There was no richer man in Venice than Tommaso Tonelli, who had enough
on his florin a day; and none younger than he, who owned himself
forty-seven years old. He led the cheerfullest life in the world, and
was quite a monster of content; but when I come to sum up his pleasures,
I fear that I shall appear to my readers to be celebrating a very
insipid and monotonous existence. I doubt if even a summary of his
duties could be made attractive to the conscientious imagination of
hard-working people; for Tonelli's labors were not killing, nor, for
that matter, were those of any Venetian that I ever knew. He had a
stated employment in the office of the notary Cenarotti; and he passed
there so much of every working day as lies between nine and five
o'clock, writing upon deeds and conveyances and petitions and other
legal instruments for the notary, who sat in an adjoining room, secluded
from nearly everything in this world but snuff. He called Tonelli by the
sound of a little bell; and, when he turned to take a paper from his
safe, he seemed to be abstracting some secret from long-lapsed
centuries, which he restored again, and locked back among the dead ages
when his clerk replaced the document in his hands. These hands were very
soft and pale, and their owner was a colorless old man, whose silvery
hair fell down a face nearly as white; but, as he has almost nothing to
do with the present affair, I shall merely say that, having been
compromised in the last revolution, he had been obliged to live ever
since in perfect retirement, and that he seemed to have been blanched in
this social darkness as a plant is blanched by growth in a cellar. His
enemies said that he was naturally a timid man, but they could not deny
that he had seen things to make the brave afraid, or that he had now
every reason from the police to be secret and cautious in his life. He
could hardly be called company for Tonelli, who must have found the day
intolerably long but for the visit which the notary's pretty
granddaughter contrived to pay every morning in the cheerless _mezzà_.
She commonly appeared on some errand from her mother, but her chief
business seemed to be to share with Tonelli the modest feast of rumor
and hearsay which he loved to furnish forth for her, and from which
doubtless she carried back some fragments of gossip to the family
apartments. Tonelli called her, with that mingled archness and
tenderness of the Venetians, his Paronsina; and, as he had seen her grow
up from the smallest possible of Little Mistresses, there was no shyness
between them, and they were fully privileged to each other's society by
her mother. When she flitted away again, Tonelli was left to a stillness
broken only by the soft breathing of the old man in the next room, and
by the shrill discourse of his own loquacious pen, so that he was
commonly glad enough when it came five o'clock. At this hour he put on
his black coat, that shone with constant use, and his faithful silk hat,
worn down to the pasteboard with assiduous brushing, and caught up a
very jaunty cane in his hand. Then, saluting the notary, he took his way
to the little restaurant, where it was his custom to dine, and had his
tripe soup and his _risotto_, or dish of fried liver, in the austere
silence imposed by the presence of a few poor Austrian captains and
lieutenants. It was not that the Italians feared to be overheard by
these enemies; but it was good _dimostrazione_ to be silent before the
oppressor, and not let him know that they even enjoyed their dinners
well enough, under his government, to chat sociably over them. To tell
the truth, this duty was an irksome one to Tonelli, who liked far better
to dine, as he sometimes did, at a cook-shop, where he met the folk of
the people (_gente del popolo_), as he called them; and where, though
himself a person of civil condition, he discoursed freely with the other
guests, and ate of their humble but relishing fare. He was known among
them as Sior Tommaso; and they paid him a homage, which they enjoyed
equally with him, as a person not only learned in the law, but a poet of
gift enough to write wedding and funeral verses, and a veteran who had
fought for the dead Republic of Forty-eight. They honored him as a most
travelled gentleman, who had been in the Tyrol, and who could have
spoken German, if he had not despised that tongue as the language of the
ugly Croats, like one born to it. Who, for example, spoke Venetian more
elegantly than Sior Tommaso? or Tuscan, when he chose? and yet he was
poor,--a man of that genius! Patience! When Garibaldi came, we should
see! The _facchini_ and gondoliers, who had been wagging their tongues
all day at the church corners and ferries, were never tired of talking
of this gifted friend of theirs, when, having ended some impressive
discourse or some dramatic story, he left them with a sudden adieu, and
walked quickly away toward the Riva degli Schiavoni.
Here, whether he had dined at the cook-shop, or at his more genteel and
gloomy restaurant of the Bronze Horses, it was his custom to lounge an
hour or two over a cup of coffee and a Virginia cigar at one of the many
caffès, and to watch all the world as it passed to and fro on the quay.
Tonelli was gray, he did not disown it; but he always maintained that
his heart was still young, and that there was, moreover, a great
difference in persons as to age, which told in his favor. So he loved to
sit there, and look at the ladies; and he amused himself by inventing a
pet name for every face he saw, which he used to teach to certain
friends of his, when they joined him over his coffee. These friends were
all young enough to be his sons, and wise enough to be his fathers; but
they were always glad to be with him, for he had so cheery a wit and so
good a heart that neither his years nor his follies could make any one
sad. His kind face beamed with smiles, when Pennellini, chief among the
youngsters in his affections, appeared on the top of the nearest bridge,
and thence descended directly towards his little table. Then it was that
he drew out the straw which ran through the centre of his long Virginia,
and lighted the pleasant weed, and gave himself up to the delight of
making aloud those comments on the ladies which he had hitherto stifled
in his breast. Sometimes he would feign himself too deeply taken with a
passing beauty to remain quiet, and would make his friend follow with
him in chase of her to the Public Gardens. But he was a fickle lover,
and wanted presently to get back to his caffè, where, at decent
intervals of days or weeks, he would indulge himself in discovering a
spy in some harmless stranger, who, in going out, looked curiously at
the scar Tonelli's cheek had brought from the battle of Vicenza in 1848.
"Something of a spy, no?" he asked at these times of the waiter, who,
flattered by the penetration of a frequenter of his caffè, and the
implication that it was thought seditious enough to be watched by the
police, assumed a pensive importance, and answered, "Something of a spy,
certainly."
