IN the afternoon Gloria called Sora Nanna to move the chest against
which she had stumbled in the morning. It would be more convenient, she
said, to put it under the bed, if it could not be taken away altogether.
It was a big, old-fashioned chest of unpainted, unvarnished wood, brown
with age, and fastened by a hasp, through which a splinter of white
chestnut wood had been stuck instead of a padlock. Gloria saw that it
was heavy, as Sora Nanna dragged it and pushed it across the room. She
remarked that, if it held only clothes, it must be packed very full.
Sora Nanna, glad to rest from her efforts, stood upright with her hand
on her hip and took breath.
"Signora," she said, "who knows what is in it? Things, certain things!
There are the clothes of that poor girl. This I know. And then, certain
other things. Who knows what is in it? It may be a thousand years since
I looked. Signora, shall we open it? But I think there are certain
things that belonged to the Englishman."
"The Englishman?" asked Gloria, with some curiosity.
She was glad of anything which could interest her a little. For the
moment she had not yet the courage to begin to write again after
Reanda's message. Anything which had power to turn the current of her
thoughts was a relief. She was sitting in the same chair beside the
cradle in which she had sat in the morning, for she had called Nanna to
move the box at a time when the child had been taken out for its second
airing. She leaned back, resting her auburn hair against the bare wall,
the waxen whiteness of her face contrasting with the bluish whitewash.
"What Englishman?" she asked again, wearily, but with a show of interest
in her half-closed eyes.
"Who knows? An Englishman. They called him Sor Angoscia." Nanna sat down
on the heavy box, and dropped her skinny hands far apart upon her knees.
"We have cursed him much. He took our daughter. It was a night of evil.
In that night the abbess died, and Sister Maria Addolorata was burned in
her cell, and the Englishman took our daughter. He took our one
daughter, Signora. We have not seen her more, not even her little
finger. It will be twenty-two years on the eve of the feast of St. Luke.
That is in October, Signora. He took our daughter. Poor little one! She
was young, young--perhaps she did not know what she did."
Gloria leaned forward, resting her chin in her hand and her elbow on
her knee, gazing at the old woman.
"She was a flower," said Nanna, simply. "He tore her from us with the
roots. Who knows what he did with her? She will be dead by this time.
May the Madonna obtain grace for her! Signora, she seemed one of those
flowers that grow on the hillside, just as God wills. Rain, sun, she was
always fresh. Then came the storm. Who could find her any more? Poor
little one!"
"Poor child!" exclaimed Gloria.
And she made Nanna tell all she knew, and how they had found the girl's
peasant dress in a corner of that very room.
"Signora, if you wish to see, I will content you," said Nanna, rising at
last.
She opened the box. It exhaled the peculiar odour of heavy cloth which
has been worn and has then been kept closely shut up for years. On the
top lay Annetta's carpet apron. Nanna held it up, and there were tears
in her eyes, glistening on her dry skin like water in a crevice of brown
rock.
"Signora, there are moths in it, see! Who cares for these things? They
are a memory. And this is her skirt, and this is her bodice. Eh, it was
beautiful once. The shoes, Signora, I wore them, for we had the same
feet. What would you? It seemed a sin to let them mould, because they
were hers. The apron, too, I might have worn it. Who knows why I did
not wear it? It was the affection. We are all so, we women. And now
there are moths in it. I might have worn it. At least it would not have
been lost."
Gloria peered into the box, and saw under the clothes a number of books
packed neatly with a box made of English oak. She stretched down her
hand and took one of the volumes. It was an English medical treatise.
She looked at the fly-leaf.
A loud cry from Gloria startled the old woman.
"Angus Dalrymple--but--" Gloria read the name and stared at Nanna.
"Eh, eh!" assented Nanna, nodding violently and smiling a little as she
at last recognized the Scotchman's name which she had never been able to
pronounce. "Yes--that is it. That was the name of the Englishman. An
evil death on him and all his house! Stefanone says it always. I also
may say it once. It was he. He took our daughter. Stefanone went after
them, but they had the beast of the convent gardener. It was a good
beast, and they made it run. Stefanone heard of them all the way to the
sea, but the twenty-four hours had passed, and the war-ship was far out.
