The Wheat Princess

CHAPTER XIII

The drops were falling fast by the time they reached the building. They hastily dismounted and pushed forward to the wide stone archway which served as entrance. A door of rudely joined boards swung across the opening, but it was ajar and banging in the wind. Sybert threw it open and led the horses into the gloomy interior. It proved to be a wine-cellar, probably belonging to the monastery. The room was low but deep, with a dirt floor and rough masonry walls; in the rear two huge vats rose dimly to the roof, and the floor was scattered with farming-implements. The air was damp and musty and pungent with the smell of fermenting grape-juice.

Sybert fastened the horses to a low beam by means of their bridles, while Marcia sat down upon a plough and pensively regarded the landscape. He presently joined her.

‘This is not a very cheerful refuge,’ he remarked; ‘but at least it is drier than the open road.’

She moved along and offered him part of her seat.

‘I think I can improve on that,’ he said, as he rummaged out a board from a pile of lumber and fitted it at a somewhat precarious slope across the plough. They gingerly sat down upon it and Marcia observed—

‘I suppose if you had your way, Mr. Sybert, we should be sitting on a McCormick reaper.’

‘It would at least be more comfortable,’ he returned.

The rain was beating fiercely by this time, and the lightning flashes were following each other in quick succession. Black clouds were rolling inland from across the Volscian mountains and piling layer upon layer above their heads. Marcia sat watching the gathering storm, and presently she exclaimed:

‘This might be a situation out of a book! To be overtaken by a thunderstorm in the Sabine mountains and seek shelter in a deserted wine-cellar—it sounds like one of the “Duchess’s” novels.’

‘It does have a familiar ring,’ he agreed. ‘It only remains for you to sprain your ankle.’

She laughed softly, with an undertone of excitement in her voice.

‘I’ve never had so many adventures in my life as since we came out to Villa Vivalanti—Marcellus, and Gervasio, and Gervasio’s stepfather, and now a cloud-burst in the mountains! If they’re going to rise to a climax, I can’t imagine what our stay will end with.’

‘Henry James, you know, says that the only adventures worth having are intellectual adventures.’

Marcia considered this proposition doubtfully.

‘In an intellectual adventure,’ she objected, ‘you could never be quite sure that it really was an adventure; you’d always be afraid you’d imagined half of it. I think I prefer mine more visibly exciting. There’s something picturesque in a certain amount of real bloodshed.’

Sybert turned his eyes away from her with a gesture of indifference.

‘Oh, if it’s merely bloodshed you’re after,’ he said dryly, ‘you’ll find as much as you like in any butcher’s shop.’

She watched him for a moment and then she observed, ‘I suppose you are disagreeable on purpose, Mr. Sybert. You have a—’ she hesitated for a word, and as none presented itself, substituted a generic term—‘horrid way of answering a person.’

He turned back toward her with a laugh. ‘If I really thought you meant it, I should have a still “horrider” way.’

‘Certainly I mean it,’ she declared. ‘I’ve always liked to read about fights and plots and murders in books. I think it’s nice to have a little blood spattered about. It’s a sort of concrete symbol of courage.’

‘Ah—I saw a concrete symbol of courage the other day, but I can’t say that it struck me as attractive.’

‘What was it?’

‘A fellow lying by the roadside, in a pool of dirty water and blood, with his mouth wide open, a couple of stiletto wounds in his neck, and his brains spattered over his face—brains may be useful, but they’re not pretty.’

She looked at him gravely, with a slow expression of disgust.

‘I suppose you think I’m horrider than ever now?’

‘Yes, said Marcia; ‘I do.’

‘Then don’t make any such absurd statement as that you think bloodshed picturesque. The world’s got beyond that. Do you object if I smoke? I don’t think it would hurt this place to have a bit of fumigating.’

She nodded permission, and watched him silently as he rolled a cigarette and hunted through his pockets for a match. The coat did not reward his search, and he commenced on the waistcoat. Suddenly she broke out with—

‘What’s that in your pocket, Mr. Sybert?’

A momentary shade of annoyance flashed over his face.

‘It’s a dynamite bomb.’

‘It’s a revolver! What are you carrying that for? It’s against the law.’

‘Don’t tell the police’ he pleaded. ‘I’ve always liked to play with fire-arms; it’s a habit I’ve never outgrown.’

