“He thinks I did it,” he muttered. “The fool, not to know me better! Let him beware, if he once goads me to reprisals!”
CHAPTER III
There was a jumble of old streets and buildings in Turin, flourishing out of sight behind the Palazzo Reale—like a scrap of wild thicket overlooked in the reclamation of a waste—which, to the many enamoured of orderliness and respectability, was a scandal, and to the few, having an eye for haphazard picturesqueness, the solitary oasis in a desert of uniformity. This irregular quarter, called “L’Anonimo,” possessed the qualities of its heterodoxy, and was consistent in nothing but its moral unconformableness. It was not so much a rookery as a hive, whence gold-ringed donnaccias flew to gather their honey, and, having collected, came back to store it, against a winter’s day, in their unconventual little cells. It was always very vivid and very busy—a never-ending fair, full of life and frivolity. Its stalls displayed a characteristic opulence of cheap Parisian hosiery and Genoese jewellery. White ankles twinkled for ever in its doorways. Its stones were dinted with the clatter of little gilded heels. It had its own cafés, and its lottery-office, of course, and its Government shops for the sale of salt and tobacco; for even nonconformity had to subscribe to the relentless gabelle. Finally, it had its drones; but they for the most part loafed at home.
It was not so very bad, this quarter, even at its heart, and rippled into less and less expression of itself the further one got from it, like the concentric rings extending from a splash in water. At quite a little distance it began to merge into a compromise with order—became a sort of sedate St John’s Wood—until, down by the Dora, it lapped itself away in an unimpeachable colony of washerwomen.
In the meanwhile, flowing down by many outlets, it threaded none prettier than that which was called the Lane of Chestnuts. And of all the whitewashed maisonnettes in that same fragrant alley, the Signorina Brambello’s was assuredly the whitest and most sweet.
It, this little house, was called the Capanna Sermollino (which means Wild-thyme Cottage), and it looked and smelt up to its name. Its walls were the shrine to a candid heart; its jalousies were of the green of Nature; and its mistress, whose beauty and perfume had come straight out of an English village, was Molly Bramble Bona roba—nothing worse and nothing better.
Poor Molly! once a rustic toast, queen of a single May, and then, alas! stolen—to what? She stood no further from honour now than by the thickness of a screen of convention. Loyalty, faith, honesty—these were all hers unimpaired; you could not look in her eyes and doubt it. Her shame was one man’s possession—near enough to the virtue of wifehood to be forgotten by her, except, perhaps, in the presence of children. Cartouche was to answer for it all.
She was lovely, of course. Her face, like a human face sketched by some amorous Puck, was a little out of drawing—a dear imperfection of prettiness. But the artist had rubbed its cheeks with real conserve of roses, and painted in its eyes with blue succory petals, and scented its rich brown hair with fragrance from the oakwoods. L’Anonimo, even in its purlieus, could hardly have justified a claim to Molly Bramble.
“I never hear your name spoken, Molly mia,” said Cartouche, “but it seems to bring a whiff of blackberries across the footlights.”
She was dressed in a clean lilac-sprigged muslin, with a fichu, soft as “milkmaids,” half-sheathing the white budding of her womanhood. A mob cap sat at grace on her pretty curls. A pity that her atmosphere was all of Spring, which perishes so soon. Molly had no arts to reap love’s winter.