CHAPTER VII
Olive sat in her little bedroom correcting exercises.
It was the drowsy middle of the afternoon and the heat was intense. All the grey-green and golden land of Tuscany lay still and helpless at the mercy of the sun. The birds had long ceased singing, and only the thin shrilling of the locusts broke the August silence. The parched earth was pale, and great cracks that only the autumn rains could fill had opened on the hillsides, but the ripening maize lay snug within its narrow sheaths of green, and the leaves of the vines hid great bunches of purpling grapes. In the fields men rested awhile from their labours, and the patient white oxen stood in the shade of the mulberries, while the sunburnt lads who drove them bathed their tired bodies in the stream, or lay idly in the lush grass at the water’s edge.
In the town the walls of houses that had fronted the morning sun were scorching to the touch, and there was no coolness even in the steep northward streets that were always in shadow, or in the grey stone-paved courts of the palaces. There were few people about at this hour, and the little stream of traffic had run dry in the Via Cavour. A vendor of melons drew his barrow close up to the battered old column in the Piazza Tolomei, and squatted down on the ground beside it. “Cocomeri! Fresc’ e buoni!” he cried once or twice, and then rolled over and went to sleep. A peasant girl carrying a basket of eggs passed presently, and she looked wistfully at the fruit, but she did not disturb his slumbers.
“Is that the aunt of your friend’s mother? No, it is the sister of my niece’s governess.” Olive laid down her pen. She was only partially dressed and her hair hung loosely about her bare white shoulders. The heat made hairpins seem a burden and outer garments superfluous. “My niece’s governess is the last. Thank Heaven for that!” she said, and she sat down on the brick floor to take off her stockings. Gemma’s fidanzato, her lawyer from Lucca, was coming to Siena for a week. He would lodge next door and come in to the Menotti for most of his meals, and already poor old Carolina was busy in the hot, airless kitchen, beating up eggs for a zabajone, and Signora Carosi had gone out to buy ice for the wine and sweet cakes to be handed round with little glasses of vin Santo or Marsala.
Carmela came into her cousin’s room soon after four o’clock. “I have just taken Gemma a cup of black coffee. Her head aches terribly.”
“I heard her moving about her room in the night,” Olive answered, and she added, under her breath, “Poor Gemma!”
Carmela lowered her voice too. “Of course Maria and I know that you see what is going on as well as we do. There is some man ... she lets down a basket from her window at nights for letters, and I believe she meets him when my aunt thinks she has gone to Mass. It is dreadful. How glad we shall be when she is safely married and away.”