AS they galloped up the long avenue under the arching trees, the villa
presently came into view. The sound of laughing voices floated out from
the open windows. Marcia drew rein with a half-involuntary cry of
dismay. The Roystons had come.
‘I’d forgotten!’ she explained to her companion. ‘We’re giving a
dinner-party to-night.’
At the sound of the clattering hoofs on the gravel of the driveway a
gay group poured out on to the loggia, welcoming the dilatory riders
with laughter and questions and greetings.
‘My dear child! Where have you been?’
‘Here, Pietro; call some one to take the horses.’
‘Is this the way you welcome guests? I shall never——’
‘Dinner’s been waiting half an hour. We were beginning to think——’
‘I’ve been worried to death! You haven’t caught cold, have you?’
‘No, Aunt Katherine,’ she laughed as she pulled off her gloves and
shook hands with the visitors. ‘But we’ve been nearly drowned! We
should have been wholly drowned if Mr. Sybert hadn’t spied a very leaky
ark on the top of a hill.’
‘I’m relieved!’ sighed her uncle as they passed into the hall. ‘I was
beginning to fear that you had had a disagreement on the way, and that
it was another case of the Kilkenny cats.’
‘Marcia, how you look! You’re covered with mud!’ cried Mrs. Copley.
With a slightly apprehensive glance toward the mirror, Marcia
straightened her hat and rubbed a daub of mud from her cheek. ‘Kentucky
Lil and Triumvirate were in too much of a hurry to get home to turn out
for puddles,’ she said. ‘How much time may we have to dress, Aunt
Katherine?’
‘Just fifteen minutes,’ returned her uncle; ‘and that is a quarter of
an hour more than you deserve. If you are not down then, we shall eat
without waiting for you.’
‘Fifteen minutes, remember!’ cried Marcia to Sybert as they parted at
the top of the stairs. ‘I’ll race with you,’ she added; ‘though I think
myself that a girl ought to have a handicap.’
She found Granton, a picture of prim disapproval, waiting with her
dress spread out on the bed. Marcia dropped into a wicker chair with a
tired sigh.
‘You’ve ridden a long way,’ Granton remarked as she removed a muddy
boot.
‘Yes, Granton, I have; and dinner’s already been waiting half an hour,
and Pietro looks like a thunder-cloud, and Mrs. Copley looks worried,
and the guests look hungry—what François looks like I don’t dare to
think. We must _fly_; our reputations depend on it.’
‘Am I ready?’ she inquired, not much more than fifteen minutes later,
as she twisted her head to view the effect in the mirror.
‘You’ll do very well,’ said Granton.
‘I’m terribly tired,’ she sighed; ‘and I feel more like going to bed
than facing guests—but I suppose, in the natural order of events,
dinner must be accomplished first.’
‘To be sure,’ said the maid, critically adjusting her train.
‘Your philosophy is so comfortable, Granton! As we have done yesterday,
so shall we do to-day and also to-morrow. It saves one the trouble of
making up one’s mind.’
She reached the salon just in time to take Paul Dessart’s silently
offered arm to the dining-room. Sybert did not appear until the soup
was being removed. He possessed himself of the empty chair beside
Eleanor Royston, with a murmured apology to his hostess.
‘It’s excusable, Sybert,’ said Copley, with a frown. ‘You should not
allow a woman to beat you.’
‘The furniture in that room you gave me,’ he complained gravely, ‘was
built as a trap for collar-buttons. The side of the bed comes to within
three inches of the floor—I couldn’t crawl under.’
‘What did you do?’ Eleanor Royston asked.
‘I borrowed one of our host’s—and I had a hard time finding it.’
‘I shall put my wardrobe under lock and key the next time you visit
us,’ Copley declared.
Sybert was curiously inspecting a small white globule he found by his
plate.
Marcia laughed and called from the other end of the table: ‘It’s your
own prescription, Mr. Sybert; drop it in your wine-glass and drink it
like a man. I’ve taken my dose.’
