CHAPTER XI

PRIVATE INQUIRY

During the rest of the young men’s stay at Innsbruck the pretty American

was, as Florian remarked, “a distinct feature.” Such is the fickleness

of man, indeed, that she almost superseded poor Linnet in their minds as

an object of interest. She was attractive beyond a doubt; she was

clever; she was lively; and she was so delighted to make a real live

poet’s acquaintance, that Will hardly knew how to receive her almost

obtrusive attentions. She brought him butter in a lordly dish, as

Florian phrased it. That same evening, in the _salon_, according to

promise, she came down with “Voices from the Hills,” Will’s thin little

volume of fugitive verse, which she had had gorgeously bound in red calf

in Paris, and made that sensitive young bard blush up to his eyes with

modesty, by insisting on pointing out which pieces she liked best, in a

voice that was audible to half the guests in the establishment.

_Ossian’s Tomb_ was her favourite—she knew that one by heart; but

_Khosru Khan_ was sweet too; and _Sister Clare_ made her cry; and then

_Gwyn_!—ah, that dear _Gwyn_ was just too lovely for anything!

And yet, Will liked her. In spite of her open praise, and his blushes,

he liked her. The surest way to a poet’s heart is to speak well of his

poetry. And besides, he said to himself, Mrs Palmer had discrimination.

She noted in his verse the metrical variety, the pictorial skill, the

strong sense of colour—just the qualities of his poor muse on which he

himself most prided himself. No artist cares for praise except for those

characteristics of his art which he feels to be his strong ones. Mrs

Palmer gave Will that, and he liked the incense.

Florian had said at St Valentin that Will needed change of air, change

of scene, change of company. And at Innsbruck he got them. The pretty

American, having found her poet, didn’t mean to let him slip again too

soon from her clutches. With the pertinacity of her compatriots, she

fastened herself at once upon the two young Englishmen. Not obtrusively,

to be sure, not ungracefully, not awkwardly, not as a European woman

might have done the same thing, but with that occidental frankness and

oblivion of sex which makes up half the charm of the charming American.

The very next morning, at the early breakfast, she happened to occupy a

small table close by them. They chatted together through the meal; at

the end of it Will mentioned, in a casual sort of way that he was going

down the street to the shop where Mrs Palmer had bought the coral

necklet. The dainty young widow seized her cue. “I am going down that

way myself,” she said. “Let me come and show you. I won’t take a minute

to run up for my hat. I’m not one of those women who can never go out

for a morning stroll without spending half-an-hour before their mirrors,

tittivating.” And, in spite of Will’s assurance that he could find the

shop very well by himself, she was as good as her word, and insisted on

accompanying them.

She had been charming in evening dress; she was more charming still in

her girlish straw hat and neat tailor-made costume, as she tripped

lightly downstairs to them. Florian, by her side, while they walked

through the streets, cast sheep’s eyes askance up at her. Even Will,

more mindful of poor Linnet’s desertion, was not wholly insensible to

that taking smile, those pearly white teeth, that dainty small nose,

those rounded contours. They turned down the road in the direction of

the Maria-Theresien Strasse. Will knew of old that quaintest and most

picturesque of European High Streets, with its queer gabled roofs, its

rococo façades, its mediæval towers, its arcades and pillars. But to

Florian, it all came with the added charm of novelty. Twice or thrice on

their way, the spirit moved him to stop and perorate. Each time, the

pretty widow cut him short at once with some quick retort of truly

American practicality. At the shop, Will selected a second necklet,

exactly like the one Mrs Palmer had chosen. “I gave her nothing before I

came away,” he said, turning to Florian, and only indicating by that

very indefinite pronoun, the intended recipient of his beautiful gift.

“One couldn’t give her _money_. ’Twould have been a positive insult. But

this ought to look well on that smooth brown neck of hers.”

“For your sister, _of course_,” Mrs Palmer said, pointedly.

“No; not for my sister,” Will admitted, with a quiet smile. “For a girl

at the inn we’ve just left at St Valentin.”

Mrs Palmer said “Oh!” ’Twas an American _oh_. It deprecated the

fact—and closed the episode. Cosmopolitan though she was, it surprised

her not a little that Will should allude to such persons in a lady’s

company. But there! these poets, you know—so many things must be

condoned to them. Because they have loved much, much must be forgiven

them. They have licence to break hearts and the most brittle of the

commandments, with far less chance of blame than their even Christians.

Will’s transaction completed, Mrs Palmer proceeded to buy a second

similar set on her own account, for presentation to the second of the

giggling inarticulates. “Poor girl!” she said, good-humouredly, “she

looked so envious last night when I gave the other to Eva Powell, I

couldn’t bear to think I’d left her out in the cold. Thirty florins, I

think you said? Ah, yes; that’s twelve dollars. Not much to make a poor

little girl so happy!”

