The Devourers

XV

Clarissa in her villa on Lake Maggiore was bored, so she wrote to Nancy to come and stay with her.

"I am weary of my sweet blue lake and of my sour blue husband. Come and stay with me a month. You shall have a large room at the top of the house, with a huge table and an inkstand large enough to drown in, and before you the view that inspired Manzoni. Come and write your masterpiece."

By the same post she sent a note to her brother-in-law:

"Aldo, mon joli, do come. Carlo is insufferable. He growls all day and snores all night. Why did I marry him? This is the fourth time I invite you this year, and you never come. Last year it was different.

"P.S.—The little poetessa is going to stay here for a month."

He arrived next day. After greetings, he asked: "Where is Sappho, the violet-haired?" Clarissa explained that Nancy had not arrived, and he sulked and played the piano all the evening, while Carlo on the sofa snored. Clarissa looked from one to the other, uncertain which of the two was insulting her most.

Nancy arrived the following day. She had brought her notebooks with her and a broken ivory pen that she always wrote with; she was full of the masterpiece. She was going to work immediately.

Driving up from the landing-place to the Villa Solitudine she told her plans to Clarissa, who nodded and smiled as she whipped up the fat cob. She was going to write a book—The Book!—a great, noble piece of work, not a little volume of flyaway poems that one reads and forgets in a day. She was going to think of and dream of The Book; to live for The Book; to breathe and walk for it, to eat and sleep for it. In Milan, with people always round her, talking and distracting, it was impossible; but here in the large bare room at the top of the house–How sweet and dear of Clarissa to think of it! Never, never could Nancy thank her enough.... Clarissa nodded and smiled, and the fat cob turned into the chestnut drive of Villa Solitudine.

Down the steps, with a couple of dogs barking and leaping at his heels, came Aldo to meet them, clad in Neapolitan fashion in white flannels and scarlet sash. His uncovered head gleamed darkly in the sun.

"Behold Endymion awakened!" said Clarissa, laughing, to Nancy. "Charmides, Adonaïs, Narcissus! The gods have cast upon him all the beauty of the world!" As Nancy did not answer, Clarissa turned to look at her. "Oh, what a stern face, ma chérie! You are quite white. What are you thinking of?"

"The Book," said Nancy; and she felt as if it were a child of hers that was to die unborn.

"You shall write it, mon ange! Aldo shall not disturb you." And she threw the reins to the little stiff groom; then, daintily raising her fluffy skirts, she alighted in Aldo's uplifted arms. Nancy put her foot on the step, but Aldo raised her lightly and lifted her down. His red, smiling mouth was close to her face. She thanked him, and he kissed her hand with the ceremonious Southern salute, "Signora, I am your slave."

Nancy went to her room—the large, bare room with the beautiful view—and stayed there all the afternoon. She put her notes in order; she placed the large sheets of paper before her; and she dipped the broken ivory pen into the huge inkstand. Then she sat and looked out of the window. She could hear the dogs barking in the garden and Clarissa's trilling laugh. On the sweet blue lake a tiny sail, like a pocket handkerchief, dipped and curtseyed away, and through the open windows of the drawing-room Aldo could be heard playing a Valse Triste. Nancy dipped the pen into the inkstand again—and looked at the view.

Now she heard the music wander off in modulating chords which resolved themselves into the rippling accompaniment of Hugo Wolff's "Musikant."

She could hear the soft tenor voice, and felt it drawing at her heart. She closed the window and sat down again. She dipped the ivory pen into the inkstand, and wrote at the top of the white sheet, "Villa Solitudine," and the date. Under it, as she had not thought of a title yet, she wrote in large letters:

Then she jumped up and ran downstairs.

At sunset they went out in a sailing-boat. Clarissa held the rudder, and Aldo stood in easy attitudes of beauty at the sail. The glow of the west was on his pure young face, and the wind of the tramontana raised his waved hair and blew it lightly across his forehead. He was silent, satisfied to know that the two women could see him, and that the red-gold sky was a good background for his profile. Clarissa talked and laughed, twittered and purred; but Aldo never spoke. And it was his silence that enraptured Nancy.

Stecchetti's words sang in her brain with new meaning, and in the days that followed the two smooth lines were always in her mind.

Aldo knew little, but he knew the value of silence. He knew the lure of the hortus conclusus—the Closed Garden into which one has not stepped. Nancy stood outside its gates and dreamed of its unseen roses, of fountains and shadowy paths and water-lilied lakes. For Aldo was a closed garden.

Aldo also knew the value of his eyes—deep, passion-lit eyes, that looked, Clarissa said, as if he had rubbed the lids with burnt cork to darken them. When he raised them suddenly, and looked straight at Nancy, she felt a little shock of pleasure that took her breath away. Little by little, day by day, those eyes drew Nancy's spirit to their depths—she leaned over them as over an abyss. In them she sunk and drowned her soul.... Then, when from his eyes her own passionate purity gazed back at her, she thought she saw his soul and not her own.

