Two or three weeks passed in a vacant, empty kind of way, and during
those weeks Minna was almost alone. She saw Mrs. Charrington two
or three times, and that lady condescended to approve of her new
apartment, and of her departure from Casa Dietrich. She was even
generous enough not to say how very glad she was that ‘the girl’ was
married, and no longer on the spot to disturb her dear Minna’s peace
of mind, and keep her entangled with ‘that set.’ She did not say it,
but Minna knew very well that she felt it, and smiled to herself rather
grimly.
For some little time she did not fret, either, at Signor Oriole’s
silence and non-appearance at the studio. She remembered and understood
what he had said about needing solitude in order to get accustomed to
his new conditions and mode of life. She presently, however, began to
be sorry that she had let him slip away from her without giving his
address. He had promised to send it, but it came not, nor any word from
him, and after two or three weeks had passed she began to grow uneasy.
She remembered the wretched condition of his circumstances and finances
when she had last seen him; his silent unhappiness on parting with
her--an unhappiness through which at the same time glowed a resolution
not to give up his self-elected solitude; and when days had grown into
weeks, and still she heard nothing of him, her alarm began to increase,
and the hopelessness of seeking through Rome for a man who had chosen
to bury himself in it without leaving any address became daily more
obvious to her.
Once she thought of calling upon Signora Dietrich and asking for news
of both Fulvia and Signor Giuseppe. Then she laughed aloud all by
herself, feeling that she might as well ask the first person she met
in the street for such information. Both the girl and the man were
unlikely to confide their affairs to Signora Dietrich, and even if they
should have done so, Minna felt with what pleasure the signora would
look at her (Mrs. Hastings) should she be weak enough to go in search
of information--would look at her and send her about her business
rather less wise than she had been before.
For the first time since she had known Rome she was weary of it, and
longed to get away from it. Letters from home also made her feel that
her presence there was desirable, if not absolutely necessary, to
regulate the affairs of her modest household, and to set in order feuds
amongst certain old retainers whom the absence of their mistress had
set by the ears. She wrote home to say that she was coming, and that
all was to be in readiness for her towards the end of May; thus she
gave herself still some time to linger and to be present when Signor
Giuseppe came--if come he should.
Meantime, in order to try to forget her anxiety, she had been working
hard at the bust of Fulvia, and she intended to take it home with her,
finished. Looking upon it, she knew that it was beautiful--knew that,
in her own intense feelings for and sympathy with its original, she had
succeeded in throwing into the beautiful sad features a whole world of
meaning--of grace, of sorrow, of proud endurance. She stopped sometimes
in her work, and gazed upon it, and pondered on the matter.
What would Fulvia’s marriage--her so-called marriage--make of her? It
was bound to work some great change or development in her character.
Would it ripen her early into a more than usually noble woman, proud
and reticent, suffering and strong? Would it crush her into a hopeless
slave, terrified and cowering before the tyrant to whom she was tied?
Or would it harden her into marble, stiffen all her girlish brightness
into a chilly glitter of the conventional, professional cheerfulness
all must wear, unless they wish the world to invent the most wonderful
calumnies concerning them and their lives? For it is true that the
inwardly unhappy, in certain circumstances, must either calumniate
themselves or be calumniated by others.
Minna could form no idea on the subject. She would have given a good
deal to learn something about it, but no sign came. There was no
news--no word of Fulvia, who had disappeared utterly when she had
departed with Marchmont for Milan on their way to London.
Minna’s state of mind grew more and more anxious, more and more
perturbed, as time went on, and the day beyond which her departure must
no longer be delayed approached with remorseless rapidity. She was
longing to leave Rome--to breathe an air which was not tainted with the
horrors and the sins of thousands of years, horrors and sins which had
never troubled her till the one horror, the one sin, was perpetrated
which went home to her and appealed to her. Now it seemed to her, when
she walked abroad, threading the narrow streets, or passing under or
beside the awful piles of ruin, as she glanced at the hoary grayness
of the Forum, looking ashen and ghastly in the dazzling May sunshine,
as she looked upwards at the grim frown of the overhanging fragments
of the Palatine, that the whole place reeked with sin and crime, and
with the deadly odour of shameful bargains and sales of human bodies
and souls. It was morbid, she felt, or tried to feel, but it was very
strong and very real; and, returning one Friday evening from the
comparative cool of Doria Pamfili gardens, into the odours and the
noises of the teeming streets below, she was suddenly seized with a
wild, unreasoning craving after a breath of the air, fresh from the
moor, salt from the sea, which she knew was blowing round her old gray
house far in the North, at home. The everlasting glare of blue and gold
in the sky and sun oppressed her; the voluptuous languor of the nights,
loud with music and vocal with thrilling notes of song, made her
feverish and restless. Had she followed her own impulse, she would have
fled within a few hours, nor ever rested till the Alps were between
her and this great insolent sorceress city.
