Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal was buried in a side chapel of the church of San Miniato al Monte, and his counterfeit presentment, wrought in stone, lies on the tomb Rossellino made for him. Rossellino, who loved to carve garlands of acanthus and small sweetamorini, has conferred immortality on some of the men whose tombs he adorned inbasso-rilièvo, and they are remembered because of him; but the cardinal has another claim. He is beautiful in himself as he rests there, his young face set in the peace that passes all understanding, his thin hands folded on his breast.
Mourners were kneeling in the central aisles of the church, and women carrying wreaths passed through it on their way to the Campo Santo beyond, for this was the day of All Souls, and there were fresh flowers on the new graves, and little black lamps were lit on those that were grass grown and decked only with the bead blossoms that are kept in glass cases and need not be changed once a year. The afternoon was passing, but still Olive lingered by the cardinal’s monument. Looking at him understandingly she saw thatthere had been lines of pain about the firm mouth. He had suffered in his short life, he had suffered until death came to comfort him and give him quiet sleep. The mother-sense in her yearned over him, lying there straight and still, with closed eyes that had never seen love; and, womanlike, she pitied the accomplished loneliness that yet seemed to her the most beautiful thing in the world. The old familiar words were in her mind as she looked down upon this saint uncanonised: “Cleanse the thoughts of my heart by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit!” and she remembered Astorre, for whose sake she had come to this church to pray. Once when she had been describing a haggard St Francis in the Sienese gallery to him, he had said: “Ah, women always pity him and admire his picturesque asceticism, but if married men look worried they do not notice it. Their troubles are no compliment to your sex.”
Poor Astorre had not been devout in any sense, but he had written his friend a long letter on the day after Gemma’s suicide, and he had asked for her prayers then. “Fausto told me how you knelt there in the street beside the dead Odalisque and said the Pater-noster and the Miserere. Perhaps you will do as much for me one day. Your prayers should help the soul that is freed now from the burden of the flesh. I cannot complain of flesh myself, but my bones weigh and Ishall be glad to be rid of them. Come and see me soon,carissima...”
The next morning his mother sent for the girl, but when she came into the darkened room where he lay he had already passed away.
“He asked for you, but he would not see a priest. You know they refused to bury his father because he fought for united Italy. Ah! Rome never forgets.”
After the funeral Signora Aurelia had sold her furniture and gone away, and she was living now with a widowed sister in Rome. The Menotti had left Siena too and had gone to Milan, and Olive, not caring to stay on alone in the place where everyone knew what had happened, had come to the Lorenzoni in Florence. She had had a letter from Carmela that morning.
“We like Milan as the streets are so gay, and the shops are beautiful. We should have got much better mourning here at Bocconi’s if we could have waited, but of course that was impossible. Our apartment is convenient, but small and rather dark. Maria hopes you are fatter. She is going to send you somepanforteand a box of sugared fruits at Christmas.La Ziahas begun to crochet another counterpane; that will be the eighth, and we have only three beds.Pazienza!It amuses her.”
Though Olive was not happy at the Palazzo Lorenzoni, she could not wish that she hadstayed with her cousins. She felt that their little life would have stifled her. Thinking of them, she saw them, happier than before, since poor Gemma had not been easy to live with, and quite satisfied to do the same things every day, waddling out of a morning to early mass and the marketing, eating and sleeping during the noon hours, and in the evenings going to hear the musicin piazza.
Olive was not happy. She was one of those women whose health depends upon their spirits, and of late she had felt her loneliness to be almost unbearable. Her youth had cried for all, or nothing. She would have her love winged and crowned; he should come to her before all the world. Never would she set her foot in secret gardens, or let joy come to her by hidden ways, but now she faced the future and saw that it was grey, and she was afraid.
It seemed to her that she was destined to live always in the Social Limbo, suspended between heaven and earth, an alien in the drawing-room and not received in the kitchen. One might as well bedéclasséeat once, she thought, and yet she knew that that must be hell.
If Avenel came to Florence and sought her out would she be weak as Gemma had been, light as Mamie was? Olive knelt for a while on the stones, and her lips moved, though her prayer was inarticulate.
Sunset was burning across the Val d’Arno, and the river flowed as a stream of pure gold under the dark of the historic bridges. Already lights sparkled in the windows of the old houses over the Ponte Vecchio, and the bells of all the churches were ringing the Ave Maria as she passed through the whining crowd of beggars at the gate of the Campo Santo and went slowly down the hill. The blessed hour of peace and silence was over now, and she must trudge back through the clamorous streets to be with Mamie, to meet the Marchese’s horribly observant eyes, and to be everlastingly quiet and complacent and useful. She was paid for that.
She was going up to her room when the lodge porter ran up the stairs after her with a letter. “For you, signorina.”
It was from Edna.
“Dear Olive”—she had written,—“I could not wait for trains so papa has hired a car, and we shall motor straight to Genoa and catch the boat there. I want to go home to America pretty badly.—Your loving friend,“Edna.“P.S.—I am still right down glad you told me.—E. M.”
“Dear Olive”—she had written,—“I could not wait for trains so papa has hired a car, and we shall motor straight to Genoa and catch the boat there. I want to go home to America pretty badly.—Your loving friend,
“Edna.
“P.S.—I am still right down glad you told me.—E. M.”
One of the servants came to Olive’s room presently.
“La Signora Marchesa wishes to see you at once in her boudoir.”
The Marchesa had come straight from the motor to her own room, her head was still swathed in a white veil, and she had not even taken off her heavy sable coat. She had switched on the light on her entrance, and now she was searching in the drawers of her bureau for her cheque-book.
“Ah, well, gold perhaps,” she said after a while, impatiently, as she snapped open the chain purse that hung from her wrist. “Is that you, Miss Agar?”
Olive, seeing her counting out her money, like the queen in the nursery rhyme, had stopped short near the door. She paled a little as she understood this must be the sequel to what she had done, but she held her head high, and there was a light of defiance in the blue eyes.
“I have to speak to you very seriously.”
The Marchesa, a large woman, was slow and deliberate in all her movements. She took her place on a brocaded settee with the air of a statue of Juno choosing a pedestal, and began to draw off her gloves. “I greatly regret that this should be necessary.” She seemed prepared to clean Augean stables, and there was something judicial in her aspect too, but she did not look at Olive. “You know that I took you into my house on the recommendation of the music-teacher, SignoraGiannini. It was foolish, I see that now. It has come to my knowledge that you had no right to enter here, no right to be with my daughter.” She paused. “You must understand perfectly what I mean,” she said impressively.
