"One might almost think that you wished to marry Aurora yourself," said
Corbario, with a sneer.
He was standing with his back to the fire in the great library of the
villa, for it was late autumn again; it was raining hard and the air was
raw and chilly.
"You may think what you please," Marcello answered, leaning back in his
deep leathern chair and taking up a book. "I am not going to argue with
you."
"Insufferable puppy," growled Folco, almost under his teeth; but
Marcello heard.
He rose instantly and faced the elder man without the slightest fear or
hesitation.
"If this were not my house, and you my guest, I would have you put out
of doors by the servants," he said, in a tone Corbario had never heard
before. "As it is, I only advise you to go before I lose my temper
altogether."
Corbario backed till his heels were against the fender, and tried to
smile.
"My dear Marcello!" he protested. "What nonsense is this? You know I am
not in earnest!"
"I am," said Marcello quietly enough, but not moving.
The half-invalid boy was not a boy any longer, nor an invalid either,
and he had found his hold on things, since the days when Folco had been
used to lead him as easily as if he had no will of his own. No one would
have judged him to be a weak man now, physically or mentally. His frame
was spare and graceful still, but there was energy and directness in his
movements, his shoulders were square and he held his head high; yet it
was his face that had changed most, though in a way very hard to define.
A strong manhood sometimes follows a weak boyhood, very much to the
surprise of those who have long been used to find feebleness where
strength has suddenly developed. Marcello Consalvi had never been
cowardly, or even timid; he had only been weak in will as in body, an
easy prey to the man who had tried to ruin him, body and soul, in the
hope of sending him to his grave.
"I really cannot understand you, my dear boy," Corbario said very
sweetly. "You used to be so gentle! But now you fly into a passion for
the merest thing."
"I told you that I would not argue with you," Marcello said, keeping his
temper. "This is my house, and I choose that you should leave it at
once. Go your way, and leave me to go mine. You are amply provided for,
as long as you live, and you do not need my hospitality any longer,
since you are no longer my guardian. Live where you please. You shall
not stay here."
"I certainly don't care to stay here if you don't want me," Folco
answered. "But this is really too absurd! You must be going mad, to take
such a tone with me!"
"It is the only one which any honourable man who knows you would be
inclined to take."
"Take care! You are going too far."
"Because you are under my roof? Yes, perhaps. As my guest, if I have
been hasty, I apologise for expressing my opinion of you. I am going out
now. I hope you will find it convenient to have left before I come in."
Thereupon Marcello turned his back on Corbario, crossed the great
library deliberately, and went out without looking round.
Folco was left alone, and his still face did not even express surprise
or annoyance. He had indeed foreseen the coming break, ever since he had
returned to the villa three weeks earlier, when Marcello had received
him with evident coldness, not even explaining where he had been since
they had last parted. But Folco had not expected that the rupture would
come so suddenly, still less that he was literally to be turned out of
the house which he still regarded as his own, and in which he had spent
so many prosperous years. There had, indeed, been some coldly angry
words between the two men. Marcello had told Folco quite plainly that he
meant to be the master, and that he was of age, and should regulate his
own life as he pleased, and he had expressed considerable disgust at the
existence Folco had been leading in Paris and elsewhere; and Folco had
always tried to laugh it off, calling Marcello prudish and
hypersensitive in matters of morality, which he certainly was not. Once
he had attempted an appeal to Marcello's former affection, recalling
his mother's love for them both, but a look had come into the young
man's eyes just then which even Corbario did not care to face again, and
the relations between the two had become more strained from that time
on.
It might seem almost incredible that a man capable of the crimes
Corbario had committed in cold blood, for a settled purpose, should show
so little power of following the purpose to its accomplishment after
clearing the way to it by a murder; but every one who has had to do with
criminals is aware that after any great exertion of destructive energy
they are peculiarly subject to a long reaction of weakness which very
often leads to their own destruction. If this were not a natural law, if
criminals could exert continually the same energy and command the same
superhuman cunning which momentarily helped them to perpetrate a crime,
the world would be in danger of being possessed and ruled by them,
instead of being mercifully, and perhaps too much, inclined to treat
them as degenerates and madmen. Their conduct after committing a murder,
for instance, seems to depend much more on their nerves than on their
intelligence, and the time almost invariably comes when their nerves
break down. It is upon the moment when this collapse of the will sets in
that the really experienced detective counts, knowing that it may be
hastened or retarded by circumstances quite beyond the murderer's
control. The life of a murderer, after the deed, is one long fight with
such circumstances, and if he once loses his coolness he is himself
almost as surely lost as a man who is carried away by his temper in a
duel with swords.
