“You have sent me a tea equipage fit for an empress! It is perfect, and I do not know how to thank you. Yes. I forgive you for writing. Have I really helped you to play? I am so glad. You say Chopin, so I suppose it is the piano? I must tell you that I remember all the stories you told me of Siena, and they add to the interest of my days. I give English lessons, and am making enough money to keep myself, but in the intervals of grammar and ‘I Promessi Sposi’ (no less than three of my pupils are translating that interminable romance into so-called English) I study the architecture of the early Renaissance in the old narrow streets, and gaze upon Byzantine Madonnas in the churches. The Duomo is an archangel’s dream, and I like to go there with my cousins and steep my soul in its beauty while they say their prayers and fan themselves. One of them is pretty and she hates me; the other two are stout and kind and empty-headed, and their aunt is nothing—a large, heavy nothing—”
“You have sent me a tea equipage fit for an empress! It is perfect, and I do not know how to thank you. Yes. I forgive you for writing. Have I really helped you to play? I am so glad. You say Chopin, so I suppose it is the piano? I must tell you that I remember all the stories you told me of Siena, and they add to the interest of my days. I give English lessons, and am making enough money to keep myself, but in the intervals of grammar and ‘I Promessi Sposi’ (no less than three of my pupils are translating that interminable romance into so-called English) I study the architecture of the early Renaissance in the old narrow streets, and gaze upon Byzantine Madonnas in the churches. The Duomo is an archangel’s dream, and I like to go there with my cousins and steep my soul in its beauty while they say their prayers and fan themselves. One of them is pretty and she hates me; the other two are stout and kind and empty-headed, and their aunt is nothing—a large, heavy nothing—”
Olive laid down her pen. “What will he think if I write him eight pages? That I wantto begin a correspondence? I do, but he must not know it.”
She tore her letter up into small pieces and wrote two lines on a sheet of note-paper.
“Thank you very much for your kind present and for what you say. Of course I forgive you ... and I shall not forget.—Yours sincerely,“Olive Agar.”
“Thank you very much for your kind present and for what you say. Of course I forgive you ... and I shall not forget.—Yours sincerely,
“Olive Agar.”
She went to the window and threw the torn scraps of the first letter out into the street, and then she sat down again and began to cry; not for long. Women who know how precious youth is understand that tears are an expensive luxury, and they are sparing of them accordingly. They suffer more in the stern repression of their emotions than do those who yield easily to grief, but they keep their eyelashes and their complexions.
Olive bathed her eyes presently and smoked a cigarette to calm her nerves. She was going out that evening to dine with her favourite pupil and his mother, and she knew they would be distressed if she looked ill or sad.
Aurelia de Sanctis had had troubles enough of her own. She had married a patriot, a man with a beautiful eager face and a body spent with disease, and a fever that never left him since the days when he lurked in the marshes of the Maremma, crouched in a tangle of wetreeds and rushes, and watching for the flash of steel in the sunshine.
Austrian bayonets ... he raved of them in his dreams, and called upon the names of comrades who had rotted in prisons or died in exile. His young wife nursed him devotedly until he died, leaving her a widow at twenty-seven. She had a small pension from the Government, and she worked at dressmaking to eke it out.
Her only child had grown up to be a hopeless invalid. He could not go to school, so he lay all day on the sofa by the window in the tiny sitting-room and helped his mother with her sewing. His poor little bony hands were very quick and dexterous.
In the evenings he read everything he could get hold of, books and newspapers. The professors from the University, who came to see him and were kind to him for his father’s sake, told each other that he was a genius and that his soul was eating up his frail body. They wondered, pitifully, what poor Signora Aurelia would do when—
The mother was hopeful, however. “He takes such an interest in everything that I think he must have a strong vitality though he seems delicate,” she said.
He had expressed a wish to learn English, and when Signora Aurelia first heard of Olive she wrote asking her to come and see her. The De Sancti lived a little way outside the Porta Romana, on the edge of the hill and outside thetown, and Maria advised her cousin not to go there.
“It is so far out on a hot dusty road, and you will grow as thin and dry as an old hen’s drumstick if you walk so much. And I know the signora is poor and will not be able to pay well.”
Olive went, nevertheless. Signora Aurelia herself opened the door to her and showed evident pleasure at seeing her. The poor woman had been beautiful, and now that she was worn by time and sorrow she still looked like a goddess, exiled to earth, and altogether shabby—a deity in reduced circumstances—but none the less divinely fair and kind. Her great love for her child had so moulded her that she seemed the very incarnation of motherhood. So might Ceres have appeared as she wandered forlornly in search of her lost Persephone, gentle, weary, her fineness a little blunted by her woes.
“Are you the English signorina? Come in! My son will be so pleased,” she said as she led the girl into the room where Astorre was working at embroidery.
Olive saw a boy of seventeen sewing as he lay on the sofa. There were some books on the floor within his reach, and a glass of lemonade was set upon the window-sill, but he seemed quite absorbed in making fine stitches. He looked up, however, as they came in and smiled at his mother.
“I have nearly finished,” he said.“Presently I shall read the sonnet, ‘Pace non trovo, e non ho da far guerra,’ to refresh myself.”
“This is the signorina who teaches English,nino mio.”
His face lit up at once and he held out his hand. “I have already studied the grammar, but the pronunciation ... ah! that will be hard to learn. Will you help me, signorina?”
“Yes, indeed I will. We will read and talk together, and soon you will speak English better than I can Italian.”
As she spoke and smiled her heart ached to see the hollowness of his cheeks and the lines of pain about his young mouth. She guessed that his poor body was all twisted and deformed under the rug that covered it. Signora Aurelia took her out on to their little terrace garden before she left. Twenty miles and more of fair Tuscan earth lay at their feet, grey olive groves and green vineyards, and the hills beyond all shimmering in the first heat of spring. Olive exclaimed at the beauty of the world.
“Yes. On summer evenings Astorre can lie here and watch what he calls the pageant of the skies. The poor child is so fond of colour. I know you will be very patient with him, signorina. He is so clever, but some days he is in pain, and then he gets tired and so cannot learn so well. You have kindly promised to come twice a week, but I must tellyou that I am not rich—” She looked at Olive wistfully.
The girl dared not offer to teach Astorre for nothing. “I can see your son will be a very good pupil,” she said hastily. “Would one lire the lesson suit you?”
