“Isn’t he just!” replied Aurora. “I want him to have the best time in the three weeks he’s going to spend here. We’ve got to show him all the beauties of Florence, and then I want him to know all our friends. We must have some tea-parties and some dinners. I want it to be just as gay. Who is there I ought to lay myself out for, if not Tom Bewick?”
“I quite agree with you. Let’s plan.”
“No, to-morrow’ll do. It’s too late. I’m tired.” The motions of Aurora’s fingers were suspended among the strands of her hair. She fell into a muse. “Seeing Tom”–she came out of it again, and went on braiding–“has brought back, along with some things I never want to forget, such a lot of things I don’t want to think of!”
“I suppose it would.”
“His sisters, for instance. He doesn’t look a bit like them, really–nasty bugs, godless, gutless pigs–but yet he brings them up before me. Idell rather more than Cora, and Idell was the meanest of the two, and her husband the miserablest, sneakingest cuss. Oh, how I hate the bunch of them! And I oughtn’t, you know. You oughtn’t to go on hating your enemies after you’ve got the better of them. But the moment I think of that trio, Cora Bewick–sour-bellied old maid!–and Idell Friebus, and her rotten little pea-green husband–pin-headed insect! flap-eared fool!–I get mad. If you could really know, Hat, the cold-heartedness and wicked-mindedness of those people! How they ever happened in Tom’s family Goodness only knows. 328And such a fine father! The Judge was as good as any of those old fellows in the Bible, I do believe. That patient, that considerate, and that just! More than just; what he did was more than just, and those girls of his simply couldn’t stand it. They couldn’t stand it, after they had neglected him all through his illness so that it was a scandal, that he should treat the person who had done their daughters’ duty for them the same as he treated them, no better and no worse, but just the same. The things those people did to me, Hat, the things they said about me–”
“I know, I know; you’ve told me,” said Hattie, soothingly and deterringly.
“The things those people did to me, and the things they said about me,”–Nell, not to be deterred, repeated intensely,–“if I’d ever wanted to give up my share, those things they did and said would have made me hold on like grim death just to spite them. Oh,”–she broke off, and flung her finished braids back over her shoulders,–“why do I let myself think of them? I grow so hot! It’s the sight of Tom that has started me back to thinking of all that excitement and disgustingness. Dear good Tom, who stood by me like a trump! I do wish, Hat, I didn’t hate so hard when I hate. We’ve taken pride in my family, I’m afraid, in being good haters, as if it were part of the same trait that makes you loyal and true to your friends. But perhaps it’s a mistake. I know that Gerald said once”–she yielded to the obscure desire to hear the air vibrate, as it had not done for some time, with the syllables of his name–“Gerald said once, when we were talking of things, ‘We must forgive everything,’ he said; ‘we must forgive happenings the same as we must people.’ And Gerald, 329you know, when he’s in sober earnest, has some good ideas.”
“Talking about Gerald,” Estelle came in quickly, glad of a change from the other subject, “did Livvy tell you that our cook met Giovanna at the market, and Giovanna told her that her master was doing finely; that he hadn’t yet been out of doors, but that he sat at the open window in the sunshine? I’d been meaning to ask you.”
“Oh.” Aurora quietly took it, and thought it over a minute. “No, she hadn’t told me. I suppose those long stairs would keep him from going out till he was good and strong. Did she say anything else?”
“Only that Giovanna was buying a chicken, and the abbé, she said, was still staying with them.”