Teresa opened the door, and saw behind the roses Nino's wild, white face.

"The Signorino! Santa Vergine!"

In an instantaneous vision she thought of the Ill.u.s.trissima, unpowdered, unprepared, reading Matilde Serao, her tresses lying on the dressing-room table. The servant's stupefied, stricken face confirmed Nino's fears. He stumbled forward, and, dropping into a seat in the hall, covered his face with his hands.

The Ill.u.s.trissima, who had heard the noise, opened the drawing-room door. At a glance she saw it all, and quietly closed the door again.

When, an instant later, Nino rushed in, the room was darkened, the shutters closed; Nunziata lay on the couch with etiolated face, a soft shimmering scarf was wound becomingly round her head, but no blue shadows were under her eyes, for there had been no time to make them.

Then all began over again; for although she was peaceful and comfortable when Nino was away, as soon as he was present she felt that all things depended upon his love, and that his absence would end her life. Tighter and tighter she grasped the little dead bird in her white, ringed hands, and louder and louder she told her tired heart that youth was living and singing still.

Nino was kind and considerate. He also wrote letters to the Italian Consulates in Rio and Buenos Ayres, asking them to make sure that Eduardo Villari was really dead--as his cook, who had returned with a good deal of money and had married a baron, declared he was.

If the thought of Nancy knocked with light fingers at Nino's heart, he never opened the door.

XV

Clarissa in her villa on Lake Maggiore was bored, so she wrote to Nancy to come and stay with her.

"I am weary of my sweet blue lake and of my sour blue husband. Come and stay with me a month. You shall have a large room at the top of the house, with a huge table and an inkstand large enough to drown in, and before you the view that inspired Manzoni. Come and write your masterpiece."

By the same post she sent a note to her brother-in-law:

"Aldo, _mon joli_, do come. Carlo is insufferable. He growls all day and snores all night. Why did I marry him? This is the fourth time I invite you this year, and you never come. Last year it was different.

"Yours, "CLARISSA.

"P.S.--The little _poetessa_ is going to stay here for a month."

He arrived next day. After greetings, he asked: "Where is Sappho, the violet-haired?" Clarissa explained that Nancy had not arrived, and he sulked and played the piano all the evening, while Carlo on the sofa snored. Clarissa looked from one to the other, uncertain which of the two was insulting her most.

Nancy arrived the following day. She had brought her notebooks with her and a broken ivory pen that she always wrote with; she was full of the masterpiece. She was going to work immediately.

Driving up from the landing-place to the Villa Solitudine she told her plans to Clarissa, who nodded and smiled as she whipped up the fat cob.

She was going to write a book--_The Book!_--a great, n.o.ble piece of work, not a little volume of flyaway poems that one reads and forgets in a day. She was going to think of and dream of The Book; to live for The Book; to breathe and walk for it, to eat and sleep for it. In Milan, with people always round her, talking and distracting, it was impossible; but here in the large bare room at the top of the house----How sweet and dear of Clarissa to think of it! Never, never could Nancy thank her enough.... Clarissa nodded and smiled, and the fat cob turned into the chestnut drive of Villa Solitudine.

Down the steps, with a couple of dogs barking and leaping at his heels, came Aldo to meet them, clad in Neapolitan fashion in white flannels and scarlet sash. His uncovered head gleamed darkly in the sun.

"Behold Endymion awakened!" said Clarissa, laughing, to Nancy.

"Charmides, Adonas, Narcissus! The G.o.ds have cast upon him all the beauty of the world!" As Nancy did not answer, Clarissa turned to look at her. "Oh, what a stern face, _ma cherie!_ You are quite white. What are you thinking of?"

"The Book," said Nancy; and she felt as if it were a child of hers that was to die unborn.

"You shall write it, _mon ange!_ Aldo shall not disturb you." And she threw the reins to the little stiff groom; then, daintily raising her fluffy skirts, she alighted in Aldo's uplifted arms. Nancy put her foot on the step, but Aldo raised her lightly and lifted her down. His red, smiling mouth was close to her face. She thanked him, and he kissed her hand with the ceremonious Southern salute, "Signora, I am your slave."

