reveal her thoughts, she must take the consequences.

“I know you did,” she retorted with equal sharpness. “Lilia saw him several times again, and I knew I ought to interfere. I called her to my bedroom one night. She was very frightened, for she knew what it was about and how severe I could be. ‘Do you love this man?’ I asked. ‘Yes or no?’ She said ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you marry him if you think you’ll be happy?’ ”

“Really–really,” exploded Philip, as exasperated as if the thing had happened yesterday. “You knew Lilia all your life. Apart from everything else–as if she could choose what could make her happy!”

“Had you ever let her choose?” she flashed out. “I’m afraid that’s rude,” she added, trying to calm herself.

“Let us rather say unhappily expressed,” said Philip, who always adopted a dry satirical manner when he was puzzled.

“I want to finish. Next morning I found Signor Carella and said the same to him. He–well, he was willing. That’s all.”

“And the telegram?” He looked scornfully out of the window.

Hitherto her voice had been hard, possibly in self-accusation, possibly in defiance. Now it became unmistakably sad. “Ah, the telegram! That was wrong. Lilia there was more cowardly than I was. We should have told the truth. It lost me my nerve, at all events. I came to the station meaning to tell you everything then. But we had started with a lie, and I got frightened. And at the end, when you left, I got frightened again and came with you.”

“Did you really mean to stop?”

“For a time, at all events.”

“Would that have suited a newly married pair?”

“It would have suited them. Lilia needed me. And as for him–I can’t help feeling I might have got influence over him.”

“I am ignorant of these matters,” said Philip; “but I should have thought that would have increased the difficulty of the situation.”

The crisp remark was wasted on her. She looked hopelessly at the raw over-built country, and said, “Well, I have explained.”

“But pardon me, Miss Abbott; of most of your conduct you have given a description rather than an explanation.”

He had fairly caught her, and expected that she would gape and collapse. To his surprise she answered with some spirit, “An explanation may bore you, Mr. Herriton: it drags in other topics.”

“Oh, never mind.”

“I hated Sawston, you see.”

He was delighted. “So did and do I. That’s splendid. Go on.”

“I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.”

“Petty selfishness,” he corrected. Sawston psychology had long been his specialty.

“Petty unselfishness,” she repeated. “I had got an idea that every one here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn’t care for, to please people they didn’t love; that they never learnt to be sincere–and, what’s as bad, never learnt how to enjoy themselves. That’s what I thought–what I thought at Monteriano.”

“Why, Miss Abbott,” he cried, “you should have told me this before! Think it still! I agree with lots of it. Magnificent!”

“Now Lilia,” she went on, “though there were things about her I didn’t like, had somehow kept the power of enjoying herself with sincerity. And Gino, I thought, was splendid, and young, and strong not only in body, and sincere as the day. If they wanted to marry, why shouldn’t they do so? Why shouldn’t she break with the deadening life where she had got into a groove, and would go on in it, getting more and more–worse than unhappy–apathetic till she died? Of course I was wrong. She only changed one groove for another–a worse groove. And as for him–well, you know more about him than I do. I can never trust myself to judge characters again. But I still feel he cannot have been quite bad when we first met him. Lilia–that I should dare to say it! –must have been cowardly. He was only a boy–just going to turn into something fine, I thought–and she must have mismanaged him. So that is the one time I have gone against what is proper, and there are the results. You have an explanation now.”

“And much of it has been most interesting, though I don’t understand everything. Did you never think of the disparity of their social position?”

“We were mad–drunk with rebellion. We had no common-sense. As soon as you came, you saw and foresaw everything.”

“Oh, I don’t think that.” He was vaguely displeased at being credited with common-sense. For a moment Miss Abbott had seemed to him more unconventional than himself.

“I hope you see,” she concluded, “why I have troubled you with this long story. Women–I heard you say the other day–are never at ease till they tell their faults out loud. Lilia is dead and her husband gone to the bad–all through me. You see, Mr. Herriton, it makes me specially unhappy; it’s the only time I’ve ever gone into what my father calls ‘real life’–and look what I’ve made of it! All that winter I seemed to be waking up to beauty and splendour and I don’t know what; and when the spring came, I wanted to fight against the things I hated–mediocrity and dulness and spitefulness and society. I actually hated society for a day or two at Monteriano. I didn’t see that all these things are invincible, and that if we go against them they will break us to pieces. Thank you for listening to so much nonsense.”

“Oh, I quite sympathize with what you say,” said Philip encouragingly; “it isn’t nonsense, and a year or two ago I should have been saying it too. But I feel differently now, and I hope that you also will change. Society is invincible–to a certain degree. But your real life is your own, and nothing can touch it. There is no power on earth that can prevent your criticizing and despising mediocrity–nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty–into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life–the real you.”

“I have never had that experience yet. Surely I and my life must be where I live.”

Evidently she had the usual feminine incapacity for grasping philosophy. But she had developed quite a personality, and he must see more of her. “There is another great consolation against invincible mediocrity,” he said–“the meeting a fellow-victim. I hope that this is only the first of many discussions that we shall have together.”

She made a suitable reply. The train reached Charing Cross, and they parted,–he to go to a matinee, she to buy petticoats for the corpulent poor. Her thoughts wandered as she bought them: the gulf between herself and Mr. Herriton, which she had always known to be great, now seemed to her immeasurable.

These events and conversations took place at Christmas-time. The New Life initiated by them lasted some seven months. Then a little incident–a mere little vexatious incident–brought it to its close.

Irma collected picture post-cards, and Mrs. Herriton or Harriet always glanced first at all that came, lest the child should get hold of something vulgar. On this occasion the subject seemed perfectly inoffensive–a lot of ruined factory chimneys–and Harriet was about to hand it to her niece when her eye was caught by the words on the margin. She gave a shriek and flung the card into the grate. Of course no fire was alight in July, and Irma only had to run and pick it out again.

“How dare you!” screamed her aunt. “You wicked girl! Give it here!”

