CHAPTER VIII
San Severino, as you pass under the portico of its front entrance, appears to be very much like other Roman churches, spacious, marble-floored, roofed with frescoed cupola and rounded arches; its wide nave is flanked with chapels, some unowned and bare; others, the vested property of great families, gorgeously or artistically decorated, marking to the experienced eye the precise date of each family's apogee of power—pure pre-Raphaelite, Renaissance, Barocco, First Empire sham classic, Gregory the Sixteenth tawdry stucco and color. Even the latest abomination, however, is chastened into harmony by the merciful siftings of years, by the ever-lessening light which struggles through the darkened yellow of windows set too high in dome and walls to be meddled with more than once or twice in a century. When the sun strikes them, long swathes of dusty gold shoot transversely down the unpeopled spaces of the church touching the mote-laden air to slow vibrations of light, calling back to a mockery of life some periwigged or pseudo-classic bust on a monument, or lingering on the lovely, flower-tinted lines of a Renaissance tomb. It is Rome in the church as elsewhere, Rome, superbly indifferent to the quality of the spoils Time chooses to fling in her lap, because she has but to let them lie there awhile in the supernal alembic of her glory-haunted air, to have them subdued, ripened, enriched, and finally incorporated into her own stricken yet transcendent beauty.
Out of the last chapel to the right of the High Altar of San Severino a low swing door gives access to a darker, dimmer sanctuary, formerly a choir, as the blackened stalls and lecterns testify, but now used only once a month for the meeting of the Sodality of the Bona Mors. An unlit altar rises against one wall, supporting a painting always curtained from the dampness save when the doors are closed to the public and the members congregate for their exercises. Only a few can tell what the picture represents—whether Saint Joseph breathes his last sigh in the arms of God Incarnate, or the Penitent Thief writhes on his cross beside the King of the Jews. "Morte certa, modo incerto," the veiled shrine seems to whisper, and something cold and deathly in the air brings the first axiom at least shudderingly home to those who pass through.
Beyond this chapel lies a small irregular chamber, its walls and pavement of marble so darkened with age that it is hard to decipher the inscriptions with which both are covered, brief Latin epitaphs recording the names of the dead who lie in the crypt below, good monks of an order which once prayed in the little chapel of the Bona Mors and has been superseded and absorbed in the course of centuries, even as its modest temple has been absorbed and dominated by the great church of San Severino.
A heavy leather curtain hangs over the outer door of the marble chamber of epitaphs, and is lifted for those who pass in and out by courteous mendicants of a more retiring disposition than those who guard the grand portico. A long, narrow courtyard, high walled but pleasantly open to the sky, and ornamented with a fountain made out of an acanthus capital, marks the final limits of the sacred premises, which run, from the Ripetta, parallel with the Santafede palace, through the entire block to the piazza of that name. The palace has its imposing front on the piazza, but the back door of San Severino leads into an obscure street opening out of the square. The street is narrow and crooked, shut in between the side walls of two or three ancient palaces, great houses of diminished splendors, whose owners do not disdain to let the ground floors of these purlieus as livery stables and small shops. Over one dark, malodorous doorway hangs a picture of a fearfully obese cow, sadly contemplating a yellow ochre field under a cracked blue sky, denoting that milk and butter are to be had within. From a cavernous den opposite, an avalanche of vegetables invades the sidewalk, crisp green lettuces, scarlet tomatoes, the magically fragrant fennel, pumpkins like globes of battered gold—the cornucopia of Ceres seems to be shaken out on the worn stones every morning. But Ceres has grown old; she sits, dark-browed, saturnine, wrinkled, on a low chair in the midst of her trophies, knitting stockings. Customers pause, select their purchases, hold up as many fingers as may represent the coppers they suppose them to be worth, and look inquiringly at Ceres. She bends a frowning glance on the questioner; if the guess be right, she nods her head; if mistaken, she corrects it by the same finger language; and the coppers drop into the basket where her ball of yarn dances at her feet. Few venture to bargain with Sora Rosa; she considers it waste of time. People pay and carry away the stuff; or they will not pay, and then somebody else will, for there is no other vegetable stall within ten minutes' walk, and who is going to risk an apoplexy from over-exercise?
