XI
Tiringa little of hotel life, Anne had taken an apartment on the heights close to the Church of theTrinitàdei Monti.
In her sunny room overlooking the city, in the intervals between her rambles, or the interchange of visits, she spent quiet happy hours. In Rome, as in no other Italian city, time slipped back, and the life of twenty years ago seemed often more real, more tangible, than her existence of to-day.
Over and over again, in Rome, she was startled to find herself living not in the present, but in the memory of an unforgetable past.
One morning, in walking through the Farnesina Palace, she stopped before a window to look down upon a narrow walled garden. The paths were mossy and weed-grown; the whole place pervaded by that air of neglect and decay, common to Italian gardens. But at the end of the enclosed oblong space, there was a beautiful old gate of marble. Orange trees in rows, ran the length of the right-handwall, and between the glossy leaves, the fruit shone golden. In the centre grass plot, amidst the long unkempt grass, there were rose bushes with pale pink monthly roses upon them; and overhead a roof of sky blue as the heart of a gentian.
Miss Page turned her head quickly, a half smile upon her lips, as though to speak to some one at her side.
It was twenty years since she had looked down upon that quiet garden, but the illusion of a bygone day was so strong, that she expected to meet a responsive smile.
The summer of which François Fontenelle had spoken to his friend, as he sat beneath Anne’s portrait, was the summer which followed her visit to her brother and his wife.
Anne had returned with her inner life wrecked and shattered. Her peace of mind was gone. She spent no more quiet days in the library with her books. A feverish restlessness drove her out of doors, where while daylight lasted, she worked among her plants, digging, weeding, planting with such energy that from sheer physical fatigue, she forced herself to sleep dreamlessly till morning renewed her toil. She was uninterrupted. Noone disturbed her. She had nothing else to do.
In spite of her protestations, Mrs. Burbage who had been growing steadily feebler through the winter, sent for a hospital nurse, and finally kept her bed.
“I will be looked after by the right people,” she declared with characteristic determination. “Trained nurses are the right people to tend the sick. I can afford to pay for them, and I will have them. You have had enough waiting upon invalids, my dear.”
Freed from nearly all her customary duties, therefore, Anne had the long spring days before her, and with the instinct of her healthy nature, she strove by hard physical work, to fill them, and at the same time to crush out the mental malady which tore at her heart.
“It’s a disease, but work will kill it,” she told herself.
And she set her teeth, and worked.
She worked; but she was burdened with a great fear and a great regret.
Immersed in books, as for the last five years she had become, she had not hitherto noticed the isolation, the narrowness of her life.
Not only had she failed to miss the intercourse of her fellow creatures, she had actually dreaded their approach.
Filled with a nervous mistrust of her own power to please, she had shunned humanity as represented by any living soul outside the gates of Fairholme Court.
“I know nothing about any one,” was the dreary burden of her thoughts. “I don’t understand anything about real men and women. My own life is empty, and so for me, the lives of others are empty too. I have nothing to say to them, no help to give them, I’m useless in a world of which I know nothing except at second hand. And as I grow older my heart will dry up and wither more and more, till I’m an old maid—the conventional old maid.”
She planted her sad thoughts with the beds of lilies; she dug them into the ground round the rose-bushes; and serenely, mockingly, the garden flourished and broke gradually into a flood of bloom.
It had never looked so beautiful as on the day when Mrs. Burbage’s maid came to her while she was watering the new rose hedge round the sundial, to say that visitors had called, and her mistress wished Miss Page to receive them.
The lilac bushes were cascades of amethyst bloom; the hawthorn trees were dazzling white, or rosy to their utmost branch. Anne had broken off great sprays of blossom which lay at the foot of the sundial, ready to be taken into the house.
She picked them up, and full of consternation and trembling shyness, made her way across the lawn, and entered the drawing-room by one of the long French windows.
It seemed to her that the room was full of men, and she put out her hand blindly to the tallest of them, murmuring incoherent words.
“I am René Dampierre,” he said. “I’m so sorry Mrs. Burbage is ill. She knew my mother, and me too when I was a child. I should like to have seen her.”
The words, spoken with the faintest foreign accent, were quite fluent, and the voice was beautiful, the gentlest man’s voice Anne had ever heard. She ventured to look at him, and involuntarily she smiled, her confidence restored.
He was very tall, she noticed, and big, and bronzed to the roots of his thick straw-coloured hair. His eyes were brown. Even at the moment, Anne was conscious of surprise. She had expected them to be blue. But they were eyes which drove away her shyness, and shewas able to shake hands calmly with his friends as he introduced them.
“This is François Fontenelle, a painter like myself. And this is Thouret, who writes very bad verse and worse novels, and this is Dacier who does everything—also very badly. All my friends. And you—Mademoiselle?”
“I am Anne Page,” she said, and to herherown amazement, she laughed.
They all looked so friendly, and they were not at all alarming.
“Anne Page? That is a Shakespeare name!” exclaimed the young man whom Dampierre had first introduced.
“Shakespeare?” repeated Dacier. “Ah! Si je pouvais seulement parler Anglais, mademoiselle!”
“I can speak a little French,” said Anne timidly. “But youmustn’tlaugh at my accent.”
They surrounded her then, talking a babel of mixed French and English, and Anne found herself laughing with them, as she tried to reply to their questions.
“May we see the garden?” asked René Dampierre presently. “Oh no! don’t put down the flowers! I would offer to take them, but if they are not in your way, do carry them. They are just right.”
“Oh yes! the goddess of the garden must keep her flowers,” insisted Dacier.
Anne kept them uncomprehendingly, since her compliance seemed to please her guests.
