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I have seen something in my time, and I tell you those foreign women are not like ours, a whit. I fell in love, once, with a northern fairy, she was not German, but she came from Lombardy, you see, and that is the reason why I lost Serveti and all the rest." "But I have no Serveti to lose," objected Nino. "You have a career as a musician to lose.
I had toiled and scraped a great deal more than you know to buy that small piece of land, and it seemed much more my own than all Serveti had ever been in my better days. Then I shut myself up in my room and read Nino's letter over again, though it pained me very much; for I needed courage.
It was only a friendly recollection of the days when I had a castello and a church of my own at Serveti, and used to have him come from Rome to sing at the festa, and he came every year to see me; and his head grew bald as mine grew grey, so that at last he wears a black skull-cap everywhere, like a priest, and only takes it off when he sings the Gloria Patri, or at the Elevation.
But I assure you I do nothing so vulgar as to patronise the fountain, any more than I would patronise Mazzarino's church, hard by. I go to the source, the spring, the well where it rises." "Ah, I know the place well," I said. "It is near to Serveti." "Serveti? Is that not in the vicinity of Horace's villa?" "You know the country well, I see," said I, sadly.
If you were, I would be ready to arrange matters." He looked at me searchingly. "Unfortunately, I am not any relation of his," I answered. "His father and mother were peasants on my estate of Serveti, when it still was mine. They died when he was a baby, and I took care of him and educated him." "Yes, he is well educated," reflected the count, "for I examined him myself.
"It would be much more proper if you retired into an elegant leisure, so that you might write as many books as you desire without wearing yourself out in teaching those students every day. Would you not like to go back to Serveti?" "Serveti! ah, beautiful, lost Serveti, with its castle and good vine-lands!" "You shall have it again before long, my father," he said.
I wandered about, though I could not expect to see any face that I knew; it is so many years since I lived at Serveti that even were the carters from my old place I should have forgotten how they looked.
But we should shorten it and call her Gigia just as though she were Luisa. Nino does not think it so pretty. Nino was silent. Perhaps he was always shy of repeating the familiar name of the first woman he had ever loved. Imagine! At twenty he had never been in love! It is incredible to me, and one of our own people, too, born at Serveti.
Nino was brought to me here. One day in the autumn a carrettiere from Serveti, who would sometimes stop at my door and leave me a basket of grapes in the vintage, or a pitcher of fresh oil in winter, because he never used to pay his house-rent when I was his landlord but he is a good fellow, Gigi and so he tries to make amends now; well, as I was saying, he came one day and gave me a great basket of fine grapes, and he brought Nino with him, a little boy of scarce six years just to show him to me, he said.
And when I told him it was one of the contadine, the wife of a tenant of mine, he would not believe it. But I never heard her sing after Serafino that was her husband was killed at the fair in Genazzano. And one day the fevers took her, and so she died, leaving Nino a little baby. Then you know what happened to me, about that time, and how I sold Castel Serveti and came to live here in Rome.
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