Chapter 6

“Positively, Lavinia,” Gheta insisted again, more crossly, “you're a nuisance! When do you go back to school?”

“In a week,” Lavinia answered serenely.

With Bembo added to the others, she could see almost nothing of the scene below. Across the river the declining sun cast a rosy light on the great glossy hedges and clipped foliage of the Boboli Gardens; far to the left the paved height of the Piazzale Michelangelo rose above the somber sweep of roofs and bridges; an aged bell rang harshly and mingled with the inconsequential clatter on the Lungarno. An overwhelming sense of the mystery of being stabbed, sharp as a knife, at her heart; a choking longing possessed her to experience all--all the wonders of life, but principally love.

“Look, Bembo!” Anna Mantegazza suddenly exclaimed. “No; there--approaching! Who's that singular person in the hired carriage?”

Her interest was so roused that Lavinia, once more forgetful of Gheta's sleeves, leaned over her sister's shoulder, and immediately distinguished the object of their curiosity.

An open cab was moving slowly, almost directly under the window, with a single patron--a slender man, sitting rigidly erect, in a short, black shell jacket, open upon white linen, a long black tie, and a soft narrow scarlet sash. He wore a wide-brimmed stiff felt hat slanted over a thin countenance burned by the sun as dark as green bronze; his face was as immobile as metal, too; it bore, as if permanently molded, an expression of excessive contemptuous pride.

Bembo's voice rose in a babble of excited information.

“'Singular?' Why, that's one of the most interesting men alive. It's Abrego y Mochales, the greatest bullfighter in existence, the Flower of Spain. I've seen him in the ring and at San Sebastian with the King; and I can assure you that one was hardly more important than the other. He's idolized by every one in Spain and South America; women of all classes fall over each other with declarations and gifts.”

As if he had heard the pronouncement of his name the man in the cab turned sharply and looked up. Gheta was leaning out, and his gaze fastened upon her with a sudden and extraordinary intensity. Lavinia saw that her sister, without dissembling her interest, sat forward, statuesque and lovely. It seemed to the former that the cab was an intolerable time passing; she wished to draw Gheta back, to cover her indiscretion from Anna Mantegazza's prying sight. She sighed with inexplicable relief when she saw that the man had driven beyond them and that he did not turn.

A bull-fighter! A blurred picture formed in Lavinia's mind from the various details she had read and heard of the cruelty of the Spanish national sport--torn horses, stiff on blood-soaked sand; a frenzied and savage populace; and charging bulls, drenched with red froth. She shuddered.

“What a brute!” she spoke aloud unintentionally.

Gheta glanced at her out of a cool superiority, but Anna Mantegazza nodded vigorously.

“He would be a horrid person!” she affirmed.

“How silly!” Gheta responded. “It's an art, like the opera; he's an artist in courage. Personally I find it rather fascinating. Most men are so--so mild.”

Lavinia knew that the other was thinking of Cesare Orsi, and she agreed with her sister that Orsi was far too mild. Without the Orsi fortune--he had much more even than Anna Mantegazza--Cesare would simply get nowhere. The Spaniard--Lavinia could not recall his name, although it hung elusively among her thoughts--was different; women of all classes, Bembo had said, pursued him with favors. He could be cruel, she decided, and shivered a little vicariously. She half heard Bembo's rapid high-pitched excitement over trifles.

“You are going to the Guarinis' sale to-morrow afternoon? But, of course, every one is. Well, if I come across Abrego y Mochales before then, and I'm almost certain to, and he'll come, I'll bring him. He's as proud as the devil--duchesses, you see--so no airs with him. The Flower of Spain. A king of sport sits high at the table--” He went on, apparently interminable; but Lavinia turned away to where tea was being laid in a far angle.

Others approached over the tiled hall and the Marchese Sanviano entered with Cesare Orsi. The window was deserted, and the women trailed gracefully toward the bubbling minor note of the alcohol lamp. Both Sanviano and Orsi were big men--the former, like Bembo, wore English clothes; but Orsi's ungainly body had been tightly garbed by a Southern military tailor, making him--Lavinia thought--appear absolutely ridiculous. His collar was both too tight and too high, although perspiration promised relief from the latter.

