That first week the wistaria began to fade, and the flowers of the Judas-tree
and peach-trees fell off and carpeted the ground with rose-colour. Then all the
freesias disappeared, and the irises grew scarce. And then, while these were
clearing themselves away, the double banksia roses came out, and the big summer
roses suddenly flaunted gorgeously on the walls and trellises. Fortune’s Yellow
was one of them; a very beautiful rose. Presently the tamarisk and the daphnes
were at their best, and the lilies at their tallest. By the end of the week the
fig-trees were giving shade, the plum-blossom was out among the olives, the
modest weigelias appeared in their fresh pink clothes, and on the rocks
sprawled masses of thick-leaved, star-shaped flowers, some vivid purple and
some a clear, pale lemon. By the end of the week, too, Mr. Wilkins arrived; even as his wife had foreseen
he would, so he did. And there were signs almost of eagerness about his
acceptance of her suggestion, for he had not waited to write a letter in answer
to hers, but had telegraphed. That, surely, was eager. It showed, Scrap thought, a definite wish for reunion;
and watching his wife’s happy face, and aware of her desire that Mellersh
should enjoy his holiday, she told herself that he would be a very unusual fool
should he waste his time bothering about anybody else. “If he isn’t nice to
her,” Scrap thought, “he shall be taken to the battlements and tipped over.”
For, by the end of the week, she and Mrs. Wilkins had become Caroline and Lotty
to each other, and were friends. Mrs. Wilkins had always been friends, but Scrap had struggled not to be. She
had tried hard to be cautious, but how difficult was caution with Mrs. Wilkins!
Free herself from every vestige of it, she was so entirely unreserved, so
completely expansive, that soon Scrap, almost before she knew what she was
doing, was being unreserved too. And nobody could be more unreserved than
Scrap, once she let herself go. The only difficulty about Lotty was that she was nearly always somewhere else.
You couldn’t catch her; you couldn’t pin her down to come and talk. Scrap’s
fears that she would grab seemed grotesque in retrospect. Why, there was no
grab in her. At dinner and after dinner were the only times one really saw her.
All day long she was invisible, and would come back in the late afternoon
looking a perfect sight, her hair full of bits of moss, and her freckles worse
than ever. Perhaps she was making the most of her time before Mellersh arrived
to do all the things she wanted to do, and meant to devote herself afterwards
to going about with him, tidy and in her best clothes. Scrap watched her, interested in spite of herself, because it seemed so
extraordinary to be as happy as all that on so little. San Salvatore was
beautiful, and the weather was divine; but scenery and weather had never been
enough for Scrap, and how could they be enough for somebody who would have to
leave them quite soon and go back to life in Hampstead? Also, there was the
imminence of Mellersh, of that Mellersh from whom Lotty had so lately run. It
was all very well to feel one ought to share, and to make a beau geste
and do it, but the beaux gestes Scrap had known hadn’t made anybody
happy. Nobody really liked being the object of one, and it always meant an
effort on the part of the maker. Still, she had to admit there was no effort
about Lotty; it was quite plain that everything she did and said was
effortless, and that she was just simply, completely happy. And so Mrs. Wilkins was; for her doubts as to whether she had had time to
become steady enough in serenity to go on being serene in Mellersh’s company
when she had it uninterruptedly right round the clock, had gone by the middle
of the week, and she felt that nothing now could shake her. She was ready for
anything. She was firmly grafted, rooted, built into heaven. Whatever Mellersh
said or did, she would not budge an inch out of heaven, would not rouse herself
a single instant to come outside it and be cross. On the contrary, she was
going to pull him up into it beside her, and they would sit comfortably
together, suffused in light, and laugh at how much afraid of him she used to be
in Hampstead, and at how deceitful her afraidness had made her. But he wouldn’t
need much pulling. He would come in quite naturally after a day or two,
irresistibly wafted on the scented breezes of that divine air; and there he
would sit arrayed in stars, thought Mrs. Wilkins, in whose mind, among much
other débris, floated occasional bright shreds of poetry. She laughed to
herself a little at the picture of Mellersh, that top-hatted, black-coated,
respectable family solicitor, arrayed in stars, but she laughed affectionately,
almost with a maternal pride in how splendid he would look in such fine
clothes. “Poor lamb,” she murmured to herself affectionately. And added, “What
he wants is a thorough airing.” This was during the first half of the week. By the beginning of the last half,
at the end of which Mr. Wilkins arrived, she left off even assuring herself
that she was unshakeable, that she was permeated beyond altering by the
atmosphere, she no longer thought of it or noticed it; she took it for granted.
