Veronica had felt herself mortally insulted by Taquisara's manner, much
more than by his words, though they had been offensive enough. Her
impression of the man was completely changed, in a moment, and she hoped
that she might never see him again, so long as she lived. It had been
one thing to praise Gianluca to her, and to press his suit for him; it
was quite another to lie in wait for her, as it were, at the end of a
drawing-room and to reproach her brutally and angrily with wishing to
break Gianluca's heart. As she thought of his eyes, and his face, and
his low voice, she grew pale with anger herself, at the mere memory of
his insolence.
It did not strike her that there could be any truth in his accusation.
Gianluca was old enough to take care of himself. Was Taquisara his
nurse, his keeper, his doctor? Gianluca was not making love to her in
his letters, nor was she, in hers, encouraging him to do so. She was
angry at the thought that the Sicilian should know anything of their
correspondence, as it seemed evident that he must. It was true that her
own friend, Bianca, knew something about it. She could forgive
Gianluca, if he had confided too much in Taquisara, but she could not
forgive Taquisara for having been the recipient of the confidence, and
she would neither forgive nor forget the way in which he had shown her
how much he knew.
For the first time in her life, Veronica longed to be a man, that she
might not only resent the insult, but have satisfaction of the man who
had insulted her. She felt that she was emphatically not playing with
Gianluca, as Taquisara had expressed it. She had told him frankly,
several months earlier, that she could not love him,--she had shaken her
head and had said that she was sorry,--and neither he nor any one else
had a right to suppose that she was now changing her mind. Since
Gianluca was apparently willing to accept the position and to be her
friend, it was nobody's affair but his and hers. She felt that she had
been fully justified in what she had said to Taquisara. At the same time
she was half conscious of being disappointed in the man, and of being
wounded by the disappointment.
She left Bianca's house early, and as she drove away to the railway
station alone with Elettra, she felt that her life was only now really
beginning. The months of independence she had enjoyed had prepared her
for this final move. In the course of setting her affairs in order, she
had been brought face to face with a side of the world which few women
ever see or understand, and her character had hardened singularly to
meet the difficulties she had found in her path. She probably
overestimated the strength she had now acquired; for more than once, on
the way to the station, she felt a momentary reaction of timidity and a
longing to go back and stay a few days more with Bianca. She laughed
bravely at herself for her weakness, and told herself that she was going
to her own place, to be surrounded by her own people, that she was
two-and-twenty years of age and had been through troubles during the
past months which had proved her strength. Nevertheless, the fact
remained that she was a very young, unmarried woman, that she was going
to live alone, and that she was breaking through the whole hard shell of
fossilized social tradition. Even Elettra, born a peasant of the
mountains, thought her mistress's decision amazingly bold, though she
approved of it in her heart, and had been ready to go to Muro with
Veronica long ago.
"What would your father, blessed soul, have said, Excellency?" she
asked, when they were seated together in the train which was to take
them to Eboli, beyond Salerno.
"Shall I send for the Countess Macomer?" asked Veronica, with a smile.
"Heaven preserve us from her!" exclaimed Elettra, and she crossed
herself hastily, and then made the sign of the horns with her fingers,
against the evil eye, and with her other hand touched a coral charm
which she had in her pocket.
Veronica had long been in correspondence with Don Teodoro about the
arrangements for her coming. He had expected that she would bring a
staff of servants from Naples with all the paraphernalia of a great
establishment. She had replied that she intended to employ only her own
people, and meant to live very simply. He suggested that she should send
a quantity of new furniture, as the apartments in the castle had not
been inhabited for nearly twenty years, but Veronica answered that she
needed no luxuries, and repeated that she meant to live very simply
indeed. She sent her saddle horse and two pairs of strong cobs with two
country carriages and a coachman--a very young man, who had served in
Gianluca's regiment and had been his man. He was to find a man in Muro
to help him in the stables, and he was the only servant, not a native,
whom she meant to employ. Don Teodoro had kept ten people at work for a
month in cleaning the vast old place. Veronica had sent also a box of
books, some linen and silver, and her fencing things--for she still
hoped that Bianca would pay her a visit.
The journey by rail occupied between four and five hours, but it did not
seem so long to her. She was surprised at the excitement she felt, as
she passed station after station and watched the changing sights and
the mountains that loomed up in the foreground, while those behind her
dwindled in the distance. She had travelled very little in her life,
since she had come back from Rome.
On the platform of the little station at Eboli, Don Teodoro was waiting
for her. His tall bent figure and enormous nose made him conspicuous at
a distance, and she could see the big silver spectacles anxiously
searching for her along the row of carriage windows. As the door was
opened for her she waved her handkerchief to the old priest, with a
little gesture of happy enthusiasm, high above her head, and he saw her
immediately and came forward, three-cornered hat in hand. She suddenly
loved the smile with which he greeted her.
"You, at least, do not think that I am mad to come to Muro, do you?" she
asked, standing beside him on the platform while Elettra was handing out
her smaller belongings.
"Not at all," answered the old man. "You are coming to take care of your
own people, and it is a good deed. Good deeds generally seem eccentric
to society--and considering their rarity, that is not extraordinary."
He smiled again, and Veronica laughed.
"Your carriage is here," said Don Teodoro. "May I take you to it? Will
you give me the tickets, Elettra? They take them at the gate."
Veronica felt a new thrill of joyous freedom and independence, as for
the first time in her life she set her little foot upon the step of her
own carriage, and glanced at the simple, well-appointed turnout. The
coachman sat alone in the middle of the box, a broad-shouldered,
clean-shaven young fellow of six-and-twenty, in a dull green livery with
white facings--the colours of the Serra.
"You would not even have a footman," observed Don Teodoro.
"No--not I!" she laughed, still standing in the carriage. "How are the
horses doing, Giovanni?" she asked of the coachman. "Are they strong
enough for the work?"
"They are good horses, Excellency," the man answered. "They need work."
"And how is Sultana?" inquired the young girl, who had not seen the mare
for several days.
"The mare is well, Excellency."
Veronica made Don Teodoro sit beside her, and Elettra installed herself
opposite them, with her mistress's bags and other things. The luggage
was piled on a cart which was to follow, and they drove away.
"I sent the carriage down yesterday," observed Don Teodoro. "I came by
the coach this morning."
"Is it so far?" asked Veronica, whose ideas about the position of her
property were still uncertain, for it had never struck Elettra that her
mistress did not know how far it was from Eboli to Muro.
"It is over thirty miles," answered the priest, with a smile. "We are
beyond civilization in Muro--we are in the province of Basilicata. But
there are little towns on the way, and you must stop to rest the horses
and to eat something. It will be almost dark when you get home."
"Home!" repeated Veronica, thoughtfully.
A confused vision rose in her mind, of an imaginary room, looking down
from a height upon a town below--a room in which she would live
altogether, with her books and her favourite objects and the
companionship of her favourite ideas and plans, all of which were to be
realized and executed in the course of time. She fancied herself gazing
down from the wide window upon what was almost all hers, upon the
dwellings of people who lived upon her land, who pastured her flocks and
drove her cattle, living, moving, and having being as integral animate
parts of her great inheritance; children of men and women whose fathers'
fathers had laboured in old days that she might have and enjoy the
fruits of so much toil, who had given much and from whom had often been
taken even that which they had not been bound fairly to give; who had
received nothing in return for generations of blood and bone worn out,
dried up, and consumed to dust in the service of the great house of
Serra. They had a right to her, as she had a right to the lands on
which they lived. There was much talk of rights, Veronica thought,
nowadays, and those who had none were privileged to speak the loudest
and to be heard first. But those who, having right on their side, were
blinded and smitten dumb by the enormous despotism of their self-styled
betters--by the glare and noise of blatant power in possession--they
were the ones who really had rights, and if she could give any of them a
single hundredth part of what was their due, she should be glad that she
had lived. Wealth, she thought, should not be an accumulation, but a
distribution, of goods. Charity should no longer mean alms, nor should
poverty be pauperism. In the young, whole-hearted simplicity of her
desire to do good, it seemed likely that she might soon be a specimen of
the strangest of all modern anomalies--the princely socialist. It was
certainly in her power to try almost any experiment which suggested
itself, and on a scale which might ultimately prove something to herself
and others.
