"I have made up my mind," Claude repeated, in a dull, dead voice, the voice of an obstinate man. "Good night."
CHAPTER XVIII
The six weeks' captivity on the hill in Sussex had been a success, and Vera was able to leave England before the first November fog descended upon Portland Place. She was in Rome, in the city where she had spent the happiest period of her life—the time in which she had first known what it meant for a woman to be adored, and lovely, and immeasurably rich. There she had first known the power of wealth and the influence of beauty; for her husband's position and her own attractions had assured her an immediate social success, and had made her a star in Roman society during her first season, while, over and above all other graces, she had the charm of novelty. But it was not the memory of social triumphs or of gratified vanity that was with her as she sat alone in the too spacious saloon, or roamed with languid step through other rooms as spacious and as lonely.
Sympathy had flowed in upon her from all her Roman acquaintances, and acquaintances of divers nationalities, the birds of passage, American, French, Spanish, German. Cards and little notes had descended upon the villa like a summer hailstorm; and she had responded with civility, but with no uncertain tone. Her mourning was to be a long mourning; and her seclusion was to be absolute. She had come to live a solitary life in her villa and gardens, to wander among ruins and steep herself in the poetry of the city. She had come not to the Rome of the present, but to the Rome of the past. This was how she explained her life to the officious people who wanted to force distractions upon her; and who in secret were already hatching matrimonial schemes by which the Provana millions might be made to infuse new life into princely races that were perishing in financial atrophy.
The Villa Provana was on high ground, beyond the Porta del Popolo, and the view from the gardens commanded the roofs and towers and cupolas of the city, and the dominating mass of the great basilica, which dwarfs all other monuments, and reduces papal Rome, with its heterogeneous roofs and turrets, steeples and obelisks, to a mere foreground for that one stupendous dome.
Day after day, in those short winter afternoons, Vera stood on the terrace in front of the villa, leaning languidly against the marble balustrade, and watching the evening mists rising slowly over the city, and the grey of the great dome gradually deepening to purple, while the golden light in the west grew more intense, and orange changed to crimson.
She was never tired of gazing at that incomparable prospect. How often in her honeymoon year she had stood there, with Mario Provana at her side, questioning him with a childish delight, and making him point out and explain every tower and every cupola, the classic, the papal, the old and the new; churches, palaces, public buildings, municipal and royal, picture-galleries, museums, fountains! It was there, as an idolised young wife, with her husband's strong arm supporting her, as she leant against him, in the pleasant fatigue after a day of pleasure, that she had learnt to know Rome, and that she had discovered how dearly the hard man of business loved the city of his birth. It was there he had told her what Victor Emanuel and Cavour—the soldier and the statesman—had done for Italy; and how that which had been but a geographical expression, a patchwork of petty states—for the most part under foreign rulers—had become the name of a great nation in the van of progress.
She thought of him now, evening after evening, in the unbroken silence and solitude of the long terrace on the crown of the hill, and only a little lower than the terrace on the Pincio. She looked backward across the arid desert of her five years of society under Disbrowe influences, five years of life that seemed worthless and joyless compared with that year of a happiness she had almost forgotten, till her husband's death carried all her thoughts back to the past: to the time when she had given him love for love; to the days that she could think of without remorse.
"Oh, God, if I had died at the end of that year, what a happy life mine would have been!"