The next morning they brought her a note; it said that he had inquired
about the San Cipriano, but the matter had to be referred to some
authority absent in Rome, and there could be no answer for a few days,
perhaps weeks. The note was signed with the assurance of the highest
consideration of the humblest of her servants,—Paolo della Rocca.
The note might have been read from the house-top: she had had letters
from him of a different strain, charming little brief letters, about a
flower, about an opera-box, about a piece of pottery,—always about some
trifle, but making the trifle the medium of a delicately-veiled homage
and a softly-hinted tenderness.
She tossed the note into the fire, and saw his name burn in the clear
flame of a pine branch: why could he not have called, instead of writing?
She was restless all day, and nothing pleased her,—not even M. de St.
Louis, who did call, and sat a long time, and was in his most delightful
humor, and full of new anecdotes about everybody and everything; but he
did not mention Della Rocca.
The Duc found no topic that suited her.
It was the Corso di Gala that afternoon; would she not go?
No: her horses hated masks, and she hated noise.
The Veglione on Sunday; would she not go to that?
No: those things were well enough in the days of Philippe d’Orléans,
who invented them, but they were now only as stupid as they were vulgar;
anybody was let in for five francs.
Did she like the new weekly journal that was electrifying Paris?
No: she could see nothing in it: there was no wit nowadays,—only
personalities, which grew more gross every year.
The Duc urged that personalities were as old as Cratinus and Archilochus,
and that five hundred years before Christ the satires of Hipponax drove
Bupalus to hang himself.
She answered that a bad thing was not the better for being old.
People were talking of a clever English novel translated everywhere,
called “In a Hothouse,” the hothouse being Society: had she seen it?
No: what was the use of reading novels of society by people who never had
been in it? The last English “society” novel she had read had described a
cabinet minister in London as going to a Drawing-room in the crowd with
everybody else, instead of by the _petite entrée_; they were always full
of such blunders.
Had she read the new French story “Le Bal de Mademoiselle Bibi”?
No: she had heard too much of it; it made one almost wish for a
censorship of the press.
The Duc agreed that literature was terribly but truly described as “un
tas d’ordures soigneusement enveloppé.”
She said that the “tas d’ordures” without the envelope was sufficient for
popularity, but that the literature of any age was not to be blamed; it
was only a natural growth, like a mushroom: if the soil were noxious, the
fungus was bad.
The Duc wondered what a censorship would let pass if there were one.
She said that when there was one it had let pass Crébillon, the Chevalier
Le Clos, and the “Bijoux Indiscrets;” it had proscribed Marmontel,
Helvetius, and Lanjuinais. She did not know how one man could be expected
to be wiser than all his generation.
The Duc admired some majolica she had purchased.
She said she began to think that majolica was a false taste; the metallic
lustre was fine, but how clumsy often the forms! one might be led astray
by too great love of old work.
The Duc praised a magnificent Sèvres panel, just painted by Riocreux and
Goupil, and given to her by Princess Olga on the New Year.
She said it was well done, but what charm was there in it? All their
modern iron and zinc colors, and hydrate of aluminum, and oxide of
chromium, and purple of Cassius, and all the rest of it, never gave
one-tenth the charm of those old painters who had only green grays
and dull blues and tawny yellows and never could get any kind of red
whatever; Olga had meant to please her, but she, for her part, would much
sooner have had a little panel of Abruzzi, with all the holes and defects
in the pottery, and a brown contadina for a Madonna; there was some
interest in that,—there was no interest in that gorgeous landscape and
those brilliant hunting-figures.
The Duc bore all the contradictions with imperturbable serenity and
urbanity, smiled to himself, and bowed himself out in perfect good humor.
“Tout va bien,” he thought to himself; “Miladi must be very much in love
to be so cross.”
The Duc’s personal experience among ladies had made him of opinion that
love did not improve the temper.
“The carriage waits, Miladi,” said her servant.
“I shall not drive to-day,” said Lady Hilda. “Tell them to saddle Saïd.”
