Loe raamatut: «Under Two Flags», lehekülg 8

“I can’t say I see the way, little one,” said Cecil, with a sigh. “What is it?”

“Why—look here. You see I’m not of age; my signature is of no use; they won’t take it; else I could get money in no time on what must come to me when Royal dies; though ‘tisn’t enough to make the Jews ‘melt’ at a risk. Now—now—look here. I can’t see that there could be any harm in it. You are such chums with Lord Rockingham, and he’s as rich as all the Jews put together. What could there be in it if you just asked him to lend you a monkey for me? He’d do it in a minute, because he’d give his head away to you—they all say so—and he’ll never miss it. Now, Bertie—will you?”

In his boyish incoherence and its disjointed inelegance the appeal was panted out rather than spoken; and while his head drooped and the hot color burned in his face, he darted a swift look at his brother, so full of dread and misery that it pierced Cecil to the quick as he rose from his chair and paced the room, flinging his cheroot aside; the look disarmed the reply that was on his lips, but his face grew dark.

“What you ask is impossible,” he said briefly. “If I did such a thing as that, I should deserve to be hounded out of the Guards to-morrow.”

The boy’s face grew more sullen, more haggard, more evil, as he still bent his eyes on the table, his glance not meeting his brother’s.

“You speak as if it would be a crime,” he muttered savagely, with a plaintive moan of pain in the tone; he thought himself cruelly dealt with and unjustly punished.

“It would be the trick of a swindler, and it would be the shame of a gentleman,” said Cecil, as briefly still. “That is answer enough.”

“Then you will not do it?”

“I have replied already.”

There was that in the tone, and in the look with which he paused before the table, that Berkeley had never heard or seen in him before; something that made the supple, childish, petulant, cowardly nature of the boy shrink and be silenced; something for a single instant of the haughty and untamable temper of the Royallieu blood that awoke in the too feminine softness and sweetness of Cecil’s disposition.

“You said that you would aid me at any cost, and now that I ask you so wretched a trifle, you treat me as if I were a scoundrel,” he moaned passionately. “The Seraph would give you the money at a word. It is your pride—nothing but pride. Much pride is worth to us who are penniless beggars!”

“If we are penniless beggars, by what right should we borrow of other men?”

“You are wonderfully scrupulous, all of a sudden!”

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly and began to smoke again. He did not attempt to push the argument. His character was too indolent to defend itself against aspersion, and horror of a quarrelsome scene far greater than his heed of misconstruction.

“You are a brute to me!” went on the lad, with his querulous and bitter passion rising almost to tears like a woman’s. “You pretend you can refuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you the smallest thing you turn on me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth. You’ll let me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to save me; you live like a Duke, and don’t care if I should die in a debtor’s prison! You only brag about ‘honor’ when you want to get out of helping a fellow; and if I were to cut my throat to-night you would only shrug your shoulders, and sneer at my death in the clubroom, with a jest picked out of your cursed French novels!”

“Melodramatic, and scarcely correct,” murmured Bertie.

The ingratitude to himself touched him indeed but little; he was not given to making much of anything that was due to himself—partly through carelessness, partly through generosity; but the absence in his brother of that delicate, intangible, indescribable sensitive-nerve which men call Honor, an absence that had never struck on him so vividly as it did to-night, troubled him, surprised him, oppressed him.

There is no science that can supply this defect to the temperament created without it; it may be taught a counterfeit, but it will never own a reality.

“Little one, you are heated, and don’t know what you say,” he began very gently, a few moments later, as he leaned forward and looked straight in the boy’s eyes. “Don’t be down about this; you will pull through, never fear. Listen to me; go down to Royal, and tell him all frankly. I know him better than you; he will be savage for a second, but he would sell every stick and stone on the land for your sake; he will see you safe through this. Only bear one thing in mind—tell him all. No half measures, no half confidences; tell him the worst, and ask his help. You will not come back without it.”

Berkeley listened; his eyes shunning his brother’s, the red color darker on his face.

“Do as I say,” said Cecil, very gently still. “Tell him, if you like, that it is through following my follies that you have come to grief; he will be sure to pity you then.”

There was a smile, a little sad, on his lips, as he said the last words, but it passed at once as he added:

“Do your hear me? will you go?”

“If you want me—yes.”

“On your word, now?”

