“Not so bad! not so bad! She at any rate has not pardoned me.”
“Your Excellency, dinner is served,” announced the butler at the door of the _salotto_, bowing to Donna Arduina Fiore.
Donna Arduina put down her knitting of dark wool, a petticoat destined for some poor woman dying of cold in the winter. She asked--
“No, Excellency, but his man Francesco has returned with a letter for Your Excellency,” and he advanced with a note on a silver tray. In the increasing gloom of the room, Donna Arduina raised her eyes to Heaven with a fleeting act of resignation, as she took her son’s letter. She had received many others in the far-off times, which it seemed to her ought never to have returned again with their habits, and now at the day’s fall Marco again writes to her as formerly. She read--
“Dear Mamma, excuse me, pardon me, but I am detained by friends for dinner at the club. If I can return early I will come and kiss your hand, if not, to-morrow. Bless me.--MARCO.”
The tender mother sighed, blessing as usual in her heart her favourite son, even if absent and drawn away elsewhere by others. In her deep maternal egoism she is content that nobody and nothing have the power to make her son forget his mother entirely. Still she sighed, and said to the butler--
“Please inform Donna Vittoria that dinner is served, and that I am waiting for her in the dining-room.” It is not very long since Donna Arduina made common table with her children, Marco and Vittoria. In the early days of their marriage she said that she did not wish to change her usual time-table, little suitable for the young couple; but it was really an affectionate excuse to leave them in liberty. Little by little, however, she learnt that they not only desired her presence at the family table, but felt an intimate need of it, as if to prevent embarrassment, so great and frequent had become the coldness and silence between Marco and Vittoria. Once, with a boyish caress, which he knew how to give his mother, winning her as he had always won her from a little one, Marco had said to her--
“Mamma dear, don’t abandon us in the hour of our dinner as in that of our death!”
“You know Vittoria more than ever at that hour seeks the solution of a philosophical problem, which has fatigued the mind of many philosophers. Hence I dare not disturb her. At least you have the habit of opening your mouth, mamma bella, and pronouncing a few words.”