The table was set for lunch out on the terrace where Astorre lay gazing upon his Tuscany, veiled in a shimmering haze of heat and crowned with August blue. The best coffee cups of majolica ware had been set out, and signora had made azabajonein honour ofFerragosto. It was meant to please Olive, who was childishly fond of its thick yellow sweetness, but she seemed restless and depressed; Astorre looked ill, and his mother’s eyes were anxious as they dwelt on him, and so the dainty was eaten in silence, and passed away unhonoured and unsung as though it were humble pie or a funeral baked meat.
Later in the afternoon, when the signora had gone to lie down, Astorre began to ask questions.
“Is your face hot?”
“Yes—no—what makes you think—”
“You are flushed,” he said bluntly, “and you will not meet my eyes. Why? Why?”
“Don’t ask,” she answered. “I cannot tell you.”
The haggard, aquiline face changed and hardened. “Someone has been rude to you, or has frightened you.”
“No.” She moved away to escape the inquisition of his eyes. “Some of these plantswant water. I shall fetch some.” She was going in when he called to her.
“Olive,” he said haltingly. “Perhaps we ought to have told you before. My mother heard of some people who want an English governess from a friend of hers who is a music mistress in Florence. They are rich and would pay well, and we should have told you when we heard of it, three days ago, but I could not bear the thought of your leaving Siena while—while I am still here. But if those people in the Piazza Tolomei are unkind—”
She came back then and sat down beside him. “I do not want to leave Siena,” she said gently.
“Thank you,” he answered, and added: “It will not be for long. Why should I pretend to you?” he went on. “I have suffered, but now I have no pain at all, only I am very weak. Look!”
He held up his hand; it was yellowish white and so thin as to be almost transparent, and it seemed to Olive to be most pathetic because it was not very small or very finely made. It held the broken promise of power, she thought sorrowfully, and she stroked the outstretched palm gently as though it were a half-frozen bird that she would bring to life again.
He closed his eyes, smiling. “Ah, your little fingers are soft and warm.”
“You were at the theatre last night,” he said presently. “Fausto saw you. How do you like your cousin’sfidanzato?”
“Not at all.”
“Olive, do you know that they say strange things about the Odalisque? I am afraid there will be trouble if her Lucchese hears—”
“I do not care to hear that nickname,” she said coldly. “It is impertinent and absurd.”
“Oh, do not let go of my hand,” he implored. “Keep on stroking it. I love it! I love it! If I were a cat you would hear me purring. Tell me about England and Shakespeare and Shelley. Anything. I will be good.”
“I—I have not brought the book I promised you. I would have fetched it on my way here, but—but I had not the key. I am sorry,nino. Yes, let us talk of nice things.”
She was quick to relent, and soon seemed to be herself again, and he kept his fever-bright eyes on her, watching her as in the old days men may have watched the stars as they waited for the dawn that was to see them pass by the Vicolo dei Moribondi.
Soon, very soon, Signora Aurelia would come out to them, and she would stay beside her son while Olive went to put on her hat, and then they would say “Addio” and leave him. And perhaps he would indeed go to God, or to some place where he would see the dear ones no more. The boy’s beautiful lips were shut close, but the grey eyes darkened and dilated painfully.
“Astorre! Are you ill? Do not look so.Oh, I will not go to the Palio. I will stay with you.”
“No, you must go, and to-morrow you can tell me all about it. But will you kiss me now? Do.”
“You need not ask twice, dear Astorre,” she whispered, as she leant over him and touched his forehead with her lips.
“Ma che!” he said ungratefully. “That’s nothing. Kiss me properly and at once.”
When the boy’s mother came out on to the terrace a moment later Olive’s blue eyes were full of tears and the rose flush of her cheeks had deepened, but she looked at her friend very kindly as she uttered the word he had been afraid to hear.
“Addio!”
The Piazza del Campo was crowded as the Signora Aurelia and Olive passed through it to their seats on the second best stand, and thecarabinieriwere clearing the course. The thousands of people in the central space, who had been chewing melon seeds, fanning themselves, and talking vociferously as they waited, grew quieter, and all began to look one way towards the narrow street from whence the procession should appear.
Olive sat wedged between Signora Aurelia and an old country priest whose shabby soutane was stained with the mud his housekeeper should have brushed off after the last rains, a fortnight before. He had a kind, worn face that smiled when Olive helped him puthis cotton umbrella in a safe place between them.
“I shall not need it yet,” he said. “But there is a storm coming. Do you not feel the heaviness of the air, and the heat,Dio mio!”
The deep bell of the Mangia tower tolled, and then the signal was given,un colpo di mortaletto, and the pageant began.
Slowly they came, the grave, armoured knights riding with their visors up that all might see how well the tanner, Giovanni, and Enrico Lupi of the wine-shop, looked in chain mail; gay, velvet-clad pages carrying the silk-embroidered standards of theircontradewith all the fine airs of the lads who stand about the bier of Saint Catherine in Ghirlandaio’s fresco in the Duomo; lithe, slenderalfieritossing their flags, twisting them about in the carefully-concerted movements that look so easy and are so difficult, until the whole great Piazza was girdled with fluttering light and colour, while it echoed to the thrilling and disquieting beat of the drums. Eachcontradahad itstamburino, and eachtamburinobeat upon his drum incessantly until his arms tired and the sweat poured down his face.
Olive’s head began to ache, but she was excited and happy, enjoying the spectacle as a child enjoys its first pantomime, not thinking but feeling, and steeping her senses in the southern glow and gaiety that was all about her. For the moment her cousin’s shame and sorrow, and her friend’s pain seemed old,unhappy, far-off things, and she could not realise them here.
Thecontradaof the Oca was the last to go by; it was a favourite with the people because its colours were those of the Italian flag, red, white and green, and the Evvivas broke out as it passed. Olive’s page, her cobbler’s son, looked gravely up at her as he went by, and she smiled at him and was glad to see that he still wore the magnolia bud she had thrown him in his hood of parti-coloured silk.