“No, I do not understand,” the girl said. “Will you explain, Marchesa?”
“Can you deny that you were involved in a most discreditable affair in Siena before you came here? That your intrigue—I hate to have to enter into the unsavoury details, Miss Agar, but you have forced me to it—that your intrigue with your cousin’sfiancédrove her to suicide, and that you were obliged to leave the place in consequence?”
“It is not true.”
“Ah, but your cousin killed herself?”
“Yes.”
“Her lover was in the house at the time, and you were there too?”
“Yes.”
“You were at the theatre the night before and everyone noticed that he paid you great attention?”
“He? Oh,” cried Olive, “how horrible, and how clever!”
The hard grey eyes met hers for a moment.
The girl’s pale face was flushed now with shame and anger. “So clever! Will you congratulate the Prince for me, Marchesa?” she said very distinctly.
“You are impertinent. Of course, I cannot keep you. My daughter—”
The Marchesa saw her mistake as she made it and would have passed on, but Olive was too quick for her. She smiled. “Your daughter! I do not think I can have harmed her.”
“You can take your money; I have left it there for you on the bureau. Please pack your boxes and be off as soon as possible.”
“I am to leave to-night? It is dark already, and I have no friends in Florence.”
The Marchesa shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t help that,” she said.
Olive went slowly out into the hall, and stood there hesitating at the head of the stairs. She scarcely knew what to do or where to turn, but she was determined not to stay longer than she could help under this roof. She went down to the porter’s lodge in the paved middle court.
“Gigia!”
The old woman came hobbling out to greet her with a toothless smile. “Ah,bella signorina, there are no more letters for you to-night. Have you come to talk to me for a little?”
“I am going away,” the girl answered hurriedly. “Will your husband come in to fetch my luggage soon? At eight o’clock?”
Gigia laid a skinny hand on Olive’s arm, and her sharp old eyes blinked anxiouslyas she said, “Where are you going,nina mia?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not to the Prince?”
“Good heavens! No!”
“Ah, thepadronais hard—and you are pretty. I thought it might be that, perhaps. Don Filippo is like his old wolf of a father, and young lambs should beware of him.”
“Can you tell me of some quiet, decent rooms where I can go to night?”
“Sicuro!My husband’s brother keeps the Aquila Verde, and you can go there. Giovanni will give you his best room if he hears that you come from us, and he will not charge too much. I am sorry you are going,cara.”
Olive squeezed her hand. “Thank you, Gigia. You are the only one I am sorry to say good-bye to. I shall not forget you.”
The Marchese was coming down the stairs as Olive went up again. He smiled at her as he stood aside to let her pass. “You are late, are you not? I shall not tell tales but I hope for your sake that my wife won’t see you.”
“She won’t see me again. I am going,” she answered.
He would have detained her. “One moment,” he said eagerly, but she was not listening. “I shall miss you.”
After all she heard him. “Thank you,” she said gravely.
A door was closed on the landing below, and the master of the house glanced at it apprehensively. He was not sure—
The Aquila Verde was the oldest of the tall houses in the narrow Vicolo dei Donati; the lower windows were barred with iron worn by the rains of four hundred years, and there were carved marble pillars on either side of the door. The façade had been frescoed once, and some flakes of colour, red, green and yellow, still adhered to the wall close under the deep protecting eaves.
“It was a palace of the Donati once,” the host explained to Olive as he set a plate of steaming macaroni swamped in tomato sauce before her.
“I thought it might have been a convent, because of the long paved corridors and this great room that is like a refectory.”
“No, the Donati lived here. Dante’s wife, Gemma, perhaps. Who knows!”
Ser Giovanni took up a glass and polished it vigorously with the napkin he carried always over his arm before he filled it with red Chianti. He had never had a foreigner in his house before, but he had heard many tales about them from the waiters in the great Anglo-American hotels on the Lung’Arno, and he knew that they craved for warmthand an unlimited supply of hot water and tea. Naturally he was afraid of them, and he was also shy of stray women, but Olive was pretty, and he was a man, and moreover a Florentine, and his brother had come with her and had been earnest in his recommendations, so he was anxious to please her. “There is nodolceto-night,” he said apologetically. “But perhaps you will take an orange.”
When Olive went up to her room presently she found a great copper jar of hot water set beside the tiny washstand. The barred window was high in the thickness of the stone wall and the uncarpeted floor was of brick. The place was bare and cold as a cell, but the bed, narrow and white as that of Mary Mother in Rossetti’s picture, invited her, and she slept well. She was awakened at eight o’clock by a young waiter who brought in her coffee and rolls on a tray. She was a little startled by his unceremonious entrance, but it seemed to be so much a matter of course that she could not resent it. He took the copper jar away with him. “Thepadronesays you will want some more water,” he said smilingly.
“Yes. But—but if you bring it back you can leave it outside the door.”
The coffee was not good, but it was hot, and the rolls were crisp and delicious, and Olive ate and drank happily and with an excellent appetite. No more listening to mangled scales and murdered nocturnes and sonatas, no moreinterminable meals at which she must sit silent and yet avoid “glumness,” no more walking at Mamie’s heels.
She was free!
Presently she said to herself, more soberly, that nevertheless she must work somehow to gain her livelihood. Yes, she must find work soon. The Aquila Verde would shelter and feed her for six lire a day. Her last month’s salary of eighty lire had been paid her four days ago, and she had already spent more than half of it on things she needed, new boots, an umbrella, gloves, odds and ends. This month’s money had been given her last night, and she had left a few lire for the servant who had always brought up her dinner to her room, and had made Gigia a little present. The cabman had bullied her into giving him two lire. She had about one hundred remaining to her. Sixes into one hundred.... Working it out carefully on the back of an old envelope she found that she might live on her means for sixteen days, and then go out into the streets with four lire in her pocket—no, three, since she could scarcely leave without giving amanciato the young man whom she now heard whistling “Lucia” in the corridor.
“The hot water, signorina.”
“A thousand thanks.”
Surely in a few days she would find work. It occurred to her that she might advertise. “Young English lady would give lessons.Terms moderate. Apply O. A., Aquila Verde.” She wrote it out presently, and took it herself to the office of one of the local papers.
“I have saved fifteen centesimi,” she thought as she walked rather wearily back by the long Via Cavour.
