“You are in love?” she gasped. “Never would you have thought of such a thing if you were not in love.”
“Oh, you poor, old preciosa!” Carlota laughed richly, folding her arms around the signora’s ample shoulders. “I wouldn’t know love if I met him face to face this minute in your teacup. But I want to know so much, Maria. I want to ask you about so many things. You love me, do you not? Enough to tell me anything at all I ask you?”
“Ah, do I not,” sighed Maria uneasily. “Is it about Mr. Ward?”
Carlota drew up a low footstool of rose silk and ivory carving, and laid her glossy head close to the one on the pillows.
“I have said I hate him,” she replied composedly. “Let us forget that I ever have to see him again. I want you to listen and love me more than you ever have so you will answer me truthfully. Why did Signor Jacobelli tell Mr. Ward to-day that my grandmother sacrificed her whole womanhood and that he would rather see me dead than have me like her. What was behind the wall of Tittani that I never knew about?”
“He is a pompous old egoist,” Maria answered with amazing composure considering the tumult in her mind. “You remember her? Did she not live like a queen with her court even at her age? She was the most regal person I ever knew. You can remember the life at the villa? Was it somber or full of unhappiness? She was the Contessa Tittani. She had everything she wanted. Some day when you have gained all that she did, we will go back to the old villa, and spend our summers there. Remember your goats, beloved, the little Nini and Cherubini—”
“They will be gone when we get back,” Carlota said slowly. “You have lied to me as you always do, Maria, with love. I will tell you things I remember that you do not know I know. I can remember my mother. She was very white, with eyes like the lower pool in the moonlight, and her hair was so soft and so long. I felt it always over my face in the darkness when she bent to kiss me good-night. I have dreamt I felt it since, and wakened reaching for her. You know Assunta?”
Maria murmured an inarticulate, doubtful injunction to Assunta’s attendant dæmon, and made horns with her finger-tips with a subconscious reversion to the old superstition of the Trentino fireside tales.
“She had a rattling tongue. What has she told you?”
“It was about the wall.” Carlota clasped her hands around her knees, and looked before her seeing the way of the old villa and the beauty of it. “It was so high to me in those days. I have looked up at it, Maria, until it seemed as if its highest terrace met the sky.”