The Title Market Part 6

Nina interrupted her reproachfully. "Don't you dare! To hear you, one might suppose you were a hundred. I don't care a bit whether Don Giovanni is a Calaban or an Antinous--All the same," she laughed, "had I better tidy my hair--or does it not matter?"

The tourists were all filing out of the castle now, and as the porter locked the doors, the princess shook hands with the little American.

"Thank you, Your Highness," she said, "you have been real kind. We--I didn't think, when I left home that I was going to be talking this way to princesses. I never dreamed they were like you; and you talk beautiful English, too."

With a warm impulse the princess laid her left hand over the cotton-gloved one in her right.

"Ah, but I was an American myself," she said, "and it does me good to see a country-woman."

They parted. Again the guide made a deep reverence to "Her Excellency,"

but to Nina the look in his eyes seemed both sly and suspicious.

In the meantime, the pony-cart carrying the prince and his brother was jogging slowly up the hills from the station.

Don Giovanni Sansevero--by his own t.i.tle the Marchese di Valdo--was still on the hither side of thirty, but if a reputation for being "irresistible to women" goes for anything, he must by this time have had some experience in their ways. At all events, his appearance so tallied with hearsay that, whether founded upon fact or not, the reputation remained.

He was supple and beautifully built, his bones were small and finely jointed, his features chiseled with cla.s.sic regularity--later on his lips might grow coa.r.s.e, but as yet they were merely full. The chief characteristic of his expression was its mobility, but it was the mobility of an actor who knows every emotion that the muscles of a face can command. Sansevero's face, also changeable as an April day, was the spontaneous expression of unconscious mood. Giovanni was of a type to smile sweetly when most angry, or to a.s.sume an air of sulkiness when at heart he might be well content. Just now, with an a.s.sumption of extreme indifference, he turned to his brother.

"What is she like, this heiress of yours whom you are so anxious to have me marry?" he asked. "Plain, stupid, a nonent.i.ty?--So much the better--those make the easy wives to manage. Give me a woman with little real success--I mean, one who has seen only the imitation fire that is lighted when man pursues with reason and not with feeling. The American men make it easy for the rest of us--they are what you call curtain raisers in the play of love. They keep the gallery busy until the entrance of the hero. I hope she is not a beauty."

"_Per Bacco_, how you do talk!" interrupted the prince. "I have no chance to answer. Miss Randolph is not a beauty; but she is _simpatica_; she has an air, a _chic_."

"So much the better, so long as the _chic_ is one of appearance and not of personality. I don't want my wife to be a siren." Suddenly he laughed and hit his brother's knee. "But what nonsense! Imagine a cold American miss having the power to make a man's pulses leap! Oh, don't make a face like that--I am not speaking of my honored sister-in-law; she is indeed of the true type of our mother." Mechanically both men indicated the sign of the cross at the word "mother."

"But," continued Giovanni, "I am not exactly worthy of a saint--it would not suit my disposition. It is bad enough a.s.sociating always with good Brother Antonio as it is. By the way, where is he?"

He gave a shrill whistle and looked back down the road for the gray figure of his inseparable friend and companion: not a monk as the name indicated, but a Great Dane. A distant cloud of dust proclaimed that the whistle had been heard. "Poor Sant Antonio!" he called as soon as the dog had caught up, "Where have you been? I suppose you were meditating along life's highway. No," he continued, "it were best I did not pretend to be better than I am; my good monk would not absolve me else. Still, do you know, sometimes I seriously doubt even Brother Antonio's morals!"

He shrugged his shoulders and laughed in great delight. Sansevero seemed undecided whether to be shocked or amused; ordinarily he would have laughed easily enough, but Giovanni in some way had seemed to involve Eleanor in his levity.

"Well," continued Giovanni, "I suppose at least Miss America, not being a Catholic, will make no objections to Sant Antonio's short-comings!"

At this Sansevero bristled, "Giovanni, I will ask you not to air your irreligious remarks about that dog with an unseemly name, in connection with the family of my wife."

