Part 26

He said nothing of Vanno, whom she had been brought there to meet, and to "save." Perhaps the Prince had not cared to come. This seemed very probable to Mary; yet the thought that he might be avoiding her did not stab the girl's heart with any sharp pang of shame or pain. A radiant peace had taken possession of her spirit, stealing into it unaware, as the perfume of lilies may take possession of the senses, before the lilies are seen. Though she felt gratitude and something almost like love for the curé, she was glad that he had sent her into his garden alone. The flowery knot pinned on the bare breast of mountain seemed even more to her than the "fairyland" Rose Winter had described. "Angel-land," she thought, as she saw how secret and hidden the bright spot was on its high jutting point of rock, with its guardian wall of towering, ivied ruin on one side, and the tall pale church on another. She felt that here was a place in which she might find herself again, the self that had got lost in the dark, somewhere far, far below this height.

She stood by the low wall which kept the garden from the precipice; and when she had looked eastward to Italy, and westward where the prostrate giant of the Tête de Chien mourns over Monaco, she turned toward the arbour in which the curé had told her to wait. Most of the big gold and copper grape-leaves had fallen now, but some were left, crisped by frost until they seemed to have been cut from thin sheets of metal; and over the mass of knotted branches rained a torrent of freshly opened roses. They and their foliage made a thick screen, and Mary could not see the inside of the arbour; but as she reached the entrance Vanno stood just within, waiting for her, very pale, but with a light on his face other than the sunlight which streamed over him. Then Mary knew that something, more intimately herself than was her reasoning mind, had expected him, and had never believed that he would refuse to come.

He held out both hands, without a word; and without a word she gave him hers. He lifted them to his lips, and kissed first one, then the other. Still keeping her hands fast, he drew them down so that her arms were held straight at her sides. Standing thus, they looked into each other's eyes, and the glory of the sun reflected back from Vanno's almost dazzled Mary. Never in her life had she known happiness like this. She felt that such a moment was worth being born for, even if there were no after joy in a long gray existence; and the truth of what she had many times read without believing, pierced to her heart, like a bright beam from heaven: the truth that love is the one thing on earth which God meant to last forever.

"Will you forgive me?" Vanno asked, his eyes holding hers.

"Yes," she said. "And will you forgive me, for not forgiving you?"

"How could you forgive me, when you thought of me as you did? But you know now that you thought wrong."

"Yes. I know. Though I don't know how I know."

"And I know you to be _yourself_. That means everything. I can't say it in any other way. Because it was your real self I knew at Marseilles--the self I've known always, and waited for, and am unworthy of at last."

"Don't call yourself unworthy."

"I won't talk about that part at all--not yet. I love you--love you! and--God! how I need you."

"And I----"

"You love me?"

He loosed her hands, and catching her up, lifted her off her feet, her slight body crushed against his, her head pressed back; and so he kissed her on the mouth, a long, long kiss that did away with any need of explanation or forgiveness. There was no returning afterward to the old selves again, they both knew before their lips had parted. It was as if they two had climbed to the top of a high tower together, and a door had been shut and locked behind them.

By and by he made her sit on the wooden seat under the rose canopy; and going down on one knee, he took up a fold of her dress and kissed it. No man but one of Latin blood could have done this and kept his dignity; but as he did the thing it was beautiful, even sacred to Mary, as if he knelt to pour balm on the wound that once he had given her. Though his lips touched only her dress, the very hem of it, she felt the thrill of the touch, as she had felt his kiss on her mouth. This was her lover, and her knight. She half feared, half adored the thought that from this moment she had granted him rights; that a man loved her, and had kissed her, and that she had confessed to loving him. It was so different from anything which she had dreamed could come to her that she could hardly believe it was happening: for when she had left the convent she was still a nun in her outlook upon life.

Yet now this bowed dark head, and the rim of brown throat between the short, thick hair and the stiff white collar, looked somehow familiar, as if the man who knelt there had always been hers. So dear was the head, so boyish in its humility, that ridiculous tears rushed smarting to her eyes. She wanted to laugh and to cry. Where his lips had touched her dress, she almost expected to see a spark of light clinging, like a fallen star.

