Gheta invariably took breakfast in her room. It was a larger chamber by
far than Lavinia's, toward the Via Garibaldi. A thick white bearskin was
spread by the canopied bed, an elaborate dressing table stood between
long windows drawn with ruffled pink silk, while the ceiling bore a
scaling ottocento frescoing of garlanded cupids. She was sitting in bed,
the chocolate pot on a painted table at her side, when Lavinia entered.
A maid was putting soft paper in the sleeves of Gheta's ball dress, and
Lavinia, finding an unexpected reluctance to proceed with what she had
come to say, watched the servant's deft care.
“Mochales was here last night,” Lavinia finally remarked abruptly--“that
is he stood on the street and serenaded you.”
Gheta put her cup down with a clatter.
“How charming!” she exclaimed. “And I missed it for an insufferable
affair. He stood under the window--”
“With a guitar,” Lavinia proceeded evenly. “It was very beautiful.”
“Heavens! Bembo's going to fetch him to the Guarinis' sale, and I forgot
and promised Anna Mantegazza to drive out to Arcetri! But Anna won't
miss this. It was really a very pretty compliment.”
She spoke with a trivial satisfaction that jarred painfully on Lavinia's
memory of the past night. Gheta calmly accepted the serenade as another
tribute to her beauty; Lavinia could imagine what Anna Mantegazza and
her sister would say, and they both seemed commonplace--even a little
vulgar--to her acutely sensitive being. She suddenly lost her desire
to resemble Gheta; her sister diminished in her estimation. The elder,
Lavinia realized with an unsparing detachment, was enveloped in a petty
vanity acquired in an atmosphere of continuous flattery; it had chilled
her heart.
The Guarinis, who had been overtaken by misfortune, and whose household
goods were, being disposed of at public sale, occupied a large gloomy
floor on the Via Cavour. The rooms were crowded by their friends and the
merely curious; the carpets were protected by a temporary covering; and
all the furnishings, the chairs and piano, pictures, glass and bijoux,
bore gummed and numbered labels.
The sale was progressing in one of the larger salons, but the crowd
circulated in a slow solid undulation through every room. Gheta and Anna
Mantegazza had sought the familiar comfortable corner of an entresol,
and were seated. Lavinia was standing tensely, with a laboring breast,
when Bembo suddenly appeared with the man whom he had called the Flower
of Spain.
“The Contessa Mantegazza,” Bembo said suavely, “Signorina Sanviano, this
is Abrego y Mochales.”
The bull-fighter bowed with magnificent flexibility. A hot resentment
possessed Lavinia at Bembo's apparent ignoring of her; but he had not
seen her at first and hastened to repair his omission. Lavinia inclined
her head stiffly. An increasing confusion enveloped her, but she forced
herself to gaze directly into Mochales' still black eyes. His face, she
saw, was gaunt, the ridges of his skull apparent under the bronzed skin.
His hair, worn in a queue, was pinned in a flat disk on his head, and
small gold loops had been riveted in his ears; but these peculiarities
of garb were lost in the man's intense virility, his patent brute
force. His fine perfumed linen, the touch of scarlet at his waist,
his extremely high-heeled patent-leather boots under soft uncreased
trousers, served only to emphasize his resolute metal--they resembled an
embroidered and tasseled scabbard that held a keen, thin and dangerous
blade.
Anna Mantegazza extended her hand in the American fashion, and Gheta
smiled from--Lavinia saw--her best facial angle. The Spaniard regarded
Gheta Sanviano so fixedly that after a moment she turned, in a species
of constraint, to Anna. The latter spoke with her customary facility and
the man responded gravely.
They stood a little aside from Lavinia; she only partly heard their
remarks, but she saw that Abrego y Mochales' attention never strayed
from her sister. Vicariously it made her giddy. The man absolutely
summed up all that Lavinia had dreamed of a romantic and masterful
personage. She felt convinced that he had destroyed her life's
happiness--no other man could ever appeal to her now; none other could
satisfy the tumult he had aroused in her. This, she told herself,
desperately miserable, was love.
Gheta spoke of her, for the three turned to regard her. She met their
scrutiny with a doubtful half smile, which vanished as Anna Mantegazza
made a light comment upon her hair being so newly up. Lavinia detested
the latter with a sudden and absurd intensity. She saw Anna, with a
veiled glance at Gheta, make an apology and leave to join an eddy of
familiars that had formed in the human stream sweeping by. Mochales
stood very close to her sister, speaking seriously, while Gheta
nervously fingered the short veil hanging from her gay straw hat.
A familiar kindly voice sounded suddenly in Lavinia's ears, and Cesare
Orsi joined her. He was about to move forward toward Gheta; but, before
he could attract her attention, she disappeared in the crowd with the
Spaniard.
“Who was it?” he inquired. “He resembles a juggler.”
Lavinia elaborately masked her hot resentment at this fresh stupidity.
She must not, she felt, allow Orsi to discover her feeling for Abrego
y Mochales; that was a secret she must keep forever from the profane
world. She would die, perhaps at a terribly advanced age, with it locked
in her heart. But if Gheta married him she would go into a convent.
“A bull-fighter, I believe,” she said carelessly.
“In other words, a brute,” Orsi continued. “Such men are not fit for the
society of--of your sister. One would think his mere presence would make
her ill.... Yet she seemed quite pleased.”
“Strange!” Lavinia spoke with innocent eyes.
