CHAPTER I.

DON ORSINO

BY

F. MARION CRAWFORD

AUTHOR OF "THE THREE FATES," "ZOROASTER," "DR. CLAUDIUS," "SARACINESCA,"

ETC.

NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS

1891, MACMILLAN AND CO.

Reprinted January, April, December, 1893; June, 1894; January, November,

1895; June, 1896, January, 1898, June, 1899; July, 1901 June, 1903;

June, 1905; January, 1907.

_Fifty-sixth Thousand_

Norwood Press J.S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

DON ORSINO.

CHAPTER I.

Don Orsino Saracinesca is of the younger age and lives in the younger

Rome, with his father and mother, under the roof of the vast old palace

which has sheltered so many hundreds of Saracinesca in peace and war,

but which has rarely in the course of the centuries been the home of

three generations at once during one and twenty years.

The lover of romance may lie in the sun, caring not for the time of day

and content to watch the butterflies that cross his blue sky on the way

from one flower to another. But the historian is an entomologist who

must be stirring. He must catch the moths, which are his facts, in the

net which is his memory, and he must fasten them upon his paper with

sharp pins, which are dates.

By far the greater number of old Prince Saracinesca's contemporaries are

dead, and more or less justly forgotten. Old Valdarno died long ago in

his bed, surrounded by sons and daughters. The famous dandy of other

days, the Duke of Astrardente, died at his young wife's feet some three

and twenty years before this chapter of family history opens. Then the

primeval Prince Montevarchi came to a violent end at the hands of his

librarian, leaving his English princess consolable but unconsoled,

leaving also his daughter Flavia married to that other Giovanni

Saracinesca who still bears the name of Marchese di San Giacinto; while

the younger girl, the fair, brown-eyed Faustina, loved a poor

Frenchman, half soldier and all artist. The weak, good-natured Ascanio

Bellegra reigns in his father's stead, the timidly extravagant master of

all that wealth which the miser's lean and crooked fingers had consigned

to a safe keeping. Frangipani too, whose son was to have married

Faustina, is gone these many years, and others of the older and graver

sort have learned the great secret from the lips of death.

But there have been other and greater deaths, beside which the mortality

of a whole society of noblemen sinks into insignificance. An empire is

dead and another has arisen in the din of a vast war, begotten in

bloodshed, brought forth in strife, baptized with fire. The France we

knew is gone, and the French Republic writes "Liberty, Fraternity,

Equality" in great red letters above the gate of its habitation, which

within is yet hung with mourning. Out of the nest of kings and princes

and princelings, and of all manner of rulers great and small, rises the

solitary eagle of the new German Empire and hangs on black wings between

sky and earth, not striking again, but always ready, a vision of armed

peace, a terror, a problem--perhaps a warning.

Old Rome is dead, too, never to be old Rome again. The last breath has

been breathed, the aged eyes are closed for ever, corruption has done

its work, and the grand skeleton lies bleaching upon seven hills, half

covered with the piecemeal stucco of a modern architectural body. The

result is satisfactory to those who have brought it about, if not to the

rest of the world. The sepulchre of old Rome is the new capital of

united Italy.

The three chief actors are dead also--the man of heart, the man of

action and the man of wit, the good, the brave and, the cunning, the

Pope, the King and the Cardinal--Pius the Ninth, Victor Emmanuel the

Second, Giacomo Antonelli. Rome saw them all dead.

In a poor chamber of the Vatican, upon a simple bed, beside which burned

two waxen torches in the cold morning light, lay the body of the man

whom none had loved and many had feared, clothed in the violet robe of

the cardinal-deacon. The keen face was drawn up on one side with a

strange look of mingled pity and contempt. The delicate, thin hands were

clasped together on the breast. The chilly light fell upon the dead

features, the silken robe and the stone floor. A single servant in a

shabby livery stood in a corner, smiling foolishly, while the tears

stood in his eyes and wet his unshaven cheeks. Perhaps he cared, as

servants will, when no one else cares. The door opened almost directly

upon a staircase and the noise of the feet of those passing up and down

upon the stone steps disturbed the silence in the death chamber. At

night the poor body was thrust unhonoured into a common coach and driven

out to its resting-place.