“On my word.”

There was an impatience in the answer, a feverish eagerness in the way he assented that might have made the consent rather a means to evade the pressure than a genuine pledge to follow the advice; that darker, more evil, more defiant look was still upon his face, sweeping its youth away and leaving in its stead a wavering shadow. He rose with a sudden movement; his tumbled hair, his disordered attire, his bloodshot eyes, his haggard look of sleeplessness and excitement in strange contrast with the easy perfection of Cecil’s dress and the calm languor of his attitude. The boy was very young, and was not seasoned to his life and acclimatized to his ruin, like his elder brother. He looked at him with a certain petulant envy; the envy of every young fellow for a man of the world. “I beg your pardon for keeping you up, Bertie,” he said huskily. “Good-night.”

Cecil gave a little yawn.

“Dear boy, it would have been better if you could have come in with the coffee. Never be impulsive; don’t do a bit of good, and is such bad form!”

He spoke lightly, serenely; both because such was as much his nature as it was to breathe, and because his heart was heavy that he had to send away the young one without help, though he knew that the course he had made him adopt would serve him more permanently in the end. But he leaned his hand a second on Berk’s shoulder, while for one single moment in his life he grew serious.

“You must know I could not do what you asked; I could not meet any man in the Guards face to face if I sunk myself and sunk them so low. Can’t you see that, little one?”

There was a wistfulness in the last words; he would gladly have believed that his brother had at length some perception of his meaning.

“You say so, and that is enough,” said the boy pettishly; “I cannot understand that I asked anything so dreadful; but I suppose you have too many needs of your own to have any resources left for mine.”

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly again, and let him go. But he could not altogether banish a pang of pain at his heart, less even for his brother’s ingratitude than at his callousness to all those finer, better instincts of which honor is the concrete name.

For the moment, thought—grave, weary, and darkened—fell on him; he had passed through what he would have suffered any amount of misconstruction to escape—a disagreeable scene; he had been as unable as though he were a Commissionaire in the streets to advance a step to succor the necessities for which his help had been asked; and he was forced, despite all his will, to look for the first time blankly in the face the ruin that awaited him. There was no other name for it: it would be ruin complete and wholly inevitable. His signature would have been accepted no more by any bill-discounter in London; he had forestalled all, to the uttermost farthing; his debts pressed heavier every day; he could have no power to avert the crash that must in a few weeks, or at most a few months, fall upon him. And to him an utter blankness and darkness lay beyond.

Barred out from the only life he knew, the only life that seemed to him endurable or worth the living; severed from all the pleasures, pursuits, habits, and luxuries of long custom; deprived of all that had become to him as second nature from childhood; sold up, penniless, driven out from all that he had known as the very necessities of existence; his very name forgotten in the world of which he was now the darling; a man without a career, without a hope, without a refuge—he could not realize that this was what awaited him then; this was the fate that must within so short a space be his. Life had gone so smoothly with him, and his world was a world from whose surface every distasteful thought was so habitually excluded, that he could no more understand this desolation lying in wait for him than one in the fullness and elasticity of health can believe the doom that tells him he will be a dead man before the sun has set.

As he sat there, with the gas of the mirror branches glancing on the gold and silver hilts of the crossed swords above the fireplace, and the smoke of his cheroot curling among the pile of invitation cards to all the best houses in town, Cecil could not bring himself to believe that things were really come to this pass with him. It is so hard for a man who has the magnificence of the fashionable clubs open to him day and night to beat into his brain the truth that in six months hence he may be lying in the debtors’ prison at Baden; it is so difficult for a man who has had no greater care on his mind than to plan the courtesies of a Guards’ Ball or of a yacht’s summer-day banquet, to absolutely conceive the fact that in a year’s time he will thank God if he have a few francs left to pay for a wretched dinner in a miserable estaminet in a foreign bathing-place.

“It mayn’t come to that,” he thought; “something may happen. If I could get my troop now, that would stave off the Jews; or, if I should win some heavy pots on the Prix de Dames, things would swim on again. I must win; the King will be as fit as in the Shires, and there will only be the French horses between us and an absolute ‘walk over.’ Things mayn’t come to the worst, after all.”

And so careless and quickly oblivious, happily or unhappily, was his temperament, that he read himself to sleep with Terrail’s “Club des Valets de Coeur,” and slept in ten minutes’ time as composedly as though he had inherited fifty thousand a year.

