CHAPTER III
LIFE’S GLAMOUR
With the death of her husband, freedom had descended upon Anne like a gift of the gods. A divine ointment, it penetrated her bruised spirit, allaying the stored-up bitterness of years. Her heart emptied itself of poison and welled with compassion for the pitiful ending of a futile life. As her husband lay back upon the pillows, broken beyond all aid, unbelievably aged, she almost forgave the insult to her youth that their common life had proved. If it had only been a case of disparity of age, no question of forgiveness would have existed at all. The twenty odd years between them might have been forged into the strongest instead of the weakest link that bound them together. It was this very disparity, in fact, which at first had attracted her to him, with the enormous flattery it implied. Her immaturity had thrilled to the condescension as it could never thrill for the horde of barbaric youngsters who formed the guard-gallant of her first New York season. Emerging from an environment entirely continental, she was accustomed to the attentions of men belonging to an older race, whose suave courtesy had its roots in the antique. From the consulates in Rome and Florence which her father had occupied ingloriously but with utter content, she had brought an old-world respect and appreciation for maturity utterly foreign to young America of even fifteen years ago. And in these respects Julius Schuyler had satisfied her entirely. In her eyes he was not only a polished, traveled and well-read man of the world, he was brilliant. He dominated. His sketches were not the mere fads of a supremely idle and blasé man. They flamed with talent. Their very unfinished condition proved it. When so much can be suggested by the mere sweep of a line, why satiate the spectator further? So she had accepted him at her own adolescent valuation, glowing dewily beneath his tired, vivacious gaze.
For it was his forte to be sprightly. The ready repartee was ever on his lips, nor was the pun scorned. No matter how trite, how forced the shaft, it played the most important rôle in his armory. To the ears of eighteen the pompous straining was inaudible, the weary dissatisfaction which it served to conceal, practically invisible. It was not until the forcing-house of marriage, the constant companionship, had opened her eyes that she glimpsed the actual man through the shallow smoke-screen behind which he strove to cover an aching ennui, an intolerable insufficiency.
Meanwhile his admiration had gone completely to her young head. The fumes of it were sweet to her unaccustomed nostrils. Almost before she was aware of it, she had consented to marry him. So it came about that before the end of her first season she had acquired a husband twenty-five years her senior, still active, distinguished in appearance, although already gray, and incidentally wealthy, besides whose fortune her father’s very comfortable means dwindled ludicrously.
And yet perhaps it had not been so bad in the long run. After all, Julius Schuyler had been a gentleman and always acquitted himself as such. For Anne there had been no brutality, no animalism to encounter. Only the monotony of an endless and artificial vivacity, the ever forcing of herself to keep up her rôle of amused and humble spectator and playmate.
He was so small, so finicky, with his endless devices for passing the time. His double solitaire, his dominoes, his checkers which he would always produce at the hint of an empty half hour. Multi-subterfuges for cheating the gnawing ennui which with the years had fastened itself upon him like a cancer. Disliking all games intensely, Anne had at first absolutely refused to share in these puerile feints against time. But, after a while, when all effort at conversation languished in the anæmic soil of his irritating triteness, she had capitulated. They played checkers in Amalfi, his back turned to the glorious bay, her subconscious bathing in its blue flame; dominoes in Luxor with the Tombs of the Kings beckoning on the glamorous horizon line; two-handed bridge on the terrace of their villa in Florence, while the setting sun tinted the Arno and set afire the mammoth dome of the old cathedral.
However, there had been compensations. The silver lining to her cloud had provided a background of decided luxury. Travel brought contact with a cosmopolitan, ever-changing, group who gave the beautiful American that delicate homage, tinged with desire, which is stimulating to a feminine ego, dissatisfied and unawakened. Intervals between tête-à-tête games were sometimes brilliant and prolonged. The buying of the villa in Florence was a joy, almost unmitigated by the fussy alterations of Julius who imagined he understood old furniture, and the Cinque-Cento. It was sheer rapture to return to Florence, to resume old friendships, revisit in stealth old haunts.
But her vitality was sapped by Julius’ greedy monopoly. He clung with the persistency of an âme damnée. He accompanied her to the dressmaker, where she was draped according to his finicky conception of her type. He chose her hats. He bought her underwear, all of the very finest, of course. But when she wore it beneath his complacent eyes, self-consciousness became an agony which habit refused to dull. If passion had underlain the complacence, she would not have minded even this. But Julius never forgot himself in his love for her. His natural diffidence was a perpetual audience, the unwelcome third in all their intercourse. Never impulsive, his caresses lacked the white heat of passion which is clean because spontaneous. Beneath his touch, Anne felt herself perpetually under the microscope. It seemed as if he were vain, not of his prowess, but of still being capable of harboring sensation at all. And habit made her quick to notice that these lapses into anæmic appetite usually followed the prodding of some erotic book or play, and were seldom occasioned by her own desirability. She became practiced in the art of retreat and withdrawal, so that the whole nature of love was distorted. Still, a sort of pity for his maimed spirit kept her silent. She closed her eyes and tried deliberately to become callous. However, she made up her mind that if so precious a commodity as freedom ever came within her grasp again, she would never permit it to escape.
And now that this freedom had been hers for almost five years, its realization had exceeded her keenest expectations. Evading every opportunity of remarriage, she had skilfully apportioned her seasons between the United States and Europe. The New York season was invariably followed by a few weeks in Egypt or the Riviera and capped by three sensuous months in the Florentine villa. And this was the best-loved time of all, in which she renewed body and soul, absorbing peace and serenity from the olive-crusted hills upon whose sides multi-colored villas gleamed like jewels in dark tresses.
Within her small but cherished garden, rose a terrace paved with bricks. One attained it by a narrow flight of moss-grown steps. Here she would sit for hours, basking beneath the sun which rode the heavens like an impartial god, while beyond the pallid balustrade, cypress-studded hills merged into the horizontal purple.