Upon this Tonelli was commonly encouraged to proceed: "Did I ever tell
you how I once sent one of those ugly muzzles out of a caffè? I knew him
as soon as I saw him,--I am never mistaken in a spy,--and I went with my
newspaper, and sat down close at his side. Then I whispered to him
across the sheet, 'We are two.' 'Eh?' says he. 'It is a very small
caffè, and there is no need of more than one,' and then I stared at him
and frowned. He looks at me fixedly a moment, then gathers up his hat
and gloves, and takes his pestilency off."
The waiter, who had heard this story, man and boy, a hundred times, made
a quite successful show of enjoying it, as he walked away with Tonelli's
fee of half a cent in his pocket. Tonelli then had left from his day's
salary enough to pay for the ice which he ate at ten o'clock, but which
he would sometimes forego, in order to give the money in charity, though
more commonly he indulged himself, and put off the beggar with, "Another
time, my dear. I have no leisure now to discuss those matters with
thee."
On holidays this routine of Tonelli's life was varied. In the forenoon
he went to mass at St. Mark's, to see the beauty and fashion of the
city; and then he took a walk with his four or five young friends, or
went with them to play at bowls, or even made an excursion to the main
land, where they hired a carriage, and all those Venetians got into it,
like so many seamen, and drove the horse with as little mercy as if he
had been a sail-boat. At seven o'clock Tonelli dined with the notary,
next whom he sat at table, and for whom his quaint pleasantries had a
zest that inspired the Paronsina and her mother to shout them into his
dull ears, that he might lose none of them. He laughed a kind of faded
laugh at them, and, rubbing his pale hands together, showed by his act
that he did not think his best wine too good for his kindly guest. The
signora feigned to take the same delight shown by her father and
daughter in Tonelli's drolleries; but I doubt if she had a great sense
of his humor, or, indeed, cared anything for it save as she perceived
that it gave pleasure to those she loved. Otherwise, however, she had a
sincere regard for him, for he was most useful and devoted to her in her
quality of widowed mother; and if she could not feel wit, she could feel
gratitude, which is perhaps the rarer gift, if not the more respectable.
The Little Mistress was dependent upon him for nearly all the pleasures
and for the only excitements of her life. As a young girl she was at
best a sort of caged bird, who had to be guarded against the youth of
the other sex as if they, on their part, were so many marauding and
ravening cats. During most days of the year the Paronsina's parrot had
almost as much freedom as she. He could leave his gilded prison when he
chose, and promenade the notary's house as far down as the marble well
in the sunless court, and the Paronsina could do little more. The
signora would as soon have thought of letting the parrot walk across
their campo alone as her daughter, though the local dangers, either to
bird or beauty, could not have been very great. The green-grocer of
that sequestered campo was an old woman, the apothecary was gray, and
his shop was haunted by none but superannuated physicians; the baker,
the butcher, the waiters at the caffè were all professionally, and, as
purveyors to her family, out of the question; the sacristan, who
sometimes appeared at the perruquier's to get a coal from under the
curling-tongs to kindle his censer, had but one eye, which he kept
single to the service of the Church, and his perquisite of
candle-drippings; and I hazard little in saying that the Paronsina might
have danced a polka around Campo San Giuseppe without jeopardy so far as
concerned the handsome wood-carver, for his wife always sat in the shop
beside him. Nevertheless, a custom is not idly handed down by mother to
daughter from the dawn of Christianity to the middle of the nineteenth
century; and I cannot deny that the local perruquier, though stricken in
years, was still so far kept fresh by the immortal youth of the wax
heads in his window as to have something beauish about him; or that,
just at the moment the Paronsina chanced to go into the campo alone, a
_leone_ from Florian's might not have been passing through it, when he
would certainly have looked boldly at her, perhaps spoken to her, and
possibly pounced at once upon her fluttering heart. So by day the
Paronsina rarely went out, and she never emerged unattended from the
silence and shadow of her grandfather's house.
If I were here telling a story of the Paronsina, or indeed any story at
all, I might suffer myself to enlarge somewhat upon the daily order of
her secluded life, and show how the seclusion of other Venetian girls
was the widest liberty as compared with hers; but I have no right to
play with the reader's patience in a performance that can promise no
excitement of incident, no charm of invention. Let him figure to
himself, if he will, the ancient and half-ruined palace in which the
notary dwelt, with a gallery running along one side of its inner court,
the slender pillars supporting upon the corroded sculpture of their
capitals a clinging vine, that dappled the floor with palpitant light
and shadow in the afternoon sun. The gate, whose exquisite Saracenic
arch grew into a carven flame, was surmounted by the armorial bearings
of a family that died of its sins against the Serenest Republic long
ago; the marble cistern which stood in the middle of the court had still
a ducal rose upon either of its four sides; and little lions of stone
perched upon the posts at the head of the marble stairway climbing to
the gallery, their fierce aspects worn smooth and amiable by the contact
of hands that for many ages had mouldered in tombs. Toward the canal
the palace windows had been immemorially bricked up for some reason or
caprice, and no morning sunlight, save such as shone from the bright
eyes of the Paronsina, ever looked into the dim halls. It was a fit
abode for such a man as the notary, exiled in the heart of his native
city, and it was not unfriendly in its influences to a quiet vegetation
like the signora's; but to the Paronsina it was sad as Venice itself,
where, in some moods, I have wondered that any sort of youth could have
the courage to exist. Nevertheless, the Paronsina had contrived to grow
up here a child of the gayest and archest spirit, and to lead a life of
due content, till after her return home from the comparative freedom and
society of Madame Prateux's school, where she spent three years in
learning all polite accomplishments, and whence she came, with brilliant
hopes and romances ready imagined, for any possible exigency of the
future. She adored all the modern Italian poets, and read their verse
with that stately and rhythmical fulness of voice which often made it
sublime and always pleasing. She was a relentless patriot, an
Italianissima of the vividest green, white, and red; and she could
interpret the historical novels of her countrymen in their subtilest
application to the modern enemies of Italy. But all the Paronsina's
gifts and accomplishments were to poor purpose, if they brought no young
men a-wooing under her balcony; and it was to no effect that her fervid
fancy peopled the palace's empty halls with stately and gallant company
out of Marco Visconti, Nicolò de' Lapi, Margherita Pusterla, and the
other romances, since she could not hope to receive any practicable
offer of marriage from the heroes thus assembled. Her grandfather
invited no guests of more substantial presence to his house. In fact,
the police watched him too narrowly to permit him to receive society,
even had he been so minded, and for kindred reasons his family paid few
visits in the city. To leave Venice, except for the autumnal
_villeggiatura_ was almost out of the question; repeated applications at
the Luogotenenza won the two ladies but a tardy and scanty grace; and
the use of the passport allowing them to spend a few weeks in Florence
was attended with so much vexation, in coming and going upon the
imperial confines, and when they returned home they were subject to so
great fear of perquisition from the police, that it was after all rather
a mortification than a pleasure that the government had given them. The
signora received her few acquaintances once a week; but the Paronsina
found the old ladies tedious over their cups of coffee or tumblers of
lemonade, and declared that her mamma's reception days were a
martyrdom,--actually a martyrdom, to her. She was full of life and the
beautiful and tender longing of youth; she had a warm heart and a
sprightly wit; but she led an existence scarce livelier than a ghost's,
and she was so poor in friends and resources that she shuddered to think
what must become of her if Tonelli should die. It was not possible,
thanks to God! that he should marry.
