I
On the twenty-second anniversary of Susanna's birth, old Commendatore
Fregi, her guardian, whose charge, by the provisions of her father's
will, on that day terminated, gave a festa in her honour at his villa
in Vallanza. Cannon had been fired in the morning: two-and-twenty
salvoes, if you please, though Susanna had protested that this was
false heraldry, and that it advertised her, into the bargain, for an
old maid. In the afternoon there had been a regatta. Seven tiny
sailing-boats, monotypes,--the entire fleet, indeed, of the Reale Yacht
Club d'Ilaria--had described a triangle in the bay, with Vallanza,
Presa, and Veno as its points; and I need n't tell anyone who knows the
island of Sampaolo that the Marchese Baldo del Ponte's _Mermaid_,
English name and all, had come home easily the first. Then, in the
evening, there was a dinner, followed by a ball, and fire-works in the
garden.
Susanna was already staying at the summer palace on Isola Nobile, for
already--though her birthday falls on the seventeenth of April--the
warm weather had set in; and when the last guests had gone their way,
the Commendatore escorted her and her duenna, the Baroness Casaterrena,
down through the purple Italian night, musical with the rivalries of a
hundred nightingales, to the sea-wall, where, at his private
landing-stage, in the bat-haunted glare of two tall electric lamps, her
launch was waiting. But as he offered Susanna his hand, to help her
aboard, she stepped quickly to one side, and said, with a charming
indicative inclination of the head, "The Baronessa."
The precedence, of course, was rightfully her own. How like her, and
how handsome of her, thought the fond old man, thus to waive it in
favour of her senior. So he transferred his attention to the Baroness.
She was a heavy body, slow and circumspect in her motions; but at
length she had safely found her place among the silk cushions in the
stern, and the Commendatore, turning back, again held out his hand to
his sometime ward. As he was in the act of doing so, however, his ears
were startled by a sound of puffing and of churning which caused him
abruptly to face about.
"Hi! Stop!" he cried excitedly, for the launch was several yards out
in the bay; and one could hear the Baroness, equally excited,
expostulating with the man at the machine:
"He! Ferma, ferma!"
"It's all right," said Susanna, in that rather deep voice of hers,
tranquil and leisurely; "my orders."
And the launch, unperturbed, held its course towards the glow-worm
lights of Isola Nobile.
The Commendatore stared. . . .
For a matter of five seconds, his brows knitted together, his mouth
half open, the Commendatore stared, now at Susanna, now after the
bobbing lanterns of the launch,--whilst, clear in the suspension, the
choir of nightingales sobbed and shouted.
"_Your_ orders?" he faltered at last. Many emotions were concentrated
in the pronoun.
"Yes," said Susanna, with a naturalness that perhaps was studied. "The
first act of my reign."
He had never known her to give an order before, without asking
permission; and this, in any case, was such an incomprehensible order.
How, for instance, was she to get back to the palace?
"But how on earth," he puzzled, "will you get back to----"
"Oh, I 'm not returning to Isola Nobile tonight," Susanna jauntily
mentioned, her chin a little perked up in the air. Then, with the
sweetest smile--through which there pierced, perhaps, just a faint
glimmer of secret mischief?--"I 'm starting on my wander-year," she
added, and waved her hand imperially towards the open sea.
It was a progression of surprises for the tall, thin old Commendatore.
No sooner had Susanna thus bewilderingly spoken, than the rub and dip
of oars became audible, rhythmically nearing; and a minute after, from
the outer darkness, a row-boat, white and slender, manned by two rowers
in smart nautical uniforms, shot forward into the light, and drew up
alongside the quay.
"A boat from the _Fiorimondo_," he gasped, in stupefaction.
"Yes," said Susanna, pleasantly. "The _Fiorimondo_ takes me as far as
Venice. There I leave it for the train."
The Commendatore's faded old blue eyes flickered anxiously.
"I can't think I am dreaming," he remarked, with a kind of vague
plaintiveness; "and of course you are not serious. My dear, I don't
understand."
"Oh, I 'm as serious as mathematics," she assured him.
She gave her head a little pensive movement of affirmation, and lifted
her eyes to his, bright with an expression of trustful candour. This
was an expression she was somewhat apt to assume when her mood was a
teasing one; and it generally had the effect of breaking down the
Commendatore's gravity. "You are a witch," he would laugh, availing
himself without shame of the way-worn reproach, "a wicked, irresistible
little witch."
"The thing," she explained, "is as simple as good-day. I 'm starting
on my travels--to see the world--Paris, which I have only seen
once--London, which I have never seen--the seaports of Bohemia, the
mountains of Thule, which I have often seen from a distance, in the
mists on the horizon. The _Fiorimondo_ takes me as far as Venice.
