So Violante went to the old woman, whose grief at parting was, perhaps, really the most pathetic part of this break-up of home, and bid her keep the bowl “for her sake.”
“Ecco, carissima,” said Maddalena, “I have had a dream, and the dream-book tells me that it means a meeting and a joy, and thou shalt meet thy true-love, or another better, and then shall I give thee back the china bowl.”
Violante was not without some lingering belief herself in the dreams and visions which Maddalena had impressed on her all her life. So it helped her a little way on her new start in life when, the last night she slept on Italian soil, she dreamt that she gave Hugh an olive-branch and that he put it into the china bowl.
She needed every little help when she sobbed and wept at parting with her father, and begged him to forgive her all she had not done.
“Ah, child, you were no good,” he said. “But do not cry; be happy, since you will not be great.”
Signor Mattei turned away, when he was left to his solitude, with a certain sense of freedom. He laid his plans for going to Florence, and thought of the dream of his youth—an opera that he had never written, but which now, perhaps, might find its way from his brain to his fingers. But he could not lay his hand on the particular piece of music that he wanted, all the store of violin-strings were mislaid, his salad was made with bad oil, and he was so much at a loss for some one to find fault with that he rushed off to find old Maddalena in her new situation and accuse her of packing up his fiddle-strings in his daughters’ box. And Maddalena, having a sore heart of her own, reproached him so unreasonably with having driven her dear young ladies out of the country that she quite restored his self-complacency; and, having refreshed her spirits by this outbreak, she went back and found the violin-strings, and hinted that when il signor was settled at Florence he had better send for her to come and keep house for him.