Presently they were all seated—the knights and pages with their standard-bearers and esquires—on their own stand in the place of honour before the great central gates of the Palazzo Pubblico.
“Now the horses will run,” explained the signora. “Many people like this part best, but I do not. Poor beasts! They are half drunk, and they are often hurt or killed. Thefantinilash at each other with their hide whips. Once I saw theMontonestrike theLupajust as they passed here; the crimson flashed out across his face, and in his pain he pulled his horse aside, and it fell heavily against the palings and threw him so that the horse of theBrucocoming on behind could not avoid going over him. They said it was terrible to see that livid weal across his mouth as he lay in his coffin.”
“He died then?”
“Ma! Sicuro!”
Olive looked up at the window where theMenotti should have been, and saw strange faces there. They had not come then. They had not, and Astorre could not. Astorre was very ill ... the times were out of joint. Her cousin’s shame and sorrow and her friend’s pain seemed to come near again, and to be once more a part of her life, and she saw “gold tarnished, and the grey above the green.” When the horses came clattering by, urged by their riders, maddened by the roar of the crowd, she tried to shut her eyes, but she could not. The horse of theDragonestumbled at the turn by San Martino and the rider was thrown, and another fell by the Chigi palace as they came round the second time. Olive covered her face with her hands. The thin, panting flanks, marked with half-healed scars and stained with sweat, the poor broken knees, the strained, suffering eyes ...
“Are you ill, signorina?” the old priest asked kindly.
“No, but the poor horses—I cannot look. Who has won?”
He rose to his feet. “TheOca!” he cried excitedly. A great roar of voices acclaimed the favourite’s victory, and when the spent horse came to a standstill thefantinoslipped off its back and was instantly surrounded by men and boys of hiscontrada, dancing and shouting with joy, kissing him on both cheeks, pulling him this way and that, until thecarabiniericame up and took him away amongst them.
“TheBrucohoped to win,” the priest said, “and theOca’s fantinomight get a knife in his back if he were not taken care of.”
Already the crowd was dispersing. The victoriouscontradahad been given the painted standard of the Palio, and were bearing it in triumph to the parish church, where it would remain until the nextFerragosto. The others were going their separate ways, pages andalfieriin silk doublets and parti-coloured hosen arm-in-arm with their friends in black broadcloth, standard-bearers smoking cigarettes, knights unhelmed and wiping heated brows with red cotton handkerchiefs.
“I will go down the Via Ricasoli with you,” Olive said.
“It is I who should take you home.”
“Oh, I do not mind the crowd, and I know you are anxious to get back to Astorre.”
“Astorre—yes. Olive, you don’t think he looks more delicate, do you?”
The girl felt that she could not have answered truly if her life had depended on her veracity.
“Oh, no,” she said. “He is rather tired, I think. The heat tries him. He will be better later on.”
The poor mother seemed relieved.
“You are right; he is always pale in the summer,” she said, trying to persuade herself that it was so. “You will come to-morrow to tell him about the Palio?”
“Yes, surely.”
There were to be fireworks later on at the Fortezza and illuminations of the Lizza gardens, so the human tide set that way and left the outlying parts of the city altogether. The quiet, tree-shadowed piazzetta before the church of Santa Maria dei Servi was quite deserted. Children played there in the mornings, and old men and women lingered there and sat on the wooden benches in the sun, but they were all away now; the bells had rung for the Ave Maria, the church doors were closed, and the sacristan had gone to his supper.
A little mist had crept up from the valley; steep red roofs and old walls that had glowed in the sun’s last rays were shadowed as the light waned, and black clouds came up from the horizon and blotted out the stars.
“Go home quickly now, Olive. There will be a storm. The poor mad people will howl to-night in the Manicomio. I hear them sometimes when I am lying awake. Good-night, my dear.”
“Good-night.”
Olive was tired, and now that she was alone she knew that she was also a little afraid, so that she lingered on the way and went slowly up the stairs of the house in the Piazza Tolomei. Carmela answered her ring at the bell; her face was swollen and her eyes were red with crying, and the little lamp she carried shook in her hand.
“Oh, Olive,” she said, “Orazio says he will not marry her. He has heard such things about her from his friends, and even in the Café Greco.... It is a scandal.”
She put her lamp down on the floor, and took out her handkerchief to wipe away the tears that were running down her cheeks.
Olive came in and shut the door after her.
“Where is he?”
“They are all in the dining-room. Aunt sent Carolina out for the evening, and it is a good thing, because of course in the kitchen she could hear everything. He sent a message to say he could not go to the Palio, and Gemma’s head ached when she came back from church, so we all stayed in. He came half an hour ago—”
“What does Gemma say?”
“Nothing. She looks like a stone.”
“I must go through the dining-room to get to my room,” Olive said uncertainly. “What shall I do? Pass through very quickly or wait here in the passage?”
“Better go in,” advised Carmela. “They may not even notice you. He keeps on talking so loudly, and aunt and Maria are crying.”
“Poor things! I am so sorry!”
The two girls clung together for a moment, and Olive’s eyes filled with tears as she kissed her cousin’s poor trembling lips. Then Carmela stooped to pick up her lamp and put it out, and they went on together down the passage.
The lamp was lit on the table that Carolina had laid for supper before she went out, and the Menotti sat in their accustomed places as though they were at a meal. Orazio Lucis was walking to and fro and gesticulating. His boots creaked, and the noise they made grated on the women’s nerves as he talked loudly and incessantly, and they listened. Maria kept her face hidden in her hands, but Gemma held herself erect as ever, and she did not move when the two girls came in, though her sombre eyes were full of shame.
“What shall I say to my friends in Lucca?” raved Orazio. “What shall I say to my mother? Even if I still consented to marry you she would not permit it; she would refuse to live in the same house with such a person—and she would be right.Mamma mia!She is always right. She said, ‘The girl is beautiful,but she has no money, and I tell you to think twice.’ I have been trapped here by all you women. You all knew.”