“Oh, yes,” the signora said with evident relief. “But are you sure that is enough? You must not sacrifice yourself, my dear—”
“It will be a pleasure to come,” Olive said very sincerely.
The acquaintance soon ripened into a triangular friendship. The signora grew to love the girl because she amused Astorre and was never obviously sorry for him, or too gentle with him, as were some of the well-meaning people who came to see the boy. “An overflow of pity is like grease exuding,” he said once. “I hate it.”
He was very old for his years. He had read everything apparently, and he discussed problems of life and death with the air of a man of forty. He had no illusions about himself. “I shall die,” he said once to Olive when his mother was not in the room. “My father gave me a spirit that burns like Greek fire and a body like—like a spent shell.”
The easy, desultory lessons were often prolonged, and then the girl stayed to dinner and played dominoes afterwards with him or with his mother until ten o’clock, when old Carolina came to fetch her home. The withered little serving-woman was voluble, and alwayscheerfully ready to lighten the way with descriptions of the last moments of her children. She had had thirteen, and two were still surviving. “One grows accustomed,signorina mia—”
“You have been crying,” Astorre said abruptly.
Olive leant against the balustrade of the little terrace. She was watching the fireflies that sparkled in the dusk of the vineyards in the valley below. A breeze had risen from the sea at sunset, and it stirred the leaves of the climbing roses and brought a faint sound of convent bells far away. Some stars shone in the clear pale sky.
Dinner had been cleared away, and Signora Aurelia had gone in to finish a white dress she was making for a bride. Olive had offered to help her. “I would rather you amused yourself with Astorre. I can see you are tired,” she had answered as she left them together.
“You have been crying,” the boy repeated insistently.
She smiled at him then. “May I not shed tears if I choose?”
“I must know why,” he answered.
“Oh, a castle in Spain.”
He looked at her searchingly. “And a castellan?”
“Yes. I want a man, and I cannot have him.Ecco!”
She did not expect him to take her seriously,but he was often perversely inclined. “Of course,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “all women want a man or men. Do you think I have been lying here all these years without finding that out? That need is the mainspring of life, the key to heaven, and the root of all evil. If—if I were different someone would want me—” His voice broke.
Olive looked away from him. “How still the night is,” she said. “The nightingales are singing in the woods below, Astorre. Do you hear them?”
“I am not deaf,” he answered in a muffled voice, “I hear them. Will you hear me?”
Watching her closely he saw that she shrank from him. “Do not be afraid,” he said gruffly. “I am not going to be a fool. No man on earth is worth your tears. That is all I wanted to say.”
“Ah, child, you are young for all your wisdom. I was not sorry for him but for myself.”
“Liar!” he cried petulantly, and then caught at her hand. “Forgive me! Come now and read me a sonnet of your Keats and then translate it to me.”
Obediently she stooped to pick up the book. The flame of the little lamp on the table at his side burned steadily.
He lay with closed eyes and lips that moved, repeating the words after her. “It is very good to listen to your voice while you are here with me alone under the stars,” he saidpresently. “Tell me, does this man love you?”
She was silent.
“Does he love you?”
“I think he did, but perhaps he has forgotten me now.”
“I love you,” the boy said deliberately.
“I cannot come again if you talk like this, Astorre.”
“I shall never say it again,” he answered, “but I want you to remember that it is so, because it may comfort you. Such words never come amiss to women. They feed on the hunger of our hearts.”
“Don’t say that!” she cried. “It is true that I like you to be fond of me, and I love you. In the best way, Astorre—oh, do believe that it is the best way!”
“With your soul, I suppose? Do you think I am an angel because I am a cripple?” he asked bitterly.
“I am sorry—”
“Poor little girl,” he said more gently, “I have hurt you instead of comforting you, as I meant to do. But how can I give what is not mine? How can I cry ‘Peace,’ when there is no peace? You will suffer still when I am at rest.”
The boy’s mother put down her work presently and came out to them, and the three sat silently watching the moon rise beyond the hills. It was as though a veil had been withdrawn to show the glimmer of distant streams,the white walls of peasant dwellings set among their vines, the belfry tower of an old Carthusian monastery belted in by tall dark cypresses, and the twisted shadows thrown by the gnarled trunks and outstanding roots of the olive trees.
“All blue and silver,” cried the girl after a while. “Thank God for Italy!”
“She has cost her children dear,” the elder woman answered, sighing. “Beyond that rampart of hills lies the Maremma, and swamps, marshes, forests are to be drained now, they say, and made profitable. You will see some peasants from over there in our streets at the time of the Palio. Poor souls! They are so lean and haggard and yellow that their bones seem to be piercing through their discoloured skins.”
“The Palio! I think Signor Lucis is coming to Siena to see it,” Olive said.
“Is that the man your cousin Gemma is to marry?” the dressmaker asked curiously. “I had heard that she was engaged, but one hears so many things. Do you like her?”
“Not very much, but really I see very little of her. I am out all day teaching.”
The door-bell clanged as the girl rose to go. “That is Carolina come for her stray sheep,” she said, smiling. “They will not believe that I can come home by myself at night.”
“They are quite right. If your aunt’s servant did not come for you I should take you back to the Piazza Tolomei myself.”
“You forget that I am English.”
Olive never attempted to explain her code; she stated her nationality and went on her way. Her first pupils had all been young girls, but as it became known that she was really English her circle widened. The prior of a Dominican convent near San Giorgio, and two privates from a regiment of Lancers stationed in the Fortezza, came to her to be taught, and some of Astorre’s friends, students at the University, were very anxious for lessons, and as the Menotti refused to have them in their house Olive had to hire a room to receive them.
The aunt disapproved. “It is not right,” she said, and when Olive assured her that she could not afford to lose good pupils she shook her large head.
“You will go your own way, I suppose, but do not bring your men here. I cannot have soldiers scratching up the carpet with their spurs, or monks dropping snuff on it.”
Olive’s days were filled, and she, having no time for the self-tormentings of idle women, was content to be not quite unhappy. She needed love and could not rest without it, and she was at least partially satisfied. Astorre and his mother adored her, thought her perfect, held her dear. All her pupils seemed to like her, and some of the students brought her little gifts of flowers, and packets of chocolate and almond-rock that Maria ate for her. The prior gave her a plaster statuette of StCatherine. “She was clever, and so are you,” he said.
“Carmela, I am not reallyantipatica?”
“What foolishness! No.”
