Oriole's daughter, a novel, Volume 1 (of 3)
Date: 2025-06-03T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fathers and daughters -- Fiction; Married women -- Fiction; Illegitimate children -- Fiction; Rome (Italy) -- Fiction

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Title: Oriole's daughter, a novel, Volume 1 (of 3)

Author: Jessie Fothergill

Release date: June 3, 2025 [eBook #76215]

Language: English

Original publication: London: William Heinemann, 1893

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76215

Credits: Peter Becker, Ed Foster and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORIOLE'S DAUGHTER, A NOVEL, VOLUME 1 (OF 3) ***

ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

NEW LIBRARY NOVELS.

THE HEAVENLY TWINS.

By Sarah Grand, Author of ‘Ideala,’ etc.

In 3 vols.

‘Every page is rife with wit and wisdom.’

Daily Telegraph.

KITTY’S FATHER.

By Frank Barrett, Author of ‘The Admirable

Lady Biddy Fane,’ etc. In 3 vols.

‘Mr. Barrett has the true gift of the story-teller.’

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By Mrs. Hungerford, Author of ‘Molly Bawn,’

etc. In 1 vol. 6s.

‘The humour of the book is delicious.’--Daily Telegraph.

AVENGED ON SOCIETY.

By H. F. Wood, Author of ‘The Englishman of
the Rue Caïn,’ etc. In 1 vol. 6s.

‘Powerfully written and deeply interesting.’

Manchester Examiner.

LONDON:
WM. HEINEMANN, 21, BEDFORD STREET, W.C.

ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

A NOVEL

BY

JESSIE FOTHERGILL

AUTHOR OF
‘THE FIRST VIOLIN,’ ‘A MARCH IN THE RANKS,’ ‘PROBATION,’
ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1893
[All rights reserved]

ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

CHAPTER I.

‘It is too annoying!’ said Minna Hastings aloud, looking darkly towards the door which the padrona had just closed behind her, more gently than usual, on taking her departure.

Minna tapped her foot on the floor and frowned, resting her chin on her hand as she leaned a little forward in her chair. Then she let her eyes wander round the large, pleasant room, into which the south sun was pouring warmly, and she frowned again. For a moment she felt a strong impulse to spring up, hasten after Madame Vincenzini, take her by her plump, good-natured shoulders and say, in firm, decided tones:

‘Signora, it will not do. It must not be. You must reconsider this most annoying decision. You must think, not of yourself, but of me.’

It was a most natural impulse. It is the one that comes to nearly all of us when people are going to act in such a manner as to cause us inconvenience.

But Minna, of course, conquered the impulse, sank back into her chair, and felt, with a sense of angry desolation, that her morning’s work was simply ruined.

She was an Englishwoman of eight-and-twenty; she was blessed with an independent, if modest, income, with decided artistic gifts, with a will of her own, and with a certain beauty which, if not always striking at the first moment, was there, and made itself felt by degrees—growing upon the beholder or the acquaintance, as certainly and as effectually as does some true and sure and noble work of art. She was tall, and graciously formed as to figure; her movements had a persuasive pliancy, yet there was power and strength in the nobly planned limbs; her arms, hands and wrists, in particular, were strong, flexible and beautifully formed. Sculpture was her art, or, perhaps more truly said, her despair. It is the sternest but most glorious of the arts. Now, in Minna’s appearance, at least, there was nothing stern. Yet had she a true conception of her art, and a true veneration for and appreciation of it.

Her face was by no means as strikingly beautiful as her figure. Her forehead was wide and large; the thick, wavy, rather coarse auburn hair sprang from it with a sort of wilfulness. The nose was by no means classical in shape or indentation, but it was refined. The fine thin nostrils were almost transparent, and expressed the extreme of sensibility and a quick, nervous temperament. The eyebrows were brown and the eyes dark gray, full of fire, full of dreaminess—artist’s eyes. The mouth was large and mobile, and expressed—what did it express? It could express any and every momentary emotion; on the other hand, it could shut up close and keep its secrets to itself did its owner so choose.

Minna at eight-and-twenty was nearly alone in the world. In Rome, in Florence, in many another city in which art is studied and in which the materials for that study abound, there are crowds of English women, American women, and even German women, working in their own studios or in those of their masters, and generally, of what age soever, unmarried. One usually knows this by a certain something in their aspect or manner—a something indefinable and indescribable. That something was not present in Minna Hastings, and, indeed, there was a plain gold ring, the only one she wore, on the third finger of the left hand—a ring which had been placed there nine years ago by Rupert Hastings, whom she had married, and who had been her husband for exactly eighteen months, having then died very suddenly of an inflammation of the lungs. Minna had always been a person who might have had many friends—indeed, there were many who were ready and wishful to be her friends. She had been, perhaps, less eager than they. In the time of her trouble, however, she had clung to one, a distant relative of her husband’s, a certain Mrs. Charrington, and with her she had, after the first horror of her loss had somewhat abated, travelled, seeking to forget enough to be able to take up something like an everyday life again, that being the consummation most devoutly sought after by most people whose lives and feelings have been crushed or shaken out of that everyday life into a higher, rarer atmosphere.

Nine months after her husband’s death, in the month of September, she had come with her friend to Rome. Mrs. Charrington lived there. Minna had never seen the place before. In a short time the mighty spell of the city of cities had begun its work, as was natural enough, on a girl of barely one-and-twenty—eager, steeped to her soul in the inborn love of art, and, despite the hard blows of Fate, filled to overflowing with the strength, the interest, and the boundless elasticity of youth. Her old love of modelling, in which she had been considered to have a very pretty trick, returned. She began to study in earnest, under a well-known modern sculptor, and from that hour her future seemed settled.

Mrs. Charrington arranged herself in her beloved apartment again with a mind at rest, and with the profound conviction that Minna was perfectly well able to get on without her. They saw each other often, but were perfectly independent of one another. Minna had never saddled herself with any kind of chaperon or companion. She had character and will, and was fond of much solitude. From that time she had lived on in Rome without let or hindrance. It had been practically her home. She had lived there in all seasons: hot and cold, summer and winter—while the hordes of the Forestieri overran it, when it was empty of almost all save its native population, or those who knew it and loved it as well as if they had been born within its bounds. Here, in Rome, she had recovered her balance, her health of mind and body, after the great stroke which had smitten her down; here she had worked, she had hoped, and aspired; studied and despaired and hoped again; she felt herself an integral part of the place. For the last three years she had considered herself very happily situated as to dwelling, in her two or three pleasant rooms, in a quiet street in the purlieus of Piazza di Spagna, with Madame Vincenzini as padrona, and not a thought or a care as respected housekeeping to trouble her. Now and then, it is true, she had said to herself: ‘It is too good to last.’

This morning the prophecy had been fulfilled—the blow had fallen. Signora Vincenzini had come to tell her that she had at last decided to give up the cares of housekeeping and go to live with her daughter, who was married to a well-to-do draper at Milano.

The house and its business would be carried on by her son Edoardo and his wife Amelia, and the signora would find everything to go exactly as it always had done—her comfort being the main study in life of the younger Vincenzini, as it had been of their mother—ecco!

‘I am very sorry, Signora Vincenzini,’ was all, or nearly all, that Minna said.

‘And so am I, signora—sorry to break our connection, which has always been so pleasant and so smooth—no disputes, no disagreements. Ma, che vuole?’—with a shrug, expressive of everything that could be said upon the subject.

Che vuole? indeed! Minna felt there was no reply to it. She let the padrona go, without having in any way committed herself on the subject of her own future course, only in her mind was the very fixed resolution that she would not at any price remain as the tenant of the younger Vincenzini, who were marked examples of the deterioration of a good stock. The wife was a colourless creature, given to flopping about the house in a dressing-gown and curl-papers, and reading greasy-looking paper-backed novels. The only time when she was tidy was when she was dressed in florid splendour for the theatre, or for some other entertainment. Her mind was not too far removed from household things to make her above examining any box or drawer which might have been incautiously left unfastened. The husband was Minna’s peculiar detestation for many reasons, and she often wondered how the excellent Signora Vincenzini came to have such a child. The worthy pair were admirably adapted to cheat, rob, and neglect some innocent young Englishman, not up to their ways, or some deputato from the country, who would need only bed and early cup of coffee in the house, and who would take his more serious colazione and dinner at some restaurant in close vicinity to the Parliamentary building in Monte Citorio. Minna resolved at once that she would not be the woman to prevent them from securing such a prey.

Her chief object must be to get out of these rooms, and into others, before the dowager signora should have taken her departure. Minna was quite able to defend herself in any contest as to agreements and prices; she knew exactly when to threaten the extortioner with the Questura, and when gracefully to ignore the fact that she was being cheated; but she was not fond of a row simply for its own sake, and was morally convinced that she would have to encounter one should she remain a day in the house after the departure of the present padrona.

After giving an hour or more to vexed consideration of the subject, she at last rose, and with a heavy sigh went to her bedroom, put on her outdoor things, and went forth to take her usual walk to her studio. It was now late in November, and the rainy season had, more or less, set in; but up to a week or ten days before it had been what dwellers in less-favoured climes would call summer—high, hot summer. Minna thought of it every now and then with a sigh of regret, and a great longing for the skies and the atmosphere and the wonderful scintillating glory of the heat which she had revelled in. In such weather the great dark palaces are a joy; the marble halls are all one asks for; the sculptures are instinct with life; one expects them every moment to move and speak: but no, they remain there, keeping their secrets fast, till the cold of winter sets in and they are once more statues—marble statues, even to the most enthusiastic.

To-day sunshine and shower alternated. Minna noticed none of it as she walked more slowly than usual towards her studio. On her way thither she had occasion to walk along a certain street, and, happening to glance upwards as she did so, she found herself opposite the door of a well-known pensione affected by some of the most highly respectable English and American visitors. A thought struck her:

‘I could at any rate take a room there till I have been able to look about me, and see what is best to be done.’

She climbed the stairs forthwith and rang the bell, resolved to settle the matter at once, so that on her return she could tell Signora Vincenzini in a firm and decided manner of her resolve.

Further disappointment awaited her. Mrs. Cartwright, the very comfortable, self-satisfied-looking matron who conducted the pensione, received her with calm and dignified indifference, an indifference born partly of the fact that her house was full, partly perhaps of the other fact that she knew Minna well by name and sight, and had heard her give utterance to views about pensioni and boarding-houses which were far from complimentary to such establishments. At any rate, as soon as she heard what Mrs. Hastings wanted—a large good room with the sun—she smiled a lofty smile, folded her hands, and regretted, with every appearance of satisfaction, that it was quite out of her power to oblige her with anything of the kind. She had no such room free—no prospect of having such a room.

Minna wished her good-morning and went away with an outwardly unruffled mien. She was not going to give way to the fit of exasperated ill-humour which she felt was coming over her before that insolent creature—not she. Within she was full of vexation. Rome, as she knew, was ill-supplied with comfortable boarding-houses. She did not wish to go to a hotel. It was altogether very annoying.

‘I wish I had never gone in,’ she muttered to herself with much irritation. ‘No room for me indeed! The instant I saw her I felt what a mistake I had made. I don’t know how I came to forget for a moment that it would be impossible for me to live, even for a week, in a pensione like that, filled with English and Americans “doing” Rome. Heavens! doesn’t one know what they are? Their one idea how to rush round it with the least possible expenditure of time and money—the day’s sightseeing a duty to be done; then the blessed relief of evening—the comfort of being able to forget the statues and the ruins and the churches, while they grumble at their ease over the badness of the dinner, and compare the prices of things at all the different places they have ever stayed at in their lives. Such memories they have for things of that kind, and for the pastry-cooks, and the jewellers and the milliners, and for the liveries of the Queen’s servants when she drives out, and for nothing else! Bah! I have had a lucky escape!’

So she told herself, looking anything but delighted with her good fortune. She walked now at a quicker pace, and with a heightened colour. It was an indubitable fact that Minna Hastings was not accustomed to be thwarted or contradicted, and that she did not take kindly to the experience. Presently arriving at the house in which her studio was situated, she walked in under the cavernous entrance, climbed the many stairs to the two rooms in which she was accustomed to work, or dream, or loiter away her time.

The first room was of moderate size and by no means luxuriously furnished. It contained, however, an easy-chair and an old comfortable sofa. There was a faded but well-tinted Oriental rug in front of the sofa and coming almost up to a perfectly hideous black stove—a stove which nevertheless was capable, as are not all Roman stoves, of giving out some heat when the wood was fairly burning in it. Minna threw off her hat, mantle and gloves, and then, opening the stove door, began with practised hand to put into it small faggots of twigs, a little torn paper, and some larger pieces of wood. Her beautiful strong hands moved quickly and lithely backwards and forwards, and up and down, in this process. Then she struck a match sharply, applied it at exactly the right spot, shut the door of the stove with a little bang, and rose from her knees, with still the same frown of vexation on her brow.

She stood still for a moment, a graceful, gracious figure, clad all in a soft golden brown, and looked absently at the door of the stove, till there came to her ear the welcome hollow sound which told her that the fire was ‘drawing,’ and in a few minutes would be brightly and safely blazing. Then she made a step or two forwards, pushed aside a portière which hung across a doorway without a door, and stepped into the next room. It was her workroom, and was not distinguished by being different from other sculptors’ studios. It was bare, it was sunless, it was spacious, and quite devoid of any effort at adornment. The usual paraphernalia lay about here and there, and the usual casts, copies and gyps of different world-known works. There were one or two things which she had begun and not finished. There were one or two finished things—a bust, a fantastic figure or two: and these finished specimens betrayed a certain strength and rugged power which scarcely accorded with one’s first impression, at any rate, of their creator.

She glanced impatiently round, then advanced towards the middle of the room, where stood something of a larger size than any of her other efforts. It was not yet the marble—it was the clay model, enveloped in its wet cloth. She approached it, and laid a hand on the outermost cloth, lifting it, and then paused, before she had discovered to view the work concealed by that drapery.

‘No,’ she said to herself, ‘I will never work at you, nor even look at you while I am in an ill-humour, and that I assuredly am just now.’

She readjusted the cloth, turned her back upon the figure, and, without vouchsafing a glance towards any of the other things, went back into the first room.

The fire was burning bravely now. She heard its merry little roar, opened the stove door, and let a delicious red glow of light and warmth into the room, and over her own face, which still looked annoyed and disgusted. She wheeled the easy-chair up in front of the fire, took a book from the table, and composed herself, or tried to do so.

‘The idea of being such a fool about all this!’ she said to herself. ‘I am ashamed of myself. Let me forget it.’

Her book was a volume of Tacitus through which, with a small amount of schoolgirl Latin, and with the aid of a dictionary and a crib, she was plodding her way. Even to-day it succeeded after a time in drawing her mind away from its vexations. The time flew by; the fire diffused a pleasant warmth. Minna now and then roused enough to stretch out her hand to the wood-basket, and cast another log upon the flames, then returned to her book. She was at last aroused by a knock at the outer door.

‘Avanto!’ cried she, scarcely raising her eyes till someone wished her good-day. Then she looked up. A tall, fresh-complexioned and handsome young man, with something a little sarcastic in his smile, advanced into the room.

‘Oh, Hans!’ she said, with a slight smile. ‘Good-day to you.’ She spoke in German, and held out her hand. Hans Riemann was her cousin, the son of an English mother and a German father. He bent over her hand, touching it lightly with his lips, and saying:

‘If you are busy and I disturb you, say so, and I will at once go away.’

‘Not in the least, thank you. I am very glad to see you. By the way, it is some time since I did see you. Where have you been?’

‘Out beyond Olevano, for more than a week sketching,’ he replied carelessly. ‘It was glorious, Minna; I have found quite a decent inn out there—at least, you who have no nonsense about you would think it quite passable, I am sure. Let’s go out there, in spring some time, shall we? I can find scenery, and you models to any extent, and quite out of the common, too.’

‘With all my heart—in spring,’ she agreed, in a melancholy voice.

‘Why that sigh? You look much graver than usual, now I come to observe you,’ he said, with a suddenly aroused interest.

She broke into a short, vexed laugh.

‘I may well look grave—cross would be nearer the mark,’ she said. Then she told him what had happened.

‘I am desolated to hear such news,’ he assured her; ‘from purely selfish motives, if from no others. Are those delightful little evenings, then, over? No more talk, no more coffee, no more Chopin and Schumann and Raff? Gott! how painful!’

‘I hope only for a time to be inhospitable,’ said she with a smile. ‘But I will tell you the truth. Something that happened after that vexed me far more than even my padrona’s perverse behaviour.’

Then she related the history of her fruitless application for board and lodging at Mrs. Cartwright’s. Hans laughed loud and long at the recital.

‘Ach, was!’ he cried. ‘It is a mercy that she refused you. The idea of you there! Why, they do not get enough to eat—so I am told—and are expected to dress for dinner and appear in the drawing-room in the evening, whether they wish it or not. Mrs. Cartwright is by way of holding a kind of salon. Yes, you may laugh—it is true. And there are people fools enough to like it, or to think they do, and to call it “very nice.” That is what all the English girls say,’ he added, looking gravely at Minna, as if he had been entirely free from any English taint. ‘I have heard them so often—before the Dying Gaul, the Apollo Belvedere, the Medusa Morente, the Apoxiomene, under the Dome of the Pantheon, and under that of St. Peter—the effect of the two being much the same—on the Appian Way, in front of the milliners’ windows—“very nice, oh, very nice!”’

‘Come, come, sir, and what of your German Mädchen? “Ach Gott, wie reizend! nein, wie entzückend schön! Das ist ja zu nett.” I can cap you at that game.’

They both laughed. Then he said suddenly:

‘Look here, Minna, why couldn’t you come and put up where I am staying? Temporarily, I mean, unless you like it so much that you decide to remain. I have often told you about it. It is central, it is cosmopolitan, it is not too dear; in fact, it ain’t dear at all. If it were, I should not be there, as you know, on the governor’s allowance. It is anything but aristocratic, that is true. It isn’t even collet-montée, though there’s nothing in the world that you need fight shy of—and it is fun, which is a great thing. Mrs. Cartwright’s isn’t. I can tell you that. I should be on the spot—your slave, as ever, and ready to tramp all over Rome with you till you have found what you want in the shape of an appartamento. Moreover, it is not full to overflowing. It seldom is, though there are several people there. There are some good rooms to let—they have good rooms there, if they have nothing else. Come and try it.’

‘Verily, you tempt me. It might be amusing. My rooms were so comfortable that it was impossible to think of them in connection with amusement. Let me see—what is it called?’

‘It is called Signora or Madame Dietrich—Casa Dietrich. She was married to a German first.’

‘First? How many more times has she been married since the first?’

‘Not one. She’s a widow, is Signora Dietrich—a widow given to spending more money than she has got. But that is a trifle. It is number seventeen, Piazza Bocca della Verità——’

‘Bocca della Verità—really Hans, I don’t want to live next door to Santa Maria in Cosmedin.’

‘It isn’t that one, of course. It has nothing to do with the old Bocca della Verità; but in some respects we who live there consider it rather a good name for it. Really and truly,’ he added earnestly, ‘it’s odd in many ways, undoubtedly. It is fundamentally Italian, but there’s nothing really wrong there, according to Italian notions—and you and I take the Romans as they are, I believe, and not as what English philistinism says everyone all over the world ought to be. And sometimes it is awfully amusing. Do come and try. If you didn’t like it you could go to a hotel the very next day, and I would take all the bother of it upon myself.’

She looked seriously reflective.

‘Of course I can’t possibly say anything till I have seen it for myself. But I will see it—yes, I will look at it.’

‘All right. Suppose you were to come and have lunch there to-day. That would give you some idea of it.’

‘With you, eh? Well, it might be a good plan. What time?’

‘In half an hour. It is close at hand. I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll run round now, and tell Giuseppe, and then come back here for you.’

‘Who is Giuseppe?’ she asked, as he made for the door.

He looked back at her, half laughing.

‘Giuseppe is—Giuseppe—well, I suppose one might call Giuseppe the manager,’ he replied, and was gone.

Minna put on her things during his absence, and was ready, when he returned, to accompany him.

‘I saw Giuseppe, and told him that a friend of mine was coming to lunch, who would afterwards wish to see their best rooms. He said, “Bene, bene! but don’t go to suppose that any rattle-pated student friend of yours is going to be put up in the best rooms of Casa Dietrich!” I did not explain. You will be explanation enough, as soon as he sees you.’

