Chapter Seven.After the first shock of horror came relief, for Wilbraham was only momentarily stunned, got up, shook himself, and laughed at their anxious faces. Sylvia flew to his side, and was brushing the dust and rubble from his coat before her face had recovered its colour, or a question had been asked. At another time the others would have smiled at the helpless and incongruous action, but their smiles had been frightened out of them for a while, and Miss Sandiland was the first to find a voice.“You must be hurt—somewhere!” she exclaimed.Wilbraham laughed ruefully.“I don’t deny it,” he said, beginning to feel himself over, and wincing. “But nothing serious, nothing broken—only bruises. Let’s get out of it. Where’s the child? All right?”A crowd had quickly collected. There were exclamations, gestures, and presently a very Babel of grateful cries, which, to Wilbraham’s disgust, pursued them as he limped stiffly away.“One child more or less,” he said grimly. “Can it matter?”After they had gone a few steps he remarked: “I didn’t do much good. Who pulled it out?”Miss Sandiland had a high bird-like voice. She broke into admiration of Teresa’s courage; Sylvia, recovering her speech, admired them both; Teresa, who had not yet spoken, began to share Wilbraham’s uneasy shyness, and to hurry on; Miss Sandiland, with a proper sense of leaving the lovers together, following her closely. They did not, either of them, know where they were going, but they found themselves in the piazza of the great church, and Mrs Brodrick came to meet them from its porch.“What is the matter?” she asked, for Teresa’s face was still white.“Nothing,” said the girl briefly. “But there might have been something.”Miss Sandiland began the story, and Teresa slipped away into the darkness of the lower church. She went straight into its deepest gloom, and knelt, as the peasants kneel, on the stones, worn by the weight of countless sorrows. She had been very near death, and she knew it, but Sylvia had been nearer to what might have crushed the joy out of her life, and though she thought of the one, she thought a great deal more of the other deliverance.Mrs Brodrick was quietly waiting for her when she came into the sunlight again, and put out her hand.“My dear!” was all she said.“Don’t pity me,” said Teresa, smiling, “I had no time to be frightened. It was a brave thing for him to do, and I don’t know how he got out of it. Have you seen him?”“Yes. He has hurt his leg, and bruised himself; nothing worse, I hope. We shall get back to Rome this evening.”“And Sylvia?”“Sylvia was in a flutter, and I gave her sal volatile.”“Of course; it was worst of all for her,” said Teresa, instantly on the defensive.“It must have been,” agreed her grandmother gravely. She was glad that Teresa had not seen Sylvia’s queer little ways of showing her agitation, which she fancied Wilbraham found irritating, although she told herself constantly that grandmothers were, perhaps, the most ineffective of people to judge the sensations of a man in love. But Sylvia had talked too much, of that she was convinced. And it was already no longer like old days, when the girl was hesitating and uncertain of herself. Now it would have been difficult to stop her.Teresa owned this—she owned things occasionally to herself, though she fought valiantly with others—when she had wearily climbed the stairs to their room, and found her sister stretched on her bed. For Sylvia started up on her elbow, and poured forth a flood of small exclamations, small lamentations, small congratulations, small wonderings. What had been stirred in her? How deep were the springs? or were there really no springs, only a little sheet of thin water, giving back the blue of heaven, it is true, but soon plumbed, and altogether unsatisfying for a thirsty soul? Donna Teresa found herself putting this question, and then ready to beat herself for putting it. For was Sylvia to-day really different from yesterday, when she had so longed for the thing which had come to pass? Was Wilbraham different that he should have awakened a sudden sympathy? And there she paused, for her nature was frankly honest, and she had to own that his personality had, at least, come home to her in a different light. He had done a very brave thing, and he had done it simply. Those few moments in which, by sheer force, he had held back the falling wall, had saved the child’s life, and she liked even the physical strength which he had shown, as a strong woman is pretty sure to like strength in a man. It becomes a type to her, and she almost always idealises it.So as Sylvia talked, Teresa grew more silent.Wilbraham treated his hurts too lightly, and had two or three weeks of lameness after they reached Rome. Naturally he spent most of his time in the Porta Pinciana—that beautiful, soft, fresh, early winter-time of Rome, when day after day the sun shines gaily out, when the sky is of an ineffable colour, when beyond the broad stretch of the campagna the bordering mountains take wonderful tints of clear yet veiled blue; and across the campagna itself flocks of sheep and lambs, guarded by shepherds in goatskin leggings, wander knee-deep in aromatic pastures, pale grey thistles, fennel withered into tall and slender stalks of yellow, and, underneath, a growth of grass and red-brown herbage. Then, as the sun goes down in a daffodil sky, wherever you may be you find some new expression of loveliness: churches and towers stand out against it; the great dome of Saint Peter’s draws all eyes to its splendid curve; the Palatine ruins stand solemn and deserted; and the brick tower of Saint Andrea, where by day the pigeons crowd, holds up its flower cap of a belfry softly dark against rosy bars of cloud.Mary Maxwell and Teresa were much taken up with their drawing in those days. A vague uneasiness which possessed Teresa could best be laid to rest by the absorption of a sketch. She no longer watched Sylvia, having hastily determined that it was an idiotic idea to suppose that her help was necessary. Of course Wilbraham was in love, and, being in love, he would not be annoyed by trifling mistakes. At any rate—but this she said quite to herself—he must get used to them. Sylvia was happy, that was the great, the real thing, and in spite of such philosophy she was anxious. In an indifferent and casual manner she tried to extract a little information from her grandmother as to what was talked about, but Mrs Brodrick answered briefly.“Oh, well,” Teresa went on, “everybody says the same thing in the same circumstances.”“Everybody says the same thing, only some people say it differently.”“Some people are not half so pretty!” cried Teresa triumphantly and illogically.She went away into her own room at once lest she should weaken Sylvia’s cause by remaining, and the next moment Sylvia herself appeared. Her sister glanced quickly at her. Were disquieting confidences at hand? But no; the charming eyes were quite untroubled.“I heard you come in,” she said.“Yes,” said Teresa, sticking up a half-finished sketch for contemplation. “All the lights changed, so we had to stop. What have you been doing? Has Mr Wilbraham been here?”“No. We are to drive by-and-by, but he had letters to write this morning—he often has,” said Sylvia simply. “Ithink it a good thing that a man should have plenty to do,” she added, with the touch of decision which was now accentuating her truisms.“There’s a discovery!” Teresa cried gaily, and then was smitten with compunction. She need not have minded.“You don’t agree with me,” said Sylvia in the same tone, “because you don’t appreciate Walter. Of course, I understand him better; I understand him very well indeed. And I wish you wouldn’t call him Mr Wilbraham, Teresa. It sounds so funny with your own brother-in-law.”“My dear! He isn’t my brother-in-law yet.”“It’s just as if he were,” announced the girl calmly.“Oh,” cried Teresa rashly, “but it isn’t! You know people who are engaged don’t always marry. They find out that they have different tastes, or that they don’t care enough, or—”She stopped suddenly, wondering what force had laid bare her own fears.Sylvia smiled pityingly.“People are silly,” she said.“And,” said the marchesa, almost breathlessly—“and you are never afraid?”“Of course not. Why should I be?”“Why should you be,” repeated Teresa, kissing her after a momentary pause, “when he loves you?”“Of course he loves me. He told me so,” said Sylvia conclusively.“What has come to me that I shouldn’t be content to let well alone?” her sister asked herself. “It would be another matter if I had seen anything to make me uneasy. But I haven’t. No, I haven’t,” she repeated determinedly. Then her eager face brightened again. “Sylvia,” she said, “I’ll try to call him Walter. If I choke, you won’t mind?”“Why should you choke?” said Sylvia, opening her eyes in surprise.When she and Wilbraham were driving along the Via Appia that afternoon, for Wilbraham as yet could not walk without difficulty, she told him, with satisfaction and a good deal of emphasis, of Teresa’s promise.“Yes,” he returned indifferently. But he began to fidget. He often fidgeted over Sylvia’s careful explanations.“Because, you see, it really seemed so strange that you two should not call each other by your Christian names! If you’re not related, you’re going to be related, quite nearly related, and then I don’t see how you could help it. Do you?”“No.”“No. Exactly. That’s what I said to Teresa,”—Sylvia’s voice was very low and confidential—“I said I thought it sounded so funny for her to call her brother-in-law Mr Wilbraham, and she said you weren’t her brother-in-law yet.”“And what,” he asked, forcing himself into interest, “did you answer to that obvious fact?”“Of course I said it was all the same, and she said that sometimes people who were engaged did not marry, and I said that people were very silly. So they are, aren’t they?”There was a twist, a muttered exclamation by her side, and Sylvia turned anxiously.“Does your leg hurt you so much to-day?”“Yes—no!” The words sounded like a groan, but Wilbraham recovered himself at once. “You’re too good to me, Sylvia, and I’m—a brute.”She laughed happily.“I wonder why you all like to call yourselves names? You and granny and Teresa so often do it, and I never do. But I’m so glad you’re not worse. I don’t think you could hide it away from me if you were. Well, and don’t you want to hear a little more what Teresa said?”“I don’t think I do just now,” he said desperately. “I want you to look at the mountains. Stand up, and you’ll see them better.”She always did what he suggested.“How pretty!” she commented.“And the tombs,” he hurried on. “I expect you can see a good many behind you.”“It was so funny of them to like to have their tombs out here, and spread all about. People are generally buried together, as they should be,” said Sylvia disapprovingly, as she dropped again by Wilbraham’s side. “Don’t let us talk about the tombs, dear. We were having such a comfortable chat, and I do so like it! Now, are you sure your leg is quite comfortable?”“Quite,” he returned, trying hard to keep impatience out of his voice.“Quite.”“That’s right.” She nestled closer to him, and he hated himself for the small irritation with which he always received her intonation of the two words, the first pitched on a higher key than the second. “I like coming out here, where no one can interrupt us.”“It’s a wonderful place.”“Because we’re here together, isn’t it?”“Dear, you mustn’t expect me to say too many pretty things.”“Of course not,” said the girl simply.“You’ve said so many, and of course I remember them all. I’m not so silly as to expect you to go on. Whatever you say and do I like.”“Don’t,” he said with unusual vehemence, “don’t set me up on a pedestal, whatever you do! I’m clay. Poor clay, too.”“Clay?” She looked bewildered.A rush of irritable shame was upon him, a nightmare weight as if all that he did at this time was false. It had touched him before, but he had succeeded in arguing with it, for to a man of his self-contained character it was easy to argue that, after so many precautions and limitations, it was impossible he should have given himself away. It was easy to argue, and he was able to bring incontrovertible reasons to support his case. The reasons had not changed. Sylvia was the same: as sweet-tempered, as amenable, as pretty as ever. The same, the same, the same—why, there lay the sting! If in three or four weeks this sameness, this insipidity, was making him sick to death, why, what—oh, God, what would a whole married lifetime do? She had not a thought which branched in a wrong direction, but he said to himself bitterly that he did not believe she owned anything which could be dignified with the name of thought; she only made scrappy little applications of other people’s ideas when they reached her in their simplest forms. His intellect was judging, despising her, scourging him with the belief that he had chosen a fool for his wife, mocking his vanity, his hopes, dropping him into depths of despair. Time, which brings healings for most sorrows, looked his worst enemy. Time—Eternity—and Sylvia!
After the first shock of horror came relief, for Wilbraham was only momentarily stunned, got up, shook himself, and laughed at their anxious faces. Sylvia flew to his side, and was brushing the dust and rubble from his coat before her face had recovered its colour, or a question had been asked. At another time the others would have smiled at the helpless and incongruous action, but their smiles had been frightened out of them for a while, and Miss Sandiland was the first to find a voice.
“You must be hurt—somewhere!” she exclaimed.
Wilbraham laughed ruefully.
“I don’t deny it,” he said, beginning to feel himself over, and wincing. “But nothing serious, nothing broken—only bruises. Let’s get out of it. Where’s the child? All right?”
A crowd had quickly collected. There were exclamations, gestures, and presently a very Babel of grateful cries, which, to Wilbraham’s disgust, pursued them as he limped stiffly away.
“One child more or less,” he said grimly. “Can it matter?”
After they had gone a few steps he remarked: “I didn’t do much good. Who pulled it out?”
