Taquisara | Page 5

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. 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