Chapter XIX: Youthful Loves

Michel dared not ask his sister for the explanation of such a prodigy. He ran and shut himself up in his little room, and, seating himself upon his bed, instead of going to sleep, he opened and compared those two precisely similar trinkets and their contents. They were absolutely indistinguishable, as were the two locks of hair; so that, after Michel had examined and handled them a long while, he no longer knew which belonged to his sister. Thereupon he recalled a remark of hers, which had made little impression upon him, although it had seemed somewhat strange to him for an instant. Mila declared that the lock of hair she had entrusted to the princess had diminished by one half in the jeweller's hands.

It was not possible to explain that curious fact. The princess did not know Michel, she had never seen him; he had not returned to Catania when she had taken Mila's scapulary and exchanged it for this beautiful locket. It is difficult to believe that a woman can fall in love with a man simply at sight of a lock of his hair. Michel cudgeled his brains to no purpose. He could think of no explanation save this, which was far from satisfactory to his intense curiosity: perhaps the princess had at some time been attached to someone whose hair was of precisely the same shade and texture as Michel's. She wore it in a locket. Observing Mila's fervent adoration of that relic of her brother, she had ordered a locket just like her own, and had given it to her.

But how impossible are the probabilities of life to a mind of eighteen years! Michel thought it much more probable that he had been loved unseen; and when he was overcome by sleep, the two lockets were still in his half-open hand.

When he awoke about noon, he found only one of them; the other had probably fallen among the bedclothes. He pulled his bed to pieces and turned it upside down; passed an hour searching in all the cracks of his floor, and all the folds of his clothes, which lay on a chair by his pillow. One of the two talismans had disappeared.

"This is a trick of Signorina Mila," he thought. His door closed with a latch only, and the girl was singing over her work in the room adjoining.

"Ah! you are up at last!" she said with a pout, when he appeared in her presence. "That is very lucky! Now will you kindly return my locket?"

"I should say, my dear, that you came and took it while I was asleep."

"Why, you have it in your hand!" she cried, seizing his hand unexpectedly. "Come, open your fingers, or I will prick them with my needle."

"I will do it," he said, "but this locket isn't yours. You have already taken the one that belongs to you."

"Really!" said Mila, snatching the trinket from her brother's hand, for he made little resistance, but watched her closely; "this is not mine? Do you think I can be mistaken?"

"In that case you have the other, Mila."

"What other? Have you one also? I don't know anything about that; but this is mine. Here is the princess's crest. It is my property; it is my souvenir. Take back your hair. If we are at odds, I am willing you should; but this locket shall never leave me again."

And she replaced it in her bosom, by no means resolved to take out the hair, for which she cared more than she chose to admit in her childish wrath.

Michel returned to his room. The other locket must be there. There was so much candor and confidence in Mila's expression and her words! But he found nothing, and so he determined to search his sister's room as soon as she had gone out. Meanwhile, he tried to make peace with her. He coaxed and cajoled her, and, vowing that all that had happened was only a jest on his part, reproached her with being proud and sensitive.

Mila consented to make peace and to kiss her brother; but she continued to be somewhat downcast, and her lovely cheeks were tinged with a less delicate flush than usual.

"You chose a bad time to tease me," she said. "There are days when one does not feel in the mood to endure raillery, and I thought that you were teasing me on purpose to make sport of my disappointment."

"Your disappointment, Mila!" cried Michel, pressing her to his heart with a smile. "Have you been disappointed? Because you didn't see the ball last night, I suppose? Oh! you are a very unfortunate little girl, and no mistake!"

"In the first place, Michel, I am not a little girl. I shall soon be fifteen, and I am old enough to have disappointments. As for the ball, I cared very little about it; and now that it's over, I don't think about it at all."

"What is this great sorrow, then? Do you want a new dress?"

"No."

"Your nightingale isn't dead?"

"Don't you hear him singing?"

"Perhaps our neighbor Magnani's big tom-cat has eaten up your turtle-dove?"

