One Of Them

“Show-places are show-places; the people who take them know it,” blurted out Mr. Morgan. “Ay, and what’s more, they’re proud of it.”

“They are, Tom,” said his wife, authoritatively.

“If you ‘d give me one of them a present, for the living in it, I ‘d not take it No, sir, I ‘d not,” reiterated Morgan, with a fierce energy. “What is a man in such a case, sir, but a sort of appraiser, a kind of agent to show off his own furniture, telling you to remark that cornice, and not to forget that malachite chimney-piece?”

“Very civil of him, certainly,” said Layton, in his low, quiet voice, which at the same time seemed to quiver with a faint irony.

“No, sir, not civil, only boastful; mere purse-pride, nothing more.”

“Nothing, Tom, – absolutely nothing.”

“What’s before the house this evening, – the debate looks animated?” said a fine bright-eyed boy of about fourteen, who lounged carelessly on Layton’s shoulder as he came up.

“It was a little scheme to visit the Villa Caprini, my Lord,” said Mosely, not sorry to have the opportunity of addressing himself to a person of title.

“How jolly, eh, Alfred? What say you to the plan?” said the boy, merrily.

Layton answered something, but in a tone too low to be overheard.

“Oh, as to that,” replied the boy, quickly, “if he be an Englishman who lives there, surely some of us must know him.”

“The very remark I was about to make, my Lord,” smiled in Mrs. Morris.

“Well, then, we agree to go there; that ‘s the main thing,” said O’Shea. “Two carriages, I suppose, will hold us; and, as to the time, shall we say to-morrow?”

To-morrow was unanimously voted by the company, who now set themselves to plot the details of the expedition, amidst which not the least knotty was, who were to be the fellow-travellers with Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, a post of danger assuredly not sought for with any heroic intrepidity, while an equally eager intrigue was on foot about securing the presence of the young Marquis of Agincourt and his tutor, Mr. Layton. The ballot, however, routed all previous machinations, deciding that the young peer was to travel with the Morgans and Colonel Quackinboss, an announcement which no deference to the parties themselves could prevent being received with a blank disappointment, except by Mr. Layton, who simply said, —

“We shall take care to be in time, Mrs. Morgan.” And then, drawing his pupil’s arm within his own, strolled negligently away.

CHAPTER IV. VISITORS

“I foretold all this,” said Charles Heathcote, peevishly, as a servant presented a number of visiting-cards with a polite request from the owners to be allowed to visit the villa and its gardens. “I often warned you of the infliction of inhabiting one of these celebrated places, which our inquisitive countrymen will see and their wives will write about.”

“Who are they, Charley?” said May, gayly. “Let us see if we may not know some of them.”

“Know them. Heaven forbid! Look at the equipages they have come in; only cast an eye at the two leathern conveniences now before the door, and say, is it likely that they contain any acquaintances of ours?”

“How hot they look, broiling down there! But who are they, Charley?”

“Mrs. Penthony Morris, – never heard of her; Mr. Algernon Mosely, – possibly the Bond Street man; Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Rice Morgan, of Plwmnwrar, – however that be pronounced; Mr. Layton and friend, – discreet friend, who will not figure by name; Mr. Gorman O’Shea, by all the powers! and, as I live, our Yankee again!”

“Not Quackinboss, surely?” broke in Sir William, good-humoredly.

“Yes. There he is: ‘U. S. A., Colonel Leonidas Shaver Quackinboss;’ and there’s the man, too, with his coat on his arm, on that coach-box.”

“I’ll certainly vote for my Transatlantic friend,” said the Baronet, “and consequently for any party of which he is a member.”

“As for me!” cried May, – “I ‘ve quite a curiosity to see him; not to say that it would be downright churlishness to refuse any of our countrymen the permission thus asked for.”

“Be it so. I only stipulate for not playing cicerone to our amiable visitors; and the more surely to escape such an indignity, I ‘m off till dinner.”

“Let Fenton wait on those gentlemen,” said the Baronet, “and go round with them through the house and the grounds. Order luncheon also to be ready.” There was a little, a very little, irritation, perhaps, in his voice, but May’s pleasant smile quickly dispelled the momentary chagrin, and his good-humored face was soon itself again.

If I have not trespassed upon my reader’s patience by minute descriptions of the characters I have introduced to him, it is in the expectation that their traits are such as, lying lightly on the surface, require little elucidation. Nor do I ask of him to bestow more attention to their features than he would upon those of travelling acquaintances with whom it is his fortune to journey in company for a brief space.

Strange enough, indeed, is that intimacy of travelling acquaintanceship – familiar without friendship, frank without being cordial. Curious pictures of life might be made from these groups thrown accidentally together in a steamboat or railroad, at the gay watering-place, or the little fishing-village in the bathing-season.

