He flattered himself on the following day that there was no smiling among the servants when he at least asked for Mrs. Miller at her hotel. This lady and her daughter, however, were not at home; and on the next day after, repeating his visit, Winterbourne again was met by a denial. Mrs. Walker’s party took place on the evening of the third day, and in spite of the final reserves that had marked his last interview with that social critic our young man was among the guests. Mrs. Walker was one of those pilgrims from the younger world who, while in contact with the elder, make a point, in their own phrase, of studying European society; and she had on this occasion collected several specimens of diversely-born humanity to serve, as might be, for text-books. When Winterbourne arrived the little person he desired most to find wasn’t there; but in a few moments he saw Mrs. Miller come in alone, very shyly and ruefully. This lady’s hair, above the dead waste of her temples, was more frizzled than ever. As she approached their hostess Winterbourne also drew near.
“You see I’ve come all alone,” said Daisy’s unsupported parent. “I’m so frightened I don’t know what to do; it’s the first time I’ve ever been to a party alone—especially in this country. I wanted to bring Randolph or Eugenio or some one, but Daisy just pushed me off by myself. I ain’t used to going round alone.”
“And doesn’t your daughter intend to favour us with her society?” Mrs. Walker impressively enquired.
“Well, Daisy’s all dressed,” Mrs. Miller testified with that accent of the dispassionate, if not of the philosophic, historian with which she always recorded the current incidents of her daughter’s career. “She got dressed on purpose before dinner. But she has a friend of hers there; that gentleman—the handsomest of the Italians—that she wanted to bring. They’ve got going at the piano—it seems as if they couldn’t leave off. Mr. Giovanelli does sing splendidly. But I guess they’ll come before very long,” Mrs. Miller hopefully concluded.
“I’m sorry she should come—in that particular way,” Mrs. Walker permitted herself to observe.
“Well, I told her there was no use in her getting dressed before dinner if she was going to wait three hours,” returned Daisy’s mamma. “I didn’t see the use of her putting on such a dress as that to sit round with Mr. Giovanelli.”
“This is most horrible!” said Mrs. Walker, turning away and addressing herself to Winterbourne. “Elle s’affiche, la malheureuse.1 It’s her revenge for my having ventured to remonstrate with her. When she comes I shan’t speak to her.”
Daisy came after eleven o’clock, but she wasn’t, on such an occasion, a young lady to wait to be spoken to. She rustled forward in radiant loveliness, smiling and chattering, carrying a large bouquet and attended by Mr. Giovanelli. Every one stopped talking and turned and looked at her while she floated up to Mrs. Walker. “I’m afraid you thought I never was coming, so I sent mother off to tell you. I wanted to make Mr. Giovanelli practise some things before he came; you know he sings beautifully, and I want you to ask him to sing. This is Mr. Giovanelli; you know I introduced him to you; he’s got the most lovely voice and he knows the most charming set of songs. I made him go over them this evening on purpose; we had the greatest time at the hotel.” Of all this Daisy delivered herself with the sweetest brightest loudest confidence, looking now at her hostess and now at all the room, while she gave a series of little pats, round her very white shoulders, to the edges of her dress. “Is there any one I know?” she as undiscourageably asked.
“I think every one knows you!” said Mrs. Walker as with a grand intention; and she gave a very cursory greeting to Mr. Giovanelli. This gentleman bore himself gallantly; he smiled and bowed and showed his white teeth, he curled his moustaches and rolled his eyes and performed all the proper functions of a handsome Italian at an evening party. He sang, very prettily, half a dozen songs, though Mrs. Walker afterwards declared that she had been quite unable to find out who asked him. It was apparently not Daisy who had set him in motion—this young lady being seated a distance from the piano and though she had publicly, as it were, professed herself his musical patroness or guarantor, giving herself to gay and audible discourse while he warbled.
“It’s a pity these rooms are so small; we can’t dance,” she remarked to Winterbourne as if she had seen him five minutes before.
“I’m not sorry we can’t dance,” he candidly returned. “I’m incapable of a step.”
“Of course you’re incapable of a step,” the girl assented. “I should think your legs would be stiff cooped in there so much of the time in that victoria.”
“Well, they were very restless there three days ago,” he amicably laughed; “all they really wanted was to dance attendance on you.”