Three days passed and she was the poorer by eighteen lire. On Sunday she spent the morning at the Belle Arti Gallery. Haggard saints peered out at her from dark corners. Flora smiled wistfully through her tears; she saw the three strong archangels leading boy Tobias home across the hills, and Angelico’s monks and nuns meeting the Blessed Ones in the green, daisied fields of Paradise, and for a little while she was able to forget that no one seemed to want English lessons.
On Monday she decided that she must leave the Aquila Verde if she could find anyone to take her for four, or even three lire a day. She went to Cook’s office in the Via Tornabuoni; it was crowded with Americans come for their mails, and she had to wait ten minutes before one of the young men behind the counter could attend to her.
“What can I do for you?”
“Can you recommend me to a very cheappension?”
She noticed a faint alteration in his manner, as though he had lost interest in what she was saying, but when he had looked at her again he answered pleasantly, “There is Vinella’s inthe Piazza Indipendenza, six francs, and there is another in the Via dei Bardi, I think; but I will ask. Excuse me.”
He went to speak to another clerk at the cashier’s desk. They both stared across at her, and she fancied she heard the words, pretty, cheap enough, poor.
“There is a place in the Via Decima kept by a Frau Heylmann. I think it might suit you, and I will write the address down. It is really not bad and I can recommend it as I am staying there myself,” he added ingenuously. He seemed really anxious to help now, and Olive thanked him.
As she went out she met Prince Tor di Rocca coming in. Their eyes met momentarily and he bowed. It seemed strange to her afterwards when she thought of it, but she fancied he would have spoken if she had given him an opportunity. Did he want to explain, to tell more lies? She had thought him too strong to care what women thought of him once they had served him and been cast aside. True, she was not precisely one of these.
The Via Decima proved to be one of the wide new streets near the Porta San Gallo. No. 38 was a pretentious house, a tenement building trying to look like a palace, and it was plastered over with dingy yellow stucco. Olive went through the hall into a courtyard hung with drying linen, and climbed up an outside iron staircase to the fifth floor. Therewas a brass plate on the Frau’s door, and Canova’s Graces in terra cotta smirked in niches on either side. The large pale woman who answered the bell wore a grey flannel dressing-gown that was almost buttonless, and her light hair was screwed into an absurdly small knot on the nape of her neck.
“You want to be takenen pension? Come in.”
She led the way into a bare and chilly dining-room; the long table was covered with black American cloth that reminded Olive of beetles, but everything was excessively clean. There was a framed photograph of the Kaiser on the sideboard. In a room beyond someone was playing the violin.
“How many are you in family?”
“I am alone.”
The Frau looked down at the gloved hands. “You are not married?”
“No.”
The woman hesitated. “You would be out during the day?”
“Oh, yes,” Olive said hopefully. “I shall be giving lessons.”
“Ah, well, perhaps— What would you pay?”
“I am poor, and I thought you would say as little as possible. I should be glad to help you in the house.”
“There is a good deal of mending,” the Frau said thoughtfully; “and you might cleanyour own room. Shall we say twenty-four lire weekly?”
The playing in the other room ceased, and a young man put his head in at the door. “Mutter,” he said, and then begged her pardon, but he did not go away.
Olive tried not to look at him, but he was staring at her and his eyes were extraordinarily blue. He was pale, and his wide brows and strong cleft chin reminded her of Botticelli’s steel-clad archangel. He wore his smooth fair hair rather long too, in the archangelic manner, he—
“Paid in advance,” Frau Heylmann said very sharply. Then she turned upon her son. “What do you want, Wilhelm?”
“Oh, I can wait,” he said easily.
She snorted. “I am sorry I cannot receive you,” she said to the girl. “I am not accustomed to have young women in my house. No.”
She waddled to the door and Olive followed her meekly, but she could not keep her lips from smiling. “I do not blame you,” she said as she passed out on to the landing. “Your son is charming.”
The woman looked at her more kindly now that she was going. “He is beautiful,” she said, with pride. “Some day he will be great.Ach!You should hear him play!”
Olive laughed. “You would not let me.”
She could not take this rebuff seriously, butas she trudged the streets in the thin cold rain that had fallen persistently all that morning her sense of humour was blunted by discomfort. The long dark, stone-paved hall that was the restaurant of the Aquila Verde seemed cold and cheerless. At noon it was always full of hungry men devouring macaroni andvitello alla Milanese, and the steam of hot food and the sound of masticating jaws greeted Olive as she came in and took her place at a little table near the stove.
The young waiter, Angelo, brought her a cup of coffee after the cheese and celery. “It gives courage,” he said. “And I see you need that to-day, signorina.”
Olive saw thepadroneof the Aquila Verde that night before she went to her room and told him she was leaving.
His face fell. “Signorina! I am sorry! I told Angelo to bring hot water every time, always, when you rang. Have you not been well served?”
She reassured him on that point and went on to explain that she was going to live alone. “I have made arrangements,” she added vaguely. “A man will come with a truck to take my box away to-morrow morning.”
And thepadronewas too much a man of his world to ask any more questions.
There had been no rooms vacant in thepensionin Piazza Indipendenza. The manservant who answered the door had recommended an Italian lady who took paying guests, and Olive had gone to see her, but her rooms were small, dark and dingy, and they smelt overpoweringly of sandal wood and rancid oil. The shabbily-smartpadronahad been voluble and even affectionate. “I am so fond of the English,” she said. “My husband is much occupied and I am often lonely, but we shall be able to go out together and amuseourselves, you and I. I had been hoping to get an invitation to go to theTrecentoball at the Palazzo Vecchio, but Luigi cannot manage it. Never mind! We will go to all theVeglioni. I love dancing.” She looked complacently down at her stubby little feet in their down-at-heel beaded slippers.
Olive had been glad to get away when she heard the impossible terms, but the afternoon was passing, and when she got to the house in the Via dei Bardi she saw bills of sale plastered on its walls and a litter of straw and torn paper in the courtyard. The porter came out of his lodge to tell her that one of the daughters had died.
“They all went away, and the furniture was sold yesterday.”
As Olive had never really wished to live and eat with strangers she was not greatly depressed by these experiences, but she was cold and tired, and her head ached, and when on her way back to the Aquila Verde she saw a card, “Affitasi, una camera, senza mobilia,” in the doorway of one of the old houses in the Borgo San Jacopo, she went in and up the long flight of steep stone stairs without any definite idea of what she wanted beyond a roof to shelter her.
