The Guests Of Hercules Part 34

"It seems, and it is."

They looked with one accord down at the Casino far below, which from the cure's garden had more than ever the semblance of a large, crouching animal. Its four horns glittered in the beginning of sunset, as if they were crusted with jewels of different colours. Its dominance over all that surrounded it, all that was smaller and less powerful and impressive than itself, was astonishingly evident from this bird's-eye point of view; but brightly as the jewels gleamed, they had lost their allurement for these two. With Vanno's arms around her, Mary wondered how she could ever have felt that the Casino was a vast magnet compelling her to come to it in spite of herself, drawing her thoughts and her money to itself, as an immense magnetic rock might draw the nails from the sides of a frail little boat. With Mary's fingers warm and soft as rose-petals against his neck, her cheek on his, Vanno could have laughed with contemptuous pity at the wretched image of himself which he seemed to see down below, stupidly hurrying along with an offering for the Casino. He was not so much shocked at his own yielding to the attraction as he was surprised that there could have been so strong an attraction.

"Doesn't it look stupid down there?" Mary asked, almost in a whisper.

"Like a lot of toy houses for children to play with?"

"And the children are tired of playing with them!" Vanno answered. "The toys there were only worth playing with when there was nothing better to do."

"That's it!" she echoed. "When there was nothing better to do. I think that was what the cure must have meant."

"The cure!" Vanno echoed. "I'd forgotten him!"

"So had I. How ungrateful of us. But you have made me forget everything except--_you_."

She rose slowly, reluctantly, and then pretended to exert her strength in lifting him up from his knees. "The cure stayed away on purpose," she said.

"Yes. For he meant this to happen--just as it has."

Mary smiled, half closing her eyes, so that the world swam before her in a radiant mist. She was less afraid of love and the man who gave and took it, now. Already it seemed that Vanno and she had always been lovers, not sad, parted lovers, but happy playmates in a world made for them. There could not have been a time when they did not understand each other. Everything before this day had been a dream. "Do you know,"

she said, "why I came here--I mean, why the cure asked me? He told me that I must come and 'save' you. As if I could! It was I who needed saving."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'IT WAS FATE BROUGHT YOU--TO GIVE YOU TO ME. DO YOU REGRET IT?'"]

"He knew," Vanno answered, speaking more to himself than to her, "that we should save each other."

As he spoke, a foot ostentatiously rattled the gravel of the path, at a safe distance. The cure coughed, and coughed again. A serious catching in the throat he seemed to have, for a man who lived in the fresh air and laughed at the notion of a "sunset chill."

Vanno took Mary's hand and kept it in his as he led her out of the arbour.

"This is what your blessing has done, Father," he said.

Then, the cure must have blessed him, too!

The priest smiled his good smile as he came toward them, the sky flaming behind his black-clad figure, like banners waving.

"I thought. I hoped. No, I knew!" And he smiled contentedly. "The stars have ceased to desire the moth, a well-known phenomenon which often upsets the solar system. The moth has lost its attraction. The stars have found each other."

"We have found each other," Mary said, "and I believe--I believe that we have found ourselves, our real selves."

"You have found yourselves and each other," echoed the cure, "which means that you have found G.o.d. I have no more fear"--and he waved a hand toward the towered building down below, set on fire by the sun--"no more fear of the moth."

XXV

They stayed on, after their friend had come to them; and all three sat together in the arbour, while the shadows hewed quarries of sapphire deep into the side of the mountains; and in the violet rain of twilight everything on land and water that was white seemed to become magically alive: the fishing boats turned to winged sea birds: the little waves were lilied with foam blossoms: the sky became a garden of stars.

When Mary first went to live at the convent, an impressionable child of eight, one of the nuns told her that the stars were spirits of children in heaven's nursery, sent out to play in the sky, that their mothers might see them and be glad: and the moon was their nurse. She repeated the legend to Vanno and the cure, and said that she had been brought up from childhood in a convent school, because she had lost her mother, and her father had gone away to India; but she did not say that she had taken the first steps toward becoming a nun. She wanted Vanno to hear this first, when they were alone together. Not that she feared the knowledge might endanger his love for her. In this immortal hour it seemed that nothing could ever again come between them.

"That accounts for what she is, does it not?" the cure exclaimed, turning to Vanno with the joy of the discoverer. "A convent school! Now, my son, what puzzled you in her is made clear. I, at least, might have guessed. A girl brought up by a band of good and innocent cloistered women must always be different from other girls. She should not be let out to wander alone in the world without guardians, as this child has been; for without a guide a few mistakes at the beginning are certain.

Now, she has made all the mistakes she need ever make; and she is no longer alone."

"Never again!" Vanno said fervently, pressing her hand under the blue cover of dusk.

It did not occur to Mary that they both took her for a much younger girl than she really was. She had lived so entirely under the jurisdiction of those older than herself that in many ways she had remained a child. And she had begun by feeling still younger than before, after suddenly blossoming into independence. It was only since the night of Christmas, when the frost of unhappiness nipped the newly unfolded petals, that the flower had begun to droop. Now that dark time was already forgotten. She could hardly realize that it had ever been. In the joy of Vanno's love for her, and his old friend's fatherly kindness, she basked in the contentment of being understood, loved, taken care of; and she knew that she was a woman, not a child, only by the capacity to love a man as a woman loves. If she had said, "But I am nearly twenty-five," the two men would have realized at once that her school days must have ended long ago, even if prolonged beyond the usual time; and they would have asked themselves, if they had not asked her, where she had spent the years between then and now, in order to account for that ignorance of the world which to them explained and excused everything she had done at Monte Carlo. But it did not enter Mary's mind to mention her age.