“Oh my other friend—my friend in need—stuck to me; he seems more at one with his limbs than you are—I’ll say that for him. But did you ever hear anything so cool,” Daisy demanded, “as Mrs. Walker’s wanting me to get into her carriage and drop poor Mr. Giovanelli, and under the pretext that it was proper? People have different ideas! It would have been most unkind; he had been talking about that walk for ten days.”
“He shouldn’t have talked about it at all,” Winterbourne decided to make answer on this: “he would never have proposed to a young lady of this country to walk about the streets of Rome with him.”
“About the streets?” she cried with her pretty stare. “Where then would he have proposed to her to walk? The Pincio ain’t the streets either, I guess; and I besides, thank goodness, am not a young lady of this country. The young ladies of this country have a dreadfully pokey time of it, by what I can discover; I don’t see why I should change my habits for such stupids.”
“I’m afraid your habits are those of a ruthless flirt,” said Winterbourne with studied severity.
“Of course they are!”—and she hoped, evidently, by the manner of it, to take his breath away. “I’m a fearful frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of nice girl that wasn’t? But I suppose you’ll tell me now I’m not a nice girl.”
He remained grave indeed under the shock of her cynical profession. “You’re a very nice girl, but I wish you’d flirt with me, and me only.”
“Ah thank you, thank you very much: you’re the last man I should think of flirting with. As I’ve had the pleasure of informing you, you’re too stiff.”
“You say that too often,” he resentfully remarked.
Daisy gave a delighted laugh. “If I could have the sweet hope of making you angry I’d say it again.”
“Don’t do that—when I’m angry I’m stiffer than ever. But if you won’t flirt with me do cease at least to flirt with your friend at the piano. They don’t,” he declared as in full sympathy with “them,” “understand that sort of thing here.”
“I thought they understood nothing else!” Daisy cried with startling world-knowledge.
“Not in young unmarried women.”
“It seems to me much more proper in young unmarried than in old married ones,” she retorted.
“Well,” said Winterbourne, “when you deal with natives you must go by the custom of the country. American flirting is a purely American silliness; it has—in its ineptitude of innocence—no place in this system. So when you show yourself in public with Mr. Giovanelli and without your mother—”
“Gracious, poor mother!”—and she made it beautifully unspeakable.
Winterbourne had a touched sense for this, but it didn’t alter his attitude. “Though you may be flirting Mr. Giovanelli isn’t—he means something else.”
“He isn’t preaching at any rate,” she returned. “And if you want very much to know, we’re neither of us flirting—not a little speck. We’re too good friends for that. We’re real intimate friends.”
He was to continue to find her thus at moments inimitable. “Ah,” he then judged, “if you’re in love with each other it’s another affair altogether!”
She had allowed him up to this point to speak so frankly that he had no thought of shocking her by the force of his logic; yet she now none the less immediately rose, blushing visibly and leaving him mentally to exclaim that the name of little American flirts was incoherence. “Mr. Giovanelli at least,” she answered, sparing but a single small queer glance for it, a queerer small glance, he felt, than he had ever yet had from her—“Mr. Giovanelli never says to me such very disagreeable things.”
It had an effect on him—he stood staring. The subject of their contention had finished singing; he left the piano, and his recognition of what—a little awkwardly—didn’t take place in celebration of this might nevertheless have been an acclaimed operatic tenor’s series of repeated ducks before the curtain. So he bowed himself over to Daisy. “Won’t you come to the other room and have some tea?” he asked—offering Mrs. Walker’s slightly thin refreshment as he might have done all the kingdoms of the earth.
Daisy at last turned on Winterbourne a more natural and calculable light. He was but the more muddled by it, however, since so inconsequent a smile made nothing clear—it seemed at the most to prove in her a sweetness and softness that reverted instinctively to the pardon of offences. “It has never occurred to Mr. Winterbourne to offer me any tea,” she said with her finest little intention of torment and triumph.
“I’ve offered you excellent advice,” the young man permitted himself to growl.
