Oriole's daughter, a novel, Volume 2 (of 3)
Date: 2025-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

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Title: Oriole's daughter, a novel, Volume 2 (of 3)

Author: Jessie Fothergill

Release date: June 4, 2025 [eBook #76220]

Language: English

Original publication: London: William Heinemann, 1893

Credits: Peter Becker, Ed Foster and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORIOLE'S DAUGHTER, A NOVEL, VOLUME 2 (OF 3) ***

ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

NEW LIBRARY NOVELS.

THE HEAVENLY TWINS.

By Sarah Grand, Author of ‘Ideala,’ etc.

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LONDON:
WM. HEINEMANN, 21, BEDFORD STREET, W.C.

ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

A NOVEL

BY

JESSIE FOTHERGILL

AUTHOR OF
‘THE FIRST VIOLIN,’ ‘A MARCH IN THE RANKS,’ ‘PROBATION,’
ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1893
[All rights reserved]

ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

CHAPTER IX.

As time went on, and the situation slowly developed itself, Minna was forced into an unwilling, annoyed kind of admiration for Signora Dietrich—the admiration which one must necessarily experience for a woman who has a distinct, rounded purpose in her mind, and who devotes herself with a single aim to the accomplishment of that purpose. Fulvia had availed herself of Minna’s invitation to come and see her, and presented herself almost every day: ostensibly to attend to her birds; in reality, as they both knew, to escape from the fear and constraint and oppression outside, into a more congenial atmosphere. It was here that Minna began to feel that admiration for the signora already spoken of.

She could not doubt that Fulvia’s mother knew perfectly well how wretched her daughter was, nor that, when with Minna, she sought relief from that wretchedness in, at any rate, occasional conversations on the subject of her unhappiness. It would have been very easy for Signora Dietrich to prevent the intercourse, forbid her daughter to enter Minna’s rooms, put a stop to the whole thing, at any moment she might choose to do so. But she did nothing of the kind, nor ever made the least objection to the visits. She was evidently very sure of her power, and did not trouble herself to interfere in small matters. It angered Minna, even while she admired it. She was, as has so often been said, not accustomed to be thwarted, and this calm smiling contempt for her influence irritated her extremely.

In a futile kind of way Minna had tried to find out something about Marchmont, wishing she could hear of something so greatly to his discredit that it might impress even Signora Dietrich with his undesirability as a husband for her daughter. In vain; she did vaguely hear something about him, but nothing that could be called exactly to his discredit—only that he had appeared in London some two years ago, and had there made a not very successful effort to ‘get into’ society; that he had been hated intensely for his meanness and vulgarity; that he had proposed for an English girl of good family, great beauty, and little or no fortune, and had been sent about his business with disdain; all of which might be disagreeable for the gentleman himself, especially if he could not conquer himself of his habit of stinginess, but which formed no data on which to go to Signora Dietrich and say, ‘You cannot possibly let your daughter marry this man.’

If Minna was conscious that the signora must be aware of the interviews between herself and Fulvia, and must be unable to approve of them, there were other thoughts which it never entered into her head to think of, but as to which she was destined to be, later, much enlightened. In the meantime the winter progressed; and she was still at Casa Dietrich, still profoundly interested in the drama going on there, still cherishing a spark of hope, founded on the fact that, as the marriage had not yet taken place, perhaps it might be, ‘somehow or other,’ altogether averted. She forced herself to be smiling and polite to the padrona of the house, hoping that by studious civility her word, if ever she should find a chance to put it in, might carry some weight with it—in which feeble assumption she merely illustrated the fact that the wish is father to the thought, and that she utterly miscalculated her enemy’s nature and capacities.

Fulvia began to look thin and pale, but, unfortunately, even more beautiful and attractive in her delicacy than when she had been in blooming health. Her great eyes grew more lustrous, her beautiful face gained a charm of haunting, wistful loveliness, from the very fact that its rounded contours were changed; and the mournful droop of her mouth was undoubtedly exquisitely beautiful. Sometimes she cast aside her despondency, with an effort, perhaps, but completely, and was her gay old self again, or very nearly so; laughed at them all, caressed her mother, alternately teased and coaxed Signor Giuseppe till his sorry expression relaxed and his eyes softened, and when he ventured to turn them full upon the girl and study her, as he had been wont to do, his sadness vanished; love and joy shone from his eyes, ‘carina carisssima’ flowed from his lips, and there was a gleam of happiness once more. These gleams, it will be understood, never occurred when Marchmont was present. Then, Giuseppe either froze into haughty silence, or worked himself into a fever of irritated impatience which ended in his flinging himself out of the house, and tearing up and down the busy, tortuous streets till he felt calmer, or—and that happened oftenest—took himself out of the way entirely, unable to bear the sight of Fulvia’s uneasy wretchedness, of her mother’s triumphant self-complacency, and of Marchmont’s nauseous attempts at flattery and love-making.

Signor Giuseppe was indeed a changed and saddened man. Minna pitied him from the depths of her heart, and did her utmost to afford him any silent consolation that lay in her power. She fancied that, to a certain extent, she had succeeded, for he had once or twice called upon her at the studio, in the twilight hour, on his way home from the cares and toils of l’ufficio. She had received him with extended hand, a smile of pleasure, a hearty ‘You are welcome,’ had drawn a chair near to the stove, and he had sat down upon it. The first time he had made some spasmodic attempts at conversation about all kinds of outside things: a crisis in the Ministry, a message from the King, some English war news that had come, and so forth.

These efforts had by-and-by died down into silence, and when he found that this silence did not annoy her, that he was allowed to sit still as long as he liked and indulge it, he had availed himself of the privilege, and passed an hour or two several times a week in her sitting-room or her studio. Minna made as if she noticed nothing peculiar or unusual in this conduct. He did not speak of his feelings; he did not allude to anything that was going on at home. The second time that he came she was not in her studio, but in the sitting-room, seated at the table drawing. She did not speak after they had exchanged a buon’ giorno, but continued her work with diligence, and had almost ceased to be conscious of his presence in the room, when a deep sigh struck on her ear. Looking up, she perceived Signor Oriole rising from his chair, looking very haggard, very worn, very sad. He came up to her, essayed a forlorn kind of smile, and said:

‘I must go away now, cara signora. Thank you a thousand times for your hospitality.’

‘A very small hospitality,’ replied Minna gently.

He shook her hand slowly and limply, and, looking at her, said in a slow, sad voice:

‘It must be measured by what it is to me, not to you. To me it is much. Signora, I am very unhappy.’

‘I know it, Signor Giuseppe,’ she said; ‘it grieves me to see it, and I wish I were not so powerless to help you.’

‘Ah, you are very good!’ replied he, ‘good to me and good to the poor child. That is one kind of help. As for any other kind, nothing can give it except an estate, and a banking account larger than those possessed by Signor Marchmont.’ He laughed nervously, with a gleam of his old sardonic amusement, and added: ‘Will you let me come again, if you do not find it quite too annoying?’

‘Come when you please—every day if you like, if it does the least good.’

‘Grazie infinite,’ replied poor Signor Giuseppe, and was gone.

About this time, too, Minna hit upon another plan for helping Fulvia herself through some of the weary hours which she had to pass in her lover’s company. Minna had lost the fervour of delight and enthusiasm in her work which she had felt for some little time after she had shown it to Signor Giuseppe, and explained to him its origin. Her hand would not return with any pleasure to shaping that figure of youth and strength and life, of happiness in the midst of toil, which had inspired her months ago. She covered it up, wondering sadly when she would feel fit to return to it; and she determined instead to do a likeness of Fulvia. In order to accomplish this purpose, it was necessary to ask her mother’s permission, which Minna boldly did.

‘Signora, I have a favour to ask of you,’ she said one night, as they stood in the hall outside the dining-room when dinner was over.

‘Anything in the world that lies in my power. I am your servant,’ said the signora, showing her white teeth in a sweet, malicious smile.

‘I wish you would let Fulvia sit to me. I am very anxious to do a bust of her, or to try if I can do one.’

‘You flatter us both, signora. I find that your amiability makes far too much of my little one. Her head will be turned, but I cannot refuse such a request.’

‘Oh, thank you! Then she may come to the studio and give me some sittings?’

‘With pleasure. Only—you will excuse me for reminding you that Fulvia is now betrothed to Mr. Marchmont, who therefore has the first claim upon her time. He will be enchanted, I am sure, that you should take her likeness, but at the same time he will doubtless often wish to be present when she is sitting to you.’

Minna had been prepared for something of the kind.

‘That I find perfectly natural under the circumstances,’ she said, with unmoved countenance and undiminished cheerfulness. ‘Fulvia can go with me to my studio, and Mr. Marchmont shall be admitted at whatever hour he likes to call—when she is there.’

‘Then we may consider the matter settled,’ said the signora, with the air of a great lady graciously bestowing a favour on a very insignificant person, all of which Minna felt—felt to the marrow of her bones, and boiled with indignation at being thus patronized by that ‘creature’; but all of which she resolutely swallowed, and swallowed with a good grace, for the sake of getting this slight alleviation in Fulvia’s distasteful day’s duties.

Thus it was arranged. From that day onwards Fulvia accompanied Minna nearly every morning to her studio, and the work of modelling her likeness began. Minna found it a perfectly fascinating occupation. She was never tired of watching the charming head, of causing it to turn this way and that, of trying the effect of different styles of hair-dressing, of different veils or hoods, or draperies cast over the glistening hair, of endeavouring to catch the effect of some fleeting smile, the curve of some dimple, or the steadfast melancholy of the beautiful mouth when sad thoughts had banished from its lips all attempt at a smile. She began models in two or three different attitudes, and was pleased with them all. The figure of the workman was shrouded away from sight. He must be left until better days—till the danger should be over and Fulvia safe and free from the hateful bonds which at present held her.

Marchmont was graciously pleased to approve of the sittings, and to give them much more frequently than they desired the pleasure of his company while those sittings were going on. He was aware that Minna, though visiting very little, did so of her own choice, and that she could, had she so wished, have been a constant guest in some of the most coveted society in Rome. For this reason, if for no other, he approved. He was also fully conscious that she disliked him more than words could express, and that it was only for Fulvia’s sake that he was tolerated in these rooms; so, true to his type, he experienced all the more pleasure in presenting himself repeatedly, and behaving as one who was quite at his ease, boasting, swaggering, and patronizing everyone and everything he came in contact with. They were uncomfortable hours to Minna, those which this creature passed in her sanctum; it was only Fulvia’s quiet but intense gratitude which gave her the patience to continue to receive him.

One morning, when they were all three together, her friend Mrs. Charrington called, came into the studio and sat down. Minna, with great presence of mind, introduced her two visitors—Mr. Marchmont, Signorina Dietrich. Marchmont, who had never yet succeeded in getting an invitation to one of Mrs. Charrington’s evenings, and who was convinced that it was entirely owing to the fact that he had so far not made her acquaintance and been able to show her how delightful he was, exhausted himself in attempts to be ingratiatingly polite. With each ill-contrived effort he merely roused more thoroughly the complete contempt of the cool-headed woman of the world, who never for a moment betrayed her utter disdain of him—never for a moment allowed him to gain the faintest shred of a vantage-ground or possibility of approaching her any nearer. She replied with indifferent glacial politeness and a smile to everything that he said, and she would certainly cut him dead next time she met him in the Corso or on the Pincian Hill.

She measured Fulvia from head to foot with calm, self-possessed, open curiosity and interest, and looked from her to the bust of her which was in progress, put up her eyeglass, and said:

‘Brava, Minna! You certainly have a talent, if not a genius, for portraiture. That is simply admirable. You have a charming model also—an inspiration in herself.’

She smiled with conventional sweetness, and bowed towards Fulvia, who fixed her large eyes upon her with serious, inquiring earnestness, and did not seem either fluttered or confused, pleased or displeased, by the notice thus bestowed upon her.

‘Come and have tea with me this afternoon,’ said Mrs. Charrington to Minna, as she rose to go.

‘Thank you, but——’

‘“But me no buts.” If not this afternoon, which? Or, if you can’t or won’t come to me, tell me when I may come to you. I came not merely to discharge myself of an invitation, but to see that something definite was arranged, because I wish to see you.’

She stood and waited, her eyes fixed with unsparing shrewdness on Minna’s face. The latter saw that the interview had to come. The sooner it should be over the better.

‘I’ll come this afternoon. I can manage it,’ she said.

‘Very good. And let the tea-hour extend itself to dinner-time and the evening as well. Now that I have you I may as well get all I can.’

‘Very well,’ said Minna unenthusiastically. ‘At five o’clock I’ll be with you.’

‘Bene! Good-morning!’ with a comprehensive and perfectly meaningless bow to Marchmont, and a condescending nod to Fulvia.

‘Allow me,’ exclaimed Marchmont, opening the door. ‘Did you drive? Let me see you to your carriage.’

She made no objection. He went down the stairs with her, and presently returned looking highly satisfied with himself.

‘A thoroughly stylish, well-bred person, Mrs. Charrington,’ he said approvingly, and Minna repressed a shudder. ‘Has she long been a friend of yours, Mrs. Hastings?’

‘Ever since I first visited Rome—now eight years ago,’ replied Minna dryly. ‘Now, Fulvia mia, I release you. We will put on our bonnets and go home to lunch.’

They did so. Minna did not return to her studio that afternoon, but presented herself at the appointed hour, and rang the bell of Mrs. Charrington’s piano. She found her alone.

CHAPTER X.

After tea had been administered, and sundry indifferent matters discussed, Mrs. Charrington said, with a subtle change in her tone:

‘My dear, I congratulate you on the company in which I found you this morning!’

‘What was wrong with the company?’ asked Minna calmly, but determined to fight.

Mrs. Charrington shrugged her shoulders.

‘The girl is perfectly beautiful!’ she said, almost irrelevantly. ‘I don’t wonder that you like to take her portrait; but what was the other creature doing in your studio?’

‘Unfortunately “the girl,” as you call her, is engaged to the other creature; and he has claims upon her society.’

‘She’s Signora Dietrich’s daughter, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘And are you still staying at that place?’

‘I am. It’s too much trouble to move.’

‘Or, rather, you don’t wish to move. I am astonished at you, I must say. It is so unlike anything you have ever been accustomed to.’

‘But what do you know about it? When I told you I was there you said you had no idea who they were.’

‘I had not then. But since then I have found out all that is necessary.’

‘Very kind of you to take so much trouble. Was it on my account?’

‘Don’t be huffy. Do you suppose I had anything but kind intentions towards you? Yes, it was on your account. And also because—though I could not remember just at the moment—I had a glimmering idea that I had once heard something about those people. It is such a bore to have a half-caught fact wandering round in your head, and evading you every time you tried to grasp it, so I just made some investigations. La signora is not the most estimable character imaginable, I think?’

‘I should suppose not. I have nothing to do with her—practically.’

‘She comes of a very clerical family,’ pursued Mrs. Charrington composedly. ‘All the women of her family are bigoted devotees, and very shaky as to morals. The two so often go together. Then, there is a man about the place, isn’t there?’

‘Yes,’ replied Minna dryly.

‘Yes—exactly. Signor Oriole, or some such name. Oh yes, it is an old story, common enough here, and disreputable enough.’

‘He is not disreputable,’ said Minna stoutly. ‘I am certain of that—though why they are not married now, when there is no husband in the way, I really don’t know. It is very unfair to the girl.’

‘It is easy enough to know why they are not married. He is, or was, a gentleman. He had a name, and a bringing up. He comes of a good family. He gave up his estate and his time, his youth and his strength, to his country. Then he got entangled with this woman some time or other, when he was wounded, or ill, or something. In a way, he is weak. She is strong all round. He was quite under her fascination for several years—not many, but several. He gave up what few rags of position and consideration remained to him, in order to be near her. A miserable despicable situation for a man of any brains or cultivation to be in. Her husband had wretched health. Everyone knew he could not live. Oriole had every intention of marrying her, and then it would have been all right. But, not long before Dietrich’s death he discovered that she could be false to her lover as well as to her husband. In spite of having, as he gave out, cast away every shred of the condition of gentil uomo—outwardly, at any rate—there was still a remnant or two of prejudice left within. He could not swallow that pill. He would not marry her. He did not desert her. That was his mistake and his weakness. She could have got on perfectly well without him—such people can always get on, somehow, because they have no scruples and no feelings, only passions and greeds of different kinds. They say he is desperately fond of the child. I don’t know how that may be. He has paid dearly enough for his slip, years ago. His life has been simply ruined, neither more nor less.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Minna, as composedly as she could. She did not betray the force of the shock with which the news of the true state of things had struck her. It had not occurred to her to imagine it for herself, but now that she heard it thus philosophically set forth by an outsider, the truth of it came irresistibly to the front. That, certainly, accounted for everything. It made the situation more tragic, but to a certain extent it relieved her mind, because it vindicated Signor Oriole.

‘I heard at the same time some talk of an engagement between the child and a rich foreigner,’ continued Mrs. Charrington. ‘I did not quite believe it, but from what you say there appears to be some truth in it.’

‘It is only too true. He and the mother are agreed. The girl is helpless, Signor Oriole is helpless, of course. This creature is enormously rich, and has tempted Signora Dietrich with a bait which she cannot resist. He is to pay her debts and give her some money—set her free, in fact—and Fulvia is to be handed over to him. It is a horrible situation.’

‘You speak as if you had some personal concern in it,’ said Mrs. Charrington in her clear, incisive tones—cool, cutting, merciless. As those tones struck upon her ear, Minna felt how utterly illogical was her own position in the matter, how purely a thing not of reason, but of feeling, impulse, emotion. She realized that she had nothing to urge in her own defence if she should be attacked on the subject, and she clung all the more ardently to her attitude in the matter. It was another proof of the friendlessness, the forlornness, of poor Fulvia Dietrich that people should wonder why she, Minna Hastings, should concern herself with her affairs. Of course there was nothing to be gained by it but vexation and disappointment, and it is so foolish, so unspeakably foolish, to let one’s self encounter these things on behalf of one who can give nothing in return for the service—wild, quixotic, vain. She said nothing.

‘Don’t you think,’ continued Mrs. Charrington, in her most dulcet tones, ‘that on the whole you had better get out of it? It isn’t a nice sort of thing to be mixed up in.’

‘I am not “mixed up” in it. I have nothing to do with it. I am sorry for the poor man who has made such a mess of his life. I pity the girl beyond all expression. It is pollution for an innocent young creature to be in the presence, even, of that man who she is told is to be her husband. I confess I can’t sit still and see a helpless thing writhe in torture without even putting out a hand to try and help. It is little enough that I can do. By coming to my studio for an hour or two every day she has less time to spend with him and her mother. And, so long as she is not actually married to him, I keep cherishing a hope that perhaps something may happen to break it off—if you call that being mixed up with it.’

