Clarissa laughed suddenly and loud. "You do that for your pleasure!

_Farceur, va!_" Aldo lifted his perfect eyebrows and did not reply. "She has nothing, not a little black sou!" And Clarissa stuck her long pointed thumbnail behind her long pointed teeth and jerked it forward.

"Oh! I dare say she has something," said Aldo, pretending to yawn carelessly. "Besides, she is a genius, and can earn what she will."

"You are the perfect Neapolitan pig," said Clarissa, and closed her eyes.

The perfect Neapolitan pig rose with an offended air and left her. He strolled into the house and took his hat and stick, then he strolled out again and through the garden into the hot street and down to the landing-place. A boat was leaving for Intra, so he went on board, and at Intra took the train for Milan. He dined at Biffi's, feeling happy.

"They will be miserable," he said. "That will teach them." Then he went to his furnished rooms on the Corso, and slept well.

In Villa Solitudine they were miserable, and it taught them.

It taught Nancy that the Closed Garden she had had a glimpse of for so brief an hour was the only garden in the world that she ever wanted to enter; and that all the words Aldo had not said were the only words she ever wanted to hear; that perfect goodness and unwavering strength must lie behind his portentous beauty, white and immovable like marble lions at a palace gate.

It taught Clarissa that one must accept the inevitable--that half a loaf was better than no bread, and that a married Aldo was better than no Aldo at all. It made her look at Nancy with closer eyes, and say to herself that she was a little creature one would easily tire of, in spite of--or because of--her intellectuality. Aldo was not a closed garden for Clarissa; she knew the feeble flowers that bowed behind its gates.

A hot, dreary week pa.s.sed with no news from Aldo. Then Clarissa telegraphed to him at Milan. She said she had told Carlo about their conversation regarding his wish to marry Nancy, and Carlo approved.

Would he come back?

Yes; Aldo would come back. He waited another day or two, and at the close of a sultry afternoon he sauntered in, just as he had sauntered out, across the sleepy, bee-droning lawns of the Villa Solitudine. He stopped at the entrance of the summer-house, where Nancy sat reading a letter--a long letter. Already two of the blue sheets had fallen at her side. Before her on the table was the inkstand and the ivory pen and The Book. As his shadow pa.s.sed the threshold she looked up; she drew a quick breath, and her face turned milky white, with a pallor that gripped at Aldo's nerves.

Once more, and for the last time, he bent his head over her hand.

"Signora, I am your slave," he said. But as he raised his eyes she knew that he had said: "Nancy, I am your master."

"Who writes to you?" he asked.

She drooped submissive lashes, and the colour ran into her cheeks. "Mr.

Kingsley, the English friend," she said. "Do you remember him?"

Aldo took her hand and with it the letter in his own.

"What does he want?"

Her dimples fluttered. "He wants me to be good," she said, laughing, with wistful eyes. "And to write."

Aldo pressed the little fist with the crumpled blue letter in it to his lips. "Well, write," he said. "Write at once."

He took the ivory pen and dipped it in the ink and put it in her hand; then he pulled the sheet of white paper which was to be The Book before her.

"Write: 'Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. He adores me.'"

And Nancy, with her hair almost touching the paper, wrote: "Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. I adore him."

The Englishman never got the letter. But he heard of it afterwards; and his English fists closed tight.

XVI

Nancy walked among asphodels and morning glory; and her soul was plunged in happiness and her eyes were washed with light.

The Book waited.

They went out in the little boat at sunset. Aldo stood at the sail, and the red sky was a background for his profile.

"Oh," sighed Nancy, looking at him and clasping puerile hands, "your beauty _aches_ me!"

Aldo quite understood it, and was pleased.

They went for long walks to Premeno and San Salvatore; as Clarissa refused to accompany them, Carlo chaperoned them, blandly bored.

