In Florence the nascent swan-feathers of Anne Champneys grew into perfect plumage. She was like a spirit new-born to another world, with all the dun-colored ties of a darker existence swept away, and only a residue of thought and feeling left of its former experience. This bright and rosy world, enriched by nature and art, was so new, its values were so different, that at first she was dazed into dumbness by it.
She came face to face with beauty and art made a part of daily life. She thought she had never seen color, or flowers, or even a real sky, until now. An existence unimaginably rich, vistas that receded into an almost fabled past, opened and spread before her glamourously. The vividness of her impressions, her reaction to this new phase of experience, the whole-souled ardor with which she flung herself into the study of Italian, her eagerness to know more, her delight in the fine old house in which they had set up their household gods, amused and charmed Mrs. Vandervelde. She felt as if she were teaching and training an unspoiled, delighted, and delightful child, and contact with this fresh and eager spirit stimulated her own.
Many of her former school friends, girls belonging to fine Florentine families, some now noble matrons, mothers of families, one or two great conventual superioresses, still resided in the city, and these welcomed their beloved Marcia delightedly. There were, too, the American and English colonies, and a coterie of well-known artists. Marcia Vandervelde was a born hostess, a center around which the brightest and cleverest naturally revolved. She changed the large, drafty rooms of the old palace into charming reflections of her own personality. A woman of wide sympathies and cultivated tastes, she delighted in the clever cosmopolitan society that gathered in her drawing-room; and it was in this opalescent social sea that she launched young Mrs. Champneys.
Mrs. Champneys was at first but a mild success, a sort of pale luminosity reflected from the more dominant Mrs. Vandervelde. But it so happened, that a gifted young Italian lost his heart at sight to her red hair and green eyes, and discovering that she had no heart of her own—at least, none for him—he wrote, in a sort of frenzy of inspiration, a very fine sonnet sequence narrating his hapless passion. The poet had been as extravagantly assertive as poets in love usually are, and the sonnets were really notable; so the young man was swept into a gust of fame; all Italy read his verse and sympathized with him. The object of a popular poet's romantic and unfortunate love is always the object of curiosity and interest, as Anne Champneys discovered to her surprise and annoyance.
"He was such a little idiot!" she told Marcia Vandervelde, disgustedly. "Always sighing and rolling his eyes, and looking at one like a sick calf,—more than once I was tempted to catch him by the shoulders and shake him!"
"He's a poet, my child," said Mrs. Vandervelde, mischievously, "and you're the lady in the case. It's been the making of him, and it hasn't done you any harm: you'll be a legend in your own lifetime."
Marcia was quite right. The poet's love clung to Anne like an intangible perfume, and a halo of romance encircled her red head. The Florentines discovered that she was beautiful; the English and Americans, cooler in judgment, found her charming. And a noted German artist came along and declared that he had found in her his ideal Undine.
Mrs. Peter remained unchanged and unimpressed. She shrugged indifferent shoulders; she wasn't particularly interested in herself as the object of poetic adoration.
She was, however, immensely interested in the beauty and romance of Florence. The street crowds, so vivacious, so good-humored, the vivid Florentine faces, enchanted her. More astonishing than storied buildings, or even imperishable art, were the figures that moved across the red-and-gold background of the city's history,—figures like Dante, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and that great prior of San Marco whose "soul went out in fire." Curiously enough, it was Savonarola who made the most profound impression upon her. It seemed to her that the immortal monk still dominated Florence, and when she saw his old worn crucifix in his cell at San Marco, something awoke in her spirit,—a sense of religious values. Religion, then, was not a mere fixed convention, subscribed to as a sort of proof of conservatism and respectability; religion was really a fixed reality, an eternal power. She read everything that she could lay her hands on covering the history of Fra Girolamo. Then she bought a picture of his red Indian-like visage, and hung it up in her room. The titanic reformer remained, a shadowy but very deep power, in the background of her consciousness, and it was this long-dead preacher who taught her to pray. He won her profoundest reverence and faith, because he had been true, he had sealed his faith with his life; she felt that she could trust him. His honesty appealed to her own.
It was such curious phases as this of the girl's unfolding character, that made her a never-failing source of interest to Marcia Vandervelde. Under her superimposed, surface indifference, Marcia reflected, Anne had a deep strain of pure unworldliness, vast possibilities. Give Anne an ideal, once arouse her enthusiasm, and she was capable of tossing aside the world for it. Marcia was vastly interested, too, in the serene detachment of the girl's attitude toward all those with whom she came in contact. One might evoke interest, sympathy, compassion, even a quiet friendliness, but her heart remained quiet, aloof, secure from invasion. Handsome young men who fell in love with her—and there were several such—seemed unable to stir any emotion in her, except perhaps, an impatient resentment. Marcia, of course, knew nothing of Glenn Mitchell. But Anne Champneys remembered him poignantly. She had learned her lesson.
