“Yes. She said she wished they had them at the villino. They have nothing but an iron finger or something, you know. I could have them copied—by way of a beginning.”
“Yes!” cried the Younger in a final burst of inspiration. “And to give the personal note, to suggest delicately the idea of your knocking at her door, you could have the Neptune’s head modeled after your own!”
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.