"Upon some natures such teaching might not have made the same impression, of course," the cure went on, thoughtfully. "This dear child, it seems to me, has a very--how shall I express it?--a very old-fashioned nature. Nothing, I believe, could ever have turned her into one of those hard modern girls they are running up now like buildings made of concrete on steel frames. But the convent teaching has accentuated all in her that was already what I call 'old-fashioned.' And you, too, my Principino, you are old-fashioned!"

"I?" exclaimed Vanno, surprised.

"Yes. You will suit each other well, you two, I prophesy. You have an old-fashioned nature: but do not think when I say that, I place you on a shelf at the back of the world's cupboard. All Romans, all Italian men, are old-fashioned at heart--and it is the heart that counts, though we do not always know it; and most of us would not like others to know it of ourselves. You have been much in the East, Principino, and you have learned to love the desert; but you would not have loved it as you do were it not for the spirit of romance which keeps you old-fashioned under a very thin veneer of what is modern. I saw this in you when you were a boy and my pupil; and I must say it made me love you the better.

It is perhaps the secret which draws the love of others toward you, without their knowing why, though it has caused life to jar on you often, no doubt, and may again. You would not, perhaps, have fallen into the mistake by which you hurt yourself and this dear child if you had not been old-fashioned. Don't you see that?"

"I suppose it is old-fashioned to have an ideal," Vanno admitted, laughing a little.

"Yes. And most old-fashioned of all, even I can see, are your ideas of women. So it is well you have fallen in love with one who is not modern."

"I know she is the Only Woman. But I grant that I may have picked up some Eastern ideas of what a woman's life ought to be. I must get rid of them, I suppose."

"You didn't 'pick those ideas up,' my son. They were in your blood. All the same, you may get rid of a few--a very few--with advantage. And safely too, because you are going to have an old-fashioned girl for your wife."

"I'm going to have her very soon, I hope," Vanno added, in a different tone.

Mary spoke not a word; and he did not press her then for an answer. But when the sudden darkness of the southern evening had warned them that it was time to go, he began in the same strain again, after they had left the tunnelled streets of the rock-village. It was so dark that Vanno had the excuse of saving Mary a stumble on the rough cobblestones, as they went slowly down the mule path. He held her tightly, his arm around her waist. She walked bareheaded, trailing her hat in her hand; and the warm perfume of her hair came to him like the scent of some hitherto unknown flower, sweeter than any other fragrance that the evening dew distilled. "I want you to be my wife very soon," he said. "I must have you. And if you're as old-fashioned as the cure thinks, you won't say no to me when I tell you that. Shall he marry us?"

"Oh--that would mean it must be _dreadfully_ soon!"

"Is there a 'dreadfully?' But--there's one thing, dearest, that I almost forgot. I must write to my father. Not that anything he could say would make any difference now; only I want him to love you, and our marriage to bring him happiness, not pain, even in the thought of it before he sees you. My brother Angelo has married lately, and he didn't let our father know till just before the thing was done. Perhaps it was not his fault. I can't tell as to that: there must have been a strong reason.

But our father was deeply hurt; and it would be even worse with me, for he makes it no secret that I'm his favourite son. I believe I'm more like my mother than Angelo is. She was an Irish-American girl, and my father adored her: though sometimes I wonder if he knew how to show his love. Anyhow, she died young, and he's been almost a recluse ever since.

I'll write him at once--and I may even go to see him, though I can hardly bear to think of leaving you long enough for that. Still, it needn't be for more than three or four days and nights. I could go and come back in that time. I'll see! But if I do go, it must be to tell him we're to be married at once, from my brother's house."

"Your brother's house?" Mary repeated.

"Yes. Angelo has taken a villa at Cap Martin for the season. Perhaps you've seen it. He and my new sister-in-law went to Ireland to visit relatives of my mother, and to England afterward. They've been married more than two months; but I saw my sister-in-law for the first time on New Year's eve, the day they arrived. She's English, though she has lived mostly in southern Germany, I believe. She's an artist--does portraits beautifully, I hear, and was much admired in Rome, where she had come to paint, when my brother met her. I know very little of her except that she's pretty and charming--if any woman who is not _you_ can be either. I'm sorry for all the men in the world, poor wretches, because there's only one you, and I've got you for mine, and I shall let them see as little of you as possible."

"That really _is_ old-fashioned!" Mary laughed.

"Do you mind? Do you want to see them?"

"Not particularly. Because you have begun to make me feel the others aren't worth seeing."

"Angel!"

They both laughed, and Vanno was entranced when her heel slipped on a stone, and he could clasp her so tightly as to feel the yielding of her body against his arm. He would have liked to sing, the night was so wonderful, and all nature seemed to be singing. Distant bells chimed, silver sweet; frogs in hidden garden pools harped like bands of fairy musicians; and from everywhere came the whisper and gurgle of running water: springs from the mountains, pouring through underground ca.n.a.ls to houses of peasants, who bought water rights by the hour.

As the two walked down the many windings of the mule path they met labourers coming up from the day's work in the country of the rich, far below. Some of the young men, clattering along in groups, joined in singing the strange tuneless songs, memories of Saracen days, which Vanno had heard on his first mountain walk. The old men did not sing.

They climbed stolidly, with heads and shoulders bent, yet not as if discouraged by the thought of the long, steep way before them before they could rest at home. They had the air of taking life as it was, entirely for granted.