Olive was tired, and now that she was alone she knew that she was also
a little afraid, so that she lingered on the way and went slowly up
the stairs of the house in the Piazza Tolomei. Carmela answered her
ring at the bell; her face was swollen and her eyes were red with
crying, and the little lamp she carried shook in her hand.
"Oh, Olive," she said, "Orazio says he will not marry her. He has
heard such things about her from his friends, and even in the Cafe
Greco.... It is a scandal."
She put her lamp down on the floor, and took out her handkerchief to
wipe away the tears that were running down her cheeks.
Olive came in and shut the door after her.
"Where is he?"
"They are all in the dining-room. Aunt sent Carolina out for the
evening, and it is a good thing, because of course in the kitchen she
could hear everything. He sent a message to say he could not go to the
Palio, and Gemma's head ached when she came back from church, so we
all stayed in. He came half an hour ago--"
"What does Gemma say?"
"Nothing. She looks like a stone."
"I must go through the dining-room to get to my room," Olive said
uncertainly. "What shall I do? Pass through very quickly or wait here
in the passage?"
"Better go in," advised Carmela. "They may not even notice you. He
keeps on talking so loudly, and aunt and Maria are crying."
"Poor things! I am so sorry!"
The two girls clung together for a moment, and Olive's eyes filled
with tears as she kissed her cousin's poor trembling lips. Then
Carmela stooped to pick up her lamp and put it out, and they went on
together down the passage.
The lamp was lit on the table that Carolina had laid for supper before
she went out, and the Menotti sat in their accustomed places as though
they were at a meal. Orazio Lucis was walking to and fro and
gesticulating. His boots creaked, and the noise they made grated on
the women's nerves as he talked loudly and incessantly, and they
listened. Maria kept her face hidden in her hands, but Gemma held
herself erect as ever, and she did not move when the two girls came
in, though her sombre eyes were full of shame.
"What shall I say to my friends in Lucca?" raved Orazio. "What shall I
say to my mother? Even if I still consented to marry you she would not
permit it; she would refuse to live in the same house with such a
person--and she would be right. _Mamma mia!_ She is always right. She
said, 'The girl is beautiful, but she has no money, and I tell you to
think twice.' I have been trapped here by all you women. You all
knew."
He pointed an accusing finger at Signora Carosi. She sobbed
helplessly, bitterly, as she tried to answer him, and Olive, who had
waited in the shadow by the door, hoping that he would move on and
enable her to pass into her own room, came forward and stood beside
her aunt. She had thought she would feel abashed before this man who
had been wronged, but he had made her angry instead, and now she would
not have left the room if he had asked her, or have told him the truth
if he had begged for it.
"Many girls have been offered me," he went on excitedly, "but I would
not hear of them because you were beautiful, and I thought you would
make a good wife. There was Annina Giannini; she had five thousand
lire, and more to come, and now she is married to a doctor in Lucca. I
gave her up for you, and you are dust of the streets."
Gemma flinched then as though he had struck her. The insult was
flagrant, and it was time to make an end. She rose from her chair
slowly, as though she were very tired, and filled her glass from the
decanter on the table with a hand that trembled so that half the wine
was spilled.
"Orazio," she said, and her dark eyes sought his and held them so that
he was compelled to stand still looking at her. "Orazio, I hope you
and your ugly fool of a mother will die slowly of a horrible disease,
and be tormented in hell for ever. May your flesh be covered with
sores while your bones rot and are gnawed by worms. _Cosi sia!_"
She crossed herself devoutly, and then drank some of the wine and
flung the glass over her shoulder. It fell to the floor and crashed to
splinters.
The man's jaw dropped and his mouth fell open, but he had no words to
answer her. She made a curious movement with her hands as though she
would cleanse them of some impurity, and then turned and went quickly
into her own room. They all heard the bolts drawn and the key turned
in the lock.
Olive was the first to speak, and her voice sounded strange and
unnatural to herself.
"She has said her say and left us, Signor Lucis. Will you not go too?
You will not marry her. _Benissimo!_ We wish you good-evening."
"You are very easy, signorina _mia_," he answered resentfully; "but I
cannot forgive."
"Who asked your forgiveness?" she retorted. "It is you who should beg
our pardon--you, who are so ready to believe the tales that are told
in the _cafes_ and to come here to abuse helpless women. You are a
coward, signore. Oh, how I hate men ... Judges in Israel ... I would
have them stoned first. _What's that?_"
There was shouting in the street, and then a loud knocking on the
house door. The women looked at each other with frightened eyes.
"What is it?"
Carmela ran to Gemma's door and shook the handle, calling to her to
come out. There was no answer, and perhaps they had a dreadful
premonition of the truth even then; Olive left them huddled together
like frightened sheep. The knocking still continued, and it sounded
very loud when she came out of the flat on to the stairs. She was
beside herself; that is, she was aware of two Olives, one who spoke in
a strange voice and trembled, and was now going down into the
darkness, stumbling at nearly every step and moaning incoherent
prayers to God, and one who watched and listened and was surprised at
what was said and done.
When she opened the great house door a man stood aside to let her come
out. She looked at him and knew him to be one of the neighbours, and
she wondered why he had run out into the street in his shirt-sleeves.
He was pale, too, and looked ill, and he seemed to want to speak to
her, but she could not listen.
A crowd had collected about something that was lying on the pavement
near their house wall; Olive looked up and saw Gemma's window opened
wide, and then she knew what it was. The people made way for her and
let her come to where the dead thing lay on its back with the knees
drawn up. Some woman had already covered the face with a handkerchief,
and dark blood was oozing out from under it. Olive crouched down
beside its pitiful disarray.
"Will someone help me carry her into the house?" she said.
No one answered her, and after a while she spoke again.
"Will someone fetch a doctor quickly?"
"It is useless, _figlia mia_; she is dead."
"At least"--her voice broke, and she had to begin again, making a
painful effort to control the words that she might be quite
intelligible--"at least help me to carry her in from the street. Is
there no Christian here?"
Two _carabinieri_ came running up now, and they made the people stand
back so that a space of pavement was left clear; the younger man spoke
to Olive.
"We cannot move the body until the authorities come, signorina. It
must stay where it is, but we shall guard it and keep the people off,
and you can fetch a sheet from the house to cover it."
"Oh, God!" she said, "when will they come?"
He slightly shrugged his shoulders.
"I do not know. We have sent to tell them. In a few minutes, perhaps,
or in two hours, three hours."
"And we must leave her here?"
"Yes, signorina."
"I will get the sheet."
He helped her to rise from her knees. Looking down she saw a stain of
blood on her skirt, and she clung to his arm for a moment, swaying as
though she would fall. There was a murmur among the people of pity and
sympathy. "_Poveretta! Che disgrazia!_"
"_Coraggio!_" the _carabiniere_ said gently.
Up again, up all the dark stairs, wondering if the others knew and
were afraid to come down, wondering if there had been much pain,
wondering if it was not all a dreadful dream from which she must wake
presently. They knew.
The younger girl met her cousin at the door; Maria had fainted, and
_la zia_ was hysterical; as to Orazio, he was sitting on the sofa
crying, with his mean, mouse-coloured head buried in the cushions.
"I looked out of your bedroom window as I could not get into her
room," whispered Carmela. "Oh, Olive, what shall we do?"
"I am going to take down a sheet as they will not let us bring her in.
You can come with me, and we will stay beside her and say prayers."
"Yes, yes. Oh, Olive, that is a good idea."
The two came out into the street together and spread the white linen
covering carefully over the stark body before they knelt, one on each
side. Of the thousands who had filled the Piazzale at sunset hundreds
came now to see them mourning the broken thing that lay between.
Olive was aware of many faces, of the murmuring of a great crowd, and
shame was added to the horror that held her fast. She folded her hands
and tried to keep her eyes fixed upon them. Then she began to pray
aloud.
"_Pater noster, qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum--_"
The clear voice was tremulous at first, but it gathered strength as it
went on, and Carmela said the words too. The men in the crowd
uncovered, and the women crossed themselves.
Rain was falling now, slowly at first and in heavy drops that splashed
upon the stones, and there was a threatening sound--a rumbling of
thunder--away in the south.
Olive knew no more prayers in Latin, but her cousin began the
Miserere.
"_Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam, et secundum
multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam._"
Among the many who had come to look their last upon the Odalisque were
men who had made free with her poor name, had been unsparing in their
utterance of the truth concerning her and ready to drag her down, and
some of these moved away now shamefacedly, but more stayed, and one
after another took up the words.
"_Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me._"
Gemma herself had trodden out the fire that consumed her, but who
could dare say of the grey cold ashes, "These are altogether vile."
"_Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci: ut justificeris in
sermonibus tuis et vincas cum judicaris._"
She had sinned, and she had been punished; she had suffered fear and
shame.
"_Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor, lavabis me, et super nivem
dealbabor._"
There had been some taint in her blood, some flaw in her will.
"_Cor mundum crea in me, Deus, et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus
meis._"
A dark-eyed slender boy, wearing the green and white and scarlet of
his _contrade_, pushed his way to the front presently. It was Romeo,
and he carried a great bunch of magnolia blossoms.
"Oh, signorina," he said, half crying, "the _alfieri_ and I wanted to
give you these because you brought us good luck so that we won the
Palio. I little thought--"
He stopped short, hesitating, and afraid to come nearer. He thought
she looked like one of the stone angels that kneel on the sculptured
tombs in the Campo Santo; her face seemed rough hewn in the harsh
white glare of the electric light, so deep were the shadows under her
eyes and the lines of pain about the praying lips. His heart ached
with pity for her.
"Give them to me," she said, and he was allowed to come into the space
that the _carabiniere_ kept clear.
He thrust the bunch hurriedly into her hands, faltering, "_Dio vi
benedica_."
"_Andatevi con Dio_," she replied, and then laid the pale flowers and
the shimmering green crown of leaves down upon the still breast.
"Gemma, if ever I hurt you, forgive me now!"
It was raining heavily, and as the sheet grew damp it clung more
closely to the body of the girl who lay there with arms outstretched
and knees drawn up as though she were nailed to a cross.
The boy still lingered. "You will be drenched. Go into the house," he
urged. Then, seeing he could not move her, he took off his velvet
embroidered cloak and put it about her shoulders. A woman in the crowd
came forward with a shawl for Carmela.
So the hours passed.
BOOK II.--FLORENCE
CHAPTER I
October can be cold enough sometimes in the Val d'Arno when the snow
falls on the Apennines, and the woods of Vallombrosa are sere, and
Florence, the flower city, lies then at the mercy of the winds. Mamie
Whittaker, who, in her own phrase, "hated to be blown about anyhow,"
had not been out all day. She lolled in an armchair before a crackling
fire of olive wood in the room that she "lit with herself when alone,"
though scarcely in the Tennysonian sense. Hers was a vivid
personality, and older women who disliked her called her flamboyant,
and referred to an evident touch of the tar-brush that would make her
socially impossible in America though it passed unnoticed in Italy.
Her age was seventeen, and she dressed after Carmen to please herself,
and read Gyp with the same intention. She was absorbed now in _Les
Amoureux_, and had to be told twice that her cousin had come before
she would look up.
"Miss Marvel? Show her in."
She rose and went forward to greet her relative, whom she had not
seen for some years, and the two met at the door and kissed each other
with enthusiasm.
"Edna! My! Well, you have not grown anyway. What a tiny thing! Come
and sit down right here." She rang for tea while her visitor slowly
and rather shyly divested herself of her sables and laid them on a
side table. Edna Marvel was the elder of the two by three years, but
she was so small that she seemed a mere child. Her sallow little face
resembled that of a tired monkey, yet it had an elfin charm, and her
hands were beautiful as carved toys of ivory made in the East for a
king's son to play with. They might hold a man's heart perhaps, but
Mamie did not notice them, her own allurements being of more obvious
description.
She thought Edna was real homely, and her spirits rose accordingly.
"Where are you staying?"
"At the Bristol. Poppa guessed we would take a villa later on if we
felt like it."
Mamie rang again. "Bring some more cakes, and tell Miss Agar to come
and pour out the tea."
"Who is Miss Agar?"
"My companion, a sort of governess person. She takes me out walks, and
sits by when my music-master comes, and so forth. She is new, and she
won't do, but I may as well make her useful while she stays."
"Why won't she do?"
"Oh, she just won't. Momma don't like her much, and I'm not singing
her praises."
Edna looked curiously at the slender girl in the black dress who came
in and took her place at the table.
She said "Good afternoon" in her pleasant little voice.
The governess person seemed rather surprised that she should address
her.
"Good afternoon," she replied. "Do you take milk and sugar?"
"Bring them round for us to help ourselves," dictated Mamie.
Olive only smiled as she repeated her question, but Edna was
distressed at her cousin's rudeness, and her sensitive face was quite
pink as she hurriedly declined sugar. She came to the table to fetch
her cup, but Miss Whittaker waited for hers to be brought to her.
"How do you like this room, Edna? I had it fixed up for myself, and
everything in it is mine." She looked complacently up at the hangings
of primrose silk that hid the fifteenth century frescoes on the walls.
Her cousin hesitated. "I guess it must have cost some."
"Yes. The Marchese does not like it. He is so set on his worm-eaten
old tapestries and carved chairs, and he wanted momma to refurnish the
palace to match, but not she! Louis Quinze, she said, and Louis
Quinze it is, more or less. I tell the Marchese that if he is so fond
of the musty Middle Ages he ought to go about in armour himself by
rights. But the old sinner is not really a bit romantic."
