Kitabı oku: «The Wheat Princess», sayfa 3

‘No; and when they can, their earnings are eaten up in taxes. The people in the southern provinces are literally starving, I tell you; and it’s worse this year than usual, thanks to men like your father and me.’

‘What do you mean?’

For a moment he felt almost impelled to tell her the truth. Then, as he glanced down at her, he stopped himself quickly. She looked so delicate, so patrician, so aloof from everything that was sordid and miserable; she could not help, and it was better that she should not know.

‘What do you mean?’ she repeated. ‘What has papa been doing?’

‘Oh, nothing very criminal,’ he returned. ‘Only at a time like this one feels as if one’s money were a reproach. Italy’s in a bad way just now; the wheat crop failed last year, and that makes it inconvenient for people who live on macaroni.’

‘Do you mean the people really haven’t anything to eat?’

‘Not much.’

‘How terrible, Uncle Howard! Won’t the government do anything?’

‘The government is doing what it can. There was a riot in Florence last month, and they lowered the grain tax; King Humbert gave nine thousand lire to feed the people of Pisa a couple of weeks ago. You can do the same for some other city, if you want to play at being a princess.’

‘I thought you believed in finding them work instead giving them money.’

‘Oh, as a matter of principle, certainly. But you can’t have ’em dying on your door-step, you know.’

‘And to think we’re having a dinner to-night, when we’re not the slightest bit hungry!’

‘I’m afraid our dinner wouldn’t go far toward feeding the hungry in Italy.’

‘How does my dress look, my dear?’ asked Mrs. Copley, appearing in the doorway. ‘I have been so bothered over it; she didn’t fix the lace at all as I told her. These Italian dressmakers are not to be depended upon. I really should have run up to Paris for a few weeks this spring, only you were so unwilling, Howard.’

Marcia looked at her aunt a moment with wide-open eyes. ‘Heavens!’ she thought, ‘do I usually talk this way? No wonder Mr. Sybert doesn’t like me!’ And then she laughed. ‘I think it looks lovely, Aunt Katherine, and I am sure it is very becoming.’

The arrival of guests precluded any further conversation on the subject of Italian dressmakers. The Contessa Torrenieri was small and slender and olive-coloured, with a cloud of black hair and dramatic eyes. She had a pair of nervous little hands which were never still, and a magnetic manner which brought the men to her side and created a tendency among the women to say spiteful things. Marcia was no exception to the rest of her sex, and her comments on the contessa’s doings were frequently not prompted by a spirit of charitableness.

To-night the contessa evidently had something on her mind. She barely finished her salutations before transferring her attention to Marcia. ‘Come, Signorina Copley, and sit beside me on the sofa; we harmonize so well’—this with a glance from her own rose-coloured gown to Marcia’s rose trimmings. ‘I missed you from tea this afternoon,’ she added. ‘I trust you had a pleasant walk.’

‘A pleasant walk?’ Marcia questioned, off her guard.

‘I passed you as I was driving in the Borghese. But you did not see me; you were too occupied.’ She shook her head, with a smile. ‘It will not do in Italy, my dear. An Italian girl would never walk alone with a young man.’

‘Fortunately I am not an Italian girl.’

‘You are too strict, contessa,’ Sybert, who was sitting near, put in with a laugh. ‘If Miss Copley chooses, there is no reason why she should not walk in the gardens with a young man.’

‘A girl of the lower classes perhaps, but not of Signorina Copley’s class. With her dowry, she will be marrying an Italian nobleman one of these days.’

Marcia flushed with annoyance. ‘I have not the slightest intention of marrying an Italian nobleman,’ she returned.

‘One must marry some one,’ said her companion.

Mr. Melville relieved the tension by inquiring, ‘And who was the hero of this episode, Miss Marcia? We have not heard his name.’