In the early morning, great ladies, quietly dressed, glide past Sora Rosa, avoid the horses which are being confidentially curried in the street, and disappear through the low doorway into the court of San Severino on their way to Mass. During the rest of the day the genial squalor of the Via Tresette is not disturbed by any jarring reminder of the prosperity and cleanliness of neighboring quarters. Near the ground at any rate all is dark, promiscuous, and prehistoric so far as modern ways are concerned. But the monastery building of San Severino rises up and up, a long, irregular pile, reaching the higher air and the sunshine at last, and breaking out into little terraces and balconies, flowery and bird-haunted, where the Fathers whom Fra Tommaso served with such zeal took their rest after the labors of the day. Fra Tommaso's own little loggia, the hanging garden which Giannella had begged to be taken to see so many years ago, was one of these, the least accessible from the larger apartments, but possessing for its owner the immense advantage of looking directly down into the Via Santafede and commanding a view of a section of the piazza at one end and of the Ripetta at the other; also of some fifty windows of the palace itself. The incorrigible amateur of the human drama, as he climbed from his forum, the church, to his villa, the loggia, always thanked Heaven for having cast his lines in pleasant places, and pitied his immediate opposite neighbors, Mariuccia and Giannella, for being exposed to the distracting temptations and vanities of the world and at the same time deprived of the delights of flower tending and pigeon feeding which he enjoyed on his terrace.
The vanities of the world had only approached Giannella by proxy for a long time past. Since Onorato's chance admiration and his untimely bit of farce had closed the doors of the piano nobile to her, life had become so narrow, so uniform, that she hardly recognized it for life at all. Three colorless years had slipped by; good Signori Dati was dead; the Princess, busy as ever, but in failing health, seemed to have forgotten her former protegé's very existence. The brief churchgoing and shopping with Mariuccia, the needlework by which she still earned small sums from ladies who remembered her address, the assistance rendered in housework and in waiting on the Professor, who, after his first surprise at her presence, never seemed to know whether she or Mariuccia brought him his meals—these made the round of Giannella's days; and since she had, in obedience to the advice of her spiritual director, put rebellion down and accepted her fate by sheer effort of will, she lacked even the stimulus of conflict with her unnatural destiny. She had not lost either her health or her beauty in the strait abode of frowning circumstance, but her buoyancy seemed gone; her eyes were deep rather than bright, and no gallant resolve to smile on life could keep the corners of her pretty mouth from drooping pathetically out of the happy upward curves of her childhood. That period was so long past that it seemed to belong to life on another planet, one much nearer the sun than this earth; but when, as in piety bound, she made one meditation a month on the joys of paradise, the angels, and the heavenly gardens and the celestial music, slid into the familiar semblance of her friends and play-fellows at Castel Gandolfo, the vineyards and the chestnut woods, the barking of the old dog—the braying of the donkey—Madonna Santissima, what abominable sacrilege were her thoughts committing? Dogs and donkeys in heaven? Those red-cheeked, dusty-legged contadini children as angels of the Lord? Oh, what a wicked girl Giannella Brockmann must be—and what would Padre Anselmo say when she told him?
She had fallen into this grievous sin for the twentieth time one winter afternoon. The light was failing, and as she rose from her seat to put her work away, the door bell, grown terribly decrepit in its advanced age, jangled with an imperious querulousness which announced a stranger. The Professor always handled it with tender care for fear of expense in repairs. Mariuccia, who seemed to have grown suddenly old, came out from the back room groaning with headache, for which she had applied her favorite remedy of tufts of "madrecara" stuffed up her nostrils. The sight of her thus adorned was one of the few things which still made Giannella shake with laughter; the dear old face resembled a boar's head in a butcher's window at Christmas time.
"Go back to bed, Mariuccia," said the girl, "I will see who it is. The padrone is in his study. I had better ask him if he wishes to see any visitors."
