|It was Tuesday afternoon at Colin Churchill's, and Minna had got her
usual weekly leave to go and visit her cousin at his own studio. 'I find
her devotion admirable,' said Madame, 'but then, this cousin he is young
and handsome. After all, there is perhaps nothing so very extraordinary
in it, really.'
Cecca was there, too, waiting her opportunity, with the little phial
always in her pocket: for who knows when Madonna della Guardia may
see the chance of earning her two promised masses? She is late this
afternoon, the English governess; but she will come soon: she never
forgets to come every Tuesday.
By and by, Minna duly arrived, and Colin kissed her before Cecca's very
eyes--the miscreant! and she took off her bonnet even, and sat down and
seemed quite prepared to make an afternoon of it.
'Cecca,' Colin cried, 'will you ask them to make us three cups of
coffee?--You can stop, Minna, and have some coffee, can't you?'
Cecca didn't understand the English half of the sentence, of course,
but she ran off quite enchanted to execute the little commission in
the Italian bent of it. A cup of coffee! It was the very thing; Madonna
della Guardia, what fortune you have sent me!
Colin and Minna sat talking within while the coffee was brewing, and
when it was brought in, Cecca waited for her opportunity cautiously,
until Minna had taken a cup for herself, and laid it down upon the
little bare wooden table beside her. It would never do to put the
medicine by mistake into the cup of the Englishman; we must manage these
little matters with all due care and circumspection. So Cecca watched
in the background, as a cat watches a mouse's hole with the greatest
silence and diligence, till at last a favourable chance occurred: and
then under the pretence of handing Minna the biscuits which came up with
the coffee, she managed cleverly to drop half the contents of the phial
into the cup beside her. Half was quite enough for one trial: she kept
the other half, in case of accident, to use again if circumstances
should demand it.
Just at that moment a note came in from Maragliano. Could Colin step
round to the other studio for a quarter of an hour? A wealthy patron had
dropped in, and wanted to consult with him there about a commission.
Cohn read the letter through hastily; explained its contents to Minna;
kissed her once more: (Ha, the last time, the last time for ever! he
will never do that again, the Englishman!) and then ran out to see the
wealthy patron.
Minna was left alone for that half-hour in the studio with Cecca.
Would she drink the coffee, now? that was the question. No, as bad luck
and all the devils would have it, she didn't seem to think of tasting or
sipping it. A thousand maledictions! The stuff would get cold, and then
she would throw it away and ask for another cupful. Blessed Madonna of
Monte-leone, make her drink it! Make her drink it! Bethink you, unless
she does, dear little Madonna, you do not get your candles or your
masses!
Still Minna sat quite silent and motionless, looking vacantly at the
beautiful model, whom she had forgotten now to feel angry or jealous
about. She was thinking, thinking vacantly; and her Italian was so
far from fluent that she didn't feel inclined to begin a conversation
off-hand with the beautiful model.
Just to encourage her, then (there's nothing like society), Ceeca drew
up her three-legged stool close beside the signorina, and began to sip
carelessly and unconcernedly at her own cup of coffee. Perhaps the
sight of somebody else drinking might chance by good luck to make the
Englishwoman feel a little thirsty.
But Minna only looked at her, and smiled half-unconsciously. To her
great surprise, the Italian woman perceived that two tears were slowly
trickling down her rival's cheeks.
Italians are naturally sympathetic, even when they are on the eve of
poisoning you; and besides one is always curious to know what one is
crying for. So Cecca leaned forward kindly, and said in her gentlest
tone: 'You are distressed, signorina. You are suffering in some way. Can
I do anything for you?'
Minna started, and wiped away the two tears hastily. 'It is nothing,'
she said, 'I didn't mean it. I--I fancied I was alone, I had forgotten.'
'What! you speak Italian!' Cecca cried, a little astonished, and half
anxious to enjoy her triumph by anticipation. 'Ah, signorina, I know
what is the matter. I have guessed your secret: I have guessed your
secret!'
