The Wheat Princess. Jean Webster
a worse shock than that, it is happier than most nobilities,’ said her uncle. And the simultaneous announcement of M. Benoit and dinner created a diversion.
It was a small party, and every one felt the absence of that preliminary chill which a long list of guests invited two weeks beforehand is likely to produce. They talked back and forth across the table, and laughed and joked in the unpremeditated way that an impromptu affair calls forth. Marcia glanced at her uncle once or twice in half perplexity. He seemed so entirely the careless man of the world, as he turned a laughing face to answer one of Mrs. Melville’s sallies, that she could scarcely believe he was the same man who had spoken so seriously to her a few minutes before. She glanced across at Sybert. He was smiling at some remark of the contessa’s, to which he retorted in Italian. ‘I don’t see how any sensible man can be interested in the contessa!’ was her inward comment as she transferred her attention to the young Frenchman at her side.
Whenever the conversation showed a tendency to linger on politics, Mrs. Copley adroitly redirected it, as she knew from experience that the subject was too combustible by far for a dinner-party.
‘Italy, Italy! These men talk nothing but Italy,’ she complained to the young Frenchman on her right. ‘Does it not make you homesick for the boulevards?’
‘I suffered the nostalgie once,’ he confessed, ‘but Rome is a good cure.’
Marcia shook her head in mock despair. ‘And you, too, M. Benoit! Patriotism is certainly dying out.’
‘Not while you live,’ said her uncle.
‘Oh, I know I’m abnormally patriotic,’ she admitted; ‘but you’re all so sluggish in that respect, that you force it upon one.’
‘There are other useful virtues besides patriotism,’ Sybert suggested.
‘Wait until you have spent a spring in the Sabine hills, Miss Copley,’ Melville put in, ‘and you will be as bad as the rest of us.’
‘Ah, mademoiselle,’ Benoit added fervently, ‘spring-time in the Sabine hills will be compensation sufficient to most of us for not seeing paradise.’
‘I believe, with my uncle, it’s a kind of Roman fever!’ she cried. ‘I never expected to hear a Frenchman renounce his native land.’
‘It is not that I renounce France,’ the young man remonstrated. ‘I lofe France as much as ever, but I open my arms to Italy as well. To lofe another land and peoples besides your own makes you, not littler, but, as you say, wider—broader. We are—we are—— Ah, mademoiselle!’ he broke off, ‘if you would let me talk in French I could say what I mean; but how can one be eloquent in this halting tongue of yours?’
‘Coraggio, Benoit! You are doing bravely,’ Sybert laughed.
‘We are,’ the young man went on with a sudden inspiration, ‘what you call in English, citizens of the world. You, mademoiselle, are American, La Signora Contessa is Italian, Mr. Carthrope is English, I am French, but we are all citizens of the same world, and in whatever land we find ourselves, there we recognize one another for brothers, and are always at home; for it is still the world.’
The young man’s eloquence was received with an appreciative laugh. ‘And how about paradise?’ some one suggested.
‘Ah, my friends, it is there that we will be strangers!’ Benoit returned tragically.
‘Citizens of the world,’ Sybert turned the stem of his wine glass meditatively as he repeated the phrase. ‘It seems to me, in spite of Miss Marcia, that one can’t do much better than that. If you’re a patriotic citizen of the world, I should think you’d done your duty by mankind, and might reasonably expect to reap a reward in Benoit’s paradise.’
He laughed and raised his glass. ‘Here’s to the World, our fatherland! May we all be loyal citizens!’
‘I think,’ said Mrs. Melville, ‘since this is a farewell dinner and we are pledging toasts, we should drink to Villa Vivalanti and a happy spring in the Sabine hills.’
Copley bowed his thanks. ‘If you will all visit the villa we will pledge it in the good wine of Vivalanti.’
‘And here’s to the Vivalanti ghost!’ said the young Frenchman. ‘May it lif long and prosper!’
‘Italy’s the place for such ghosts to prosper,’ Copley returned.
‘Here’s to the poor people of Italy—may they have enough to eat!’ said Marcia.
Sybert glanced up in sudden surprise, but she did not look at him; she was smiling across at her uncle.
CHAPTER IV
The announcement that a principe Americano was coming to live in Villa Vivalanti occasioned no little excitement in the village. Wagons with furnishings from Rome had been seen to pass on the road below the town, and the contadini in the wayside vineyards had stopped their work to stare, and had repeated to each other rumours of the fabulous wealth this signor principe was said to possess. The furniture they allowed to pass without much controversy. But they shook their heads dubiously when two wagons full of flowering trees and shrubs wound up the roadway toward the villa. This foreigner must be a grasping person—as if there were not trees enough already in the Sabine hills, that he must bring out more from Rome!
The dissection of the character of Prince Vivalanti’s new tenant occupied so much of the people’s time that the spring pruning of the vineyards came near to being slighted. The fountainhead of all knowledge on the subject was the landlord of the Croce d’Oro. He himself had had the honour of entertaining their excellencies at breakfast, on the occasion of their first visit to Castel Vivalanti, and with unvarying eloquence he nightly recounted the story to an interested group of loungers in the trattoria kitchen: of how he had made the omelet without garlic because princes have delicate stomachs and cannot eat the food one would cook for ordinary men; of how they had sat at that very table, and the young signorina principessa, who was beautiful as the holy angels in paradise, had told him with her own lips that it was the best omelet she had ever eaten; and of how they had paid fifteen lire for their breakfast without so much as a word of protest, and then of their own accord had given three lire more for mancia]. Eighteen lire. Corpo di Bacco! that was the kind of guests he wished would drop in every day.
But when Domenico Paterno, the baker of Castel Vivalanti, heard the story, he shrugged his shoulders and spread out his palms, and asserted that a prince was a prince all over the world; and that the Americano had allowed himself to be cheated from stupidity, not generosity. For his part, he thought the devil was the same, whether he talked American or Italian. But it was reported, on the other hand, that Bianca Rosini had also talked with the forestieri when she was washing clothes in the stream. They had stopped their horses to watch the work, and the signorina had smiled and asked if the water were not cold; for her part, she was sure American nobles had kind hearts.
Domenico, however, was not to be convinced by any such counter-evidence as this. ‘Smiles are cheap,’ he returned sceptically. ‘Does any one know of their giving money?’
No one did know of their giving money, but there were plenty of boys to testify that they had run by the side of the carriage fully a kilometre asking for soldi, and the signore had only shaken his head to pay them for their trouble.
‘Si, si, what did I tell you?’ Domenico finished in triumph. ‘American princes are like any others—perhaps a little more stupid, but for the rest, exactly the same.’
There were no facts at hand to confute such logic.
And one night Domenico appeared at the Croce d’Oro with a fresh piece of news; his son, Tarquinio, who kept an osteria in Rome, had told the whole story.
‘His name is Copli—Signor Edoardo Copli—and it is because of him’—Domenico