As he walked from the Palazzo Acorari to his little apartment in the Ludovisi quarter of the city, Monsieur d'Antin was unusually preoccupied, and more than once he chuckled to himself. His sister Jeanne was certainly not gifted with a sense of humor, but he found himself wondering whether she was quite as incompetent to look after her own affairs as she wished him to believe. Experience taught him that while piety and humor seldom went together, piety and a shrewd eye to worldly advantage were by no means unfrequently to be found working very harmoniously side by side.
Somebody in Palazzo Acorari, Monsieur d'Antin felt convinced, had an interest in maintaining the status quo, so far as the existing constitution of the Montefiano establishment was concerned. Jeanne might be a bad woman of business, but, when all was said and done, at thirty-five or so, with no money—with nothing, in short, except a local reputation for holiness—she had succeeded in marrying a man who had been able to give her a very substantial position in the world, and who had had the tact to leave her a good many years in which to enjoy its full advantages without the incubus of his company.
But it was more likely that Jeanne allowed herself to be swayed by the counsels of the priest whom, according to her own account, she always consulted. It was conceivable, nay, it was even probable, that Monsieur l'Abbé Roux might desire that Donna Bianca Acorari should remain as much as possible secluded from the world for reasons of his own. So long as she remained unmarried, so long would she, no doubt, be content that the Montefiano properties should be managed more or less as they had been hitherto managed; and who could tell how much benefit the Abbé Roux might not, directly or indirectly, gain from the present system of management.
And Bianca Acorari? Monsieur d'Antin allowed his thoughts to dwell upon her dreamy face, with its eyes that seemed always to be looking into an unexplored distance, upon the curved mouth and firm, rounded throat, upon the graceful lines of the figure just melting into womanhood, and came to the conclusion that Jeanne and her abbé were a couple of fools. Why, the girl had something about her that stirred even his well-worn passions—and how would it not be with a younger man? She had some idea, too, of her own power, of her own charm, unless he was very much mistaken. It was a vague, undefined consciousness, perhaps, but none the less fascinating on that account. A child? Nonsense! A peach almost ripe for the plucking.
IX
It was very still in the ilex grove of the Villa Acorari. The air was sultry, and not a leaf stirred; yet angry-looking clouds occasionally drifted across the sky from the sea, and cast moving patches of purple shadow on the plain stretching away from below Velletri to the coast.
The sunbeams glanced here and there through the heavy foliage. They threw quaint, checkered patterns on the moss-grown flag-stones surrounding a group of fountains, and flashed upon the spray falling over sculptured nymphs and river-gods wantoning in cool green beds of arum leaves and water-lilies.
A gentle, drowsy murmur of insects filled the air, and the splashing of the fountains—otherwise deep silence reigned. Lizards, green and golden-brown, darted out of the crevices in the old stone seats, paused abruptly with little heads poised in a listening attitude, and darted away again; while blue dragon-flies hawked over the waters of the fountains, now giving mad chase to a fly, now resting—jewels set in green enamel—on a lily leaf.
It was not to be wondered at if the gardens of the Villa Acorari were reputed to be haunted by spirits of the old gods. On this July afternoon some mysterious influence, infinitely peaceful but infinitely sad, seemed to brood over them. All the glamour of a mighty past seemed to enfold them—such a past as many an old villa in the neighborhood of Rome has witnessed, in which every passion, good and bad, has played its part; in which scenes of love and hate, of joy and sorrow, of highest virtue and foulest crime have succeeded each other through the centuries.
Tradition declared that a shrine sacred to the rites of the Lupercalia once stood in the midst of this ilex grove, on the very spot where the fountains now murmured and the water-lilies lifted their pure whiteness to the hot caress of the sunbeams.