by Grant Allen
Just to encourage her, then (there’s nothing like society), Ceeca drew up her three-legged stool close beside the signorina, and began to sip carelessly and unconcernedly at her own cup of coffee. Perhaps the sight of somebody else drinking might chance by good luck to make the Englishwoman feel a little thirsty.
But Minna only looked at her, and smiled half-unconsciously. To her great surprise, the Italian woman perceived that two tears were slowly trickling down her rival’s cheeks.
Italians are naturally sympathetic, even when they are on the eve of poisoning you; and besides one is always curious to know what one is crying for. So Cecca leaned forward kindly, and said in her gentlest tone: ‘You are distressed, signorina. You are suffering in some way. Can I do anything for you?’
Minna started, and wiped away the two tears hastily. ‘It is nothing,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean it. I — I fancied I was alone, I had forgotten.’
‘What! you speak Italian!’ Cecca cried, a little astonished, and half anxious to enjoy her triumph by anticipation. ‘Ah, signorina, I know what is the matter. I have guessed your secret: I have guessed your secret!’
Minna blushed. ‘Hush,’ she said eagerly. ‘Not a word about it. My friend may return. Not a word about it.’
But still she didn’t touch her coffee.
Then Cecca began to talk to her gently and soothingly, in her best soft Italian manner. Poor thing, she was evidently very sad. So far away from her home too. Cecca was really quite sorry for her. She tried to draw her out and in her way to comfort her. The signorina hadn’t long to live: let us at least be kind and sympathetic to her.
For, you see, an Italian woman is capable of poisoning you in such a perfectly good-humoured and almost affectionate fashion.
At first, Minna didn’t warm very much to the beautiful model: she had still her innate horror of Italian women strong upon her; and besides she knew from her first meeting that Cecca had a terrible vindictive temper. But in time Cecca managed to engage her in real conversation, and to tell her about her own little personal peasant history. Yes, Cecca came from Calabria, from that beautiful province; and her father, her father was a fisherman.
Minna started. ‘A fisherman! How strange. And my father too, was also a fisherman away over yonder in England!’
It was Cecca’s turn to start at that. A fisherman! How extraordinary. She could hardly believe it. She took it for granted all along that Minna, though a governess, was a grand English lady; for the idea of a fisher man’s daughter dressing and living in the way that Minna did was almost inconceivable to the unsophisticated mind of a Calabrian peasant woman. And to wear a bonnet, too! to wear a bonnet!
‘Tell me all about it,’ Cecca said, drawing closer, and genuinely interested (with a side eye upon the untasted coffee). ‘You came to Rome then,’ jerking her two hands in the direction of the door, ‘to follow the Englishman?’ ‘Signora Cecca,’ Minna said, with a sudden vague instinct, in her tentative Italian, ‘I will trust you. I will tell you all about it. I was a poor fisherman’s daughter in England, and I always loved my cousin, the sculptor.’ Cecca listened with the intensest interest. Minna lifted her cup for the first time, and took a single sip of the poisoned coffee.
‘Good!’ thought Cecca calmly to herself. ‘If she takes a first sip, why of course in that case she will certainly finish it.’
Then Minna went on with her story, shortly and in difficulty, pieced out every here and there by Cecca’s questions and ready pantomime. Cecca drank in all the story with the deepest avidity. It was so strange that something should just then have moved the Englishwoman to make a confidante of her. A poor fisherman’s daughter, and neglected now by her lover who had become a grand and wealthy sculptor! Mother of God, from the bottom of her heart, she really pitied her.
‘And when he came to Rome,’ Cecca said, helping out the story of her own accord, ‘he fell in with the grand English ladies like the one with the military papa; and they made much of him; and you were afraid, my little signorina, that he had almost forgotten you! And so you came to Rome on purpose to follow him.’
Minna nodded, and her eyes filled with tears a second time.
‘Poor little signorina!’ Cecca said earnestly.
‘It was cruel of him, very cruel of him. But when people come to Rome they are often cruel, and they soon forget their lovers of the province.’ Something within her made her think that moment of poor Giuseppe, who had followed her so trustfully from that far Calabria.
