WHO AND WHAT
Old Elsie was not born a peasant. Originally she was the wife of
a steward in one of those great families of Rome whose estate and
traditions were princely. Elsie, as her figure and profile and all her
words and movements indicated, was of a strong, shrewd, ambitious, and
courageous character, and well disposed to turn to advantage every gift
with which Nature had endowed her.
Providence made her a present of a daughter whose beauty was wonderful,
even in a country where beauty is no uncommon accident. In addition to
her beauty, the little Isella had quick intelligence, wit, grace, and
spirit. As a child she became the pet and plaything of the Princess
whom Elsie served. This noble lady, pressed by the _ennui_ which is
always the moth and rust on the purple and gold of rank and wealth,
had, as other noble ladies had in those days, and have now, sundry
pets: greyhounds, white and delicate, that looked as if they were made
of Sèvres china; spaniels with long silky ears and fringy paws; apes
and monkeys, that made at times sad devastations in her wardrobe; and
a most charming little dwarf, that was ugly enough to frighten the
very owls, and spiteful as he was ugly. She had, moreover, peacocks,
and macaws, and parrots, and all sorts of singing-birds, and falcons
of every breed, and horses, and hounds,--in short, there is no saying
what she did _not_ have. One day she took it into her head to add the
little Isella to the number of her acquisitions. With the easy grace
of aristocracy, she reached out her jeweled hand and took Elsie's one
flower to add to her conservatory,--and Elsie was only too proud to
have it so.
Her daughter was kept constantly about the person of the Princess, and
instructed in all the wisdom which would have been allowed her, had
she been the Princess's own daughter, which, to speak the truth, was
in those days nothing very profound,--consisting of a little singing
and instrumentation, a little embroidery and dancing, with the power of
writing her own name and of reading a love letter.
All the world knows that the very idea of a pet is something to be
spoiled for the amusement of the pet-owner; and Isella was spoiled in
the most particular and circumstantial manner. She had suits of apparel
for every day in the year, and jewels without end,--for the Princess
was never weary of trying the effect of her beauty in this and that
costume; so that she sported through the great grand halls and down the
long aisles of the garden much like a bright-winged humming-bird, or a
damsel-fly all green and gold. She was a genuine child of Italy,--full
of feeling, spirit, and genius,--alive in every nerve to the
finger-tips; and under the tropical sunshine of her mistress's favor
she grew as an Italian rosebush does, throwing its branches freakishly
over everything in a wild labyrinth of perfume, brightness, and thorns.
For a while her life was a triumph, and her mother triumphed with her
at an humble distance. The Princess was devoted to her with the blind
fatuity with which ladies of rank at times will invest themselves in
a caprice. She arrogated to herself all the praises of her beauty and
wit, allowed her to flirt and make conquests to her heart's content,
and engaged to marry her to some handsome young officer of her train,
when she had done being amused with her.
Now we must not wonder that a young head of fifteen should have
been turned by this giddy elevation, nor that an old head of fifty
should have thought all things were possible in the fortune of such
a favorite. Nor must we wonder that the young coquette, rich in the
laurels of a hundred conquests, should have turned her bright eyes on
the son and heir, when he came home from the University of Bologna.
Nor is it to be wondered at, that this same son and heir, being a
man as well as a Prince, should have done as other men did,--fallen
desperately in love with this dazzling, sparkling, piquant mixture
of matter and spirit, which no university can prepare a young man to
comprehend,--which always seemed to run from him, and yet always threw
a Parthian shot behind her as she fled. Nor is it to be wondered at,
if this same Prince, after a week or two, did not know whether he was
on his head or his heels, or whether the sun rose in the east or the
south, or where he stood, or whither he was going.
In fact, the youthful pair very soon came into that dreamland where
are no more any points of the compass, no more division of time, no
more latitude and longitude, no more up and down, but only a general
wandering among enchanted groves and singing nightingales.
It was entirely owing to old Elsie's watchful shrewdness and address
that the lovers came into this paradise by the gate of marriage; for
the young man was ready to offer anything at the feet of his divinity,
as the old mother was not slow to perceive.
So they stood at the altar for the time being a pair of as true lovers
as Romeo and Juliet: but then, what has true love to do with the son of
a hundred generations and heir to a Roman principality?
Of course, the rose of love, having gone through all its stages of bud
and blossom into full flower, must next begin to drop its leaves. Of
course. Who ever heard of an immortal rose?
The time of discovery came. Isella was found to be a mother; and then
the storm burst upon her and drabbled her in the dust as fearlessly as
the summer wind sweeps down and besmirches the lily it has all summer
been wooing and flattering.
The Princess was a very pious and moral lady, and of course threw her
favorite out into the street as a vile weed, and virtuously ground her
down under her jeweled high-heeled shoes.
