CAMILLA’S FIRST AFFAIR

BY GERTRUDE HALL

Author of “What Camilla did with Her Money,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY EMIL POLLAK-OTTENDORFF

NEVER did there live a pretty woman so poor in faith as Camilla, where the protestations of her adorers were concerned.[5] It was certainly not when they professed to find her charming that she was incredulous, nor yet when they declared themselves épris. It was when they asserted for their sentiments, durability; for themselves, the same conspicuous constancy as distinguishes the north star.

Particularly during the period when she was known as Princess Elaguine, and lived in Paris, was comment made—in those circles where it is thought no shame to talk over lovely ladies—upon the ultimate inaccessibility of the princess, who was yet so ready to be courted. She liked the society of men, delighted in the atmosphere of their lively admiration, accepted their compliments as animals in the Zoo will swallow buns. But she no more reposed confidence in them than she would have reached with her hand through the bars of the wild-beast cages.

A singular case. For she was Italian, and though her eyes were cool and green, there lurked in her face somewhere—her lips, perhaps, or her eyelids, or her cheeks or chin—what physiognomist could tell?—a promise of warmth and richness that drew foolish fellows to press on and on—till they came to a barrier, beyond which she looked at them with ironical eyes which told them that, sorry for them though she was, she did not believe in them one little bit. Not one of her critics had the intelligence, probably, to guess what was at bottom of it. (Yet how common it is, when you find a person afraid of dogs, to discover that he was bitten when a child!) And far from Camilla would it have been to set them on the right scent.

The truth was, in her mind there lived the memory—quite fresh still when she chose to recall it, so deep a mark had it made—of a passage in her youth to which was referable the line of a whole life with regard to the tender passion. It was the memory, as you have guessed, of her first affair.

IT was in Florence, where she was born and brought up. They were tarradiddles which she told later about her origin: that her mother was a Roman marchesa and her father court physician to Victor Emmanuel II, and that her name was Cordez. Her name, as a matter of truth, was Bugiani. Her mother had at one time waited on customers in a village osteria, at another had been a house-servant. The man who called her daughter was something or other at the railway-station. Her aunt was a cook. Her sister Bianca worked in a little shop on Porta Rossa at making straw-braid into hats, with other gossiping little women who ate their simple lunch out of a piece of newspaper. Her brother Olindo was apprenticed to a gardener.

When the truth about Camilla comes out, anybody may know how it happened that she received an education so immeasurably above that enjoyed by the rest of her family—as fine an education for a woman as Florence could afford. The elegant boarding-school where she lived ten months of the year, the Institut Heller, had a reputation to maintain.

Her two-months’ vacation Camilla spent at home, perforce, with her plebeian family, in the hot city.

The house stood in a wide, pleasant street, and had a handsome entrance. The main door, open all day, let you under a high arched way. The door to the ground floor gave on this, and the staircase climbed from it to the upper stories, each occupied by a different family. This passage ended in a court, with a plot of earth and an oleander or two; on this opened the modest quarters of the Bugiani, who in consideration of certain favors performed certain duties.

From all such Camilla was exempt. Antenore—Babbo, she called him—never suggested that she should work in the summer like Bianca, at straw-braiding or some such thing. It went against the grain, but what would you? Being reserved for a different destiny, she must not be creating for herself a past she might blush for, nor yet hardening her hands with labor. So she never answered the night ring at the big front door, never touched the huge pump-handle in the court, by which this house, boasting every modern convenience, was supplied with water in all its kitchens.

Every morning at nine she appeared in the portone dressed for the street, a picture of the well-born, well-bred young lady who never steps out unescorted. But where was her maid, where her duenna? About this matter there was simply nothing to be done. A bitter necessity to Antenore that his young daughters should run about Florence unattended—part of the hardship that drew from him so often the remark that Poverty is a Pig.

Had he been able, however, to keep a constant eye upon Camilla, he would have seen nothing to blame. She went quietly and swiftly, looking neither to right nor left, her well-brought-up eyes slid away from those of Man, appearing to prefer the paving-stones. She conducted herself like the young ladies of good family among whom she had lived; her clothes were such as theirs, their traditions had perfectly become hers; whether escorted or not, she was not to be taken for any but one of them.

