“It is always a bad year,” said Pandolfini, ruefully. “I never knew it otherwise since I was a boy.”
“Praised be God, yet we live! we are not, after all, at the mercy of the olives,” said the old man, cleverly shifting his ground; then he added, in more insinuating yet judicial tones, “If, instead of making calculations on the tombola, as I see you have been doing, whether numbers or colours I know not, the padrone would make himself beautiful and marry one of those rich English ladies, who have more money than they know what to do with——”
“Fie, Tonino! is it better to be at the mercy of a lady, than of the olives?”
“That is quite different. They are only women at the best, however rich they may be; and a man is no man who cannot manage a woman; but the Providence of heaven which is inscrutable, which will send a frost when it is sunshine that is wanted, and torrents when one has but asked for showers, that is what no man can manage. The padrone may be sure that I give him good advice.”
“And why not?” said Pandolfini, with that smile which is confusion to all givers of advice. “Why not?” Was that an answer to make, as if it were some bagatelle? Antonio began to sweep energetically, careless of his master’s coffee; and Pandolfini sallied out into the fresh morning. He was not a man so objectless as not to know what to do with himself when he happened to be earlier than usual. But to-day, what was there to do? He crossed the streets, and went and looked over the low wall at Arno sweeping on below. There had been rain, and the stream was very full. The hurry and sweep of the yellow water seemed to carry his soul with it as it flowed and flowed. But it carried everything with indifference, not to be diverted from its flowing!—all kinds of waifs and strays, and even a common boat which had got loose, and was blundering heavily down-stream, like the blind thing it was, bumping here and there, carried along with a sort of labouring, piteous appeal for guidance. Pandolfini watched it with a kind of half amusement, half sympathy. It caught at last in a muddy corner under the first arch of the bridge, the only gloomy and dirty spot, so far as could be seen, in all the hurrying stream. Was this what Antonio called inscrutable Providence?—that strange, impersonal, half-heathen deity, to whose operations all Christendom attributes every evil with a sort of pious resentment?
When the boat was thus arrested in its course, Pandolfini roused himself from his fascination. He went into the little Church of the Spina, close to the river, and heard a Mass, though it was not his custom; and then he sallied forth again, and performed a multitude of little duties which he had neglected—a curious jumble. He paid a few little debts; he went and looked at some pictures which he had long forgotten; he paid a few visits—to an old canonico in the cathedral, who had taught him when he was a boy, to an old servant, to a friend whom he had almost lost sight of—such visits as might be made any morning. It seemed to him afterwards that everything he had done was like the half-conscious act of a man taking leave of his old life. When the thought occurred to him it did not make him melancholy. It is only sad to take leave of a phase of life which is ending, when that to which you look forward is less happy. When it is the other way, is there not a secret exultation, a concealed happiness, even in the farewell?
It was too early yet to go to Hunstanton, to inquire into his success. Englishmen are not so early as Italians, and Pandolfini remembered with a smile all the ceremonies that his friend had to get through before commencing any enterprise out of doors. First his breakfast—a meal unknown to the abstemious Tuscan, whose coffee was swallowed in two minutes; then the letters and newspapers which the post brought him; then his “business” in his study apart from the vulgar eye, a formula Mr. Hunstanton went through religiously, as if he had his estate to manage on the second floor of the Palazzo dei Sogni. All these had to be gone through—and who could tell how many more? He gazed at the great house from the other side of the river before there was any sign of waking save in the rooms under the roof, where the tenants were out upon the loggias, and busy with their morning occupations like the rest of their countryfolk, long before the drowsy English had opened an eyelid.
Then the persianis began to open one by one, and the mist of dreams cleared off. On the first floor the persianis had not been closed at all. How he knew Diana in that! how she loved the air, the morning sunshine, not yet too hot for pleasure, the soft gay shining of the morning, even the sounds beneath which more fastidious forestieri objected to! Nor hers the ear that was ready to be offended by lively voices of common life, by the morning noises and cries of humble traffic. Pandolfini’s heart swelled, and a soft moisture of exquisite feeling came to his eyes. Though she was of the family of the Dreams, as he had said, no artificial gloom of drawn curtains, of hushed movement, was natural to Diana; the early sunshine, the morning bells, the herb-gatherers’ cry in the streets, were no disturbance to her. The sweet homely stir of living was the best call for her. He felt that it was in her to rise lightly as the lark to all the duties of that blessed common living, were they necessary; and the more homely they were, the more noble would Diana appear in them. So he thought, looking across from the other side of Arno with that exquisite moisture in his eyes, in that glory of the morning. As a matter of fact, the first English head that appeared at the windows of the Palazzo dei Sogni was Mrs. Norton’s, who pushed the persianis open with her own hand to air the rooms, and looked out like a little brown hen-bird, the grandmother, if there could be such an official, of the nest. She called to Sophy to make haste, to get ready, while she made the tea, and to come and look at the market-people coming in from the country—or rather going away again, as they were by this time; and then Sophy looked out with all her curls. But the watcher did not so much as notice these two, and Diana’s balcony remained vacant. Notwithstanding all these beautiful thoughts about her, and notwithstanding that these thoughts were all true, Diana, as a matter of fact, was not, at this period of her life, an early riser, as has been already said.
Poor Pandolfini! He knew no more than the least interested passer-by the disastrous business his English friend was doing for him a little later on—nor how his fate was getting decided, and all the miraculous sweetness over which he was brooding, being turned to gall. He waited through all the long morning, remembering English habits, with a shrug of his shoulders, till “luncheon”—mysterious word!—should be over; reflecting, perhaps not quite justly as he did so, on the portentous English appetite which demanded two meals so early in the day. Then, with a heart which did something more than beat, which gave leaps and bounds against his breast, and then paused breathless to recover itself, he rushed up the long stairs. Diana was on her balcony as he approached, and after a little wave of her hand to him, disappeared suddenly. What did that mean? His heart sank, then bounded again with excitement, anxiety, suspense. He rushed up to the Hunstantons’ second floor like a whirlwind, and found himself in his friend’s room, breathless, speechless, breaking in, he supposed, like a thief.
“Well?”—all the breath left in him, and all the fever of emotion, came forth in the one word.