“Why does Gemma hate me then? No one else does, or if they do they hide it, but she looks daggers at me always.”
Carmela had been invited to tea in her cousin’s bedroom. The water did not boil yet, but her mouth was already full of cake.
“What happened the other night when Gemma let you in?” she mumbled.
“Did she say anything to you?”
“No, but I am not blind or deaf. You have not spoken to each other since.”
Olive lifted the kettle off the spirit lamp. “You like it weak, I know.”
“Yes, and three lumps of sugar. Tell me what happened,cara.”
“Well, as I came up the stairs that night I noticed a strong scent of tobacco—good tobacco. Sienese boys smoke cheap cigarettes, and the older men get black Tuscan cigars, but this was different. It reminded me of— Oh, well, never mind. When I came to the first landing I felt sure there was someone standing close against the wall waiting for me to go by, and yet when I spoke no one answered. You know how dark it is on the stairs at night. I could not see anything, but I listened, and, Carmela, a watch was ticking quite near me, by my ear. I could not move for a moment, and then I heard Carolinacalling—she was with me, you know, but she had gone up first—and I got up somehow. Gemma let us in. She said she had been asleep, and I noticed that her hair was all loose and tumbled. I told her I fancied there was someone lurking on the stairs, and she said it must have been the cat, but I knew from the way she said it that she was angry. She lit her candle and marched off into her own room without saying good-night, and I was sorry because I have always wanted to be friends with her. I thought I would try to say something about it, so I went to her door and knocked. She opened it directly. ‘Go away, spy,’ she said very distinctly, and then I grew angry too. I laughed. ‘So there was a man on the stairs,’ I said.”
Carmela stirred her tea thoughtfully. “Ah!” she said. “How nice these spoons are. I wish you would tell me who gave them to you.”
She helped herself to another cake. “Gemma is difficult, and we shall all be glad when September comes and she is safely married. She is lazy. You have seen us of a morning, cutting out, basting, stitching at her wedding clothes, while she sits with her hands folded. Are you coming out with us this evening?”
The Menotti strolled down to the Lizza nearly every day after thesiesta, and Carmela often persuaded her cousin to accompany them. The gardens were set on an outlyingspur of the hill on which the wolf’s foster son, Remus, built the city that was to be fairer than Rome. The winter winds, coming swiftly from the sea, whipped the laurels into strange shapes, shook the brown seed pods from the bare boughs of the acacias, and froze the water that dripped from the Medicean balls on the old wall of the Fortezza. Even in summer a little breeze would spring up towards sunset, and the leaves that had hung heavy and flaccid on the trees in the blazing heat of noon would be stirred by it to some semblance of life, while the shadows lengthened, and the incessant maddening scream of the locusts died down into silence. The gardens were a favourite resort. As the church bells rang the Ave Maria the people came to them by Camollia and San Domenico, to see each other and to talk over the news of the day.
Smart be-ribboned nurses carrying babies on white silk cushions tied with pink or blue rosettes, young married women with their children, stout mothers chaperoning the elaborate vivacity of their daughters, occupied seats near the bandstand, or lingered about the paths as they chattered and fanned themselves incessantly to the strains of the Intermezzo fromCavalleria Rusticanaor some march of Verdi’s. A great gulf was fixed between the sexes on these occasions. The young men congregated about the base of Garibaldi’s statue; more or less gilded youthsdevoted to “le Sport,” wearing black woollen jerseys and perforated cycling shoes, while lady-killers braved strangulation in four-inch collars. There were soldiers too, cavalry lieutenants, slender, erect, and very conscious of their charms, and dark-faced priests, who listened to the music carefully with their eyes fixed on the ground, as being in the crowd but not of it. Olive watched them all with mingled amusement and impatience. If only the boys would talk to their friends’ sisters instead of eyeing them furtively from afar; if only the girls would refrain from useless needlework and empty laughter. They talked incessantly and called every mortal—and immortal—thingcarina. Queen Margherita wascarina, and so was the new cross-stitch, and so was this blue-eyed Olive. Yes, they admitted her alien charm. She wasstrana, too, but they did not use that word when she was there or she would have rejoiced over such an enlargement of their vocabulary.
“They are amiable,” she told Astorre, “but we have not one idea in common.”
“Ah,” he said, “can one woman ever praise another without that ‘but’? Do you think them pretty?” he asked.
“Yes, but one does not notice them when Gemma is there.”
“That is the pale one, isn’t it? I have heard of her from the students, and also from the professors of the University. One of myfriends raves about her Greek profile and her straight black brows. He calls her his silent Sappho, but I fancy Odalisque is a better name for her. There is no brain or heart, is there?”
“I don’t know,” she answered uncertainly. “She seldom speaks to anyone, never to me.”
“She is jealous of you probably.”
The heats of July tried the boy. He was not so well as he had been in the spring, and lately he had not been able to help his mother with her needlework. The hours of enforced idleness seemed very long, and he watched for Olive’s coming with pathetic eagerness. She never failed to appear on Tuesdays and Saturdays, though the lessons had been given up since his head ached when he tried to learn. Signora Aurelia met her always at the door with protestations of gratitude. “You amuse him and make him laugh, my dear, because you are so fresh, and you do not mind what you say. It is good of you to come so far in the sun.”
The girl’s heart ached to see the haggard young face so white against the dark velvet of the piled-up cushions. The deep grey eyes lit up with pleasure at the sight of her, but she found it hard to meet their yearning with a smile.
Sometimes she found old men sitting with him, grave and potent signiors, professors from the University, who, on being introduced, beamed paternally and asked her questionsabout Oxford and Cambridge. There were bashful youths too, who blushed when she entered and rose hurriedly with muttered excuses. If they could be induced to stay, Olive, seeing that it pleased Astorre to see them shuffling their feet and writhing on their chairs in an agony of embarrassment before her, did her best to make them uncomfortable.
“Your friends are all so timid,” she said. He looked at her with a kind of triumph, a pride of possession.
“They do not understand you as I do. Fausto admires you, but you frighten him.”
“Is he Gemma’s adorer?” she asked with a careful display of indifference.
“Yes, he is alwaysamoroso.”
“Ah! Does he smoke?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said. She did not really believe that the man on the stairs could have been Fausto. Gemma would not look twice at such a harmless infant now. When she was forty-five, perhaps, she might smile on boys, but at twenty-six—
Olive sat in her little bedroom correcting exercises.
