The Countess wrote that afternoon to Baron Goldbirn, of Vienna, and to
the Princess Anatolie, now in Styria, that the engagement between her
daughter and Signor Guido d'Este was broken off by mutual agreement. She
had told Cecilia that she had been to see Guido and had confessed the
plain truth, and that there need be no more comedies, because men never
died of that sort of thing after all, and it was much better for them to
be told everything outright. Cecilia seemed perfectly satisfied and
thanked her. Then the Countess said she would like to go to Brittany, or
perhaps to Norway, where she had never been, but that if Cecilia
preferred Scotland, she would make no objection. She would go anywhere,
provided the place were cool, and on the top of a mountain, or by the
sea, but she wished to leave at once. Everything had been ready for
their departure several days ago.
"You do not really mean to leave Rome till Guido--I mean, till Signor
d'Este is out of all danger, do you?" asked the young girl.
"My dear, since you are not going to marry him, what difference can it
make?" asked the Countess, unconsciously heartless. "The sooner we go,
the better. You are as pale as a sheet and as thin as a skeleton. You
will lose all your looks if you stay here!"
Cecilia was in a loose white silk garment with open sleeves. She looked
at the perfect curve of her arm, from the slender wrist to the
delicately rounded elbow, and smiled.
"I am not a skeleton yet," she said.
"You will be in a few days," her mother answered cheerfully. "There is a
telegraph to everywhere nowadays, and Signor Lamberti will be here and
can send us news all the time. You cannot possibly go and see the poor
man, you know. If you could only guess how I felt, my dear, when I found
myself there this morning alone with him! I confess, I half expected
that the walls would be covered with the most dreadful pictures, those
things I do not like you to look at in the Paris Salon, you know. Women
apparently waiting for tea on the lawn--before dressing--that sort of
thing." The good Countess blushed at the thought.
"They are only women!" said Cecilia. "Why should I not look at them?"
"Because they are horrid," answered the Countess. "But I must say I saw
nothing of the sort in Guido's rooms. Nevertheless, I felt like the
wicked ladies in the French novels, who always go out in thick veils and
have little gold keys hidden somewhere inside their clothes. It must be
very uncomfortable."
She prattled on and her daughter scarcely heard her. All sorts of hard
questions were presenting themselves to Cecilia's mind together. Had she
done wrong, or right? And then, though it might have been quite right to
let Lamberti know that she loved him, had her behaviour been modest and
maidenly, or over bold? After all, could she have helped putting out her
hand to find his just then? And when she had found it, could she
possibly have checked herself from drawing him nearer to her? Had she
any will of her own left at that moment, or had she been taken unawares
and made to do something which she would never have done, if she had
been quite calm? Calm! She almost laughed at the word as it came into
her thought.
Her mother was reading the _Figaro_ now, having given up talking when
she saw that Cecilia did not listen. Ever since Cecilia could remember
her mother had read the _Figaro_. When it did not come by the usual post
she read the number of the preceding day over again.
Cecilia was trying to decide where to spend the rest of the summer,
tolerably sure that she could make her mother accept any reasonable plan
she offered. By a reasonable plan she meant one that should not take her
too far from Rome. For her own part she would have been glad not to go
away at all. There was Vallombrosa, which was high up and very cool, and
there was Viareggio, which was by the sea, but much warmer, and there
was Sorrento, which had become fashionable in the summer, and was never
very hot and was the prettiest place of all. Something must be decided
at once, for she knew her mother well. When the Countess grew restless
to leave town, it was impossible to live with her. A startled
exclamation interrupted Cecilia's reflections.
"My dear! How awful!"
"What is it?" asked Cecilia, placidly, expecting her mother to read out
some blood-curdling tale of runaway motor cars and mangled nursery
maids.
"This is too dreadful!" cried the Countess, still buried in the article
she had found, and reading on to herself, too much interested to stop a
moment.
"Is anybody amusing dead?" enquired Cecilia, with calm.
"What did you say?" asked the Countess, reaching the end. "This is the
most frightful thing I ever heard of! A million of francs--in small
sums--extracted on all sorts of pretexts--probably as blackmail--it is
perfectly horrible."
"Who has extracted a million of francs from whom?" asked Cecilia, quite
indifferent.
"Guido d'Este, of course! I told you--from the Princess Anatolie----"
"Guido?" Cecilia started from her seat. "It is a lie!" she cried,
leaning over her mother's shoulder and reading quickly. "It is an
infamous lie!"
"My dear?" protested the Countess. "They would not dare to print such a
thing if it were not true! Poor Guido! Of course, I suppose they take an
exaggerated view, but the Princess always gave me to understand that he
had large debts. It was a million, you see, just that million they
wished us to give for your dowry! Yes, that would have set him straight.
But they did not get it! My child, what an escape you have made! Just
fancy if you had been already married!"
"I do not believe a word of it," said Cecilia, indignantly throwing down
the paper she had taken from her mother's hand. "Besides, there is only
an initial. It only speaks of a certain Monsieur d'E."
"Oh, there is no doubt about it, I am afraid. His aunt, 'a certain
Princess,' his father 'one of the great of the earth.' It could not be
any one else."
"I should like to kill the people who write such things!" Cecilia was
righteously angry.
The seed sown by Monsieur Leroy was bearing fruit already, and in a much
more public place than he had expected, or even wished. The young lawyer
cared much less for the money he might make out of the affair than for
the advantage of having his name connected with a famous scandal, and he
had not found it hard to make the story public. The article appeared in
the shape of a letter from an occasional correspondent, and said it was
rumoured that since her nephew was to make a rich marriage the Princess
would bring suit to recover the sums she had been induced to lend him on
divers pretences. Her legal representative in Rome, it was stated, had
been interviewed, but had positively refused to give any information,
and his name was given in full, whereas all the others were indicated by
initials followed by dots. The lawyer flattered himself that this was a
remarkably neat way of letting the world know who he was and with what
great discretion he was endowed.
As Cecilia thought of Guido's face as she had seen it that morning, her
heart beat with anger and she clenched her hand and turned away. Her
mother believed the story, or a part of it, and others would believe as
much. The _Figaro_ had come in the morning, and the article would
certainly appear in the Roman papers that very evening. Guido would not
hear of it at present, because Lamberti would keep it from him, but he
must know it in the end.
The girl was powerless, and realised it. If she had been mistress of her
own fortune she would readily have satisfied the Princess's demands on
Guido, for she suspected that in some way the abominable article had
been authorised by his aunt. But she was still Baron Goldbirn's ward,
and the sensible financier would have laughed to scorn the idea of
ransoming Guido d'Este's reputation. So would her mother, though she was
generous; and besides, the Countess could not touch her capital, which
was held in trust for Cecilia.
"What a mercy that you are not married to him!" she said, reading the
article again, while her daughter walked up and down the small boudoir.
"You should not say such things!" Cecilia answered hotly. "Why do you
read that disgusting paper? You know the story is a vile falsehood, from
beginning to end. You know that as well as I do! Signor Lamberti will go
to Paris to-night and kill the man who wrote it."
Her eyes flashed, and she had visions of the man she loved shaking a
miserable creature to death, as a terrier kills a rat. Oddly enough the
miserable creature took the shape of Monsieur Leroy in her vivid
imagination.
"Monsieur Leroy is at the bottom of this," she said with instant
conviction. "He hates Guido."
"I daresay," answered the Countess. "I never liked Monsieur Leroy. Do
you remember, when I asked about him at the Princess's dinner, what an
awful silence there was? That was one of the most dreadful moments of my
life! I am sure her relations never mention him."
"He does what he likes with her. He is a spiritualist."
"Who told you that, child?"
"That dear old Don Nicola Francesetti, the archaeologist who showed us
the discoveries in Saint Cecilia's church."
"I remember. I had quite forgotten him."
"Yes. He told me that Monsieur Leroy makes tables turn and rap, and all
that, and persuades the Princess that he is in communication with
spirits. Don Nicola said quite gravely that the devil was in all
spiritualism."
"Of course he is," assented the Countess. "I have heard of dreadful
things happening to people who made tables turn. They go mad, and all
sorts of things."
"All sorts of things," in the Countess's mind represented everything she
could not remember or would not take the trouble to say. The expression
did not always stand grammatically in the sentence, but that was of no
importance whatever compared with the convenience of using it in any
language she chanced to be speaking. She belonged to a generation in
which a woman was considered to have finished her education when she had
learned to play the piano and had forgotten arithmetic, and she had now
forgotten both, which did not prevent her from being generally liked,
while some people thought her amusing.
Just at that moment she seemed hopelessly frivolous to Cecilia, who was
in the greatest distress for Guido, and left her to take refuge in
solitude. She could remember no day in her life on which so much had
happened to change it, and she felt that she must be alone at last.
In her old way she sat down to let herself dream with open eyes in the
darkened room. There could be no harm in it now, and the old longing
came upon her as if she had never tried to resist it. She sat facing the
shadows and concentrated all her thoughts on one point with a steady
effort, sure that presently she should be thinking of nothing and
waiting for the vision to appear, and for the dream-man she had loved so
long. He might take her into his arms now, and she would not resist him;
she would let his lips meet hers, and for one endless instant she would
be lifted up in strong and strange delight, as when to-day her veiled
cheek had pressed against his for a second--or an hour--she did not
know. He might kiss her in dreams now, for in real life he loved her as
she loved him, and some day, far off no doubt, when poor Guido was well
and strong again, and Lamberti had silenced all the calumnies invented
against him, then it would all surely come true indeed.
