The encounter

Front matter

—-*

By the author of

The Little French Girl

II “<“ Rouge et Noir’—Have you read it?”

“Yes, I’ve read it,” said Persis. She could not remember a time when she had not read what she _ wished to read.

“It’s pretty depressing,” said Mrs. eeauscys and, the water having begun faintly to sing, “ Fill your bottle before it boils,” she said. ‘The way they go is something dreadful; the neck of my new one’s begun to leak already.” And she then went on, picking up her book again and adjusting her pince-nez with a slender little hand, “ And it’s pretty improper, too. I suppose the young man gets his head cut off. I’m almost too sleepy to go on and find out to-night.”

“ Yes; he gets his head cut off,” said Persis, smiling slightly as she filled the bottle.

“Well, he deserves it,’ said Mrs. Fennamy. “ He’s about the meanest thing I ever came across.”

“ He was mean, certainly,” Persis assented, screwing on her top; “but there is something piteous about him, too. It’s like seeing a rapid, bright little bird of prey shot down.”

“ Well, I can’t say I feel sorry for any of them,” said Mrs. Fennamy. “ They all behaved about as badly as they could. What they found in him to fall in love with I can’t imagine. Good-night, dear.”

Persis stooped over her and they kissed affectionately. —

Chapter II

KNOCK came at Mrs. Fennamy’s door, when Persis and her mother were having their breakfast together, and a deep, tragic voice, speaking English, but with an Italian accent, inquired: “TI may come in?” |

“Come in! Come in, Eleanora!’? mother and daughter replied, and, the door opening, as if with precaution, an extraordinary-looking woman slid into the room, recalling, in her decorated height, her as it were sombre festivity, a may-pole by Goya.

She was tall and gaunt and sallow, her face set with dark eyes and with spacious teeth, like the ivory keys of an ancient piano. Her brow, under a thatch of dusty black hair, was ample and innocent, and she had a retreating chin and dilated, histrionic nostrils.

This was the Signorina Eleanora Zardo, an old and devoted friend, of whom Persis had said that she had the brow and eyes of a sibyl and the mouth and chin of a rabbit. “Or, perhaps,” she had altered her metaphor, meditating the passionate benevolence, the extravagance and strangeness of their Eleanora, “ more like a desert saint than a sibyl—Saint Mary of Egypt. Can’t you see her eyes gazing at you from a cave?” Mrs. Fennamy had assented to this, adding that she supposed Saint Mary of Egypt, also, did not very often wash. Eleanora’s hap-hazard personal habits were the subject of frequent and distressed cogitations on Mrs. Fennamy’s part,

Persis had defended her from the imputation. Eleanora, after all, steeped herself in mud once a year at Tannenkreuz, and that was more than one could say of Saint Mary of Egypt; but Mrs. Fennamy surmised that Saint Mary had spent her life sitting in hot sand, and that hot sand was very cleansing.

Signorina Zardo was, indeed, ambiguously dishevelled with her impenetrable hair and great, black, plumed, battered and dusty hat and her tattered silks and laces, rose and black and grey, all strangely caught together by tarnished safety pins or old cameos and mosaics. Long earrings of pearl and coral repaired with white thread dangled from her ears; the ruffled lace at her elbows was old and dingy.

Signorina Zardo was a scholar, and had lectured on Dante, in London, Boston and Berlin. Her friendships were cosmopolitan. She lived when at home, in Florence, in the darkest of little entresols, and gave counsel, consolation and often, from meagre resources, material assistance to numberless protégés, many of them of European disreputability. Nothing could chill or repel her devotion. On her mother’s side she derived from an ancient and iniquitous family. She was the fruit of a mésalliance; her father had been a music-teacher.

She had come to Tannenkreuz some weeks before the Fennamys, and was staying at a cheaper pension near by.

“My dears—what can you think or guess! ”’—she said, after she had placed her parasol in a corner and seated herself near the bed, where, the breakfast tray upon her knees, Mrs. Fennamy sat propped on pillows. “Je vous le donne en cent. I had myself no idea— not the faintest—of such a thing. Heis here! Ludwig is here! I have but just seen him!”