It was the drowsy middle of the afternoon and the heat was intense. All the grey-green and golden land of Tuscany lay still and helpless at the mercy of the sun. The birds had long ceased singing, and only the thin shrilling of the locusts broke the August silence. The parched earth was pale, and great cracks that only the autumn rains could fill had opened on the hillsides, but the ripening maize lay snug within its narrow sheaths of green, and the leaves of the vines hid great bunches of purpling grapes. In the fields men rested awhile from their labours, and the patient white oxen stood in the shade of the mulberries, while the sunburnt lads who drove them bathed their tired bodies in the stream, or lay idly in the lush grass at the water’s edge.
In the town the walls of houses that had fronted the morning sun were scorching to the touch, and there was no coolness even in the steep northward streets that were always in shadow, or in the grey stone-paved courts of the palaces. There were few people about at this hour, and the little stream of traffic hadrun dry in the Via Cavour. A vendor of melons drew his barrow close up to the battered old column in the Piazza Tolomei, and squatted down on the ground beside it. “Cocomeri! Fresc’ e buoni!” he cried once or twice, and then rolled over and went to sleep. A peasant girl carrying a basket of eggs passed presently, and she looked wistfully at the fruit, but she did not disturb his slumbers.
“Is that the aunt of your friend’s mother? No, it is the sister of my niece’s governess.” Olive laid down her pen. She was only partially dressed and her hair hung loosely about her bare white shoulders. The heat made hairpins seem a burden and outer garments superfluous. “My niece’s governess is the last. Thank Heaven for that!” she said, and she sat down on the brick floor to take off her stockings. Gemma’sfidanzato, her lawyer from Lucca, was coming to Siena for a week. He would lodge next door and come in to the Menotti for most of his meals, and already poor old Carolina was busy in the hot, airless kitchen, beating up eggs for azabajone, and Signora Carosi had gone out to buy ice for the wine and sweet cakes to be handed round with little glasses ofvinSanto or Marsala.
Carmela came into her cousin’s room soon after four o’clock. “I have just taken Gemma a cup of black coffee. Her head aches terribly.”
“I heard her moving about her room in the night,” Olive answered, and she added, under her breath, “Poor Gemma!”
Carmela lowered her voice too. “Of course Maria and I know that you see what is going on as well as we do. There is some man ... she lets down a basket from her window at nights for letters, and I believe she meets him when my aunt thinks she has gone to Mass. It is dreadful. How glad we shall be when she is safely married and away.”
“Who is the man?”
“Hush! I don’t know. Do you hear the beating of a drum? One of theContradeis coming.”
The two girls ran to the window, and Olive opened the green shutters a little way that they might see out without being seen. The day of the Palio was close at hand, and the pages andalfieriof the rival parishes, whose horses were to run in the race, were already going about the town. Olive never tired of watching the flash of bright colours as the flags were flung up and deftly caught again, and she cried out now with pleasure as the little procession moved leisurely across the piazza.
“I wonder why they come here,” Carmela said, as the firstalfierolet the heavy folds of silk ripple about his head, twisted the staff, seemed to drop it, and gathered it to him again easily with his left hand. The page stoodaside with a grave assumption of the gilded graces of the thirteenth century. He was handsome in his dress of green and white and scarlet velvet.
“Why does he look up here?”
Olive laughed a little. “He is the son of the cobbler who mends my boots,” she whispered. “He is trying to learn English and I have lent him some books, and that is why he has come to do us honour. I think it is charming of him.”
She took a white magnolia blossom from a glass dish on her table. “Shall I be mediæval too?”
The boy raised smiling eyes as the pale flower came fluttering down to him. One of thealfierilaughed aloud.
“O Romeo, sei bello!”
“Son’ felice!” he answered, and he kissed the waxen petals ardently.
Olive softly clapped her hands together. “Is he not delicious! What an actor! Oh, Italy!”
Now that the performance was over thealfieristrolled across the piazza to the barrow that was still drawn up by the column. “Cocomeri! Fresc’ e buoni!”
“I never know what will please you,” Carmela said as she sat down. “But foreigners always like the Palio. You will see many English and Americans and Germans on the stands.”
“Yes, I love it all. Yesterday I passedthrough the Piazza del Campo and saw the workmen putting palings all about the centre, and hammering at the stands, while others strewed sand on the course and fastened mattresses to the side of the house by San Martino.”
“Ah, thefantiniare often thrown there and flung against the wall. If there were no mattresses ... crack!” Carmela made a sound as of breaking bones and hummed a few bars of Chopin’sMarche Funèbre.
Olive shuddered. “You are an impressionist, Carmela. Two dabs of scarlet and a smear—half a word and a shrug of the shoulders—and you have expressed a five-act tragedy. I think you could act.”
“Oh, I am not clever; I should never be able to remember my part.”
“You would improvise,” Olive was beginning, when Carmela sprang up and ran to the window again.
“It is Orazio!” she cried. “He has come in a cab.”
Thevetturinohad pulled his horse up with a jerk of the reins after the manner of his kind; the wretched animal had slipped and he was now beating it about the head with the butt end of his whip. His fare had got out and was looking on calmly.
Olive hastily picked up one of her shoes and flung it at them. It struck thevetturinojust above the ear. “A nasty crack,” she said. “His language is evidently frightful.It is a good thing I can’t understand it, Carmela.”
She looked down at the angry, bewildered men, and thevetturino, catching a glimpse of the flushed face framed in a soft fluff of brown hair, shook his fist and roared a curse upon it.
“Touch that horse again and I’ll throw a jug of boiling water over you,” she cried as she drew the green shutters to; and then, in quite another tone, “Oh, Giovanni, be good. What has the poor beast ever done to you?” She turned to Carmela. “I know him. His wife does washing for Signora Aurelia,” she explained.
A slow grin overspread the man’s heavy face as he rubbed his head.
“Mad English,” he said, and then looked closely at the coin the Lucchese had tendered him.
“Your legal fare,” Orazio began pompously.
“Santo Diavolo—”
“I am a lawyer.”
“Si capisce!Will you give the signorina her shoe?” He handed it to Orazio, who took it awkwardly.
“The incident is closed,” Olive said as she came back to her cooling tea. “I hope there is a heaven for horses and a hell for men. Oh, how I hate cruelty! Carmela, if that is Orazio I must say I sympathise with Gemma. How could any woman love a mean, narrow-shouldered, whitey-brown paper thing like that?”
