Chapter Eight.
Teresa’s fortune made less difference in her life than she had expected. It gave her pleasure to be able to do more than plan for others, but she was uncertain whether her fresh powers added to their happiness. There was Sylvia; Sylvia was provided for otherwise, and Wilbraham’s worst enemy would not have accused him of sordid motives. Perhaps he was not uninfluenced by social advantages. Perhaps it had been more easy for him to fall—coolly and decorously to fall—in love with a girl who was dressed with care, and no longer tramped along wet pavements, than with one obliged to study petty and occasionally disfiguring economies. But there was another side to this “perhaps,” a side which Donna Teresa was trying not to see, and, at times, successfully succeeded in suppressing. Had he ever been really in love?
But she was sure he never could be what she called really in love.
Next to Sylvia came her grandmother. Her grandmother was old. Age wants to have the rugged bits of life’s road made smooth for steps no longer buoyant and unfaltering. Teresa thought of a hundred ways for doing this, yet, after all, they came to very little. For as Mrs Brodrick had foreseen from the first, we can’t wrench off the habits of a lifetime without hurt.
“My dear,” she said with a laugh at herself, “I’ve always burnt one candle instead of two. When you light three my room looks a great deal nicer, but I’m uneasy. I blow one out as soon as ever I get the chance.”
“I shall put in electric light,” Teresa declared. “You are a wicked woman.”
“I’m a frugal one if you please, and it’s disturbing at my time of life to find one’s virtues turned into vices. I can’t afford it. I haven’t time to get a new set.”
Under the jest there lay earnest, as Teresa’s quick sympathy instantly discovered.
“Granny,” she said wistfully, perching herself on the arm of her grandmother’s chair, “is there really nothing I can do? You’re sure it isn’t a horrid mean little feeling of pride?”
“I am sure of nothing,” said Mrs Brodrick, smiling, “except that I am lazy.”
Baffled in this direction, Teresa’s mind rushed off to farther points,—doubling, trebling her subscriptions, and searching for objects which were not long in presenting themselves, all with outstretched hands. Her money flew, yet left her unsatisfied. At every turn problems met her, and when she pushed them impatiently on one side, they still clamoured in her ears. She wanted to know more of the real question of the people, and could not reach it. She talked to Nina.
“Eh-h-h-h-h! Misery enough, eccellenza!”
“That I know. But why?”
“Why? Who knows?” Nina spreads her hands. “There is no work, or if there is work there is no money to buy it with. But whether there is no work or no bread, there is always the tax, tax, tax.”
“Is it that the country is so poor?”
“There are many who grow rich on its poverty, eccellenza,” Nina replied significantly.
“What do the people think would make things better?”
“Eh-h-h-h! Who knows? There is wild talk.”
Teresa was frowning.
“Heaven knows if I were one of them I should talk wildly myself!”
She spoke to Wilbraham, and he answered her gravely and at some length, for in a theoretical fashion the subject interested him.
“What can you do when there is a mass of bribery on the upper level, and an undisciplined people below? Unhappily the nation is a prey to the miserable system of bargaining, or, as it would be called, of combinazione. Everything, from the prayers of the Church downwards, is to be had for a consideration, and without it too often Justice halts, and Religion makes no sign. Read their own pictures of their own deputies. Until you cure that sore, it seems to me that help is useless.”
“Then you think that bribery and not taxation is the cause of their misery?”
“No doubt the nation is over-taxed, and in consequence its energies are largely spent upon efforts to evade taxation. In this, as may be conceived, the rich are much more successful than the poor, who have fewer means of escape, and are forced from wretchedness to wretchedness, and to yet lower depths again. The richer man lays out something judiciously, and his rating sinks accordingly. The poor man hasn’t got the money to lay out, and he is crushed.”
“Ah, poor souls!” Teresa cried impulsively.
“But,” asked her grandmother, “why don’t they use their vote to get reform?”
“I can’t conceive,” said Wilbraham. “In spite of never-ceasing murmurs against the government of the day, they refuse to recognise that to a large extent they hold the remedy in their own hands. An incredible proportion don’t go to the polls at all, and it is not only the large numbers who obey the Vatican instructions to abstain, but hundreds stay away, I can only suppose, from indifference or hopelessness. Sometimes it seems that they are like children, who can’t look beyond the hour. They have a proverb, ‘An egg to-day is better than a hen to-morrow.’ Contrast this with our ‘bird in the hand,’ which sounds like it and yet has a very different meaning.”
“And still they have such fine qualities!” said Mrs Brodrick.
“Gratitude, for one,” added Teresa.
