Kitabı oku: «The Wheat Princess», sayfa 11

CHAPTER XIV

As they galloped up the long avenue under the arching trees, the villa presently came into view. The sound of laughing voices floated out from the open windows. Marcia drew rein with a half-involuntary cry of dismay. The Roystons had come.

‘I’d forgotten!’ she explained to her companion. ‘We’re giving a dinner-party to-night.’

At the sound of the clattering hoofs on the gravel of the driveway a gay group poured out on to the loggia, welcoming the dilatory riders with laughter and questions and greetings.

‘My dear child! Where have you been?’

‘Here, Pietro; call some one to take the horses.’

‘Is this the way you welcome guests? I shall never–’

‘Dinner’s been waiting half an hour. We were beginning to think–’

‘I’ve been worried to death! You haven’t caught cold, have you?’

‘No, Aunt Katherine,’ she laughed as she pulled off her gloves and shook hands with the visitors. ‘But we’ve been nearly drowned! We should have been wholly drowned if Mr. Sybert hadn’t spied a very leaky ark on the top of a hill.’

‘I’m relieved!’ sighed her uncle as they passed into the hall. ‘I was beginning to fear that you had had a disagreement on the way, and that it was another case of the Kilkenny cats.’

‘Marcia, how you look! You’re covered with mud!’ cried Mrs. Copley.

With a slightly apprehensive glance toward the mirror, Marcia straightened her hat and rubbed a daub of mud from her cheek. ‘Kentucky Lil and Triumvirate were in too much of a hurry to get home to turn out for puddles,’ she said. ‘How much time may we have to dress, Aunt Katherine?’

‘Just fifteen minutes,’ returned her uncle; ‘and that is a quarter of an hour more than you deserve. If you are not down then, we shall eat without waiting for you.’

‘Fifteen minutes, remember!’ cried Marcia to Sybert as they parted at the top of the stairs. ‘I’ll race with you,’ she added; ‘though I think myself that a girl ought to have a handicap.’

She found Granton, a picture of prim disapproval, waiting with her dress spread out on the bed. Marcia dropped into a wicker chair with a tired sigh.

‘You’ve ridden a long way,’ Granton remarked as she removed a muddy boot.

‘Yes, Granton, I have; and dinner’s already been waiting half an hour, and Pietro looks like a thunder-cloud, and Mrs. Copley looks worried, and the guests look hungry—what François looks like I don’t dare to think. We must fly; our reputations depend on it.’

‘Am I ready?’ she inquired, not much more than fifteen minutes later, as she twisted her head to view the effect in the mirror.

‘You’ll do very well,’ said Granton.

‘I’m terribly tired,’ she sighed; ‘and I feel more like going to bed than facing guests—but I suppose, in the natural order of events, dinner must be accomplished first.’

‘To be sure,’ said the maid, critically adjusting her train.

‘Your philosophy is so comfortable, Granton! As we have done yesterday, so shall we do to-day and also to-morrow. It saves one the trouble of making up one’s mind.’

She reached the salon just in time to take Paul Dessart’s silently offered arm to the dining-room. Sybert did not appear until the soup was being removed. He possessed himself of the empty chair beside Eleanor Royston, with a murmured apology to his hostess.

‘It’s excusable, Sybert,’ said Copley, with a frown. ‘You should not allow a woman to beat you.’

‘The furniture in that room you gave me,’ he complained gravely, ‘was built as a trap for collar-buttons. The side of the bed comes to within three inches of the floor—I couldn’t crawl under.’

‘What did you do?’ Eleanor Royston asked.

‘I borrowed one of our host’s—and I had a hard time finding it.’

‘I shall put my wardrobe under lock and key the next time you visit us,’ Copley declared.

Sybert was curiously inspecting a small white globule he found by his plate.

Marcia laughed and called from the other end of the table: ‘It’s your own prescription, Mr. Sybert; drop it in your wine-glass and drink it like a man. I’ve taken my dose.’