From this, and various other circumstances which occurred in the course

of their first few days at Innsbruck, it began to dawn dimly upon

Florian’s open mind that their American friend, though she knew not the

Van Rensselaers, the Vanderbilts, and the Livingstones, must have been

“comfortably left” by the late Mr Palmer. It was clear she had money for

every whim and fancy. She took frequent drives, up the Brenner or down

the Innthal, in a roomy two-horse carriage specially ordered from the

livery stables; and she always gave a seat to one at least of the

giggling inarticulates; and then, “on the girl’s account, you know,”

with good-natured zeal, asked Will and Florian to take part in the

expedition. “It’s so good for them, of course,” she said, “to see a

little, when they can, of young men’s society. They’re each of them here

with an invalid mamma—throat and lungs, poor things—you know the kind

of person; and before I came, they had nobody to talk to, not even one

another, for they were far too much afraid of a mutual snub ever to

utter a syllable. I’ve tried to bring them out a bit, and make life

worth living for them. But without a young man—at that age—no

amusement’s worth anything. _Do_ come, Mr Deverill—there’s a good soul,

just to humour them.”

And Will and Florian, it must be candidly allowed, fell in with a good

grace with her philanthropic projects. Though, to be sure, when once the

carriage got under way, they seemed much more desirous of amusing the

pretty American herself, than of seconding her schemes for drawing out

the latent conversational powers of the giggling inarticulates, who

contented themselves chiefly with leaning back in their seats, and

listening open-mouthed to Florian’s flamboyant disquisitions. That,

however, is a detail. Will attempted at first to pay his share of the

carriage; but such interference with her plans Mrs Palmer most manfully

and successfully resisted. She wanted to give the girls a little outing,

she said; Will might come or he might stop; but she wasn’t going to let

any other person pay for her well-meant attention to her poor little

protégées. To that point she stuck hard, through thick and thin. They

must come as her guests if they came as anything.

From this, and sundry other events that came under his knowledge by

occulter channels, Florian grew strengthened in his idea that the late

Mr Palmer, whoever he might have been, had at least “cut up well,” and,

what was more to the point, had cut up entirely in his widow’s favour.

Now this was business; for Florian, incurious as he was by nature where

mere gossip was concerned, liked to know what was what in the

matrimonial market. As he was wont to put it sweetly to his friends at

the Savile, he wasn’t going to throw himself away on a woman for

nothing. He had an income of his own, just sufficient to supply him with

the bare necessaries of life—such as stalls at the opera and hansoms

_ad libitum_; and, this being so, he had no intention of giving up that

singular franchise which young men call “their liberty,” except in

return for valuable consideration. But if good things were going, he

liked at least to know of them; some day, perhaps, if some lady bribed

him high enough, he might possibly consent to retire by her side into

the Philistine gloom of wedded respectability.

So he pushed his inquiries hard into the Vision’s antecedents, wholly

without effect, during the first few days of their stay at Innsbruck.

A few nights later, however, as they sat in the _salon_ after a long

day’s tramp to the summit of the Patscher Kopf, Florian found himself

cast casually into conversation with an American old maid, belonging to

the most virulent type and class of old maidhood—“of the cat-kind,

catty,” he said afterwards to Will Deverill; one of those remarkable

persons who have pervaded cosmopolitan hotels for years together, and

are on intimate terms with the domestic skeletons in every cupboard.

Miss Beard, as she was called, favoured Florian at full length with the

histories and antecedents of the giggling inarticulates, their papas and

mammas, and all their forebears; informing him with much gusto how one

of them had paid ninepence in the pound to his creditors, and another

had been cashiered from the navy for embezzlement. Then she proceeded in

the same strain to demolish the unprepossessing gentleman of

nonconformist exterior, who had been guilty, it seemed, of the social

crime of retail business. Miss Beard was inclined, indeed, to believe he

was nothing more than a retired chemist; but she wasn’t even sure—with

hushed and bated breath—that it mightn’t be as bad as grocery and

provisions. All these, and many other unimportant details, Florian’s

soul endured, possessing itself in patience for many minutes together,

in the fervent hope that at last this living encyclopædia of

genealogical knowledge would come round to the character of the Vision

of Beauty.

“And Mrs Palmer, who sits opposite me,” he adventured gently after

awhile, when Miss Beard reached a pause in her caustic comments; “she

seems a nice little thing in her way, though, of course, a mere

butterfly. She comes from New York. I suppose you know her?”

Miss Beard drew herself up with that offended dignity which only an

American woman of the “very best class” can exhibit in perfection when

you suspect her of an acquaintance with a person moving in a social

grade less exalted than the sphere she herself revolves in. “I don’t

_know_ her,” she said, markedly, “but I know, of course, who she is.