It occurred to Olive that the right kind of governess would utter a
word in season. "It is not usual for young girls to refer to their
stepfathers as you do," she said drily.
"Wait until you know mine better," Mamie answered unabashed. "Last
night he said your complexion was miraculous. Next thing he'll try if
it comes off. Are you coming to dinner to-night, Edna?"
"Yes, auntie asked us. The--the Prince will be here, won't he?"
Mamie looked down her nose. "Oh, yes," she said carelessly. "Your beau
will come. People generally do when we ask them. The food is all
right, and we have real good music afterwards sometimes. You know
Avenel stays in Florence whiles because his brother has a Villa at
Settignano. Well, momma guessed she would get him to play here for
nothing once. Of course she was willing to pay any money for him
really, but she just thought she would try it on. She asked him to
dinner with a lot of other people, and made him take her in, though
there were two Neapolitan dukes among the guests. The food was
first-rate; she had told the cook to do his best, and she really
thought the _entree_ would have made Vitellius sit up. It was
perfect. Well, afterwards she asked Avenel to play, and he just smiled
and said he could not. Why, she said, he gave a recital the day before
for nothing, for a charity, and played the people's souls out of their
bodies, made them act crazy, as he always does. Couldn't he play for
friendship? No, he said, he couldn't just then because one must be
filled with sorrow oneself before one can make others feel, and he
inferred that he had no room even for regret. 'I play Chopin on a
biscuit,' he said."
"He must be rather a pig," was Edna's comment.
"Not a bit of it. Momma said he really had not eaten much; in fact she
had noticed that he left a bit of that lovely _entree_. Perhaps he is
afraid of getting fat. Momma was real mad with him."
Olive's cheeks were flushed and her hands trembled as she arranged the
cups on the tray. She was thankful for the shelter afforded by the
great silver tea-pot. Mamie's back was turned to her, but Edna seemed
desirous of including her in the conversation.
"Have you heard Avenel, Miss Agar?" she asked presently in her gentle,
drawling way.
"No. Is he very famous? I have never heard of him as a pianist."
"Oh, his professional name is Meryon, of course. He is billed as that
and known all the world over, though he only began to play in public
three years ago when his wife left him. She was always a horrid woman,
and she made him marry her when he was quite a boy, they say. They say
he plays to forget things as other men take to drink. He has been
twice to New York, and I know a girl who says he gave her a lock of
his hair, but I don't believe her. It is dark brown, almost black, but
I guess she cut it off a switch. He's not that kind."
Olive said nothing.
"You need not stay if you don't want to," Mamie said unceremoniously.
"Be ready to come down after dinner. I might want you to play my
accompaniments."
"I can't think why you say she won't do," cried Edna when she was gone
out of the room. "I call her perfectly sweet. Rather sad-looking, but
just lovely."
Mamie sniffed. "Glad you admire her," she said.
The governess was expected to appear at luncheon, but dinner was
served to her in her own room, where she must sit in solitary state,
dressed in her best and waiting for a summons, until eleven o'clock,
when she might assume that she would not be wanted and go to bed. This
evening Olive lingered rather anxiously over her dressing, trying to
make the best of herself, since it seemed that she was really to come
down to-night into the yellow drawing-room where she spent so many
weary hours of a morning listening to Mamie scraping her Strad while
the German who was supposed to teach her possessed his soul in
patience. She put on her black silk dress. It was a guinea robe bought
at a sale in Oxford Street the year before, a reach-me-down garment
for women to sneer at and men to describe vaguely as something dark,
and she hated the poor thing.
Most women believe that the men who like them in cotton frocks would
adore them in cloth of gold, and are convinced that the secret of
Cleopatra's charm lay in her extensive wardrobe.
Avenel. It had shocked Olive to hear his name uttered by alien lips,
as it hurt her to suppose that he came often to the Palazzo Lorenzoni.
She would not suppose it, and, indeed, nothing that Mamie had said
could lead her to think that he was a friend of the family. They had
clutched at him greedily, and he had repaid with an impertinence. That
was all.
The third footman, whose duty it was to attend upon her, brought two
covered dishes on a tray at eight o'clock, and soon after nine he came
again to fetch her.
There was a superabundance of gorgeous lackeys in the corridors that
had been dusty and deserted five years before, and a gigantic _Suisse_
stood always on guard now outside the palace gates. The Marchesa would
have liked to have had outriders in her scarlet livery when she went
out driving in the streets of Florence, but her husband warned her
that some mad anarchist might take her for the Queen, and so she
contented herself with a red racing motor. The millions old Whittaker
had made availed to keep his widow and the man who had given her a
title in almost regal state. They entertained largely, and the Via
Tornabuoni was often blocked with the carriages and motors that
brought their guests. Olive, sitting alone in her chilly bedroom,
mending her stockings or trying to read, heard voices and laughter as
the doors opened--harsh Florentine and high English voices, and the
shrill sounds of American mirth--night after night. But the Lorenzoni
dined _en famille_ sometimes, as even marquises and millionaires may
do, and there were but two shirt-fronts and comparatively few diamonds
in the great golden shining room when she entered it.
The Marchesa, handsome, hard-featured, gorgeous in grey and silver,
did not choose to notice her daughter's governess; she was deep in
talk with her brother-in-law; but men could not help looking at Olive.
Mr Marvel stood up and bowed as she passed, and the silent, saturnine
Marchese stared. His black eyes were intent upon her as she came to
the piano where Mamie was restlessly turning over the music, and no
one watching him could fail to see that he was making comparisons
that were probably to the disadvantage of his step-daughter.
Fast men are not necessarily fond of the patchouli atmosphere in their
own homes, and somehow Mamie seemed to reek of that scent, though in
fact she never used it. She was clever and fairly well educated, and
she had always been sheltered and cared for, but she was born to the
scarlet, and everything she said and did, her way of walking, the use
she made already of her black eyes, proclaimed it. To-night, though
she wore the red she loved--a wonderful, flaring frock of chiffon
frills and flounces--she looked ill, and her dark face was sullen.
"The beastly wind has given me a stiff neck," she complained. "Here, I
want to have this."
She chose a coon's lullaby out of the pile of songs, and Olive sat
down obediently and began the accompaniment. It was a pretty little
ditty of the usual moony order, and Mamie sang it well enough. Mr
Marvel looked up when it was over to say, "Thank you, my dear. Very
nice."
"It is a silly thing," Mamie answered ungraciously. "I'll sing you a
_canzonetta_ now."
She turned over the music, scattering marches and sonatas, and
throwing some of them on the floor in her impatience. Olive, wondering
at her temper, presently divined the cause of it. The folding doors
that led into the library were half closed. No lamps, but a flicker of
firelight and the hush of lowered voices, Edna's pleasant little pipe
and a man's brief, murmured answers, and there were short spaces of
silence too. The American girl and her prince were there.
The Marchese had raised his eyebrows at the first words of the
_canzonetta_, and at the end of the second verse he was smiling
broadly.
"Little devil!" he said.
No one heard him. His wife was showing her brother-in-law some of her
most treasured bits of china. She was quite calm, as though her
knowledge of Italian was fair the Neapolitan dialect was beyond her.
Mr Marvel, of course, knew not a syllable of any language but his own,
and the slang of Southern gutters was as Greek to Olive. Their
placidity amused the Marchese, and so did the thought of the little
scene that he knew was being enacted in the library.
"Shall we join the others now, Edna, _carissima_?"
"If--if you like."
He nearly laughed aloud as he saw the silk curtains drawn. The Prince
stood aside to allow Edna to pass in first, and Olive, glancing up
momentarily from the unfamiliar notes, saw the green gleam of an
emerald on the strong brown hand as the brocaded folds were lifted
up. Her own hands swerved, blundered, and she perpetrated a hopeless
discord.
"I beg your pardon," she said confusedly.
Mamie shrugged her shoulders. "Never mind," she answered lightly. "The
last verse don't matter anyway. Come to here, Edna. Momma wants to
hear your fiddle-playing."
"Yes, play us something, my dear."
The little girl came forward shyly.
As the Prince and the Marchese stood together by the fireplace at the
other end of the long room Mamie joined them. "You sang that devil's
nocturne inimitably," observed her stepfather, drily. "I am quite
sorry to have to ask you not to do it again."
"Not again? Why not?"
She perched herself on the arm of one of the great gilt chairs. The
Prince raised his eyes from the thoughtful contemplation of her ankles
to stare at her impudent red parted lips.
"Why not! Need I explain, _cara_? It was delicious; I enjoyed it, but,
alas!" He heaved an exaggerated sigh and then laughed, and the young
man and the girl shared in his merriment.
"I am sorry to make so many mistakes," Olive said apologetically as
she laboured away at her part of an easy piece arranged for violin and
piano.
"Oh, it is nothing. I have made ever so many myself, and I ought to
have turned the page for you."
The gentle voice was rather tremulous.
"That was charming," pronounced the Marchesa. "Now that sonata, Edna.
I am so fond of it."
"Very well, auntie."
The Prince had gone into the billiard-room with his host, and Mamie
was with them. They were knocking the balls about and laughing ...
laughing.
CHAPTER II
In the Cascine gardens the lush green grass of the glades was strewn
with leaves; soon the branches would be bare, or veiled only in winter
mists, and the Arno, swollen with rain, ran yellow as Tiber. It was
not a day for music, but the sun shone, and many idle Florentines
drove, or rode, or walked by the Lung'Arno to the Rajah's monument,
passing and repassing the bench where Olive sat with Madame de
Sariviere's stout and elderly German Fraeulein. Mamie was not far away;
flamboyant as ever in her frock of crimson serge, her black curls tied
with ribbon and streaming in the wind, she was the loud centre of a
group of girls who played some running game to an accompaniment of
shrill cries and little screams of laughter.
"Do you like young girls?" Olive asked the question impulsively, after
a long silence.
"I am fond of my pupils; they are good little things, rather foolish,
but amiable. But I understand your feeling, my poor Miss Agar. Your
charge is--"
Olive hesitated. "It is a difficult age; and she has the body of
twenty and the sense of ten. I am putting it very badly, but--but I
was hateful years ago too. I think one always is, perhaps. I remember
at school there were self-righteous little girls; they were narrow and
intolerant, easily shocked, and rather bad-tempered. The others were
absurdly vain, sentimental, sly. All that comes away afterwards if one
is going to be nice."
"They are female but not yet womanly. The newly-awakened instincts
clamour at first for a hearing; later they learn to wait in silence,
to efface themselves, to die, even," answered the Fraeulein, gravely.
A victoria passed, then some youths on bicycles, shouting to each
other and ringing their bells. They were riding all together, but they
scattered to let Prince Tor di Rocca go by. He was driving tandem, and
his horses were very fresh. Edna was with him, her small wan face
rather set in its halo of ashen blonde hair and pale against the rich
brown of her sables.
When they came by the second time Mamie called to her cousin. The
Prince drew rein, and the groom sprang down and ran to the leader's
head.
"My, Edna, how cold you look! It's three days since I saw you, but I
guess Don Filippo has been doing the honours. Have you seen all the
old galleries and things? Momma said she noticed you and uncle in a
box at the Pergola last night."
She stood by the wheel, and as she looked up, not at Edna but at the
Prince, he glanced smilingly down at her and then away again.
"We are going back to the hotel now," Edna said. "Will you come and
have tea, Mamie? Is that Miss Agar over there? Ask her if you may, and
if she will come too."
"I don't need to ask her," the girl answered, but she went back
nevertheless and spoke to Olive.
"Can the groom take the cart home, Filippo? We will walk back with
them."
"Yes, Bellina is in spirits, but she will not run away from Giovanni,"
he said, trying not to seem surprised that she should curtail their
drive.
They crossed the wide gravelled space outside the gardens and walked
towards the town by the Lung'Arno. Already the cypresses of San
Miniato showed black against the sky, and the reflected flame of
sunset was dying out in the windows of the old houses at the river's
edge. All the people were going one way now, and leaving the
tree-shadowed dusk for the brightly-lit streets, Via Tornabuoni, all
palaces and antiquity shops, and Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where the
band would play presently.
The two American girls walked together with Don Filippo and Olive
followed them. Edna held herself very erect, but Mamie seemed almost
to lean backwards. She swayed her hips as she went and swung her short
skirts, and there was affectation and a feverish self-consciousness in
her every movement. Olive could not help smiling to herself, but she
remembered that at school she had been afflicted with the idea that a
pout--the delicious _moue_ of fiction--became her, and so she was
inclined to leniency. Only seventeen.
The Prince wore riding gloves, and so the green gleam of his emerald
was hidden from her. If only she could be sure that she had seen him
before. What then? Nothing--if she could think that he would always be
kind to gentle little Edna.
Just before they reached the hotel Miss Marvel joined her, leaving her
cousin to go on with Don Filippo, and began to talk to her.
"The river is just perfect at this hour. Our sitting-room has a
balcony and I sat there last night watching the moon rise over San
Miniato. I guess it looked just that way when Dante wrote his sonnets.
Beatrice must have been real mad with him sometimes, don't you think
so? She must have been longing to say, 'Come on, and don't keep
talking.' But she was a nice high-minded girl, and so she never did.
She simply died."
"If she died for him she must have been a fool," Olive said shortly.
Her eyes were fixed on the Prince's broad back. He was laughing at
some sally of Mamie's.
Edna was shocked. "Don't you just worship Dante?"
