The Title Market Part 8

"Are all young girls in America so unreasonably capricious, so whimsically balanced mentally as--a young girl I once met?"

"How was she?" Nina's curiosity was aroused in spite of her.

"Very inexperienced, and therefore uncertain. Like the person who in dancing counts one, two, three--one, two, three, for fear of losing time--or like the inexperienced swimmer who measures constantly the distance to sh.o.r.e."

"Children, you are chattering nonsense," the princess interfered. "Here, you lazy ones, help me to write the invitations!"

Nina arose and went to look over her aunt's shoulder. "Oh, but it is for day after to-morrow!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean to say that any one will come at such short notice?" That the invitations were merely visiting cards with "Informal Dance" written in the corner, and a date not forty-eight hours ahead, astonished her. She asked about the details. How could they arrange for the decorations, favors, supper? But the princess smiled complacently. Candles were all the decoration necessary! the favors would be trifles that could be bought in half an hour; and as for supper--what could young people want more than lemonade or tea, sandwiches, and cakes? The only question was where they should dance.

The princess turned to Giovanni. "I think it is best in the picture gallery, don't you?"

"The floor is not so smooth as in the Room of the Aenead, but come, let us go and decide." He led the way, and they followed. The Room of the Aenead was next that in which they were sitting. The portrait gallery, filled with treasures from the days of Italy's grandeur, was still beyond. It was this apartment of all others that most appealed to Nina.

For a moment she forgot why they had come into the gallery, and her attention remained fixed upon the canvases. With the ever-vigilant Giovanni at her side, she seemed to be walking in a day that was past, to be enveloped in a fairy mantle! She put her hand on a group said to be the work of Michelangelo, running her fingers over the face of one of the figures with awe in her touch.

"To think," she said very softly, the wonder breaking through the low tone of her voice, "to think that Michelangelo's own living hand has been where mine is now--still more, he has been in this very room! Not alone he, but Raphael, Correggio, and Pinturicchio! And all this is called home by my own aunt. _Mine!_" A little quiver had come into her throat. "It is too wonderful! Yet it gives me the strangest sensation--I can't exactly explain it, but it is as though I were not born at all. Do you know," she had turned to Giovanni wistfully, "I think I can understand just a little of the way you feel--it is as though you were securely planted like a tree. In the beginning, long ago, you were put into the earth with the first things sown. I am merely a leaf, blown from what branch I do not even know--belonging nowhere, coming from nothing. I think I see for the first time what you mean, over here, but just _being_ and not caring to do more than survive from the gloriousness of all this." She spread her arms out as though bewildered.

"Now you see," Giovanni answered her, as though there were a new and strong bond of sympathy between them, "why decorations are unnecessary.

Can you imagine these walls, which for centuries have looked down upon every great personage of Rome, being decked up like a Christmas tree because a number of people whose achievements are in no way ill.u.s.trious are coming for an hour or two?"

"I think," said Nina, "that I shall dance like a wraith. It seems almost a sacrilege to bob around and prattle in such surroundings. How silly their sainted ghosts might think us!"

"I never thought of the old masters as saints exactly. But come, Mademoiselle--let us pretend--in each of those chandeliers are burning a hundred wax candles. It is the night of the ball--we open it so--will you dance?"

Again there appeared a Giovanni that she had never seen before, his lazy arrogance vanished, as, whisking a handkerchief out of his pocket to wave in his hand, he became a sprite--a dancing faun, a reincarnation of the spirit of Donatello.

Twice he traversed the length of the gallery, and then, with a vigor added to his grace, he caught Nina and swung her with him into his whirling dance. It had been perfectly done; even in his _abandon_ there was no lack of ceremony. There was none of the "come along" spirit of youth in America. He was in this, just as he was in everything else, a remnant of a past age; he had merely been transformed into a Bacchant!

He was in no way a mere young man who had grabbed a young girl around the waist and made her dance.

But as the princess watched them, her feelings were strongly at variance. Admiration played the greater part. Even a much less biased mind than hers could not have failed to appreciate the wonderful grace of the man and the girl, for Nina was as graceful as he. Yet the princess looked vaguely troubled, too, at the thought that Giovanni was perhaps overstepping his privilege.

"Giovanni! Nina!" she called, but she might as well have appealed to the wind that blew through the courtyard below, and instead of their heeding she felt her own waist encircled as Sansevero, who had entered by the door behind her, swept her into the dance with him. "But, Sandro!" she exclaimed, resisting, "it is . . . not seemly! What if . . . the servants . . . should . . . see us?" But, joining Giovanni in the tune he was whistling, Sansevero seemed to have caught some of his brother's humor.

If Giovanni had become the spirit of grace, Alessandro had become the spirit of recklessness, and Eleanor was whirled, breathless, not as one dances usually, but madly, so that her feet barely touched the floor. To add to the revelry of the scene, the Great Dane, who was never far from Giovanni's side, now joined the general whirl and leaped round and round as though he had but newly come from a bath, his deep bark punctuating the valse the two men were whistling. The princess felt an apprehensive dread of a servant's intrusion, and again a breathless "Sandro, stop!"

escaped her lips just as----

The portiere was lifted and the footman announced, "_Suo Eccellenza il Duca di Scorpa!_"

"Ah, I hope I do not intrude upon the family gaiety!" The duke's face was insinuatingly bland and his manner smooth as an eel.

The dancers stopped instantly. The princess flushed, but otherwise only one who knew her intimately might have guessed that she was conscious of having been put in the position of a careless and undignified chaperon.

