THE ball ended, the guests gone, Villa Vivalanti forgot its one burst
of gaiety, and settled down again to its usual state of peaceful
somnolence. The days were growing warmer. White walls simmering in the
sunshine, fragrant garden borders resonant with the hum of insects, the
cool green of the ilex grove, the sleepy, slow drip of the fountain—it
was all so beautifully Italian, and so very, very lonely! During the
hot mid-days Marcia would sit by the ruins of the old villa or pace the
shady ilex walks with her feelings in a tumult. She had seen neither
Paul Dessart nor Laurence Sybert since the evening of her birthday, and
that moment by the fountain when the three had faced each other
silently was not a pleasant memory. It was one, however, which recurred
many times a day.
Of Sybert Marcia heard no news whatever. In reply to her casual
question as to when he would be at the villa again, her uncle had
remarked that just at present Sybert had more important things to think
of than taking a villeggiatura in the Sabine hills. But of Paul Dessart
and the Roystons most unexpected news had come. Paul’s father had had
an ‘attack’ brought on by overwork, and they were all of them going
home. The letters were written on the train _en route_ for Cherbourg; a
long letter from Margaret, a short one from Eleanor. The latter
afforded some food for reflection, but the reflection did not bring
enlightenment.
‘DEAR MARCIA’ (it ran):
‘I am sorry not to see you again, and (to be quite
frank) I am equally sorry not to have seen Mr. Sybert
again. I feel that if I had had more time, and half a
chance, I might have accomplished something in the
interests of science.
‘Margaret told you, of course, that Paul is going back
with us. We hope his father’s illness isn’t serious,
but he preferred to go. There is nothing to keep him in
Rome, he says. Poor fellow! you must write him a nice
letter. Don’t worry too much about him, though; he
won’t blow his brains out.
‘I _could_ tell you something. I have just the tiniest
suggestion of a suspicion which—granted fair winds and
a prosperous voyage—may arrive at the dignity of news
by the time we reach the other side. However, you don’t
deserve to hear it, and I shan’t tell. Have I aroused
your curiosity sufficiently? If so, _c’est tout_.
‘I shall hope to see you in Pittsburg this autumn.
That, my dear Marcia, is merely a polite phrase and is
not strictly true. I shall hope, rather, to see you in
Paris or Rome or Vienna. I am afraid that I have the
wander-habit to the end. The world is too big for one
to settle down permanently in one place—and that place
Pittsburg; is it not so? One can never be happy for
thinking of all the things that are happening in all of
the places where one is not.
_‘Au revoir_, then, till autumn; we’ll play on the
Champs-Elysées together.
‘ELEANOR.’
A letter had come also from Marcia’s father, which put her in an
uncomfortably unsettled frame of mind. It was written in the Copley
vein of humorous appreciation of the situation; but, for all that, she
could see underneath that she had hurt him. He disavowed all knowledge
and culpability in the Triple Alliance and the Abyssinian war. He
regretted the fact that the taxes were heavy, but he had had no hand in
making up Italy’s financial budget. As to wheat, there were many
reasons why Italy could not afford it, aside from the fact that it was
dear. Marcia could give what she wished to the peasants to make up for
her erring father, and he inclosed a blank cheque to her order—surely
an excessive sign of penitence on the part of a business man. The
letter closed with the statement that he was lonely without her, and
that she must come back to America next winter and keep her old father
out of mischief.
She read the last few sentences over twice, with a rising lump in her
throat. It was true. Poor man, he must be lonely! She ought to have
tried to take her mother’s place, and to have made a home for him
before now. Her duty suddenly presented itself very clearly, and it
appeared as uninviting as duties usually do. A few months before she
would not have minded, but now Italy had got its hold upon her. She did
not wish to go; she wished only to sit in the sunshine, happy,
unthinking, and let the days slip idly by. A picture flashed over her
of what the American life would be—a brownstone house on Fifth Avenue
in the winter, a country place in the Berkshires in the summer; an aunt
of her mother’s for chaperon, her father’s friends—lawyers and bankers
and brokers who talked railroads and the Stock Exchange; for interests
she would have balls and receptions, literary clubs and charities.
Marcia breathed a doleful sigh. Her memories of the New York house were
dreary; it was not a life she cared to renew. But nothing of all this
did she let her father know. She sent a gracefully forgiving letter,
with the promise that she would come home for the winter, and not a
hint that the home-coming was not her own desire.