During this exchange of badinage Paul Dessart said never a word. He sat with his eyes fixed moodily on the table-cloth, and—one hates to say it of Paul—he sulked. For the first time since she had known him, Marcia found him difficile. He started no subject himself, and those that she started, after a brief career, fell lifeless. It may have been that she herself was somewhat ill at ease, but in any case several awkward silences fell between them, which the young man made no attempt to break. Mr. Copley would never have said of him to-night that he was an ornament to any dinner-table. It fell to the Frenchman across the way to keep the ball rolling.

In an errant glance toward the other end of the table, Marcia saw Sybert laughing softly at something Eleanor had said. She stayed her glance a second to note involuntarily how well they went together. Eleanor, with her white shoulders rising from a cloud of pale-blue gauze, looked fair and distinguished; and Sybert, with his dark face and sullen eyes, made an esthetically satisfying contrast. He was bending toward her with that air of easy politeness, that superior self-sufficiency, which had always exasperated Marcia so. But Eleanor knew how to take it; she had been out nine seasons, and the smile with which she answered him was quite as mocking as his own.

He looked to-night, through and through, what Marcia had always taken him for—the finished cosmopolitan—the diplomat—the diner-out. But he was not just that, she knew; she had seen him off his guard in the midst of the storm that afternoon, and she was still tingling with the surprise of it. She recalled what Mr. Melville had said that afternoon in the ilex grove—she was always recalling what people said about Sybert. The things seemed to stick in one’s mind; he was a subject that gave rise to many mots. ‘You think you are very broad-minded because you see the man underneath the peasant. Don’t you think you could push your broad-mindedness one step further and see the man underneath the man of the world?’ She had caught a glimpse that afternoon. It seemed now as if his air of super civilization were only a mask to conceal—she did not know what, underneath. She was searching for an apt description when she heard the young Frenchman laughingly inquire: ‘Mademoiselle Copley est un peu distraite ce soir, n’est-ce pas?’

With a little start, she became aware that some one had asked her a question. For the remainder of the dinner she kept her eyes at her end of the table, and exerted herself to be gracious to her taciturn companion. Paul’s bad temper was not unbecoming, and he scarcely could have adopted a wiser course. Marcia had expected to find him sparkling, enthusiastic, convincing; and she had come down prepared to withstand his charm. Mais voilà! there was no charm to withstand. He was sullen, moody, with a frown scarcely veiled enough for politeness. Some one had once compared him, not very originally, to a Greek god. He looked it more than ever to-night, if one can imagine a Greek god in the sulks. What was the matter with him, Marcia could only guess. Perhaps, as his cousin had affirmed, he was like a cat and needed stroking the right way of the fur. At any rate, she found the new mood rather taking, and she somewhat weakly allowed herself to stroke him the right way. By the time they rose from the table he was, if not exactly purring, at least not showing his claws.

At the Royston girls’ suggestion, they put on evening wraps and repaired to the terrace—except the two elder ladies, who preferred the more tempered atmosphere of the salon. Mrs. Copley delegated her husband and Sybert to act as chaperons—a position which Sybert accepted with a bow, to the accompaniment of a slightly puzzled smile on Eleanor’s part. She could not exactly make out the gentleman’s footing in the household. They seated themselves in a group about the balustrade, with the exception of Eleanor and Sybert, who strolled back and forth the length of the flagging. Eleanor was doing her best to-night, and her best was very good; she appeared to have wakened a spark in even his indifference. Marcia, with her eyes on the two, thought again how well they went together, and M. Benoit was a second time on the verge of calling her distraite.

The two strollers after a time joined the group, Eleanor humming under her breath a little French chanson that had been going the rounds of the Paris cafés that spring.

‘Oh, sing something we all know,’ said Margaret, and with a laughing curtesy toward Sybert she struck into ‘Fair Harvard.’ The other girls joined her. Their voices, rising high and clear, filled the night with the swinging melody. It seemed strangely out of place there, in the midst of the Sabine hills, with the old villa behind them and the Roman Campagna at their feet. As their voices died away Sybert laughed softly.