He pointed an accusing finger at Signora Carosi. She sobbed helplessly, bitterly, as she tried to answer him, and Olive, who had waited in the shadow by the door, hoping that he would move on and enable her to pass into her own room, came forward and stood beside her aunt. She had thought she would feel abashed before this man who had been wronged, but he had made her angry instead, and now she would not have left the room if he had asked her, or have told him the truth if he had begged for it.
“Many girls have been offered me,” he went on excitedly, “but I would not hear of them because you were beautiful, and I thought you would make a good wife. There was Annina Giannini; she had five thousand lire, and more to come, and now she is married to a doctor in Lucca. I gave her up for you, and you are dust of the streets.”
Gemma flinched then as though he had struck her. The insult was flagrant, and it was time to make an end. She rose from her chair slowly, as though she were very tired, and filled her glass from the decanter on the table with a hand that trembled so that half the wine was spilled.
“Orazio,” she said, and her dark eyes sought his and held them so that he was compelled to stand still looking at her. “Orazio, I hopeyou and your ugly fool of a mother will die slowly of a horrible disease, and be tormented in hell for ever. May your flesh be covered with sores while your bones rot and are gnawed by worms.Cosi sia!”
She crossed herself devoutly, and then drank some of the wine and flung the glass over her shoulder. It fell to the floor and crashed to splinters.
The man’s jaw dropped and his mouth fell open, but he had no words to answer her. She made a curious movement with her hands as though she would cleanse them of some impurity, and then turned and went quickly into her own room. They all heard the bolts drawn and the key turned in the lock.
Olive was the first to speak, and her voice sounded strange and unnatural to herself.
“She has said her say and left us, Signor Lucis. Will you not go too? You will not marry her.Benissimo!We wish you good-evening.”
“You are very easy, signorinamia,” he answered resentfully; “but I cannot forgive.”
“Who asked your forgiveness?” she retorted. “It is you who should beg our pardon—you, who are so ready to believe the tales that are told in thecafésand to come here to abuse helpless women. You are a coward, signore. Oh, how I hate men ... Judges in Israel ... I would have them stoned first.What’s that?”
There was shouting in the street, and thena loud knocking on the house door. The women looked at each other with frightened eyes.
“What is it?”
Carmela ran to Gemma’s door and shook the handle, calling to her to come out. There was no answer, and perhaps they had a dreadful premonition of the truth even then; Olive left them huddled together like frightened sheep. The knocking still continued, and it sounded very loud when she came out of the flat on to the stairs. She was beside herself; that is, she was aware of two Olives, one who spoke in a strange voice and trembled, and was now going down into the darkness, stumbling at nearly every step and moaning incoherent prayers to God, and one who watched and listened and was surprised at what was said and done.
When she opened the great house door a man stood aside to let her come out. She looked at him and knew him to be one of the neighbours, and she wondered why he had run out into the street in his shirt-sleeves. He was pale, too, and looked ill, and he seemed to want to speak to her, but she could not listen.
A crowd had collected about something that was lying on the pavement near their house wall; Olive looked up and saw Gemma’s window opened wide, and then she knew what it was. The people made way for her and let her come to where the dead thing lay on itsback with the knees drawn up. Some woman had already covered the face with a handkerchief, and dark blood was oozing out from under it. Olive crouched down beside its pitiful disarray.
“Will someone help me carry her into the house?” she said.
No one answered her, and after a while she spoke again.
“Will someone fetch a doctor quickly?”
“It is useless,figlia mia; she is dead.”
“At least”—her voice broke, and she had to begin again, making a painful effort to control the words that she might be quite intelligible—“at least help me to carry her in from the street. Is there no Christian here?”
Twocarabiniericame running up now, and they made the people stand back so that a space of pavement was left clear; the younger man spoke to Olive.
“We cannot move the body until the authorities come, signorina. It must stay where it is, but we shall guard it and keep the people off, and you can fetch a sheet from the house to cover it.”
“Oh, God!” she said, “when will they come?”
He slightly shrugged his shoulders.
“I do not know. We have sent to tell them. In a few minutes, perhaps, or in two hours, three hours.”
“And we must leave her here?”
“Yes, signorina.”
“I will get the sheet.”
He helped her to rise from her knees. Looking down she saw a stain of blood on her skirt, and she clung to his arm for a moment, swaying as though she would fall. There was a murmur among the people of pity and sympathy. “Poveretta! Che disgrazia!”
“Coraggio!” thecarabinieresaid gently.
Up again, up all the dark stairs, wondering if the others knew and were afraid to come down, wondering if there had been much pain, wondering if it was not all a dreadful dream from which she must wake presently. They knew.
The younger girl met her cousin at the door; Maria had fainted, andla ziawas hysterical; as to Orazio, he was sitting on the sofa crying, with his mean, mouse-coloured head buried in the cushions.
“I looked out of your bedroom window as I could not get into her room,” whispered Carmela. “Oh, Olive, what shall we do?”
“I am going to take down a sheet as they will not let us bring her in. You can come with me, and we will stay beside her and say prayers.”
“Yes, yes. Oh, Olive, that is a good idea.”
The two came out into the street together and spread the white linen covering carefully over the stark body before they knelt, one on each side. Of the thousands who had filled the Piazzale at sunset hundreds came now tosee them mourning the broken thing that lay between. Olive was aware of many faces, of the murmuring of a great crowd, and shame was added to the horror that held her fast. She folded her hands and tried to keep her eyes fixed upon them. Then she began to pray aloud.
“Pater noster, qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum—”
The clear voice was tremulous at first, but it gathered strength as it went on, and Carmela said the words too. The men in the crowd uncovered, and the women crossed themselves.
Rain was falling now, slowly at first and in heavy drops that splashed upon the stones, and there was a threatening sound—a rumbling of thunder—away in the south.
Olive knew no more prayers in Latin, but her cousin began the Miserere.
“Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam, et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.”
Among the many who had come to look their last upon the Odalisque were men who had made free with her poor name, had been unsparing in their utterance of the truth concerning her and ready to drag her down, and some of these moved away now shamefacedly, but more stayed, and one after another took up the words.
“Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me.”
Gemma herself had trodden out the fire thatconsumed her, but who could dare say of the grey cold ashes, “These are altogether vile.”
“Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci: ut justificeris in sermonibus tuis et vincas cum judicaris.”
She had sinned, and she had been punished; she had suffered fear and shame.
“Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor, lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.”
There had been some taint in her blood, some flaw in her will.
“Cor mundum crea in me, Deus, et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis.”
A dark-eyed slender boy, wearing the green and white and scarlet of hiscontrade, pushed his way to the front presently. It was Romeo, and he carried a great bunch of magnolia blossoms.
“Oh, signorina,” he said, half crying, “thealfieriand I wanted to give you these because you brought us good luck so that we won the Palio. I little thought—”
He stopped short, hesitating, and afraid to come nearer. He thought she looked like one of the stone angels that kneel on the sculptured tombs in the Campo Santo; her face seemed rough hewn in the harsh white glare of the electric light, so deep were the shadows under her eyes and the lines of pain about the praying lips. His heart ached with pity for her.
“Give them to me,” she said, and he was allowed to come into the space that thecarabinierekept clear.
He thrust the bunch hurriedly into her hands, faltering, “Dio vi benedica.”
“Andatevi con Dio,” she replied, and then laid the pale flowers and the shimmering green crown of leaves down upon the still breast. “Gemma, if ever I hurt you, forgive me now!”
It was raining heavily, and as the sheet grew damp it clung more closely to the body of the girl who lay there with arms outstretched and knees drawn up as though she were nailed to a cross.
The boy still lingered. “You will be drenched. Go into the house,” he urged. Then, seeing he could not move her, he took off his velvet embroidered cloak and put it about her shoulders. A woman in the crowd came forward with a shawl for Carmela.
So the hours passed.
October can be cold enough sometimes in the Val d’Arno when the snow falls on the Apennines, and the woods of Vallombrosa are sere, and Florence, the flower city, lies then at the mercy of the winds. Mamie Whittaker, who, in her own phrase, “hated to be blown about anyhow,” had not been out all day. She lolled in an armchair before a crackling fire of olive wood in the room that she “lit with herself when alone,” though scarcely in the Tennysonian sense. Hers was a vivid personality, and older women who disliked her called her flamboyant, and referred to an evident touch of the tar-brush that would make her socially impossible in America though it passed unnoticed in Italy. Her age was seventeen, and she dressed after Carmen to please herself, and read Gyp with the same intention. She was absorbed now inLes Amoureux, and had to be told twice that her cousin had come before she would look up.
“Miss Marvel? Show her in.”
She rose and went forward to greet herrelative, whom she had not seen for some years, and the two met at the door and kissed each other with enthusiasm.
“Edna! My! Well, you have not grown anyway. What a tiny thing! Come and sit down right here.” She rang for tea while her visitor slowly and rather shyly divested herself of her sables and laid them on a side table. Edna Marvel was the elder of the two by three years, but she was so small that she seemed a mere child. Her sallow little face resembled that of a tired monkey, yet it had an elfin charm, and her hands were beautiful as carved toys of ivory made in the East for a king’s son to play with. They might hold a man’s heart perhaps, but Mamie did not notice them, her own allurements being of more obvious description.
She thought Edna was real homely, and her spirits rose accordingly. “Where are you staying?”
“At the Bristol. Poppa guessed we would take a villa later on if we felt like it.”
Mamie rang again. “Bring some more cakes, and tell Miss Agar to come and pour out the tea.”
“Who is Miss Agar?”
“My companion, a sort of governess person. She takes me out walks, and sits by when my music-master comes, and so forth. She is new, and she won’t do, but I may as well make her useful while she stays.”
“Why won’t she do?”
“Oh, she just won’t. Momma don’t like her much, and I’m not singing her praises.”
Edna looked curiously at the slender girl in the black dress who came in and took her place at the table.
She said “Good afternoon” in her pleasant little voice.
The governess person seemed rather surprised that she should address her.
“Good afternoon,” she replied. “Do you take milk and sugar?”
“Bring them round for us to help ourselves,” dictated Mamie.
Olive only smiled as she repeated her question, but Edna was distressed at her cousin’s rudeness, and her sensitive face was quite pink as she hurriedly declined sugar. She came to the table to fetch her cup, but Miss Whittaker waited for hers to be brought to her.
“How do you like this room, Edna? I had it fixed up for myself, and everything in it is mine.” She looked complacently up at the hangings of primrose silk that hid the fifteenth century frescoes on the walls.
Her cousin hesitated. “I guess it must have cost some.”
“Yes. The Marchese does not like it. He is so set on his worm-eaten old tapestries and carved chairs, and he wanted momma to refurnish the palace to match, but not she!Louis Quinze, she said, and Louis Quinze it is, more or less. I tell the Marchese that if he is so fond of the musty Middle Ages he ought to go about in armour himself by rights. But the old sinner is not really a bit romantic.”
It occurred to Olive that the right kind of governess would utter a word in season. “It is not usual for young girls to refer to their stepfathers as you do,” she said drily.
“Wait until you know mine better,” Mamie answered unabashed. “Last night he said your complexion was miraculous. Next thing he’ll try if it comes off. Are you coming to dinner to-night, Edna?”
“Yes, auntie asked us. The—the Prince will be here, won’t he?”
Mamie looked down her nose. “Oh, yes,” she said carelessly. “Your beau will come. People generally do when we ask them. The food is all right, and we have real good music afterwards sometimes. You know Avenel stays in Florence whiles because his brother has a Villa at Settignano. Well, momma guessed she would get him to play here for nothing once. Of course she was willing to pay any money for him really, but she just thought she would try it on. She asked him to dinner with a lot of other people, and made him take her in, though there were two Neapolitan dukes among the guests. The food was first-rate; she had told the cook to do his best, and she really thought theentréewould have made Vitellius sit up. It was perfect. Well, afterwards she asked Avenel to play, and he just smiled and said he could not. Why, she said, he gave a recital the day before for nothing, for a charity, and played the people’s souls out of their bodies, made them act crazy, as he always does. Couldn’t he play for friendship? No, he said, he couldn’t just then because one must be filled with sorrow oneself before one can make others feel, and he inferred that he had no room even for regret. ‘I play Chopin on a biscuit,’ he said.”