During this exchange of badinage Paul Dessart said never a word. He sat
with his eyes fixed moodily on the table-cloth, and—one hates to say
it of Paul—he sulked. For the first time since she had known him,
Marcia found him _difficile_. He started no subject himself, and those
that she started, after a brief career, fell lifeless. It may have been
that she herself was somewhat ill at ease, but in any case several
awkward silences fell between them, which the young man made no attempt
to break. Mr. Copley would never have said of him to-night that he was
an ornament to any dinner-table. It fell to the Frenchman across the
way to keep the ball rolling.
In an errant glance toward the other end of the table, Marcia saw
Sybert laughing softly at something Eleanor had said. She stayed her
glance a second to note involuntarily how well they went together.
Eleanor, with her white shoulders rising from a cloud of pale-blue
gauze, looked fair and distinguished; and Sybert, with his dark face
and sullen eyes, made an esthetically satisfying contrast. He was
bending toward her with that air of easy politeness, that superior
self-sufficiency, which had always exasperated Marcia so. But Eleanor
knew how to take it; she had been out nine seasons, and the smile with
which she answered him was quite as mocking as his own.
He looked to-night, through and through, what Marcia had always taken
him for—the finished cosmopolitan—the diplomat—the diner-out. But he
was not just that, she knew; she had seen him off his guard in the
midst of the storm that afternoon, and she was still tingling with the
surprise of it. She recalled what Mr. Melville had said that afternoon
in the ilex grove—she was always recalling what people said about
Sybert. The things seemed to stick in one’s mind; he was a subject that
gave rise to many _mots_. ‘You think you are very broad-minded because
you see the man underneath the peasant. Don’t you think you could push
your broad-mindedness one step further and see the man underneath the
man of the world?’ She had caught a glimpse that afternoon. It seemed
now as if his air of super civilization were only a mask to
conceal—she did not know what, underneath. She was searching for an
apt description when she heard the young Frenchman laughingly inquire:
‘Mademoiselle Copley _est un peu distraite ce soir, n’est-ce pas_?’
With a little start, she became aware that some one had asked her a
question. For the remainder of the dinner she kept her eyes at her end
of the table, and exerted herself to be gracious to her taciturn
companion. Paul’s bad temper was not unbecoming, and he scarcely could
have adopted a wiser course. Marcia had expected to find him sparkling,
enthusiastic, convincing; and she had come down prepared to withstand
his charm. _Mais voilà!_ there was no charm to withstand. He was
sullen, moody, with a frown scarcely veiled enough for politeness. Some
one had once compared him, not very originally, to a Greek god. He
looked it more than ever to-night, if one can imagine a Greek god in
the sulks. What was the matter with him, Marcia could only guess.
Perhaps, as his cousin had affirmed, he was like a cat and needed
stroking the right way of the fur. At any rate, she found the new mood
rather taking, and she somewhat weakly allowed herself to stroke him
the right way. By the time they rose from the table he was, if not
exactly purring, at least not showing his claws.
At the Royston girls’ suggestion, they put on evening wraps and
repaired to the terrace—except the two elder ladies, who preferred the
more tempered atmosphere of the salon. Mrs. Copley delegated her
husband and Sybert to act as chaperons—a position which Sybert
accepted with a bow, to the accompaniment of a slightly puzzled smile
on Eleanor’s part. She could not exactly make out the gentleman’s
footing in the household. They seated themselves in a group about the
balustrade, with the exception of Eleanor and Sybert, who strolled back
and forth the length of the flagging. Eleanor was doing her best
to-night, and her best was very good; she appeared to have wakened a
spark in even his indifference. Marcia, with her eyes on the two,
thought again how well they went together, and M. Benoit was a second
time on the verge of calling her _distraite_.
The two strollers after a time joined the group, Eleanor humming under
her breath a little French _chanson_ that had been going the rounds of
the Paris cafés that spring.
‘Oh, sing something we all know,’ said Margaret, and with a laughing
curtesy toward Sybert she struck into ‘Fair Harvard.’ The other girls
joined her. Their voices, rising high and clear, filled the night with
the swinging melody. It seemed strangely out of place there, in the
midst of the Sabine hills, with the old villa behind them and the Roman
Campagna at their feet. As their voices died away Sybert laughed softly.