The signora herself seldom cared to go out, for the reason that it was
too cold in winter and too hot in summer. In the one season she clung
all day to her wadded arm-chair, with her _scaldino_ in her lap; and in
the other season she found it a sufficient diversion to sit in the great
hall of the palace, and be fanned by the salt breeze that came from the
Adriatic through the vine-garlanded gallery. But besides this habitual
inclemency of the weather, which forbade out-door exercise nearly the
whole year, it was a displeasure to walk in Venice on account of the
stairways of the bridges; and the signora much preferred to wait till
they went to the country in the autumn, when she always rode to take the
air. The exceptions to her custom were formed by those after-dinner
promenades which she sometimes made on holidays, in summer. Then she put
on her richest black, and the Paronsina dressed herself in her best, and
they both went to walk on the Molo, before the pillars of the lion and
the saint, under the escort of Tonelli.
It often happened that, at the hour of their arrival on the Molo, the
moon was coming up over the low bank of the Lido in the east, and all
that prospect of ship-bordered quay, island, and lagoon, which, at its
worst, is everything that heart can wish, was then at its best, and far
beyond words to paint. On the right stretched the long Giudecca, with
the domes and towers of its Palladian church, and the swelling foliage
of its gardens, and its line of warehouses--painted pink, as if even
Business, grateful to be tolerated amid such lovely scenes, had striven
to adorn herself. In front lay San Giorgio, picturesque with its church
and pathetic with its political prisons; and, farther away to the east
again, the gloomy mass of the madhouse at San Servolo, and then the
slender campanili of the Armenian convent rose over the gleaming and
tremulous water. Tonelli took in the beauty of the scene with no more
consciousness than a bird; but the Paronsina had learnt from her
romantic poets and novelists to be complimentary to prospects, and her
heart gurgled out in rapturous praises of this. The unwonted freedom
exhilarated her; there was intoxication in the encounter of faces on the
promenade, in the dazzle and glimmer of the lights, and even in the
music of the Austrian band playing in the Piazza, as it came purified to
her patriotic ear by the distance. There were none but Italians upon the
Molo, and one might walk there without so much as touching an officer
with the hem of one's garment; and, a little later, when the band ceased
playing, she should go with the other Italians and possess the Piazza
for one blessed hour. In the mean time, the Paronsina had a sharp little
tongue; and, after she had flattered the landscape, and had, from her
true heart, once for all, saluted the promenaders as brothers and
sisters in Italy, she did not mind making fun of their peculiarities of
dress and person. She was signally sarcastic upon such ladies as Tonelli
chanced to admire, and often so stung him with her jests that he was
glad when Pennellini appeared, as he always did exactly at nine o'clock,
and joined the ladies in their promenade, asking and answering all those
questions of ceremony which form Venetian greeting. He was a youth of
the most methodical exactness in his whole life, and could no more have
arrived on the Molo a moment before or after nine than the bronze
giants on the clock-tower could have hastened or lingered in striking
the hour. Nature, which had made him thus punctual and precise, gave him
also good looks, and a most amiable kindness of heart. The Paronsina
cared nothing at all for him in his quality of handsome young fellow;
but she prized him as an acquaintance whom she might salute, and be
saluted by, in a city where her grandfather's isolation kept her strange
to nearly all the faces she saw. Sometimes her evenings on the Molo
wasted away without the exchange of a word save with Tonelli, for her
mother seldom talked; and then it was quite possible her teasing was
greater than his patience, and that he grew taciturn under her tongue.
At such times she hailed Pennellini's appearance with a double delight;
for, if he never joined in her attacks upon Tonelli's favorites, he
always enjoyed them, and politely applauded them. If his friend
reproached him for this treason, he made him every amend in answering,
"She is jealous, Tonelli,"--a wily compliment, which had the most
intense effect in coming from lips ordinarily so sincere as his.
The signora was weary of the promenade long before the Austrian music
ceased in the Piazza, and was very glad when it came time for them to
leave the Molo, and go and sit down to an ice at the Caffè Florian.
This was the supreme hour to the Paronsina, the one heavenly excess of
her restrained and eventless life. All about her were scattered tranquil
Italian idlers, listening to the music of the strolling minstrels who
had succeeded the military band; on either hand sat her friends, and she
had thus the image of that tender devotion without which a young girl is
said not to be perfectly happy; while the very heart of adventure seemed
to bound in her exchange of glances with a handsome foreigner at a
neighboring table. On the other side of the Piazza a few officers still
lingered at the Caffè Quadri; and at the Specchi sundry groups of
citizens in their dark dress contrasted well with these white uniforms;
but, for the most part, the moon and gas-jets shone upon the broad,
empty space of the Piazza, whose loneliness the presence of a few
belated promenaders only served to render conspicuous. As the giants
hammered eleven upon the great bell, the Austrian sentinel, under the
Ducal Palace, uttered a long, reverberating cry; and soon after a patrol
of soldiers clanked across the Piazza, and passed with echoing feet
through the arcade into the narrow and devious streets beyond. The young
girl found it hard to rend herself from the dreamy pleasure of the
scene, or even to turn from the fine impersonal pain which the presence
of the Austrians in the spectacle inflicted. All gave an impression
something like that of the theatre, with the advantage that here one's
self was part of the pantomime; and in those days, when nearly
everything but the puppet-shows was forbidden to patriots, it was
altogether the greatest enjoyment possible to the Paronsina. The pensive
charm of the place imbued all the little company so deeply that they
scarcely broke it, as they loitered slowly homeward through the deserted
Merceria. When they reached the Campo San Salvatore, on many a lovely
summer's midnight, their footsteps seemed to waken a nightingale whose
cage hung from a lofty balcony there; for suddenly, at their coming, the
bird broke into a wild and thrilling song, that touched them all, and
suffused the tender heart of the Paronsina with an inexpressible pathos.
Alas! she had so often returned thus from the Piazza, and no stealthy
footstep had followed hers homeward with love's persistence and
diffidence! She was young, she knew, and she thought not quite dull or
hideous; but her spirit was as sole in that melancholy city as if there
were no youth but hers in the world. And a little later than this, when
she had her first affair, it did not originate in the Piazza, nor at
all respond to her expectations in a love-affair. In fact, it was
altogether a business affair, and was managed chiefly by Tonelli, who
having met a young doctor, laurelled the year before at Padua, had heard
him express so pungent a curiosity to know what the Paronsina would have
to her dower, that he perceived he must be madly in love with her. So
with the consent of the signora he had arranged a correspondence between
the young people; and all went on well at first,--the letters from both
passing through his hands. But his office was anything but a sinecure,
for while the Doctor was on his part of a cold temperament, and disposed
to regard the affair merely as a proper way of providing for the natural
affections, the Paronsina cared nothing for him personally, and only
viewed him favorably as abstract matrimony,--as the means of escaping
from the bondage of her girlhood and the sad seclusion of her life into
the world outside her grandfather's house. So presently the
correspondence fell almost wholly upon Tonelli, who worked up to the
point of betrothal with an expense of finesse and sentiment that would
have made his fortune in diplomacy or poetry. What should he say now?
that stupid young Doctor would cry in a desperation, when Tonelli
delicately reminded him that it was time to answer the Paronsina's last
note. Say this, that, and the other, Tonelli would answer, giving him
the heads of a proper letter, which the Doctor took down on square bits
of paper, neatly fashioned for writing prescriptions. "And for God's
sake, caro dottore, put a little warmth into it!" The poor Doctor would
try, but it must always end in Tonelli's suggesting and almost dictating
every sentence; and then the letter, being carried to the Paronsina made
her laugh: "This is very pretty, my poor Tonelli, but it was never my
onoratissimo dottore who thought of these tender compliments. Ah! that
allusion to my mouth and eyes could only have come from the heart of a
great poet. It is yours, Tonelli, don't deny it." And Tonelli, taken in
his weak point of literature, could make but a feeble pretence of
disclaiming the child of his fancy, while the Paronsina, being in this
reckless humor, more than once responded to the Doctor in such fashion
that in the end the inspiration of her altered and amended letter was
Tonelli's. Even after the betrothal, the lovemaking languished, and the
Doctor was indecently patient of the late day fixed for the marriage by
the notary. In fact, the Doctor was very busy; and, as his practice
grew, the dower of the Paronsina dwindled in his fancy, till one day he
treated the whole question of their marriage with such coldness and
uncertainty in his talk with Tonelli, that the latter saw whither his
thoughts were drifting, and went home with an indignant heart to the
Paronsina, who joyfully sat down and wrote her first sincere letter to
the Doctor, dismissing him.
"It is finished," she said, "and I am glad. After all, perhaps, I don't
want to be any freer than I am; and while I have you, Tonelli, I don't
want a younger lover. Younger? Diana! You are in the flower of youth,
and I believe you will never wither. Did that rogue of a Doctor, then,
really give you the elixir of youth for writing him those letters? Tell
me, Tonelli, as a true friend, how long have you been forty-seven? Ever
since your fiftieth birthday? Listen! I have been more afraid of losing
you than my sweetest Doctor. I thought you would be so much in love with
lovemaking that you would go break-neck and court some one in earnest on
your own account!"
Thus the Paronsina made a jest of the loss she had sustained; but it was
not pleasant to her, except as it dissolved a tie which love had done
nothing to form. Her life seemed colder and vaguer after it, and the
hour very far away when the handsome officers of her king (all good
Venetians in those days called Victor Emanuel "our king") should come to
drive out the Austrians, and marry their victims. She scarcely enjoyed
the prodigious privilege, offered her at this time in consideration of
her bereavement, of going to the comedy, under Tonelli's protection and
along with Pennellini and his sister, while the poor signora afterwards
had real qualms of patriotism concerning the breach of public duty
involved in this distraction of her daughter. She hoped that no one had
recognized her at the theatre, otherwise they might have a warning from
the Venetian Committee. "Thou knowest," she said to the Paronsina, "that
they have even admonished the old Conte Tradonico, who loves the comedy
better than his soul, and who used to go every evening. Thy aunt told
me, and that the old rogue, when people ask him why he doesn't go to the
play, answers, 'My mistress won't let me.' But fie! I am saying what
young girls ought not to hear."
