Chapter Eleven.
A couple of months passed without apparent change. To Wilbraham they had seemed to drag like lead, yet, looking back, their swiftness appalled him. The wedding would be after Easter, and now that the new year had come, it brought a date which had been remote, measurably nearer. He had gone through a bad fierce time of repulsion, of anger with his own amazing folly, with fate, with everything and everybody, with Sylvia worst of all. Then pride had come to his aid, and he determined resolutely to make the best of the situation. The strong pride of a very self-controlled man was able to do this more thoroughly than he had even hoped. He set his teeth now and then to avoid showing irritation at Sylvia’s futile remarks, but he always had succeeded in keeping under outward signs of impatience, and devoutly trusted that the power would never fail him. He was helped along by the girl’s own contentment. She asked so little! On the other hand this very trait sometimes annoyed him, for in the moments when the desire to break his bonds grew all but overpowering, he felt that the little he gave could not for a day have satisfied another woman.
What was really a sign of danger, if only he had recognised it, was, that in spite of his increasing dread of his marriage, he did not dislike his hours in the Porta Pinciana. Teresa, in her fear for the wreck of Sylvia’s happiness, told herself that she must take care he did not dislike them. She was not a vain woman. The failure of her marriage had knocked any belief in her own charms out of her, and left only an exaggerated conviction of the immense power of beauty. It never entered her head that a constant contrast between her quick, clever, and sympathetic talk and poor Sylvia’s platitudes might be perilous. She did not think of Wilbraham on her own account at all, only and entirely as affecting Sylvia, although she had liked him better since the day at Assisi. Once or twice she had looked critically at him, and said to herself that his face had gained something in losing an expression of cool superiority, which used to annoy her. He was not handsome—his chin was too square, his nose too thick, his hair too straight; but there was strength in every movement, and she was sure he might be trusted. She dwelt much on that quality, at times, when she looked anxiously at Sylvia. For she had her anxieties, sometimes trying to set them at rest for ever, by questioning the girl in a roundabout way.
“There’s nothing you want, Sylvia?”
“Yes,” said the girl, “I want a little wool if you are going out.”
“We must begin to think of the clothes—the important clothes,” said Teresa with a laugh, but watching her all the time. “I mean you to have yours from Paris.”
“There is no good in wasting money,” Sylvia returned practically. “Why do people always think they must do that when they marry? It’s silly.”
“Well, one isn’t married every day of one’s life,” pleaded the marchesa. Suddenly she said, with a quick change of voice, “Dear, you do want to marry your Walter, don’t you?”
“Of course!” The girl stared blankly in her face. “When people are engaged, of course they marry. How funny you are, Teresa!”
“Well, then,” cried the other gaily, “none of your horrid little economical scruples for me! What’s the good of having more money than I know what to do with, if one mayn’t spend it? I shall order the frocks, and they shall be lovely.”
“I think you had better consult Walter.”
“Then I won’t. He can dress you after you are married; I shall do it before. Tell him so, if you like.”
“Oh, we don’t talk of dress.”
“What do you talk of?” asked Teresa with sudden curiosity.
“I—I don’t know,” vaguely. “I think—sometimes—places.”
The young marchesa who believed in romance, though her own was ended, looked at her anxiously.
“Is that all?”
“It’s a good deal. You can’t think how much there seems to say about Rome. And besides, he reads the newspaper.”
“Oh!” cried Teresa sharply.
“I don’t care about newspapers, generally, of course,” Sylvia went on, with her little air of finality, “but I like him to read them, because I can knit all the time, and count the stitches. One needn’t always attend.”
On the whole there was not much comfort to be got out of this conversation, except that the girl was quite unruffled by doubts. Teresa would have liked to have been as sure of Wilbraham, for her sympathies were too lively not to have often alarmed her. She tried to close her eyes, and to make the house as pleasant as she could for him, succeeding only too well.
“Let us go to-morrow to Villa Madama,” she said one Friday evening. Fernanda, with her broad smile, had just brought in the coffee, a log fire burnt merrily in the open stove, from the street rose a stir of voices, cracking of whips, cries of “Tribuna! Ecco Tribu—u—na!” “Polenti!” “Cerini, un sol’ cerini!” and the great hum of the electric tram, rushing up and down the hill like remorseless fate. “We’ll get the two Maxwells.”
Teresa rose up and stood before the fire, so that its glow fell on her white dress. Mrs Brodrick moved uneasily in her chair, for she saw that although Wilbraham was sitting on a sofa beside Sylvia, he was watching Teresa.
“I don’t know if Mary can come, but I am sure she would like it.”
“Then,” said Wilbraham, “she will. She always does what she likes.”
“She does what she likes,” agreed Mrs Brodrick smiling, “but she doesn’t always like what she does.”
“Who does?” Wilbraham said, with a queer quick ring in the question. Teresa caught it, and twisted the conversation.
“Colonel Maxwell picked up a Garofalo to-day—signed and all.”
“Then he will be happy for a week,” said her grandmother.
“Unless Mary shakes him out of his convictions. It’s idiotic of her, but she says she can’t help it after a day’s ravings.”
