It was Gioja, walking with her usual listless grace.
Her small head, its crisply waved Tuscan hair bound with a kerchief of dull blue, was carried far back as no kerchiefed head has a right to be; and her eyes, blue as the kerchief but not dull, looked straight ahead, dilated and musing. She did not see the Signore,—a thing that could have befallen no other girl in the village, unless it were blind Chiara, and the Signore watched her go with a frown,—for this was not the direction of Vincigliata. And why was she starting so early, unless to defeat the glances with which all these closed doors would soon be alive?
Yet he continued to watch her. There were other girls in the village just as pretty. Many a strain of noble blood had gone to the making of these Vignolese peasants. This was not the first girl the Signore had seen who looked as if—change her gown and tie a bonnet over her hair—she might loll in her carriage of an afternoon at the Cascine with the best of the fine ladies in the city below. But there was no other whom the Signore ever leaned over the wall to look after. And as he leaned his frown deepened; he was sorry for Oreste; but—marry a girl like that and leave her alone, in Italy! Anybody might foresee the end. And he frowned again, not at Gioja this time, who had disappeared from view, but at a mental image, wearing, it is true, an air dangerously like that of Oreste’s sposa.
Yes, indeed, anybody might foretell the end. That was what the whole community, already buzzing with the scandal, said. And it was exactly what the Padre said when, five minutes later, he came up the path and sank upon the marble seat, mopping his brow beneath the beaver hat.
“I have been to Oreste’s,” he said apologetically, “and thought I would look in upon the Signore in passing. There was nobody there.”
The Signore, engaged in pouring red wine for his guest, made no response, and the priest stole a troubled glance at him as he took the glass from his hand.
“Perhaps, Signore, you may have seen them pass, and can tell me if that child went with her husband?”
“No,” said the Signore, after a minute’s deliberation, “I could not.”
His guest sighed as he sipped the wine. He had grown gray in the service of the village. He had known Gioja from her babyhood. His was the hand which had held and oiled and dipped her at the font, and had led her from then until her present estate; and he, if any one, had a right to borrow trouble, seeing that all troubles were brought to him in the end. His fine, thin lips shut above the wineglass in the sensitive line which marks the better of Rome’s two types. His soul was straight and simple. The one vanity it owned was to be on terms of companionship with the occupant of the big villa. The half hour on its terrace or in its salotto formed his social dissipation, and dearly did he prize the importance it gave him in the eyes of his flock. Nay, it gave importance to the whole community.
“Not every village has a priest like ours,” said the gossips, complacently, “that a so-educated stranger Signore would make so much of.”