"Your mother has gone out. Do come!" And Adèle gave Nancy's hair a little pull on each side and a pat on the top, and hurried her to the drawing-room, where the Englishman was waiting. He rose, a stern-looking, clean-shaven man, with friendly eyes in a hard face.
Nancy put out her hand and said: "Buon giorno."
He answered: "How do you do? My Italian is very poor. May I speak English?"
Nancy dimpled. "You may speak it, but I may not understand it," she said.
But she understood him. He had written a critical essay on her book, with prose translations of some of the lyrics, and wished to close the article with anaperçuof her literary aims and intentions. What work was she doing at present! What message——?
"Nothing," said Nancy, with a little helpless Latin gesture of her hands. "I am doing nothing."
"Peccato!" said the Englishman. And he added: "I mean your Italian word in both senses—a pity and a sin."
Nancy nodded, and looked wistful.
"Why are you not working?" asked her visitor severely.
Nancy repeated the little helpless gesture. "I don't know," she said; then she smiled. "In Italy we talkso much. We say all the beautiful things we might write. That is why Italian literature is so poor, and Italian cafés so interesting. As for our thoughts, when we have said them they are gone—blown away like the fluff of the dandelions I used to tell the time by when I was a little girl in England."
That childish reminiscence brought her very near to him, and he told her about his mother and his younger sister, who lived in Kent, in an old-fashioned house in the midst of a great garden.
"You make me homesick for England," said Nancy.
Mr. Kingsley looked pleased. "Do you remember England?" he asked.
"No," said Nancy; "I am always homesick for things that I have forgotten, or for things that I never have known." And she smiled, but in her eyes wavered the nostalgic loneliness of the dreamer's soul.
The Englishman cleared his throat, and said in a practical voice: "I hope that you will work very hard, and do great things."
She tried to. She got up early the next morning, and wrote in her diary, "Incipit vita nova!" and she made an elaborate time-table for every hour of the day; then she made a list of the things she intended to write—subjects and ideas that had stirred in her mind for months past, but had been scattered by distracting visits, dispersed in futile conversations. She felt impatient and happy and eager. On the large white sheet of paper which lay before her, like a wonderful unexplored country full of resplendent possibilities, she traced with reverent forefinger the sign of the cross.
Some one knocked at the door. It was Clarissa dellaRocca, Nino's married sister, tall, trim, and sleek in magnificent clothes.
"Mes amours!" she exclaimed, embracing Nancy, and pressing her long chin quickly against Nancy's cheek. "Do put on your hat and come for a drive with me. Aldo has come from America. He is downstairs in the stanhope. He is trying my husband's new sorrels, and so, of course, I insisted on going with him. Now I am frightened, and I have nobody to scream to and to catch hold of."
"Catch hold of Aldo, whoever he may be," said Nancy, laughing.
"He is my brother-in-law. But I can't," said Clarissa, waving explanatory mauve-gloved hands; "he is driving. Besides, he is horribly cross. Have you never seen him? He is Carlo's youngest brother. Do come. He will be much nicer if you are there."
"But he does not know me," said Nancy, still with her pen in her hand.
"That's why. He is always nice to people he does not know. Come quickly,ma chérie. He isravissant. He has been to America on a wild and lonely ranch in Texas. He speaks English and German, and he sings like an angel. Make yourself beautiful,mon chou aimé."
Nancy slipped into a long coat, and pinned a large hat on her head without looking in the glass.
Clarissa watched her from out of her long careful eyelids, and said: "Mon Dieu!" Then she asked suddenly: "How young are you?"
"Nearly seventeen," said Nancy, looking for her gloves.
"What luck!" sighed Clarissa. "And you are sure you won't mind if I pinch you? I must! The near horse rears."
Then they ran downstairs together, where Aldo della Rocca sat, holding the two impatient sorrels in with shortened reins. He was flicking at their ears and making them plunge with curved, angry necks and frothing mouths. He was certainlyravissant. His profile, as Nancy saw it against the blue June sky, was like Praxiteles' Hermes. His glossy hair gleamed blue-black as he raised his hat with a sweeping gesture that made Nancy smile. Then they were seated behind him, and the puissant horses shot off down the Corso and towards the Bastioni at a magnificent pace. Clarissa shrieked a little now and then when she remembered to, but Aldo did not seem to hear her, so she soon desisted.
"Is he not seraphically beautiful?" she said to Nancy, pointing an ecstatic forefinger at her brother-in-law's slim back. "I often say to Carlo: 'Why, why did I meet you first, and not your Apolline brother?'"
Nancy smiled. "But surely he is rather young."
"He is twenty-four, you little stinging-nettle," said Clarissa; "and he has been so much petted and adored by all the women of Naples that he might be a thousand."
"How horrid!" said Nancy, looking disdainfully at the unwitting back before her, at the shining black hair above the high white collar, and at the irreproachable hat sitting correctly on the top of it all.
"Oh yes, he is horrid," said Clarissa; "but how visually delectable!"
Aldo della Rocca turned his profile towards them. "I shall take you along the Monza road," he said.
"Oh," cried Clarissa, "such an ugly old road, where no one will see us."
"I am driving the horses out to-day," said her brother-in-law, "not your Paris frocks." And he turned awayagain, and took the road towards Monza at a spanking gait.
"Il est si spirituel!" laughed Clarissa, who bubbled over into French at the slightest provocation. The straight, white, dusty road, bordered with poplars, stretched its narrowing line before them, and the sorrels went like the wind. Suddenly, as they were nearing the first ugly-looking houses of Sesto, the driver checked suddenly, and the ladies bent forward to see why. A hundred paces before them, struggling and swaying, now on the side-walk, now almost in the middle of the road, were two women and a man. Some children standing near a door shrieked, but the struggling, scuffling group uttered no sound. Nancy stood up. The man, whose hat had fallen in the road—one could see his dishevelled hair and red face—had wrenched one arm loose from the clutch of the women, and with a quick gesture drew from his pocket something that the sun glanced on.
