He laughed.
“You poor darling! Wasn’t it ever as hot as this in Apex?”
She withdrew her hand with a slight grimace.
“Yes—but I didn’t marry you to go back to Apex!”
Ralph laughed again; then he lifted himself on his elbow and regained the hand. “I wonder what you DID marry me for?”
“Mercy! It’s too hot for conundrums.” She spoke without impatience, but with a lassitude less joyous than his.
He roused himself. “Do you really mind the heat so much? We’ll go, if you do.”
She sat up eagerly. “Go to Switzerland, you mean?”
“Well, I hadn’t taken quite as long a leap. I only meant we might drive back to Siena.”
She relapsed listlessly against her tree-trunk. “Oh, Siena’s hotter than this.”
“We could go and sit in the cathedral—it’s always cool there at sunset.”
“We’ve sat in the cathedral at sunset every day for a week.”
“Well, what do you say to stopping at Lecceto on the way? I haven’t shown you Lecceto yet; and the drive back by moonlight would be glorious.”
This woke her to a slight show of interest. “It might be nice—but where could we get anything to eat?”
Ralph laughed again. “I don’t believe we could. You’re too practical.”
“Well, somebody’s got to be. And the food in the hotel is too disgusting if we’re not on time.”
“I admit that the best of it has usually been appropriated by the extremely good-looking cavalry-officer who’s so keen to know you.”
Undine’s face brightened. “You know he’s not a Count; he’s a Marquis. His name’s Roviano; his palace in Rome is in the guide-books, and he speaks English beautifully. Celeste found out about him from the headwaiter,” she said, with the security of one who treats of recognized values.
Marvell, sitting upright, reached lazily across the grass for his hat. “Then there’s all the more reason for rushing back to defend our share.” He spoke in the bantering tone which had become the habitual expression of his tenderness; but his eyes softened as they absorbed in a last glance the glimmering submarine light of the ancient grove, through which Undine’s figure wavered nereid-like above him.
“You never looked your name more than you do now,” he said, kneeling at her side and putting his arm about her. She smiled back a little vaguely, as if not seizing his allusion, and being content to let it drop into the store of unexplained references which had once stimulated her curiosity but now merely gave her leisure to think of other things. But her smile was no less lovely for its vagueness, and indeed, to Ralph, the loveliness was enhanced by the latent doubt. He remembered afterward that at that moment the cup of life seemed to brim over.
“Come, dear—here or there—it’s all divine!”
In the carriage, however, she remained insensible to the soft spell of the evening, noticing only the heat and dust, and saying, as they passed under the wooded cliff of Lecceto, that they might as well have stopped there after all, since with such a headache as she felt coming on she didn’t care if she dined or not. Ralph looked up yearningly at the long walls overhead; but Undine’s mood was hardly favourable to communion with such scenes, and he made no attempt to stop the carriage. Instead he presently said: “If you’re tired of Italy, we’ve got the world to choose from.”
She did not speak for a moment; then she said: “It’s the heat I’m tired of. Don’t people generally come here earlier?”
“Yes. That’s why I chose the summer: so that we could have it all to ourselves.”
She tried to put a note of reasonableness into her voice. “If you’d told me we were going everywhere at the wrong time, of course I could have arranged about my clothes.”
“You poor darling! Let us, by all means, go to the place where the clothes will be right: they’re too beautiful to be left out of our scheme of life.”
Her lips hardened. “I know you don’t care how I look. But you didn’t give me time to order anything before we were married, and I’ve got nothing but my last winter’s things to wear.”
Ralph smiled. Even his subjugated mind perceived the inconsistency of Undine’s taxing him with having hastened their marriage; but her variations on the eternal feminine still enchanted him.
“We’ll go wherever you please—you make every place the one place,” he said, as if he were humouring an irresistible child.
“To Switzerland, then? Celeste says St. Moritz is too heavenly,” exclaimed Undine, who gathered her ideas of Europe chiefly from the conversation of her experienced attendant.
“One can be cool short of the Engadine. Why not go south again—say to Capri?”
“Capri? Is that the island we saw from Naples, where the artists go?” She drew her brows together. “It would be simply awful getting there in this heat.”
“Well, then, I know a little place in Switzerland where one can still get away from the crowd, and we can sit and look at a green water-fall while I lie in wait for adjectives.”
Mr. Spragg’s astonishment on learning that his son-in-law contemplated maintaining a household on the earnings of his Muse was still matter for pleasantry between the pair; and one of the humours of their first weeks together had consisted in picturing themselves as a primeval couple setting forth across a virgin continent and subsisting on the adjectives which Ralph was to trap for his epic. On this occasion, however, his wife did not take up the joke, and he remained silent while their carriage climbed the long dusty hill to the Fontebranda gate. He had seen her face droop as he suggested the possibility of an escape from the crowds in Switzerland, and it came to him, with the sharpness of a knife-thrust, that a crowd was what she wanted—that she was sick to death of being alone with him.
He sat motionless, staring ahead at the red-brown walls and towers on the steep above them. After all there was nothing sudden in his discovery. For weeks it had hung on the edge of consciousness, but he had turned from it with the heart’s instinctive clinging to the unrealities by which it lives. Even now a hundred qualifying reasons rushed to his aid. They told him it was not of himself that Undine had wearied, but only of their present way of life. He had said a moment before, without conscious exaggeration, that her presence made any place the one place; yet how willingly would he have consented to share in such a life as she was leading before their marriage? And he had to acknowledge their months of desultory wandering from one remote Italian hill-top to another must have seemed as purposeless to her as balls and dinners would have been to him. An imagination like his, peopled with such varied images and associations, fed by so many currents from the long stream of human experience, could hardly picture the bareness of the small half-lit place in which his wife’s spirit fluttered. Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it. He was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience. The task of opening new windows in her mind was inspiring enough to give him infinite patience; and he would not yet own to himself that her pliancy and variety were imitative rather than spontaneous.
Meanwhile he had no desire to sacrifice her wishes to his, and it distressed him that he dared not confess his real reason for avoiding the Engadine. The truth was that their funds were shrinking faster than he had expected. Mr. Spragg, after bluntly opposing their hastened marriage on the ground that he was not prepared, at such short notice, to make the necessary provision for his daughter, had shortly afterward (probably, as Undine observed to Ralph, in consequence of a lucky “turn” in the Street) met their wishes with all possible liberality, bestowing on them a wedding in conformity with Mrs. Spragg’s ideals and up to the highest standard of Mrs. Heeny’s clippings, and pledging himself to provide Undine with an income adequate to so brilliant a beginning. It was understood that Ralph, on their return, should renounce the law for some more paying business; but this seemed the smallest of sacrifices to make for the privilege of calling Undine his wife; and besides, he still secretly hoped that, in the interval, his real vocation might declare itself in some work which would justify his adopting the life of letters.