The Wheat Princess

‘Dear Marcia’ (it ran):

‘I am sorry not to see you again, and (to be quite frank) I am equally sorry not to have seen Mr. Sybert again. I feel that if I had had more time, and half a chance, I might have accomplished something in the interests of science.

‘Margaret told you, of course, that Paul is going back with us. We hope his father’s illness isn’t serious, but he preferred to go. There is nothing to keep him in Rome, he says. Poor fellow! you must write him a nice letter. Don’t worry too much about him, though; he won’t blow his brains out.

‘I could tell you something. I have just the tiniest suggestion of a suspicion which—granted fair winds and a prosperous voyage—may arrive at the dignity of news by the time we reach the other side. However, you don’t deserve to hear it, and I shan’t tell. Have I aroused your curiosity sufficiently? If so, c’est tout.

‘I shall hope to see you in Pittsburg this autumn. That, my dear Marcia, is merely a polite phrase and is not strictly true. I shall hope, rather, to see you in Paris or Rome or Vienna. I am afraid that I have the wander-habit to the end. The world is too big for one to settle down permanently in one place—and that place Pittsburg; is it not so? One can never be happy for thinking of all the things that are happening in all of the places where one is not.

‘Au revoir, then, till autumn; we’ll play on the Champs-Elysées together.

A letter had come also from Marcia’s father, which put her in an uncomfortably unsettled frame of mind. It was written in the Copley vein of humorous appreciation of the situation; but, for all that, she could see underneath that she had hurt him. He disavowed all knowledge and culpability in the Triple Alliance and the Abyssinian war. He regretted the fact that the taxes were heavy, but he had had no hand in making up Italy’s financial budget. As to wheat, there were many reasons why Italy could not afford it, aside from the fact that it was dear. Marcia could give what she wished to the peasants to make up for her erring father, and he inclosed a blank cheque to her order—surely an excessive sign of penitence on the part of a business man. The letter closed with the statement that he was lonely without her, and that she must come back to America next winter and keep her old father out of mischief.

She read the last few sentences over twice, with a rising lump in her throat. It was true. Poor man, he must be lonely! She ought to have tried to take her mother’s place, and to have made a home for him before now. Her duty suddenly presented itself very clearly, and it appeared as uninviting as duties usually do. A few months before she would not have minded, but now Italy had got its hold upon her. She did not wish to go; she wished only to sit in the sunshine, happy, unthinking, and let the days slip idly by. A picture flashed over her of what the American life would be—a brownstone house on Fifth Avenue in the winter, a country place in the Berkshires in the summer; an aunt of her mother’s for chaperon, her father’s friends—lawyers and bankers and brokers who talked railroads and the Stock Exchange; for interests she would have balls and receptions, literary clubs and charities. Marcia breathed a doleful sigh. Her memories of the New York house were dreary; it was not a life she cared to renew. But nothing of all this did she let her father know. She sent a gracefully forgiving letter, with the promise that she would come home for the winter, and not a hint that the home-coming was not her own desire.

It seemed that, things having once commenced to change, everything was going. Mr. Copley himself exploded the next bombshell. He came back from Rome one night with the announcement that the weather was getting pretty hot, and the family ought to leave next week for Switzerland.

‘Oh, Uncle Howard, not yet!’ Marcia cried. ‘Let us wait until the end of June. It isn’t too hot till then. Up here in the hills it’s pleasant all summer. I don’t want to leave the villa.’

‘Rome is hot just now in more ways than one,’ he returned. ‘I’d feel safer to have you in Switzerland or up in the Tyrol during the excitement. Goodness only knows what’s going to happen next. I’m expecting to wake up in the middle of a French revolution every morning, and I should like to have you out of the country before the beheading begins.’

‘There isn’t really any danger of a revolution?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘Not in a country where every other man’s a soldier and the government’s in command. But there have been houses broken into and a good many acts of lawlessness, and we’re rather lonely off here.’

‘I hate to think of going away,’ Marcia sighed. ‘We’ll come back in the autumn, won’t we, Uncle Howard?’

‘Oh, yes, if you like. I dare say we could manage a month or so out here before we go into the palazzo for the winter.’

‘And I’ll be going back to America for the winter,’ she sighed.

He looked at her with a slight smile.

‘Are you the girl, Marcia, who used to preach sermons to your uncle about Americans living abroad?’

Marcia reflected his smile somewhat wanly.

‘And I’m practising my own preaching, am I not?’

‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘when the time comes you can do as you please. Your father can get along without you one year more.’

‘No, I think I ought to go, for of course he must be lonely but—I should like to stay! It seems more like home than any place I’ve ever been in. I’ve really never belonged anywhere before, and I like so much to be with you.’

‘Poor little girl! You have had a chequered career.’

‘Yes, Uncle Howard, I have; and it keeps on being chequered! I haven’t been in the villa three months, but really I don’t remember ever having lived so long in one place before. It’s been nice, hasn’t it? I hate dreadfully to have it end. It seems like shutting away a whole part of my life that can never come back.’

‘Oh, well, if you feel that way about it, I’ll buy the villa and we can come out every spring. You can bring your father over, and we will dip him in the waters of Lethe, too.’

‘I’m afraid he wouldn’t be dipped,’ she laughed. ‘He’d be running a cable connexion out here and setting up a ticker on the terrace, so that he could watch the stock market as well as the view.’

Mr. Copley’s mouth twitched slightly at the picture.

‘We must all ride our hobbies, I suppose, or the world would be a very dreary world indeed.’

She looked up at him and hesitated.

‘Uncle Howard, do you and papa—that is—do you mind my asking?—are you very good friends?’