"He has a knife or a pistol!" gasped Nancy.
The struggling women had seen it, too, and now they shrieked, clutching and grappling with him, and screaming for help.
Nancy thrust her small, strong hands forward. "I can hold the horses," she said, and seized the reins from Della Rocca's fingers.
He turned and looked at her in surprise. "Why, what——?" And he stopped.
She read the doubt in his face, and read it wrong.
"I can—I can!" she cried. "Go quickly! We shall be all right!"
He twisted his mouth in curious fashion; then he jumped from his seat, and ran in light leaps across theroad. The man was holding the revolver high out of the women's reach, while they clung to him and held him frantically, convulsively, crying: "Help! Madonna! Help!"
Della Rocca reached him in an instant, and wrenched the short revolver away. With a quick gesture he opened the barrel and shook the cartridges out upon the ground. He tossed the weapon to one of a dozen men who had now come hurrying out of a neighbouring wine-shop, and, running lightly across the dusty road, he was back at the side of the carriage in an instant. He glanced up at Nancy, and raised his hat again with the exaggerated sweep that had caused her to smile before.
"Pardon me for keeping you waiting," he said.
"Ah,quel poseur!" cried Clarissa, who had sat with her eyes shut, holding her ears during the excitement.
Della Rocca smiled, and, jumping into his place, took the reins from Nancy's strained and trembling hands. She dropped back in her seat feeling faint and excited. The horses plunged and started forward again.
"What courage!" said Clarissa, taking Nancy's fingers in her own.
"Yes," said Nancy, looking with approval at the straight, slim shoulders and the black hair and the irreproachable hat. "I like a brave man."
Clarissa gave one of her little Parisian shrieks.
"Ouiche! it is not Aldo—it is you who are brave! Aldo is as cautious as a hare, but, being a preposterousposeur, he would not miss an effect for worlds!" And Clarissa flourished an imaginary hat in the Della Rocca style.
Nancy laughed, and believed not a word about the hare.
When they left her at her door she answered his sweeping salutation with a serious little nod; she ran up the stairs hurriedly, and into her room. On her writing-table lay an unopened letter from Nino; he wrote to her every morning and called on her every afternoon.
Nancy did not glance at it. She ran out on to the balcony. But the stanhope had already turned out of sight.
Nancy stepped back into her room and slowly drew off her gloves. For some unexplained reason she was glad that her wrists still ached, and that her fingers were bruised by the dragging of the hard, stiff reins.
From the open balcony the wind blew into the room, and scattered the papers on her writing-table. It blew away Nino's letter; it blew away the elaborate time-table she had drawn up and the lists of the work she was to do; it blew away the large white sheet of paper—the fair sheet full of resplendent possibilities—on which she had traced with reverent finger the sign of the cross.
When the Englishman called again to bring her a copy of theFortnightlywith the article on "An Italian Lyrist," he found that she had not worked at all; she looked as sweet and helpless and idle as ever, and the room was full of visitors. He was introduced to her mother, whom he found gentle and subdued, and to the vigorous, loud-voiced Aunt Carlotta, and to all the poets.
"I am afraid, mother dear," said Nancy, leaning her billowy head against her mother's arm and looking up at her new friend with May-morning eyes, "that Mr. Kingsley will think I have no character."
"You have a complexion," interposed Aunt Carlotta. "That is enough for a girl."
Valeria laughed. "It is true. Italian girls must not have characters until they marry. Then their husbands make it for them, according to their own tastes."
Mr. Kingsley smiled down at Nancy. "Why should I think you have no character?"
"Because you told me to work. And I promised; and I have not," said Nancy.
"Have you done nothing at all since I saw you?" he asked.
Nancy shook her head.
"And have you no thoughts, no ideas that urge for expression?"
"Oh yes!" said Nancy, waving eloquent, impatient fingers. "Ideas and thoughts grow and bloom and blow in my mind like flowers in a garden. Then all these people come and talk to me.... Alas," she sighed, looking round the murmuring, laughing room, "in the evening my garden is barren, for I have cut all my flowers and given them away."
The Englishman forgot that he was English, and said what he thought:
"I wish I could carry you off, and lock you up for a year, with nothing but books and a table and an inkstand," he said.
"I wish you could," laughed Nancy, clasping eager hands. "I should love it. Not a soul would be allowed to speak to me. And I should have my meals passed in through the window."
The Englishman laughed the sudden laugh of one who laughs seldom. "And I should walk up and down outside with a gun."
Nancy looked at him, and a quick, shy thought, like a bird darting into an open window, entered her mind for an instant. Surely it would be good to have this strong, kind sentinel between herself and the world; to feel the light firmness of his touch on her shoulder keeping her to her work—to the work she loved, and yet was willing to neglect at the call of every passing voice. This stern, fair countenance would face the world for her; these strong shoulders would carry her burdens; these candid eyes would look into her soul and keep it clear and bright.
Then the bird-thought flew out of the window of her mind, for the door opened and love and destiny came in. It was Aldo della Rocca, more than ever visually delectable.
With him came his sister-in-law Clarissa, and Nino. Nino looked depressed and dreary; La Villari was writing to him; his conscience was harassing him; Aldo della Rocca's self-confident beauty irritated him.
"What, Nino! Here again?" said Nancy, with a laugh. "You said last night that henceforward you would never come to see us more than twice a week."
"That's right," said Nino. "Yesterday was the last visit of last week, and this is the first visit of this week. Besides, Della Rocca told me he was coming, so I felt that I had to come too. Of course, I did all I could to shake him off, but he is as persistent and adhesive as one of his compatriot cab-drivers in Santa Lucia. So that is why I could not come alone."
"How confusing!" said Nancy, turning to greet Della Rocca.
Della Rocca smiled; and his smile was sudden and brilliant, as if a row of lights had been lit at the back of his eyes.
He bent over Nancy's proffered hand. "Signora—your slave!" he said in ceremonious Southern fashion.