It seemed that, things having once commenced to change, everything was
going. Mr. Copley himself exploded the next bombshell. He came back
from Rome one night with the announcement that the weather was getting
pretty hot, and the family ought to leave next week for Switzerland.
‘Oh, Uncle Howard, not yet!’ Marcia cried. ‘Let us wait until the end
of June. It isn’t too hot till then. Up here in the hills it’s pleasant
all summer. I don’t want to leave the villa.’
‘Rome is hot just now in more ways than one,’ he returned. ‘I’d feel
safer to have you in Switzerland or up in the Tyrol during the
excitement. Goodness only knows what’s going to happen next. I’m
expecting to wake up in the middle of a French revolution every
morning, and I should like to have you out of the country before the
beheading begins.’
‘There isn’t really any danger of a revolution?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘Not in a country where every other man’s a soldier and the
government’s in command. But there have been houses broken into and a
good many acts of lawlessness, and we’re rather lonely off here.’
‘I hate to think of going away,’ Marcia sighed. ‘We’ll come back in the
autumn, won’t we, Uncle Howard?’
‘Oh, yes, if you like. I dare say we could manage a month or so out
here before we go into the palazzo for the winter.’
‘And I’ll be going back to America for the winter,’ she sighed.
He looked at her with a slight smile.
‘Are you the girl, Marcia, who used to preach sermons to your uncle
about Americans living abroad?’
Marcia reflected his smile somewhat wanly.
‘And I’m practising my own preaching, am I not?’
‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘when the time comes you can do as you please.
Your father can get along without you one year more.’
‘No, I think I ought to go, for of course he must be lonely but—I
should like to stay! It seems more like home than any place I’ve ever
been in. I’ve really never _belonged_ anywhere before, and I like so
much to be with you.’
‘Poor little girl! You have had a chequered career.’
‘Yes, Uncle Howard, I have; and it keeps on being chequered! I haven’t
been in the villa three months, but really I don’t remember ever having
lived so long in one place before. It’s been nice, hasn’t it? I hate
dreadfully to have it end. It seems like shutting away a whole part of
my life that can never come back.’
‘Oh, well, if you feel that way about it, I’ll buy the villa and we can
come out every spring. You can bring your father over, and we will dip
him in the waters of Lethe, too.’
‘I’m afraid he wouldn’t be dipped,’ she laughed. ‘He’d be running a
cable connexion out here and setting up a ticker on the terrace, so
that he could watch the stock market as well as the view.’
Mr. Copley’s mouth twitched slightly at the picture.
‘We must all ride our hobbies, I suppose, or the world would be a very
dreary world indeed.’
She looked up at him and hesitated.
‘Uncle Howard, do you and papa—that is—do you mind my asking?—are
you very good friends?’
Mr. Copley frowned a moment without replying. ‘Well Marcia, he’s a good
deal older than I, and we’re not particularly congenial.’ He
straightened his shoulders with a laugh. ‘Oh, well, there’s no use
concealing disagreeable truths. It appears they will out in the end. As
a matter of fact, your father and I haven’t had anything to do with
each other for the past ten years. The first move was on his part, when
he wrote about you last fall—you didn’t know that you came as an
olive-branch, did you?’
‘I didn’t know; he didn’t tell me anything about it, but I—well, I
sort of guessed. I’m sorry about it, Uncle Howard. I’m sure that it’s
just because you don’t understand each other.’
‘I’m afraid we never have understood each other, and I doubt if we ever
can, but we’ll make another effort.’
‘It’s so hard to like people when you don’t understand them, and so
easy when you do,’ said Marcia.
‘It facilitates matters,’ he agreed.
‘I think I’m beginning to understand Mr. Sybert,’ she added somewhat
vaguely. ‘He’s different, when you understand him, from the way you
thought he was when you didn’t understand him.’
‘Ah, Sybert!’ Mr. Copley raised his head and brought his eyes back from
the edge of the landscape. ‘I thought I knew him, but he’s been a
revelation to me this spring.’
‘How do you mean?’ Marcia asked, striving to keep out of her tone the
interest that was behind it.
