Olive sat in her little bedroom correcting exercises.
It was the drowsy middle of the afternoon and the heat was intense.
All the grey-green and golden land of Tuscany lay still and helpless
at the mercy of the sun. The birds had long ceased singing, and only
the thin shrilling of the locusts broke the August silence. The
parched earth was pale, and great cracks that only the autumn rains
could fill had opened on the hillsides, but the ripening maize lay
snug within its narrow sheaths of green, and the leaves of the vines
hid great bunches of purpling grapes. In the fields men rested awhile
from their labours, and the patient white oxen stood in the shade of
the mulberries, while the sunburnt lads who drove them bathed their
tired bodies in the stream, or lay idly in the lush grass at the
water's edge.
In the town the walls of houses that had fronted the morning sun were
scorching to the touch, and there was no coolness even in the steep
northward streets that were always in shadow, or in the grey
stone-paved courts of the palaces. There were few people about at this
hour, and the little stream of traffic had run dry in the Via Cavour.
A vendor of melons drew his barrow close up to the battered old column
in the Piazza Tolomei, and squatted down on the ground beside it.
"_Cocomeri! Fresc' e buoni!_" he cried once or twice, and then rolled
over and went to sleep. A peasant girl carrying a basket of eggs
passed presently, and she looked wistfully at the fruit, but she did
not disturb his slumbers.
"Is that the aunt of your friend's mother? No, it is the sister of my
niece's governess." Olive laid down her pen. She was only partially
dressed and her hair hung loosely about her bare white shoulders. The
heat made hairpins seem a burden and outer garments superfluous. "My
niece's governess is the last. Thank Heaven for that!" she said, and
she sat down on the brick floor to take off her stockings. Gemma's
_fidanzato_, her lawyer from Lucca, was coming to Siena for a week. He
would lodge next door and come in to the Menotti for most of his
meals, and already poor old Carolina was busy in the hot, airless
kitchen, beating up eggs for a _zabajone_, and Signora Carosi had gone
out to buy ice for the wine and sweet cakes to be handed round with
little glasses of _vin_ Santo or Marsala.
Carmela came into her cousin's room soon after four o'clock. "I have
just taken Gemma a cup of black coffee. Her head aches terribly."
"I heard her moving about her room in the night," Olive answered, and
she added, under her breath, "Poor Gemma!"
Carmela lowered her voice too. "Of course Maria and I know that you
see what is going on as well as we do. There is some man ... she lets
down a basket from her window at nights for letters, and I believe she
meets him when my aunt thinks she has gone to Mass. It is dreadful.
How glad we shall be when she is safely married and away."
"Who is the man?"
"Hush! I don't know. Do you hear the beating of a drum? One of the
_Contrade_ is coming."
The two girls ran to the window, and Olive opened the green shutters a
little way that they might see out without being seen. The day of the
Palio was close at hand, and the pages and _alfieri_ of the rival
parishes, whose horses were to run in the race, were already going
about the town. Olive never tired of watching the flash of bright
colours as the flags were flung up and deftly caught again, and she
cried out now with pleasure as the little procession moved leisurely
across the piazza.
"I wonder why they come here," Carmela said, as the first _alfiero_
let the heavy folds of silk ripple about his head, twisted the staff,
seemed to drop it, and gathered it to him again easily with his left
hand. The page stood aside with a grave assumption of the gilded
graces of the thirteenth century. He was handsome in his dress of
green and white and scarlet velvet.
"Why does he look up here?"
Olive laughed a little. "He is the son of the cobbler who mends my
boots," she whispered. "He is trying to learn English and I have lent
him some books, and that is why he has come to do us honour. I think
it is charming of him."
She took a white magnolia blossom from a glass dish on her table.
"Shall I be mediaeval too?"
The boy raised smiling eyes as the pale flower came fluttering down to
him. One of the _alfieri_ laughed aloud.
"_O Romeo, sei bello!_"
"_Son' felice!_" he answered, and he kissed the waxen petals ardently.
Olive softly clapped her hands together. "Is he not delicious! What an
actor! Oh, Italy!"
Now that the performance was over the _alfieri_ strolled across the
piazza to the barrow that was still drawn up by the column.
"_Cocomeri! Fresc' e buoni!_"
"I never know what will please you," Carmela said as she sat down.
"But foreigners always like the Palio. You will see many English and
Americans and Germans on the stands."
"Yes, I love it all. Yesterday I passed through the Piazza del Campo
and saw the workmen putting palings all about the centre, and
hammering at the stands, while others strewed sand on the course and
fastened mattresses to the side of the house by San Martino."
"Ah, the _fantini_ are often thrown there and flung against the wall.
If there were no mattresses ... crack!" Carmela made a sound as of
breaking bones and hummed a few bars of Chopin's _Marche Funebre_.
Olive shuddered. "You are an impressionist, Carmela. Two dabs of
scarlet and a smear--half a word and a shrug of the shoulders--and you
have expressed a five-act tragedy. I think you could act."
"Oh, I am not clever; I should never be able to remember my part."
"You would improvise," Olive was beginning, when Carmela sprang up and
ran to the window again.
"It is Orazio!" she cried. "He has come in a cab."