Clarissa's high voice rang out. "He has been reading your poems day and night, Nancy. And he has put them to music. Glorious! Quite à la Richard Strauss or Tosti or Hugo Wolff! He must sing them to you."
Then she sailed round, greeting the poets, many of whom she knew. The Englishman was introduced as the Signor Kingsley, and Clarissa asked him many questions about London, and did not wait to hear what he answered, but went off with Adèle and Aunt Carlotta to a French lecture on "Napoléon et les Femmes." The poets, as soon as they had had vermouth and biscottini di Novara, also went away.
Then Della Rocca seated himself at the piano, and, preluding softly, strayed from harmony to harmony into the songs he had composed for Nancy. He played with his head bent forward and his soft hair falling darkly over half his face, making him look like a younger brother of Velasquez's Christ. He had the musical talent of a Neapolitan street-boy and the voice of an angel who had studied singing in Germany. Nancy felt happy tears welling into her eyes, and Della Rocca's clear-cut, down-curving profile wavered before her gaze.
The Signor Kingsley sat silent in his corner near the window. Valeria was in the shadow with some quiet work in her hand, and Nino, who was sulky and bored, smoked cigarette after cigarette and yawned.
Nancy bent forward with clasped hands, listening to her own words, the lovelier for their garb of music as children are more lovely when clothed in shimmering robes and crowned with roses. She had sent her thoughts out into the world, in their innocent and passionateimmaturity, bare and wild. And, behold, he brought them back to her veiled in silver minor keys, borne on palanquins of rhythmic harmonies, regal, measured, stately, like the young sisters of a queen.
Mr. Kingsley's mouth tightened as he watched the back of the singer's black head nodding to the music, and listened to the soft tenor voice rolling over the "r's" and broadening on the mellow "a's" of the tender Italian words. He felt his own good English baritone contracting in his throat, and he wondered what made "these Latin idiots" sing as they did. Then he glanced at Nancy, who had closed her eyes, and at Nino, who was in the rocking-chair staring at the ceiling; and suddenly he felt that he must take his leave. He rose at the end of the cycle of songs, and Nancy turned to him with vague eyes to say good-bye. His kind clear gaze rested on her face.
"Do not cut all your flowers," he said.
Nancy shook her head. "No, no!" she said. "I won't. I really won't."
"Remember that your masterpiece is before you, and the little poems are done with. Lock your doors. Shut out the world, and start on a new work to-morrow."
Nancy said, "Yes, yes, I will." Then an absent look stole over her light eyes. "Ah!der Musikant!" she cried, turning to Della Rocca, who was singing in German, and pronouncing as if it were Genovese. "I remember that. Is it not Eichendorff?"
"'Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts,'" said Della Rocca.
"Oh, do you really speak German? I love people who speak German," cried Nancy, on whom the German poet's spell still rested.
"I learned it at Göttingen," said Della Rocca, with his illuminating smile.
"Ach, de Stadt die am schönsten ist wenn man sie mit dem Rücken ansieht," quoted Nancy, laughing.
Della Rocca laughed too, although he did not understand what she had said; then he turned to the piano again.
Nancy felt happy and inclined to kindness. "Do not go yet," she said to Mr. Kingsley. "Sit down and talk to me."
But Mr. Kingsley knew better. Della Rocca's melting notes were drawing the girl's thoughts away again, and he could notice the little shiver creep round her face, leaving it slightly paler, as the silver tenor voice took a high A in falsetto and held it long and pianissimo.
"I will come again some day, if I may," he said. "But I almost hope that I shall find your doors locked."
Again the bird-thought came fluttering into the window of Nancy's mind, as the Englishman's strong hand closed firm and warm round hers.
Then the door was shut on Mr. Paul Kingsley, and the thought flew away and was gone.
"Who is that conceited fool of an Englishman?" said Nino, who felt cross and liked to show it.
Nancy flushed. "Please don't speak like that about Englishmen. My father was English." Then she added, with a little toss of her head: "And he was not a bit of a conceited fool."
"I never said he was," said Nino.
"Oh!" gasped Nancy, "you did!"
"I said nothing of the kind," declared Nino. "Your father was a good and noble man."
"You know I was not talking of my father," said Nancy.
"No more was I," said Nino.
Nancy turned to Della Rocca, who was preluding carelessly with smooth fingers and all his smiles alight.
"Nino always cavils and confuses until one does not know what one is talking about!"
Della Rocca nodded. "That is just what his celebrated friend, Nunziata Villari, said about him when I saw her in Naples. By the way, Nino,"—he ran up a quick scale of fourths and let them fall in a minor arpeggio like tumbling water—"they say La Villari tried to commit suicide last month. Locked herself up with a brazier of coke, like a love-sick grisette. Did you hear about it?"
"No," said Nino, "I did not." Then he looked long, mildly, fixedly at Della Rocca, who after a moment got up and said good-bye.
When he had left, Nancy said to Nino: "Who is La Villari? And why did she try to kill herself? La Villari! I thought that was an actress who had died a hundred years ago."
Nino took her hand. "You don't know anything, Nancy," he said. "You don't even know that you are a vulture and a shark."
Nancy laughed. "Yes, but who is La Villari?"
"She is someone you have devoured," said Nino.
And, remembering the brazier of coke, he left for Naples by the next train; for, though he had a nose of putty, he had a heart of gold.
During the long, dreary journey in an empty carriage of the slow train Nino fought his battles and chastened his soul. He set his conscience on the empty seat beforehim and looked it in the face. The desires of his heart sat near him, and took his part. His conscience had a dirty face that irritated him; his desires were fair as lilies and had high treble voices that spoke loud. His conscience said nothing, only sat there showing its dirty face and irritating him.
By the time Bologna was reached the lilies had it all their own way. After all he was young—well, comparatively young; thirty-one is young for a man—and he had his life before him, while Nunziata—well, she had lived her life. And she had had eight years of his: the eight best years, for after all at thirty-one a man is not young—well, not so young. His conscience was staring at him, so he changed argument. Nunziata did not really love him any more, she had told him so a hundred times during the last two years; it was a burden, a chain of misery to them both. She had herself begged him to leave her after one of those well-remembered, never-ending scenes that were always occurring since she had finally abandoned the theatre for his sake.
