a dull street in Fano: they are all so wonderfully dull. But still there are degrees. During the morning hours there are four or five old women sitting behind little vegetable stalls in the spacious grand piazza. (Fish? Che! vi pare? when we are not on speaking terms with the sea! We eat salt fish brought from—Heaven knows where, and try to fancy ourselves an inland town.) And even during the hour of the sacred siesta, there is a dog or two sleeping; or perhaps even mooning lazily about in that heart and centre of the city. There are a few shops, too, in the streets nearest to this centre, the owners of which will consent to part with an article or two from their small store, if you will put them in a good humour by dawdling and gossiping for half-an-hour first, and not attempt to obtrude commerce upon them too crudely and abruptly. And all this is life.
But there are streets in Fano—aristocratic streets of enormous palaces, where no such symptoms of life are ever met with. These are the dull streets. A stray dog in those streets would howl himself into a decline because of the intensity of the solitude! Long stretches of blank windowless wall of enormous height, shutting in convent gardens; other still loftier walls, with little windows high up in them, fitted with troughs in front of them, to prevent the inmates from distracting their minds by gazing into the too tempting world with all its pomps and vanities in the street below; immense palaces, so hugely large as to puzzle all conjecture at the motive which could have led to their construction, with handsome heavy stone mouldings and cornices around the windows, whole ranges of which may be seen boarded up with rough planks: these things make up the quiet and aristocratic streets of Fano.
And it was in one of the most quiet and most aristocratic of these that the Signora Clementina Dossi lived.
Not that la Clementina Dossi, properly speaking, belonged to the aristocratic classes of society, though the position she now occupied was so eminently respectable as to entitle her to admittance among the easy-going aristocracy, which mostly confined its exclusiveness and its prerogative to occasions of high state and public solemnities, and the matrimonial alliances of its sons and daughters.
Forty years or so before the date of Giulia Vanni’s arrival in Fano, Tina Tratti, as she was then called, had been well and favourably known through a tolerably large circuit of the cities of Italy as an actress of no little talent. She had been a beauty in her day, specially celebrated for her sylph-like figure; and had for several years of her spring-tide flitted from city to city, the favourite of garrisons and universities, and the queen of a whole galaxy of green-rooms.
Tina Tratti, however, amid her flittings and her flirtings, and her triumphs on and behind the scenes, had kept a sufficiently shrewd eye to the main chance, and had been a sufficiently valuable component part of the successive companies to which she had belonged, to have laid by a very snug little competence by the time her spring-tide was over. The period had arrived, too, by that time, however, when the same shrewd appreciation of the world and its ways, which, amid all the “bohemianism” of her early days, had caused one record at least of that pleasant time—her banker’s book—to be such as could be afterwards perused with satisfaction, led her to the decision that it was time to “regularise” her position in the world. She did so by marrying Signor Amadeo Dossi, the well-known impresario, who was not above ten years her senior, who had also laid by a snug little fortune, and who in finding a wife, and retiring from work, was well pleased to meet with so charming a person as La Tina, whose good sense led him to think that she would be duly aware of all that ought to accompany “regularising her position,” and whose little fortune was a very pleasant and convenient addition to his own.
So they quitted the theatre together, and came to settle at Fano. And Signor Dossi had never had reason to repent the step he had taken. The ex-sylph Tina Tratti had made him a very good wife during the remainder of his days; which had come to a conclusion some fifteen years before the time at which her history touches that to be narrated in these pages.
In taking a husband, the actress had looked to the regularising of her worldly position, as has been said; and had successfully achieved that object. When she became a widow, however, it appeared to her that the time had come for a further regularising process. She now inclined to regularise her spiritual position, as regarded the stage to which the next shifting of the scene would introduce her. And she set about doing so with the same practical purpose-like good sense which had presided over her previous metamorphosis. She made selection of a well recommended “director,” became a member of one or two sisterhoods, made certain little changes in her style of dress, was not niggard in “benefactions,” was constant at morning mass in all weathers, and invited more priests and rather fewer officers to her house than had been the case during the lifetime of her husband. With regard to more intimately personal changes, there really was not very much to be done. She took up a copy of the “Confessor’s Manual,” and ran over the authorised list of sins, with their weights and degrees of blackness. And she could find but one which seemed to stand in her way at all. La gola![1] La Signora Clementina did like a good dinner; and was specially fond of a bit of something nice for supper! But after all! The first glance showed that “la gola” was in the list of venial and not in that of mortal sins. And a consultation upon the subject with her new “director” showed her that, properly managed, it was so very, very venial a sin, that really there were some virtues that seemed more dangerous. There were the ordinances of the Church respecting certain days and certain meats, it is true. But then the Church knew that fasting was not adapted to all constitutions. There were dispensations; and really on the whole very cheap! The Church had no wish to injure anybody’s health. It would be a sin to do so! And if, after all was said and- ↑ The technical theological term for gluttony.
