Chapter Five.
“Teresa!”
“Granny!”
The young marchesa, who was moving about the room, touching her flowers, and musing as to an improved angle for a tall bamboo which had arrived that morning to fill a lonely corner, turned with a shade of defiance in voice and manner.
“Do you know what you are doing?”
There was a momentary hesitation before the answer came.
“Who does?”
The defiance was already tinged with uneasiness, and facing the keen old eyes Teresa dropped her own.
“Then I will tell you,” said Mrs Brodrick gravely. “You are playing a very dangerous game.”
“Everything that is worth anything has its dangers,” said Teresa, trying to speak lightly.
“But we have no right to push other people into them.”
“Push!” Now the marchesa laughed outright. “Push! Oh, be just. Do you pretend to say it would be possible to push Mr Wilbraham into any position he hadn’t deliberately chosen? You know better. He will walk round and round, and look at it closely from every side, and advance only when he is convinced it is eminently desirable and safe. He’s a hundred years old if he’s a day.”
“That’s as you like. He is a good man.”
Teresa, imagining—perhaps with truth—that she detected a shade of regret in the tone, fired up promptly.
“Not too good for my Sylvia.”
“Not too good. But too clever, too exacting.”
“You are never quite fair to Sylvia.”
“Nor,” said Mrs Brodrick with a quick smile, “are you.”
Teresa moved uneasily.
“She is very pretty.”
“Very.”
“And very good-tempered.”
“Very.”
Then they paused.
“Well, isn’t that enough for any man?” Teresa asked, with a show of conviction.
“It will not be enough for Mr Wilbraham.”
“That’s for him to judge. Why do you scold me? I’m doing nothing.”
“I should have said you were spending your energies in making ways smooth and pleasant,” her grandmother added after a momentary hesitation. “Well?”
“Well, I have a theory that Love cuts his own paths when he wants them.”
“Oh, granny,” protested Teresa, “but you—you are so romantic! Things have changed.”
“No, no, they are eternally the same,” said Mrs Brodrick, with a smile at her own failure.
After all, Teresa was not doing her justice, for her fears chiefly centred on Sylvia. Wilbraham, she agreed in her mind, could take care of himself, but if Sylvia suffered an acute sorrow, was her character strong enough to keep its equilibrium? She doubted. And she only faintly hoped that what she had said might influence Teresa, for, though it cost her something to offer advice she had very little belief in its being taken.
She began to wish they were out of Rome.
A month had passed since the day at Ostia; Wilbraham lingered, and had even arrived at the point of acknowledging to himself that he was lingering, which is a long step for a cautious man. It was true that other friends of his and of Mrs Brodrick’s had arrived, and were in a hotel not far from the Porta Pinciana. Their advent seemed to fling him yet more comfortably with his first acquaintances, for a second man put him at his ease. Moreover, Colonel and Mrs Maxwell wanted to see everything, since, although she had been born in Italy, he had never been in Rome. Teresa made herself his guide, and Sylvia fell naturally to Wilbraham. Teresa was still on the watch to cover blunders, but they had passed the stage in which she had been afraid to leave her alone with him. She even doubted whether he were alive to the difference in the conversation between Sylvia and Mrs Maxwell, who could talk brilliantly. There she was mistaken. He saw, and, on the whole, thought he preferred simplicity to brilliancy in a woman. He would have resented anything which made him ridiculous; short of that, the girl he married would require few mental gifts.
There had been talk of the marchesa finding a larger apartment.
“There is all this money to be spent,” she said with a laugh, “and honestly I don’t quite know how.”
“Do you want to go?” asked her grandmother cheerfully.
“Not I.”
“Nina hopes, if you do,” remarked Sylvia, looking up from knitting a sock, “that you will be very careful to take another crooked room; it’s lucky, she says.”
“I’ll have nothing more to do with Nina’s lucky theories,” said Teresa.
“Imagine, Mary,” she went on to Mrs Maxwell, who was lazily skimming an Italian newspaper, “on All Saints’ Day she brought us horrible biscuits made like cross-bones, and expected us to eat them! Biscuits of the dead, she called the dreadful things, and groaned all day over my want of devout feeling, when I couldn’t look at them.”