In a vast hall, upon an enormous catafalque, full thirty feet above the

floor, lay all that was left of the honest king. Thousands of wax

candles cast their light up to the dark, shapeless face, and upon the

military accoutrements of the uniform in which the huge body was

clothed. A great crowd pressed to the railing to gaze their fill and go

away. Behind the division tall troopers in cuirasses mounted guard and

moved carelessly about. It was all tawdry, but tawdry on a magnificent

scale--all unlike the man in whose honour it was done. For he had been

simple and brave.

When he was at last borne to his tomb in the Pantheon, a file of

imperial and royal princes marched shoulder to shoulder down the street

before him, and the black charger he had loved was led after him.

In a dim chapel of St. Peter's lay the Pope, robed in white, the

jewelled tiara upon his head, his white face calm and peaceful. Six

torches burned beside him; six nobles of the guard stood like statues

with drawn swords, three on his right hand and three on his left. That

was all. The crowd passed in single file before the great closed gates

of the Julian Chapel.

At night he was borne reverently by loving hands to the deep crypt

below. But at another time, at night also, the dead man was taken up

and driven towards the gate to be buried without the walls. Then a great

crowd assembled in the darkness and fell upon the little band and stoned

the coffin of him who never harmed any man, and screamed out curses and

blasphemies till all the city was astir with riot. That was the last

funeral hymn.

Old Rome is gone. The narrow streets are broad thoroughfares, the Jews'

quarter is a flat and dusty building lot, the fountain of Ponte Sisto is

swept away, one by one the mighty pines of Villa Ludovisi have fallen

under axe and saw, and a cheap, thinly inhabited quarter is built upon

the site of the enchanted garden. The network of by-ways from the

Jesuits' church to the Sant' Angelo bridge is ploughed up and opened by

the huge Corso Vittorio Emmanuele. Buildings which strangers used to

search for in the shade, guide-book and map in hand, are suddenly

brought into the blaze of light that fills broad streets and sweeps

across great squares. The vast Cancelleria stands out nobly to the sun,

the curved front of the Massimo palace exposes its black colonnade to

sight upon the greatest thoroughfare of the new city, the ancient Arco

de' Cenci exhibits its squalor in unshadowed sunshine, the Portico of

Octavia once more looks upon the river.

He who was born and bred in the Rome of twenty years ago comes back

after a long absence to wander as a stranger in streets he never knew,

among houses unfamiliar to him, amidst a population whose speech sounds

strange in his ears. He roams the city from the Lateran to the Tiber,

from the Tiber to the Vatican, finding himself now and then before some

building once familiar in another aspect, losing himself perpetually in

unprofitable wastes made more monotonous than the sandy desert by the

modern builder's art. Where once he lingered in old days to glance at

the river, or to dream of days yet older and long gone, scarce

conscious of the beggar at his elbow and hardly seeing the half dozen

workmen who laboured at their trades almost in the middle of the public

way--where all was once aged and silent and melancholy and full of the

elder memories--there, at that very corner, he is hustled and jostled by

an eager crowd, thrust to the wall by huge, grinding, creaking carts,

threatened with the modern death by the wheel of the modern omnibus,

deafened by the yells of the modern newsvendors, robbed, very likely, by

the light fingers of the modern inhabitant.