Marcia laughed good-humouredly. ‘Your friend Mr. Dessart.’ The Melvilles exchanged glances. ‘I met him in the gallery, and as the carriage hadn’t come and Gerald was playing in the fountain and Marietta was flirting with a gendarme (Dear me! Aunt Katherine, I didn’t mean to say that), we strolled about until the carriage came. I’m sure I had no intention of shocking the Italian nobility; it was quite unpremeditated.’

‘If the Italian nobility never stands a worse shock than that, it is happier than most nobilities,’ said her uncle. And the simultaneous announcement of M. Benoit and dinner created a diversion.

It was a small party, and every one felt the absence of that preliminary chill which a long list of guests invited two weeks beforehand is likely to produce. They talked back and forth across the table, and laughed and joked in the unpremeditated way that an impromptu affair calls forth. Marcia glanced at her uncle once or twice in half perplexity. He seemed so entirely the careless man of the world, as he turned a laughing face to answer one of Mrs. Melville’s sallies, that she could scarcely believe he was the same man who had spoken so seriously to her a few minutes before. She glanced across at Sybert. He was smiling at some remark of the contessa’s, to which he retorted in Italian. ‘I don’t see how any sensible man can be interested in the contessa!’ was her inward comment as she transferred her attention to the young Frenchman at her side.

Whenever the conversation showed a tendency to linger on politics, Mrs. Copley adroitly redirected it, as she knew from experience that the subject was too combustible by far for a dinner-party.

‘Italy, Italy! These men talk nothing but Italy,’ she complained to the young Frenchman on her right. ‘Does it not make you homesick for the boulevards?’

‘I suffered the nostalgie once,’ he confessed, ‘but Rome is a good cure.’

Marcia shook her head in mock despair. ‘And you, too, M. Benoit! Patriotism is certainly dying out.’

‘Not while you live,’ said her uncle.

‘Oh, I know I’m abnormally patriotic,’ she admitted; ‘but you’re all so sluggish in that respect, that you force it upon one.’

‘There are other useful virtues besides patriotism,’ Sybert suggested.

‘Wait until you have spent a spring in the Sabine hills, Miss Copley,’ Melville put in, ‘and you will be as bad as the rest of us.’

‘Ah, mademoiselle,’ Benoit added fervently, ‘spring-time in the Sabine hills will be compensation sufficient to most of us for not seeing paradise.’

‘I believe, with my uncle, it’s a kind of Roman fever!’ she cried. ‘I never expected to hear a Frenchman renounce his native land.’

‘It is not that I renounce France,’ the young man remonstrated. ‘I lofe France as much as ever, but I open my arms to Italy as well. To lofe another land and peoples besides your own makes you, not littler, but, as you say, wider—broader. We are—we are– Ah, mademoiselle!’ he broke off, ‘if you would let me talk in French I could say what I mean; but how can one be eloquent in this halting tongue of yours?’

‘Coraggio, Benoit! You are doing bravely,’ Sybert laughed.

‘We are,’ the young man went on with a sudden inspiration, ‘what you call in English, citizens of the world. You, mademoiselle, are American, La Signora Contessa is Italian, Mr. Carthrope is English, I am French, but we are all citizens of the same world, and in whatever land we find ourselves, there we recognize one another for brothers, and are always at home; for it is still the world.’

The young man’s eloquence was received with an appreciative laugh. ‘And how about paradise?’ some one suggested.

‘Ah, my friends, it is there that we will be strangers!’ Benoit returned tragically.

‘Citizens of the world,’ Sybert turned the stem of his wine glass meditatively as he repeated the phrase. ‘It seems to me, in spite of Miss Marcia, that one can’t do much better than that. If you’re a patriotic citizen of the world, I should think you’d done your duty by mankind, and might reasonably expect to reap a reward in Benoit’s paradise.’

He laughed and raised his glass. ‘Here’s to the World, our fatherland! May we all be loyal citizens!’

‘I think,’ said Mrs. Melville, ‘since this is a farewell dinner and we are pledging toasts, we should drink to Villa Vivalanti and a happy spring in the Sabine hills.’

