Olive in Italy Part 8

Then sometimes of a morning, when Maria and the aunt had gone out marketing, and Carmela, shapeless and dishevelled in her white cotton jacket, was dusting or ironing, the beautiful idle sister would come out of her room, dressed for the street and carrying a prayer-book.

Carmela would remonstrate with her. "You are not going alone?"

"Only to ma.s.s."

On the morning of the fifteenth of August she did not go with the others to the parish church at six o'clock, but she was up early, nevertheless. She wrote a letter, and presently, having sealed it, she dropped it out of the window. A boy who had been lingering about the piazza since dawn, and staring up at the close-shuttered fronts of the tall houses, picked it up and ran off with it. When Maria and Carmela came back with their aunt soon after seven they drank their black coffee in the kitchen before going to their rooms to rest. Carolina took Olive's breakfast in to her on a tray when they were gone. The English girl had milk with her coffee and some slices of bread spread with rancid b.u.t.ter. Gemma lay in wait for the old woman and stopped her as she came from the kitchen.

"Find out what she is going to do to-day," she whispered.

Carolina nodded and her shrivelled monkey face was puckered into a smile. She came back presently. "She is going to the Duomo and then to _colazione_ with the De Sancti. She will go with Signora Aurelia to see the Palio and only come back here to supper."

Gemma went back to her room to finish her dressing. She put on a pink muslin frock and a hat of white straw wreathed with roses and leaves.

Surely her beauty should avail to give her all she desired, light and warmth always, diamonds and fine laces, and silks to clothe her and give her grace, and the possession of the one man's heart, with his name and a place in the world beside him. Surely she was not destined to live with Orazio and his tiresome mother, penned up in a shabby little house in Lucca, and there growing old and hideous. She sat before her gla.s.s thinking these thoughts and waiting until she heard Olive's quick, light step in the pa.s.sage and then the opening and shutting of the front door. Carolina was in the kitchen and the others had gone to lie down, but she went into the dining-room and listened for a moment there before she ventured into her cousin's room. She had often been in to pry when alone in the flat, and she knew where to look for the key of the attic in the Vicolo. Olive always kept it in a corner of the table drawer and it was there now. Gemma smiled her rare slow smile as she put it in her purse. There was a photograph of her aunt--Olive's mother--on the dressing-table, and a Tauchnitz edition of Swinburne's _Atalanta in Calydon_ lay beside it, the embroidered ta.s.sel of the marker being one of Astorre's pitiful little gifts. She swept them off on to the floor and poured the contents of the ink-stand over them. She had acted on a spiteful impulse, and she was half afraid when she saw the black stream trickling over the book and blotting out the face of the woman who had been of her kin. It seemed unlucky, a _malore_, and she was vexed with herself. She looked into the kitchen on her way out. "Carolina, if they ask where I am I have gone to church."

The old woman nodded. "Very well, signorina, but you are becoming too devout. _Bada, figlia mia!_"

Siena is a city dedicated to the Virgin, and the feast of her a.s.sumption is the greatest of all her red-letter days. The streets had echoed at dawn to the feet of _contadini_ coming in by the Porta Romana, the Porta Camollia, the Porta Pespini. The oxen had been fed and left in their stalls; there was no ploughing in the fields on this day, no gathering of figs, no sound of singing voices and laughter in the vineyards. The brown wrinkled old men and women, the lithe, slender youths in their suits of black broadcloth--wood G.o.ds disguised by cheap tailoring--all had left their work and come many a mile along the dusty roads and across fields to the town for the dear Madonna's sake, and to see the Palio. The country girls had all new dresses for the _Ferragosto_ and they strutted in the Via Cavour like little pigeons pluming themselves in the sunshine. They were nearly all pretty, and the flapping hats of Tuscan straw half hid and half revealed charming curves of cheek and chin, little tip-tilted noses, soft brown eyes. Many of the townsfolk were out too on this day of days and the streets were crowded with gay, vociferous people. There was so much to see. The old picture-gallery was free to all, and the very beggars might go in to see the sly, pale, almond-eyed Byzantine Madonne in their gilt frames, and Sodoma's tormented Christ at the Pillar with the marks of French bullets in the plaster. All the palaces too were hung with arras, flags fluttered everywhere, church bells were ringing.

Gemma pa.s.sed down a side street and went a little out of her way to avoid the Piazza del Campo, but she had to cross the Via Ricasoli, and the crowd was so dense there that she was forced to stand on a doorstep for a while before she could get by.

"What are they all staring at?" she asked impatiently of a woman near her.

"It is the horse of the _Montone_! They are taking him to be blessed at the parish church."

The poor animal was led by the _fantino_ who was to ride him in the race, and followed by the page. He was small and lean and grey, with outstanding ribs and the dry scar of an old wound on his flank. The people eyed him curiously. "An ugly beast!" "Yes, but you should see him run when the cognac is in him."

Gemma began to be afraid that she would be late, and that He might find the door shut and go away again, and she pushed her way through the crowd and hurried down the Vicolo and into the house numbered thirteen. She was very breathless, being tightly laced and unused to so many stairs, and she stumbled a little as she crossed the threshold. She was glad to sit down on one of the chairs by the open window. The bare room no longer seemed conventual now that its unaccustomed air was stirred by the movement of her fan and tainted by the faint scent of her violet powder.

