Taquisara

Taquisara.

by F. Marion Crawford.

CHAPTER I.

"Where shall I sign my name?"

Veronica Serra"s thin, dark fingers rolled the old silver penholder nervously as she sat at one end of the long library table, looking up at the short, stout man who stood beside her.

"Here, if you please, Excellency," answered Lamberto Squarci, with an affable smile.

His fingers were dark, too, but not thin, and they were smooth and dingy and very pointed, a fact which the young princess noticed with dislike, as he indicated the spot on the broad sheet of rough, hand-made paper, where he wished her to sign. A thrill of repulsion that was strong enough to be painful ran through her, and she rolled the penholder still more quickly and nervously, so that she almost dropped it, and a little blot of ink fell upon the sheet before she had begun to write.

"Oh! It is of no importance!" said the Neapolitan notary, in a rea.s.suring tone. "A little ink more or less!"

He had some pink blotting-paper ready, and was already applying a corner of it to the ink-spot, with the neat skill of a professional scribe.

"I will erase it when it is dry," he said. "You will not even see it.

Now, if your Excellency will sign--that will make the will valid."

Three other persons stood around Donna Veronica as she set the point of her pen to the paper, and two of them watched the characters she traced, with eager, unwinking eyes. The third was a very insignificant personage just then, being but the notary"s clerk; but his signature was needed as a witness to the will, and he patiently waited for his turn. The other two were husband and wife, Gregorio and Matilde, Count and Countess Macomer; and the countess was the young girl"s aunt, being the only sister of Don Tommaso Serra, Prince of Acireale, Veronica"s dead father.

She looked on, with an eager, pleased expression, standing upright and bending her head in order to see the point of the pen as it moved over the rough paper. Her hands were folded before her, but the uppermost one twitched and moved once or twice, as though it would go out to get possession of the precious doc.u.ment which left her all the heiress"s great possessions in case of Donna Veronica"s death. It was a bit of paper well worth having.

The girl rose, slight and graceful, when she had written her name, and the finely chiselled lips had an upward curve of young scorn, as she turned from the table, while the notary and his clerk proceeded to witness the will. Immediately, the countess smiled, very brightly, showing beautiful teeth between smooth red lips, and her strong arms went round her young niece. She was a woman at least forty years of age, but still handsome.

"I thank you with all my heart!" she cried. "It is a proof of affection which I shall never forget! You will live a hundred years--a thousand, if G.o.d will it! But the mere wish to leave me your fortune is a token of love and esteem which I shall know how to value."

Donna Veronica kissed her aunt"s fresh cheek coldly, and drew back as soon as she could.

"I am glad that you are pleased," she answered in a cool and colourless voice.

She felt that she had said enough, and, so far as she expected any thanks, her aunt had said too much. She had made the will and had signed it, for the sake of peace, and she asked nothing but peace in return.

Ever since she had left the convent in which she had been educated and had come to live with her aunt, the question of this will had arisen at least once every day, and she knew by heart every argument which had been invented to induce her to make it. The princ.i.p.al one had always been the same. She had been told that if, in the inscrutable ways of Providence, she should chance to die young, unmarried and childless, the whole of the great Acireale property would go to relations whom she had never seen and of whom she scarcely knew the names. This, the Countess Macomer had insisted, would be a terrible misfortune, and as human life was uncertain, even when one was very young, it was the duty of Veronica to provide against it, by leaving everything to the one remaining member of the Serra family who, with herself, represented the direct line, who had taken a mother"s place and duties in bringing up the orphan girl, and who had been ready to sacrifice every personal consideration for the sake of the child"s welfare.

Veronica did not see clearly that the Countess Macomer had ever really sacrificed anything at all in the execution of her trust as guardian, any more than the count himself, who, with Cardinal Campodonico, was a joint trustee, had ever been put to any inconvenience, beyond that of being the uncle by marriage of one of the richest heiresses in Italy. It was natural that when she had signed the will at last, she should receive her aunt"s effusive thanks rather coldly, and that she should show very little enthusiasm when her uncle kissed her forehead and expressed his appreciation of her loving intention. The plain truth was that if she had refused any longer to sign the will, the two would have made her life even more unbearable than it was already.