Copley bowed his thanks. ‘If you will all visit the villa we will pledge it in the good wine of Vivalanti.’

‘And here’s to the Vivalanti ghost!’ said the young Frenchman. ‘May it lif long and prosper!’

‘Italy’s the place for such ghosts to prosper,’ Copley returned.

‘Here’s to the poor people of Italy—may they have enough to eat!’ said Marcia.

Sybert glanced up in sudden surprise, but she did not look at him; she was smiling across at her uncle.

CHAPTER IV

The announcement that a principe Americano was coming to live in Villa Vivalanti occasioned no little excitement in the village. Wagons with furnishings from Rome had been seen to pass on the road below the town, and the contadini in the wayside vineyards had stopped their work to stare, and had repeated to each other rumours of the fabulous wealth this signor principe was said to possess. The furniture they allowed to pass without much controversy. But they shook their heads dubiously when two wagons full of flowering trees and shrubs wound up the roadway toward the villa. This foreigner must be a grasping person—as if there were not trees enough already in the Sabine hills, that he must bring out more from Rome!

The dissection of the character of Prince Vivalanti’s new tenant occupied so much of the people’s time that the spring pruning of the vineyards came near to being slighted. The fountainhead of all knowledge on the subject was the landlord of the Croce d’Oro. He himself had had the honour of entertaining their excellencies at breakfast, on the occasion of their first visit to Castel Vivalanti, and with unvarying eloquence he nightly recounted the story to an interested group of loungers in the trattoria kitchen: of how he had made the omelet without garlic because princes have delicate stomachs and cannot eat the food one would cook for ordinary men; of how they had sat at that very table, and the young signorina principessa, who was beautiful as the holy angels in paradise, had told him with her own lips that it was the best omelet she had ever eaten; and of how they had paid fifteen lire for their breakfast without so much as a word of protest, and then of their own accord had given three lire more for mancia]. Eighteen lire. Corpo di Bacco! that was the kind of guests he wished would drop in every day.

But when Domenico Paterno, the baker of Castel Vivalanti, heard the story, he shrugged his shoulders and spread out his palms, and asserted that a prince was a prince all over the world; and that the Americano had allowed himself to be cheated from stupidity, not generosity. For his part, he thought the devil was the same, whether he talked American or Italian. But it was reported, on the other hand, that Bianca Rosini had also talked with the forestieri when she was washing clothes in the stream. They had stopped their horses to watch the work, and the signorina had smiled and asked if the water were not cold; for her part, she was sure American nobles had kind hearts.

Domenico, however, was not to be convinced by any such counter-evidence as this. ‘Smiles are cheap,’ he returned sceptically. ‘Does any one know of their giving money?’

No one did know of their giving money, but there were plenty of boys to testify that they had run by the side of the carriage fully a kilometre asking for soldi, and the signore had only shaken his head to pay them for their trouble.

‘Si, si, what did I tell you?’ Domenico finished in triumph. ‘American princes are like any others—perhaps a little more stupid, but for the rest, exactly the same.’

There were no facts at hand to confute such logic.

And one night Domenico appeared at the Croce d’Oro with a fresh piece of news; his son, Tarquinio, who kept an osteria in Rome, had told the whole story.

‘His name is Copli—Signor Edoardo Copli—and it is because of him’—Domenico scowled—‘that I pay for my flour twice the usual price. When the harvests failed last year, and he saw that wheat was going to be scarce, he sent to America and he bought all the wheat in the land and he put it in storehouses. He is holding it there now while the price goes up—up—up. And when the poor people in Italy get very, very hungry, and are ready to pay whatever he asks, then perhaps—very charitably—he will agree to sell. Già, that is the truth,’ he insisted darkly. ‘Everybody knows it in Rome. Doubtless he thinks to escape from his sin up here in the mountains—but he will see—it will follow him wherever he goes. Maché! It is the story of the Bad Prince over again.’

