"Is there nothing else I can do?"
I nodded, with my eyes full of tears. "Yes!" and I looked at the piano.
She smiled and sat down. She sang for me. I know she sang her very best. She had a lovely voice.
When I went through the hall to the door two men-servants bowed me out as if I were a princess. And I went down the stairs weeping bitterly.
I went along the street, crying and not caring who saw me. Then I sat down in Madison Square. Suddenly someone came and sat beside me. A woman. I felt her eyes fixed on me for a long time, and I turned and looked at her. There, under a turquoise toque, sat the golden hair and the large face of the prairie chicken.
"How do you do, Mrs. Doyle?" I said.
"What?" She turned quickly. "How do you know my name?" And she added, frowning: "What are you crying for?"
"For love of a woman who has been kind to me," I said.
"There are lots of kind women," she answered. "I'm kind. What do you want?"
"I want you to come and talk to my husband," I said. "You know him. You met him in Monte Carlo. His name is Aldo della Rocca."
"What? Della Rocca? That lovely Italian creature? That Apollo of Belvedere? Of course I remember him. Where is he? What is he doing here?"
"Come and see," I said.
And she came up to Mrs. Schmidl's house in 28th Street.
That evening we dined with the prairie chicken, or rather, she invited herself to dine with us. She said "Poison!" when she tasted the Knödelsuppe, and "Poison!" when she tasted the Blutwurst and Kraut. She is probably a very great lady, judging by her bad behaviour.
In my heart hope opens timid eyes.
VII
Mrs. Doyle was a very great lady. Her husband had been a political "boss"; her sister had married an English baronet; and her daughter, Marge, eighteen years old, "a mere infant," as she said, had married Herbert van Osten, the Congressman.
She was full of good ideas. "Now, you two might be the rage of New York in no time," she said, at the end of the dinner. "You are a Count, aren't you?" And she looked confidently at Aldo. "'Della Rocca'! That sounds like a Count."
"Oh yes," said Aldo, with his shining white smile, humorously remembering his grandfather's name, "Esposito," which means a foundling, and the "Della Rocca" added to it because the little Esposito had been left on a rock near Posilippo.
"Well, let me see. You must have an atelier of some kind. Ateliers are all the rage. And your wife–" Mrs. Doyle raised her sepia eyebrows and pinched her large chin pensively.
"My wife is a great poetess," said Aldo.
"Is she?" said Mrs. Doyle. "Well—let me see. She must—she must dress a little differently—red scarves and things—and look picturesque, and read her poems in salons here. Poetry is all the rage. And if it is Eyetalian, you know," she added encouragingly to Nancy, "no one will understand it. I shall discover you. I shall give an At Home. 'Eyetalian poetry' in a corner of the cards. That's an elegant idea!"
But Nancy was refractory. She said she would not wear red scarves, nor recite her poetry; and what was Aldo going to do in an atelier?
"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Doyle, "faces like his are not met with every day on Broadway. I don't know how it is in your country, but his looks alone are enough to make him the rage here."
Aldo nodded, looking at Nancy as if to say: "You see?"
"But what is the good of being the rage if one has nothing to live on? What are we to eat?" asked Nancy, feeling brutal and unlovely, and terre à terre.
"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed Mrs. Doyle. "If once you are the rage in a place like New York!" … And she raised her round blue eyes to Frau Schmidl's ceiling, where languid flies walked slowly.
But Nancy assured her that it was impossible. Could she not find some work for Aldo to do?
"What work?" said Mrs. Doyle, resting an absent-minded blue gaze on the lustrous convolutions of Aldo's hair, on his white, narrow forehead, on his intense and violent eyes, and the scarlet arcuation of his vivid lips. "What work can he do?"
"Oh!" Nancy said vaguely, "what work do men do? He has been to the University and taken a degree. He has studied law, but has not practised. I am sure he could do anything. He is very clever."
"Oh yes," assented Mrs. Doyle dreamily.
She was thinking. She was thinking of something her married daughter had been saying to her that very morning. Suddenly, she got up and said good-bye. She let Aldo help her into her long turquoise coat, and find her gloves; and then she sent him off to fetch a motor-cab. Alone with Nancy, she was about to open her large silver-net reticule when she saw Nancy's straight gaze fixed upon her. So she refrained, and kissed her instead.
"Ta-ta, Apollo," she said, shaking a fat, white-gloved hand out of the carriage window to Aldo, who stood on the side-walk, bare-headed and deferential. Then, leaning back as the carriage slid along 7th Avenue and turned into 66th Street, she mused: "He will do—he will do elegantly. Won't Marge be delighted! That will teach Bertie to sit up. Elegant idea! Bertie will have to sit up."
Bertie was not sitting up. His wife, Mrs. Doyle's daughter, was. And very straight she sat, with defiant, frizzy head and narrow lips, when she heard the front door open and close. But it was not to her husband's insubordinate footsteps. It was the indulgent swish of her mother's silken skirts that rustled slowly upwards.
Bertie's wife sprang up and opened the door.
"'Mum'? At this hour? What has happened?"
"Nothing, Marge—nothing. Is Bertie at home?" said Mrs. Doyle.
"No," and the young pink lips narrowed again. "It is only eleven o'clock at night. Why should he be at home?"
"Marge, I have an elegant idea," said Mrs. Doyle, seating herself resolutely in an armchair opposite her daughter. "I have found the very thing we need. The bo ideel, my lambkin."
When Mrs. Doyle rose to go at midnight they were both wreathed in smiles.
"You will have to be very careful, dear," said Mrs. Doyle. "Don't be rash, and unlikely, and over-generous. The wife is a stubborn creature who spells things with a capital letter: you know what I mean—Work and Art and Dignity, and all that kind of thing. She must not be rubbed up the wrong way. Besides, it will answer just as well if he does not know what he is doing."
"That's so," said her daughter. "Mum, you're a daisy."
The unsuspecting Bertie came home that night a little before one o'clock, keyed up for the usual withering sarcasm and darkling reproach. He found his wife asleep, lamb-like and dove-like, her frizzy head foundered contentedly in the pillows, a book of Gyp on the coverlet, and a mild smile—was it of indulgence or of treason?—playing on her soft half-open lips.
The next day Mrs. Doyle called on Aldo and Nancy. Anne-Marie was introduced and patted on the head, and sent down into the kitchen.
"I have a secretaryship for you," said Mrs. Doyle to Aldo. "You can start at once. Twenty dollars a week. They won't give more."
Aldo was graciously complacent, and Nancy looked anxious.
"His English is very imperfect," she said.
"Oh, the English is chiefly copying; he can do that, can't he?"
"Of course," said Aldo, frowning at Nancy.
Nancy asked for particulars, and Mrs. Doyle folded her fat hands and gave them. It was a confidential post. He was to be "secretary to her daughter"—catching Nancy's steady grey eye, Mrs. Doyle added—"'s husband, Mr. Van Osten;" and the work was chiefly of a political character. He would have to—er—copy speeches, and … etcetera. He would have a study, not in the Van Osten's house, but—er—in the same street a few doors off, opposite. He was not to talk about his work, because it was of a very—er—private character.
"Mr. Van Osten is a peculiar man," added Mrs. Doyle. "But you will understand all that in time, when you get to know him. When can you start?"
"Now," said Aldo.
Mrs. Doyle laughed. "Well, I think next Monday will do. Meanwhile"—and she coughed—"the Van Ostens are very—oh, very much for appearance, you know. You had better go to Brooks and get him to rig you out. I shall drive round and speak to Brooks about you at once."