After the affair with the Doctor, I say, life refused to return exactly
to its old expression, and I suppose that, if what presently happened
was ever to happen, it could not have occurred at a more appropriate
time for a disaster, or at a time when its victims were less able to
bear it I do not know whether I have yet sufficiently indicated the
fact, but the truth is both the Paronsina and her mother had from long
use come to regard Tonelli as a kind of property of theirs, which had
no right in any way to alienate itself. They would have felt an attempt
of this sort to be not only very absurd, but very wicked, in view of
their affection for him and dependence upon him; and while the Paronsina
thanked God that he would never marry, she had a deep conviction that he
ought not to marry, even if he desired. It was at the same time
perfectly natural, nay, filial, that she should herself be ready to
desert this old friend, whom she felt so strictly bound to be faithful
to her loneliness. As matters fell out, she had herself primarily to
blame for Tonelli's loss; for, in that interval of disgust and ennui
following the Doctor's dismissal, she had suffered him to seek his own
pleasure on holiday evenings; and he had thus wandered alone to the
Piazza, and so, one night, had seen a lady eating an ice there, and
fallen in love without more ado than another man should drink a
lemonade.
This facility came of habit, for Tonelli had now been falling in love
every other day for some forty years; and in that time had broken the
hearts of innumerable women of all nations and classes. The prettiest
water-carriers in his neighborhood were in love with him, as their
mothers had been before them, and ladies of noble condition were
believed to cherish passions for him. Especially, gay and beautiful
foreigners, as they sat at Florian's, were taken with hopeless love of
him; and he could tell stories of very romantic adventure in which he
figured as hero, though nearly always with moral effect. For example,
there was the countess from the mainland,--she merited the sad
distinction of being chief among those who had vainly loved him, if you
could believe the poet who both inspired and sang her passion. When she
took a palace in Venice, he had been summoned to her on the pretended
business of a secretary; but when she presented herself with those idle
accounts of her factor and tenants on the mainland, her household
expenses and her correspondence with her advocate, Tonelli perceived at
once that it was upon a wholly different affair that she had desired to
see him. She was a rich widow of forty, of a beauty supernaturally
preserved and very great. "This is no place for thee, Tonelli mine," the
secretary had said to himself, after a week had passed, and he had
understood all the waywardness of that unhappy lady's intentions. "Thou
art not too old, but thou art too wise, for these follies, though no
saint"; and so had gathered up his personal effects, and secretly
quitted the palace. But such was the countess's fury at his escape that
she never paid him his week's salary; nor did she manifest the least
gratitude that Tonelli, out of regard for her son, a very honest young
man, refused in any way to identify her, but, to all except his closest
friends, pretended that he had passed those terrible eight days on a
visit to the country village where he was born. It showed Pennellini's
ignorance of life that he should laugh at this history; and I prefer to
treat it seriously, and to use it in explaining the precipitation with
which Tonelli's latest inamorata returned his love.
Though, indeed, why should a lady of thirty, and from an obscure country
town, hesitate to be enamored of any eligible suitor who presented
himself in Venice? It is not my duty to enter upon a detail or summary
of Carlotta's character or condition, or to do more than indicate that,
while she did not greatly excel in youth, good looks, or worldly gear,
she had yet a little property, and was of that soft prettiness which is
often more effective than downright beauty. There was, indeed, something
very charming about her; and, if she was a blonde, I have no reason to
think she was as fickle as the Venetian proverb paints that complexion
of woman; or that she had not every quality which would have excused any
one but Tonelli for thinking of marrying her.
After their first mute interview in the Piazza, the two lost no time in
making each other's acquaintance; but though the affair was vigorously
conducted, no one could say that it was not perfectly in order. Tonelli
on the following day, which chanced to be Sunday, repaired to St. Mark's
at the hour of the fashionable mass, where he gazed steadfastly at the
lady during her orisons, and whence, at a discreet distance, he followed
her home to the house of the friends whom she was visiting. Somewhat to
his discomfiture at first, these proved to be old acquaintances of his;
and when he came at night to walk up and down under their balconies, as
bound in true love to do, they made nothing of asking him indoors, and
presenting him to his lady. But the pair were not to be entirely balked
of their romance, and they still arranged stolen interviews at church,
where one furtively whispered word had the value of whole hours of
unrestricted converse under the roof of their friends. They quite
refused to take advantage of their anomalously easy relations, beyond
inquiry on his part as to the amount of the lady's dower, and on hers as
to the permanence of Tonelli's employment. He in due form had Pennellini
to his confidant, and Carlotta unbosomed herself to her hostess; and the
affair was thus conducted with such secrecy that not more than two
thirds of Tonelli's acquaintance knew anything about it when their
engagement was announced.
There were now no circumstances to prevent their early union, yet the
happy conclusion was one to which Tonelli urged himself after many
secret and bitter displeasures of spirit. I am persuaded that his love
for Carlotta must have been most ardent and sincere, for there was
everything in his history and reason against marriage. He could not
disown that he had hitherto led a joyous and careless life, or that he
was exactly fitted for the modest delights, the discreet variety, of his
present state,--for his daily routine at the notary's, his dinner at the
Bronze Horses or the cook-shop, his hour at the caffè, his walks and
excursions, for his holiday banquet with the Cenarotti, and his formal
promenade with the ladies of that family upon the Molo. He had a good
employment, with a salary that held him above want, and afforded him the
small luxuries already named; and he had fixed habits of work and of
relaxation, which made both a blessing. He had his chosen circle of
intimate equals, who regarded him for his good-heartedness and wit and
foibles; and his little following of humble admirers, who looked upon
him as a gifted man in disgrace with fortune. His friendships were as
old as they were secure and cordial; he was established in the
kindliness of all who knew him; and he was flattered by the dependence
of the Paronsina and her mother, even when it was troublesome to him.
He had his past of sentiment and war, his present of story-telling and
romance. He was quite independent: his sins, if he had any, began and
ended in himself, for none was united to him so closely as to be hurt by
them; and he was far too imprudent a man to be taken for an example by
any one. He came and went as he listed, he did this or that without
question. With no heart chosen yet from the world of woman's love, he
was still a young man, with hopes and affections as pliable as a boy's.
