AURELIA AND THE DOCTOR
It was, I know very well, the aim and desire of this beautiful lady to
approve herself mother to the exile thus cast upon her hands, and it was
so as much by reason of her innate charity as of her pride in her
husband's credit. To blame an ambition so laudable would be impossible,
nor is blame intended to lie in recording the fact that she was a year
my junior, though two years a wife. Such was the case, however, and it
did not fit her for the position she wished to occupy. Nor indeed did
her beauties of person and mind, unless a childish air and sprightly
manner, cloudy-dark hair, a lovely mouth and bosom of snow, a caressing
voice, and candour most surprising because most innocent, can be said to
adapt a young lady to be mother to a young man. Be these things as they
may--inflaming arrows full of danger, shafts of charity, pious
artillery, as you will--they were turned full play upon me. From the
first moment of my seeing her she set herself to put me at ease, to make
me an intimate of her house, to make herself, I may say in no wrong
sense, an inmate of my heart--and God knoweth, God knoweth how she
succeeded.
Aurelia! Impossibly fair, inexpressibly tender and wise, with that
untaught wisdom of the child; daughter of pure religion, as I saw thee
at first and can see thee still, can that my first vision of thee ever
be effaced? Nay, but it is scored too deeply in my heart, is too surely
my glory and my shame. Still I can see that sweet stoop of thy humility,
still thy hands crossed upon thy lovely bosom, still fall under the
spell of thy shyly welcoming eyes, and be refreshed, while I am stung,
by the gracious greeting of thy lips. "Sia il ben venuto, Signer
Francesco," saidst thou? Alas, what did I prove to thee, unhappy one,
but il mal venuto, the herald of an evil hour? What did I offer thee in
exchange for thy bounty but shame and salt tears? What could be my
portion but fruitless reproach and footsore pilgrimage from woe to woe?
But I forget myself. I am not yet to disinter these unhappy days.
It is not to be supposed from this apostrophe that when I fell at once
to love my master's wife I saw in her more than my lamp and my saint,
the gracious presence which should "imparadise," in Dante's phrase, my
mind. I was an honest lad, very serious and very simple. Perhaps I was a
fool, but I was a pure fool: and he had been a very monster of depravity
who could have cast unwholesome regard upon a welcome so generous and
modest as hers. I declare that she was never anything to me but a holy
emanation, not to be approached but on the knees, not to be looked upon
but through a veil. So from this page until near the end of my long
history she will appear to the reader. I never had an unworthy thought
of her, never an unworthy desire. I never credited her with more than
charity towards myself; and if I gloried in the fact that I was
privileged to love so wondrous a being, the thought humiliated me at the
same time. I was conscious of my nothingness before her worthiness, and
desperate to fit myself for her high society. A noble rage for
excellence possessed me; like any champion or knight of old I strove to
approve my manhood, only that I might lay the spoils of it at her sacred
feet.
By origin Aurelia was a Sienese, the daughter of the ancient, noble but
reduced family of Gualandi, and had, without knowing it, caught the
fancy of Dr. Lanfranchi when he was in her native city upon some
political question or another. At the age of eighteen she had been made
the subject of a marriage treaty between her mother and this learned man
of fifty--a treaty conducted by correspondence and without any by-or-
with-your-leave of hers. It may be doubted whether she had done much
more than see and quiz her husband until she was brought to his house,
to be mistress of that and slave of its master. Doing violence to the
imaginations of a lover, I can look back upon her now with calmness, and
yet see no flaw upon her extraordinary perfections. I can still see her
lovely in every part, a bright, glancing, various creature, equally
compounded of simplicity and common sense. Her greatest charm was
precisely what we call charm--a sweetly willing, pliant disposition, an
air of gay seriousness, such as a child has, and a mood which could run
swiftly, at the touch on some secret spring, from the ripple of laughter
to the urgency of tears. She was very devout, but not at all in our way,
who must set our God very far off if we are to consider His awful
nature; she carried her gaiety with her into church, and would laugh in
the face of the Blessed Virgin or our Saviour just as freely as in that
of the greatest sinner of us all. Her carriage and conversation with
Heaven were, indeed, exactly those which she held towards the world, and
were such that it was impossible not to love her, and yet, for an honest
man who desired to remain one, equally impossible to do it. For although
she was made in shape, line and feature to be a man's torment and
delight, she carried her beauties so easily, valued them so staidly, and
considered them so unaffectedly her husband's property, that he would
have been a highway thief who had dared anything against her.