Miss Sandiland had a high bird-like voice. She broke into admiration of Teresa’s courage; Sylvia, recovering her speech, admired them both; Teresa, who had not yet spoken, began to share Wilbraham’s uneasy shyness, and to hurry on; Miss Sandiland, with a proper sense of leaving the lovers together, following her closely. They did not, either of them, know where they were going, but they found themselves in the piazza of the great church, and Mrs Brodrick came to meet them from its porch.
“What is the matter?” she asked, for Teresa’s face was still white.
“Nothing,” said the girl briefly. “But there might have been something.”
Miss Sandiland began the story, and Teresa slipped away into the darkness of the lower church. She went straight into its deepest gloom, and knelt, as the peasants kneel, on the stones, worn by the weight of countless sorrows. She had been very near death, and she knew it, but Sylvia had been nearer to what might have crushed the joy out of her life, and though she thought of the one, she thought a great deal more of the other deliverance.
Mrs Brodrick was quietly waiting for her when she came into the sunlight again, and put out her hand.
“My dear!” was all she said.
“Don’t pity me,” said Teresa, smiling, “I had no time to be frightened. It was a brave thing for him to do, and I don’t know how he got out of it. Have you seen him?”
“Yes. He has hurt his leg, and bruised himself; nothing worse, I hope. We shall get back to Rome this evening.”
“And Sylvia?”
“Sylvia was in a flutter, and I gave her sal volatile.”
“Of course; it was worst of all for her,” said Teresa, instantly on the defensive.
“It must have been,” agreed her grandmother gravely. She was glad that Teresa had not seen Sylvia’s queer little ways of showing her agitation, which she fancied Wilbraham found irritating, although she told herself constantly that grandmothers were, perhaps, the most ineffective of people to judge the sensations of a man in love. But Sylvia had talked too much, of that she was convinced. And it was already no longer like old days, when the girl was hesitating and uncertain of herself. Now it would have been difficult to stop her.
Teresa owned this—she owned things occasionally to herself, though she fought valiantly with others—when she had wearily climbed the stairs to their room, and found her sister stretched on her bed. For Sylvia started up on her elbow, and poured forth a flood of small exclamations, small lamentations, small congratulations, small wonderings. What had been stirred in her? How deep were the springs? or were there really no springs, only a little sheet of thin water, giving back the blue of heaven, it is true, but soon plumbed, and altogether unsatisfying for a thirsty soul? Donna Teresa found herself putting this question, and then ready to beat herself for putting it. For was Sylvia to-day really different from yesterday, when she had so longed for the thing which had come to pass? Was Wilbraham different that he should have awakened a sudden sympathy? And there she paused, for her nature was frankly honest, and she had to own that his personality had, at least, come home to her in a different light. He had done a very brave thing, and he had done it simply. Those few moments in which, by sheer force, he had held back the falling wall, had saved the child’s life, and she liked even the physical strength which he had shown, as a strong woman is pretty sure to like strength in a man. It becomes a type to her, and she almost always idealises it.
So as Sylvia talked, Teresa grew more silent.
Wilbraham treated his hurts too lightly, and had two or three weeks of lameness after they reached Rome. Naturally he spent most of his time in the Porta Pinciana—that beautiful, soft, fresh, early winter-time of Rome, when day after day the sun shines gaily out, when the sky is of an ineffable colour, when beyond the broad stretch of the campagna the bordering mountains take wonderful tints of clear yet veiled blue; and across the campagna itself flocks of sheep and lambs, guarded by shepherds in goatskin leggings, wander knee-deep in aromatic pastures, pale grey thistles, fennel withered into tall and slender stalks of yellow, and, underneath, a growth of grass and red-brown herbage. Then, as the sun goes down in a daffodil sky, wherever you may be you find some new expression of loveliness: churches and towers stand out against it; the great dome of Saint Peter’s draws all eyes to its splendid curve; the Palatine ruins stand solemn and deserted; and the brick tower of Saint Andrea, where by day the pigeons crowd, holds up its flower cap of a belfry softly dark against rosy bars of cloud.
Mary Maxwell and Teresa were much taken up with their drawing in those days. A vague uneasiness which possessed Teresa could best be laid to rest by the absorption of a sketch. She no longer watched Sylvia, having hastily determined that it was an idiotic idea to suppose that her help was necessary. Of course Wilbraham was in love, and, being in love, he would not be annoyed by trifling mistakes. At any rate—but this she said quite to herself—he must get used to them. Sylvia was happy, that was the great, the real thing, and in spite of such philosophy she was anxious. In an indifferent and casual manner she tried to extract a little information from her grandmother as to what was talked about, but Mrs Brodrick answered briefly.
“Oh, well,” Teresa went on, “everybody says the same thing in the same circumstances.”
“Everybody says the same thing, only some people say it differently.”
“Some people are not half so pretty!” cried Teresa triumphantly and illogically.
She went away into her own room at once lest she should weaken Sylvia’s cause by remaining, and the next moment Sylvia herself appeared. Her sister glanced quickly at her. Were disquieting confidences at hand? But no; the charming eyes were quite untroubled.
“I heard you come in,” she said.
“Yes,” said Teresa, sticking up a half-finished sketch for contemplation. “All the lights changed, so we had to stop. What have you been doing? Has Mr Wilbraham been here?”
“No. We are to drive by-and-by, but he had letters to write this morning—he often has,” said Sylvia simply. “Ithink it a good thing that a man should have plenty to do,” she added, with the touch of decision which was now accentuating her truisms.
“There’s a discovery!” Teresa cried gaily, and then was smitten with compunction. She need not have minded.
“You don’t agree with me,” said Sylvia in the same tone, “because you don’t appreciate Walter. Of course, I understand him better; I understand him very well indeed. And I wish you wouldn’t call him Mr Wilbraham, Teresa. It sounds so funny with your own brother-in-law.”
“My dear! He isn’t my brother-in-law yet.”
“It’s just as if he were,” announced the girl calmly.
“Oh,” cried Teresa rashly, “but it isn’t! You know people who are engaged don’t always marry. They find out that they have different tastes, or that they don’t care enough, or—”
She stopped suddenly, wondering what force had laid bare her own fears.
Sylvia smiled pityingly.
“People are silly,” she said.
“And,” said the marchesa, almost breathlessly—“and you are never afraid?”
“Of course not. Why should I be?”
“Why should you be,” repeated Teresa, kissing her after a momentary pause, “when he loves you?”
“Of course he loves me. He told me so,” said Sylvia conclusively.
“What has come to me that I shouldn’t be content to let well alone?” her sister asked herself. “It would be another matter if I had seen anything to make me uneasy. But I haven’t. No, I haven’t,” she repeated determinedly. Then her eager face brightened again. “Sylvia,” she said, “I’ll try to call him Walter. If I choke, you won’t mind?”
“Why should you choke?” said Sylvia, opening her eyes in surprise.
When she and Wilbraham were driving along the Via Appia that afternoon, for Wilbraham as yet could not walk without difficulty, she told him, with satisfaction and a good deal of emphasis, of Teresa’s promise.
“Yes,” he returned indifferently. But he began to fidget. He often fidgeted over Sylvia’s careful explanations.
“Because, you see, it really seemed so strange that you two should not call each other by your Christian names! If you’re not related, you’re going to be related, quite nearly related, and then I don’t see how you could help it. Do you?”
“No.”
“No. Exactly. That’s what I said to Teresa,”—Sylvia’s voice was very low and confidential—“I said I thought it sounded so funny for her to call her brother-in-law Mr Wilbraham, and she said you weren’t her brother-in-law yet.”
“And what,” he asked, forcing himself into interest, “did you answer to that obvious fact?”
“Of course I said it was all the same, and she said that sometimes people who were engaged did not marry, and I said that people were very silly. So they are, aren’t they?”
There was a twist, a muttered exclamation by her side, and Sylvia turned anxiously.
“Does your leg hurt you so much to-day?”
“Yes—no!” The words sounded like a groan, but Wilbraham recovered himself at once. “You’re too good to me, Sylvia, and I’m—a brute.”
She laughed happily.
“I wonder why you all like to call yourselves names? You and granny and Teresa so often do it, and I never do. But I’m so glad you’re not worse. I don’t think you could hide it away from me if you were. Well, and don’t you want to hear a little more what Teresa said?”
“I don’t think I do just now,” he said desperately. “I want you to look at the mountains. Stand up, and you’ll see them better.”
She always did what he suggested.
“How pretty!” she commented.
“And the tombs,” he hurried on. “I expect you can see a good many behind you.”
“It was so funny of them to like to have their tombs out here, and spread all about. People are generally buried together, as they should be,” said Sylvia disapprovingly, as she dropped again by Wilbraham’s side. “Don’t let us talk about the tombs, dear. We were having such a comfortable chat, and I do so like it! Now, are you sure your leg is quite comfortable?”
“Quite,” he returned, trying hard to keep impatience out of his voice.
“Quite.”
“That’s right.” She nestled closer to him, and he hated himself for the small irritation with which he always received her intonation of the two words, the first pitched on a higher key than the second. “I like coming out here, where no one can interrupt us.”
“It’s a wonderful place.”
“Because we’re here together, isn’t it?”
“Dear, you mustn’t expect me to say too many pretty things.”
“Of course not,” said the girl simply.
“You’ve said so many, and of course I remember them all. I’m not so silly as to expect you to go on. Whatever you say and do I like.”
“Don’t,” he said with unusual vehemence, “don’t set me up on a pedestal, whatever you do! I’m clay. Poor clay, too.”
“Clay?” She looked bewildered.
A rush of irritable shame was upon him, a nightmare weight as if all that he did at this time was false. It had touched him before, but he had succeeded in arguing with it, for to a man of his self-contained character it was easy to argue that, after so many precautions and limitations, it was impossible he should have given himself away. It was easy to argue, and he was able to bring incontrovertible reasons to support his case. The reasons had not changed. Sylvia was the same: as sweet-tempered, as amenable, as pretty as ever. The same, the same, the same—why, there lay the sting! If in three or four weeks this sameness, this insipidity, was making him sick to death, why, what—oh, God, what would a whole married lifetime do? She had not a thought which branched in a wrong direction, but he said to himself bitterly that he did not believe she owned anything which could be dignified with the name of thought; she only made scrappy little applications of other people’s ideas when they reached her in their simplest forms. His intellect was judging, despising her, scourging him with the belief that he had chosen a fool for his wife, mocking his vanity, his hopes, dropping him into depths of despair. Time, which brings healings for most sorrows, looked his worst enemy. Time—Eternity—and Sylvia!