She went quickly down the passage, pausing to put her head in at the study door. The Professor had grown older too, and bent more closely over his book than of yore. Not risking speech, Giannella looked a question as he raised his head; he nodded assent, and then the bell began its crazy dance again. Giannella hastily opened the front door and found herself face to face with a short, rather stout man, whose features she could not discern in the gloom, but who asked in an imperious tone whether the distintissimo Professor were at home. At the same time he handed her a card, from which she decided that this must be his first visit to the house.
"Favorisca," she murmured, and the stout gentleman followed her to Bianchi's room. She saw the Professor rise and come forward with a puzzled air, and heard the visitor begin an apology for his intrusion. Then she closed the door on them and went back to the kitchen, not sufficiently interested even to glance at the card, which she dropped on the little table beside the umbrella-stand in the passage.
"Is he never going, then, this cataplasm of a visitor?" exclaimed Mariuccia an hour later. "The padrone's supper is ready and spoiling. Take in the lamp, Giannella. They must be in the dark in there."
When Giannella entered the study, lamp in hand, she found that Bianchi had lighted a candle and was examining some papers, which he laid down quickly on seeing her. His sallow cheeks were flushed, and as he glanced up it struck the girl that his eyes looked unusually bright.
Opposite to him, leaning back in an arm-chair, sat the visitor, whom the light revealed as a youngish man with narrow black eyes and a round countenance, evidently intended for smiles, but disciplined just now into a kind of judicial severity which could not altogether suppress the under element of amusement with which he was regarding his host.
He too glanced quickly up at the girl who stood in the doorway, the lamp she carried illuminating her fair hair and grave young face. After a moment's hesitation she advanced and set the lamp on the table between the two men. Bianchi dropped his hands over the papers and looked across to his guest.
"This is Giannella Brockmann, Signor' Avvocato," he said; "you perceive that she is alive and in good health."
The stranger rose to his feet and seemed about to speak, but the Professor raised a warning hand, and, turning to Giannella, dismissed her with a nod of the head. As she closed the door she heard him say hurriedly, "Later, later. Not at present—it is a nervous temperament."
Her curiosity was aroused from its years of sleep, awakened as by the twang of a bowstring letting an invisible arrow fly past her. Was Bianchi referring to her? What was the communication which the other had wished to make and which he had arrested so peremptorily? She had scarcely had time to formulate the queries in her mind when she heard murmurs of farewells, the sound of the front door closing, and the Professor's footsteps returning to his study, where he locked himself in. It was all very unusual.
She did not see the padrone again that evening, for Mariuccia, still wearing her satyr-like adornment, took the tray from her hands and carried in his supper. The next day, however, Giannella was surprised by his pausing, as he met her in the passage, to return her dutiful "good-morning," a mark of interest which he had never shown before. A little later he actually called her by name and showed her a row of books on a lower shelf, which, he said, required dusting. Mariuccia seemed unwell, and she had much to do; would Giannella undertake to dust the books regularly? He would be much obliged.
When she informed Mariuccia of this order the old woman laughed sardonically. "It has taken him a great many years to find out that I have much to do," she sneered, "and I have waited on him when I was so shaking with fever that the plates rattled in my hands—and he never noticed that I was ill. Cipicchia! That visitor must have been an angel in disguise, to have thus opened the padrone's heart to poor you and me, Giannella. Let us hope that he will soon come again."
He did come again, two or three times in the course of the next fortnight, and with each visit the Professor's kind notice of Giannella increased, until she began to have an uncomfortable feeling in his hitherto impersonal presence. As she came and went, his eyes followed her with a growing lambency behind the big spectacles. She was called into his room on frivolous pretexts, and one day he asked her if she could kindly cook his supper. Mariuccia had brought in some polpetti, and he had remarked that Giannella cooked polpetti divinely.
Mariuccia's sharp eyes had marked the padrone's new attitude and she was much disquieted. Was it possible that at fifty-seven he was committing the folly of falling in love? And that, suddenly and unreasonably, with the girl who had waited on him for years past without winning so much as a word or a glance of recognition from him? If so, it was nothing but bewitchment, dark bewitchment. The lawyer who came to see him now must be quite the opposite of an angel, since the spell dated from his first visit. The spell had evidently been cast by him.
