V
The house to which Cesare Orsi took Lavinia was built over the rim of a small steep island in the Bay of Naples, opposite Castellamare. It faced the city, rising in an amphitheater of bright stucco and almond blossoms, across an expanse of glassy and incredibly blue water. It was evening, the color of sky and bay was darkening, intensified by a vaporous rosy column where the ascending smoke of Vesuvius held the last upflung glow of the vanished sun. Lavinia could see from her window the pale distant quiver of the electric lights springing up along the Villa Nazionale.
The dwelling itself drew a long irregular façade of white marble on its abrupt verdant screen—a series of connected pavilions, galleries, pergolas, belvedere, flowering walls and airy chambers. There were tesselated remains from the time of the great pleasure-saturated Roman emperors, a later distinctly Moorish influence, quattrocento-painted eaves, an eighteenth-century sodded court, and a smoking room with the startling colored glass of the nineteenth.
The windows of Lavinia's room had no sashes; they were composed of a double marble arch, supported in the center by a slender twisted marble column, with Venetian blinds. She stood in the opening, gazing fixedly over the water turning into night. She could hear, from the room beyond, her husband's heavy deliberate footfalls; and the sound filled her with a formless resentment. She wished to be justifiably annoyed by them, or him; but there was absolutely no cause. Cesare Orsi's character and disposition were alike beyond reproach—transparent and heroically optimistic. Since their marriage she had been insolent, she had been both captious and continuously indifferent, without unsettling the determined eager good-nature with which he met her moods.
During the week he went by launch into Naples in the interests of his banking, and did not return for luncheon; and she had long uninterrupted hours for the enjoyment of her pleasant domain. Altogether, his demands upon her were reasonable to the point of self-effacement. He laughed a great deal; this annoyed her youthful gravity and she remonstrated sharply more than once, but he only leaned back and laughed harder. Then she would either grow coldly disdainful or leave the room, followed by the echo of his merriment. There was something impervious, like armor, in his excellent humor. Apparently she could not get through it to wound him as she would have liked; and she secretly wondered.
He was prodigal in his generosity—the stores of the Via Roma were prepared to empty themselves at her desire. Cesare Orsi's wife was a figure of importance in Naples. She had been made welcome by the Neapolitan society—lawn fêtes had been given in villas under the burnished leaves of magnolias on the height of Vomero. The Cavaliere Nelli, Orsi's cousin and a retired colonel of Bersaglieri, entertained lavishly at dinner on the terrace of Bertolini's; she went out to old houses looking through aged and riven pines at the sea.
She would have enjoyed all this hugely if she had not been married to Orsi; but the continual reiteration of the fact that she was Orsi's wife filled her with an accumulating resentment. The implication that she had been exceedingly fortunate became more than she could bear. The consequence was that, as soon as it could be managed, she ceased going about.
She was now at the window, immersed in a melancholy sense of total isolation; the water stirring along the masonry below, a call from a shadowy fishing boat dropping down the bay, filled her with longing for the cheerful existence of the Lungarno. She had had a letter from Gheta that morning, the first from her sister since she had left Florence, brief but without any actual expression of ill will. After all was said, she had brought Gheta a great disappointment; if she had been in the elder's place probably she would have behaved no better.... It occurred to her to ask Gheta to Naples. At least then she would have some one with whom to recall the pleasant trifles of past years. She would have liked to ask Anna Mantegazza, too; but this she knew was impossible—Gheta had not forgiven Anna for her part on the night that had resulted in Orsi's proposal for Lavinia.
She wondered, more obscurely, whether Abrego y Mochales was still in Florence. He loomed at the back of her thoughts, inscrutably dark and romantic. It piqued her that he had not made the slightest response to her palpable admiration. But he had been tremendously stirred by Gheta, who was never touched by such emotions.
A desire to see Mochales grew insidiously out of her speculations; a desire to talk about him, hear his name. Lavinia deliberately shut her eyes to the fact that this last became her principal reason for wishing to see Gheta.
She told Cesare, with a diffidence which she was unable to overcome, that she had written asking her sister for a visit. Seemingly he didn't hear her. They were at breakfast, on the wine-red tiling of a pergola by the water, and he had shaken his fist, with a rueful curse, in the direction of Naples. Before him lay an open letter with an engraved page heading.
“I said,” Lavinia repeated impatiently, “that Gheta will probably be here the last of the week.”
“The sacred camels!” Orsi exclaimed; then: “Oh, Gheta—good!” But he fell immediately into an angry reverie. “If I dared—” he muttered.
“What has stirred you up so?”
“It's difficult to explain to any one not born in Naples. Here, you see, all is not in order, like Florence; we have had a stormy time between brigands and secret factions and foreign rulers; and certain societies sprang up, necessary once, but now—when one still exists—a source of bribery and nuisance. This letter, for example, congratulates me on the possession of a charming bride; it expresses the devotion of a hidden organization, but points out that in order to guarantee your safety in a city where the guards are admittedly insufficient it will be necessary for me to forward two thousand lire at once.”
“You will, of course, ignore it.”
“I will certainly send the money at once.”
“What a cowardly attitude!” Lavinia declared contemptuously. “You allow yourself to be blackmailed like a common criminal.”
Orsi laughed, his equilibrium quickly restored.
“I warned you that a stranger could not understand,” he reminded her. “If the money weren't sent, in ten days or two weeks perhaps, there would be a little accident on the Chiaja—your carriage would be run into; you would be upset, confused, angry. There would be profuse apologies, investigation, perhaps arrests; but nothing would come of it. If the money was still held back something a little more serious would occur. Nothing really dangerous, you understand; but finally the two thousand lire would be gladly paid over and the accidents would mysteriously cease.”
“An outrage!” Lavinia asserted, and Orsi nodded.
“If you had an enemy,” he continued, “you could have her gown ruined in the foyer of the San Carlos; if it were a man he would be caught at his club with an uncomfortable ace in his cuff. At least so I'm assured. I haven't had any reason to look the society up yet.” He laughed prodigiously. “Even murders are ascribed to it. Careful, Cesare, or a new valet will cut your throat some fine morning and your widow walk away with a more graceful man!”
“Your jokes are so stupid.” Lavinia shrugged her shoulders.
He laid the letter on the table's edge and a wandering air bore it slanting to the floor, but he promptly recovered it.
“That must go in the safe,” he ended; “it is well to have a slight grasp on those gentlemen.”
He rose; and a few minutes later Lavinia saw his trim brown launch, with its awning and steersman in gleaming white, rushing through the bay toward Naples.