It was a brilliant day; all the bells were pealing, and the sunshine and
the soft wind streaming in. She thought a ten-mile stretch across the
open country might do her good; at any rate, it would be better than
sitting at home, or pacing slowly in the procession of the Corso di Gala,
which was only a shade less stupid than the pelting Corso.
Saïd was a swift, nervous, impetuous horse,—the only sort of horse
she cared to ride; and he soon bore her beyond the gates, leaving the
carriages of her friends to crush each other in the twisting streets, and
vie in state liveries and plumes and ribbons and powdered servants, and
amuse the good-natured, kindly, orderly crowds of Floralia, clustered on
the steps of churches and under the walls of palaces.
She rode against the wind, as straight as the state of the roads would
permit her, as wonderful a sight to the astonished country-people as
though she had been Santa Margarita on her dragon. Saïd took a few stone
walls and sunken fences which put him on good terms with himself. She was
in no mood to spare him, or avoid any risks it might amuse him to run;
and they had soon covered many more miles than she knew.
“Where are we?” she asked her groom, when Saïd slackened his pace at last.
The groom, who was a Scotchman, had no idea and no power of asking.
“It does not matter,” said his mistress, and rode on again.
They were on a tolerably broad road, with a village above them, on
a steep green vine-clad hill; there were the usual olive-orchards
everywhere, with here and there pear- and plum-trees, which had not
yet begun to show their silver buds, and farther still all around the
countless curves of the many mountain-spurs that girdle the valley of
Floralia. There was another stone wall in front of them; beyond it the
turf looked green and pleasant; she put Saïd at it, but some one from a
distance called out to her in Italian, “For God’s sake stop the horse!”
On the other side of the wall the ground fell suddenly to a depth of
twenty feet.
She caught up Saïd’s head in time only by a moment; he stood erect on
his hind legs for a second, but she kept her seat unshaken; she thought
he would lose his balance and fall back on her; but she stilled and
controlled him with the coolest nerve. As he descended on his front feet,
Della Rocca came through a high iron gate on the left, leaped a ditch,
and sprang to the horse’s head.
“How can you do such mad things?” he said, with a quiver in his voice.
“That gate was locked; I could only shout to you. I thought I was too
late——”
His face was pale as death; her color had not even changed. She looked at
him, and smiled a little.
“So many thanks! it is a silly habit, taking walls; I learned to like it
when I was a child and rode with my brother. Saïd is not frightened now;
you may let him alone. Where are we?”
“On the ground of Palestrina.”
“Palestrina! I see nothing of your villa.”
“We are eight miles from the villa. It lies beyond those other hills; but
all the ground here is mine. I was visiting one of my farms. By heaven’s
mercy I saw you——”
His voice still faltered, and his face was pale with strong emotion; his
hand had closed on hers, and rested on her knee.
“You were behind that tall gate, then?”
“Yes; I have the key of that gate, but the lock was rusted. Come and rest
a moment: you are a long way from Floralia. There is an old farm-house
here; they are all my own people.”
She dismounted, and threw the bridle to her groom.
“It terrifies you more than it did me,” she said, with a little laugh.
He took both her hands and kissed them; he did not answer, neither did
she rebuke him.
He led her through the iron gate down a grassy path between the gray
gnarled olive-trees and the maples with their lithe red boughs; there
was a large old house with clouds of pigeons round it; and great
mulberry-trees near, and sculptured shields and lions on the walls; women
ran to him delightedly, men left their plows afar off and came, eager and
bareheaded, to see if there was any chance to serve him; he was their
prince, their lord, their idol, their best friend; as their fathers had
followed his to the death, so would they have followed him. Half a dozen
flew to do each word of his bidding,—brought in the horse, brought out
an oaken settle for her in the sun, brought fresh water from the spring,
fresh lemons from the tree, fresh violets from the hedges.
At a sign from him, one of the shepherd-boys, who was famous for his
singing, came and stood before them, and sang to his guitar some of the
love-songs of the province in a sweet tenor voice, liquid as the singing
of nightingales. The green and gracious country was around, the low sun
made the skies of the west radiant, the smell of the woods and fields
rose fresh from the earth. She drank the draught he made for her, and
listened to the singing, and watched the simple, pastoral, old-world life
around her, and felt her heart thrill as she met the amorous worship of
his eyes.