‘I really think you are a very reckless young man,’ said Minna, as she followed him out of the room and down the stairs.

CHAPTER II.

Hans Riemann led Minna through one or two narrow streets and alleys, till they emerged in a small, quiet, but very pleasant-looking piazza, the exact locality of which I am not going to reveal; it was one of those which one is constantly coming upon in Rome in the most unexpected way—nooks which surprise and delight the old inhabitant almost as much as, perhaps more than, the hasty visitor, lying as they often do close beside or behind some well-known street or quarter which his steps have paced many a time, and with every winding of which he thought he was acquainted. Quaint and quiet, hoary and old, they hide themselves—known to those who inhabit them, and to few beside. It was on the sunny side of this piazza that the great brown palace was situated in which Madame Dietrich had a floor for her boarding-house. It is a large palace, though not one that is found on Baedeker’s plan of Rome, nor even is it mentioned in the compendious pages of Gsell-Fells. It was all quite new to Minna, and its aspect pleased her; a little quiet exclamation which broke from her lips as they entered it showed that she felt its charm.

‘Not bad, is it?’ said Hans Riemann, catching the sound of approval. ‘Here it is—Piazza Bocca della Verità, and here is the entrance to Casa Dietrich.’

He went in, under a great marble archway leading into a court, and she followed him.

‘Casa Dietrich is on the first piano,’ he observed. ‘That is one of its great merits. You will excuse me for thus singing its praises. You will find out its defects quickly enough.’

They climbed the stairs, broad and well laid, of a grayish-white marble, and dirty, of course, till they arrived at a door on the first piano, on which door was a brass plate with the inscription ‘Signora Dietrich,’ and before which lay a very dirty mat turned wrong way up, and inscribed ‘Salve.’ Hans Riemann pushed open the door, and waved his hand to Minna to pass on. She did so, and found herself in a large, well-proportioned hall, the floor of which was covered with straw-matting in tolerably good repair. Doors opened from it, of course, on all sides. There was a table in the middle of the space—at one side of the hall a marble-topped table against the wall, crowded with an array of lamps, large and small. This hall was a little dark, but not unfriendly in appearance.

‘We’ll go and sit in the salon till the bell has rung,’ said Riemann, looking round and seeing no one. At that moment a waiter came into the hall—a young man with a handsome, silly, sentimental face, who looked vaguely round, and then gazed with bland benevolence on the pair.

‘Has the bell rung, Ettore?’ asked Riemann.

‘Signorino, no,’ replied Ettore in a soft voice, and with a primo tenore kind of smile, and he shook his head.

‘Belongs to one of the oldest and noblest Florentine families,’ said Hans in an explanatory manner to Minna, in English. ‘Like all the rest of them, you know—decaduto. Italians and Irishmen are always descended from princes, and the lower their station the greater were the princes—in the days that are no more. It’s awfully sad! This way, Minna, please. I should deceive you if I led you to expect much in the way of punctuality here. I hope you are not famished.’

‘No,’ said Minna indifferently, as she followed him into the salon—a fine, large, admirably proportioned room, with a slightly vaulted ceiling and three windows. It was not at all surprising in Rome that a palace, or rather part of one, should now be a boarding-house; there was a fitness in the order of things which brought a nobly descended Florentine into its halls as a waiter. But there was something pathetic or exasperating—according to the temper of the observers—in the contrast between the just proportions and pleasing form of the room itself, which was so well designed to be furnished with stately richness and splendour, and the order of things actually prevailing. There was a piano, of course. There was a round table in the middle of the room, with a heavy, hideous plush cover; the said table was covered with trash of the meanest description—odd volumes of Tauchnitz novels with torn backs; a ragged archaic Baedeker’s ‘Central Italy and Rome’—for there are travellers who will take all the trouble necessary to get to a new country, and will then be too mean and too ignorant to buy themselves a new guide-book; a frightful blue-glass vase, filled with artificial flowers; a monstrosity in the shape of an inkstand (‘Does anyone ever write letters here?’ Minna wondered); and other decorative trifles of a like nature. The walls were hung with a series of the crudest chromo-lithographs of sentimental pictures—a simpering young lady in a crinoline and chignon lifting a bright green-upper skirt to show a dazzling white under one and ugly little black boots with elastic sides is being handed by an equally simpering young gentleman towards a close carriage, which looks much too small to contain her crinoline alone, not to speak of her own person and remaining garments, and those of the young gentleman. This fascinating work of art is labelled ‘I nuovi sposi.’ On the other side of a tarnished, distorting glass, which had once been a mirror, hung as a companion picture, and an encouragement to matrimony, the representation of a lovely being with an abnormally swan-like throat, and flowing robes and veil of black crape, pouring copious tears upon a little gravestone, with the perspective of which something had gone hopelessly wrong; she is surrounded by crosses, cypresses, and other accompaniments of a graveyard scene, and the exhilarating inscription of this work of art is ‘La Madre desolata.’

‘That is the high-art side of the room,’ said Hans, kindly explaining. ‘Art, love and grief, the piano, the “Sposi” and the desolate mother—you see the connection, I doubt not. Here is the frivolous, or society department.’ He pointed where a stove reared itself, where the sofas and easy-chairs, all more or less dingy-looking, congregated, and where, on the walls, was a great collection of photographic likenesses of ladies and gentlemen, in every variety of posture, size, and costume, but mostly, as here represented, uninteresting, to use the mildest term. In addition to these were hung up all kinds of rubbish in the shape of little fancy baskets, boxes with handles, trumpery ‘ornamental’ cases and bottles, and unclassable, unusable trash of every description. The wall-paper, against which were hung these gems of art and fancy, was of a brilliant yellow; the carpet, now faded, had once been dazzlingly, agonizingly variegated. The ruling motif, as it were, of the furniture colour was of a deep, full rose, with a suspicion of magenta in it. It had been also mercifully dimmed by time and having been sat upon by the boarders of many seasons.

Minna looked round this salon with a slow, scrutinizing, comprehensive glance, taking it all in, nodding her head mournfully now and then, as she recognised with experienced eye some decoration, some ornament, or some piece of furniture common to this class of establishment.

‘Yes,’ said Hans, laughing; ‘it is bad, I know; but it is Rome. Because she has been first in everything—art and beauty included, therefore—you know what I would say!’

‘Yes,’ Minna assented; ‘it is her curse now, of course.’

She seated herself in one of the dingy easy-chairs, Hans in another, and after they had been talking together for a little time they became aware of a series of lusty thumps and bangs, apparently on different doors, which knocks gradually approached nearer to where they were, till at last the door was flung open, and Ettore cried, much as ‘Ready’ is cried when the guard whistles and the train starts, ‘Lunch is ready,’ and disappeared.

In ten minutes the entire company then staying at Casa Dietrich had assembled in the dining-room, and were discussing their lunch, or colazione, and the day’s doings or the morrow’s doings, with a loud rattle of knives and forks, a clashing of plates and dishes, and a consumption of thin red wine such as was going on at that same hour in dozens of pensioni and hotels all over the great city.

There was nothing very remarkable about any of the boarders at Casa Dietrich, or if there were, their peculiarities were veiled by the absorbing interest of the moment. Hans Riemann received a good many nods and smiles of friendly greeting from the very mixed specimens of nationalities who dropped in. Some glances of inquiry and interest were bestowed upon his companion, but in the main everyone appeared thoroughly interested in his or her own business. Next to Minna, on her right, sat an intelligent-looking lady, with a clever face and white hair drawn very tightly back from her forehead and twisted into what Minna felt must be a painfully firm knob at the back. An English upper servant would have sniffed at her dress as being too ugly and badly made for anyone with a sense of self-respect to wear. Of course she soon revealed herself as a German, and one who could give a good account of herself in the matter of culture, no matter what her shortcomings as to dressmaking might be. Riemann sat on Minna’s left hand, and opposite to her was an empty place.

‘Well,’ said Minna to herself, ‘they are not distinguished-looking, I must say. Some of them are decidedly odd. Those Americans up at the end of the table are simply awful. The Italian men look a pretty decent sort. The Englishwoman down there at the other end of the table, with the red nose and the round hat and veil—unspeakable, quite. The old Scotchman and his lady-wife are an odd-looking couple; but I must say they don’t stare at one as if one were a wild beast, nor look as if they would take a week to make up their minds whether they should speak to one or not, as they certainly would have done at Mrs. Cartwright’s.—Am I making a long stay?’ she added, turning with a smile to the German lady, who had just asked her a question, and explaining her situation to her.

‘Ah, so!’ said the latter as if much impressed; and Minna, turning again to her plate, discovered that the empty seat opposite to her was just being occupied by its rightful owner. He was at one and the same time seating himself and looking with piercing earnestness at her, Minna Hastings. Her quick first glance at him showed her a man considerably above middle height, rather spare and muscular, age apparently fifty at least, hair beginning, but only just beginning, to be grizzled, eyes dark and brilliant, full of fire, and capable too of softness, a mobile mouth, concealed by a heavy dark moustache, a fine chin. It was in every respect a noble head. Every line of his figure and face betrayed an eager, restless, nervous temperament, force of intellect, force of will, while a certain perversity about the lines which came from the nose to the mouth, and a certain biting of the lips together, would seem to indicate powerful prejudices, strong passions. The whole aspect of the man was outside the common run; as he looked at her and she at him, Minna felt, without putting her feelings into words, that whatever the rest of the company might be, one member of it was beyond, perhaps above, the average. He gave her the impression of bringing a different atmosphere into the whole place. Almost before she had had time to form these conclusions, Hans Riemann, half rising and addressing the new-comer and Minna, formally presented him to her as Signor Giuseppe Oriole. As he rose again from his chair to make her a profound bow, Minna noticed how exceeding shabby was his dress of rusty black, the cloth worn to its foundation, pathetically poverty-stricken, and how spotlessly clean on the other hand was his white linen collar and shirt-front; he wore no cuffs. They were, as she knew with lightning-like swiftness of intuition, far too great an extravagance for everyday use.

She returned his bow and his greeting with a polite inclination of the head, and replied to him in his own language.

‘Ah,’ said he, with another of the piercing looks, ‘you speak Italian!’

‘Surely,’ said she, smiling. ‘I have lived eight years in Rome.’

‘Really,’ said he, and then, looking at Riemann, who had become rather red: ‘Where, then, is your friend, Riemann?’

‘The signora is my friend,’ said Hans, blushing more violently than before. ‘We are cousins.’

‘Ah!’ said Signor Oriole with a decidedly haughty accent; ‘you did not, then, tell me the truth. You said, “un mio amico.”’

Hans looked awkward, but not angry, and Signor Oriole, suddenly relaxing his severity, said:

‘Well, well; boys will play tricks on old men to the end of time.’

With that he fell to vigorously on a dish of buttered eggs, which the sentimental-looking Ettore now offered to him.

Minna was not particularly hungry. She leaned back in her chair and looked at the company, and held a little conversation with the German lady and a little with Hans, and in the intervals watched her opposite neighbour with a kind of fascination which annoyed herself—she did not know why. He did not address her again. His looks wandered, or, rather, darted, sharply in every direction. The plaintive Ettore came to him repeatedly, apparently for directions, which were given to him in a low tone but with considerable agitation of manner; his eyes flashed, his hands worked, his patience was evidently not of the most elastic kind. Minna remembered what Hans had said, laughing, about Signor Giuseppe—that he supposed he was the manager. Apparently his surmise was right enough. His thoughts were evidently very much engrossed with the serving of the repast, which was very Italian in character and very slow in process. There was something incongruous and absurd in the contrast between his appearance and his pursuit. She felt inclined to laugh. Then, all at once, his sharp ear caught the import of a discussion at some little distance from him, which was going on between an English girl and her Italian neighbour, about the enormities committed by Nero, and the burning of Rome in his reign. The English young lady, whose entire views on the subject were evidently derived from Baedeker and some extremely elementary guide to Roman history, was duly shocked at the monster’s wickedness. Her neighbour, a young Italian in training for an avvocate, or lawyer, was vague to the last degree on the subject. Had the Emperor Nero, then, committed so many atrocities? He did not know. He had seen Rossi act the part in a play—oh, a long, very long play of five acts, most tedious! Rossi was too old, too fat; he puffed, he grunted; impossible that any illusion could exist with such a figure acting the principal part. In this long dry play it seemed to him that Nero was a born coward, and there had also been in it a woman, a most wearisome woman, who shouted and scolded and threatened, and was hideously ugly to boot.

‘But that was a play; this is history,’ said the young lady.

‘Really! well, I do not know much history, sa!’ said the young man, who then owned that for his part he had never been inside the Colosseum, nor to the Palatine Hill, nor any of those tumble-down places. He preferred Ronzi and Singers’ restaurant, or that of the Milano in Monte Citorio.

‘Oh, signore!’ cried the young lady. ‘But you must have learnt at school how wicked Nero was—the Christians—why, he——’

‘Do not be too sure of the wickedness of Nero, signorina mia,’ broke in the voice of Signor Giuseppe. ‘Nero was an artist. Never forget that. To an artist, much may be forgiven. He rebuilt Rome, and left it far more beautiful than did Augustus, even after his great boast. His feeling for the beautiful was keen, strong, intense; in art, in music, in architecture, in sumptuous ideas, grandly carried out, he excelled. He was an artist. Yes, that was, in the main, the character of Nero.’

Utterly abashed, and incapable, with her mere smattering of the language, of replying to him, or dealing with this view of the question, the young girl became crimson and remained silent. Hans Riemann, good naturedly but mistakenly advancing to her rescue, observed that Nero must have been a rather terrific kind of artist.

‘Che!’ snapped Signor Giuseppe, in great excitement, while the long sinewy fingers of his left hand endeavoured, with the aid of a piece of bread, to chase a piece of meat on to the point of a knife which he held in his right. Then, with flashing eyes, he muttered, but not so low that Minna could not hear it all:

‘Dio mio! These English! These Americans! These wearisome girls, as ignorant as apes, who come and patronize us—patronize Rome! and give forth their idiotic sentiments on her monuments and heroes. Bah! ugh! It is too much—it is far too much! It turns one’s blood to gall.’

His angry passions had arisen. His colour had fled. His eyes flashed—his lips moved in whispers, inarticulate, of contempt and dislike. Minna, who was endowed with a strong sense of the ridiculous, felt the blood rush to her face in the strong effort she made to refrain from smiling. She felt that for some reason or other she would not for the world that Signor Giuseppe should see her smiling. Therefore, as a matter of course, he at once raised his eyes and fixed them full upon her face, just as the smile refused to be any longer utterly concealed, just as the recollection of his impassioned defence of Nero and his equally impassioned indictment of her younger countrywoman made the laughter bubble over, into her eyes and upon her mouth, whether she would or no. She felt as if she had been a schoolgirl caught laughing when she should have been respectfully listening to the professor’s lecture. The crimson tide mounted higher and higher—she found her situation embarrassing, and was enraged with herself for doing so. Relief appeared from an unexpected quarter. Ettore again came stealing softly round to Signor Oriole’s side, and whispered something in his ear.

‘Che diavolo!’ cried Signor Giuseppe, and this time the matter appeared to be one of such urgent importance that he sprang up, pushed his chair back with a loud rattle, and with a quick, eager step and rusty coat-tails flying behind him, followed Ettore round the table and out through a door.

‘Where has he gone?’ asked Minna of Hans, in a low voice. She felt almost hysterical in her effort not to laugh, not to betray how odd she found the whole situation, and the astonishing part of it was, to her, that the rest of the company sat so placidly in their places, engrossed in their talk and jokes, and seemed scarcely to have seen what had been going on in this particular corner.

‘To the kitchen,’ replied Hans, also betraying not the least surprise. ‘There is a new cook, the fifth in four months. He came yesterday, and he has probably made a frightful mess of something—tumbled the compôte into the fire, or ruined the vegetables, or something, who knows? I do not wish to conceal any of our shortcomings—and they are many—from you.’

‘Into the kitchen!’ repeated Minna. ‘But isn’t there a Signora Dietrich?’

‘Of course there is. But she and Fulvia, the bambina, are away just now.’

‘So this poor gentleman is facchino in ordinary, as well as manager,’ murmured Minna wonderingly. ‘What next?’

‘You’ve hit the right nail on the head when you say “this poor gentleman,”’ replied Hans in a rapid, discreetly low tone. ‘He’s a gentleman, and he’s poor, and——’

Here Signor Giuseppe reappeared, and went to his place, moving more calmly, perhaps, with a face white from inner excitement of some kind, probably painful. He seated himself in ominous silence. His lips moved a little, but no sound came from them. Once or twice he glanced, with eyes full of suppressed fire, towards the kitchen door. A great peace and silence now reigned in that region. Again no one seemed in the least struck by what had taken place. Again Minna felt a wild desire to burst into a peal of laughter, but happening just at that moment to glance towards Signor Giuseppe, she met his eyes fixed fully, and probably accidentally, on her face. Though he was looking at her, she did not feel as if he really saw her, and those eyes were full of such sadness, such despondency; over the whole face, still pale from recent excitement, there was a look of such resigned, all-enduring patience, that all her desire to laugh vanished away. Instead, she could have wept. She said nothing, but fixed her eyes firmly upon her plate, then, with an effort, turned to the German lady, and carried on a trifling conversation with her, until at last, to her intense relief, the company began to move, rising from their chairs and dispersing quickly.

‘I suppose you will want to go now, or very soon,’ said Hans Riemann to her.

‘Well, yes.’

‘Do you care to see the rooms, or not, after this specimen?’ he asked her in a low voice, with a half-laugh.

Minna paused perceptibly ere she replied. Should she come here or not? It was altogether very odd, and did not seem as if it would be very comfortable. Then she looked up, and saw that Signor Giuseppe was looking with the same piercing, almost suspicious, glance at her and Hans as they spoke together. She took her decision at once.

‘Yes, I think I will look at the rooms.’

‘Are you at liberty, Signor Giuseppe?’ asked Hans, in a matter-of-fact tone which jarred on Minna, though she felt it was ridiculous in her to think anything about it. After all, the man was the ‘manager,’ and was evidently heart and soul in his work.

‘At liberty for what?’ asked Signor Oriole, almost rudely.

‘Mrs. Hastings, you know, would like to see the rooms here, if you will kindly show her what you have disengaged.’

‘Ah, yes, yes!’ he said, as if remembering himself. Then, with a look upon his face expressive of extreme ill-temper, and dislike of everyone and everything in general, he said coldly:

‘This way, signora, if you will favour me so far.’

CHAPTER III.

In a week from that day Minna Hastings left her lodgings and removed to Casa Dietrich. She had stored her superfluous furniture in her studio and the sitting-room belonging to it, and had taken possession of two of the best rooms at Casa Dietrich, on the express understanding that the arrangement was a temporary one, to be terminated by a week’s notice on either side. She was persuaded that she would find it very uncomfortable at the establishment in Piazza Bocca della Verità, and that she should not stay there a day longer than was necessary for her to find another private apartment which should suit her thoroughly. She told her cousin Hans so, and he only laughed and hoped she might be ‘agreeably disappointed.’

As a matter of fact, at the end of that week, when she had been at considerable trouble in settling herself into her rooms, had made them look homelike and comfortable, and had begun to fall into the routine of the house, she felt very unwilling to begin the onerous work of searching for an apartment. Minna was naturally of a somewhat indolent temperament. When roused or interested she was capable both of vigorous thought and vigorous action, but she was not very easy to be roused. She found Casa Dietrich amusing—at first, mildly so; then more strongly fascinating and she could always, if amusement began to pass subtly into ennui, leave the general company and retire to the privacy of her own room, and as she was also much at her studio, she had begun already to think that it might not be a bad plan to remain all the winter where she was. So she appeared pretty regularly at the principal meal—dinner—breakfasting in her own room, and often lunching in her studio; and from her place at table in the evening she surveyed the scene with a placid, good-humoured, impersonal kind of amusement, which showed in her face more perhaps than she was aware, and produced upon one or two persons an effect of which she was utterly unconscious.

Signora Dietrich, with her daughter, continued to be away, visiting relations of her late husband at Milan. She was seldom mentioned, but there was a young Italian man who sometimes asked if good news had been received of la signorina Fulvia.

When Minna had studied the entire company of the guests, and then turned to the sole representative of the house itself, if representative he were, who was not even a relation, she decided that he was quite the most interesting person under that roof, the person whose acquaintance was assuredly best worth having—and this even after the wretched contretemps (whether his fault or hers she never could decide) which had taken place on her arrival at the house.