‘I swear I’d forgotten it!’
Margaret shook her head in mock reproof. ‘Forgotten it!’ she cried. ‘A
man ought to be ashamed to acknowledge it if he had forgotten his Alma
Mater song. It’s like forgetting his country.’
‘I suspect,’ said Eleanor, ‘that it’s time for you to go back to
America and be naturalized, Mr. Sybert.’
‘Oh, well, Miss Royston,’ he objected, ‘I suppose in time one outgrows
his college, just as one outgrows his kindergarten.’
‘And his country,’ Marcia added, as much for Paul Dessart’s benefit as
for his own.
* * * * *
Margaret, searching for diversion, presently suggested that they visit
the ghost. Marcia objected that the ghost was visible only during the
full moon, but the objection was overruled. There was some moon at
least, and a wild night like this, with flying clouds and waving
branches, was just the time for a ghost to think of his sins. Mr.
Copley, in the office of chaperon, remonstrated that the grass would be
damp; but there were rubbers, he was told. Marcia acquiesced in the
expedition without any marked enthusiasm; she foresaw a possible
_tête-à-tête_ with Paul Dessart. As they set out, however, she found
herself walking beside M. Benoit, with Paul contentedly strolling on
ahead at the side of his younger cousin, while Eleanor and the two
chaperons brought up the rear. As they came to the end of the laurel
path and approached the region of the ruins, Margaret paused with her
finger on her lips and in a conspiratorial whisper impressed silence on
the group. They laughingly fell into the spirit of the play, and the
whole party stole along with the elaborate caution of ten-year-old boys
ambuscading Indians.
The ruins in the dim light looked a fit harbour for ghosts. The
crumbling piles of masonry were almost hidden by the dark foliage, but
the empty fountain stood out clearly in a little open space between the
trees.
The group paused on the edge of the trees and stood with eyes turned
half expectantly toward the fountain. As they looked, they saw, with a
tremor of surprise, the dim figure of a man rise from the coping and
dissolve into the surrounding shadows. For a moment no one uttered a
sound beyond a quick gasp of astonishment, and an excited giggle from
Margaret Royston. Paul was the first to rise to the occasion with the
muffled assertion that he recognized the fair and warlike form in which
the majesty of buried Denmark did sometime march. Before any of them
had recovered sufficiently to follow the apparition, a second ghost
rose from the coping and stood wavering in apparent hesitancy whether
to recede or advance. This was more than tradition demanded, and with a
quick exclamation both Copley and Sybert sprang forward to solve the
mystery.
A babble of noisy expostulation burst forth. The ghost was vociferous
in his apologies. He had finished his work and had desired to take the
air. It was a beautiful night. He came to talk with a friend. He did
not know that the signore ever came here, or he would never have
ventured.
The tones were familiar, and a little sigh of disillusionment swept
through the group. The two men came back laughing, and Paul
apostrophized tragically:
‘Another lost illusion! If all the ghosts turned out to be butlers, how
unromantic the world would be!’
The young Frenchman took up the tale of mourning.
‘But the true ghost, Monsieur le Prince, whom I was preparing to paint;
after this he will not deign to poke his nose from the grave. It is an
infamy! An infamy!’ he declared.
They laughingly turned back toward the villa, and Marcia discovered
that she was walking beside Paul. It had come about quite naturally,
without any apparent interposition on his part; but she did not doubt,
since he had the chance, that he would take advantage of it to demand
an answer, and she prepared herself to parry what he might choose to
say. He strolled along, whistling softly, apparently in no hurry to say
anything. When he did break the silence it was to remark that the
tree-toads were infernally noisy to-night. He went on to observe that
he wasn’t particularly taken with her butler; the fellow protested too
much in the wrong place, and not enough in the right. From that he
passed to a flying criticism of villa architecture. Villa Vivalanti was
a daisy except for the eastern wing, and that was ‘way off in style and
broke the lines. Those gingerbread French villas at Frascati, he
thought, ought to be razed to the ground by act of parliament.
