Peter, we may suppose, returned to Villa Floriano that afternoon in a
state of some excitement.
“He ought to have told her--”
“It was her right to be told--”
“What could her rank matter--”
“A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--”
“She would have despised the conventional barriers--”
“No woman could be proof against such a compliment--”
“The case was peculiar--ordinary rules could not apply to it--”
“Every man gets the wife he deserves--and he had certainly gone a long
way towards deserving her--”
“He should simply have told her the story of his book and of her part in
it--he need n't have mentioned love--she would have understood--”
The Duchessa's voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded perpetually
in his ears; the words she had spoken, the arguments she had urged,
repeated and repeated themselves, danced round and round, in his memory.
“Ought I to have told her--then and there? Shall I go to her and tell
her to-morrow?”
He tried to think; but he could not think. His faculties were in a
whirl--he could by no means command them. He could only wait, inert,
while the dance went on. It was an extremely riotous dance. The
Duchessa's conversation was reproduced without sequence, without
coherence--scattered fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully,
in swift disorder. If he would attempt to seize upon one of those
fragments, to detain and fix it, for consideration--a speech of hers,
a look, an inflection--then the whole experience suddenly lost its
outlines, his recollection of it became a jumble, and he was left, as it
were, intellectually gasping.
He walked about his garden, he went into the house, he came out, he
walked about again, he went in and dressed for dinner, he sat on his
rustic bench, he smoked cigarette after cigarette.
“Ought I to have told her? Ought I to tell her to-morrow?”
At moments there would come a lull in the turmoil, an interval of quiet,
of apparent clearness; and the answer would seem perfectly plain.
“Of course, you ought to tell her. Tell her--and all will be well. She
has put herself in the supposititious woman's place, and she says, 'He
ought to tell her.' She says it earnestly, vehemently. That means that
if she were the woman, she would wish to be told. She will despise the
conventional barriers--she will be touched, she will be moved. 'No woman
could be proof against such a compliment.' Go to her to-morrow, and tell
her--and all will be well.”
At these moments he would look up towards the castle, and picture
the morrow's consummation; and his heart would have a convulsion.
Imagination flew on the wings of his desire. She stood before him in all
her sumptuous womanhood, tender and strong and glowing. As he spoke, her
eyes lightened, her eyes burned, the blood came and went in her cheeks;
her lips parted. Then she whispered something; and his heart leapt
terribly; and he called her name--“Beatrice! Beatrice!” Her name
expressed the inexpressible--the adoring passion, the wild hunger and
wild triumph of his soul. But now she was moving towards him--she was
holding out her hands. He caught her in his arms--he held her yielding
body in his arms. And his heart leapt terribly, terribly. And he
wondered how he could endure, how he could live through, the hateful
hours that must elapse before tomorrow would be to-day.
But “hearts, after leaps, ache.” Presently the whirl would begin again;
and then, by and by, in another lull, a contrary answer would seem
equally plain.
“Tell her, indeed? My dear man, are you mad? She would simply be amazed,
struck dumb, by your presumption. I can see from here her incredulity--I
can see the scorn with which she would wither you. It has never dimly
occurred to her as conceivable that you would venture to be in love with
her, that you would dare to lift your eyes to her--you who are nothing,
to her who is all. Yes--nothing, nobody. In her view, you are just a
harmless nobody, whose society she tolerates for kindness' sake--and
faute de mieux. It is precisely because she deems you a nobody--because
she is profoundly conscious of the gulf that separates you from
her--that she can condescend to be amiably familiar. If you were of a
rank even remotely approximating to her own, she would be a thousand
times more circumspect. Remember--she does not dream that you are Felix
Wildmay. He is a mere name to her; and his story is an amusing little
romance, perfectly external to herself, which she discusses with
entirely impersonal interest. Tell her by all means, if you like Say,
'I am Wildmay--you are Pauline.' And see how amazed she will be, and how
incensed, and how indignant.”
Then he would look up at the castle stonily, in a mood of desperate
renunciation, and vaguely meditate packing his belongings, and going
home to England.
At other moments a third answer would seem the plain one: something
between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a compromise, it not a
reconciliation.
“Come! Let us be calm, let us be judicial. The consequences of our
actions, here below, if hardly ever so good as we could hope, are hardly
ever so bad as we might fear. Let us regard this matter in the light of
that guiding principle. True, she does n't dream that you are Wildmay.
True, if you were abruptly to say to her, 'I am Wildmay--you are the
woman,' she would be astonished--even, if you will, at first, more or
less taken aback, disconcerted. But indignant? Why? What is this gulf
that separates you from her? What are these conventional barriers of
which you make so much? She is a duchess, she is the daughter of a lord,
and she is rich. Well, all that is to be regretted. But you are neither
a plebeian nor a pauper yourself. You are a man of good birth, you are a
man of some parts, and you have a decent income. It amounts to this--she
is a great lady, you are a small gentleman. In ordinary circumstances,
to be sure, so small a gentleman could not ask so great a lady to become
his wife. But here the circumstances are not ordinary. Destiny has
meddled in the business. Small gentleman though you are, an unusual and
subtle relation-ship has been established between you and your great
lady. She herself says, 'Ordinary rules cannot apply--he ought to tell
her.' Very good: tell her. She will be astonished, but she will see that
there is no occasion for resentment. And though the odds are, of course,
a hundred to one that she will not accept you, still she must treat you
as an honourable suitor. And whether she accepts you or rejects you,
it is better to tell her and to have it over, than to go on forever
dangling this way, like the poor cat in the adage. Tell her--put your
fate to the touch--hope nothing, fear nothing--and bow to the event.”