Mrs. Fennamy looked up from the roll she was buttering. She always had her bath and did her hair before she breakfasted. Her head now was a masterpiece of compact puff and fluff and coil. The light fringe that covered half her forehead gave to her clear, incurious eyes an added and almost infantile directness. “Ludwig?” she inquired. ‘‘ Who, Eleanora dear, is Ludwig?”

Persis answered her. ‘‘ There is only one Ludwig, mamma; Herr Wehlitz, of course; Eleanora’s philosopher friend. Is he staying in Tannenkreuz, Eleanora?”

“Yes, my child; staying here. And I had thought him in Switzerland. His health is bad. You will remember my anxieties on the score of his health. It was, I find, a sudden decision to come to Tannenkreuz. Herr Sachs advised the baths, and Ludwig then remembered that I had spoken well of them. They came on at once from the Engadine. Already, he says, he feels benefitted. Yes; he will doubtless be here for the rest of our own stay.”

“T remember now,” Mrs. Fennamy said, adding honey to her roll. “ He is the man who writes the queer books and who quarrels with all his friends. You are the only one he has n’t quarrelled with, are n’t you, Eleanora?”’

Signorina Zardo, at this, threw up her hands and eyes as if at an incorrigible child. “ Annetta mia!” she murmured. “ Know, my friend,” she went on, smiling and shaking her head, “know that a giant such as Ludwig wrestles only with those approaching his own stature. The pigmies he leaves in peace. Why not? They can do him no affront. I, to my great Ludwig, am such a pigmy. I do not understand the meaning of the thunderstorms I see raging above my head. SoI tell him. So I am safe. I do not understand his books. ‘They are terrible and full of splendour; abysses where one sees great lights—falling—or mounting. Abysses that may be heavens ”’— Signorina Zardo’s voice had fallen to a low note of awed melancholy as she spoke—‘ but not mine; not mine,” she finished. She counted herself an idealist free-thinker; yet the roots of her Church were deep in her.

Persis, who had glanced away from her and back at her and up at the ceiling and out of the window, while she was speaking, now said: ‘‘ You pretend not to understand his books so that you need not quarrel with him, so that you may keep him your friend. You do understand them and you abhor them.”

For a moment Signorina Zardo, fixing her great eyes upon the girl, contemplated her in silence. Then, her face softening to a half playful, half cajoling smile, she again shook her head and, putting a finger to her lips, said in a stage whisper: ‘ And if it is so, Persis? If it is so? I throw myself upon your mercy!”

“I won't betray you,” said Persis slightly smiling. “He shall keep his only friend as far as I am concerned.”

“ Ah—but you are mistaken—I am not his only friend. He still has friends, and devoted friends, with him. Herr Sachs is such a one, and Graf von Liidenstein should be counted among them. And I want him to make yet another,” Signorina Zardo went on, leaning to the young girl and taking her hand. “TI want him to know our Persis; our poetess; our strange dreamy head. You are to meet. And if you have often heard his name on my lips be assured that he has often heard yours.”

“We must meet, of course,” said Persis, ‘“ but whether to be friends is another question. I may like the man less than his books—for his books I do like— they do not frighten me at all. Do you remember, Eleanora, three years ago in Florence, the day I cut my hand and you took me into your room to bind it up, and I leaned over your dressing-table to see the photograph standing there? It stood next to one of me—that may have been a good omen—and I spotted it with blood when I took it up, and that may have been a bad one. But you told me then that he was 17 bd your great unhappy friend and that I—though I was only sixteen—was the only woman you had known who could understand him. I have always wished to meet him, too, since then.”

Persis Fennamy spoke with a singular maturity. She had been versed since childhood in foreign tongues, and her own had come to be but one among many, to be used with the same ease and the same exactitude. There was nothing girlish, nothing careless or excessive in her use of words.

“I remember. I have always remembered. I have always intended that you should meet,” said Signorina Zardo. “For years those two faces have stood together on my table. You have always been as different from other women as he from other men. You are fitted, as no one else whom I have known, to be his disciple. Often, in what you say, I hear his own irony, his own scorn, and his aspiration.”’ She and Persis looked at each other, Signorina Zardo with solemnity, the young girl, though slightly smiling, with an accepting gravity.

