Chapter V: Book I: I (4)

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.

"Ed io che intesi cio che non dicevi,
M'innamorai di te perche tacevi."

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! ca 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 Fraeulein Mueller or was it Heine?--used to say, "Wie koennte 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 Adele 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.

"And of the old grandfather who died alone on the hill-side----"

"We had to find Nancy," said Valeria.

"And of little Edith and her poor mother, forsaken in their darkest hour by those they loved----"

"But it was to safeguard Nancy," said Valeria.

Hearing her words, he realized the puissance of all-conquering, maternal love. Nothing mattered but Nancy, though Nancy herself, with gentle, unconscious hands, had taken all things from her. Had not he himself, the lover of Valeria's girlhood, turned from her, heart-stricken for Nancy?

There was a pause.

"And I am thinking of you, Valeria, over whose heart I have trampled,..." said Nino, with a break in his voice.

"You could not help it. You loved Nancy," said Valeria. "And now"--her pitying eyes filled with tears--"your hope is shipwrecked and your heart broken, too."

Nino did not answer. He turned away and gazed out of the window. He was thinking of Nancy, so mild and sweet-voiced, with eyes like blue hyacinths under the dark drift of her hair. And once more he realized how Nancy in her dove-like innocence had absorbed and submerged the existence of those around her. Her sweet helplessness itself had wrecked and shattered, had devastated and destroyed. The lives of all those who loved her had gone to nourish the clear flame of her genius, the white fire of her youth.

Nino gazed down at the red wedding-carpet that stretched its scarlet line to the pavement's edge like a narrow path of blood.

"Behold," he said, "the trail of the dear devourer--the course of the dove of prey!"

* * * * *

As the train glided out of the station, and shook and ran, and the cheers and the waving handkerchiefs were left behind, Nancy raised her eyes, tender and tear-lit, to Aldo's face. Her white wedded hand was to open the gates of the Closed Garden.

Now the bowers of roses, and the fountains, and the water-lilied lakes!

XVIII

They had chosen to go to Paris, because Aldo said he had had enough of landscapes to last him a lifetime. Also Clarissa had remarked to Nancy: "If you want to have a clear vision of life, and a well-balanced brain, always be properly dressed. And you cannot be dressed at all unless you are dressed by Paquin."

"But I have my work to think about," said Nancy. "I do not mind much about clothes."

"Very well," said Clarissa, "if you want to be a dowdy genius and quarrel with your husband before you have been married two months, go your own way, and wear coats and skirts."

So they went to Paris, and soon Paquin's gibble-gabbling demoiselles were busy sewing cloudy blues and faint mauves to save Nancy from quarrelling with Aldo two months afterwards.

At Aldo's suggestion they took rooms in a small hotel in Rue Lafayette, for, as he said, they were not millionaires, and one could use one's money better than in spending it at grand hotels. Nancy said he was quite right, and wondered at his wisdom. Indeed, he knew many things. He knew the prices of everything one ate, and he pounced on the waiters as soon as there was any attempt at overcharging, or if they absent-mindedly reckoned in the date written at the top of the bill in a line with the francs.

Nancy rather dreaded that moment in the brilliant restaurant when Aldo opened and inspected the neatly-folded bill, while the solemn-nosed waiter looked down sarcastically at his smooth, well-brushed head. Nancy noticed that, whenever they entered a place, everyone ran to meet them, opening doors for them with obsequious bows, showing them places with flourish of arm and of table-napkin. Aldo's hat was taken from him with reverential hand, and her cloak was carried tenderly from her. But when, after settling the bill, they got up to go, nobody seemed to pay much attention to them. Aldo had to fetch his own hat and look for the cloak, and even to open the heavy glass doors himself, for the small boy would be absent, or looking another way and making faces at the head-waiter. Cabs also had a way of being all smiles and hat-touchings and little jokes when they were hailed, and all sullenness and loud monologue when they were dismissed.

"They think that because we are on our honeymoon we must be fools. Money is money," said Aldo.