She knew that there was no reason why her life should be made hard to bear. She was not only rich, and a princess in her own right. She was young and, if not pretty, at least fairly well endowed with those gifts which attract and please, and bring their possessor the daily little satisfactions that make something very like happiness, before pa.s.sion throws its load into the scales of life on the right side or the wrong.

She knew that, at her age, she might have been married already, and she wondered that her aunt should not have proposed to marry her before now.

Yet in this she was not displeased, for her best friend, Bianca Campodonico, had been married two years already to Corleone, of evil fame, and was desperately unhappy. Veronica dreaded a like fate, and was in no haste to find a husband. The countess told her always that she should be free to choose one for herself within reasonable limits of age, name, and fortune. Such an heiress, with such a fortune, said Matilde Macomer, could marry whom she pleased. But so far as Veronica had been allowed to see the world, the choice seemed anything but large.

The count and countess had always been very careful in the selection of their intimate a.s.sociates--they could hardly be said to have any intimate friends. Since Veronica had come to them from the convent in Rome, where she had been educated according to her dead father"s desire, they had been doubly cautious and trebly particular as to the persons they chose to receive. Their responsibility, they said openly, was very great. The child"s happiness, was wholly in their hands. They would be held accountable if she should form an unfortunate attachment for some ineligible young man who might chance to dine at their table.

The responsibility, they repeated with emphasis, was truly enormous. It was also an unfortunate fact that in their Neapolitan society there were many young men, princes and dukes by the score, who had nothing but their names and t.i.tles to recommend them, and who would have found it very hard to keep body and t.i.tle together, so to say, if gambling had suddenly been abolished, or had gone out of fashion unexpectedly.

Then, too, the Macomer couple had always led a retired life and had kept aloof from the very gay portion of society. They lived well, according to their station, and so far as any one could see; but it had always been said that Gregorio Macomer was miserly. At the same time it suited his wife, for reasons of her own, not to be conspicuous in the world, and she encouraged him to lead a quiet existence, spending half the year in the country, and receiving very few people when in Naples during the winter and spring. Gregorio had one brother, Bosio, considerably younger than himself and very different in character, who was not married and who lived at the Palazzo Macomer, on excellent terms both with Gregorio and the countess, as well as with Veronica herself. The young girl was inclined to like him, though she felt dimly that she could never understand him as she believed that she understood her aunt and uncle.

He was, indeed, almost the only man, excepting her uncle, whom she could be said to know tolerably well. He was not present on that afternoon when she signed the will, but his absence did not surprise her, for he had always abstained from any remarks about her property or his brother"s and sister-in-law"s guardianship, in such a marked way as to make her understand that he really wished to know nothing about the management or disposal of her fortune.

She liked him for several reasons,--for his non-interference in discussions about her affairs, for a certain quiet consideration, just a shade more friendly than deference, which he showed for her slightest wishes, and chiefly, perhaps, for his conversation and perfectly even temper.

Her uncle Macomer was not always good-tempered and he was never considerate. He was a stiff man, of impenetrable face, much older than his wife, cold when he was pleased, and harsh as rough ice when he was annoyed; a tall, bony man, with flattened lips, from which the grey moustaches and the beard were brushed smoothly away in all directions.

He had very small eyes--a witty enemy of his said they were so small that one could not find them in his face, and those who knew him laughed at the jest, for they always seemed hard to find when one wished to meet them. His shoulders were unusually high and narrow, but he did not stoop. On the contrary, he habitually threw back his head, with a certain coldly aggressive stiffness, so that he easily looked above the person with whom he was talking. Though he had never been given to any sort of bodily exercise, his hands were naturally h.o.r.n.y, and they were almost always cold. For the rest, he was careful of his appearance and scrupulous in matters of dress, like many of his fellow-countrymen. In his household he insisted upon a neatness as fastidious as his own, and nothing could have induced him to employ a Neapolitan servant. His family colours were green and black, and the green of his servants"

liveries was of the very darkest that could be had.