‘I swear I’d forgotten it!’

Margaret shook her head in mock reproof. ‘Forgotten it!’ she cried. ‘A man ought to be ashamed to acknowledge it if he had forgotten his Alma Mater song. It’s like forgetting his country.’

‘I suspect,’ said Eleanor, ‘that it’s time for you to go back to America and be naturalized, Mr. Sybert.’

‘Oh, well, Miss Royston,’ he objected, ‘I suppose in time one outgrows his college, just as one outgrows his kindergarten.’

‘And his country,’ Marcia added, as much for Paul Dessart’s benefit as for his own.

Margaret, searching for diversion, presently suggested that they visit the ghost. Marcia objected that the ghost was visible only during the full moon, but the objection was overruled. There was some moon at least, and a wild night like this, with flying clouds and waving branches, was just the time for a ghost to think of his sins. Mr. Copley, in the office of chaperon, remonstrated that the grass would be damp; but there were rubbers, he was told. Marcia acquiesced in the expedition without any marked enthusiasm; she foresaw a possible tête-à-tête with Paul Dessart. As they set out, however, she found herself walking beside M. Benoit, with Paul contentedly strolling on ahead at the side of his younger cousin, while Eleanor and the two chaperons brought up the rear. As they came to the end of the laurel path and approached the region of the ruins, Margaret paused with her finger on her lips and in a conspiratorial whisper impressed silence on the group. They laughingly fell into the spirit of the play, and the whole party stole along with the elaborate caution of ten-year-old boys ambuscading Indians.

The ruins in the dim light looked a fit harbour for ghosts. The crumbling piles of masonry were almost hidden by the dark foliage, but the empty fountain stood out clearly in a little open space between the trees.

The group paused on the edge of the trees and stood with eyes turned half expectantly toward the fountain. As they looked, they saw, with a tremor of surprise, the dim figure of a man rise from the coping and dissolve into the surrounding shadows. For a moment no one uttered a sound beyond a quick gasp of astonishment, and an excited giggle from Margaret Royston. Paul was the first to rise to the occasion with the muffled assertion that he recognized the fair and warlike form in which the majesty of buried Denmark did sometime march. Before any of them had recovered sufficiently to follow the apparition, a second ghost rose from the coping and stood wavering in apparent hesitancy whether to recede or advance. This was more than tradition demanded, and with a quick exclamation both Copley and Sybert sprang forward to solve the mystery.

A babble of noisy expostulation burst forth. The ghost was vociferous in his apologies. He had finished his work and had desired to take the air. It was a beautiful night. He came to talk with a friend. He did not know that the signore ever came here, or he would never have ventured.

The tones were familiar, and a little sigh of disillusionment swept through the group. The two men came back laughing, and Paul apostrophized tragically:

‘Another lost illusion! If all the ghosts turned out to be butlers, how unromantic the world would be!’

The young Frenchman took up the tale of mourning.

‘But the true ghost, Monsieur le Prince, whom I was preparing to paint; after this he will not deign to poke his nose from the grave. It is an infamy! An infamy!’ he declared.

They laughingly turned back toward the villa, and Marcia discovered that she was walking beside Paul. It had come about quite naturally, without any apparent interposition on his part; but she did not doubt, since he had the chance, that he would take advantage of it to demand an answer, and she prepared herself to parry what he might choose to say. He strolled along, whistling softly, apparently in no hurry to say anything. When he did break the silence it was to remark that the tree-toads were infernally noisy to-night. He went on to observe that he wasn’t particularly taken with her butler; the fellow protested too much in the wrong place, and not enough in the right. From that he passed to a flying criticism of villa architecture. Villa Vivalanti was a daisy except for the eastern wing, and that was ‘way off in style and broke the lines. Those gingerbread French villas at Frascati, he thought, ought to be razed to the ground by act of parliament.

