The Complete Short Stories of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells
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answered. “If you didn’t intend to stop here, your train will be leaving in a moment.”
“I meant to get off, I suppose,” she said. “I don’t believe I’m going any farther.” She leaned back against the bars of the bench, and put up one of her slim arms along the top.
There was something wrong. Lanfear now felt that, in spite of her perfect tranquillity and self-possession; perhaps because of it. He had no business to stay there talking with her, but he had not quite the right to leave her, though practically he had got his dismissal, and apparently she was quite capable of taking care of herself, or could have been so in a country where any woman’s defencelessness was not any man’s advantage. He could not go away without some effort to be of use.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Can I help you in calling a carriage; or looking after your hand-baggage—it will be getting dark—perhaps your maid—”
“My maid!” The girl frowned again, with a measure of the amazement which she showed when he mentioned her father. “I have no maid!”
Lanfear blurted desperately out: “You are alone? You came—you are going to stay here—alone?”
“Quite alone,” she said, with a passivity in which there was no resentment, and no feeling unless it were a certain color of dignity. Almost at the same time, with a glance beside and beyond him, she called out joyfully: “Ah, there you are!” and Lanfear turned, and saw scuffling and heard puffing towards them the short, stout elderly gentleman who had sent him to her. “I knew you would come before long!”
“Well, I thought it was pretty long, myself,” the gentleman said, and then he courteously referred himself to Lanfear. “I’m afraid this gentleman has found it rather long, too; but I couldn’t manage it a moment sooner.”
Lanfear said: “Not at all. I wish I could have been of any use to—”
“My daughter—Miss Gerald, Mr.—”
“Lanfear—Dr. Lanfear,” he said, accepting the introduction; and the girl bowed.
“Oh, doctor, eh?” the father said, with a certain impression. “Going to stop here?”
“A few days,” Lanfear answered, making way for the forward movement which the others began.
“Well, well! I’m very much obliged to you, very much, indeed; and I’m sure my daughter is.”
The girl said, “Oh yes, indeed,” rather indifferently, and then as they passed him, while he stood lifting his hat, she turned radiantly on him. “Thank you, ever so much!” she said, with the gentle voice which he had already thought charming.
The father called back: “I hope we shall meet again. We are going to the Sardegna.”
Lanfear had been going to the Sardegna himself, but while he bowed he now decided upon another hotel.
The mystery, whatever it was, that the brave, little, fat father was carrying off so bluffly, had clearly the morbid quality of unhealth in it, and Lanfear could not give himself freely to a young pleasure in the girl’s dark beauty of eyes and hair, her pale, irregular, piquant face, her slender figure and flowing walk. He was in the presence of something else, something that appealed to his scientific side, to that which was humane more than that which was human in him, and abashed him in the other feeling. Unless she was out of her mind there was no way of accounting for her behavior, except by some caprice which was itself scarcely short of insanity. She must have thought she knew him when he approached, and when she addressed him those first words; but when he had tried to set her right she had not changed; and why had she denied her father, and then hailed him with joy when he came back to her? She had known that she intended to stop at San Remo, but she had not known where she had stopped when she asked what place it was. She was consciously an invalid of some sort, for she spoke of getting well under sunsets like that which had now waned, but what sort of invalid was she?
II
Lanfear’s question persisted through the night, and it helped, with the coughing in the next room, to make a bad night for him. None of the hotels in San Remo receive consumptive patients, but none are without somewhere a bronchial cough. If it is in the room next yours it keeps you awake, but it is not pulmonary; you may comfort yourself in your vigils with that fact. Lanfear, however, fancied he had got a poor dinner, and in the morning he did not like his coffee. He thought he had let a foolish scruple keep him from the Grand Hotel Sardegna, and he walked down towards it along the palm-flanked promenade, in the gay morning light, with the tideless sea on the other hand lapping the rough beach beyond the lines of the railroad which borders it. On his way he met files of the beautiful Ligurian women, moving straight under the burdens balanced on their heads, or bestriding the donkeys laden with wine-casks in the roadway, or following beside the carts which the donkeys drew. Ladies of all nations, in the summer fashions of London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York thronged the path. The sky was of a blue so deep, so liquid that it seemed to him he could scoop it in his hand and pour it out again like water. Seaward, he glanced at the fishing-boats lying motionless in the offing, and the coastwise steamer that runs between Nice and Genoa trailing a thin plume of smoke between him and their white sails. With the more definite purpose of making sure of the Grand Hotel Sardegna, he scanned the different villa slopes that showed their level lines of white and yellow and dull pink through the gray tropical greenery on the different levels of the hills. He was duly rewarded by the sight of the bold legend topping its cornice, and when he let his eye descend the garden to a little pavilion on the wall overlooking the road, he saw his acquaintances of the evening before making a belated breakfast. The father recognized Lanfear first and spoke to his daughter, who looked up from her coffee and down towards him where he wavered, lifting his hat, and bowed smiling to him. He had no reason to cross the roadway towards the white stairway which climbed from it to the hotel grounds, but he did so. The father leaned out over the wall, and called down to him: “Won’t you come up and join us, doctor?”
“Why, yes!” Lanfear consented, and in another moment he was shaking hands with the girl, to whom, he noticed, her father named him again. He had in his glad sense of her white morning dress and her hat of green-leafed lace, a feeling that she was somehow meeting him as a friend of indefinite date in an intimacy unconditioned by any past or future time. Her pleasure in his being there was as frank as her father’s, and there was a pretty trust of him in every word and tone which forbade misinterpretation.
“I was just talking about you, doctor,” the father began, “and saying what a pity you hadn’t come to our hotel. It’s a capital place.”
“I’ve been thinking it was a pity I went to mine,” Lanfear returned, “though I’m in San Remo for such a short time it’s scarcely worth while to change.”
“Well, perhaps if you came here, you might stay longer. I guess we’re booked for the winter, Nannie?” He referred the question to his daughter, who asked Lanfear if he would not have some coffee.
“I was going to say I had had my coffee, but I’m not sure it was coffee,” Lanfear began, and he consented, with some demur, banal enough, about the trouble.
“Well, that’s right, then, and no trouble at all,” Mr. Gerald broke in upon him. “Here comes a fellow looking for a chance to bring you some,” and he called to a waiter wandering distractedly about with a “Heigh!” that might have been offensive from a less obviously inoffensive man. “Can you get our friend here a cup and saucer, and some of this good coffee?” he asked, as the waiter approached.
“Yes, certainly, sir,” the man answered in careful English. “Is it not, perhaps, Mr. and Misses Gerald?” he smilingly insinuated, offering some cards.
“Miss Gerald,” the father corrected him as he took the cards. “Why, hello, Nannie! Here are the Bells! Where are