Nancy went to her room--the large, bare room with the beautiful view--and stayed there all the afternoon. She put her notes in order; she placed the large sheets of paper before her; and she dipped the broken ivory pen into the huge inkstand. Then she sat and looked out of the window. She could hear the dogs barking in the garden and Clarissa's trilling laugh. On the sweet blue lake a tiny sail, like a pocket handkerchief, dipped and curtseyed away, and through the open windows of the drawing-room Aldo could be heard playing a Valse Triste. Nancy dipped the pen into the inkstand again--and looked at the view.

Now she heard the music wander off in modulating chords which resolved themselves into the rippling accompaniment of Hugo Wolff's "Musikant."

"Wenn wir zwei zusammen waren Wurd' das Singen mir vergeh'n."

She could hear the soft tenor voice, and felt it drawing at her heart.

She closed the window and sat down again. She dipped the ivory pen into the inkstand, and wrote at the top of the white sheet, "Villa Solitudine," and the date. Under it, as she had not thought of a t.i.tle yet, she wrote in large letters:

"THE BOOK."

Then she jumped up and ran downstairs.

At sunset they went out in a sailing-boat. Clarissa held the rudder, and Aldo stood in easy att.i.tudes of beauty at the sail. The glow of the west was on his pure young face, and the wind of the _tramontana_ raised his waved hair and blew it lightly across his forehead. He was silent, satisfied to know that the two women could see him, and that the red-gold sky was a good background for his profile. Clarissa talked and laughed, twittered and purred; but Aldo never spoke. And it was his silence that enraptured Nancy.

"Ed io che intesi ci che non dicevi, M'innamorai di te perche tacevi."

Stecchetti's words sang in her brain with new meaning, and in the days that followed the two smooth lines were always in her mind.

Aldo knew little, but he knew the value of silence. He knew the lure of the _hortus conclusus_--the Closed Garden into which one has not stepped. Nancy stood outside its gates and dreamed of its unseen roses, of fountains and shadowy paths and water-lilied lakes. For Aldo was a closed garden.

Aldo also knew the value of his eyes--deep, pa.s.sion-lit eyes, that looked, Clarissa said, as if he had rubbed the lids with burnt cork to darken them. When he raised them suddenly, and looked straight at Nancy, she felt a little shock of pleasure that took her breath away. Little by little, day by day, those eyes drew Nancy's spirit to their depths--she leaned over them as over an abyss. In them she sunk and drowned her soul.... Then, when from his eyes her own pa.s.sionate purity gazed back at her, she thought she saw his soul and not her own.

The Book cried in her now and then, but she stifled its voice and whispered: "Wait!"

And The Book waited.

One day in the garden Aldo spoke to Clarissa. She was in the hammock pretending to read.

"Clarissa, I am twenty-five years old."

"Vlan! ca y est!" said Clarissa, dropping her book. Then she drew a deep breath, and her nostrils turned a little pale; but the superposed roses of her cheeks bloomed on, independent of her ebbing blood and sickening heart.

"I am penniless," continued Aldo, picking a piece of gra.s.s and chewing it; "and Carlo has given me to understand that he can exist without me if he tries very hard."

Clarissa sat up. "When? What did he say? Does he ... has he ... did he mean anything?"

Aldo shook his comely head. "Carlo never means anything. But I shall have to go back to--to the Texas ranch, or marry."

The Texas ranch was a romantic invention of Clarissa's, the only foundation for which was a three weeks' holiday which Aldo had once spent in the city of New York.

Clarissa bit her red, narrow lips. "Yes," she said.

During the long pause that followed Aldo picked another piece of gra.s.s and chewed it.

"I suppose," said Clarissa, looking at him sideways through her long lids, "you will marry some affectionate old thing with money."

"No. I know them," said Aldo. "They demand the affection, and keep the money."

After a pause, in which he felt Clarissa's angry eyes on his face, he said: "I am going to marry the little Sappho."