He had learnt the phrase from his grandfather, who had kept a shop in Via Caracciolo. The grandfather's wife--who in her radiant girlhood in Piedigrotta had sat for English and German painters--had said: "Yes; but education is education," and had sent her three sons to school in Modena and Milan. The eldest son, who was the father of Carlo and Aldo, had then learnt to say: "A gentleman is a gentleman." And on the strength of this he would have nothing more to do with his shopkeeping parents in Naples. When he died Carlo, who was twenty, went and hunted up the old people. They did not need him, and were afraid of him, and called him "Eccellenza." But Aldo, who was thirteen, and unverisimilarly beautiful, they called "l'Amorino"; they petted and spoiled him, and let him count the money in the till. And he liked them and their shop. And he learnt that money was money. The phrase always struck Nancy mute. Aldo, strolling beside her along the boulevard, continued: "It is people like Carlo that spoil things. Carlo is a perfect idiot with his money."

"Oh, but he is very kind," said Nancy; and Aldo wondered whether she knew that Carlo was paying all their expenses--made out with fanciful additions by Aldo--and had promised to do so for a year after their marriage.

"After that, not one penny. Never as long as I live," Carlo had said to his young brother a week before the wedding. "So hustle and do something useful."

But Aldo did not intend to hustle. Rude, unaesthetic word! A man with his physique could not hustle. Carlo lacked all sense of the fitness of things. Clarissa said so, too. But on this occasion Aldo did not consult Clarissa, because she had once said: "I understand adoring a man, but I do not understand paying his debts."

Nancy soon found that Aldo's knowledge extended further than accounts and prices. He knew places in Paris, and he knew people--such places and such people as she had never heard of, read of, or dreamt of. He always said to Nancy: "Now you shall see things that will make you laugh." But Nancy laughed little, then less; until one day she could not laugh at all. She felt as if she would never laugh any more. Everything was horrible, everything made her shrink and weep.

"It is life, my dear," said Aldo, with his habitual little gesture of both hands outwards and upwards. "How can you write books if you do not know what is life?"

Oh, but she did not want to know what is life. She could write books without knowing. And oh, she wished that Aldo did not know either. And let them go away quickly, and forget, and never, never remember it any more.

So Aldo, who was not unkind, and who had not found the enlightening of Nancy as amusing as he had expected, called for the hotel bill, said it was preposterous, got the proprietor to deduct twelve per cent., and then told him they were leaving the next day.

The next day they left. They went to the Villa Solitudine, which Clarissa and Carlo were not using, and for which it was arranged that Aldo should pay rent to Clarissa. Clarissa let him off the rent; and Carlo, not knowing, paid it back to him. So that, on the whole, it was not an unprofitable arrangement for Aldo.

Nancy tried to forget what life was, and smiled and blossomed in tenuous sunrise beauty. And because of all she knew, and was trying to forget, and because she wore trailing Parisian gowns and large, plumed hats, Aldo burned with volcanic meridional love for her.

The Book waited.

One evening, when Aldo was at the piano, improvising music and words on Nancy's loveliness, and she sat on a stool beside him, she asked suddenly: "When shall we begin to work?"

"Oh, never!" said Aldo, putting his right arm round her neck without interrupting the chords he was playing with his left hand.

Nancy laughed, and laid her head against his arm.

"Oh, but we must, Aldo. I want to write my book. It is to be a great book."

Aldo nodded, and went on playing.

"And you, Aldo. You cannot pass your life saying that you adore me."

"Oh yes, I can," said Aldo.

Nancy laughed softly and kissed his sleeve. Then suddenly a strange feeling came over her--a feeling of loneliness and fear. She felt as if she were alone in the world, and small and helpless, with no one to take care of her. She felt as if Aldo were younger and weaker and more helpless than she. And the terror of the Infinite fell upon her soul. Aldo was singing softly, meltingly, with his head bent forward and his dark hair falling over his face. Suddenly Nancy thought that it would be good to be safely locked in a large light room with nothing but books and an inkstand, and someone walking up and down outside with a gun.

"The wall!" she said to herself as the Englishman's light eyes and stalwart figure came before her mind. Then she said: "Work shall be my wall." And she went to her room and unpacked her ivory pen.

XIX

Four months before the year of Carlo's bounty was up, Aldo made up his mind that he must hustle after all. They had settled in Milan; then nothing had happened. Carlo would never change his mind. Valeria had shown him her banking account, and proved to him that there was nothing Nancy could have beyond her skimpy forty thousand francs; Lady Sainsborough, the elderly English person in Naples who had taken such a fancy to him, had not answered his last two letters, and had probably altered her will; so there was nothing to do or to hope for. He must hustle.

