The marchesa is far too much absorbed to notice this. Silvestro, standing near the door—the high desk and the marchesa's tall figure between him and the hearth—does not perceive it either. Still the marchesa bends over her papers, reading some and throwing others over her shoulders into the flames behind.
Silvestro, who had grown hot and cold twenty times in a minute, standing before her, his book under his arm—thinking she had forgotten him—addresses her at last.
"How does madama feel?" Silvestro asks most humbly, turning his lack-lustre eyes upon her, "Well," is the marchesa's brief reply. She signs to him to lay his book upon her desk. She takes it in her hand. She turns over the pages, following line after line with the tip of her long, white forefinger.
"There seems very little, Silvestro," she says, running her eyes up and down each page as she turns it slowly over. Her brow knits until her dark eyebrows almost meet—"very little. Has the corn brought in so small a sum, and the olives, and the grapes?"
"Madama," begins Silvestro, and he bends his head and shoulders, and squeezes his skinny hands together, in a desperate effort to obliterate himself altogether, if possible, in the face of such mishaps—"madama will condescend to remember the late spring frosts. There is no corn anywhere. Upon the lowlands the frost was most severe; in April, too, when the grain was forward. The olives bore a little last season, but Corellia is a cold place—too cold for olives; the trees, too, are very old. This year there will be no crop at all. As for the grapes—"
"Accidente to the grapes!" interrupts the marchesa, reddening. "The grapes always fail. Every thing fails under you."
Silvestro shrinks back in terror at the sound of her harsh voice. Oh, that those purple mountains around would cover him! The moment of her wrath is come. What will she say to him?
"I wish I had not an acre of vineyard," the marchesa continues. "Disease, or hail, or drought, or rain, it is always the same—the grapes always fail."
"The peasants are starving, madama," Silvestro takes courage to say, but his voice is low and muffled.
"They have chestnuts," she answers quickly, "let them live on chestnuts."