Marcia responded rather lamely to his remarks, as she puzzled her brains to think whether she had done anything to offend him. He seemed entirely good-humoured, however, and chatted along as genially as the first time they had met. She could not comprehend this new attitude, and though it was just what she had wished for—such is the contrariness of human nature—she vaguely resented it. Had M. Benoit seen her just then he might have accused her, for the third time, of being distraite.

The ghost-hunters, upon their return, shortly retired for the night, as the festa at Genazzano would demand an early start. Before going upstairs, Marcia waited to give orders about an open-air breakfast-party she was planning for the morrow. In searching for Pietro she also found her uncle. Mr. Copley, very stern, was engaged in telling the butler that if it occurred again he would be discharged; and the butler, very humble, was assuring the signore that in the future his commands should be implicitly obeyed.

‘Uncle Howard,’ Marcia remonstrated, ‘you surely aren’t scolding the poor fellow because of to-night? What difference does it make if he does entertain his friends in the grounds of the old villa? We never go near the place.’

‘It is this particular friend I am objecting to.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Gervasio’s stepfather.’

‘Oh, you don’t suppose,’ she cried, ‘that he is trying to steal the child back again?’

‘I should like to see him do it!’ said Mr. Copley, with decision. ‘He doesn’t want the boy,’ he added. ‘What he wants is money, but he isn’t going to get any. I won’t have him hanging about the place, and the servants may as well understand it first as last.’

Marcia, having outlined her plan for the breakfast to a somewhat unresponsive Pietro, finally gained her room; and setting her candle down on the table, she dropped into the first chair she came to with a sigh of relief that the evening was over. She was tired, not only in body, but in mind as well.

The evening was not quite ended, however. A gentle tap came on the door, and she opened it to find Eleanor and Margaret in loose silk dressing-gowns. ‘Let us in quick,’ said Margaret. ‘We’ve just met a man in the hall.’

‘The ubiquitous Pietro shutting up windows,’ added Eleanor. ‘If I were you, I’d discharge that man and get a more companionable butler. It’s uncanny for an Italian servant to be as grave as an English one.’

‘Poor Pietro has just had a scolding, which, I suppose, accounts for his gravity. It’s funny,’ she added, ‘that’s exactly the advice that Paul gave me to-night.’ The ‘Paul’ was out before she could catch it, and she reddened apprehensively, but the girls let it pass without challenging.

‘We’ve come to talk,’ said Margaret, possessing herself of the couch and settling the cushions behind her. ‘I hope you’re not sleepy.’

‘Very,’ said Marcia; ‘but I dare say I shan’t be ten minutes from now.’

‘You needn’t worry; this isn’t going to be an all-night session,’ drawled Eleanor from the lazy depths of an easy-chair. ‘We start at nine for the Madonna’s festa.’

‘You’d better appreciate us now that you’ve got us,’ added Margaret. ‘We should by rights have slept in Rome to-night.’

‘How did you manage it?’

‘Paul took mamma down to the Forum to look at some inscriptions they’ve just dug up; and while she was gone Eleanor and I scrambled around and packed the trunks for Perugia. By the time she came back we had everything ready to come out here, and our hats on waiting to start. She didn’t recover her breath until we were in the train, and then she couldn’t say anything before Mr. Copley. When it comes to starting on Journeys,’ Margaret added, ‘mamma is not what you’d call impulsive.’

‘Not often,’ assented Eleanor; ‘but there have been instances. By the way,’ she added, ‘I wish you’d explain about Mr. Sybert; I confess I don’t quite grasp his standing in the family. How do you come to be taking such lengthy horseback rides with a young man and no groom? You never did that when my mother was chaperoning you.’

‘No,’ acquiesced Marcia; ‘I didn’t. But Mr. Sybert’s a little different. He’s not exactly a young man, you know; he’s a friend of Uncle Howard’s. He happened to be available this afternoon, and Angelo didn’t happen to be, so he came instead.’

‘As a sort of sub-groom?’ Eleanor asked. ‘I should think he might object to the position.’

