The next day the Duca della Rocca left cards on Lady Hilda and the
Comtesse de Caviare, and then for a fortnight never went near either of
them, except to exchange a few words with them in other people’s houses.
M. de St. Louis, who was vastly enamored of his project, because it was
his project (what better reason has anybody?), was irritated and in
despair.
“You fly in the face of Fate!” he said, with much impatience.
Della Rocca laughed.
“There is no such person as Fate: she perished with all the rest of the
pagan world when we put up our first gas-lamp. The two I regret most of
them all are Faunus and Picus: nowadays we make Faunus into a railway
contractor, and shoot Picus for the market-stall.”
“You are very romantic,” said the Duc, with serene contempt. “It is
an unfortunate quality, and I confess,” he added, with a sigh, as
if confessing a blemish in a favorite horse, “that perhaps she is a
little deficient in the other extreme, a little too cold, a little too
unimpressionable; there is absolutely no shadow of cause to suppose she
ever felt the slightest emotion for any one. That gives, perhaps, a
certain hardness. It is not natural. ‘Une petite faiblesse donne tant de
charme.’”
“For a wife, one might dispense with the ‘petite faiblesse,’—for any one
else,” said Della Rocca, with a smile: the blemish did not seem much of
a fault in his eyes.
“That is a romantic notion,” said the Duc, with a little touch of
disdain. “In real truth, a woman is easier to manage who has had—a past.
She knows what to expect. It is flattering to be the first object of
passion to a woman. But it is troublesome: she exacts so much!”
“If I were not that, I have seldom cared to be anything,” said Della
Rocca.
“That is an Italian amorous fancy. Romeo and Othello are the typical
Italian lovers. I never can tell how a Northerner like Shakspeare could
draw either. You are often very unfaithful; but _while_ you are faithful
you are ardent, and you are absorbed in the woman. That is one of the
reasons why an Italian succeeds in love as no other man does. ‘L’art de
brûler silencieusement le cœur d’une femme,’ is a supreme art with you.
Compared with you, all other men are children. You have been the supreme
masters of the great passion since the days of Ovid.”
“Because it is much more the supreme pursuit of our lives than it is
with other men. How can Love be of much power where it is inferior to
fox-hunting, and a mere interlude when there is no other sport to be had,
as it is with Englishmen?”
“And with a Frenchman it is always inferior to himself!” confessed the
French Duc, with a smile. “At least they say so. But every human being
loves his vanity first. ‘Only wounded my vanity?’ poor Lord Strangford
used to say. ‘Pray, what dearer and more integral part of myself could
you wound?’ He was very right. If we are not on good terms with
ourselves, we can never prevail with others.”
“Yet a vain man seldom succeeds with women.”
“A man who lets them see that he is vain does not: that is another
matter. Vanity—ah! there is Miladi, she has plenty of vanity; yet it is
of a grandiose kind, and it would only take a little more time and the
first gray hairs to turn it into dissatisfaction. All kinds of discontent
are only superb vanities,—Byron’s, Musset’s, Bolingbroke’s——”
A horse nearly knocked the Duc down in the midst of his philosophies as
he picked his way delicately among the standing and moving carriages to
the place where the white great-coats with the black velvet collars of
the Lady Hilda’s servants were visible.
The Lady Hilda’s victoria stood in that open square where it is the
pleasure of fashionable Floralia to stop its carriages in the course of
the drive before dinner.
The piazza is the most unlovely part of the park; it has a gaunt red café
and a desert of hard-beaten sand, and in the middle there are some few
plants, and a vast quantity of iron bordering laid out in geometrical
patterns, with more hard-beaten sand between them, this being the modern
Floralian idea of a garden; to which fatal idea are sacrificed the noble
ilex shades, the bird-filled cedar groves, the deep delicious dreamful
avenues, the moss-grown ways, and the leaf-covered fountains, worthy to
shelter Narcissus and to bathe Nausicaa, which their wiser forefathers
knew were alike the blessing and the glory of this land of the sun.
Nevertheless,—perhaps because it is the last place in the world where
anybody with any gleam of taste would be supposed ever voluntarily
to stop a carriage,—here motley modern society delights to group its
fusing nationalities; and the same people who bored each other in the
morning’s calls, and will bore each other in the evening’s receptions,
bore each other sedulously in the open air, and would not omit the sacred
ceremonial for anything,—unless, indeed, it rained.
