The Happy End Part 13

Anna Mantegazza turned. "You may see something of interest here," she called to Mochales.

A series of steps, made by projecting stones, rose to the top of an eight-foot wall, up which Anna unexpectedly led the way. The wall was broad, afforded a comfortable footing, and enclosed a straw-littered yard. A number of doors led into a barn, and into one some men were urging refractory cattle. In a corner a small compact bull, with the rapierlike horns of the mountain breeds, was secured by a nose ring and a short chain; and to the latter the men turned when the other animals had been confined. Two threatened the animal with long poles, while a third unfastened the chain from the wall; and then all endeavored to drive him within. Abrego y Mochales stood easily above, watching these clumsy efforts.

Suddenly the bull stopped, plunged his front hoofs into the soft mold of the stable yard and swept his head from side to side with a broken hoa.r.s.e bellow. The men prodded him with urgent cries; but the bull suddenly whirled, snapping the poles, and there was an immediate scattering.

The sight of the retreating forms apparently enraged the animal, for he charged with astonis.h.i.+ng speed and barely missed horning the last man to fall over the barricade of a half door. Mochales smiled; he called familiarly to the bull. Then he stooped and vaulted lightly down into the yard. Lavinia gave a short exclamation; she was cold with fear. Orsi looked on without any emotion visible on his heavy face. Anna Mantegazza leaned forward, tense with interest. "_Bravo!_" she called.

Gheta Sanviano smiled.

The bull did not see Mochales at first, then the man cried tauntingly.

The bull turned and stood with a lowered slowly-moving head, an uneasy tail. The Spaniard found a small milking stool and, carrying it to the middle of the yard, sat and comfortably rolled another cigarette. He was searching for a match when the bull moved forward a pace; he had found and was striking it when the bull increased his pace; he was guarding the flame about the cigarette's end when the animal broke into a charging run.

The Flower of Spain inhaled a deep breath of smoke, which he expelled in deliberate globes.

"Oh, don't! Oh----" Lavinia exclaimed, an arm before her eyes.

Mochales s.h.i.+fted easily from his seat and apparently in the same instant the bull crushed the stool to splinters.

"_Bravo! Bravo!_" Anna Mantegazza called again, and the man bowed until his extended hat rested on the ground.

He straightened slowly; the bull whirled about and flung himself forward. Abrego y Mochales now had one of the discarded poles; and, waiting until the horns had almost encircled him, he vaulted lightly and beautifully over the running animal's shoulder. He waited again, avoiding the infuriated charge by a scant step; and, when the bull stopped he had Mochales' hat placed squarely upon his horns. Lavinia watched now in fascinated terror; she could not remove her gaze from the slim figure in the short black jacket and narrow crimson sash. At the moment when her tension relaxed, Mochales, with a short running step, vaulted cleanly to the top of the wall. His cigarette was still burning. She wanted desperately to add her praise to Anna Mantegazza's enthusiastic plaudits, Gheta's subtle smile; but only the utmost ba.n.a.lities occurred to her.

They descended the stone steps and slowly mounted toward the house.

Cesare Orsi resolutely dropped back beside Lavinia.

"You are really superb!" he told her in his highly colored Neapolitan manner. "Most women--Anna Mantegazza for example--are like children before such a show as that back there. Your sister, too, was pleased; it appealed to her vanity, as the fellow intended it should. But you only disliked it.... I could see that in your att.i.tude. It was the circus--that's all."

Lavinia gazed at him out of an unfathomable contempt. She thought: What a fool he is! It wasn't Abrego y Mochales' courage that appealed to her most, although that had afforded her an exquisite thrill, but his powerful grace, his absolute physical perfection. Orsi was heated again and his tie had slipped up over the back of his collar.

She recalled the first talk she had had with him about Mochales and the manner in which she had masked her true feeling for the latter.

How easy Orsi had been to mislead! Now she was seized by the desire to show him the actual state of her mind; she wanted, in bitter sentences, to tell him how infinitely superior the Spaniard was to such fat easy grubs as himself. She longed to make clear to him exactly what it was that women admired in men--romance and daring and splendid strength.

It might suit Gheta, who had wrinkles, to encourage such men as Cesare Orsi; their wealth might appeal to cold and material minds, but they could never hope to inspire pa.s.sion; no one would ever cherish for them a hopeless lifelong love.

"Do you know," Orsi declared with firm conviction, "you are even handsomer than your sister!"

"Fool! fool! fool!" But she could not, of course, say a word of what was in her thoughts. She met his admiring gaze with a blank face, conscious of how utterly her exterior belied and hid the actual Lavinia Sanviano.

She felt wearily old, sophisticated. In her room, dressing for the evening, she made up her mind that she must have a black dinner gown--later she would wear no other shade.

IV

Anna Mantegazza knocked and entered just as Lavinia had finished with her hair and was slipping into the familiar white dress. There had been, within the last few hours, a perceptible change in the former's att.i.tude toward her. Lavinia realized that Anna Mantegazza regarded her with a new interest, a greater and more personal friendliness.

"My dear Lavinia!" she exclaimed, critically overlooking the other's preparations. "You look very appealing--like a snowdrop; exactly.

I should say the toilet for Sunday at the convent; but no longer appropriate outside. Really, I must speak to the marchesa--parents are so slow to see the differences in their own family. Gheta has been a little overemphasized.

"I wonder," she continued with glowing vivacity, "if you would allow me--I a.s.sure you it would give me the greatest pleasure in the world....

Your figure is a thousand times better than mine; but, thank heaven, I'm still slender.... A little evening dress from Vienna! It should really do you very well. Will you accept it from me? I'd like to give you something, Lavinia; and it has never been out of its box."

She turned and was out of the room before Lavinia could reply. There was no reason why she shouldn't take a present from Anna--Pier Mantegazza and her father had been lifelong friends, and his wife was an intimate of the Sanvianos. It would not, probably, be black. It wasn't. Anna returned, followed by her maid, who bore carefully over her arm a s.h.i.+mmering ma.s.s of glowing pink.

"Now!" Anna Mantegazza cried. "Your hair is very pretty, very original--but hardly for a dress by Verlat. Sara!"

The maid moved quietly forward and directed an appraising gaze at Lavinia. She was a flat-hipped Englishwoman, with a cleft chin and enigmatic greenish eyes. "I see exactly, madame," she a.s.sured Anna; and with her deft dry hands she took down Lavinia's laboriously arranged hair.

She drew it back from the brow apparently as simply as before, twisted it into a low knot slightly eccentric in shape, and recut a bang.

Lavinia's eyes seemed bluer, her delicate flush more elusive; the shape of her face appeared changed, it was more pointed and had a new willful charm.

"The stockings," Anna commanded.

Dressed, Lavinia Sanviano stood curiously before the long mirror; she saw a fresh Lavinia that was yet the old; and she was absorbing her first great lesson in the magic of clothes. Verlat, a celebrated dressmaker, was typical of the Viennese spirit--the gown Lavinia wore resembled, in all its implications, an orchid. There was a whisper here of satin, a pale note of green, a promise of chiffon. Her crisp round shoulders were bare; her finely molded arms were clouded, as it were, with a pink mist; the skirt was full, incredibly airy; yet every movement was draped by a suave flowing and swaying.

Lavinia recognized that she had been immensely enriched in effect; it was not a question of mere beauty--beauty here gave way to a more subtle and potent consideration. It was a potency which she instinctively shrank from probing. For a moment she experienced, curiously enough, a gust of pa.s.sionate resentment, followed by a quickly pa.s.sing melancholy, a faint regret.

Anna Mantegazza and the maid radiated with satisfaction at the result of their efforts. The former murmured a phrase that bore Gheta's name, but Lavinia caught nothing else. The maid said:

"Without a doubt, madame."

Lavinia lingered in her room, strangely reluctant to go down and see her sister. She was embarra.s.sed by her unusual appearance and dreaded the prominence of the inevitable exclamations. At last she was obliged to proceed. The rest stood by the entrance of the dining room. Anna Mantegazza was laughing at a puzzled expression on the good-natured countenance of Cesare Orsi; Gheta was slowly waving a fan of gilded feathers; Abrego y Mochales was standing rigid and somberly handsome; and, as usual, Pier Mantegazza was late.

Gheta Sanviano turned and saw Lavinia approaching, and the elder's face, always pale, grew suddenly chalky; it was drawn, and the wrinkles, carefully treated with paste, became visible about her eyes. Her hands shook a little as she took a step forward.

"What does this mean, Lavinia?" she demanded. "Why did I know nothing about that dress?"

"I knew nothing myself until a little bit ago," Lavinia explained apologetically, filled with a formless pity for Gheta. "Isn't it pretty?

Anna Mantegazza gave it to me."

She could see, over Gheta's shoulder, Cesare Orsi staring at her in idiotic surprise.

"Don't you like it, Gheta?" Anna asked.

Gheta Sanviano didn't answer, but closed her eyes for a moment in an effort to control the anger that shone in them. The silence deepened to constraint, and then she laughed lightly.

"Quite a woman of fas.h.i.+on!" she observed of Lavinia. "Fancy! It's a pity that she must go back to the convent so soon."

Her eyes while she was speaking were directed toward Anna Mantegazza and the resentment changed to hatred. The other shrugged her shoulders indifferently and moved toward the dining room, catching Lavinia's arm in her own.

Mantegazza entered at the soup and was seated on Gheta's right; Cesare Orsi was on Anna's left; and Lavinia sat between the two men, with Mochales opposite. Whatever change had taken place in her looks made absolutely no impression upon the latter; it was clear that he saw no one besides Gheta Sanviano.

In the candlelight his face more than ever resembled bronze; his hair was dead-black; above the white linen his head was like a superb effigy of an earlier and different race from the others. It was almost savage in its still austerity. Cesare Orsi, too, said little, which was extraordinary for him. If Lavinia had made small mark on Mochales, at least she had overpowered the other to a ludicrous degree. It seemed that he had never before half observed her; he even muttered to himself and smiled uncertainly when she chanced to gaze at him.

But what the others lacked conversationally Anna Mantegazza more than supplied; she was at her best, and that was very sparkling, touched with malice and understanding, and absolute independence. She insisted on including Lavinia in every issue. At first Lavinia was only confused by the attention pressed on her; she retreated, growing more inarticulate at every sally. Then she became easier; spurred partly by Gheta's direct unpleasantness and partly by the consciousness of her becoming appearance, she retorted with spirit; engaged Pier Mantegazza in a duet of verbal confetti. She gazed challengingly at Abrego y Mochales, but got no other answer than a grave perfunctory inclination.

She thought of an alternative to the black gowns and unrelieved melancholy--she might become the gayest member of the gay Roman world, be known throughout Italy for her reckless exploits, her affairs and Vienna gowns, all the while hiding her pa.s.sion for the Flower of Spain.

It would be a vain search for forgetfulness, with an early death in an atmosphere of roses and champagne. Gheta was gazing at her so crossly that she took a sip of Mantegazza's brandy; it burned her throat cruelly, but she concealed the choking with a smile of high bravado.

After dinner they progressed to a drawing-room that filled an entire end of the villa; it lay three steps below the hall, the imposing walls and floor covered with tapestries and richly dark rugs. Lavinia more than ever resembled an orchid, here in a gloom of towering trees curiously suggested by the draperies and s.p.a.ce. She went forward with Anna Mantegazza to an amber blur of lamplight, the others following irregularly.