IV
Thus it came about that the genetic word was spoken. To stop its effect was now beyond the power of man. Thenceforward it remained for the Younger only to stand by and admire his handiwork.
Events were by no means slow in materialising. The Elder quickly reported on the knockers. Melconi, the sculptor, had taken a cast and was to remodel the head in accordance with the Younger’s suggestion. The prospective donor was already engaged upon a sequence of sonnets—in the manner of Petrarch, he said—to accompany the gift. In the meantime he had ascertained that Susannah would not draw a tranquil breath until she possessed a certain heraldic shield, an old stone coat-of-arms which hung high above the street on the corner of a house across the Arno. He had accordingly entered into negotiation with the owner of the house, had acquired for a fabulous sum the shield in question and had borne it in triumph to the expectant Susannah.
This was but the beginning. The Younger no longer needed to offer suggestions. The Elder’s own imagination was fertilised, and now that he knew how ladies were wooed in America he purposed to win Susannah. That young woman expressed no fleeting fancy which her admirer did not at once embody for her in some form of art. She could not look with favour on the moon but that the marquis would run to order of his jeweller a replica of that heavenly orb, in material far more precious than the original. He could think only in terms of the idea which the Younger had implanted in his mind. The door of the villino swung unceasingly to messengers from the goldsmith, the dealer in antiques, the florist, the pastry cook. Even the upholsterer went, and to all was displayed an equal hospitality.
At this the Younger began to feel a secret irritation. He was amused. He was gratified to find his types turn out so typical. But it seemed to him they overdid it. He had not really supposed that Susannah was so bad as that. It verged on the scandalous. Unless—but it could mean only one thing.
Matters, however, proved not to be so simple, after all. There came a day when the Elder entered the studio in a state of mind more perturbed than any he had yet betrayed.
“She has refused me,” he called out. “What do you think of that?”
The Younger did not know what to think of it. While, on the one hand, he could not restrain a certain gratification at Susannah’s discernment, he deprecated, on the other, her amazing course with regard to the presents. But the Elder left him no time to muse.
“And what do you suppose she said?” he continued excitedly. “She said she wasn’t sure how much I really cared for her. How much! She holds out her hand for everything I bring and then she agreeably withdraws it when she sees nothing more. After I have made myself the talk of the town!”
“Well, you know what I told you,” remarked the Younger, who was much at sea. “Did you expect to bribe her?”
“Yes, I know what you told me. And I know what to think of such people.”
The Younger shrugged his shoulders.
“If that is the way you take it, I begin to think Susannah is right.”
The Elder threw him a look.
“But what does she want?” he cried, clasping his hands dramatically in the air. “What does she want that I can’t give her? What is she now, compared to what she would be as my wife?”
The Younger examined his finger nails.
“You have already had some opportunity to learn that an American girl is the most unfettered creature in the universe. She may think it more amusing to stay so than to become an Italian marchioness.”
“I thought you said they were respectable—your famous jeunes filles,” exclaimed the Elder sarcastically.
The Younger shrugged his shoulders.
“At any rate she won’t stay jeune forever. And what is she now, compared to what she would become? She is nobody, whereas my wife——” A handsome gesture left the Younger to figure that personage. “Then she evidently finds the attractions of this country superior to the rather problematical ones—if you will pardon me!—of her own. She says every day she is going, but she never goes.”
“Well, she is at least free to go. And you must remember that America is gilded with the associations of an unbitted youth. There is but an open door between her and an iridescent dream. When Europe has no more to offer her champing spirit she has but to step back into that happy hunting-ground of the jeune fille. Whereas with you—the door would close behind her.”
The Elder put this from him with a twist of head and hand. “Excuse me, caro mio, if I seem to allude to personal matters. But you will remember that at Viareggio, that first time, you attributed something of your own coolness to—to the fact——”
“Of being a pauper?” filled out the Younger cheerfully. “Yes.”
“Well, if I must say it, she could do much worse than to marry me. Doesn’t she know?”
“That is true,” admitted the Younger, studying his nails anew. From another these facts somehow came with less grace. So he contented himself with adding: “But she might also do better.”
“How?” interrogated the Elder, turning savagely upon him. “What more, I ask you, can a respectable girl want? In God’s name, what more?”
The Younger suddenly knew that he approved enough of Susannah’s discernment to suspend judgment upon her bad taste.
“Perhaps what you call ‘respectability,’ for one thing,” he suggested. “And for another——” He pulled up. “Yet she has that already. So why should she want it?”
“What?” demanded the Elder. “I will give her whatever she wants. What is it?”
The way in which he shouted it made the Younger look out of the window.
“Youth,” he replied.
There was a silence. There was such a silence that the Younger knew he had been a fool. He turned around with the intention of smoothing things over a bit, and the look which he caught on the Elder’s face deepened his pang.
But the marquis, giving him no time, passed it off.
“Eh, my young friend, you have hit it on the head. But never mind. I have not made myself the talk of the town for nothing. And Miss Susannah shall find it out. I will go on as I have begun. I will pay her such attention, I will give her such presents, that even she—even she—will find that she is compromised. Then I will tell you whom she will marry.”
And with this delicate intimation he stalked away.