But Donna Teresa was silent. She turned away her head, and did not utter more than a few curt sentences until they all got out at the gate of Villa Madama.
There Maxwell collected his enthusiasms, and forgot his conversation; Wilbraham was taciturn. Not Sylvia’s ignorance, but her incapability of understanding, weighed on him. She might easily have known nothing of Margaret of Austria, even, conceivedly, as little of Charles the Fifth; it was far more depressing to perceive that when an idea of either was presented to her, she could not grasp it, because there was apparently no substance into which it could sink. In the frescoes and delicate plaster mouldings she saw no beauty, but was aware of damp on the walls and the emptiness of the vast rooms, and wondered whether the white owl nailed against the door meant anything. Wilbraham found himself wincing when he heard her little fatuous remarks. Wincing. It had come to this.
Villa Madama, unfinished, a mere beautiful shell, hangs, as every one knows, on the side of a wooded hill, above the Tiber, and facing the mountains, which on that day had put on their loveliest colours, and lay a dream of soft lilac amethyst against a yet softer sky. Here and there a whiter gleam marked Tivoli or the near villages, and stretching to the north couched the Leonessa, sheeted with snow. It was from the square melancholy garden behind the house that they looked at these things. Running down the hill before them were grey olives, dotted with olive presses, and close beneath the low wall stretched a great cistern, in which the frogs were croaking. The Villa, facing the east, is soon left by the sun, and the sadness of the garden becomes accentuated. Tall withered campagna-like weeds have filled it, a great cipollino sarcophagus adds to the inexpressibly deserted impression; even the pretty fountain at the back, where the hill water runs out between moss and ferns, and through a grey elephant’s head, is choked into melancholy. And at the far end, flanking an old garden gate, two immense stone figures, battered, grey, mutilated, but still curiously expressive, stand and look down upon the desolation which belongs to them, and them only, with an air of cynical mockery. Mrs Maxwell turned her back on them.
“I don’t think they’re nice,” she said in her soft determined voice. “Do you?”
Teresa glanced up.
“Why not?” she said. “They’ve a very good time of it there, look on, needn’t interfere, and needn’t feel.”
“That’s what I complain of,” said Mrs Maxwell reflectively. “It puts them in such an unfairly superior position. Here are we, torn by a dozen petty anxieties; I am sure I am, for I don’t in the least know where in Rome to get a decent hat. Now, my dear—just think, what would a hat seem to them?”
Mrs Brodrick laughed. Mrs Maxwell talked on.
“Still, I’m not so sure. I don’t know that I should like never to be in the dance. And if they do get at all interested, existence must be so scrappy. There is Sylvia, pretty, and young, and in love. They’ve seen it all before, a hundred times—isn’t this the place for lovers to come?—but don’t tell me that the poor grey old things wouldn’t be curious to know how it’s going on. And it must be so seldom that they get their sequels. No,” she waved her hand to them, Roman fashion, shaking it rapidly, palm downwards—“no, I’m not going to swallow your superior airs. You’re dying of jealousy, you’d like to know about my hat, and Sylvia’s wedding. And you’re not one bit superior. You’re just like other men, pretending to be cynical, because you can’t get what you want, and I see through you. There!” Two minutes later she had hold of Teresa’s wrist and was strolling along a weedy path. “I want to speak to you,” she said.
“What about?” demanded the marchesa quickly.