The Happy End Part 14

Cesare Orsi sat at Lavinia's side, quickly finishing one long black cigar and lighting another; Pier Mantegazza and Mochales smoked cigarettes. Anna was smoking, but Gheta had refused. Lavinia's feeling for her sister had changed from pity to total indifference. The elder had been an overbearing and thoughtless superior; and now, when Lavinia felt in some subtle inexplicable manner that Gheta was losing rank, her store of sympathy was small. Lavinia hoped that she would marry Orsi immediately and leave the field free for herself. She wondered whether her father would buy her a dress by Verlat.

"Honestly," Orsi murmured, "more beautiful than your--"

She stopped him with an impatient gesture, wondering what Mochales was saying to Gheta. A possibility suddenly filled her with dread--it was evident that the Spaniard was growing hourly more absorbed in Gheta, and the latter might----Lavinia could not support the possibility of Abrego y Mochales married to her sister. But, she rea.s.sured herself, there was little danger of that--Gheta would never make a sacrifice for emotion; she would be sure of the comfortable material thing, and now more than ever.

Anna Mantegazza moved to a piano, which, in the obscurity, she began to play. The notes rose deliberate and melodious. Gheta Sanviano told Orsi:

"That's Iris. Do you remember, we heard it at the Pergola in the winter?"

"Do go over to her," Lavinia whispered.

He rose heavily and went to Gheta's side, and Lavinia waited expectantly for Mochales to change too. The Spaniard shifted, but it was toward the piano, where he stood with the rosy reflection of his cigarette on a moody countenance. It was Pier Mantegazza who sat beside her, with a quizzical expression on his long gray visage. He said something to her in Latin, which she only partly understood, but which alluded to the changing of water into wine.

"I am a subject of jest," he continued in Italian, "because I prefer water."

She smiled with polite vacuity, wondering what he meant.

"You always satisfied me, Lavinia, with your dark smooth plait and white simplicity; you were cool and refreshing. Now they have made you only disturbing. I suppose it was inevitable, and with you the change will be temporary."

"I'll never let my hair down again," she retorted. "I've settled that with Gheta. Mother didn't care, really."

She was annoyed by the implied criticism, his entire lack of response to her new being. He had grown blind staring at his stupid old coins.

A step sounded behind her; she turned hopefully, but it was only Cesare Orsi.

"The others have gone outside," he told her, and she noticed that the piano had stopped.

Mantegazza rose and bowed in mock serious formality, at which Lavinia shrugged an impatient shoulder and walked with Orsi across the room and out upon the terrace.

Florence had sunk into a dark chasm of night, except for the curving double row of lights that marked the Lungarno and the indifferent illumination of a few princ.i.p.al squares. The stars seemed big and near in deep blue s.p.a.ce. Orsi was standing very close to her, and she moved away; but he followed.

"Lavinia," he muttered, and suddenly his arm was about her waist.

She leaned back, pushing with both hands against his chest; but he swept her irresistibly up to him and kissed her clumsily. A cold rage possessed her. She stopped struggling; yet there was no need to continue--he released her immediately and opened a stammering apology.

"I am a madman," he admitted abjectly--"a little animal that ought to be shot. I don't know what came over me; my head was in a carnival. You must forgive or I shall be a maniac, I----"

She turned and walked swiftly into the house and mounted to her room. All the pleasure she had had in the evening, the Viennese gown, evaporated, left her possessed by an utter loathing of self. Now, in the mirror, she seemed hateful, the clouded chiffon and airy clinging satin unspeakable. Looking back out of the dim gla.s.s was a stranger who had betrayed and cheapened her. Her pure serenity revolted against the currents of life sweeping down upon her, threatening to inundate her.

She unhooked the Verlat gown with trembling fingers and--once more in simple white--dropped into a deep chair, where she cried with short painful inspirations, her face pressed against her arm. Her emotion subsided, changed to a formless dread, and again to a black sense of helplessness. Suddenly she rose and mechanically shook loose her hair--footsteps were approaching. Her sister entered, pale and vindictive.

"You are to be congratulated," she proceeded thinly; "you made a success with everybody--that is, with all but Mochales. It was for him, wasn't it? You were very clever, but you failed ridiculously."

Lavinia made no reply.

"I hope Mochales excuses you because of your greenness."

"Youth isn't any longer your crime," Lavinia retorted at last.

"That dress--it would suit Anna Mantegazza; but you looked only indecent."

"Perhaps you're right, Gheta," Lavinia said unexpectedly. "I'm going to bed now, please."

Her balance, restored by sleep, was once more normal when she returned to the Lungarno. It was again late afternoon, the daily procession was returning from the Cascine, and Gheta was at the window, looking coldly down. The Marchesa Sanviano was knitting at prodigious speed a shapeless gray garment. They all turned when a servant entered:

Signer Orsi wished to see the marchese.

This unusual formality on the part of Cesare Orsi could have but one purpose, and Lavinia and their mother gazed significantly at the elder sister.

"The marchese is dressing," his wife directed.

She drew a long breath of relief and nodded over her needles. Gheta raised her chin; her lips bore the half-contemptuous expression that lately had become habitual; her eyes were half closed.