She had said: "Go! I implore you to go! I cannot live like this any longer! For my sake, go!" So it was really in order to please her that he had gone.
The face of his conscience opposite him was looking dirtier than ever. But the treble voices of his desires rang shrill: "He must not forget his duties to himself and to others. He had a duty to his father, who longed to have him near him, settled happily and normally; he had a duty to Valeria, who——" Here he quickly changed argument again. "He had a duty to Nancy, to little, innocent, wonderful Nancy, who understood nothing of the world; she must be saved from designing knaves, from strugglinglittérateursand poets who would like tomarry her and use her vogue in order to scramble up to a reputation, from the professionalbeau jeune hommelike Aldo, who would break her heart.... It really was his duty——" The train slowed, shivered, and stopped. He was glad to get out, and rush to a hurried supper in the buffet, because the ugly face opposite him was more than he could stand.
All through the night in the slow train to Rome he fought his battles and chastened his soul, and the little ugly face said not a word, but looked at him.
When day dawned he had broken the lilies, and they lay, whiter than before, at his feet. And the face of his conscience was clean. When Rome was reached, where he had three hours to wait for the Naples express, he hurried into the telegraph-office and sent a message to Nunziata:
"Arriving this evening at nine. Forgive. Yours for ever,Nino."
Then, just as he was getting into the hotel omnibus, he learned that a special excursion train was leaving for Naples at once. He could arrive four hours sooner. He hastened back into the station, caught the train, and was already approaching Naples when La Villari received his telegram.
La Villari had just begun her luncheon, and thespaghetti al burro e formaggiolay in a goodly heap of pale gold on her plate. She had just put her fork into them and begun to turn it round and round, when Teresa came in excitedly.
"A telegram, Illustrissima," she said.
La Villari opened the telegram. "Misericordia!" she said. "He is coming back."
Teresa cleaned her hands on her apron. What? The Signorino? He was returning?
"Yes, to-night. At nine o'clock," sighed La Villari.
Well, let the Illustrissima not allow the spaghetti to get cold. And Teresa sighed also, as she left the room and hustled the telegraph-boy off without giving him a tip.
They had been so happy without the Signorino. They had had such quiet, comfortable meals. The Illustrissima had had no nerves, no convulsions, but a good appetite and a pleasant temper. Now it would all begin again: the excitements, the tempers of the Illustrissima; the dinner left to get cold while the Illustrissima and the Signorino quarrelled; the rushings out of the Signorino; the tears of the Illustrissima; the telephone messages; the visitors and relations to argue with and console the Illustrissima; then the returnings of the Signorino; and supper for everybody in the middle of the night. It was not a life.
Teresa brought in the auburn cutlet a la Milanese. There! already it was beginning. The Illustrissima had not eaten the spaghetti!
"Do not bother me with the spaghetti," said the Illustrissima, who already had the nerves. "Let us think about this evening."
"Yes," said Teresa. "Shall we have vol-au-vent that His Excellency likes?"
"Oh, do not bother me with vol-au-vent!" cried the Illustrissima. "Do you not understand that he must not find us like this?"
"Vossignoria will put on the blue crêpe-de-chine gown," said Teresa; "and I will order the coiffeuse for six o'clock."
Yes, yes; but that was not sufficient. Nino must notfind her sitting there waiting for him, as if she had no one in the world but him.
"Go away, Teresa, go away! I must think," she said. And Teresa went to her kitchen grumbling.
La Villari's views of life and her manner of dealing with situations were according to Sardou, Dumas, or D'Annunzio. Nino must either find her supine in a darkened room, with etiolated cheeks and blue shadows under her spent eyes; or then, after his arrival, she must enter, coming from some brilliant banquet, rose-crowned and laughing. She sees him! She vacillates. Her jewelled hand clutches at her heart. "Nino!"—and he is at her feet.... Then he makes her a scene of jealousy. Where has she been? With whom? Where was she when his telegram arrived? Who sends her all these flowers? Pah! He throws them out of the window—and all is as it should be.
As it happened, there were no flowers in the room. So La Villari rang the bell and told Teresa to order fifty francs worth of white roses and tuberoses from the florist, to be brought as soon as possible, and the hair-dresser for six o'clock, and the brougham for seven.
"And, Teresa!..."
Teresa turned back with a dreary face.
"Remember that it was you who opened the telegram. I was out. I am always out. With many people, you understand."
Yes, Teresa understood. And with callous back and shuffling shoes she went away to order the flowers, and the brougham, and the hair-dresser.
La Villari unpinned her hair, put the greater part of it neatly on the dressing-table in readiness for the coiffeuse, rubbed a little lanoline round her eyes, and settledherself with Matilde Serao's "Indomani" to one more peaceful afternoon.
Love was not peaceful, it was agitating and uncomfortable; and keeping up the pretence of being twenty-eight when one is forty-five is a labour and a toil. Of course, she adored Nino; the mere thought of his ever tiring of her, or leaving her, brought visions of despair and vengeance, of vitriol and dagger to her mind. But oh! how she envied those placid women who surrender their youth submissively, and slip serenely into gentle middle-age as a ship glides into quiet waters. With her, because her lover was young, she must grasp and grapple with the engulfing years. She must clutch at her youth as a child clutches a wild bird fluttering to escape. Alas! when the child opens its fingers the prisoner is dead. Better let it fly when it will.
So thought Nunziata Villari. The feathers and the wings still lay in her hand, but youth, the bird, was dead.
She took up the book, and stifled thought under the blanket of Matilde Serao's warm prose.
The excursion train ran into Naples at five o'clock, just as a florist in the Strada Caracciolo was threading a wire into the green throat of the last white rose for the Illustrissima. Fifty francs worth of roses in Naples in the month of June are enough to consummate the perfumed death in Freiligrath's "Blumenrache," and then enough to cover the maiden's coffin from wider to narrowest end. It took two men to carry them, tied in huge bunches, along the Strada Caracciolo to the Palazzo Imparato.