"I would like to see him try it! I tell you that I don't bother my head about Signor Magnani or his cat."

The tone in which she uttered Magnani's name made Michel prick up his ears, and, upon glancing at his little sister's face, he saw that she had her eyes fixed, not upon her work--although her head was bent--but upon a wooden gallery where Magnani usually worked, opposite Mila's chamber. At that moment Magnani was walking along his gallery. He did not look at Mila's window, and Mila did not look at her work.

"Mila, my darling child," said Michel, taking both her hands and kissing them, "do you see that young man with the absent-minded air?"

"Well," Mila replied, as the blood came and went in her cheeks, "what about him?"

"I want to tell you, my child, that if your heart is ever inclined to love, you must not think of that young man."

"What nonsense!" said the girl, shaking her head and trying hard to laugh. "He is the last man of whom I should ever think, I tell you that!"

"Then you will be exceedingly wise," rejoined Michel, "for Magnani's heart is not free; he has long been in love with another woman."

"That doesn't concern me, and is of no possible interest to me," said Mila; and, bending over her work, she turned her wheel swiftly. But Michel was pained to see two great tears fall upon her skein of silk.

Michel's heart was very tender. He understood the feeling of shame by which his young sister was overwhelmed, and which added a fresh pang to those from which he himself was suffering. He saw the superhuman efforts that the poor child made to stifle her sobs and overcome her confusion. He felt that that was not the moment to humiliate her more by insisting upon an explanation.

So he pretended to see nothing; and, thinking that he would reason with her when she was more self-possessed, he left the room where she was working.

But he was so excited himself that he could not stay in his own room. He made one last, fruitless search, and, abandoning the hope of finding the vanished talisman,--hoping that it would appear when he was not thinking about it, as often happens in the case of lost articles,--he determined to go and see Magnani and make peace with him; for they had parted in anger, and Michel, unable to avoid a secret feeling of pride in the thought that the princess was madly in love with him, felt that his generous solicitude for his unfortunate rival redoubled.

He crossed the yard and entered Magnani's father's workroom on the ground floor. But he looked in vain for Antonio in his room. His old mother told him that he had gone out a moment before; but could not tell him in what direction he had gone. Michel thereupon strolled into the country, half thinking of overtaking him, half absorbed by his own musings.

Meanwhile Magnani, impelled by the same feelings of loyalty and regard, had determined to go and see Michel. His modest dwelling had a second exit, and the one that he took led less directly, through a dark and narrow passage at the rear of the other two houses, to the poor, old-fashioned house which Pier-Angelo occupied with his children.

Thus the two young men did not meet. Magnani went upstairs and looked into a large, bare, dilapidated room, where he saw Pier-Angelo stretched out on his cot-bed, in a deep sleep which the emotions of love and youth no longer disturbed.

Thereupon Magnani climbed the staircase, or rather the ladder leading to the attics, and entered Michel's chamber, which adjoined Mila's.

Michel's door was open; Magnani went in, and, finding no one there, was about to go out again, when the cyclamen, which Michel had carefully placed in an old Venetian glass of curious workmanship, caught his eye. Unquestionably Magnani was the soul of probity, the incarnation of scrupulous honor; and yet it is not certain that, if he had dreamed that that flower had fallen from the princess's bouquet, he would not have stolen it. But it did not occur to him; he concluded simply that Michel, like himself, had a passion for the cyclamen.

Suddenly Magnani was roused from his contemplation by a sound which startled him. Somebody was weeping in the adjoining room. He heard sobs, stifled but heart-rending, behind the partition, not far from the door between the two rooms. Magnani was well aware that Mila lived on that floor. He had often nodded to her smilingly from his gallery, when he saw her, blooming with youth and beauty, at her window. But, as she had made no impression on his heart, and as he had never spoken to her except as to a child, he did not consider at that moment the exact location of her attic, nor indeed did he think of her at all. To be sure there was nothing masculine in her manner of weeping, but in Michel's voice there were some tones so youthful and so soft that it might well be he who was mourning so. Magnani thought only of his young comrade, and, full of solicitude for him, hastily opened the door and entered Mila's room.