She could have forgiven her any common frailty; of course it was
natural that the girl should have been seduced by the all-conquering
charms of her son,--but aspire to marriage with their house!--pretend
to be her son's wife! Since the time of Judas had such treachery ever
been heard of?
Something was said of the propriety of walling up the culprit alive,--a
mode of disposing of small family matters somewhat _à la mode_ in those
times. But the Princess acknowledged herself foolishly tender, and
unable quite to allow this very obvious propriety in the case.
She contented herself with turning mother and daughter into the streets
with every mark of ignominy, which was reduplicated by every one of her
servants, lackeys, and court-companions, who, of course, had always
known just how the thing must end.
As to the young Prince, he acted as a well-instructed young nobleman
should, who understands the great difference there is between the tears
of a duchess and those of low-born women. No sooner did he behold his
conduct in the light of his mother's countenance than he turned his
back on his low marriage with edifying penitence. He did not think it
necessary to convince his mother of the real existence of a union whose
very supposition made her so unhappy, and occasioned such an uncommonly
disagreeable and tempestuous state of things in the well-bred circle
where his birth called him to move. Being, however, a religious youth,
he opened his mind to his family-confessor, by whose advice he sent a
messenger with a large sum of money to Elsie, piously commending her
and her daughter to the Divine protection. He also gave orders for an
entire new suit of raiment for the Virgin Mary in the family chapel,
including a splendid set of diamonds, and promised unlimited candles to
the altar of a neighboring convent. If all this could not atone for a
youthful error, it was a pity. So he thought, as he drew on his riding
gloves and went off on a hunting party, like a gallant and religious
young nobleman.
Elsie, meanwhile, with her forlorn and disgraced daughter, found a
temporary asylum in a neighboring mountain village, where the poor,
bedrabbled, broken-winged song-bird soon panted and fluttered her
little life away.
When the once beautiful and gay Isella had been hidden in the grave,
cold and lonely, there remained a little wailing infant, which Elsie
gathered to her bosom.
Grim, dauntless, and resolute, she resolved, for the sake of this
hapless one, to look life in the face once more, and try the battle
under other skies.
Taking the infant in her arms, she traveled with her far from the scene
of her birth, and set all her energies at work to make for her a better
destiny than that which had fallen to the lot of her unfortunate mother.
She set about to create her nature and order her fortunes with that
sort of downright energy with which resolute people always attack the
problem of a new human existence. This child should be happy: the rocks
on which her mother was wrecked she should never strike upon,--they
were all marked on Elsie's chart. Love had been the root of all poor
Isella's troubles,--and Agnes never should know love, till taught it
safely by a husband of Elsie's own choosing.
The first step of security was in naming her for the chaste Saint
Agnes, and placing her girlhood under her special protection. Secondly,
which was quite as much to the point, she brought her up laboriously
in habits of incessant industry,--never suffering her to be out of her
sight, or to have any connection or friendship, except such as could
be carried on under the immediate supervision of her piercing black
eyes. Every night she put her to bed as if she had been an infant, and,
wakening her again in the morning, took her with her in all her daily
toils,--of which, to do her justice, she performed all the hardest
portion, leaving to the girl just enough to keep her hands employed and
her head steady.
The peculiar circumstance which had led her to choose the old town
of Sorrento for her residence, in preference to any of the beautiful
villages which impearl that fertile plain, was the existence there of
a flourishing convent dedicated to Saint Agnes, under whose protecting
shadow her young charge might more securely spend the earlier years of
her life.
With this view, having hired the domicile we have already described,
she lost no time in making the favorable acquaintance of the
sisterhood,--never coming to them empty-handed. The finest oranges of
her garden, the whitest flax of her spinning, were always reserved as
offerings at the shrine of the patroness whom she sought to propitiate
for her grandchild.
In her earliest childhood the little Agnes was led toddling to the
shrine by her zealous relative, and at the sight of her fair, sweet,
awestruck face, with its viny mantle of encircling curls, the torpid
bosoms of the sisterhood throbbed with a strange, new pleasure, which
they humbly hoped was not sinful,--as agreeable things, they found,
generally were. They loved the echoes of her little feet down the damp,
silent aisles of their chapel, and her small, sweet, slender voice, as
she asked strange baby-questions, which, as usual with baby-questions,
hit all the insoluble points of philosophy and theology exactly on the
head.
The child became a special favorite with the Abbess, Sister Theresa,
a tall, thin, bloodless, sad-eyed woman, who looked as if she might
have been cut out of one of the glaciers of Monte Rosa, but in whose
heart the little fair one had made herself a niche, pushing her way up
through, as you may have seen a lovely blue-fringed gentian standing in
a snowdrift of the Alps with its little ring of melted snow around it.