Chapter Eight.Teresa’s fortune made less difference in her life than she had expected. It gave her pleasure to be able to do more than plan for others, but she was uncertain whether her fresh powers added to their happiness. There was Sylvia; Sylvia was provided for otherwise, and Wilbraham’s worst enemy would not have accused him of sordid motives. Perhaps he was not uninfluenced by social advantages. Perhaps it had been more easy for him to fall—coolly and decorously to fall—in love with a girl who was dressed with care, and no longer tramped along wet pavements, than with one obliged to study petty and occasionally disfiguring economies. But there was another side to this “perhaps,” a side which Donna Teresa was trying not to see, and, at times, successfully succeeded in suppressing. Had he ever been really in love?But she was sure he never could be what she called really in love.Next to Sylvia came her grandmother. Her grandmother was old. Age wants to have the rugged bits of life’s road made smooth for steps no longer buoyant and unfaltering. Teresa thought of a hundred ways for doing this, yet, after all, they came to very little. For as Mrs Brodrick had foreseen from the first, we can’t wrench off the habits of a lifetime without hurt.“My dear,” she said with a laugh at herself, “I’ve always burnt one candle instead of two. When you light three my room looks a great deal nicer, but I’m uneasy. I blow one out as soon as ever I get the chance.”“I shall put in electric light,” Teresa declared. “You are a wicked woman.”“I’m a frugal one if you please, and it’s disturbing at my time of life to find one’s virtues turned into vices. I can’t afford it. I haven’t time to get a new set.”Under the jest there lay earnest, as Teresa’s quick sympathy instantly discovered.“Granny,” she said wistfully, perching herself on the arm of her grandmother’s chair, “is there really nothing I can do? You’re sure it isn’t a horrid mean little feeling of pride?”“I am sure of nothing,” said Mrs Brodrick, smiling, “except that I am lazy.”Baffled in this direction, Teresa’s mind rushed off to farther points,—doubling, trebling her subscriptions, and searching for objects which were not long in presenting themselves, all with outstretched hands. Her money flew, yet left her unsatisfied. At every turn problems met her, and when she pushed them impatiently on one side, they still clamoured in her ears. She wanted to know more of the real question of the people, and could not reach it. She talked to Nina.“Eh-h-h-h-h! Misery enough, eccellenza!”“That I know. But why?”“Why? Who knows?” Nina spreads her hands. “There is no work, or if there is work there is no money to buy it with. But whether there is no work or no bread, there is always the tax, tax, tax.”“Is it that the country is so poor?”“There are many who grow rich on its poverty, eccellenza,” Nina replied significantly.“What do the people think would make things better?”“Eh-h-h-h! Who knows? There is wild talk.”Teresa was frowning.“Heaven knows if I were one of them I should talk wildly myself!”She spoke to Wilbraham, and he answered her gravely and at some length, for in a theoretical fashion the subject interested him.“What can you do when there is a mass of bribery on the upper level, and an undisciplined people below? Unhappily the nation is a prey to the miserable system of bargaining, or, as it would be called, ofcombinazione. Everything, from the prayers of the Church downwards, is to be had for a consideration, and without it too often Justice halts, and Religion makes no sign. Read their own pictures of their own deputies. Until you cure that sore, it seems to me that help is useless.”“Then you think that bribery and not taxation is the cause of their misery?”“No doubt the nation is over-taxed, and in consequence its energies are largely spent upon efforts to evade taxation. In this, as may be conceived, the rich are much more successful than the poor, who have fewer means of escape, and are forced from wretchedness to wretchedness, and to yet lower depths again. The richer man lays out something judiciously, and his rating sinks accordingly. The poor man hasn’t got the money to lay out, and he is crushed.”“Ah, poor souls!” Teresa cried impulsively.“But,” asked her grandmother, “why don’t they use their vote to get reform?”“I can’t conceive,” said Wilbraham. “In spite of never-ceasing murmurs against the government of the day, they refuse to recognise that to a large extent they hold the remedy in their own hands. An incredible proportion don’t go to the polls at all, and it is not only the large numbers who obey the Vatican instructions to abstain, but hundreds stay away, I can only suppose, from indifference or hopelessness. Sometimes it seems that they are like children, who can’t look beyond the hour. They have a proverb, ‘An egg to-day is better than a hen to-morrow.’ Contrast this with our ‘bird in the hand,’ which sounds like it and yet has a very different meaning.”“And still they have such fine qualities!” said Mrs Brodrick.“Gratitude, for one,” added Teresa.“It is a joy to help them.”“And that leads to pauperising,” Wilbraham insisted. “Even the best of you do a lot of harm. There’s that young priest out in the San Lorenzo quarter. His work in one sense is magnificent. I admire his self-devotion tremendously, but I also think he has got hold of the wrong end of the stick, and is regenerating a few at the cost of encouraging a seething hot-bed of beggars.”“It’s easy to criticise,” Teresa said. “That I own. As easy as to see other people’s faults. We’ve plenty of our own; only at this moment we were discussing why Italy is not prosperous in spite of an excellent king and queen.”“And your cure would be to let them starve!” cried Teresa unjustly. “Do you ever think of the women and children?”“Yes; I think of them a good deal,” he returned, looking quietly at her.“Yet can suggest nothing?”“Except as a spectator. Is that of any practical use?”She turned impatiently away, but the next moment was back and holding out her hand.“I’m afraid I was very rude,” she said, her grey eyes looking frankly into his. “I’m all in a puzzle myself, and expect other people to pull me out of it—in the wayIthink best, of course,” she added with a laugh.As his hand closed round hers, Wilbraham was conscious of a strange unsteadiness in his grasp. He turned pale, hardly knowing what to answer.“I should like to—to help you,” was what he lamely said.“Who can?” said Teresa, shaking her head. It’s my snare that I will never believe things mayn’t be altered—improved—or that I shouldn’t have a finger in the mending. Sylvia will tell you that, and here she comes to stop us from quarrelling any further.“Quarrelling?” cried Sylvia anxiously.“Well,” returned her sister, “at any rate, you arrived in the middle of an apology, and it was mine.”“Never mind, then,” said the girl, nodding her head. “I know Walter won’t be angry. Not really angry, you know.”“Don’t be too sure,” mocked Teresa, going away. At the door she flung a shaft at Wilbraham. “Don’t you think before worse comes to worse we might apply to Cesare?”She closed the door and stood thinking. The word was only a half jest, for she had more than once breathed a wish to enlist a socialist on her side; to hear at least what his party had to suggest for the mending of matters which seemed beyond the reach of others. If she could see—if she could soften Cesare!—and being a woman and young, she never doubted that softening would follow the seeing—if, perhaps, she might indirectly help him, so lifting away the unpleasant remembrance of having once made him suffer unjustly! Half reluctantly she called Nina.“Where shall I find Cesare—Cesare Bandinelli, you know?”“Where?” echoed Nina. “Chi lo sa! Wherever there is mischief.”“Is he at the same place?”“No, eccellenza.”“I want to see him.”“Such as he are better left undisturbed.”The little Viterbo woman knew perfectly where he had gone, but she would have fenced for an hour and not let it out. And there was a touch of disquiet in her manner.“Then I must ask Peppina?”“Peppina may know. Yes, eccellenza, that is true,” returned Nina. She reflected that Peppina would probably also keep her knowledge to herself. “It is certain she may know.”Teresa made no further attempt. She went down the stairs and out into the sun. Her heart grew gay as she felt the warm blessed glow and saw the clear bright colours of the South. She was going to the Maxwells’ hotel, but made a round on purpose to breathe the light air, and to have a look at a vegetable shop which she wanted to paint, where lettuces, tomatoes, green peas, carrots, rings of endive, orange flesh of gourds, glowed out of a cavernous darkness. Then she dawdled round and up the Spanish steps, greeted by smiles from the models and importunities from creatures just out of babyhood—all faded olive greens and blues, rags, and enchanting smiles, with a violet or two twisted shamelessly up for sale—until she had passed her own street again, and reached the Maxwells’ hotel.“Is Peppina in?” she asked, after paying a decent tribute of attention to Mary Maxwell’s latest grievances.“Not she! She always has something to buy or to ask about. It seems to me that is all I pay her for. Why do you ask?”“I want to hear of her Cesare.”“Well, she never begrudges talk, I’ll say that for her,” said Mrs Maxwell, with a lazy laugh. “I’m not so sure that she tells you very much, when all’s said and done.”“If she’s loyal, I like her the better.”“Hum! She’s in love. Whether loyalty comes in. However, you’d better tell me what you’d like to know.”And she listened in silence while Donna Teresa hastily touched on her perplexities.“You see, Mary,” she ended—“you see you must allow two points. Help is wanted, and it ought to be wise help. What is wise help?”“You poor thing! If you go about asking that question of all your friends, you will soon have picked up a basketful of ill-assorted scraps. I can’t imagine any two of them agreeing.”Mrs Maxwell’s shrewd common-sense represented a bucket of water dashed on Teresa’s flame. But she would not give in.“Scraps are better than nothing,” she retorted. “And Cesare is certainly no friend.”“No-o,” said Mrs Maxwell, drawling the word, and throwing a log on the fire. Then she sat up and said with decision, “If I were you, I would have nothing to do with Cesare.”“Why, he’s my chief hope,” laughed Teresa. “So please, Mary, make out from Peppina where he is to be found, or, better still, get her to persuade him to come to speak to me. He must have forgiven me by this time.”“I wouldn’t trust him,” replied Mrs Maxwell, shaking her small head. “Remember, he’s a Sicilian.”“And what has that to do with it? What do you expect him to do to me? Oh, Mary, really this is too absurd!”“Very well. Only don’t say you weren’t warned,” returned the other huffily. “What is it that I am to ask? Oh, the man’s address. As if he had one!”But she made no more remonstrances, and indeed exerted herself so far as to question Peppina that evening. Peppina answered volubly, and flung in much extraneous matter. There was no better workman, no one so clever, so handsome, so ill-used in all Rome. It was because he did not bribe the police that they were hard on him. Others did what they liked, and made it square; but Cesare was too honourable for such ways, and suffered in consequence, poor fellow! She grew guarded the instant Teresa’s desire was touched upon. If it had been the signora, now—Cesare had once seen her, and had ever since called her Peppina’s beautiful signora. Mrs Maxwell believed this to be a lie; yet was pleased by it.“You had better persuade him,” she said.“Sissignora, but why? Is there money to be had?”“I daresay. Yes, I am sure there is. The marchesa is likely to pay well for whatever she asks him to undertake.”“Sissignora, I will do all that is possible. I will try to see him some day when you do not want me.”And she was in earnest. She always wanted Cesare to make money, and she thought if he could but have something to spare for the lottery, he might draw such a fortune as had fallen to a crier of theTribunaonly a few months earlier. With this idea in her head she resolved to use all her powers of persuasion, and believed in success, because it was not Donna Teresa whom he hated so much as Wilbraham.But Wilbraham, meanwhile, had heard of the scheme.Teresa, who at this time tried to be very cordial with him, spoke that evening of her visit to the Maxwells. A wind was blowing with unusual strength for Rome, banging shutters and driving rainy gusts against the glass. Sylvia was nervously afraid of a thunderstorm, and asked many times whether Wilbraham heard thunder, so many times that Teresa brought in Cesare as a diversion, making a jest of her intended efforts to tame him. Wilbraham did not say much in reply—he could hold his tongue when he liked—but he listened intently, and the next morning, while the rain was still falling heavily, and tumbling in sheets from broad eaves on the passers-by, he in his turn made his way to the Maxwells.“She must not be allowed to employ that man,” he ended emphatically, after an explanation.Colonel Maxwell pulled his moustache.“Must not?” He laughed.“Must not,” Wilbraham insisted.“I suppose it’s hard on the poor beggar if nobody is to give him a leg up.”“That’s not Teresa’s affair,” said his wife severely. “I quite agree—fully—with Mr Wilbraham. Teresa is so impulsive that she has to be protected against herself. Of course she ought not to be hand and glove with socialists and murderers.”“That’s it,” said Wilbraham, delighted. “And you think you can stop it?”“Think? I am sure. Five lire will stop anything with Peppina. But it really is folly of Teresa.”“Perhaps. But a generous folly.”Wilbraham spoke hastily. MrsMaxwell leaned back in her chair, and tapped the table with her fingers.“Well, it has its inconveniences,” she remarked drily. “Sylvia is not like that. Sylvia would never rush into extravagances without first consulting some one.”He stood up, tall and stiff.“They are different,” he said guardedly.“Oh, yes—they are different.”Mary Maxwell, who loved playing with fire so long as she did not burn her own fingers, laughed as she spoke, and afterwards enlarged on the subject to her husband.“I,” she said, “give him a month—one month. Every one has acted idiotically in supposing that poor little Sylvia could hold an affection, and now—see!”“No one asked him to fall in love. You make him out a wretched cur,” returned Colonel Maxwell, from behind the sheets of theTimes.“If Teresa did not ask him, she managed that it should be easy; always dressing up that poor little goose in borrowed plumes. Heavens! Imagine being tied for life to a bundle of platitudes!Youcan’t, you know; but then you ought not to have left me to say it,” she said, perching herself on the arm of his chair.“Go along! I’m reading Christie’s sale.”“You needn’t supposeyou’reever going to have a Christie sale. Well, if you’re so unsociable, I shall go and speak at once to Peppina. Do you hear?”A grunt replied. In fact he did not hear, or might have offered sound advice. As it was, Mrs Maxwell was both anxious to impress the girl, and to have it over quickly, so that she did not linger at preliminaries. Peppina answered her call with yards of frilling in her hands.“About Cesare,” Mrs Maxwell began.“Have you seen him yet?”“Signora! By your favour! And with all this to be done before night!”She held up her frills.“Then you need not go.”“Need not go? Per Bacco, but what has changed, signora?”“The marchesa will not require Cesare, that is all,” said Mrs Maxwell carelessly.Peppina was looking hard at her, and there was a queer glitter in her eyes. She had been dreaming through the night of the lottery and possible riches, and she immediately connected Wilbraham’s visit with her disappointment. There was, however, no use in talking.“I am sorry, signora,” she said, drawing a deep angry breath. “It would have been good for the poor fellow.”“He will find something better to do.”“In Rome!” The girl flung out her hands with a gesture of hopelessness which made Mrs Maxwell uncomfortable.“Really, Peppina,” she said pettishly, “as you have not told him, I can’t see that there is much harm done. If I give you five lire for him, he ought to be delighted.”“The signora is always so generous!” said Peppina. Her fingers closed round the note, but her eyes had not lost their dangerous gleam, and her face was pale. Mrs Maxwell, quite satisfied with herself, went away, wondering, it must be confessed, how Teresa would bear this interruption of her plans for the good of mankind. But she thought if they all opposed her wish to enlist Cesare, that she would yield, especially because, for Sylvia’s sake, she avoided anything which Wilbraham appeared particularly to dislike.Peppina went that evening to the house of a sister-in-law near the Piazza Navona, and sent a child to seek for Cesare. When he came, she made a sign that she wished to speak to him alone, and they went out into the piazza. The south wind fluttered warmly, and the sky was thick with stars. She told her story quickly, holding back Donna Teresa’s name, because she had never been sure that he would have worked for her. As it was, he only heard that a chance had been snatched from him.“It was the Englishman, I know it!” cried Peppina. “You were quite right. He hates you.”“I will be even with him one day,” said Cesare in a low fierce voice.“He came to the house in all that rain; they talked—talked—I heard them. And as soon as he had gone, in comes the signora to me. She thought herself so clever, because she did not say his name. As if I were a fool!”Peppina’s voice was passionately contemptuous. They had turned out of the piazza and were passing along the narrow street at the end of which is Pasquino’s mutilated figure.“I will be even with him,” repeated Cesare.“There was money in it, English money, too, which is better. And now Angelo suffers as well.”“Have I not said that I will be even with him? Do not throw words about,” he exclaimed, turning sharply on her. “My blood is hot enough without your putting fire to it.”“Eh—and those are my thanks!” cried the girl, flinging from him.He made no answer, and they walked sullenly abreast of each other till they had passed the tragic block of the Cancellaria where Rossi was killed. Then Peppina drew nearer, glancing from time to time at her lover.“What shall you do?” she said at last in a low voice.He did not answer her directly.“You can find out where he goes, what he does?” he said at last.“From one or the other—yes.”“He leaves Rome perhaps for Naples?”“Perhaps. I do not know. But not yet.”“I can wait,” he said significantly. They relapsed into silence again, walking in the shadows. It was Peppina who at last spoke again. Cesare’s life was so solitary that he felt little need of speech. All the money he could earn was spent on Angelo, and in providing himself with the barest necessaries of life. He was never seen in a wine-shop.“I will go to that Nina of those people in the Porta Pinciana,” said the girl. “The Englishman marries one of them, and she will chatter like a magpie if I let her. It will please you if I find out, eh, Cesare mio?”She touched his arm softly with her finger as she spoke, and turned up her face to his. He stooped and kissed her.“I have told you,” he said briefly. But she missed a passionate ring in his voice for which she hungered.“I believe you are thinking only of the Englishman,” she said with reproach.“That is true,” he allowed simply. “He fills my being. There seems no room for anything else, not even for you. You must wait, Peppina.”If it had been a woman of whom he spoke, her wild blood would have carried her away. But she understood and could sympathise when he only meant revenge. It seemed quite natural to her.“I will wait,” she said. “Yes.”