He had, in a word, that reputation of good-fellow which in Venice gives
a man the title of _buon diavolo_, but on which he does not anywhere
turn his back with impunity, either from his own consciousness or from
public opinion. There never was such a thing in the world as both good
devil and good husband; and even with his betrothal Tonelli felt that
his old, careless, merry life of the hour ended, and that he had tacitly
recognized a future while he was yet unable to cut the past. If one has
for twenty years made a jest of women, however amiably and insincerely,
one does not propose to marry a woman without making a jest of one's
self. The avenging remembrance of elderly people whose late matrimony
had furnished food for Tonelli's wit now rose up to torment him, and in
his morbid fancy the merriment he had caused was echoed back in his own
derision.
It shocked him to find how quickly his secret took wing, and it annoyed
him that all his acquaintances were so prompt to felicitate him. He
imagined a latent mockery in their speeches, and he took them with an
argumentative solemnity. He reasoned separately with his friends; to all
who spoke to him of his marriage he presented elaborate proofs that it
was the wisest thing he could possibly do, and tried to give the affair
a cold air of prudence. "You see, I am getting old; that is to say, I am
tired of this bachelor life in which I have no one to take care of me,
if I fall sick, and to watch that the doctors do not put me to death. My
pay is very little, but, with Carlotta's dower well invested, we shall
both together live better than either of us lives alone. She is a
careful woman, and will keep me neat and comfortable. She is not so
young as some women I had thought to marry,--no, but so much the better;
nobody will think her half so charming as I do, and at my time of life
that is a great point gained. She is good, and has an admirable
disposition. She is not spoiled by Venice, but as innocent as a dove. O,
I shall find myself very well with her!"
This was the speech which with slight modification Tonelli made over
and over again to all his friends but Pennellini. To him he unmasked,
and said boldly that at last he was really in love; and being gently
discouraged in what seemed his folly, and incredulously laughed at, he
grew angry, and gave such proofs of his sincerity that Pennellini was
convinced, and owned to himself, "This madman is actually
enamored,--enamored,--like a cat! Patience! What will ever those
Cenarotti say?"
In a little while poor Tonelli lost the philosophic mind with which he
had at first received the congratulations of his friends, and, from
reasoning with them, fell to resenting their good wishes. Very little
things irritated him, and pleasantries which he had taken in excellent
part, time out of mind, now raised his anger. His barber had for many
years been in the habit of saying, as he applied the stick of fixature
to Tonelli's mustache, and gave it a jaunty upward curl, "Now we will
bestow that little dash of youthfulness"; and it both amazed and hurt
him to have Tonelli respond with a fierce "Tsit!" and say that this jest
was proper in its antiquity to the times of Romulus rather than our own
period, and so go out of the shop without that "Adieu, old fellow,"
which he had never failed to give in twenty years. "Capperi!" said the
barber, when he emerged from a profound revery into which this outbreak
had plunged him, and in which he had remained holding the nose of his
next customer, and tweaking it to and fro in the violence of his
emotions, regardless of those mumbled maledictions which the lather
would not permit the victim to articulate. "If Tonelli is so savage in
his betrothal, we must wait for his marriage to tame him. I am sorry. He
was always such a good devil."
But if many things annoyed Tonelli, there were some that deeply wounded
him, and chiefly the fact that his betrothal seemed to have fixed an
impassable gulf of years between him and all those young men whose
company he loved so well. He had really a boy's heart, and he had
consorted with them because he felt himself nearer their age than his
own. Hitherto they had in no wise found his presence a restraint. They
had always laughed, and told their loves, and spoken their young men's
thoughts, and made their young men's jokes, without fear or shame,
before the merry-hearted sage, who never offered good advice, if indeed
he ever dreamed that there was a wiser philosophy than theirs. It had
been as if he were the youngest among them; but now, in spite of all
that he or they could do, he seemed suddenly and irretrievably aged.
They looked at him strangely, as if for the first time they saw that
his mustache was gray, that his brow was not smooth like theirs, that
there were crow's-feet at the corners of his kindly eyes. They could not
phrase the vague feeling that haunted their hearts, or they would have
said that Tonelli, in offering to marry, had voluntarily turned his back
upon his youth; that love, which would only have brought a richer bloom
to their age, had breathed away forever the autumnal blossom of his.
Something of this made itself felt in Tonelli's own consciousness,
whenever he met them, and he soon grew to avoid these comrades of his
youth. It was therefore after a purely accidental encounter with one of
them, and as he was passing into the Campo Sant' Angelo, head down, and
supporting himself with an inexplicable sense of infirmity upon the cane
he was wont so jauntily to flourish, that he heard himself addressed
with, "I say, master!" He looked up, and beheld the fat madman who
patrols that campo, and who has the license of his affliction to utter
insolences to whomsoever he will, leaning against the door of a
tobacconist's shop, with his arms folded, and a lazy, mischievous smile
loitering down on his greasy face. As he caught Tonelli's eye he nodded,
"Eh! I have heard, master"; while the idlers of that neighborhood, who
relished and repeated his incoherent pleasantries like the _mots_ of
some great diner-out, gathered near with expectant grins. Had Tonelli
been altogether himself, as in other days, he would have been far too
wise to answer, "What hast thou heard, poor animal?"
"That you are going to take a mate when most birds think of flying
away," said the madman. "Because it has been summer a long time with
you, master, you think it will never be winter. Look out: the wolf
doesn't eat the season."
The poor fool in these words seemed to utter a public voice of
disapprobation and derision; and as the pitiless bystanders, who had
many a time laughed with Tonelli, now laughed at him, joining in the
applause which the madman himself led off, the miserable good devil
walked away with a shiver, as if the weather had actually turned cold.