‘I do,’ was the decisive reply. ‘Of course when one sees helpless creatures being tortured, to use your flowery language, one must do something. I should do something myself. But that is just the point. Why see them? Why be anywhere near them? You have plenty of friends of your own standing, your own kind, and your own position. You have relations and connections. Why must you cast them all off, and go and busy yourself in the concerns of a disreputable Italian woman and her threadbare old simpleton of a former lover, and their child and the vulgar little upstart who wants to marry the child. “A passion in tatters” on the part of the two elderly persons—a stupid vulgar love-story on that of the younger ones. Do look at it in the proper light. What have you to do with such things—what do you want dans cette galère? You can’t do anything, as you say. Go away and leave them, and return to your natural place amongst your friends and in society. That is the only course for you to take.’

Minna shook her head.

‘I’m interested in it,’ she replied.

Mrs. Charrington began to look vexed.

‘I don’t think you understand what a mistake you are making.’

‘And I am very fond of the child,’ pursued Minna. ‘The more I see of her the more I love her. Poor thing! I can’t understand how any woman with a heart in her breast, seeing what is going on, could stand aside and leave her to her fate, without even a word of sympathy.’

‘Oh, when it comes to “a woman with a heart in her breast,” that is just the same as when philanthropists and charitable or religious maniacs tell you they “feel” something very strongly. They “feel” that Mrs. Brown or Mrs. Jones, and her crew of begging children, must not be allowed to go to the workhouse or prison, and——’

‘Really, Mary, your similes are flattering!’

‘There is too much truth in them. The plain fact of the matter is that you have got into a set of anything but respectable people, whose youthful follies and sins are coming home to roost, and bringing their children in their hands with them. You ought to have nothing whatever to do with them. You are letting yourself be carried away by your “feelings.” Oh, I could say many rude and true things on that subject. Some day or other you will bitterly repent it. When that day comes don’t say that I did not warn you.’

‘It may come, then,’ said Minna, with a heightened colour. ‘I am satisfied with what I am doing. I wish it were more; I should embrace it with eagerness. If I could get Fulvia Dietrich out of this horrible situation, at almost any cost to myself I would do it. I was not quite sure what I felt about it before, but your plain-spoken remarks have made my own mind quite clear to me. So don’t you think we have said enough about it?’

‘I see it is useless to say anything more to you,’ replied Mrs. Charrington, disguising her vexation at having thus overshot her mark, as she now plainly perceived she had done. ‘I have relieved my mind, at any rate, and discharged what I felt to be an imperative duty. It hasn’t been pleasant, and I am aware that it is the kind of thing one never gets any thanks for. I have no objection to talk about something else, as you have taken the bit between your teeth.’

They did not return to the subject. Mrs. Charrington exerted herself to play the amiable hostess, Minna was the complaisant guest; but she felt all the time that Mrs. Charrington was disapproving, deeply disapproving, and the intercourse was constrained and unsatisfactory.

When Minna went away, ‘Remember,’ said her friend, ‘I decline to call upon you at that house. I shall look you up at the studio now and then, but I don’t countenance Casa Dietrich.’

‘How pleasant it would be if we could crush out all pain and wrong and wickedness by simply saying we did not countenance them!’ was Minna’s retort, in a tone not devoid of bitterness. ‘Good-night,’ she added, and went out and down the stairs. She breathed a long sigh as she got into a little carriage, and gave the address of Casa Dietrich.

‘She will never understand and never approve,’ she said to herself. ‘And it will be the same with everyone I know. They will call me mad and a simpleton. Well, they will just have to call me so. What would it matter if Fulvia were happy? How I wish she was my daughter! I wish I had a daughter.’

CHAPTER XI.

On the following morning, just as Minna was preparing to go out to her studio, there came a tap on the door, followed by the entrance of Fulvia.

‘I am so sorry, signora,’ said she. ‘Mamma has sent me to say that I shall not be able to go with you to-day. We are to go out, she and I, and Signor Marchmont. We shall be out all day, and we shall be busy for several days.’

She spoke listlessly and mechanically, without a trace of spirit or animation.

‘Oh, I am sorry. What makes you so busy?’

‘My trousseau,’ replied Fulvia coldly.

‘Your trousseau? Why—has there—is anything settled?’

‘I am to be married in the middle of April—in a month from now. And it seems I am to be dressed up for it, like our Blessed Lady for a festa.’

She looked drearily round the room; her face was pale, her lips looked drawn and dry. She went up to the cage where the canaries now flourished exceedingly in the comfort of Minna’s room, and on the good food which she gave them, and mechanically brushed some grains of seed from the cloth into her hand, dropped them into the fender before the stove, and stood there as if not knowing what to do next.

Minna also did not know what to do, and was filled with impotent rage at her own want of power or inventiveness, or whatever it might be. The dreadful thing was coming nearer and nearer, and not a glimpse appeared in their horizon of any weapon or means of warding it off. After a moment’s pause, during which all kinds of wild ideas and speculations rushed through her brain, Minna asked abruptly:

‘Fulvia mia, tell me something. I have a good reason for asking you. When you first told me of this thing, you said your mother was in debt, and that Mr. Marchmont was going to pay her debts.’

‘Yes, it is quite true,’ Fulvia nodded. ‘I heard them talking about it. I heard him tell mamma that she was the hardest-hearted business woman he had ever met, and that she would wring blood from a stone.’

Minna refrained from comment, and went on:

‘Did you ever hear how much money your mother wanted to pay her debts? Is it a great deal?’

‘Oh, an enormous sum!’ cried Fulvia. ‘At least ten thousand lire. I heard them say so. And then he gives her a present as well, but more than that—far more. I do not know how much.’

Minna almost smiled at first, and then felt a sense of burning rage at the idea conveyed to her by Fulvia’s words. The girl was then to be sold for a beggarly four hundred pounds, more or less. So much was necessary, it would seem, to set Signora Dietrich free from embarrassment. The rest was simply for luxury, was over and above, was the premium on her daughter’s wretchedness and degradation. Minna meditated darkly. She felt restless, feverish with anxiety and the agitation of a half-formed scheme which had just begun to shape itself in her mind.

There was a pause. Then she said:

‘Well, cara mia, I am sorry you cannot come to me, but I fear there is no getting out of this expedition.’

‘Oh no!’ said Fulvia apathetically. ‘I only came to tell you of it. A rivederci.’

She smiled faintly and drearily, and went away.

Two or three days passed, during which Minna scarcely saw anything of the three chief actors in the drama. She was left much to her own devices, and ‘thought the more.’ The weather was mild and exquisite; they were out all day, now buying things, now off on some excursion or ‘pleasure’ party. There was a subdued bustle about signora’s rooms, as of dressmakers, milliners and other purveyors of feminine finery and luxury. It was quite evident that things were being hastened on to their end. Meantime, the everyday prosaic business of the pensione went on as usual. The house was full. It was the height of the season in Rome. Every day people came and went. Every day Signor Oriole looked more and more busy, more and more shabby, woebegone, and irritable. Needless to say that he never formed one of any of the parties or excursions. He went on in a sort of mechanical way, grinding at the wretched duties which he had taken upon his shoulders long ago; working out his punishment, and, so far as Minna could judge, and much to her astonishment, not rebellious, only miserably resigned.

Minna did little work during those days, though she passed a good deal of time at her studio. She was utterly absorbed in anxious considerations of a kind perfectly fatal to the abstraction required for artistic work.

Thus things stood when one afternoon she sat up in her parlour at Casa Dietrich, with a book idly lying on her knee, as she gazed out into the clear cold afternoon light, which would soon descend into darkness and night.

A knock on the door. In answer to her ‘Avanti,’ Fulvia entered.

‘Ah, Fulvia, come in. It is ever so long since I saw you.’

‘Good-evening, signora. I only came to look at my birds,’ said Fulvia in a low voice. ‘I have neglected them shamefully, but I am sure you have not.’ She went up to the cage and chirped to them. ‘There is nothing for me to do,’ she said with a faint smile.

‘All the better. You have been busy. Come here; sit down on this sofa and tell me how you are.’

Fulvia accepted the invitation, sat down, and stretched out one hand towards the warmth that came from the stove, from which also came a dull, pleasant red glow. The room was warm and pleasant, scented with violets and early roses.

‘It is so delightful here,’ said Fulvia, rather wearily.

‘It is delightful to see you there. But you have been very busy, I suppose?’

‘Oh, I suppose so. We have rushed from one place to another. We have seen a great many things, and a great deal of money has been spent. I am quite bewildered with it. And I have tried on so many clothes. All day, when I was not having them bought for me, it seems to me that I was standing there with a woman pinning and fitting, and clipping things with great scissors. Some of them are ready, and have come home.’

‘But you do not wear them!’ said Minna, whose eyes fell upon the girl’s dress, and saw that it was the old, much-despised blue woollen thing which Fulvia had worn when she had first met her.

‘No; I will never put any of them on till I am obliged to,’ said Fulvia sullenly.

They were both silent for a little while, till Fulvia, presently leaning forward on the sofa, and clasping her hands round her knees, said:

‘Signora!’

‘Yes?’

‘Mamma says I am to be married in three weeks.’

‘So soon?’

‘Sometimes I think it is awfully soon. Then, again, I have another feeling, which is, that three weeks may mean—never. I have such strange sensations in my mind. I hardly know how to explain them to you. I feel as if the time would go on and on, and all this foolish making of dresses, and buying of jewellery might go on too, till the time comes, and that then I shall not know anything more, but shall somehow be away, out of it all, flying about in space; as if I should have become something else—not a girl—not a human creature any more. I shall be free from all this pain and fear, and from all this weight which seems to be bound on to my head, and round it; but at the same time, I shall have forgotten all the things I used to know. I shall not remember any more what the earth was like, or what Rome was. All the dreadful things will be forgotten—but all the good things too. For instance, I should have forgotten mamma and Signor Marchmont, as if I had never known them; but I should have forgotten you too, and Beppo. I do not wish to forget you, and to forget Beppo would mean to forget all the greatest happiness I have ever had.’

‘You must not indulge in such fancies. Grief and joy always go together here. You will not forget us, any more than we shall forget you.’

‘For the last few days, Signor Marchmont has talked about what “we” shall do when we are married,’ pursued Fulvia, unheeding Minna’s futile remark. ‘He has kept asking me questions, and expecting answers to them. It was dreadful before, when I only had to listen, but now—to have to answer these questions is frightful. If I could be silent always—if I were quite sure that I should never need to speak a word again, I think I could go through anything. But this talking—my head feels so strange!’ she added, putting her hand up to it. ‘Do you think I shall be able to bear three weeks more of this, without something happening? Don’t you think something is sure to happen before then?’

Minna, speechlessly, put out her hand to take that of Fulvia, and while she held it and sought wildly in her soul for something that might carry comfort, she saw all at once that a change had come over Fulvia’s face—a stiffness into her attitude. The hand was cold, the face was white. She evidently neither heard nor saw anything more, and her figure began to sway when she stood, for she had risen from her seat while describing her sensations to Minna.

The latter sprang from her chair, caught her in time to prevent her falling, and half pulled, half led her toward the sofa, and got her on to it. There she lay, in a dead faint.

‘Now is my time,’ said Minna to herself. ‘I should be a criminal if I were to hesitate any longer;’ and with that, after casting one hasty look towards Fulvia, she left the room, and sped along the corridors as fast as she could go till she came to Signora Dietrich’s room. She knocked loudly and unceremoniously on the door, opened it and confronted the signora, who was writing at a table, and who had just lifted her head to see what the interruption was.

‘Signora, your daughter is ill. She is fainting. She is in my room. You had better come to her at once!’ said Minna; and without waiting for a reply, she flew back to her own quarters, where she found Fulvia exactly as she had left her.

Scarce two minutes had passed since she had left the room. She scarcely had time to dash some water on the girl’s face, when a step behind her—a light but audible footstep—warned her that Signora Dietrich was in the room. She closed the door with deliberation, came up to the couch, and looked upon the rigid form of her daughter.

‘What is all this?’ she asked, but without any excitement or irritation in her manner. ‘What has she been doing? She appeared quite well when we came in at four o’clock.’

‘No—she is not well. No one is, or can be well, who is so unhappy as she is,’ replied Minna openly.

‘She is not unhappy,’ replied the signora, still calmly and deliberately. ‘She is fanciful, she is ignorant, and she is young. She has always been so much petted and indulged. It is constantly the case. She thinks, before she is seventeen, that she knows better than her mother, who is forty-seven, what is for her good and happiness. I thought exactly the same when my mother married me to Signor Dietrich.’

She was undoing Fulvia’s dress, with skilful and not unkindly hands; but there was no pity, no sympathy, no unbending in her attitude.

‘And do you feel now that you were wrong, and that your mother was right?’ asked Minna, beside herself.

Signora Dietrich paused for a moment in her operations, and looked Minna full in the face.

‘Certainly I do,’ she replied, and fell to work again.

‘A lie,’ said Minna to herself. ‘She did not even get material prosperity from the bargain.’

‘Did you suffer thus?’ she asked again, and her eyes once more fell upon Fulvia’s white, rigid, unconscious face.

‘Girls are hysterical,’ was the signora’s reply. ‘There, she is better now. She was tired. We have had a busy day. I must tell Marchmont that she must keep quiet to-morrow.’

‘I should advise you to keep her out of his way as much as possible for the next three weeks, if you wish your plan to be accomplished. She has had about as much as she can bear.’

‘You are extremely kind, thus to interest yourself in my poor affairs.’ said the signora blandly, in her full musical tones. ‘I am glad to have this opportunity of thanking you for your disinterested kindness.’

Minna felt the insult that was implied, but she had her end to gain. She was not to be turned aside from it by a few amenities of this description. So she replied, as if she had not noticed the tone at all:

‘Fulvia is dear to me. I love her, and wish her to be happy. Is she not recovering a little now?’

‘Yes. She is going to be better, I think.’

‘It is dark. I will light the lamp,’ said Minna, and she did so quickly. The light was a good one, and served amply to illuminate the scene and those taking part in it.

By slow degrees the rigidity gradually left Fulvia’s face and limbs. A long, shuddering sigh broke from her breast, and her eyes slowly opened. They fell at once upon her mother, who was standing near her. Signora Dietrich, despite her impecuniosity, dressed well when once she had made up her mind to get out of her dressing-gown into her gown. She had on just now a handsome black satin garment, with a white lace collar and cuffs. The somewhat florid and profuse style of her jewellery was the only ‘mark of the beast’ to distinguish her.

‘Mamma!’ exclaimed Fulvia, starting up, and looking round her in a bewildered way. ‘Where am I, and what has been the matter with me?’

‘Little over-tired, that is all,’ answered her mother. ‘You’ve had a little faint, as girls will sometimes, when they are excited or exhausted. Do you feel fit to walk now? Because, if so, we will relieve Signora Hastings of our presence, and let her have her room to herself.’

Fulvia made no reply. Her face was still very white, and a strange hollowness had come under her eyes and in her cheeks.

‘Pray do not hurry,’ said Minna. ‘I should like to say something to you, signora,’ she continued earnestly. ‘Will you not sit down here? I mean no disrespect to you by anything I may say. Pray remember that.’

Signora Dietrich bowed with cold dignity, and waited. She even took the chair which Minna offered her. The latter went on:

‘I am sure you wish your daughter’s happiness.’

‘It would be very unnatural if I did not—my only child,’ replied the lady, but still coldly.

‘And you think to secure it by marrying her to a rich man?’

‘It is not necessary for me to explain what I think. It is absurd to think we have secured anything, by any arrangements we can make. We can but act for the best, and await the result. You have lived long enough in our country to know that our marriage arrangements and our ideas upon these questions are quite different from those which prevail in yours,’ said madame, with a scarcely concealed sneer. ‘I thank the good God that it is so. I may be prejudiced, but I prefer the absolute obedience to parents, and the retiring modesty which characterizes the young girls of my country, to the boldness and forwardness which one sees in the English, and more so, if possible, in the Americans,’ said Signora Dietrich, clearly and calmly. ‘I have repeatedly heard that no harm comes of the freedom you accord your girls. I do not believe it. I have seen many of them, sitting round my own table, as well as in public places and in my friends’ houses. There is a hardihood, a boldness, a masculine roughness, about them which is hateful to me,’ she went on, with what was evidently the most sincere and intense conviction. Minna saw that she was telling the truth now, at least.

‘They walk alone in the streets,’ pursued the signora. ‘No girl can do that without bad consequences. It is simply impossible. I do not blame the girls. I pity them. They did not make the institutions of their country, and are not answerable for them; but if they knew what graces would be added to them, how much they would gain in charm and attractiveness, had they but the modesty and bashfulness of our own Italian girls, they would of their own accord refuse to do the things which we find so atrocious. Once for all, signora, understand that I know the customs of our countries are different, and that I prefer those of my own. In your country a girl is said to choose for herself—a husband, I mean. The result is, there are more unhappy old maids in England than in any other country on the face of the earth. Perhaps they enjoy themselves, or think they do, in the exercise of their freedom, while they are still young and the world is fair to them; but they repent it bitterly afterwards, and I have heard more than one truth-speaking English mother wish that there was something more like our system prevailing at home. In your country you arrange marriages secretly and often unsuccessfully, because it is considered a shame for it to be acknowledged that a girl wants a husband. With us it is an acknowledged fact that only through having a husband can she gain any position. Ours is the more honest method of the two. An unmarried woman is here an anomaly; her position is wretched, her privileges nil. It is the duty of every good mother to provide early against the possibility of any such lot befalling her daughter. As much her duty,’ continued the signora with emphasis, ‘as to bring her up to be modest and virtuous. Do that while she is still a child. When she is older give her a husband. It is the law of God and the law of nature, and it is commanded by the Church, in the majority of cases, that a woman should be a wife and mother; and a child’s fancies must not be allowed to interfere with the performance, by her mother, of the most sacred duty. Love, obedience, self-sacrifice, these are woman’s duties, her privilege, her happiness. My Fulvia shall not have the path to them closed, and by her own mother. Excuse this long dissertation on my part. I fancy you were going to say something, and I am prepared to give it my full attention, from politeness—the politeness which is habitual in our country—not because you have any right to utter a word in the matter.’

‘Yes; I had something to say,’ replied Minna, refusing to be befogged by madame’s eloquence, though she saw that the author of that eloquence believed firmly in every word she spoke. She was convinced that the act she contemplated was for Fulvia’s good, as well as to her own advantage, and this conviction, of course, made it more difficult to argue with her.