Unfortunately Mrs. Herriton was out of the room. Irma, who was not in awe of Harriet, danced round the table, reading as she did so, “View of the superb city of Monteriano–from your lital brother.”

Stupid Harriet caught her, boxed her ears, and tore the post-card into fragments. Irma howled with pain, and began shouting indignantly, “Who is my little brother? Why have I never heard of him before? Grandmamma! Grandmamma! Who is my little brother? Who is my–”

Mrs. Herriton swept into the room, saying, “Come with me, dear, and I will tell you. Now it is time for you to know.”

Irma returned from the interview sobbing, though, as a matter of fact, she had learnt very little. But that little took hold of her imagination. She had promised secrecy–she knew not why. But what harm in talking of the little brother to those who had heard of him already?

“Aunt Harriet!” she would say. “Uncle Phil! Grandmamma! What do you suppose my little brother is doing now? Has he begun to play? Do Italian babies talk sooner than us, or would he be an English baby born abroad? Oh, I do long to see him, and be the first to teach him the Ten Commandments and the Catechism.”

The last remark always made Harriet look grave.

“Really,” exclaimed Mrs. Herriton, “Irma is getting too tiresome. She forgot poor Lilia soon enough.”

“A living brother is more to her than a dead mother,” said Philip dreamily. “She can knit him socks.”

“I stopped that. She is bringing him in everywhere. It is most vexatious. The other night she asked if she might include him in the people she mentions specially in her prayers.”

“What did you say?”

“Of course I allowed her,” she replied coldly. “She has a right to mention any one she chooses. But I was annoyed with her this morning, and I fear that I showed it.”

“And what happened this morning?”

“She asked if she could pray for her ‘new father’–for the Italian!”

“Did you let her?”

“I got up without saying anything.”

“You must have felt just as you did when I wanted to pray for the devil.”

“He is the devil,” cried Harriet.

“No, Harriet; he is too vulgar.”

“I will thank you not to scoff against religion!” was Harriet’s retort. “Think of that poor baby. Irma is right to pray for him. What an entrance into life for an English child!”

“My dear sister, I can reassure you. Firstly, the beastly baby is Italian. Secondly, it was promptly christened at Santa Deodata’s, and a powerful combination of saints watch over–”

“Don’t, dear. And, Harriet, don’t be so serious–I mean not so serious when you are with Irma. She will be worse than ever if she thinks we have something to hide.”

Harriet’s conscience could be quite as tiresome as Philip’s unconventionality. Mrs. Herriton soon made it easy for her daughter to go for six weeks to the Tirol. Then she and Philip began to grapple with Irma alone.

Just as they had got things a little quiet the beastly baby sent another picture post-card–a comic one, not particularly proper. Irma received it while they were out, and all the trouble began again.

“I cannot think,” said Mrs. Herriton, “what his motive is in sending them.”

Two years before, Philip would have said that the motive was to give pleasure. Now he, like his mother, tried to think of something sinister and subtle.

“Do you suppose that he guesses the situation–how anxious we are to hush the scandal up?”

“That is quite possible. He knows that Irma will worry us about the baby. Perhaps he hopes that we shall adopt it to quiet her.”

“Hopeful indeed.”

“At the same time he has the chance of corrupting the child’s morals.” She unlocked a drawer, took out the post-card, and regarded it gravely. “He entreats her to send the baby one,” was her next remark.

“She might do it too!”

“I told her not to; but we must watch her carefully, without, of course, appearing to be suspicious.”

Philip was getting to enjoy his mother’s diplomacy. He did not think of his own morals and behaviour any more.

“Who’s to watch her at school, though? She may bubble out any moment.”

“We can but trust to our influence,” said Mrs. Herriton.

Irma did bubble out, that very day. She was proof against a single post-card, not against two. A new little brother is a valuable sentimental asset to a school-girl, and her school was then passing through an acute phase of baby-worship. Happy the girl who had her quiver full of them, who kissed them when she left home in the morning, who had the right to extricate them from mail-carts in the interval, who dangled them at tea ere they retired to rest! That one might sing the unwritten song of Miriam, blessed above all school-girls, who was allowed to hide her baby brother in a squashy place, where none but herself could find him!

How could Irma keep silent when pretentious girls spoke of baby cousins and baby visitors–she who had a baby brother, who wrote her post-cards through his dear papa? She had promised not to tell about him–she knew not why–and she told. And one girl told another, and one girl told her mother, and the thing was out.

“Yes, it is all very sad,” Mrs. Herriton kept saying. “My daughter-in-law made a very unhappy marriage, as I dare say you know. I suppose that the child will be educated in Italy. Possibly his grandmother may be doing something, but I have not heard of it. I do not expect that she will have him over. She disapproves of the father. It is altogether a painful business for her.”

She was careful only to scold Irma for disobedience–that eighth deadly sin, so convenient to parents and guardians. Harriet would have plunged into needless explanations and abuse. The child was ashamed, and talked about the baby less. The end of the school year was at hand, and she hoped to get another prize. But she also had put her hand to the wheel.

It was several days before they saw Miss Abbott. Mrs. Herriton had not come across her much since the kiss of reconciliation, nor Philip since the journey to London. She had, indeed, been rather a disappointment to him. Her creditable display of originality had never been repeated: he feared she was slipping back. Now she came about the Cottage Hospital–her life was devoted to dull acts of charity–and though she got money out of him and out of his mother, she still sat tight in her chair, looking graver and more wooden than ever.

“I dare say you have heard,” said Mrs. Herriton, well knowing what the matter was.

“Yes, I have. I came to ask you; have any steps been taken?”

Philip was astonished. The question was impertinent in the extreme. He had a regard for Miss Abbott, and regretted that she had been guilty of it.

“About the baby?” asked Mrs. Herriton pleasantly.

“Yes.”

“As far as I know, no steps. Mrs. Theobald may have decided on something, but I have not heard of it.”

“I was meaning, had you decided on anything?”

“The child is no relation of ours,” said Philip. “It is therefore scarcely for us to interfere.”