Finally one morning—one Friday morning—some of the children of the village who were in the habit of loitering on the highway in the hope of picking up stray soldi, reported that the American’s horses and carriages had come out from Rome, and that the drivers had stopped at the inn of Sant’ Agapito and ordered wine like gentlemen. It was further rumoured that the principe himself intended to follow in the afternoon. The matter was discussed with considerable interest before the usual noonday siesta.

‘It is my opinion,’ said Tommaso Ferri, the blacksmith, as he sat in the baker’s doorway, washing down alternate mouthfuls of bread and onion with Vivalanti wine—‘it is my opinion that the Signor Americano must be a very reckless man to venture on so important a journey on Friday—and particularly in Lent. It is well known that if a poor man starts for market on Friday, he will break his eggs on the way; and because a rich man has no eggs to break, is that any reason the buon Dio should overlook his sin? Things are more just in heaven than on earth,’ he added solemnly; ‘and in my opinion, if the foreigner comes to-day, he will not prosper in the villa.’

Domenico nodded approvingly.

‘Si, si, Tommaso is right. The Americano has already tempted heaven far enough in this matter of the wheat, and it will not be the part of wisdom for him to add to the account. Apoplexies are as likely to fall on princes as on bakers, and a dead prince is no different from any other dead man—only that he goes to purgatory.’

It was evident, however, that the foreigner was in truth going to tempt Fate; for in the afternoon two empty carriages came back from the villa and turned toward Palestrina, obviously bound for the station. All the ragazzi of Castel Vivalanti waited on the road to see them pass and beg for coppers; and it was just as Domenico had foretold: they never received a single soldo.

The remarks about the principe Americano were not complimentary in Castel Vivalanti that night; but the little yellow-haired principino was handled more gently. The black-haired little Italian boys told how he had laughed when they turned somersaults by the side of the carriage, and how he had cried when his father would not let him throw soldi; and the general opinion seemed to be that if he died young, he at least had a chance of paradise.

CHAPTER V

Meanwhile, the unconscious subjects of Castel Vivalanti’s ‘apoplexies’ were gaily installing themselves in their new, old dwelling. The happy hum of life had again invaded the house, and its walls once more echoed to the ring of a child’s laughter. They were very matter-of-fact people—these Americans, and they took possession of the ancestral home of the Vivalanti as if it were as much their right as a seaside cottage at Newport. Upstairs Granton and Marietta were unpacking trunks and hampers and laying Paris gowns in antique Roman clothes-chests; in the villa kitchen François was rattling copper pots and kettles, and anxiously trying to adapt his modern French ideas to a mediaeval Roman stove; while from every room in succession sounded the patter of Gerald’s feet and his delighted squeals over each new discovery.

For the past two weeks Roman workmen and Castel Vivalanti cleaning-women had been busily carrying out Mrs. Copley’s orders. The florid furniture and coloured chandeliers of the latter Vivalanti had been banished to the attic (or what answers to an attic in a Roman villa), while the faded damask of a former generation had been dusted and restored. Tapestries covered the walls and hung over the balustrade of the marble staircase. Dark rugs lay on the red tile floors; carved chests and antique chairs and tables of coloured marble, supported by gilded griffins, were scattered through the rooms. In the bedrooms the heavy draperies had been superseded by curtains of an airier texture, while wicker chairs and chintz-covered couches lent an un-Roman air of comfort to the rooms.

In spite of his humorous grumbling about the trials of moving-day, Mr. Copley found himself very comfortable as he lounged on the parapet toward sunset, smoking a pre-prandial cigarette, and watching the shadows as they fell over the Campagna. Gerald was already up to his elbows in the fountain, and the ilex grove was echoing his happy shrieks as he prattled in Italian to Marietta about a marvellous two-tailed lizard he had caught in a cranny of the stones. Copley smiled as he listened, for—Castel Vivalanti to the contrary—his little boy was very near his heart.