And yet he feels that Rome must be Rome still. He stands aloof and gazes

at the sight as upon a play in which Rome herself is the great heroine

and actress. He knows the woman and he sees the artist for the first

time, not recognising her. She is a dark-eyed, black-haired, thoughtful

woman when not upon the stage. How should he know her in the strange

disguise, her head decked with Gretchen's fair tresses, her olive cheek

daubed with pink and white paint, her stately form clothed in garments

that would be gay and girlish but which are only unbecoming? He would

gladly go out and wait by the stage door until the performance is over,

to see the real woman pass him in the dim light of the street lamps as

she enters her carriage and becomes herself again. And so, in the

reality, he turns his back upon the crowd and strolls away, not caring

whither he goes until, by a mere accident, he finds himself upon the

height of Sant' Onofrio, or standing before the great fountains of the

Acqua Paola, or perhaps upon the drive which leads through the old Villa

Corsini along the crest of the Janiculum. Then, indeed, the scene thus

changes, the actress is gone and the woman is before him; the capital of

modern Italy sinks like a vision into the earth out of which it was

called up, and the capital of the world rises once more, unchanged,

unchanging and unchangeable, before the wanderer's eyes. The greater

monuments of greater times are there still, majestic and unmoved, the

larger signs of a larger age stand out clear and sharp; the tomb of

Hadrian frowns on the yellow stream, the heavy hemisphere of the

Pantheon turns its single opening to the sky, the enormous dome of the

world's cathedral looks silently down upon the sepulchre of the world's

masters.

Then the sun sets and the wanderer goes down again through the chilly

evening air to the city below, to find it less modern than he had

thought. He has found what he sought and he knows that the real will

outlast the false, that the stone will outlive the stucco and that the

builder of to-day is but a builder of card-houses beside the architects

who made Rome.

So his heart softens a little, or at least grows less resentful, for he

has realised how small the change really is as compared with the first

effect produced. The great house has fallen into new hands and the

latest tenant is furnishing the dwelling to his taste. That is all. He

will not tear down the walls, for his hands are too feeble to build them

again, even if he were not occupied with other matters and hampered by

the disagreeable consciousness of the extravagances he has already

committed.

Other things have been accomplished, some of which may perhaps endure,

and some of which are good in themselves, while some are indifferent and

some distinctly bad. The great experiment of Italian unity is in process

of trial and the world is already forming its opinion upon the results.

Society, heedless as it necessarily is of contemporary history, could

not remain indifferent to the transformation of its accustomed

surroundings; and here, before entering upon an account of individual

doings, the chronicler may be allowed to say a few words upon a matter

little understood by foreigners, even when they have spent several

seasons in Rome and have made acquaintance with each other for the

purpose of criticising the Romans.

Immediately after the taking of the city in 1870, three distinct

parties declared themselves, to wit, the Clericals or Blacks, the

Monarchists or Whites, and the Republicans or Beds. All three had

doubtless existed for a considerable time, but the wine of revolution

favoured the expression of the truth, and society awoke one morning to

find itself divided into camps holding very different opinions.

At first the mass of the greater nobles stood together for the lost

temporal power of the Pope, while a great number of the less important

families followed two or three great houses in siding with the

Royalists. The Republican idea, as was natural, found but few

sympathisers in the highest class, and these were, I believe, in all

cases young men whose fathers were Blacks or Whites, and most of whom

have since thought fit to modify their opinions in one direction or the

other. Nevertheless the Red interest was, and still is, tolerably strong

and has been destined to play that powerful part in parliamentary life,

which generally falls to the lot of a compact third party, where a

fourth does not yet exist, or has no political influence, as is the case

in Rome.

For there is a fourth body in Rome, which has little political but much

social importance. It was not possible that people who had grown up

together in the intimacy of a close caste-life, calling each other

"thee" and "thou," and forming the hereditary elements of a still feudal

organisation, should suddenly break off all acquaintance and be

strangers one to another. The brother, a born and convinced clerical,

found that his own sister had followed her husband to the court of the

new King. The rigid adherent of the old order met his own son in the

street, arrayed in the garb of an Italian officer. The two friends who

had stood side by side in good and evil case for a score of years saw

themselves suddenly divided by the gulf which lies between a Roman

cardinal and a Senator of the Italian Kingdom. The breach was sudden and

great, but it was bridged for many by the invention of a fourth,

proportional. The points of contact between White and Black became Grey,

and a social power, politically neutral and constitutionally

indifferent, arose as a mediator between the Contents and the

Malcontents. There were families that had never loved the old order but

which distinctly disliked the new, and who opened their doors to the

adherents of both. There is a house which has become Grey out of a sort

of superstition inspired by the unfortunate circumstances which oddly

coincided with each movement of its members to join the new order. There

is another, and one of the greatest, in which a very high hereditary

dignity in the one party, still exercised by force of circumstances,

effectually forbids the expression of a sincere sympathy with the

opposed power. Another there is, whose members are cousins of the one

sovereign and personal friends of the other.