Down the long street she walked to the Institut Heller, which occupied the first floor of a characteristic brown Florentine palazzo, at the corner of a wide sunny piazza with a marble-faced old church. Camilla went there to practise. As she had no piano at home, it had been arranged that she should continue during vacation to use the Pleyel upright in the school music-room, and incidentally redirect Mademoiselle Heller’s mail. The servant left as caretaker could neither write nor read.

So at nine daily Camilla would set forth, in a pale yellow batiste and a black hat with a plume, carrying gloves and a parasol. Her charming eyebrows were obscured by the “fringe” which had come into fashion—for this was 1879; a thick braid hung down her neck, where it was turned back and fastened with a velvet bow.

She was not yet very pretty. The green sepals wrapped the folded rose-leaves rather straightly, the future rose hardly yet knew itself to be a rose. Antenore had no such great need to feel uneasiness at the thought of bees and butterflies.

Her little head, of course, was full of the vague dreams of sixteen, which does not mean the dreams of a New England maiden of sixteen. Camilla’s grandmother had been married before that age, one of her schoolmates, only fifteen, had left school to become affianced; the Veronese Juliet, it will be remembered, was fourteen. Though Camilla fulfilled the European ideal of a jeune fille, unstained by so much as an unauthorized breath, and had the pretty, virginal air of such, she may be described, rather than as a stick of green wood, as a little bonfire in preparation—dry brush and resinous pine, all duly laid and for the present cold, but ready to sparkle and flame when the Torch should come.

Unconscious of this, she could still think of forty things besides love. Her chief sentiment in reaching the freedom of the streets was that it would be pleasant to be for several hours away from home, to have a series of cool, empty, palatial rooms all to herself—to practise, yes, but also to read and to look out of the window.

That was her chief sentiment on the fifth of July. By the fifteenth—But it cannot be said that Camilla ever honestly regretted the relative simplicity which she lost that summer.

With all her air of minding her own distinguished affairs, she yet saw everything. She knew by sight the tenants of the house, of course, for whom the Babbo and Olindo, or Aunt Battistina and Bianca, combining forces, agitated the stiff pump-handle. She was familiar with the faces she passed daily on her way. And she naturally remarked, the second time he appeared there, a youth, an idle, slender damerino, who seemed waiting for something, on the opposite side of the street. The third time she saw him, she wondered whom he was there for. The breath-catching possibility striking her that he waited to see her come forth—for that style of thing was done in Florence in those days—she gave him his share of an abstracted look, taking in the house fronts and the lamp-post near which he stood. A handsome man, young, the faintest smear of charcoal-dust on his upper lip—seventeen, perhaps. A son of family, quite certainly.

No, he was not there for her sake; he remained watching the door, while pretending not to, after she had passed. For somebody else, then, living in the same house. She had seen him half a dozen times before she could determine whom. One evening she recognized him in the shadowy form hanging about the stairs, once even in the court—her court! She knew all by that time, and scorned him. It was the French maid on the second floor. This person took a child out for the air every morning; she went to the Fortezza, where the little one could play.

And he, a gentleman, could degrade himself to pursue that creature! Parisian, yes, but ugly, and not a day less than twenty-five.

The rather sweet, hungry, expectant, young-dog look of a boy belonging to circles where the maidens are so guarded that if there is to be romance it must be sought where there are greater facilities, mollified her not at all. It disgusted her. It disgusted her to the point finally that, running into him unexpectedly under the archway, she drew herself up and gave him a look in which was expressed all that decent people, la gente per bene, think of such bad taste, a prolonged, punishing, proud look; then passed on, her heart thumping with the excitement of the thing.

On the day following, glancing from the tail of her eye to see whether he were at his usual post, she did not find him. Before she had reached the end of the street he passed her, then lingered and allowed her to pass. She did it in a hurry, with downcast eyes and rising color. Reaching Miss Heller’s, she rang with all her might. Never, it seemed to her, never had old Italia in her distant kitchen been so slow in pulling the wire that released the catch and allowed the little door cut in the large one to swing inward.

When at midday she was obliged to come out again, the gallant was standing sentry across the way. She was aware of him following her at a just respectful distance.