“It is a joy to help them.”
“And that leads to pauperising,” Wilbraham insisted. “Even the best of you do a lot of harm. There’s that young priest out in the San Lorenzo quarter. His work in one sense is magnificent. I admire his self-devotion tremendously, but I also think he has got hold of the wrong end of the stick, and is regenerating a few at the cost of encouraging a seething hot-bed of beggars.”
“It’s easy to criticise,” Teresa said. “That I own. As easy as to see other people’s faults. We’ve plenty of our own; only at this moment we were discussing why Italy is not prosperous in spite of an excellent king and queen.”
“And your cure would be to let them starve!” cried Teresa unjustly. “Do you ever think of the women and children?”
“Yes; I think of them a good deal,” he returned, looking quietly at her.
“Yet can suggest nothing?”
“Except as a spectator. Is that of any practical use?”
She turned impatiently away, but the next moment was back and holding out her hand.
“I’m afraid I was very rude,” she said, her grey eyes looking frankly into his. “I’m all in a puzzle myself, and expect other people to pull me out of it—in the way I think best, of course,” she added with a laugh.
As his hand closed round hers, Wilbraham was conscious of a strange unsteadiness in his grasp. He turned pale, hardly knowing what to answer.
“I should like to—to help you,” was what he lamely said.
“Who can?” said Teresa, shaking her head. It’s my snare that I will never believe things mayn’t be altered—improved—or that I shouldn’t have a finger in the mending. Sylvia will tell you that, and here she comes to stop us from quarrelling any further.
“Quarrelling?” cried Sylvia anxiously.
“Well,” returned her sister, “at any rate, you arrived in the middle of an apology, and it was mine.”
“Never mind, then,” said the girl, nodding her head. “I know Walter won’t be angry. Not really angry, you know.”
“Don’t be too sure,” mocked Teresa, going away. At the door she flung a shaft at Wilbraham. “Don’t you think before worse comes to worse we might apply to Cesare?”
She closed the door and stood thinking. The word was only a half jest, for she had more than once breathed a wish to enlist a socialist on her side; to hear at least what his party had to suggest for the mending of matters which seemed beyond the reach of others. If she could see—if she could soften Cesare!—and being a woman and young, she never doubted that softening would follow the seeing—if, perhaps, she might indirectly help him, so lifting away the unpleasant remembrance of having once made him suffer unjustly! Half reluctantly she called Nina.
“Where shall I find Cesare—Cesare Bandinelli, you know?”
“Where?” echoed Nina. “Chi lo sa! Wherever there is mischief.”
“Is he at the same place?”
“No, eccellenza.”
“I want to see him.”
“Such as he are better left undisturbed.”
The little Viterbo woman knew perfectly where he had gone, but she would have fenced for an hour and not let it out. And there was a touch of disquiet in her manner.
“Then I must ask Peppina?”
“Peppina may know. Yes, eccellenza, that is true,” returned Nina. She reflected that Peppina would probably also keep her knowledge to herself. “It is certain she may know.”
Teresa made no further attempt. She went down the stairs and out into the sun. Her heart grew gay as she felt the warm blessed glow and saw the clear bright colours of the South. She was going to the Maxwells’ hotel, but made a round on purpose to breathe the light air, and to have a look at a vegetable shop which she wanted to paint, where lettuces, tomatoes, green peas, carrots, rings of endive, orange flesh of gourds, glowed out of a cavernous darkness. Then she dawdled round and up the Spanish steps, greeted by smiles from the models and importunities from creatures just out of babyhood—all faded olive greens and blues, rags, and enchanting smiles, with a violet or two twisted shamelessly up for sale—until she had passed her own street again, and reached the Maxwells’ hotel.
“Is Peppina in?” she asked, after paying a decent tribute of attention to Mary Maxwell’s latest grievances.
“Not she! She always has something to buy or to ask about. It seems to me that is all I pay her for. Why do you ask?”
“I want to hear of her Cesare.”
“Well, she never begrudges talk, I’ll say that for her,” said Mrs Maxwell, with a lazy laugh. “I’m not so sure that she tells you very much, when all’s said and done.”
“If she’s loyal, I like her the better.”
“Hum! She’s in love. Whether loyalty comes in. However, you’d better tell me what you’d like to know.”
And she listened in silence while Donna Teresa hastily touched on her perplexities.
“You see, Mary,” she ended—“you see you must allow two points. Help is wanted, and it ought to be wise help. What is wise help?”
“You poor thing! If you go about asking that question of all your friends, you will soon have picked up a basketful of ill-assorted scraps. I can’t imagine any two of them agreeing.”
