In Gianluca’s case such a condition of things was natural enough. He felt that she understood friendship when he meant love, and he was aware that he was progressing slowly but surely towards the freedom to say what was always in his heart, while his success must depend upon his wisdom and tact in not surprising her with a declaration of passion, in the midst of a discussion upon church history or modern systems of charity. Compared with what he had felt in their former relations, he was happy, now, beyond his utmost expectations; and, in the relative happiness he had found, he was willing to be patient, rather than to risk anything prematurely.
It was more strange, perhaps, that Veronica should regard this growing intimacy as she did, for she had no under-thought of a future change to something else, as he had, and she was naturally simple in reasoning and direct in action. Yet she could not but be aware that there was a sort of duality in their friendship, and she never confused the ideas they exchanged when in the one state — that is to say, when writing — with those about which they talked when an actual meeting brought them into the other. The one state already was an intimacy; the other was hardly yet more than a pleasant acquaintance, with the memory of a disagreeable beginning. Such curiosities of human intercourse are more easily understood by those who have met with them in life than explained to those who have not. The facts were plain. When Veronica and Gianluca were together in Bianca’s drawing-room, they said nothing which might not have been heard with indifference by all Naples. When they wrote to each other they spoke of themselves, of their real thoughts about things and people, of their belief, and, to some extent, of their feelings.
Veronica did not perhaps acknowledge that, little by little, Gianluca’s letters were beginning to fill the place of poor Bosio’s conversation in former times. But that was what was taking place. She was more lonely in mind than in heart, and without making the slightest pretence to talent or unusual cultivation, she craved a mental companionship of some sort to take up the thread where it had been broken. She had found it unexpectedly in her new friend’s letters, and she recognized it and clung to it, as to something almost necessary in her existence. When she was ready to go up to Muro, she knew that without those letters life in such a solitude would be well nigh unsupportable, whereas, being able to look forward to them, and to answering them, her hours of idleness were already a foretasted pleasure.
She had not even told the cardinal that she was going, and she was going alone. In Naples this seemed so incredible that after she was gone, people spontaneously invented a companion for her and assured one another that she had sent for a distant and elderly old-maid cousin as a chaperon and protectress. Even the cardinal believed it, taking it almost for granted.
On the afternoon of the day before her departure Gianluca came, walking with difficulty and excusing himself for bringing his stick with him into the drawing-room. He was very pale, and looked more ill than for a long time past. But he spoke calmly enough, though saying little more than was required, while Bianca and Veronica kept up the conversation. Veronica was in good spirits and was evidently looking forward to the journey with pleasure and curiosity.
Then Ghisleri appeared, followed shortly by Taquisara, who had called very rarely during the winter. Veronica thought that he had grown very cold and silent. He slowly stirred a cup of tea which he did not drink, and he scarcely joined in the conversation at all. He looked occasionally at one or another of the party, and once or twice his eyes fixed themselves on Veronica’s face. She could not understand why his presence chilled her, but she was aware that she spoke more coldly than usual to Gianluca.
At the end of half an hour, the latter rose to go, glancing at Veronica as he did so. Taquisara, on pretence of setting down his tea-cup, rose also and managed to place himself in front of Bianca, and said something to which Ghisleri gave an answer, just as Veronica and Gianluca were standing close together.
“May I go on writing to you?” asked Gianluca, in a low tone and quickly.
Veronica looked up at him with a startled expression.
“Oh please — please!” she answered anxiously. “As often as you can — I count on it! Of course!”
Gianluca’s thin, pale face brightened suddenly as he heard her vehement request and the anxiety in her tone.
“Thank you,” he said. “Good-bye.”
He shook hands with Bianca, nodded to the two men, and turned away towards the door. He had not reached it, walking a little less painfully in his excitement, when he was aware that he had left his stick leaning against the chair in which he had sat. He stopped and looked back to be sure that it was there, before returning to get it. Veronica was watching him, saw what he had done, picked up the stick and carried it swiftly to him before he could come for it.
Taquisara had seen her movement and had tried to get the stick before she could, to take it to his friend. He had been too far out of reach, and she had been before him. But he followed her, and he saw that as she handed Gianluca his property, she looked up into his face and smiled very kindly. Gianluca thanked her, smiling too, and the impression any one would have had was that they thoroughly understood each other. He bowed again and went out. Veronica turned to come back to the tea-table and found herself facing Taquisara’s fiery eyes. She was surprised, and looked into his face, very near to him, and waiting for him to stand aside.
“You are playing with him,” he said in a low and angry voice.
The room was long, and Bianca and Ghisleri were at the other end of it. After he had spoken, Veronica stared at him a moment, in genuine amazement at his words and manner. Then her eyes gleamed, too, and the delicate nostrils quivered.
“You are insolent,” she said coldly, and turning a little to the right, she passed him.
“No. I am his friend,” he answered, scarcely above a whisper, as she went by.
He came back, shook hands with Bianca, bowed coldly to Veronica, and left the room within two minutes after Gianluca.