Soon Valeria arrived. Nancy went down to meet her at the landing-place, looking ethereal and pink as a spray of apple-blossom. Valeria kissed her with hot tears. "Oh! my baby, my baby!" she said, and wished that the seventeen years were a dream, and that her child's small head were still safely nestling at her breast. In Nancy's young love she lived the days of her own betrothal over again, and Tom arose in her memory and was with her day and night. On this same silky blue lake Tom had so often rowed her with Zio Giacomo, in a little boat called _Luisa_. She tearfully begged Nancy and Aldo to come with her and see if they could not find that very self-same boat.

They found, indeed, three _Luisas_, but Valeria could not recognize them; still, all three of the boatmen declared that they remembered her perfectly, and got the expected tip.

"Of course," said Valeria, deeply moved, "it cannot have been all three of them."

And Aldo said: "You should not have given them anything. They were none of them more than twenty-five years old." Whereupon Valeria sighed deeply.

Then it was decided that they should go in reverent pilgrimage to the Madonna del Monte, where Nancy's father had asked Nancy's mother to marry him. The road was lined with beggars: shouting cripples, exhibiting sores and stumps.

"Some of these are very old," sighed Valeria. "I am sure they were here that day, and must have seen me."

"I shall give a franc to every one of them," said Nancy, taking out her small fat purse, as the first one-armed mendicant held out his greasy hat.

"My dear Nancy, what nonsense!" said Aldo. "There are about a hundred of them!"

"Well?" and Nancy raised clear, questioning eyes to his.

"Oh, _I_ don't mind," said Aldo, with a little Neapolitan shrug.

Valeria looked at the handsome figure and impeccable profile of her future son-in-law, as he strolled beside them up the steep wide road.

Her heart was heavy with recollections. Up this road she had walked in her blue dress and scarlet tie with Tom beside her--Tom, broad and careless in his slouchy brown suit, who had given the beggars all his coppers and silver, just as Tom's daughter was doing to-day. Again she looked at Aldo's slim, straight shoulders and sighed. "I wish it had been an Englishman!" she thought. Then, as her memory took her to England, she saw someone else. "Or, then, poor dear Nino." And she sighed again; but not altogether for Nancy's sake.

She wrote to Nino that evening, and, almost without knowing it, began her letter, "Poor dear Nino!"

Nino was out interviewing Consuls about the presumably deceased Eduardo Villari when the letter arrived. So Nunziata opened the letter.

In it Valeria told Nino that Nancy, "our little Nancy," was betrothed to Aldo della Rocca, and could Nino not do anything to prevent it? And why, oh why, had his sister Clarissa invited them both to stay at the Villa Solitudine, so that, as Fraulein Muller or was it Heine?--used to say, "Wie konnte es anders sein," for how could anyone see Nancy in the resplendency of her seventeen Aprils and not fall in love with her? And oh, she was so sorry for poor, dear Nino, for she knew the secret of his heart. And how true it was what he had said about Nancy's eyes being so pure that they seemed never to have gazed at aught but the sky; and she understood him and his sufferings, for had she not herself suffered dreadfully through him, years ago--but never mind, that was nothing. And it had never been dear, dear Nino's fault at all; it was her own foolish fault and Fate.... And she hoped Nino did not think that she had really suffered, for she had not, and now she never, never thought of it any more! And if he came quickly he might still be in time; and oh, she knew he must be heart-broken, but he was not to mind, because it could not be helped. And she was ever his unhappy Valeria.

Nunziata read the rambling letter three times before she understood it.

The letter opened her eyes.

When her eyes were open Nunziata saw well. She saw the chain of desire stretching out ring on ring: from Valeria's heart to Nino; from Nino's heart to Nancy; from Nancy's heart to Aldo, as in a children's game; and Love pa.s.sing down from one to the other, stopping before each with gift of pa.s.sion, of pain, of joy. She saw that her years placed her behind Valeria--far back, far back, out of the game; and she knew that Love had pa.s.sed her, and would not stop before her any more. Then she remembered that she had had her gifts; that Love had heaped roses at her feet, and that she had moved through pa.s.sions as through a field of flowers.

Nunziata decided that she would play the game.