Urania wrote most charmingly. She said that they were having a very
quiet time with the old prince at San Stefano, as they were not
inviting visitors because the castle was too gloomy, too shabby, too
lonely, but that she would think it most delightful if Cornélie would
come and spend a few weeks with them. She added that she would send
Mr. van der Staal an invitation as well. The letter was addressed
to the Via dei Serpenti and forwarded to Cornélie from there. She
understood from this that Gilio had not mentioned that she was living
in Duco's studio and she understood also that Urania accepted their
liaison without criticizing it....
The Banners had been dispatched to London; and, now that Duco was
no longer working, a slight indolence and a vague boredom hung about
the studio, which was still cool, while the town was scorching. And
Cornélie wrote to Urania that she was very glad to accept and promised
to come in a week's time. She was pleased that she would meet no
other guests at the castle, for she had no dresses for a country-house
visit. But with her usual tact she freshened up her wardrobe, without
spending much money. This took up all the intervening days; and she
sat sewing while Duco lay on the sofa and smoked cigarettes. He also
had accepted, because of Cornélie and because the district around the
Lake of San Stefano, which was overlooked by the castle, attracted
him. He promised Cornélie with a smile not to be so stiff. He would
do his best to make himself agreeable. He looked down rather haughtily
on the prince. He considered him a scallywag, but no longer a bounder
or a cad. He thought him childish, but not base or ignoble.
Cornélie went off. He took her to the station. In the cab she kissed
him fondly and told him how much she would miss him during those few
days. Would he come soon? In a week? She would be longing for him:
she could not do without him. She looked deep into his eyes, which
she loved. He also said that he would be terribly bored without
her. Couldn't he come earlier, she asked. No, Urania had fixed
the date.
When he helped her into a second-class compartment, she felt sad to
be going without him. The carriage was full; she occupied the last
vacant seat. She sat between a fat peasant and an old peasant-woman;
the man civilly helped her to put her little portmanteau in the rack
and asked whether she minded if he smoked his pipe. She civilly
answered no. Opposite them sat two priests in frayed cassocks. An
unimportant-looking little brown wooden box was lying between their
feet: it was the supreme unction, which they were taking to a dying
person.
The peasant entered into conversation with Cornélie, asked if she was
a foreigner: English, no doubt? The old peasant-woman offered her a
tangerine orange.
The remainder of the compartment was occupied by a middle-class family:
father, mother, a small boy and two little sisters. The slow train
shook, rattled and wound its way along, stopping constantly. The
little girls kept on humming tunes. At one station a lady stepped
out of a first-class carriage with a little girl of five, in a white
frock and a hat with white ostrich-feathers.
"Oh, che bellezza!" cried the small boy. "Mamma, mamma, look! Isn't
she beautiful? Isn't she lovely? Divinamente! Oh ... mamma!"
He closed his black eyes, lovelorn, dazzled by the little white
girl of five. The parents laughed, the priests laughed, everybody
laughed. But the boy was not at all confused:
"Era una bellezza!" he repeated once more, casting a glance of
conviction all around him.
It was very hot in the train. Outside, the mountains gleamed white on
the horizon and glittered like a fire with opal reflections. Close to
the railway stood a row of eucalyptus-trees, sickle-leaved, brewing a
heavy perfume. On the dry, sun-scorched plain, the wild cattle grazed,
lifting their black curly heads with indifference to the train. In the
stifling, stewing heat, the passengers' drowsy heads nodded up and
down, while a smell of sweat, tobacco-smoke and orange-peel mingled
with the scent of the eucalyptuses outside. The train swung round a
curve, rattling like a toy-train of tin coaches almost tumbling over
one another. And a level stretch of unruffled lazulite--metallic,
crystalline, sky-blue--came into view, spreading into an oval goblet
between slopes of mountain-land, like a very deep-set vase in which a
sacred fluid was kept very blue and pure and motionless by a wall of
rocky hills, which rose higher and higher until, as the train swung
and rattled round the clear goblet, at one lofty point a castle
stood, coloured like the rocks, broad, massive and monastic, with
the cloisters running down the slope. It rose in noble and sombre
melancholy; and from the train one could hardly distinguish what was
rock and what was building-stone, as though it were all one barbaric
growth, as though the castle had grown naturally out of the rock and,
in growing, had assumed something of the shape of a human dwelling
of the earliest times. And, as though the oval with its divine blue
water had been a sacred reservoir, the mountains hedged in the Lake
of San Stefano and the castle rose as its gloomy guardian.
The train wound along a curve by the water-side, swung round a
bend, then round another and stopped: San Stefano. It was a small,
quiet town, lying sleepily in the sun, without life or traffic, and
visited only in the winter by day-trippers, who came from Rome to
see the cathedral and the castle and tasted the wine of the country
at the osteria.
