Then there was a little pause. The conversation between the father and daughter was apt to run in broken periods. He very seldom originated anything. When she found a subject upon which she could interest him, he would reply, to a certain limit, and then the talk would drop. He was himself a very silent man, requiring no outlet of conversation; and when he refused to be interested, it was a task too hard for Frances to lead him into speech. She on her side was full of a thousand unsatisfied curiosities, which for the most part were buried in her own bosom. In the meantime Domenico made the circle of the table with the new dish, and his step and a question or two from his master were all the remarks that accompanied the meal. Mr Waring was something of a gourmet, but at the same time he was very temperate—a conjunction which is favourable to fine eating. His table was delicately furnished with dishes almost infinitesimal in quantity, but superlative in quality; and he ate his dainty light repast with gravity and slowly, as a man performs what he feels to be one of the most important functions of his life.
“Tell Mariuccia that a few drops from a fresh lemon would have improved this ragoût—but a very fresh lemon.”
“Yes, Excellency, freschissimo,” said Domenico, with solemnity.
In the household generally, nothing was so important as the second breakfast, except, indeed, the dinner, which was the climax of the day. The gravity of all concerned, the little solemn movement round the white-covered table in the still soft shade of the atmosphere, with those green persiani shutting out all the sunshine, and the brown old walls, bare of any decoration, throwing up the group, made a curious picture. The walls were quite bare, the floor brown and polished, with only a square of carpet round the table; but the roof and cornices were gilt and painted with tarnished gilding and half-obliterated pictures. Opposite to Frances was a blurred figure of a cherub with a finger on his lip. She looked up at this faint image as she had done a hundred times, and was silent. He seemed to command the group, hovering over it like a little tutelary god.
CHAPTER II.
The Warings had been settled at Bordighera almost as long as Frances could remember. She had known no other way of living than that which could be carried on under the painted roofs in the Palazzo, nor any other domestic management than that of Domenico and Mariuccia. She herself had been brought up by the latter, who had taught her to knit stockings and to make lace of a coarse kind, and also how to spare and save, and watch every detail of the spese—the weekly or daily accounts—with an anxious eye. Beyond this, Frances had received very little education: her father had taught her fitfully to read and write after a sort; and he had taught her to draw, for which she had a little faculty—that is to say, she had made little sketches of all the points of view round about, which, if they were not very great in art, amused her, and made her feel that there was something she could do. Indeed, so far as doing went, she had a good deal of knowledge. She could mend very neatly—so neatly, that her darn or her patch was almost an ornament. She was indeed neat in everything, by instinct, without being taught. The consequence was, that her life was very full of occupation, and her time never hung heavy on her hands. At eighteen, indeed, it may be doubted whether time ever does hang heavy on a girl’s hands. It is when ten years or so of additional life have passed over her head, bringing her no more important occupations than those which are pleasant and appropriate to early youth, that she begins to feel her disabilities; but fortunately, that is a period of existence with which at the present moment we have nothing to do.
Her father, who was not fifty yet, had been a young man when he came to this strange seclusion. Why he should have chosen Bordighera, no one had taken the trouble to inquire. He came when it was a little town on the spur of the hill, without either hotels or tourists, or at least very few of these articles—like many other little towns which are perched on little platforms among the olive woods all over that lovely country. The place had commended itself to him because it was so completely out of the way. And then it was very cheap, simple, and primitive. He was not, however, by any means a primitive-minded man; and when he took Domenico and Mariuccia into his service, it was for a year or two an interest in his life to train them to everything that was the reverse of their own natural primitive ways. Mariuccia had a little native instinct for cookery such as is not unusual among the Latin races, and which her master trained into all the sophistications of a cordon bleu. And Domenico had that lively desire to serve his padrone “hand and foot,” as English servants say, and do everything for him, which comes natural to an amiable Italian eager to please. Both of them had been encouraged and trained to carry out these inclinations. Mr Waring was difficult to please. He wanted attendance continually. He would not tolerate a speck of dust anywhere, or any carelessness of service; but otherwise he was not a bad master. He left them many independences, which suited them, and never objected to that appropriation to themselves of his house as theirs, and assertion of themselves as an important part of the family, which is the natural result of a long service. Frances grew up accordingly in franker intimacy with the honest couple than is usual in English households. There was nothing they would not have done for the Signorina—starve for her, scrape and pinch for her, die for her if need had been; and in the meantime, while there was no need for service more heroic, correct her, and improve her mind, and set her faults before her with simplicity. Her faults were small, it is true, but zealous Love did not omit to find many out.