“He must be rather a pig,” was Edna’s comment.
“Not a bit of it. Momma said he really had not eaten much; in fact she had noticed that he left a bit of that lovelyentrée. Perhaps he is afraid of getting fat. Momma was real mad with him.”
Olive’s cheeks were flushed and her hands trembled as she arranged the cups on the tray. She was thankful for the shelter afforded by the great silver tea-pot. Mamie’s back was turned to her, but Edna seemed desirous of including her in the conversation.
“Have you heard Avenel, Miss Agar?” she asked presently in her gentle, drawling way.
“No. Is he very famous? I have never heard of him as a pianist.”
“Oh, his professional name is Meryon, of course. He is billed as that and known all theworld over, though he only began to play in public three years ago when his wife left him. She was always a horrid woman, and she made him marry her when he was quite a boy, they say. They say he plays to forget things as other men take to drink. He has been twice to New York, and I know a girl who says he gave her a lock of his hair, but I don’t believe her. It is dark brown, almost black, but I guess she cut it off a switch. He’s not that kind.”
Olive said nothing.
“You need not stay if you don’t want to,” Mamie said unceremoniously. “Be ready to come down after dinner. I might want you to play my accompaniments.”
“I can’t think why you say she won’t do,” cried Edna when she was gone out of the room. “I call her perfectly sweet. Rather sad-looking, but just lovely.”
Mamie sniffed. “Glad you admire her,” she said.
The governess was expected to appear at luncheon, but dinner was served to her in her own room, where she must sit in solitary state, dressed in her best and waiting for a summons, until eleven o’clock, when she might assume that she would not be wanted and go to bed. This evening Olive lingered rather anxiously over her dressing, trying to make the best of herself, since it seemed that she was really to come down to-night into theyellow drawing-room where she spent so many weary hours of a morning listening to Mamie scraping her Strad while the German who was supposed to teach her possessed his soul in patience. She put on her black silk dress. It was a guinea robe bought at a sale in Oxford Street the year before, a reach-me-down garment for women to sneer at and men to describe vaguely as something dark, and she hated the poor thing.
Most women believe that the men who like them in cotton frocks would adore them in cloth of gold, and are convinced that the secret of Cleopatra’s charm lay in her extensive wardrobe.
Avenel. It had shocked Olive to hear his name uttered by alien lips, as it hurt her to suppose that he came often to the Palazzo Lorenzoni. She would not suppose it, and, indeed, nothing that Mamie had said could lead her to think that he was a friend of the family. They had clutched at him greedily, and he had repaid with an impertinence. That was all.
The third footman, whose duty it was to attend upon her, brought two covered dishes on a tray at eight o’clock, and soon after nine he came again to fetch her.
There was a superabundance of gorgeous lackeys in the corridors that had been dusty and deserted five years before, and a giganticSuissestood always on guard now outside the palace gates. The Marchesa would haveliked to have had outriders in her scarlet livery when she went out driving in the streets of Florence, but her husband warned her that some mad anarchist might take her for the Queen, and so she contented herself with a red racing motor. The millions old Whittaker had made availed to keep his widow and the man who had given her a title in almost regal state. They entertained largely, and the Via Tornabuoni was often blocked with the carriages and motors that brought their guests. Olive, sitting alone in her chilly bedroom, mending her stockings or trying to read, heard voices and laughter as the doors opened—harsh Florentine and high English voices, and the shrill sounds of American mirth—night after night. But the Lorenzoni dineden famillesometimes, as even marquises and millionaires may do, and there were but two shirt-fronts and comparatively few diamonds in the great golden shining room when she entered it.
The Marchesa, handsome, hard-featured, gorgeous in grey and silver, did not choose to notice her daughter’s governess; she was deep in talk with her brother-in-law; but men could not help looking at Olive. Mr Marvel stood up and bowed as she passed, and the silent, saturnine Marchese stared. His black eyes were intent upon her as she came to the piano where Mamie was restlessly turning over the music, and no onewatching him could fail to see that he was making comparisons that were probably to the disadvantage of his step-daughter.
Fast men are not necessarily fond of the patchouli atmosphere in their own homes, and somehow Mamie seemed to reek of that scent, though in fact she never used it. She was clever and fairly well educated, and she had always been sheltered and cared for, but she was born to the scarlet, and everything she said and did, her way of walking, the use she made already of her black eyes, proclaimed it. To-night, though she wore the red she loved—a wonderful, flaring frock of chiffon frills and flounces—she looked ill, and her dark face was sullen.
“The beastly wind has given me a stiff neck,” she complained. “Here, I want to have this.”
She chose a coon’s lullaby out of the pile of songs, and Olive sat down obediently and began the accompaniment. It was a pretty little ditty of the usual moony order, and Mamie sang it well enough. Mr Marvel looked up when it was over to say, “Thank you, my dear. Very nice.”
“It is a silly thing,” Mamie answered ungraciously. “I’ll sing you acanzonettanow.”
She turned over the music, scattering marches and sonatas, and throwing some of them on the floor in her impatience. Olive, wondering at her temper, presently divinedthe cause of it. The folding doors that led into the library were half closed. No lamps, but a flicker of firelight and the hush of lowered voices, Edna’s pleasant little pipe and a man’s brief, murmured answers, and there were short spaces of silence too. The American girl and her prince were there.
The Marchese had raised his eyebrows at the first words of thecanzonetta, and at the end of the second verse he was smiling broadly.
“Little devil!” he said.
No one heard him. His wife was showing her brother-in-law some of her most treasured bits of china. She was quite calm, as though her knowledge of Italian was fair the Neapolitan dialect was beyond her. Mr Marvel, of course, knew not a syllable of any language but his own, and the slang of Southern gutters was as Greek to Olive. Their placidity amused the Marchese, and so did the thought of the little scene that he knew was being enacted in the library.
