Stradella | Page 3

Uncle Michele did not condescend to honour her with another kiss,
after the formal occasion on which he had announced her betrothal to
himself. But he showed a growing interest in her music-lessons as the
weeks passed, and he frequently made her sing pieces of his own to
him, correcting each shade of expression most fastidiously, and
occasionally performing the more difficult passages himself, with many
affected gestures and self-approving waggings of his head, though his
voice was tuneless and harsh, and his ear anything but perfect.
'Of course,' he would say, 'it is only to give you an idea!'
The idea which he conveyed to Ortensia was that of a performing bear
eating strawberries; but she managed to keep her countenance, and not
to mimic him when she repeated the passage herself, profiting by his
instruction. It was the sort of music that rich amateurs used to write by

the ream, subject to the unacknowledged 'corrections' of a well-paid
professional; but the girl's sweet voice and genuine talent made the airs
sound passable, while her dreamy eyes and her caressing pronunciation
of the trivial words did the rest. It was mere talent, for she hardly
understood what she was saying, or singing, and she felt not the least
emotion, but she seemed to kiss the syllables as they passed her lips.
The first bloom of young womanhood was already on her cheek, but
the frosts of childhood's morning had not melted from her maiden
heart.
One day she was sitting just at the edge of the sunshine that poured
upon the eastern carpet from the high loggia. The room overlooked the
garden court of the palace, and the palms and young orange-trees, in
vast terra-cotta pots, laden with yellow fruit, had already been brought
out and set in their places, for it was the spring-time; the sunshine fell
slanting on the headless Ariadne, which was one of the Senator's chief
treasures of art, and the rays sparkled in the clear water in the beautiful
sarcophagus below. The lilies had already put out young leaves too,
that lay rocking on the ripples made by the tiny jet of the fountain.
There were long terra-cotta troughs full of white violets, arranged as
borders along the small paved paths, and red flower-pots were set
symmetrically in squares and rings and curves with roses just blooming,
and mignonette, and carnations that still lingered in the bud. It was a
formal little garden, but in the midst of its regularity, neither in the
centre, nor at any of the artificially planned corners and curves, but out
of line with all, one cypress reared up its height. Even as Ortensia saw
it, looking out from her loggia, it overtopped the high wall that divided
the garden from the canal and the low houses on the other side,
showing its dark plume sharp and clear against the sunlit sky; but when
the morning and the evening breezes blew in spring and summer, it
swayed lazily, and the feathery top waved from side to side, and bent to
the caressing air like a live thing. Ortensia loved the tree better than
anything else in the garden; even better than the beautiful Greek
Ariadne, which her uncle had himself brought from Crete in one of his
ships.

She was watching it now, and where the sunlight played in the tip, she
could see the golden and reddish lights of the cypress twigs through the
deep green. On her knees she held a large musical instrument all made
of ivory, and inlaid with black, a lute with eleven strings, but of the
shorter kind with the head of the keyboard turned back at a right angle.
It lay in her lap, in the ample straw-coloured folds of her silk skirt, and
its broad white ribband was passed over her shoulder, and pressed on
her lace collar on the left side of her neck.
At a considerable distance from her, a small, middle-aged woman in
grey sat in a high chair, bending forward over the little green pillow on
which she was making bobbin lace.
There was a good deal of furniture in the large room, and it belonged to
different periods; some of it was carved, some inlaid, some gilt in the
new French fashion. A great Persian carpet of most exquisite colours
softened and blended by age lay on the floor, and the curtains of the
doors were of rich old Genoa velvet, with palm leaves woven in gold
thread on a faded claret ground.
The time lacked about an hour of noon, and in the deep stillness the
trickling of the tiny fountain came up distinctly from the garden.
Something had just happened which Ortensia did not understand, and
she had let her lute sink in her lap, to