The Book cried in her now and then, but she stifled its voice and whispered: "Wait!"

And The Book waited.

One day in the garden Aldo spoke to Clarissa. She was in the hammock pretending to read.

"Clarissa, I am twenty-five years old."

"Vlan! ça y est!" said Clarissa, dropping her book. Then she drew a deep breath, and her nostrils turned a little pale; but the superposed roses of her cheeks bloomed on, independent of her ebbing blood and sickening heart.

"I am penniless," continued Aldo, picking a piece of grass and chewing it; "and Carlo has given me to understand that he can exist without me if he tries very hard."

Clarissa sat up. "When? What did he say? Does he … has he … did he mean anything?"

Aldo shook his comely head. "Carlo never means anything. But I shall have to go back to—to the Texas ranch, or marry."

The Texas ranch was a romantic invention of Clarissa's, the only foundation for which was a three weeks' holiday which Aldo had once spent in the city of New York.

Clarissa bit her red, narrow lips. "Yes," she said.

During the long pause that followed Aldo picked another piece of grass and chewed it.

"I suppose," said Clarissa, looking at him sideways through her long lids, "you will marry some affectionate old thing with money."

"No. I know them," said Aldo. "They demand the affection, and keep the money."

After a pause, in which he felt Clarissa's angry eyes on his face, he said: "I am going to marry the little Sappho."

Clarissa laughed suddenly and loud. "You do that for your pleasure! Farceur, va!" Aldo lifted his perfect eyebrows and did not reply. "She has nothing, not a little black sou!" And Clarissa stuck her long pointed thumbnail behind her long pointed teeth and jerked it forward.

"Oh! I dare say she has something," said Aldo, pretending to yawn carelessly. "Besides, she is a genius, and can earn what she will."

"You are the perfect Neapolitan pig," said Clarissa, and closed her eyes.

The perfect Neapolitan pig rose with an offended air and left her. He strolled into the house and took his hat and stick, then he strolled out again and through the garden into the hot street and down to the landing-place. A boat was leaving for Intra, so he went on board, and at Intra took the train for Milan. He dined at Biffi's, feeling happy.

"They will be miserable," he said. "That will teach them." Then he went to his furnished rooms on the Corso, and slept well.

In Villa Solitudine they were miserable, and it taught them.

It taught Nancy that the Closed Garden she had had a glimpse of for so brief an hour was the only garden in the world that she ever wanted to enter; and that all the words Aldo had not said were the only words she ever wanted to hear; that perfect goodness and unwavering strength must lie behind his portentous beauty, white and immovable like marble lions at a palace gate.

It taught Clarissa that one must accept the inevitable—that half a loaf was better than no bread, and that a married Aldo was better than no Aldo at all. It made her look at Nancy with closer eyes, and say to herself that she was a little creature one would easily tire of, in spite of—or because of—her intellectuality. Aldo was not a closed garden for Clarissa; she knew the feeble flowers that bowed behind its gates.

A hot, dreary week passed with no news from Aldo. Then Clarissa telegraphed to him at Milan. She said she had told Carlo about their conversation regarding his wish to marry Nancy, and Carlo approved. Would he come back?

Yes; Aldo would come back. He waited another day or two, and at the close of a sultry afternoon he sauntered in, just as he had sauntered out, across the sleepy, bee-droning lawns of the Villa Solitudine. He stopped at the entrance of the summer-house, where Nancy sat reading a letter—a long letter. Already two of the blue sheets had fallen at her side. Before her on the table was the inkstand and the ivory pen and The Book. As his shadow passed the threshold she looked up; she drew a quick breath, and her face turned milky white, with a pallor that gripped at Aldo's nerves.

Once more, and for the last time, he bent his head over her hand. "Signora, I am your slave," he said. But as he raised his eyes she knew that he had said: "Nancy, I am your master."

"Who writes to you?" he asked.

She drooped submissive lashes, and the colour ran into her cheeks. "Mr. Kingsley, the English friend," she said. "Do you remember him?"

Aldo took her hand and with it the letter in his own.

"What does he want?"

Her dimples fluttered. "He wants me to be good," she said, laughing, with wistful eyes. "And to write."

Aldo pressed the little fist with the crumpled blue letter in it to his lips. "Well, write," he said. "Write at once."

He took the ivory pen and dipped it in the ink and put it in her hand; then he pulled the sheet of white paper which was to be The Book before her.

"Write: 'Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. He adores me.'"

And Nancy, with her hair almost touching the paper, wrote: "Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. I adore him."

The Englishman never got the letter. But he heard of it afterwards; and his English fists closed tight.

