“No, signora,” said the waiter, and he bowed and went back into the old palazzo.
“I wanted to go to a cheap hotel,” said Maude, dreamily, and with a happy smile upon her face—somewhat inane, it is true, for it was the young married lady’s smile—“but he said his cara bella sposa must have everything of the best. Oh, my darling! my darling! how he loves me. Poor? What is poverty? I grow more proud of him every day. What do we want with society? Ah, how I hate it. Give me poverty and love. Oh, come back, my darling, come back. That’s what my heart keeps beating whenever he is away.”
It was certainly a very pleasant kind of poverty, in a sunny land with a delicious view of the bay, and a good table-d’hôte; and a loving husband; and as Maude, the young wife, dreamed and adored her husband in his absence, she smiled and showed her white teeth till a sound of voices made her start and listen.
“Oh, how I do tremble every time any one fresh comes to the hotel. I always fancy it is Sir Grantley Wilters come to fetch me back. But he dare not try to claim me now, for I am another’s. But what are we to do when the money is all gone?”
She thought dreamily, but in a most untroubled fashion.
“I can sing,” she said at last, “so can he, and he plays admirably. Ah, well, there’s time enough to think of that when the money is all gone. Let me be happy now after all that weary misery, but I must write home. There, I’ll go and do it now before he returns.—Oh!”
She had risen to go, but sank back trembling and half-fainting in her seat as a pallid, weary-looking, washed-out elderly gentleman tottered out of the house into the piazza, and dropped into a chair just in front of the door.
“Oh, dear! oh, dear!” he sighed, as he let his walking-stick fall clattering down. “How tired out I do feel.”
“Oh!” sighed Maude, as she saw that her only means of exit was barred.
“I with—I wish—damme, I wish I was back at home with my legs under my own table, and—and—and a good glass of port before me. Hang that Robbins, a confounded scoundrel; I—I—I know I shall finish by breaking his head. Four days before I left England I asked him to put one single bottle of the ’20 port in my dressing-room with the cork drawn, and he threw her ladyship at my head, and, damme, I didn’t get a drop. And my own port—a whole bin of it—my own port—my own port. Hah! how comfortable a chair is when you’re tired. He was a good fellow who first invented chairs.”