That is one of the advantages of owning a steam-yacht. Otherwise, I
should have to go by the Austrian-Lloyd packet; and that would n't be
half so comfortable."
Her eyes, still raised to the Commendatore's, melted in a smile;--a
smile seemingly all innocence, persuasiveness, tender appeal for
approbation, but (I 'm afraid) with an undergleam that was like a
mocking challenge.
He, perforce, smiled too, though with manifest reluctance; and at the
same time he frowned.
"My dear, if it were possible, I should be angry with you. This is
scarcely an appropriate hour for mystifications."
"_That_ it is n't," agreed Susanna, heartily. And she put up her hand,
to cover a weary little yawn. "But there 's _no_ mystification. There
's a perfectly plain statement of fact. I 'm starting to-night for
Venice."
He studied her intently for a moment, fixedly, pondering something.
Then, all at once, the lines of dismay cleared from his lean old
ivory-yellow face.
"Ha! In a ball-dress," he scoffed, and pointed a finger at Susanna's
snowy confection of tulle and satin and silver embroidery, all
a-shimmer in the artificial moonlight of the electric lamps, against
the background of southern garden,--the outlines and masses, dim and
mysterious in the night, of palms and cypresses, of slender
eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, magnolias, of orange-trees, where the
oranges hung, amid the dark foliage, like dull-burning lanterns. A
crescent of diamonds twinkled in the warm blackness of her hair. She
wore a collar of pearls round her throat, and a long rope of pearls
that descended to her waist, and was then looped up and caught at the
bosom by an opal clasp. A delicate perfume, like the perfume of
violets, came and went in the air near her. She held a great fluffy
fan of white feathers in one hand, and in the other carried loose her
long white gloves; and gems sparkled on her fingers. The waters under
the sea-wall beside her kept up a perpetual whispering, like a
commentary on the situation. The old man considered these things, and
his misgivings were entirely dissipated.
"Ha!" he scoffed, twisting his immense iron-grey moustaches with
complacency. "I can't guess what prank you may be up to, but you are
never starting for Venice in a ball-dress. You 're capable of a good
deal, my dear, but you 're not capable of that."
"Oh, I 'm capable of anything and everything," Susanna answered,
cheerfully ominous. "Besides," she plausibly admonished him, "you
might do me the justice of supposing that I have changes aboard the
_Fiorimondo_. My maid awaits me there with quite a dozen boxes.
So--you see. Oh, and by the bye," she interjected, "Serafino also is
coming with me. He'll act as courier--buy my tickets, register my
luggage; and then, when we reach our ultimate destination, resume his
white cap and apron. My ultimate destination, you must know," she
said, with a lightness which, I think, on the face of it was spurious,
"is a little village in England--a little village called Craford;
and"--she smiled convincingly--"I hear that the cuisine is not to be
depended upon in little English villages."
All the Commendatore's anxieties had revived. This time he frowned in
grim earnest.
"_Créforrrd_!" he ejaculated.
The word fell like an explosion; and there was the climax of horrified
astonishment in those reverberating r's.
"I think you are mad," he said. "Or, if you are not mad, you are the
slyest young miss in Christendom."
Susanna's eyes darkened, pathetic, wistful.
"Ah, don't be cross," she pleaded. "I 'm not mad, and I 'm not sly.
But I 'm free and independent. What's the good of being free and
independent," she largely argued, "if you can't do the things you want
to? I 'm going to Craford to realise the aspiration of a lifetime. I
'm going to find out my cousin, and make his acquaintance, and see what
he 's like. And then--well, if he 's nice, who knows what may happen?
I planned it ever so long ago," she proclaimed, with an ingenuousness
that was almost brazen, "and made all my preparations. Then I sat down
and waited for the day when I should be free and independent."
Her eyes melted again, deprecating his censure, beseeching his
indulgence, yet still, with a little glint of raillery, defying him to
do his worst.
His hand sawed the air, his foot tapped the ground.
"Free and independent, free and independent," he fumed, in derision.
"Fine words, fine words. And you made all your preparations
beforehand, in secrecy; and you 're not sly? Misericordia di Dio!"
He groaned impotently; he shook his bony old fist at the stars in the
firmament.
"Perhaps you will admit," he questioned loftily, "that there are
decencies to be observed even by the free and independent? It is not
decent for you to travel alone. If you mean a single word of what you
say, why are n't you accompanied by the Baronessa?"
"The Baronessa fatigues me," Susanna answered gently. "And I
exasperate her and try her patience cruelly. She 's always putting
spokes in my wheel, and I 'm always saying and doing things she
disapproves of. Ah, if she only suspected the half of the things I
don't say or do, but think and feel!"
She nodded with profound significance.
