Sanviano spread out his hands helplessly.
"Well," he demanded, "what could I do?... A man with Orsi's blameless
character and the Orsi banks!"
V
The house to which Cesare Orsi took Lavinia was built over the rim of a
small steep island in the Bay of Naples, opposite Castellamare. It
faced the city, rising in an amphitheater of bright stucco and almond
blossoms, across an expanse of glassy and incredibly blue water. It was
evening, the color of sky and bay was darkening, intensified by a
vaporous rosy column where the ascending smoke of Vesuvius held the
last upflung glow of the vanished sun. Lavinia could see from her
window the pale distant quiver of the electric lights springing up
along the Villa Nazionale.
The dwelling itself drew a long irregular facade of white marble on its
abrupt verdant screen--a series of connected pavilions, galleries,
pergolas, belvedere, flowering walls and airy chambers. There were
tesselated remains from the time of the great pleasure-saturated Roman
emperors, a later distinctly Moorish influence, quattrocento-painted
eaves, an eighteenth-century sodded court, and a smoking room with the
startling colored glass of the nineteenth.
The windows of Lavinia's room had no sashes; they were composed of a
double marble arch, supported in the center by a slender twisted marble
column, with Venetian blinds. She stood in the opening, gazing fixedly
over the water turning into night. She could hear, from the room
beyond, her husband's heavy deliberate footfalls; and the sound filled
her with a formless resentment.
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