A general and unremarkable conversation mingled with the faint rattle of passing cups and low directions to a servant. Lavinia was seated next to Cesare Orsi, but she was entirely oblivious of his heavy kindly face and almost anxiously benevolent gaze. He spoke to her, and because she had comprehended nothing of his speech she smiled at him with an absent and illuminating charm. He smiled back, happy in her apparent pleasure; and his good-nature was so insistent that she was impelled to reward it with a remark.

She thought, she said, that Gheta was particularly lovely this afternoon. He agreed eagerly; and Lavinia wondered whether she had been clumsy. She simply couldn't imagine marrying Cesare Orsi, but she knew that such a match for Gheta was freely discussed, and she hoped that her sister would not make difficulties. She wouldn't have dresses so fussy as Gheta's--in figure, anyhow, she was perhaps her sister's superior--fine materials, simply cut, with a ruffle at the throat and hem, a satin wrap pointed at the back, with a soft tassel....

Orsi was talking to Gheta, and she was answering him with a brevity that had cast a shade of annoyance over the Marchese Sanviano's large features. Lavinia agreed with her father that Gheta was a fool. She must be thirty, the younger suddenly realized. Bembo was growing hysterical from the tea and his own shrill anecdotes. He resembled a grotesque performing bird with a large beak. Lavinia's mind returned to the silent dark man who had passed in a cab. She wished, now, that she had been sitting at the front of the window--the object of his unsparing intense gaze. She realized that he was extremely handsome, and contrasted his erect slim carriage with Orsi's thick slouched shoulders. The latter interrupted her look, misinterpreted it, and said something about candy from Giacosa's.

Lavinia thanked him and rose; the discussion about the tea table became unbearably stupid, no better than the flat chatter of the nuns at school.

Her room was small and barely furnished, with a thin rug over the stone floor, and opened upon the court about which the house was built. The Sanvianos occupied the second floor. Below, the _piano nobile_ was rented by the proprietor of a great wine industry. It was evident that he was going out to dinner, for his dark blue brougham was waiting at the inner entrance. The horse, a fine sleek animal, was stamping impatiently, with ringing shoes, on the paved court. A flowering magnolia tree against one corner filled the thickening dusk with a heavy palpitating sweetness.

Lavinia stayed for a long while at the ledge of her window. Her hair, which she wore braided in a smooth heavy rope, slid out and hung free. The brougham left, with a clatter of hoofs and a final clang of the great iron-bound door on the street; above, white stars grew visible in a blue dust. She dressed slowly, changing from one plain gown to another hardly less simple. Before the mirror, in an unsatisfactory lamplight, she studied her appearance in comparison with Gheta's.

She lacked the latter's lustrous pallor, the petal-like richness of Gheta's skin. Lavinia's cheeks bore a perceptible flush, which she detested and tried vainly to mask with powder. Her eyes, a clear bluish gray, inherited from the Lombard strain in her mother, were not so much fancied as her sister's brown; but at least they were more uncommon and contrasted nicely with her straight dark bang. Her shoulders and arms she surveyed with frank healthy approbation. Now her hair annoyed her, swinging childishly about her waist, and she secured it in an instinctively effective coil on the top of her head. She decided to leave it there for dinner. Her mother was away for the night; and she knew that Gheta's sarcasm would only stir their father to a teasing mirth.

Later, Gheta departed for a ball, together with the Marchese Sanviano--to be dropped at his club--and Lavinia was left alone. The scene in the court was repeated, but with less flourish than earlier in the evening. Gheta would be nominally in the charge of Anna Mantegazza; but Lavinia knew how laxly the American would hold her responsibility. She wished, moving disconsolately under high painted ceilings through the semi-gloom of still formal chambers, that she was a recognized beauty--free, like Gheta.

The drawing-room, from which they had watched the afternoon procession, was in complete darkness, save for the luminous rectangle of the window they had occupied. Its drapery was still disarranged. Lavinia crossed the room and stood at the grille. The lights strung along the river, curving away like uniform pale bubbles, cast a thin illumination over the Lungarno, through which a solitary vehicle moved. Lavinia idly watched it approach, but her interest increased as it halted directly opposite where she stood. A man got quickly out--a lithe figure with a broad-brimmed hat slanted across his eyes. It was, she realized with an involuntary quickening of her blood, Abrego y Mochales. A second man followed, tendered him a curiously shaped object, and stood by the waiting cab while the bull-fighter walked deliberately forward. He stopped under the window and shifted the thing in his hands.

