In all that Matilde had told Bosio the elder woman had been quite right.

Veronica was strongly prejudiced in his favour, and what Taquisara had managed to say in a few words about the interested nature of the proposal, not only had little weight with Veronica, but was the only point which had not pleased her in her interview with the Sicilian.

After all, he had attacked her only near relatives in hinting, and more than hinting, that they wished to gain possession of her wealth. She was really ignorant of the fact that Cardinal Campodonico had so rarely even made a pretence of inquiring about the state of her fortune. She met him occasionally, and he never failed to say something pleasant to her, which she afterwards remembered. Whenever Gregorio Macomer spoke to her of business, he used the cardinal's name to give weight to his statements, and Veronica naturally supposed that the princely prelate was informed of all that took place, and approved of everything which Macomer did. It was no wonder that she turned a deaf ear to Taquisara's warning, which, as coming from Gianluca's friend, seemed calculated purposely to influence her against marrying Bosio.

In reality, and apart from the little superficial argumentation with which Veronica had diverted her own mind during the late hours of the afternoon, she had made up her mind that before seriously considering the question of marrying Bosio, she would see Gianluca and give him just such an opportunity of speaking with her alone, as she had given his friend Taquisara. There was really much directness of understanding and purpose in her young character, together with a fair share of tenacity; for, as Matilde had told Bosio, Veronica was a Serra, which was at least equivalent to saying that she was not an insignificant person of weak will and feeble intelligence. She was indeed the last of her name, but the race had not decayed. It was by accident and by force of circ.u.mstances that it had come to be represented by the solitary young girl who sat reading a novel over her fire on that evening, caring very little for the fact that she was a very great personage, related to many royal families, a Grandee of Spain and a Princess of the Holy Roman Empire, all in her own right alone, as Veronica Serra--all of which advantages Taquisara had hastily recapitulated to her that morning. So long as she should live, the race was certainly not extinct, nor worn out; for she had as much vitality as all the tribe of the Spina family taken together. She was not, indeed, conscious of her untried strength, for she had never yet had any opportunity of using it; and in the matter of the will, which was the only one that had yet arisen in which she might have tried herself, she had yielded in the simple desire to get rid of a perpetual importunity. Beyond that she had attached very little importance to it. Her aunt might be miserly, but Veronica, in her youth and health, could not think it even faintly probable that she should die before the elder woman and leave the latter her fortune. Taquisara's hasty counsel had therefore fallen in barren ground. She scouted the idea that Gregorio Macomer had ruined himself in speculations, for she believed him to be a man of extraordinary caution, and probably something of a miser.

Taquisara had therefore not prejudiced her at all against Bosio, nor against the idea of marrying the latter. And Matilde, as has been said, was quite right in supposing that Veronica would see much in favour of the marriage.

Bosio was distinctly a desirable man for a husband. Nine women out of ten would have admitted this without hesitation. The strongest argument against the statement seemed to lie in the fact that there were a few faintly grey streaks in his thick and silky hair. For the rest, whatever he chose to say of himself, he was still within the limits of what one may call second youth. He was only between fifteen and sixteen years older than Veronica, and such a difference of age between man and wife does not generally begin to be felt as a disadvantage until the man is nearly sixty. He was not at all a worn-out dandy, with no illusions, and no const.i.tution to speak of; for circ.u.mstances, as well as his own sober tastes, had caused him to lead a quiet and restful life, admirably adapted to his sound but delicately organized nature. He was decidedly good-looking, especially in a city where beauty is almost the exclusive distinction of the other s.e.x. His figure, though slightly inclined to stoutness, was still graceful, and he carried himself with a good bearing and a quiet manner, which, might well pa.s.s for dignity. So much for his appearance. Intellectually, in Veronica's narrow experience of the world, he was quite beyond comparison with any one she knew. It is true that she really knew hardly any one. But her own intelligence enabled her to judge with tolerable fairness of his capacities, and she had found these varied and broadly developed, precisely in the direction of her own tastes.

Lastly, Matilde was right in counting upon the existing intimacy as a factor in the case. The idea of being suddenly betrothed to marry an almost total stranger was as strongly repugnant to Veronica as it seems to be attractive to most girls of her age and cla.s.s in Southern Italy.

The fact is, perhaps, that the majority of such young girls learn to think of themselves as being sure to lead hopeless and helpless lives, unless they are married; and as very few of them possess such attractions or advantages as to make it a positive certainty that they can marry well, they grow up with the idea that it is better to take the first chance than to risk waiting for a second, which may never come. To these, marriage is a very uncertain lottery; and if they draw a prize, they are not easily persuaded to throw it back into fate's bag, and play for another. The very element of uncertainty lends excitement to the game, and they readily attribute all sorts of perfections to the imaginary stranger who is to be the partner of their lives.