Teresa’s fortune made less difference in her life than she had expected. It gave her pleasure to be able to do more than plan for others, but she was uncertain whether her fresh powers added to their happiness. There was Sylvia; Sylvia was provided for otherwise, and Wilbraham’s worst enemy would not have accused him of sordid motives. Perhaps he was not uninfluenced by social advantages. Perhaps it had been more easy for him to fall—coolly and decorously to fall—in love with a girl who was dressed with care, and no longer tramped along wet pavements, than with one obliged to study petty and occasionally disfiguring economies. But there was another side to this “perhaps,” a side which Donna Teresa was trying not to see, and, at times, successfully succeeded in suppressing. Had he ever been really in love?
But she was sure he never could be what she called really in love.
Next to Sylvia came her grandmother. Her grandmother was old. Age wants to have the rugged bits of life’s road made smooth for steps no longer buoyant and unfaltering. Teresa thought of a hundred ways for doing this, yet, after all, they came to very little. For as Mrs Brodrick had foreseen from the first, we can’t wrench off the habits of a lifetime without hurt.
“My dear,” she said with a laugh at herself, “I’ve always burnt one candle instead of two. When you light three my room looks a great deal nicer, but I’m uneasy. I blow one out as soon as ever I get the chance.”
“I shall put in electric light,” Teresa declared. “You are a wicked woman.”
“I’m a frugal one if you please, and it’s disturbing at my time of life to find one’s virtues turned into vices. I can’t afford it. I haven’t time to get a new set.”
Under the jest there lay earnest, as Teresa’s quick sympathy instantly discovered.
“Granny,” she said wistfully, perching herself on the arm of her grandmother’s chair, “is there really nothing I can do? You’re sure it isn’t a horrid mean little feeling of pride?”
“I am sure of nothing,” said Mrs Brodrick, smiling, “except that I am lazy.”
Baffled in this direction, Teresa’s mind rushed off to farther points,—doubling, trebling her subscriptions, and searching for objects which were not long in presenting themselves, all with outstretched hands. Her money flew, yet left her unsatisfied. At every turn problems met her, and when she pushed them impatiently on one side, they still clamoured in her ears. She wanted to know more of the real question of the people, and could not reach it. She talked to Nina.
“Eh-h-h-h-h! Misery enough, eccellenza!”
“That I know. But why?”
“Why? Who knows?” Nina spreads her hands. “There is no work, or if there is work there is no money to buy it with. But whether there is no work or no bread, there is always the tax, tax, tax.”
“Is it that the country is so poor?”
“There are many who grow rich on its poverty, eccellenza,” Nina replied significantly.
“What do the people think would make things better?”
“Eh-h-h-h! Who knows? There is wild talk.”
Teresa was frowning.
“Heaven knows if I were one of them I should talk wildly myself!”
She spoke to Wilbraham, and he answered her gravely and at some length, for in a theoretical fashion the subject interested him.
“What can you do when there is a mass of bribery on the upper level, and an undisciplined people below? Unhappily the nation is a prey to the miserable system of bargaining, or, as it would be called, ofcombinazione. Everything, from the prayers of the Church downwards, is to be had for a consideration, and without it too often Justice halts, and Religion makes no sign. Read their own pictures of their own deputies. Until you cure that sore, it seems to me that help is useless.”
“Then you think that bribery and not taxation is the cause of their misery?”
“No doubt the nation is over-taxed, and in consequence its energies are largely spent upon efforts to evade taxation. In this, as may be conceived, the rich are much more successful than the poor, who have fewer means of escape, and are forced from wretchedness to wretchedness, and to yet lower depths again. The richer man lays out something judiciously, and his rating sinks accordingly. The poor man hasn’t got the money to lay out, and he is crushed.”
“Ah, poor souls!” Teresa cried impulsively.
“But,” asked her grandmother, “why don’t they use their vote to get reform?”
“I can’t conceive,” said Wilbraham. “In spite of never-ceasing murmurs against the government of the day, they refuse to recognise that to a large extent they hold the remedy in their own hands. An incredible proportion don’t go to the polls at all, and it is not only the large numbers who obey the Vatican instructions to abstain, but hundreds stay away, I can only suppose, from indifference or hopelessness. Sometimes it seems that they are like children, who can’t look beyond the hour. They have a proverb, ‘An egg to-day is better than a hen to-morrow.’ Contrast this with our ‘bird in the hand,’ which sounds like it and yet has a very different meaning.”
“And still they have such fine qualities!” said Mrs Brodrick.
“Gratitude, for one,” added Teresa.
“It is a joy to help them.”
“And that leads to pauperising,” Wilbraham insisted. “Even the best of you do a lot of harm. There’s that young priest out in the San Lorenzo quarter. His work in one sense is magnificent. I admire his self-devotion tremendously, but I also think he has got hold of the wrong end of the stick, and is regenerating a few at the cost of encouraging a seething hot-bed of beggars.”
“It’s easy to criticise,” Teresa said. “That I own. As easy as to see other people’s faults. We’ve plenty of our own; only at this moment we were discussing why Italy is not prosperous in spite of an excellent king and queen.”
“And your cure would be to let them starve!” cried Teresa unjustly. “Do you ever think of the women and children?”
“Yes; I think of them a good deal,” he returned, looking quietly at her.
“Yet can suggest nothing?”
“Except as a spectator. Is that of any practical use?”
She turned impatiently away, but the next moment was back and holding out her hand.
“I’m afraid I was very rude,” she said, her grey eyes looking frankly into his. “I’m all in a puzzle myself, and expect other people to pull me out of it—in the wayIthink best, of course,” she added with a laugh.
As his hand closed round hers, Wilbraham was conscious of a strange unsteadiness in his grasp. He turned pale, hardly knowing what to answer.
“I should like to—to help you,” was what he lamely said.
“Who can?” said Teresa, shaking her head. It’s my snare that I will never believe things mayn’t be altered—improved—or that I shouldn’t have a finger in the mending. Sylvia will tell you that, and here she comes to stop us from quarrelling any further.
“Quarrelling?” cried Sylvia anxiously.
“Well,” returned her sister, “at any rate, you arrived in the middle of an apology, and it was mine.”
“Never mind, then,” said the girl, nodding her head. “I know Walter won’t be angry. Not really angry, you know.”
“Don’t be too sure,” mocked Teresa, going away. At the door she flung a shaft at Wilbraham. “Don’t you think before worse comes to worse we might apply to Cesare?”
She closed the door and stood thinking. The word was only a half jest, for she had more than once breathed a wish to enlist a socialist on her side; to hear at least what his party had to suggest for the mending of matters which seemed beyond the reach of others. If she could see—if she could soften Cesare!—and being a woman and young, she never doubted that softening would follow the seeing—if, perhaps, she might indirectly help him, so lifting away the unpleasant remembrance of having once made him suffer unjustly! Half reluctantly she called Nina.
“Where shall I find Cesare—Cesare Bandinelli, you know?”
“Where?” echoed Nina. “Chi lo sa! Wherever there is mischief.”
“Is he at the same place?”
“No, eccellenza.”
“I want to see him.”
“Such as he are better left undisturbed.”
The little Viterbo woman knew perfectly where he had gone, but she would have fenced for an hour and not let it out. And there was a touch of disquiet in her manner.
“Then I must ask Peppina?”
“Peppina may know. Yes, eccellenza, that is true,” returned Nina. She reflected that Peppina would probably also keep her knowledge to herself. “It is certain she may know.”
Teresa made no further attempt. She went down the stairs and out into the sun. Her heart grew gay as she felt the warm blessed glow and saw the clear bright colours of the South. She was going to the Maxwells’ hotel, but made a round on purpose to breathe the light air, and to have a look at a vegetable shop which she wanted to paint, where lettuces, tomatoes, green peas, carrots, rings of endive, orange flesh of gourds, glowed out of a cavernous darkness. Then she dawdled round and up the Spanish steps, greeted by smiles from the models and importunities from creatures just out of babyhood—all faded olive greens and blues, rags, and enchanting smiles, with a violet or two twisted shamelessly up for sale—until she had passed her own street again, and reached the Maxwells’ hotel.
“Is Peppina in?” she asked, after paying a decent tribute of attention to Mary Maxwell’s latest grievances.
“Not she! She always has something to buy or to ask about. It seems to me that is all I pay her for. Why do you ask?”
“I want to hear of her Cesare.”
“Well, she never begrudges talk, I’ll say that for her,” said Mrs Maxwell, with a lazy laugh. “I’m not so sure that she tells you very much, when all’s said and done.”
“If she’s loyal, I like her the better.”
“Hum! She’s in love. Whether loyalty comes in. However, you’d better tell me what you’d like to know.”
And she listened in silence while Donna Teresa hastily touched on her perplexities.
“You see, Mary,” she ended—“you see you must allow two points. Help is wanted, and it ought to be wise help. What is wise help?”
“You poor thing! If you go about asking that question of all your friends, you will soon have picked up a basketful of ill-assorted scraps. I can’t imagine any two of them agreeing.”
Mrs Maxwell’s shrewd common-sense represented a bucket of water dashed on Teresa’s flame. But she would not give in.
“Scraps are better than nothing,” she retorted. “And Cesare is certainly no friend.”
“No-o,” said Mrs Maxwell, drawling the word, and throwing a log on the fire. Then she sat up and said with decision, “If I were you, I would have nothing to do with Cesare.”
“Why, he’s my chief hope,” laughed Teresa. “So please, Mary, make out from Peppina where he is to be found, or, better still, get her to persuade him to come to speak to me. He must have forgiven me by this time.”