“Idiotic,” repeated Wilbraham.
“What’s idiotic?” asked Sylvia, standing up by the lamp to recover a dropped stitch.
There was a momentary pause.
“To open a man’s eyes to his mistakes, so long as he’s pleased. It’s so unnecessary,” Wilbraham answered sharply.
“Then what ought one to do?”
“Leave them. He’ll find them out for himself, soon enough.”
Sylvia so rarely took an independent line that they were surprised to see her shaking her head.
“I’d rather be told,” she said, still examining her work.
Teresa moved uneasily.
“Are we to go to the Villa Madama, or not?” she asked almost sharply. “Say yes or no, some one.”
“We all say yes,” said Mrs Brodrick, with something of effort in the words. She, too, had been listening. Teresa went quickly to Sylvia and put her hand on her shoulder, the two young heads bending together.
“How beautifully you knit!” cried Teresa, taking the work in her other hand. “I can never keep the silk so even. Do you know your fairy godmother must have been an exceedingly neat person?”
Once in her hearing, Wilbraham had inveighed against untidiness.
“Oh, Teresa, as if anybody ever had a fairy godmother!”
“Ah, you weren’t brought up on a course of fairy stories, or you’d know better—Sylvia never once told a fib in her life,” she added to Wilbraham—“so she wouldn’t listen to anything which couldn’t be guaranteed as true. I was so unscrupulous that I used to take her in whenever I could.”
“Teresa, you didn’t!” cried the girl, shocked, and turning honest helpless eyes with appeal in them to Wilbraham. Her sister laughed.
“Don’t be afraid, I can bear the burden of those sins. Granny, I wish you’d let me burn that horrid sketch you’ve stuck up there. It’s all wrong.”
Sylvia returned to her knitting; Teresa, a slim white figure, hands clasped behind her, had wandered off to stand before an easel in a dim corner. Wilbraham felt an unaccountable longing to make her turn towards him again.
“I saw your Cesare to-day,” he said.
“Did you?” She came quickly out of the shadows, and dropped on a chair. “Tell me about him, please.”
“There’s little to tell. He was talking to a man near the Trevi.”
“How did he look? Hungry?”
“Well, yes—poor,” Wilbraham admitted, “and as big a ruffian as ever.”
Teresa glanced at him mischievously.
“Do you always determine what your eyes mean to see beforehand?”
“I don’t wear rose-coloured glasses, at any rate.” He had certainly changed a good deal, for he now liked to spar with her, and his tone was eager.
“Poor Cesare!” she sighed. “Did he glare?”
“Like a Trojan.”
“Well, you can’t expect him to like you.”
“You might say, us.”
“Oh no,” she said carelessly. “I was the first sinner, I own; but I did try to apologise, and you didn’t. You wounded his—”
“Vanity,” put in Wilbraham with a laugh. “So be it. I shall have to bear the consequences as best I can.”
Teresa was restless this evening. She got up again.
“There’s the ten-o’clock bell.”
“Does that mean that I’m to go?” he asked, rising in his turn.
“It means that I am going.”
“And to-morrow?”
“Oh, settle with Sylvia,” she said impatiently.
They filled two carriages, a big and a little one. Teresa was with Colonel Maxwell in the smaller, and he thought her preoccupied when he thought about it, which was not often. It was true that she did not comment as freely as usual upon what they passed, though masses of lovely flowers were grouped round the Boat fountain, models sat about on the Trinita steps, a man in the piazza was binding together rough and ready brooms for his dust-cart out of a sort of golden ling, a line of scarlet German students lit up the gloomy Babuino, and out in the Popolo they came upon a blaze of sunshine, hot enough even to warm the heart of the old obelisk.
“By Jove, when all’s said and done, it’s a fine world!” commented Colonel Maxwell suddenly.
“A very tangled one,” threw back Teresa. “I wish you would tell me what to do with it?”
“I?” he laughed. “That’s a largish order. You seem to be doing it tolerably well between you, just at present. A fortune and a wedding all in one winter. Wilbraham’s a very good chap,” he added, thinking she might require reassurance. “He wants knowing, as I daresay you’ve found out, but he’s worth the trouble. And a happy marriage will give him just what he needs to rub off pounds of his mother’s spoiling.” Teresa hesitated. She was in a perplexed mood, and advice seemed the one thing to help her, as it sometimes seems until we have got it.
“Do you think him clever?” she asked with apparent inconsequence.
“Don’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, if you really ask me, I should put my opinion a bit stronger. Of course he’s no ass. He did a lot at college.”
“Oh, those are often the stupidest men!” Teresa said sharply.
“In that case, he’s stupid.”
But from the look she turned on him he suddenly realised that she was very much in earnest, and began to speak seriously, while the thought shot through his mind, “Great Scott! She’s ambitious for that poor little nonentity!” He said aloud, “You know Sir Henry Thurstone by name? He told me last year he believed Wilbraham could do anything he liked, and he doesn’t say that sort of thing freely. They’re all anxious he should go into Parliament, and I suppose he will when he’s once married.”
