Olive in Italy Part 20

Yes, but if the true love came she would be shamed. She knew that her faith in Dante's Amor, his lord of terrible aspect, made his coming possible. The men and women who go about proclaiming that there is no such person because they have never seen him were born blind. Like those prosy souls who call the poets mad, they mistake impotence for common sense.

Besides, the first step always costs so dear, and now that he was gone and she could think of him calmly she knew that she was afraid of Filippo Tor di Rocca. He was cruel. Then among the forces arrayed against him there was the desire of that she called her soul to mortify her flesh, to beckon, to lead by stony ways to the heights of sacrifice. She could not be sure where that first step would lead her, she could not be sure of herself or gauge the depths to which she might fall.

"Oh, G.o.d!" she said aloud. "Help me! Don't let things be too difficult."

The hours of darkness were long, but the grey glimmering dawn came at last with a pattering of rain against the uncurtained window. Olive rose as soon as it was light, and before eight she had eaten the crust of bread she had saved for her breakfast and was gone out. On her way down the stairs she met her landlady and spoke to her.

"If anyone comes to see me will you tell them that I have gone out, and that I do not know when I shall come in again. And if anything is said about my going away you can say that I have changed my mind and that I shall not leave Florence."

She would not cross the river for fear of meeting Filippo in any of the more-frequented streets on the other side, so she went down the Via della Porta Romana and out by the gates into the open country beyond. She walked for a long time along muddy roads between the high walls of vineyards and olive orchards. She had an umbrella, but her skirts were draggled and splashed with mire and the water came through the worn soles of her thin shoes. She had nothing to eat and no money to buy food. There were some coppers in her purse, but she had forgotten to bring that. It was windy, and as she was toiling up the steep hill to Bellosguardo her umbrella blew inside out. She threw it down by the side of the road and went on, rather glad to be rid of it and to feel the rain on her face. She had two hands now to hold her skirt and that was better. Soon after noon she knocked at the door of a gardener's cottage and asked for something to eat; she was given a yellow lump of _polenta_ and a handful of roast chestnuts and she sat down on a low wall by the roadside to devour them. She did not think much about anything now, she could not even feel that she cared what happened to her, but she adhered to the resolution she had made to keep out of the way until Tor di Rocca had left Florence. She could not sit long. It was cold and she was poorly clad, so poorly that the woman in the cottage had believed her to be a beggar. The Prince would have had to buy her clothes before he could take her away with him.

She wandered about until nightfall and then made her way back to the house in the Borgo, footsore and cold and wretched, but still the captain of her soul; ragged, but free and in no man's livery.

The landlady heard her coming slowly up the stairs and came out of her room to speak to her.

"A gentleman called for you this morning. I told him you were gone out and that you had changed your mind about leaving Florence, and at first he seemed angry, and then he laughed. 'Tell her we shall meet again,' he said. Then another came this afternoon in an automobile and asked if you lived here, and when I said you were out he said he would come again this evening. He left his card."

Olive looked at it with dazed eyes. Her pale face flushed, but as she went on up the stairs the colour ebbed away until even her lips were white. She had to rest twice before she could reach her own landing, and when she had entered her room she could go no farther than the door. She fell, and it was some time before she could get up again, but she still held the card crumpled in her hand.

"Jean Avenel."

CHAPTER IX

The Villa Fiorelli is set high among the olive groves above the village of Settignano. There are Medicean b.a.l.l.s on a shield over the great wrought-iron gates, and the swarthy splendid banker princes appear as the Magi in the faded fresco painting of the Nativity in the chapel. They have knelt there in the straw of the stable of Bethlehem for more than four hundred years. The _n.o.bili_ of Florence were used to loiter long ago on the terrace in the shade of the five cypresses, and women, famous or infamous, but always beautiful, listened to sonnets said and songs sung in their honour in the scented idleness of the rose garden. The villa belonged first to handsome, reckless Giuliano, the lover of Simonetta and others, and the father of a Pope, and when the dagger thrusts of the Pazzi put an end to his short life his elder brother and lord, Lorenzo, held it for a while before he sold it to the Salviati. So it pa.s.sed through many hands until at last Hilaire Avenel bought it and filled it with the books and armour that he loved. There were Spanish suits, gold-chased, in the hall, Moorish swords and lances, and steel hauberks on the staircase, and stray arquebuses, greaves and gauntlets everywhere. They were all rather dusty, since Hilaire was unmarried; but he was well served nevertheless. He was not a sociable person, and no Florentine had ever partaken of a meal with him, but it was currently reported that he sat through a ten-course dinner every night of his life, crumbling the bread at the side of his plate, and invariably refusing to partake of nine of the dishes that were handed in form by the old butler.