‘This is what I had to say,’ Minna went on, after pausing to draw breath. She spoke curtly, plainly, and almost roughly. ‘You have selected for your daughter’s husband a man whom she loathes. He is not her countryman. He has no such ideas as those you have just been speaking of. He is rich, but he is not even a gentleman. He is a vulgar, purse-proud, mean upstart. He is not in society; his manners are too odious and his stinginess too great to admit him there. Your daughter will not even gain a position by marrying him. He proposed to a young Englishwoman who, happier than your daughter, was able to decide for herself in the matter, and who rejected him with contempt. Had he ventured to address her again, her brothers would probably have horsewhipped him—as he deserved. He is a coward. He knows that Fulvia detests him, and he shelters himself behind your authority, which can compel her to the hateful marriage with him. All his money cannot make him anything but detestable to a modest and pure-minded girl—like your little Fulvia,’ she added, with a slight break in her voice, as she laid her hand for an instant on the girl’s wrist. ‘You are not doing your duty by her. You are committing a hideous sin in tying what you yourself call a modest and virtuous girl to that—bah! I should have no right to say these things to you if I had not something to propose as an alternative. You say you love your daughter. In that case, I suppose you are willing to make some sacrifice for her sake, and to secure her happiness. I hear that Mr. Marchmont is to relieve you from all money embarrassments. If I were a rich woman, I would say, “Take twice as much from me as he gives you.” But I am not rich. I am only moderately well off. All I can propose is this: If you will release Fulvia from her engagement, I will provide for her both now and in the future. At present I will take the whole expense of her maintenance from you. If she should, later, meet a man whom she could love, and who should wish to marry her, I will pay her every year half of my income; and I will at once make a will, leaving my entire property to her at my death. I am mistress of all that I have, and as my family are well off, they need not be injured by my taking this course. Fulvia need never fear care or want if you will agree to this arrangement; and if she will give me continually the affection she feels for me at present, and is restored to the happiness which is her right at her age, I shall be more than repaid. I shall be rich. This is what I offer you. I am aware that it does not much improve your position, except through your daughter’s happiness; but as I imagine that to be your main object in life, I shall know by your acceptance or refusal of my proposal whether what you say about this is true, or simply an excuse to get what you want for yourself, not for her.’

‘Signora!’ cried Fulvia, ‘signora! Oh, if I might die for you at this moment! Mamma! mother! speak—let me be happy again!’

Her voice broke into a wail, as she turned from Minna and looked at her mother.

Signora Dietrich had not for a moment lost her presence of mind. She could hit hard, and she could also take hard knocks, unperturbed. She looked from one to the other of them, calmly, gravely, unwaveringly. Her voice, when she spoke, was sweet and strong; she threw over her features an expression of resignation, half sad, half bitter.

‘I see,’ said she, ‘that you are, like most Englishwomen, straightforward, if somewhat brutal in your way of displaying even your kind feelings. Your remarks about my future son-in-law are unwarrantable and quite without foundation. Your offer, however, shows you to be sincere and well-meaning. You have, I believe, never been a mother, so you cannot be expected to understand what one who is a mother feels, on being asked to discard her own careful plans for her child’s happiness, and to adopt the views of a foreigner, a complete stranger, unacquainted with her history and her circumstances, and utterly unable to appreciate what she is doing in the matter. But I love my child, and this gives me patience. I wish for my child’s happiness far, far more than for my own, and this endows me with strength to unfold a story of sorrow about which I should have preferred to keep silence. I have educated my daughter in the right way. I am quite confident in the stability of my teaching and of the principles I have instilled into her mind. I see that her ideas have been disturbed, her filial piety has been tampered with, her unreasoning girlish fancies have been fostered, without regard to any rights or feelings of mine. It is my duty as a mother and as a Christian to meet this heavy trial with firmness and meekness. I am not afraid. Mia figlia, you have heard what Signora Hastings has said to me?’

‘Yes, mamma,’ was the breathless response.

‘Good. Then hear now what I have to say to Signora Hastings and to you. I will place the two situations before you, and you can choose between them. I have no doubt as to which course you will pursue.’

She paused for a moment, and then, with solemnity, and sweetness too, which extorted from Minna an unwilling admiration, she proceeded:

‘Fulvia mia, I must touch upon topics which it is best that young girls should know nothing about. Signora Hastings has driven me to this painful position by her no doubt well-meant meddling in a matter which she does not understand. You will soon be a wife, and your eyes could not much longer remain closed to much that is sad and evil in this world. You have always been to me a sweet and obedient child, and, but for this unhappy interference of a stranger in our affairs, I believe you would have been the same in this case as in all others. My daughter, have I ever treated you with unkindness? Recall all you can remember of your childhood and youth, and tell me, do you recollect any unkindness from me to you?’

‘No, mamma. You have always, until now, been good to me—kind and indulgent.’

‘Until now. That is, it seems to you that now I am no longer kind and indulgent. But has it never occurred to you that perhaps you did not quite understand all that I am doing?’

Fulvia was silent. She was still seated on the sofa, looking white and miserable. Signora Dietrich had placed herself beside her, and she now proceeded:

‘My child! I know even more of your recent thoughts than you suppose. In your short life you have had little sorrow and much joy—no deceptions, no disappointments. In mine, which seems to me a long one, I have lived through grief and bitterness of which you can form no conception. I pass over that for the present. Just now I ask you only one question, but I ask it solemnly, and I bid you reply to it with absolute truth and candour. Never mind if you hurt me. I know what your answer will be if you speak the truth. On your honour, then, of all those who surround you, and whom you know—of all your friends, all your relations, not excepting me—whom do you love the most?’

Fulvia was troubled by this question, and did not immediately reply to it. Her hands moved nervously; her face grew red, and then pale again. But at last, raising her eyes, which were filled with a tender light, she looked full at her mother, and in a very low but perfectly audible voice replied:

‘Beppo, my mother.’

Signora Dietrich bowed her head gravely and assentingly.

‘Yes,’ she observed. ‘I am glad to find you so truthful. I knew this, and have long known it. We do not always bestow our greatest love on the most worthy objects. But I have known this thing, and though it has many a time lacerated my heart, I have not spoken of it nor reproached you with it. But the time, however, has now come in which I must speak. My kindness to you, my good intentions towards you, have been called in question. Though I have absolute right to dispose of you as I please, without explaining or justifying myself, I do not choose to do so. Your mother is weak where her child is concerned—as she was once, in far other circumstances, weak before, to her cost. Fulvia——’

She rose from her place beside her daughter, and stood before her.

They both had to look up to her. For a moment she preserved silence, then said, in a distinct, unfaltering voice:

‘Signor Oriole is your father.’

Minna, though she had so long known this thing, felt her heart spring to her throat. Her emotion caused her physical agony. She sat silent, her fingers unconsciously tightening themselves, and clutching at her dress. And she watched breathlessly.

There was a short silence, during which Fulvia stared, as if fascinated, at her mother, with wide-open, frightened eyes and a dazed, bewildered expression. Then suddenly she buried her face in her hands, as if she could no longer bear to look upon what she saw. But she was silent still. Presently Signora Dietrich, in the same unbroken voice, went on:

‘This was your mother’s weakness. This is your mother’s sin. Now you may judge your mother, if you choose. She can have nothing to answer you. She is at your mercy. She has been punished. Women are made weak, and then are punished for not being strong. One hard punishment of mine has been that the man to whom I gave my whole heart, my whole soul, everything that I had to give—this man has never made me his wife. Do you suppose that was not hard for a proud woman to bear? Even after nothing stood in the way—even after I had humbled myself with tears and prayers for your sake—to ask him for this deed of justice, he refused it to me. My other punishment—and I swear it has been the harder of the two to bear—has been that I had to live my life day by day and see that my child, whom I adored, loved this man better than she loved me. The heart and the soul must be strong which can go on with such a life and not succumb to the wretchedness of it. It pleased God to make me strong in these respects—yes, to give me the strength even to tell you this story. Now, my daughter, speak! What have you to say to your mother? Choose between me and your new friend.’

Fulvia uncovered her face. Minna was surprised at its expression. It had aged, but there was no more any indecision, any pleading, any look of submissive dependence in it. She, too, rose, made a step towards her mother, and, looking at her, said:

‘Before I tell you that, tell me why, if Beppo was as bad as you say, and treated you with cruelty, you stayed in the same house with him? Why did you let him stay here and work for us—for you and me—as I know he has done?’

Almost without hesitation, and certainly without the flicker of an eyelid, the signora replied:

‘For the same reason that has dictated all my other conduct—for your sake. Alone, I was unequal to the responsibility—the wear and tear of carrying on this house. When one has no money and no friends, and when one is alone, one may drown one’s self. When one has one’s child to live for, one lives through every degradation. That is the reason why I live under the same roof with him.’

Fulvia bowed her head, smiling with indescribable bitterness.

‘I see,’ said she. ‘For me you have endured these sufferings—meaning that, when my turn came, I should suffer, too, and should set you free?’

‘I had hoped that it would be your pride and pleasure to do so,’ replied her mother; ‘and I am confronted with the extraordinary statement that you are not in love with the man who wishes to marry you. What girl—what decent, virtuous, well-brought-up girl—is ever in love with her husband when she marries him? What should you know of love? Heaven forbid that at your age and in your circumstances you should be acquainted with it. You know now exactly how things stand. Now and on the spot you must make your decision. Either your engagement to Signor Marchmont must be honourably carried out, in which case I must hear no more sighs and complaints, or you must tell me at once that you prefer to accept Signora Hastings’ offer and go over to her. Should you thus decide I shall not reproach you, I shall not blame you. I shall simply say, You cease to be my child; and I shall require that you both leave my house this night. Here I take my seat. Reflect as long as you please on the matter; but you will give me your answer before we leave this room.’

She seated herself, folded her hands on her knee, and waited. Not a tremor betrayed that she felt any agitation.

Minna confessed to herself that the woman was magnificent in her cleverness and audacity. She was playing for what to her were the highest stakes imaginable—money, ease, freedom. She was secure of victory. There was no hope now for the other side. Minna dared not look at Fulvia, but, as the girl had not yet spoken, she made a last forlorn effort, and said in a rather loud, spasmodic voice, which broke in discordantly upon the silence:

‘Signora Dietrich, you are acting unfairly. You ought not to require your daughter’s answer without having called Signor Oriole, and given him the chance of replying to your accusations.’

‘An Englishwoman, then, in such a moment as this would lie, would she?’ retorted the signora with unbroken calm; but her eyes plunged themselves into those of Minna with a look of hatred which the other never forgot. ‘Of course you are Signor Oriole’s advocate. His devoted attentions to you deserve some reward. I am of course ignorant as to how you are in collusion in this attempt to divide me and my child.’

Minna received this unexpected backhanded stab with great presence of mind; looking her adversary full in the face the whole time; but there was a strange, whirling sensation in her head, the like of which she had never felt before.

‘You have accused him behind his back. You bid your daughter choose, without letting him tell his side of the story. You have not told her all,’ she added, fixing her eyes ever more resolutely on the signora’s face.

For one instant Signora Dietrich’s eyes wavered, flickered—for one instant her lips twitched. Then she looked herself again. It was at this moment that Fulvia’s voice was heard.

‘I hear what you both say,’ she observed. ‘I have heard all that is needful. Mamma is quite right. The choice must be made now. Suppose she called Beppo, and told all this story over again. Do you suppose I want to see poor Beppo more unhappy than he already is? Some people are born to be happy, and some to be miserable; I know now what I have to expect. I should be unhappy now, either way. I should be unhappy now, even with you, signora carissima.’ She looked at Minna. ‘The more I feel myself justified in accepting your generosity, the more unhappy I should be, because one must feel one’s friends to be very wicked before one can leave them all and go away with a stranger. I will not do that. But I love you for being willing to let me come to you. The other unhappiness is perhaps not greater; it is different, that is all. I take it. That is my choice. I only ask one thing of you.’

She turned to her mother, and they could both see that a subtle change had come over her. Her eyes looked straight into those of Signora Dietrich, but without any expression, coldly, stonily; and her attitude took a certain rigidity, she drew herself back as it were. ‘Let everything go on without change, as quickly as possible, and do not let us ever speak of this again. It is over—it is done with. Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly, carissima mia. You have taken the wisest resolution imaginable,’ said her mother, rising, and pressing a kiss upon her forehead. ‘I knew,’ she added, with a sweet smile, ‘that the lessons I had so diligently inculcated could not be without fruit, sooner or later.’

‘Then we can go,’ said Fulvia, who had all in a moment lost her childish retirement of manner, and who now spoke as if she were the person to order how things should be. ‘I wish to speak one word with Signora Hastings,’ she added; ‘do not be afraid to leave me with her. I shall follow you in a moment. Everything is quite decided now.’

Signora Dietrich went away with a gracious smile. When she had rustled away and they were quite alone, Fulvia turned to Minna, and said:

‘What I told you was true. I will not go with you, because there would be no good and no happiness in it. It is better to be unhappy because of others than because of one’s self. But do you think I believe that Beppo is a bad man?’

Her eyes flashed fire as she asked the question with energy, and with almost solemn earnestness went on:

‘No, he is not bad. There is something bad behind it all—something so bad that I do not want to know it. But he is not bad. Signora,’ she bent to Minna, and whispered passionately in her ear, ‘I am glad he is my father. It is the one good thing I have heard to-night.’

She then gave Minna a hasty kiss on the cheek and one on the hand, and in a moment Mrs. Hastings was alone. Quiet though the interview had been, there was now a singing in Minna’s ears, a rushing noise in her head, and a tremulousness in her throat, with a general feeling of collapse and bouleversement which told how strong had been the excitement, and how intense the strain of the whole episode.

‘And she has conquered, and she does not care a straw; she has got what she wants,’ Minna muttered between her teeth, and then tears of rage and disappointment came to her relief. She wept till she was weary, and all the excitement had evaporated.

CHAPTER XII.

It was Fulvia’s wedding-day. Some days before Minna had had most of her belongings removed to a couple of rooms which she had taken. She felt it utterly impossible to remain in the house after the event should have taken place, and would gladly have left, but, on saying something of the kind to Fulvia herself, she had noticed a look of alarm and disappointment pass over her face and dilate her eyes. That was enough for Minna; but as well as that she had the half-superstitious feeling that even at the very last second something might happen to avert the catastrophe.

Nothing had happened; nothing was going to happen. Minna, on this unhappy day, left the house early, not intending to return to it. She had said good-bye to Fulvia the night before. As for Signor Giuseppe, she had scarcely caught so much as a glimpse of him for many days. The man contrived to hide and efface himself, as it were. Sometimes Minna was aware of a kind of slender dark shadow slipping away in the background, silent, rapid, noiseless. Once or twice she had tried to lay hold of the shadow, to say a few words to it, to force it to speak to her, but she had not been successful. She had a painful, deep conviction that Signor Giuseppe was suffering horribly; that he had probably used every persuasion, every argument that he could think of, to persuade Signora Dietrich to abandon her purpose, and that his utter failure to move or turn her aside had literally crushed him. The thought of this helpless misery made Minna suffer too. In the night, sometimes, if she awoke and began to reflect upon all that was going on, she found it was usually to him that her thoughts turned with the greatest pity and compunction.

The ‘threadbare old scarecrow of a former lover of Signora Dietrich,’ Mrs. Charrington had called him; and it was a grandly contemptuous way of dismissing the whole subject. But Minna could not dismiss it. A threadbare old scarecrow (human) may suffer, and is not so well able to fight his sufferings or the cause of them as a younger and stronger man might be. She had this conviction very strongly, and would gladly have afforded consolation had it been in her power to do so, but she found no opportunity for it. He avoided her in the house, never came near the studio, and someone said that Signor Oriole was very much engaged at his office. Minna did not believe it.

It was a wonderful morning, late in April—that wedding-day. As Minna made her way from Casa Dietrich to her studio, a delicious air blew upon her face. The sky was flecked with white clouds. Rain had fallen in the night, and the streets of Rome were glistening with the damp. Now it was dark, now light, under the changing sky. The endless din of the great city resounded on every side, as she walked with a heavy heart through it all. She hoped in a few hours to be many miles away from the city. She took a book and sat in the window waiting till the carriage should come for her which she had ordered on her way hither.

Before the said carriage arrived, she heard a step in the corridor, a subdued knock, and then the door was opened, and Signor Giuseppe presented himself before her. A great weight fell from Minna’s heart. She had foreboded she knew not what from his silence and avoidance of her.

‘You have come,’ she exclaimed with animation, rising and going a little towards him. Then she stopped, silent, not knowing what more to say, he looked so woebegone, so utterly broken, and without heart or courage—so unlike himself.

‘I thought you would be at the office,’ said Minna gently at last, going up to him and taking his hand.

‘So did I,’ he replied drearily. ‘And to-day, of all days in the year, the poor distraction of my daily drudgery has been taken away from me. Imagine, signora. When I arrived at the office this morning, the porter met me with the announcement that we, the clerks, all had a holiday without any abatement of our week’s salary.’ He laughed. ‘And for what reason, do you suppose? Because the eldest son of the head of the firm is to be married this morning, and is so elated at his good fortune that he last night got his father to consent to this arrangement, and each of us, as we arrived, received the news. Another wedding,’ pursued Signor Giuseppe with melancholy bitterness. ‘I suppose the porter thought me mad, for, instead of smiling and expressing my delight at the event, I begged to be allowed to go in and proceed with my work. “God forbid!” cried the fellow. “Do you suppose I am going to waste my precious hours of freedom because you are fool enough to wish to work when there is no need of it?” He flourished his keys, and I came to my senses enough to assure him that it had only been a joke on my part. I turned away, and after wandering about for half an hour, I could bear it no longer, but came here. I knew you would not refuse me a corner till the day is over, even——’

‘Surely,’ said she, ever more and more gently. ‘I am thankful you had confidence enough in me to come here. In a few minutes the carriage will come which will take me out of Rome for the day. You will come with me. We will both escape.’

‘Go away,’ he said unwillingly. ‘I had not thought of that.’

‘But I think of it. It will be much the best for us both. I am going to Villa Adriana, outside Tivoli. You are just the companion I should wish at that place; so it is agreed.’

‘To Villa Adriana,’ he responded, with something like a smile. ‘Ah, what a happy afternoon I once spent there with the child and one of her young companions! That is years ago. I will go with you, signora.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Minna, speaking much more cheerfully than she felt. She was glad to have gained her end, and had a hope that when they had once set off, and he was within sight of the endless remnants of the former glory of his beloved city, he might cast off some of his present wretchedness, and begin to be interested in the things he had studied so deeply.

It was as she had expected. At first, and for some little time after they had set off, he continued to be sad and silent. Minna could have been the same, but she made an effort, put it aside, and when they at last got into the open country, and into one of the campagna roads, she roused her companion, by asking him what was this or that object which they were passing or approaching. Gradually he also roused, his enthusiasm kindled; he began to relate the history of first one thing and then another. Then by-and-by, when they had left behind them every trace of the city, and were out on the open campagna, they began to feel its influence—its melancholy grandeur, its solitude, its majesty. Their driver, who knew his way well, took them, at Minna’s desire, as much out of the beaten track as possible; and before they arrived at the villa they had traversed roads on which she had never been before. They were all known, however, to her companion, who explained them to her, with their bearing and connection with other roads, all with the most minute and perfect exactness.