She had come, soon after lunch one day, with a great deal of luggage: two or three large trunks, and the usual accompaniment of travelling-bags, hold-alls, umbrellas, sunshades, and cloaks. She was received on the threshold by Signor Oriole, who opened the door wide, as wide as it would go, and, smiling upon her, bade her welcome. He was attired, as she perceived, in the same rusty black as on the day she had first seen him; there was ever about him the same appearance of a gentleman, and the bow he made her was a courtly one. All this Minna saw vaguely, but her thoughts were taken up with her luggage, which was being borne upstairs by two stout facchini. She had not the faintest idea that Signor Giuseppe attached any importance to her coming, and she replied to his greeting with a comprehensive, vague kind of bow, and an absent expression, while she said quickly:

‘Oh, will you tell them into which room to put the luggage? It must all go into the bedroom for the present, and I will decide afterwards what to do with it.’

So engrossed was she with this important question, that she did not clearly see—though she had a general impression to that effect—the sudden violent change which came over Signor Giuseppe’s countenance. The smile—the genial smile of welcome—faded from it; it flushed angrily. His figure became stiff and rigid. Without bestowing another look on Minna, he cried out in a sharp harsh tone:

‘Ettore!’

Ettore quickly appeared, running and attentive, in answer to this summons. Signor Giuseppe waved his hand with an imperial gesture towards the group near the door—the lady, the luggage, the facchini—and in a commanding tone said:

‘Send the people here to take the orders of the signora about her luggage. At once, do you hear?—at once!’ His voice trembled with excitement.

‘Si, signore,’ replied the imperturbable one, with a glance from his liquid eyes towards the arrival. ‘At once,’ he added, after a thoughtful pause of some duration.

Before he could persuade himself to go and summon ‘the people,’ so magnificently spoken of, and who consisted of a porter, a kitchen boy, and a housemaid, Signor Giuseppe, flashing one fiery, withering look towards Minna, and with a little bend of the head, as stiff and scornful as his first had been gracious and benignant, had turned on his heel and was gone. She saw his figure disappearing, head erect, shoulders squared, rusty coat-tails flying behind him. But she was too much concerned about the disposition of her luggage to pay much heed to it all. At last everything was safely placed, and she, once in her rooms, did not emerge from them again till Ettore had thumped upon her door with the brief announcement ‘Pronto,’ much past the time at which she had been told dinner was served.

When she went into the dining-room, she found her place to be, as before, between Hans Riemann and the German lady, and opposite Signor Giuseppe. She made a general bow to the company as she took her place, and Signor Giuseppe was included in that bow. The merest movement of his head returned her greeting, and as he ostentatiously went out of his way not to speak to her during the entire repast, she decided that he was a very rude person, and a foolish one to boot, since such treatment was not exactly calculated to attract visitors to the house which was under his management. It did not occur to her for a moment to trouble herself, or to feel concerned about it. She conversed with her neighbours on either hand, and saw incidentally that the same pantomime went on between Signor Giuseppe and Ettore which she had observed when she had lunched there a week before. Had she not been an old Roman, and accustomed to Italian ways, she might have found the whole repast a somewhat extraordinary affair, and she noticed that some inexperienced English and American visitors had hard work not to break into loud exclamations over the food which was offered to them, and the profuse use of the toothpick, and the degagés attitudes practised by the Italian part of the company.

There was first of all a soup, of a somewhat thin and watery consistency. This was followed by some roast meat, surrounded by chopped-up vegetables of different kinds—finocchi, little hard potatoes and small onions—savoury, perhaps, but scarcely tempting to those accustomed to other things. It disappeared quickly, nevertheless. The third course was tiny birds dexterously chopped in halves, very hard, very spare in proportions, bearing, in fact, a suspicious likeness to starving sparrows, caught unawares and sacrificed to make a feast for Lucullus. Salad accompanied this dish. After it had been eaten a long pause followed, during which the members of the company entertained each other with conversation—conversation of a polyglot description. The Americans, with nasal, unabashed and unabashable distinctness, gave their views on the subject of Italy in general and the Eternal City in particular. Rome did not please them—that particular set of them—and they said so with characteristic courage. They had been there nearly three weeks, and they guessed they were almost through now, and should be ready to go in a few days. The antiquities were interesting, they admitted, but the streets would be a disgrace to the latest Western city in America; and the beggars were a scourge. The ancient Roman didn’t know everything, and, for their part, they thought Canova’s statue of the Princess Pauline Borghese and the Carlo Dolcis in one or two of the picture-galleries were just lovely—sweet, they were; and they were going to take home copies of several of them.

‘Canova’s things,’ said one portly matron, ‘were beautiful—so soft; they couldn’t be softer if they were cut out of butter or blanc-mange.’

‘Butter!’ murmured Hans Riemann, in an ecstasy; ‘dear woman, I thank thee for that epithet! “The Butterman.” It supplies a long-felt want in my vocabulary—a descriptive epithet for Canova. Do you call this feast of reason nothing, Minna?’

‘I call it delightful,’ said Minna, whose eyes were brimming over with laughter, and her cup of pleasure was now filled to the brim by the spectacle of an American citizen refusing butter to his cheese, remarking with closed eyes and an ineffable expression to his neighbour:

‘Butter, sir; no. I never touch butter outside Philadelphia.’

While this discourse was going on in a loud voice at the other end of the table, an English party at the other extremity of it were discreetly muttering their commonplaces beneath their breath. When any of their remarks did rise to the surface, they were usually to the effect that they thought the Pope ought to be made to show himself more to the people; they believed they would have to go away without seeing him at all. The Queen they had seen that afternoon driving on the Pincio—such shabby liveries, such a poor turn-out altogether! Why, an English squire would be ashamed—and so forth. Some Germans, in another quarter, were exhausting themselves in delighted recollections of what they had seen. As usual, they were far more thoroughly instructed than either the English or the Americans of the same class in life, and had gone about their sight-seeing in a methodical, systematic manner worthy of all praise. They knew what they had seen. They knew what they wanted to see. They were full of statistics and gutturals and enthusiasm; they discussed ‘der Nero,’ ‘der August,’ and ‘der Hadrian’ with solid good sense and deep interest, the while they valiantly struggled with the tough roast-beef, and devoured bones and all the hapless sparrow-like creatures which have been already described. The Italians, who were exclusively men, some of them youths in business houses or professional offices, and one or two older ones, appeared to be in their way decent fellows enough. They spoke with the rapidity of lightning; their dark eyes gleamed and their white teeth flashed. They were full of cortesia, and at the same time brimming over with amusement and a keen sense of the ridiculous. Nothing that was absurd in the rest of the company escaped the piercing eyes of these young men.

Minna, who understood all about it, and was well acquainted with the Italian quickness at grasping all that went on around them, admired more than ever their presence of mind and unvarying politeness to those who caused them so much amusement. With patient, polite gravity they listened to the well-meant efforts of some English and Germans to converse with them in their own language; nothing but an irrepressible gleam in their eyes betrayed that they were secretly convulsed with laughter at some of the wild mistakes and extraordinary turns of expression of their interlocutors.

‘I dare say,’ thought Minna to herself, ‘that some of those stupid-looking English and Germans, and those self-conceited Americans, are thinking to themselves that “these foreigners” are a set of chattering, grinning apes; I have so often heard them express that discriminating opinion. Little do they think that to the apes they appear more like clumsy clowns in a pantomime than anything else.’

There was only one Italian member of the company who seemed more irritated than amused at the proceedings, and that member was, of course, Signor Giuseppe, who, in a very bad temper, listened nevertheless with avidity to what was going on around him, and, though understanding very little English, or perhaps because he understood very little English, still grasped enough of what was going on to whet his impatience and anger, and who kept muttering uncomplimentary remarks in idiomatic Roman to a young Italian who sat at his right hand. One of these remarks came clearly to Minna’s ears.

‘Listen to that English girl,’ hissed Signor Giuseppe, in a fury, into his neighbour’s ear, ‘with her grécié. Why do English people never succeed in pronouncing grazie as it ought to be spoken? Grécié, grécié, between their clipped-in lips, as if they were afraid that something bad would happen if they let the sound flow out. What a language is theirs!—and they have voices, too, from whose sound cats would fly in terror.’

Minna heard it all, and, resolved to bring him to book, fixed her eyes calmly upon his face, and waited till he should look at her, as she was convinced he would sooner or later. His neighbour laughed a little, in some embarrassment, with a side-glance at Minna, whose blonde beauty he admired extremely. He fully agreed with all that Signor Giuseppe had said, and often had hard work himself not to laugh at that English grécié, but he would have preferred to reserve the expression of his amusement till later, when he could have made a good story of it at the Circolo, and sent half a dozen fellows into fits of laughter by his clever mimicry of the foreigners’ pronunciation of that important little word.

Just then Signor Giuseppe lifted his head, and his eyes fell full upon Minna’s face. He still looked angry and perturbed, but embarrassed, repentant—not a jot.

She smiled, and, to let him know she had heard his complimentary speech, said:

‘Grazie, signore.’

He reddened, looked angrily at her, and said ill-temperedly, and with a shrug expressive of whole volumes of comments on the situation:

‘Già! You, signora, speak Italian like a Roman. What can I say more? That very fact must make you aware of the shortcomings of most of your compatriots in that respect.’

‘At least, they try to learn to speak your beautiful language with their cat-like voices, poor things!’ said Minna quietly, but with an ambiguous smile, all of which evidently irritated this very irritable gentleman almost to madness. What might have happened next, in the wordy war, who shall say?

At that moment Ettore, consciously or unconsciously, came to the rescue, by appearing with the dish for which they had been waiting so long—the most important dish of the feast, at any rate to a true Italian—the sweet, the dolce.

‘May it sweeten some of our tempers!’ thought Minna to herself, with a furtive smile, as she saw it borne round, and all eyes anxiously fixed upon it. Unfortunately for her, it was a dish of which she had never been able to overcome her dislike—a kind of heavy pastry in the shape of a great tart, filled with an equally heavy, rich, creamy mixture, yellow in colour, and containing chopped-up almonds, sweet to sickliness.

It went its round, and met with various receptions as it slowly proceeded. By the Italians it was greeted with acclamation, with gleaming eyes, and only half-suppressed murmurs of delighted appreciation; by the English with some distrust. They looked at it suspiciously; they paused, they hesitated; finally, they cut off a small piece and put it on their plates with an expression which said plainly:

‘I don’t know what you are, but I’m hungry, and I’m going to try you, at any rate.’

It had a warmer welcome from the Americans—themselves ardent lovers of ‘candies’ and pastries. The Germans took it as a matter of course—whether they liked it or not, it was part of the repast, which would have to be paid for; and a repast was needed, and must be fully discussed, in order that they might have strength for the next day’s work. They ate it, and said nothing. When it was offered to Minna, she simply refused it, and thought no more about it. She had seen it before; she had tried it, and she disliked it. In a few moments a voice from the other side of the table accosted her:

‘Signora!’

She looked up. The dish was now being handed to Signor Giuseppe. His right hand held a knife suspended over it; his eyes were fixed inquiringly upon Minna.

‘Can I not persuade you to change your mind?’ he said with dignified, old-fashioned courtesy; ‘or do you dislike sweets?’

‘I do not like that sweet, signore,’ she replied, with an unguarded candour for which a moment afterwards she could have bitten out her tongue.

‘You do not like this sweet?’ he echoed, plunging the knife into it, and cutting off an inordinately large slice, as if to show how right-minded persons prized it. ‘Yet it is a distinctly Roman plat. It is celebrated.’

‘I know,’ said Minna apologetically. ‘I am very sorry. I do not like it, and never eat it.’

‘Dio mio!’ ejaculated Giuseppe, with another shrug, as he conveyed the huge cutlet of paste and cream to his own plate with a look of displeasure.

‘Another piece of English stupidity,’ observed Minna, smiling again.

But the dolce seemed to have the wished-for effect on Signor Giuseppe’s humour. He smiled benevolently, shook his head, and responded:

‘Ah yes, there are so many of them! What is one amongst the rest?’

It was, intrinsically considered, an excessively rude remark, but Minna felt it implied that her want of taste and Englishness were pardoned, and, strange to say, the conviction was quite soothing to her.

Later in the evening she sat in the room she had made into a sitting-room talking to Hans Riemann, whom she had invited in to hang up some little pictures for her.

‘Hans,’ she asked suddenly, ‘what is Signor Giuseppe? Has he a business outside, or does he devote his whole time to the management of this extraordinary establishment?’

‘Oh, he has a place in some lawyer’s office I believe—something very small! He gets about eighty pounds a year from it, all told, I fancy. The hours are not long, and that gives him leisure to boss this concern, do you see.’

‘Oh ... well, it seems odd to me! I am sure he is not a stupid man——’

‘Stupid? I should rather think not,’ cried Hans; ‘the very reverse. There’s hardly a thing you can mention that old Giuseppe can’t tell you something about: art, architecture, archæology, Church history, and other history. Politics, philosophy, religion—he has studied them all. Yes, he’s a first-rate all-round man is Giuseppe. If you ever want to know anything about the ruins, you know, or the excavations—anything about any of these old mosaics or wall-paintings, or about mythology, or about Roman history, from the time of Romulus and Remus, or whatever the creatures were, downwards, go to Signor Oriole and he’ll tell you. I once went with him, I and another fellow, to the Palatine Hill, and I can tell you I never heard anything so interesting in my life. He made it all live again, beginning with those old walls, don’t you know—those made of the big blocks of tufa when Rome was on the top of the Palatine and nowhere else, and he pointed to Villa Mills and shook his finger at it and said he had seen things beneath the convent which would have raised ghosts—awful ghosts—before the eyes of any but a set of cabbage-headed nuns: he swore he had seen the altar of the Pelasgic Roma Quadrata there. He took us round the whole thing—what one is allowed to see of it. It lasted for hours. We didn’t get back to lunch; we never missed it,’ said Hans in an almost awestruck tone, and, indeed, the fact was one worthy to be recorded in letters of gold. ‘All through those palaces he took us, and into Livia’s house and all the rest of it, and we followed him like lambs. I can tell you, if they had made our Roman history as interesting as that when we were at school I should have known more than I do now.’

‘And do you think Signor Oriole’s history was made very interesting for him when he was at school?’ asked Minna with a touch of malice.

‘Now, Minna, that’s too bad of you! Am I not just trying to show that he’s a genius and not an ordinary man? I believe he knows just as much about it as any of these celebrated fellows, Lanciani or Roissieof, or any of them. He’s immensely learned,’ Hans went on with youthful enthusiasm. ‘He can always tell me everything I want to know.’

‘An infallible gauge to the depths of his learning,’ murmured Minna to herself.

Hans went on:

‘He is a republican, you know, at heart. He has fought for his country. He helped to plant the tricolour on Castel Sant’Angelo. He was in it on that twentieth day of September. Yes, he has fought in the red shirt. He has given up all he had. He comes of an awfully good Southern Italian family with a title, duke or prince, but he won’t use it, and gets very angry if anyone speaks to him about it. Says he is plain citizen Giuseppe Oriole, and basta cosi! He’s a gentleman is Giuseppe, if ever there was one.’

‘Then why does he waste his time and his powers and his brains and irritate himself to madness, as I can see he does, by undertaking the petty cares of the management of a second-class pensione in Rome—for that’s what it is, when all is said and done. For a small salary a dozen men could be found to do it, and to do it better than he does. Does Signora Dietrich pay him?’ she added suddenly.

Hans laughed, somewhat uncomfortably.

‘Pay him!’ he ejaculated; ‘not she. He does it to save her from having to pay someone else, because she is poor and extravagant, and he is—well, he is a very old and intimate friend of hers,’ he concluded lamely.

There was a pause; then Minna said, in the tone of one to whom a single word has cleared up a mystery.

‘Oh, I see ... and Signora Dietrich—what is she like?’

‘I decline to attempt any description of Signora Dietrich,’ replied Hans. ‘I suppose she will be home before long, and then you can judge for yourself.’

‘I don’t want a description,’ said Minna resolutely. ‘I only want a word. Tell me—yes or no—do you like her?’

‘No,’ replied Hans.

‘Ah!’ said Minna, slowly moving her head once or twice, and then, in a different tone, as of one who would say ‘Let this be forgotten,’ she said, pointing to the wall: ‘That print of the “Gioconda” does not hang quite straight; one touch to the left will make it right, if you don’t mind.’

Hans rose to fulfil her behest, and, having put the picture straight, observed that he had an appointment at Ronzi’s with two other fellows, and wished her good-night. Perhaps he had quite forgotten, as Minna assuredly had, that Signora Dietrich was not alone in her absence. Her daughter Fulvia was with her.

CHAPTER IV.

One morning Minna, who breakfasted in her own room, having finished sooner than usual, in consequence of the premature arrival of Arcangela, the housemaid, with the meal, found herself also ready to go out earlier than was her wont. She put on her outdoor things and went towards the dining-room to see if perchance a young American girl, to whom she had taken something of a liking, should be already there. It was Friday, and she had promised the girl to drive with her some fine Friday or Monday afternoon in Doria Pamfili Gardens. She thought she might catch her at breakfast, and arrange the matter before going out.

She was about to enter the room, when the scene which was going on there arrested her attention. She paused, and stood spellbound on the threshold, watching it.

Several of the visitors of Casa Dietrich were seated at the table, either breakfasting or waiting till their breakfasts should be ready. Some were reading newspapers, some had letters, some were in conversation. At the end of the table nearest the door were seated a pair who, having been there a week, were this morning going away. They had been at Rome before, and had merely been here this time, they said, to refresh their memories. They were Scottish, sententious, conventional and orthodox. The husband was elderly—verging on old—with a queer, ruddy apple kind of face, surrounded with a bristly little white beard, which made a sort of frame for it. His nose was red at the tip, and his excessively near-sighted light-blue eyes looked weak and watery. He somewhat resembled some aged and faithful Highland retainer as seen on the stage; and one felt rather surprised than otherwise to find, when he rose up, that he was clad, not in kilt and sporran, but in a pair of black-and-white check trousers.

His lady-wife was more patriotic in her garb, and wore a gown of some bright tartan, of rather a large pattern. A blue ribbon was tied round her neck, and in her light hair—she was much younger than her spouse—was always to be seen a pin of great dimensions, ever stuck into the selfsame coil of the selfsame plait, and surmounted by one large and flawless imitation pearl. Hans Riemann had dubbed her ‘the Scotch Pearl’ within five minutes of first seeing her. The name by which the couple was known to the world at large was Macdougall.

There they sat, having finished their meal, and held in conversation or discussion no less a person than Signor Oriole. His back was turned towards Minna, but she saw from his shoulders that he was vexed, rasped, disgusted. His rusty frock-coat drooped mournfully towards his knees; his head was thrown back. While he listened and answered, he was engaged, as Minna saw with a sudden feeling of painful surprise, in gathering together their cups and saucers, their plates and egg-cups, and putting them on to a tray which stood in front of him. The husband of the Scotch Pearl seldom interfered in his wife’s arrangements—it was she who led the conversation, in something which, as Minna gathered, was intended for French.

‘Nous partongs aujordwee,’ she remarked to Giuseppe, folding her arms and looking at him, while the pearl gleamed from the plaits of auburn. ‘Angsee nous voulongs avwor notter congt. Est-il prête?’

‘Le voici, madame,’ replied Giuseppe, with the utmost promptitude, producing an envelope from his pocket.

‘Ow! Mercy!’ said the Pearl, somewhat taken aback by this readiness of retort. ‘Laisong nous vawr,’ she added, opening it, and perusing the items, carefully checking them off with her fingers.

Signor Giuseppe’s long thin fingers were busy, as Minna saw, among the plates and dishes. She instinctively drew a little back, but interest and curiosity tied her to the spot. She knew that he was writhing under the infliction. Wonderful to relate, the Pearl had no exception to take to any of the details of her bill.

‘Wee,’ she remarked. ‘C’est jooste. My dear, have you your purse? I want a hundred and twenty lire.’ Then, turning once more to Giuseppe, with affable condescension: ‘Nous partongs a ongze oor. Voulez-vous commingday oon voitoor poor nous, at ayay soing que tous les malles sont ong bah de bonne oor.’

‘Non, madame, ce n’est pas mon métier a moi de commander des voitures pour les voyageurs. Vous pouvez vous addresser au facchino,’ was the reply, in a voice quivering with suppressed fury.

‘Commong?’ asked the lady inquiringly, not understanding this rapid flow of words and at the same time she handed him notes for the hundred and twenty lire.

‘Merci,’ said he with a haughty bow, as he swept the last piece of crockery on to the tray with a trembling hand, and added: ‘I will at once give you the receipt.’

Leaving the tray on the table for Ettore to remove, he came out into the hall, where pen and ink were always to be found. Minna made a hasty movement to go away, but it was too late. Signor Giuseppe’s movements were not slow. He was out of the room and confronting her in an instant. For one or two seconds they faced each other, Minna wishing that the ground would open beneath her and swallow her up, Signor Giuseppe very pale and very erect. At last he said in a low voice:

‘Signora.’

‘Signore,’ she began, but he interrupted her, saying in an icy voice:

‘You are earlier than usual this morning. Can I do anything for you?’

‘I—I wonder if Miss Scotson is there,’ said Minna confusedly, as with a great effort she walked past him into the dining-room and looked round.

Miss Scotson was not there, and Minna had lost all desire to speak to her. Shaking her head, she came out of the room, giving an embarrassed, timid glance to where at one side of the hall Signor Giuseppe was writing out the receipt for the Scotch Pearl and her husband. She longed to speak to him, but dared not be the first; he took absolutely no notice of her as she went rapidly away out of the hall door, down the steps and out, in the direction of her studio, but almost unconscious of what she was doing.

‘Why did I go? What a fool I was! Why did I stand by the door when I saw him there?... But why should it matter? If he can do the work of a waiter before half a dozen others, why cannot he do it before me?’

She reached her studio, thus pondering, and tried to forget it all in her work.

This was destined to be a day of contretemps. She returned to Casa Dietrich for lunch, having an appointment in the middle of the afternoon. At the meal Signor Giuseppe sat opposite to her as usual, but did not notice her in any way, for which grace she was devoutly thankful. The lunch went off peacefully enough. Ettore appeared to be on his better behaviour, and less than an hour was consumed in the entertainment.

Minna’s engagement that afternoon was at a reception given by her old friend, Mrs. Charrington, a reception from which she dared not absent herself, though not specially anxious to go there or anywhere. She knew that some fifty or sixty guests had been invited, and that she must appear more or less en grande tenue. She dressed herself therefore with some care, and, a little after four, came from her room looking very handsome and very attractive in a costume of gray silk and brown fur. She was just throwing her fur cloak over her arm, knowing she would want it as she drove to her friend’s house; and thus arrayed, she went down a short passage which led into a long narrow kind of ante-room, through which she had to pass to reach the entrance hall. No sooner had she entered the ante-room than she saw that her ill-luck was pursuing her. In the room were two persons in earnest, yea, passionate discussion or dispute—Signor Giuseppe and Ettore. The subject of their discourse was the week’s wash of household linen, which lay in piles, neatly folded and fresh from the hands of the laundress, on the tables, on the chairs, on the floor, and in every direction around them. Signor Giuseppe held a long piece of paper covered with figures. He had been reading out the list of the numbers of each article, and it was Ettore’s duty to count them; to say giusto if they were right, and non c’è if any of them were missing. The point in question now was that some dinner-napkins were wanting, which, Ettore vowed, could never have been sent to the wash at all, for that the woman who did the washing was a very honest, upright woman, and, if they were not there, it was an indisputable fact that they never had been there, let them stand on the list as much as Signor Giuseppe or anyone else pleased.

‘You rascal!’ Giuseppe had just cried passionately. ‘Do you mean to tell me I am a liar?’

The reply was a shrug expressing volumes.

‘Look again!’ ejaculated the irate gentleman. ‘Here are twenty-four table-napkins on the list, and only twenty are to be found. Count carefully. If they are not there, I will myself go and threaten the wretched creature with the Questura and an exposure of her dishonesty. Do you imagine I will let Signora Dietrich be thus plundered and not lift a finger in her defence?’

Very unwillingly Ettore began his search all over again, and Giuseppe, furious with his slowness, cast aside the list, and with his nervous fingers turned over the things and began to help him. Minna was sorely embarrassed. This was her only way of exit. She must either steal back to her room and give up her party—for this was a business which would not be over in five minutes—or she must brave the worst, walk through the room, and take what came.

‘What a simpleton I am!’ she told herself. ‘I may turn my whole life upside down if I am to be always thinking of things like this. I will go straight through to the hall.’

She advanced with a faint hope of being able to slip unobserved past the busy Signor Giuseppe—a vain aspiration. Whether he heard her step or felt her presence, who shall say? He turned sharp upon her just as she had come up to where he was, and stood there, looking angry and excited, with a red colour in his cheeks. It was impossible to quite ignore the situation—at least, for Minna it was. She forced an embarrassed smile, and observed:

‘I see you are very busy.’

‘Yes,’ replied Signor Giuseppe with a horrid sneering laugh, as he eyed her over from head to foot, ‘I am. This is my daily work. Yours, I see, permits of more elegant arrangements in every way.’ He bowed to her deeply, mockingly, and as she still hesitated, he added in the same nasal sneering tone: ‘Gentilissima signora, pardon me if I remind you that the time of the working man is precious, and our business unfortunately takes up a good deal of room.’

She found absolutely nothing to say in reply to this. She saw how angry he was. The veins on his forehead swelled, his eyes flashed, his fingers worked. With a bow and a troubled look she passed out of the room and into the hall. Seated in a little open carriage into which she had stepped, and driving towards Mrs. Charrington’s house, she found she was shaking with excitement, vexed and perturbed to her inmost being.

‘I shall have to leave this place,’ she told herself. ‘It is an impossible situation, and cannot continue. I am not going to have my comfort ruined by a touchy man who chooses to set some perfectly imaginary value on my opinion, and who is himself nothing to me—less than nothing to me. I must go. What an unlucky moment that was in which Signora Vincenzini came to me to tell me she was leaving Rome! I felt at the time that it was the beginning of troubles, and so it was.’

She looked straight before her as they drove to one of the most fashionable streets in a new quarter of the Quirinal, where her friend lived. On setting off she had felt very angry with Signor Giuseppe for annoying her by his evident vexation every time she saw him in a position derogatory to his dignity.

‘It is senseless—so unreasonable,’ she said to herself. ‘It has to be; I suppose he has chosen that it shall be so; and he ought to accept the situation that he has created for himself. Anyone can see—at least, I can—that he is a gentleman, and that this is a most unsuitable occupation for him, but wouldn’t he be still more of a gentleman if he took it quietly—dignified the office he has to fill instead of letting its unpleasantnesses spoil his temper and make him look ridiculous? An Englishman and English gentleman would do that. Of course he ought to do it.’

But before she had arrived at her destination her thoughts had taken another turn. She was no stranger in this land; she knew perfectly well the passionate eagerness and excitability of these children of the South; it was one of the traits which had endeared them to her. And she knew that for all his undignified, unguarded, outspoken rebellion against his position, Signor Oriole was none the less a gentleman, and one of high degree. She knew, too, down in her secret heart, that his uncontrollable vexation when she found him as to-day she had found him, engaged in sordid, menial offices, arose from the fact that in his eyes she was something above and beyond the herd of guests who filled the pensione, and as to whose coming and going, seeing or not seeing, commenting or not, upon his position, he was haughtily and superbly indifferent.

She did not feel sure whether she was most pleased or most annoyed at this fact; she knew it was a fact, and while she was trying to decide what was her opinion upon it, her carriage stopped at the door of Mrs. Charrington’s apartment. She dismissed it and went upstairs. In two minutes she found herself in one of her friend’s lovely drawing-rooms, which were filled with a dainty, perfumed, well-dressed crowd of different nationalities. There were pretty girls, elegant women, and a sprinkling of men of the most correct and irreproachable manner and appearance. There were also a moderately well-developed ‘lion’ or two, male and female, roaring just now as gently as any sucking-dove. The trumpet tones of the American contingent were not wanting to complete this specimen of the Englishwoman abroad and at home. Most of the company were talking, laughing, and assiduously handing to each other and consuming tea, cake, and liqueurs, discussing the last star at the theatre or opera, the last scandal or gossip about the English or American colony at Rome, the last novel; in a corner were two or three who combined with fashion a passion for archæology, the last discovery, the last fragment of a statue which had been unearthed in any of the excavations, the possibility of more such discoveries on the Palatine—if only one could get under the foundations of Villa Mills, so jealously guarded by its nuns, what might not be found there? And so forth. The winter daylight was almost over, the curtains had been drawn, the lamps lighted. Soft rose-coloured or tender yellow silk shades toned everything down, and made a kind of dreamland of the rooms with their costly furniture and many treasures of art—with their soft carpets, their rich rugs, and abundance of modern comforts.

Minna leaned back in the corner of a sofa, near a small table on which stood one of these rose-shaded lamps. She had drunk her tea and was idly holding the cup in her hand, her eyes fixed on the little drop which remained at the bottom of it. She had been conversing for a short time with a funny-looking little Scotch monsignore, who figured largely at gatherings of this description, and of whom she was not particularly fond. He had just removed his dapper little figure and blonde face with its pink cheeks to the vicinity of a tall, handsome English girl, who was more disposed than Minna to be gracious to him. Minna, as she sat there, seemed to see Monsignore Macpherson’s figure fade away, and be all at once replaced by another, which rose from the ground or appeared in the air, forming itself gradually before her mental vision: a finely-set head, and a countenance at once pale and bronzed, eyes that flashed, lips that could be eloquent, nervously-moving white hands, and a very shabby suit of clothes and rusty black coat.

‘What was he like before—when he was young? How did he ever come to be in this pitiful condition? Surely no man with any will or spirit need have drifted into such a state! There must have been a great weakness somewhere, I am certain, which he now recognises. He knows it is his own fault, and that is what makes him so abnormally irritable; yes, abnormally, even for an irritable Italian, and——’

‘Minna Hastings, I have not been able to get a word with you until this moment,’ said a clear, decided voice just at her elbow.

At the same moment, a white hand, on which flashed many rings, was laid on her wrist, and Mrs. Charrington, in a billow of silk and lace, sat down beside her. Minna sighed and looked up.

‘How could I expect to be distinguished above other women?’ she asked, forcing a smile. ‘When you have fifty or sixty people to attend to some must come short.’

‘Well, you see, I do my possible—and I have been well assisted by my niece there, that pretty little thing with the yellow hair and forget-me-not eyes. She has turned the head of every Italian man in the room. She is going to spend the winter with me.’

‘Is she?’ said Minna vaguely.

Her hostess noticed her want of interest, but did not care just then to remark upon it, so she proceeded:

‘Having spoken to everyone, I may now rest myself for a few minutes beside you. You used to be the embodiment of rest and tranquillity. What is this I hear about your having left your apartment?’

‘It is quite true. I left it because I had to. I was very much annoyed about it. After revelling for so long in the comforts provided by Signora Vincenzini, it is not easy to reconcile one’s self to anything less.’

‘No, of course. And where are you now? Stay, I remember your note was dated Piazza Bocca della Verità. I never heard of any place there. What is it? A hotel, an apartment—what?’

‘What my cousin Hans, who introduced me to it, calls diggings,’ said Minna, with a laugh not altogether unconstrained.

It was one thing to act on impulse, and go, chaperoned as it were by Hans Riemann, to Casa Dietrich, and make believe that she enjoyed the flavour of Bohemianism there; it was quite another to give a description of the place—a description which should sound in any way credible or suitable to this keen-eyed woman of the world, who, however much she might in her own heart detest conventionality, nevertheless knew that it was the price which had to be paid for the enjoyment of a certain position and consideration in the world, and who did not mean to sacrifice that position and all its good things, let the price be twice as heavy.

‘Diggings—a pensione, I suppose you mean? Does Riemann live there? I always address to his studio; there he is, by the way, talking to Kitty. I thought I knew of all the pensioni in Rome which have any pretensions to position—unhappily for me,’ said Mrs. Charrington. ‘Perhaps it is a new place. There’s ample scope for a good new pensione in Rome.’

‘Oh no, it is quite old, and very shabby and second-class. Hans does live there, and I’m only staying till I find an apartment to suit me. I am difficult to please,’ said Minna briskly. ‘You would be horror-struck, I dare say, at some of the doings.... And, then, I am so much at my studio,’ she added, with forced indifference.

‘Yes; are you busy just now?’ asked Mrs. Charrington, fixing her critical hazel eyes upon Minna’s face and observing her attentively.

‘Yes—no—that is, I ought to be. I keep trying. Oh, you know, Mary, how wretched I become when I get to a certain point in my work—always! I begin with such hope, thinking that I have really, at last, hit upon an idea that someone else has not had—and had in a better shape—before. And then, some fine day, I walk into the Vatican or the Campidoglio and look at things, and it is all over.’

‘Is this all over, then?’

‘Not yet—no.’

‘Then it can hardly be that which worries you.’

‘Worries me? I am not worried,’ said Minna hastily. ‘Why, do I look worried?’

‘I said worried for want of a better name. You don’t look like yourself. From what you say of your pensione I should imagine that you don’t get proper food at this precious establishment, and that it is beginning to tell upon you.’

‘Oh, what nonsense!’ began Minna, when two guests, coming up, began a profuse leave-taking.

Mrs. Charrington turned to them; she was quickly surrounded by other people. Minna, she knew not why, breathed more freely, and presently she also took her leave.

‘I am coming to see you soon,’ said Mrs. Charrington. ‘Must I come to your studio or to Bocca della Verità?’

‘Come to whichever I am most likely to be found at at the time,’ said Minna composedly.

‘Good; I shall look you up some day soon.’

She nodded. Minna went downstairs and walked till she met an open carriage.

Rome was just beginning to spend the evening; it would continue at that occupation till the small hours of the morning. The streets would be vocal, the whips would be cracking, the crowd would be moving nearly all through the night. Just now it looked gay, full of life and brilliance, as she drove homewards through the brilliantly-lighted streets and piazzas, past splashing Trevi, with its groups of loungers outlined dark in the electric light against the shining wet marble slabs, now past a row of shops illuminated by all the power of gas which could be turned on, then suddenly a plunge into some obscure, narrow street, again an open square, brightly lighted on every side, and rising from the centre of it the solemn majesty of the Pantheon, with its wondrous dome and its awful portico, seeming to say, ‘I stand alone now, and have many thoughts, many memories, O ye little hurrying children of to-day! Once I was one of a great company, some of whom were grander than I; light your gas flames, spread your electricity, multiply your scientific microscopes, but with them all ye shall never read my secret nor the secret of them that made me. That is not for the scientist to tell, but for the poet; and I observe that scientists become more and poets fewer; yet I may stand to shelter him, though he be another thousand years a-coming.’

It was a spot in which Minna had never yet found herself without a secret thrill of pleasure. She felt it even now, preoccupied as she was, and looked with grateful eyes at the huge building as she passed it. In five minutes more she was at the door of Casa Dietrich.

When she entered the hall, she found it was much later than she had imagined, and that the ubiquitous Ettore was even now on his way from door to door, knocking on each one and uttering his customary chant of ‘Dinner is ready.’

Two disastrous encounters she had already had to-day with Signor Giuseppe. She went into the dining-room in some trepidation, sincerely hoping that a third might not take place. Should such a thing happen, she would be forced to conclude that someone had looked at her with the evil eye.

For a time all went well. She pointedly made a very polite bow to Signor Giuseppe, which he returned in silence and with cold majesty, and the meal began. The soup had gone round. Then came a dish of roast meat which was first handed round Minna’s side of the table. She helped herself to it and to the vegetables which followed, and had eaten her portion before she noticed that anything had gone wrong. Then, having finished, she beheld at the opposite side of the table a row of anxious-looking, downcast faces. On the plates before them lay little heaps of vegetables which had been there so long that they had ceased even to steam.

There was no sign of any meat, and Ettore, as she soon perceived, was conspicuous by his absence. There was, moreover, something portentous, something which warned of coming disaster, in the very quietness and stillness which prevailed at that side of the table. Something had happened, or was happening, without the least doubt—something of ill-omen. Minna felt the shock and the discomfort of it as strongly as if she herself had been the person concerned. She would have given a good deal not to be obliged to look at Signor Giuseppe at this moment; but who is there who does not always at such a crisis involuntarily look in the direction he would most eagerly avoid? It was only as her eyes were dragged towards him that she became conscious that the solitary voice she had for some time heard as in a dream, holding forth, was that of Signor Giuseppe. She listened for a moment, her eyes fixed upon her plate.

He was talking to a young Englishman who sat next him, a recent arrival, whom he had taken into special favour on account of his having taken the trouble to study Italian seriously, and because he was really interested in certain periods of Roman history.

‘Yes,’ Signor Giuseppe was just now saying, ‘it is true. Tiberius was an aristocrat, nothing else. Read what the German historian says of him; how he despised the mob even more profoundly than he hated the patricians. Yet even he dared not neglect the amusement of that mob. Even he had to think out spectacles for that mob’s entertainment. There was fear mingled with his contempt. “Bread and the games” was a word now fairly established, and not to be neglected with impunity. He——’

Here Minna found her eyes, whether she would or not, fixed on Signor Giuseppe’s face, and she knew in an instant that all this brave show of historical instruction was put on; the whole thing was put on. Young Mr. Humphreys was wondering secretly how long he was to wait for his dinner. Signor Giuseppe, while he spoke, was crumbling bread with one hand, dashing the other through his hair, and casting glances of strained, anxious suspense towards the door leading to the kitchen regions, through which the service came. But, engrossed though he was with this, he of course knew in an instant that Minna’s attention had been drawn to the proceedings—that she was looking at him. This time he did not look angry, he looked agonized.

Such a fiasco in the proceedings was enough to make all the guests take themselves off first thing to-morrow morning to other establishments where they would be better served, and after all, though he hated and despised these forestieri, or thought he did, he was dependent on their money and their favour for—Signora Dietrich’s bread.

‘Yes,’ he continued, with a desperate effort at composure as he wandered in his misery from one theme to another, scarce knowing what he was saying; ‘there is no doubt that the gloomy-looking place you speak of, overlooking the Forum, was the palace of Caligula, but as for anyone being able to point out the exact corridor or vault in which his assassination took place, as M. Boissie, the French archæologist, pretends to do—that is a pure and simple impossibility, and——’

At this moment, at the prompting of some evil spirit or demon, there flashed into Minna’s mind a reminiscence of the days of her youth, and Brewer’s ‘Guide to Roman History,’ with its pragmatical questions and sententious answers, one of which, relating to Caligula, had sunk deeply into her mind.

‘How long,’ asked the ‘Guide to Roman History,’ ‘did this idiotic monster reign?’

She tried to suppress the almost hysterical laugh which she felt was surely coming—the laugh at the disappointed diners, the ridiculous inadequacy of the service at this strange establishment, at Brewer’s sweeping characterization of Caligula—the tears which were just as ready to come at the thought what a long day of torture this must have been to the poor fallen gentleman opposite to her, who even now could think of nothing more trivial or amusing with which to tide over this awful failure in the evening meal than dissertations on the character of Tiberius and the ruins on the Palatine.

The two sensations combined were almost too much for her; she suppressed any sound of laughter, but she could not altogether control her expression of countenance. She felt she must speak—say something, however idiotic, to someone—and she turned to Hans Riemann, intending to ask him sharply if he had nothing to say for himself, but not before Signor Giuseppe had seen first her look at himself, and then what must have seemed the ill-concealed mirth on her countenance. A flood of angry colour rushed over his face. He was evidently insulted to his inmost being, and Minna felt paralyzed.

‘I must go,’ she said within herself. ‘I must get away from here, for I can’t bear it.’

Once again her unconscious saviour in such moments came to the rescue. Ettore emerged from the kitchen looking very grave, and stole round to Signor Giuseppe as if anxious to hide himself from the view of all but him. Arrived at his side he bent low and whispered something in his ear—no long communication, but apparently a terrible one.

‘Maledetto!’ came from between Signor Oriole’s clenched teeth, and, like a whirlwind, he passed round the table, through the door, and was gone, followed by Ettore as by a pallid shadow.

Then broke loose the flood of talk, comment, question.

‘What is the meaning of all this? Are we going to have nothing to eat? Has the food given out? Has Ettore let it fall and spoiled it all? What a place is this! I never knew anything like it!’ from English and Americans, while a deep bass chorus came from the German contingent.

