Chapter VII: The Palazzo Scaramucci

A long, bare room, the walls painted in distemper, with a running border of leaves and flowers, and the same design running across the rafters overhead; three huge windows, with small panes, draped with old brocaded hangings round the top, but without either blinds or curtains to shut out the cloudy glimpses of the sky; very sparely furnished; some old cabinets and rococo tables by the walls, some old settees and chairs, which had once been handsome; the floor tiled with red triangular tiles, with pieces of carpet before the sofas. At one end a stove, which opened to show the little fire, erected upon a stone slab like a door-step, and with an ugly piece of black tube going almost horizontally into the wall, had been added for the advantage of the English Forestieri, who insisted--benighted northern people--upon such accessories of what they called comfort. Another old rug, faded out of its natural brightness into sweet secondary tints of colour, had been laid before this impromptu fireplace; but the aspect of the place was cold, chilling the spectator to the bone. One or two dark portraits, painted on panels, hung on the walls; they were very grim and very old; for this was the _terzo piano_, let at a cheap rate, and with few elegancies to boast of. Near the stove, on a little marble-topped table, stood the tall lamp, with its two unshaded wicks blazing somewhat wildly, for it had not been trimmed for some time. The oil in it, however, one good, cheap luxury, which even the poor may have in Italy, was so sweet and pure that the air was quite untainted. On a little tray was a long loaf of the brown, very dry bread of the country, a plate of green salad, and a thin flask of common red wine--a pretty supper to look at, but scarcely appetizing fare for a delicate appetite. At the first glance there seemed to be no one in the room to benefit by these preparations, but after a while you could perceive in the recess of one of the windows a shadowy figure, leaning up in a corner, with its head against the pane, looking out. All that could be seen from that window was the cloudy sky, and some occasional gleams of moonlight, which threw silver lines upon the dark floor, and--when you looked down, as into a well--the Arno, flowing far below, with the stars, and clouds, and fitful moon, all reflected in it; and on its very edge the little Church of St. Maria della Spina, with all its tiny pinnacles tipped with silver. She who looked out from this high window could not be looking for any one; the people below were as specks hurrying along in the cold, with cloaks twisted over their shoulders. The watcher was nearer the heavens than the earth. She stood there so long, and was so motionless, that gradually the blazing light, blown about softly by some draught from door or window, the little table with the salad and the wine-flask became the centre of the still life, and the human shadow in the window counted for nothing. No breath or sound betrayed that something was there more alive than the light of the lamp or the glimmer of the wood embers, which, indeed, fell now and then in white ashes, and broke the utter silence of the place.

This silence, however, was much more effectually broken by the entrance of a stout, middle-aged Italian, with a cloak over one of his shoulders, and the _cache-nez_ in his hand in which he was about to muffle his features when he went out. He looked round and round the large room, apparently unable to see the figure in the window, and then, with an impatient exclamation, went to the table and snuffed the blazing wicks and trimmed the lamp. “Just like her, just like her,” he said to himself, “gazing somewhere; never eating, never considering that one must live. If I were to add a slice of salami--though the child is fastidious, she does not eat salami----”

“I am here, Niccolo,” said a voice from the window.

“So I supposed, signorina; I knew you must be in some corner. May I be permitted to remark that life is not supported by the eyes, but by the mouth? If you will not eat the _cena_ I have prepared for you, what can I do? I cannot take you on my knees and feed you like a baby. Oh, I have done it; I have been obliged to do it, when I had the poor padrone’s authority to sustain me, before now.”

“Niccolo,” said the voice, “I shall not want anything more to-night. If you are ready you may go.”

“Oh yes, I may go,” said Niccolo fretfully, “not knowing whether I may not find you a little heap of cinders in the morning, or fallen down in the window and frozen to death, Madonna Santissima! without the power to raise yourself up. If you would but have Philomena to stay with you, at least, in case you should want anything.”

“I want nothing,” said the girl. She came out of the window, advancing a few steps, but still keeping quite out of the cheerful circle of the light.