To be followed by a man is frightening, for Man is a Hunter. There is a difference, though, in the degree of disagreeableness of the fright, if the Hunter is so desirable-looking as to be himself an imaginable object of hunt.

Next day it was the same thing. At a just respectful distance he followed her to school and back. On the day after that, the same. When this proceeding had been kept up for three days, it took rightly the aspect of romance, filling the thoughts of sixteen with surmises, tremors, a sense of initiation, and the excitement of a great secret.

On the fourth morning, as she was reaching the school, he passed ahead of her, and pushed a letter under the door.

It was inscribed, “To the First who shall enter.” It ran thus:

Signorina,

I write to crave your pardon, and to explain my apparent impertinence in following you on the street. But how could a man of any sensibility endure the thought of so much grazia and gentilezza walking unprotected in a city with whose iniquities he is but too well acquainted? I cannot conceive of the false security or the remissness that so exposes a dove to falcons. Fear not that I shall myself presume to offer the offense which it is my determination to prevent others from offering. Regard me solely as a cavaliere whose courage and strength are dedicated to your service.

Suo devotissimo,
GIULIO FORTI.

How delicate! How knightly! Her climbing of the stairs was sleep-walking. She adjusted the slats of the blind so that, unseen, she could look at him where he loitered in the doorway across the street. He must have very little to do, really, to afford all that time. But of course it was vacation for him as for her. And he had the resource of cigarettes. Now he was talking with the porter, of whom he had just begged a light. He took off his straw hat to fan himself with it, for even on the shady side of the freshly watered street it was hot weather. He was a pretty boy—her words for him were “a handsome man”—with a covering of close black astrakhan to his small round head, a speaking eye, dainty features, and a warm-toned skin agreeably sprinkled with freckles. He wore the carefully fitted clothes of a good class, new, but not too new, and a light silk cravat chosen with thought.

Camilla that day omitted scales and exercises. Her piano could be heard in the street. She played her show pieces, “Les Cloches du Monastère,” “Les Soupirs,” “La Caressante,” various Chopin waltzes.

When she came forth at noon, and her body-guard sprang from his door to fall into the relation of a dog at her heels, he first begged wistfully with his eyes to know by a look from her that he was understood and forgiven. She gave him the look he wanted. A moment later he hustled off the sidewalk a man who, he considered, had passed her too closely. There was a high word or two, then the workman grumblingly fell away from the irate young gentleman shaking his slender cane.

They were new heavens and new earth between which Camilla now moved forth at morning, with an oleander at her breast, token that she was a woman and adorned herself to be the more loved. For there was no supposing that the vague fever in her veins, glowing by day and filling the night with dreams, had not been caught, by a contagion as strange as subtle, from the fever in his brown eyes.

At the end of a week his face, when upon reaching the school he hurried forward without a word to pull the bell-handle for her, was pale with anguish, and his eyes catching hers expressed urgent reproach. On the morning following he unexpectedly pressed inside the door after her, and pushed it to. They stood alone in the great stone hallway. He was obviously agitated, and her heart had stopped.

“Signorina,” he burst forth, hoarse with the sincerity of his emotion, “what have I done? I wish to know what you have against me. Never do you give me a look, never a smile. You regard me with horror, it is evident. And why? Why? I must find out before I live another day. If I am repulsive to you I had best go and drown myself. Why, tell me, do you act toward me as if I were either invisible or else a little dust in the street? Am I a toad, a reptile, in your eyes?”

Camilla had clenched one hand and pressed it over her heart; she lifted the other to her throat. Giulio was not surprised that a young girl should be terrified in the circumstances to the point of fainting. In this great moment the exhibition of her timidity must not make him timid. Trembling at his own courage, he took her hands, in part to reassure and if necessary support, in part to conquer further. He pressed them with all his strength, and commanded, imploringly, “Look at me in the face, and see whether I am such a monster! See whether you find in my eyes anything but love and by loyalty! Look, I beg, look! Look!” He waited, straining her hands.

Camilla, thus masterfully summoned, slowly lifted her face and looked. Both of them looked volumes.

The next thing, he was gently grasping her head. She averted her lips with unaffected shrinking. He very respectfully kissed her hair. He hoped he knew how a well-brought-up man behaves with a well-brought-up young girl.