“I wish you hadn’t minded,” said Sylvia again, with some uneasiness.
Mrs Brodrick fidgeted.
“And the other day, instead of our Italian paper, she brought word that the man had sold his out, but that he assured me it didn’t matter, because there was nothing in it.”
“Your Nina sounds a hundred times more entertaining than my Peppina,” remarked Mrs Maxwell. “She knows nothing, and breaks everything. But then she is in love, and when she looks in my face with her beautiful eyes, and mentions that fact as a reason for all my misfortunes, what am I to do?”
“Is her lover in Rome?” asked Mrs Brodrick, rather from politeness than interest.
“Yes. Every now and then he swoops down upon her, and she insists upon going out with him. I point out the inconvenience, and she cries, but goes. Then she comes back, and breaks more things. I wish he weren’t quite such a strong character.”
“What is his occupation?” said Teresa, amused.
“So far as I can make out, it is pulling down the kingdom. This keeps him exceedingly busy. He has no money to speak of, and a lame little brother to support.”
“Oh!” cried the marchesa, suddenly intent.
“What is that?” inquired her grandmother, as keenly.
“Why this stir?” said Mrs Maxwell, opening her blue eyes. “Are you two by any chance in the conspiracy?”
“Does he live under S. Pietro in Montorio? Is he called Cesare Bandinelli? And has he a history?” Teresa questioned breathlessly. Then she jumped up and closed the window to shut out the noise of the electric tram and of the men who were crying “O-olive—go-o-omberi!” with broad intonations. She came back exclaiming—“This is extraordinarily interesting. I know that Cesare, poor fellow!”
“I don’t think you ought to call him poor fellow, Teresa,” corrected Sylvia. “Mr Wilbraham thinks him a very dangerous man.”
“Oh, he’s dangerous, he’s dangerous, I daresay,” agreed her sister, “but in our affair I was the sinner. Listen, Mary.” And she told her story, ending oracularly, “So you see!”
Mrs Maxwell was looking at her queerly.
“Yes, I see,” she said at last. “I’m beginning to put things together. And,” she went on, recovering herself with a laugh, “that always happens after I hear about Cesare.”
Teresa was too much interested and excited to notice anything unusual in Mary Maxwell’s manner. Mrs Brodrick, more experienced, watched her without asking questions.
“Perhaps we might manage to do something for the boy through Peppina?” Teresa suggested eagerly. “I needn’t show.”
“I think you had better leave it alone,” Mrs Maxwell replied slowly. “But I’ll ask my husband,” she added, noticing the young marchesa’s disappointment.
“Oh, he’ll say the same. Men do. Please remember, Mary, that it would take a weight off my mind.”
“I’ll remember. I’ll do all I can.” Mrs Maxwell promised so lavishly that Mrs Brodrick was certain nothing was meant to come of it. And she was right, for nothing came of it, though Mrs Maxwell kept her promise to remember.
“I don’t like it,” she said to her husband in the evening when they were alone, and he was admiring a cleverly blackened and altogether worthless picture, which he had picked up as a great bargain that day, at ten times its actual value.
“You know nothing about it,” he returned in an affronted tone. “The light and shade—”
“Light and shade? Oh! I didn’t mean the picture, I meant Cesare, Peppina’s lover. Now do you understand? It must be our Mr Wilbraham whom he is vowing vengeance against.”
Colonel Maxwell’s ideas of Italian life were borrowed from the stage.
“Rum chaps. Always vowing vengeance, aren’t they?” he said indifferently. “I wouldn’t bother about Wilbraham. He can take care of himself.”
“Well I don’t like it,” repeated his wife.
“If the fellow’s a brute, get rid of Peppina.”
“That is absurd.” Mrs Maxwell was not accustomed to have her affairs interfered with so trenchantly, and she spoke with indignation. “That is so like a man. Peppina—when she isn’t breaking things—is the comfort of my life. The one comfort,” she added emphatically.
“All right.” He stepped back to gaze rapturously at his picture. “Now I wonder who’s the best man here to trust with this sort of thing. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if it turned out a Pinturicchio.”
Mrs Maxwell, who knew much better, held revenge in her hand, and yet somehow could not use it. It would have been too downright, too brutal. She looked at him pityingly.
