The old servant obediently disappeared.
Bianca Maria took from a little shelf a religious novel of Pauline Craven's, 'Le Mot de l'Énigme,' a pious, consolatory book. But her mind would not be soothed that evening by the French author's gentle words. Sometimes the girl listened intently to find out if her father's friends were going away or if others were coming. There was nothing—not a sound. The great weekly mysterious conspiracy was going on, breathed out from face to face as if it was a frightful piece of witchcraft. This impression grew so on Bianca Maria's mind, that now even the silence frightened her. She tried again two or three times to read the charming book, but her eyes rested on the printed lines without seeing them. The sense of the words she forced herself to read escaped her. Her whole mind was taken up listening to the noises in the drawing-room. Silence still, as if not a living soul was there. She shut the book and called the servant, not feeling able to bear that solitude full of ghosts.
Margherita hastened in, and silently awaited her young mistress's orders.
'Let us say the Rosary,' she whispered.
Sometimes, when the hours seemed longest to the lonely scion of the Cavalcanti, when sleeplessness kept her eyes open, when her fancies got too lugubrious, she loved to pray aloud with her maid to cheat time, hours of watching, nervousness. She dreaded speaking to servants—her natural pride made her avoid it; but praying together seemed to her only a simple act of Christian humility.
'Let us say the Rosary,' she repeated, seating herself by her white bed.
Margherita sat near the door, at a respectful distance. Bianca Maria said the first prayers, the Mystery, and half of the Pater Noster; Margherita said the other part. The same with the Ave Marias: the first part Bianca Maria said; Margherita took it up and finished it. They prayed in a low tone, but one could easily distinguish the voices, always taking up their part of the prayer in time. At every ten Ave Marias, or Stations of the Rosary, they piously crossed themselves, and bent their heads low in reverence to the Holy Ghost at every Gloria Patri.
Thus, between mystical absorption in prayer, the natural emotion these familiar, but poetical supplications aroused, and the sound of her own voice, the girl forgot for a little the great drama developing round her father. The whole Rosary was said thus, slowly, with the piety of real believers. Before beginning the Litany to the Virgin she knelt at her chair, with her elbows on the seat, and the maid knelt in her corner. The girl invoked the Virgin in Latin, with all the tender names her devotees use, and the servant answered 'Ora pro nobis.' But from the beginning of the Litany a rising sound of voices reached from the drawing-room. This noise disturbed Bianca Maria's prayers. She tried not to listen to it by raising her voice more; but it was impossible now to abstract herself from that clash of voices getting excited and angry.
'What can it be?' she said, stopping in her intercessions.