Perhaps, after all, Floralia reads aright the generation that visits it.
The ilex shadows and the cedar groves need Virgil and Horace, Tasso and
Petrarca, Milton and Shelley.
The Lady Hilda, who never by any chance paused in the piazzone, had
stopped a moment there, to please Madame Mila, who, in the loveliest
Incroyable bonnet, was seated beside her.
The men of their acquaintance flocked up to the victoria. Lady Hilda paid
them scanty attention, and occupied herself buying flowers of the poor
women who lifted their fragrant basket-loads to the carriage. Madame Mila
chattered like the brightest of parroquets, and was clamorous for news.
“Quid novi?” is the cry in Floralia from morning till night, as in
Athens. The most popular people are those who, when the article is not
to be had of original growth, can manufacture it. Political news nobody
attends to in Floralia; financial news interests society a little more,
because everybody has stocks or shares in something somewhere; but
_the_ news is gossip,—dear delicious perennial ever-blessed gossip,
that reports a beloved friend in difficulties, a rival _in extremis_, a
neighbor no better than she should be, and some exalted personage or
another caught hiding a king in his sleeve at cards or kissing his wife’s
lady-of-the-bedchamber.
Gossip goes the round of the city in winter as the lemonade-stands do in
summer.
If you wish to be _choyé_ and asked out every night, learn to manufacture
it; it is very easy: take equal parts of flour of malice and essence of
impudence, with several pepper-corns of improbability to spice it, some
candied lemon-peel of moral reflections, and a few drops of the ammonia
of indecency that will make it light of digestion, and the toothsome
morsel will procure you welcome everywhere.
If you can also chop up any real Paschal lamb of innocence in very fine
pieces, so that it is minced and hashed and unrecognizable forever,
serve the mince with the vinegar of malignity, and the fresh mint of
novelty, and you will be the very Carême of gossip henceforward. Run
about society with your concoctions in and out of the best houses, as
fast as you can go, and there will be no end to your popularity. You
will be as refreshing to the thirst of the dwellers in them as are the
lemonade-sellers to the throats of the populace.
Perhaps Fate still lurked and worked in the Latin land, and had hidden
herself under the delicate marabouts of the chapeau Incroyable; at any
rate, Madame Mila welcomed the Duc and his companion with eagerness, and
engaged them both to dinner with her on the morrow in a way that there
was no refusing.
Madame Mila was discontented with the news of the day. All her young
men could only tell her of one person’s ruin,—poor Victor de Salaris’,
which she had always predicted and contributed to cause, and which was
therefore certainly the more agreeable,—and two scenes between married
people whom she knew: one because the brute of a husband would not
allow his wife to have her tallest footman in silk stockings; the other
because the no less a brute of a husband would not let _his_ wife have
a Friendship. Madame Mila scarcely knew which refusal to condemn as the
most heartless and the most vulgar.
The Lady Hilda dined with her on the morrow; and the little Comtesse,
with the fine instinct at discovering future sympathies of a woman “qui a
vecu,” took care that Della Rocca took her cousin in to dinner.
“I would give all I possess to see Hilda _attendrie_,” she said to
herself. As what she possessed just then was chiefly an enormous quantity
of unpaid bills, perhaps she would not have lost so very much. But the
Lady Hilda was not _attendrie_: she thought he talked better than most
men,—at least, differently,—and he succeeded in interesting her probably
because he had been so indifferent in calling upon her. That was all.
Besides, his manner was perfect; it was as _vieille cour_ as M. de St.
Louis’s.
Lady Hilda, who should have been born under Louis Quatorze, suffered much
in her taste from an age when manner, except in the South, is only a
tradition, smothered under cigar-ash and buried in a gun-case.
As for him, he mused, while he talked to her, on the words of the Duc,
who had known her all her life. Was it true that she had never felt even
a passing “weakness”? Was it certain that she had always been as cold as
she looked?
He wished that he could be sure.
