The landlady heard her coming slowly up the stairs and came out of her room to speak to her.
“A gentleman called for you this morning. I told him you were gone out and that you had changed your mind about leaving Florence, and at first he seemed angry, and then he laughed. ‘Tell her we shall meet again,’ he said. Then another came this afternoon in an automobile and asked if you lived here, and when I said you were out he said he would come again this evening. He left his card.”
Olive looked at it with dazed eyes. Her pale face flushed, but as she went on up the stairs the colour ebbed away until even her lips were white. She had to rest twice before she could reach her own landing, and when she had entered her room she could go no farther than the door. She fell, and it was some time before she could get up again, but she still held the card crumpled in her hand.
“Jean Avenel.”
CHAPTER IX
The Villa Fiorelli is set high among the olive groves above the village of Settignano. There are Medicean balls on a shield over the great wrought-iron gates, and the swarthy splendid banker princes appear as the Magi in the faded fresco painting of the Nativity in the chapel. They have knelt there in the straw of the stable of Bethlehem for more than four hundred years. The nobili of Florence were used to loiter long ago on the terrace in the shade of the five cypresses, and women, famous or infamous, but always beautiful, listened to sonnets said and songs sung in their honour in the scented idleness of the rose garden. The villa belonged first to handsome, reckless Giuliano, the lover of Simonetta and others, and the father of a Pope, and when the dagger thrusts of the Pazzi put an end to his short life his elder brother and lord, Lorenzo, held it for a while before he sold it to the Salviati. So it passed through many hands until at last Hilaire Avenel bought it and filled it with the books and armour that he loved. There were Spanish suits, gold-chased, in the hall, Moorish swords and lances, and steel hauberks on the staircase, and stray arquebuses, greaves and gauntlets everywhere. They were all rather dusty, since Hilaire was unmarried; but he was well served nevertheless. He was not a sociable person, and no Florentine had ever partaken of a meal with him, but it was currently reported that he sat through a ten-course dinner every night of his life, crumbling the bread at the side of his plate, and invariably refusing to partake of nine of the dishes that were handed in form by the old butler.
“It’s real mean of your brother to keep his lovely garden shut up all through the spring,” the Marchesa Lorenzoni had said once to Jean, and he had replied, “Well, it is his.”
That seemed final, but the present Marchesa and late relict of Jonas P. Whittaker of Pittsburg was not so easily put off. She was apt to motor up to Settignano more than once in the May month of flowers; the intractable Hilaire was never at home to her, but she revenged herself by multitudinous kind inquiries. He was an invalid, but he disliked to be reminded of his infirmities almost as much as he did most women and all cackle about the weather.