He did so. He wrote a third letter to Lady Sainsborough. Then he decided to ask Carlo to make room for him in his silk mills, which Carlo refused to do.

Then he looked up Nancy's publishers, and asked them if they would advance a substantial sum on the unwritten book, which they also refused to do. So having done all he could, he decided not to hustle any more, but to let events take their course.

Nancy did not help him at all. She was selfishly engrossed in her book, and sat in her room all day, with hair pinned tightly back and wild and lucent eyes. Whenever he came into the room she put up her hand without turning round--a gesture he could not bear--and went on with her writing. If he disregarded the gesture, she looked up at him with those wild, light eyes, and he felt hurried, and forgot what he wanted to say. So he muddled along with her forty thousand francs, and read the papers, played the piano, and went out to the Caffe Biffi every evening until it was time to go to the Patriottica for a game of billiards.

There he frequently saw Nino sitting glumly with the corners of his mouth turned down; and they turned down further when Aldo came in, so that Aldo positively hated the sight of him. Besides, Carlo, who had refused to do anything for Aldo, had actually taken Nino into partnership; and, just to irritate and show off, Nino was working vulgarly, like a nigger, twelve or fourteen hours a day. The gratified Carlo was to be seen with Nino in the evenings walking through the Galleria arm-in-arm with him as if they were brothers, with that absurd Zio Giacomo trotting alongside, grinning like an old hen, while he, Aldo, Carlo's own brother, had to mooch about alone, smoking cheap cigarettes, or else to run alongside of Giacomo like an outsider, and listen for the thousandth time to the recital of the prodigal Nino's reform and rehabilitation.

He went to Clarissa and complained; but she was unsympathetic. She rubbed her left-hand nails against her right-hand palm and looked out of the window. He had expected her to pass a white, jewelled hand lightly over his bowed head and say, "_Povero bello!_ Poor beauteous one!" as she had sometimes done a year or so ago; but when he bowed his head she continued rubbing the nails of her left hand against her right-hand palm and looking out of the window.

He felt that a great deal depended upon her friendship, and it was almost out of a sense of duty to Nancy that he grasped her hand and kissed it in his best and softest manner. "Oh, don't be a snail, Aldo," said Clarissa, taking her hand away. Then she looked down at him and shook her head: "I _am_ thankful I married Carlo."

This was untrue, of course, said Aldo to himself; but, added to the other things, it rankled. When he left her he understood that Clarissa considered him as much Nancy's property as the pair of antique silver candle-sticks she had given to Nancy for a wedding-present, and that never would she take them back or light the candles in them again.

Nancy had written one-third of The Book. It was a great book--a book the world would speak of. Like the portent of Jeanne of Orleans, a vision had fallen upon her young, white heart and set it aflame. She felt genius like an eagle beating great wings against her temples. Inspiration, nebulous and wan, stretched thin arms to her, and young ideas went shouting through her brain. Then the phrase, like a black-and-white flower, rolled back its thundering petals, and the masterpiece was born.

XX

Aldo was not allowed to play the piano any more, because it disturbed Nancy's thoughts. He also stayed at home to see anyone who called, so that Nancy should not be interrupted. He himself brought her meals into her room when she did not wish to break her train of thought by going to table, and when the loud-footed, cheerful servant annoyed and distracted her.

A reverential hush was on the house.

The Rome publisher, Servetti, heard of The Book, and came to Milan to ask if he could have it. Zardo, the publisher of the "Cycle of Lyrics," who had omitted to pay for the last two editions of that distinguished and fortunate volume, sent, unasked, an unverisimilarly large cheque; and suggested for her new work a special _edition de luxe_. Nancy replied to no one, heeded no one. The Book held her soul.

It was a winter evening, and the lamps were lit, when Nancy wrote at the summit of a candid page, "Chapter XVII." She wrote the heading carefully, reverentially, painting over the Roman numbers with loving pen. This was the culminating chapter of The Book. It had been worked up to in steep and audacious ascent, and after it and from it the story would flow down in rushing, inevitable stream to its portentous close. But this chapter was the climax and the crown.