After all, she was a woman of wonderful charm, though she did go about
with Madame Mila, smoke cigarettes after dinner, and correct you as to
the last _mot_ made on the boulevards. He began to think that this was
only the mere cachet of the world she lived in,—only the mere accident of
contact and habit.
All women born under the Second Empire have it more or less; and, after
all, she had but little of it; she was very serene, very contemptuous,
very high-bred; and her brilliant, languid, hazel eyes looked so
untroubled that it would have moved any man to wish to trouble their
still and luminous depths.
She seemed to him very objectless and somewhat cynical. It was a pity.
Nature had made her perfect in face and form, and gifted her with
intelligence, and Fashion had made her useless, tired, and vaguely
cynical about everything, as everybody else was in her world; except
that yet larger number who resembled Madame Mila,—a worse type still,
according to his view.
It was a pity, so he thought, watching the droop of her long eyelashes,
the curve of her beautiful mouth, the even coming and going of her breath
under her shining necklace of opals and emeralds.
He began to believe that the Duc was right. There was no “past” in that
calmest of indolent glances.
“You smoke, madame?” he said, a little abruptly to her, after dinner.
She looked at her slender roll of paper.
“It is a habit,—like all the rest of the things one does. I do not care
about it.”
“Why do it, then? Are you not too proud to follow a habit, and imitate a
folly?”
She smiled a little, and let the cigarette pale its ineffectual fires and
die out.
“They have not known how to deal with her,” he thought to himself; and he
sat down and played écarté, and allowed her to win, though he was one of
the best players in Europe.
Fate had certainly been under the Incroyable bonnet of Madame Mila. For
during the evening she suddenly recalled his villa, and announced her
intention of coming to see it. In her little busy brain there was a
clever notion that if she only could get her cousin once drawn into what
the Duc would call a “petite faiblesse,” she herself would hear no more
lectures about Maurice; and lectures are always tiresome, especially when
the lecturer has lent you several thousands, that it would be the height
of inconvenience ever to be reminded to repay.
A woman who has “petites faiblesses” is usually impatient with one who
has none; the one who has none is a kind of standing insolence. Women
corrupt more women than men do. Lovelace does not hate chastity in women;
but Lady Bellaston does with all her might.
Pretty Madame Mila was too good-natured and also too shallow to hate
anything; but if she could have seen her cousin “compromised” she would
have derived an exquisite satisfaction and entertainment from the sight.
She would also have felt that Lady Hilda would have become thereby more
natural and more comfortable company.
“Dear me! she might have done anything she had liked all these years,”
thought Madame Mila; “nobody would have known anything; and nothing would
hurt her if it were known, whilst she has all that money.”
For Madame Mila herself, perched on one of the very topmost rungs of the
ladder of the world’s greatness, and able therefore to take a bird’s-eye
view therefrom of everything, was very shrewd in her way, and knew that
society never was known yet to quarrel with the owner of fifty thousand a
year.
So she carried her airy little person, laden to-night with gold
embroideries on dull Venetian red until she looked like a little figure
made in lac, over to the écarté-table when the écarté was finished, and
arranged a morning at Palestrina for the day after to-morrow. He could
only express his happiness and honor, and his regrets that Palestrina was
little more than an empty shell for their inspection.
The day after the morrow was clear and cloudless, balmy and
delicious,—such days as the Floralian climate casts here and there
generously amidst the winter cold, as a foretaste of its paradise of
summer. The snow was on the more distant mountains of course, but only
made the landscape more lovely, changing to the softest blush color and
rose under the brightness of the noonday sun. The fields were green with
the springing cereals; the pine woods were filling with violets; the
water-courses were brimming and boisterously joyous.
It was winter still, but the sort of winter that one would expect in
fairy-land or in the planet Venus.
Madame Mila, clad in the strictest Directoire costume, with a wonderful
hat on her head that carried feathers, grasses, oleander-flowers, and a
bird of Dutch Guiana, and was twisted up on one side in a manner known
only to Caroline Reboux, descended with her Maurice to the Lady Hilda’s
victoria, lent her for the day. To drive into the country at all was an
act abominable and appalling to all her ideas.
In Paris, except on race-days, she never went farther than the lake, and
never showed her toilettes at Versailles in the Assembly, because of the
endless drive necessary as a means to get there.