XVI

Nancy walked among asphodels and morning glory; and her soul was plunged in happiness and her eyes were washed with light. The Book waited.

They went out in the little boat at sunset. Aldo stood at the sail, and the red sky was a background for his profile.

"Oh," sighed Nancy, looking at him and clasping puerile hands, "your beauty aches me!"

Aldo quite understood it, and was pleased.

They went for long walks to Premeno and San Salvatore; as Clarissa refused to accompany them, Carlo chaperoned them, blandly bored.

Soon Valeria arrived. Nancy went down to meet her at the landing-place, looking ethereal and pink as a spray of apple-blossom. Valeria kissed her with hot tears. "Oh! my baby, my baby!" she said, and wished that the seventeen years were a dream, and that her child's small head were still safely nestling at her breast. In Nancy's young love she lived the days of her own betrothal over again, and Tom arose in her memory and was with her day and night. On this same silky blue lake Tom had so often rowed her with Zio Giacomo, in a little boat called Luisa. She tearfully begged Nancy and Aldo to come with her and see if they could not find that very self-same boat.

They found, indeed, three Luisas, but Valeria could not recognize them; still, all three of the boatmen declared that they remembered her perfectly, and got the expected tip.

"Of course," said Valeria, deeply moved, "it cannot have been all three of them."

And Aldo said: "You should not have given them anything. They were none of them more than twenty-five years old." Whereupon Valeria sighed deeply.

Then it was decided that they should go in reverent pilgrimage to the Madonna del Monte, where Nancy's father had asked Nancy's mother to marry him. The road was lined with beggars: shouting cripples, exhibiting sores and stumps.

"Some of these are very old," sighed Valeria. "I am sure they were here that day, and must have seen me."

"I shall give a franc to every one of them," said Nancy, taking out her small fat purse, as the first one-armed mendicant held out his greasy hat.

"My dear Nancy, what nonsense!" said Aldo. "There are about a hundred of them!"

"Well?" and Nancy raised clear, questioning eyes to his.

"Oh, I don't mind," said Aldo, with a little Neapolitan shrug.

Valeria looked at the handsome figure and impeccable profile of her future son-in-law, as he strolled beside them up the steep wide road. Her heart was heavy with recollections. Up this road she had walked in her blue dress and scarlet tie with Tom beside her—Tom, broad and careless in his slouchy brown suit, who had given the beggars all his coppers and silver, just as Tom's daughter was doing to-day. Again she looked at Aldo's slim, straight shoulders and sighed. "I wish it had been an Englishman!" she thought. Then, as her memory took her to England, she saw someone else. "Or, then, poor dear Nino." And she sighed again; but not altogether for Nancy's sake.

She wrote to Nino that evening, and, almost without knowing it, began her letter, "Poor dear Nino!"

Nino was out interviewing Consuls about the presumably deceased Eduardo Villari when the letter arrived. So Nunziata opened the letter.

In it Valeria told Nino that Nancy, "our little Nancy," was betrothed to Aldo della Rocca, and could Nino not do anything to prevent it? And why, oh why, had his sister Clarissa invited them both to stay at the Villa Solitudine, so that, as Fräulein Müller or was it Heine?—used to say, "Wie könnte es anders sein," for how could anyone see Nancy in the resplendency of her seventeen Aprils and not fall in love with her? And oh, she was so sorry for poor, dear Nino, for she knew the secret of his heart. And how true it was what he had said about Nancy's eyes being so pure that they seemed never to have gazed at aught but the sky; and she understood him and his sufferings, for had she not herself suffered dreadfully through him, years ago—but never mind, that was nothing. And it had never been dear, dear Nino's fault at all; it was her own foolish fault and Fate.... And she hoped Nino did not think that she had really suffered, for she had not, and now she never, never thought of it any more! And if he came quickly he might still be in time; and oh, she knew he must be heart-broken, but he was not to mind, because it could not be helped. And she was ever his unhappy Valeria.

Nunziata read the rambling letter three times before she understood it. The letter opened her eyes.

When her eyes were open Nunziata saw well. She saw the chain of desire stretching out ring on ring: from Valeria's heart to Nino; from Nino's heart to Nancy; from Nancy's heart to Aldo, as in a children's game; and Love passing down from one to the other, stopping before each with gift of passion, of pain, of joy. She saw that her years placed her behind Valeria—far back, far back, out of the game; and she knew that Love had passed her, and would not stop before her any more. Then she remembered that she had had her gifts; that Love had heaped roses at her feet, and that she had moved through passions as through a field of flowers.

Nunziata decided that she would play the game.

She went with her newly-opened eyes to her room and threw the shutters back. She looked at her tired pink face in the glass, at her crimson lips and complicated hair. She went on her knees beside her bed and said three Paters and three Aves. Then she opened her reluctant hands and gave her dead youth back to God.