"Yes, yes," answered the elder girl. "He was a dear, but even he was
not worth that. At least, I don't know. He was a dear; but I was
thinking of a girl I knew ... perhaps I may tell you about her some
day."
"Yes, do," Edna said perfunctorily. She was trying to hear what her
cousin was saying to Filippo, and wishing she could amuse him as well.
They passed through the wide hall of the hotel and went up in the
lift. The Marvels' private sitting-room was on the second floor. They
were much too rich to condescend to the palms and bamboo tables and
wicker chairs of the common herd, and tea was served to Edna and her
guests in a green and white boudoir that was, as the Marchesa might
have said, more or less Louis Seize.
Mr Marvel came in presently, refusing tea, but asking leave to smoke,
and the Prince, gracefully deferential to his future father-in-law,
listened to the little he had to say, answering carefully in his
perfect English.
"Yes, sir. There is a great deal of poverty here. On my Tuscan estates
too. Alas! yes."
Mamie sat near him, and in the flickering red light of the fire she
looked almost pretty. Filippo's eyes strayed towards her now and then.
Edna came presently to where Olive rested apart on the wide cushioned
window-seat. "Will you have some more tea?"
"No, thank you. I think we must be going soon. The Marchesa will not
like it if we stay out too long."
Edna hesitated. "I wanted to ask you a silly question. Had you ever
seen the Prince before last week?"
There was the slightest perceptible pause before Olive answered, "No,
never. Why do you ask?"
"I thought you looked as if you had somehow that night at the
Lorenzoni palace. When we came in you were at the piano, and I thought
you looked queer--as if--"
"Oh, no," Olive said again, but she wondered afterwards if she had
done right.
On their way home Mamie drew her attention to a poster, and she saw
the name of Meryon in great orange letters on a white ground.
"He will be here before Christmas. I'll let you come with me to hear
him play if you are good," she said, and she took the elder girl's
hand in hers and pinched it. "I could race you home down this side
street, but I suppose I must not."
She was gay and good-humoured now, and altogether at her best, and
Olive tried hard to like her, but she could not help seeing that the
triumph that overflowed in easy, shallow kindness was an unworthy one.
CHAPTER III
Olive sat alone at the end of one of the tiers of the stone
amphitheatre built into the hill that rises, ilex clad, to the heights
of San Giorgio. Some other women were there, mothers with young
children, nurses and governesses dowdily dressed as she was in
dark-coloured stuffs, but she knew none of them.
Mamie seldom cared to come to the old Boboli gardens. Its green
mildewed terraces and crumbling deities of fountain and ilex grove had
no charm for her, and as a rule she and her friends preferred the
crowded Lung'Arno and Cascine on the days when there was music, but
this Thursday she had suggested that they should come across the
river.
"Daisy Vereker has promised to meet me, and as she is only here a week
on her way to school in Paris I should hate to disappoint her."
The two girls were lingering now about the grass arena, talking
volubly, whispering, giggling. Miss Vereker's maid, a yellow-haired
Swiss, sat not far off with her knitting, and every now and then she
called harshly to her charge to know the time.
Olive sat very still, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on the far
horizon. She loved the old-world silence that was only broken by the
dripping of water in the pools. No birds sang here, no leaves fell at
the waning of the year. The seasons had little power over stained
marble and moss, cypress, and ilex and olive, and as spring brought no
riot of green and rose and gold in flower, so autumn took nothing
away. Surely there were ghosts in the shadowed avenues, flitting in
and out among the trees, joining hands to dance "_la ronde_" about the
pool of Neptune. Gay abbes, cavaliers, beautiful ladies of the late
Renaissance, red-heeled, painted, powdered; frail, degenerate children
of the hard-headed old Florentine citizens pictured in the frescoes of
Giotto and Masaccio. No greater shades could come to Boboli.
Florence was half hidden by the great yellow bulk of the Pitti palace,
but Olive could see the slender, exquisite white and rose tower of
Giotto, and the mellowed red of the cathedral's dome against the faint
purple of the hills beyond Fiesole, and she looked at them in
preference to the contorted river gods and exuberant nymphs of the
fountain in the royal courtyard close by.
After a while she opened her book and began to read. Presently she
shivered; her jacket was thin, and the air grew chilly as the
afternoon waned, but her reading absorbed her and she was surprised,
when at last she raised her eyes, to see that the Pitti palace was
already dark against the sky. Nurses and children were making their
way out, and soon those who lingered would hear stentorian shouts from
the gardeners, "_Ora si chiude!_" and they too would leave by one or
other of the gates.
Olive climbed down into the arena. Mamie was nowhere in sight, and
Daisy Vereker and her maid were gone too. Olive, thinking that perhaps
they might have gone up to the fountain of Neptune, began to climb the
hill. She asked an old man who was coming down from there if he had
seen two young ladies, one dressed in red.
"No, signorina."
She hurried back to the arena and spoke to a woman there. "Have you
seen a young lady in red with black curls?"
She answered readily: "_Sicuro!_ She went towards the Porta Romana
half an hour ago. I think the other signorina was leaving and she
wished to accompany her a part of the way. There was an older person
with them."
Olive's relief was only momentary; it sounded well, but one might walk
to the Porta Romana and back twice in the time. Soon the gates would
be closed, and if she had not found Mamie then, and the gardeners made
her leave with the others, what should she do? She suspected a trick.
The girl had a mischievous and impish humour that delighted in the
infliction of small hurts, and she might have gone home, happy in the
thought that her governess would get a "wigging," or she might be
hiding about somewhere to give her a fright.
Olive went up the steep path towards the Belvedere, hoping to find her
there. That part of the garden was not much frequented, and the white
bodies and uplifted arms of the marble gods gleamed ghostly and
forlorn in the dusk of the ilex woods that lay between the
amphitheatre and the gate.
She went on until she saw a glimmer of red through the close-woven
branches. Mamie was there in the dark wood, and she was not alone. A
man was with her, and he was holding her easily, as if he knew she
would not go yet, and laughing as she stood on tiptoe to reach the
fine cruel lips that touched hers presently, when he chose that they
should.
Olive turned and ran up the path to the top of the hill, and there she
stood for a while, trying to get her breath, trying to be calm, and
sane and tolerant, to see no harm where perhaps there was none after
all. And yet the treachery and the deceit were so flagrant that surely
no condonation was possible. She felt sick of men and women, and of
life itself, since the greatest thing in it seemed to be this
hateful, miscalled love that preceded sorrow and shame and death. Was
love always loathsome to look upon? Not in pictures or on the stage,
where it was represented as a kind of minuet in which the man makes
graceful advances to a woman who smiles as she draws away, but in real
life--
"Not real love," she said to herself. "Oh, God, help me to go on
believing in that."
Raising her eyes she saw the evening star sparkling in a wide, soft,
clear space of sky. It seemed infinitely pure and remote, and yet
somehow good and kind, as it had to Dante when he climbed up out of
hell.
"_Quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle._"
"_Ora si chiude!_" bawled a gardener from the Belvedere.
Mamie came hurrying up the path towards the hill. "Oh, are you there?"
she said in some confusion. "I went some of the way to the other gate
with Daisy."
"I was beginning to be afraid you were lost, so I came along hoping to
meet you," answered Olive.
She said nothing to the girl of what she had seen. It would have been
useless; nothing could alter or abash her inherent unmorality. But
after dinner she wrote a note to Edna and went out herself to post it.
The answer came at noon on the following day. Miss Marvel would be at
home and alone between three and four and would be pleased to see Miss
Agar then; meanwhile she remained very sincerely her friend.
CHAPTER IV
"Why do you tell me this now?" asked Edna. "The other day when I asked
you if you had known him before you said you had not."
"Something that has happened since then determined me."
Edna's room was full of flowers, roses, narcissi and violets, and the
air was heavy with their scent. Filippo had never failed in his
_petits soins_. It was so easy to give an order at the florist's, and
the bill would come in presently, after the wedding, and be paid in
American dollars. There were boxes of sweets too; and a volume of
Romola, bound in white and gold, lay on the table. Edna had been
looking at the inscription on the fly-leaf when Olive came in.
"_Carissima_" he had written, and she had believed him, but that was
half an hour ago. Now her small body was shaken with sobs, her face
was stained with tears because that faith she had had was dying.
The chill at her heart made her feel altogether cold, and she edged
her chair nearer to the fire, and put her feet up on the fender.
"I wish I could feel it was not true, but somehow though I have been
so fond of him I have not trusted him. Well, your cousin was
beautiful, and perhaps he had known her a long time before he knew me.
He wanted to say good-bye kindly. He was entangled--such things
happen, I know. He could not help what happened afterwards. That was
not his fault."
Olive could not meet her pleading eyes. "I thought something like that
last week," she said. "And that is why I kept silence; but now I know
he would make you unhappy always. Oh, forgive me for hurting you so."
She came and knelt down beside the little girl, and put her arms about
her. "Don't cry, my dear. Don't cry."
"Oh, Olive, I was so fond of him! Now tell me what has happened
since."
"Put your hands in mine. There, I will rub the poor tiny things and
warm them. They are so pretty. Yesterday, in the Boboli gardens, I
missed your cousin, and when I went to look for her I saw her with the
Prince. He held her and was kissing her."
"Oh!" Edna sprang to her feet. "That settles it. Mamie is common and
real homely, and if he can run after her I have done with him. I could
have forgiven the other, especially as she is dead, but Mamie!
Gracious! Here he is!"
He came into the room leisurely, smiling, very sure of his welcome.
Olive met the hot insolence of his stare steadily, and Edna turned her
back on him.
"Olive," she said, "you speak to him. Tell him--ask him--" Her gentle
voice broke.
"What is the matter?" he asked carefully.
"I saw you twice in Siena last summer. Do you remember _Rigoletto_ at
the Lizza theatre? You were in the stage box. You wore evening dress,
and I saw that emerald ring you have now on your finger. The next day
you met my Cousin Gemma in my room in the Vicolo dei Moribondi. Do you
remember the steep dark stairs and the white walls of the bare place
where you saw her last?"
He made no answer, and there was still a smile on his lips, but his
eyes were hard. Edna was looking at him now, but he seemed to have
forgotten her.
"I suppose you loved her," Olive said slowly. "Do you remember the
faint pink curve of her mouth, the little cleft in her chin, and her
hair that was so soft and fine? There were always little stray curls
on the white nape of her neck. I came to my room that morning to fetch
a book. When I had climbed the stairs I found that I had not the key
with me, but the door was unlocked and I saw her there with a man, and
I saw the green gleam of an emerald."
Men have such a power of silence. No woman but would have made some
answer now, denying with a show of surprise, making excuses, using
words in one way or another.
"They were talking about you in the town, though I think they did not
know who you were--at least I never heard your name--and that night
Gemma's _fidanzato_ told her he would not marry her. You know best
what that meant to her. She rushed into her own room and threw herself
out of the window. Ah, you should have seen the dark blood oozing
through the fine soft curls! She lay dead in the street for hours
before they took her away."
"_Santissimo Dio!_ Is this true?"
"Yes."
"Gemma--I never knew it--" His face was greatly altered now, and he
had to moisten his lips before he could speak.
"I could have forgiven that," Edna said tremulously after a while.
"But not yesterday. Your kisses are too cheap, Filippo."
"Oh," he said hoarsely. "So Gemma's cousin saw that too. It was
nothing, meant nothing. Edna, if you can pardon the other, surely--"
"It was nothing; and it proved that Mamie is nothing, and that you are
nothing--to me. That is the end of the matter."
He winced now at the contempt underlying her quiet words, and when she
took off her ring and laid it on the table between them he picked it
up and flung it into the fire.
"I do not take things back," he said savagely.
When he had left the room Edna began to cry again. "I believe he is
suffering now, but not for me. Would he care if I killed myself? I
guess not. I am not pretty, only my hands, and hands don't count."
Olive tried to comfort her.
"Poppa shall take me away right now. I have had enough of Europe, and
so I shall tell him when he comes in. Must you go now? Well, good-bye,
my dear, and thank you. You are white all through, and I am glad you
have acted as you have, though it hurts now. If ever I marry it shall
be an American ... but I was real fond of Filippo."
CHAPTER V
Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal was buried in a side chapel of the church
of San Miniato al Monte, and his counterfeit presentment, wrought in
stone, lies on the tomb Rossellino made for him. Rossellino, who loved
to carve garlands of acanthus and small sweet _amorini_, has conferred
immortality on some of the men whose tombs he adorned in
_basso-rilievo_, and they are remembered because of him; but the
cardinal has another claim. He is beautiful in himself as he rests
there, his young face set in the peace that passes all understanding,
his thin hands folded on his breast.
Mourners were kneeling in the central aisles of the church, and women
carrying wreaths passed through it on their way to the Campo Santo
beyond, for this was the day of All Souls, and there were fresh
flowers on the new graves, and little black lamps were lit on those
that were grass grown and decked only with the bead blossoms that are
kept in glass cases and need not be changed once a year. The afternoon
was passing, but still Olive lingered by the cardinal's monument.
Looking at him understandingly she saw that there had been lines of
pain about the firm mouth. He had suffered in his short life, he had
suffered until death came to comfort him and give him quiet sleep. The
mother-sense in her yearned over him, lying there straight and still,
with closed eyes that had never seen love; and, womanlike, she pitied
the accomplished loneliness that yet seemed to her the most beautiful
thing in the world. The old familiar words were in her mind as she
looked down upon this saint uncanonised: "Cleanse the thoughts of my
heart by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit!" and she remembered
Astorre, for whose sake she had come to this church to pray. Once when
she had been describing a haggard St Francis in the Sienese gallery to
him, he had said: "Ah, women always pity him and admire his
picturesque asceticism, but if married men look worried they do not
notice it. Their troubles are no compliment to your sex."