"We belong," she pointed out, "to discrepant generations. I 'm so
intensely modern, and she 's so irredeemably eighteen-sixty. I 've
only waited for this blessed day of liberty to cut adrift from the
Baronessa. And the pleasure will be mutual, I promise you. She will
enjoy a peace and a calm that she has n't known for ages. Ouf! I feel
like Europe after the downfall of Napoleon."
She gave her shoulders a little shake of satisfaction.
"The Baronessa," she said, and I 'm afraid there was laughter in her
tone, "is a prisoner for the night on Isola Nobile." I 'm afraid she
tittered. "I gave orders that the launch was to start off the moment
she put her foot aboard it, and on no account was it to turn back, and
on no account was any boat to leave the island till to-morrow morning.
I expect she 'll be rather annoyed--and puzzled. But--cosa vuole?
It's all in the day's work."
Then her voice modulated, and became confidential and exultant.
"I 'm going to have such a delicious plunge. See--to-night I have put
on pearls, and diamonds, and rings, that the Baronessa would never let
me wear. And I 've got a whole bagful of books, to read in the
train--Anatole France, and Shakespeare, and Gyp, and Pierre Loti, and
Molière, and Max Beerbohm, and everybody: all the books the Baronessa
would have died a thousand deaths rather than let me look at. That's
the nuisance of being a woman of position--you 're brought up never to
read anything except the Lives of the Saints and the fashion papers. I
've had to do all my really important reading by stealth, like a thief
in the night. Ah," she sighed, "if I were only a man, like you! But
as for observing the decencies," she continued briskly, "you need have
no fear. I 'm going to the land of all lands where (if report speaks
true) one has most opportunities of observing them--I 'm going to
England, and I 'll observe them with both eyes. And I 'm not
travelling alone." She spurned the imputation. "There are Rosina and
Serafino; and at the end of my journey I shall have Miss Sandus. You
remember that nice Miss Sandus?" she asked, smiling up at him. "She is
my fellow-conspirator. We arranged it all before she went away last
autumn. I 'm to go to her house in London, and she will go with me to
Craford. She 's frantically interested about my cousin. She thinks
it's the most thrilling and romantic story she has ever heard. And she
thoroughly sympathises with my desire to make friends with him, and to
offer him some sort of reparation."
The Commendatore was pacing nervously backwards and forwards, being, I
suppose, too punctilious an old-school Latin stickler for etiquette to
interrupt.
But now, "Curse her for a meddlesome Englishwoman," he spluttered
violently. "To encourage a young girl like you in such midsummer
folly. A young girl?--a young hoyden, a young tom-boy. What? You
will travel from here to London without a chaperon? And books--French
novels--gr-r-r! I wish you had never been taught to read. I think it
is ridiculous to teach women to read. What good will they get by
reading? You deserve--upon my word you deserve . . . Well, never
mind. Oh, body of Bacchus!"
He wrung his hands, as one in desperation.
"A young girl, a mere child," he cried, in a wail to Heaven; "a
mere"--he paused, groping for an adequate definition--"a mere
irresponsible female orphan! And nobody with power to interfere."
Susanna drew herself up.
"Young?" she exclaimed. "A mere child? I? Good gracious, I 'm
_twenty-two_."
She said it, scanning the syllables to give them weight, and in all
good faith I think, as who should say, "I 'm fifty."
"You really can't accuse me of being young," she apodictically
pronounced. "I 'm twenty-two. Twenty-two long years--aïe, Dio mio!
And I look even older. I could pass for twenty-five. If," was her
suddenly-inspired concession, "if it will afford you the least atom of
consolation, I 'll _tell_ people that I am twenty-five. _There_."
She wooed him anew with those melting eyes, and her tone was soft as a
caress.
"It is n't every man that I 'd offer to sacrifice three of the best
years of my life for--and it is n't every man that I 'd offer to tell
fibs for."
She threw back her head, and stood in an attitude to invite inspection.
"Don't I look twenty-five?" she asked. "If you had n't the honour of
my personal acquaintance, would it ever occur to you that I 'm what you
call 'a young girl'? Would n't you go about enquiring of every one,
'Who is that handsome, accomplished, and perfectly dressed woman of the
world?'"
And she made him the drollest of little quizzical moues.
In effect, with her tall and rather sumptuously developed figure, with
the humour and vivacity, the character and decision, of her face, with
the glow deep in her eyes, the graver glow beneath the mirth that
danced near their surface,--and then too, perhaps, with the unequivocal
Southern richness of her colouring: the warm white and covert rose of
her skin, the dense black of her undulating abundant hair, the sudden,
sanguine red of her lips,--I think you would have taken her for more
than twenty-two. There was nothing of the immature or the unfinished,
nothing of the tentative, in her aspect. With no loss of freshness,
there were the strength, the poise, the assurance, that we are wont to
associate with a riper womanhood. Whether she looked twenty-five or
not, she looked, at any rate, a completed product; she looked
distinguished and worth while; she looked alive, alert: one in whom the
blood coursed swiftly, the spirit burned vigorously; one who would love
her pleasure, who could be wayward and provoking, but who could also be
generous and loyal; she looked high-bred, one in whom there was race,
as well as temperament and nerve.