A shrivelled, snuffy old woman showed her the room. It was very large and lofty, and it had two great arched windows that looked out upon the huddled roofs of Oltr’Arno.The brick floor was worn and weather-stained, as were the white-washed walls.
“It was aloggia, but some of the arches have been filled in and the others glazed. Ten lire a month, signorina. As to water, there is a good fountain in the courtyard.”
Olive moved in next day.
Heaven helps those who help themselves, she thought, as she borrowed a broom from her landlady to sweep the floor. The morning was fine and she opened the windows wide and let the sun and air in. At noon she went down into the Borgo and bought friedpolentafor five soldi and a slice of chestnut cake at the cook shop, and filled her kettle with clear cold water from the fountain in the courtyard.
Later, as she waited for the water to boil over her little spirit lamp, she made a list of absolute necessaries. She had paid a month’s rent in advance, and fifty-three lire remained to her. Fifty-three lire out of which she must buy a straw mattress, a camp-stool, two blankets, some crockery and soap.
She went out presently to do her shopping and came back at dusk. She was young enough to rather enjoy the novelty of her proceedings, and she slept well that night on the floor, pillowless, and wrapped in her coarse brown coverings; and though the moon shone in upon her through the unshuttered windows for a while she did not dream or wake until the dawn.
Olive tried very hard to get work in the days that followed, and she went twice to the registry office in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.
“Ah, you were here before.” A stout woman came bustling out from the room behind the shop to speak to her the second time. “There is nothing for you,signorina mia. The ladies who come here will not take anyone without a character, and a written reference from Milan or Rome is no good. I told you so before. Last winter Contessa Foscoli had an English maid with a written character—not from us, I am glad to say—and she ran away with the chauffeur after a fortnight, and took a diamond ring and the Contessa’s pearls with her. If you cannot tell me who you were with last I shall not be able to help you.”
“The Marchesa Lorenzoni,” Olive said.
The woman drew in her breath with a hissing noise, then she smiled, not pleasantly. “Why did you not say so before? I have heard of you, of course. The little English girl! Well, I can’t help you, my dear. This is a registry office.”
Olive walked out of the shop at once, but she heard the woman calling to someone in the room at the back to come and look at her, and she felt her cheeks burning as she crossed the road. “The little English girl!” What were they saying about her?
One morning she went into one of theEnglish tea-rooms. It was kept by two elderly maiden ladies, and one of them came forward to ask her what she wanted. The Pagoda was deserted at that hour, a barren wilderness of little bamboo tables and chairs, tea-less and cake-less. The walls were distempered green and sparsely decorated with Japanese paper fans, and Olive noticed them and the pattern of the carpet and remembered them afterwards as one remembers the frieze, the engravings, the stale periodicals in a dentist’s waiting-room.
“Do—do you want a waitress?”
The older woman’s face changed. Oh, that change! The girl knew it so well now that she saw it ten times a day.
“No. My sister and I manage very well, and we have an Italian maid to do the washing up.”
“Thank you,” Olive said, faltering. “You don’t know anyone who wants an English girl? I have been very well educated. At least—”
“I am afraid not.”
Poor Olive. She was an unskilled workwoman, not especially gifted in any way or fitted by her upbringing to earn her daily bread. Long years of her girlhood had been spent at a select school, and in the result she knew a part of the Book of Kings by heart, with the Mercy speech from theMerchant of Veniceand the date of the Norman Conquest. Every day she bought theFieramosca, andshe tried to see the other local papers when they came out. Several people advertised who wanted to exchange lessons, but no one seemed inclined to pay. Once she saw names she knew in the social column.
“The Marchese Lorenzoni is going to Monte Carlo, and he will join the Marchesa and Miss Whittaker in Cairo later in the season.”“Prince Tor di Rocca is going to Egypt for Christmas.”
“The Marchese Lorenzoni is going to Monte Carlo, and he will join the Marchesa and Miss Whittaker in Cairo later in the season.”
“Prince Tor di Rocca is going to Egypt for Christmas.”
It was easy to read between the lines.
Florence, in the great days of the Renaissance, bore many men whom now she delights to honour, and Ugo Manelli was one of these. He helped to build a bridge over the Arno, he had his palace in the Corso frescoed by Masaccio, he framed sumptuary laws, and he wrote sonnets, charming sonnets that are still read by the people who care for such things. The fifth centenary of his birthday, on the twenty-eighth of November, was to be kept with great rejoicings therefore. There were to be fireworks and illuminations of the streets for the people, and aTrecentocostume ball at the Palazzo Vecchio for those who had influence to procure tickets and money to pay for them.
Mamie, greatly daring, proclaimed her intention of wearing the “umile ed onesto sanguigno” of Beatrice.
“You will be my Dante, Don Filippo? Momma is going in cloth of gold as Giovanna degli Albizzi.”
The Marchese looked inquiringly at the Prince. “Shall you add to the gaiety of nations, or at least of Florence?”
The young man shrugged his broad shoulders.“I suppose so.” He was well established ascavalier serventenow in the Lorenzoni household, and it was understood that Mamie would be a princess some day. The girl was so young that the engagement could scarcely be announced yet.
“I guess we must wait until you are eighteen, Mamie,” her mother said. “Keep him amused and don’t be exacting or he’ll quit. He is still sore from his jilting.”
“I can manage him,” the girl boasted, but she had no real influence over him now. The forbidden fruit had allured him, but since it was his for the gathering it seemed sour—as indeed it was, and he was not the man to allow himself to be tied to the apron-strings of a child. When he was in a good humour he watched his future wife amusedly as she metaphorically and sometimes literally danced before him, but he discouraged the excess of audacity that had attracted him formerly, perhaps because he scarcely relished the idea of a Princess Tor di Rocca singing, “O che la gioia mi fè morir.”
Probably he regretted gentle, amenable Edna. At times he was grimly, impenetrably silent, and often he said things that would have wounded a tender heart past healing. Fortunately there were none such in the Palazzo Lorenzoni.
“I shall be ridiculous as the Alighieri, and you must forgive me, Mamie, if I say that onescarcely sees in you a reincarnation of Monna Beatrice.”
“Red is my colour,” the girl answered rather defiantly.
The Marchese laughed gratingly.
Filippo dined with the Lorenzoni on the night of the ball. He wore the redlucco, but had declined to crown himself with laurel. His gaudy Muse, however, had no such scruples, and her black curls were wreathed with silver leaves. The Prince was not the only guest; there was a slender, flaxen-haired girl from New York dressed after Botticelli’s Judith, an artillery captain as Lorenzo dei Medici, and another man, a Roman, in the grey of the order of San Francesco.
