Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 2/Chapter 7
SHE sat by her open window, breakfasting languidly, when she discovered that he was just below her. His long chair had been placed in the sunshine of the upper terrace beneath the window, though she did not know this until she heard his sister giving him a morning greeting there.
"You don't think you were indiscreet to venture out into the night air, Charles?" Miss Orbison said; and a scraping upon the gravel indicated that she dragged one of the iron chairs with her, and came to sit beside him. "You don't look the worse, I'm sure."
"No. What difference would it make if I did?" he returned, with a short laugh. "When one's certain to be worse before long in any event, what difference is it if one's worse a day or two sooner?"
Miss Orbison protested gently. "Ah, don't say that, Charles!"
"No. Perhaps it's just as well unsaid. It's better to leave the most of what we know about some things unsaid, of course; so forgive me. At any rate, last night made me glad I'd hung on at least till then. I was no end sorry you hadn't overlooked your cold and come with us."
"Really! It was quite what Mr. Rennie said it would be, then?"
"Quite! You could add something to that, if you cared to."
"Really! What was it like, Charles?"
"I couldn't possibly tell you," he said. "It was one of those things you have to see and hear yourself; you'll get only a feeble water colour of it from me. I think a chap like Beethoven might have put it into music; but I doubt if Robert Browning could have done it in verse."
"Really! It was as impressive as all that?"
"'Impressive,'" he said, and laughed again briefly, in his discontent with her word. "Would you say that of the volcano yonder? Last night I thought it was the tent of Zeus and that the god himself was in bivouac there. We sat where Cicero had sat, I think; and long before him, Plato. It seemed to me I could see processions of all the dead Greeks who had sat in that theatre; they came sweeping up out of the sea and down out of the sky on the shafts of moonshine. They were shaped of that light, themselves, and they took their old places in the theatre they must have dearly loved, since they built it upon the most magnificent site in the world. You'd have thought then that only a great chant should have come up to us from the stage; that anything less wouldn't have been bearable. No, it wasn't so. The music was transfigured, translated out of itself into something almost intolerably beautiful. And then, when they played the Pastorale, there came a sweet, carolling voice from the air—a woman's voice singing as a nightingale sings, not singing to be heard, but just out of its own heart—and sang the Pastorale with them. You couldn't tell where she sat or stood, or in what part of the theatre she was; and you didn't want to know: she was doing simply the loveliest thing a human being ever did, and you had no wish to see her or even to learn who she was. What she did, itself, was enough. For me"
"Yes? For you, Charles?" his sister asked, as he paused.
"For me," he answered, "it was the final loveliness in the hour of greatest sheer beauty I've ever known in my life. One doesn't want to touch such a thing at all."
"No," Miss Orbison said sympathetically. "Of course not, Charles."
But the girl near the window above them held to a different way of thinking; she was not of the age when such a thing is to be left untouched. She sat for a little while, breathing rapidly, her eyes brilliant and her colour deep, in her delight; then, as the sister and brother fell silent, devoting their attention to the landscape, or to reverie, she moved silently out of her chair, and stole to the mirror across the room. Smiling rapturously upon it she let her finger tips rest upon their reflected fellows: "You certainly did something!" she whispered to her counterpart. Then she let her green Chinese wrapper slide down from her, and began to dress.
Before she had quite finished she heard Miss Orbison speaking again, but not from beneath the window; evidently she was at a little distance.
"I'll be back before lunch, Charles," she said. "You can call to one of the gardeners to fetch Agostino if you need anything. You're sure you"
"Of course," her brother interrupted a little irritably. "I sha'n't need you. I'm not flat on my back, yet. Do go along!"
Miss Orbison went, and Claire stepped noiselessly to the window. Orbison was reclining just below in the warm full sunshine, with his heavy rug pulled close about him; and no one else was upon the upper terrace or in the pergola that bordered it. Gardeners were at work among the flower beds beyond the terrace; and a group of German travellers stood talking by the railing above the precipice; but at that distance their voices were not heard more loudly here than the droning of the bees among the flowering vines that grew upon the old stone walls of the hotel. Smoke massed itself placidly upon the shoulders of the volcano; hazy cliffs of lilac rose from a pale-blue sea, and the air seemed gilded with the southern morning sunlight. No young heroine of a romantic drama could have wished a stage better set for her entrance.
Claire selected the prettiest pair of patent-leather slippers that she owned, and, seated upon a stool before her dressing table, thoughtfully put them on. "Now where you going to take me?" she whispered excitedly to her feet, when they were thus becomingly encased.
But, as she well knew they would, they took her to the pergola upon the upper terrace. She appeared there a few minutes later, bright-eyed, high-coloured, altogether charming, with a small red book in her hand; and, after a musing and impersonal glance about her, which appeared to reveal nothing to detain her interest, she seated herself upon a bench beneath the shading vines. She sat in profile to the Englishman, and only a few paces distant from him; she had no doubt of his attention, nor that he knew she was conscious of it. Her lively heart made her aware of its beating; but she turned over the pages of her book with a steady, graceful little hand; and then, with her downcast eyes upon the turning pages, she began to sing the Pastorale in a low, sweet voice, as if little more than humming the melody to herself. Yet she made it clear enough, she was sure.
When she had sung it through, her colour was even higher than before, and she held her book so near to her eyes that she seemed almost to bury her blushing face in it. This was something she had not expected—a moment of fluttering panic—but she bravely lowered the book and slowly turned her head to face him.
Orbison was looking at her intently, with that eagerness in his haggard eyes her mother had said was "as if he knew he couldn't get much out of life but did hope to get that little."
For a long moment they looked at each other; then she rose and went slowly toward him until she stood at his feet.
"I'm glad you liked it, Mr. Orbison," she said. "It was meant for you."