A hard parrot voice, coming from above, out of sight, made them both jump. “Who is there?” It was Italia, who, when she had pulled the wire that governed the street-door, was wont to come down from her kitchen and let the visitor in at the door of the first floor. Seeing no one, she was making inquiry.

“It’s Camilla,” was called to her from below. “I am coming. I am resting a minute. Leave the door open.”

The stone-floored echoing hallway where they stood was vast as a royal ballroom. At the farther end, broad, low stairs vanishing upward; on the right, the long wall, unbroken save by one door—the ground floor was reserved by the owner, always absent; at the left, three open arches letting into a court, the bottom of a wide shaft with windows, over which a square of burning blue sky. The pavement of this court was green with the damp of centuries; a stone coping, projecting from the wall, hemmed in enough earth to support a spindling rose-tree.

“I am forced to go away to-morrow,” Giulio, still short-breathed with emotion, whispered spasmodically; “and how can I go without learning my fate from you? I am compelled to visit my married sister and be absent for two eternal weeks. My family is obliged to stay in town through the summer, you know, by my grandmother’s serious illness; but my parents insist that I shall go for the change. I vow I will not! I will disobey, and incur I know not what from their displeasure, unless you promise to answer the letters I shall write you. Do you promise? Viareggio. Poste Restante. I will not compromise you by remaining longer. On the way home make me happy by a glance now and then, when it will not be observed. Farewell, my soul! I am your slave!”

Among the letters to be redirected to Mademoiselle Heller she found his first letter. She answered it there at the school, when she ought to have been practising. In the two weeks of his absence she received about twenty letters, for in the ardor of his passion he sometimes wrote twice a day. The same did she.

As life was far from monotonous at the Mediterranean watering-place, where in beautiful striped tights of white and blue he took glorious swims twice a day, one might suppose that bits of news, information, anecdote, a little fun, would have found their way into his letters. Not at all. They were love-letters neat. He would write:

How, O my adored fidanzata, can I live through the days and months and years that must pass before the blessing of the sacerdote will have given me the right to call you mine, wholly, wholly, and forever, mine! When I think that at the end of summer I must, as my parents have decided, go to Zurich to complete my studies, and be divided from you by mountains as well as months, I feel that, in view of the anguish of that distance and waiting, it had almost been better had I never met the beam of your beauteous eye. But courage! Let us take courage, thinking of our future happiness.

She would write:

In the night, in dreams, you are always with me. I cannot sleep but you are there; and so I find myself, when I am not ardently wishing for a letter, sighing for the night and dreams. Caro mio bene, should you ever love me less, how could I endure it? If ever your heart should change toward me, if ever another should have the place with you which it is my joy and honor to hold, keep it a secret from me, I conjure you! I might kill myself, or perhaps you!

A day earlier than she had expected, he stood at the Heller entrance, in time to slip in with her. He folded her to his breast, both of them breathless and throbbing. But again with a brusk instinctive movement she got her lips out of the way, and he controlled his impulse. A man who respects himself respects his own affianced. He pressed a long, silent kiss upon her brow.

Raising a warning finger, she listened a second, then sang out to Italia, “I am going to rest a minute before doing the stairs. Let the door stand open for me.”

They seated themselves on the bottom steps for a good long scene in whispers.

Never were there such facilities, for Italia would not again think of the door, save to suppose that Camilla had come in by it and shut it behind her. Any one descending could be heard long before seen. Giulio had time to tiptoe out, Camilla would appear to be just arriving. When the danger was past, she could let Giulio in again.

The facilities were, in fact, too great! These young things had leisure to say everything a thousand times over.

Both of them knew a great deal about lovers, from general rumor and private confidence, from drama, book, and song. Their wide-awake Latin minds had early incorporated all that lore, and they acted now in as grown-up a manner as they knew. Camilla developed an umbrageous mood one day, during which she questioned him about his past. Oh, nothing of the smallest consequence, he said, with regard to a certain francese. He had had the opportunity to render her a service, once, when she was caught in the rain with her little charge. He had chanced to be carrying an umbrella, that was all. After that, he had continued the acquaintance, just a little, from courtesy.