Here, indeed, was to be reckoned with that quality of strong common
sense, without which she had been no Tuscan girl. She had it in a
remarkable degree, as you may judge when I say that it reconciled her to
her position of wife to a vast, disorderly, tyrannical man nearly old
enough to be her grandfather. It enabled her to weigh the dignity, ease
and comfort of the Casa Lanfranchi against any romantic picture which a
more youthful lover could paint before her eyes. I am convinced--the
conviction was, it will be seen, forced upon me--that not only was she a
loyal, obedient and cheerful, but also a loving wife to this huge and
blusterous person, of whom nevertheless she was a good deal afraid. For
if he fondled her more than was becoming, he stormed at her also in a
way not tolerable.
When Dr. Lanfranchi met me on my arrival, I remember that he took my
hand in his own and never let go of it until he had me in his house.
This made me feel like a schoolboy, and I never lost the feeling of
extreme youth in his eyes. I believe now that his terrific silence, his
explosive rages, mock ceremoniousness, and startling alternations were
all parts of his method towards his pupils, for my experiences of them
were not peculiar. I have seen him cow a whole class by a lift of his
great square head, and most certainly, whatever scandalous acts may have
disgraced the university in my time, they never occurred where Dr.
Lanfranchi was engaged. Burly, bulky, blotched as he was, dirty in his
person, and in his dress careless to the point of scandal, he had the
respect of every student of the Bo. He was prodigiously learned and a
great eater. The amount of liquid he could absorb would pass belief: it
used to be said among us that he drank most comfortably, like a horse,
out of a bucket. His lectures were extraordinary, crammed with
erudition, which proceeded from him by gasps, jerks, and throttled cries
for mercy on his failing breath, and illustrated by personalities of the
most shocking description--he spared no deformity or defect of any one
of us if it happened to engage his eye. Sometimes a whole hour's lecture
would be consumed in a scandalous tale of Rome or Naples, sometimes
indeed it would be a reminiscence of his own youthful days, which
policy, if not propriety, should have counselled him to omit. Yet, as I
say, he never lost the respect of the class, but was feared, served, and
punctually obeyed.
It was much the same at home--that is, his methods and their efficacy
were the same. In private life he was an easy, rough, facetious
companion, excessively free in his talk, excessively candid in the
expression of his desires, and with a reserve of stinging repartee which
must have been more blessed to give than to receive. Terrible storms of
rage possessed him at times, under which the house seemed to rock and
roll, which sent his sweet wife cowering into a corner. But, though she
feared him, she respected and loved the man--and I was to find that out
to my cost before my first year was out.
Meantime that year of new experience, uplifting love and growth by
inches must ever remain wonderful to me--with Aurelia's music in my ears
and Love's wild music in my heart. Happy, happy days of my youth!
"Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos, a quien los antiguos pusieron
nombre de dorados!" cried the knight of La Mancha; and I may call that
Paduan year my age of song. It ran its course to the sound of flutes,
harps, and all sweet music. I never knew, until I knew Aurelia, that
such exulting tides of melody could pour from human throat.
When Aurelia rose in the morning and threw open her green shutters, if
the sunlight was broad upon the Pra, flecked upon the trees, striking
the domes and pinnacles of the Santo with fire, she sang full diapason
with that careless fling of the voice, that happy rapture, that bravura
which makes the listener's heart go near to burst with her joy. If rain
made the leaves to droop, or scudded in sheets along the causeways, she
sang plaintively, the wounded, aggrieved, hurt notes of the nightingale.
Her song then would be some old-remembered sorrow of her land--of
Ginevra degli Almieri, the wandering wife; of the Donna Lombarda, who
poisoned her lover; or of the Countess Costanza's violated vow. So she
shared confidences with the weather, and so unbosomed herself to nature
and to God. Meantime she was as busy as a nesting-bird. She made her
doctor's chocolate, and took it in to him with the gazette or the news-
sheet; she would darn a hole in my stocking, on my leg, without pricking
me at all, look me over, brush me, re-tie my hair, pat me into order
with a critical eye, and send me off to my classes or study with a sage
counsel to mind my books, and a friendly nod over her shoulder as we
each went our ways. She would go to mass at the Santo, to market in the
Piazza; she would cheapen a dress-length, chat with a priest, admonish
old Nonna, the woman of the house--all before seven o'clock in the
morning; and not before then would she so much as sip a glass of coffee
or nibble a crust of bread. On Sundays and Festas she took her husband's
arm and went to church as befitted, wearing her glazed gown of silver
grey, her black lace zendado. She took a fan as well as a service-book--
and happy was I to carry them for her; she had lace mittens on her hands
and a fine three-cornered hat on her head. She looked then what she
truly was, the thrifty young housewife, who, if she was as lovely as the
summer's dawn, was so only by the way. And thrifty she proved herself.
For when she had kneeled and crossed herself twice towards the altar,
she pulled up the shining silk gown all about her middle and sat down
upon her petticoat.
Exquisite, fragrant, piteous Aurelia! Is it wonderful that I loved her?
And who was I--O heaven! What sort of lover was I to disturb her sweetly
ordered life? To that I must next address myself, cost me what it may.