Nino from his cab saw two men bearing white flowers far ahead of him, and wondered vaguely for whom they might be.
Then he thought of Nunziata's face as he had lastseen it—pallid, with a tortured smile, as she said good-bye. But now he would see her smile again, that pretty tilted smile that was still young....
(The men with the flowers had turned a corner. Nino's cab turned it, too, and there were the men again, marching before him.)
He had been a brute and a hound, but he would atone. He would do the right thing. Nunziata should not be left in tears again, nor again be driven to the little brazier of coke, like a love-sick grisette....
(The men with the white flowers were alongside. Now they were left behind.)
And now the carriage stopped at the door of the Palazzo Imparato. The driver handed the luggage down, and a waiting lazzarone grabbed and shouldered it. While Nino was paying the fare the men with the flowers came up, and Nino turned to glance at them as they passed.But they did not pass.They turned into the Palazzo Imparato and vanished in the shadow of the gateway.
Nino's heart leaped up, and stood still. The lazzarone, watching him, saw tragedy in his face, and was satisfied that the tip would be a large one; for the lazzarone knew that despair is as generous as happiness.
Nino ran, blind with his terrors, up the wide flights of stairs. On Nunziata's landing the men with the flowers stood waiting.
Teresa opened the door, and saw behind the roses Nino's wild, white face.
"The Signorino! Santa Vergine!"
In an instantaneous vision she thought of the Illustrissima, unpowdered, unprepared, reading Matilde Serao, her tresses lying on the dressing-room table. Theservant's stupefied, stricken face confirmed Nino's fears. He stumbled forward, and, dropping into a seat in the hall, covered his face with his hands.
The Illustrissima, who had heard the noise, opened the drawing-room door. At a glance she saw it all, and quietly closed the door again.
When, an instant later, Nino rushed in, the room was darkened, the shutters closed; Nunziata lay on the couch with etiolated face, a soft shimmering scarf was wound becomingly round her head, but no blue shadows were under her eyes, for there had been no time to make them.
Then all began over again; for although she was peaceful and comfortable when Nino was away, as soon as he was present she felt that all things depended upon his love, and that his absence would end her life. Tighter and tighter she grasped the little dead bird in her white, ringed hands, and louder and louder she told her tired heart that youth was living and singing still.
Nino was kind and considerate. He also wrote letters to the Italian Consulates in Rio and Buenos Ayres, asking them to make sure that Eduardo Villari was really dead—as his cook, who had returned with a good deal of money and had married a baron, declared he was.
If the thought of Nancy knocked with light fingers at Nino's heart, he never opened the door.
Clarissa in her villa on Lake Maggiore was bored, so she wrote to Nancy to come and stay with her.
"I am weary of my sweet blue lake and of my sour blue husband. Come and stay with me a month. You shall have a large room at the top of the house, with ahuge table and an inkstand large enough to drown in, and before you the view that inspired Manzoni. Come and write your masterpiece."
By the same post she sent a note to her brother-in-law:
"Aldo,mon joli, do come. Carlo is insufferable. He growls all day and snores all night. Why did I marry him? This is the fourth time I invite you this year, and you never come. Last year it was different."Yours,"Clarissa."P.S.—The littlepoetessais going to stay here for a month."
"Aldo,mon joli, do come. Carlo is insufferable. He growls all day and snores all night. Why did I marry him? This is the fourth time I invite you this year, and you never come. Last year it was different.
"Yours,"Clarissa.
"P.S.—The littlepoetessais going to stay here for a month."
He arrived next day. After greetings, he asked: "Where is Sappho, the violet-haired?" Clarissa explained that Nancy had not arrived, and he sulked and played the piano all the evening, while Carlo on the sofa snored. Clarissa looked from one to the other, uncertain which of the two was insulting her most.
Nancy arrived the following day. She had brought her notebooks with her and a broken ivory pen that she always wrote with; she was full of the masterpiece. She was going to work immediately.
Driving up from the landing-place to the Villa Solitudine she told her plans to Clarissa, who nodded and smiled as she whipped up the fat cob. She was going to write a book—The Book!—a great, noble piece of work, not a little volume of flyaway poems that one reads and forgets in a day. She was going to think of and dream of The Book; to live for The Book; to breathe and walk for it, to eat and sleep for it. In Milan, with people always round her, talking and distracting, it was impossible; but here in the large bare room at the top of thehouse——How sweet and dear of Clarissa to think of it! Never, never could Nancy thank her enough.... Clarissa nodded and smiled, and the fat cob turned into the chestnut drive of Villa Solitudine.
Down the steps, with a couple of dogs barking and leaping at his heels, came Aldo to meet them, clad in Neapolitan fashion in white flannels and scarlet sash. His uncovered head gleamed darkly in the sun.
"Behold Endymion awakened!" said Clarissa, laughing, to Nancy. "Charmides, Adonaïs, Narcissus! The gods have cast upon him all the beauty of the world!" As Nancy did not answer, Clarissa turned to look at her. "Oh, what a stern face,ma chérie! You are quite white. What are you thinking of?"
"The Book," said Nancy; and she felt as if it were a child of hers that was to die unborn.
"You shall write it,mon ange! Aldo shall not disturb you." And she threw the reins to the little stiff groom; then, daintily raising her fluffy skirts, she alighted in Aldo's uplifted arms. Nancy put her foot on the step, but Aldo raised her lightly and lifted her down. His red, smiling mouth was close to her face. She thanked him, and he kissed her hand with the ceremonious Southern salute, "Signora, I am your slave."