“Poppa left for Monte this morning,” Mamie explained over the soup. “He reckoned dressing up was just foolishness, but the fact is armour is hot and heavy, and he would have had to pass from trousers into greaves. He has not got the right kind of legs for parti-coloured hosen, someway.”
The Piazza della Signoria was crowded as it had been on that dreadful May day when Girolamo’s broken body was burnt to ashes there; as it was on the afternoon of the Pazzi conspiracy, when a bishop was hanged from one of the windows of the old Palazzo. But the old order had changed, giving place to new even here, and the people had come now merely to see the fine dresses; there was nothought of murder, though there might be some picking of pockets. The night was still and cold, and the white, round moon that had risen above the roof of the Loggia dei Lanzi shone, unclouded, upon the restless human sea that divided here and there to let the carriages and motors pass. The guests entered by the side door nearest the Uffizi, andcarabinierikept the way clear. The crowd was dense thereabouts, and the people pushed and jostled one another, leaned forward, and stood on tiptoe to see the brocaded ladies in their jewelled coifs and the men, hooded and strange, in their gay mediæval garb.
The Marchesa’s cloth of gold drew the prolonged “Oh!” of admiration that is only accorded to the better kind of fireworks, and hearing it, she smiled, well satisfied. Mamie followed with Filippo. Her dress of rose-coloured brocade was exquisite. It clung to her and seemed to be her one and only garment; one could almost see the throb of her heart through the thin stuff. She let her furred cloak fall as she got out of the car and then drew it up again about her bare arms and shoulders.
“Who is the black-curled scarlet thing?”
“Beatrice.”
“What! half naked! She is more like one of thedonninein theDecameron.”
Her Dante, overhearing, hurried her up thesteps. His eyes were bright with anger in the shadow of his hood, but they changed and darkened as he caught sight of one girl’s face in the crowd. At the foot of the grand staircase he turned, muttering some excuse and leaving Mamie and her mother to go up alone, and hurried back and out into the street. He stood aside as though to allow some newcomers to pass in. The girl he had come to see was close to him, but she was half hidden behind acarabiniere’sbroad epauletted shoulders.
“Scusi,” murmured the Prince as he leant across the man to pull at her sleeve. “I must see you,” he said urgently. “When? Where?”
“When you like,” she answered, but her eyes were startled as they met his. “No. 27 Borgo San Jacopo. The only door on the sixth landing.”
“Very well. To-night, then, and in an hour’s time.”
The press of incoming masqueraders screened them. Thecarabiniereknew the Prince by sight, and he listened with all his might, but they spoke English, and he dared not turn to stare at the girl until the tall figure in the redluccohad passed up the steps and gone in again, and by that time she had slipped away out of sight.
Filippo came to the Borgo a little before midnight and crossed the dingy threshold ofNo. 27 as the bells of the churches rang out the hour. The old street was quiet enough now but for the wailing of some strayed and starving cats that crept about the shadowed courts and under the crumbling archways, and the departing cab woke strange echoes as it rattled away over the cobble stones.
The only door on the sixth landing was open.
“What are you doing here?” Filippo said, wonderingly, as he groped his way in. The room was in utter darkness but for one ray of moonlight athwart it and the faint light of the stars, by which he saw Olive leaning against the sill of one of the unshuttered windows, and looking, as it seemed, towards him.
“Come in,” she said. “You need not be afraid of falling over the furniture. There is not much.”
“You seem partial to bare attics.”
“Ah! you are thinking of my room in the Vicolo dei Moribondi.”
“Yes!” he said as he came towards her from the door. “I cannot rest, I cannot forget. For God’s sake tell me about the end! I have been to Siena since I heard, but I dared not ask too many questions. Was she—did she suffer very much before she died? Answer me quickly.”
“Throw back your hood,” she said. “Let me see your face.”
Impatiently he thrust the folds of white and scarlet away and stood bare-headed. She saw that his strong lips quivered and that his eyes were contracted with pain.
“No, she died instantly. They said at the inquest that it must have been so.”
“Her face—was she—” his voice broke.
“I did not see it. It was covered by a handkerchief,” she said gently. “Don’t! Don’t! I did not think you would suffer so much.”
“I suffer horribly day and night. Love is the scourge of the world in the hands of the devil. That is certain. She is buried near the south wall of the Campo Santo. Oh, God! when I think of her sweet flesh decaying—”
Olive, scarcely knowing what she did, caught at his hand and held it tightly.
“Hush, oh, hush!” she said tremulously. She felt as though she were seeing him racked. “I do believe that her soul was borne into heaven, God’s heaven, on the day she died. She was forgiven.”
“Heaven!” he cried. “Where is heaven? I am not guilty of her death. She was a fool to die, and I shall not soon forgive her for leaving me so. If she came back I would punish her, torment her, make her scream with pain—if she came back—oh, Gemma!—carissima—”
The hard, hot eyes filled with tears. He tried to drag his hand away, but the girl held it fast.
“You are kind and good,” he said presently in a changed voice. “I am sorry if I did you any harm with the Lorenzoni, but the woman told me she meant to send you away in any case because of the Marchese.”
Then, as he felt the clasp of her fingers loosening about his wrist, “Don’t let go,” he said quickly. “Is he really going to take you to Monte Carlo with him?”
“Does his wife say so? Do you believe it?”
He answered deliberately. “No, not now. But you cannot go on living like this.”
“No.”
He was right. She could not go on. Her little store of coppers was dwindling fast, so fast that the beggars at the church doors would soon be richer than she was. And she was tired of her straits, tired of coarse food and a bare lodging, and of the harsh, clamorous life of the streets. The yoke of poverty was very heavy.
Filippo drew a little nearer to her. “I could make you love me.”
“Never.”
He made no answer in words but he caught her to him. She lay for a moment close in his arms, her heart beating on his, before she cried to him to let her go.
He released her instantly. “Well?”
“I must light the lamp,” she said unsteadily. She was afraid now to be alone with him in thedim, starlit room, and she fumbled for the matches. He stood still by the window waiting until the little yellow flame of thelucernaburnt brightly on the floor between them, then he smiled at her, well pleased at her pallor. “You see it would be easy,” he said.
She answered nothing.