He imposed his taste upon his household, and gave it a certain marked respectability which betrayed no information about his fortune. To all appearances he was not poor; but it would have been impossible to say with certainty whether he were rich or only in moderate circ.u.mstances.

He was undoubtedly more careful than ninety-nine out of a hundred of his fellow-citizens, in getting the value of what he spent, to the uttermost splitting of farthings; and when he spoke of money there was a certain cruel hardening of the hard lines in his face, which Veronica never failed to notice with dislike. She wondered how her aunt could have led an apparently tranquil life with such a man during more than twenty years.

Doubtless, she thought, Bosio"s presence acted as a palliative in the somewhat grim atmosphere of the Palazzo Macomer. He was utterly different from his brother. In the first place, he was gentle and kind in speech and manner, though apparently rather sad than gay. He was different in face, in figure, in voice, in carriage--having quiet brown eyes, and brown hair only streaked with grey, with a full, silky beard; a clear pale complexion; in frame shorter than Gregorio, with smaller bones, slightly inclined to stoutness, but rather graceful than stiff; small feet and well-shaped hands of pleasant texture; a clear, low voice that never jarred upon the ear, and a kindly, half-sad laugh in which there was a singular refinement, of the sort which shows itself more in laughter than in speech. Laughter is, indeed, a terrible betrayer of the character, and a surer guide in judgment than most people know. For men learn to use their voices skilfully and to govern their tones as well as their words; but, beyond not laughing too loud for ordinary decency of behaviour, there are few people who care, or realize, how they laugh; and those who do, and who, being aware that there is room for improvement, endeavour to improve, very generally produce either a semi-musical noise, which is false and affected, or a perfectly inane cachinnation which has nothing human in it at all.

Bosio Macomer was a refined man, not only by education and outward contact with the refinements he sought in others, but within himself and by predisposition of nature. He read much, and found beauties in books which his friends thought dull, but which appealed tenderly to his innate love of tenderness. He had probably lost many illusions, but the sweetest of them all was still fresh in him, for he loved nature unaffectedly. In an un.o.btrusive way he was something of an artist, and was fond of going out by himself, when in the country, to sketch and dream all day. Veronica did not understand how with such tastes he could bear the life in the Palazzo Macomer, for months at a time. He was free to go and come as he pleased, and since he preferred the country, she wondered why he did not live out of town altogether. His existence was the more incomprehensible to her, as he rarely lost an opportunity of finding fault with Naples as a city and with the Neapolitans as human beings. Sometimes he did not leave the house for many days, as he frankly admitted, preferring the little apartment in the upper story of the house, where he lived independently, with one old servant, amongst his books and his pictures, appearing downstairs only at dinner, and not always then. His place was always ready for him, but no one ever remarked his absence, nor inquired where he might be when he chose to stay away.

He was on excellent terms with every one. The servants adored him, while they feared his brother and disliked the countess; when he appeared he never failed to kiss the countess"s hand, and to exchange a friendly word or two with Gregorio; but as for the latter, Bosio made no secret of the fact that he preferred the society of the ladies of the household to that of the count, with whom he had little in common. He certainly admired his sister-in-law, and more than once frankly confessed to Veronica that in his opinion Matilde Macomer was still the most beautiful woman in the world. Yet Veronica had observed that he was critical of looks in other women, and she thought his criticisms generally just and in good taste. For her part, however, if he chose to consider her middle-aged aunt lovely, Veronica would not contradict him, for she was cautious in a certain degree, and in spite of herself she distrusted her surroundings.

There were times when the Countess Macomer inspired her with confidence.

