Olive in Italy Part 22

"I have been so looking forward to showing you the garden," he said hurriedly in his kind eagerness to put her at her ease. "There are still a few late chrysanthemums, and you will find blue and white violets in the gra.s.s by the sundial."

They pa.s.sed down the steps together and through the green twilight of the orange groves, and came to a little fountain in the midst of a s.p.a.ce of lawn set about with laurels. Hilaire threw a biscuit into the pool, and the dark water gleamed with silver and gold as the fish rushed at it.

"I flatter myself that all the living things in this garden know me,"

he said. "I bar the plainer kinds of insects and scorpions, of course; but the small green lizards are charming, aren't they?"

"Mamie Whittaker had one on a gold chain. She used to wear it sometimes."

"She would," he said drily. "The young savage! Better go naked than torture harmless things."

"This place is perfect," sighed Olive; and then, "You have no home in France?"

"We should have; but our great-grandfather was guillotined in Paris during the Terror, and his wife and child came to England. Years later, when they might have gone back they would not. Why should they?

Napoleon had given the Avenel estates to one of his ruffians, who had since seceded to the Bourbon and so made all secure. Besides, they were happy enough. Marie Louis Hilaire gave music lessons, and the Marquise scrubbed and cooked and patched their clothes--she, who had been the Queen's friend, and so they managed to keep the little home together. Presently the young man married, and then Jean Marie appeared on the scene. We have a picture of him at the age of five, in a nankeen frock and a frill. Our mother was a Hungarian--hence Jean's music, I suppose--and there is Romany blood on that side. These are our antecedents. You will not be surprised at our vagaries now?"

Olive smiled. "No, I shall remember the red heels of Versailles, English bread and b.u.t.ter, and the gipsy caravan."

"Jean has fetched your books from the Monte di Pieta. Marietta found the tickets in your coat pocket. You don't mind?"

Looking at her he saw her eyes fill with tears, and he hurried on: "No rubbish, I notice. Are you fond of reading?"

"Yes."

"I was wondering if you would care to undertake a work for me."

"I should be glad to do anything," she said anxiously.

"I have some thousands of books in the villa. Those I have collected myself I know--they are all in the library--but there are many that were left me by my father, and others that came from an uncle, and they are all piled up in heaps in the empty rooms on the second floor.

I want someone to sort them out, catalogue, and arrange them for me.

Would you care to do it?"

"Yes, indeed."

"That's all right then," he said hastily. "I'll get a carpenter in at once to put up some more shelves ready for them. And I think you had better stay on in the villa, if you don't mind. It will be more convenient. The salary will be two hundred lire a month, paid in advance."

"Your kindness--I can't express my grat.i.tude--" she began tremulously.

"Nonsense! This is a business transaction, and I am coming out of it very well. I should not get a man to do the work for that absurdly small sum. I am underpaying you on purpose because I hate women."

Olive laughed. "Commend me to misogynists henceforth."

She wanted to begin at once, but her host a.s.sured her that he would rather she waited until the shelves were put up.

"You will have to sort them out several times, according to date, language and subject. Perhaps Jean can help you when he returns. He is away just now."

Watching her, he saw the deepening of the rose.

"I--I can't remember exactly what happened the night I came, Mr Avenel. You know I had not been able to find work, and though my _padrona_ was kind she was very poor too. She p.a.w.ned my things for me, but they fetched so little, and I had not had anything to eat for ever so long when he came. He has not gone away because of me, has he?"

Hilaire threw the fish another biscuit; it fell among the lily leaves at the feet of the weather-stained marble nymph of the fountain.

"I must decline to answer," he said gravely, after a pause. "I understand that you are twenty-three and old enough therefore to judge for yourself, and I do not intend to influence either you or Jean, if I can help it. You will be perfectly free to do exactly what you think right, my dear girl. I will only give you one bit of advice, and that is, look at life with your eyes wide open. Don't blink! This is Friday, and Jean is coming to see you on Wednesday."

CHAPTER XI

Olive told herself that Hilaire was very good to her in the days that followed. He came sometimes into the room where she was, to find her sitting on the floor amid the piles of books she was trying to reduce to some kind of order.

"You do not get tired? I am afraid they are rather dusty."

"Oh, not at all," she a.s.sured him. She was swathed in a blue linen ap.r.o.n of Marietta's and had tied a cotton handkerchief over her hair.

"I like to feel I am doing something for you," she said. "I wish--you have been--you are so kind."

On the Wednesday morning she covered some of the books with brown paper and pasted labels on their backs. She tried not to listen for the creaking of the great gates as they swung open, for the grating of wheels against the stones, for Jean's voice calling to his brother, for his quick step upon the stair, but she heard all as she wrote _Vita Nuova_ on the slip intended for an early edition of the _Rape of the Lock_, and put the _Decameron_ aside with some sermons and commentaries that were to be cla.s.sified as devotional literature. He did not come to her then, but she was desperately afraid that he might. "I am not ready ... not ..."

When, later, she came into the dining-room she seemed to be perfectly at her ease. Jean's eyes had been fixed on the door, and they met hers eagerly as she came forward. "Are you better?" he asked, and then bit his lip, thinking he had said the wrong thing.

"Oh, yes. But--but you look pale and thinner."

Her little air of gay indifference fell away from her. As he still held her hand she felt the tears coming and longed to be able to run upstairs and take some more sal volatile, but Hilaire came to the rescue.

"Well, let's have lunch," he said. "I hate tepid food."

When they had taken their places Jean gave the girl a letter.

"It came for you to the Lorenzoni. I called at the porter's lodge this morning and Ser Gigia gave it me."

"Such a waste of good things I never saw," the butler said afterwards to his wife. "As you know, the _padrone_ never eats more than enough to fill a bird, but I have seen the signorino hungry, and the young lady too. To-day, however, they ate nothing, though the _frittata_ was fit to melt in one's mouth. I should not have been ashamed to set it before the Archangel Gabriel, and he would have eaten it, since it is certain that the Blessed One has never been in love."

After the meal, to which no one indeed had done justice, Hilaire explained that he was going to write some letters.

The younger man looked at Olive. "Come with me," he said abruptly. "I want to play to you."

"I want to hear you," she said as she rose from the table.

He followed her into the music-room and shut the door. "Well?"

She chose to misunderstand him. "It is charming. Just what a shrine of sound should be."

The grand piano stood out from the grey-green background of the walls beyond, there was a bronze statuette of Orpheus with his lute on a twisted Byzantine column of white and gold mosaic, and a long cus.h.i.+oned divan set on one side broke the long lines of light on the polished floor.

"What are you going to play?" she asked.

"Nothing, at present," he said, smiling at her. "I want to talk to you first. You are not frightened?"