Taquisara | Page 5

winter and the filthy
dust of Naples in summer. Dark, poor faces and ill-clad forms moved
through the halls, and horrible voices echoed perpetually in the
corridors, where those who waited discussed taxes, and wrangled, and
cursed those in power, and cheated one another, and picked a pocket
now and then, and spat upon the marble pavement whereon royal and
lordly feet had so often trod in days gone by. It had all become a great
nest of dirt and stealing and busy chicanery, where dingy, hawk-eyed
men with sodden white faces and disgusting hands lay in wait for the
unwary who had business with the city government, to rob them on
pretence of facilitating their affairs, to cringe for a little coin flung them
in scorn sometimes by one who had grown rich in greater robbery than

they could practise--sometimes, too, springing aside to escape a kick or
a blow as ill-tempered success went swinging by, high-handed and
vulgarly cruel, a few degrees less filthy and ten thousand times more
repulsive.
Once, Veronica had insisted upon going through the palace. She would
never enter it again, and after that day, when she passed it, she turned
her face from it and looked away. Vaguely, she wondered whether they
were not deceiving her and whether it were really the home she dimly
remembered. There had been splendid things in it, then--she would not
ask what had become of them, but without asking, she was told that
they had been wisely disposed of, and that instead of paying people for
keeping an uninhabited palace in order, she was receiving an enormous
rent for it from the city.
Then she had wished to see the lovely villa that came back in the
pictures of her dreams, and she had been driven out into the country
according to her desire. From a distance, as the carriage approached it,
she recognized the lordly poplars, and far at the end of the avenue the
elaborately stuccoed front and cornices of the old-fashioned "barocco"
building. But the gardens were gone. Files of neatly trimmed vines,
trained upon poles stuck in deep furrows, stretched away from the
avenue on either side. The flower garden was a vegetable garden now,
and the artichokes and the cabbages and the broccoli were planted with
mathematical regularity up to the very walls. There were hens and
chickens on the steps and running in and out of the open door, and from
a near sty the grunt of many pigs reached her ears. A pale,
earthy-skinned peasant, scantily clad in dusty canvas, grinned sadly and
kissed the hem of her skirt, calling her 'Excellency' and beginning at
once to beg for reduction of rent. A field-worn woman, filthy and
dishevelled, drove back half a dozen nearly naked children whose little
legs were crusted with dry mud, and whose faces had not been washed
for a long time.
And within, there was no furniture. In the rooms upstairs were stores of
grain and potatoes, and red peppers and grapes hanging on strings. The
cracked mirrors, built into the gilded stucco, were coated with heavy

unctuous dust, and the fine old painted tiles on the floor were loose and
broken in places. In the ceiling certain pink and well-fed cherubs still
supported unnatural thunderclouds through which Juno forever drove
her gold-wheeled car and team of patient peacocks, smiling high and
goddess-like at the squalor beneath. Still Diana bent over Endymion
cruelly foreshortened in his sleep, beyond the possibility of a waking
return to human proportions. Mars frowned, Jove threatened, Venus
rose glowing from the sea; and below, the unctuous black dust settled
and thickened on everything except the cracked floors piled with maize
and beans and lupins, and rubbed bright between the heaps by the
peasants' naked feet.
Veronica turned her back upon the villa, as she had turned from the
great palace in the Toledo. They whispered to her that the peasant's rent
must not be reduced, for he was well able to pay, and they pointed to
the closely planted vines and vegetables and olives that stretched far
away to right and left, where she remembered in her dreams of far
childhood that there had been lawns and walks and flowers. The man,
she was told, was not the only peasant on the place. There were other
houses now, and huts that could shelter a family, and there was land,
land, always more land, as far as she could see, all as closely and neatly
and regularly planted with vegetables and grain, vines and olives; and it
was all hers, and yielded enormous rents which were wisely invested.
She was very rich indeed, but to her it all seemed horribly sordid and
grinding and mean--and the peasants looked prematurely old,
labour-worn, filthy, wretchedly poor.