“I wouldn’t trust him,” replied Mrs Maxwell, shaking her small head. “Remember, he’s a Sicilian.”
“And what has that to do with it? What do you expect him to do to me? Oh, Mary, really this is too absurd!”
“Very well. Only don’t say you weren’t warned,” returned the other huffily. “What is it that I am to ask? Oh, the man’s address. As if he had one!”
But she made no more remonstrances, and indeed exerted herself so far as to question Peppina that evening. Peppina answered volubly, and flung in much extraneous matter. There was no better workman, no one so clever, so handsome, so ill-used in all Rome. It was because he did not bribe the police that they were hard on him. Others did what they liked, and made it square; but Cesare was too honourable for such ways, and suffered in consequence, poor fellow! She grew guarded the instant Teresa’s desire was touched upon. If it had been the signora, now—Cesare had once seen her, and had ever since called her Peppina’s beautiful signora. Mrs Maxwell believed this to be a lie; yet was pleased by it.
“You had better persuade him,” she said.
“Sissignora, but why? Is there money to be had?”
“I daresay. Yes, I am sure there is. The marchesa is likely to pay well for whatever she asks him to undertake.”
“Sissignora, I will do all that is possible. I will try to see him some day when you do not want me.”
And she was in earnest. She always wanted Cesare to make money, and she thought if he could but have something to spare for the lottery, he might draw such a fortune as had fallen to a crier of theTribunaonly a few months earlier. With this idea in her head she resolved to use all her powers of persuasion, and believed in success, because it was not Donna Teresa whom he hated so much as Wilbraham.
But Wilbraham, meanwhile, had heard of the scheme.
Teresa, who at this time tried to be very cordial with him, spoke that evening of her visit to the Maxwells. A wind was blowing with unusual strength for Rome, banging shutters and driving rainy gusts against the glass. Sylvia was nervously afraid of a thunderstorm, and asked many times whether Wilbraham heard thunder, so many times that Teresa brought in Cesare as a diversion, making a jest of her intended efforts to tame him. Wilbraham did not say much in reply—he could hold his tongue when he liked—but he listened intently, and the next morning, while the rain was still falling heavily, and tumbling in sheets from broad eaves on the passers-by, he in his turn made his way to the Maxwells.
“She must not be allowed to employ that man,” he ended emphatically, after an explanation.
Colonel Maxwell pulled his moustache.
“Must not?” He laughed.
“Must not,” Wilbraham insisted.
“I suppose it’s hard on the poor beggar if nobody is to give him a leg up.”
“That’s not Teresa’s affair,” said his wife severely. “I quite agree—fully—with Mr Wilbraham. Teresa is so impulsive that she has to be protected against herself. Of course she ought not to be hand and glove with socialists and murderers.”
“That’s it,” said Wilbraham, delighted. “And you think you can stop it?”
“Think? I am sure. Five lire will stop anything with Peppina. But it really is folly of Teresa.”
“Perhaps. But a generous folly.”
Wilbraham spoke hastily. Mrs
Maxwell leaned back in her chair, and tapped the table with her fingers.
“Well, it has its inconveniences,” she remarked drily. “Sylvia is not like that. Sylvia would never rush into extravagances without first consulting some one.”
He stood up, tall and stiff.
“They are different,” he said guardedly.
“Oh, yes—they are different.”
Mary Maxwell, who loved playing with fire so long as she did not burn her own fingers, laughed as she spoke, and afterwards enlarged on the subject to her husband.
“I,” she said, “give him a month—one month. Every one has acted idiotically in supposing that poor little Sylvia could hold an affection, and now—see!”
“No one asked him to fall in love. You make him out a wretched cur,” returned Colonel Maxwell, from behind the sheets of theTimes.
“If Teresa did not ask him, she managed that it should be easy; always dressing up that poor little goose in borrowed plumes. Heavens! Imagine being tied for life to a bundle of platitudes!Youcan’t, you know; but then you ought not to have left me to say it,” she said, perching herself on the arm of his chair.
“Go along! I’m reading Christie’s sale.”
“You needn’t supposeyou’reever going to have a Christie sale. Well, if you’re so unsociable, I shall go and speak at once to Peppina. Do you hear?”
A grunt replied. In fact he did not hear, or might have offered sound advice. As it was, Mrs Maxwell was both anxious to impress the girl, and to have it over quickly, so that she did not linger at preliminaries. Peppina answered her call with yards of frilling in her hands.
“About Cesare,” Mrs Maxwell began.
“Have you seen him yet?”
“Signora! By your favour! And with all this to be done before night!”
She held up her frills.
“Then you need not go.”
“Need not go? Per Bacco, but what has changed, signora?”
“The marchesa will not require Cesare, that is all,” said Mrs Maxwell carelessly.
Peppina was looking hard at her, and there was a queer glitter in her eyes. She had been dreaming through the night of the lottery and possible riches, and she immediately connected Wilbraham’s visit with her disappointment. There was, however, no use in talking.
“I am sorry, signora,” she said, drawing a deep angry breath. “It would have been good for the poor fellow.”
“He will find something better to do.”
“In Rome!” The girl flung out her hands with a gesture of hopelessness which made Mrs Maxwell uncomfortable.
“Really, Peppina,” she said pettishly, “as you have not told him, I can’t see that there is much harm done. If I give you five lire for him, he ought to be delighted.”
“The signora is always so generous!” said Peppina. Her fingers closed round the note, but her eyes had not lost their dangerous gleam, and her face was pale. Mrs Maxwell, quite satisfied with herself, went away, wondering, it must be confessed, how Teresa would bear this interruption of her plans for the good of mankind. But she thought if they all opposed her wish to enlist Cesare, that she would yield, especially because, for Sylvia’s sake, she avoided anything which Wilbraham appeared particularly to dislike.
Peppina went that evening to the house of a sister-in-law near the Piazza Navona, and sent a child to seek for Cesare. When he came, she made a sign that she wished to speak to him alone, and they went out into the piazza. The south wind fluttered warmly, and the sky was thick with stars. She told her story quickly, holding back Donna Teresa’s name, because she had never been sure that he would have worked for her. As it was, he only heard that a chance had been snatched from him.
“It was the Englishman, I know it!” cried Peppina. “You were quite right. He hates you.”
“I will be even with him one day,” said Cesare in a low fierce voice.
“He came to the house in all that rain; they talked—talked—I heard them. And as soon as he had gone, in comes the signora to me. She thought herself so clever, because she did not say his name. As if I were a fool!”
Peppina’s voice was passionately contemptuous. They had turned out of the piazza and were passing along the narrow street at the end of which is Pasquino’s mutilated figure.
“I will be even with him,” repeated Cesare.
“There was money in it, English money, too, which is better. And now Angelo suffers as well.”
“Have I not said that I will be even with him? Do not throw words about,” he exclaimed, turning sharply on her. “My blood is hot enough without your putting fire to it.”
“Eh—and those are my thanks!” cried the girl, flinging from him.
He made no answer, and they walked sullenly abreast of each other till they had passed the tragic block of the Cancellaria where Rossi was killed. Then Peppina drew nearer, glancing from time to time at her lover.
“What shall you do?” she said at last in a low voice.
He did not answer her directly.
“You can find out where he goes, what he does?” he said at last.
“From one or the other—yes.”
“He leaves Rome perhaps for Naples?”
“Perhaps. I do not know. But not yet.”
“I can wait,” he said significantly. They relapsed into silence again, walking in the shadows. It was Peppina who at last spoke again. Cesare’s life was so solitary that he felt little need of speech. All the money he could earn was spent on Angelo, and in providing himself with the barest necessaries of life. He was never seen in a wine-shop.
“I will go to that Nina of those people in the Porta Pinciana,” said the girl. “The Englishman marries one of them, and she will chatter like a magpie if I let her. It will please you if I find out, eh, Cesare mio?”
She touched his arm softly with her finger as she spoke, and turned up her face to his. He stooped and kissed her.
“I have told you,” he said briefly. But she missed a passionate ring in his voice for which she hungered.
“I believe you are thinking only of the Englishman,” she said with reproach.
“That is true,” he allowed simply. “He fills my being. There seems no room for anything else, not even for you. You must wait, Peppina.”
If it had been a woman of whom he spoke, her wild blood would have carried her away. But she understood and could sympathise when he only meant revenge. It seemed quite natural to her.
“I will wait,” she said. “Yes.”
Chapter Nine.Mrs Maxwell confessed herself to Teresa on their way back from church the next morning. Teresa had a momentary anger, but, as the other had said, she was very anxious to consider Wilbraham at this time, and contented herself with a passing outbreak of indignation.“You are absolutely ridiculous, all of you! Supposing the man to be what you say, what possible harm can be done by my speaking to him? I’ve a great mind to find him out on my own account. I have only to go to the questura.”“You won’t,” said Mrs Maxwell confidently.And she did not. It appeared as if Wilbraham would be annoyed, and for Sylvia’s sake she must walk warily with Wilbraham. Only in the Palace of the Caesars, that afternoon, she allowed herself a little mockery towards him.“So you’ve been undermining my projects,” she said gaily. “Did you expect me to be so meek as to give in?”He flushed.“I expected you to be annoyed,” he said.“Why didn’t you tell me yourself?”“Would that have influenced you?”“Why not?” returned Teresa, surprised. She went on very gently—“I hope, if only for Sylvia’s sake, that we shall always be friends.”“Did you call me?” said Sylvia, looking round.Teresa put out her hand to her and smiled.“I call you now, at any rate,” she said. “I was talking about you.”“And when Walter and I are together, he likes to talk of you,” said the girl happily.Teresa smiled, thinking only that she was found useful to fill up blank spaces in the conversation. Love might idealise Sylvia, but could hardly go so far as to conjure interest into her talk. Not looking at Wilbraham, she was quite unconscious of his embarrassment, and returned to her subject.“Mary and you both seem to think Cesare a dangerous man? Now I believe that sort of wild talk is mere froth.”“I don’t know. It may be,” said Wilbraham, recovering himself with difficulty. “I daresay he is not really dangerous, but somehow I don’t like the fellow. I don’t care for you to have to do with him—”He checked himself, and Teresa waited, expecting him to say more. As he was still silent, she remarked thoughtfully and with a slight hesitation—“It is so difficult for us to throw ourselves into these foreign natures. We insist on judging them by our own standards. Yet,”—she laughed and broke off—“I find it dreadfully hard to have one standard for myself and another for other people, don’t you?”It is doubtful whether Wilbraham had ever attempted it. What he did not approve of he banned. But he was not thinking of this.“One knows what is right, I’m sure, always,” said Sylvia, trying to keep up with the talk.“You do, dear, for yourself, I think, always,” Teresa returned quickly, looking at her kindly. “And what is more, you would do it. Now I wish he would say something nice,” she said to herself, glancing at Wilbraham. He was looking straight ahead, apparently he had not even heard, and she began to beat her brains, going back to the subject of characteristics. “When you think of it,” she said, “there is something remarkable in a race of their standing remaining in many ways so childlike.”“Very remarkable,” said Wilbraham grimly. “Last summer they chose to be affronted because the band in the Colonna played Wagner oftener than pleased their patriotism, so they just fell on the poor chaps, wrecked the stand, and tore the music into atoms. Nice sensible proceeding!”“I think I’ve heard of just as sensible in London and Paris,” retorted Teresa in a smooth voice. “Would you like me to mention a few instances?”He looked at her and they both laughed. More softly still, she put in one further word—“Other people’s folly is soveryfoolish!”“Ithink some of the books one reads are very foolish,” Sylvia proclaimed.“They talk about things which couldn’t possibly happen, just as if they were real. So silly!”Wilbraham quickly looked away.“It is provoking, sometimes,” said Teresa. “One gets mixed, at least I do.”She glanced at Wilbraham, not at all understanding what was in his mind, but wishing that he would be more genial, more natural. Certainly she was getting nervous herself, for she had never been so conscious of Sylvia’s deficiencies. They had never before seemed sufficiently important to weigh against her beauty and sweetness. Now the little prosaic vague speeches disturbed her quite unduly.She put herself yet more on the defensive.They wandered round that imperial hill where memories jostle each other, and even under the divinely blue Roman sky great angry ghosts rise and stare at the petty intruders whom, in life, one hand-wave would have swept away. They sat on a bank, where, behind them, towered the brick fragment which may have looked on the trial of an apostle, and, before, lay that little space of crowded ruin of which each stone holds history. Teresa, foolish short-sighted Teresa, thinking only how best to shield and show off another, was at her best and brightest, touched each point with delicate fancies, twisted Sylvia’s inanities into playfulness, was delightful towards Wilbraham. She was a little surprised at last when he sprang up.“I must be off,” he said briefly.“Look here; shall I put you into a carriage, or do you mean to stop longer?”“Oh, we will go,” answered Teresa, reflecting ruefully that she could not have been very successful in her valiant attempts to make the afternoon pleasant to him, when he ended it in such an abrupt fashion. But Sylvia drove home in excellent spirits.“I like you to come with us, because Walter likes to talk to you,” she said cheerily. “You understand him better now, don’t you? I know he enjoyed himself this afternoon.”“I expect he always enjoys himself when you are there.”“Yes, of course,” the girl answered serenely. “He doesn’t say much, but I talk.”Teresa was silent. Presently her sister began again.“Teresa, Mary says that people who marry are sometimes very unhappy. She says you were unhappy.”“Mary!” exclaimed Teresa angrily. “Mary says a great deal!”“But were you?” Sylvia persisted. “Yes.”The marchesa kept her face turned away.“Why, I wonder? Did you love him?”“Yes, at first.”“Did he love you?”“I thought so,” said Teresa with difficulty.There was a pause.“I don’t think I understand,” said Sylvia slowly. “Don’t people always know?”The carriage rattled over rough stones and tram lines.“No,” said Teresa. “Not always.”“How funny!Iknow.”“I hope you will be very fortunate, dear,” replied her sister, looking wistfully at her, and again over-estimating the power of the sweet face. “I think you will.”“Of course,” Sylvia answered happily. “You see, Walter told me that he was fond of me, so I know. I suppose some people only imagine things? You must have imagined. Poor Teresa; and I wonder how you could! I think I should have found out.”Donna Teresa that night stood looking from her window. Above the houses, Orion, brave hunter, strode across the sky, his dog at his heels, and soft fleecy clouds flying before him. For midwinter the air was extraordinarily mild. Sylvia’s innocent words had stirred gnawing memories, which never altogether left her. How miserable she had been! What humiliations she had endured! It had been in a certain measure her remembrance of this, and her dread lest Sylvia’s face should attract another marchese, which had made her, perhaps, unduly anxious for the solid, unromantic engagement with Wilbraham to come about. She had weighed and judged him. She thought him cold, unsympathetic, reserved, yet was sure he might be trusted, and never had the least doubt that he knew his own mind, and would keep to it. Why was not this still sufficient for her? At times it was, land at all times she fell back upon it for support. But there were moments when she could not convince herself, when in comparison with other women—never with herself—poor Sylvia’s limitations stared at her. Then she flung herself into the gap. Then, as this afternoon, she dug into her own stores, brought forth all her powers, exerted herself, covered Sylvia, and never once thought that here lay danger. On the contrary, she believed that she often failed, and laughed ruefully at the remembrance of Wilbraham’s sudden movement of escape.But if it were all in vain! If he were beginning to realise a dreadful mistake! If before Sylvia there lay long unloved years, and before Wilbraham the heavyweight of weary disappointment—what then?And all Teresa’s reflections ended in this.If—what then?
