During the time that elapsed between Mr. Batiscombe's visit and the
expedition to see the launch, Leonora had an access of the religious
humour. The little scene with her husband had made a deep impression on
her mind, and as was usual when she received impressions, she tried to
explain it and understand it and reason about it, until there was little
of it left. That is generally the way with those people who make a study
of themselves; when they have a good thought or a good impulse, they
dissect the life out of it and crow over the empty shell.
It was clear, thought Leonora, that the sudden outburst of affection
which made her tell her husband that she wanted "all of him" was the
result of some sensation of dissatisfaction, of some unfulfilled
necessity for a greater sympathy. But, if at the very beginning she had
not the key to his heart, if he did not wholly love her now, it was
clear that he never would at all. Why was it clear? Oh! never mind the
"why,"--it was quite clear. Moreover, if he could never love her wholly
as she wished and desired, she was manifestly a misunderstood woman, a
most unhappy wife, a condemned existence,--loving and not being loved in
return. And he, the heartless wretch, was anxious about the cook! Good
heavens! the cook--when his wife's happiness was in danger! In this
frame of mind there was evidently nothing more appropriate for her to do
than to take a prayer-book and to hide her face in a veil, and slip away
to the little church on the road, a hundred yards from the house. For a
wrecked existence, thought Leonora, there is no refuge like the Church.
She was not a Catholic, but that made no difference; in great distress
like this, she could very well be comforted by any kind of religion
short of her father's, which latter, to her exalted view, consisted of
four walls and a bucket of whitewash, seasoned with pious discourses and
an occasional psalm-tune.
What she could not see, what was really at the bottom of the small
tempest she rashly whirled up in her over-sensitive soul, was her own
disillusionment. She had deceived herself into believing that she loved
her husband, and the deception had cost her an effort. She was beginning
to realise that the time was at hand when she might strive in vain to
believe in her own sincerity, when her heart would not submit to any
further equivocation, and when she should know in earnest what
hollowness and weariness meant. As yet this was half unconscious, for it
seemed so easy to make herself the injured party.
Poor Marcantonio was not to blame. He was the happiest of mortals, and
went calmly on his way, doubting nothing and thinking that he was of
all mortal men the most supremely fortunate.
Meanwhile Leonora kneeled in the rough little church, solacing herself
with the catalogue of those ills she thought she was suffering. The
stones were hard; there was a wretched little knot of country people,
squalid and ill-savoured, who stared at the great lady for a moment, and
then went on with their rosaries. A dirty little boy with a cane twenty
feet long was poking a taper about and lighting lamps, and he dropped
some of the wax on Leonora's gown. But she never shrank nor looked
annoyed.
"All these things are very delightful," she said to herself, "if you
only consider them as mortifications of the flesh."
She remembered how often just such little annoyances had sent her out of
other churches disgusted and declaring that religion was a vain and
hollow thing; and now, because she could bear with them and was not
angry, she felt quite sure it was genuine.
"Yes," said she piously, as, an hour later, she picked her way home
through the dusty road, "yes, the Church is a great refuge. I will go
there every day."
Indeed, she was so resigned and subdued that evening at dinner, that
Marcantonio asked whether she had a headache.
"Oh no," she answered, "I am perfectly well, thank you."
"Because if you are indisposed, ma bien-aimée," continued her husband
with some anxiety, "we will not go to Castellamare to-morrow."
"I will certainly go," she said. "I would go if I had twenty headaches,"
she might have added, for it would have been true.
"The occasion will be so much the more brilliant, ma très chère,"
remarked Marcantonio gallantly, as they went out into the garden under
the stars.
"It is a hollow sham," said Leonora to herself. "He does not mean it."
But whether it was the effect of the morning, or the magic influence of
Mr. Batiscombe's personality, is not certain; at all events when that
gentleman appeared at the appointed hour to announce that his boat was
in readiness, Leonora looked as though she had never known what care
meant. She doubtless still remembered all she had thought on the
previous afternoon, and she was still quite sure that her existence was
a wreck and a misery,--but then, she argued, why should we poor
misunderstood women not take such innocent pleasures as come in our way?
It would be very wrong not to accept humbly the little crumbs of
happiness,--and so on. So they went to Castellamare.
It is not far, but the wind seldom serves in the morning, and it was an
hour and a half before the six stout men in white clothes and straw hats
pulled the boat round the breakwater of the arsenal. Everything was
ready for the ceremony. Half a dozen Italian ironclads lay in the
harbour, decked from stem to stern with flags; the royal personages had
arrived, and were boring each other to death in a great temporary
balcony, gaudily decorated with red and gold, which had been reared on
the shore within reach of the nose of the new ship. The ship herself, a
huge, ungainly thing, painted red and bearing three enormous national
flags, lay like a stranded monster in the cradle, looking for all the
world like a prehistoric boiled lobster with its claws taken off. The
small water room opposite the arsenal was crowded with every kind of
craft, and little steamers arrived every few minutes from Naples to
swell the throng. The July sun beat fiercely down and there was not a
breath of air. The boatmen were all wrangling in a dozen southern
dialects, and no one seemed to know why the ceremony was delayed any
longer. Nevertheless, as is usual in such cases, there was half an hour
to wait before the thing could be done.
