Well, Clotilde was there. Clotilde would know pertinent discourses to hold to the brazen beggars when their shamelessness passed bounds. Meanwhile Gerald could see that she enjoyed this distributing of good things among her fellow-citizens. Not that she was strongly disposed to charity. He did not believe she gave away anything of her own, but she loved to see Aurora give. After a life spent in a home where the lumps of sugar were counted and the coffee-beans kept under lock and key, it attracted her like wild, incredible romance.
It would have hurt her to behold this unproductive output, no doubt, had it not been a mere foreigner who lost what her own people gained,–money, besides, that could never have benefited her, and that came nearer to benefiting 198her when spent in that manner than in another. Clotilde, loyal in service, giving more than good measure, offering all the pleasant fruits of a visible devotion, could yet not be expected to have–or, to state it more fairly, was not supposed by Gerald to have–any real bowels for this outsider, who might for one thing be drawing from bottomless gold-mines, or, if she were not, would suffer a ruin she had richly deserved. And might it not in aftertimes profit her, Clotilde, to have been instrumental to this person and that in obtaining money from the millionaire? The shops recognized such a title to reward, and offered it regularly to such private middlemen as herself for a careful guiding of the dispensing hand, and this without the feeling on any side that it was the payment of the unjust steward.
Gerald did not in the least despise Clotilde, poor Clotilde, with her nose like a little white trumpet between her downy pink and white cheeks, for this businesslike outlook and use of her position. It would have been different if she had been a friend and gentleman.
The portrait did not progress rapidly. Gerald was not hurrying. On Gerald’s lips as he painted there played an ambiguous smile, privately derisive of his work and the fun he was having.
No problems, no effort, none of those searching doubts of oneself that produce heart-sickness; nor yet any of those exaltations that cause one to forget the hour of meals. Curious that it should have been fun all the same!... His reply to which was that only a very poor observer could think it curious that the lower man within a man should feel it fun to be indulged. Fortunately, a natural limit was set to this Capuan period.
199He would come from the winter world into the room which the American kept enervatingly warm, a pernicious practice. One could not deny, however, that the body relaxed in it with a sense of well-being, after steeling itself to resist the insidious Italian cold, exuding from damp pavements and blown on the sharp tramontana; that cold which is never, if measured by the thermometer, severe, but against which clothing seems ineffectual. The blood does not react against it; the blood shrinks away, and stagnates around the heart.
He would change his coat for a velveteen jacket, not in order to be picturesque, but to keep his coat-cuffs clean. He was as particular as an old maid, Aurora told him, before he had been caught absentmindedly wiping paint off on his hair.
The fair model would get her chair-legs into correspondence with certain chalk-marks on the carpet, be helped to find her pose, and having made herself comfortable, turn on him blue eyes, with a faint brown shadow under them–blue eyes that wore a sheepish look until she presently forgot she was sitting for her picture. She was pressed to keep her opera-cloak over her shoulders, lest she take cold in her décolleté; the high fur collar made an effective background for her face. Then he would fall to painting, and the hours of the forenoon would fly.
An amiable woman would now and then make a remark, easily jocular. Another amiable woman–soothing presences, both–would answer. Or he would answer; there would be an interlude of familiar talk, rest, and laughing, and throwing a ball for a scampering puppy. At noon an end to labor. He would remain for lunch, that meal of cheery luxury, immorally abundant. After it he would 200still linger in this house, bright and warm with fires, smoking cigarettes in a chair as luxuriously soft as those curling clouds on which are seen throning the gods in ceiling frescos, and grow further day by day into the intimacy of the amiable women. In full afternoon they would ask him if he would go out with them in their carriage, take an airing, and return for dinner; or, if he obstinately declined, might they set him down somewhere. He would make a point of not accepting, and hurry off afoot with his damp umbrella.