She’s the widow of Palmer—the well-known Palmer—the notorious Palmer,

who—but there!—you’ve been in the States; you must know all about

him.”

“Not Palmer the murderer!” Florian exclaimed in surprise. “She’s too

young for that, surely.”

“No; _not_ Palmer the murderer,” Miss Beard responded in a very shrill

voice with considerable acerbity. “_He_ was at least a _gentleman_. I

can’t say as much for this lady’s husband. She’s the widow of Palmer,

the dry-goodsman in Broadway.”

“Oh, indeed,” Florian cried, deeply interested in this discovery—for it

meant much money. “I remember the place well—a palatial building in the

Renaissance style at the corner of a street near the junction with Fifth

Avenue. These princes of commerce in your Western world represent in our

midst to-day the great signiors of the Adriatic who held the gorgeous

East in fee, and whose Gothic façades, rich in arch and tracery, still

line the long curve of the Grand Canal for us. They are the satraps of

finance. The world in our times is ruled once more—as in Venice of old,

in the heyday of its splendour—by the signet-ring of the merchant.

Palmer was one of these—a paladin of silken bales, a Doge Dandolo of

Manhattan, a potentate in the crowded marts of the Samarcand of the

Occident.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Miss Beard retorted in an acrid tone,

eyeing him sternly through her _pince-nez_, “but I say he was a

dry-goodsman.”

Florian descended at a bound from the open empyrean to the solid earth

of commonplace. “Well, at any rate, he was rich,” he said, letting the

paladins slide. “He must have died worth millions.”

“His estate was proved,” Miss Beard said, curtly, “at a sum in dollars

which totals out—let me see—fives into 35—ah, yes, to exactly seven

hundred and eighty-four thousand pounds sterling.”

Florian gave a little gasp. “That’ll do,” he said, with slow emphasis.

“And he left it?” he suggested, after a second’s pause, with an

interrogative raising of his broad white forehead.

“And he left it, every cent,” Miss Beard responded, “without deduction

of any sort, to that fly-away little inanity.”

Florian drew a deep breath. “Then she’s rich,” he said, musing; “rich

beyond the utmost dreams of avarice.”

“Well, of course she is,” Miss Beard answered, with a sharp little snap,

as though every one knew that. “If she wasn’t, could she go tearing

about Europe as she does, herself and her maid, buying everything she

sees, and making presents right and left—to everyone she comes across.

She’d give her own soul away if anybody asked her for it. Little

empty-headed fool! She’s not fit to be trusted with the use of money.

But, of course, one can’t _know_ her, however rich she may be. We draw

the line in the States at keeping shop. And, besides, she was never

brought up among cultivated people.”

As she spoke, Florian noted several things silently to himself. He

noted, first, that Mrs Palmer spoke the English tongue many degrees more

correctly, and more pleasantly as well, than her would-be critic. He

noted, second, that her very generosity was counted for blame to her by

this narrower nature. He noted, third, that in republican America, even

more than in monarchical and aristocratic England, Mrs Palmer’s

cleverness, her information, her reading, her culture, were as dust in

the balance in Society’s eyes, compared with the damning and indelible

fact that her late lamented husband had owned a dry-goods store. But,

being a worldly-wise man, Florian noted these things in his own heart

alone. Externally, he took no overt notice of them. On the contrary, he

continued his talk in the same bland and honey-sweet tone as ever.

“Still, she’d be a catch in her way,” he said, with a condescending

smile, “for any man who didn’t object to swallow her antecedents.”

“She would,” Miss Beard replied, with austere self-respect, “if people

care to mix in that sort of society. For myself, I’ve been used to a

different kind of life. _I_ couldn’t put up with it.”

Florian was audacious. He posed the one last question he still wished to

ask, boldly. “And there’s no awkward clause, I suppose,” he said,

without even the apology of a blush, “in her husband’s will, of that

nasty so-long-as-my-said-wife-remains-unmarried character?”

Miss Beard took up her Galignani with crushing coldness. She didn’t care

to discuss such people’s prospects from such a standpoint. Their

matrimonial affairs were beneath her notice. For fine old crusted

prejudice of a social sort, commend me, so far as my poor knowledge

goes, to the members of good New Yorker families. “To the best of my

knowledge and belief,” she murmured, acridly, without raising her eyes,

“the property’s left for her own sole use and benefit, without any

restriction. But I’m sure I don’t know. If you want to find out you’d

better ask her. I don’t burden my mind with these people’s business.”

Then Florian knew the Vision of Beauty was a catch not to be despised by

a man of culture. Such wealth as that, no gentleman could decline, in

justice to himself, if she gave him the refusal of it.