Her father, who was not fifty yet, had been a young man when he came to this strange seclusion. Why he should have chosen Bordighera, no one had taken the trouble to inquire. He came when it was a little town on the spur of the hill, without either hotels or tourists, or at least very few of these articles--like many other little towns which are perched on little platforms among the olive woods all over that lovely country. The place had commended itself to him because it was so completely out of the way. And then it was very cheap, simple, and primitive. He was not, however, by any means a primitive-minded man; and when he took Domenico and Mariuccia into his service, it was for a year or two an interest in his life to train them to everything that was the reverse of their own natural primitive ways. Mariuccia had a little native instinct for cookery such as is not unusual among the Latin races, and which her master trained into all the sophistications of a cordon bleu. And Domenico had that lively desire to serve his padrone “hand and foot,” as English servants say, and do everything for him, which comes natural to an amiable Italian eager to please. Both of them had been encouraged and trained to carry out these inclinations. Mr Waring was difficult to please. He wanted attendance continually. He would not tolerate a speck of dust anywhere, or any carelessness of service; but otherwise he was not a bad master. He left them many independences, which suited them, and never objected to that appropriation to themselves of his house as theirs, and assertion of themselves as an important part of the family, which is the natural result of a long service. Frances grew up accordingly in franker intimacy with the honest couple than is usual in English households. There was nothing they would not have done for the Signorina--starve for her, scrape and pinch for her, die for her if need had been; and in the meantime, while there was no need for service more heroic, correct her, and improve her mind, and set her faults before her with simplicity. Her faults were small, it is true, but zealous Love did not omit to find many out.
Mr Waring painted a little, and was disposed to call himself an artist; and he read a great deal, or was supposed to do so, in the library, which formed one of the set of rooms, among the old books in vellum, which took a great deal of reading. A little old public library existing in another little town farther up among the hills, gave him an excuse, if it was not anything more, for a great deal of what he called work. There were some manuscripts and a number of old editions laid up in this curious little hermitage of learning, from which the few people who knew him believed he was going some day to compile or collect something of importance. The people who knew him were very few. An old clergyman, who had been a colonial chaplain all his life, and now “took the service” in the bare little room which served as an English church, was the chief of his acquaintances. This gentleman had an old wife and a middle-aged daughter, who furnished something like society for Frances. Another associate was an old Indian officer, much battered by wounds, liver, and disappointment, who, systematically neglected by the authorities (as he thought), and finding himself a nobody in the home to which he had looked forward for so many years, had retired in disgust, and built himself a little house, surrounded with palms, which reminded him of India, and full in the rays of the sun, which kept off his neuralgia. He, too, had a wife, whose constant correspondence with her numerous children occupied her mind and thoughts, and who liked Frances because she never tired of hearing stories of those absent sons and daughters. They saw a good deal of each other, these three resident families, and reminded each other from time to time that there was such a thing as society.