‘Ach, um Gotteswillen, was ist denn geschehen? Kriegen wir weiter nichts? Was soll das alles bedeuten?’

Hans Riemann uplifted his voice to soothe the impatient multitude.

‘Accidents will happen,’ he said. ‘It’s the cook, I know. He was new two days ago, and is most likely drunk at this moment. It can’t be helped.’

‘Very well for you—you have had your roast meat,’ replied young Humphreys; ‘but what about us?’

‘Pazienza! You’ll get something,’ said Hans. ‘If nothing is to be had here, they will send to the trattoria close by. They do many queer things here, but they have a sense of honour as regards people’s dinners.’

Thus it happened. Signor Giuseppe did not return. Minna did not remain in the room till the end of the meal. She had had enough in every way, and retired to her own quarters early.

‘It is intolerable,’ she told herself for the fiftieth time. ‘To-morrow I shall make preparations for leaving. I won’t stand any more of this.’

Indeed, it was long since she had been made to feel so uncomfortable, and, as has been already intimated, she was a woman who had always had a great deal of her own way, and who did not take kindly to this experience—of being made uncomfortable.

CHAPTER V.

On the following morning Minna sallied forth immediately after breakfast, leaving word with Ettore that she was going to her studio, and would not be in for either lunch or dinner. She felt the need of getting away for a time from this atmosphere growing ever more imperious. She must go away, be alone, take counsel with herself as to what she was going to do.

She walked quickly to the studio, lighted the fire, and shut herself up. Once there, she breathed more freely, and felt as if released from some constantly pursuing influence. The hours of the day flew by with incredible swiftness, but, instead of coming to any decision, she shirked the question, What am I to do? and devoted herself instead to a minute study of some anatomical plates, and to some photographs of animals and birds in motion, and to a treatise on the same subject which bore directly upon her art.

It was very interesting, it was very delightful; but every now and then conscience told her that her thoughts ought to be differently occupied, and that at this rate she would return to Casa Dietrich no better prepared to face the next disagreeable scene than when she had left it. She did not, however, feel energy or inclination to go into the question, to get a clear view of the situation, and of her own position in it. It was much easier to reflect upon the order in which a horse’s legs were lifted as he ran, or upon the rhythm of the beat of a hawk’s wings as he flew.

Thus the time passed, and it was evening, and then night, almost before she knew it. She had not done an hour’s work throughout the day. She had taken the coverings from the clay cast which she was now modelling, and looked at it, and had given it a touch here and there, but without effecting anything real. The old woman who acted as portress downstairs, and who waited upon her on these occasions, as much as she required waiting upon, had brought her in some dinner from a trattoria, of which the residue, given to old Filomena, caused the poor creature’s eyes to glisten and blessings to fall from her lips.

Filomena had now gone away, and Minna was left to solitude and her own thoughts. She had lighted a lamp and put a shade over it. She had drawn her chair up towards the stove, and leaning back, with hands clasped loosely on her knee, she looked into the glow of the red-hot wood, and watched the flame which occasionally shot forth and then died down again. Her reverie was profound, and not altogether joyful. She was roused from it by a sharp, decided knock upon the door.

‘Hans—he need not have come, I don’t want him,’ she thought, frowning, and then cried, ‘Avanti!’ The door was opened, and she beheld, not Hans, but Signor Giuseppe.

She was surprised, and not altogether pleased, for she felt sure that the interview would be more or less painful. Yet she could not feel vexed; she tried to account to herself for her mixed sensations by telling herself, ‘It will be a bore, and very disagreeable, but perhaps it is best to get it over on neutral ground.’

All this flashed quickly through her mind as, after a hardly perceptible hesitation, she rose and said:

‘Signor Oriole!’

‘Good-evening, signora,’ he said, bowing as he advanced into the room. ‘I knew you were at your studio, and, as I am wishful to speak to you, I have taken the freedom of calling here. If I disturb you or my visit is inconvenient, you will at once send me away. I shall not be offended.’

This Signor Giuseppe was as different from the Signor Giuseppe who was engaged at Casa Dietrich as one man could possibly be from another. It is true, this man had the same outward appearance as the other, the same shabby dress, whose shabbiness was at present somewhat concealed by a comparatively new and good overcoat, and a respectable hat, held in his hand. But beyond this, all was different.

This was a gentleman of polite and gracious manner, dignified, but genial withal—a gentleman who met her on terms of equality, and whose apology was made more for form’s sake than because he felt such apology to be needful. It was an unspeakable relief to Minna to find him thus disposed, and she replied with cordiality as she extended her hand:

‘Indeed, signore, I am too glad that you care to come and pay me a visit here. If I had had the least idea that you would have taken so much trouble, I would have invited you before. You are welcome here.’

She pointed smilingly to the old sofa, and Signor Giuseppe took a seat upon it, and looked around him.

‘This is surely not your workroom,’ he said, without answering her polite speeches, as his eyes wandered from one object to another.

‘No. This is my sitting-room, business-room, reception-room, whatever you like to call it. Above all, it is the sanctuary to which I beat a retreat whenever I feel discouraged with my own miserable attempts inside there’ (she pointed slightingly in the direction of the workroom), ‘so discouraged that I can no longer remain amongst them and the ghosts of better things. A very useful room, this, I assure you.’

‘Ah, you feel like that,’ said Giuseppe, looking at her, ‘but not often, I imagine.’

‘Oftener than not, signore.’

‘I should not have thought it.’

‘Do I appear so very self-complacent?’

‘Perhaps not. I may have judged you wrongly. It is probably merely your position in general, which is a secure and comfortable one, which gives you that appearance of unruffled calm.’

‘But I do not always feel unruffled calm, by any means,’ she told him.

‘Not even when you encounter me engaged in the duties of a household servant, or a collector of rents and rates, or a supplementary cook—in short, in all the most ludicrous and undignified false positions in which a man can be placed—and smile serenely with cold amusement upon the spectacle,’ he said, plunging into the very heart of the uncomfortable topic.

Minna drew a deep breath.

‘I do not smile with cold amusement at you or at anything which I see causes you to suffer,’ she said in a clear, almost loud voice, as she looked him full in the face, thinking to herself, ‘Thank heaven! now we are going to have it out, in one way or another. Something must come of this.’

‘Signora, you could scarcely sit here and admit that what I say is true. Politeness demands of you that you should deny my assertion. Yet I have seen you smiling at me, or rather at my embarrassment, repeatedly—at the ridiculous dilemmas in which Fate has so often decreed that you should catch me.’

‘I wish I could make you understand how far from me it is to wish to laugh at what gives pain to another,’ she said. ‘I know I have smiled. I can’t help that. Heaven has given me a keen sense of the ridiculous. I cannot alter my nature.’

‘Just so; you admit all that I say; you find me ridiculous.’

‘No, I do not. Sometimes I am reminded of things which are ridiculous, or which seem ridiculous to me. I am reminded of them by the situations in which I see you,’ she went on boldly, in spite of the anger she saw rising in his face. ‘You don’t believe me. I will give you an example; then, perhaps, you will see what I mean. You have perhaps not forgotten that, last night, at dinner——’

‘Ah!’ exclaimed he, wincing visibly, as if someone had thrust a sharp pin into him. ‘Forgotten?’ he continued in a deep, tragic voice; ‘no, I have not forgotten!’

‘I thought so,’ Minna said to herself, and continued aloud: ‘When you were trying to bridge over the interval at dinner by talking about Tiberius and Caligula I admired you. It showed what topics your mind would run upon if it might follow its own bent. When you talked about Caligula’s assassination, I thought suddenly about a silly old lesson-book from which I used to be taught what they called Roman history in my childhood. My companions and I used to make jokes about it. One of those silly old jokes came into my mind; it all seemed so funny. I laughed. I was not laughing at you. You may believe me or not; I am telling you the truth. You have often thought I was laughing at you when I was not. You have often been angry with me when I did not in the least deserve it. You were yesterday, and I felt it.’

She spoke with considerable force and directness, looking at him steadily as she did so. And as she looked it came into her mind that seldom or never had she seen a more distinguished, intellectual head and face than those of her visitor. All the passionate unrest and irritation which consumed him throughout his life at Casa Dietrich had vanished—one could see now something of what Signor Giuseppe, in happier circumstances, might have looked.

There was the nameless grace and pride and high breeding which belongs to one of noble race who has been reared in the traditions of that race. He can never cast off the results of that early training. Though not a weak face, it was a sensitive, passionate one—the face of one whose impulse might now and then lead him into error; but his heart, never. He paused for some time after her energetic words, looking reflectively towards the floor; then, raising his eyes, dark, soft, and gentle, as she had never seen them before, said:

‘Signora, answer me one question: for what do you take me?’

‘For a gentleman,’ replied Minna, who had got very much excited, though she did not betray the excitement by any restlessness of manner; ‘for a gentleman, signore, with whom I would gladly be further acquainted and on more friendly terms, if he would allow it; but he will not. He renders it impossible by his harsh treatment of both himself and me.’

‘For a gentleman?’ said Signor Giuseppe sadly, but his face lighted up for all that; the words had been inexpressibly soothing to his irritated feelings; as to their sincerity he could have no manner of doubt. ‘Ah, signora, I was a gentleman once; that was when I was young and hated aristocracy, and thought one man was as good as another—and one woman. Destiny arranged that my theories should be put to a severe test. That test shattered them—scattered them to the winds in a thousand fragments. Shreds, rags, ribbons were all that was left of my glorious doctrines. When it was too late I realized that in flinging away my position and my inheritance, such as it was—not much, but enough to let me use it for others as well as for myself—in doing this I had done a fool’s deed. It had been kinder both to myself and to others had I remained Conte di San Malato, and kept my money and my estate. I might have improved my own dependents, my neighbours; my charity might have begun at home. Instead, I devoted it, as I hoped, to the good of Italy in general—the cause of humanity at large. When I knew by heart the mistake I had made, when I found the condition to which ignorance and trustfulness had reduced me, I set myself to work to forget that I had ever been what is called a gentleman. I cast in my lot with those to whom I had bound myself, in honour if not in law. I did not suppose that the least rag, the smallest vestige, was left—of what I used to be. Yet you say you can see some such remnants.’

‘Now,’ said Minna, smiling, but through a mist, ‘now you will really make me laugh at you. I suppose you never indulge in analysis of your own feelings and sentiments, or I would ask you, why do you feel miserable in your present circumstances? why do they jar upon you? why do you get so angry with me—unhappy me!—for seeing you engaged in duties which a servant ought to do? why have you come here now and talked to me thus, if not for that very reason, that a gentleman you always have been, a gentleman you are, and a gentleman you must remain, whatever may happen? It cannot be scorched out of the blood when once it is in it. Why should you care, except for that? You have lost your position outwardly, yet you did not wish me to misunderstand; you feared I might. But I have not done so, not for a moment, not from the very first. How could I?’

‘You mean,’ he said, in a tone of deep dejection, ‘that you did not, even for the first day or two that you were with us, take me for a hired steward, something like the head-waiter at a very third-rate hotel?’

‘Never. I saw you undertaking duties and doing work which struck me on the spot as utterly inappropriate to your proper condition. I at once concluded that you had excellent reasons for acting as you did. I did once make a mistake, in pure absence of mind, the day I arrived with all my luggage—do you remember? You came to the door, and I spoke about my boxes instead of letting you receive me as I now know you wished to do. I have been sorry for it many a time since. Now you know exactly what I have felt in the matter.’

‘You are right,’ he said in a low voice, and still dejectedly. ‘You are right in every word you say. The old folly has not been burnt out—the old feelings are not extinguished; since I made your acquaintance, I am sorry to say, they are stronger than before. That makes it so much the worse.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. Surely it is all right now. Everything is explained.’

‘Far from it. I came to see you with a purpose. Once or twice during our conversation I have thought that purpose might be abandoned; but I see now that, on the contrary, it had better be carried out. I came here intending to ask a favour of you.’

‘And what is the favour?’ she asked gently.

‘Nothing more nor less than this: that you would leave Casa Dietrich.’

‘Leave—Casa—Dietrich?’ echoed Minna. It was the very thing which, for many days past, she had been telling herself she would do. Perhaps it was not altogether unprecedented that, when someone else asked her to do that which she had been telling herself she would do, she should feel angry, hurt, and offended. ‘Leave Casa Dietrich?’ she repeated; ‘and why?’

‘Because it is excessively painful to me that you should be there; very soon it will become still more painful to me. Yes; it is solely on my own account, for my own selfish reasons, that I ask you to leave Casa Dietrich.’

‘But why, now that we thoroughly understand one another, should it be more painful for you? Surely, now all will go well. You will not mistrust me; you will not misjudge me. As for me, my opinion of you is what it has been from the first, and I see no reason to suppose that it will ever alter; therefore it should be less, not more, painful for you if I remain.’

She was so intensely in earnest about it that she had not even time to be surprised at her own sublime inconsistency. She wished to remain at Casa Dietrich, but she wished that Signor Oriole should wish her to remain.

There was another long pause, during which he again studied the ground, and she saw that a struggle was going on in his mind. At last he looked up and said, in a low voice but clearly:

‘I see now; I have to-night added one more mistake to the many others of which my life has been composed. Seeing the groove I am now in, fast and immovable, I should have continued to travel in it without making a sign or a struggle. I wished to speak to you, because I—valued your opinion. There are things which may not and cannot be explained. I cannot explain openly to you why I wish you to go. If I go away now without further explanation, you set me down in your own mind as an imbecile, and justly so. I must say something. With your fine brilliant intelligence you will understand me more or less. Hitherto you have seen merely my degradation, my humiliation. That was bad enough, but now that we have had an explanation I could endure it. But from now, or from very soon after this day, you will be witness of my shame—of the irremediably wretched and degrading life to which I am bound in punishment of my own folly and weakness—a life which I must go on leading, which I can neither improve nor terminate, for reasons which it is utterly impossible to me to explain to you. You have seen me, a drudge, at my drudgery. Within a week—nay, it may be in a day or two—the drudge’s owner will return. My slavery will again be complete. My cup will have added to its bitterness the intolerable flavour of knowing that you are there looking on. You have pitied me hitherto; now I foresee that you will despise me. That I have deserved contempt, though I am now expiating my sin in dust and ashes, does not make it better. And,’ he started up from his chair and twisted his fingers into and out of each other, ‘I cannot live in your contempt; I cannot bear it; I ask you to go.’

Minna sat as if rooted to her chair. She felt a surging in her ears, and things were indistinct for a moment or two before her eyes. Partially, if not completely, she comprehended the situation, and understood that for him it was an agonizing one. Of his relations to Signora Dietrich she had no manner of doubt in her own mind. She was no child; she knew a good deal of the world, and had a considerable tolerance for many human weaknesses. She had no difficulty in understanding that the bond which kept Giuseppe tied at his present post must be a strong one. As to its nature, on one side, at any rate, she was quite certain in her own mind. That her presence and society had roused in him feelings of interest and admiration long dormant, there could be also no manner of doubt, and those reawakened feelings had caused him to feel more poignantly than ever the misery of the position to which circumstances or his own weakness in time past had reduced him.

Minna was not a vain woman, but a very proud one. She would gladly have sacrificed any incense to her vanity, to her sense of power of attraction, afforded by the present situation, if by so doing she could have eased the misery of poor Signor Giuseppe’s heart. But no action of hers would ease that misery, whereas the idea of beating a retreat before the oncoming Signora Dietrich made her turn hot and cold, and hot again, with a nameless feeling of anger and indignation.

‘I could never despise you, Signor Oriole. It is not in my nature to despise those who are suffering. You have been pained by what is now past, because you mistrusted me and did not see things as they were. I am not so bad as you thought. Now you mistrust me again. You want me to go away because you think I shall be hard or censorious, or something odious.’

‘No, it is not that,’ he almost groaned. ‘It is not that. It is quite different. It is again a selfish reason.’

‘Would it not be better, since now all is clear between us, to trust me thoroughly, and let me stay?’ she said, softly and persuasively. ‘We are friends, are we not?’

He stopped suddenly in his restless pacing about the room, and stood in front of her.

‘You are—you would—you could take me for your friend!’ he exclaimed.

‘Why not, if you will have me for yours?’

‘You do not know what that would mean to me. You know—you must know, from your own observation, that mine is a ruined life—a wreck. But you would be my friend?’

‘If you will be mine, as I said,’ she replied.

‘If—ah, signora! I shall never doubt you any more—never. Your hand on the bargain.’

Unhesitatingly she placed her hand within his, and he, holding it, bent his dark eyes upon her with an expression of mingled pride and sadness, and said:

‘I have found a treasure I never more expected to know—a friend, a good, true, gentle, yet spirited woman, my friend.... And you will yield to my foolish wish, and will leave me to struggle alone with my unhappy position. The thought that you are my friend will help me along, and the knowledge that you are happy, and in your true and natural surroundings, and out of these utterly false ones, will console me many a time when I should otherwise be utterly despondent.’

‘You say you trust me—that you will never mistrust me again; and in the same breath you show the greatest possible mistrust of me—you bid me go,’ said Minna, with tears in her voice.

‘Signora——’ he stammered.

‘That is not trusting me,’ she pursued coldly. ‘To bid me fly, beat a retreat—I, your friend—simply because Signora Dietrich is coming home! I am not afraid of Signora Dietrich—are you?’

Oriole dropped her hand, and she saw his face turn pale all over. He seemed scarcely able to breathe for a few minutes, then said deliberately:

‘I have truly no reason to fear her. I have no wish to see you in the same house with her. It will be painful to me. I would fain have spared all pain to you. Remain, signora, since that is your wish. I have not another word to say on the subject.’

‘But, don’t you see——’

He arrested her words with a gesture so decided and haughty that she felt herself dominated by it.

‘It is quite decided—è fatto,’ he said quickly. ‘Let us not waste words on it. I am at your service (alla sua disposizione).’

She felt some of the joy of victory, but almost more strongly the usual victor’s cruel generosity of wishing to make the conquered think that he has the best of it. But she was tongue-tied, somehow, and began to wonder with a thrill whether she had done well—that she had done womanly did not occur to her, though it struck Signor Oriole strongly. She felt that the interview, in so far as this subject was concerned, was over. His dejection seemed to have vanished, and he had the air of now being master of the situation. Minna felt as if she did not quite know what she had done, or what the end of it might be.

There was a silence, on her part of some embarrassment. He broke it by saying in a matter-of-fact voice:

‘Will you not show me your studio—your work?’

CHAPTER VI.

‘Oh!’ replied Minna hastily, ‘I have never done anything worth speaking of, or calling work. People who wish to imagine that they are sculptors should not come to Rome. It is the last place in the world for them to be happy in.’

‘But you are surely working at something now?’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Già,’ she said discontentedly.

‘You have bent me to your wish,’ he said; ‘will you not now bend to mine, and let me see something? It would, moreover, appear odd to people who should hear that I have been at your studio, but seen none of your work.’

‘You are a critic. You are a connoisseur in these things,’ she said; ‘I know it from many things I have heard you say—such just remarks! That was when I was afraid to speak to you.’

‘And you are afraid of my criticism! If you have anything of the true artist in you, you ought rather to welcome it.’

‘Yes, you are right. Very well. Pray come this way. Say the worst you think about it. I dare say it will be only what I deserve.’

She rose, took the lamp in one hand, and a screen in the other to control the light, and led the way into her studio.

She had not yet wrapped up the clay figure on which she was engaged, but had merely thrown a cloth over it until she should be ready to go. She placed the lamp on a table, saying:

‘This is all I can show you. The others are worth nothing.’

‘One moment, signora. Let me judge for myself,’ said he, and, taking the lamp into his hand, he went round the room, looking at first one thing and then another, saying, now and then, ‘This is a copy. That you invented for yourself, did you not?’ to which Minna usually found she had to reply, ‘Yes.’

He made no comment on any of the work, which annoyed her very much; she was convinced he was filled with contempt for it. She tried to reconcile herself to the situation by telling herself that, after what had passed between them, she owed it to him to let him see her work, and say anything or nothing, as he might think fit.

When he had gone the round of the room, he turned to her, saying:

‘And now for the capo d’opera. So far, it seems to me, you have not patience enough to finish anything. You begin your thought, but you do not carry it through.’

‘Don’t expect a capo d’opera,’ she said. ‘It may be worse than all the rest. I only know it interests me the most. If you will take hold of the cloth at that side, we can lift it off.’