Minna blushed. 'Hush,' she said eagerly. 'Not a word about it. My friend
may return. Not a word about it.'
But still she didn't touch her coffee.
Then Cecca began to talk to her gently and soothingly, in her best soft
Italian manner. Poor thing, she was evidently very sad. So far away from
her home too. Cecca was really quite sorry for her. She tried to draw
her out and in her way to comfort her. The signorina hadn't long to
live: let us at least be kind and sympathetic to her.
For, you see, an Italian woman is capable of poisoning you in such a
perfectly good-humoured and almost affectionate fashion.
At first, Minna didn't warm very much to the beautiful model: she had
still her innate horror of Italian women strong upon her; and besides
she knew from her first meeting that Cecca had a terrible vindictive
temper. But in time Cecca managed to engage her in real conversation,
and to tell her about her own little personal peasant history. Yes,
Cecca came from Calabria, from that beautiful province; and her father,
her father was a fisherman.
Minna started. 'A fisherman! How strange. And my father too, was also a
fisherman away over yonder in England!'
It was Cecca's turn to start at that. A fisherman! How extraordinary.
She could hardly believe it. She took it for granted all along that
Minna, though a governess, was a grand English lady; for the idea of a
fisher man's daughter dressing and living in the way that Minna did was
almost inconceivable to the unsophisticated mind of a Calabrian peasant
woman. And to wear a bonnet, too! to wear a bonnet!
'Tell me all about it,' Cecca said, drawing closer, and genuinely
interested (with a side eye upon the untasted coffee). 'You came to Rome
then,' jerking her two hands in the direction of the door, 'to follow
the Englishman?' 'Signora Cecca,' Minna said, with a sudden vague
instinct, in her tentative Italian, 'I will trust you. I will tell you
all about it. I was a poor fisherman's daughter in England, and I
always loved my cousin, the sculptor.' Cecca listened with the intensest
interest. Minna lifted her cup for the first time, and took a single sip
of the poisoned coffee.
'Good!' thought Cecca calmly to herself. 'If she takes a first sip, why
of course in that case she will certainly finish it.'
Then Minna went on with her story, shortly and in difficulty, pieced
out every here and there by Cecca's questions and ready pantomime. Cecca
drank in all the story with the deepest avidity. It was so strange
that something should just then have moved the Englishwoman to make a
_confidante_ of her. A poor fisherman's daughter, and neglected now by
her lover who had become a grand and wealthy sculptor! Mother of God,
from the bottom of her heart, she really pitied her.
'And when he came to Rome,' Cecca said, helping out the story of her own
accord, 'he fell in with the grand English ladies like the one with the
military papa; and they made much of him; and you were afraid, my little
signorina, that he had almost forgotten you! And so you came to Rome on
purpose to follow him.'
Minna nodded, and her eyes filled with tears a second time.
'Poor little signorina!' Cecca said earnestly.
'It was cruel of him, very cruel of him. But when people come to
Rome they are often cruel, and they soon forget their lovers of the
province.' Something within her made her think that moment of poor
Giuseppe, who had followed her so trustfully from that far Calabria.
Minna raised the cup once more, and took another sip at the poisoned
coffee. Cecca watched the action closely, and this time gave a small
involuntary sigh of relief when Minna set it down again almost untasted.
Poor little thing! after all she was only a fisherman's daughter, and
she wanted her lover, her lover of the province, to love her still the
same as ever! Nothing so very wrong or surprising in that! Natural, most
natural.... But then, the Englishman, the Englishman! she mustn't be
allowed to carry off the Englishman.... And Giuseppe, poor Giuseppe....
Well, there, you know; in love and war these things will happen, and one
can't avoid them.
'And you knew him from a child?' she asked innocently.