For answer Giovanni blew a whistle into the air.

Sansevero grew sulky. "I warn you! Don't let Leonore hear you make remarks that she might think slighting about her darling! She is like her own child to her!"

For a few moments both men were silent. Giovanni's face was no longer mocking; he was watching the beautiful lope of his huge dog. Sansevero looked straight ahead, quite pensively for him. "Poor Leonore," he said at last. "It is often such as she who have no children!" Unconsciously he sighed.

Giovanni smiled, "I don't see what she wants of another child than you!"

"And you will inherit----"

"Please! I am not quite so bad as that. Believe me, I should rejoice for you if you had children. Leonore would have made a wonderful mother.

Even I might be respectable if a woman such as she loved me as she loves you. But," he grew flippant again, "to marry one of those nose-in-the-air, soulless, school-teacher prudes--Never! And in any event, my dear, I am not so sure I want to marry your heiress. I am very well as I am!" He shrugged his shoulders. A moment later, though, he put a question. "What is her first name?--I have forgotten."

"Nina."

"Nina! Really a charming name, that! One that can be said without breaking consonants against the teeth. There was a girl once, very pretty, but she was called--I can never p.r.o.nounce it--E-d-i-t-h--those are the letters. But Ni-na! It has a delicious sound." He let it slip over his tongue. Then he put his head on one side and asked quizzically, "How much has she?"

Sansevero looked up quickly; he hesitated a moment, then answered stiffly: "She has a great fortune, but she is also my niece."

Giovanni raised his eyebrows, and then burst into shouts of laughter.

"What has come over you? It was you who suggested the match! You know as well as I that my debts don't disturb me in the least. It is quite easy always to--borrow, if one must pay."

CHAPTER VI

LOVE, AND A GARDEN

Don Giovanni arrived on Tuesday, and Sat.u.r.day found him out on the terrace leaning over the bal.u.s.trade beside Nina. His expression was unusually animated, for he was making the most of his first chance to talk to her without the presence of a third person. Not that they were alone--the Princess Sansevero was too much of an Italian to leave a young girl for a moment unchaperoned. But she was walking about with the head gardener, discussing the possibilities of saving a grove of cypress trees that showed signs of dying; and though she kept the young people well in sight, she could not overhear their conversation. Giovanni's big dog, St. Anthony, was lying outstretched in the sunshine.

In the full light, Nina had ample opportunity for observing that her companion was quite as good-looking in detail as in general effect; and the rhythmic inflection of his voice--he spoke in French--she thought truly attuned to his surroundings. He was one of those who, like Italy itself, give to strangers only the suggestion of their meaning, and he interested Nina chiefly as a new unsolved problem.

Gradually the habitual sleepy expression had returned to his eyes, and his voice grew dreamy. "We of Italy," he was saying, "live, endure, die, if need be--always for the same reason--woman and love! Your men in America"--his teeth glittered as he smiled--"tell me, Mademoiselle, do you believe they know what it is to love? Do they hide it, perhaps, from us Europeans?"

"I should think," answered Nina sagely, "that love means more to our men than to you." (A remark that John Derby had made came into her mind as she spoke: "You will find your own countrymen go in for the real thing, where the foreigner spends all his time talking about it.")

Don Giovanni was too thoroughly a European to become argumentative. "You see, I speak only from hearsay," he continued, with that air of agreeing with her which only the Latin possesses. "I have always been led to suppose that love plays a very small part in the lives of your countrymen." He held the thread of the conversation, but his manner said plainly that he only waited humbly to be enlightened. "I should have said," he went on, "an ill.u.s.tration of love in my country as contrasted with yours is shown in the gardens--just as our gardens bloom all the year, so love blooms always in our hearts; flowers and love, they go together; nowhere in the world are they so perfect as in Italy."

"So cultivated?" asked Nina.

He took no notice of the quip. "If to cultivate is to think of and to nurture, to strive always for greater perfection, then, yes, let us say cultivated."