But even this temperate answer provoked its counter-answer.
“The odds are a hundred to one, a thousand to one, that she will not
accept you. And if you tell her, and she does not accept you, she will
not allow you to see her any more, you will be exiled from her presence.
And I thought, you did not wish to be exiled from her presence, You
would stake, then, this great privilege, the privilege of seeing her, of
knowing her, upon a. chance that has a thousand to one against it. You
make light of the conventional barriers--but the principal barrier of
them all, you are forgetting. She is a Roman Catholic, and a devout one.
Marry a Protestant? She would as soon think of marrying a Paynim Turk.”
In the end, no doubt, a kind of exhaustion followed upon his excitement.
Questions and answers suspended themselves; and he could only look up
towards Ventirose, and dumbly wish that he was there. The distance was
so trifling--in five minutes he could traverse it--the law seemed absurd
and arbitrary, which condemned him to sit apart, free only to look and
wish.
It was in this condition of mind that Marietta found him, when she came
to announce dinner.
Peter gave himself a shake. The sight of the brown old woman, with
her homely, friendly face, brought him back to small things, to actual
things; and that, if it was n't a comfort, was, at any rate, a relief.
“Dinner?” he questioned. “Do peris at the gates of Eden DINE?”
“The soup is on the table,” said Marietta.
He rose, casting a last glance towards the castle.
Towers and battlements...
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.”
He repeated the lines in an undertone, and went in to dinner. And then
the restorative spirit of nonsense descended upon him.
“Marietta,” he asked, “what is your attitude towards the question of
mixed marriages?”
Marietta wrinkled her brow.
“Mixed marriages? What is that, Signorino?”
“Marriages between Catholics and Protestants,” he explained.
“Protestants?” Her brow was still a network. “What things are they?”
“They are things--or perhaps it would be less invidious to say
people--who are not Catholics--who repudiate Catholicism as a deadly and
soul-destroying error.”
“Jews?” asked Marietta.
“No--not exactly. They are generally classified as Christians. But
they protest, you know. Protesto, protestare, verb, active, first
conjugation. 'Mi pare che la donna protesta troppo,' as the poet
sings. They're Christians, but they protest against the Pope and the
Pretender.”
“The Signorino means Freemasons,” said Marietta.
“No, he does n't,” said Peter. “He means Protestants.”
“But pardon, Signorino,” she insisted; “if they are not Catholics,
they must be Freemasons or Jews. They cannot be Christians.
Christian--Catholic: it is the same. All Christians are Catholics.”
“Tu quoque!” he cried. “You regard the terms as interchangeable? I 've
heard the identical sentiment similarly enunciated by another. Do I look
like a Freemason?”
She bent her sharp old eyes upon him studiously for a moment. Then she
shook her head.
“No,” she answered slowly. “I do not think that the Signorino looks like
a Freemason.”
“A Jew, then?”
“Mache! A Jew? The Signorino!” She shrugged derision.
“And yet I'm what they call a Protestant,” he said.
“No,” said she.
“Yes,” said he. “I refer you to my sponsors in baptism. A regular, true
blue moderate High Churchman and Tory, British and Protestant to the
backbone, with 'Frustrate their Popish tricks' writ large all over me.
You have never by any chance married a Protestant yourself?” he asked.
“No, Signorino. I have never married any one. But it was not for the
lack of occasions. Twenty, thirty young men courted me when I was a
girl. But--mica!--I would not look at them. When men are young they are
too unsteady for husbands; when they are old they have the rheumatism.”
“Admirably philosophised,” he approved. “But it sometimes happens that
men are neither young nor old. There are men of thirty-five--I have even
heard that there are men of forty. What of them?”
“There is a proverb, Signorino, which says, Sposi di quarant' anni son
mai sempre tiranni,” she informed him.
“For the matter of that,” he retorted, “there is a proverb which says,
Love laughs at locksmiths.”
“Non capisco,” said Marietta.
“That's merely because it's English,” said he. “You'd understand fast
enough if I should put it in Italian. But I only quoted it to show the
futility of proverbs. Laugh at locksmiths, indeed! Why, it can't even
laugh at such an insignificant detail as a Papist's prejudices. But
I wish I were a duke and a millionaire. Do you know any one who could
create me a duke and endow me with a million?”
“No, Signorino,” she answered, shaking her head.
“Fragrant Cytherea, foam-born Venus, deathless Aphrodite, cannot,
goddess though she is,” he complained. “The fact is, I 'm feeling
rather undone. I think I will ask you to bring me a bottle of
Asti-spumante--some of the dry kind, with the white seal. I 'll try
to pretend that it's champagne. To tell or not to tell--that is the
question.
'A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
With the dream of, meet death with--
And yet, if you can believe me, the man who penned those lines had never
seen her. He penned another line equally pat to the situation, though he
had never seen me, either
'Is there no method to tell her in Spanish?”
But you can't imagine how I detest that vulgar use of 'pen' for
'write'--as if literature were a kind of pig. However, it's perhaps
no worse than the use of Asti for champagne. One should n't be too
fastidious. I must really try to think of some method of telling her in
Spanish.”
Marietta went to fetch the Asti.