How free is all the intercourse of those who seem to have taken a vow with themselves never to meet each other again! With what humorous zest do they enjoy the oddities of this one, or the eccentricities of that, making up little knots and cliques, to be changed or dissolved within the day, and actually living on the eventualities of the hour, for their confidences! The contrasts that would repel in ordinary life, the disparities that would discourage, have actually invited intimacy; and people agree to associate, even familiarly, with those whom, in the recognized order of their daily existence, they would have as coldly repelled.

There was little to bind those together whom we have represented as seated under the chestnut-trees at the Bagni de Lucca. They entertained their suspicions and distrusts and misgivings of each other to a liberal extent; they wasted no charities in their estimate of each other; and wherever posed by a difficulty, they did not lend to the interpretation any undue amount of generosity; nay, they even went further, and argued from little peculiarities of dress, manner, and demeanor, to the whole antecedents of him they criticised, and took especial pains in their moments of confidence to declare that they had only met Mr. – for the first time at Ems, and never saw Mrs. – till they were overtaken by the snow-storm on the Splugen.

Such-like was the company who now, headed by the obsequious butler, strolled leisurely through the spacious saloons of the Villa Caprini.

Who is there, in this universal vagabondage, has not made one of such groups? Where is the man that has not strolled, “John Murray” in hand, along his Dresden, his Venice, or his Rome; staring at ceilings, and gazing ruefully at time-discolored frescos, – grieved to acknowledge to his own heart how little he could catch of a connoisseur’s enthusiasm or an antiquarian’s fervor, – wondering within himself wherefore he could not feel like that other man whose raptures he was reading, and with sore misgivings that some nice sense had been omitted in his nature? Wonderfully poignant and painful things are these little appeals to an inner consciousness. How far such sentiments were distributed amongst those who now lounged and stared through salon and gallery, we must leave to the reader’s own appreciation. They looked pleased, convinced, and astonished, and, be it confessed, “bored” in turn; they were called upon to admire much they did not care for, and wonder at many things which did not astonish them; they were often referred to histories which they had forgotten, if they ever knew them, and to names of whose celebrity they were ignorant; and it was with a most honest sense of relief they saw themselves reach the last room of the suite, where a few cabinet pictures and some rare carvings in ivory alone claimed their attention.

“A ‘Virgin and Child,’ by Murillo,” said the guide.

“The ninth ‘Virgin and Child,’ by all that’s holy!” said Mr. O’Shea. “The ninth we have seen to-day!”

“The blue drapery, ladies and gentlemen,” continued the inexorable describer, “is particularly noticed. It is ‘glazed’ in a manner only known to Murillo.”

“I ‘m glad of it, and I hope the secret died with him,” cried Mr. Morgan. “It looks for all the world like a bathing-dress.”

“The child squints. Don’t he squint?” exclaimed Mosely.

“Oh, for shame!” cried Mrs. Morris. “Mr. Layton is quite shocked with your profane criticism.”

“I did not hear it, I assure you,” said that gentleman, as he arose from a long and close contemplation of a “St. John,” by Salvator.

“‘St. John preaching in the Wilderness!’” said Quackinboss; “too tame for my taste. He don’t seem to roll up his sleeves to the work, – does he?”

“It’s not stump-oratory, surely?” said Layton, with a quiet smile.

“Ain’t it, though! Well, stranger, I’m in a considerable unmixed error if it is not! You’d like to maintain that because a man does n’t rise up from a velvet cushion and lay his hand upon a grand railing, all carved with grotesque intricacies, all his sentiments must needs be commonplace and vulgar; but I ‘m here to tell you, sir, that you ‘d hear grander things, nobler things, and greater things from a moss-covered old tree-stump in a western pine-forest, by the mouth of a plain, hardy son of hard toil, than you’ve often listened to in what you call your place in Parliament Now, that’s a fact!”

There was that amount of energy in the way these words were uttered that seemed to say, if carried further, the discussion might become contentious.

Mr. Layton did not show any disposition to accept the gage of battle, but turned to seek for his pupil.

“You ‘re looking for the Marquis, Mr. Layton,” asked Mrs. Morris, “ain’t you? I think you’ll find him in the shrubberies, for he said all this only bored him, and he ‘d go and look for a cool spot to smoke his cigar.”

“That’s what it all comes to,” said Morgan, as soon as Layton had left the room; “that’s the whole of it! You pay a fellow – a ‘double first’ something or other from Oxford or Cambridge – five hundred a year to go abroad with your son, and all he teaches him is to choose a cheroot.”

“And smoke it, Tom,” chimed in Mrs. Morgan.

“There ain’t no harm in a weed, sir, I hope?” said Quackinboss. “The thinkers of this earth are most of ‘em smoking men. What do you say, sir, to Humboldt, Niebuhr, your own Bulwer, and all our people, from John C. Colhoun to Daniel Webster? When a man puts a cigar between his lips, he as good as says, ‘I ‘m a-reflecting, – I ‘m not in no ways to be broke in upon.’ It’s his own fault, sir, if he does n’t think, for he has in a manner shut the door to keep out intruders.”

“Filthy custom!” muttered Mr. Morgan, with a garbled sentence, in which the word “America” was half audible.