Marcia in the house had been gaily superintending the unpacking, and running back and forth between the rooms, as excited by her new surroundings as Gerald himself.

‘What time does Villa Vivalanti dine?’ she inquired while on a flying visit to her aunt’s room.

‘Eight o’clock when any of us are in town, and half-past seven other nights.’

‘I suppose it’s half-past seven to-night, alors! Shall I make a grande toilette in honour of the occasion?’

‘Put on something warm, whatever else you do; I distrust this climate after sundown.’

‘You’re such a distrustful person, Aunt Katherine! I can’t understand how one can have the heart to accuse this innocent old villa of harbouring malaria.’

She returned to her own room and delightedly rummaged out a dinner-gown from the ancient wardrobe, with a little laugh at the thought of the many different styles it had held in its day. Perhaps some other girl had once occupied this room; very likely a young Princess Vivalanti, two hundred years before, had hung silk-embroidered gowns in this very wardrobe. It was a big, rather bare, delightfully Italian apartment with tall windows having solid barred shutters overlooking the terrace. The view from the windows revealed a broad expanse of Campagna and hills. Marcia dressed with her eyes on the landscape, and then stood a long time gazing up at the broken ridges of the Sabines, glowing softly in the afternoon light. Picturesque little mountain hamlets of battered grey stone were visible here and there clinging to the heights; and in the distance the walls and towers of a half-ruined monastery stood out clear against the sky. She drew a deep breath of pleasure. To be an artist, and to appreciate and reproduce this beauty, suddenly struck her as an ideal life. She smiled at herself as she recalled something she had said to Paul Dessart in the gallery the day before; she had advised him—an artist—to exchange Italy for Pittsburg!

Mr. Copley, who was strolling on the terrace, glanced up, and catching sight of his niece, paused beneath her balcony while he quoted:—

 
‘“But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”’
 

Marcia brought her eyes from the distant landscape to a contemplation of her uncle; and then she stepped through the glass doors, and leaned over the balcony railing with a little laugh.

‘You make a pretty poor Romeo, Uncle Howard,’ she called down. ‘I’m afraid the real one never wore a dinner-jacket nor smoked a cigarette.’

Mr. Copley spread out his hands in protest.

‘For the matter of that, I doubt if Juliet ever wore a gown from—where was it—42, Avenue de l’Opéra? How does the new house go?’ he asked.

‘Beautifully. I feel like a princess on a balcony waiting for the hunters to come back from the chase.’

‘I can’t get over the idea that I’m a usurper myself, and that the rightful lord is languishing in a donjon somewhere in the cellar. Come down and talk to me. I’m getting lonely so far from the world.’

Marcia disappeared from the balcony and reappeared three minutes later on the loggia. She paused on the top step and slowly turned around in order to take in the whole affect. The loggia, in its rehabilitation, made an excellent lounging-place for a lazy summer morning. It was furnished with comfortably deep Oriental rush chairs, a crimson rug and awnings, and, at either side of the steps, white azaleas growing in marble cinerary urns.

‘Isn’t this the most fun you ever had, Uncle Howard?’ she inquired as she brought her eyes back to Mr. Copley waiting on the terrace below. ‘We’ll have coffee served out here in the morning, and then when it gets sunny in the afternoon we’ll move to the end of the terrace under the ilex trees. Villa Vivalanti is the most thoroughly satisfying place I ever lived in.’ She ran down the steps and joined him. ‘Aren’t those little trees nice?’ she asked, nodding toward a row of oleanders ranged at mathematical intervals along the balustrade. ‘I think that Aunt Katherine and I planned things beautifully!’

‘If every one were as well pleased with his own work as you appear to be, this would be a contented world. There’s nothing like the beautiful enthusiasm of youth.’