Those very beautiful dark eyes of hers had but one defect, namely, that they were quite too near together; but they were still the best features in the elder woman"s face, and when Veronica looked at them from such an angle as not to notice their relative position, she almost believed that she could trust them. But she never liked the smooth red lips, nor the over-pointed nose, which had something of the falcon"s keenness without its n.o.bility. The thick and waving brown hair grew almost too low on the white forehead, and, whether by art or nature, the eyebrows were too broad and too dark for the face, though they were so well placed as to greatly improve the defect of the close-set eyes.

There was a marvellous genuine freshness of colour in the clear complexion, and the woman carried her head well upon a really magnificent neck. She was strong and vital and healthy, and her personality was as distinctly dominating as her physical self. Yet she was generally very careful not to displease her husband, even when he was capricious, and Veronica was sometimes surprised by the apparent weakness with which she yielded to him in matters about which she had as good a right as he to an opinion and a decision. The girl supposed that her aunt was not so strong as she seemed to be, when actually brought face to face with the rough ice of Gregorio Macomer"s character.

Veronica made her observations discreetly and kept them to herself, as was not only becoming but wise. At first the change from the semi-cloistered existence of the convent in Rome to the life at the Palazzo Macomer had dazzled the girl and had confused her ideas. But with the natural desire of the very young to seem experienced, she had begun by manifesting no surprise at anything she saw; and she had soon discovered that, although she was supposed to be living in the society of the most idle and pleasure-loving city in the world, her surroundings were in reality neither gay nor dazzling, but decidedly monotonous and dull. She had dim, childish memories of magnificent things in her father"s house, though the main impression was that of his death, following closely, as she had been told, upon her mother"s. Of the latter, she could remember nothing. In dreams she saw beautiful things, and brilliant light and splendid pictures and enchanted gardens, and when she awoke she felt that the dreams had been recollections of what she had seen, and of what still belonged to her. But she sought the reality in vain. The grand old palace in the Toledo was hers, she was told, but it was let for a term of years to the munic.i.p.ality and was filled with public offices; the marble staircases were black and dingy with the pa.s.sing of many feet that tracked in the mud in winter and the filthy dust of Naples in summer. Dark, poor faces and ill-clad forms moved through the halls, and horrible voices echoed perpetually in the corridors, where those who waited discussed taxes, and wrangled, and cursed those in power, and cheated one another, and picked a pocket now and then, and spat upon the marble pavement whereon royal and lordly feet had so often trod in days gone by. It had all become a great nest of dirt and stealing and busy chicanery, where dingy, hawk-eyed men with sodden white faces and disgusting hands lay in wait for the unwary who had business with the city government, to rob them on pretence of facilitating their affairs, to cringe for a little coin flung them in scorn sometimes by one who had grown rich in greater robbery than they could practise--sometimes, too, springing aside to escape a kick or a blow as ill-tempered success went swinging by, high-handed and vulgarly cruel, a few degrees less filthy and ten thousand times more repulsive.

Once, Veronica had insisted upon going through the palace. She would never enter it again, and after that day, when she pa.s.sed it, she turned her face from it and looked away. Vaguely, she wondered whether they were not deceiving her and whether it were really the home she dimly remembered. There had been splendid things in it, then--she would not ask what had become of them, but without asking, she was told that they had been wisely disposed of, and that instead of paying people for keeping an uninhabited palace in order, she was receiving an enormous rent for it from the city.

Then she had wished to see the lovely villa that came back in the pictures of her dreams, and she had been driven out into the country according to her desire. From a distance, as the carriage approached it, she recognized the lordly poplars, and far at the end of the avenue the elaborately stuccoed front and cornices of the old-fashioned "barocco"

building. But the gardens were gone. Files of neatly trimmed vines, trained upon poles stuck in deep furrows, stretched away from the avenue on either side. The flower garden was a vegetable garden now, and the artichokes and the cabbages and the broccoli were planted with mathematical regularity up to the very walls. There were hens and chickens on the steps and running in and out of the open door, and from a near sty the grunt of many pigs reached her ears. A pale, earthy-skinned peasant, scantily clad in dusty canvas, grinned sadly and kissed the hem of her skirt, calling her "Excellency" and beginning at once to beg for reduction of rent. A field-worn woman, filthy and dishevelled, drove back half a dozen nearly naked children whose little legs were crusted with dry mud, and whose faces had not been washed for a long time.

