The Wheat Princess. Jean Webster
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and, reinforced by Gerald, they had an unusually festive tea-party. Mr. Copley had once remarked concerning Paul Dessart that he would be an ornament to any dinner-table, and he undoubtedly proved himself an ornament to-day.
Melville, introducing the subject of a famous monastery lately suppressed by the government, gave rise to a discussion involving many and various opinions. The contessa and Dessart hotly defended the homeless monks; while the other men, from a political point of view, were inclined to applaud the action of the premier. Their arguments were strong, but the little contessa, two slender hands gesticulating excitedly, stanchly held her own; though a ‘White’ in politics, her sympathies, on occasion, stuck persistently to the other side. The church had owned the property for five centuries, the government for a quarter of a century. Which had the better right? And aside from the justice of the question—Dessart backed her up—for ascetic reasons alone, the monks should be allowed to stay. Who wished to have the beauties of frescoed chapels and carved choir-stalls pointed out by blue-uniformed government officials whose coats didn’t fit? It spoiled the poetry. Names of cardinals and prelates and Italian princes passed glibly; and the politicians finally retired beaten. Marcia, listening, thought approvingly that the young artist was a match for the diplomats, and she could not help but acknowledge further that whatever faults the contessa might possess, dullness was not among them.
It was Gerald, however, who furnished the chief diversion that afternoon. Upon being forbidden to take a third maritozzo, he rose reluctantly, shook the crumbs from his blouse, and drifted off toward the ilex grove to occupy himself with the collection of lizards which he kept in a box under a stone garden seat. The group about the tea-table was shortly startled by a splash and a scream, and they hastened with one accord to the scene of the disaster. Mr. Copley, arriving first, was in time to pluck his son from the fountain, like Achilles, by a heel.
‘What’s the matter, Howard?’ Mrs. Copley called as the others anxiously hurried up.
‘Nothing serious,’ he reassured her. ‘Gerald has merely been trying to identify himself with his environment.’
Gerald, dripping and sputtering, came out at this point with the astounding assertion that Marietta had pushed him in. Marietta chimed into the general confusion with a volley of Latin ejaculations. She push him in! Madonna mia, what a fib! Why should she do such a thing as that when it would only put her to the trouble of dressing him again? She had told him repeatedly not to fall into the fountain, but the moment her back was turned he disobeyed.
Amid a chorus of laughter and suggestions, of wails and protestations, the nurse, the boy, and his father and mother set out for the house to settle the question, leaving the guests at the scene of the tragedy. As they strolled back to the terrace the contessa very adroitly held Sybert on one side and Dessart on the other, while with a great deal of animation and gesture she recounted a diverting bit of Roman gossip. Melville and Marcia followed after, the latter with a speculative eye on the group in front, and an amused appreciation of the fact that the young artist would very much have preferred dropping behind. Possibly the contessa divined this too; in any case, she held him fast. The consul-general was discussing a criticism he had recently read of the American diplomatic service, and his opinion of the writer was vigorous. Melville’s views were likely to be both vigorously conceived and vigorously expressed.
‘In any case,’ he summed up his remarks, ‘America has no call to be ashamed of her representative to Italy. His Excellency is a fine example of the right man in the right place.’
‘And his Excellency’s nephew?’ she inquired, her eyes on the lounging figure in front of them.
‘Is an equally fine example of the right man in the wrong place.’
‘I thought you were one of the people who stood up for him.’
‘You thought I was one of the people who stood up for him? Well, certainly, why not?’ Melville’s tone contained the suggestion of a challenge; he had fought so many battles in Sybert’s behalf that a belligerent attitude over the question had become subconscious.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Marcia vaguely. ‘Lots of people don’t like him.’
Melville struck a match, lit a cigar, and vigorously puffed it into a glow; then he observed: ‘Lots of people are idiots.’
Marcia laughed and apologized—
‘Excuse me, but you are all so funny about Mr. Sybert. One day I hear the most extravagant things in his praise, and the next, the most disparaging things in his dispraise. It’s difficult to know what to believe of such a changeable person as that.’
‘Just let me tell you one thing, Miss Marcia, and that is, that in this world a man who has no enemies is not to be trusted—I don’t know how it may be in the world to come. At for Sybert, you may safely believe what his friends say of him.’
‘In that case he certainly does not show his best side to the world.’
‘He probably thinks his best side nobody’s business but his own.’ And then, as a thought re-occurred to him, he glanced at her a moment in silence, while a brief smile flickered across his aggressively forceful face. She could not interpret the smile, but it was vaguely irritating, and as he did not have anything further to say, she pursued her theme rough-shod.
‘When you see a person who doesn’t take any interest in his own country; whose only aim is to be thought a cosmopolitan, a man of the world; whose business in life is to attend social functions and make after-dinner speeches—well, naturally, you can’t blame people for not taking him very seriously.’ She finished with a gesture of disdain.
‘You were telling me a little while ago, Miss Marcia, about some of the people in Castel Vivalanti. You appear to be rather proud of your broad-mindedness in occasionally being able to detect the real man underneath the peasant—don’t you think you might push your penetration just one step further and discover a real man, a personality, beneath the man of the world? Once in a while it exists.’
‘You can’t argue me into liking Mr. Sybert,’ she laughed; ‘Uncle Howard has tried it and failed.’
Mr. and Mrs. Copley returned shortly to their guests; and the contessa, bemoaning the nine miles, announced that she must go. Mr. Copley suggested that nine miles would be no longer after dinner than before, but the lady was obdurate and her carriage was ordered. She took her departure amid a graceful flurry of farewell. The contessa had an unerring instinct for effect, and her exits and her entrances were divertingly spectacular. She bade Mrs. Copley, Marcia, and the consul-general good-bye upon the terrace, and trailed across the marble flagging, attended—at a careful distance from her train—by the three remaining men. Sybert handed her into the carriage, Dessart arranged the lap-robe, while Copley brought up the rear, gingerly bearing her lace parasol. With a gay little tilt of her white-plumed hat toward the group on the terrace and an all-inclusive flash of black eyes, she was finally off, followed by the courtly bows of her three cavaliers.
Marcia, with Sybert and Dessart on either hand, continued to stroll up and down the terrace, while her aunt and uncle entertained Melville amid the furnished comfort of the loggia. Sybert would ordinarily have joined the group on the loggia, but he happened to be in the middle of a discussion with Dessart regarding the new and, according to most people, scandalous proposition for levelling the Seven Hills. The two men seemed to be diametrically opposed to all their views, and were equally far apart in their methods of arguing. Dessart would lunge into flights of exaggerated rhetoric, piling up adjectives and metaphors until by sheer weight he had carried his listeners off their feet; while Sybert, with a curt phrase, would knock the corner-stone from under the finished edifice. The latter’s method of fencing had always irritated Marcia beyond measure. He had a fashion of stating his point, and then abandoning his adversary’s eloquence in mid-air, as if it were not worth his while to argue further. To-day, having come to a deadlock in the matter of the piano regolatore, they dropped the subject, and pausing by the terrace parapet, they stood looking down on the plain below.
Dessart scanned it eagerly with eyes quick to catch every contrast