‘Why are you carrying it?’ she repeated.

Sybert found his match and lighted his cigarette with slow deliberation. Then he rose to his feet and looked down at her. ‘You ask too many questions, Miss Marcia,’ he said, and he commenced pacing back and forth the length of the dirt floor.

She remained with her elbow resting on her knee and her chin in her hand, looking out at the storm. Presently he came back and sat down again.

‘Is our amnesty off?’ he asked.

Before she could open her mouth to respond a fierce white flash of lightning came, followed instantly by a deafening crash of thunder. A torrent of water came pouring down on the loose tiles with a roar that sounded like a cannonading. The air seemed quivering with electricity. The horses plunged and snorted in terror, and Sybert sprang to his feet to quiet them.

‘Jove! It is a cloudburst,’ he cried.

Marcia ran to the open doorway and stood looking out across the storm-swept valley. The water was coming down in an almost solid sheet; the clouds hung low and black and impenetrable except when a jagged line of lightning cut them in two. From the height across the valley the tall square monastery tower rose defiantly into the very midst of the storm, while the cypress trees at its base swayed and writhed and wrung their hands in agony. Sybert came and stood beside her, and the two watched the storm in silence.

‘There,’ he suddenly flashed out, with a little undertone of triumph in his voice—‘there is Italy!’ He nodded toward the old walls rising so stanchly from the storm. ‘That’s the way the Italians have weathered tyranny and revolution and oppression for centuries, and that’s the way they will keep on doing.’

She looked up at him quickly, and caught a gleam of something she had never seen before in his face. It was as if an internal fire were blazing through. For an imperceptible second he held her look, then his eyelids drooped again and his usual expression of reserve came back.

‘Come and sit down,’ he said; ‘you’re getting wet.’

They turned back to the plough again and sat side by side, looking out at the storm. The beating of the rain on the tiles above their heads made a difficult accompaniment for conversation, and they did not try to talk. But they were electrically aware of each other’s presence; the wild excitement of the storm had taken hold of both of them. Marcia’s breath came fast through slightly parted lips, her cheeks were flushed, her hair was tumbled, and there was a yellow glow in her deep grey eyes. Her face seemed to vivify the gloomy interior. Sybert glanced at her sidewise once or twice in half surprise; she did not seem exactly the person he had thought he knew. Her hand lay in her lap, idly clasping her gloves and whip. It looked white and soft against her black habit.

Suddenly Marcia asked a question.

‘Will you tell me something, Mr. Sybert?’

‘I am at your service,’ he bowed.

‘And the truth?’

‘Oh, certainly, the truth.’

She glanced down in her lap a moment and smoothed the fingers of her gloves in a thoughtful silence. ‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘I don’t know, after all, what I want to ask you; but there is something in the air that I don’t understand. Tell me the truth about Italy.’

‘The truth about Italy?’ He repeated the words with a slight accent of surprise.

‘Last week in Rome, at the Roystons’ hotel, everybody was talking about the wheat famine and the bread riots, and they all stopped suddenly when I asked any questions. Uncle Howard will never tell me a thing; he just jokes about it when I ask him.’

‘He’s afraid,’ said Sybert. ‘No one dares to tell the truth in Italy; it’s lèse majesté.’

She glanced up at him quickly to see what he meant. His face was quite grave, but there was a disagreeable suggestion of a smile about his lips. She looked out of doors again with an angry light in her eyes. ‘Oh, I think you are beastly!’ she cried. ‘You and Uncle Howard both act as if I were ten years old. I don’t think that a wheat famine is any subject to joke about.’

‘Miss Marcia,’ he said quietly, ‘when things get to a certain point, if you wish to keep your senses you can’t do anything but joke about them.’

‘Tell me,’ she said.

There was a look of troubled expectancy in her face. Sybert half closed his eyes and studied the ground without speaking. Not very many days before he had felt a fierce desire to hurl the story at her, to confront her with a picture of the suffering that her father had caused; now he felt as strongly as her uncle that she must not know.

‘Since you cannot do anything to help, why should you wish to understand? There are so many unpleasant things in the world, and so many of us already who know about them. It’s—’ he turned toward her with a little smile, but one which she did not resent—‘well, it’s a relief, you know, to see a few people who accept their happiness as a free gift from heaven and ask no questions.’

‘I am not a baby. I should not care to accept happiness on any such terms.’