She could not fly. Business still tied her for a few days, and the
idea that there was someone somewhere within those mazes of streets
with whom she had clasped hands in friendship, and whose misery was to
her nervous unrest as the ocean compared to a fretting brooklet, was a
torment to her.
Still time flew by relentlessly. It wanted now only two days to the
date fixed for her departure. She had been at the studio all one
afternoon, superintending the packing of the bust of Fulvia, which,
heavy though it was, she had determined to take with her own personal
luggage, and also that of the as yet unfinished statue, which, packed
and enveloped with the greatest care, was to go by sea to Liverpool,
and thence to be despatched to her home. The carriers were to come
to-morrow for the great package. She intended to return herself,
see it off the premises, and pack up and put away the things she was
leaving here, for she intended to retain the rooms for at least a
year, against her possible return to Rome. The noise and the bustle
were over. The men, satisfied with the _buona mano_ they had received,
grinned from ear to ear, wished her a successful journey and said a
cordial _a rivederci_. They clattered down the stairs and away, and
when the last noise of their feet had died away, she got up and looked
rather sorrowfully round the shabby room, now quite turned upside down,
in which she had spent so many happy hours, and so many sad ones too.
It was useless to linger. The place now sent a shudder through her.
She would go away, to her lodging, and busy herself in beginning the
packing necessary for her journey.
It was a hot May evening, towards six o’clock. She put on her broad
straw hat, took her gloves and sunshade from the table, and left the
room, locking the door behind her. Slowly she descended the cool dark
staircase, and went through the court, deep in shadow, towards the
dazzling white light in the street. As she slowly paced along, her
eye was caught by another shadow which flitted along, close to the
wall--and crowning the shadow was a man’s white face. Some little
thrill, some intuitive knowledge, darted through her veins and heart.
She stopped suddenly and decidedly, arrested the shadow, and laid her
hand upon its arm.
‘Signor Oriole--at last! Why have you treated me in this way?’
‘Why have I treated myself in this way, you should rather ask,’ he
said; ‘do you suppose that if I had had anything good to tell you I
should not have been with you before now? My news was always bad;
therefore, though I have many times been as far as this court, I have
never mounted the stair.’
‘Bad news--of Fulvia?’ she added, still instinctively holding him fast
by the arm lest he should yet escape.
‘No, of myself,’ said he, with some naïveté, ‘though, of course, it
would not matter about me if she were not concerned in it too.’
‘Come upstairs,’ said Minna decidedly, as she turned back. ‘Come
upstairs, and tell me everything about it.’
He made no resistance, but suffered her to lead him upstairs.
She unlocked the door, and they at once stood within the dreary,
half-dismantled room. Closing the door behind them, she looked at him.
She did not ask him how he did. There was no need for that. He was
not at all well, as anyone could see. Signor Giuseppe was a broken
man. The signs of that condition are well known, and easily to be
recognised. They do not need to be recapitulated here.
‘Sit down,’ said Minna gently, ‘and tell me what has happened to you,
and why you have never come to see me.’
‘I have had a great misfortune,’ said Signor Giuseppe. ‘I have come
into a fortune--not a large one, but enough, if it had come in time,
to----’
He stopped abruptly. Minna, breathless, wondered if his troubles had
really affected his mind. But there was no appearance about him of a
disordered brain, only of a profoundly sad heart.
‘Tell me about it,’ she said.
‘Of course I should have come to see you before if this had not
happened,’ he said. ‘It was very soon after I last saw you; in fact,
only two or three days after. One day at the office I found some
papers for me, which had been sent to one or two wrong addresses. I
ought to have had them a week before--mark you, a week!’ he said in
a louder voice, raising his hand and gesticulating a little. ‘I have
told you, and you know all about it, that once I was different. I was
not what I am now. I was a gentleman. I was not this broken-down old
vagabond whom you have always known, and to whom you have still been
kind. When I gave up my own estate, which was sufficient, though not
large, and left my country, I left also others behind me--relations,
connections. Amongst them, an uncle, my father’s brother, who was
rather a singular old character. I will not trouble you with an account
of him. He was an eccentric. He was a bachelor, something also of a
miser, and very much of a curmudgeon. He lived alone on his property,
and we saw little or nothing of him. When I went to say good-bye to
him, and to tell him that I was going to fight for the freedom of my
country, and for her unity, and that I was disposing of my property
in order to be able the more effectually to help, he said: “Beppino
mio, you are a complete and utter fool. Fight for your country as
much as you please--young blood must have an outlet, and that is at
least a respectable style of sowing your wild oats; but keep a whole
suit of clothes in which to dress yourself when the battle is over, a
chimney nook in which to rest and warm yourself, a fowl for the pot,
a vine wherefrom to fill the vats, and a field of corn from which to
provide bread for yourself. Otherwise you will find that, by the time
your country is free, you yourself are a slave. You have never been
accustomed to work for your livelihood. Take my word for it, your plan
will not answer.” I was then twenty-two. I paid no heed to his words,
but went my own way. You know the rest. Two months ago, I believe, I
would have welcomed back the Austrians if I could have been secure of
fifty thousand lire. But I might as well have cried for the moon. And
yet, nearly a week before the child was married, far more than fifty
thousand lire were mine, had I known it. He died, it seems, months ago,
at his property far away in the country, in Sicily. He was ninety-five.