In country-houses she carefully kept her own room till about five
o’clock; and, when forced for her health to go to Vichy, or St. Moritz,
or any such place, she played cards in the mornings, and, when she was
obliged to go out, looked at the other invalids’ dresses. Mountains
were only unpleasant things to be tunneled; forests were tolerable,
because one could wear such pretty Louis Quinze hunting-habits and the
_curée_ by torchlight was nice; the sea, again, was made endurable by
bathing-costumes, and it was fun to go and tuck up your things and hunt
for prawns or pearls in the rock-pools and shallows,—it gave rise to many
very pretty situations. But merely to drive into the country!—it was only
fit occupation for a maniac. Though she had proposed it herself, the
patient Maurice had a very _mauvais quart-d’heure_ as they drove.
The Lady Hilda, who was too truly great an _élégante_ ever to condescend
in the open air to the eccentricities and bizarreries of Madame
Mila,—mountebankisms worthy a traveling show, she considered them to
be,—was clad in her black sable, which contrasted so well with the
fairness of her skin, and drove out with the Princess Olga, Carlo Maremma
and M. de St. Louis fronting them in their Schouvaloff barouche. She did
not hate the cold, and shiver from the fresh sea-wind, and worry about
the badness of the steep roads, as Madame Mila did; on the contrary, she
liked the drive, long though it was, and felt a vague interest in the
first sights of Palestrina, its towers and belfries shining white on the
mountain-side, with the little villages clustered under its broad dark
ring of forest.
“What a pity that Paolo is so poor!” said Carlo Maremma, looking upward
at it.
“He carries his poverty with infinite grace,” said the Princess Olga.
“He is worthy of riches,” said the Duc.
Lady Hilda said nothing.
Palestrina was twelve miles and more from the city, and stood on the high
hills facing the southwest; it was half fortress, half palace; in early
times its lords had ruled from its height all the country round; and
later on, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, a great cardinal
of the Della Rocca had made it into as sumptuous a dwelling-place as
Caprarola or Poggio a Cajano.
Subsequently the family had ranged itself against the ruling faction of
the province, and had suffered from war and confiscation; still later,
Palestrina had been plundered by the French troops of Napoleon; yet,
despoiled and impoverished as it was, it was majestic still, and even
beautiful; for, unlike most such places, it had kept its girdle of oak
and ilex woods; and its gardens, though wild and neglected, were unshorn
of their fair proportions; and the fountains fell into their marble
basins, and splashed the maidenhair ferns that hung over them, as they
had done in another age for the delight of the great cardinal and his
favorites.
Della Rocca received them in the southern loggia, a beautiful vaulted and
frescoed open gallery, designed by Bramante, and warm in the noonday sun
as though January were June.
A king could not have had more grace of welcome and dignity of courtesy
than this ruined gentleman; he had a very perfect manner, certainly,
thought the Lady Hilda once again. She was one of those women (they are
many) upon whom manner makes more impression than mind or morals. Why
should it not? It is the charm of life and the touchstone of breeding.
There was only one friend with him, a great minister, who had retired
from the world and given himself up to the culture of roses and
strawberries. There was a simple repast, from the produce of his own
lands, ready in what had been once the banqueting-hall. It was made
graceful by the old Venetian glass, the old Urbino plates, the old
Cellini salt-cellars; and by grapes, regina and salamana, saved from
the autumn, and bouquets of Parma violets and Bengal roses, in old blue
Savona vases. It was a frugal meal, but fit for the tale-tellers of the
Decamerone.
They rambled over the great building first, with its vast windows showing
the wide landscape of mountain and plain, and far away the golden domes
and airy spires of the city shining through a soft mist of olive-trees.
The glory of this house was gone, but it was beautiful still, with the
sweet clear sunlight streaming through its innumerable chambers, and
touching the soft hues of frescoed walls that had grown faded with age
but had been painted by Spinello, by Francia, by the great Frate, and by
a host whose names were lost, of earnest workers, and men with whom art
had been religion.
It was all dim and worn and gray with the passage of time; but it was
harmonious, majestic, tranquil. It was like the close of a great life
withdrawn from the world into a cloistered solitude and content to be
alone with its God.