When Cornélie alighted, she at once saw the prince.
"How sweet of you to come and look us up in our eyrie!" he cried,
in rapture, eagerly pressing her two hands.
He led her through the station to his little basket-carriage, with
two little horses and a tiny groom. A porter would bring her luggage
to the castle.
"It's delightful of you to come!" he repeated. "You have never been
to San Stefano before? You know the cathedral is famous. We shall go
right through the town: the road to the castle runs behind it."
He was smiling with pleasure. He started the horses with a click of
his tongue, with a repeated shake of the reins, like a child. They
flew along the road, between the low, sleepy little houses, across
the square, where in the glowing sunlight the glorious cathedral
rose, Lombardo-Romanesque in style, begun in the eleventh and added
to in every succeeding century, with the campanile on the left and
the battisterio on the right: marvels of architecture in red, black
and white marble, one vast sculpture of angels, saints and prophets
and all as it were covered with a thick dust of ages, which had long
since tempered the colours of the marble to rose, grey and yellow and
which hovered between the groups as the one and only thing that had
been left over of all those centuries, as though they had sunk into
dust in every crevice.
The prince drove across a long bridge, whose arches were the remains of
an ancient aqueduct and now stood in the river, the bed of which was
quite dried up, with children playing in it. Then he let the little
horses climb at a foot's pace. The road led steeply, winding, barren
and rocky, up to the castle, while valleys of olives sank beneath
them, affording an ever wider view over the ever wider panorama of
blue-white mountains and opal horizons gleaming in the sun, with
suddenly a glimpse of the lake, the oval goblet, now sunk deeper and
deeper, as in a fluted brim of sun-scorched hills, its blue growing
deeper and more precipitous, a mystic blue that caught all the blue
of the sky, until the air shimmered between lake and sky as in long
spirals of light that whirled before the eyes. Until suddenly there
drifted an intoxication of orange-blossom, a heavy, sensual breath
as of panting love, as though thousands of mouths were exhaling a
perfumed breath that hung stiflingly in the windless atmosphere of
light, between the lake and the sky.
The prince, happy and vivacious, talked a great deal, pointed this
way and that with his whip, clicked at the horses, asked Cornélie
questions, asked if she did not admire the landscape. Slowly, straining
the muscles of their hind-legs, the horses drew the carriage up the
ascent. The castle lay massive, huddling close to the ground. The
lake sank lower and lower. The horizons became wider, like a world;
a fitful breeze blew away some of the orange-blossom breath. The road
became broad, easy and level. The castle lay extended like a fortress,
like a town, behind its pinnacled walls, with gate within gate. They
drove in, across a courtyard, under an archway into a second courtyard,
under a second archway with a third courtyard. And Cornélie received
a sensation of awe, a vision of pillars, arches, statues, arcades
and fountains. They alighted.
Urania ran out to meet her, embraced her, welcomed her affectionately
and took her up the stairs and through the passages to her room. The
windows were open; she looked out at the lake and the town and the
cathedral. And Urania kissed her again and made her sit down. And
Cornélie was struck by the fact that Urania had grown thin and had lost
her former brilliant beauty of an American girl, with the unconscious
look of a cocotte in her eyes, her smile and her clothes. She was
changed. She had "gone off" a little and was no longer so pretty,
as though her good looks had been a short-lived pretence, consisting
of freshness rather than line. But, if she had lost her bloom, she
had gained a certain distinction, a certain style, something that
surprised Cornélie. Her gestures were quieter, her voice was softer,
her mouth seemed smaller and was not always splitting open to display
her white teeth; her dress was exceedingly simple: a blue skirt and a
white blouse. Cornélie found it difficult to realize that the young
Princess di Forte-Braccio, Duchess di San Stefano, was Miss Urania
Hope of Chicago. A slight melancholy had come over her, which became
her, even though she was less pretty. And Cornélie reflected that
she must have some sorrow, which had smoothed her angles, but that
she was also tactfully accommodating herself to her entirely novel
environment. She asked Urania if she was happy. Urania said yes,
with her sad smile, which was so new and so surprising. And she
told her story. They had had a pleasant winter at Nice, but among
a cosmopolitan circle of friends, for, though her new relations
were very kind, they were exceedingly condescending and Virgilio's
friends, especially the ladies, kept her at arm's length in an almost
insolent fashion. Already during the honeymoon she had perceived
that the aristocracy were prepared to tolerate her, but that they
could never forget that she was the daughter of Hope the Chicago
stockinet-manufacturer. She had seen that she was not the only one who,
though she was now a princess and duchess, was accepted on sufferance
and only for her millions: there were others like herself. She had
formed no friendships. People came to her parties and dances: they
