It was late, and he did not feel disposed to break the almost holy calm of his feelings after so many agitations, by making any effort to see his cousin that evening. He looked up at the tall houses as he went along, wondering if perhaps one of the faint lights he saw might be hers, but he was content to remain in this state of doubt till next day. One night could make little difference. When he had finished the meal, which was slight, but more satisfactory than anything he had been able to have since he left Paris, he made inquiries of the genial Italian waiter as to the position of the Palazzo Scaramucci, and whether anything was known of its English inhabitants. Antonio indicated to him exactly where the house was, and was eager to add that he knew the servant of the English gentleman who had died there. “Figure to yourself,” he said, “that Mademoiselle, his daughter, is all alone in that house of the dead.” The conversation was carried on in French, and Antonio was eloquent. He gave the stranger instantly a sketch of the girl thus left without any one to take care of her. “Letters have come from the friends in England, but no one has arrived,” said Antonio. “What kind of hearts can they have, blessed Madonna! Niccolo does not know what will become of the poor young lady. The Forestieri here are kind to her, but what is that when she is left all alone by her friends? Monsieur perhaps may know some of her friends? She is a beautiful young lady, but strange, neither like the English Meeses, nor the Italian Signorine, and Niccolo says——”
“Did you say she was beautiful?” said Frederick. This was a particular which it was impossible to hear without a certain interest.
“She will be beautiful when she is older, when she has more embonpoint,” said Antonio. “But she is not English in her beauty, nor in anything else. Niccolo says she will sit for days together and never speak. She had a very strange father. He is buried in the English cemetery, so I believe all must be right. But in my opinion, though Monsieur may think it droll, the old Englishman was tant soit peu sorcier!”
“Sorcier?” said Frederick, with a languid smile.
“Of course Monsieur thinks it droll—but for my part I believe he has thrown a spell over Mademoiselle. No one can melt her. She sheds no tear, Niccolo says. She listens to the English ladies without replying a word. The only Christian thing about her is that she goes often to St. Maria della Spina, the little, little, very little church which Monsieur may have remarked; and as she is Protestant, I suppose that must be a sin. Perhaps, if Monsieur knows any of the English in Pisa, he will be able to see this strange and beautiful young girl”——
“Perhaps,” said Frederick, taking the key of his bedroom and the candle from Antonio’s hand. He did not choose to say that he was the lingering messenger whom her friends had sent for Innocent. But his mind was compassionately moved towards her. Beauty is always a point in everybody’s favour, and the sense of power and protection in himself was pleasant to him. It quite completed, if anything had been wanted to do so, the rehabilitation of Frederick Eastwood in Frederick Eastwood’s own eyes. What a change his appearance would make in the position of this deserted young creature, whose melancholy soul no doubt only wanted the touch of his kindness and compassion to rouse it into warmer life! “Poor child,” he said to himself almost tenderly, as he went to bed. He would be a brother to her, and to do them justice at home, they would be good to the poor girl. Yet somehow he could not but feel that his own influence, as the first to go to her, would do most for Innocent. The thought diffused a pleasant warmth and revival about his heart.
Pisa is not a cheerful place. It has neither the beauty of situation, nor the brightness of aspect, nor even the larger historical interest which belongs to Florence, its near neighbour and whilom rival. It has fallen out of the race as a town may do as well as an individual. But, on the other hand, it has no keen ice-wind to sweep its streets like those that chill the very blood in your veins in the deep ravines cut through lofty blocks of houses which form the Florentine streets. The equable temperature of Pisa hangs about it like a cloud, stilling the life in it that it may never grow loud enough to disturb the invalids who set up their tents in those old palaces. They have a little society among themselves, gentle, monotonous, and dull, such as befits invalids. A great many English people are in that subdued winter population, people who are, or are supposed to be, poitrinaires, and people in attendance upon these sufferers, and finally, people who go because other people go, without either knowing or caring about the special advantages of the place. An English doctor and his wife, and an English clergyman and his wife, are generally to be found in all such places, and most usually these excellent persons do all they can to reduce the little colony of English, living in the midst of the quaint old foreign town, into the aspect of a village or small country place in England, where everybody talks of everybody, and knows his or her domestic grievances by heart. Mr. Vane, when he came to Pisa to die, had sought the assistance of the doctor, but not of the clergyman; so it was Mrs. Drainham, and not Mrs. St. John, who had taken Innocent in hand when her father died, and had tried to make something of the forlorn girl. Though Frederick of course knew nothing about this, two letters had been despatched but a few days before to Mrs. Eastwood and another relation, adjuring them to come to the help of the young stranger. The doctor had himself written in a business like way to Sir Edmund Vane, but Mrs. Drainham had taken Mrs. Eastwood in hand, and had written her what both herself and the doctor felt to be a very touching letter. The author of this affecting composition had been reading it over to some select friends on the very evening on which Frederick arrived in Pisa. Dr. and Mrs. Drainham lived on the first floor of the Casa Piccolomini, on the sunny side of the Arno, in a very imposing apartment, where they often assembled round them a little society “in a very quiet way,” for the doctor himself was something of an invalid, and practised in Pisa as much for his own health as for that of his patients. They were people who were generally understood to be well off, an opinion which it is good for everybody, and especially for professional people, to cultivate about themselves. Every Wednesday and Saturday, tea and thin bread and butter, cut exactly as bread and butter is in England, were to be had from eight till eleven in the Drainhams’ handsome drawing-room. On the evening in question the English colony at Pisa was very well represented in this modest assembly. There was Mr. and Mrs. St. John, accompanied by a gentle young English curate with pulmonary symptoms, who was staying with them, and giving the benefit of his services when he felt able for it. There was old Mr. Worsley and his pretty daughters, one of whom was suffering from bronchitis, and the other from ennui, the latter the more deadly malady of the two. The healthy portion of the population was rather in the background, and not held in much estimation. Mr. St. John himself, who now weighed nearly sixteen stone, had come to Pisa also with pulmonary symptoms, and was fond of citing himself as an instance of the cures effected by its wonderful equability of temperature. “But a winter in England would kill me still. I could never survive a winter in England,” he would say, tapping his ample bosom with his hand, and coughing to show that he had not quite lost the habit. On this particular occasion he uttered these words, which were very frequent on his lips, in order to console and encourage poor little Mrs. O’Carroll, the wife of a gigantic Irishman, who had broken all his bones one after another in riding across country, and who stood gaunt and tall in a corner conversing with the doctor, with red spots upon his high cheekbones, and a hollow circle round his big eyes, which did not promise such a comfortable termination.
“Oh, then, and you’ll tell Harry,” said the anxious woman, with the mellow tones of her country. “You’ll tell him all about it, Mr. Singin, dear, and what you took, and how you lived?”
“There is nothing to tell, my dear lady,” said the clergyman. “Pisa air, and a regular life, and taking care never to be out late or early, and nourishing food as much as I could take. But the air is the great thing. There is a serenity and equability in this Italian climate.”
“Ah, then!” cried poor Mrs. O’Carroll, “to get him to take care is all the battle. He never was ill in his life, and he won’t allow he’s ill, not if I were to preach to him night and day.”