She had never thought of natural beauty, or of the lives of the poor,
save now and then when they had been recalled to her by some silvery
landscape of Corot or some sad rural idyl of Millet; as she sat here, she
felt as if she had passed all her life in some gorgeous heated theatre,
and had only now come out into the open air and under the arch of heaven.
There was a wonderful, dreamy, lulling charm in this olive-hidden
solitude: she did not care to move, to think, to analyze. He did not
speak to her of love; they both avoided words, which, spoken, might break
the spell of their present peace and part them; but every now and then
his eyes looked into hers, and were heavy with the languor of silent
passion, and stirred her heart to strange sweet tumult.
When the boy sang the passionate, plaintive, love-songs, then her face
grew warm, and her eyelids fell: it was no longer an unknown tongue to
her.
She would not think of the future: she resigned herself to the charm of
the hour.
So did he also. The night before, he had resolved to avoid her, to cease
to see her, to forget her. She had wounded him, and he had told himself
that it was best to let the world have her, body and soul. Now chance had
overruled his resolve: he could not war with his fate; he let it come as
it might. He had found his way to influence her; he knew that he could
move her as no other could; yet he hesitated to say to her what must
unite them or part them.
Besides, since this woman had grown dear to him with a passion alike
born out of her physical beauty and his own sense of power on her and
his insight into the richer possibilities of her nature, the colder
calculations which had occupied him at his first knowledge of her seemed
to him base and unworthy; if he had not loved her he would have pursued
her with no pang of conscience; having grown to love her, to love her
loveliness, and her pride, and her variableness, and her infinite
charm, and her arrogant faults, to love _her_ in a word, and to desire
indescribably to lead her from the rank miasma of the pleasures and pomps
of the world into a clearer and higher spiritual atmosphere, he recoiled
more and more day by day from seeking her as the medium of his own
fortune, he checked himself more and more in the utterance of a passion
which could but seem to her mingled at the least with the lowest of
motives.
He was her lover, he did not disguise it from himself or her; but he
paused before doing that which would make him win or lose it all; not
because he feared his fate, but because he could not bring himself to the
acceptance of it.
“Sing me something yourself,” she said to him; and he took the boy’s
mandolin, and, leaning against the porch of the house, touched a chord of
it now and then, and sang her every thing she would, while the sun shone
in the silver of the olives and the afternoon shadows stole slowly down
the side of the mountains. Then he sat down on the steps at her feet, and
talked to her of his people, of his land, of his boyhood and his youth.
“I have lived very much in the great world,” he said, after a time,—“this
world which you think is the only one. But I am never so well content as
when I come back here under my olives. I suppose you cannot understand
that?”
“I am not sure: yes, perhaps. One grows tired of everything.”
“Everything that is artificial, you mean. People think Horace’s love of
the rural life an affectation. I believe it to be most sincere. After the
strain of the conventionality and the adulation of the Augustan court,
the natural existence of the country must have been welcome to him. I
know it is the fashion to think that a love of Nature belongs only to
the Moderns; but I do not think so. Into Pindar, Theocritus, Meleager,
the passion for Nature must have entered very strongly; what _is_ modern
is the more subjective, the more fanciful, feeling which makes Nature a
sounding-board to echo all the cries of man.”
“But that is always a Northern feeling.”
“Inevitably. With us Nature is too _riante_ for us to grow morbid about
it. The sunshine that laughs about us nine months of every year, the
fruits that grow almost without culture, the flowers that we throw to
the oxen to eat, the very stones that are sweet with myrtle, the very
sea-sand that is musical with bees in the rosemary, everything we grow up
among from infancy makes our love of Nature only a kind of unconscious
joy in it; but here even the peasant has that, and the songs of the men
that cannot read or write are full of it. If a field-laborer sing to his
love, he will sing of the narcissus and the crocus, as Meleager sang to
Heliodora twenty centuries ago——”
“And your wild narcissus is the true narcissus,—the Greek narcissus, with
its many bells to one stem?”