After Folco had killed his wife and had just failed to kill Marcello, he
had behaved with wonderful calm and propriety for a little while; but
before long the old wild longing for excitement and dissipation, so long
kept down during his married life, had come upon him with irresistible
force, and he had yielded to it. Then, in hours of reaction, in the
awful depression that comes with the grey dawn after a night of wine and
pleasure and play, terrible little incidents had come back to his
memory. He had recalled Kalmon's face and quiet words, and his own
weakness when he had first come to see Marcello in the hospital--that
abject terror which both Regina and the doctor must have noticed--and
his first impression that Marcello no longer trusted him as formerly,
and many other things; and each time he had been thus disturbed, he had
plunged deeper into the dissipation which alone could cloud such
memories and keep them out of sight for a time; till at last he had come
to live in a continual transition from recklessness to fear and from
fear to recklessness, and he had grown to detest the very sight of
Marcello so heartily that an open quarrel was almost a relief.
If he had been his former self, he would undoubtedly have returned to
his original purpose of killing Marcello outright, since he had not
succeeded in killing him by dissipation. But his nerve was not what it
had been, and the circumstances were not in his favour. Moreover,
Marcello was now of age, and had probably made a will, unknown to
Corbario, in which case the fortune would no longer revert to the
latter. The risk was too great, since it would no longer be undertaken
for a certainty amounting to millions. It was better to be satisfied
with the life-interest in one-third of the property, which he already
enjoyed, and which supplied him with abundant means for amusing himself.
It was humiliating to be turned out of the house by a mere boy, as he
still called Marcello, but he was not excessively sensitive to
humiliation, and he promised himself some sort of satisfactory vengeance
before long. What surprised him most was that the first quarrel should
have been about Aurora. He had more than once said in conversation that
he meant to marry the girl, and Marcello had chosen to say nothing in
answer to the statement; but when Folco had gone so far as to hint that
Aurora was in love with him and was about to accept him, Marcello had as
good as given him the lie direct, and a few more words had led to the
outbreak recorded at the beginning of this chapter.
As a matter of fact Corbario understood what had led to it better than
Marcello himself, who had no very positive reason for entirely
disbelieving his stepfather's words. The Contessa and her daughter had
returned to Rome, and Corbario often went to see them, whereas Marcello
had not been even once. When Marcello had last seen Folco in the
Engadine, he had left him sitting in their little room at the hotel.
Folco was not at all too old to marry Aurora; he was rich, at least for
life, and Aurora was poor; he was good-looking, accomplished, and ready
with his tongue. It was by no means impossible that he might make an
impression on the girl and ultimately win her. Besides, Marcello felt
that odd little resentment against Aurora which very young men sometimes
feel against young girls, whom they have thought they loved, or are
really about to love, or are afraid of loving, which makes them rude, or
unjust, or both, towards those perhaps quite unconscious maidens, and
which no woman can ever understand.
"My dear Harry, why will you be so disagreeable to Mary?" asks the
wondering mother. "She is such a charming girl, and only the other day
she was saying that you are such a nice boy!"
"Humph!" snorts Harry rudely, and forthwith lights his pipe and goes off
to the stables to growl in peace, or across country, or to his boat, or
to any other heavenly place not infested by women.
There had been moments when, in his heart, Marcello had almost said that
it would serve Aurora right to be married to Corbario; yet at the first
hint from the latter that she was at all in danger of such a fate,
Marcello had broken out as if the girl's good name had been attacked,
and had turned his stepfather out of the house in a very summary
fashion.
Having done so, he left the villa on foot, though it was raining hard,
and walked quickly past San Pietro in Montorio and down the hill towards
Trastevere. The southwest wind blew the rain under his umbrella; it was
chilly as well as wet, and a few big leaves were beginning to fall from
the plane-trees.
He was not going to the little house, where Regina sat by the window
looking at the rain and wishing that he would come soon. When he was
down in the streets he hailed the first cab he saw, gave the man an
address in the Forum of Trajan, and climbed in under the hood, behind
the dripping leathern apron, taking his umbrella with him and getting
thoroughly wet, as is inevitable when one takes a Roman cab in the rain.