He could see it. Could he go to the war-ship? It had cannons. They would
have killed him. Then I should have had neither daughter nor husband. So
he came back."
The long habit of acting had made Gloria strong, but her hands shook on
the closed volume. She had known that her mother had been an Italian,
that they had left Italy suddenly and had been married on board an
English man-of-war by the captain, that same Walter Crowdie, a relative
of Dalrymple's, after whom Gloria and Griggs had named the child. More
than that Dalrymple had never been willing to tell her. She remembered,
too, that though she had once or twice begged him to take her to Tivoli
and Subiaco, he had refused rather abruptly. It was clear enough now.
Her mother had been this Annetta whom Dalrymple had stolen away in the
night.
And the wrinkled, leathery old hag, with her damp, coarse mouth, her skinny
hands, and her cunning, ignorant eyes, was her grandmother--Stefanone
was her grandfather--her mother had been a peasant, like them, beautified
by one of nature's mad miracles.
There could be no doubt about it. That was the truth, and it fell upon
her with its cruel, massive weight, striking her where many other truths
had struck her before this one, in her vanity.
She grasped the book tightly with both hands and set her teeth. After
that, she did not know what Nanna said, and the old woman, thinking
Gloria was not paying a proper attention to her remarks, pushed and
heaved the box across the room rather discontentedly. It would not go
under the bed, being too high, so she wedged it in between the foot of
the bedstead and the wall. There was just room for it there.
"Signora, if ever your one child leaves you without a word, you will
understand," said Nanna, a little offended at finding no sympathy.
"I understand too well," answered Gloria.
Then she suddenly realized what the woman wanted, and with great
self-control she held out her hand kindly. Nanna took it and smiled, and
pressed it in her horny fingers.
"You are young, Signora. When you are old, you will understand many
things, when evils have pounded your heart in a mortar. Oil is sweet,
vinegar is sour; with both one makes salad. This is our life. Rest
yourself, Signora, for you walked well this morning. I go."
Gloria felt the pressure of the rough fingers on hers, after Nanna had
left her. The acrid odour of peeled vegetables clung to her own hand,
and she rose and washed it carefully, though she was scarcely conscious
of what she was doing. Suddenly she dropped the towel and went back to
the box. It had crossed her mind that the single book she had opened
might have been borrowed from her father and that she might find another
name in the others--that Nanna might have been mistaken in thinking that
she recognized the English name--that it might all be a mistake, after
all.
With violent hands she dragged out the moth-eaten clothes and threw them
behind her upon the floor, and seized the books, opening them
desperately one after the other. In each there was the name, 'Angus
Dalrymple,' in her father's firm young handwriting of twenty years ago.
She threw them down and lifted out the oak box. A little brass plate was
let into the lid, and bore the initials, 'A. D.' There was no doubt
left. The books all bore dates prior to 1844, the year in which, as she
knew, her father had been married. It was impossible to hesitate, for
the case was terribly clear.
She rose to her feet and carried the box to the window and set it upon a
chair, sitting down upon another before it. It was not locked. She
raised the lid, and saw that it was a medicine chest. There was a
drawer, or little tray, on the top, full of small boxes and very minute
vials, lying on their sides. Lifting this out, she saw a number of
little stoppered bottles set in holes made in a thin piece of board for
a frame. One was missing, and there were eleven left. She counted them
mechanically, not knowing why she did so. Then she took them out and
looked at the labels. The first she touched contained spirits of
camphor. It chanced to be the only one of which the contents were
harmless. The others were strong tinctures and acids, vegetable poisons,
belladonna, aconite, and the like, sulphuric acid, nitric acid,
hydrochloric acid, and others.
Gloria looked at them curiously and set them back, one by one, put in
the little tray and closed the lid. Then she sat still a long time and
gazed out of the window at the rugged line of the hills.