“I am going to Naples to-morrow by the afternoon train. Will you come with me? We will go where you like from there, to Capri, or to Sicily; and you will help me to forget, and I will teach you to live.”
There was silence between them for a while. Olive stared with fascinated eyes at this tall, lithe man whose redlucco, falling in straight folds to his feet, became him well. The upper part of his face was in shadow, and she saw only the strong lines of the cleft chin, and the beautiful cruel lips that smiled at her as though they knew what her answer must be.
She was of those who are apt to prefer one hour of troubled joy to the long, grey, eventless years of the women who are said to be happy because they have no history, and it seemed to her that the moment had come when she must make a choice. This love was not what she had dreamed of, longed for; other lips, kinder and more true, should have set their seal on her accomplished womanhood. She knew that this that was offered was a perilous and sharp-edged thing, a bright sheath thatheld a sword for her heart, and yet that heart sang exultantly as it fluttered like a wild bird against the bars of its cage. It sang of youth and life and joy that cares not for the morrow.
It sang.
Filippo watched her closely and he saw that she was yielding. Her lips parted, and instinctively as he came towards her she closed her eyes so nearly that he saw only a narrow line of blue gleaming between her lashes. But as he laid his hands upon her shoulders something awoke within her, a terror that screamed in her ears.
“I am afraid,” she said brokenly. “Leave me and come back to-morrow morning if you will. I cannot answer you now.”
As he still held her she spoke again. “If I come to you willingly I shall be more worth having, and if you do not go now I will never come. I will drown myself in the Arno.”
“Very well. I will come to-morrow.”
When he was gone she went stumblingly across the room to the mattress on the floor in the farthest corner, and threw herself down upon it, dressed as she was.
There was no more oil in the little lamp, and its flame flickered and went out after a while, leaving her in the dark. The clocks were striking two. Long since the moon had set behind the hills and now the stars were fading, or so it seemed. There was no light anywhere.
Olive did not sleep. Her frightened thoughts ran to and fro busily, aimlessly, like ants disturbed, hither and thither, this way and that. He could give her so much. Nothing real, indeed, but many bright counterfeits. For a while she would seem to be cared for and beloved. Yes, but if the true love came she would be shamed. She knew that her faith in Dante’s Amor, his lord of terrible aspect, made his coming possible. The men and women who go about proclaiming that there is no such person because they have never seen him were born blind. Like those prosy souls who call the poets mad, they mistake impotence for common sense.
Besides, the first step always costs so dear, and now that he was gone and she could think of him calmly she knew that she was afraid of Filippo Tor di Rocca. He was cruel. Then among the forces arrayed against him there was the desire of that she called her soul to mortify her flesh, to beckon, to lead by stony ways to the heights of sacrifice. She could not be sure where that first step would lead her, she could not be sure of herself or gauge the depths to which she might fall.
“Oh, God!” she said aloud. “Help me! Don’t let things be too difficult.”
The hours of darkness were long, but the grey glimmering dawn came at last with a pattering of rain against the uncurtainedwindow. Olive rose as soon as it was light, and before eight she had eaten the crust of bread she had saved for her breakfast and was gone out. On her way down the stairs she met her landlady and spoke to her.
“If anyone comes to see me will you tell them that I have gone out, and that I do not know when I shall come in again. And if anything is said about my going away you can say that I have changed my mind and that I shall not leave Florence.”
She would not cross the river for fear of meeting Filippo in any of the more-frequented streets on the other side, so she went down the Via della Porta Romana and out by the gates into the open country beyond. She walked for a long time along muddy roads between the high walls of vineyards and olive orchards. She had an umbrella, but her skirts were draggled and splashed with mire and the water came through the worn soles of her thin shoes. She had nothing to eat and no money to buy food. There were some coppers in her purse, but she had forgotten to bring that. It was windy, and as she was toiling up the steep hill to Bellosguardo her umbrella blew inside out. She threw it down by the side of the road and went on, rather glad to be rid of it and to feel the rain on her face. She had two hands now to hold her skirt and that was better. Soon after noon she knocked at the door of a gardener’s cottage and asked for somethingto eat; she was given a yellow lump ofpolentaand a handful of roast chestnuts and she sat down on a low wall by the roadside to devour them. She did not think much about anything now, she could not even feel that she cared what happened to her, but she adhered to the resolution she had made to keep out of the way until Tor di Rocca had left Florence. She could not sit long. It was cold and she was poorly clad, so poorly that the woman in the cottage had believed her to be a beggar. The Prince would have had to buy her clothes before he could take her away with him.
She wandered about until nightfall and then made her way back to the house in the Borgo, footsore and cold and wretched, but still the captain of her soul; ragged, but free and in no man’s livery.
The landlady heard her coming slowly up the stairs and came out of her room to speak to her.
“A gentleman called for you this morning. I told him you were gone out and that you had changed your mind about leaving Florence, and at first he seemed angry, and then he laughed. ‘Tell her we shall meet again,’ he said. Then another came this afternoon in an automobile and asked if you lived here, and when I said you were out he said he would come again this evening. He left his card.”
Olive looked at it with dazed eyes. Her pale face flushed, but as she went on up the stairs the colour ebbed away until even her lips were white. She had to rest twice before she could reach her own landing, and when she had entered her room she could go no farther than the door. She fell, and it was some time before she could get up again, but she still held the card crumpled in her hand.
“Jean Avenel.”
The Villa Fiorelli is set high among the olive groves above the village of Settignano. There are Medicean balls on a shield over the great wrought-iron gates, and the swarthy splendid banker princes appear as the Magi in the faded fresco painting of the Nativity in the chapel. They have knelt there in the straw of the stable of Bethlehem for more than four hundred years. Thenobiliof Florence were used to loiter long ago on the terrace in the shade of the five cypresses, and women, famous or infamous, but always beautiful, listened to sonnets said and songs sung in their honour in the scented idleness of the rose garden. The villa belonged first to handsome, reckless Giuliano, the lover of Simonetta and others, and the father of a Pope, and when the dagger thrusts of the Pazzi put an end to his short life his elder brother and lord, Lorenzo, held it for a while before he sold it to the Salviati. So it passed through many hands until at last Hilaire Avenel bought it and filled it with the books and armour that he loved. There were Spanish suits, gold-chased, in the hall, Moorish swords and lances, and steel hauberks on the staircase, and strayarquebuses, greaves and gauntlets everywhere. They were all rather dusty, since Hilaire was unmarried; but he was well served nevertheless. He was not a sociable person, and no Florentine had ever partaken of a meal with him, but it was currently reported that he sat through a ten-course dinner every night of his life, crumbling the bread at the side of his plate, and invariably refusing to partake of nine of the dishes that were handed in form by the old butler.
