Olive in Italy Part 2

"Is Siena beautiful?"

"It is a gem of the Renaissance, and you will love it as I do, I know, but I wish you could have seen Florence first. My brother has a villa at Settignano and I am going there now. The fruit trees in the orchard will be all white with blossom. You remember Romeo's April oath: 'By yonder moon that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops--'"

They lunched in the station restaurant at Genoa, and there he bought the girl a basket of fruit. "A poor subst.i.tute for the tea you will be wanting presently," he explained. "You have no tea-basket with you?

You will want one if you are going to live with Italians."

"I never thought of it."

"May I send you one?" he asked eagerly. "Do let me."

Olive flushed with pleasure. No one had been so kind to her since her mother died. Evidently he liked her--oh! he liked her very much. She suddenly realised how much she would miss him when they parted at Florence and she had to go on alone. It had been so good to be with someone stronger than herself who would take care of her. He had seemed happy too, and she thought he looked younger now than he did when she first saw him standing by the bookstall at Victoria station.

"It is very good of you," she said. "I should like it. Thank you. I--I shall be sorry to say good-bye."

He met her wistful eyes gravely. "I should like you to know that I shall never forget this day," he said. "I shall never cease to be grateful to you for being so--for being what you are. My wife is different."

"Your wife--"

"I don't live with her."

He took a card from his case presently and scribbled an address on it.

"I dare not hope that I shall ever hear from you again, but that is my name, and letters will always be forwarded to me from my brother's place. If ever I could do anything--"

She faltered some word of thanks in an uncertain voice. She felt as if something had come upon her for which she was unprepared, some shadow of the world's pain, some flame of its fires that flickered at her heart for a moment and was gone. She was suddenly afraid, not of the brown eyes that were fixed so hungrily upon her face, but of herself.

She could hear the beating of her own heart. The pity of it--the pity of it! He was so nice. Why could not they be friends--

The night had fallen long since and they were nearing Florence.

"Don't forget to change at Empoli," he said. "I will send my man on as far as that to look after you. Will you let me kiss you?"

"Yes."

He came over and sat on the seat by her side. "Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you," he said gently, and then, seeing her pale, he drew back. "No, I won't. It would not be fair. Oh, I beg your pardon! It will be enough for me to remember how good you were."

The train pa.s.sed into the lighted station, and he stood up and took his hat and coat from the rack before he turned to her once more.

"Good-bye."

CHAPTER IV

"Has anyone seen our cousin?" asked Gemma as she helped herself to _spaghetti_.

Her aunt shrugged her fat shoulders. "No! The _donna di servizio_ is mistress here, and she has ordained that the cousin shall not be disturbed. She has even locked the door, and she carries the key in her pocket."

"It is true," old Carolina said placidly. She was accustomed to join in the conversation at table when she chose, and Italian servants are allowed great freedom of speech. "You were all in your beds when Giovanni Scampo drove her here in his cab this morning or you would have seen her then. The poor child is half dead with fatigue. Let her sleep, I say. There are veal cutlets to come, Signorina Maria; will you have more _spaghetti_?"

"A little more."

The old woman shook her head. "You eat too much."

The Menotti lived in a small stuffy flat on the third floor of 25, Piazza Tolomei. It had the one advantage of being central, but was otherwise extremely inconvenient. The kitchen was hot and airless, and the servant had to sleep in a dark cupboard adjoining, in an atmosphere compounded of the scent of cheese, black beetles and old boots. There were four bedrooms besides, all opening on to the dining-room; and a tiny drawing-room, seldom used and never dusted, was filled to overflowing with gilt furniture and decorative fantasies in wool work.

The Menotti did not entertain. They met their friends at church, or at the theatre, or in the Lizza gardens, where they walked every evening in the summer. No man had ever seen them other than well dressed, but in the house they wore loose white cotton jackets and old skirts. They were _en deshabille_ now, though their heads were elaborately dressed and their faces powdered, and Maria's waist was considerably larger than it appeared to be when she was socially "visible."

"I must breathe sometimes," she said.