“It is a pity,” sighed Carmela as she moved towards the door. “But after all they are all alike in the end. I must go now to help Maria lace. I pull a little, and then wait a few minutes.È un martirio!”
“Why does she do it?”
“Why does an ostrich bury its head in the sand? Why does a camel try to get through the eye of a needle? (But perhaps he does not.) I often tell her fat cannot be hidden, but she will not believe.”
When Olive went into thesalottoa few minutes before seven she found the family assembled. Signor Lucis rose from his place at Gemma’s side as the aunt uttered the introductory formula. He brought his heels together and bowed stiffly from the waist, and when Olive gave him her hand in English fashion he took it limply and held it for a moment before he dropped it. His string-coloured moustache was brushed up from a loose-lipped mouth, and he showed bad teeth when he smiled.
“The signorina speaks Italian?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ah, does she come from London?”
“I had no settled home in England.”
“Ah! The sun never shines there?”
She laughed. “Not as it does here,” she admitted. “Where is my shoe?”
“It was yours then?” he said with an attempt at playfulness. “Gemma has been quite jealous of the unknown owner, but shesays it is much larger than any of hers.” The girls’ eyes met but neither spoke, and Orazio babbled on, unheeding: “Her feet arecarini, and I can span her ankle with my thumb and forefinger; but you are small made too, signorina.”
Carolina poked her head in at the door. “Al suo comodo è pronto,” she said, referring to the dinner, and hurried away again to dish up the veal cutlets.
The young man contrived to remain behind in thesalottofor a moment and to keep Gemma with him. Olive looked at them as they took their places at table, and she understood that the girl had had to submit to some caress. She looked sick and her lips were quite white, and if Lucis had been a man of quick perceptions he would have realised, her face must have shown him, that she loathed him. He was dense, however, and though he commented on her silence later on it was evident that he attributed it to shyness.
Olive, thinking to do well, flung herself into the conversational breach. Her cousins had nothing to say, and the aunt’s thoughts were set on the dinner and cumbered with much serving. So she talked to him as in duty bound, and he seemed inclined to banter her.
Her feet, her temper, her relations withvetturini. He was execrable, but she would not take offence.
After dinner they all sat in the littlesalottountil it was time to go to the theatre, and stillOlive talked and laughed with Orazio, teaching him English words and making fun of his pronunciation of them. Gemma watched her sombrely and judged her by her own standards, and Carmela caught at her cousin’s arm presently as they passed down the crowded Via Cavour together.
“Why did you make her so angry? She will always hate you now. I did not know you werecivetta.”
Olive looked startled. “Angry? What do you mean?”
“Why did you speak so much to Orazio? Gemma thought you wanted to take her husband from her and she will not forgive.”
“Why, I could see it made her ill to look at him and that she shrank from his touch, and I did as I would be done by. I distracted his attention.”
Carmela laughed in spite of herself. “Oh, Olive, and I thought you were so clever. Do you not understand that one can be jealous of a man one does not love? I know that though I am stupid. All Italians are jealous. You must remember that.”
“I am sorry,” Olive said ruefully after a pause. “I see you are right. She will never believe that I wanted to help her. If only you could persuade her to give up Orazio. Surely the other man would come forward then. You and Maria talk of getting her safely married and away, but I see farther. There can be no safety in union with the wrong man—”
Carmela shook her head. “She wants a husband,” she said stolidly, “and Orazio will make a good one. You do not understand us, my dear. You can please yourself with dreams and fancies, but we are different.”
Olive was careful to sit down with Carmela on one side of their box on the second tier, leaving two chairs in front for thefidanzati, but the young man made several efforts to include her in the conversation and she understood that she had put herself in a false position. Orazio had misunderstood her because her manners were not the manners of Lucca, and he knew no others. It annoyed her to see that he plumed himself on his conquest, but her sense of humour enabled her to avoid his glances with a good grace, especially as she realised that she had brought them on herself.
She felt nothing but pity for her cousin now. It would be terrible to marry a man like that, she thought, and she wondered that so many women could rush in where angels feared to tread. She believed that there were infinite possibilities of happiness in the holy state of matrimony, but it seemed to her that perhaps the less said of some actualities the better.
Carmela was right. At this time she pastured on dreams and fancies. Her emotions were not starved, but they were kept down and only allowed to nibble. Shethought often of the man who had been kind to her, and sometimes she wished that he had kissed her. It would have been something to remember. Often, if she closed her eyes, she could almost cheat herself into believing him there close beside her, his brown gaze upon her, his lips quivering with a strange eagerness that troubled her and yet made her glad. Jean Avenel. It was a good name.
He had gone to America and she assured herself that he must have forgotten her, but she did not try to forget him. She nursed the little wistful sorrow for what might have been, as women will, and would not bind up the scratch he had inflicted. Already she had learned that some pain is pleasant, and that a stinging sweetness may be distilled from tears. Sometimes at night, when it was too hot to sleep and she lay watching the fine silver lines of moonlight passing across the floor, she asked herself if she would see him again, and when, and how, and wove all manner of cobweb fancies about what might be.
She ripened quickly as fruit ripens in the hot sunshine of Italy; her lips were more sweetly curved and coloured, and her blue eyes were shadowed now. They were like sapphires seen through a veil.
Maria gave her the opera-glasses and she raised them to scan the house. It was a gala night and the theatre was hung with flags and brilliantly illuminated. There were candleseverywhere, and the great chandelier that hung from the ceiling was lit. The heat was stifling, and the incessant fluttering of fans gave the women in theparterreand in the crowded boxes a look of unrest that was belied by their placid, expressionless faces. Many glanced up at the Menotti in their box. There was some criticism of Gemma’s Lucchese.
“He is ugly, but she could not expect to get a husband here where she is so well known. They say—”
“The Capuan Psyche and a rose from the garden of Eden,” said a man in the stage box, who had discerned Olive’s fresh, eager prettiness beyond the pale beauty of the Odalisque.
He handed the glasses to his neighbour. “Choose.”
“Therôleof Paris is a thankless one; it involved death in the end for the shepherd prince.”
“Yes, but you are not a shepherd prince.”