Mr Waring painted a little, and was disposed to call himself an artist; and he read a great deal, or was supposed to do so, in the library, which formed one of the set of rooms, among the old books in vellum, which took a great deal of reading. A little old public library existing in another little town farther up among the hills, gave him an excuse, if it was not anything more, for a great deal of what he called work. There were some manuscripts and a number of old editions laid up in this curious little hermitage of learning, from which the few people who knew him believed he was going some day to compile or collect something of importance. The people who knew him were very few. An old clergyman, who had been a colonial chaplain all his life, and now “took the service” in the bare little room which served as an English church, was the chief of his acquaintances. This gentleman had an old wife and a middle-aged daughter, who furnished something like society for Frances. Another associate was an old Indian officer, much battered by wounds, liver, and disappointment, who, systematically neglected by the authorities (as he thought), and finding himself a nobody in the home to which he had looked forward for so many years, had retired in disgust, and built himself a little house, surrounded with palms, which reminded him of India, and full in the rays of the sun, which kept off his neuralgia. He, too, had a wife, whose constant correspondence with her numerous children occupied her mind and thoughts, and who liked Frances because she never tired of hearing stories of those absent sons and daughters. They saw a good deal of each other, these three resident families, and reminded each other from time to time that there was such a thing as society.
In summer they disappeared—sometimes to places higher up among the hills, sometimes to Switzerland or the Tyrol, sometimes “home.” They all said home, though neither the Durants nor the Gaunts knew much of England, and though they could never say enough in disparagement of its grey skies and cold winds. But the Warings never went “home.” Frances, who was entirely without knowledge or associations with her native country, used the word from time to time because she heard Tasie Durant or Mrs Gaunt do so; but her father never spoke of England, nor of any possible return, nor of any district in England as that to which he belonged. It escaped him at times that he had seen something of society a dozen or fifteen years before this date; but otherwise, nothing was known about his past life. It was not a thing that was much discussed, for the intercourse in which he lived with his neighbours was not intimate, nor was there any particular reason why he should enter upon his own history; but now and then it would be remarked by one or another that nobody knew anything of his antecedents. “What’s your county, Waring?” General Gaunt had once asked; and the other had answered with a languid smile, “I have no county,” without the least attempt to explain. The old general, in spite of himself, had apologised, he did not know why; but still no information was given. And Waring did not look like a man who had no county. His thin long figure had an aristocratic air. He knew about horses, and dogs, and country-gentleman sort of subjects. It was impossible that he should turn out to be a shopkeeper’s son, or a bourgeois of any kind. However, as has been said, the English residents did not give themselves much trouble about the matter. There was not enough of them to get up a little parochial society, like that which flourishes in so many English colonies, gossiping with the best, and forging anew for themselves those chains of a small community which everybody pretends to hate.
In the afternoon of the day on which the encounter recorded in the previous chapter had taken place, Frances sat in the loggia alone at her work. She was busy with her drawing—a very elaborate study of palm-trees, which she was making from a cluster of those trees which were visible from where she sat. A loggia is something more than a balcony; it is like a room with the outer wall or walls taken away. This one was as large as the big salone out of which it opened, and had therefore room for changes of position as the sun changed. Though it faced the west, there was always a shady corner at one end or the other. It was the favourite place in which Frances carried on all her occupations—where her father came to watch the sunset—where she had tea, with that instinct of English habit and tradition which she possessed without knowing how. Mr Waring did not much care for her tea, except now and then in a fitful way; and Mariuccia thought it medicine. But it pleased Frances to have the little table set out with two or three old china cups which did not match, and a small silver teapot, which was one of the very few articles of value in the house. Very rarely, not once in a month, had she any occasion for these cups; but yet, such a chance did occur at long intervals; and in the meantime, with a pleasure not much less infantine, but much more wistful than that with which she had played at having a tea-party seven or eight years before, she set out her little table now.