“Marry a clergyman!” said Mr. Bentley, with a kind of roar; and down he came on his knees, first seizing her hand.
Madame Floriani slowly raised herself from a reclining posture. She looked at the young incumbent blushing and trembling on the ground before her; and gently drew away the hand he was holding between his own. And his own were so red! She was going to speak seriously; but—I am grieved to say it of Rosa who ought to have known better—the young man’s apple-face and awkward attitude were so ludicrous—the remembrance of all his absurd attempts at solemnity and asceticism came up so vividly in contrast with the ridicule and humiliation of his present position—it was such an unlooked-for offer, and was made so clumsily, that her gravity gave way, and she burst into a fit of laughter.
It was very wrong, and there was no excuse to be made for her; but the situation was very ridiculous—though she should not have laughed for all that. Mr. Bentley started up, seized his hat and very tight umbrella—it was a glorious day in July, but Mr. Bentley patronised umbrellas—and rushed from the house; turning round at the door to say, angrily, “Your place shall know me no more, madame!”
And so war was finally declared, and Miss Augusta Grandville was satisfied. I doubt if she would have been as content if she had known the full particulars of the casus belli. Mr. Bentley said it was the hardened and impenetrable nature of Madame Floriani—how that he had sought to convert her, and she had answered him only with mockery—and Madame Floriani said nothing. She only laughed; and drew a certain sketch, which she showed to the Winter girls under the strictest vows of secresy. Which, to their honour be it said, they religiously kept. Though, when Helen Winter met Mr. Bentley the day after she had seen that drawing, she turned so red in trying to look grave, that Laura pinched her arm, and said, “Helen! don’t be silly,” below her breath.
The Bentleyites were the strongest. In a short time Madame Rosa’s Wednesday evenings were almost deserted. All the very good avoided her and her house as if a moral plague existed around her. The Miss Grandvilles, indeed, very nearly cut her. They scarcely bowed when they saw her, and passed her very stiffly even in church. Sometimes they were afflicted with sudden short-sightedness, and did not see her at all. Miss Augusta, through being triumphant, could afford to be magnanimous; and she was a shade less distant in her manner: when met with Mr. Bentley, she was positively gracious. Then the Cantabs went back to their respective colleges, and the leaves began to fall. In the dreary autumn weather—the rain and fog and drizzling mist—that now came on, even her own adherents could not come out so often to see her; so that the sweet face grew sad in thinking of the bright sky and the warm hearts of Italy; and the joyous spirits sank in this social solitude, for want of love and sympathy to sustain it. The days were so grey and dark, she could not even paint; and in the Langthwaite lending library, were only dull histories or biographies. The mud and the rain frightened the soft half-foreigner, and kept her much within doors, moping in a dull Cumberland house, where the clouds came down so low, that they sometimes rested on the roof; and where the only visitors she saw were half-a-dozen good-hearted country girls, with not an idea amongst them beyond Berlin work or babies’ caps; which, to a woman accustomed to the best and most intellectual society of Rome, was scarcely sufficient mental distraction. What was she to do?—fight or retire? She thought of Italy, of her friends there, of the treasures of art, of the beauty, the free life, the ease, the love, the fulness of existence,—and she covered her face in her hands, while tears forced their way through her fingers. Then she thought of Mr. Bentley, and of his offer and of how he looked when he was down on his knees before her; and she laughed till she had a pain in her side. But she could not laugh for ever at Mr. Bentley and his offer, and the ennui of her life began to grow insupportable. It was reported at last that she was going away. It was Laura Winter who said so first, by Rosa’s permission, one day after she had been at Whitefield House. Madame Floriani had cried, and said that she was ill: the constant damp did not agree with her; and she had grown very thin and sallow rather than pale as she used to be; and she said, too, that she was dull; she could not bear it any longer. Her heart was Italian. It would not live in such an atmosphere; and then she had cried dreadfully, and Laura had cried too, for sympathy. As girls in the country always do.
So, Rosa owned herself beaten. Langthwaite morality had been too strong for her, and Langthwaite coldness too severe. Mr. Bentley had won the battle, and she cared now only for her retreat. She packed up her pictures and her books, her statues and her blue silk curtains; advertised Whitefield House for sale; and sold it well too. A retired sugar-broker bought it, and furnished it in gold and velvet. He had not a picture, nor a bust, nor a book; but he had hangings that cost a small fortune, and an assortment of colours that must surely please some one, as none in the whole rainbow were absent. Rosa had nothing to do with this; all she cared for, was to get out of Langthwaite, and to leave Cumberland clouds for Italian sunshine. She went to make her farewell calls. And, after having kissed all the Miss Grandvilles on both cheeks—for she was a generous, forgiving woman, with a loving heart and a perfect temper, and would not bear malice if she died for it—and after having shaken hands cordially with Mr. Bentley—who, like a foolish fat schoolboy, attempted to sulk—she turned her sweet face to the south, and left a climate that was killing her, and a people who did not love her, for the beauty and the graciousness of Italy.
But she left the seeds of discord behind her that soon bore deadly fruit. Deprived of their patroness, the Florianites sank to the ground. They were snubbed, maltreated, slighted, and all but extinguished. And when Miss Augusta Grandville at last got Mr. Bentley to consent to their marriage, not one of them was invited to the wedding. It was the day of retribution, and the Bentley faction were unsparing.
Madame Floriani did not forget her old adherents when she was established in her Roman home again; and after the Grandville marriage had turned out notoriously ill—for Miss Augusta was imperious, and Mr. Bentley obstinate—she invited the two Winter girls to Rome, and actually sent a man-servant all the way down to Langthwaite to take care of them on their journey. Which royal act nearly canonised her, though Mrs. Bentley said it was ridiculous, “And, good gracious! could not those two girls take care of themselves—if indeed they went at all, which if they had been her sisters they should not have done?”
Madame Floriani was very kind to her old friends. She took them everywhere, and fêted and petted them beyond measure. Their soft, pretty English faces, with their bright cheeks and long fair ringlets, made a sensation among the dark eyes and raven locks at Rome. The Miss Winters were decidedly the belles of their society—which is a woman’s state of paradise. Madame Floriani with her foreign notions set about marrying her young ladies. A task not very difficult; for foreigners like English wives; because they can trust them so much; and English women like foreign husbands, because they are more polite than their own countrymen. So Madame Rosa married them both—one to a count and the other to a baron. And when they went back to Langthwaite, which they did for their wedding trip, the people called them my lord and my lady, and treated them like queens. Even Mrs. Bentley yielded the past, which was a marvellous distinction, and made up for a great deal of the past. After all, then, Rosa had not entirely lost; the days of her teaching survived in her disciples, for Laura Winter settled at Langthwaite, and remodelled society there after the Floriani system. And now that Mr. Bentley was married, of course his influence was lessened; and all the young ladies who had tried to touch his heart by their austerity, now thought more of Laura’s foreign friends who came to see her, and who thought life without innocent laughter not worth the living.
MURMURS.