Sister Theresa offered to take care of the child at any time when the
grandmother wished to be about her labors; and so, during her early
years, the little one was often domesticated for days together at the
Convent. A perfect mythology of wonderful stories encircled her, which
the good sisters were never tired of repeating to each other. They were
the simplest sayings and doings of childhood,--handfuls of such wild
flowers as bespread the green turf of nursery-life everywhere, but
miraculous blossoms in the eyes of these good women, whom Saint Agnes
had unwittingly deprived of any power of making comparisons or ever
having Christ's sweetest parable of the heavenly kingdom enacted in
homes of their own.
Old Jocunda, the portress, never failed to make a sensation with her
one stock-story of how she found the child standing on her head and
crying,--having been put into this reversed position in consequence of
climbing up on a high stool to get her little fat hand into the vase of
holy water, failing in which Christian attempt, her heels went up and
her head down, greatly to her dismay.
"Nevertheless," said old Jocunda, gravely, "it showed an edifying turn
in the child; and when I lifted the little thing up, it stopped crying
the minute its little fingers touched the water, and it made a cross on
its forehead as sensible as the oldest among us. Ah, sisters, there's
grace there, or I'm mistaken."
All the signs of an incipient saint were, indeed, manifested in the
little one. She never played the wild and noisy plays of common
children, but busied herself in making altars and shrines, which she
adorned with the prettiest flowers of the gardens, and at which she
worked hour after hour in the quietest and happiest earnestness.
Her dreams were a constant source of wonder and edification in the
Convent, for they were all of angels and saints; and many a time, after
hearing one, the sisterhood crossed themselves, and the Abbess said,
"_Ex oribus parvulorum_." Always sweet, dutiful, submissive, cradling
herself every night with a lulling of sweet hymns and infant murmur of
prayers, and found sleeping in her little white bed with her crucifix
clasped to her bosom, it was no wonder that the Abbess thought her the
special favorite of her divine patroness, and like her the subject of
an early vocation to be the celestial bride of One fairer than the
children of men, who should snatch her away from all earthly things, to
be united to Him in a celestial paradise.
As the child grew older, she often sat at evening with wide, wondering
eyes, listening over and over again to the story of the fair Saint
Agnes,--how she was a princess, living in her father's palace, of such
exceeding beauty and grace that none saw her but to love her, yet of
such sweetness and humility as passed all comparison; and how, when
a heathen prince would have espoused her to his son, she said, "Away
from me, tempter! for I am betrothed to a lover who is greater and
fairer than any earthly suitor,--he is so fair that the sun and moon
are ravished by his beauty, so mighty that the angels of heaven are his
servants;" how she bore meekly with persecutions and threatenings and
death for the sake of this unearthly love; and when she had poured out
her blood, how she came to her mourning friends in ecstatic vision,
all white and glistening, with a fair lamb by her side, and bade them
weep not for her, because she was reigning with Him whom on earth she
had preferred to all other lovers. There was also the legend of the
fair Cecilia, the lovely musician whom angels had rapt away to their
choirs; the story of that queenly saint, Catharine, who passed through
the courts of heaven, and saw the angels crowned with roses and lilies,
and the Virgin on her throne, who gave her the wedding ring that
espoused her to be the bride of the King Eternal.
Fed with such legends, it could not be but that a child with a
sensitive, nervous organization and vivid imagination, should have
grown up with an unworldly and spiritual character, and that a poetic
mist should have enveloped all her outward perceptions similar to that
palpitating veil of blue and lilac vapor that enshrouds the Italian
landscape.
Nor is it to be marveled at, if the results of this system of education
went far beyond what the good old grandmother intended. For, though a
stanch good Christian, after the manner of those times, yet she had not
the slightest mind to see her grand-daughter a nun; on the contrary,
she was working day and night to add to her dowry, and had in her eye
a reputable middle-aged blacksmith, who was a man of substance and
prudence, to be the husband and keeper of her precious treasure. In a
home thus established she hoped to enthrone herself, and provide for
the rearing of a generation of stout-limbed girls and boys who should
grow up to make a flourishing household in the land. This subject she
had not yet broached to her grand-daughter, though daily preparing to
do so,--deferring it, it must be told, from a sort of jealous, yearning
craving to have wholly to herself the child for whom she had lived so
many years.
Antonio, the blacksmith to whom this honor was destined, was one of
those broad-backed, full-chested, long-limbed fellows one shall often
see around Sorrento, with great, kind, black eyes like those of an ox,
and all the attributes of a healthy, kindly, animal nature. Contentedly
he hammered away at his business; and certainly, had not Dame Elsie
of her own providence elected him to be the husband of her fair
grand-daughter, he would never have thought of the matter himself; but,
opening the black eyes aforenamed upon the girl, he perceived that she
was fair, and also received an inner light through Dame Elsie as to the
amount of her dowry; and, putting these matters together, conceived a
kindness for the maiden, and awaited with tranquillity the time when he
should be allowed to commence his wooing.