Minna raised the cup once more, and took another sip at the poisoned coffee. Cecca watched the action closely, and this time gave a small involuntary sigh of relief when Minna set it down again almost untasted. Poor little thing! after all she was only a fisherman’s daughter, and she wanted her lover, her lover of the province, to love her still the same as ever! Nothing so very wrong or surprising in that! Natural, most natural.... But then, the Englishman, the Englishman! she mustn’t be allowed to carry off the Englishman.... And Giuseppe, poor Giuseppe.... Well, there, you know; in love and war these things will happen, and one can’t avoid them.
‘And you knew him from a child?’ she asked innocently.
‘Yes, from a child. We lived together in a little village by the sea-shore in England; my father was a fisherman, and his a gardener. He used to go into the fields by the village, and make me little images of mud, which I used to keep upon my mantelpiece, and that was the first beginning, you see, of his sculpture.’
Mother of heaven, just like herself and Giuseppe! How they used to play together as children on the long straight shore at Monteleone. ‘But you were not Christians in England, you were pagans, not Christians!’
For the idea of images had suggested to Cecca’s naïve mind the notion of the Madonna.
Minna almost laughed, in spite of herself, at the curious misapprehension, and drew out from her bosom the little cross that she always wore instead of a locket. ‘Oh yes,’ she said simply, without dwelling upon any minor points of difference between them; ‘we are Christians — Christians.’
The girl examined the cross reverently, and then looked back at the coffee with a momentary misgiving. After all, the Englishwoman was very gentle and human-like and kind-hearted. It was natural she should want to keep her country lover. And besides she was really, it seemed, no heretic in the end at all, but a good Christian.
‘When people come to Rome and become famous,’ she repeated musingly, ‘they do wrong to be proud and to forget the lovers of their childhood.’ Giuseppe loved her dearly, there was no denying it, and she used to love him dearly, too, down yonder on the shore at Monteleone.
Minna raised her cup of coffee a third time, and took a deeper drink. Nearly a quarter of the whole was gone now; but not much of the poison, Cecca thought to herself, thank heaven; that was heavy and must have sunk to the bottom. If only one could change the cups now, without being observed! Poor little thing, it would be a pity, certainly, to poison her. One oughtn’t to poison people, properly speaking, unless one has really got some serious grudge against them. She was a good little soul, though no doubt insipid, and a Christian, too; Madonna della Guardia, would the bargain hold good, Cecca wondered silently, seeing the Englishwoman had miraculously turned out to be after all a veritable Christian. These are points of casuistry on which one would certainly like to have beforehand the sound opinion of a good unprejudiced Calabrian confessor.
‘You think he makes too much of the tall signorina!’ Cecca said lightly, smiling and nodding. (Cecca had, of course, an immense fund of sympathy with the emotion of jealousy in other women.)
Minna blushed and looked down timidly without answering. What on earth could have possessed her to make so free, at this particular minute, with this terrible Italian model woman? She really couldn’t make it out herself, and yet she knew there had been some strange unwonted impulse moving within her. (If she had read Von Hartmann, she would have called it learnedly the action of the Unconscious. As it was, she would ha
ve said, if she had known all, that it was a Special Providence.)
So wishing merely to change the subject, and having nothing else to say at the moment, she looked up almost accidentally at the completed clay of the Nymph Bathing, and said simply: ‘That is a beautiful statue, Signora Cecca.’
Cecca smiled a majestic smile of womanly gratification, and showed her double row of even regular pearl-white teeth with coquettish beauty. ‘I posed for it,’ she said, throwing herself almost unconsciously into the familiar attitude. ‘It is my portrait!’
‘It is a splendid portrait,’ Minna answered cordially, glancing quickly from the original to the copy, ‘a splendid portrait of a very beautiful and exquisitely formed woman.’