Marcia responded rather lamely to his remarks, as she puzzled her
brains to think whether she had done anything to offend him. He seemed
entirely good-humoured, however, and chatted along as genially as the
first time they had met. She could not comprehend this new attitude,
and though it was just what she had wished for—such is the
contrariness of human nature—she vaguely resented it. Had M. Benoit
seen her just then he might have accused her, for the third time, of
being _distraite_.
The ghost-hunters, upon their return, shortly retired for the night, as
the festa at Genazzano would demand an early start. Before going
upstairs, Marcia waited to give orders about an open-air
breakfast-party she was planning for the morrow. In searching for
Pietro she also found her uncle. Mr. Copley, very stern, was engaged in
telling the butler that if it occurred again he would be discharged;
and the butler, very humble, was assuring the signore that in the
future his commands should be implicitly obeyed.
‘Uncle Howard,’ Marcia remonstrated, ‘you surely aren’t scolding the
poor fellow because of to-night? What difference does it make if he
does entertain his friends in the grounds of the old villa? We never go
near the place.’
‘It is this particular friend I am objecting to.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Gervasio’s stepfather.’
‘Oh, you don’t suppose,’ she cried, ‘that he is trying to steal the
child back again?’
‘I should like to see him do it!’ said Mr. Copley, with decision. ‘He
doesn’t want the boy,’ he added. ‘What he wants is money, but he isn’t
going to get any. I won’t have him hanging about the place, and the
servants may as well understand it first as last.’
Marcia, having outlined her plan for the breakfast to a somewhat
unresponsive Pietro, finally gained her room; and setting her candle
down on the table, she dropped into the first chair she came to with a
sigh of relief that the evening was over. She was tired, not only in
body, but in mind as well.
The evening was not quite ended, however. A gentle tap came on the
door, and she opened it to find Eleanor and Margaret in loose silk
dressing-gowns. ‘Let us in quick,’ said Margaret. ‘We’ve just met a man
in the hall.’
‘The ubiquitous Pietro shutting up windows,’ added Eleanor. ‘If I were
you, I’d discharge that man and get a more companionable butler. It’s
uncanny for an Italian servant to be as grave as an English one.’
‘Poor Pietro has just had a scolding, which, I suppose, accounts for
his gravity. It’s funny,’ she added, ‘that’s exactly the advice that
Paul gave me to-night.’ The ‘Paul’ was out before she could catch it,
and she reddened apprehensively, but the girls let it pass without
challenging.
‘We’ve come to talk,’ said Margaret, possessing herself of the couch
and settling the cushions behind her. ‘I hope you’re not sleepy.’
‘_Very_,’ said Marcia; ‘but I dare say I shan’t be ten minutes from
now.’
‘You needn’t worry; this isn’t going to be an all-night session,’
drawled Eleanor from the lazy depths of an easy-chair. ‘We start at
nine for the Madonna’s festa.’
‘You’d better appreciate us now that you’ve got us,’ added Margaret.
‘We should by rights have slept in Rome to-night.’
‘How did you manage it?’
‘Paul took mamma down to the Forum to look at some inscriptions they’ve
just dug up; and while she was gone Eleanor and I scrambled around and
packed the trunks for Perugia. By the time she came back we had
everything ready to come out here, and our hats on waiting to start.
She didn’t recover her breath until we were in the train, and then she
couldn’t say anything before Mr. Copley. When it comes to starting on
Journeys,’ Margaret added, ‘mamma is not what you’d call impulsive.’
‘Not often,’ assented Eleanor; ‘but there have been instances. By the
way,’ she added, ‘I wish you’d explain about Mr. Sybert; I confess I
don’t quite grasp his standing in the family. How do you come to be
taking such lengthy horseback rides with a young man and no groom? You
never did that when my mother was chaperoning you.’
‘No,’ acquiesced Marcia; ‘I didn’t. But Mr. Sybert’s a little
different. He’s not exactly a young man, you know; he’s a friend of
Uncle Howard’s. He happened to be available this afternoon, and Angelo
didn’t happen to be, so he came instead.’
‘As a sort of sub-groom?’ Eleanor asked. ‘I should think he might
object to the position.’