“I prefer weak tea!” cried Daisy, and she went off with the brilliant Giovanelli. She sat with him in the adjoining room, in the embrasure of the window, for the rest of the evening. There was an interesting performance at the piano, but neither of these conversers gave heed to it. When Daisy came to take leave of Mrs. Walker this lady conscientiously repaired the weakness of which she had been guilty at the moment of the girl’s arrival—she turned her back straight on Miss Miller and left her to depart with what grace she might. Winterbourne happened to be near the door; he saw it all. Daisy turned very pale and looked at her mother, but Mrs. Miller was humbly unconscious of any rupture of any law or of any deviation from any custom. She appeared indeed to have felt an incongruous impulse to draw attention to her own striking conformity. “Good-night, Mrs. Walker,” she said; “we’ve had a beautiful evening. You see if I let Daisy come to parties without me I don’t want her to go away without me.” Daisy turned away, looking with a small white prettiness, a blighted grace, at the circle near the door: Winterbourne saw that for the first moment she was too much shocked and puzzled even for indignation. He on his side was greatly touched.
“That was very cruel,” he promptly remarked to Mrs. Walker.
But this lady’s face was also as a stone. “She never enters my drawing-room again.”
Since Winterbourne then, hereupon, was not to meet her in Mrs. Walker’s drawing-room he went as often as possible to Mrs. Miller’s hotel. The ladies were rarely at home, but when he found them the devoted Giovanelli was always present. Very often the glossy little Roman, serene in success, but not unduly presumptuous, occupied with Daisy alone the florid salon enjoyed by Eugenio’s care, Mrs. Miller being apparently ever of the opinion that discretion is the better part of solicitude. Winterbourne noted, at first with surprise, that Daisy on these occasions was neither embarrassed nor annoyed by his own entrance; but he presently began to feel that she had no more surprises for him and that he really liked, after all, not making out what she was “up to.” She showed no displeasure for the interruption of her tête-à-tête with Giovanelli; she could chatter as freshly and freely with two gentlemen as with one, and this easy flow had ever the same anomaly for her earlier friend that it was so free without availing itself of its freedom. Winterbourne reflected that if she was seriously interested in the Italian it was odd she shouldn’t take more trouble to preserve the sanctity of their interviews, and he liked her the better for her innocent-looking indifference and her inexhaustible gaiety. He could hardly have said why, but she struck him as a young person not formed for a troublesome jealousy. Smile at such a betrayal though the reader may, it was a fact with regard to the women who had hitherto interested him that, given certain contingencies, Winterbourne could see himself afraid—literally afraid—of these ladies. It pleased him to believe that even were twenty other things different and Daisy should love him and he should know it and like it, he would still never be afraid of Daisy. It must be added that this conviction was not altogether flattering to her: it represented that she was nothing every way if not light.
But she was evidently very much interested in Giovanelli. She looked at him whenever he spoke; she was perpetually telling him to do this and to do that; she was constantly chaffing and abusing him. She appeared completely to have forgotten that her other friend had said anything to displease her at Mrs. Walker’s entertainment. One Sunday afternoon, having gone to Saint Peter’s with his aunt, Winterbourne became aware that the young woman held in horror by that lady was strolling about the great church under escort of her coxcomb of the Corso. It amused him, after a debate, to point out the exemplary pair—even at the cost, as it proved, of Mrs. Costello’s saying when she had taken them in through her eye-glass: “That’s what makes you so pensive in these days, eh?”
“I hadn’t the least idea I was pensive,” he pleaded.
“You’re very much preoccupied; you’re always thinking of something.”
“And what is it,” he asked, “that you accuse me of thinking of?”
“Of that young lady’s, Miss Baker’s, Miss Chandler’s—what’s her name?—Miss Miller’s intrigue with that little barber’s block.”
“Do you call it an intrigue,” he asked—“an affair that goes on with such peculiar publicity?”
“That’s their folly,” said Mrs. Costello, “it’s not their merit.”
“No,” he insisted with a hint perhaps of the preoccupation to which his aunt had alluded—“I don’t believe there’s anything to be called an intrigue.”
“Well”—and Mrs. Costello dropped her glass—“I’ve heard a dozen people speak of it: they say she’s quite carried away by him.”
“They’re certainly as thick as thieves,” our embarrassed young man allowed.
Mrs. Costello came back to them, however, after a little; and Winterbourne recognised in this a further illustration—than that supplied by his own condition—of the spell projected by the case. “He’s certainly very handsome. One easily sees how it is. She thinks him the most elegant man in the world, the finest gentleman possible. She has never seen anything like him—he’s better even than the courier. It was the courier probably who introduced him, and if he succeeds in marrying the young lady the courier will come in for a magnificent commission.”
“I don’t believe she thinks of marrying him,” Winterbourne reasoned, “and I don’t believe he hopes to marry her.”