Only think, signora, of anyone being unlucky enough to live to be
ninety-five! I was his only living direct relative. All the others were
gone. Everything that he had comes to me. I am again in the possession
of an income--nay, I am well off, at ease, so far as my ideas go ...
and I did not know it in time to save her.’
There was a long silence. Sweeping over Minna’s mind came the full
sense of the miserable, sordid tragedy of the situation. Another
thought, which she would not for the world have hurt him by uttering,
was that his poor little property would not have had a feather’s weight
in the balance with Signora Dietrich when she was arranging Fulvia’s
marriage with Marchmont.
‘What can I say?’ she said at last. ‘There is nothing to say.’
‘Nothing. I quite agree with you,’ he replied bitterly, and they were
both silent again, till at last she asked:
‘And your work--and your lodging? What are you doing about that?’
‘As for the lodging, it is not worth while to change it,’ he said
despondently. ‘I am in the same place--Via----’
He named a wretched little street, quite near to where he had left her
on that evening when they had been to Hadrian’s Villa, near the Forum
of Trajan, and Minna felt all the sordid wretchedness and discomfort
which he had gone through pierce her own heart.
‘But you go to the office every day?’ she inquired gently.
‘No more,’ he said. ‘They did not want me. I had begun to make
mistakes. They were very kind, but they wanted to get rid of me.’
Then he told her a story between the lines of which she was easily
able to read. He had evidently clung to his post at the office with a
pitiable tenacity: it was something for him to do; it was a remnant of
the old accustomed order of things; in so far, it was a consolation,
and it kept him going. He had been many years with that particular
firm of lawyers. The principal was a kind-hearted man, and had always
treated him well, and when, within the last month or two, it was found
that Oriole’s work was always going wrong, was full of mistakes,
and that he constantly forgot the commissions or pieces of writing
entrusted to him, Signor Gismondi began to make inquiries. He wished to
be kind and considerate, but business had to be thought of. The result
of the inquiries discovered to him that Oriole had come into some
property, which placed him in an independent if very modest position,
and above want. There was then no need for further scruples. Signor
Gismondi sent for his gray-headed clerk, and, as kindly as he could,
intimated to him that his services were to be dispensed with--a new and
a younger man was to be engaged in his place--after Easter, when he
pleased--_ecco_!
A last rag of pride and sensitiveness sent a red flush into Signor
Giuseppe’s cheek. With a bow, the majesty of which good Signor Gismondi
could not have attained to, had he practised for twenty years, Oriole
intimated that it was just the same to him when he left--to-day,
to-morrow, next week. If they had not already engaged the services
of someone else, he was willing to wait just to accommodate them, as
long as they liked. Signor Gismondi seized eagerly upon this opening
for softening the blow, and assured Giuseppe that he would confer a
very great favour upon them by remaining for another week, until they
had looked about them for a person suitable to replace him. Agreed!
Signor Giuseppe was in much better spirits that week, being under the
impression that he was really doing a favour to the firm of Gismondi e
Nipoti. But when the week was over and the occupation gone, oh! then
was Signor Giuseppe to be pitied. Well for them who, reduced to such a
condition of drifting loneliness, have one compassionate eye fixed upon
them--only one! They may be saved. It is such as he, reduced perhaps a
stage lower in grief and hopelessness, who, looking round instinctively
in a last effort to find something which shall encourage them to remain
in the world, and failing to do so, meeting no outstretched hand,
seeing no eye which has any attention in it for them--such as these it
is who, lingering near the river, some evening or other plunge into
it, or who purchase their dose of poison, and, after keeping it for
a time, suddenly swallow it, or discharge the pistol which has been
long loaded and ready, or who infallibly find some gate or other open,
through which they can creep out of one blackness into another that is
yet darker.
