"Oh," sighed Nancy, looking at him and clasping puerile hands, "your beauty aches me!"
Aldo quite understood it, and was pleased.
They went for long walks to Premeno and San Salvatore; as Clarissa refused to accompany them, Carlo chaperoned them, blandly bored.
Soon Valeria arrived. Nancy went down to meet her at the landing-place, looking ethereal and pink as a spray of apple-blossom. Valeria kissed her with hot tears. "Oh! my baby, my baby!" she said, and wished that the seventeen years were a dream, and that her child's small head were still safely nestling at her breast. In Nancy's young love she lived the days of her own betrothal over again, and Tom arose in her memory and was with her day and night. On this same silky blue lake Tom had so often rowed her with Zio Giacomo, in a little boat called Luisa. She tearfully begged Nancy and Aldo to come with her and see if they could not find that very self-same boat.
They found, indeed, three Luisas, but Valeria could not recognize them; still, all three of the boatmen declared that they remembered her perfectly, and got the expected tip.
"Of course," said Valeria, deeply moved, "it cannot have been all three of them."
And Aldo said: "You should not have given them anything. They were none of them more than twenty-five years old." Whereupon Valeria sighed deeply.
Then it was decided that they should go in reverent pilgrimage to the Madonna del Monte, where Nancy's father had asked Nancy's mother to marry him. The road was lined with beggars: shouting cripples, exhibiting sores and stumps.
"Some of these are very old," sighed Valeria. "I am sure they were here that day, and must have seen me."
"I shall give a franc to every one of them," said Nancy, taking out her small fat purse, as the first one-armed mendicant held out his greasy hat.
"My dear Nancy, what nonsense!" said Aldo. "There are about a hundred of them!"
"Well?" and Nancy raised clear, questioning eyes to his.
"Oh, I don't mind," said Aldo, with a little Neapolitan shrug.
Valeria looked at the handsome figure and impeccable profile of her future son-in-law, as he strolled beside them up the steep wide road. Her heart was heavy with recollections. Up this road she had walked in her blue dress and scarlet tie with Tom beside her—Tom, broad and careless in his slouchy brown suit, who had given the beggars all his coppers and silver, just as Tom's daughter was doing to-day. Again she looked at Aldo's slim, straight shoulders and sighed. "I wish it had been an Englishman!" she thought. Then, as her memory took her to England, she saw someone else. "Or, then, poor dear Nino." And she sighed again; but not altogether for Nancy's sake.
She wrote to Nino that evening, and, almost without knowing it, began her letter, "Poor dear Nino!"
Nino was out interviewing Consuls about the presumably deceased Eduardo Villari when the letter arrived. So Nunziata opened the letter.
In it Valeria told Nino that Nancy, "our little Nancy," was betrothed to Aldo della Rocca, and could Nino not do anything to prevent it? And why, oh why, had his sister Clarissa invited them both to stay at the Villa Solitudine, so that, as Fräulein Müller or was it Heine?—used to say, "Wie könnte es anders sein," for how could anyone see Nancy in the resplendency of her seventeen Aprils and not fall in love with her? And oh, she was so sorry for poor, dear Nino, for she knew the secret of his heart. And how true it was what he had said about Nancy's eyes being so pure that they seemed never to have gazed at aught but the sky; and she understood him and his sufferings, for had she not herself suffered dreadfully through him, years ago—but never mind, that was nothing. And it had never been dear, dear Nino's fault at all; it was her own foolish fault and Fate.... And she hoped Nino did not think that she had really suffered, for she had not, and now she never, never thought of it any more! And if he came quickly he might still be in time; and oh, she knew he must be heart-broken, but he was not to mind, because it could not be helped. And she was ever his unhappy Valeria.
Nunziata read the rambling letter three times before she understood it. The letter opened her eyes.
When her eyes were open Nunziata saw well. She saw the chain of desire stretching out ring on ring: from Valeria's heart to Nino; from Nino's heart to Nancy; from Nancy's heart to Aldo, as in a children's game; and Love passing down from one to the other, stopping before each with gift of passion, of pain, of joy. She saw that her years placed her behind Valeria—far back, far back, out of the game; and she knew that Love had passed her, and would not stop before her any more. Then she remembered that she had had her gifts; that Love had heaped roses at her feet, and that she had moved through passions as through a field of flowers.
Nunziata decided that she would play the game.
She went with her newly-opened eyes to her room and threw the shutters back. She looked at her tired pink face in the glass, at her crimson lips and complicated hair. She went on her knees beside her bed and said three Paters and three Aves. Then she opened her reluctant hands and gave her dead youth back to God.
She washed her face with warm water and soap, and unpinned her elaborate curls. She wound her own soft hair round her head, and put on a plain black gown. Then, looking, although she did not think so, twenty years younger and twenty times sweeter than she did before, she went downstairs to wait for Nino.
That same evening she sent him back to his father. His luggage was packed and the brougham was waiting for him at the door, and still he declared he would not go. He would not leave her. Her face was whiter than any poudre de lys could ever make it as she kissed his forehead, and blessed it with the sign of the cross, and told him that he must indeed go, and not return again.
At last, before his stubborn refusal, she took the weapon that hurt her most, and used it to pierce her own heart. "Think of Nancy!" she said. "You may still be in time to prevent her from marrying an adventurer."
Nino looked into the pale, kind face, from which every trace of triviality had been washed by the warm water and the tears. And, being a man, he did not wait, and refuse, and then catch a later train; but with candid cruelty he said: "You are right. You are an angel. May the saints bless you!"
… She stood on the balcony and watched the carriage drive away into the night; it turned up Corso Umberto and was gone. With it the lights went out in Nunziata Villari's life.
Youth, love, hope, desire—Fate blew all the candles out, and left her in the dark.
XVII
Aldo's curved red lips under his very young moustache opened to words as well as to kisses under Nancy's impelling, eager love. During the long hours they spent together she spoke and he must answer. His splendid, silent eyes urged her to quick questionings, and his kisses did not still the thirst of her soul for his soul. Little by little she pushed back the gates of the Closed Garden; gently, day by day, she ventured a step farther adown the mysterious paths. Where are the arbours of roses? Where the fountains and the deep, water-lilied lakes? She tiptoed down the narrow paths that Clarissa and many others had trodden before her, and when she had come to the end she said: "I am mistaken. I have not entered the Garden yet."
They were to be married almost at once. Aldo was impatient, and Nancy was in love; and The Book was waiting. So Valeria left for Milan to prepare the trousseau, and Nancy must follow a week later. On the eve of her journey Clarissa went up to say good-night to Nancy in her room—the large, bare room in which the masterpiece had not been written. Nancy's trunks were packed. The ivory pen and The Book were put away. The large inkstand stood alone on the large table.
Nancy was leaning out of the window looking at the stars. Clarissa came and stood behind her and looked up into the cobalt depths.