‘Oh, the way he’s taken hold of things. It seems an absurd thing to
say, but I believe he’s had almost as much influence as the police in
quieting the trouble. He has an unbelievably strong hold on the
people—how he got it, I don’t know. He understands them as well as an
Italian, and yet he is a foreigner, which gives him, in some ways, a
great advantage. They trust him because they think that, being a
foreigner, he has nothing to make out of it. He’s a marvellous fellow
when it comes to action.’
‘You never would guess it to look at him!’ she returned. ‘Why does he
pretend to be so bored?’
‘Be so bored? Well, I suppose there are some things that do bore him;
and the ones that don’t, bore other people. His opinions are not
universally popular in Rome, and being a diplomatist, I dare say he
thinks it as well to keep them to himself.’
‘What are his opinions?’ she asked tentatively. ‘I don’t like to accuse
him of being an anarchist, since he assures me that he’s not. But when
a man wants to overthrow the government——’
‘Nonsense! Sybert doesn’t want to overthrow the government any more
than I do. Just at present it’s under the control of a few corrupt
politicians, but that’s a thing that’s likely to happen in any country,
and it’s only a temporary evil. The Italians will be on their feet
again in a year or so, all the better for their shaking-up, and Sybert
knows it. He’s got more real faith in the government than most of the
Italians I know.’
‘But he talks against it terribly.’
‘Well, he sees the evil. He’s been looking at it pretty closely, and he
knows it’s there; and when Sybert feels a thing he feels it strongly.
But,’ Copley smiled, ‘while he says things himself against the country,
you’ll find he’ll not let any one else say them.’
‘What do people think about him now—being mixed up in all these riots?’
‘Oh, just now he’s mixed up in the right side, and the officials are
very willing to pat him on the back. But as for the populace, I’m
afraid he’s not making himself over-liked. They have a most immoral
tendency to sympathize with the side that’s against the law, and they
can’t understand their friends not sympathizing with the same side.
It’s a pretty hard thing for him to have to tell these poor fellows to
be quiet and go back to their work and starve in silence.’ Copley
sighed and folded his arms. ‘I am sorry, Marcia, you don’t like Sybert
better. There are not many like him.’
Marcia let the observation pass without comment.
* * * * *
The next morning, as Mrs. Copley and Marcia were sitting on the loggia
listlessly engaged with books and embroidery, there came whirring down
the avenue the contessa’s immaculate little victoria, with the yellow
coronet emblazoned on the sides, with the coachman and footman in the
Torrenieri livery, green with yellow pipings. It was a gay little
affair; it matched the contessa. She stepped out, pretty and debonair,
in a fluttering pale-green summer gown, and ran forward to the loggia
with a little exclamation of distress.
‘_Cara signora, signorina_, I am desolated! We must part! Is it not
sad? I go with Bartolomeo’ (Bartolomeo was the count) ‘to plant olive
orchards on his estate in the Abruzzi. Is it not lonely, that—to spend
the summer in an empty castle on the top of a mountain, with only a
view for company? And my friends at the baths or the lakes or in
Switzerland, or—oh, everywhere except on my mountain-top!’
Marcia laughed at the contessa’s despair.
‘But why do you go, contessa, if you do not like it?’ she inquired.
‘But my husband likes it. He has a passion for farming; after roulette,
it it his chief amusement. He is very pastoral—Bartolomeo. He adores
the mountain and the view and the olive orchards. And in Italy,
signorina, the wife has to do as the husband wishes.’
‘I’m afraid the wives have to do that the world over, contessa.’
‘Ah, no, signorina, you cannot tell me that; I have seen. In America
the husband does as the wife wishes. It is a beautiful country, truly.
You have many charming customs. Yes, I will give you good advice: you
will be wise to marry an American. They do not like mountain-tops. But
perhaps you will visit me on my mountain-top?’ she asked. ‘The
view—ah, the beautiful view! It is not so bad.’
‘I’m afraid not, contessa. We are leaving for the Tyrol ourselves a
week from to-morrow.’
‘So soon! Every one is going. Truly, the world comes to an end next
week in Rome.’
Marcia found herself growing unexpectedly cordial toward their guest;
even the contessa appeared suddenly dear as she was about to be
snatched away. She bade her an almost affectionate farewell, and stood
by the balustrade waving her handkerchief until the carriage
disappeared.
‘Will marvels never cease?’ she asked her aunt. ‘I think—I really
think that I like the contessa!’