“You had better not trust it to anybody,” she said sweetly. “They might steal it. If I were you I should keep to soap and water. And,” she added, quite inconsequently, as he thought, “Jim, you’re a dear old donkey!”
That ended it.
Mrs Brodrick was restless; Teresa, who could not, or would not, understand why, chose to insist that her grandmother wanted change of air, and suggested many manner of places, but places where they might all go together.
“It would be such a pity to break us up,” she said.
For a moment Mrs Brodrick was silent.
“Where are we to go?” she asked a little wearily.
“Oh, darling,” cried Teresa, flying to kiss her, “don’t say it in such a tone. Don’t be so tragically sorry! Everything is arranging itself so prettily! And I’ll tell you where we’ll go,” she hurried on, much as if she wished to block argument. “Let us have a day or two at Perugia, so as to see Assisi.”
“All?”
“How could we leave any one out?” asked Teresa reproachfully. “You and Sylvia and I, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And the Maxwells, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And Mr Wilbraham, of course.”
But Mrs Brodrick was obstinately silent again.
The drag up to Assisi is long and dusty, yet with Assisi itself lying always splendidly as a goal in front, it is possible to forget both heat and dust. Olive groves straggle all about, chicory and blue thistles fringe the side of the road; a personality which the world has not yet forgotten makes itself curiously felt when you come in sight of his fields, his mountains, his wide skies, and look back at the dome of Saint Mary of the Angels bathed in soft mist. A Miss Sandiland, one of the many single women who go about the world alone, was of the party which was to spend a night at the Subisio. Hence they, at once, pursued by clamorous beggars, climbed the stony streets to the broad arcaded spaces before the great church, Lombard and Gothic, with its square and round towers and vast magnificent porch. Then from the clear sunlight they turned into darkness—but what darkness! Darkness out of which colours glow, colours laid on by Cimabue and Giotto, darkness shrouding in mystery those strange grave impassible faces looking down into a world which does not touch them. Teresa stood silent, squeezing her hands; Sylvia asked many questions, and Wilbraham answered them; a monk came forward and pointed out this, that, and the other; another monk arranged hideous imitation flowers on the central altar. Presently Wilbraham came back to where Teresa stood.
“The others are gone,” he said.
“Will you come?”
“Gone, gone where?” she said, starting and looking round, “gone away?”
“No, no,” he said indulgently, remembering that she was always scatterbrained, “oh no. But have you forgotten that there’s an upper church?”
“Yes,” returned Teresa briefly, “I had forgotten.”
“May I show you the way?”
She followed silently up the stone staircase, and when they reached the top, he did not see that she again paused and left him to join the others.
After the gloom of the lower, the almost joyous gaiety of the upper church contrasts with it so amazingly that the effect must have been counted upon. Everything is in light delicate harmony. Slender columns of alternate pink and grey; bays roofed with ultramarine dividing others in which Cimabue’s frescoes gleam with strange greens and yellows; choir-stalls with shell-like canopies, lined with blue and gold, surmounting grave tarsia work of saints and angels. There is a small apse with an arcaded gallery, the shafts of pink and grey, and at the back great angels stand on guard. An exquisite small stone pulpit is placed against the wall by the high altar, the column is cut away to give it room, and where it begins again is supported by a grasping hand. Under foot all is pink stone, and round the altar finest cosmatesque mosaic. The lower part of the wall is painted in soft reds and golds to represent looped hangings, and above this, on loveliest blue-green backgrounds, are the Giottos. Noble figures of Cimabue’s look down from the roof; stately angels with red wings tipped with light visit Abraham: the saints’ nimbuses are worked out in raised plaster, the great Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, talk with monks in their cells; all is light, colour, glory; and the windows are large, with delicately stained glass, or, like that at the west, white.
Teresa came up to the others abruptly, and only Mrs Brodrick noticed that her eyes were wet.
“It’s too much,” she said with a quick motion of her hand. “What did they mean? Earth and heaven?—struggle and victory?—the church militant and triumphant?”