But now she waited long, patiently, in the certainty that she could go
back to the marble court and stand by the pillar in the morning light
till she felt him coming up behind her. Yet she saw nothing, and her
eyes grew weary of watching the shadows, and closed themselves, for it
was afternoon, and very hot, and she was tired. She fell into a sweet
sleep in her chair, and presently the refreshing breeze that springs up
in Rome towards five o'clock in summer blew through the drawn blinds to
fan her delicate cheek, and stir the little golden ringlets at her
temples. While she slept her face grew sad by slow degrees, and on her
lap her hands moved and lay with their palms turned upwards as if she
were appealing piteously to some higher power for mercy and help.
Shadows darkened softly under her eyes, as she lay thus, and the young
lids swelled and trembled; and she, who never shed tears waking, wept
silently in her sleep. The bright drops hung by the lashes and broke,
trickling down her cheeks, one by one, till they fell sideways upon her
bare white neck. Many they were and long they fell, and when they ceased
at last, her face was very white and still, as if she were quite dead,
and dead of a sorrow that could be consoled only in heaven.
She had dreamed that the Vestal's vow was broken at last, and that she
was sitting alone at night on the steps of the closed Temple, leaning
back against the base of a pillar, watching the stars that slowly
ascended out of the east; and she was thinking of what she had been, and
that she should never again stand within the holy place to feed the
sacred fire with the consecrated wood, and sweep the precious ashes into
the mysterious pit beneath the altar. Never again was she to write down
the records of the lordly Roman unions that had kept the stock great and
pure and the free blood clean from that of slaves for a thousand years.
Never might she sit at the feet of the Chief Virgin in the moonlit
court, listening to tales of holy Vestals in old time, while the slow
water murmured in the channels between one fountain and another.
It was all over, all ended, all behind her in the past for ever. Her vow
was broken, because her veiled cheek had touched the cheek of a living,
breathing man who had laid a strong hand upon her neck and had pressed
her close to him, she consenting, and always to consent. She was not to
die for it, since it was no mortal sin, but she was no longer a Vestal
now, and the Temple and the house of the pure in heart were shut against
her henceforth and would not be opened again. She knew that she had
passed the threshold for the last time, and that the man she loved would
soon come and take her away to another life. After that there would be
no fear in the world, since she would always be with him, and he would
make her forget all. But he had not come yet, and while she waited her
tears flowed quietly and sadly for all that was no more to be hers, but
most of all because she had broken a high and solemn promise which had
been the foundation of her life. In the old dream, when the Vestals were
dismissed from their office each to her own home, she was the most
faithful of them all, to the very end. But now she had been the very
first to yield, and they had put her out of their midst, sadly and
silently, to wait alone in the night for him she loved. So she waited
and wept, and the night wind seemed to freeze the salt tears on her face
and neck; yet he did not come.
Then she heard his step; but she was wakened by the soft sound of the
latch bolt of her door in its socket, and she sprang to her feet,
straight and white, with a little sharp cry, for the fancied sound had
always frightened her as nothing else could. This time she had not
turned the key, and the door opened.
"Did I startle you, child?" asked her mother's voice, kindly. "I am
sorry. Signor Lamberti is in the drawing-room. I think you had better
come. He has heard of the article in the _Figaro_, and is reading it
now."
"I will come in a minute, mother," Cecilia answered, turning her face
away. "Let me slip on my frock."
"It is only Signor Lamberti," the Countess observed, rather
thoughtlessly. "But I will send you Petersen."
The door was shut again, and Cecilia heard her mother's tripping
footsteps on the glazed tiles in the corridor. She knew that she had
blushed quickly, for she had been taken unawares, but the room was
darkened and her mother had noticed nothing. She was suddenly aware that
her cheeks and her neck were wet, and she remembered what she had dreamt
and wondered that her tears should have been real. She had let in more
light now and she looked at herself in the glass with curiosity, for she
did not remember to have cried since she had been a little girl. The
dried tears gave her face a stained and spotted look she did not like,
and she made haste to bathe it in cold water. Even the near-sighted
Petersen might see something unusual, and she would not let Lamberti
guess that she had been crying on that day of all days.
It was all very strange, and while she dressed she wondered still why
the real tears had come, and why she had dreamt she had broken her vow.