“No, the signorina wants nothing; the signorina will soon not want anything but a hole in the heretic cemetery beside her father; and when one goes sinfully out of the world by one’s own wickedness, besides being a Protestant and believing nothing, what can one look for? If I were the signorina, I should take very good care as long as I could not to die, and put myself in the power of those beings with the prongs that you see in the Campo Santo. I should take very great trouble, for my part, not to die.”

Upon this she came out altogether out of the darkness, and approached the fire. “Do you think that not eating kills people?” she asked. “I cannot eat, I have no appetite, but I do not wish to die.”

“At least, under any circumstances, one can drink a little wine,” said Niccolo, with disapproving dignity; “no effort is necessary to swallow a little wine. Signorina, I have put everything in order. I will leave the key with Luigi down-stairs, that the Philomena may enter in the morning without disturbing you. I now wait only to bid you a _felicissimina notte_. _Buona notte_, my little mistress--sleep well; and the Madonna and the saints take care of you, poor child!”

This little outburst was not unusual. The girl extended her hand to him with a smile, and Niccolo kissed it. Then throwing his cloak over his other shoulder, and wrapping it round him, he left her in her solitude. The guests at the Casa Piccolomini were dispersing at the same time, escorting each other, and escorted by their servants through the still streets. As Niccolo closed the great door after him, the sound seemed to reverberate through the blackness of the great staircase, down which he plunged, darkling, groping his way by the walls. Mr. Worsley, who lived on the first floor, had a coil of green wax-taper in his pocket, which he lighted to guide himself and his daughter to the door. They were a little afraid when they heard the footsteps stumbling down, not having been able to divest themselves of the idea that stiletto-thrusts were the natural accompaniments of a dark staircase. And with his cloak doubled over his left shoulder, and his red _cache-nez_ hiding his countenance, Niccolo looked dangerous, more like killing his man in a corner than watching with the tenderness of a woman over the wayward child whom he had just left with an ache in his honest heart.

All alone in the house! The _appartamento_ was not so large as that of Mr. Worsley down-stairs, for it was divided into two, as being adapted for cheaper lodgers. Besides this large _salone_, however, there was an ante-chamber, of which while Mr. Vane was alive he made a dining-room; and then a long stone passage, echoing and dreary, through which the solitary girl had to pass to her bed-room, another terrible stone room, floored with tiles, at the other end of the house. She had to pass her father’s room by the way, and another gaping empty chamber, full of the furniture which, with Italian superstition, had been turned out of the chamber of death. She was not afraid. She had been used to such constant solitude that it seemed natural to her. While her father was alive she had been as solitary as she was now, and it did not seem to her, as it did to everybody else, that his mere presence in the house made so much difference. She had been brought up in a Spartan-Italian fashion, to bear the cold and heat as things inevitable. She put her feet upon the stone slab, which did duty as a hearth, more from custom than for the warmth, which she scarcely thought of. A small scaldino stood under the table, full of fresh embers, which Niccolo had brought with him from the kitchen; but though she was cold she did not take it up and warm her hands over it, as a thorough Italian would have done. She was half Italian only, and half English, rejecting many habits of both nations. She had a small cloak of faded velvet drawn round her shoulders, old and cut after no fashion that had prevailed within the memory of man. It had come, I believe, originally from a painter’s studio, but it was warm and kept her alive in the penetrating cold. Kind Mrs. Eastwood, in her luxurious chamber, was wondering at that moment how the poor child would brave an English winter, and if “the little room” would be warm enough, with its soft carpets and close-drawn curtains, and cheery fire. If she could have seen the Italian girl with her old mantle on her shoulders, and the scaldino at the foot of her chair!

