The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg/Chapter 1
IT was a broiling afternoon of mid-August in Brinoë and everybody who was anybody had long ago quit its burning pavements and chilly palaces for the mountains or the sea. Left behind there were only stray bands of sweating tourists and a few such remnants of the permanent colony as Mrs. Weatherby and the mysterious companion whom no one had ever met; old Mrs. Whitehead, Mr. Binnop, the curate of the English church, the usual Marchesas and Contessas, thick as flies, and Mr. Augustus John Winnery. Except Mrs. Weatherby all these stayed in baking Brinoë for the same reason. (The old Contessa Salverini put up her shutters and lived in the back of her house, giving out word that she had gone to Montecatini for the cure, and receiving all her letters by arrangement with the poste restante of Montecatini.) None of them would have given you the real reason. They stayed because they could not leave their beloved Brinoë or because they were engaged in some work of an archæological or literary nature which forced them to remain. The real reason was that they were all too poor to leave.
In the case of Mr. Winnery, he could not leave because he was engaged upon a colossal work which already had taken up the greater part of his life. It was called "Miracles and Other Natural Phenomena." In speaking of this work he always placed a profound emphasis on the word natural lest you should think that he was taken in by such nonsense as miracles. He was a small, bald man of fifty-two and a quarter of a century earlier he had written parodies and light verse which had appeared now and then in the Yellow Book. But a kind of blight had fallen early on his literary career and for years now he had been devoting his none too great energies to demolishing the idea of miracles in general and the legends clustered about the saints in particular.
His work kept him in Brinoë. It had kept him there for twenty-nine previous and consecutive summers, and it was not yet completed. (Indeed, only Mr. Winnery knew that it was still in a chaotic stage, consisting almost entirely of huge accumulations of notes and copyings from various little-known books on the saints.) Still, it served its purpose, and year after year it continued to give him a faint echo of that fleeting glory which he had known as a young literary radical. Old Mrs. Whitehead and those Anglo-Saxon Marchesas and Contessas who had not become more Catholic than the Blackest Black still spoke of Mr. Winnery's work with a kind of awe. Mr. Binnop, the curate, who prided himself on being broadminded, did not mention the work at all, but he did not, on the other hand, allow it to interfere with his friendship with Mr. Winnery.
And now in the scalding heat of the August mid-afternoon Mr. Winnery was driving in a decrepit fiacre up the long winding road that led to the heights of Monte Salvatore. He cursed the heat and himself and Mrs. Weatherby, Miss Annie Spragg, the coachman and Brinoë itself—sacred, beautiful, romantic Brinoë, surrounded by blue hills covered with clouds of blue violets and fragrant narcissus. Of course, thought Mr. Winnery bitterly, the poetic temperament always chose to write about Brinoë in May and never in August. Now if a scientist, a realist, had written of Brinoë, it would have been another story. He hated Brinoë, not because it actually lacked all the miraculous qualities attributed to it by Browning, Longfellow and the advertisements of the tourist agencies, but because he had to live there. Poverty and inertia had chained him to Brinoë for twenty-nine years and now at fifty-two he saw no prospect of escaping from it even in death. In the end he would be laid to rest, after a service read by Mr. Binnop (who read the service so badly) in the Protestant cemetery. It would have to be the Protestant cemetery because there was no special cemetery for agnostics. He would rest in death among all the poets, spinsters, retired colonels, widows, decayed clergymen and adulteresses who since the eighteenth century had lived and died among the exaggerated beauties of Brinoë. Probably he would be laid to rest beside old Mrs. Whitehead. Perhaps even in her grave she would rattle her false teeth over her dish of tea. Doubtless she would be buried with a collected edition of "Ouida" placed at the head of her coffin.
The fiacre moved in a cloud of yellow dust. Yellow dust covered the black cypresses and the grey olive trees and the blue-black ilex that wilted against walls turned a bilious yellow by the unrelenting sun. "Ah," thought Mr. Winnery bitterly, "the beautiful blue cloudless sky of Italy. Italy, land of laughter and sunshine. Ha! Ha!" But it was worse than that, for added to the baking sun there was a hot wind from Africa. It had been blowing steadily for two days, having sprung up on the night of Miss Annie Spragg's death. It bore on its restless bosom clouds of dust and heat from the Sahara all the way across the blue Mediterranean to the foothills of the Alps. You wakened in the morning to see the trees on the hills above Brinoë swaying in what appeared to be a cool fresh breeze and then you thrust your shutters open to find that it was a wind charged with the heat of all Inferno. And quickly you clapped the shutters tight again, feeling slightly insane.
The driver of the fiacre smelled of sweat and garlic and beat his bony horses from time to time with the butt of his whip across their already scarred and blistered rumps. "Ah," thought Mr. Winnery bitterly, "these gay, kindly, carefree Italians. Children of Nature." (So read the tourist circulars.) He fell to cursing Ruskin and Browning. "Where you rest, there decorate," wrote Mr. Ruskin. (He was not sure that he had the quotation correctly, but that was the idea.) The Italians never stopped decorating. It was their passion for decoration that had induced them to cover the seat of the fiacre with great excrescences of soiled imitation filet lace. The seat was at least black. You would not have noticed the dirt. Or if they must decorate, why did they not wash the decorations from time to time?
Mr. Winnery was a bachelor and wore yellow gloves to keep microbes from his plump pink hands.
Fifty-two years of bachelordom had induced a certain inflexible routine into his manner of living. For at least twenty years he had lived in the same rooms, eaten the same food, risen and gone to bed at the same hours, always found his cigarettes in the same spot and his books where he had last put them down. He had sent off his querulous book reviews and his fashionable correspondence to the Ladies' Own World at exactly the same day by exactly the same post. On Thursdays he went to the Principessa Bologna's, on Mondays to Mrs. Whitehead's, and on Wednesdays to the Marchesa Barducci's.
Today he had shattered the routine for the first time in order to torture himself with the long drive to Mrs. Weatherby's villa. When he had gone more than half-way he told himself that he had simply gone insane with heat and boredom; but having already suffered a really colossal discomfort it did not seem worth while to turn back. In the cool of the evening the journey would be an easier one. At least it could not be more uncomfortable.
The only concrete reason he could discover for the temporary outburst of insanity was a desire to know something of Miss Annie Spragg, and Mrs. Weatherby appeared to be the only person in all Italy, or all the world, for that matter, who knew anything of her. Mr. Winnery was out in the sun in the interests of science.
For twenty-nine years he had been writing his colossal work and now for the first time a miracle had occurred, as one might have said, just beneath his nose. It was the miracle of the stigmata. In death an eccentric old maid, who lived in one room of the ruined old rookery known as the Palazzo Gonfarini, had received the marks of the Crucifixion. It was the miracle of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Catherine of Siena. Three persons had witnessed it, besides all the mob that broke in afterward to carry off as relics all the furniture and even the clothes of Miss Annie Spragg; these witnesses were a nun known as Sister Annunziata, a priest called Father Baldessare and the janitress of the tenement, a bawdy, irreligious, anti-clerical Socialist shrew, who called herself Signora Bardelli.