Well, she would counteract it if she could. Giannella should not go near that fatal sitting-room and its occupant if she could help it. Giannella seconded the precautionary measures with all her might. She was thankful to be spared the attentions which were becoming too obvious to be ignored. Resolutely she stayed at the other end of the house, but Bianchi took to wandering over there after her. She pondered on the possibility of paying for a place in the vettura and taking refuge with the old friends at Castel Gandolfo; but money was painfully scarce; she and Mariuccia now depended entirely on the latter's wages and on the fifteen baiocchi a day which her generous master had so unwillingly granted when she first came to live with him twenty years before. No, a journey was out of the question; the prison doors could not be pushed ajar.
The door was opening even now, but Giannella had no premonition of it. Having attained the sober age of twenty without possessing a single young acquaintance in Rome (for none of her former schoolfellows lived in that remote quarter), she was allowed by Mariuccia, when the old joints felt stiff, to go out alone sometimes for Mass and marketing. Mariuccia's dreams of a bright future for her foster-child were fading sadly away at last; Giannella would be considered an old maid in another year or two, and the good young man with fifty thousand scudi had never come. Instead, by an ugly "scherzo" of fate, Carlo Bianchi, the shrunken recluse who had never looked at anything more closely resembling a woman than some statue thousands of years old, dead and cold as the creature deserved to be for having been perpetuated in such indecent nudity, Carlo Bianchi was waking up to the fact that a beautiful young woman was a member of his household; and, unless Mariuccia's own shrewdness was at fault, he would soon propose to install her as its mistress.
With all his failings, his domestic tyrant could not credit him with baser intentions, but this was bad enough. If he should succeed—Mariuccia groaned aloud at the possibility—the rest of Giannella's life would be "in Galera," that of a slave at the galleys. Let the poor child get out into the air and sunshine, exchange a word with Fra Tommaso, with stout, smiling Sora Amalia, who lived under the sign of the cow, even with cross old Sora Rosa, who had so far unbent to "la Biondina" as to make her a present of figs or cherries once or twice. It was hard, after all the struggles to keep Giannella a lady, that she should be reduced to friends like these, that not a person of her own class should ever remember or notice her. But there, it was destiny! "Run along, Giannella, and see if ricotta is cheap to-day. The padrone would like some for his breakfast."
So Giannella came and went a little more freely, and she did not attract the attention which the good nuns had dreaded for that dangerous golden hair when they let their dove fly from the convent ark four years before. Everyone in the vicinity knew her by sight, and it was a vicinity whose staid inhabitants rarely changed. The world, the flesh, and the devil, might go roaring up and down the Corso a few blocks away, but within sound of the bells of San Severino all was calm, ancient, safe. Mariuccia's Biondina, as she was called, could come and go, in her dark dress, with the bit of black lace veiling her modest head, and no curious or disrespectful glance would follow her. She could escape from the house and venture on a little walk by the river, past the palace where kind Cardinal Cestaldini was basking in a rarefied atmosphere of contemplation, good works, and learning, could pass the time of day with Fra Tommaso and the incurables, and linger among the monuments and frescoes of the church or try to decipher the inscriptions in the funereal gallery beyond the chapel of the Bona Mors, all without embarrassment or molestation. And as was natural, the small, new liberty was sweet and reviving to her repressed youth. She saw no tragedy in it, as did Mariuccia, to whom the acknowledgment of Giannella's passing youth and apparently irrevocable spinsterhood was a bitter trial. She was not sure now that in choosing the single state for herself she had not made a big mistake; but then she had chosen it for herself, and that was quite a different thing.