I am afraid I am describing too much, which is a fatal weakness for a historian to fall into; but yet, of course, the gentle reader who does not scorn that delightful title would prefer to hear what this solitary girl was like. She had a straight, slim figure, too slim for beauty, though that defect of youth is one which it is easy to forgive. Her hair was dark and soft, and hung about her face, framing it with a soft fold, very slightly undulating at the ends, though not in anything that could be called a curl. I must warn my dear friend and gentlest auditor, that this sounds a great deal better in words, and looks a great deal better in a picture, than it does in reality; for a girl of sixteen with hair thus hanging about her, neither curled nor dressed, is apt to be an objectionable young person, inclining to untidiness, and to look like a colt, unkempt and untrimmed. But Innocent was a neglected girl, who had never known any better. She did not strike you at the first glance as beautiful. She had no colour, and even had been called sallow by some observers. The chief beauty that struck the beholder was the perfect shape of her face, a pure oval, with the chin somewhat accentuated, as in the pictures of Leonardo da Vinci, and the eyes somewhat long in shape. Miss Bolding was right when she called the girl a Leonardo. She wanted the crisped hair, and that subtle, sidelong sweetness in the eyes, which is so characteristic of that great master; but otherwise the character of her face was the same--somewhat long, and with all the softness of youth in the prolonged and perfect curve of the colourless cheek. The eyes were heavy-lidded; they were not “well-opened eyes.” Only in moments of emotion did she raise the heavy lids freely, and flash the full light of her look upon you. At the present moment those lids were doubly heavy with dreams. The lips, which were thin and rather straight, without curves, were closed upon each other with the closeness of meditation; her hair fell into the hollow of her neck on either side, and lay in a half ring and careless twist upon her shoulder. A very simple back dress, without trimmings, appeared under the velvet cloak; these were the days before the Watteau fashion became popular, when dresses were made with but one skirt, and long, sweeping over the wearer’s feet. Such was her costume and her appearance. She took a little of the wine from the flask, and a morsel of the dry brown bread, and swallowed them as it seemed with great difficulty, bending over the fire in the stove, which began to sink into white ashes. Silence, cold, solitude, all around; and here in the empty house, in the empty world, this solitary creature, so young and forlorn. But she was not afraid. After a while she rose quite calmly, and lifted the long stalk of the lamp, and went away through the long echoing, ghostly passage. She saw nothing, feared nothing; her imagination was not at liberty, it was absorbed about other things.

Next morning it was more cheerful in the great _salone_; there was light, at least, which was much, and I think there was sunshine; but the gentle reader will forgive me if I confess that I have forgotten whether the Palazzo Scaramucci was on the sunny or the shady side. At all events, there was daylight, and a blue, clear, shining sky, and the sight of sunshine outside if not its actual presence. When Mrs. Drainham, who was really concerned about the girl, came to see her before twelve next morning, she found her seated by the same little table which had held her lamp on the previous night, with a little dish of polenta before her, and again the dry brown bread and the small flask of wine. It seemed the strangest, most distasteful breakfast to the Englishwoman. “Oh, my dear,” she cried, “do send away that mess, and have a nice cup of tea. Wouldn’t you enjoy a nice cup of tea? If you will come with me, my maid will make you one directly--and perhaps an egg and a little delicate bread and butter. I don’t wonder that you have no appetite, my poor child.”

“I like polenta,” said Innocent, playing with her spoon, “and I don’t like tea.”

This seemed immoral to Mrs. Drainham. “If you go to England, my dear, you must not say you have been in the habit of having wine for breakfast,” she said, “It would be thought so very strange for a young girl.”

Innocent made no immediate answer. With a perverse impulse she poured out a little of the nostralé wine, the commonest and cheapest, and diluted it with water. I do not, I confess, think it was an attractive beverage. “Probably I shall never be in England,” she said in a very low tone.

“Oh, you must go to England; that is one thing there can be no doubt of. What are you to do here, poor child? Friends have been raised up to you here, but it is not likely that people who are not connected with you would continue--and the apartment, you know,” continued Mrs. Drainham, in her eagerness to prove what was self-apparent, “must be let. The marchese is very poor, and he could not be expected to lie out of his money, and Niccolo must find another situation. Everything, in short, is at a standstill until you go away.”

Something hot rushed to the girl’s eyes--but if they were tears it was so unusual to shed them, that they rushed back again after an ineffectual effort to get forth. She made no answer. She had learned ere now, young as she was, the benefit of taking refuge in silence. Mrs. Drainham had drawn a chair near her, and sat looking at her, with eyes full of a curiosity not unmixed with disapproval. Mrs. Drainham, in short, disapproved of everything about her--her loose hair, her odd dress, her old velvet cloak, even the polenta on the tray before her, and the coloured water she was drinking. “What will they do with her in England?” she asked herself in dismay; but then _her_ responsibility, at least, would be over, and her mind relieved.

