Chapter 7

Olive sat in her little bedroom correcting exercises.

It was the drowsy middle of the afternoon and the heat was intense. All the grey-green and golden land of Tuscany lay still and helpless at the mercy of the sun. The birds had long ceased singing, and only the thin shrilling of the locusts broke the August silence. The parched earth was pale, and great cracks that only the autumn rains could fill had opened on the hillsides, but the ripening maize lay snug within its narrow sheaths of green, and the leaves of the vines hid great bunches of purpling grapes. In the fields men rested awhile from their labours, and the patient white oxen stood in the shade of the mulberries, while the sunburnt lads who drove them bathed their tired bodies in the stream, or lay idly in the lush grass at the water's edge.

In the town the walls of houses that had fronted the morning sun were scorching to the touch, and there was no coolness even in the steep northward streets that were always in shadow, or in the grey stone-paved courts of the palaces. There were few people about at this hour, and the little stream of traffic had run dry in the Via Cavour. A vendor of melons drew his barrow close up to the battered old column in the Piazza Tolomei, and squatted down on the ground beside it. "_Cocomeri! Fresc' e buoni!_" he cried once or twice, and then rolled over and went to sleep. A peasant girl carrying a basket of eggs passed presently, and she looked wistfully at the fruit, but she did not disturb his slumbers.

"Is that the aunt of your friend's mother? No, it is the sister of my niece's governess." Olive laid down her pen. She was only partially dressed and her hair hung loosely about her bare white shoulders. The heat made hairpins seem a burden and outer garments superfluous. "My niece's governess is the last. Thank Heaven for that!" she said, and she sat down on the brick floor to take off her stockings. Gemma's _fidanzato_, her lawyer from Lucca, was coming to Siena for a week. He would lodge next door and come in to the Menotti for most of his meals, and already poor old Carolina was busy in the hot, airless kitchen, beating up eggs for a _zabajone_, and Signora Carosi had gone out to buy ice for the wine and sweet cakes to be handed round with little glasses of _vin_ Santo or Marsala.

Carmela came into her cousin's room soon after four o'clock. "I have just taken Gemma a cup of black coffee. Her head aches terribly."

"I heard her moving about her room in the night," Olive answered, and she added, under her breath, "Poor Gemma!"

Carmela lowered her voice too. "Of course Maria and I know that you see what is going on as well as we do. There is some man ... she lets down a basket from her window at nights for letters, and I believe she meets him when my aunt thinks she has gone to Mass. It is dreadful. How glad we shall be when she is safely married and away."

"Who is the man?"

"Hush! I don't know. Do you hear the beating of a drum? One of the _Contrade_ is coming."

The two girls ran to the window, and Olive opened the green shutters a little way that they might see out without being seen. The day of the Palio was close at hand, and the pages and _alfieri_ of the rival parishes, whose horses were to run in the race, were already going about the town. Olive never tired of watching the flash of bright colours as the flags were flung up and deftly caught again, and she cried out now with pleasure as the little procession moved leisurely across the piazza.

"I wonder why they come here," Carmela said, as the first _alfiero_ let the heavy folds of silk ripple about his head, twisted the staff, seemed to drop it, and gathered it to him again easily with his left hand. The page stood aside with a grave assumption of the gilded graces of the thirteenth century. He was handsome in his dress of green and white and scarlet velvet.

"Why does he look up here?"

Olive laughed a little. "He is the son of the cobbler who mends my boots," she whispered. "He is trying to learn English and I have lent him some books, and that is why he has come to do us honour. I think it is charming of him."

She took a white magnolia blossom from a glass dish on her table. "Shall I be mediæval too?"

The boy raised smiling eyes as the pale flower came fluttering down to him. One of the _alfieri_ laughed aloud.

"_O Romeo, sei bello!_"

"_Son' felice!_" he answered, and he kissed the waxen petals ardently.

Olive softly clapped her hands together. "Is he not delicious! What an actor! Oh, Italy!"

Now that the performance was over the _alfieri_ strolled across the piazza to the barrow that was still drawn up by the column. "_Cocomeri! Fresc' e buoni!_"

"I never know what will please you," Carmela said as she sat down. "But foreigners always like the Palio. You will see many English and Americans and Germans on the stands."

"Yes, I love it all. Yesterday I passed through the Piazza del Campo and saw the workmen putting palings all about the centre, and hammering at the stands, while others strewed sand on the course and fastened mattresses to the side of the house by San Martino."

"Ah, the _fantini_ are often thrown there and flung against the wall. If there were no mattresses ... crack!" Carmela made a sound as of breaking bones and hummed a few bars of Chopin's _Marche Funèbre_.

Olive shuddered. "You are an impressionist, Carmela. Two dabs of scarlet and a smear--half a word and a shrug of the shoulders--and you have expressed a five-act tragedy. I think you could act."

"Oh, I am not clever; I should never be able to remember my part."

"You would improvise," Olive was beginning, when Carmela sprang up and ran to the window again.

"It is Orazio!" she cried. "He has come in a cab."