Nancy passed a quick hand across her forehead and pushed back her ruffled hair. Then she looked across at Aldo. He was sitting at the opposite side of the table with some sheets of music-paper before him. The shine of the lamp fell blandly on his narrow head. He looked dejected and dull.

"What is it, Aldo?" she asked, stretching her hand affectionately across the table to him. In the joy and the overflowing ease of inspiration she felt kind and compassionate.

"Oh, nothing," sighed Aldo. "I was thinking of writing a symphony; but I cannot do anything without trying it at the piano. And that disturbs you. Never mind! Don't worry about me."

"Oh, but I do worry," said Nancy, getting up and going round to his side. She bent over him with her arm on his shoulder. Before him on the sheet was half a line of breves and semibreves, which Nancy remembered from her childhood as little men getting over stiles.

"You know," said Aldo, with his pen going over and over the face of one of the little men and making it blacker and larger than the others, "Ricordi is publishing those songs of mine; but I believe it is only because they have your words. So I thought I would try a symphony which will be all my own. But I ought to be able to try it at the piano."

"I know, dear," said Nancy, smoothing his soft, thick hair. "I know I am a horrid, selfish thing, upsetting everything and everybody. But never mind!" And she glanced across to the large "Chapter XVII" at the top of the fair sheet, and the wet ink of the "XVII" glistened and beckoned to her upside down at the other side of the table. "Wait till I have finished my book. Then you shall do all you want; and we shall go and pass blue days in the country and be as happy as sandboys, and"--she added for him--"as rich as Cr[oe]sus."

He raised his dark eyes to her, and she thought that he looked like Murillo's Saint Sebastian.

"Your writing has swallowed up all your love for me," he said.

"Oh no!" said Nancy, and she caressed the beautiful brow. "It is you, your presence, your beauty, that inspires me and helps me to write."

Aldo sighed. "I suppose I am a nonentity. And I must be grateful if the fact of my having a straight nose has helped you to write your book."

Nancy felt conscience-stricken. "Don't be bitter, dear heart," she said. "I must be selfish! If I do not sit there and write, I feel as if I had a maniac shut up in my brain, beating and shrieking to get out. And oh, Aldo, when I do write, coolly and quickly and smoothly, I feel like a mountain-spring gushing out my life in glad, scintillant waters."

Aldo drew her face down and kissed her. "Nothing shall interfere with your book," he said.

"No, nothing," said Nancy--"nothing!"

As she spoke a strange, quivering sensation passed over her, a quick throb shook her heart, and the roots of her hair prickled. Then it was past and gone. She stepped back to her place at the table and stood looking down at Chapter XVII. The wet ink still glistened on it. She was waiting.... She knew she was waiting for that strange throb to clutch at her heart again. She looked across at Aldo. He was thoughtfully painting the face of another semibreve and making it large and black. She sat down and dipped the ivory pen into the gaping mouth of the inkstand.

Ah, _again!_ the throb! the throb! like a soft hand striking at her heart. And now a flutter as of an imprisoned bird!

"Aldo! Aldo!" she cried, falling forward with her face hidden on her arm. And her waving hair trailed over Chapter XVII, and blurred the waiting page.

XXI

NANCY stirred, sighed, and awoke.

In the room adjoining, Valeria was sobbing in Zio Giacomo's arms, and Aunt Carlotta was kissing Adele, and Aldo was shaking hands with everybody.

Nancy could hear the whispering voices through the half-open door, and they pleased her. Then another sound fell on her ear, like the ticking of a slow clock--click, click, a gentle, peaceful, regular noise that soothed her. She turned her head and looked. It was the cradle. The Sister sat near it, dozing, with one elbow on the back of the chair and her hand supporting her head; the other hand was on the edge of the cradle. With gentle mechanical gesture, in her half sleep, she rocked it to and fro. Nancy smiled to herself, and the gentle clicking noise lulled her near to sleep again.

She felt utterly at peace--utterly happy. The waiting was over; the fear was over. Life opened wider portals over wider, shining lands. All longings were stilled; all empty places filled. Then with a soft tremor of joy she remembered her book. It was waiting for her where she had left it that evening when futurity had pulsed within her heart. The masterpiece that was to live called softly and the folded wings of the eagle stirred.

* * * * *

In the gently-rocking twilight of the cradle the baby opened its eyes and said: "I am hungry."