It was not till he found himself in Carlotta's presence that the long
summer appeared to return to him. Indeed, in her tenderness and his real
love for her he won back all his youth again; and he found it of a truer
and sweeter quality than he had known even when his years were few,
while the gay old-bachelor life he had long led seemed to him a period
of miserable loneliness and decrepitude. Mirrored in her fond eyes, he
saw himself alert and handsome; and, since for the time being they were
to each other all the world, we may be sure there was nothing in the
world then to vex or shame Tonelli. The promises of the future, too,
seemed not improbable of fulfilment, for they were not extravagant
promises. These people's castle in the air was a house furnished from
Carlotta's modest portion, and situated in a quarter of the city not too
far from the Piazza, and convenient to a decent caffè, from which they
could order a lemonade or a cup of coffee for visitors. Tonelli's
stipend was to pay the housekeeping, as well as the minute wage of a
servant-girl from the country; and it was believed that they could save
enough from that, and a little of Carlotta's money at interest, to go
sometimes to the Malibran theatre or the Marionette, or even make an
excursion to the mainland upon a holiday; but if they could not, it was
certainly better Italianism to stay at home; and at least they could
always walk to the Public Gardens. At one time, religious differences
threatened to cloud this blissful vision of the future; but it was
finally agreed that Carlotta should go to mass and confession as often
as she liked, and should not tease Tonelli about his soul; while he, on
his part, was not to speak ill of the pope except as a temporal prince,
or of any of the priesthood except of the Jesuits when in company, in
order to show that marriage had not made him a _codino_. For the like
reason, no change was to be made in his custom of praising Garibaldi and
reviling the accursed Germans upon all safe occasions.
As Tonelli had nothing in the world but his salary and his slender
wardrobe, Carlotta eagerly accepted the idea of a loss of family
property during the revolution. Of Tonelli's scar she was as proud as
Tonelli himself.
When she came to speak of the acquaintance of all those young men, it
seemed again like a breath from the north to her betrothed; and he
answered, with a sigh, that this was an affair that had already finished
itself. "I have long thought them too boyish for me," he said, "and I
shall keep none of them but Pennellini, who is even older than I,--who,
I believe, was never born, but created middle-aged out of the dust of
the earth, like Adam. He is not a good devil, but he has every good
quality."
While he thus praised his friend, Tonelli was meditating a service,
which when he asked it of Pennellini, had almost the effect to destroy
their ancient amity. This was no less than the composition of those
wedding-verses, without which, printed and exposed to view in all the
shop-windows, no one in Venice feels himself adequately and truly
married. Pennellini had never willingly made a verse in his life; and
it was long before he understood Tonelli, when he urged the delicate
request. Then in vain he protested, recalcitrated. It was all an offence
to Tonelli's morbid soul, already irritated by his friend's obtuseness,
and eager to turn even the reluctance of nature into insult. He took his
refusal for a sign that he, too, deserted him; and must be called back,
after bidding Pennellini adieu, to hear the only condition on which the
accursed sonnet would be furnished, namely, that it should not be signed
Pennellini, but An Affectionate Friend. Never was sonnet cost poet so
great anguish as this: Pennellini went at it conscientiously as if it
were a problem in mathematics; he refreshed his prosody, he turned over
Carrer, he toiled a whole night, and in due time appeared as Tonelli's
affectionate friend in all the butchers' and bakers' windows. But it had
been too much to ask of him, and for a while he felt the shock of
Tonelli's unreason and excess so much that there was a decided coolness
between them.
This important particular arranged, little remained for Tonelli to do
but to come to that open understanding with the Paronsina and her mother
which he had long dreaded and avoided. He could not conceal from himself
that his marriage was a kind of desertion of the two dear friends so
dependent upon his singleness, and he considered the case of the
Paronsina with a real remorse. If his meditated act sometimes appeared
to him a gross inconsistency and a satire upon all his former life, he
had still consoled himself with the truth of his passion, and had found
love its own apology and comfort; but in its relation to these lonely
women, his love itself had no fairer aspect than that of treason, and he
shrank from owning it before them with a sense of guilt. Some wild
dreams of reconciling his future with his past occasionally haunted him;
but in his saner moments, he perceived their folly. Carlotta, he knew,
was good and patient, but she was nevertheless a woman, and she would
never consent that he should be to the Cenarotti all that he had been;
these ladies also were very kind and reasonable, but they too were
women, and incapable of accepting a less perfect devotion. Indeed, was
not his proposed marriage too much like taking her only son from the
signora and giving the Paronsina a stepmother? It was worse, and so the
ladies of the notary's family viewed it, cherishing a resentment that
grew with Tonelli's delay to deal frankly with them; while Carlotta, on
her part, was wounded that these old friends should ignore his future
wife so utterly. On both sides evil was stored up.
When Tonelli would still make a show of fidelity to the Paronsina and
her mother, they accepted his awkward advances, the latter with a cold
visage, the former with a sarcastic face and tongue. He had managed
particularly ill with the Paronsina, who, having no romance of her own,
would possibly have come to enjoy the autumnal poetry of his love if he
had permitted. But when she first approached him on the subject of those
rumors she had heard, and treated them with a natural derision, as
involving the most absurd and preposterous ideas, he, instead of
suffering her jests, and then turning her interest to his favor,
resented them, and closed his heart and its secret against her. What
could she do, thereafter, but feign to avoid the subject, and adroitly
touch it with constant, invisible stings? Alas! it did not need that she
should ever speak to Tonelli with the wicked intent she did; at this
time he would have taken ill whatever most innocent thing she said. When
friends are to be estranged, they do not require a cause. They have but
to doubt one another, and no forced forbearance or kindness between them
can do aught but confirm their alienation. This is on the whole
fortunate, for in this manner neither feels to blame for the broken
friendship, and each can declare with perfect truth that he did all he
could to maintain it. Tonelli said to himself, "If the Paronsina had
treated the affair properly at first!" and the Paronsina thought, "If he
had told me frankly about it to begin with!" Both had a latent heartache
over their trouble, and both a sense of loss the more bitter because it
was of loss still unacknowledged.
As the day fixed for Tonelli's wedding drew near, the rumor of it came
to the Cenarotti from all their acquaintance. But when people spoke to
them of it, as of something they must be fully and particularly informed
of, the signora answered coldly, "It seems that we have not merited
Tonelli's confidence"; and the Paronsina received the gossip with an air
of clearly affected surprise, and a "_Davvero!_" that at least
discomfited the tale-bearers.