That evening, in the loose-box down at Royallieu, Forest King stood without any body-covering, for the night was close and sultry, a lock of the sweetest hay unnoticed in his rack, and his favorite wheaten-gruel standing uncared-for under his very nose; the King was in the height of excitation, alarm, and haughty wrath. His ears were laid flat to his head, his nostrils were distended, his eyes were glancing uneasily with a nervous, angry fire rare in him, and ever and anon he lashed out his heels with a tremendous thundering thud against the opposite wall, with a force that reverberated through the stables and made his companions start and edge away. It was precisely these companions that the aristocratic hero of the Soldiers’ Blue Ribbon scornfully abhorred.

They had just been looking him over—to their own imminent peril; and the patrician winner of the Vase, the brilliant six-year-old of Paris, and Shire and Spa steeple-chase fame, the knightly descendant of the White Cockade blood and of the coursers of Circassia, had resented the familiarity proportionately to his own renown and dignity. The King was a very sweet-tempered horse, a perfect temper, indeed, and ductile to a touch from those he loved; but he liked very few, and would suffer liberties from none. And of a truth his prejudices were very just; and if his clever heels had caught—and it was not his fault that they did not—the heads of his two companions, instead of coming with that ponderous crash into the panels of his box, society would certainly have been no loser, and his owner would have gained more than had ever before hung in the careless balance of his life.

But the iron heels, with their shining plates, only caught the oak of his box-door; and the tete-a-tete in the sultry, oppressive night went on as the speakers moved to a prudent distance; one of them thoughtfully chewing a bit of straw, after the immemorial habit of grooms, who ever seem as if they had been born into this world with a cornstalk ready in their mouths.

“It’s almost a pity—he’s in such perfect condition. Tip-top. Cool as a cucumber after the longest pipe-opener; licks his oats up to the last grain; leads the whole string such a rattling spin as never was spun but by a Derby cracker before him. It’s almost a pity,” said Willon meditatively, eyeing his charge, the King, with remorseful glances.

“Prut-tush-tish!” said his companion, with a whistle in his teeth that ended with a “damnation!” “It’ll only knock him over for the race; he’ll be right as a trivet after it. What’s your little game; coming it soft like that, all of a sudden? You hate that ere young swell like p’ison.”

“Aye,” assented the head groom with a tigerish energy, viciously consuming his bit of straw. “What for am I—head groom come nigh twenty years; and to Markisses and Wiscounts afore him—put aside in that ere way for a fellow as he’s took into his service out of the dregs of a regiment; what was tied up at the triangles and branded D, as I know on, and sore suspected of even worse games than that, and now is that set up with pride and sich-like that nobody’s woice ain’t heard here except his; I say what am I called on to bear it for?”: and the head groom’s tones grew hoarse and vehement, roaring louder under his injuries. “A man what’s attended a Duke’s ‘osses ever since he was a shaver, to be put aside for that workhus blackguard! A ‘oss had a cold—it’s Rake what’s to cure him. A ‘oss is entered for a race—it’s Rake what’s to order his morning gallops, and his go-downs o’ water. It’s past bearing to have a rascally chap what’s been and gone and turned walet, set up over one’s head in one’s own establishment, and let to ride the high ‘oss over one, roughshod like that!”

And Mr. Willon, in his disgust at the equestrian contumely thus heaped on him, bit the straw savagely in two, and made an end of it, with a vindictive “Will yer be quiet there; blow yer,” to the King, who was protesting with his heels against the conversation.

“Come, then, no gammon,” growled his companion—the “cousin out o’ Yorkshire” of the keeper’s tree.

“What’s yer figure, you say?” relented Willon meditatively.

“Two thousand to nothing—come!—can’t no handsomer,” retorted the Yorkshire cousin, with the air of a man conscious of behaving very nobly.

“For the race in Germany?” pursued Mr. Willon, still meditatively.

“Two thousand to nothing—come!” reiterated the other, with his arms folded to intimate that this and nothing else was the figure to which he would bind himself.

Willon chewed another bit of straw, glanced at the horse as though he were a human thing to hear, to witness, and to judge, grew a little pale; and stooped forward.

“Hush! Somebody’ll spy on us. It’s a bargain.”

“Done! And you’ll paint him, eh?”