They removed the covering from the figure, and the unfinished work stood revealed. Minna’s heart was beating fast. He stood and looked at the figure, and she, standing near him, tried to put herself, as it were, outside herself, and judge of it as an intelligent outsider might have done. The effort was useless, of course. She only succeeded in confusing herself and coming to no conclusion.

Meantime, the work at which they looked was this: a nearly life-size figure of a young man, somewhat above middle height, but not very tall. His dress—what there was of it—was the dress of a nineteenth-century working man; in this case, of an Italian working man. That is to say, he had on something between a culotte and trousers, short and rather loose, of some thinnish linen, summer stuff, bound round his waist with a leathern belt. His shirt had been taken off and was cast in a little heap on the ground beside him. His sinewy naked feet seemed to clasp the ground on which he stood, which ground was strewn with bits of rough stone or pebble; he was standing erect; his right hand grasped the handle of a stout shovel, the spade part of which was half sunk in a heap of cindery-looking substance. His left arm was raised and crooked; the hand drooped somewhat in a peculiar way, with its back turned towards his forehead. The action was unmistakable: he had been wiping the sweat from his forehead, and the face of this figure, with the eyes raised, the head lifted, in the act of one who has suddenly paused for an instant in a piece of long-continued, strenuous labour, was filled with an expression of strength, resolution, energy, and at the same time of patient endurance, which was magnificently conveyed.

It was not a particularly Italian face—that is, though an Italian had served for its model, he had been one of the fair-haired, clear-complexioned, blue-eyed men whom one encounters, not unfrequently, but always with a thrill of surprise, in all parts of Italy, especially in Rome or its surrounding country, in the most unexpected way, amidst the swarthy children of a blazing sun and a fertile earth. There was nothing particularly Southern any more than particularly Northern in its features: there was a broad, rather rugged forehead; level eyebrows; a nose of no particular order, unless it might be called truculent; a mouth whose lips were hidden somewhat under a little rough moustache; the expression was the expression of the labouring man, full of life and strength, and not averse to his work, all the world over.

Signor Giuseppe stood quite still for what seemed to Minna a very long time, gazing in absolute silence at this figure, measuring it from head to foot in its strength, its vigour, earnestness, and even brutality.

At last, ‘That is your own—all your own?’ he asked.

‘Yes—and yet no; nothing is quite our own. It was just a coincidence that brought it about.’

‘Tell me about it. But first let me guess. It is hardly finished enough yet to tell its own tale clearly. He is a working man with a spade. He has been pausing in his work and wiping his brow. What is that stuff into which he has been digging?’

‘Coal—engine coal,’ said Minna rather nervously.

‘Ah-h!’ Signor Giuseppe nodded his head. ‘Coal—bene! Well, what is to become of the coal?’

‘Here,’ said Minna, pointing to a lump of clay as yet shapeless, near to which the workman’s shirt was cast on the ground—‘here is to be—when it is done—one of those strong coarse wicker baskets which he is filling with coal. Each basket, when it is filled, will be carried to the tender of the locomotive and emptied into it. He is the stoker. He is helping because there is haste. I saw it one day when I was rambling about near the station. I had turned aside to have a look at my favourite bit of the Agger of Servius which is preserved there; you know, signore, what I mean: I may as well confess my debts. A writer of my country, a celebrated historian, who also loves very much many things connected with your country, has written, amongst other things, a little article on “The Walls of Rome,” which I have read so often that I almost know it by heart. Are you tired, or do you want to hear the whole history of this figure?’

‘I want to hear it all. Tell me about it.’

Minna took up a volume, bearing traces of having been much read, which lay on a stool near her work. It was the ‘Historical and Architectural Sketches’ of Freeman, and it opened of itself at the place she spoke of. She read, translating rapidly into Italian as she did so.

‘This bit is from a sketch called “Mons Sacer,”’ she said; ‘it is not the one about the walls. He says: “We set out along the Via Nomentana; we pass by the gimcrack Colosseum of the Prince; we pass by the two churches which have fared in such opposite ways at infallible hands; we ask ourselves the purpose of the ruin which stands in their close neighbourhood, and which, like so many others, bears the name of Maxentius. But this time we do not turn back when we have reached the basilica.... We are seeking a spot which tells us of days when as yet Rome had no prince but her Princeps Senatus; no pontiff but the head of the religion of Jupiter and Minerva. But before we altogether cast the modern world behind us, we are forcibly reminded of its presence as we cross the modern substitute for Appian and Flaminian Ways, the network of railways which carry out the saying that all roads lead to Rome. Nor is the reminder out of place,”’ Minna read slowly, and with emphasis; ‘“the great works of ancient and modern engineering skill have much in common. There is a likeness sometimes in their actual appearance—always in the mighty spirit of enterprise, the boundless command of physical resources, which is common to both and unknown to intermediate ages.”’

She paused and looked at him, half closing the book. His eyes gleamed with delight.

‘Bene, bene!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who is this man, this splendid fellow? I could embrace him. No whining over modern progress as destructive of ancient grandeur. This man takes hold of the thing at the right end.’

‘Oh, there is plenty of abuse—of things and people he doesn’t like!’ said Minna, laughing, and feeling excited and pleased. ‘Popes, for instance; and Barberini and Borghesi meet with short shrift from him.’

‘All the better; that is still more after my own heart. If he had included kings and princes in the list, better still. But go on!’

‘Well, you will understand that, knowing all this writing as I do, the very words of it went through my mind as I stood leaning against a railing near the siding at the railway-station, and looking at that bit of the Agger inside it, and thinking of the ancient engineering works and of what Freeman says about this weakest corner of the city; weakest by nature, made specially strong by art. “Here, on the eastern side, where there was no river to embank, no cliff to scarp, ran the mighty Agger of Servius Tullius ... within the line of the Agger and defended by a vast hornwork stood the Colline Gate.... Here was the natural point of attack for every enemy.... Through the Colline Gate the revolted army came back to overthrow the tyranny of the Decemvirs. Over the Colline Gate, so the tale ran, Hannibal hurled his spear—a tale wild enough, but one which still shows at which point men looked for Hannibal to have entered Rome if he had entered it at all. And it was by the Colline Gate that Rome fought her last battle for her being against Italian enemies. It was there that Scilla saved her when the last Pontius came to root up the wood which sheltered the wolves that so long had ravaged Italy. On that day Rome fought, not for dominion, but for life; she had not to fight for life again till the Colline Gate and the Servian Agger had passed away, and till Rome had found that she needed new ramparts to shield her from new enemies.”’

‘Ai—i,’ came like a long sigh from Signor Giuseppe’s lips; his eyes, his thoughts were far away. These words had roused again that passion for his country and for her freedom which had been so intense—he lived through his former struggles; he fought his battles o’er again.

‘Just then,’ said Minna, taking up her own narrative again, ‘while I was thinking about all this, my eye fell upon an engine and tender in the siding. There was the engine-driver, seated on a log of wood, eating his supper; there was a boy, and there was a young man who was the stoker, and they were talking. You see, I understand what they say. I am better off than so many people who come here. There was some discussion about coals being loaded into the tender. Someone who ought to have been there then, helping, had not come, and there was some haste. Suddenly this young man sprang up, seized a shovel, and fell to upon the work. He got hot, he threw his shirt off, and worked with a sort of fury. The sweat poured from him. The boy was working no less vigorously, seizing the baskets and emptying them into the coal place on the tender. I wished I could help them. They were splendid. Then all at once this fellow stopped short, wiped his brow with his hand, and stood still as you see him here. As he looked then, it seemed to me that his pose was almost classical. For all his energy, there was real rest and repose in the attitude. There flashed into my mind a recollection of that figure of the ‘Chariot-driver’ in the Sala della Biga at the Vatican—you remember?’

He nodded.

‘A handsome lad, isn’t he? in all his elegant trappings, even if it isn’t very precious as a work of art. He stands there with great calm and self-possession, looking cool and comfortable; but all the same one knows, one feels, that sometimes he must have had to exert himself pretty hard, guiding his team of four or six, perhaps, or racing in grim earnest round the amphitheatre, amidst the cheers and howls of the greens and blues. He did not always look so cool and comfortable. I don’t know how my thoughts followed one another, but suddenly there it was—the connection, the analogue—that marble boy in the Vatican, and these, the real chariot-drivers of to-day, with their surroundings. I had always felt that there are things to-day as suited to be put into marble or bronze, and to live as records of our times, as there were in those other days which we study with such interest and delight. Only I had never been quite able to hit upon the exact thing that I wanted. Here it was, I thought—one instance of it, at any rate. The thought in my mind was a grand and beautiful one. I fell to work at once, in a fever of delight; then came doubts and difficulties, and that is all the result—all there is to show for it.’

She looked dejectedly at the figure.

‘All,’ echoed Signor Giuseppe, and then continued in tones of decision; ‘it contains the material for a very good “all.” Defy that feeling of discouragement. Work it out to the best of your power. You will never be satisfied with it; what artist ever was satisfied with his own embodiment of his own thought? But it has original power, it is distinctly a work of art; it has a right to live, to fulfil its mission of being exposed to view and giving pleasure and wakening thought in others. You say there was something classical in the young man’s pose as he paused in his toil. Well, as your work stands now, you have succeeded in conveying that classical quality into this work of to-day. It is the rarest good-fortune. You need wish for no higher praise than that, and I give it you confidently because I know what I am talking about.’

‘I cannot believe it. It seems impossible,’ said Minna, whose eyes were shining and whose heart was beating.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Whether you believe or not, it is so. What do you intend to call it?’

‘I have thought of a great many names. The one that displeases me the least is simply the words “In the sweat of thy brow”—with “Roma” and the date when—if ever—it is finished. What do you think?’

She was astonished to find herself giving him such confidences; it was generally almost impossible for her to talk about her work.

‘Good,’ he said, nodding. ‘Don’t admit the idea of any other name into your mind. That fits it. That will do. Don’t soften it down, either the work or the name. There is a tinge of ferocity underlying all its repose. That is what gives it its character.’

‘You’ll turn my head with such praise.’

‘Che! Where did you get hold of the model for it?’

‘Oh, I was lucky in that. A young man to whose mother I had done some little kindnesses came and stood for it. He was glad of the money and interested in the whole thing; and there was a vast difference between him and the professional ones who lounge about on the Spanish Steps.’

‘Then, this face is not the face of the man you originally saw, when the idea occurred to you?’

‘No. That man was swarthy and black-browed—an unmistakable Italian. This, as you may guess, is one of the fair-haired, light-complexioned men whom I might see without surprise working on my brother’s land, or digging in my own garden, at home. But I thought it was so much the better. It is meant quite as much to be expressive of to-day, of work in general, as of Italy, so I did not see the need of having a purely Italian type.’

‘No; you were right,’ said Signor Giuseppe, helping her to envelop the figure again it its damp cloths. ‘I congratulate you,’ he added very gently, in a voice that shook Minna’s feelings somewhat. ‘Once,’ he added, ‘I thought of devoting myself to art. But there were obstacles in the way. I had to drop it. I had not time for even the least attempts at such a thing.’

They went back into the sitting-room, and Minna began to put on her bonnet.

‘Do you drive?’ he asked, ‘or may I escort you to the house?’

‘I will walk if you will walk with me,’ replied Minna; and in a minute or two she had locked the door behind her, and they were going downstairs.

It was a mild and beautiful night, and they went slowly along the lighted streets and glittering piazze towards Casa Dietrich. Rome was awake and alive, as she always begins to be about that hour. It is true, the turmoil never ceases for a moment throughout the day; but it is at night that the particularly vivid, eager life starts up, that crowds most do throng the streets, and pour in and out of the cafés, the faces gleam keener, and wit flows more freely, and gesticulation is more animated, and the cries are shriller of those who call newspapers and matches and sermons of fashionable preachers, and sponges and crockery, and miscellaneous toys and goods of every description, as well as the thousand other things which are hawked through Roman streets by stentorian Roman lungs.

Ever more piercing, ever more confounding to a sensitive set of nerves, ever more delightful and inspiring, do they grow to this wondrous race, which, while brimming over with life and eagerness and nervous force, yet seem to be sublimely ignorant of the existence of nerves in the sense of having them to be pained and wearied. It is unknown how many hours of sleep the average Roman extracts from the twenty-four, but probably fewer than the inhabitants of any other place in the world.

Minna knew the turmoil, the tumult, and the excitement, and loved them. They came to her ever fresh, ever interesting, ever inspiring. She loved them alike in these winter nights, in the spring evenings, and late in summer nights, when the mighty world-city with its great mystery had been during the burning hours of the day quelled into silence, but at night rose up, and, as it were, adorned herself and said, ‘I will go forth and wander in my gardens, and sit in my places of entertainment, and rest beside my fountains, and listen to the mirth of my children, for life is good.’ She loved it all, and loved to be in it. And as she and Signor Giuseppe paced slowly along on their way from her studio to the house, she tried to explain to him some of this feeling that she had, and some of the emotions which the spectacle of this mighty and throbbing life roused in her.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is dear to me, too. You think it noisy, as all foreigners do, disturbing, clashing, shrill. Yet I often come and wander about in it, to find quiet and peace. Then I study it, and every time I study it it twines itself more firmly about my heart. The roots of my love for it strike deeper and more inextricably into my being. Sometimes I see its tragic side most plainly, sometimes its happier one, but always it is wonderful and fascinating and indescribable, as it always must be for those who can see more than the mere outside. My city was once the mistress of the world. Times are changed since then; she is barely mistress of herself now that she has choked and strangled the power of her tyrants. But she has done it, and that power will never lift its head again. I know that the same spirit is still in my countrymen as was in them when that was built.’ He looked up at the Pantheon, beside which they now emerged from a side-street.

In less than five minutes they had climbed the stairs of Casa Dietrich, and stood within the hall. From the drawing-room was coming the usual evening clatter. On the hall-table stood a kind of infernal machine, miscalled a musical box, which, on being as it were fed with circular pieces of cardboard, riddled with holes and labelled with the names of different tunes—and on a handle being turned, ground forth the semblance of the said tunes. It formed an unfailing source of delight and recreation to at any rate the Italian portion of the company, one of whom was even now industriously turning the handle and producing a feeble and distorted version of the ‘Beautiful blue Danube’ waltzes—a performance which it made Minna shudder to hear.

When the Italian boy saw them he waved his disengaged hand gaily, wished them good-evening, and asked if the music was not charming. In a distant dark corner a figure was gyrating gracefully all alone, humming the notes of the air. As they advanced into the hall, its movements ceased, it also came forward, smiling, and undulating still in its walk—it was the fallen patrician Ettore, who bowed himself before them, saying gently:

‘With the permission of the signorina yonder, I was diverting myself and practising my dancing at the same time. I also wished to be on the spot when the Signor Oriole should return, in order to tell him that the signora and the Signorina Fulvia arrived an hour ago, and desired to speak to him the instant he came in.’

‘The signora has returned,’ repeated Signor Giuseppe, in a tone almost of bewilderment; and then, suddenly recovering himself:

‘Bene, bene! I will be with her in a moment.’

He turned to Minna with a face to which had returned, as she at once saw, all its old look of vexation and discontent, and with an effort wished her good-night. Then, as if wishful to get a bad business over as quickly as might be, he strode off in the direction of Signora Dietrich’s room, leaving Minna to go her own way.

CHAPTER VII.

It was a long time before Minna slept that night. She was excited, but pleasantly so. In her gratification over what Signor Giuseppe had said to her about her work, and over his keen appreciation and comprehension of the different mental and emotional phases which had gone to the production of that work, she forgot the rest of the interview and its painfulness, or, if she did not quite forget, it became dim, it fell into the background. Her artist’s soul had been rejoiced, and a stimulus given to her to proceed with the work. She paid less heed than she would have done to poor Signor Giuseppe’s entreaty that she would go away, and to the misery he evidently felt that she should remain as the witness of his humiliation. No, she thought of her work—of the figure of youth and strength and delight in work which had so fascinated her, and felt that now she could go back to it and work at it with passion of pleasure and interest—that absorption which is the life and soul of works of art, and without having had which put into them they can never interest and delight others, let their technique be never so perfect, their proportions never so correct.

When at last she did go to sleep it was to dream pleasant dreams and wake refreshed, glad, and eager to begin again. She was ready to set out betimes, and was walking quickly along the passage, which went from her quarter of the house to the front door, when she encountered, coming slowly along towards her, a young girl, whom she had never heretofore seen in the house. She was tall, and had the early developed figure and air of a young Italian woman. She was probably not more than sixteen, though she looked twenty. She had an exquisitely beautiful complexion, fair but pale—almost without even the faintest rose-tinge. She had also splendid waving nut-brown hair, which had in it glints of gold; dark eyes, which might have been either gray or blue, or even black, but which were certainly not brown; thick dark eyebrows, a delicate little aquiline nose, and a mouth as yet undecided in expression, but agreeable rather than actually beautiful in shape. She was dressed quite as a girl—almost as a child. Her plain dark-blue woollen skirt came only just below her ankles, and showed very pretty, small, thoroughbred-looking feet, cased in shabby slippers, which had once been red, and were now no colour at all that can be classified. The loosely-made blouse bodice of her frock, for it could hardly be called a gown, showed a charming figure, rounded, but not yet full, graceful and lissom. An ugly hard leather belt clasped her round little waist, and two fingers of her right hand were thrust in between the belt and the waist as she came swinging slowly along in the direction of a table on which stood a cage containing two canary-birds. Her left hand hung loosely at her side, and held a bunch of green stuff—food for the birds, no doubt.

They and their cage had appeared since Minna had come in last night, and from this and other circumstances she concluded that this must be the Signorina Fulvia, the daughter of Signora Dietrich, who had returned with her.

The girl raised her eyes as she met Minna, and looked at her attentively, gravely, but not at all rudely. Each inclined her head, said buon giorno, and passed on her way.

‘What a beautiful girl!’ said Minna to herself, ‘and what a strange expression she has! Is it sulky or sad? What is it? It does not look ill-tempered to me; in fact, I should say she had a soul.... But she is very beautiful!’

She walked on to her studio, thinking of her work; but every now and then, in the midst of her new-born ardour and eagerness, the face and figure of the girl swam before her mind’s eye, and disappeared again in a way that caused her to pause once or twice and wonder what it meant.

She passed a busy, eager, happy day. No one called; no one disturbed her. She lunched at her studio, snatching the minutes from her now absorbing work in which to take the meal.

By-and-bye it grew too dark for her to work any more. She covered up the figure with tender care, and, after taking off her blouse and apron and cleansing her hands, returned to her little sitting-room, and, throwing herself down on the couch, clasped her hands behind her head, and was lost in a happy, glowing dream of present and future works of art.

Then it was time, if she meant to return to Casa Dietrich for dinner, that she should do so. Still in a dream, she put on her things and walked back to the house. As she mounted the stairs, once again the beautiful face of the girl, with its inexplicable trouble or anger or rebellion, and the sombreness of its eyes, presented itself before her mind’s eye. Once again she felt that she was in the real, practical, everyday world, and that in the world there was trouble.

Ettore came round rather more punctually than usual with his thump on the door and his ‘Pronto!’ and Minna took her way to the dining-room.

Some people were already seated at the table, but there was a group near the door, standing round a rather small slight woman who was talking with animation and in an accent that was Roman of the Romans—in the accent that Minna loved to hear. And yet she did not altogether like this voice.

She had to pass this group as she went to her place, and as she did so it divided, and the lady who had been talking turned and saw her. It was, of course, Signora Dietrich, the mistress of the house. As she perceived Minna she made a kind of slide forward, graceful, but distinctly feline, and, in a much softer lower voice than is usual with her compatriots, greeted her with all the most flowery phrases of her flowery native tongue, bidding her welcome to her house, and regretting that she had not been able to do so before, though, she added, she had been quite aware of her presence there. Her friend, Signor Oriole, had told her of the gentilissima Inglese who had come to them, and she hoped that the said gentilissima and illustrissima found everything to her liking, and used her, Signora Dietrich’s, house as though it were her own.

