Bessie, dozing over a novel under the shelter of a huge pink parasol, scarcely thought it necessary to reply audibly to such a crazy proposition, but as Marion turned and walked away she signalled to the faithful Luigi to follow and look after him, which Luigi—with what groans one can imagine, just after the midday macaroni and in that blazing heat—obediently did.
The day wore on, the sun began to sink, and the evening breeze ruffled the water. The parasol had long been closed, the novel thrown aside, and Bessie was beginning to look anxiously landward, when the truants reappeared in the distance. As they drew nearer she could see that Marion carried in his hand a huge iron key, while Luigi, directly behind him, was flinging his arms up in the air in gestures of despair. As they came close, the gestures became those of beseeching deprecation, and she realised that he was trying to say, unbeknown to the “padrone,” “It was not my fault, Signora mia, oh indeed, not my fault!” while Marion, a little in doubt as to his reception, stopped before her and held up the great rusty key, saying, “It’s mine, _mine_, my dear, for the next thirty years!”
“What—this awful place? Oh, why did I let you go away without me?” she wailed. “What on earth are you going to do with it?—and what have you paid for it?”
He mentioned the sum—not a very large one, it is true—but Luigi, hovering near, pale and scared, whispered, with every appearance of sincere grief: “He could have had it for the hundredth part of that, Signora! Alas, for the good money! But it was not my fault—there was no holding the Signore, and those assassins at the Municipio took advantage of him!”
To tell the truth, it was not the money side of the matter which distressed my sister-in-law so much as the prospect of being required to come and pass weeks at a time in this grim dungeon, without a single convenience of life, twelve miles from a market town, and of course lashed to the battlements by every Mediterranean storm. It took her some days to reconcile herself to the new acquisition—poor girl—but Marion had not made a mistake, after all. The family was not invited to San Niccola till he had made several journeys thither himself, with carpenters and materials, and when they did come they found that the lonely keep had been transformed internally to a quite possible dwelling—though certainly an inconveniently isolated one. Generally, however, he went there alone, to rest from everything connected with modern life, and he found it a fine, quiet place for writing in, at any rate.