* Has he still that big moustache?” Mrs. Fennamy inquired, pouring out her second cup of coffee. She was an abstemious little person and breakfast was, to her, the chief meal of the day. ‘‘ I remember that photograph. I never liked those big, gushing moustaches. I always think a man must have a weak mouth when he wears such a big moustache.”

Mrs. Fennamy often disconcerted Signorina Zardo. She was disconcerted now and glanced at Persis, murmuring: ‘“ Weak? There is nothing in Ludwig that is weak. Strength is his creed; he is the apostle of strength. It is a mere matter of fashion, the way in which a man may choose to wear his moustache ~~ Is it not so, chérie?” She was troubled. Her eyes dwelt almost with appeal on Persis.

“Of course it is,” said Persis, taking up her neglected cup of coffee. ‘‘ Like the colour of neck-ties or the cut of trousers. How horrid; my coffee is quite coms

“There’s plenty more milk here,” said Mrs. Fennamy, pouring the tepid contents of the milk-jug into her ubiquitous saucepan. “ Heat it on the spirit-lamp.” And she went on as unpolemically as if the milk alone were in question: ‘“‘Glaring eyes aren't a matter of fashion, anyway. I think a man whose eyes glare when he is being photographed must be weak in some ways. It’s all very well to glare when you’re looking down an abyss.” And she added, since to this there was no reply: “ And as for trousers, you know, Persis, you never could bear that young Englishman we met on the Riviera, because his trousers were too loose.”

“It remains to be seen whether I shall be able to bear Herr Wehlitz, since his moustache is too big,” said Persis. ‘‘ When are we to meet, Eleanora? I promise you to see the moustache and the glare in true proportion. I imagine that I shall be able to forgive them to him.”

“Oh, my dear, forgive! He is not one to need forgiveness!” Signorina Zardo murmured, vexed, almost to tears, it was evident, by her friend’s levity. “But for the meeting, that is not yet arranged. I am to go to his hotel at one—he is at the Beau Séjour —and then we will see what can be settled. . Ludwig is capricious, uncertain, and by no means re-established yet in health. He cannot count upon himself.”

Persis stood watching her milk slowly heave in the saucepan and since she was silent Signorina Zardo went on to say that Herr Sachs, Ludwig’s devoted friend, had come with him to Tannenkreuz and, indeed, had been with him for over a year now. He was a cripple; an admirable little person. Graf von Lidenstein, too, a very brilliant man, a man of the world, had come in order to be near Ludwig, for whom his admiration was unbounded.

Persis now laid the little silver strainer on her cup and poured out her hot milk, and, as she came back to her seat, she remarked that they could meet Herr Wehlitz that afternoon at four in the Kur-Garten.

Signorina Zardo, had she been less gladly preoccupied, might have perceived from the young. girl’s slightly sulky air that in her own betrayal of uncertainty she had blundered. _

Chapter III

RS. FENNAMY and Signorina Zardo had met twelve years before at a Swiss hotel where their modest au quatriéme, united by a balcony, overlooked a great lake and a range of snowy Alps. Persis had then been seven years old, an unusual little girl, with brilliant, glancing eyes, dark brows and radiant hair falling to her waist. Her clothes, too—for Mrs. Fennamy had always known how to dress her child—had been unusual; little cloaks of poppy-red silk over white lawn frocks; small black shoes, like those of Alice-in-Wonderland, strapped across white socks, and shell-like little hats of fine white straw. It was the child, rather than the unobtrusively elegant mother, who had first attracted Signorina Zardo’s attention as she stood leaning on the balcony, gazing with pondering, perplexed brows at the sunlit evening clouds. “Is it an only child, madame?” she had inquired when the little girl had been taken away to bed and she and Mrs. Fennamy, divided only by an iron railing, sat over their coffee. “Yes; she is my only child,” Mrs, Fennamy replied.