And within, there was no furniture. In the rooms upstairs were stores of grain and potatoes, and red peppers and grapes hanging on strings. The cracked mirrors, built into the gilded stucco, were coated with heavy unctuous dust, and the fine old painted tiles on the floor were loose and broken in places. In the ceiling certain pink and well-fed cherubs still supported unnatural thunderclouds through which Juno forever drove her gold-wheeled car and team of patient peac.o.c.ks, smiling high and G.o.ddess-like at the squalor beneath. Still Diana bent over Endymion cruelly foreshortened in his sleep, beyond the possibility of a waking return to human proportions. Mars frowned, Jove threatened, Venus rose glowing from the sea; and below, the unctuous black dust settled and thickened on everything except the cracked floors piled with maize and beans and lupins, and rubbed bright between the heaps by the peasants"

naked feet.

Veronica turned her back upon the villa, as she had turned from the great palace in the Toledo. They whispered to her that the peasant"s rent must not be reduced, for he was well able to pay, and they pointed to the closely planted vines and vegetables and olives that stretched far away to right and left, where she remembered in her dreams of far childhood that there had been lawns and walks and flowers. The man, she was told, was not the only peasant on the place. There were other houses now, and huts that could shelter a family, and there was land, land, always more land, as far as she could see, all as closely and neatly and regularly planted with vegetables and grain, vines and olives; and it was all hers, and yielded enormous rents which were wisely invested.

She was very rich indeed, but to her it all seemed horribly sordid and grinding and mean--and the peasants looked prematurely old, labour-worn, filthy, wretchedly poor. If she had even had any satisfaction from so much wealth, it might have seemed different. She said so, in her heart.

She was accustomed to tell her confessor that she was proud and uncharitable and unfeeling--not finding any real misdeeds to confess.

She was willing to believe that she was all that and much more. If she had been living in the whirling, golden pleasure-storm of an utterly thoughtless world, she believed herself bad enough to have shut her memory"s eyes to the haggard peasant-mother of the dirty half-clad children--to all the hundreds of them who doubtless lived just like the one she had seen, all upon her lands; she could have forgotten the busy-thieving, sodden-faced crowd that thronged the chambers wherein her fathers had been born and had feasted kings and had died--the very room where her own father had lain dead. She could have shut it all out, she thought, if she had held in her hands the gold that all this brought, to scatter it at her will; for she was sure that she had not a better heart than other girls of her age. But she had never seen it. The reality of her own life was too weak and colourless, by contrast, to make the name of fortune an excuse for the sordid facts of meanness. There was no splendour about her, no wild gaiety, none of the glorious extravagance of conscious young wealth, and there was very little amus.e.m.e.nt to divert her thoughts. The people she would have liked to know were kept at a distance from her. She was advised not to buy the things which attracted her eyes, and was told that they were not so good as they looked, and that on the whole it was better to keep money than to spend it--but that, of course, she might do as she pleased, and that when she wanted money her uncle Macomer would give it to her.

It all pa.s.sed through his hands, and he managed everything, with the a.s.sistance of Lamberto Squarci the notary and of other men of business--mostly shabby-looking men in black, with spectacles and unhealthy complexions, who came and went in the morning when old Macomer was in his study attending to affairs. Veronica knew none but Squarci by name, and never spoke with any of them. There seemed to be no reason why she should.