Poor Astorre had not been devout in any sense, but he had written his
friend a long letter on the day after Gemma's suicide, and he had
asked for her prayers then. "Fausto told me how you knelt there in the
street beside the dead Odalisque and said the Pater-noster and the
Miserere. Perhaps you will do as much for me one day. Your prayers
should help the soul that is freed now from the burden of the flesh. I
cannot complain of flesh myself, but my bones weigh and I shall be
glad to be rid of them. Come and see me soon, _carissima_ ..."
The next morning his mother sent for the girl, but when she came into
the darkened room where he lay he had already passed away.
"He asked for you, but he would not see a priest. You know they
refused to bury his father because he fought for united Italy. Ah!
Rome never forgets."
After the funeral Signora Aurelia had sold her furniture and gone
away, and she was living now with a widowed sister in Rome. The
Menotti had left Siena too and had gone to Milan, and Olive, not
caring to stay on alone in the place where everyone knew what had
happened, had come to the Lorenzoni in Florence. She had had a letter
from Carmela that morning.
"We like Milan as the streets are so gay, and the shops are beautiful.
We should have got much better mourning here at Bocconi's if we could
have waited, but of course that was impossible. Our apartment is
convenient, but small and rather dark. Maria hopes you are fatter. She
is going to send you some _panforte_ and a box of sugared fruits at
Christmas. _La Zia_ has begun to crochet another counterpane; that
will be the eighth, and we have only three beds. _Pazienza!_ It amuses
her."
Though Olive was not happy at the Palazzo Lorenzoni, she could not
wish that she had stayed with her cousins. She felt that their little
life would have stifled her. Thinking of them, she saw them, happier
than before, since poor Gemma had not been easy to live with, and
quite satisfied to do the same things every day, waddling out of a
morning to early mass and the marketing, eating and sleeping during
the noon hours, and in the evenings going to hear the music _in
piazza_.
Olive was not happy. She was one of those women whose health depends
upon their spirits, and of late she had felt her loneliness to be
almost unbearable. Her youth had cried for all, or nothing. She would
have her love winged and crowned; he should come to her before all the
world. Never would she set her foot in secret gardens, or let joy come
to her by hidden ways, but now she faced the future and saw that it
was grey, and she was afraid.
It seemed to her that she was destined to live always in the Social
Limbo, suspended between heaven and earth, an alien in the
drawing-room and not received in the kitchen. One might as well be
_declassee_ at once, she thought, and yet she knew that that must be
hell.
If Avenel came to Florence and sought her out would she be weak as
Gemma had been, light as Mamie was? Olive knelt for a while on the
stones, and her lips moved, though her prayer was inarticulate.
Sunset was burning across the Val d'Arno, and the river flowed as a
stream of pure gold under the dark of the historic bridges. Already
lights sparkled in the windows of the old houses over the Ponte
Vecchio, and the bells of all the churches were ringing the Ave Maria
as she passed through the whining crowd of beggars at the gate of the
Campo Santo and went slowly down the hill. The blessed hour of peace
and silence was over now, and she must trudge back through the
clamorous streets to be with Mamie, to meet the Marchese's horribly
observant eyes, and to be everlastingly quiet and complacent and
useful. She was paid for that.
She was going up to her room when the lodge porter ran up the stairs
after her with a letter. "For you, signorina."
It was from Edna.
"DEAR OLIVE"--she had written,--"I could not wait for
trains so papa has hired a car, and we shall motor
straight to Genoa and catch the boat there. I want to go
home to America pretty badly.--Your loving friend,
"EDNA.
"_P.S._--I am still right down glad you told me.--E. M."
One of the servants came to Olive's room presently.
"La Signora Marchesa wishes to see you at once in her boudoir."
The Marchesa had come straight from the motor to her own room, her
head was still swathed in a white veil, and she had not even taken off
her heavy sable coat. She had switched on the light on her entrance,
and now she was searching in the drawers of her bureau for her
cheque-book.
"Ah, well, gold perhaps," she said after a while, impatiently, as she
snapped open the chain purse that hung from her wrist. "Is that you,
Miss Agar?"
Olive, seeing her counting out her money, like the queen in the
nursery rhyme, had stopped short near the door. She paled a little as
she understood this must be the sequel to what she had done, but she
held her head high, and there was a light of defiance in the blue
eyes.
"I have to speak to you very seriously."
The Marchesa, a large woman, was slow and deliberate in all her
movements. She took her place on a brocaded settee with the air of a
statue of Juno choosing a pedestal, and began to draw off her gloves.
"I greatly regret that this should be necessary." She seemed prepared
to clean Augean stables, and there was something judicial in her
aspect too, but she did not look at Olive. "You know that I took you
into my house on the recommendation of the music-teacher, Signora
Giannini. It was foolish, I see that now. It has come to my knowledge
that you had no right to enter here, no right to be with my daughter."
She paused. "You must understand perfectly what I mean," she said
impressively.
"No, I do not understand," the girl said. "Will you explain,
Marchesa?"
"Can you deny that you were involved in a most discreditable affair in
Siena before you came here? That your intrigue--I hate to have to
enter into the unsavoury details, Miss Agar, but you have forced me to
it--that your intrigue with your cousin's _fiance_ drove her to
suicide, and that you were obliged to leave the place in consequence?"
"It is not true."
"Ah, but your cousin killed herself?"
"Yes."
"Her lover was in the house at the time, and you were there too?"
"Yes."
"You were at the theatre the night before and everyone noticed that he
paid you great attention?"
"He? Oh," cried Olive, "how horrible, and how clever!"
The hard grey eyes met hers for a moment.
The girl's pale face was flushed now with shame and anger. "So clever!
Will you congratulate the Prince for me, Marchesa?" she said very
distinctly.
"You are impertinent. Of course, I cannot keep you. My daughter--"
The Marchesa saw her mistake as she made it and would have passed on,
but Olive was too quick for her. She smiled. "Your daughter! I do not
think I can have harmed her."
"You can take your money; I have left it there for you on the bureau.
Please pack your boxes and be off as soon as possible."
"I am to leave to-night? It is dark already, and I have no friends in
Florence."
The Marchesa shrugged her shoulders. "I can't help that," she said.
Olive went slowly out into the hall, and stood there hesitating at the
head of the stairs. She scarcely knew what to do or where to turn, but
she was determined not to stay longer than she could help under this
roof. She went down to the porter's lodge in the paved middle court.
"Gigia!"
The old woman came hobbling out to greet her with a toothless smile.
"Ah, _bella signorina_, there are no more letters for you to-night.
Have you come to talk to me for a little?"
"I am going away," the girl answered hurriedly. "Will your husband
come in to fetch my luggage soon? At eight o'clock?"
Gigia laid a skinny hand on Olive's arm, and her sharp old eyes
blinked anxiously as she said, "Where are you going, _nina mia_?"
"I don't know."
"Not to the Prince?"
"Good heavens! No!"
"Ah, the _padrona_ is hard--and you are pretty. I thought it might be
that, perhaps. Don Filippo is like his old wolf of a father, and young
lambs should beware of him."
"Can you tell me of some quiet, decent rooms where I can go to night?"
"_Sicuro!_ My husband's brother keeps the Aquila Verde, and you can go
there. Giovanni will give you his best room if he hears that you come
from us, and he will not charge too much. I am sorry you are going,
_cara_."
Olive squeezed her hand. "Thank you, Gigia. You are the only one I am
sorry to say good-bye to. I shall not forget you."
The Marchese was coming down the stairs as Olive went up again. He
smiled at her as he stood aside to let her pass. "You are late, are
you not? I shall not tell tales but I hope for your sake that my wife
won't see you."
"She won't see me again. I am going," she answered.
He would have detained her. "One moment," he said eagerly, but she was
not listening. "I shall miss you."
After all she heard him. "Thank you," she said gravely.
A door was closed on the landing below, and the master of the house
glanced at it apprehensively. He was not sure--
CHAPTER VI
The Aquila Verde was the oldest of the tall houses in the narrow
Vicolo dei Donati; the lower windows were barred with iron worn by the
rains of four hundred years, and there were carved marble pillars on
either side of the door. The facade had been frescoed once, and some
flakes of colour, red, green and yellow, still adhered to the wall
close under the deep protecting eaves.
"It was a palace of the Donati once," the host explained to Olive as
he set a plate of steaming macaroni swamped in tomato sauce before
her.
"I thought it might have been a convent, because of the long paved
corridors and this great room that is like a refectory."
"No, the Donati lived here. Dante's wife, Gemma, perhaps. Who knows!"
Ser Giovanni took up a glass and polished it vigorously with the
napkin he carried always over his arm before he filled it with red
Chianti. He had never had a foreigner in his house before, but he had
heard many tales about them from the waiters in the great
Anglo-American hotels on the Lung'Arno, and he knew that they craved
for warmth and an unlimited supply of hot water and tea. Naturally he
was afraid of them, and he was also shy of stray women, but Olive was
pretty, and he was a man, and moreover a Florentine, and his brother
had come with her and had been earnest in his recommendations, so he
was anxious to please her. "There is no _dolce_ to-night," he said
apologetically. "But perhaps you will take an orange."
When Olive went up to her room presently she found a great copper jar
of hot water set beside the tiny washstand. The barred window was high
in the thickness of the stone wall and the uncarpeted floor was of
brick. The place was bare and cold as a cell, but the bed, narrow and
white as that of Mary Mother in Rossetti's picture, invited her, and
she slept well. She was awakened at eight o'clock by a young waiter
who brought in her coffee and rolls on a tray. She was a little
startled by his unceremonious entrance, but it seemed to be so much a
matter of course that she could not resent it. He took the copper jar
away with him. "The _padrone_ says you will want some more water," he
said smilingly.
"Yes. But--but if you bring it back you can leave it outside the
door."
The coffee was not good, but it was hot, and the rolls were crisp and
delicious, and Olive ate and drank happily and with an excellent
appetite. No more listening to mangled scales and murdered nocturnes
and sonatas, no more interminable meals at which she must sit silent
and yet avoid "glumness," no more walking at Mamie's heels.
She was free!
Presently she said to herself, more soberly, that nevertheless she
must work somehow to gain her livelihood. Yes, she must find work
soon. The Aquila Verde would shelter and feed her for six lire a day.
Her last month's salary of eighty lire had been paid her four days
ago, and she had already spent more than half of it on things she
needed, new boots, an umbrella, gloves, odds and ends. This month's
money had been given her last night, and she had left a few lire for
the servant who had always brought up her dinner to her room, and had
made Gigia a little present. The cabman had bullied her into giving
him two lire. She had about one hundred remaining to her. Sixes into
one hundred.... Working it out carefully on the back of an old
envelope she found that she might live on her means for sixteen days,
and then go out into the streets with four lire in her pocket--no,
three, since she could scarcely leave without giving a _mancia_ to the
young man whom she now heard whistling "Lucia" in the corridor.
"The hot water, signorina."
"A thousand thanks."
Surely in a few days she would find work. It occurred to her that she
might advertise. "Young English lady would give lessons. Terms
moderate. Apply O. A., Aquila Verde." She wrote it out presently, and
took it herself to the office of one of the local papers.
"I have saved fifteen centesimi," she thought as she walked rather
wearily back by the long Via Cavour.
Three days passed and she was the poorer by eighteen lire. On Sunday
she spent the morning at the Belle Arti Gallery. Haggard saints peered
out at her from dark corners. Flora smiled wistfully through her
tears; she saw the three strong archangels leading boy Tobias home
across the hills, and Angelico's monks and nuns meeting the Blessed
Ones in the green, daisied fields of Paradise, and for a little while
she was able to forget that no one seemed to want English lessons.
On Monday she decided that she must leave the Aquila Verde if she
could find anyone to take her for four, or even three lire a day. She
went to Cook's office in the Via Tornabuoni; it was crowded with
Americans come for their mails, and she had to wait ten minutes before
one of the young men behind the counter could attend to her.
"What can I do for you?"
"Can you recommend me to a very cheap _pension_?"
She noticed a faint alteration in his manner, as though he had lost
interest in what she was saying, but when he had looked at her again
he answered pleasantly, "There is Vinella's in the Piazza
Indipendenza, six francs, and there is another in the Via dei Bardi, I
think; but I will ask. Excuse me."
He went to speak to another clerk at the cashier's desk. They both
stared across at her, and she fancied she heard the words, pretty,
cheap enough, poor.
"There is a place in the Via Decima kept by a Frau Heylmann. I think
it might suit you, and I will write the address down. It is really not
bad and I can recommend it as I am staying there myself," he added
ingenuously. He seemed really anxious to help now, and Olive thanked
him.
As she went out she met Prince Tor di Rocca coming in. Their eyes met
momentarily and he bowed. It seemed strange to her afterwards when she
thought of it, but she fancied he would have spoken if she had given
him an opportunity. Did he want to explain, to tell more lies? She had
thought him too strong to care what women thought of him once they had
served him and been cast aside. True, she was not precisely one of
these.