Mrs Maxwell confessed herself to Teresa on their way back from church the next morning. Teresa had a momentary anger, but, as the other had said, she was very anxious to consider Wilbraham at this time, and contented herself with a passing outbreak of indignation.
“You are absolutely ridiculous, all of you! Supposing the man to be what you say, what possible harm can be done by my speaking to him? I’ve a great mind to find him out on my own account. I have only to go to the questura.”
“You won’t,” said Mrs Maxwell confidently.
And she did not. It appeared as if Wilbraham would be annoyed, and for Sylvia’s sake she must walk warily with Wilbraham. Only in the Palace of the Caesars, that afternoon, she allowed herself a little mockery towards him.
“So you’ve been undermining my projects,” she said gaily. “Did you expect me to be so meek as to give in?”
He flushed.
“I expected you to be annoyed,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me yourself?”
“Would that have influenced you?”
“Why not?” returned Teresa, surprised. She went on very gently—“I hope, if only for Sylvia’s sake, that we shall always be friends.”
“Did you call me?” said Sylvia, looking round.
Teresa put out her hand to her and smiled.
“I call you now, at any rate,” she said. “I was talking about you.”
“And when Walter and I are together, he likes to talk of you,” said the girl happily.
Teresa smiled, thinking only that she was found useful to fill up blank spaces in the conversation. Love might idealise Sylvia, but could hardly go so far as to conjure interest into her talk. Not looking at Wilbraham, she was quite unconscious of his embarrassment, and returned to her subject.
“Mary and you both seem to think Cesare a dangerous man? Now I believe that sort of wild talk is mere froth.”
“I don’t know. It may be,” said Wilbraham, recovering himself with difficulty. “I daresay he is not really dangerous, but somehow I don’t like the fellow. I don’t care for you to have to do with him—”
He checked himself, and Teresa waited, expecting him to say more. As he was still silent, she remarked thoughtfully and with a slight hesitation—
“It is so difficult for us to throw ourselves into these foreign natures. We insist on judging them by our own standards. Yet,”—she laughed and broke off—“I find it dreadfully hard to have one standard for myself and another for other people, don’t you?”
It is doubtful whether Wilbraham had ever attempted it. What he did not approve of he banned. But he was not thinking of this.
“One knows what is right, I’m sure, always,” said Sylvia, trying to keep up with the talk.
“You do, dear, for yourself, I think, always,” Teresa returned quickly, looking at her kindly. “And what is more, you would do it. Now I wish he would say something nice,” she said to herself, glancing at Wilbraham. He was looking straight ahead, apparently he had not even heard, and she began to beat her brains, going back to the subject of characteristics. “When you think of it,” she said, “there is something remarkable in a race of their standing remaining in many ways so childlike.”
“Very remarkable,” said Wilbraham grimly. “Last summer they chose to be affronted because the band in the Colonna played Wagner oftener than pleased their patriotism, so they just fell on the poor chaps, wrecked the stand, and tore the music into atoms. Nice sensible proceeding!”
“I think I’ve heard of just as sensible in London and Paris,” retorted Teresa in a smooth voice. “Would you like me to mention a few instances?”
He looked at her and they both laughed. More softly still, she put in one further word—
“Other people’s folly is soveryfoolish!”
“Ithink some of the books one reads are very foolish,” Sylvia proclaimed.
“They talk about things which couldn’t possibly happen, just as if they were real. So silly!”
Wilbraham quickly looked away.
“It is provoking, sometimes,” said Teresa. “One gets mixed, at least I do.”
She glanced at Wilbraham, not at all understanding what was in his mind, but wishing that he would be more genial, more natural. Certainly she was getting nervous herself, for she had never been so conscious of Sylvia’s deficiencies. They had never before seemed sufficiently important to weigh against her beauty and sweetness. Now the little prosaic vague speeches disturbed her quite unduly.
She put herself yet more on the defensive.
They wandered round that imperial hill where memories jostle each other, and even under the divinely blue Roman sky great angry ghosts rise and stare at the petty intruders whom, in life, one hand-wave would have swept away. They sat on a bank, where, behind them, towered the brick fragment which may have looked on the trial of an apostle, and, before, lay that little space of crowded ruin of which each stone holds history. Teresa, foolish short-sighted Teresa, thinking only how best to shield and show off another, was at her best and brightest, touched each point with delicate fancies, twisted Sylvia’s inanities into playfulness, was delightful towards Wilbraham. She was a little surprised at last when he sprang up.
“I must be off,” he said briefly.
“Look here; shall I put you into a carriage, or do you mean to stop longer?”
“Oh, we will go,” answered Teresa, reflecting ruefully that she could not have been very successful in her valiant attempts to make the afternoon pleasant to him, when he ended it in such an abrupt fashion. But Sylvia drove home in excellent spirits.
“I like you to come with us, because Walter likes to talk to you,” she said cheerily. “You understand him better now, don’t you? I know he enjoyed himself this afternoon.”
“I expect he always enjoys himself when you are there.”
“Yes, of course,” the girl answered serenely. “He doesn’t say much, but I talk.”
Teresa was silent. Presently her sister began again.
“Teresa, Mary says that people who marry are sometimes very unhappy. She says you were unhappy.”
“Mary!” exclaimed Teresa angrily. “Mary says a great deal!”
“But were you?” Sylvia persisted. “Yes.”
The marchesa kept her face turned away.
“Why, I wonder? Did you love him?”
“Yes, at first.”
“Did he love you?”
“I thought so,” said Teresa with difficulty.
There was a pause.
“I don’t think I understand,” said Sylvia slowly. “Don’t people always know?”
The carriage rattled over rough stones and tram lines.
“No,” said Teresa. “Not always.”
“How funny!Iknow.”
“I hope you will be very fortunate, dear,” replied her sister, looking wistfully at her, and again over-estimating the power of the sweet face. “I think you will.”
“Of course,” Sylvia answered happily. “You see, Walter told me that he was fond of me, so I know. I suppose some people only imagine things? You must have imagined. Poor Teresa; and I wonder how you could! I think I should have found out.”
Donna Teresa that night stood looking from her window. Above the houses, Orion, brave hunter, strode across the sky, his dog at his heels, and soft fleecy clouds flying before him. For midwinter the air was extraordinarily mild. Sylvia’s innocent words had stirred gnawing memories, which never altogether left her. How miserable she had been! What humiliations she had endured! It had been in a certain measure her remembrance of this, and her dread lest Sylvia’s face should attract another marchese, which had made her, perhaps, unduly anxious for the solid, unromantic engagement with Wilbraham to come about. She had weighed and judged him. She thought him cold, unsympathetic, reserved, yet was sure he might be trusted, and never had the least doubt that he knew his own mind, and would keep to it. Why was not this still sufficient for her? At times it was, land at all times she fell back upon it for support. But there were moments when she could not convince herself, when in comparison with other women—never with herself—poor Sylvia’s limitations stared at her. Then she flung herself into the gap. Then, as this afternoon, she dug into her own stores, brought forth all her powers, exerted herself, covered Sylvia, and never once thought that here lay danger. On the contrary, she believed that she often failed, and laughed ruefully at the remembrance of Wilbraham’s sudden movement of escape.
But if it were all in vain! If he were beginning to realise a dreadful mistake! If before Sylvia there lay long unloved years, and before Wilbraham the heavyweight of weary disappointment—what then?
And all Teresa’s reflections ended in this.If—what then?