“What is the matter with Taquisara?” asked Ghisleri, carelessly. “He seems irritable.”
Bianca looked at Veronica.
“Does he? I suppose he is anxious about Don Gianluca.”
Veronica was still pale when she spoke, but the tone was cold and indifferent.
CHAPTER XVIII.
VERONICA HAD FELT herself mortally insulted by Taquisara’s manner, much more than by his words, though they had been offensive enough. Her impression of the man was completely changed, in a moment, and she hoped that she might never see him again, so long as she lived. It had been one thing to praise Gianluca to her, and to press his suit for him; it was quite another to lie in wait for her, as it were, at the end of a drawing-room and to reproach her brutally and angrily with wishing to break Gianluca’s heart. As she thought of his eyes, and his face, and his low voice, she grew pale with anger herself, at the mere memory of his insolence.
It did not strike her that there could be any truth in his accusation. Gianluca was old enough to take care of himself. Was Taquisara his nurse, his keeper, his doctor? Gianluca was not making love to her in his letters, nor was she, in hers, encouraging him to do so. She was angry at the thought that the Sicilian should know anything of their correspondence, as it seemed evident that he must. It was true that her own friend, Bianca, knew something about it. She could forgive Gianluca, if he had confided too much in Taquisara, but she could not forgive Taquisara for having been the recipient of the confidence, and she would neither forgive nor forget the way in which he had shown her how much he knew.
For the first time in her life, Veronica longed to be a man, that she might not only resent the insult, but have satisfaction of the man who had insulted her. She felt that she was emphatically not playing with Gianluca, as Taquisara had expressed it. She had told him frankly, several months earlier, that she could not love him, — she had shaken her head and had said that she was sorry, — and neither he nor any one else had a right to suppose that she was now changing her mind. Since
Gianluca was apparently willing to accept the position and to be her friend, it was nobody’s affair but his and hers. She felt that she had been fully justified in what she had said to Taquisara. At the same time she was half conscious of being disappointed in the man, and of being wounded by the disappointment.
She left Bianca’s house early, and as she drove away to the railway station alone with Elettra, she felt that her life was only now really beginning. The months of independence she had enjoyed had prepared her for this final move. In the course of setting her affairs in order, she had been brought face to face with a side of the world which few women ever see or understand, and her character had hardened singularly to meet the difficulties she had found in her path. She probably overestimated the strength she had now acquired; for more than once, on the way to the station, she felt a momentary reaction of timidity and a longing to go back and stay a few days more with Bianca. She laughed bravely at herself for her weakness, and told herself that she was going to her own place, to be surrounded by her own people, that she was two-and-twenty years of age and had been through troubles during the past months which had proved her strength. Nevertheless, the fact remained that she was a very young, unmarried woman, that she was going to live alone, and that she was breaking through the whole hard shell of fossilized social tradition. Even Elettra, born a peasant of the mountains, thought her mistress’s decision amazingly bold, though she approved of it in her heart, and had been ready to go to Muro with Veronica long ago.
“What would your father, blessed soul, have said, Excellency?” she asked, when they were seated together in the train which was to take them to Eboli, beyond Salerno.
“Shall I send for the Countess Macomer?” asked Veronica, with a smile.
“Heaven preserve us from her!” exclaimed Elettra, and she crossed herself hastily, and then made the sign of the horns with her fingers, against the evil eye, and with her other hand touched a coral charm which she had in her pocket.
Veronica had long been in correspondence with Don Teodoro about the arrangements for her coming. He had expected that she would bring a staff of servants from Naples with all the paraphernalia of a great establishment. She had replied that she intended to employ only her own people, and meant to live very simply. He suggested that she should send a quantity of new furniture, as the apartments in the castle had not been inhabited for nearly twenty years, but Veronica answered that she needed no luxuries, and repeated that she meant to live very simply indeed. She sent her saddle horse and two pairs of strong cobs with two country carriages and a coachman — a very young man, who had served in Gianluca’s regiment and had been his man. He was to find a man in Muro to help him in the stables, and he was the only servant, not a native, whom she meant to employ. Don Teodoro had kept ten people at work for a month in cleaning the vast old place. Veronica had sent also a box of books, some linen and silver, and her fencing things — for she still hoped that Bianca would pay her a visit.
The journey by rail occupied between four and five hours, but it did not seem so long to her. She was surprised at the excitement she felt, as she passed station after station and watched the changing sights and the mountains that loomed up in the foreground, while those behind her dwindled in the distance. She had travelled very little in her life, since she had come back from Rome.
On the platform of the little station at Eboli, Don Teodoro was waiting for her. His tall bent figure and enormous nose made him conspicuous at a distance, and she could see the big silver spectacles anxiously searching for her along the row of carriage windows. As the door was opened for her she waved her handkerchief to the old priest, with a little gesture of happy enthusiasm, high above her head, and he saw her immediately and came forward, three-cornered hat in hand. She suddenly loved the smile with which he greeted her.