‘And you want to know about Italy? Very well,’ he said grimly; ‘I can give you plenty of statistics.’ He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and traced lines in the dirt floor with his whip, speaking in the emotionless tone of one who is quoting a list from a catalogue.

‘The poor people bear three-fourths of the taxes. Every necessity of life is taxed—bread and salt and meat and utensils—but such things as carriages and servants and jewels go comparatively free. When the government has squeezed all it can from the people, the church takes its share, and then the government comes in again with the state lotteries. The Latin races are already sufficiently addicted to gambling without needing any extra encouragement from the state. Part of the revenue thus collected is spent in keeping up the army—in training the young men of the country in idleness and in a great many things they would do better without. Part of it goes to build arcades and fountains and statues of Victor Emmanuel. The most of it stops in official pockets. You may think that politics are as corrupt as they can be in America, but I assure you it is not the case. In Italy the priests won’t let the people vote, and the parliament is run in the interests of a few. The people are ignorant and superstitious; more than half of them can neither read nor write, and the government exploits them as it pleases. The farm labourer earns only from twenty-five to thirty cents a day to support himself and his family. Fortunately, living is cheap or there would soon not be any farm labourers alive.

‘Last year—’ he paused and an angry flush crept under his dark skin—‘last year in Lombardy, Venetia, and the Marches—three of the most fertile provinces in Italy—fifteen thousand people went mad from hunger. The children of these pellagrosi will be idiots and cripples, and ten years from now you will find them on the steps of churches, holding out maimed hands for coppers. At this present moment there are ten thousand people in Naples crowded into damp caves and cellars—practically all of them stricken with consumption and scrofula, and sick with hunger.’

He leaned forward and looked into her face with blazing eyes.

‘Marcia, in this last week I’ve seen—God!’ he burst out, ‘what things I’ve seen!’

He got up and strode to the door, and Marcia sat looking after him with frightened eyes. The air seemed charged with his words. She felt herself trembling, and she caught her breath quickly with a half-gasp. She closed her eyes and pictures rose up before her—pictures she did not wish to see. She thought of the hordes of poor people in Castel Vivalanti, of the bony, wrinkled hands that were stretched out for coppers at every turn, of the crowds of children with hungry faces. She thought of the houses that they lived in—wretched little dens, dark and filthy and damp. And it wasn’t their fault, she repeated to herself; it wasn’t their fault. They were honest and frugal, they wanted work; but there was not enough to go around.

She sat quite still for several moments, feeling acutely a great many things she had scarcely divined before. Then presently she glanced over her shoulder at the great vats towering out of the darkness behind her. They suddenly presented themselves to her imagination as a symbol, a visible sign of the weight of society bearing down upon the poor, crushing out goodness and happiness and hope. As she watched them with half-fascinated eyes, they seemed to swell and grow until they dominated the whole room with the sense of their oppressiveness. She rose with a little shiver and almost ran to the door.

‘Let’s go!’ she cried.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, looking at her face.

‘Nothing. I want to go. It’s stopped raining.’

He led out the horses and helped her to mount.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked again, ‘Your hand is trembling. Did I say anything to frighten you?’

She shook her head without answering, and when they reached the road she drew a long breath of fresh air and glanced back with a nervous laugh.

‘I had the most horrible feeling in there! I felt as if something were going to reach out from those vats and grab me from behind.’

‘I think,’ he suggested, ‘that you’d better take some of your aunt’s quinine when you get home.’

‘Mr. Sybert,’ she said presently, ‘I told you one day that I thought poor people were picturesque, I don’t think so any more.’

‘I didn’t suppose that you meant it.’

‘But I did!’ said Marcia. ‘I’ve merely changed my mind.’ She touched Kentucky Lil with her whip and splashed on ahead down the road that led toward the monastery, while Sybert followed with a slightly perplexed frown.

The storm had passed as quickly as it had come. Loose, flying clouds still darkened the sky, but the heavy black thunder-clouds were already far to the eastward over the Apennines. In its brief passage, however, the storm had left havoc behind it. The vines in the wayside vineyards were stripped of their leaves, and the bamboo poles they were trained upon broken and bent. Branches torn from the olive trees were strewn over the grass, and in the wheat fields the young grain was bowed almost to the ground. A fierce mountain torrent poured down the side of the road through a gully that an hour before had been dry.