Chapter Ten.Peppina, Mrs Maxwell’s maid, having, as she often had, a note to take to the Marchesa di Sant’ Eustachio, turned in for some words with Nina, now promoted to the position of head of the kitchen, with a staff of two assistants, whom she governed merrily. The kitchen was still untidy. Assunta smilingly dragged out a chair from behind a barricade of heaped baskets; Fernanda, showing her white teeth, bore away in her arms a huge brown jar of vinegar. Nina had not been content until she had got two or three of these jars from Viterbo, of coarse highly-glazed pottery, with a fine free design of yellow on the brown. She now pointed out her treasure to Peppina with joyous pride.“And our marchesa has two in the sala with all her other beautiful things,”—Nina exalted her family to the skies—“she took them away from me and left me nothing for the wine. But that, see you, was because she could find nothing like them in Rome. Rome is a poor place, for all they talk so much, and make one pay, pay, pay. Eh-h-h-h-h! Blessed Virgin, whether one has to pay! Spinach,tre soldi, onions,due soldi, a slice of gourd, a pepperino—I ask you what a pepperino is worth? Well, believe it or not, that great Mariaccia—daughter of a Jew I call her—when she brought her basket this morning, she askedquattro soldi! Quattro soldi!—Fernanda, child, there is the bell, fly! Here, stay! Take off thy apron, which the signora said should only be worn in the kitchen—the saints alone know why—and remember to say, ‘Buon giorno eccellenza.’—Quattro soldi, Peppina mia, true as that I sit here, and at Viterbo—ah, at Viterbo they do not rob like that.”“It is true,” said Peppina, sighing. “In Rome it is hard to live.”“But not for you. You are like me. Eh-h-h-h-h! It was a good day for me when Signora Bianco at the laundry told me these angels wanted a donna.” Peppina still looked gloomy.“Why should you be their donna? Why should some have so much money, and others none at all?”Nina’s funny little face squeezed itself into innumerable lines as she nodded her head sagaciously.“Ah, that is Cesare, eh? That is what he says.”“Yes,” acknowledged the other, glancing at her. “That is what Cesare says. And he is very clever. All the world knows that he is very clever?”“Perhaps,” returned Nina, shutting her mouth obstinately. “But, see here, how much good has he done himself with his cleverness?”“Because he is always thinking of others. You do not understand—no one understands!” cried the girl passionately. She sprang up and stood leaning against the table, her breast heaving, her splendid eyes on fire. “He is not working for himself, he is not working for you or for me, or for this one or for that—it is for the whole world. When he comes and talks to me of his thoughts, his plans, he seems,”—she flung out her hands—“to set the whole of me in a blaze.”“Eh-h-h-h-h!” Nina’s shrewd little eyes narrowed. “The whole world. And you like that?”“Who would not?”“Not I.”“You! You!”Peppina’s look rested on her with a touch of contempt, but Nina’s gay laugh bubbled on.“If I were you I should not care to share all these good things which Cesare is going to get, with—Elena Cianchetti, for instance.”The girl started as if she had been stung.“The Cianchetti! She is a viper.”Nina nodded her head, and began to wash her lettuces.“Perhaps. But Cesare did not always think her a viper.”“Oh!” Peppina flung out her hands, flung her rival and the whole world on one side. “If he spoke to her, I could kill him. But he will not.”“It seems to me that when we are going to do good to everybody, there are always a few we mean to leave out. Perhaps, in that way we should all be left out. Who knows?” remarked the philosopher, still nodding like a mandarin. The girl’s socialism had received a check. Nina glanced at her and turned the subject. “The English signore, who will marry our signorina, his leg is not well yet, after all these long days. It is because he travelled on a Tuesday—an unlucky day.”“Ah!” said Peppina indifferently. She was always alert when Wilbraham was spoken of, because Cesare had ordered her to bring him what news she could, but she was well on her guard against betraying special interest to her present companion, and she no longer talked to Mrs Maxwell. “So it is true they are to be married?”“True? Did I not tell you?”“I had forgotten,” lied the girl. “She is pretty.”“As pretty and as innocent as the angels. And our marchesa, who has grown suddenly very rich, would give her everything in the world if she wished it.”“If your marchesa is rich, I would have chosen her if I had been the Englishman.”“She might not have said yes,” returned Nina with a snort. “She has had enough of what you all think the most wonderful thing you can get. Eh-h-h-h-h, my Pietro was not the worst, though he will need many masses to give him a little ease, that is certain; but after he had been to the wine-shop—(Fernanda,figlia mia, slip out and buy some fresh ricotta for the signora, it pleases her)—and I had to do my work with a black eye and a swelled face,ecco!”—Nina’s eyebrows, shoulders, hands, shot up expressively—“I do not want another Pietro. And our marchesa is like me.”“Did he beat her?” asked Peppina, stretching herself and yawning. She was still thinking of Elena Cianchetti, and she wished to get back and brood upon Nina’s words, but she reflected that the best way of binding Cesare to herself was to be useful to him. She loved him passionately, and would have been unscrupulous towards any one who stood between them.“Those people do not give black eyes. They strike at hearts, and that hurts worse.”“Yes,” said the girl comprehendingly, looking at the older woman, and surprised that such knowledge had come to her. “Yes, it does. But the signorina, she does not fear?”“The English are different.”“Yes, they are cold—hard,” cried Peppina passionately. “They go on their way without caring. Yes, that is what—”She stopped. She had been going to quote Cesare, and he had always warned her to keep his name out of the way when she was trying to pick up information for him. But, quick as she was, Nina was quicker, and had no difficulty in reading what had so nearly escaped her lips. It made her angry.“It is easy to call white black,” she said sharply.“And they have voices—ee-ee-ee—like little canary birds,” mimicked the girl contemptuously. Her own voice was harsh, and the other flung a withering glance at her.“That is better than to scream like a jay.”“Well, I do not like them.”“I should think not.”“Why?” asked the girl, suddenly suspicious, and conscious that she had let her temper sweep her farther than she intended.“Because if you liked them you would be grateful, eh? And gratitude is as rare as a white ant.Ecco!”Nina smoothed out her skirts and flirted some water towards her lettuces, spilling a good deal over Peppina in the process. She was always horribly untidy. Peppina looked angrily at her, and drew her skirts out of the wet. She hesitated whether to go away in a rage, or to linger and try to hear something more definite. Fernanda’s return, carrying on green leaves a great piece of the snow-white ricotta (curd of sheep’s milk), and in her other hand a stick of spiked arbutus berries, relieved the tension.“It is for our marchesa,” she said proudly, exhibiting the scarlet berries.“Do they stay all the winter?” asked Peppina, knowing this to be one of the points on which Cesare was curious, and so swallowing her displeasure.“Who knows? They do as they like,” returned Nina. “All the forestieri do as they like, and why should ours be different?”“Perhaps they will go to Naples?”“Perhaps, or to Sicily,” said the older woman, looking keenly at her. “In that case—”“Yes?” said Peppina, eagerly leaning forward.“Cesare might tell them a little about the Mafia. Eh?”The girl drew suddenly back, her face white. It took her a minute to recover herself.“The Mafia? What is that?” she said, trying to speak carelessly and failing, for her voice shook.“Who knows? Ask Cesare.—Assunta, in there, will you never have done with those unfortunate dishes? Go, Fernanda, go and see if she is sleeping.”Peppina went away quickly. She told herself that she would be very careful not to mention the word Mafia to Cesare, as he would be sure to think she had been in some way to blame for its name having been so much as breathed. Those who have to do with such secret societies as the Camorra or the Mafia do not talk of them, and to the ignorant world the names convey a theatrical rather than a real meaning. This does not prevent their existing, and in a more extended network than we might conceive possible. The Mafia, indeed, exists, and has existed since the time of the Moors in Sicily, when, law and justice being unattainable, the secret society was formed to apply them in a rough and ready fashion. Then it was probably useful; now it serves only for private revenge. And as private revenge is an unfailing incentive, a society which allows its members to strike, and then protects it by the terror of its name, will never want adherents or the help of the devil.Peppina was not thinking of all this as she went back to the hotel, swinging her body from the hips with the free lithe gait of a Trastevere woman. She was only reflecting how she could best adapt the little she had gathered from Nina to Cesare’s wishes. Her love for him was passionate, but it was so largely mixed with fear—particularly since that dark episode in his life—that it was doubtful which excitement was at any time uppermost. She lied to him as readily as to any one else, only she took more care not to be found out. As she reached the end of the Sistina she stopped to buy a few hot chestnuts, and Cesare at the same moment came up the Tritone.“Did I startle you?” he said, taking the chestnuts she held out to him.“No; why should you?” asked the girl simply. “Am I not always thinking of you? Where are you going?”“To the station to meet a man.”“I will walk with you,” she said, turning to cross the sunny piazza by his side. “Those people do not want me.”“No,” said Cesare bitterly. “They pay for what they do not want, so that we who want have nothing with which to pay. And your priests tell you that is right!”“Do not let us talk of the priests,” said the girl, hastily crossing herself unseen to him. Acts were not much, but it always frightened her to hear him speak against religion. To get him away from this subject she was ready to invent freely. “I have been with that Nina—over there,” and she flung her dark head on one side in the direction from whence she had come, “and I have heard something.”“Ah!” The “Ah” was greedy. He had brooded over Wilbraham’s high-handedness until he had come to see in him a representative of the injustices which he maintained society had inflicted upon him, and he hated the Englishman with a hatred out of all proportion with his wrongs.“She is a poor idiot,” Peppina went on contemptuously, “without ideas. But she talks.”Cesare nodded. If any one had noticed they might have observed that he never now flung out a word against women.“She talks of her angels. They are all angels with her. And I think they are going away. Not now, but later. I believe it will be to Naples or Sicily.”“Good!” he cried, and her heart gave a leap of delight at seeing his eyes brighten. The next moment he turned on her. “You did not tell her it was I who wanted to know?”“Altro!” exclaimed the girl indignantly. “Am I a fool? I did not even ask the question myself. I tell you she talks. But you are pleased, dear one?” she went on, her voice changing into deep tenderness.He stretched his hands to her, and they stood still for an instant looking into each other’s eyes. The warm sunlight was round them; by their side a man was urging his miserable overladen mule up the Tolentino hill with the long “A-a-a-a-a-o-o!” which had been the cry of his forefathers in the old amphitheatre days. For a moment Peppina let herself go, dizzy with almost intolerable delight, the next a thought stung her, the more sharply for this very delight; she held back from him and cried passionately—“When did you see the Cianchetti?”“The Cianchetti!” He was surprised and displeased, so that he flushed under the girl’s piercing look. But he looked back at her. “At her window this morning,” he said unhesitatingly.“This morning!”Peppina was pale as death, and trembling all over. Her burning eyes put the question so insistently that he answered as if she had spoken—“Why do you ask? She is nothing to me.”The girl told too many lies herself to recognise truth in others. His words brought back the blood from her heart, and to a certain extent relieved her. But she did not quite believe, although she pretended that she did. She was going to strike out at Nina, and say that she had accused him, when she remembered that she had just denied mentioning his name.“I knew you had seen her. I felt it here,” she answered, pressing her heart. “But of course if you say that—”“When do they go to Sicily?” he demanded presently, reverting to a more absorbing topic.“Who knows? They don’t say. It will be in the spring no doubt.”He nodded. She looked at him and thought he was thinner than ever.“Cesare! Is there nothing? Is there no hope?”He laughed grimly.“Ma che! Of course there is hope. That is always left, though it grows mouldy with time. They have promised me something on theAvantistaff. And besides,”—his eyes kindled—“there may be a great stroke struck before long.”“What stroke? Tell me.”“No, no, carina,” he said, not unkindly. “There will be no telling.”She reflected.“Cesare, truly, what have you eaten to-day?”“Your chestnuts.”She was turning out her pocket the next moment and pressing a five lire note upon him.“Blessed Virgin, that it should be so bad as that! But the saints themselves sent me out with this in my pocket. Cesare, caro, you shall! For Angelo, for Angelo!”He had pushed it away with almost violence, but at this appeal looked down at it, and his hand hesitated. Peppina saw her advantage.“The child must be hungry, and it is so bad for a child to be hungry. Take it, take it!”He caught her wrist.“Peppina, swear. Is it your own?”“Is it my own! Whose else should it be? Yes, yes, yes, I tell you!”He drew a long breath.“I had begun to think of a pan of charcoal. There seemed nothing else, only there were one or two affairs I wanted to have arranged first.”“Now you will get food?”“Yes.”“For you both. Promise.”“I promise.”The Sant’ Angelo gun boomed out, and all the church bells began to clang. Peppina stood still.“I must go,” she said, “A rividerti.” She wanted to say that the Cianchetti could not have done so well for him, but she was afraid, and hurried away down the Venti Settembre. She swung along, her heart full of Cesare, and hot tears in her eyes. “He has so many enemies, this Englishman and all,” she cried vehemently, “and only me on his side. A pan of charcoal! Oh, it would kill me! What should I have done if the signora had not given me that money for the washing? Madonna santissima, I will carry a candle to thee at Sant’ Agostino this very day.” So she went on with her thoughts, a medley of passionate love, jealousy, and fear, until she reached the hotel and went upstairs. At the door of the Maxwell’s sala she paused. “I shall say I lost it,” she remarked cheerfully. “Madonna santissima,twocandles!”
Peppina, Mrs Maxwell’s maid, having, as she often had, a note to take to the Marchesa di Sant’ Eustachio, turned in for some words with Nina, now promoted to the position of head of the kitchen, with a staff of two assistants, whom she governed merrily. The kitchen was still untidy. Assunta smilingly dragged out a chair from behind a barricade of heaped baskets; Fernanda, showing her white teeth, bore away in her arms a huge brown jar of vinegar. Nina had not been content until she had got two or three of these jars from Viterbo, of coarse highly-glazed pottery, with a fine free design of yellow on the brown. She now pointed out her treasure to Peppina with joyous pride.
“And our marchesa has two in the sala with all her other beautiful things,”—Nina exalted her family to the skies—“she took them away from me and left me nothing for the wine. But that, see you, was because she could find nothing like them in Rome. Rome is a poor place, for all they talk so much, and make one pay, pay, pay. Eh-h-h-h-h! Blessed Virgin, whether one has to pay! Spinach,tre soldi, onions,due soldi, a slice of gourd, a pepperino—I ask you what a pepperino is worth? Well, believe it or not, that great Mariaccia—daughter of a Jew I call her—when she brought her basket this morning, she askedquattro soldi! Quattro soldi!—Fernanda, child, there is the bell, fly! Here, stay! Take off thy apron, which the signora said should only be worn in the kitchen—the saints alone know why—and remember to say, ‘Buon giorno eccellenza.’—Quattro soldi, Peppina mia, true as that I sit here, and at Viterbo—ah, at Viterbo they do not rob like that.”