She was mystified. But they were all friendly and kind, and easy to entertain. She had spoken to few men in her life, and she did not know there were any like these. It was a new sensation to be addressed with deference, and regarded with attention.
Never before had Anne felt flattered, and the sensation was agreeable.
She took them to her rose garden, and showed them the quaint old sundial, which, at her instigation, the gardener had brought from an outhouse in which she had discovered it, and set up in a space enclosed by clipped yews.
She showed them her borders of snowy pinks, with the lavender bushes behind them, and the garden she was making, a fancy of her own, (new then,) in which only Shakespeare’s flowers should grow.
“There are a great many, you see,” she told them. “And such nice old-fashioned plants. Rue and marjoram, and lavender, and marigolds. I love marigolds, don’t you? They won’t come yet, though.”
“No. They are ‘flowers of middlesummer,’” quoted Monsieur Fontenelle. “You see I know your Shakespeare,” as Anne turned to him with a smile of pleased surprise.
“And the ‘daffodils that come before the swallow dares’ are nearly over,” said Dampierre. “But you still have some pale primroses and the violets.... Now don’t try to show off, François, becauseIwant to!... ‘Violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes or Cytherea’s breath.’”
“You are wonderful!” laughed Anne. “You are Frenchmen, but you knowThe Winter’s Tale!”
“I ought to. I have been brought up chiefly in England,” returned Dampierre. “But Fontenelle is a disgusting genius. He knows the literature of all languages by instinct. He was born knowing them. In his nurse’s arms he terrified his relations by babbling in English, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic.”
Anne laughed again. “Then he would like to see the library,” she said. “I will take you there presently. I’m glad you approve my Shakespeare garden,” she added, with a touch of the shyness she had almost forgotten.
“It’s delicious!” declared René. “That old wall as a background, and the mass ofwallflowers—gillyflowers, Shakespeare calls them, doesn’t he? And the beds of violets! The scent of it all! It smells of England. And I love England, because it’s my mother’s and Shakespeare’s country.”
“You have some of your own flowers growing here,” he added, stooping towards a bed of double narcissus, and glancing up at Anne with a smile.
“My own flowers?” she repeated, puzzled.
“Don’t you know the country name for these?” He was still smiling. “Sweet Nancies.”
“And in Shakespeare your name is ‘sweet Anne Page,’” added Fontenelle, “the prettiest English name in the world.”
A faint colour came to Anne’s face. She glanced from one to another with a look half shy, half pleased, half pitiful.
It gave place to a little movement of dignity.
“I’m glad you like my name,” she said.
In her voice there was a suggestion of fear. The fear that these strange yet pleasant young men were laughing at her. She took them across the sunny lawn, where the beech tree’s silken leaves had still the freshness of spring. A thousand birds were singing and calling. The scent of the lilac hung in theair, and the hawthorns were drenched in fragrant snow.
Before the irregular charming front of the house, the men paused, and breaking into French, poured out ecstasies of praise.
“Ravissant! Quelle belle ligne! Que c’est délicieux!”
“This is the library,” said Anne, as the men followed her through the open window into the dim beautiful room.
It was the one room in the house unspoilt by modern furniture; left just as it had been in her old friend’s day, with its high-backed chairs of gilded Spanish leather, its heavy rich curtains at the window, and the books reaching from floor to ceiling, their bindings of calf and leather forming the most harmonious of decorations. Simultaneously, the men uttered exclamations of delight.
Fontenelle rushed to one of the shelves, and became absorbed in the titles of the books which he read aloud, calling to his companions now and again, when he had discovered a treasure. René Dampierre stood in the embrasure of one of the windows, with Anne.
“Do you read these books?” he asked, smiling down at her.
“Yes,” said Anne, simply. “I read themfor nearly five years. But I haven’t read anything lately,” she added, involuntarily.
“No? Why not?”
Again the colour rushed to her cheeks, and her companion, suddenly curious, wondered what he could have said to destroy her composure.
“I don’t know,” she answered hurriedly. “I have been so busy in the garden. Shall we have tea out of doors? It’s quite warm enough.”
She left him to give the order, and when the library door closed, François abandoned the books, and crossed the room to him.
“But she’s charming!” he exclaimed, speaking in English. “Isn’t it an unusual type? That clear pale face and the soft hair, and the soft voice? I shall get her to sit for me.”
“She’s accustomed to be thought exceedingly plain,” remarked Dampierre.
Fontenelle made an impatient gesture.
“By the usual idiot perhaps. How do you know?”
“By her manner. She hasn’t any of the airs of a pretty woman. She thought we were laughing at her just now, in the garden.”
“If we made her think herself pretty,mon cher, she’d surprise us all. There are a thousand possibilities in that face.”
“Allons!I for one am quite ready,”laughed Dampierre. “I believe you’re right. She could be beautiful, though she’s not young. What do you think? Thirty-two, thirty-three?—or more?”
François shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter. She’s one of the women for whom age doesn’t count—except as an improvement.”
“An unusual case.”
“Of course. But she’s unusual. I’m going to paint her.”
“Tea’s ready,” said Anne, appearing again at the window. “It was in the drawing-room, so I just had it carried out.”
She was quite at her ease now, and tea was a delightful meal under the flickering shade of the beech tree.
The men praised her French, inquired how she had learnt it so well; laughed and chattered; and finally took their leave, with many invitations to Anne. She must come to their studio, which was really only a barn. She must come to tea at the Falcon Inn. It was quite worth seeing. Above all, they must come back to the most charming garden in the world.
“Pour revoir la déesse du jardin,” added Thouret, lifting his hat with a flourish, as she stood in the porch, watching their departure.