The man addressed was handsome as a faun might be and as a tiger is. Not sleek, but lean and brown, with hot, insolent eyes and a fine and cruel mouth. A great emerald sparkled on the little finger of his left hand. He was one of the few in the house who wore evening dress, and he was noticeable on that account, but he had been standing talking with some other men at the back of his box hitherto. He came forward now and Gemma saw him. Her set lips relaxed and seemed to redden as she met his bold, lifted gaze, but ashis eyes left hers and he raised his glasses to stare past her at Olive her face contracted so that for the moment she was almost ugly.
The performance was timed to begin at nine, but at twenty minutes past the hour newsvendors were still going to and fro with bundles of evening papers, and the orchestra was represented by a melancholy bald-headed man with a cornet. The other musicians came in leisurely, one by one, and at last the conductor took his place and the audience settled down and was comparatively quiet while the Royal March was being played. The orchestra had begun the overture toRigolettowhen some of the men who stood in the packed arena behind thepalchicried out and their friends in other parts of the house joined in. They howled like wolves, and for a few minutes the uproar was terrific, and Verdi’s music was overwhelmed by the clamour of voices until the conductor, turning towards the audience, said something inaudible with a deprecating bow and a quick movement of his hands.
“Ora, zitti!” yelled a voice from the gallery.
Silence was instant, and the whole house rose and stood reverently, listening to a weird and confused jumble of broken chords that yet could stir the pulses and quicken the beating of young hearts.
Olive had risen with the rest. “What is it?” she whispered to Maria.
“Garibaldi’s Hymn.”
It seemed a red harmony of rebellious souls, climbing, struggling, clutching at the skirts of Freedom. The patter of spent shot, the heavy breathing of hunted fugitives, the harsh crying of dying men, the rush of feet that stumbled as they came over the graves of the Past; all these sounds of bygone strife rang, as it were, faintly, beyond the strange music, as the sea echoes, sighing, in a shell.
Signora Aurelia had told Olive how in the years before Italy was free and united under the king, when Guiseppe Verdi was a young man, the students would call his name in the theatre until the house rang to the cry of “Viva Verdi! Viva Verdi!” A little because they loved their music-maker, more because V. E. R. D. I. meant Vittor Emanuele, Re D’Italia, and they liked to sing his forbidden praises in the very ears of the white-coat Austrians.
They had their Victor. Had he not sufficed? Olive knew that the authorities scarcely countenanced the playing of the Republican hymn. Was it because it made men long for some greater ruler than a king, or for no ruler at all? Freedom is more elusive even than happiness. Never yet has she yielded herself to men, though she makes large promises and exacts sacrifices as cruel as ever those of Moloch could have been. Her altars stream with blood, but she ... she is talking, or she is pursuing, or she is on a journey, or peradventure she sleepeth ... and herprophets must still call upon her and cut themselves with knives.
As the curtain went up Olive leant forward that she might see the stage. It was her first opera. Music is a necessity in Italy, but in England it is a luxury, and somehow she and her mother had never been able to afford even seats in the gallery at Covent Garden.
Now all her thoughts, all her fancies, were swept away in the flood of charming melody. The story, when she understood it, shocked and repelled her. It seemed strange that crime should be set to music, and that one should have to see abduction, treachery, vice, and a murder brutally committed in full view of the audience, while the tenor sang the lightest of all his lyrics: “La donna è mobile.”
Gemma asked for an ice during the secondentr’acte, and Orazio hurried out to get one for her at the buffet. The girl looked tired, but she was kind to her lover in her silent, languid way, listening to his whispered inanities, and allowing him to hold her hand, though her flesh shrank from the damp clamminess of his grasp, and she hated his nearness and wished him away.
The man who sat alone now in the stage box could see no flaw in her composure, and she seemed to him as perfectly calm as she was perfectly beautiful, though he had noticed that not once had she looked towards the stage. She kept her eyes down, and they were shadowed by the long black lashes. Ah, shewas beautiful! The man’s lean brown face was troubled and he sighed under his breath. He went out in the middle of the third act, and he did not come back again.
After a while Gemma moved restlessly. “Orazio,per carità! Your hand is so hot and sticky! I shall change places with Carmela,” she said. She released her fingers from the young man’s grasp with the air of one crushing a forward insect or removing a bramble from the path, and she actually beckoned to her sister to come.
Orazio flushed red and he seemed about to speak as Carmela rose from her seat, but the aunt interposed hurriedly.
“Sit still, Gemma, you are tired or you would not speak so. The lights hurt your eyes and make your head ache.”
“Yes, I am tired,” the girl said wearily. “I slept ill last night. Forgive me, Orazio, if I was cross. I am sorry.”
Her dull submission touched Olive with a sudden sense of pity and of fear, but Orazio was blind and deaf to all things written between the lines of life, and he could not interpret it.
“I do not always understand you,” he said stiffly, and he would not relax until presently she drew nearer to him of her own accord.
The Vicolo dei Moribondi is the narrowest of all the steep stone-paved streets that lead from the upper town to the market-place of Siena, and the great red bulk of the Palazzo Pubblico overshadows it. Olive had come that way once from the Porta Romana, and seeing the legend: “Affitasi una camera” displayed in the doorway of one of the shabby houses, had been moved to climb the many stairs to see the room in question.
It proved to be a veritable eyrie, large, bare, passably clean, and very well lighted. From the window she saw the hillside below the church of San Giuseppe, a huddle of red roofs and grey olive orchards melting into a blue haze of distance beyond the city walls, and the crowning heights of San Quirico. Leaning out over the sill of crumbling stone she looked down into the Vicolo as into a well.
The rent was very low, and the woman who had the room to let seemed a decent though a frowsy old soul, and so the matter was settled there and then, and Olive had left the house with the key of her new domain in her pocket.
She had bought a table and two chairs and a shelf for her books at a second-hand furniture shop near the Duomo, and had given her firstlesson there two days later, and soon the quiet place seemed more like home to her than the stuffy flat in the Piazza Tolomei. What matter if she came to it breathless from climbing five flights of stairs? It was good to be high up above the stale odours of the streets. The window was always open. There were no woollen mats to be faded or waxen fruits to be melted by the sun’s heat. A little plaster bust of Dante stood on the table, and Olive kept the flowers her pupils gave her, pink oleander blossoms and white roses from the terrace gardens, in a jar of majolica ware, but otherwise the place was unadorned.
“It is like a convent,” Carmela said when she came there with Maria and her aunt for an English tea-drinking.