The winter had softened into spring and the spring warmed to summer, when Mariuccia's enemy, the mysterious avvocato, made his last visit to the Professor. He carried an imposing sheaf of papers in his hand and was accompanied by an older man who looked like a notary, for he wore even bigger spectacles than the padrone's and his right forefinger was dyed dark with ink. A few minutes after the two had been admitted, Giannella was summoned to the study. Some very direct questions were put to her by the lawyer, as to her name, age, and recollections of childhood, questions which surprised her greatly, for she could not imagine why these details should interest strangers. Then a paper was laid before her which she was requested to sign. She drew back, a chill fear coming over her that it might be a marriage contract—that she was being entrapped into a union with Bianchi, who stood beside her, breathing hard with suppressed excitement and considerately holding a sand castor over the page, ready to dry the writing at once. As she hesitated, he touched her arm with his free hand, and the touch spelled compelling will. She was conscious that the other two men were staring at her in bewilderment, and she obeyed—as she had obeyed authority, in one form or another, all her life, and signed her name.
Bianchi instantly took possession of the sheet and handed it to the lawyer, who wrote on it in his turn. Then, as Bianchi signified to Giannella that she might retire, the lawyer came round to her side of the table, shook hands with her, congratulated her on her good fortune, and, with quite a friendly ring in his voice, begged her to consider his services at her disposal in the future. She thanked him, inwardly wondering at his optimism. The only good fortune apparent in her circumstances was the one of having found a shelter and a home—to which she had less future claim than the swallows to their nests in the palace eaves.
Emerging from the study she found Mariuccia hovering near the door, wild with curiosity and suspicion. Giannella described what had taken place, and as soon as the visitors had departed Mariuccia stormed into the study and assailed the Professor with angry questions as to what the child had been made to sign. What was this indecent secrecy? What had anyone to say to Giannella that she, who had brought her up, might not hear? Was that abominable paper a marriage contract? She would tear it up and light the fire with it. Did he figure to himself that Giannella was to be disposed of without Mariuccia Botti's consent?
Bianchi, who seemed calm and triumphant now, locked the drawer of his secretary and put the key in his pocket before deigning to reply to her tirade; indeed its fluency and fury left no opening for reply until she paused for want of breath, her eyes like coals, her grizzled locks shaking above her brow like angry snakes. The master had never seen her in a passion before, and he shrank back instinctively. Then, as she was opening her lips to speak again, he said quickly and with some dignity, "Calm yourself, Mariuccia. One does not speak to one's padrone in that manner. The paper which Giannella signed was just a legal one, connected with ... business of mine. You cannot write—it would have been useless to call you in. You perceive that you have made a foolish mistake? Oh, I forgive you. You have had no instruction, and you women of the people are ever illogical and suspicious. As to marriage ... listen to me, and do not transport yourself with anger—it sours the blood and might bring on an apoplexy which I have so greatly feared for you, overloading yourself with food as you do. Fifteen baiocchi a day for one woman. Holy Æsculapius, how have you survived it for twenty years?"
"Man without eyes, without vitals," cried Mariuccia, "what do you suppose Giannella has lived on since she came back from the convent? Air? Trevi water? Have I not fed the poor child for years? Have you ever given her a crumb from your table, a sugar-plum at Epiphany, or a maritozzo in Lent? Domine Dio, keep Thy Hand on my head or I shall end by losing patience with this blind and heartless one."
The Professor was roused to reprisals at last. "Do not imagine that I am blind, O female without judgment!" he exclaimed. "Gladly would I have made presents of food to Giannella, though I am a poor man and could ill afford it—but I perceived that your charity to her might be the means of saving your life, preventing you from dying of surfeit—a most painful end. Thus has your good deed already had its reward. But to show you, O ignorant and audacious one, that I have a true affection for Giannella and a mind full of generosity I will now—" He choked, then went on manfully, "I will now give you five baiocchi a day for her board, out of my own pocket. It is imprudent—I shall suffer—but I am resolved. Behold." And he held out five dingy coppers in his half-closed hand.
