“O, Mr. Mann, I haven’t cut them yet. Babies don’t have them.”
“Don’t they? Well, you have other teeth in their place, white and sharp–but by this time you are four years old.”
“Ah, here I begin to remember. You draw the pictures, and I’ll describe myself. Four years old!–let me see–I had a sled for Christmas, and I used to eat green apples. That’s all I can remember; and five and six years old were just the same.”
“O, no, I’m sure you went to church for the first time somewhere along there; and isn’t that a noteworthy event? I suppose all your thoughts were of your button boots and your new parasol?”
“I behaved beautifully, I know; mamma says so; sat up like a lady, while you were sleeping, on that very same Sunday, off in some little country church, I suppose.”
“I shouldn’t wonder–sleeping in my brother’s outgrown coat into the bargain, with the sleeves dangling over my little brown hands.”
“It doesn’t seem as if they could ever have been very little, does it, Mr. Mann?”
Mr. Mann unfolded five fingers and a thumb and surveyed them gravely for a moment. “It is strange that this once measured three inches by two and couldn’t hit out any better than your’s could.”
Mae had laid her hand on her knee and was looking at it also in the most serious manner. Now she doubled it into a small but very pugnacious looking fist, which she shook most entrancingly before the very eyes of the young man by her side. The eyes turned such a peculiar look upon her that she hastened to add: “Go on with your dissolving views. It is number eight’s turn next. You are the showman, and I am interested spectator.”
“You insist upon describing my pictures, so I think you are properly first assistant to the grand panorama. Here’s eight-year- old. Try your powers on her.”
“Let me see. O, then I read all the while, the ‘Fairchild Family’ and ‘Anna Ross,’ and I used to wear my hair in very smooth braids, I remember. I was ever so good.”
“Impossible; you must have forgotten,” suggested Norman. “You surely whispered in school and committed similar dreadful crimes. Poor little prig.”
“No, don’t,” plead Mae; “please don’t laugh at the little girl me. I love to think of her as so goody-goody. Last night,” and Mae lowered her voice, “I seemed to see little Mae Madden kneeling down in the old nursery in her woolly wrapper saying her prayers,” and Mae brought up on the prayers very abruptly, and bent over toward the sand and began to draw hastily. “Here comes nine-year-old Mae. Mr. Mann, you may do the describing.”
“O, I suppose there were doll’s parties, first valentines, and rides with Albert in his buggy, when you clung very tightly to the slight arm of the carriage and smiled very bravely up in his face. You must have been pretty then.”
“No, I was dreadfully ugly. I had broken out two teeth climbing a stone wall.”
“You had stopped being good?”
“Yes, that only lasted a little bit of a time.”
“Miss Mae, I’m sure you were never ugly, but naughty and silly, I dare say. Kept a diary now, didn’t you?”
“Yes, and went to sleep with Eliza Cooke’s poems under my pillow every night, and my finger holding the book open at some such thrilling verse as this:
‘Say on that I’m over romantic
In loving the wild and the free, But the waves of the dashing Atlantic, The Alps and the eagle for me.'”
“Did you wear your hair plaited when you were ten years old?” enquired Norman, intensely busy with another drawing.
“O no; I didn’t do anything when I was ten years old but get mad and make up with my two dearest friends.”
“One of whom was your dearest friend one-half of the time and the other the rest of it, I suppose.”
“Don’t be satirical, sir. I had a lover when I was eleven; I used to skate with him and write him little notes, folded very queerly.”
“Why do you draw twelve and thirteen with their heads down?” asked Mae, after a moment.
“Because they read so much; everything they can get hold of, including, possibly, a very revised edition of ‘Arabian Nights’?”
“Yes,” laughed Mae, “and my first novel, ‘Villette.'”
“You go to a play for the first time now,” suggested Norman. “How you clasp your hands and wink your eyes and bite your lips! And next day, in front of your mother’s pier-glass, how you scream ‘O, my love,’ and gasp and tumble over in a heap in your brown calico, as the grand lady did the night before, in her pink silk.”
“Brown calico, indeed! I never condescended to die in my own clothes, let me assure you. The garret was overhauled, and had been since I was a mere baby, for effective, sweeping garments. Let us hurry along over fourteen and fifteen. I was sentimental and tried to be so young-ladyish then. I used to read history with Albert, and always put on both my gloves when I started out, and had great horror of girls who talked loud in the street. I learned to make bread, and shirt bosoms, and such things.”
“Well, here you are in a long dress, Miss Sweet Sixteen. I remember you home from boarding school on a vacation.”
“What did you think of me?” asked Mae, “didn’t we have a nice time that summer? O, how silly I was!”
She hurried on, because the eyes had given her that peculiar look again, which put her heart in a tremble. “I did have a beautiful time at boarding school,” she continued, “the darlingest principal and such girls.”
“Then I suppose you wrote a salutatory in forlorn rhyme to end off with,” laughed Norman, “and read it, all arrayed in white, in a trembling voice, and everybody applauded, and even old Judge Seymour admired it, while you were reading, with your pink cheeks and trembling hands and quivering voice.”
“Abominable! I didn’t have the salutatory, and the girl who did, read a superb one, as strong and masculine–“
“Then the Judge went to sleep, I’m sure,” declared Norman.
“Well,” said Mae, “you are leaving out two years,” for Norman had leaned back against the rock with his arms folded.
“By and by,” said Norman, “we all come off to Europe, and some of us go through the heart-ache, don’t we?”
“Yes,” replied Mae, softly.
“But come out ahead one day at Sorrento, perhaps?” asked Norman. To which Mae made no direct reply.
“All the Mae Maddens have faded away,” she said, looking down at the sand again. “The tide is rising.” And she walked forward to the ripples of water, and then came slowly back and stood before Norman seriously. He laughed.
“Why, Mr. Mann,” said Mae, “I have been so very, very wicked.”
The dreadful Mr. Mann only laughed again.
“You act as if it were all a joke. I never saw you so merry before.”
“I have never been as happy before in my life.”
“Why?” asked Mae, in a low voice.
“Because I have found you,” he answered earnestly, and before she knew it Mae was lifted in the strong, manly arms, her pink cheek close to Norman’s brown one, and his lips on hers. She leaned her face against his and clung tightly to him,
“O, Mr. Norman Mann,” she said, “do you really want me as much–as I do you?”
And Norman, still holding her tightly, bent his hand, with hers clasped in it, to the sand, and after the Mae Madden, he wrote another name, so that it read:
MAE MADDEN MANN.
Then he said a great many, many things, all beginning with that electric, wonderful little possessive pronoun “my,” of which he had discoursed formerly, and he held her close all the while, and they missed the next train for Naples.
The gay peasant costume fell about the girl’s round lithe form like the luxuriant skin of some richly marked animal; but out of her eyes looked a woman’s tender, loving, earnest soul. Norman Mann had saved her.
CHAPTER XIV.
Edith was quietly married to Albert at Easter time, in the English Chapel at Florence. The event was hastened by the sudden appearance of Mae’s parents, who set sail soon after hearing of the Sorrento escapade and the embryonic engagement, which awaited their sanction before being announced. Everything was beautifully smooth at last. Edith and Albert left the day of their marriage for Munich, and later, Mrs. Jerrold was to settle down with them at Tuebingen. The rest of the party were to summer in Switzerland; then came fall, and then–what?
Norman thought he knew, and Mae said she thought he didn’t, but this young woman was losing half her character for willfulness, and Norman was growing into a perfect tyrant, so far as his rights were concerned. Easter is a season of marriages. Mae read in a Roman paper the betrothal announcement of the Signor Bero and Signorina Lillia Taria. “I would like to send them a real beautiful present,” said she, and Norman did not say no. So these two hunted all over Florence, and at length, in the studio of a certain not unknown Florentine, they discovered the very gift Mae desired–a picture of a young Italian soldier, bringing home his bride to his own people. There was the aged mother, proud and happy, waiting to bid the dark-eyed girl welcome. “She has a real ‘old Nokomis’ air,” laughed Mae. “I know she would have told her son not to seek ‘a stranger whom he knew not.'” The distant olive-colored hillsides, the splashing fountain near at hand, each face, and even the thick strong sunshine seemed to bear a tiny stamp with Italy graven on it. “The name of the picture is exactly right,” said Mae. Under the painting were these words: “Italia Our Home.”
Norman would hardly have been human if he had not cast a quick glance at her as she stood thoughtfully before the picture. Mae was almost as good as an Italian for involuntary posing. She had made a tableau of herself now, with one hand at her eyes to shade them from the glare of the sun that fell fiercely through the window, her head half on one side, and a bit of drapery, of lace or soft silk, tight around her white throat. She felt Norman’s glance, and looked up quickly, and smiled and shook her head: “No, Italy is not my home, although I love it so well. There is a certain wide old doorway not many miles from New York, and the hills around it, and the great river before it, and the people in it, all belong together, too. That’s where we belong, Norman, in America, our home,” and Mae struck a grand final pose with her hands clasped ecstatically, and her eyes flashing in the true Goddess of Liberty style.
