“I do think,” said the freckled one, “that she wants nothing except quiet.”
And perhaps the freckled one pulled the one with the hand by the sleeve, for the hold on Scrap’s forehead relaxed, and after a minute’s silence, during which no doubt she was being contemplated—she was always being contemplated—the footsteps began to scrunch the pebbles again, and grew fainter, and were gone.
“Lady Caroline has a headache,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, re-entering the dining-room and sitting down in her place next to Mrs. Fisher. “I can’t persuade her to have even a little tea, or some black coffee. Do you know what aspirin is in Italian?”
“The proper remedy for headaches,” said Mrs. Fisher firmly, “is castor oil.”
“But she hasn’t got a headache,” said Mrs. Wilkins.
“Carlyle,” said Mrs. Fisher, who had finished her omelette and had leisure, while she waited for the next course, to talk, “suffered at one period terribly from headaches, and he constantly took castor oil as a remedy. He took it, I should say, almost to excess, and called it, I remember, in his interesting way the oil of sorrow. My father said it coloured for a time his whole attitude to life, his whole philosophy. But that was because he took too much. What Lady Caroline wants is one dose, and one only. It is a mistake to keep on taking castor oil.”
“Do you know the Italian for it?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“Ah, that I’m afraid I don’t. However, she would know. You can ask her.”
“But she hasn’t got a headache,” repeated Mrs. Wilkins, who was struggling with the macaroni. “She only wants to be let alone.”
They both looked at her. The word shovel crossed Mrs. Fisher’s mind in connection with Mrs. Wilkins’s actions at that moment.
“Then why should she say she has?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“Because she is still trying to be polite. Soon she won’t try, when the place has got more into her—she’ll really be it. Without trying. Naturally.”
“Lotty, you see,” explained Mrs. Arbuthnot, smiling to Mrs. Fisher, who sat waiting with a stony patience for her next course, delayed because Mrs. Wilkins would go on trying to eat the macaroni, which must be less worth eating than ever now that it was cold; “Lotty, you see, has a theory about this place—”
But Mrs. Fisher had no wish to hear any theory of Mrs. Wilkins’s.
“I am sure I don’t know,” she interrupted, looking severely at Mrs. Wilkins, “why you should assume Lady Caroline is not telling the truth.”
“I don’t assume—I know,” said Mrs. Wilkins.
“And pray how do you know?” asked Mrs. Fisher icily, for Mrs. Wilkins was actually helping herself to more macaroni, offered her officiously and unnecessarily a second time by Francesca.
“When I was out there just now I saw inside her.”
Well, Mrs. Fisher wasn’t going to say anything to that; she wasn’t going to trouble to reply to downright idiocy. Instead she sharply rapped the little table-gong by her side, though there was Francesca standing at the sideboard, and said, for she would wait no longer for her next course, “Serve me.”
And Francesca—it must have been wilful—offered her the macaroni again.
X
There was no way of getting into or out of the top garden at San Salvatore except through the two glass doors, unfortunately side by side, of the dining-room and the hall. A person in the garden who wished to escape unseen could not, for the person to be escaped from would be met on the way. It was a small, oblong garden, and concealment was impossible. What trees there were—the Judas tree, the tamarisk, the umbrella-pine—grew close to the low parapets. Rose bushes gave no real cover; one step to right or left of them, and the person wishing to be private was discovered. Only the northwest corner was a little place jutting out from the great wall, a kind of excrescence or loop, no doubt used in the old distrustful days for observation, where it was possible to sit really unseen, because between it and the house was a thick clump of daphne.
Scrap, after glancing round to see that no one was looking, got up and carried her chair into this place, stealing away as carefully on tiptoe as those steal whose purpose is sin. There was another excrescence on the walls just like it at the northeast corner, but this, though the view from it was almost more beautiful, for from it you could see the bay and the lovely mountains behind Mezzago, was exposed. No bushes grew near it, nor had it any shade. The northwest loop then was where she would sit, and she settled into it, and nestling her head in her cushion and putting her feet comfortably on the parapet, from whence they appeared to the villagers on the piazza below as two white doves, thought that now indeed she would be safe.
Mrs. Fisher found her there, guided by the smell of her cigarette. The incautious Scrap had not thought of that. Mrs. Fisher did not smoke herself, and all the more distinctly could she smell the smoke of others. The virile smell met her directly she went out into the garden from the dining-room after lunch in order to have her coffee. She had bidden Francesca set the coffee in the shade of the house just outside the glass door, and when Mrs. Wilkins, seeing a table being carried there, reminded her, very officiously and tactlessly Mrs. Fisher considered, that Lady Caroline wanted to be alone, she retorted—and with what propriety—that the garden was for everybody.
Into it accordingly she went, and was immediately aware that Lady Caroline was smoking. She said to herself, “These modern young women,” and proceeded to find her; her stick, now that lunch was over, being no longer the hindrance to action that it was before her meal had been securely, as Browning once said—surely it was Browning? Yes, she remembered how much diverted she had been—roped in.
Nobody
