Silvio smiled. "You are full of objections," he said; "but you need not be uneasy. It is true that we no longer have Mademoiselle Durand to depend upon, but we shall find other means of communicating with each other. After all, shall we not be under the same roof here all the winter and spring? The princess will not remain at the Villa Acorari forever. No—if there should be any pressure put upon Bianca to make her give me up against her will I shall very soon know it. We are agreed on all those points. If the princess keeps quiet, we shall keep quiet also. She has a perfect right to refuse her consent to Bianca marrying me—for the present. But in course of time that right will no longer hold good. While it does, however, Bianca and I have agreed to respect it, unless, in order to protect ourselves, we are forced to set it at defiance, get some priest to marry us, and delay the legal marriage till afterwards. This is what I have explained to Babbo—and he calls it the braying of donkeys in May. Well, at least the donkeys know what one another mean, which, after all, is something gained—from their point of view!"
Giacinta laughed, and then became suddenly grave again.
"Well, Silvio mio," she replied, "you seem to have settled everything in your own mind, and I only hope it will all be as easy as you think. So much depends on the girl herself. If you are sure of her, then, as you say, three years soon pass. In the mean time, if I were you, I would watch very carefully. As I have told you before, for some reason which we know nothing of, it is not intended that the girl should marry; and when I say they might marry her to somebody else, I do not believe it."
Silvio shrugged his shoulders. "All the better for me," he observed; and Giacinta, with a slight gesture of impatience, was about to reply, when the professor entered the room.
XVII
The sollione had ran his course. Already the vines on the slopes below Montefiano were showing patches of ruddy gold among their foliage, and the grapes were beginning to color, sometimes a glossy purple, sometimes clearest amber. Figs and peaches were ripe on the fruit trees rising from among the vines, and here and there tall, yellow spikes of Indian-corn rattled as the summer breeze passed over them.
Solitary figures prowled about the vineyard with guns—no brigands, but merely local sportsmen lying in wait for the dainty beccafichi which visit the fig-trees at this season and slit open the ripest figs with their bills. In the evening a half-dozen of the plump little brown-and-white birds will make a succulent addition to the dish of polenta on which they will repose. Perhaps, if fortune favor, a turtle-dove, or even a partridge, may find its way into the oven for the sportsman's evening meal. In the mean time, a few purple figs, from which the sun has scarcely kissed away the chill of the night dew, a hunch of brown bread and a draught of white wine from a flask left in the shade and covered with cool, green vine leaves, form a breakfast not to be despised by one who has been out with his gun since the dawn was spreading over the Sabine hills and the mists were rolling back before it across the Roman Campagna to the sea.
Who that has not wandered through her vineyards and forests, among her mountains and by the side of her waters in the early hours of a summer dawn, or the late hours of a summer night, knows the beauty of Italy? Then the old gods live again and walk the earth, and nature triumphs. The air is alive with strange whisperings: the banks and the hedgerows speak to those who have ears to hear—of things that lie hidden and numbed during the hot glare of the day.
The gray shadows lying over the campagna were fast dissolving before a light that seemed to change almost imperceptibly from silver into gold, as the first rays of the rising sun stole over the Sabine mountains. Across the plain, the summit of Soracte was already bathed in light, while its base yet lay invisible, wreathed in the retreating mists. The air was fresh with the scent of vines and fig-trees, and long threads of gossamer, sparkling with a million dew-drops, hung from grassy banks rising above a narrow pathway between the terraces of the vineyards.
A black figure suddenly appeared round an angle of the winding path. Don Agostino Lelli, his cassock brushing the blossoms of wild geranium and purple mallow as he passed, was making his way in the dawn of the summer morning back to Montefiano. He had been sitting through the night with a dying man—a young fellow whom an accident with a loaded wagon had mortally injured. The end had come an hour or two before the dawn, and Don Agostino had speeded the parting soul with simple human words of hope and comfort, which had brought a peace and a trust that all the rites enjoined by the Church had failed to do. Perhaps he was thinking of the failure, and wondering why sympathy and faith in the goodness of God had seemed to be of more avail at the death-bed he had just left than ceremonies and sacraments.