“It’s real mean of your brother to keep his lovely garden shut up all through the spring,” the Marchesa Lorenzoni had said once to Jean, and he had replied, “Well, it is his.”
That seemed final, but the present Marchesa and late relict of Jonas P. Whittaker of Pittsburg was not so easily put off. She was apt to motor up to Settignano more than once in the May month of flowers; the intractable Hilaire was never at home to her, but she revenged herself by multitudinous kind inquiries. He was an invalid, but he disliked to be reminded of his infirmities almost as much as he did most women and all cackle about the weather.
Jean lived with him when not playing Chopin at the ends of the earth, and when the two were together the elder declared himself to be perfectly happy. “I only want you.”
“And your first editions and your Cellini helmet.”
When Jean came back from his American tour his brother was quick to notice a change in him, and when on the day after his Florentine concert he came in late for a dinner which he ate in silence, Hilaire spoke his mind. They were together in the library. Jean had taken a book down from the shelves but he was not reading it.
“Bad coffee.”
“Was it?”
Hilaire was watching his brother’s face. It seemed to him that there were lines in it that he had not seen before, and the brown eyes that gazed so intently into the fire were surely very tired.
He began again rather awkwardly. “You have been here a week, Jean.”
“Yes.”
“Did the concert go off well?”
“Oh, well enough. As usual.”
“You went away alone in the Itala car before nine this morning and you came back scarcely an hour ago. What is the matter? Is there some new trouble? Jean, dear man, I am older than you; I have only you. What is it?”
Jean reached out for his tobacco pouch. “Hilaire,” he said very gravely, after a pause, which he occupied in filling his pipe. “You remember I asked you to do anything, anything, for a girl named Olive Agar. You have never heard from her or of her?”
“Never.”
“Ah,” he sighed, “I have been to Siena. There was some affair—early in September she came to Florence, to the Lorenzoni of all people in the world.”
Hilaire whistled.
“Yes, I know,” the younger man said gloomily, as though he had spoken. “That woman! What she must have suffered in these months! Well, she left them suddenly at the beginning of November.”
“Where is she now?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.”
“Why did she leave Siena?”
“There was some trouble—a bad business,” he answered reluctantly. “She lived with some cousins, and one of them committed suicide. She came away to escape the horror and all the talk, I suppose.”
“Ah, I need not ask why she left the Lorenzoni woman. No girl in her senses would stay an hour longer than she could help with her.”
“Hilaire, I think I half hoped to see her at the concert yesterday. When I came on the platform I looked for her, and I am sure I should have seen her in that crowd if she had been there. She is different, somehow. I played like a machine for the first time in my life, I think, and during the interval the manager asked me why I had not given the nocturne that was down on the programme.I said something about a necessary alteration at the last moment, but I don’t know now what I did play. I was thinking of her. A girl alone has a bad time in this world.”
“You are going to find her? Is she in love with you?”
Jean flushed. “I can’t answer that.”
“That’s all right. What I really wanted to know was if you cared for her. I see you do. Oh, Lord!” The older man sighed heavily as he put down his coffee-cup. “I wish you would play to me.”
Jean went into the music-room, leaving the folding doors between open, and sat down at the piano. There was no light but the moon’s, and Hilaire saw the beloved head dark against the silvery grey of the wall beyond. The skilled hands let loose a torrent of harmonies.
“Damn women!” said Hilaire, under cover of the fortissimo.
He spent some hours in the library on the following day re-arranging and dusting his books, lingering over them, reading a page here and there, patting their old vellum-bound backs fondly before he returned them to their shelves. They absorbed him, and yet the footman bringing in his tea on a tray heard him saying, “I must not worry.”
Jean had always come to him with his troubles ever since he was a child, and the worst of all had been brought about by a woman. That was years ago now. Hilairehad been away from England, and he had come back to find his brother aged and altered—and married.
They had got on so well together without women in these latter years that Hilaire had hoped they might live and die in peace, but it seemed that it was not to be. Jean had gone out again in the car to look for his Olive. Well, if she made him happy Hilaire thought they might get on very well after all. But he had forebodings, and later, he sat frowning at the white napery and glittering glass and silver reflected in the polished walnut wood of his well-appointed table, and he refused soup and fish with unnecessary violence. Jean loved this girl and she could make him happy if she would, but would she? She was evidently not of a “coming-on disposition”; she was good, and Jean was, unfortunately, still married to the other.
It had been raining all day. The wind moaned in the trees and sighed in the chimney, and now and again the blazing logs on the hearth hissed as drops fell on them from above.
“There is a good fire in the signorino’s dressing-room, I hope. He has been out all day, and it is so stormy that—”
“The signorino has come in,eccellenza. He—he brought a lady with him. She seemed faint and ill, and I sent for the gardener’s wife to come and look after her. I have given herthe blue room, and the housekeeper is with her now. She was busy with the dinner when she first came.” The old butler rubbed his hands together.
“I hope I did right,” he said after a pause.
Hilaire roused himself. “Oh, quite right, of course. She will want something to eat.”
“I have sent up a tray—”
“Ah, when?”
“He—here he is.”
The old man drew back as Jean came in. “I am sorry to be late, Hilaire.”
“It does not matter.”
Thereafter both sat patiently waiting for the end of a dinner that seemed age-long. When, at last, they were alone Jean rose to his feet; he was very pale and his brown eyes glittered.
“Did Stefano tell you? I have found her and brought her here.”
“Oh, she has come, has she?”
“You think less of her for that. Ah, you will misjudge her until you know her. Wait.”
He hurried out of the room.
Hilaire stood on the hearth with his back to the fire. He repeated his formula, but there was a not unkindly light in his tired eyes, and when presently the door was opened and the girl came in he smiled.
The club foot, of which he was nervously conscious at times, held him to his place, but she came forward until she was close to him.
“You are his brother,” she began. “I—what a good fire.”
She knelt down on the bear skin and stretched her hands to the blaze. Hilaire noticed that she was excessively thin; the rose-flushed cheeks were hollow and the curves of the sweet cleft chin too sharp. He looked at her as she crouched at his feet; the nape of the slim neck showed a very pure white against the shabby black of her dress, there were fine threads of gold in the soft brown tangle of her hair.