"I am afraid you will find this a dreadful bore," said Batiscombe to
Leonora in English, while Marcantonio was busy trying to make out some
of his friends on shore through a field-glass. Batiscombe had sat in the
stern-sheets to steer during the trip, and having Leonora on one side of
him and her husband on the other, had gone through an endless series of
polite platitudes. If it had not been that Leonora attracted him so much
he must himself have been bored to extinction. But then in that case he
would probably not have put himself in such a position at all.
"Oh, nothing of this kind bores me," said Leonora cheerfully.
"You say that as though there were many kinds of things that did,
though," observed Batiscombe, looking at her. It was a natural remark,
without any intention.
"Dear me, yes!" exclaimed Leonora. "Life is not all roses, you know."
She therewith assumed a thoughtful expression and looked away.
"I should not have supposed there were many thorns in your path,
Marchesa. Would it be indiscreet to inquire of what nature they may be?"
Leonora was silent, and put up her glass to examine the proceedings on
shore.
Batiscombe, who had come out that day with the sworn determination not
to say or do anything to increase the interest he felt in the Marchesa,
found himself wondering whether she were unhappy. The first and most
natural conclusion was that she had been married to Marcantonio by
designing parents, and that she did not care for him. Society said it
had been a love-match, but what will society not say? "Poor thing," he
thought, "I suppose she is miserable!"
"Forgive me," he said, in a low voice. "I did not know you were in
earnest."
Leonora blushed faintly and glanced quickly at him. He had the faculty
of saying little things to women that attracted their attention.
"What lots of poetry one might make about a launch," he said
laughing,--for it was necessary to change the subject,--"ship--dip;
ocean--motion; keel--feel; the rhymes are perfectly endless."
"Yes," said Leonora; "you might make a sonnet on the spot. Besides,
there is a great deal of sentiment about the launching of a great
man-of-war. The voyage of life--and that sort of thing--don't you know?
How hot it is!"
"I will have another awning up in a minute," and he directed the
sailors, helping to do the work himself. He stood upon the gunwale to do
it.
"I am sure you will fall," said Leonora, nervously. "Do sit down!"
"If I had a millstone round my neck there would be some object in
falling," said Batiscombe. "As it is, I should not even have the
satisfaction of drowning."
"What an idea! Should you like to be drowned?" she said, looking up to
him.
"Sometimes," he answered, still busy with the awning. Then he sat down
again.
"You should not say that sort of thing," said Leonora. "Besides, it is
rude to say you should like to be drowned when I am your guest."
"Great truths are not always pretty. But how could any man die better
than at your feet?" He laughed a little, and yet his voice had an
earnest ring to it. He had judged rightly when he foresaw that he must
fall in love with Leonora.
Marcantonio, who did not understand English, was watching the
proceedings on shore.
"Ah! it is magnificent!" he cried, with great enthusiasm. The royal
personage who was to christen the ship had just broken the bottle of
wine, and the little crowd of courtiers, officers, and maids of honour
clapped their hands and grinned. They all looked hot and miserable and
exhausted, but they grinned right nobly, like so many Cheshire cats.
There was a sound of knocking and hammering, a final shout of warning
from the dock officers, a slight trembling of the great hull, and then
the ship began to move, slowly at first, and ever more quickly, till
with a mighty rush and a plunge and a swirl she was out in the water.
The people yelled till they were hoarse, the boatmen cursed each other
by all the maledictions ever invented to meet the exigencies of a lost
humanity, the royal personages stood together on their platform looking
like a troupe of marionettes in a toy theatre, and congratulating each
other furiously as though they had done it all themselves; everything
was noise and sunshine and tepid water; Marcantonio was flourishing his
hat, and Leonora waved a little lace handkerchief, while Batiscombe sat
looking at her and wondering why he had never thought her beautiful
before. Indeed, she was superb in her simple, raw silk gown, with
fresh-cut roses at her waist.
"It seems to me, Marchese, that you are very enthusiastic," said
Batiscombe to Marcantonio.
"Mon Dieu!" exclaimed the other, shrugging his shoulders, "one cheers
these things as one would cheer fireworks, or a race. It signifies
nothing."
"Oh, of course," said Leonora; "and besides, it is so pretty."
"I think it is horrible," said Batiscombe, suddenly.
"Why--what?"