“You may be very sure she thinks of nothing at all. She romps on from day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age. I can imagine nothing more vulgar,” said Mrs. Costello, whose figure of speech scarcely went on all fours. “And at the same time,” she added, “depend upon it she may tell you any moment that she is ‘engaged.’ ”
“I think that’s more than Giovanelli really expects,” said Winterbourne.
“And who is Giovanelli?”
“The shiny—but, to do him justice, not greasy—little Roman. I’ve asked questions about him and learned something. He’s apparently a perfectly respectable little man. I believe he’s in a small way a cavaliere avvocato.2 But he doesn’t move in what are called the first circles. I think it really not absolutely impossible the courier introduced him. He’s evidently immensely charmed with Miss Miller. If she thinks him the finest gentleman in the world, he, on his side, has never found himself in personal contact with such splendour, such opulence, such personal daintiness, as this young lady’s. And then she must seem to him wonderfully pretty and interesting. Yes, he can’t really hope to pull it off. That must appear to him too impossible a piece of luck. He has nothing but his handsome face to offer, and there’s a substantial, a possibly explosive Mr. Miller in that mysterious land of dollars and six-shooters. Giovanelli’s but too conscious that he hasn’t a title to offer. If he were only a count or a marchese!3 What on earth can he make of the way they’ve taken him up?”
“He accounts for it by his handsome face and thinks Miss Miller a young lady qui se passe ses fantaisies!”4
“It’s very true,” Winterbourne pursued, “that Daisy and her mamma haven’t yet risen to that stage of—what shall I call it?—of culture, at which the idea of catching a count or a marchese begins. I believe them intellectually incapable of that conception.”
“Ah but the cavaliere avvocato doesn’t believe them!” cried Mrs. Costello.
Of the observation excited by Daisy’s “intrigue” Winterbourne gathered that day at Saint Peter’s sufficient evidence. A dozen of the American colonists in Rome came to talk with his relative, who sat on a small portable stool at the base of one of the great pilasters. The vesper-service was going forward in splendid chants and organ-tones in the adjacent choir, and meanwhile, between Mrs. Costello and her friends, much was said about poor little Miss Miller’s going really “too far.” Winterbourne was not pleased with what he heard; but when, coming out upon the great steps of the church, he saw Daisy, who had emerged before him, get into an open cab with her accomplice and roll away through the cynical streets of Rome, the measure of her course struck him as simply there to take. He felt very sorry for her—not exactly that he believed she had completely lost her wits, but because it was painful to see so much that was pretty and undefended and natural sink so low in human estimation. He made an attempt after this to give a hint to Mrs. Miller. He met one day in the Corso a friend—a tourist like himself—who had just come out of the Doria Palace, where he had been walking through the beautiful gallery. His friend “went on” for some moments about the great portrait of Innocent X, by Velasquez,5 suspended in one of the cabinets of the palace, and then said: “And in the same cabinet, by the way, I enjoyed sight of an image of a different kind; that little American who’s so much more a work of nature than of art and whom you pointed out to me last week.” In answer to Winterbourne’s enquiries his friend narrated that the little American—prettier now than ever—was seated with a companion in the secluded nook in which the papal presence is enshrined.
“All alone?” the young man heard himself disingenuously ask.
“Alone with a little Italian who sports in his button-hole a stack of flowers. The girl’s a charming beauty, but I thought I understood from you the other day that she’s a young lady du meilleur monde.”6
“So she is!” said Winterbourne; and having assured himself that his informant had seen the interesting pair but ten minutes before, he jumped into a cab and went to call on Mrs. Miller. She was at home, but she apologised for receiving him in Daisy’s absence.
“She’s gone out somewhere with Mr. Giovanelli. She’s always going round with Mr. Giovanelli.”
“I’ve noticed they’re intimate indeed,” Winterbourne concurred.
“Oh it seems as if they couldn’t live without each other!” said Mrs. Miller. “Well, he’s a real gentleman anyhow. I guess I have the joke on Daisy—that she must be engaged!”
“And how does your daughter take the joke?”
“Oh she just says she ain’t. But she might as well be!” this philosophic parent resumed. “She goes on as if she was. But I’ve made Mr. Giovanelli promise to tell me if Daisy don’t. I’d want to write to Mr. Miller about it—wouldn’t you?”