Mrs Maxwell’s shrewd common-sense represented a bucket of water dashed on Teresa’s flame. But she would not give in.
“Scraps are better than nothing,” she retorted. “And Cesare is certainly no friend.”
“No-o,” said Mrs Maxwell, drawling the word, and throwing a log on the fire. Then she sat up and said with decision, “If I were you, I would have nothing to do with Cesare.”
“Why, he’s my chief hope,” laughed Teresa. “So please, Mary, make out from Peppina where he is to be found, or, better still, get her to persuade him to come to speak to me. He must have forgiven me by this time.”
“I wouldn’t trust him,” replied Mrs Maxwell, shaking her small head. “Remember, he’s a Sicilian.”
“And what has that to do with it? What do you expect him to do to me? Oh, Mary, really this is too absurd!”
“Very well. Only don’t say you weren’t warned,” returned the other huffily. “What is it that I am to ask? Oh, the man’s address. As if he had one!”
But she made no more remonstrances, and indeed exerted herself so far as to question Peppina that evening. Peppina answered volubly, and flung in much extraneous matter. There was no better workman, no one so clever, so handsome, so ill-used in all Rome. It was because he did not bribe the police that they were hard on him. Others did what they liked, and made it square; but Cesare was too honourable for such ways, and suffered in consequence, poor fellow! She grew guarded the instant Teresa’s desire was touched upon. If it had been the signora, now—Cesare had once seen her, and had ever since called her Peppina’s beautiful signora. Mrs Maxwell believed this to be a lie; yet was pleased by it.
“You had better persuade him,” she said.
“Sissignora, but why? Is there money to be had?”
“I daresay. Yes, I am sure there is. The marchesa is likely to pay well for whatever she asks him to undertake.”
“Sissignora, I will do all that is possible. I will try to see him some day when you do not want me.”
And she was in earnest. She always wanted Cesare to make money, and she thought if he could but have something to spare for the lottery, he might draw such a fortune as had fallen to a crier of the Tribuna only a few months earlier. With this idea in her head she resolved to use all her powers of persuasion, and believed in success, because it was not Donna Teresa whom he hated so much as Wilbraham.
But Wilbraham, meanwhile, had heard of the scheme.
Teresa, who at this time tried to be very cordial with him, spoke that evening of her visit to the Maxwells. A wind was blowing with unusual strength for Rome, banging shutters and driving rainy gusts against the glass. Sylvia was nervously afraid of a thunderstorm, and asked many times whether Wilbraham heard thunder, so many times that Teresa brought in Cesare as a diversion, making a jest of her intended efforts to tame him. Wilbraham did not say much in reply—he could hold his tongue when he liked—but he listened intently, and the next morning, while the rain was still falling heavily, and tumbling in sheets from broad eaves on the passers-by, he in his turn made his way to the Maxwells.
“She must not be allowed to employ that man,” he ended emphatically, after an explanation.
Colonel Maxwell pulled his moustache.
“Must not?” He laughed.
“Must not,” Wilbraham insisted.
“I suppose it’s hard on the poor beggar if nobody is to give him a leg up.”
“That’s not Teresa’s affair,” said his wife severely. “I quite agree—fully—with Mr Wilbraham. Teresa is so impulsive that she has to be protected against herself. Of course she ought not to be hand and glove with socialists and murderers.”
“That’s it,” said Wilbraham, delighted. “And you think you can stop it?”
“Think? I am sure. Five lire will stop anything with Peppina. But it really is folly of Teresa.”
“Perhaps. But a generous folly.”
Wilbraham spoke hastily. Mrs
Maxwell leaned back in her chair, and tapped the table with her fingers.
“Well, it has its inconveniences,” she remarked drily. “Sylvia is not like that. Sylvia would never rush into extravagances without first consulting some one.”
He stood up, tall and stiff.
“They are different,” he said guardedly.
“Oh, yes—they are different.”
Mary Maxwell, who loved playing with fire so long as she did not burn her own fingers, laughed as she spoke, and afterwards enlarged on the subject to her husband.
“I,” she said, “give him a month—one month. Every one has acted idiotically in supposing that poor little Sylvia could hold an affection, and now—see!”
“No one asked him to fall in love. You make him out a wretched cur,” returned Colonel Maxwell, from behind the sheets of the Times.
“If Teresa did not ask him, she managed that it should be easy; always dressing up that poor little goose in borrowed plumes. Heavens! Imagine being tied for life to a bundle of platitudes! You can’t, you know; but then you ought not to have left me to say it,” she said, perching herself on the arm of his chair.