"To see a nation squandering money in this way, when the taxes on land
are at sixty per cent. and more, and the people emigrating by the
shipload because they cannot live in their own homes."
"Oh, for that matter, you are right," said Marcantonio, turning grave in
a moment. "I could tell you a story about taxes."
"What is it?" asked Leonora. "Those things are so interesting."
"Last autumn I was in the Sabines; I have a place up there, altogether
ancient and dilapidated--a mere ruin. I own some of the land, and the
peasants own little vineyards. One day I saw by the roadside a poor old
man, a sort of village crétin, whom every one knew quite well. We used
to call him Cupido; he was half idiotic and quite old. He was weeping
bitterly, poor wretch, and I asked him what was the matter. He pointed
to a little plot of land by the road, inclosed by a stone wall, and said
the tax-gatherer had taken it from him. And then he cried again, and I
could not get anything more out of him."
"Poor creature!" exclaimed Leonora, sympathetically.
"Well," continued Marcantonio, "I made inquiries, and I found that he
had owned the little plot, and that the tax-gatherer had first seized
the wretched crop of maize--perhaps a bushel basket full--to pay the
tax; and then, as that did not cover his demands, he seized the land
itself and sold it or offered it for sale."
"Infamous!" cried Leonora, and the tears were in her eyes.
"A cheerful state of things," remarked Batiscombe, "when the whole crop
does not suffice to pay the taxes on the soil!"
"N'est-ce pas?" said Marcantonio. "Well, I provided for the poor old
man, but he died in the winter. It broke his heart."[1]
[Footnote 1: The author witnessed the facts here described in 1880.]
"I love the Italians," said Batiscombe; "but their ideas of economy are
peculiar. I suppose that without much metaphor or exaggeration one might
say that the poor crétin's bushel of corn is gone into that ridiculous
ironclad over there."
"But of course it is," said Marcantonio. "The whole thing probably paid
for one rivet. You, who write books, Monsieur Batiscombe, put that into
a book and render it very pathetic."
"It needs little rendering to make it that," said Batiscombe, and he
looked at Leonora's eyes that were not yet dry.
By this time the royal marionettes had been bundled off to their boats,
and the crowd of small craft on the water began to disperse.
Batiscombe's six men fell to their oars and the boat shot out from the
breakwater. Presently they hoisted the bright lateen sails to the
breeze. Batiscombe perched himself on the weather rail, and took the
tiller, as the brave little craft heeled over and began to cut the
water. The wind fanned Leonora's cheek, and she said it was delightful.
Batiscombe suggested that they should run into one of the great green
caves that honeycomb the cliffs near Sorrento, and make it their
dining-room. So away they went, rejoicing to be out of the heat and the
noise. It was twelve o'clock, and far up among the orange groves the
little church bells rang out their midday chime, laughing together in
the white belfries for joy of the sunshine and the fair summer's day.
"I should like to be always sailing," said Leonora, who had now quite
forgotten her woes and enjoyed the change.
"Ma chère," said her husband, "there is nothing simpler."
"You always say that," she answered rather reproachfully; "but this is
the very first time I have been on the water since we came."
"My boat and my men are always at your disposal, Marchesa," said
Batiscombe, looking down at her, "and myself, too, if you will
condescend to employ me as your skipper."
"Thanks, you are very good," said she. "But I thought you were only
passing, and were to be off in a few days?" She glanced up at him, as
though she meant to be answered.
"Oh, it is very uncertain," said Batiscombe. "It depends," he added in a
lower voice and in English, "upon whether you will use the boat." It was
rather a bold stroke, but it told, and he was rewarded.
"I should like very much to go out again some day," she said.
Those little words and sentences, what danger signals they ought to be
to people about to fall in love! Batiscombe knew it; he knew well that
every such speech, in her native language and in a half voice, was one
step nearer to the inevitable end. But he was fast getting to the point
when, as far as he himself was concerned, the die would be cast. His
manner changed perceptibly during the day, as the influence gained
strength. His voice grew lower and he laughed less, while his eyes shone
curiously, even in the midday sun.
The boat ran into the cave, which was the largest on the shore, and
would admit the mast and the long yards without difficulty. Within the
light was green, and the water now and again plashed on the rocks. The
men steadied the craft with their oars and the party proceeded to lunch.
Most of "society" has a most excellent appetite, and when one reflects
how very hard society works to amuse itself, it is not surprising that
it should need generous nourishment. The unlucky cook had done his best,
and the result was satisfactory. There were all manner of things, and
some bottles of strong Falerno wine. Batiscombe drank water and very
little of it.
"Somebody has said," remarked Marcantonio with a laugh, "that one must
distrust the man who drinks water when other people drink wine. We shall
have to beware of you, Monsieur Batiscombe." He had learned the name
very well by this time.