“Yes—I’ll—paint him.”

The assent was very husky, and dragged slowly out, while his eyes glanced with a furtive, frightened glance over the loose-box. Then—still with that cringing, terrified look backward to the horse, as an assassin may steal a glance before his deed at his unconscious victim—the head groom and his comrade went out and closed the door of the loose-box and passed into the hot, lowering summer night.

Forest King, left in solitude, shook himself with a neigh; took a refreshing roll in the straw, and turned with an appetite to his neglected gruel. Unhappily for himself, his fine instincts could not teach him the conspiracy that lay in wait for him and his; and the gallant beast, content to be alone, soon slept the sleep of the righteous.

CHAPTER VIII
A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE

“Seraph—I’ve been thinking,” said Cecil musingly, as they paced homeward together from the Scrubs, with the long line of the First Life stretching before and behind their chargers, and the hands of the Household Cavalry plying mellowly in their rear.

“You don’t mean it. Never let it ooze out, Beauty; you’ll ruin your reputation!”

Cecil laughed a little, very languidly; to have been in the sun for four hours, in full harness, had almost taken out of him any power to be amused at anything.

“I’ve been thinking,” he went on undisturbed, pulling down his chin-scale. “What’s a fellow to do when he’s smashed?”

“Eh?” The Seraph couldn’t offer a suggestion; he had a vague idea that men who were smashed never did do anything except accept the smashing; unless, indeed, they turned up afterward as touts, of which he had an equally vague suspicion.

“What do they do?” pursued Bertie.

“Go to the bad,” finally suggested the Seraph, lighting a great cigar, without heeding the presence of the Duke, a Field-Marshal, and a Serene Highness far on in front.

Cecil shook his head.

“Can’t go where they are already. I’ve been thinking what a fellow might do that was up a tree; and on my honor there are lots of things one might turn to–”

“Well, I suppose there are,” assented the Seraph, with a shake of his superb limbs in his saddle till his cuirass and chains and scabbard rang again. “I should try the P. R., only they will have you train.”

“One might do better than the P. R. Getting yourself into prime condition, only to be pounded out of condition and into a jelly, seems hardly logical or satisfactory—specially to your looking-glass, though, of course, it’s a matter of taste. But now, if I had a cropper, and got sold up–”

“You, Beauty?” The Seraph puffed a giant puff of amazement from his Havana, opening his blue eyes to their widest.

“Possible!” returned Bertie serenely, with a nonchalant twist to his mustaches. “Anything’s possible. If I do now, it strikes me there are vast fields open.”

“Gold fields!” suggested the Seraph, wholly bewildered.

“Gold fields? No! I mean a field for—what d’ye call it—genius. Now, look here; nine-tenths of creatures in this world don’t know how to put on a glove. It’s an art, and an art that requires long study. If a few of us were to turn glove-fitters when we are fairly crushed, we might civilize the whole world, and prevent the deformity of an ill-fitting glove ever blotting creation and prostituting Houbigant. What do you say?”

“Don’t be such a donkey, Beauty!” laughed the Seraph, while his charger threatened to passage into an oyster cart.

“You don’t appreciate the majesty of great plans,” rejoined Beauty reprovingly. “There’s an immense deal in what I’m saying. Think what we might do for society—think how we might extinguish snobbery, if we just dedicated our smash to Mankind. We might open a College, where the traders might go through a course of polite training before they blossomed out as millionaires; the world would be spared an agony of dropped h’s and bad bows. We might have a Bureau where we registered all our social experiences, and gave the Plutocracy a map of Belgravia, with all the pitfalls marked; all the inaccessible heights colored red, and all the hard-up great people dotted with gold to show the amount they’d be bought for—with directions to the ignoramuses whom to know, court, and avoid. We might form a Courier Company, and take Brummagem abroad under our guidance, so that the Continent shouldn’t think Englishwomen always wear blue veils and gray shawls, and hear every Englishman shout for porter and beefsteak in Tortoni’s. We might teach them to take their hats off to women, and not to prod pictures with sticks, and to look at statutes without poking them with an umbrella, and to be persuaded that all foreigners don’t want to be bawled at, and won’t understand bad French any the better for its being shouted. Or we might have a Joint-Stock Toilette Association, for the purposes of national art, and receive Brummagem to show it how to dress; we might even succeed in making the feminine British Public drape itself properly, and the B. P. masculine wear boots that won’t creak, and coats that don’t wrinkle, and take off its hat without a jerk, as though it were a wooden puppet hung on very stiff strings. Or one might—”

“Talk the greatest nonsense under the sun!” laughed the Seraph. “For mercy’s sake, are you mad, Bertie?”