“Do not wish for riches,” said the Lady Hilda to him, as he said
something to her of it. “If you had riches you would desecrate this; you
would ‘restore’ it, you would ‘embellish’ it, you would ruin it.”
He smiled a little sadly.
“As it is, I can only keep the rains from entering and the rats from
destroying it. Poverty, madame, is only poetical to those who do not
suffer it. Look!” he added, with a laugh, “you will not find a single
chair, I fear, that is not in tatters.”
She glanced at the great old ebony chair she was resting in, with its
rich frayed tapestry seat, and its carved armorial bearings.
“I have suffered much more from the staring, gilded, and satin
abominations in a millionaire’s drawing-room. You are ungrateful——”
“And you, madame, judge of pains that have never touched and cannot touch
you. However, I can be but too glad that Palestrina pleases you in any
way. It has the sunshine of heaven, though not of fortune.”
“And I am sure you would not give it up for all the wealth of the
Rothschilds.”
“No.”
“How lovely this place would look,” Madame Mila was saying at the same
moment, out of his hearing, to the Princess Olga, “if Owen Jones could
renovate it and Huby furnish it! Fancy it with all the gilding re-gilded,
and the pictures restored, and Aubusson and Persian carpets everywhere,
and all those horrid old tapestries, that must be full of spiders, pulled
down and burnt. What a heavenly place it would be!—and what balls one
might give in it! Why, it would hold ten thousand people!”
“Poor Paolo will never be able to do it,” said the Princess Schouvaloff,
“unless——”
She glanced at the Lady Hilda where she sat at the farther end of the
chamber, whilst Della Rocca leaned against the embrasure of the window.
“I think she has a fancy for him,” said Madame Mila. “But as for
marrying, you know,—that, of course, is out of the question.”
“I don’t see why,” said the princess.
“Oh, out of the question,” said Madame Mila, hastily. “But if she
should take a liking to him, it would be great fun. She’s been so
awfully _exaltée_ about all that sort of thing. Dear me! what a pity
all those nasty, old, dull frescoes can’t be scraped off and something
nice and bright, like what they paint now, be put there! but I suppose
it would take so much money. I should hang silk over them; all these
clouds of pale angels would make me melancholy mad. There is no style
I care a bit for but Louis Quinze. I am having new wall-hangings for
my saloon done by the Ste. Marie Réparatrice girls; a lovely green
satin,—apple-green,—embroidered with wreaths of roses and broom, after
flower-groups by Fantin. Louis Quinze is so cheerful, and lets you have
such lots of gilding, and the tables have such nice straight legs, and
you always feel with it as if you were in a theatre and expecting the
_Jeune Premier_ to enter. Here one feels as if one were in a church.”
“A monastery,” suggested Princess Olga.
Thereon they went and had their luncheon, and Madame Mila, studying
the Capo di Monte dessert-service, appraised its value,—for she was a
shrewd little woman,—and wondered, if Paolo della Rocca were so poor as
they said, why did he not send up all these old porcelains and lovely
potteries to the Hôtel Drouot: Capo di Monte, she reflected, sells for
more than its weight in gold, now that it is the rage of the fashion. She
felt inclined to suggest this to him, only she was not quite sure how
he might take it. Italians, she had heard, were so absurdly proud and
susceptible.
After luncheon, they went into the green old gardens, green with ilex
and arbutus and laurel and cypress avenues, although it was mid-winter;
and the great minister discoursed on the charms of the country and the
beauty of solitude in a way that should almost have awakened the envy of
Horace in his grave; and the Duc de St. Louis disagreed with him in witty
arguments that might have made the shades of Rochefoucauld and Rivarôl
jealous.
And they rambled and idled and talked and sauntered in those charming
hours which an Italian villa alone can create; and then the Ave Maria
chimed from the belfries of a convent up above on the hill, and the winds
grew chill, and the carriages were called round to the steps of the
southern terrace, and the old steward brought to each lady the parting
gift of a great cluster of the sweet Parma violets.
“Well, it’s been pleasanter than I thought for,” said Madame Mila,
rolling homeward. “But, oh, this wretched, odious road! I shall catch my
death of cold!”
Lady Hilda was very silent as they drove downward, and left Palestrina
alone to grow gray in the shades of the twilight.