A Lady of Rome. F. Marion Crawford

where her brougham was waiting.

      Just before she reached it, and as if quite by accident, Oderisio Boccapaduli came strolling by. He helped her to get in and begged her to excuse him if he had not come back to the booth before she had left it, adding that he had met his mother, which was quite true, and that she had detained him, which was a stretch of his imagination.

      ‘Get in with me,’ Maria answered as he stood at the open door of the carriage. ‘If you are going away, too, I will take you into town and drop you wherever you like.’

      He thanked her and accepted the invitation with alacrity, though he wondered why it was given. He could not have understood that she was physically afraid to be alone with her memory just then.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      Maria asked her friend Giuliana Parenzo to lunch with her the next day. If Baldassare Castiglione came at three o’clock, and if it seemed wiser not to refuse him the door outright, he should at least not find her alone.

      The Countess occupied one floor of a rather small house in the broad Via San Martino, near the railway station. It was a sunny apartment, furnished very simply but very prettily. After her husband had left her she had declined to accept any allowance from him and had moved out of the old palace, in which the state apartment was now shut up, while the rest of the great building was now occupied by a cardinal, an insurance company, and a rich Chicago widow. Maria lived on her own fortune, which was not large, but was enough, as she had been an only child and both her parents were dead.

      Giuliana sat on her right at the small square table, and on her left was seated a sturdy boy over eight years old, and lately promoted to sailor’s clothes. Why are all boys now supposed to go to sea between six and eight or nine, or even until ten and twelve?

      Leone was a handsome child. He had thick brown hair and a fair complexion; his bright blue eyes flashed when he was in a rage, as he frequently was, and his jaw was already square and strong. Maria was the only person who could manage him, and was apparently the only one to whom he could become attached. He behaved very well with Giuliana Parenzo; but though she did her best to make him fond of her, she was quite well aware that she never succeeded in obtaining anything more from him than a kind of amusing boyish civility and polite toleration. As for nurses, he had made the lives of several of them so miserable that they would not stay in the house, and Maria had now emancipated him from women, greatly to his delight. He submitted with a tolerably good grace to being dressed and taken to walk by a faithful old man-servant who had been with Maria’s father before she had been born. He was not what is commonly known as a ‘naughty boy’; he spoke the truth fearlessly, and did not seek delight in torturing animals or insects; but his independence and his power of resistance, passive and active, were amazing for such a small boy, and he seemed not to understand what danger was. Maria did not remember that he had ever cried, either, even when he was in arms. Altogether, at the age of eight, Leone di Montalto was a personage with whom it was necessary to reckon.

      Maria knew that she loved him almost to the verge of weakness, but she would not have been the woman she was if she had been carried beyond that limit. He was all she had left in life, and so far as lay in her she meant that he should be a Christian gentleman. Nature seemed to have made him without fear; and Maria would have him reach a man’s estate without reproach. It was not going to be easy, but she was determined to succeed. It was the least she could do to atone for her one great fault.

      Without reproach he should grow up, for his very being was a reproach to her. That was the bitterest thing in her lonely existence, that the sight of what she loved best, and in the best way, should always remind her of the blot in her own life, of that moment of half-consenting weakness when she had been at the mercy of a desperate, daring, ruthless man whom she could not help loving. It was cruel that her only great consolation, the one living creature on whom she had a right to bestow every care and thought of her loving heart, should for ever call up the vision of her one and only real sin.

      There were moments when the mother’s devotion to her child felt like a real temptation, when she asked herself in self-torment whether it was all for the boy alone, or whether some part of it was not for that which should never be, for what she had fought so hard to thrust out of her heart since the day when she had married Montalto, seven years ago. For she had loved Castiglione even then, and before that, when she had been barely seventeen and he but twenty, and they had danced together one autumn evening at the Villa Montalto, at a sort of party that had not been considered a real party, and to which her mother had taken her because she wished to go to it herself, or perhaps because she wanted Montalto to see her pretty daughter and fall in love with her before she was out of the schoolroom.

      And that was what had happened. It had all been fated from the first. On that very night Montalto fell in love with her, and she with Baldassare del Castiglione, whom she had called Balduccio, and who had called her Maria, ever since they had known each other as little children. On that night she had felt that he was a man, and no longer a boy. It was the first time she had seen him in his new officer’s uniform, for it was not a week since he had got his commission. But she had hardly known Montalto, who had been brought up much more in Spain and Belgium than in Rome, because his mother was Spanish and his father had been a block of the old school, who feared the (godless) education of modern Italy.

      Giuliana Parenzo was a year or two older than Maria, and the latter had felt for her the boundless admiration which very young girls sometimes have for those slightly older ones in whom they see their ideals. Giuliana had been a thoroughly good girl, had married happily, was a thoroughly good wife, and was the conscientious mother of five children; but she was very far from being the saintly heroine her friend’s imagination had made of her.

      She was morally lucky. Without in the least depreciating the intrinsic value of her virtue, it is quite fair to ask what she might have done if she had ever been placed in the same situation as her friend. But this never happened to her, though she was apparently not without those gifts and qualities that suggest enterprise on the part of admirers. She had been a very pretty girl, and in spite of much uneventful happiness and five children she was considered to be a beautiful woman at nine-and-twenty; and, moreover, she was extremely smart. In looks she was not at all like a rigid Roman matron.

      But temptation had not come her way; it had passed by on the other side, and she could hardly understand how it could exist for others, since it certainly had never existed for her. There are people who go through life without accidents; they cross the ocean in utterly rotten steamers without knowing of the danger, they travel in the last train that runs before the one that is wrecked, they go out in high-speed motors with rash amateur chauffeurs who are killed the very next day, they leave the doomed city on the eve of the great earthquake, and the theatre five minutes before the fire breaks out.

      Similarly, there are women who are morally so lucky that an accident to their souls is almost an impossibility. Giuliana Parenzo was one of them, and Maria’s affection gave her credit for strength because she had never faced a storm. Not that it mattered much, after all. The important thing was that Maria, even at the worst crisis of her young life, had always looked upon her spotless friend as her guide and her ideal. Yet there had been a time when it would have been only too easy for her to look another way.

      To-day Maria had turned to Giuliana naturally in her difficulty. It was hardly a trouble yet, but Castiglione’s return and his intended visit were the first incidents that had disturbed her outwardly peaceful life in all the seven years that had passed since her husband had left Rome. The rest had been within her.

      It would not last long. Castiglione had said that he had only a fortnight’s leave, and with the most moderate desire to avoid him, she need not meet him more than two or three times while he was in Rome. To refuse to receive him once would perhaps look to him like fear or weakness, and she believed that she was strong and brave; yet she did not wish to see him alone, not because she was afraid of him, but because to be alone with him a few moments, even as she had been yesterday afternoon, brought the past too