‘He couldn’t help himself!’ she laughed. ‘Aunt Katherine forced him into it.’

Eleanor regarded Marcia with a still puzzled smile. ‘You talk about Mr. Sybert as if he were a contemporary of your grandfather. How old is he, may I ask?’

‘I don’t know. He’s nearly as old as Uncle Howard. Thirty-five or thirty-six, I should say.’

‘A man isn’t worth talking to under thirty-five.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ Margaret objected. ‘I never heard any one in my life talk better than Paul, and he’s exactly twenty-five.’

‘Paul talks words; he doesn’t talk ideas,’ said her sister.

There was a pause, in which Eleanor leaned forward to examine some bits of green and blue iridescent glass lying in a little tray on the table. ‘What are these?’ she inquired.

‘Pieces of perfume-bottles that the grave-digger in Palestrina found in an old Etruscan tomb. There were some bronze mirrors, and the most wonderful gold necklace—I wanted it dreadfully, but he didn’t dare sell it; it’s gone to a museum in Rome. Aren’t these pieces of glass lovely, though? I am going to have them set in gold and made into pins.’

‘Here’s a little bottle that’s scarcely broken.’ Eleanor held it up before the candle and let the light play upon its surface. ‘Who do you suppose owned it before you, Marcia?’

‘Some girl who turned to dust centuries ago.’

‘And her necklaces and mirrors and perfume-bottles still exist. What a commentary!’

‘Thank goodness, they don’t put such things in one’s coffin nowadays,’ said Marcia; ‘or twenty-five hundred years from now some other girl would be saying the same of us.’

‘Twenty-five hundred years,’ Eleanor murmured. ‘I declare, my nine seasons sink into insignificance!’ She dropped the bottle into its tray and leaned back in her chair with a little laugh. ‘America is a bit tame, isn’t it, after Italy? One doesn’t get so many emotions.’

‘I’m not sure but one gets too many in Italy,’ said Marcia.

‘How long are you going to stay over?’

‘I don’t know. It’s so much easier not to make up one’s mind. I shall probably stay a year or so longer with Uncle Howard.’

‘I like your uncle, Marcia. He has a very taking way of saying funny things without smiling.’

‘Ah,’ sighed Marcia, ‘he has!’

‘And as for Mr. Sybert–’ Margaret put in mockingly.

‘I think he’s about the most interesting man I’ve met in Europe,’ Eleanor agreed imperturbably.

‘The most interesting man you’ve met in Europe?’ Marcia opened her eyes. The statement was sweeping, and Eleanor had had experience. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ said Eleanor, with the judicial air of a connoisseur, ‘for one thing, he has a striking face. I don’t know whether you ever noticed it, but he has eyes exactly like that portrait of Filippino Lippi in the Uffizi. I kept thinking about it all the time I was talking to him—sleepy sort of Italian eyes, you know—and an American mouth. It makes an interesting combination; you keep wondering what a man like that will do.’

As Marcia made no comment, she continued:

‘He has an awfully interesting history. We met him at a reception last week, and Mr. Melville told me all about him afterward. He was born in Genoa—his father was United States consul—and he was brought up in the midst of the excitement during the fight for Italian unity. Politics was in the air he breathed. He knows more about the Italians than they know about themselves. He speaks the language like a native, and he never–’

‘Oh, I know what Mr. Melville told you,’ Marcia interrupted. ‘He likes him.’

‘Don’t most people?’

‘Ask your cousin about him. Ask Mr. Carthrope, the English sculptor. Ask anybody you please—barring my uncle—and see what you’ll hear.’

‘What shall I hear?’

‘A different story from every person.’

‘Well, really! He’s worth knowing.’

‘I detest him!’ Marcia made the statement as much from habit as conviction.

Eleanor regarded her a moment rather narrowly, and then she observed: ‘I will tell you one thing, Marcia Copley; and that is, that interesting men are mighty scarce in this world. I don’t remember ever having met more than half a dozen.’