Nancy went to her room—the large, bare room with the beautiful view—and stayed there all the afternoon. She put her notes in order; she placed the large sheets of paper before her; and she dipped the broken ivory pen into the huge inkstand. Then she sat and looked out of the window. She could hear the dogs barking in the garden and Clarissa's trilling laugh. On the sweet blue lake a tiny sail, like a pocket handkerchief, dipped and curtseyed away, and through the open windows of thedrawing-room Aldo could be heard playing a Valse Triste. Nancy dipped the pen into the inkstand again—and looked at the view.
Now she heard the music wander off in modulating chords which resolved themselves into the rippling accompaniment of Hugo Wolff's "Musikant."
"Wenn wir zwei zusammen wärenWürd' das Singen mir vergeh'n."
She could hear the soft tenor voice, and felt it drawing at her heart. She closed the window and sat down again. She dipped the ivory pen into the inkstand, and wrote at the top of the white sheet, "Villa Solitudine," and the date. Under it, as she had not thought of a title yet, she wrote in large letters:
"THE BOOK."
Then she jumped up and ran downstairs.
At sunset they went out in a sailing-boat. Clarissa held the rudder, and Aldo stood in easy attitudes of beauty at the sail. The glow of the west was on his pure young face, and the wind of thetramontanaraised his waved hair and blew it lightly across his forehead. He was silent, satisfied to know that the two women could see him, and that the red-gold sky was a good background for his profile. Clarissa talked and laughed, twittered and purred; but Aldo never spoke. And it was his silence that enraptured Nancy.
"Ed io che intesi ciò che non dicevi,M'innamorai di te perchè tacevi."
Stecchetti's words sang in her brain with new meaning, and in the days that followed the two smooth lines were always in her mind.
Aldo knew little, but he knew the value of silence.He knew the lure of thehortus conclusus—the Closed Garden into which one has not stepped. Nancy stood outside its gates and dreamed of its unseen roses, of fountains and shadowy paths and water-lilied lakes. For Aldo was a closed garden.
Aldo also knew the value of his eyes—deep, passion-lit eyes, that looked, Clarissa said, as if he had rubbed the lids with burnt cork to darken them. When he raised them suddenly, and looked straight at Nancy, she felt a little shock of pleasure that took her breath away. Little by little, day by day, those eyes drew Nancy's spirit to their depths—she leaned over them as over an abyss. In them she sunk and drowned her soul.... Then, when from his eyes her own passionate purity gazed back at her, she thought she saw his soul and not her own.
The Book cried in her now and then, but she stifled its voice and whispered: "Wait!"
And The Book waited.
One day in the garden Aldo spoke to Clarissa. She was in the hammock pretending to read.
"Clarissa, I am twenty-five years old."
"Vlan! ça y est!" said Clarissa, dropping her book. Then she drew a deep breath, and her nostrils turned a little pale; but the superposed roses of her cheeks bloomed on, independent of her ebbing blood and sickening heart.
"I am penniless," continued Aldo, picking a piece of grass and chewing it; "and Carlo has given me to understand that he can exist without me if he tries very hard."
Clarissa sat up. "When? What did he say? Does he ... has he ... did he mean anything?"
Aldo shook his comely head. "Carlo never means anything. But I shall have to go back to—to the Texas ranch, or marry."
The Texas ranch was a romantic invention of Clarissa's, the only foundation for which was a three weeks' holiday which Aldo had once spent in the city of New York.
Clarissa bit her red, narrow lips. "Yes," she said.
During the long pause that followed Aldo picked another piece of grass and chewed it.
"I suppose," said Clarissa, looking at him sideways through her long lids, "you will marry some affectionate old thing with money."
"No. I know them," said Aldo. "They demand the affection, and keep the money."
After a pause, in which he felt Clarissa's angry eyes on his face, he said: "I am going to marry the little Sappho."
Clarissa laughed suddenly and loud. "You do that for your pleasure!Farceur, va!" Aldo lifted his perfect eyebrows and did not reply. "She has nothing, not a little black sou!" And Clarissa stuck her long pointed thumbnail behind her long pointed teeth and jerked it forward.
"Oh! I dare say she has something," said Aldo, pretending to yawn carelessly. "Besides, she is a genius, and can earn what she will."
"You are the perfect Neapolitan pig," said Clarissa, and closed her eyes.
The perfect Neapolitan pig rose with an offended air and left her. He strolled into the house and took his hat and stick, then he strolled out again and through the garden into the hot street and down to the landing-place. A boat was leaving for Intra, so he went on board, and at Intra took the train for Milan. He dined at Biffi's, feeling happy.
"They will be miserable," he said. "That will teachthem." Then he went to his furnished rooms on the Corso, and slept well.
In Villa Solitudine they were miserable, and it taught them.
It taught Nancy that the Closed Garden she had had a glimpse of for so brief an hour was the only garden in the world that she ever wanted to enter; and that all the words Aldo had not said were the only words she ever wanted to hear; that perfect goodness and unwavering strength must lie behind his portentous beauty, white and immovable like marble lions at a palace gate.
It taught Clarissa that one must accept the inevitable—that half a loaf was better than no bread, and that a married Aldo was better than no Aldo at all. It made her look at Nancy with closer eyes, and say to herself that she was a little creature one would easily tire of, in spite of—or because of—her intellectuality. Aldo was not a closed garden for Clarissa; she knew the feeble flowers that bowed behind its gates.
A hot, dreary week passed with no news from Aldo. Then Clarissa telegraphed to him at Milan. She said she had told Carlo about their conversation regarding his wish to marry Nancy, and Carlo approved. Would he come back?
Yes; Aldo would come back. He waited another day or two, and at the close of a sultry afternoon he sauntered in, just as he had sauntered out, across the sleepy, bee-droning lawns of the Villa Solitudine. He stopped at the entrance of the summer-house, where Nancy sat reading a letter—a long letter. Already two of the blue sheets had fallen at her side. Before her on the table was the inkstand and the ivory pen and The Book. As his shadow passed the threshold she lookedup; she drew a quick breath, and her face turned milky white, with a pallor that gripped at Aldo's nerves.
Once more, and for the last time, he bent his head over her hand. "Signora, I am your slave," he said. But as he raised his eyes she knew that he had said: "Nancy, I am your master."
