CHAPTER XXI.

They were received by Fulvia alone.

‘My husband is intensely disappointed,’ she said, ‘but he is not at all well to-day. Dr. Brownrigg was here this morning, and absolutely forbade his coming in to dinner. You will be kind enough to take me by myself.’

They had all enough _savoir faire_ not to betray their great exultation at the announcement, and to say, without even a conscious look amongst them, that they were sorry Mr. Marchmont was suffering.

The dinner was a charming one. The conversation never ceased, and Marchmont’s name was scarcely mentioned. When the meal was over--they had lingered over it--they all went out of the dining-room together. In the hall Fulvia said:

‘If you want to smoke, do it now. I am going to ask Mrs. Hastings to do me a favour. Come with me,’ she added, turning to Minna. ‘I must just go and speak to him for a few moments before we go to the drawing-room.’

Minna assented, and they went to Marchmont’s rooms.

They found him in the midst of his luxuries--the softly shaded lights, the cunningly padded couches, the endless appliances for securing ease and comfort. He was already beginning to look very much flushed; his hard eyes were bright, and his twisted mouth looked more askew, more grotesquely sardonic than ever.

When he saw Minna, he made an effort at something approaching politeness, but he looked at his wife with an irritated impatience which he did not attempt to conceal.

‘What have you been doing?’ he asked snappishly. ‘Does it take over two hours for four people to eat their dinner? I thought you were never coming.’

‘Have we been so long? We were enjoying ourselves, I suppose,’ said Fulvia, with a slight smile, as she approached his couch. ‘Che, che! Don’t excite yourself, or you will have a dreadfully bad night. You know you will.’

She spoke lightly, as one would speak to a fretful child, but without any of the tenderness one would use to such a child. Her face was hard, and her eyes undisturbed.

‘Go and stand a little way off,’ he told her, not heeding what she had said to him. ‘I want to see what you look like. What gown is that? How long have you had it? It’s a new one.’ He spoke excitedly.

‘Indeed it is not. I have had it on several times. The flowers are different, that’s all.’

‘A preposterous dress for the occasion,’ he said crossly, but his eyes devoured the figure that wore it, and the face that looked so coldly and quietly down upon him from a little distance away.

‘That is very polite to Mrs. Hastings, who has done me the honour to come in evening dress,’ said Fulvia, and she pushed a chair forward for Minna. ‘Sit down here,’ she said to her, looking at her with, as Minna could not help thinking, an underlying feeling of some kind--hatred, or despair, or a boundless ennui, under the forced patience of her eyes--for they were patient, those eyes of Fulvia Marchmont, or, if it were not patience, it was death that was in them--the death of all susceptibility and sensibility.

‘I meant no harm to Mrs. Hastings,’ said Marchmont with a kind of disgusted apology in his tone. Then, after a pause, when both the women were seated, he began:

‘Fulvia, this doctor here isn’t up to anything. I ought to have been on my legs again long before now. Why don’t you hurry him up? I believe you are in league together, he and you, to keep me ill.’

‘What a horridly uncomfortable feeling to have!’ said his wife dryly. ‘Not a feeling I should like to have at all. I would much rather die at once than be always suspecting that the people about me were slowly killing me.’

‘Die!’ he repeated angrily. ‘I don’t mean to die, I can tell you. I mean to get well again--of course I shall. Bless my soul! I’m only five-and-thirty now. The idea of a man of five-and-thirty being incurably ill! Ridiculous! But I need very thorough treatment, and he doesn’t give it to me. He does nothing to make me well.’

‘No? What do you mean? What do you want doing?’

‘I want to have him dismissed, and another sent for.’

‘Another? They are not so plentiful here. You remember what the man in London said about you?’

‘Of course--every word.’

‘Well, has anything been neglected which he advised? You have the little book in which I wrote it all out. You can check off each thing, and judge for yourself whether or not his orders have been obeyed. He’s the first authority in the world on such matters, and you know it.’

A kind of inarticulate growl or snarl was the response. Fulvia went on:

‘If you mistrust Mr. Brownrigg to such an extent, you had better tell him so yourself--I shall not do it, for I think him most conscientious, and much cleverer than one would expect to find a country practitioner in an out-of-the-way place like this.’

‘I have told him more than once,’ said Marchmont sulkily.

‘You have? And what does he say to it? I should really like to know.’