“Yes. In March and April it will be out everywhere in the fields and
woods about here. I thought once that you loved flowers as you loved art,
merely as a decoration of your salon. But I was wrong. They are closer
to your heart than that. Why do you deny your emotions? Why do you mask
yourself under such cold phrases as those you used to me yesterday?”
She smiled a little.
“How should I remember what I said so long back as yesterday?”
“That is hard!—for those who hear may remember for a lifetime. Your words
kept me from where you were last night.”
“What I say at any time is worth but little thought. I fear you think
too well of me always,” she said, on a sudden vague impulse and the first
pang of humility that she had ever known to smite the superb vanity that
had always enwrapped her.
With a soft grace of action he touched with his lips the hem of her
riding-skirt.
“No,” he said simply, “you might indeed ‘daze one to blindness like the
noonday sun.’ But I am not blind. I see in you many errors more against
yourself than others; I see the discontent which always argues high
unsatisfied desire, and the caprice which is merely the offshoot of too
long indulgence of all passing fancies; but what matter those?—your
nature and the nobility of it lie underneath them in a vein of gold
unworked. You have had the language of flattery to nausea: I do not give
it you; I say but what I believe.”
The tears sprang into her eyes, and the music of his voice thrilled
through her.
She did not care to wait for the words that she knew would follow as his
fingers stole and clasped hers close, and she felt on her the gaze she
did not dare to meet. She rose, and glanced to the west.
“The sun is just gone behind the hills. I shall be late. Will you tell
them to bring me Saïd?”
He rose, too, and did not oppose her departure.
“I rode here myself, fortunately,” he said. “You must allow me to go with
you into Floralia; the roads are bad and hard to find.”
They brought Saïd out of the great wooden sweet-smelling outhouse, and
he raised her in silence to her saddle. He gave her a little knot of the
fragrant leafless calycanthus with a few sprays of myrtle; she put it in
her bosom; it was already dusk, and he saw the softened dimness of her
eyes.
They rode down together in the declining light through the winding ways
of the outlying country into the town; it was quite dark when they
reached the gates; they had ridden fast and spoken scarcely at all.
As he lifted her from Saïd in the gloom within the scarcely-lighted
street, he pressed her softly for one second in his arms, so that she
felt the beating of his heart.
“Dio te guarde,” he murmured.
She left him in silence, and without rebuke.
“Is that you, Paolo?” said the voice of Madame Mila in the darkness,
as a carriage, gorgeous with amber and gold liveries and with Carnival
camellias at the horses’ heads, pulled up with great noise and haste
before the hotel door.
“Is that you, Paolo? I am so glad! I wanted to speak to you. The Corso
was horridly stupid. I don’t care a bit except for the pelting days: do
you? I sprained my arm last year in Rome with the pelting, and I really
blinded poor Solvario for a week. Why, dear me, that’s Saïd! Have you and
Hilda been riding together?”
“I met your cousin, madame, by chance; she had lost her way. It is very
easy to do so among our hills.”
“How very fortunate that you met her!” said Madame Mila, with a little
saucy laugh. “She will kill herself riding that horrid Saïd some
day:—perhaps she will listen to you if you tell her not. What was it I
wanted to say?—oh, I want a very good box for the Veglione. You are one
of the directors of the opera, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Well, mind I have one,—big enough to hold the supper-table
comfortably; and see Maurice about it, and dine with me to-morrow, will
you? Nina and Olga and the usual people. Dear me! how these horses do
fidget! How very nice that you should have met dear Hilda just when she’d
lost her way! Good-by; but of course you’ll be at the Roubleskoff’s
to-night? I wish it wasn’t costume. I’m embroidered all over with Union
Jacks. I’m England; and I have a little Khedive on a gold stick that
keeps tumbling up and down, and I carry a ship in full sail on the top of
my head. I assure you it’s very trying to be a Naval Power. How ever I
shall be able to waltz with that ship!”
Della Rocca rode away in the darkness, as the skirts of Madame Mila
vanished in the hotel door-way with the gleam of golden-pheasant
trimmings shining under the gas-lamp.