“Go along! I’m reading Christie’s sale.”
“You needn’t suppose you’re ever going to have a Christie sale. Well, if you’re so unsociable, I shall go and speak at once to Peppina. Do you hear?”
A grunt replied. In fact he did not hear, or might have offered sound advice. As it was, Mrs Maxwell was both anxious to impress the girl, and to have it over quickly, so that she did not linger at preliminaries. Peppina answered her call with yards of frilling in her hands.
“About Cesare,” Mrs Maxwell began.
“Have you seen him yet?”
“Signora! By your favour! And with all this to be done before night!”
She held up her frills.
“Then you need not go.”
“Need not go? Per Bacco, but what has changed, signora?”
“The marchesa will not require Cesare, that is all,” said Mrs Maxwell carelessly.
Peppina was looking hard at her, and there was a queer glitter in her eyes. She had been dreaming through the night of the lottery and possible riches, and she immediately connected Wilbraham’s visit with her disappointment. There was, however, no use in talking.
“I am sorry, signora,” she said, drawing a deep angry breath. “It would have been good for the poor fellow.”
“He will find something better to do.”
“In Rome!” The girl flung out her hands with a gesture of hopelessness which made Mrs Maxwell uncomfortable.
“Really, Peppina,” she said pettishly, “as you have not told him, I can’t see that there is much harm done. If I give you five lire for him, he ought to be delighted.”
“The signora is always so generous!” said Peppina. Her fingers closed round the note, but her eyes had not lost their dangerous gleam, and her face was pale. Mrs Maxwell, quite satisfied with herself, went away, wondering, it must be confessed, how Teresa would bear this interruption of her plans for the good of mankind. But she thought if they all opposed her wish to enlist Cesare, that she would yield, especially because, for Sylvia’s sake, she avoided anything which Wilbraham appeared particularly to dislike.
Peppina went that evening to the house of a sister-in-law near the Piazza Navona, and sent a child to seek for Cesare. When he came, she made a sign that she wished to speak to him alone, and they went out into the piazza. The south wind fluttered warmly, and the sky was thick with stars. She told her story quickly, holding back Donna Teresa’s name, because she had never been sure that he would have worked for her. As it was, he only heard that a chance had been snatched from him.
“It was the Englishman, I know it!” cried Peppina. “You were quite right. He hates you.”
“I will be even with him one day,” said Cesare in a low fierce voice.
“He came to the house in all that rain; they talked—talked—I heard them. And as soon as he had gone, in comes the signora to me. She thought herself so clever, because she did not say his name. As if I were a fool!”
Peppina’s voice was passionately contemptuous. They had turned out of the piazza and were passing along the narrow street at the end of which is Pasquino’s mutilated figure.
“I will be even with him,” repeated Cesare.
“There was money in it, English money, too, which is better. And now Angelo suffers as well.”
“Have I not said that I will be even with him? Do not throw words about,” he exclaimed, turning sharply on her. “My blood is hot enough without your putting fire to it.”
“Eh—and those are my thanks!” cried the girl, flinging from him.
He made no answer, and they walked sullenly abreast of each other till they had passed the tragic block of the Cancellaria where Rossi was killed. Then Peppina drew nearer, glancing from time to time at her lover.
“What shall you do?” she said at last in a low voice.
He did not answer her directly.
“You can find out where he goes, what he does?” he said at last.
“From one or the other—yes.”
“He leaves Rome perhaps for Naples?”
“Perhaps. I do not know. But not yet.”
“I can wait,” he said significantly. They relapsed into silence again, walking in the shadows. It was Peppina who at last spoke again. Cesare’s life was so solitary that he felt little need of speech. All the money he could earn was spent on Angelo, and in providing himself with the barest necessaries of life. He was never seen in a wine-shop.
“I will go to that Nina of those people in the Porta Pinciana,” said the girl. “The Englishman marries one of them, and she will chatter like a magpie if I let her. It will please you if I find out, eh, Cesare mio?”
She touched his arm softly with her finger as she spoke, and turned up her face to his. He stooped and kissed her.
“I have told you,” he said briefly. But she missed a passionate ring in his voice for which she hungered.
“I believe you are thinking only of the Englishman,” she said with reproach.
“That is true,” he allowed simply. “He fills my being. There seems no room for anything else, not even for you. You must wait, Peppina.”
If it had been a woman of whom he spoke, her wild blood would have carried her away. But she understood and could sympathise when he only meant revenge. It seemed quite natural to her.
“I will wait,” she said. “Yes.”