Winterbourne replied that he certainly should; and the state of mind of Daisy’s mamma struck him as so unprecedented in the annals of parental vigilance that he recoiled before the attempt to educate at a single interview either her conscience or her wit.
After this Daisy was never at home and he ceased to meet her at the houses of their common acquaintance, because, as he perceived, these shrewd people had quite made up their minds as to the length she must have gone. They ceased to invite her, intimating that they wished to make, and make strongly, for the benefit of observant Europeans, the point that though Miss Daisy Miller was a pretty American girl all right, her behaviour wasn’t pretty at all—was in fact regarded by her compatriots as quite monstrous. Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that were turned upon her, and sometimes found himself suspecting with impatience that she simply didn’t feel and didn’t know. He set her down as hopelessly childish and shallow, as such mere giddiness and ignorance incarnate as was powerless either to heed or to suffer. Then at other moments he couldn’t doubt that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced. He asked himself whether the defiance would come from the consciousness of innocence or from her being essentially a young person of the reckless class. Then it had to be admitted, he felt, that holding fast to a belief in her “innocence” was more and more but a matter of gallantry too fine-spun for use. As I have already had occasion to relate, he was reduced without pleasure to this chopping of logic and vexed at his poor fallibility, his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her extravagance was generic and national and how far it was crudely personal. Whatever it was he had helplessly missed her, and now it was too late. She was “carried away” by Mr. Giovanelli.
A few days after his brief interview with her mother he came across her at that supreme seat of flowering desolation known as the Palace of the Cæsars. The early Roman spring had filled the air with bloom and perfume, and the rugged surface of the Palatine was muffled with tender verdure. Daisy moved at her ease over the great mounds of ruin that are embanked with mossy marble and paved with monumental inscriptions. It seemed to him he had never known Rome so lovely as just then. He looked off at the enchanting harmony of line and colour that remotely encircles the city—he inhaled the softly humid odours and felt the freshness of the year and the antiquity of the place reaffirm themselves in deep interfusion. It struck him also that Daisy had never showed to the eye for so utterly charming; but this had been his conviction on every occasion of their meeting. Giovanelli was of course at her side, and Giovanelli too glowed as never before with something of the glory of his race.
“Well,” she broke out upon the friend it would have been such mockery to designate as the latter’s rival, “I should think you’d be quite lonesome!”
“Lonesome?” Winterbourne resignedly echoed.
“You’re always going round by yourself. Can’t you get any one to walk with you?”
“I’m not so fortunate,” he answered, “as your gallant companion.”
Giovanelli had from the first treated him with distinguished politeness; he listened with a deferential air to his remarks; he laughed punctiliously at his pleasantries; he attached such importance as he could find terms for to Miss Miller’s cold compatriot. He carried himself in no degree like a jealous wooer; he had obviously a great deal of tact; he had no objection to any one’s expecting a little humility of him. It even struck Winterbourne that he almost yearned at times for some private communication in the interest of his character for common sense; a chance to remark to him as another intelligent man that, bless him, he knew how extraordinary was their young lady and didn’t flatter himself with confident—at least too confident and too delusive—hopes of matrimony and dollars. On this occasion he strolled away from his charming charge to pluck a sprig of almond-blossom which he carefully arranged in his button-hole.
“I know why you say that,” Daisy meanwhile observed. “Because you think I go round too much with him!” And she nodded at her discreet attendant.
“Every one thinks so—if you care to know,” was all Winterbourne found to reply.
“Of course I care to know!”—she made this point with much expression. “But I don’t believe a word of it. They’re only pretending to be shocked. They don’t really care a straw what I do. Besides, I don’t go round so much.”
“I think you’ll find they do care. They’ll show it—disagreeably,” he took on himself to state.
Daisy weighed the importance of that idea. “How—disagreeably?”
“Haven’t you noticed anything?” he compassionately asked.
“I’ve noticed you. But I noticed you’ve no more ‘give’ than a ramrod the first time ever I saw you.”
“You’ll find at least that I’ve more ‘give’ than several others,” he patiently smiled.
“How shall I find it?”
“By going to see the others.”
“What will they do to me?”
“They’ll show you the cold shoulder. Do you know what that means?”
Daisy was looking at him intently; she began to colour. “Do you mean as Mrs. Walker did the other night?”
“Exactly as Mrs. Walker did the other night.”
She looked away at Giovanelli, still titivating with his almond-blossom. Then with her attention again on the important subject: “I shouldn’t think you’d let people be so unkind!”