The clouds gradually grew more white and less black; then by degrees unfolded, spread away and rolled aside, leaving great expanses of the blue peculiar to those skies and to no others. The exulting song of larks was everywhere. Dainty small flowers of every shape and every hue, veritable lilies of the field, carpeted the grass at either side of the road. Brilliant little green lizards sunned themselves on large gray stones and fragments of walls and tombs, whose mystery no man should ever unravel. Now and then a flock of sheep in charge of some dark-faced herdsman with a gleaming smile looked up in mild but not alarmed astonishment as they drove by. Turning her head, and looking behind her, Minna saw where the great city lay in the distance, gray or purple or blue, as the clouds shifted and the light flashed or faded; dim but mighty, with misty-looking domes and cupolas confusedly raising themselves from the general mass, and seeming to beckon back into their charmed circle those who ventured to break forth from it. She had fled from it all this morning, feeling as if one only of the many wickednesses which it sheltered, which were perpetrated within its walls—the one blot upon its splendour which happened to have come under her own eyes had darkened it for ever to her; but now, despite this feeling which was still there, she felt her heart-strings drawn, as they ever were, by a longing which amounted to pain, as she saw that vague outline in the distance, of the great empress-queen of all cities, past, present, and to come, shrunken from her former dimensions, stripped of her former splendour, modernized, vulgarized, patronized (as her companion had once so bitterly complained) by hordes of the curious and pleasure-seeking leisured classes of the world, but matchless still, supreme and imperial still.

She did not speak her thought to Signor Giuseppe. In the present circumstances she was almost ashamed of having such a thought.

They had now left the wilder campagna, and were within a mile of the villa gates. They had got into the region of cultivated fields and trees—into the home of the almond and olive. The former grew in orchards showing every shade of blossom, from a shell-tinted white to the deepest, richest rose-pink.

The exquisite bloom hung like clouds over the fields. In the hedges were masses of blackthorn, like fairy lace flung over the boughs. Now and then a whiff of perfume betrayed the near presence of hidden violets—it was all nearly over, at the last stage of its loveliness. In another week it would be too late to see all this magic of spring. Blossoms would be shed; the fairy colours would have given place to ordinary green leaves. The early flowers would be over. One might mourn them, but who could forget that the compensation would be—roses?

The carriage stopped at the gaudy modern gate which is the entrance to the solemnly beautiful cypress avenue, the beginning of the great expanse of ruined grandeur and desolate beauty which were once Hadrian’s summer palace.

They got out, and arranged with the driver to meet them at the gates many hours later. Minna rejoiced his heart by a noble buona mano for himself and his horses, bidding him refresh himself and them as he listed. Then they entered the avenue, and in ten minutes were wandering, untroubled by guides or custodi, through those gardens and passages, past those almost obliterated ruins and buildings which yet in their decay and wreck call aloud to attest the wonder and splendour, beyond words to describe, of which they once had formed a part.

The hours flew by while they walked or sat and ate their lunch, and speculated and wondered as to the meaning of this, that, and the other, and Signor Giuseppe was beguiled into a long, learned, ingenious dissertation on the character of Hadrian, which, it will readily be understood, he had studied with both ardour and acumen; and Minna, seated in the deserted nymphæum, with its falling water, and melancholy statues, and waving trees, with a golden sky above, a wilderness of purple violets below, murmured to herself, ‘Animula, vagula, blandula,’ and the rest of it, and had almost forgotten her own heartache in pondering on the past, when suddenly her companion, snatching his watch from its place, looked at it, and said, in an indescribable voice:

‘Past five. It must be all over and done with now.’

Minna’s heart sank like lead. She felt a criminal for being here, for having for one moment felt something that might be called enjoyment.

‘Let us go,’ she said abruptly, starting from her place.

They were well on the homeward way to Rome, and had been almost silent the whole time. Then Minna said casually:

‘I will put you down at the door of Casa Dietrich, Signor Oriole. You know that I do not return there.’

‘Nor I,’ was the curt response. ‘You can spare yourself the trouble. I will get out where our ways part.’

‘You do not return?’ she cried, astonished.

‘I? Never; if it is intolerable for you, what do you suppose it must be for me? I told Signora Dietrich some weeks ago, “The day you marry the child to the Australian, I shake the dust of your house from my feet.” She laughed at me, and said, “Bene!” Not long before, when I thought, for other reasons, of going away, she almost went on her knees to me to beg me to remain.’

It was the only allusion he had ever made to any words that might have passed between him and Signora Dietrich. Minna knew instinctively that only strong excitement had called it forth.

‘But—but——’ she stammered, for there came with vivid clearness to her mind the fact that he was exceedingly poor; had a salary of some seventy or eighty pounds a year, all told, and that but for the home at Casa Dietrich, which, it is true, he paid for with his heart’s blood, he must have been reduced to absolute indigence. She felt a chill at her very heart. ‘Where do you go, if I may venture to ask?’ she inquired.

‘To a little lodging which I have taken. It does not matter where it is,’ said he calmly, but with a certain pride at the same time. ‘It is no place where I could ask any of my friends to come and see me. Do not think I am complaining,’ he went on with perfect self-possession; ‘it is just. I have merited it. My own weakness, my own selfishness and folly, taking a shape of which I will not speak to you, have placed me in the pitiable, the contemptible position in which you see me to-day. It is true, I have been punished already many years for my sin. It is equally true that no number of years of expiation could sufficiently atone for it. I stayed, like you, signora, to the last moment, in the futile hope that something might happen—to be near her till the end. Nay, more,’ he added, sinking his voice, ‘I called her to me one day not long ago, and I told her that, if she chose to confront the risk and the misery of it, I would go away with her—fly, in fact, from that house and from her fate, and would work for her as for my daughter, would never desert her till life deserted me. But she would not. She said she thanked me for what I offered, and trusted me, but that it would not make things much better; it would not give her her mother again. I knew then that this thing would happen. Of course such things do happen, and worse, if there can be any worse. Nothing is too ghastly to be true. Now I have lost her—it is merely continuing my life alone.’

‘I understand that. But you must not cut yourself off from everyone and everything,’ she said in distress. ‘If you will not tell me where you are going—but, yes, you will tell me where you are going. I will never intrude upon you, never interfere with you, but I must know where you are. Give me your address. I’ll promise not even to look at it unless there is some urgent reason for my doing so.’

‘I cannot understand why you should hold so much to it,’ he remarked; ‘but if it is so you shall have it—I will send it to you. And sometimes, if you will let me, I will come and see you.’

‘Indeed you will, or I shall be very unhappy,’ she said, almost choked with tears. ‘I do not like this. I do not approve of it. I don’t know what to do. You have taken me utterly by surprise.’

‘Ma che!’ he exclaimed, with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Never mind me. Here I will get out,’ he added, stopping the coachman at the entrance to a narrow street in the purlieus of Trajan’s Forum. ‘I will send you the address,’ he went on, ‘and do not be disturbed if it should be some little time before you see me again. I have need of solitude, to get accustomed to the new order of things.’

He stood beside the carriage, shutting the door, clasped her hand for a moment, baring his head, and bowing over it with an old-fashioned courtliness which all his troubles had not untaught him.

‘Grazie infinite,’ he said, resolutely smiling at her and signing to the driver to go on.

Minna had a final glimpse of him standing with his hat in his hand under a street-lamp—for it was now quite dark—and looking after her.

‘It is all wrong,’ she said to herself—‘wrong from beginning to end. What will be the end of it all?’

CHAPTER XIII.

Two or three weeks passed in a vacant, empty kind of way, and during those weeks Minna was almost alone. She saw Mrs. Charrington two or three times, and that lady condescended to approve of her new apartment, and of her departure from Casa Dietrich. She was even generous enough not to say how very glad she was that ‘the girl’ was married, and no longer on the spot to disturb her dear Minna’s peace of mind, and keep her entangled with ‘that set.’ She did not say it, but Minna knew very well that she felt it, and smiled to herself rather grimly.

For some little time she did not fret, either, at Signor Oriole’s silence and non-appearance at the studio. She remembered and understood what he had said about needing solitude in order to get accustomed to his new conditions and mode of life. She presently, however, began to be sorry that she had let him slip away from her without giving his address. He had promised to send it, but it came not, nor any word from him, and after two or three weeks had passed she began to grow uneasy. She remembered the wretched condition of his circumstances and finances when she had last seen him; his silent unhappiness on parting with her—an unhappiness through which at the same time glowed a resolution not to give up his self-elected solitude; and when days had grown into weeks, and still she heard nothing of him, her alarm began to increase, and the hopelessness of seeking through Rome for a man who had chosen to bury himself in it without leaving any address became daily more obvious to her.

Once she thought of calling upon Signora Dietrich and asking for news of both Fulvia and Signor Giuseppe. Then she laughed aloud all by herself, feeling that she might as well ask the first person she met in the street for such information. Both the girl and the man were unlikely to confide their affairs to Signora Dietrich, and even if they should have done so, Minna felt with what pleasure the signora would look at her (Mrs. Hastings) should she be weak enough to go in search of information—would look at her and send her about her business rather less wise than she had been before.

For the first time since she had known Rome she was weary of it, and longed to get away from it. Letters from home also made her feel that her presence there was desirable, if not absolutely necessary, to regulate the affairs of her modest household, and to set in order feuds amongst certain old retainers whom the absence of their mistress had set by the ears. She wrote home to say that she was coming, and that all was to be in readiness for her towards the end of May; thus she gave herself still some time to linger and to be present when Signor Giuseppe came—if come he should.

Meantime, in order to try to forget her anxiety, she had been working hard at the bust of Fulvia, and she intended to take it home with her, finished. Looking upon it, she knew that it was beautiful—knew that, in her own intense feelings for and sympathy with its original, she had succeeded in throwing into the beautiful sad features a whole world of meaning—of grace, of sorrow, of proud endurance. She stopped sometimes in her work, and gazed upon it, and pondered on the matter.

What would Fulvia’s marriage—her so-called marriage—make of her? It was bound to work some great change or development in her character. Would it ripen her early into a more than usually noble woman, proud and reticent, suffering and strong? Would it crush her into a hopeless slave, terrified and cowering before the tyrant to whom she was tied? Or would it harden her into marble, stiffen all her girlish brightness into a chilly glitter of the conventional, professional cheerfulness all must wear, unless they wish the world to invent the most wonderful calumnies concerning them and their lives? For it is true that the inwardly unhappy, in certain circumstances, must either calumniate themselves or be calumniated by others.

Minna could form no idea on the subject. She would have given a good deal to learn something about it, but no sign came. There was no news—no word of Fulvia, who had disappeared utterly when she had departed with Marchmont for Milan on their way to London.

Minna’s state of mind grew more and more anxious, more and more perturbed, as time went on, and the day beyond which her departure must no longer be delayed approached with remorseless rapidity. She was longing to leave Rome—to breathe an air which was not tainted with the horrors and the sins of thousands of years, horrors and sins which had never troubled her till the one horror, the one sin, was perpetrated which went home to her and appealed to her. Now it seemed to her, when she walked abroad, threading the narrow streets, or passing under or beside the awful piles of ruin, as she glanced at the hoary grayness of the Forum, looking ashen and ghastly in the dazzling May sunshine, as she looked upwards at the grim frown of the overhanging fragments of the Palatine, that the whole place reeked with sin and crime, and with the deadly odour of shameful bargains and sales of human bodies and souls. It was morbid, she felt, or tried to feel, but it was very strong and very real; and, returning one Friday evening from the comparative cool of Doria Pamfili gardens, into the odours and the noises of the teeming streets below, she was suddenly seized with a wild, unreasoning craving after a breath of the air, fresh from the moor, salt from the sea, which she knew was blowing round her old gray house far in the North, at home. The everlasting glare of blue and gold in the sky and sun oppressed her; the voluptuous languor of the nights, loud with music and vocal with thrilling notes of song, made her feverish and restless. Had she followed her own impulse, she would have fled within a few hours, nor ever rested till the Alps were between her and this great insolent sorceress city.

She could not fly. Business still tied her for a few days, and the idea that there was someone somewhere within those mazes of streets with whom she had clasped hands in friendship, and whose misery was to her nervous unrest as the ocean compared to a fretting brooklet, was a torment to her.

Still time flew by relentlessly. It wanted now only two days to the date fixed for her departure. She had been at the studio all one afternoon, superintending the packing of the bust of Fulvia, which, heavy though it was, she had determined to take with her own personal luggage, and also that of the as yet unfinished statue, which, packed and enveloped with the greatest care, was to go by sea to Liverpool, and thence to be despatched to her home. The carriers were to come to-morrow for the great package. She intended to return herself, see it off the premises, and pack up and put away the things she was leaving here, for she intended to retain the rooms for at least a year, against her possible return to Rome. The noise and the bustle were over. The men, satisfied with the buona mano they had received, grinned from ear to ear, wished her a successful journey and said a cordial a rivederci. They clattered down the stairs and away, and when the last noise of their feet had died away, she got up and looked rather sorrowfully round the shabby room, now quite turned upside down, in which she had spent so many happy hours, and so many sad ones too. It was useless to linger. The place now sent a shudder through her. She would go away, to her lodging, and busy herself in beginning the packing necessary for her journey.

It was a hot May evening, towards six o’clock. She put on her broad straw hat, took her gloves and sunshade from the table, and left the room, locking the door behind her. Slowly she descended the cool dark staircase, and went through the court, deep in shadow, towards the dazzling white light in the street. As she slowly paced along, her eye was caught by another shadow which flitted along, close to the wall—and crowning the shadow was a man’s white face. Some little thrill, some intuitive knowledge, darted through her veins and heart. She stopped suddenly and decidedly, arrested the shadow, and laid her hand upon its arm.

‘Signor Oriole—at last! Why have you treated me in this way?’

‘Why have I treated myself in this way, you should rather ask,’ he said; ‘do you suppose that if I had had anything good to tell you I should not have been with you before now? My news was always bad; therefore, though I have many times been as far as this court, I have never mounted the stair.’

‘Bad news—of Fulvia?’ she added, still instinctively holding him fast by the arm lest he should yet escape.

‘No, of myself,’ said he, with some naïveté, ‘though, of course, it would not matter about me if she were not concerned in it too.’

‘Come upstairs,’ said Minna decidedly, as she turned back. ‘Come upstairs, and tell me everything about it.’

He made no resistance, but suffered her to lead him upstairs. She unlocked the door, and they at once stood within the dreary, half-dismantled room. Closing the door behind them, she looked at him. She did not ask him how he did. There was no need for that. He was not at all well, as anyone could see. Signor Giuseppe was a broken man. The signs of that condition are well known, and easily to be recognised. They do not need to be recapitulated here.

‘Sit down,’ said Minna gently, ‘and tell me what has happened to you, and why you have never come to see me.’

‘I have had a great misfortune,’ said Signor Giuseppe. ‘I have come into a fortune—not a large one, but enough, if it had come in time, to——’

He stopped abruptly. Minna, breathless, wondered if his troubles had really affected his mind. But there was no appearance about him of a disordered brain, only of a profoundly sad heart.

‘Tell me about it,’ she said.

‘Of course I should have come to see you before if this had not happened,’ he said. ‘It was very soon after I last saw you; in fact, only two or three days after. One day at the office I found some papers for me, which had been sent to one or two wrong addresses. I ought to have had them a week before—mark you, a week!’ he said in a louder voice, raising his hand and gesticulating a little. ‘I have told you, and you know all about it, that once I was different. I was not what I am now. I was a gentleman. I was not this broken-down old vagabond whom you have always known, and to whom you have still been kind. When I gave up my own estate, which was sufficient, though not large, and left my country, I left also others behind me—relations, connections. Amongst them, an uncle, my father’s brother, who was rather a singular old character. I will not trouble you with an account of him. He was an eccentric. He was a bachelor, something also of a miser, and very much of a curmudgeon. He lived alone on his property, and we saw little or nothing of him. When I went to say good-bye to him, and to tell him that I was going to fight for the freedom of my country, and for her unity, and that I was disposing of my property in order to be able the more effectually to help, he said: “Beppino mio, you are a complete and utter fool. Fight for your country as much as you please—young blood must have an outlet, and that is at least a respectable style of sowing your wild oats; but keep a whole suit of clothes in which to dress yourself when the battle is over, a chimney nook in which to rest and warm yourself, a fowl for the pot, a vine wherefrom to fill the vats, and a field of corn from which to provide bread for yourself. Otherwise you will find that, by the time your country is free, you yourself are a slave. You have never been accustomed to work for your livelihood. Take my word for it, your plan will not answer.” I was then twenty-two. I paid no heed to his words, but went my own way. You know the rest. Two months ago, I believe, I would have welcomed back the Austrians if I could have been secure of fifty thousand lire. But I might as well have cried for the moon. And yet, nearly a week before the child was married, far more than fifty thousand lire were mine, had I known it. He died, it seems, months ago, at his property far away in the country, in Sicily. He was ninety-five. Only think, signora, of anyone being unlucky enough to live to be ninety-five! I was his only living direct relative. All the others were gone. Everything that he had comes to me. I am again in the possession of an income—nay, I am well off, at ease, so far as my ideas go ... and I did not know it in time to save her.’

There was a long silence. Sweeping over Minna’s mind came the full sense of the miserable, sordid tragedy of the situation. Another thought, which she would not for the world have hurt him by uttering, was that his poor little property would not have had a feather’s weight in the balance with Signora Dietrich when she was arranging Fulvia’s marriage with Marchmont.

‘What can I say?’ she said at last. ‘There is nothing to say.’

‘Nothing. I quite agree with you,’ he replied bitterly, and they were both silent again, till at last she asked:

‘And your work—and your lodging? What are you doing about that?’

‘As for the lodging, it is not worth while to change it,’ he said despondently. ‘I am in the same place—Via----’

He named a wretched little street, quite near to where he had left her on that evening when they had been to Hadrian’s Villa, near the Forum of Trajan, and Minna felt all the sordid wretchedness and discomfort which he had gone through pierce her own heart.

‘But you go to the office every day?’ she inquired gently.

‘No more,’ he said. ‘They did not want me. I had begun to make mistakes. They were very kind, but they wanted to get rid of me.’

Then he told her a story between the lines of which she was easily able to read. He had evidently clung to his post at the office with a pitiable tenacity: it was something for him to do; it was a remnant of the old accustomed order of things; in so far, it was a consolation, and it kept him going. He had been many years with that particular firm of lawyers. The principal was a kind-hearted man, and had always treated him well, and when, within the last month or two, it was found that Oriole’s work was always going wrong, was full of mistakes, and that he constantly forgot the commissions or pieces of writing entrusted to him, Signor Gismondi began to make inquiries. He wished to be kind and considerate, but business had to be thought of. The result of the inquiries discovered to him that Oriole had come into some property, which placed him in an independent if very modest position, and above want. There was then no need for further scruples. Signor Gismondi sent for his gray-headed clerk, and, as kindly as he could, intimated to him that his services were to be dispensed with—a new and a younger man was to be engaged in his place—after Easter, when he pleased—ecco!