They had been some six or eight months in Florence when Mr. Berkeley Hayden put in his appearance, somewhat to Mrs. Vandervelde's surprise. She had not expected this! She studied her old friend speculatively. H'm! She remembered the pale face of the young Italian poet whose sad sonnets all Italy was reading with delight. Then she looked at the red-headed source of those sonnets,—and she had no doubt as to the cause of Mr. Hayden's appearance in Florence at this time,—and wondered a bit. The situation gave a fillip to her imagination; it was piquant. One wondered how it would end.
Peter Champneys? Marcia scented disruption, where that impalpable relationship was concerned. She was ignorant as to Anne's real feelings and intentions in regard to her absentee husband. Anne never mentioned him. She bore his name, she held herself rigidly aloof from all lovers; herein one saw her sole concessions to the tie binding her. Marcia didn't see how it was possible that the two should avoid hating each other; the mere fact that they had been arbitrarily forced upon each other by the imperious will of old Chadwick, would inevitably militate against any hope of future affection between them. And now here was Berkeley Hayden, quite as imperious as Chadwick Champneys had ever been, and who was quite as successful in getting what he wanted.
Anne had welcomed Mr. Hayden gladly. She was honestly delighted to see him. Florence had taught her, signally, the depths of her own lack of culture, and this biting knowledge increased her respect for Mr. Berkeley Hayden. Marcia was immensely clever, charmingly cultivated, a woman of the world in the best sense, but Anne's native shrewdness told her that Marcia's knowledge was not equal to Hayden's. His culture was surer and deeper. He was more than a mere amateur; he knew. He stood apart, in her mind, and just a little higher than anybody else. She turned to him eagerly, and there was established between them, almost unconsciously, the most potent, perfect, and dangerous of all relationships, because it is the most beautiful and natural,—that, in which the man is the teacher and the woman the pupil.
Hayden saw her, too, to greater advantage, here under this Florentine sky, against the background of perhaps the most beautiful city in the world. She glowed, splendidly young and vivid. She did not laugh often, but when she did, it was like a peal of music; it came straight from her heart and went direct to yours. It was as catching as fire, as exhilarating as the chime of sleigh-bells on a frosty Thanksgiving morning, as clear and true as a redbird's whistle; and it had tucked away in it a funny, throaty chuckle so irresistibly infectious that suspicious old St. Anthony himself, would have joined in accord with it, had he heard its silver echo in his wilderness. Berkeley Hayden's immortal soul stood on the tiptoe of ecstasy when Anne Champneys laughed.
She no longer thought of herself as Nancy Simms; she knew herself now as Anne Champneys, a newer and better personality dominating that old, unhappy, ignorant self. If at times the man glimpsed that other shadowy self of hers, it was part of her mysterious appeal, her enthralling, baffling charm. It invested her with a shade of inscrutable, prescient sorrow, as of old unhappy far-off things. He hadn't the faintest idea of Nancy Simms, a creature utterly foreign to his experience. And because she did not love him, Anne Champneys never spoke of that old self, never confided in him. He did not know her as she had been, he only knew her as she was now. That, however, fully satisfied his critical taste. The marvel of her alabaster skin, fleckless and flawless, the glory of her glittering red hair, the sea-depths of her cool, gray-green eyes, the reserve of her expression, the virginal curve of her lip, enchanted him. He liked the tall, slender strength of her, the lightness of her step, her grace when she danced, her spirited pose when she rode. Here was the woman, the one woman, to bear his name, to be the mistress of his house. She was the only woman he had ever really wished to marry. And she was nominally married to Peter Champneys.
Hayden was honorable. Had hers been a real marriage, had she been a happy wife, he would have respected the tie that bound her, and gone his way. But the situation was exceptional. She wasn't really a wife at all, and like Mrs. Vandervelde, he could see in such a marriage nothing but a cause for mutual disgust and dislike. Well, then, if he loved her, and Peter Champneys didn't, he certainly was not working Peter Champneys any harm in winning away from him a wife he didn't want. Why should he stand aside and let her go, for such a shadow as that ceremony had been? The Champneys money? That meant nothing weighed in the balance with his desire. He could give her as much, and more, than she would forego. Mrs. Berkeley Hayden would eclipse Mrs. Peter Champneys.
Deliberately, then, but delicately, after his fashion, Hayden set himself to win Anne Champneys. He felt that his passion for her gave him the right. He meant to make her happy. She could have her marriage annulled. Then she would become Mrs. Berkeley Hayden. Even the fact that he really knew very little about her did not trouble him. He coveted her, and he meant to have her.
He read the young Italian's sonnets, which she had inspired, and they made him thoughtful. He could readily understand the depths of feeling such a woman could arouse. Had she no heart, as the Italian lamented? He wondered. It came to him that she was, in truth, detached, sufficient to herself, an ungregarious creature moving solitarily in a mysterious world all her own. What did she think? What did she feel? He didn't know. He was allowed to see certain aspects of her intelligence, and her quicknes............