Minna, listening to it all, felt herself constrained to confess that the greater part of it was arrant lies. Signor Giuseppe, she felt certain, had never written any such things about her. Signora Dietrich had been told that an Englishwoman had come and had taken two of her best rooms without demurring to the price of them, and that it would be a desirable thing if she were to remain there for some time. This was her way of evincing esteem and politeness. Minna replied with a smile and a few vague phrases and went to her seat, from which she could survey the signora, who was not, at first sight, a very striking-looking person. She was of scarcely medium height; she had evidently once been pretty, in a blonde, fragile, petite style; she was now very much passée, and distinctly faded in every respect. Some things she had lost, others she had preserved. Her figure was now nothing to boast of, whatever it might once have been; her complexion was sallow, which ill accorded with her pale-brown hair and light gray eyes. Moreover, the hair was by no means as abundant as it had been, and her brow was wrinkled; charms of youth, or even maturity, had left her and had begun to be merged in the defects of the period called elderly. What had not left her was the thin firm line of her lips, the white teeth which flashed when she smiled, the rapid glances of her eyes, full of indefinable meanings, the delicate white hands, and the marvellous power of expressing volumes by a single turn of her wrist and flash of her fingers.

These things had not left her, nor the strength of her will either. She had taken her place at the table, and everyone felt her presence, felt her power. The little faded woman who kept the pensione was the most important person in the house.

She sat at one end of the long narrow table. On her right hand was her daughter, and when Minna saw the two together she saw how much family likeness there was between them, although in every detail they were so different. The young girl was dressed now in some bright-coloured gown: not a pretty gown, and still a morning, not an evening, garment. She looked perhaps a degree brighter than when Minna had met her in the morning, but still not quite happy. On the signora’s left hand was an unoccupied place. The rest of the company were dispersed as before. Signor Giuseppe was again Minna’s vis-à-vis. He came in rather late, and did not cast many glances towards the head of the table until, after the soup had gone round, the person arrived for whom the place beside Signora Dietrich seemed to have been reserved.

This was a young man whom Minna had never before seen at the house. He did not, however, appear to be an entire stranger, for he exchanged greetings with several of those present as he made his way up the room behind Signor Giuseppe to Fulvia, so that Minna, being opposite, had full opportunity for observing him, and, indeed, as he made his way along and his eyes fell upon her, he honoured her with an open and particularly impudent stare. He was not, physically considered, an attractive specimen of his kind, being short, thin to attenuation, and prematurely aged in face and figure. His dress was excessively neat, and a whiff of Es. Bouquet came across the table as he went his way. This inadequate figure supported a head rather large in proportion to it, with a face which revolted Minna to her inmost being the instant she saw it.

Originally, he had probably rejoiced in a rather delicate pink and white complexion; it was nothing to boast of now, but the features were regular and clearly cut; the eyes were bright, and he wore a diminutive light moustache, just shading his upper lip. Intrinsically there was nothing to find fault with in his features or in the colour of his eyes; many a man beside whom he would have appeared an Adonis on a small scale goes through the world and succeeds in pleasing, or, at least, in not offending. It was his expression which hung forth the flag of warning, before which Minna, with the instinct of a good woman not devoid of intelligence, shrank and mistrusted. The utter badness, vulgarity, and cynical self-satisfaction of the creature were patent to anyone who chose to see them.

Whatsoever he had originally been, whatsoever he had been as a child and a youth, this man had so lived, and had so misused his life, his powers, his means, and his intelligence, that now, feign he never so diligently, he could only look what he was, a blasé little rake, unprincipled and unscrupulous. His tastes were evidently florid: several rings with stones in them decorated his little nervous, fleshless hands; a white rosebud was in his button-hole—type of beauty and virtue. He was in evening dress. Diamond shirt-studs glittered on his narrow expanse of shirt-front, and the hair which was left him was arranged with extreme care and attention.

‘What a horrible little reptile!’ thought Minna. ‘Who and what can he be? What language does he speak? He might be anything—or nothing. He will certainly never die for his country, if he have one.’

She watched how he made his way towards the head of the table; she watched how Fulvia Dietrich suddenly stiffened and seemed to freeze into lifelessness as he approached; how her mother, on the contrary, seeing him coming, leaned back in her chair, smiled a sweet smile of welcome, threw the glance of her curious eyes upwards towards him, and, stretching out both her hands and arms, bare to the elbow, cried in tones which, though not loud, were audible to all:

‘Ah, Marchmont, buona sera! Welcome! We are delighted to see you!’

‘Good-evening, signora. I’m late, but I have a good reason for it,’ he said, while Minna, with unreasoning annoyance, said to herself:

‘English—how utterly disgusting!’

‘How d’ya do?’ he went on in English, but with an accent which was not altogether English nor yet American. ‘What a time you’ve been away! Why on earth didn’t you come back sooner?’

‘Aha-ha!’ laughed the signora, always speaking Italian, ‘questo caro Marchmont. He will always pretend that I speak fluent English. So fond of his little jest! Of course I should have come home sooner; I hate to be separated so long from all my dear friends and guests.’ She looked round with a smile which was more impudent than complimentary to the said guests, and Minna was divided between amusement and indignation. ‘But business is business. Matters connected with my late husband’s affairs have kept me in Milan till now. Fulvia mia, what is the matter with you? Do you not hear that Signor Marchmont is speaking to you?’

She spoke caressingly, or perhaps wished to do so, but could not altogether prevent a sharp tone from coming into her voice, and her eyes looked threatening as she bent them upon her daughter.

Fulvia, thus apostrophized, stiffly made some little change in her rigid attitude, turned her head stiffly to one side and bowed to Mr. Marchmont, forced a constrained smile, and, as his hand was thrust close under her eyes and between them and her plate, lifted her own limply and also limply rested it for a second in his.

‘Now Rome will be itself again,’ said he gallantly, ‘now that the flower of Casa Dietrich has returned, looking more blooming than ever. Per Bacco! you have improved immensely while you have been away.’ He spoke Italian to her, a fluent and comprehensible, but very disagreeable and foreign Italian. ‘You make my flowers look faded, but they must get accustomed to that. See, I bought these in Via Condotti as I came along, for you—on purpose for you! They are scarce enough yet.’

He laid a spray or two of exquisite white lilac beside her plate. She looked anything but pleased, crimsoned to her temples as she muttered some words of thanks, it might be, and then grew gradually pale again. Her want of enthusiasm was amply atoned for by her mother’s superfluity of it.

‘Ah, lovely, most lovely!’ she cried, so that all the table could hear, first clasping her hands and then gesticulating with them. ‘Caro Marchmont, you are too generous. These must have cost a small fortune. You see the child is quite overcome. She does not know how to thank you for them.’

‘She either does not know how or does not wish to do it,’ said Marchmont, with a simper which was not altogether fatuous; there was an edge, as it were, to its silliness—as one might say, weakness tempered with cruelty.

He made his way round to the empty place on the signora’s left hand, opposite to Fulvia, whose face had again grown stony during this dialogue between her mother and, it would seem, her admirer. Not her lover—surely not her declared lover, thought Minna, to whom the whole scene had been inexpressibly repugnant and painful. Behind the vulgarity and absurdity of the two speakers and the constrained silence of the girl, she seemed to read horrible possibilities.

The ‘spectre,’ as she had immediately dubbed Marchmont in her own mind, was now hidden from her sight, but she could see Fulvia and Fulvia’s mother, and she hardly knew what to make of the spectacle.

A performance something like that which had already taken place continued throughout the meal. The young girl was by turns haughty and disdainful, cross, sulky, embarrassed, and then, with an immense effort, superficially polite. In each phase she looked exceedingly handsome and attractive. Mr. Marchmont’s shrill voice, with its curious vulgar accent, was strident, and dominated the conversation at that end of the table. Now he spoke English, anon Italian, but in whichever tongue he spoke his theme was the same: his own belongings, possessions, wishes, intentions, and the great prices he had paid for the things he had, or intended to pay for those he meant to have.

Signora Dietrich listened ever with the same rapture of attention, the same fixedly smiling mouth, the same wandering, unmoved eyes, and the same loud expressions of delight in his conversation and affairs in general.

‘Horrible woman!’ thought Minna. ‘I wonder what she is up to. Does she take this fellow for a rich man, and think she can get him to marry her daughter? Preposterous! Rich or poor, he has seen the seamy side of life, he has seen more bad than good, and is fully alive to all the useful things he can buy with his money if he has it. Why, he can have position and good birth as well as beauty, if he will pay enough. He won’t marry the daughter of Signora Dietrich—lucky for her!’

She had become so intensely interested in the drama at that end of the table that she had absolutely forgotten her immediate neighbours. At this moment she happened, during a short pause in the conversation, to cast her eyes across the table, and she encountered those of Signor Giuseppe, fixed with a fascinated look on her face. His own expression seemed to question, to study, to interrogate her eyes, as if he would have forced them to confess plainly the thought that was in her mind. There was an anxious, wistful inquiry in his gaze which went to her heart, even while she started a little and coloured a little at being thus caught watching the proceedings at the end of the table with such interest.

With a sigh she recovered herself, and tried to enter into conversation with him. But the effort was not successful; Signor Giuseppe did not respond. There was no more of his old peevishness and mistrust towards herself; he had evidently crushed that once for all after their explanation of last night. This was not, either, his usual angry irritation with the misdoings of the servants or the shortcomings of the dinner. It was, as Minna keenly felt, something very much deeper, sadder, and more tragical than any of those feelings. His silence was the silence of profound and hopeless grief and disapprobation, and she presently ceased to make any effort to disturb it.

The rest of the company appeared to be as usual much interested in their own affairs, with the exception of a bad-tempered Polacca, who expressed her opinion audibly in very bad German, to the effect that that woman was as great a fool, and the girl as complete a ninny, as ever; and that a woman, whose business it was to make her living by keeping a hotel, had no right to dress herself out in silks and satins as if she had been the hostess of a private dinner-party. Minna suppressed a smile, but the next thing she heard interested her more. Mr. Marchmont was saying:

‘Signorina Fulvia, how long will it take you to make yourself ready for the opera? I have got the tickets here in my pocket. Took a box at a premium at Piales. It is Lucia di Lammermoor. Surely you want to go. Your mother looks as if she were ready for anything, as she always is—from a ride in a tramcar to a box at the opera.’

‘And so can Fulvia be ready, caro Marchmont,’ cried the signora, who had indeed wakened up in a marvellous manner at Marchmont’s announcement; ‘she can have her dress on in ten minutes. Girls, you know, need no long preparations—no “making up” like their unfortunate elders. Go, Fulvia, you will be ready by the time we have finished coffee. Go, carissima mia.’

‘I am tired, mamma,’ said the girl, and indeed she looked exceedingly weary.

‘Tired! who ever heard of a young girl being tired, when it is a question of a box at the opera? Why, Nilsson is singing; all Rome will be there. Absurd, my sweetest pet! Signor Marchmont has got the tickets—all we have to do is to enjoy the results.’

‘Oh, if she doesn’t want to go!’ came the strident voice, in accents of pique.

‘Of course she wants to go. It is the same as with the flowers. So many pleasures and attentions, coming at once after the quiet life we have been leading, bewilder her. Now go, carina,’ she added, bending towards Fulvia with the same unchanging, artificial smile on her face, but with, as Minna saw, a steely flash of resolution in her eyes. She laid her hand for a moment on her daughter’s wrist. It seemed to Minna as if her fingers tightened on it in a fashion not exactly tender.

Fulvia rose slowly. There was no smile at all on her lips. She came down the room, also slowly, and paused for a moment behind Signor Giuseppe’s chair, laid her hands on his shoulders, and said in a low voice, between pettishness and coaxing:

‘Beppino, can’t you hinder my having to go to the hateful theatre?’

His eyebrows contracted sharply. Minna felt her heart throb as she watched them.

‘I think you had better do as your mother wishes to-night,’ said he, also in a low voice.

‘What a perfectly miserable story!’ she said to herself, with an aching heart. ‘Beppino, forsooth. I suppose this child does not know what it all means; she is still a bambina, in many ways. Still, an Italian girl of sixteen——’

‘Cattivo!’ said Fulvia, giving him a little blow on the shoulder. ‘You will do nothing that I wish now. I am cross with you.’

She walked out of the room with the majesty of a queen. Minna plunged wildly into a conversation about she knew not what with her left-hand neighbour. She could not speak to Hans Riemann. She had met Fulvia’s eyes as she lifted her head after her colloquy with Signor Giuseppe, and she had seen in them that which made her sadder than before.

Coffee was served. Signora Dietrich, hastily swallowing hers, made a flowery apology to the company in general for leaving them, but put it to them whether she was not right to avail herself of Signor Marchmont’s princely generosity, and, with many a nod and beck, many a false and wreathed smile, she made her way from the room, followed by the gentleman of the princely generosity.

‘How painful, and horrid, and unpleasant it all is!’ said Minna to herself when she was alone in her own sitting-room; ‘and what is the meaning of it all?... I thank my God that my mother was not like that woman,’ she suddenly whispered to herself, clasping her hands involuntarily; and she was surprised to find herself stamping her foot on the floor, and choking down a sob.

Just then there was a tap on her door. Not wishful to admit anyone and everyone, she advanced to it and opened it. Hans Riemann stood there.

‘I got hold of that old print you wanted, Minna, yesterday, and I’ve come to show it you. The man actually let me bring it here for you to look at. He wants a lot for it, of course, but you may——’

‘Come in,’ she said, opening the door to admit him, and she turned the light up while he went to a table, unrolled the print and spread it before her.

‘It is beautiful,’ said she, forgetting everything else for the moment, as she bent over it and examined it. ‘Of course he will want a lot for it. How much may he ask?’

‘Two hundred lire.’

‘Oh, it is too much. I can’t afford it. Take it away, and don’t let me look at it any more.’ She pushed it away from her, and Hans laughed.

‘We shall get it for less, of course. You ought to have it for about half. We’ll offer him seventy-five. Would you give a hundred?’

‘Yes, a hundred, but not one centesimo more.... Oh Hans, sit down! My curiosity is on fire. Who and what is the awful creature who is taking the signora and her daughter to the opera to-night?’

‘Oh! you may well ask,’ said Hans shrugging his shoulders. ‘Signor Marchmont—isn’t he a horror? “The skeleton,” I call him. It is a shame too, the way that woman chucks the girl at him! There’s no decency in it. Signora Dietrich is not a nice woman, as I think I have mentioned before.’

‘You said so—yes; and I can see it for myself. But what is he? Surely not an Englishman—nor yet an American.’

‘Oh Lord no! By all the rules of sensation novels, he ought to be a Russian prince who has ruined himself in Paris with absinthe and the other attractions of that capital. But he isn’t—he’s an Australian.’

‘An Australian?’

‘Yes. Father died when he was a mere child, leaving an enormous fortune, amassed chiefly by the sale of drink at various bars and canteens in town and country. This accumulated till he was one-and-twenty, of course, and grew into something fabulous. Then he was free, and then he began to use his freedom. He has led a life of grand train ever since, and he must be at least five-and-thirty now. Sometimes he looks like a mummy five thousand years old.’

‘And has his fortune lasted all that time?’

‘Has it lasted? I should think so. He’s the meanest miser in existence. He wants everything and he gets everything, and manages to pay less for it than if he were a decent fellow worth five thousand a year. That man has lived in every capital in Europe, and knows everything there is bad in every one of them, and he has done it cheap. That’s the disgusting part of it,’ said Hans resentfully; and Minna, though she could have given no reason for it, felt resentful, too—so true is it that prodigality carries with it a certain charm, and that the man who ruins himself ‘royally,’ as one says, earns an amount of admiration and distinction, while the economical rake gets the full measure of condemnation for all his sins, and the hatred of all who know anything about him to boot.

‘Then he is really rich now? What brings him to a place like this?’

‘Oh, I can’t tell. It’s about six months since they met him somewhere or other, and he took an immense fancy to Fulvia, which is not returned, as you may see. I believe Signora Dietrich thinks that, if she angles cleverly and patiently enough, he will actually propose for the girl. Goodness knows what he will do. As you might hear to-night—he took care to let us know—he has been opening his purse-strings for bouquets and opera-boxes, which looks serious. He’s the most awful cad that ever walked this earth, and the hardness of him is something appalling.’

‘And Signor Oriole?’ said Minna in a low voice.

‘He loathes him,’ said Hans, reddening. ‘Oriole is a gentleman; you see what the other is. But what is he to do? He has no legal authority here. There’s nothing acknowledged as to their former relations. He has no money with which to bribe the signora, and that’s the only thing that touches her. She is over head and ears in debt, but I think even she will hardly get her debts paid by Marchmont. Altogether, it’s not a savoury story. Don’t you bother yourself about it.’

‘I cannot help thinking about that girl. She is so beautiful, and there’s something so sweet, and even stately, about her sometimes, child as she is. You must know all that, Hans. What do you think about it all? Don’t you admire her immensely?’

She looked at him searchingly. Hans shrugged his shoulders again and bit his lips and coloured.

‘You see too much,’ he said. ‘There are limits even to my folly. Poor little Fulvia! She is completely changed within the last few months. She used to be the gayest, jolliest girl—full of fun; not like the Italian jeunes filles usually are, but with a real sense of humour, and such a healthy kind of nature. She used to chaff us all round, not a bit rudely, and say the most laughable things to us, and now one can hardly get a word out of her. It’s an awful pity!’

‘It is indeed,’ Minna assented mournfully. ‘That man is to me the most horrible creature I have ever seen. There’s something of the snake about him.’

‘There’s a bit of everything that’s nasty and contemptible,’ said Hans, rising to go. ‘It’s no good thinking about it. People have got to settle their own affairs. They must fight it out amongst themselves. Good-night, Minna. You look tired. I’ll offer him seventy-five, then, and I may go up to a hundred; is that it?’

‘Yes, please; thank you for saving me the trouble.’

‘Oh, it’s a pleasure!’ said Hans, going away.

CHAPTER VIII.

Hans Riemann had advised Minna not to ‘bother herself’ about the drama which was going on in the house, but she thought about it a great deal. She had been greatly attracted by Fulvia Dietrich, and there was something, too, in the anomalous, unhappy position of Signor Giuseppe with regard to the girl which wrung her heart. She was destined soon to know more of the affair. She went to her studio on the morning after her conversation with Hans, without having seen anyone belonging to the house. She did not come in to lunch, but returned early in the afternoon with the intention of writing some letters before dinner.

As she went to her rooms her eye fell upon the two canary birds in their cage, and it struck her that it was not a particularly good position for the little creatures to be in. The cage stood on the broad ledge of a window high up in the wall of the corridor, which was cold and draughty. It was, moreover, a window which never got any sun, and was altogether a cheerless place. A chair which had always stood just under the window had now been removed to some little distance from it, doubtless to make the birds safe from any attempts on the part of Gatto, the cat, an important personage in an Italian house, to make nearer acquaintance with them. Yesterday and this morning Minna had noticed that they twittered cheerfully, but this afternoon they were quite silent and sad. She could just see them sitting each on a separate perch, dejected-looking, little yellow balls, without a chirp to offer between them. Something was wrong. It was the work of a moment to move the chair under the window again, spring upon it, and look into the cage.

‘Poor little things! you may well be silent,’ she said aloud.

Their little water-pots were empty, there was neither seed nor greenstuff of any kind in the cage, which from all appearances had been cleared of food and water for some time.

‘Water you shall certainly have,’ said Minna, ‘and I’ll try if I can’t get you some food too.’

She chirped to them and they moved uneasily. She looked round to calculate where to step when she should have the cage in her hands, and beheld Fulvia Dietrich standing there with green leaves and a little tin of sand.

‘Ah, good-day, signorina!’ said Minna, with all the cordiality she could put into her voice. ‘Pray excuse my taking this liberty. I thought they were so very silent that——’

‘That I was going to let them starve to death,’ said Fulvia, her beautiful pale face looking up into Minna’s. ‘And you were quite right. They have been neglected since yesterday morning. But now I am going to attend to them.’

‘May I lift the cage down, and will you not come into my sitting-room, and fill the glasses there, and put in the food? It will be more convenient, and I think they are a little cold up there.’

‘Thank you,’ said Fulvia, with a faint smile. ‘You are very kind. But I fear it will disturb you.’

‘Not in the least. This way,’ said Minna, carefully stepping off the chair, with the cage in her hands. Fulvia opened the door of the sitting-room, and they went in.

‘Oh, how pleasant it is here!’ exclaimed the girl as they entered the room, which certainly looked cosy and homelike, and which felt warm and genial.

‘I am glad you like it,’ replied Minna, placing the cage upon a table. ‘See! I will bring some water from the other room, and you can give them all they want. It would be a good thing to let them stay here for awhile,’ she added. ‘It is so much warmer than outside.’

