The Devourers Part 4

"Because I am afwaid of them!" and Nancy smiled bewitchingly.

Everybody found this an astonis.h.i.+ngly profound reply, and the question of Nancy's genius recurred constantly in the conversation.

Edith said: "Of course, it will be painting. Her father, poor dear Tom, was such a wonderful landscape-painter. And I believe he did some splendid figures, too."

Mrs. Avory concurred; but Valeria shook her head and changed colour.

"Oh, I hope not!" she said, instant tears gathering in her eyes.

Mrs. Avory looked hurt. "Why not, Valeria?" she said.

"Oh, the smell," sobbed Valeria; "and the models ... and I could not bear it. Oh, my Tom--my dear Tom!" And she sobbed convulsively, with her head on Mrs. Avory's shoulder, and with Edith's arm round her.

Nancy screamed loud, and had to be taken away to the nursery, where Fraulein Muller, the German successor of Wilson, shook her.

"Could it not be music?" said Valeria, after a while, drying her eyes dejectedly. "My mother was a great musician; she played the harp, and composed lovely songs. When she died, and I went to live in Milan with Uncle Giacomo, I used to play all Chopin's mazurkas and impromptus to him, although he said he hated music if anyone else played.... And, then, when I married ..."--Valeria's sobs burst forth again--"dear Tom ... said ..."

Edith intervened quickly. "I certainly think it ought to be music;" and she kissed Valeria's hot face. "The kiddy sings 'Onward, Christian Soldiers,' and 'Schlaf, Kindchen' in perfect tune. Fraulein was telling me so, and said how remarkable it was."

So Nancy was sent for again, and was brought in by Fraulein, who had a scratch on her cheek.

Nancy was told to sing, "Schlaf, Kindchen, schlaf, da draussen steht ein Schaf," and she did so with very bad grace and not much voice. But loud and servile applause from everyone, including Fraulein, gratified her, and she volunteered her entire repertoire, comprising "There'll be razors a-flyin' in the air," which she had learned incidentally from the attractive and supercilious gardener's boy, Jim Brown.

So it was decided that Nancy should be a great musician, and a piano with a small keyboard was obtained for her at once. A number of books on theory and harmony were bought, and Edith said Valeria was to read them carefully, and to teach Nancy without letting her notice it. But Nancy noticed it. And at last she used to cry and stamp her feet as soon as she saw her mother come into the room.

Fraulein, with much diplomacy, and according to a German book on education, taught her her notes and her alphabet at the same time; but the result was confusion. Nancy insisted on spelling words at the piano, and could find no "o" for dog, and no "t" for cat, and no anything; while the Italian Valeria added obscurity and bewilderment by calling "d" _re_, and "g" _sol_, and "b" _c_. Nancy became sour and suspicious.

In everything that was said to her she scented a trap for the conveying of musical knowledge, and she trusted no one, and would speak to no one but Jim Brown and the grandfather.

At last she lit upon a device that afflicted and horrified her tormentors. One day, when her mother was drawing little men, that turned out to be semibreves, Nancy, speechless with anger, put her hand to her soft hair, and dragged out a handful of it. Valeria gave a cry; she opened the little fist, and saw the soft black fluff lying there.

"Oh, baby, baby! how could you!" she cried. "What a dreadful thing! How can you grieve your poor mother so!"

That ended the musical education. Every time that a note lifted its black head over Nancy's horizon, up went her hand, and she pulled out a tuft of her hair. Then she opened her fist and showed it. Books on harmony were put away; the piano was locked. No more Beethoven or Schumann was sung to her in the guise of lullabies by Fraulein at night; but her old friend, "Baby Bunting," returned, and accompanied her, as of old, when she sailed down the stream of sleep, afloat on the darkness.

"Bye, Baby Bunting, Father's gone a-hunting, To shoot a rabbit for its skin, To wrap little Baby Bunting in."

... Nancy sat on the gra.s.s, nursing her doll, and watching three small rampant feathers on Fraulein Muller's hat, nodding, like little plumes on a hea.r.s.e, in time with something she was reading.

"What are you reading?" asked Nancy.

Fraulein Muller went on nodding, and read aloud: "'s.h.i.+ne out, little het, sunning over with gurls.'"

