Shaking the drops of water from her fingers, she rose and stood a moment looking down the green alley she had come by toward the sunny blaze of terrace at the end. She closed her eyes and pictured it as it had looked on her birthday night, a fairy scene, with the tiny bulbs of coloured light glowing among the branches. She pictured Sybert’s face as he had stood beside her. It seemed almost as if the moment would come back again, if she only thought about it hard enough. And then the remembrance of that other moment followed, and the expression on Sybert’s face as he had turned away. What did he think? she asked herself for the hundredth time; and she turned her back upon the fountain and hurried down the laurel walk as if to shut the memory out.
The wheat field to-day was ablaze with flaming poppies. The reds and yellows were so crude that no artist would have dared to paint them in their untoned brilliancy. Marcia paused to study the effect. Her eyes wandered from this daring foreground across scarcely less brilliant olive groves and vineyards to Castel Vivalanti on its mountain-top, an irregular mass of yellow ochre against a sky of cobalt blue. There was no attempt at shading. The colours were as unaffectedly primary as an illumination from some old manuscript, or as the outlines a child fills in from his tin box of half a dozen little cakes of paint. This Italy was so uncompromising in her moods. No variant note was allowed to creep in to mar the effect she was striving for. Marcia recalled the sudden storm of the mountain, how fiercely untamed, how intense it had been; she thought of the moonlight nights of the spring, when the mood was lyrical—the soft outline of tower and rain, the songs of nightingales, the heavy odours of acacia and magnolia blossoms. Italy was an impressionist, and her children were like her. There were no half-tones in the Italian nature any more than in the Italian landscape. There were many varying moods, but each in itself was concentrated. Just now there were storms, perhaps, but before long there would be moonlight and singing and love-making again, and the clouds would be forgotten.
She strolled on to the ruins of the old villa and sat down among the crumbling arches. She was in a very different mood herself than on that other afternoon of the early spring when Paul Dessart had found her there. She thought of the little sketch he had painted, and recalled her own words as he gave it to her: ‘I will keep it to remember you and the villa by when I go home to America.’ The words had been spoken lightly, but now they sounded prophetic. Everything had seemed before her then; now all seemed behind. A few months more and she would be back in America, with possibly nothing more than the sketch to remember her life in Italy by—and it had meant so much to her; now that it was slipping away, she realized how much. She seemed to have grown more, to have felt more, than in all her life before; and she hated inexpressibly to leave it behind.
Crossing to the little grotto that had formed the subject of the picture, she stood gazing pensively at the dilapidated moss-grown pile of stones. The afternoon when Paul had sketched it seemed years before; in reality it was not two months. She thought of him as he had looked that day—so enthusiastic and young and debonair—and she thought of him without a tremor. Many things had changed since then, and she had changed with them. If only Eleanor’s suspicion might be true, that he would come to care for Margaret! She clung to the suggestion. Eleanor’s ‘superstition’ need trouble her no more; Paul would not need to be avenged.
She turned aside, and as she did so something caught her eyes. She leaned over to look, and then started back with an exclamation of alarm. A man was lying asleep, almost at her feet, hidden by the tall weeds that choked the entrance to the grotto. The first involuntary thought that flashed to her mind was of Gervasio’s stepfather, but immediately she knew that he was not the sleeper. Gervasio’s stepfather was old, with a grizzled beard; it was evident that this man was young, in spite of the fact that his hat was pulled across his eyes. She laughed at her own fear; it was some peasant who had come from the fields to rest in the shade.
She leaned over to look again, and as she did so her heart suddenly leaped into her mouth. The man’s shirt was open at the throat, and there was a dark-purple crucifix tattooed upside down upon his breast. For a second she stood staring, powerless to move; the next, she was running wildly across the blazing wheat field toward the shelter of the villa, with a frightened glance behind at the shadow of the cypresses.
CHAPTER XXIII
Marcia passed the afternoon in a state of nervous impatience for her uncle’s return. She said nothing to Mrs. Copley of the man she had found asleep in the grotto, and the effort to preserve an outward serenity added no little to her inner trepidation. In vain she tried to reason with her fear; it was not a subject which responded to logic. She assured herself over and over again that the man could not be the same Neapolitan who had warned her uncle; that he was safely in prison; and that the tattooed crucifix was only the general mark of a secret society. The assurance did not carry conviction. Her first startled impression had been too deep to be thrown off lightly, and coming just then, in the midst of the rioting and lawlessness, the incident carried additional force. She had lately heard many stories of lonely villas being broken into, of travellers on the Campagna being waylaid and robbed, of the vindictiveness of the Camorra, which her uncle had opposed. The stories were not reassuring; and though she resolutely put them out of her mind, she found herself thinking of them again and again. Italy’s elaborate police system, she knew, was not merely for show.
Mr. Copley and the Melvilles were due at five, but as they had not appeared by half-past, Mrs. Copley decided that they had missed their train, and she and Marcia sat down to tea—or, more accurately, to iced lemonade—without waiting. The table was set under the shade of the ilex trees where the grove met the upper end of the terrace, and where any slight breeze that chanced to be stirring would find them out. Gerald and Gervasio swallowed their allotted glassful and two brioches with dispatch, and withdrew to the cool shadows of the ilex grove to play at horse with poor, patient Bianca and the streaming ribbons of her cap. Mrs. Copley and Marcia took the repast in more leisurely fashion, with snatches of very intermittent conversation. Marcia’s eyes wandered in the pauses to the poppy-sprinkled wheat field and the cypresses beyond.
‘I believe they are coming, after all!’ Mrs. Copley finally exclaimed, as she shaded her eyes with her hands and looked down across the open stretch of vineyards to where the Roman road, a yellow ribbon of dust, divided the fields. ‘Yes, that is the carriage!’