“Don’t you like it, Teresa?” asked Sylvia anxiously. “Mr Wilbraham has been telling me so much about it. Did you know that Giotto was a shepherd boy—”
“Was he?” and Teresa, who knew all there is to know about Giotto, shot down from the heights to come to her sister’s help.
“And Cimabue was his master,” went on Sylvia, marshalling her little facts with pride.
“It makes it much more interesting to know about them, doesn’t it?” said the young marchesa, smiling at her, but glancing also at Wilbraham. She need not have feared. His eyes were on Sylvia, he was seeing the young fair face, with its innocent expression, with lips just parted, and reading more than there was, and yet less. What did he care that she should not have Italian painters at her fingers’ ends? He knew them himself, and the knowledge did not seem very valuable. Determination suddenly fired him, and Teresa seeing the look smiled again, this time triumphantly, and turned away.
When they came forth into the piazza, Colonel Maxwell’s fever for “picking up” things broke out.
“It’s absurd to think one can’t find something in a place like this,” he remarked argumentatively. “I shall have a look at some of the side streets. I don’t want to drag any of you, you know.”
“I must go with him,” sighed Mary Maxwell, gathering her dress round her with the air of a martyr,—“in self-defence. I don’t know otherwise what awful things he may bring to me to pack. Don’t anybody else come.”
“I am coming. I like experiences,” said Miss Sandiland.
So these three went away, and the others set themselves to climb the steep broken streets towards the ruined Porta S. Giovanni.
“One is rather breathless, but after all it is not such a long step back to the Middle Ages as I thought,” said Mrs Brodrick, as they passed between the rough grey stone houses, and turned to look at the sunset. There before them stretched the great plain, encompassed with hills of full blue-grey. A few small clouds, edged dazzlingly with gold, barred the sun, and hung over the mountains; above these a clear green Perugino sky melted overhead into the tenderest blue, and, lying across the seas of light, stretched clouds of most exquisite form and colour, their edges bright rosy red. Then they set themselves again to climb steep streets, past broad, striding arches, low and dark, houses flinging out vast sheltering eaves, green doors, carnations hanging from windows, birdcages, squalor, vivid colour, women with their waterpots.
“Where are the others?” said Mrs Brodrick suddenly, as they came out on the ruined gate.
“Never mind, granny,” answered Teresa, smiling softly, “I think they are doing very well.”
“You are like other women,” said her grandmother, shaking her head; “you will only see as much as you want to see.”
“At any rate it’s too late now to see more.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know. I’m only convinced. Really and truly I’m delighted,” she went on triumphantly, “and so you ought to be. What could you wish for better? We know all about Mr Wilbraham—except—no, I don’t know his Christian name. Has he one?”
Mrs Brodrick refused to laugh. Teresa gazed at her with mock anxiety.
“Granny, I shall be really relieved when this affair is finished, I don’t quite like you over it,” she sighed. “Do you dream of anything dark in the background? Or if I dislike it ever so much, do you suppose it could be stopped now?”
“No,” admitted her grandmother. She added whimsically: “But isn’t that rather like starting a rock down hill, and asking whether you can be expected to stop it?”
“Perhaps,” Teresa said. “I don’t think your simile pretty, all the same,” she went on. “Nobody is going to be crushed; and I believe you’ll see that this being loved is just what Sylvia wanted to give her confidence. She’ll develop.”
Mrs Brodrick wanted to ask what would develop, and didn’t dare. She thought of Sylvia as a pretty face and a sweet nature masking an absolutely empty mind, and doubted. The young marchesa could not be always at hand to turn a stupid remark into something which did not seem so stupid after all, and she did not believe that Sylvia could stand on her own feet. She had done her best to stop what was happening and had failed. Age is tolerant, and there was nothing for it now save to accept failure.
“You and I,” said Teresa, with a caressing hand, “will always live together.”
“Always,” said Mrs Brodrick bravely, a smile covering the pain in her heart.
And she turned to go down.
When they reached the piazza the sky had changed. All the gold had gone. In its stead a long red line stretched across the mountainous horizon; above it, light deepened into blue, masses of clouds had suddenly trooped up from the south. Sylvia and Wilbraham came out quite unexpectedly from the shadow of the great church. Sylvia flew to her sister and caught her hand.
“Teresa, Teresa!” she cried under her breath.