CHAPTER IV

"Why do you tell me this now?" asked Edna. "The other day when I asked you if you had known him before you said you had not."

"Something that has happened since then determined me."

Edna's room was full of flowers, roses, narcissi and violets, and the air was heavy with their scent. Filippo had never failed in his _pet.i.ts soins_. It was so easy to give an order at the florist's, and the bill would come in presently, after the wedding, and be paid in American dollars. There were boxes of sweets too; and a volume of Romola, bound in white and gold, lay on the table. Edna had been looking at the inscription on the fly-leaf when Olive came in.

"_Carissima_" he had written, and she had believed him, but that was half an hour ago. Now her small body was shaken with sobs, her face was stained with tears because that faith she had had was dying.

The chill at her heart made her feel altogether cold, and she edged her chair nearer to the fire, and put her feet up on the fender.

"I wish I could feel it was not true, but somehow though I have been so fond of him I have not trusted him. Well, your cousin was beautiful, and perhaps he had known her a long time before he knew me.

He wanted to say good-bye kindly. He was entangled--such things happen, I know. He could not help what happened afterwards. That was not his fault."

Olive could not meet her pleading eyes. "I thought something like that last week," she said. "And that is why I kept silence; but now I know he would make you unhappy always. Oh, forgive me for hurting you so."

She came and knelt down beside the little girl, and put her arms about her. "Don't cry, my dear. Don't cry."

"Oh, Olive, I was so fond of him! Now tell me what has happened since."

"Put your hands in mine. There, I will rub the poor tiny things and warm them. They are so pretty. Yesterday, in the Boboli gardens, I missed your cousin, and when I went to look for her I saw her with the Prince. He held her and was kissing her."

"Oh!" Edna sprang to her feet. "That settles it. Mamie is common and real homely, and if he can run after her I have done with him. I could have forgiven the other, especially as she is dead, but Mamie!

Gracious! Here he is!"

He came into the room leisurely, smiling, very sure of his welcome.

Olive met the hot insolence of his stare steadily, and Edna turned her back on him.

"Olive," she said, "you speak to him. Tell him--ask him--" Her gentle voice broke.

"What is the matter?" he asked carefully.

"I saw you twice in Siena last summer. Do you remember _Rigoletto_ at the Lizza theatre? You were in the stage box. You wore evening dress, and I saw that emerald ring you have now on your finger. The next day you met my Cousin Gemma in my room in the Vicolo dei Moribondi. Do you remember the steep dark stairs and the white walls of the bare place where you saw her last?"

He made no answer, and there was still a smile on his lips, but his eyes were hard. Edna was looking at him now, but he seemed to have forgotten her.

"I suppose you loved her," Olive said slowly. "Do you remember the faint pink curve of her mouth, the little cleft in her chin, and her hair that was so soft and fine? There were always little stray curls on the white nape of her neck. I came to my room that morning to fetch a book. When I had climbed the stairs I found that I had not the key with me, but the door was unlocked and I saw her there with a man, and I saw the green gleam of an emerald."

Men have such a power of silence. No woman but would have made some answer now, denying with a show of surprise, making excuses, using words in one way or another.

"They were talking about you in the town, though I think they did not know who you were--at least I never heard your name--and that night Gemma's _fidanzato_ told her he would not marry her. You know best what that meant to her. She rushed into her own room and threw herself out of the window. Ah, you should have seen the dark blood oozing through the fine soft curls! She lay dead in the street for hours before they took her away."

"_Santissimo Dio!_ Is this true?"

"Yes."

"Gemma--I never knew it--" His face was greatly altered now, and he had to moisten his lips before he could speak.

"I could have forgiven that," Edna said tremulously after a while.

"But not yesterday. Your kisses are too cheap, Filippo."

"Oh," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "So Gemma's cousin saw that too. It was nothing, meant nothing. Edna, if you can pardon the other, surely--"

"It was nothing; and it proved that Mamie is nothing, and that you are nothing--to me. That is the end of the matter."

He winced now at the contempt underlying her quiet words, and when she took off her ring and laid it on the table between them he picked it up and flung it into the fire.

"I do not take things back," he said savagely.

When he had left the room Edna began to cry again. "I believe he is suffering now, but not for me. Would he care if I killed myself? I guess not. I am not pretty, only my hands, and hands don't count."

Olive tried to comfort her.

"Poppa shall take me away right now. I have had enough of Europe, and so I shall tell him when he comes in. Must you go now? Well, good-bye, my dear, and thank you. You are white all through, and I am glad you have acted as you have, though it hurts now. If ever I marry it shall be an American ... but I was real fond of Filippo."