“THEY SEATED THEMSELVES ON THE BOTTOM STEPS FOR A GOOD LONG SCENE IN WHISPERS”

Novices, they played their parts according to romantic conventions known to both, beneath which the unconventional heart did in the case of each after its nature.

It appeared, as gradually as a flower fades on its stalk, that even he, even in vacation, had duties occasionally, engagements, pressing engagements sometimes, things that must be attended to for his father, or mother, or grandmother. He would have to consult his watch. Sometimes he could stay only a minute.

She asked him one day why he was in such a heavy humor, so silent. He asked sadly in reply how he could be different, living in a house where all were so deeply concerned over the condition of his poor grandmother. Added to this, his aunt was arriving to see her mother, and was bringing his cousins. They would take up his whole time for the next few days.

Camilla looked at him attentively. Murmuring, “My idol!” he drew her cheek down to his shoulder and imprisoned her hands in those pretty, dry, brown hands of his, which had the gift of pleasing her so much.

“La Caressante,” as it rang forth from her window on certain of those soft, summer mornings, might have been mistaken for a musical imitation of artillery sputtering amid the varied sounds of battle, “Les Soupirs” for the note-portrayal of a wreck tossed in a stormy swell.

One morning, with the affected briskness of a man who does his best to put a good face on a tiresome business, he said, “Expect me not, my Camilla, to-morrow. I am sent off to visit my married sister up at Vicchio. A sudden decision. My family, saying that I have grown thin, as I have, indeed, with the cruel anxiety of our secret, believe I need the change. A dreadful bore, but what can I do?”

“Another married sister? How many more married sisters, caro mio, have you in your pocket?”

“There is still another—three in all. I was born long after them, the only man-child, which gives an excuse to old friends of the family for saying that my parents spoil me. And I am sorry to tell you, Camilla, that you must not write to me there, for there is no such thing as poste restante. The letters are brought to the villa by a peasant and my sister distributes them. Nor shall I find it possible to write you, for I could not post a letter unknown.”

Bianca that night was roused from the deadness of sleep by unaccustomed signs of life in her bedfellow, Camilla, who, she realized with horror, was struggling in the effort to keep her sobbing inside and unheard.

“What is it? Oh, what is the matter?” she asked, feeling in the dark for her sister’s shoulder.

“Non mi seccare!” Camilla answered, with a furious dash of her heel. “Bother me not!” but without concealment after that she relieved her need to weep.

Giulio at Vicchio, far among the hills! Giulio thinking of her, while from the high loggia he looked Florenceward. Giulio sending his wishes as he gazed at Venus—stella confidente!—brightening in the fading sunset!

The pain of absence, of this black and total silence, was such that on the fourth day, after reading over all his letters, she broke the rule and stole out to go for just a minute to his street and satisfy her yearning to see the windows of his vacant room.

She did not go far, for on the way she saw him, or—for a moment she thought herself the victim, possibly, of an hallucination. It was his exact image, anyhow. He walked along lightly, his straw hat far back on his head, his pretty nose and white teeth to the wind, talking with a boy of his own age and type. He was laughing, as he drew something on the air with his half-burned cigarette; she caught the glint in the sunshine of the signet-ring on his little finger. She turned and ran.

That day she asked Bianca whether she would help her, and then she told her everything.

At evening—Antenore was kept late at the station on certain nights of the week—they slipped out together while Aunt Battistina’s back was turned, and hurrying like guilty creatures went to the Cornelio gardens.

Almost invariably, when Camilla had asked how he had spent the evening, Giulio had said, “At Cornelio’s, with my father.”

They posted themselves in an unlighted doorway whence they could watch the entrance of the fashionable open-air café. Over the laurel wall inside the iron railing floated golden haze. Between pieces of band-music were intervals of clattering china and voices. Figures passed in and out.

It was not so simple as they had thought, this waiting. Wishing to be as unnoticed as mice, they felt more conspicuous than camels. Bianca’s little yellow dog, Pallina, who had refused absolutely to stay behind, had the vile habit of yapping at passers; cracks and cuffs would not subdue her. The persons barked at naturally turned to look.

Half a dozen times footsteps were heard, or imagined, on the stairs farther within. The girls each time hurried out of the way, and, against their habit, afraid of everybody, walked along the house fronts the length of the gardens, then back, to ensconce themselves again, very uneasy as to what the guard of public safety had thought, half expecting him to darken the doorway suddenly and question them. Oh, it was an evening to remember like some painful nightmare! Camilla, in spite of all, never lost sight of their reason for being there.