Mrs. Fennamy neither invited nor repelled casual acquaintances. Signorina Zardo seemed to her rather 21 ridiculous-looking, and distressingly unkempt, but she was quite willing to talk to her, dimly aware of something in the aspect of the melancholy Italian which pleased her more than her untidiness displeased. She had had no opportunity to make acquaintances other than casual. Her friends, the gentry of a small, faraway American town, were not of a kind who could offer European letters of introduction. When they went to Europe, a rite almost as punctually accomplished as “coming out” or confirmation, they were occupied, solely and perforce, with the sights of the countries they visited and not with their societies. The people in Ashleyville couldn’t imagine why Annette Fennamy should care to go wandering about with her child as she had now done for two years; for her letters never conveyed the least appreciation of the opportunities for culture amongst which she moved. Nor did she write of people. Her life seemed a serene and aimless oscillation.

“A very unusual little child,” Signorina Zardo pursued on this occasion, a momentous one for mother and daughter. “And you travel with her? You will educate her in Europe?—-You are an American, are you not?”

“Yes, we’re Americans,” said Mrs. Fennamy, “and I expect I’ll keep Persis over here till she’s grown up.”

Signorina Zardo showed her surprise. ‘“ But that will be many years! You have friends on this side? Your little child has companions? She will not miss her home?—Or are you perhaps training her to a vocation?”

“No; we don’t know anybody, hardly, over here. A friend of mine is married in London, but we don’t care much about her husband—and we met some people we took to a great deal in Florence.” Mrs. Fennamy quite spoke as if the tastes of her child counted with her own. ‘“ But that’s all. I don't think Persis misses anything. She’s too young to miss anything. And we haven't a home, exactly, any longer. I’m a widow; my mother died three years ago and my father’s been dead for a long time and I never had any brothers or sisters. It seemed more satisfactory to come over here than to stay in Ashleyville; not that I could n’t be very contented in Ashleyville.”’ |

‘4 Ashleyville? Where is that? I have been in America, but I do not remember the name.” The Italian lady was frankly curious.

“Well, you’d not be likely to have heard of Ashleyville,” said Mrs. Fennamy with her small smile that neither apologized for the insignificance of her native place nor claimed acknowledgment for its dignity. ‘ Yes, it’s a small town.” She told Signorina Zardo all about Ashleyville; its derivation from New England and Virginia; its drowsy streets, shaded by avenues of trees; its sober Colonial houses; its strict social traditions of mingled austerity and innocence. She placed it with affectionate impartiality. * Yes; it’s simple in some ways; most ways, perhaps;

but not in the ways Europeans expect to find. It’s the kind of place they never seem to see. It isn't a bit crude or hurried or anxious. It just thinks it’s all right and it’s been thinking so for a good while—as good whiles go in America, It’s just as peaceful and as contented as can be and the people are the nicest sort of people, only caring about reading all the best books and bringing up their children well and having nice, sweet homes;’’ Mrs. Fennamy spoke with tenderness. “T could be very contented in Ashleyville,” she repeated; “but I felt from the first that Persis didn’t belong there.” —

“Indeed? She did not belong there? It was too peaceful, too kind and too rooted for your potent little child? Yes, I can understand your feeling. And what then of your larger cities? New York, or Boston? Did you think of them?”

“Yes; I thought of them; I have some friends in New York. I stayed there one winter after I married and I liked it in a way; but as far as the people went it seemed to me pretty much the same as Ashleyville. They were just the same people, except that they had better accents and that more of them had their clothes made in Paris and gave dinner-parties instead of luncheons; they weren't a bit different; and what I felt about Persis was that she was different. So I thought we’d better leave America. I thought there ’d be more chance of being different over here.”

Signorina Zardo had kept her eyes upon the little lady with deepening interest. “ But it is a very extraordinary, a very strange and valiant motive; to leave your home, your kindred and all you care for,” she exclaimed. “ You believe in your child’s destiny. You sacrifice your life to that.”

This romantic interpretation did not seem to fit in with Mrs. Fennamy’s conception of the case. She shook her head saying: “I don’t know about a destiny. I don’t feel ambitious, exactly, about her. I just feel as if I was taking a fish out of soft-water where it did n’t belong and putting it in the sea, where it did, to take its chances. It’s not sacrificing my life. Persis is the most interesting thing in my life, and the most interesting thing I can do is to give her all the chances I can.”