She kept her eyes fixed on him while he spoke, and while she slowly answered—
“Of course Sylvia—is not exactly clever.”
“Well, wives don’t have to be clever,” said Maxwell, trying to find something that would not sound brutal.
“No.”
“And she’s awfully pretty. No doubt about that.” He went on hurriedly—“See that wine-cart? A great picturesque blob of colour, isn’t it, with the horse hung all over with red tassels?”
But Donna Teresa was silent. She turned away her head, and did not utter more than a few curt sentences until they all got out at the gate of Villa Madama.
There Maxwell collected his enthusiasms, and forgot his conversation; Wilbraham was taciturn. Not Sylvia’s ignorance, but her incapability of understanding, weighed on him. She might easily have known nothing of Margaret of Austria, even, conceivedly, as little of Charles the Fifth; it was far more depressing to perceive that when an idea of either was presented to her, she could not grasp it, because there was apparently no substance into which it could sink. In the frescoes and delicate plaster mouldings she saw no beauty, but was aware of damp on the walls and the emptiness of the vast rooms, and wondered whether the white owl nailed against the door meant anything. Wilbraham found himself wincing when he heard her little fatuous remarks. Wincing. It had come to this.
Villa Madama, unfinished, a mere beautiful shell, hangs, as every one knows, on the side of a wooded hill, above the Tiber, and facing the mountains, which on that day had put on their loveliest colours, and lay a dream of soft lilac amethyst against a yet softer sky. Here and there a whiter gleam marked Tivoli or the near villages, and stretching to the north couched the Leonessa, sheeted with snow. It was from the square melancholy garden behind the house that they looked at these things. Running down the hill before them were grey olives, dotted with olive presses, and close beneath the low wall stretched a great cistern, in which the frogs were croaking. The Villa, facing the east, is soon left by the sun, and the sadness of the garden becomes accentuated. Tall withered campagna-like weeds have filled it, a great cipollino sarcophagus adds to the inexpressibly deserted impression; even the pretty fountain at the back, where the hill water runs out between moss and ferns, and through a grey elephant’s head, is choked into melancholy. And at the far end, flanking an old garden gate, two immense stone figures, battered, grey, mutilated, but still curiously expressive, stand and look down upon the desolation which belongs to them, and them only, with an air of cynical mockery. Mrs Maxwell turned her back on them.
“I don’t think they’re nice,” she said in her soft determined voice. “Do you?”
Teresa glanced up.
“Why not?” she said. “They’ve a very good time of it there, look on, needn’t interfere, and needn’t feel.”
“That’s what I complain of,” said Mrs Maxwell reflectively. “It puts them in such an unfairly superior position. Here are we, torn by a dozen petty anxieties; I am sure I am, for I don’t in the least know where in Rome to get a decent hat. Now, my dear—just think, what would a hat seem to them?”
Mrs Brodrick laughed. Mrs Maxwell talked on.
“Still, I’m not so sure. I don’t know that I should like never to be in the dance. And if they do get at all interested, existence must be so scrappy. There is Sylvia, pretty, and young, and in love. They’ve seen it all before, a hundred times—isn’t this the place for lovers to come?—but don’t tell me that the poor grey old things wouldn’t be curious to know how it’s going on. And it must be so seldom that they get their sequels. No,” she waved her hand to them, Roman fashion, shaking it rapidly, palm downwards—“no, I’m not going to swallow your superior airs. You’re dying of jealousy, you’d like to know about my hat, and Sylvia’s wedding. And you’re not one bit superior. You’re just like other men, pretending to be cynical, because you can’t get what you want, and I see through you. There!” Two minutes later she had hold of Teresa’s wrist and was strolling along a weedy path. “I want to speak to you,” she said.
“What about?” demanded the marchesa quickly.
“I’m bored,” said Mrs Maxwell with gloom. “Bored.”
Teresa dropped into ease at once.
“Here?”
“Here? Oh no. It’s more serious, bigger. I’ve had too much Rome, too many stones, bricks, sarcophaguses, instructive people. Then I’m not thinking so much of myself as of Jem. Do you wish to see him buy up all the rubbish in the place?”
“Well, go!” said Teresa, laughing.
“And be as dull as ditch-water in some forlorn place! Thank you.”
“What do you want, then?”
Teresa knew Mary Maxwell of old, and felt sure that she was fully possessed with what she intended to do, although she did not often, as now, admit a personal motive. She was very attractive and spoilt, and had really convinced herself that she made others her first consideration.
“Look at Sylvia,” she went on.
“Sylvia is a girl who shows up better in the country than in these—these very learned places.”
“Never mind Sylvia,” said the young marchesa quietly. But she knew it was true.
“And Sicily is charming.”
“Are we to go to Sicily then?”
“Peppina has told me a great deal about it,” Mrs Maxwell continued, unheeding, “and I know it will be the very place to suit you. Let us go while the almond blossom is out. Next month. There, there—it’s settled; you’ll all bless me.”
Teresa ended by promising to consult her grandmother. But, in the restless fit which had come upon her, she owned that the idea was pleasant.