“Inevitable question addressed to Genius!” yawned Cecil. “I’m showing you plans that might teach a whole nation good style if we just threw ourselves into it a little. I don’t mean you, because you’ll never smash, and one don’t turn bear-leader, even to the B. P., without the primary impulse of being hard-up. And I don’t talk for myself, because, when I go to the dogs I have my own project.”

“And what’s that?”

“To be groom of the chambers at Meurice’s or Claridge’s,” responded Bertie solemnly. “Those sublime creatures with their silver chains round their necks and their ineffable supremacy over every other mortal!—one would feel in a superior region still. And when a snob came to poison the air, how exquisitely one could annihilate him with showing him his ignorance of claret; and when an epicure dined, how delightfully, as one carried in a turbot, one could test him with the eprouvette positive, or crush him by the eprouvette negative. We have been Equerries at the Palace, both of us, but I don’t think we know what true dignity is till we shall have risen to headwaiters at a Grand Hotel.”

With which Bertie let his charger pace onward, while he reflected thoughtfully on his future state. The Seraph laughed till he almost swayed out of saddle, but he shook himself into his balance again with another clash of his brilliant harness, while his eyes lightened and glanced with a fiery gleam down the line of the Household Cavalry.

“Well, if I went to the dogs I wouldn’t go to Grand Hotels; but I’ll tell you where I would go, Beauty.”

“Where’s that?”

“Into hot service, somewhere. By Jove, I’d see some good fighting under another flag—out in Algeria, there, or with the Poles, or after Garibaldi. I would, in a day—I’m not sure I won’t now, and I bet you ten to one the life would be better than this.”

Which was ungrateful in the Seraph, for his happy temper made him the sunniest and most contented of men, with no cross in his life save the dread that somebody would manage to marry him some day. But Rock had the true dash and true steel of the soldier in him, and his blue eyes flashed over his Guards as he spoke, with a longing wish that he were leading them on to a charge instead of pacing with them toward Hyde Park.

Cecil turned in his saddle and looked at him with a certain wonder and pleasure in his glance, and did not answer aloud. “The deuce—that’s not a bad idea,” he thought to himself; and the idea took root and grew with him.

Far down, very far down, so far that nobody had ever seen it, nor himself ever expected it, there was a lurking instinct in “Beauty,”—the instinct that had prompted him, when he sent the King at the Grand Military cracker, with that prayer, “Kill me if you like, but don’t fail me!”—which, out of the languor and pleasure-loving temper of his unruffled life, had a vague, restless impulse toward the fiery perils and nervous excitement of a sterner and more stirring career.

It was only vague, for he was naturally very indolent, very gentle, very addicted to taking all things passively, and very strongly of persuasion that to rouse yourself for anything was a niaiserie of the strongest possible folly; but it was there. It always is there with men of Bertie’s order, and only comes to light when the match of danger is applied to the touchhole. Then, though “the Tenth don’t dance,” perhaps, with graceful, indolent, dandy insolence, they can fight as no others fight when Boot and Saddle rings through the morning air, and the slashing charge sweeps down with lightning speed and falcon swoop.

“In the case of a Countess, sir, the imagination is more excited,” says Dr. Johnson, who had, I suppose, little opportunity of putting that doctrine for amatory intrigues to the test in actual practice. Bertie, who had many opportunities, differed with him. He found love-making in his own polished, tranquil circles apt to become a little dull, and was more amused by Laura Lelas. However, he was sworn to the service of the Guenevere, and he drove his mail-phaeton down that day to another sort of Richmond dinner, of which the lady was the object instead of the Zu-Zu.

She enjoyed thinking herself the wife of a jealous and inexorable lord, and arranged her flirtations to evade him with a degree of skill so great that it was lamentable it should be thrown away on an agricultural husband, who never dreamt that the “Fidelio-III-TstnegeR,” which met his eyes in the innocent face of his “Times” referred to an appointment at a Regent Street modiste’s, or that the advertisement—“White wins—Twelve,” meant that if she wore white camellias in her hair at the opera she would give “Beauty” a meeting after it.