‘Sometimes he laughs. The last time he was quite angry because I said something about you. He said, “Come! none of that,” or something like it. It’s no good. They are either in love with you or afraid of you, all the lot of them. The next time I see a doctor I don’t intend you to come near till I’ve had it all out with him, and got to know his real opinion about me.’

‘I am sure I shall be very glad to be away,’ replied Fulvia with icy indifference. ‘We have talked long enough about this, too. I didn’t bring Mrs. Hastings to have anything of this kind inflicted upon her. Do you know what we were talking about at dinner?’

‘No--and don’t want to.’

‘Very well; we’ll say good-evening, then. It is too great a penance for my visitor.--Come!’ She looked at Minna, and rose.

Minna followed her example.

‘Don’t go, Fulvia!’ cried her husband in a thin, piercing voice, which had a sound in it of fretful tears. ‘Can’t you understand what a man feels like, mewed up here all day, and not able to do anything that anyone else can?’

‘Oh, it must be very unpleasant, I am sure,’ she replied with perfect tranquillity. ‘But that is no reason why other people should be made uncomfortable by your discomfort.--Come!’ She again turned to Minna, with a smile.

‘You will come back again?’ he cried in a persistent, shrill voice.

‘Oh, of course I shall come as usual,’ she replied.

Minna shook hands with the poor little suspicious, fretful mummy of a creature, disliking him a degree less than she had ever done before. He was being punished so obviously and so severely.

They left the room, and went back towards the drawing-room.

‘A man!’ ejaculated Fulvia, half to herself, as she paused for a moment, and then gave a kind of laugh. ‘A man--già!’

Minna made no remark beyond one to the effect that he really seemed very ill.

‘Oh yes, he is very ill,’ replied Fulvia, shrugging her shoulders.

They found Hans and Mr. Hamilton in the drawing-room waiting for them. They sat down in a group near one of the windows, and left the rest of the great cold-looking room to itself. The light grew dimmer and dimmer. A servant came with a lamp. Fulvia bade him place it on a table in the corner, and not to bring any more lights. It made a radiant soft yellow glow in the background, with its gold-silk shade. They talked in low voices about Italy, even about Rome. Hans’ eye roved round the walls as if in search of something.

‘What are you looking for, as if you missed something?’ Fulvia asked him.

‘There is hardly a trace here, if any, that you are a foreigner, and have lived abroad most of your time,’ he said, laughing. ‘I speak, of course, from an English point of view.’

‘What a fine irony!’ observed Mr. Hamilton carelessly.

Hans looked nettled.

Fulvia said he was right.

‘So far as this room goes, at any rate,’ she added. ‘But Mrs. Hastings knows that I have things upstairs, in my own sitting-room.’

‘For example?’

‘Oh,’ said Fulvia very gently, but with a change in her voice for all that, ‘two of Melozzo da Forli’s angels.’

‘Those in the Sacristy dei Canonici, do you mean?’ asked Hans eagerly.

‘Yes, the divinely sentimental one, and the one with a drum--a kind of drum; do you remember? I have other things, too. Some of those white angels which are in one of the chapels, a broken-down place belonging to S. Gregorio Magno. Do you remember those, too?’

‘Do I remember?’ he again repeated. ‘Per Dio! do I remember?’

‘I should never have seen those pictures but for Mrs. Hastings,’ continued Fulvia. ‘I don’t think Roman girls as a rule know much of what there is all around them in their own city. Even Bep----’

She stopped suddenly and crimsoned. There was a silence. Even Fulvia was embarrassed. Minna came to the rescue by asking Hans about his travels of last year.

He related some of his adventures in out-of-the-way places, and said carelessly that he thought of going soon to the Caucasus, where there was magnificent scenery, and of there making a series of landscape and costume studies, bringing them home, and exhibiting them in London.

‘Of course I should make them very realistic and very bizarre,’ he added; ‘that is the only road to name and fortune now. Of course, too, if I went, I should have to stay an awfully long time to accomplish what I want to do.’

Another pause. Minna wondered if it was only her excited imagination which saw a leaden pallor overspread Fulvia’s face. It was Mr. Hamilton who at last asked, in a dry kind of voice:

‘Should you go for pleasure exactly?’

‘For pleasure and for art,’ replied Hans promptly. ‘For what else should I go?’