The mountain air was fresh and keen, and the horses, excited by the storm, plunged on, recklessly irrespective of mud and water. They crossed the little valley that lay between the hill of the wine-cellar and the higher hill of the monastery, clattered through the single street of the tiny hamlet which huddled itself at the base of the hill, and wound on upward along the narrow walled roadway that turned and unturned upon itself like the coils of a serpent. They passed through the dark grove of cypresses that skirted the outer walls, and emerged for a moment on a small plateau which gave a wide view of receding hills and valleys and hills again. Below them, at a precipitous angle, lay the valley they had just come through and the clustering brown-tiled roofs of the little Noah’s Ark village.

As they rode out from the shadow of the trees, by a common impulse they both drew rein and brought their horses to a standstill at the edge of the grove. Away to the eastward the sky was black, but the western sky was a blaze of orange light, and the sun, an orange ball, was dropping into the purple Campagna as into a sea. The shadows were settling in the valley beneath them, but the hills were tinged with a shimmering light, and the tower above their heads was glowing in a sombre, softened beauty.

They had scarcely had time, however, to more than glance at the wide-spread picture before them when they became aware of a little human drama that was being enacted under their eyes.

A young monk in the brown cassock of the Franciscans, probably a lay brother in the monastery, was standing in the vineyard by the roadside, resting for a moment from his task of tying up the vines that had been beaten down by the storm. He had not seen the riders—his back was turned toward them, and his gaze was resting on the field across the way, where scarlet poppies were growing among the wheat. But his eyes were not for the flowers, nor yet for the light on the hills beyond—these he had seen before and understood. He was watching a dark-haired peasant girl and a man dressed in shepherd’s clothes, who were strolling side by side along the narrow pathway that led diagonally through the wheat. The man, strong-limbed and brown and muscular, in sheepskin trousers and pointed hat, was bending toward her, talking insistently with vehement Italian gestures. She appeared to listen, and then she shrugged her shoulders and half drew back, while her mocking laugh rang out clearly on the still evening air. For a moment he hesitated, then he boldly put his arm around her, and the two passed down the hill and out of sight in the direction of the hamlet. The poor young frate, his work forgotten, with hands idly hanging at his sides, stared at the spot where they had disappeared. And as he looked, the monastery bells in the campanile above him slowly rang out the ‘Ave Maria.’ He started guiltily, and with a hasty sign of the cross caught up his rosary and bowed his head in prayer.

At the unexpected sound of the bells the horses broke into a quick trot. The monk, startled at the clatter of hoofs so near, turned suddenly and looked in their direction. As he caught sight of Marcia’s and Sybert’s eyes upon him, and knew that they had seen, a quick flush spread over his thin dark face, and turning away he bowed his head again.

Marcia broke the silence with a low laugh as they rode on into the shade of the cypresses.

‘He thought we were–’ and then she stopped.

‘Lovers too,’ said Sybert. ‘Poor devil! I suppose he thinks the world is full of lovers outside his monastery walls. There,’ he added, ‘is a man who is living for an idea.’

‘And is beginning to suspect that it is the wrong one.’

He shot her a quick glance of comprehension. ‘Ah, there’s the rub,’ he returned, a trifle soberly—‘when you begin to suspect your idea’s the wrong one.’

They rode on down the hill into the darkening valley. They were going the straight way home now, and the horses knew it. They were still in the hills when the twilight faded, and a young moon, just beyond the crescent, took its place, riding high in a sky scattered thick with flying clouds. It was a wild, wet, windy night, though on the lower levels the roads were fairly dry: the storm had evidently wasted its fury on the heights.

It was too fast a pace to admit much talking, and they both contented themselves with their thoughts. Only once did Marcia break the silence.

‘I feel as if we were carrying the good news from Ghent to Aix!’

Sybert laughed and quoted softly:—

Kentucky Lil would make quite a Roland,’ he broke off.

‘She’s the nicest horse I ever rode,’ said Marcia.

As they turned in at the villa gates she said contritely, ‘I didn’t know it would take so long; I’m afraid, Mr. Sybert, that I’ve made you very late!’

‘Perhaps I like adventures too,’ he smiled; ‘and you and I, Miss Marcia, have travelled far to-day.’