‘It’s a very good thing to have, just the same,’ said Marcia, good-naturedly; ‘and without mentioning any names, I know one man who would be less disagreeable if he had more of it.’

‘None of that!’ said her uncle. ‘Our pact was that if I stopped grumbling about the villa being so abominably far from Rome, you were not to utter any—er–’

‘Unpleasant truths about Mr. Sybert? Very well, I’ll not mention him again; and you’ll please not refer to the thirty-nine kilometres—it’s a bargain. Gerald, I judge, has found the fountain,’ she added as a delighted shriek issued from the grove.

‘And a menagerie as well.’

‘If he will only keep them out of doors! I shall dream of finding lizards in my bed.’

‘If you only dream of them you will be doing well. I dare say the place is full of bats and lizards and owls and all manner of ruin-haunting creatures.’

‘You’re such a pessimist, Uncle Howard. Between you and Aunt Katherine, the poor villa won’t have a shred of character left. For my part, I approve of it all—particularly the ruins. I am dying to explore them—do you think it’s too late to-night?’

‘Far too late; you’d get malaria, to say nothing of missing dinner. Here comes Pietro now to announce the event.’

As the family entered the dining-room they involuntarily paused on the threshold, struck by the contrast between the new and the old. In the days of Cardinal Vivalanti the room had been the chapel, and it still contained its Gothic ceiling, appropriately redecorated to its new uses with grape-wreathed trellises, and, in the central panelling, Bacchus crowned with vines. The very modern dinner-table, with its glass and silver and shaded candles, looked ludicrously out of place in the long, dusky, vaulted apartment, which, in spite of its rakish frescoes, tenaciously preserved the air of a chapel. The glass doors at the end were thrown wide to a little balcony which overlooked the garden and the ilex grove; and the room was flooded with a nightingale’s song.

Marcia clasped her hands ecstatically.

‘Isn’t this perfect? Aren’t you glad we came, Aunt Katherine? I feel like forgiving all my enemies! Uncle Howard, I’m going to be lovely to Mr. Sybert.’

‘Don’t promise anything rash,’ he laughed. ‘You’ll get acclimated in a day or two.’

Gerald, in honour of the occasion, and because Marietta, under the stress of excitement, had forgotten to give him his supper, was allowed to dine en famille. Elated by the unwonted privilege and by his new surroundings, he babbled gaily of the ride in the cars and the little boys who turned ‘summelsorts’ by the roadside, and of the beautiful two-tailed lizard of the fountain, whose charms he dwelt on lovingly. But he had missed his noonday nap, and though he struggled bravely through the first three courses, his head nodded over the chicken and salad, and he was led away by Marietta still sleepily boasting, in a blend of English and Italian, of the bellissimi animali he would catch domane morning in the fountain.

‘It is a pity,’ said Marcia, as the sound of his prattle died away, ‘Gerald hasn’t some one his own age to play with.’

‘Yes, it is a pity,’ Copley returned. ‘I passed a lonely childhood myself, and I know how barren it is.’

‘That is the chief reason that would make me want to go back to New York,’ said his wife.

Her husband smiled. ‘I suppose there are children to be found outside of New York?’

‘There are the Kirkups in Rome,’ she agreed; ‘but they are so boisterous; and they always quarrel with Gerald whenever they come to play with him.’

‘I am not sure, myself, but that Gerald quarrels with them,’ returned her husband. However fond he might be of his offspring, he cherished no motherly delusions. ‘But perhaps you are right,’ he added, with something of a sigh. ‘It may be necessary to take him back to America before long. I myself have doubts if this cosmopolitan atmosphere it the best in which to bring up a boy.’

‘I should have wished him to spend a winter in Paris for his French,’ said Mrs. Copley, plaintively; ‘but I dare say he can learn it later. Marcia didn’t begin till she was twelve, and she has a very good accent, I am sure.’

Mr. Copley twisted the handle of his glass in silence.