Signorina Zardo’s gaze dwelt on her as she broke a tablet of beetroot sugar to the required length and dropped it into her second cup of coffee. It was arresting to receive so strongly an impression of the indomitable, the inflexible, the purposeful from one apparently so trivial, these qualities seeming as far removed from the little lady with her fair, elaborate head and black lace frills and pale blue bows as were _ the snowy Alps from tablets of beetroot sugar. There was no emotion, no enthusiasm, no romance about her, yet Signorina Zardo had rarely felt more arrested by anyone.

* Signora,” she said, “ you and your Persis interest me greatly. Will you count me among the many new friends that your new life will surely bring you?” And Mrs. Fennamy, smiling quietly at her while she stirred her coffee, said, “‘ Why yes; thank you ever so much. You wont find me interesting, you know, but as Persis grows up she ’ll interest you more and more, I feel sure; and you ’re just the sort of friend I want for Persis. You’re different, too. There was nothing in Ashleyville a bit like you.”

After that, on sunny mornings, when she and Signorina Zardo sat under the trees in the garden watching Persis play, Mrs. Fennamy would talk about her child for as long as her new friend cared to question her. Persis usually played alone, going in and out among the shrubberies with an air of absorbed and intricate drama, hiding, tip-toeing out, and racing suddenly along the sanded paths to the far wall at the lake-edge where her bonne, a merry, dark-eyed French woman with close white cap and agile hands, sat sewing. She seemed fond of her bonne, fonder, apparently, than of her mother, and would throw herself, breathlessly, against her knees, looking up at her in some secret triumph. She did not seem to care at all for dolls. Signorina Zardo never saw her with one. “ No,’ said Mrs. Fennamy. ‘She likes to look at them at first, if they are pretty and nicely dressed; but then she puts them away and seems to forget all about them. And she doesn’t care about other children, either. I asked her why she didn’t play with that little Canadian girl who is always following her about and she said she did n’t like her, and when I asked why, she thought a moment and said it was because she wore earrings. I don’t like a child to wear earrings myself, do you? And she says she does n’t like the way another little girl’s hair smells— it’s perfectly clean hair, you know—only she says it has a funny, soapy smell, Sometimes I think she has n’t much heart,’’ Mrs. Fennamy went on dispassionately, “ We met a poor old beggar-woman with one eye yesterday, and when we saw her Persis ran up to me and took hold of my skirt as if she wanted to be protected—she seems really to be afraid of anything ugly or unpleasant—and I told her it wasn’t brave to act like that, and to try and see if she could n’t be brave, like Hercules when ‘he killed the Hydra, and give the poor old woman a ten centime piece.

And do you know what she said—looking up at me, her little face all white and set—‘ Why does n’t some one kill the old woman?’ I told her the Hydra was bad,’ Mrs. Fennamy continued after giving Signorina Zardo the opportunity for a vague murmur, “and that the poor old woman was good, and then she asked me how I knew she was good, and I could n’t think of anything to say except that the Hydra would have tried to tear us to pieces, but that all that the old woman wanted was a little money to get herself some food and that I ’d give it to her myself if she was too cowardly; and that braced her up and she said: ‘Let me give her five francs, then, she can only get two sticks of sucre d’orge for ten centimes.’ So I gave her a franc—I thought five too much—and when she came back and we walked away she was rubbing the hand the old woman had taken, and when I asked her 27 why she did that—the old woman had looked quite clean and nice—she said: ‘Her hand was like a hen’s foot, mamma, and she smelt like a hen.’ She seems to go very much by smells. But it sounds as if she had n’t much heart, does n’t it?”

“*T am afraid she will not like me, your interesting child,” said Signorina Zardo with her benignant, melancholy smile. “I am ugly, and perhaps I, too, smell like a hen.” | |

“Oh no, Persis doesn’t think so,” Mrs. Fennamy assured her. ‘“‘ She thinks you smell like an old trunk of mine where I keep fur and things in camphor; it’s a rather nice smell. The trunk has a picture of the Bay of Naples inside the lid, and perhaps that made her think of it, too. I told her you were an Itallane

Persis had, as yet, made no advances towards acquaintance with her mother’s new friend, but that evening, Signorina Zardo, finding her alone and leaning on the railing of the balcony, the little girl turned her eyes on her and said: “ Will you tell me a SLOrY Loy

“A story? What kind of a story?” Signorina Zardo asked, much pleased; “I am not good at telling stories, I fear.”