The _vetturino_ had pulled his horse up with a jerk of the reins after the manner of his kind; the wretched animal had slipped and he was now beating it about the head with the butt end of his whip. His fare had got out and was looking on calmly.

Olive hastily picked up one of her shoes and flung it at them. It struck the _vetturino_ just above the ear. "A nasty crack," she said. "His language is evidently frightful. It is a good thing I can't understand it, Carmela."

She looked down at the angry, bewildered men, and the _vetturino_, catching a glimpse of the flushed face framed in a soft fluff of brown hair, shook his fist and roared a curse upon it.

"Touch that horse again and I'll throw a jug of boiling water over you," she cried as she drew the green shutters to; and then, in quite another tone, "Oh, Giovanni, be good. What has the poor beast ever done to you?" She turned to Carmela. "I know him. His wife does washing for Signora Aurelia," she explained.

A slow grin overspread the man's heavy face as he rubbed his head.

"Mad English," he said, and then looked closely at the coin the Lucchese had tendered him.

"Your legal fare," Orazio began pompously.

"Santo Diavolo--"

"I am a lawyer."

"_Si capisce!_ Will you give the signorina her shoe?" He handed it to Orazio, who took it awkwardly.

"The incident is closed," Olive said as she came back to her cooling tea. "I hope there is a heaven for horses and a hell for men. Oh, how I hate cruelty! Carmela, if that is Orazio I must say I sympathise with Gemma. How could any woman love a mean, narrow-shouldered, whitey-brown paper thing like that?"

"It is a pity," sighed Carmela as she moved towards the door. "But after all they are all alike in the end. I must go now to help Maria lace. I pull a little, and then wait a few minutes. _È un martirio!_"

"Why does she do it?"

"Why does an ostrich bury its head in the sand? Why does a camel try to get through the eye of a needle? (But perhaps he does not.) I often tell her fat cannot be hidden, but she will not believe."

When Olive went into the _salotto_ a few minutes before seven she found the family assembled. Signor Lucis rose from his place at Gemma's side as the aunt uttered the introductory formula. He brought his heels together and bowed stiffly from the waist, and when Olive gave him her hand in English fashion he took it limply and held it for a moment before he dropped it. His string-coloured moustache was brushed up from a loose-lipped mouth, and he showed bad teeth when he smiled.

"The signorina speaks Italian?"

"Oh, yes."

"Ah, does she come from London?"

"I had no settled home in England."

"Ah! The sun never shines there?"

She laughed. "Not as it does here," she admitted. "Where is my shoe?"

"It was yours then?" he said with an attempt at playfulness. "Gemma has been quite jealous of the unknown owner, but she says it is much larger than any of hers." The girls' eyes met but neither spoke, and Orazio babbled on, unheeding: "Her feet are _carini_, and I can span her ankle with my thumb and forefinger; but you are small made too, signorina."

Carolina poked her head in at the door. "_Al suo comodo è pronto_," she said, referring to the dinner, and hurried away again to dish up the veal cutlets.

The young man contrived to remain behind in the _salotto_ for a moment and to keep Gemma with him. Olive looked at them as they took their places at table, and she understood that the girl had had to submit to some caress. She looked sick and her lips were quite white, and if Lucis had been a man of quick perceptions he would have realised, her face must have shown him, that she loathed him. He was dense, however, and though he commented on her silence later on it was evident that he attributed it to shyness.

Olive, thinking to do well, flung herself into the conversational breach. Her cousins had nothing to say, and the aunt's thoughts were set on the dinner and cumbered with much serving. So she talked to him as in duty bound, and he seemed inclined to banter her.

Her feet, her temper, her relations with _vetturini_. He was execrable, but she would not take offence.

After dinner they all sat in the little _salotto_ until it was time to go to the theatre, and still Olive talked and laughed with Orazio, teaching him English words and making fun of his pronunciation of them. Gemma watched her sombrely and judged her by her own standards, and Carmela caught at her cousin's arm presently as they passed down the crowded Via Cavour together.

"Why did you make her so angry? She will always hate you now. I did not know you were _civetta_."

Olive looked startled. "Angry? What do you mean?"

"Why did you speak so much to Orazio? Gemma thought you wanted to take her husband from her and she will not forgive."

"Why, I could see it made her ill to look at him and that she shrank from his touch, and I did as I would be done by. I distracted his attention."

Carmela laughed in spite of herself. "Oh, Olive, and I thought you were so clever. Do you not understand that one can be jealous of a man one does not love? I know that though I am stupid. All Italians are jealous. You must remember that."

"I am sorry," Olive said ruefully after a pause. "I see you are right. She will never believe that I wanted to help her. If only you could persuade her to give up Orazio. Surely the other man would come forward then. You and Maria talk of getting her safely married and away, but I see farther. There can be no safety in union with the wrong man--"

Carmela shook her head. "She wants a husband," she said stolidly, "and Orazio will make a good one. You do not understand us, my dear. You can please yourself with dreams and fancies, but we are different."