But in this, Veronica's ideas were quite different. She had a.s.suredly not been brought up in vanity and pride of station, and though naturally proud, she was not at all vain. From her childhood, however, she had received something of that sort of constant consideration which is the portion of those born to exalted fortunes. She had never had less of it, perhaps, than in her aunt's house; for the Countess Macomer was not only of her own race and name, and therefore too near to her to show her any such little formalities of respect, but had also, as a matter of policy and with considerable tact, managed to keep the dominant position in her own house. She had shut out the little court of young friends who would very probably have gathered round her niece--acquaintances of Veronica's convent days, older than herself, but anxious enough to be called her friends--and the tribe of men, old and young, who, in the extremely complicated relationships of the Neapolitan n.o.bility, claimed some right to be treated as cousins and connexions of the family. All these Matilde had strenuously kept away, isolating Veronica as much as possible from young people of her own age, and proportionately diminishing both the girl's power to choose a husband for herself and her appreciation of her own right to make the choice. Nevertheless, Veronica knew that she had that right, and she intended to exercise it.

Unconsciously, however, her judgment had been guided towards the selection of Bosio, so that she was now by no means so free an agent as she supposed herself to be. She did not love him at all; but she liked him very much, and admired him, and since it was time for her to be married, she was strongly inclined to choose for her husband the only man of her acquaintance whom she both admired and liked.

These long and tedious explanations are necessary in order to explain how it came about that Veronica Serra, with her great position and vast estates, seriously thought of uniting herself with such a comparatively obscure personage as Count Bosio Macomer. Taquisara had very fairly described the latter's position to her that morning as that of an insignificant poor gentleman, in no point of name or fortune the superior of five hundred others, and who might naturally be supposed to covet the dignities and the wealth which Veronica could confer upon him. But Veronica had resented both the description and the suggestions which had accompanied it, which showed well enough, how strong her inclination really was.

On the other side, there remained the impression made upon her by what Taquisara had said for Gianluca, and last of all the impression made upon her by Taquisara himself, as a man, and as a standard by which to measure other men in the future.

With regard to Gianluca, Veronica was indeed curious, but she was also somewhat sceptical. She could not, of course, say surely that a young man might not die of love for a girl whom he scarcely knew; and among the acquaintances of her family she remembered at least one case in converse, where a morbid maiden of eighteen years had died because she was not allowed to marry the man she loved. Even there, it had been hinted that the girl had caught a bad cold which had fastened upon her delicate lungs. It was doubtless a romantic story, and if anything appealed to her for Gianluca, it was the romance in his case. Her reading had been very limited as yet, and the book she was reading so eagerly was a French translation of the Bride of Lammermoor. The romance of it spoke directly to her imagination; but when the book was closed she did not believe that she had a romantic disposition. It is an indisputable fact that the people to whom the strangest things happen never regard themselves as romantic characters, whatever others may think of them. They are, indeed, more often active and daring people, to whom what others think extraordinary seems quite natural and easy. They make the events out of which humanity's appet.i.te for romance is fed, and become, to humanity, themselves the unconscious embodiments of romance itself. In her heart, therefore, Veronica was a little sceptical about the reality of the terrific pa.s.sion by which, according to Taquisara, his friend was consumed. She recalled his face distinctly, as she had seen him half a dozen times in the world, and she thought the definition of him which she had given Bianca Corleone a very just one. He reminded her of one of Perugino's angels--with a youthful beard. If angels had beards, she thought, without a smile, they would have beards like Gianluca della Spina's, very youthful, scanty, curling, and so fair as to be almost colourless.

She remembered that he had looked at her rather sadly, and had spoken little and to no purpose, making futile remarks about juvenile amus.e.m.e.nts, and one or two harmless little jokes which she had quite forgotten, but to which he had referred at the next short meeting, at some other house, on the corner of some other similar sofa. That was all that she could call up out of her memories. She had thought him insipid.

Once she remembered distinctly that while he had been talking to her, she had been watching Bianca Corleone's handsome brother, Gianforte, whom she had seen only once before, and that when her companion had asked her to agree with him, she had said 'yes,' without having the least idea of what he had been saying. He had produced only a very slight and transparent shadow amongst the figures of her recollections.