The Contessa was out, in spite of the weather, but Marcello asked if
Aurora would see him, and presently he was admitted to the drawing-room,
where she was sitting beside a rather dreary little fire, cutting a new
book. She threw it down and rose to meet him, as little outwardly
disturbed as if they had seen each other constantly during the past two
years. She gave him her hand quietly, and they sat down and looked at
the fire.
"It won't burn," Aurora said, rather disconsolately. "It never did burn
very well, but those horrid people who have had the apartment for two
years have spoilt the fireplace altogether."
"I remember that it used to smoke," Marcello answered, going down on his
knees and beginning to move the little logs into a better position.
"Thank you," Aurora said, watching him. "You won't succeed, but it's
good of you to try."
Marcello said nothing, and presently he took the queer little Roman
bellows, and set to work to blow upon the smouldering spots where the
logs touched each other. In a few seconds a small flame appeared, and
soon the fire was burning tolerably.
"How clever you are!" Aurora laughed quietly.
Marcello rose and sat upon a low chair, instead of on the sofa beside
her. For a while neither spoke, and he looked about him rather
awkwardly, while Aurora watched the flames. It was long since he had
been in the room, and it looked shabby after the rather excessive
magnificence of the villa on the Janiculum, for which Corbario's taste
had been largely responsible. It was just a little shabby, too, compared
with the dainty simplicity of the small house in Trastevere. The
furniture, the carpets, and the curtains were two years older than when
he had seen them last, and had been unkindly used by the tenants to whom
the Contessa had sub-let the apartment in order to save the rent.
Marcello missed certain pretty things that he had been used to see
formerly, some bits of old Saxe, a little panel by an early master, a
chiselled silver cup in which there always used to be flowers. He
wondered where these things were, and felt that the room looked rather
bare without them.
"It burns very well now," said Aurora, still watching the fire.
"What has become of the old silver cup," Marcello asked, "and all the
little things that used to be about?"
"We took them away with us when we let the apartment, and they are not
unpacked yet, though we have been here two months."
"Two months?"
"Yes. I was wondering whether you were ever coming to see us again!"
"Were you? I fancied that you would not care very much to see me now."
Aurora said nothing to this, and they both looked at the fire for some
time. The gentle sound of the little flames was cheerful, and gave them
both the impression of a third person, talking quietly.
"I should not have come to-day," Marcello said at last, "except that
something has happened."
"Nothing bad, I hope!" Aurora looked up with a sudden anxiety that
surprised him.
"Bad? No. At least, I think not. Why are you startled?"
"I have had a headache," Aurora explained. "I am a little nervous, I
fancy. What is it that has happened?"
Marcello glanced at her doubtfully before he answered. Her quick
interest in whatever chanced to him took him back to the old times in an
instant. The place was familiar and quiet; her voice was like forgotten
music, once delightful, and now suddenly recalled; her face had only
changed to grow more womanly.
"You never thought of marrying Folco, did you?" he asked, all at once,
and a little surprised at the sound of his own words.
"I?" Aurora started again, but not with anxiety. "How can you think such
a thing?"
"I don't think it; but an hour ago, at the villa, he told me in almost
so many words that you loved him and meant to accept him."
A blush of honest anger rose in the girl's fair face, and subsided
instantly.
"And what did you say?" she asked, with a scarcely perceptible tremor in
her tone.
"I turned him out of the house," Marcello answered quietly.
"Turned him out?" Aurora seemed amazed. "You turned him out because he
told you that?"
"That and other things. But that was the beginning of it. I told him
that he was lying, and he called me names, and then I told him to go. He
will be gone when I reach home."
To Marcello's surprise, Aurora got up suddenly, crossed the room and
went to one of the windows. Marcello rose, too, and stood still. She
seemed to be looking out at the rain, but she had grasped one of the
curtains tightly, and it looked as if she were pressing the other hand
to her left side. For a second her head bent forward a little and her
graceful shoulders moved nervously, as though she were trying to swallow
something hard. Marcello watched her a moment, and then crossed the room
and stood beside her.
"What is it?" he asked in a low voice, and laying his hand gently on
hers that held the curtain.
She drew her own away quietly and turned her head. Her eyes were dry and
bright, but there were deep bistre shadows under them that had not been
there before, and the lower lids were swollen.
"It is nothing," she answered, and then laughed nervously. "I am glad
you have made your stepfather go away. It was time! I was afraid you
were as good friends as ever."
"We have not been on good terms since we parted in Pontresina. Do you
remember when I left him in your sitting-room at the hotel? He had been
trying to persuade me to go back to Paris with him at once. In fact--"
he hesitated.
"You intended to go," Aurora said, completing the sentence. "And then
you changed your mind."
"Yes. I could not do it. I cannot explain everything."
"I understand without any explanation. I think you did right."
She went back to the fireplace and sat down in the corner of the sofa,
leaning far back and stretching out one foot to the fender in an
unconscious attitude of perfect grace. In the grey afternoon the
firelight began to play in her auburn hair. Now and then she glanced at
Marcello with half-closed lids, and there was a suggestion of a smile on
her lips. Marcello saw that in her way she was as beautiful as Regina,
and he remembered how they had kissed, without a word, when the moon's
rays quivered through the trees by the Roman shore, more than two years
ago. They had been children then. All at once he felt a great longing to
kneel down beside the sofa and throw his arms round her waist and kiss
her once again; but at almost the same instant he thought of Regina,
waiting for him by the window over there in Trastevere, and he felt the
shame rising to his face; and he leaned back in his low chair, clasping
his hands tightly over one knee, as if to keep himself from moving.
"Marcello," Aurora began presently, but she got no further.
"Yes?" Still he did not move.
"I have something on my conscience." She laughed low. "No, it is
serious!" she went on, as if reproving herself. "I have always felt that
everything that has happened to you since we parted that morning by the
shore has been my fault."
"Why?" Marcello seemed surprised.
"Because I called you a baby," she said. "If you had not been angry at
that, if you had not turned away and left me suddenly--you were quite
right, you know--you would not have been knocked down, you would not
have wandered away and lost yourself. You would not have lost your
memory, or been ill in a strange place, or--or all the rest! So it is
all my fault, you see, from beginning to end."
"How absurd!" Marcello looked at her and smiled.
"No. I think it is true. But you have changed very much, Marcello. You
are not a boy any longer. You have a will of your own now; you are a
man. Do you mind my telling you that?"
"Certainly not!" He smiled again.
"I remember very well what you answered. You said that I should not
laugh at you again. And that has come true. You said a good many other
things. Do you remember?"
"No. I was angry. What did I say? Everything that happened before I was
hurt seems very far off."
"It does not matter," Aurora answered softly. "I am glad you have
forgotten, for though I was angry too, and did not care at the time, the
things you said have hurt me since."
"I am sorry," Marcello said gently, "very, very sorry. Forgive me."
"It was all my fault, for I was teasing you for the mere fun of the
thing. I was nothing but a silly school-girl then."
"Yes. You have changed, too."
"Am I at all what you expected I should be?" Aurora asked, after a
moment's silence.
Marcello glanced at her, and clasped his hands over his knee more
tightly than ever.
"I wish you were not," he answered in a low voice.
"Don't wish that." Her tone was even lower than his.
Neither spoke again for some time, and they did not look at each other.
But the flames flickering in the small fireplace seemed to be talking,
like a third person in the room. Aurora moved at last, and changed her
position.
"I am glad that you have quarrelled with your stepfather," she said. "He
meant to do you all the harm he could. He meant you to die of the life
you were leading."
"You know that?" Marcello looked up quickly.
"Yes. I have heard my mother and Professor Kalmon talking about it when
they thought I was not listening. I always pretend that I am not
listening when anybody talks about you." She laughed a little. "It is so
much simpler," she added, as if to explain. "The Professor said that
your stepfather was killing you by inches. Those were his words."
"The Professor never liked him. But he was right. Have you seen him
often?"
"Yes." Aurora laughed again. "He always turns up wherever we are,
pretending that it is the most unexpected meeting in the world. He is
just like a boy!"
"What do you mean? Is he in love with you?"
"With me? No! He is madly in love with my mother! Fancy such a thing!
When he found that we were coming back to Rome he gave up his
professorship in Milan, and he has come to live here so as to be able to
see her. So I hear them talking a great deal, and he seems to have found
out a great many things about your stepfather which nobody ever knew. He
takes an extraordinary interest in him for some reason or other."
"What has he found out?" asked Marcello.
"Enough to hang him, if people could be hanged in Italy," Aurora
answered.
"I should have thought Folco too clever to do anything really against
the law," said Marcello, who did not seem much surprised at what she
said.
"The Professor believes that it was he that tried to kill you."
"How is that possible?" Marcello asked, in great astonishment. "You
would have seen him!"
"I did. You had not been gone three minutes when he came round to the
gap in the bank where I was standing. He came from the side towards
which I had seen you go. It was perfectly impossible that he should not
have met you. The Professor says he must have known that you were there,
looking at the storm, but that he did not know that I was with you, and
that he was lying in wait for you to strike you from behind. If we had
gone back together he would not have shown himself, that's all, and he
would have waited for a better chance. If I had only followed you I
should have seen what happened."
"That is the trouble," said Marcello thoughtfully. "No one ever saw what
happened, and I remember nothing but that I fell forward, feeling that I
had been struck on the back of the head. Did you not hear any sound?"
"How could I, in such a gale as was blowing? It all looks dreadfully
likely and quite possible, and the Professor is convinced that your
stepfather has done some worse things."
"Worse?"
"Yes, because he did not fail in doing them, as he did when he tried to
kill you."
"But what must such a man be?" cried Marcello, suddenly breaking out in
anger. "What must his life have been in all the years before my mother
married him?"
"He was a kind of adventurer in South America. I don't quite know what
he did there, but Professor Kalmon has found out a great deal about him
from the Argentine Republic, where he lived until he killed somebody and
had to escape to Europe. If I were you I would go and see the Professor,
since he is in Rome. He lives at No. 16, Via Sicilia. He will tell you a
great deal about that man when he knows that you have parted for good."
"I'll go and see him. Thank you. I cannot imagine that he could tell me
anything worse than I have already heard."
"Perhaps he may," Aurora answered very gravely.
Then she was silent, and Marcello could not help looking at her as she
leaned back in the corner of the sofa. Of all things, at that moment, he
dreaded lest he should lose command of himself under the unexpected
influence of her beauty, of old memories, of the failing light, of the
tender shadows that still lingered under her eyes, of that exquisite
small hand that lay idly on the sofa beside her, just within his reach.
He rose abruptly, no longer trusting himself.
"I must be going," he said.
"Already? Why?" She looked up at him and their eyes met.
"Because I cannot be alone with you any longer. I do not trust myself."
"Yes, you do. You are a man now, and I trust you."
He had spoken roughly and harshly in his momentary self-contempt, but
her words were clear and quiet, and rang true. He stood still in silence
for a moment.
"And besides," she added softly, "she trusts you too."
There was a little emphasis on the word "she" and in her tone that was a
reproach, and he looked at her in wonder.
"We cannot talk of her, you and I," she said, turning her eyes to the
fire, "but you know what I mean, Marcello. It is not enough to be kind.
We women do not think so much of that as you men fancy. You must be true
as well."
"I know it," Marcello answered, bending his head a little. "Good-bye,
Aurora."
"No. Not good-bye, for you will come again soon, and then again, and
often."
"Shall I?"
"Yes, because we can trust each other, though we are fond of each other.
We are not children any longer, as we used to be."
"Then I will come sometimes."
He took her hand, trying not to feel that it was in his, and he left her
sitting by the rather dreary little fire, in the rather shabby room, in
the grey twilight.
As he drove through the wet streets, he went over all she had said, went
over it again and again, till he knew her words by heart. But he did not
try, or dare to try, to examine what he felt, and was going to feel. The
manliness that had at last come to its full growth in him clung to the
word "true" as she had meant it.
But she, being left alone, leaned forward, resting her elbows on her
knees and clasping her hands as she gazed at the smouldering remains of
the fire. She had known well enough that she had loved him before he had
come; she had known it too well when he had told her how he had driven
Folco out of his house for having spoken of her too carelessly. Then the
blood had rushed to her throat, beating hard, and if she had not gone
quickly to the window she felt that she must have cried for joy. She was
far too proud to let him guess that, but she was not too proud to love
him, in spite of everything, though it meant that she compared herself
with the peasant girl, and envied her, and in all maiden innocence would
have changed places with her if she could.