Jean was dragging one of the great armchairs closer.
“You are cold,” he said anxiously. “Come and sit here.”
She rose obediently.
“Have you had any dinner?” asked Hilaire.
“Yes; they brought me some soup in my room. I am not hungry now.”
She spoke very simply, like a child. Jean had rifled all the other chairs to provide her with a sufficiency of cushions, and now he brought her a footstool.
“I think I must take my shoes off,” she said. “So cold—you see they let the water in, and—”
“Take them off at once,” ordered Hilaire, and he watched, still with that faint smile in his eyes, as Jean knelt to do his bidding.
“That’s very nice,” sighed the girl. “Inever knew before that real happiness is just having lots to eat and being warm.”
The two men looked at each other.
“I have often wondered about you,” she said to Hilaire presently. “Your eyes are just like his. I think if I had known that I should have had to come before; but you see I promised Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal—in San Miniato—that I would not. What am I talking about?” Her voice broke and she covered her face with her hands.
“Oh, my God!” Jean would have gone to her, but his brother laid a restraining hand on his arm.
“Leave her alone,” he said. “She will be all right to-morrow. It’s only excitement, nervous exhaustion. She must rest and eat. Wait quietly and don’t look at her.”
Jean moved restlessly about the room; Hilaire, gravely silent, seemed to see nothing.
So the two men waited until the girl was able to control her sobs.
“I am so sorry,” she said presently. “I have made you uncomfortable; forgive me.”
“Will you take a brandy-and-soda if I give it you?”
“Yes, if you think it will do me good.”
Hilaire limped across to the sideboard. He was scarcely gone half a minute, but when he came back with a glass of the mixture he had prescribed he saw his brother kneelingat the girl’s side, his arms about her, his face hidden in the folds of her skirt.
“Jean! Get up!” he said very sharply. “Pull yourself together.”
Olive sat stiffly erect; her swollen, tear-stained lids hid the blue eyes, her pale, quivering lips formed words that were inaudible.
Hilaire ground his teeth. “Get up!”
After a while the lover loosed his hold; he bent to kiss the girl’s feet; then he rose and went silently out of the room. Hilaire listened for the closing of another door before he rang the bell.
For some days and nights Olive lived only to eat and sleep. When she woke it was to hear a kind old voice urging her to take hot milk or soup, to see a kind old face framed in white hair set off by black lace lappets; and yet whenever she closed her eyes at first she was aware of a passionate aching echo of words said that was sad as the sound of the sea in a shell. “I love you—I love you—” until at last sleep helped to knit up the ravelled sleave of care.
Every morning there were fresh roses for her.
“The signorino hopes you are better.”
“Oh, much better, thank you.” And after a while a day came when she felt really strong enough to get up. She dressed slowly and came down and out on to the terrace. The crumbling stones of the balustrade were moss-grown, as was the slender body of the bronze Mercury, poised for flight and dark against the pale illimitable blue of the December sky. Hilaire Avenel never tried to make Nature neat; the scarlet leaves of the Virginia creeper came fluttering down and were scattered onthe worn black and white mosaic of the pavement; they showed like fire flickering in the sombre green of the cypresses. Beyond and below the garden, the olive and ilex woods, and the steep red roofs of Settignano, lay Florence, a city of the plain, and wreathed in a delicate mist. There was the great dome of Santa Maria dei Fiori; the tortuous silver streak that was Arno, spanned by her bridges; there was Giotto’s tower, golden-white and rose golden, there the campanile of the Badia, the grim old Bargello, and the battlemented walls of the Palazzo Vecchio; farther still, across the river, the heights of San Miniato al Monte, Bellosguardo, and Mont’ Oliveto, cypress crowned.
Two white rough-coated sheep-dogs came rushing up the steps from the garden to greet Olive with sharp barks of joy, and Hilaire was not slow to follow. Olive still thought him very like his brother, an older and greyer Jean.
“I have been so looking forward to showing you the garden,” he said hurriedly in his kind eagerness to put her at her ease. “There are still a few late chrysanthemums, and you will find blue and white violets in the grass by the sundial.”
They passed down the steps together and through the green twilight of the orange groves, and came to a little fountain in the midst of a space of lawn set about withlaurels. Hilaire threw a biscuit into the pool, and the dark water gleamed with silver and gold as the fish rushed at it.
“I flatter myself that all the living things in this garden know me,” he said. “I bar the plainer kinds of insects and scorpions, of course; but the small green lizards are charming, aren’t they?”
“Mamie Whittaker had one on a gold chain. She used to wear it sometimes.”
“She would,” he said drily. “The young savage! Better go naked than torture harmless things.”
“This place is perfect,” sighed Olive; and then, “You have no home in France?”
“We should have; but our great-grandfather was guillotined in Paris during the Terror, and his wife and child came to England. Years later, when they might have gone back they would not. Why should they? Napoleon had given the Avenel estates to one of his ruffians, who had since seceded to the Bourbon and so made all secure. Besides, they were happy enough. Marie Louis Hilaire gave music lessons, and the Marquise scrubbed and cooked and patched their clothes—she, who had been the Queen’s friend, and so they managed to keep the little home together. Presently the young man married, and then Jean Marie appeared on the scene. We have a picture of him at the age of five, in a nankeen frock and a frill. Ourmother was a Hungarian—hence Jean’s music, I suppose—and there is Romany blood on that side. These are our antecedents. You will not be surprised at our vagaries now?”
Olive smiled. “No, I shall remember the red heels of Versailles, English bread and butter, and the gipsy caravan.”
“Jean has fetched your books from the Monte di Pietà. Marietta found the tickets in your coat pocket. You don’t mind?”
Looking at her he saw her eyes fill with tears, and he hurried on: “No rubbish, I notice. Are you fond of reading?”
“Yes.”
“I was wondering if you would care to undertake a work for me.”
“I should be glad to do anything,” she said anxiously.
“I have some thousands of books in the villa. Those I have collected myself I know—they are all in the library—but there are many that were left me by my father, and others that came from an uncle, and they are all piled up in heaps in the empty rooms on the second floor. I want someone to sort them out, catalogue, and arrange them for me. Would you care to do it?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“That’s all right then,” he said hastily. “I’ll get a carpenter in at once to put up some more shelves ready for them. And I think you had better stay on in the villa, if youdon’t mind. It will be more convenient. The salary will be two hundred lire a month, paid in advance.”