Taquisara | Page 6

If she had even had any
satisfaction from so much wealth, it might have seemed different. She
said so, in her heart. She was accustomed to tell her confessor that she
was proud and uncharitable and unfeeling--not finding any real
misdeeds to confess. She was willing to believe that she was all that
and much more. If she had been living in the whirling, golden
pleasure-storm of an utterly thoughtless world, she believed herself bad
enough to have shut her memory's eyes to the haggard peasant-mother
of the dirty half-clad children--to all the hundreds of them who
doubtless lived just like the one she had seen, all upon her lands; she
could have forgotten the busy-thieving, sodden-faced crowd that
thronged the chambers wherein her fathers had been born and had

feasted kings and had died--the very room where her own father had
lain dead. She could have shut it all out, she thought, if she had held in
her hands the gold that all this brought, to scatter it at her will; for she
was sure that she had not a better heart than other girls of her age. But
she had never seen it. The reality of her own life was too weak and
colourless, by contrast, to make the name of fortune an excuse for the
sordid facts of meanness. There was no splendour about her, no wild
gaiety, none of the glorious extravagance of conscious young wealth,
and there was very little amusement to divert her thoughts. The people
she would have liked to know were kept at a distance from her. She
was advised not to buy the things which attracted her eyes, and was
told that they were not so good as they looked, and that on the whole it
was better to keep money than to spend it--but that, of course, she
might do as she pleased, and that when she wanted money her uncle
Macomer would give it to her.
It all passed through his hands, and he managed everything, with the
assistance of Lamberto Squarci the notary and of other men of
business--mostly shabby-looking men in black, with spectacles and
unhealthy complexions, who came and went in the morning when old
Macomer was in his study attending to affairs. Veronica knew none but
Squarci by name, and never spoke with any of them. There seemed to
be no reason why she should.
The count had told her that when she wished it, he was ready to render
an account of the estates and would be happy to explain everything to
her at length. She understood nothing of business and was content to
accept the roughest statement as he chose to give it to her. She was far
too young to distrust the man whom she had been taught to respect as
her guardian and as a person of scrupulous honesty. She was
completely in his power, and she was accustomed to ask him for any
little sums she needed. It never really struck her that he might misuse
the authority she indifferently left in his hands.
It was her aunt who had induced her to make the will, and for whose
conduct she felt a sort of undefined resentment and contempt.
Considering, she thought, how improbable it was that she herself

should die before Matilde Macomer, the latter had shown an absurd
anxiety about the disposal of the fortune. If Veronica had yielded the
point, she had done so in order to get rid of an importunity which
wearied her perpetually. She was to marry, of course, in due time. God
would give her children, and they would inherit her wealth. It was
really ridiculous of her aunt to be so anxious lest it should all go to
those distant relations in Sicily and Spain. Nevertheless, in order to
have peace, she signed the will, and her aunt thanked her effusively,
and old Macomer's flat lips touched her forehead while he spoke a few
words of gratified approval.
In the evening she told Bosio, the count's brother, of what she had done.
His gentle eyes looked at her thoughtfully for a few seconds, and he did
not smile, nor did he make any observation.
A few minutes later he was talking of a picture he had seen for sale--a
mere sketch, but by Ribera, called the Spagnoletto. She made up her
mind to buy it for him as a surprise, for it pleased her to give him
pleasure.
But when she was alone in her room that night she recalled Bosio's
expression when she had told him about the will. She was sure that he
was not pleased, and she wondered why he had not at least said
something in reply--something quite indifferent perhaps, but yet
something, instead of looking at her in total