‘He couldn’t help himself!’ she laughed. ‘Aunt Katherine forced him
into it.’
Eleanor regarded Marcia with a still puzzled smile. ‘You talk about Mr.
Sybert as if he were a contemporary of your grandfather. How old is he,
may I ask?’
‘I don’t know. He’s nearly as old as Uncle Howard. Thirty-five or
thirty-six, I should say.’
‘A man isn’t worth talking to under thirty-five.’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ Margaret objected. ‘I never heard any one in my life
talk better than Paul, and he’s exactly twenty-five.’
‘Paul talks words; he doesn’t talk ideas,’ said her sister.
There was a pause, in which Eleanor leaned forward to examine some bits
of green and blue iridescent glass lying in a little tray on the table.
‘What are these?’ she inquired.
‘Pieces of perfume-bottles that the grave-digger in Palestrina found in
an old Etruscan tomb. There were some bronze mirrors, and the most
wonderful gold necklace—I wanted it dreadfully, but he didn’t dare
sell it; it’s gone to a museum in Rome. Aren’t these pieces of glass
lovely, though? I am going to have them set in gold and made into pins.’
‘Here’s a little bottle that’s scarcely broken.’ Eleanor held it up
before the candle and let the light play upon its surface. ‘Who do you
suppose owned it before you, Marcia?’
‘Some girl who turned to dust centuries ago.’
‘And her necklaces and mirrors and perfume-bottles still exist. What a
commentary!’
‘Thank goodness, they don’t put such things in one’s coffin nowadays,’
said Marcia; ‘or twenty-five hundred years from now some other girl
would be saying the same of us.’
‘Twenty-five hundred years,’ Eleanor murmured. ‘I declare, my nine
seasons sink into insignificance!’ She dropped the bottle into its tray
and leaned back in her chair with a little laugh. ‘America is a bit
tame, isn’t it, after Italy? One doesn’t get so many emotions.’
‘I’m not sure but one gets too many in Italy,’ said Marcia.
‘How long are you going to stay over?’
‘I don’t know. It’s so much easier not to make up one’s mind. I shall
probably stay a year or so longer with Uncle Howard.’
‘I like your uncle, Marcia. He has a very taking way of saying funny
things without smiling.’
‘Ah,’ sighed Marcia, ‘he has!’
‘And as for Mr. Sybert——’ Margaret put in mockingly.
‘I think he’s about the most interesting man I’ve met in Europe,’
Eleanor agreed imperturbably.
‘The most interesting man you’ve met in Europe?’ Marcia opened her
eyes. The statement was sweeping, and Eleanor had had experience. ‘How
do you mean?’ she asked.
‘Well,’ said Eleanor, with the judicial air of a connoisseur, ‘for one
thing, he has a striking face. I don’t know whether you ever noticed
it, but he has eyes exactly like that portrait of Filippino Lippi in
the Uffizi. I kept thinking about it all the time I was talking to
him—sleepy sort of Italian eyes, you know—and an American mouth. It
makes an interesting combination; you keep wondering what a man like
that will do.’
As Marcia made no comment, she continued:
‘He has an awfully interesting history. We met him at a reception last
week, and Mr. Melville told me all about him afterward. He was born in
Genoa—his father was United States consul—and he was brought up in
the midst of the excitement during the fight for Italian unity.
Politics was in the air he breathed. He knows more about the Italians
than they know about themselves. He speaks the language like a native,
and he never——’
‘Oh, I know what Mr. Melville told you,’ Marcia interrupted. ‘He likes
him.’
‘Don’t most people?’
‘Ask your cousin about him. Ask Mr. Carthrope, the English sculptor.
Ask anybody you please—barring my uncle—and see what you’ll hear.’
‘What shall I hear?’
‘A different story from every person.’
‘Well, really! He’s worth knowing.’
‘I detest him!’ Marcia made the statement as much from habit as
conviction.
Eleanor regarded her a moment rather narrowly, and then she observed:
‘I will tell you one thing, Marcia Copley; and that is, that
interesting men are mighty scarce in this world. I don’t remember ever
having met more than half a dozen.’