He went home to his solitary dinner, and scarcely touched it, and barely
even noticed his dog. He sat alone a long time, thinking, in the same
room where, four months before, he had pondered on the Duc de St. Louis’s
counsels, and had decided to himself that this woman, beautiful though
she was, was arrogant, unimpressionable, extravagantly capricious, and in
every way antagonistic to him.
Now he was passionately in love with her himself; he knew that she was in
love with him; he believed that he had only to ask and have.
And yet he hesitated.
It was the marriage of all other marriages for him; he had softened
and subdued her in a manner which could not but intoxicate his vanity,
though he had less vanity than most men; he did not distrust her
character, because he believed that there was a vague lofty nobility in
it, and a latent, though untouched, tenderness; of her caprices, of her
changefulness, of her moods of contempt and of impatience, he had no fear
he would substitute other emotions for them. And yet he hesitated; he was
unresolved; he was doubtful whether to accept the empire he had obtained.
He would have concluded a marriage of interest as coldly and tranquilly
as any other man with a woman to whom he was indifferent. But with this
woman whose mere touch thrilled him to the heart, and whose imperious
eyes had only grown gentle for his sake!—never had he felt his poverty so
painfully as in this moment when supreme Fortune seemed to have smiled
upon him.
Though he loved her with passion, he almost wished that he had never seen
her face.
After all, though generous, she was arrogant: sooner or later she might
make him feel that the golden sceptre was hers and not his. To his
temper, which, although gentle, was deeply ingrained with the pride which
had been transmitted to him from many generations of a feudal nobility,
such a possibility seemed unendurable. He sat still lost in thought till
his lamp grew low, and the wind, rising loud, shook the leaded panes of
the old high windows.
“I suppose when Fortune does smile at us we always quarrel with her so,”
he thought, with some impatience of his own irresolution.
After all, what other man in Europe would not have been content?
He got up, caressed the dog, turned the lamp higher, and went into his
bed-chamber.
“Get out the white mousquetaire dress,” he said to his old servant. “I
will go to the Roubleskoff ball.”
All patrician Floralia was at the Roubleskoff ball, one of the last
great entertainments of the moribund Carnival. In six more days there
would come the Day of Ashes; and Floralia would repent her sins in
sadness,—that is, with only musical parties, a dinner here and there, and
no suppers at all:—perhaps a ball might be squeezed in once or twice by
grace of the Russian calendar, but, then, if you took advantage of that
you were _brouillé_ with all the _codini_[2] at once.
He reached the Roubleskoff villa late, not so late but that he was in
time to see the arrival of the woman who had sat with him at her feet,
and talked with him of Meleager and the white narcissus flowers.
Lady Hilda entered like a sovereign, and drew all eyes on herself.
She was attired as Vittoria Colonna, and carried her purples and cloth of
gold with more than royal grace; the color on her cheek was heightened,
her eyes had a dewy brilliancy; what they spoke to her she seemed hardly
to hear.
He was as her shadow all the evening.
They were both curiously happy; both curiously troubled. Neither cared to
look onward.
Society there assembled said that it was a great thing for the Duca della
Rocca; and wondered whether they would live most in Floralia or Paris.
“C’est moi qui a inspiré cela,” said the Duc de St. Louis, with much
self-complacency, sitting down to the whist-table; he was quite sure that
all was right; he had seen the look in the eyes of both of them.
“She will compromise herself at last. Oh, what a comfort it will be!”
thought little Madame Mila, carrying her frigate in full sail airily
through the mazes of the cotillon with a sleeveless bodice on, cut so low
that it was really as good—or as bad—as if she had had nothing at all.
She did not wish any harm, of course, only, really, Hilda, with a lover
like other people, would be so much more natural and agreeable.
“But they will marry, people say,” suggested M. des Gommeux, to whom
alone she confided these ideas.
“When do people ever say anything that is true?” said Madame Mila,
with profound contempt, tossing her little head till the Naval Power
of England was in jeopardy. She was irritated to hear Maurice even
talk about marriage; it was an improper thing for him even to mention,
considering his relation to herself. When he approached any young girl or
marriageable woman of any sort, Madame Mila bristled like a little angry
terrier that sees a cat; on the whole, she was still more exacting than
Mlles. Rose Thé and Boulotte, and whereas in society he could escape from
them, he could in no wise escape from her.