'Yes, from a child. We lived together in a little village by the
sea-shore in England; my father was a fisherman, and his a gardener. He
used to go into the fields by the village, and make me little images of
mud, which I used to keep upon my mantelpiece, and that was the first
beginning, you see, of his sculpture.'
Mother of heaven, just like herself and Giuseppe! How they used to play
together as children on the long straight shore at Monteleone. 'But you
were not Christians in England, you were pagans, not Christians!'
For the idea of images had suggested to Cecca's naïve mind the notion of
the Madonna.
Minna almost laughed, in spite of herself, at the curious
misapprehension, and drew out from her bosom the little cross that she
always wore instead of a locket. 'Oh yes,' she said simply, without
dwelling upon any minor points of difference between them; 'we are
Christians--Christians.'
The girl examined the cross reverently, and then looked back at the
coffee with a momentary misgiving. After all, the Englishwoman was very
gentle and human-like and kind-hearted. It was natural she should want
to keep her country lover. And besides she was really, it seemed, no
heretic in the end at all, but a good Christian.
'When people come to Rome and become famous,' she repeated musingly,
'they do wrong to be proud and to forget the lovers of their childhood.'
Giuseppe loved her dearly, there was no denying it, and she used to love
him dearly, too, down yonder on the shore at Monteleone.
Minna raised her cup of coffee a third time, and took a deeper drink.
Nearly a quarter of the whole was gone now; but not much of the poison,
Cecca thought to herself, thank heaven; that was heavy and must have
sunk to the bottom. If only one could change the cups now, without being
observed! Poor little thing, it would be a pity, certainly, to poison
her. One oughtn't to poison people, properly speaking, unless one has
really got some serious grudge against them. She was a good little soul,
though no doubt insipid, and a Christian, too; Madonna della Guardia,
would the bargain hold good, Cecca wondered silently, seeing the
Englishwoman had miraculously turned out to be after all a veritable
Christian. These are points of casuistry on which one would certainly
like to have beforehand the sound opinion of a good unprejudiced
Calabrian confessor.
'You think he makes too much of the tall signorina!' Cecca said lightly,
smiling and nodding. (Cecca had, of course, an immense fund of sympathy
with the emotion of jealousy in other women.)
Minna blushed and looked down timidly without answering. What on earth
could have possessed her to make so free, at this particular minute,
with this terrible Italian model woman? She really couldn't make it out
herself, and yet she knew there had been some strange unwonted impulse
moving within her. (If she had read Von Hartmann, she would have called
it learnedly the action of the Unconscious. As it was, she would have
said, if she had known all, that it was a Special Providence.)
So wishing merely to change the subject, and having nothing else to say
at the moment, she looked up almost accidentally at the completed clay
of the Nymph Bathing, and said simply: 'That is a beautiful statue,
Signora Cecca.'
Cecca smiled a majestic smile of womanly gratification, and showed her
double row of even regular pearl-white teeth with coquettish beauty. 'I
posed for it,' she said, throwing herself almost unconsciously into the
familiar attitude. 'It is my portrait!'
'It is a splendid portrait,' Minna answered cordially, glancing quickly
from the original to the copy, 'a splendid portrait of a very beautiful
and exquisitely formed woman.'
'Signorina!' Cecca cried, standing up in front of her, and roused by a
sudden outburst of spontaneous feeling to change her plan entirely, 'you
are quite mistaken; the master does not love the tall lady. I know the
master well, I have been here all the time, I have watched him narrowly.
He does not love the tall lady: she loves him, I tell you, but he does
not care for her; in his heart of hearts he does not love her; I know,
for I have watched them. Signorina, I like you, you are a sweet little
Englishwoman, and I like you dearly. Your friend from the village
in England shall marry you!' ['Oh, don't talk so!' Minna cried
parenthetically, hiding her face passionately between her hands.)
'And if the tall lady were to try to come between you and him,' Cecca
added vigorously, 'I would poison her--I would poison her--I would
poison her! She shall not steal another woman's lover, the wretched
creature. I hate such meanness, signorina, I will poison her.'