‘Signorina!’ Cecca cried, standing up in front of her, and roused by a sudden outburst of spontaneous feeling to change her plan entirely, ‘you are quite mistaken; the master does not love the tall lady. I know the master well, I have been here all the time, I have watched him narrowly. He does not love the tall lady: she loves him, I tell you, but he does not care for her; in his heart of hearts he does not love her; I know, for I have watched them. Signorina, I like you, you are a sweet little Englishwoman, and I like you dearly. Your friend from the village in England shall marry you!’ (‘Oh, don’t talk so!’ Minna cried parenthetically, hiding her face passionately between her hands.)
‘And if the tall lady were to try to come between you and him,’ Cecca added vigorously, ‘I would poison her — I would poison her — I would poison her! She shall not steal another woman’s lover, the wretched creature. I hate such meanness, signorina, I will poison her.’
As Cecca said those words, with an unfeigned air of the deepest and most benevolent sympathy, she managed to catch her long loose scarf as if by accident in the corner of the light table where Minna’s half-finished cup of coffee was still standing, and to upset it carelessly on to the floor of the studio. The cup with a crash broke into a hundred pieces.
At that very moment Colin entered. He saw Minna rising hastily from the settee beside the overturned table, and Cecca down on her knees upon the floor, wiping up the coffee hurriedly with one of the coarse studio towels. Cecca looked up in his face with a fearless glance as if nothing unusual had happened. ‘An accident, signor,’ she cried: ‘my scarf caught in the table. I have spilt the signorina’s cup of coffee. But no matter. I will run down immediately and tell them below to make her another.’
‘Cecca and I have been talking together, Colin,’ Minna said, replacing the fallen table hastily, ‘and, do you know, isn’t it strange, she’s a fisherman’s daughter in Calabria? and oh! Colin, I don’t believe after all she’s really half such a bad sort of girl as I took her to be when I first saw her. She’s been talking to me here quite nicely and sympathetically.’
‘Italians are all alike,’ Colin answered, with the usual glib English faculty for generalisation about all ‘foreigners.’ ‘They’ll be ready to stab you one minute, and to fall upon your neck and kiss you the very next.’
Going out of the studio to order more coffee from the trattoria next door, Cecca happened to meet on the doorstep with her friend Giuseppe.
‘Beppo,’ she said, looking up at him more kindly than had been her wont of late: ‘Beppo, I want to tell you something — I’ve changed my mind about our little difference. If you like, next Sunday you may marry me.’
‘Next Sunday! Marry you!’ Beppo exclaimed, astonished. ‘Oh, Cecca, Cecca, you cannot mean it!’
‘I said, next Sunday, if you like, you may marry me. That’s good ordinary sensible Calabrian, isn’t it? If you wish, I’ll give it you in Tuscan: you can understand nothing but Tuscan, it seems, since you came to Rome, my little brother.’
She said the words tenderly, banter as they were, in their own native dialect: and Beppo saw at once that she was really in earnest.
‘But next Sunday,’ he exclaimed. ‘Next Sunday, my little one! And the preparations?’
‘I am rich!’ Cecca answered calmly. ‘I bring you a dower. I am the most favourite model in all Rome this very moment.’
‘And the Englishman — the Englishman? What are you going to do with the Englishman?’
‘The Englishman may marry his sweetheart if he will,’ the girl replied with dogged carelessness.
‘Cecca! you did not give the.... medicine to the Englishman?’
Cecca drew the half-empty bottle from her pocket and dashed it savagely against the small paving-stones in the alley underfoot. ‘There,’ she cried, eagerly, as she watched it shiver into little fragments. ‘See the medicine! That is the end of it.’
‘And the cat, Cecca?’
Cecca drew a long breath. ‘How much of it would hurt a human being — a woman?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Somebody has drunk a little by mistake — just so much!’ And she measured the quantity approximately with the tip of her nail upon her little finger.
Giuseppe shook his head re-assuringly, shrugged his shoulders, and opened his hands, palms outward, as if to show he was evidently making no mental reservation. ‘Harmless!’ he said. Quite harmless. It would take a quarter of a phial at least to produce any effect worth speaking of.’
Cecca clasped her silver image of the Madonna ecstatically. ‘That’s well, Beppo,’ she answered with a nod. ‘I must go now. On Sunday, little brother! On Sunday. Beppo — Beppo — it was all a play. I love you. I love you.’