But she winced inwardly, and felt no rea.s.surance in the knowledge that the duke's tongue was known to be more skillful in the art of embroidering than the fingers of the most expert needlewoman. Sansevero followed his wife's cue, but without feeling her dismay, for he, it must be remembered, liked Scorpa. He had the nave manner of a child caught doing something foolish, but that was all. Giovanni welcomed the duke suavely, yet, as the princess led Scorpa into the living rooms, Nina had an exhibition of a real side of Giovanni that she was destined to remember ever after.

She never in her life had imagined that such fury could be depicted in the human countenance. His nostrils dilated, and his jaw was squared.

"I'll kill that viper yet!" he muttered between his teeth, and, reaching out for the first thing to hand, his long smooth fingers locked around the neck of the Great Dane--so tight that the dog, half strangled and snarling, lunged at his tormenter. Nina cried out in horror, but instantly Giovanni's temper vanished as it had come. He relaxed his fingers with a caress; and the animal fawned on him.

"Forgive me, Mademoiselle." He said it as lightly as though there had been only some trivial inattention to overlook.

The whole scene had taken place in a moment--so quickly, in fact, that as Nina and he followed the princess through the adjoining rooms, she half wondered if her senses had deceived her. What manner of man was this indolent, graceful descendant of a feudal race? As he approached the duke, Nina unconsciously held her breath. Half expecting to see them draw daggers then and there, she glanced fearfully from one to the other; but Giovanni, smiling his sleepy-eyed smile, talked as though he thought the duke the most charming man in the world.

CHAPTER VIII

OPENING DAY AT THE t.i.tLE MARKET

On the evening of the dance the Princess Malio, stiff, thin, and sour, and the old d.u.c.h.ess Scorpa, stolid, ugly, and squat, sat together in a corner of the ballroom--that is to say, the picture gallery--of the Palazzo Sansevero.

"So that is the new American heiress!" said the d.u.c.h.ess. "Very presentable, I call her. My Todo might do worse than marry her--but of course"--her face drew itself into the grimace that did duty for a smile--"my Todo would have little chance for her favor in compet.i.tion with your nephew."

The princess bowed in acknowledgment and strongly protested against the idea of any one's being able to compete with a Duke Scorpa.

The conversation between these two old women was always forced into just such channels of conscious politeness. It was rarely that they disclosed the antagonism that formed the chief spice of their lives. But the princess could not control an impulse to destroy, if possible, the satisfaction of her rival.

"My dear d.u.c.h.ess," she insinuated dulcetly, "do you really credit her fabulous fortune?" Her manner expressed her pity for the other's credulity. "Such a sum as five hundred thousand _lire_ a year too much oversteps the mark of probability."

But the complacency of the d.u.c.h.ess was not so easily disturbed. "Oh, no, that is not right!" she broke in. "I have been a.s.sured that she has five hundred thousand _dollars_ a year. Dollars! And there are five _lire_ in every dollar, remember."

"Dollars!" echoed the princess--and her voice rose several notes above normal pitch; in fact, she nearly screamed. "I am very certain you are misinformed." But her skepticism barely covered her real chagrin because her nephew was a cadaverous nonent.i.ty, with little to recommend him to a t.i.tle hunter. As she looked at the girl in question, however, there was a decided relish in her next remark:

"I think Giovanni Sansevero will carry off that prize! See the way she is smiling up at him. Ah! and now they are dancing together. Certainly they make a suitable looking couple."

The d.u.c.h.ess straightened her dumpy figure to its greatest possible height. For once she forgot herself. "Would any one marry a Sansevero when there is a Scorpa to choose!"

"It has happened," chuckled the princess.

The threatening break in their habitual politeness was averted by the arrival of a third old lady, the Marchesa Valdeste. As her husband was the receiver of the "_Gran Collare de l'Anunziata_," a distinction that gave him the rank of cousin to the king, the d.u.c.h.ess and the princess both rose for a moment in deference. The "collaress" seated herself with them. In contrast to theirs, her face was sweet and fresh, with an expression almost like that of a young girl. Her whole personality was gentle, and she punctuated what she said by a curious little swaying motion, a bending of the body from the waist, very suggestive of the way a flower bends on its stalk to the breeze.

The marchesa was also much interested in the new heiress, and although a certain finish of demeanor now modified their remarks, none of them attempted to conceal her ambition to secure Nina's money for her own family.

The Princess Malio was more eager than skeptical as she asked the marchesa, "Have you heard the story of her half a million dollar income?

Do you believe it possible!"

The marchesa turned her little hands over, palms up. "She has something incredible, but I cannot say how much. Maria Potensi asked the American amba.s.sador if the celebrated James Randolph was as rich as reputed, and he said----"

The d.u.c.h.ess became almost apoplectic in her eagerness. "He said----"

The marchesa looked for all the world like a young girl telling a fairy tale. "He said"--she breathed it in wonder--"that Mr. Randolph's wealth was so fabulous that it was beyond computing! And _this_ is his _only child_!"

An awed stillness fell upon the group, each old lady looking and longing according to her own nature. It was the marchesa who at last broke the silence. "I cannot deny that I should like my Cesare to be so fortunate as to win her, but I must confess she and Giovanni Sansevero make a charming couple!"

"Dancing, yes," snapped the d.u.c.h.ess, "but for my taste they dance too fast!"

"She is doubtless thinking of her tub of a son, who moves with about the grace of an elephant," whispered the Princess Malio behind her fan.

"I can imagine nothing more graceful than the picture they make at this moment," the marchesa answered, wistfully regarding the two slim figures whirling down the length of the room, dancing, dancing on! as though it were the first, and not the tenth, time they had traversed the great gallery; the elastic poise of each the same, the gold-colored gauze of Nina's dress exactly matching the rippling waves of glorious hair only a shade below the sleek black head of her partner.