Signor Giuseppe had not got as far as that, though he was well on the
way to it. Minna, looking at him, understood it all; and an immense
pity, an immense longing to help and save, came over her. There was a
silence as they sat facing one another in the room, which was now very
quiet. A ray of warm, rather stuffy sunshine had crept round to the
window, and mercilessly lighted up all the rather shabby, threadbare
details of the place. It left Minna in the shade, but fell upon her
companion, and showed her the profound sadness and hopelessness of
his expression. He had aged by twenty years. The man who, when she
had first seen him, had struck her as barely beginning to be elderly,
was now old. If no one helped him he would be lost. That was what she
felt with a strength of pity and of conviction which swamped all other
feelings. She broke the silence rather abruptly.
‘Do you see what a state of disorder the room is in?’ she asked.
‘I thought there was something different about it,’ he replied, looking
round. ‘Are you going to make some alterations?’
‘Oh no; I am only going to shut it up. I am leaving Rome the day after
to-morrow,’ she replied, with studied carelessness.
Her announcement had exactly the effect she had calculated upon.
‘Leaving Rome!’ he echoed, with a great start and look of blank dismay;
and then, naïvely enough:
‘What is to become of me?’
‘Oh, that is easily settled. I am going straight home to England--to my
own house. You must come with me.’
‘Impossible,’ ejaculated Signor Giuseppe, springing from his chair and
looking very much agitated. ‘Signora, you speak with all the calm,
deliberate frenzy peculiar to your nation. But you should not mock at
my misfortunes.’
‘I never was less inclined to mock in my life,’ said Minna, settling
herself into the corner of the sofa, prepared to do battle for any
length of time. ‘What I propose is the utmost common-sense, and is also
the only thing to be done. To-night you go home and arrange your plans
for getting ready to-morrow. To-morrow you employ in getting all that
you want for the journey, and for a prolonged stay in our bleak country
during its so-called summer. You must spend some of this money that you
have got,’ she went on with the utmost tranquillity, trying hard not to
smile at the almost paralyzed astonishment with which he continued to
regard her. ‘It will be all right. The day afterwards you will be quite
ready, with your luggage, and I shall call for you in good time’--with
emphasis--‘on my way to the station. Three-forty is the time of the
train. Don’t forget. We shall go to Milan, and rest there, and then
pursue our way to England. I will write to-night to my housekeeper to
say I am bringing someone with me, and that she is to have a room
ready. There is really no more to be said.’
‘But there is--a great deal,’ burst out Signor Giuseppe. ‘And it may
all be expressed in one word: Impossible!’
Minna smiled. The argument was a long one. She had to fight the
objections and doubts and unwillingness of a man whose last experiences
of life, outside his own city, had been the rough and painful ones of
a soldier, subject to all kinds of pain and privations; one who had
come into the great city after endless and exhausting struggles, and
who clung to it as one who felt that he had a nook there which he knew,
whereas all the world outside was cold and strange and empty. If one
must die, it were better to die at home.
He realized, with an intensity which showed what strength and life
still lay behind the broken-down outer man, that he was a wreck and a
ruin; he was sure he would be a hateful burden, a nuisance--a nuisance
to anyone whose companion he might be. Minna was very patient. Point
by point she fought his doubts and fears and scruples, and at last
told him that, whatever he might think, he had still duties in the
world, and that he ought to go where he could gain strength and prepare
himself to meet them.
‘And my duties, signora, what may they be? Where do they lie?’
‘As long as Fulvia lives you have a duty to her,’ replied Minna calmly,
and she saw him start and turn pale. ‘You cannot cast it aside. One day
you will meet her again. I am absolutely certain of it. You do not know
in what condition you may meet her. You do not know what her need may
be, nor how you can minister to it, but this much is certain: that you
ought to be ready to help her if she should need help--and how should
she not need it, sooner or later?’
It was this argument which, more than any of the others, prevailed.
When he went away, she had his promise, and she had made him give her
his exact address. He also promised to see her on the morrow, and let
her know that he was getting ready to go with her. He had even come so
far back to the real, practical world as to wonder, with ill-concealed
uneasiness, what her friends and relations would say to her importation
into their midst of such a wretched scarecrow as himself.
‘Fortunately,’ said Minna, ‘I am not dependent on what my friends and
relations say. And they are not barbarians, either.’
He did not fail her. He was ready and waiting when she called for him
at the appointed time--a transformed man, as to outward appearance,
though with a somewhat nervous and scared expression, as if no such
step had ever been taken by anyone before.
The noise and bustle of the station and the departure of the train
were over. They were outside the city. The long uninteresting line of
the gigantic basilica of San Paolo without the Walls had gradually
disappeared from their view. The campagna stretched desolately around
them. The sun went down in the west, in a red ball of fire. Signor
Oriole’s eyes strained into the distance, towards the faint-blue cloud
which still showed him where the city lay, and his lips moved as he
murmured to himself:
‘Rome--for whom I have lived--grant me to die in thine arms!’