Джин Уэбстер - The Wheat Princess

Marcia looked at her aunt a moment with wide-open eyes. ‘Heavens!’ she thought, ‘do I usually talk this way? No wonder Mr. Sybert doesn’t like me!’ And then she laughed. ‘I think it looks lovely, Aunt Katherine, and I am sure it is very becoming.’

The arrival of guests precluded any further conversation on the subject of Italian dressmakers. The Contessa Torrenieri was small and slender and olive-coloured, with a cloud of black hair and dramatic eyes. She had a pair of nervous little hands which were never still, and a magnetic manner which brought the men to her side and created a tendency among the women to say spiteful things. Marcia was no exception to the rest of her sex, and her comments on the contessa’s doings were frequently not prompted by a spirit of charitableness.

To-night the contessa evidently had something on her mind. She barely finished her salutations before transferring her attention to Marcia. ‘Come, Signorina Copley, and sit beside me on the sofa; we harmonize so well’—this with a glance from her own rose-coloured gown to Marcia’s rose trimmings. ‘I missed you from tea this afternoon,’ she added. ‘I trust you had a pleasant walk.’

‘A pleasant walk?’ Marcia questioned, off her guard.

‘I passed you as I was driving in the Borghese. But you did not see me; you were too occupied.’ She shook her head, with a smile. ‘It will not do in Italy, my dear. An Italian girl would never walk alone with a young man.’

‘Fortunately I am not an Italian girl.’

‘You are too strict, contessa,’ Sybert, who was sitting near, put in with a laugh. ‘If Miss Copley chooses, there is no reason why she should not walk in the gardens with a young man.’

‘A girl of the lower classes perhaps, but not of Signorina Copley’s class. With her dowry, she will be marrying an Italian nobleman one of these days.’

Marcia flushed with annoyance. ‘I have not the slightest intention of marrying an Italian nobleman,’ she returned.

‘One must marry some one,’ said her companion.

Mr. Melville relieved the tension by inquiring, ‘And who was the hero of this episode, Miss Marcia? We have not heard his name.’

Marcia laughed good-humouredly. ‘Your friend Mr. Dessart.’ The Melvilles exchanged glances. ‘I met him in the gallery, and as the carriage hadn’t come and Gerald was playing in the fountain and Marietta was flirting with a gendarme (Dear me! Aunt Katherine, I didn’t mean to say that), we strolled about until the carriage came. I’m sure I had no intention of shocking the Italian nobility; it was quite unpremeditated.’

‘If the Italian nobility never stands a worse shock than that, it is happier than most nobilities,’ said her uncle. And the simultaneous announcement of M. Benoit and dinner created a diversion.

It was a small party, and every one felt the absence of that preliminary chill which a long list of guests invited two weeks beforehand is likely to produce. They talked back and forth across the table, and laughed and joked in the unpremeditated way that an impromptu affair calls forth. Marcia glanced at her uncle once or twice in half perplexity. He seemed so entirely the careless man of the world, as he turned a laughing face to answer one of Mrs. Melville’s sallies, that she could scarcely believe he was the same man who had spoken so seriously to her a few minutes before. She glanced across at Sybert. He was smiling at some remark of the contessa’s, to which he retorted in Italian. ‘I don’t see how any sensible man can be interested in the contessa!’ was her inward comment as she transferred her attention to the young Frenchman at her side.

Whenever the conversation showed a tendency to linger on politics, Mrs. Copley adroitly redirected it, as she knew from experience that the subject was too combustible by far for a dinner-party.

‘Italy, Italy! These men talk nothing but Italy,’ she complained to the young Frenchman on her right. ‘Does it not make you homesick for the boulevards?’

‘I suffered the nostalgie once,’ he confessed, ‘but Rome is a good cure.’

Marcia shook her head in mock despair. ‘And you, too, M. Benoit! Patriotism is certainly dying out.’

‘Not while you live,’ said her uncle.

‘Oh, I know I’m abnormally patriotic,’ she admitted; ‘but you’re all so sluggish in that respect, that you force it upon one.’

‘There are other useful virtues besides patriotism,’ Sybert suggested.

‘Wait until you have spent a spring in the Sabine hills, Miss Copley,’ Melville put in, ‘and you will be as bad as the rest of us.’

‘Ah, mademoiselle,’ Benoit added fervently, ‘spring-time in the Sabine hills will be compensation sufficient to most of us for not seeing paradise.’

‘I believe, with my uncle, it’s a kind of Roman fever!’ she cried. ‘I never expected to hear a Frenchman renounce his native land.’

‘It is not that I renounce France,’ the young man remonstrated. ‘I lofe France as much as ever, but I open my arms to Italy as well. To lofe another land and peoples besides your own makes you, not littler, but, as you say, wider—broader. We are—we are– Ah, mademoiselle!’ he broke off, ‘if you would let me talk in French I could say what I mean; but how can one be eloquent in this halting tongue of yours?’

‘ Coraggio , Benoit! You are doing bravely,’ Sybert laughed.

‘We are,’ the young man went on with a sudden inspiration, ‘what you call in English, citizens of the world. You, mademoiselle, are American, La Signora Contessa is Italian, Mr. Carthrope is English, I am French, but we are all citizens of the same world, and in whatever land we find ourselves, there we recognize one another for brothers, and are always at home; for it is still the world.’

The young man’s eloquence was received with an appreciative laugh. ‘And how about paradise?’ some one suggested.

‘Ah, my friends, it is there that we will be strangers!’ Benoit returned tragically.

‘Citizens of the world,’ Sybert turned the stem of his wine glass meditatively as he repeated the phrase. ‘It seems to me, in spite of Miss Marcia, that one can’t do much better than that. If you’re a patriotic citizen of the world, I should think you’d done your duty by mankind, and might reasonably expect to reap a reward in Benoit’s paradise.’

He laughed and raised his glass. ‘Here’s to the World, our fatherland! May we all be loyal citizens!’

‘I think,’ said Mrs. Melville, ‘since this is a farewell dinner and we are pledging toasts, we should drink to Villa Vivalanti and a happy spring in the Sabine hills.’

Copley bowed his thanks. ‘If you will all visit the villa we will pledge it in the good wine of Vivalanti.’

‘And here’s to the Vivalanti ghost!’ said the young Frenchman. ‘May it lif long and prosper!’

‘Italy’s the place for such ghosts to prosper,’ Copley returned.

‘Here’s to the poor people of Italy—may they have enough to eat!’ said Marcia.

Sybert glanced up in sudden surprise, but she did not look at him; she was smiling across at her uncle.

The announcement that a principe Americano was coming to live in Villa Vivalanti occasioned no little excitement in the village. Wagons with furnishings from Rome had been seen to pass on the road below the town, and the contadini in the wayside vineyards had stopped their work to stare, and had repeated to each other rumours of the fabulous wealth this signor principe was said to possess. The furniture they allowed to pass without much controversy. But they shook their heads dubiously when two wagons full of flowering trees and shrubs wound up the roadway toward the villa. This foreigner must be a grasping person—as if there were not trees enough already in the Sabine hills, that he must bring out more from Rome!