A rich chord of strings vibrated through the night, another followed, and then a brief pattern of sound was woven from the serious notes of a guitar. Lavinia shrank back within the room--it was, incredibly, a serenade on the stolid Lungarno. It was for Gheta! The romance of the south of Spain had come to life under their window. A voice joined the instrument, melodious and melancholy, singing an air with little variation, but with an insistent burden of desire. The voice and the guitar mingled and fluctuated, drifting up from the pavement exotic and moving. Lavinia could comprehend but little of the Spanish:

_“I followed through the acacias, But it was only the wind. .... looked for you beyond the limes----“_

The thrill at her heart deepened until tears wet her cheeks. It was for Gheta, but it overwhelmed Lavinia with a formless and aching emotion; it was for Gheta, but her response was instant and uncontrollable. It seemed to Lavinia that the sheer beauty of life, which had moved her so sharply, had been magnified unbearably; she had never dreamed of the possibilities of such ecstasy or such delectable grief.

The song ended abruptly, with a sharp jarring note. The man by the carriage moved deferentially forward and took the guitar. She could see the minute pulsating sparks of cigarettes; heard a direction to the driver. Abrego y Mochales and the other got into the cab and it turned and shambled away. Lavinia Sanviano moved forward mechanically, gazing after the dark vanishing shape on the road. She was shaken, almost appalled, by the feeling that stirred her. A momentary terror of living swept over her; the thrills persisted; her hands were icy cold. She had been safely a child until now, when she had lost that small security, and gained--what?

She studied herself, clad in her coarse nightgown with narrow lace, in her inadequate mirror. The color had left her cheeks and her eyes shone darkly from shadows. “Lavinia Sanviano!” she spoke aloud, with the extraordinary sensation of addressing, in her reflection, a stranger. She could never, never wear her hair down again, she thought with an odd pang.

II

Gheta invariably took breakfast in her room. It was a larger chamber by far than Lavinia's, toward the Via Garibaldi. A thick white bearskin was spread by the canopied bed, an elaborate dressing table stood between long windows drawn with ruffled pink silk, while the ceiling bore a scaling ottocento frescoing of garlanded cupids. She was sitting in bed, the chocolate pot on a painted table at her side, when Lavinia entered.

A maid was putting soft paper in the sleeves of Gheta's ball dress, and Lavinia, finding an unexpected reluctance to proceed with what she had come to say, watched the servant's deft care.

“Mochales was here last night,” Lavinia finally remarked abruptly--“that is he stood on the street and serenaded you.”

Gheta put her cup down with a clatter.

“How charming!” she exclaimed. “And I missed it for an insufferable affair. He stood under the window--”

“With a guitar,” Lavinia proceeded evenly. “It was very beautiful.”

“Heavens! Bembo's going to fetch him to the Guarinis' sale, and I forgot and promised Anna Mantegazza to drive out to Arcetri! But Anna won't miss this. It was really a very pretty compliment.”

She spoke with a trivial satisfaction that jarred painfully on Lavinia's memory of the past night. Gheta calmly accepted the serenade as another tribute to her beauty; Lavinia could imagine what Anna Mantegazza and her sister would say, and they both seemed commonplace--even a little vulgar--to her acutely sensitive being. She suddenly lost her desire to resemble Gheta; her sister diminished in her estimation. The elder, Lavinia realized with an unsparing detachment, was enveloped in a petty vanity acquired in an atmosphere of continuous flattery; it had chilled her heart.

The Guarinis, who had been overtaken by misfortune, and whose household goods were, being disposed of at public sale, occupied a large gloomy floor on the Via Cavour. The rooms were crowded by their friends and the merely curious; the carpets were protected by a temporary covering; and all the furnishings, the chairs and piano, pictures, glass and bijoux, bore gummed and numbered labels.

The sale was progressing in one of the larger salons, but the crowd circulated in a slow solid undulation through every room. Gheta and Anna Mantegazza had sought the familiar comfortable corner of an entresol, and were seated. Lavinia was standing tensely, with a laboring breast, when Bembo suddenly appeared with the man whom he had called the Flower of Spain.

