The Devourers Part 14

She tried to. She got up early the next morning, and wrote in her diary, "_Incipit vita nova!_" and she made an elaborate time-table for every hour of the day; then she made a list of the things she intended to write--subjects and ideas that had stirred in her mind for months past, but had been scattered by distracting visits, dispersed in futile conversations. She felt impatient and happy and eager. On the large white sheet of paper which lay before her, like a wonderful unexplored country full of resplendent possibilities, she traced with reverent forefinger the sign of the cross.

Some one knocked at the door. It was Clarissa della Rocca, Nino's married sister, tall, trim, and sleek in magnificent clothes.

"_Mes amours!_" she exclaimed, embracing Nancy, and pressing her long chin quickly against Nancy's cheek. "Do put on your hat and come for a drive with me. Aldo has come from America. He is downstairs in the stanhope. He is trying my husband's new sorrels, and so, of course, I insisted on going with him. Now I am frightened, and I have n.o.body to scream to and to catch hold of."

"Catch hold of Aldo, whoever he may be," said Nancy, laughing.

"He is my brother-in-law. But I can't," said Clarissa, waving explanatory mauve-gloved hands; "he is driving. Besides, he is horribly cross. Have you never seen him? He is Carlo's youngest brother. Do come.

He will be much nicer if you are there."

"But he does not know me," said Nancy, still with her pen in her hand.

"That's why. He is always nice to people he does not know. Come quickly, _ma cherie_. He is _ravissant_. He has been to America on a wild and lonely ranch in Texas. He speaks English and German, and he sings like an angel. Make yourself beautiful, _mon chou aime_."

Nancy slipped into a long coat, and pinned a large hat on her head without looking in the gla.s.s.

Clarissa watched her from out of her long careful eyelids, and said: "Mon Dieu!" Then she asked suddenly: "How young are you?"

"Nearly seventeen," said Nancy, looking for her gloves.

"What luck!" sighed Clarissa. "And you are sure you won't mind if I pinch you? I must! The near horse rears."

Then they ran downstairs together, where Aldo della Rocca sat, holding the two impatient sorrels in with shortened reins. He was flicking at their ears and making them plunge with curved, angry necks and frothing mouths. He was certainly _ravissant_. His profile, as Nancy saw it against the blue June sky, was like Praxiteles' Hermes. His glossy hair gleamed blue-black as he raised his hat with a sweeping gesture that made Nancy smile. Then they were seated behind him, and the puissant horses shot off down the Corso and towards the Bastioni at a magnificent pace. Clarissa shrieked a little now and then when she remembered to, but Aldo did not seem to hear her, so she soon desisted.

"Is he not seraphically beautiful?" she said to Nancy, pointing an ecstatic forefinger at her brother-in-law's slim back. "I often say to Carlo: 'Why, why did I meet you first, and not your Apolline brother?'"

Nancy smiled. "But surely he is rather young."

"He is twenty-four, you little stinging-nettle," said Clarissa; "and he has been so much petted and adored by all the women of Naples that he might be a thousand."

"How horrid!" said Nancy, looking disdainfully at the unwitting back before her, at the shining black hair above the high white collar, and at the irreproachable hat sitting correctly on the top of it all.

"Oh yes, he is horrid," said Clarissa; "but how visually delectable!"

Aldo della Rocca turned his profile towards them. "I shall take you along the Monza road," he said.

"Oh," cried Clarissa, "such an ugly old road, where no one will see us."

"I am driving the horses out to-day," said her brother-in-law, "not your Paris frocks." And he turned away again, and took the road towards Monza at a spanking gait.

"Il est si spirituel!" laughed Clarissa, who bubbled over into French at the slightest provocation. The straight, white, dusty road, bordered with poplars, stretched its narrowing line before them, and the sorrels went like the wind. Suddenly, as they were nearing the first ugly-looking houses of Sesto, the driver checked suddenly, and the ladies bent forward to see why. A hundred paces before them, struggling and swaying, now on the side-walk, now almost in the middle of the road, were two women and a man. Some children standing near a door shrieked, but the struggling, scuffling group uttered no sound. Nancy stood up.