"It's real mean of your brother to keep his lovely garden shut up all through the spring," the Marchesa Lorenzoni had said once to Jean, and he had replied, "Well, it is his."

That seemed final, but the present Marchesa and late relict of Jonas P. Whittaker of Pittsburg was not so easily put off. She was apt to motor up to Settignano more than once in the May month of flowers; the intractable Hilaire was never at home to her, but she revenged herself by mult.i.tudinous kind inquiries. He was an invalid, but he disliked to be reminded of his infirmities almost as much as he did most women and all cackle about the weather.

Jean lived with him when not playing Chopin at the ends of the earth, and when the two were together the elder declared himself to be perfectly happy. "I only want you."

"And your first editions and your Cellini helmet."

When Jean came back from his American tour his brother was quick to notice a change in him, and when on the day after his Florentine concert he came in late for a dinner which he ate in silence, Hilaire spoke his mind. They were together in the library. Jean had taken a book down from the shelves but he was not reading it.

"Bad coffee."

"Was it?"

Hilaire was watching his brother's face. It seemed to him that there were lines in it that he had not seen before, and the brown eyes that gazed so intently into the fire were surely very tired.

He began again rather awkwardly. "You have been here a week, Jean."

"Yes."

"Did the concert go off well?"

"Oh, well enough. As usual."

"You went away alone in the Itala car before nine this morning and you came back scarcely an hour ago. What is the matter? Is there some new trouble? Jean, dear man, I am older than you; I have only you. What is it?"

Jean reached out for his tobacco pouch. "Hilaire," he said very gravely, after a pause, which he occupied in filling his pipe. "You remember I asked you to do anything, anything, for a girl named Olive Agar. You have never heard from her or of her?"

"Never."

"Ah," he sighed, "I have been to Siena. There was some affair--early in September she came to Florence, to the Lorenzoni of all people in the world."

Hilaire whistled.

"Yes, I know," the younger man said gloomily, as though he had spoken.

"That woman! What she must have suffered in these months! Well, she left them suddenly at the beginning of November."

"Where is she now?"

"That's just it. I don't know."

"Why did she leave Siena?"

"There was some trouble--a bad business," he answered reluctantly.

"She lived with some cousins, and one of them committed suicide. She came away to escape the horror and all the talk, I suppose."

"Ah, I need not ask why she left the Lorenzoni woman. No girl in her senses would stay an hour longer than she could help with her."

"Hilaire, I think I half hoped to see her at the concert yesterday.

When I came on the platform I looked for her, and I am sure I should have seen her in that crowd if she had been there. She is different, somehow. I played like a machine for the first time in my life, I think, and during the interval the manager asked me why I had not given the nocturne that was down on the programme. I said something about a necessary alteration at the last moment, but I don't know now what I did play. I was thinking of her. A girl alone has a bad time in this world."

"You are going to find her? Is she in love with you?"

Jean flushed. "I can't answer that."

"That's all right. What I really wanted to know was if you cared for her. I see you do. Oh, Lord!" The older man sighed heavily as he put down his coffee-cup. "I wish you would play to me."

Jean went into the music-room, leaving the folding doors between open, and sat down at the piano. There was no light but the moon's, and Hilaire saw the beloved head dark against the silvery grey of the wall beyond. The skilled hands let loose a torrent of harmonies.

"d.a.m.n women!" said Hilaire, under cover of the fortissimo.

He spent some hours in the library on the following day re-arranging and dusting his books, lingering over them, reading a page here and there, patting their old vellum-bound backs fondly before he returned them to their shelves. They absorbed him, and yet the footman bringing in his tea on a tray heard him saying, "I must not worry."

Jean had always come to him with his troubles ever since he was a child, and the worst of all had been brought about by a woman. That was years ago now. Hilaire had been away from England, and he had come back to find his brother aged and altered--and married.

They had got on so well together without women in these latter years that Hilaire had hoped they might live and die in peace, but it seemed that it was not to be. Jean had gone out again in the car to look for his Olive. Well, if she made him happy Hilaire thought they might get on very well after all. But he had forebodings, and later, he sat frowning at the white napery and glittering gla.s.s and silver reflected in the polished walnut wood of his well-appointed table, and he refused soup and fish with unnecessary violence. Jean loved this girl and she could make him happy if she would, but would she? She was evidently not of a "coming-on disposition"; she was good, and Jean was, unfortunately, still married to the other.

It had been raining all day. The wind moaned in the trees and sighed in the chimney, and now and again the blazing logs on the hearth hissed as drops fell on them from above.

"There is a good fire in the signorino's dressing-room, I hope. He has been out all day, and it is so stormy that--"