The consciousness of the unworthy part he was acting toward these ladies
had come at last to poison the pleasure of Tonelli's wooing, even in
Carlotta's presence; yet I suppose he would still have let his
wedding-day come and go, and been married beyond hope of atonement, so
loath was he to inflict upon himself and them the pain of an
explanation, if one day, within a week of that time, the notary had not
bade his clerk dine with him on the morrow. It was a holiday, and as
Carlotta was at home, making ready for the marriage, Tonelli consented
to take his place at the table from which he had been a long time
absent. But it turned out such a frigid and melancholy banquet as never
was known before. The old notary, to whom all things came dimly, finally
missed the accustomed warmth of Tonelli's fun, and said, with a little
shiver, "Why, what ails you, Tonelli? You are as moody as a man in
love."
The notary had been told several times of Tonelli's affair, but it was
his characteristic not to remember any gossip later than that of
'Forty-eight.
The Paronsina burst into a laugh full of the cruelty and insult of a
woman's long-smothered sense of injury. "Caro nonno," she screamed into
her grandfather's dull ear, "he is really in despair how to support his
happiness. He is shy, even of his old friends,--he has had so little
experience. It is the first love of a young man. Bisogna compatire la
gioventù, caro nonno." And her tongue being finally loosed, the
Paronsina broke into incoherent mockeries, that hurt more from their
purpose than their point, and gave no one greater pain than herself.
Tonelli sat sad and perfectly mute under the infliction, but he said in
his heart, "I have merited worse."
At first the signora remained quite aghast; but when she collected
herself, she called out peremptorily, "Madamigella, you push the affair
a little beyond. Cease!"
The Paronsina, having said all she desired, ceased, panting.
The old notary, for whose slow sense all but her first words had been
too quick, though all had been spoken at him, said dryly, turning to
Tonelli, "I imagine that my deafness is not always a misfortune."
It was by an inexplicable, but hardly less inevitable, violence to the
inclinations of each that, after this miserable dinner, the signora, the
Paronsina, and Tonelli should go forth together for their wonted
promenade on the Molo. Use, which is the second, is also very often the
stronger nature, and so these parted friends made a last show of union
and harmony. In nothing had their amity been more fatally broken than in
this careful homage to its forms; and now, as they walked up and down in
the moonlight, they were of the saddest kind of apparitions,--not mere
disembodied spirits, which, however, are bad enough, but disanimated
bodies, which are far worse, and of which people are not more afraid
only because they go about in society so commonly. As on many and many
another night of summers past, the moon came up and stood over the Lido,
striking far across the glittering lagoon, and everywhere winning the
flattered eye to the dark masses of shadow upon the water; to the trees
of the Gardens, to the trees and towers and domes of the cloistered and
templed isles. Scene of pensive and incomparable loveliness! giving even
to the stranger, in some faint and most unequal fashion, a sense of the
awful meaning of exile to the Venetian, who in all other lands in the
world is doubly an alien, from their unutterable unlikeness to his sole
and beautiful city. The prospect had that pathetic unreality to the
friends which natural things always assume to people playing a part, and
I imagine that they saw it not more substantial than it appears to the
exile in his dreams. In their promenade they met again and again the
unknown, wonted faces; they even encountered some acquaintances, whom
they greeted, and with whom they chatted for a while; and when at nine
the bronze giants beat the hour upon their bell,--with as remote effect
as if they were giants of the times before the flood,--they were aware
of Pennellini, promptly appearing like an exact and methodical spectre.
But to-night the Paronsina, who had made the scene no compliments, did
not insist as usual upon the ice at Florian's; and Pennellini took his
formal leave of the friends under the arch of the Clock Tower, and they
walked silently homeward through the echoing Merceria.
At the notary's gate Tonelli would have said good-night, but the signora
made him enter with them, and then abruptly left him standing with the
Paronsina in the gallery, while she was heard hurrying away to her own
apartment. She reappeared, extending toward Tonelli both hands, upon
which glittered and glittered manifold skeins of the delicate chain of
Venice.
She had a very stately and impressive bearing, as she stood there in the
moonlight, and addressed him with a collected voice. "Tonelli," she
said, "I think you have treated your oldest and best friends very
cruelly. Was it not enough that you should take yourself from us, but
you must also forbid our hearts to follow you even in sympathy and good
wishes? I had almost thought to say adieu forever to-night; but," she
continued, with a breaking utterance, and passing tenderly to the
familiar form of address, "I cannot part so with thee. Thou hast been
too like a son to me, too like a brother to my poor Clarice. Maybe thou
no longer lovest us, yet I think thou wilt not disdain this gift for thy
wife. Take it, Tonelli, if not for our sake, perhaps then for the sake
of sorrows that in times past we have shared together in this unhappy
Venice."
Here the signora ended perforce the speech, which had been long for
her, and the Paronsina burst into a passion of weeping,--not more at her
mamma's words than out of self-pity and from the national sensibility.
Tonelli took the chain, and reverently kissed it and the hands that gave
it. He had a helpless sense of the injustice the signora's words and the
Paronsina's tears did him; he knew that they put him with feminine
excess further in the wrong than even his own weakness had; but he tried
to express nothing of this,--it was but part of the miserable maze in
which his life was involved. With what courage he might he owned his
error, but protested his faithful friendship, and poured out all his
troubles,--his love for Carlotta, his regret for them, his shame and
remorse for himself. They forgave him, and there was everything in their
words and will to restore their old friendship, and keep it; and when
the gate with a loud clang closed upon Tonelli, going from them, they
all felt that it had irrevocably perished.
I do not say that there was not always a decent and affectionate bearing
on the part of the Paronsina and her mother towards Tonelli and his
wife; I acknowledge that it was but too careful and faultless a
tenderness, ever conscious of its own fragility. Far more natural was
the satisfaction they took in the delayed fruitfulness of Tonelli's
marriage, and then in the fact that his child was a girl, and not a boy.
It was but human that they should doubt his happiness, and that the
signora should always say, when hard pressed with questions upon the
matter: "Yes, Tonelli is married; but if it were to do again, I think he
would do it to-morrow rather than to-day."