Then he found out what Mariuccia meant when she spoke of losing patience. She came up to him in two strides and shook both hands in his face. "What?" she screamed, "you want to pay for Giannella now? Why have you never thought of it before? Four years last Easter she came home, and never once have you said, 'Mariuccia mia, there is a paul, to buy something for the girl—what do I know, a cake, a bit of ribbon?' No, she grew up, she has waited on you and ironed for you and mended your old rags of shirts that only hold together by the grace of God. She has combated with the butcher and the baker and the fishmonger till they had to take something off their prices for you—they fear to see her coming, though she is as beautiful as an angel—and you never even spoke to her till a few weeks ago. But now—the devil in hell alone knows why—you have suddenly found out that she is good and pretty, and you make big eyes at her and call her to dust your wicked old books—and now you have the temerity to offer me money for her! No indeed, Professore mio, this you shall never do. Go back to your Veneres and Giunones—I wonder the Holy Father did not send the shameless females to the galleys for having their portraits taken like that—and leave Giannella to me."
Bianchi had not listened to this tide of reproaches, accompanied as it was by violently menacing gestures, without taking immediate measures for self-preservation. He edged round the room, keeping his back to the wall and facing Mariuccia, who followed him step by step, never allowing the distance between them to diminish by a handbreadth, until the door was reached. Carefully the Professor put out one hand behind him and ascertained that it was ajar. Then with amazing agility he stepped back into the passage, and from there hurled his last bomb. "You spoke of marriage. Yes, woman of hard head and mountainous ignorance, I intend to marry Giannella." Then the door was slammed in Mariuccia's face and the next moment the padrone was flying down the stairs.
His enemy, haggard, and trembling from reaction, remained in possession of the field, but she knew that she was vanquished. When Giannella heard the front door close she ran to the study, whence sounds of battle had rolled for the last half-hour. She found her old friend with her head sunk forward on the table while slow tears trickled through her knotty fingers all over the padrone's papers. The master had evidently been put to flight, but Mariuccia's victory seemed to have been a costly one. She refused to confide to Giannella the subject of her "piccolo argomento," as she called it, with Bianchi. The long habit of silence gave her strength to keep her counsel about his alarming proposal. Taken together with his changed attitude towards the girl, it could, in her judgment, point to but one thing, "passione," the fatal, sudden, all-devouring passion in which the Roman believes as blindly as did the Greek tragedian. This poisoned arrow had entered the padrone's heart. Mamma mia, here was a complication over which to astrologize her poor head! Who was going to sustain the combat, day in day out, under that narrow roof, with an obstinate man who was undoubtedly being smitten in his dried-up middle age with just retribution for the unnatural repressions of his youth, and who, moreover, held all the advantages of the situation, since he was the master of the house? She did not abandon her belief in the spell which she accused the strange lawyer of weaving around the poor man; no, that was a part of the doom; he was Satan's emissary, permitted, for some inexplicable reason, to sow the seed which had taken such violent possession of the unfortunate Professor. He had disappeared when his evil work was done and it could probably not be undone by anyone else. It was all destiny—but most afflicting.
As for telling Giannella—no. Love was not a proper subject to discuss with young girls, and then, such love as this? So she informed Giannella that she had been asked to sign the mysterious paper as a witness to something or other that had no connection with her, and that the slight disagreement had arisen from Bianchi's irritation at being questioned. Why had she been crying? Oh, she was feeling "strana" that day—it was all the fault of the scirocco.
The Professor returned towards evening, very haughty and dignified. Mariuccio contradicted all her explanations of the morning by forbidding Giannella to go near him, and carried in his supper tray herself, in grim silence more aggressive than words, even those of her rich vocabulary. She was only waiting for the rattle of a plate or the turning of a door handle to put an end to the armistice and serve as a declaration of renewed hostilities, but Bianchi was deaf and dumb. He informed her, when she came in to remove his tray, that he would be going to Ostia the next day; his coffee must be ready and his clothes brushed by seven o'clock. Then he returned to the perusal of a letter, and Mariuccia, greatly relieved at the prospect of his absence for so many hours, prayed for the intervention of protecting Providence in Giannella's affairs before his return—and sat up till late, brushing his clothes and preparing the frugal lunch which he always carried with him on such archæological expeditions.