‘I suppose, after all,’ he said finally, to no one in particular, ‘if you manage to bring up a boy to be a decent citizen you’ve done something in the world.’

‘I don’t know,’ Marcia objected, with a half-laugh. ‘If one man, whom we will suppose is a decent citizen, brings up one boy to be a decent citizen, and does nothing else, I don’t see that much is gained to the world. Your one man has merely shifted the responsibility.’

Mr. Copley shrugged a trifle. ‘Perhaps the boy might be better able to bear it.’

‘Of course it would be easier for the man to think so,’ she agreed. ‘But if everybody passed on his responsibilities there wouldn’t be much progress. The boys might do the same, you know, when they grew up.’

Mrs. Copley rose, ‘If you two are going to talk metaphysics, I shall go into the salon and have coffee alone.’

‘It’s not metaphysics; it’s theology,’ her husband returned. ‘Marcia is developing into a terrible preacher.’

‘I know it,’ Marcia acknowledged. ‘I’m growing deplorably moral; I think it must be the Roman air.’

‘It doesn’t affect most people that way,’ her uncle laughed. ‘I don’t care for any coffee, Katherine. I will smoke a cigarette on the terrace and wait for you out there.’

He disappeared through the balcony doors, and Marcia and her aunt proceeded to the salon.

Marcia poured the coffee, and her aunt said as she received her cup, ‘I really believe your uncle is getting tired of Rome and will be ready to go back before long.’

‘I don’t believe he’s tired of Rome, Aunt Katherine. I think he’s just a little bit—well, discouraged.’

‘Nonsense, child! he has nothing to be discouraged about; he is simply getting restless again. I know the signs! I’ve never known him to stay as long as this in one place before. I only hope now that he will not think of any ridiculous new thing to do, but will be satisfied to go back to New York and settle down quietly like other people.’

‘It seems to me,’ said Marcia, slowly, ‘as if he might do more good there, because he would understand better what the people need. There are plenty of things to be done even in New York.’

‘Oh, yes; when he once got settled he would find any amount of things to take up his time. He might even try yachting, for a change; I am sure that keeps men absorbed.’

Marcia sipped her coffee in silence and glanced out of the window at her uncle, who was pacing up and down the terrace with his hands in his pockets. He looked a rather lonely figure in the half-darkness. It suddenly struck her, as she watched him, that she did not understand him; she had scarcely realized before that there was anything to understand.

Mrs. Copley set her cup down on the table, and Marcia rose. ‘Let’s go out on the terrace, Aunt Katherine.’

‘You go out, my dear, and I will join you later. I want to see if Gerald is asleep. I neglected to have a crib sent out for him, and the dear child thrashes around so—what with a bed four feet high and a stone floor–’

‘It would be disastrous!’ Marcia agreed.

She crossed the loggia to the terrace and silently fell into step beside her uncle. It was almost dark, and a crescent moon was hanging low over the top of Guadagnolo. A faint lemon light still tinged the west, throwing into misty relief the outline of the Alban hills. The ilex grove was black—gruesomely black—and the happy song of the nightingales and the splashing of the fountain sounded uncanny coming from the darkness; but the white, irregular mass of the villa formed a cheerful contrast, with its shining lights, which threw squares of brightness on the marble terrace and the trees.

Marcia looked about with a deep breath. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Uncle Howard?’ They paused a moment by the parapet and stood looking down over the plain. ‘Isn’t the Campagna lovely,’ she added, ‘half covered with mist?’

‘Yes, it’s lovely—and the mist means death to the peasants who live beneath it.’

She exclaimed half impatiently:

‘Uncle Howard, why can’t you let anything be beautiful here without spoiling it by pointing out an ugliness beneath?’

‘I’m sorry; it isn’t my fault that the ugliness exists. Look upon the mist as a blessed dew from heaven, if it makes you any happier.’

‘Of course I should rather know the truth, but it seems as if the Italians are happy in spite of things. They strike me as the happiest people I have ever seen.’