“It is true,” said Peppina, sighing. “In Rome it is hard to live.”
“But not for you. You are like me. Eh-h-h-h-h! It was a good day for me when Signora Bianco at the laundry told me these angels wanted a donna.” Peppina still looked gloomy.
“Why should you be their donna? Why should some have so much money, and others none at all?”
Nina’s funny little face squeezed itself into innumerable lines as she nodded her head sagaciously.
“Ah, that is Cesare, eh? That is what he says.”
“Yes,” acknowledged the other, glancing at her. “That is what Cesare says. And he is very clever. All the world knows that he is very clever?”
“Perhaps,” returned Nina, shutting her mouth obstinately. “But, see here, how much good has he done himself with his cleverness?”
“Because he is always thinking of others. You do not understand—no one understands!” cried the girl passionately. She sprang up and stood leaning against the table, her breast heaving, her splendid eyes on fire. “He is not working for himself, he is not working for you or for me, or for this one or for that—it is for the whole world. When he comes and talks to me of his thoughts, his plans, he seems,”—she flung out her hands—“to set the whole of me in a blaze.”
“Eh-h-h-h-h!” Nina’s shrewd little eyes narrowed. “The whole world. And you like that?”
“Who would not?”
“Not I.”
“You! You!”
Peppina’s look rested on her with a touch of contempt, but Nina’s gay laugh bubbled on.
“If I were you I should not care to share all these good things which Cesare is going to get, with—Elena Cianchetti, for instance.”
The girl started as if she had been stung.
“The Cianchetti! She is a viper.”
Nina nodded her head, and began to wash her lettuces.
“Perhaps. But Cesare did not always think her a viper.”
“Oh!” Peppina flung out her hands, flung her rival and the whole world on one side. “If he spoke to her, I could kill him. But he will not.”
“It seems to me that when we are going to do good to everybody, there are always a few we mean to leave out. Perhaps, in that way we should all be left out. Who knows?” remarked the philosopher, still nodding like a mandarin. The girl’s socialism had received a check. Nina glanced at her and turned the subject. “The English signore, who will marry our signorina, his leg is not well yet, after all these long days. It is because he travelled on a Tuesday—an unlucky day.”
“Ah!” said Peppina indifferently. She was always alert when Wilbraham was spoken of, because Cesare had ordered her to bring him what news she could, but she was well on her guard against betraying special interest to her present companion, and she no longer talked to Mrs Maxwell. “So it is true they are to be married?”
“True? Did I not tell you?”
“I had forgotten,” lied the girl. “She is pretty.”
“As pretty and as innocent as the angels. And our marchesa, who has grown suddenly very rich, would give her everything in the world if she wished it.”
“If your marchesa is rich, I would have chosen her if I had been the Englishman.”
“She might not have said yes,” returned Nina with a snort. “She has had enough of what you all think the most wonderful thing you can get. Eh-h-h-h-h, my Pietro was not the worst, though he will need many masses to give him a little ease, that is certain; but after he had been to the wine-shop—(Fernanda,figlia mia, slip out and buy some fresh ricotta for the signora, it pleases her)—and I had to do my work with a black eye and a swelled face,ecco!”—Nina’s eyebrows, shoulders, hands, shot up expressively—“I do not want another Pietro. And our marchesa is like me.”
“Did he beat her?” asked Peppina, stretching herself and yawning. She was still thinking of Elena Cianchetti, and she wished to get back and brood upon Nina’s words, but she reflected that the best way of binding Cesare to herself was to be useful to him. She loved him passionately, and would have been unscrupulous towards any one who stood between them.
“Those people do not give black eyes. They strike at hearts, and that hurts worse.”
“Yes,” said the girl comprehendingly, looking at the older woman, and surprised that such knowledge had come to her. “Yes, it does. But the signorina, she does not fear?”
“The English are different.”
“Yes, they are cold—hard,” cried Peppina passionately. “They go on their way without caring. Yes, that is what—”
She stopped. She had been going to quote Cesare, and he had always warned her to keep his name out of the way when she was trying to pick up information for him. But, quick as she was, Nina was quicker, and had no difficulty in reading what had so nearly escaped her lips. It made her angry.
“It is easy to call white black,” she said sharply.
“And they have voices—ee-ee-ee—like little canary birds,” mimicked the girl contemptuously. Her own voice was harsh, and the other flung a withering glance at her.
“That is better than to scream like a jay.”
“Well, I do not like them.”
“I should think not.”
“Why?” asked the girl, suddenly suspicious, and conscious that she had let her temper sweep her farther than she intended.
“Because if you liked them you would be grateful, eh? And gratitude is as rare as a white ant.Ecco!”
Nina smoothed out her skirts and flirted some water towards her lettuces, spilling a good deal over Peppina in the process. She was always horribly untidy. Peppina looked angrily at her, and drew her skirts out of the wet. She hesitated whether to go away in a rage, or to linger and try to hear something more definite. Fernanda’s return, carrying on green leaves a great piece of the snow-white ricotta (curd of sheep’s milk), and in her other hand a stick of spiked arbutus berries, relieved the tension.
“It is for our marchesa,” she said proudly, exhibiting the scarlet berries.
“Do they stay all the winter?” asked Peppina, knowing this to be one of the points on which Cesare was curious, and so swallowing her displeasure.
“Who knows? They do as they like,” returned Nina. “All the forestieri do as they like, and why should ours be different?”
“Perhaps they will go to Naples?”
“Perhaps, or to Sicily,” said the older woman, looking keenly at her. “In that case—”
“Yes?” said Peppina, eagerly leaning forward.
“Cesare might tell them a little about the Mafia. Eh?”
The girl drew suddenly back, her face white. It took her a minute to recover herself.
“The Mafia? What is that?” she said, trying to speak carelessly and failing, for her voice shook.
“Who knows? Ask Cesare.—Assunta, in there, will you never have done with those unfortunate dishes? Go, Fernanda, go and see if she is sleeping.”
Peppina went away quickly. She told herself that she would be very careful not to mention the word Mafia to Cesare, as he would be sure to think she had been in some way to blame for its name having been so much as breathed. Those who have to do with such secret societies as the Camorra or the Mafia do not talk of them, and to the ignorant world the names convey a theatrical rather than a real meaning. This does not prevent their existing, and in a more extended network than we might conceive possible. The Mafia, indeed, exists, and has existed since the time of the Moors in Sicily, when, law and justice being unattainable, the secret society was formed to apply them in a rough and ready fashion. Then it was probably useful; now it serves only for private revenge. And as private revenge is an unfailing incentive, a society which allows its members to strike, and then protects it by the terror of its name, will never want adherents or the help of the devil.
Peppina was not thinking of all this as she went back to the hotel, swinging her body from the hips with the free lithe gait of a Trastevere woman. She was only reflecting how she could best adapt the little she had gathered from Nina to Cesare’s wishes. Her love for him was passionate, but it was so largely mixed with fear—particularly since that dark episode in his life—that it was doubtful which excitement was at any time uppermost. She lied to him as readily as to any one else, only she took more care not to be found out. As she reached the end of the Sistina she stopped to buy a few hot chestnuts, and Cesare at the same moment came up the Tritone.
“Did I startle you?” he said, taking the chestnuts she held out to him.
“No; why should you?” asked the girl simply. “Am I not always thinking of you? Where are you going?”
“To the station to meet a man.”
“I will walk with you,” she said, turning to cross the sunny piazza by his side. “Those people do not want me.”
“No,” said Cesare bitterly. “They pay for what they do not want, so that we who want have nothing with which to pay. And your priests tell you that is right!”
“Do not let us talk of the priests,” said the girl, hastily crossing herself unseen to him. Acts were not much, but it always frightened her to hear him speak against religion. To get him away from this subject she was ready to invent freely. “I have been with that Nina—over there,” and she flung her dark head on one side in the direction from whence she had come, “and I have heard something.”
“Ah!” The “Ah” was greedy. He had brooded over Wilbraham’s high-handedness until he had come to see in him a representative of the injustices which he maintained society had inflicted upon him, and he hated the Englishman with a hatred out of all proportion with his wrongs.
“She is a poor idiot,” Peppina went on contemptuously, “without ideas. But she talks.”
Cesare nodded. If any one had noticed they might have observed that he never now flung out a word against women.
“She talks of her angels. They are all angels with her. And I think they are going away. Not now, but later. I believe it will be to Naples or Sicily.”
“Good!” he cried, and her heart gave a leap of delight at seeing his eyes brighten. The next moment he turned on her. “You did not tell her it was I who wanted to know?”
“Altro!” exclaimed the girl indignantly. “Am I a fool? I did not even ask the question myself. I tell you she talks. But you are pleased, dear one?” she went on, her voice changing into deep tenderness.
He stretched his hands to her, and they stood still for an instant looking into each other’s eyes. The warm sunlight was round them; by their side a man was urging his miserable overladen mule up the Tolentino hill with the long “A-a-a-a-a-o-o!” which had been the cry of his forefathers in the old amphitheatre days. For a moment Peppina let herself go, dizzy with almost intolerable delight, the next a thought stung her, the more sharply for this very delight; she held back from him and cried passionately—
“When did you see the Cianchetti?”
“The Cianchetti!” He was surprised and displeased, so that he flushed under the girl’s piercing look. But he looked back at her. “At her window this morning,” he said unhesitatingly.
“This morning!”
Peppina was pale as death, and trembling all over. Her burning eyes put the question so insistently that he answered as if she had spoken—
“Why do you ask? She is nothing to me.”
The girl told too many lies herself to recognise truth in others. His words brought back the blood from her heart, and to a certain extent relieved her. But she did not quite believe, although she pretended that she did. She was going to strike out at Nina, and say that she had accused him, when she remembered that she had just denied mentioning his name.
“I knew you had seen her. I felt it here,” she answered, pressing her heart. “But of course if you say that—”
“When do they go to Sicily?” he demanded presently, reverting to a more absorbing topic.
“Who knows? They don’t say. It will be in the spring no doubt.”
He nodded. She looked at him and thought he was thinner than ever.
“Cesare! Is there nothing? Is there no hope?”
He laughed grimly.
“Ma che! Of course there is hope. That is always left, though it grows mouldy with time. They have promised me something on theAvantistaff. And besides,”—his eyes kindled—“there may be a great stroke struck before long.”
“What stroke? Tell me.”
“No, no, carina,” he said, not unkindly. “There will be no telling.”
She reflected.
“Cesare, truly, what have you eaten to-day?”
“Your chestnuts.”
She was turning out her pocket the next moment and pressing a five lire note upon him.
“Blessed Virgin, that it should be so bad as that! But the saints themselves sent me out with this in my pocket. Cesare, caro, you shall! For Angelo, for Angelo!”
He had pushed it away with almost violence, but at this appeal looked down at it, and his hand hesitated. Peppina saw her advantage.
“The child must be hungry, and it is so bad for a child to be hungry. Take it, take it!”
He caught her wrist.
“Peppina, swear. Is it your own?”
“Is it my own! Whose else should it be? Yes, yes, yes, I tell you!”
He drew a long breath.
“I had begun to think of a pan of charcoal. There seemed nothing else, only there were one or two affairs I wanted to have arranged first.”
“Now you will get food?”
“Yes.”
“For you both. Promise.”
“I promise.”
The Sant’ Angelo gun boomed out, and all the church bells began to clang. Peppina stood still.
“I must go,” she said, “A rividerti.” She wanted to say that the Cianchetti could not have done so well for him, but she was afraid, and hurried away down the Venti Settembre. She swung along, her heart full of Cesare, and hot tears in her eyes. “He has so many enemies, this Englishman and all,” she cried vehemently, “and only me on his side. A pan of charcoal! Oh, it would kill me! What should I have done if the signora had not given me that money for the washing? Madonna santissima, I will carry a candle to thee at Sant’ Agostino this very day.” So she went on with her thoughts, a medley of passionate love, jealousy, and fear, until she reached the hotel and went upstairs. At the door of the Maxwell’s sala she paused. “I shall say I lost it,” she remarked cheerfully. “Madonna santissima,twocandles!”