His mother glanced at him nervously. “Poor Lilia was almost a daughter to me once. I know what Miss Abbott means. But now things have altered. Any initiative would naturally come from Mrs. Theobald.”

“But does not Mrs. Theobald always take any initiative from you?” asked Miss Abbott.

Mrs. Herriton could not help colouring. “I sometimes have given her advice in the past. I should not presume to do so now.”

“Then is nothing to be done for the child at all?”

“It is extraordinarily good of you to take this unexpected interest,” said Philip.

“The child came into the world through my negligence,” replied Miss Abbott. “It is natural I should take an interest in it.”

“My dear Caroline,” said Mrs. Herriton, “you must not brood over the thing. Let bygones be bygones. The child should worry you even less than it worries us. We never even mention it. It belongs to another world.”

Miss Abbott got up without replying and turned to go. Her extreme gravity made Mrs. Herriton uneasy. “Of course,” she added, “if Mrs. Theobald decides on any plan that seems at all practicable–I must say I don’t see any such–I shall ask if I may join her in it, for Irma’s sake, and share in any possible expenses.”

“Please would you let me know if she decides on anything. I should like to join as well.”

“My dear, how you throw about your money! We would never allow it.”

“And if she decides on nothing, please also let me know. Let me know in any case.”

Mrs. Herriton made a point of kissing her.

“Is the young person mad?” burst out Philip as soon as she had departed. “Never in my life have I seen such colossal impertinence. She ought to be well smacked, and sent back to Sunday-school.”

His mother said nothing.

“But don’t you see–she is practically threatening us? You can’t put her off with Mrs. Theobald; she knows as well as we do that she is a nonentity. If we don’t do anything she’s going to raise a scandal–that we neglect our relatives, &c., which is, of course, a lie. Still she’ll say it. Oh, dear, sweet, sober Caroline Abbott has a screw loose! We knew it at Monteriano. I had my suspicions last year one day in the train; and here it is again. The young person is mad.”

She still said nothing.

“Shall I go round at once and give it her well? I’d really enjoy it.”

In a low, serious voice–such a voice as she had not used to him for months–Mrs. Herriton said, “Caroline has been extremely impertinent. Yet there may be something in what she says after all. Ought the child to grow up in that place–and with that father?”

Philip started and shuddered. He saw that his mother was not sincere. Her insincerity to others had amused him, but it was disheartening when used against himself.

“Let us admit frankly,” she continued, “that after all we may have responsibilities.”

“I don’t understand you, Mother. You are turning absolutely round. What are you up to?”

In one moment an impenetrable barrier had been erected between them. They were no longer in smiling confidence. Mrs. Herriton was off on tactics of her own–tactics which might be beyond or beneath him.

His remark offended her. “Up to? I am wondering whether I ought not to adopt the child. Is that sufficiently plain?”

“And this is the result of half-a-dozen idiocies of Miss Abbott?”

“It is. I repeat, she has been extremely impertinent. None the less she is showing me my duty. If I can rescue poor Lilia’s baby from that horrible man, who will bring it up either as Papist or infidel–who will certainly bring it up to be vicious–I shall do it.”

“You talk like Harriet.”

“And why not?” said she, flushing at what she knew to be an insult. “Say, if you choose, that I talk like Irma. That child has seen the thing more clearly than any of us. She longs for her little brother. She shall have him. I don’t care if I am impulsive.”

He was sure that she was not impulsive, but did not dare to say so. Her ability frightened him. All his life he had been her puppet. She let him worship Italy, and reform Sawston–just as she had let Harriet be Low Church. She had let him talk as much as he liked. But when she wanted a thing she always got it.

And though she was frightening him, she did not inspire him with reverence. Her life, he saw, was without meaning. To what purpose was her diplomacy, her insincerity, her continued repression of vigour? Did they make any one better or happier? Did they even bring happiness to herself? Harriet with her gloomy peevish creed, Lilia with her clutches after pleasure, were after all more divine than this well-ordered, active, useless machine.

Now that his mother had wounded his vanity he could criticize her thus. But he could not rebel. To the end of his days he could probably go on doing what she wanted. He watched with a cold interest the duel between her and Miss Abbott. Mrs. Herriton’s policy only appeared gradually. It was to prevent Miss Abbott interfering with the child at all costs, and if possible to prevent her at a small cost. Pride was the only solid element in her disposition. She could not bear to seem less charitable than others.

“I am planning what can be done,” she would tell people, “and that kind Caroline Abbott is helping me. It is no business of either of us, but we are getting to feel that the baby must not be left entirely to that horrible man. It would be unfair to little Irma; after all, he is her half-brother. No, we have come to nothing definite.”

Miss Abbott was equally civil, but not to be appeased by good intentions. The child’s welfare was a sacred duty to her, not a matter of pride or even of sentiment. By it alone, she felt, could she undo a little of the evil that she had permitted to come into the world. To her imagination Monteriano had become a magic city of vice, beneath whose towers no person could grow up happy or pure. Sawston, with its semi-detached houses and snobby schools, its book teas and bazaars, was certainly petty and dull; at times she found it even contemptible. But it was not a place of sin, and at Sawston, either with the Herritons or with herself, the baby should grow up.

As soon as it was inevitable, Mrs. Herriton wrote a letter for Waters and Adamson to send to Gino–the oddest letter; Philip saw a copy of it afterwards. Its ostensible purpose was to complain of the picture postcards. Right at the end, in a few nonchalant sentences, she offered to adopt the child, provided that Gino would undertake never to come near it, and would surrender some of Lilia’s money for its education.

“What do you think of it?” she asked her son. “It would not do to let him know that we are anxious for it.”

“Certainly he will never suppose that.”

“But what effect will the letter have on him?”

“When he gets it he will do a sum. If it is less expensive in the long run to part with a little money and to be clear of the baby, he will part with it. If he would lose, he will adopt the tone of the loving father.”

