Aurora repressed the first words that came to her lips,–and set aside the next ones that rose in her mind to say. Silence again reigned for a moment. Then, with the serious face, almost invisibly rippling, that betokened in her a secret and successful fight against laughter, she said in what she called her good English, faintly reminiscent of Antonia’s:
“I am aware, my dear Gerald, of the honor, the very great honor, you do me. I thank you–for coming up to the scratch like a little man. But the feeling I have that I could never be warthy of so much honor deceydes me to declane. Gerald,” she went on, discarding her English, “don’t say another word! You dear, dear boy! The things you want to defend me against don’t amount to a row of pins when all I’ve got to do if it comes to the pinch is pack my grip and clear out. Thank you all the same, you pet, for your kindness. Don’t think of it again. I am sort of glad, though, you’ve got that proposal out of your system. Now we can go back to a sensible life.”
378CHAPTER XXI
Aurora, of the excellent three-times-a-day appetite, Aurora of the good sound slumbers, picked at her food and slept brokenly for part of a week at that period, such was her impatience at the dragging length of time, the emptiness of time, undiversified and unenhanced by the presence in her house of any man devoted to her. No odor of tobacco smoke in the air, no cane in the corner; Tom on his way to America, Gerald hurt or cross or both. But, the ladies agreed, when Aurora had told Estelle the latest about Gerald, her refusal could not possibly occasion a cessation of relations, since his offer, chivalrous and unpremeditated, had been at most a cute and endearing exhibition of character. His sensitiveness could not be long recovering, and everything would be as before.
Aurora had been half prepared for his staying away all Saturday; but having been justified in that, she the more confidently looked for him on Sunday. It is simply incredible, as almost everybody has felt at least once in his life, how long the hours can be when you are waiting for something.
At the end of a singularly unprofitable day, Aurora sat in the red and green room with all the windows open to the sweet airs and odors of May, and no lamp lighted that might attract night-moths, or, worse, the thirsty, ferocious Florentine zanzara. She just sat, not doing a thing. Estelle 379after a while left her, to retire to her own quarters, close the windows and make a light.
Aurora watched the dark blue velvet sky over Bellosguardo, and thought.
A tinkling of mandolins, a thrumming of guitars, informed her of street-singers stationed under her windows. A tenor voice rose in the song she was so fond of, La Luna Nova, mingling at the end of the verse with other male voices that repeated the second half of it. It sounded infinitely sweet out in the warm spring night.
After La Luna Nova they sang Fra i rami, fulgida, and Vedi, che bianca Luna, and Dormi pure, all things she particularly liked. The voices struck her as being nearer than the garden railing; she thought the singers must have found the carriage gate open and slipped in without noise. She bent forth a little, and as she could not see them imagined them standing among the shrubs. She propped her elbows on the window-rail and listened, grateful for this bath of sweetness to her spirit after the day’s profound ennui.