“Yes, I believe we do, Mae; I am almost anxious to get back and begin work in that young, eager country.”
“And so am I,” said Mae.
Norman laughed. “To think of your coming down to work, you young butterfly.”
“It is what we all have to come to, isn’t it?–unless we go to that creature that finds some mischief still for idle hands to do. I don’t expect to come to stone-cutting or cattle-driving, but I do expect to settle down into a tolerable housewifely little woman, and–”
“And look after me.”
“Yes, I suppose so–and myself, and probably a sewing-class and the cook’s lame son. Heigh-ho-hum! What a pity it is, that it is so uninteresting to be good.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t be saucy. I do know, perfectly well, that Mae Madden, naughty, idle, and silly, may be, after all, not so stupid; but get me good, industrious and wise, and it will take all of my time when I’m not asleep to keep so. No, there’ll be nothing to say about me any more. I’ll be as humdrum as–“
“As I am.”
“You–why Norman, are you humdrum?”
“Of course I am, dreadfully humdrum. If you and I were in a story- book, you would have ten pages to my one, to keep the reader awake. But then, story-books aren’t the end of life. Suppose you, Mae Madden, have been odd, full of variety, ready to twist common occurrences into something startling and romantic, have you been happy? Haven’t you been restless and discontented? Now, can’t you, grown humdrum and good, be very happy and contented and joyful, even if the sun rises on just about the same Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the year round? You will not do for a story-book then, but won’t you do better for life? And, after all, a lively murderer is a great deal more sensational than you could ever be.”
“Even when I ran away?”
“Yes. Now, you see, I have been humdrum again, and half preached a sermon.”
“All right, sir; so long as you take me for a text, you may preach as you want to, and by and by, I dare say, I shall agree with you.”
“It would have been a great deal more interesting if you had married that Italian.”
“How do you know I could have married that Italian, my lord? He is going to marry a girl as much more beautiful than I am as–as Bero himself is than you–and yet I would rather have you. And now, don’t you dare look at me in that way. I’ll never say another nice thing to you if you do. This artist will think we are–“
“Lovers, my dear. And aren’t we?”
* * * * * * *
Ten days later Norman entered with a letter for Mae. “Read it to me,” she said, throwing back the blinds and leaning her elbows on the window-cushion.
“It is from Lillia. Would you rather read it yourself?” “O, no.” So Norman read what Lillia had written in her pretty broken English:
“My DEAR MISS MAE:–Thank you of all my heart for your so lovely gift. I have had so little home since long, long ago my mother died, and now I am to have one as the maid in the picture has. We will marry the fifth day of May at five o’clock, and will wish you to be there. Don’t forget me.
LILLIA.”
“Signor Bero has added a postscript, Mae, which you can translate better than I.” And Norman handed her the letter. Mae translated it thus:
“Did you know all that the picture would say to me, Signorina? Receive my thanks for it, too, and believe I shall always live worthy of my Italy, my wife and friends that I see in the picture, and of another friend who lives so far away, whom I shall never see again, if I have such a friend. Think of my beautiful Lillia on our wedding day. We shall be married at St. Andrea’s, at vesper time.
Bero.”
“And this is the day,” said Mae, dropping the note.
“And the very hour, allowing the bride and the sun a few minutes each,” added Norman, glancing at the clock.
They gaze quietly out of the window of their lodgings on the Borgo Ognissante, but Mae sees far away beyond the Arno, into the church of St. Andrea,–music, and pomp, and beautiful ceremony, and before the altar, a woman in her bridal robes, with heavily figured lace falling over her black hair and white forehead, and against her soft cheeks and shoulders. Her great brown eyes have thrown away the mist of sadness for a luminous wedding veil of joy, and she is Lillia, and by her side, erect, proud, glorious, with a lingering ray of light falling on his golden head, is her happy husband, Bero. They stand before the altar of St. Andrea’s. “God bless you,” says Mae aloud. Then her gaze wanders back to the coral and mosaic shops below in the street, and up across to the opposite window, where a long-haired, brown-moustached, brown-eyed man leans, puffing smoke from his curved lips, and holding his cigarette in his slender fingers. She meets his gaze now, as she has met it before. “He is wondering what life will bring to these two young people, I fancy,” says Mae.
“Our own wedding-day, Mae,” Norman replies; and they both forget all about Lillia, and Bero, and the stranger, and suddenly leave the window. The long-haired man puffs his cigar in a little loneliness, and wishes that wedding bells might ring for his empty heart too.