“Shall we join the others now, Edna,carissima?”
“If—if you like.”
He nearly laughed aloud as he saw the silk curtains drawn. The Prince stood aside to allow Edna to pass in first, and Olive, glancing up momentarily from the unfamiliar notes, saw the green gleam of an emerald on the strong brown hand as the brocaded foldswere lifted up. Her own hands swerved, blundered, and she perpetrated a hopeless discord.
“I beg your pardon,” she said confusedly.
Mamie shrugged her shoulders. “Never mind,” she answered lightly. “The last verse don’t matter anyway. Come to here, Edna. Momma wants to hear your fiddle-playing.”
“Yes, play us something, my dear.”
The little girl came forward shyly.
As the Prince and the Marchese stood together by the fireplace at the other end of the long room Mamie joined them. “You sang that devil’s nocturne inimitably,” observed her stepfather, drily. “I am quite sorry to have to ask you not to do it again.”
“Not again? Why not?”
She perched herself on the arm of one of the great gilt chairs. The Prince raised his eyes from the thoughtful contemplation of her ankles to stare at her impudent red parted lips.
“Why not! Need I explain,cara? It was delicious; I enjoyed it, but, alas!” He heaved an exaggerated sigh and then laughed, and the young man and the girl shared in his merriment.
“I am sorry to make so many mistakes,” Olive said apologetically as she laboured away at her part of an easy piece arranged for violin and piano.
“Oh, it is nothing. I have made ever so many myself, and I ought to have turned the page for you.”
The gentle voice was rather tremulous.
“That was charming,” pronounced the Marchesa. “Now that sonata, Edna. I am so fond of it.”
“Very well, auntie.”
The Prince had gone into the billiard-room with his host, and Mamie was with them. They were knocking the balls about and laughing ... laughing.
In the Cascine gardens the lush green grass of the glades was strewn with leaves; soon the branches would be bare, or veiled only in winter mists, and the Arno, swollen with rain, ran yellow as Tiber. It was not a day for music, but the sun shone, and many idle Florentines drove, or rode, or walked by the Lung’Arno to the Rajah’s monument, passing and repassing the bench where Olive sat with Madame de Sarivière’s stout and elderly German Fräulein. Mamie was not far away; flamboyant as ever in her frock of crimson serge, her black curls tied with ribbon and streaming in the wind, she was the loud centre of a group of girls who played some running game to an accompaniment of shrill cries and little screams of laughter.
“Do you like young girls?” Olive asked the question impulsively, after a long silence.
“I am fond of my pupils; they are good little things, rather foolish, but amiable. But I understand your feeling, my poor Miss Agar. Your charge is—”
Olive hesitated. “It is a difficult age; and she has the body of twenty and the sense of ten. I am putting it very badly, but—butI was hateful years ago too. I think one always is, perhaps. I remember at school there were self-righteous little girls; they were narrow and intolerant, easily shocked, and rather bad-tempered. The others were absurdly vain, sentimental, sly. All that comes away afterwards if one is going to be nice.”
“They are female but not yet womanly. The newly-awakened instincts clamour at first for a hearing; later they learn to wait in silence, to efface themselves, to die, even,” answered the Fräulein, gravely.
A victoria passed, then some youths on bicycles, shouting to each other and ringing their bells. They were riding all together, but they scattered to let Prince Tor di Rocca go by. He was driving tandem, and his horses were very fresh. Edna was with him, her small wan face rather set in its halo of ashen blonde hair and pale against the rich brown of her sables.
When they came by the second time Mamie called to her cousin. The Prince drew rein, and the groom sprang down and ran to the leader’s head.
“My, Edna, how cold you look! It’s three days since I saw you, but I guess Don Filippo has been doing the honours. Have you seen all the old galleries and things? Momma said she noticed you and uncle in a box at the Pergola last night.”
She stood by the wheel, and as she lookedup, not at Edna but at the Prince, he glanced smilingly down at her and then away again.
“We are going back to the hotel now,” Edna said. “Will you come and have tea, Mamie? Is that Miss Agar over there? Ask her if you may, and if she will come too.”
“I don’t need to ask her,” the girl answered, but she went back nevertheless and spoke to Olive.
“Can the groom take the cart home, Filippo? We will walk back with them.”
“Yes, Bellina is in spirits, but she will not run away from Giovanni,” he said, trying not to seem surprised that she should curtail their drive.
They crossed the wide gravelled space outside the gardens and walked towards the town by the Lung’Arno. Already the cypresses of San Miniato showed black against the sky, and the reflected flame of sunset was dying out in the windows of the old houses at the river’s edge. All the people were going one way now, and leaving the tree-shadowed dusk for the brightly-lit streets, Via Tornabuoni, all palaces and antiquity shops, and Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where the band would play presently.
The two American girls walked together with Don Filippo and Olive followed them. Edna held herself very erect, but Mamieseemed almost to lean backwards. She swayed her hips as she went and swung her short skirts, and there was affectation and a feverish self-consciousness in her every movement. Olive could not help smiling to herself, but she remembered that at school she had been afflicted with the idea that a pout—the deliciousmoueof fiction—became her, and so she was inclined to leniency. Only seventeen.
The Prince wore riding gloves, and so the green gleam of his emerald was hidden from her. If only she could be sure that she had seen him before. What then? Nothing—if she could think that he would always be kind to gentle little Edna.
Just before they reached the hotel Miss Marvel joined her, leaving her cousin to go on with Don Filippo, and began to talk to her.
“The river is just perfect at this hour. Our sitting-room has a balcony and I sat there last night watching the moon rise over San Miniato. I guess it looked just that way when Dante wrote his sonnets. Beatrice must have been real mad with him sometimes, don’t you think so? She must have been longing to say, ‘Come on, and don’t keep talking.’ But she was a nice high-minded girl, and so she never did. She simply died.”
“If she died for him she must have been afool,” Olive said shortly. Her eyes were fixed on the Prince’s broad back. He was laughing at some sally of Mamie’s.