‘I know it is not good for them on that window-ledge, but I have nowhere else for them. In the salon people tease them so—people are so silly,’ said Fulvia, with an impatient look and a shrug of the shoulders. ‘In the dining-room and our own room mamma will not allow them. So I put them up there. I am so sorry they have been neglected to-day.—Ah, carini, carissimi!’ she added, chirping to them, and putting seed into the glass, and thrusting the green salad leaf and a bit of sugar between the bars.

Minna had brought a bottle of water from the next room, and now she watched Fulvia while the girl took out the little water-tank and the bath, and filled them both with fresh water, talking the while to the birds in the most caressing tones, and yet with a peculiar accent in her voice of hardness, or strain, or suffering—of something that was far from peace of mind or lightness of heart.

She made a charming spectacle while thus ministering to the little things, who soon began to revive. They evidently knew her, and hopped about, and even perched on one of the fingers which she held out to them. Fulvia’s head, with its thick glistening hair, bent over them. She again wore her plain dark-blue flannel frock and leather belt, and her feet were once more encased in the shabby little once-red slippers. Her face Minna could not see, but she felt sure that, in spite of all her caressing words and gestures addressed to the birds, she was not smiling, not happy.

Presently she looked up, saying:

‘Thank you for letting me come here. I will not intrude upon you any more. And you must not think I am in the habit of forgetting my birds. It is very unusual with me.’

‘I am sure it is. But won’t you leave them here for a time? Why should they not stay here altogether? It would be much more healthy for them than in the cold window-ledge, and you can come in and attend to them whenever you please.’

‘It would be very troublesome for you?’ said Fulvia, who, however, flushed with pleasure.

‘Not in the least. I am such a selfish person that I should not offer it if I did not think I should like it. See; we will put them here, on this empty table near the window. There they will be quite happy. Listen; he is beginning a little song even now.’

Indeed, the bird was trilling a low song of thanks and pleasure on feeling the good effect of the warmth and food.

‘And now,’ added Minna, rapidly and eagerly pursuing her real object, ‘you will stay with me a little while, while I have some tea. I am English, you know. I must always have my cup of tea at this hour. Do you ever drink it?’

‘I have drunk it,’ said Fulvia; ‘and in any case I am at your disposal, signora.’

‘Then here. Sit in this armchair. You look tired. You should not be tired—a girl like you,’ said Minna playfully, as she laid her hand for a moment on Fulvia’s shoulder, and tried to smile into the beautiful forlorn face.

‘I am not tired,’ replied Fulvia at once, rather proudly. ‘I am never tired. I am very young and very strong. But my head feels tired sometimes,’ she added inconsistently.

Minna went about the room, having cast off her wraps and hat, and she prepared the tea with the spirit-lamp and things she always had in readiness. Fulvia watched her, and gradually her curious, rigid attitude somewhat relaxed. A look of repose came over her face, which had been so hard and set. She leaned back in the easy-chair in an attitude of languor which seemed to say that it was long since she had thus unbent.

Presently the tea was ready. Fulvia had accepted a cup of it, but very much diluted, crying out with unfeigned horror at the strength of the beverage offered to her by Minna.

‘Signora, why do you ask me to sit with you?’ she presently demanded.

‘Because I love to have young people and young things, happy things, about me.’

‘But you are very happy yourself. You look so,’ said Fulvia, in curious, abrupt little sentences.

‘Yes, my child. I am very happy. I do not know why I should be so happy, and have a life so free from grief and care as mine is, but I am very grateful for it.’

‘But have you ever been sad?’

‘Very—once in my life. Sadder than you can imagine.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Fulvia quickly. Then she added: ‘But, of course, I am happy too. At least, I ought to be; for I am to have, it seems, everything that I like best.’

‘I wonder what you do like best?’ asked Minna with a smile.

‘A great deal of money to do what I like with. I hate to be poor. A beautiful house of my own, not like this, filled with strangers who come and go, and are often rude and greedy and impertinent. I don’t mean you,’ she added quickly. ‘You are quite different from most of them, and I should not be telling you these things if you were like all the rest of them. As I say, a beautiful private house of my own, full of lovely furniture; the couches will be covered with satin, and the chairs with the same, I dare say. There will be brocaded curtains, as beautiful as those in the gallery of the Palazzo Doria, to which I once went with Beppo to see the pictures. There will be mirrors in every room, and any of the things which I have so often seen in the windows of the best shops in the Corso and Via Condotti I can have by merely going in and ordering them. Think of it!’ she continued in a voice of animation, and with a smile which Minna tried not to see was ghastly. ‘Me? I am just over sixteen. I shall soon be able to do all that. Ah, what will Gemma Barbensi and Bianca Sant’otto say? As for dresses—you see this?’ She touched it scornfully, and flicked a frayed portion near the cuff with contemptuous fingers. ‘You would never guess how long I have had this dress. More than two years. And I have grown so much that it has had to be altered again and again. I am so tired of this horrible old blue woollen gown. No more of such things. I can go to madame, or can send to Paris, if it pleases me, and order just what I like—silk and velvet things, or satin. Do you not like soft silken things? Yes, I’m sure you do. All your things are soft and flowing. This woollen dress you have on now’—she stretched out her hand and touched it—‘has a petticoat of silk under it. I like that—don’t you?’

Without giving Minna time to reply, she went on:

‘Then, there will be my evening dresses too. They will be lovely. I delight in evening dresses—gauze and silk, and all kinds of devices for making people look beautiful. And, then, evening is the time for jewellery. I am so fond of jewels. Diamonds are the most beautiful, after all. Do you think I should look well in, say, velvet—white velvet, with a long train, and quantities of fine white lace upon it—and a diamond necklace, diamonds in my hair, diamond earrings, diamond rings—what a lot of diamonds one could use to be sure, if one tried! I think diamond shoe-buckles also would be charming, and a diamond tassel to the string of my fan, which would be of ivory and white lace. How do you think I should look in such a costume?’

She sat up, facing Minna, and smiling the same fixed smile, the muscles of her face moving in obedience to her will, but no inner merriment or pleasure or anticipation present to give any light to her eyes or any expression to her smile.

‘My dear,’ said Minna, ‘you would look very beautiful in such a costume, I have no doubt. My opinion is, that beautiful clothes and jewels always look more beautiful still when worn by beautiful persons, and perhaps you have heard before now that you are beautiful.’

‘I have heard it a great many times, especially lately,’ replied Fulvia, in a hard, rasping voice. ‘But you look very grave. You do not speak as if you would like to see me in such a dress—wearing such ornaments.’

‘To tell the truth, I would rather see you still simply dressed, even in this old blue frock which you so much dislike.’ (She noticed that Fulvia started, and looked down with a half-frightened expression at the folds of her old gown.) ‘You are very, very young. Velvet and diamonds worn by women mean a great many things—generally, amongst others, that they have a position to maintain and responsibilities to fulfil—for which you are very young. I should think you might be very happy for some time yet in your youth, enjoying yourself, and studying a little, perhaps, because, of course, you can’t know everything yet.’ She smiled kindly.

‘Oh, pooh!’ cried Fulvia, with a toss of her head. ‘I have been shut up so long. There is all the world to see, and it is quite time I began. I am a Roman girl,’ she went on, lifting her head with a superb gesture. ‘We Roman people do not wait so long to begin our lives as you cold people in your cold country. Beppo told me that. He knows everything. I often go and sit with him in his little room while he is reading. What learned, profound books he reads!’ she went on. ‘He is a scholar indeed, and he has taught me some things from his books. The other day—before we went away, that is—I was reading in a book which he had from the library, translated from the German, about ancient customs here and about what became of Roman girls long ago, when there were emperors here and slaves, and when this city was the mistress of the world—and of your country too.’

She looked defiantly at Minna, who only smiled, saying:

‘Yes, I know it was a great thing for our country that your city and your emperors were its masters once. Well?’

‘I read how by the time a girl was thirteen or fourteen, at the latest, she was married. She went straight home to her husband’s house, and was immediately the most important person in it. Her husband called her Domina; she had power unlimited to amuse herself, to interest herself, to do what she liked. She had even the power of life and death over her slaves, and many members of her household——’

‘And it did her no good,’ interposed Minna hastily. ‘If you had read further you would most likely have found that these young ladies, so early promoted, did not turn out the best of characters afterwards.’

Ignoring this, Fulvia went on:

‘And I am rather more than sixteen, so I think it is high time that I began to follow this good example. Mamma, moreover, says that I am to do so. She has arranged it all.’

‘How?’ asked Minna, almost breathlessly.

‘She says I am to be married,’ replied Fulvia, whose lips were dry, despite the glowing picture she had just been painting.

‘Married!—may I ask to whom?’

‘Oh yes. To Signor Marchmont. He has been in love with me, he says, ever since he first saw me. He is fabulously rich. We went to the opera with him last night. He talked to me all the time. This morning, very early, he came to see mamma. Just before lunch he went away, and she called me, and told me he had asked her for my hand, and that she had promised it to him.’

‘She did not ask you whether you wished him to have it?’

‘Ask me? Che! She can do as she likes,’ said Fulvia, across whose face a dreadful expression was creeping, which turned Minna’s heart cold.

‘But—but——’

‘She told me all that I have told you. I am to have all these things I have been describing to you, and many more—carriages and horses, and men-servants. And I am to travel, and go to Australia, that he may show his friends there what a beautiful wife he has got. But I am not to live there. I shall live in London or Paris.’

‘Not in Rome?’

‘No, not in Rome,’ replied Fulvia, a cold despair in her voice. ‘It seems he objects to Rome; and he told mamma he did not want my relations—he wanted me.’

‘But, my child, there is something all wrong in this. Why do you look at me in that way if——’

‘Oh, it is all right, of course,’ said Fulvia, with a little grating laugh. ‘It is so surprising, that is all. Why do I trouble you with it? Because you are kind—because I heard Beppo say that you were noble-minded. Because you were kind to my poor little birds, so I was sure you would be kind to me, and——’

Almost simultaneously they rose from their chairs. Minna advanced towards Fulvia, who was looking at her now with undisguised despair, with distended eyes full of horror.

‘Fulvia, I only saw you yesterday morning for the first time, but I knew in a moment that you were not happy. I saw it again last night at dinner. You are not happy, in spite of all that you tell me about dresses, and jewels, and so forth. Speak out! You do not wish to marry this man. You are not satisfied about it.’

‘Oh, signora!’ cried Fulvia, in a hollow voice, clasping her hands and looking at Minna. ‘Wish to marry him? I hate him! I hate him! Is he not too dreadful? Oh, what must I do? Oh-h!’ Her sigh ended in a shudder, which shook her from head to foot. ‘I have to hold myself tight, like this,’ and she gathered herself in till she looked about half her natural size, ‘whenever I think about it, or I should begin to scream and cry and talk nonsense. Ah, Dio mio! what have I done that this should have happened to me? Have I really been so bad? And I am afraid—afraid——’ she went on in a freezing whisper, looking around the room with a wild uncontrollable terror in her eyes. ‘It cannot be, it must not be; but it will—that’s the worst! There’s no way out of it. Even Beppo will not help me. I rushed to him and besought him. “Take me away!” I said. “Do not let this happen! I won’t speak to him—I won’t marry him.”’ She suppressed a cry of horror. ‘And he said he could do nothing. I think I am going mad; I feel as if I must run about all over the house, and say to everyone, “Do you know Signor Marchmont? I’m going to be married to him. Don’t you envy me?”’

She burst into a paroxysm of laughing and sobbing combined, hysterical, frantic.

‘Something must be done,’ said Minna beneath her breath, as she looked at her. Then, as a sudden thought crossed her mind, she went up to Fulvia again, put one arm about her shoulder, and with the other drew her head upon her bosom, stroking the bright hair and touching it with her lips.

‘Fulvia mia, one word. Do you love somebody else?’

‘Somebody else? No!’ said Fulvia, suddenly lifting her head, and looking at Minna with her clear, truthful eyes. ‘Why should I? If I loved someone else, and someone else loved me, I should not be afraid. He would no doubt be kind to me, and would kill me rather than let it happen. Now I must do for myself anything that has to be done. Oh, it is so horrible to be afraid! It is the most horrible thing there can be, I am sure. And do you know what it is that I am afraid of—most afraid of, that is?’

‘No, cara mia; tell me.’

‘That if this very worst should happen—if nothing comes to save me, and I am actually married to him, he may be stronger than I am, and—and—I was reading in some of Beppo’s books—they are the only books I ever see—that strong natures put their own stamp on weaker ones—if in time he were to put the stamp of his nature upon me; if some time I, who only wish to be good and do no harm to anybody, should become bad—oh, my God! there is such a long time in life—everything can happen! If this can happen, why should not that happen also?’

Minna’s heart seemed to freeze within her. Decidedly this was no common, tame-natured girl. There was passion, and the capacity for infinite suffering, in her. Perhaps too, by the same rule, the strength to struggle with that suffering. Who should say? But it was no light or frivolous soul which had felt itself on the verge of madness from the contemplation of that possibility.

‘No, no, impossible!’ said Minna brokenly, not knowing what else to say.

‘I never used to have such thoughts,’ pursued Fulvia; ‘it is all since twelve o’clock to-day. I can feel myself turning from a child into a woman. Yesterday I was a bambina, as Beppo always called me. To-day I feel quite old.’

She looked indeed ten years older than she had done the night before. Suddenly she added:

‘But I had a thought this afternoon. It came into my mind quite suddenly, and gave me comfort.’

‘What was it?’

‘You know we went to the opera last night. It was Lucia di Lammermoor. I have also read the romance of the “Bride of Lammermoor” translated into our language. Lucia found a way to escape when her mother was cruel to her, and so can I.’

‘Hush! it won’t be necessary. It shall not be necessary!’ exclaimed Minna hastily.

‘I asked mamma why, when she had been kind to me all my life, she should now all at once become hard and cruel. She said she was doing me the truest kindness—that I could be no judge in the matter, and that if I had any affection for her I should gladly make this little sacrifice, if it were a sacrifice. Then she told me she was deeply in debt. Our visitors, it seems, do not make her fortune. By my marriage she will be released from every care, and will also have a large sum of money to do as she pleases with. For the first time since I was born, she says, she will know what freedom and self-respect mean.’

‘At the price of her daughter’s slavery, dishonour, and hopeless degradation,’ said Minna to herself.

‘That, of course, is something,’ pursued Fulvia. ‘I must do all I can for my mother, naturally. But is it not awful? Oh! why is Beppo not rich? If he had plenty of money he would have given it all to mamma to pay her debts, and he would have saved me. He told me there was nothing strong in the world now except money, and that it always had been so from the earliest times, since first money was invented. It can do everything, and those who have it can make other people good or bad, just as they please, all because they have a few yellow lumps more than the others have. He was rough—quite rough and hard to me. He almost pushed me away when I knelt down and begged him to make things different. He said, “Go, child! you are in your mother’s hands, not mine.” “But you can talk to mamma—you can persuade her,” I said. He laughed. Beppo laughed. Everything is so strange that I no longer know what anything means.’

Minna knew by instinct the agony which that laugh had concealed.

‘Do not mistrust him,’ she said soothingly. ‘He may perhaps even now find a way out of it.’

Fulvia pushed her hair back, and looked around her with a bewildered expression. ‘It seems so strange. I feel so curious. At one moment it seems as if I had been miserable for thousands of years and never should be anything else. Then, all in a moment, I feel as if it were a dream—all nonsense—and that I had imagined it all. Perhaps it will turn out to be so.’

She looked desolately at Minna.

‘Has—has anything been said about the time of this? Did he want to be married soon?’

‘As soon as possible, but he is obliged to go away for a little while first, to London, where his business is. And there was something about lawyers and settlements. I don’t know what; I don’t understand it.’

‘Is he coming again to-night?’

‘Yes, I believe so. But not to dinner. Yes, he is coming to-night,’ she said in an apathetic voice, as if the last point of emotion had been reached, and she was past feeling anything more. ‘I suppose he will come every night until he goes away.’

Minna was silent. All sorts of wild plans and projects went careering through her mind. So far as she could gather, the bargain, though clinched between the two parties in authority—Marchmont and Signora Dietrich—had not yet been formally ratified in presence of the object of barter—Fulvia, to wit. That part of the affair was probably to come off to-night, when the victim would be adorned for the sacrificial altar, and crowned, so to speak, with garlands. What was to be done? She kept stupidly repeating to herself, ‘Something must be done!’ but she knew perfectly well that the something did not exist, could not be done, could not be brought about by anything short of a miracle.

Fulvia Dietrich, legally and by the iron traditions of her nationality, was as absolutely her mother’s chattel, and at her mother’s disposal, as if she had been a basket of oranges which the signora had bought in the market. It was the mother’s duty to see the girl provided for, either by marriage, or by sending her into a convent, or by disposing of her in some way, decently and in order. And in the proposed arrangement everything necessary had been attended to—everything outwardly necessary, that is. There was money, something which for want of a better name might be called position, honourable marriage, a future free from pecuniary cares, if from nothing else.

It was most fortunate that the dispenser of all these things should make the impression upon nine persons out of ten of being a horror—a sort of moral reptile—to be whose wife must be, for any decent girl, hell upon earth.

Minna felt it to her inmost soul. That, however, did not help, did not give her the power to arrest the action of Signora Dietrich, and could effect nothing towards the saving of Fulvia from her fate.

‘I suppose he is received in respectable society,’ she thought darkly. ‘I’ve never met him anywhere; but—surely—have I heard people talking about some rich, vulgar colonial millionaire? I’ve been so little out lately. I must begin to stir myself up and go about a little more amongst my fellow-creatures. Can he be an impostor?’ She gave a joyful start. ‘Who knows what he is? I’m sure in looks the most stagey roué that ever played the villain’s part in a transpontine melodrama could not exceed him. He looks just the man to have a wife concealed somewhere. No doubt he has. Oh yes, that must be the case. We must find it out, and expose him. Even the signora could not get over such an awkward little fact as that, in addition to which her daughter could not be legally married to him, and could have no claims upon his money. Really, I am becoming acute and ingenious, driven by necessity.’

She had been sitting still all this time, her hand resting upon that of Fulvia; and looking up now, she perceived the girl’s eyes fixed upon her with wistful solicitude. In an instant Minna knew that all her thoughts and suspicions amounted to practically nothing—counted for nothing, would effect nothing.

‘Fulvia,’ she said in a deep voice, ‘it is a difficult matter. I am not clever enough to grapple with it at once. All I can say to you is, that I shall think about it continually, and if I can find a means of helping you I shall do it. I know this is cold comfort for you, but I am only human—I can do no more.’

‘Ah!’ said Fulvia, ‘I am sure you would if you could. So would Beppo. Poor Beppo! He has no money, you know, or he would give every penny of it to mamma to set me free. And I should let him do it, because then I could pay him for it by working for him with my own hands. We should be so happy, even in an attic—I with my work, he with his books—we should never think of anything dreadful.’

‘You love Signor Giuseppe?’ hazarded Minna.

‘Love him! Ah, how good he is! and how kind, and how wise ... and how sad!’ she added in a lower voice.

Yes; Minna knew it, and felt that she must not pursue the subject any further. It was like prying into a man’s secrets behind his back.

‘Now I must go,’ said Fulvia. ‘You have been very kind to me. I like being here.’

‘You must come often. I shall always be glad when you do. You will have to come, you know, to look after the birds.’

Fulvia nodded gravely.

‘Yes, I must go now to mamma’s room. She will wonder already where I have been so long.’

She put her hand within that which Minna extended to her, carried the latter to her lips, and then, lifting her head, and with a forlorn smile, went quietly out of the room.

END OF VOL. I.

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Changes made to text:

On page 4, changed “eight-and twenty” to “eight-and-twenty”
On page 23, near “Medusa Morente”, the original spelling of “Apoxiomene” has been retained
On page 24, inserted missing period after “Come and try it”
On page 126, added missing period after “of what I used to be”
On page 140, near “she said discontentedly”, changed “Giá” to “Già”
On page 213, added missing period after “almost breathlessly”
On page 222, added missing period after “She looked desolately at Minna”

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Table of Contents

- ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

- NEW LIBRARY NOVELS.

- ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

- CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- CHAPTER III.

- CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER V.

- CHAPTER VI.

- CHAPTER VII.

- CHAPTER VIII.

- TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE