It was at this time that Maria had come nearest to her confidence. Word came from England to them that Tennant had been stricken blind, and in the midst of a gala performance of “Traviata,” La Paoli had left all and gone to him. He had refused to see her when she reached London. Bertrand Wallace, his closest friend, had told her simply enough that he was without means, that he longed to go to Italy where “he might feel the sun on his face,” and she had entered into the splendid conspiracy that glorified the end of her life.
The Villa Tittani faced the Campagna with a lofty, blank wall. Beyond it stretched terraced gardens, winding alleys of cypress and ilexes, a place of enchantment, with the never-ending music of falling waters in the distance, of hidden fountains in grottoes, and cascades that fell over ancient steps in ripples of silver. Yet all its beauty was dominated by its wall, blank on one side, terraced on the garden side into long, steep depths of mystery, of infinite green vistas that lost their way in the cypress gloom of the lower distances.
Here Wallace brought his friend, the blind poet, to the little house near the end of the wall where the view opened seaward. Two old servants of the Tittani had cared for him until his passing, and here La Paoli could come and watch him from a distance, unseen or suspected in the largesse of her love by the man whose faith she had betrayed for fame. It was characteristic of her that even in her grief and isolation from him, she seemed to find a supreme, almost fierce, satisfaction in the tragic immolation of her own happiness for his sake. He had died finally, unconscious, on her breast, and she had never sung again.
“You see, Maria, I have proved the truth of it in my own heart’s blood,” she had said, “A woman cannot serve two gods. If Bianca has my voice, help me to teach her this: no man is content with half of a woman’s love or nature. If she desires to attain to the highest art, she must sacrifice love.”
Within six months after she had left the shelter of the convent Bianca had married Peppino Trelango, son of a dead patriot. The Contessa had cared for him through his boyhood, because she had heard him playing on his violin once on the old quay at Pontecova where centuries before the body of the boy count, Giovanni Borgia, had borne witness against his brother in the dawn. When Bianca came home, she had met him in the old gardens, a boy of nineteen, like one of the marble fauns come to life to teach her youth’s heritage. When the Contessa returned from a trip to her favorite midsummer retreat at Isola Bella, she had found the two gone, and Maria desolate with despair.
It was from this romance that Carlota had been born. After the death of Peppino in an Algerian skirmish, Bianca had returned to the villa behind the old rose-colored wall with her child. She had lived in the gardens with the memories of her love, a silent, smiling, stately girl who baffled the vivid, emotional La Paoli by the elusive sensitiveness of her nature.
“She is the wraith of my passion for the love I denied,” the Contessa would declare. “I starved for him, and trampled the desire with my pride while I bore her to Tittani. She is the very spirit of renunciation, Maria, and she will drive me to madness with her silence and resignation. Carlota is not like her. She is a flame, a beautiful rosebud, all light and movement. She is like I was, God keep her.”
Carlota was four when they bore her mother down to the old tomb of the Tittani. She could remember her voice at night when she bent over her to kiss her, and the fall of her long, soft hair over her face. Sometimes in their walks through the gardens, in the quiet years of her girlhood, she would come to the old tomb set into the hillside, its iron gates overgrown with vines, and she would lean her cheek against them. Assunta, her nurse, would scold her for not keeping her thoughts on the spiritual.
“Ah, a little that was my mother lies here,” Carlota would answer. “I may love it, Assunta, without sinning, may I not, just her beautiful hair even?”
After Italy entered the war, the villa had been turned into a hospital, and the fortune of the Contessa laid at the feet of “La Patria.”