If it had been a question of marriage for her cousin, indeed, Madame
Mila would have opposed it tooth and nail; she had a feeling, a very
acute one, that Della Rocca did not approve of herself, and that he would
certainly never allow his wife, if he had one, to be very intimate with
her. But Madame Mila knew what other people did not,—that there could be
no question of such a marriage for her cousin; and so she smiled on Della
Rocca, and was always engaging him to dinner; because Lady Hilda, with
her lover about her, like any one else, would be so much more humanized
and natural, and would sympathize so much better with other people.
That kind of virtue of Hilda’s—if it were virtue—was such an odd, chilly,
unpleasant thing, she thought; to live in that way, with hundreds of men
seeking her, and cold alike to them all, was something so very unnatural;
it was almost as bad as being one of those queer women who wouldn’t tie
their skirts back, or wear high heels, or dress their hair properly:—it
was so strange, too, in a person who in all other matters was the very
queen of fashion, the very head and front of the most perfect worldliness.
It was very late, and daylight quite, when Lady Hilda, contrary to her
custom, left the ball; she had been happy with a warmth and feverishness
of happiness altogether new to her; nothing more had passed between them,
but they had been together all the night, although never alone.
She stood a moment in the door-way, facing the daylight. Most women are
ruined by such a test; she looked but the more beautiful with the sunrise
flush touching her cheek, and the pearls in her bosom, and the diamonds
in her hair.
“I may come to you early?” he murmured, as she paused that instant on the
step.
“Yes,—no. No: I shall be tired. Wait till the evening. You are coming to
Mila.”
The words were a denial; but on her lips there was sweetness, and in her
eyes a soft emotion, as she moved onward and downward to the carriage.
He was not dissatisfied or dismayed. As he drew the furs over her
gold-laden skirts, his head bore lower and lower, and his lips touched
her hand and her arm.
“The sun is up. I never am so late as this,” she said, as though she did
not feel those kisses; but, by the clear light of the day-dawn, he saw
the blood mantle over her throat and bosom, and the tremulous shadow of a
smile move her mouth.
The horses sprang forward; he stood on the lower step, grave and lost in
thought.
“Is it too early to offer felicitations, my friend?” said the Duc de St.
Louis, pausing for an instant as he passed out to go homeward; he had
been playing whist all night.
“I do not understand you,” he answered, with the tranquil falsehood of
society.
The question annoyed him deeply. He loved this woman with all the
tenderness and passion of his temperament, and loved her the more for
the ascendency he had gained over her and the faults that he saw in her;
he loved her generously, truly, and with purer desire than most men. Yet
what would his love for her ever look to the world?—since he was poor.
The Lady Hilda, with her fair hair tumbled about her pillows, and her
gorgeous cloth of gold lying on a couch like a queen’s robes abandoned,
went home and slept restlessly, yet with a smile on her face, some
few hours: when she awoke it was with a smile, and with that vague
sweet sense of awakening to some great joy, which is one of the most
precious gifts of happiness, a dreamful misty sense of expectation and
recollections blending in one, and making the light of day beautiful.
She lay still some time, awake, and yet dreaming with half-closed
eyelids, and her thick hair loosened and covering her shoulders, and the
sweet scent close at hand of a glassful of calycanthus and myrtle, that
she had been very careful to tell them to set near her bed. Lazily, after
awhile, she rang a little bell, and bade her maids open her shutters. The
grand light of the noonday poured into the chamber.
“Give me a mirror,” she said to them.
When they gave her one, she looked at herself and smiled again: she was
one of those women who are lovely when they wake: there are not many.
They brought her her chocolate, and she sipped a little of it, and lay
still, looking at the violets and hearing the ringing of church-bells
from across the water: she was happy; it seemed to her that all her life
before had not been happiness, after all; only pleasure.
An hour later her maid brought her a telegram. She opened it with a
little impatience. Why should anything break in on her day-dream?
It merely said that her brother was in Paris, and would come onward, and
be with her that night. She let the paper fall, as though she were stung
by an adder.
It recalled to her what she had forgotten.