A last rag of pride and sensitiveness sent a red flush into Signor Giuseppe’s cheek. With a bow, the majesty of which good Signor Gismondi could not have attained to, had he practised for twenty years, Oriole intimated that it was just the same to him when he left—to-day, to-morrow, next week. If they had not already engaged the services of someone else, he was willing to wait just to accommodate them, as long as they liked. Signor Gismondi seized eagerly upon this opening for softening the blow, and assured Giuseppe that he would confer a very great favour upon them by remaining for another week, until they had looked about them for a person suitable to replace him. Agreed! Signor Giuseppe was in much better spirits that week, being under the impression that he was really doing a favour to the firm of Gismondi e Nipoti. But when the week was over and the occupation gone, oh! then was Signor Giuseppe to be pitied. Well for them who, reduced to such a condition of drifting loneliness, have one compassionate eye fixed upon them—only one! They may be saved. It is such as he, reduced perhaps a stage lower in grief and hopelessness, who, looking round instinctively in a last effort to find something which shall encourage them to remain in the world, and failing to do so, meeting no outstretched hand, seeing no eye which has any attention in it for them—such as these it is who, lingering near the river, some evening or other plunge into it, or who purchase their dose of poison, and, after keeping it for a time, suddenly swallow it, or discharge the pistol which has been long loaded and ready, or who infallibly find some gate or other open, through which they can creep out of one blackness into another that is yet darker.

Signor Giuseppe had not got as far as that, though he was well on the way to it. Minna, looking at him, understood it all; and an immense pity, an immense longing to help and save, came over her. There was a silence as they sat facing one another in the room, which was now very quiet. A ray of warm, rather stuffy sunshine had crept round to the window, and mercilessly lighted up all the rather shabby, threadbare details of the place. It left Minna in the shade, but fell upon her companion, and showed her the profound sadness and hopelessness of his expression. He had aged by twenty years. The man who, when she had first seen him, had struck her as barely beginning to be elderly, was now old. If no one helped him he would be lost. That was what she felt with a strength of pity and of conviction which swamped all other feelings. She broke the silence rather abruptly.

‘Do you see what a state of disorder the room is in?’ she asked.

‘I thought there was something different about it,’ he replied, looking round. ‘Are you going to make some alterations?’

‘Oh no; I am only going to shut it up. I am leaving Rome the day after to-morrow,’ she replied, with studied carelessness.

Her announcement had exactly the effect she had calculated upon.

‘Leaving Rome!’ he echoed, with a great start and look of blank dismay; and then, naïvely enough:

‘What is to become of me?’

‘Oh, that is easily settled. I am going straight home to England—to my own house. You must come with me.’

‘Impossible,’ ejaculated Signor Giuseppe, springing from his chair and looking very much agitated. ‘Signora, you speak with all the calm, deliberate frenzy peculiar to your nation. But you should not mock at my misfortunes.’

‘I never was less inclined to mock in my life,’ said Minna, settling herself into the corner of the sofa, prepared to do battle for any length of time. ‘What I propose is the utmost common-sense, and is also the only thing to be done. To-night you go home and arrange your plans for getting ready to-morrow. To-morrow you employ in getting all that you want for the journey, and for a prolonged stay in our bleak country during its so-called summer. You must spend some of this money that you have got,’ she went on with the utmost tranquillity, trying hard not to smile at the almost paralyzed astonishment with which he continued to regard her. ‘It will be all right. The day afterwards you will be quite ready, with your luggage, and I shall call for you in good time’—with emphasis—‘on my way to the station. Three-forty is the time of the train. Don’t forget. We shall go to Milan, and rest there, and then pursue our way to England. I will write to-night to my housekeeper to say I am bringing someone with me, and that she is to have a room ready. There is really no more to be said.’

‘But there is—a great deal,’ burst out Signor Giuseppe. ‘And it may all be expressed in one word: Impossible!’

Minna smiled. The argument was a long one. She had to fight the objections and doubts and unwillingness of a man whose last experiences of life, outside his own city, had been the rough and painful ones of a soldier, subject to all kinds of pain and privations; one who had come into the great city after endless and exhausting struggles, and who clung to it as one who felt that he had a nook there which he knew, whereas all the world outside was cold and strange and empty. If one must die, it were better to die at home.

He realized, with an intensity which showed what strength and life still lay behind the broken-down outer man, that he was a wreck and a ruin; he was sure he would be a hateful burden, a nuisance—a nuisance to anyone whose companion he might be. Minna was very patient. Point by point she fought his doubts and fears and scruples, and at last told him that, whatever he might think, he had still duties in the world, and that he ought to go where he could gain strength and prepare himself to meet them.

‘And my duties, signora, what may they be? Where do they lie?’

‘As long as Fulvia lives you have a duty to her,’ replied Minna calmly, and she saw him start and turn pale. ‘You cannot cast it aside. One day you will meet her again. I am absolutely certain of it. You do not know in what condition you may meet her. You do not know what her need may be, nor how you can minister to it, but this much is certain: that you ought to be ready to help her if she should need help—and how should she not need it, sooner or later?’

It was this argument which, more than any of the others, prevailed. When he went away, she had his promise, and she had made him give her his exact address. He also promised to see her on the morrow, and let her know that he was getting ready to go with her. He had even come so far back to the real, practical world as to wonder, with ill-concealed uneasiness, what her friends and relations would say to her importation into their midst of such a wretched scarecrow as himself.

‘Fortunately,’ said Minna, ‘I am not dependent on what my friends and relations say. And they are not barbarians, either.’

He did not fail her. He was ready and waiting when she called for him at the appointed time—a transformed man, as to outward appearance, though with a somewhat nervous and scared expression, as if no such step had ever been taken by anyone before.

The noise and bustle of the station and the departure of the train were over. They were outside the city. The long uninteresting line of the gigantic basilica of San Paolo without the Walls had gradually disappeared from their view. The campagna stretched desolately around them. The sun went down in the west, in a red ball of fire. Signor Oriole’s eyes strained into the distance, towards the faint-blue cloud which still showed him where the city lay, and his lips moved as he murmured to himself:

‘Rome—for whom I have lived—grant me to die in thine arms!’

CHAPTER XIV.

May in London, five years later. The weather was bad, and everyone said the season was a dull one. To Minna Hastings it did not much matter whether it was dull or bright. She had come to spend a fortnight in town with some friends; she had never been very fond of London. She had quitted her home with regret, and though not exactly longing to be back there, she was yet quite ready to return to it when the time should come for her to do so. This was, perhaps, ungrateful on her part, for there was no doubt that this year Minna had one morning wakened to find herself, in a small way, and amongst a certain set, famous.

The figure of the workman, which for three years had been standing finished in her studio at home, had been sent to one of the London galleries, accepted, well placed, and seen of all who visited that gallery. To Minna’s own surprise, it had proved an immense ‘take.’ Critics, alike with those who were not critics, had been fascinated with it. It had been reviewed, admired, talked about, till Minna was rather sorry she had sent it. It represented so much more to her than it ever could to those who saw it. Its strength and grace were praised—its originality, its boldness, its daring simplicity, and so forth. The most curious things were said about it. The artist, when she met with these lucubrations, rubbed her eyes, sometimes in vexation, sometimes in amusement, at the intentions which were attributed to her.

‘Mrs. Hastings has evidently,’ said one oracle, ‘made a profound study of the finest models of modern French sculpture, and the intention she seeks to convey in this masterly work is obvious.’

So obvious that, as obvious things often do, it escaped the knowledge of its author, who only said to herself, ‘Thank heaven they do not know the history of all that I put into it!’

Then came applications from sundry would-be buyers, known and unknown. Many hundreds of pounds might have been Minna’s had she been disposed to part with her work. But she could not do so. Feeling forbade it, and, luckily for her, circumstances allowed her to keep it.

She never had forgotten, never could forget, what had passed between her and Signor Giuseppe that evening when she had shown it to him, and had heard what he had to say about it—and about some other things.

She was persuaded with difficulty by her friends to go and look at it one morning. She knew not what shock came over her as her eyes encountered the figure of her own handiwork, to the finishing of which had gone so many thoughts, wishes, and aspirations. There he stood, confronting her as she placed herself before him, seeming to live and stand out from all the surrounding things. She met his patient, steady eyes, which asked her, ‘Do you know me in all this foreign crowd, so alien to me and to you? Do you not remember those still hours of solitude and striving in which you lived with me and made me what I am? When will you take me back to be with you again, since neither of us can be where we would—at home in Rome?’ A choking came in her throat as she thought of the shabby old studio—the hours of intense life, both of joy and of sorrow, and she turned abruptly away, while her friends walked round the figure, and exclaimed, and admired, and put the wonted questions to her, ‘Minna, how did you come to think of it? What put it into your head?’ ‘I could never have thought of such a thing if I had been crowned for it,’ and so on.

When the slight mist which covered her eyes had cleared from them, and she could see clearly again, she took time to look round, and found herself in a kind of little tribuna, round which, in an inner circle, as it were, were disposed statues and busts, while on the walls hung pictures. She glanced round, and began to examine the latter; she found herself almost in front of one which soon arrested her attention. It represented a corner of the great church of Santa Maria-sopra-Minerva at Rome, and one of the little episodes which one constantly sees occurring in Roman churches—one half of the episode, at least, is common enough. A young girl, accompanied by a servant, drops an alms into the hand of a beggar. The beggar is an old woman, whose withered countenance lights up as she glances into the face of the girl. Just behind the old woman is the figure of a young man, whose eyes are fixed with a passion of admiration and entreaty upon the girl’s face, which, sweet and calm and cold, smiles upon the old woman, and does not even see him. No possibility of mistaking the meaning in those eyes, nor the prayer for notice and love in the entire attitude and look. There was an emotional quality in this picture which went far to triumph over a good many faults of colour and execution.

As Minna looked at it, a strange feeling stole over her. The faces of the young man and the girl were not portraits, but there was in them a haunting likeness to two faces she had known, which likeness sent a thrill through her. Hastily turning over the leaves of her catalogue, she found the number and title of the picture, and a scarcely suppressed ‘Ah!’ broke from her lips.

‘The Two Mendicants—Hans Riemann.’

Fastened to the spot, she examined the picture with eager attention. Never had she imagined her cousin Hans to be possessed of such subtlety in expressing a graceful thought. It was he—it was Fulvia; not boldly and openly portrayed, but hinted at, indicated, shadowed forth, as it were. Patent to her, who was familiar with them both, and with their stories—a veiled mystery, not even a mystery—merely a delicate attractive picture to any outsider who knew nothing of the drama which underlay it all.

‘I knew it—I was certain of it!’ Minna said to herself, but quite beneath her breath. ‘I taxed him with it, and he turned it off. Why did he not speak out at the time? Oh, I would have helped him through everything. I would have become poor that he might have succeeded. If Fulvia had had a lover—one whom she loved, at that time—she might have been saved. She would have had a strength to resist which would have carried her through everything.... Hans, you fool! And how he has improved! I used to think his things rather finikin, I didn’t care for them—but this shows a perfectly enormous advance.’

‘What are you looking at?’ asked the loud, cheerful voice of one her friends, just at her elbow. ‘That! Oh, isn’t it odd that Mr. Riemann’s picture should have got put close to your piece of sculpture? It’s a pretty thing, very. Do you know, I said the other day that, according to the accepted rule in such things, and judging from the outside only, the picture ought to have been by the woman, and the statue by the man. The picture is so delicate, you know, and refined and emotional, and all that. (I hear he has sold it very well.) And the statue—well, you know, Minna, it has been praised for its brutality: in the French sense of the word, not the English.’

To all of which Minna made little rejoinder, except a faint smile. She did manage to murmur that the picture was very charming, and that Hans had made great progress during the last few years.

Then they moved on, laughing at Minna for not being more interested in the public view of her own work. They made the weary round of the gallery, and looked at all the most talked-of pictures, and at last went away to get lunch somewhere, and then to go and see some other show. All day long there dwelt in Minna’s mind the tender grace of that painting. She wondered who had bought it. She was longing to possess it herself. She felt unreasonably annoyed and vexed with the happy owner, whoever he or she might be. And when at night, wearied in brain and body with the empty whirl of the day, she placed her head upon her pillow, the scene again rose before her eyes: ‘The Two Mendicants’—the gracious figure, whose hand was relieving the one, and passing by the other, not even seeing him. Minna said within herself, ‘I’ll go again. I shall go and look at it as often as I can escape from them and get there alone.’

Her last thought was, ‘Shall I tell Beppo? I think not. He never speaks about it now, but I am sure the pain of that time has never been less in his soul than it was just when it happened. It would hurt him. No; I won’t say anything.’

She carried out her intention, and, under one pretext or another, managed several times to escape from her companions, slip alone into the gallery, thread her way through its rooms, and finally, with a sigh of pleasure and pain combined, seat herself before the picture, with her back to the statue, while she looked, wondered, and speculated.

Where was Fulvia? What had become of her? What had she grown into? Not one word had been heard of her since her marriage. She had never written to anyone at home—neither to her mother, nor to Giuseppe, nor to Minna herself. At the time of the marriage it had been Marchmont’s intention to take his bride first to London and Paris, and sooner or later to Australia, to ‘show’ her, in his own characteristic language, to his ‘people’ there, who were understood to be very rich, and given to admire sumptuous and beautiful things—such things as Fulvia would have every chance of becoming.

Whether he had carried out this programme Minna had never heard. She thought it probable; she thought it even possible that he might have settled in Australia, having discovered that he was a bigger man in Sydney or Melbourne than he would be in London or Paris. Of one thing only she was certain—that they had never revisited Rome.

On this particular morning Minna was at her post before the picture, and passing through her mind was the wonder where Hans could now be. The easy-going young fellow whom she had known in Rome at Casa Dietrich had made some way in the world as an artist, but chiefly as a painter of what seemed to Minna ‘prettiness.’ Even in this case she would have mistrusted her own judgment and thought her delight in the picture to be more the result of the associations it had for her mind than its own inherent merit, but the verdict on all sides was to the same effect as her own.

In a half-dream she sat, leaning back in the comfortable settee, and vaguely hearing the voices and footsteps of those who passed, but not heeding them, unless they stood before her and actually interrupted her view of the picture.

Voices behind her of two women—probably young women.

‘Oh, Ethel, this must be the statue that Tom was talking about. He said it was splendid. What is it called?’

Leaves of a catalogue were fluttered quickly over—then, in dulcet tones:

‘“In the sweat of thy brow. Roma, 18——” What on earth does it mean?’

‘A horrid, common working man, and nothing else. Well, I cannot understand what anyone can see to admire in that, I must say. Let’s see—artist’s name, Minna Hastings. A woman! Just fancy any lady deliberately setting to work and carving out the figure of a dirty half-naked man like that! What a queer creature she must be!’

Minna was interested, charmed. She did not move, but gazed steadily before her at the picture. Now the two speakers were immediately behind her. There was no crowd, and they could quite well see over her head.

‘Now just look what different things strike different people!’ said the more decided voice of the two. ‘Look at that picture—“The Two Mendicants.” I call it lovely. Isn’t that girl sweet? And the old woman—splendid! And the young man. Ethel’—in an excited whisper—‘he really has a look of—don’t you know? Those long eyes and that intense look—what Fräulein would call schwärmerisch. I do like it. Well, you see, that’s Rome, too. “In the church of Santa Maria-sopra-Minerva, Roma.” And the painter is a man—Hans Riemann, you see. Well, all one can say is that some men have much nicer tastes than some women.... Hadn’t we better go on to the next room, or we shall not get it all done before lunch?’

‘Oh yes! Come!’

They walked away. Minna, half turning her head, stole a look after them. A couple of fresh-looking, ‘nicely’-dressed, rather meaningless English girls. There are hundreds and thousands of them, gaily passing their opinions on everything that comes under their notice in the heavens above or in the earth beneath. Minna smiled to herself, and again became lost in contemplation of the picture.

The door into the small room in which she sat was behind her. For some time she was left in undisturbed solitude. Then there were footsteps behind her, of two persons. She paid no heed to them. They stopped—evidently in front of her work. There was a prolonged silence, till at last a man’s voice said, earnestly and softly:

‘Well, is it not what I told you? Did I do right to bring you?’

A woman’s voice in reply, which yet sounded almost as if the speaker spoke to herself, in a half-dream.

‘Yes; it is the same—Roma. Oh, I am very glad you brought me!’

She spoke Italian. For one moment Minna’s heart sprang with such a wild throb to her throat that she could neither move nor speak. Then it seemed to stop altogether; then went beating on again at five times its usual pace. It all took but a couple of seconds. She had recovered her power of speech and motion. She rose swiftly from her place, and turned towards the speakers, her face in a pale blaze of emotion.

It was true. There was no deception. That was Hans, older, handsomer, with his boyish tendency to lounge developed into the supple ease of a man of the world, but with—the words of the young lady who had been so pleased with his picture came into Minna’s mind almost grotesquely: ‘Those long eyes and that intense look’—the eyes and the look which are so difficult to read aright in man or woman—experience only can prove whether they mean a character weak, selfish, and sensuous, or earnest and passionately clinging in its loves and hates, hopes and fears. Whatsoever the look might betoken, the man was Hans; and that woman beside him, in the full splendour of youth and beauty, in the full pomp of the costliest simplicity of dress, with the bearing of a queen, and the utterly calm and self-possessed, rather cool aspect—that was Fulvia.

For a moment the three stood looking at each other, while their expressions changed half a dozen times. It was Minna who spoke first, in a voice which she could not force to be steady, tried she never so hard.

‘Fulvia!’ she said. ‘Hans!’

‘Minna, by Jove!’ ejaculated Hans, recovering from his astonishment. ‘I never was more floored in my life, though why I should have been I’m sure I don’t know. It’s the most natural thing in the world for you to be here—just as it is for us. I have brought Mrs. Marchmont, you see, to show her an old acquaintance.’ He smiled and looked at Minna’s statue.

A great change had come over Fulvia’s face. She had grown very pale; her steady eyes wavered—one could almost have sworn that, for one moment, they were dim. While Hans was talking, she and Minna had clasped hands and were looking at one another. Minna was far past speaking. It was as if her own beloved child, long lost, had returned to her. Fulvia also seemed not to be possessed of much eloquence. A grave, sweet smile dawned upon her lips; in a low voice and with an accent of indescribable tenderness she said:

‘Signora carissima!’

It was the exact tone in which she had often spoken to Minna, when she had sat with her five years ago, in her little salon at Casa Dietrich, discussing the woeful future. As she spoke, with a swift, graceful gesture she lifted Minna’s hands to her lips, and kissed them, one after the other.

The elder woman was shaken to her innermost being. She felt that, if she spoke, tears would rush from her eyes and choke her voice. After a long time, ‘At last!’ she stammered out, and, unable to bear it any longer, she sat down hastily on the bench, and, still holding Fulvia’s hand, drew her to the space beside her.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, recovering breath, ‘the gods are good. Sometimes they send us what we want. They have been good to me to-day.’

‘Whether they have been good to me, I can hardly yet decide,’ said Hans in a melancholy voice. He was practically left out in the cold while this interview was going on. ‘Anyhow,’ he continued, ‘they have blessed me with sense enough to see that I had better retire while I can do so with self-respect, and leave you two to your conversation. But you will perhaps favour me with the merest indication as to what I am to do for you later. Shall I disappear altogether, and return no more? Shall I come back for you, Mrs. Marchmont, and take you home? Or, in short, I am at your orders, ladies, when once I know what those orders are.’