Edna was shocked. “Don’t you just worship Dante?”
“Yes, yes,” answered the elder girl. “He was a dear, but even he was not worth that. At least, I don’t know. He was a dear; but I was thinking of a girl I knew ... perhaps I may tell you about her some day.”
“Yes, do,” Edna said perfunctorily. She was trying to hear what her cousin was saying to Filippo, and wishing she could amuse him as well. They passed through the wide hall of the hotel and went up in the lift. The Marvels’ private sitting-room was on the second floor. They were much too rich to condescend to the palms and bamboo tables and wicker chairs of the common herd, and tea was served to Edna and her guests in a green and white boudoir that was, as the Marchesa might have said, more or less Louis Seize.
Mr Marvel came in presently, refusing tea, but asking leave to smoke, and the Prince, gracefully deferential to his future father-in-law, listened to the little he had to say, answering carefully in his perfect English.
“Yes, sir. There is a great deal of poverty here. On my Tuscan estates too. Alas! yes.”
Mamie sat near him, and in the flickering red light of the fire she looked almost pretty. Filippo’s eyes strayed towards her now and then. Edna came presently to where Olive rested apart on the wide cushioned window-seat. “Will you have some more tea?”
“No, thank you. I think we must be going soon. The Marchesa will not like it if we stay out too long.”
Edna hesitated. “I wanted to ask you a silly question. Had you ever seen the Prince before last week?”
There was the slightest perceptible pause before Olive answered, “No, never. Why do you ask?”
“I thought you looked as if you had somehow that night at the Lorenzoni palace. When we came in you were at the piano, and I thought you looked queer—as if—”
“Oh, no,” Olive said again, but she wondered afterwards if she had done right.
On their way home Mamie drew her attention to a poster, and she saw the name of Meryon in great orange letters on a white ground.
“He will be here before Christmas. I’ll let you come with me to hear him play if you are good,” she said, and she took the elder girl’s hand in hers and pinched it. “I could race you home down this side street, but I suppose I must not.”
She was gay and good-humoured now, and altogether at her best, and Olive tried hard to like her, but she could not help seeing that the triumph that overflowed in easy, shallow kindness was an unworthy one.
Olive sat alone at the end of one of the tiers of the stone amphitheatre built into the hill that rises, ilex clad, to the heights of San Giorgio. Some other women were there, mothers with young children, nurses and governesses dowdily dressed as she was in dark-coloured stuffs, but she knew none of them.
Mamie seldom cared to come to the old Boboli gardens. Its green mildewed terraces and crumbling deities of fountain and ilex grove had no charm for her, and as a rule she and her friends preferred the crowded Lung’Arno and Cascine on the days when there was music, but this Thursday she had suggested that they should come across the river.
“Daisy Vereker has promised to meet me, and as she is only here a week on her way to school in Paris I should hate to disappoint her.”
The two girls were lingering now about the grass arena, talking volubly, whispering, giggling. Miss Vereker’s maid, a yellow-haired Swiss, sat not far off with her knitting, and every now and then she called harshly to her charge to know the time.
Olive sat very still, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on the far horizon. She loved the old-world silence that was only broken by the dripping of water in the pools. No birds sang here, no leaves fell at the waning of the year. The seasons had little power over stained marble and moss, cypress, and ilex and olive, and as spring brought no riot of green and rose and gold in flower, so autumn took nothing away. Surely there were ghosts in the shadowed avenues, flitting in and out among the trees, joining hands to dance “la ronde” about the pool of Neptune. Gay abbés, cavaliers, beautiful ladies of the late Renaissance, red-heeled, painted, powdered; frail, degenerate children of the hard-headed old Florentine citizens pictured in the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio. No greater shades could come to Boboli.
Florence was half hidden by the great yellow bulk of the Pitti palace, but Olive could see the slender, exquisite white and rose tower of Giotto, and the mellowed red of the cathedral’s dome against the faint purple of the hills beyond Fiesole, and she looked at them in preference to the contorted river gods and exuberant nymphs of the fountain in the royal courtyard close by.
After a while she opened her book and began to read. Presently she shivered; her jacket was thin, and the air grew chilly as the afternoon waned, but her reading absorbed herand she was surprised, when at last she raised her eyes, to see that the Pitti palace was already dark against the sky. Nurses and children were making their way out, and soon those who lingered would hear stentorian shouts from the gardeners, “Ora si chiude!” and they too would leave by one or other of the gates.
Olive climbed down into the arena. Mamie was nowhere in sight, and Daisy Vereker and her maid were gone too. Olive, thinking that perhaps they might have gone up to the fountain of Neptune, began to climb the hill. She asked an old man who was coming down from there if he had seen two young ladies, one dressed in red.
“No, signorina.”
She hurried back to the arena and spoke to a woman there. “Have you seen a young lady in red with black curls?”
She answered readily: “Sicuro!She went towards the Porta Romana half an hour ago. I think the other signorina was leaving and she wished to accompany her a part of the way. There was an older person with them.”
Olive’s relief was only momentary; it sounded well, but one might walk to the Porta Romana and back twice in the time. Soon the gates would be closed, and if she had not found Mamie then, and the gardeners made her leave with the others, what shouldshe do? She suspected a trick. The girl had a mischievous and impish humour that delighted in the infliction of small hurts, and she might have gone home, happy in the thought that her governess would get a “wigging,” or she might be hiding about somewhere to give her a fright.
Olive went up the steep path towards the Belvedere, hoping to find her there. That part of the garden was not much frequented, and the white bodies and uplifted arms of the marble gods gleamed ghostly and forlorn in the dusk of the ilex woods that lay between the amphitheatre and the gate.
She went on until she saw a glimmer of red through the close-woven branches. Mamie was there in the dark wood, and she was not alone. A man was with her, and he was holding her easily, as if he knew she would not go yet, and laughing as she stood on tiptoe to reach the fine cruel lips that touched hers presently, when he chose that they should.