Here, Mr. Winnery told himself, was a perfect laboratory specimen of a miracle. He might investigate and pull it apart to his heart's content. It was not, Mr. Winnery told himself, a very rare miracle. It was always happening somewhere. There were more than a hundred such cases on record. Only last month there had been a sausage-maker's daughter in Bavaria. . . . And there were only two cases which had been recognized as authentic and one of these at least—that of Saint Catherine of Siena—he looked upon as dubious. No one but Saint Catherine herself had witnessed the scars because she had prayed that they be made invisible to others. And then, as he pointed out in his work, she had also a great motive in the rivalry between the Franciscans, who claimed the miracle for the founder of their order, and the Dominicans, of which she was in reality, if not in name, the head. Pope Sixtus IV had issued a decree at that time giving a monopoly of the miracle to Saint Francis and making it a censurable offense to mention Saint Catherine's experience as authentic. Saint Catherine, Mr. Winnery thought, was a powerful but not a very original woman.
But Miss Annie Spragg was neither Dominican nor Franciscan. Indeed, no one seemed to know whether she was anything at all.
For at least fifteen years Miss Annie Spragg had been one of the sights of Brinoë, like the Etruscan excavations, and so Winnery had seen her countless times. But it was not until she was dead that he, in common with the rest of the world, learned her name. Today it was a name printed in newspapers all over the world. . . . In Paris, New York, Milan, Bombay, Copenhagen. . . . Tired journalists had arrived in Brinoë from Rome and Paris and Milan to report upon the mysterious happening.
For at least fifteen years Miss Annie Spragg had wandered the streets regardless of heat or cold, storm or sunshine—an eccentric old maid whom the Italians looked upon merely as one of the phenomena of a generous Nature, and whom the foreign colony resented as something a little shameful. She seemed never to have had but one costume. This consisted of a bedraggled but miraculously serviceable suit of tweed with a skirt which trailed the ground alike in dust and mud, and a large flowered picture hat on which the roses, from the constant assault of the brilliant Italian sunlight, had long since lost the glory of their original aniline mauves and magentas. Over this hat she wore a thick black veil and always on her hands she wore white cotton gloves.
So little was known of her that in death there seemed no one who was certain even of her nationality. One of the two Brinoë newspapers (bitter rivals of each other) described her as "Miss Annie Spragg, born at Newcastle-on-Tino (sic), England,"—a quite natural mistake due to the conviction of all Italians that anyone eccentric must be English. It was the mysterious Mrs. Weatherby who stepped forward and corrected that impression. In bad Italian she tactlessly addressed a letter to the rival paper pointing out with some nationalistic feeling that Miss Annie Spragg was certainly not English, but American, and that she had once been a resident of Winnebago Falls, Iowa, a city of which Mrs. Weatherby was herself a native. Mrs. Weatherby wrote that she had recognized the old maid soon after coming to Brinoë when she encountered her one day in the Piazza San Giovanni. The letter was signed Henrietta Weatherby (Mrs. Alonzo Weatherby), Villa Leonardo, Monte Salvatore.
Mrs. Weatherby was herself, Mr. Winnery believed, something of an eccentric. In winter and in the spring she was to be seen driving about the town in a fiacre, clad all in white, with a flowing white veil. In season she frequently carried a bouquet of tuberoses. She was a middle-aged woman of powerful build and in the circles frequented by Mr. Winnery it was said that she was a seeress and contemplated founding a new and what she chose to call an "eclectic" religion. In May it was her habit to retire to the Villa Leonardo in a lonely valley some miles beyond Monte Salvatore for the sake, it was said, "of meditation and soul growth." Old Mrs. Whitehead, who sought out every newcomer at least once, reported an encounter with Mrs. Weatherby which left her confused and baffled, owing, she said, to the spiritual cast which Mrs. Weatherby insisted upon giving to their brief conversation.
She was always accompanied by a plump and youngish woman dressed in black who appeared to be a sort of companion-secretary. No one had ever heard the name of this lady and she had had speech with no one. It was rumored that she was a deaf-mute.
As the fiacre reached the crest of Monte Salvatore Mr. Winnery's nerves became worn to a fine edge. He began even to think gloomily of suicide. His whole life, he told himself, had been a failure. He had attained the age of fifty-two without anything having happened to him. He had known neither love nor love's twin sister passion, and of late the thought of the experiences which he had overlooked troubled him profoundly. It was becoming a kind of neurasthenia. On its philosophic side he found the thought terrifying. It meant that he had missed the most important of human experiences. Perhaps, he told himself, that was what the world found lacking in his work; a touch of passion might have made him popular if not distinguished. On the physical side of the question it had occurred to him lately that the attainment of such experience had not yet become an impossibility.
He was, he supposed, at that period which people called in capital letters the Dangerous Age in Men. And lately he had noticed a certain physical change in himself, as though some gland too long inactive had begun at last to perform its functions. He who had always been a thin, fragile little man began to grow heavier and feel stronger. Even his liver seemed to trouble him less. He had begun to experience the growth of a new force and vitality which at times shook him like a fever. He supposed it was that new force which had driven him out today in the burning heat. On the intellectual side he had begun to have a curiosity about life which was altogether new and quite disturbing. It made him feel uneasy and restless, but although he slept less well, the lack of sleep did not appear in his new-found vigor to trouble him. Until the age of fifty-two he had been a literary and classical writer who wrote of love only in its more refined aspects.
The carriage reached the square of Monte Salvatore (that romantic Monte Salvatore of which he had dreamed in his Victorian youth and which now looked a bilious yellow and smelled badly). It passed through the baking streets and began to slip down the opposite side of the hill into another pocket-like valley filled to the brim with dust and heat. Why, Mr. Winnery asked himself, should anyone exchange the heat of this valley for that of the other in the belief that it was cooler here or that the air was any better. No one but a fool like this Mrs. Weatherby. . . .
As the fiacre descended into the second valley Winnery was forced to admit to himself that it did seem cooler here. The trees appeared thicker and less jaded and the dust less overwhelming, though that may have been only because the road was rarely used. They ascended for a time and then began a descent so sharp that the fiacre pressed close against the buttocks of the bony horses, and presently on turning a corner the driver turned and in a wave of garlic exclaimed with an operatic gesture, "Behold the Villa Leonardo."
There was no villa to be seen, but only an island of dark thick trees clinging to the side of the mountain and leading up to it a long avenue of venerable oaks. As they drew near, it became evident that the narrow road ended at the villa itself and had no other reason for existence. The clump of trees was like a patch of black sewn upon the side of the grey and yellow hill. There was no other building of any sort near it. Indeed, thought Winnery, it must be impossible to see from there any human habitation. (He was a gentleman given to rather pompous language, who had known his great flowering in the day of the mot juste.) It did seem cooler here, though it may have been only the sense of isolation that enveloped the ancient villa.
On either side of the long straight drive leading up to the house stood pillars of reddish stone, each surmounted by a panther and a goat with a serpent at their feet. The panther and the goat held between them a shield upon which no arms had ever been cut. So damaged were the figures by time and weather that a less antiquarian eye than Mr. Winnery's would not have known them for what they were. Straight ahead the avenue lost itself in the shadows of gnarled and ancient trees which hung closely over the road.
