Tonio pushed very gently on the door. Through the margin of light he could see it was that dark gentleman, Ruggerio, they were talking to, and the Contessa, seeing Tonio, came forward quickly:
“You go upstairs, radiant child,” she said now as she came into the corridor, closing the doors behind her.
“But who is that man?” he whispered.
“I don’t want to tell you until it’s settled,” she said. “Come with me.”
15
THREE O’CLOCK. Yet half the company was still in the house.
“Darling child,” the Contessa had said as she shut him in, “it was only by chance Signore Ruggerio was to be here. And we were all so sure if we told you, you wouldn’t sing!”
And for hours Tonio had waited alone in this spacious upstairs chamber over the noisy street.
Five hundred ducats, he was thinking, that’s a fortune. Surely it’s some sort of theatrical negotiations, but what sort?
One moment he feared everything, and the next he was terrified of disappointment. Yet Caffarelli had applauded him! No, he was merely being gracious to the Contessa. Tonio could make up his mind to nothing. What did it all mean?
Carriages came and went. Guests paused on the doorstep below to laugh and to embrace. And in the uneven flare of the torches could be seen a dim configuration of the lazzaroni on the steps of the church opposite, men who in this mild delicious night had no need of shelter and could simply stretch out under the moon.
Tonio left the window and found himself pacing the floor.
The painted clock tinked on the mantel. There were maybe three hours before dawn. And he had not undressed yet; certainly Guido must come to him.
What if Guido were in bed with the Contessa? No, Guido couldn’t do that to him, not tonight. And the Contessa had promised him she would come; “as soon as it is all settled,” she had said.
“This could be nothing,” he told himself now firmly for the seventeenth time. “This Ruggerio, why, maybe he runs some little theater in Amalfi or someplace, and they want to take you there for some sort of trial…. But for five hundred ducats?” He shook his head.
But no matter how tormented he was over all of this, he could not stop thinking of the yellow-haired girl. He’d not recovered from the shock of learning she was a widow, and he had only to pause in his thoughts at any moment to see her and to see that room full of paintings, to see that mourning dress of black taffeta and that radiant little face.
No violet ribbon, no violet bows. Only her little mouth was violet this time, and she is a widow. That was the only color to her, save for that hair, and all those colors on the canvases behind her, which surely must have been her own.
He was such a fool for stammering and staring as he had done. How many times had he wanted such a moment with her, and she was a widow! When he had it finally, what did he do?
And maybe, just maybe, from some private corner somewhere in the palazzo she had heard him sing.
He saw those pictures in a blaze suddenly. It seemed quite unreal to him that it was her work. Yet she had been painting in the very midst of it. The canvas before her had been enormous, and if he could only remember the exact figures in it, then he could compare it in his memory with the rest.
It was so remarkable that she might have done all that. Yet he understood now that she had been married to that elderly man whom he had always believed to be her father, and he saw the whole of her life in a new light. He could remember so vividly their first meeting, her tears, some sense of deep suffering into which he’d blundered, drunk and careless, and tantalized by her loveliness and her youth.
She’d been married to that old man and now she was free.
And she painted not only simple Virgins and little angels; she painted giants, forests, turbulent seas.
He stood listening in the middle of this darkened bedchamber, and the church bells were ringing, it seemed, soft solemn reverberations. The little painted clock had been fast.
He buttoned his vest suddenly, smoothed his coat, and went to the door. Maybe everyone had forgotten him, and Guido was