Now she seized Bianca’s arm. Giulio was coming out, with a party—the boy of earlier in the day, and two young girls dressed exactly alike, the cousins, very likely; behind them came a middle-aged gentleman and lady.

“The grandmother must be getting well,” said Camilla through her teeth, “seeing that they can laugh like that!”

“We will say,” she arranged with Bianca on the way home, “that while we stood at the door taking the air, Maria Nutini and her mother passed, and we joined them for a turn. They left us at the corner.”

Every time Bianca was wakened that night, she saw Camilla writing. Once tears were falling upon the paper. Ordered to keep still, Bianca sorrowfully relapsed into her healthy young sleep.

In the morning Camilla posted her letter. If it fell into his mother’s hands, so much the worse for him.

To live on, days, months, years, with that burden of love turned back upon the heart, like a dammed-in torrent, how could it be endured? What, what did one do to destroy the spell by which another got this dreadful power to fill one’s every thought, made himself master over the motions of one’s blood? For Camilla, in her outraged pride, desired not to love Giulio any more.

The hours of suspense were so intolerable that more than once she wished she never had been born. She had calculated the earliest at which she might expect an answer. She allowed not an hour more before writing him again. And then she waited with confidence, knowing positively that she should see him.

In this second waiting she had the first glimmering notion that she might feel better by and by, that the burning sense of ignominy attached to feeling oneself trampled and disdained might be turned to victorious gladness by making the other, the dear enemy, feel himself more trampled, more disdained.

She was not wishing that she never had been born, while, gathering suggestion from Spanish ballad and Sicilian tale, she plotted a development of the story in every point worthy of herself. Her scene firmly imagined and finished off with the right artistic touches, she could actually hum that afternoon. When Bianca, helping Battistina to hunt for the vegetable-knife needed to prepare supper, asked her whether she had seen anything of it, she could answer by a careless snatch of song.

At ten precisely, without the necessity to ring, the little door cut in the large one yielded to Giulio’s hand. He was fortified to meet his lady just inside, but the great hallway was empty. Surprised, he took a few doubtful steps, made up his mind, and fell to pacing the floor. After a while, he stopped under the middle arch, sent an absent glance from window to window up the white shaft to the square of blue, and composed himself to wait where he stood, arms crossed, feet well apart. He was a trifle pale, and with his troubled air appeared more grown-up than when, six or seven weeks ago, with the desert ahead of the long empty season in town, he had wondered what resources of distraction the streets, his only hope, might afford.

Half an hour passed. The shutter inside the window above and opposite moved; Camilla’s hand appeared, beckoning him to mount the stairs.

She met him at the door of the primo piano, but when he would have taken her hand she hurried before him, into Mademoiselle Heller’s own sacred sitting-room, where the chairs were in ghostly covers and the chandelier was muffled in a gauze bag. The closed windows kept out the heat and noise, kept in the faint musty smell. She turned, they looked at each other, and she smiled, as it struck him, a singular smile.

“You wished to see me,” he said.

“I did. But I have seen you already. For twenty minutes I watched you from behind the shutter when you did not know I was there; you were standing under the arch. And—I believe it saved your life. See what I had brought.” She showed him a little knife, bright and pointed, with a handle of horn. (It must be said that her dagger looked rather like a vegetable-knife.) He gave a just perceptible start. His heart had naturally jumped. But he knew, deep down, that the dagger was part of play-acting. With a gesture intended insolently to reassure, she threw it on the table, and smiled the singular smile which twisted her lips to an expression of such excessive irony. “Be not afraid. I had never seen your face when you were trying to cover your fear and inventing lies to tell me. After that spectacle, I decided you were not worthy of my powder. No, you need fear nothing from that silly stiletto, either for yourself or for me. I am not sure which I meant it for. Both, perhaps.”

“Come, Camilla,” he began, in the low, soft, ultra-reasonable tone which any man knows is the one to adopt with excited, unreasonable women. “Come! This is hardly the speech to hold to me. You are too agitated to know what you are saying. It seems to me that after such a letter as you wrote, threatening me—nientedimeno!—with a blow on the cheek wherever you met me, before everybody, it is I rather than you who have the right to call myself offended. If I am here, it is because I love you in spite of your bad treatment of me, and I wish to explain.”