“The Contessa Mantegazza,” Bembo said suavely, “Signorina Sanviano, this is Abrego y Mochales.”

The bull-fighter bowed with magnificent flexibility. A hot resentment possessed Lavinia at Bembo's apparent ignoring of her; but he had not seen her at first and hastened to repair his omission. Lavinia inclined her head stiffly. An increasing confusion enveloped her, but she forced herself to gaze directly into Mochales' still black eyes. His face, she saw, was gaunt, the ridges of his skull apparent under the bronzed skin. His hair, worn in a queue, was pinned in a flat disk on his head, and small gold loops had been riveted in his ears; but these peculiarities of garb were lost in the man's intense virility, his patent brute force. His fine perfumed linen, the touch of scarlet at his waist, his extremely high-heeled patent-leather boots under soft uncreased trousers, served only to emphasize his resolute metal--they resembled an embroidered and tasseled scabbard that held a keen, thin and dangerous blade.

Anna Mantegazza extended her hand in the American fashion, and Gheta smiled from--Lavinia saw--her best facial angle. The Spaniard regarded Gheta Sanviano so fixedly that after a moment she turned, in a species of constraint, to Anna. The latter spoke with her customary facility and the man responded gravely.

They stood a little aside from Lavinia; she only partly heard their remarks, but she saw that Abrego y Mochales' attention never strayed from her sister. Vicariously it made her giddy. The man absolutely summed up all that Lavinia had dreamed of a romantic and masterful personage. She felt convinced that he had destroyed her life's happiness--no other man could ever appeal to her now; none other could satisfy the tumult he had aroused in her. This, she told herself, desperately miserable, was love.

Gheta spoke of her, for the three turned to regard her. She met their scrutiny with a doubtful half smile, which vanished as Anna Mantegazza made a light comment upon her hair being so newly up. Lavinia detested the latter with a sudden and absurd intensity. She saw Anna, with a veiled glance at Gheta, make an apology and leave to join an eddy of familiars that had formed in the human stream sweeping by. Mochales stood very close to her sister, speaking seriously, while Gheta nervously fingered the short veil hanging from her gay straw hat.

A familiar kindly voice sounded suddenly in Lavinia's ears, and Cesare Orsi joined her. He was about to move forward toward Gheta; but, before he could attract her attention, she disappeared in the crowd with the Spaniard.

“Who was it?” he inquired. “He resembles a juggler.”

Lavinia elaborately masked her hot resentment at this fresh stupidity. She must not, she felt, allow Orsi to discover her feeling for Abrego y Mochales; that was a secret she must keep forever from the profane world. She would die, perhaps at a terribly advanced age, with it locked in her heart. But if Gheta married him she would go into a convent.

“A bull-fighter, I believe,” she said carelessly.

“In other words, a brute,” Orsi continued. “Such men are not fit for the society of--of your sister. One would think his mere presence would make her ill.... Yet she seemed quite pleased.”

“Strange!” Lavinia spoke with innocent eyes.

It was like turning a knife in her wound to agree apparently with Cesare Orsi--rather, she wanted to laugh at him coldly and leave him standing alone; but she must cultivate her defenses. There was, too, a sort of negative pleasure in misleading the banker, a sort of torment not unlike that enjoyed by the early martyrs.

Cesare Orsi regarded her with new interest and approbation.

“You're a sensible girl,” he proclaimed; “and extremely pretty in the bargain.” He added this in an accent of profound surprise, as if she had suddenly grown presentable under his eyes. “In some ways,” he went on, gathering conviction, “you are as handsome as Gheta.”

“Thank you, Signor Orsi,” Lavinia responded with every indication of a modesty, which, in fact, was the indifference of a supreme contempt.

“I have been blind,” he asseverated, vivaciously gesticulating with his thick hands.

Lavinia studied him with a remote young brutality, from his fluffy disarranged hair, adhering to his wet brow, to his extravagantly pointed shoes. The ridiculous coral charm hanging from his heavy watch chain, a violent green handkerchief, an insufferable cameo pin--all contributed pleasurably to the lowering of her opinion of him.