Between her and the pale sky she saw her own life, and the hideous
failure of it all, culminating in the certainty that she was of the
blood of the old peasant couple to whose house a seeming chance had
brought her to die. She felt that she could not live, and would not live
if she could. It was all too wildly horrible, too utterly desolate.
The only human being that clung to her was the one of all others whom
she most feared and hated, whose very touch sent a cold shiver through
her. She and fate together had pounded her heart in a mortar, as the old
woman had said. With a bitterness that sickened her she thought of her
brief married life, of her poor social ambition, of her hopeless efforts
to be some one amongst the great. What could she be, the daughter of
peasants, what could she have ever been? Probably some one knew the
truth about her, in all that great society. Such things might be known.
Francesca Campodonico's delicate noble face rose faintly between her and
the sky, and she realized with excruciating suddenness the distance that
separated her from the woman she hated, the woman who perhaps knew that
Gloria Dalrymple was the daughter of a peasant and a fit wife by her
birth for Angelo Reanda, the steward's son.
The ruin of her life spread behind her and before her. She could not
face it. The confusion of it all seemed to blind her, and the confusion
was pierced by the terrible thought that on the next day but one Griggs
would return again, the one being who would not leave her, who believed
in her, who worshipped her, and whom she hated for himself and for the
destruction of her existence which had come by him.
In the box before her was death, painful perhaps, but sure as the grave
itself. She was not a coward, except when she was afraid of Paul Griggs,
and the fear lest he, too, should find out the truth was worse than the
fear of mortal pain.
She sat still in her place, staring out of the window. After a long
time, the nurse came in, carrying the child asleep in her arms, covered
with a thin gauze veil. Gloria started, and then smiled mechanically as
she had trained herself to smile whenever the child was brought to her.
The nurse laid the small thing in its cradle, and Gloria, as in a dream,
put the books and the clothes back into the box, and was glad that the
nurse asked no questions. When she had shut down the lid, she rose to
her feet and saw that she had left the medicine chest on the chair. She
took it into the bedroom and set it upon the table.
Then she sat down and wrote to Reanda. There was no haste in the
writing, and her head was clear and cool, for she was not afraid. Griggs
could not return for two days, and she had plenty of time. She went over
her story, as she had gone over it many times before in her letters. She
told him all, but not the discovery she had just made. That should die
with her, if it could. It would be easy enough, on the next day, when
the nurse was out, to open the box again, and to tear out the fly-leaf
from each book and so destroy the name. As for the medicine chest,
Griggs might see that it had belonged to her father, but he would
suppose that she had brought it amongst her belongings. He would never
guess that it had lain hidden in the old box for more than twenty years.
That was her plan, and it was simple enough. But she should have to wait
until the next day. It was better so. She could think of what she was
going to do, and nobody would disturb her. She finished her letter.
"You have killed me," she wrote at the end. "If I had not loved you to
the very end, I would tell you that my death is on your soul. But it is
not all your fault, if I have loved you to death. I would not die if I
could be free in any other way, but I cannot live to be touched and
caressed again by this man whom I loathe with all my soul. I tell you
that when he kisses me it is as though I were stung by a serpent of ice.
It is for your sake that I hate him as I do. For your sake I have
suffered hell on earth for more than a whole year. For your sake I die.
I cannot live without you. I have told you so again and a hundred times
again, and you have not believed me. You write to-day and you tell me
that I shall be free, when you die, to marry Paul Griggs. I would rather
marry Satan in hell. But I shall be free to-morrow, for I shall be dead.
God will forgive me, for God knows what I suffer. Good-bye. I love you,
Angelo. I shall love you to-morrow, when the hour comes, and after that
I shall love you always. This is the end. Good-bye. I love you; I kiss
your soul with my soul. Good-bye, good-bye.
"GLORIA."
She cut a lock from her auburn hair and twisted it round and round her
wedding ring, and thrust it into the envelope.