Margaret rose with something of a yawn. ‘If you’re going to discuss potentialities, I’m going to bed. Come on, Eleanor. To-morrow’s the festa of Our Lady of Good Counsel, and we start at nine o’clock.’
Eleanor rose reluctantly. ‘I wish we weren’t going to Perugia on Wednesday. I should much rather stay here with Marcia.’
‘And Mr. Sybert,’ Margaret laughed.
‘Oh, yes, Mr. Sybert,’ Eleanor acquiesced. ‘He annoys you until you get him settled.’
‘He’s like one of those problems in algebra,’ suggested Marcia. ‘Given a lot of things, to find the value of x. You work it exactly right and x won’t come.’
Margaret paused by the door and gathered her wrapper around her like a toga.
‘While you’re talking about interesting people,’ she threw back, ‘I know one who isn’t appreciated, and that’s Paul. He’s a mighty nice boy.’
‘That’s just what he is,’ said Eleanor. ‘A nice boy—et c’est tout. Good night, Marcia. When we come back from Perugia we’ll sit up all night talking about interesting men. It’s an interesting subject.’
CHAPTER XV
Villa Vivalanti was astir early in the morning—early, that is, for the villa. Castel Vivalanti had been at work two hours and more when Pietro went the rounds of the bedroom doors with his very obsequious, ‘Buon giorno, Excellency; if it suits your convenience, coffee will be served in the ilex grove in half an hour.’ Coffee in the ilex grove was a new departure in accordance with Marcia’s inspiration of the night before. And the ilex grove to-day, as Bianca exclaimed with clasped hands, reminded one of paradise. The week of rain had left it a study in green; the deep, rich tone of ilex leaves arching overhead, the blue green moss on dark tree trunks, the tender tint of young grass sprouting in the paths, and the yellow flickering sunlight glancing everywhere. Out on the terrace the peacock was trailing his feathers over the marble pavement with a conscious air of being in tune with the day.
Marcia was first to appear. She stepped on to the loggia with a little exclamation of delight at the beauty of the morning. In a pale summer gown, her hair burnished by the sun, she herself was not out of touch with the scene. She crossed the terrace and stood by the balustrade, looking off through a golden and purple haze to the speck on the horizon of Rome and St. Peter’s. The peacock called her back, strutting insistently with wide-spread tail.
‘You ridiculous bird!’ she laughed. ‘I suppose you have been posing here for two hours, waiting for some one to come and admire,’ and she hurried off to the grove to make sure that Pietro had carried out her orders.
The table was spread by the fountain, where the green arched paths converged and the ilexes grew in an open circle. The sunlight flickering through on dainty linen and silver and glass and on little cakes of golden honey—fresh from a farm in the Alban hills—made a feast which would not have been out of place in a Watteau painting. Marcia echoed Bianca’s enthusiasm as her eyes fell upon the scene, and Pietro flew about with an unprecedented ardour, placing rugs and cushions and wicker chairs.
‘It is perfect,’ she cried, as she retreated down one of the paths to get a perspective. ‘But there are no flowers,’ she added. ‘That will never do; we must have some lilies-of-the-valley, Pietro. You fix a bowl in the centre, while I run and pick them,’ and she started off toward the garden borders.
Here Paul Dessart found her five minutes later. He greeted her with a friendly, ‘Felicissimo giorno, signorina!’ The transient clouds of yesterday had disappeared from his brow as well as from the sky, and he joined gaily in her task.
‘There!’ said Marcia as she rose to her feet and shook back the stray hair from her eyes. ‘Could anything be more in keeping with a sylvan breakfast than these?’ She held at arm’s length for him to admire a great bunch of delicate transparent bells sheathed in glistening green. ‘Come,’ she cried; ‘the artist must arrange them’; and together they turned toward the fountain.
A spray of bluest forget-me-nots hung over one of the garden borders. The young man stooped and, breaking it, presented it with his hand on his heart.
‘Signorina,’ he begged in a tone of mock-Italian sentiment—‘dearest signorina, I am going where duty calls—far, far away to Perugia. Non-te-scordar-di-me!’
She laughed as she put the flowers in her belt, but with a slightly deeper tinge on her cheek. Paul, in a mood like this, was very attractive.
As they entered the grove they heard the prattle of childish voices, and presently Gerald and Gervasio appeared down the walk, carrying each a saucer of crumbs for their scaly friends of the fountain. They stopped with big eyes at the sight of the table spread for breakfast.
‘Oh, Cousin Marcia!’ Gerald squealed delightedly, ‘are we doin’ to eat out uv doors? May Gervas’ an’ me eat wif you? Please! Please!’
Marcia feigned to consider.
‘Yes,’ said she finally, ‘this is my party, and if you’ll be good boys and not talk, I’ll invite you. And when you’ve finished your bread and milk, if you’ve been very good, you may have some—’ she paused and lowered her voice dramatically while the two hung upon her words—‘honey!’
Paul Dessart laughed at what struck him as an anticlimax, but the boys received the assurance with acclamation. Gervasio was presented to the young painter, and he acknowledged the introduction with a grace equal to Gerald’s own. He had almost forgotten that he was not born a prince. As Gerald shook hands he invited the guest, with visible hesitancy, to throw the crumbs; but Paul generously refused the invitation, and two minutes later the little fellows were kneeling side by side on the coping of the fountain, while the arching pathways rang with their laughter.
The rest of their excellencies soon appeared in a humour to fit the morning, and the usually uneventful ‘first breakfast’ partook of the nature of a fête. Gerald’s and Gervasio’s laughter rang free and unchecked. The two were sitting side by side on a stone garden-seat (the broken-nosed bust of a forgotten emperor brooding over them), engaged for the present with twin silver bowls of bread and milk, but with speculative eyes turned honeyward. The ghost of overnight was resurrected and jeered at, while the ghost himself gravely passed the cups. The sedately stepping peacock, who had joined the feast uninvited, became the point of many morals as he lowered his feathers in the dust to scramble for crumbs. Before the party ended, Sybert and Dessart engaged in a good-natured bout on Sybert’s theme of yesterday concerning Italy’s baneful beauty.
‘Paul has missed his calling!’ declared Eleanor Royston. ‘He should have been a ward politician in New York. It is a pity to see such a gift for impromptu eloquence wasted in private life.’
For a time Paul subsided, but their controversy closed with the laugh on his side. Apropos of riots, his thesis was that they were on the whole very jolly. And he upheld this shockingly barbaric view with the plea that he always liked to see people having a good time, and that next to sleeping in the sun and eating macaroni the Italians were never so happy as when engaged in a row. For his part, he affirmed, he expected to find them tearing up the golden paving-stones of paradise to heave at each other!
The image wrung a smile from even Sybert’s gravity; It contained just enough of truth, and not too much, to make it funny. Pietro’s announcement, at this point, that the carriages were ready to drive their excellencies to the festa dissolved the party in a scurry for hats and wraps. Sybert at first had declined the festa, on the plea that he had business in Rome. Marcia had accepted his excuse with the simply polite statement that they would be sorry not to have him, but Eleanor Royston had refused to let him off.