It was not that she meant to study political economy, or socialism, nor
to give the name of an experiment to anything she did. She had been
struck by the practical necessity for doing something, when Don Teodoro
had first written to her about the condition of the people in Muro, and
her own observations made on her farms in the Falernian district--one
of the richest corners of vine land in all Italy--had convinced her that
some sort of action was urgently necessary. And if, in the midst of such
riches, the Falernian peasants were half starved, what must be the state
of the people on her lands in the Basilicata? Don Teodoro had drawn her
an accurate picture, full of those plain details which carry more than
the weight of their mere words. Something should be done at once. She
had given him power and money to help the very poorest, before she came;
but her common sense told her that the evil lay too deep in the soil to
be reached by a light shower of silver--or even by a storm of gold rain.
Inventors, great or small, are rarely theorists; the invention must be
suited to the necessity, before all things, and the theory may come
afterwards if anybody cares for it. For a theory is nothing but an
attempted explanation, and the fact must exist before it can possibly
need explaining. Bread is a great invention against hunger, and a man
needs to know nothing about the gastric juices to save himself from
starvation when the loaf is in his hand. Veronica meant to put the
loaves where they were needed, within reach of those who needed them.
As she was driven through the rugged country on that May afternoon, she
felt that she had a future before her, that she was going into action,
and leaving stagnation behind, and that her own life, which was to be
her very own, was just beginning. It was to be a life quite different
from the existence of any one she knew, for, unlike the lives of her
friends, hers was to have an integral, independent existence of its own,
with one determined object for all its activity.
The months she had passed in Bianca's house had rather strengthened than
weakened the unformulated resolution which she had first vaguely reached
in the dark days after Bosio's death. There had been much solitude, and
many rides and drives into the country with her beautiful, silent
friend; and there had been very little contact with the world to disturb
the onward current of her thoughts. More than all, the first breath of
liberty after long restraint had enlarged and widened her determination
to be always free, in spite of the world, and society, and the drone of
the busy-bodies' gossip. In her heart, the memory of Bosio had grown in
dignity, till it was solemn and imposing out of all proportion with what
the man himself had been, even as Veronica had known him. To know the
truth of what his real life had been would have shaken her own to its
foundations. But there was no fear of that; and now, her chief companion
was to be the priest who had loved him as a friend. Possibly that last
fact had even influenced her a little in her final determination to
live at Muro, rather than in any other of four or five equally habitable
or uninhabitable places which she owned, and where she might have begun
her work under circumstances quite as favourable to success.
She had thought very little of any need she might feel for relaxation
and amusement, and she was very far from realizing what that solitude
meant, which she was seeking with so much enthusiasm. She had never yet
been as much alone as she should have liked to be, and she could not
imagine that she might possibly become tired of playing the princess in
the tower for months together, with only the company of one learned old
ecclesiastic as her sole diversion. The vision of home which she evoked
was always the same, but she did not even know whether the castle had a
room which looked down upon the little town. She imagined but a single
room; the rest was all a blank. She had been told that it was a great
old fortress, with towers and halls and courts, gloomy, grand, and
haunted by the ghosts of murdered kings and queens; but the slight
descriptions she had heard produced no prevision of the reality as
compared with what she really wanted and was sure that she should find.
She thought of Gianluca, as the carriage rolled along through the lower
hills, and she looked forward with pleasure to writing about what she
saw and expected to see. It seemed probable that she would write even
longer letters to him, now that she was to be quite alone, and she hoped
that his would be as interesting as ever. She thought again with anger
of Taquisara's extraordinary conduct, for she was positively sure that
she was not playing with his friend in any sense of the word. The very
suggestion would have been insulting, if he had made it in the most
carefully guarded and tactful language. As he had put it, it had been
nothing short of outrageous.
Gianluca must be blind indeed, she assured herself, if he fancied that
she meant more than friendship by the constant exchange of letters with
him. It might be eccentric; it might be looked upon as utterly and
unpardonably unconventional, but it could never be regarded as a
flirtation by letter. The proof of that, Veronica argued to herself, was
that both of them knew that it was nothing of the sort, a manner of
begging the question familiar to those who wish to do as they please
without hindrance from within or without.