If one may say so, and she certainly said so, not only to herself but also to
Lady Caroline, she had found her celestial legs. Contrary to Mrs. Fisher’s idea of the seemly—but of course contrary; what else
would one expect of Mrs. Wilkins?—she did not go to meet her husband at
Mezzago, but merely walked down to the point where Beppo’s fly would leave him
and his luggage in the street of Castagneto. Mrs. Fisher disliked the arrival
of Mr. Wilkins, and was sure that anybody who could have married Mrs. Wilkins
must be at least of an injudicious disposition, but a husband, whatever his
disposition, should be properly met. Mr. Fisher had always been properly met.
Never once in his married life had he gone unmet at a station, nor had he ever
not been seen off. These observances, these courtesies, strengthened the bonds
of marriage, and made the husband feel he could rely on his wife’s being always
there. Always being there was the essential secret for a wife. What would have
become of Mr. Fisher if she had neglected to act on this principle she
preferred not to think. Enough things became of him as it was; for whatever
one’s care in stopping up, married life yet seemed to contain chinks. But Mrs. Wilkins took no pains. She just walked down the hill singing—Mrs.
Fisher could hear her—and picked up her husband in the street as casually as if
he were a pin. The three others, still in bed, for it was not nearly time to
get up, heard her as she passed beneath their windows down the zigzag path to
meet Mr. Wilkins, who was coming by the morning train, and Scrap smiled, and
Rose sighed, and Mrs. Fisher rang her bell and desired Francesca to bring her
her breakfast in her room. All three had breakfast that day in their rooms,
moved by a common instinct to take cover. Scrap always breakfasted in bed, but she had the same instinct for cover, and
during breakfast she made plans for spending the whole day where she was.
Perhaps, though, it wouldn’t be as necessary that day as the next. That day,
Scrap calculated, Mellersh would be provided for. He would want to have a bath,
and having a bath at San Salvatore was an elaborate business, a real adventure
if one had a hot one in the bathroom, and it took a lot of time. It involved
the attendance of the entire staff—Domenico and the boy Giuseppe coaxing the
patent stove to burn, restraining it when it burnt too fiercely, using the
bellows to it when it threatened to go out, relighting it when it did go out;
Francesca anxiously hovering over the tap regulating its trickle, because if it
were turned on too full the water instantly ran cold, and if not full enough
the stove blew up inside and mysteriously flooded the house; and Costanza and
Angela running up and down bringing pails of hot water from the kitchen to eke
out what the tap did. This bath had been put in lately, and was at once the pride and the terror of
the servants. It was very patent. Nobody quite understood it. There were long
printed instructions as to its right treatment hanging on the wall, in which
the word pericoloso recurred. When Mrs. Fisher, proceeding on her
arrival to the bathroom, saw this word, she went back to her room again and
ordered a sponge-bath instead; and when the others found what using the
bathroom meant, and how reluctant the servants were to leave them alone with
the stove, and how Francesca positively refused to, and stayed with her back
turned watching the tap, and how the remaining servants waited anxiously
outside the door till the bather came safely out again, they too had
sponge-baths brought into their rooms instead. Mr. Wilkins, however, was a man, and would be sure to want a big bath. Having
it, Scrap calculated, would keep him busy for a long while. Then he would
unpack, and then, after his night in the train, he would probably sleep till
the evening. So would he be provided for the whole of that day, and not be let
loose on them till dinner. Therefore Scrap came to the conclusion she would be quite safe in the garden
that day, and got up as usual after breakfast, and dawdled as usual through her
dressing, listening with a slightly cocked ear to the sounds of Mr. Wilkins’s
arrival, of his luggage being carried into Lotty’s room on the other side of
the landing, of his educated voice as he inquired of Lotty, first, “Do I give
this fellow anything?” and immediately afterwards, “Can I have a hot bath?”—of
Lotty’s voice cheerfully assuring him that he needn’t give the fellow anything
because he was the gardener, and that yes, he could have a hot bath; and soon
after this the landing was filled with the familiar noises of wood being
brought, of water being brought, of feet running, of tongues vociferating—in
fact, with the preparation of the bath. Scrap finished dressing, and then loitered at her window, waiting till she
should hear Mr. Wilkins go into the bathroom. When he was safely there she