“I must find Gheta,” she pronounced, suddenly aware of her isolation with Cesare Orsi in the crowd, and of curious glances. Orsi immediately took her arm, but she eluded him. “Go first, please; we can get through sooner that way.”

They progressed from room to room, thoroughly exploring the dense throng about the auctioneer, but without finding either Gheta, Anna Mantegazza or the bull-fighter.

“I can't think how she could have forgotten me!” Lavinia declared with increasing annoyance. “It's clear that they have all gone.”

“Don't agitate yourself,” Cesare Orsi begged. “Sanviano will be absolutely contented to have you in my care. I am delighted. You shall go home directly in my carriage.” He conducted her, with a show of form that in any one else or at another time she would have enjoyed hugely, to the street, where he handed her into an immaculately glossy and corded victoria, drawn by a big stamping bay, and stood with his hat off until she had rolled away.

It was comfortable in the luxuriously upholstered seat and, in spite of herself, Lavinia sank back with a contented sigh. There was in its case a gilt hand mirror, into which she peered, and a ledge that pulled out, with a crystal box for cigarettes and a spirit lighter. The Sanvianos had only a landaulet, no longer in its first condition; and Lavinia wondered why Gheta, who adored ease, had been so long in securing for herself such comforts as Orsi's victoria.

They swept smoothly on rubber tires into the Lungarno and rapidly approached her home. The carriage stopped before the familiar white façade, built of marble in the pseudo-severity of the early nineteenth century, and the porter swung open the great iron gate to the courtyard. Lavinia mounted the square white shaft of the stairs to the Sanvianos' floor with a deepening sense of injury. She would make it plain to Gheta that she was no longer a child to be casually overlooked.

A small room, used in connection with the dining room for coffee and smoking, gave directly on the hall; there she saw her father sitting, with his hat still on, his face stamped with an almost comical dismay, and holding an unlighted cigar.

“Gheta left me at the Guarinis',” Lavinia halted impetuously. “If it hadn't been for Signor Orsi I shouldn't be here yet; I was completely ignored.”

“Heavens!” her father exclaimed, waving her away. “Another feminine catastrophe! Go to your sister and mother. My head is in a whirl.”

Her mother, then, had returned. She went forward and was suddenly startled by hearing Gheta's voice rise in a wail of despairing misery. She hurried forward to her sister's room. Gheta, fully dressed, was prostrate, face down, upon her bed, shaken by a strangled sobbing that at intervals rose to a thin hysterical scream. The Marchesa Sanviano, still in her traveling suit and close-fitting black hat, sat by her elder daughter's side, trying vainly to calm the tumult. In the background the maid, her face streaming with sympathetic tears, was hovering distractedly with a jar of volatile salts.

“Mamma,” Lavinia demanded, torn by extravagant fears, “what has happened?”

The marchesa momentarily turned a concerned countenance.

“Your sister,” she said seriously, “has found some wrinkles on her forehead.”

Lavinia with difficulty restrained a sharp giggle. Gheta's grief and their mother's anxiety at first seemed so foolishly disproportionate to their cause. Then a realization of what such an occurrence meant to Gheta dawned upon her. To an acknowledged beauty like Gheta Sanviano the marks of Time were an absolute tragedy; they threatened her on every plane of her being.

“But when--” Lavinia began.

“They--Anna Mantegazza and she--went to the dressing room at the Guarinis', where, it seems, Anna discovered them--sympathetically, of course.”

Gheta's sobbing slowly subsided under the marchesa's urgent plea that unrestrained emotion would only deepen her trouble. She did not appear at dinner; and afterward the marchese, his wife and Lavinia sat wrapped in a gloomy silence. The marchesa was still handsome, in spite of increasing weight. The gray gaze inherited by Lavinia had escaped the parent; her eyes were soft and dense, like brown velvet. She was a woman of decision and now she brought her hands smartly together.

“We have waited too long with Gheta; we should not have counted so confidently on her beauty; time flies so treacherously. She must marry as soon as possible.”

“Thank God, there's Cesare Orsi!” her husband responded.

Lavinia was gazing inward at the secretly enshrined image of the Flower of Spain.

III

Gheta Sanviano often passed a night at the Mantegazzas' villa on the Height of Castena, a long mile from the city.