The _vetturino_ had pulled his horse up with a jerk of the reins after
the manner of his kind; the wretched animal had slipped and he was now
beating it about the head with the butt end of his whip. His fare had
got out and was looking on calmly.
Olive hastily picked up one of her shoes and flung it at them. It
struck the _vetturino_ just above the ear. "A nasty crack," she said.
"His language is evidently frightful. It is a good thing I can't
understand it, Carmela."
She looked down at the angry, bewildered men, and the _vetturino_,
catching a glimpse of the flushed face framed in a soft fluff of brown
hair, shook his fist and roared a curse upon it.
"Touch that horse again and I'll throw a jug of boiling water over
you," she cried as she drew the green shutters to; and then, in quite
another tone, "Oh, Giovanni, be good. What has the poor beast ever
done to you?" She turned to Carmela. "I know him. His wife does
washing for Signora Aurelia," she explained.
A slow grin overspread the man's heavy face as he rubbed his head.
"Mad English," he said, and then looked closely at the coin the
Lucchese had tendered him.
"Your legal fare," Orazio began pompously.
"Santo Diavolo--"
"I am a lawyer."
"_Si capisce!_ Will you give the signorina her shoe?" He handed it to
Orazio, who took it awkwardly.
"The incident is closed," Olive said as she came back to her cooling
tea. "I hope there is a heaven for horses and a hell for men. Oh, how
I hate cruelty! Carmela, if that is Orazio I must say I sympathise
with Gemma. How could any woman love a mean, narrow-shouldered,
whitey-brown paper thing like that?"
"It is a pity," sighed Carmela as she moved towards the door. "But
after all they are all alike in the end. I must go now to help Maria
lace. I pull a little, and then wait a few minutes. _E un martirio!_"
"Why does she do it?"
"Why does an ostrich bury its head in the sand? Why does a camel try
to get through the eye of a needle? (But perhaps he does not.) I often
tell her fat cannot be hidden, but she will not believe."
When Olive went into the _salotto_ a few minutes before seven she
found the family assembled. Signor Lucis rose from his place at
Gemma's side as the aunt uttered the introductory formula. He brought
his heels together and bowed stiffly from the waist, and when Olive
gave him her hand in English fashion he took it limply and held it for
a moment before he dropped it. His string-coloured moustache was
brushed up from a loose-lipped mouth, and he showed bad teeth when he
smiled.
"The signorina speaks Italian?"
"Oh, yes."
"Ah, does she come from London?"
"I had no settled home in England."
"Ah! The sun never shines there?"
She laughed. "Not as it does here," she admitted. "Where is my shoe?"
"It was yours then?" he said with an attempt at playfulness. "Gemma
has been quite jealous of the unknown owner, but she says it is much
larger than any of hers." The girls' eyes met but neither spoke, and
Orazio babbled on, unheeding: "Her feet are _carini_, and I can span
her ankle with my thumb and forefinger; but you are small made too,
signorina."
Carolina poked her head in at the door. "_Al suo comodo e pronto_,"
she said, referring to the dinner, and hurried away again to dish up
the veal cutlets.
The young man contrived to remain behind in the _salotto_ for a moment
and to keep Gemma with him. Olive looked at them as they took their
places at table, and she understood that the girl had had to submit to
some caress. She looked sick and her lips were quite white, and if
Lucis had been a man of quick perceptions he would have realised, her
face must have shown him, that she loathed him. He was dense, however,
and though he commented on her silence later on it was evident that he
attributed it to shyness.
Olive, thinking to do well, flung herself into the conversational
breach. Her cousins had nothing to say, and the aunt's thoughts were
set on the dinner and cumbered with much serving. So she talked to him
as in duty bound, and he seemed inclined to banter her.
Her feet, her temper, her relations with _vetturini_. He was
execrable, but she would not take offence.
After dinner they all sat in the little _salotto_ until it was time to
go to the theatre, and still Olive talked and laughed with Orazio,
teaching him English words and making fun of his pronunciation of
them. Gemma watched her sombrely and judged her by her own standards,
and Carmela caught at her cousin's arm presently as they passed down
the crowded Via Cavour together.
"Why did you make her so angry? She will always hate you now. I did
not know you were _civetta_."
Olive looked startled. "Angry? What do you mean?"
"Why did you speak so much to Orazio? Gemma thought you wanted to take
her husband from her and she will not forgive."
"Why, I could see it made her ill to look at him and that she shrank
from his touch, and I did as I would be done by. I distracted his
attention."
Carmela laughed in spite of herself. "Oh, Olive, and I thought you
were so clever. Do you not understand that one can be jealous of a man
one does not love? I know that though I am stupid. All Italians are
jealous. You must remember that."
"I am sorry," Olive said ruefully after a pause. "I see you are right.
She will never believe that I wanted to help her. If only you could
persuade her to give up Orazio. Surely the other man would come
forward then. You and Maria talk of getting her safely married and
away, but I see farther. There can be no safety in union with the
wrong man--"
Carmela shook her head. "She wants a husband," she said stolidly,
"and Orazio will make a good one. You do not understand us, my dear.
You can please yourself with dreams and fancies, but we are
different."