The Children of the King Part 23

"What does one do with them?" asked San Miniato. "Are they good to eat?"

"One knows that, Excellency. We put them into a kettle with milk, and they drink all the milk in the night and the next day they are good to cook."

"Can we take the ladies, Ruggiero?"

"In the sail boat, Excellency, and then, if you like, you and the Signorina can go with me in the little one with my brother, and I will pull while Bastianello and your Excellency take the crabs."

"Very well. Then get a small boat ready for to-night, Ruggiero."

"I have one of my own, Excellency."

"So much the better. If the ladies will not go, you and I can go alone."

"Yes, Excellency."

San Miniato wondered why Ruggiero was so pale.

CHAPTER XI.

Again the mother and daughter were together in the cool shade of their terrace. Outside, it was very hot, for the morning breeze did not yet stir the brown linen curtains which kept out the glare of the sea, and myriads of locusts were fiddling their eternal two notes without pause or change of pitch, in every garden from Ma.s.sa to Scutari point, which latter is the great bluff from which they quarry limestone for road making, and which shuts off the amphitheatre of Sorrento from the view of Castellamare to eastward. The air was dry, hot and full of life and sound, as it is in the far south in summer.

"And when do you propose to marry me?" asked Beatrice in a discontented tone.

"Dearest child," answered her mother, "you speak as though I were marrying you by force to a man whom you detest."

"That is exactly what you are doing."

The Marchesa raised her eyebrows, fanned herself lazily and smiled.

"Are we to begin the old argument every morning, my dear?" she asked.

"It always ends in the same way, and you always say the same dreadful things to me. I really cannot bear it much longer. You know very well that you bound yourself, and that you were quite free to tell San Miniato that you did not care for him. A girl should know her own mind before she tells a man she loves him--just as a man should before he speaks."

"San Miniato certainly knows his own mind," retorted Beatrice viciously.

"No one can accuse him of not being ready and anxious to marry me--and my fortune."

"How you talk, my angel! Of course if you had no fortune, or much less than you have, he could not think of marrying you. That is clear. I never pretended the contrary. But that does not contradict the fact that he loves you to distraction, if that is what you want."

"To distraction!" repeated Beatrice with scorn.

"Why not, dearest child? Do you think a man cannot love because he is poor?"

"That is not the question, mamma!" cried Beatrice impatiently. "You know it is not. But no woman can be deceived twice by the same comedy, and few would be deceived once. You know as well as I that it was all a play the other night, that he was trying to find words, as he was trying to find sentiments, and that when the words would not be found he thought it would be efficacious to seize my hand and kiss it. I daresay he thought I believed him--of course he did. But not for long--oh! not for long. Real love finds even fewer words, but it finds them better, and the ring of them is truer, and one remembers them longer!"

"Beatrice!" exclaimed the Marchesa. "What can you know of such things!

You talk as though some man had dared to speak to you--"

"Do I?" asked the girl with sudden coldness, and a strange look came into her eyes, which her mother did not see.

"Yes, you do. And yet I know that it is impossible. Besides the whole discussion is useless and wears me out, though it seems to interest you.

Of course you will marry San Miniato. When you have got past this absurd humour you will see what a good husband you have got, and you will be very happy."

"Happy! With that man!" Beatrice's lip curled.

"You will," answered her mother, taking no notice. "Happiness depends upon two things in this world, when marriage is concerned. Money and a good disposition. You have both, between you, and you will be happy."

"I never heard anything more despicable!" cried the young girl. "Money and disposition! And what becomes of the heart?"

The Marchesa smiled and fanned herself.

"Young girls without experience cannot understand these things," she said. "Wait till you are older."

"And lose what looks I have and the power to enjoy anything! And you say that you are not forcing me into this marriage! And you try to think, or to make me think, that it is all for the best, and all delightful and all easy, when you are sacrificing me and my youth and my life and my happiness to the mere idea of a better position in society--because poor papa was a sulphur merchant and bought a t.i.tle which was only confirmed because he spent a million on a public charity--and every one knows it--and the Count of San Miniato comes of people who have been high and mighty gentlemen for six or seven hundred years, more or less. That is your point of view, and you know it. But if I say that my father worked hard to get what he got and deserved it, and was an honest man, and that this great personage of San Miniato is a penniless gambler, who does not know to-day where he will find pocket money for to-morrow, and has got by a trick the fortune my father got by hard work--then you will not like it. Then you will throw up your hands and cry 'Beatrice!' Then you will tell me that he loves me to distraction, and you will even try to make me think that I love him. It is all a miserable sham, mamma, a vile miserable sham! Give it up. I have said that I will marry him, since it appears that I have promised. But do not try to make me think that I am marrying him of my own free will, or he marrying me out of disinterested, pure, beautiful, upright affection!"

Having delivered herself of these particularly strong sentiments, Beatrice was silent for a while. As for the Marchesa, she was either too wise, or too lazy, to answer her daughter for the present and she slowly fanned herself, lying quite still in her long chair, her eyes half closed and her left hand hanging down beside her.