The Commendatore, however, was a thousand miles from these
considerations. He glared fiercely at her--as fiercely as it was _in_
his mild old eyes to glare. He held himself erect and aloof, in a
posture that was eloquent of haughty indignation.
"I will ask your Excellency a single question. Are you or are you not
the Countess of Sampaolo?" he demanded sternly.
But Susanna was incorrigible.
"At your service--unless I was changed at nurse," she assented,
dropping a curtsey; and an imp laughed in her eyes.
"And are you aware," the Commendatore pursued, with the tremor of
restrained passion in his voice, "that the Countess of Sampaolo, a
countess in her own right, is a public personage? Are you aware that
the actions you are proposing--which would be disgraceful enough if you
were any little obscure bourgeoise--must precipitate a public scandal?
Have you reflected that it will all be printed in the newspapers, for
men to snigger at in their cafes, for women to cackle over in their
boudoirs? Have you reflected that you will make yourself a nine-days'
wonder, a subject for tittle-tattle with all the gossip-mongers of
Europe? Are you without pride, without modesty?"
Susanna arched her eyebrows, in amiable surprise.
"Oh?" she said. "Have I omitted to mention that I 'm to do the whole
thing in masquerade? How stupid of me. Yes,"--her voice became
explanatory,--"it's essential, you see, that my cousin Antonio should
never dream who I really am. He must fancy that I 'm just
anybody--till the time comes for me to cast my domino, and reveal the
fairy-princess. So I travel under a nom-de-guerre. I 'm a widow, a
rich, charming, dashing, not too-disconsolate widow; and my name . . .
is Madame Fregi."
She brought out the last words after an instant's irresolution, and
marked them by a hazardous little smile.
"What!" thundered the Commendatore. "You would dare to take _my_ name
as a cloak for your escapades? I forbid it. Understand. I
peremptorily forbid it."
He stamped his foot, he nodded his outraged head, menacingly.
But Susanna was indeed incorrigible.
"Dear me," she grieved; "I hoped you would be touched by the
compliment. How strange men are. Never mind, though," she said, with
gay resignation. "I 'll call myself something else. Let's
think. . . . Would--would Torrebianca do?" Her eyes sought counsel
from his face.
Torrebianca, I need n't remind those who are familiar with Sampaolo, is
the name of a mountain, a bare, white, tower-like peak of rock, that
rises in the middle of the island, the apex of the ridge separating the
coast of Vallanza from the coast of Orca.
"Madame Torrebianca? La Nobil Donna Susanna Torrebianca?" She tried
the name on her tongue. "Yes, for an impromptu, Torrebianca is n't
bad. It's picturesque, and high-sounding, and yet not--not
_invraisemblable_. You don't think it _invraisemblable_? So here 's
luck to that bold adventuress, that knightess-errant, the widow
Torrebianca."
She raised her fluffy white fan, as if it were a goblet from which to
quaff the toast, and flourished it aloft.
The poor old Commendatore was mumbling helpless imprecations in his
moustache. One caught the word "atrocious" several times repeated.
"And now," said Susanna brightly, "kiss me on both cheeks, and give me
your benediction."
She moved towards him, and held up her face.
But he drew away.
"My child," he began, impressively, "I have no means to constrain you,
and I know by experience that when you have made up that perverse
little mind of yours, one might as well attempt to reason with a Hebrew
Jew. Therefore I can only beg, I can only implore. I implore you not
to do this fantastic, this incredible, this unheard-of thing. I will
go on my knees to you. I will entreat you, not for my sake, but for
your own sake, for the sake of your dead father and mother, to put this
ruinous vagary from you, to abandon this preposterous journey, and to
stay quietly here in Sampaolo. Then, if you must open up the past, if
you must get into communication with your distant cousin, I 'll help
you to find some other, some sane and decorous method of doing so."
Still once again Susanna's eyes melted, but there was no mockery in
them now.
"You are kind and patient," she said, with feeling; "and I hate to be a
brute. Yet what is there to do? I can't alter my resolution. And I
can't bear to refuse you when you talk to me like that. So--you must
forgive me if I take a brusque way of escaping the dilemma."
She ran to the edge of the quay, and sprang lightly into her boat.
"Avanti--avanti," she cried to the rowers, who instantly pushed the
boat free, and bent upon their oars.
Then she waved her disfranchised guardian a kiss.
"Addio, Commendatore. I 'll write to you from Venice."