Olive in Italy Part 18

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 rea.s.sured 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 pa.s.sing, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 PaG.o.da 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 spa.r.s.ely decorated with j.a.panese 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 ap.r.o.n-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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s. 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.