‘There might be many reasons,’ was the reply, in a tone of profound indifference. Yet to this indifference there was, as it were, an edge which seemed in some way to pique or offend Hans. He rose suddenly from his chair, observing abruptly:

‘I cannot tell what on earth you mean, Hamilton.’ Then he stood before the window which looked across the park. ‘From here,’ he observed, in a strangled kind of voice, ‘one can see the trees of your garden, Minna.’

‘What a discovery! what a revelation to me!’ said she, laughing. ‘Have you only just found it out?’

‘Doubt is cast upon everything that I say,’ exclaimed Hans, in a tone of annoyance. ‘Were you aware of those trees, Mrs. Marchmont?’

‘Yes.’

‘Coming to the edge of the wood, one might signal, if necessary, to the Hall. Did you never find it unpleasant, Minna, when the Parkynsons were here?’

‘Certainly not. The Parkynsons were well-behaved people, and I trust I am the same. Why should I have found it unpleasant?’

After this exchange of civilities of a dubious kind, the conversation flagged. Though it was nearing the end of July, the light continued strong and clear in that Northern sky until a late hour. They did not stay till late--left, in fact, so early that it was still daylight out-of-doors, and Fulvia said she would walk with them part of the way. She took a light shawl over her arm, and they paced slowly along in the delicious summer evening. The air was filled with scents of flowers and hay; the thick trees stood motionless: their voices, if they raised them in the least, sounded echoing and clear.

‘It is lovely,’ said Fulvia, with a full sigh as of one who passes suddenly from pain to ease. She looked up into the glory of the darkening sky. ‘It rests one only to feel it.’

She was walking in advance with Minna and Richard Hamilton. The gravel drive was wide enough for half a dozen persons to walk abreast upon it, but Hans hung behind. As they drew near Minna’s domain, Fulvia said she must turn back. It was then that Hans stepped forward, saying in a matter-of-course tone:

‘You will not go alone. I shall walk with you to the house.’

‘As you like,’ replied Fulvia indifferently.

She took leave of Minna and Mr. Hamilton, and turned. Hans was by her side.

The brother and sister went on in silence for a little time, till at last Minna said, in a tone of vexation, deep though muffled:

‘That was pretty strong, I must say. Richard, why did you not go back with them too?’

‘Do you think they wanted me?’

‘What does it matter whether they wanted you or not? I wish--oh, I wish so many things! You do not know how wild with vexation I was, when I saw Hans sitting beside you in the waggonette that evening! It was such impudence in him to come without an invitation!’

‘He said you had invited him.’

‘I never did. He invited himself. Of course I could not say no. From the very first I have mistrusted him. He was in love with her in Rome when she was a mere child, and----’

Mr. Hamilton shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t think you see the situation clearly,’ he said, in his indifferent way. ‘There is a situation, and it is one in which no outsider can do anything. For her,’ he added after a full stop, ‘except herself, of course. Whether she is strong or weak, it will prove.’

‘She is strong,’ Minna asseverated, almost passionately. ‘She must be tremendously strong, or how could she have lived through all she has had to live through, and have come out of it so splendidly?’

‘That’s one kind of strength--a purely negative kind, of which you women constantly possess so much. Her pride has helped her through that, and an obstinate determination not to be dragged down by her husband to his level. She has brains, so of course the suffering must have been much more acute than if she had been a mere block of wood. But people can so often be strong through every kind of cruelty and hardness, and yet collapse at the first word of affection or sympathy--especially that kind of sympathy, of one sex to the other.’

‘Oh Richard! The first word!’

‘I am saying nothing. I say, if she is to be helped out of this, it must be by her own strength.’

‘I wish Hans were in the Caucasus now, and would stay there,’ she said, with a bitter, uneasy resentment.

‘But he isn’t. And the Caucasus is a long way off. Here we are, at your house, and here is Signor Oriole walking about the garden.’

Signor Giuseppe was pacing about a round sweep of gravel in front of the house, his hands clasped behind him, his head slightly bowed, his eyes fixed upon the marks left in the gravel by his own footsteps.

He was so lost in thought that Minna had to speak his name before he noticed them.

‘You have returned?’ he said, smiling; and then, looking round, his face suddenly became shadowed.

‘Riemann?’ he asked. ‘Where is he?’

‘Here at your service,’ replied Hans, just behind them, and Minna, at least, instantly began to be thoroughly ashamed of what she called her own unworthy suspicions. She spoke to Hans with a cordiality which was almost eager.

They lingered a little out-of-doors, still enjoying the beauty of the night, and loath to leave it. Then the whole party went into the house.