would slip out and settle herself in her garden and resume her inquiries into
the probable meaning of her life. She was getting on with her inquiries. She
dozed much less frequently, and was beginning to be inclined to agree that
tawdry was the word to apply to her past. Also she was afraid that her future
looked black. There—she could hear Mr. Wilkins’s educated voice again. Lotty’s door had
opened, and he was coming out of it asking his way to the bathroom. “It’s where you see the crowd,” Lotty’s voice answered—still a cheerful voice,
Scrap was glad to notice. His steps went along the landing, and Lotty’s steps seemed to go downstairs,
and then there seemed to be a brief altercation at the bathroom door—hardly so
much an altercation as a chorus of vociferations on one side and a wordless
determination, Scrap judged, to have a bath by oneself on the other. Mr. Wilkins knew no Italian, and the expression pericoloso left him
precisely as it found him—or would have if he had seen it, but naturally he
took no notice of the printed matter on the wall. He firmly closed the door on
the servants, resisting Domenico, who tried to the last to press through, and
locked himself in as a man should for his bath, judicially considering, as he
made his simple preparations for getting in, the singular standard of behaviour
of these foreigners who, both male and female, apparently wished to stay with
him while he bathed. In Finland, he had heard, the female natives not only were
present on such occasions but actually washed the bath-taking traveller. He had
not heard, however, that this was true too of Italy, which somehow seemed much
nearer civilisation—perhaps because one went there, and did not go to Finland. Impartially examining this reflection, and carefully balancing the claims to
civilisation of Italy and Finland, Mr. Wilkins got into the bath and turned off
the tap. Naturally he turned off the tap. It was what one did. But on the
instructions, printed in red letters, was a paragraph saying that the tap
should not be turned off as long as there was still fire in the stove. It
should be left on—not much on, but on—until the fire was quite out; otherwise,
and here again was the word pericoloso, the stove would blow up. Mr. Wilkins got into the bath, turned off the tap, and the stove blew up,
exactly as the printed instructions said it would. It blew up, fortunately,
only in its inside, but it blew up with a terrific noise, and Mr. Wilkins leapt
out of the bath and rushed to the door, and only the instinct born of years of
training made him snatch up a towel as he rushed. Scrap, half-way across the landing on her way out of doors, heard the
explosion. “Good heavens,” she thought, remembering the instructions, “there goes Mr.
Wilkins!” And she ran toward the head of the stairs to call the servants, and as she ran,
out ran Mr. Wilkins clutching his towel, and they ran into each other. “That damned bath!” cried Mr. Wilkins, perhaps for the only time in his
life forgetting himself; but he was upset. Here was an introduction. Mr Wilkins, imperfectly concealed in his towel, his
shoulders exposed at one end and his legs at the other, and Lady Caroline
Dester, to meet whom he had swallowed all his anger with his wife and come out
to Italy. For Lotty in her letter had told him who was at San Salvatore besides herself
and Mrs. Arbuthnot, and Mr. Wilkins at once had perceived that this was an
opportunity which might never recur. Lotty had merely said, “There are two
other women here, Mrs. Fisher and Lady Caroline Dester,” but that was enough.
He knew all about the Droitwiches, their wealth, their connections, their place
in history, and the power they had, should they choose to exert it, of making
yet another solicitor happy by adding him to those they already employed. Some
people employed one solicitor for one branch of their affairs, and another for
another. The affairs of the Droitwiches must have many branches. He had also
heard—for it was, he considered, part of his business to hear, and having heard
to remember—of the beauty of their only daughter. Even if the Droitwiches
themselves did not need his services, their daughter might. Beauty led one into
strange situations; advice could never come amiss. And should none of them,
neither parents nor daughter nor any of their brilliant sons, need him in his
professional capacity, it yet was obviously a most valuable acquaintance to
make. It opened up vistas. It swelled with possibilities. He might go on living
in Hampstead for years, and not again come across such another chance. Directly his wife’s letter reached him he telegraphed and packed. This was
business. He was not a man to lose time when it came to business; nor was he a
man to jeopardise a chance by neglecting to be amiable. He met his wife
perfectly amiably, aware that amiability under such circumstances was wisdom.
Besides, he actually felt amiable—very. For once, Lotty was really helping him.