There was a challenge; there was also a look of pity that annoyed her.

It was this that she resented. She felt that she was being enmeshed in an invisible web, and she sought for a means of escape. Seeing none she might be sure of, she dropped the figurative speech and took refuge in plat.i.tudes.

"In America we admire a man for what he does--over here you do nothing.

Each day for you is the same. You spend your time as a woman might, unless you go into the army, the church, or diplomacy. For instance, you, yourself, what is your ambition? Is there anything you are trying to do?"

Indolently he shrugged his shoulders, and with a half-lazy arrogance he answered, "Why should I try to create a personal and trivial future, when I can, without striving, merely survive from a far more glorious past? Listen, Mademoiselle, do you think as much can be accomplished by one short generation as by many? For instance, could a garden such as this be produced in the lifetime of one man?" He waved his arm in a circular motion. "It is not alone its plan and its fountains, and its green shrubbery that make it what it is, but the history of human lives that is planted in its every turn and corner. The gardens of America are but newly born from the minds of your landscape architects; in most of them the trees are but newly planted. This garden was already stately with ilex and cypress when the first white men of North America were sowing a little corn. How can you feel romance in a garden where there is no tradition save of the hours a few laborers have spent in digging?"

Suddenly a look of real ardor came into his face, an animation into his expression that gave a new charm to his words. "On this terrace where we now stand, leaning upon the marble of this very railing, countless men who were heroes, poets, philosophers, and fair women who were their sweethearts, have looked, as we do, over the hills laden with blossoming trees. Up that path yonder to the monastery have gone pilgrims, sinners, martyrs, and many lovers to have their vows blessed, or to find a haven for broken hearts. In the _allee_ of cypress trees have walked many of the great lovers of Italy's romance. From this terrace end Beatrice herself is said to have thrown a rose of that very bush's parent stem to her immortal lover. Every corner of the garden holds its story of meetings that made of it a paradise, of partings that made of it an inferno. What is paradise, but love? Inferno, but the sorrow of love?

Down before us, and even up here on this terrace, scenes have been enacted in feud and in peace, horrible scenes of bloodshed and cruelty, and again scenes of splendor--gatherings of church, ceremonials of state, but chiefly scenes of love--some beautiful and happy, others no less beautiful because they were tragic. Shall I tell you some of the stories?"

Nina nodded an eager a.s.sent; Giovanni's manner held her completely.

"Almost where you are standing, Cecilia Sansevero was stabbed by Guido Corlone before he killed himself, so that they might be together in the next world. Out of that window, the third from the end, another daughter of our house descended by a silk ladder. They--she and her lover--took the path directly below here; the guards saw them. This happened just beside the statue yonder. He drew his sword and stood before her, but the guards were too many, and he was killed. She had poison in a locket that she wore, and almost before they could drag her arms from about her lover's neck, she also was dead."

"Horrible!" cried Nina. Her face, mobile as Giovanni's own, had unconsciously reflected, in changing expressions, the progress of his narrative. "To think that in such a place as this such things really happened." She shuddered, then added, "But, Don Giovanni, are there no pleasant stories? Please think of some."

"Oh, any number. Once there was a small house in the valley--a lodge it would be called now. A very pretty girl lived there. This time it was the son of our house, a young, hot-headed fellow like all of us."

Giovanni let just enough fire gleam in his eyes to give Nina a glimpse of another phase of him. "Well, this son--whose name was the same as mine, Giovanni, a Prince Sansevero--he was mad about this girl. He would marry her or he would take his life. She was the star of his destiny, the crown of his life, and all the rest of it. They were going to send her away--she was to go into a cloister; he was locked up in the castle. But the old custodian, who adored the boy, let him escape by the underground pa.s.sage. He came out in the church. She had gone there to pray, knowing nothing of the underground way--it was kept a profound secret in those days. As the girl knelt, Giovanni appeared suddenly beside the altar. Her duenna thought him an apparition, and the two fled up to the monastery--that one you see from here."

"And then----?" said Nina breathlessly.