‘And you’ve had experience,’ suggested Marcia.

‘Nine seasons.’

‘Who were they—the half-dozen?’

‘One was a Kansas politician who wrote poetry. A most amazing mixture of crudeness and tact—remarkably bright in some ways, but unexpectedly lacking in others. He’d never read Hamlet; said he’d heard of it, though. Another was a super-civilized Russian. I met him in Cairo. He spoke seven languages, and didn’t find any of them full enough to express his thoughts. Another was–’

‘The engineer,’ suggested Marcia. She had heard of the engineer both from Eleanor and her mother.

‘Yes,’ agreed Eleanor, ‘the chief engineer on the Claytons’ yacht. I cruised around with them two years ago on the Mediterranean, and the only interesting man on board was the engineer. He was English, and he’d lived in India and Burma, and in—oh, hundreds of nameless places. I couldn’t get much out of him at first; he was pretty shy. English people are, you know. But when he saw that one was really interested he would tell the most astonishing tales. I didn’t have much chance to talk to him—he didn’t appeal to mamma. That was one of the times that mamma was impetuous,’ she added with a laugh. ‘Instead of keeping on to Port Said with the boat, we disembarked at Alexandria and ran up to Cairo for the rest of the winter. It was there I met the Russian. He was stopping at Shepheard’s.’

Eleanor paused, and her gaze became reminiscent as she sat toying with the little Etruscan perfume-bottle.

‘And the others?’ Marcia prompted.

‘Well, let me see,’ Eleanor laughed. ‘I once knew a professor of psychology in a little speck of a New England college. He spent his whole life in thinking, and he’d arrived at some very queer conclusions. He was most entertaining—he knew absolutely nothing about the world.’ A shade of something like remorse crossed her face, and she hastily abandoned the professor. ‘Did I say there were any more? I can’t think who the fifth can be, unless I include the blacksmith who married my maid. I never knew him personally; I merely judge from her report of him. He beats her, I believe, when he gets angry; but he’s so apologetic afterward that she enjoys it. If you’ve ever read Wuthering Heights he’s exactly like Heathcliff. I’d really like to know him. He’d be worth studying.’

‘That’s the trouble,’ complained Marcia. ‘If you’re a man you can go around and get acquainted with any one you please, whether he’s a blacksmith or a prince; but if you’re a girl you have to wait till you’re introduced at a tea. And the interesting ones never are introduced at teas.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Eleanor; ‘that’s partly true. But, on the other hand, I think you really get to know people better if you’re a girl—what they’re really like inside, I mean. Men are remarkably confidential creatures.’

‘Did you find Mr. Sybert confidential?’

‘N-no. I can’t say that I did. He’s queer, isn’t he? You have the feeling that he doesn’t talk about what he thinks about—that’s why I should like to know him. It’s not what a man does that makes him interesting; it’s what he thinks. It’s his potentialities.’

Margaret rose with something of a yawn. ‘If you’re going to discuss potentialities, I’m going to bed. Come on, Eleanor. To-morrow’s the festa of Our Lady of Good Counsel, and we start at nine o’clock.’

Eleanor rose reluctantly. ‘I wish we weren’t going to Perugia on Wednesday. I should much rather stay here with Marcia.’

‘And Mr. Sybert,’ Margaret laughed.

‘Oh, yes, Mr. Sybert,’ Eleanor acquiesced. ‘He annoys you until you get him settled.’

‘He’s like one of those problems in algebra,’ suggested Marcia. ‘Given a lot of things, to find the value of x. You work it exactly right and x won’t come.’

Margaret paused by the door and gathered her wrapper around her like a toga.

‘While you’re talking about interesting people,’ she threw back, ‘I know one who isn’t appreciated, and that’s Paul. He’s a mighty nice boy.’

‘That’s just what he is,’ said Eleanor. ‘A nice boy—et c’est tout. Good night, Marcia. When we come back from Perugia we’ll sit up all night talking about interesting men. It’s an interesting subject.’