But as she went in to order the coffee the next second, she said to herself with a regretful grimace: ‘What a fool I was after all to waste the medicine! Why, if only I had thought of it. I might have used it to poison the other one, the tall Englishwoman. She shall not be allowed to steal away the little signorina’s lover!’
CHAPTER XXXVIII. GWEN HAS A VISITOR.
In the gardens of the Villa Panormi, Gwen Howard-Russell was walking up and down by herself one morning, a few days later, among the winter flowers (for it was now January), when she saw a figure she fancied she could recognise entering cautiously at the main gate by the high road to the Ponte Molle. Why, yes, she couldn’t be mistaken. It was certainly the woman Cecca, the beautiful model down at Mr. Colin Churchill’s studio! How very extraordinary and mysterious! What on earth could she be coming here for?
Gwen walked quickly down to meet the girl, who stood half hesitating in the big central avenue, and asked her curiously what she wanted.
‘Signorina,’ Cecca answered, not unrespectfully, ‘I wish to speak with you a few minutes in private.’
Gwen was surprised and amused at this proposal, but not in the least disconcerted. How deliciously Italian and romantic! Mr. Churchill had sent her a letter, no doubt — perhaps a declaration — and he had employed the beautiful model to be the naturally appropriate bearer of it. There’s something in the very air of Rome that somehow lends itself spontaneously to these delightful mystifications. In London, now, his letter would have been delivered in the ordinary course of business by the common postman! How much more poetical, and antique, and romantic, to send it round by the veritable hands of his own beautiful imaginary Wood Nymph!
‘Come this way,’ she said, in her imperious English fashion; 41 will speak with you down here in the bower.’
Cecca followed her to the bower in silence, for she resented our brusque insular manners: and somewhat to Gwen’s surprise when she reached the bower, she seated herself like an equal upon the bench beside her. These Italians have no idea of the natural distinctions between the various social classes.
‘Well,’ Gwen asked, after a moment’s pause. ‘What do you want to say to me? Have you brought me any message or letter?’
‘No, signorina,’ the girl answered somewhat maliciously. ‘Nothing: nothing. I come to speak to you of my own accord solely.’
There was another short pause, as though Cecca expected the English lady to make some further inquiry: but as Gwen said nothing, Cecca began again: ‘I want to tell you something, signorina. You know the little English governess, the master’s c
ousin?’
‘Yes, I know her. That is to say, I have met her.’
‘Well, I have come to tell you something about her. She is a fisherman’s daughter, as I am, and she was brought up, far away, in a village in England, together with the master.’
‘I know all about her,’ Gwen answered somewhat coldly. ‘She was a servant afterwards at a house in London, and then she became a teacher in a school, and finally a governess. I have heard all that before, from a friend of mine in England.’
‘But I have something else to tell you about her,’ Cecca continued with unusual self-restraint for an Italian woman. ‘Something else that concerns you personally. She was brought up with the master, and she used to play with him in the meadows, when she was a child, where he made her little images of the Madonna in clay; and that was how he first of all began to be a sculptor. Then she followed him from her village to a city: and there he learned to be more of a sculptor. By-and-by, he came to Rome: but still, the little signorina loved him and wished to follow him. And at last she did follow him, because she loved him. And the master loves her, too, and is very fond of her. That is all that I have to tell you.’
She kept her eye fixed steadily on Gwen while she spoke, and watched in her cat-like fashion to see whether the simple story was telling home, as she meant it to do, to Gwen’s intelligence. As she uttered the words she saw Gwen’s face grow suddenly scarlet, and she knew she had rightly effected her intended purpose. She had struck the right chord in Gwen’s pride, and Minna now would have nothing more to fear from the tall Englishwoman. ‘Safer than the poison,’ she thought to herself reflectively, ‘and as it happens, every bit as useful and effectual, without half the trouble or danger.’
Gwen looked at her steadily and without flinching. ‘Why do you say all this to me?’ she asked haughtily.