Indeed Beatrice, instead of becoming more reconciled with the situation she had accepted, was growing more impatient and unhappy every day, as she realised all that her marriage with San Miniato would mean during the rest of her natural life. She had quite changed her mind about him, and with natures like hers such sudden changes are often irrevocable.

She could not now understand how she could have ever liked him, or found pleasure in his society, and when she thought of the few words she had spoken and which had decided her fate, she could not comprehend the state of mind which had led her into such a piece of folly, and she was as angry with herself as, for the time being, she was angry with all the world besides.

She saw, too, and for the first time, how lonely she was in the world, and a deep and burning longing for real love and sympathy took possession of her. She had friends, of course, as young girls have, of much her own age and not unlike her in their inexperienced ideas of life. But there was not one of them at Sorrento, nor had she met any one among the many acquaintances she had made, to whom she would care to turn. Even her own intimate a.s.sociates from childhood, who were far away in Sicily, or travelling elsewhere, would not have satisfied her. They could not have understood her, their answers to her questions would have seemed foolish and worthless, and they would have tormented her with questions of their own, inopportune, importunate, tiresome. She herself did not know that what she craved was the love or the friends.h.i.+p of one strong, honest man.

It was strange to find out suddenly how wide was the breach which separated her from her mother, with whom she had lived so happily throughout her childhood and early youth, with whom she had agreed--or rather, who had agreed with her--on the whole almost without a discussion. It was hard to find in her now so little warmth of heart, so little power to understand, above all such a display of determination and such quiet force in argument. Very indolent women are sometimes very deceptive in regard to the will they hold in reserve, but Beatrice could not have believed that her mother could influence her as she had done.

She reflected that it had surely been within the limits of the Marchesa's choice to take her daughter's side so soon as she had seen that the latter had mistaken her own feelings. She need not have agreed with San Miniato, on that fatal evening at Tragara, that the marriage was definitely settled, until she had at least exchanged a word with Beatrice herself.

The future looked black enough on that hot summer morning. The girl was to be tied for life to a man she despised and hated, to a man who did not even care for her, as she was now convinced, to a man with a past of which she knew little and of which the few incidents she had learned repelled her now, instead of attracting her. She fancied how he had spoken to those other women, much as he had spoken to her, perhaps a little more eloquently as, perhaps, he had not been thinking of their fortunes but of themselves, but still always in that high-comedy tone with the studied gesture and the cadenced intonation. She did not know whether they deserved her pity, those two whom he pretended to have loved, but she was ready to pity them, nameless as they were. The one was dead, the other, at least, had been wise enough to forget him in time.

Then she thought of what must happen after her marriage, when he had got her fortune and could take her away to the society in which he had always lived. There, of course, he would meet women by the score with whom he was and long had been on terms of social intimacy far closer than he had reached with her in the few weeks of their acquaintance.

Doubtless, he would spend such time as he could spare from gambling, in conversation with them. Doubtless, he had many thoughts and memories and a.s.sociations in common with them. Doubtless, people would smile a little and pity the young countess. And Beatrice resented pity and the thought of it. She would rather pity others.

Evil thoughts crossed her young brain, and she said to herself that she might perhaps be revenged upon the world for what she was suffering, for the pain that had already come into her young life, for the wretched years she antic.i.p.ated in the future, for her mother's horrible logic which had forced her into the marriage, above all for San Miniato's cleverly arranged scene by which the current of her existence had been changed. San Miniato had perhaps gone too far when he had said that Beatrice was kind. She, at least, felt that there was anything but kindness in her heart now, and she desired nothing so much as to make some one suffer something of what she felt. It was wicked, doubtless, as she admitted to herself. It was bad and wrong and cruel, but it was not heartless. A woman without heart would not have felt enough to resent having felt at all, and moreover would probably be perfectly well satisfied with the situation.

The expression of hardness deepened in the young girl's face as she sat there, silently thinking over all that was to come, and glancing from time to time at her mother's placid countenance. It was really amazing to see how much the Marchesa could bear when she was actually roused to a sense of the necessity for action. Her const.i.tution must have been far stronger than any one supposed. She must indeed have been in considerable anxiety about the success of her plans, more than once during the past few days. Yet she was outwardly almost as unruffled and as lazy as ever.

"Dearest child," she said at last, "of course, as I have said, I cannot argue the point with you. No one could, in your present state of mind.

But there is one thing which I must say, and which I am sure you will be quite ready to understand."

Beatrice said nothing, but slowly turned her head towards her mother with a look of inquiry.

"I only want to say, my angel, that whatever you may think of San Miniato, and however much you may choose to let him know what you think, it may be quite possible to act with more civility than you have used during the last few days."

"Is that all?" asked Beatrice with a hard laugh. "How nicely you turn your phrases when you lecture me, mamma! So you wish me to be civil.

Very well, I will try."

"Thank you, Beatrice carissima," answered her mother with a sigh and a gentle smile. "It will make life so much easier."