So that when I am seven years old, comes the Hope man; he looks upon the child with the blue eye and the brown, and sighs his great breath on my hair, and takes me to the English school. But I come every summer to my own people, so that I have all that is best of both kinds, and grow to be so beautiful and have such fascination, that when there comes sometimes a Hope father or Hope mother to take me on a trip and be sorry for me, I laugh at their backs! The mother I do not like, and she does not like me. She is a fool, and she has, too, another child. It is a girl and it is said to be pretty; but the picture she carries with her resembles a pale, shapeless child with dull hair,—not like mine that burns men's hearts like fire! Moreover this child has things that I should have, more money, more fuss, she is more shown. I am proud to be what I am; my mother, who is scarcely more than a common servant, had the great luck to marry into the Camorra, and my brother Nicola at eighteen takes the oath, so I am not come alone from dull peasants and these cackling Yankees, but from free men, born to judge, born to strike, born to live wild and to satisfy their blood. But all the same, as to this brat, Christina, I am the elder sister and I should have all, all! I make up my mind to be even with her and to spoil what things she has. I hear how she is strange, and is a lonely child, and plays she has a sister to talk to, a little girl who lives in the looking-glass; and how it is a game of hers that when she is in a gown of pink the sister is in blue, and when they buy her a doll there is another for the sister, and a place set at the dolls' teas, and Christina talks for the two. Then I know she is a fool, like her mother.
When I am fifteen, and of the right age for passion and to break men's hearts, my bad luck comes and breaks my own. It could not leave me with the poor to be like the poor, it raised me up so that my nose sniffed at sight of them, and then it brought me together with Alonzo Pasquale, the son of a millionaire. He was mad for me, and well he might be, and I liked him so well, being young and fanciful, that I gave him encouragement. I ran away from school with him and we would have been happy forever, he having so much to give me, but that he grew weary of my blue eye and my brown. He told me so, for he was a dog and a devil, and I took little Filippi Alieni, and married him! It was wise. It was as well to be married, and he was a gentleman, with money. All was done as a wise girl should do, and yet see how my luck pursued me!
His people cast him off, on my account, their own daughters being ugly; and Nicola, who has been the best of brothers to me, Nicola got him into the Camorra, where his gentlemanly manners would make him able to get, first, confidence, and then money, from the best.
Yet when I had been but three months married and was not yet sixteen, he gets himself caught. And in prison he tells, he betrays his comrades, so that he is released, and for this Nicola does not kill him. No, he keeps the secret of that disgrace, and ships us to America, where I am to introduce my husband to the Hopes. All so well planned, and yet such luck!
One of those to whom he had confessed loses his place, and then, by blackmail, that he will give my husband's treachery to the Camorra, he gets from him all the money that he now has. So that I have to lose him quickly; to take the little, ah, so little! there is left, and slip away! I do not wish a Camorra knife in my back!
I am afraid to go to the Hopes, for there he will follow me, and he is a snivelling, watering thing to make a fuss and spoil all. So I ask for work to teach Italian, and I live for a little while as if I were quite commonplace. And so I meet with the great Jim.
Hail and farewell, my poor Jim! You were only twenty-three and you cared too much! You did so many things for me, you thought such things about me, and were of such a considerate politeness and care, it made me laugh! But you were a beautiful lover, and I would have loved you, if I could! I would have been glad to marry you, as you made me so weary begging of me. I was very happy with you; you gave more to me and I think you loved me better than any one. But you were very silly to believe me, and silly to leave me when you found me out! That little whimpering puppy came; and, since you left me, and he had a good hint from Nicola how to get money from an Italian family here, what was I to do? We did very well, for a while, besides the money the Hopes sent me—I told them I came here to escape impertinence and was teaching Italian—and then they lost their money and I wrote to them no more.
But Mrs. Hope, because of her sick conscience, was always trying, in sly ways, to find where I was. And it seems when her brat was come to fourteen years old it chanced upon my last letter and learned all. Heavens, what a row it raised! And how I was written to and written to; and some letters being forwarded me that they had tried sending me to Italy, were all about how she cried for me, and pitied and loved me and rejoiced, and said, again and again: "Oh, mother, I have a sister! I have a sister!" "Bene!" I thought, "she sounds like a tiresome little minx; but at least it is a thing to know!"
So that by and by—when Filippi is clumsy again and goes to jail for four years, and they dare to put me there for two—when I come out I go to my sentimental miss, who is now more than sixteen and makes already a little money. Not a dollar has she made since but I have had the half of it. She has no frugality; she is all luxuries and caprices and always in debt; and for a while it seemed as if really she would be scarcely of any use at all. But it is strange how pale she is, and yet attracts and shoots onward! Since then I have found a letter about those two years when I was silent. She wrote it to Will Denny, who thought she did too much for me. Like this:
"As I grew up and understood, and saw what little girls can come to in a world like this, I thought here was I and where was she?—My elder sister, born in wedlock, born of my father and my mother, grown up among peasants, among hardships, and if she had come to harm, lost, thrown away, forsaken and denied—for what? For any fault of hers? For a convention, a cowardice, done in obedience to the chatter of fools and in order to stand well with those that have no hearts! What can I think of my poor mother but that her weakness forsook and denied her child to please the world? What can I think of any shame or sorrow that touches Allegra but that this is what the world and her own family have made of her? Oh, Will, it came to be my madness to find her and to ask her forgiveness for being in her place. All that I am and have and ever shall be I stole from her, and only give her back again to repay what can never in this world be repaid!"