‘Poor Hans!’ said Minna, smiling, and looking at him more attentively. She was struck again with his altered appearance. She had not seen him now for more than three years, and had heard very little about him. He was, as she knew, about eight-and-twenty, but he looked considerably older. In some aspects he looked like eight-and-thirty. He had a dark, bronzed, richly-coloured face, grave, soft, dark-brown eyes, and a brown, pointed beard and moustache. The general aspect of his face was one of gravity—gravity, dignity, and poetical, artistic beauty. There was nothing left of his old, boyish manner, except its simplicity, for he had the great charm of simplicity.

All this Minna realized and saw, as, with one of her hands laid upon one of Fulvia’s, she looked up at him, and listened to what he said. She turned to Fulvia.

‘What do you wish, Fulvia? What can you do for me? I mean, how long can we be together? And is this the best place? I can take you to my room at my friends’ if you like, where we can be alone.’

‘I think this is as good a place as any,’ said Fulvia, who now spoke English, with but little foreign intonation. ‘We can then arrange how to meet again. You are very kind, Mr. Riemann. I don’t think there is anything you can do for me. I ordered my carriage to be here at one. It can come, and wait, or Mrs. Hastings and I can leave whenever we like. I shall see you again to-night, I suppose? Good-morning.’

With a gracious bow of her head she dismissed him. Minna called after him.

‘Hans, you will come and see me. I’m staying at the Montons’, where you have been many a time. I shall be there about a week longer. Send me a line, and I will be at home when you come.’

‘Very well,’ said he, without the faintest trace of ungraciousness—definable, at any rate. For all the suavity of his manner, Minna knew that he was annoyed at the meeting. She, however, cared nothing for that. She smiled upon him. He lifted his hat, and saying ‘A rivederci’ went slowly out of the room.

‘Now, Fulvia, tell me something about yourself,’ said Minna, looking at her companion and stroking her hand.

CHAPTER XV.

‘Cara Signora,’ said Fulvia, with a slight smile, ‘I have literally nothing to tell you about myself. I saw you five years ago. I was almost seventeen then. It is therefore obvious that I am now nearly twenty-two. Since that day I have travelled a great deal, seen a great deal, and learnt a great deal. That was to be expected. A child of seventeen must necessarily be densely ignorant of everything outside the schoolroom and the nursery. But a child with any intelligence must necessarily learn a great deal in so long a time as has passed since we met, and I have had ample opportunities for learning—oh, ample.’

She broke off, smiling—a sweet, frigid smile. Minna scarcely heeded its sweetness but felt all its frigidity, which communicated itself to her own heart.

‘You have never been to Rome again, I suppose?’ she asked quickly, and this time Fulvia’s face grew hard, though she still smiled.

‘Not to Rome. We have been, I think, almost everywhere else, and, as you perceive, are now in London.’

‘Living here, or for the season?’ asked Minna.

‘Neither one nor the other. We are in a kind of transition period. We came here from the South of France, where we spent nearly the whole winter. I hate the Riviera—don’t you? There is such a spasmodic attempt at gaiety and amusing yourself there, which comes to nothing, however hard you may try. To an active-minded person like myself, it is a frightful life, but there is an institution at —— where cases like my husband’s could be treated, so we stayed there.’

‘Cases like your husband’s—is he ill?’

‘Yes, he is ill.’

‘Is it anything serious? Did he benefit by the treatment you speak of?’

‘Not in the least, so far as I can see. This illness began, about eighteen months ago, with partial paralysis. It has continued to be partial paralysis ever since, and it is partial paralysis now. All the baths and waters (we have tried those too) and massage and electricity in the world will never produce the least effect upon it, but of course, when people are ill, they like to try everything, and my theory is to indulge them in their wish. It gives them something to do and think of, at any rate.’

She smiled, and adjusted the flowers in the belt of her white gown.

‘Then you have come to London for further treatment?’

‘For further advice. The doctors at Cannes told us the specialists whom we ought to consult here, so we have obediently come, and consulted them. Of course they don’t tell him—nor even me—but they know perfectly well what it is. It will not kill him yet—at least, it is not likely to do so. If he were a poor man, and unable to get proper attention, he might die very soon. But he is a rich man, who can command everything that he wants, and he may live for—a—great—many—years,’ said Fulvia, in quiet, clear tones, with little pauses between the words, as she reached the end of her sentence. ‘It may get worse. He might die of something quite different; or he might have a stroke, and die of it; but he will never be better. It is a very unpleasant thing for him, but, as one of the doctors told him a little while ago, it is the result entirely of the life he chose to live as a young man. It was quite too hard a life for his constitution, and he may be thankful that it is not something much more horrible.’

Minna was silent, feeling a horror in her heart. Fulvia sat beside her, with her little firm, delicately gloved hands folded lightly on her knee. Her face was like the face of Fulvia Dietrich, with startling yet indefinable differences. The girlish indecision of outline had entirely disappeared, and left an exquisitely modelled face, with firm, statuesque curves of cheek and lip, pure aquiline line of nose, and a broad, rather low forehead—that is, a forehead on which the hair grew low, the same thick, glistening hair which the girl Fulvia had had. The slim figure of the young maiden had bloomed out into the full strength and magnificent outlines of early womanhood. She had grown taller, Minna was convinced, as well as having taken on this perfect outline with its larger, firmer curves and commanding beauty. The expression on Fulvia’s face was one of the utmost calm and placidity. Did she, or did she not, feel anything? Minna speculated. In speaking of her husband, not a ray of feeling of any kind had betrayed itself. Whether she were glad or sorry, bored, disgusted, satisfied, it would have been utterly impossible to tell. Minna maintained an anxious, uneasy silence. Presently Fulvia resumed:

‘Of course, under these circumstances it is ridiculous to talk of being here “for the season.” He cannot go out at all, and I certainly cannot, alone, in London. We are in lodgings—a hotel was too noisy for him. The doctors recommend him to go to the country. They have told him this much: that he will never be strong again, and must never dream of making any exertions to speak of; and they talk about country air and a quiet life’—she laughed, for the first time during their meeting, a little cold laugh of mingled amusement and contempt. ‘So he is debating whether to buy a place, or hire a place in the country—and where. That is really all that keeps us in London now. I have already taken several most tiresome railway journeys, to see different places which were to let or sell—nothing suitable, of course, when I got there. And I am sure I don’t know when or if anything will ever be settled.’

‘How I wish you would come into our neighbourhood! There is a place close to mine,’ exclaimed Minna impulsively, ‘or rather, I ought to say, I occupy a sort of “at his gates” position with regard to it. It is the great house of the neighbourhood, and mine is only a little old-fashioned place. But it is to let or sell at this present moment, and nobody has taken it yet.’

‘Where do you live?’ asked Fulvia.

‘Up in the North—at West Wall, in Durham. It is near the sea, and it is near the moors, so that if healthiness is any consideration I am sure we can offer it to you.’

‘How cold!’ exclaimed Fulvia, with a little shiver.

‘Ah, yes, you child of the South! It is cold, it is gray, and it is bleak—towards the sea, at any rate. But we have warm hearts, and the Hall is built in a sheltered spot.’

‘Who are “we”?’ asked Fulvia tranquilly, and not repelling the suggestion which Minna had made.

‘We are’—she paused abruptly, then went on quickly: ‘you will be surprised, if you have heard no home news—Signor Oriole lives with me now. “We” are Signor Oriole and myself, and Rhoda Hamilton, my niece. She is nearly always with me. She is my brother’s only child, and he is a widower.’

‘Signor Oriole!’ echoed Fulvia, and this time the calm coolness of her voice and expression changed. ‘He lives with you? How and why is that?’

‘Mia cara, after you were married—the day you were married—he left Casa Dietrich, never to return. He was very unhappy—so unhappy that it makes me so only to think of it. He quite disappeared for a time. Even I lost him; and we are great friends, as you know. Then almost by accident I found him again, in a sad condition mentally and morally, though he had become a little better off as this world’s things go. Almost by force I brought him to England with me. I was leaving Rome when I found him. He was to pay me a long visit—that was all we said. But my home has been his ever since that day. He has never quite recovered from that grief—your marriage, I mean; but I think, except for that, he is almost contented. I think he is happier than he would be anywhere else.’

‘It was very kind of you,’ said Fulvia, in an abrupt, cool tone. She began to beat with her parasol on the skirt of her dress—the only sign she had given of nervous discomposure. ‘Is he very sad? Do you know, I think it will be better to drop talking of all that time. It is quite over and done with. I am glad he is not in poverty. It would be very delightful to be near you, and yet——’

‘Don’t decide upon anything. Think about it.’

‘I cannot say that I will not, though I don’t know whether I am wise to consider it. My husband always had a sort of vexed admiration for you, because you had an assured position and were hardly civil to him. He might like to go somewhere where we knew someone who was “in society”’ (with another little cool laugh). ‘But, listen! You will come and see me, won’t you? I am busy to-day—I have a lot of things to do; but to-morrow come and have lunch with me if you can. After lunch I will take you to see my husband. If I should find an opportunity between now and then, I will tell him I have seen you, and what you say about this place. What is it called? But you can tell him all that yourself. It will be something to talk about—the greatest boon in the world to me.’

‘I will come. You must give me your address,’ said Minna. She hated the idea of seeing Marchmont, but she could not refuse Fulvia’s request, and she felt a kind of delighted joy in the fact that Fulvia wished to see her again—turned to her with confidence, as an old friend in whose goodwill she trusted.

‘Yes. And now, I am sorry to say, I shall have to go. I suppose the carriage will be waiting. Can I take you anywhere? What are you doing?’

‘Loafing about,’ said Minna, laughing; ‘and to some purpose, since I have met you. No, thank you; go your own way. I must join my friends at lunch.’

They rose and moved slowly away.

‘Stop!’ exclaimed Minna suddenly. ‘Did Hans bring you here to see that thing of mine?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And did he not mention his own picture, hanging here in the corner?’

‘No!’ said Fulvia quickly, turning back again. ‘Where is it—and which?’

Minna pointed it out to her. Fulvia looked at it for some little time in silence. She did not smile, she did not frown, but turned at last to Minna, saying simply, though very gravely:

‘It is very pretty—and very sentimental. He ought to do better than that, and he intends to.’

‘Does he?’ They were now really walking away. ‘To tell you the truth, I was almost more surprised to see him than you. I thought he was in the Tyrol, or Italy, somewhere, for the whole summer.’

‘He was at Como when we were there a month or two ago. He was even then on his way home from Southern Italy and Sicily. He came to England about a fortnight after we did, and of course we have seen a good deal of him since. He knows everything, you see,’ she added, in the same grave, matter-of-fact tone. ‘We have some few acquaintances in London, and houses where we visited; but my husband is morbidly anxious that they should not know about our being here now. And yet he gets so nervous and fidgety if he has not some outsider to talk to. So Mr. Riemann’s society has been a real godsend.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Minna vaguely.

At the door of the gallery, Fulvia gave Minna her card and address, and held out her hand. She did not avoid her friend’s eyes. She smiled most frankly and most sweetly upon her as she shook hands. It was Fulvia’s old smile—outwardly. Holding her hand for a moment, Minna said:

‘I shall be writing to Signor Oriole. I shall tell him I have met you. It would be absurd not to do so. Will you not give me some message for him?’

Fulvia’s lips tightened for a moment. Then she said quietly:

‘Please give him my love, and say that perhaps we may meet during the summer, if—supposing we should by any chance think of this place you have told me of.’

‘Very well,’ said Minna, and Fulvia added cheerfully:

‘I am so glad he is independent now. It must make everything so much easier for him.’

With another pressure of the hand they parted. Fulvia got into her carriage, and was driven away. Minna, torn by all kinds of different emotions, kept thinking, ‘How glad I am to have found her! How I wish she would not keep saying she is glad he is independent, as if that compensated for everything else! I shall see her again to-morrow. What is she in reality? What has he become? She is a riddle to me yet.’

Vaguely she went out into the street, looking about her with the equally vague intention of getting into an omnibus to go part of the way home, and finally, with an impatient ‘pshaw!’ beckoned to the driver of a hansom, got into it, and was likewise borne into the working-day world again.

CHAPTER XVI.

At a few minutes after half-past one on the following day, Minna rang the bell of the large, demure-looking door of a large, well-kept, and equally demure-looking house in a good street off one of the most fashionable squares. ‘Lodgings,’ perhaps, but evidently first-rate ones, both as to accommodation and, probably, price.

A man-servant opened the door. Mrs. Marchmont was at home. He led Minna upstairs to the drawing-room, announced her, and departed. It was a large, handsome, tastefully furnished London drawing-room, having very little about it of the usual serpent’s trail. Fulvia rose from a low chair which stood beside a small table covered with newspapers and periodicals.

‘It is very good of you to come. Put off your mantle—so. When I have a friend with me, I hate to see her looking as if next moment she would be going away. And your hat—so. You are not changed one bit, cara signora,’ she added, with more warmth and approachableness of manner than she had yet displayed. Minna said little. Her heart was very full.

Fulvia led her to a sofa near the window, placed her there, and sat down beside her. She was exquisitely dressed in a sort of morning gown of muslin, lace and ribbons. One portion of her bargain at any rate had been kept, the side of luxury, of which Fulvia had spoken with assumed enthusiasm to Minna, when she had first made her her confidant on the subject of her engagement. There was a sumptuousness in the young woman’s entire appearance which was carried out to the minutest details of her attire and its appointments. Minna looked at her, and her artist’s eye, as well as that of human affection, took it all in, and contrasted it with the little blue woollen frock of former days.

‘We will have lunch first, and then go to see my husband,’ said Fulvia, and to Minna, in whom the recollection of the past was so vivid, it was a mystery how she could utter those two words, ‘my husband,’ and wear that slight, cool smile, look at her interlocutor with those clear, limpid eyes, and carry herself with such unembarrassed ease.

Lunch was announced, and they went downstairs. They were alone, and they talked about a great many things. Fulvia appeared to be very candid, very cheerful, and very indifferent. She told Minna of many things that ‘they’ had done at different times since her marriage. The only peculiarity which Minna noticed about her conversation was that it never referred to anything earlier than two or three years back. As to the first year or two of her marriage, or what she had done or seen then, or where she had been, she was absolutely silent, except that once she casually mentioned having been in Australia; and when Minna incautiously asked when, she said, with a sudden freezing coolness of tone, ‘Oh, it was about four years ago.’

They seemed to have passed a good deal of time at Vienna, perhaps the most absolutely frivolous capital in Europe, as Minna recollected. There, from Fulvia’s account, they had met personages a good deal connected with politics and diplomacy, and she, at least, had made a success in rather exclusive circles. She spoke with regret of not having been able to devote herself to this life.

‘I should like a political life,’ she said; ‘I should like a political salon very much. You see, anyone like me, young and strong, and with an active, inquiring mind’—she laughed a little—‘with a great deal of money and no children, is really in need of something to do with her time. There are several occupations and pastimes which such a woman may take to. I have thought of them all. She may go in for society and utter frivolity, or for being a femme incomprise, or for literature, or art, or mysterious fascination, which means lovers, or for politics. I have come to the conclusion that politics are the least risky, the most satisfying, and at the same time the most exciting of these pursuits. And I had just brought my husband round to my way of thinking. He had decided to settle in England, and look out for a constituency. Of course he would have had to buy it, but those things can generally be managed; we should have lived chiefly here, in London, and then—we should have seen. Just when it was decided, he was overtaken by this illness, and there is an end of it all.’

‘Temporarily?’ hazarded Minna.

‘Altogether. We shall have to live in the country, and I dread it, I must say. I have got so accustomed to excitement, of one kind or another, that I shall be very badly off without it. I do not deceive myself as to our position—not in the least. In London, people like us may conquer and hold fast a certain kind of standing—if we do not mind how much money we spend. In the country—in the county, which, of course, is the only part of the country worth considering—it is quite different. More difficult, slower, more subject to mortifying ups and downs than in town. No, I dread the country. It will be a vera seccatura to have to live there.’

Minna did not like the tone of all this.

But she had nothing to say to it. It all looked as if her little Fulvia had been hardened into a woman of the world; and if so, what wonder? Perhaps it had not been in her nature to be elevated by such an experience. Perhaps it was better that she should have developed into this, than sunk into a lifeless, spiritless thing, without nerve to meet her life.

Lunch over, Fulvia rose.

‘I shall have to drag you upstairs,’ she said. ‘The whole of the second-floor is given up to him, and I have my bedroom higher still. This way!’

Silently Minna followed her, and they mounted the stairs to the second-floor. Fulvia tapped at the door of a front-room. It was opened at once by a man-servant.

‘Is Mr. Marchmont ready to see us?’ asked Fulvia. ‘I sent him word I was bringing a friend.’

‘Quite ready, madam. He has been expecting you,’ said the man, throwing open the door and announcing her.

‘Come, will you?’ said Fulvia, looking back for a second towards Minna, whose heart beat uncomfortably fast as the recollection came rushing over her of the agony, the fainting, the despair she had witnessed five years ago; of the exceeding bitter cry which had gone forth from the girl Fulvia Dietrich, before she had, all shivering with terror, but strung up to the last pitch of self-abnegation, left her mother’s room to become Fulvia Marchmont. The scene would not go out of Minna’s mind, in spite of the woman she now saw before her—well, strong, and full of life, and most certainly not crushed, visibly at any rate.

She followed, as she had been bidden to do. Fulvia walked straight up to where, with its head towards a large, pleasantly-shaded window, stood a luxurious invalid’s couch. It was broad and soft, padded, with the most cunning contrivances for giving ease to limbs tired or diseased. Over it was spread a quilted silken coverlet of some gorgeous Eastern pattern. Under this coverlet was, presumably, a human figure, because at the head of the couch there was a snowy white pillow, adorned with lace frills and ruchings; and on the pillow reclined a head. The head must, in the nature of things, be connected with limbs, but so small and shrivelled and shrunken were those limbs that no outline of them was to be seen under the billowy-looking cover.

The face, which was turned in their direction as they came in, was such a strange, distorted, withered-looking little countenance as Minna did not remember ever to have seen before. The mouth was drawn down at one side in a ridiculously grotesque way. One eyelid had drooped, and would not be raised. The eye that still possessed its power looked eagerly and suspiciously at them, with the glance which Minna remembered so well—sharp, mistrustful and restless. The rest of the face she would hardly have recognised. It was that of a premature septuagenarian—of a septuagenarian who suffered, and whose sufferings had wrought no good, or nobility, or sweetness in his nature, which, in fact, had been ruined and rotten, and hopelessly warped, or ever the sufferings had begun.

‘Good-morning!’ said Fulvia, in a clear, cool voice as she walked towards him.

‘Good-morning, my dear, good-morning. I thought you were never coming.’

He feebly stretched out his skinny little left hand, and held it towards her without paying any attention to her visitor. She just touched the hand with the tips of her fingers, and then, turning, said:

‘Here is Mrs. Hastings. You remember her at Rome. She was very kind to me, and she did a bust of me—do you remember? She has been having lunch with me.’

The grotesque head made a grotesque kind of inclination on hearing these words. Minna was forced herself to come forward and say:

‘I am sorry you are so much out of health.’

‘Oh, a mere temporary thing—a kind of sunstroke, or something of that sort,’ said the voice she remembered so well. That was hardly altered at all. ‘Where did you meet Mrs. Marchmont? Was it an accident, or did you know we were here?’ he continued impatiently.

Minna was glad of the torrent of questions, which she proceeded to answer categorically.

He did not pay much attention to what she said to him, but continued to follow with his eyes every movement of his wife, as she moved hither and thither about the room. Minna began to realize something of the facts of the case. The man into whose power Fulvia had been sold while still a child was now a miserable, hopeless invalid, as helplessly in her power as she had been in his. She was strong. She had force of character and stamina of constitution. She had inherited her mother’s strong will and her father’s mental ability. She had got over the horrors and miseries of the first stage—slavery. The reins had now fallen into her hands, and she had grasped them firmly. She had not the least intention of letting them go. That she felt the faintest spark of affection for this wretched little mummy on the couch, even in this helpless invalid condition, Minna could not for an instant believe. Everything about her, in her attitude, her look, her manner, in the tone of her voice, in the deliberate calm glance she cast upon the face that so eagerly followed her every movement, spoke of the complete mastery she enjoyed, of the unlimited power she exercised. She had evidently conquered in the fight—there must have been a fight with herself as well as with him—conquered fully and without reserve. No victory is bloodless, either materially or metaphorically; no possession is gained without a price having to be paid for it, sooner or later. At what price had Fulvia gained her victory? Minna wondered. What had she given up in return for the power she had acquired?

Such questions rushed vaguely and hastily through her mind, as she tried to reply to Marchmont’s questions, seeing plainly that he was not listening, and that he thought her presence a frightful bore. Fulvia presently seated herself near to them, and observed coolly:

‘I told you what Mrs. Hastings had said about there being a place near to her which was to let. I told you last night. Did you think about it at all?’

‘A place to let—oh yes! Yes, I thought about it. It’s such a confoundedly long way from London to where you live, Mrs. Hastings,’ he said restlessly.

‘No place in England is far from London now,’ replied Minna. ‘It only takes six hours—not quite as much by a flying express.’

‘No—no; that’s true. Fulvia seems to have quite set her mind on going to see this place. She says she’s going with you when you leave London. When do you leave London?’

‘In less than a week now.’

‘Ah, well! if she says she will go, she will go,’ said Marchmont; ‘and, as she says, the more perfect quiet I have, the sooner I am likely to get well. It is very provoking to be laid up in this way.’

Evidently his thoughts were entirely centred on himself and his sensations. Fulvia, not he, would decide upon where they were to go in order that he might have the ‘perfect quiet’ he spoke of. They sat with him for half an hour, and then Minna thought she must go. Fulvia said she would go downstairs with her, but promised Marchmont to return and read the newspapers to him. Minna unwillingly exerted herself to shake hands with him. He wished her good-bye with a restless, wandering glance which settled nowhere except on his wife.

The two women parted. Fulvia came all the way downstairs with her guest, a proceeding which, Minna instinctively felt, was very unusual on her part. She supposed she might take it as a compliment, or even as a mark of affection. A meeting was arranged for a few days hence at the house of Minna’s friends, and Fulvia added:

‘He was quite right in saying that I said I should go with you to look at this house. Would you take me?’

‘Wouldn’t I, my dear! I wish you would go there.’

Fulvia smiled.

‘I really am thinking about it. Though I haven’t seen it, it is the first thing I have heard of which has in the least attracted me. By the time I see you again I shall have made up my mind, and will let you know.’

‘I think she will have made up her mind to come,’ said Minna to herself, as she went away.

CHAPTER XVII.

Minna had given Hans her address, and he one day called to see her. It was getting near the end of her stay in London.

Her first reflection as he came into the room was perhaps slightly irrelevant.

‘How old is Hans now? Let me see: he must be twenty-eight at least. He might be anything, as far as looks go.’

He certainly might have been anything from twenty-eight to thirty-eight, because he was dark and grave, with a certain picturesqueness of figure and richness of colouring which made him look older than he really was. There was nothing left in him of that ingenuousness which she had known in him when he had been a youth. His movements had a certain slowness and deliberation which was neither languor nor effeminacy. His smile, very infrequent, was delightful when it came, and it came now as he drew near to his cousin Minna, took her hand, and bent his fine dark eyes upon her.

‘I have been remiss, Minna. I wanted to come before; but when one has been two whole years outside one’s own country, and returned to London, one is apt to find a good deal to do—to put it mildly.’

‘I can well believe it, and feel the privilege of receiving any visit from you. To tell the truth, I thought you were booked to be abroad a good deal longer.’

‘I had vaguely thought about staying longer. But I’m a vagrant—I got tired of cloudless blue skies and endless unabashed sunshine, and all at once began to long for some English damp and greenness.’

‘In London?’

‘I see you have not lost your old trick of taking a fellow up pretty sharply. No, not in London—at least, only at first. I’m hoping soon to be in the country. I shall spend the whole summer, at least, in England, and I hope you will let me come and see you before it is over.’

‘Surely. I should think it very strange if you went away without coming to see me. You don’t know our part of the country, either. Yes, you must come. Come when you like. You must take us as you find us—Signor Oriole and Rhoda and me.’

‘He is still with you, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it true that Mrs. Marchmont has an idea of going with you to look at this place near yours?’

‘Yes. We go together the day after to-morrow. She says it is to be only for one night.’

‘H’m. She knows Oriole is with you?’

‘Of course she knows. Hans, I must congratulate you on your picture. It is odd that you and I should be hand-in-hand here, after Rome, isn’t it? Those old days, I see, remained in your heart as well as in mine. I felt quite a thrill when I saw it. I pointed it out to Mrs. Marchmont.’

‘Did you? What did she say?’

‘You are so popular now that I can afford to tell you exactly what she said. “Very pretty, and very sentimental,” were her words. “He can do better than that, and intends to.”’

Hans smiled slightly with eyes a little downcast, and pulled out the fingers of the glove which he had removed from his right hand.

‘She has not grown sentimental, at any rate,’ he said, with the faintest possible shrug of the shoulders.

‘No,’ said Minna slowly. ‘You go there often, I suppose?’ she added, almost abruptly.

‘Oh no!’ replied Hans, lifting his eye at once, and looking straight at her. ‘Very little. She is frightfully particular. Of course there can be no sympathy between him and me, fiend that he is; and she simply doesn’t encourage men about the place. Of course I call now and then, so do a few others; but none of us go as often as we should like to.’

He spoke with a grave simplicity which had something almost boyish in it, and which stirred Minna’s heart to a warm feeling for him. Her expression at once became more cordial.

‘You see,’ he went on, ‘there’s no chaperon, no lady-companion, no nothing. She’s all alone; Marchmont said he would have no one of the sort about the house, so——’ He shrugged his shoulders again.

Minna thought to herself: ‘That is, she does not choose to have a chaperon. Of course she could have one if she liked. But she has no need of any such appendage. She is strong.’ All she said was:

‘Well, I dare say she is quite right. Then, Hans, you will let me know when you want to come and stay with me. It is a simple place, you know. Don’t expect the luxuries of your father’s palace down at Brighton.’

‘Don’t twit me with that,’ said Hans vexedly. ‘How I detest that place, Minna! The horrible vulgarity of it, the smell of money, for it is nothing else. The girls—have you seen any of the girls lately?’

‘Not very lately. Once or twice one of them has condescended to penetrate to our Northern wilds, and astonish the natives with her costumes, and her general tone of fashion and—what must one call it?—disinvoltura. But you know they are not bad girls. Their bark is far worse than their bite. It is their education.’

‘I don’t get on with them,’ said Hans candidly. ‘And they think me a mooning, sentimental idiot. So there is a great sympathy between us. The whole aspect of that place—the newness, the bareness, the glass-houses, and the gravel drive; the organ, and the picture-gallery, and—tutti quanti! No, I will promise you not to pine after it when I am with you.’

‘Don’t despise it, my good sir. It means ease and freedom from care for you in days to come. You are an artist now; you may be a Mæcenas some time.’

‘I don’t want to be either,’ he said, drawing his brows together.

‘Not wish to be an artist! Hans!’

‘Well, not that exactly. We always want what we haven’t got. My wishes I tell to no one.’

He rose to take leave. She did not detain him. He repeated his promise of writing to her, and departed. After he had gone she stood for a few minutes, thoughtfully looking down, her hand resting on the mantelpiece.

‘I wonder if his wishes have any connection whatsoever with his picture,’ she thought to herself, and shook her head. ‘I hope not.’

Fulvia kept her word, and met Minna at the railway-station on the appointed day. She dismissed her servant, when he had attended to her, saying:

‘You can go, Parkinson. Be sure you see Mr. Marchmont, and tell him it was all right at the station, and that I will send a telegram to-morrow to say at what time you are to meet me. It may be night.’

The man went away. Very soon the two women were alone together in the carriage, and the train speeding swiftly Northwards.

They were not very talkative, but at last Fulvia said:

‘What did people think and say when Signor Oriole became part of your household?’

Minna shrugged her shoulders.

‘My dear, what could they do or say? My well-known eccentricity was considered to account for everything. One or two of them said it was very funny, but I really did not care much what they said. Besides, I had my brother to support me in all that I did. He quite approved.’

‘Your brother?’

‘Yes. I have one brother, and scarcely another relation in the world. His daughter, my niece Rhoda, almost lives with me. My brother is a man whom no one can despise or pooh-pooh. He is a very lucky man. He holds extreme opinions (so called) on many questions, social and religious and others, and yet he is accepted and respected as if he were the most orthodox of the orthodox. You know, I am a much more commonplace, conservative person than he is in reality, and yet I have the credit of being reckless, impulsive and defiant of all the conventionalities, while Mr. Hamilton, who despises conventionalities in a practical way which I dare not attempt, is a tame cat in the most rigorously respectable houses. Thus it is sometimes.’

‘Yes, I know. What did he do, then—Mr. Hamilton—to make things straight?’

‘My dear Fulvia, I cannot admit that they needed making straight. But if they did, this is how it was managed. Very soon after my return home with Signor Oriole, Richard came to stay with me, bringing Rhoda with him. He paid me a long visit. He was seen everywhere with Signor Oriole. They got on splendidly. We were all together constantly. My niece and your—and Signor Oriole are devoted to each other. His ways with children and young people are fascinating—there are no fathers so charming to their children as the Italian fathers. You have only to see them together to know that at once. Then we all went away together, and stayed a good while at my brother’s place—in fact, we live alternately at each other’s houses. I returned, with Rhoda and Signor Oriole. He has taught her Latin and Italian. There was really nothing to be said. I do not know a single friend of mine who really knows him and dislikes him.’

‘No,’ said Fulvia, in a low voice and with downcast eyes. ‘To know him is to love him. If Beppo had had the destiny suited to him he would have been the adored father of the happiest family of children the world ever knew. I know it.’

She said no more about it, but something in her face told Minna that she felt all this more deeply than, perhaps, she would have admitted.

Minna was thinking of the coming meeting all the time that she was driving Fulvia in her pony-carriage from the station to her house, a distance of some six miles. They drove through the lanes, whose hedges were fresh with the brilliant green of early June, not yet white with hawthorn—that is a bloom which rarely shows itself early in Durham—clear-looking fields and pastures, great trees with polished leaves shining as they rustled in the wind; along the highroads they drove, elevated and giving great sweeps of landscape, chiefly huge swells of moorland, purple under the changing sky, and in the far distance a silver shimmer which was the sea. The air was fresh and cool, the sun was bright, the pony was happy and willing. The six miles were quickly covered, and then they stopped in front of a small plain wicket from which a short footpath led to the deep porch of a long-fronted two-storied house without any claims to architecture. Windows had here and there been thrown out, to afford more room and more light, quite regardless of neatness or any effort at appearance. Different kinds of roses clambered over the porch and up to the windows, and a thick mass of ivy covered all one side of the house. At the sound of their wheels a gardener’s boy had come from some hidden region, grinning from ear to ear, to hold the pony. A waiting maid in a lilac print gown and a white apron came flying forth from the kitchen side of the house, smiling a welcome.

‘Take the things, Mary. Put that bag in the blue room for Mrs. Marchmont. Is Signor Oriole in?’

‘Yes, ma’am. At least, he was writing in his study half an hour ago.’

‘Come, Fulvia,’ said Minna, gently taking her hand, and leading her into the house. The front door stood wide open, showing a broad tiled passage, square, like a hall full of shade, but with rays of sunshine pouring down also from a landing window at the head of a short flight of shallow stairs. Minna paused a moment, and then said:

‘You will come and speak to him at once, won’t you?’

‘Oh yes, please,’ replied Fulvia, almost nervously. ‘At once. Then it will be done with.’

‘This way, then. Shall I go away, and leave you with him?’

‘No, oh no, my dear Mrs. Hastings!’ she exclaimed almost imploringly. ‘Come with me, and stay all the time; I am strong, but I am not made of iron.’

‘I will stay,’ was all that Minna said, leading her along a passage, and through a sort of little anteroom to a door at which she knocked. A voice from within cried, ‘Avanti.’ Fulvia was pale as death, still and rigid. Without pausing, Minna opened the door and went in, drawing her companion with her by the hand.

Facing them, and just rising from his place before a table covered with writing materials, papers, and books, was Signor Oriole, a white-headed, white-bearded man with a pale face, but with thick eyebrows, scarcely touched with the frost of years, and flashing dark eyes, clear and brilliant as ever, belying his look of age. Minna felt Fulvia’s hand spring aside within hers. She divined the shiver of emotion which must be shaking her soul; she quietly released the hand, and, blotting out her presence as much as possible, said simply:

‘Here is Fulvia, signore.’

Fulvia stood, looking pale and rigid still. Mechanically she allowed him to take her hand; they were both very grave as they looked one another in the eyes. Their last interview had been that in which Oriole had offered to take Fulvia away with him and hide them both from her mother’s iron resolution—that in which his whole heart had gone to her, and in which she, white, trembling, agonized, but resolute, had strung herself up to refuse the offer—to stay, and take what should come. At parting she had flung herself into his arms with a wail of despair, and he had strained her to his heart and kissed her without a word. It had been the moment in which they had come nearest to flinging aside all concealment, but they had parted even then without the final word.

It could not be that moments such as that were not distinctly present in the consciousness of both. But now, after a few seconds of what seemed paralyzed silence, Fulvia’s figure lost its rigid look. She smiled, just the same sweet, cool smile that Minna knew so well, and said:

‘After so long we meet. It is only a week since I knew you lived here with Mrs. Hastings. Let me tell you, caro signore, I find you look much better here than you used to do in Rome.’

‘Good heavens! Is that all she has to say?’ muttered Minna beneath her breath.

‘And you, Fulvia, are indeed changed,’ was his reply, as he bent his eyes upon her piercingly, but apparently without much emotion. ‘It is true, you have grown five years older since I saw you—a long time in a young woman’s life.’

He lifted her hand to his lips and bowed over it with courtly, old-fashioned grace. They spoke quietly and steadily, but Minna noticed that they both spoke Italian, and addressed each other in Roman fashion with voi instead of lei[A] and she drew her own conclusions from these facts.

[A] Voi, you; lei, thee. The latter is the usual mode of address when any politeness or formality is exacted. The former betokens some familiarity, but is much more used, even by acquaintances, in Southern than in Northern Italy.

It did not last much longer. Minna made a move to leave the room, saying she would show Fulvia her bedroom, and send her a cup of tea there. They all moved away. The meeting was over. The emotions, whatever they might have been, had been well choked down, resolutely repressed from motives of common-sense and decent self-control.

Thus, under this foreign but friendly Northern roof, did the father and daughter meet—children of the South and of its hot impulses, eager quickness, passionate loves and hates—both beaten by circumstances into a demeanour and a conduct utterly different from that which would have been natural to them; both, in spite of all the past, in spite of all that had been lived out and battled through by them, in spite of every attracting link of sorrow and suffering, ‘strangers yet.’

CHAPTER XVIII.

The visit was only as long as Fulvia had said it would be. Nothing that Minna could say prevailed upon her to stay two nights instead of only one. She passed the evening with her friend, and partly with Signor Oriole—that is, he dined with them, and joined them afterwards in the drawing-room for a short time, but afterwards went, as usual, to his study, to Minna’s great disappointment. She had indulged in vague, dim ideas and hopes on the subject of this meeting, desiring that it should, somehow or other, bring Fulvia and her father together. It had apparently done nothing of the kind. They were civil to one another, amiable, pleasant, and nothing more. Neither seemed oppressed by the other’s company, but, on the other hand, neither seemed anxious to be left alone with the other, or to be much together. It was perhaps quite natural, Minna owned with a sigh, as she saw Signor Giuseppe withdraw, leaving her and Fulvia together.

‘I think you will be awfully tired, Fulvia, if you return to-morrow afternoon.’

Fulvia laughed.

‘Tired. I am never tired. I am very strong,’ she said, raising her head and throwing her shoulders back. ‘To make fatigue an excuse for staying would be ridiculous indeed.’

On the following morning she went with Minna and her niece Rhoda, a rather awkward, ‘leggy’-looking girl, with a promise of future good looks, on an expedition to the Hall, to look at it and judge of its suitability for their purpose. She said little, but that little was favourable. Coming back to lunch, she expressed herself satisfied with all she saw of it and its appurtenances. The solicitor of the family who wished to let it was in London, and from him she could obtain all necessary particulars.

‘I shall give my husband a good account of it,’ she said. ‘I shall try to persuade him to come. And if we come, we shall come soon.’

When lunch was over, at which Signor Giuseppe was again present, the two women went together to Minna’s drawing-room, where they were alone. Rhoda and Signor Giuseppe, who were the firmest of friends, went away, first to do a Latin lesson, and then to take a long country walk. Fulvia looked thoughtful as she seated herself, and said:

‘Though he is so changed, he is just the same as ever. He makes all the young people happy who come near him. I see it is the same with that niece of yours. I could find it in my heart to envy her.’

‘He is assuredly very good to Rhoda. She is having a most unconventional bringing-up. Latin and Italian with Signor Oriole, some everyday grammar and geography and arithmetic with Mr. Howard, our old curate here. She gets some music lessons now and then. It is not her strong point. My brother teaches her something—a kind of social science, I think—and I——’

‘And you?’ asked Fulvia, with a smile.

Minna laughed.

‘My department may perhaps be that which in the well-known dame’s school was called, “Manners, twopence extra.”’

‘Rather more than manners, I think,’ said Fulvia, ‘if it is anything like what you did for me in Rome, so long ago.’

‘Don’t say I did it. I did what I could to comfort you, that was all. The root of the matter was in yourself, for it was only a short time that we were together. One could not tell then whether you were weak or strong. It seems strong.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Fulvia carelessly. ‘A great deal, I suppose, depends on one’s circumstances. Perhaps if I had been exposed to poverty and struggle, and disappointments of that kind, I might not have been so ‘strong’ as you call it. Some natures are strong in one way, some in another. The fact is,’ she went on, looking at Minna with the same open, candid smile, ‘I was not born for poverty, Mrs. Hastings, nor for obscurity. I don’t say it boastfully, but because I know it to be absolutely true. My mother knew my nature better than I did myself when she arranged my marriage.’