At sight of him the girl uttered a loud shriek and fled to the farthest corner of her room, hiding her face.

"Mila, my dear little neighbor," cried honest Magnani, standing respectfully near the door, "forgive me, do not be afraid of me; I made a mistake, I heard someone weeping as if his heart would break, and I thought it was your brother. I didn't stop to think, but rushed in here, in my anxiety--but, great heaven, my dear child, why are you weeping so?"

"I am not weeping," replied Mila, stealthily wiping her eyes, and pretending to look for something in an old chest of drawers against the wall; "you are entirely mistaken. I thank you, Signor Magnani; but leave me, you ought not to come into my room like this."

"True, true, I know it, I am going away, Mila; and yet I don't dare to leave you thus, you are too much overcome, I can see. I am afraid you are sick. Let me go and wake your father, so that he can come and comfort you."

"No, no! do not think of it! I don't want you to wake him!"

"But, my dear ----"

"No, I tell you, Magnani; you would make me much worse if you should cause my father that trouble."

"But what is the matter, Mila? Your father has not been scolding you, has he? You never deserve to be scolded! And he is so kind, so gentle, he loves you so dearly!"

"Oh! no, indeed, he never said a word to me except words of love and kindness. You see that you are dreaming, Magnani; I have no sorrow, I was not weeping."

"Why, I can see from here that your face is swollen and your eyes red, my dear girl. What heart-breaking grief can one have at your age, lovely, and beloved by all, as you are?"

"Don't laugh at me, I beg you," said Mila, proudly. But she turned pale, and trying to sit down calmly, fell sobbing upon her chair.

Magnani had so little suspicion that he could possibly be anything more than a friend in her eyes, and his feeling for her was so placid that he no longer thought of leaving her. He approached her without any other emotion than affectionate interest, sat down at her feet on a cushion of plaited straw, and, taking her hand in his, questioned her with an assumption of something like paternal authority.

Poor Mila was so perturbed that she had not the strength to repel him. It was the first time that he had ever spoken to her so near and with such evident affection. Oh! how happy she would have been but for the fatal words that Michel had said to her! But those words were still ringing in her ears, and Mila was too proud to allow her secret to be suspected. She made a mighty effort, and answered with a smile that her trouble was a matter of little importance, and was due simply to a little quarrel she had had with her brother.

"Michel quarrel with you, my poor angel?" said Magnani, watching her carefully; "is it possible? Oh! no! you are mistaken. Michel loves you more than all the world, and he is quite right. If you had quarreled, he would be here, as I am, at your feet, and much more eloquent than I to comfort you; for he is your brother, and I am only your friend. But, however that may be, I am going to find him; I will scold him roundly, if he is in the wrong. But it will be enough for him to see you cast down and changed as you are, to make him much unhappier than you."

"Magnani," said Mila, detaining him as he rose, "I forbid you to go and find Michel. That would be giving too much importance to a piece of childish folly. Pay no more attention to it, and do not speak of it to him or to my father. I assure you that I have already forgotten it, and that my brother and I will be entirely reconciled to-night."

"If it is only a childish quarrel," said Magnani, sitting down beside her, "why, your susceptibilities are altogether too keen, my dear Mila. I have sisters too, and when I was not so sensible as I am now, when I was Michel's age, I used to tease them a little. But they didn't cry; they paid back my mischief with interest, and I always came out second best."

"That was because they had spirit, and apparently I haven't enough to defend myself," replied Mila, sadly.

"You have a great deal of spirit, Mila, I have noticed that; you are not Pier-Angelo's daughter and Michel's sister for nothing, and you have a better education than the other young women of your station. But you have more heart than spirit, since you can defend yourself only with your tears!"

Magnani's praise comforted and pained the girl at the same time. She was flattered to find that, while not seeming to pay any heed to her, he had observed her closely enough to be able to do her justice. But the tranquil kindliness of his manner told her plainly enough that Michel had not deceived her.