Dorothy, and Other Italian Stories

He rose, walked about the room, coming back to lean over the gilded top of her chair and say, with emphasis, "What in the world does that old wretch mean by staying here so persistently all this time?"

She laughed. Benjamin Franklin, looking up from his task, laughed too – probably on general principles of sociability and appreciation of his fee.

"To go back to your faults," she said; "please come and sit down, and acknowledge them. You have a very jealous nature."

"You are mistaken. However, if you like jealousy, I can easily take it up."

"It will not be necessary. It is already there."

"You are thinking of some particular instance; of whom did you suppose I was jealous?"

But she would not say.

After a while he came back to it. "You thought I was jealous of Lorimer Percival," he said.

The custodian now announced that both shoes were dry; she put them on, buttoning them with an improvised button-hook made of a hair-pin. The old man stood straightening himself after his bent posture; he still smiled – probably on the same general principles. The afternoon was drawing towards its close; Ford asked him to bring round the horses. He went out; they could hear his slow, careful tread on each of the slippery stairs. Katharine had risen; she went to the mirror to adjust her riding-hat. Ford came up and stood behind her. "Do you remember when I looked at you in the glass, in this same way, a year ago?" he said.

"How you talked to me that day about my poor little book! You made me feel terribly."

"I am sorry. Forgive it."

"But you do not forgive the book?"

"I will forget it, instead. You will write no more."

"Always so sure! However, I will promise, if you acknowledge that you have a jealous disposition."

She spoke gayly. He watched her in the glass a moment, then drew her away. "Whether I have a jealous disposition or not I do not know," he answered. "But I was never jealous of Lorimer Percival; I held him in too light estimation. And I did not believe – no, not at any time – that you loved him; he was not a man whom you would love. Why you allowed yourself to become engaged to him I do not know; but I suspect it was because he flattered what you thought your literary talent. I do not believe you would ever have married him; you would have drawn back at the last moment. To be engaged to him was one thing, to marry him another. You kept your engagement along for months, when there was no reason at all for the delay. If you had married him I should have thought the less of you, but I should not have been jealous." He paused. "I might never have let you know it, Katharine," he went on; "but I prefer that there should be nothing but the truth between us. I know that it was Percival who broke the engagement at the last, and not you. I knew it when I was here in the summer. He himself told me when I met him in Scotland just after his marriage."

She broke from him. "How base are all men!" she said, in a voice unlike her own.

"In him it was simply egotism. He knew that I had known of his engagement to you, and he wished me to appreciate that in order to marry that sweet young girl, who was quite without fortune, he had been obliged to make, and had made, a great sacrifice."

"Great indeed!" she commented, bitterly. "You do well to commend him."

"I do not commend him. I simply say that he was following out his nature. Being a poet, he is what is called sympathetic, you know; and he wanted my appreciation and sympathy – I will not say applause."

She was standing with her back towards him. She now walked towards the door. But her courage failed, she sank into a chair and covered her face with her hands. "It is too much," she said. "You wait until I have lost my fortune and am overwhelmed; you wait until I am rejected, cast aside; and then you come and win from me an avowal of my love, telling me afterwards —afterwards" – Her voice broke, she burst into tears.

"Telling you afterwards nothing but that I love you. Telling you afterwards that I have not had one really happy moment since our conversation in this old house a year ago. Telling you afterwards that my life has resolved itself into but one unceasing, tormenting wish – the wish, Katharine, that you would love me, I suppose I ought to say a little, but I mean a great deal. Look at me; is this humble enough for you?"

He drew her hands away; she saw that he was kneeling at her feet; and, not only that, but she saw also something very like a mist in the gray eyes she had always thought too cold.

In the library of Mr. John Ford, near New York, there hangs in the place of honor a water-color sketch of an old yellow château. Beneath it, ranged by themselves, are all the works of that eloquent authoress and noble woman, Madame de Staël.

"You admire her?" said a visitor recently, in some surprise. "To me she always seemed a – a little antique, you know."

"She is antiquity itself! But she once lent me her house, and I am grateful. By-the-way, Katharine, I never told you, although I found it out afterwards: Benjamin Franklin understood English, after all."

THE END