Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 6, 2025
They went away together, leaving the invalid with Taquisara and his own servant. Veronica led them to her favourite room, then showed them their own, and went back to wait for them, while Elettra brought the tea, just as she had done of old in the Palazzo Macomer. Veronica watched her while she was arranging the tea-table. Elettra, who rarely spoke unbidden, ventured to make a remark.
Matilde sipped her coffee, and turned her back to the light. "Three thousand francs!" repeated Macomer, slowly recovering a little self-control. "My dear child! What can you want of so much money?". "Is it so very much?" asked Veronica, innocently surprised. "You have told me that I have more than eight hundred thousand a year. It is for charity. The people at Muro have no hospital.
"After all," observed Macomer, absently, "it is only a woman." "Only a woman?" Matilde's lip curled. "I am only a woman." Macomer nodded slowly, as though realizing what that meant, but he said nothing in answer. With his hands under the table he slipped low down in his chair, his head bent forward upon his breast, in deep thought.
Then the Toledo, where the gutters could not swallow the deluge, but sent their overflow in dark yellow streams down each side of the street then the narrower, darker ways and lanes between the high houses and the low, black doorways, through the heart of old Naples, home at last to the Palazzo Macomer.
The responsibility was then entirely theirs, and he merely obeyed their directions in preparing any necessary legal documents. But as soon as the guardianship had expired, he knew that in order to be of use in helping Macomer to rob his ward, he should be obliged to artificially construct the instruments needed, in such a way as to appear legal to the world.
Without, in those dark winter days, storm drove storm over the ancient, evil city, rain followed rain, and gloom changed watches with darkness by day and night for one whole week, while the moon waned from the last quarter to the new. And within, Matilde Macomer went about the house, when she left her room at all, like a great, pale-faced, black shadow of something terrible, passing words.
So they lived quietly together, in spite of the Cardinal Campodonico's objections and arguments, and, little by little, Veronica became quite used to her absolute independence of plan and action, and the idea of taking an elderly gentlewoman for a companion grew more and more distasteful to her. Meanwhile her aunt was living all alone at the Palazzo Macomer.
Presently Matilde returned, followed by Macomer, wrapped in a dark velvet dressing-gown, his face white and twitching, his usually smooth grey beard unbrushed, and his grey hair in disorder.
But she told Elettra to go out and buy a little crape to put on the black frock, and to send for dressmakers to make mourning things quickly. The confusion in the house had subsided into stillness. Bosio Macomer was in his coffin. The servants were exhausted, and there was no one to direct.
If she could stand and walk and see, she would go to Veronica's room that afternoon and kill her. She hated her, too. She hated her all the more bitterly because she felt afraid to kill her, and knew that she must conquer her fear before she could do it. She hated her most savagely because, but for her, Bosio Macomer would still have been alive.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking