Olive in Italy Part 5

"Carmela, I am not really _antipatica_?"

"What foolishness! No."

"Why does Gemma hate me then? No one else does, or if they do they hide it, but she looks daggers at me always."

Carmela had been invited to tea in her cousin's bedroom. The water did not boil yet, but her mouth was already full of cake.

"What happened the other night when Gemma let you in?" she mumbled.

"Did she say anything to you?"

"No, but I am not blind or deaf. You have not spoken to each other since."

Olive lifted the kettle off the spirit lamp. "You like it weak, I know."

"Yes, and three lumps of sugar. Tell me what happened, _cara_."

"Well, as I came up the stairs that night I noticed a strong scent of tobacco--good tobacco. Sienese boys smoke cheap cigarettes, and the older men get black Tuscan cigars, but this was different. It reminded me of-- Oh, well, never mind. When I came to the first landing I felt sure there was someone standing close against the wall waiting for me to go by, and yet when I spoke no one answered. You know how dark it is on the stairs at night. I could not see anything, but I listened, and, Carmela, a watch was ticking quite near me, by my ear. I could not move for a moment, and then I heard Carolina calling--she was with me, you know, but she had gone up first--and I got up somehow.

Gemma let us in. She said she had been asleep, and I noticed that her hair was all loose and tumbled. I told her I fancied there was someone lurking on the stairs, and she said it must have been the cat, but I knew from the way she said it that she was angry. She lit her candle and marched off into her own room without saying good-night, and I was sorry because I have always wanted to be friends with her. I thought I would try to say something about it, so I went to her door and knocked. She opened it directly. 'Go away, spy,' she said very distinctly, and then I grew angry too. I laughed. 'So there was a man on the stairs,' I said."

Carmela stirred her tea thoughtfully. "Ah!" she said. "How nice these spoons are. I wish you would tell me who gave them to you."

She helped herself to another cake. "Gemma is difficult, and we shall all be glad when September comes and she is safely married. She is lazy. You have seen us of a morning, cutting out, basting, st.i.tching at her wedding clothes, while she sits with her hands folded. Are you coming out with us this evening?"

The Menotti strolled down to the Lizza nearly every day after the _siesta_, and Carmela often persuaded her cousin to accompany them.

The gardens were set on an outlying spur of the hill on which the wolf's foster son, Remus, built the city that was to be fairer than Rome. The winter winds, coming swiftly from the sea, whipped the laurels into strange shapes, shook the brown seed pods from the bare boughs of the acacias, and froze the water that dripped from the Medicean b.a.l.l.s on the old wall of the Fortezza. Even in summer a little breeze would spring up towards sunset, and the leaves that had hung heavy and flaccid on the trees in the blazing heat of noon would be stirred by it to some semblance of life, while the shadows lengthened, and the incessant maddening scream of the locusts died down into silence. The gardens were a favourite resort. As the church bells rang the Ave Maria the people came to them by Camollia and San Domenico, to see each other and to talk over the news of the day.

Smart be-ribboned nurses carrying babies on white silk cus.h.i.+ons tied with pink or blue rosettes, young married women with their children, stout mothers chaperoning the elaborate vivacity of their daughters, occupied seats near the bandstand, or lingered about the paths as they chattered and fanned themselves incessantly to the strains of the Intermezzo from _Cavalleria Rusticana_ or some march of Verdi's. A great gulf was fixed between the s.e.xes on these occasions. The young men congregated about the base of Garibaldi's statue; more or less gilded youths devoted to "le Sport," wearing black woollen jerseys and perforated cycling shoes, while lady-killers braved strangulation in four-inch collars. There were soldiers too, cavalry lieutenants, slender, erect, and very conscious of their charms, and dark-faced priests, who listened to the music carefully with their eyes fixed on the ground, as being in the crowd but not of it. Olive watched them all with mingled amus.e.m.e.nt and impatience. If only the boys would talk to their friends' sisters instead of eyeing them furtively from afar; if only the girls would refrain from useless needlework and empty laughter. They talked incessantly and called every mortal--and immortal--thing _carina_. Queen Margherita was _carina_, and so was the new cross-st.i.tch, and so was this blue-eyed Olive. Yes, they admitted her alien charm. She was _strana_, too, but they did not use that word when she was there or she would have rejoiced over such an enlargement of their vocabulary.

"They are amiable," she told Astorre, "but we have not one idea in common."

"Ah," he said, "can one woman ever praise another without that 'but'?

Do you think them pretty?" he asked.

"Yes, but one does not notice them when Gemma is there."

"That is the pale one, isn't it? I have heard of her from the students, and also from the professors of the University. One of my friends raves about her Greek profile and her straight black brows. He calls her his silent Sappho, but I fancy Odalisque is a better name for her. There is no brain or heart, is there?"

"I don't know," she answered uncertainly. "She seldom speaks to anyone, never to me."

"She is jealous of you probably."

