Como te amo, amama, bellissima mujer![B]
The words belonged to the air which he had whistled a weary week ago. Young Tracy came along, and caught up the air, although he was innocent of Spanish; he had his mandolin on his arm; he proffered it to the colonel.
“Miss Janet has been singing coon-songs to his nibs, who is really getting almost human,” he observed affably; “well, a little patience and interest will reveal new possibilities of the Fireless Stove! In man or metal. Shall we get under his nibs’ window and give him the Bedouin Love Song and I Picked Me a Lemon in the Garden of Love and the Sextette from Lucia and other choice selections? He seemed to be sitting up and taking notice; let’s lift him above the sordid thoughts of Wall Street and his plans for busting other financiers.”
The soldier gave this persiflage no answer; his own thoughts were far from gay. He stood drinking in the beauty of the April night. The air was wonderfully hushed and clear; and the play of the moonlight on the great heliotrope bushes and the rose-trees, which dangled their clusters of yellow and white over the stone parapets of the balconies, tinted the leafage and flickered delicately over the tracery of shadow on the gray walls. Not a cloud flecked the vast aërial landscape—only stars beyond stars, through unfathomable depths of dim violet, and beneath the stars a pale moon swimming low in the heavens; one could see it between the spandrels of the arches spanning the colonnade.
“Looks like a prize night-scene on the stage, doesn’t it?” said Tracy. “Jolly good shadows—and aren’t these walls bulging out at the bottom bully? I used to know the right name for such architectural stunts when I was taking Fine Arts Four—dreadful to neglect your educational advantages and then forget all the little you didn’t neglect, ain’t it? I say, get on to those balconies—that isn’t the right word for the mission style, I guess; but never mind; aren’t they stunning? Do you see the ladies up there? Is that Archie sniggering? What do you think of the haunted house, now, Colonel?”
Tracy’s gay eyes sought the other’s gaze to find it turn somber. Winter couldn’t have told why; but a sudden realization of the hideous peril dogging the warm, lighted, tenanted house, submerged him and suffocated him like a foul gas. Let their guards be vigilant as fear, let their wonderful new search-light flood rock and slope and dusky Chaparral bush; and peer as it might through the forest aisles beyond; yet—yet—who could tell!
But he forced an equal smile in a second for the college boy; and chatted easily enough as they climbed up the stepped arches to the balcony and the little group looking seaward.
Aunt Rebecca in black lace and jewels was tilting with the world in general and Millicent Winter in particular; she displayed her most cynical mood. She had demolished democracy; had planted herself firmly on the basic doctrine that the virtues cultivated by slavery far outnumber its inseparable vices; and that most people, if not all, need a master; had been picturesquely and inaccurately eloquent on the subject of dynamite (which she pronounced the logical fourth dimension of liberty, fraternity and equality); had put the yellow rich where they belonged; and the red anarchists mainly under the sod; and she had abolished the Fourth of July to the last sputter of fire-cracker; thence by easy transitions she had extolled American art (which American patrons were too ignorant to appreciate), deplored American music (“The trouble isn’t that it is canned,” says she, “but that it was spoiled before they canned it!”) and was now driving a chariot of fire through American literature; as for the Academics, they never said what they thought, but only what they thought they ought to think; and they always mistook anemia for refinement, as another school mistook yelling and perspiring for vigor.
Just as Winter modestly entered the arena, no less a personage than Henry James was under the wheels. Janet Smith had modestly confessed to believing him a consummate artist; and Millicent in an orotund voice declared that he went deep, deep down into the mysteries of life.
“I don’t deny it; he ought to get down deep,” returned Aunt Rebecca in her gentlest, softest utterance; “he’s always boring.”