"Perhaps there is truth in it," said Batiscombe, "but it is not my habit
I can assure you. The origin of the saying lies in the good old custom
of doctoring other people's draughts. The man who drank water at a feast
two hundred years ago was either afraid of being poisoned himself, or
was engaged in poisoning his neighbours."
"Oh, the dear, good old time!" exclaimed Leonora, eating her salad
daintily.
"Do you wish it were back again?" asked Batiscombe. "Are there many
people you would like to poison?"
"Oh, not that exactly," and she laughed. "But life must have been very
exciting and interesting then."
"Enfin," remarked Marcantonio, "I am very well pleased with it as it is.
There was no opera, no election, no launching of war-ships; and when you
went out you had to wear a patent safe on your head, in case anybody
wanted to break it for you. And then, there was generally some one who
did. Yes, indeed, it must have been charming, altogether ravishing.
Allez! give me the nineteenth century."
"I assure you, Marchesa," said Batiscombe, "life can be exceedingly
exciting and interesting now."
"I dare say," retorted Leonora, "for people who go round the world in
boats in search of adventures, and write books abusing their enemies.
But we--what do we ever do that is interesting or exciting? We stay at
home and pour tea."
"And in those days," answered Batiscombe, "the ladies stayed at home and
knit stockings, or if they were very clever they worked miles and miles
of embroidery and acres of tapestry. About once a month they were
allowed to look out of the window and see their relations beating each
other's brains out with iron clubs, and running each other through the
body with pointed sticks. As the Marchese says, it was absolutely
delightful, that kind of life."
"You are dreadfully prejudiced," said Leonora.
"But I am sure it was very nice."
And so they talked, and the men smoked a little, till they decided that
they had had enough of it, and the oars plashed in the water together,
sending the boat out again into the bright sun. In five minutes they
were at the landing belonging to the Carantoni villa. There was a deep
cleft in the cliffs just there, and the descent wound curiously in and
out of the rock, so that in many places you could only trace it from
below by the windows hewn in the solid stone to give light and air to
the passage. The rocks ran out a little at the base, and there were
steps carved for landing. There are few places so strikingly odd as this
landing to the Carantoni villa. Leonora said it was "eerie."
When it came to parting, the young couple were profuse in their thanks
to Mr. Batiscombe for the enchanting trip.
"I hope," said Marcantonio, "that you will come and dine with us very
soon, and change your mind about the water-drinking, and give us another
opportunity of thanking you."
"I have enjoyed it very, very much," said Leonora, giving Batiscombe her
hand. Their eyes met, and for the first time she noticed the curious
light in his glance. But he bowed very low and very elaborately, so to
say.
"You will keep your promise," he said, "and use the boat again?"
"Thanks so very much. But of course we will have a boat of our own now,
and so I should not think of asking you."
She smiled a little at him. Somehow he understood perfectly that he
could nevertheless induce her to accept his offer. He stood hat in hand
on the rocks as they disappeared into the dark stairway. Then he sprang
into the boat, and the men pulled lustily away.
He leaned back in the stern with his hand on the tiller and his eyes
half closed. In the bottom of the boat were the luncheon baskets, and
one of Leonora's roses had fallen from the stem and lay withering in the
hot July sun. Batiscombe picked it up, looked at it, pulled a leaf or
two, and threw it overboard, with a half sneer of dissatisfaction.
"They have forgotten the baskets, though," he thought to himself. "If
they had asked me to go up with them, as they should have done, I would
have had them carried up. As it is I will--I will wait till they write
for them. I could hardly take them myself." And he lighted a cigarette.
As Leonora mounted the stairway, leaning on her husband's arm, she
turned to get a glimpse of the boat gliding away in the distance. She
could just see it through one of the windows in the rock.
"Why did you not ask him to come up?" she inquired.
"Why did you not ask him, my angel?" returned Marcantonio.
"I thought you might not like it," she answered.
"Comment donc! He is very amiable, I am sure. But I thought you were
tired and had had enough of him,--in short, that you did not want him."
"Ah!" ejaculated Leonora. She felt a little curious sense of pleasure,
that was quite new to her, at the idea that her husband could have
seriously thought she did not want Mr. Batiscombe.
"Naturally," added Marcantonio, "we ought to have asked him."
"I suppose so," said she, indifferently enough.
"I will call on him to-morrow, and we will have him to dinner, if it is
agreeable to you, my dear."
"Oh yes--I do not mind at all," said Leonora. She was thinking about
something, and did not speak again till they reached the house.
It was very frivolous, but she was really thinking about the curious
expression of Mr. Batiscombe's eyes. She did not remember to have ever
seen anything exactly like it. Besides, she had known him, more or less,
for some time, and had never noticed it before. Perhaps it was the
reflection from the water. But she dreamed that night that she saw those
eyes very close to her, and the expression of them frightened her a
little, but was not altogether disagreeable.