A further means of amalgamation has been found in the existence of the

double embassies of the great powers. Austria, France and Spain each

send an Ambassador to the King of Italy and an Ambassador to the Pope,

of like state and importance. Even Protestant Prussia maintains a

Minister Plenipotentiary to the Holy See. Russia has her diplomatic

agent to the Vatican, and several of the smaller powers keep up two

distinct legations. It is naturally neither possible nor intended that

these diplomatists should never meet on friendly terms, though they are

strictly interdicted from issuing official invitations to each other.

Their point of contact is another grey square on the chess-board.

The foreigner, too, is generally a neutral individual, for if his

political convictions lean towards the wrong side of the Tiber his

social tastes incline to Court balls; or if he is an admirer of Italian

institutions, his curiosity may yet lead him to seek a presentation at

the Vatican, and his inexplicable though recent love of feudal princedom

may take him, card-case in hand, to that great stronghold of Vaticanism

which lies due west of the Piazza di Venezia and due north of the

Capitol.

During the early years which followed the change, the attitude of

society in Rome was that of protest and indignation on the one hand, of

enthusiasm and rather brutally expressed triumph on the other. The line

was very clearly drawn, for the adherence was of the nature of personal

loyalty on both sides. Eight years and a half later the personal feeling

disappeared with the almost simultaneous death of Pius IX. and Victor

Emmanuel II. From that time the great strife degenerated by degrees into

a difference of opinion. It may perhaps be said also that both parties

became aware of their common enemy, the social democrat, soon after the

disappearance of the popular King whose great individual influence was

of more value to the cause of a united monarchy than all the political

clubs and organisations in Italy put together. He was a strong man. He

only once, I think, yielded to the pressure of a popular excitement,

namely, in the matter of seizing Rome when the French troops were

withdrawn, thereby violating a ratified Treaty. But his position was a

hard one. He regretted the apparent necessity, and to the day of his

death he never would sleep under the roof of Pius the Ninth's Palace on

the Quirinal, but had his private apartments in an adjoining building.

He was brave and generous. Such faults as he had were no burden to the

nation and concerned himself alone. The same praise may be worthily

bestowed upon his successor, but the personal influence is no longer the

same, any more than that of Leo XIII. can be compared with that of Pius

IX., though all the world is aware of the present Pope's intellectual

superiority and lofty moral principle.

Let us try to be just. The unification of Italy has been the result of a

noble conception. The execution of the scheme has not been without

faults, and some of these faults have brought about deplorable, even

disastrous, consequences, such as to endanger the stability of the new

order. The worst of these attendant errors has been the sudden

imposition of a most superficial and vicious culture, under the name of

enlightenment and education. The least of the new Government's mistakes

has been a squandering of the public money, which, when considered with

reference to the country's resources, has perhaps no parallel in the

history of nations.

Yet the first idea was large, patriotic, even grand. The men who first

steered the ship of the state were honourable, disinterested,

devoted--men like Minghetti, who will not soon be forgotten--loyal,

conservative monarchists, whose thoughts were free from exaggeration,

save that they believed almost too blindly in the power of a

constitution to build up a kingdom, and credited their fellows almost

too readily with a purpose as pure and blameless as their own. Can more

be said for these? I think not. They rest in honourable graves, their

doings live in honoured remembrance--would that there had been such

another generation to succeed them.

And having said thus much, let us return to the individuals who have

played a part in the history of the Saracinesca. They have grown older,

some gracefully, some under protest, some most unbecomingly.