Signora Carosi had sipped a little tea and eaten a good many of the cakes Olive had bought from thepasticceria. “The situation is impossible,” she remarked, as she brushed the crumbs off her lap.
“The stairs are a drawback,” Olive admitted, not without malice, “but fortunately my pupils are all young and strong.”
“You are English. I always say that when I am asked how I can permit such things. ‘What would you? She teaches men grammar alone in an attic. I cannot help it. She is English.’”
Gemma had been asked to come too on this occasion, but she had excused herself. She so often had headaches when the others weregoing out, and they would leave her lying down in her room. When they came back she was always up and better, and yet she seemed feverish and strange. Then sometimes of a morning, when Maria and the aunt had gone out marketing, and Carmela, shapeless and dishevelled in her white cotton jacket, was dusting or ironing, the beautiful idle sister would come out of her room, dressed for the street and carrying a prayer-book. Carmela would remonstrate with her. “You are not going alone?”
“Only to mass.”
On the morning of the fifteenth of August she did not go with the others to the parish church at six o’clock, but she was up early, nevertheless. She wrote a letter, and presently, having sealed it, she dropped it out of the window. A boy who had been lingering about the piazza since dawn, and staring up at the close-shuttered fronts of the tall houses, picked it up and ran off with it. When Maria and Carmela came back with their aunt soon after seven they drank their black coffee in the kitchen before going to their rooms to rest. Carolina took Olive’s breakfast in to her on a tray when they were gone. The English girl had milk with her coffee and some slices of bread spread with rancid butter. Gemma lay in wait for the old woman and stopped her as she came from the kitchen.
“Find out what she is going to do to-day,” she whispered.
Carolina nodded and her shrivelled monkey face was puckered into a smile. She came back presently. “She is going to the Duomo and then tocolazionewith the De Sancti. She will go with Signora Aurelia to see the Palio and only come back here to supper.”
Gemma went back to her room to finish her dressing. She put on a pink muslin frock and a hat of white straw wreathed with roses and leaves. Surely her beauty should avail to give her all she desired, light and warmth always, diamonds and fine laces, and silks to clothe her and give her grace, and the possession of the one man’s heart, with his name and a place in the world beside him. Surely she was not destined to live with Orazio and his tiresome mother, penned up in a shabby little house in Lucca, and there growing old and hideous. She sat before her glass thinking these thoughts and waiting until she heard Olive’s quick, light step in the passage and then the opening and shutting of the front door. Carolina was in the kitchen and the others had gone to lie down, but she went into the dining-room and listened for a moment there before she ventured into her cousin’s room. She had often been in to pry when alone in the flat, and she knew where to look for the key of the attic in the Vicolo. Olive always kept it in a corner of the table drawer and it was there now. Gemma smiled her rare slow smile as she put it in her purse. There was a photograph of her aunt—Olive’s mother—on the dressing-table,and a Tauchnitz edition of Swinburne’sAtalanta in Calydonlay beside it, the embroidered tassel of the marker being one of Astorre’s pitiful little gifts. She swept them off on to the floor and poured the contents of the ink-stand over them. She had acted on a spiteful impulse, and she was half afraid when she saw the black stream trickling over the book and blotting out the face of the woman who had been of her kin. It seemed unlucky, amalore, and she was vexed with herself. She looked into the kitchen on her way out. “Carolina, if they ask where I am I have gone to church.”
The old woman nodded. “Very well, signorina, but you are becoming too devout.Bada, figlia mia!”
Siena is a city dedicated to the Virgin, and the feast of her Assumption is the greatest of all her red-letter days. The streets had echoed at dawn to the feet ofcontadinicoming in by the Porta Romana, the Porta Camollia, the Porta Pespini. The oxen had been fed and left in their stalls; there was no ploughing in the fields on this day, no gathering of figs, no sound of singing voices and laughter in the vineyards. The brown wrinkled old men and women, the lithe, slender youths in their suits of black broadcloth—wood gods disguised by cheap tailoring—all had left their work and come many a mile along the dusty roads and across fields to the town for the dear Madonna’s sake, and to see the Palio. The country girls had all new dresses for theFerragostoand they strutted in the Via Cavour like little pigeons pluming themselves in the sunshine. They were nearly all pretty, and the flapping hats of Tuscan straw half hid and half revealed charming curves of cheek and chin, little tip-tilted noses, soft brown eyes. Many of the townsfolk were out too on this day of days and the streets were crowded with gay, vociferous people. There was so much to see. The old picture-gallery was free to all, and the very beggars might go in to see the sly, pale, almond-eyed Byzantine Madonne in their gilt frames, and Sodoma’s tormented Christ at the Pillar with the marks of French bullets in the plaster. All the palaces too were hung with arras, flags fluttered everywhere, church bells were ringing.
Gemma passed down a side street and went a little out of her way to avoid the Piazza del Campo, but she had to cross the Via Ricasoli, and the crowd was so dense there that she was forced to stand on a doorstep for a while before she could get by.
“What are they all staring at?” she asked impatiently of a woman near her.
“It is the horse of theMontone! They are taking him to be blessed at the parish church.”
The poor animal was led by thefantinowho was to ride him in the race, and followed by the page. He was small and lean and grey, with outstanding ribs and the dry scar of an old wound on his flank. The people eyed him curiously. “An ugly beast!” “Yes, butyou should see him run when the cognac is in him.”
Gemma began to be afraid that she would be late, and that He might find the door shut and go away again, and she pushed her way through the crowd and hurried down the Vicolo and into the house numbered thirteen. She was very breathless, being tightly laced and unused to so many stairs, and she stumbled a little as she crossed the threshold. She was glad to sit down on one of the chairs by the open window. The bare room no longer seemed conventual now that its unaccustomed air was stirred by the movement of her fan and tainted by the faint scent of her violet powder.
Outside, in the market-place, the country women were sitting in the shade of their enormous red and blue striped umbrellas beside their stalls of fruit, while the people who came to buy moved to and fro from one to the other, beating down prices, chaffering eagerly with little cries of “Per carità!” and “Dio mio!” shrugging their shoulders, moving away, until at last the peasants would abate their price by one soldo. A clinking of coppers followed, and the green peaches and small black figs would be pushed into a string bag with a bit of meat wrapped in a back number of theVedetta Senese, a half kilo ofpasta, and perhaps a tiny packet of snuff from the shop where they sell salt and tobacco and picture postcards of the Pope and La Bella Otero.