“How can I help it?”
“I should think you’d want to say something.”
“I do want to say something”—and Winterbourne paused a moment. “I want to say that your mother tells me she believes you engaged.”
“Well, I guess she does,” said Daisy very simply.
The young man began to laugh. “And does Randolph believe it?”
“I guess Randolph doesn’t believe anything.” This testimony to Randolph’s scepticism excited Winterbourne to further mirth, and he noticed that Giovanelli was coming back to them. Daisy, observing it as well, addressed herself again to her countryman. “Since you’ve mentioned it,” she said, “I am engaged.” He looked at her hard—he had stopped laughing. “You don’t believe it!” she added.
He asked himself, and it was for a moment like testing a heartbeat; after which, “Yes, I believe it!” he said.
“Oh no, you don’t,” she answered. “But if you possibly do,” she still more perversely pursued—“well, I ain’t!”
Miss Miller and her constant guide were on their way to the gate of the enclosure, so that Winterbourne, who had but lately entered, presently took leave of them. A week later on he went to dine at a beautiful villa on the Cælian Hill, and, on arriving, dismissed his hired vehicle. The evening was perfect and he promised himself the satisfaction of walking home beneath the Arch of Constantine and past the vaguely-lighted monuments of the Forum. Above was a moon half-developed, whose radiance was not brilliant but veiled in a thin cloud-curtain that seemed to diffuse and equalise it. When on his return from the villa at eleven o’clock he approached the dusky circle of the Colosseum the sense of the romantic in him easily suggested that the interior, in such an atmosphere, would well repay a glance. He turned aside and walked to one of the empty arches, near which, as he observed, an open carriage—one of the little Roman street-cabs—was stationed. Then he passed in among the cavernous shadows of the great structure and emerged upon the clear and silent arena. The place had never seemed to him more impressive. One half of the gigantic circus was in deep shade while the other slept in the luminous dusk. As he stood there he began to murmur Byron’s famous lines out of “Manfred”;7 but before he had finished his quotation he remembered that if nocturnal meditation thereabouts was the fruit of a rich literary culture it was none the less deprecated by medical science. The air of other ages surrounded one; but the air of other ages, coldly analysed, was no better than a villainous miasma. Winterbourne sought, however, toward the middle of the arena, a further reach of vision, intending the next moment a hasty retreat. The great cross in the centre was almost obscured; only as he drew near did he make it out distinctly. He thus also distinguished two persons stationed on the low steps that formed its base. One of these was a woman seated; her companion hovered before her.
Presently the sound of the woman’s voice came to him distinctly in the warm night-air. “Well, he looks at us as one of the old lions or tigers may have looked at the Christian martyrs!” These words were winged with their accent, so that they fluttered and settled about him in the darkness like vague white doves. It was Miss Daisy Miller who had released them for flight.
“Let us hope he’s not very hungry”—the bland Giovanelli fell in with her humour. “He’ll have to take me first; you’ll serve for dessert.”
Winterbourne felt himself pulled up with final horror now—and, it must be added, with final relief. It was as if a sudden clearance had taken place in the ambiguity of the poor girl’s appearances and the whole riddle of her contradictions had grown easy to read. She was a young lady about the shades of whose perversity a foolish puzzled gentleman need no longer trouble his head or his heart. That once questionable quantity had no shades—it was a mere black little blot. He stood there looking at her, looking at her companion too, and not reflecting that though he saw them vaguely he himself must have been more brightly presented. He felt angry at all his shiftings of view—he felt ashamed of all his tender little scruples and all his witless little mercies. He was about to advance again, and then again checked himself; not from the fear of doing her injustice, but from a sense of the danger of showing undue exhilaration for this disburdenment of cautious criticism. He turned away toward the entrance of the place; but as he did so he heard Daisy speak again.
“Why it was Mr. Winterbourne! He saw me and he cuts me dead!”
What a clever little reprobate she was, he was amply able to reflect at this, and how smartly she feigned, how promptly she sought to play off on him, a surprised and injured innocence! But nothing would induce him to cut her either “dead” or to within any measurable distance even of the famous “inch” of her life. He came forward again and went toward the great cross. Daisy had got up and Giovanelli lifted his hat. Winterbourne had now begun to think simply of the madness, on the ground of exposure and infection, of a frail young creature’s lounging away such hours in a nest of malaria. What if she were the most plausible of little reprobates? That was no reason for her dying of the perniciosa.8 “How long have you been ‘fooling round’ here?” he asked with conscious roughness.