After they had gone a little way, the villa itself came into view—a commonplace yellowish villa set among cypresses and olive trees with a flat façade ornamented in the fashion of Spanish rather than Italian baroque. It had an unkempt look with its shutters all closed against the heat and the shrubbery all scraggly and unpruned. At the door, just beside a large clump of sword-like yuccas, stood a smart motor painted black with a delicate red stripe running about the top. It was an eccentric, Latin and expensive car, shining with too much polished metal and too many elegant appurtenances, of the kind known as une voiture de grand sport. The sight of it tended to raise the spirits of Mr. Winnery. It meant that he would not be compelled to encounter the formidable Mrs. Weatherby alone.
As he came nearer still, he saw that a part of the villa on the side next to the valley had been built upon a sort of terrace foundation of a much older period. This, Mr. Winnery saw, was of Roman construction. It might be that underneath it lay an even more ancient foundation of Etruscan origin.
"Extremely interesting," he murmured, so loudly that the driver turned as if in expectation of an order and then saw at once that his fare was thinking of other things.
The house was placed so that it commanded a superb view of the lonely valley, a view indeed which one would never have suspected from the approach. Perhaps, he thought, it had been chosen in the beginning by some Roman for its sense of space, a thing so rare in the crowded valleys about Brinoë. At the very bottom of the valley there was a yellow line tracing the course of a freshet, now completely dry in the heat of mid-August. And suddenly he felt suffocated once more and choking with dust.
The carriage stopped before the door and Mr. Winnery, after putting on his yellow gloves and endeavoring vainly to brush the thick dust from his clothing, went up the steps and pulled a copper bell-handle made in the form of a ram's head and covered by a patine of verdigris. There was an answering tinkle of a bell, but no other evidence of life. He rang again and then again with no more success, and suddenly he was aware that the driver was looking at him with an expression of malice as if he said, "You forced me to come all the way out here in the heat for nothing." It was a perfectly blank expression, but touched with insinuation. It made Mr. Winnery suddenly angry and embarrassed. It reminded him how he detested Italians as a race. He pulled violently and the bell answered again with a mocking violence. Then he turned and saying, "Wait for me here," came down the steps and took a grass-grown path that led through a tangle of ivy and cypress hedge toward the back of the house.
For more than a hundred feet Winnery made his way through a sort of tunnel of foliage, so thick that even at this season the earth beneath his feet seemed damp and moist, and then all at once he came upon the most extraordinary and beautiful garden. It was large and square in size and so placed upon the artificially raised terrace that it seemed to hang in space above the valley. The garden was entirely of greenery, a sort of vast chamber of which roof and walls were made of foliage. There was no flower of any sort. The villa itself made one wall and the other three sides were entirely closed by the thick walls of ancient cypresses of a size Winnery had never seen save at Tivoli. Near the ground where the cypresses had no foliage, light, reflected from the grey and yellow valley below, filtered in between the ancient grey trunks. Over the whole garden there was a living roof made by the branches of countless plane trees planted to form colonnades and so trimmed and trained that their yellowing leaves shut out all heat and light. Within this area the sun never penetrated and there was no grass but only a carpet of red clay flecked here and there by patches of moss which in the extraordinary light had turned an unreal and poisonous shade of green. It was as if in the entire parched and desolate valley, life, green and exuberant, flourished only within this enclosure.
At first he had thought the garden empty, too, and silent like the house, but after a moment, when his eyes had grown accustomed to the fierce blaze of hot light from the valley below, he discovered a group of figures at the far end. There appeared to be several servants and working men, and four women, of whom one, a vision of fluttering white, was unmistakably the seeress, Mrs. Weatherby. There was also a tall gentleman dressed all in black, with silver hair. They stood gathered about a hole which appeared to be the termination of a long trench freshly cut from the direction of the villa itself. The damp red clay lay heaped about their feet. And then as he approached he discovered the object of their scrutiny—something which appeared to be the size and shape of a man and which was flecked and discolored by the clay.
"Ah," thought Mr. Winnery. "They have been digging a cesspool."
It was the smallish plump woman in black who first noticed him and spoke to Mrs. Weatherby. The seeress turned and came toward him. She did not walk; she floated in an artificial and gracious manner which made him know at once that she had practiced this walk for many years. She was a heavy woman not without a certain handsomeness due to her size and her majestic carriage. As she drew near she held out her hand and, exposing an array of flashing, healthy teeth in a practiced smile, said, "Mr. Winnery, I presume."
And Winnery, fixing his face determinedly into a smile, murmured, "It was good of you to let me come, Mrs. Weatherby."
Together they turned toward the others.
"I am afraid there was no one to answer the bell. We had all come out here, even the servants. We have just made a remarkable discovery. While digging a new cesspool, the workmen unearthed a statue. We have been unable to identify it. It seems to me a very strange statue."
In the back of his mind Winnery kept thinking, "I loathe this woman because she is refined and because she is so healthy and therefore so entirely out of place here." Because he had a liver, healthy people full of vitality had long been abhorrent to him, like people who whistle and sing in their morning tubs.
He was then introduced, first to a tall, handsome but rather battered woman of fifty, dressed smartly and much too youthfully in clothes which by their simplicity and cut bore the mark of the most expensive of Paris dressmakers. The woman had for him a faint air of familiarity. It was a face he had seen somewhere, the face of a woman of fifty which has been much worked over. She wore a great many bracelets and a string of real pearls.
"Principessa d'Orobelli," murmured Mrs. Weatherby, with a quiver of satisfaction. And then Mr. Winnery knew. She was one of those brilliant birds of passage whose photographs taken at the Lido surrounded by naked young men, whose names were of no importance, appeared from time to time in the illustrated weeklies. Although he had never seen her before, he had written many paragraphs for the Ladies' Own World concerning her movements hither and yon across the face of Italy. She was the smart, the almost notorious, d'Orobelli.
"And Father d'Astier," murmured Mrs. Weatherby with a pleased and gracious nod in the direction of the silver-haired gentleman. Father d'Astier bowed, a tall, handsome man with intense black eyes, a fine nose and a splendid rather sensual mouth, a figure at sixty possessed of great vigor and distinction. Winnery knew of him, too, a priest without any parish save all of God's world, who lunched and dined "everywhere." He had a simple mission in life: it was to convert the rich who married impoverished titles and to help on their way to grace any others of considerable wealth who felt a leaning toward Rome. He was a confessor to many fashionable and scandalous ladies, to great bankers and members of decayed royal families. Old stories of Father d'Astier and "the d'Orobelli" (as Winnery thought of her), heard at secondhand through years, rolled through the back of his mind. For an instant it gave him a pleasant, warm sense of moving in the great world.
"And Miss Fosdick," concluded Mrs. Weatherby with a slight and careless gesture as if she were tossing a piece of dirt over her shoulder. The gesture indicated the plump, shy little woman dressed in black who stood in the background with a touching air of timidity. This, of course, was Mrs. Weatherby's companion, the deaf-mute. Out of the corner of his eye, Winnery saw how she hovered in the background, almost tremulously, obscured by that figure all in white which seemed at once so vaporous and so solid. Miss Fosdick was like shadow. She was shy too and frightened like a bird. Mr. Winnery felt a sudden wave of pity for her.
"What an awful life!" he thought.
While they had been talking a workman appeared coming down one of the long light-flecked corridors of the garden, carrying in each hand a pail of water. In his wide belt of black elastic was thrust a scrubbing-brush. He was a young man, dark and black-eyed, who wore blue trousers stained with the red clay and a checkered shirt open to expose his dark sunburned chest. Winnery, who through years of boredom had come to amuse himself at desperate moments by watching the sly, half-concealed actions of people, saw Princess d'Orobelli's eye rove over the masculine young figure. Herodias, he thought. The workman knelt down and with the scrubbing-brush began to remove the patches of red clay from the freshly disinterred statue.
They stood about watching while the statue, slightly pitted here and there by the action of acids hidden in the sour ground of the dark garden, emerged in all the beauty of its time-worn creamy white marble. Princess d'Orobelli whispered something to Father d'Astier. One of the maidservants giggled and was silenced at once by a glance of venom from Mrs. Weatherby, who had clearly determined to regard this as a sacred moment.
Priapus himself had risen from the mouldering soil of the ancient garden.
Whatever hand carved the figure had moved with understanding and passion. The statue carried in every line a kind of quivering voluptuousness. The very curves of the muscles and the line of the back and hips quivered between the realms of ecstasy and that disgust which follows quickly upon satiety. It was a glorification of sensuality. Indeed, the sculptor had done his work so well that for a long time the little group about the excavation stood awed into silence, as if something had risen from the red clay which roused disturbing memories in those who were experienced and disturbing intimations in those who had remained until that moment virginal. No one could have remained entirely chaste after looking upon the statue.
There were certain portions of the statue missing, and Mrs. Weatherby, noting this, said, "I'll set Giovanni to work tomorrow digging for the rest."
But Father d'Astier protested quickly, perhaps in the interests of the church or perhaps because he thought such a piece of marble better buried forever.
"I think it's no use, Mrs. Weatherby. You might dig up the whole garden without discovering anything. That is usually the case."
Giovanni suddenly turned the statue full upon its back so that the face, amazingly preserved, looked up at them. It was the face of an old man, but a full vigorous face partly covered by a magnificent curling beard drawn back to expose the lips, in which there was that same sensual beauty hovering between ecstasy and disgust. Winnery, looking down at it, thought, "It is a beautiful thing, but a dangerous and disturbing one. Having it about, no one would ever have peace. Perhaps it is safe with Mrs. Weatherby. She is possibly insensitive to everything." And then he saw suddenly that Miss Fosdick was watching him and that she was blushing. There was an odd flicker of sympathy between them. Neither was very young and both were without experience. Suddenly he thought her appealing and young (though she must have been at least thirty-five) beside the hardness of the notorious d'Orobelli, the cold worldliness of Father d'Astier and the florid pretense of Mrs. Weatherby.
They set the statue against the wall of the garden above a soft mattress of green ilex and then, with Mrs. Weatherby floating before them in a cloud of white, they turned back toward the villa. Winnery found himself walking beside Miss Fosdick, for he already detested his hostess and was shy and frightened in the presence of such creatures as the d'Orobelli and Father d'Astier. A sense of depression still haunted them all. Once Winnery, feeling embarrassed by this unnatural silence, murmured to Miss Fosdick, "It is a beautiful thing—that statue."
To which the answer came quickly with blushes and an unexpected passion. "No, I think it's horrible."
He knew then that the story of her being a deaf-mute was not true.
They had tea in a great room painted a faded pink and decorated with a series of frescoes depicting the amorous excursions of Jupiter to the earth. These frescoes might well have been called The Apotheosis of Anatomy, for they were done by some painter with an admiration for Luca Signorelli and every muscle was thrown into high relief. The whole effect was one of a plump and writhing unrest. But the proportions of the room were noble and threw the frescoes into obscurity. Unfortunately, Mrs. Weatherby had added fresh horrors. The furniture was an odd mixture of periods and styles, all of them the frankest imitations. On the chairs she had placed indiscriminately pillows of satin in the most brilliant shades of Veronese green, Tyrian purple and mustard yellow, all trimmed with black and gold lace—pillows such as are born only of the Latin imagination. She explained that it was always the general effect at which she drove rather than the detail, and that therefore the authenticity of furniture was of very little importance to her. "The effect," she murmured, "on entering a room . . . the effect." She allowed the sentence to finish itself in a vague, fluttering gesture, also (thought Mr. Winnery) the result of much practice. A grey parrot squawked on a perch in one corner and two tiny Pomeranians ran out screeching and yapping as the party entered.
But when the shutters were thrown open the room became magnificent, for one discovered that the whole valley lay spread out beneath the windows. The same golden light that filtered through into the deep garden poured in through the great arched openings that made one side of the room. The sun had begun to slip down below the crests of the mountain at the head of the valley and all the African dust suspended in the hot air had caught and reflected its rays in a blaze of extravagant color. In the bottom of the valley the lights were blue and purple and at the top these turned to green and yellow and a curious shade of red gold. It was exaggerated and, to Mr. Winnery's English eyes, a little overdone, like everything in Italy.
"What a marvelous place," murmured the Princess in a deep, throaty voice. "Why have I never seen it or heard of it?"
At that moment a servant brought tea, bad tea, of the kind bought in Italy in ancient tins, and biscuits, also out of tins, that were dry and hard.
"I have never placed much importance upon food," observed Mrs. Weatherby as she seated herself in an imitation Renaissance chair inlaid with mother-of-pearl. "I have lived for seventeen years on the spirit, ever since I lost Mr. Weatherby and discovered the consolations of religion." She turned suddenly and addressed her companion. "Will you pour, Gertrude?" And again to the Princess d'Orobelli, "Yes, it is a place rich in tradition and history, rich indeed." Again her words trailed off into space as if she found them poor, shabby things to express all the beauty of which she alone was conscious.
Winnery began to suspect that this transparent woman fancied herself as an enigma, a kind of Sibyl. Watching her, he began to suspect, too, that she was a very rich and a very mean woman, and that she sought to gloss over her meannesses by any motive at hand. She would have dragged in God Himself if necessary. He saw also that Father d'Astier and the Princess were profoundly bored and that upon both their faces had appeared that mechanical smile which is a strange mixture of condescension, absent-mindedness and a desire to be polite—a smile which is one of the marks of persons frequenting smart society. Thirty years of this practice had fixed hard lines on the face of the Princess. He asked himself suddenly why that strange pair had stayed to tea when they might easily have sped back to Brinoë in the black and red motor. Indeed, he could not see why they were there at all.
Mrs. Weatherby, who had now struck an attitude in the awkward Renaissance chair, continued her discussion of the history of the place. It went back, she said, to Roman times at least. The very statue they had just discovered proved as much. Then certainly it had once been occupied by Leonardo da Vinci, who, it was said, had used the cowshed for his famous experiments in flying, and after that it had been the property of the Spanish Ambassador at Brinoë, who used it as a summer residence and added the baroque façade with its agitated statues. Mrs. Weatherby ornamented the account with many minute and boring details, most of them completely inaccurate, since Mrs. Weatherby possessed but the sketchiest ideas of Italian history. Each inaccuracy caused Winnery to wince and struggle with a desire to set her right, for he was one who cared profoundly for detail. He would have spoken, but that instinct told him his effort was certain to make no impression and would only delay the story of Miss Annie Spragg. A woman accustomed to making over religions would not be awed by history. Besides, as in the case of the furniture, it was the effect she sought rather than the accuracy of detail.
During all this time Miss Fosdick sat quietly, her little pink hands resting in her lap, but it was clear that her thoughts had wandered far from the impressive account which she must already have heard a thousand times. She kept looking out into the magnificent valley, that valley which as night came nearer and nearer, began to approach in a miraculous fashion that ideal which Winnery had once had of the beauties of Italy. Here through these windows one beheld no beggars and no Fascisti, one was aware of no smells and no dirt, but only the magnificence of Nature itself undefiled by the touch of man. Winnery for a moment felt that its beauty compensated a little for the boredom of being compelled to live in Brinoë.
But presently he found himself more fascinated by Miss Fosdick than by the beauty of the view. He no longer heard Mrs. Weatherby. Her sonorous voice had become simply a dim annoyance, like the buzzing of a fly. Her rapturous bosom no longer heaved and fell within the line of his vision. He was touched by the look of hunger in the eyes of her poor companion. It was a look which showed itself in the eyes alone, for the rest of the face wore a fixed and practiced expression of sweetness and contentment as befitted the handmaiden of a great religious teacher. She even managed to look as if she were interested. Once more she seemed to him touchingly young and innocent, like a bird . . . (he groped for a moment for the proper literary image) . . . like a bird that is being tormented. She was aware, he thought, of a beauty which lay beyond the valley, a beauty, too, which had nothing to do with the calcomine of the religions through which Mrs. Weatherby must have dragged her by the hair of her head. And then suddenly he experienced excitement at the sight of her soft full throat and the rather matronly curve of the bosom beneath the shining black poplin. He began to see her for the first time—her fine hair and melancholy eyes, her high color and all her Rubens curves. The experience startled him for a second, as something new in all his experience. He could trace it vaguely only to the strange obscene influence of the statue. But it pleased and flattered him that the emotion should have occurred at all.
Mrs. Weatherby had by now become launched upon her period of religious experiment among the numerous sects of Southern California, but the Princess d'Orobelli arose and, taking the matter firmly in hand, cut her short and at the same time revealed the reason for her coming to the Villa Leonardo. She said, "Do tell us, Mrs. Weatherby, what you know of this Spragg woman? I am dining with friends and must leave soon. I should like to know the story. It will help make the dinner a success. No one is talking of anything else but Miss Annie Spragg."
So that was the reason why the Princess and Father d'Astier had made the hot, dusty journey! They had come to the apparent fount of all knowledge upon the subject of Miss Annie Spragg.
Mrs. Weatherby, upset for a moment at being interrupted in the process of making herself enigmatic, recovered quickly and said, "Of course, I never really knew her any more than I knew her here in Brinoë. We lived in the same community but, as you might say, in different worlds. Gertrude knew her better than I. Isn't that true, Gertrude?" She turned to wrest the attention of her companion away from the unsafe extravagant beauty of the valley and back into the room. From the irritation in her voice it was clear that she had known all along, despite even Miss Fosdick's perfected expression of deep interest, that her companion's thoughts were wandering. It was clear also, thought Winnery, that later, when the guests were gone, Miss Fosdick would pay for her inattention. She would pay dearly.
"Yes, Aunt Henrietta?" replied Miss Fosdick mildly.
Aunt Henrietta, thought Winnery. Then she must be the niece of Mrs. Weatherby.
But Mrs. Weatherby displayed no intention of allowing Miss Fosdick, however well she knew the story, to tell it. She rolled into it in sonorous but refined periods, embroidered by a great deal of explanation as to setting and background.
Fifteen years earlier Mrs. Weatherby had been the richest and the most important woman in Winnebago Falls, since her husband, the late Mr. Alonzo Weatherby, had been president of the Farmers' Bank and also held a monopoly on the new water works. Since then, Mrs. Weatherby indicated modestly, she had become vastly, incalculably richer due to the fact that Mr. Weatherby before dying had invested money in certain tracts of waste land in Oklahoma which now poured forth gold in the form of oil. He had been, one gathered from her accounts, a shrewd but ineffectual little man whom she had browbeaten into the status of a consort. Winnery saw him perfectly—the husband of Mrs. Weatherby, Mr. Henrietta Weatherby. He had observed a great many Mr. and Mrs. Weatherbys among the American tourists who visited Brinoë. She spoke of him with condescension and even with a little contempt, as vaguely useless and perfectly insignificant.
"I think I can say honestly," she added, "that he was always spiritually my inferior."
The town of Winnebago Falls, which she also described with a great amount of detail, rose up in a kind of crude reality as a town old as towns went in Iowa, of big houses built in the florid style of the eighties and set back from streets lined with rows of cottonwoods and elms—a town which was the center of an agricultural community and so rather sleepy and quiet and the last place in which to expect such stories as she had to tell of Miss Annie Spragg.
"Winnebago Falls," she said proudly, "was not one of those German settlements in Iowa. It was founded by New Englanders. One of them was my grandfather."
She made it clear that she was important, not alone by wealth, but also by blood, and even more than that by the faith into which she had been born. "Miss Fosdick and myself were both Congregationalists, and in such a place the best people were always Congregationalists. That is one of the reasons why I never really knew Miss Annie Spragg. She was a Primitive Methodist and kept house for her brother, who was much older than herself and a Primitive Methodist preacher. But the Primitive Methodists were an insignificant lot and mostly poor whites from the Kentucky mountains."
At this point Father d'Astier, speaking English with all the elegance of one who knows a foreign tongue perfectly, interrupted to ask exactly what was a poor white. He listened with great interest while she explained and when it was made clear she said, "Of course, Miss Fosdick knew Miss Spragg better than myself. There were reasons for that."
She made clear the reasons. Miss Fosdick's mother had been a girl friend of Mrs. Weatherby. They had gone to school together and been married on the same day, but from that moment their courses had diverged, for Mrs. Weatherby's husband had gone up in the world and Mrs. Fosdick's had slipped steadily down into poverty. With poverty social obscurity came to her old school friend and Mrs. Fosdick's daughter, who now sat plump and on the verge of middle age in the Villa Leonardo, had been forced to do the best she could. Thus she had come into contact with individuals in Winnebago Falls whom Mrs. Weatherby knew only distantly if at all. Among these individuals was Miss Spragg.
"But I never forgot that Emma Fosdick had always been my friend," continued Mrs. Weatherby, "and I did all I could for her daughter Gertrude."
She indicated her companion with the gesture of one showing his good works to the Lord. The wretched Miss Fosdick turned quickly and gave an appreciative smile in the direction of her benefactor and then fell once more to staring out of the window into the purpling valley, looking confused and tortured and miserable.
To Winnery, watching her, the thought occurred again that she was like a plump pigeon used by the preposterous woman in white as an object upon which to practice some obscure and sadistic torment.