In the old days the scaffold and the gallows had been set up there, and the Street of the Dying had earned its name then, so many doomed wretches had passed down it from the Justice Hall and the prisons to the place of expiation. Weighed down by chains they had gone reluctantly, dragging their feet upon their last journey, trying to listen to the priest’s droning of prayers, or to see some friendly face in the crowd.
The memory of old sorrows and torments lay heavy sometimes here on those who had eyes to see and ears to hear the things of the past, and Olive was often pitifully aware of the Moribondi. Rain had streamed down their haggard faces, washing their tears away, the sun had shone upon them, dazzling their tired eyes as they turned the corner where the cobbler had his stall now, and came to the place from whence they might have their first glimpse of the scaffold. Poor frightened souls! But Gemma knew nothing of them, and she would have cared nothing if she had known. She was not imaginative, and her own ills and the present absorbed her, since now she heard the man’s step upon the stair.
“You have come then,” she cried.
He made no answer, but he put his arms about her, holding her close, and kissed her again and again.
“Filippo! Let me go! Let me breathe,carissimo! I want to speak to you.”
He did not seem to hear her. He had drawn the long steel pins out of her hat and had thrown the pretty thing down on the floor, and the loosened coils of shining hair fell over his hands as his strong lips bruised the pale, flower-like curves of her mouth.
Filippo had loved many women in the only way possible to him, and they had been won by his brutality and his insolence, and by the glamour of his name. The annals of mediæval Italy were stained with blood and tears because of the Tor di Rocca, and their loves that ended always in cruelty and horror, and Filippo had all the instincts of his decadent race. In love he was pitiless; no impulses of tenderness or of chivalry restrained him, and his methods were primeval and violent. Probably the Rape of the Sabines was his ideal of courtship, but the subsequent domesticity, the settling down of the Romans with their stolen wives, would have been less to his taste.
“Filippo!” Gemma cried again, and this time he let her go.
“You may breathe for one minute,” he said,looking at his watch. “There is not much time.”
He drew the chair towards the table and sat down. “Come!” he said imperatively, but she shook her head.
“Ah, Filippo, I love you, but you must listen. Did you see myfidanzatoin our box at the theatre last night?”
“Yes, and I am glad he is so ugly. I shall not be jealous. You must give me your address in Lucca,” he said coolly.
Her face fell. “You will let me marry him? You—you do not mind?”
He made a grimace. “I do not like it, but I cannot help it.”
“But he makes me sick,” she said tremulously. “I hate him to touch me.”
It seemed that her words lit some fire in him. His hot eyes sparkled as he stretched out his arms to her. “Ah, come to me now then.”
She stood still by the table watching him fearfully. “Filippo, I hoped—I thought you would take me away.”
“It is impossible. I cannot even see you again until after Christmas. It will be safer—better not. But in January I will come to Lucca, and then—”
He hesitated, weighing his words, weighing his thought and his desire.
“And then?” she said.
He looked at her closely, deliberately, divining the beauty that was half hidden fromhim. Her parted lips were lovely, and the texture of her white skin was satin smooth as the petals of a rose; there was no fault in the pure oval of her face, in the line of her black brows. He could see no flaw in her now, and he believed that she would still seem unsurpassably fair after a lapse of time.
“Then, if you still wish it, I will take you away. You shall have a villa at San Remo—”
“I understand,” she said hurriedly, and she covered her face with her hands.
She had hoped to be the Princess Tor di Rocca, and he had offered to keep her still as hisamica. Presently, if she wished it and it still suited him, he would set her feet on the way that led to the streets. “Then if you wish it—” To her the insult seemed to lie in the proposed delay. She loved him, and she had no love for virtue. She loved him, and if he had urged her to go with him on the instant she would have yielded easily. But she must await his convenience; next year, perhaps; and meanwhile she must go to Lucca, she must be married to the other man.
She was crying, and tears oozed out between her fingers and dripped on the floor. “He is horrible to me,” she said brokenly.
Filippo rose then and came to her; he loved her in his way, and she moved him as no woman had done yet.
“Why need you marry him? Do not. Wait for me here and I will surely come for you,” he said as he drew her to him.
She hid her face on his shoulder. “I dare not send him away,” she whispered. “All Siena would laugh at me, and I should be ashamed to be seen. No other man would ever take me after such a scandal. Besides, you know I must be married. You know that, Filippo! And if you did not come—”
“I shall come.”
She clung to him in silence for a while before she spoke again.
“Why not until January?”
“You will be good if I tell you?” he asked when he had kissed her.
“Yes, yes; only hold me.”
“Gemma, you must know that I am poor. I have told you often how the palace in Florence is shabby, eaten up with moth and rust. The Villa at Certaldo is falling into ruins too. I am poor.”
“You have an automobile, servants, horses; you stay here at the best hotel.”
“I should not be poor for acontadinobut I am for a prince,” he said impatiently and with emphasis. “Believe me, I want money, and I must have it. I cannot steal it or earn it, or win it in the lottery unfortunately, so I must marry it.”
She cowered down as though he had struck her, and made an effort to escape from him, but he held her fast. She tried to speak, but the pain in her throat prevented her from uttering an articulate sound.
“Do not think of the woman,” he said hurriedly. “You need not. I do not. Once I am married I shall go my own way, of course, but her father is in Naples now, and he is a tiresome old fool.”
“Santissimo Dio!” she gasped presently. “When—when—”
“In December.”
“Is she beautiful?”
He laughed as he gave the answer she hoped for. “She is an American,” he added, “and it sets one’s teeth on edge to hear her trying to talk Italian. Her accent! She is a small dry thing like a grasshopper.”
“I wish she was dead.”
He set himself to soothe and comfort her, but it was not easy.
“I might as well be ugly,” she cried again and again.
It was the simple expression of her defeat. The beauty she had held to be a shield against sorrow and a key to the garden of delights was but a poor thing after all. It had not availed her, and she had nothing else. She was stripped now, naked, alone and defenceless in a hard world.
“Carissima, be still. Have patience. I love you, and I shall come for you,” whispered Tor di Rocca, and she tried to believe him, and to persuade herself that the flame in his brown eyes would burn for her always.
Slowly, as the passion of grief ebbed, the tide of love rose in her and flushed her wan,tear-stained face and made it beautiful. The door of the room was opened, but neither she nor the man heard it, or saw it closed again. It was their last hour, this bare room was their world and they were alone in it.