CHAPTER V

Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal was buried in a side chapel of the church of San Miniato al Monte, and his counterfeit presentment, wrought in stone, lies on the tomb Rossellino made for him. Rossellino, who loved to carve garlands of acanthus and small sweet _amorini_, has conferred immortality on some of the men whose tombs he adorned in _ba.s.so-rilievo_, and they are remembered because of him; but the cardinal has another claim. He is beautiful in himself as he rests there, his young face set in the peace that pa.s.ses all understanding, his thin hands folded on his breast.

Mourners were kneeling in the central aisles of the church, and women carrying wreaths pa.s.sed through it on their way to the Campo Santo beyond, for this was the day of All Souls, and there were fresh flowers on the new graves, and little black lamps were lit on those that were gra.s.s grown and decked only with the bead blossoms that are kept in gla.s.s cases and need not be changed once a year. The afternoon was pa.s.sing, but still Olive lingered by the cardinal's monument.

Looking at him understandingly she saw that there had been lines of pain about the firm mouth. He had suffered in his short life, he had suffered until death came to comfort him and give him quiet sleep. The mother-sense in her yearned over him, lying there straight and still, with closed eyes that had never seen love; and, womanlike, she pitied the accomplished loneliness that yet seemed to her the most beautiful thing in the world. The old familiar words were in her mind as she looked down upon this saint uncanonised: "Cleanse the thoughts of my heart by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit!" and she remembered Astorre, for whose sake she had come to this church to pray. Once when she had been describing a haggard St Francis in the Sienese gallery to him, he had said: "Ah, women always pity him and admire his picturesque asceticism, but if married men look worried they do not notice it. Their troubles are no compliment to your s.e.x."

Poor Astorre had not been devout in any sense, but he had written his friend a long letter on the day after Gemma's suicide, and he had asked for her prayers then. "Fausto told me how you knelt there in the street beside the dead Odalisque and said the Pater-noster and the Miserere. Perhaps you will do as much for me one day. Your prayers should help the soul that is freed now from the burden of the flesh. I cannot complain of flesh myself, but my bones weigh and I shall be glad to be rid of them. Come and see me soon, _carissima_ ..."

The next morning his mother sent for the girl, but when she came into the darkened room where he lay he had already pa.s.sed away.

"He asked for you, but he would not see a priest. You know they refused to bury his father because he fought for united Italy. Ah!

Rome never forgets."

After the funeral Signora Aurelia had sold her furniture and gone away, and she was living now with a widowed sister in Rome. The Menotti had left Siena too and had gone to Milan, and Olive, not caring to stay on alone in the place where everyone knew what had happened, had come to the Lorenzoni in Florence. She had had a letter from Carmela that morning.

"We like Milan as the streets are so gay, and the shops are beautiful.

We should have got much better mourning here at Bocconi's if we could have waited, but of course that was impossible. Our apartment is convenient, but small and rather dark. Maria hopes you are fatter. She is going to send you some _panforte_ and a box of sugared fruits at Christmas. _La Zia_ has begun to crochet another counterpane; that will be the eighth, and we have only three beds. _Pazienza!_ It amuses her."

Though Olive was not happy at the Palazzo Lorenzoni, she could not wish that she had stayed with her cousins. She felt that their little life would have stifled her. Thinking of them, she saw them, happier than before, since poor Gemma had not been easy to live with, and quite satisfied to do the same things every day, waddling out of a morning to early ma.s.s and the marketing, eating and sleeping during the noon hours, and in the evenings going to hear the music _in piazza_.

Olive was not happy. She was one of those women whose health depends upon their spirits, and of late she had felt her loneliness to be almost unbearable. Her youth had cried for all, or nothing. She would have her love winged and crowned; he should come to her before all the world. Never would she set her foot in secret gardens, or let joy come to her by hidden ways, but now she faced the future and saw that it was grey, and she was afraid.

It seemed to her that she was destined to live always in the Social Limbo, suspended between heaven and earth, an alien in the drawing-room and not received in the kitchen. One might as well be _decla.s.see_ at once, she thought, and yet she knew that that must be h.e.l.l.

If Avenel came to Florence and sought her out would she be weak as Gemma had been, light as Mamie was? Olive knelt for a while on the stones, and her lips moved, though her prayer was inarticulate.

Sunset was burning across the Val d'Arno, and the river flowed as a stream of pure gold under the dark of the historic bridges. Already lights sparkled in the windows of the old houses over the Ponte Vecchio, and the bells of all the churches were ringing the Ave Maria as she pa.s.sed through the whining crowd of beggars at the gate of the Campo Santo and went slowly down the hill. The blessed hour of peace and silence was over now, and she must trudge back through the clamorous streets to be with Mamie, to meet the Marchese's horribly observant eyes, and to be everlastingly quiet and complacent and useful. She was paid for that.