Mrs. Weatherby shifted her position a little, causing the imitation chair to creak beneath her weight. At the same moment the parrot burst with a terrifying suddenness into a series of shrill screams and squawks.
"He wants to go to bed," said Mrs. Weatherby, turning to Miss Fosdick. "Will you take him away, dear? He should have gone long ago."
Miss Fosdick rose with an awkward self-conscious gesture of brushing imaginary crumbs from her lap, and murmuring, "Yes, Aunt Henrietta," took the unpleasant bird from its perch and carried it, still screeching horribly, off into the shadows of the great echoing hall where the darkness appeared to quiet its nerves.
As she went out the door, Mrs. Weatherby murmured, "She is a good girl and a great comfort to me. She has lived with me now ever since she was eighteen, when Mr. Weatherby died and I went to California. She has never cared to marry. Indeed, I think she has never found a man worthy of her."
With the disappearance of Miss Fosdick, Mr. Winnery felt a little pang of disappointment like the first faint warnings of an approaching indigestion. She seemed to him the only healthy, simple creature in the room.
"But to get on with Miss Spragg," said Mrs. Weatherby. "She always lived a very quiet life and seldom went out except in the evenings. She was always a little queer, but she grew queerer and queerer as she grew middle-aged."
Miss Spragg had occupied, it seemed, with her brother the clergyman, a small wooden house of some six rooms set back from the street in a tangle of lilacs, maple trees and vines in the poorest part of town. Soon after she came there, either she or her brother had a high wooden fence built to enclose the back yard. What went on inside the fence no one knew very clearly, but it became known gradually that it concealed a weird collection of animals. The old maid, people said, was very fond of them. There were guinea-pigs, rabbits, cats, a pair of decrepit dogs, and at one period, Mrs. Weatherby heard, even a skunk. The thick trees about the house were alive with birds and they came from all over the town to be fed within the enclosure.
"That," interrupted Father d'Astier, "would perhaps explain her having chosen Saint Francis of Assisi for special adoration in her old age."
"It was Saint John the Shepherd," put in Mr. Winnery; and then with a burst of Non-Conformist emotion, "who in the Roman church is merely a survival of the pagan Dionysus."
Mrs. Weatherby ignored the comment, perhaps because she had no idea of Saint Francis, of Saint John the Shepherd, or Dionysus, and sweeping on, said, "I used to see her sometimes, but I never cared for her. She had a proud way of walking, like a cat, and she gave herself airs, as if she was better than other people. In the end that was what made other people hate her. The congregation of her brother's church took a great dislike to her because she would never join in church work and never went to call on any of them. I don't suppose there was anybody in the town who in all the years she lived in Winnebago Falls had a dozen words with her. Nobody ever knew anything about her. They just took her for granted after a time. It was the black goat that first began to make trouble."
From somewhere, perhaps from some Irish family living near the railroad in Winnebago Falls, the old maid acquired a black he-goat to add to her pets. There was no reason, said Mrs. Weatherby, why a goat should seem a pet more strange than a dog except that the human race has always had a curious feeling about goats, and in Winnebago Falls this feeling turned to comment and indignation at the sight of an old maid walking through the streets with a goat by her side. For she developed the habit of taking the goat at dusk each evening to the outskirts of the town to feed on the thick sweet clover that grew by the county road.
"It was a queer thing to do," observed Mrs. Weatherby. "And in small towns, of course, everything gets to be known and people aren't as tolerant as, well . . . we are in a place like Brinoë."
This remark she accompanied by a sweeping gesture in the direction of the distant city, as if she would gather it up and enclose it within her over-plump arms. It was her city, Brinoë—Winnery suddenly had the feeling that she would make her own anything which she thought might be of use to her. She spoke as if her grandfather, instead of being a Congregationalist, had been at least a Gonzaga or a Sforza.
"But the worst trouble," she said, "came about when a man called Hasselman, who delivered milk in Winnebago Falls, told the story that he saw her coming home one morning just after daylight across the fields from a place called Meeker's Gulch." She paused for a moment and then added, "And the goat was with her."
The last sentence she uttered slowly and with a great ponderousness and then waited a moment. The Princess, whose thoughts had clearly been wandering, was sitting upright now. She had stopped glancing at her watch and was listening, and into the eyes of Father d'Astier there had come a queer look of pain.
"Nobody ever proved the story," said Mrs. Weatherby, "and Hasselman was known to drink, so a great many people thought he had been seeing things. But the people in the town began to get uneasy about Miss Annie Spragg and say that she ought to be shut up. A committee from the church was going to see her brother about having her sent away the very day he was murdered."
Somewhere in one of the other rooms the parrot began again to screech and Mrs. Weatherby, annoyed, suddenly rose and, floating across the room, called out, "Gertrude, Gertrude, what are you doing to Anubis?" There was an echo of cold savagery in her voice, as if the parrot were the only thing in the world she loved besides herself.
Miss Fosdick appeared again and in a tremulous voice murmured, "He doesn't seem to like being shut up now. That's why he's screeching."
"Well, take the curtain off his cage and then fetch a light."
It had grown quite dark and the only light in the room was the faint reflected glow of the dying sunset. Mrs. Weatherby seemed a little, thought Mr. Winnery, like a figure out of a nightmare which might suddenly turn out to be real. It was not true, he told himself. There wasn't any such person as Mrs. Weatherby.
The Princess was murmuring, "But the murder, my dear Mrs. Weatherby. . . . You left us in midair."
"It has never been explained," said Mrs. Weatherby. "He was found beaten to death in broad daylight by the side of the road on the edge of the town. It seems he used to compose his sermons while taking long walks and it happened to him then. They never found out who did it. People said that she must have had something to do with it and that she ought to have been shut up long before. I think they arrested her, but they couldn't prove that she was even out of the house that day. I never knew much about it. It happened a little while after I moved to California to begin my experimental work."
And then suddenly, as if the story had come to an end before she meant it to, she said weakly, "And that's all there is. After the murder she left the town and nobody knew where she went until I saw her in the Piazza San Giovanni two years ago. I couldn't believe my eyes at first, and then I seized Miss Fosdick and said, 'That's that Spragg woman, isn't it, Gertrude?' and Miss Fosdick looked too, and said, 'Yes!' We didn't speak to her, because she seemed so queer and we didn't want to attract attention." She turned suddenly to Father d'Astier. "I suppose that was not humble of me or Christian or Catholic, but I hadn't then received the light."
There was something about this remark and its entire unexpectedness which made Winnery start and ask himself, "What is she up to now? What game is she playing with Father d'Astier?"
"I remember it was two years ago because it was at the Easter procession and it rained on Easter and she was kneeling in the rain and was wearing a big picture hat covered with faded flowers. And the colors were running in the rain."
At that moment Miss Fosdick appeared, carrying a huge wrought-iron candlestick almost as tall and almost as heavy as herself. In it, burning, there was one of those fat round candles which are to be seen everywhere in the churches in Italy. In place of a flame there was an electric bulb. She came in quietly, put down the candlestick and retired silently into the shadows.
The d'Orobelli rose abruptly and said, "What a very interesting story! But I am late. I must go." She made it clear none the less by some skilful intonation of her voice or expression in her eyes that she had really found it a boring tale badly told and not worth the trip to the Villa Leonardo.
Mrs. Weatherby became a miracle of graciousness and, bidding them all good-by, murmured, "I must have a word with Father d'Astier."
Winnery would have gone into the hall with the Princess, but he remembered that Miss Fosdick, forgotten and ungraceful, was lingering in the shadows. He turned to speak to her and found that she was coming toward him in order to light them out. At the same moment he heard Mrs. Weatherby murmuring something to the priest. He was able to catch only two words—"prayer and meditation"—and began to think that he had gone mad.
"You will have to go out by the garden," Mrs. Weatherby was saying. "Margharita has stupidly lost the key to the main door and no locksmith will come from Brinoë until the end of the week."
They moved down the hallway between dark rooms, from one of which came the muffled indignant squawking of the parrot Anubis, King of Darkness. Winnery had taken the candlestick from the frightened Miss Fosdick and was heading the little procession. In the garden the light still filtered in between the black trunks of the gigantic cypresses, but it was a different light now, feeble and blue and diffused, the light from a hot waning moon that had risen above the mountains on the opposite side of the valley. Far away, at the end of one of the tunnels made by the plantain trees, the statue, scrubbed white now by the strong brown hands of Giovanni, gleamed against the black ilex hedge. Mr. Winnery saw it again suddenly in his imagination. He saw with a remarkable clearness all its beauty and sensuality. It occurred to him that at some time in the remote past there must have been other people living here in this same ancient spot, living here and perhaps worshipping the ancient figure of Priapus—troops of harlots and courtesans and voluptuaries. And their successors had been Mrs. Weatherby and Miss Fosdick, bringing with them so much that was the essence of a country that lay beyond Atlantis, unknown and unimagined in the days when this Priapus was carved.
In order to reach the front of the villa it was necessary to pass again through the tangled green tunnel which was too low to allow the passage of the great candlestick. Miss Fosdick solved the problem by removing the candle itself and leading the way. In order not to fall in the darkness they took hands in chain fashion, first Miss Fosdick and then Winnery, then the Princess and last of all Father d'Astier. Miss Fosdick's hand was plump and soft and placid, but the hand of the Princess was thin and hard and feverish. Winnery thought it was trembling violently.
And then as they approached the other side there arose in the thick bushes very near at hand the faint sound of a scuffle and a torrent of words uttered in a soft masculine Italian and then the laugh, hot and voluptuous and almost hysterical, of a woman. For a second Mr. Winnery had the wild thought that he had overheard the ghosts of that ancient garden, and then the Princess, emerging from the hedge, called out sharply, "Enrico! Enrico!" There was a silence and she repeated the call and out of the bushes came a chauffeur, dark and smartly dressed. She loosed on him a torrent of nervous, impatient abuse. She was in great haste, she said. She was already late. Why had he kept her waiting while he amused himself pinching servant girls?
It was the vulgar performance of a well-bred woman whose nerves were frayed.
Then Father d'Astier proposed that they take Mr. Winnery in the motor. Turning, he said, "If you go back in the fiacre you'll have no dinner until nearly midnight."
The driver of the fiacre grumbled at being deserted after darkness on a road so lonely, but Winnery, in an unbalanced moment of extravagance, paid him for the whole journey and a little over and he retired, still mumbling his indignation.
It was the Princess herself who drove. She had Father d'Astier by her side and Mr. Winnery was placed in the back with the sulking Enrico. They bade Miss Fosdick good-night and the car suddenly sprang forward with a wild roar, violating the silence of the remote valley. The sound echoed and re-echoed through the hills, shattering the strange mood that had settled on Winnery. He was alive, after all. It was the twentieth century. This was a voiture de grand sport in which he had clearly found a perilous seat.
It shot through the green tunnel at a terrifying speed, so that the leaves whisked by with a hissing sound. Looking back he saw the black figure of Miss Fosdick, still bearing the electric candle, disappear into the copse of myrtle and ivy and laburnum. At the end of the drive, when they had passed between the panthers and the fauns, he turned again and there on the terrace beyond the room where they had been sitting a little while before stood Mrs. Weatherby. In the thin moonlight she would have been invisible save for the whiteness of her gown. He thought she stood with her arms held outstretched toward the sky, but he could not make certain. The car suddenly shot ahead with a wild roar. The Princess drove as if she were a mad woman.
The ride back to Brinoë was much quicker, but no less free from discomfort, than the ride out in the fiacre. It was only a different sort of discomfort. Winnery, who never rode in motors because he could not afford it, felt that he was being shot through Italy in a cannon-ball. There was no dust this time, for the dust was left far behind, and even the dust which remained on his clothes was blown away by the very speed at which the big car hurtled along the narrow roads. In Monte Salvatore and beyond, the Princess set the strident German horn to shrieking at each wall and turning. It was as if all the violence of a wild, undisciplined nature had been loosed. The big Grebel lights ate through dust and darkness alike and presently Brinoë lay below them huddled in the tight little valley and glowing faintly in the moonlight, covered by a thick canopy of heat and dust. The wind from Africa still blew.
Once inside the city the Princess was forced to drive more slowly as the car, making rumbling noises of impatience, turned and twisted through the crooked streets. In the poor quarter they were compelled suddenly to draw up altogether and stop for a moment. In front of them, before the door of an ancient palace, stood a crowd that filled the street from side to side. It was the ancient Palazzo Gonfarini where Miss Annie Spragg had died two days before. The throng made way sullenly for the big motor and as it passed the door of the palace Winnery discerned in the dim light from a battered jet of gas three figures—a stout Italian woman leaning on a broom made of twigs, a gigantic nun, and a fat short little priest. These were no doubt the janitress and Father Baldessare and Sister Annunziata, the witnesses of the miracle. Against the grey wall just beneath the gaslight knelt the black figures of two peasant women, praying.
Winnery shouted suddenly to the Princess, "I will get down here. . . ." The car stopped abruptly before the pastry-cake façade of St. Stefano and he descended. Thanking them, he bade them good-night. The car suddenly shot ahead, leaving him on the sidewalk alone, knowing that he would never see them again. They did not belong to his world. They were not interested in him. They were gone about their business and he felt a sudden wild pang of literary curiosity. Where was the d'Orobelli bound in such haste? What would they be doing that night? Why was her hand so feverish? Why did it tremble so violently? Where had they come from? What tragedies, what delights, had touched their lives? Why had they gone to the Villa Leonardo? They were growing old, too, like himself, and the d'Orobelli was frightened.
Suddenly, as if awakening, he turned toward the old palace where he occupied two shabby rooms. Something odd had happened to him and he was aware of it all at once with a sudden quickening of the heart. He had gone up the hill feeling a bitter and disappointed man, old at fifty and lost forever, and now he felt suddenly no age at all. It was as if age did not exist. Even the boredom had vanished—that awful boredom in which nothing interested him, in which everything lost its value and slithered to a common level of monotony. There were two things he wanted passionately. One was to escape somehow from Brinoë and the other to live a little before he died. It was becoming an obsession with him. It seemed that until now he had existed in a kind of literary spell completely detached from reality, and now when he had begun to be old he was aware of life.
He felt a disturbing desire to wander off alone in search of adventure, moving in the constant romantic expectancy that something might happen to him. He had no idea what it was he expected nor what he would do with it when it arrived, but it seemed to him that he could not go back to his flat to unlock the door and find the same chairs, the same books, even the same food that he had known day after day in years of endless monotony. He halted and turned abruptly, setting out for the Piazza Garibaldi, where there were lights and music and gaiety.
He had a poor dinner and some vinegary wine, neither of which seemed to matter greatly. He listened to the sugary Italian music played abominably by a band seated under the arcade. "The Italians," he thought bitterly, "are a musical people." He listened to fragments of talk and fanned himself because of the heat. Yet he enjoyed himself as he had not done in years. He felt life stirring about him. He fell again to speculating upon the mystery of such lives as Father d'Astier's and the d'Orobelli's, which seemed so obvious and were in reality so mysterious. He thought of that preposterous woman Mrs. Weatherby and found himself wondering what it would be like to love and be loved, to have a home and wife and perhaps children. He could not see why these things had never occurred to him before and he thought himself a little mad. Perhaps it was the heat and the hot wind, and perhaps it was the queer change which had come over him lately. Indeed, he even blushed a little in the darkness. He thought a great deal about Miss Fosdick.
At last when he had finished dinner he went for a walk in the moonlight along the river. The wind had died down and it occurred to him suddenly that in the moonlight Brinoë seemed as romantic as people supposed it to be. In the moonlight even the terrible equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel seemed romantic.
As he walked, his own past began to concern him more and more as a sterile thing which had meant nothing to the world and very little to himself, a past filled with promise that had always seemed foredoomed to disappointment. At twenty-four he had been a brilliant and promising fellow. His parodies and his verse had appeared in the Yellow Book alongside the work of other men whose promise had been fulfilled. People had taken him up and asked him about—him, the son of humble parents, educated at Oxford by his uncle who made a fortune as a ship chandler. Critics wrote of him that "he struck a new note," et cetera, et cetera. He had been one of the literary radicals of his day. And then suddenly something had happened and people grew tired of him. No one wrote of him any longer. The fashions changed and his sort of thing was no longer wanted. The Yellow Book died. And now all the parodies and verse lay encased, forgotten and dusty, in copies of a periodical filed away in dusty museums. It was a curiosity. It all dated now. Nobody wanted that kind of thing. It dated. It was older than the writing of the Venerable Bede.
In all the symphony of literature he had been able only to harp on one string and long ago that string had grown flat and monotonous from too much use.
Now for fifteen years he had been writing items about the English who lived in Italy and about those fashionable and gaudy creatures like the d'Orobelli and Father d'Astier who passed through Florence on their way from Rome to Paris or Rome to Venice. He knew them not. He only wrote what filtered down from their world into the duller circles which he frequented. Sometimes he wrote querulous book reviews, mostly of travel books written about Italy, and these, too, appeared in the Ladies' Own World between advertisements for scents and flesh reducers. It was all sordid and unworthy, but it helped to eke out the income given him by Uncle Horace. Well, sometime he would finish his book on Miracles. . . . Some day if he had any money and could escape from the boredom of Brinoë.
And then again when he had been on the verge of inheriting all that money from Uncle Horace the old man chose in his dotage to marry a strumpet, a cheap Cockney woman young enough to be his granddaughter. Aunt Bessie! He thought of her with disgust as he had seen her in the Temperance Hotel in Bloomsbury on the day he went to buy her off with promises of money after Uncle Horace was dead. A yellow-haired slattern, fat and vulgar, with a Cockney accent. But then Uncle Horace had always been a common, vulgar old man. . . . To leave all that income to her with the provision that when she died it was to go on to him, her nephew! And that woman—his Aunt Bessie—was ten years younger than himself and had the constitution of an ox! No, he had been haunted by bad luck. Nothing ever came out right. And now he was nearly fifty-three. His life meant nothing to himself or to anyone else. He had been a failure and it was too late now to accomplish anything. Nothing that mattered had ever happened to him.
At eleven o'clock when he turned again toward his own flat he went by way of the Palazzo Gonfarini, through crooked narrow streets, filled with rubbish and smells, where shadows seemed thicker than shadows should have been. The crowd before the battered doors of the old palace had thinned a little, but there were still people there, gossiping and looking up toward the window just beneath the eaves, and near the doorway there were three devout women kneeling in the dust beneath the room of the mysterious old maid who would be buried tomorrow.
All the way from the Gonfarini Palace to his own flat Mr. Winnery turned over in his mind the power of superstition, against which all the logic and the intelligence in the world appeared to make no progress. There were things which science could not yet explain, but some day it would explain all and then in a moment of triumph superstition, religions, churches, all would be swept away and man liberated to command his own destiny untrammeled by dark heritages of the past. Some day he would finish his book. For the moment he had at hand splendid material, a laboratory, as it were, a perfect specimen in the case of Miss Annie Spragg. He would go deeper and deeper into her story. Mrs. Weatherby had not told everything. Clearly she knew things she had chosen for some reason not to tell.
His own flat was dark and after he had turned on the light and turned down his bed, he discovered that the charwoman had thrust a telegram under the door. It might, he thought, have come from the editor of the Ladies' Own World asking for information of some special importance. He had had such telegrams before. He picked it up and opened it.
Who was John Willis? For a moment he stood quite still with the telegram in his hand, uncomprehending. Then for a second he felt suddenly ill. And slowly it began to make sense to him.
Aunt Bessie was dead and he was a rich man. His whole life was changed. He need no longer live in Brinoë because he had no money. He need no longer write grudging book reviews and bits of gossip about people he did not know. Aunt Bessie was dead. Aunt Bessie, who was younger than himself and whom he had never expected to die. She could not have been more than forty-two and she had stood between him and his uncle's wealth for nearly twenty years. Aunt Bessie with her Cockney accent and low manners who had kidnapped into marriage a rich old man three times her age. All that money was his. It was an act of God.
When he had recovered his senses a little, he sat down at the table and stuck the telegram in the letter-rack. He was a careful man and he knew that when he wakened in the morning he would need to see it there in order to believe that he had not been dreaming.
Then his eye fell upon the pile of paper on which was written his weekly correspondence for the Ladies' Own World. An hour later he would have taken his pen and added, "Among those who paid Brinoë fleeting visits during the month were Father d'Astier, the well-known dignitary, and Princess Faustino d'Orobelli. She wore, etc., etc., etc." At this season, when there was no one in Brinoë every item was precious. Now he simply took up the papers and, tearing them twice across, threw them into the waste-paper basket. Then, feeling the need of air, he pushed open the windows and as he stood there looking down at the river, he found himself thinking of Miss Fosdick.
"She is of a suitable age," he thought. "Neither too young nor too old. She is not a widow, so she will have had no experience. She is innocent, more innocent than myself. I must find out more about her."
As he turned away from the window it occurred to him that all the evening he had been aware of some vague thing disturbing himself and all the life about him. Perhaps it was only because the wind from Africa had died down at last.
He was intensely lonely.