The count had told her that when she wished it, he was ready to render an account of the estates and would be happy to explain everything to her at length. She understood nothing of business and was content to accept the roughest statement as he chose to give it to her. She was far too young to distrust the man whom she had been taught to respect as her guardian and as a person of scrupulous honesty. She was completely in his power, and she was accustomed to ask him for any little sums she needed. It never really struck her that he might misuse the authority she indifferently left in his hands.

It was her aunt who had induced her to make the will, and for whose conduct she felt a sort of undefined resentment and contempt.

Considering, she thought, how improbable it was that she herself should die before Matilde Macomer, the latter had shown an absurd anxiety about the disposal of the fortune. If Veronica had yielded the point, she had done so in order to get rid of an importunity which wearied her perpetually. She was to marry, of course, in due time. G.o.d would give her children, and they would inherit her wealth. It was really ridiculous of her aunt to be so anxious lest it should all go to those distant relations in Sicily and Spain. Nevertheless, in order to have peace, she signed the will, and her aunt thanked her effusively, and old Macomer"s flat lips touched her forehead while he spoke a few words of gratified approval.

In the evening she told Bosio, the count"s brother, of what she had done. His gentle eyes looked at her thoughtfully for a few seconds, and he did not smile, nor did he make any observation.

A few minutes later he was talking of a picture he had seen for sale--a mere sketch, but by Ribera, called the Spagnoletto. She made up her mind to buy it for him as a surprise, for it pleased her to give him pleasure.

But when she was alone in her room that night she recalled Bosio"s expression when she had told him about the will. She was sure that he was not pleased, and she wondered why he had not at least said something in reply--something quite indifferent perhaps, but yet something, instead of looking at her in total silence, just for those few seconds.

After all, she was really more intimate with him than with her aunt and uncle, and liked him better than either of them, so that she had a right to expect that he should have answered with something more than silence when she told him of such a matter.

She sat a long time in a deep chair near her toilet table, thinking about her own life, in the great dim room which half a dozen candles barely lighted; and perhaps it was the first time that she had really asked herself how long her present mode of existence was to continue, how long she was to lie half-hidden, as it were, in the sombrely respectable dimness of the Macomer establishment, how long she was to remain unmarried. Knowing the customs of her own people in regard to marriage, as she did, it was certainly strange that she should not have heard of any offer made to her uncle and aunt for her hand. Surely the mothers of marriageable sons knew of her existence, of her fortune, of the t.i.tles she held in her own right and could confer upon her husband and leave to her children. It was not natural that no one should wish to marry her, that no mother should desire such an heiress for her son.

With the distrustful introspection of maiden youth, she suddenly asked herself whether by any possibility she were different from other girls and whether she had not some strange defect, physical or mental, of which the existence had been most carefully concealed from her all her life. In the quick impulse she rose and brought all the burning candles to the toilet table, and lighted others, and stood before the mirror, in the yellow light, gazing most critically at her own reflexion. She looked long and earnestly and quite without vanity. She told herself, cataloguing her looks, that her hair was neither black nor brown, but that it was very thick and long and waved naturally; that her eyes were very dark, with queer little angles just above the lids, under the prominent brows; that her nose, seen in full face, looked very straight and rather small, though she had been told by the girls in the convent that it was aquiline and pointed; that her cheeks were thin and almost colourless; that her chin was round and smooth and prominent, her lips rather dark than red, and modelled in a high curve; that her ears were very small--she threw back the heavy hair to see them better, turning her face sideways to the gla.s.s; that her throat was over-slender, and her neck and arms far too thin for beauty, but with a young leanness which might improve with time, though nothing could ever make them white. She was dark, on the whole. She was willing to admit that she was sallow, that her eyes had a rather sad look in them, and even that one was almost imperceptibly larger than the other, though the difference was so small that she had never noticed it before, and it might be due to the uncertain light of the candles in the dim room. But most a.s.suredly there was no physical defect to be seen. She was not beautiful like poor Bianca Corleone; but she was far from ugly--that was certain.