“Dear, you’re shockingly cynical.” After a pause she added, “How would the sum work out?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure. But if you wanted to ensure the baby being posted by return, you should have sent a little sum to HIM. Oh, I’m not cynical–at least I only go by what I know of him. But I am weary of the whole show. Weary of Italy. Weary, weary, weary. Sawston’s a kind, pitiful place, isn’t it? I will go walk in it and seek comfort.”

He smiled as he spoke, for the sake of not appearing serious. When he had left her she began to smile also.

It was to the Abbotts’ that he walked. Mr. Abbott offered him tea, and Caroline, who was keeping up her Italian in the next room, came in to pour it out. He told them that his mother had written to Signor Carella, and they both uttered fervent wishes for her success.

“Very fine of Mrs. Herriton, very fine indeed,” said Mr. Abbott, who, like every one else, knew nothing of his daughter’s exasperating behaviour. “I’m afraid it will mean a lot of expense. She will get nothing out of Italy without paying.”

“There are sure to be incidental expenses,” said Philip cautiously. Then he turned to Miss Abbott and said, “Do you suppose we shall have difficulty with the man?”

“It depends,” she replied, with equal caution.

“From what you saw of him, should you conclude that he would make an affectionate parent?”

“I don’t go by what I saw of him, but by what I know of him.”

“Well, what do you conclude from that?”

“That he is a thoroughly wicked man.”

“Yet thoroughly wicked men have loved their children. Look at Rodrigo Borgia, for example.”

“I have also seen examples of that in my district.”

With this remark the admirable young woman rose, and returned to keep up her Italian. She puzzled Philip extremely. He could understand enthusiasm, but she did not seem the least enthusiastic. He could understand pure cussedness, but it did not seem to be that either. Apparently she was deriving neither amusement nor profit from the struggle. Why, then, had she undertaken it? Perhaps she was not sincere. Perhaps, on the whole, that was most likely. She must be professing one thing and aiming at another. What the other thing could be he did not stop to consider. Insincerity was becoming his stock explanation for anything unfamiliar, whether that thing was a kindly action or a high ideal.

“She fences well,” he said to his mother afterwards.

“What had you to fence about?” she said suavely. Her son might know her tactics, but she refused to admit that he knew. She still pretended to him that the baby was the one thing she wanted, and had always wanted, and that Miss Abbott was her valued ally.

And when, next week, the reply came from Italy, she showed him no face of triumph. “Read the letters,” she said. “We have failed.”

Gino wrote in his own language, but the solicitors had sent a laborious English translation, where “Preghiatissima Signora” was rendered as “Most Praiseworthy Madam,” and every delicate compliment and superlative–superlatives are delicate in Italian–would have felled an ox. For a moment Philip forgot the matter in the manner; this grotesque memorial of the land he had loved moved him almost to tears. He knew the originals of these lumbering phrases; he also had sent “sincere auguries”; he also had addressed letters–who writes at home? –from the Caffe Garibaldi. “I didn’t know I was still such an ass,” he thought. “Why can’t I realize that it’s merely tricks of expression? A bounder’s a bounder, whether he lives in Sawston or Monteriano.

“Isn’t it disheartening?” said his mother.

He then read that Gino could not accept the generous offer. His paternal heart would not permit him to abandon this symbol of his deplored spouse. As for the picture post-cards, it displeased him greatly that they had been obnoxious. He would send no more. Would Mrs. Herriton, with her notorious kindness, explain this to Irma, and thank her for those which Irma (courteous Miss!) had sent to him?

“The sum works out against us,” said Philip. “Or perhaps he is putting up the price.”

“No,” said Mrs. Herriton decidedly. “It is not that. For some perverse reason he will not part with the child. I must go and tell poor Caroline. She will be equally distressed.”

She returned from the visit in the most extraordinary condition. Her face was red, she panted for breath, there were dark circles round her eyes.

“The impudence!” she shouted. “The cursed impudence! Oh, I’m swearing. I don’t care. That beastly woman–how dare she interfere–I’ll–Philip, dear, I’m sorry. It’s no good. You must go.”

“Go where? Do sit down. What’s happened?” This outburst of violence from his elegant ladylike mother pained him dreadfully. He had not known that it was in her.

“She won’t accept–won’t accept the letter as final. You must go to Monteriano!”

“I won’t!” he shouted back. “I’ve been and I’ve failed. I’ll never see the place again. I hate Italy.”

“If you don’t go, she will.”

“Abbott?”

“Yes. Going alone; would start this evening. I offered to write; she said it was ‘too late!’ Too late! The child, if you please–Irma’s brother–to live with her, to be brought up by her and her father at our very gates, to go to school like a gentleman, she paying. Oh, you’re a man! It doesn’t matter for you. You can laugh. But I know what people say; and that woman goes to Italy this evening.”

He seemed to be inspired. “Then let her go! Let her mess with Italy by herself. She’ll come to grief somehow. Italy’s too dangerous, too–”

“Stop that nonsense, Philip. I will not be disgraced by her. I WILL have the child. Pay all we’ve got for it. I will have it.”

“Let her go to Italy!” he cried. “Let her meddle with what she doesn’t understand! Look at this letter! The man who wrote it will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow. He’s a bounder, but he’s not an English bounder. He’s mysterious and terrible. He’s got a country behind him that’s upset people from the beginning of the world.”

“Harriet!” exclaimed his mother. “Harriet shall go too. Harriet, now, will be invaluable!” And before Philip had stopped talking nonsense, she had planned the whole thing and was looking out the trains.

Chapter 6

Italy, Philip had always maintained, is only her true self in the height of the summer, when the tourists have left her, and her soul awakes under the beams of a vertical sun. He now had every opportunity of seeing her at her best, for it was nearly the middle of August before he went out to meet Harriet in the Tirol.

He found his sister in a dense cloud five thousand feet above the sea, chilled to the bone, overfed, bored, and not at all unwilling to be fetched away.

“It upsets one’s plans terribly,” she remarked, as she squeezed out her sponges, “but obviously it is my duty.”

“Did mother explain it all to you?” asked Philip.

“Yes, indeed! Mother has written me a really beautiful letter. She describes how it was that she gradually got to feel that we must rescue the poor baby from its terrible surroundings, how she has tried by letter, and it is no good–nothing but insincere compliments and hypocrisy came back. Then she says, ‘There is nothing like personal influence; you and Philip will succeed where I have failed.’ She says, too, that Caroline Abbott has been wonderful.”

Philip assented.

“Caroline feels it as keenly almost as us. That is because she knows the man. Oh, he must be loathsome! Goodness me! I’ve forgotten to pack the ammonia! . . . It has been a terrible lesson for Caroline, but I fancy it is her turning-point. I can’t help liking to think that out of all this evil good will come.”

Philip saw no prospect of good, nor of beauty either. But the expedition promised to be highly comic. He was not averse to it any longer; he was simply indifferent to all in it except the humours. These would be wonderful. Harriet, worked by her mother; Mrs. Herriton, worked by Miss Abbott; Gino, worked by a cheque–what better entertainment could he desire? There was nothing to distract him this time; his sentimentality had died, so had his anxiety for the family honour. He might be a puppet’s puppet, but he knew exactly the disposition of the strings.

They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to be beautiful. And the train which had picked them at sunrise out of a waste of glaciers and hotels was waltzing at sunset round the walls of Verona.

“Absurd nonsense they talk about the heat,” said Philip, as they drove from the station. “Supposing we were here for pleasure, what could be more pleasurable than this?”

“Did you hear, though, they are remarking on the cold?” said Harriet nervously. “I should never have thought it cold.”

And on the second day the heat struck them, like a hand laid over the mouth, just as they were walking to see the tomb of Juliet. From that moment everything went wrong. They fled from Verona. Harriet’s sketch-book was stolen, and the bottle of ammonia in her trunk burst over her prayer-book, so that purple patches appeared on all her clothes. Then, as she was going through Mantua at four in the morning, Philip made her look out of the window because it was Virgil’s birthplace, and a smut flew in her eye, and Harriet with a smut in her eye was notorious. At Bologna they stopped twenty-four hours to rest. It was a FESTA, and children blew bladder whistles night and day. “What a religion!” said Harriet. The hotel smelt, two puppies were asleep on her bed, and her bedroom window looked into a belfry, which saluted her slumbering form every quarter of an hour. Philip left his walking-stick, his socks, and the Baedeker at Bologna; she only left her sponge-bag. Next day they crossed the Apennines with a train-sick child and a hot lady, who told them that never, never before had she sweated so profusely. “Foreigners are a filthy nation,” said Harriet. “I don’t care if there are tunnels; open the windows. “He obeyed, and she got another smut in her eye. Nor did Florence improve matters. Eating, walking, even a cross word would bathe them both in boiling water. Philip, who was slighter of build, and less conscientious, suffered less. But Harriet had never been to Florence, and between the hours of eight and eleven she crawled like a wounded creature through the streets, and swooned before various masterpieces of art. It was an irritable couple who took tickets to Monteriano.

“Singles or returns?” said he.

“A single for me,” said Harriet peevishly; “I shall never get back alive.”

“Sweet creature!” said her brother, suddenly breaking down. “How helpful you will be when we come to Signor Carella!”

“Do you suppose,” said Harriet, standing still among a whirl of porters–“do you suppose I am going to enter that man’s house?”

“Then what have you come for, pray? For ornament?”

“To see that you do your duty.”

“Oh, thanks!”

“So mother told me. For goodness sake get the tickets; here comes that hot woman again! She has the impudence to bow.”

“Mother told you, did she?” said Philip wrathfully, as he went to struggle for tickets at a slit so narrow that they were handed to him edgeways. Italy was beastly, and Florence station is the centre of beastly Italy. But he had a strange feeling that he was to blame for it all; that a little influx into him of virtue would make the whole land not beastly but amusing. For there was enchantment, he was sure of that; solid enchantment, which lay behind the porters and the screaming and the dust. He could see it in the terrific blue sky beneath which they travelled, in the whitened plain which gripped life tighter than a frost, in the exhausted reaches of the Arno, in the ruins of brown castles which stood quivering upon the hills. He could see it, though his head ached and his skin was twitching, though he was here as a puppet, and though his sister knew how he was here. There was nothing pleasant in that journey to Monteriano station. But nothing–not even the discomfort–was commonplace.

“But do people live inside?” asked Harriet. They had exchanged railway-carriage for the legno, and the legno had emerged from the withered trees, and had revealed to them their destination. Philip, to be annoying, answered “No.”

“What do they do there?” continued Harriet, with a frown.

“There is a caffe. A prison. A theatre. A church. Walls. A view.”

“Not for me, thank you,” said Harriet, after a weighty pause.

“Nobody asked you, Miss, you see. Now Lilia was asked by such a nice young gentleman, with curls all over his forehead, and teeth just as white as father makes them.” Then his manner changed. “But, Harriet, do you see nothing wonderful or attractive in that place–nothing at all?”

“Nothing at all. It’s frightful.”

“I know it is. But it’s old–awfully old.”

“Beauty is the only test,” said Harriet. “At least so you told me when I sketched old buildings–for the sake, I suppose, of making yourself unpleasant.”

“Oh, I’m perfectly right. But at the same time–I don’t know–so many things have happened here–people have lived so hard and so splendidly–I can’t explain.”

“I shouldn’t think you could. It doesn’t seem the best moment to begin your Italy mania. I thought you were cured of it by now. Instead, will you kindly tell me what you are going to do when you arrive. I do beg you will not be taken unawares this time.”

“First, Harriet, I shall settle you at the Stella d’Italia, in the comfort that befits your sex and disposition. Then I shall make myself some tea. After tea I shall take a book into Santa Deodata’s, and read there. It is always fresh and cool.”

The martyred Harriet exclaimed, “I’m not clever, Philip. I don’t go in for it, as you know. But I know what’s rude. And I know what’s wrong.”

“Meaning–?”

“You!” she shouted, bouncing on the cushions of the legno and startling all the fleas. “What’s the good of cleverness if a man’s murdered a woman?”

“Harriet, I am hot. To whom do you refer?”

“He. Her. If you don’t look out he’ll murder you. I wish he would.”

“Tut tut, tutlet! You’d find a corpse extraordinarily inconvenient.” Then he tried to be less aggravating. “I heartily dislike the fellow, but we know he didn’t murder her. In that letter, though she said a lot, she never said he was physically cruel.”

“He has murdered her. The things he did–things one can’t even mention–”

“Things which one must mention if one’s to talk at all. And things which one must keep in their proper place. Because he was unfaithful to his wife, it doesn’t follow that in every way he’s absolutely vile.” He looked at the city. It seemed to approve his remark.

“It’s the supreme test. The man who is unchivalrous to a woman–”

“Oh, stow it! Take it to the Back Kitchen. It’s no more a supreme test than anything else. The Italians never were chivalrous from the first. If you condemn him for that, you’ll condemn the whole lot.”

“I condemn the whole lot.”

“And the French as well?”

“And the French as well.”

“Things aren’t so jolly easy,” said Philip, more to himself than to her.

But for Harriet things were easy, though not jolly, and she turned upon her brother yet again. “What about the baby, pray? You’ve said a lot of smart things and whittled away morality and religion and I don’t know what; but what about the baby? You think me a fool, but I’ve been noticing you all today, and you haven’t mentioned the baby once. You haven’t thought about it, even. You don’t care. Philip! I shall not speak to you. You are intolerable.”

She kept her promise, and never opened her lips all the rest of the way. But her eyes glowed with anger and resolution. For she was a straight, brave woman, as well as a peevish one.

Philip acknowledged her reproof to be true. He did not care about the baby one straw. Nevertheless, he meant to do his duty, and he was fairly confident of success. If Gino would have sold his wife for a thousand lire, for how much less would he not sell his child? It was just a commercial transaction. Why should it interfere with other things? His eyes were fixed on the towers again, just as they had been fixed when he drove with Miss Abbott. But this time his thoughts were pleasanter, for he had no such grave business on his mind. It was in the spirit of the cultivated tourist that he approached his destination.

One of the towers, rough as any other, was topped by a cross–the tower of the Collegiate Church of Santa Deodata. She was a holy maiden of the Dark Ages, the city’s patron saint, and sweetness and barbarity mingle strangely in her story. So holy was she that all her life she lay upon her back in the house of her mother, refusing to eat, refusing to play, refusing to work. The devil, envious of such sanctity, tempted her in various ways. He dangled grapes above her, he showed her fascinating toys, he pushed soft pillows beneath her aching head. When all proved vain he tripped up the mother and flung her downstairs before her very eyes. But so holy was the saint that she never picked her mother up, but lay upon her back through all, and thus assured her throne in Paradise. She was only fifteen when she died, which shows how much is within the reach of any school-girl. Those who think her life was unpractical need only think of the victories upon Poggibonsi, San Gemignano, Volterra, Siena itself–all gained through the invocation of her name; they need only look at the church which rose over her grave. The grand schemes for a marble facade were never carried out, and it is brown unfinished stone until this day. But for the inside Giotto was summoned to decorate the walls of the nave. Giotto came–that is to say, he did not come, German research having decisively proved–but at all events the nave is covered with frescoes, and so are two chapels in the left transept, and the arch into the choir, and there are scraps in the choir itself. There the decoration stopped, till in the full spring of the Renaissance a great painter came to pay a few weeks’ visit to his friend the Lord of Monteriano. In the intervals between the banquets and the discussions on Latin etymology and the dancing, he would stroll over to the church, and there in the fifth chapel to the right he has painted two frescoes of the death and burial of Santa Deodata. That is why Baedeker gives the place a star.

Santa Deodata was better company than Harriet, and she kept Philip in a pleasant dream until the legno drew up at the hotel. Every one there was asleep, for it was still the hour when only idiots were moving. There were not even any beggars about. The cabman put their bags down in the passage–they had left heavy luggage at the station–and strolled about till he came on the landlady’s room and woke her, and sent her to them.

Then Harriet pronounced the monosyllable “Go!”

“Go where?” asked Philip, bowing to the landlady, who was swimming down the stairs.

“To the Italian. Go.”

“Buona sera, signora padrona. Si ritorna volontieri a Monteriano! (Don’t be a goose. I’m not going now. You’re in the way, too.) “Vorrei due camere–”

“Go. This instant. Now. I’ll stand it no longer. Go!”

“I’m damned if I’ll go. I want my tea.”

“Swear if you like!” she cried. “Blaspheme! Abuse me! But understand, I’m in earnest.”

“Harriet, don’t act. Or act better.”

“We’ve come here to get the baby back, and for nothing else. I’ll not have this levity and slackness, and talk about pictures and churches. Think of mother; did she send you out for THEM?”

“Think of mother and don’t straddle across the stairs. Let the cabman and the landlady come down, and let me go up and choose rooms.”

“I shan’t.”

“Harriet, are you mad?”

“If you like. But you will not come up till you have seen the Italian.”

“La signorina si sente male,” said Philip, “C’ e il sole.”

“Poveretta!” cried the landlady and the cabman.

“Leave me alone!” said Harriet, snarling round at them. “I don’t care for the lot of you. I’m English, and neither you’ll come down nor he up till he goes for the baby.”

“La prego-piano-piano-c e un’ altra signorina che dorme–”

“We shall probably be arrested for brawling, Harriet. Have you the very slightest sense of the ludicrous?”

Harriet had not; that was why she could be so powerful. She had concocted this scene in the carriage, and nothing should baulk her of it. To the abuse in front and the coaxing behind she was equally indifferent. How long she would have stood like a glorified Horatius, keeping the staircase at both ends, was never to be known. For the young lady, whose sleep they were disturbing, awoke and opened her bedroom door, and came out on to the landing. She was Miss Abbott.

Philip’s first coherent feeling was one of indignation. To be run by his mother and hectored by his sister was as much as he could stand. The intervention of a third female drove him suddenly beyond politeness. He was about to say exactly what he thought about the thing from beginning to end. But before he could do so Harriet also had seen Miss Abbott. She uttered a shrill cry of joy.

“You, Caroline, here of all people!” And in spite of the heat she darted up the stairs and imprinted an affectionate kiss upon her friend.

Philip had an inspiration. “You will have a lot to tell Miss Abbott, Harriet, and she may have as much to tell you. So I’ll pay my call on Signor Carella, as you suggested, and see how things stand.”

Miss Abbott uttered some noise of greeting or alarm. He did not reply to it or approach nearer to her. Without even paying the cabman, he escaped into the street.

“Tear each other’s eyes out!” he cried, gesticulating at the facade of the hotel. “Give it to her, Harriet! Teach her to leave us alone. Give it to her, Caroline! Teach her to be grateful to you. Go it, ladies; go it!”

Such people as observed him were interested, but did not conclude that he was mad. This aftermath of conversation is not unknown in Italy.

He tried to think how amusing it was; but it would not do–Miss Abbott’s presence affected him too personally. Either she suspected him of dishonesty, or else she was being dishonest herself. He preferred to suppose the latter. Perhaps she had seen Gino, and they had prepared some elaborate mortification for the Herritons. Perhaps Gino had sold the baby cheap to her for a joke: it was just the kind of joke that would appeal to him. Philip still remembered the laughter that had greeted his fruitless journey, and the uncouth push that had toppled him on to the bed. And whatever it might mean, Miss Abbott’s presence spoilt the comedy: she would do nothing funny.

During this short meditation he had walked through the city, and was out on the other side. “Where does Signor Carella live?” he asked the men at the Dogana.

“I’ll show you,” said a little girl, springing out of the ground as Italian children will.

“She will show you,” said the Dogana men, nodding reassuringly. “Follow her always, always, and you will come to no harm. She is a trustworthy guide. She is my daughter.”
cousin.”
sister.”

Philip knew these relatives well: they ramify, if need be, all over the peninsula.

“Do you chance to know whether Signor Carella is in?” he asked her.

She had just seen him go in. Philip nodded. He was looking forward to the interview this time: it would be an intellectual duet with a man of no great intellect. What was Miss Abbott up to? That was one of the things he was going to discover. While she had it out with Harriet, he would have it out with Gino. He followed the Dogana’s relative softly, like a diplomatist.

He did not follow her long, for this was the Volterra gate, and the house was exactly opposite to it. In half a minute they had scrambled down the mule-track and reached the only practicable entrance. Philip laughed, partly at the thought of Lilia in such a building, partly in the confidence of victory. Meanwhile the Dogana’s relative lifted up her voice and gave a shout.

For an impressive interval there was no reply. Then the figure of a woman appeared high up on the loggia.

“That is Perfetta,” said the girl.

“I want to see Signor Carella,” cried Philip.

“Out!”

“Out,” echoed the girl complacently.

“Why on earth did you say he was in?” He could have strangled her for temper. He had been just ripe for an interview–just the right combination of indignation and acuteness: blood hot, brain cool. But nothing ever did go right in Monteriano. “When will he be back?” he called to Perfetta. It really was too bad.

She did not know. He was away on business. He might be back this evening, he might not. He had gone to Poggibonsi.

At the sound of this word the little girl put her fingers to her nose and swept them at the plain. She sang as she did so, even as her foremothers had sung seven hundred years back–

Poggibonizzi, fatti in la,
Che Monteriano si fa citta!

Then she asked Philip for a halfpenny. A German lady, friendly to the Past, had given her one that very spring.

“I shall have to leave a message,” he called.

“Now Perfetta has gone for her basket,” said the little girl. “When she returns she will lower it–so. Then you will put your card into it. Then she will raise it–thus. By this means–”

When Perfetta returned, Philip remembered to ask after the baby. It took longer to find than the basket, and he stood perspiring in the evening sun, trying to avoid the smell of the drains and to prevent the little girl from singing against Poggibonsi. The olive-trees beside him were draped with the weekly–or more probably the monthly–wash. What a frightful spotty blouse! He could not think where he had seen it. Then he remembered that it was Lilia’s. She had brought it “to hack about in” at Sawston, and had taken it to Italy because “in Italy anything does.” He had rebuked her for the sentiment.

“Beautiful as an angel!” bellowed Perfetta, holding out something which must be Lilia’s baby. “But who am I addressing?”

“Thank you–here is my card.” He had written on it a civil request to Gino for an interview next morning. But before he placed it in the basket and revealed his identity, he wished to find something out. “Has a young lady happened to call here lately–a young English lady?”

Perfetta begged his pardon: she was a little deaf.

“A young lady–pale, large, tall.”

She did not quite catch.

“A YOUNG LADY!”

“Perfetta is deaf when she chooses,” said the Dogana’s relative. At last Philip admitted the peculiarity and strode away. He paid off the detestable child at the Volterra gate. She got two nickel pieces and was not pleased, partly because it was too much, partly because he did not look pleased when he gave it to her. He caught her fathers and cousins winking at each other as he walked past them. Monteriano seemed in one conspiracy to make him look a fool. He felt tired and anxious and muddled, and not sure of anything except that his temper was lost. In this mood he returned to the Stella d’Italia, and there, as he was ascending the stairs, Miss Abbott popped out of the dining-room on the first floor and beckoned to him mysteriously.

“I was going to make myself some tea,” he said, with his hand still on the banisters.

“I should be grateful–”

So he followed her into the dining-room and shut the door.

“You see,” she began, “Harriet knows nothing.”

“No more do I. He was out.”

“But what’s that to do with it?”

He presented her with an unpleasant smile. She fenced well, as he had noticed before. “He was out. You find me as ignorant as you have left Harriet.”

“What do you mean? Please, please Mr. Herriton, don’t be mysterious: there isn’t the time. Any moment Harriet may be down, and we shan’t have decided how to behave to her. Sawston was different: we had to keep up appearances. But here we must speak out, and I think I can trust you to do it. Otherwise we’ll never start clear.”

“Pray let us start clear,” said Philip, pacing up and down the room. “Permit me to begin by asking you a question. In which capacity have you come to Monteriano–spy or traitor?”

“Spy!” she answered, without a moment’s hesitation. She was standing by the little Gothic window as she spoke–the hotel had been a palace once–and with her finger she was following the curves of the moulding as if they might feel beautiful and strange. “Spy,” she repeated, for Philip was bewildered at learning her guilt so easily, and could not answer a word. “Your mother has behaved dishonourably all through. She never wanted the child; no harm in that; but she is too proud to let it come to me. She has done all she could to wreck things; she did not tell you everything; she has told Harriet nothing at all; she has lied or acted lies everywhere. I cannot trust your mother. So I have come here alone–all across Europe; no one knows it; my father thinks I am in Normandy–to spy on Mrs. Herriton. Don’t let’s argue!” for he had begun, almost mechanically, to rebuke her for impertinence. “If you are here to get the child, I will help you; if you are here to fail, I shall get it instead of you.”

“It is hopeless to expect you to believe me,” he stammered. “But I can assert that we are here to get the child, even if it costs us all we’ve got. My mother has fixed no money limit whatever. I am here to carry out her instructions. I think that you will approve of them, as you have practically dictated them. I do not approve of them. They are absurd.”

She nodded carelessly. She did not mind what he said. All she wanted was to get the baby out of Monteriano.

“Harriet also carries out your instructions,” he continued. “She, however, approves of them, and does not know that they proceed from you. I think, Miss Abbott, you had better take entire charge of the rescue party. I have asked for an interview with Signor Carella tomorrow morning. Do you acquiesce?”

She nodded again.

“Might I ask for details of your interview with him? They might be helpful to me.”

He had spoken at random. To his delight she suddenly collapsed. Her hand fell from the window. Her face was red with more than the reflection of evening.

“My interview–how do you know of it?”

“From Perfetta, if it interests you.”

“Who ever is Perfetta?”

“The woman who must have let you in.”

“In where?”

“Into Signor Carella’s house.”

“Mr. Herriton!” she exclaimed. “How could you believe her? Do you suppose that I would have entered that man’s house, knowing about him all that I do? I think you have very odd ideas of what is possible for a lady. I hear you wanted Harriet to go. Very properly she refused. Eighteen months ago I might have done such a thing. But I trust I have learnt how to behave by now.”

Philip began to see that there were two Miss Abbotts–the Miss Abbott who could travel alone to Monteriano, and the Miss Abbott who could not enter Gino’s house when she got there. It was an amusing discovery. Which of them would respond to his next move?

“I suppose I misunderstood Perfetta. Where did you have your interview, then?”

“Not an interview–an accident–I am very sorry–I meant you to have the chance of seeing him first. Though it is your fault. You are a day late. You were due here yesterday. So I came yesterday, and, not finding you, went up to the Rocca–you know that kitchen-garden where they let you in, and there is a ladder up to a broken tower, where you can stand and see all the other towers below you and the plain and all the other hills?”

“Yes, yes. I know the Rocca; I told you of it.”

“So I went up in the evening for the sunset: I had nothing to do. He was in the garden: it belongs to a friend of his.”

“And you talked.”

“It was very awkward for me. But I had to talk: he seemed to make me. You see he thought I was here as a tourist; he thinks so still. He intended to be civil, and I judged it better to be civil also.”

“And of what did you talk?”

“The weather–there will be rain, he says, by tomorrow evening–the other towns, England, myself, about you a little, and he actually mentioned Lilia. He was perfectly disgusting; he pretended he loved her; he offered to show me her grave–the grave of the woman he has murdered!”

“My dear Miss Abbott, he is not a murderer. I have just been driving that into Harriet. And when you know the Italians as well as I do, you will realize that in all that he said to you he was perfectly sincere. The Italians are essentially dramatic; they look on death and love as spectacles. I don’t doubt that he persuaded himself, for the moment, that he had behaved admirably, both as husband and widower.”

“You may be right,” said Miss Abbott, impressed for the first time. “When I tried to pave the way, so to speak–to hint that he had not behaved as he ought–well, it was no good at all. He couldn’t or wouldn’t understand.”

There was something very humorous in the idea of Miss Abbott approaching Gino, on the Rocca, in the spirit of a district visitor. Philip, whose temper was returning, laughed.

“Harriet would say he has no sense of sin.”

“Harriet may be right, I am afraid.”

“If so, perhaps he isn’t sinful!”

Miss Abbott was not one to encourage levity. “I know what he has done,” she said. “What he says and what he thinks is of very little importance.”

Philip smiled at her crudity. “I should like to hear, though, what he said about me. Is he preparing a warm reception?”

“Oh, no, not that. I never told him that you and Harriet were coming. You could have taken him by surprise if you liked. He only asked for you, and wished he hadn’t been so rude to you eighteen months ago.”

“What a memory the fellow has for little things!” He turned away as he spoke, for he did not want her to see his face. It was suffused with pleasure. For an apology, which would have been intolerable eighteen months ago, was gracious and agreeable now.

She would not let this pass. “You did not think it a little thing at the time. You told me he had assaulted you.”

“I lost my temper,” said Philip lightly. His vanity had been appeased, and he knew it. This tiny piece of civility had changed his mood. “Did he really–what exactly did he say?”

“He said he was sorry–pleasantly, as Italians do say such things. But he never mentioned the baby once.”

What did the baby matter when the world was suddenly right way up? Philip smiled, and was shocked at himself for smiling, and smiled again. For romance had come back to Italy; there were no cads in her; she was beautiful, courteous, lovable, as of old. And Miss Abbott–she, too, was beautiful in her way, for all her gaucheness and conventionality. She really cared about life, and tried to live it properly. And Harriet–even Harriet tried.