Mr. Copley frowned a moment without replying. ‘Well Marcia, he’s a good deal older than I, and we’re not particularly congenial.’ He straightened his shoulders with a laugh. ‘Oh, well, there’s no use concealing disagreeable truths. It appears they will out in the end. As a matter of fact, your father and I haven’t had anything to do with each other for the past ten years. The first move was on his part, when he wrote about you last fall—you didn’t know that you came as an olive-branch, did you?’

‘I didn’t know; he didn’t tell me anything about it, but I—well, I sort of guessed. I’m sorry about it, Uncle Howard. I’m sure that it’s just because you don’t understand each other.’

‘I’m afraid we never have understood each other, and I doubt if we ever can, but we’ll make another effort.’

‘It’s so hard to like people when you don’t understand them, and so easy when you do,’ said Marcia.

‘It facilitates matters,’ he agreed.

‘I think I’m beginning to understand Mr. Sybert,’ she added somewhat vaguely. ‘He’s different, when you understand him, from the way you thought he was when you didn’t understand him.’

‘Ah, Sybert!’ Mr. Copley raised his head and brought his eyes back from the edge of the landscape. ‘I thought I knew him, but he’s been a revelation to me this spring.’

‘How do you mean?’ Marcia asked, striving to keep out of her tone the interest that was behind it.

‘Oh, the way he’s taken hold of things. It seems an absurd thing to say, but I believe he’s had almost as much influence as the police in quieting the trouble. He has an unbelievably strong hold on the people—how he got it, I don’t know. He understands them as well as an Italian, and yet he is a foreigner, which gives him, in some ways, a great advantage. They trust him because they think that, being a foreigner, he has nothing to make out of it. He’s a marvellous fellow when it comes to action.’

‘You never would guess it to look at him!’ she returned. ‘Why does he pretend to be so bored?’

‘Be so bored? Well, I suppose there are some things that do bore him; and the ones that don’t, bore other people. His opinions are not universally popular in Rome, and being a diplomatist, I dare say he thinks it as well to keep them to himself.’

‘What are his opinions?’ she asked tentatively. ‘I don’t like to accuse him of being an anarchist, since he assures me that he’s not. But when a man wants to overthrow the government–’

‘Nonsense! Sybert doesn’t want to overthrow the government any more than I do. Just at present it’s under the control of a few corrupt politicians, but that’s a thing that’s likely to happen in any country, and it’s only a temporary evil. The Italians will be on their feet again in a year or so, all the better for their shaking-up, and Sybert knows it. He’s got more real faith in the government than most of the Italians I know.’

‘But he talks against it terribly.’

‘Well, he sees the evil. He’s been looking at it pretty closely, and he knows it’s there; and when Sybert feels a thing he feels it strongly. But,’ Copley smiled, ‘while he says things himself against the country, you’ll find he’ll not let any one else say them.’

‘What do people think about him now—being mixed up in all these riots?’

‘Oh, just now he’s mixed up in the right side, and the officials are very willing to pat him on the back. But as for the populace, I’m afraid he’s not making himself over-liked. They have a most immoral tendency to sympathize with the side that’s against the law, and they can’t understand their friends not sympathizing with the same side. It’s a pretty hard thing for him to have to tell these poor fellows to be quiet and go back to their work and starve in silence.’ Copley sighed and folded his arms. ‘I am sorry, Marcia, you don’t like Sybert better. There are not many like him.’

Marcia let the observation pass without comment.

The next morning, as Mrs. Copley and Marcia were sitting on the loggia listlessly engaged with books and embroidery, there came whirring down the avenue the contessa’s immaculate little victoria, with the yellow coronet emblazoned on the sides, with the coachman and footman in the Torrenieri livery, green with yellow pipings. It was a gay little affair; it matched the contessa. She stepped out, pretty and debonair, in a fluttering pale-green summer gown, and ran forward to the loggia with a little exclamation of distress.

‘Cara signora, signorina, I am desolated! We must part! Is it not sad? I go with Bartolomeo’ (Bartolomeo was the count) ‘to plant olive orchards on his estate in the Abruzzi. Is it not lonely, that—to spend the summer in an empty castle on the top of a mountain, with only a view for company? And my friends at the baths or the lakes or in Switzerland, or—oh, everywhere except on my mountain-top!’

Marcia laughed at the contessa’s despair.

‘But why do you go, contessa, if you do not like it?’ she inquired.

‘But my husband likes it. He has a passion for farming; after roulette, it it his chief amusement. He is very pastoral—Bartolomeo. He adores the mountain and the view and the olive orchards. And in Italy, signorina, the wife has to do as the husband wishes.’

‘I’m afraid the wives have to do that the world over, contessa.’

‘Ah, no, signorina, you cannot tell me that; I have seen. In America the husband does as the wife wishes. It is a beautiful country, truly. You have many charming customs. Yes, I will give you good advice: you will be wise to marry an American. They do not like mountain-tops. But perhaps you will visit me on my mountain-top?’ she asked. ‘The view—ah, the beautiful view! It is not so bad.’

‘I’m afraid not, contessa. We are leaving for the Tyrol ourselves a week from to-morrow.’

‘So soon! Every one is going. Truly, the world comes to an end next week in Rome.’

Marcia found herself growing unexpectedly cordial toward their guest; even the contessa appeared suddenly dear as she was about to be snatched away. She bade her an almost affectionate farewell, and stood by the balustrade waving her handkerchief until the carriage disappeared.

‘Will marvels never cease?’ she asked her aunt. ‘I think—I really think that I like the contessa!’