She had never dreamt that before, not even when she used to meet
Lamberti in her dreams by the fountain in the Villa Madama. It was
stranger still that she should not have been able to call up the waking
vision in the old way. It was as if some power she had once possessed
had left her very suddenly, a power, or a faculty, or a gift; she could
not tell what it was, but it was gone and something told her that it
would not return. She made haste, and almost ran along the broad
passage.
When she went into the drawing-room Lamberti was standing with the
_Figaro_ in his hand, before her mother who was sitting down. He bowed
rather stiffly, though he smiled a little, and she saw that his blue
eyes glittered and his face had the ruthless look she used to dread. She
knew what it meant now, and was pleased. She wished she could see him
shake the wretch who had written the article; she was glad that he was
just what he was, not too tall, strong, active, red-haired and angry, a
fighting man from head to foot, roused and ready for a violent deed. She
had waited for him so long, outside the closed Temple of Vesta in the
cold night wind!
"It is not the article that matters," he said, taking it for granted
that she knew the contents. "It is what Guido would feel if he read it."
"Especially just now," observed the Countess, looking at Cecilia.
"What are you going to do?" Cecilia asked as quietly as she could.
"Shall you go to Paris?"
"No! this was written in Rome. I will wager my life that the lawyer who
is mentioned here wrote it all and got some clever Frenchman to
translate it for him. I know the fellow by name."
"I thought Monsieur Leroy was at the bottom of it," said Cecilia.
Lamberti looked at her a moment.
"I daresay," he said. "I am sure that the Princess never meant that
anything of this sort should be printed. Did Guido ever tell you about
her money dealings with him?"
Guido had never mentioned them, of course, and Lamberti explained in a
few words exactly what had happened, and the nature of the receipts
Guido had given to his aunt.
"I daresay you are right about Monsieur Leroy," he concluded, "for the
old lady is far too clever to have done such an absurd thing as this,
and it is just like his blundering hatred of Guido."
"I wish he were here," said Cecilia, looking at Lamberti's hands. "I
wonder what you would do to him."
"The lawyer is here, which is more to the purpose," Lamberti answered.
"You cannot fight a lawyer, can you?" asked the young girl. "You cannot
shoot him."
"One can without doubt," returned Lamberti, smiling. "But it will not be
necessary."
"My dear child," cried the Countess in a reproachful tone, "I had no
idea you could be so bloodthirsty! Your father fought with Garibaldi,
but I am sure he never talked like that."
"Men have no need of talking, mother. They can fight themselves."
"May I take the _Figaro_ with me?" asked Lamberti. "I may not be able to
buy a copy. By the bye, Baron Goldbirn is your guardian, is he not? He
must have important relations with the financiers in Paris."
Cecilia looked at her mother, meaning her to answer the question.
"He is always in Paris himself," said the Countess. "I mean when he is
not in Vienna."
"Can you telegraph to him to use his influence in Paris, so that the
_Figaro_ shall correct the article? Newspapers never take back what they
say, but it will be enough if a paragraph appears in a prominent part of
the paper stating that some ill-disposed people having supposed that the
person referred to in a recent letter from a Roman correspondent was
Guido d'Este, the editors take the opportunity of stating positively
that no reference to him was intended. Will you telegraph that?"
"But will it be of any use?" asked the Countess, who was slightly in awe
of Baron Goldbirn.
"Please write the telegram yourself," Cecilia said. "Then there cannot
be any mistake. The address is Kaernthner Ring, Vienna."
"You will find writing paper in my boudoir," said the Countess. "Cecilia
will show you."
The young girl led the way to her mother's table in the next room, and
Lamberti sat down before it, while she pulled out a sheet of paper and
gave him a pen. Neither looked at the other, and Lamberti wrote slowly
in a laboured round hand unlike his own, intended for the telegraph
clerk to read easily.
"How shall I sign it?" he asked when he had finished.
"'Countess Fortiguerra.'"
He wrote, blotted the page, and rose. For one moment he stood close
beside her.
"Shall I tell your mother?" he asked, in a low voice.
"Not yet."
He bent his head and looked at her, and his face softened wonderfully in
that instant. But there was not a touch of their hands, though they were
alone in the room, nor a tender word spoken in a whisper to have told
any one that they loved each other so well. They were alike, and they
understood without speech or touch.
Lamberti read the telegram to the Countess, who seemed satisfied, but
not very hopeful about the result.
"I never could understand what financiers and newspapers have to do with
each other," she observed. "They seem to me so different."
"There is not often any resemblance between a horse and his rider," said
Lamberti, enigmatically.
"Will you come this evening and tell us what the lawyer says?" Cecilia
asked.
"Yes, if I may."
"Pray do," said the Countess. "We should so much like to know. Poor
Guido! Good-bye!" Lamberti left the room.