It was like turning a knife in her wound to agree apparently with Cesare
Orsi--rather, she wanted to laugh at him coldly and leave him standing
alone; but she must cultivate her defenses. There was, too, a sort of
negative pleasure in misleading the banker, a sort of torment not unlike
that enjoyed by the early martyrs.
Cesare Orsi regarded her with new interest and approbation.
“You're a sensible girl,” he proclaimed; “and extremely pretty in the
bargain.” He added this in an accent of profound surprise, as if she had
suddenly grown presentable under his eyes. “In some ways,” he went on,
gathering conviction, “you are as handsome as Gheta.”
“Thank you, Signor Orsi,” Lavinia responded with every indication of a
modesty, which, in fact, was the indifference of a supreme contempt.
“I have been blind,” he asseverated, vivaciously gesticulating with his
thick hands.
Lavinia studied him with a remote young brutality, from his fluffy
disarranged hair, adhering to his wet brow, to his extravagantly pointed
shoes. The ridiculous coral charm hanging from his heavy watch chain, a
violent green handkerchief, an insufferable cameo pin--all contributed
pleasurably to the lowering of her opinion of him.
“I must find Gheta,” she pronounced, suddenly aware of her isolation
with Cesare Orsi in the crowd, and of curious glances. Orsi immediately
took her arm, but she eluded him. “Go first, please; we can get through
sooner that way.”
They progressed from room to room, thoroughly exploring the dense throng
about the auctioneer, but without finding either Gheta, Anna Mantegazza
or the bull-fighter.
“I can't think how she could have forgotten me!” Lavinia declared with
increasing annoyance. “It's clear that they have all gone.”
“Don't agitate yourself,” Cesare Orsi begged. “Sanviano will be
absolutely contented to have you in my care. I am delighted. You shall
go home directly in my carriage.” He conducted her, with a show of form
that in any one else or at another time she would have enjoyed hugely,
to the street, where he handed her into an immaculately glossy and
corded victoria, drawn by a big stamping bay, and stood with his hat off
until she had rolled away.
It was comfortable in the luxuriously upholstered seat and, in spite of
herself, Lavinia sank back with a contented sigh. There was in its case
a gilt hand mirror, into which she peered, and a ledge that pulled out,
with a crystal box for cigarettes and a spirit lighter. The Sanvianos
had only a landaulet, no longer in its first condition; and Lavinia
wondered why Gheta, who adored ease, had been so long in securing for
herself such comforts as Orsi's victoria.
They swept smoothly on rubber tires into the Lungarno and rapidly
approached her home. The carriage stopped before the familiar white
façade, built of marble in the pseudo-severity of the early nineteenth
century, and the porter swung open the great iron gate to the courtyard.
Lavinia mounted the square white shaft of the stairs to the Sanvianos'
floor with a deepening sense of injury. She would make it plain to Gheta
that she was no longer a child to be casually overlooked.
A small room, used in connection with the dining room for coffee and
smoking, gave directly on the hall; there she saw her father sitting,
with his hat still on, his face stamped with an almost comical dismay,
and holding an unlighted cigar.
“Gheta left me at the Guarinis',” Lavinia halted impetuously. “If it
hadn't been for Signor Orsi I shouldn't be here yet; I was completely
ignored.”
“Heavens!” her father exclaimed, waving her away. “Another feminine
catastrophe! Go to your sister and mother. My head is in a whirl.”
Her mother, then, had returned. She went forward and was suddenly
startled by hearing Gheta's voice rise in a wail of despairing misery.
She hurried forward to her sister's room. Gheta, fully dressed, was
prostrate, face down, upon her bed, shaken by a strangled sobbing that
at intervals rose to a thin hysterical scream. The Marchesa Sanviano,
still in her traveling suit and close-fitting black hat, sat by
her elder daughter's side, trying vainly to calm the tumult. In the
background the maid, her face streaming with sympathetic tears, was
hovering distractedly with a jar of volatile salts.
“Mamma,” Lavinia demanded, torn by extravagant fears, “what has
happened?”
The marchesa momentarily turned a concerned countenance.
“Your sister,” she said seriously, “has found some wrinkles on her
forehead.”
Lavinia with difficulty restrained a sharp giggle. Gheta's grief and
their mother's anxiety at first seemed so foolishly disproportionate
to their cause. Then a realization of what such an occurrence meant to
Gheta dawned upon her. To an acknowledged beauty like Gheta Sanviano
the marks of Time were an absolute tragedy; they threatened her on every
plane of her being.
“But when--” Lavinia began.
“They--Anna Mantegazza and she--went to the dressing room at the
Guarinis', where, it seems, Anna discovered them--sympathetically, of
course.”
Gheta's sobbing slowly subsided under the marchesa's urgent plea that
unrestrained emotion would only deepen her trouble. She did not appear
at dinner; and afterward the marchese, his wife and Lavinia sat wrapped
in a gloomy silence. The marchesa was still handsome, in spite of
increasing weight. The gray gaze inherited by Lavinia had escaped the
parent; her eyes were soft and dense, like brown velvet. She was a woman
of decision and now she brought her hands smartly together.
“We have waited too long with Gheta; we should not have counted so
confidently on her beauty; time flies so treacherously. She must marry
as soon as possible.”
“Thank God, there's Cesare Orsi!” her husband responded.
Lavinia was gazing inward at the secretly enshrined image of the Flower
of Spain.