He kissed her affectionately on getting out of Beppo’s fly, and was afraid she
must have got up extremely early; he made no complaints of the steepness of the
walk up; he told her pleasantly of his journey, and when called upon,
obediently admired the views. It was all neatly mapped out in his mind, what he
was going to do that first day—have a shave, have a bath, put on clean clothes,
sleep a while, and then would come lunch and the introduction to Lady Caroline. In the train he had selected the words of his greeting, going over them with
care—some slight expression of his gratification in meeting one of whom he, in
common with the whole world, had heard—but of course put delicately, very
delicately; some slight reference to her distinguished parents and the part her
family had played in the history of England—made, of course, with proper tact;
a sentence or two about her eldest brother Lord Winchcombe, who had won his
V.C. in the late war under circumstances which could only cause—he might or
might not add this—every Englishman’s heart to beat higher than ever with
pride, and the first steps towards what might well be the turning-point in his
career would have been taken. And here he was . . . no, it was too terrible, what could be more terrible?
Only a towel on, water running off his legs, and that exclamation. He knew at
once the lady was Lady Caroline—the minute the exclamation was out he knew it.
Rarely did Mr. Wilkins use that word, and never, never in the presence of a
lady or a client. While as for the towel—why had he come? Why had he not stayed
in Hampstead? It would be impossible to live this down. But Mr. Wilkins was reckoning without Scrap. She, indeed, screwed up her face
at the first flash of him on her astonished sight in an enormous effort not to
laugh, and having choked the laughter down and got her face serious again, she
said as composedly as if he had had all his clothes on, “How do you do.” What perfect tact. Mr. Wilkins could have worshipped her. This exquisite
ignoring. Blue blood, of course, coming out. Overwhelmed with gratitude he took her offered hand and said “How do you do,”
in his turn, and merely to repeat the ordinary words seemed magically to
restore the situation to the normal. Indeed, he was so much relieved, and it
was so natural to be shaking hands, to be conventionally greeting, that he
forgot he had only a towel on and his professional manner came back to him. He
forgot what he was looking like, but he did not forget that this was Lady
Caroline Dester, the lady he had come all the way to Italy to see, and he did
not forget that it was in her face, her lovely and important face, that he had
flung his terrible exclamation. He must at once entreat her forgiveness. To say
such a word to a lady—to any lady, but of all ladies to just this one . . . “I’m afraid I used unpardonable language,” began Mr. Wilkins very earnestly, as
earnestly and ceremoniously as if he had had his clothes on. “I thought it most appropriate,” said Scrap, who was used to damns. Mr. Wilkins was incredibly relieved and soothed by this answer. No offence,
then, taken. Blue blood again. Only blue blood could afford such a liberal,
such an understanding attitude. “It is Lady Caroline Dester, is it not, to whom I am speaking?” he asked, his
voice sounding even more carefully cultivated than usual, for he had to
restrain too much pleasure, too much relief, too much of the joy of the
pardoned and the shriven from getting into it. “Yes,” said Scrap; and for the life of her she couldn’t help smiling. She
couldn’t help it. She hadn’t meant to smile at Mr. Wilkins, not ever; but
really he looked—and then his voice on the top of the rest of him, oblivious
of the towel and his legs, and talking just like a church. “Allow me to introduce myself,” said Mr. Wilkins, with the ceremony of the
drawing-room. “My name is Mellersh-Wilkins.” And he instinctively held out his hand a second time at the words. “I thought perhaps it was,” said Scrap, a second time having hers shaken and a
second time unable not to smile. He was about to proceed to the first of the graceful tributes he had prepared
in the train, oblivious, as he could not see himself, that he was without his
clothes, when the servants came running up the stairs and, simultaneously, Mrs.
Fisher appeared in the doorway of her sitting-room. For all this had happened
very quickly, and the servants away in the kitchen, and Mrs. Fisher pacing her
battlements, had not had time on hearing the noise to appear before the second
handshake. The servants when they heard the dreaded noise knew at once what had happened,
and rushed straight into the bathroom to try and staunch the flood, taking no
notice of the figure on the landing in the towel, but Mrs. Fisher did not know
what the noise could be, and coming out of her room to inquire stood rooted on
the door-sill. It was enough to root anybody. Lady Caroline shaking hands with what evidently,
if he had had clothes on, would have been Mrs. Wilkins’s husband, and both of
them conversing just as if— Then Scrap became aware of Mrs. Fisher. She turned to her at once. “Do let me,”
she said gracefully, “introduce Mr. Mellersh-Wilkins. He has just come. This,”
she added, turning to Mr. Wilkins, “is Mrs. Fisher.” And Mr. Wilkins, nothing if not courteous, reacted at once to the conventional
formula. First he bowed to the elderly lady in the doorway, then he crossed
over to her, his wet feet leaving footprints as he went, and having got to her
he politely held out his hand. “It is a pleasure,” said Mr. Wilkins in his carefully modulated voice, “to meet
a friend of my wife’s.” Scrap melted away down into the garden.