The Via Decima proved to be one of the wide new streets near the Porta
San Gallo. No. 38 was a pretentious house, a tenement building trying
to look like a palace, and it was plastered over with dingy yellow
stucco. Olive went through the hall into a courtyard hung with drying
linen, and climbed up an outside iron staircase to the fifth floor.
There was a brass plate on the Frau's door, and Canova's Graces in
terra cotta smirked in niches on either side. The large pale woman who
answered the bell wore a grey flannel dressing-gown that was almost
buttonless, and her light hair was screwed into an absurdly small knot
on the nape of her neck.
"You want to be taken _en pension_? Come in."
She led the way into a bare and chilly dining-room; the long table was
covered with black American cloth that reminded Olive of beetles, but
everything was excessively clean. There was a framed photograph of the
Kaiser on the sideboard. In a room beyond someone was playing the
violin.
"How many are you in family?"
"I am alone."
The Frau looked down at the gloved hands. "You are not married?"
"No."
The woman hesitated. "You would be out during the day?"
"Oh, yes," Olive said hopefully. "I shall be giving lessons."
"Ah, well, perhaps-- What would you pay?"
"I am poor, and I thought you would say as little as possible. I
should be glad to help you in the house."
"There is a good deal of mending," the Frau said thoughtfully; "and
you might clean your own room. Shall we say twenty-four lire weekly?"
The playing in the other room ceased, and a young man put his head in
at the door. "_Mutter_," he said, and then begged her pardon, but he
did not go away.
Olive tried not to look at him, but he was staring at her and his eyes
were extraordinarily blue. He was pale, and his wide brows and strong
cleft chin reminded her of Botticelli's steel-clad archangel. He wore
his smooth fair hair rather long too, in the archangelic manner, he--
"Paid in advance," Frau Heylmann said very sharply. Then she turned
upon her son. "What do you want, Wilhelm?"
"Oh, I can wait," he said easily.
She snorted. "I am sorry I cannot receive you," she said to the girl.
"I am not accustomed to have young women in my house. No."
She waddled to the door and Olive followed her meekly, but she could
not keep her lips from smiling. "I do not blame you," she said as she
passed out on to the landing. "Your son is charming."
The woman looked at her more kindly now that she was going. "He is
beautiful," she said, with pride. "Some day he will be great. _Ach!_
You should hear him play!"
Olive laughed. "You would not let me."
She could not take this rebuff seriously, but as she trudged the
streets in the thin cold rain that had fallen persistently all that
morning her sense of humour was blunted by discomfort. The long dark,
stone-paved hall that was the restaurant of the Aquila Verde seemed
cold and cheerless. At noon it was always full of hungry men devouring
macaroni and _vitello alla Milanese_, and the steam of hot food and
the sound of masticating jaws greeted Olive as she came in and took
her place at a little table near the stove.
The young waiter, Angelo, brought her a cup of coffee after the cheese
and celery. "It gives courage," he said. "And I see you need that
to-day, signorina."
CHAPTER VII
Olive saw the _padrone_ of the Aquila Verde that night before she went
to her room and told him she was leaving.
His face fell. "Signorina! I am sorry! I told Angelo to bring hot
water every time, always, when you rang. Have you not been well
served?"
She reassured him on that point and went on to explain that she was
going to live alone. "I have made arrangements," she added vaguely. "A
man will come with a truck to take my box away to-morrow morning."
And the _padrone_ was too much a man of his world to ask any more
questions.
There had been no rooms vacant in the _pension_ in Piazza
Indipendenza. The manservant who answered the door had recommended an
Italian lady who took paying guests, and Olive had gone to see her,
but her rooms were small, dark and dingy, and they smelt
overpoweringly of sandal wood and rancid oil. The shabbily-smart
_padrona_ had been voluble and even affectionate. "I am so fond of the
English," she said. "My husband is much occupied and I am often
lonely, but we shall be able to go out together and amuse ourselves,
you and I. I had been hoping to get an invitation to go to the
_Trecento_ ball at the Palazzo Vecchio, but Luigi cannot manage it.
Never mind! We will go to all the _Veglioni_. I love dancing." She
looked complacently down at her stubby little feet in their
down-at-heel beaded slippers.
Olive had been glad to get away when she heard the impossible terms,
but the afternoon was passing, and when she got to the house in the
Via dei Bardi she saw bills of sale plastered on its walls and a
litter of straw and torn paper in the courtyard. The porter came out
of his lodge to tell her that one of the daughters had died.
"They all went away, and the furniture was sold yesterday."
As Olive had never really wished to live and eat with strangers she
was not greatly depressed by these experiences, but she was cold and
tired, and her head ached, and when on her way back to the Aquila
Verde she saw a card, "_Affitasi, una camera, senza mobilia_," in the
doorway of one of the old houses in the Borgo San Jacopo, she went in
and up the long flight of steep stone stairs without any definite idea
of what she wanted beyond a roof to shelter her.
A shrivelled, snuffy old woman showed her the room. It was very large
and lofty, and it had two great arched windows that looked out upon
the huddled roofs of Oltr'Arno. The brick floor was worn and
weather-stained, as were the white-washed walls.
"It was a _loggia_, but some of the arches have been filled in and the
others glazed. Ten lire a month, signorina. As to water, there is a
good fountain in the courtyard."
Olive moved in next day.
Heaven helps those who help themselves, she thought, as she borrowed a
broom from her landlady to sweep the floor. The morning was fine and
she opened the windows wide and let the sun and air in. At noon she
went down into the Borgo and bought fried _polenta_ for five soldi and
a slice of chestnut cake at the cook shop, and filled her kettle with
clear cold water from the fountain in the courtyard.
Later, as she waited for the water to boil over her little spirit
lamp, she made a list of absolute necessaries. She had paid a month's
rent in advance, and fifty-three lire remained to her. Fifty-three
lire out of which she must buy a straw mattress, a camp-stool, two
blankets, some crockery and soap.
She went out presently to do her shopping and came back at dusk. She
was young enough to rather enjoy the novelty of her proceedings, and
she slept well that night on the floor, pillowless, and wrapped in her
coarse brown coverings; and though the moon shone in upon her through
the unshuttered windows for a while she did not dream or wake until
the dawn.
Olive tried very hard to get work in the days that followed, and she
went twice to the registry office in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.
"Ah, you were here before." A stout woman came bustling out from the
room behind the shop to speak to her the second time. "There is
nothing for you, _signorina mia_. The ladies who come here will not
take anyone without a character, and a written reference from Milan or
Rome is no good. I told you so before. Last winter Contessa Foscoli
had an English maid with a written character--not from us, I am glad
to say--and she ran away with the chauffeur after a fortnight, and
took a diamond ring and the Contessa's pearls with her. If you cannot
tell me who you were with last I shall not be able to help you."
"The Marchesa Lorenzoni," Olive said.
The woman drew in her breath with a hissing noise, then she smiled,
not pleasantly. "Why did you not say so before? I have heard of you,
of course. The little English girl! Well, I can't help you, my dear.
This is a registry office."
Olive walked out of the shop at once, but she heard the woman calling
to someone in the room at the back to come and look at her, and she
felt her cheeks burning as she crossed the road. "The little English
girl!" What were they saying about her?
One morning she went into one of the English tea-rooms. It was kept
by two elderly maiden ladies, and one of them came forward to ask her
what she wanted. The Pagoda was deserted at that hour, a barren
wilderness of little bamboo tables and chairs, tea-less and cake-less.
The walls were distempered green and sparsely decorated with Japanese
paper fans, and Olive noticed them and the pattern of the carpet and
remembered them afterwards as one remembers the frieze, the
engravings, the stale periodicals in a dentist's waiting-room.
"Do--do you want a waitress?"
The older woman's face changed. Oh, that change! The girl knew it so
well now that she saw it ten times a day.
"No. My sister and I manage very well, and we have an Italian maid to
do the washing up."
"Thank you," Olive said, faltering. "You don't know anyone who wants
an English girl? I have been very well educated. At least--"
"I am afraid not."
Poor Olive. She was an unskilled workwoman, not especially gifted in
any way or fitted by her upbringing to earn her daily bread. Long
years of her girlhood had been spent at a select school, and in the
result she knew a part of the Book of Kings by heart, with the Mercy
speech from the _Merchant of Venice_ and the date of the Norman
Conquest. Every day she bought the _Fieramosca_, and she tried to see
the other local papers when they came out. Several people advertised
who wanted to exchange lessons, but no one seemed inclined to pay.
Once she saw names she knew in the social column.
"The Marchese Lorenzoni is going to Monte Carlo, and he
will join the Marchesa and Miss Whittaker in Cairo later
in the season."
"Prince Tor di Rocca is going to Egypt for Christmas."
It was easy to read between the lines.
CHAPTER VIII
Florence, in the great days of the Renaissance, bore many men whom now
she delights to honour, and Ugo Manelli was one of these. He helped to
build a bridge over the Arno, he had his palace in the Corso frescoed
by Masaccio, he framed sumptuary laws, and he wrote sonnets, charming
sonnets that are still read by the people who care for such things.
The fifth centenary of his birthday, on the twenty-eighth of November,
was to be kept with great rejoicings therefore. There were to be
fireworks and illuminations of the streets for the people, and a
_Trecento_ costume ball at the Palazzo Vecchio for those who had
influence to procure tickets and money to pay for them.
Mamie, greatly daring, proclaimed her intention of wearing the "_umile
ed onesto sanguigno_" of Beatrice.
"You will be my Dante, Don Filippo? Momma is going in cloth of gold as
Giovanna degli Albizzi."
The Marchese looked inquiringly at the Prince. "Shall you add to the
gaiety of nations, or at least of Florence?"
The young man shrugged his broad shoulders. "I suppose so." He was
well established as _cavalier servente_ now in the Lorenzoni
household, and it was understood that Mamie would be a princess some
day. The girl was so young that the engagement could scarcely be
announced yet.
"I guess we must wait until you are eighteen, Mamie," her mother said.
"Keep him amused and don't be exacting or he'll quit. He is still sore
from his jilting."
"I can manage him," the girl boasted, but she had no real influence
over him now. The forbidden fruit had allured him, but since it was
his for the gathering it seemed sour--as indeed it was, and he was not
the man to allow himself to be tied to the apron-strings of a child.
When he was in a good humour he watched his future wife amusedly as
she metaphorically and sometimes literally danced before him, but he
discouraged the excess of audacity that had attracted him formerly,
perhaps because he scarcely relished the idea of a Princess Tor di
Rocca singing, "_O che la gioia mi fe morir_."
Probably he regretted gentle, amenable Edna. At times he was grimly,
impenetrably silent, and often he said things that would have wounded
a tender heart past healing. Fortunately there were none such in the
Palazzo Lorenzoni.
"I shall be ridiculous as the Alighieri, and you must forgive me,
Mamie, if I say that one scarcely sees in you a reincarnation of
Monna Beatrice."
"Red is my colour," the girl answered rather defiantly.
The Marchese laughed gratingly.
Filippo dined with the Lorenzoni on the night of the ball. He wore the
red _lucco_, but had declined to crown himself with laurel. His gaudy
Muse, however, had no such scruples, and her black curls were wreathed
with silver leaves. The Prince was not the only guest; there was a
slender, flaxen-haired girl from New York dressed after Botticelli's
Judith, an artillery captain as Lorenzo dei Medici, and another man, a
Roman, in the grey of the order of San Francesco.
"Poppa left for Monte this morning," Mamie explained over the soup.
"He reckoned dressing up was just foolishness, but the fact is armour
is hot and heavy, and he would have had to pass from trousers into
greaves. He has not got the right kind of legs for parti-coloured
hosen, someway."
The Piazza della Signoria was crowded as it had been on that dreadful
May day when Girolamo's broken body was burnt to ashes there; as it
was on the afternoon of the Pazzi conspiracy, when a bishop was hanged
from one of the windows of the old Palazzo. But the old order had
changed, giving place to new even here, and the people had come now
merely to see the fine dresses; there was no thought of murder,
though there might be some picking of pockets. The night was still and
cold, and the white, round moon that had risen above the roof of the
Loggia dei Lanzi shone, unclouded, upon the restless human sea that
divided here and there to let the carriages and motors pass. The
guests entered by the side door nearest the Uffizi, and _carabinieri_
kept the way clear. The crowd was dense thereabouts, and the people
pushed and jostled one another, leaned forward, and stood on tiptoe to
see the brocaded ladies in their jewelled coifs and the men, hooded
and strange, in their gay mediaeval garb.
The Marchesa's cloth of gold drew the prolonged "Oh!" of admiration
that is only accorded to the better kind of fireworks, and hearing it,
she smiled, well satisfied. Mamie followed with Filippo. Her dress of
rose-coloured brocade was exquisite. It clung to her and seemed to be
her one and only garment; one could almost see the throb of her heart
through the thin stuff. She let her furred cloak fall as she got out
of the car and then drew it up again about her bare arms and
shoulders.
"Who is the black-curled scarlet thing?"
"Beatrice."
"What! half naked! She is more like one of the _donnine_ in the
_Decameron_."
Her Dante, overhearing, hurried her up the steps. His eyes were
bright with anger in the shadow of his hood, but they changed and
darkened as he caught sight of one girl's face in the crowd. At the
foot of the grand staircase he turned, muttering some excuse and
leaving Mamie and her mother to go up alone, and hurried back and out
into the street. He stood aside as though to allow some newcomers to
pass in. The girl he had come to see was close to him, but she was
half hidden behind a _carabiniere's_ broad epauletted shoulders.