The three girls were inclined to stoutness, but Gemma drank vinegar and ate sparingly, and so had succeeded in keeping herself slim hitherto, though she was only three years younger than Maria, who was twenty-nine and looked forty.

Carmela was podgy, but she might lace or not just as she pleased. No one would look at her in any case since her kind, good-humoured, silly face was marked with smallpox.

Gemma was the pride of her aunt and the hope of the family. The girls were poor, and it is hard for such to find husbands, but she had recently become engaged to a young lawyer from Lucca, who had been staying with friends in Siena when he saw and fell in love with the girl whom the students at the University named the "Odalisque."

Hers was the strange, boding loveliness of a pale orchid. She had no colour, but her curved lips were faintly pink, as were the palms of her soft, idle hands. "I shall be glad when she is married," her aunt said often. "It is very well for Maria or Carmela to go through the streets alone, but Gemma is otherwise, and I cannot be always running after her. Then her temper ... _Dio mio!_"

"Perhaps it is the vinegar," suggested Carolina rather spitefully.

"No. She wants a husband."

When the dinner was over Signora Carosi went to her room to lie down, and her two elder nieces followed her example, but Carmela pa.s.sed into the kitchen with Carolina.

"You will let me see the cousin," she said, wheedling. "Gemma thinks she will be ugly, with great teeth and a red face like the Englishwomen in the Asino, but I do not believe it."

"If the signorina is hoping for a miracle of plainness she will be unpleasantly surprised," said the old woman, and her shrivelled face was as mischievous as a monkey's as she drew the key of Olive's room from her pocket. "I am going to take her some soup now, and you shall come with me."

It is quite impossible to be retiring, or even modest, in the mid-Victorian sense, in flats. A bedroom cannot remain an inviolate sanctuary when it affords the only means of access to the bathroom or is a short cut to the kitchen. Olive had had some experience of suburban flats during holidays spent with school friends, and had suffered the familiarity that breeds weariness in such close quarters.

As she woke now she was unpleasantly aware of strangers in the room.

"Only a lover or a nurse may look at a woman while she sleeps without offence," she said drowsily. "It is an unpardonable liberty in all other cla.s.ses of the population. Are you swains, or sisters of mercy?"

She opened her eyes and met Carmela's puzzled stare with laughter. "I was saying that when one is ill or in love one can endure many things," she explained in halting Italian.

"Ah," Carmela said uncomprehendingly, "I am never ill, _grazia a Dio_, but when Maria has an indigestion she is cross, and when Gemma is in love her temper is dreadful. Perhaps, being a foreigner, you are different. Are you tired?"

"Yes, I am, rather, but go on talking to me. I am not sleepy."

Carmela, nothing loth, drew a chair to the bedside. "You need not get up yet," she said comfortably. "We always lie down after dinner until five, and later we go for a walk. You will see the Via Cavour full of people in the evening, officers and students, and mothers with daughters to be married, all walking up and down and looking at each other. Orazio Lucis first saw Gemma like that, and he followed us home, and then found out who we were and asked questions about us.

Every day we saw him in the Piazza, smoking cigarettes, and waiting for us to go out that he might follow us, and Gemma would give him one look, and then cast down her eyes ... so!" Carmela caricatured her sister's affectation of unconsciousness very successfully, and looked to Olive and Carolina for applause.

The servant grinned appreciation. "Yes, the signorina is very _civetta_. I, also, have seen her simpering when the _avvocato_ has been here, but she soon gets tired of him, and then her face is as G.o.d made it."

Olive dressed herself leisurely when they had left her, and unpacked her clothes and her little store of books. Her cousins, coming to fetch her soon after six o'clock, found her ready to go out, but so absorbed in a guide-book of Siena that she did not hear Maria's knock at the door.

She had resolved that she would apply art and archaeology as plasters to the wound life had given her already. She would stay her heart's hunger with moods and tenses, but not of the verb "_amare_." Learning and teaching, she might make her mind lord of her emotions.

She came forward rather shyly to meet her cousins. The three together were somewhat overpowering, flounced and frilled alike, and highly scented. Maria and Carmela fat, pleasant and profuse; Gemma silent, with dark resentful eyes and scornful lips that never smiled at other women.