It was a severe tax on her credulity to try and believe that he was dying for love of her. If it were true, she thought, why had he not had the courage to make her understand it? The fact that the offer made by his family had not been communicated to her might have been hard to explain, but she was not disturbed for want of an explanation. She did not care for the man in the least, and there might be fifty reasons why her aunt and uncle should think him undesirable. On the whole, she believed that Taquisara had enormously exaggerated the state of the case. The Sicilian himself impressed her as singularly honest and bold, but she was much more ready to believe that the friend who had sent him might have interested views, than that Bosio Macomer, whom she liked and admired, was anxious to get possession of her fortune.

Taquisara himself had struck her as something new in the way of a man, of a sort such as she had never seen nor dreamt of, and her mind dwelt long on the recollection of the interview. In some way which she could not explain, she vaguely connected him with the book she was now reading--the Bride of Lammermoor; in other words, he appeared to her in the light of a romantic character, and the first that had ever come within the circle of her experience. His recklessness of formalities, of all the limits supposed to be set upon the conversation of mere acquaintance, of what she might or might not think of him individually, so long as she would listen to what he had to say for his friend, seemed to her to belong to a type of humanity with which she had never come in contact. He, and he only, as yet had stirred some thought of another existence than the one which seemed to lie straight before her,--a broad, plain road, as the wife of Bosio.

Of love, indeed, there was nothing in her heart, for any man. Within her all was yet dim and still as a sweet summer's night before the dawning.

In her firmament still shone the myriad stars that were her maiden thoughts, not yet lost in the high twilight, to be forgotten when love's sun should rise, in peace, or storm, as rise he must. Under her feet, low, virgin flowers still bloomed in dusk, such as she should find not again in the rose gardens or the thorn-land that lay before her. In maidenhood's tender eyes the greater tenderness of woman awaited still the coming day.

CHAPTER IX.

The weather changed during the night, and when Veronica awoke in the morning the gusty southwest was driving the rain from the roof of the opposite house into a grey whirl of spray that struck across swiftly, to scourge the thick panes with a thousand lashes of watery lace.

As Veronica watched her maid opening the heavy old-fashioned shutters, one by one, the sight of each wet window hurt her a little more, progressively, until, when all were visible, she could have cried out of sheer disappointment. For she had unconsciously been looking forward to another day like yesterday, calm and clear and peaceful with much sunshine. But even in Naples it cannot always be spring in December--though it generally is in January. She had hoped for just such another day as the preceding one. She had remembered how she and Taquisara had stood in the sunlight by the marble steps in Bianca Corleone's garden, and she had expected to stand there again this morning with Gianluca, to hear what he had to say.

That was impossible, however, and while she was slowly dressing she tried to decide what she should do. It was easy enough to make up her mind that she must see Gianluca, but it was much more difficult to determine exactly how she should find an excuse for going out alone on such a morning. It seemed probable that, whatever she might propose as a reason, her aunt would immediately wish to accompany her. They had given her the afternoon and the evening of the previous day in which to think over her answer, and Matilde might naturally enough expect to hear it this morning. In any case she should not be able to order the carriage and slip out alone as she had done the first time. She had meant to go out on foot with her maid, and then to take a cab in the street and drive to the villa. But in such weather as this she could not do such a thing without exciting remark. It was a week-day, and there were no ma.s.ses to hear, as an excuse, by the time she was dressed.

She watched herself in the gla.s.s, while her maid was doing her hair. The dull light of the rainy morning made her own face look grey and sallow.

She had not slept very well, and her eyes were heavy, she thought. The glaring whiteness of the thing she had thrown over her shoulders while her hair was being brushed made her look worse. She had little vanity about her appearance, as a rule, but on that particular day she would have been glad to look her best.

Not that she at all believed that Gianluca was dying for her; but he was certainly in love with her. Of that she felt sure, for she could not suppose that Taquisara himself was not convinced of the fact. Nor had she the smallest beginning of a tender sentimentality about the fair-haired young man. Nevertheless, if she was to meet him, she did not wish to be positively ugly, as she seemed to be to herself when she looked into the mirror, facing the dulness of the rain-beaten window.

Whether she herself was ever to care for him or not, she somehow did not wish to disappoint him by her appearance, and the undefined fear lest she might affected her spirits. Then, before she had quite finished dressing, Matilde Macomer knocked at the door and came in. She was looking far worse than Veronica, and from the absence of colour in her face, her eyes seemed to be more near together than ever. Her appearance made Veronica feel a little more hopeful, and the young girl said to herself that after all the light of a rainy day was unbecoming to every one, and much more so to a woman of forty than to a girl of twenty.

