But there was something wistful, faintly sorrowful in this aerial beauty. There was a soul in it, a yearning as in all souls. She put down her cheek on Bobby's head, and, thus unseen, the tears came stealing.
"Poor child," thought the Marchesa, who divined those tears she could not see, "poor child ... but I must speak to-night—I must—I really must."
When they reached Baveno, the Marchesa insisted on getting out and going up to the hotel with Sophy to see that she was given nice rooms. Something about the young woman, all alone with her little son, went to her heart. The Marchesa herself had not been very happy in her marriage. Her fullest life had been lived as the mother of her two boys. Thus Sophy and Bobby touched her very nearly.
"She seems quite worn out all of a sudden, poor child," said she, as she rejoined Amaldi. Without apparently looking at her son, she saw the quick change that came over his face when she said that Sophy seemed worn out. He made the Meccanico sit in the bow, and himself steered the little Fretta all the way to "Le Vigne." He talked very little on the way home, chiefly about the farm and the weather. He was afraid it might be going to rain to-morrow. There were clouds slowly rising behind the Sasso.
"Then you'll have to put off your villa-hunt with Mrs. Chesney," he said. He said this very naturally, pronouncing the name without the least self-consciousness. The Marchesa felt that her task was going to be very difficult indeed. She, too, lapsed into silence, now watching the lovely sky, now glancing at her son's dark, nervous hands as they turned the little wheel slightly from time to time. Passionate hands they were. The Marchesa had been a passionate nature herself. She could feel with Marco as well as for him.
Le Vigne, or the Castello Amaldi, as it was sometimes called, lay on the Lombard shore of the Lake not far from Angera. It had been one of the old hunting lodges of the Amaldi, in more sumptuous days. It was really no more a castle than the Castello di Frino, on the hills above the village of Ghiffa; though it had, what Frino had not, a massive reconnoitring tower at one corner of the quadrangle of buildings that formed a court behind the house itself. It made a delightful summer home, standing close to the lake shore and surrounded by a farm of some two thousand acres. It was of white stucco with thick, ancient walls. A terrace along the front led by long, shallow steps to the lawns and gardens, which reached to the water. Behind, in the buildings enclosing the court, were kitchens, laundry, carpenter shop, stables, et cetera. Big arched ways led from the cortile into the kitchen garden and the open country beyond.
When the Marchesa had come to Le Vigne as a bride forty years ago, she had regretted that it did not lie in the mountainous portion of the Lake. Now she had grown to love this wistful, reedy shore more than any other part of Lago Maggiore.
She stepped out in the big darsena with a sigh of pleasure, and walked across the lawn, stopping to put a spray of white oleander in her belt.
Marco and his mother dined on the terrace, at a little table set with old Lodi ware. There was a bowl of white oleander—the Marchesa's favourite flower—in the centre. Its fragile blossoms gave off a perfume strangely heady and spiritual at the same time—a faint, sweet perfume as of blossomed peach-kernels.
The dusk came on gradually, spangled with stars and fireflies. All the clouds had melted from the sky. It spread above them like an endless expanse of violet smoke, glittering with vari-coloured sparks.