“You have never been at school, my dear, I suppose?”

“No.”

“Nor learned anything? But you must have had some resources; you must be able to do something? Needlework at least, or tapestry, or something to amuse yourself with? You must have been very lonely in your papa’s time, as I hear he never saw any one. And you could not sit all the day with your hands before you; you must have been able to do something?” Mrs. Drainham cried, impressed almost against her will by the silence of her companion.

“I can read,” said Innocent.

“And no more? I hope your aunt, Mrs. Eastwood, is well off. It would be dreadful indeed if your relations were not well off. Girls in your position frequently have to go out as governesses. I don’t want to be unkind; but, my dear, it is for your advantage that you should look your circumstances in the face. Most girls of your age (you are past sixteen?) would have thought of that already. Suppose, for instance, that you were compelled to try and work for your own living. Now, what would you do?”

The suggestion was so strange that Innocent lifted her eyelids, and turned a wondering look upon her questioner; but apparently perceiving that nothing was to be made of it, cast them down again, with a slight shrug of her shoulders, and made no reply. “Why should I take the trouble to talk?” she seemed to say, which was not very civil to Mrs. Drainham, nor encouraging to that lady’s benevolence, it must be allowed.

“You never thought of that view of the matter?” said the persevering woman. “But you ought to think of it. Few people, unless they are very rich, are disposed to take all the responsibility of a girl like you. They might help you, and be kind to you; but they would most likely think it was right and best that you should contribute at least to your own support.”

“I do not know what you mean,” said Innocent looking at her with mingled wonder and resentment. She pushed away her little tray from her, and in sheer bewilderment took up the scaldino, putting it in her lap, and holding her hands over it. This was another thing upon which the doctor’s wife, as she herself avowed, could not look with any toleration. She made a little gesture of distress, as if she would have put it away.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, my dear, don’t let me see you with that odious thing on your knee! An English girl keeps her hands warm with doing something or other. You will find nothing of that sort in England. There your time will be all filled up in a rational way. There is always something going on, and you will find no time to nurse your hands in your lap. Of course, there is a great deal that will be very novel. Put down that scaldino, dear. I can’t bear to see you with it. It is such an odd thing for an English girl to do.”

“Am I an English girl?” said Innocent dreamily. She did not respond to what was said to her. “She never gives you a reasonable answer,” Mrs. Drainham said afterwards, with an impatience for which it was not difficult to account.

It was just then that the tinkling bell at the door pealed, and Niccolo after some parley admitted a stranger. Niccolo recognized the name at once, though no English visitor could have recognized it had he heard it from Niccolo’s lips. “Signor Estvode,” he said, looking in at the door, and pausing, with the true instinct of an Italian servant, to watch the effect of the announcement. Innocent started to her feet, in her haste, dropping instinctively from her shoulders her old velvet mantle, and Mrs. Drainham sat and stared with genuine British composure, without any thought of politeness. Frederick came in, looking (as he was) something of an invalid still. He was pale; he had that look of convalescence we have already referred to on his interesting countenance. He came forward, holding out both his hands to the girl, who stood devouring him with her eyes, which for once were fully opened. She could not say anything; she could scarcely breathe. Many speculations had crossed her mind as to the kind of messenger who might arrive. This young man, looking not unlike one of the heroes of her dreams, pale, melancholy, yet smiling, holding out his hands to her, made such a sudden lodgment in the girl’s inexperienced heart as I can neither define nor account for. The chances are that his mother, who was much kinder than Frederick, would have made no impression at all upon Innocent. She looked at him with her eyes all aglow and shining, with a sudden glad contraction and then expansion of her heart. She put down the scaldino, and went a step forward. “You are my little cousin,” said Frederick, in a voice which the natural impulse of kindness and the pleasant sense of beneficence made melodious. He looked at her with no criticism in his eyes, rather with admiration and pleasure. The girl paused all aglow, on tiptoe, her sudden impulse betraying itself in every line of her slim figure. Then she obeyed that impulse, poor, forlorn child. She threw herself forward, took the outstretched hands, and bent down and kissed them in her pretty Italian way. “Yes, I am Innocent,” she said; “oh, take me away! take me away!”