"_Scusi_," murmured the Prince as he leant across the man to pull at
her sleeve. "I must see you," he said urgently. "When? Where?"
"When you like," she answered, but her eyes were startled as they met
his. "No. 27 Borgo San Jacopo. The only door on the sixth landing."
"Very well. To-night, then, and in an hour's time."
The press of incoming masqueraders screened them. The _carabiniere_
knew the Prince by sight, and he listened with all his might, but they
spoke English, and he dared not turn to stare at the girl until the
tall figure in the red _lucco_ had passed up the steps and gone in
again, and by that time she had slipped away out of sight.
Filippo came to the Borgo a little before midnight and crossed the
dingy threshold of No. 27 as the bells of the churches rang out the
hour. The old street was quiet enough now but for the wailing of some
strayed and starving cats that crept about the shadowed courts and
under the crumbling archways, and the departing cab woke strange
echoes as it rattled away over the cobble stones.
The only door on the sixth landing was open.
"What are you doing here?" Filippo said, wonderingly, as he groped his
way in. The room was in utter darkness but for one ray of moonlight
athwart it and the faint light of the stars, by which he saw Olive
leaning against the sill of one of the unshuttered windows, and
looking, as it seemed, towards him.
"Come in," she said. "You need not be afraid of falling over the
furniture. There is not much."
"You seem partial to bare attics."
"Ah! you are thinking of my room in the Vicolo dei Moribondi."
"Yes!" he said as he came towards her from the door. "I cannot rest, I
cannot forget. For God's sake tell me about the end! I have been to
Siena since I heard, but I dared not ask too many questions. Was
she--did she suffer very much before she died? Answer me quickly."
"Throw back your hood," she said. "Let me see your face."
Impatiently he thrust the folds of white and scarlet away and stood
bare-headed. She saw that his strong lips quivered and that his eyes
were contracted with pain.
"No, she died instantly. They said at the inquest that it must have
been so."
"Her face--was she--" his voice broke.
"I did not see it. It was covered by a handkerchief," she said gently.
"Don't! Don't! I did not think you would suffer so much."
"I suffer horribly day and night. Love is the scourge of the world in
the hands of the devil. That is certain. She is buried near the south
wall of the Campo Santo. Oh, God! when I think of her sweet flesh
decaying--"
Olive, scarcely knowing what she did, caught at his hand and held it
tightly.
"Hush, oh, hush!" she said tremulously. She felt as though she were
seeing him racked. "I do believe that her soul was borne into heaven,
God's heaven, on the day she died. She was forgiven."
"Heaven!" he cried. "Where is heaven? I am not guilty of her death.
She was a fool to die, and I shall not soon forgive her for leaving me
so. If she came back I would punish her, torment her, make her scream
with pain--if she came back--oh, Gemma!--_carissima_--"
The hard, hot eyes filled with tears. He tried to drag his hand away,
but the girl held it fast.
"You are kind and good," he said presently in a changed voice. "I am
sorry if I did you any harm with the Lorenzoni, but the woman told me
she meant to send you away in any case because of the Marchese."
Then, as he felt the clasp of her fingers loosening about his wrist,
"Don't let go," he said quickly. "Is he really going to take you to
Monte Carlo with him?"
"Does his wife say so? Do you believe it?"
He answered deliberately. "No, not now. But you cannot go on living
like this."
"No."
He was right. She could not go on. Her little store of coppers was
dwindling fast, so fast that the beggars at the church doors would
soon be richer than she was. And she was tired of her straits, tired
of coarse food and a bare lodging, and of the harsh, clamorous life of
the streets. The yoke of poverty was very heavy.
Filippo drew a little nearer to her. "I could make you love me."
"Never."
He made no answer in words but he caught her to him. She lay for a
moment close in his arms, her heart beating on his, before she cried
to him to let her go.
He released her instantly. "Well?"
"I must light the lamp," she said unsteadily. She was afraid now to be
alone with him in the dim, starlit room, and she fumbled for the
matches. He stood still by the window waiting until the little yellow
flame of the _lucerna_ burnt brightly on the floor between them, then
he smiled at her, well pleased at her pallor. "You see it would be
easy," he said.
She answered nothing.
"I am going to Naples to-morrow by the afternoon train. Will you come
with me? We will go where you like from there, to Capri, or to Sicily;
and you will help me to forget, and I will teach you to live."
There was silence between them for a while. Olive stared with
fascinated eyes at this tall, lithe man whose red _lucco_, falling in
straight folds to his feet, became him well. The upper part of his
face was in shadow, and she saw only the strong lines of the cleft
chin, and the beautiful cruel lips that smiled at her as though they
knew what her answer must be.
She was of those who are apt to prefer one hour of troubled joy to the
long, grey, eventless years of the women who are said to be happy
because they have no history, and it seemed to her that the moment had
come when she must make a choice. This love was not what she had
dreamed of, longed for; other lips, kinder and more true, should have
set their seal on her accomplished womanhood. She knew that this that
was offered was a perilous and sharp-edged thing, a bright sheath
that held a sword for her heart, and yet that heart sang exultantly
as it fluttered like a wild bird against the bars of its cage. It sang
of youth and life and joy that cares not for the morrow.
It sang.
Filippo watched her closely and he saw that she was yielding. Her lips
parted, and instinctively as he came towards her she closed her eyes
so nearly that he saw only a narrow line of blue gleaming between her
lashes. But as he laid his hands upon her shoulders something awoke
within her, a terror that screamed in her ears.
"I am afraid," she said brokenly. "Leave me and come back to-morrow
morning if you will. I cannot answer you now."
As he still held her she spoke again. "If I come to you willingly I
shall be more worth having, and if you do not go now I will never
come. I will drown myself in the Arno."
"Very well. I will come to-morrow."
When he was gone she went stumblingly across the room to the mattress
on the floor in the farthest corner, and threw herself down upon it,
dressed as she was.
There was no more oil in the little lamp, and its flame flickered and
went out after a while, leaving her in the dark. The clocks were
striking two. Long since the moon had set behind the hills and now the
stars were fading, or so it seemed. There was no light anywhere.
Olive did not sleep. Her frightened thoughts ran to and fro busily,
aimlessly, like ants disturbed, hither and thither, this way and that.
He could give her so much. Nothing real, indeed, but many bright
counterfeits. For a while she would seem to be cared for and beloved.
Yes, but if the true love came she would be shamed. She knew that her
faith in Dante's Amor, his lord of terrible aspect, made his coming
possible. The men and women who go about proclaiming that there is no
such person because they have never seen him were born blind. Like
those prosy souls who call the poets mad, they mistake impotence for
common sense.
Besides, the first step always costs so dear, and now that he was gone
and she could think of him calmly she knew that she was afraid of
Filippo Tor di Rocca. He was cruel. Then among the forces arrayed
against him there was the desire of that she called her soul to
mortify her flesh, to beckon, to lead by stony ways to the heights of
sacrifice. She could not be sure where that first step would lead her,
she could not be sure of herself or gauge the depths to which she
might fall.
"Oh, God!" she said aloud. "Help me! Don't let things be too
difficult."
The hours of darkness were long, but the grey glimmering dawn came at
last with a pattering of rain against the uncurtained window. Olive
rose as soon as it was light, and before eight she had eaten the crust
of bread she had saved for her breakfast and was gone out. On her way
down the stairs she met her landlady and spoke to her.
"If anyone comes to see me will you tell them that I have gone out,
and that I do not know when I shall come in again. And if anything is
said about my going away you can say that I have changed my mind and
that I shall not leave Florence."
She would not cross the river for fear of meeting Filippo in any of
the more-frequented streets on the other side, so she went down the
Via della Porta Romana and out by the gates into the open country
beyond. She walked for a long time along muddy roads between the high
walls of vineyards and olive orchards. She had an umbrella, but her
skirts were draggled and splashed with mire and the water came through
the worn soles of her thin shoes. She had nothing to eat and no money
to buy food. There were some coppers in her purse, but she had
forgotten to bring that. It was windy, and as she was toiling up the
steep hill to Bellosguardo her umbrella blew inside out. She threw it
down by the side of the road and went on, rather glad to be rid of it
and to feel the rain on her face. She had two hands now to hold her
skirt and that was better. Soon after noon she knocked at the door of
a gardener's cottage and asked for something to eat; she was given a
yellow lump of _polenta_ and a handful of roast chestnuts and she sat
down on a low wall by the roadside to devour them. She did not think
much about anything now, she could not even feel that she cared what
happened to her, but she adhered to the resolution she had made to
keep out of the way until Tor di Rocca had left Florence. She could
not sit long. It was cold and she was poorly clad, so poorly that the
woman in the cottage had believed her to be a beggar. The Prince would
have had to buy her clothes before he could take her away with him.
She wandered about until nightfall and then made her way back to the
house in the Borgo, footsore and cold and wretched, but still the
captain of her soul; ragged, but free and in no man's livery.
The landlady heard her coming slowly up the stairs and came out of her
room to speak to her.
"A gentleman called for you this morning. I told him you were gone out
and that you had changed your mind about leaving Florence, and at
first he seemed angry, and then he laughed. 'Tell her we shall meet
again,' he said. Then another came this afternoon in an automobile and
asked if you lived here, and when I said you were out he said he would
come again this evening. He left his card."
Olive looked at it with dazed eyes. Her pale face flushed, but as she
went on up the stairs the colour ebbed away until even her lips were
white. She had to rest twice before she could reach her own landing,
and when she had entered her room she could go no farther than the
door. She fell, and it was some time before she could get up again,
but she still held the card crumpled in her hand.
"Jean Avenel."
CHAPTER IX
The Villa Fiorelli is set high among the olive groves above the
village of Settignano. There are Medicean balls on a shield over the
great wrought-iron gates, and the swarthy splendid banker princes
appear as the Magi in the faded fresco painting of the Nativity in the
chapel. They have knelt there in the straw of the stable of Bethlehem
for more than four hundred years. The _nobili_ of Florence were used
to loiter long ago on the terrace in the shade of the five cypresses,
and women, famous or infamous, but always beautiful, listened to
sonnets said and songs sung in their honour in the scented idleness of
the rose garden. The villa belonged first to handsome, reckless
Giuliano, the lover of Simonetta and others, and the father of a Pope,
and when the dagger thrusts of the Pazzi put an end to his short life
his elder brother and lord, Lorenzo, held it for a while before he
sold it to the Salviati. So it passed through many hands until at last
Hilaire Avenel bought it and filled it with the books and armour that
he loved. There were Spanish suits, gold-chased, in the hall, Moorish
swords and lances, and steel hauberks on the staircase, and stray
arquebuses, greaves and gauntlets everywhere. They were all rather
dusty, since Hilaire was unmarried; but he was well served
nevertheless. He was not a sociable person, and no Florentine had ever
partaken of a meal with him, but it was currently reported that he sat
through a ten-course dinner every night of his life, crumbling the
bread at the side of his plate, and invariably refusing to partake of
nine of the dishes that were handed in form by the old butler.
"It's real mean of your brother to keep his lovely garden shut up all
through the spring," the Marchesa Lorenzoni had said once to Jean, and
he had replied, "Well, it is his."
That seemed final, but the present Marchesa and late relict of Jonas
P. Whittaker of Pittsburg was not so easily put off. She was apt to
motor up to Settignano more than once in the May month of flowers; the
intractable Hilaire was never at home to her, but she revenged herself
by multitudinous kind inquiries. He was an invalid, but he disliked to
be reminded of his infirmities almost as much as he did most women and
all cackle about the weather.
Jean lived with him when not playing Chopin at the ends of the earth,
and when the two were together the elder declared himself to be
perfectly happy. "I only want you."
"And your first editions and your Cellini helmet."
When Jean came back from his American tour his brother was quick to
notice a change in him, and when on the day after his Florentine
concert he came in late for a dinner which he ate in silence, Hilaire
spoke his mind. They were together in the library. Jean had taken a
book down from the shelves but he was not reading it.
"Bad coffee."
"Was it?"
Hilaire was watching his brother's face. It seemed to him that there
were lines in it that he had not seen before, and the brown eyes that
gazed so intently into the fire were surely very tired.
He began again rather awkwardly. "You have been here a week, Jean."
"Yes."
"Did the concert go off well?"
"Oh, well enough. As usual."
"You went away alone in the Itala car before nine this morning and you
came back scarcely an hour ago. What is the matter? Is there some new
trouble? Jean, dear man, I am older than you; I have only you. What is
it?"
Jean reached out for his tobacco pouch. "Hilaire," he said very
gravely, after a pause, which he occupied in filling his pipe. "You
remember I asked you to do anything, anything, for a girl named Olive
Agar. You have never heard from her or of her?"
"Never."
"Ah," he sighed, "I have been to Siena. There was some affair--early
in September she came to Florence, to the Lorenzoni of all people in
the world."
Hilaire whistled.
"Yes, I know," the younger man said gloomily, as though he had spoken.
"That woman! What she must have suffered in these months! Well, she
left them suddenly at the beginning of November."
"Where is she now?"
"That's just it. I don't know."
"Why did she leave Siena?"
"There was some trouble--a bad business," he answered reluctantly.
"She lived with some cousins, and one of them committed suicide. She
came away to escape the horror and all the talk, I suppose."
"Ah, I need not ask why she left the Lorenzoni woman. No girl in her
senses would stay an hour longer than she could help with her."
"Hilaire, I think I half hoped to see her at the concert yesterday.
When I came on the platform I looked for her, and I am sure I should
have seen her in that crowd if she had been there. She is different,
somehow. I played like a machine for the first time in my life, I
think, and during the interval the manager asked me why I had not
given the nocturne that was down on the programme. I said something
about a necessary alteration at the last moment, but I don't know now
what I did play. I was thinking of her. A girl alone has a bad time in
this world."
"You are going to find her? Is she in love with you?"
Jean flushed. "I can't answer that."
"That's all right. What I really wanted to know was if you cared for
her. I see you do. Oh, Lord!" The older man sighed heavily as he put
down his coffee-cup. "I wish you would play to me."
Jean went into the music-room, leaving the folding doors between open,
and sat down at the piano. There was no light but the moon's, and
Hilaire saw the beloved head dark against the silvery grey of the wall
beyond. The skilled hands let loose a torrent of harmonies.
"Damn women!" said Hilaire, under cover of the fortissimo.
He spent some hours in the library on the following day re-arranging
and dusting his books, lingering over them, reading a page here and
there, patting their old vellum-bound backs fondly before he returned
them to their shelves. They absorbed him, and yet the footman bringing
in his tea on a tray heard him saying, "I must not worry."
Jean had always come to him with his troubles ever since he was a
child, and the worst of all had been brought about by a woman. That
was years ago now. Hilaire had been away from England, and he had
come back to find his brother aged and altered--and married.
They had got on so well together without women in these latter years
that Hilaire had hoped they might live and die in peace, but it seemed
that it was not to be. Jean had gone out again in the car to look for
his Olive. Well, if she made him happy Hilaire thought they might get
on very well after all. But he had forebodings, and later, he sat
frowning at the white napery and glittering glass and silver reflected
in the polished walnut wood of his well-appointed table, and he
refused soup and fish with unnecessary violence. Jean loved this girl
and she could make him happy if she would, but would she? She was
evidently not of a "coming-on disposition"; she was good, and Jean
was, unfortunately, still married to the other.
It had been raining all day. The wind moaned in the trees and sighed
in the chimney, and now and again the blazing logs on the hearth
hissed as drops fell on them from above.
"There is a good fire in the signorino's dressing-room, I hope. He has
been out all day, and it is so stormy that--"
"The signorino has come in, _eccellenza_. He--he brought a lady with
him. She seemed faint and ill, and I sent for the gardener's wife to
come and look after her. I have given her the blue room, and the
housekeeper is with her now. She was busy with the dinner when she
first came." The old butler rubbed his hands together.
"I hope I did right," he said after a pause.
Hilaire roused himself. "Oh, quite right, of course. She will want
something to eat."
"I have sent up a tray--"
"Ah, when?"
"He--here he is."
The old man drew back as Jean came in. "I am sorry to be late,
Hilaire."
"It does not matter."
Thereafter both sat patiently waiting for the end of a dinner that
seemed age-long. When, at last, they were alone Jean rose to his feet;
he was very pale and his brown eyes glittered.
"Did Stefano tell you? I have found her and brought her here."
"Oh, she has come, has she?"
"You think less of her for that. Ah, you will misjudge her until you
know her. Wait."
He hurried out of the room.
Hilaire stood on the hearth with his back to the fire. He repeated his
formula, but there was a not unkindly light in his tired eyes, and
when presently the door was opened and the girl came in he smiled.
The club foot, of which he was nervously conscious at times, held him
to his place, but she came forward until she was close to him.
"You are his brother," she began. "I--what a good fire."
She knelt down on the bear skin and stretched her hands to the blaze.
Hilaire noticed that she was excessively thin; the rose-flushed cheeks
were hollow and the curves of the sweet cleft chin too sharp. He
looked at her as she crouched at his feet; the nape of the slim neck
showed a very pure white against the shabby black of her dress, there
were fine threads of gold in the soft brown tangle of her hair.
Jean was dragging one of the great armchairs closer.
"You are cold," he said anxiously. "Come and sit here."
She rose obediently.
"Have you had any dinner?" asked Hilaire.
"Yes; they brought me some soup in my room. I am not hungry now."
She spoke very simply, like a child. Jean had rifled all the other
chairs to provide her with a sufficiency of cushions, and now he
brought her a footstool.
"I think I must take my shoes off," she said. "So cold--you see they
let the water in, and--"
"Take them off at once," ordered Hilaire, and he watched, still with
that faint smile in his eyes, as Jean knelt to do his bidding.
"That's very nice," sighed the girl. "I never knew before that real
happiness is just having lots to eat and being warm."
The two men looked at each other.
"I have often wondered about you," she said to Hilaire presently.
"Your eyes are just like his. I think if I had known that I should
have had to come before; but you see I promised Cardinal Jacopo of
Portugal--in San Miniato--that I would not. What am I talking about?"
Her voice broke and she covered her face with her hands.
"Oh, my God!" Jean would have gone to her, but his brother laid a
restraining hand on his arm.
"Leave her alone," he said. "She will be all right to-morrow. It's
only excitement, nervous exhaustion. She must rest and eat. Wait
quietly and don't look at her."
Jean moved restlessly about the room; Hilaire, gravely silent, seemed
to see nothing.
So the two men waited until the girl was able to control her sobs.
"I am so sorry," she said presently. "I have made you uncomfortable;
forgive me."
"Will you take a brandy-and-soda if I give it you?"
"Yes, if you think it will do me good."
Hilaire limped across to the sideboard. He was scarcely gone half a
minute, but when he came back with a glass of the mixture he had
prescribed he saw his brother kneeling at the girl's side, his arms
about her, his face hidden in the folds of her skirt.
"Jean! Get up!" he said very sharply. "Pull yourself together."
Olive sat stiffly erect; her swollen, tear-stained lids hid the blue
eyes, her pale, quivering lips formed words that were inaudible.
Hilaire ground his teeth. "Get up!"
After a while the lover loosed his hold; he bent to kiss the girl's
feet; then he rose and went silently out of the room. Hilaire listened
for the closing of another door before he rang the bell.
CHAPTER X
For some days and nights Olive lived only to eat and sleep. When she
woke it was to hear a kind old voice urging her to take hot milk or
soup, to see a kind old face framed in white hair set off by black
lace lappets; and yet whenever she closed her eyes at first she was
aware of a passionate aching echo of words said that was sad as the
sound of the sea in a shell. "I love you--I love you--" until at last
sleep helped to knit up the ravelled sleave of care.
Every morning there were fresh roses for her.
"The signorino hopes you are better."
"Oh, much better, thank you." And after a while a day came when she
felt really strong enough to get up. She dressed slowly and came down
and out on to the terrace. The crumbling stones of the balustrade were
moss-grown, as was the slender body of the bronze Mercury, poised for
flight and dark against the pale illimitable blue of the December sky.
Hilaire Avenel never tried to make Nature neat; the scarlet leaves of
the Virginia creeper came fluttering down and were scattered on the
worn black and white mosaic of the pavement; they showed like fire
flickering in the sombre green of the cypresses. Beyond and below the
garden, the olive and ilex woods, and the steep red roofs of
Settignano, lay Florence, a city of the plain, and wreathed in a
delicate mist. There was the great dome of Santa Maria dei Fiori; the
tortuous silver streak that was Arno, spanned by her bridges; there
was Giotto's tower, golden-white and rose golden, there the campanile
of the Badia, the grim old Bargello, and the battlemented walls of the
Palazzo Vecchio; farther still, across the river, the heights of San
Miniato al Monte, Bellosguardo, and Mont' Oliveto, cypress crowned.
Two white rough-coated sheep-dogs came rushing up the steps from the
garden to greet Olive with sharp barks of joy, and Hilaire was not
slow to follow. Olive still thought him very like his brother, an
older and greyer Jean.
"I have been so looking forward to showing you the garden," he said
hurriedly in his kind eagerness to put her at her ease. "There are
still a few late chrysanthemums, and you will find blue and white
violets in the grass by the sundial."
They passed down the steps together and through the green twilight of
the orange groves, and came to a little fountain in the midst of a
space of lawn set about with laurels. Hilaire threw a biscuit into
the pool, and the dark water gleamed with silver and gold as the fish
rushed at it.
"I flatter myself that all the living things in this garden know me,"
he said. "I bar the plainer kinds of insects and scorpions, of course;
but the small green lizards are charming, aren't they?"
"Mamie Whittaker had one on a gold chain. She used to wear it
sometimes."
"She would," he said drily. "The young savage! Better go naked than
torture harmless things."
"This place is perfect," sighed Olive; and then, "You have no home in
France?"
"We should have; but our great-grandfather was guillotined in Paris
during the Terror, and his wife and child came to England. Years
later, when they might have gone back they would not. Why should they?
Napoleon had given the Avenel estates to one of his ruffians, who had
since seceded to the Bourbon and so made all secure. Besides, they
were happy enough. Marie Louis Hilaire gave music lessons, and the
Marquise scrubbed and cooked and patched their clothes--she, who had
been the Queen's friend, and so they managed to keep the little home
together. Presently the young man married, and then Jean Marie
appeared on the scene. We have a picture of him at the age of five, in
a nankeen frock and a frill. Our mother was a Hungarian--hence Jean's
music, I suppose--and there is Romany blood on that side. These are
our antecedents. You will not be surprised at our vagaries now?"
Olive smiled. "No, I shall remember the red heels of Versailles,
English bread and butter, and the gipsy caravan."
"Jean has fetched your books from the Monte di Pieta. Marietta found
the tickets in your coat pocket. You don't mind?"
Looking at her he saw her eyes fill with tears, and he hurried on: "No
rubbish, I notice. Are you fond of reading?"
"Yes."
"I was wondering if you would care to undertake a work for me."
"I should be glad to do anything," she said anxiously.
"I have some thousands of books in the villa. Those I have collected
myself I know--they are all in the library--but there are many that
were left me by my father, and others that came from an uncle, and
they are all piled up in heaps in the empty rooms on the second floor.
I want someone to sort them out, catalogue, and arrange them for me.
Would you care to do it?"
"Yes, indeed."
"That's all right then," he said hastily. "I'll get a carpenter in at
once to put up some more shelves ready for them. And I think you had
better stay on in the villa, if you don't mind. It will be more
convenient. The salary will be two hundred lire a month, paid in
advance."
"Your kindness--I can't express my gratitude--" she began tremulously.
"Nonsense! This is a business transaction, and I am coming out of it
very well. I should not get a man to do the work for that absurdly
small sum. I am underpaying you on purpose because I hate women."
Olive laughed. "Commend me to misogynists henceforth."
She wanted to begin at once, but her host assured her that he would
rather she waited until the shelves were put up.
"You will have to sort them out several times, according to date,
language and subject. Perhaps Jean can help you when he returns. He is
away just now."
Watching her, he saw the deepening of the rose.
"I--I can't remember exactly what happened the night I came, Mr
Avenel. You know I had not been able to find work, and though my
_padrona_ was kind she was very poor too. She pawned my things for me,
but they fetched so little, and I had not had anything to eat for ever
so long when he came. He has not gone away because of me, has he?"
Hilaire threw the fish another biscuit; it fell among the lily leaves
at the feet of the weather-stained marble nymph of the fountain.
"I must decline to answer," he said gravely, after a pause. "I
understand that you are twenty-three and old enough therefore to judge
for yourself, and I do not intend to influence either you or Jean, if
I can help it. You will be perfectly free to do exactly what you think
right, my dear girl. I will only give you one bit of advice, and that
is, look at life with your eyes wide open. Don't blink! This is
Friday, and Jean is coming to see you on Wednesday."
CHAPTER XI
Olive told herself that Hilaire was very good to her in the days that
followed. He came sometimes into the room where she was, to find her
sitting on the floor amid the piles of books she was trying to reduce
to some kind of order.
"You do not get tired? I am afraid they are rather dusty."
"Oh, not at all," she assured him. She was swathed in a blue linen
apron of Marietta's and had tied a cotton handkerchief over her hair.
"I like to feel I am doing something for you," she said. "I wish--you
have been--you are so kind."
On the Wednesday morning she covered some of the books with brown
paper and pasted labels on their backs. She tried not to listen for
the creaking of the great gates as they swung open, for the grating of
wheels against the stones, for Jean's voice calling to his brother,
for his quick step upon the stair, but she heard all as she wrote
_Vita Nuova_ on the slip intended for an early edition of the _Rape of
the Lock_, and put the _Decameron_ aside with some sermons and
commentaries that were to be classified as devotional literature. He
did not come to her then, but she was desperately afraid that he
might. "I am not ready ... not ..."
When, later, she came into the dining-room she seemed to be perfectly
at her ease. Jean's eyes had been fixed on the door, and they met hers
eagerly as she came forward. "Are you better?" he asked, and then bit
his lip, thinking he had said the wrong thing.
"Oh, yes. But--but you look pale and thinner."
Her little air of gay indifference fell away from her. As he still
held her hand she felt the tears coming and longed to be able to run
upstairs and take some more sal volatile, but Hilaire came to the
rescue.
"Well, let's have lunch," he said. "I hate tepid food."
When they had taken their places Jean gave the girl a letter.
"It came for you to the Lorenzoni. I called at the porter's lodge this
morning and Ser Gigia gave it me."
"Such a waste of good things I never saw," the butler said afterwards
to his wife. "As you know, the _padrone_ never eats more than enough
to fill a bird, but I have seen the signorino hungry, and the young
lady too. To-day, however, they ate nothing, though the _frittata_ was
fit to melt in one's mouth. I should not have been ashamed to set it
before the Archangel Gabriel, and he would have eaten it, since it is
certain that the Blessed One has never been in love."
