Madame Variani made a gesture of dissent. Her heavy, handsome face was turned upon him rather sleepily, as though the heat oppressed her. But her slight frown betrayed, to anyone who knew her, alert attention.
'We can, I say!' cried the Count, striking his knee. 'Besides, the battle is not ranged as Manisty sees it. There are priests, and priests. Up in my part of the world the older priests are all right. We landowners who go with the monarchy can get on with them perfectly. Our old Bishop is a dear: but it is the young priests, fresh from the seminaries—I grant you, they're a nuisance! They swarm over us like locusts, ready for any bit of mischief against the Government. But the Government will win!—Italy will win! Manisty first of all takes the thing too tragically. He doesn't see the farce in it. We do. We Italians understand each other. Why, the Vatican raves and scolds—and all the while, as the Prefect of Police told me only the other day, there is a whole code of signals ready between the police headquarters and a certain window of the Vatican; so that directly they want help against the populace they can call us in. And after that function the other day—where I saw you, Mademoiselle'—he bowed to Lucy—'one of the first things the Vatican did was to send their thanks to the Government for having protected and policed them so well. No; Manisty is in the clouds.' He laughed good-humouredly. 'We are half acting all the time. The Clericals must have their politics, like other people—only they call it religion.'
'But your poor starved peasants—and your corruption—and your war?' said
Lucy.
She spoke with energy, frowning a little as though something had nettled her. 'She is like a beautiful nun,' thought the young man, looking with admiration at the austere yet charming face.
'Oh! we shall pull through,' he said, coolly. 'The war was an abomination—a misery. But we shall learn from it. It will no more ruin us than a winter storm can ruin the seed in the ground. Manisty is like all the other clever foreigners who write dirges about us—they don't feel the life-blood pulsing through the veins as we landowners do.' He flung out his clasped hand in a dramatic gesture. 'Come and live with us for a summer on one of our big farms near Mantua—and you shall see. My land brings me just double what it brought my father!—and our contadini are twice as well off. There! that's in our starving Italy—in the north of course, mind you!'
He threw himself back, smoking furiously.
'Optimist!' said a woman's voice.
They looked round to see the Marchesa Fazzoleni upon them. She stood smiling, cigarette in hand, a tall woman, still young—though she was the mother of five robust children. Her closely-fitting black dress somehow resembled a riding-habit; her grey gauntletted gloves drawn to the elbow, her Amazon's hat with its plume, the alertness and grace of the whole attitude, the brilliancy of her clear black eye—all these carried with them the same suggestions of open-air life, of health of body and mind—of a joyous, noble, and powerful personality.
'Look well at her,' the Ambassador had said to Lucy as they stepped into the garden after luncheon. 'She is one of the mothers of the new Italy. She is doing things here—things for the future—that in England it would take twenty women to do. She has all the practical sense of the north; and all the subtlety of the south. She is one of the people who make me feel that Italy and England have somehow mysterious affinities that will work themselves out in history. It seems to me that I could understand all her thoughts—and she mine—if it were worth her while. She is a modern of the moderns; and yet there is in her some of the oldest stuff in the world. She belongs, it is true, to a nation in the making—but that nation, in its earlier forms, has already carried the whole weight of European history!'
And Lucy, looking up to the warm, kind face, felt vaguely comforted and calmed by its mere presence. She made room for the Marchesa beside her.