The man, whose hat had fallen in the road--one could see his dishevelled hair and red face--had wrenched one arm loose from the clutch of the women, and with a quick gesture drew from his pocket something that the sun glanced on.

"He has a knife or a pistol!" gasped Nancy.

The struggling women had seen it, too, and now they shrieked, clutching and grappling with him, and screaming for help.

Nancy thrust her small, strong hands forward. "I can hold the horses,"

she said, and seized the reins from Della Rocca's fingers.

He turned and looked at her in surprise. "Why, what----?" And he stopped.

She read the doubt in his face, and read it wrong.

"I can--I can!" she cried. "Go quickly! We shall be all right!"

He twisted his mouth in curious fashion; then he jumped from his seat, and ran in light leaps across the road. The man was holding the revolver high out of the women's reach, while they clung to him and held him frantically, convulsively, crying: "Help! Madonna! Help!"

Della Rocca reached him in an instant, and wrenched the short revolver away. With a quick gesture he opened the barrel and shook the cartridges out upon the ground. He tossed the weapon to one of a dozen men who had now come hurrying out of a neighbouring wine-shop, and, running lightly across the dusty road, he was back at the side of the carriage in an instant. He glanced up at Nancy, and raised his hat again with the exaggerated sweep that had caused her to smile before.

"Pardon me for keeping you waiting," he said.

"Ah, _quel poseur!_" cried Clarissa, who had sat with her eyes shut, holding her ears during the excitement.

Della Rocca smiled, and, jumping into his place, took the reins from Nancy's strained and trembling hands. She dropped back in her seat feeling faint and excited. The horses plunged and started forward again.

"What courage!" said Clarissa, taking Nancy's fingers in her own.

"Yes," said Nancy, looking with approval at the straight, slim shoulders and the black hair and the irreproachable hat. "I like a brave man."

Clarissa gave one of her little Parisian shrieks.

"_Ouiche!_ it is not Aldo--it is you who are brave! Aldo is as cautious as a hare, but, being a preposterous _poseur_, he would not miss an effect for worlds!" And Clarissa flourished an imaginary hat in the Della Rocca style.

Nancy laughed, and believed not a word about the hare.

When they left her at her door she answered his sweeping salutation with a serious little nod; she ran up the stairs hurriedly, and into her room. On her writing-table lay an unopened letter from Nino; he wrote to her every morning and called on her every afternoon.

Nancy did not glance at it. She ran out on to the balcony. But the stanhope had already turned out of sight.

Nancy stepped back into her room and slowly drew off her gloves. For some unexplained reason she was glad that her wrists still ached, and that her fingers were bruised by the dragging of the hard, stiff reins.

From the open balcony the wind blew into the room, and scattered the papers on her writing-table. It blew away Nino's letter; it blew away the elaborate time-table she had drawn up and the lists of the work she was to do; it blew away the large white sheet of paper--the fair sheet full of resplendent possibilities--on which she had traced with reverent finger the sign of the cross.

XIII

When the Englishman called again to bring her a copy of the _Fortnightly_ with the article on "An Italian Lyrist," he found that she had not worked at all; she looked as sweet and helpless and idle as ever, and the room was full of visitors. He was introduced to her mother, whom he found gentle and subdued, and to the vigorous, loud-voiced Aunt Carlotta, and to all the poets.

"I am afraid, mother dear," said Nancy, leaning her billowy head against her mother's arm and looking up at her new friend with May-morning eyes, "that Mr. Kingsley will think I have no character."

"You have a complexion," interposed Aunt Carlotta. "That is enough for a girl."

Valeria laughed. "It is true. Italian girls must not have characters until they marry. Then their husbands make it for them, according to their own tastes."

Mr. Kingsley smiled down at Nancy. "Why should I think you have no character?"