_"What?"_ said Nancy.

"'s.h.i.+ne out, little het, sunning over with gurls,'" repeated Fraulein Muller.

"What does mean 'sunning over with girls'?" cried Nancy, frowning.

"Gurls, gurls--hair-gurls!" explained Fraulein.

"_Curls!_ Are you sure it is curls?" said Nancy, dropping her doll in the gra.s.s, and folding her hands. "Read it again. Slowly."

"'s.h.i.+ne out, little het,'" repeated Fraulein. And Nancy said it after her. "'s.h.i.+ne out, little head, s.h.i.+ne out, little head ... sunning over with curls.'"

Then she said to her governess: "Say that over and over and over again, until I tell you not to;" and she shut her eyes.

"Aber warum?" asked Fraulein Muller.

Nancy did not open her eyes nor answer.

"Komische Kleine," said Fraulein; and added, in order to practise her English, "Comic small!" Then she did as she was told.

That night Nancy quarrelled with "Baby Bunting." She sat up in bed with flushed cheeks and small, tight fists, and said to Fraulein Muller: "Do not tell me that any more."

Fraulein, who had been droning on in the dusk over her knitting, and thinking that at this hour in Dusseldorf her sister and mother were eating _belegte Brodchen_, looked up in surprise.

"What it is, mein Liebchen?"

"Do not tell me any more about that rabbit. I cannot hear about him any more. You keep on--you keep on till I am ill."

Fraulein Muller was much troubled in suggesting other songs. She tried one or two with scant success.

Nancy sat up again. "All those silly words tease me. Sing without saying them."

So Fraulein hummed uncertain tunes with her lips closed, and she was just drifting into Beethoven, when Nancy sat up once more:

"Oh, don't do that!" she said. "Say words without those silly noises.

Say pretty words until I go to sleep."

So Fraulein, after she had tried all the words she could think of, took Lenau's poems from her own bookshelf, and read Nancy to sleep. On the following evenings she read the "Waldlieder," and then "Mischka," until it was finished. Then she started Uhland; and after Uhland, Korner, and Freiligrath, and Lessing.

Who knows what Nancy heard? Who knows what visions and fancies she took with her to her dreams? In the little sleep-boat where Baby Bunting used to be with her, now sat a row of German poets, long of hair, wild of eye, fulgent of epithet. Night after night, for months and years, little Nancy drifted off to her slumber with lyric and lay, with ode and epic, lulled by cadenced rhythm and resonant rhyme. On one of these nights the poets cast a spell over her. They rowed her little boat out so far that it never quite touched sh.o.r.e again.

And Nancy never quite awoke from her dreams.

V

In Milan the cross-grained old architect, Giacomo Tirindelli, Valeria's "Zio Giacomo," stout of figure and short of leg, got up in the middle of the night and went to his son Antonio's room.

The room was empty. He had expected this, but he was none the less incensed. He went to the window and threw the shutters open. Milan slept. Silent and deserted, Via Principe Amedeo lay at his feet. Every alternate lamp already extinguished showed that it was past twelve o'clock; and a dreary cat wandered across the road, making the street emptier for its presence.

Zio Giacomo closed the window, and walked angrily up and down his son's room. On the walls, on the mantelpiece, on the desk, were photographs--Nunziata Villari as Theodora, in stiff regal robes; Nunziata Villari as Cleopatra, clad in jewels; Nunziata Villari as Marguerite Gautier, in her nightdress, or so it appeared to Zio Giacomo's angry eyes; Villari as Norah; Villari as Sappho; Villari as Francesca. Then, in a corner, in an old frame, the portrait of a little girl: _"My Cousin Valeria, twelve years old."_ Zio Giacomo stopped with a short angry sigh before the picture of his favourite niece, whom he had hoped one day to call his daughter. "Foolish girl," he grumbled, "to marry that idiotic Englishman instead of my stupid, disobedient son----"

Then another profile of Nunziata Villari caught his eye, and then again Nunziata Villari, all hair and smile.... Zio Giacomo had time to learn the strange, strong face by heart before he heard the street-door fall to, and his son's footsteps on the stairs.