This gentle and well-intentioned speech was interrupted by a sort of human feminine rendering of a leonine roar from Camilla. “Zurigo! Zurigo! Ha!” she exclaimed, “those are your tactics, are they? What you are thinking is that in a few days more you will depart for Zurigo. You need only keep up this comedy for a few days and then you can drop me without fear. All you will have to do is not to write.” Her eyes flared up intense and green; she took a pantherine step nearer. “But I—” she smacked the varnished table startlingly with the flat of her palm—“I do not admit that I am a person who can be dropped. And you are here in order that I may drop you first, and in such a manner as you cannot mistake or forget. You shall know yourself quite certainly, my fine sir, to have been discarded. But I wish you to remember for another time.” Another pantherine step nearer. His manhood, of which he was at the moment intensely conscious, forbade his receding by an inch. “I wish you to remember, for another time, that one does not so lightly take up and throw over persons like me. A man of nothing, like yourself, takes a puny wax doll to make love to and then neglect, knowing that it is safe.” She was under his very nose. “I wish you to learn the danger there is in making love to—to tigresses! Will you remember hereafter—” his head was suddenly clutched, he felt claws through his hair—“to keep to your own kind and let alone such creatures as could eat you at a bite? A man should be the stronger, while you—I could dare, fight, love, ten to your one. I saw it while you stood down there. Will you remember?”

The pain of her iron finger-nails in his scalp was fairly unendurable, but he stood it with boyish dignity, like a little Spartan; for one thing, certain that if he tried to free himself he would come forth all the more sorrily scratched; for another, not finding this maltreatment by passionate feminine fingers altogether disagreeable. His eyes were half closed, an enigmatic smile played over his lips. At the same time, he was intensely on the alert, ready to prevent her making him ridiculous beyond a certain limit.

“Will you remember,” she said, “what happens when one amuses oneself with persons who have blood in their veins? Will you? There, go! I do not believe you will forget.”

She released him with a push. With ceremonious deliberation he took out his pocket-handkerchief, to wipe a goutlet of blood from the edge of his hair.

“These are scarcely parliamentary methods!” he said, and managed a laugh. “But a man—” an enormous increase in his sense of masculine importance appeared in his bearing—“a man, you know, cannot resent such fairy touches from the hand of a lady. He is bound to consider such attentions a compliment. I have been flattered beyond my deserts. But I cannot be mistaken in thinking that I have brought love and caresses this morning to the wrong market, and so, with your permission, I will withdraw. Until another day, Camilla, when you feel more kindly disposed. No, my Camilla, I shall not forget you. I think I can promise in all sincerity not to forget.”

He got to the door a little hurriedly, but with the hope that he had not come off so very badly after all.

Once out of the house, the little future man of the world took a deep lungful of the free air. The thumb he presently slipped through his armhole, while with the other hand he swung his cane, expressed as far as it could the enrichment he felt in the knowledge of women gained that morning. Hero of a scene of jealousy! But who would have dreamed that a well-brought-up girl...? He delicately touched his temple to see whether it still bled.

Drawn by Emil Pollak-Ottendorff

“EVERY TIME BIANCA WAS WAKENED ... SHE SAW CAMILLA WRITING”

Camilla had thrown herself into one of the shrouded arm-chairs. The scene had not been what she intended. One thing after the other—finally that ferocious need to get her fingers among his hair—had interfered. But she regretted nothing, though not unaware of having, to produce her grand effect, torn off a part of herself and thrown it to the crows. She would bleed, and she would miss it; still, for the moment she regretted nothing.

SHE never saw Giulio again, to speak to him. As she did not even pass him on the street for a year or two (and pretend not to know him!) she supposed him in Zurich. Often, in the night, for ever so long after their parting, her heart would be caught as if in a screw by the remembrance of the past. Shame would burn her for her lapses from a becoming rigor. There had been a kiss or two, after all. Unpractical longing for everything to have been different, or else for everything by some wonderful twist of fortune still to turn out well, and she and Giulio be together again, would wring tears from her. But in her saner moments she understood that there was no hope of that, and simply cried into her pillow because she could not get Giulio out of her blood.

But time passed. Many things happened. She grew up. When finally one day she did run into Giulio on the street (and pretend not to know him!) nothing stirred in her heart at sight of the old love. She smiled with pity for her honest ardor of the old days, and its innocent avowal.

Her dream of the future had changed. In the present dream, which naturally contained love along with riches and glory, it was always love that she received, love lavished in Arabian Nights’ baskets of jewels at her feet. All her part was condescension. This was the work of Giulio—the inconstant. Never again should a man hold her in his hand, to feel and suffer in dependence upon him. She would have all the power herself.

IT was the school-boy Giulio still at work when, as Princess Elaguine, in Paris, she showed herself so willing to be amused by men, and so resolved not to give any man the chance to make her miserable.

[5] The writer is speaking of that Camilla, once obscure companion and secretary to Mrs. Northmere, the author, and later her heir, some of whose adventures have been told in these pages. See “Mrs. Northmere’s Treasure,” in THE CENTURY for August, 1910, and “What Camilla did with Her Money,” in THE CENTURY for January, 1911.

THE HIGH TIDE AT GETTYSBURG[6]

BY WILL H. THOMPSON

(Of the Fourth Georgia, Doles’s Brigade, Rodes’s Division, Ewell’s Corps.)

A CLOUD possessed the hollow field,

The gathering battle’s smoky shield.

Athwart the gloom the lightning flashed,

And through the cloud some horsemen dashed,

And from the heights the thunder pealed.

Then at the brief command of Lee

Moved out that matchless infantry,

With Pickett leading grandly down,

To rush against the roaring crown

Of those dread heights of destiny.

Far heard above the angry guns

A cry across the tumult runs,—

The voice that rang through Shiloh’s woods

And Chickamauga’s solitudes,

The fierce South cheering on her sons!

Ah, how the withering tempest blew

Against the front of Pettigrew!

A khamsin wind that scorched and singed

Like that infernal flame that fringed

The British squares at Waterloo!

A thousand fell where Kemper led;

A thousand died where Garnett bled:

In blinding flame and strangling smoke

The remnant through the batteries broke

And crossed the works with Armistead.

“Once more in Glory’s van with me!”

Virginia cried to Tennessee:

“We two together, come what may,

Shall stand upon these works to-day!”

(The reddest day in history.)

Drawn by Stanley M. Arthurs. Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill

“IN VAIN VIRGINIA CHARGED AND RAGED, A TIGRESS IN HER WRATH UNCAGED”

[❏
LARGER IMAGE]

Brave Tennessee! In reckless way

Virginia heard her comrade say:

“Close round this rent and riddled rag!”

What time she set her battle-flag

Amid the guns of Doubleday.

But who shall break the guards that wait

Before the awful face of Fate?

The tattered standards of the South

Were shriveled at the cannon’s mouth,

And all her hopes were desolate.

In vain the Tennesseean set

His breast against the bayonet!

In vain Virginia charged and raged,

A tigress in her wrath uncaged,

Till all the hill was red and wet!

Above the bayonets, mixed and crossed,

Men saw a gray, gigantic ghost

Receding through the battle-cloud,

And heard across the tempest loud

The death-cry of a nation lost!

The brave went down! Without disgrace

They leaped to Ruin’s red embrace.

They only heard Fame’s thunders wake,

And saw the dazzling sunburst break

In smiles on Glory’s bloody face!

They fell, who lifted up a hand

And bade the sun in heaven to stand!

They smote and fell, who set the bars

Against the progress of the stars,

And stayed the march of Motherland!

They stood, who saw the future come

On through the fight’s delirium!

They smote and stood, who held the hope

Of nations on that slippery slope

Amid the cheers of Christendom!

God lives! He forged the iron will

That clutched and held that trembling hill.

God lives and reigns! He built and lent

The heights for Freedom’s battlement

Where floats her flag in triumph still!

Fold up the banners! Smelt the guns!

Love rules. Her gentler purpose runs.

A mighty mother turns in tears

The pages of her battle years,

Lamenting all her fallen sons!

[6] First printed in THE CENTURY for July, 1888.