“You, at least, do not think that I am mad to come to Muro, do you?” she asked, standing beside him on the platform while Elettra was handing out her smaller belongings.
“Not at all,” answered the old man. “You are coming to take care of your own people, and it is a good deed. Good deeds generally seem eccentric to society — and considering their rarity, that is not extraordinary.”
He smiled again, and Veronica laughed.
“Your carriage is here,” said Don Teodoro. “May I take you to it? Will you give me the tickets, Elettra? They take them at the gate.”
Veronica felt a new thrill of joyous freedom and independence, as for the first time in her life she set her little foot upon the step of her own carriage, and glanced at the simple, well-appointed turnout. The coachman sat alone in the middle of the box, a broad-shouldered, clean-shaven young fellow of six-and-twenty, in a dull green livery with white facings — the colours of the Serra.
“You would not even have a footman,” observed Don Teodoro.
“No — not I!” she laughed, still standing in the carriage. “How are the horses doing, Giovanni?” she asked of the coachman. “Are they strong enough for the work?”
“They are good horses, Excellency,” the man answered. “They need work.”
“And how is Sultana?” inquired the young girl, who had not seen the mare for several days.
“The mare is well, Excellency.”
Veronica made Don Teodoro sit beside her, and Elettra installed herself opposite them, with her mistress’s bags and other things. The luggage was piled on a cart which was to follow, and they drove away.
“I sent the carriage down yesterday,” observed Don Teodoro. “I came by the coach this morning.”
“Is it so far?” asked Veronica, whose ideas about the position of her property were still uncertain, for it had never struck Elettra that her mistress did not know how far it was from Eboli to Muro.
“It is over thirty miles,” answered the priest, with a smile. “We are beyond civilization in Muro — we are in the province of Basilicata. But there are little towns on the way, and you must stop to rest the horses and to eat something. It will be almost dark when you get home.”
“Home!” repeated Veronica, thoughtfully.
A confused vision rose in her mind, of an imaginary room, looking down from a height upon a town below — a room in which she would live altogether, with her books and her favourite objects and the companionship of her favourite ideas and plans, all of which were to be realized and executed in the course of time. She fancied herself gazing down from the wide window upon what was almost all hers, upon the dwellings of people who lived upon her land, who pastured her flocks and drove her cattle, living, moving, and having being as integral animate parts of her great inheritance; children of men and women whose fathers’ fathers had laboured in old days that she might have and enjoy the fruits of so much toil, who had given much and from whom had often been taken even that which they had not been bound fairly to give; who had received nothing in return for generations of blood and bone worn out, dried up, and consumed to dust in the service of the great house of Serra. They had a right to her, as she had a right to the lands on which they lived. There was much talk of rights, Veronica thought, nowadays, and those who had none were privileged to speak the loudest and to be heard first. But those who, having right on their side, were blinded and smitten dumb by the enormous despotism of their self-styled betters — by the glare and noise of blatant power in possession — they were the ones who really had rights, and if she could give any of them a single hundredth part of what was their due, she should be glad that she had lived. Wealth, she thought, should not be an accumulation, but a distribution, of goods. Charity should no longer mean alms, nor should poverty be pauperism. In the young, whole-hearted simplicity of her desire to do good, it seemed likely that she might soon be a specimen of the strangest of all modern anomalies — the princely socialist. It was certainly in her power to try almost any experiment which suggested itself, and on a scale which might ultimately prove something to herself and others.
It was not that she meant to study political economy, or so
cialism, nor to give the name of an experiment to anything she did. She had been struck by the practical necessity for doing something, when Don Teodoro had first written to her about the condition of the people in Muro, and her own observations made on her farms in the Falernian district — one of the richest corners of vine land in all Italy — had convinced her that some sort of action was urgently necessary. And if, in the midst of such riches, the Falernian peasants were half starved, what must be the state of the people on her lands in the Basilicata? Don Teodoro had drawn her an accurate picture, full of those plain details which carry more than the weight of their mere words. Something should be done at once. She had given him power and money to help the very poorest, before she came; but her common sense told her that the evil lay too deep in the soil to be reached by a light shower of silver — or even by a storm of gold rain.
Inventors, great or small, are rarely theorists; the invention must be suited to the necessity, before all things, and the theory may come afterwards if anybody cares for it. For a theory is nothing but an attempted explanation, and the fact must exist before it can possibly need explaining. Bread is a great invention against hunger, and a man needs to know nothing about the gastric juices to save himself from starvation when the loaf is in his hand. Veronica meant to put the loaves where they were needed, within reach of those who needed them.
As she was driven through the rugged country on that May afternoon, she felt that she had a future before her, that she was going into action, and leaving stagnation behind, and that her own life, which was to be her very own, was just beginning. It was to be a life quite different from the existence of any one she knew, for, unlike the lives of her friends, hers was to have an integral, independent existence of its own, with one determined object for all its activity.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 844