Lavinia sat with her hands loose in her lap. She was wondering whether or not, should she make a vigorous protest, they would send her back to the convent. The Verlat gown was carefully hung in her closet. Last night she had been idiotic.

The Marchese Sanviano appeared hurriedly and alone; his tie was crooked and his expression very much disturbed. His wife looked up, startled.

"What!" she demanded directly. "Didn't he----"

"Yes," Sanviano replied, "he did! He wants to marry Lavinia."

Lavinia half rose, with a horrified protest; Gheta seemed suddenly turned to stone; the knitting fell unheeded from the marchesa's lap.

Sanviano spread out his hands helplessly.

"Well," he demanded, "what could I do?... A man with Orsi's blameless character and the Orsi banks!"

V

The house to which Cesare Orsi took Lavinia was built over the rim of a small steep island in the Bay of Naples, opposite Castellamare. It faced the city, rising in an amphitheater of bright stucco and almond blossoms, across an expanse of gla.s.sy and incredibly blue water. It was evening, the color of sky and bay was darkening, intensified by a vaporous rosy column where the ascending smoke of Vesuvius held the last upflung glow of the vanished sun. Lavinia could see from her window the pale distant quiver of the electric lights springing up along the Villa n.a.z.ionale.

The dwelling itself drew a long irregular facade of white marble on its abrupt verdant screen--a series of connected pavilions, galleries, pergolas, belvedere, flowering walls and airy chambers. There were tesselated remains from the time of the great pleasure-saturated Roman emperors, a later distinctly Moorish influence, quattrocento-painted eaves, an eighteenth-century sodded court, and a smoking room with the startling colored gla.s.s of the nineteenth.

The windows of Lavinia's room had no sashes; they were composed of a double marble arch, supported in the center by a slender twisted marble column, with Venetian blinds. She stood in the opening, gazing fixedly over the water turning into night. She could hear, from the room beyond, her husband's heavy deliberate footfalls; and the sound filled her with a formless resentment. She wished to be justifiably annoyed by them, or him; but there was absolutely no cause. Cesare Orsi's character and disposition were alike beyond reproach--transparent and heroically optimistic. Since their marriage she had been insolent, she had been both captious and continuously indifferent, without unsettling the determined eager good-nature with which he met her moods.

During the week he went by launch into Naples in the interests of his banking, and did not return for luncheon; and she had long uninterrupted hours for the enjoyment of her pleasant domain. Altogether, his demands upon her were reasonable to the point of self-effacement. He laughed a great deal; this annoyed her youthful gravity and she remonstrated sharply more than once, but he only leaned back and laughed harder. Then she would either grow coldly disdainful or leave the room, followed by the echo of his merriment. There was something impervious, like armor, in his excellent humor. Apparently she could not get through it to wound him as she would have liked; and she secretly wondered.

He was prodigal in his generosity--the stores of the Via Roma were prepared to empty themselves at her desire. Cesare Orsi's wife was a figure of importance in Naples. She had been made welcome by the Neapolitan society--lawn fetes had been given in villas under the burnished leaves of magnolias on the height of Vomero. The Cavaliere Nelli, Orsi's cousin and a retired colonel of Bersaglieri, entertained lavishly at dinner on the terrace of Bertolini's; she went out to old houses looking through aged and riven pines at the sea.

She would have enjoyed all this hugely if she had not been married to Orsi; but the continual reiteration of the fact that she was Orsi's wife filled her with an acc.u.mulating resentment. The implication that she had been exceedingly fortunate became more than she could bear. The consequence was that, as soon as it could be managed, she ceased going about.

She was now at the window, immersed in a melancholy sense of total isolation; the water stirring along the masonry below, a call from a shadowy fishing boat dropping down the bay, filled her with longing for the cheerful existence of the Lungarno. She had had a letter from Gheta that morning, the first from her sister since she had left Florence, brief but without any actual expression of ill will. After all was said, she had brought Gheta a great disappointment; if she had been in the elder's place probably she would have behaved no better.... It occurred to her to ask Gheta to Naples. At least then she would have some one with whom to recall the pleasant trifles of past years. She would have liked to ask Anna Mantegazza, too; but this she knew was impossible--Gheta had not forgiven Anna for her part on the night that had resulted in Orsi's proposal for Lavinia.

She wondered, more obscurely, whether Abrego y Mochales was still in Florence. He loomed at the back of her thoughts, inscrutably dark and romantic. It piqued her that he had not made the slightest response to her palpable admiration. But he had been tremendously stirred by Gheta, who was never touched by such emotions.

A desire to see Mochales grew insidiously out of her speculations; a desire to talk about him, hear his name. Lavinia deliberately shut her eyes to the fact that this last became her princ.i.p.al reason for wishing to see Gheta.

She told Cesare, with a diffidence which she was unable to overcome, that she had written asking her sister for a visit. Seemingly he didn't hear her. They were at breakfast, on the wine-red tiling of a pergola by the water, and he had shaken his fist, with a rueful curse, in the direction of Naples. Before him lay an open letter with an engraved page heading.

"I said," Lavinia repeated impatiently, "that Gheta will probably be here the last of the week."