Daisy, lovely in the sinister silver radiance, appraised him a moment, roughness and all. “Well, I guess all the evening.” She answered with spirit and, he could see even then, with exaggeration. “I never saw anything so quaint.”
“I’m afraid,” he returned, “you’ll not think a bad attack of Roman fever very quaint. This is the way people catch it. I wonder,” he added to Giovanelli, “that you, a native Roman, should countenance such extraordinary rashness.”
“Ah,” said this seasoned subject, “for myself I have no fear.”
“Neither have I—for you!” Winterbourne retorted in French. “I’m speaking for this young lady.”
Giovanelli raised his well-shaped eyebrows and showed his shining teeth, but took his critic’s rebuke with docility. “I assure Mademoiselle it was a grave indiscretion, but when was Mademoiselle ever prudent?”
“I never was sick, and I don’t mean to be!” Mademoiselle declared. “I don’t look like much, but I’m healthy! I was bound to see the Colosseum by moonlight—I wouldn’t have wanted to go home without that; and we’ve had the most beautiful time, haven’t we, Mr. Giovanelli? If there has been any danger Eugenio can give me some pills. Eugenio has got some splendid pills.”
“I should advise you then,” said Winterbourne, “to drive home as fast as possible and take one!”
Giovanelli smiled as for the striking happy thought. “What you say is very wise. I’ll go and make sure the carriage is at hand.” And he went forward rapidly.
Daisy followed with Winterbourne. He tried to deny himself the small fine anguish of looking at her, but his eyes themselves refused to spare him, and she seemed moreover not in the least embarrassed. He spoke no word; Daisy chattered over the beauty of the place: “Well, I have seen the Colosseum by moonlight—that’s one thing I can rave about!” Then noticing her companion’s silence she asked him why he was so stiff—it had always been her great word. He made no answer, but he felt his laugh an immense negation of stiffness. They passed under one of the dark archways; Giovanelli was in front with the carriage. Here Daisy stopped a moment, looking at her compatriot. “Did you believe I was engaged the other day?”
“It doesn’t matter now what I believed the other day!” he replied with infinite point.
It was a wonder how she didn’t wince for it. “Well, what do you believe now?”
“I believe it makes very little difference whether you’re engaged or not!”
He felt her lighted eyes fairly penetrate the thick gloom of the vaulted passage—as if to seek some access to him she hadn’t yet compassed. But Giovanelli, with a graceful inconsequence, was at present all for retreat. “Quick, quick; if we get in by midnight we’re quite safe!”
Daisy took her seat in the carriage and the fortunate Italian placed himself beside her. “Don’t forget Eugenio’s pills!” said Winterbourne as he lifted his hat.
“I don’t care,” she unexpectedly cried out for this, “whether I have Roman fever or not!” On which the cab-driver cracked his whip and they rolled across the desultory patches of antique pavement.
Winterbourne—to do him justice, as it were—mentioned to no one that he had encountered Miss Miller at midnight in the Colosseum with a gentleman; in spite of which deep discretion, however, the fact of the scandalous adventure was known a couple of days later, with a dozen vivid details, to every member of the little American circle, and was commented accordingly. Winterbourne judged thus that the people about the hotel had been thoroughly empowered to testify, and that after Daisy’s return there would have been an exchange of jokes between the porter and the cab-driver. But the young man became aware at the same moment of how thoroughly it had ceased to ruffle him that the little American flirt should be “talked about” by low-minded menials. These sources of current criticism a day or two later abounded still further: the little American flirt was alarmingly ill and the doctors now in possession of the scene. Winterbourne, when the rumour came to him, immediately went to the hotel for more news. He found that two or three charitable friends had preceded him and that they were being entertained in Mrs. Miller’s salon by the all-efficient Randolph.
“It’s going round at night that way, you bet—that’s what has made her so sick. She’s always going round at night. I shouldn’t think she’d want to—it’s so plaguey dark over here. You can’t see anything over here without the moon’s right up. In America they don’t go round by the moon!” Mrs. Miller meanwhile wholly surrendered to her genius for unapparent uses; her salon knew her less than ever, and she was presumably now at least giving her daughter the advantage of her society. It was clear that Daisy was dangerously ill.