Lady Guenevere was very scrupulous never to violate conventionalities. And yet she was a little fast—very fast, indeed, and was a queen of one of the fastest sets; but then—O sacred shield of a wife’s virtue—she could not have borne to lose her very admirable position, her very magnificent jointure, and, above all, the superb Guenevere diamonds!

So, for the sake of the diamonds, she and Bertie had their rendezvous under the rose.

This day she went down to see a dowager Baroness aunt, out at Hampton Court—really went, she was never so imprudent as to falsify her word; and with the Dowager, who was very deaf and purblind, dined at Richmond, while the world thought her dining at Hampton Court. It was nothing to anyone, since none knew it to gossip about, that Cecil joined her there; that over the Star and Garter repast they arranged their meeting at Baden next month; that while the Baroness dozed over the grapes and peaches—she had been a beauty herself, in her own day, and still had her sympathies—they went on the river, in the little toy that he kept there for his fair friends’ use; floating slowly along in the coolness of evening, while the stars loomed out in the golden trail of the sunset, and doing a graceful scene a la Musset and Meredith, with a certain languid amusement in the assumption of those poetic guises, for they were of the world worldly; and neither believed very much in the other.

When you have just dined well, and there has been no fault in the clarets, and the scene is pretty, if it be not the Nile in the afterglow, the Arno in the moonlight, or the Loire in vintage-time, but only the Thames above Richmond, it is the easiest thing in the world to feel a touch of sentiment when you have a beautiful woman beside you who expects you to feel it. The evening was very hot and soft. There was a low south wind, the water made a pleasant murmur, wending among its sedges. She was very lovely, moreover; lying back there among her laces and Indian shawls, with the sunset in the brown depths of her eyes and on her delicate cheek. And Bertie, as he looked on his liege lady, really had a glow of the old, real, foolish, forgotten feeling stir at his heart, as he gazed on her in the half-light, and thought, almost wistfully, “If the Jews were down on me to-morrow, would she really care, I wonder?”

Really care? Bertie knew his world and its women too well to deceive himself in his heart about the answer. Nevertheless, he asked the question. “Would you care much, chere belle?”

“Care what?”

“If I came to grief—went to the bad, you know; dropped out of the world altogether?”

She raised her splendid eyes in amaze, with a delicate shudder through all her laces. “Bertie! You would break my heart! What can you dream of?”

“Oh, lots of us end so! How is a man to end?” answered Bertie philosophically, while his thoughts still ran off in a speculative skepticism. “Is there a heart to break?”

Her ladyship looked at him an laughed.

“A Werther in the Guards! I don’t think the role will suit either you or your corps, Bertie; but if you do it, pray do it artistically. I remember, last year, driving through Asnieres, when they had found a young man in the Seine; he was very handsome, beautifully dressed, and he held fast in his clinched hand a lock of gold hair. Now, there was a man who knew how to die gracefully, and make his death an idyl!”

“Died for a woman?—ah!” murmured Bertie, with the Brummel nonchalance of his order. “I don’t think I should do that, even for you—not, at least, while I had a cigar left.”

And then the boat drifted backward, while the stars grew brighter and the last reflection of the sun died out; and they planned to meet to-morrow, and talked of Baden, and sketched projects for the winter in Paris, and went in and sat by the window, taking their coffee, and feeling, in a half-vague pleasure, the heliotrope-scented air blowing softly in from the garden below, and the quiet of the starlit river in the summer evening, with a white sail gleaming here and there, or the gentle splash of an oar following on the swift trail of a steamer; the quiet, so still and so strange after the crowded rush of the London season.

“Would she really care?” thought Cecil, once more. In that moment he could have wished to think she would.

But heliotrope, stars, and a river, even though it had been tawny and classical Tiber instead of ill-used and inodorous Thames, were not things sufficiently in the way of either of them to detain them long. They had both seen the Babylonian sun set over the ruins of the Birs Nimrud, and had talked of Paris fashions while they did so; they had both leaned over the terraces of Bellosguardo, while the moon was full on Giotto’s tower, and had discussed their dresses for the Veglione masquerade. It was not their style to care for these matters; they were pretty, to be sure, but they had seen so many of them.