Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/29

Rh fairylike and unreal, that it is difficult to believe that the cares and troubles of the world can have any place there, or that the inhabitants can have anything to do but to look picturesque and dance and sing from the cradle to the grave.

Nevertheless, the Piano di Sorrento is a country in which people love, hate, weep, struggle, pinch, and suffer in the same way as mortals do in other parts of this planet. Here is the history of a man and a woman, born and bred in Sorrento, to both of whom want and suffering were familiar in their earlier years; while one of them, at least, experienced more of the latter sensation than most people would hold to be the fair share of a lifetime.

The name of Annunziata Vannini, the famous prima donna, has become well known to the world, while that of Luigi Ratta will convey no idea to the mind of the reader, and would probably, indeed, never have been heard ten miles from his native village of Sorrento but for a circumstance which shall in due course be related. But everybody has seen and heard the Vannini; and even those who cannot claim to be considered as other than nobodies—that is to say, people who look upon a guinea and a half as too long a price to pay for an evening's amusement—must have become familiar with her features from her photographs in the shop-windows, where she has figured in a hundred different costumes and attitudes any time during the last fifteen years. Yet a very small proportion of the admiring and appreciative throngs who have applauded her to the echo while bouquets, laurel wreaths, and even diamond bracelets upon occasion, have been showered down upon her as she stood smiling and curtsying upon the stages of Covent Garden, St. Petersburg, and Paris, is aware that, not so very long ago, she was a bare-footed orphan girl, helping her aunt, old Marta Vannini, at the wash-tub, seldom tasting meat, sometimes getting cuffed for carelessness, and not unfrequently going hungry to bed.

In those old days, from which she has become so widely and utterly removed, Annunziata Vannini was a beautiful, laughing, happy, and good-natured girl, whom everybody was fond of, and whom some (notably Luigi Ratta) loved so much that they would fain have taken her, all poor and dowerless as she was, to gladden their homes permanently with her bright presence. Nowadays her beauty has lost something of its freshness, as is but natural after fifteen years of constant labour and excitement and contact with the world; her laughter is perhaps neither so frequent nor so hearty as it used to be; and it is proverbial that wealth does not of necessity confer happiness on its possessor. Good-natured the Vannini has always been, and always will be; one may suppose, till the end of the chapter.

The peasants of Sorrento gave her the sobriquet of "la bella Sorrentina", after the well-known song that bears that title—whether from her remarkable beauty or from the fact that Luigi, who played the guitar a little, was fond of trolling out the air at her garden-gate, I do not know. The name was, at all events, a sufficiently appropriate one.

Lovers, as has been said, were not wanting to her; but at the age of eighteen she had as yet declined to have anything to say to any of them—even to Luigi Ratta, whom perhaps she liked the best of all, and who had been constant to her ever since the time when, as children of ten and eight years old respectively, they had broken a small coin together, each promising to keep a half in sign of eternal fidelity.

Luigi, like herself, was, at the time our story opens, an orphan. His father had died about two years before, leaving him a small sum of money carefully locked up in a cash-box, a share in a good-sized fishing-boat, a couple of nets, and a little cottage just outside Sorrento. With this property Luigi, though not precisely well-to-do, felt himself in a position to support a wife; nor need he have sought long or far to find a willing partner, for he was steady, handsome, hard-working, and as strong as an ox. But there was only one girl in the world that Luigi felt any inclination for; and she, when one spoke to her of love, would only laugh; and if one mentioned marriage, was apt to retire into the house and slam the door in one's face. It was provoking; but Luigi was of a long-suffering and persevering nature; he doubted not but that, in the end, his hopes would be fulfilled, and in the mean time possessed his soul in patience, and got what comfort he could from long interviews with the girl of his heart, on fine nights after work-hours, at the end of old Marta Vannini's garden, which overlooked the sea. He used to take his guitar, on such occasions, and station himself by the low lava-built wall, singing love-songs till such time as it pleased Annunziata to become aware of his presence, and come down and talk to him.

Now it chanced that as he was thus