Now she heard the music wander off in modulating chords which resolved themselves into the rippling accompaniment of Hugo Wolff's "Musikant."
She could hear the soft tenor voice, and felt it drawing at her heart. She closed the window and sat down again. She dipped the ivory pen into the inkstand, and wrote at the top of the white sheet, "Villa Solitudine," and the date. Under it, as she had not thought of a title yet, she wrote in large letters:
Then she jumped up and ran downstairs.
At sunset they went out in a sailing-boat. Clarissa held the rudder, and Aldo stood in easy attitudes of beauty at the sail. The glow of the west was on his pure young face, and the wind of the tramontana raised his waved hair and blew it lightly across his forehead. He was silent, satisfied to know that the two women could see him, and that the red-gold sky was a good background for his profile. Clarissa talked and laughed, twittered and purred; but Aldo never spoke. And it was his silence that enraptured Nancy.
Stecchetti's words sang in her brain with new meaning, and in the days that followed the two smooth lines were always in her mind.
Aldo knew little, but he knew the value of silence. He knew the lure of the hortus conclusus—the Closed Garden into which one has not stepped. Nancy stood outside its gates and dreamed of its unseen roses, of fountains and shadowy paths and water-lilied lakes. For Aldo was a closed garden.
Aldo also knew the value of his eyes—deep, passion-lit eyes, that looked, Clarissa said, as if he had rubbed the lids with burnt cork to darken them. When he raised them suddenly, and looked straight at Nancy, she felt a little shock of pleasure that took her breath away. Little by little, day by day, those eyes drew Nancy's spirit to their depths—she leaned over them as over an abyss. In them she sunk and drowned her soul.... Then, when from his eyes her own passionate purity gazed back at her, she thought she saw his soul and not her own.
The Book cried in her now and then, but she stifled its voice and whispered: "Wait!"
And The Book waited.
One day in the garden Aldo spoke to Clarissa. She was in the hammock pretending to read.
"Clarissa, I am twenty-five years old."
"Vlan! ça y est!" said Clarissa, dropping her book. Then she drew a deep breath, and her nostrils turned a little pale; but the superposed roses of her cheeks bloomed on, independent of her ebbing blood and sickening heart.
"I am penniless," continued Aldo, picking a piece of grass and chewing it; "and Carlo has given me to understand that he can exist without me if he tries very hard."
Clarissa sat up. "When? What did he say? Does he … has he … did he mean anything?"
Aldo shook his comely head. "Carlo never means anything. But I shall have to go back to—to the Texas ranch, or marry."
The Texas ranch was a romantic invention of Clarissa's, the only foundation for which was a three weeks' holiday which Aldo had once spent in the city of New York.
Clarissa bit her red, narrow lips. "Yes," she said.
During the long pause that followed Aldo picked another piece of grass and chewed it.
"I suppose," said Clarissa, looking at him sideways through her long lids, "you will marry some affectionate old thing with money."
"No. I know them," said Aldo. "They demand the affection, and keep the money."
After a pause, in which he felt Clarissa's angry eyes on his face, he said: "I am going to marry the little Sappho."
Clarissa laughed suddenly and loud. "You do that for your pleasure! Farceur, va!" Aldo lifted his perfect eyebrows and did not reply. "She has nothing, not a little black sou!" And Clarissa stuck her long pointed thumbnail behind her long pointed teeth and jerked it forward.
"Oh! I dare say she has something," said Aldo, pretending to yawn carelessly. "Besides, she is a genius, and can earn what she will."
"You are the perfect Neapolitan pig," said Clarissa, and closed her eyes.
The perfect Neapolitan pig rose with an offended air and left her. He strolled into the house and took his hat and stick, then he strolled out again and through the garden into the hot street and down to the landing-place. A boat was leaving for Intra, so he went on board, and at Intra took the train for Milan. He dined at Biffi's, feeling happy.
"They will be miserable," he said. "That will teach them." Then he went to his furnished rooms on the Corso, and slept well.
In Villa Solitudine they were miserable, and it taught them.
It taught Nancy that the Closed Garden she had had a glimpse of for so brief an hour was the only garden in the world that she ever wanted to enter; and that all the words Aldo had not said were the only words she ever wanted to hear; that perfect goodness and unwavering strength must lie behind his portentous beauty, white and immovable like marble lions at a palace gate.
It taught Clarissa that one must accept the inevitable—that half a loaf was better than no bread, and that a married Aldo was better than no Aldo at all. It made her look at Nancy with closer eyes, and say to herself that she was a little creature one would easily tire of, in spite of—or because of—her intellectuality. Aldo was not a closed garden for Clarissa; she knew the feeble flowers that bowed behind its gates.
A hot, dreary week passed with no news from Aldo. Then Clarissa telegraphed to him at Milan. She said she had told Carlo about their conversation regarding his wish to marry Nancy, and Carlo approved. Would he come back?
Yes; Aldo would come back. He waited another day or two, and at the close of a sultry afternoon he sauntered in, just as he had sauntered out, across the sleepy, bee-droning lawns of the Villa Solitudine. He stopped at the entrance of the summer-house, where Nancy sat reading a letter—a long letter. Already two of the blue sheets had fallen at her side. Before her on the table was the inkstand and the ivory pen and The Book. As his shadow passed the threshold she looked up; she drew a quick breath, and her face turned milky white, with a pallor that gripped at Aldo's nerves.
Once more, and for the last time, he bent his head over her hand. "Signora, I am your slave," he said. But as he raised his eyes she knew that he had said: "Nancy, I am your master."
"Who writes to you?" he asked.
She drooped submissive lashes, and the colour ran into her cheeks. "Mr. Kingsley, the English friend," she said. "Do you remember him?"
Aldo took her hand and with it the letter in his own.
"What does he want?"
Her dimples fluttered. "He wants me to be good," she said, laughing, with wistful eyes. "And to write."
Aldo pressed the little fist with the crumpled blue letter in it to his lips. "Well, write," he said. "Write at once."
He took the ivory pen and dipped it in the ink and put it in her hand; then he pulled the sheet of white paper which was to be The Book before her.
"Write: 'Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. He adores me.'"
And Nancy, with her hair almost touching the paper, wrote: "Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. I adore him."
The Englishman never got the letter. But he heard of it afterwards; and his English fists closed tight.
XVI
Nancy walked among asphodels and morning glory; and her soul was plunged in happiness and her eyes were washed with light. The Book waited.
They went out in the little boat at sunset. Aldo stood at the sail, and the red sky was a background for his profile.