After the meal, to which no one indeed had done justice, Hilaire
explained that he was going to write some letters.
The younger man looked at Olive. "Come with me," he said abruptly. "I
want to play to you."
"I want to hear you," she said as she rose from the table.
He followed her into the music-room and shut the door. "Well?"
She chose to misunderstand him. "It is charming. Just what a shrine of
sound should be."
The grand piano stood out from the grey-green background of the walls
beyond, there was a bronze statuette of Orpheus with his lute on a
twisted Byzantine column of white and gold mosaic, and a long
cushioned divan set on one side broke the long lines of light on the
polished floor.
"What are you going to play?" she asked.
"Nothing, at present," he said, smiling at her. "I want to talk to you
first. You are not frightened?"
"No." She sat on the divan and he stood before her, looking down into
her eyes.
"I think I had better try to tell you about my wife," he said. "May I
sit here? And may I smoke?"
"Yes." She drew her skirts aside to make room for him next to her. "I
want to hear you," she said again.
"Imagine me, a boy of twenty-two, convalescing in country lodgings
after an illness that seemed to have taken the marrow out of my bones.
Hilaire was in Japan, and I--a callow fledgling from the nest--was
very sick and sorry for myself. There were some people living in
rather a large house at the other end of the village who took notice
of me. They were the only ones, and I have thought since that my
acquaintance with them really did for me with everyone else. They were
not desirable--but--well, I was too young, and just then too
physically weak to avoid their more pressing attentions. Old Seldon
was one of those flushed, swollen men whose collars seem always to be
too small for them. He tried to be pleasant, but it was not a great
success. There were two daughters at home, and Gertrude was the
eldest. She had been married, and the man had died, leaving her
penniless. As you may suppose she had not come back to veal. I was
sorry for her then because she seemed a good sort, and she was very
kind to me; she was five years my senior--"
"Go on," Olive said.
"I used to go to the house nearly every evening. She sang well, and I
used to play her accompaniments, while the old man hung about the
sideboard. He never left us alone, and the younger girl, Violet, used
to meet the rector's son in the stables then. I heard that afterwards.
They lived anyhow, and owed money to all the tradespeople round.
"One night I was awakened by a knocking outside; my landlady slept at
the back, and she was deaf besides, so I went down myself. The wind
put my candle out as I opened the door, but I saw a woman standing
there in the rain, and I asked her what she wanted. She made no
answer, but pushed past me into the passage, and went into my
sitting-room. I followed, of course.
"Well, perhaps you have guessed that it was Gertrude. Her yellow hair
hung down and about her face; she was only half dressed, and her bare
arms and shoulders were all wet. Her skirts were torn and stained with
mud. She told me her father had turned her out of the house in a
drunken fury and she had come to me. Even then I wondered why she had
not gone to some woman--surely she might have found shelter--however,
she had come to me. I was going to call up my landlady, but she would
not allow it because she said that no one but I need ever know. She
would creep home through the fields soon after sunrise and her sister
would let her in. The old man would be sleeping heavily.... The end of
it was that I let her go up to my room while I lay on the sofa in the
little parlour. The horsehair bolster was deucedly hard, but I was
young, and when I did get off I slept well. When I woke it was nearer
eight than seven, and I had just scrambled up when my landlady came
in. One look at her face was enough. I understood that Gertrude had
overslept herself too.
"The sequel was hateful. There was a frightful scandal, of course; the
father raved, the women cried, the rector talked to me seriously,
and--Olive, mark this--Gertrude would not say anything. I married her
and we came away."
"It was a trap," cried Olive.
"We had not one single thing in common, and you know when there is no
love sex is a barrier set up by the devil between human souls. After
some years of mutual misery I brought her here. Poor Hilaire has hated
respectable women ever since--she was that, if that counts when there
is nothing else. Just virtue, with no saving graces. She is living in
London now, is much esteemed, and regularly exceeds her allowance."
"Was she pretty?"
Jean had let his pipe go out, and now he relit it. "Oh, yes," he said,
"I suppose so. Frizzy hair and all that. I fancy she has grown stout
now. She is the kind that spreads."
"Life is all so hateful," sighed the girl. Jean moved away from her
and went to the window. Hilaire was limping across the terrace
towards the garden steps. When he was gone out of sight Jean came back
into the room.
"My brother is unhappy too. The woman he loved died. Oh, Olive, are we
to be lonely always because the law will not give me a divorce from
the woman who was never really my wife, never dear to me or near to me
as you are? Joy is within our reach, a golden rose on the tree of
life, and it is for you to gather it or to hold your hand. Don't
answer me yet for God's sake. Wait!"
He went to the piano and opened it.
Rain ... rain dripping on the roof through the long hours of night,
and the weary moaning of the wakeful wind. Thronging memories of past
years, past youth, past joy, past laughter echoing and re-echoing in
one man's hungry heart. Light footsteps of children never to be born
... and then the heavy tread of men carrying a coffin, and the last
sound of all--the clanging of an iron door....
The grave ... the grave ... it held the boy who had loved her, and
presently, surely, it would hold this man too, sealing his kind lips
with earth, closing his brown eyes in an eternal darkness.
He played, as thousands had said, divinely, not only with his hands
but with his soul. The music that had been a work of genius became a
miracle when he interpreted it, and indeed it seemed that virtue went
out of him. His face was drawn and pale and a pulse beat in his cheek.
Olive, gazing at him through a blur of tears, knew that she had never
longed for anything in her life as she longed now to comfort this pain
expressed in ripples, and low murmurings, and great crashing waves of
the illimitable sea of sound. Her heart ached with the pity that is a
woman's way of loving, and as he left the piano she rose too. He
uttered a sort of cry as she swayed towards him, and clasped her in
his arms.
"I love you," he said, his lips so close to hers that she felt rather
than heard the words.
CHAPTER XII
Jean came to the villa a little before noon on the following day.
Hilaire, who was in the library, heard his voice in the hall calling
the dogs, heard him whistling some little song tune as he opened and
shut all the doors one after the other.
"'_O l'amor e' come un nocciuola
Se non se apre non si puo mangiarla--_'"
"Hilaire, where are you? I thought I should find you on the terrace
this fine morning. Where is she?" he added eagerly as he laid a great
bunch of roses down on the table. "Is her headache better? Has not she
come down yet?"
He looked across the room to where his brother's grey head just showed
above the high carved back of his chair.
"Hilaire! Why don't you answer?"
In the silence that ensued he distinctly heard the ticking of the
clock on the mantelpiece and the falling of the soft wood ashes in the
grate; the beating of his own heart sounded loud to him. One of the
dogs was scratching at the door and whining to be let in.
"Hilaire."
"She is gone."
"Gone?"
"Yes. She left this letter for you."
"Ah, give it to me." He opened and read it hurriedly.
"I thought you meant dead at first," he said. His brown eyes had lost
the light that had been in them and were melancholy as before; he
stood still by the table looking down upon his roses. They would fade,
and she would never see them now. Never ... never ...
"Come and sit by the fire and let's talk it over quietly," said
Hilaire. "Oh, damn women," he mumbled as he drew at his pipe--the
fifth that morning. It was the first time in a week that he had
uttered his pet expletive. "What does she say?"
"You can read her letter."
"Would she mind?"
"Oh, no," Jean said bitterly. "She loves you--what she calls
loving--next best after me. She told me so."
Hilaire carefully smoothed the crumpled, blotted page out on his knee.
"MY DEAREST JEAN,--I am going away because I am a
coward. I dare not live with you, and I dare not ask you
to forgive me. Last night as I lay awake I thought and
thought about my feeling for you and I was sure that it
was love. I used to think of you often last summer and
to wonder where you were and what you were doing, and I
hoped you had not forgotten me. I did not love you then,
but I suppose my thoughts of you kept my heart's door
open for you, and certainly they helped to keep out
someone else who came and tried to get admittance. Oh,
one must suffer to keep love perfect, but isn't it worth
while? You may not believe me now when I say that if I
cared for you less I should stay, but it is true. Oh,
Jean, even when we were so happy for a few minutes
yesterday something in me looked beyond into the years
to come and was afraid. Not of you; I trust you,
dearest; but of the world. Men would stare at me and
laugh and whisper together, and women would look away,
and I know I should not be able to bear it. I am not
brave like that. Oh, every word I write must hurt you, I
know. Remember that I love you now and shall always.
Good-bye.--Your
"OLIVE."
"I should keep this."
"I am going to. Hilaire, did you know she was going? Did she tell
you?"
The older man answered quietly: "Yes, I knew, and I sent her to the
station in the motor. I had promised a strict neutrality, Jean, and
she was right to go. Some women, good women, may be strong enough to
bear all the suffering that is entailed upon them by a known
irregularity in their lives. She is not. It would probably have killed
her though I am not saying that she would not have been happy
sometimes, when she could forget her shame."
Jean flinched as though his brother had struck him. "Don't use that
word."
"Well, what else would it be? What else would the world call it? And
women listen to what the world says. 'Good name in man or woman is the
immediate jewel of their souls'; Othello said something like that, and
it's often true. Besides, you know, this woman is pure in herself, and
from what she told me I understand that she has seen something of the
seamy side of love lately--enough to inspire her with dread. She is
afraid, and her fear is exquisite; a very fine and rare thing. It is
the bloom on the fruit and should not be brushed off with an ungentle
hand. Poor child! Don't blame her as she blames herself or I shall
begin to think she is too good for you."
Jean sat leaning forward staring into the fire.
"Do you realise that when I brought her here it was from starvation in
a garret? Where is she going? What will she do? Oh, God! The poor
little slender body! Do you remember she said it was happiness just to
be warm and have enough to eat?"
"That's all right," Hilaire said hastily. "She is going to a good
woman, a friend she made in Siena. The letter you brought was from
her, and she wrote to say she had been ill and wished Olive could come
and be with her for a while."
"I see! And she was glad to get away."
"My dear man, did you really think she would be so easily won? She
loves you, and you not only made love to her yesterday afternoon; you
played to her--I heard you--and I knew she would have to say 'Yes' to
everything. Now she says 'No,' but you must not think she does not
care." Hilaire got up, came across to where his brother sat, and laid
a caressing hand on his shoulder. "Dear Jean, will it comfort you to
hear me swear she means every word of that letter? It's not all over.
You will come together in the end. Her poor blue eyes were drowned in
tears--"
"Oh, don't," Jean said brokenly. The hard line of his lips relaxed. He
hid his face in his hands.
Hilaire went out of the room.
BOOK III.--ROME
CHAPTER I
Olive was alone in the compartment of the train that bore her away
from Florence and from Jean. She had a book; it lay open on her lap,
and she had tried to read, but the lines all ran together and the
effort to concentrate her thoughts made her head ache. She was very
unhappy. It seemed to her that now indeed life was emptied of all
sweets and the taste of it was as dust and ashes in her mouth. She was
leaving youth and joy behind; or rather, she had killed them and left
a man to bury them. At Orvieto she nearly broke down. It would be so
easy to get out and cross over to the other platform and there await
the next train back to Florence. She had her hand upon the handle of
the door when a boy with little flasks of wine in a basket came up and
asked her to buy, and as she answered him she heard the cry of
"_Partenza!_" It was too late; the moment had passed, and after a
while she knew that she was glad she had not yielded. She was doing
the right thing. What was the old French motto? "_Fais ce que doit,
advienne que pourra._" The brave words comforted her a little. She was
very tired, and presently she slept.
She was awakened by the discordant yells of the Roman _facchini_ on
the station platform. One of them carried her box to the office of the
Dogana, but a large party of Americans had come by the same train and
the officials were too busily engaged in turning over the contents of
their innumerable Saratogas to do more than scrabble in chalk on the
side of her shabby leather trunk and shake their heads at the
proffered key, and soon she was in a _vettura_ clattering down the
wide new Via Nazionale.
Signora de Sanctis lived with her sister in one of the old streets in
the lower part of the city near the Pantheon--the Via Arco della
Ciambella. The houses there are built on the foundations of the Baths
of Agrippa, and a brick arch, part of the great Tepidarium, remains to
give the street its name. The poor fragment has been Christianised; a
wayside altar sanctifies it, and a little painted shrine to the
Madonna adorns the base. The buildings on that side are small and mean
and overshadowed by the great yellow palace of the Spinola opposite.
Olive's friends lived over a wine shop, but the entrance was some way
down the street.
"Fortunately, my dear," as they remarked, "though really the place is
very quiet. People go outside the gates to get drunk."
Both the women seemed glad to see her. Her room was ready and a meal
had been prepared and the cloth laid at one end of the work-table. The
younger sister was a dressmaker too, and the floor was strewn with
scraps of lining and silk. A white dress lay on the sofa, carefully
folded and covered with a sheet of tissue paper.
"You look tired, Olive. Were you not happy in Florence?"
The girl admitted that the Lorenzoni had not been very kind to her.
She had left them and had been living on her savings. It had been hard
to find other employment. "I want to work," she said. "You will let me
help you, and I hope to get lessons."
She asked to be allowed to wash the plates and dishes and put them
away in the tiny kitchen. She was in a mood to bear anything better
than the idleness that left room for her own sad thoughts, and she
wished that they would let her do some sewing. "I am not good at
needlework, but I can hem and put on buttons," she pleaded.