When he looked up and saw the tears, still kneeling he put his arms around her, and slowly drew her to him. Then her hands stole out to clasp his neck, her fingers interlacing, and she let her cheek lie softly against his. His face was hot as if the sun had scorched it, and she could feel a little pulse beating in his temple. There was a faint suggestion rather than a fragrance of tobacco smoke about his hair and his clothes, which made her want to laugh with a delightful, childish sense of amusement that mingled with the thrill of her love for him.

"You always belonged to me, you know," he said. "What time I have wasted, not finding you before! But I knew you existed. I knew always that I should meet you some day. And then I nearly lost you--but we won't talk of that, because you have forgiven me: and forgiving means forgetting, doesn't it?"

She answered only by pressing her face more closely against his.

"But there are other things for you to forgive," he went on. "I used to think I was very strong, not only in my body but in my will. Now I see that I can be weak. Can you love a man who does things he knows to be beneath him? I have made a fool of myself in the Casino--a fool like the rest. I began because I was miserable, but----"

"Was it I who made you miserable?"

"Yes. But that is no excuse for me. I deserved it all and more: I'd hurt you. And afterward, I went on being a fool, because--it gave me a kind of pleasure, when I'd lost pleasure in other things. It's the weakness of it that I hate in myself, not so much the thing I did. A woman should have a man's strength to lean on, if she is to love him. Weakness is unpardonable in a man. Yet I'm asking you to forgive it, and let me begin over again."

"I love you as you are," Mary said. "What am I, to judge? What have I myself been doing?"

"You are a girl; and you are so young. You knew no better. I knew. You were led on. I walked into the trap with my eyes open."

"I was warned. My father just before he died wrote me a letter saying there was 'gambler's blood' in my veins. Those words always run in my head now. And a friend who loves me begged me not to come to Monte Carlo."

"It was Fate brought you--to give you to me. Do you regret it?"

"I don't regret anything--if you don't; because what is past--for both of us--doesn't feel real. This is the only real part. We were brought to Monte Carlo for this, it seems now."

"It seems, and it is."

They looked with one accord down at the Casino far below, which from the curé's garden had more than ever the semblance of a large, crouching animal. Its four horns glittered in the beginning of sunset, as if they were crusted with jewels of different colours. Its dominance over all that surrounded it, all that was smaller and less powerful and impressive than itself, was astonishingly evident from this bird's-eye point of view; but brightly as the jewels gleamed, they had lost their allurement for these two. With Vanno's arms around her, Mary wondered how she could ever have felt that the Casino was a vast magnet compelling her to come to it in spite of herself, drawing her thoughts and her money to itself, as an immense magnetic rock might draw the nails from the sides of a frail little boat. With Mary's fingers warm and soft as rose-petals against his neck, her cheek on his, Vanno could have laughed with contemptuous pity at the wretched image of himself which he seemed to see down below, stupidly hurrying along with an offering for the Casino. He was not so much shocked at his own yielding to the attraction as he was surprised that there could have been so strong an attraction.

"Doesn't it look stupid down there?" Mary asked, almost in a whisper. "Like a lot of toy houses for children to play with?"

"And the children are tired of playing with them!" Vanno answered. "The toys there were only worth playing with when there was nothing better to do."

"That's it!" she echoed. "When there was nothing better to do. I think that was what the curé must have meant."

"The curé!" Vanno echoed. "I'd forgotten him!"

"So had I. How ungrateful of us. But you have made me forget everything except--_you_."

She rose slowly, reluctantly, and then pretended to exert her strength in lifting him up from his knees. "The curé stayed away on purpose," she said.

"Yes. For he meant this to happen--just as it has."

Mary smiled, half closing her eyes, so that the world swam before her in a radiant mist. She was less afraid of love and the man who gave and took it, now. Already it seemed that Vanno and she had always been lovers, not sad, parted lovers, but happy playmates in a world made for them. There could not have been a time when they did not understand each other. Everything before this day had been a dream. "Do you know," she said, "why I came here--I mean, why the curé asked me? He told me that I must come and 'save' you. As if I could! It was I who needed saving."

[Illustration: "'IT WAS FATE BROUGHT YOU--TO GIVE YOU TO ME. DO YOU REGRET IT?'"]

"He knew," Vanno answered, speaking more to himself than to her, "that we should save each other."

As he spoke, a foot ostentatiously rattled the gravel of the path, at a safe distance. The curé coughed, and coughed again. A serious catching in the throat he seemed to have, for a man who lived in the fresh air and laughed at the notion of a "sunset chill."

Vanno took Mary's hand and kept it in his as he led her out of the arbour.

"This is what your blessing has done, Father," he said.

Then, the curé must have blessed him, too!

The priest smiled his good smile as he came toward them, the sky flaming behind his black-clad figure, like banners waving.

"I thought. I hoped. No, I knew!" And he smiled contentedly. "The stars have ceased to desire the moth, a well-known phenomenon which often upsets the solar system. The moth has lost its attraction. The stars have found each other."

"We have found each other," Mary said, "and I believe--I believe that we have found ourselves, our real selves."

"You have found yourselves and each other," echoed the curé, "which means that you have found God. I have no more fear"--and he waved a hand toward the towered building down below, set on fire by the sun--"no more fear of the moth."

XXV

They stayed on, after their friend had come to them; and all three sat together in the arbour, while the shadows hewed quarries of sapphire deep into the side of the mountains; and in the violet rain of twilight everything on land and water that was white seemed to become magically alive: the fishing boats turned to winged sea birds: the little waves were lilied with foam blossoms: the sky became a garden of stars.

When Mary first went to live at the convent, an impressionable child of eight, one of the nuns told her that the stars were spirits of children in heaven's nursery, sent out to play in the sky, that their mothers might see them and be glad: and the moon was their nurse. She repeated the legend to Vanno and the curé, and said that she had been brought up from childhood in a convent school, because she had lost her mother, and her father had gone away to India; but she did not say that she had taken the first steps toward becoming a nun. She wanted Vanno to hear this first, when they were alone together. Not that she feared the knowledge might endanger his love for her. In this immortal hour it seemed that nothing could ever again come between them.

"That accounts for what she is, does it not?" the curé exclaimed, turning to Vanno with the joy of the discoverer. "A convent school! Now, my son, what puzzled you in her is made clear. I, at least, might have guessed. A girl brought up by a band of good and innocent cloistered women must always be different from other girls. She should not be let out to wander alone in the world without guardians, as this child has been; for without a guide a few mistakes at the beginning are certain. Now, she has made all the mistakes she need ever make; and she is no longer alone."

"Never again!" Vanno said fervently, pressing her hand under the blue cover of dusk.

It did not occur to Mary that they both took her for a much younger girl than she really was. She had lived so entirely under the jurisdiction of those older than herself that in many ways she had remained a child. And she had begun by feeling still younger than before, after suddenly blossoming into independence. It was only since the night of Christmas, when the frost of unhappiness nipped the newly unfolded petals, that the flower had begun to droop. Now that dark time was already forgotten. She could hardly realize that it had ever been. In the joy of Vanno's love for her, and his old friend's fatherly kindness, she basked in the contentment of being understood, loved, taken care of; and she knew that she was a woman, not a child, only by the capacity to love a man as a woman loves. If she had said, "But I am nearly twenty-five," the two men would have realized at once that her school days must have ended long ago, even if prolonged beyond the usual time; and they would have asked themselves, if they had not asked her, where she had spent the years between then and now, in order to account for that ignorance of the world which to them explained and excused everything she had done at Monte Carlo. But it did not enter Mary's mind to mention her age.

"Upon some natures such teaching might not have made the same impression, of course," the curé went on, thoughtfully. "This dear child, it seems to me, has a very--how shall I express it?--a very old-fashioned nature. Nothing, I believe, could ever have turned her into one of those hard modern girls they are running up now like buildings made of concrete on steel frames. But the convent teaching has accentuated all in her that was already what I call 'old-fashioned.' And you, too, my Principino, you are old-fashioned!"

"I?" exclaimed Vanno, surprised.

"Yes. You will suit each other well, you two, I prophesy. You have an old-fashioned nature: but do not think when I say that, I place you on a shelf at the back of the world's cupboard. All Romans, all Italian men, are old-fashioned at heart--and it is the heart that counts, though we do not always know it; and most of us would not like others to know it of ourselves. You have been much in the East, Principino, and you have learned to love the desert; but you would not have loved it as you do were it not for the spirit of romance which keeps you old-fashioned under a very thin veneer of what is modern. I saw this in you when you were a boy and my pupil; and I must say it made me love you the better. It is perhaps the secret which draws the love of others toward you, without their knowing why, though it has caused life to jar on you often, no doubt, and may again. You would not, perhaps, have fallen into the mistake by which you hurt yourself and this dear child if you had not been old-fashioned. Don't you see that?"

"I suppose it is old-fashioned to have an ideal," Vanno admitted, laughing a little.

"Yes. And most old-fashioned of all, even I can see, are your ideas of women. So it is well you have fallen in love with one who is not modern."

"I know she is the Only Woman. But I grant that I may have picked up some Eastern ideas of what a woman's life ought to be. I must get rid of them, I suppose."

"You didn't 'pick those ideas up,' my son. They were in your blood. All the same, you may get rid of a few--a very few--with advantage. And safely too, because you are going to have an old-fashioned girl for your wife."

"I'm going to have her very soon, I hope," Vanno added, in a different tone.

Mary spoke not a word; and he did not press her then for an answer. But when the sudden darkness of the southern evening had warned them that it was time to go, he began in the same strain again, after they had left the tunnelled streets of the rock-village. It was so dark that Vanno had the excuse of saving Mary a stumble on the rough cobblestones, as they went slowly down the mule path. He held her tightly, his arm around her waist. She walked bareheaded, trailing her hat in her hand; and the warm perfume of her hair came to him like the scent of some hitherto unknown flower, sweeter than any other fragrance that the evening dew distilled. "I want you to be my wife very soon," he said. "I must have you. And if you're as old-fashioned as the curé thinks, you won't say no to me when I tell you that. Shall he marry us?"

"Oh--that would mean it must be _dreadfully_ soon!"

"Is there a 'dreadfully?' But--there's one thing, dearest, that I almost forgot. I must write to my father. Not that anything he could say would make any difference now; only I want him to love you, and our marriage to bring him happiness, not pain, even in the thought of it before he sees you. My brother Angelo has married lately, and he didn't let our father know till just before the thing was done. Perhaps it was not his fault. I can't tell as to that: there must have been a strong reason. But our father was deeply hurt; and it would be even worse with me, for he makes it no secret that I'm his favourite son. I believe I'm more like my mother than Angelo is. She was an Irish-American girl, and my father adored her: though sometimes I wonder if he knew how to show his love. Anyhow, she died young, and he's been almost a recluse ever since. I'll write him at once--and I may even go to see him, though I can hardly bear to think of leaving you long enough for that. Still, it needn't be for more than three or four days and nights. I could go and come back in that time. I'll see! But if I do go, it must be to tell him we're to be married at once, from my brother's house."

"Your brother's house?" Mary repeated.

"Yes. Angelo has taken a villa at Cap Martin for the season. Perhaps you've seen it. He and my new sister-in-law went to Ireland to visit relatives of my mother, and to England afterward. They've been married more than two months; but I saw my sister-in-law for the first time on New Year's eve, the day they arrived. She's English, though she has lived mostly in southern Germany, I believe. She's an artist--does portraits beautifully, I hear, and was much admired in Rome, where she had come to paint, when my brother met her. I know very little of her except that she's pretty and charming--if any woman who is not _you_ can be either. I'm sorry for all the men in the world, poor wretches, because there's only one you, and I've got you for mine, and I shall let them see as little of you as possible."

"That really _is_ old-fashioned!" Mary laughed.

"Do you mind? Do you want to see them?"

"Not particularly. Because you have begun to make me feel the others aren't worth seeing."

"Angel!"

They both laughed, and Vanno was entranced when her heel slipped on a stone, and he could clasp her so tightly as to feel the yielding of her body against his arm. He would have liked to sing, the night was so wonderful, and all nature seemed to be singing. Distant bells chimed, silver sweet; frogs in hidden garden pools harped like bands of fairy musicians; and from everywhere came the whisper and gurgle of running water: springs from the mountains, pouring through underground canals to houses of peasants, who bought water rights by the hour.

As the two walked down the many windings of the mule path they met labourers coming up from the day's work in the country of the rich, far below. Some of the young men, clattering along in groups, joined in singing the strange tuneless songs, memories of Saracen days, which Vanno had heard on his first mountain walk. The old men did not sing. They climbed stolidly, with heads and shoulders bent, yet not as if discouraged by the thought of the long, steep way before them before they could rest at home. They had the air of taking life as it was, entirely for granted.