The heats of July tried the boy. He was not so well as he had been in the spring, and lately he had not been able to help his mother with her needlework. The hours of enforced idleness seemed very long, and he watched for Olive's coming with pathetic eagerness. She never failed to appear on Tuesdays and Sat.u.r.days, though the lessons had been given up since his head ached when he tried to learn. Signora Aurelia met her always at the door with protestations of grat.i.tude.

"You amuse him and make him laugh, my dear, because you are so fresh, and you do not mind what you say. It is good of you to come so far in the sun."

The girl's heart ached to see the haggard young face so white against the dark velvet of the piled-up cus.h.i.+ons. The deep grey eyes lit up with pleasure at the sight of her, but she found it hard to meet their yearning with a smile.

Sometimes she found old men sitting with him, grave and potent signiors, professors from the University, who, on being introduced, beamed paternally and asked her questions about Oxford and Cambridge.

There were bashful youths too, who blushed when she entered and rose hurriedly with muttered excuses. If they could be induced to stay, Olive, seeing that it pleased Astorre to see them shuffling their feet and writhing on their chairs in an agony of embarra.s.sment before her, did her best to make them uncomfortable.

"Your friends are all so timid," she said. He looked at her with a kind of triumph, a pride of possession.

"They do not understand you as I do. Fausto admires you, but you frighten him."

"Is he Gemma's adorer?" she asked with a careful display of indifference.

"Yes, he is always _amoroso_."

"Ah! Does he smoke?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Oh, nothing," she said. She did not really believe that the man on the stairs could have been Fausto. Gemma would not look twice at such a harmless infant now. When she was forty-five, perhaps, she might smile on boys, but at twenty-six--

CHAPTER VII

Olive sat in her little bedroom correcting exercises.

It was the drowsy middle of the afternoon and the heat was intense.

All the grey-green and golden land of Tuscany lay still and helpless at the mercy of the sun. The birds had long ceased singing, and only the thin shrilling of the locusts broke the August silence. The parched earth was pale, and great cracks that only the autumn rains could fill had opened on the hillsides, but the ripening maize lay snug within its narrow sheaths of green, and the leaves of the vines hid great bunches of purpling grapes. In the fields men rested awhile from their labours, and the patient white oxen stood in the shade of the mulberries, while the sunburnt lads who drove them bathed their tired bodies in the stream, or lay idly in the lush gra.s.s at the water's edge.

In the town the walls of houses that had fronted the morning sun were scorching to the touch, and there was no coolness even in the steep northward streets that were always in shadow, or in the grey stone-paved courts of the palaces. There were few people about at this hour, and the little stream of traffic had run dry in the Via Cavour.

A vendor of melons drew his barrow close up to the battered old column in the Piazza Tolomei, and squatted down on the ground beside it.

"_Cocomeri! Fresc' e buoni!_" he cried once or twice, and then rolled over and went to sleep. A peasant girl carrying a basket of eggs pa.s.sed presently, and she looked wistfully at the fruit, but she did not disturb his slumbers.

"Is that the aunt of your friend's mother? No, it is the sister of my niece's governess." Olive laid down her pen. She was only partially dressed and her hair hung loosely about her bare white shoulders. The heat made hairpins seem a burden and outer garments superfluous. "My niece's governess is the last. Thank Heaven for that!" she said, and she sat down on the brick floor to take off her stockings. Gemma's _fidanzato_, her lawyer from Lucca, was coming to Siena for a week. He would lodge next door and come in to the Menotti for most of his meals, and already poor old Carolina was busy in the hot, airless kitchen, beating up eggs for a _zabajone_, and Signora Carosi had gone out to buy ice for the wine and sweet cakes to be handed round with little gla.s.ses of _vin_ Santo or Marsala.

Carmela came into her cousin's room soon after four o'clock. "I have just taken Gemma a cup of black coffee. Her head aches terribly."

"I heard her moving about her room in the night," Olive answered, and she added, under her breath, "Poor Gemma!"

Carmela lowered her voice too. "Of course Maria and I know that you see what is going on as well as we do. There is some man ... she lets down a basket from her window at nights for letters, and I believe she meets him when my aunt thinks she has gone to Ma.s.s. It is dreadful.

How glad we shall be when she is safely married and away."

"Who is the man?"

"Hus.h.!.+ I don't know. Do you hear the beating of a drum? One of the _Contrade_ is coming."

The two girls ran to the window, and Olive opened the green shutters a little way that they might see out without being seen. The day of the Palio was close at hand, and the pages and _alfieri_ of the rival parishes, whose horses were to run in the race, were already going about the town. Olive never tired of watching the flash of bright colours as the flags were flung up and deftly caught again, and she cried out now with pleasure as the little procession moved leisurely across the piazza.

"I wonder why they come here," Carmela said, as the first _alfiero_ let the heavy folds of silk ripple about his head, twisted the staff, seemed to drop it, and gathered it to him again easily with his left hand. The page stood aside with a grave a.s.sumption of the gilded graces of the thirteenth century. He was handsome in his dress of green and white and scarlet velvet.

"Why does he look up here?"

Olive laughed a little. "He is the son of the cobbler who mends my boots," she whispered. "He is trying to learn English and I have lent him some books, and that is why he has come to do us honour. I think it is charming of him."