She did not wish to be alone with her aunt if she could help it, and she promptly invented several little things for her maid to do, in order to keep the latter in the room. The maid was a thin, dark woman of middle age, from the mountains. She was a widow, and her husband had been an under-steward on the Serra estate at Muro, who had been brutally murdered five years earlier by half a dozen peasants whose rents had been raised, when he endeavoured to exact payment. The rents had been raised by Gregorio Macomer, and the woman knew it, and remembered. But she was very quiet and grave, and seemed to be satisfied with her position. She was certainly devoted to Veronica. Matilde glanced at her two or three times, as though wishing her to go, but Veronica paid no attention to the hint.

After exchanging a few words with her niece the countess began to walk up and down nervously and seeming to hesitate as to what she should say.

She was horribly anxious, and very much afraid of betraying her anxiety.

She knew how dangerous it might be to press Veronica for an answer before it was ready. And Veronica stood before a tall dressing-mirror, making disjointed remarks about the weather, between her instructions to her maid, while apparently altogether dissatisfied with her appearance.

First she wished a little pin at her throat, and then she gave it back to the woman and told her to look for another which she well knew would be hard to find. Then she quarrelled with a belt she wore,--for just then belts were in fashion, as they are periodically without the slightest reason,--and she thought that perhaps she would not wear one at all, and she asked Matilde's opinion.

The countess forced herself to consider the matter with an appearance of interest. But she was not without resources, and she suddenly bethought her of a belt of her own which Veronica might try, and sent the maid for it, apparently oblivious of the fact that, being fitted to her own imposing figure, it would be far too long for her niece. As soon as the woman had shut the door Matilde seized her opportunity.

"Have you come to any conclusion, Veronica dear?" she asked, making her voice full of a gentle preoccupation.

"I have not seen Bosio," answered the young girl. "How can I decide, until I have seen him?"

"I thought that you did not wish to see him last night--"

"No--not last night. I wished to be alone--but--one of these days, I should like to talk to him."

"One of these days! To-day, dear. Why not? He is naturally anxious for your answer--"

"Is he? It seems so strange! We have seen each other every day, for so long--and I never supposed--"

She broke off, not, apparently, from any shyness about going into the subject, but because she was very much interested in the fastening of the second pin she had tried.

"I suppose it is much better not to wear any jewelry at all," she said, with exasperating indifference.

"Until you are married!" answered Matilde, who was not to be kept from the matter in hand. "You see, everything turns upon that," she continued, with a low laugh. "The sooner it is decided, the sooner you may wear your jewels. No," she went on rapidly. "Of course you never suspected that Bosio loved you, and he would have been very wrong to let you know it, until your uncle and I had given our permission. But he was diffident even about mentioning the matter to us. You cannot have known him so long without having discovered that he has great delicacy of feeling. He did not like to suggest the marriage. You will see when you talk with him after this. I have very much doubt whether he will have the boldness to speak very directly--"

"How absurd!" exclaimed Veronica. "As though we did not know each other intimately!"

"Yes, but that is the man's nature, and I like it in him. You can easily manage to let him understand at the first word what you have decided.

But if you would tell me first,--especially if you mean to refuse,--it would be better. I myself wish only the happiness of you both. You must be absolutely free in your decision. After all, I daresay that you will refuse him."

With great mastery of her tone and manner, she spoke in an indifferent way. She was trying the dangerous experiment of playing a little upon Veronica's contrariety. The young girl laughed.

"That is not at all certain!" she answered. "Only I do not see why you should all be in such a hurry. If Bosio has been in love with me so long as you say, he will remain in love long enough for me to think over the matter, will he not? If he has been in a state of anxiety for weeks, it will not hurt him to be anxious for one day more--or a week more--or even a month. After all, it is for all my life, you know, Aunt Matilde.

I must see how the idea looks when I am used to it. I am not a child, and I am not foolishly frightened at the idea of being married, nor out of my mind with joy at it, either, like a girl of the people."

"Of course not," said Matilde, growing a little pale with sheer nervousness.

"I daresay that we should be very happy together," continued Veronica.

"But how can I possibly be sure of it? No--I suppose that one is never sure of anything until one has tried, but one may feel almost sure that one is going to be sure; that is what I want, before I say 'yes.' Do you wonder?"

"Oh, no!" answered the countess, quickly agreeing with her. "On the contrary--"

At this point the conversation was interrupted by the return of the maid. The belt, as was to be expected, did not fit at all, and Veronica put on her own again. The maid moved about the room, setting things in order.

"Give him a sign, if you wish him to speak when you meet," said Matilde, in a low voice. "It will be so much easier for him. Wear a flower in your frock to-night at dinner--any flower. May I tell him that?"

"Yes," answered Veronica, for it seemed a charitable suggestion so far as Bosio was concerned. "I am going out, now," she added suddenly. "May I have the carriage?"