Winterbourne constantly attended for news from the sick-room, which reached him, however, but with worrying indirectness, though he once had speech, for a moment, of the poor girl’s physician and once saw Mrs. Miller, who, sharply alarmed, struck him as thereby more happily inspired than he could have conceived and indeed as the most noiseless and light-handed of nurses. She invoked a good deal the remote shade of Dr. Davis, but Winterbourne paid her the compliment of taking her after all for less monstrous a goose. To this indulgence indeed something she further said perhaps even more insidiously disposed him. “Daisy spoke of you the other day quite pleasantly. Half the time she doesn’t know what she’s saying, but that time I think she did. She gave me a message—she told me to tell you. She wanted you to know she never was engaged to that handsome Italian who was always round. I’m sure I’m very glad; Mr. Giovanelli hasn’t been near us since she was taken ill. I thought he was so much of a gentleman, but I don’t call that very polite! A lady told me he was afraid I hadn’t approved of his being round with her so much evenings. Of course it ain’t as if their evenings were as pleasant as ours—since we don’t seem to feel that way about the poison. I guess I don’t see the point now; but I suppose he knows I’m a lady and I’d scorn to raise a fuss. Anyway, she wants you to realise she ain’t engaged. I don’t know why she makes so much of it, but she said to me three times ’mind you tell Mr. Winterbourne.’ And then she told me to ask if you remembered the time you went up to that castle in Switzerland. But I said I wouldn’t give any such messages as that. Only if she ain’t engaged I guess I’m glad to realise it too.”
But, as Winterbourne had originally judged, the truth on this question had small actual relevance. A week after this the poor girl died; it had been indeed a terrible case of the perniciosa. A grave was found for her in the little Protestant cemetery, by an angle of the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring-flowers. Winterbourne stood there beside it with a number of other mourners; a number larger than the scandal excited by the young lady’s career might have made probable. Near him stood Giovanelli, who came nearer still before Winterbourne turned away. Giovanelli, in decorous mourning, showed but a whiter face; his button-hole lacked its nosegay and he had visibly something urgent—and even to distress—to say, which he scarce knew how to “place.” He decided at last to confide it with a pale convulsion to Winterbourne. “She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable.” To which he added in a moment: “Also—naturally!—the most innocent.”
Winterbourne sounded him with hard dry eyes, but presently repeated his words, “The most innocent?”
“The most innocent!”
It came somehow so much too late that our friend could only glare at its having come at all. “Why the devil,” he asked, “did you take her to that fatal place?”
Giovanelli raised his neat shoulders and eyebrows to within suspicion of a shrug. “For myself I had no fear; and she—she did what she liked.”
Winterbourne’s eyes attached themselves to the ground. “She did what she liked!”
It determined on the part of poor Giovanelli a further pious, a further candid, confidence. “If she had lived I should have got nothing. She never would have married me.”
It had been spoken as if to attest, in all sincerity, his disinterestedness, but Winterbourne scarce knew what welcome to give it. He said, however, with a grace inferior to his friend’s: “I dare say not.”
The latter was even by this not discouraged. “For a moment I hoped so. But no. I’m convinced.”
Winterbourne took it in; he stood staring at the raw protuberance among the April daisies. When he turned round again his fellow mourner had stepped back.
He almost immediately left Rome, but the following summer he again met his aunt Mrs. Costello at Vevey. Mrs. Costello extracted from the charming old hotel there a value that the Miller family hadn’t mastered the secret of. In the interval Winterbourne had often thought of the most interesting member of that trio—of her mystifying manners and her queer adventure. One day he spoke of her to his aunt—said it was on his conscience he had done her injustice.
“I’m sure I don’t know”—that lady showed caution. “How did your injustice affect her?”
“She sent me a message before her death which I didn’t understand at the time. But I’ve understood it since. She would have appreciated one’s esteem.”
“She took an odd way to gain it! But do you mean by what you say,” Mrs. Costello asked, “that she would have reciprocated one’s affection?”
As he made no answer to this she after a little looked round at him—he hadn’t been directly within sight; but the effect of that wasn’t to make her repeat her question. He spoke, however, after a while. “You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked to make a mistake. I’ve lived too long in foreign parts.” And this time she herself said nothing.
Nevertheless he soon went back to live at Geneva, whence there continue to come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn: a report that he’s “studying” hard—an intimation that he’s much interested in a very clever foreign lady.