were frère et compagnon and hand and glove with Gilio; the women
called him by his Christian name, laughed and flirted with him and
seemed quite to approve of him for marrying a few millions. To Urania
they were just barely civil, especially the women: the men were not
so difficult. But the whole thing saddened her, especially with all
these women of the higher nobility--bearers of the most famous names
in Italy--who treated her with condescension and always managed to
exclude her from every intimacy, from all private gatherings, from all
cooperation in the matter of parties or charities. When everything
had been discussed, then they asked the Princess di Forte-Braccio
to take part and offered her the place to which she was entitled
and even did so with scrupulous punctiliousness. They manifestly
treated her as a princess and an equal in the eyes of the world, of
the public. But in their own set she remained Urania Hope. And the
few other, middle-class millionaire elements of course ran after her,
but she kept these at a distance; and Gilio approved. And what had
Gilio said when she once complained of her grievance to him? That she,
by displaying tactfulness, would certainly conquer her position, but
with great patience and after many, many years. She was now crying,
with her head on Cornélie's shoulder: oh, she reflected, she would
never conquer them, those haughty women! What after all was she,
a Hope, compared with all those celebrated families, which together
made up the ancient glory of Italy and which, like the Massimos,
traced back their descent to the Romans of old?
Was Gilio kind? Yes, but from the beginning he had treated her as
"his wife." All his pleasantness, all his cheerfulness was kept for
others: he never talked to her much. And the young princess wept: she
felt lonely, she sometimes longed for America. She had now invited her
brother to stay with her, a nice boy of seventeen, who had come over
for her wedding and travelled about Europe a little before returning
to his farm in the Far West. He was her darling, he consoled her;
but he would be gone in a few weeks. And then what would she have
left? Oh, how glad she was that Cornélie had come! And how well she
was looking, prettier than she had ever seen her look! Van der Staal
had accepted: he would be here in a week. She asked, in a whisper,
were they not going to get married? Cornélie answered positively no;
she was not marrying, she would never marry again. And, in a sudden
burst of candour, unable to conceal things from Urania, she told
her that she was no longer living in the Via dei Serpenti, that she
was living in Duco's studio. Urania was startled by this breach of
every convention; but she regarded her friend as a woman who could
do things which another could not. So it was only their happiness
and friendship, she whispered, as though frightened, and without
the sanction of society? Urania remembered Cornélie's imprecations
against marriage and, formerly, against the prince. But she did like
Gilio a little now, didn't she? Oh, she, Urania, would not be jealous
again! She thought it delightful that Cornélie had come; and Gilio,
who was bored, had also looked forward so to her arrival. Oh, no,
Urania was no longer jealous!
And, with her head on Cornélie's shoulder and her eyes still full
of tears, she seemed merely to ask for a little friendship, a little
affection, a few kind words and caresses, this wealthy American child
who now bore the title of an ancient Italian house. And Cornélie
felt for her because she was suffering, because she was no longer
a small insignificant person, whose line of life happened to cross
her own. She took her in her arms, comforted her, the weeping little
princess, as with a new friendship; she accepted her in her life as a
friend, no longer as a small insignificant person. And, when Urania,
staring wide-eyed, remembered Cornélie's warning, Cornélie treated that
warning lightly and said that Urania ought to show more courage. Tact,
she possessed, innate tact. But she must be courageous and face life
as it came....
They stood up and, clasped in each other's arms, looked out of the
open window. The bells of the cathedral were pealing through the air;
the cathedral rose in noble pride from out of a very low huddle of
roofs, a gigantic cathedral for so small a town, an immense symbol
of ecclesiastical dominion over the roof-tops of the little town
kneeling in reverence. And the awe which had filled Cornélie in the
courtyard, among the arcades, statues and fountains, inspired her anew,
because glory and grandeur, dying but not dead, mouldering but not
spent, seemed to loom dimly from the mystic blue of the lake, from
the age-old architecture of the cathedral, up the orange-clad hills
to the castle, where at an open window stood a young foreign woman,
discouraged, although that phantom of glory and grandeur needed her
millions in order to endure for a few more generations....
"It is beautiful and stately, all this past," thought Cornélie. "It
is great. But still it is no longer anything. It is a phantom. For
it is gone, it is all gone, it is but a memory of proud and arrogant
nobles, of narrow souls that do not look towards the future."
And the future, with a confusion of social problems, with the waving of
new banners and streamers, now whirled before her in the long spirals
of light, which, like blue notes of interrogation, shimmered before
her eyes, between the lake and the sky.