Olive turned and ran up the path to the top of the hill, and there she stood for a while, trying to get her breath, trying to be calm, and sane and tolerant, to see no harm where perhaps there was none after all. And yet the treachery and the deceit were so flagrant that surely no condonation was possible. She felt sick of men and women, and of life itself, since the greatest thing in itseemed to be this hateful, miscalled love that preceded sorrow and shame and death. Was love always loathsome to look upon? Not in pictures or on the stage, where it was represented as a kind of minuet in which the man makes graceful advances to a woman who smiles as she draws away, but in real life—
“Not real love,” she said to herself. “Oh, God, help me to go on believing in that.”
Raising her eyes she saw the evening star sparkling in a wide, soft, clear space of sky. It seemed infinitely pure and remote, and yet somehow good and kind, as it had to Dante when he climbed up out of hell.
“Quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.”
“Ora si chiude!” bawled a gardener from the Belvedere.
Mamie came hurrying up the path towards the hill. “Oh, are you there?” she said in some confusion. “I went some of the way to the other gate with Daisy.”
“I was beginning to be afraid you were lost, so I came along hoping to meet you,” answered Olive.
She said nothing to the girl of what she had seen. It would have been useless; nothing could alter or abash her inherent unmorality. But after dinner she wrote a note to Edna and went out herself to post it.
The answer came at noon on the following day. Miss Marvel would be at home and alone between three and four and would be pleased to see Miss Agar then; meanwhile she remained very sincerely her friend.
“Why do you tell me this now?” asked Edna. “The other day when I asked you if you had known him before you said you had not.”
“Something that has happened since then determined me.”
Edna’s room was full of flowers, roses, narcissi and violets, and the air was heavy with their scent. Filippo had never failed in hispetits soins. It was so easy to give an order at the florist’s, and the bill would come in presently, after the wedding, and be paid in American dollars. There were boxes of sweets too; and a volume of Romola, bound in white and gold, lay on the table. Edna had been looking at the inscription on the fly-leaf when Olive came in. “Carissima” he had written, and she had believed him, but that was half an hour ago. Now her small body was shaken with sobs, her face was stained with tears because that faith she had had was dying.
The chill at her heart made her feel altogether cold, and she edged her chair nearer to the fire, and put her feet up on the fender.
“I wish I could feel it was not true, but somehow though I have been so fond of him I have not trusted him. Well, your cousin wasbeautiful, and perhaps he had known her a long time before he knew me. He wanted to say good-bye kindly. He was entangled—such things happen, I know. He could not help what happened afterwards. That was not his fault.”
Olive could not meet her pleading eyes. “I thought something like that last week,” she said. “And that is why I kept silence; but now I know he would make you unhappy always. Oh, forgive me for hurting you so.” She came and knelt down beside the little girl, and put her arms about her. “Don’t cry, my dear. Don’t cry.”
“Oh, Olive, I was so fond of him! Now tell me what has happened since.”
“Put your hands in mine. There, I will rub the poor tiny things and warm them. They are so pretty. Yesterday, in the Boboli gardens, I missed your cousin, and when I went to look for her I saw her with the Prince. He held her and was kissing her.”
“Oh!” Edna sprang to her feet. “That settles it. Mamie is common and real homely, and if he can run after her I have done with him. I could have forgiven the other, especially as she is dead, but Mamie! Gracious! Here he is!”
He came into the room leisurely, smiling, very sure of his welcome. Olive met the hot insolence of his stare steadily, and Edna turned her back on him.
“Olive,” she said, “you speak to him. Tell him—ask him—” Her gentle voice broke.
“What is the matter?” he asked carefully.
“I saw you twice in Siena last summer. Do you rememberRigolettoat the Lizza theatre? You were in the stage box. You wore evening dress, and I saw that emerald ring you have now on your finger. The next day you met my Cousin Gemma in my room in the Vicolo dei Moribondi. Do you remember the steep dark stairs and the white walls of the bare place where you saw her last?”
He made no answer, and there was still a smile on his lips, but his eyes were hard. Edna was looking at him now, but he seemed to have forgotten her.
“I suppose you loved her,” Olive said slowly. “Do you remember the faint pink curve of her mouth, the little cleft in her chin, and her hair that was so soft and fine? There were always little stray curls on the white nape of her neck. I came to my room that morning to fetch a book. When I had climbed the stairs I found that I had not the key with me, but the door was unlocked and I saw her there with a man, and I saw the green gleam of an emerald.”
Men have such a power of silence. No woman but would have made some answer now, denying with a show of surprise, making excuses, using words in one way or another.
“They were talking about you in the town, though I think they did not know who you were—at least I never heard your name—and that night Gemma’sfidanzatotold her he would not marry her. You know best what that meant to her. She rushed into her own room and threw herself out of the window. Ah, you should have seen the dark blood oozing through the fine soft curls! She lay dead in the street for hours before they took her away.”
“Santissimo Dio!Is this true?”
“Yes.”
“Gemma—I never knew it—” His face was greatly altered now, and he had to moisten his lips before he could speak.
“I could have forgiven that,” Edna said tremulously after a while. “But not yesterday. Your kisses are too cheap, Filippo.”
“Oh,” he said hoarsely. “So Gemma’s cousin saw that too. It was nothing, meant nothing. Edna, if you can pardon the other, surely—”
“It was nothing; and it proved that Mamie is nothing, and that you are nothing—to me. That is the end of the matter.”
He winced now at the contempt underlying her quiet words, and when she took off her ring and laid it on the table between them he picked it up and flung it into the fire.
“I do not take things back,” he said savagely.
When he had left the room Edna began to cry again. “I believe he is suffering now, but not for me. Would he care if I killed myself? I guess not. I am not pretty, only my hands, and hands don’t count.”
Olive tried to comfort her.
“Poppa shall take me away right now. I have had enough of Europe, and so I shall tell him when he comes in. Must you go now? Well, good-bye, my dear, and thank you. You are white all through, and I am glad you have acted as you have, though it hurts now. If ever I marry it shall be an American ... but I was real fond of Filippo.”