In the end of the year 1887 old Leone Saracinesca is still alive, being

eighty-two years of age. His massive head has sunk a little between his

slightly rounded shoulders, and his white beard is no longer cut short

and square, but flows majestically down upon his broad breast. His step

is slow, but firm still, and when he looks up suddenly from under his

wrinkled lids, the fire is not even yet all gone from his eyes. He is

still contradictory by nature, but he has mellowed like rare wine in the

long years of prosperity and peace. When the change came in Rome he was

in the mountains at Saracinesca, with his daughter-in-law, Corona and

her children. His son Giovanni, generally known as Prince of Sant'

Ilario, was among the volunteers at the last and sat for half a day upon

his horse in the Pincio, listening to the bullets that sang over his

head while his men fired stray shots from the parapets of the public

garden into the road below. Giovanni is fifty-two years old, but though

his hair is grey at the temples and his figure a trifle sturdier and

broader than of old, he is little changed. His son, Orsino, who will

soon be of age, overtops him by a head and shoulders, a dark youth,

slender still, but strong and active, the chief person in this portion

of my chronicle. Orsino has three brothers of ranging ages, of whom the

youngest is scarcely twelve years old. Not one girl child has been given

to Giovanni and Corona and they almost wish that one of the sturdy

little lads had been a daughter. But old Saracinesca laughs and shakes

his head and says he will not die till his four grandsons are strong

enough to bear him to his grave upon their shoulders.

Corona is still beautiful, still dark, still magnificent, though she has

reached the age beyond which no woman ever goes until after death. There

are few lines in the noble face and such as are there are not the scars

of heart wounds. Her life, too, has been peaceful and undisturbed by

great events these many years. There is, indeed, one perpetual anxiety

in her existence, for the old prince is an aged man and she loves him

dearly. The tough strength must give way some day and there will be a

great mourning in the house of Saracinesca, nor will any mourn the dead

more sincerely than Corona. And there is a shade of bitterness in the

knowledge that her marvellous beauty is waning. Can she be blamed for

that? She has been beautiful so long. What woman who has been first for

a quarter of a century can give up her place without a sigh? But much

has been given to her to soften the years of transition, and she knows

that also, when she looks from her husband to her four boys.

Then, too, it seems more easy to grow old when she catches a glimpse

from time to time of Donna Tullia Del Ferice, who wears her years

ungracefully, and who was once so near to becoming Giovanni

Saracinesca's wife. Donna Tullia is fat and fiery of complexion,

uneasily vivacious and unsure of herself. Her disagreeable blue eyes

have not softened, nor has the metallic tone of her voice lost its

sharpness. Yet she should not be a disappointed woman, for Del Ferice is

a power in the land, a member of parliament, a financier and a

successful schemer, whose doors are besieged by parasites and his

dinner-table by those who wear fine raiment and dwell in kings' palaces.

Del Ferice is the central figure in the great building syndicates which

in 1887 are at the height of their power. He juggles with millions of

money, with miles of real estate, with thousands of workmen. He is

director of a bank, president of a political club, chairman of half a

dozen companies and a deputy in the chambers. But his face is

unnaturally pale, his body is over-corpulent, and he has trouble with

his heart. The Del Ferice couple are childless, to their own great

satisfaction.

Anastase Gouache, the great painter, is also in Rome. Sixteen years ago

he married the love of his life, Faustina Montevarchi, in spite of the

strong opposition of her family. But times had changed. A new law

existed and the thrice repeated formal request for consent made by

Faustina to her mother, freed her from parental authority and brotherly

interference. She and her husband passed through some very lean years in

the beginning, but fortune has smiled upon them since that. Anastase is

very famous. His character has changed little. With the love of the

ideal republic in his heart, he shed his blood at Mentana for the great

conservative principle, he fired his last shot for the same cause at the

Porta Pia on the twentieth of September 1870; a month later he was

fighting for France under the gallant Charette--whether for France

imperial, regal or republican he never paused to ask; he was wounded in

fighting against the Commune, and decorated for painting the portrait of

Gambetta, after which he returned to Rome, cursed politics and married

the woman he loved, which was, on the whole, the wisest course he could

have followed. He has two children, both girls, aged now respectively

fifteen and thirteen. His virtues are many, but they do not include

economy. Though his savings are small and he depends upon his brush, he

lives in one wing of an historic palace and gives dinners which are

famous. He proposes to reform and become a miser when his daughters are

married.