She washed her face with warm water and soap, and unpinned her elaborate curls. She wound her own soft hair round her head, and put on a plain black gown. Then, looking, although she did not think so, twenty years younger and twenty times sweeter than she did before, she went downstairs to wait for Nino.

That same evening she sent him back to his father. His luggage was packed and the brougham was waiting for him at the door, and still he declared he would not go. He would not leave her. Her face was whiter than any poudre de lys could ever make it as she kissed his forehead, and blessed it with the sign of the cross, and told him that he must indeed go, and not return again.

At last, before his stubborn refusal, she took the weapon that hurt her most, and used it to pierce her own heart. "Think of Nancy!" she said. "You may still be in time to prevent her from marrying an adventurer."

Nino looked into the pale, kind face, from which every trace of triviality had been washed by the warm water and the tears. And, being a man, he did not wait, and refuse, and then catch a later train; but with candid cruelty he said: "You are right. You are an angel. May the saints bless you!"

… She stood on the balcony and watched the carriage drive away into the night; it turned up Corso Umberto and was gone. With it the lights went out in Nunziata Villari's life.

Youth, love, hope, desire—Fate blew all the candles out, and left her in the dark.

XVII

Aldo's curved red lips under his very young moustache opened to words as well as to kisses under Nancy's impelling, eager love. During the long hours they spent together she spoke and he must answer. His splendid, silent eyes urged her to quick questionings, and his kisses did not still the thirst of her soul for his soul. Little by little she pushed back the gates of the Closed Garden; gently, day by day, she ventured a step farther adown the mysterious paths. Where are the arbours of roses? Where the fountains and the deep, water-lilied lakes? She tiptoed down the narrow paths that Clarissa and many others had trodden before her, and when she had come to the end she said: "I am mistaken. I have not entered the Garden yet."

They were to be married almost at once. Aldo was impatient, and Nancy was in love; and The Book was waiting. So Valeria left for Milan to prepare the trousseau, and Nancy must follow a week later. On the eve of her journey Clarissa went up to say good-night to Nancy in her room—the large, bare room in which the masterpiece had not been written. Nancy's trunks were packed. The ivory pen and The Book were put away. The large inkstand stood alone on the large table.

Nancy was leaning out of the window looking at the stars. Clarissa came and stood behind her and looked up into the cobalt depths.

"I hate the stars," said Nancy; "I am afraid of them."

"Why?" said Clarissa, to whom a star was a star.

"Oh, I want to be sure that somewhere they leave off," said Nancy. "It terrifies me to think of fabulous nothingness behind unending space, of perpetual neverness beyond unceasing time. I should like a wall built round the universe, a wall that would shut me safely in, away from the terrible infinity."

Clarissa laughed. "Perhaps when you are married you will feel less little and lonely."

"Perhaps," said Nancy. And she added: "Aldo must be the wall."

"Oh, my dear," said Clarissa, "Don't try to make poor Aldo anything that he isn't. He is sweet; he is lovely; he is full of talent. But he is no more a wall than this is." And she waved her filmy gossamer scarf that blew lightly in the air.

That evening Carlo said to his wife: "I feel like a brute, letting that good-for-nothing brother of mine marry the nice little girl. He will make her miserable."

"Not at all," said Clarissa, putting out the candle with her book, a thing Carlo could not bear. "She will write poems on his profile and be perfectly happy, until she gets tired of him for not being something that he isn't."

"Oh, well," growled Carlo. "I suppose you know her best. Women are cackling cats."

"Mixed metaphor," murmured Clarissa, and went to sleep comfortably, feeling that Carlo was a wall.

Nancy was married in Rome. All the poets of Italy came with poems, and Nino brought a necklet of pearls . From the Quirinal came a pendant, with a picture of a boy's face set in diamonds.

After the wedding-breakfast all the guests left, passing to their carriages down the red carpet that stretched from the door to the edge of the pavement. Then Nancy, in her mouse-grey travelling-gown, kissed Valeria, and wept and said good-bye. And kissed Nino, and wept and said good-bye. And she went with her husband down the red carpet to the carriage. Carlo and Clarissa, Aunt Carlotta and Adèle followed to the station, where there were great crowds waiting to see them off.

Valeria and Nino remained alone in the desolate room. Valeria's face was hidden in her hands. She was looking down the days of the future, and saw them lonely, dark and desolate. Nino gazed through tear-blurred eyes at the bowed figure before him, and his thoughts went back through the years. Bending forward, he took her hand and kissed it. She smiled wanly.

"What are you thinking of?" she said.

"I was thinking of Nancy, and of the past," said Nino. "Of her father, poor Tom, who died so suddenly–"

"It was to save Nancy," said Valeria.