CHAPTER XIV

As they galloped up the long avenue under the arching trees, the villa presently came into view. The sound of laughing voices floated out from the open windows. Marcia drew rein with a half-involuntary cry of dismay. The Roystons had come.

‘I’d forgotten!’ she explained to her companion. ‘We’re giving a dinner-party to-night.’

At the sound of the clattering hoofs on the gravel of the driveway a gay group poured out on to the loggia, welcoming the dilatory riders with laughter and questions and greetings.

‘My dear child! Where have you been?’

‘Here, Pietro; call some one to take the horses.’

‘Is this the way you welcome guests? I shall never–’

‘Dinner’s been waiting half an hour. We were beginning to think–’

‘I’ve been worried to death! You haven’t caught cold, have you?’

‘No, Aunt Katherine,’ she laughed as she pulled off her gloves and shook hands with the visitors. ‘But we’ve been nearly drowned! We should have been wholly drowned if Mr. Sybert hadn’t spied a very leaky ark on the top of a hill.’

‘I’m relieved!’ sighed her uncle as they passed into the hall. ‘I was beginning to fear that you had had a disagreement on the way, and that it was another case of the Kilkenny cats.’

‘Marcia, how you look! You’re covered with mud!’ cried Mrs. Copley.

With a slightly apprehensive glance toward the mirror, Marcia straightened her hat and rubbed a daub of mud from her cheek. ‘Kentucky Lil and Triumvirate were in too much of a hurry to get home to turn out for puddles,’ she said. ‘How much time may we have to dress, Aunt Katherine?’

‘Just fifteen minutes,’ returned her uncle; ‘and that is a quarter of an hour more than you deserve. If you are not down then, we shall eat without waiting for you.’

‘Fifteen minutes, remember!’ cried Marcia to Sybert as they parted at the top of the stairs. ‘I’ll race with you,’ she added; ‘though I think myself that a girl ought to have a handicap.’

She found Granton, a picture of prim disapproval, waiting with her dress spread out on the bed. Marcia dropped into a wicker chair with a tired sigh.

‘You’ve ridden a long way,’ Granton remarked as she removed a muddy boot.

‘Yes, Granton, I have; and dinner’s already been waiting half an hour, and Pietro looks like a thunder-cloud, and Mrs. Copley looks worried, and the guests look hungry—what François looks like I don’t dare to think. We must fly; our reputations depend on it.’

‘Am I ready?’ she inquired, not much more than fifteen minutes later, as she twisted her head to view the effect in the mirror.

‘You’ll do very well,’ said Granton.

‘I’m terribly tired,’ she sighed; ‘and I feel more like going to bed than facing guests—but I suppose, in the natural order of events, dinner must be accomplished first.’

‘To be sure,’ said the maid, critically adjusting her train.

‘Your philosophy is so comfortable, Granton! As we have done yesterday, so shall we do to-day and also to-morrow. It saves one the trouble of making up one’s mind.’

She reached the salon just in time to take Paul Dessart’s silently offered arm to the dining-room. Sybert did not appear until the soup was being removed. He possessed himself of the empty chair beside Eleanor Royston, with a murmured apology to his hostess.

‘It’s excusable, Sybert,’ said Copley, with a frown. ‘You should not allow a woman to beat you.’

‘The furniture in that room you gave me,’ he complained gravely, ‘was built as a trap for collar-buttons. The side of the bed comes to within three inches of the floor—I couldn’t crawl under.’

‘What did you do?’ Eleanor Royston asked.

‘I borrowed one of our host’s—and I had a hard time finding it.’

‘I shall put my wardrobe under lock and key the next time you visit us,’ Copley declared.

Sybert was curiously inspecting a small white globule he found by his plate.

Marcia laughed and called from the other end of the table: ‘It’s your own prescription, Mr. Sybert; drop it in your wine-glass and drink it like a man. I’ve taken my dose.’

During this exchange of badinage Paul Dessart said never a word. He sat with his eyes fixed moodily on the table-cloth, and—one hates to say it of Paul—he sulked. For the first time since she had known him, Marcia found him difficile. He started no subject himself, and those that she started, after a brief career, fell lifeless. It may have been that she herself was somewhat ill at ease, but in any case several awkward silences fell between them, which the young man made no attempt to break. Mr. Copley would never have said of him to-night that he was an ornament to any dinner-table. It fell to the Frenchman across the way to keep the ball rolling.