As Cecca said those words, with an unfeigned air of the deepest and most
benevolent sympathy, she managed to catch her long loose scarf as if by
accident in the corner of the light table where Minna's half-finished
cup of coffee was still standing, and to upset it carelessly on to the
floor of the studio. The cup with a crash broke into a hundred pieces.
At that very moment Colin entered. He saw Minna rising hastily from the
settee beside the overturned table, and Cecca down on her knees upon
the floor, wiping up the coffee hurriedly with one of the coarse studio
towels. Cecca looked up in his face with a fearless glance as if nothing
unusual had happened. 'An accident, signor,' she cried: 'my scarf caught
in the table. I have spilt the signorina's cup of coffee. But no matter.
I will run down immediately and tell them below to make her another.'
'Cecca and I have been talking together, Colin,' Minna said, replacing
the fallen table hastily, 'and, do you know, isn't it strange, she's a
fisherman's daughter in Calabria? and oh! Colin, I don't believe after
all she's really half such a bad sort of girl as I took her to be when
I first saw her. She's been talking to me here quite nicely and
sympathetically.'
'Italians are all alike,' Colin answered, with the usual glib English
faculty for generalisation about all 'foreigners.' 'They'll be ready to
stab you one minute, and to fall upon your neck and kiss you the very
next.'
Going out of the studio to order more coffee from the trattoria next
door, Cecca happened to meet on the doorstep with her friend Giuseppe.
'Beppo,' she said, looking up at him more kindly than had been her wont
of late: 'Beppo, I want to tell you something--I've changed my mind
about our little difference. If you like, next Sunday you may marry me.'
'Next Sunday! Marry you!' Beppo exclaimed, astonished. 'Oh, Cecca,
Cecca, you cannot mean it!'
'I said, next Sunday, if you like, you may marry me. That's good
ordinary sensible Calabrian, isn't it? If you wish, I'll give it you in
Tuscan: you can understand nothing but Tuscan, it seems, since you came
to Rome, my little brother.'
She said the words tenderly, banter as they were, in their own native
dialect: and Beppo saw at once that she was really in earnest.
'But next Sunday,' he exclaimed. 'Next Sunday, my little one! And the
preparations?'
'I am rich!' Cecca answered calmly. 'I bring you a dower. I am the most
favourite model in all Rome this very moment.'
'And the Englishman--the Englishman? What are you going to do with the
Englishman?'
'The Englishman may marry his sweetheart if he will,' the girl replied
with dogged carelessness.
'Cecca! you did not give the.... medicine to the Englishman?'
Cecca drew the half-empty bottle from her pocket and dashed it savagely
against the small paving-stones in the alley underfoot. 'There,' she
cried, eagerly, as she watched it shiver into little fragments. 'See the
medicine! That is the end of it.'
'And the cat, Cecca?'
Cecca drew a long breath. 'How much of it would hurt a human
being--a woman?' she asked anxiously. 'Somebody has drunk a little by
mistake--just so much!' And she measured the quantity approximately with
the tip of her nail upon her little finger.
Giuseppe shook his head re-assuringly, shrugged his shoulders, and
opened his hands, palms outward, as if to show he was evidently making
no mental reservation. 'Harmless!' he said. Quite harmless. It would
take a quarter of a phial at least to produce any effect worth speaking
of.'
Cecca clasped her silver image of the Madonna ecstatically. 'That's
well, Beppo,' she answered with a nod. 'I must go now. On Sunday, little
brother! On Sunday. Beppo--Beppo--it was all a play. I love you. I love
you.'
But as she went in to order the coffee the next second, she said to
herself with a regretful grimace: 'What a fool I was after all to waste
the medicine! Why, if only I had thought of it. I might have used it to
poison the other one, the tall Englishwoman. She shall not be allowed to
steal away the little signorina's lover!'