Outside, in the market-place, the country women were sitting in the shade of their enormous red and blue striped umbrellas beside their stalls of fruit, while the people who came to buy moved to and fro from one to the other, beating down prices, chaffering eagerly with little cries of "_Per carita!_" and "_Dio mio!_" shrugging their shoulders, moving away, until at last the peasants would abate their price by one soldo. A clinking of coppers followed, and the green peaches and small black figs would be pushed into a string bag with a bit of meat wrapped in a back number of the _Vedetta Senese_, a half kilo of _pasta_, and perhaps a tiny packet of snuff from the shop where they sell salt and tobacco and picture postcards of the Pope and La Bella Otero.

In the old days the scaffold and the gallows had been set up there, and the Street of the Dying had earned its name then, so many doomed wretches had pa.s.sed down it from the Justice Hall and the prisons to the place of expiation. Weighed down by chains they had gone reluctantly, dragging their feet upon their last journey, trying to listen to the priest's droning of prayers, or to see some friendly face in the crowd.

The memory of old sorrows and torments lay heavy sometimes here on those who had eyes to see and ears to hear the things of the past, and Olive was often pitifully aware of the Moribondi. Rain had streamed down their haggard faces, washing their tears away, the sun had shone upon them, dazzling their tired eyes as they turned the corner where the cobbler had his stall now, and came to the place from whence they might have their first glimpse of the scaffold. Poor frightened souls!

But Gemma knew nothing of them, and she would have cared nothing if she had known. She was not imaginative, and her own ills and the present absorbed her, since now she heard the man's step upon the stair.

"You have come then," she cried.

He made no answer, but he put his arms about her, holding her close, and kissed her again and again.

CHAPTER X

"Filippo! Let me go! Let me breathe, _carissimo_! I want to speak to you."

He did not seem to hear her. He had drawn the long steel pins out of her hat and had thrown the pretty thing down on the floor, and the loosened coils of shining hair fell over his hands as his strong lips bruised the pale, flower-like curves of her mouth.

Filippo had loved many women in the only way possible to him, and they had been won by his brutality and his insolence, and by the glamour of his name. The annals of mediaeval Italy were stained with blood and tears because of the Tor di Rocca, and their loves that ended always in cruelty and horror, and Filippo had all the instincts of his decadent race. In love he was pitiless; no impulses of tenderness or of chivalry restrained him, and his methods were primeval and violent.

Probably the Rape of the Sabines was his ideal of courtship, but the subsequent domesticity, the settling down of the Romans with their stolen wives, would have been less to his taste.

"Filippo!" Gemma cried again, and this time he let her go.

"You may breathe for one minute," he said, looking at his watch.

"There is not much time."

He drew the chair towards the table and sat down. "Come!" he said imperatively, but she shook her head.

"Ah, Filippo, I love you, but you must listen. Did you see my _fidanzato_ in our box at the theatre last night?"

"Yes, and I am glad he is so ugly. I shall not be jealous. You must give me your address in Lucca," he said coolly.

Her face fell. "You will let me marry him? You--you do not mind?"

He made a grimace. "I do not like it, but I cannot help it."

"But he makes me sick," she said tremulously. "I hate him to touch me."

It seemed that her words lit some fire in him. His hot eyes sparkled as he stretched out his arms to her. "Ah, come to me now then."

She stood still by the table watching him fearfully. "Filippo, I hoped--I thought you would take me away."

"It is impossible. I cannot even see you again until after Christmas.

It will be safer--better not. But in January I will come to Lucca, and then--"

He hesitated, weighing his words, weighing his thought and his desire.

"And then?" she said.

He looked at her closely, deliberately, divining the beauty that was half hidden from him. Her parted lips were lovely, and the texture of her white skin was satin smooth as the petals of a rose; there was no fault in the pure oval of her face, in the line of her black brows. He could see no flaw in her now, and he believed that she would still seem unsurpa.s.sably fair after a lapse of time.

"Then, if you still wish it, I will take you away. You shall have a villa at San Remo--"

"I understand," she said hurriedly, and she covered her face with her hands.

She had hoped to be the Princess Tor di Rocca, and he had offered to keep her still as his _amica_. Presently, if she wished it and it still suited him, he would set her feet on the way that led to the streets. "Then if you wish it--" To her the insult seemed to lie in the proposed delay. She loved him, and she had no love for virtue. She loved him, and if he had urged her to go with him on the instant she would have yielded easily. But she must await his convenience; next year, perhaps; and meanwhile she must go to Lucca, she must be married to the other man.

She was crying, and tears oozed out between her fingers and dripped on the floor. "He is horrible to me," she said brokenly.

Filippo rose then and came to her; he loved her in his way, and she moved him as no woman had done yet.

"Why need you marry him? Do not. Wait for me here and I will surely come for you," he said as he drew her to him.

She hid her face on his shoulder. "I dare not send him away," she whispered. "All Siena would laugh at me, and I should be ashamed to be seen. No other man would ever take me after such a scandal. Besides, you know I must be married. You know that, Filippo! And if you did not come--"

"I shall come."

She clung to him in silence for a while before she spoke again.