‘Fulvia!’

‘Well?’ said Fulvia, looking calmly at her. ‘You look appalled, amazed. What I say is perfectly true. I found it out—well, very soon after I was married; at the same time, in the same moment, I may say, as that in which I began to value my diamonds.’

‘No,’ said Minna in a tone of pain, ‘you do not think so. You are saying it just for—for——’ She stopped abruptly.

‘Ebbene! For what?’ asked Fulvia tranquilly. ‘Do you not like me to say it?’

‘I hate you to say it.’

‘What would you prefer me to say? That I have been and am a miserable woman? That I was crushed by my lot? That I had not the power to meet my circumstances, and with a strong hand to control them, instead of letting them control me? That is the only other thing that I could say. And yet you have just been praising me for being strong, a kind of praise which, I flatter myself, I deserve to a certain extent.’

Again Minna was silent. Had she spoken the truth, given utterance to the feeling that was in her heart, deep down, she would have said: ‘Yes, I had rather in truth have heard that your bravery and strength were employed to conceal the saddest of hearts, than that you had no sadness to conceal. I would rather you had been sad to the last day of your life than that your conquering strength had crushed, not only your adverse circumstance, but your highest and best self, your soul, your heart. For that is what it comes to when you say you are satisfied. I do not wish you to be satisfied with this.’

‘I don’t mind telling you about it,’ Fulvia went on. ‘You were so kind to me when I was such a silly, miserable girl. I don’t forget old kindnesses, and I should like you to know me as I am—no better and no worse. I was miserable for ever so long—worse than miserable, dark, wretched, despairing. Oh, it was awful, that hard, dry wretchedness that eats into your soul like some hideous corroding disease! I made up my mind at once to cut myself adrift from my old life, absolutely and entirely. I did not even write to Beppo, as you know. I had been made to do what I didn’t want to do. We all hate that—naturally. I was vexed, cross, and even furiously angry. But I got over it. I found it was worth while to get over it, and that, on the other hand, to sulk and pout, and cry till my eyes were scarlet all round, and my nose like a beetroot, was not worth while. Do you know when I first felt that—that it was worth while to get over it?’

‘How can I know?’

‘It was at a great ball in London, at a very grand house to which we had been invited through an Australian Minister then staying in London, who could not afford to risk my husband’s displeasure. There was money in the question, of course; there always is,’ said Fulvia, smiling again. ‘We went to this ball. I was in a very bad humour. I had all sorts of silly, sentimental scruples about putting on my white satin and diamonds and pearls—a lamb dressed out for the sacrifice, a kind of Iphigenia, you know, and all the rest of it. Dio mio! what nonsense! What a self-important, self-conscious bambina, I was! I had to go, whether I liked it or not. I had been crying in the morning, and my husband was very angry with me. He had threatened me with all sorts of vague but terrible punishments if I did not, as he called it, rise to the occasion and pull myself together a bit. And I will tell you something else—a most ridiculous thing. I had just passed my seventeenth birthday; the fearful and wonderful hours at which the entertainments began, to which we went, were a physical trial to me. Things are late in Rome too, of course, but, then, I hadn’t been to any things, except occasionally. I was a mere child. I craved my sleep, my beautiful long, unbroken sleep that I had always enjoyed till then. Sometimes I used to fall asleep while my maid was dressing me for one of those functions, and had hard work not to do so when I got to them—not to yawn in the face of my partner at dinner or in a dance. This time, however, I was excited even before we arrived at —— House. It was all very new to me. I had never been at anything like that before. I was at first so shy and sad that I kept very quiet, and was thus saved from committing some solecism or making a fool of myself somehow. As the evening went on, I found that people were looking at me. I found that men were asking to be introduced to me. They were such wonderful men, it then seemed to me—so utterly different from any men I had ever seen before. I saw in their eyes that they found me beautiful. They talked to me, and when they found that I had to keep eking out my still scanty English with Italian, they were more than ever delighted with me. Some few of them spoke my native language more or less badly—generally more so, I must say. In short, I was a great success. I was introduced to a Royal Personage, who said some excessively commonplace things to me, and was himself excessively amused at my initiating several remarks; but he said he liked it, so my reputation for charming originality grew apace. I felt that I was a person of distinction. My husband came up to me once during the evening, and whispered into my ear, “You will do. Keep it up like this, and I’ll give you whatever present you like to ask for.” I could not quite tell what it all meant, but it made my head feel gay and excited. It took me away from my miseries. It was pleasanter to think of than——’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Our home life was not altogether enchanting. During the evening I was dancing in a quadrille with a very handsome young Englishman, and just opposite to us was a countrywoman of his. She also was very handsome. I saw that she looked at me a great deal, but of course did not speak to me. I never made her acquaintance, though I often saw her afterwards. I don’t know how one gets to know these things, but one always does. I discovered that the season before she had been one of the greatest beauties of the year. She had had a good many offers, and amongst them one from my husband, whom she had refused very unceremoniously. Now she was hearing, or rather guessing, that on all sides people were saying that Marchmont had married someone more beautiful than she was. And though she did not in the least regret, I am sure, having refused him, yet she did not like to hear—and to see—that his wife did really surpass her in beauty. Yes,’ pursued Fulvia, ‘it was that evening, in the light of the hundreds of wax candles, and amidst all the beautiful flowers, beautiful women, and fashionable or distinguished men at —— House, that I first realized it was worth while to wake up, to be strong, to preserve my beauty and make the most of myself. I understood it. It came to me like a revelation. That was the life I was born for, and I was soon at home in it. It suits me, and I do not wish to exchange it for any other.’

‘You have never had any children?’ asked Minna quietly.

Fulvia started, surprised for a moment from her self-possession, and exclaimed, hastily and fervently:

‘No—no! Thank God, I never had a child. And now—I never shall.’

‘If the life suits you so admirably, it almost seems——’

‘Che! I am woman of fashion. What do women of fashion want with children? Lovers, on the other hand——’

‘Lovers! I hope you’ll never condescend to that.’

‘Oh, bah!’ said Fulvia, with superb amusement. ‘You don’t suppose I mean love in a serious sense? That is ridiculous. I suppose it exists—but not for people like me, not for people of my world. It would only hamper us——’

At this moment the door opened, and Signor Giuseppe walked into the room.

‘May I join you, as Fulvia is so soon leaving?’ he asked.

‘Oh, surely. Come in.’

He seated himself. ‘Do not let me interrupt you,’ he said to Fulvia. ‘I heard your voice as I was coming in. Go on.’

Fulvia hesitated a moment, looking almost embarrassed. Then, glancing down a little, she went on:

‘I was talking to Mrs. Hastings about my life and my occupations. As I was saying’—she looked again at Minna-‘falling in love would only be a great hindrance to us in our career. You see, everything is changed so—the relations of men to each other, of class to class, of order to order, and, above all, the relations of man and woman to each other. And the relations of women towards society and towards the world are changing wonderfully. It is recognised everywhere now—at least, by all who have their eyes open—that women are henceforward to play a different part in the world’s story. There is a class of woman now existing who will never marry, are never asked to marry, and are not a bit less happy on that account. And why? Because, though they will never marry, they have their clearly defined place in the world. There is a place for them now, though formerly there was none. They form one section, and a new one, of womankind—a sort of connecting link between men and women. I call them the third sex,’ pursued Fulvia to her silenced but not delighted hearers. ‘Then, again, there are the women who marry for love, for the purpose of living with their husbands in homes of their own, and having children, and perpetuating the practice and tradition of the great domestic virtues which are supposed to be so very firmly developed in this particular country.’ She smiled a little, not very genially. ‘They are valuable, too; in fact, we couldn’t very well do without them. But there are yet others who marry, sometimes consciously for position and influence and estate; sometimes unconsciously—sometimes they have it thrust upon them.’ She did not smile at all, and Minna felt that there was deadly earnest behind her calm manner. ‘At any rate, they enter upon that condition, and then they find that there is a world for them, too—a place for them, too, in public affairs, in the social parliament, in giving its tone to modern life in general. Such women necessarily have numbers of—well, whatever you like to call them: admirers, hangers-on, lovers—it’s an old-fashioned word. They know exactly what use to make of such a state of affairs; they know that feelings, and love, and all that kind of thing, are not for them. They have quite a distinct sphere—an influence and a world apart from all sentiment—except what happens to be fashionable at the time; and love no more enters into their calculations than it does into those of the women I first spoke of. They wield another kind of power. It is better suited to them, and better worth having—for them. In a vague, formless way everybody knows this. Some day it will be formulated and written about, and reduced to a system; and by that time fresh developments will be in the air. But sometimes one even of that order of women forgets herself, and somebody teaches her that she has a heart, and it runs away with her, and then——’

‘And then, there is the devil to pay,’ observed Signor Giuseppe, who had not lived for five years in England without picking up some terse native expressions, which he used often with singular point and correctness.

‘Exactly,’ replied Fulvia with a light, hard laugh, as she shrugged her shoulders. ‘It is because she is weak, then. She does not by nature belong to that order. The sooner that fact is proved, and she is relegated from it to another for which she is more suited, the better for her and everyone else.’

‘I think your doctrine a hard one, and a heartless one,’ said Minna, ever more and more constrainedly.

‘But—exactly!’ exclaimed Fulvia almost impatiently. ‘Have I not just been saying that heart is for one set of people only? There are others who are happier and better off without taking it into account. Surely it is better that they should know this, and should get the best out of their lives that is to be extracted from them, rather than spend their time in struggling after some impossible ideal, and dying discontented and misunderstood?’

Minna shook her head as she rang the bell for tea to be brought in. There was something wrong, fallacious and unreal about it, though it tripped glibly from Fulvia’s clever tongue. The most painful thing about it, to her, was that she could not make out whether Fulvia spoke in jest or earnest, for effect, or from a fully convinced heart.

‘Does your husband take any interest in all this?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Oh, my husband’s sole concern now is his ruined health, and his futile hopes of some time being well again. And in any case it does not much matter what he thinks about it. You know he was roturier to the backbone. He was nowhere in society. With all his money, he had no graces of his own with which to conquer a footing in it. It was I who did that for him,’ she said, raising her head a little, and both, as they looked at her wonderful beauty, pure in its outline, girlish still in its freshness, refined and proud, felt that what she said must certainly be true. ‘I won his place for him. It was for my sake that he was tolerated—yes, tolerated,’ she repeated, coolly meeting Minna’s eyes with unmoved calmness. ‘He knows it. Ill though he is, he does not wish to sink out of that world which it cost him so much money to enter. He does not quite like never to be able even to seem to hold the reins, but he would dislike it still more if I were to drop them, and put on a cap and apron, and settle down to nurse him, and never leave his bedside.’

Everything that she said, with such tranquil, quiet assurance, bore upon it the outward impress of truth. As Minna very well knew, such lives, such circumstances, did sometimes so adjust themselves, especially if the woman who was thrust into such a position proved herself strong and self-possessed. A weakling, in the circumstances, with this young woman’s beauty, temptations and absence of safeguards, would either have made some disastrous mess of her life, or would have sickened and pined away in sorrow. Fulvia Marchmont had done neither the one nor the other. She had strength of will and weight of brain, which had been ripened and developed with hothouse rapidity, very painfully and very early. Was that all? was the question which tormented Minna. Had the gentleness of her girl’s nature been quite killed? Was there no weak or vulnerable point, no bit of heart left unprotected by the steel mail of worldliness in which she had encased it? Was she happy, having really found what suited her nature and tastes and capacities? Or was the extreme contentment, amounting to complacency, at least half put on to conceal a void ‘behind the veil’? That was what Minna could not decide to her own satisfaction. The things which, in the whole conversation, had most perplexed and disheartened her had been Fulvia’s quiet statement that her mother had known best and decided wisely, her utter, cheerful calm in meeting Signor Giuseppe, and the bright, clear, dry glance with which she looked into his face, with its profound sadness—for profoundly sad it was, despite the softening influences of the last few years.

‘I shall try one more test,’ Minna decided within herself, and after a little while she said:

‘You must not go away without coming to see my particular den, Fulvia. Come with me now. It is where I oftenest spend my time, so you will know where to think of me. Come with us, won’t you?’ she added, taking Signor Oriole’s hand, and drawing him along with her. They went through the hall to the other side of the house, where were two or three moderately sized rooms opening one out of the other.

‘Here is my sanctum,’ said Minna. ‘I don’t do any more sculpture now—nothing to speak of. That is the almost last real piece of work that I finished—really finished, you know. Do you remember it?’

She pointed with her finger to the bust of Fulvia the girl, and led Fulvia the woman up to it, and made her stand in front of it.

For a moment her lips twitched, her eyebrows contracted. She did not speak for some time, but stood quite steadily and motionless before the bust, her hands lightly folded one over the other. At last she said:

‘I am sure it was an excellent likeness. I can see my present features exactly.’ She smiled, and drew her forefinger down the line of her nose. ‘And the eyes and the forehead, and the way the hair grows—it is myself exactly, even now. But the expression! Did I really look such a woebegone, sentimental, lackadaisical creature as that?’

She laughed, and turned inquiringly to Minna, who replied in a slow, sad voice:

‘Yes, you looked even so sad as that; and you felt even so sad as that.’

Again a little impatient shrug of the shoulders, and a smiling ‘Dio mio! I must have been a very depressing companion.’

She turned to find Signor Giuseppe standing just behind her, gazing with intense, wistful earnestness through his spectacles, alternately at her and at the likeness. His face was full of some kind of emotion. She resolutely declined to notice it, but said to Minna:

‘I think it is an awful pity that you do not work any more at such things as this. If you had been a poor woman you would have had to do it, and you would have earned name and fame.’

‘Possibly,’ replied Minna dryly, as they went out of the room.

Fulvia would not sit down again. She said it was high time to get ready for her drive to the station, as she would not miss the train on any account.

She had gone, almost promising to return and bring her husband to Yewridge Hall. Minna, back again in her own house, went straight to her den, threw aside her hat and gloves, sat down in a chair directly in front of the bust—the work of her own hands—and looked intently at it, interrogating it, entreating it. So sad—so unspeakably sad and grieved—that girl’s face! So firm, so bright, so apparently untouched by grief or care, untroubled by any wish save for power, and conscious pleasure in possessing a great deal of it, that of the woman! Yet the cold marble, with the look of one who was sad unto death, was not really as lifeless as the living woman, who smiled and talked and spoke brightly and took a superficial interest in all that was going on.

Minna started, and her eyes dilated. Had she at last got the clue to the transformation? What were the words that tried to take shape in her mind as she looked at the immovable marble, and thought of the marble endowed with life now on her way to London? The name of an old play, the words of some old proverb—‘Killing no Murder.’

‘That is it!’ she exclaimed aloud, and then, looking again and again at the sweet sad lips which she herself had carved, she said in a whisper to herself:

‘No, it is worse than that; it is murder no killing! That is the answer to the enigma; I know it is. It was her own mother who did it. Oh, horrible, horrible! She murdered, without killing her! Her soul is dead—that’s what it is—poor little Fulvia’s beautiful soul and warm, beating heart—murdered; while her body and her brain are left to live on alone. How I used to wonder, just after she was married, how it would end, what turn it would take with her—crush her, or harden her, or kill her! It has been the moral death. She is murdered, and is yet living.’

There are moments in the lives of most of us in which some great truth comes home to us with overpowering force. It may be uttered by other lips, and may from them strike straight into our souls, as the answer to some strange and puzzling problem over which we have been brooding. The sight of a picture; the notes of a song, or of some instrument of music; the prospect of clouds in the heaven, or rain sweeping across the fields; the wail of the wind on a stormy day or night: any or all of these may, with a lightning-quick flash of intuition, crystallize the idea which has been floating in a state of solution in our minds. Such intuitions have the value of spiritual revelations—they are beyond proof; they may even be disproved theoretically—they can never be the less true and real to those who have experienced them; and although every voice on earth should uplift itself and pronounce them false, it were useless. He or she who has been thus, as it were, smitten in the face, in the heart, and in the soul, by one of these flashes of spiritual insight, never more has the power to disbelieve it.

Such a revelation came at that moment into the heart of Minna Hastings, as she sat with her hands clasped round her knees, and looked up at her own handiwork, standing on its pedestal, and gazing forth with nameless sadness into life.

Minna had never had a child of her own; she had, however, above all things, a mother’s heart, and craved with unspeakable craving for motherhood. All children and young things were dear to her: they all loved her and confided in her. She had known many girls since her own girlhood; had heard from their own lips the histories of their griefs and joys, their hopes and fears; had loved them, counselled them, admonished them, been patient and kind and helpful to them; but she had never loved one of them with such a love as that which she had borne to Fulvia Dietrich. Of all the girls she had known, Fulvia was the one whom she would most have desired to be her own child. It swept over her heart now, this deep love, like a great wave, strong as ever, pitiful, yearning as ever, and she knew how Fulvia’s lot had saddened her own bright life. She realized what that sudden meeting with her had meant. As she looked and looked, her sadness increased, till it was almost more than she could bear. Great tears gathered in her eyes, fell from them, rolled down her cheeks and into her hands, and before she knew what was happening she was shaking with sobs—the sobs of an endless pity and compunction, the sobs of one who would fain help to overthrow some great wrong, heal some immense grief and injustice, and who cannot.

Without her being aware of it, the door of the room had been opened by someone who had knocked twice and received no answer. It was Signor Giuseppe, who came in and first made her aware of his presence by laying his hand upon her shoulder.

‘Why are you weeping?’ he asked in a husky voice. ‘I could not wait any longer. Why do you weep? Has she been complaining? Has she told you her griefs?’

‘No,’ said Minna sadly. ‘I wish she had; it would have been better. I should have felt happier if she were crying all day, than that she should have become what she is. You will see; you must know what I mean.’

‘I know what you think,’ he said slowly.

‘And don’t you think the same?’

‘I don’t know. We shall see, as you say. She practically promised me to come here.’

‘Promised you? When?’

‘I saw her alone for a few minutes,’ he said with a smile. ‘It was before lunch—before she made that brilliant dissertation to you on the subject of women and their spheres. I diritti della donna,’ he added with a little laugh. ‘It sounded very well. She is a brave girl, that Fulvia! She will come here and be near us.’

But Minna, looking at the marble likeness of Fulvia Dietrich, shook her head, and her heart misgave her.

END OF VOL. II.

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Changes made to text:

On page 91, changed “Aminula” to “Animula”
On page 92, changed “Bené” to “Bene”
On page 116, changed “to day” to “to-day”

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Table of Contents

- ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

- NEW LIBRARY NOVELS.

- ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

- CHAPTER IX.

- CHAPTER X.

- CHAPTER XI.

- CHAPTER XII.

- CHAPTER XIII.

- CHAPTER XIV.

- CHAPTER XV.

- CHAPTER XVI.

- CHAPTER XVII.

- CHAPTER XVIII.

- TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE