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Wheat Princess

<h2 class='c009'>CHAPTER XXII</h2></div> The next few days were anxious ones for Italy. The straw-weavers of Tuscany were marching into Florence with the cry, ‘Pane o lavore!‘—‘Bread or work!‘—and in the north not bread, but revolution was openly the watchword. Timid tourists who had no desire to be mixed up in another ‘49 were scurrying across the frontiers into France and Switzerland; adventurous gentlemen from the Riviera, eager to enjoy the fun and not unwilling to take advantage of a universal tumult, were gaily scrambling in. The ministry, jostled from its usual apathy, had vigorously set itself to suppressing real and imaginary plots. Opposition newspapers were sequestered and the editors thrown into jail; telegrams and letters were withheld, public meetings broken up, and men arrested in the streets for singing the ‘Hymn of Labour.’ The secret police worked night and day. Every café and theatre and crowd had its spies 210 disguised as loungers; and none dared speak the truth to his neighbour for fear his neighbour was in the pay of the premier. In Milan the rioters had been lashed into a frenzy by their first taste of blood, and for three days the future of United Italy looked dark. Wagons and tramcars were overturned in the streets to make barricades. Roofs and windows rained down tiles and stones, and the soldiers obeyed but sullenly when ordered to fire upon the mob. In their hearts many of them sympathized. The socialists were out in force and working hard, and their motto was, ‘Spread the discontent!’ Priests and students from the universities were stirring up the peasants in the fields and urging them on to revolt. All dissatisfied classes were for the moment united in their desire to overthrow the existing government; what should take its place could be decided later. When Savoy was ousted, then the others—the republicans, the priests, the socialists, the hungry mob in the streets—could fight it out among themselves. And as each faction in its heart believed itself to be the strongest, the fight, if it should come, was like to prove the end of Italy. <hr class='c008' /> While the rest of the kingdom was filled with tumult, only faint echoes reached Villa Vivalanti dozing peacefully in the midst of its hills. Marcia, sitting with folded hands, fretted uselessly at her forced inaction. She scarcely left the villa grounds; she was carrying out Sybert’s suggestion far more literally than he had meant it. She had not the moral courage to face the countryside; it seemed as if every peasant knew about the wheat and followed her with accusing eyes. Even the villa servants appeared to her awakened sensibilities to go about their duties perfunctorily, as if they too shared the general distrust in their employers. The last week dragged slowly to its end. There were only four more days to be spent in the villa, and Marcia now was impatient to leave it. She wanted to get up into the mountains—anywhere out of Italy—where she need never hear the word ‘wheat’ again. Saturday—the week-end that the Melvilles were to spend at the villa—dawned oppressively hot. It was a foretaste of what Rome could do in midsummer. Not a leaf was stirring; there was no suggestion of mist on the hills, and 211 the sun beat down glaringly upon a gaudily coloured landscape. The outer walls of the villa fairly sizzled in the light; but inside the atmosphere was respectably tempered. The green Venetian blinds had been dropped over the windows, the rugs rolled back, and the floors sprinkled with water. The afternoon sun might do its worst outside, but the large airy rooms were dark and cool—and quiet. Half an hour before, the walls had echoed Gerald’s despairing cry, ‘I won’t go to sleep! I won’t go to sleep!’ for Gerald was a true Copley and he took his siestas hardly. But he had eventually dropped off in the midst of his revolt; and all was quiet now when Marcia issued from her room, garden hat in hand. She paused with a light foot at Gerald’s door. The little fellow was spread out, face downward, on the bed, his arms and legs thrown to the four winds. Marcia smiled upon the little clenched fists and damp yellow curls and tiptoed downstairs. On a pile of rugs in the lower hall Gervasio and Marcellus were curled up together, sleeping peacefully and happily. She smiled a blessing on them also. Next to Gerald, Gervasio was the dearest little fellow in the world, and Marcellus the dearest and the homeliest dog. She raised the blind and stepped on to the loggia. A blast of hot air struck her, and she hesitated dubiously. It was scarcely the weather for an afternoon stroll, but the ilex grove looked cool and inviting, and she finally made a courageous dash across the terrace and plunged gratefully into its shady fastnesses. The sun-beaten world outside the little realm of green was an untempered glare of heat and colour. The only sounds which smote the drowsy air were the drip, drip of the fountain and the murmurous drone of insects in the borders of the garden. Marcia paused by the fountain, and dropping down upon the coping, dipped her fingers idly in the water. Shaking the drops of water from her fingers, she rose and stood a moment looking down the green alley she had come by toward the sunny blaze of terrace at the end. She closed her eyes and pictured it as it had looked on her birthday night, a fairy scene, with the tiny bulbs of coloured light glowing among the branches. She pictured Sybert’s face as he had stood beside her. It seemed almost as if the moment would come back again, if she only thought about it 212 hard enough. And then the remembrance of that other moment followed, and the expression on Sybert’s face as he had turned away. What did he think? she asked herself for the hundredth time; and she turned her back upon the fountain and hurried down the laurel walk as if to shut the memory out. The wheat field to-day was ablaze with flaming poppies. The reds and yellows were so crude that no artist would have dared to paint them in their untoned brilliancy. Marcia paused to study the effect. Her eyes wandered from this daring foreground across scarcely less brilliant olive groves and vineyards to Castel Vivalanti on its mountain-top, an irregular mass of yellow ochre against a sky of cobalt blue. There was no attempt at shading. The colours were as unaffectedly primary as an illumination from some old manuscript, or as the outlines a child fills in from his tin box of half a dozen little cakes of paint. This Italy was so uncompromising in her moods. No variant note was allowed to creep in to mar the effect she was striving for. Marcia recalled the sudden storm of the mountain, how fiercely untamed, how intense it had been; she thought of the moonlight nights of the spring, when the mood was lyrical—the soft outline of tower and rain, the songs of nightingales, the heavy odours of acacia and magnolia blossoms. Italy was an impressionist, and her children were like her. There were no half-tones in the Italian nature any more than in the Italian landscape. There were many varying moods, but each in itself was concentrated. Just now there were storms, perhaps, but before long there would be moonlight and singing and love-making again, and the clouds would be forgotten. She strolled on to the ruins of the old villa and sat down among the crumbling arches. She was in a very different mood herself than on that other afternoon of the early spring when Paul Dessart had found her there. She thought of the little sketch he had painted, and recalled her own words as he gave it to her: ‘I will keep it to remember you and the villa by when I go home to America.’ The words had been spoken lightly, but now they sounded prophetic. Everything had seemed before her then; now all seemed behind. A few months more and she would be back in America, with possibly nothing more than the sketch to 213 remember her life in Italy by—and it had meant so much to her; now that it was slipping away, she realized how much. She seemed to have grown more, to have felt more, than in all her life before; and she hated inexpressibly to leave it behind. Crossing to the little grotto that had formed the subject of the picture, she stood gazing pensively at the dilapidated moss-grown pile of stones. The afternoon when Paul had sketched it seemed years before; in reality it was not two months. She thought of him as he had looked that day—so enthusiastic and young and debonair—and she thought of him without a tremor. Many things had changed since then, and she had changed with them. If only Eleanor’s suspicion might be true, that he would come to care for Margaret! She clung to the suggestion. Eleanor’s ‘superstition’ need trouble her no more; Paul would not need to be avenged. She turned aside, and as she did so something caught her eyes. She leaned over to look, and then started back with an exclamation of alarm. A man was lying asleep, almost at her feet, hidden by the tall weeds that choked the entrance to the grotto. The first involuntary thought that flashed to her mind was of Gervasio’s stepfather, but immediately she knew that he was not the sleeper. Gervasio’s stepfather was old, with a grizzled beard; it was evident that this man was young, in spite of the fact that his hat was pulled across his eyes. She laughed at her own fear; it was some peasant who had come from the fields to rest in the shade. She leaned over to look again, and as she did so her heart suddenly leaped into her mouth. The man’s shirt was open at the throat, and there was a dark-purple crucifix tattooed upside down upon his breast. For a second she stood staring, powerless to move; the next, she was running wildly across the blazing wheat field toward the shelter of the villa, with a frightened glance behind at the shadow of the cypresses. <div class='chapter'> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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