"Who writes to you?" he asked.
She drooped submissive lashes, and the colour ran into her cheeks. "Mr. Kingsley, the English friend," she said. "Do you remember him?"
Aldo took her hand and with it the letter in his own.
"What does he want?"
Her dimples fluttered. "He wants me to be good," she said, laughing, with wistful eyes. "And to write."
Aldo pressed the little fist with the crumpled blue letter in it to his lips. "Well, write," he said. "Write at once."
He took the ivory pen and dipped it in the ink and put it in her hand; then he pulled the sheet of white paper which was to be The Book before her.
"Write: 'Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. He adores me.'"
And Nancy, with her hair almost touching the paper, wrote: "Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. I adore him."
The Englishman never got the letter. But he heard of it afterwards; and his English fists closed tight.
Nancy walked among asphodels and morning glory; and her soul was plunged in happiness and her eyes were washed with light.The Book waited.
They went out in the little boat at sunset. Aldo stood at the sail, and the red sky was a background for his profile.
"Oh," sighed Nancy, looking at him and clasping puerile hands, "your beautyachesme!"
Aldo quite understood it, and was pleased.
They went for long walks to Premeno and San Salvatore; as Clarissa refused to accompany them, Carlo chaperoned them, blandly bored.
Soon Valeria arrived. Nancy went down to meet her at the landing-place, looking ethereal and pink as a spray of apple-blossom. Valeria kissed her with hot tears. "Oh! my baby, my baby!" she said, and wished that the seventeen years were a dream, and that her child's small head were still safely nestling at her breast. In Nancy's young love she lived the days of her own betrothal over again, and Tom arose in her memory and was with her day and night. On this same silky blue lake Tom had so often rowed her with Zio Giacomo, in a little boat calledLuisa. She tearfully begged Nancy and Aldo to come with her and see if they could not find that very self-same boat.
They found, indeed, threeLuisas, but Valeria could not recognize them; still, all three of the boatmen declared that they remembered her perfectly, and got the expected tip.
"Of course," said Valeria, deeply moved, "it cannot have been all three of them."
And Aldo said: "You should not have given them anything. They were none of them more than twenty-five years old." Whereupon Valeria sighed deeply.
Then it was decided that they should go in reverentpilgrimage to the Madonna del Monte, where Nancy's father had asked Nancy's mother to marry him. The road was lined with beggars: shouting cripples, exhibiting sores and stumps.
"Some of these are very old," sighed Valeria. "I am sure they were here that day, and must have seen me."
"I shall give a franc to every one of them," said Nancy, taking out her small fat purse, as the first one-armed mendicant held out his greasy hat.
"My dear Nancy, what nonsense!" said Aldo. "There are about a hundred of them!"
"Well?" and Nancy raised clear, questioning eyes to his.
"Oh,Idon't mind," said Aldo, with a little Neapolitan shrug.
Valeria looked at the handsome figure and impeccable profile of her future son-in-law, as he strolled beside them up the steep wide road. Her heart was heavy with recollections. Up this road she had walked in her blue dress and scarlet tie with Tom beside her—Tom, broad and careless in his slouchy brown suit, who had given the beggars all his coppers and silver, just as Tom's daughter was doing to-day. Again she looked at Aldo's slim, straight shoulders and sighed. "I wish it had been an Englishman!" she thought. Then, as her memory took her to England, she saw someone else. "Or, then, poor dear Nino." And she sighed again; but not altogether for Nancy's sake.
She wrote to Nino that evening, and, almost without knowing it, began her letter, "Poor dear Nino!"
Nino was out interviewing Consuls about the presumably deceased Eduardo Villari when the letter arrived. So Nunziata opened the letter.
In it Valeria told Nino that Nancy, "our littleNancy," was betrothed to Aldo della Rocca, and could Nino not do anything to prevent it? And why, oh why, had his sister Clarissa invited them both to stay at the Villa Solitudine, so that, as Fräulein Müller or was it Heine?—used to say, "Wie könnte es anders sein," for how could anyone see Nancy in the resplendency of her seventeen Aprils and not fall in love with her? And oh, she was so sorry for poor, dear Nino, for she knew the secret of his heart. And how true it was what he had said about Nancy's eyes being so pure that they seemed never to have gazed at aught but the sky; and she understood him and his sufferings, for had she not herself suffered dreadfully through him, years ago—but never mind, that was nothing. And it had never been dear, dear Nino's fault at all; it was her own foolish fault and Fate.... And she hoped Nino did not think that she had really suffered, for she had not, and now she never, never thought of it any more! And if he came quickly he might still be in time; and oh, she knew he must be heart-broken, but he was not to mind, because it could not be helped. And she was ever his unhappy Valeria.
Nunziata read the rambling letter three times before she understood it. The letter opened her eyes.
When her eyes were open Nunziata saw well. She saw the chain of desire stretching out ring on ring: from Valeria's heart to Nino; from Nino's heart to Nancy; from Nancy's heart to Aldo, as in a children's game; and Love passing down from one to the other, stopping before each with gift of passion, of pain, of joy. She saw that her years placed her behind Valeria—far back, far back, out of the game; and she knew that Love had passed her, and would not stop before her any more. Then she remembered that she had had her gifts; that Love hadheaped roses at her feet, and that she had moved through passions as through a field of flowers.
Nunziata decided that she would play the game.
She went with her newly-opened eyes to her room and threw the shutters back. She looked at her tired pink face in the glass, at her crimson lips and complicated hair. She went on her knees beside her bed and said threePatersand three Aves. Then she opened her reluctant hands and gave her dead youth back to God.
She washed her face with warm water and soap, and unpinned her elaborate curls. She wound her own soft hair round her head, and put on a plain black gown. Then, looking, although she did not think so, twenty years younger and twenty times sweeter than she did before, she went downstairs to wait for Nino.
That same evening she sent him back to his father. His luggage was packed and the brougham was waiting for him at the door, and still he declared he would not go. He would not leave her. Her face was whiter than anypoudre de lyscould ever make it as she kissed his forehead, and blessed it with the sign of the cross, and told him that he must indeed go, and not return again.
At last, before his stubborn refusal, she took the weapon that hurt her most, and used it to pierce her own heart. "Think of Nancy!" she said. "You may still be in time to prevent her from marrying an adventurer."
Nino looked into the pale, kind face, from which every trace of triviality had been washed by the warm water and the tears. And, being a man, he did not wait, and refuse, and then catch a later train; but with candid cruelty he said: "You are right. You are an angel. May the saints bless you!"
... She stood on the balcony and watched the carriage drive away into the night; it turned up Corso Umberto and was gone. With it the lights went out in Nunziata Villari's life.
Youth, love, hope, desire—Fate blew all the candles out, and left her in the dark.
Aldo's curved red lips under his very young moustache opened to words as well as to kisses under Nancy's impelling, eager love. During the long hours they spent together she spoke and he must answer. His splendid, silent eyes urged her to quick questionings, and his kisses did not still the thirst of her soul for his soul. Little by little she pushed back the gates of the Closed Garden; gently, day by day, she ventured a step farther adown the mysterious paths. Where are the arbours of roses? Where the fountains and the deep, water-lilied lakes? She tiptoed down the narrow paths that Clarissa and many others had trodden before her, and when she had come to the end she said: "I am mistaken. I have not entered the Garden yet."
They were to be married almost at once. Aldo was impatient, and Nancy was in love; and The Book was waiting. So Valeria left for Milan to prepare the trousseau, and Nancy must follow a week later. On the eve of her journey Clarissa went up to say good-night to Nancy in her room—the large, bare room in which the masterpiece had not been written. Nancy's trunks were packed. The ivory pen and The Book were put away. The large inkstand stood alone on the large table.
Nancy was leaning out of the window looking at thestars. Clarissa came and stood behind her and looked up into the cobalt depths.
"I hate the stars," said Nancy; "I am afraid of them."
"Why?" said Clarissa, to whom a star was a star.
"Oh, I want to be sure that somewhere they leave off," said Nancy. "It terrifies me to think of fabulous nothingness behind unending space, of perpetual neverness beyond unceasing time. I should like a wall built round the universe, a wall that would shut me safely in, away from the terrible infinity."
Clarissa laughed. "Perhaps when you are married you will feel less little and lonely."
"Perhaps," said Nancy. And she added: "Aldo must be the wall."
"Oh, my dear," said Clarissa, "Don't try to make poor Aldo anything that he isn't. He is sweet; he is lovely; he is full of talent. But he is no more a wall than this is." And she waved her filmy gossamer scarf that blew lightly in the air.
That evening Carlo said to his wife: "I feel like a brute, letting that good-for-nothing brother of mine marry the nice little girl. He will make her miserable."
"Not at all," said Clarissa, putting out the candle with her book, a thing Carlo could not bear. "She will write poems on his profile and be perfectly happy, until she gets tired of him for not being something that he isn't."
"Oh, well," growled Carlo. "I suppose you know her best. Women are cackling cats."
"Mixed metaphor," murmured Clarissa, and went to sleep comfortably, feeling that Carlo was a wall.
Nancy was married in Rome. All the poets of Italy came with poems, and Nino brought a necklet of pearls. From the Quirinal came a pendant, with a picture of a boy's face set in diamonds.
After the wedding-breakfast all the guests left, passing to their carriages down the red carpet that stretched from the door to the edge of the pavement. Then Nancy, in her mouse-grey travelling-gown, kissed Valeria, and wept and said good-bye. And kissed Nino, and wept and said good-bye. And she went with her husband down the red carpet to the carriage. Carlo and Clarissa, Aunt Carlotta and Adèle followed to the station, where there were great crowds waiting to see them off.
Valeria and Nino remained alone in the desolate room. Valeria's face was hidden in her hands. She was looking down the days of the future, and saw them lonely, dark and desolate. Nino gazed through tear-blurred eyes at the bowed figure before him, and his thoughts went back through the years. Bending forward, he took her hand and kissed it. She smiled wanly.
"What are you thinking of?" she said.
"I was thinking of Nancy, and of the past," said Nino. "Of her father, poor Tom, who died so suddenly——"
"It was to save Nancy," said Valeria.
"And of the old grandfather who died alone on the hill-side——"
"We had to find Nancy," said Valeria.
"And of little Edith and her poor mother, forsaken in their darkest hour by those they loved——"
"But it was to safeguard Nancy," said Valeria.
Hearing her words, he realized the puissance of all-conquering, maternal love. Nothing mattered but Nancy, though Nancy herself, with gentle, unconscious hands, had taken all things from her. Had not he himself, the lover of Valeria's girlhood, turned from her, heart-stricken for Nancy?
There was a pause.
"And I am thinking of you, Valeria, over whose heart I have trampled, ..." said Nino, with a break in his voice.
"You could not help it. You loved Nancy," said Valeria. "And now"—her pitying eyes filled with tears—"your hope is shipwrecked and your heart broken, too."
Nino did not answer. He turned away and gazed out of the window. He was thinking of Nancy, so mild and sweet-voiced, with eyes like blue hyacinths under the dark drift of her hair. And once more he realized how Nancy in her dove-like innocence had absorbed and submerged the existence of those around her. Her sweet helplessness itself had wrecked and shattered, had devastated and destroyed. The lives of all those who loved her had gone to nourish the clear flame of her genius, the white fire of her youth.
Nino gazed down at the red wedding-carpet that stretched its scarlet line to the pavement's edge like a narrow path of blood.
"Behold," he said, "the trail of the dear devourer—the course of the dove of prey!"
As the train glided out of the station, and shook and ran, and the cheers and the waving handkerchiefs were left behind, Nancy raised her eyes, tender and tear-lit, to Aldo's face. Her white wedded hand was to open the gates of the Closed Garden.
Now the bowers of roses, and the fountains, and the water-lilied lakes!