“Aren't you?” Persis said, her radiant yet cold gaze dwelling on her. “ But your eyes are full of stories.”

“Are they, indeed? Sad ones, perhaps you think?”

“Yes; very sad,” said Persis, nodding. ‘ All the things that have happened to you, I guess. Were you whipped and starved when you were little and shut in prisons like Marie Antoinette? Did you ever see people having their heads cut off?”

“Dio mio! No. Such horrors were not in my day, I am glad to say; though some time, when you are older and study history, you may care to hear many wonderful things that I have heard my father tell—stories of our great Italian struggle for liberty. Dim memories, also, of my own. But no; I was not unkindly treated when I was a child. My parents died when I was: still young, but the good aunt who brought me up was kind to me.”

“Then, when you grew up, perhaps it was then that sad things happened,” said Persis. . “ Perhaps robbers carried you off in a wood and put you ina dark cavern with bars of iron across the entrance— so dark that you could only see to grope your way to the bowl of water and piece of dry bread they left there for you. And at night, when they came back, you had to work and work—mending their clothes and cooking for them—by torchlight, till you grew so thin and yellow and—from being so much in the dark —your eyes got like an owl’s eyes.. Have you ever seen an owl in the daytime? Their eyes are just like yours.”’

Signorina Zardo’s eyes, indeed, dwelt on her with something of the bird’s nocturnal melancholy. “ Strange little child,’ she said, “you put me into fairy-tales. I was never carried off by robbers; yet it is not so untrue, what you say of my life; not so untrue.”

Persis, after a hesitation, had given her her hand and came and stood beside her knee, looking up at her face and down at her dress and ornaments and away at the sky and lake, after the flitting fashion that Signorina Zardo had already remarked as characteristic of her. “It is not so untrue,” she murmured, putting back the child’s bright, turbulent hair with a gentle hand. “I have been very poor—ah, very poor —and that is, indeed, to be in a dark cavern. And those for whom I toiled—(I taught and wrote, yes, far into the night)—-gave me little more than bread and water in return. And so my youth passed away, and I became thin and pale and old. Yet it was not so sad as you might think, my little Persis. You will learn that one may find treasures in the cavern of poverty and, perhaps, see angels in the dark.”

“Treasures? what sort of treasures? These, do you mean?” Persis asked, touching the mosaics and chains and cameos with which Signorina Zardo’s wrists and throat and breast were decorated.

“No; not these,’ she said, smiling, “something much better than these poor yet beloved trinkets. The treasures I mean are friends; the hearts of friends.”

_“ Have you a great many friends?” Persis asked, leaning now against Signorina Zardo’s knee as she 30 looked at her, some personal attraction in the gentle Italian overcoming the shrinking from physical contact so noticeable in the child, ‘I expect you have, because you would be so good to them.”

“Yes; I have many dear friends, My life is blessed indeed.”

“And did you really see angels? Aren’t angels make-believes, like fairies and Santa Claus?”

“No;” Signorina Zardo shook her head. ‘“ Angels are not make-believes. But they do not come as in the picture-books. They are the thoughts of God that visit us.” |

They continued to look at each other for a little while after this, Signorina Zardo glad of the opportunity for influencing a young mind scantily supplied, she imagined, with spiritual sustenance; then Persis said, her eyes dilating singularly: “I pray to God every night and morning, grandmamma taught me to, years ago, when we lived in America; but I don’t know who He is or how He can hear me. If He is good, why does He let things die? I saw a dead mouse in the garden yesterday. It had blood on its nose, and when I saw it was quite dead, it frightened me so that I ran away and hid for a long time in the bushes.”

As she spoke, Signorina Zardo saw that she was trembling. She lifted her to her lap, the little body yielding with a curious languor, in which her new friend read the benumbing influences of the remembered fear. ‘‘ Let me tell you, dear child,” she said,