Mary drove through the streets of Florence, along the road by which she had come, and then up the hill on the top of which was the villa. The hill was steep and wound sharply with horse-shoe turns. About half-way up was a little semi-circular terrace, with a tall, very old cypress and a parapet in front, from which one got a view of the cathedral and the towers of Florence. Tempted by the beauty of the night Mary stopped the car and got out. She walked to the edge and looked over. The sight that met her eyes, the valley flooded with the full moon under the vastness of the cloudless sky, was so lovely that it wrung her heart with a throb of pain.
Suddenly she was aware that a man was standing in the shadow of the cypress. She saw the gleam of his cigarette. He came towards her. She was a trifle startled, but had no intention of showing it. He took off his hat.
"Excuse me, are you not the lady who was so generous in the restaurant?" he said. "I should like to thank you."
She recognized him.
"You are the violinist."
He no longer wore that absurd Neapolitan costume, but nondescript clothes which looked threadbare and dingy. He spoke English well enough but with a foreign accent.
"I owed my landlady for my board and lodging. The people I live with are very good to me, but they are poor and they aced the money. Now I shall be able to pay them."
"What are you doing here?" asked Mary.
"It is on my way home. I stopped to look at the view."
"Do you live near here, then?"
"I live in one of the cottages just before you come to your villa."
"How do you know where I live?"
"I"ve seen you passing in your car. I know that you have a beautiful garden and there are frescoes in the villa."
"Have you been in it?"
"No. How should I? The contadini have told me about it."
Mary had lost the slight nervousness which she had had for a moment. He was a pleasant-spoken, rather shy young man; she remembered how ill at ease he had looked in the restaurant.
"Would you like to come and see the garden and the frescoes?" she said.
"It would give me much pleasure. When would it be convenient?"
Rowley and his unexpected proposal of marriage had amused and excited her. She had no wish to go to bed.
"Why not now?" she said on an impulse.
"Now?" he repeated, surprised.
"Why not? The garden is never so beautiful as under the full moon."
"I should be very pleased," he said primly.
"Jump into the car. I'll drive you up."
He took his seat by her side. She continued on her way and they came to a group of cottages huddled together.
"That is where I live," he told her.
She slowed down and looked reflectively at the poverty-stricken little houses. They were horribly sordid. She drove on and presently they came to the gates of her villa. They stood open and she drove in.
She parked the car and they walked up the narrow drive. The principal rooms and Mary's bedroom were on the second floor, to which you ascended by a fine flight of steps. She opened the door and turned on the lights. There was nothing much to see in the hall and she took the young man straight into the drawing-room with the painted walls. It was a noble apartment and the owners of the villa had furnished it with period pieces of fine quality. Flowers arranged in great vases mitigated its stately severity. The frescoes were somewhat damaged and had been none too well restored, but with all those figures in their sixteenth-century clothes they gave an impression of a multifarious and magnificent vitality.
"Wonderful, wonderful!" he cried. "I didn't think one ever saw such things except in a museum. I never realized that people could possess them."
It gave her a thrill to see his delight. She did not think it necessary to tell him that there was not a chair in which you could sit with comfort or that, with those marble floors and that vaulted ceiling, except in the warmest of warm weather you shivered with cold.
"And is it all yours?" he asked.
"Oh no. It belongs to friends of mine. They've lent it to me while they're away."
"I'm sorry. You are beautiful and it's right that you should possess beautiful things."
"Come along," she said, "and I'll get you a glass of wine and then well go and look at the garden."
"No, I had no dinner. Wine would go to my head."
"Why did you have no dinner?"
He gave a careless, boyish laugh.
"I had no money. But never mind about that; I shall eat tomorrow."
"Oh, but that's awful. Come into the kitchen and we'll see if we can't find something for you to eat now."
"I'm not hungry. This is better than food. Let me see the garden with the moon shining."
"The garden will keep and so will the moon. I'm going to make you some supper and then you shall see anything you like."
They went down into the kitchen. It was vast, with a stone floor and a huge old-fashioned range where you might have cooked for fifty people. Nina and Ciro were long since in bed and asleep and the cook had gone home to her cottage half-way down the hill. Mary and the stranger, hunting about for food, felt like a pair of burglars. They found bread and wine, eggs, bacon and butter. Mary turned on the electric stove which the Leonards had put in, started to toast some slices of bread and broke the eggs into a frying-pan to scramble them.
"Cut some rashers of bacon," she told the young man, "and we'll fry them. What is your name?"
With the bacon in one hand and a knife in the other, he clicked his heels together.
"Karl Richter, student of art."
"Oh, I thought you were Italian," she said lightly, as she beat the eggs. "That sounds German."
"I was Austrian when Austria existed."
There was a sullenness in his tone which made Mary give him a questioning look.
"How is it you speak English? Have you ever been to England?"
"No. I learnt it at school and at the University." Suddenly he smiled. "You're marvellous to be able to do that."
"To do what?"
"Cook."
"Would it surprise you if I told you I'd been a working girl and not only was able to cook for myself, but had to?"
"I shouldn't believe it."
"Would you rather believe that I'd lived in luxury all my life with a host of servants to look after me?"
"Yes. Like a princess in a fairy story."
"Then it's true. I can scramble eggs and fry bacon because that was one of the gifts I received at my christening from my fairy godmother."
When everything was ready they put it on a tray and, Mary leading, went into the dining-room. It was a large room with a painted ceiling, with a tapestry at each end and great gilt-wood sconces on the side walls. They sat opposite one another in tall stately chairs at a refectory table.
"I'm ashamed of my poor and shabby clothes," he smiled. "In this splendid room I should be dressed in silk and fine velvet like the cavaliers in an old picture."
His suit was shabby, his shoes patched, and his shirt, open at the neck, frayed. He wore no tie. By the light of the tall candles on the table his eyes were dark and cavernous. He had a strange head with close-cropped black hair, high cheek-bones, hollow cheeks, a pallid skin and a look of strain which was somewhat moving. It occurred to Mary that in costume, dressed, say, like one of those young princes in a picture by Bronzino at the Uffizi, he would have been very nearly beautiful.
"How old are you?" she asked him.
"Twenty-three."
"What else matters?"
"What is the good of youth that has no opportunity? I live in a prison and there's no escape from it."
"Are you an artist?"
He laughed.
"Can you ask me after hearing me play? I'm not a violinist. When I escaped from Austria I got work in a hotel, but business was bad and I was sent away. I've had one or two odd jobs, but it's difficult to get them when you're a foreigner and your papers aren't in order. I play the fiddle when I get the chance just to keep body and soul together, but I don't get the chance every day."
"Why did you have to leave Austria?"
"Some of us students protested against the Anschluss. We tried to organize resistance. It was stupid of course. We hadn't a hope. The only result was that two of us were shot and the rest put in a concentration camp. They put me in for six months, but I escaped and crossed the mountains into Italy."
"It all sounds rather horrible," said Mary.
It was a lame and inadequate thing to say, but it was all she could think of.
He gave her an ironical smile.
"I'm not the only one, you know. There are thousands and thousands of us in the world now. Anyhow I'm free."
"But what are your plans for the future?"
A look of despair crossed his face and he was about to answer. But he made an impatient gesture and laughed.
"Don't let me think of that now. Let me enjoy this priceless moment. Nothing has ever happened to me like this in all my life. I want to enjoy it so that whatever comes to me later it will be a recollection that I can always treasure."
Mary looked at him strangely and it seemed to her that she could hear the beating of her heart. It had been almost a joke, what she had said to Rowley, the reverie of an idle day that, when the moment came, she knew she would shrink from. Had the moment come now? She felt queerly reckless. She drank very little as a rule and the strong red wine she had been drinking to keep him company had gone to her head. There was something mysteriously disturbing in thus sitting in that vast room with its memories of long ago opposite this young man with the tragic face. It was long past midnight. The air that came in through the open windows was warm and scented. Mary felt a sort of languor running through her excitement; her heart seemed to melt in her bosom and at the same time the blood seemed to race madly through her veins. She rose abruptly from the table.
"Now I will show you the garden and then you must go."
Access to it was most convenient from the great room in which were the frescoes, and thither she led him. On the way through he paused to look at a handsome cassone that stood against the wall; then he caught sight of the gramophone.
"How strange that looks in these surroundings!"
"I sometimes put it on when I'm sitting in the garden by myself."
"May I put it on now?"
"If you like."
He turned the switch. By chance the record was that of a Strauss waltz He gave a little cry of delight.
"Vienna. It's one of our dear Viennese waltzes."
He looked at her with shining eyes. His face was transfigured. She had an intuition of what he wanted to ask her, and saw at the same time that he was too timid to speak. She smiled.
"Can you dance?"
"Oh, yes; I can do that. I dance better than I play."
"Let me see."
He put his arm round her and in that sumptuous, empty room, in the dead of night. they waltzed to the old-fashioned charming tune of the Viennese conductor. Then she took his hand and led him out into the garden. By the garish light of day it had sometimes a look that was a trifle forlorn, like a woman much loved who has lost her loveliness; but now under the full moon, with its trimmed hedges and ancient trees, with its grotto and its lawns, it was thrilling and secret. The centuries fell away and wandering there you felt yourself the inhabitant of a fresher, younger world in which instinct was more reckless and consequences less material. The light summer air was scented with the white flowers of night.
They walked silently, hand in hand.
"It's so beautiful," he murmured at last, "it's almost unbearable." He quoted that celebrated line of Goethe's in which Faust, satisfied at length, begs the fleeting moment to stay. "You must be very happy here."
"Very," she smiled.
"I'm glad. You're kind and good and generous. You deserve happiness. I should like to think that you have everything in the world you desire."
She chuckled.
"At all events I have everything I have any right to hope for."
He sighed.
"I should like to die this night. Nothing so wonderful will ever happen to me again. I shall think of it all my life. I shall always have this evening to remember, the glimpse of your beauty and the recollection of this lovely spot. I shall always think of you as a goddess in heaven and I shall pray to you as though you were the Madonna."
He lifted her hand to his lips and with an awkward, touching little bow, kissed it. She gently touched his face. Suddenly he fell on his knees and kissed the hem of her dress. Then a great exaltation seized her. She took his head in her hands, raising him towards her, and kissed his eyes and his mouth. There was something solemn and mystical in the action. She had a feeling that was strange to her. Her heart was filled with loving kindness.
He rose to his feet and passionately clasped her in his arms. He was twenty-three. She was not a goddess to pray to, but a woman to possess.
They went back into the silent house.
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