‘And you’ve had experience,’ suggested Marcia.
‘Nine seasons.’
‘Who were they—the half-dozen?’
‘One was a Kansas politician who wrote poetry. A most amazing mixture
of crudeness and tact—remarkably bright in some ways, but unexpectedly
lacking in others. He’d never read _Hamlet_; said he’d heard of it,
though. Another was a super-civilized Russian. I met him in Cairo. He
spoke seven languages, and didn’t find any of them full enough to
express his thoughts. Another was——’
‘The engineer,’ suggested Marcia. She had heard of the engineer both
from Eleanor and her mother.
‘Yes,’ agreed Eleanor, ‘the chief engineer on the Claytons’ yacht. I
cruised around with them two years ago on the Mediterranean, and the
only interesting man on board was the engineer. He was English, and
he’d lived in India and Burma, and in—oh, hundreds of nameless places.
I couldn’t get much out of him at first; he was pretty shy. English
people are, you know. But when he saw that one was really interested he
would tell the most astonishing tales. I didn’t have much chance to
talk to him—he didn’t appeal to mamma. That was one of the times that
mamma was impetuous,’ she added with a laugh. ‘Instead of keeping on to
Port Said with the boat, we disembarked at Alexandria and ran up to
Cairo for the rest of the winter. It was there I met the Russian. He
was stopping at _Shepheard’s_.’
Eleanor paused, and her gaze became reminiscent as she sat toying with
the little Etruscan perfume-bottle.
‘And the others?’ Marcia prompted.
‘Well, let me see,’ Eleanor laughed. ‘I once knew a professor of
psychology in a little speck of a New England college. He spent his
whole life in thinking, and he’d arrived at some very queer
conclusions. He was most entertaining—he knew absolutely nothing about
the world.’ A shade of something like remorse crossed her face, and she
hastily abandoned the professor. ‘Did I say there were any more? I
can’t think who the fifth can be, unless I include the blacksmith who
married my maid. I never knew him personally; I merely judge from her
report of him. He beats her, I believe, when he gets angry; but he’s so
apologetic afterward that she enjoys it. If you’ve ever read _Wuthering
Heights_ he’s exactly like Heathcliff. I’d really like to know him.
He’d be worth studying.’
‘That’s the trouble,’ complained Marcia. ‘If you’re a man you can go
around and get acquainted with any one you please, whether he’s a
blacksmith or a prince; but if you’re a girl you have to wait till
you’re introduced at a tea. And the interesting ones never are
introduced at teas.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Eleanor; ‘that’s partly true. But, on the other hand, I
think you really get to know people better if you’re a girl—what
they’re really like inside, I mean. Men are remarkably confidential
creatures.’
‘Did you find Mr. Sybert confidential?’
‘N-no. I can’t say that I did. He’s queer, isn’t he? You have the
feeling that he doesn’t talk about what he thinks about—that’s why I
should like to know him. It’s not what a man does that makes him
interesting; it’s what he thinks. It’s his potentialities.’
Margaret rose with something of a yawn. ‘If you’re going to discuss
potentialities, I’m going to bed. Come on, Eleanor. To-morrow’s the
festa of Our Lady of Good Counsel, and we start at nine o’clock.’
Eleanor rose reluctantly. ‘I wish we weren’t going to Perugia on
Wednesday. I should much rather stay here with Marcia.’
‘And Mr. Sybert,’ Margaret laughed.
‘Oh, yes, Mr. Sybert,’ Eleanor acquiesced. ‘He annoys you until you get
him settled.’
‘He’s like one of those problems in algebra,’ suggested Marcia. ‘Given
a lot of things, to find the value of x. You work it exactly right and
x won’t come.’
Margaret paused by the door and gathered her wrapper around her like a
toga.
‘While you’re talking about interesting people,’ she threw back, ‘I
know one who isn’t appreciated, and that’s Paul. He’s a mighty nice
boy.’
‘That’s just what he is,’ said Eleanor. ‘A nice boy—_et c’est tout_.
Good night, Marcia. When we come back from Perugia we’ll sit up all
night talking about interesting men. It’s an interesting subject.’