"Misery will be the foundation of my second manner, my angel," he says

to his wife, when he has done something unusually extravagant.

But Faustina laughs softly and winds her arm about his neck as they look

together at the last great picture. Anastase has not grown fat. The gods

love him and have promised him eternal youth. He can still buckle round

his slim waist the military belt of twenty years ago, and there is

scarcely one white thread in his black hair.

San Giacinto, the other Saracinesca, who married Faustina's elder sister

Flavia, is in process of making a great fortune, greater perhaps than

the one so nearly thrust upon him by old Montevarchi's compact with

Meschini the librarian and forger. He had scarcely troubled himself to

conceal his opinions before the change of government, being by nature a

calm, fearless man, and under the new order he unhesitatingly sided with

the Italians, to the great satisfaction of Flavia, who foresaw years of

dulness for the mourning party of the Blacks. He had already brought to

Rome the two boys who remained to him from his first marriage with

Serafina Baldi--the little girl who had been born between the other two

children had died in infancy--and the lads had been educated at a

military college, and in 1887 are both officers in the Italian cavalry,

sturdy and somewhat thick-skulled patriots, but gentlemen nevertheless

in spite of the peasant blood. They are tall fellows enough but neither

of them has inherited the father's colossal stature, and San Giacinto

looks with a very little envy on his young kinsman Orsino who has

outgrown his cousins. This second marriage has brought him issue, a boy

and a girl, and the fact that he has now four children to provide for

has had much to do with his activity in affairs. He was among the first

to see that an enormous fortune was to be made in the first rush for

land in the city, and he realised all he possessed, and borrowed to the

full extent of his credit to pay the first instalments on the land he

bought, risking everything with the calm determination and cool judgment

which lay at the root of his strong character. He was immensely

successful, but though he had been bold to recklessness at the right

moment, he saw the great crash looming in the near future, and when the

many were frantic to buy and invest, no matter at what loss, his

millions were in part safely deposited in national bonds, and in part as

securely invested in solid and profitable buildings of which the rents

are little liable to fluctuation. Brought up to know what money means,

he is not easily carried away by enthusiastic reports. He knows that

when the hour of fortune is at hand no price is too great to pay for

ready capital, but he understands that when the great rush for success

begins the psychological moment of finance is already passed. When he

dies, if such strength as his can yield to death, he will die the

richest man in Italy, and he will leave what is rare in Italian finance,

a stainless name.

Of one person more I must speak, who has played a part in this family

history. The melancholy Spicca still lives his lonely life in the midst

of the social world. He affects to be a little old-fashioned in his

dress. His tall thin body stoops ominously and his cadaverous face is

more grave and ascetic than ever. He is said to have been suffering from

a mortal disease these fifteen years, but still he goes everywhere,

reads everything and knows every one. He is between sixty and seventy

years old, but no one knows his precise age. The foils he once used so

well hang untouched and rusty above his fireplace, but his reputation

survives the lost strength of his supple wrist, and there are few in

Rome, brave men or hairbrained youths, who would willingly anger him

even now. He is still the great duellist of his day; the emaciated

fingers might still find their old grip upon a sword hilt, the long,

listless arm might perhaps once more shoot out with lightning speed, the

dull eye might once again light up at the clash of steel. Peaceable,

charitable when none are at hand to see him give, gravely gentle now in

manner, Count Spicca is thought dangerous still. But he is indeed very

lonely in his old age, and if the truth be told his fortune seems to

have suffered sadly of late years, so that he rarely leaves Rome, even

in the hot summer, and it is very long since he spent six weeks in Paris

or risked a handful of gold at Monte Carlo. Yet his life is not over,

and he has still a part to play, for his own sake and for the sake of

another, as shall soon appear more clearly.